I close my laptop when the sky is thin and pale, the kind of color that makes everything look a little washed. Lines from articles keep floating when I blink—dosages, side effects, survival curves that curve the wrong way. The words don't leave when the screen goes dark. They just hang there behind my eyes.
There's a small prick in the back of my head. It's always there now. Not loud. Just a tap that says: keep moving.
Not now. Rest later.
I stand and my back pops. The room smells like paper and soap. I rinse my face until my skin feels awake enough to fake it. My tea is cold; I drink it anyway. I comb my hair with my fingers. Shirt, tie, blazer. I check my bag twice—pen, notebooks, lunch. I don't know why the second check calms me, but it does. Maybe it's proof that I can still hold small things together.
Outside, the morning is soft. A bike clicks past. Somewhere a dog gives one bark and decides that's enough. The air has that early taste that makes the day seem like a good idea. My eyes still burn a little, but breathing helps.
Tsubaki is already at the corner, standing like the sidewalk belongs to her. Hands in her skirt pockets. Ponytail a little crooked. She spots me and her mouth dips in the middle.
"You look tired again," she says. She tries to make it light. The worry still sticks.
I smile. It's small, but it's not fake. "Thank you for caring, Tsubaki. There's no one like you."
She squints at me, like she's measuring how much of that is deflection. "Don't you sweet-talk me," she says, and bumps my shoulder with hers. "I mean it. Your eyes look like you fought a copier."
"I survived."
"Barely." She tips her head. "How many hours?"
I pretend to think. "Enough."
"Kousei."
I look at the crosswalk light even though it's green. "I was reading."
"You're not a doctor."
"I'm reading, not operating."
"That's not the flex you think it is," she mutters, but it's soft. We start walking. Our steps find the same rhythm they always do.
She talks because that's her way of checking if I'm still in there. A teacher mixed up two students and then pretended he meant it. Their neighbor's cat has declared their porch state property. Watari almost crashed his bike waving to three people at once because he is physically allergic to choosing. I answer where I can. "That tracks." "He actually did that?" "You should charge the cat rent." The joke lines are easy. The quiet between isn't heavy. Tsubaki lets me have it. She's known me long enough to know my silence isn't a door slamming, it's a room I need to pass through.
Halfway to school she nudges me with her elbow. "Be honest. You're not sleeping, are you?"
"I sleep. Sometimes."
"How sometimes?"
"Sometimes sometimes."
She clicks her tongue. "You're going to break."
"I won't." The prick taps once, like backing me up. Keep going.
Her voice drops. "I know you won't," she says, and then she kicks a pebble because looking at me while she says it is too much. "I also know 'won't' and 'shouldn't' are different."
"I'll nap on the train," I offer.
"You don't take the train."
"Right." I breathe out a laugh. "Then I'll nap mentally."
"That's not a thing."
"It should be."
She gives me a sideways look. "Promise me you'll eat actual dinner later."
"I will."
"And text me if you... I don't know. If you do anything dumb."
"What counts as dumb?"
"You'll know," she says, and we both smile because we both know that's not true.
The school gate is loud in that familiar way that makes your chest feel like it can open a little. Backpacks, shoes, white shirts, voices. The building runs on the same slightly broken clock it always has. Watari's voice carries above the rest like a flag somebody won't take down. He finds us in seconds, as if he's got some internal GPS set to "Kousei."
"There you are," he says, and drops an arm over my shoulders like I weigh nothing. He smells like shampoo that pretends to be ocean air. "Our piano man returns to the world of the living."
"Barely," Tsubaki says, loyal to her bit.
Watari studies my face with a comic squint. "He needs sunlight, protein, and two legally questionable smoothies."
"I'm taking donations," I say.
"I'm offering enthusiasm only," he says, cheerful, and steers us through the doors like he owns them.
The hallway has its own weather. Today it's warm and a little chaotic, a wind that pushes but doesn't topple. Teachers throw reminders into the current. Someone laughs so hard they hiccup. Someone else runs, gets told not to run, and then compromises at a fast walk. I let the tide carry me. It keeps my spine straight.
The prick taps. Keep going. I nod at the floor and do.
Classes roll by. Numbers, poems, dates, a diagram that I copy carefully even though I'm sure I'll never need it. My handwriting starts neat, ends tilted. Twice my pen tries to write a term from last night's reading in the wrong place. I cross each one out hard and write the right word over it, as if I can overwrite my brain the same way. My head feels like a desk with too many stacks of paper and not enough drawers. When I push one pile straight, another slides. I pick it up. I try again. It's not graceful, but it moves forward.
By lunch, the relief feels like a floor under my shoes. We claim a table by the windows where the sun paints the plastic in soft rectangles. Watari's tray looks like a dare. Tsubaki has a home lunch that could double as a weapon. Kaori comes in with her case, sets it neatly against the wall, and sits across from me as if that seat has had her name on it all morning.
It's our first lunch together—the four corners of this strange little square. It clicks together like it was always supposed to. Kaori hooks one ankle around the chair leg; the motion is economic and exact. She pushes her hair behind her ear, scans the table with bright interest, and smiles like she's tuned the room up a half-step. Heads turn toward her without meaning to.
I look at her without staring. You learn how to do that if you need to.
Watari says the soccer captain invented a warm-up that is just "vibes and jogging" and three people pulled a hamstring. Tsubaki says the gym floor squeaks no matter where she stands and maybe the squeak is actually haunting her. Kaori laughs, and the table loosens. The laugh comes from the center of her chest; it's not polite. It's alive.
Right before it, there's a breath—one beat deeper than it needs to be. It's quick. You'd miss it if you blinked.
I don't blink.
She opens her chopsticks and there's a half-second pause before the first bite, like she's giving an invisible downbeat to her own body. The smile doesn't slip, but at the edges of her eyes there's a thin tiredness you'd never see unless you were staring for the wrong reasons. I'm not staring. I'm collecting. Fold the detail. Put it away. Don't make it the whole moment.
The prick presses, gentle but there. Keep going. I slide the thought to the back so it doesn't eat the light in front of me.
"Alright," Watari says, holding up a roll like a judge's gavel, "controversial opinion time. The cafeteria bread? Elite."
Tsubaki doesn't look up. "Bread shouldn't squeak."
"It's the tray," he says, wounded.
"It's the bread," she says, final.
Kaori taps her chopsticks on the edge of her box, two, three, four, like a metronome checking if the room is on tempo. "Melon pan tastes better on the roof," she says.
Watari narrows his eyes. "Altitude improves flavor?"
"Science," she says, straight-faced.
I can't help it. "Strong citation," I say.
She flashes me a look that's half challenge, half invitation. "See? He gets it."
The sunlight slides a square across my hand. It makes her hair hold a brighter edge for a moment and then let it go. Something in my chest tugs—familiar and not. I've been near this before. Not this exact set of words, not this exact lunch, but an angle of light like this, a joke like this, the feeling of the table balanced on her laugh. Back then, I didn't know what to watch. Now I do. Now I can't stop.
"Piano man," Watari says, "soccer after school. Come watch me embarrass three first-years and a goal post."
"You can do that without witnesses," Tsubaki tells him.
"Where's the art in that?" he says, wounded again. It's impressive how durable his feelings are.
I open my mouth to offer a maybe and close it. I already know where I need to be after school. It's not the field.
We trade bites like a ritual. Watari barters a dumpling from Tsubaki with two cucumbers and a speech about team spirit. Tsubaki guards her omelet with a fork the way a knight guards a bridge. Kaori tries to split a piece of chicken into thirds, gets annoyed, makes fourths, and ends up giving me the neatest quarter as if it matters. I say thank you. It feels like a ceremony so ordinary you could miss it, which is a nice kind of ceremony.
Talk drifts. A teacher with a rubric that reads like a riddle. A rumor about a vending machine that ate a coin and then spit out three. Watari claims teachers fear his charisma. Tsubaki says teachers fear his homework. Kaori says both can be true. I let their voices hold me up like a railing. When Kaori speaks, something in my attention narrows, like a lens sliding into focus without my permission. I note the steadiness of her hands, the way excitement makes them draw shapes in the air, the small stillness when she touches the case—right hand steadying the left for a half-beat, then releasing. If you're not looking, it's nothing. If you are, it's a note you copy down and don't read out loud.
"Do you ever smile with teeth," Kaori asks me, tipping her head, "or is that a finals-only special?"
"I can schedule one," I say.
"When?"
"Next Tuesday."
She drums an invisible planner on the table. "Lunch or dinner?"
"Dealer's choice."
"Dangerous," she says, pleased.
Watari waggles his eyebrows like he's playing a silent instrument. Tsubaki gives him the "don't start" look. He starts anyway. It somehow makes her laugh. The sound files away part of the ache behind my eyes.
The prick taps. Watch. Learn. Hurry, but don't rush. I nod to the tap and let it fade back where it belongs.
The bell rings. It always sounds like a line drawn across the room. Chairs scrape. Trays stack. See you, see you, see you. Watari stands and stretches until his spine pops.
"I will now demonstrate athletic greatness," he announces to a small, captive audience of no one.
"Try not to sprain your ego," Tsubaki says, already slinging her bag up.
"I make no promises," he says, and someone calls his name and he moves like the hallway belongs to him.
Tsubaki pauses by me. "Eat dinner," she says. Then, softer, because she can't help it, "And sleep."
"I will," I tell her.
"When?"
"Soon."
She makes the face that means define soon and then sighs, because she knows the dance as well as I do. "Text me later," she says, and points two fingers at her eyes and then at me in the most dramatic way possible, because if she doesn't turn it into a bit, she'll turn it into an argument. She jogs after Watari. She doesn't look back. She doesn't need to. I know she'll circle back with a message anyway.
Kaori has already lifted her case. She checks the balance, adjusts the angle. Her movements are precise without being fussy. She looks at me the way you look at a path you're already planning to take. "Come on," she says. Not loud. Just sure.
I stand. The table is almost empty. Sunlight lies in long strips on the floor. There's a ring of water on the plastic where someone's cup sat; I wipe it away with my sleeve without thinking. I push my chair in. I check my bag again—pen, notebooks, phone. It's silly and it steadies me.
We walk the hallway together. The building hums: a scale from a practice room, a shoe squeak that sounds like a small bird, the low murmur of teachers finishing sentences. The air smells like floor cleaner and the faint sweet dust of rosin. Kaori walks half a step ahead, unhurried, like she knows the corridors better than anyone and the corridors know her back. I keep pace. My body feels heavy in the way that means I'm still carrying the same weight, not sinking under it.
We turn into the music wing. The bulletin board is its usual mess—crooked flyers, a rehearsal notice with a rip in the corner, a drawing of a cello with a smiley face someone added after the fact. My eyes slide past all of it and catch on the little window in the door ahead. Wired glass. The edge of a piano bench visible if you look at the right angle. My chest does that tighten-loosen thing I can't stop.
Kaori stops in front of the door and turns to me. Her eyes run over my face once, not prying, just seeing.
Her beautiful blue eyes catch with mine.
"You're tired again, piano man," she says. It's gentle. Not scolding. A note, not a verdict.
A laugh tries to jump out and I keep it behind my teeth. "I'm working on it."
She tips her chin toward the door. "Work on this too."
The prick taps once, patient as a metronome only I can hear. Not now. Rest later. I nod because the tap and the girl and the door are all pointing the same way.
Her hand finds my sleeve for a second—light, just a tap to mark the beat. "Ready?" she asks.
I swallow. I let the answer come up from somewhere older than the tired. "Yeah," I say, and this time it's easy to mean it.
Kaori smiles—Bright and honest—and reaches for the handle. The metal catches the light. I breathe in. The hallway narrows to this small patch of floor, this door, this breath.
I inhale.
Kaori pushes the handle and the door gives with a click. The room smells the way it always did—dust that isn't dirty, paper, a thin line of polish, a memory of old rosin. Light falls in wide bands across the floor. The stands wait like bare trees. Someone left a pencil on the ledge. There's a soft hum from the ceiling that I never noticed until I stopped coming here, and now I just can't miss it....
My feet stop on their own. This was my place. My shelter. I lived whole seasons inside this room. Then I didn't. Then I stayed away so long it felt like the room might forget my name.
Kaori steps in ahead of me, easy, sure. She doesn't tiptoe. She belongs in spaces like this because she walks like she belongs. She sets her case down, checks the balance, and looks at me over her shoulder.
"Well?" she says. Not a dare. A cue.
I breathe in. My chest tightens, then lets go. I nod and follow her inside.
The piano waits. The bench is the same. The edge of the wood is smooth where too many hands have slid past it. I run my fingers along the rim as if I'm checking for splinters, but I'm not. I'm just making sure it's real. The keys are closed. The lacquer holds a dull reflection of the window bars. The lid creaks when I lift it. The sound goes straight into my ribs.
Kaori is already unfastening the latches on her case. The tiny metal snaps are bright in the quiet. She lifts the violin out with that clean economy she has—no wasted motion. The instrument looks like it likes her. Her left hand settles on the neck, her right holds the bow near the balance point. There's a half-second where she stills and checks herself, and then it passes. If you're not looking, you won't see it. I'm looking.
I sit. The bench gives a little and then holds. I put my hands on my knees first, because I need a beat. The prick at the back of my head is there. A small tap. Keep going. I set both feet on the floor until I can feel the weight of them. I open my hands over the keys but don't touch yet.
It has been so long.....
The thought is plain and heavy. It doesn't twist. It just sits in my chest and fills it. So long since I sat like this. So long since I let the keys press back. So long since I let my hands be the thing that speaks.
Kaori turns a peg a hair, listens, turns it back, listens again. "Saint-Saëns?" she asks, voice casual, eyes bright. "Introduction and Rondo?"
Saint-Saëns.... I remembered it all too well..."I meet her eyes and nod. "Yeah."
"Good," she says, and sets her bow. "Don't fall behind or I'll drag you."
"Understood."
She smiles.....it's hard to look directly into....So bright but so fragile. It makes my heart tighten again.
I set my fingers where they need to go. My palms are hot and dry. I can hear my pulse in the small skin at the base of my thumb. I exhale and touch the keys like I would touch the surface of a lake—flat, steady, no splash.
The first notes are stiff. They wobble in my hands for a bar. Then a second bar. Then the shape returns like it was waiting in the room all along. My wrists find their line. My shoulders drop a half inch. My body remembers faster than my mind can name the remembering.
Kaori comes in, quick and alive. Her sound is a bright line that pulls the room into focus. I feel her on my right side as if light could push. She leans into a phrase and the tone opens, and I follow her, not because I decide to, but because there is only one way to be in this with her and it is to go.
It is strange. It is home. It is both at once.
On the outside, I'm quiet. I'm the same boy who sits very still at a piano and makes it look easy. Inside, everything is loud and soft at the same time. It has been so long. The thought keeps repeating. It becomes rhythm. It becomes a pulse under the pulse. Playing with her feels like a dream I have walked into by accident—a weary, gentle dream that would run away if I moved wrong or said the wrong word. I hold myself very steady so I don't wake it.
The prick is still there, but small. Not gone. Just far. It taps like a metronome in another room. Hurry without rushing. Watch. Learn. I can do both. I can play and count and watch her.
She takes one of those slightly deeper breaths before a tricky entrance. Not a gasp—just a breath a touch too big for the space. Her bow arm stays smooth, but her left hand sets a little more carefully than it should, as if she is writing the note into the string instead of dropping it there. No one would catch it unless they were staring for the wrong reason. I'm not staring. I'm keeping time with my eyes.
She pushes the tempo by a hair and grins, and I grin back before I can stop it. She wants motion. She wants air under the notes. Fine. I give her air. I play into her weight and then away from it. When she leans forward on the line, I lay the floor a beat early so she can land. When she pulls, I don't drag. I let the space stretch and then click back in. It's a conversation without words. It's the kind of talk we're built for.
Halfway through, a memory tries to claw up—another room, another year, another her—and I press it down, not cruel, just firm. Not now. Rest later. This isn't that. This is this. A new line. The same composer. A different page.
We hit the first big run and she flies. Her sound is clean enough to cut paper and messy enough to feel like a person. She doesn't hide. She doesn't shrink. She takes the corner hard and dares me to keep the road under her. I do. It's easy, and it is not easy at all.
My hands stop feeling like hands. They feel like the part of me that remembers who I am when I'm not trying to carry sixteen other things. The weight in my chest loosens. The room fits again. The old hum in the ceiling becomes the backing track. The light across the lid becomes a line on a staff. Her sound draws a path on the air and I put the ground under it as fast as it needs, as slow as it asks.
We land together at the cadence and the silence after is full. Not empty—full. I can hear my own breath, and hers, and the small click of her bow hair settling. Sweat beads at my temples. My fingers hover. I don't want to lift them in case the dream decides that's the signal to leave.
Kaori's bow point dips a little. She's smiling the kind of smile that is more in the eyes than the mouth. Her shoulders drop. There's a tiny tremor in the after-muscle that holds the violin where it sits, and then it's gone. If you blink, you miss it.
"You didn't fall behind," She said
"You didn't need to drag me," I say.
"Yet," she says, and her grin tilts.
I let my hands rest in my lap. My pulse is loud in my wrists. The prick reaches forward from the back of my head and taps once, polite. Remember. I nod to it. I'm not forgetting. I'm not losing the thread. I just needed this.
Kaori lowers the violin and looks at me like she is checking a temperature only she can read. Not close. Not far. Just a good look. "We're joining the Towa competition," she says. It isn't a question. It isn't even an ask. It is the weather report.
"Yes," I say.
It comes out easy. No stumble. No caveats. No "maybe" to buy time I don't want. It's the easiest answer I've given all week.
She blinks, surprised for a beat, then not as surprised as the first time I accepted her. A slow smile creeps in. "You know," she says, playful, "it was easier to convince you than I thought. I didn't expect it to be so easy."
"I'm very reasonable," I say.
"That seems fake." She shot back
"Sometimes I'm reasonable."
She tilts her head. "We'll test that."
"Soon?" I say.
"Soon," she says, and the word feels like a promise to the air more than to me. She sets the violin on the open case and checks the bridge out of habit. Her hands move with that small, neat care again. It calms me just to watch them.
I close the fallboard halfway, then stop and leave it open. I don't want to hear the click it makes when it shuts. Not yet. I want to keep the rim of this moment in the room a little longer. I wipe my palm on my pants. My fingers buzz. My chest feels light in a way that makes me nervous and warm at the same time.
Kaori looks at the wall clock. "We have time to run the opening again," she says, "but if we do it now, I'll speed it up later, and if you yell at me, I'll pretend I can't hear."
"I don't yell."
"Then I'll pretend you did."
I snort before I can stop it. "Fair."
She lifts the violin again and the bow hair catches a sliver of light and goes bright for a second. She finds her stance without thinking—feet under her, knees not locked, shoulders loose. The small stillness touches her left hand for half a beat and passes. I see it. I store it. I don't name it. I won't give it any more space than it takes.
We run the opening. I smooth the floor under her sound. She tests corners. I widen them by a hair so she can take them fast without skidding. When she tries a different color on a phrase, I bring the harmony up to meet it. When she lets a note hang, I hold my breath with it so the silence doesn't feel alone.
There's a point where the two of us line up so cleanly that the air around us feels thinner, like we used some of it to make the sound. I could live in that point. I won't, but I could.
We stop again, not because we fail, but because we don't need to prove a point to each other. The room hums. Kaori lowers the violin and presses her chin where the rest left a small red stripe. It fades while I watch. She exhales and laughs once, quiet, almost to herself.
"Okay," she says. "This is going to be fun."
I nod. The word fun lands in a strange place in me—new and familiar. I had fun here, once, before everything got heavy. Then I stopped using that word. Maybe I can borrow it again.
"I'll fill out the Towa form," she says. "You show up."
"I can do that."
"And don't be late."
"I can try."
"No," she says. "Do."
I raise my hands. "Do."
She seems satisfied with that. She tucks the violin in its bed and clips the bow in place. The latches click shut in two neat beats. She stands, stretches one shoulder, then rolls her wrist like she's flicking water off her fingers. She does it casually, but the move holds my eyes for a second. I add it to the drawer in my head and close the drawer.
"Hey," she says, softer. "You okay?"
"I'm good," I say, and for once I don't need to add anything. It's true. It's fragile, like a soap bubble, but true.
She nods like she believes me. "Good."
We don't rush to leave. There's no need. The room is not going anywhere and neither are we for the next minute. She glances at the piano and then at me. "You play like you know where I'm going before I do," she says.
I shrug. "You drive like you know I'll follow."
She laughs. "Good answer."
We drift toward the door together. I close the lid gently and slide the bench in with my knee. The pencil is still on the ledge; I put it where it belongs, even though no one asked me to. Old habits.
We step into the hall. The world is louder out here—footsteps, voices, a whistle from the field, another scale from a practice room. The light is different too, boxier. Kaori looks both ways though there's nothing to check for. She has her case in her hand and a small piece of hair stuck to her cheek that she doesn't notice. I don't reach to fix it. That's not our distance yet...
She glances at me. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," I say.
"Good," she says. "Don't make me chase you."
"You already did," I say.
She smiles. "True."
We stand there for a second longer, not because we need to, but because the day feels like it's balancing on this small pause and I don't want to knock it off. The prick taps once, a soft metronome at the back of my head. Keep going. Watch. Learn. I nod to it. I hear it. I won't forget.
Kaori shifts the case to her other hand. "Text Tsubaki," she says, as if she can read the message waiting in my pocket. "Tell her you're not doing anything dumb."
"I'll tell her I'm doing something smart," I say.
"That'll scare her more," she says, amused.
"True," I admit.
She starts to walk and I match her step. We don't talk about anything else important. We don't need to. We pass the crooked flyer with the smiling cello. We pass the window where the light falls in squares. When we reach the corner, she taps my sleeve—just once—like she did before the door.
"See you, piano man," she says with a tired but radiant smile
I nod "See you," I say.
She hums and goes one way. I stand for a breath and watch the spot she leaves behind, as if it will hold her outline for a second longer. Then I breathe out and turn. The music room is behind me. The day is still in front. The dream is still here if I move carefully.
I start walking.