The voices of people beyond the door grew faint and distant, replaced by the faint, intimate sound of lips meeting in my ears. My lips, which had been tracing the edge of Danyu’s mouth, traveled down along her jaw and came to rest at the nape of her neck. As I pressed my lips there and drew my tongue slowly across her skin, the scent that was hers alone flooded into me. At the same moment, I heard the sound of a sharp breath drawn in above me.

“A, Astaire.”

When my lips passed the nape of her neck and reached her collarbone, Danyu stopped me with a trembling voice. With that voice came the noise beyond the door, drifting back to me once more. As the reality I had lost hold of rushed back all at once, the heat that had filled my head went cold.

I stepped back from Danyu and looked at her where she leaned against the wall. Through her disheveled clothing, the pale skin of her chest rose and fell with her quickened breathing. I bit down on my lip and reproached myself. The thought that I had no idea how far I might have gone had she not called out to me made my head swim. This was a school, and countless students were passing by just outside. I could not afford to lose my senses like this.

Forcing myself not to look at her chest, I carefully straightened her clothing. At the touch of my hands, Danyu became aware of her state of dress and turned away quickly, her face burning red.

“It’s warm out, isn’t it? Summer must be coming soon. Still only April, though. Ha.”

Whether to dispel the awkward air somehow, words poured from Danyu’s lips without pause. Most of it was incoherent, but the last thing she said lodged itself directly in my ear.

“I had been wondering whether you turned down the proposal because you felt burdened by the idea of taking my family’s name. Once my sister gets married in May and leaves for abroad, whoever becomes my husband will have to take the Astrid name and carry on the family line. Giving up the name Werner is no small thing, after all.”

Giving up the name Werner? I thought about it for a moment, then wrapped my arms around Danyu where she stood with her back to me and rested my chin on top of her head. The hands that had been straightening her clothing went still.

“Miss Danyu. Now that I think about it, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Astaire Astrid. Doesn’t it have rather a nice ring to it? I think it may be worth serious consideration.”

I glanced down, and Danyu’s face was flushed a deeper red than I had ever seen it.

* * *

At some point, I had begun making a remarkable number of small mistakes in my daily life. Discovering too late that I had buttoned my shirt wrong and having to dress again. Losing my train of thought mid-lecture and standing in blank silence long enough to earn strange looks from my students. Small, trivial errors that would never have happened to me under ordinary circumstances kept piling up one after another.

I knew the reason well enough. The idea that she and I had become what people commonly call lovers. To someone like me, who had never once allowed himself to believe he could have the one he so desperately wanted, this fact felt profoundly unreal. For that reason, I had lately been drifting through the clear and ordinary moments of my days in a strange, hazy stupor, as though moving through a dream. The only time this reality felt tangible was when I held her in my arms and felt the warmth of her against my whole body.

In hallways where the foot traffic had died away, in empty lecture rooms, in practice rooms where only the two of us existed. I would sometimes draw her close and give her a light kiss. Every time I saw her go red and lose her composure over nothing more than a soft brush of lips, a smile found its way to my face without fail. The fact that all of her flustered confusion was entirely because of me was, above all else, what pleased me most.

Of course, there were plenty of moments that caught me off guard as well. Whenever Danyu quietly reached for my hand in a lecture room where students had not yet fully filed out, or flashed a playful wink the moment our eyes met while I was calling attendance, I had to work rather hard to keep up an air of composure and ease. But I could say with certainty that none of those incidents had ever surprised me the way this particular moment did.

“I want to come to your place tonight, Astaire.”

The words dropped out of nowhere while she was tidying up after a private lesson, and for a moment I had no choice but to doubt my own ears. When a lover visits someone’s home at night, it usually means. I forced myself to stop that line of thought and managed a smile. My ears must be playing tricks on me.

“Pardon? What did you just say?”

“I said I’m coming to your place tonight. If I finish class and we have dinner, it’ll probably be around eight?”

But as if to make a fool of that hope, the answer that came from Danyu’s lips again was not much different from what I had heard the first time. My mind went blank for a moment. Of course she wouldn’t be coming to my home for the reason lovers typically might, but regardless of her reasons, a young woman visiting a man’s home at a late hour was not a good idea.

More than anything, I had lately been putting in considerable effort to maintain a proper distance even at school, where there were always eyes around. In that state, if she were to enter my own space, I genuinely could not be certain I would be able to keep myself entirely gentlemanly. Unable to say any of that directly, I could only watch her expression, and Danyu tilted her head with a slight furrow of her brow.

“Oh, do you have plans to go out tonight? I assumed you’d be home since you didn’t mention anything.”

“That’s not it.”

“Really? Then there’s no problem.”

After all my hesitation, I had barely managed to get those words out, and Danyu broke into a bright smile. The look of genuine relief on her face left me feeling thoroughly strange. I found myself truly unable to tell whether it was a good thing that she trusted me this much, or a bad thing that even after all the kisses we had shared, I had failed to inspire even a proper sense of wariness in her.

“I want to give my sister a surprise with music. Play something beautifully at the wedding and catch her completely off guard. So I need to practice, but if I do it at home she’ll find out right away.”

“Well, the school practice rooms—”

Danyu, whether or not she had any sense of my inner turmoil, launched eagerly into her explanation. In the middle of it I tried to raise a reasonable objection, but it wasn’t particularly effective. Danyu looked at me as though I had said something strange, eyes going wide, and then continued with even more enthusiasm than before.

“I only have time in the evenings because of classes all day, but the school closes up by then, doesn’t it? I heard you can get special approval, but would that really work for something this personal? The process seems complicated too. And the school is so dark and empty at that hour, it’s frightening. I was really at a loss, and then it suddenly came to me! I could practice at your place, Astaire. There’s a good piano there, and it won’t be frightening.”

Watching Danyu smile with such guileless certainty that my home was a safe place, I could only nod along, caught somewhere between wanting to laugh and wanting to cry. What am I going to do with this innocent girl? Surely she doesn’t go to just any man’s home this easily. My thoughts became tangled in an instant, but Danyu had already said she had her next class and hurried out of the practice room.

I had a few more classes of my own after that, but I had no memory of how I got through them. By the time I came to my senses, the classes were already over, and my students were giving me odd looks as they said goodbye and filed out of the lecture room.

Things were not much different once I returned home. I sat in a daze, unable to eat a proper meal, doing nothing but staring at the clock. The ticking of the clock hands, which I never normally noticed, sounded as loud as thunder and refused to let me settle. All the while, the time crept steadily closer to eight.

As I paced restlessly in front of the door, a light knock sounded. I moved to the door on reflex and opened it, and there was Danyu, staring up at me with wide, round eyes.

“The door opened so suddenly, it startled me.”

Hearing her say that, I realized I had flung the door open without even asking who was there.

“Come in.”

I pushed away my embarrassment as best I could and spoke, and Danyu stepped inside with a small smile. Since I had begun living alone, guests had occasionally visited, but a visitor at this late an hour was a first. People generally thought of the night as a time for rest, and unless someone was truly close to you, visits at this hour were neither invited nor accepted. In any case, realizing that she and I now fell within the bounds of that closeness made me genuinely happy.

“Where’s the piano?”

Danyu glanced around the living room with curious eyes and asked. I guided her toward the staircase leading to the second floor and pointed to a firmly closed door. It was a small piano room where I held lessons with my private students.

“It’s on the second floor. The first door on the left when you go up.”

“What’s the room on the right?”

“Ah, that’s the bedroom.”