The lock sticks for half a second like it's deciding whether I deserve to come home. I shoulder the door and it gives, and then there's Kaori in my doorway making a small lake on the genkan.
She's dripping from hair to socks, an outline of sunlight and wet. Her bow case thunks against the wall like it's also exhausted from bad ideas. The air fills with that river smell—cold metal, green things, summer trying to be brave.
"Permission to squish around your house," she says, already squishing.
"Shoes," I hear myself say, because if rules exist anywhere, they should exist here.
She toes them off with exaggerated care, then wiggles her bare feet on the mat like she's blessing the floor. "Ta-da. See? I'm civilized." A drop jumps from the tip of her nose to the tile. She watches it fall as if it were art.
The clock in the kitchen does a single proud tick. The thought arrives on its heels and dents my mood: I was supposed to be on a train already. Seventh floor, security desk, a door with a name in small letters. Saitou Yonoshita. Tomorrow, then. I shove the irritation down where it can chew on my ribs in private.
"Stay there," I say. "You're a hazard."
"I'm an ambiance," she says, delighted at being upgraded. "I bring freshness."
"You bring mildew." I step around her puddle, grab the old laundry basket from the hall closet, and set it on the mat like a moat. "Wet things in here. Clothes—" I glance at her and realize there is no universe where the sentence ends politely. "Hang on."
I raid my closet. The first shirt my hand finds is the white one that makes me look like I'm trying too hard. No. I dig deeper and come up with an old basketball jersey I never had the height to deserve. Twenty-three. The number looks too confident. I pull a pair of long gray sweats off a hanger that never asked to be useful.
When I return, she's touching my doorframe with the kind of curiosity that belongs in museums. Her fingers trace a nick in the wood like she's reading braille. "First time I've been here," she murmurs, to the house, to herself, to me.
"Here." I thrust the clothes toward her with more force than necessary. The jersey slaps into her hands like a surrender flag. "Bathroom. Second door."
She holds the jersey up, squints like a jeweler. "Twenty-three. Nice. Confidence number. You, sir, are secretly arrogant."
"I'm secretly trying not to have a flooded hallway."
She grins, bows to the laundry basket like it's an old friend, and disappears down the hall with a patter of damp footprints. The bathroom fan starts its moth-wing whirr. Pipes knock to themselves. Somewhere in the neighborhood a delivery scooter argues with gravity.
I lean against the wall next to the door and count seconds and stupid decisions. The train map unfolds in my head unhelpfully: change at Nishi, walk two blocks past the coffee-and-printers station, elevator that smells like old bureaucracy. Tomorrow. I will go tomorrow. I will wear a different shirt and a better face. I will knock until my knuckles learn his door.
The bathroom clicks open. Kaori steps out in my jersey and sweats, sleeves swallowing her wrists, the number stark against the fabric like it's announcing a parade. Her hair is a glossy mess, drops still finding escape routes along her jaw.
"If you say I look ridiculous," she says, striking a model pose that's 40% irony and 60% invincible, "I will throw your fancy soap at your head."
"You look like a burglar who targets sports stores," I say, because honesty is a limited resource and I'm hoarding mine.
She laughs. It warms the hallway three degrees. "New aesthetic unlocked." She plucks at the hem, admiring the oversized swing of it. "It smells like... detergent and notes."
"That's just... house.."I say, which is not an answer.
A drop races down a strand, hesitates at her chin, leaps. Instinct moves me before dignity votes. I herd her toward the couch with the towel I grabbed from the linen shelf.
"Sit."
"Bossy."
"Wet." I plant her there and drape the towel over her head like a ridiculous blessing.
"Hey!" comes muffled from under cotton. "I am not a dog."
"Then hold still like a person," I say, and scrub.
She yelps. "Gentler! That's my brain."
"It's misbehaving." I slow down. The towel hisses the way towels do when they pretend to be ocean. I try to be efficient, but the act of taking care slips under my guard; I find I'm smoothing more than drying, gathering water from the ends so it doesn't climb back. She goes quiet under my hands, a small, contented hush that feels like a song I forgot I knew.
"That's better," she says, voice normal again when the towel lifts. Her hair springs into something halfway between order and storm. She pats it, satisfied, and then looks past me, eyes catching on the framed photos in the narrow hall.
She stands before I can invent a distraction. "So this is your house," she says, as if telling a friend their own name. She wanders like gravity got upgraded. Fingers hover over the metronome on the sideboard. She taps it gently; the weight clicks once. "This little tyrant." She smiles at it as if it were a child who used to bite.
She stops at a photo of my mother taken in a year that feels like a lie now—face turned slightly to light, mouth mid-laugh. Kaori doesn't speak. She doesn't have to. The room edits itself around that silence, kinder than usual.
Then she moves on, because that is her way: not disrespecting the past, just refusing to drown in it. The house, traitor that it is, brightens for her, like walls crave oxygen.
She reaches the end of the hall and pauses at the closed door. It is just a door. It also isn't. Inside is the life I am trying to assemble with string and paper, stacks and stacks of proof that I am either serious or naive. Also sheet music. Also dust. Mostly dust.
She tilts her head like a sparrow, which I recognize now as a warning. "My woman's intuition," she declares, and the grin is already building, "is telling me something."
"Don't," I say. The word lands sharper than I intend.
She pivots, clocking the tone. Her eyebrows climb. "Oh?"
"It's a disaster." My throat is suddenly too small for air. "Private." I hear how that sounds and hate it for a dozen reasons I don't have words for. "Please."
Her smile turns thoughtful rather than cruel, which makes it worse. "If you say 'please' like that, it means there's treasure." She faces the door. My heart does a stupid drumroll. "I'mma do it."
"Kaori—"
The handle turns. The door opens.
Paper has a smell. People forget until it hits them: heat-softened ink, oxidized edges, a sweetness like old glue. It breathes out of the room in a tired sigh. Sunlight angles through half-shut blinds and lands on crumpled printouts, spines of notebooks, the off-white of copy paper that has known fingerprints and bad ideas. There are sticky notes on sticky notes. A mug with something unspeakable at the bottom. On the desk, a spread of my handwriting so dense it looks like a net thrown over drowning thoughts. In the corner, under all of it, the shape of a piano like a whale under snow.
Kaori's voice lowers without asking me. "Oh."
She takes one step in, then another, as if the floor might complain. Her fingers trail over the nearest stack, picking up a corner of some graph I no longer trust. She is not afraid of mess; she is offended by it on the piano's behalf. She reaches the instrument and stops, a small frown softening the knives of her eyes.
The piano is dusty in the way things get when the person who loves them learns to love them in the wrong time. Keys wear a veil of ash. The fallboard is an accusation in satin finish.
I grimace as I know exactly what's going to happen as I open my mouth to intervene.
"Raaagh!!!," she says, a sound from somewhere below language, and then both hands sweep.
Like my previous life the notes leave the piano in a panic of paper. Pages skid to the floor. A notebook somersaults and lands open on a paragraph I do not want read by anyone, ever. A flimsy mountain collapses in dignified silence.
I flinch and grimace again down at the papers. "You could have placed it down nicely, you know?"
"Hush," she says without looking at me, and it contains all the patience I probably deserve.
She pulls a handkerchief from the pocket of the sweats like a magician coaxing a dove out of a shoe—where did that even come from—and sets to work. Not frantic. Reverent. Small circles first on the fallboard, then the lip above the keys, then the keys themselves. The cloth comes away gray. She refolds to clean, refolds again. She breathes on the A above middle C and wipes, as if fogging it will soften the past.
A tear falls before she notices it. It lands on middle D, bright and exact, and wobbles there like a taste of ocean. She doesn't wipe that one. Another follows, quiet as an admission. Her shoulders tremble on the inhale and hold steady on the exhale. It isn't a sob. It isn't theater. It is the simple physics of someone finding a thing important to them in a state that insists it was not.
Something tightens behind my sternum—a winch hauling up guilt from a deep place. I step forward, then stop, because there is nothing to say that doesn't tangle us. I want to tell her I have been playing in my head, that my hands still move in air when the subway is loud, that loudness itself has a key if you listen long enough. I want to tell her I've been selfish with time because I'm trying to buy more of it wholesale elsewhere. None of those sentences survive the brightness of her grief for an object that is not an object.
She presses the cloth between two keys and pulls it back slow. "There," she whispers to the piano, not to me. "You were suffocating, weren't you?"
I hate the part of me that wants to apologize to furniture, and I hate the part of me that already is.
"Kaori," I say, because if I don't say her name I might drown in the discretion of the room.
She stops, the handkerchief stilled over E. She doesn't turn around at first. I watch the moment wash over her: breath, decision, some private geometry righting itself. Then she sets the cloth on the closed fallboard like a folded flag and faces me.
Tears are still living on her face, making tracks they shouldn't have to make. There is nothing meek in them. They glitter like anger sometimes does when it's aimed at the right target.
She crosses the small battlefield floor—paper crushed under her heel with small apologies from the fibers—and halts an inch from me. Close enough that I can count the tiny droplets caught in her lashes. Close enough that the number on the jersey is an audacity I cannot look at.
She lifts her hand and presses a finger into my chest. The gesture is small. It lands like a verdict.
"We're not done talking about finals," she says.
The room hears it. The house hears it. The piano, cleaned in a strip like a runway, hears it. Somewhere down the block a dog decides to bark because this is the kind of sentence that makes living things nervous.
In the hall, the metronome clicks once, unbidden, like a judge clearing his throat.
I swallow against the lump that has been there since the hallway at school and find there are two kinds of air in this house now: the kind that keeps you breathing and the kind you have to earn.
Her finger digs into my sternum like a metronome spike.
"About the finals," she says. "We're not finished."
The house holds still. Dust floats like held breath. The strip she cleaned on the fallboard gleams like a runway; everything else is wreckage.
"You collapsed," I say. The words come out before the committee in my head can vote them down. "On stage."
She flinches—small, almost nothing—then pastes the smile back on. "And then I stood back up."
"We already won," I push, because if I stop pushing I'll fall. "First place. We proved the point. Why do it again?"
"Because that wasn't the point," she shoots back. "Winning was just the world catching up."
"It's enough," I insist, hating the sound of it and needing it anyway. "We don't have to—"
"We?" She arches a brow. "So it's a we when it's a retreat."
I stare at the scuff mark I've been meaning to scrub near the baseboard. Saying the quiet thing out loud makes the room tilt. "You fainted, Kaori. That's not a rumor. I watched you hit the floor."
"Don't say it like that," she says, sudden heat in the words. "You make it sound like I broke. I stumbled. Human bodies do that."
"You were white as the stage." My voice goes rough around the edges. "You scared me."
For the first time her anger misses a step. There's a hitch, a stutter, then the engine catches again. "Good. Now you know how I feel every time you vanish behind a dumb excuse."
I want to tell her where I went instead—the trains I didn't take today, the elevator I didn't stand in, the door I didn't knock on. The address is a hot rectangle in my pocket, paper learning me by heart. Saitou Yonoshita. Tomorrow, I promise the future I've been building with a pen. Tomorrow.
"I'm not vanishing," I say, quieter. "I'm choosing not to watch you crumple again because I chased your tempo instead of the truth."
She steps closer until the jersey's big white 23 fills my peripheral vision like a dare. "Then catch me. That's the job, remember?" She taps my sternum. "You keep time. I jump. We land together."
"It's not a trick jump," I say. "It's a cliff."
"Maybe I like cliffs."
"That isn't bravery; that's—" I bite off the word reckless before it can ruin what's left.
She hears it anyway. "Say it." She glares down
"Reckless," I say, and the syllables taste like guilt.
Her jaw sets. The handkerchief she left on the fallboard watches us like a folded flag at the wrong ceremony. She drags her gaze over the toppled papers, the books stamped with other people's names, the pencil I snapped and kept because wasting still feels like a sin.
"What is all this?" she asks, voice low now, the heat turned to something tighter. "You say 'we' when you want out, and 'I' when you want to disappear. Which is it? Where are you going that isn't the stage next to me? You said you would be my accompanist!
I should lie better. I should say college entrance nonsense and "teacher's project" and "extra lessons" and other normal teenage scaffolding. Instead the truth walks to the edge of my mouth and dangles its feet. My Guilt spikes at her last words.
"I had an appointment," I say, which is the skeleton of a confession. "Missed it. I'll go tomorrow."
"With who?"
"A person who knows more than I do," I say, which is both everything and nothing. "Someone who might help me not waste time."
"What time?" She gestures to the rubble at our feet. "All of this looks like wasting. The piano's drowning in it."
"I know," I say, and the admission shakes something loose in my throat. "I know."
She studies me like she did the dusty octave, patient, methodical, finding where the grime hides. "You're not afraid of the piano anymore," she says, not a question.
"No," I answer. It surprises us both to hear it without the usual choke. "Not her. Not that."
"Then you're afraid of me," she says, and it isn't cruel; it's precise.
"I'm afraid of watching you fall," I say, because that much belongs to anyone who saw it. "I'm afraid of pretending it's fine and then carrying you offstage again while people clap for the wrong thing."
Her eyes flare. "They clapped because it was beautiful."
"They clapped because they didn't know where else to put the noise inside them," I say, and hate how old it sounds, how tired. "I'm not interested in applause if it means you on the floor."
She laughs, short and sharp. "You think saying no will keep me standing? You think you can control that? The stage is where I'm alive, Kousei. With you. If I fall, I fall where I'm supposed to be."
"So your plan is to drag me to the edge and make me watch?" The words come out harsher than I intend. "That's... that's cruel."
"Cruel is quitting on me," she says, voice suddenly soft, which hurts more. "Cruel is telling me that the most honest thing I've ever done with another person is optional." She says softly "Cruel is telling me you would be my accompanist to just... do this..."
The radiator ticks once like a bug trapped in a clock. A siren far away decides we are not its business. My palms itch with the urge to put them somewhere—her shoulders, the clean strip of wood, my own pockets where the card lives like a pulse.
"I can't split," I say. "School is a pile, rehearsals are another, and then there's—" I wave at the desk where my handwriting looks like a thousand small attempts at not drowning. "You want me to be a perfect accompanist, a good student, a son who doesn't wreck the floor plan, and—" and a boy who breaks a door open on the seventh floor tomorrow and learns enough in a week to change the slope of a life. "—and I'm fourteen. There aren't that many hours."
She snorts. "Perfection again. That old god. Kill it."
"I'm not worshipping it," I say. "I'm just counting. There are only so many things you can carry before one of them breaks your hands"
His hands were already breaking with what he had so far. If he added one more thing which we finals... the emotional and physicals toll of everything will just be too much...
"Then we carry different things," she says, and suddenly she's inches from me, damp hair cold on my knuckles where I didn't notice my fist had curled. "I carry the fear. You carry the time. That's the deal."
"I don't remember signing," I say, and hate the whine in it.
"You did when you played with me," she says simply. "That was the contract."
Silence opens like a trapdoor. I look at the cleaned keys. It would be so easy to sit down and let my hands do what they know. It would be so easy to give her this now and figure out a different tomorrow later. But the address in my pocket burns a hole the shape of a window I haven't looked through yet. If I choose the sound right now, I'm choosing not to knock later. If I choose later, I'm choosing not to stand next to her under lights that become a cathedral when she breathes.
"Why is it all or nothing with you?" I ask. "Why can't we not do the finals and still be us?" He said it yet I knew exactly why. It was a dumb question and I berated myself mentally for it
Her eyes go glass-bright, no tears this time, just the sheen lacquer gets when light hits it clean. "Because my 'us' happens there," she says, pointing toward a hall neither of us can see from this room. "On a stage. With you. I'm not asking you to do it forever. I'm asking you to do it now."
I shake my head. "I can't build a later if I set fire to now."
"And I can't live a now that's empty"she says. "Now is all I have..."she says much more softly but I hear it perfectly.
We stand in that terrible math. My throat tastes like metal. Her fingers twitch like they're resisting grabbing mine and making me agree by force.
"Okay," I say finally, not agreement, not surrender—just a word to keep the ceiling up. "Okay."
She waits. When I don't add anything, her mouth hardens. "You're impossible."
"And you're—" I stop before I say reckless again. "Unfair."
"Good," she says, and somehow she means it. "Then we match."
She turns away from me because the room ran out of places to put our eyes. The air has gotten thick with the smell of paper and old polish and the river still clinging to her hair. She stalks to the window and throws the latch with a violence the brass doesn't deserve.
The sash grinds up. Evening spills in—cooler than before, clean. The street offers up its usual chorus: a bicycle chain complain-humming, a pushcart seller talking a price down to himself, a far train putting a line under the skyline.
She leans into the frame and inhales like she hasn't all day. "You're suffocating," she says over her shoulder. "Open a window sometimes."
"I just did," I say.
"Not this one."
It would be funny if we weren't both made of flint.
Her breath slows. My ribs try to copy hers and fail. The angle of her cheek softens in the wedge of light, the jersey bunching at her waist in a way that feels like it knows secrets. I let my eyes come down from the ceiling for the first time in minutes and think I might be able to shape a better sentence next try—
—and then the air changes. Not wind. Attention.
Across the narrow residential lane, framed by a rectangle that mirrors ours, someone is standing at a window too. Hair pulled back from practice, jersey in a different color, bag strap still across one shoulder like she hasn't decided whether she's leaving or arriving.
Tsubaki.
Her eyes go straight to Kaori—damp hair, my clothes, in my house—and then to me, and then back again. It happens in less than a breath, a three-beat scan that writes the whole scene in her head in permanent ink.
Kaori, who can smell weather but prefers to name it late, lifts her arm and waves like a sunrise. The grin is immediate, reflexive, the kind that throws a rope across any gap. "Tsubaki!" she chirps, bright enough to be mistaken for normal.
It lands like an insult.
Tsubaki doesn't wave back. The surprise that hopped into her eyes gets eaten by something darker. Her mouth presses into a line so thin it might cut you. The hand on the bag strap tightens until the knuckles flash. She doesn't blink. If she blinked, she might miss the part where I say something reasonable. I don't say anything.
Kaori's wave falters, then tries to recover with an extra wiggle, like she can draw a smile on the world by shaking her hand harder. "Hey!" she calls into the alley of afternoon. "We were just—" She doesn't finish because there isn't a word that covers all the were justs we were just.
Tsubaki's stare moves again, not fast, not flashy—over the soaked strands clinging to Kaori's neck, over the big white 23 jerking a joke out of a serious moment, over the naked strip of clean wood on my piano like a wound. She takes in the towel I dropped, the mess I let exist, the way my shoulders have curled in as if that could make me smaller than a frame can contain.
Her face shifts. Not shouting. Not tears. A steadier anger—dense, cold. The kind you can build a wall with.
Kaori lowers her arm, cheerful exhausted out of it. She keeps the smile because letting it go would be admitting we've crossed into a different kind of day. "It's not what—" she starts, and the sentence trips over its own feet.
A breeze moves through both rooms at once, twin curtains lifting like ghosts practicing their exits. Somewhere a TV tells a joke on delay. My heart chooses that moment to discover it can bruise itself.
Tsubaki reaches up and slides her own window higher like she needs more oxygen to not say anything. The light on her skin is softer in her room; behind her, a bat leans against a wall, a uniform shirt hangs from a chair back, a trophy gleams with reflected afternoon. It looks like a life where things have names. Her eyes don't belong to that life right now. They belong to a place where the history of three kids is a tight knot and one pull can ruin a neckline.
Kaori tries one last time—palms up, helpless, still shining because shining is her only weapon. "Hi," she says, ridiculous and brave.
Tsubaki looks at her hand. Then at mine. Then at our window, which has become a confession booth with the doors ripped off.
I feel the moment I run out of cleverness. It's when your mouth has a word and you can't find any place in the room to put it where it won't explode. The address in my pocket does its tiny heartbeat. Tomorrow, I think stupidly, as if scheduling will save us from what's happening now.
"God," I say, which is a prayer, and then the prayer realizes no one is available to take it. "God damn it."
The syllables fall into the space between the windows and make no sound at all.