falling for you

Osamu is seated on the edge of the bed beside you, fully dressed, staring down at you as you fight the pull to slip back into unconsciousness.

“What time is it?” you rasp out, rolling over a little more under the warm swath of blankets wrapped around you. The clock on your bedside table startles you, your eyes snapping to the boy watching your sleepy face placidly. “Samu, it’s four in the morning.”

“I know that,” he says with a light laugh, brushing some hair back from your face.

“Why are you waking me up?” you ask him, the grogginess of sleep still saturating your words, leaning into the warmth of his touch and resisting the urge to let your eyes shut again. “Thought you had the day off.”

“I do. We’re going somewhere.”

“At four in the morning?”

Osamu pats your cheek lightly. “Yep.”

Maybe it’s because you’re too tired to question it, or maybe it’s the way that Samu pries you up out of bed with careful, gentle hands. He passes you a pair of comfortable leggings that you pull on mindlessly, then one of his old Inarizaki VBC sweatshirts you like so much, and finally he bundles you into one of his own coats before guiding your teetering, dozy form out the door and into his truck.

It’s still dark out, and cold enough that you can see your breath under the streetlights as you crawl into the passengers seat and Samu shuts your door behind you. The truck is already warm and running, and there’s two cups of coffee waiting in the cupholders in insulated travel mugs.

“Put yer buckle on,” Osamu instructs you after taking his own seat, and you do as you’re told as he shifts the gearstick into drive.

You aren’t in the car for more than 15 minutes before you fall asleep again.

When you wake for the second time it’s lighter, though still not quite day break. It takes you a moment to realize where you are, and why.

You watch the scenery outside the window blur past, before sliding your eyes towards the windshield. The time on the dashboard reads 5:15.

“Samu, where the hell are we?” you croak, rubbing the sleep from your eyes.

“Mornin’ sunshine,” your boyfriend laughs from the driver’s seat, looking over at you with his eyes crinkling at the corner. His hair is bed-head messy, and he has a smudge of white on the corner of his mouth.

Toothpaste, maybe?

“Did ya sleep alright? Hit a pretty nasty hole a ways back but ya didn’t even notice. Snored right through it.”

“I don’t snore,” you lie, sitting up a little straighter in your seat. Your body hurts from sleeping in such a strange position, but you can’t really do anything about the lingering stiffness while you’re still trapped in the moving vehicle. “Where are we?” you repeat your earlier question which Samu had tactically avoided.

“About an hour outside Osaka,” Osamu says, completely unhelpfully.

You’re in the car driving, and the clock on the dash tells you it’s been about an hour since you started driving, so what he tells you is already a given.

“Where are we going?” you ask him.

He tuts. “‘Fraid I can’t tell ya that. Top secret.”

You furrow your brow.

This isn’t like Osamu. He’s never pulled anything like this before. You don’t know what to make of it.

“Yer coffee’s still hot, and I got us donuts.” Samu takes one hand off the wheel to grab a paper bag from the floor by his feet. It crinkles noisily as he hands it to you.

Inside the bag are a few donuts, covered in powdered sugar. You suspect there are already a few missing from within.

That explains the smudge on his face.

You lick your thumb, reaching over the centre console towards him.

Osamu stiffens at the unexpected contact, softening as he realizes what you’re doing. You run the pad of your thumb across the corner of his mouth a few times until the traces of white are gone, pulling away to sit back in your seat.

You lick the sugar off your finger absentmindedly when you’re done, before reaching into the bag for a donut of your own.

“If we’re going to Tokyo, why didn’t we just take the train?” you ask through a mouthful of fried dough and sugar, noting a directional sign that the two of you pass along the highway indicating you’re travelling in the direction of the capital. You had suspected as much, given that the screen of the dashboard said you were travelling north east from your home in Osaka.

“Not goin’ to Tokyo,” Samu replies simply, reaching for his cup of coffee in the cupholder beside him. It’s empty, he seems to remember only seconds after picking it up, and he puts it back down without even taking a sip.

You lick the sugar off your fingers and reach for your own cup of untouched coffee, popping open the lid and holding it out to him.

He takes it from your hand, bringing it to his lips and tilting it back all without removing his eyes from the road. He hands it back to you after taking a long swig.

He winces a little after he swallows, watching from the corner of his eye as you bring the travel mug to your own lips. “Careful, s’still hot, babe.”

You hum, taking a trepidatious sip from the well-insulated cup. He’s right.

“So where are we going, and why did you feel the need to wake me up at the crack of dawn to get there?”

Samu shoots you a look—exasperated but loving—from his seat beside you.

“Can’t anything ever be a surprise with you?””

“Not if I can help it,” you reply back smoothly, earning you a laugh.

“I just… wanted to do somethin’ nice for ya,” he mutters, almost reluctantly. He takes an audible breath—in and out—before adding, “I know you’ve been feelin’ a bit… off lately.”

You stiffen in your seat, eyes fixed unseeingly to the lines of the highway as they flash past on the asphalt.

“-’s nothing wrong with that, but I know you’ve been havin’ a hard time ’n I just-“

“Samu.”

Your strained voice makes him falter, his sentence ending before he can say it in its entirety.

It’s quiet for a moment. A little uncomfortable.

“D’ya mind if I put some music on now that yer awake?” Osamu tries to ease the tension that has settled over the cab of the truck. You nod stiffly.

Osamu reaches to fiddle with the buttons and nobs of the radio, but in truth seems less concerned with finding something he likes on the air than just finding something that will distract from the borderline suffocating stillness in the car between you.

You feel bad.

For more reasons than one.

Firstly, because he was clearly just trying to do something nice to cheer you up. A sincere, heartfelt gesture blossoming from his desire for you to be happy and well. A deed sown, tended to, and grown from his love for you.

Secondly, because he noticed that you needed to be cheered up in the first place; noticed what you had been trying not to let sink its claws too deeply into you; noticed what so much of your mental energy had been going into covering up, pretending wasn’t there, pretending wasn’t sitting on your shoulders like a weight—impossible to see but crushing to bear.

You’d been trying not to let it show how much you’d been struggling lately. You’d been sleeping a lot. Usually in bed before Osamu made it home from work in the evenings, and sleeping in past when he woke up in the mornings. On the afternoons he made it home early (which he tried to do at least three times a week) you were usually too drained to do anything beyond make dinner, clean up, shower, and collapse into bed.

You thought you’d been managing it.

Suppressing it.

Concealing it.

Obviously you were wrong.

The song playing over the sound system is an old love song. One you remember your mom singing along to in the kitchen of your childhood home while she would cook dinner for your family. It was from the soundtrack of a romantic comedy that had come out when you were still too young to know what comedy was, let alone romance, but there’s something nostalgic and comforting about it. In any case, you appreciate the distraction, settling back in your seat and sipping the too-hot coffee for lack of anything else you’d prefer to do.

You drive for another hour, sharing your cup of coffee between you in place of conversation, listening to old love songs playing on the morning radio.

Osamu turns off the highway at an innocuous looking exit, a few minutes past a sign that had told you Tokyo was still more than 400 kilometres away. There’s nothing outside your windows except countryside—no city or town or other civilization to be seen. It’s only seven in the morning, and you pass just a handful of other vehicles on the winding rural roads as you make your way along them.

“Samu, where the hell are we?” you ask at the very moment Osamu turns up a dirt road—a driveway of some sort.

“D’ya remember back when we started dating?” Osamu asks, eyes fixed too concentratedly on the road outside the windshield to be natural. He’s nervous, you can tell.

“Uh, yeah. It was five years not fifty years ago,” you joke, but there’s an undercurrent to it, the implication that you feel like you’ve loved him forever. You know he feels it too.

“I wanted to buy ya flowers,” he ignores your jibe, though not without peeking at you pointedly from the corner of his eye, “spent ages in the flower shop down the road from our first apartment trying to pick them out. I had almost no money to spend and that nice lady that owned it sent me home with a bouquet worth three times what I paid her for it.”

You remember it all. The flower shop; the terrible one bedroom apartment that was all the two of you could afford back then, when you were still a student and Onigiri Miya was just a food stall on a busy road; the bouquet so large you didn’t even have anything big enough to put it into when Osamu brought it home to you, and you’d had to break it up between four different receptacles to house it: a narrow vase, two empty sake bottles, and an over-sized coffee mug. It smelled so nice that every corner of your dingy little apartment was filled with the scent of the flowers for days.

“Ya hated it.”

“I did not!” you gasp, jaw dropping at the accusation, and you turn in your seat to face your boyfriend defensively.

“Ya told me that flowers are a waste of money and that a nicer gift is something you can eat!” Samu laughs as he says it, tossing his head back against the headrest of his seat.

You purse your lips, scratching the back of your neck sheepishly. You don’t remember speaking those words exactly, but it does sound suspiciously like something you’d say.

“I told you I loved them,” you mutter. And you did. You even pressed some of the blossoms between the pages of your heavy text books to save, and now they hang in frames on the wall of your current (and much less austere) apartment.

“I asked what yer favourite flowers are. D’ya remember whatcha told me?” Samu asks, finally turning his head to properly look at you.

You wrack your brain for a moment, and then shake your head. The memory evades you.

“Strawberries,” Samu says. “Ya told me yer favourite flowers are strawberries.”

You blink.

You notice for the first time that the truck has slowed to a stop, idling in park at the end of the driveway. Outside the windows of the truck you see a modest little house, a shed of some sort, and a row of greenhouses dotted along the lush green fields of the property.

“One of my suppliers told me about this place, apparently they grow the best berries in Japan. They sell some of ‘em fer like fifty-thousand yen. The ojisan who runs it’s a nice guy though, invited us down for the day to check it out.”

You blink again, only this time your eyes go a little blurry as you peel them open, something hot slipping down your cheeks.

“I know ya don’t like to talk about it when yer going through stuff,” Samu says quietly from the seat beside you, but you can’t bring yourself to look at him. He reaches over and places a hand, warm and comforting, on your knee. “But I want ya to know that I love ya, and I’m always here, s’all.”

Your throat feels tight and dry, and suddenly you wish you had some of that coffee left in your empty travel mug.

“I-“ you choke a little on your first attempt to reply, swallowing hard. “I just know you have so much on your plate already. I never wanna add more to that just because I’m…” you don’t know how to finish your thought.

“Hey.” Samu’s fingers tighten a little on your knee, not painful in any way, but enough to tell you he needs you to look at him, to be there with him right now.

You look at him sheepishly, eyes struggling to meet his level, resolute gaze.

“Lovin’ someone is work. Life is hard, and sometimes it’s ugly, and things aren’t always just gonna work themselves out easy all the time. But I wanna share that with ya: yer whole life, not just the good stuff. So ya can’t just go and decide on yer own what things yer goin’ through you gotta keep to yourself or do alone, because I’m right here. I wanna work on it with ya. Because this is worth it.”

You’re openly crying now, in the passenger seat of Samu’s beloved truck, in the driveway of a strawberry farm in the middle of nowhere, an empty paper bag filled with donut crumbs and powdered sugar under your feet.

Samu leans across the centre console of the truck, wrapping you in his arms as best he’s able to in the slightly awkward confines of your respective seats. He smells like laundry detergent and coffee. He’s warm and solid and right where you need him, like always.

His large hand cradles the back of your head as your tears soak into the flannel shirt he’s got on, letting you cry it out for as long as you need to. When you finally pull yourself together a little bit, he withdraws, wiping at your tears and snot with the soft edge of his sleeve.

“Ya feel a bit better now?” he asks gently.

You nod.

“I love you,” you whisper.

“I love ya too,” he grins, toothy and boyish. “Now are ya ready to go and pick some flowers or what?”

“Strawberries aren’t technically flowers,” you sniff, but you’re smiling.

“Who cares,” Samu laughs, and the sound is as warm as the early morning sunlight breaking over the fields and streaming into the widows behind him. “I wanna see what’s so good about these ones that he’s chargin’ an arm and a leg for ‘em.”

“Bet I can pick more than you can,” you say, scrunching your nose up challengingly.

Osamu scoffs, reaching for the handle of the truck door and throwing it open.