I came for sweetness and walked away with x-rated filth. interlaced finger hand holding? What kind of perverted deviant are you, author?
But for real, just admit that you like each other already. Because the secret to a good romcom story isn't the perpetual chase, it's enjoying the two characters together as they do stuff. And if you've made enjoyable characters (which is the case here) and you have plots that can be had outside of just their mutual pining (which they can since part of this is rehabbing Hitomi's image and making her more friendly and outgoing like some sort of voluptuous, shark-tooth Komi), they can be an actual couple and still do that stuff.
Plus you can even do more because now you have full-blown couple plots enter the picture.
Shipping Bed Death/Eternal UST/Moonlighting Syndrome is the worst lie that fiction writers impose on themselves. Because it's a crock of crap used as an excuse to cover for inadequate writing or other factors and is often a self-fulfilling prophecy (writers avoid putting a couple together for fear of it, and by the time they cave they're doing so to save an already floundering work that's probably gonna die soon anyway. And by that point just putting the couple together won't be enough to get it back on track. So it dies a death anyway and dumb writers and observers go "see?! You put the couple together and then it all went to hell! That's why you can't have established relationships in fiction!" as if correlation proves causation)