Crush

[Catche Jagger]

((Kayoko Kotohiki continued from Sugi Tapped))

Kayoko had first met him while in her first year of middle school, when she had been first learning the tea ceremony. The headmaster’s grandson was handsome, elegant, and kind. He was also nineteen.

When Kayoko’s mother had pressed her into joining the tea ceremony club, she’d made a point of it being about surrounding herself with the right kind of people, about meeting the right boys. That was a lot to put on one so young, but Kayoko eventually understood the reason she’d done it. A kind, sad woman didn’t want to see her daughter have a life as hard as she had lived.

Still, she didn’t know what was meant by the “right” sort, until she’d seen him. He was the sort of man it was difficult to believe really existed, and yet there he was, in the flesh.

However, Kayoko was not the only admirer that he had. No, girls her own age all the way up to middle-aged women twice his age adored the man. She had no chance, and yet she’d set it up in her head that the two of them could be destined for one another. When he was around, Kayoko would make sure to keep her back a bit straighter, to keep a posture befitting someone sophisticated. She even put in greater effort into flower arranging and properly performing the tea ceremony.

Surely he’d notice.

It went on like this throughout middle school, the two of them only speaking twice, and yet her love for him only seemed to grow. It was a child’s understanding of love, a love of something that cannot know you or love you back, but at the time it was a feeling more powerful, more exciting than anything she’d felt before.

So when, in her first year of high school, she’d found the other girls from the club looking exceptionally dour one day, she couldn’t have imagined the reason.

It turned out that he was getting married and probably wouldn’t be coming around much anymore. The word was that his bride-to-be was as beautiful, elegant, and kind as he was and, perhaps most importantly, she was about his own age. An inevitable outcome for anyone honestly observing the situation.

Even Kayoko had known, somewhere deep down, that this was the way things would go. That didn’t stop her from feeling sick upon hearing the news.

When she’d gone home that day, Kayoko had gone home and could only shove her face into a pillow to cry and cry and cry, mourning the loss of a childish fantasy, of a love that had only ever existed in her own mind.

It was an embarrassment to think about now. She’d been so naive then, so invested in a reality that could never be.

And yet, thoughts of Seto and Sugimura let her back to that pillow, to a Kayoko that felt so far from her now.

“Stupid…” She choked, curling up beneath a tree.

((continued elsewhere...))