Chapter 5 The View beyond Friendship Carrot Cake #6
Hozumi and I clasped hands with each other in solidarity.
“So embarrassing…” Iori said. Squaring his shoulders, he walked briskly ahead.
Teaming up, Hozumi and I followed, once again sandwiching him in from both sides.
“No need to be shy now. Do tell us more. Here, allow me to hold that for you,” I offered, referring to the bag containing the cream cheese.
“I think there might have been a lesson about how one’s soul can be saved by telling people about your love life,” Hozumi added.
“That is a load of crap. Karma will get you.” Iori retorted.
I’d never seen Iori expose his emotions in this way. It was the first time I had seen him get angry or blush with embarrassment.
Maybe this is the “real” Iori. I gently shook my head to stop the thought. It’s not right to ask if this is his “real” self or not. Perhaps even he doesn’t have a grasp of who he is yet.
I pushed on anyway. “So? What did you say exactly? And where did you tell her?”
“I think it was…” Iori mumbled awkwardly, scratching at his ear lobes. “Inokashira Park.”
Oh. My. God. The most romantic spot!
“I’ve never been there,” Hozumi muttered.
“Are you the only Tokyoite who’s never been there?” I exclaimed.
“I’m from Chiba.”
“Well, I’m from Kagoshima, and from my perspective, Chiba is basically Tokyo,” I said. “We should go there sometime! The place is massive. There’s a pond with swan boats, and the park hosts different events, especially over the national holidays.”
“Right,” Hozumi said without even trying to feign interest.
We arrived back at Amayadori and gave our wet umbrellas a shake before sticking them in the stand outside.
As I groped in my bag for the keys, Iori reminisced, “Oh, yeah, we went on the swan boat. Shizuku absolutely loved it. That was fun…”
When I spun around, I found Iori staring idly into the night, his hands stuffed in his pockets. From time to time, I felt stray raindrops on my face.
“We had ice cream, and a balloon artist twisted a dog for Shizuku. We spent the whole day doing all sort of things. By the evening, Shizuku had grown cranky and fell asleep. She wouldn’t wake up, so we went to one of the benches by the pond and laid her down while Koharu and I rested our feet.”
A solitary drop of rain fell on the swirl of my head and streamed down.
“I was having such a good time. Having my loved ones next to me. Walking everywhere with them. Getting exhausted. Laughing our heads off. I thought, Wow, such profound happiness really does exist. I felt this from the bottom of my heart. That day made me realize that I didn’t need to think that they’ll disappear from my life unless I gave them exactly what they wanted; I could be entirely myself. ”
A raindrop fell on the tip of Iori’s nose.
“Before I knew it, I had said the words.”
The droplet descended to his lips and streamed down his chin.
“I love you. I always have.”
He spoke as if he were talking to someone in the distance, far above the clouds.
“ ‘Although I’m scared of losing the relationship we have now,’ ” he said, looking straight ahead with unblinking eyes, “ ‘I want to see what the view beyond friendship looks like. Next time I see you, can it be a date?’ ”
His clear voice reverberated through the quiet night.
Iori expelled a breath. It was as though his emotional string had been pulled so tight that it finally snapped.
The view beyond friendship. How did he feel as he said those words?
“And then…?” I asked. “What did she say?”
Iori quietly kicked a pebble across the concrete.
“She said no. She said that Taiyo was still her number one. That I was important to her, but she couldn’t have a romantic relationship with me.”
Hozumi sighed. Without meaning to, I followed with an even bigger sigh.
Not that I was surprised. I sort of guessed that would be the outcome. I’d gathered that Koharu was that kind of person, and that was the very reason Iori had fallen in love with her. I felt that I was starting to get to know her, little by little.
“I could never recover from that,” Hozumi muttered, his head dropping in disappointment.
“Me either, I would probably regret falling in love.”
I sighed yet again. The devastating reality of Iori’s lost love hit Hozumi and me in a way that neither of us had anticipated. I was crestfallen, as if the whole thing had happened to me.
“But—” Iori said.
“But…?” Hozumi and I both lifted our heads in surprise.
Iori kept his back turned as he muttered, “She told me that when she heard me say ‘the view beyond friendship,’ it also made her want to see a new world with me.”
“Just to be clear—Koharu said that?”
“Yeah,” Iori mumbled, his ears redder than ever.
“That is so…beautiful. It’s like a waka poem.”
I swung the bag with the cream cheese around and around. Iori kept his face turned away determinedly, probably because he could feel his face growing hot.
“She said that she wasn’t ready for a relationship but asked me if we could still hang out as friends. That was enough for me. I was Shizuku’s best playmate, and I wasn’t ready to let go of the relationship we had either.”
Perhaps Koharu hadn’t finished processing her feelings yet. She probably saw him as a friend she could talk to and a person she felt a connection with. But up until then, she’d never even considered the possibility of having a romantic relationship with him.
Iori scratched at the back of his head, as if trying to cover up his embarrassment. “And that’s the story of how Shizuku came to know me as ‘Daddy,’ even though in reality I was just a handsome neighbor who wanted to hang out with them.”
Despite everything he had said about being good at behaving the way other people wanted him to, it turned out that when it came to Koharu, he was rather incompetent at hiding himself.
Having finished most of the cake-making, Iori sat down on the sofa as he wiped his hands. For now, all we had to do was wait for the cake to bake in the oven.
“The year the three of us spent together was the happiest time of my life. Truly, it was the best.” Iori nodded as if acknowledging his own statement.
“We celebrated Christmas together. Me, celebrating Christmas in a traditional home setting! I couldn’t believe it, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.
Koharu asked me to go and get a tree, but I had no idea how big it was supposed to be.
I thought, Surely there’s no such thing as a tree being too big?
So I went to the home decor store and bought the biggest one they had.
Koharu gave me a good scolding for that. ”
“I guess you thought better too big than too small,” Hozumi said.
Narrowing his eyes, Iori smiled softly, as if his mind was traveling back in time.
“Shizuku loved it, though. She got all animated, saying no one else would own such a big tree. I even got a present from Koharu.”
Iori got up and stepped toward the display shelf near the door. When he returned, he had something in his hand.
It was a snow globe. Inside the glass dome was a tiny Santa Claus and reindeer flying in the sky.
“Isn’t that the snow globe that Shizuku gave you today—wait, no, it’s always been on the shelf, hasn’t it?”
“That’s right. Shizuku didn’t bring this to me today. It’s the snow globe that Koharu gave me six years ago.”
Iori had always kept the snow globe where he could see it, in a prime location on the shelf.
“That Christmas day was the best day of my life,” Iori murmured, stroking the top of the glass dome.
“I wish things could have stayed that way, but it didn’t work out.
We had been living together for about one year when Koharu told me she couldn’t keep leaning on me.
She said, ‘If I stay with you, I feel like I’ll become too dependent. ’ She was crying.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I think…”
Iori stared into the softly sparkling glass ball.
“Koharu wanted to be able to support someone, not the other way around. She was born into a wealthy family in Seijo and grew up in a huge house. Her father was an executive at a pharmaceutical company. As a child, she had access to everything: good education, friends from good families. A life everyone envied. Koharu’s only misfortune was that she realized that she was born into fortunate circumstances,” Iori said matter-of-factly.
“Her misfortune was that she was fortunate?” I asked.
Rubbing his bald head, Hozumi muttered as if he was speaking to himself, “Everyone wants to believe that they’ve built their lives through effort and talent.
No one wants to admit that they had an advantage.
That they only succeeded because they were lucky.
Or because their parents invested a lot of money in them.
Or because they were born into good circumstances. ”
Iori looked at Hozumi for a moment, then mumbled in agreement, “Yeah.”
He continued, “From a pretty young age, Koharu was aware of the power of this ‘advantage,’ as Hozumi calls it. Which was why she wanted to do things on her own and why she struggled. Taiyo was the kind of person who could simply put all his heart into everything he did no matter what. I think that was why she was attracted to him.”
It seemed that the unspoken ending to that was “and not me.”
“Koharu had lived her whole life being handed things. Lots of things. Even things that should have been far out of her reach for her abilities. I think she was sick of that life.”
Iori held his head, resting his elbows on the table. As he blinked his downcast eyes, his eyelashes fluttered.
“She told me something at the end.”
“What did she say?”
“ ‘I am happy. I can make myself happy. I shouldn’t need you, or someone else, to make me happy.’ ”
A waft of humid air drifted through the door and clung to my body. I pointlessly rubbed the back of my neck.