Intimacy

(Shin's PoV)

—

We got out of the shower a while later, not before enjoying ourselves, because Akane said: "I need to make sure that her virus has fully gone away".

I toweled her hair for her at the sink because she claimed her arms were too tired, which was an obvious lie that I did not challenge, and after that, she demanded that I blow dry her hair. And I did it.

Akane stayed with her arms crossed in front of the mirror while I gently dried her hair, occasionally smiling, but with her eyes locked on my movements.

Even without makeup, Akane was still beautiful, and I couldn't help but stop to admire her.

"What is it, Shin? Is there something on my face?" She asked. 

"Not at all. I was just admiring you." I replied.

"I know that you're watching the small mole under my eye, dumbhead," She said, her arms still crossed.

"Nah. I was just thinking how lucky I am to have such a beautiful girlfriend," I replied, smiling.

"Tch— You're impossible..." She said, her fingers gently caressing my forearms.

Then, after we were done, she wandered into my bedroom in one of my dark hoodies — another oversized one she had claimed as hers — and a pair of my sweatpants she had rolled at the waist.

I pulled on a plain T-shirt and pajama pants and followed her into the living room, where she had already claimed her usual corner of the couch, one leg folded under her, the Lilibat box open on her lap.

She was eating the cereal dry, straight out of the box, with her fingers, and she had turned on the TV.

She looked up at me as I came into the room with the bag of snacks, cereal crumbs caught at the corner of her mouth, and stared at me with the flat, unapologetic dignity of a wolf caught with a rabbit.

"What," she said flatly.

"Nothing," I said, holding my laugh.

"Say it, Ishikawa," She pouted.

"Nothing to say. I swear." I replied.

"Ghost Boy." Her voice grew more menacing.

"You have a piece of chocolate on your face," I said while scratching the back of my head.

"I-I know. I put it there." She looked away for an instant.

"Alright." I giggled.

And then, I sat down on the couch next to her. I did not sit far, because the lone wolf did not allow me to sit far.

Within three seconds of my body making contact with the cushion, her leg had unfolded from under her, extended across the space between us, and locked her cold foot firmly against the side of my thigh.

I glanced down at the foot.

She was staring straight ahead at the television, chewing cereal, her expression neutral.

"Your foot is on me," I said.

"It's cold." She said.

"That's not my problem," I replied, smiling. "Get a blanket."

"It's my foot. My foot. My problem is now your problem. Follow the logic. Love is sharing and taking care of your lover's problems, right? Logic. Act like a boyfriend, dumbhead." Akane said, mischievously.

"That's not logic, Akane. That's taking advantage of me." I replied.

"Watch the movie, Shin." She commanded, still eating her cereal.

I let out a soft, quiet laugh, reached down, and pulled her foot fully into my lap, wrapping my hand around her ankle to warm it.

Her expression didn't change. But somewhere behind her eyes, a small light of satisfaction flickered like a match.

I picked up the remote and queued up a horror movie neither of us had seen, something Korean and low-budget with subtitles and a promising number of dead-eyed children in the trailer.

She reached across the couch, wordless, and dragged the blanket from the armrest over both of us.

Then, halfway through the opening credits, she spoke.

"Shin."

"Yes, Akane?" 

"I need to say something." She said, her voice almost unreadable.

I muted the television.

She kept her eyes fixed on the muted screen, her fingers moving absently through the cereal box, her voice landing in the quiet with a small, deliberate steadiness that I recognized.

This was her assembled voice, the one she used when she had spent time putting sentences in order before saying them out loud.

"I'm not leaving you alone for a single second next week," she said. "Not during the rehearsals. Not during the setup. Not during the festival itself. If you go to the bathroom, I'm standing outside the door. If you buy a canned coffee, I'm walking with you to the vending machine. This is non-negotiable, and I'm not asking." She said, her voice leaving no room for any argument.

"Okay. More time together, that's fine." I said, my voice normal.

She glanced sideways at me, one eyebrow lifting. "That was fast."

"You expected an argument, Takanashi?" I teased.

"I expected at least a small negotiation." She replied.

"I already knew that you wouldn't leave me alone. I had already accepted my fate." I said, caressing her thigh.

Her mouth curved slightly at the corner.

Then, she reached out and pressed her fingers briefly against my forearm with a small, grateful press, before she went back to her cereal and continued.

"I've been thinking about tonight," she said, quieter. "The way she came at you. It wasn't real."

"Well, she was the same as the first time I interacted with her. It felt pretty real." I said, remembering the first time I met her.

"That's because you were the target of the physical part, but I was watching everything. It was a performance, Shin. She was hitting a mark. The arm-grab, the chest-pat, the sung-out Shin-kun, the blown kiss at the end... Everything seemed too perfect. She was executing."

"Executing what?" I said, confused.

"A message," Akane replied, her voice flat.

I looked at her. She was still staring at the muted screen, her jaw set in that particular quiet way of hers, the one that meant she was assembling the pieces out loud so she could look at them from the outside.

"I'm almost sure Kenji is behind this," she said. "Whatever he's doing, whatever he's trying to build, he's been throwing signals at me all week. First he came to personally bring me money, then him talking with Tsubame, then the soccer club harassing Sora and the fact that he was there to save the day... It's not a coincidence. Kenji doesn't do coincidences. Despite being a complete asshole, he's still my brother, so he's not stupid."

"You think he was watching tonight?" I asked, almost scared.

"I think he had someone watching. Or he told her to report back. Something like that. She wasn't performing for you or me... she was performing so that whatever she did could be described to someone later."

I sat with that for a moment.

She turned her face fully toward me for the first time since starting the sentence. Her eyes were dark and steady in the blue light of the muted television, tired but clear.

"He's probably trying to force a reaction out of me, Shin. I think he knows the only way he'll ever get me to talk to him again is by escalating something into my line of sight that I can't ignore. And I think he's choosing this method because a direct approach like a phone call, a message, or showing up at my apartment... I would shut down inside within three seconds. He knows me. He knows I'll ignore his messages because I hate him. But he also knows that if enough weird things start happening around the people I care about, sooner or later I'll come looking for him myself, if only to make it stop."

She lowered her eyes.

"That's what I think this is," she said quietly. "I think he's laying bait."

I set the remote down on the armrest.

Then, I looked at her, at the way she was sitting cross-legged in my oversized hoodie with cereal crumbs on the fabric.

I reached over and slid the cereal box gently out of her lap, set it on the coffee table, and pulled her sideways against me until her cheek was resting against my shoulder and her legs were folded across my lap under the blanket.

"The only thing that matters," I said quietly, "is that it's you and me here, right now. No one else. Not Kenji. Not Tsubame. Not anyone. Whatever he's trying to build, he can build it out there. In here, it's just us."

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then her hand slid up, her fingers curling loosely into the fabric of my t-shirt over my chest, and she let out a small, slow breath against my collarbone.

"Okay," she whispered. "Just pinch me during the movie so that I know that I'm not dreaming," Akane added, before kissing me.

And then, we stayed like that, only with ourselves.

The horror movie played on in muted silence in front of us, its subtitles scrolling by, a child on screen slowly turning her head one hundred and eighty degrees toward the camera in what was probably meant to be a terrifying jump-scare, and neither of us paid any attention to it.

Eventually, without a word, I reached for the remote and turned the television off entirely, and Akane didn't protest.

We went to bed a while later, and I don't remember, exactly, how we got from the couch to the bedroom.

There was the low, warm quiet of the hallway, and the shape of her hand in mine, and the soft click of my bedroom door closing behind us, and then the room was dark, and her mouth was against mine, and the world narrowed to the small warm sphere of the two of us and the specific, quiet way she breathed against my skin when she was letting me in past every single one of her walls.

For some reason, Akane seemed to be more passionate than usual, and she didn't leave my hand for a single instant.

Afterward, the room was very quiet.

Akane had curled herself against my chest with a completeness that suggested she had no intention of moving before morning, her cheek pressed flat against my sternum, one arm looped across my ribs, one leg tangled between mine under the blanket.

Her hair was splayed against my shoulder in dark strands.

My hand had found her scalp at some point without my deciding to put it there, and I was moving my fingers slowly, absently, through her hair with a soft, steady rhythm that I could tell, by the gradual slowing of her breath, was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

I let the silence stretch for a while, and then, softly, into the dark, I asked:

"How are you? Really?"

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then, against my chest, her voice came out low and warm and slightly muffled by the fabric of my shirt.

"Tired." She just said.

"Okay," I replied.

"But... good. Somewhere under the tired." She whispered, her thumb gently caressing my skin.

"Okay."

"But... I'm also... " she paused, searching for a word, and then apparently gave up on finding it. "Happy. Because you're still here."

"And I'll always be here," I replied. "As long as you don't abandon me."

"Never, Ishibaka." She replied, her fingers tightened slightly on my ribs.

"And if you stop stroking my head for a single millisecond," she murmured, her voice already thick with the specific, slow blur of a person falling asleep mid-sentence, "I will suffocate you with a pillow, Ghost Boy. But you should know I love you anyway. Even though you're an idiot."

I laughed softly against her hair.

"Understood," I whispered.

This time, she didn't answer. Her breath had already lengthened, her body going warm and heavy against my chest in the specific, boneless way of a person who had trusted the room enough to let go of her guard.

Within thirty seconds, she was asleep, and I kept my fingers moving through her hair without stopping.

For a long time, I just lay there in the dark, listening to the soft, even rhythm of her breathing against me, watching the pale line of light from the streetlamp outside cut a soft diagonal flicker across the ceiling.

Her lashes rested against her cheekbones in dark half-moons. Her mouth was slightly parted. The line of her shoulder rose and fell with a slow, unhurried peace that I had never seen in her waking hours.

She was beautiful. She was so damn beautiful.

Not in the way that girls in magazines were beautiful, or in the way that Kurone had once been beautiful to my ten-year-old eyes.

Something else. Something harder, quieter, and more unrepeatable.

The kind of beautiful that belonged to a person who knew who she was.

I let my thumb trace a small, slow arc against her temple.

"I love you too, Akane," I whispered into the dark, so quietly that not even the pillow could have overheard it. "I can feel it in every part of me. But I can't say it to you yet. Not until I'm sure that when I do, it'll land the way it's supposed to, and not scare you into believing I'm giving you something you'll have to pay back."

Her breath moved softly against my ribs.

"Soon," I whispered. "Just learn to dance, Death Lady..."

Then I closed my eyes, my fingers still slowly moving through her hair, and let the quiet of the room settle over both of us.