Chương 260: 107. Emergency Recall 1

Once the wet clothes were hung on the drying rack, the hairdryer put away, and the water on the bathroom floor mostly wiped up, the room finally settled into a state that was somehow worse than before. Not messy. Not chaotic. Just — too quiet. The kind of quiet that made every single object in this love hotel feel unreasonably present. The bed that was far too big. The dark, idle projection screen. The suspiciously small sofa and table.

And the air, carrying a soft fragrance that had no business existing in any ordinary hotel. I stood beside the bed, staring at the immorally oversized piece of furniture dead center, and had exactly one thought. This bed was practically the sun of the entire room. Everything else — the furniture, the two of us — was just being forced into orbit around it.

"How much longer are you going to stare at it?" Maki's voice came from beside me. I turned and saw she'd already set her terminal on the table, hung up her jacket, and sorted the bags we'd brought back from the park into neat rows. The Puni Puni Mouse keychain, ugly with total conviction, now hung off the corner of the table like a trophy from the day's entire catalogue of absurdities. I cleared my throat.

"I'm checking whether this bed violates Federal building codes."

"You can't tell that just by looking."

"At least I can register my condemnation visually."

"The bed doesn't feel remorse."

"How would you know? Maybe it's already witnessed more than enough of human depravity." Maki gave the bed a brief glance.

"Then it's probably going to be very disappointed tonight." I blinked. It took me half a beat to catch what she meant.

"... Maki. The things you say are getting more dangerous by the day."

"I'm stating facts." There it was again. The most frightening thing about her — her face never once looked like she was teasing anyone, and yet whatever she said always landed with unerring precision on the exact spot I least wanted to examine. In the end, we lay down. Neither of us repeated the obvious, useless observation that the bed really is huge. Once the blanket was up, the warmth of the AC and the clean scent of the sheets settled around us.

On the surface, it looked exactly like the kind of night where you close your eyes and just fall asleep. That was only on the surface. I lay facing the ceiling for three minutes, then rolled over. Two more minutes. Rolled again. A while later, Maki's flat voice came from beside me.

"Shimo."

"What."

"If you roll over one more time, the bed might actually start feeling remorse." I froze.

"You're not asleep?"

"What do you think?"

"I figured someone like you could just go into standby the second you lay down."

"I'm not a machine."

"You really act like one most of the time." Maki didn't answer right away. The room was dark, only the bedside lamp leaving a thin, warm edge of light along her outline. She lay on her side, hair loose across the pillow, the collar of her loungewear slightly open from the angle — nothing like the steel-plated composure she wore on the bridge. That was deeply unfair. She was already difficult enough in daylight. She had no business looking like this at night as well.

"What are you looking at now?" she asked.

"How do you know I'm looking at anything?"

"Because when you go quiet, it means your brain's running off somewhere it shouldn't." I frowned.

"Does that count as some kind of privacy violation?"

"It counts as a highly efficient read."

"You have a real talent for making insufferable sound like a professional skill." Maki gave a quiet "Mm." That "Mm" was clearly just agreement. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. I watched her, a strange tightness sitting in my chest. Not unhappiness — more like everything I'd already pushed down was being slowly dragged back up by how unreasonably steady she looked. Because just now, outside the bathroom — that moment— I cut the thought off immediately.

Keep going down that road and tonight really wasn't happening. Then Maki spoke first.

"Give me your hand." I blinked.

"What?"

"You can't sleep, can you?"

"Did you just invent that causal link on the spot?"

"Maybe," she said.

"But try it first." I stayed quiet for two seconds, then reached my hand over. Maki took it, completely naturally. Her palm was warm. Her fingers closed with no extra force, but the grip was unreasonably steady. It wasn't some deliberately loaded gesture — if anything, it was simple enough to feel self-evident. Which was exactly why my heartbeat refused to follow orders.

"This way you won't keep flipping around," she said.

"It's just holding hands. You make it sound like you're securing hazardous materials."

"In a sense, I am."

"There's something wrong with you."

"You're the one who looks like it right now." I was about to pull my hand back, but that was exactly when Maki shifted a little closer. Just a little. But a bed doesn't leave much room to play dumb to begin with, and that small shift stepped, hard, on the line I'd been barely managing to convince myself was still holding — everything is completely normal.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"This is making it even harder to sleep."

"I know." She admitted it so readily I didn't even know which sentence to explode about first. And she wasn't lunging at me. She just stayed there — steady, quiet, sitting at exactly the distance where any closer would be undeniably wrong, and any farther would look too deliberate. Like she was waiting for me to admit it myself first: that I wasn't any calmer than she was.

"Weren't you pretty fierce earlier?" she said quietly. My throat tightened.

"I can be fierce now, too."

"Can you."

"Want to find out?" Maki looked at me. Even at this distance, her eyes were still that same stillness. But maybe it was the dark, or maybe my brain genuinely wasn't operating within normal parameters anymore — either way, I kept feeling like something else had started mixing into that stillness.

"Shimo," she said, voice dropping lower.

"Every time you're being stubborn, your face gives it away completely."

"... I'm not being stubborn."

"You are."

"I—" I didn't finish. Maki's other hand came up, fingertips brushing the side of my face, moving aside a strand of hair the dryer hadn't quite tamed. Just once. But it was too close, and too quiet. I lost the ability to speak entirely.

"See," she said, flat as ever.

"Quiet again." I genuinely wanted to strangle her. Or kiss her. Or maybe, at this point, those two things weren't meaningfully different. The next second, I actually leaned forward a little. Not a big movement. More like a defiant counterattack from someone backed into a corner with nowhere left to retreat. Maki didn't dodge. She just watched me, breathing unbroken — and only when I got close enough that our foreheads nearly touched did her lashes tremble, very slightly. A tiny movement. But I saw it.

And in that exact instant, I understood something — She wasn't unaffected. She was just better at hiding it than I was. The realization was infuriating. And, in the most underhanded possible way, it also made me feel a little less alone in this. I said quietly:"If you pull back now, I won't laugh at you." Maki held my gaze. Half a second passed before she answered, slowly:"Make sure you don't laugh at yourself first." Unbelievable. The second that landed, I moved almost on instinct and kissed her. Not hard.

Barely skilled enough to even call it a kiss. More of a touch, really — one carrying a stubborn edge, a need to confirm something, a refusal to concede first. The instant our lips met, my heartbeat went completely out of order, my fingers tightening without my permission. Maki didn't pull away. She really didn't. She just held still and took it quietly, and then, right when I expected myself to break off immediately, she followed — just slightly. Just a fraction. But that fraction was the most lethal part.

My breathing scattered. My hand was still in hers; my other hand had grabbed the cuff of her sleeve without deciding to. The heat under the blanket seemed to spike all at once, and even the room's overly soft fragrance turned thicker. The next second, we both stopped. Not one of us pushing the other away. Just both of us knowing, at the same moment, that going any further would be a problem. But even stopped, the distance didn't open back up. She was still close. I was still looking at her.

Our breathing was a mess, and neither of us spoke first. That kind of silence is the worst kind. Bad enough that I honestly suspected — if either of us had moved even a fraction more just now, tonight might genuinely have gone somewhere neither of us was ready for. And then, right on that razor's edge— A sound came through the wall, very clearly:"Ahnn—" Maki and I both froze at the exact same moment. The room next door had apparently decided it owed the world nothing in the way of dignity.

The sound came fast and direct, the tail of it dragged out long, backed by a very self-explanatory creak of mattress springs. The combined effect was more than enough to make anyone with a functioning sense of shame want to tear their own ears off on the spot. I blanked for a full second. The next second, Maki went completely still too. Then our eyes met. The whole situation was too absurd for words.

The absurdity of it snapped whatever had been pulled taut inside me, sending it off in a completely different direction. I turned my face away first, shoulders shaking. Beside me, Maki had clearly stalled out too. The next second, we both burst out laughing. Not loud. The kind of laugh you can't hold back once the outside world has barged in and cut the thread on you. I pressed my forehead into the pillow, shaking with it.

"What the hell..." Maki's voice carried a trace of laughter she couldn't quite flatten out either.

"I did say this room wasn't normal."

"It's not the room," I managed between breaths.

"It's that next door is just working harder than we are."

"And you still have energy to review them."

"What else am I supposed to do? Score their performance?"

"If you want, I can make you a spreadsheet."

"... Fuck, there's genuinely something wrong with you." That set me off laughing again. The tension that had been about to catch fire felt like it had been forcibly torn open by that single, deeply undignified interruption from next door. Strangely, it didn't scatter completely. It shifted into something softer, closer, and considerably harder to pretend wasn't there. As the laughter faded, Maki suddenly reached out and pulled me a little closer to her. Then held me. Not pinning me down. Not teasing.

Just quietly, solidly pulling me in. I didn't move at first. She held me a little tighter than usual, but not enough to be uncomfortable. The warmth under the blanket, the weight of her arm settling around me, the faint clean scent of her freshly washed hair — all of it pressed the still-unsteady rhythm in my chest down low and quiet. I rested my forehead against her shoulder. After a while, I said, low:"You're really annoying like this." Maki didn't let go.

She just tilted her head down slightly, her voice so light it landed almost directly against my ear.

"Sleep, Shimo." Just those words. And yet they made my chest burn hotter than any of the closeness before it. Not because it was some calculated, smooth line. Because it was exactly her. Like she knew the line we'd just walked had already gotten dangerous enough, so she was the one pulling it back now. Like she knew I was still unsettled, so she wasn't pressing any closer. Like she genuinely hadn't been much calmer than I was tonight — she'd just been the one who, in the end, steadied the rhythm first.

I stayed quiet for a long time, then, entirely without dignity, caught a small fold of the fabric at her back.

"... Don't act like nothing happened tomorrow." Maki paused.

"All right."

"And don't say I started it."

"You did start it."

"Maki."

"Mm."

"I really don't want to argue with you right now."

"Then don't." She finished, and her arm tightened just a fraction. Just a fraction. But it was enough to press everything quiet — all the tangled, restless noise still running through me — until none of it could surface again. The rain kept falling outside. Through the wall, the occasional muffled sound with absolutely no educational value drifted over, but all of it had gone very far away now. What was left was just the warmth under the blanket. Her breathing. Her scent. And that low — Sleep, Shimo.

I closed my eyes. But I knew neither of us was actually asleep yet. We just both chose not to say it. And so the room, and the night along with it, slowly sank into the dark.