Okazaki Yumemi was missing… until she, suddenly and decidedly, wasn't.
Ryu was effectively moved to full-time professor, complete with more hours and more pay. Of course, it wasn't by choice. Okazaki Yumemi had extreme bouts of disappearing, so Ryu had no alternative but to fill her shoes. How she had managed tenure, he'd never know.
It was an idle day in his apartment when Yumemi appeared. And it was exactly that: She had appeared. From his peripheral vision, the girl, as if she had always been there, was.
Yumemi, who smelled faintly of ashen fire, shook off the sleeves of her crimson jacket and flung it down to the ground, exposing a black camisole underneath. Beads of sweat dipped down her cheek and to the floor.
Frankly, to the man who was previously considering what to make for lunch, it was all too much. But before Ryu could open his mouth to question her, she spoke first.
"Time, no—another world," she said, nodding, as if she were continuing a conversation she had with him. As if she had never disappeared for weeks on end. "I've found it, Ryu."
"What?"
"Do you believe in magic?" she said.
His mind slowed. "Not… really?"
"I didn't either. But then I traversed. To other worlds. Or maybe another time, or another dimension, who knows? One where science alone does not dictate the elements. Say it is insane. Absurd, even. I could have been hallucinating for all I know. But I believe I may have been to where no mortal of our realm has been before."
"Insane is… certainly the word for it." But Ryu took a look into Yumemi's eyes, and, within those ruby pools, there was clarity—an alarming amount of it. The nervous fiddling of her hands, her clear eyes gazing level into his own, her mouth which spoke words faster than her mind could process: Ryu could not make sense of it.
"Then call me ill," she said, feverishly laughing all the while. It was a rare set of laughs that threatened to expose her age. "And embrace me. I'm giddy," she added.
The man hesitated. Though he missed her touch, he felt at odds with himself. Should he encourage her behavior? Could he call this creature 'Yumemi' when she was giggling like a schoolgirl (which he supposed she was, technically) and speaking of dimension-traveling magic?
The short answer was: Yes, he would. Ryu pulled her close into a hug and cradled her head. Reciprocating, Yumemi wrapped her arms around the man's waist and breathed out a comfortable sigh.
"You've been gone for a while," he said. In other words, though his awkward self would not let him say it, he missed her.
"Mmm," she mumbled. It barely qualified as a response to the man, but he approximated it to, 'I'm back.'
"Do you," he whispered into her ear, "want to take this to a more intimate place?"
Yumemi matched the man's tone. "What's more intimate than a man's private home?"
"Within," he hinted. "Within the man's home."
"The dusty closet he never uses."
"I wouldn't say—"
"A joke, Ryu. I think anybody'd know what you're talking about. But first, I think I'll take a shower. I must smell like Hell itself."
"...Sure."
So the man let her go and, aware of what's to come, shuffled over to his bedroom. In the fifteen minutes it took Yumemi to take a shower, Ryu found himself internalizing. Before his transition to a full-time professor, the man was reluctant to proceed. And now, he could only wait until Yumemi stepped back into his bedroom to share a moment with him. The Ryu from before hesitated to risk letting their academic relationship deteriorate into romance.
To hell with that, thought the current Ryu. His time with the red-haired girl was finite, and he was very aware of it. In the time that they shared together, he was hers, and she was his. It was a rather limited exclusivity, given the girl would leave for weeks at a time, minimum, but he preferred that over nothing at all—even if his intimacy was bound by something akin to a timeshare.
Still, for the now, he had Yumemi. She took gentle steps that padded the floorboards softly and echoed in the quiet hallway to the bedroom. Yumemi came with her black camisole, which stuck to her still-wet skin, her damp, crimson hair, her half-open skirt, and a fuddled smile coupled with a slight blush on the cheeks. She sat down at the edge of the bed, letting her unbraided hair fall to the sheets, and patted the bedding to her side.
"Well?" she said.
Ryu complied, moving to sit beside her. Reaching to her cheek, he pulled her in closer for a brief kiss. "Let's keep going."
"Okay." Yumemi nodded in slow affirmation.
And, until thereafter, no rhetoric was required.
The next day, when Yojuu Ryu came to, the first thing that the man saw was Okazaki Yumemi. There in his bed, clad in only a white undershirt and the rest of his bed covers, she was scribbling away furiously on a notepad. The sunlight from outside seeped through the blinds and trickled towards the red-headed woman. Ryu laughed to himself. She was no more radiant than she usually was—and Ryu found himself likening her more to a tumultuous storm than the sun—that is to say, he saw her as she was: Yumemi. Her disheveled hair, her voice deep and cracked in the morning as she muttered to herself, the snort she did at her own notes—they were all Yumemi-like.
Her pen slowed the moment Yumemi noticed Ryu awake. "Hello," she said gruffly.
"Good morning."
As good as it was, the morning was quiet.
"I have a lecture to do today," he said to break the silence. "It's Monday."
"Ah," she said dismissively. "So it's Monday."
Perhaps anybody else would have written off the red-headed woman's words as eccentric. Time moved at different paces for different persons, after all. To Ryu, however, they were words of foreboding.
"Yumemi," he said.
"Hmm?" Her pen stopped. Yumemi shuffled around the covers to face the man, and as she did, her bare thighs were painfully exposed to the man, temporarily rendering the man silent. The previous night flashed through his mind, though he quickly dismissed it.
I want you to stay, he thought to her.
Ryu, however, was a coward. "It's nothing. I need to get ready for work."
And as he showered, and as he made breakfast and prepared coffee, his thoughts swarmed him. Could it be today? No, it couldn't be, he thought. She'd have the decency to tell me, right?
His distractions gave rise to a missing twenty minutes of his schedule, which had made him decidedly tardy. He'd be five minutes late to the lecture hall, at least. Ryu cursed and left his breakfast unfinished. Finally, the man yelled out to Yumemi, "I'm off. I'll be back after lecture."
"...Yeah," was the lukewarm response.
And as the man shut the door, walking at frantic pace to the lecture halls, he resolved to tell her to stay with him after he returned home.
But she was already gone.