Episode 28 — Almost Summer

In sunshine that seems impossible for the day after the rainy season ended, the feeling of summer and the cool of her touch mix together in my palm. This hot, and yet Shion hadn’t broken a single sweat. As though she alone inhabited a different world — her lightly pigmented skin, her beauty like a painted ideal of pure white, carried the cold with her.

And scattering that beauty around her as she went, Shion murmured:

“It’s hot…”

Oh — Shion is hot too. I’m sorry for assuming something strange of you. With that apology folded in, I let go of her hand, not wanting to make the heat worse — our hands had joined without either of us deciding to. At once, a cool touch found my palm again. Pure white fingertips wound through mine. And as if to register a protest, the hand tightened. Then, words too.

“Why did you let go?”

Shion pushed her lips into a pout, and gave me a look of rare displeasure. I hurried to explain myself.

“You said you were hot, so I thought it might be better not to hold hands—”
“I’m hot, but I don’t want to not hold hands.”
“Sorry…”
“From now on, letting go without asking — that’s not allowed.”

Saying it, Shion pressed her fingertips tight. The pure white fingers that usually dance so delicately across the keys were now holding on to my hand with clumsy, earnest force.

And then — another cryptic thing left behind.

“If we separate, I feel like Uta will go somewhere far away. So it’s not allowed.”
“I feel like that’s supposed to be my line…”

I said it on reflex. Because if anyone was going to be left behind, it was obviously me by any measure. If anything — watching Shion perform at the concert hall, I’d felt it in my bones. We live in different worlds. I’m irredeemably ordinary, and Shion is somewhere far above someone like me. So the idea of me leaving Shion behind makes no sense.

And yet Shion tilted her head, genuinely puzzled.

“Why?”
“Because your piano is incredible, and your performance the other day was incredible. And you’ve been recognised by all sorts of people, and you won a prize. So…”

Stringing those words together, I felt something like possessiveness or heaviness seeping through them, and with no way to course-correct I was already beginning to prepare my internal post-mortem — when Shion said it clearly, in that transparent voice:

“But all of it is sound for you.”
“…What.”

Shion’s voice rang out with such unambiguous clarity that I couldn’t process it, and a sound escaped me. Shion, walking beside me, bathed fully in the blazing sun, looked straight at me, and repeated:

“From here on, every performance of my piano — every last one, not a single one excepted — is a performance dedicated to Uta.”

The temperature of the joined hand stayed cool as ever. And that, paradoxically, told me that these words had left Shion’s mouth as plain and ordinary truth. And the voice Shion poured into me, the gaze from those violet-indigo eyes, the whole of her beauty — it was so dazzling. Scorching my chest far more than the sun, making it hard to breathe. And even so, I don’t want to look away. I want to keep looking forever.

“Play piano for me. Keep playing piano — for me”.

The words I had thrown out to bind Shion to the piano — to keep my ideal beauty from escaping. The crystallisation of a wish drenched in selfishness — and now it exists before me as reality. It was so enormous, so beyond what I’d dared hope, so far in excess of what I deserved that it seemed like someone’s mistake.

If I left it as it was, it might dissolve like a heat shimmer one day. So — I wanted to become someone who could someday hold even that wish in their arms. I wanted to become irreplaceable to Shion. That was what I wished.

I want to be equal to Shion.

With that resolve, I held Shion’s hand tight.

And then:

“Say something.”

Shion murmured it in a small, anxious voice. Just the murmur of a beautiful girl. Possessed of looks and a sound far beyond ordinary — and still showing something as endearing as this, which I thought was thoroughly unfair.

“Thank you. I’m glad you’ve kept the promise all this time.”

Whether calling that selfish wish of mine a promise was right or fair, I wasn’t sure. But calling it that gave it a little more solidity, made it seem more likely to last — so I decided to call it that.

“Promise…”

And Shion repeated the word back, as if confirming it. There was something that sounded like happiness in the way it resonated. If she was truly glad to have it called that — it was so much happiness on top of happiness that I was in danger of coming apart — so I forced a change of subject.

“Anyway — you said you wanted to go somewhere. What did you want to do, Shion?”

At my question, Shion rummaged through her bag as if suddenly remembering, and produced her phone, and held the screen out to me.

“I want to try this thing called karaoke.”

With those words, what appeared on the screen was an entirely modest internet article — the kind listing the standard pastimes of students — and in the search bar, the charmingly blunt search query: things to do with friends.

Taking everything together, the word that seemed to fit was: adorable.

“Let’s do it.”

I nodded, savouring what Shion had brought me.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

Shion murmured it.

The matching strap on her phone swayed happily.