All Beautiful Girls Want to Stick with Me

After completing her purchase, the bookstore owner carefully placed the first-edition limited copy of Sword Art Online Volume 1 into a brown paper bag.

Then, she led Kotomi to the café area.

The owner set down the vanilla-flavored coffee and 50 caramel biscuits at a quiet, secluded corner table. The seating consisted of two small sofas placed closely together.

The arrangement of the chairs and tables was casual, which was a defining feature of this café. While seemingly random, the placement was designed to make the space feel comfortable and inviting. Achieving such an effect required careful selection of furniture styles, colors, positioning, and even consideration of the overall ambiance—including the café’s lighting, music, and decor.

”Thanks, owner,” Kotomi said gratefully.

Despite her frequent social mishaps, she wasn’t socially anxious. However, whenever she ate alone outside, she preferred sitting in a quiet, inconspicuous corner where she wouldn’t attract attention.

After all, if she were eating with someone, any embarrassment would be shared. But eating alone, especially with her appetite, was a different story. Even if there was no malice in strangers’ curious gazes, the thought of people watching her eat so much made her uncomfortable.

The spot the bookstore owner picked for her was perfect—peaceful, spacious, and hidden from prying eyes. It was so ideal that Kotomi even considered bringing her laptop here on Sundays to write.

It seemed like every writer enjoyed working in cafés. Kotomi had never really understood why before, but now it suddenly made sense.

It actually seemed kind of nice.

”No need to thank me. Enjoy your meal. I need to get back to organizing the magazines,” the bookstore owner said before walking away.

Owning a bookstore café might be a dream lifestyle for many, but only those who actually ran one understood how exhausting it could be. Despite the seemingly relaxed atmosphere, there were endless daily tasks to handle.

Even just maintaining the café’s coffee beans and brewing equipment required meticulous care.

After eating twenty caramel biscuits, Kotomi suddenly remembered something important. She quickly washed her hands, tidied up the table, and carefully arranged the coffee and a few biscuits on a small, elegant plate—creating a picturesque afternoon tea setting.

She made sure to move the large plate with the remaining biscuits to another table.

There was no way she was going to make it look like she ate that much in the photo.

A fragrant cup of coffee, a delicately arranged selection of caramel biscuits, and a perfectly positioned book.

Kotomi followed this composition as she set up the shot, selecting Sword Art Online Volume 1’s limited edition as the featured book.

She adjusted the angle, decided whether to use flash, and meticulously prepared every detail before finally pressing the shutter.

Just setting up the photo had left her sweating. She hadn’t expected food photography to be such a challenge. Wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, she reviewed the image she had taken. It looked refined, elegant—exactly the aesthetic she wanted.

Sighing, she muttered to herself, ”I never thought taking a stylish photo would be this much work… or this exhausting.”

No wonder those lifestyle vloggers on video platforms could wake up at ungodly hours—4 AM, sometimes even earlier—and still have the energy to maintain their disciplined, aesthetically pleasing routines.

Just setting up the perfect shot, arranging a picturesque table setting, and preparing a visually appealing but minimal portion of food must have been enough to force them into alertness.

Of course, Kotomi wasn’t referring to genuine study vloggers but rather those influencers who marketed themselves as paragons of self-discipline while secretly pushing ads and sponsorships.

She considered editing the photo, but honestly, she couldn’t be bothered. It was too much effort. In the future, she would just take a simple picture of herself holding the book and upload it to Twitter—that would be enough.

As for the kind of captions elegant influencers used—those polished, subtly flexing tweets in impeccable Japanese, sometimes sprinkled with English words—she sat in her chair, furrowing her brows, trying to come up with something fitting.

Damn it, this is harder than writing a 2,000-character essay! she thought, frustration mounting. Eventually, she gave up, opened Twitter, and simply typed: