Chapter 194. An Unexpected Relationship. (5/7)

“I understand… I’ll give it a shot.”

“Good. As for the royalty payments I promised you, they get sent to me on the last day of the month so I’ll send it to you on the first day of the month in the future.”

With my own personal proofreader/editor, in the future, I’d be able to focus solely on writing alone. I would be able to double or triple my efficiency if I could ignore those steps. They were very time-consuming steps and you needed to switch between two separate mindsets. The mindset when you were in the creation process was completely different from when you were editing or proofreading. 

You’d stop on a single word for minutes on end trying to think of a more fitting one. You might read a sentence and feel it didn’t flow very well and want to restructure and condense it. You might notice a word being overused a lot and get annoyed by it. You might also stumble upon some problems with verb tenses that might be a pain in the ass to fix at times. The simplest and laziest solution would be to just throw some quotation marks around those blocks of text and call it a day. You’d just turn it into a dialogue or monologue where tenses didn’t matter as much so you wouldn’t need to give a shit if it really came down to it.

“Uh… about the royalties, I don’t need them. You’re already giving me this opportunity.”

“Absolutely not. You will take those royalties. In this world, you must not work for free. Even if you are taking it as a training experience, you should still be compensated for your time.”

“But you’re not receiving anything in return.”

“Yes, I am. I am receiving my time back that I’d spend on doing these things myself in the future. Wisteria, you will soon become someone I need and value greatly in the future. Someone I rely on. I’ve acquired you, which is plenty of compensation in advance for me.”

“You need me?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be someone you rely on?”

“Yes.”

“My relationship with you would be-”

“Equal partners. In a sense, I suppose we will become family too.”

“Is it really fine for me to receive so much just for my soul? Aren’t you losing out? I mean… we only just met yesterday.”

“Is it really necessary to spend years on end getting to know someone to feel a connection to them? Wisteria, I feel like I’ve known you for a very long time. You aren’t aware of it, but we share many similarities. So many so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were my long-lost sister or something. Our experiences in life aren’t so different. Haha… but... it’d probably be difficult to think of you as a sister after what happened yesterday.”

“Oh? Are you overly conscious about that?” A mischievous smile crept onto her face as she sat down close to my side.

“You know, there are guys that enjoy that sort of immoral play~ if I was something like a stepsister, it’s fine, isn’t it? Should I call you big brother? Or maybe little brother would make more sense considering our age? But you also feel like a big brother to me~ ahhh~ I can’t make up my mind which role I want to take.”

“You could just choose both and pick one depending on the circumstances.”

“Oh~ that’s a good idea, big brother.”

“No, but really, it’s just weird. I’ve never had a sibling before, please stop.”

“Oh? If you’ve never had one I guess I’ll be your first big sister and little sister at the same time. You’ll be my first too, a little brother and… big brother.” She let her body relax and lean on me when she said that.

When I thought back to yesterday’s scene where we sat side by side on the counter while she tried to unlock my phone I suddenly felt that the term little sister fit her perfectly in that memory.

“Why is our relationship becoming even stranger than it already was?”

“What do you mean?”

“Before you’d just become my girlfriend’s master. But with this, does it not mean my little sister is my girlfriend’s master in the art of blowjobs?” I wanted to cry again. The relationships between the women I became entangled with only got messier and more complex as time went on.

Trying to map out my relationships in my mind made my head hurt. It was best not to think too hard about it. I’d go crazy if I really tried to comprehend it.

“Hey, big brother, aren’t you going to start teaching me? We don’t have that much time like you said.”

“Right, we should get to work on that immediately.”

I took out my phone and logged into my account where I kept all my stories. I started from the very beginning and started the editing and proofreading process in front of her. I explained in detail what I was doing and why I was doing it for every step. It made the overall process become much longer than it usually took. It took me two hours of talking and explaining just to get through a single chapter.

After we made it through one chapter, I gave her a chapter of her own to work on to see how she would fare. Whenever she made a change, I’d ask her about her thought process behind it. If she made a change that didn’t make sense, I’d point it out and explain why it was better left as is. She didn’t get upset at all, she nodded her head when she understood my explanation.

Each individual author had a quirk to their writing that sometimes came across as a mistake when in fact they were intentional at times. There were many such minute little nuances that a proofreader and editor would need to gradually grow accustomed to in the author’s work. They were distinguishing features of an author, what made their writing unique and allowed it to come to life at times.

Some might refer to it as part of the style the author developed over time.

It took about four hours for her to get through a single chapter with her doing the work. It took so much longer because it wasn’t just me explaining things to her, but her explaining her thought process and me elaborating on things she brought up. It was honestly a lengthy process and quite tiring. But seeing her enthusiasm to learn from me I’d sucked it up.

By the time we finished the chapter she was working on, it was already 2:30 PM. I’d gotten here pretty early at 8:00 AM to work but I’d barely gotten anything done when she showed up shortly after I arrived. On the surface, it could be considered a rather unproductive day at first glance; however, I considered it a future investment.

“Since we don’t have much time until I need to head out for my shift at work, I’ll edit the next chapter on my own. Just watch and ask me if you have any questions, okay?”

“Sure.”

She leaned close to me with her chin on my shoulder and watched intently as I worked. She didn’t ask as many questions as before, it seemed she’d gained a better understanding in the last six hours. She only asked me a single question eight minutes into editing the chapter.

At the fifteen minutes mark though, I felt her chin suddenly slip off my shoulder.

When I turned my head to her, the top of her head lightly brushed against my left cheek. I only now realized her eyes had shut at some point. Her breathing was steady, she looked quite peaceful and relaxed. Her soft cheek was pressed up against my shoulder. 

Seeing her behave how a cute little sister might when her older brother read a story to them, I felt a strange feeling I didn’t understand stir within me. What was this peculiar feeling I’d never felt once in my life? Was this that thing they called kinship?

We weren’t even related though, I’d also only met her the day before. Yet… I felt strangely close to her. I didn’t bother to continue with the chapter I was working on. Instead, I leaned back and let Wisteria slide down onto my lap and allowed her to sleep peacefully. While she’d leaned against me, she’d tucked her feet to her left side on top of the couch so she ended up in a more comfortable position with her cheek flat on her side atop my lap.

I didn’t understand where the urge welled up from, but I placed my right hand on the side of her head and brushed it through her hair passing over the top of her head.

I did this a few times while looking down at her side profile. As expected, this little/big sister was quite the beauty.

For her to become so docile from one day to the next, there was such a huge gap I could hardly see the two versions of her as the same person. I guess this was what people called ‘gap moe.’ The fact that I even thought of that term was embarrassing as hell. Someone, please kill me. I’m forty, mentally, I swear!