"Social conformity is not about agreement," the professor said. "It is about compliance. There is a difference."

Kaito was not listening.

He was thinking about Hana.

Not in the warm embarrassing way from the metro yesterday.

This was the opposite.

She is going to die soon. She is being haunted by a ghost. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

He had seen Hana that morning before class.

She looked fine.

Bright eyes, easy smile, the same warm energy she always had.

He had checked her spiritual energy instinctively — a passive read, nothing she would notice — and found nothing unusual.

Thin and human and completely ordinary. Whatever was haunting her was either in the initial stage or very careful.

Both options were bad.

"Focus."

Kaito blinked.

The old man was sitting beside him again, grey jacket, white hair, folded hands on the desk.

He was looking at the front of the room with his chin slightly down and his brow drawn.

"My son is teaching an important topic," he said. "And you are sitting there with the face of a man whose brain has left the building."

"Sorry," Kaito said quietly. He looked at the board.

The professor had written: Conformity vs Compliance — Asch Experiment, 1951. He wrote it down without reading it.

"Is it a girl?" the old man asked after a while.

Kaito’s eyebrow moved. "You just told me to focus."

"I did. And now I am asking a question. These are two separate things."

"You are distracting me."

The old man glanced at the board. "It looks like an easy topic anyway." He leaned back, arms loose, chin up. "So. Is it a girl?"

Kaito exhaled through his nose. "Yes."

The old man’s eyes brightened. His chin lifted. The corners of his mouth pulled up slow.

"Ah," he said. He looked at the ceiling for a moment. "Youth."

Kaito waited.

"Back in high school," the old man said, "I had a girlfriend. Lovely girl."

His eyes went slightly unfocused.

"Incredible body. Those tits of hers — full, soft, the kind you could spend a whole afternoon with and still feel like you hadn’t done them justice." He shook his head slowly. "And her ass. God. Round and high and perfectly—"

"You said you had a wife," Kaito said.

"I do. She is a wonderful woman." He paused. "This was high school."

Kaito looked at the board.

"I wonder what she looks like now," the old man said, mostly to himself. He had a small smile on his face, private and a little filthy. "I can feel it. Better with age."

This old man is an absolute pervert.

"Go visit her then," he said.

The old man’s smile faded.

He looked at his hands, spread slightly on the desk.

"I cannot. My spiritual body only reaches places and people I was connected to. My son. My wife. My grandson." He looked at his hands a moment longer.

"That girl and I, we connected only physically, but not spiritually. She is outside my reach now. That is simply how it is for us."

Kaito nodded once awkwardly.

The old man was quiet for a moment.

Then the smile came back.

He turned to Kaito, one finger raised, eyes bright.

"Here is my advice," he said. "Whatever you think is the right amount of foreplay — double it." He gave Kaito a slow thumbs up. "You can thank me later."

Then he was gone.

Kaito sat very still.

The professor continued talking about social conformity.

A student in the front row raised her hand.

The afternoon light came through the windows at a low angle and the room was warm and quiet and completely normal.

Kaito thought about foreplay.

Specifically he thought about Hana.

Her laugh.

Her light brown hair.

The way she had looked when she said it’s a date through closing doors.

And then his brain, entirely without his permission, continued that train of thought somewhere he had not intended to go.

Her neck. Her collarbones. The soft curve of her shoulders.

What she might look like with her hair down and her eyes half closed.

The sounds she might make if someone touched her the right way.

Her hands. Her waist. Her toes curled.

The warmth of her skin under his palms. Her back arching. Her mouth open. Her—

He stopped.

He looked at the desk.

He was very aware that he was in a classroom.

The professor dismissed them for lunch. Chairs scraped. Bags rustled. People stood and moved toward the door.

Kaito did not stand up.

He sat with his bag on his lap and looked at his notes and waited.

His face was red.

Other things were also happening that required him to remain seated and think about extremely unsexy things.

He thought about his father.

He thought about the Reizen clan training hall at six in the morning in winter.

He thought about Kazane’s face.

That last one worked very well.

He should have started with that.

He stood up, grabbed his bag, and left for the cafeteria.