I'm giving this volume one less star than the first, but truthfully it's not that much different quality-wise. My level of enjoyment, however, has dropped now that I begin to understand (as I questioned as I read the first volume) how this manga manages to go for such a long run when the characters only seem a few steps away from becoming romantically involved and ending the story.

The answer this volume seems to give is that it simply won't be letting the relationship move forward, period. After the end of the first volume when Sumire began to grasp that Momo had a life outside being her pet and in some way was a whole person she didn't even know, I was really looking forward to seeing in this second volume how this small realization might change how she relates to him. Yet the subsequent chapters go on just as those in the first volume. The manga continues to shine lights on the various plights of the strong-yet-still-feminine working woman and in some ways explore the different sides of how Sumire and Momo see and relate to one another. Yet no matter how many chapters reiterate how essential, in various ways, Momo is to Sumire, each lesson learned never seems to change the way she sees him past the end of a chapter.

Now with the knowledge that this is not the sort of series where things develop continuously through the chapters, things that didn't bother me so much in the first volume began to rub me the wrong way here. Momo may be a stronger and more complex person outside his life with Sumire, but his willingness--not only turn himself into a bumbling animal to please his object of rather sudden affection, but to do so indefinitely as the relationship continues to spin its wheels--is a bit of a turn off. Sumire's failure to see what way her relationship with Momo is trending despite being an intelligent woman was understandable for a volume, and maybe even more, but the prospect that she may keep on as is for a large part of the series stretches my suspension of disbelief a little too far. Not to mention the fact that she's pretty much thoughtlessly two-timing her boyfriend as she does it.

Still, again, the chapters here aren't actually much different from those in the first volume. Knowledge of how this manga might be playing out lessens my interest and made it hard to read more than two or three chapters at a time without it starting to drag, but it still is a pretty pleasant read. I'm not as eager to make it through the rest of the series as I once was, but as someone who's vast majority of romance reading is in BL, the existence of an even semi-likable straight romance is enough to keep me reading for a while, though I may opt to borrow future volumes I don't already own rather than buy them myself. And it is of course also still quite early in the series. It's very possible that while this second volume is rather stationary, the manga will change its approach toward developing the relationship in the future. ( )