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“Tanaka.”
No answer.
“Tanaka, class is over.”
Still nothing.
It must be the warm weather—all that sunshine coming in through the windows. It’s too comfortable. Tanaka stays slumped over his desk, out completely. If it had been a normal class period, Ohta might have kept a stricter watch on Tanaka, stopped him from dozing off in the first place. But homeroom’s always lax, and even moreso when the teacher is out, leaving the class with independent study. They’d been given just one task to end their school day, directions scribbled on the board and a stack of forms on the front desk. But the hour has come and gone, and even the students on cleaning duty have left for home or club activities. It's just the two of them now in the empty room.
Ohta glances over the small bit of Tanaka’s printout that he can make out from beneath the makeshift pillow of his arms.
Name: blank. University Choices: blank. Intended Field of Study: blank.
Pretty much what Ohta expects. Ohta had filled out the counseling questionnaire in ten minutes and no one else in their class spent longer than twenty. But it’s not due until tomorrow, so Ohta supposes he can give Tanaka some leeway on this. As his eyes slide away from the page, his gaze catches on pencil marks. Oh. So Tanaka managed to fill out at least one field after all. He tilts his head for a better angle.
Future Career: Ohta’s husband.
Ohta straightens up, grip tightening on the strap of his school bag. The feeling isn’t surprise, exactly. After all, it’s far from the first time he’s suffered through one of Tanaka’s oblique marriage proposals. Except they’re not even proposals—they’re always just assumptions without asking, as if it were a matter of fact that their lives would lead them to that end.
“You can’t,” he says, simply. Because it is a simple truth.
Tanaka doesn’t respond.
Even if he were awake, that train of thought is something Tanaka could never be left to finish on his own. It always falls to Ohta to run the rails of reasonable explanations. Why they couldn’t. Why they shouldn’t. Really, living with Tanaka would be closer to babysitting than marriage, like taking care of a particularly fussy houseplant.
It’s their third year already. This joke stopped being funny a long time ago; it’s time to grow up. Tanaka. How long are you going to keep saying things like this?
“It’s impossible,” he says, more harshly now, and he’s not talking to Tanaka anymore. “Even if I—” Ohta breaks off, pressing his knuckles against the surface of an empty desk. He clenches his jaw, tries to swallow around the thick knot of words he shouldn’t say.
“Hey. Tanaka. You still asleep?”
Outside the window, Ohta can see the sports clubs in the fields below, soccer players running drills, the basketball team working on conditioning, sprinters dashing in time trials. Other clubs mill around the grounds as well—outdoor sketching, photography, and more activities that Ohta can’t discern from the distance. Even the clouds look busy, billows stretching to long traveling ribbons in the sky.
But inside the empty classroom it’s completely silent. The chatter of the students down below and the shouts of athletes stay partitioned on the other side of the glass. No sound, no movement, besides the rise and fall of Tanaka’s back with each breath. It feels separate from the world, two lives momentarily set apart from seven billion others. A closed bubble where time and space have been suspended. And maybe reality, too.
Ohta bends down towards Tanaka. Leans in closer, far enough that he has to brace his weight on Tanaka’s desk to keep from falling into him.
“I want,” he says quietly, only realizing how tensely he’s breathing when he sees the way it tousles Tanaka’s hair in uneven bursts, “to always be the one who gets to wake you up.”
As soon as the words come, he steps back, remembering himself, but he moves too suddenly. He stumbles, bumping desks out of their neat rows, nearly tangling his legs in the furniture.
Even through the clatter, Tanaka barely shifts.
The classroom returns to silence. Ohta presses the back of his hand against his mouth.
It had always been just outside of his attention. For a long time it had stayed there, ignored and unwelcome. It’s the kind of thought that would make friendship hard, and self-control harder. He’d done his best to pretend it didn’t exist at all, that it was something whose shape he could not recognize. And now he’s opened the door himself and let it in. A wish, standing in the genkan of his heart, nervous, shoes still on, and waiting.