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"Then what happened?" she asked, quieter than she meant to.
Sasaki's expression crumbled. He pressed both palms against his temples, elbows braced on the kotatsu, and stared down at the woodgrain as though it had personally wronged him. The overhead light caught the faint sheen of sweat at his hairline.
Perfect. Keep the voice cracking just slightly—not too much, or she'll think I'm faking it.
"She was excited," he said hoarsely. "More excited than me, even. And she reached down to my… lower half." He swallowed hard enough that Sayuri could see his throat work. "Nothing. No response at all. We both figured I was just nervous—first time being that close to anyone, you know? She was really sweet about it. Kept saying it was okay, kept trying to help me relax."
He dragged his hands down his face, pulling his lower eyelids into brief red crescents. "She rubbed me through my pants for—I don't even know how long. Minutes. And I felt nothing, Sayuri-nee. Like my body just… switched off. Eventually she stopped, and the look on her face—" His voice splintered. "She told me not to contact her again. Then she left."
Sayuri's lips parted. The mug in her hands had gone entirely forgotten.
He couldn't get hard?
The bluntness of the thought startled her. She replayed what he'd said—kissing, mutual touching, his crush's hand stroking him through the fabric of his pants—and couldn't reconcile any of it with the outcome.
Sasaki was what, eighteen? Nineteen? Boys that age were practically spring-loaded. A stiff breeze during gym class was enough to cause a crisis. The idea that sustained, deliberate contact from a girl he'd fantasized about for months produced zero physical response sounded less like nerves and more like a medical pamphlet she wasn't qualified to read.
This is worse than a fight. Way worse.
"Sasaki—don't spiral yet, okay?" She leaned forward, one hand reaching across to hover near his wrist without quite landing. "It could've been adrenaline. Your emotions were running so high, and it was your first intimate experience. Sometimes the body just locks up. That doesn't mean something's broken."
She said it with more confidence than she felt.
Sasaki lifted his head. His eyes were faintly bloodshot—an impressive detail even Sayuri didn't clock as manufactured—and his lower lip trembled once before he bit down on it. "I thought that too. She thought that too. She kept going, trying to help, rubbing me over my jeans, talking softly, and I just—" He shook his head, a sharp frustrated jerk. "Nothing. Not even a twitch. Sayuri-nee, what if something's actually wrong with me?"
The image he'd planted bloomed unbidden behind Sayuri's eyes: some faceless girl's slender fingers working rhythmically over the front of Sasaki's jeans, coaxing, patient at first, then increasingly uncertain, while Sasaki stared at the ceiling with that exact brand of quiet horror. Heat rushed up Sayuri's neck and pooled across her cheekbones. She pressed the cool ceramic of the mug against one cheek and pretended she was adjusting her hair.
Focus. He's hurting. This is not the time to get flustered over mental images.
"Have you ever… noticed anything like this before?" She fought to keep her voice clinical, the way a school nurse might. Neutral. Detached. Definitely not picturing anything. "Outside of yesterday, I mean. Day-to-day."
Sasaki's ears went pink. "I haven't really paid attention? Sometimes guys at school send around videos and I don't even open them, so I wouldn't know if—"
"Okay, okay." She held up a hand, not needing the specifics of whatever degenerate group chat. "What about mornings? Boys usually have a… a natural response when they wake up. A physical one." She articulated each word like she was reading from a biology textbook, her gaze fixed firmly on the far wall where a framed Violet Evergarden print hung slightly crooked.
Sasaki blinked. Tilted his head. "Morning response?"
Sayuri stared at him.
He doesn't even know what morning wood is?
A thread of genuine alarm stitched through her chest. If he'd never experienced it—if he honestly had no frame of reference for something that basic—then maybe this wasn't performance anxiety at all. Maybe there was a circulation issue, a hormonal imbalance, something that required an actual urologist and not a twenty-three-year-old literature graduate sitting across a kotatsu in an oversized Sanrio hoodie.
But then the memory detonated.
Two days ago. Sasaki pinning her to the hallway floor after that ridiculous stumble, his full weight settling across her hips before either of them could react. The crush of his chest against her breasts. And pressed against the inside of her left thigh, unmistakable even through two layers of clothing—hard, thick, radiating heat like a brand, twitching faintly against her skin as his hips shifted.
That had not been "no response."
That had been aggressive response.
Sayuri's eyes widened. Her fingers tightened around the mug until her knuckles blanched. She ran the timeline: the fall was two days ago. The failed confession was yesterday. One day apart. Even the most sudden case of dysfunction didn't flip like a light switch inside twenty-four hours—not in someone barely out of high school, not in someone whose body had been so obviously, almost painfully functional pressed against her—
She looked at Sasaki. He was still hunched over, the portrait of anguish, knuckles white where they gripped the edges of the kotatsu. Her gaze drifted involuntarily to his lap, hidden beneath the blanket. Then snapped back up.
No. Don't look there. Think.
"Sayuri-nee? What's wrong?" Sasaki must have caught the shift in her expression, because he straightened slightly, tension flickering across his jaw.
"Nothing." Sayuri shook her head. Drew a slow breath through her nose—jasmine, hojicha char, and beneath it, the clean laundry-and-skin scent that clung to Sasaki's collar whenever he sat this close. "Sasaki, can I ask you something? And I need you to answer honestly, even if it's embarrassing. This matters."
He nodded, throat bobbing.
She pressed her lips together, summoning every ounce of composure she'd ever faked during thesis presentations. "Have you ever had a wet dream? And those morning reactions I mentioned—waking up and finding that you're… already responding, physically, before you've even done anything. Have those happened to you before?"
Sasaki's flush deepened from pink to a dull, blotchy red that spread from his ears down to his collar. "Y-yeah. Both. Pretty regularly, actually." He rubbed the back of his neck, unable to meet her eyes. "So does that mean I'm okay? But then yesterday, with her—I kept imagining her all the time before that, Sayuri-nee. Sometimes I'd just think about her and I'd get—" He cut himself off, pressing his lips into a hard line.
Bingo. He's perfectly healthy. So why didn't it work with her?
The answer was already assembling itself in the back of Sayuri's mind, and she did not care for its shape one bit. Her pulse had kicked up to a tempo she associated with deadline panic. Mouth dry. Palms damp. The air between them felt suddenly thicker, weighted with something she couldn't name and didn't want to.
She forced herself to ask.
"Sasaki." Her voice came out steadier than expected. "That day in the hallway. When you fell on top of me." She couldn't look at him—her gaze fled to the window, to the pale scallop of curtain trembling in the draft from the AC unit. "What did that feel like? Physically."
Sasaki went very still.
She's asking. She remembers. God, she definitely felt it—
Wait. That's good. That's exactly what I need her to think about.
Several seconds of silence thickened between them. The delivery truck outside had gone. A crow called twice from the telephone wire beyond the balcony, its cry sharp and somehow accusatory.
"My heart was pounding," Sasaki finally murmured, his head ducked so low his bangs hid his eyes. "I couldn't breathe. It was—intense. Like every nerve just—" He gripped his own knee beneath the blanket. "It felt good. Really good. I'm sorry."
Sayuri's face ignited. The blush hit so hard and so fast that her vision swam for a half-second, blood rushing to the surface of her skin until her cheeks felt sunburnt. She remembered the weight of him—the solid, startling heaviness of a boy who was taller and broader than she kept expecting—and the heat of that rigid length pressed against her inner thigh, and the tiny involuntary grind of his hips before he'd scrambled off her.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Counted to three internally.
"That's—" Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. "That's a normal physiological response. You don't need to apologize. And honestly, if you hadn't reacted at all in that situation, that's when I'd be worried." A weak laugh escaped her, more breath than sound. "It'd mean I've completely lost my charm."
The joke landed clumsily between them. Sasaki glanced up through his bangs, uncertain.
Sayuri's mind was racing. The pieces clicked with a clarity she found deeply inconvenient. He'd been aroused—very aroused—by accidental contact with her body. One day later, with the girl he'd supposedly fantasized about for months, nothing. Wet dreams, morning erections, spontaneous responses to thoughts of his crush—all present and accounted for right up until the moment he'd landed on top of Sayuri and felt her breasts compress against his chest, felt her thigh warm against his cock through his shorts.
He fixated. On me. After seeing my body that day—after touching my chest during the fall—his body rewired its response. That's why he couldn't perform with her. Because his body wanted—
She slammed the brakes on that thought so hard she nearly bit her tongue.
I need to take responsibility for this.
"Your girlfriend was upset because she felt like you didn't want her," Sayuri said carefully, forcing her voice into something resembling authority. "But based on what you've told me—and based on what I know from that day—your body is functioning fine. The issue isn't physical."
"Then what is it?" Sasaki asked, and the genuine-sounding desperation in his voice tugged at something low in Sayuris sternum.
Hook, line, sinker. She's rationalizing it for me now.
"We can find out." The words left Sayuri's mouth before the sensible part of her brain could intervene. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears—a war drum, absurdly loud for a Sunday afternoon in a Meguro Ward apartment that smelled like burnt tea. "Come closer. Like that day."
Sasaki hesitated, hovering at the edge of the kotatsu.
Sayuri bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper. She fixed him with the most serious expression she could manage, chin lifted, jaw set, even as a visible tremor ran through her clasped hands. "This is medical, Sasaki. You helped me when I needed it—let me help you now. If we can confirm that your body responds normally to stimulus, then you'll know the problem with your girlfriend was situational, not permanent. Don't you want to know?"
Something shifted behind his eyes—a flicker of resolve that looked almost rehearsed, though Sayuri was too deep in her own adrenaline to notice. He stood, circled the kotatsu, and stopped in front of where she sat on the floor cushion, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to see his face.
She reached up and took his right hand. His fingers were warm, slightly calloused at the pads—guitarist's hands, she'd noticed before—and they twitched once in her grip. She pressed his palm flat against the back of her own hand, stroked her thumb across his knuckles.
"Anything?" she asked.
He shook his head.
Sayuri's throat clicked when she swallowed. The jasmine-and-skin scent of him was stronger now, standing this close—warm cotton, a trace of citrus shampoo, and beneath it the faintly sharp, clean musk of a young man's body that made her hindbrain light up in ways she categorically refused to examine.
Before the rational part of her could file an objection, she lifted his hand and pressed it firmly against her chest.
His palm settled over her left breast. Even through the thick fleece of her Sanrio hoodie and the T-shirt bra beneath it, the contact was immediate and electric—his hand large enough that his fingers curled slightly around the outer curve, the heel of his palm resting against the swell where it met her sternum. Sayuri felt her nipple tighten involuntarily against the fabric, and prayed to every deity in the Shinto pantheon that he couldn't tell.
She turned her face sharply to the right, staring at the crooked Violet Evergarden print with the intensity of someone trying to read its frame serial number. Her voice came out thin, fractured at the edges. "Wh-what about now?"
Sasaki stood frozen. His fingers hadn't moved—just sat there, rigid, cupping the warm weight of her through fleece. Sayuri could hear him breathing. Shallow, fast, audible.
"I think…" His voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper, rough-grained in a way that made Sayuri's stomach dip. "Yeah. I think—something's happening."
Something's happening. God, that's the understatement of the century.
Relief crashed through her—bright, dizzying, disproportionate to the situation. Her eyes stung. She blinked fast, lashes fluttering, and squeezed them shut.
"Okay. Good." Her chest rose and fell unevenly beneath his hand, her heartbeat hammering so hard she knew he could feel it against his palm. "Then—Sasaki, you can move. On your own. If your body responds to the contact, then it proves there's nothing wrong with you. So just—"
She couldn't finish the sentence. She pressed her lips together, kept her eyes screwed shut, and tilted her chin up like a girl bracing for a flu shot—the one thing she hated most in the world—offering herself to the small, necessary hurt because it was the right thing to do.
This is my fault. He saw my body. He touched me by accident and now his brain is tangled up in it, and the least I can do is help him prove to himself that he's healthy. That's all this is. That's all.
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