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'TIS THE SEASON FOR UNRESOLVED FEELINGS — SATORU GOJO

pairing — satoru gojo x suguru’s little sister!reader

summary — eight years ago, satoru gojo almost kissed you on the bleachers, then apologized and left without looking back. you’ve spent every year since convincing yourself you’re over it—until you spot him across the mall in a santa costume that’s two sizes too small, beard slipping, surrounded by screaming toddlers—and you do what any rational adult would do. you hide. unfortunately, the universe has other plans. like locking you both inside a bookstore until morning.

... a story about growing up, growing apart, and finding your way back to each other.

word count — 18.9 k

genre/tags — modern AU, childhood friends to lovers, brother’s best friend, mutual pining, slow burn, second chance romance, he kept the bracelet (you kept the trauma), forced proximity, blue spring feelings, hurt/comfort, she kisses him first

warnings — 16+ ONLY. themes of abandonment and loneliness, past bullying, sports injury/career loss, angst, and a man who failed chemistry twice but never stopped loving you

author's note — i’m back, friends !! ahhh i’m so happy to share something with you again (kinda nervous about it too, ehmm). this story is written in first person, so i hope you’ll still be able to enjoy it, even if it’s a little unusual but i think it turned out kinda sweet :')) & this is my love letter to second chances and the complicated emotions of growing up <3

masterlist + read on ao3 + support my writing

“Hiding out here too?”

I turned at the sound of his voice. He climbed the bleachers with two plastic cups in his hands, white hair catching the last traces of sunset. Satoru Gojo. My brother’s best friend. My almost, my maybe, my never-quite.

“I thought you’d be busy with your fan club,” I said as I took the cup he offered. He dropped down next to me, long legs stretched over the row in front of us, close enough that our shoulders almost touched but didn’t.

“They’ll survive without me for a few minutes.”

A lie. People orbit him the way moons orbit planets—helpless. And I was one of them, one moon in a crowded sky. But in twelve days that would change. He’d be gone, accepted early to some university three prefectures away, the kind that sends its offers on thick cream paper. Our town would shrink to the size of a matchbox in his rearview mirror, and I would stay behind and count the days until the matchbox burned.

I raised the cup and took a sip. It was overly sweet.

Fireflies drifted above the wide soccer field, blinking like tiny stars in the growing dark. Behind us the graduation party spilled noise across the open air, laughter that sounded too loud, too hopeful, too unsure, the nostalgia of people already turning this place into a story, happy to escape and secretly wishing the time back.

I didn’t want to hide out here. I thought I’ve overcome my cowardness years ago but looks like I didn’t. I slipped away from the party when the celebration began to weight heavy on my heart, when each congratulation directed at them felt like a small funeral for the version of me that believed nothing would ever change.

Sixteen is a stupid age. Old enough to know people leave, young enough to believe you might be the exception.

And I didn’t want to be so sad that day. I really tried. It was Satoru and Suguru’s graduation party, after all. A happy day. The last great hurrah before they left. But I couldn’t shake the thought that I would stay here, finish school alone, rooted to this small town like someone had pinned me down with no chance to catch up.

I probably should have stayed with my friends, let their chatter about summer trips and movie stars wash over me and pretend I care about the same things. I could have passed for normal. Instead I followed the same worn path, trailing after my brother and his best friend because that had always been what I do.

Saturday mornings in our school gyms with my textbooks open while they ran drills, or late-night convenience store trips where they bought me ice cream and ruffled my hair. Birthdays, holidays, ordinary afternoons that somehow turned special because the two of them filled every moment with a brightness I never learned to create on my own.

My adolescence shaped itself around them. Suguru’s little sister. Satoru’s friend’s kid sister. I answered to those roles more readily than to my own name some days.

And somewhere between my childhood and this humid summer night, I convinced myself that if I stayed tucked inside the pocket they made for me, it would never stop fitting. I let myself believe the story would hold steady forever.

But it wouldn’t. Everything would change. In two weeks the house would go quiet. And I would still be here, sixteen and small and so unbearably left behind. Still in love with someone who called me kid and probably didn’t know my favorite color.

Two years felt like forever at that age. Seven hundred thirty days. Seven hundred thirty nights of maybe texting, maybe not. Long enough for new cities to leave their marks on his skin, for inside jokes to form in languages I wouldn’t speak, for girls with longer legs and brighter smiles to learn the exact pressure of his hand at the small of their back.

By the time I’d be old enough to board a train without permission, I would be the footnote he mentioned when someone asked about home. Remember Suguru’s little sister? Yeah, she was always around.

I hated that thought.

“Nervous about Osaka?” I asked, mostly to fill the silence before my thoughts ate me alive.

“I guess I should be. New city, more competition, living on my own for the first time…” He drank from his cup. “It doesn’t feel real yet.”

“It will when you’re playing in front of thousands of people.”

“Maybe.” He fell quiet for a moment, then asked, “What about you? Nervous about next year?”

“A little. But also… excited? I want to do well. I need to do well if I want any chance of getting into Tokyo’s chemistry program. My grades have to be perfect.”

“Hey.” He bumped my shoulder gently. “You’ll be fine. You’re the smartest person I know.”

“You’re just saying that to be nice.”

“I’m serious. You dragged me and Suguru through every year of chemistry, even though we’re two years ahead of you. Remember all those Sundays in your kitchen when you explained stoichiometry to us like it’s the easiest thing ever? And I still couldn’t get it.”

“You weren’t that bad.”

“I absolutely was,” he said. “Suguru was only slightly less terrible. But you saved our asses every time. Point is, Tokyo would be idiots if they didn’t take you.”

“You really think so?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I know so. You’re going to get exactly where you want to go.”

I looked down and picked at the rim of my cup, hoping my heartbeat wasn’t as loud as it felt.

“You’re lucky,” he said after a moment.

“Why’s that?”

He smiled, small and fragile, the kind that used to make teachers forgive him for never doing his homework.

“You know what you want,” he said. “You’ve got everything lined up. You’re gonna be some famous chemist or something, probably discover a new element and win a Nobel Prize.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s not. You’re stupidly smart. It’s honestly terrifying.” He leaned back on his elbows, eyes drifting to the first stars poking through the sky. “Meanwhile I’m just following Suguru and hoping I don’t screw everything up.”

“You won’t screw it up.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I know so,” I said, throwing his own words back at him. “You and Suguru are gonna be amazing. You’ll travel the world, play in big and famous arenas, maybe even the Olympics.”

“You really think that?”

“I do. I always have.”

“But what if it doesn’t work out? What if I get there and I’m not good enough? What if I fail and have to come back with nothing… I don’t know. I’m talking nonsense.”

“You won’t fail. You’re too good for that. And you know it.”

He gave another fragile smile. “Must be nice, having everything figured out already.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I mean, I know what I want to study, but everything else is just—” I swirled the last of the punch. The ice had melted into pink water. “A total mess.”

“Like what?”

I stared straight ahead, at the dark line where the field ended and the rest of the world began.

“Like wondering if the people I care about will still be around when I graduate. If anything will be the same in two years. If I’ll still matter to them when they’re off chasing dreams somewhere far away.”

He was quiet so long I thought he hadn’t heard. I wanted to disappear into the bleachers.

“You’ll always matter,” he said at last.

I wanted to laugh at how small the promise sounded against the size of what I needed. I wanted to cry because it was the most he’d ever given me. I wanted to beg him to say it again, louder so the night could keep it forever. Instead I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Will I?” I asked, foolishly.

“Of course. You think I could forget you?”

“Even when you’re in Osaka? When you’re playing for one of the best teams in the country, with scouts probably circling you after every game?” I should have stopped there. “Or girls?”

“Is that what you think my life is gonna look like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about what you’ll do. I just know you’ll be too busy living your amazing new life to think about home.”

“You’re not just home,” he said. “You’re—”

“I’m what?” I hated it. I didn’t take it back.

“You’re important to me. You’ve always been.”

I could barely contain my little heart from exploding.

“Satoru,” I said, and it sounded like please and don’t and stay all at the same time.

His hand moved first. His fingertips brushed the back of mine where it rested on the warm metal. It was barely a touch. It should have been nothing. It felt like everything. I was so foolishly in love.

“I know I shouldn’t—”

His knuckles grazed my cheek. And for a heartbeat—one impossibly long, impossibly hopeful moment—I thought he might close the distance. I thought he might actually—

But something in him snapped shut. His hand fell. His gaze dropped to the ground.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He stood and moved fast, long legs taking the bleacher steps two at a time. I have to go, he said and didn’t even look back as he took my stupid childhood dreams with him.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough for the punch to go warm, for the music to loop twice, for the hollow in my chest to stretch into something too big for my small body to hold.

Eventually I walked home alone. I locked myself in my room, pressed my face into the pillow, and cried until my ribs hurt. When Mom knocked, I told her I was emotional about graduation. She believed me because mothers want to.

Two weeks later he left for Osaka without saying goodbye. Suguru hugged me in the driveway, ruffled my hair the way he always had, and promised he’d call every week. Satoru stood by the car with sunglasses on even though the sky was overcast, and lifted one hand in a wave that never became anything more.

The car pulled away. I watched until the taillights vanished, then went inside and closed the door on the rest of my childhood.

That was eight years ago.

Eight years of no contact. Eight years of pretending I was over it, that I was mature and unbothered, that time had made me sensible. Until now. Because there he was.

Across the mall.

In full view.

Dressed in a Santa costume that was both too tight and too short, with a fake beard hanging slightly askew. A glittery vinyl banner screamed SANTA’S VILLAGE! above his head, and a line of toddlers and parents stretched toward the plastic throne where he sat, all six-foot-three of him.

Startled, I stood behind the register of the bookstore where I worked over the holidays, arms full of orders and trying not to drop all of them as my brain forgot how to function.

I should’ve walked away. I should’ve pretended I was needed in the cookbook section, or called in sick, or quit on the spot, or fled the country—literally anything except stand there and stare. But, of course, I stared. Because of course I would.

And eventually Satoru Gojo—my brother’s best friend, my could-have-been, my nearly-was, the unfinished story I left back in high school—looked up, and his eyes caught mine.

Satoru blinked.

I blinked.

And in the middle of a crowded mall, surrounded by Mariah Carey promising she didn’t want a lot for Christmas, angry toddlers, and a mall cop eating his fifth donut of the day and not in the slightest doing his job… Satoru Gojo, the wound I never recovered from, whispered—

“…oh shit.”

Merry Christmas to me.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

We stared at each other.

Not long—maybe three seconds, maybe an eternity—hard to tell when lungs suddenly forgot how to work and the world stretched so thin it felt like one wrong breath might tear straight through it.

His eyes, that winter-sky blue right before the first snow decides to fall, held mine across the cheap tinsel and screaming toddlers. Eight years should have dulled them, turned them ordinary. But they hadn’t. If anything, time had sharpened them, made them brighter, more unmistakably his.

“Excuse me?” a woman said beside him. She nudged a small child forward—a little girl with pink cheeks and wide eyes staring up at the giant red figure in front of her.

Satoru blinked.

I blinked.

And the moment shattered like ice.

The little girl took one look at him—this weary Santa with the slipping beard and faint panic rising in his eyes—and immediately burst into tears.

“Ho… ho…?” Satoru tried, but it came out more like a question.

The child wailed louder.

My own heart wasn’t doing much better. It beat too fast, too hard, too uneven, like it wasn’t sure whether to sprint or stop entirely. Because Satoru Gojo was here. Here. After eight years of nothing but secondhand mentions from Suguru, a few blurry appearances in my brother’s stories, and a whole lot of distance.

He was here. In this mall. In my town.

It wasn’t even his job. It was Suguru’s stupid annual winter side hustle—the one he uses up for his gaming habit instead of buying needed textbooks. But he was nowhere in sight. Why hadn’t he mentioned anything?

A strange pressure built behind my ribs.

None of it made sense. Satoru lived somewhere far away now. He had med-school lectures to attend, clinical rotations to do, an entire life that had nothing to do with our nowhere town or me. He had no reason to be here. He shouldn’t be here. And he absolutely had no right to make me feel like I’d been hit by a train I’d spent years convincing myself had already left the station with one single glance. And yet—

He came back.

“Hey.”

I startled so violently the top three books slid off the stack and hit the carpet with a dull thud. Maki stood right beside me, one eyebrow arched like she’d caught me—which, I guess, she did.

“…Who.” She followed the line of my stare. “—are you staring at?”

“I—uh—no one.”

Maki’s gaze flicked back to the disaster across the mall. A too tall and too broad Santa with white hair poking out from under the hat, velvet pants that stopped far too high on his legs, and a fake beard held in place by a rubber band stretched thin enough to snap from a single sigh.

She looked at him.

She looked at me.

She looked at him again.

Her face didn’t move, but somehow she managed to deliver several very loud thoughts at once, including:

You absolute clown.

You’re lying to my face.

What the hell is that man wearing?

“Right,” she said. “So you’re just… admiring mall Santa.”

“I wasn’t—he’s—”

“Tall? Weirdly attractive for someone who looks like he got kicked out of the North Pole? Doing a bad job?”

I stared at her, betrayed.

She shrugged. “I’m not blind.”

Across the mall, Santa-Satoru was squatting awkwardly, his beard slipping lower by the second. He whispered something to the sniffling girl; whatever it was worked, because her wail turned into a hiccup, and then a shy smile. For one heartbeat he looked up again, scanning, searching. And landed on me.

Maki followed the trajectory of his eyes.

“Oh,” she said. “Now I get it.”

“I—he’s not—it’s not—”

“You know him,” she said, deadpan. “You know mall Santa.”

“Stop calling him that.”

“Then give me a better title.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Not when Satoru Gojo—my almost, my what-if, my forever something—stood twenty meter away in a stupid Santa costume, staring at me like he’d just seen something he thought had died years ago suddenly open its eyes again. And I had no idea what any of it meant.

Maki didn’t drop it. Of course she didn’t.

“So you gonna explain why hot mall Santa is staring at you like he wants you as his gift under the christmas tree?”

“He’s not—he wasn’t—Maki, stop.”

“Nope. Because you’re doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you’re panicking like you’re some teenager.”

I winced. She was, as usual, correct. Maki waited. I stayed silent. She lifted an eyebrow. I gave up.

“Fine. He’s my brother’s best friend.”

Maki blinked. Once. “That’s it?”

“No.”

“I figured.”

Before I could elaborate—or panic further—I grabbed her sleeve and pulled her sideways, past the game section and manga, straight into the self-help aisle, because—let’s be real, no one’s ever there. Maki stared at me, waiting for me to talk between a sea of motivational quotes, cheerful covers, and titles like Finding Your Inner Light, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and You’re Not Crazy You’re Just Healing!

I wanted to die.

“So he’s kinda, like—” I rubbed my face; tried again. “I mean, he is—was—is, I guess, still is but also no, was and—”

Maki tapped a book titled Stop Walking on Eggshells and gestured at me.

“You’re enjoying this,” I said.

“Yes. I very much enjoy watching you malfunction. Now tell me why mall Santa is making you lose your mind.”

“He used to be around all the time. When we were kids. Like every single day.”

“So childhood friend crush. Classic. Continue.”

“It wasn’t—I mean—” My fingers found a book at random to have something to hold. It was titled How Not to Fall for the Wrong Guy. I shoved it back. “He went to Osaka with my brother to play basketball and I’ve never seen him again since.”

“That happens,” Maki said, not unkindly.

“Yeah, but there was… something. Right before he left. Something that almost happened. And then didn’t.”

“Ah. Now were’re getting to the interesting part.”

“There’s nothing interesting because nothing happened. Or maybe it did, I don’t know. And I know it’s stupid. I’ve spent years trying to get over it. Over him. And now he’s here? In a Santa costume? In my mall? I mean—what is happening? What am I supposed to do with that?”

Maki made a thoughtful face, then pointed at a pink paperback beside my elbow titled Managing Panic Before It Manages You.

“You might need that.”

“Not helpful.”

She crossed her arms and leaned a shoulder against the Mindfulness and Meditation shelf. “Do you still have feelings for him?”

“No! God, no. I’m too busy for feelings. I have deadlines, rent, a succulent that’s on the verge of death. You know how it is.” I reached for the nearest row of books and began rearranging them, pulling one forward, nudging another back, straightening a row that didn’t actually need straightening. “It’s just—A lot happened. After he left.”

“Like what?”

“Satoru got injured.” My fingers found the corner of some pastel book about radical forgiveness and pulled at it until the edge curled. “About four years ago. It was bad. He had to quit basketball.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Suguru didn’t give me details—or better said, I didn’t ask really. But it was serious and Satoru wasn’t the same after. After his injury he moved to another city and started studying sports medicine.” I slid a book half an inch to the left, paused, then slid it right back again. “Suguru said he got quieter. More closed off. I never asked. I didn’t think it was my place. I still don’t think it is.”

“So you two haven’t talked since before the injury,” she said.

“Not once.”

“And now he’s standing in the middle of this mall in a Santa costume, looking at you like you’re his long lost girlfriend.”

I traced the raised letters on a book cover. After his injury, everything between us—between the three of us, really—changed in ways none of us ever named. Suguru and Satoru grew a little distant, their calls got shorter, the laughter between them sounded different. Satoru transferred to another university, and Suguru quit too. Said he didn’t want it anymore if they couldn’t have it together. And now, standing here with him somewhere in this building, too close and too far at the same time, I realized I wasn’t even sure I knew who Satoru Gojo was anymore.

“It’s strange,” I said. “Seeing him again. After so long.”

My fingers closed around a bright green paperback titled Overcome Anything in 30 Days! I pulled it forward, pushed it back, shifted the angle, aligned the spine with the others, then pulled it out again because the spacing felt wrong.

Maki watched with the look of someone witnessing a car crash and unable to tear her eyes away, while somewhere past the shelves, the mall’s Christmas playlist kept looping.

“You’ve rearranged that book six times,” she said.

“It’s crooked.”

“It’s not crooked.”

“It feels crooked.”

I adjusted it again. Now it actually was crooked, leaning forward like it was trying to escape the shelf, which I couldn’t blame it for. If I were trapped between self-help books on a Thursday afternoon, I’d try to flee too. I frowned, tried to fix it, made it worse, and finally gave up with a long exhale and shoved it back into place.

Maki raised an eyebrow. “Feel better?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

A sudden burst of noise pulled me back to reality—voices, footsteps, the unmistakable ding of the front register. Customers had already begun to line up, a small crowd gathering at the cashier as if Maki and I had been hiding in this aisle far longer than I’d meant to.

Before either of us could move, our manager appeared at the end of the row with that flat expression of someone who had been searching for quite a while and absolutely expected to find us doing nothing productive.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

I tried to keep myself as busy as possible in the last hours of my shift, which wasn’t exactly hard. Holiday shoppers swarmed the aisles like we were giving things away for free. I answered their questions on autopilot.

“Do you have anything for a twelve-year-old who likes dragons?”

“Fantasy section, back left corner.”

“What about cookbooks?”

“Front table, next to the registers.”

I didn’t halt for a second—scanned barcodes, tied twine around brown paper, shoved purchases into gift bags. I even covered for Maki, so she could sneak away for a quick nap in the staff room. Anything to keep my brain occupied and keep my eyes from drifting toward the open hall, where Satoru was probably still traumatizing small children in that absurd costume.

But every time the line thinned and I had four seconds to breathe, my gaze betrayed me. It sought him out, the same way it had during those long, sunburnt summers, when watching him felt easier than looking anywhere else.

And there he was.

Satoru.

Santa-Satoru.

Still somehow looking like himself even under all that red velvet and cheap polyester fur. Now and then I caught the flash of white hair when he tugged the beard down to breathe, or the striped socks he definitely hadn’t owned at eighteen when the pants rode up. And the way he leaned down when a kid climbed into his lap—careful, gentle—was the same way he used to lean over my homework when I was twelve and pretending I didn’t know the answer just to keep him close.

I watched, transfixed. And every time, something in my chest tightened, like it recognized him before the rest of me could decide whether it wanted to. He was still him. And I was still watching.

He was older, of course—eight years will do that. But it was more than time. His face had lost the last traces of boyhood softness; his jaw was sharper, the faint roundness in his cheeks long gone. He’d always been tall, but now his shoulders looked broader, his arms stronger.

I hated that I couldn’t look away from the man he’d grown into. I thought I’d never get to see this version of him.

After he left, I treated his Instagram like a minefield—one wrong tap and I’d blow off a limb. It was this dramatic. But the nights got longer, and discipline thinned. Eventually I’d find myself awake in the middle of the night, thumb hovering, then giving in.

Action shots from games. Group photos after practice with his arm slung around people I didn’t recognize. Stories from away trips—hotel rooms, bus rides, teammates laughing.

And the comments. God, the comments.

Girls—dozens of them—flooding every post with heart emojis and comments that got worse the more you scrolled. marry me. ruin my life. hello beautiful boy. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, that I was above this kind of teenage stuff. But I did care. And then came the night I fell down the fan-edit rabbit hole.

One accidental tap and there he was in slow motion—sweat catching stadium lights, fingers in damp white hair, laughing like the world had never said no to him with captions like why is he so perfect and imagine being the girl he smiles at like this. I wanted to throw my phone against the wall.

I knew I was stupid to feel jealous. An almost-something on a summer bleacher didn’t buy me a single inch of him or give me a say in his new life, the people he met, or the girl he leaned into after wins. I was the girl he almost kissed, then apologised to, then left without a glance back. Nothing more. I cared anyway.

And it had hurt. If I let myself be honest—which I tried very hard not to—it had hurt like hell watching him build a whole bright life without me. Watching him smile in photos with people who got to orbit him the way I once had, while I stayed here, still in high school, still the kid sister who didn’t matter enough to visit.

After the injury I stopped looking altogether. Suguru called one night and told me Satoru had gone down during a game. Something about his knee, about surgery and physical therapy and an unclear recovery, possibly even career end.

I opened Instagram that same night, but I couldn’t look. Couldn’t handle seeing dreams I’d watched form since childhood splinter. Couldn’t handle seeing him hurt, even through a screen. Later I learned he’d deleted his account.

And now he was here, not in a screen but breathing and wearing a supid red costume and all. A memory that had learned how to walk again.

None of it helped. I needed answers. Or at least one answer. So during a moment of quiet—no crying children, no stressed shoppers, no requests for “that book with the blue cover that everyone talks about on TikTok”—I ducked behind the counter and pulled out my phone.

you: why is satoru here

The three dots appeared almost immediately.

suguru: you saw him??

suguru: he lost a bet

suguru: had to take over my shift

you: you couldn’t have warned me???

suguru: sorry i was busy

suguru: besides you’ve been avoiding him for years

suguru: figured you two should talk

you: we have nothing to talk about

suguru: sure

suguru: that’s why you always flee the room when i mention him, right?

you: i hate you

suguru: love you too little sister

suguru: be nice to him okay? he’s going through it rn

My fingers paused above the keyboard. Going through it? Was it about his injury? I started to type, but another message landed before I could finish.

suguru: gotta run

suguru: don’t kill each other

I stared at the screen. A bet. He was here because he lost a bet. Not because he missed the town, not because Suguru asked him to come home for the holidays, not because some part of him wondered what I looked like at twenty-four.

Just bad luck and worse timing.

It should have been a relief. A door slamming shut on every stupid hope I’d refused to admit I was still carrying. But it landed like a punch. I shoved my phone back into my pocket and swallowed the heavy feeling it left behind.

“Customer at the register,” Maki called, and I went back to work.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

By evening the holiday chaos finally thinned, and we were supposed to be closing soon, but I moved slower than necessary. I closed the register a little too late, counted the till twice, pretended the receipt paper needed replacing. Anything to keep me here a bit longer.

I wasn’t walking out those doors yet. Not after hearing Satoru’s voice drift across the hall earlier, telling some security guard he’d be “out of here soon.” I would wait him out.

“I’ll close,” I told Maki as she shrugged into her coat. “I’ve got inventory to finish anyway.”

She gave me a look that said she knew exactly what I was doing and found it deeply pathetic, but not pathetic enough to call me out on it.

“Don’t stay too late,” she said. “Empty malls are creepy as hell.”

“Lock up when you’re done!” Our manager was already halfway out the door. “And actually finish the inventory this time!”

I waited until I couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore, until the overhead lights dimmed and the holiday music finally, goddamn finally, shut off. Mariah Carey might not want a lot for Christmas, but I sure as hell didn’t want to hear that song anymore for my Christmas.

I exhaled and opened the ordering tablet. One hour, I decided. Sixty safe minutes. By then the red suit would be folded in some staff room and he’d be gone—out the doors, into the cold, back to whatever life he lived now.

It felt like a solid plan. Reasonable. Adult, even. Which should have been my first clue it wouldn’t work.

I made it fifty-three minutes.

Footsteps echoed down the empty mall. Could’ve been security; they did rounds at this hour. But something in the rhythm pulled at me in a way I felt in my chest before I recognized anything in my head.

“You still here?”

I turned. And there he was.

He still wore the stupid red velvet jacket and pants, but the hat and beard were gone, exposing pale skin and the soft freckles across his nose and cheeks. Somehow that made it worse—made him look less like mall Santa and more like himself.

Like the boy on the bleachers.

Like the boy who almost kissed me.

Like the boy who ran.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you left.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged, hands disappearing into red pockets. “Didn’t feel right to leave without saying a real hello.”

“We don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“This awkward reunion thing. It’s late. You can just go. It’s fine.”

“What if I wanted to see you?”

I hated the way my pulse stumbled at the sound of his voice, how my whole body still tensed like we were back on that bleacher, suspended in an almost that never happened. I hated that after I’d buried him so deep I swore the dirt was packed, one stupid question cracked the grave open again. And that I wanted him to stay almost as much as I wanted him to leave.

“Satoru—”

“It’s been years,” he said. “And you’re still avoiding me.”

“I’ve been avoiding you?”

“Yeah. You have.”

“You left,” I said. “You and Suguru packed your bags and went off to Osaka, and I haven’t seen you once. Not once in eight years.”

“You could’ve called—”

“So could you! Don’t stand there and act like I’m the one who disappeared. You never called either, Satoru. You were the one too busy living your perfect little dream life while I was still here. Alone.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Not fair? From what I saw, you were the university athlete, the basketball star. Had all the parties, the attention, all the girls tripping over themselves in your comments and—”

Heat rose straight up my cheeks. Did I just admit to stalking his social media?—Yes, but I pushed forward anyway, because halting now felt like stepping off a cliff.

“You were busy,” I said. “I get it. You didn’t have time for your best friend’s little sister anymore.”

“That’s not—You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then tell me! Tell me why you left that night on the bleachers. Tell me why eight years went by and you never—” I couldn’t push the last words out. “You never came back.”

“I was in Osaka. I had practice, games, classes—”

“Suguru came home. Every break. You couldn’t manage it once?”

“It’s complicated—”

“It’s really not.” My fingers tightened around the tablet I was still holding. “You wanted to pretend that night never happened. Okay, fine. You did. But don’t stand here acting like I’m the one who—”

“I was trying to give us both space!”

“I didn’t want space! I wanted my friend back.” Something in his face went still, like I’d struck a nerve. “You were my friend, Satoru. Before anything else, before everything else, you were my friend. And then you just… left.”

“You were Suguru’s little sister,” he said. “You still are.”

“So that night was what? Something you wanted until you remembered whose sister I was?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“You didn’t have to.” My chest felt too small for all of this. “You ran away fast enough.”

“You were sixteen—”

“I was sixteen and in love with you! God, Satoru, was that not painfully obvious? You could’ve said something—anything. ‘Sorry, I’m not interested,’ or ‘Don’t fall for your brother’s best friend,’ or literally any sentence other than just stand up and run.”

“I was sixteen,” I went on, quieter now but no less fierce. “Sixteen and stupid and desperate for you. Any stupid excuse would’ve worked. My frontal lobe wasn’t even fully developed yet, you know—I would’ve swallowed whatever explanation you handed me without a second thought. And you could’ve spared me years of wondering what I did wrong. Of wondering what we almost were. Of wondering why I wasn’t enough.”

“And now I’m twenty-four. I’m doing a PhD. I’m supposed to be an adult. I’m supposed to be past this. But I still—I still wonder if you were my one true love and I just… missed my only chance.”

The bookstore went suddenly, violently quiet, the way a room falls silent after a glass shatters. I didn’t understand why everything I’d been holding back was suddenly spilling out, but by the time I noticed, I was already speaking again.

“I didn’t deserve this,” I said. “I didn’t deserve years of worrying. Of not knowing. I didn’t deserve to feel like that.”

Satoru stood three meters away, looking as though I had punched him. He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I… I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s actually the worst thing you could have said. Congratulations.”

I moved past him, my shoulder brushing his. I grabbed my coat from behind the counter with hands that trembled.

“Wait—”

“Don’t.” I didn’t look back. I couldn’t watch the plea form and die on his mouth once more. “Just don’t, Satoru. Go home. Go anywhere that’s not here.”

I reached the glass door of the bookstore and pushed. Nothing. I pushed harder. Still nothing. “What—” I rattled the handle, panic rising. I moved to the next door. Locked. I tried the emergency exit. Also locked.

“No, no, no—”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was 9:02 p.m—the mall had closed two minutes ago. Security must’ve already done their final round and closed the building, and left.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What’s wrong?” Satoru came up beside me. He tried the handle himself. It didn’t budge.

“We’re locked in.” I stared past my own reflection in the glass into the darkened mall—shuttered storefronts, shadowed corridors, not a single soul left. “Security closed the building already.”

“Can you call someone?”

I pulled out my phone again—2% battery—and then the screen went black. I blinked, tapped the side button. Nothing. “No, no, no—don’t you dare.” I pressed the power button harder like that would magically fix it. “Come on—” A faint battery icon flickered once, then—darkness.

I let my head thunk against the glass.

“I’ve got mine,” Satoru said, pulling his hand from his pocket and reaching for his phone—except his fingers closed around empty air. He searched the other pocket, then the inside of his coat, then the Santa jacket. His face went still.

“I…” he began.

I looked at him.

He winced.

“…think my phone is still at the Santa booth.”

I wanted to die. Again.

“They won’t be back till 6 a.m.,” I said. “That’s when the cleaning crew comes.”

Nine hours. Nine hours locked in with the person I’d spent years trying not to think about.

“There has to be another exit,” Satoru said. “Emergency exits, loading docks—something.”

“All alarmed,” I said. “We open one, the cops show up.”

“So let the cops show up.”

“And explain why we’re here after hours? My boss will fire me on the spot.” I slid down until I was sitting against the cold glass of the door, burying my face in my hands. “This cannot be happening.”

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

High school gymnasiums always smell like teenage sweat and floor wax, packed so tightly with people one can barely breathe. I can still remember it so vividly, feel the humidity on my skin, damp and heavy, and suddenly, I’m fifteen again, lungs burning on that early spring day of the regional semifinals.

We were up against Saitama West, with their star player who’d already been scouted by university coaches. Everyone said our team didn’t stand a chance.

I showed up two hours before the game and saved myself a seat in the front row. My friends told me I was insane to sit there alone for that long, staring at an empty court, but I didn’t care. This mattered, because it mattered to them—to him.

Slowly, the silence was replaced by a low hum, then a roar. Parents, students, and teachers—people who usually couldn’t be bothered to attend a sports event—flooded the bleachers, while the opposing team’s section was a sea of their colors, three times the size of ours, their chants already deafening during warm-up.

I sat there with my knees pulled tight to my chest, wearing Suguru’s old practice jersey. It was comically large, the hem hanging past my knees like a dress and it still smelt faintly of teenage boy that never truly washes out of polyester no matter how often you clean it. I had stolen Mom’s liquid eyeliner to draw their numbers on my cheeks. On my left cheek, a 7 for Suguru and on my right cheek, a 10 for Satoru.

I clung to the edge of the bleacher, the metal cold against my palms, my stomach twisted into a tight knot. I was terrified they would lose. But beneath that fear was a selfish ache—a hope that maybe, if they won, Satoru would look up into the stands and finally see me, really see me, not as Suguru’s little sister, but as the girl wearing his number on her cheek.

It was a stupid, I know. But when you are young, you believe everything you read on Wattpad or see in Disney movies. You believe that magic happens if you just wish hard enough. And for once, just once, I wanted to be the Disney princess.

And for a heartbeat, I was.

Satoru found me first. Even across the crowded gymnasium, with hundreds of people between us, his blue eyes locked onto mine. He grinned—that wide, cocky, impossibly boyish grin I had always been helpless against—and pointed a finger at his chest, then at the number 10 painted on my cheek. I was so happy.

Suguru noticed a second later, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. I stuck my tongue out.

And then the game began. Suddenly everything moved at once, my eyes barely catching up. When Saitama West scored first, my stomach dropped through the floor. It looked too easy for them. But then Suguru took the ball. He slipped past a defender, drove toward the basket, and flicked a pass back over his shoulder. Satoru was already there, catching it in stride for a layup.

“Let’s go!” I screamed, leaping to my feet with the rest of the student section. “Go! Go! Go!”

By halftime, we were down by eight. My friends went out to get nachos and soda while I stayed glued to the edge of the bleachers, alone in the crowd, watching the third quarter go downhill fast.

Saitama West’s star player was a nightmare—faster, meaner, moving like he already belonged on a pro court. He was unstoppable, sinking shot after shot as if it were nothing, silencing our side of the gym with every clean swish. With four minutes left, we were down by twelve. Someone behind me already declared that it’s over. I refused to stop believing.

I had watched them run drills around our block until their shirts clung with sweat to their skin and their laughter turned to groans. I had sat on the porch steps and watched them practice until darkness swallowed the driveway, until Suguru had to drag Satoru inside by his hood because Satoru refused to go home until he hit ten throws in a row.

They didn’t quit when it was dark. They didn’t quit when they were tired. They wouldn’t quit now.

In the fourth quarter, something changed. Suguru turned into a wall, holding the opposing star player to zero points, while Satoru caught fire. He sank three straight shots, each one seeming to hang in the air for eternity before slicing through the net and surging the entire gym to its feet.

With thirty seconds left, the score was tied. My voice was gone by then, nothing more than an awkward rasp, but I was still screaming—or trying to. It didn’t matter. Everyone was standing, the floorboards rattling under our feet, the noise so loud that I couldn’t even hear the referee’s whistle anymore.

Suguru brought the ball up. Ten seconds. The defense collapsed around him—three bodies closing in, arms up, trapping him near the arc. Nine seconds. He drove right, and then I saw it—the tiny opening. It was the backdoor cut, the exact same tactic they’d rehearsed under the flickering streetlamps of our driveway a thousand times, right up until the neighbors complained about the noise.

Eight seconds. Satoru caught the pass. He took one dribble and went up. Seven seconds. The ball left his fingertips. It hit the iron. It rolled around the rim once, twice. Six seconds.

It fell through.

Sound crashed over me like a tidal wave—screams, the thunder of stomping feet and the roar of the student section flooding the court before the teachers even had time to stop them. Suguru and Satoru were swept up in the riptide, vanishing into a sea of people.

I hung back at the edge of the celebration, heart pounding so hard against my ribs I thought it might bruise the bone. I watched them rise from the crowd, breathless and sweating, but they looked impossibly bright and alive.

And then, through the surge of bodies and noise, Satoru’s eyes found mine. He lifted his hand and traced the arc of his layup in the air, then pointed a finger directly at the 10 painted on my cheek and mouthed the words, silent but unmistakable:

Saw that?

A heartbeat.

For you.

A smile broke over his face like sunlight.

I went home that night and wrote it down in my diary, pressing the ballpoint pen so hard into the page that it carved the words into the next page.

He didn’t look at the cheerleaders. He didn’t look at the scouts. He looked at me, I wrote and underlined the word me three times. It was my Disney moment.

I stared at the ink drying on the page, convinced that this was the start of my happily ever after. I didn’t know yet that the thing about blue springs and youth is that they burn out, and that being the princess usually just means you have the furthest to fall.

Afterwards, when the chaos died down and people started to filter out, I’d waited by the locker rooms like always. Mom was running late—stuck at work, as usual—so I had time to kill and nowhere else to be.

The gym was nearly empty now, just the janitor starting to sweep up confetti and a few students taking photos near the exit.

I wandered back onto the court and stared up at the scoreboard, which still showed the final score in red LEDs. A forgotten basketball lay on the edge of the court. I picked it up, dribbled once, twice, and took a shot. It clanged off the rim and bounced away.

“You’re doing it all wrong.”

I spun around so fast I nearly tripped over my feet.

Satoru was standing at the edge of the court. He had showered, white hair damp and darkened, falling messily over his forehead. Suguru was probably still in there, using up all the hot water—just like home.

“I wasn’t—I was just messing around.”

“Here, let me show you.” He dropped his gym bag, picked up the basketball and walked over. “You’re holding the ball wrong. Fingers spread—like this.” He demonstrated the grip, and then passed it to me. “And your stance—feet shoulder-width apart.”

I adjusted my feet, feeling foolish.

“Better,” he said, stepping closer, too close. “Now, when you shoot, it’s all in the wrist. You have to follow through.”

He moved behind me, a sudden warmth at my back. I stopped breathing. His hands slid along my arms, then guided my arms upward and corrected the angle of my elbows. His hand wrapped around my forearm to steady it, and I froze entirely.

I had always known Satoru was tall, that he was strong. I’d watched him grow into his height like a weed, watched his shoulders broaden year by year. But knowing it and feeling it were two different things.

His fingers circled my wrist with room to spare, where mine would have barely met. My heart was doing something stupid and frantic in my chest, a hummingbird battering against its cage, the way only teenage hearts do when they suddenly realize how much bigger a boy’s hand is than hers.

“Don’t throw it. Guide it,” he said, his breath brushing my hair. I prayed he wouldn’t notice the goosebumps rising along my arms.

I took a breath and pushed the ball. It rose in a high arc, mostly guided by his strength. It spun once, a perfect rotation, and dropped clean through the net. Swish.

“Oh my god!” I hopped in place. “I made it!”

“See? Natural talent.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You did all the work.”

“Nah.” A grin pulled at his lips. “That was all you.” He grabbed the rebound and tossed it back to me. “Try again. On your own this time.”

I squared my feet. I tried to remember the angle he’d pulled my elbows into and shot.

Clang.

“Not bad,” he encouraged. “Again.”

I shot again. This time the ball hit the rim before bouncing off.

“See? You’re getting it.”

Satoru caught the rebound with one hand and spun it on the tip of his index finger, the ball blurring into a perfect orange sphere. It was effortless, showy, and unfairly cool.

“You ever think about joining the team?” he asked, watching the rotation.

“The girls’ team?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged, letting the ball drop into his palm. “Why not?”

“Because…” I had never really considered it. Basketball was their world—Suguru’s and Satoru’s. I was only the spectator, the one who held the towels. I didn't belong inside the lines. “I don’t know. I’m not good enough.”

“You could be. With practice.” He nudged the ball back into my hands. “Plus,” he added, looking down at me, “then you’d be around more. You know, at practices and stuff. Not just games.”

I looked up at him, searching his face, risking everything on a single question.

“You want me around more?”

“Yeah,” he said “I mean, you’re our good luck charm, right? Gotta keep you close.”

Our. Not my. It hurt.

In one syllable, he had tied himself back to Suguru, reminding me of the unshakeable bond they formed. To him, I wasn’t a girl he wanted. I was the mascot. I was the little sister of the duo.

“Right.” I tucked a stray strand behind my ear and pretended my little heart didn’t hurt. “I’ll think about it.”

I would never join. And if I ever did, it would’ve been only because he suggested it. But by the time tryouts came around, I’d always talk myself out of it—tell myself it was stupid, forcing my way into their world just to be near him. Wanting something that much makes you terrified to reach for it.

But right then, standing alone with him in that quiet gym, I felt brave enough for one last act of stupidity.

“I, um… I made you something. For winning.”

I pulled the bracelet I’d made for him out of my jeans pocket. It was simple—woven thread in blue and white, the team colors. I’ve spent three lunch periods hiding in the library, watching YouTube tutorials on my phone, starting over twice, because it had to be right. It had to be perfect.

Satoru took it and he held it up to the light. “You made this?” He turned the woven band over in his large hands like it was something impossibly precious instead of cheap embroidery thread.

“It’s dumb, I know. But I thought… I don’t know. For luck. Or whatever.”

“It’s not dumb.”

He’d slipped it onto his wrist immediately and tugged it in place. “It’s perfect.”

I’d tried not to melt on the spot. “Don’t tell Suguru, okay?” I added quickly. “He’ll be weird about it.”

He smiled. “Then it’s out secret.”

Our secret.

After all the ours that meant him and Suguru, here was one that was just mine and his.

I looked up at him from where I was still sitting on the cold floor, leaning against the glass door that refused to open. And from this angle, I saw it.

He was still wearing it.

Blue and white thread. It was frayed and faded now, the vibrant colors of our high school team washed out by years of sun and water and life. It sat tighter on his wrist than it had back then, almost too small for the man he had grown into. But he had kept it.

Had worn it enough for it to fade, enough for it to fray, enough for it to become a part of him.

“You’re still wearing it,” I said.

His hand moved to his wrist, thumb brushing over the worn threads.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

His gaze stayed on the bracelet, on the knots I had tied a lifetime ago.

“We should find somewhere to sit,” he said. “Nine hours is a long time to spend on the floor.”

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

The staff room was barely a room at all. A narrow table, a couple of chairs that didn’t match, a mini-fridge that hummed too loud and lockers that didn’t quite close.

I switched on the electric kettle. It was old and took forever to boil, but I needed something to do with my hands. While it hissed, I dug through my locker and pulled out the emergency snacks I kept for long shifts. A few pieces of leftover Halloween candy and a box of cereal bars that were probably close to expired but still edible—or so I hoped.

“Here.” I tossed one to Satoru.

Satoru caught it with one hand—a reflex that hadn’t dulled with time, it seemed—and turned it over. “Cranberry?”

“It’s all I have.”

He tore the wrapper open with his teeth and took a bite. I reached into the cabinet for two mugs—one chipped, one with the bookstore’s fading logo—and grabbed two tea bags from the staff box, and hoped they weren’t close to expired too.

I leaned against the counter, watching the first thin wisps of steam rise from the kettle, and tried my best not to look at him. But then the cheap chair creaked behind me and I glanced over my shoulder anyway because apparently I’m weak.

He looked too big for the space, legs stretched out under the tiny table. I didn’t know what to make of him anymore.

There was a time when I knew him without trying. He spent half his life in our house, raiding our fridge and coming and going like he lived there. He knew which drawer held the good biscuits, which floorboard squeaked, which window stuck in summer. And I knew the way he stretched out his words when he was tired, the way he’d drop onto our couch and be asleep in ten seconds, the way he hovered in the kitchen when he didn’t want to go home yet.

Back then, he filled every room he walked into. He talked fast and laughed loud, pulling me and Suguru into his orbit whether we wanted to be there or not. Stillness didn’t suit him. It never had. He was the boy who almost kissed me once, then left before I could decide what it meant. Perhaps I should have anticipated that. He’d never stayed still a day in his life.

And now there was this person I hardly knew. His hair was cut short at the neck, and there was a stillness to him I had never seen before. He looked like someone who had decided exactly how much of himself the world was allowed to see and locked the rest away. Someone I recognized, but no longer understood.

I watched him chew the cranberry bar, jaw sharper than I remembered. A man where my memory still tried to put a boy.

“Your manager takes photos?”

I followed his gaze to the corkboard above the table. A scatter of Polaroids pinned up with pushpins. There was Maki making a face behind a rude customer’s back. Nobara and I laughing over a spilled box of inventory. A group photo from Halloween where we were all dressed up as different book characters.

“Yeah,” I said. “She looks strict, but she really cares.”

“Which one is she?”

“The blonde in the back. Yuki.” I pointed to a candid shot of her laughing. “She started it when she opened the store. Said everyone who would work here should leave a piece of themselves behind.”

Satoru still chewed the cereal bar while his gaze moved across the corkboard until he stopped on one specific square near the center.

It was from my birthday last month. I wore a silly paper party hat that had already half slid off my head, while the rest of the staff crowded around me. Everyone had their hands lifted in heart signs, laughing and shouting at the same time at some poor customer we’d asked to take the picture, but held the camera wrong so the whole picture came out crooked.

My fourth birthday without so much as a text from him.

“You look happy here,” he said.

“I am happy.”

He was still looking at the wall. At the evidence of a life he hadn’t been part of.

“I didn’t know you worked here.”

“Why would you,” I said. “We don’t exactly talk.”

Right then, the kettle clicked off.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

I clicked on the floor lamp near the two overstuffed green velvet armchairs in the reading corner; its yellow light barely reached the edges of the shelves that framed the nook. I grabbed two blankets from the storage closet and tossed one over his chair. It smelled like something that had been stored too long in the closet, but warmth was warmth.

Sliding into my own chair, I pulled my knees up and tucked the wool around my legs. The chairs were angled toward each other—close enough to talk without raising our voices, far enough that our legs wouldn’t accidentally touch.

It would be absurdly easy to pretend this was normal, to imagine it was just a random Thursday night and we were simply two people who knew each other—rather than two people who hadn’t spoken in years and were now trapped together in a city mall until morning.

Silence filled the store. After a while, Satoru shifted. I felt his eyes on me before I met them.

“Suguru told me you’re pursuing your PhD.”

He was watching me with something careful in his expression, like he was stepping onto ice and testing how much it would hold.

“I’m just starting out,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“What are you researching?”

“It’s technical.”

“Tell me anyway.”

I sighed. “I’m part of a group studying photophysics. Basically, how molecules behave under extreme light conditions. We’re trying to figure out how to make energy transfer more efficient, how to stop things from losing power as heat. It’s complicated and half the time the data makes no sense, but when something finally behaves the way it’s supposed to…” I trailed off, realizing my hands were moving, emphasizing the words. I pulled the blanket tighter. “It’s pretty cool. That’s all.”

“Tell me more,” he said.

“It’s boring, really. Dry math and a hell lot of experiments. You’d regret asking.”

“I won’t.”

He said it without a beat of hesitation. I eyed him, waiting for the smirk, the punchline where he’d admit he was just asking to be polite but to be honest he doesn’t really care. It didn’t come. He sat there in the dim lamplight, turned towards me, and waited.

“Fine,” I said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Promise.”

I shifted the blanket higher over my knees. “We study behavior under pressure. Specifically, how molecules react when you hit them with really intense light, lke stronger than sunlight intense. We use lasers to push them into highly unstable states, and then track what they do in the few nanoseconds before they calm down.”

“Calm down?”

“Return to their original state,” I said. “Their lowest energy level. Where they’re stable again.”

“So you’re stressing them out and watch what happens?”

“Pretty much, yeah. We push electrons to higher energy levels, and when they drop back down, they release energy—sometimes as light, sometimes as heat. The goal is to make that release cleaner and more efficient. If we understand the pathways, we might be able to design better solar cells, more efficient catalysts, that kind of thing.”

“Huh.” He leaned back in the chair. “Sounds pretty cool.”

“You don’t have to pretend to be interested.”

“I’m not pretending.”

I shot him a look. I almost believed him. But I’d been made fun of enough times to know when someone was lying.

“Shouldn’t you know all this anyway?” I said. “Don’t med students have to take chemistry?”

“Yeah. We do.”

“And?”

“I failed it.” He touched the back of his neck. “Twice.”

I blinked. “Wait—what?”

“Passed on the third attempt.” A thin smile. “Barely. I think my professor felt sorry for me by then.”

“Satoru, you—” I stared at him, genuinely shocked. “You—the person I tutored in chemistry throughout his entire school life—failed chemistry in university? Twice?”

“In my defense, organic chemistry in med is completely different to what they teach you in school.”

“Oh my god. All those hours. All those diagrams I drew. The flashcards I made you—”

“Those were great—”

“You memorized the entire periodic table!”

“I forgot it immediately after finals,” he admitted. “Like, the next day. Gone.”

I wanted to throw my blanket at him. “How are you even still in med school?”

“Anatomy makes sense to me. Physiology too. But chemistry is just—” He waved a hand vaguely. “Invisible things doing invisible things.”

“That’s what I explained! For months!”

“I know.” He had the decency to look sheepish. “I’m really sorry about that, by the way. You put in a lot of effort for nothing.”

I slumped back in my chair. “You’re telling me you almost failed out of med school because of chemistry?”

“I didn’t almost fail out.”

“Third attempt, Satoru.”

He sighed, defeated. “Fine. I almost dropped out of med because of chemistry.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I know.”

“All those hours.”

“I know.”

“The flashcards had little drawings on them.”

“They were very cute drawings,” he said. “Didn’t help me pass, but still cute.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Always have been.”

After that, we fell into a quiet that wasn’t awkward so much as familiar—the kind of easy silence shared by people who have too much history to feel compelled to fill every gap with noise. I leaned back a little farther in my chair and listened to the faint hum of the refrigerator in the break room that carried through the empty aisles.

“You look different when you talk about it,” he said. “Chemistry, I mean.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Lighter, maybe. Like you’ve found your place.”

Satoru shifted again, sinking a bit deeper into his armchair, his long legs stretched out into the pool of lamplight.

“Can you show me sometime?” he asked.

“Show you?”

“The lab. Your work. If that’s allowed. If you want.”

I blinked, surprised. And suddenly the reading corner felt smaller, warmer, as if the night had pulled our chairs inches closer together without us moving.

“If I had known how important chemistry would become in my life,” he mused, looking up at the ceiling, “I’d have paid more attention to your lectures.”

“I didn’t lecture you.”

“You did. And you were brutal about it. You were two grades below me and still smarter in every way.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“It’s not,” he insisted. “You’d look at my homework, make that tiny annoyed face—the one where your nose scrunches up just a little—and I’d feel… weirdly ashamed of myself.”

“Because I scolded you?”

“Because you scolded me,” he confirmed immediately. “You’d correct one equation, pointing out where I missed a valence electron or whatever, and I’d think—Wow, I’m an idiot.” He went quiet for a moment. “You made me nervous.”

“I made you nervous?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You always did.”

I stared at him, the words still hanging between us like smoke I couldn’t wave away. Anger hit me so suddenly I didn’t have time to brace for it—hot and ugly, like a match struck too close to skin.

I made him nervous.

What was the point of that confession now? What did it count for, eight years too late, spoken in a locked mall at midnight like some kind of punchline to a joke I’d stopped finding funny?

He’d been nervous. He’d felt something. And he’d left anyway. Not because he didn’t feel the same. Not because it wouldn’t work. But because I was Suguru’s little sister. A label he slapped over every other part of me until I disappeared beneath it.

And I realized, I was never a person to him in those moments—only a rule. A bright line drawn in the carpet of someone else’s house. Crossing it would have been messy, inconvenient, a conversation with his best friend he apparently couldn’t stomach. So he chose the cleaner story: honor, loyalty, restraint. He kept his hands spotless while I learned to breathe around the ache of what almost happened.

It hurt. Because if he’d felt it too—if he’d been nervous, if I’d mattered—then why hadn’t I been worth the risk? Why hadn’t I been worth a single conversation, a single attempt, a single goddamn phone call in eight years? What good was his nervousness if he never let it matter?

I would have followed him anywhere if he’d only asked. If he’d only gave me some small proof that I mattered more than the principle of not betraying Suguru.

I would have forgiven the missed birthdays. I would have forgiven the months of radio silence. I would have wiped my eyes and picked up the phone if he had called, even on the nights I swore I hated him, even when I was crying into my pillow over the sheer unfairness of loving him. I would have forgiven him for breaking my heart if he had just shown up to hold the pieces.

One call. One stupid, cowardly call and I would have run to him, arms wide, dignity in shreds, because back then love felt bigger than pride and I was young enough to believe forgiveness could fix a person. I was that stupid. I was that in love.

But he didn’t. He waited. He waited until the wanting had turned into resentment, until the girl who would have waited forever grew up into a woman who knew better.

I turned my face before he could read any of it.

“Suguru talks about you a lot,” he went on, ignoring my silence. “He’s proud of you. Says you work too much.” A small pause. “He worries, you know. But he also thinks you’re incredible. He always has.” Another pause, quieter. “I do too.”

I closed my eyes.

It would have been easier if he’d said nothing. If he’d stayed on his side of the chasm, playing the role of the distant family friend. But instead, he reached across it, offering me something warm, something earnest—something I didn’t know how to hold anymore.

“You don’t know me,” I said.

“You’re still you. I know you.”

“No. You don’t.” I pushed myself out of the armchair, the wool blanket pooling at my feet. “You have no idea.”

“Then tell me.”

“You don’t get to ask that. You don’t get to walk in here after eight years and talk like you understand who I am now.”

“Then help me understand! Tell me what’s wrong. Don’t you have everything you wanted? The PhD, the future, all of it. You’re doing exactly what you always said you would. Isn’t this the life you dreamed about?”

“Fuck you,” I spat, spinning around to face him. “You don’t know anything.”

He flinched, but the anger was already rising in him too.

“Maybe I don’t,” he said. “Maybe I don’t understand you anymore. Because what else could you possibly want? You already have everything you ever wanted.”

“You left! You promised me I’d always matter, and then you left and never looked back. And I was alone again. I was the nerd of the school again—the pathetic girl who’d been left behind.” I took a shaking breath. “I needed you. And you left. And you made it look so easy—having girlfriends in every other city and never once picked up the phone.”

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off.

“Do you know what the worst part was? It wasn’t the bullying. It wasn’t eating lunch alone. It was realizing that you were right.”

“About what?”

“That I wasn’t worth staying for.” My voice barely made it past the knot in my throat. “That I was just Suguru’s little sister. Just some kid with a crush. Nothing more.”

“No—That’s not—”

“Then what was I, Satoru? Because from where I’m standing, I was someone you found it very easy to leave behind.”

He went quiet. So quiet I could hear the distant creak of the building settling into the night.

“I never had a girlfriend,” he said at last.

“What?”

“I said I never had a girlfriend.” His fingers found the bracelet on his wrist and twisted it absently. “You said I was too busy with girlfriends but I wasn’t. I never—I couldn’t.”

“That’s bullshit. I saw the comments—the pictures. All those girls—”

“Commented on my Instagram, yeah. Showed up at games. Asked for my number. But I never… I didn’t want them.” He was still staring at the bracelet, then looked up. “You want to know why?”

“No. I really don’t”

“Because none of them were you.”

I tried to make sense of his words, but I couldn’t.

“Why didn’t you ever call?” I whispered.

“To tell you what? That I couldn’t stop thinking about you? That every game I played, I was looking for your face in the crowd even though I knew you weren’t there? That I—”

“What? That you what?”

“That I’m still in love with you.”

I stood there, mouth half open, trying to stitch his confession into the fabric of everything I knew to be true, with the conviction I’d carried for yers that he’d simply forgotten I existed, but the thread kept slipping. Still in love, still in love, the thought looped endlessly in my head. He couldn’t mean it. People didn’t keep years of silences for love; they kept them for indifference.

And I had proof—the empty inbox, the unanswered texts, the birthdays I stopped mentioning because he never remembered. I had built an entire house of evidence that I was forgettable, and now he wanted to torch it with one sentence?

My pulse hammered, too loud and too fast. If he was telling the truth, then every night I cried myself to sleep had been for nothing. Every time I stalked his Instagram and hated myself for it, every time I called myself pathetic for still caring—wrong. I’d spent years learning to live inside the shape of his absence, carving out space for the ache until it fit me, and now he was saying the absence itself had been a lie?

“Is this all a joke to you?” I choked out, tears spilling over. “You left me thinking for years that there was something wrong with me. That you regretted almost kissing me. That I was just some stupid kid you wanted to forget about.”

I wiped at my face, hating the tears, hating him.

“Do you know what that did to me? Watching you live this whole perfect life in Osaka while I was stuck here wondering what I did wrong?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong—”

“Then why does it feel like I did? Why does it feel like I’ve been punished for years for having feelings I didn’t ask for? Do you know how lost I’ve been? Wondering if I’m enough. Being so fucking unsure and scared about everything. How many nights I stayed up wondering if I was making the right choices, if any of it mattered, if I mattered?”

I couldn't breathe around the tightness in my chest. It felt like drowning on dry land.

“I needed you,” I said—the confession punched its way out and took half my lung with it. “I needed you so much, and you weren’t there. I’ve felt so alone. So fucking alone. And all I wanted—all I needed—was for you to come back and tell me it would be okay. That I would be okay.”

A pause.

“I’m sorry I left,” he said at last. “I didn’t know how to be around you without wanting—without wanting everything.”

I looked at him through tears.

“You’re such an idiot,” I said.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

I still remember the bite of the wind that autumn day.

I was twelve. My schoolbag was cutting into my shoulder, and my breath fogged the air in puffy clouds. I stood outside the school gates as the sun sank lower, turning the sky that particular shade of bruised purple and orange that meant evening was coming.

All the other kids had been picked up hours ago. The last bus home had left an hour earlier. Even the teachers’ cars were gone.

I realized then, in that small and shattering way children do, that she had simply forgotten. Again. It wasn’t intentional; it was just that her work was loud and urgent, and I was quiet and easy to overlook. But sometimes being forgotten hurt more than if she had done it on purpose. It confirmed what the girls in the bathroom had said earlier: that I was invisible.

I had tried calling home three times from the payphone down the road. No answer. Suguru wasn’t home either—he was helping Mrs. Harukawa from next door getting her groceries, like he did on Wednesdays. So I sat on the curb, backpack clutched to my chest, trying not to move my head.

If I moved, the clump of sticky, grape-scented gum stuck to the back of my hair pulled at my scalp. The girls from 6-B had put it there during lunch, laughing as they mashed it in. I hadn’t cried then because I refused to give them the satisfaction. And I wasn’t going to cry now, because I was twelve, and crying was for babies.

But then the streetlights flickered on, buzzing overhead, and for the first time, I understood what it meant to be an afterthought.

“Hey.” I didn’t noice him until he stood in front of me. “What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”

I looked up to see Satoru. He’d found me.

He must have come from basketball practice, his gym bag hanging from one shoulder. He had just turned fourteen the week before, but to me he looked so much older—confident and sure of himself in a way that seemed almost adult. He had that short, cropped haircut everyone at school suddenly wanted, the kind that made boys look cooler, like they were on the verge of becoming something bigger than they were, while I was still so scared and unsure about everything.

“Waiting for my mom.” I looked back at the pavement, terrified that if I looked up again, the tears I was holding back would spill over. “She’s just running late.”

“How late?”

I shrugged, a tiny movement that made the gum pull at my hair. I flinched.

Satoru didn’t miss it. He crouched down in front of me, bringing his face level with mine. He reached out and gently tilted my chin up, forcing me to look at him. Then he turned my head slightly.

“Who did that?”

“Did what?”

“Don’t.” He guided my face back to his. “Who?”

I shook my head, big tears falling onto tiny hands.

“Okay.” He stood and slung his gym bag over his shoulder. “Suguru’s helping your neighbour today, right?”

I managed a little nod, not trusting my voice.

“Come on.” He offered me his hand. It was large and warm, his fingers taped up for practice. “We’re not waiting here.”

“But my mom—”

“I’ll leave a note on the gate. She won’t kill us. And anyway, we’re getting hot chocolate first.”

He took me to that small café near the train station—the warm one that smelled of roasted almonds and vanilla. He sat me down in a booth in the back, then went to the counter. He came back with a cup of crushed ice and two hot chocolates—the fancy kind with real melted chocolate and caramel drizzle that cost twice as much as I had pocket money for the week.

He slid into the booth next to me instead of across and told me to turn around. And then, the most popular boy in middle school sat in this quiet café, painstakingly working hand lotion and ice cubes into my hair to get the gum out of my hair. He was incredibly gentle. He didn’t pull. He didn’t make fun of me.

It had felt weird. And embarrassing. And I’d wanted to cry all over again, because I couldn’t even fix it myself—because I was sitting there like a helpless little kid while he tried to undo something cruel and stupid those girls at school thought was funny.

“Why do they do it?” I asked quietly, watching the caramel drizzle sliding down the inside of my glass.

“Because they’re bored,” he said. “And mean. And probably unhappy.”

“Unhappy with what?”

“With themselves.” He carefully separated another sticky strand. “Happy people don’t go around putting gum in other’s people hair. Only people who feel small try to make other people feel smaller. It makes them feel better about themselves.”

I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that the gum in my hair was proof that I was in some way better than them, that I made them feel bad about themselves, and not only a sign that I was easy to bully.

“Does it get better?” I asked. “When you’re older?”

“Yeah. It does. My mom always says you stop caring about the people who don’t matter, and you find the ones who do.”

“You believe her?”

“I do. Because I’ve found mine. You and Suguru.” His voice softened. “And you’ll find your people too. I promise.”

But I had my people.

It took almost an hour.

Satoru told me about the constellations starting to appear in the darkening sky outside the window while he worked at my hair, about a documentary on black holes he’d watched the other night, about his stupid couch and how Suguru had tripped over his own feet in practice yesterday. He built a wall of words to keep the world out.

When he finally worked the last of it loose, leaving only the faintest sweet smell of bubblegum behind, he set down the comb and turned me around in the booth to face him.

“Listen to me,” he said, suddenly serious. “Those girls? They don’t matter. They don’t get to make you feel small. You’re worth a hundred of them. Got it?”

I nodded, my throat tight.

“And if they do this again—if they do anything—you tell me. Or Suguru. We’ll handle it.”

I wiped at my eyes. “You can’t fight middle school girls, Satoru.”

“Watch me.”

A grin cracked his serious expression. He reached out and ruffled my damp, sticky hair.

“Actually, you’re right. I can’t fight them but I’ll stand behind you and look intimidating. You can fight your own battles. But you don’t have to fight them alone.”

When Suguru finally came home, he found us in the living room—Satoru and me playing Mario Kart on the old Nintendo 64, like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t just spent an hour fixing something that wasn’t his problem.

The next morning, Satoru was leaning against the school gates when I arrived and walked me to my classroom. He didn’t say anything to the girls. He didn’t have to. He was tall and looked scary if he wanted to, and that was enough.

On the days Suguru had afternoon activities, Satoru was always there. I found out weeks later that he was skipping the first hour of his basketball practice to walk me home—trading his playing time and enduring his coach’s complaints just to make sure I made it to my front door without looking over my shoulder.

For years, I lived inside the bubble of his protection. I walked tall because his shadow was long enough to cover me. But gravity is a temporary force, and eventually, orbits deteriorate.

Satoru graduated. He packed his bags for a university in Osaka, taking his brightness and protection with him. And the moment he left, the air around me grew thin again.

The bullying didn’t come back the way it had before. There was no gum in my hair, no shoved lockers. It was smarter now. Quieter. It was the silence when I walked into a room. It was the way conversations stopped dead when I approached. It was the collective decision that I was, once again, invisible.

Without Satoru and my brother to look intimidating behind me, I became that unsure little girl again, the one who’d never figured out how to stand up for herself and was scared senseless to try.

I stopped going to the cafeteria. I stopped trying to find a seat at the tables where I wasn’t wanted. I retreated to the library. I ate my lunch alone between shelves of dusty encyclopedias and fiction, surrounded by characters who were brave in ways I didn’t know how to be. I wanted to believe that I was like the heroines in the books—misunderstood, waiting for her story to start, for my real Disney moment. But really, I was just waiting for him to come back and save me.

And when that realization finally settled in—that no one was coming, that the cavalry had moved on—I felt a kind of desolation that nearly swallowed me whole. I was so lost. Without them, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I was just an outline of a person, defined by who I was related to and who I was waiting for.

I had to claw my way out of that library. I had to fight so hard, so goddamn hard, to invent a version of myself that didn’t need a bodyguard. I had to build a spine out of something other than their approval. I turned to books, to science, to the cold, hard certainty of facts—things that couldn’t leave me, things that didn’t make promises they wouldn’t keep.

I found myself in the vacuum they left behind. But someday you have to decide you cannot hide anymore, cannot keep curling into the space someone else used to fill. Someday you have to stand up, even if your hands are shaking, and declare yourself the leader of your own life. And God, it was a lonely, brutal birth.

“I found more.”

Satoru crouched beside me, holding out a fresh box of tissues from the break room.

“Thanks.”

I took one, dabbing at my face even though I was pretty sure I’d run out of tears. I curled up on the floor, back against the rough fabric of the armchair, knees pulled tight to my chest. The adrenaline that had fueled me earlier had drained away, leaving my limbs heavy and my head throbbing with that dull, dehydration headache that always follows a good cry.

Satoru set the tissue packet on the carpet between us and lowered himself to the floor across from me, long legs folding awkwardly as he leaned against the opposite chair. The red velvet pants rode up, exposing his striped socks again.

“You should really get out of that costume. It looks miserable. And I can’t take you seriously when you look like Santa.”

He looked down at the suit—at the fake white trim, and the velvet already pilling in places—as if realizing for the first time that he was still wearing it.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s itchy as hell, anyway.”

He unbuckled the wide black belt and let it fall onto the carpet, then unzipped the jacket. The padded red bulk slid off his shoulders and crumpled behind him. Underneath, he wore a fitted white tank top.

I immediately regretted suggesting it.

He rolled his neck, stretching out his shoulders, and the cotton pulled tight across a frame I no longer recognized. I had spent the last hours grieving the boy I used to know—the lanky teenager who lived in basketball shorts all year round and ate cereal straight from the box. But the person in front of me wasn’t that boy anymore. Not even close.

I looked away.

“Better?” I asked, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near pathetic.

“Much better.” He tossed the Santa jacket over the arm of the chair and leaned back on his hands, veins standing out in sharp lines along his forearms. “Though now I’m wondering if I should put it back on.”

“Why?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t.”

I threw my blanket at him.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

It was nearly four in the morning when we gave up on sleep entirely.

We’d tried. Both of us retreating to our armchairs with blankets pulled up to our chins, pretending the silence was comfortable, pretending we weren’t aware of every shift and breath the other made. But sleep was not possible. My mind kept circling back to everything we’d said, everything still left unsaid, replaying it on an endless loop until I wanted to scream.

Satoru had been the first to break. Suggested we find something to do, anything. And now, here we were, sprawled on the carpet between the velvet armchairs with a board game spread between us—something with a dice and complicated cards that he’d pulled from the store’s game section, promising he’d pay for it later when the register worked again.

Two more hours. Just two more hours until the cleaning crew arrived and shattered this strange, suspended reality we were trapped in.

The game was simple enough that we didn’t need to think too hard, complicated enough that it keept our heads busy. A welcome distraction. I watched him roll the dice, watched his fingers—those stupidly long fingers—move his piece across the board.

He was cheating. Probably. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to be sure, but it seemed like the kind of thing he’d do just to get under my skin. It felt painfully domestic. It felt like the rainy Sunday afternoons of our childhood, when we’d play card games too, rewritten in a language I was only just learning to speak.

And as the minute hand ticked closer to dawn, I found myself wishing, selfishly, that the sun wouldn’t rise. I didn’t want the locks to open.

“Don’t take it too hard.” Satoru nudged his winning piece forward with a flick of his finger, already grinning. “I’m just naturally gifted at board games.”

I lost, of course. “You cheated.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t need to prove it. I know you did.”

“Sounds like something a loser would say.”

He was still smiling in that infuriating, boyish way that had always made it impossible to stay mad at him for long.

He pushed himself up from the carpet and stretched his arms overhead. A sharp hiss escaped through his teeth. He reached down, gripping his knee, his face tightening in pain that wiped the smile clean off his face.

He sank back down, stretched his leg out in front of him, and shoved the Santa polyester up over his knee. I watched him dig his fingers into skin.

“Suguru told me.”

“Suguru talks too much.”

“He said a surgery could fix it. He said the doctors told you that you could play again. If you wanted to.”

“Yeah,” he breathed out, the word rough. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

He stared at his knee, thumb tracing the line of the scar, somehow pretty and ugly at the same time.

“The surgery is expensive,” he said. “And even then, there’s no guarantee it will work. No guarantee I’d ever play at the level I used to.”

“But there’s a chance.”

“There’s a chance.”

It was hard to see him like that—so unsure of himself, unsure of the one thing he’d always loved. This was the boy who used to fall asleep with a basketball in his bed. The boy I once believed would die if he couldn’t run.

“You love it,” I said.

“I still do. But I don’t know if that’s what I want anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

He leaned his head back against the armchair, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling.

“Basketball was everything for so long, and I was so sure that this is what I always wanted—what my life’s gonna be like.” His hand slowed on his knee. “And then it was just... gone. One bad landing, and the future I had always imagined myself in disappeared, and I had no idea who I was without it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“It’s okay.” A faint smile touched his lips. “Turns out losing everything forces you to figure out what you actually want. Not what you’re supposed to want, or your parents or whatever—just what matters to you.”

“And basketball doesn’t matter anymore?”

“I don’t know. I loved it. I really loved it. But I don’t know if I loved it for the right reasons. Or if I was just good at it, so I kept doing it.” His thumb found the bracelet on his wrist, worrying at the frayed blue and white threads. “Sports medicine makes sense. I get to stay close to the game, help other kids the way I wish someone had helped me. And if I never play again maybe that’s okay.”

“You don’t have to decide right now,” I said.

“I know. Doesn’t stop everyone from asking, though.” He lowered himself fully onto the carpet, lying flat on his back with one arm folded behind his head, staring up at the dark. “It was bad. After the injury. Everyone kept telling me it would be okay, that I’d come back from it. But I knew the second I hit the floor that it was over.”

“The surgery didn’t go as well as they hoped,” he continued. “Recovery took longer. And every day I wasn’t on the court was another day watching everyone else move forward without me. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t that guy anymore—the basketball player, the one everyone expected things from.” His voice dropped lower. “I felt like I’d lost everything, and that I failed at the only thing I was ever supposed to be good at.”

I lowered myself onto the carpet beside him and turned onto my side. I watched the rise and fall of his chest and thought about the boy who used to write be a pro basketball player at the top of every Christmas wish list he’d ever made.

How cruel growing up is. It takes the brightest certainties and shatters them, leaving us to sweep up the pieces and pretend we’re fine because that’s what adulthood is about. It’s no fairytale.

One day you’re the boy who will never stop running; the next you’re learning how to walk without pain. One day you’re the girl who knows exactly who she is; the next you’re teaching yourself how to be someone again.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

He pushed himself up and rested on one elbow. I could count the pale lashes framing those impossible blue eyes, and in that moment, I wanted him never to look away.

“It’s okay. I was probably terrible company anyway.”

And I wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that I would’ve taken him grumpy and bitter and unfair and broken if that was all he had to give.

“I envied you, you know,” he said. “Back then. A lot more than I want to admit.”

“You… envied me?”

“I did. I asked Suguru about you all the time. And he’d tell me you got into your dream university, that you were top of your class, that you got into your PhD program. You sounded so sure of yourself. And I had—nothing. I didn’t know who I was or what I’m gonna do. And you looked like you were becoming everything you always said you wanted.”

Stupid, I thought. I had everything except him.

“I’m sorry I never called. I was—” his voice thinned, almost broke. “I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That you would hate me.”

He looked away, eyes drifting to the shelves, then to the carpet between us, anywhere but me. Amber light slid across his cheekbones, settling into the faint hollow beneath his eyes that made him look older, more worn than I’d ever seen him.

“I was afraid you’d moved on and find someone other, someone better. Someone who wouldn’t hurt you. Someone who would show up, who would be there for you. Not someone who would disappear because he got scared of what his own feelings meant.”

His hand moved to the bracelet, fingers working the frayed threads again.

“I wanted to visit so many times. I wanted to call. But what would that even be? Me on the phone saying, ‘I’m thinking about you, but I can’t come home because basketball takes up so much of my life’? What kind of relationship would that be?”

I was grateful I was already on the floor, because I was sure my legs would’ve given out at the way he said relationship—like it was something real, something we could have actually had. And it felt so unbearably unfair.

Because I’d spent eight years trying to kill that want. I’d folded it into the smallest, sharpest square possible and shoved it somewhere deep behind my ribs where it couldn’t embarrass me anymore.

I dated people who were kind and uncomplicated, people who never made my heart behave like it was trying to escape my chest. I told myself what I’d felt for Satoru was only the dramatic intensity of adolescence, the kind of thing everyone goes through and grows out of.

I’d spent years and years terrifying myself out of hoping for anything else—only for it to come back as if nothing had changed at all. And I’m still sixteen and stupid and desperate for him.

He pushed himself upright then, turning away.

“I wanted something better for you,” he said quietly.

It is strange how time changes people—how it can turn even the most confident person adrift. It hollows people out in places you didn’t know were soft.

“Do you remember the winter ball in tenth grade?”

He didn’t turn around.

“Mom and I spent hours trying to find a dress,” I went on. “We came home with empty hands because I didn’t feel pretty enough for any of them. And you were out in the driveway playing basketball with Suguru. You asked if I’d found anything, and I told you no, and that I might not even go because the only person who asked me was Souta from math, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go with him.” I took a breath. “Do you remember what you said?”

I think he knew, but he wanted me to say it anyway.

“You told me I deserved someone better. You told me I deserved someone who’d treat me right. Someone who’d show up with flowers and tell me I looked beautiful and actually mean it. Someone who wasn’t asking just because he thought I’d be an easy yes.”

“I remember,” he said quietly.

“And then you asked me to go with you instead,” I said. “You picked me up at seven. You wore a suit that Suguru made fun of for weeks, but you didn’t care. You brought me purple dahlias because you remembered they were my favorite. And you danced with me all night.”

I could still feel his hand at the small of my back it if I closed my eyes. Could feel the way he held me like I was something precious, something breakable, even though I’d never felt stronger than I did in his arms. We moved in this uneven little sway to the music because neither of us could dance, and I remember thinking that I didn’t care if the whole world was watching, because he looked at me like I was the only person in that overheated gym.

I remember the exact moment the slow song started—how his grip tightened, how he pulled me closer without asking, and I let him. I pressed my cheek to his shoulder and breathed him in, thinking this is it, this is the moment everything changes. My heart was beating so violently I was terrified he’d feel it through his shirt. I was so sure he’d kiss me before the night ended.

He didn’t. But for those few hours, I was the girl from the movies—the one who gets chosen.

“I was so happy.”

He turned his head slightly. “You were?”

“Of course. Can you imagine my smile when I heard you’d hit Souta in the face with the basketball during practice? Everyone said it was an accident, but I let myself hope it wasn’t.”

“That was kind of stupid.”

“I thought you were so cool.”

“Because I broke someone’s nose with a ball?”

“Because you did it for me. Back then, you always showed up—for everything. When I was scared, when I needed help, when I didn’t even know how to ask for it.” A beat. “You told me I deserved better that night. You told me I deserved everything. You were my everything—my better.”

“And then I left.”

“And then you left,” I said, softer than I meant to.

Something in him seemed to give way then. He lowered himself down on the carpet beside me and turned onto his side, eyes level with mine, and rested his head on the crook of his arm.

We were so close now. Close enough that I could see the faint scar on the bridge of his nose he got from a backboard in sophomore year. Close enough that I could count every faint freckle scattered across his cheekbones. Close enough that I could feel the pulse in his wrist where it lay inches from my fingers, betraying him. Close enough that when he exhaled, I breathed him in.

Almost touching. Always almost. The way everything with us had always been—almost, but not quite. We’d been rehearsing this story since we were kids and stupid enough to believe almost counted as yes.

“I’m sorry I was such a coward back then. Still am,” he said, pushing up on his elbow. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want me if I wasn’t him anymore. If I was just… me.”

I wanted to laugh and cry in the same breath.

As if there were a single version of him that I wouldn’t have loved with the same helpless certainty. As if I hadn’t already loved him in every lifetime we never got to live—the boy I grew up with, the one who shielded me, the one who flew, the one who fell, and the familiar stranger beside me now.

I would love him no matter what. I would find him and choose him in every version, in every lifetime, until the stars burned out.

“You’re so stupid,” I said.

I didn’t wait for a response. I reached out to cradle his face in my hands. His skin was warm, and I ran my thumbs over his cheekbones, forcing him to look at me.

“I’ll always want you.”

And then there was no distance left at all. I leaned in and kissed him. And for the first time in a very long time, the ache finally felt like coming home.

He froze for a single stunned heartbeat—a soft, breathless shock against my mouth, like he couldn’t quite believe I’d chosen him after everything. But the hesitation lasted only a fraction of a second, and the shock melted out of him like frost under sudden sun. He exhaled into the kiss.

His hand slid up the back of my neck, his long fingers weaving deep into my hair to cradle my head. He guided me back against the floor, rolling us so gently the carpet barely shifted beneath us. I was on my back before I could catch my breath, the faint light of the lamp spilling across his face as he hovered above me, eyes wide and bright as frost, searching mine for permission he already had.

And I answered by pulling him down.

Our lips met again, surer now, no hesitation left in either of us. His weight settled over me, careful and close, the heat of him sinking into my chest until I couldn’t tell where my heartbeat ended and his began.

A mechanical click broke through the quiet. Fluorescent lights hummed awake overhead. The entire mall lurched from night to morning in a single breath.

6:00 a.m.

I pulled back slightly. “The security—they’re here—”

“I know,” he murmured against my mouth.

“We should—”

“Probably.” But he didn’t move. His thumb traced along my jaw, eyes searching mine. “In a second.”

“Satoru—”

And then he kissed me again. Deeper this time, more insistent, like he’d been holding this moment inside him for years, like he was trying to erase every empty second we’d spent apart.

He kissed me like he’d finally come home.

“I’m still mad at you,” I said against his mouth.

“I know.” He kissed me again, softer this time. “I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”

“That’s a big promise.”

“I’m not running this time.”

He pushed himself up, pulling me with him to sit in his lap. “I won’t,” he said. “I promise. I won’t.” His arms wrapped around me, warm and sure and everything I had ever wanted. One hand rested against the small of my back, the other threading through my hair, cradling my head like I was something precious.

Mine, I thought, dizzy with it. Mine, mine, mine. This boy was finally, impossibly mine.

I kissed him harder, my fingers curling into the fabric of his tank top, and felt him smile against my mouth. Distant footsteps echoed through the mall, the real world waiting to interrupt. Neither of us cared.

Maybe Disney got it right sometimes. All those movies I used to roll my eyes at, where the music swells and the lights come up and the princess finally gets kissed the way the entire theater has rooted for all along—maybe they hadn’t been lying after all.

Because this would’ve been the moment the orchestra kicked in, when the violins would start playing and the curtains drew back, and snow began to fall right on cue—the kind of happily-ever-after I stopped believing in when I was sixteen.

And it was happening on a dusty bookstore carpet in a locked mall, with a boy half out of a Santa costume, between shelves of romance novels and self-help books.

But it didn’t matter. It was better. It was real.

It was the boy who once broke my heart and somehow, against every rule my guarded self had built, put it back together with every soft, careful kiss.

Turns out fairytales don’t always wear ball gowns and crowns. Sometimes they wear a frayed friendship bracelet and a knee that will never fully heal. Sometimes they limp a little, and cry a little, and wander eight years in the dark to find their way back.

But they still come true.

Here, with his mouth warm against mine, with the boy who had once been my entire sky and never really stopped being it, mine finally did.

── ⟢ ・⸝⸝

“You sure this is allowed?” he asked as I swiped my access card at the door.

“It’s Christmas break. No one’s here.” The lock released with a sharp beep. “Besides, you’re the one who wanted to see where I work.”

“I did,” he said, and stepped in behind me.

It was quiet in that particular way a lab gets over the holidays, when everyone finally has a reason big enough to leave without feeling guilty—because apparently weekends don’t qualify. But the faint chemical smell still hung in the air, the one I’d stopped noticing sometime around my third month in the program.

I flicked on the overhead lights, washing the room in cold. Glassware lay scattered across the black benches exactly where everyone had left it three days ago. Beakers, notebooks, and a tube rack holding three samples I’d meant to run before the break, and a pile of gloves I knew exactly which undergrad left because he’d always promise he’d throw them out “in a minute” and never did.

Satoru paused in the doorway for a beat. His gaze moved over the equipment, the annotated periodic table on the wall (someone had drawn a smiley face on fluorine, which remained a mystery to this day), and the whiteboard full with equations that made no sense or maybe they did if you tilted your head far enough. Then his attention stuck on the laser rig in the left corner, where someone had put a Christmas hat on it for holiday spirit or something.

“It’s bigger than I expected,” he said.

“We share it with two other research groups.” I set my bag on my usual bench near the fume hood. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

I walked him through the space, my voice shifting into that overly animated tone I never hear until I run out of breath and want to die of embarrassment. In the moment, though, I had no brakes. I pointed out the UV-Vis spectrometer where we took absorption spectra, the gas chromatograph that always failed us at the worst possible times, the glovebox where we handled our most sensitive samples.

I kept explaining, words tripping over each other as if they’d been waiting for an audience to hear me speak about molecules and lasers, and he did his best to keep up. He followed me, asking questions that were surprisingly thoughtful for someone who’d failed chemistry twice.

“Wait, so you work in the dark?” he asked.

“Sometimes. Light can ruin the whole thing, so we wrap everything in foil, use amber glassware, or switch to red light when we have to.”

“That’s actually kind of cool.”

“Right?” I felt a grin take over my face. “It feels very mad scientist sometimes.”

When we reached the laser setup, I couldn’t stop myself anymore. It was my project—the thing I had poured myself into for months. I launched into an explanation of the photochemical reactions we studied, how we used ultrafast lasers to excite molecules and track their behavior in billionths of a second. My hands flew everywhere as I tried to explain the invisible world I lived in.

I was halfway through another sentence when it hit me that I’d been gesturing like a maniac for five straight minutes.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m talking too much.”

I turned toward him. He had settled against the bench beside the laser, head resting in his palm. He wasn’t looking at the laser. He was looking at me. In the way people in books look up at constellations—like something had rearranged itself overhead and he couldn’t quite believe it was real.

“What?” I asked, my voice smaller than I meant it to be.

“You’re so beautiful.”

“You’re stupid.”

He pushed off the bench and closed the space between us. His hand rose, thumb brushing along my cheekbone.

“I love this,” he said. “I always did.”

“Love what?”

“That look you get when you talk about chemistry. Like nothing else in the world matters.” His thumb traced the edge of my jaw, slow and almost thoughtful. “It used to drive me crazy in high school. You’d start explaining some reaction and sketch the molecule structure, and I’d just… sit there. Pretending to understand.”

“You weren’t pretending. You were actually terrible at it.”

“I was. Probably because I spent more time watching you than listening. Half the reason I failed it twice in university. I kept waiting for you to walk in and save me again.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, well.” His forehead rested against mine, his voice going quiet. “I’ve been stupid about you for a very long time.”

And then he kissed me.

And even after all the kissing we’d done—greedy and endless like we were trying to make up for eight years in a matter of days—it still felt new. Still made my knees weak. I melted into him, hands fisting in the front of his sweater.

“We have to go,” I said, though my fingers refused to let him go. “Christmas dinner. My mom’s expecting us in less than an hour.”

“One second.” His hand slipped to the back of my neck and tilted my head back to deepen the kiss. A sound escaped me, somewhere between a warning and giving up entirely, and he smiled against my lips. His other hand slid down my spine, pressed just above the waistband of my jeans, and the small of my back arched helplessly against him.

“Satoru—” I managed between kisses. “We’re going to be late.”

“Hmmm,” he murmured, which did not count as actual language.

“My mom will kill us.”

“Let her.” Another kiss, hungrier, before he trailed down my neck, guiding me back against the bench. “I’m making up for lost time.”

“Suguru will kill us.”

He stopped. Pulled back. Stared at me for one long moment. “Right. Yeah. We should go.” He grabbed his coat. “Now. Immediately.”

“That changes you?”

“He already hates my guts. I’m not testing my luck. He’s studying law—he’ll sue me or worse.” He took my hand, already pulling me toward the door. “And I’d like to stay alive long enough to keep kissing you, if that’s alright.”

Snow fell in thick, puffy flakes, blanketing the city in white. In the car, Satoru’s hand found mine across the center console, his thumb drawing slow circles over my wrist as we drove. By the time we pulled into my childhood driveway, the windows glowed warm against the winter dark. Through the frosted glass, I saw Mom moving around the kitchen, the Christmas tree lights twinkling in the living room. It looked exactly the way it always had. Like nothing had changed.

Except everything had.

We barely made it three steps inside before Suguru appeared in the hallway, arms crossed, expression neutral in that terrifying way only older brothers manage to.

“You’re late,” he said.

“Traffic—” Satoru began.

“Twenty-three minutes late.” Suguru’s eyes narrowed. “To Christmas dinner.”

“We got held up at the lab—”

“The lab.” Suguru's voice was suspiciously calm. He looked at me. I looked at the floor. “Right. The lab.”

He stepped forward and pulled me into a hug so tight I thought I heard a rip crack. Over his shoulder, he shot Satoru a look that could’ve frozen boiling water.

“Hi, Suguru,” I muttered into his sweater.

“Hi, little sister.” He kissed the top of my head and let me go. “Satoru.”

“Hey, man—”

Suguru grabbed him before he could finish, hauling him into what looked like a hug but was definitely some kind of wrestling hold. Satoru made a strangled noise.

“I hate this,” Suguru said in a perfectly calm voice, his arm locked around Satoru’s neck. “I hate that you’re dating my sister. I’ve hated the idea since you were both stupid teenagers.”

“Can’t—breathe—”

“But,” Suguru continued, loosening his grip by maybe a millimeter, “I can’t say I didn’t see it coming.”

“You’re getting sentimental already?” Satoru asked, mockingly.

“Don’t test your luck.” He tightened the hold again, then finally released Satoru, who stumbled back, gasping like he’d only narrowly escaped an execution.

Suguru clapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince.

“You hurt her, I’ll end you.”

“Understood.”

“I’m a law student now. I know how to hide a body.”

“…Also understood.”

“Good.” Suguru turned toward the kitchen. “Mom! They’re finally here!”

Inside, it was all exactly as I remembered and somehow more—the table nearly collapsing under far too much food, the tree in the corner topped with the same star we’d repaired one too many times, and the table with the same old faded tablecloth with the cranberry stain shaped like a heart we’d used since I was eight.

Suguru was already claiming his usual seat, still shooting Satoru looks like he’d later accidentally, and not at all accidentally, stab him with a fork when he’d reach for the blueberry tart. And Mom bustled around with serving dishes, humming to the Christmas music that played on the radio on the counter.

It was chaotic. It was loud. It was the same kitchen where I’d eaten breakfast every morning and done my homework at the table, right up until the day it held my university acceptance letter. The same living room where I’d learned to walk, where Suguru had taught me card games, where we’d spent countless evenings sprawled on the couch watching movies.

I hadn’t understood, until now, how much of my life had orbited this space. How many moments, big and small, had unfolded here. How the most important parts of growing up had happened within these walls. And somehow, with Satoru’s hand warm in mine, it finally felt complete.

This, I thought. This is what coming home feels like. And I couldn’t wait for more chaotic Christmases just like this—with him beside me, exactly where we were always meant to end up.

Suguru threw a bread roll at Satoru’s head. Satoru caught it with one hand, grinning like an idiot.

“Your throws got weak, man,” he said, tossing it back. “You lose your arm in law school?”

“Keep talking and the next one’s a plate.” Suguru caught the bread, expression flat. “Besides, you’ve had a rough couple years. Didn’t want to embarrass you.”

Satoru’s smile sharpened. “Oh, we’re doing this?”

“We’re doing this.”

Mom appeared in the doorway with a wooden spoon raised as if she was one second away from throwing it. “It’s Christmas. Sit down. Both of you.”

Satoru looked down at me, his eyes impossibly blue in the candlelight, and smiled.

“Merry Christmas,” he said softly.

I thought about that first moment in the mall—me frozen behind the register, watching him in that ridiculous Santa suit, certain it was the worst possible timing. The cruelest joke. Turns out the universe knew exactly what it was doing.

“Welcome home,” I whispered.

He pulled me closer, his breath warm against my lips. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m home.” And then he kissed me.

From somewhere behind us, Suguru made an exaggerated gagging noise. Under his breath, he added,

“You’re welcome, by the way.”

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author's note — hope this gave you the same feeling as warm socks and hot chocolate after coming in from the cold !! thank you so much for reading. i’ve had the busiest summer and i can’t tell you how grateful i am for all the lovely messages you sent during my absence. they genuinely kept me motivated. thank you, truly.

i’ve been experimenting a bit with different pov these past months and somehow ended up falling into first person. it makes me feel less like a distant narrator and more like someone living inside it, and i hope it finds its intended audience anyway, even if first person in fanfic isn’t always everyone’s favorite. thank you for giving it a chance.

and i really hope you liked the teenage angst in this one. there’s something almost magical about that time in life when your emotions feel too big for your own body, when you’re convinced things will always stay exactly as they are and then you grow older, look back, and feel a little nostalgic of it all :'))

if you’re waiting for your own second chance, i hope it finds you gently and at exactly the right time. thank you for spending a little of your day with me and merry christmas to those who celebrate ! if you don't, i hope your days treat you kindly <3

ps: i swear the next update is one of my main stories. i haven’t forgotten about them ahhhh

pss: if you want to read another little christmas story from last year, you can find it here. and if you want to get notifications for future updates, you can join my taglist here.

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