Chương 235: 92. Remember to Lock Door 2

Back in the second-class cabin, the door slid shut, and the engine noise, the footsteps, everyone else's eyes — all of it got sealed off outside. The room held only me and Maki. And a quiet that was getting very hard to pretend wasn't there. Maki set her tool bag and data pad down on the desk. Same as always — neat, efficient, giving nothing away. But it was exactly because there was nothing to see that I was certain. She cared. I leaned against the bed frame and watched her for a while.

"You're stewing." Maki, back turned to me, paused mid-motion straightening her cuff. Just half a second.

"No I'm not."

"That 'no' is on the exact same level as Victor saying 'it's simple.'" She didn't answer. I took two steps closer.

"Fine, let me put it differently. Right now you look exactly like someone quietly taking the phrase 'the Kushima kid' apart in her head. On loop." Maki finally turned to look at me. Not sharp. If anything, calm. Which, coming from her, was the most dangerous version.

"Don't you have anything better to do?"

"No," I said, honestly.

"I can just tell."

"Then keep it to yourself."

"Can't do that." I spread my hands.

"You look like you're about to weld yourself into the bulkhead. I'm not going to pretend I don't see it." Maki stared at me for two seconds, then laughed. Short. Quiet. Not a happy laugh. The kind that comes out right after someone's landed dead-center, and your first instinct is to bite back.

"Getting awfully bold lately, aren't you, Shimo." I blinked. Before I could throw anything back, she reached out. My first thought was that she was going to flick my forehead, or maybe pinch my cheek as payback. Then, the next second—"Wait—hey—Maki, what—!" She went straight for my side. Fast. Precise. Aimed dead-on at my worst spot. Completely premeditated. I folded sideways on reflex, nearly rolling right off the edge of the bed.

"You're insane! Who does that—haha—stop—""Weren't you just dispensing life advice?" Her voice stayed flat. Her hands did not.

"Survive this first. Then we'll talk."

"What does this have to do with surviving—!"

"Everything."

"You're making that up!" I was laughing too hard to breathe properly, one hand batting at her wrist, the other guarding my ribs. Maki had clearly been stewing all day, or maybe she'd just finally found a perfectly legitimate outlet for it, because she showed absolutely no sign of easing off. I scrambled back up the bed. She followed. The sheets went to hell in about three seconds. A pillow got knocked sideways. My leg tangled in the edge of the blanket.

I grabbed for her wrist with one hand and shielded my side with the other—but once someone else has the rhythm of a thing like this, it's exactly like firing your attitude thrusters at random in zero-G. The harder you try to save it, the more humiliating it gets.

"Maki! Stop—stop a second—!"

"Weren't you talking a big game a minute ago?"

"That was my mouth talking, I didn't put my life on the line—haha—not there, don't—!" Life on the line finally got a real reaction out of her. The corner of her mouth actually lifted. Brief. Just barely. But the second it showed, the pressure across her whole face let go. I saw it. So I stopped fighting, reached up, grabbed her shoulder, and the second her focus slipped—"Your turn." I pulled. It worked. Worked well enough that a second later we'd both gone down, the whole position flipped.

Maki's hand landed braced by my ear. I was half on my side, knee tangled in the wrecked sheets, and suddenly we were too close—close enough that all the laughing from a second ago got dialed down like someone had turned a switch. The room held its breath. Not silent, exactly. The vent hummed on, low and steady. The ship's distant vibration hadn't stopped. But both of those fell back, far behind everything else. What was close was only her breathing, mine, and the heat neither of us had had time to put away.

I was still catching my breath when I realized, somewhere in the middle of it, something had gone wrong.... Wait. This wasn't the distance from a second ago anymore. Maki had gone still too. Her hand stayed braced beside me. Not pressing down. Not pulling back either. Her eyes were close enough that I could see them properly. The usual cold was still there. But maybe because we'd just been too close, too messy, too unguarded—even that cold looked scorched at the edges, different from how it usually sat on her.

My heart slammed, hard. Loud enough that I genuinely wondered if she could hear it. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. I licked my dry lips. For one second my head went almost completely empty. And right in that emptiness, something surfaced. Clear. Dangerous. Not fully formed. Not a decision I'd actually made. Just— I wanted to lean in. Even a little. I looked at her, fingers curling into the sheet, unable to tell if that counted as reaching or just losing my grip.

Then— The world flipped. Maki's hand came down on my shoulder, fast, like she'd already known exactly where that restless thought in my head was heading. My back sank back into the mattress. My wrist was caught—light, but absolute—and I was pressed down before the impulse had even finished. Not rough. But with zero room to argue. My breath caught. Maki hovered above me, looking down, close enough to be unreasonable. The leftover heat from our fight hadn't left her eyes, but her voice, when it came, was low. Level.

Level enough to be the most dangerous version of itself.

"Shimo." She had me pinned. Not hard. Which was exactly the problem. The pressure was precise—precise enough to make one thing clear: if she wanted to keep me here, I wasn't going anywhere. My wrist locked under her hand, my shoulder sunk into the mattress, my breathing shot to pieces, every rise and fall of my chest feeling completely visible to her. The room was too quiet. Quiet enough that I could hear exactly how absurd my own heartbeat sounded.

Maki was close—close enough that I could see the shadow her lashes threw. The heat from a minute ago hadn't gone anywhere. Her breath was close. Her temperature was close. Even our eyes felt like they were about to overlap.

"Shimo." She said it again. Just that. Low, pulled up from somewhere in her throat, stripped of the usual cool distance—carrying instead a thread of something faint and rough I'd never heard from her before. My throat had gone dry. My answer came a beat late.

"... What." She didn't answer right away. She just looked at me. That look was infuriating. Like she was genuinely waiting for me to admit, out loud, whatever was sitting restless in my chest. Heat crawled up the back of my ears under it. I wanted to look away. I couldn't make myself actually do it. Then she lowered her head. The moment her lips touched mine, my mind went almost entirely blank. It's not that the thought had never crossed my mind.

If anything, in the second right before, I'd already had some vague, dangerous sense of where this was going. But sensing something and having it actually happen are two completely different things. The kiss was light. Light like a question. Like a confirmation. Like everything Maki does—settle in steady first, make sure this is real, make sure I'm not going to push her away. Which made it so much worse. I should have frozen. I should have pushed her back. I should have said something. I didn't manage any of it.

Because she pulled back half an inch, looked at me, and the only thought left in my head was one very bad one. Not enough. My hand moved before I could think it through. I grabbed a fistful of her collar and pulled her back down. This time, I kissed her first. She stalled—just barely. Just long enough to check whether I actually knew what I was doing. Then her fingers tightened, the grip on my wrist shifting from restraint into something a lot closer to permission. We kissed again.

The first time had been too light. The second time came apart completely. Really came apart. Breath against breath, mouth against mouth, whoever pulled back and whoever leaned in again—even the rhythm stopped making sense. All I knew was my heart was going too fast, too hard, the way it does after a full combat sim. Except worse, because this wasn't a question of whether I'd survive. It was that I had no idea what to do with this particular kind of losing control. Maki runs cold, most of the time. Not right now.

Her hand slid from my wrist to my shoulder, fingers pressing through the fabric like she was afraid I'd actually bolt—or like she already knew I wouldn't. The touch left a thin, burning line wherever it landed, hot enough to wreck what was left of my breathing. I'd meant to hold my ground. Meant to at least look like I still had some composure. The second she leaned closer, that plan died completely. The surrender wasn't spoken. It was in the way my fingers went loose.

In the way my grip on her collar turned from pulling into holding on. In the fact that some small, sensible part of my brain was still saying wait, isn't this too fast, while the rest of me had already, honestly, voted the other way. She noticed. So she got a little bolder. Her fingers found the collar of my jacket, paused for a beat, then slid down—loosening what our earlier scuffle had already half-undone. Not rough. Almost restrained, even.

Which was exactly what made it lethal—like she could have gone much further and was choosing, deliberately, to take it one inch at a time, forcing every single movement to register with total clarity. I caught her hand on reflex.

"Wait—Maki…" Even I could hear how little weight that carried. Too soft. More reminder than protest. More like I was trying to salvage some last scrap of dignity for myself. She looked up at me. Whatever was in her eyes now had nothing to do with how she usually looked. Close. Dark. And carrying a trace of aggression I had never once seen on her face before.

"You want me to stop?" she asked, low. I opened my mouth.... If I'd really wanted her to stop, I wouldn't have pulled her down here in the first place. I knew that. She knew it too. So I pushed against her, twice, mostly on principle—wrists doing absolutely nothing—and by the end even I could tell the resistance looked less like a fight and more like the last small ritual before giving up. She watched me for two seconds. The corner of her mouth moved, faintly. Not laughing at me. Closer to: understood.

Then she lowered her head and kissed me again. Deeper this time. Less patient. My breath broke apart and she pressed me back into the mattress, my fingers digging into the sheets on instinct. My jacket slipped loose; the air at my collarbone and neck went cold, while the heat of her settling over me stayed scorching. That collision of cold and hot burned straight through whatever was left of my ability to think clearly.

All I could do was breathe badly and try to say something, only to get cut off by the next kiss before I managed it. The room was too quiet. Quiet enough to hear the fabric shifting, my own wrecked breathing, and the low sound of her breath falling right by my ear. Then— The door opened.

"Hoshino, want to grab dinner—" The voice cut off. So did everything else in the room. My brain went white for a full second. Not a figure of speech. Actual static. The next second, I whipped my head around. Jess stood in the doorway. Not alone. Roy, D, and Harvey were right behind her—clearly on their way in to make a perfectly ordinary dinner invitation, now all frozen in the doorframe wearing identical expressions, like someone had hit the whole group with the same petrification spell.

Jess's gaze swept slowly into the room. Over the wrecked sheets. Over me, flat on the mattress. Over Maki, still hovering above me, nowhere near far enough away to explain any of it. And then that absolute menace smiled. The specific, wicked kind of smile that had clearly been waiting its whole life for this exact moment.

"Well, well," Jess drawled, slow and honeyed.

"Looks like somebody's already eaten." I detonated.

"GET OUT!!" Loud enough that it startled even me. D rebooted first, stumbling backward and grabbing at Harvey, who was still rooted in place, watching the show.

"Retreat, retreat, retreat! This isn't a dinner invitation anymore, this is an active incident!" Harvey's whole face had gone scarlet, still stammering.

"I—I didn't mean to see anything, I really just came to ask if—""Shut up and run!" Roy hauled him back by the arm, his own ears burning red enough to double as navigation lights. Jess was, of course, the last to retreat. And she couldn't leave without one more twist of the knife, eyes curved into crescents, voice dripping sweet enough to be poisoned.

"Don't stop on our account. We can absolutely pretend we didn't see a thing."

"JESS!!"

"Okay, okay." She raised both hands, finally backing out, and got her parting shot in just as the door slid shut.

"I'll save you two seats at dinner. If you've got time." The door closed with a solid thud. The room dropped back into silence. This time, it was worse. I lay there, frozen, face burning hot enough to feel like it might actually be smoking. Every bit of that heat, that loss of control, that thing that had been half a second from becoming something we couldn't take back—Jess had just detonated it into an entirely different category of disaster with four words: somebody's already eaten.

Maki finally eased back, a little. Even with the distance, she was still too close. Way too close. Close enough that I had no idea whether to fix my collar first, or bury myself under the blanket and declare myself legally dead. Two seconds passed. Then Maki laughed. Quiet. Low. I whipped my head around and glared at her.

"You're laughing?!" Her breathing still hadn't fully settled either, but she clearly couldn't help it.

"Sorry."

"That did not sound like someone who's actually sorry!"

"Mm." She actually considered it.

"Probably not." I grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it straight at her.

"This is all your fault!" She caught it one-handed, and had the nerve to answer, perfectly calm:"Weren't you the one who pulled me down first?" I had nothing. I just sat there, red-faced, glaring, with absolutely nothing to say. Maki looked back at me, and the heat that hadn't fully left her eyes was still sitting there. Which made it worse. Because I understood, with total clarity, exactly what had just been interrupted. It wasn't only a dinner invitation.

It was something that, if it had actually kept going, there would have been no pretending it never happened.