It Could Only Mean One Thing!

“Your glasses fell off.” Ume says. She reaches out her hand and inadvertently glides her fingers through his hair in the process of picking them up off the ground behind his head. “Don’t wanna break those.”

“O-Oh…”

Tani was sure that something else was about to happen, he doesn’t exactly know what that is, but it certainly wasn’t supposed to be this.

Ume chuckles and playfully places his glasses back onto his face.

“...Thanks.”

At least he has an answer to why his vision was so blurry.

Standing up to her feet, she holds out her hand to help him up, he obliges and once on solid footing begins to dust himself off. Ume proceeds to help him with that, and smacks his shoulders and back rather roughly. Her little hand's contact with him feels equivalent to sledgehammer strikes.

Tani doesn’t react to her touch, he instead twists his face away from her.

“Are you hurt anywhere?” she asks, halting her blows and leaning forward, attempting to read his expression despite his resistance to her gaze.

“I’m fine..!”

Hiding his embarrassment without physically concealing the evidence has become impossible. If he allowed her to see him now, she’d notice that his cheeks are as cherry red as it was when he was a kid that used to lose to her in the swing jumping competitions.

His mind starts a race against the light of stars. 

(How can she be so calm after that? She’s acting like being that close to someone isn’t a big deal; our noses almost touched! She might as well have been straddling me, I can still feel the sensation of her hips on my lap, in fact, I may never forget it!)

Yet here she is with prying eyes inflicting even more damage. 

Fighting the internal suggestion that he may be the one overreacting here, he quickly succumbs to his jumbled emotions. Knowing that she can handle this kind of situation with such easy familiarity makes him want to crawl into a hole and hide.

In this very moment, Ume and Anita become interchangeable within his mind; he can almost see the transparent figures of the two colliding with each other to take on the form of some sort of super human. 

(Anita has also touched me without thinking anything of it, up until this point I was under the impression that she was unique in that regard.)

Apparently Kimura Ume is no different. 

(I could chalk up Anita’s bold nature to a cultural difference, but Kimura Ume? The girl I thought I knew is supposed to be feeling the exact same way as I do right now. How has she grown up so much in just three short years?)

It must mean that Anita and Ume are far more mature than he is, the two girls having gone through real life high school experiences while he was engrossed with his studies. It’s either that, or they don’t see him as someone worth getting flustered by, physical contact with him is equivalent to physical contact with a child.

A deep breath brings an abrupt halt to those racing thoughts, he needs to save face or risk forever being a passenger to the whims of people around him. If she is more mature, he can’t let her know that she is, he’d lose whatever advantage he may have in the smarts department. And if she sees him as some kind of child, he’ll return the favor and at least pretend anything she does has no effect on him.

“I guess you can’t be considered a comedic relief character any more, I know a hero when I see one. I probably would have been hurt if not for you.” Tani says without a hitch.

Any trace of residual embarrassment is gone.

"H-Hero?" she asks.

"Yeah, good job." Tani replies before noticing Ume’s hat fallen on the ground. “That still doesn’t make me your sidekick though.”

Picking up her hat and presenting it to her affords him his first good look at her face.

“...Eh?”

It is not what he was expecting to see.

She looks atomic.

Her hair is ruffled up, and an ahoge reaches skyward like a short circuiting satellite sticking out of her head.

The mature Kimura Ume he had created within his mind is blown away and replaced by the very real girl standing in front of him with a quivering lip and eyes darting from one place to another.

As if realizing she’s hatless, she clasps at her hair and frantically tries to fix the mess.

“Uwa!? A-Ahh, oh, ummm...!”

She’s making it worse, and she can sense his pity as his gaze lands on her bright red face.

“Gimme that please!” She snatches the hat out of his hand so fast that it creates a wind gust strong enough to violently blow the leaves off a nearby tree. Throwing the hat back onto her head, she twists her entire body away from him.

“Wait a second…” Tani says, leaning over her shoulder to investigate as she pulls the entirety of the hat over face. 

The roles have been reversed. 

“Why are you more embarrassed about your stupid hat hair than you are about straddling me!?”

“Bbdgllhddkkkhh!!” Ume lets an undecipherable noise escape her lips and sprints away from the playground.

“Hey!” Tani gives chase, “And now you are running away??”

“B-B-B-Because you just said I straddled you without your head exploding as a result! How could you say that? Can’t you read the air?? There's something wrong with you!”

“Read the--- excuse me! You didn’t even react when you put my glasses back on my face! I assumed you could care less!”

“I was in shock, I didn't know what else to do!”

Tani continues to pursue her through the park, but her cheetah-like movements leave him in the dust.

“You could've gotten off of me quicker!”

Her distant voice echoes off the surrounding residential buildings when she retorts, “And what about you?? So casually handing back my hat afterwards and calling me a hero, you’re no different than the seductive manga character Charl thinks you are! Go away!”

“I was trying to play it cool!”

The two had fabricated very distinct caricatures out of each other. It makes one wonder how anyone views the other person at any given time. 

Making her way to the edge of a pond that connects to the rivulet running through the entirety of Oyokogawa park, it is here that Tani finally catches up to her. She plops herself near the edge and begins to take off her shoes.

“What are you doing?” he asks, clasping at his knees trying to catch his breath.

“I am going to drown myself!”

The pond is a designated spot for children to dip their feet in during the hot months of summer, it isn’t more than a few inches deep so she’d have to try extremely hard to pull that off.

The thought of which brews up a peculiar tempest in the pit of his belly.

“Then what’s the point of taking off your shoes? You won’t need them where you’re going.”

Her shoulders jump as if only now discovering the error of her ways. She still tosses her shoes aside and scoffs, “W-Well maybe I don’t wanna die with my shoes on!”

"And god forbid you get your pants wet in the process." he says while watching her pull her designer jeans up to her knees.

The tempest within Tani is making its way up through his chest.

Ume stands to her feet at the edge of the pond and sends a salute to the sky before declaring, “So long, cruel world!”

With that, she jumps into the water feet first.

The impact creates the tiniest drop of a splash, and things go silent for a couple seconds before being broken by the abrasive honk of a far away car beeping its horn.

She awkwardly turns her body his way and sends him a sheepish grin.

The tempest within Akihiro Tani puffs his cheeks out, and then blasts forth out of his mouth.

“Hahahahaha~!”

He can’t contain it any longer.

“Hahaha but why though, Ume? Hahaha!”

By now he’s doubled over and cracking up.

He had told her earlier that she'd need to get creative if she wanted to make him laugh, well, this is about as inventive as it gets.

Ume stands in the water and pouts, “Is my emotional trauma really that funny to you!?”

“No, no.” Tani waves one hand in front of his face while the other clasps at his stomach in a futile attempt to stifle his next batch of laughs. “It’s just you, you are funny.”

“Ugh, now I wish I was the comedic relief character that dies first in the movie. At least I wouldn’t have to live through the shame of you seeing me like this.”

With a few heavy breaths to taper off his mirth, he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye with his sleeve and makes his way to the edge of the pond. “There's nothing to be ashamed about... I’m relieved, actually.”

“Relieved?”

“For a while there, I thought you left me behind…”

Tani is not talking about her running away from him, he was always going to catch up to her eventually.

Ume can sense that, although she isn't positive, she is at least paying attention to his emotions this time around.

Tani is genuinely smiling...

“I’m glad that you’re still with me.” 

Ume is at first bewildered by him, and then she becomes even more red faced.

“....”

She can only answer with silence and a soft stare.

He reaches out his hand to her, but distracted by his smile she doesn't realize it right away.

A few minutes ago she reacted solely on instinct after finding herself on top of him, so she had blanked on how his hand felt when she helped him to his feet.

Now that it is presented in front of her like a christmas gift, she can see just how much bigger it is than she remembers. 

She reciprocates.

The sturdiness of his grip surprises her upon grabbing his hand, then she is plucked like a feather from the pond and onto solid ground.

He's also a lot stronger than she remembers too.

Not breaking eye contact with her and looking like someone who has just retrieved a long lost heirloom, he says,

“We’re almost there, let’s get that ice cream.”

The ** Date -----To Be Continued!