After Being Dumped With the Insult, “You’re So Clingy!” and Finding Her in Despair, I Kept Encouraging My Beautiful Classmate and as a Result, That Beautiful Girl Started Directing Her Heavy Emotions Toward Me Instead, but Since I Like Emotionally Heavy Girls, It’s No Problem - 5

Chapter 5: ~Another Side: Futaba~

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Despair had taken control of her mind and body. Futaba stood in the school courtyard, her body battered by the heavy rain, crushed by a sense of loss. All she had wanted was to devote herself to the person she loved. Devoting herself to the one she loved had been her purpose in life—her joy. But that very person had rejected her. Her reason for living had been denied. She had been on the verge of losing her will to live.

If the very thing that gave her life meaning was denied, did she even have a reason to exist? She had wanted to simply disappear from this world altogether. That was what she had thought.

Suddenly, the rain stopped striking her body. It wasn’t that the rain itself had stopped. The sound of it reaching her ears hadn’t ceased. In fact, it seemed to grow even more intense. Finding it strange, she lifted her face. There stood a boy. He introduced himself as her classmate, “Ichika Kokonoe.”

Futaba, who had wanted to be left alone, rejected Ichika. If she were going to disappear, she had wanted to do so quietly and alone. However, Ichika took an action she never expected.

“If you’re okay with it, I’ll listen to you. Sometimes talking helps. You can complain about anything. If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine too. We can just sit here together in the rain until you feel better. I’ll stay with you.”

After saying that, he sat down beside her and began getting soaked in the rain himself. On top of that, he thoughtfully angled the umbrella toward her so she wouldn’t get any wetter. She had wondered whether speaking to someone could possibly ease this unfathomable despair. But Ichika showed no sign of leaving her side. At this rate, he would catch a cold.

Feeling guilty about that, Futaba began talking about what had happened earlier. At first, she had listed only the facts in a flat, detached manner. But as she continued, emotion welled up inside her, and she found herself telling him the cries of her heart. Ichika listened without denying her feelings. And he encouraged her.

She had thought she no longer needed human warmth or kindness. She had planned to let the cold rain strike her and quietly fade away from this world. That had been her wish. But when she actually came into contact with someone’s kindness, it seeped into her. It was clumsy kindness, yet like ice melting, the coldness in her heart gradually regained warmth.

After having Ichika listen to her, Futaba’s heart had grown somewhat lighter. Though it still felt as if there were a hole in her heart, at the very least the pitch-black despair that had once dominated her was gone. Having somehow regained her footing, Futaba agreed to move to Ichika’s boarding house at his suggestion. They had both been soaked after standing in the rain for so long. If they didn’t dry off and warm up, they would truly catch a cold.

After arriving at his lodging, Ichika urged Futaba to take a bath first. She declined, saying it felt wrong to bathe before the host, but he insisted that he was fine and forcibly pushed her into the changing room. The truth was, she had been grateful for his thoughtfulness. She, too, had been at her limit from the cold.

However, when she returned to the room after warming up in the bath, Ichika collapsed. Futaba had misunderstood. He had looked unfazed while being soaked in the rain, and since he had urged her to warm up first, she had thought he was fine. But in reality, Ichika had been at his limit as well. He had simply hidden it so as not to make her worry.

She hurriedly laid him down on the bed. Fortunately, a thermometer had been lying in the corner of the room. She placed it under his arm and measured his temperature. 38 degrees Celsius. Judging from his symptoms, it was undoubtedly a cold. There was no doubt that he had caught it because of her.

Feeling responsible, Futaba decided to nurse him. She placed a damp towel on his forehead to draw out the heat, raised the temperature on the air conditioner, and made sure he wouldn’t feel chilled.

“Jujo… don’t… cry…”

“Kokonoe-kun…”

Futaba looked at Ichika with concern as he muttered deliriously in his distress. In the pouring rain, he had encouraged her and saved her from the brink of despair. Moreover, he had endured his own suffering to let her take the bath first so she wouldn’t catch a cold.

“Clumsy… but kind…”

There were many people in this world who called themselves “kind,” but few who could truly put themselves on the line for someone else. Futaba devoted herself earnestly to nursing the feverish Ichika. She changed the damp towel on his forehead, wiped away his sweat, and searched through the cluttered room to find cold medicine. Whenever he murmured in pain, she held his hand and encouraged him.

As she busied herself taking care of him, she felt the hole in her heart gradually being filled.

Why is that?

Futaba wondered, placing a hand over her chest. The large hole in her heart had formed because she had lost her former “purpose in life.”

…To Futaba, who had lost that purpose, Ichika had said the following words:

『Maybe… Maybe you could find something new to live for.』

Ichika had told her to fill the hole in her heart by finding a new purpose. 

A new purpose. She still couldn’t seem to find what that was. But as she cared for Ichika like this, it was true that her wounded heart was healing.

“Could this perhaps be my new purpose?”

Futaba vaguely thought of such a thing.

…However, it would be a little while longer before she came to know the answer.

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