Daisuke pulls himself away from me and looks directly into my eyes, still riddled with tears. “You didn’t have to go so far just for something like that.”

“But it’s really important to me that I do what my dad never could.”

“He tried to kill you, though,” He says, his voice smoothed over like a crystalline figure. “It gave you one hell of a trauma if you can remember as clear as day, and you just want to make him proud in his grave?” I nod my head. Daisuke sighs and sits on the edge of the bed. I move my legs over as the mattress dips underneath his weight. He lifts his sleeve down to the middle of his hand and wipes my tears away. “You really are a Daddy’s-Girl, aren’t you, Toujiro-san?”

My heart thumps. “Didn’t you call me ‘Akira’ before? Why the sudden change?”

His cheeks flush pink and he removes his hand from my face. He sits awkwardly and looks around the room, not knowing where to set his eyes. “I-I only called you that because I thought that you had fainted and that your cold was actually more serious.”

“So you called me by my first name since you were panicking?”

“Uh...yes?”

I giggle. It was at this point when I realized that I was able to act like a full-fledged girl around Daisuke. It was also at this moment when I realized for the first time that Daisuke was a guy. I was a girl, and he was a guy. And we were both alone in the nurse’s office.

I stopped laughing instantly. I could feel my whole body burning up as Daisuke looked at me. The air around us had become awkward and the tension in the air was as thick as syrup. I felt like i needed to break it. “Hey, Daisuke-san, I--”

Before I knew it, Daisuke’s face was less than an inch away from mine.