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Peko practices for weeks. Hinata says that she “might be going about it kind of intensely, don't you think, Pekoyama?” but she doesn’t know how else to be. She has a goal, and accomplishing that goal requires all her strength and all her focus, just like any other.
There is a lot she needs to learn. It's too important for her to risk doing it incorrectly.
She practices walking next to him instead of behind him. It’s awkward, at first; sometimes he turns too fast and collides with her shoulder, and other times he steps on her toes when he isn’t expecting her so close. He flushes with frustration the first few times it happens, but he never accepts her apologies when she gives them and he never tells her to stop, so she doesn’t. It isn’t difficult for her to learn where to stand when she wants him to catch her in his periphery, or how to accommodate him when he moves.
But walking is simple. She’s been keenly aware of all her major muscle groups for as long as she can remember; training them to move one way instead of another way has never been a struggle. As long as she thinks of this as just another training maneuver, getting her body to obey becomes much easier.
Thinking is something else.
On the days when they work or clean together, she watches his movements and narrates them in her head. The young master found the flower we were looking for on one of the tree’s lower branches. The young master swept up the mess Souda left on the hotel lobby floor. Only she tries to stop herself when she thinks young master, and replace it with Fuyuhiko instead.
(He catches her staring more than once. “Seriously, Peko,” he says after the third time in one day, scrubbing his cheeks with the heels of his hands, “if there’s something on my face and you’re not telling me, I’m gonna be pissed.”)
She isn’t usually successful. For the first week she can’t bring herself to do it at all. After that, she still gets it wrong most of the time; she corrects herself, and then has to correct her correction. Sometimes she’ll think she’s doing better than normal, before realizing that she’s needed to correct herself five times in as many minutes and didn’t notice any of them.
The times she does manage it aren’t much better. They feel like boulders in her gut, or needles at the back of her neck. She holds on to each one until they pile together, collections of small betrayals that he never asked for, and is hardly aware of.
It’s not a muscle that’s easily retrained.
But she tries. She practices. She wants to be able to call him by name when she finally does ask him. She wants to stand with him, not follow after him. Until she’s strong enough to do that without faltering, she doesn’t deserve to ask him at all.
For all her practicing, though, she still isn’t ready when it happens. She’d wanted to wait until the end of the school trip, when they were off the island and away from their classmates and safe somewhere familiar. But there is a week when Usami asks them to construct a shiny bit of jewelry, and Hinata sends the two of them out to the beach to look for the small, glittering stones that sometimes settle at the bottom of the tide pools.
The young master doesn’t like the water, even just the shallow tide pools.
Fuyuhiko doesn’t like the water, even just the shallow tide pools. He leaves his dress jacket in his cottage and rolls the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, but in her experience the stones never collect near the edges of the pools. The push and pull of the water always shuffles them to the deep points at the center, where they get caught in crevices or buried in sand.
She takes off her shoes and her tights and wades into the pool while he paces around its perimeter. The water is shallow, only licking the bottom of her knees at the deepest point, and crystal clear; she can see straight down to the bottom. The sand is warm between her toes.
“There are some here,” she tells him, when she reaches the center of the pool. They wink up at her from the bottom, the light refracted and wavy even through still water.
“Goddamn it. Of course they’re all the way over there.”
He stoops down to roll his pant legs up to his knees. “You don’t need to do that,” she says. “I can gather them.”
“I’m not just gonna sit here and watch while you do all the work,” he says. The water splashes up his legs when he climbs in, and he grimaces. “Fuck, why is it so hot?”
“This pool has been standing in the sun since this morning, I think.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
They work together to gather the stones up from the bottom of the pool. There’s enough to fill the small bucket Peko brought from the beach house nearly to the top, much more than the class will need to finish Usami’s trinket. Even so, the young master still reaches down to pull one of the larger shards out from where it’s wedged between the rocks. (Fuyuhiko.) He has to twist his arm to extract it, and when it finally pops free it sends water sloshing up his elbow to soak the right sleeve of his shirt.
“Gotcha, you little bastard.” He holds the stone up over his head to inspect it. It’s wider than the others, and pretty, where it catches in the light. His face is pink from exertion, or maybe from a little too much sun. When he grins, Peko can see where there are new freckles across his cheekbones.
She doesn't mean to. She isn’t ready. But he turns to look at her, his smile sharp and triumphant, and then she says, “Fuyuhiko.”
It sounded right in her head, but on her tongue it feels heavy and wrong. Her whole body rebels against it: her jaw locks, her muscles tense, and her fingers curl until her nails bite into the skin of her palms. The base of her spine aches, like it can’t understand why she isn’t bending to bow.
Peko wonders if she’ll always be like this.
His eyes are wide, now. (In the sun, with the backdrop of pale rocks behind him, they could almost be gold.) He isn’t smiling anymore, and that makes her chest feel sunken and cold, but she doesn’t lower her eyes. She bites her lip too hard to keep her apology in.
“Yeah?” He’s very quiet. The rush of the water almost drowns him out. He clears his throat. “I mean, yeah. What’s up?”
She's made him anxious. He’s trying to hide it from her, and that makes her anxious, too. (Her heart is beating so quickly it almost hurts.) She wants to smile for him. She wants to take his anxiety away from him, to reassure him, or at least show him what she means, but every inch of her feels twisted up tight.
She squeezes her eyes shut. Disappointment weighs in the pit of her stomach, but it doesn't matter now. She can only move forward. What had Hinata told her to say?
She opens her mouth, but the words don’t come. What comes out instead is, “Forgive me.”
The young master doesn’t say anything. Peko thinks the roaring in her ears must be too loud to be the ocean.
When she’s brave enough to open her eyes again, all the nervous energy has washed out of him, but not in the way she’d hoped. His shoulders are slouched, and he isn’t looking at her when he drags a damp hand back through his hair. “For what?”
For addressing you inappropriately, her mind recites. For acting above my station. For presuming you’d want or need anything other than a tool.
Peko grits her teeth and says nothing. She wasn’t ready. She’s not strong enough. She knew that already; she doesn’t know why she expected anything different. She needs to wait, the way she planned.
The tide water laps against her legs when he moves toward her. It’s warm, even on her dry skin. “In that case, I don’t forgive you,” he says. “‘Cause apparently there’s nothing to forgive.” The sun is bright on his upturned face, enough that he has to squeeze one eye shut to look at her. This close she can see where there’s green in his iris. “What were you gonna say to me?”
“It isn’t important. Please do not—”
“It doesn’t have to be important,” he presses. “If you wanna say it, then I wanna hear it. Okay? So….”
One of his pant legs has slipped far enough off his knee that the cuff is starting to soak with salt water, but he doesn’t do anything to fix it. He’s still watching her face, even though it must be uncomfortable in the sun. She thinks about what it would be like if he smiled right now, with the rest of his expression already so lopsided.
She feels one of the tangled, twisted knots in her chest start to come loose.
She nods. Her stomach churns, but not unpleasantly. “L-Let’s… do something,” she manages. “Together.”
She thinks she’s probably bungled Hinata’s intended delivery. But when she smiles, he smiles back, exactly the way she’d pictured it.