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She’s red cheeks and dirty clothes under a mottled sorbet sky. She scrapes her loafers through the soil, fingers knotted in the hem of her dress. Her brows are knit in frustration. Embarrassment, maybe. Her lower lip dimples as she bites down on it.
He tries not to stare.
A flock of birds stretch their shadows across the creek bed. Their distant song colors the air as the heat leeches from the day and into the swirling pink and orange clouds overhead. They’d been walking home together on the main road under this selfsame sky not long ago. She’d asked if he’d share his music and he’d offered her an earbud without comment.
He’d lost himself in the fantasy of it, then, bobbing their heads to the same rhythm and watching cars peal down the road. The weight of her book bag pressed in on his shoulder. The whip of her ribbons against his skin when the breeze picked up. The brush of her skin against his arm as they walked side by side.
Then she fell.
The earbud tore from his ear. The sound of traffic flooded his senses, then her voice as she screamed. She skidded down the embankment mostly on her side. Loose soil gathered in front of her and scattered in the air. It muddled her clothes and mussed her hair. She flailed with her hands and feet to slow her descent, then finally skidded to a stop in the creekbed. Socks wet. Palms scraped and dirty. Fear in her eyes. She whipped around towards the main road, and watched instead as Kyo slid down the embankment on his feet after her.
“Tohru! What the hell?”
He’d reached for her with an open hand and pulled her to her feet. Concern stitched his brows tight, but his voice was gentle as he asked if she was okay. He helped brush the leaves from her hair. He didn’t scold her or bemoan the steep climb between them and home. He just shrugged her bag further up his shoulder and followed the path carved by the creek.
“If you’re alright, let’s keep going. Pretty sure we can follow this back to the house.” he told her with a grin, “Or do you need me to call you an ambulance?”
They’d shared a laugh.
She stops. Creekwater streams around stones and brush, darkening the earth beneath her feet.
His gaze rolls over her until he meets her eyes across the gap. The fractured shadow of a wooden plank splays over his shoulder. He frowns.
"What happened? You almost fall again?"
She shakes her head, her focus someplace past him. "No, I’m okay. It's just the bridge."
He tenses his brow and glances over his shoulder.
The last vestiges of daylight slice through the slats in the bridge’s wooden planks and paint the earth below in strips of light and shadow. The ropes that bind each piece show their age in frayed fibers that gleam gold in dying light and the carpet of moss thriving on its surface. Sturdy dowels driven into the ground shoulder the weight of the bridge in silence. A smattering of mushrooms bloom from the cracks and crevices of the wood. Its patchwork shadow looms in an arc down in the creekbed. It creaks in the breeze, suspended high overhead.
He turns back to her. "What about it?"
"Shigure told me it's bad luck to walk under a bridge."
"Shigure doesn't know shit. You'll be fine."
Her shoulders hike. "But he said bridges link endings and beginnings, so they attract spirits of loss. He said they can cling to people who pass by too carelessly."
Kyo chuffs. "Then we'll be careful."
"A-are they that easy to avoid?"
"How the hell should I know? It's your superstition."
"Well, Shigure did say you can ward off dark spirits by--” she stumbles over her words, “b-by kissing."
He reddens. "What the hell is he tellin' you stuff like that for?"
"I thought he was trying to be helpful."
"Jeez, what is it with that guy?" He hangs his head and his face fades from view. He props his hands on his hips and bores holes into the ground, face flushed. He throws her a look as his hair sweeps across his forehead.
"Listen."
She nods, eyes fixed upon him.
"That guy ain't your dad and he ain't your friend. If he does or says anything that creeps you out, tell 'im to fuck off."
She knits her brow and waves her hands in front of her reflexively, as if to bat problems from the air and into the dirt. "N-no, I don't think he meant anything by it."
He crosses his arms. "Doesn't matter what he meant , it's fucking weird for an adult man to tell a teenage girl she’s gotta kiss somebody to avoid bein’ haunted by a bridge."
"Well, the spirits surrounding the bridge."
His brows pinch so tightly that creases conjure on his skin. " Whatever . None of it's real anyway, he's just tryin' to freak you out."
She shifts from foot to foot. "I don't know."
Light skims across his eyes as his attention melts down her legs and back up again. There's pink in his cheeks when he makes her gaze. He closes his teeth over the inside of his lip and kicks at the ground.
"Let's just go, okay?" he softly says. "It's gonna be dark soon and we’re screwed if we're still off the main road by then."
Kyo presses forward a pace or two. He shares his warmth with her through the palm of his hand and the curl of his fingers over hers. He turns toward the path home before she can make his gaze. He tows her along behind him.
She stumbles after with a yelp. "B-but the bridge!"
"Story's bullshit. You'll be fine."
"But what about you?"
He shakes his head, incredulous. " We'll be fine."
He advances a pace or two ahead of her, their hands interlinked between them. She watches as shadow swallows him head first. It swells over his shoulders and floods down his back. It spreads across his arm, outlining the way his muscles shape to bone under golden skin before swallowing her along with him. Her skin cools immediately upon plunging into the bridge’s bow-shaped shadow.
The air here is cold and wet, shaded by the bridge and kept cool by the towering ridges of dirt and roots at either side. It smells of earth and rainwater. She feels the snowmelt cool her leather loafers on either side as they part the water with each heavy step. She tightens her fingers under Kyo’s and draws closer to him, eyes trained on the space between his shoulder blades. Slices of light and shadow ream across his back like prison bars. A patchwork of dark obstruction and the sunlight that slips between, just enough to coat his skin before slipping back into darkness.
“Kyo, wait!” she shouts, her heartbeat in her throat.
He turns.
Her fingers are cold as they spread across his jaw. Her thumb brushes away his hair and grazes his ear. A sliver of light drapes over her, illuminating one of her eyes honey-brown like a riverbed in summer. It’s the last thing he sees before it happens. Before she curls her fingers and draws him in, an arrow in a bowstring, and presses her lips to his.
He pulls closed the curtain on the whole of the world. He loses her summertime eyes and the fall of her fringe and her pink cheeks and her dirty dress. The world is black as his eyes close. His heart plays a staccato beat in the dark. Rainwater and roses pour in as he pulls in a breath. His fingertips just graze her dress’s collar, one hand wrapped round hers and the other caught in her orbit. Her body heat radiates into his palm. He closes his fingers around it, her collar flicking over his index finger before falling back into place.
He could scream.
And like the tides, her fingers drag along the curve of his jaw and pull apart from him entirely. The world returns as he opens his eyes, heart thrumming behind them.
She takes a step back, knitting her fingers behind her.
The air of late spring is sweet as it cools on her lips. It crackles with the magic of words left unsaid; of wistful gazing and chests full to the brim. Her heart raps a frantic rhythm. She reigns in her voice's wavering with a smile.
"I, um, I hope you'll forgive me." She tilts her head to the side.
"F...forgive you?" His pupils gleam, black moons against red skies.
She nods. "I'm very cautious about these kinds of things. There's already been so much loss between the two of us, and I couldn’t handle it if a dark spirit latched onto you when I could’ve done something to help. So I’m sorry for...for--"
He wonders, then, if she remembers what her mother’s voice sounds like. If it sounds as clear and close as the way he remembers it. As terrifying and accusatory as it sounds to him when he snaps up from his bed in the middle of the night. Guilt coils around his gut like a snake. A bead of sweat tracks down cold skin. He scrapes the back of his neck with his fingernails.
In spite of everything, she’s already haunted. And it’s all his --
"R-right. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it."
He scours her like the pages of a book. Her face is flushed, but the air is cool. She stares up at him with her big brown eyes, refracting stars as they blink to life across the blackening sky. He pours down the strands of her hair like running water, watching each silk strand slide over her shoulder and flow, suspended in the dark.
He drags his hand from the back of his neck to his lips. He grasps at the memory of her kiss and shelters it like a lit match in the palm of his hand. Roots spiral from the soles of his sneakers and tether him to the earth. His shoulders hike. It's quiet but for the thrum of his heart and the trickle of creekwater.
"Tohru, you don’t--"
"Oh no, it's getting late." she watches the moon rise in his eyes. She chuckles and tucks her hair behind her ear. "Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. You were saying?"
He hangs his head and stuffs his hands in his pockets. "Forget it. It's nothin'."
"Could I? Um, could you --" she falls into step at his side.
The words hardly break the silence before he takes her hand, fingers threading in hers.
"So you don't fall." He quietly says.
"Right."
It’s not long before they’re home.