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Yuzuki generally wasn’t the type to make plans, and she certainly wasn’t the type to be disappointed if they were cancelled. Sometimes that was just the way life worked out, and she had no reason to complain about it. There were always other ways she could fill her time; she had plenty of hobbies, and plenty of friends, too, so there was no lack of opportunity. Today was no different. When, in her second to last class of the day, she got a text from Waka saying that he couldn’t go to the movies with her after school, she wasn’t particularly disappointed by it. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been looking forward to seeing some cringey, gory, action-packed movie she’d heard vague reviews about, but she had no problem going out with him another time. Besides, it wasn’t as though such movies were ever in short supply.
What put her off this time, though, was the message he’d sent her. It had nothing to do with his sudden cancelling plans; this wasn’t the first time it had happened, obviously, considering the number of times they’d gone out together. It had more to do with the way it was worded. Despite his typically anxious personality, Waka wasn’t usually desperate for an excuse when cancelling plans with her; he knew that she wouldn’t be let down by it, so he normally just apologized and asked if they could move it to another time, no explanation required.
Such was not the case today. The message he had sent her was almost entirely an excuse, and lacked the usual request to reschedule:
Hey, sorry this is so sudden but I can’t go to the movies later. Some stuff just came up really suddenly, and I have a lot of schoolwork that I’m behind on. I’m really sorry to cancel so suddenly but I won’t have any time after practice
When she first received it, she didn’t think much of it. She only noticed that something was off when he stopped replying afterwards. She sent what she had thought was a lighthearted, maybe slightly teasing message telling him that it was all good, and they could see it another time if he wanted—to which he would usually respond thanking her for understanding, and sometimes offering another time. Today, though, he didn’t respond to it at all. Yuzuki wasn’t annoyed by that, per se. If anything, it just made her a little worried about him.
And hence, after her final class of the day came to an end, she decided to go check in on him.
The doors to the gym were propped open after school, and no one stopped her when she walked inside. She caught a few players staring at her with wide eyes as she scanned the group, but didn’t pay them much mind; since she started helping them practice occasionally, a lot of the basketball players seemed to be unable to keep their eyes off of her (she was flattered, but she was uninterested). What threw her off, though, was that Waka was nowhere to be seen amongst the practicing basketball team.
A twinge of concern pricked Yuzuki as she stepped onto the basketball court and approached the team captain. He was too preoccupied with a drill to notice her at first, but when he eventually saw her walking towards him, she thought she may have seen him flinch.
“Oh—Seo-san! Why are you here?” His eyes were wide, and he was frozen in place as his basketball dropped to the floor and bounced away.
“I’m not here to practice, don’t get too excited.” The captain’s muscles visibly relaxed upon hearing those words. “I’m looking for Wakamatsu,” she continued.
The captain’s eyes skimmed around the gym for a moment, then went back to Yuzuki. “I saw him in the locker room before practice….” His voice trailed off as his eyes once again drifted away from her. “I’m not sure where he is now.”
“Hmm. Alright,” she responded, nudging past the captain and approaching the door to the boys’ locker room at the back of the gym. When she pushed the door open, she distantly heard someone yelling to her that she wasn’t allowed in there, but she chose to ignore it.
The locker room was lit up by fluorescent lights and littered with people’s clothes and school supplies that had been haphazardly thrown on the ground. It was significantly less organized than the girls’ locker room, but Yuzuki couldn’t judge, as she was no contributing factor to the cleanliness of the other room.
The door clicked shut behind her, and the only sounds she could hear now were the buzzing of the lights on the ceiling and the muffled sounds of the practice continuing outside. There didn’t seem to be anyone else there, but she figured she would look for him, just in case.
“Waka,” she called, stepping past rows of lockers and small stalls off to the side. “Are you in here?” She was met with silence.
‘I guess he went home,’ she thought. Well, at least she tried. If something was wrong, she could ask him about it tomorrow; it was probably no big deal—
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden break in the relative silence of the room. She froze in her steps, hesitantly glancing behind her. She waited for a few seconds, trying to decide whether or not she had imagined it, but was only met, again, with the same background noises from before.
Her eyebrows furrowed as she took a few steps forward, but she once again stopped when the silence was breached again. She definitely wasn’t imagining it; from somewhere in the room, she was hearing choppy, strained breaths. And unless her ears deceived her, they carried a familiar voice on them.
“Waka?” she called again. Her voice wavered with a slight hint of concern, though it probably wouldn’t have been noticeable to most. She stayed silent for a few more seconds, waiting for a response, but instead got the same feeble sound she’d been hearing. Doubtfully, she began walking in the direction of the sound; it got a bit louder as she heard it a few more times, eventually tracing it to a stall in the far corner of the room. The curtain was drawn shut, but she could very clearly hear sounds coming from behind it…and the sounds were undeniably him. Faint traces of his voice were carried on the uneven breaths that rung off the walls of the deserted room, and the closer she listened, the more defined the tremor behind them became.
A spike of worry jetted through her gut. Yuzuki was used to hearing people cry. Chiyo cried all the time—be it about stress, school, or her failing love life—and Yuzuki was usually able to be relatively consoling, she thought. But this was different. She had known Chiyo for years, and they were comfortable enough with each other at this point that it wasn’t awkward for either of them. She and Waka had only been close for a few months, and they weren’t anywhere near as close as she was with Chiyo. Not to mention, she had never heard him cry before. In fact, she’d never seen him particularly upset at all. But what was she supposed to do, then? Just leave?
She took a deep breath and found herself wringing her hands before she spoke again. “Wakamatsu. Are you alright?”
There were a few more pained, choppy cries before, finally, she heard him speak. “Please leave me alone, Seo-senpai.”
Yuzuki pursed her lips. Any sarcastic or teasing reply that could have been forming in her mind slipped away, and she paused for a few seconds. When he didn’t add anything else to his sentence, she finally spoke a few more, hushed words:
“I don’t want to leave you here unless I know you’re going to be ok.” He didn’t respond to that, but his voice became less hidden, descending into full-blown sobs. She swallowed, pressing her hand against the edge of the stall. “Are you going to be ok?”
For a few unbearably long seconds, the only sounds that filled the room were tormented, broken cries from behind the drawn curtain. And then, finally, a word surfaced above them.
“No.”
Yuzuki’s fingers curled around the edge of the stall, her mind trying to form any appropriate words. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, hesitant to speak at all in this situation. But, finally, she settled on: “Can I come in?”
There was another brief delay before he replied. “Yes.”
She drew in a slow, deep breath before gently pulling back the curtain, and she felt her stomach drop when she saw the state he was in.
His knees were pulled against his chest, and his head was resting against them. His entire body was visibly trembling, and what little she could see of his skin was pale and glistening with sweat. He didn’t look up at her; if anything, she thought she saw him pull his legs closer against his chest and bury his face deeper in his knees.
Her brain short-circuited at the sight. He seemed terrified down to his core, like he had just watched someone get killed in front of him; Chiyo’s melodramatic outbursts about her bonehead of a crush could never have prepared her for something like this.
“Waka,” she mumbled, stepping towards him and gently resting her hand on his shoulder. He flinched at her touch, and she almost pulled her hand away, but his muscles seemed to relax a bit after a moment. She chewed the inside of her lip, trying to decide what she should do. “Did something happen?”
He didn’t give a verbal response, only a soft shake of his head from where it was pressed into his knees.
Yuzuki nodded in acknowledgement, although he wasn’t looking at her. “Do you want me to stay?”
He took a little longer to answer that, but eventually nodded. “Yes. Please.”
Yuzuki swallowed and moved her hand from his shoulder to sit down beside him, cautiously reaching her hand to rest it on top of his. He didn’t have any reaction to the gesture, and for a while, they stayed like that without speaking. She couldn’t tell how long it was before his tears began to slow, and one of his hands lifted from where it was digging into his shin to wipe his eyes. She raised her eyes to where his now barely peeked out above his knees; they were incredibly bloodshot and red around the rims, and heavy dark bags had formed beneath them, standing out against his flushed, tear-stained cheeks. When they made eye contact, a surge of red spread out to his ears, and he once again rested his face on his legs.
He was still shaking, and there were still soft, erratic sobs leaving him, but they had slowed enough that Yuzuki made another attempt at getting him to speak.
“Do you want to talk about it?” She wasn’t sure what “it” was, but she had nothing better to say to him at this moment.
He heaved a deep sigh and once again dragged his hand beneath his teary eyes. “It’s not really anything. I just haven’t slept in a week.”
Yuzuki stared at him for a moment, mouth slightly agape as she tried to process the words he’d just said. He’d mentioned to her before, only in passing, that he suffered from insomnia. She was aware of the fact somewhere in the back of her mind, but she hadn’t ever really considered what that meant. She’d occasionally experienced sleepless nights before, where she would be completely restless despite an overwhelming tiredness weighing down on her body; she rarely thought about them except when they were occurring, but she knew that they were absolutely excruciating. She had never experienced them for more than one night at a time; the concept of going a week without sleeping sounded horrific.
“Everything seems a hundred times more intense than it actually is,” he continued, voice raw and crackly, “I feel like something bad is gonna happen any moment. And I’ve had this-this splitting headache since last night, I feel like my head is about to fucking explode—”
He stopped talking and rested both his hands against the back of his head, pressing his face back into his knees as a few more heavy sobs wrenched themselves from his core. Yuzuki’s mouth hung open, but no words formed on her tongue. It wasn’t as if she knew what it felt like, or there was any useful advice she could give. She settled at once again resting her hand on his shoulder, tracing soft circles where her fingers lay. He didn’t seem to notice it, and if he did, he didn’t show any response. But she held her hand there nonetheless, feeling his shoulders tremble underneath her touch.
A few more minutes passed like that. The stillness of the room, disrupted only by his occasional cries and the distant sounds of the practice still occurring outside, became almost comfortable after a while, and when it was finally broken, it was by his voice.
“Thank you.”
She glanced at him; his face was still hidden behind his legs, and she could still feel him shaking, but his breathing seemed to have slowed to a more normal pace. She waited for a second, then, with only a slight trace of doubt, chuckled softly.
“Don’t mention it.”
She heard a soft sigh leave his lips and, finally, he pushed her hand away from his shoulder and sat up, leaning his back against the wall behind him. His face was illuminated more clearly now; the dark semicircles beneath his eyes were a striking bluish black, defined enough that she probably could have seen them standing halfway across a room, and the blood vessels in his eyes were irritated, crawling in gaudy strands of red from the corners of his eyes to his glossy sapphire irises. His skin seemed to be regaining its color, but he still looked ashy, aside from a few red patches that had formed on his cheeks. He didn’t make eye contact with her, instead looking straight up at the ceiling above him and fidgeting with his fingers in front of him.
“Hey,” she said after a few seconds, “practice is gonna be over soon. Do you wanna get out of here before they all come back in here?”
His eyes went wide at that realization, and he shifted his gaze towards her. “Oh—yeah, that’s a good idea.” He quickly wiped his eyes once more before extending his legs and standing up; he still looked shaky, but he was standing, so she wasn’t going to interfere. She noticed his bag still lying on the floor and picked it up before standing up herself and handing it to him. He muttered a quiet “thanks” as he took it from her and turned to walk out of the cramped stall.
She followed behind him as he left the locker room and stepped out into the gym; she caught a few people gawking at them as they walked outside, but she doubted it was because they were observant enough to notice Wakamatsu’s swollen eyes or the tear stains on his cheeks. They were probably just shocked to see them together. Maybe they were jealous. Frankly, she didn’t care all that much.
They walked in relative silence for a good while. It wasn’t an awkward silence so much as an I-just-found-you-having-a-panic-attack-in-a-locker-room-and-don’t-really-know-if-there’s-anything-that-can-be-said-to-shift-conversation-away-from-that silence that neither of them felt particularly urgent to break. But when they eventually got on the train together, got off the train together, and wound up standing in front of his house, she felt obligated to say something.
“Um…so are you gonna be alright? I can go home if you want.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of the train station from which they had just come, but he quickly shook his head.
“Oh, it’s not a big deal if you want to stay, I mean—only if you want to, obviously, if you want to go home then don’t feel like you have to stay here, it’s just that you live kind of far away, if you didn’t want to walk all the way back by yourself….” He tripped over his words for a couple more seconds before lowering his head; she thought she could see a muted tint of red on the tips of his ears, but she may have been imagining it. “You don’t have to go home if you don’t want to, senpai.”
Yuzuki hesitated for a second before a slight smirk grew on her face. “You don’t need to sound so nervous, Waka. I’m your friend, you know that, right?”
He didn’t raise his gaze, and he hesitated a few seconds before responding. “Yes, of course.”
She smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “Alright, come on, let’s go inside, then.”
Yuzuki had been inside Waka’s house a few times before; usually they would only go there if he needed to get something or if they wanted to change into more comfortable clothes than their uniforms before going out somewhere else. It was generally pretty empty, since both his parents worked, his sister was much older than him and lived in another city, and his brother tended to stay in his room every time she had been over. She usually didn’t stay for very long, save for the one time they’d watched a movie together because a random torrential thunderstorm closed the trains for multiple hours on a day they had planned to go out and see a movie anyway, but she certainly didn’t mind it.
“Do you like video games?” he asked when they had both stepped inside and shut the door behind them. She slipped her shoes off and glanced up at him, then shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t usually have time to play them, though.”
“What kind of games do you play?”
She contemplated that for a second. “At home I usually play those kinda tactical action games. I like rhythm games, too, but don’t play them as much.”
He stared at her, his gaze suddenly narrowing, then widening again and wrinkling a little at the corners. She thought she caught a glint of excitement in his reddened eyes, and a soft smile appeared on his face.
“That’s about the last thing I would have expected from you.” He laughed, touching his hand to the back of his neck. “I figured you probably played horror games or shooter games or something. But, um…I have a few rhythm games, if you want to play.”
She wasn’t sure why that was so surprising to him—she thought, given that she was a singer, it would make sense for her to play rhythm games—but she didn’t press it.
“Sure.”
He smiled. “Great.”
Before they went to his room, he politely filled two glasses of water and handed one to her. She uttered an instinctive “Thanks” as he reached into a taller cabinet and removed a small plastic bottle from which he poured two white tablets and swallowed them down with a swig of water.
“What’s that?” she asked, gesturing towards the bottle as he returned it.
“Just for my headache,” he answered, closing the cabinet. “Alright, let’s go.”
He turned around and gestured for Yuzuki to follow as he went up the dark stairwell and pushed open the door to his bedroom, which was slightly less organized than she had ever seen it. It was still a mile neater than hers, and she had no right to judge, but his bed wasn’t neatly made so much as hastily thrown back together, and the desk against the far wall was nearly obscured beneath a mountain of random papers with seemingly no sense of organization.
There was a large, squishy rug under his bed that covered the bulk of the hardwood floor around it, and on the ground near the edge of his room a monitor was placed facing one side of his bed. A computer and a gaming console sat beside it, and he pressed a few buttons that lit up the screen and brightly displayed the console’s logo. He paired two controllers and handed one to her, sifting through a stack of games he procured from a box behind the computer and settling on one that she had never played but had heard excellent reviews of.
Neither of them spoke as he loaded the game, but questions began to dance on the surface of her mind as she gazed at his still swollen eyes reflecting the bright light of the screen. She was still having a hard time mentally processing what she had witnessed earlier, and part of her thought it was best to just leave it be until she was sure he was feeling better, but it was also becoming increasingly difficult to just pretend like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. On a normal day, they would go out and she would tease and provoke him just to see him get flustered, then simply apologize by buying him a gift or something, but currently, she was hesitant to say anything at all that would risk setting him off again. She wouldn’t say it out loud, if it could be avoided, but she wanted to help him. Something about seeing him so upset made her deeply uncomfortable; it was strange, because she had never felt that way when Chiyo or really anyone else cried around her, but she wanted to avoid seeing it again at all costs if she could.
“Hey,” she said eventually, delicately framing her tone so that it wouldn’t come off as though she were making fun of him.
“Hmm?”
“Has that ever happened to you before?”
His hands suddenly stopped moving, and he turned to look at her. His expression was blank for a second, then faltered into a slight frown as he leaned back against the frame of his bed.
“Uh…it doesn’t happen often.” He swallowed, refocusing his attention on the screen and scrolling through the different levels displayed. “I’ve had panic attacks before, but…I haven’t had one that bad since junior high.”
“Oh.” She fiddled with the buttons on the controller in her hand. “And it’s all because of insomnia?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. And stress. But they’re not unrelated.” He paused, and she was about to say something in response when he suddenly continued.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it though. I’m usually pretty good at coping with it, this isn’t normal for me or anything. We all have our days.” He breathed an exasperated sigh, turning to look at her. “It’s really nothing to worry about, Seo-senpai, I promise.”
Part of her couldn’t help but shake the feeling that he was only saying it to reassure her, but she did believe him, for the most part. She nodded, then turned away to face the screen.
“Okay, I’m not worried. Let’s play.”
The soft, half-formed smile reappeared on his face, and he turned to the screen, pressing a few buttons until the loading screen was replaced with a colorful level screen.
“Cooperative or competitive?”
She snickered and raised her eyebrows at him. “What do you think?”
He chuckled and rolled his eyes, selecting competitive mode and loading a moderately difficult level. They didn’t speak much while they played, except for either of them occasionally swearing quietly when they failed to align their clicks with the notes on the screen as the tempo grew more erratic and difficult to follow. It went on for a few levels growing progressively more intense before, finally, Waka tossed his controller aside and sighed.
“Getting frustrated?” she asked, a small smirk growing on her face, and he returned a faint smile.
“Of course not,” he replied, “just wanted to pause for a second.” He stretched his arms above his head and closed his eyes, yawned, and then reopened them to look at the screen. The smile had fallen from his face when his lips reconnected, and his eyes were droopier as he picked his controller back up and loaded the next level. The discomforting prick of concern resurged in her stomach, and she turned to face the screen, hoping not to draw much attention to it.
“Are you tired?” she asked, though upon a moment’s reflection, the question seemed perhaps not her most insightful. Suddenly alarmed, she turned to face him again, hoping he hadn’t taken it as an insult that may set him off again, but she was relieved to find the same smile resting beneath his tired eyes.
“Obviously,” he replied. “But I won’t sleep right now, anyway. It’s way too early.”
“Will you sleep once it’s dark?”
His smile fell, and he turned to face her, his eyes narrowing. “I hope so.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded, turning for a moment back at the screen, but quickly giving up and turning back to him. “Hey, Waka…if you don’t sleep tonight, can you stay home tomorrow?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”
She set the controller down, her tongue almost aching from how unnatural it felt to be speaking so carefully to him. “I don’t want you to have another mental breakdown. Just…try to stay home and rest if you don’t sleep enough tonight, okay?”
He averted his gaze and seemed to contemplate it for a few seconds before sighing and chuckling softly to himself. “Yeah…yeah, okay. I’m so damn exhausted that I’m sure I’ll sleep well tonight even if my usual sleep aids aren’t helping, but if I don’t, I’ll stay home and try to rest some more.”
She smiled, a lingering tightness she had barely noticed in her chest suddenly vanishing. “I’m glad.” She once again turned to the TV screen, and once again promptly turned back to him. “What are your usual sleep aids?”
She watched him for his response, and her heart skipped a beat when a familiar red hue spread across his face. She almost began frantically clarifying that that had been a genuine question, and she hadn’t even been trying to embarrass him by it, but he opened his mouth before she did, and she hesitated, though he didn’t speak right away.
“Well…I don’t sleep well with dead silence, so usually music helps.”
“Mhm.”
“I think I’ve mentioned to you before….” His voice trailed off shyly, and his eyes drifted back towards the TV screen, which had gone grey from their lack of activity. “Lorelei from the glee club has a really peaceful voice, it helps me sometimes but…not this week, I guess.”
Yuzuki’s face suddenly buzzed with warmth, and she smirked, her heart slowing back to its usual pace at Waka’s statement. She had figured he was too worn out to want to joke with her, but if he was willing to keep up the bit about pretending not to know that she was Lorelei, he couldn’t have been that sensitive. Even if he refused to let the joke die, though, it never failed to make her chest swell with a strange sweetness whenever he expressed to her how much he loved her singing, even if he refused to say it to her directly.
“Mm. Well, sorry about that,” she expressed half-genuinely, and was about to add another joke before an idea clicked in her mind. “Oh. You know, I might actually have something for you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Hold on,” she said, reaching into her bag for her phone and opening the voice memos app. “The quality is bad since I was recording on my phone, and they’re outtakes, so you know, not great, but maybe better than nothing.”
She pressed the play button on her screen and was met with a few seconds of muffled sounds of her adjusting her phone, followed by her clearing her throat and then speaking.
‘Alright, this is take one.’
She cringed at the sound of her own voice, but tried to keep her expression neutral as the recording gradually rose from silence to her own steady voice gracefully shaping each word of an aria she had started learning not long ago. In retrospect, the recording wasn’t terrible for a first attempt, but her nose still scrunched up in anticipation of the note she knew she’d failed to hit, which stung inharmoniously out from the others and was followed by abrupt silence, then a small chuckle and a quietly breathed, ‘Nope, that wasn’t it.’
She snickered at herself, hoping to mask the warm splotches of embarrassment painting themselves on her neck and face, but Waka didn’t seem to notice either way. His heavy eyes were locked on her phone screen, and even though they were still swollen and half closed, his pupils were dilated as he silently listened to her slightly better second attempt at the same song. Her first glaring mistake, anyway, came about thirty seconds later than it had in the first attempt, and Waka’s eyebrow twitched when it played, but his eyelids continued to slowly droop closer to each other as the recording went on, each outtake growing ever so slightly more accurate.
The recording played for almost three minutes before a sudden smack against her shoulder startled her from her intent focus on not cringing to death. Her eyes snapped wide open, and she shuffled away from the point of contact, but as soon as she processed what had actually happened, her hands froze, and she stopped moving just as suddenly as she had started.
Waka’s eyes were now fully closed, and all the tension that had been so strikingly visible in his features had unwound. His arms hung loosely, one draped over his lap and the other at his side next to her, and his entire body had slumped to the side with all the gracefulness of a ferret, landing his head directly atop her shoulder. Tufts of soft hair brushed against her neck and cheek, and her stomach fluttered—though, surely, that was only because of the embarrassing music that was still playing from the phone she had dropped on the ground, and not from the warm, sweet sensation of his hair tickling her skin.
She drew a deep breath and straightened her spine, moving slowly enough not to rouse him as she reached for her phone. Her fingers instinctively moved to pause the recording, but she hesitated before pressing the button as he exhaled a deep, even breath whose warmth she could just barely feel as it rushed past her chin. She swallowed, hoping to subdue the heat that was only swelling more and more strongly on her face (because of the recording), and after a moment of contemplation, she shifted her thumb to the side of her phone and slightly lowered the volume. She placed it on the floor in front of him, far enough away that she could just barely hear it over the sound of her own breathing and the faint loading music of the neglected video game.
She drew her hands in front of her and rested them on her legs, taking a slow breath in through her nose and shifting awkwardly to lean more of her weight against the bed. The support released a bit of the tension from her shoulders, but a strange strain she couldn’t readily identify remained tightly wound in her gut—though, it wasn’t totally unpleasant. Sure, it may have felt a little like she was going to throw up, but it was outweighed by the accompanying sensations of her heart steadily pounding like it did whenever she played sports—like it did whenever she got to play basketball with him—and the tender warmth in her face that she figured he probably felt every time she teased him. She supposed these feelings were probably just side effects of the wave of relief that flowed through her when all the discomforting anxiety that had tormented him so visibly before finally faded away, and she didn’t have to be so impossibly careful with everything she said or did.
She tilted her head to get a better look at him. It was difficult to see his face from this angle, but the color seemed to have returned fully to his cheeks, and his lips were parted just slightly; a hushed, steady sound rolled from them with every deep rise and fall of his chest, but it carried no traces of the panic that plagued it before. She could more clearly see his arms and legs, which rested motionlessly beside him and showed no evidence of the tension that was almost always present in at least some of his muscles, either from the focused strength of his body whenever he played basketball or simply the awkward stiffness with which he tended to carry himself.
Her heart rate picked up as she watched him, and the tingling blush in her face spread along her skin and flowered in her chest.
Damn. He was cute.
Her eyes narrowed, and she turned towards the darkened TV screen as that thought took shape and then melted again a few times in her brain.
“Psh.” She snickered at herself, softly shaking her head. She was starting to sound like Chiyo.
She reached the arm that Waka wasn’t leaning against to retrieve the controller she’d discarded on the floor and bring the game back to life. She paused it for just a moment to lower the volume and switch the game mode to singleplayer, then carefully raised her other arm to place both hands on the controller. She settled back even farther against the bed before moving on to the next level and following along as best she could with the lowered volume, which seemingly was not enough to draw Waka from his sleep.
Time ticked on comfortably as she played through the levels, setting new records on the majority of them, and the strange but not totally unwelcome feelings that fluttered inside of her gradually vanished as his presence there became more like a background to the more demanding task of aligning her clicks with the movements of colorful shapes darting across the screen at the speed of light. The sun had lowered to a level that pierced directly through his window and cast a blinding glare on the TV before her phone eventually buzzed, and she paused the level she was currently on to check on it.
It was a message from Ryousuke, which simply read:
Come home for dinner unless you want me to eat it all
Followed by another which said:
We’re having yakitori
Well. That certainly wasn’t an offer she would turn down.
She quickly sent off a reply that she would be home soon and exited the half-finished level, setting the controller down on the floor beside her and glancing at Waka again. He was still soundly asleep, and his head had slumped forward a little more, but all his weight was still balancing on her shoulder. Maybe if she moved extremely carefully, she would be able to maneuver her way out from beneath him without waking him up; the thought of leaving him passed out on the floor was mildly entertaining. She could almost imagine the pretty pink hue that would spread all the way to the tips of his ears as he woke up and realized that he had fallen asleep there because of her singing, and maybe even connect the dots or vaguely remember that he had fallen asleep leaning against her arm. She almost wanted to send him a text explaining that she had to leave after an hour of letting him rest on her, framing it as an apology that she wasn’t able to say goodbye, just so that she could be sure he’d blush like that.
But as adorable—no, not adorable, maybe amusing—as that would be, the longer she considered it, the less she liked the idea of him waking up feeling sore from lying on the solid ground and nullifying the badly-needed comfort that sleep should have given him.
She blew some air between her lips and slowly shifted towards him, raising an arm to gently shake his shoulder.
“Hey, Waka,” she muttered. “I have to go home. You should go to bed.”
He sighed and shifted slightly, pressing the arm that hung at his side into the ground and rolling his shoulders back. His eyelids twitched a little, and he scrunched them shut tighter before he half opened them and gazed distantly at the ground, then the screen, then at her. His eyes hadn’t quite returned to their usual clear color, but the red vessels that had been protruding so strongly before had receded to just the corners, and the watery lines etched around them had vanished completely, replaced only by a few dried tears that had solidified while he was sleeping.
“Did I fall asleep?” he murmured, raising his other arm and rubbing his eye.
“Yeah,” she answered as he pushed himself mostly upright, relieving her of his weight as some half-awake clarity returned to his face. She came close to adding that he hadn’t just fallen asleep, but fallen asleep because of her, and fallen asleep on her, but she withheld, sensing that he may not have fully woken up yet, and if she didn’t startle him out of his daze, he could probably keep resting after she left. Even if it felt almost criminal to pass up such a perfect opportunity to tease him, she would never want to actually hurt him, and evidently, insomnia could hurt him. She hoped she would never have to see that again, and if she had some control over it, she wouldn’t waste it on a joke. Plenty more opportunities would arise later.
“Sorry,” he said, squinting his eyes at the light coming in through the window. “That usually doesn’t happen.”
She lightly patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. You should go to bed, though, instead of lying on the floor.”
He sighed and stretched his arms above his head. “Okay.”
With sluggish, half-conscious motions, he braced his arms against the bed frame and pushed himself to his feet, standing off-balanced for a moment before flopping on his back atop the mattress and closing his eyes again. His knees were still bent at the side of the bed, and his legs were long enough that his toes still touched the floor, but he only laid that way for a moment before slowly dragging them onto the mattress and rolling into the flat pillows at the top of his bed.
His eyes opened very slightly when his body went still again, and he half-glanced at her before exhaling heavily and pressing his face into the pillow so that just the very side of his face was still visible.
“Sorry, senpai,” he muttered again, “I can walk you to the train station if you want.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s fine. Just sleep.”
A faint smile took shape on his lips, and he nodded very softly. “Okay. Thank you.”
His voice was almost uncharacteristically calm, and it was so faint and unfocused that she was almost certain he would remember none of this interaction whenever he actually woke up.
She vastly preferred this version of tiredness on him. It didn’t seem to smother or torment him like the exhaustion that had attacked him before; instead, his features were completely serene, and his body appeared more relaxed than she could ever recall seeing him. A flare of embarrassment sparked in her chest, but she couldn’t help the overwhelming, blissful relief that seeing him so calm evoked in her, especially after how miserable he looked before. She almost wished she could see him like this more often—though, if he would only ever become tired enough to sleep during the day when he failed to sleep at night, she could accept never seeing it again. She could savor this moment—this whole afternoon she had spent with him, the weird bubbly feelings he’d completely unintentionally made her feel, the beautiful configuration of his face and body when he slept—right next to all her other fond memories of him.
She pressed her fingers between her eyes and chuckled at herself, softly shaking her head. “Alright, I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”
He didn’t reply, or make any indication that he had heard her, but that was probably for the best. She didn’t need him to be conscious right now. She didn’t need him to notice the blush that her own ideas had undoubtedly plastered on her face. She didn’t need him having any reason to tease her for getting flustered—that was just backwards.
She silently collected her phone and her bag from the floor and slinked from his room as soundlessly as possible. The roads were still decently crowded as she walked from his house back to the train station, but she didn’t run into anyone she knew for the entire stretch—which was, again, probably for the best, but as she sat on the train headed back to her house, the need to articulate and make sense of her feelings in some lighthearted manner got the best of her.
Lucky for her, she knew an expert on the subject.
She pulled out her phone and sent a series of texts to Chiyo:
You know how I’ve always said I don’t understand what you’re talking about every time you ramble about nozaki-kun
I think I’ve finally discovered the emotion you’re describing