Kenji
As Kenji spoke, I brought my feet to a halt, stopping a few feet away from him.
Instead of running away, I just stood there, my posture completely straight, looking directly into his narrowed eyes.
"About what?" I asked. My voice was perfectly leveled, entirely devoid of any emotional fluctuation.
Kenji's eyes tightened into slits, studying my face for a long, calculating moment, as if he were trying to figure out exactly which version of me he was dealing with.
I didn't know what he was searching for, but at the same time, I felt like he was searching for a crack in me.
"About the karaoke box," he said finally, his words coming out sharp and clipped. "About what you did in that room. The way you stood there and systematically humiliated us."
"I didn't humiliate anyone, Kenji," I replied smoothly, looking at him with an unblinking clarity. "I just stood there and told the truth. If the truth humiliates you, that's not my problem."
Kenji let out a short, sharp, bitter laugh; a hollow, ugly sound that bounced off the metal lockers.
"The truth, you say," he repeated, tilting his head, a patronizing, venomous smirk appearing on his lips. "You think you're clever, don't you? You think you've actually won something because you found your tongue for five minutes."
"I don't think anything," I said, my tone remaining entirely flat. "I was just trying to tell funny stories." I teased.
Kenji took a sudden, aggressive step closer, invading my personal space, and the scent of his expensive cologne mixed unpleasantly with the sterile smell of the school corridor.
His voice dropped an octave, becoming even quieter, even more tightly coiled.
"You should be profoundly grateful that we were in a public establishment that night, Ishikawa," he whispered, a dangerous, dark promise flickering in his eyes. "You should thank whatever gods you worship that there were witnesses around. Because if we weren't in that room... if we were out here in the dark... I am not a patient person. I don't tolerate people talking down to my girlfriend or me."
The underlying threat of violence hung heavy in the air between us, thick and toxic.
A week ago, a threat like that from an athletic, popular alpha male like Kenji would have made my stomach drop, my knees shake, and my vision blur with panic.
But right now? I looked at his tensed muscles, and I felt absolutely nothing.
No fear and no urge to apologize. Just a profound, clinical detachment.
"But you didn't do anything," I said simply, my voice an impenetrable wall of indifference. "And now the damage is done. I don't care about Kurone anymore. I don't care about what she thinks, and I certainly don't care about what you think. I'm leaving."
I shifted my weight, moving to step cleanly around his shoulder to continue my walk toward the exit doors.
"That's it?" Kenji called out after me, his voice rising, the controlled anger finally cracking to reveal the ugly, bruised ego beneath the surface. "You're just going to walk away like a coward?"
I stopped walking. I didn't turn around to face him right away. I just stood there, staring at the double doors at the end of the hall.
"There's nothing left to say, Kenji," I stated quietly. "Talking won't get us anywhere."
Kenji let out a low, mocking hiss, and when he spoke again, he threw a calculated, brutal low blow, specifically designed to rip open the deepest wounds of my past.
"She never wanted you, Shin. Not for a single, miserable second."
The words hit me square in the center of my back.
I stood completely frozen. It wasn't like a knife wound—I was far too numb to her name for that kind of sharp, agonizing pain.
It was more like a sudden, freezing wave of dirty water washing over me, a stark, ugly reminder of the seven-year psychological prison I had only just escaped.
Slowly, deliberately, I turned on my heel to face him.
Kenji was standing there, his chest locked tight, his eyes glittering with a cruel, triumphant satisfaction.
He saw me stop, and my absolute stillness. So, his narcissistic brain immediately misinterpreted it as a direct hit. He thought he had successfully found my weak spot.
Instead of showing any kind of emotion, I just stared at him, my face a completely blank slate.
I was waiting.
But I wasn't waiting because I was sad or heartbroken. I was waiting because a strange, cold curiosity had suddenly taken root in my chest.
'Show me,' I thought, staring at his smug, arrogant face. 'Give me everything. Tell me every single dirty, hidden detail. Show me the full extent of her lies. Give me more reasons to completely, irrevocably despise the memory of her.'
I feigned being caught entirely off guard, letting my shoulders drop just a fraction to encourage him.
Kenji, fully swallowing the bait, took another step forward, practically vibrating with the urge to twist the knife he thought he held.
"She and I... we were already talking, texting, and hooking up for months before Valentine's Day," he said, his voice dripping with a venomous, boastful satisfaction. "Months, Shin. While you were trailing behind her like a pathetic little puppy, she was sending me pictures from her bedroom. And do you know how often your name came up in our conversations?"
He paused, leaning in, deliberately savoring the moment like a sadist delaying a blow.
"Almost never. You didn't even exist to her when you weren't actively doing something for her. Except..." a cruel grin spread across his face, "...except for a couple of times when she wanted to laugh. She told me about the promise. The stupid pinky promise in the sandbox from when you were ten years old. She thought it was hilarious. She said you were still clinging to it like a pathetic, brain-damaged child clinging to a filthy security blanket. She said she only kept you around because it was convenient to have a harbor that always agreed with her."
I stood perfectly still, listening to the sound of his voice echoing in the empty hall.
The words should have entirely destroyed me. And in a distant, structural way, they did cause a dull, passing ache deep in my chest. But it wasn't the ache of a broken heart. It was the heavy, mournful realization of just how much of my precious youth, my energy, and my soul I had completely wasted on a girl who hadn't even possessed the basic human decency to respect my existence.
Kurone had turned my entire life's devotion into a joke to entertain another man in the dark.
I kept listening to him, and without any particular reason, my heart wanted to know even more details.
"She never felt a single ounce of guilt about it, either," Kenji continued, his voice rising as he grew bolder, stepping entirely into my space. "Not once. She was wrapped up in my sheets, laughing at your text messages, while you were probably sitting alone in your dark house, waiting for hours just for her to send a single word back."
He stopped, his eyes searching my face for the tears he desperately wanted to see.
"Do you want to know the absolute worst part, Ishikawa?" he whispered, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial, disgusting purr. "She didn't think about you at all. Not during her very first time with me. Not after. You weren't even a passing thought in her head while she was screaming my name. You were nothing to her. Absolute zero."
I felt a profound, heavy sensation twist violently in the pit of my stomach, but not the one that a love betrayal makes you feel.
It was pure, visceral, bone-deep disgust; an overwhelming wave of revulsion directed at the sheer, terrifying narcissism of the monster I had worshiped for a quarter of my life.
Despite his words, I managed to keep my mask perfectly intact. I kept my breathing slow, my eyes locked dead onto Kenji's glittering gaze.
The urge to beat him senseless was too much.
"And you honestly believe that makes you better than me, Kenji?" I asked, my voice coming out incredibly quiet, steady, and entirely devoid of fear.
Kenji blinked, his smug grin faltering for a microsecond.
He was completely caught off guard by my utter lack of an emotional breakdown; I could see it from his reaction.
"I'm not trying to be better," he muttered, his tone shifting into something more defensive. "I'm trying to make your stupid brain understand reality. You were never, ever going to be her choice. You're a nobody, Ishikawa. So don't walk around the corridors pretending like you've won some grand prize just because you ran straight to her best friend the second you got dumped."
He crossed his thick arms over his chest again, attempting to reassume that posture of untouchable athletic dominance. He tilted his head, a nasty, sharp glint appearing in his eyes.
"You actually think Akane Takanashi is any different?" he asked, a condescending sneer distorting his features. "You think that crazy bitch actually cares about a broken loser like you? She's using you, Ishikawa. Just like she's used every single person who ever made the mistake of getting close to her. She's been manipulating people, playing mind games, and pulling strings since middle school. She's a snake. A pretty one, sure, but she's a poisonous snake. She's completely insane."
The air in my lungs turned instantly to liquid nitrogen.
The calm, detached curiosity that had been keeping me anchored throughout his insults vanished in a flash of blinding, absolute white light.
The insults to my character, the revelations about Kurone's betrayal, the mockery of my childhood promise—none of it had truly broken through my apathy.
But the very microsecond her name left his mouth wrapped in that disgusting, casual slander, a cold, hard knot of visceral, protective hatred formed in the center of my chest.
'He just said that about Akane.'
The girl who had stayed awake all night to clean the remnants of my misery. The girl who had trusted me with her absolute first time in the dark. The girl who had held my hand in front of the entire school, silently declaring to the world that I was worth something. He was standing there, breathing the same air as me, calling her a snake.
I felt a strange, terrifying physical sensation take over my body.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
My voice came out in a low, glacial, terrifyingly controlled whisper that seemed to physically vibrate through the floorboards of the empty corridor.
Inside the pockets of my uniform trousers, my hands balled into tight, white-knuckled fists.
I squeezed my fingers together so hard my short nails cut deeply into the flesh of my palms.
The sharp, stinging pain was the only thing keeping me grounded, the only thing preventing me from letting go of my bag and driving my fist straight into his smug mouth.
Kenji shrugged carelessly, a small, arrogant smile playing on his lips, completely oblivious to the fact that he was currently standing on top of a landmine.
"Don't worry about it, Ishikawa," he said, turning his body slightly to walk away, tossed the words over his shoulder like trash. "You'll find out soon enough. You'll see exactly how 'good' and 'innocent' she really is. Just wait until she's done with you."
"Kenji."
I called his name out, and that wasn't a shout. It was a command.
He froze, his boots stopping against the linoleum. The pretty boy didn't turn around to face me, but I could see the sudden tension locking up his broad shoulders.
"For now," I said, my voice carrying a cold, absolute finality that seemed to cut off the oxygen in the hallway, "she is the person who reached out and saved my life when I was standing on the edge. The rest of it doesn't matter to me in the slightest."
Kenji remained completely silent for a long, heavy moment, standing there in the dim corridor with his back to me and his posture rigid.
I could feel that he didn't want to provoke me anymore.
Even a narcissist like him was smart enough to recognize the tone of a man who had absolutely nothing left to lose.
He had eventually realized, with a sudden shock, that he could no longer win this interaction verbally.
When he finally spoke again, his voice was entirely different. It was quieter, brittle, and fully stripped of its confident, athletic armor.
"Tch," he muttered, shifting his bag on his shoulder. "For the record... I don't have anything against you personally, Ishikawa. But I absolutely despise disrespect. From this exact moment onward... don't you ever dare to look down on Kurone or me again."
I looked at his rigid back, and a slow, tired, thoroughly knowing smile spread across my lips.
"Don't worry, Kenji," I said quietly, the words falling like heavy stones into the silence. "I don't have any need to. You should say this thing to your special strawberry Princess."
Kenji stood frozen for one final second, the weight of the insult registering in his bruised ego.
Then, without uttering another single syllable, he marched away down the corridor, his heavy boots clicking a rapid, chaotic rhythm against the floor until he disappeared around the corner toward the main exit.
He knew that he couldn't reply anymore. Kurone was the one who 'tormented' me, and he knew it.
I stood alone in the hallway for a long time, watching the empty space where he had been.
Slowly, I let out a long, shuddering breath, my shoulders dropping.
I pulled my hands out of my pockets and felt that they were shaking uncontrollably—not from a single shred of fear, but from the raw, volatile surge of protective anger that was still coursing through my veins. My palms were marked with small, crescent-shaped indentations where my nails had cut the skin.
Despite all my anger, I didn't run after Kenji.
Instead, I reached into my bag, pulled out my smartphone, and unlocked the screen.
My fingers were steady as I pulled up her chat.
"Shin: I'm officially on my way back. Put the kettle on."
I locked the screen, shoved the phone back into my pocket, and began to walk.
My steps were fast, purposeful, and entirely focused on the future.
I was walking toward her, and I wanted to see her as soon as possible.
I needed to tell her what had happened and ask what Kenji meant.