The day had gone and the room was dark. Turning on the lights felt like more effort than it was worth.
Hatano sat with her chin in her hand, looking at the laptop screen.
She watched the cursor blink at the end of the text for a while, pushed Shinomiya and Rōkai to the edge of her mind, and turned her attention back to the novel she’d been working on for the competition.
The protagonist was an untalented female football forward.
For a while she and her childhood friend — a prodigious striker — had been called the two wings, playing side by side from primary school. But as the years passed the gap widened in one direction only. The protagonist ground through her training even on the days her childhood friend rested, running herself into the ground trying to close it — and the distance kept growing. She arrived, eventually, at a state in which no one expected anything of her, her efforts went unrewarded, and she pressed on through the constant gnaw of inadequacy. Same forward line as her childhood friend; goals scored: not even in the same hemisphere. She was called a support player, a foil. She had been through every flavour of failure and doubt, and where all of that left her—
Effort is rewarded — the easy ending. Hatano deleted the plot line and stared at what remained.
She let herself fall back against the chair. The frame creaked.
The message wasn’t changing. The meaning of effort. That was what she was writing toward.
The ending had to be a happy one — the protagonist had to be rewarded. Not because that was the correct or superior outcome, but because the world was already so full of unreasonable bitterness that in a story, at least, there might be room for a happy ending. She wouldn’t apologise for that.
Which meant the question was: how does a protagonist who has kept going unrewarded finally get her reward? And to answer it, what exactly did she need to dig into?
She opened a scratch file and typed. What was the protagonist actually looking for?
She stared at the words. Then, on a new line: She could keep going because she had something to look for. If she’s going to be rewarded, it can only be the moment that is finally found.
The tangled threads of her thinking came together into something with shape. She leaned closer and began to type faster.
The protagonist’s figure — someone going on without reward — grew more defined under the words, like a watermark becoming visible. A faint haziness came over her awareness of the physical room; her consciousness moved toward the world inside the text — and there she found the protagonist, in the shadow of her childhood friend being mobbed by celebrating teammates after a brilliant goal, having managed once again only the assist.
And in that figure she saw, for a moment, the face of someone she knew.
Then, the intrusive rattle of the phone on the desk.
The sharp brake-slam sensation of having a thread of concentration snapped. She looked at the phone with the visceral irritation of someone woken by an alarm, and reached for it. She’d half-expected it to be Rōkai, whose number she’d only just saved — but the name on the screen was one she didn’t know by sight, though she recognised it immediately.
“…Shindo?”
A call from him was unusual. She converted the interrupted-concentration irritation into something like curiosity, turned the light on, and answered.
In the corner of a noisy izakaya, the Literary Appreciation Club was having its weekly drinks night. Talking, laughing, eating — people spending the evening in their own ways. Some of them were working an angle at their intended target of the evening.
“Shinomiya-san, are you drinking—?” What’s-his-name - Iizuka said, face tilted toward her, cheeks flushed.
Shinomiya arranged a smile and said yes.
She was staring at the surface of her cocktail, vaguely, unable to get absorbed in the mood around her. Nobody seemed to notice. The men who’d been angling for her kept directing small conversational attempts at her; the women watched this with their usual distaste.
Up until recently, Shinomiya had craved this. The wanting and the resenting directed at her from all sides. But tonight she felt hollow underneath it, and understood — felt it clearly for the first time — that she had always only been half-filling herself this way. Always convinced herself she was satisfied. Always been mistaken.
She found herself scanning the room the way she might look for someone, and of course the person she was looking for wasn’t there. She’d quit the club. Each time the memory of the aquarium surfaced — the warmth of it, the ease — the boredom and the emptiness came up after it like a tide.
Nearby, Sasaki was leaning in to talk to Shijima, asking about some publication project she’d heard about through Shindo. Shijima answered pleasantly — not a win yet, the goal isn’t publication, there’s further to go — and Sasaki looked pleased with herself and threw a sideways look at Shinomiya, catching the flatness of her expression and reading it as defeat. A little triumphant smile.
Shijima noticed, and looked at Shinomiya too. Saw the absence in her face and looked faintly worried. He began to say something — Iizuka got there first.
“Shinomiya-san! We’re thinking of doing a second venue tonight. Would you want to come?”
The barely-disguised intent in his expression. No one at the table was under any illusions about what he was proposing, or why. Looks of various levels of resignation were directed at him from around the table.
Into Shinomiya’s mind, from nowhere, came Hatano.
If you don’t want to say it, you don’t have to — but if getting it out would help, I’ll listen. Eyes that didn’t just look at the surface of things. Words delivered without reservation or condition.
Something tightened painfully in her chest.
She made herself arrange a solid smile, pressed a hand there, and kept it in place.
But nothing had changed. As she’d told Hatano: nothing was going to change. Shinomiya — dropout, failure, the fallen one — only knew how to fill herself up this way. Only knew how to live this way. She told herself this, and arranged her expression into something warm, and turned the smile on Iizuka too.
Though — just sitting here absorbing whatever Iizuka was offering would be boring. Better to draw in more people — Shijima, Shindo — and generate more jealousy, more looking, more recognition, more of the thing she needed.
She told herself this, and turned to begin with Shindo, sitting beside her.
At exactly that moment, Shindo’s eyes cut through her.
“Are you feeling unwell?”
Highball in hand, looking at her, and the question landed in her chest like something heavy.
She let the smile go slightly rigid.
She’d thought no one had noticed. But someone had. She wasn’t unwell — but there was a sentence in her head she couldn’t dislodge, and a person she couldn’t stop thinking about. If she admitted it, though, Iizuka’s proposed outing would fall apart, and she’d go home to an emptiness with nothing to fill it.
— No. Her instincts and her reason said it together, cutting across the rationalisation.
She knew. The truth was plain. Whatever she did here tonight, she was not going to fill the hollow place. Not with this, not with these feelings, not with people who looked at her for these reasons. She knew it. And deep underneath the surface of herself, in the place where she kept what she actually wanted — she wanted to go somewhere with Hatano again. Talking about nothing in particular, being looked at the way Hatano looked at her. That.
But admitting it meant dismantling everything she’d spent years building and calling herself. So she kept trying to look away from it.
And yet her heart, honest and dry and thirsty, went on asking for water.
“…A little.”
She said it before she’d decided to. Heard herself say it. Almost pressed her hand over her mouth.
Shindo, who had asked, looked genuinely surprised that she’d actually said so. Iizuka, who’d been listening, immediately leaned in — “Are you okay? I could walk you home—” — and Shindo reached a hand across, blocked him without ceremony, and pulled out his phone.
“I’ll call you a car. Go home. Iizuka — give it up.”
He said it with the tone of someone closing a door, and Iizuka deflated. Shijima, watching, looked satisfied and looked away.
Shinomiya understood that she should be disappointed. The occasion she’d been telling herself she needed had just been cancelled on her behalf. She tried to feel the loss of it.
What she felt was relief. She turned away from that feeling and tried very hard not to look at it.
“Hey — yeah, it’s me. I need a pick-up.”
He was on the phone to someone he apparently knew — too casual a tone for a standard taxi service. Shinomiya sipped the last of her cocktail in small, reluctant increments.
Within thirty minutes, Shindo’s phone buzzed. He read the screen and gave a small, amused laugh.
“Quick,” he said. He looked at her. “Your ride’s here. Get home safely.”
“Oh — yes! Thank you!”
She couldn’t leave a car waiting. She gathered her things, acknowledged the looks from the men who watched her go — the particular trailing-off quality of that attention — thanked Shindo with a single quiet word and pressed the taxi fare into his hand, and stepped away from the table.
Her feet felt lighter than she’d expected.
What to do afterward. She wasn’t drunk, not really — the drinks had been light. Nothing waited for her at home. She could kill some time somewhere — and at the edge of her mind, fixed there like something burned in, was the image of a person she kept reaching for, and stopping herself from reaching for.
She took out her phone, scrolled to the number, hovered. Then — afraid of what she was feeling, afraid of what it would mean to acknowledge it — she stopped.
Go home and sleep. Sort through your feelings first.
She held this thought, tucked the phone away, and pushed the door open.
Late-autumn night air came in against her face. Clean and cold.
She stepped out and let the door close and looked around for the taxi — and found nothing. She walked a little way, looking. Nobody. “Odd,” she said to herself, and turned around.
And then, without warning, a familiar voice reached her.
“…Well. You look perfectly fine to me.”
Her heart lurched in a single, unmistakable motion.
She turned and looked toward the voice — at the person standing beside the izakaya door, orange light from the frosted glass falling across black hair and eyes that were the colour of deep water. Slightly out of breath, as though she’d come quickly. The person who had been in Shinomiya’s thoughts for three days — since the museum, since the last time they’d been together — standing right there.
Shindo had called Hatano. Not a taxi. Hatano.
Every question about how and why fell away before she could ask any of them, because ahead of all of it was a tightening in her chest so acute it nearly hurt.
“Sen — pai.”
She stood there, frozen, eyes wide, looking at the person she’d been missing.
Three days since the museum. Three days of the feeling growing without anything to let it out, and now it was pressing against the inside of her chest without mercy. She pressed her hand over her heart and let the cold that was rolling in from early winter begin to cool her face, which was going warm.
Hatano glanced toward the building — toward Shindo somewhere inside — with a look that promised consequences.
“That idiot told me you were in terrible shape. — How are you feeling?”
“I — I’m fine! Really, I’m completely, I’m fine.”
She’d swung all the way to honesty without thinking about it, saying the true thing before any calculated version could get there first.
Hatano looked relieved, and then slightly puzzled. If Shinomiya was genuinely fine, why had she come out alone, and why had Shindo called her? The questions were evidently forming, but she took one look at Shinomiya’s face, which was doing several things at once, and let them go.
Instead, she gave a small, helpless laugh, the kind that meant what am I going to do with you.
“I’m seeing you home. Train’s fine?”
Too many feelings crowding against each other for any one of them to get through as words. The happiness at having her here, the truthful want of being walked home, the familiar smallness and the too-real-for-comfort honesty of all of it. She opened her mouth and nothing that came out would have been right.
Shinomiya thought about it for a moment.
Then, without speaking, she extended her hand and looped her arm through Hatano’s.
The surprised look she received, she answered by dropping her face downward, ears flushing to their edges, and saying nothing.
Hatano looked at her for a moment. Then the corner of her mouth moved, and she said quietly to no one in particular — as though explaining something to the empty street — “It’s dark, and it’s cold,” and that was all.
Tonight the cold was real. The street was dark underfoot. But arms linked together like this were warm, and there was something in the warmth that made staying upright feel easier.
All the way to the station, they walked like that. Like people who belonged together.