I stood in the corridor for a moment, watching Danyu from a distance where she looked no bigger than a dot, then muffled my footsteps and quietly drew closer. Along the way I picked up a few sheets of music that had scattered underfoot and held them out to her, and she lifted her head from the floor.

“Oh, thank you.”

The face that had been smiling brightly as she offered her thanks went rigid in an instant. She had realized I was the one holding out the sheet music. In that same moment, Danyu sprang to her feet and turned to go. The red hair that swept across my field of vision snapped the last thread of my reason.

“Miss Danyu!”

I grabbed Danyu roughly by the arm and started walking. The sheet music she had just gathered fell back to the floor, but neither of us had any attention to spare for it. Danyu resisted and tried to pull her arm free, but against a man’s strength it was hardly a contest.

I pushed her into an empty lecture hall and closed the door. Danyu bit down on her lip and looked at me, then stepped past me and pulled the door open again, but I reached out and shut it with ease, trapping her between my arms.

Danyu leaned against the lecture hall door and looked at me, her chest rising and falling without pause. Being dragged along at a man’s pace had left her short of breath. Her ragged breathing filled the empty room. I kept my eyes on her gray irises and waited for her to calm down. She avoided my gaze and bit her lip again.

“Move. Someone will come.”

True to her words, the sound of footsteps and conversation drifted through the lecture hall door. Danyu seemed firmly convinced I would quietly step aside at that, but I had not a single drop of gentlemanly composure left in me.

“There are no more classes in this room today. And besides.”

I reached out and locked the lecture hall door. The click of the lock snapping into place made Danyu’s eyes go wide as she turned her gaze to me.

“This should be no problem at all, then.”

The tension that rippled through her wavering eyes made my mouth go dry. The scrape that had not yet fully healed was still visible on Danyu’s cheek, the first I had seen of her in days. I wanted to ask whether she had made it home safely that night, whether she had gone to the hospital and had it properly treated. There was so much I wanted to ask, but the question that came out first was a thoroughly selfish one.

“Why are you avoiding me?”

I held my silence and waited for Danyu’s answer, but her mouth never opened. The anxiety and worry made me feel close to tears. I lowered my head and pressed my face into her shoulder. I felt her flinch, but I could not find the courage to look at her face. Only a desperate voice came out with a sigh.

“Please don’t avoid me. Even I get hurt when someone avoids me that plainly. Is this punishment for the presumptuous kiss?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just that I……”

The quiet voice that had been murmuring near my ear trailed off. I lifted my head and looked at Danyu’s face, and it was crumpling the way it had that evening. A face on the verge of tears. The ache in my chest was unavoidable.

“Is it really that unbearable?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you dislike seeing my face that much? Is it truly that awful? My loving you, the kiss that day, all of it?”

My gaze dropped from her gray irises to her red lips, and Danyu raised her hand and pressed it over her own mouth. Did she think I was about to kiss her again? Did she dislike me enough to block me like that? Several questions drifted through my mind at once, and the strength went out of the hand braced against the wall.

“I won’t apologize. Not for the kiss that day, and not for the feeling I have for you.”

Even with my arms no longer holding her in place, Danyu stayed where she was, leaning against the lecture hall door and looking at me.

“If seeing me is a burden to you, I’ll leave the school. Please don’t skip classes you want to attend just to avoid me.”

I watched her look up at me with a slightly dazed expression, then reached out and unlocked the door. The click of it opening rang through the quiet. And with that sound, Danyu’s voice came from just below my chin.

“Don’t skip classes I want to attend? Why do you think I come to school? You don’t even know that, do you?”

Danyu was looking up at me with a hollow laugh. The look in her eyes held both resentment and sorrow at once, and I lost my words entirely.

“Kissing me, talking about leaving. You do it all so easily. I don’t understand. This whole situation is giving me a headache and tying me in knots, but I suppose it’s all simple enough for you?”

“Is that what you want to ask me right now? Whether all of this is simple for me?”

It was a cruel question to put to someone who had held himself back even from looking at her, let alone kissing her. I swear I had never once thought of her and the word easy in the same breath. 

On the contrary, things as ordinary as talking about everyday life or sitting across from someone at a meal, things I did without a second thought with anyone else, became something I did not know how to handle when it was her. Why was she asking me this? Before the confusion could clear, Danyu’s calm voice continued.

“I’ve heard you’ve had quite a few relationships. Is that why it’s so easy for you to want someone’s body like that? I don’t know what kind of women you’ve been with or what those relationships were like, but you can’t expect me to play that role too. No matter how cleverly you try to unsettle me, I won’t be swayed.”

“Is that how you’ve been seeing me?”

How do you correct a misunderstanding when you don’t even know where it began? I ran a hand through my hair and locked the half-open door again. Danyu had clearly heard the lock click, but she did not move. Instead, those gray eyes full of reproach turned on me fully. A single look from you, holding me to account, and I become the most wretched man in the world.

“Relationships? Yes. I’ve had plenty. Dating young women chosen by my family, wanting each other’s bodies through the night. That’s generally how it goes, isn’t it. At my age, not having done any of that would be stranger. I wanted to just go along with it all and live an ordinary life. What’s so difficult about kissing someone and spending the night? Sio Lieselotte, the man you chose, had no shortage of lovers for a single night either.”

I felt deeply sorrowful and let my mouth run without thinking. Words I had never once let out in front of her began pouring out, low and unguarded. I could see from Danyu’s increasingly rigid expression that my words were hurting her, but I could not stop them from coming. Whatever she thought of me, this was who I truly was, and I wanted to show her everything I had desperately wanted to hide, if that was what it took to reach her with my sincerity.

“You have no idea how much I agonized before I kissed you. I had made up my mind. Don’t even look at what you can’t have. Blend into the world somehow and live a decent life. I don’t know how someone who had resolved all of that ended up carrying you in his heart. But when I came to my senses, I was already here. Right in front of you.”

After I became aware of my feelings for her, everything I had believed to be the essence of life turned hollow. She was the only person who held my world in her hands, and I was a foolish man who did not know how to act toward someone like that.

“I almost wish I were the kind of man you think I am. If I could seduce you skillfully enough to stay by your side, it wouldn’t matter what kind of person I became. But I am not as capable as Miss Danyu imagines. I am not at ease, and I am not bold.”

Danyu had once spoken to me about the maturity of adults. She believed I possessed a composure she herself lacked, but in truth I had no claim to any such grand quality. I had simply been doing everything I could to appear like a mature adult.

With a performance passable enough to conceal the parts of me that had never quite grown up, I had followed the path in front of me without much thought, and somewhere at the end of it, she was there. I did not know how I had arrived at that point, so I did not know the reason either. But at some moment I found the reason my steps had turned toward her, and from that day my world turned upside down.