The taxi's brakes let out an ear-piercing screech as it pulled up to the lobby of the Tokyo Central General Hospital.
The door hadn't even fully slid open before Kazuya threw himself out. He tossed a large bill onto the driver's seat and sprinted straight toward the emergency wing, not caring in the slightest about getting his change back.
The cold autumn night air slapped him in the face, but it did absolutely nothing to calm the frantic beating of his heart. The sharp, sterile smell of hospital antiseptic flooded his nose. He took long, desperate strides, pushing his way through the busy crowd in the waiting area, his eyes darting around to read the overhead signs.
His chest felt tight. Grandma Nagomi was the only person in this family who had always given the original Kazuya her unconditional love. The sheer terror of facing the worst-case scenario made his mind go completely blank.
Arriving in front of Room 402, Kazuya stopped dead in his tracks. He swallowed hard, took a breath, and shoved the sliding door open.
"Grandma!"
His voice cut through the quiet room. His eyes immediately landed on Nagomi lying on the hospital bed. She looked pale, an IV drip connected to her arm. But her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slow and steady. It looked like the worst had passed and she was simply sleeping off the sedatives. Standing right next to her bed were Kazuo and Harumi, his parents, both looking exhausted and sick with worry.
Hearing the door open, Kazuo and Harumi turned their heads at the same time. The brief wave of relief at seeing their son quickly vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated horror. Their eyes didn't stay on Kazuya's worried face. Instead, they immediately dropped down to his right arm, which was hanging limply by his side.
Drip... drip...
Thick drops of blood were slowly falling, leaving bright red splatters on the pristine white tiles of the hospital floor. The thin blue ribbon wrapped around Kazuya's knuckles had been soaked through a long time ago. It was completely useless at stopping the bleeding from the deep cuts left by the shattered glass. To make matters worse, his face was deathly pale and covered in cold sweat. He looked like a guy who had just crawled out of a grave.
"Oh my god! Kazuya! What happened to your hand?!" Harumi cried out in a panic. She dropped the warm towel she was holding and rushed over to her son. "Your face is completely white! Were you in an accident?!"
"What is wrong with you?! What were you doing to get yourself into this mess?!" His dad, Kazuo, was just as freaked out. He clumsily reached out, wanting to check the arm, but was too scared to cause more pain. He spun around, stuck his head out into the hallway, and yelled at the top of his lungs. "Nurse! Doctor! We have someone bleeding over here!"
The sudden shouting made Kazuya wince. He felt a little dizzy, but he forced himself to stand up straight. He gently pulled his arm back, avoiding his mother's worried gaze.
"Everyone, calm down. It's just a minor scratch. I'm fine," Kazuya said, his voice a bit raspy and out of breath. He really didn't want to make a big deal out of this. The only person who needed attention right now was his grandmother. He hid his bleeding hand behind his back, making up a clumsy excuse. "I can handle this myself, don't worry about it. How is Grandma doing?"
"Handle it yourself?! Look at you!" Kazuo yelled, his face a mix of heartbreak and anger. "You're bleeding all over the floor! Were you planning on letting your grandmother wake up, see this, and have another heart attack?!"
Right at that moment, a nurse hurried into the room pushing a medical cart. Taking one look at Kazuya's condition, she gave him a strict, no-nonsense glare. Ignoring all of his excuses and protests, the professional nurse firmly grabbed him and forced him to sit down on a chair by the wall.
"Sit still. Cuts this deep need to be properly disinfected, and you need a tetanus shot right now. Otherwise, it's going to get infected," the nurse said, already untying the blood-soaked ribbon and wiping away the dried blood with an alcohol pad.
The sharp sting of alcohol hitting his raw skin made Kazuya flinch, but he didn't let out a single sound.
While he sat there letting the nurse treat his wound, with his parents still standing over him and nagging out of concern, the hospital door was suddenly shoved open once again.
This time, the sound of the door was followed by heavy, desperate panting.
A petite girl rushed in, looking completely out of breath. Her short hair was a windblown mess, her cream-colored sweater was messy, and her chest was heaving up and down. She stood in the doorway, resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath, looking around the room wildly until her eyes locked onto the young man sitting on the chair.
Sarashina Ruka.
The atmosphere in the room instantly froze. Kazuo, Harumi, and even the nurse stopped what they were doing and stared blankly at the creature that had just burst in. A pretty, completely unfamiliar high school girl, radiating panic.
Kazuya froze. His head, already pounding from exhaustion, throbbed violently. He thought he had lost this annoying kid back at the hospital lobby. Who would have thought she'd be stubborn enough to track him all the way to this exact room?
"Kazuya-kun!" Ruka cried out, her big eyes welling up with tears as she took quick steps toward him.
Kazuo blinked, pushed his glasses up his nose, looked at the girl, and then looked back at his son. "Young lady... who are you? How do you know our Kazuya?"
Realizing the adults were looking at her, Ruka instantly stood up straight. She smoothed down her messy hair, took a deep breath, and her eyes lit up with a weird, stubborn determination. She opened her mouth, fully prepared to clearly announce the words she had been holding onto for the entire taxi ride.
"Hello! Let me introduce myself, I am his girlf - "
Ignoring the sharp pain of the tetanus needle going into his arm, Kazuya shot up from his chair like he had been struck by lightning. He lunged at Ruka with a speed he didn't even know his exhausted body still had. His uninjured left hand flew up, clamping down hard over the 17-year-old's mouth before the word "girlfriend" could even slip out.
"Mmph... mmph!" Ruka squirmed, her eyes wide as she stared at him.
"S-She is... a student I'm tutoring!" Kazuya forced an incredibly awkward smile, stammering out the worst lie of his life. Cold sweat started pouring down the back of his neck.
He used his weight to push Ruka backward toward the door. "She probably just got worried because she saw me rushing over here, so she followed me... You don't need to worry about it, I'll just go walk her out!"
But Kazuya's desperate attempt to cover things up backfired horribly. In the dead silence of the room, his clumsy panic and the rough way he covered her mouth only made the whole situation look ten times more suspicious.
And then, Harumi's attention shifted. Being a mother, she had a sharp eye for unusual details. When Kazuya moved closer to the brighter lights near the doorway, the evidence on his body became painfully obvious.
Harumi narrowed her eyes. Her gaze swept over her son's pale face and stopped right at the corner of his mouth.
A faint pink smudge.
It wasn't a scratch. It wasn't blood. It was smeared lip gloss.
Next, her eyes drifted down to the sleeve of Kazuya's white hoodie - the exact spot he had used to roughly wipe his mouth the moment he stepped out of the Ferris wheel cabin. On the pristine white fabric, a messy streak of pink lip gloss mixed with a little bit of dried blood was clearly visible. It was a sloppy, incredibly suggestive stain.
Harumi slowly brought a hand up to cover her mouth. Her eyes widened, and she turned to look at her husband. Kazuo seemed to have noticed the exact same thing. He looked at the lipstick on his son's mouth, then looked at the high school girl his son was currently gagging. The girl's face was completely flushed, and she, too, had smudged lip gloss around her mouth.
To the two parents, the truth was as clear as day. Their 20-year-old son had taken a high school girl out on a date, gotten into a fight (or some wild accident) bad enough to leave his hand dripping with blood. And then... he and this girl had shared a kiss so passionate that lipstick was smeared everywhere, right before rushing to the hospital.
A heavy, suffocatingly awkward silence swallowed the room. Nobody said a word.
Kazuo cleared his throat, looked away at the wall, and let out a few fake coughs. Harumi awkwardly stared down at her shoes, her cheeks turning red out of pure secondhand embarrassment for her son's unbelievably bold actions. Even the nurse was blushing, keeping her head down and cleaning up her medical tray as if she were desperately wishing she could turn invisible and escape this private family drama.
Even though no one said it out loud, their eyes said it all: They absolutely believed this girl was Kazuya's girlfriend, or at the very least, they were in some kind of highly complicated, passionate relationship.
Kazuya stood there, feeling the bizarre vibe in the room. He followed his mother's gaze, looked down at his sleeve, and then caught a faint reflection of himself in the hospital window. The lip gloss on his mouth. The stain on his sleeve.
His world completely shattered. He knew exactly what they were thinking. The cheap, dramatic, cheesy romance-movie misunderstanding that he hated more than anything in the world was currently playing out in his parents' heads.
Kazuya opened his mouth to explain himself, but his throat locked up. How was he supposed to explain this? Tell them that this brat had forcefully kissed him in a panic attack while dangling 60 meters in the air? The more he tried to explain, the more it would sound like a pathetic excuse - even if it was the truth. Worse, telling them about the amusement park accident would probably just give his parents a heart attack.
Realizing he couldn't stay in this room for another second, Kazuya gritted his teeth. He grabbed Ruka tightly by the wrist and, without saying another word, dragged her out into the hallway under the incredibly awkward gaze of his family.
"Kazuya, take it easy, your hand is still hurt!" his mother called out right as the door slid shut.
...
Kazuya dragged Ruka all the way down to a quiet corner at the end of the hallway where no one was around. He let go of her hand roughly, took a step back, and ran a hand through his messy hair, trying to calm his heavy breathing. The fatigue from the blood loss was starting to make his temples throb.
He looked down at Ruka. She was rubbing her reddened wrist where he had grabbed her, but her eyes were still staring right at him. She didn't look like she wanted to run away at all.
"Listen to me you litle brat," Kazuya said, his voice dropping to the coldest, most threatening tone he could manage. "I don't know what kind of script your brain is trying to write right now, but don't try to cause a scene here. My family is in that room, and I don't have the time to play fake romance games with you. You mess this up, and you won't get a single cent for today's date! Get out of my sight. Right now."
It was a direct threat, attacking the very core of her job as a "rental girlfriend." Kazuya was absolutely sure that being spoken to this harshly, being insulted like this, would make any girl in the service industry feel offended, get mad, and storm off.
But completely wrecking his calculations, Sarashina Ruka didn't cry out of self-pity. She didn't get angry and leave.
Instead, Ruka took a step forward, closing the distance between them. Without a hint of hesitation, she threw her arms around Kazuya's waist and buried her small face into his chest. She clung to him like glue, completely ignoring the smell of sweat and blood on his clothes.
"I don't need your money!" Ruka looked up, her big round eyes looking straight into his. "Money doesn't matter anymore. You protected me. You held me so I wouldn't be scared. My heart beat for you... I'm going to take responsibility for everything we went through today!"
It was a lightning-fast confession. Blunt, clumsy, and entirely fearless. Looking into her eyes, there was no fake acting. There was no industrial-grade, customer-service smile. There was only a stubbornness and a sincerity so bright it was almost blinding.
Kazuya stood frozen like a statue. His chest rose and fell. Deep down, a massive wave of confusion swelled up, crashing directly into the psychological walls he had built around himself.
Ever since he had arrived in this world, he was used to looking at life through a lens of total cynicism. He believed that every sweet word out of a woman's mouth had a hidden agenda. Mami manipulated him because of her narcissism. The girls online said nice things to get donations. He had prepared a dozen different mental scripts to tear down Ruka's fake mask.
But as he looked down, staring deep into the eyes of this 17-year-old girl, desperately searching for a hint of greed, a trace of acting, or even the smallest drop of fakeness... he couldn't find any of the things he wanted to see.
The pure sincerity in her eyes was so clear it actually scared him. It completely went against the dark, practical view of the world he had always believed in. A girl who didn't care about money, who didn't care about his rude attitude, who purely wanted to be by his side just because of an innocent, naive feeling.
It was exactly this illogical purity that threw Kazuya totally off balance. His brain had zero data on how to process unconditional, agenda-free sincerity. The feeling was suffocating.
"Let... let go," Kazuya stammered, his voice losing its usual rock-solid confidence.
He grabbed Ruka by the shoulders and quickly pushed her away. The overwhelming confusion, combined with the sudden headache crashing over him, made it impossible for him to face her for even a second longer. He needed a quiet place. He needed to splash cold water on his face to stabilize his completely chaotic mind.
Without saying anything else, Kazuya turned around and started jogging down the hallway, heading straight for the restrooms.
"Kazuya-kun! Wait for me!"
Ruka's voice called out from behind him.
Kazuya tried to run faster, but his legs suddenly felt like they were made of lead. One meter... two meters... three meters...
The world around him started to blur. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling stretched out into long, blinding streaks of white. The immense pressure of surviving an insanely stressful day, combined with the blood he had lost from the wound, and the fact that he hadn't eaten anything since lunch, finally pushed his average college-student body past its absolute limit.
After running about five meters, Kazuya felt the floor tilt sideways. Every sound around him - from Ruka's footsteps to the background hum of the hospital - suddenly faded away, as if getting sucked into a vacuum.
His eyes rolled shut. His knees buckled.
"Ah! Kazuya-kun!"
Ruka's terrified scream was the very last thing Kazuya heard before gravity took completely over, sending his body crashing down hard onto the cold hospital floor.