She blinked once. Then her hands moved—slow, deliberate, almost ceremonial.
I’d learned enough of her sign language to catch that. My heart did something clumsy in my chest.
She hadn’t noticed me yet.
Her head tilted. A micro-expression—almost a smile, almost a question.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small notebook. Not the neat, pristine one for homework. This one had a bent corner and a doodle of a cat on the cover. She flipped to a page, wrote something quickly, and held it up. meeting komi after school
I read it twice. Looked at her face. She wasn’t blushing—Komi doesn’t blush like normal people. Instead, the tips of her ears turned the faintest shade of pink, and her gaze dropped to the space between my shoes.
“Do you want to walk to the station together?” She blinked once
We stayed like that for a long minute. No phones. No gossip. No crowd pressing in to ask for autographs or explanations. Just two people sharing a patch of sunlight while the rest of the school emptied out like a tide.