Chapter 69: Distracted

I blinked.

[Whoa.]

For a moment, neither of us moved. Her hand was still on my collar, my hands were still on her shoulders. Her face was still an inch from mine. I could feel her breath on my lips.

Then, her mental OS turned back on and she pulled away.

"W-Watch where you’re going!" Her face turned the reddest I’d ever seen it. She turned her head away.

... But she was still holding onto me. She must have realized because the very next thing she did was let go and act like her hand had been burned.

I bent down, picked her glasses up off the floor, and handed them back to her.

"Y-You were running through the halls! Don’t you know that’s dangerous???"

"And you were reading through the halls. Who does that?"

"E-Everyone does that! Besides, it works out usually when the other person is looking forward!"

"So it’s my fault???" I smiled a little. I mean, it was way too amusing, wasn’t it?

"Of course!"

We spent an embarrassingly long time debating it. Maybe I should have been a bit more focused but in my defense, I was busy saving the world! Of course, I couldn’t tell her that.

I noticed she was still very close to me, though. And at that moment... I couldn’t help it.

I decided to have some fun.

I leaned in.

"You certainly took a long time to back off though... Were you hoping more would happen?" I asked.

Instantly, her soul left her body and her brows soared to the sky.

"W-WHAT ARE YOU SAYING!?"

"I’m just making an observation. You took one step back. One. There was a whole hallway available."

"Th-The step size was appropriate for the situation!" She pushed her glasses up so hard I heard the frame creak. "And that... that didn’t happen, anyway! It was an accident of momentum! Two bodies on intersecting paths! Without intent it doesn’t count as anything, so wipe that look off your face!"

"I’m just saying."

"Well STOP SAYING!"

Somewhere in the back of my head, a small responsible voice said the word plan. I heard it the way you hear a bell from another village. I didn’t listen.

"Ooh~ Your ears are pink," I said.

"They are not!"

"They arrre. Look how red they’re getting. Do they do that around everyone, or am I special?"

"It’s the sunset! The light in this hallway is red! Everything in it is red! You’re red!"

"Am I?"

"You... hm." She actually looked. Then she caught herself looking, made a strangled noise, and stared very hard at the wall past my shoulder. "This conversation is over. I’m going to the baths."

[Oh?]

"Right, it’s almost the ninth bell, isn’t it?"

"It IS the ninth bell schedule, which I already told you about, for scheduling purposes, and if you happen to also bathe at that time then that is a coincidence of timetables and nothing else!"

"A coincidence of timetables."

"Yes! I’m leaving!"

She did not leave. She stood there clutching her book to her chest and glaring up at me, and I grinned down at her, and somewhere past the pounding of my extremely charmed heart I registered a door sliding open at the far end of the corridor.

Lily stepped out of the linen room, towels stacked to her chin.

[The plan!! It’s happening!!]

I snapped upright like a soldier. Stage one, complete: heroine, corridor, towels, sunset. And there, entering from the east end with all the enthusiasm of a man attending his own trial: Cassian. The paper walls glowed exactly on cue. Even the light was method acting.

All they had to do was walk into each other. Biology would handle the rest. I’d written it myself.

[Go on. Collide. Collide!!]

They closed the distance.

Thirty feet.

Twenty.

At fifteen feet, Lily saw him over her towel stack and shifted course to the left side of the hall.

At ten, Cassian shifted right.

[No. No no no, same side, SAME side, why are you both being polite NOW-]

They passed each other like two ships in the night.

An entire arm’s length apart, actually. Lily said "excuse me" to a man she was not even close to touching. Cassian grunted. Grunted! Not "watch where you’re going, commoner," not a soft voice, not a wrist catch. A grunt!

Then she turned the corner, and he kept walking, and the corridor’s romantic lighting shone down on absolutely nothing.

[FUUUUCK!]

Cassian trudged past us on his way out. He looked at me, looked at Odette, and clicked his tongue.

"Waste of time. There’s nothing back here."

[THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A GIRL BACK HERE, YOU ABSOLUTE PLANK.]

The door at the end of the hall slid shut behind him.

"Kohaku."

"Mm."

"Your face just went through five emotions and none of them made sense." Odette had her notebook out. When had she gotten her notebook out? "You herded me into position, you watched those two like a hawk at a rabbit farm, and just now you looked personally betrayed by two strangers walking past each other. Explain."

"... I like hallways." My broken mind supplied. "They allow for so many interactions to happen, don’t you think?"

She raised a concerned brow.

"Fine. Keep your secrets." She wrote a line, snapped the notebook shut, and marched off toward the baths with her ears still burning. Three steps in, she stopped. "Ninth bell," she said, without turning around. "The schedule!!!"

Then she was gone.

[... Well. Mission failed.]

I looked down the empty corridor, where the greatest almost-kiss in the history of The Heroine’s Heart had just been replaced by a grunt.

---

I lay face-down on the futon and mumbled into the pillow.

"... He grunted." The pillow did not respond. It was a good listener that way. "So many Chapters of romantic development and none of them are landing."

The door slid open. Footsteps padded over, and then a weight settled next to me, and someone poked the back of my head.

"Kohaku? Why are you talking to the bedding?"

"I’m not talking to the bedding. I’m mourning."

"Mourning what?"

"A death in the family."

Lily gasped. The futon shifted as she scrambled closer, and both her hands landed on my shoulder and hauled at me with genuine alarm.

"WHAT? Whose? When?! Why didn’t you say anything, we’ve been walking around all day looking at rice!"

I turned my head enough to free one eye. She was leaning over me with her face all crumpled up, still holding the towels she’d been folding, and she looked so sincerely devastated on my behalf that I felt the guilt physically arrive.

"Nobody died, Lily."

"You said-"

"Sorry, it’s a figure of speech. Something I worked on didn’t work out. That’s all."

She sat back on her heels and pressed a hand over her heart, and then she got mad, which for Lily meant puffing up like an offended bird.

"Don’t SCARE me like that! I thought I’d have to write a condolence letter! I was already composing it!"

"That fast?"

"I compose quickly when I’m upset!"

I laughed into the pillow despite everything. She smacked my shoulder, once, with the softest hit in the recorded history of violence, and then she resumed folding the blankets like the professional she was.

"So what didn’t work out?" she asked. "You’ve been strange all day. Stranger. You gave me a tour of a hallway."

"The hallway was educational."

"You told me the well rope was forty feet."

"That could be true. Neither of us has measured it."

She gave me a long look over the towel stack. I could see her deciding whether to push. Somewhere behind those blue eyes a little scale tipped, and she folded the next towel instead.

"Fine," she said. "But if you mope into that pillow any longer you’ll suffocate, and THEN I’ll be writing the letter for real."

She was right. Lying here wasn’t going to fix anything. What I needed was a reset: hot water, empty head, steam. Wash off the failure, reassess tomorrow. The almost-kiss was dead, but the arc wasn’t, and a professional doesn’t cry over one deleted scene.

---

Then the ninth bell rang through the paper walls.

[... Ninth bell. The schedule.]

I sat up so fast my ears popped.

"I’m going to the baths."

"Now? You just spent ten minutes refusing to move."

"I’ve completed my mourning period." I grabbed a towel off her folded stack, which earned me a second soft smack, and hunted for my washcloth. "Steam is good for grief."

"You’re not sad at all anymore, are you!"

"I am extremely sad. I’m going to go be sad in the water."

Lily narrowed her eyes at me, and I gave her my most innocent smile, and she pointed at the door with a towel like she was banishing me from the kingdom.

I went, whistling.

[Okay. New plan for tonight: soak, recover, and flirt with Odette until her glasses fog up. She practically demanded I come. "The schedule!!!" Adorable. If today gives me nothing else, it gave me that.]

The bathhouse sat at the end of the covered walkway, lanterns lit, steam curling out from under the eaves. I slid the changing room door open, stripped, hung my towel, hummed a little tune, and stepped through into the bath proper.

"Odeeeeette~ I have arrived, per the sched-"

White hair.

Red eyes.

Water up to her collarbone.

Serena.