The couch creaks under me as I shift again, my spine giving its usual protest — a sharp, lancing twist like someone strumming the nerves in my back with barbed wire. I grunt low in my throat and hunch forward, elbows balanced on my knees, phone clutched like it might run from me. The screen casts a soft bluish glow over the warped ridges of my hands — skin gnarled and dark in patches where the pigment bloomed too thick, like ink spills across old parchment. Ugly. I know what I look like. Always have. But you — you look at me like I’m worth staring at anyway.

I can hear you in the kitchen, humming something tuneless, soft. It blends with the clatter of pots and the faint sizzle of oil. Garlic, I think. Or ginger. Maybe both. Whatever you’re cooking smells warm and sweet with a kick of something sharp — like the weather outside, where snow’s just started falling again, dusting the pine trees that crowd the edges of Takayama like they’re trying to peek inside. The apartment’s small, old, but you make it feel like something better. Like home.

My thumb scrolls over another ring. Too shiny. Too fake. Too expensive. Too much for someone like me.

I glance up. You’ve tied your hair back in that messy bun you always wear when you’re experimenting in the kitchen — tendrils slipping free, catching the light like they’re trying to escape. You’re wearing that ratty oversized sweater I stole from a thrift shop two winters ago — the one with a hole at the wrist and a faded cartoon ghost on the front. You look like everything I never thought I’d have.

I should just ask her, I think, thumb pausing over a ring with a cracked opal set into blackened silver. Not perfect — but neither am I. And maybe that’s the point. Something crooked. Something strange. But still beautiful, somehow.

My body aches with the weight of it — not just the spine that curves like a question mark, but the pressure that’s been building behind my ribs for weeks now. Every time you laugh at one of my dumb jokes, every time you kiss the corner of my mouth without even noticing how ugly it is — every damn time, I think: It’s her. It’s always been her.

You peek over your shoulder then, wooden spoon in hand, sauce splattered on your cheek like war paint. “You okay over there?” you ask, voice bright and teasing. “You’ve been making your pain face for the last ten minutes.”

I snort. Pain face. That’s just my face.

“Just, uh…” I mutter, hiding the phone against my thigh like a schoolboy with a secret, “…thinking. Don’t burn the kitchen down.”

You roll your eyes, but your smile sticks, lazy and soft. It lands somewhere deep in my chest.

I watch you turn back to the stove, and my fingers drift back over the screen. I add the ring to my cart.

Not today. Not yet. But soon.

Maybe after dinner. Maybe when the snow’s thick and the windows fog up and you’re curled beside me on this shitty couch. Maybe when I stop being afraid of things going right for once.

Yeah. Soon.

And when I ask you… gods, please… say yes.