Chương 237: 93. Obvious Romance 2

The whole walk back to the second-class cabin, I kept rehearsing one line: When we get back, I'm going to talk to Maki about what happened. I ran it at least seven times in my head. Some versions sounded like an interrogation. Some like a negotiation.

One version was so mature I almost wanted to applaud myself — something about let's calm down, sort this out, establish what that actually was, figure out how we move forward, and determine whether I have legal grounds to weld Jess into an exterior panel if she keeps this up tomorrow.

The problem is that sounding coherent in your head doesn't mean your mouth can actually deliver it — especially when the person responsible for running your brain through the FTL drive was walking right beside you, steps steady, breathing steady, profile calm, like the entire dinner-table execution had nothing to do with her. The longer I walked, the more unfair it felt. By any reasonable measure, she should have been the one falling apart. She'd kissed me first. She'd pressed me back into the mattress first.

She was the one who could still laugh after everyone walked in. And the only one still in pieces was me. There was no justice in that. The cabin door slid open, and that familiar, lethal quiet settled back in. Same double. Two beds. One desk. One TV. One private bathroom. Neat, clean, civilized — like a trap. By day, a prize. By night, a crime scene. I stood in the doorway and seriously considered turning around and sleeping in the corridor of the student berths.

Maki went in first, pulled the door shut, and draped her jacket over the chair back — natural as anything, like we'd just had a perfectly ordinary dinner and were now going through the motions of shower, review, sleep, with absolutely nothing left over in the "may cause elevated heart rate" category.... She really is too much. I stood there for two seconds, then hit the light panel, walked in, and took my own jacket off. Neither of us spoke.

Quiet enough that I could hear fabric moving, and the line in my own head bouncing off the walls: say it now, say it now, if you don't say it now you definitely won't later. I took a slow breath. Fine. Come on, Hoshino Shimo. You welded a panel in zero-G this afternoon. You can produce one coherent sentence tonight.

"Maki," I said. She was setting her data pad on the desk. She turned at the sound.

"Mm?"... We were done. One syllable, and half the composure I'd stacked up on the walk collapsed. Because her expression was too normal. Not performed-normal. Not nothing-happened normal either. More like — she was waiting for me to go first. Which was worse than watching her fall apart. My throat went dry. I pushed through anyway.

"About... earlier." She looked at me. Didn't fill the silence. Just waited.... Right. The scariest thing about her tonight wasn't anything she'd done. It was how good she was at waiting until you handed her the words yourself. I looked away, tried to sound less like a jammed mechanical arm.

"I mean the room, earlier. Not the mess hall." A quiet "Mm."

"I know."

"Good that you know." I laughed, dry.

"So — nothing you want to say?" Two seconds of silence.

"Which part do you want?" I blinked.

"Which part?"

"Are you asking about," she said, tone maddeningly organized, "the fact that we kissed? Or the fact that Jess and the others walked in?" I stalled completely.... She's doing this on purpose. She's absolutely doing this on purpose. She could have blurred it into one muddy package. Instead she'd sliced it apart clean, like triaging error codes on a maintenance panel — this fault here, that one there, which one do you want addressed first — and made me choose.

"Do you have to be this direct about it?" I glared.

"What else would I do?" she said, still level.

"Didn't you say you wanted to talk it through?"... Fine. She wasn't even wrong. Which made me want to throw a pillow at her more, not less. I sat down on the edge of the bed, fingers pulling absently at the sheet.

"I thought," I said slowly, "I'd be a little more coherent by the time we got back." She leaned against the desk, watching me.

"And?"

"And now I feel like Victor took my brain and welded it." I pressed my palm to my forehead.

"Crooked." This time she actually laughed. Brief. Barely there — gone before it could fully settle. But even that half-second knocked my pulse sideways.

"You can still laugh?" I looked up. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"Not at you."

"Then what?"

"At the metaphor. It's not very good." I glared at her.

"Maki."

"Mm."

"The way you're acting like nothing happened is genuinely infuriating." She went quiet a moment before answering.

"I'm not acting like nothing happened." I stilled. Her voice hadn't moved. Her eyes hadn't looked away.

"If I fell apart with you right now," she said, "this wouldn't get any better." Damn it. That landed harder than anything else she'd said all night. Because it meant she wasn't numb, and she wasn't playing dumb. She was just — holding it. Whatever anger I had left suddenly had nowhere to go. Like throwing a punch into a mattress. I sat with that for a moment, then asked, quietly, "So are you falling apart?" I regretted it the second it left my mouth.

What kind of question was that — handing someone your own throat and politely asking if they'd like to squeeze. She didn't dodge it. She held my gaze for two seconds, then said, very softly:"What do you think?" Game over. Worse than a direct admission, because it forced me to reconstruct the whole thing myself — who broke the kiss first, who pulled who back, who asked do you want me to stop and kept looking at me like that when I couldn't even answer. Heat crawled up behind my ears.

"Don't throw the question back at me," I said, turning away.

"Then don't ask questions you know will make you worse."

"You can be pretty awful sometimes."

"I only found that out today." I snapped my head around.

"Meaning?" She straightened, walked over, and stopped at the edge of my bed. Not close enough to call safe. Not far enough to call it anything but dangerous.

"It means," she said, looking down at me, voice unfairly calm, "that when you usually mess with me, you don't seem to do much reflecting on it afterward." I opened my mouth to protest — and stopped. Because... maybe I did. I'd gotten too used to poking at her. At that overkill calm. At the way she clearly cared but never said so. At the way she always looked like she had everything perfectly contained. Every time I nudged her, she'd just frown, snap back, or flatten me with that even tone of hers.

So I'd assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that no matter how much I poked, nothing would actually happen. Today proved otherwise. And once it happened, it happened too fast for me to catch up. A small, inconvenient guilt settled in.

"... That's different."

"How."

"Mine was—" I fumbled for the words, "—less inherently dangerous." She looked at me without answering. Then took another half-step forward. Just half. My spine still locked up anyway.

"Shimo," she said, low.

"I think you might have a slight misunderstanding about your own danger radius." My heart slammed against my ribs.

"How am I dangerous?"

"Want examples right now?"

"..." I shut up. Because if this kept going, I had a strong suspicion we'd end up right back where the door had interrupted us. And I wasn't ready for that. Not logically, anyway. My body clearly hadn't gotten the memo. I hated that. She must have seen me spiraling, because this time she didn't press closer. Instead, she sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped, faint but impossible to ignore.

"I'm not trying to force you to sort this out tonight," she said. I blinked at her.

"If your head's a mess right now," she said, flat as ever, "then let it stay a mess."

"That's your advice?"

"Practical advice."

"Not very elegant."

"But it works." I opened my mouth and got shut down again. The most infuriating thing about her was never what she said — it was that she always managed, at the exact moment I most wanted to power through on pure stubbornness, to press me gently back down to earth with the least flashy possible line. The room stayed quiet for a while. I looked at my own fingers and noticed the urgent need to have everything settled right now had actually faded a little. Not because it was fine.

Because I'd realized — maybe some of this simply couldn't be sorted out yet. Not by me, at least. I couldn't say whether what happened earlier had been impulse, loss of control, or something that had been sitting there all along, waiting for one more excuse. I couldn't name the feeling in my chest looking at her right now — half wanting to bolt, half not wanting to move at all. I said, muffled, "But it's annoying."

"Mm."

"It's messy."

"Mm."

"And Jess is definitely going to make my life hell about this tomorrow." That got a different reaction. She actually laughed.

"That part's probably true." I glared.

"You're laughing."

"It's predictable."

"Are you a little too familiar with how awful Jess is?"

"We've been classmates this long. Isn't that enough?"... Fair, actually. I huffed and fell back onto the bed. The ceiling was too white, too clean — nothing like a place where something significant had nearly happened a few hours earlier. Maki was still sitting on the edge of the bed, unmoving. I stared up for a few seconds, then said, "Hey."

"Mm?"

"If nobody had opened that door tonight—" I paused, then asked it anyway, "—what were you going to do?" She went quiet for two seconds. Long enough that I started regretting the question. Then: "Do you want the honest answer?" My throat tightened.

"... Are you going to ask that every time tonight?"

"Because every time I give it, your reaction is significant."

"Depends what you're saying." She looked down at me, gaze steady enough to make me uneasy all over again.

"If nobody had opened the door," she said, slow, "I don't think I would have stopped there." My breath caught. Everything I'd just pushed down came flooding straight back — fingers, breath, collar, that heat that had been one step from going somewhere it couldn't be walked back from. The back of my ears burned. My neck too.

"You—" I couldn't decide whether to be angry at her for being honest, or at myself for asking. She watched me for a moment, then reached out and smoothed a stray piece of my hair back into place. The touch was light. Lighter than anything she'd said. Worse, somehow.

"So letting you stay a mess right now," she said, low, "already counts as me having a conscience." I stared at her, heart going again.

"You call that having a conscience?"

"More than Sergeant Takenaka does." Bringing up Takenaka for comparison, at a moment like this, probably said something about how steady her own head actually was. But I laughed anyway. Weak, but real. She watched me laugh and didn't push further. The room settled again. Still messy. Still warm. Still impossible to pretend, with a straight face, that none of it had happened. But not the kind of mess that made me want to hide from my own breathing, the way it had the second we walked back in.

I rolled onto my side, facing her, chin propped on my arm.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"I still really want to bury Jess."

"Reasonable."

"D too."

"Also reasonable."

"Harvey and Roy... we can negotiate a reduced sentence." The corner of her mouth moved.

"Ash?" I thought about it.

"He was too accurate tonight. He goes in the hole too." This time she really laughed. Not big. Clear. Something in my chest dipped, quietly, watching that. Not in a bad direction. More like: Right. The most disorienting part of today wasn't getting caught. It was that I'd already started liking the sight of her laughing like that. That thought was more dangerous than anything else tonight. I shoved my face a little further into the pillow. She asked, "What now?"

"Nothing."

"That 'nothing' sounds a lot like my 'no' from this afternoon." Muffled, I said, "Then call it karma." She made a low sound and, mercifully, didn't push it further. After a moment she stood, walked over, and dimmed the main light by a notch — leaving only the soft glow from the desk lamp and the bedside light. The room quieted into something that actually felt like night. When she turned back, I was still watching her.

"Going to sleep?" I asked.

"What else?" she said.

"You want Jess to catch us twice in one day?"

"... Don't talk like there's going to be a sequel." She glanced at me. Flat expression. Calm eyes. But I caught something in them I didn't like one bit.

"The sequel hasn't ended yet." I went rigid.

"Maki."

"Mm."

"You are genuinely awful tonight." She didn't deny it. Just walked back to her own bed, paused for a beat, and tossed over one last line, quiet and even:"Likewise."... Damn her. Watching her back, I felt it all at once — the urge to laugh, the urge to put my head through the wall, and something I still wasn't quite ready to name, sparking around in my chest like loose current. The feeling was absolutely terrible. Because it had no intention of letting me sleep.