I finished pressing a bandage over the treated scrape and let a small smile slip. I wanted those eyes, resting so completely at ease as they looked at me, to fill with tension. I wanted to become not just a passing acquaintance to you, but the one person whose face made your heart race every time you looked at him.

“In other words, adults are realistic and cowardly. I’m no different. So if I told you I want you badly enough to stake everything on it, what are my odds of winning this gamble?”

The hand that had been on the bandage moved to her soft cheek, and warmth reached my cold fingertips. That heat stirring in my chest must have come from her flushed cheeks.

“That’s a meaningless question.”

The word meaningless, spoken in a trembling voice, lodged in my heart like a thorn. Was that a declaration that no matter what I did, her feelings would not change?

“Yes. Meaningless. Because whatever the odds, I have no choice but to throw myself into this gamble. It doesn’t matter what situation you’re in. I know it’s a selfish thing to say, but if I let you go while pretending to be at ease, pretending to be a gentleman, I will never be able to forgive myself.”

I forced a smile and leaned toward her. I felt Danyu’s body go rigid at the sudden closeness. Her eyes, wider than usual, were full of exactly the tension I had been hoping for.

“I’m going to kiss you now, Miss Danyu. Push me away if you don’t want this. You can hit me and curse at me. But if there is even the smallest chance for me.”

Please accept me.

The words I could not bring myself to say circled inside my mouth. The hand that had been touching her flushed cheek had drifted to the back of her neck without my realizing it, cradling her nape. The beating of a heart pulsed beneath my fingertips, so vivid it hardly seemed real. I drew her gently toward me, and her face came right up to mine. Her eyes, fixed entirely on me, and the faint breath brushing my cheek made time feel like it had stopped.

I lowered my head and brought my lips to hers. The first time very lightly, the second time a little deeper. Through each soft press of lips, I kept my eyes on Danyu’s, but I could not read any emotion from her wavering gaze.

A line from a poem came to me then, about how the greatest puzzle in the world is the heart of the person you love. I had once laughed at those words, confident in my ability to read people, but the truth was that this was precisely why I had never been able to read Danyu Astrid’s heart, even after watching her for so long. Perhaps not only in the past, but now, and in the future as well. I would go on fretting anxiously over where her heart was pointed.

If I cannot see it, I would rather close my eyes. All this time I had been trying to read her heart because I wanted some return on my own feelings, in whatever form, but at some point all of that had lost its meaning. It was because I had come to understand that even if I learned this feeling would never be returned, it would never go away.

I pressed my lips a little deeper. I ran my tongue along her lower lip and stroked the back of her neck, and felt the tension drain from her body. I did not want to be rough with her the way I had been the first time. I pushed down the instinct urging me to press closer and instead slowly ran my hand through her hair.

The longer our lips stayed together, the shorter our breaths became. Each time our lips parted, her sweet breath touched the corner of my mouth, and the quiet room grew warm with the soft sounds between us. Every sense in my body turned toward her. A longing to have not just her lips but everything beyond them rose from somewhere deep inside me.

I had to stop that thought somehow. I held down the desire crying out not to pull away and slowly straightened up. I breathed in deeply to steady myself and looked down at Danyu, and she was biting down hard on her lip with an expression I could not quite name.

“Miss Danyu.”

I tried calling her name carefully, hiding the anxiety in my chest, but there was no answer. In the silence, I looked at her eyes and found tears gathering in them.

“Oh, why are tears coming now?”

The moment she said it, tears began spilling from Danyu’s eyes beyond her control. She pressed her hand over her mouth as though trying to hold them back, but in the end she let out a choked sound and broke into sobs.

I stood there like a fool, unable to reach out to her or step away. I had comforted many people crying over someone else, but no one had ever cried because of me. What on earth was I supposed to do in a situation like this? Before I could even search my mind for an answer, Danyu rose from her seat. Tears were still falling steadily from her eyes.

“I want to go home.”

The words she barely managed to squeeze out through her tears reached my ears a beat late. Danyu turned and walked out of the office before I could even extend a hand. I knew I should follow her, but my feet would not move. Seeing her crying face again, understanding why she had cried. All of it frightened me. But what frightened me most was the part of myself that had looked at Danyu in tears and still wanted her.

“Oh, this is a problem. I don’t want to give up no matter what happens. What am I going to do?”

I let the feeling I could no longer contain slip out of my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut. Danyu’s face as she sobbed like a child floated before me and I could not bring myself to open my eyes.

Astaire Werner loves Danyu Astrid. He did not know when it had started, but at some point it had become true. It took years to admit that clear feeling to himself, and several more months to express it to her. In other words, my love was very slow and very careful. I knew it was because of the fear and cowardice inside me. I was that pitiful a man.

I think it again and again. If I had recognized my feelings for her a little sooner, if I had told her even a little earlier. Would things be even slightly different now?

All of it was pointless speculation. She was about to be married, and the one standing beside her would be Sio Lieselotte, not me. But all of that felt far less significant than the countless hesitations that had drifted through me before I kissed her.

There was a time I believed I could control my own heart. The way the longing for my mother’s affection had faded, the way my passion for the piano had settled, I was certain that if I kept my mouth shut and waited, this feeling too would pass in time. As I always had, I turned away from what I wanted, resented it, and waited for the yearning to burn itself out from within, but all of it was my own arrogance.

She was the sea, and my heart was a river. The feeling I had begun to acknowledge flowed toward her without stopping, the way a river flows toward the sea. Her heart, which would never return to me, and the sharp eyes of those around us, none of it made any difference.

It does not matter if it goes unreturned. You are beautiful, and it is only natural that I came to love you. I only ask that you not deny even this feeling of mine.

But sadly, my uneasy premonition did not miss by much. From that day on, Danyu began cutting off every possible chance of meeting me, as though she had made up her mind to do so. She stopped coming not only to private lessons but to my lectures as well, and if she happened to hear my voice from a distance, she would spin around and make a swift escape.

I chased after her desperately, but she fled from me with equal determination. In the lecture halls and practice rooms, even in the crowded corridors, she slipped past me with practiced ease. Every time I caught a glimpse of red hair at the edge of my vision only to watch it vanish in an instant, my chest burned.

After days of this continued back-and-forth, my head went so distant I felt close to losing my mind. My celebrated gentlemanly smile was apparently no longer enough to conceal my feelings, because fellow professors asked me several times whether something serious had happened at home. Each time, I had to explain at length that my household was perfectly peaceful and that I myself was perfectly fine.

The breaking point came one afternoon during those days. I had somehow made it through a lecture and was heading back to my office when I spotted Danyu Astrid crouched in the corridor, picking up sheet music. It was a considerable distance away, but I was certain the woman was Danyu Astrid. It was not only because of her red hair.

When she appears, the air in the world changes. It was not a comment on any physical pressure. It was simply what happened inside me. At some point, every time I saw her, my chest had begun to ache with a heaviness I could not bear, like something pressing down on me from above.