Free The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, Vol. 5 by Satoshi Wagahara

give you a massive phone bill!”
    “Yeah, sorry, I’ll be more careful with it. What’s up?”
    “Oh, um…”
    Rika uncharacteristically clammed up.
    “Hmm?”
    “Hey, where are you, Emi? Your voice is kinda echo-y.”
    “Huh? I’m in the bathroom. I was just about to scrub the bathtub a little.”
    “Ohhhh. Okay. Well, if you’re busy, it doesn’t have to be right now or—”
    “What? Wow, what’s up with you today, Rika? Is this gonna go for a while, or…?”
    Rika couldn’t have sounded more reluctant. Compared to her usual sunny self, it was hard to imagine.
    “No, no, nothing that long, but… Oooh, how should I put it? Maybe it kinda will, actually.”
    “Rika…? What’s up? Something going on?”
    Emi stiffened her voice a little.
Something troubling her, maybe?
    Depending on how you gauged it, this might be Rika acting agitated over something. Whatever it was had to be serious.
    Emi sat down on the edge of the tub, preparing for an extended chat.
    “If something’s on your mind, just say it, okay? You called because you wanted to talk to me, right?”
    She could feel Rika agonizing over something across the line.
    “…Well, don’t laugh, okay?”
    That relieved Emi a little. If Rika was afraid it’d make her laugh, it couldn’t have been too much of a doggie downer.
    “I won’t, I won’t. So what’s up?”
    “Um… So, like, I know it’s
really
weird to ask somebody this…”
    “Yeah?”
    “But I don’t have anyone else I can ask, so…you mind if I bend your ear for a little bit?”
    “Sure, go ahead. What’s on your mind?”
    Emi tried her best to squeeze it out of her. If her friend was in trouble, she wanted to help if she could. She’d done so countless times in the past, and Rika also helped her out of a pinch more than once.
    If she was pussyfooting around the issue this much, it must have been tormenting her pretty badly.
    “Okay, so…”
    Rika, her voice more resolute now, took a deep breath.
    “Um, what kinda clothes do you think Ashiya likes?!”
    “……………………………………………………………………”
    Emi, seated on the bathtub, mobile phone firmly planted against one ear, froze.
    “…Emi?”
    Rika took Emi’s lack of immediate response with a hefty dose of suspicion.
    It wasn’t enough to release Emi from her shackles.
    Whenever someone runs into a completely unexpected set of circumstances, they try to harness their past experiences, tossing all of them into the wind in a mad attempt at a solution. Much of the time, though, all those past experiences offer little more than a lot of wishful thinking.
    There was no better way to describe Emi at that moment. Which was why the answer that finally dribbled out in the end was:
    “Something…cheap, maybe?”
    “Cheap? So, like, no fancy brands or anything?”
    “Y-yeeeaaahhh.”
    Emi was still frozen, her voice bereft of emotion.
    “I’ve never seen him wear anything besides stuff from UniClo. There’s no way he’d be wearing those cheapo shoes because he
likes
them…”
    “Huh? Whoa, whoa, Emi, that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about what kinda stuff
he
likes to buy for himself.”
    “…What
do
you mean?”
    Emi’s face began to twitch a little again.
    A dark foreboding spread across her mind. She could literally feel her organs squirm uneasily in her chest.
    “I mean… Oh, you
know
what I mean, Emi! I’m talking about what kinda outfit you think he’d find cute on a woman!!”
    It must have taken a lot of courage for Rika to ask the question.
    Of
course
she couldn’t have brought it up with anyone else.
    The only women who knew Ashiya before Rika were Emi, Chiho, and Suzuno. But as far as Emi knew, Rika wasn’t chummy enough with the other two to ask them questions like
this
.
    She and Chiho had gotten closer, certainly, thanks to the whole Alas Ramus thing. But this was a more intimate issue. Really, asking someone what to do in order to make a man pay