“Not once have I revealed this side of myself to another person. I believed that if anyone ever saw me like this, my world would fall apart. It was a foolish thought, but I was afraid of it. From now on, however, I intend to stop. Seeking your heart while hiding myself would be cowardly, and the last thing I want is to be a coward before you.”

I gazed at Danyu, hoping with everything in me that these desperate feelings would reach her, but her eyes were fixed on the floor rather than on me.

“Miss Danyu. I am nothing more than a wretched man who longs for your heart. You are the one who made me this way, so why don’t you see it.”

“That’s a lie.”

Danyu’s voice trembled faintly as she stood with her head bowed. I had little difficulty understanding why her voice was shaking. It sounded exactly as it had that evening after I kissed her, when she had broken down in tears. Flustered, I reached out toward her, but she pushed my arm away with a surprisingly firm hand.

“You turned down the marriage proposal.”

“Pardon?”

“I was told you said you couldn’t imagine marrying someone as young as me. That the age difference was too great. And when I asked if you were upset that someone you knew had put forward a proposal without consulting you first, your reaction was lukewarm at best. How was I supposed to interpret that attitude of yours, that take-it-or-leave-it indifference? You said it was fine, but wasn’t that just because you couldn’t bring yourself to refuse me to my face, so you had your answer delivered through my mother instead?”

The words that came back to me were so far from anything I had expected that I could only stand there, frozen, staring at her blankly. But perhaps reading my silence as something else entirely, Danyu could no longer hold back, and a sob broke from her lips.

“After all that, you kissed me the way you did that day, and then today you get angry at me for keeping my distance. So what is it? You don’t want to marry me, but you do want to kiss me? Is that it? Am I the kind of woman who’s only good enough to pass the time with, for someone like Astaire?”

Her words hit me like a blow to the chest. I quickly reached out and lifted Danyu’s chin. Tears were streaming ceaselessly from her reddened, bloodshot eyes.

“Miss Danyu. What are you—”

“I suppose it’s not so strange that a first love doesn’t work out, since you’re still inexperienced. But why is the second one like this too? I thought about it so carefully this time. Because I didn’t want to be hurt anymore, because I wanted to finally be happy. I really thought it through. And yet here we are. I must just be unlucky. Why does it keep turning out like this with every person I come to care for.”

With every word she spoke, my chest sank lower. Every time I had looked at her until now, I had felt a dull ache I didn’t know what to do with, but what gripped my heart in this moment was something far stronger than that ache. Unable to hold back any longer, I pulled Danyu into a tight embrace.

“Let go.”

Danyu struck my chest with her fist and pushed against me, but I felt no pain. For some reason, a smile kept finding its way to my lips.

“Let go of me!”

I held her even tighter and slowly began to speak.

“It is true that I turned down the marriage proposal. But I had no idea the other party was you.”

My chest swelled with a tension entirely unlike anything I had ever felt lecturing in front of a hall full of students.

“After becoming a professor, I had not been in frequent contact with my family home, so all I knew was that a proposal had come in. The part about the age difference making marriage impossible was most likely an excuse my mother invented. I turned the proposal down simply because I had no desire to marry anyone who was not the person I wanted. So had I known the other party was you, I never would have done such a thing. On the contrary, even if you had said no, I would have pushed and pleaded until the match was made. I am not foolish enough to let an opportunity like that slip through my fingers.”

Without me noticing, Danyu had gone still.

“……Is that true? You’re not lying?”

Danyu asked carefully, her face buried against my chest. A laugh escaped me at the hesitant, tentative way she asked. I quietly reached out and touched her red hair. My hand found those strands with an ease I had never thought possible, strands I had believed I would never be allowed to touch. The soft sensation scattering across my fingertips seemed to make even my heart tingle.

“Have you already forgotten? That I said I would stake everything I had to make you mine. There must have been some misunderstanding that day. I think we were each talking about something different. Because of that, the wedding invitation.”

If Danyu’s apology that day had been about the sudden marriage proposal rather than about an actual wedding, then what in the world had that invitation been. The moment I brought up the invitation, the source of every misunderstanding between us, Danyu lifted her head with a puzzled expression.

“The wedding invitation I gave you that day? The one for my sister’s wedding?”

The words came out so casually that I couldn’t quite make sense of them. My sister’s wedding invitation. Only after turning the phrase over in my mind several times did its meaning finally settle. The invitation Danyu had handed me that day had not been her own. It had been her sister’s. Liv Astrid’s. The instant I understood that, everything about that day fell completely into place.

“There’s about a week left now. My mother was against the marriage until the very end, actually. She only gave in when she heard there was a child on the way. They set the date in a hurry too, determined to hold the ceremony before the baby arrives. I was surprised myself. Honestly, getting her approval that way was so very like my sister.”

It took no time at all to realize just how foolish all the misunderstandings I had built up on my own had been. They were misunderstandings that never would have existed had I simply gathered my courage and confessed to her first. Danyu had been continuing to speak with a bewildered look on her face, but when she glanced up at my vacant expression, she furrowed her brow. It seemed she had realized something while talking about her sister’s wedding.

“Oh, did you think I was apologizing about that rather than the proposal? Because my sister and you had a proposal going at some point, and she set the date without telling you in advance?”

It wasn’t quite the right guess, but I didn’t have the courage to admit my actual misunderstanding aloud.

“And Sio?”

I asked about Sio in a roundabout way, and Danyu blinked at me with a blank expression.

“Sio? Why is Sio suddenly coming up now?”

“I heard Sio is also returning in May.”

“Is that so? I didn’t know. I haven’t heard from him since I gave him the key. I knew he had left the capital, but.”

There was not a moment’s hesitation in her answer, and with that, everything became clear. How absurd the misunderstandings I had conjured up entirely on my own had been. The moment I understood the full picture, a bright laugh escaped my lips. Danyu had been tilting her head at me as I suddenly laughed, but before long a smile appeared on her lips as well.

“Anyway, I’m relieved. I was really hoping the age difference was just an excuse. If it were any other reason, I could find a way to change, but the age difference is something I can’t do anything about. I couldn’t have borne it if I were nothing more than a child in your eyes, Astaire. I want you to see me as a woman.”

The words rang in my ears and the bright laugh that had been slipping from my lips stopped in an instant. Danyu Astrid had always had a way of throwing something like that straight at me without warning. She had said that I was the adult she had always looked up to, but in truth it was this quality of hers that I envied most. How could I ever convey a love this overwhelming to her in kind? I had no talent for that sort of thing whatsoever.

“I believe I said as much on the day of our first lesson. That if I had thought of you as a child, I never would have kissed you. From that moment on, you were already a woman to me, Miss Danyu. The kind of woman so beautiful I had no choice but to fall in love with her.”

Even to my own ears it was an embarrassingly earnest thing to say, and Danyu’s face flushed red in an instant. She must have felt the heat rising to her cheeks, because she quickly ducked her head, but I caught her by the shoulders and persistently followed her eyes. Startled by how quickly our faces drew close, Danyu’s eyes went wide.

“My face must be a mess.”

“No. You’re beautiful.”

Danyu hastily looked away. I let a quiet smile slip through and caught her turning head, then pressed my lips to hers. After a brief hesitation, Danyu’s lips parted, and as she was pressed back by my advance, her back met the door with a loud sound. It was our third kiss, yet my throat burned as though it were the very first time I had ever kissed her. It was a deeply strange feeling. Had I ever wanted someone this much? No matter how I took in her lips, the thirst would not be quenched.

I lingered at Danyu’s lips and drew her waist toward me. As the distance between us closed, the curves of her body pressed fully against mine, and heat rose to my head before I could stop it. Only then did I realize her clothing was thinner than usual. Perhaps because the weather had warmed in recent days. My mind had been reaching for an explanation, but I let the thought go. Instead, every nerve I had turned toward the soft warmth of her body against mine.