The first hangover of Risa's life was with Otani. Four years earlier.

A month after her nineteenth birthday, she was left at home alone a few days, and Otani had gone to sleep with her. Despite being the perfect opportunity to learn more about physics of each other, she was too embarrassed to step forward and he too in love to put them quickly. Despite the repeated encouragement of Nobu and Nakao, the last evening ended with a stalemate, and Risa was lost in deep thinking while Otani slept in the futon beside her.

She got up to drink a glass of water in the kitchen, and Risa felt lost, and more and more emotionally distant from the boy who was now sleeping in her room. A month without being able to see each other was too much ... Although he had reassured her several times, the feeling that he was being away from her was more than real.

Instead of water, Risa had opened a can of beer. Fresh and bitter, rushing down the throat, a feeling of lightness slowly made its way inside her.

"What are you doing?" The sleepy voice of Otani asked behind her.

Risa winced, babbling. Scratching his head, the boy was watching. He reached toward her and took the can from her hands.

He muttered: "Have you drained it all, stupid?" Before pouring the remaining contents in his throat.

"Here, shrimp!" She yelled at him, throwing him another can "Not only this, I drunk all of then, and now I start another one!" She concluded, heading for the couch at home with the whole package under her arm.

Otani grunted satisfied by the normal reaction of his girlfriend and went to sit by her side, in front of TV, watching the umpteenth replicas of Hokuto no Ken.

It was two in the morning, the house was dark and silent. The blue light of the TV was the only source of light in the living room, while the excited voices of actors echoed around them. They were together in the same sofa, but at the same time were very far. Without realizing it, Risa had increased the frequency of sips. Another beer was over, and she felt lighter, she wanted to laugh.

"But ... They are finished! How many have you drunk?"

"Ten ..." She said with a chuckle.

"But what are you laughing idiot? And I? There's nothing left!"

"There is still some sake in the kitchen, if you want ..." She rose unsteadily to go get him. She had returned to the sofa with a little difficult, two bottles in hand, while Otani was staring the screen.

"Here."

"Uh? Thanks ..." And he began to drink slowly.

"You like it?"

"Yes. But I prefer the beer."

She did not know how long they had stayed on the couch watching the adventures of Kenshiro while drinking. She did not even know which of them had begun. She only knew that at some point she found herself lying on the couch, Otani above her ... Among the senses clouded by alcohol, Risa felt strange feelings, pleasant and unpleasant together.

She liked to feel the weight of Otani, as well as hear his voice hoarse and his hands slip under her pajamas. But at the same time that limited her movements, the voice of her boyfriend was so unusual as to make her shudder. And his hands, so large, touched her where no one had ever dared to touch before, and Risa was not so sure she was ready for those caresses, and what would come after.

Indecisive, insecure, uncertain and drunk, she had left him to go ahead, she was stripped, touched, kissed without voicing her fears and uncertainties.

Thus, her first hangover and her first time were merged into a single occasion, and she had wasted perhaps the only time when she could move closer to Otani.

And since then, every hangover had become the memory of the suffering, of the inadequacy of their love. Because the next morning, both woke up with a terrible hangover, and they had not had the courage to look each other. They neither found the courage ever again, because that morning coincided with the last time they had met.

They had not even officially left. The first months they phoned each other. They had never been good at talking about their feelings, and the phone, which obliged them to express themselves with words, limited their scarce notices about comments on the latest news Umibozu and about their studies. Suddenly, Risa's shifts at work could no longer combine with those of Otani, and he had given up after yet another refusal to propose to go out together. Deserted even the rare group meetings with friends. There was no longer any desire to meet again, because it was a too much big fear seeing that their teenage love was over, miserably broken among the rocks of adulthood, between misunderstandings and their inability to communicate.

Even after four years, Risa wondered what didn't worked, among them. But she did not have an answer.

What remained was the ugly memory that relived in discomfort after every hangover staggering and dreams that she often did at night, when she relived her first time with Otani without the fear and insecurity that had ruined it.

Getting up and ready to go to work that morning was more difficult than expected. But at least, it was Friday, and that night, for sure, expecting a good night's sleep.

Instead, driven by Mana and Riko, he decided to participate in yet another group appointment. There was no limit to their bad luck. At work he reaped one success after another, but obviously in love she was doomed. After Otani there had been Shoji and Hajime, two handsome guys taller than her, sensitive and gentle, with whom she had two stories-photocopy: both wrecked in front of her inability to deal with intimacy with the opposite sex.

She looked around, sitting on the sofas in the middle of young people of the group date. That place, the Tokyo Paradise, if only it was really cool. It was a beer garden, on the roof of a building in Shibuya, where guests strolled among the lush plants and sipped drinks watching the lights of Tokyo.

It was actually a fantastic place, but after the fifth white russian who had ordered, hoping to recover the moral, Risa had moved away unsteadily from the table, to go and sit alone at the bar. She did not want to stand there and please his designated companion, who was now clearly hooking with Riko.

The waiter had served her the usual white russian, with the smile of an ordinance as he peered out of sight in her cleavage. Staring at the glass of the glass, that reflected her distorted image, she wondered if in recent times was not a bit 'too far with alcohol.

She had not noticed the stranger who was sitting beside her. Or rather, she had perceived him, but the technique to respond to random boardings (that Riko and Mana had taught her) planned to ignore it. And that evening she did not really want to look up, not even to see if he was cute.

Thus, her hand lifted the glass, her lids half closed waiting to hear the white russian burn down her throat. Instead, someone had put his hand on her wrist, blocking her movement. A familiar voice reached her through the mists of drunkenness.

"This is the sixth you drink tonight, Koizumi. Don't you think it's time to stop?"