Worth the Effort

Saiyuri Okoto takes injuries seriously.
Atsushi Murasakibara takes the snacks inside Yōsen's athletic treatment room seriously.
At first, that's the only reason the enormous first-year basketball player keeps appearing in front of her with increasingly questionable medical complaints. A bruised finger. A blister. A sore shoulder that somehow does not interfere with opening three bags of chips.
Then Saiyuri hides the snacks.
Murasakibara keeps coming.
Somewhere between athletic tape, convenience-store runs, quiet afternoons and a boy who insists basketball is annoying, Saiyuri realizes Atsushi's problem has never been that he feels nothing.
It's that admitting something matters makes losing it possible.
And Saiyuri has no intention of telling him what he should love.
She'd just like him to stop lying about what he already does.