Chapter 7: Bathroom Breakdown
The fluorescent light in the coffee shop bathroom buzzed like a trapped insect. It washed everything in a sickly, green-tinged white. Hana braced her hands on the cold porcelain sink, her head bowed, trying to breathe through the rigid cage of her ribs. Her reflection in the mirror was a stranger—pale skin, eyes too wide, the sharp lines of her cheekbones looking brittle.
Okay. Thanks for telling me.
The five words were a mantra of annihilation. She’d sent the text an hour ago. The world had not ended. The coffee shop played acoustic folk music. People laughed at tables outside. Life was grotesquely normal.
Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. A fine, violent tremor that started in her wrists and scattered out to her fingertips. She clenched them into fists, the studs on her knuckle-duster rings digging into her palms. It didn’t help.
The door opened with a soft creak. Hana didn’t move, hoping whoever it was would just use a stall and leave.
“Hana?”
Sakura’s voice was quiet, tentative. Hana saw her appear in the mirror, a blot of warm color against the sterile white tiles. She looked worried.
“Hey,” Sakura said, taking a hesitant step closer. “You, uh… you left your stuff at the table. Your sketchbook. I was packing up and saw you vanish in here. You okay?” Her gaze dropped to Hana’s white-knuckled hands gripping the sink. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine,” Hana said, the words automatic and sandpaper-rough. “Low blood sugar. Didn’t eat.” It was a pathetic lie.
“You want me to grab you a muffin or something?” Sakura didn’t leave. She stood there, a quiet, persistent presence of concern. “You look really pale.”
“I said I’m fine, Sakura.” The bite in her tone was too sharp. It echoed off the tiles. She saw Sakura flinch slightly in the mirror, and a fresh wave of self-loathing tightened her throat. This was who she was. A bristling, poisoned thing, pushing away the exact kindness she craved.
Sakura didn’t retreat. Instead, she leaned against the row of sinks, folding her arms. Her voice was softer now, but deliberate. “You’re not. And it’s okay if you’re not.” A pause. The hum of the lights filled the space. “Did something happen? After I left earlier?”
A jagged, humorless sound escaped Hana’s throat. She turned from the sink, her back against the cold porcelain, sliding down until she was sitting on the thankfully clean floor. She drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. The posture was childlike, defenseless. She couldn’t maintain the façade standing up.
Sakura hesitated, then gracefully sank to the floor across from her, tucking her legs beneath her. She didn’t speak. Just waited.
“I told him,” Hana whispered to her own knees. The words were barely audible over the buzzing light. “I texted him. I told him you were going to ask him out. That he should say yes.”
Sakura’s intake of breath was sharp. “Oh. Hana, you didn’t have to—”
“He answered.” Hana cut her off, her voice gaining a little strength, edged with hysteria. “He said, ‘Okay. Thanks for telling me.’” She finally looked up, meeting Sakura’s confused brown eyes. Her own vision was blurry, hot. “Okay. That’s all. He didn’t ask why I was telling him. He didn’t say it was a bad idea. He didn’t… he didn’t say anything.”
The logic of her own pain was suddenly, horrifically clear to her. She had handed him a weapon, and he hadn’t even noticed it was one. He’d just accepted it, like receiving a weather update. The indifference was the real cut.
“I don’t understand,” Sakura said gently, her brow furrowed. “Why does that upset you so much? I mean… you told me to go for it. You said it was a good idea.”
“Because I’m a liar!” The confession erupted, too loud in the small space. Hana’s hands came up, gripping her own hair. “It’s not a good idea. It’s a terrible idea. He shouldn’t be with you. He should be…” The words died, choked by the sheer vastness of her own need.
Sakura’s expression shifted from concern to dawning, slow comprehension. The pieces were clicking into place now. The weird tension Hana carried. Her sharp questions about Kenji’s headspace. Her brittleness. “Hana… you and Kenji. You’re not just… friends from the group. Are you?”
A sob ripped itself from Hana’s chest, harsh and ugly. She shook her head, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes, trying to dam the flood. “We were. We are. I don’t know. It’s this… thing. This messy, stupid, unfinished thing that I ruined. I push, he pulls. I say shit I don’t mean. He gets quiet. It’s a fucking dance and I keep stepping on his feet.” She dropped her hands, her face a wreck of streaked eyeliner and raw anguish. “And you just… you just walk in. And you’re nice. And you’re easy. And you remember how he takes his stupid coffee. And you don’t make him feel like a project.”
Sakura was silent for a long moment, absorbing the torrent. Her face wasn’t angry. It was… pained. “So when I asked you for advice… that was cruel of me. I’m so sorry, Hana. I had no idea.”
“Don’t apologize,” Hana spat, anger flaring at the kindness. “This is my mess. I made it. I’m the drama. He told you that, right? The drama from his past? That’s me. I’m the lesson.”
She drew in a shuddering breath, the fight leaving her as suddenly as it came. She was just empty, and aching, and so desperately tired of her own jagged edges. She looked at Sakura—really looked at her. The gentle posture, the open face, the clarity in her eyes that came from not being eternally at war with yourself.
A desperate, impossible yearning seized her.
“Please,” Hana whispered, the word shattered. She leaned forward, her blue eyes blazing with a feverish intensity. “Please, just… make me like you.”
Sakura recoiled a fraction of an inch. “What?”
“Tell me how to do it.” Hana’s voice was a ragged plea, her teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached. “Tell me how to be warm. How to be uncomplicated. How to just… be someone he can be ‘lighter’ with. I don’t know how. I look at you and it’s like watching someone speak a language I was never taught. I need him. And I don’t know how to be the person who gets to have him. So just… tell me. Make me like you.”
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the relentless fluorescent hum. Sakura stared at her, her earlier compassion now tinged with something like horror. This wasn’t rivalry. This was a disintegration.
“Hana,” she said finally, her voice firm but not unkind. “I can’t do that. You don’t… you don’t get it. This isn’t about being a type of person. It’s about being honest. If you have feelings for him, you need to tell him. Not sabotage yourself. Not try to contort yourself into something you’re not.”
“He doesn’t want what I am!” Hana cried, the truth of it echoing in the sterile room. “He wants peace. He wants the opposite of me.”
“You don’t know that,” Sakura insisted, but her conviction sounded thin, even to herself. She had seen Kenji’s relieved smile when he took the coffee. She had felt the ease between them, an ease conspicuously absent when Hana was around.
Sakura slowly got to her feet, brushing off her jeans. She looked down at Hana, a small, sad figure curled on the bathroom floor. The dynamic had shifted irrevocably. The bubbly barista was gone, replaced by a woman who understood she was an unwitting pawn in a much older, more painful game.
“I’m not going to ask him out,” Sakura said quietly.
Hana’s head snapped up. “What? Why not?”
“Because it’s clearly not simple. And I don’t want to be the ‘easy’ choice he settles for because he’s tired of the hard one.” There was a new steel in Sakura’s voice. “And because you’re his friend, and you’re clearly in pieces, and that matters to me too.” She walked to the door, then paused, her hand on the handle. “But Hana, this? What you’re doing? This isn’t the way. Begging a rival for lessons… that’s not strength. It’s surrender. And he’ll never respect that. Nobody could.”
She left, the door swinging shut with a soft, definitive click.
Hana was alone. The advice—tell him—hung in the acidic air, a useless prescription for a terminal condition. Tell him what? That she was a jealous, possessive mess? That she wanted to burn the easy bridge he was about to cross just so he’d be forced to look back at the wreckage she inhabited?
She pulled out her phone. The text thread with Kenji was a cold monument. Okay. Thanks for telling me.
Her thumb hovered, then moved. Her heart was a frantic, wounded animal in her chest.
Hana: I’m at The Lock. Tonight. I need to see you. Please.
She sent it before she could think. A direct summons. No sarcasm, no filter. Just a raw, exposed nerve of a request.
She put her head back against the cold cabinet and closed her eyes, waiting in the buzzing silence for either salvation or the final, merciful silence of being ignored.
The buzzing light was the only answer. Minutes bled together on the cold tile floor. Her phone remained dark, a sleek black mirror showing her own hollowed-out expression. Salvation was a no-show. Silence, it seemed, was the only reply she’d get.
Eventually, the numbness in her legs forced her to move. She stood, her joints protesting, and splashed water on her face. The girl in the mirror was a ruin of smudged kohl and red-rimmed eyes. She looked exactly how she felt: demolished. She roughly toweled her face dry, the coarse paper scratching her skin.
Back at her table, her sketchbook sat where she’d abandoned it. Sakura was gone, but she’d neatly placed the book atop Hana’s leather jacket. No note. The latte was still there, too, a full, cold monument to a conversation that had capsized everything. Hana shoved the sketchbook into her bag and left the cup, a perfect circle of beige waste.
The walk to The Lock was a blur of neon signs and pedestrian shadows. Her phone weighed a thousand pounds in her pocket. Every few steps, she’d check it, thumbing the screen to life only to be greeted by a wallpaper of a geometric wolf she’d designed in a more confident life. No notifications. The silence was an active, gnawing thing.
The bar was already lively, a cavernous space humming with pre-weekend energy. Music with a heavy bassline thumped through worn floorboards. She spotted Leo and a few others from the group at a high-top near the back, their laughter cutting through the din. They hadn’t seen her yet.
And then she saw him. Kenji was at the far end of the bar, nursing a pint of dark beer. He was alone, staring at the condensation sliding down the glass. He hadn’t noticed her either. Seeing him like that, in a moment of unobserved stillness, sent a fresh lance through her. He looked thoughtful, maybe a little weary. Not excited. Not like a man anticipating a date.
Her courage, a brittle and fleeting thing, threatened to snap. She could still turn around. She could go home, pour a drink, and let the silence become permanent. But the memory of her own voice in the bathroom—Please make me like you—scorched that escape route shut. She couldn’t live with that version of herself.
She walked toward the bar, each step a conscious act of will. She slid onto the stool next to him, the wood still warm from a previous occupant. The bartender, a guy with a impressive beard, raised an eyebrow in her direction.
“Whiskey. Neat,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady.
Kenji finally turned his head. His expression wasn’t angry. It was carefully neutral, a practiced blankness that was worse than any glare. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She nodded at his glass. “You got my text.”
“I did.” He took a slow sip. “You said you needed to see me.”
The bartender set her whiskey down with a soft thud. She wrapped her fingers around the glass, the amber liquid catching the dim light. She didn’t drink it. “And you came.”
“You said ‘please’.” He said it like it was a foreign word, a curious artifact. “You never say please.”
The observation was a small, precise cut. He noticed her absences, her edges. He just didn’t seem to know what to do with them anymore. “Yeah, well. Desperate times.”
He didn’t smile. He just waited, his dark eyes watching her profile as she stared straight ahead at the ranked bottles behind the bar. The weight of his attention was a physical pressure. She could feel the phantom presence of Sakura between them, of the text, of every unspoken thing.
“Sakura’s not going to ask you out,” Hana blurted out, the words tumbling into the noisy space between songs.
Kenji’s eyebrows lifted a fraction. A flicker of something—surprise, maybe irritation—passed over his face. “Okay. Did you tell her not to?”
“No.” Hana finally took a gulp of the whiskey. It burned a clean, clarifying path down her throat. “She figured it out on her own. The whole… messy situation. I kind of had a meltdown in the coffee shop bathroom. It was a whole scene. She was very… understanding.” She couldn’t keep the bitter twist from her voice.
“A meltdown,” Kenji repeated flatly. He swirled his beer. “About what, exactly?”
“About you!” The words were too loud. She lowered her voice, leaning in closer. The scent of his soap, something clean and faintly cedar, made her chest ache. “About her asking you out. About you saying ‘okay.’ About the fact that I am apparently the exhausting, dramatic history lesson you’ve moved on from.”
He was silent for a long moment, his jaw working. “I never called you exhausting, Hana.”
“You didn’t have to! You told her you’d learned to be careful with your energy. I’m the energy leak, Kenji. I know I am.” She was pleading now, and she hated it, but she couldn’t stop. “I say the wrong thing. I push you away when I want the opposite. I’m all sharp corners.”
“So you decided to, what, set me up with someone soft instead?” he asked, his voice low. There was an edge to it now, a hint of the frustration she’d been waiting for. “As some kind of… penance? Or to test me?”
“I don’t know!” She ran a hand through her choppy hair. “Maybe. Probably. It was stupid. It was a panic move. Seeing her with you, it was so… seamless. And I am all seams. Everything about me is frayed.”
Kenji finished his beer and signaled the bartender for another. He didn’t offer to get her a second whiskey. “You think I want seamless?” He finally looked at her fully, and the neutrality was gone, replaced by a deep, frustrated weariness. “You think after all this time, I’m looking for easy?”
“Everyone wants easy, Kenji.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I want real. Even when it’s difficult. But I can’t do ‘real’ if it’s a game. If you’re going to spend half your time pushing me toward the exit and the other half getting mad that I looked at it.” He accepted the fresh pint. “That text today? That was a game. And I’m tired of playing.”
The finality in his tone was a door closing. Hana felt the last of her shaky bravado dissolve. This was it. The consequence. She stared into her glass, the whiskey suddenly looking like a shallow pool of regret. “So what now?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer right away. He watched the group at the high-top, where Leo was now waving them over with enthusiastic gestures. “Now,” Kenji said, his voice softer, “you decide what you actually want. Not what you’re scared of losing in the moment. Not what you think you deserve. What you want.” He slid off his stool. “And you tell me. With your whole chest. No intermediaries. No tests.”
He started to walk toward their friends, then paused, turning back. His expression was unreadable again, but his eyes held hers. “But Hana? Decide soon. This… this limbo is the exhausting part.”
He moved to join the others, leaving her alone at the bar. The noise of the bar swelled around her, a wave of disconnected joy. She watched him go, watched Sakura’s absence at the table feel somehow more palpable than her presence ever had. The choice was hers, laid bare and terrifying. She could stay on this stool, finish her drink, and let the distance become permanent geography. Or she could follow him, into the noisy, crowded light, and try to say the one true thing she’d spent years carefully hiding.