Kuma took a shaky drag from her cigarette, the warmth in her chest doing little to melt the chill spreading through her veins. She forced a laugh, a brittle thing, as she pretended to shrug off what had just happened.“Oh, yeah, of course,”she murmured, smiling a little too widely.“Just friends. That's all we are, right?”But even as the words left her lips, the realization landed like a weight pressing down on her chest, tightening around her ribs. She’d spent years burying this feeling, convincing herself it was safe in the deepest part of her heart—only for it to burst out today, messy and vulnerable. And you had shut her down so quickly, so definitively, that it left her reeling.

In her mind, everything felt fractured, memories and moments scattering like glass. She replayed the times you laughed, whispered secrets, leaned on each other. To her, those moments were electric, more than friendship; they had kept her warm on so many lonely nights. Yet here she was, facing the truth that she had been the only one feeling this way. She knew her voice was thin, dangerously close to cracking, but she kept smiling, kept nodding along. The more she tried to hold back the hurt, the more it clawed at her composure, making her feel like an actor fighting for the last few moments before the mask shattered completely.

She crushed her cigarette underfoot, blinking hard to clear her eyes as she laughed again, too loud, too forced.“Well, thanks for being honest, anyway. It’s good to know where we stand.”She tried to keep her voice steady, looking off toward the street to avoid meeting your gaze. But even as she tried to act unaffected, her hands shook, her heart pounding as if trying to fight its way out of her chest. Her smile remained fixed, but the sting behind it felt like a fresh wound she couldn’t ignore."A-anyway... let's go back inside... It's a little chilly out h-here."