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Yuu dreaded the morning, almost wishing she didn’t have to leave her comfortable, warm bed. With her first year coming to a close, finals were piling up, and her study habits took up more and more time. She wasn’t top of her class like Touko was, but she definitely couldn’t afford to slack.
Koyomi and Akari both were working hard to study too, and they had been meeting almost every day with a few other friends to study together at the library. Yuu felt a slight pang of loneliness as she got ready, realizing it had been almost two weeks since she last got to spend time with her girlfriend alone. They certainly texted all the time, but nothing could replace the feeling of just lying next to her and kissing her whenever Yuu wanted to. She sighed dreamily, grabbed her phone, and sent a swift text to her love.
Yuu: good morning! :> <3
Touko responded almost immediately.
Touko: Good morning, baby! <3 I miss you so much.
Touko: I wish I had time to study with you today, but Sayaka and some other kids from our class are going over what will be on the math final, and I can’t afford to slack.
Touko: But… maybe right after school, before we meet at the library, we could see each other for a few minutes?
Yuu smiled at her phone as she walked down the road, the gentle breeze rustling her hair. She had plenty of time to walk and get to class on time, so she didn’t mind slowing down a bit to text at the same time.
Yuu: i would love to! ive missed you a lot too!
There was something so comforting about knowing her girlfriend couldn’t play cool and pretend she didn’t also feel this hollow ache. Her girlfriend had given up on the pretend role of being the older, more serious one. Now they both readily admitted when they missed each other, and each time Yuu realized she was missed, her heart skipped a beat.
It felt like a silly thing to get all excited for, but to Yuu, it was the most straightforward declaration of love: the idea of having so little time, but still going out of her way to be with Yuu… it was too sweet. And even when Touko was busy she thought of Yuu – well, maybe that wasn’t so surprising considering how the relationship started, but it still warmed her heart.
She got to class early and spent time at her homeroom desk texting Touko.
Touko: I wish we had class together. Sitting alone makes me wish I could walk over and visit you right now
Yuu: ill see you soon baby, don’t wor
Akari gasped.
“Baby?!” She exclaimed.
Yuu jumped, not realizing her friend had been hovering right behind her, and managed to slam her phone face-first into the desk before she read the name.
“What? Baby? I was just texting my uhm- my sister!”
Akari’s whole face contorted with disbelief. Her eyebrows rose higher and higher as Yuu turned more and more red.
“You have never called your sister, of all people baby. Who’s the mystery boy?” She dramatically threw her hand over her forehead. “And to think, you’ve listened to me complain about my love life, meanwhile you have a thriving one in the shadows!”
Still flustered, Yuu didn’t reply in time before Koyomi appeared.
Her friend’s deadpan face betrayed little emotion to an onlooker, but after being friends for such a long time, Yuu could read her like a book.
“What are you guys talking about?” She asked, pulling her chair up to face the two of them. She glanced between them, looking lost.
Yuu opened her mouth to reply, but Akari cut her off.
“Yuu has a secret boyfriend!”
Koyomi blinked in surprise, and then her face warped to one of slight hurt.
“You didn’t tell us?” She asked softly, making Yuu want to sink into the ground.
“It’s- I didn’t- I just-“She stammered, her hands nervously fiddling with her hair. The heat in the room began to feel stifling as her two best friends exchanged sad little glances with each other.
Then Yuu just hung her head defeatedly.
“I promise I didn’t tell you guys for a reason… but I’m sorry, you’re right. I should have told you two a long time ago.”
Akari gasped. “So it IS a secret boyfriend! I thought I was wrong! But you just proved it!”
Yuu jumped. “You tricked me!”
“Well, you’re the one with a secret!”
“I didn’t mean to have one! It just happened so fast, and then it had been so long and it felt like there never was a good moment to mention it…”
Koyomi stared at the two of them.
“I am almost certain we’ve brought it up before…” She mumbled, and Yuu realized she was right. Almost every time Akari lamented over her lost basketball crush, the conversation ended by steering into the other girls’ love lives, or lack of one.
Yuu had always found it easier to continue the idea of her not having found love, even though her girlfriend was usually waiting after club to walk her home, hand in hand. It had been a wonder that so many months had passed without them being caught, but it had barely even crossed Yuu’s mind to tell them.
Considering its strange nature, she almost felt like her relationship was meant to be kept a secret forever. Would her friends be accepting of the fact that Yuu was a lesbian? That she was dating an older girl, and the class president, even?
Her homeroom teacher, Mr Saito, walked in, and Yuu was saved as her friend scurried to their seats. Akari shot Yuu a look that promised the conversation wasn’t over, and Yuu slowly put her phone down into her bookbag before preparing for class.
Before her study date with her friends, one Yuu had no doubt would be spent getting grilled, she met up with Touko.
They leaned against a wall near a vending machine right outside their school, Touko sipping a matcha milk tea can and Yuu nervously fiddling with the straw of her apple juice.
“So… are you going to tell them everything!”
“I don’t know!” Yuu exploded, slumping over in a pathetic heap on the bench. Her girlfriend smiled lovingly as she nervously bounced her legs, bringing a soft hand down on Yuu’s hair to pet her gently.
Touko sat down next to Yuu, setting their bags on the floor in front of them.
“It’s been so long - and they are going to think I like to keep secrets or something. Or that I don’t actually consider them my close friends. Which I do! They are my closest friends and I love them, but I just…” She trailed off, leaning her head on Touko’s shoulder and hiding her face in the fabric.
Touko, for all the months they had been together, hadn’t gotten much better at remaining calm in moments of small intimacy. Yuu felt her girlfriend’s heart start to race and the heat radiating off her face, but she maturely kept her hand on Yuu’s hair and pretended she didn’t start to quiver.
“I think you should just tell them the truth. And the whole story too!”
“But that’ll be so embarrassing!” Yuu wailed.
Touko laughed gently, sounding like bells. “Maybe for me, but I think you had a pretty normal, slow burning love. I don’t mind being honest about how we started out.”
Yuu smiled, remembering how strange their relationship was at first. Her fascination of the concept of love, Touko’s positively awful understanding of it, and how
Yuu somehow convinced herself that it was perfectly normal to want to kiss your friend, out of kindness, of course, and that she wasn’t catching any feelings in the process.
“Did you ever tell Saeki the whole story?” Yuu asked, sitting upright and facing her girlfriend, who was cherry red with the small amount of PDA.
She laughed again, this time with a nervous hint, and let go of Yuu’s hair to fiddle with her own.
“I mean- I never told her all the details… but that doesn’t really matter, right?”
Yuu gasped in mock horror and swatted Touko’s arm gently. “You are keeping secrets from your best friends too!”
“It just is a bit embarrassing for me in that story! Plus, she knows all she needs to, and I don’t think giving her all the details of our relationship would be super kind after she confessed to me.”
Yuu hummed in agreement, slurping up the rest of her juice box.
“I guess I will just have to be honest,” she sighed, standing up. Touko smiled at her, standing up beside her, and not for the first time, Yuu found herself looking up at her girlfriend’s warm grey eyes.
The wind caught up just in time to rustle long strands of black hair over her face, which Yuu gently tucked behind her ear. No sense in allowing such a beautiful face to be hidden, right?
“I guess so. But that seems to work out well in your favor, doesn’t it?” Touko replied, mirth colouring her voice.
Yuu playfully elbowed her girlfriend as they walked back to campus together, just far enough apart to deny any allegations that might come their way. Although having her girlfriend remain close friends with someone who was in love with her felt awkward at times, the fact that a majority of the school believes Touko and Sayaka were dating worked out to their benefit at times.
She waved goodbye to Touko at the stairwell and waited for a few heartbeats to head in after her. A force of habit, making it so they seemed even less conspicuous. It almost pained Yuu having to lag behind and leave Touko, and one look into Touko’s eyes and a glance at her teeth, gently worrying her lip, told her that she felt the same, but they had to anyways.
“Wait!” Yuu called, just a few moments before Touko opened the doors at the top of the stairwell. She turned and looked down with eyes that glistened curiously.
“Come over tonight? We can walk home together?” Yuu asked, feeling vulnerable. Her voice was soft, but it reached her love.
Touko burst into a deep blush, but she grinned cheekily and nodded before turning into the library, not risking calling down an answer in case someone heard.
Yuu sighed, focusing the butterflies in her stomach, and checked the time on her phone. She was meant to meet with her friends almost fifteen minutes ago, but she didn’t have any texts from them like she usually would have to ask where she was. She would typically have lied and said she was in the bathroom, but it felt like today would be an awful time to continue such a ruse.
She took a few deep breaths, focused herself as other students bustled past to reach the library, and finally ascended the stairs.
She found Akari and Koyomi at a table near the back, somewhat secluded. It wasn’t the regular table they had taken up almost every other day for the past week, and one look at the lack of open notebooks on the table told Yuu that she wasn’t likely to get much studying done today.
She took another deep breath, then set down her bags.
“Okay,” she started, meeting the gazes of her close friends. “I’m going to just… tell you everything.”
Akari grinned cheekily. “You better not leave out a single detail!”
“I won’t!” Yuu promised, and then she fiddled with her keychain as she took another breath.
“It all started after I joined the school council… do you remember that boy I was really close with in middle school?”
Koyomi nodded.
“He asked me out.”
Akari gasped. “So he’s your secret lover!”
Yuu laughed. “No, no, I needed advice on how to tell him no. I told him I needed time at first to think about it, but from the moment he confessed to me I knew in my heart that my answer would be a no. Then I stumbled across someone getting confessed to and turning them down perfectly!”
She smiled, remembering how she first met Touko. “Nobody’s feelings got crushed, and it was done so eloquently, so I decided to ask them advice after the student council meeting. They even held my hand while I called him, and we talked a bit about how both of us were turning down people because they just… didn’t make our hearts beat fast.”
Akari and Koyomi nodded, leaning forward as Yuu paused.
“Then… they told me right after the phone call that they were in love with me!”
Akari gasped again, dramatically as she could. “Right after saying he couldn’t catch feelings!”
Yuu giggled. “Yeah, I was pretty shocked too. And then… we kissed…”
That got Koyomi, the usually stoic girl, leaning forward with a glean in her eyes. “And you kissed him back?” She asked.
“I- kind of? It all got so complicated, but we essentially made a deal. I knew I couldn’t love someone so suddenly, and there was just so much love on the other side, but I was kind of curious as to what it was like, so I accepted a… kind-of relationship. It took me a while to realize I was falling to, probably like around our second or third date?”
“So many dates and you didn’t even have a crush on them!” Akari exclaimed.
Yuu hummed. “It was… a really slow burning crush, but I don’t think I would have ever agreed to the sort-of relationship we ended up in if I didn’t kind of like them back. And who could blame me, I mean – so smart, and beautiful…” Yuu sighed, lost in picturing her girlfriend.
Akari snapped. “Rest of the story. What happened next?”
“Oh!” Yuu jumped. “Right. Well, at first, the relationship was built on the fact that I couldn’t love anyone back, but then after I realized I did start to love, I had to make it so that the idea of a reciprocal relationship was okay. We had a lot of conversations, and worked on getting over all those weird hangups that got us into that relationship in the first place. Then I sort of… confessed? And ran away.”
Her friends gasped.
“You ran away?” Koyomi quietly asked.
Yuu laughed again. “Yeah, because the response I got was an apology! It took a few weeks before we talked again, realizing all our feelings were mutual and that we were ready to date, and we have been going steady for a few months since then.”
“Wow,” Akari said. “You’ve had this whole weird relationship behind our backs!”
“I really didn’t mean to, it just started out as a secret because I wasn’t really in a real relationship, then it became so convoluted and weird… I really am sorry, you two.”
“All is forgiven!” Akari smiled.
“Under one condition….” Koyomi said at the same time. Yuu glanced nervously at her friend, while Akari looked on with surprise.
“This story… it’s unlike any other love story… please… can I write it?”
“You want to write my relationship into a story?” Yuu exclaimed, blushing faintly.
“Of course, I won’t use your real names or anything, but the slow burn, the unreciprocated advances, every part of it is a telltale romance story!” Koyomi worried her hair between her fingers as she spoke. “I haven’t had much of an inspiration for romance before… I wonder how it’ll turn out.”
Yuu blushed. “As long as nobody can tell it was us…” She agreed, cautiously.
They spent the rest of the afternoon trading little stories, about the dates and funny moments they experienced, and Yuu felt lighter having told her friends the truth. They didn’t seem to mind any part of the romance, even when the stories had some suggestive bits, and were eagerly asking questions.
It felt… pleasant to be open with her friends. Yuu promised herself not to silently hide her relationship from them ever again, smiling wider and wider the longer they all talked.
Touko texted her just as they were wrapping up, and the sun was starting to set.
Touko: I’m ready to walk home whenever you are. Just finished studying!
Yuu: okay! :)
Touko: How did the talk go over with your friends?
Yuu: really well, they seemed to be really invested in it. Koyomi wants to write a story about us, though lol
Touko: She absolutely should! You are so easy to love, the whole world could see that!
Yuu blushed at her phone. Akari glanced up, noticing her texting.
“Still secretive about your relationship, huh?” She asked.
“What?” Yuu responded, genuinely confused.
Akari gestured to her phone. “When are we going to meet your mystery man, anyways? Which one from the student council is he?”
Yuu felt her face go white. There was no way she had told her entire romance and forgotten to say Touko’s name!
Touko, summoned by Yuu’s anxieties, appeared from behind a bookshelf. Yuu felt her heart drop into her stomach.
“Yuu!” She called happily, bounding up, and, despite the look of growing horror on her girlfriend’s face, pecked her on the lips and draped her arms around her.
“I heard the conversation went well!” She continued, utterly oblivious to the way her friends’ mouths hung open. Turning to the other two girls, she continued.
“I’ve always wanted to be more open about us, but there was never a good moment to- “
“You’re dating Nanami Touko?” Akari interrupted, shooting straight up. Even Koyomi looked pale and shaken.
“I don’t know how I forgot to mention her name!” Yuu cried. Touko, realizing her awful timing, slowly removed her arms, like that would dissolve the damage done.
“Lesbians…” Koyomi mumbled, garnering the attention of the other girls. “This story is going to be so popular!”