Mahiru’s pen brushed across the paper, making a scratching sound as she filled the blank white page with writing. Beside her, Amane tried not to peek at what was being set down by the slim ballpoint pen grasped in Mahiru’s dainty fingers as he watched her silently fill the thick book with words etched in black ink. After they’d finished dinner and had cleaned up, the two of them were relaxing together. They weren’t the type to be all over each other constantly. Their classmates, including the foolish Itsuki, had the wrong idea about them, and Amane wasn’t sure whether to laugh about it or not. Apparently everyone thought Amane and Mahiru were getting frisky twenty-four hours a day. The fact was, sometimes they did their own thing. They weren’t always doing the same activity, or getting intimate. Even when they were sharing the same space, they spent a lot of peaceful time together pursuing their own interests. That day was no exception, and although she had secured a seat by Amane’s side, Mahiru was quietly absorbed in her writing. Naturally, it would be rude of him to peek at her book, even if he was her boyfriend, so Amane wasn’t trying to look, but he could tell she was writing something. Previously, she had written down the recipes for particular dishes and her thoughts on how the food turned out. But Mahiru wrote those in something else. Glancing over, Amane could see this was a leather-bound book. “What are you writing?” He knew it was rude to interrupt her, but she had been focusing silently for quite a while, so without meaning to, he got curious and asked her about it. Mahiru immediately raised her head and gave him a strange look. Then she saw Amane’s gaze was lingering near her hands, and she made a small noise of understanding. “Ah. This is my diary…I guess you could call it. I thought I’d better write down what happened today before I forget.” “Wow, that’s so dedicated or, like, thoughtful of you.” It made perfect sense to Amane that it was her diary, and sure enough, once she mentioned it, Amane could see the book in her hands did look like one. It wasn’t especially cute or pretty, like the kind many high school girls preferred. Instead, it looked dignified and sturdy, which he thought was very fitting for Mahiru. She must have taken good care of it, because although it looked like she’d had the diary for quite a long time, it didn’t show excessive wear. At least Amane didn’t think it was something she had just picked up recently. “Do you write in it every day?” “No, not that frequently, only when something happens that’s worth recording. I guess it’s just a habit I’ve had since I was little…” “I think it’s great. If you make a note about what happened on a given day, then later when you think back on it, you’ll know what went on.” “I write down the good and the bad, though.” Amane had never gone so far as to keep a diary, but whenever he wanted to make a memo about something, he jotted it down in the scheduling app on his smartphone. Doing so was helpful to him when he thought back on things later. “I just think it’s the perfect way to organize my feelings and information about my life. If I write it down here, I can quickly recall what happened, you see. I wrote an entry when we first met, Amane…or rather, the first time we ever talked.” “Let me guess—it was just one line… ‘What the hell’s wrong with this guy?’” The first time he had ever spoken with Mahiru was the day he handed her his umbrella. Thinking back on it now, he was sure he had been brusque and standoffish. He couldn’t have made a particularly good impression, he thought. From Mahiru’s perspective, it must have been certifiably awful. To begin with, she didn’t talk about it much, but on that day, Mahiru had been sitting alone in that park after a terrible confrontation with her mother. So it couldn’t have felt very good to have someone come up and talk to her with that kind of bluntness, when she had just been hurt. The more he thought back on it, the more he began to feel regret as he wondered why he couldn’t have had a better attitude, but Mahiru looked at Amane’s face and smiled. She seemed amused. “Heh-heh, I won’t deny it, but my impression of you wasn’t that bad. The main thing was that I was startled; I already knew that you were pretty cold from seeing you in school. And I could tell that you weren’t approaching me with bad intentions.” “Well, that’s good, I think.” “Yes. I think it was exactly that attitude of yours, Amane, that helped make it okay… If someone you don’t know suddenly treats you kindly, it’s pretty scary, isn’t it? Because it’s scary when a stranger tries to get close.” “Sure, I guess so.” Back then, Mahiru had probably felt wary of strangers. Precisely because she had understood her own value and social standing, she’d seemed like she had drawn a definite line of separation that kept everyone else at a distance. “Well, in the end, even though you had that kind of attitude, it did become part of the reason I felt like I could trust you, so it wasn’t a bad thing.” “I’m glad it turned out that way, but, well, I still feel bad, like maybe the way I acted or what I said could have been better somehow.” Amane felt sorry he had been unfriendly, even for him, but Mahiru just smiled in amusement. “Amane, back then, your stony face and your unfriendliness did make you stand out, you know.” “Sorry about that.” “I’m not saying it was a bad thing.” When Mahiru elegantly covered her mouth as she giggled, her soft, whisper-like laugh leaked through her fingers. Amane instinctively shot her a glare, but that only made her laugh even more, so Amane turned away in frustration. Though she kept laughing, she didn’t tease him any more than that. Mahiru had been the one having a hard time back then, so this amount of teasing wasn’t really anything to get upset about, but be that as it may, Amane didn’t love it, either. He let out a small, exasperated sigh and, as payback, ran his fingertips across her back with an expression of feigned ignorance on his face. He could feel her body jerk in surprise. But she didn’t seem inclined to reproach him for it. Instead, Mahiru got her own payback by slapping Amane, who was sitting next to her, once on the thigh. Then she went right back to running her pen over the page of her diary. There was a distinct possibility she was recording what had just happened. He thought she might be writing down something strange that Mahiru would tease him about later, but he had no right to stop her, so despite his complicated feelings, he pressed his lips together and simply watched Mahiru as she cheerfully wrote in her diary. She didn’t necessarily write in it every day, and she didn’t necessarily fill out a whole page every time. Also, it was easy to tell by looking at it that the leather binding was fairly well-worn, so she had probably been keeping the diary for a pretty long time. Judging by the number of pages she had made it through, about two-thirds of the way, it seemed like she’d been writing for many years. It looked like the book must have been with Mahiru the whole time she was growing up. “Are you curious about it?” Amane had been watching her write while trying not to look at the contents, and Mahiru seemed to have noticed his eyes on her. She tilted her head sweetly. “Mm, it would be a lie to say I wasn’t interested, but that book holds all the memories and feelings you’ve written down up to now, right? The good and the bad, it’s all in there. If it’s something that you don’t want other people to see, I’m not going to force you to show me or anything.” Amane recognized that he was definitely on the possessive side, but it wouldn’t be right for him to try to tell someone else what to do just because of his own feelings. He was not going to hurt his partner just to satisfy his own curiosity, and he didn’t think he needed to know every last thing about Mahiru anyway. He thought it was best for Mahiru to keep her secrets and that she would decide whether or not to tell him about them. Amane figured he didn’t have the right to choose for her. “I’m sure there are things in there you’d rather keep hidden, and it wouldn’t be good for me to read them… Just because I’m your boyfriend, that doesn’t mean I’m dumb or insensitive enough to go prying into your past. Plus, everyone has one or two things they’d like to keep secret.” “Amane, sometimes I don’t know what to do because you’re a little too understanding.” “Now, listen…” For some reason, he felt like she was getting fed up with him, which was baffling to him, but he could tell her exasperation wasn’t disapproving; instead, it tended toward admiration, so he didn’t make any further complaints. “…I’m not you, so I can’t possibly know everything about you, and I’m sure there are some things I don’t need to know. There’s such a thing as privacy and private thoughts.” “Heh-heh, I know that, but…I just thought you might want to know, out of curiosity.” “…I don’t want to go peeking over your shoulder. If you tell me something because you want me to know, that would be fine.” He would be perfectly satisfied with whatever she wanted to share. He tried to convey that he would respect her wishes to the end, but Mahiru looked like she was struggling with something as she flipped through the diary pages. “Hmm… It’s hard to pick something when you ask me about things I want to tell you.” The pages where Mahiru had recorded her life flipped past her slim fingertips, and pages lined with rounder, more youthful writing than she used now came into view and then disappeared again. “There’s not really anything all that interesting written here, you know. It’s turned into less of a diary and more like a simple record, or maybe a kind of report. If you want something like a typical diary, I guess my middle school years are the closest. I was pretty emotionally immature, so whenever something bad happened, and I couldn’t let it go, I wrote down my complaints in my diary, so that stuff’s in there, too.” “If that’s what you call immaturity, then I guess that makes people who take their anger out on everybody else babies or something.” “Well, when someone vents their anger and wants other people to cheer them up because they can’t contain their own emotions, you can’t deny it’s a lot like a child throwing a tantrum, right?” “That’s harsh, but I guess you’re right… I’ll be careful.” “Why does that make you look so disheartened, Amane?” “Oh, I was just thinking there might be a part of me that can get like that.” Amane didn’t get angry much, and he didn’t associate with people enough to lash out at someone else anyway, but he wondered if he only thought that was true because he had never noticed that side of himself. The people who did that kind of thing often didn’t even realize what they were doing, so once again Amane cautioned himself and hoped this would be a lesson that he would not forget. Meanwhile, Mahiru looked like she was deep in thought. “…Amane throwing a tantrum—I’d like to see that.” “You would not!” “I’m joking, kind of.” “Kind of?” “I mean, it would be something new; I think it’d be cute.” “No matter how you look at it, taking out my anger on you would be psychological abuse, and I don’t think there would be anything charming about it…” Actually, it made him sick just to imagine himself throwing a tantrum and taking it out on Mahiru. It would be cute if he were a child, but while there might be a little bit of youth left in Amane’s appearance, he was nearly a full-grown adult. Surely nobody would want to see someone so old crying because things didn’t go his way. And Mahiru was most likely just saying that she wanted to see Amane show more emotion rather than approving of him behaving so immaturely. “Well, setting all that aside, it seems to me like you would be the last person to lash out at others, Amane. I mean, you’re harder on yourself than anyone else, and you have a tendency to put yourself down and get depressed somewhere out of sight.” “Uh…” “Whenever anything happens, you pretty much always think you’re to blame, and you get really disheartened, right? Even when the other person is overwhelmingly in the wrong, you only pay attention to your own mistakes.” “…Well, it’s rare for someone to be completely in the wrong.” Just as Mahiru said, when it came down to it, Amane was the sort of person who usually blamed himself for any problems that came up, and he often quietly beat himself up for it. “Even if they’re not one hundred percent wrong, there are definitely times when the other person is like ninety percent in the wrong, you know?” “That’s true, but—” “I’m the same as you, but I try to be more pragmatic. I do reflect on my own behavior, but I also look objectively at whether or not I bear any of the blame, and I don’t apologize or dwell on it any more than necessary. I don’t want to be crushed by feelings of self-condemnation.” Amane thought it was incredible that Mahiru could think that way. It was a testament to her clear-mindedness, and he was honestly jealous she could do that. “Well, what it comes down to is that, in the past, I was a little bit worse at processing my emotions, and it wasn’t very endearing,” Mahiru continued. “And I was much less adept at handling myself than I am now. I can look back on it and see how young I really was.” “Not very endearing, huh?” “Why do you sound so doubtful?” “Just wondering what you’re counting as endearing.” Mahiru never seemed to really appreciate how adorable she was when she was talking, but she was so cute, it seemed like her behavior had to be intentional, and Amane wondered how she could say that. Her angelic behavior, on the other hand, was something she did purposefully, so there was a part of Mahiru that expected people to think she was elegant and mature when she was acting like that. But she didn’t seem conscious of her mannerisms when she was just being herself, alone with Amane, who had gotten past her whole angel persona. Although on rare occasions she could be pushed back into that persona when agitated by someone somewhere, the rest of the time she was her true self. Her cute gestures and word choices would have been a lot of work for anyone else to make deliberately, but for Mahiru, they came entirely naturally, which was a scary thought. “And who was it who once said my behavior wasn’t endearing?” Mahiru asked. “Me, though I didn’t have good judgment back then.” Upon reflection, he had behaved really poorly in the past and said more than he should have. So when she pointed it out, Amane felt guilty. “…Just like you said, Amane, I think I actually wasn’t charming at all.” “But now when I think of you back then, you were super cute.” “Are you sure you’re not biased because now you’ve fallen for me?” “I think you were cute then even without bias, you know. Like a little hedgehog.” Now that Amane knew how she really was, when he looked back at the version of Mahiru who wouldn’t relax around anyone, who had put her angel mask on and politely rejected everyone, casually refusing to allow people to approach her, she certainly seemed like a prickly little animal with lots of spikes. Her angelic style had been her secret for protecting her mind and body, so he wasn’t going to say anything about it one way or another, but looking at how relaxed and affectionate she was now, it really was hard for him to believe she was the same person. He hadn’t meant to make fun of her; rather, he thought it was an amusing and apt comparison, and he was smiling. But Mahiru, on the other hand, had puffed her cheeks like two little balloons. Her somewhat childish expression was extremely endearing, and Amane couldn’t help but comment, “Now you’re a squirrel, I guess.” She delivered a series of gentle karate chops into his side. Sure enough, she looked adorable as she smacked him, registering her complaint. It was even cuter because Amane knew she did things like that only with him. “…In the end, you turned into a lovely little kitten, much more docile and spoiled than you were when we first met.” “…Even though I’m not as cool as a cat anymore?” “You did stop playing cool, didn’t you?” It would probably be more accurate to say she no longer had any need to put on an act. She no longer had any need to keep up appearances around Amane. Precisely because she trusted Amane would accept her as she was, Mahiru let him see her in a vulnerable state. The love that had led her to place that trust in him made him happier than anything else. “…I don’t need to act cool around you, Amane.” “You hardly ever did, even from the beginning, though.” “How terrible of me.” “Sorry for mentioning it.” “…You can apologize by petting my head, okay?” Mahiru presented her head to him expectantly, and even as he worried he might burst out laughing, he ran his palm over her soft-looking hair. It felt very nice to pass his fingers through the silken, flax-colored strands that were so well looked after, and just by gliding his fingers over them a little, passing right through without any snags, he caused their scent to fill the air, an invigorating yet sweet aroma. As he carefully ran his fingers through her hair, combing through it so that it would slip through his hand with a rustling sound, Mahiru’s look of displeasure quickly softened, allowing her happiness to show through. “Does this please you, princess?” “It does.” True to her word, Mahiru let him see her delighted expression and didn’t try to hide it, and he could hardly be blamed for imagining she had grown a tail and was wagging it happily. “Maybe you’re not a cat; maybe you’re a puppy dog.” “What did you say?” “Not a thing, princess.” It seemed like he might spoil her good mood if he said too much, so he swallowed his words, tucking the thought away in his chest, then kept stroking Mahiru’s head as she openly encouraged his pampering. Mahiru seemed to have decided for the moment to pretend like she hadn’t heard his comment, and she gently leaned back against him while purring and accepting the affection from his hand. The diary was still asserting its existence in her hand. “Don’t you need to write down the next part?” he asked. “…After we’re done here, I’ll write that Amane treated me like an animal again.” “If you write that, when you read it later, you’re gonna think I was doing something problematic.” “Heh-heh, if I don’t remember, then I’ll just ask you what you were doing.” As if writing that down was already a done deal, she opened up the diary and softly ran her fingers over the unfinished passage. “I want to make all sorts of memories going forward. I want to write them down just like the diary I’ve kept thus far, so they will nourish me.” Mahiru said that and flipped through the pages again, back to the past, her eyes softening as she stared nostalgically at the words written there in slightly old, somewhat faded ink. “…I already knew this, but I can tell that when I wasn’t with you, Amane, I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with my life.” She didn’t sound regretful or discontented or pained. Mahiru simply seemed to be thinking back with a wistful look in her eye as she told him this in a gentle tone of voice. She opened her diary to a page she must have written quite a long time ago, and she quietly closed her eyes.
Chapter 169
18 min read