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"I NEVER READ your letter," he hurriedly said, before Reo could even utter his name.
"What?"
There was something strange in Nagi's overall appearance. He looked affected and restless, like an overcharged object that needed to let the energy out soon. His eyes shone with an emotion Reo had never seen in him before, so strong and unknown it pinned Reo to the ground. He looked as if being there pained him.
"The one you gave me, where you said you loved me," Nagi insisted, "I didn't read it in time. I didn't know I had to read it."
His breathing was coming out in puffs between each sentence, and Reo wondered if Nagi had run all the way here to say this. He wondered, too, if Nagi had thought of what to say or hadn't had the time to do so, and so emotions and words escaped him, making it hard for him to mask or understand them.
Most importantly, Reo wondered what the hell was Seishiro talking about.
"Why didn't you tell me?" The skater continued, torn between frustration and grief. "Why couldn't you be honest from the start to avoid all these misunderstandings? I could've seen you that year. We could've fixed this right there. We would've."
The certainty in his words, so opposite to his trembling frame, made Reo remember who he was going against and what they were talking about. Didn't he explain it all in his letter? Wasn't he clear enough?
"I was scared," Reo replied carefully, closing the door behind him. He wanted to be angry; did Seishiro care so little that he couldn't even read the one thing Reo left for him? But the anger didn't come naturally, and instead, he wasn't sure how he felt. He wasn't sure he could even feel.
"You didn't know?" He asked again, almost whispering. You didn't know there was a time I loved you so bad I fell apart?
"I had no idea," Nagi replied.
Reo didn't know what was worse. As usual, Nagi's quiet nature gave space to silence, and that also gave space for thinking. Reo could only start to process what the other man was saying, without being able to give it much nuance, since it was conflicting with everything he's come to terms with in the past two years.
What did this mean? That every time Reo cursed Seishiro for letting him go so easily, he had been mistaken?
No. Even if Seishiro had gone to the park, it wouldn't have changed that he had still invalidated Reo's feelings, replaced him with Isagi, and pushed him away in the last year or so of their friendship. It didn't eradicate the root of the problem; the heartbreaking emotions Reo had written down, those that made him leave. It didn't magically fix things...
