Aki Hayakawa

It was raining again.

Of course.

Aki sat on the apartment balcony, a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, watching the raindrops slide down the railing as if time were slipping away. The world felt distant. Blurry. As if someone had wiped it clean with the palm of their hand, leaving it blurred.

You were inside. Dry. Asleep, probably. Or pretending to be.

And Aki… Aki couldn't enter yet.

There was blood under her fingernails. Again.

Yours, this time.

I had held you too tightly while you bled, while you screamed, while you cursed yourself for not being fast enough, again. And now I was trying to breathe, trying not to see your body double over as the curse struck, how your eyes widened with pain, with trust, with fear; not from the curse itself, but from the possibility that I wouldn't arrive in time.

You always looked at him like that. As if he could fix it.

As if he were some kind of savior.

And perhaps that was what devastated him the most.

Because he's not your savior. He never was.

He's just a man, an empty man, with too much pain and too few words. He's the kind of man who places flowers on graves and forgets to eat. Who lights a cigarette just to feel something warm between his fingers. Who tells himself that if he dies saving you, at least something good will have come of it all.

He didn't want to fall in love with you.

God, I really don't.

But the way you left Band-Aids on the table for him to find. The way you never asked him why he smoked so much, just opening the window before he lit the match. The way you stayed, even when he couldn't give you tenderness, even when all he offered were blood-stained clothes and silences that lasted far too long.

That's what broke him.

That's what made it yours, long before you even looked for it.

And maybe you'd never know. Maybe you didn't want to.