Work Text:
Mikami glanced through the cafe window. He shouldn’t have been here and he didn’t plan to stay long (certainly not until she noticed), he just had to see. Kiyomi sat at the third table from the left. She leaned back, and laughed, stroking the naked arm of the woman sitting opposite him, and at that very moment, Mikami's skin was flooded with hot waves of reddish jealousy. He reached into his pocket and put his glasses back in its case. It was winter, an afternoon in February to be certain, the asphalt frozen on ice was flooded with the knock of hard-soled shoes. He gave his wife one last look. No, he won't have to wait for Kiyomi Takada-Mikami to get home by the night, just as he hadn't had to wait for her in the last six days. They had slowly set a record…
It was a mutual agreement. Mikami would have been free of everything, he could have spent his free time with friends, in a bar, in the bed of another man or woman, as Kiyomi would, but Mikami was not interested in these things now. He wanted Kiyomi more and more, he became more jealous just like at the beginning of their relationship, and that was exactly what made them enter into a pact, which is why they eventually agreed on this game of power.
Kiyomi explained it as some sort of yarn. As threads, one of which is sometimes released as the other pulls closer. If Kiyomi had let Mikami stifle her with his jealousy, they wouldn’t be together. Not anymore.
The first days always worked well. They didn’t see each other, they didn’t think of each other, and they didn’t even touch each other, others all the more so. Mikami often wondered if Kiyomi was equally uninterested in any partner she had other than him.
It was a masochistic game that neither of them wanted to lose. That would have required one of them to confess; they can’t stand it without the other anymore. That was the part that made Mikami continue to play. Even if he would have preferred to tear all the threads to keep the woman by his side without the game.
***
It was night when Kiyomi headed home. Not to a hotel or an unknown apartment, she wasn’t dirty, she wasn’t drunk, and she didn’t change her mind, not even when she stopped in front of the huge door. The key was already in her hand.
I saw you in front of the cafe today — she could have said that but she didn’t want to humiliate Teru, she didn’t want to finish it like that.
Kiyomi wasn't here because she intended him. She silently adjusted the plain, gold ring on her thin finger and stepped inside.
Teru stood in the living room. More specifically, he was already wearing a suit with a white tie. Was he preparing to give up?
She wrapped his arms around the man's neck and hid her face in his chest.
She knew and loved the fine-tuned tremor in Teru's limbs. She loved that the scent of the man's deodorant never suppressed the scent of his office, the books, the courtroom. Though Teru combed conscientiously in vain, the back of the train path and the chair constantly left a tangled part in his hair at the nape of his neck, which Kiyomi unfolded with her hands. She loved the soft breath he took.
"I lost," Kiyomi lied in the kiss.