Too Late
(PoV—Kurone, after her encounter with Shin)
—
The heels of my Mary Janes clicked a frantic, uneven rhythm against the linoleum of the now-empty corridor.
It wasn't my usual confident walk; this was an uncertain, shuffling walk, as if every meter of floor were transforming into shifting, treacherous sand beneath my feet.
I kept my head down, hands tightly interlaced behind my back, using the physical tension to stop myself from biting my nails.
It was a filthy habit I thought I'd buried in middle school, but now, the urge clawed at me with a savage intensity.
'Why?' The question pulsed in my temples. 'How did he change so much in just two days?'
Shin looked like a totally different person.
He wasn't the boy who followed me like a shadow, his eyes perpetually imploring for my approval, his hands always ready to snatch my heavy bag from my shoulder.
I felt it. He was... cold, distant, and terrifyingly indifferent.
And then, there was the question he'd thrown at me like a poisoned dart: "Do you know what my favorite color is?"
The realization was a jagged shard of glass lodged in my chest.
I didn't know.
After seven years, I still didn't know his favorite color.
'How could I have been so ignorant?' I asked myself, while desperately searching my mind for a sign, a hint, a single conversation where he might have let slip a preference, a dream, a boundary.
Nothing. I found nothing literally.
My mind was a barren landscape, with no memories of the things he loved.
Shin had always just been... there; A reassuring, silent shadow, a safe harbor, the only one I could rely on when the world outside became too abrasive.
And yet... with one simple question, I realized that I had never treated him like a human being with his own interior world, with dreams or tastes or a soul.
I had used him as a mirror to reflect my own brilliance, and I had never once bothered to look at the person holding the glass.
I tried to shove the thought away, clenching my fists until my nails bit into my skin.
'I don't need him,' I lied to myself, my voice echoing in the hollow silence of the hallway. 'I don't need him at all. I have Kenji.'
Kenji was perfect.
He was everything I wanted my future boyfriend to be: popular, with his head on his shoulders, a hot guy who knows what he wants.
He even bought me expensive things and made me feel like the center of the universe.
Shin was just... Shin: a nostalgic habit, a background character who had suddenly decided to walk off the stage.
And Akane… how could she? The thought was a cold flame igniting in my stomach.
She betrayed me. She stabbed me in the back. I didn't expect her to go for him since I've already told her not to touch him. But hey, in the end, I should've expected things to turn out like this.
Akane always had a crush on him, and... I couldn't allow her to get close to him, and yet, she did.
I thought she was my best friend since she always helped me with everything, especially school and friendships. She even helped me to get close to Kenji.
I guess that everything was a lie.
My mind conjured images of her—the combat boots, the mocking smirk, the way she had looked at him.
'She stole my Shin. She preyed on his weakness. She's disgusting.' That's what I thought.
But the more I repeated the accusation, the thinner it sounded.
In reality, Akane hadn't stolen anything. Shin wasn't my property, and he probably hadn't ever been.
Suddenly, I stopped walking for a second, my lungs burning, as the terrifying clarity settled in: I hadn't lost him because she was a thief; I had lost him because I had starved him until he was forced to find food somewhere else.
During the lunch break, while the classroom was filled with the distant, cheerful chatter of the cafeteria, I fished my phone from my pocket.
My fingers were trembling so violently that I nearly dropped it.
Then I automatically pulled up the chat with Shin.
The last messages were mine—demands, questions, accusations. He never replied to me, not once, since Valentine's Day.
I could write to him… I needed.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard, and I began to type, the letters appearing in tiny, mocking bubbles.
'Shin, can we talk again, please?? Shin, I'm sorry. Shin, it wasn't supposed to be like this.' I wrote, but then I deleted every word and opened his profile, staring at his photo—an old picture from two years ago.
Why hadn't he ever changed it? Why had he kept everything the same, static and frozen in time, while I had been moving forward? Perhaps because I had never asked him to change, or perhaps because I had needed him to stay the boy I could rely on.
'Why am I still looking at this?' I felt a hysterical sob bubbling in my throat.
'I have Kenji. He should be the one supporting me.' I thought, as I closed the chat and opened the one with Kenji.
My fingers were still shaking, but I forced myself to type. "Hey Kenji-kun, can we meet after school? I really want to see you…❤️❤️"
Then, I hit send, and the blue ticks appeared within seconds. Then, the three little dots of the "typing..." animation began to dance.
My heart hammered against my ribs, waiting for the lifeline, waiting to be told I was still special.
"Sorry, babe, I can't today, sorry. Hanging out with the guys at the arcade to celebrate practice. Maybe another time."
I stared at the screen until the letters blurred.
I needed him, I wanted to talk, and I wanted to hear that I was still the center of his world, that Shin meant nothing, that I was still the perfect angel.
But Kenji was with his friends.
Kenji was always with his friends, at the arcade, or at practice.
He never asked how I felt unless it was to boast about me, and he probably didn't know anything about me, despite the fact that we had been talking for... months?
He didn't know about my fears or something stupid like my favorite food.
Shin had always known, and he had always been there at three in the morning just to listen to my trivial paranoias.
'Stop it, Kurone,' I ordered myself, shoving the phone into my bag with such force I heard the screen groan.
Then, I forced myself to walk back to my class, and the rest of the day was a grueling, agonizing charade.
The teacher's voice was a flat, distant drone, the lesson on the Meiji Restoration a meaningless sequence of sounds that evaporated before I could grasp their meaning.
I sat at my desk, my hands tangled together in my lap, my thumbs incessantly picking at each other in a nervous, repetitive cycle.
"Tsugikawa!"
The sudden, sharp call made me jump so hard that my chair skidded across the floor.
The entire class turned to look at me—a sea of eyes, some mocking, some merely bored.
"Could you tell me the years of the Meiji Restoration?"
The silence was like a physical weight pressing down on my lungs. I hadn't heard a single word. My brain was a void.
"...1868," I whispered, the number escaping my lips based on a desperate, blind guess.
"Correct," the teacher muttered, turning back to the board.
I survived the day by sheer luck, guessing my way through every question, but I couldn't escape the whispers.
They trailed me through the halls like a persistent scent.
"What's wrong with her?"
"She's so distracted."
"Did you see how Shin humiliated her at the karaoke?"
"And where is Kenji? They haven't been seen together all day…"
Yeah... for some reason, too many people knew about our 'event' at the Karaoke, since one of my classmates managed to hear the entire scene, and I still don't know how.
I kept my head down, waiting for the torture to end.
When the final bell finally rang, it sounded like a gavel falling in a courtroom.
I fled the building, my footsteps heavy, my gaze fixed on the asphalt, and I didn't know why, but my legs carried me to the main gates.
The courtyard was a festival of youth—laughter, shouting, groups of friends making plans, and it made me feel like an alien observing a world I no longer understood.
And then, I saw him.
Shin pushed through the heavy glass doors, his bag slung over his shoulder, eyes scanning the crowd with a calm, focused intensity, clearly looking for someone. He used to do the same with me.
When his gaze fixed on a point in the distance, his entire face, illuminated by a light I had never seen before, bloomed with a soft, genuine glow in his eyes.
I followed his line of sight and saw leaning casually against the brick wall near the main gates, with a carton of iced latte in one hand, and her bag slung over her shoulder.
She immediately pushed off the wall and walked straight toward him without a hint of hesitation.
When she reached him, Shin reached out and took her hand.
In that moment, I stopped breathing. I couldn't.
That wasn't a tentative, shy touch, and that surely wasn't the way he used to touch my sleeve, hoping for permission.
It was a firm, solid, undeniable grip. Their fingers wove together as if they belonged there, a lock that seemed unshakable.
And then, Shin smiled.
It was a liberated, serene, deeply happy smile, and he looked so incredibly handsome—more beautiful than I had ever seen him, because for the first time, he wasn't wearing a mask of devotion for my benefit.
I felt my chest constrict, as if someone had driven a dagger between my ribs.
I had never wanted him. I had never looked at him with the hunger that girl was showing right now, but seeing him like this—seeing him belonging to someone who clearly valued him—made me realize the magnitude of my own hollow existence.
Akane leaned into his shoulder, and Shin squeezed her hand, a gesture of pure, quiet intimacy.
Then, they walked away together, heading toward the school exit, leaving me behind in the shadows of the courtyard.
I remained frozen, my feet cemented to the concrete, my heart drumming a frantic, mournful rhythm.
My instinct—the primitive, possessive part of my brain—screamed at me to run to them and grab Shin's arm, just to say anything, scream anything, do anything to break that connection, to pull him back into my orbit.
But... I didn't move. I couldn't. My body didn't respond.
Because looking at them, I finally understood.
He wasn't mine anymore. And God help me, I wasn't even sure if he ever had been.
I watched their silhouettes grow smaller with every step they took, and with that, a little part of me was dying.
In that moment, while being completely alone, I had finally decided to walk back home. That was my only option.
—
The drive back to the Tsugikawa estate was a haze of grey.
Our villa was a palace of luxury: high ceilings, marble floors, manicured gardens, and a bedroom twice the size of Shin's entire apartment, filled with designer clothes, high-end cosmetics, and every comfort money could buy. I had everything since I was born.
But tonight, it felt like an echoing, sterile tomb.
I didn't even say 'Hi' to my parents or my butlers.
I just walked toward my room and collapsed onto my bed, with my arms folded tightly over my chest, staring into the dark.
The silence was deafening, pressing against my eardrums until they hummed.
Then, my gaze drifted to the desk, landing on the surface where I kept the tokens of my "relationship" with Kenji. A box of artisan chocolates, a designer handbag, a silver bracelet, all the things he gifted.
'Before Valentine's Day... everything was normal...'
I thought, biting my lip until it tasted of metal.
It hadn't happened on Valentine's Day.
Valentine's Day was just the perfect occasion to make our relationship public.
Everything had started weeks, maybe months earlier, when Kenji noticed me during one of his soccer team's training sessions.
He got close to me and started talking like no one had ever done before: he was confident, charming, and he immediately made clear that he didn't want only a 'friendship'.
That guy made my heart race, and I fell for his sweet words and gifts.
Since then, I had been seeing Kenji in secret while Shin waited for me, did my chores, worried about my moods, and poured his heart into a girl who was already kissing someone else.
He didn't know, and he had never suspected.
He had just kept on serving me, kept on hoping, kept on wondering when his moment would come, all while I was playing house with another man.
My stomach churned, a knot of revulsion tightening within me.
'I didn't want to hurt him.' I thought, but it was a lie.
I perfectly knew it was a lie even as the thought flickered through my mind.
I didn't care if he would've been hurt; probably, I didn't care about him at all.
Shin was just… background noise.
He wasn't real.
I never tried to ask myself what he was feeling, because he was just a prop in my life, and now that I had seen him smile, it was too late.
My eyes then wandered to the silver frame on my desk to see a Polaroid photo from two years ago, with Shin and me at the fairground. He had spent every yen he had on those rigged shooting games just to win me that enormous teddy bear.
I remembered how I had laughed, draped in the giant toy, while he stood there, his face covered in cotton candy and sweat, his eyes lit with a joy I now realized was entirely for me.
'You were so happy,' I thought, the realization stinging worse than the jealousy. 'And you were with me.' A bitter, broken smile appeared on my face for an instant.
The knot in my throat became a strangling coil. I didn't want it to end like this.
A single tear slid down my cheek, then another, trailing into the silk of my pillow.
Then, I pulled my knees to my chest, sobbing in the dark as realization started to hit me.
'How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so selfish? How did I not realize I was losing you until you were already gone?'
The idea of revenge flickered in my mind like a dying ember.
I could have made him pay. I could have torn Akane's life apart, ruined her reputation, and made Shin regret his choice.
I knew exactly which buttons to press. I was an expert at this, especially with my family's influence.
But as I looked at that Polaroid, and as I replayed the image of Shin's genuine smile in the courtyard—a smile that was finally, truly free—I stopped.
'Are you happy, Shin?'
I bowed my head, my shoulders shaking with the weight of my sorrow.
'I hope… I hope you are.'
Maybe I didn't love him the way he deserved to be loved, or maybe I just loved being loved by him since I've never truly desired his happiness. I didn't know.
I climbed off the bed, my legs feeling heavy, and moved to the floor-to-ceiling window. Then, I pressed my palms against the glass, staring out at the starless, black night.
'Why did seeing Akane hold your hand hurt so much?'
I was dating Kenji, and I never wanted to be Shin's girlfriend. I've never promised him a single thing I intended to keep. Then why?
Because…
I pressed my hand against my chest, feeling the frantic, painful rhythm of a heart that had been awakened too late.
'Because I love you.'
The realization was a train crash that tore through my defenses, leaving me raw and exposed.
I had spent seven years keeping him close, never letting him go, sabotaging his attempts to have female friends, feeding him crumbs of affection, all because, deep down in the dark, twisted places of my ego, I loved him, but I was incapable of showing it.
I didn't know how to love. I had treated his devotion like a commodity, his presence like a right, and his happiness like an irrelevant afterthought.
'You deserve to be happy, Shin.'
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, trying to steady my breathing.
Even if it isn't with me.
I closed my eyes, letting the darkness of the room swallow me whole.
Even if it was never meant to be with me.