Part-3 Ch-06 Ep-01
127
Entries
A Fevered Cold and a Heart That Longs
2026
Cough, cough. The only sound echoing through the room was my own coughing.
Overcome by a dense, bone-deep lethargy, I raised a hand to my face; my palm was slick with sweat.
I'd come down with a cold.
...And right after the culture festival ended, too.
Letting my hand fall weakly back onto the bed, I muttered under my breath.
"I want to see Mari..."
The culture festival had ended on Friday.
That very night, a sudden chill ran through me, and I realized something was off with my body, so I did something unusually responsible for once and didn't go over to Mari's house that weekend.
Since I'd spent the entire weekend quietly shut up in my room, I'd thought, Oh, I should be fine by now, but almost as if on cue, I developed a fever on Sunday night.
And just like that, I'd been absent from school since Monday. Several days had already passed.
My fever had gone down quite a bit, and physically I was definitely recovering, but my head still felt heavy and sluggish, and even getting out of bed was unbearably exhausting.
I'm an exam-year student, so what the hell am I even doing?
I haven't even settled on my first-choice school yet...
There was more than enough to be anxious about regarding my current situation, but even so, the thing occupying my thoughts more completely than anything else right now was—
I haven't been able to see Mari for days. I want to see her.
That feeling alone consumed me.
At this point, I even found myself wishing for one of those cliché developments from a yuri novel I'd read recently (a personal all-time favorite where the heroine ends up with her childhood friend): the classic "nursing your sick childhood friend back to health" scenario.
Though, realistically speaking, I hadn't even been able to take a bath because of this cold, and I looked like an absolute disaster, so Mari was the one person I least wanted seeing me in this state.
Ah, but still.
"I want to get better soon and see her..."
There was no way a lonely little murmur like that could possibly reach anyone. With nothing else left to do, I closed my eyes once more and slowly surrendered myself to sleep.
~~~End~~~