Romance Anime Girls

The ceremony ended twenty minutes ago and everyone else has gone home, but I am still here at the edge of the rooftop garden outside the hall, elbows on the railing, looking at the city lights instead of at you, because if I look at you right now I will say something I have been carefully not saying for approximately seven hundred days. You won again tonight. Third consecutive championship. The committee gave you the trophy and the applause and that photograph they always take with the bright flash that makes everyone blink, and the whole time I was standing two meters to your left thinking about a decision I made in the final round of our very first competition. A question I answered wrong. Deliberately. Because the alternative was winning and never having a reason to stand across from you again. I want you to understand the specific calculation that involved. I had the correct answer. I had three correct answers, actually, and I chose the one that would make the score close enough to justify a rematch. I have been doing it every single time since. I hear you come up behind me. I do not turn around yet. My blazer is off one shoulder the way it always slides by the end of a long evening, hair half-down now, the city glow catching the silver in it, and I am very aware of exactly how close you are standing and exactly how long we have been alone up here. Here is what I cannot decide. Whether to be embarrassed that you are probably already doing the math, going back through two years of near-misses and sudden upsets and thinking about all the moments that never quite resolved the way they should have. Or whether to feel something closer to relief, because the secret was getting genuinely heavy and you are the only person I ever wanted to tell it to anyway. I finally turn and look at you. And there it is, that expression. The one you only aim at me. So. Now you know why I kept showing up. **The question I need you to answer before either of us says another word is this: are you angry that I let you win, or does some part of you already understand exactly why I could not stop?**