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.: seventeen :.
but if i just showed up at your party, would you have me?
would you want me?
would you tell me to go fuck myself, or lead me to the garden?
in the garden, would you trust me if i told you it was just a summer thing?
i’m only seventeen, i don’t know anything—
but i know i miss you.
[three summers’ past]
one time i was riding on my skateboard
when i passed your house;
it’s like i couldn’t breathe.
New people were a rarity in town, but in Enishi’s world they typically only represented trouble when they did appear. His father had married the last new person to come to town—the nanny, no less—and while this new pair of humans didn’t represent quite that level of threat, he was still not terribly interested in making nice with the new girl.
Tomoe, the epitome of neighborly grace, had represented the entire family when she had gone to drop off the casserole and dessert she had made to ease the newcomers into their new life in town. She reported back to her younger brother—an intense, quiet boy with altogether few friends and fewer still with decent reputations—that the girl was his age and was very pretty. At fourteen, Enishi was barely starting to notice girls, and was not at all interested in discussing girls with his older sister; he was not intrigued by the prospect of this new girl in the slightest.
She also lost her mother quite young, Tomoe had told him. That was enough to warrant reconnaissance, but nothing more.
It was easy enough to find her house, because the Chief of Police always resided in the same house owned by the city. Enishi was quite familiar with Officer Saitou, the former chief, and took something akin to delight in finding new and inventive ways of causing trouble in the idyllic upper-class suburban oasis they all called home. It was a rather symbiotic relationship, truly—Saitou wanted work to do, real work, and needed a way to convince his superiors that whatever injury he had sustained in the line of duty in his previous job would not forever compromise his ability to engage in investigative detective work. But nothing of substance never happened in town, until Enishi took it upon himself to help Saitou in his investigative pursuits through petty crimes—light arson, assault, the usual things boys with wealthy fathers could pay to get their way out of. And sure enough, it worked; rumor had it that the new officer had lost his wife in a sting gone wrong, and was placed here to lick his wounds and get the kid away from the trauma. Saitou took his place in his old jurisdiction.
Enishi figured the new chief had been briefed on the only resident in town with anything resembling a rap sheet, so it would not do to simply walk the few blocks to the center of town. First impressions mattered, after all; Enishi rode his skateboard, the most egregious method of travel he had access to in his early teens.
He didn’t quite know what he would do when he got there; he wasn’t really the type to ring the doorbell and make pleasantries, particularly with a dad-cop. But the more Tomoe’s words lingered in his head, the more he wanted to meet the girl. The most grim reality any citizen in town ever faced was the prospect of a particularly low shipment of organic kale in the Co-Op. None of them dealt with death, at least not the kind of death that shouldn’t happen—to young people, to young parents. And none of them were living with private convictions that what had been called death should actually be called murder.
If anyone could understand, maybe it would be this girl. He doubted it, but he’d check her out if only to be more sure in his conviction that his pain was singular in the realm of human emotional experiences.
Any concerns Enishi had about pleasantries or fathers or small talk were erased. The girl was in the front yard and he spotted her as soon as he rounded the corner of her block. If she was pretty, it didn’t register in any part of his brain; instead, he was overwhelmed by the aura of her. She was sparring with a dummy in the front yard, sometimes with a wooden sword, sometimes with hands and feet, and sometimes she just launched herself at the mannequin with incoherent rage. There was seemingly no rhyme or reason to her choice of method of attack other than whatever emotional whim she was engaging in the moment. Enishi dimly recognized some of the movements from his own martial arts practices, and could tell she had been formally trained in some kind of tradition—but the grace was gone, and replaced with an utter fury at seemingly anyone or anything.
He was just marveling at the depth of sadness in her eyes when her ferocity turned on him in full force.
“What’re you staring at?!” She was very loud, and panting heavily from over-exertion or anger or possibly both. “I don’t know you.”
His eyes widened despite himself; he was not fully prepared for the intensity of her regard. He wasn’t afraid of her by any means, but she was a lot. Slowly, he coasted his way closer to her, understanding her like he understood a wounded animal—understanding her like he understood himself.
“Enishi Yukishiro.” He ran a hand through his hair, feigning nonchalance. “Now you know me.”
The girl looked unconvinced, narrowing her eyes at him as she looked him over. He wondered if she was assessing him as a threat.
“You met my sister a couple of days ago. She brought a casserole.” Enishi never explained himself to anyone, but for once in his life he wanted an olive branch. All the better that he didn’t have to cook it or otherwise expend any other energy than to ride on his sister’s good will. Again.
The girl finally blinked, nodding to herself in recognition and reorienting her posture to be more casual. “I remember her. You look like her,” she said that mostly to herself, as if putting the pieces together. “That was really kind of her and it was really, really good.” He would come to learn later on that neither Kaoru nor her father were particularly good cooks and that Kaoru’s appraisal of Tomoe’s cooking skills was honest.
“I can go get your casserole dish. I think it went through the dishwasher already.”
“Don’t worry about it….” Enishi blinked, only now noticing she had never introduced herself.
“Kaoru. Kaoru Kamiya.” Unexpectedly, the girl walked up to him and extended a hand for a handshake. He took it, but her grip was stronger than his—he wasn’t often in the business of exchanging handshakes with other kids.
They were silent for a long moment, before Enishi wordlessly gestured towards the sparring dummy in the yard.
“I practice kendo. Some other stuff, too. But mostly kendo. It’s a family tradition, goes back a lot of generations. I could practice in the basement, but it’s nice out. And I want everyone to know not to mess with me.”
Enishi nodded; this made perfect sense to him—the weather, the kendo, the need for people to think of you as strong and not to be trifled with. “We could spar sometime,” he offered, and found that he meant it.
Kaoru flashed him the first genuine smile she had felt since her mother died, took his hand, and yanked him towards her backyard. He let her.
Kaoru’s backyard had a sizeable treehouse, which must have been a relic from some long-gone family as Saitou had no kids that Enishi knew of. It checked all of the boxes for every interested party—it was far away from Enishi’s house, far enough away from Kaoru’s father’s watchful gaze, and small enough that the elder Kamiya could be reasonably certain all the kids were doing in there was talking. It was the perfect storm of positive circumstances—two lonely kids, feeling adrift and cheated out of something essential in their lives, with a perfectly sized hangout ensconced in relative privacy. The treehouse served multiple roles—it was a confessional, a hideout, a place to calm down when invariably one or both of the adolescents was angry with a parental figure, a place to indulge in the snacks Enishi’s stepmother refused to purchase for his house, and a place where they safely experimented with hair color. (Enishi came to love the platinum silver and made it a permanent addition; Kaoru left colors alone once the bleach fried her hair.) But above all, it was theirs. Enishi became a semi-permanent fixture in the backyard of the Kamiya homestead, and it was not entirely uncommon for Enishi to be in the treehouse without Kaoru if she was otherwise busy. The more Enishi and Kaoru hung out, the less trouble Enishi endeavored to get himself into, which suited Chief Kamiya just fine.
The last thing Enishi wanted was for Kamiya to do too well at his job and be relocated to some town that could actually use him.
[summer]
those days turned into nights slept next to her,
but i dreamt of you all summer long.
“You’re sure you don’t want to go?”
His tone was even, as it almost always was—betraying nothing at all. Even after so many years, he pretended that anything other than casual indifference might actually kill him. It was a similar brand of nonchalance that seemed to afflict all of the other boys at school, but no one wore it like a coat of armor quite like Enishi did. Kaoru knew better, of course; she didn’t even have to try to hear the subtle longing in his voice.
Slowly, she raised herself from her prone position, where she had been staring at the beams of sunlight streaming through the slats in the roof of the treehouse that sat in the trees in her backyard. It was only teenage metabolism and some amount of luck that kept the structure sound even with two teenagers stuffed inside of it.
“It’s not that I don’t want to come,” she replied, exasperated. It was a conversation they must have had a dozen times in the last month, and she had long since passed the point of being able to explain it to him like an adult. She’d now reverted to explaining it like he was five—slowly, kindly, and with a hint of finality. “It’s that I absolutely can’t. My dad completely flipped out, and he’s not going to change his mind about this.”
The trip in question was a concept dead on arrival; Kaoru pulled out every trick she had in her sleeves to warm her father up to the idea, but it was a resounding when hell freezes over response that brooked no argument—much less an explanation for his reasoning. Kaoru was still irritable with her father for it, which did not phase him in the slightest… but if she were really honest with herself, she knew her father’s unspoken fears were completely founded. On its face, there was nothing obviously improper about the trip in question. Enishi’s state senator father owned a vacation home on the coast, and was using his recess to take his new trophy wife, two children, and daughter’s college boyfriend to the mansion through June and July. Politicians were not often in the business of endorsing impropriety amongst youth, Kaoru tried to reason, but her father just set his normally friendly smile in a grim line and shook his head.
“We’re just friends, dad!” Was the exclamation that ended that pseudo-conversation. Her father pretended not to laugh and Kaoru pretended not to hear him do so. And she pretended that that was just stereotypical fatherly paranoia, until she began counting down the number of days until Enishi left with dread. And when she reasoned with herself that it was just going to be a lonely summer without her partner in crime, her subconscious emotions responded by making a dedicated summer playlist for him. And when that was rationalized away as just a good excuse to get him to listen to some bands she desperately wanted him to appreciate like she did, her dreams started making painfully clear what her conscious mind absolutely did not want to acknowledge. The frequency, content, and intensity of dreams about her best friend had her waking in a near panic attack more mornings than not. It was fine when she was having these kinds of dreams about—
“You just don’t want to spend two months with Kenshin hanging all over Tomoe, I get it.” Enishi looked at her over his glasses, a smirk playing against his lips. Kaoru attempted to ram her foot into his shin as punishment for the cruel joke, but the space afforded little more leverage than an awkward shove with her shoe and a resulting smudge of dirt on his pants.
An interesting shift had occurred throughout the last year, the first since Tomoe and Kenshin had graduated and gone off to university. Kaoru had never vocalized it for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of things, but it was something she thought of with some regularity as she tried to figure out what her hormones were doing. His older sister and her boyfriend had been a topic mostly off-limits throughout the first two years of their friendship. Enishi hated Kenshin for reasons he never fully articulated, and Kaoru had never poked too hard at that particular bear for fear he might break something in her presence. And for her part, Kaoru behaved the way most of the girls at the high school behaved around Kenshin Himura—with deference, thinly veiled longing, and a proclivity towards over-analyzing every pleasant interaction they had ever had (which was all of them; he never seemed to lose his temper or have a negative thing to say to or about anyone). That dynamic was the grey cloud which had lingered over their friendship—albeit at a distance—for two years, and had mysteriously cleared once the older Yukishiro and her boyfriend had moved away from town last fall. Similarly, Kaoru’s affection for Kenshin had also waned; it was as if the spell he had over her had broken with enough distance. It was probably coincidence, Kaoru often reasoned—Enishi was a mercurial soul, and his fluctuation in mood could rarely be attributed to just one thing. But there was something that thrilled her that maybe, maybe that irritability had stemmed from a kind of jealousy she had been too blind to notice before, and maybe that meant… something.
At the very least, they could joke about it now.
“The summer is going to suck without you,” Kaoru said after a long moment of watching Enishi wipe the dirt off of his pant leg. She was always the more vulnerable one, and this disclosure was nothing out of the ordinary. They locked gazes then, both searching for something in the other that they could find if only they had the wherewithal to recognize it. The egocentrism of adolescence ran too deeply in their bones, however, and the moment was quickly gone.
“My dad’s gonna make me do all this SAT prep,” Kaoru grumbled, turning her head to hide her blush. She knew Enishi would miss her, too; after all, he wanted her to come along with his family and was more persistent about this than most things with her. But she wanted him to say it, and she hated that she was so demonstrative while he was so reserved. “And I’m not even going to have you to complain to.”
Enishi’s stepmother, a woman hardly old enough to pretend to have birthed Enishi much less Tomoe, was one of those new-age enthusiasts who erroneously thought that having her teenage-and-barely-young-adult stepchildren keep their phones at home would help facilitate “family bonding.”
“I wouldn’t be able to commiserate with your plight,” he replied with a shrug, again expertly shoving Kaoru’s most sensitive buttons. Kaoru had slightly better grades, but she worked hard for them—Enishi cared little for formal education, but he was so brilliant that even his minimal efforts kept him more than afloat in school. He’d have no problem at all with his college entrance exams.
“Why am I even friends with you?” She asked to no one in particular, shifting so she was once again laying down, this time with her feet and ankles sticking out of the opening that served as the treehouse door. This brought her head down around Enishi’s knee, which she unabashedly used as a pillow.
“Levity,” he replied simply, letting one of his hands rest on the top of her head. It was an intimate gesture, but Kaoru was so distracted by her own melancholy that she didn’t even acknowledge it.
[fall]
i won’t make assumptions about why you switched your homeroom,
but i think it’s ‘cause of me.
The risk Enishi took was calculated, but Kaoru was such an enigmatic quantity that, upon retrospection, he realized he should not have ever come to depend on her reaction.
The summer had been brutal; Enishi didn’t like Kenshin even before he met Kaoru, and though it was somewhat soothing that she wasn’t around to act like his lapdog, it didn’t do much else to calm his frustration. His sister was just different when Kenshin was around, less dependable, more flighty, and he hated it.
It wasn’t even just being the fifth wheel in a dysfunctional familial situation that was grating on his nerves, though it certainly wasn’t pleasant to watch his father coddle the woman he replaced his mother with. He missed Kaoru with a kind of desperation that he couldn’t put words to—it was different than the gaping hole in his heart that his mother had left behind, but given the fact that Kaoru was less than a few hundred miles away and presumably intact he was amazed at the intensity with which he longed to see her. It put everything he had been reasonably sure of before into a sudden and stark relief—he loved his best friend, so much it bordered on madness, and he had no idea what to do with that knowledge. The idea of sharing that knowledge with her and being turned down was absolutely not an option; there were still minor structures in town he’d rather like to destroy, and he’d not be able to keep himself from doing so if she didn’t reciprocate his feelings.
Kaoru was demonstrative with him, she was vulnerable—but then, she was like that with almost everyone in her circle. Enishi had always believed himself to be the sun in her personal solar system, but Kaoru had enough room in her heart to love all of the planets—Sano, Megumi, Misao, Aoshi, Yahiko, even Kenshin… so her verbal affection was no better an indicator of her romantic inclinations than the mood ring she sometimes wore just to irritate him—looks like we’re both mercurial today!, she would exclaim as the stupid ring changed colors.
The idea came to him as all terrible ideas do, when he was emotionally highly strung and feeling reckless. It wasn’t even really a fully formed set of thoughts, more a visceral reaction to the opportunity that had presented itself in happenstance. But there she was, that girl whose name he could never remember but that he knew lived in the coastal resort town all year long. Over the years she had come to approach Enishi every time she caught wind he was in town, and he was no more interested in her at seventeen than he had been in any prior year—but her company did attract his attention.
He recognized them dimly at first, and then all at once. The Sekihara twins, Tae and Sae, were casual friends of Kaoru’s—rather like moons orbiting the planets orbiting the sun. Their parents owned a set of remarkably popular restaurants both in his hometown and along the coast; presumably, they were here on holiday or to scout out a new location. They seemed really chummy with the girl in their company, and all the better that the twins were notorious gossips.
It was almost too easy; a languidly slow pace in the girl’s line of sight, a charming smile, an agreement to a ride back home. She winked and Tae—or maybe it was Sae, who cared—was pulling out her phone as they tore out of the parking lot together.
It was supposed to be easy; it was supposed to be the perfect barometer of Kaoru’s feelings. No doubt the twins would tell Kaoru about this new woman hanging on Enishi’s every word, they’d tell him to his face that he was in trouble or something else terribly inane, and he’d just have to wait out the remaining weeks knowing fully well Kaoru would have a tantrum and demand what was hers upon his return.
But the taunting never came, so the dramatics had to increase—and for weeks, he followed this girl wherever she went when his family would allow. He held her hand and wrapped a casual arm around her waist and even kissed her. And the twins kept texting, but they absolutely never betrayed the confidence of whoever it was they were telling about all of this, and in turn he had to become increasingly more demonstrative, and that summer he found that even he could get in over his head.
It was only on the long drive home that the reality that Kaoru didn’t care about his romantic escapades slapped him in the face, but at least then he would have his definitive answer and they could go on as they always had. He didn’t expect what awaited him—or, rather, what didn’t—when he got back to town.
He waited in the tree house, so long that he even relented and rang the doorbell. Kaoru’s father was on shift, and Kaoru had the good grace to answer the door though it was painfully obvious in her eyes that she didn’t want to. Kaoru had the kind of face that betrayed absolutely everything, if not in her expression then at least in her eyes, and that afternoon he was nearly blown away by the depth of some emotion he could not identify—not anger, not sadness, perhaps wistfulness if he had to put a name to it. It was not like Kaoru to be wistful, to be passive about what it was she was feeling, and something akin to alarm shot through his central nervous system.
“Oh hey,” she smiled, but her smile was wrong. “Welcome back—how was your trip?” It was all politeness, a satellite call to a passing ship in the night that would soon pass by forever. Enishi had never been gone so long before, but even after shorter trips Kaoru was known to potentially fracture ribs with the force of her embraces. He had braced himself for that, but the feeling that slammed into him instead was more painful than her hugs could ever be.
“It was about as you’d expect. Pretty terrible.” He shrugged, pretending to be very interested in a passing car on the road behind him so he wouldn’t have to look in her eyes.
“I bet.” Her conversation was uncharacteristically flat and awkward, and he knew then that he had gravely miscalculated everything. Kaoru was upset, and she was not going to let him know, and he knew that she knew that he would not press the issue. After a moment of silence, she added. “I’d really love to catch up, but I’m really behind on my SAT prep and I need to get it done before my dad gets home.”
The last remaining week of summer was like that; Kaoru was never outright angry or impolite, but she was distant. She never popped up in the treehouse; if she noticed rustling in the yard, she’d come out and say hello and stumble her way through a forced apology. There was always something keeping her busy—test preparation, errands for her father, kendo practice, something. Most of the more banal tasks were things Enishi used to hang around for, joining Kaoru on trips to the Co-Op or the dry cleaner just to provide company. But Kaoru was always in some artificial rush these days, exchanging pleasantries and then reacting as if she was perpetually late for whatever was next on her to-do list.
The only solace he could carry was that there was no way Kaoru could ignore him in school; there were so few students in their grade that they were all but assured to share every class. But as he sauntered into homeroom that crisp September morning—on time, for once, out of sheer anticipation—it was painfully obvious that Kaoru would not be joining him. She didn’t join him in first period, either. When she showed up in third period, she met Enishi’s hardened gaze with a blasé expression and unconvincing apology.
“I thought I told you—I had to change out of P.E. to take Japanese instead, and it just really messed up my whole schedule.”
Kaoru had never mentioned that; Enishi would know, he would have remembered. But there was no room for arguing with her, not in this classroom where everyone could hear them, anyway. He was already on perpetually thin ice within their broader peer group, rescued only by association with Kaoru and her remarkable normalcy, and to bicker with her about furthering her foreign language education would be wildly inappropriate. He didn’t much care for what others thought of him, but at this point it was unlikely Kaoru would automatically volunteer to be his partner for group assignments and he needed to keep what little social currency he had left in order to skate through junior year on others’ efforts.
[winter]
i know where it all went wrong—
your favorite song was playing from the far side of the gym.
i was nowhere to be found; i hate the crowds, you know that—
plus, i saw you dance with him.
Junior year had been hell—not even half over yet, it felt longer to Kaoru than the previous three years combined. Even after three months of practice, she still hadn’t quite mastered what it meant to be a person not completely enmeshed with Enishi.
They had done each other some small favors: He had stopped coming around the house in mid-September; she had volunteered to partner with him on all of the projects in the two classes they shared. He never offered any insights or updates about the girl he was dating; she didn’t ask. Kaoru vacillated wildly between desperately wanting him so much closer and being thankful for the mental reprieve his detachment offered her. She berated herself in numerous journal entries; how could she have sacrificed her most important friendship over something so petty as a summer romance? But just when she thought she had hardened that part of her heart enough to rekindle what she had broken, his presence and its reminder that it wasn’t her he was in love with tore her resolve apart. She couldn’t hold onto him, but she couldn’t let him leave, either.
So she shouldn’t have been surprised, she knew, on that freezing December Saturday night. She was lingering aimlessly on the front steps of the school building, venturing inside only to regain feeling in her legs before milling around outside once again. Winter formal was the consolation prize for the three younger years in the high school, some kind of practice for how to engage each other against the background of pop music and low lighting before they were allowed to go to prom as seniors. No one ever asked Kaoru; no one ever felt they could. Attending winter formal together was part of the unwritten, unspoken contract of her friendship with Enishi, and she had been terrified about what would happen this night as much as she was terrified about what would not happen. And as the minutes continued to tick by, and her knees shook from the cold, she came to the stunning realization that this was the end. She had really done it, this time; he was too smart and too sensitive to be satisfied with being kept merely an arm’s length away.
It was with a fractured heart that she ventured back into the school, for the final time that evening. If the questions came, the questions came; it wasn’t like she could go home at this point, not with the rest of her friends lingering around until they inevitably called it and went to the cheapest diner Sano had enough gas in his car to get to. She had played too much at this game—wanting him when she could handle it, cutting him off when she could not—and, besides, he was probably at that resort town her father would never be able to afford to take her to, feeling up that girl she would never be as good as.
The tears came hot and fast but Kaoru willed them to stay collected in her lashes, not willing to subject herself to more of Megumi’s forceful preening should her tears ruin her makeup. She walked with as much dignity as she could muster between the lingering cold in her legs, the instability of the heels on her feet, and the utter desire to collapse that seemed to permeate all of the bones in her body.
“Kaoru?” It was a male voice; Kaoru’s head responded to the voice behind her with a force akin to whiplash. It was wishful thinking that connected dots that should not have been connected; there was no other explanation that she would ever confuse Katsu’s soft tones with that of Enishi.
“Uh, hi, Katsu.” Kaoru paused out of politeness, turning fully to face him. He was Sano’s friend, so for all intents and purposes he was merely a friend of hers by association. She knew him to be a quiet boy, artsy, though with a flair for dramatics that allowed his friendship with Sano to make intuitive sense. He had long hair, which Kaoru found she rather liked when she allowed herself to see him as something other than a two dimensional character in the stageplay of her life.
“Not here with Yukishiro, I take it?” Kaoru was sure she heard some kind of lilt in his tone, but couldn’t quite place it.
“Er, no; I suppose he’s busy tonight. We never made plans to come together, if that’s what you’re asking.” Kaoru forced her tone to stay neutral; she even offered a shadow of a smile just to confirm how little she cared.
“Do you—Are you here with someone else?”
Was the lilt in his tone that of hopefulness? Kaoru would have let her jaw drop open if she were not keeping all of her facial muscles tightly controlled.
“No, I don’t have a date.”
“Would you like one?”
And that was how Kaoru found herself in the arms of Sano’s friend—someone who had not even really been on her radar before that night. But it was fun, she realized, to dance with someone who wanted to; Enishi never wanted to dance, never really particularly wanted to be there but for the fact that it made Kaoru happy. But Katsu was different; he did not hang his pride on not enjoying school or anything adjacent. He was good friends with Megumi through his association with Sano, and by association with Megumi, Aoshi and Misao were easily brought in as well. There was a genuine camaraderie amongst the group of them that, by definition, could not exist with Enishi around; he always, always engaged social situations with Kaoru with an air of possessiveness that made others take a step back. But there was no pretense here tonight, and for the first time in three months Kaoru felt herself laugh again, in that meaningful way she thought she had lost forever at the end of summer.
She was too distracted to notice Enishi walking in, nonchalantly with his hands in his pockets. He lingered for only a song; by the time Kaoru felt someone’s eyes on her and looked up, the gym doors were swinging shut in his wake.
[spring]
i showed up at your party--
will you have me? will you love me?
will you kiss me on the porch in front of all your stupid friends?
It had been a custom for as long as any of them could remember, the Chief’s end-of-the-year party in the backyard of the city-owned house. It had been a largely discouraged tradition in the years Saitou and his wife lived there, but since taking it over Chief Kamiya had made it a downright affair. The party served multiple functions—a last get-together for the children before families scattered amongst their various summer travel plans, a send-off for the graduating seniors, and a not-so-subtle reminder that the Chief lived in the neighborhood and wouldn’t take kindly to kids making trouble over the summer. But mostly, it was Chief Kamiya’s way of celebrating the community he and his daughter now called home. He was eternally grateful for the second chance at life they both had been given, being welcomed here with such open arms, and he loved nothing more than to give back that positive energy in spades.
The food was catered, the music was tasteful but youth-adjacent, and the festoon lighting draped around fences and over the deck was warm. The elder Kamiya noticed his daughter chatting up her group of friends—Sano, Megumi, Aoshi, and Katsu had just graduated, leaving only Misao and Kaoru behind to suffer through another year of high school. All of the teens and tweens in his yard were similarly bunched up, chatting in smaller groups of peers, and he smiled because he knew all of them—knew their parents, who they hung out with, what made them happy and made them tick. It was what drove him to get into the force in the first place, this level of community camaraderie.
His smile quirked, for the briefest of moments, into a frown. No, not everybody was here—there was definitely someone missing, someone important, someone whose absence in his life (by association) had been noteworthy only because of his otherwise verbose daughter’s unwillingness to talk about him.
It was almost like déjà vu, if only Enishi believed in it. The skateboard had been upgraded to a motorcycle over the years, but it was the identical mix of wonderment and dread that accompanied him on his ride up the familiar cobblestone streets to Kaoru’s house as it had the first time they met. In a lot of ways, it felt like he was approaching her again for the very first time. It had been a hell of a year, and the push-and-pull of their dynamic had left them both grabbing at nothing.
He should leave well enough alone; he knew that in the way that he knew most things, cold and calculatingly. But Kaoru had always been enigmatic, and his reactions to her were always similarly confusing. There was a part of him, the wishful—or maybe arrogant—part, that had him convinced that there was no way she could be happy with the way things had fizzled out between them. This was not two people going their separate ways organically, as he observed many high school friendships did. No, he was the same person he had always been, and she was the same person she had always been, and were it not for this grave set of miscalculations on his part, they would be as close as they ever were. He believed this in his bones, and though he was ill-practiced at apologies and loathe to offer one up, this felt like the best opportunity to do so. Kaoru couldn’t exactly avoid him in this situation, and she couldn’t suggest he didn’t belong there. It was probably not very fair, but seeing that she would always have the home field advantage over him—literally, she never came over to his house—he figured the ambush would level things out a bit.
He had practiced the words in his head a thousand times, how to tell her that what he had done last summer was an immature mistake. He found that that part was not particularly hard, but it was the next part—not railing into her for her doing her part wrong that he had a hard time bypassing. He had done a stupid thing, sure, but shouldn’t she have known what he was angling for? He had even called Tomoe, in an uncharacteristic show of desperation, for help. She had made it abundantly clear that he was not to blame Kaoru for not being psychic, but had been otherwise rather useless for what to say instead.
Kaoru’s house came into view, and that was it. He was out of time to agonize over what to say to her; in many ways, he felt a considerable sense of relief. It was done. Whatever was going to happen, would happen, and it would no longer occupy the bulk of his waking—and sleeping—thoughts. He would say the right thing, or the wrong thing, but it would be something and it would catalyze this stagnant friendship, or relationship, or whatever it was into whatever it was going to become.
Unlike that meeting as children, there was no angry girl violently throwing her body around in the yard. It wasn’t quiet, there wasn’t an absence of witnesses. No, this was bright and loud and very, very public. Enishi had more than half a mind to turn around and get back on his bike and haul off, when the authoritative voice of Kaoru’s dad stopped him in his tracks.
“Enishi?”
“You say that like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Well, haven’t I?” Chief Kamiya’s face broke into his characteristic mile-wide grin, and Enishi hated how comfortable it made him feel; there was at least one person here who didn’t absolutely hate him, anyway. The chief was sitting on the front porch, conspicuously alone. “I was actually just thinking about you, wondering if you’d show up. It has been quite a while.”
Enishi just shrugged at that, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Kaoru never told me what happened, if that helps.”
“Nothing happened.” It was said quickly, defensively, and Enishi knew Kaoru’s father wasn’t a stupid man. Fortunately, he was also a kind man, and let it go.
“I’ll go get Kaoru, I’m sure she’d—” But the elder Kamiya’s words were cut off, as his daughter bounded out of the front door and onto the porch, breathlessly.
“Dad, little Suzume got herself stuck in the tree and is too terrified to come down, can you h—” Her train of words came to a screeching halt as she took in the scene before her—Enishi petulantly but also contritely standing on her front lawn, hands in his pockets in a show of discomfort and surrender.
“Yes, I’ll go right now.” Kaoru’s father laid a gentle hand on her shoulder for the briefest of moments before retreating back into the house, leaving Kaoru on her porch and Enishi slowly ambling up the front steps.
“It’s good to see y—” She had tried to be polite, but politeness was not what he had come here for. Kaoru always complained that he was too internalizing, not demonstrative enough, didn’t she? And he was struggling to find the right words, so altogether it seemed like the best course of action to just show her.
Enishi’s first kiss had been with that girl on the beach; she was experienced, and he was doing a great job of pretending to be, and he thought he had avoided the entirety of that awkward-first-kiss experience no worse for wear. But the first time he kissed Kaoru, her mouth slightly ajar with words wanting to be said as she was caught by surprise, was in no way suave or sophisticated or even particularly enjoyable. It was awkward, as a teenager’s first kiss should be, and as far as he knew he was hers and she was definitely his first kiss that mattered.
Sputtering, Kaoru pulled away with a fierce determination in her eyes, guarded—even as she gently touched her lips with her shaking fingers. “What about that girl, huh?” Kaoru looked like she was pulling in all of her internal reserves to be angry, crossing her arms over her chest in indignation.
“The one I set myself up with to make you jealous? Looks like it worked.” And he went in to kiss her again, and she let him, and it was better this second time but not by much. He was fully prepared for this outcome, he noted—perhaps that was why the words never came to him even as he obsessed over them. Because no words were needed.
“I can’t believe you!” She went so far as to stomp her foot on the deck once they pulled away from each other, but not so far as to push him away when they kissed again. He had wondered, idly, what would change between them when and if this disclosure had ever come to pass. Judging by Kaoru’s flaring temper in this moment, the answer, blissfully, was nothing.
“It was stupid, and I shouldn’t have done it.” He hovered just around the apology, staring into her eyes as they both caught their breath. “And if you want to hate me…” He didn’t know what to say, didn’t really want to even leave her the option, but it felt appropriate to honor that at least.
She gave him a long look, considering, and then spoke slowly. “Did you just get one ear pierced? It looks kind of stupid.”
He would have been offended, but the way she wrapped her arms around his neck and laughed through their kiss eased the sting.