The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the silence.
The silence was deafening. No laughter. No music. No footsteps rushing through the hall. Just an overwhelming weight... a heavy, suffocating silence, hanging over the house, trapping everything in the shadows of yesterday's mistake.
I couldn't even bring myself to face her.
I stayed in bed, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, trying to fight off the flood of thoughts that threatened to swallow me whole. The kiss. Her touch. How it felt so right, even though it shouldn't have. How I let myself feel that, let her make me feel something so wrong.
My stomach twisted with guilt, a deep, gnawing ache that sank lower and lower with every passing second. But underneath the guilt, there was something darker, something colder. Fear. A fear that maybe, just maybe, I couldn't undo this. That I had crossed a line I could never uncross, and now we were both trapped in the consequences, unable to escape.
I pulled myself out of bed, my movements slow and mechanical, as if my body was moving on its own without me. The house felt colder than usual. Emptier. Silent. The absence of her laughter was a constant reminder of what we'd done, of what we couldn't take back.
When I walked into the kitchen, I saw her. Aoi. She was already there, standing with her back to me, her shoulders stiff, her body tense. I could feel the distance between us stretching further and further, until it felt as though the space between us was a chasm we'd never be able to cross.
I swallowed, forcing the words out past the lump in my throat.
"Aoi," I whispered, my voice strained, raw. "We can't do this."
She didn't turn around. She didn't need to. Her stillness told me everything I needed to know. Her heart was racing as fast as mine, but she wasn't going to show it. She was already closing herself off from me.
"Riku," she said, her voice fragile, like it might break at any second. "I know."
Those words, I know; hit me like a blow to the chest. I thought I could say it, end it, make everything go back to normal, but hearing her so soft, so broken, made everything feel even worse. Like I was breaking something I couldn't fix.
I wanted to reach out to her. I wanted to hold her, tell her everything would be okay, but I couldn't move. The guilt. The shame. The fear of what we had done. They kept me frozen in place, like I was being held down by invisible chains.
"We can't be together like that," I said, the words coming out barely above a whisper, like I was afraid they might vanish if I spoke too loudly. "You're my sister, Aoi. That's not… that's not right."
I saw her shoulders tremble. Her hands, clenched tightly at her sides, were shaking. But she didn't say anything else. She didn't argue. She just nodded, her back still turned to me, like she had already accepted it all.
"Okay," she whispered, her voice so small it felt like a knife twisting in my chest.
Okay. The word rang in my ears, and it felt like the world was closing in on me. I wasn't sure if it was my heart breaking, or if it was hers, but it didn't matter. We were both dying inside, and I was the one who had put the poison in her veins.
I turned away before I could say anything more, before the weight of what had just happened could crush me. I couldn't look at her. I couldn't even look at myself.
The rest of the day passed in a blur of silence. She avoided me. I avoided her. We both pretended that nothing had happened, that everything was fine. But it wasn't.
Every time I caught a glimpse of her eyes lowered, lips pressed together tight as if to stop herself from saying something she couldn't. I felt my chest tighten. My heart felt like it was being squeezed, crushed beneath the weight of this new, unbearable silence.
We were both pretending.
Pretending that we weren't falling apart. Pretending that the air wasn't thick with the things we couldn't say, the things we couldn't take back.
And the silence? It wasn't enough to erase the truth. It was just a mask, and under it, everything was falling apart.