I forgot I'm not alone

The midday sun burned my back. The little air there was in the atmosphere was so hot that sweat formed beads on my forehead and my twin ponytails were itchy. My school uniform was making me uncomfortable as it clung to my body and my bag was slipping from my sweaty hands that were joined behind my back. A sweet scent was traveling from the flowers and trees near the outer torii gate of the temple we were visiting.

The only thing in my field of view were his honey eyes that were watching me in amusement and anticipation. He had stopped some steps lower than where I was standing and was waiting for the words to escape my mouth as if he already knew what they were. I hated that about him. How he could read me like an open book. How he made it seem like he didn’t care but in reality, he was paying attention to the smallest details. His long rose gold hair was swaying in the faint wind and his ears and cheeks were bright red from the burning sunlight.

He didn’t try to rush me, he didn’t ask why I had gotten silent all of a sudden or why my chest was going up and down rapidly. I wasn’t sure if it was because he already knew or because he was trying to be considerate for once. The only certain thing was that I couldn’t keep dodging or delaying it. I had made my decision and would be ready to live with the consequences.

I had thought over my words so many times that I could express it in at least a thousand different ways. Nothing seemed right, however, and deciding to let him influence me, I stuck to the simplest but most important ones.

“You know, you are a pain in the ass but…” He chuckled and as usual, appeared to be enjoying the characterization. I smiled despite myself. There were so many things about him that I didn’t understand but I was willing to try and find out what they meant. “I like you” I finally said it in one breath.

His eyes opened widely and his smug smile faded leaving his lips open in surprise. The colour in his cheeks became more prominent and some of it spilled further down to his neck. For the first time, I saw him lose his words and not know how to react. It was a bit satisfying, even if I could feel my face burning worse than his.

He clenched his fists and tried to take a decisive step forward to come nearer. My instinct was to shy away but I didn’t. I didn’t want to send mixed signals, not anymore at least. I was so used to him talking non-stop and being full of never-ending energy that I couldn’t help but feel weird seeing him move on his tiptoes without having uttered a single word or making a single sound. I wasn’t sure how I should act when he was like this so I merely waited for him to reduce the distance between us.

Even when moving so slowly, the moment he was right opposite of me seemed to come too quickly. His body consumed all the space in front of me and didn’t allow me to look at anything else. I could feel the heat emanating from him and hear his breath from above my head.

I tried to look up into his eyes but it needed more courage than I expected. Before I could muster it up, his arms moved like they were afraid I could break but when I didn’t try to get away, he crushed me into a hug.

It felt warm. I was shocked at first but then, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath enjoying it. He sighed relieved and squeezed me against him making me feel his heartbeat. Until that moment, I would never have thought that there could be someone with a heart racing more than mine but I was proven wrong. I lifted my arms and got ready to squeeze back but he pushed me away gently without letting me go and puckered his lips.

“Get away from me, you creep!” I tried to push him away a lot more violently when I realized he was trying to kiss me.

“I may be a creep but you love me” He whined like a big baby. Aaand, he’s back. Just like that, the moment was ruined. I managed to be set free from his embrace and started walking towards the temple with a quick pace.

“Who said that? Certainly not me!”

“You can’t take it back noooow! You are stuck with meee!” He sang in his usual irritating voice. I was almost consumed by the desire to punch him so hard that he would lose a tooth but then I thought that two can play this game.

I turned around and walked back to him.

“And you’re stuck with me! Got a problem with that?!” I grabbed his hand as he stared at me surprised with my unusual forwardness. I dragged him, forcing him to follow me. If I tried to run away from it, then there was no point in saying it in the first place. Things were going to be different. I was going to make sure of that.

“You’re so strong, Kaida! I think you’re hurting me!” He pretended with a ridiculously high voice.

“Shut up!”

“Oh my, so vulgar!” I took a deep breath to calm my rapidly beating heart and let the blushing subside somewhat. I drew him closer to me and turned to face him.

“Taijo” Such a small word but it took everything in me to manage to say it. His face was so deeply red that he looked like a tomato. That oughta do the work with this chatterbox. After all, it was the first time I was calling him by his first name. Needless to say, I managed to enjoy the rest of our time without any annoying commentary. Only drawback? Saying his name had pretty much the same effect on me as it had on him. I felt like I would die.

It was so vivid and alive that if I hadn’t already seen it a bunch of times, I might have believed that it was true and wouldn’t feel like this as I slowly opened my eyes. The same recurring dream had been haunting me since the day I had hurt Kajiura so badly. I couldn’t eat, I didn’t want to speak and I sure as hell couldn’t sleep. At least this dream gave me the illusion of something good happening, what could have been if I wasn’t a coward, had upheld my part of the promise and confessed the moment I realized that my feelings were different than I initially thought. Everything would have been so much better then. The main reason I couldn’t sleep whatsoever wasn’t the longing for something that wasn’t there when I woke up but rather guilt for the other nightmare that wouldn’t leave me alone. The nights that I didn’t repeat this fake aspect of my reality, I closed my eyes and saw Kajiura transform into a small child that couldn’t stop crying because nobody loved him and nobody would. His parents had changed the notion of love, I had destroyed it. I had taken that last remaining piece of him that hoped and stomped on it. My life was a living nightmare after that day and I went through my routine knowing that I deserved every torturing bit.

My parents knew better than asking me about it after my first reaction to them reaching out about this specific topic, Matsuda seemed at a loss of what to do and since I wouldn’t talk to her about it she simply tried to distract my mind but failed miserably and everyone else in the school didn’t pay enough attention to me to care- even if I felt like they were always watching me and whispering amongst each other about it. I was chased by my own shadow. Even Karuizawa-sensei didn’t want to listen to me or my reasons. He didn’t seem to know exactly what had happened but he knew that his brother was devastatingly hurt and I had something to do with it.

So every attempt I made to reach him or do something to make up for it was futile. After some days he stopped coming to school altogether because his exams were nearing and he needed to be focused solely on studying. So I could no longer watch him from afar wistfully. I didn’t even have that. It was awfully like what I had feared would happen but a lot worse because I knew that things between us were the worst they could be and if I didn’t act fast enough, I would lose my chance to ever do something about it. Things would be permanently broken and no effort would mend them. Instead of cherishing our last moments in the same school, I had completely ruined them and now he was going to go away and I wouldn’t be able to see him anymore.

“Okay, I waited long enough. I can’t take it anymore. You need to tell me what’s going on or I’m going to call over a teacher” Only when Matsuda’s voice dragged me out of my thoughts did I realize that my heart’s bleeding was taking the form of tears streaming from my eyes down my chin. I looked up with bloodshot eyes.

“What?”

“You heard me! I had enough of being discreet! I don’t care about anything! You’re coming with me right now and we’re going to talk about this.” She took me by the arm and dragged me out. I didn’t protest, I didn’t have the strength to. I just limped behind her making her pull most of my weight until we reached a spot inside the schoolyard underneath a tree. It was far enough that no teacher would spot us or someone overhear us. She sat me down on the one side of the benches with a bit of force before towering over me and crossing her arms underneath her chest with an expectant expression. “Well?”

“Well?” I parroted. I didn’t know what she expected me to say. The voices in my head were still screaming and clawing at my mind to take control of it. I found it difficult to pay attention to her actions and words.

“I wouldn’t mind if you chose someone else to trust instead of me but there’s been weeks and by your decreasing state I’d say that you haven’t talked to anyone about it.” I shrugged. What did she want? A medal for her deduction? I already knew all of that. It wasn’t something new.

“So?” I asked indifferently and she looked me up and down like she couldn’t believe how much I could change over a course of weeks and then she looked worried. It must be something big if I was like that and instead of getting better I was getting worse. She was starting to understand things. I didn’t like the clarity in her eyes. I wanted to get up and walk away before she could find out more. She was more perceptive than I thought.

I had almost gotten up when she talked.

“You can’t even talk about it with Kajiura-kun?” My body froze midway like I was struck by lightning and I snapped my head towards her, brows furrowed. Her eyes opened wide at the abruptness of my swifting expression but then there was a spark within them. I felt like I could die when I almost managed to read the thought in her eyes. Bull’s eye. I would have tried to walk away still, if I wasn’t so shocked by the mere mention of his name. “Something happened with him, didn’t it?”

This question was my undoing. I hadn’t realized that all along, I just wanted to let it all out and share the burden with someone else because it was too heavy to bear alone. I sat back down on the bench and stumbled upon my words, my voice going hoarse since I hadn’t spoken this much to someone in a while, as I explained everything with every unnerving detail. Tears flowed nonstop, sometimes choking my words as I swallowed their salty taste and sometimes making my eyes burn like hell. But I didn’t stop until I was finished. At some point, she came and sat beside me and before I knew it, she slowly embraced my shoulder and welcomed me inside her arms. I hid in the crook of her neck and inhaled sharply and with difficulty. It was like I had opened a dam and it took me a while to calm down. We would have lost two hours of our lessons by now. Not that I gave a damn at the moment.

She stroked my back gently creating easing circles with her fingertips and murmured some comforting words that I couldn’t make out but the mere sound of her voice was enough to help me breathe again and slow down the beating of my heart.

“I don’t know if you want my opinion or not but…If you think about it, he opened his heart completely to you, even if you hurt him. Don’t you think that instead of trying so hard to come up with something big, you should at least open your heart to him too?” She proposed after I don’t know how long. I froze in her touch and she sensed it because she instantly stopped caressing me. She backed away a bit probably thinking that she had overstepped her boundaries but I looked up at her with a spark that had been extinguished for too long and wiped away my tears.

“You’re right. That’s exactly what I’m gonna do”