Ms. Toriumi tried to compose herself, but found herself unravelling toward the end of her timid suggestion. "M-Maybe we could have dinner...?" She kept looking at the boy she addressed, Minato Arisato, her former student. Everything felt futile to her, and she felt the more shamed for revealing her feelings, not only for realizing she had admitted her innermost desires to the object of her affections over the Internet, but for admitting her interest in him a second time, in person. His face, seeming in that moment indifferent to her, caused her to despair and, with anger at herself for lowering the guard she had upheld for so long, swore and fled, wanting to hide herself away at her tiny apartment before she cried.
Without reflection, Minato pursued her. She heard his footsteps and tried to ignore his presence as she gathered her purse and overcoat.
Minato called her by name, but she continued to grab her items without looking back to him.
"I'm very busy, Arisato, and as I'm not your teacher anymore, I don't think there's any subject left to discuss." Clutching her items, she began to walk briskly from him before he spoke:
"May I please take you to dinner?"
She stopped, facing away. Her head turned and her gaze, full of pain, met his. She spoke, her voice broken: "What do you want from me, Minato?"
"May I please take you to dinner when it would be convenient for you?"
"Why?"
Minato's mind seemed to strain against a great weariness that had plagued him ever since his last ordeal, and he managed to reply: "I like you very much."
Silence.
He added, "I wasn't able to express my own feelings for you as your student." Ms. Toriumi's expression was changing before his eyes. There were no others in their surroundings, so he continued in a quiet but emphatic voice: "When you told me online your own feelings, I didn't know who you were, either. If I had known, I would have been the happiest man alive."
And so began a different course of events. There was an inevitable outpouring of emotions over the dinner they shared that very night -- how her eyes gleamed in the candlelight! It seemed as though with every smile of Ms. Toriumi, his tiredness grew less.
They had agreed to meet each other again the next day, this time for a walk in the park, and he had procured for her a bouquet of red roses. She smiled so happily and so full of love at seeing them that Minato forgot he had ever been dying. She placed her bouquet on a nearby park bench and, heedless of anyone who might be watching, dared to take him into her arms in an embrace that was returned immediately, and Minato felt her hands pressing at his back the harder for it. Faster than the rising listlessness planted in Minato poured her love for him, and the immutability of death was exchanged for a different certainty: That they would be married to each other and live happily, ever after.
