He had these dreams, sometimes. Thick ones. They left him gently and he would wake up warm and smiling, as relieved as he felt when Honda-san noticed the scrunch in his brow and forced his eyebrows apart from each other, pushing and molding his flesh with her cool, soft hands. Sometimes he tensed his muscles on purpose, just to feel her touch him.
They weren't the right sort of dreams to be having, he knew. She was a pretty girl, and close to him, and from the very first she had...moved him, in some profound and near-poetic way. But in his dreams, he only ever kissed her on the cheek or brow. Never the mouth. Never sensual, or even romantic, as it should have been. Some part of him worried if it made him perverse, if he assigned the words "purity" and "chastity" to what he felt for her as some means of justifying what he truly wanted, and what he knew to be integrally wrong.
Tohru was not his mother.
Of course not. Of course she couldn't be. A girl his own age, one pretty and kind and readily accessible, and all he wanted was to lie his head in her lap and have her hands rest against his neck, and guide him to his rest.
"I love you," he says to her in all his dreams, and means it with all his heart, though incorrectly, he knows. But as they were only dreams, she only smiles at him, and tucks him back in, and when she says his name it is with old familiarity and affection, and the relief he feels as his brow relaxes is nothing, nothing, compared to flood of happiness evoked from a single brush of her hand against his own.