Chapter Text
Zenitsu noticed Kaigaku’s name in a work group chat.
Not a nickname.Not a contact label he’d customized himself.Just a clean, standardized full name on a white screen.
He stared at it for a few seconds too long, until new messages pushed it upward and he realized he’d been spacing out.
So this was how it happened. No street corner, no coincidence, no dramatic return. Just two people who had once fallen out of each other’s lives, reconnected by a system that didn’t care about history.
He didn’t say anything right away. Not because he was nervous—because he didn’t know what tone to use. Too familiar would feel inappropriate. Too distant would feel dishonest.
Kaigaku replied in the group chat first. Received. Just that. Short. Neutral. Efficient.
Zenitsu hesitated, then opened a private message.
Long time no see.
He deleted an emoji before sending it. The reply came a few minutes later.
Yeah.
One word. Zenitsu stared at it for a moment and realized that whatever distance had formed between them over the years could now be measured in something this small—a single syllable on a screen.
They met again a week later, at an in-person meeting for the project. Kaigaku arrived exactly on time. His jacket was draped neatly over the back of his chair, sleeves rolled with deliberate precision—someone who looked like he belonged in rooms like this. Zenitsu was two minutes late. He pushed the door open slightly out of breath, a half-finished coffee still in his hand. For a brief second, neither of them spoke.
Kaigaku’s eyes lingered on him—not long, but long enough for Zenitsu to notice. As if he were quietly confirming that this was, in fact, him.
“Long time,” Kaigaku said. His tone was calm, professional. Like greeting a former coworker, not someone who used to know him too well.
“Yeah,” Zenitsu replied, smiling reflexively.
The meeting went smoothly. They discussed timelines, adjusted details, finished
each other’s sentences with an ease that felt unsettling. As if the years between them had simply been folded away. Zenitsu was the only one who noticed how strange that was.
When it ended, Kaigaku stood up first, already gathering his things. “Kaigaku,” Zenitsu called without thinking. He turned. “Yeah?” Zenitsu opened his mouth, intending to ask if he wanted to get dinner sometime. Instead, the words shifted. “I’ll send you the files later.” “Okay.” And that was it.
That evening, Zenitsu sent the documents—and attached a short voice message. Just a quick explanation about one minor detail. Casual. Almost careless. But the moment he hit send, something settled heavily in his chest. It had been years since he’d done this. Years since he’d chosen, without necessity or obligation, to place his voice directly in Kaigaku’s hands.
Kaigaku didn’t reply with a voice message. Just text. Got it. Zenitsu set his phone face down on the desk and stared at the ceiling for a while. Only then did it become clear to him: They had reconnected, yes. They were just no longer living in the same time.
The first call happened by accident.
Zenitsu didn’t mean to press the button. He was walking back to his apartment, phone balanced in one hand, scrolling through emails with the other. A notification came in, the screen shifted, and suddenly the call interface filled his vision. Kaigaku’s name appeared at the top.
Ringing. Zenitsu stopped walking. For half a second, he considered hanging up. Pretending it hadn’t happened. Blaming it on bad reception or a pocket misfire. That would have been easier.
Then the call connected.
“Hello?” Kaigaku’s voice was different over the phone. Slightly flatter. Less guarded, somehow—like he hadn’t had time to put his face on yet.
“—Sorry,” Zenitsu said quickly. “That was an accident.”
A pause. “…You called,” Kaigaku said, not accusing, just stating a fact.
“Yeah. I mean. I didn’t mean to. I was walking and—” Zenitsu stopped himself, realizing how ridiculous he sounded. “Anyway. You don’t have to—”
“It’s fine,” Kaigaku said.
Another pause. Longer this time. Neither of them hung up.
Zenitsu leaned against the railing outside his building, watching a car crawl through the intersection below.
“You busy?”
“Not really.”
That surprised him. “Oh.”
Silence stretched between them—not uncomfortable, exactly, but unfamiliar.
It felt like standing in a room they both remembered, only to find the furniture rearranged. Kaigaku spoke first. “You said you’d send the updated files.”
“I did. Earlier today.”
“I saw.”
Zenitsu smiled faintly, even though Kaigaku couldn’t see it. “Right. Then… yeah. That’s all.”
He waited for the call to end. It didn’t.
“You still in the city?” Kaigaku asked.
“For now.”
“For now,” Kaigaku repeated, like he was filing the phrase away for later. “You always say that.”
Zenitsu exhaled. “Some habits stick.”
Another silence—but this one felt different. Softer. Like neither of them was in a hurry to leave.
They talked for eight minutes. About nothing, mostly. The project timeline. A new café near the office. How the weather had been unpredictable lately.
When they finally hung up, Zenitsu didn’t realize how long he’d been crying until his eyes started to sting. His tears had already overflowed since he heard Kaigaku asked him if he’s still in the city, or maybe earlier, and landed on his scarf, leaving a few tear stains on it.
He told himself it hadn’t meant anything.
After that, the calls kept happening. Not every day. Not at first. Just often enough to feel incidental.
Sometimes Zenitsu called. Sometimes Kaigaku did. There was no pattern, no schedule. Just a quiet assumption that the other person might pick up. They rarely talked about anything important.
Zenitsu would call while walking somewhere—home, the grocery store, nowhere in particular. Kaigaku usually answered from indoors. His apartment. His office.
Once, a stairwell, his voice echoing faintly like he’d stepped away from something loud.
“What are you doing?” Zenitsu asked one night.
“Working.”
“Still?”
“Yes.”
Zenitsu winced. “You’re going to burn out.”
A pause. “You sound like you care.”
“I sound like someone who’s right,” Zenitsu said lightly.
Kaigaku snorted before he could stop himself.
Zenitsu froze. “…Did you just laugh?”
“I did not.”
“You did,” Zenitsu said, grinning openly now. “I heard it.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“I won’t,” Zenitsu said. “But I’m glad it exists.”
Kaigaku didn’t respond to that. He didn’t hang up either.
What surprised Zenitsu wasn’t how easy the calls became. It was how quickly he started planning his time around them. He’d catch himself slowing his walk home, dragging out errands, staying up later than usual. All small, deniable choices. None of them deliberate enough to feel like a commitment.
He started leaving his phone off silent. Kaigaku never commented on it, but Zenitsu noticed patterns anyway. Kaigaku almost never called during the day. Almost always at night. Sometimes it was late enough that Zenitsu was already in bed, lights off, staring at the ceiling.
“You awake?” Kaigaku asked once.
“I am now.”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Then why’d you call?”
“…Didn’t think you’d answer.”
Zenitsu smiled into his pillow. “You called anyway.”
Kaigaku didn’t deny it.
They didn’t say goodnight when they hung up.
They never said goodbye either.
The calls just… ended. One of them would stop talking, or get distracted, or say, “I should go,” and the line would go dead without ceremony.
Zenitsu found that he liked it that way.
The first time the calls crossed a line, neither of them acknowledged it.
Zenitsu was listening to music when Kaigaku called. He answered without pausing the song, letting it play softly through the speaker.
“What’s that?” Kaigaku asked.
“A song.”
“I can tell.”
Zenitsu laughed. “I mean—it’s new. I think. It just came on.”
Kaigaku was quiet for a moment. “Let it play.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
So Zenitsu did.
They didn’t talk for almost a full minute. The song filled the space between them—muffled, imperfect, not meant to be shared this way. When it ended, Kaigaku exhaled slowly.
“…That was annoying.”
“Liar.”
“Maybe.”
Zenitsu hesitated, then said, “There’s this line in it. About kissing through the phone.”
Kaigaku scoffed. “That’s stupid.”
“Yeah,” Zenitsu agreed. “It is.”
Another pause.
“…You always listen to things like that?” Kaigaku asked.
“Only when I’m alone.”
“You’re not alone right now.”
Zenitsu swallowed. “I know.”
They changed the subject after that. Neither of them mentioned the song again.
At some point, Zenitsu realized something was wrong. Not wrong enough to stop. Just wrong enough to notice.
He couldn’t remember the last time they’d seen each other in person. Weeks had passed. Maybe longer. All he had were calls. And voice messages, sometimes—short ones, practical ones, usually from him. Kaigaku almost never sent audio back.
Still, Zenitsu kept leaving them. Explanations. Jokes. Small observations he didn’t want to lose.
Each time, he told himself it was nothing.
But why would he stared at those messages from Kaigaku and let his tears quietly flew on his checks often?
He didn’t know. Neither would the owner of those messages would ever tell him.
Each time, he felt like he was putting something fragile somewhere it might not be found.
At least they were still connected, weren’t they? He took the placebo in. It tasted bittersweet.
One night, after the call ended, Zenitsu stared at his phone longer than usual. The screen was dark. Silent.
He thought, not for the first time, that this— this invisible line between them— was the closest they’d been in years.
And that scared him more than the distance ever had.
He buried his face in the pillow. He cried like a young kid, letting the tears drowning him. Soft blanket swallowed his sobs and fragility. He miss that reluctantly but warm hug from his little elder brother in the kindergarten.
Zenitsu began noticing the patterns before he could even name them.
Kaigaku’s calls came late, almost always after ten. Sometimes Zenitsu would be halfway asleep, the ceiling staring back at him like a blank page, and the sudden vibration of his phone would jolt him upright. Other times, the calls came while he was walking home, earbuds in, music leaking softly, and he would pause mid-step, squinting at the screen, as if seeing Kaigaku’s name there could somehow anchor him to reality.
There was an intimacy to it, but it was a fragile, uneven thing. They never spoke about themselves directly. Not really. Zenitsu would talk about a café that had opened near the office, a song that made him think of the rain, a stray cat that had crossed his path on the way home. Kaigaku would reply with short affirmations, or a single word that somehow carried more weight than anything Zenitsu could articulate: “Noted.” “Okay.” “Sure.”
These small exchanges built a rhythm. Zenitsu found himself anticipating it almost as much as he dreaded it. Every time he picked up his phone, he asked himself: will this be a short call? Will he answer? Or will it go straight to voicemail again?
One evening, Zenitsu walked through a quiet part of the city, rain misting the streetlights and reflecting the neon signs in fractured colors. He had been listening to a new track on his playlist, a soft electronic beat that made him think of distant rooms, of voices carried over wires. On impulse, he dialed Kaigaku.
The phone rang once, twice… then straight to voicemail. He froze, thumb hovering over the red hang-up button. Call again? No. He knew what would happen. He had experienced it enough by now. So he left a short voice message:
“Hey… just wanted to tell you about the song. It reminded me of… nothing important. Hope you’re okay.”
He sent it and continued walking, pretending the wetness on his jacket was from the rain and not the tremor in his hands. His phone vibrated once. He ignored it. Maybe Kaigaku called back. Maybe not. He would never know.
Another night, Zenitsu stayed up later than usual, finishing a minor work task that could have waited. He called Kaigaku just to let him know, thinking it would be polite. The line connected, and for a brief moment, the familiarity of Kaigaku’s voice made him relax. They spoke about nothing—an exchange of trivialities that held a delicate balance: work deadlines, which cafés were open, the weather. Zenitsu laughed at a cold joke Kaigaku made, and for one suspended minute, it felt like they were exactly where they were supposed to be.
Then Kaigaku said: “I need to finish something.”
The call ended abruptly. Zenitsu stared at the phone. His chest ached. The comfort had existed only in the pause between words, and now it was gone. He sank into the quiet of his apartment, the city lights faintly bleeding through the blinds, and listened to the leftover hum of his playlist. Every note reminded him of the voice he could no longer hold.
He stared at the ceiling in the darkness. Nothing on it, but a lamp which was turned off.
He closed his eyes. Only his breath and heart beats drilling into his ears.
He felt something wet the fabric of the pillow on both sides of his head. It was still warm. He didn’t want to know what it was. But he knew it was his tears.
The calls became a private game. Zenitsu would sometimes answer with the music still playing, letting Kaigaku hear snippets of the songs he liked. Once, Kaigaku asked what he was listening to, and Zenitsu made a joke about the lyrics being too stupid to explain. Kaigaku laughed—a short, almost imperceptible sound. Zenitsu caught it, frozen mid-step, smiling to himself for longer than anyone should in silence.
Other times, Zenitsu deliberately waited to answer, wanting to see if Kaigaku would call again. He left voice messages that were short, mundane, carefully neutral. “The sky looks like this tonight.” “Saw a stray cat on the street.” “Coffee was terrible today, haha.”
Most of the time, Kaigaku didn’t respond. And Zenitsu left them anyway.
He began noticing the rhythm of Kaigaku’s life without needing to be told.
Late-night calls, almost every time.
Almost no daytime interactions.
Occasional muted laughter or a single word to answer something, then silence. Zenitsu learned to anticipate the gaps, to read them like a calendar written in invisible ink. He would pause at street corners, listening to distant traffic, the hum of neon, the echo of his own footsteps, waiting to see if Kaigaku would call. And sometimes, when he answered late at night, Kaigaku’s voice sounded tired. Quiet. He didn’t complain. He didn’t question. He didn’t linger. Zenitsu sometimes imagined him leaning against the edge of his desk, phone in hand, staring at the ceiling too, mirroring Zenitsu’s own restless habit.
Months passed like this. He coundn’t tell how long it exactly has been. It doesn’t really matter anyway. He was satisfied with the existing circumstances.
Zenitsu kept notes in his head: the time of day Kaigaku would likely answer, the length of each call, the small idiosyncrasies in his voice—the way it softened when amused, or stiffened when focused. He left voice messages he knew would never be replied to.
He knew the rhythm was fragile. He also knew that he didn’t care.
Because it was the closest they had been in years.
Zenitsu had gotten used to the rhythm, or so he told himself.
Late calls, brief exchanges, unanswered messages—he had memorized the pattern. He knew when Kaigaku would pick up, when he wouldn’t, even when he wasn’t paying attention. It was like a pulse. Sometimes reassuring, sometimes fragile.
But life is not always smooth sailing, right?
It was a normal Thursday evening. Zenitsu had stayed late at the office, the kind of overtime that left him empty but alert, the city streets glowing through rain-smeared windows. He pulled out his phone and saw Kaigaku’s name. On impulse, he dialed.
Ringing.
Ringing.
Ringing.
Voicemail. “Hello, no one is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Zenitsu stared at the screen. The usual rhythm was gone. The line he had relied on, the invisible thread he had traced so carefully, had slipped away in a moment. He left a message anyway:
“I… just wanted to check if you got the files. Hope you’re okay.”
It felt absurd even as he said it. His voice sounded small, muffled, drowned by the hum of the office and the soft tapping of rain against the window.
In the next few days, calls went unanswered more often. Texts sat unread. Voice messages—short, careful, deliberate—were never returned.
Zenitsu tried to reason it away. Kaigaku was busy. Kaigaku had a life outside of him. It was okay. It had always been okay.
But then one night, Zenitsu found himself staring at the phone for an hour. He had called three times. No answer. The city hummed faintly beyond the window. His room was silent except for the low tick of the clock. He imagined Kaigaku on the other side: at a desk, lights dim, working late, not thinking of him at all.
The thought twisted inside him like cold water.
He couldn’t hear his breath and heart beats clearly this time. He heard whimpers.
Then the timeline fast forwarded to the day he would never forget.
It was a bad day, created difficulties by superiors, cold eyes from colleagues. But everyday was much of muchness. So it wasn’t too bad though. When Zenitsu was on his way home, he caught a sudden downpour. The rain didn’t drizzle—it fell in relentless sheets, a gray curtain that blurred the city and erased the familiar outlines of streetlights and shop signs. His jacket was soaked through almost immediately, sticking to his shoulders and chest like a second skin. Water pooled in his shoes, sloshing with every step, soaking through the thin socks he hadn’t bothered to change that morning. The umbrella he had tucked under one arm did little more than flutter uselessly in the wind. Streetlights reflected off the wet asphalt in fractured, trembling colors: neon reds, greens, yellows, flickering like candle flames. Zenitsu’s own reflection stared back at him in the puddles, distorted, unsteady, almost unrecognizable. His hair clung to his forehead, droplets running into his eyes, stinging. He pressed his palms against his face, trying to shake it off, but the cold, the wet, the ache in his chest—it all mingled into something he could barely name.
He pulled out his phone. Kaigaku’s name glowed at the top. His thumb hovered over it for a moment, trembling. He dialed, needing something—anything—familiar, some human voice to anchor him in the chaos around him.
The phone rang.
Rang again.
And then straight to voicemail. “Hello, no one is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Zenitsu’s stomach twisted. The thread that had kept him steady, even through weeks of silence, snapped with a small, almost inaudible pop. He left a message anyway, voice low, careful, almost strangled by the storm and the shaking of his hands:
“I… I’m soaked. I don’t want to walk home like this. Can you…?”
He stopped. Couldn’t finish. Don’t sound pathetic. Don’t sound needy. The words stuck in his throat. He ended the message simply:
“Just… hope you’re okay.”
Hanging up, he slipped the phone back into his soaked jacket pocket. Each droplet that hit his face felt like a tiny weight pressing him further into the pavement. Cars rushed past, sending waves of cold water onto the sidewalk. The wind howled between buildings, tugging at his coat, flinging rain into his eyes.
He trudged on, one step at a time, feeling the city blur around him. Streetlight halos melted into the puddles. Reflections of strangers’ umbrellas swirled in the water. The scent of wet asphalt and exhaust burned in his nose. Every sound—tapping rain, passing engines, distant sirens—echoed like a reminder that he was completely alone, utterly unmoored, and desperately small in a city that didn’t notice him at all. Even the storm, in its immense fury, felt indifferent. The rain would not pause for him. The wind would not bend its course. And Kaigaku, just like the weather, seemed unreachable—present in the world, yet impossibly distant.
Zenitsu’s feet ached. His fingers were numb. His chest tightened with each heartbeat. But he kept walking, because he had no choice. Because turning back meant admitting defeat to the silence. Because, against all reason, he still hoped—just a fraction—that the phone might ring again.
The rain dropped on his hair and checks, ran all the way down and ended up in his mouth.
The rainwater tasted salty.
Over the following week, Zenitsu tracked every missed call.
Every voicemail.
Every unread message.
Each one was a small fracture, widening imperceptibly. He tried not to panic, tried to convince himself it didn’t matter, that the calls were optional, that Kaigaku’s silence was just the way he had always been.
But it did matter. It mattered in the small hours of the night, when he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the city and wondering if Kaigaku had even thought of him once.
And sometimes he cried quietly, muffled into his pillow, not for Kaigaku, not even for himself—just for the tiny thread they had once held, now fraying beyond repair.
The calls, when answered, became a different kind of weight. Kaigaku’s voice was distant, clipped, disinterested. Laughter was rarer, words shorter, tone flatter. Conversations that had once lingered for ten, fifteen minutes now lasted two or three. Questions went unanswered. Affirmations replaced warmth.
Zenitsu left voice messages anyway:
“I walked past that street.”
“The sky looks like this tonight.”
“Coffee was terrible today.”
Short, safe, mundane. Yet each one felt like tossing a note into a dark well.
And still he called.
He began noticing other signs. Kaigaku might answer, might not. He might speak, might not. The rhythm of their connection—the pulse that had anchored Zenitsu—had begun to fade.
And Zenitsu had already staked everything on that pulse.
By the end of that month, Zenitsu realized a painful truth:
He didn’t just miss Kaigaku.
He missed the possibility of Kaigaku.
Every unanswered call, every unreturned voicemail, every clipped phrase across the line—it all reminded him that proximity, connection, even attention, were not guaranteed.
The thread was slipping. And no matter how tightly he held on, it was fraying.
Zenitsu had begun to leave the city.
Not with drama, not with a warning. No suitcases full of words or notes to explain what had happened. He simply moved, one small step at a time, to an apartment in another district, another building, another block that Kaigaku would never pass by. It wasn’t a plan; it was instinct, a quiet surrender to a rhythm that had long since shifted away from him.
He kept his phone close at first. Checked it compulsively. Every vibration, every light on the screen made his chest jump. He imagined Kaigaku picking up, imagined a voice that had grown distant and cool for weeks warming just enough to anchor him again.
But the phone never rang.
The first few days, he tried. Called at the times Kaigaku used to answer. Left voice messages that were short, innocuous, meant to keep the line alive.
“I walked past that street today.”
“The sky is clear tonight.”
“Coffee was bad.”
No reply. Not even the small, clipped affirmations he had grown accustomed to. The rhythm had vanished entirely.
And then Zenitsu noticed something worse: even messages marked “delivered” went unread. The little green check marks had disappeared. Voicemail became a cruel echo chamber, reminding him that his words existed somewhere, but would never reach the other side.
It rained again.
Zenitsu watched from his small apartment window, the city beneath him blurred by streaks of water sliding down the glass. Neon signs reflected, fractured into colors that shimmered and bled into one another. He thought of that first storm, the night he had stood soaked through on the wet streets, leaving a trembling message he couldn’t finish. The memory made his chest ache, a reminder that some distance could never be bridged.
He tried calling again that night, a ritual more than hope. Ring… ring… and then voicemail.
“Hello… no one is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”
He left a message anyway. Short. Bare.
“I miss you.”
And it stayed there. Waiting. Unheard. Impossible to reclaim.
Days passed.
Weeks followed.
Zenitsu’s phone became quieter and quieter. Notifications were off. Calls were ignored. Messages were left unsent. He no longer timed the day around potential calls. The thread of connection had dissolved completely, leaving only a hollow echo in the spaces between thoughts.
He walked through the city, the same streets Kaigaku would have known, but it felt like walking through someone else’s memory. Cafés, intersections,
streetlights—each one was a ghost of familiarity that Kaigaku would never occupy again.
Even the songs they had shared, the ones that had passed through speakers and earbuds between them, became markers of absence. Zenitsu listened to them alone, replaying the faint echoes of laughter that had never truly existed over the wires. He imagined Kaigaku in his own apartment, unaware, distant, unmoved. And it hurt more than any argument ever could.
Zenitsu stopped leaving messages.
Stopped calling.
He still reached for the phone sometimes, as though muscle memory could recreate a habit long gone. His thumb hovered over the screen, poised to dial, and then he stopped. He knew there was nothing to say. Nothing to hear. The connection was gone, vanished in a way that words, time, or gestures could never reverse.
Even silence, once familiar and comforting, became heavy. He could feel it pressing against his chest, filling the room around him, occupying the spaces where Kaigaku’s voice should have been.
It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t bitterness. It was resignation.
And it was complete.
Weeks turned into months.
Zenitsu carried on with life: work, errands, fleeting encounters with strangers, the occasional coffee alone at cafés that reminded him of a city he no longer belonged to. Yet every so often, a sound would make him pause—the faint echo of a ringtone, a melody in a café, the distant rush of rain—and for a fraction of a second, he would imagine Kaigaku answering, imagining the line alive again. But there was nothing. Just the empty room, the quiet city, and the memory of what had been lost.
The phone remained on his desk, untouched for days, then weeks. Notifications disabled, calls silenced, messages left unsent. The little pulses that had once marked a rhythm of connection were extinguished entirely.
Zenitsu didn’t cry anymore. He didn’t scream. He didn’t leave notes. He simply accepted the absence, letting it settle into his life, a shadow he carried without comment, without thought, without hope.
The city outside his window gleamed wet and indifferent. Neon lights flickered. Rain pattered softly against the glass. He remembered the first time he had sent a voice message—small, trembling, full of hope. He could almost feel the weight of it in his pocket, a reminder that some things existed only in potential, never realized.
He pressed his fingers to the glass. The reflection staring back at him was pale, quiet, alone. And finally, he let it be.
Kaigaku would not answer.
The calls would never connect.
The messages would never be heard.
And that was the way it would remain.
The storm passed, as all storms do.
But the silence it left behind was permanent.
Zenitsu turned from the window, setting the phone face down on the desk. No vibration. No light. No sign. Just the quiet room, his own heartbeat, and the memory of a connection that had once been, fleetingly, everything.
And in that quiet, he understood: some bonds are never repaired, some voices are never heard, and some distances, once widened, can never be crossed again.
Zenitsu’s phone had already started to heat up by the third call.
It wasn’t bad reception.
It wasn’t powered off.
It was just— No answer.
He leaned against the vending machine outside the convenience store, the night wind rattling the plastic bags nearby with a soft, restless rustle. The song in his earbuds had looped so many times he could practically recite it by heart. That line—kiss me through the phone—hung there like an ill-timed request, swallowed back down his throat again and again.
Voicemail.
“Hello… no one is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Zenitsu stared at Kaigaku’s name on the screen, and for a moment, he didn’t know what to say.
Rain tapped against the glass of the vending machine, steady and deliberate, as if counting the seconds of his hesitation for him.
“…Kaigaku,”
he finally said. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
He paused, as if changing his mind mid-thought.
“Never mind. That sounds unnecessary.”
A small laugh slipped out of him, though there was no humor in it.
“I just heard a song.”
“There’s a line in it about kissing through the phone.”
His breathing grew shallow.
“I know you’d think it’s stupid.”
“So you don’t have to call me back.”
The prompt tone warned him that time was running out.
“If you ever hear this…”
“Just know that,
at that moment,
I really love you.”
The call ended on its own.
Kaigaku didn’t listen to the voicemail until the next night.
He’d been working late, phone on silent, missing every call. It wasn’t until he returned to his empty apartment that he noticed the missed calls and the single voicemail waiting.
Zenitsu’s name made him frown.
He hadn’t planned on opening it.
But the moment the melody spilled out of his earbuds, his hand slowed.
When the message finished playing, he stood there, frozen, as if something had lodged itself in his throat.
I really love you,
spoken too late, and with far too much sincerity.
Kaigaku stared at the screen for a long time before pressing call back.
—No answer.
He tried again.
Still no answer.