"My hearing has always been sharp..." Never mind just a classroom door—even with countless high-rises in between, as long as someone was watching him, Sogo Doma could sense it. As the saying went: when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.
"You said that on purpose just now, didn't you?" Shizuka Hiratsuka's eye twitched.
"Was I wrong?" Sogo Doma countered. "Shizuka, among your female friends, isn't Haruno the one you're closest to?"
Another little misdirection trick—he had deliberately emphasized female friends.
"..." Shizuka Hiratsuka said, "That's true, but..."
Just because Shizuka Hiratsuka seemed carefree and forthright didn't mean she was popular. She often helped her senior colleagues and students with their work, but in truth, there weren't many people she was close to. Though she always acted like one of the boys, one shouldn't forget that she was beautiful...
Most girls wouldn't become friends with someone far prettier than themselves. If they went out together, wouldn't they be reduced to mere leaves highlighting the flower?
The girls in the Service Club could become friends partly because none of them faded into the background. Yukino Yukinoshita was adorable, but Utaha Kasumigaoka was no slouch either, while Mashiro was so airheadedly cute that people couldn't help but dote on her. And if one set aside Ako's yandere tendencies—though, of course, no one in the Service Club knew she was a yandere...
Ako was actually the ideal Yamato nadeshiko this country admired: beautiful, cute, and wholly devoted to the other person. She just had a tendency to turn yandere and snap, that was all. Ahem...
Well, she had rarely gone dark lately, probably because she had realized U, M, R wasn't her husband in real life.
But setting all that aside, Ako was undeniably a beautiful girl as well.