Exactly what I wanted - after reading about 150+ pages of a charming, slow-building story with cute fluffy moments: surprise non-con! The characters were perilously close to being decent people with respect for one another, but this is what I get for assuming the mangaka would do the ethical thing and not expect us to condone actual rape. Super not okay.
If only I had a dollar for every time a character blamed their horrible behavior on "I'm just so lonely" and "I thought I would lose you". Well you deserve to lose him, to be honest. I read carefully over the next pages following this exchange, hoping he would get some alarming wake-up call (like, "hey I did a really awful thing, I need to change myself" at the very minimum), but instead we get a watered down faux-pology ("I'm sorry, except I feel justified because of my strong feelings," basically) and a love interest that essentially shrugs it off after a small fight that's played for a laughs and an embrace. You're kidding. I realize this book is about a decade old now, but we all know better by now, don't we? Let's all collectively realize how awful this trope is. We need to bury it. Forever.
It's a decent enough story, otherwise. The art is actually very nice, the character personalities seem genuine, and there are some genuine laughs and endearing domestic moments. No part of it was amazing, but it was far from bad. I was hoping that, by the end of a whole volume, it would find a true moment of catharsis or reach its emotional peak. (You know, how a good story slowly builds to that "wow" moment?) But instead we get a clumsy stumbling finale born from some confusing comedy of errors, at the expense of butchering the ethics of the character I liked the most. The characters appear to have learned almost nothing, really, and they're not really much better as people. There's a theme or two that fails to really go anywhere, which is disappointing because all of these things were leading towards a strong point that failed to materialize in the final acts. What a shame.