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"That's my spot!"
Dazai overhears a hum coming from the back of his neck. He squints and lifts his eyelids gradually; his view field is flooded with a pair of green checked trousers. Tilting his head and looking up, he notices that the thin voice his ear caught earlier belongs to a short boy with hair like a sunset and thick-rimmed glasses where the light reflects off the lenses.
"Huh?" Dazai mutters. The corners of his eyes curl, scrutinizing that student who now wears a even more critical and annoyied expression. If possible.
"That's my spot!" The redhead repeats. "I always sit here, every day." He points his finger to the chair on which Dazai is studying or rather taking a regenerative nap.
The book he has picked up hours ago still marks page one and has a light smear in a peripheral corner, which would have enraged the librarian if he had laid his eyes on it. But, luckily, that cute redhead took his place.
Very cute and very furious.
For this Dazai tries to tease him, chuckling and leaning back the chair, folding his arms behind the head.
"I don't see your name here."
"You don't even know my name!"
"And what's your name?"
"Not your business, anyway."
"Okay, Not-your-business, I'm going to the other side of the table before you have a heart attack."
Not only he's infuriated: his cheeks have lit up a fiery red and his hands have curled into fists. He looks like he's about to start a fight over a seat in the school library. But maybe it's just Dazai's mockery behavior that turns him on.
As he reaches his new position, Dazai notices the meticulously tidy and clean books of the redhead, and an almost punctilious care in placing the parti-colored pens and notebook on which to take notes.
Nothing to do with his material: A smudged book and a pen with the ink almost dried up and the cap nibbled on the tip. A total mess.
When their gazes meet, Dazai spots that behind the lenses he hides sparkling blue eyes, deep as the ocean and clear as a summer sky. And leaving them, returning to the letters of his book - or rather, his nap - now seems like a divine punishment.
"Who are you, a creep?" The redhead adjusts his glasses to his nose with the tip of his forefinger and turns a questioning look around; the blue that for a fragment of time has given off so much peaceful now resembles a stormy sea.
"Maybe."
"Maybe?!" the tone rises up and is enriched with a note of frustration. "You're not even from this school, why are you here?"
Oh, he has been uncovered.
Dazai could have justified himself by saying he hasn't do laundry that day, that he rolled into the closet wearing ripped jeans and a t-shirt with an old 80's movie print, but the truth is he came to that school library for at least a week, every day, for a motive.
A guy.
A guy he had followed, absorbed in reading a collection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, so much that he didn't notice the world around him.
He had also spied small gestures that he repeated every time he turned a page: he brushed a finger over his lips, wore it through his hair, curling a copper lock and then let it flow and fall gently on his shoulders.
It was amazing how he could make such an ordinary gesture special.
Dazai drags his thoughts back to earth. "I'll say to you if you tell me your name." He proposes a trade where he knows he'd be the one to gain.
The redhead hesitates, tapping his pen on the table and nervously gnawing his lower lip. "Chuuya." He says it in one breath. "Chuuya Nakahara."
A smile blossoms on Dazai's lips.
"Hi Chuuya Nakahara, I'm Dazai Osamu.
And I'm here for you."