SUPERMARKET FLOWERS ( t. oikawa )

01 | the intoxicating smiles

before.

I'm a fool. And you are the grand king.

Tell me what to do your highness.

HE WAS A PEST.

"Iwa-channnnn~" the pest calls as Mana converses with Iwaizumi. The girl can't help but shake her head and take the direction opposite Iwaizumi.

She had a bad feeling about this.

Now her fears had been turned into reality. Always tailing her, finding excuses so pitiful that Mana can't help but respond to.

"You're lonely," he told her once. "Your confidence and harshness is a facade you put on to push others away."

"You barely know me," she responded.

"I'm good at reading people," he informs her. "I'm a setter. In order to adjust to the needs of my teammates, I have to be able to read even the slightest change in emotion and yet you are-" he shakes his head, giving her a wry smile. "You have to figure that one out for yourself."

Mana stares blankly at her. "Is this your new excuse to talk to me?" she asks. "Because I bottle my emotions? Try harder, Trashykawa."

She didn't show it, but he had hit the bullseye.

"You got me, Mana-chaaan~!"

Hail and snow continue pelting the ground, outside, the school is almost an arctic wasteland. Mana forgot to wear her gloves and now she's afraid that she'll die of frostbite before she reaches home.

Warm shoulders encircle her own and she looks up to see the infamous setter. "What are you doing?" she asks, suppressing a tremble.

"Keeping you warm. You're so cold."

"You're so cliché," she mumbles, adjusting her scarf to hide the red that begins spreading on her cheeks. Traitorous hormones.

"You know you like it~!"

She had slapped him once. Accidentally. When she mistook him for a pervert. It was another cold evening, snow piling up on the sides of the streets.

"That hurt, Mana-chaaann~!" Apparently, she had slapped him so hard that it bruised and she had to tend to the injury in her apartment.

"Suck the complains, Crappykawa," she mutters back at him before pressing a damp cotton ball on his cheeks.

"Itai~!"

She presses the cotton harder.

"Continue complaining and I'll spread the news that you got slapped by a girl," she says.

"Do that and I'll tell them you're my girlfriend."

A slap meets the other side of his cheek.

"Why the hell are you always following me around?" she asks, when she finds him hiding beneath a shelf of teddy bears in the women's section. It was a Saturday and she was set to buy clothes for herself. Her other clothes were beginning to get tighter around the chest section. "I can tolerate school days, but I swear I can't handle you during weekends!"