Episode 10 — Angel and Little Devil

Today again, countless sound particles resonate against my eardrums. Tracing their source, my eyes find Kanzaki-san’s fingertips, dancing lightly across the keys. Dazzling white, lustrous fingertips. Both piano keys and computer keyboard are struck — and yet what they bring into being couldn’t be further apart. Kanzaki-san’s playing is graceful. It is itself a work of art.

Against that: the sheer ungainliness of writing. Hunched over, wringing out ideas, clinging to the keyboard in desperation so the images in my head don’t dissolve before I can catch them. And all of it produces nothing but a string of characters that falls hopelessly short of the real beauty before me.

I stare at Kanzaki-san in order to make that poor replica.

A fierce passage, trembling as if with joy. Drawn along by it, her body sways, her hair moves — both asserting their beauty. Apart from that very first day, Kanzaki-san’s playing had never once shown a crack.

And from that sight, my gaze drifts naturally back to those lightly moving fingertips again — and a certain fact arrives.

I held Kanzaki-san’s hand just now.

I nearly topple from my chair. Because the fact is so removed from reality. That beautiful hand — those fingers that seem to exist for the sole purpose of playing piano — had been wrapped around mine.

Kanzaki-san’s hand was smooth. Silky. Soft. Its temperature was cool, throwing my own warmth into sharp relief. Small — and yet what it brought me overflowed my palms entirely.

I do nothing but receive from Kanzaki-san’s fingertips. Sound. Warmth. In return, I give nothing back — I only reproduce poor imitations of what I’ve been given, wallowing in self-satisfaction.

Giving nothing back, and yet Kanzaki-san still chooses to spend time with me — that alone remained a mystery. Maybe it was because I never confronted that essential question, let things stay comfortably vague, that my writing only ever managed to trace the surface of her beauty without reaching what lay underneath. I thought that might be true.

Heart still loud with all of this, I was mid-way through that particular bout of self-criticism when Kanzaki-san’s sound touched its final note. Leaving beautiful resonance in its wake, walking through it as if through water, she crossed from the piano toward me with her usual light step.

I stood from the old wooden chair, as always, to meet her.

“Today was wonderful too.”

I said it with a small round of applause, ordinary words failing me as usual. In front of Kanzaki-san, words don’t come well — in the face of that beauty, every word feels powerless. Being with her brings as much awareness of my own inadequacy as it brings inspiration, and somehow I don’t hate the feeling.

Perhaps I’m a masochist. Well — you’d have to be one to write fiction at all, I suppose. I was thinking something along those lines when Kanzaki-san, without smiling, gave a nod — and then released a thoroughly abrupt set of words.

“Sit down.”
“Oh — okay.”

Without understanding why, I did as I was told and sat.

And then, softly, the sensation of a skirt against my knees. A warmth and a sweet scent settled over me, pressing gently down.

“Kanzaki-san…?”

It took ten seconds and a little more to understand the situation. And then, finally: Kanzaki-san had sat down on my lap. She was so light I hadn’t even noticed. Which — no, that wasn’t the point. The situation itself was impossible.

I hurried to ask her:

“Kanzaki-san — what are you doing?”
“Sitting on your lap.”
“I can see that, but…”

Kanzaki-san didn’t move a muscle on my lap. So I was the only one visibly flustered, and every small shift brought her hair, her presence, close enough to make my heart feel close to boiling.

What on earth is happening.

I turned it over desperately in my overheating mind, and then a memory surfaced — the classroom during break time. It’s true: girls holding hands, sitting on each other’s laps, hugging, all of it is an ordinary sight. I was the one who’d always been outside it. Calm down — by ordinary standards, this is probably fine.

I assembled that hypothesis and aimed it at Kanzaki-san.

“Are you maybe — the tactile type? Like, physically affectionate with people?”
“No. I don’t like being close with others.”
“Then this is…?”

Maybe I simply don’t register as a person to her — that was where my thoughts went. Actually, I rather hoped that was it. Because otherwise I risked making a catastrophically wrong assumption about what this meant.

But then, like an angel whispering, Kanzaki-san’s small voice arrived:

“You’re special.”
“Oh.”

I held on to composure by my fingernails. My heart creaked. It was making an awful sound.

And as if to press the point further, Kanzaki-san continued — like a little devil, coaxing:

“I love your words. So I wanted to be close to them.”

I lost mine entirely.