Prologue
Mornings are always hard. Opening your eyes—that's the hard part. And if I'm being honest, that cuts two ways.
The first is simple biology. I'd stayed up fooling around until the small hours of dawn, so of course my body staged a quiet rebellion at the thought of getting up. The second was something else entirely: the plain, stubborn wish to live forever inside a dream.
There was always that hope, first cousin to delusion, that the moment I opened my eyes a world unlike yesterday might be waiting. But a delusion is only a delusion. Today, same as ever, nothing awaited me but another dreary day identical to the last.
"Urghhh......"
Fresh out of sleep, I was a zombie in every sense of the word. Eyes barely cracked, I stretched a hand toward the head of the bed and groped around until my fingers closed on something.
The instant I had the phone, I checked the time. Thankfully, I hadn't overslept.
"Nnngh......"
I gave the throbbing skin around my eyes a timid little massage, stretched once—long and hard—and climbed down off the bed.
God, this was rough. The bed looked endlessly soft, and the sight of it was criminally tempting. I wanted nothing more than to fall straight back in, but a man has to eat, so I cast the longing aside and forced my head to turn. If I didn't wash up and get moving, I'd never make it to work on time.
"Glug, glug!"
I hauled a water bottle out of the fridge, twisted off the cap, and drank it down cold. Cups? I didn't use pathetic things like cups. I was a real man.
Then I made a beeline for the bathroom.
"Scrub, scrub."
To save time, I brushed my teeth while standing at the toilet—toothbrush in one hand, the other shoving my pants down. If that wasn't multitasking in the truest sense, what was?
"Huh?"
I reached down to line up a proper aim, and something felt wrong. Empty. There was nothing in my hand.
Am I still half asleep? The thought had barely formed when I looked down—and time stopped dead.
"I-it's gone."
Out of nowhere, a line from a movie that had once struck me hard rose up in my head.
......Except it hadn't so much buried itself as vanished. And what had vanished was the single most important thing a man possesses.
I couldn't believe it. I rubbed my eyes again and again and checked once more, but the treasure that had stood so proud for me every morning had disappeared without a trace.
"H-how is this even—!"
Lost, with no idea what to do, I glanced wildly around—and my eyes met the mirror.
"......Is this for real?"
Staring back from the glass, eyes round as coins, was a woman I had never seen in my life.