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All the windows in their home had been open since yesterday because Ken had asked if she minded, and Touka had said no without thinking about it. So now there was a breeze moving through the room that smelled like grass and something she still didn't have a name for. Not exhaust. Not concrete warming in the sun. Just air, the kind that didn't taste like anything.
She was still getting used to that.
Getting to the living room had taken longer than it used to. She moved differently now, carefully, redistributing her weight with each step like she was carrying something she was afraid to spill, which was more or less accurate. The baby had been sitting low all week, a pressure that made everything below her ribcage feel vaguely foreign. She'd woken up that morning, eyes drifting to her bulging belly, and thought: eight months. One more to go. She'd thought it without a hint of the dread that had marked her early days of pregnancy, and that was its own kind of strange magic.
The living room was full of books.
Not on the shelves, where they belonged, but everywhere else. Stacked on the floor in loose towers. Spread across the coffee table in overlapping fans. Balanced on the arm of the couch, like someone had been interrupted mid-thought. Ken was kneeling at the base of the large bookcase against the far wall, his back to her, doing something with his hands that involved very precise adjustments to the spacing between volumes.
He hadn't heard her come in.
Touka stood in the doorway and watched him for a moment. He was tilting his head at a slight angle, examining the arrangement the way he sometimes examined sentences in books, looking for the thing that was almost right but not quite. His white hair was a little flat on one side from sleep. He'd probably been at this for a while.
"You look busy."
He startled, turned, and relaxed in the space of about two seconds. "You're up." He was already getting to his feet, moving to her on instinct, and he pressed a simple kiss to her temple before she'd quite registered that he was close enough to do it. Easy and automatic, no fanfare. The kind of thing that had stopped requiring thought somewhere along the way.
"I am." She followed him into the room, heading to the couch, where there was a clear stretch of cushion not currently occupied by literature. "You got up early."
"I couldn't sleep." He shifted back to the bookshelves, resuming whatever calculation he was making. "I didn't want to wake you."
Touka sat. Slowly, with one hand on the armrest, lowering herself with the care of someone who had recently discovered that the phrase "getting comfortable" was no longer something she could easily do. She settled slowly. The baby shifted, feeling the change.
"Okay?" Ken asked without looking.
"Fine." She moved her attention to his work.
He'd made progress on the top half. She could see the order reasserting itself, everything standing at attention. Classic literature on the left. Contemporary working its way toward the middle. He had strong opinions about how books should be organized that she'd never fully understood, but the results were always the same: the shelves looked like something out of a photograph. Always deliberate. Always meticulously arranged.
Her gaze drifted lower.
The bottom two shelves were still in progress. Ken's novels stood in orderly rows, the familiar spines she'd learned to recognize by sight rather than content over the past months. And mixed between them, wrong, clearly wrong, were manga volumes.
Touka leaned forward slightly.
Then she stood, which took some effort, and crossed to the bookcase.
She pulled one out. Looked at it. Put it back and pulled out another. Then a third. Three volumes from a series she'd read in pieces over years, borrowed from wherever she could find them, never owned herself.
She shifted to look at him. Ken had gone very still, his hands hovering over a shelf with a book he hadn't placed yet.
"Ken," Touka began, amused. "Are you becoming an otaku?"
"I'm just organizing the shelves," he murmured.
"With manga?"
"Among other things." He set the book down carefully, straightened, brushed something imaginary off his hands. He was not looking at her. He was examining the floor with an expression of great interest.
Touka gazed at the volume in her hand. "These aren't yours."
"They're on my bookcase."
"Don't play coy." She turned the manga over, read the back, set it against her hip. "You used to say manga wasn't real literature. I clearly remember you saying that. You had a whole thing about it."
"I was being pretentious."
"You were," she agreed. "So now what, you've reformed? Buying series you've never even read to make up for it?"
He picked up another book. Put it on a shelf. Adjusted it. "I've read some of them."
"Really?" She didn't really believe that.
"Parts of them." His ears had gone faintly pink, which meant he had either read more than he was letting on, or considerably less. Knowing what a literature snob he was, it was probably less. Much less.
Her eyes honed in on his hand as he started rubbing the smooth curve of his chin. By now, she knew this action all too well.
Touka set the volume back in its spot, between a Sōseki novel and what she was fairly certain was something by a guy named Kafka. She studied the arrangement, unable to let the question go. "Why do you have these?"
Ken was quiet for a heartbeat. "You used to rent them. At Anteiku. From the library, and from wherever else you could find them." He ran his thumb along the spine of the book in his hand. "And after. In the 24th, you read anything you could get your hands on."
"I know." She nodded. "I was there."
"I know you were there." He sighed, finally looking at her. There was that expression, the one where he was trying to be matter-of-fact and not quite getting there. "You like them. So I got some."
Touka looked again. At her manga tucked in between his novels, his philosophy texts, his poetry collections. Cheerful, bright spines against dark ones.
"You mixed them with your books," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
He seemed to consider arguing, maybe even ignoring with the question, then didn't. "It's our house."
That was all. No elaboration, no footnotes. He wheeled back to his task as he picked up another book. Touka stood there, parsing this.
She stared at the Sōseki. She stared at the manga volume pressed up against it. She thought about how less than a year ago she'd been living underground in a ward carved out of a broken city, reading anything she could under light that gave her headaches, just to distract herself from the suffocating misery and uncertainty around her while a war out of her control raged on...and how she'd not once let herself picture this. Open windows. Green fields outside. A husband who went to bed too late and woke up too early and apparently spent the quiet hours buying her things and hiding them among his things like he was embarrassed about it.
It felt like the most natural thing in the world.
She reached out and touched one of the comics again, this time a neon green one. Just with her fingertips. Then she turned and found him right there, close, watching her with his hands loose at his sides, a tender smile on his lips. She reached up and took hold of the front of his shirt, not pulling, simply holding the soft fabric between her fingers. His eyes went down at her hand. Then at her face, her mouth.
She kissed him. It was nothing dramatic, her mouth against his, brief but certain, how you kiss someone when you've run out of words for something and that's fine because they already know. He kissed her back the same way, one hand coming up to cup the side of her face, his thumb caressing her cheek.
She pulled back. "You ruined your collection," she smirked.
The corners of his mouth twitched. He caught her hand before she could drop it entirely, held it, his thumb moving once across her swollen knuckles, and then released it.
She reached and took out one of the manga volumes and pressed it into a different gap, between two of his favorite novels, where it fit a little better. Not a perfect fit. But better.
"There. Now it's really ruined."
Ken glanced over, looking at where she'd put it. "Perfect placement," he seemed to glow, and it felt so ridiculous to her that this was their life now. Their completely boring, mundane life.
She wouldn't trade it for anything.
Before she could make her way back to the couch she paused, reaching up for a manga she'd noticed earlier. She really wanted to read this one, particularly before their daughter came and her free time vanished. It was slightly too high. She stretched, and the baby objected to the angle, a slow rolling shift of weight that threw off her balance, and she grabbed the shelf edge, steadying herself.
Ken was beside her before she'd fully noticed that he'd moved at all.
"I'm fine," she assured him, before he could start fretting.
"You almost-"
"I didn't."
He stood there, hands half-raised, caught in the specific paralysis of a man who wanted very badly to help but knew better than to treat her like she was made of glass. He was adorable, but eight months in, his protectiveness had tipped somewhere past endearing and into something she didn't always have the heart to complain about.
"I was going to ask if you needed the book." He gestured vaguely upward. "I don't want you to hurt yourself."
"Ken. I'm pregnant," she reminded him. "Not helpless."
"I know." He lowered his hands slowly, as if he were standing down from something. "I know that." He paused, and she could see him working through it, whatever he was thinking. Probably something stupid. "Do you need the manga?"
Touka peered up at it. Then at him, pointing. "Yeah. That one."
He nodded, glancing up. Then, calmly because he had already made up his mind, he moved to her instead, got his hands around her carefully, one arm sliding under her knees and one firm at her back, adjusting twice to make sure he had her weight right, mindful of the bump in the way he was mindful of everything that mattered to him.
And then he lifted her.
"Ken!"
"You can reach it now." His voice was entirely too reasonable for someone in the middle of doing something this silly.
She opened her mouth to tell him as much, then glanced up, and found the book was in fact exactly at eye level. With a warm, flushed face she grabbed it off the shelf with as much dignity as she could manage, which was not very much. He watched her do it with an expression of quiet satisfaction that she made a mental note to address later.
It wasn't until later that she realized what he had done and why he hadn't gotten it for her. Why he hadn't reached past her and solved it the way he could have, easily, without a second thought. He'd given her the height and let her do the rest. He knew her. Knew what it cost her to need help in so many ways these days, and knew better than to take the doing of things away from her completely when he didn't have to.
She really was going to have to do something about how much she loved him.
He set her back down with the same gentle care he'd used to pick her up, like he was returning something precious that he intended to keep. She found her footing, manga clutched firmly to her chest. He was close still, not quite stepping back, his hands hovering at her waist longer than necessary before dropping.
"You're an idiot," she told him.
His expression didn't quite change, but his eyes did. "You have your terrible book, don't you."
"Terrible manga," she corrected.
He opened his mouth to say something and she kissed him instead. Partly because he was insufferable and partly because she was eight months pregnant in a house that smelled like sweet grass instead of exhaust fumes and he had put her manga on his bookcase with his beloved books, intertwining the two, without making a single thing of it.
His hand came up to her jaw, tilting her face toward his, and whatever softness she'd started he deepened, unhurried and thorough, saying the things he often struggled to find the words for but never failed to show.
When she ended the kiss she let herself stay there, leaning into his chest, his arms holding her close, hands settling protectively against the sides of her stomach where their baby had been making her presence known more and more these last few weeks.
Eventually she straightened and he let go slowly, like he was unconvinced about it. He didn't turn back to the bookcase right away - just looked at her, something quiet and full washing over him, before he finally did.
She made her way to the couch and settled carefully, manga open in her lap.
Even as she dove into her story she could hear him still at it. The soft sound of books and manga volumes sliding against each other, a cover being smoothed, small movements being made with that quiet particular patience that was so completely him. The bookcase, when she peeked back at it, held everything together without distinction, his books and her manga standing next to each other like they'd always been that way.
She watched for longer than she meant to.
She pressed her hand to her stomach, feeling their daughter move beneath it, watched Ken in his element, still making his quiet order of things, and felt the world buzz around them with possibility, beautifully ordinary.