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The hat Jirou is wearing courtesy of Momo does little to cover her already sunburnt face that’s been flushing redder by the minute. Momo’s made a basket, sunscreen, three hats, and a particularly sturdy ladder, and all Jirou has done the past six hours is sit and stare at Momo wonderingly, looking like a child tangled up in Christmas lights. Kaminari, who’s been dragging his feet behind them all day has finally sat himself down in the brown sod of the orchard.
“Wake me up when the harvest’s over,” he mumbles, eyes half-closed already, straw hat discarded in the dirt like an afterthought. Jirou rolls her eyes to the back of her head for the millionth time so far. ‘For a pro hero,’ she thinks, ‘he’s pretty goddamn lazy.’
They’ve been out the entire day, and though the evening sky is casting shade across their faces, Jirou still feels the telltale prickle of raw skin on her cheeks and sharp bare shoulders. It’s definitely going to peel. She picks at her shoulder and winces. Without turning her head, Momo calls from above.
“You’re going to get scars that way Kyouka. The sunscreen’s in the apple basket.”
And it is there, laying lopsidedly in the basket, smeared with white zinc and whatever else is in sunscreen. Jirou smooths it on her face yet again and winces even more at the burn the sunscreen causes against her sun smoked skin. Momo climbs down from the tree with a basketful of lemons and the last rays of sunshine dappling across her face as the sun dips lower in the sky, trading places with the moon and crystalline stars scattered across the black velvet of space. And this is what Jirou’s been waiting for all day, with Kaminari snoring softly, matching pitch with the wind blowing gently through the trees, limbs askew in sleep, the air around them finally quiet for the most part.
“You got a lot,” Jirou says, gesturing to the basket of citrus fruits in her arms, too scared to look at Momo straight on without the fear of backing out of her plan. ‘Why?’ she thinks. ‘Why did it take me this long to get here?’
She knows the answer. Despite what she says, or what her face doesn’t reveal, Jirou is absolutely petrified of ruining anything with Momo.
Momo looks her right in the eye like she always does and quietly notes that Jirou’s hands are shaking. Jirou pulls her hat down over her eyes further and sticks the offending hands into her pockets. She’s a nervous wreck, but Momo has orange leaves in her loose hair, and her eyes are shining darker than the sky, and Jirou thinks that she can’t do this, she doesn’t want to.
But she does, crossing the distance between them and grabbing Momo’s hand with her own clammy fingers that haven’t stopped trembling since Momo put the sunscreen on her ruddy cheeks hours ago, swift soft fingers ghosting their way across her face so quickly she almost believed that she never felt Momo in the first place.
The wind shakes the trees with a rattle, rustling the orange leaves on the ground, in Momo’s hair, in the gaps of the hat Jirou is wearing. And she asks what she’s been waiting to ask for months.
“May I kiss you?”
Momo blinks like a deer in headlights, running a hand through her curtain of hair before she nods.
“Kyouka, you never had to ask.”
Jirou kisses her then, standing on her toes to bridge the gap. And right there Momo looks like a statue, bright white and carved by a sculptor with no subtlety in definition. But she isn’t a statue, and neither of them is frozen anymore. Momo lifts her hand and touches Jirou’s cheek. This time she leaves it there, and it’s only the two of them in the dark beneath the gemstone sky, tasting citrus kisses and electrified by one another. They don’t let go of each other for a long time, and when they do, Jirou feels warm all over as though she’s been lit up from the inside and a switch has clicked into its rightful place.
Momo tastes like lemons, and Jirou’s lips are cherry.
And Jirou realizes that there are a thousand more citrus kisses to be shared.
She likes that thought.
She really, really does.