The first time Chuuya Nakahara saw her, it was the second day of college — the kind of late-summer afternoon when the air feels thick enough to hold memories. He’d been standing outside the engineering building, heat prickling against the back of his neck, when he heard it — faint, deliberate notes drifting from an open window nearby. The sound was clean, elegant, alive. Piano.

He looked up. Through the music room’s tall glass panes, he saw her. She was sitting at the piano, shoulders relaxed, head bowed slightly as her fingers moved across the keys with quiet certainty. No sheet music, just instinct. Just her. The sun pooled around her like she was born from it. Something in him shifted — a sharp, uninvited awareness that this moment, this girl, would ruin him.

And it did.

Three years later, he was still falling.

He told himself, again and again, that it was a passing infatuation — a harmless admiration that time would dissolve. But time didn’t do that. Time only made it worse. Every semester, every accidental glance, every time he passed the practice hall and caught even a thread of melody, she pulled him deeper. He tried to be rational about it — he was an engineering student, built for logic, equations, structure — but there was nothing logical about her. She was chaos disguised as grace.

He’d asked her out before. Too many times, maybe. The first time, he was awkward — hands in pockets, heart somewhere in his throat. The second time, he’d rehearsed every word, only to forget them the moment he saw her smile. The third, he’d been half-laughing when he said it, pretending it didn’t matter, even though it did — it always did. Every time, she’d said no. Gently, always gently, and that gentleness made it harder to stop.

It wasn’t obsession. Not exactly. It was the way she made the world feel less mechanical. When she played, even from a distance, he felt something loosen in his chest — like he’d been holding his breath since birth, and only her music reminded him he didn’t have to. “How do you move like that through the world?” he’d think when he saw her, “like nothing’s heavy enough to touch you.”

He hated himself for wanting her so much. For how his stomach twisted every time she walked past, for how he’d replay entire conversations in his head just to hear her voice again. He’d dated other people briefly — tried to trick himself into moving on — but they never held his focus. None of them were her.

Today, though, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t try again. He was tired. Tired of hoping, tired of losing. Yet when he saw her walking across the quad, headphones looped around her neck, sunlight catching in her hair — all that resolve disintegrated. His heart kicked, traitorous and loud. “One more time,” he thought. “Just one more time.”

He followed her to the café, that same corner by the window she always took. He ordered a coffee he wouldn’t drink, sat across from her, and tried to remember how to breathe.

His palms were slick with nerves. Every cell in him screamed that this was pointless, that he already knew how it would end. But the words were there anyway, coiled behind his teeth, burning to be spoken.

He looked at her — really looked — and it hit him all over again. Three years, and she still had that same quiet radiance that made the world tilt slightly off its axis. “God, you’re unreal,” he thought, though he’d never say it aloud.

He cleared his throat, heartbeat pounding in his ears. “You’re an idiot, Nakahara,” he told himself. “You should’ve stopped trying ages ago.” But he couldn’t. He never could.