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“You could fall in love with me,” he says. Pleads.
And Aoi—Aoi thinks about falling in love.
She thinks about long hair tipped with teal, thinks about applying the box dye together, getting so covered in it that no amount of scrubbing could take the color from her skin.
She thinks about eyes like pink pearls, soft lips and soft skin, gentle, calloused hands cupping her face.
She thinks about gardening together, about strong arms and bright smiles, about bright sun, about hair turned pearlescent to match pink-pearl eyes.
She thinks about Nene.
“No.” Her voice is final, resigned, spills from her mouth without conscious thought, free of the control she so often hides behind. She feels as though she is underwater, drifting. “I cannot.”
His face remains determined, though the heartbreak surges beneath.
She thinks about a childhood full of laughter, of kindness and determination of a boy she will never marry.
She loves Akane. She loves him, but never in the way he wants her to.
She feels the fragility of their bond in this moment, feels a friendship that has always been vital fraying as though it might break—all because she cannot make it more.
“Why not? I can—I’ve done everything. What have I missed? How do I become someone you could love?”
He is desperate now, grasping at straws. He does not understand that he is perfect, that there is nothing he needs to change. That there is nothing he could do to fix this. That it is not him that is wrong, but her.
“I already have someone I love.”
He is silent. Still. The wind is not, rushes past them, shaking the trees, their hair, their very bones.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” There is something empty in his eyes, something desolate, broken.
She knows what he means.
He is so, so wrong.
She thinks If only he knew , but she cannot tell him. It is not her secret to spill, a shame not hers to feel.
She thinks about blue eyes following orange, thinks about love and responsibility and humanity.
She thinks about bitter jealousy that goes both ways, about pink eyes following him and brown eyes following her, never satisfied.
She thinks about bone-deep exhaustion, blue eyes holding a sadness deep enough to drown in, thinks about laying side by side and lamenting their failures of making, of humanity.
She thinks about sad smiles and being broken beyond repair.
She thinks about Teru.
She loves him, she does. But not in the way Akane thinks. Not in the way that matters.
She loves them both, deeply, laments at their despair, at being the cause of it for opposing reasons. One she cannot love, and one whose love she has unwillingly stolen.
“It’s not him,” she says, and she is floating, now. This is the moment that will break her. “It will never be a him.”
The world rushes in. Realization sparks in his eyes, comprehension, and she is falling, falling.
She had not meant to let that slip. Her loosened control has betrayed far more than she is willing, far more than is safe, than can be moved past.
He knows, now, of her shame. Why she can never love him, why she can never be enough.
She has lost him.
And she cannot stand to see his disgust, see how he will abandon her now that he knows , knows she is greedy and desirous and broken.
And she runs.