I'm really lagging behind shows.

Episode 18
Bugs have it nice, don't they?
They shut themselves in their shells yet they are still claustrophobic.

Rina is transferred to a rival company M & M Music (M3) as another part of Eiji's payment for the painting and the Sakura Group is disbanded. Yuki was still troubled that her best friend would no longer be there to support her and decides to go visit Touya to talk to him about it. However, just as Yuki was dropping by to briefly visit Touya's father, Yayoi reminds him of their own relationship and that he must help her make Yuki realise she must no longer rely on people for support. During the weekend, Touya secretly decides to drop by to visit Rina who was having her last performance at Ogata Productions and there, a crying Rina seeks comfort from him. Yuki leaves an important dinner to visit too and just manages to see Touya leaving.

Episode 19

One says you can move on once you've had enough of something.
Usually it's as if you were already bored before you had enough.

Rina finds a worried looking Yuki waiting outside her room and lets her inside. Rina doesn't try to hide the fact that she and Touya kissed or her feelings towards him. It was then that Yuki reveals she knew everyone was hiding secrets from her and becomes very anxious. Rina remains calm and tries to make Yuki hit her but Yuki doesn't. Instead, she bites her own hand so hard, blood drips to the floor. However, she wasn't going to give up on Touya and intended to wait for his love for her to return. Afterwards, Yuki decides to go for a drive with Yayoi after Eiji let her off for leaving dinner unexpectedly. Touya is hired by Rina as her assistant once again through her own savings and on the first day at M3, she finds none of her songs will be used. Instead she will be assisting one of the Sakura Group members who was going solo. There, Touya is surprised to find the singer was Menou - a girl who he had met and called another of his "goddesses" at Yuki's first concert. While helping her record songs, Rina is reminded of the times she spent recording with her own brother, Eiji.

Episode 20
Love is irrational.
Lovers who said that were poets, commentators and philosophers.

Touya had found Menou waiting for him at the train station and is made to take her back to his home. However, while out to pick up some beer for her, he calls her manager and she is unwillingly taken away. Meanwhile Yuki, after everything's she's been through and her talk with Rina, finds the courage to question Eiji's methods during a practice session. Eiji laughs, happy at the fact she was improving herself under all the pressure and decides to take her to Echoes where he had all his counterfeit paintings displayed. When Yuki points out that they all had the portrait of a different girl in them, Eiji goes crazy and sits in the room alone. A moment later, Yayoi enters and appears to be happy and satisfied that he had finally woken up from his dreams of searching for a painting that he had long forgotten. Returning to himself again, Eiji was ready to start composing something new and stays at Echoes. The next day, after spending some time with Rina during her singing practice, Touya returns to university after a long time and meets the girl who had introduced him to his job as a tutor. She thanks him for calling her a "goddess" and the two of them go out to dinner. However, they are interrupted when Yayoi finds him at the restaurant and takes him away for the night.

Episode 21
I think I want to return to where the path forks.
I should have gone right. This journey has been filled with nothing but regret.

After another day at work where Touya met Yuki for the first time as Rina's manager, he has another intimate moment with Yayoi before he goes off to visit his father at the hospital. He seemed to be glad his son was seeing one less girl. Later, Touya is off to tutor Mana again. He gives her a present partly as thanks for helping him out with Yuki's present when he went to the concert. Mana accepts, asking how his relationship with Yuki was going before beginning to study but she puts on a pair of headphones to ignore Touya. However, after Touya leaves the room, she removes them again to listen to him. Later, her mother who also happened to be Rina's new boss returns home and was surprised who the tutor was. She reveals how Touya was now working for Rina and upon hearing this, Mana loses her temper thinking they both had been lying to her all this time. She rushes out the house and cycles off. Touya had decided it was best he left her with Haruka but learning she had not returned home for the night, he calls Misaki to find out where Haruka and Mana might be. He finds them at the cabin and is surprised to see that Haruka was the energetic self she once was again. Meanwhile, Tamaru catches Yayoi's stalker and decides to strike a deal with him but, he was unaware Menou had caught them and was eavesdropping on their plans. He had yet to give up on Misaki who he had once impregnated and gives her a call.

Thoughts

So... How many more girls are just going to drop into Touya's arms like that? Well, at least he resisted Menou. Maybe Yayoi's threat managed to wake him up for a moment. Then again, maybe not since he still went ahead with Rina.

Anyway, I think Yayoi might actually be in love with Eiji and is willing to sacrifice anything for him to see him happy - Just look at the lengths she's going to make Yuki stronger and become the "art" Eiji wants to achieve. She even smiled when he woke up from his crazy obsession with paintings. Perhaps she was a girl (or one of the girls) that Eiji had tried to realise into his precious art before Rina even.

Someone on the Animesuki.com forums were joking about calling girls as "goddesses" like Touya and then someone else made an interesting point about how it can have different effects in different cultures... Come to think of it, whenever there's a romance scene in Asian dramas the male always seem to call their love interest a "goddess" when they're sweet talking whereas in Western dramas, they usually use "princess" instead.