It was 2:30 in the morning.
The bedroom was dark and dim, with only the faint hum of the air conditioner breaking the silence.
Kaoru Hoshitani lay on his side in bed, eyes wide open.
The hollow feeling that followed his intimacy with Aina Saiten receded from his limbs like an ebbing tide.
What replaced it was something unsettling—a morbid, crystalline clarity.
‘This morning, in Osaka… Rika Kawasaki had put me through an entire day of torment.’
That brutal sensory deprivation had left even his soul feeling incomplete.
And when night fell, he’d had to desperately mask the fractures in his eyes, forcing himself to go along with Aina Saiten’s “post-night-snack tenderness.”
His body no longer felt like his own.
Half of it had been roughly torn apart in the abyss, while the other half had to disguise itself with sweet submission under the guise of everyday normalcy.
Aina Saiten was sleeping deeply, her breathing slow and even.
As always, one of her hands rested habitually on Kaoru Hoshitani’s waist.
That hand was warm, soft, carrying a sense of security he longed to cling to.
But at this moment, to Kaoru Hoshitani, it felt like a silent verdict.
‘Aina… she probably knows everything, doesn’t she?’
She knew he was lying. She knew what those marks that wouldn’t wash off really meant.
But she chose not to call him out.
That gentle avoidance was more suffocating than a direct confrontation.
Holding his breath, as if afraid of disturbing some fragile dream, Kaoru Hoshitani slowly, bit by bit, slipped out from under Aina Saiten’s arm.
His bare feet met the cold wooden floor, the chill climbing from his ankles all the way into his heart.
Like a wandering spirit, he left the bedroom and entered the pitch-black living room.
He didn’t turn on the main light. Instead, he fumbled for the small nightlight in the corner and switched it on.
A faint warm yellow glow barely outlined the contours of the space.
Everywhere he looked, there were traces of their life together.
The couple mugs on the coffee table, the photo frame by the TV stand showing the two of them nestled together, and the knitted cardigan Aina Saiten had casually draped over the back of the sofa.
Every familiar object had become a thin, razor-sharp needle, piercing his chest without resistance.
Kaoru Hoshitani walked to the corner of the sofa and sat down, curling himself into a small ball, burying his face deep between his knees.
That brief melody had once truly played through his dreams.
He thought of the summer two years ago. The night she confessed to him in the night wind.
Back then, he’d naively believed that as long as they held hands like that, they could walk together far into the future.
But when had that taken-for-granted happiness started to wander off and fade away?
He closed his eyes in pain, trying to shut himself off from this cruel world.
But the moment he closed them, the images came flooding back even more relentlessly—
Rika Kawasaki’s possessive gaze as she pressed him against the office desk, Chinatsu Ayase’s meaningful smile as she secretly photographed him with her mobile phone, and…
The deep, unfathomable exhaustion lurking beneath Aina Saiten’s eyes as she ate her night snack tonight.
Clearly aware of the sorrow within his own heart, yet he could only let himself sink deeper and deeper into the mire.
Kaoru Hoshitani slowly raised his head.
Pale moonlight streamed through the translucent curtains of the balcony, casting a sheet of silver white at the edge of his vision.
He happened to catch sight of the small glass vase tucked away in the corner of the living room storage cabinet.
Inside were three sunflowers.
They were the gift Aina Saiten had specially bought at the flower shop to cheer him up when she came to apologize that day.
But now, the water in the vase had long turned murky and cloudy.
The once-upright stems had bent and withered.
The edges of the golden petals were curled and blackened, and several had completely dried up, scattered across the wooden surface nearby.
Kaoru Hoshitani stared at them, transfixed.
He remembered the day Aina Saiten brought those three sunflowers to the izakaya to pick him up after work.
That day, he had just escaped from the warehouse, the shameful marks Rika Kawasaki had left on his neck still fresh.
The moment he saw that bouquet of blooming sunflowers, he’d completely broken down and sobbed.
Aina Saiten thought he’d been moved.
But only he knew—it was born from the deepest, most desperate guilt and self-loathing in his soul.
Sunflowers were plants meant to follow the sun.
But these three sunflowers, ever since being brought into this home and placed in the corner of the living room, had never seen the real sun again.
They were just like his and Aina Saiten’s love—
Once so bright, so pure, yet now locked away in the shadows, withering irreversibly in the darkness where no light could reach.
Kaoru Hoshitani stood up, as if pulled by some invisible force, and walked to the storage cabinet.
He reached out a pale finger and gently touched the fallen, withered petal.
With the faintest pressure, the dried petal let out a brittle crackle and crumbled into powder, drifting lightly into his warm palm.
The scent of the summer breeze from afar seemed to pierce through the boundaries of time and space at that moment, passing through his hair.
He remembered the image of his father placing that sunflower hair clip into his small palm when he was a child.
[Kaoru must also grow forever toward the sun, just like a sunflower.]
Back then, he truly believed he could remain clean and sunward forever.
If miracles truly existed in this world, how he wished he could desperately find the Kaoru Hoshitani he used to be.
He thought of the sunset two years ago.
Aina Saiten, back on holiday from Tokyo, stood on the street of the small town, the evening glow painting her silhouette with a golden edge.
When he shyly called out “Aina Onee-san,” the way his heart skipped a beat was still vivid to this day.
Back then, he’d wanted nothing more than to stand by her side, clean and pure, forever.
But now, he was still standing beside her—yet the shell was no longer the boy as pure as the first snow of the mountain forest.
Once the floodgates of memory opened, they could never close again.
It was a starlit night, with sea waves gently lapping against the shore.
Aina Saiten, so utterly focused in that moment, seemed to stand right before his eyes.
She looked into his eyes, her voice trembling faintly in the sea breeze:
“I like you.”
Her gaze was brighter than the stars scattered across the sky.
And back then, he had simply stared at her, then blushed, lowered his head, and mustered every ounce of courage to reply:
“Me too.”
That overflowing, irreplaceable longing had once gently enveloped him in his solitude.
That was the most complete, most beautiful memory of his entire life.
But the sunflowers would eventually bloom across the hillsides, and he could no longer find a dream of his own.
Drip. A single warm drop of liquid struck the tabletop.
Kaoru Hoshitani finally cried.
It wasn’t a hysterical wail, but the tears simply wouldn’t stop.
What kind of emotion was this, so complex it felt like it could shatter the soul?
The joy of the past and the sorrow of the present, the gratitude of being rescued and the pain of being defiled, and the trembling, ecstatic thrill that seemed ready to burst from his chest when he recalled that summer—
“Back then, I was so happy, so happy, so happy…”
These vast and violent emotions, like black tides raising monstrous waves, tore at each other within his body, mixing together, eventually becoming a bloody, mangled murmur.
Noble? Pure? Beautiful?
Isn’t the one who best fits those words in this world… you?
He questioned himself desperately, over and over, in the depths of his heart.
In this muddy world, saturated with power and desire, it was precisely because Aina had unconditionally accepted and affirmed the boy who had nothing through those gentle words that he believed from the bottom of his heart:
She was more beautiful, noble, dignified, and pure than anyone else in this world.
But he had lost her—this wonderful woman—and the clean version of himself, with his own hands.
Rika Kawasaki’s forceful hands had already branded indelible marks deep within his body, and Chinatsu Ayase’s meaningful gaze had already drilled cracks into his scarred heart.
He clenched his palm tightly, letting the powder of the sunflower petals sting his skin.
Facing the empty, deathly silent living room, Kaoru Hoshitani lowered his shattered head and choked out through thick sobs:
“Aina Onee-san… I’m sorry.”
After a long while, the tears finally dried.
Kaoru Hoshitani sniffled, carefully pulled the three withered sunflowers from the murky vase, and together with the broken petals scattered on the table, held them reverently in his palms.
He had originally planned to take them to the balcony and bury them in the flowerpot’s soil, to let them rest in peace.
But when he reached the sliding door of the balcony, his footsteps came to an abrupt halt.
He couldn’t bear to part with them.
Even if they had rotted, even if they had withered, they were still gifts from Aina Saiten.
In the end, he turned around and placed the remains back into the glass vase.
He went to the kitchen, drew some clean water, and slowly poured it in.
He knew full well it was useless.
No matter what he did, withered sunflowers could never bloom again, just like the invisible crack between him and Aina Saiten.
Kaoru Hoshitani slowly walked back to the sofa, collapsing against the soft backrest as if all strength had left him, and pulled Aina Saiten’s knitted cardigan over himself, wrapping tightly.
Exhaustion finally flooded in like a tide, accompanying the complete depletion of his spirit.
The boy’s body curled up in the corner of the sofa, gradually letting down its guard against reality, each breath carrying scorching heat.
The hours-long brutal plundering in Osaka during the day had left his body temperature with a feverish, damp warmth.
From his soft hairline to his flushed ears, Kaoru Hoshitani’s skin was so thin it was almost translucent, as if the fragile capillaries beneath could be easily glimpsed.
His eyes were tightly shut, his long, raven-feather-like lashes trembling restlessly.
Those eyelids, thin as an aquatic creature’s membrane, carried a fragile beauty on the verge of death.
His usually rosy lips now held a dull, crushed pallor, and the faint breath escaping them sounded like a pure, innocent boy who knew nothing of the world, yet was forced by the snares of fate to sing a mournful elegy of despair.
In the second before his consciousness slipped entirely into the dark of his dreams, he heard a faint whisper from the deepest part of his heart:
“If only… there were a chance to go back to that summer…”
“Back to that sunset, when Aina Onee-san first called my name…”
In his sleep, Kaoru Hoshitani seemed to feel an unconscious restlessness and torment.
He furrowed his brows slightly, tucking one bare arm, smooth yet mottled with red marks, beneath his head in exhaustion.
Then, beneath those aquatic eyelids, his eyes grew damp once more.
Darkness slowly swallowed all his senses.
The tide of memory gently lifted this broken, beautiful body, carried it away, flowing upstream—all the way back to that seaside small town two years ago, to that classroom where the chalk dust covered the blackboard, and to that—
Evening when the summer school bell rang.