Chapter Text
Page 1
“Hurry up, Miyamura!” She shouted. He caught up with her soon enough and they kept walking back to the Hori household. The cherry blossoms danced their way down to the ground; the refreshing breeze of spring surrounded them. While the two chatted, in the back of their minds, they – as always – were thinking of the other: she would hold her gaze on his and he would do the same. He would pass the odd comment that would annoy her, then swiftly laugh and apologise for it. Their fingers would interlock the entire way: nothing had really changed between yesterday and today, nothing at least between the two of them. Just everything around them.
Miyamura held both black tubes with patience as he looked on at her digging in her bag. He felt that calm of the wind again, its sound surfing down the street. “Ah, there they are!” Hori had located her keys. She held them with a triumph greater than she had held her diploma during the ceremony, grinning wider too. The two abandoned all of their belongings at the genkan – he went straight for the shower, she sat down on the peach-coloured sofa and pulled out her cellphone. Right. I need to ask Yu-
“Hori-san?” She processed his call from elsewhere in the house, eyes still on the screen.
“Yeah?”
“Wanna come in with me? I bet we could make it work this time!” She matched the gentle smile she felt in his voice.
Chuckling, then looking up from her cellphone and turning her face towards the door, she yelled, “You idiot, the shower won’t have gotten any bigger since last time!” A couple seconds of silence and…
“…Okay…” She heard the smile still remain, only now with some defeat mixed in. Laughing quietly to herself again, she looked back down at the screen. There hadn’t been enough time to discuss it in full at the graduation ceremony, but she did speak to Yoshikawa, then Miyamura on their walk home, about a graduation party. She typed in what dates would be doable for her and Miyamura and sent the message. Letting her phone fall next to her, she sat back against it and gazed at the ceiling.
After some time of waiting, bored, Hori’s ears picked up the sound of the door to the bathroom opening and closing, followed by Miyamura. “The shower’s free now, Hori-san!”
“Okay!” She promptly pushed herself up from the sofa and began to pad through the house towards the bathroom. Noticing the calves – and the towel above them – trotting down the stairs when she got there, she ascended. Warm and comfortable; yet communicative, smiles were given in passing: the only sound was of the feet on the wooden steps. Hori opened the door to the bathroom and began to get her clothes off when she noticed the temperature of the shower.
“Miyamura!” Frustration was easily divined through her tone. A sigh was released. He had only just reached the door to the living room.
He felt the fatigue of this exercise wearing down his response. “What is it, Hori-san?”
“Why the hell are your showers so hot, you idiot? It’s expensive, you know!”
“It’s… therapeutic for my skin!”
Hori rolled her eyes as she took off her leggings and couldn’t help but feel the corners of her mouth perk up. It was an acceptable excuse. She called back down, “Alright… Just make sure I don’t notice next time I go in after you, okay?” Miyamura closed his eyes and smiled. He let out another sigh: retribution had not come just yet. He shifted his clothes from on top of both hands to under his left arm and opened the door to the living room. The towel went into the laundry room once he had got dressed, and he sank into the sofa, bathing in the residual warmth that Hori had left.
Bzz bzz.
She left her cellphone here. Miyamura extended his arm towards the coffee table and grabbed it, checking out the screen – 1 new message from Yoshikawa Yuki – this must be about the party. He pressed in her code and gave it a read.
She heard the door to the bathroom open. “Hori-san?”
“Yeah?” She didn’t hear the next bit over the noise of the water and the obstruction of the glass (if necessity called for it, she could have deciphered him calling her name through vibration alone). She shunted the shower door open slightly. “What was that?” She asked absent-mindedly. No response. She directed her eyes away from the cloudy, translucent glass and towards the gap, only to see an entranced Miyamura making the most out of whatever he was able to see with the new window into the shower. She flared up.
“Idiot!” She shouted, immediately shutting the shower door again, plunging her hearing back into a guessing game. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t very hard to discern what the next sound was, which came after a five-or-so seconds: a knock on the glass. The door began to move – not by her doing – and the gap was restored.
“Hori-san?” He wasn’t visible in front of the gap; a single waving hand was the replacement. The heat on her face remained.
“...What is it?”
“Yoshikawa-san got back to you.” The waving hand had now conjured her cellphone! “She said that everything seemed to be A-OK.”
“...Okay.”
“...I’ll be on the sofa.” There was a slight pause. “Sorry for staring. You were just so beautiful that I couldn’t resist.” She leaned on the glass, her face as red as her feet now, and let the cascading water replace her speech. Miyamura took his time in the silence. “Love you.”
"...Love you too. I'll be down soon." The shower door, then the bathroom door, were shut again.
The sushi was good. Kyosuke had probably eaten more than anybody else at the table combined – the idea of him being able to fit dinner in was extraordinary. During the walk back to the house, the couple found themselves tag-teaming behind the rest of her family. “What do you think is going to happen with Yoshikawa-san and Ishikawa-kun?” Miyamura asked her as he found her hand. She fused them comfortably.
“I don’t know.”
“They were so attached to one another, yet never made anything official, did they?” Miyamura turned his head to look at her.
“Don’t think so. If they did, Yuki would stop at nothing to tell me.” Miyamura looked back and made one of those brief, quiet sounds of disappointed acknowledgement. They kept walking.
“I hope they do.”
“Me too.”
Their shoes tapped on the road. Miyamura’s gaze landed on Kyosuke, Yuriko, and Souta as they walked not too far in front of them. Without turning his head, he said tenderly, “I didn’t have the time to tell you as you pushed all of us out of the house: you look really nice.” On cue he felt her bash her forehead into his shoulder and her grip on his hand become infinitely tighter.
Page 2
The party rolled around a few days later. It was being hosted by Hori, who had condemned the rest of her family to the upstairs of the house while it went on. Souta and Kyosuke found it excessively punitive – they would be losing access to Miyamura for an entire evening – and thus he was roped into playing games with them for good portion of the afternoon. Yoshikawa arrived first, giving Hori a gigantic hug the moment she got through the door. They spent that time before anyone else had arrived chatting in the living room while Miyamura, who was able to hear them from the kitchen, took out all the things that had been bought for the party from the cupboards. “How have things been with Tooru?”
Yoshikawa smiled. “Good, good! We’ve hung out pretty much every day since the ceremony.”
Hung out? Hori and Miyamura thought in unison. He phased out of the girls’ conversation and looked in the fridge.
Kouno was next to arrive – she basically replaced Hori’s spot in the living room while she got up to help Miyamura with setting everything up – then Ishikawa, Iura, and Yanagi, all as one group, before finally Sengoku and Ayasaki. Sengoku had organised for him and Ayasaki to definitely be the last ones to arrive at the party so that there was adequate distraction away from his presence. He did not want to be stuck in the same room as the demon, save for Miyamura and Remi, before anybody else arrived.
The evening quickly found its pace. While he thought he had the party spirit in him at the start, as it ramped up, Ishikawa felt that he needed to step out of the living room and into the garden for a moment – it was getting pretty stuffy and noisy in there. He let the others know that he was going to be back in a second, before shutting the door behind him. The garden was quiet; calming. After a bit of time bathing in darkness, he heard the muffled noise of everyone in the house explode behind him before it was cut off by the distinct sound of the door to the garden being closed.
“Tooru?” It was Yoshikawa. “Everything okay? You’ve been out here for a bit and I – well, we” She laughed awkwardly, “were getting a bit worried…”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It was just getting a bit stuffy in that room.” He maintained his view on the night sky.
“I see…”
Do I ask her now?
More silence.
“...Yoshikawa?”
“Y-Yes?”
“We’re in a bit of a weird spot, aren’t we?” He maintained his focus on the night sky. It was meant to be an actual question but the lack of a response from her made it a rhetorical one. He knew he was right about their situation anyway. “What do you want to do?”
Despite her attempts to keep herself away, she could feel herself, very slowly, being pulled towards him – she knew exactly what she wanted, even if she couldn’t see him very well. She forced herself forward, onto the grass, in spite of the safety that hesitation provided. She would get what she wanted this time. “I want…” Come on. Just say it. “I want to be with you. Properly.” Suddenly, the grass, its blades which had only moments ago felt like a labyrinth that would need to be navigated towards Tooru, felt like nothing more than patterns under her socks: she walked forward into the darkness of the garden. She looked up at the night sky once next to him. It was boundless. Not overwhelming, but instead full of opportunity.
“Me too.” His fingers glided against hers; hers against his, before they joined. The silence was welcomed back.
“Shall we go back in?”
“One more minute.”
Miyamura could hear the front door shut from the living room once Hori had said her goodbyes to Iura, who was unsurprisingly the life of the party, and the most drunk at the end of it. Miyamura had drunk a bit as well, but nothing anywhere near as hefty as what Iura had managed to get down. He heard the familiar sound of her steps in the hallway – he could tell it was her just from the pattern – and asked, “Do you want to clean up now or tomorrow morning?” when she appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.
Hori had definitely drunk more than him, but her determination to not have to do any cleaning up in the morning overpowered any and all light-headedness. “Let’s just do it now, yeah?” Miyamura, sitting in the chair opposite the sofa, nodded. The cleaning: sweeping; putting things in plastic bags; wiping down surfaces, was like clockwork. Their duet concluded with a synchronised collapse into Hori’s bed still with everything on. After the necessary kisses, hair stroking, and search for the right position for the two of them to be in, sleep slowly drifted in.