My Strict Boss Is the Secret Artist Drawing Spicy Comics of Us novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fourth Stall
A junior salaryman reads the new chapter of his favorite spicy comic in a bathroom stall and finds himself in it, then finds the half-inked next page in his strict chief's open drawer.
At six o'clock on Thursday, Sota Ichinose locked himself in the fourth stall and opened chapter eighty-seven.
Panel one showed a young salaryman with a crooked tuft of hair, spilling coffee across a report.
It was his tuft, his report and his coffee, from nine o'clock that morning.
Panel two showed the stern section chief bending that salaryman over the same desk.
The salaryman's speech bubble said, "Chief, the report is still wet."
Sota stopped breathing.
He had read After Hours, Chief every Thursday for two years, always in this stall.
It was the only stall on the fourteenth floor with a lock that worked.
The comic was spicy, it was drawn by an artist called Redpen, and until today it had been about two strangers.
Now the salaryman had Sota's ears, the pink tips drawn in pink, and the section chief had Chief Takamine's glasses.
Even the stain on the carpet by the vending machine was in the background.
Panel three showed the chief's hand flat on the desk beside the salaryman's hand, close enough to touch.
Sota's whole body went hot, and he looked at the ceiling tiles and said a very quiet prayer.
Outside the stall, the door of the men's room opened.
Shoes crossed the tile, slow and even.
Sota held his phone against his chest, and the app made its three-note chime anyway, loud as a doorbell.
A pair of polished black oxfords stopped outside the stall.
They stayed there for four seconds.
Then they turned around and walked out, and the door sighed shut.
Sota decided the shoes had belonged to a man who disliked chimes.
He washed his hands for a full minute, with cold water, and went back to the floor.
The section was already half empty, and everyone left was pretending to be busy.
Chief Reiji Takamine stood at Sota's desk with his red pen in his hand.
He was thirty, the youngest chief the company had ever had, and nobody had seen him smile.
His suit was charcoal, his parting was straight, and his glasses had no rims to hide behind.
"Ichinose," he said. "Ten minutes."
"Stomach, Chief."
"Drink water."
He picked up the Hirano Warehouse report from the desk, still stained brown at one corner, and read it standing.
Sota knew the coffee ring was on page four.
He had made it that morning, and Chief Takamine had said only, "Rewrite it."
Now the chief leaned down, put his left palm flat on the desk beside Sota's hand, and set the red pen to the margin.
His right hand came down on the other side.
His arms framed Sota's chair.
It was panel three, exactly, down to the angle of the little finger.
There was a gray smudge of pencil lead on the edge of the chief's right hand.
Sota stared at it because he could not stare at anything else.
"Your figure on page two is wrong," the chief said, close to his ear. "Look at me."
Sota looked up.
Chief Takamine's face was a closed door, and his eyes behind the glasses were perfectly calm.
"It is," Sota said. "I'll fix it."
"The warehouse was insured for forty million yen, not fourteen."
"Yes, Chief."
"Tonight. You may leave when it is done, or you may take it home and do it tomorrow."
It was seven forty. The rule was that everyone left by eight unless the chief signed for overtime.
Sota thought about the stall, and the shoes, and the pink ears on the page.
He thought, If I go home I will read chapter eighty-seven forty more times.
"I'll stay and finish it here," he said.
The chief's pen stopped moving.
"Then I'll sign for it."
"Thank you, Chief."
"Do not thank me for overtime."
The floor emptied around them one desk at a time.
Nao Fujiwara, at the next desk, mouthed, What are you doing? and left.
By nine, there was only the sound of keys, and the air conditioner, and the chief's pen scratching in his own corner.
At ten, Chief Takamine stood up.
"I'm going to the copier," he said. "Do not touch anything."
"No, Chief."
His footsteps went off down the dark aisle.
Sota finished the figure on page two and looked up to stretch.
The chief's bottom drawer was open an inch.
A screen glowed in it, the size of a magazine, and a pen lay across it.
Sota knew he should not look, and he knew he was going to.
He pulled the drawer out.
It was a drawing tablet, and on it was a page half inked in black.
The salaryman with the crooked tuft sat on a toilet lid in the fourth stall of the fourteenth floor, reading his phone, with pink ears.
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