Sleeping Pills

(Shin's PoV)

—

We took the long way home, neither of us deciding to, my mind already trembling with anticipation since I knew Akane needed to 'recharge her energy'.

Hoshiko had disappeared into the crowd near the station, and neither of us moved for a while afterward.

Akane stood there with the shopping bag hooked over one wrist, looking at the gap in the crowd where she'd gone, and then she took my hand and started walking, and we went.

Her building was on the way, so we stopped there first.

She was up and back down in four minutes, boots hammering the stairwell because she refuses to wait for the elevator when she's in a hurry, and she came out through the glass door with a bag over her shoulder and the enormous box of chocolates held against her chest with both arms.

"I'm not leaving these in an empty apartment," she said, as if the chocolates might otherwise get lonely. "It would be a shame..."

"So that's the whole reason we went back," I said.

"It's one of several reasons." She shoved the bag at me and kept the chocolates. "Now be a man and carry that. I have a fragile cargo, you know."

"Fine, fine..." I sighed. 

"Anyway... those earrings look really great on you, you know?" Akane said, smiling proudly.

"I know. Thanks," I replied, with a smug voice.

"I'm never gonna make a compliment again, I swear," Akane pinched the bridge of her nose.

I laughed, genuinely. 

Considering the fact that I was standing on the edge of the school's rooftop, ready to throw my life away not so long ago... this surely was a great thing. Moreover, the fact that I was learning to live again, on my own, with the help of Akane, who doesn't control every single action of mine, made me happy.

In such a short amount of time, I fell in love with the edgy girl who saved my life. Not in a million years would I've expected something like that.

"What are you staring at, dumbhead?" Akane asked, no venom in her voice. 

"The chocolates, of course," I replied.

"Tch— These are mine, not yours. Remember it," Akane said, clutching the box protectively against her chest.

"Yeah... whatever..." I sighed.

And then, we started walking.

The residential streets took over about ten minutes later, the neon falling away behind us, and the noise dropped off the way it always does when you cross that line.

The cold had gone from sharp to just steady, and Akane's hand was warm in mine and stayed there for the whole walk, and neither of us said much of anything.

She hummed something under her breath for some time, but I didn't recognize it. I didn't even ask, because she stops when you point it out.

My house came up on the left, dark and silent, and Akane went in ahead of me, toed off her boots, and put the chocolates on the low table in front of the couch with the care of a woman placing an offering.

Then she turned around, took two fistfuls of my new jacket, and walked backward, steering me.

"Sit."

"Akane—"

"Sit down, Ishikawa."

And I sat.

Then she dropped onto the couch beside me, pushed me sideways until I was half-lying against the armrest, and then climbed on top of me and settled with her cheek on my chest and her arms around my ribs and every part of her weight distributed with clear intent.

"Tonight I want to sleep like this," she announced into my sternum. "You're under an obligation not to move."

"For how long?" I asked, my hand reaching the top of her head.

"Indefinitely." She adjusted her position.

"I have a spine."

"You had one. It's mine now. I've claimed it the moment we became lovers." She burrowed further in. "Now... put a movie on. I can't sleep in complete silence; I need a background noise."

"What kind?" I asked.

"Don't insult me." She replied.

So I got the remote off the arm of the couch and put on the first horror thing the streaming service offered, which turned out to be an exorcism film with a poster of a girl's face split down the middle and a title in a font that was doing far too much work.

Akane made a small, deeply satisfied noise and got comfortable.

"This one seems good." She muttered.

Then, I opened the chocolates one-handed and put the box on my stomach where she could reach it.

The other hand went into her hair without any conscious decision on my part, and I started moving my fingers through it, and about ninety seconds later I felt her whole body drop about half a degree in tension the way it always does.

The film took its time, and it turned out to be the average mainstream horror movie.

A family moved into a house, a priest had a crisis of faith in a rain-soaked cemetery, and a child began behaving oddly at approximately the eleven-minute mark.

"They're all exactly the same," Akane said, around a chocolate. "Every damn one of them."

"You picked it, in some ways." I said.

"I didn't pick it, I refused to insult myself by naming a genre. That's different." She pointed a finger at the screen without lifting her head. "Watch. Now he'll say she needs help he can't give. Then there's a Latin book. Then something crawls on a ceiling. As always."

The priest said the family needed help he wasn't qualified to provide.

Akane made a sound of pure vindication.

"I don't understand why you like them if you can predict all of it," I said.

"That's why I like them." She reached for another chocolate. "There's nothing in them. They're completely empty. Nothing can actually get you. It's a hundred minutes of a very loud house being loud, and then a man wins, and the credits happen." Her voice went quieter, still perfectly casual. "Movies where things could actually get you are a different genre, and I don't watch those."

I kept my hand moving through her hair and didn't say anything about that, and she reached up without looking and patted the side of my face twice, which is her way of saying 'yes, I know, I heard it too.'

Something crawled on a ceiling at the fifty-minute mark, and she was delighted.

"You know," she said, somewhere in the second half, when the movie had stopped requiring attention. "I'm actually glad Hoshiko finally got out of that studio."

"Yeah, she looked so happy today, and you were right. Her aura is contagious. Too much." I said.

"No, I mean it. In the entire time I've known her, the only time we've ever gone anywhere together was to buy groceries and skin care products." She said it to the middle distance, chin resting on my chest. "Two years. One trip to a supermarket. She carried the bag and told me about a client with a terrible dragon, and that was our social life. We spent most of our time in that studio."

"I can't really blame her, to be honest," I said.

"Mm?" 

"I didn't go out either." I shrugged under her. "Not by myself. Not once, really. Every time I went anywhere it was with Kurone, and—"

Akane's hand came up and pinched my cheek, hard, with a pout I could hear even without seeing her face.

"—and with Ren," I said, "until Ren put a snake in my clothes."

The pinch released.

"You deserved that, you know," she said, entirely without remorse.

"I clearly didn't, Akane."

"Shhh. You'd earned it." She settled back down. "Same as that time at the arcade when you cheated at the shooting gallery and took the Mordecai Von Ravenloft plush that I had been working toward for two hours."

"I didn't cheat, you were just bad." I joked, before getting lightly punched on the chest.

"Tch—. You leaned over the line, Shin. There's a line painted on the floor, and you leaned over it. That's clearly cheating." Her voice had gone dangerous in the specific happy way it goes when she's enjoying herself. "I had budgeted for that plush. I had a strategy."

"You know I still have it, right?" I said.

She went very still.

Then she pushed herself up on both elbows on my chest and looked down at me, and the amber light from the lamp caught the whole surprised shape of her face.

"What? Seriously?" 

"It's in a box somewhere upstairs. Probably in the storage room with the middle school stuff." I shrugged again, as much as a person can shrug while pinned. "I never threw anything out. I'll go dig for it tomorrow."

Akane stared at me for another second.

"Tomorrow," she repeated.

"Yes. Tomorrow. Right now I just want to enjoy this." I said, caressing her cheek.

She groaned and dropped her forehead onto my sternum with a solid thud.

"Stop being sappy, you're embarrassing," she said into my shirt. "And you're making me want to cover you in kisses, which is even worse."

"You're worse than I am, honestly. I at least admit it." I teased.

"Imbecile." 

But she didn't get up, and she didn't argue the point either, and her hand stayed flat over my heart for the rest of the film.

In the end, the priest won, and the credits happened. Neither of us moved to turn it off for a while.

Then Akane lifted her head, and I could see something had occurred to her, because her eyes had that specific bright focus they get about half a second before my evening changes direction.

"I want to ask you a favor, Shin."

"What kind?" I asked, curious.

"Can... I hear you play the piano again?" She said, her voice softened.

I looked at her.

Her request caught me off guard. I didn't expect something like that.

"Yeah," I said. "Of course."

She was off me and standing before I'd finished the sentence.

And then, we both walked upstairs, to my room.

The piano is in my room, against the far wall, a Yamaha upright my father bought me because 'Music is the only thing that will never leave you alone'.

Akane went and sat on the edge of my bed with her legs folded under her and her hands in her lap, and she didn't say anything or take her phone out. She just waited.

I sat down, lifted the fallboard, and put my hands on the keys.

Usually, I don't play other people's music. I never learned properly enough for that, so what comes out is whatever I've been assembling in my head, which used to be the only conversation happening in this house.

I played the first song I had written after my parents left, which is slow and goes nowhere in particular, and then the second one, which is better.

The room was very quiet around the sound.

At some point I became aware that I'd stopped thinking about what I was doing with my hands, which almost never happens, and that the piece had drifted somewhere warmer than where I'd started it, and I let it go where it wanted.

When I finally lifted my hands off the keys, the last note hung in the room for a long time.

"You look so calm when you play," Akane said quietly, behind me. "Like... I don't know... like you're in a totally different world, in another dimension. Ah damn... I don't know how to explain it. All I see is... peace."

I turned around on the bench.

She was sitting exactly where I'd left her, arms wrapped loosely around her own knees, watching me with her chin tilted and an expression on her face I don't have a good word for. Not a smirk, but something open, and soft, and entirely without her usual armor.

"Yeah," I said. "Now I am."

She caught it. I watched her catch it.

Her mouth opened slightly, and she looked away toward the window and then back, and the tips of her ears went red in the lamplight.

"...P-Play something else," she said.

So I turned back around and played something else. And then another. Softer things, slower, the ones that don't go anywhere, and the room got warmer as the house settled around us.

Behind me, I heard her shift and lie down on top of the covers at some point without saying anything.

I was somewhere in the middle of the fourth piece when I heard her yawn.

"You're an excellent sleeping pill, Ishikawa," she mumbled. "You should find a job where you put people to sleep. It's 100% effective."

I let the piece finish anyway, then closed the fallboard.

When I turned around, she was pulling her hoodie off over her head, and she threw it in the general direction of the chair and missed by a considerable margin.

Then she flopped face-first onto the bed and did not move again.

"Are you getting under the covers, or is this the final position?" I teased.

"Mmph."

"Akane," I called her.

"Handle it."

And I did it.

I got the covers out from under her, which took some negotiation, got the lamp off, and got in.

She found me in the dark in about two seconds, which is a thing she does with a kind of homing accuracy that I've stopped being surprised by.

Her forehead pressed into my chest, her hand fisted in the front of my shirt, one leg hooked over mine, her whole body arranged into the smallest possible amount of space directly against me.

"Obligation," she reminded me, already more than half asleep.

"Not moving," I said, petting her head.

"Good boy," She muttered against my chest.

Her breathing evened out within a minute.

I lay there for a while in the dark with my hand on the back of her head and listened to the house being quiet, which used to be the worst sound in the world and has become, at some point, something else entirely.

Tomorrow she'd have to talk to Kurone.

She hadn't mentioned it again since the walk, and I hadn't brought it up, and I wasn't going to.

Then, I closed my eyes and went to sleep with her hand still on my chest, feeling her serene breathing against me.

Sometimes, there are things that are way more intimate than physical intimacy.

'Just wait, Akane. I'll make you the happiest girl alive.'