WILDFLOWER [Ryunosuke Tanaka x OC]

Chapter 11 - The Talk

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Later that same day, Kano dozed off in class.

She'd been dreaming of The Incident, the night everything flipped upside down. And for some godforsaken reason, it was mixed with the second-worst night of her life, smearing into a not-real memory of total fuckery. Flashing lights smeared across Reika's stunned face as she stood on the edge of a pine forest, and Kano's father poured drinks from the back of their family car while her uncle played spin the bottle in the middle of the road with her classmates. Wakatoshi Ushijima flickered in and out, beside her, beside Reika, beside her father, in the trees. Kano couldn't feel her heart. The taste of pine sap oozed thick in her mouth, coating her tongue and filling her lungs. She couldn't speak. Nothing made sense. Her mind loved to make her suffer.

Not until she was forced out of her sleep by two large hands on her shoulders, shaking her violently, did she notice that she'd been asleep. Through the fading haze of her nightmare, Kano focused her searing contacts on Tanaka, who knelt beside her desk, concern creasing his brow. "You okay?" he asked lowly, gently.

Nodding with a long yawn, Kano glanced around the room to find the whole class pretending to work and watching out of the corners of their eyes... the teacher too.

Fuck my life.

"Tanaka, escort Abe to the nurse's office," their teacher said. Frowning, he ripped a hall pass off of his notepad and brandished it with a flourish.

Still pretty confused and tired, Kano followed orders blindly, scampering after Tanaka as he grabbed their note and left the room. He shut the door after them, and they headed down the hall, heavy silence only punctuated by Kano's stifled yawns at first.

He'd be lying if he said he wasn't at least a little distracted by her wearing his shirt. But that couldn't be helped. Stupid feelings.

Tanaka shook himself from his thoughts and said, "You screamed in your sleep during quiet work time... Nightmares again, huh?" He shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to keep the conversation light and non-confrontational. The memory of her screaming bloody murder when she slept over still haunted his mind, echoing through time in his ears.

She said nothing.

He pressed on, unrelenting. "When's the last time you slept, Kano?"

"None of your-"

"It sure as shit is my business," he said, tilting his voice toward authoritative and away from caring. "You said it yourself, babe. You're my best friend. Besides Noya, that is. And you're not taking care of yourself. You're not okay, even though you pretend you are. So I need to step in to make sure you aren't running yourself into the ground."

Kano didn't have a good answer for him; he was 100% right. She'd been forgetting to eat, pushing herself too hard during practice, bottling up her emotions, staying up late to do homework, and waking up early to do chores... she'd been running herself ragged. Most recently, she'd stopped sleeping altogether for a few days at a time, just to maximize her free time and efficiency. She knew she'd sleep eventually... but that didn't matter.

And Kano just accepted that this was how it was right now.

Ryu grabbed her shoulder, grip loosening when he realized he might be overreacting. "I need to know... just, at least this one damn thing, Kano. Just this one. Tell me the last time you slept so I can feel like I learned something real about you today."

His words confused her, buzzing and stinging in Kano's brain like a swarm of mosquitos. Something real...?

"At your house," she admitted softly, avoiding his intense gaze.