Chapter Text
It was the hottest day of the year so far, a record-setting 33.2° C in late May, when you first met him.
You hadn’t thought it would be that bad--after all, you’d lived most of your life farther south, where the heat was much worse than it ever was in the typically-cool Miyagi Prefecture--but you hadn’t counted on the humidity being quite so intense, especially not so early in the morning. Which was why, after taking one step outside, you went right back into your house to grab a second water bottle. Running with something in both hands could be annoying, and you’d definitely look kind of dumb, but it was still better than getting heatstroke.
Even so, you decide that you’d better take it easy today. No reason to push yourself too hard in this heat.
You’re a runner, specifically a long-distance runner, a third-year high school student who’d been the rising star of her track team back at your old school in your hometown of Toyokawa, in the Aichi Prefecture--which was saying something, since the girls’ long-distance running team had won the All-Japan High School Ekiden Championship several times. That was why you’d chosen that school in the first place, for the chance to win the Ekiden, even though you’d had to get up an extra half-hour early and switch trains twice to get there, even though none of your middle school friends were going there. And you’d chosen well; the team very nearly won a fourth time when you were a first-year, though you weren’t actually allowed to run; you were a standby, a substitute in case of injury, even though you were faster and had more endurance than both of the two second-years and at least one of the third-years who ran. You can’t help thinking that if only you’d been allowed to run, if only you’d worked harder and somehow convinced them to put you on the team, your school might have won. It had gotten worse the following year, when you did get to run as a second-year: your team had suffered a crushing defeat by your rival school, and it had been frustrating (and literally painful) enough that you still don’t like to think about it. You’d sworn then that it would be different next year.
And it was, far more than you had expected, because your family had suddenly moved, and none of all the hard work and sacrifices you’d made for your team of the previous two years had mattered.
The school you’re at currently isn’t bad, but Niiyama Girls’ High is famous for their volleyball team, not their track team. The most athletic girls all play volleyball, and only the ones who don’t make the team or have no interest in that sport but want to be athletes of some sort end up joining your club. None of the schools nearby are known for their track teams, in fact, and with college entrance exams right around the corner, your parents had refused to let you choose any school that was nearly an hour away from home, so Niiyama Girls’ High it was.
And it could be worse, honestly. Sure, the ‘queens of volleyball’ got all the attention and most of the club funding, but it’s still a good school, with caring teachers and fast-track classes. The people are nice, too--your classmates had welcomed you, and you made new friends with surprising ease, despite being a little shy at first. All the girls on your team are working hard and giving it their all in every practice...but you know in the back of your mind that it won’t be enough. That while your team is definitely going to make it to the Ekiden, you won’t be able to win once you’re there. Not against your old teammates. Not against Kojokan High, who won last year and ripped your one chance at ever winning away.
I should’ve trained harder, is all you can think whenever you remember that day, the stitch in your side, the fire in your lungs, the throbbing pain in your left ankle, the way the girl from Kojokan had pushed and pressed you and thrown off your rhythm. The way you’d let her throw off your rhythm. Her mocking, lilting laughter and the swish of her long ponytail as she’d left you in her dust and claimed the victory, crossing the finish line mere seconds ahead of you, and yet it might as well have been forever for all the difference it made.
Stop, you tell yourself now, banishing those negative thoughts that hang like dark clouds around your head most mornings. Not now. You can feel the sweat trickling down your back already and you’ve only just finished your pre-stretching warm-up jog to the small park at the end of the block. Not today, when it’s almost too hot to handle. You look up from stretching your hamstrings and feel another sudden surge of heat, and this one has nothing to do with the weather.
...Speaking of being too hot to handle...
It’s him.
Ever since you’d moved here in the spring, you’d fallen into a pattern of running every morning before school. You could’ve actually done that at school, but you figure you spend enough time there already. Running in town is more interesting anyway, a nice change of pace, and a good way to learn your way around your new place of residence instead of just doing endless laps around a track, literally going nowhere fast.
And, well, the fact that you’d encountered the most attractive guy you’d ever seen during that first run, as well as your second and third, was just an added bonus, some nice extra scenery. Not that you’d said anything to him, or even made eye contact, you had just admired him from afar. (Particularly his thighs. And his calves. He had a really nice back also...and where his thighs met his back, that was nice too...then there were his arms...) After most of a week of passing each other in the crosswalk at a particular corner, you’d concluded that this was a regular morning routine for him also, every day except Mondays, which was fine with you, though it definitely wasn’t a deal-breaker. Most of your focus was on your running, your breathing, your pulse and your pace, not the brief three seconds or so you spent giving a passing glance to a good-looking stranger who had never seemed to look back.
It was strange, though: you couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked vaguely familiar, but you’re absolutely certain that you’ve never met him before. No, it had to be that you’d seen a picture of him somewhere, something impersonal. Had he been on television? In the newspaper? Some kind of magazine? You don’t know, you simply can’t place him, and while it is a minor, niggling irritation at the back of your mind, like a grain of sand trapped inside an oyster’s shell, you decide that it’s ultimately not important.
Running is what matters. Making yourself faster, stronger, better, the best, that’s what’s important. Not some random guy you pass on the street most every day, never exchanging so much as a glance or a silent nod.
...Even so, some small part of you still can’t help looking forward to those few transitory seconds in the morning when you’re reminded that this sort of living, breathing personification of beauty can exist in the world, and that you can feel the slight breeze that moves across your skin when he passes you by.
It’s him.
You’d know that ass anywhere.
Not to mention those well-toned, surprisingly smooth-looking legs, the powerful shoulders, and that honestly too-handsome face. Beautiful, that’s really the only word that can half-adequately describe him, that can even begin to do him justice.
...However, he doesn’t look all that beautiful right now.
Right now he’s bent over double in the middle of the sidewalk, hands on his knees, elbows locked, and you can see the sheen of sweat covering his body, can hear the ragged pant of his breath that’s making his whole body heave. His face is pale, his eyes are slightly glazed, and despite the heat, you notice goosebumps on his arms as he raises a hand to his head, wincing.
You’re no medic but you are a runner, an experienced, long-time athlete, so you know immediately what you’re looking at here: heat exhaustion.
Even though he’s in the middle of the sidewalk, even though there are plenty of people out and about at this time of morning, no one seems to take any notice of his harsh breathing or increasingly visible struggle to stay on his feet. People pass right by without so much as a waver of hesitation, step around him, avoid looking at him, carry on with their business despite his obvious distress--and somehow you just can’t stand it.
Almost before you know what you’re doing, you find yourself coming up alongside him, shoving one of your water bottles into his hands, and saying in a tone that brooks no arguments, “Drink that, but not too fast.”
The beautiful stranger fumbles with the bottle, his long, graceful hands unexpectedly clumsy as he wrestles with the cap then gulps down two long, greedy mouthfuls of water.
“Not too fast,” you repeat, reaching out to rest an admonishing hand on his bare forearm, then jerking it back when you feel how clammy his skin is. Just water isn’t going to be enough; you have to get him somewhere cool, somewhere that he can sit down and rest and keep drinking that water for a while, and you have to do it fast. “Come on. Let’s get you out of this heat,” you say, careful to explain yourself so he’ll know why it is that you, some random girl off the street, are taking him by the elbow and insistently pulling him along.
He comes along willingly, or at least unquestioningly, and within three minutes you’ve hauled him into the nearest shopping mall. The doors slide open and the air conditioning hits you like a wall of very cold, possibly-made-of-ice bricks; you can’t help but shiver as you step through into the chilly building that echoes with the chatter of countless voices even this early in the morning, and after half a dozen steps, you can already feel the sweat cooling on your body, making your shirt stick to your back worse than ever.
It’s not hard to find an empty bench, and you tow the beautiful stranger over to it, then unceremoniously push him down onto it. Setting down your other water bottle, you take the first one back from him, twisting the cap so that it’s only partially open. (You’d been meaning to throw it out since that cap was becoming a problem, only letting a little water through at a time unless it was open wide enough to release a forceful gush instead; now you’re glad of its quirk, since it’ll force him to drink more slowly.)
“Rest here,” you say as you pass the bottle back to him. “And keep drinking that, but only a little at a time. I’ll go get you a sports drink. Any requests?”
The stranger’s brown eyes are clear now, but they’re downcast, focused on the water bottle in his hands; the faintest moue of irritation--or frustration?--is starting to form on his face, a furrow forming between his eyebrows, across his nose. He doesn’t raise his head as he gives it a negative shake, and you find yourself saying, “All right, no complaints allowed, then!” as you turn on your heel and march off to find the nearest vending machine.
It’s not until you’re in the act of pressing the button on the machine that everything you’ve just done in the past 10 minutes or so finally catches up with you. Your hand wavers, your finger almost juking down and hitting the button of a less-popular flavor; it takes you a few seconds to remove the pad of your finger from the button, even after the sports drink tumbles down into the receptacle bin below with a heavy clunk.
What the hell am I doing? you wonder, and this time your hands are the ones that fumble with a cool drink. It was true that you were only trying to help someone in trouble, taking charge and doing something that clearly needed to be done since no one else was doing it, but...you were also pretty bossy about it all, and right now you’re probably getting more involved than is really necessary.
You didn’t think you were such a sucker for a pretty face.
Right. I’ll just give him this drink, tell him he can keep that water bottle, and say that he should rest here a little longer before heading home, you decide. It’s Sunday, thankfully not a school day, so you don’t have to worry about being late to class, but it is probably too late for you to get in your full run--the heat is only going to get worse as the sun climbs higher in the sky, and there’s no sense in pushing yourself into the same state as the guy you’d just kinda saved.
...I really did kinda save him...does that make me the knight in shining armor, and him the princess? you wonder with a quiet snicker, and, well, he’s certainly pretty enough to fill the role. Much prettier than you, not that you really think of yourself as ugly. You’re just...you. Normal and mostly unremarkable.
Anyway, you had dragged him in here pretty insistently, so here’s hoping he doesn’t press kidnapping charges or anything--another good reason to give him the drink and take off immediately after. Well, once you’re sure he’s really okay, that is...
He’s still sitting, but now he’s also leaning back against the wall behind him when you return, his head tilted back, brown eyes focused unseeingly on the glass and corrugated metal that make up the ceiling. Your water bottle dangles loosely from one of his hands, forgotten for the moment, but the way he’s holding it makes it look about half-full, like he’s been following your advice and drinking from it at a measured pace. What with the way he’s staring into space, you’d be worried that he’s delirious or confused, except there’s a focused light in his eyes that tells you that he’s merely lost in thought, not in any sort of heat exhaustion haze; all trace of his previous slight frustration is gone.
You find your steps slowing, then stopping completely, and for the first time ever, you actually let yourself look at him for longer than five seconds.
That prolonged observation just confirms what you’d known already: he’s beautiful. From his strong jaw and perfect nose to his graceful neck and long, sleekly-muscled limbs, to his double-lidded eyes and skillfully-tousled brown hair, he’s definitely the best-looking guy you’ve ever seen in real life. There’s something about his bearing, too, that had always drawn you in, an intensity you’d felt even facing him across the crosswalk in the mornings...
You shake your head at yourself before you can really start staring, though. He’s handsome, sure, but that doesn’t mean anything to you: anyone that handsome is probably either already taken or has a terrible personality. Or maybe both, you think musingly. You’d seen more than your share of nice girls who put up with way too much crap from awful boyfriends simply because the guy was good-looking. There’s no reason that this guy couldn’t be the same way.
Not that it matters. This is a one-time thing, you’ll probably never talk to him again. Heck, he might not even remember you the next time you pass each other on the street. He might not have even noticed you at all before today. He’d always seemed very focused on his running, and so were you. You’d never had any reason to call out to him. Even after something like this, you still won’t, not really. Some people might use it as an excuse to find out more about him, to learn his name and maybe even get his phone number or email, but...well, that’s a little too forward for you, and you’re not that confident about anything, really, except your skill at running and in a few classes at school. Boys are something of a mystery, almost a foreign species, an unknown quantity, and talking to them about anything other than school or sports is a daunting task.
Well, this is sort of about sports, you attempt to reassure yourself. It’s about his health, anyway, so maybe you can manage it. Maybe. Probably. Drawing a deep breath, you steel yourself, and stride forward with a self-assurance that you know should be convincing to anyone who doesn’t actually know you, but that is truly paper-thin at best. Once more into the breach!
“Hey,” you say by way of greeting, offering him the sports drink, which he accepts with a chipper, “Ah, thank you! Sorry for your trouble!” that doesn’t really sound all that sorry. As he takes it, his hand brushes yours, and when he flashes an unexpectedly charming smile up at you, you’re suddenly not certain that brief moment of contact was an accident. You’re even more not certain that it’s a completely honest smile--it comes too easily for you to accept it at (hah) face value--but you have no way of knowing, and you can’t really hold it against him either way. After all, isn’t there something fake about most smiles given to strangers? In any case, you’re faking being calm about all of this, so you really don’t have any room to point fingers, and, well. Fake or not, it’s still a very nice smile...so much so that you can’t deny that your heart gives a worrisome little flutter on seeing it so close-up.
“Please excuse me,” you say, quickly ducking your head as you bend over him, grasping his arm and pressing two fingers against his wrist, finding his radial pulse point and silently counting his heartbeats as you keep an eye on your wristwatch. You’re glad to find that his pulse is strong and steady, already back to a normal-range resting heart rate, and when you give a relieved little sigh and look up from the shifting digits on your watch, you find him watching you with a faint smile--no, smirk--on that handsome face.
“Y-your...pulse is good,” you stutter, wavering under the close inspection of those sharp brown eyes, listening to your own heartbeat thunder in your ears a little and praying that any additional pinkness in your too-hot cheeks will be written off as something to do with the heat you’d both been subjected to until recently. You swallow hard and force yourself to keep talking. “How do you feel?”
“I’m feeling a lot better now,” he says cheerfully, and you start to try to offer him a hesitant smile in return, but before you can quite manage it, he adds, “Though if you really want me to drink this sports drink you just gave me, I’m afraid I’ll need my hand back~”
For a second you’re confused; then you realize that you’ve still got ahold of his wrist. Locking a startled squeak behind clenched jaws, you hastily release him, hurriedly tucking your hands behind your back and wanting to apologize, but not feeling entirely certain of your voice at the moment.
The stranger, in contrast, seems completely at ease, twisting the lid off the bottle and downing a good third of the drink in one go, closing his eyes and tilting his head back like an actor in a television commercial, and you find yourself staring yet again, particularly at the curve of his lips set against the mouth of the bottle, the motion in his throat as he swallows, and those unfairly long, dark eyelashes.
Goddamn, but he’s pretty.
Your watch beeps on your wrist just as he finishes taking that deep draught; and while you’ve got your head down again, looking at your watch, you see him glance over at you in your peripheral vision.
“Thank you for helping me,” he says suddenly, and you give a tiny, involuntary jump at his tone (which is friendly and far too charming) and look up, startled. His expression matches his tone of voice, and you swallow hard and resist the urge to take a quick step backwards at how flirty it is. “You seriously came to my rescue!”
“Well, someone had to,” you manage, turning your face away from that welcoming, magnanimous smile. “I couldn’t just let you collapse out there.”
“Ah, but you could have. No one else was stopping to help.”
Once again you look up in startlement, this time because...although that playful tone from before hasn’t gone anywhere, there’s a note of soft sincerity in his words, and the smile you find angled up at you is a little less Casanova and a little more candid.
“That’s exactly why I had to do something,” you reply with a knee-jerk sort of matter-of-factness, your tone rife with obviously I couldn’t just leave you, stranger or not, what kind of person does something like that?
Your watch beeps again (you’d been expecting it to, since you’d just now set it to go off again to give yourself an excuse to escape, if necessary--you’re usually good at planning ahead like that) and you make your eyes go wide as you feign surprise on seeing the time.
“Ah, gotta go, I’m running late,” you say, giving him a slight bow before turning to go, though not before retrieving your first water bottle and adding over your shoulder, “You should probably rest here a little longer, at least until you finish that sports drink and the rest of that water.”
He’s looking at you with a little more interest than before, but he doesn’t try to make you stay, just smiles that maybe-fake smile and waves and gives a cute little, “Bye bye~”
“Look after yourself,” you say with a hint of admonishment, then turn your back on him completely and head for the exit. You think you feel his eyes on you as you go, but tempting as it is, you won’t let yourself look back, so you don’t know for certain.
You tell yourself that you’re not running away, but if you were, what would you be running away from, exactly? A probably-shallow, too-handsome potential heartbreaker who had been polite and grateful and only a little bit flirty and who maybe didn’t deserve to have you run away like this, but you figure better safe than sorry. You’d done what you’d felt you had to do, what basic human decency compelled you to do. You’d stepped in and kept him from getting heat stroke, and you’d even bought him a drink. He seemed to have recovered already, and you didn’t owe it to him to stay any longer, but you did owe yourself at least part of your daily run, though as hot as it is, it’ll be more of a light jog.
The most ridiculous thing in the world would be for you to get heat exhaustion, and have to be saved by the mysterious stranger in turn. But this isn’t a shoujo manga or some romcom movie, and you’re a lot smarter than that anyway. You don’t press your luck, keeping your pace steady and cutting your distance down more than halfway, making sure to drink regularly from the single remaining water bottle in your hand, losing yourself in the steady tap of your feet on the concrete, the regular rhythm of your breathing and heartbeat.
And for a time, it works, just like it always does. For a time, you forget everything but your soul-deep dedication to always placing one foot in front of the other, unwaveringly.
But as always, you can’t run forever. And you have the whole long, cold shower and short but soothing soak in the bath afterwards to think and overthink everything you’d said and done to that beautiful stranger. By the end of all that over-analyzing, you’re not sure what you want to do more: drown yourself in the bath or come up with a new route for your morning run.
In the end you do neither, burying yourself in your studies instead, refusing to think about what tomorrow morning might bring.
Nothing, you tell yourself as you get ready for bed hours later. It’s not going to bring anything, except for too much heat and humidity again. You’d gotten so involved in other things, schoolwork and helping around the house, that you honestly hadn’t thought about that morning for most of the day. Only now, as you turn out your lights and crawl beneath your blankets, do thoughts of the beautiful stranger slip into the forefront of your mind. I hope he really was all right after I left, you find yourself thinking, and you wonder if it’s just simple concern that brought him back into your thoughts, or if you’ve already fallen prey to that too-charming smile.
You can’t help but scoff aloud at that idea. Right. You’re not that easy.
You text your friends for a while, remind your fellow track teammates about morning practice, then when your watch beeps a warning about the time, you plug your phone in and tuck it away for the night.
Tomorrow will bring what it brings, you muse to yourself as you start to drift into the welcome, restful delirium of sleep. There’s no sense in worrying about it now. All you can do is what you’ve always done, and keep putting one foot in front of the other.