A Mysterious Crush

"confess to misaki"

Asuka blinked. She had already read this line of the bucket list when she first picked up the notebook, but somehow, it’s just now dawning on her that Kyo had a crush on someone. At least she assumed it was a crush. Confess could mean anything. Was he confessing his love or confessing to a crime? Numerous other questions begin to form in her brain as well. Like, who even is Misaki? When did Kyo start liking her and how did Asuka never know? How is she even supposed to find her?! So far, every item on Kyo’s list has required her to look for something. But despite everything she went through to look for the clover, a missing person is a thousand times more of a "needle in the haystack" than even that.

She decided to start with her first question, who even was this person? Is she an old classmate of his maybe? This prompts Asuka to look through Kyo’s bookshelf for a yearbook. She gets up to go to his room. It's less intimidating that it was the last time she entered and she headed straight for the bookshelf. Running her finger along the spines of each book, she chooses a thin, tall one placed in the middle of her brother's old car magazines. Pulling it out, the cover confirms it as the yearbook of his third year in high school.

Opening it up, she flips through it until she finds his class and goes through every face and name available. She pauses when seeing his own portrait near the bottom of the page. His hair was shorter in this photo, but he had the same wide toothy grin. Though it saddened her deeply to know she won't be able to see him smile like that ever again, her determination is refueled, and she continues until the last smiling face has been counted.

No one in his class had the name Misaki as a surname or a given name. This left her with no choice but to look through every single class in the book in case he had fallen for someone outside of his homeroom. Including any male students with Misaki in their name, Asuka was left with four options. There was no guarantee that any of these people were involved with her brother in the slightest, but it was all she had for now.

Not wanting to launch a full-scale investigation off of these clues alone, Asuka opted to do a little more research. After returning the yearbook back onto the shelf, she went back to her room and reexamined Kyo's notebook.

She held it in her hands before looking through the diary entries written in its pages, silently apologizing to Kyo once again for parsing through his private thoughts. There were quite a few entries written before he inserted the bucket list, which was more near the last few page of the book, so she hadn’t read most of them thoroughly while she was flipping through it the first time. Not everything he wrote about was about his daily life and Asuka would often come across entries where he wrote about dreams he had or notes jotted down for work.

Asuka remembers when Kyo changed jobs. Before then he was working at a moving company that had him work from 6 AM, keeping him out until one in the morning without even paying for overtime. She remembers how miserable he was then, and always tried to make sure he had food waiting for him when he got back. One night he was drunk and he complained about it to her, saying that the company told him “if he doesn’t like it he can quit.” He blathered on that night insisting that he would quit, Insurance if he did.

She crosses out the possibility of his crush being related to the moving company, as all of his coworkers would have been the old cigarette smokers he sometimes talked about— and never fondly. After he switched jobs two years ago, his mood began to improve quite gradually as he readjusted to his new work schedule. Thus, she concludes her next possible target to be the delivery service company he transferred to. Perhaps there was a girl he ran into enough times to develop a crush on her, or maybe she asked him out first.

She skips ahead using the dates he printed above each passage as a guide to the year he transferred jobs. As she carefully reads each diary entry, she begins to lose hope as the words betray no hint of romantic affection for anyone. She does encounter a few pages where her own name is written though, one of them being about a time she got caught smoking at school. Not one of her proudest moments, but those days are over.

On around the thirtieth page, something unusual catches her eye:

5/16/20XX

“I was assigned a new route today. That kind of sucks because the ramen place I’d go to for lunch everyday was there and this one is too out of the way for me to make the trip in between :(. On the bright side I met a real cute customer as one of my clienteles. I hope I get to deliver packages at the store more often ♡.”

Seeing that Kyo ended a sentence with a heart made her snort, but it was also her best clue to finding this mysterious girl he was obsessed with enough to allude to her in his bucket list of all things. She turns the page hoping for an immediate pay off, but this one is about a mistake he made at work. Though it was entertaining to read, it didn’t help her. This entry was about two years ago, so there’s a possibility it’s about a different person.

It is about five pages later until Asuka finds another passage that is implied to be referring to the same customer Kyo mentioned previously.

5/29/20XX

“I finally got the store owner’s name after crossing paths a bit. It’s Misaki. What a nice name. I got invited in after almost passing out from heat exhaustion x_x. Definitely wearing a hat next time. The tea shop has the most delicious tea I’ve ever had, maybe because Misaki made it for me…it must be magic.”

A hand flies to her face to hide the secondhand embarrassment from no one in particular. She knows this isn’t the first time he’s ever had a crush on someone. He’s never directly told her that he liked anyone, but there have been many times that she’s been able to put two into together on her own. This one time they were both out shopping for groceries together, and they encountered a girl he knew at the same store. He was a red-faced mess, barely able to speak. Asuka took the opportunity to teach him about it the whole way back home. He seemed to have a thing for long black hair.

In fact, she recalls a night where they were watching television together. They had just finished dinner and Kyo decided to finish it off with a couple cans of Citrus Sour for dessert. While watching some variety show about famous foreign actors. She can’t remember the name, but when one of them popped up his eyes flew open. “Misaki?!” He bolted up, knocking the alcohol out of his grasp and spilling the rest of the contents onto the rug. Ignoring it and her shouts he went up to the TV, sobbing and calling Misaki’s name over and over.

It’s a moment that’s hard to forget because she had never seen him act like that before, even when he was drunk. She’d had to drag him away from the screen before his tears and drool shorted it out. Nevertheless, she was unable to remember this just now. The actress who had been on the screen had long black hair and a soft expression on her face. “This Misaki must be extremely beautiful to be mistaken for an actress,” Asuka thinks after recalling that display.

There are a few more things written about Misaki, but they become less and less detailed until he stops writing about her entirely. But why? Could it be he lost contact with her or something? But then why would he bother to put a missing person in his bucket list? Did he plan on tracking her down in that case? She hopes not. That would be kind of creepy, not to mention basically impossible for her to pull off.

After mulling it over for a while, she throws her head back in frustration and spins around in her chair. So far, she knows that Misaki is connected to his previous place of work as apart of their clientele. According to the journal entries, it’s possible Kyo didn’t end up seeing her every day, but it might just be that he didn’t end up writing about it. 

Asuka closes the notebook. This should be about all the information she can extract from it alone. Leaving it on her desk, she makes plans for her next course of action.