It was the day of the next shared-bill show.

The dressing room at the venue was small, passed from one act to the next. By the time VEIL had finished changing into their stage clothes, more cases had appeared in the hallway, and cables no one could identify were crossing the floor. In her rush to get ready, Reina had left her pouch of throat lozenges beneath a folding chair.

The other band was due on before VEIL. A little earlier, Reina had watched the rest of their members carry instruments and cases one by one toward the stage.

She assumed the drummer was there with them.

She assumed the room was empty.

Going back for the pouch was a nuisance, but if her throat went dry before a set, Reina began worrying about things she did not need to worry about. She wanted to sing properly tonight too.

She knocked on the door once.

There was no answer.

The room beyond it was quiet. Everything she had seen in the hallway made it seem as though the dressing room had already been cleared.

Reina opened the door.

The first thing she saw was her pouch beneath the chair.

Then she noticed that the curtain at the back of the room stood slightly open.

She had thought every member of the other band had left.

In fact, only the drummer remained behind the curtain.

He had taken off the shirt he had arrived in and was holding a black T-shirt—probably the one he meant to wear onstage—in both hands. With his back to her, he spread the fabric as if checking which way the sleeves went.

Reina could not move.

She had seen him play drums several times. She knew the way his shoulders lifted and fell when he swung his arms, the way the back of his T-shirt moved broadly with him. But movement during a performance was movement made to create sound.

This was different.

The arm holding the T-shirt rose. One shoulder lifted slightly, making a shallow shadow along one side of his back. When he exhaled, the shadow disappeared at once. In the silence of the dressing room, a motion that had seemed whole behind a drum kit separated into smaller pieces.

The line of muscle running from his shoulder down his back stood out clearly beneath the light. What was usually hidden under cloth now moved in something close to plain view: the outline of his back widening when he raised his arm, the groove between his shoulder blades, the faint contraction near his waist each time he breathed out.

She should not be looking.

By the time she thought it, she already had.

Reina tore her eyes away. She should have closed the door and asked Mizuki to get the pouch later. The lozenges mattered, perhaps, but they were not something Reina herself had to retrieve at this exact moment.

Still, the pouch was right in front of her.

She could get it without going near him. Keeping her eyes on the floor, Reina walked toward the chair.

“Did you leave something behind?”

The man spoke.

Without looking up, Reina nodded.

“Sorry. I’ll be out in a second.”

“It’s fine.”

After saying only that, he stepped farther behind the curtain. He did not come toward the path Reina would take. There was a soft brush of fabric, and Reina understood that he had begun threading his arms into the T-shirt he would wear onstage.

She picked up the pouch and stood.

She should have left then.

But at the edge of the full-length mirror beside the curtain, Reina saw him reflected there.

He was still putting one arm through a sleeve. In the mirror, the transfer of force from shoulder to arm passed through him once. A muscle lifted almost imperceptibly, then vanished beneath the shirt.

The sound of the snare from the previous show came back to her.

When he played drums, one shoulder drew a little backward just before the next strike. For some reason, Reina remembered that. He was not holding sticks now, and yet the order in which his arm moved was the same.

The pouch slipped slightly in her hand.

The man looked at her through the mirror.

Reina looked away.

That second look had not been an accident.

After she closed the dressing-room door, Reina checked that the black pouch was still in her hand.

The lozenges were inside. So were her spare hairpins and the lipstick she always carried.

What she had returned for was properly in her hand.

And yet, with her back against the closed door, she could not begin walking right away. Each time a low sound from the stage side trembled through the wall, the back she had seen rose behind her open eyes: the line of his shoulder, the small contraction when he exhaled, the movement of his arm in the mirror.

When she stepped into the hallway, the air suddenly felt cold. Reina opened the zipper of the pouch and put a lozenge in her mouth. Even as its sweetness spread across her tongue, her breathing did not settle.

She told herself she had only been startled.

Anyone would be startled if they unexpectedly saw someone changing. It was normal to go rigid, normal not to be able to move at once.

Reina pushed the pouch into her bag and walked down the hallway.

Even once the other band began playing, she made a point of staying away from the wings. She straightened the hem of her outfit, warmed the hand that would hold the microphone, answered when Mizuki checked the running order. There was plenty to do.

During one of their songs, a low kick drum made the adjacent wall shudder.

The shoulder she had seen in the mirror returned to her mind.

Reina took a sip of water. She thought that if she concentrated on the coldness passing down her throat, the memory would disappear. Instead, even the back of his hand as he put on the T-shirt remained strangely precise. The order in which the muscles moved. The slight angle at which his shoulder pulled back.

What was she remembering about something like that?

She stopped thinking about it.

The other band finished. After a short changeover, it was VEIL’s turn. Reina stepped onto the stage. The audience was dark, and the heat of the lights touched her cheeks. Usually, in the first song, she looked for the people who had come for them. Tonight, she tried not to search the crowd for faces.

Just after she began singing, she noticed a dark male silhouette near the back of the room. She did not look closely enough to see a face. There were plenty of people in black clothes. There was no reason to decide it was him.

But before they entered the second verse, when she drew breath, the back she had seen while he was changing surfaced again.

Only the first word of the next line came out a little rough.

Reina tightened her fingers around the microphone and placed the next words more clearly than usual. Singing would bring her back. She only had to push her voice forward hard enough that there would be no room to think about bodies.

She sang through to the end.

Even after she came offstage, heat stayed beneath her outfit. That was not unusual after finishing a set. Reina drank water and changed without looking into a mirror.

After the show, Mizuki asked, “Were you nervous at the beginning today?”

“Yeah. Maybe the air was a little dry.”

When Reina smiled and showed her the packet of lozenges, Mizuki did not ask anything more.

Her throat really had been dry. So it was not entirely a lie.

When Reina headed for the exit after packing up, the man was standing along the hallway wall. He had slung his stick bag over one shoulder. He might have been waiting for someone, or he might simply have been standing there.

Reina tried to pass him.

“Earlier.”

The man called to her.

She stopped.

“Sorry. I didn’t hear you knock.”

Reina looked at him.

He said nothing about what had happened in the dressing room. Nothing about what Reina had seen, or about catching her looking again. She thought he had no intention of putting any of it into words.

“I was the one who walked in without checking,” she said.

Her voice was more ordinary than she had expected.

“Did you get what you came for?”

“Yeah.”

He had asked only about the forgotten thing.

The man gave a small nod. He said nothing further, turning instead toward a name someone called from farther down the hall.

Reina headed for the exit as well.

—He had noticed me looking at him in the mirror. Maybe that was why he did not mention the dressing room.—

It was only that. And yet Reina could not look at her own face in the elevator door as it closed.

On the train home, a message from her boyfriend arrived.

Did it end?

Reina wrote back:

I’m on my way home now.

His reply came at once.

It got late. Is your throat okay?

It’s fine. I had a lozenge.

Good. I’m sorry. Something came up today that I really couldn’t get out of.

It’s okay. Come next time if you can.

I will. Drink some water when you get home, okay? And get to bed early.

He did not ask about the show until Reina began writing about it herself. Reina loved that about him: he did not force words out of her.

Reading the messages, she could smile a little.

With him, she did not have to look for reasons behind her words or her body like this. She could say what she wanted to say, and when they met, she could simply laugh.

After she turned the screen facedown, the face reflected in the window looked like the face she always had after a live show.

When she got home, she showered first. She dried her hair and put her stage clothes in the laundry basket. She changed into loungewear and drank water in the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed, and a car passed outside the balcony.

It was an ordinary night.

She wanted to believe she had gone back to ordinary.

Once she was in bed, she sent her boyfriend another message.

I’m home. Thank you.

His answer came back at once.

Good. Good night.

After looking at those words, Reina turned her phone facedown.

When she tried to sleep, the only thing that bothered her was the heat that remained inside her body.

It was because of the show.

After singing, there were nights when she was tired but unable to sleep. After using her voice, standing under lights, facing an audience, the body could feel as though it were still onstage. Tonight was probably only the continuation of that.

Because she was trying to find a reason for the heat, the changing room came back to her. It was only the most awkward moment of the day, stuck at the edge of her mind. It was not that the man was the reason she felt hot.

Once the heat subsided, that memory would thin out on its own.

That was what she told herself.

She did not want to lie awake like this. When she saw her boyfriend, she did not want to look tired for no reason.

Under the blanket, Reina breathed out slowly.

She touched herself only to calm the heat. If it was only a bodily thing, it could end in the body. Once the heat left her, the memory stuck to it should disappear too.

At first, she tried not to remember anything. Her middle finger moved slowly. It traced one small circle, then moved up and down again. She kept her attention only on the sensation at her fingertips.

She remembered her boyfriend’s voice: the gentle way he waited without hurrying her when she went quiet. She thought that voice might lead her back to what was familiar. The warmth of his hand, the pace of his breath, the distance between them when he said her name.

In the middle of that voice, the man’s arm intruded, holding a black T-shirt in both hands.

His shoulder lifted, and a shallow shadow passed over his back. When he exhaled, the shadow vanished.

Reina stopped her finger.

“No,” she said quietly.

The man was not why her body felt hot. Her mind was only fastening that memory to heat that had already been there. It was only what remained of the show.

Reina tried to picture being with her boyfriend again. She would tell him what they had sung at the show, tell him what had gone well. If she pictured his calm smile, she should be able to come back.

But each time she breathed out, the man’s shoulder dropping slightly came forward ahead of her boyfriend’s voice.

She began moving her finger again. This time she traced herself a little more deeply, more slowly. The stronger the sensation became, the more finely detailed the memory of the man grew: the movement of his shoulder as he put his arm through the T-shirt, the instant a muscle rose, the eyes that had looked at her through the mirror. The sequence she was not supposed to want to remember continued by itself.

Reina stopped again.

She could stop here.

No. If she stopped here, it would mean she had stopped because she remembered him. She did not want to admit that. She had to let the heat in her body settle completely. If the heat settled, he would naturally fall away too.

And yet the instant he looked at her through the mirror pushed her boyfriend’s voice aside.

Her breathing grew shallow. A small tension gathered in her shoulders. Reina turned her face into the pillow and made her breath thin, as if trying to keep anyone from hearing it in a room where no one could.

It was not complicated. The heat left after the show was only desire, Reina told herself.

Right after telling herself that, a painfully simple question rose to the surface.

If it was only desire, why was he the only one she remembered?

Reina did not consider the answer.

She began moving her fingers again. This time she brought two together and slowly pushed them inside. Her hips lifted slightly with the movement.

At the same moment, the man’s back became more vivid.

The pleasure deepened.

The deeper it became, the clearer his figure grew.

The clearer it grew, the harder it became to stop moving her fingers.

Heat traveled all the way to the base of her fingers. Her hips answered in small movements, and tension gathered along the insides of her thighs. Her breathing grew shallower still.

“It’s not…”

She repeated the words without sound. Desperate to think of her boyfriend’s voice again, she tried to say his name inside her mind. She tried to lay his gentle breathing, the feeling of his hands, over the memory.

The man’s back rose more sharply in her mind.

The closer she came to the crest, the more the shadows of muscle she had seen under the dressing-room lights seemed to move in time with her fingers.

The more she remembered, the stronger her body answered.

The more she tried to resist, the more her fingers moved as though tracing the man’s motions. The tension in her shoulders traveled into her fingertips. Each small shift of her hips let out another breath. When she bit her lip to suppress it, her body reacted more sharply.

“...Stop.”

She did not know whom she was saying it to.

The pleasure deepened again. Her hips moved without asking her to decide, her thighs trembled slightly, and her heels dragged against the sheets. Her resistance did not disappear. It remained, while the memory of him grew denser.

The eyes that had met hers in the mirror. The sensation of force moving from shoulder to arm as he put on his T-shirt. The shadow that disappeared when he exhaled.

Each time she brought it back, her fingers moved deeper, more precisely. Each change in angle left her faint. And each time, his back rose again.

The contradiction itself became heat.

Then his image grew sharper still.

The sharper it became, the less she could contain her body’s response.

Reina’s breathing had almost become a sound. Her shoulders tightened, sweat gathered at the back of her neck. The insides of her thighs burned, and her hips moved back and forth with her fingers.

“Even though it isn’t…”

The words did not disappear, not even at the end.

They remained as she shuddered once and bit down on her lip.

Heat surged through her all at once, and her hips sank into the bed. A long wave spread from the base of her fingers through her waist, her back, her shoulders. Reina pressed her face into the pillow, doing everything she could to keep back the breath that wanted to escape.

When the heat became quiet, Reina pulled her fingers away at once.

For a while, she looked at the ceiling in the dark room.

It was because she had thought too much about it. The high of the show had simply lasted longer than usual. By morning, it would fade.

Her feelings for her boyfriend had not changed. Remembering the man in her head had not betrayed anyone. Nothing had happened in reality. She had only tried to calm the heat in her body.

The date had already changed.

If she slept, she would return to herself by morning.

Reina believed that in earnest, and closed her eyes.