A girl in his eyes – by preety-lady-serenity

Disclaimer: The characters belong to Aya Nakahara and that is final.

There are times when I get flashes of memory of that first time I noticed him. It was Christmas and I was at a breaking point. I felt abandoned by everyone.

It is difficult being the fool of the company. You are expected not to care if you are spending Christmas alone. You are expected not to realise that other couples are prancing around holding hands. It is also difficult being the tall girl. They see you are they think you must be tomboyish and tough. They think you do not care about frilly dresses and do not get easily hurt because you are tall and you can fight boys if you want to. They think that you must be strong because crying and weakness is for girls like Chiharu-chan, who is small and frail, and not for girls like Risa-chan that is like a giant totem pole.

It is true that at the time I did not care it was Lovers' Christmas but I did care that I was all alone. I was angry at Nobu-chan that day, not because she chose Nakao-chi over me, but because she told me it was not that important that we could not meet. For her I was a 'big girl enough' to be strong and not care to feel lonely.

But I was lonely! I was scared to be left out by three couples and I knew no one want a third wheel, let alone a seventh one. So I stood there, clutching my bag, my knee hurting from the fall, feeling as if I was about to die and there he came running and heaving.

It wasn't much the fall and the hurt of my knee that reduced me to tears that Christmas evening. It was the moving realisation that he treated me like a girl. I know that afterwards I accused him of not realising I was a girl, but now that I think of it he was the only person that to his sight I was a girl.

His declare that he had a date with me first showed he saw me as the girl I was. When I started crying and he took my hand to comfort me he saw me as a girl. I haven't told him, or anyone else, but when he caught my hand I saw him as a man. If there was a way I would have buried my face in his chest to cry that moment. Because I know he saw me as a girl and he was giving me some kind of permission to be frail and cry.

Years after that incident and a few months after our graduation he told me that he always knew I was a girl – it was just that he felt no eroticism at first. But the truth was that I had always been a girl to his eyes – a tall idiot, but a girl nevertheless.

So what do you think?