Chapter 10: Wet Dreams
The dreams weren’t dreams. They were visitations.
Jay woke in the dark of his father’s guest room—it would never be his room—heart hammering against his ribs, the sheets tangled around his legs, and the phantom sensation of skin still buzzing on his fingertips. The first time, the morning after Yuto’s, it had been a hazy, pleasant shock. By the third night, it was a torment.
It was always the same starting point: the feel of her ribcage under his thumb, the exact texture of cotton giving way to warmth. But in the dream, the blanket fell away completely. In the dream, his hand didn’t stop at her ribs. It slid upward, palming the soft, perfect weight of her breast, her nipple hardening against his calloused palm. In the dream, she didn’t stiffen; she arched into him, a silent gasp against his neck. His other hand would slide down, past the waistband of her jeans, and she would be wet, so fucking wet for him, and he’d wake up soaked in sweat and come, breathing like he’d sprinted a mile, disgusted and electrified.
The problem was the waking world offered no relief. He saw her in homeroom, head bent over a notebook, the line of her neck as she tucked dark hair behind her ear, and the memory of that kiss on the cold engawa would slam into him with physical force. His body would thrum with a restless, aggressive energy that rugby practice could barely dent. He’d tackle too hard, run too fast, earning concerned looks from his captain.
“You’re a beast this week, Tanaka,” the captain said, clapping him on the shoulder after a particularly brutal drill. “Channel that. Just don’t kill anyone.”
Jay just grunted, wiping sweat from his eyes. He wasn’t channeling anything. He was fleeing it.
A week after the movie night, the tension wasn’t a cord between them; it was a solid wall. They exchanged nods in the hallway, brief, loaded looks. Hiromi would chatter, looping Emily into conversations about university applications or a new café, and Jay would stand with Yuto, feeling the words “biological facts” like a fresh bruise. Yuto had apologized, sloppily and repeatedly, but the damage was done. It had sharpened Jay’s hunger, made it ugly and desperate.
It had sharpened Jay’s hunger, making it ugly and desperate. He found himself walking different routes between classes, avoiding the stretch of hallway by the art room where she sometimes lingered. He told himself it was to get his head straight, to drown out the relentless, graphic replay of things that hadn’t happened. He was cordoning himself off, a one-man quarantine, and it felt like the most responsible thing he could do.
During lunch on Friday, he sat with Yuto on a bench facing the rugby field, chewing a tasteless sandwich.
“You’re being weird, man,” Yuto said, cracking open a milk carton. “Is this about my stupid joke? I said I was sorry.”
“It’s not about the joke,” Jay said, which was only half a lie. It was about everything the joke had tapped into—the ugliness of expectation, the fear that his own want was just as crude. The sun was too bright, glinting off the distant windows of the art wing.
“Then what? You’re moping. Is it your dad? Kyoto?”
Jay just shook his head, balling up his wrapper. The thought of his mother’s tense, perfunctory video calls, of his father’s silent presence in that orderly house, felt like a different species of problem. This was a living thing coiled in his gut. This was her skin under his thumb in the dark. He stood up abruptly. “Gotta go. Forgot a book.”
He didn’t go for a book. He went to the boys’ locker room, empty and echoing at this hour, and splashed cold water on his face. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. He stared at his dripping reflection in the scratched mirror, at the shadows under his own eyes. You’re turning into a ghost, he thought. Haunted by a girl who’s alive and sitting two classrooms away.
His phone, facedown on the sink counter, vibrated with a soft buzz.
He dried his hands slowly on his trousers before picking it up. A notification glowed on the screen. He tapped it.
The message was from Emily. No emoji, no preamble. Just seven words that sliced through all his stupid, self-imposed distance.
‘IS EVERYTHING OK? SEEMS LIKE YOU ARE AVOIDING ME.’
The concrete floor beneath his feet seemed to drop an inch. The hum of the lights amplified, drilling into his skull. He read the sentence three times, each word a stark, accusing monument. She’d noticed. Of course she’d noticed. He’d been a clumsy, obvious ghost.
His thumbs hovered over the screen. He could lie. He could say he was swamped with rugby and college apps. He could deflect. But the memory of her forehead pressed to his in the cold garden, the devastating seriousness of that kiss, rose up and choked the lies in his throat.
He typed a single word. ‘Yeah.’
He sent it. It was neither an answer nor a denial. It was a stunned, stupid admission. He stared at the screen, waiting for the typing ellipsis, for the judgment, for anything. The silence from the device felt louder than anything.
The silence from the device felt louder than anything. He held the phone until the screen went black, reflecting his own hollow stare. The final bell rang, a distant shriek, but he stayed frozen at the sink.
He needed air that didn’t smell of sweat and industrial cleaner. He shoved the phone in his pocket and shouldered his bag, exiting into the side courtyard. A cold, fine drizzle had begun, misting the concrete and dampening his uniform. He walked toward the bike racks, head down, the ghost of her skin still humming under his touch.
“Jay.”
The voice cut through the drizzle. Emily stood by his bike, her school bag held over her head like a makeshift umbrella. Her uniform blazer was dark with moisture at the shoulders. She looked soaked, annoyed, and utterly real.
The ghost in his head vanished. Here was the living girl, her piercing eyes narrowed not in artistic contemplation, but in clear irritation.
“You’ve been walking the other way all week,” she said. Her tone wasn’t accusatory. It was flat, a simple statement of observed fact. Water dripped from a strand of hair clinging to her cheek. “Did I do something on the engawa?”
“No.” The word came out too fast, too harsh. He fiddled with the combination lock on his bike chain to avoid her eyes. The cool metal was a tangible anchor. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Then what is it?” She didn’t move closer. The five feet between them felt like a canyon of rainy air. “You kissed me and then you… evaporated. Unless that was your plan. A single, dramatic, goodbye kiss.”
He finally looked at her. The vulnerability she’d shown in the garden was gone, replaced by a defensive, wary hardness he recognized all too well. It was the same look she’d had for years after their friendship ended. He had put it back there. The realization was a physical ache.
“It wasn’t a goodbye,” he said, his voice low. “It’s the opposite.”
“It doesn’t feel like the opposite.” She shifted the bag on her head. A car splashed through a puddle on the street beyond the school gates, the sound harsh in the quiet courtyard. “It feels like you’re scared.”
He was. He was terrified. Not of her, but of the violent, wanton things his mind painted every night, of the crude framework the world would shove them into. Of becoming his father, all hunger and consequence. He couldn’t say that.
“Yuto’s joke,” he started, but she cut him off.
“This isn’t about Yuto. This is about you and me. And a phone call your mother might make.” She took a step forward. The rain pattered softly on her bag. “You said you didn’t care if she found out.”
“I don’t.”
“Prove it.” The challenge hung between them, sharp and immediate. “Stop acting like we’re a secret even from each other.”
A group of first-years ran laughing through the rain toward the gates, their voices fading. Jay yanked his unlocked bike free from the rack. The chain clattered. He looked from the bike to her, standing stubbornly in the drizzle.
An impulse, reckless and clear, cut through the noise in his head.
“Get on,” he said, nodding to the bike’s crossbar.
She blinked. “What?”
“You’re soaked. I’ll take you home. Or… not home.” He swallowed. “The izakaya. Your mom’s shift doesn’t start until six, right?”
He saw the calculation in her eyes. Going home meant separate rooms, more silence. The izakaya on a rainy afternoon would be empty. It was neutral, yet intimate territory, filled with the ghost of her mother’s labor and their own shared, unresolved history.
She didn’t smile. But she nodded, once. She swung her bag onto her back and walked over. He steadied the bike as she perched sideways on the bar in front of him, her body fitting awkwardly between his arms and the handlebars. He could feel the damp heat of her through their uniforms.
He pushed off, the bike wobbling for a moment under their combined weight before he found balance. The rain misted their faces as he pedaled out of the gates and onto the slick street.
She was rigid at first, holding herself away. But as he turned a corner, she had to lean back into him for balance. The back of her head rested against his collarbone. Her damp hair smelled of rain and faint, clean shampoo.
Neither spoke. The rhythmic shush of the tires on wet pavement, the occasional ping of rain on the bike’s metal frame, were the only sounds. He navigated the familiar streets, his world telescoped down to the circle of his arms, the weight of her against his chest, the steady pump of his legs.
It was an intimacy more profound than the kiss. It was logistical, necessary, and unbearably close. With every pedal stroke, the wall he’d built all week crumbled a little more.
He stopped in the alley beside the izakaya, the familiar red lantern dark and dripping. The back door was propped open with a brick for the delivery guy. Emily slid off the bar, her legs unsteady. She looked at the open door, then back at him.
“She’s not here,” Emily said, as if reading his last, silent doubt. “She’s doing the books at home before her shift.”
They left the bike leaning against the damp wall and stepped inside. The narrow corridor was dim, smelling of stale beer, fried food, and bleach. It was chillingly familiar. He followed her past stacked crates of empty bottles, their footsteps loud on the concrete.
They emerged into the silent main room. The chairs were upturned on tables. The long wooden bar, usually gleaming under warm lights, was a dark, polished expanse. The only illumination came from the gray rainy light filtering through the front window.
Emily walked behind the bar with the ease of long practice. She grabbed two towels from a shelf and tossed one to him. It was thin and smelled faintly of sanitizer. He rubbed it over his hair, watching her.
She dabbed at her face and neck, then leaned back against the counter where the spirits bottles stood in silent rows. Her gaze was direct, expectant. The defensiveness was still there, but underneath was a flicker of the girl from the engawa, waiting for his truth.
He stayed on the customer side of the bar. The divide felt important.
“The dreams started after Yuto’s house,” he said. The words left his mouth before he could censor them. They sounded raw, stupid in the quiet room.
Her brows drew together slightly. “What dreams?”
He looked at the familiar bottles of shochu and whiskey, the ghosts of a hundred salarymen’s conversations. He couldn’t look at her. “About you. About… that night. But they don’t stop where we stopped.”
The silence that followed was total. He heard the soft patter of rain on the window awning outside, the distant drip of a leaky tap in the corridor. He forced himself to meet her eyes.
She wasn’t blushing. She wasn’t smiling. She was listening, her expression solemn and utterly still, as if parsing a difficult text.
“They’re… graphic,” he continued, the admission tearing something loose inside him. “Relentless. I wake up…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “And then I see you at school, and all I can think about is the dream, not the real you. It felt violent. It felt like what Yuto was talking about, and I hated it. I hated myself for it. So I… stepped back.”
He braced for her revulsion, for her to call him creepy, to tell him he was exactly what she’d feared.
Emily placed her sanitizer-scented towel neatly on the bar. She studied his face, his tense shoulders. Then, a faint, almost imperceptible shadow of a smile touched her lips. It wasn’t happy. It was acknowledging a shared, brutal irony.
“So you’ve been avoiding me,” she said slowly, “because you’re having a completely normal, biological reaction to the first real intimacy you’ve had in years?”
He blinked. “It doesn’t feel normal. It feels like an invasion. Of you.”
“It’s your dreams, Jay. Not you.” She paused, choosing her words with care. “My mother works here. I clean these tables. I see the salarymen who come in, who drink too much and leer at her. That’s violent. That’s an invasion. What you’re describing is just… a body catching up to a feeling it’s been denied for a very long time.”
She came around the end of the bar, closing the physical distance he’d maintained. She stopped an arm’s length away, her gaze holding his. “The question isn’t what your subconscious does in the dark. The question is what you do in the light. And in the light, you’ve been kind of an asshole.”
A choked, half-hysterical laugh escaped him. The tension in his shoulders broke, not into relaxation, but into a bewildered relief. She wasn’t running. She was reframing.
“Yeah,” he admitted, the word heavy with regret. “I have been.”
“Stop it.” Her voice was firm now. “We have enough real problems. My mom’s bills. Your dad’s silence. That… phone. We don’t need to invent new ones by overthinking a dream.” She took a final step forward, so close he could see the droplets of rain still caught in her eyelashes. “The kiss was real. This is real.” She gestured between them. “The rest is just noise.”
He reached out, not to pull her in, but to touch the back of her hand with his fingertips. A point of contact. Grounding. “How are you this calm?”
“I’m not,” she said quietly. “I’m terrified. But I’m more terrified of going back to that silent place where we don’t talk for years.” She laced her fingers through his, their hands still damp from the rain. “So no more avoiding. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s weird. Deal?”
He tightened his grip, felt the solid, real bones of her hand. “Deal.”
“And if the dreams are too persistent,” she whispered, her fingers trailing up his forearm, “maybe we just… do what they say.”
Her words didn’t hang in the air—they detonated. The sanitizer smell vanished, replaced by the electric scent of ozone after a lightning strike. Jay’s breath stopped. Her fingers on his arm were points of searing connection.
He searched her face. There was no tease there, no performative seduction. Just a staggering, frank offer wrapped in a whisper. It was a solution posed as a question, utterly devoid of the slick fantasy his dreams had manufactured. This was real, and the reality of it was infinitely more terrifying.
The drip of the tap in the corridor marked a frantic, uneven rhythm. He could feel his own pulse in his throat.
“Here?” The word was gravel. He glanced at the darkened room, the ghost of her mother’s workplace. It felt like a violation of a different kind.
“God, no.” A quick, sharp laugh escaped her, breaking the spell just enough to let oxygen back into the room. She pulled her hand back, tucking her hair behind her ear. The gesture was self-conscious, a retreat from the cliff’s edge. “Not here. This place already has enough secrets.”
He nodded, the movement jerky. His body was a live wire, but his mind was scrambling to catch up. “Your place is… your mom. My place is my dad.” Each option was a minefield. Yuto’s was tainted. There was nowhere that belonged just to them.
“I know.” She wrapped her arms around herself, not from cold, but as if holding her own courage in place. “I’m not saying now. I’m not saying tonight. I’m just saying… the theory exists. As an option. To stop the dreams from being the only place that thing lives.”
It was the most pragmatic, revolutionary thing he’d ever heard. She wasn’t offering herself; she was offering a treaty. A collaborative effort to reclaim a narrative from his own subconscious. The sheer, brave logic of it undid him.
“You’re incredible,” he breathed, the words leaving him before he could shape something more poetic.
She rolled her eyes, but a faint blush finally colored her cheeks. “I’m realistic. And I’m tired of being haunted by things that aren’t real. We have enough real ghosts.”
A sudden, heavy thud against the alley door made them both jump apart. They froze, hearts synced in a panicked hammer. A deliveryman’s grumbled curse followed, then the sound of a handcart rolling away.
The interruption was a bucket of cold water. The intimate bubble shattered, replaced by the oppressive awareness of time and place. Her mother would be here soon to prep for the evening shift. His father expected him home.
“I should get the bike back before the rain gets worse,” he said, the normalcy of the statement absurd.
“Yeah.” She straightened her blazer, her schoolgirl persona settling back over her shoulders like a weight. “Me too. I mean, I should… go home and change.”
They walked back through the dim corridor, side-by-side but not touching. The world had narrowed and expanded all at once. They had a secret, but it wasn’t a burden. It was a shared, shimmering possibility lodged in the future.
Out in the alley, the rain had softened to a mist. He wheeled the bike out. She stood, looking suddenly young and uncertain.
“So,” she said. “No more ghosting.”
“No more ghosting,” he agreed. He wanted to kiss her goodbye, but the moment had pivoted back to something delicate. He nudged her shoulder with his own instead, a solid, friendly pressure. “See you tomorrow. For real.”
“For real,” she echoed, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through.
He watched her walk down the alley, a figure dissolving into the gray drizzle, until she turned the corner. Then he swung his leg over the bike, the metal cold and familiar under his hands. As he pedaled toward his father’s house, the dreams felt different. They were no longer a haunting. They were a blueprint. And for the first time, he wasn't afraid of the architect.
The following Wednesday, the rain had given way to a brittle, clean sunlight. Jay found Emily at her usual lunch spot, a secluded bench under a ginkgo tree whose leaves were just beginning to turn. Hiromi was with her, animatedly describing a drama she’d watched.
“So then he grabs her wrist, right, but it’s not aggressive, it’s passionate,” Hiromi said, miming the gesture with a rice ball.
Emily listened, a faint smile on her lips, but her eyes flicked up as Jay approached. The smile deepened, just for him. It was a private, conscious thing.
“Mind if I crash?” he asked, his voice casual.
Hiromi’s eyes went wide, her narrative forgotten. “Uh. No. Sure.” She scooched over, making space on the bench. “This is… new.”
“It’s old, actually,” Emily said quietly, peeling a tangerine. The citrus scent spiked the air. “We’re just reinstating it.”
Jay sat, his knee brushing Emily’s. The contact was simple, deliberate. Hiromi looked between them, her expression shifting from shock to dawning, delighted comprehension. She wisely said nothing, taking an enormous bite of her rice ball.
The normalcy of it was a kind of miracle. They ate in comfortable silence for a moment, listening to the distant shouts from the soccer field. The secret possibility they’d crafted in the izakaya hummed softly beneath the surface, a quiet engine giving purpose to every mundane gesture.
“My dad’s going to Osaka on Friday,” Jay said, not looking at Emily. He focused on opening his own lunch box. “Overnight. For a meeting.”
The implication landed softly between them. Hiromi coughed, pretending to be intensely interested in a cloud.
Emily finished a segment of tangerine. She wiped her fingers carefully on a napkin. “Is that right?”
“Yeah.” He chanced a glance at her. Her expression was unreadable, but a pulse fluttered at the base of her throat. “The house will be empty.”
The sentence hung there, full of everything and nothing. It was a statement of fact. It was an invitation. It was a test.
Hiromi stood up abruptly, gathering her things. “You know what? I just remembered I promised Yuto I’d quiz him on kanji. He’s going to fail miserably. Carry on.” She fled with a barely suppressed grin.
Emily watched her go, then turned her full attention to Jay. The sunlight dappled through the ginkgo leaves, casting moving patterns on her face. “An empty house,” she repeated.
“Yeah.” He felt like he was balancing on a high wire. “I was thinking… we could watch a movie. One we actually pay attention to. Without commentary.”
A slow, real smile spread across her face, erasing the last of the week’s tension. “That sounds… theoretically perfect.”
“Good.” He nodded, a matching smile tugging at his own mouth. The fear was still there, a low thrum in the background. But it was now partnered with a fierce, focused anticipation. They had a plan. It was terrifying. It was theirs.
The bell rang, shrill and invasive. Around them, the schoolyard erupted into motion. Emily gathered her things, her movements sure. As she stood, her hand brushed his, a quick, grounding touch.
“Friday,” she said, not a question.
“Friday,” he confirmed.
She walked toward the school building, her back straight, her dark hair swinging. Jay watched her go, the blueprint in his mind shifting from dream to daylight. The ghosts were receding. The future, vast and frightening and theirs, was taking a concrete, singular shape. It had a day of the week.