I'd always liked the pale blue of the sky right before sunrise.

They said that for a person—I believe that the adjective before it was called passionate—person like me would love the fiery pink of a sunset, shades of orange like brushstrokes painted across a colorless sky. In these instances, I smile, and say that, a sunset is beautiful too.

And it is. But sometimes it's the overlooked that is the prettier. The burnt orange of sunsets and sunrise reminds me of violins, and blue reminds me of...a more living thing. Yes, the violin is alive. What makes it more alive is the human that allows it to sing. I love the violin, but I can love human beings even if they happened to be awkward and quiet even after you've been dating for five years already. So he catches my eyes, holds it, and then looks out of the window of The Happy Cat. Fingers curl around the mug of coffee, and I think, again, of violins.

"Don't look at me," he says quietly, but not completely unkindly. I direct my gaze to the sheaf of papers under his hands. It was ironic that the violinist we had all known to be single-mindedly dedicated to only one aspect of the world had chosen to pursue a PhD not just in music, but also in medicine.

"Sorry," he says. "It's just a little bit of…stress."

"Okay," I mutter absentmindedly. I twirl the blue pen in my hand and scribble more words onto the notepad, thinking endlessly on irony.

"I'd rather not talk. I'll probably start snapping."

"Okay."

So we sit. Like so many afternoons, side by side, hand in hand with papers in front of us, that we clear together. And at the end of the day we take our violins to the little park with a cathedral and play, a little symphony of our own. Englishwomen gather to listen. And at the end of the day, heading home. It's just one of another afternoon, one of more to come. I like that I have this consistency for it now, and for a long time more to come.

There is a pause. Then, "Kaho?"

"You're feeling especially chatty today," I mutter as I scrawl out a passage about the comparisons of comedies and tragedies, especially that of Romeo and Juliet. Love is a rather stupid thing. Considering my situation, that was ironic.

"Believe me when I say that it's against my better wishes. We need to discuss this."

I nod. "So what is it?"

"Actually. The wedding? Of Shimizu and Fuyumi," he says, sounding vaguely amused. "There were two invitations in the mail."

The wedding. I did remember an email about it, but it was one that I had clicked through in a hurry to find the email regarding the assignment that way laid in front of me now.

"That's ironic." I say. Write some more about the rather foolish love of Romeo and Juliet, the one between Lysander and Hermia. Love is ironic. It picks two different people and insists in binding them together.

"Oh really," he chuckles. "Hino. Stop thinking of the ironies in life and love. Listen."

"I heard you, Tsukimori-kun."

"Then help in the compilation of them getting together in a presentation." He sighs. "Personally, I think that's a little overblown."

I think of all the pictures we have in the computer of them.

"So first, after the concours ended,"

"I won that concours," he says lightly. I kick him underneath the table. We know that already. We know how it goes, the violinist who never loses, playing his best at every stage, winning, shrugging it off like it was nothing, the return to daily life, and then the first date. On the rooftop of Seisou.

I ignore the thought.

"It was a little while after the joint performances ended. And they'd gotten to each other a little better, so they spent some time together afterwards," I say.

I remember the first day, Fuyumi's pale face flushed and smiling, and the endless teasing of Nami for all of the flowers that Shimizu liked to weave into her hair, the insistence that she had her hair long, like it was now, cascading just after her back, and the effortless knot I'd taught her to twist it into.

"It's good that Shimizu has someone to look after him," he remarks. Both of us are probably thinking about the tendency Shimizu had of falling asleep or spacing out, anywhere, anytime.

"That's really ironic."

"I thought," Len says, a light hint of mock annoyance in his voice. "That we could settle the irony for a while."

I shrug, turn my gaze back to my paper, and look at him again. You're not the only one who will ever be busy, you know.

"All right, we have. I think I'll be able to retrieve some old pictures and draw up a timeline. Is there anything more?"

I watch my pen tap against the paper. Len covers his hand over it.

"That's really annoying."

"Everything is annoying to you,"

"That's especially annoying, inclusive of thefact that we're supposed to be playing Canon."

I process the information.

"It's rather cliché. The irony of having musicians at musicians' wedding," I laugh, list it down as an example, next to the one that states the irony of the "wittiest wall" in A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Okay, I'm sorry."

"Kaho. I have a whole case for patients as a topic for papers, but I'm sitting down and talking through their wedding with you."

And so I shrug, again, and he slides the papers into a file, tucks it back into my bag, retrieves his laptop, and we laugh when all the pictures of Shimizu and Fuyumi appear in the folder, the awkward ones, amusing ones, ones that are painfully cringe-worthy, ones that have obviously been composed one way but went the other. The word irony shoots into my mouth again, but I bite it back with another laugh and drag it over to the presentation. Fuyumi probably didn't want overly amusing pictures at her wedding.

"I liked the other one better, Kaho."

"That one was too funny."

"That is exactly my point."

I shake my head no.

Why not, he challenges silently, tilts his head, raises an eyebrow.

I grin, slam the lid of his laptop down, and match his position.

"You're telling me that you want awkwardly composed pictures of yourself and whoever you're marrying on a slideshow?"

"What do you mean?"

Rolling my eyes, I stand and sling my bag over my shoulders.

"I mean that I'm leaving for home where I can actually get sufficient time to be productive with my work,"

And the reference to home is for the dormitory ran by Matron Demitri for girls in the Cambridge English major program—cozy, small, and adorably cramped, that was home at London. It was a studious environment. No one unregistered stayed after seven. No one registered left after seven.

He frowns, traces of humor appearing and disappearing from his face, disguises of the situation. "In reference to the statement "whoever you're marrying"."

I bite my lip.

"What about that?" I manage.

"Who do you think I'll be marrying, Kaho?"

Inwardly, I curse my choice of words—those were ones that could easily have been cut out without damaging sentence structure. And then I curse Len for being overly sharp.

Outwardly, I smile, albeit awkwardly.

"Let's not. Talk about that," I stammer, an overlapping of incoherence. "What I meant was that Fuyumi deserves some respectable pictures at her wedding, as does. Everyone."

"That doesn't explain your choice of words. If that's what you wanted to say, you would have said it like that."

Once I run outside, it's drizzling slightly, the typical London weather. The raindrops fall onto my cardigan.

"I didn't mean anything."

I look away, face flaming, cursing every single part of myself again.

"If you say so," he reaches out, grabs my hand, and pulls me back. "You are such a liar."

I stare at the ground. Really, my shoes are simply fascinating: a pair of flats, no straps, covering my feet completely with beige cashmere, fitted to the size of my feet, as were all other shoes. This was a revelation.

Look at me, his fingers tilt my chin up. I look at the sky, a cross of both grey and blue in all of its glory.

A soft sigh. A pressure on my shoulder. A pair of lips pressed lightly against my forehead. I close my eyes, and the skies disappear when I wrap my arms around Len's shoulders. We stay like that for a moment, frozen like statues, so then I slide my head to rest on his shoulders. He sighs lightly, raises a hand to my head, and then we really stop moving for moments longer.

When I think he might have forgotten what we were discussing, he adds in my ear, "Just so you know, I don't plan on just marrying anyone."