The least Osamu could do was to comfort her or—dare Bunko think it, change her entirely.
After a while, Bunko slipped away from Osamu’s arms. He’d given up on subduing her upon realizing that she wouldn’t be leaving the house any time soon.
Bunko turned around to look at Osamu, studying his mismatched eyes intently with her green ones.
Osamu tersely avoided her gaze, his lids slowly descending to curtain his eyes as if to keep them safe from her scrutiny. He wasn’t sure if the mask was still intact, which was why he didn’t want to take the risk. Surprisingly, as slow as Bunko’s thought process could be at seldom times, she could pick up emotions at a better speed and accuracy than he and Kohana combined.
“You seem more affected than I thought,” Bunko pointed out.
Osamu’s chagrin was given away through his incensed statement of, “That’s only because I’m concerned about my own student, Bunko. Aren’t you feeling the same way towards her?”
Slightly hurt by his slightly glacial reply, her fingers twitched slightly as she shook her head. Her stomach was beginning to ache and the same went with her heart. She disliked this feeling of hurt mostly because she hadn’t felt it in such a long time—not even eight years ago.
“Of course I’m concerned, but your… distress kind of differs from mine in terms of caliber. I hope you’re aware of that…” she added nervously. Obviously, she was confident that Osamu wouldn’t go on a rampage—as an adult, he was definitely capable of controlling himself… even to the point that he hardly ever seemed to care.
If it was even in his character, Osamu would’ve groaned, but he did very well to suppress it. For years, he’d been practicing on keeping his emotions in check all the time, so something like this didn’t take much effort at all.
However, hiding certain emotions was a whole different thing.
Even at his age, it was no surprise that he still had yet to experience different types of feelings, but he already knew the kinds that he would soon experience.
It was safe to say that there were many coming events that could incite those sentiments.
“Are you trying to say something…?”
Bunko nodded, not at all caring that she was crossing the line into a rather perilous territory.
“I’m just saying that you should start taking your own feelings into account. If you plan to keep up that mask in order to hide something from her… or me, I suggest you find out just why you’re feeling a little bit too strongly about this. I can see guilt in your eyes, just so you know. And I won’t listen if you suddenly start complaining about this not being any of my business.
“As someone who holds some kind of one-sided love for you, I don’t have much of a right to pry any further.” Her eyes softened after she’d said those words, and so did her voice. She could also observe the added struggle in Osamu with the way his shoulders tensed. “But I won’t keep my opinions to myself if it means that I could help you in some way possible. I don’t know whether you’d done anything to suddenly feel guilty like that, but… I’m just asking you to stop.”
Osamu’s eyes flared—this was something that Bunko was sure she would never remove from her memory. He’d never looked at her with such rage, sorrow and pain mixed all together.
Somehow, it also made her wonder whether or not she actually thought Osamu could be even slightly.
Just when she’d thought he’d snap, a submissive breath left his soft lips and he turned his back on her, walking forward to sit on the blue couch that sat on the left side of Bunko’s living room. He just sat there for a while, his form hunched forward and his head in his hands.
[16] One Step Forward
Start from the beginning
