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“Mai used to tease me about this.”
“What about?”
“Said I could manage to hold the universe in my hands and still wouldn’t be able to muster up an emotion in my shriveled, cold heart.”
Yuuta hummed, nuzzling her nape. The weight of his arm draped over her anchored Maki to the mattress and to the solid heat of his chest against her back. “Well, she was wrong.”
He was always straightforward like that. It transported Maki back to that day in the classroom, Yuuta’s sweetly blushing face proclaiming the Zenins’ demise.
“How do you know?” she whispered, tracing figures on his leanly muscled forearm. It wasn’t as if she was inclined to disillusion those who thought she was heartless. It was easier this way, holding the world at arm’s length. It meant Maki was less likely to get hurt again.
“I’m holding you, aren’t I?” Yuuta said, splaying his fingers on her bare stomach. Maki’s skin was blotchy, burnt and mutilated in places where smooth skin once paved taut muscles.
She couldn’t look at herself most days, except through Yuuta’s tender touch caressing paths over the worn grooves of her body.
“I see you, Maki,” he whispered behind her ear, voice husky with sleepiness. She squeezed her eyes shut at the painful sincerity in his voice. “You’re burdened with a heart twice as big as anyone I know. You had to find ways to protect it.”
The hand on her stomach moved to press on her chest, palm over her heart. Maki’s breath hitched, the fragile beat of it racing breathlessly under his touch.
The truth was, Maki held many flutters in her heart. A hundred emotions that started and ended with Yuuta; Yuuta was everywhere in between.
It was never her intention. Maki condemned love; it was impractical, painful. Somehow, though, Yuuta slipped past the barbed wire. Maki wondered why she ever assumed love was a choice.
It was not. It was an overwhelming force, and she was helpless to do anything but be swept by its currents.
She said nothing, eyes closed and breathing in their shared essence. There was a deep ache in her belly where Yuuta had bruised her with his passion, egged on by her pleas to quench the burn of her desire for him clawing up her insides, to make her feel something other than the phantom agony of fire on her skin.
Yuuta’s soft snores reached her moments later, breaths tickling her sensitive skin. Everything felt different now, each touch reaching deeper, every sensation amplified. Was it her burnt skin, peeled back and exposed, or was it Yuuta’s doing, Maki didn’t know.
She often wondered if different rules governed the small universe between the two of them. Where the world chained her down, she was weightless in the space between his arms. Where everything hurt like blaring sirens in the night, it was gentle and quiet here with this man who smiled twice as big even when the world sucked twice as much.
Perhaps this was her karmic destiny; Yuuta was here to balance the monumental shit in her life. Otherwise, why would someone so bright and pure shackle himself to someone like her?
Maki drifted off.
She awoke with gasping breaths and Yuuta’s gentle, urgent whispers rousing her from the memory of fire on her body, eating her up until she was ash.
Sweat beaded on her clammy skin—the room felt ten degrees hotter, and her vision was swimming, blurry with sleep and tears.
“Maki, Maki,” Yuuta was saying, hands fluttering over her shoulders. “Shh, you’re okay, you’re okay now, hey, hey, look at me.”
Her eyes refocused with some struggle, still seeing afterimages of glaring light in her retinas. Dream and reality overlapped until her eyes zeroed in on Yuuta’s worried slate blue eyes.
“Oh,” she said haltingly, wiping at her face. “Sorry. I— sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”
Yuuta released a relieved sigh, pulling her back against his chest. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “Are you okay?”
Maki wished she had an answer for him that wasn’t ‘I don’t know’. She was alive and safe, but everything was different, wrong. Like someone had dismantled Maki and put her back together out of shape.
“No,” she decided, taking a choked breath and releasing it.
Yuuta’s hold tightened on her, silence clogging up the room. He buried his face in her hair, breathed her in. “Tell me what you need.”
“I don’t want to remember,” she whispered, hating how vulnerable she sounded.
“Do you think you can go back to sleep?” he asked gently, rubbing her back with so much tenderness it made Maki feel like she was made out of glass.
She shook her head. Maki couldn’t close her eyelids without seeing the fire and remembering the smell of burning flesh.
Yuuta sat up, the muscles in his broad back flexing. He had scars too, prettier ones than the splotches mapping her skin. White and pink lines like an oil painting. “Let’s go on a walk.”
It was three in the morning. Maki wanted to tell him he was crazy, but the thought of returning back to the haunted valleys of her mind surged panic into her system. At once, she was claustrophobic, walls too cramped, breaths tight in her lungs.
“Yeah,” she croaked, slipping out of bed to put her clothes on.
Yuuta was ready with her coat when she slipped into a pair of dark boots, sleep rubbed out of his eyes but dark circles prominent as always. He pulled it up her arms and took a moment to smooth his big hands through her choppy hair.
Maki smiled weakly, a little self conscious whenever he peered too closely. “It’ll grow out,” she said for reasons she couldn’t fathom. She wasn’t particularly shallow, but Maki had loved her hair.
Yuuta smiled, affectionate and warm. “It will,” he agreed. “And even if it doesn’t, it’s beautiful like this too.”
Maki’s heart leaped. It was a losing battle tempering her heartbeat around him. She allowed him to take her hand and silently lead them out into the autumn night, roads dark and deserted save for the flood of warm glow under the beacon of street lights.
Sucking in a breath of gelid air, Maki allowed the chilliness to settle inside her lungs, chasing away the memory of burning. The panic shrouding her mind began to filter out until her thoughts were calm once again, and she could focus on the cracks of Yuuta’s palm against hers.
They took the sidewalk to the main road, Maki tracing the dewy railing of the concrete ramp fencing the ocean with tentative fingertips. It was cold. Maki used to hate the cold. Now, she relished every mute tremble of her frame as the breeze barrelled into her.
Yuuta allowed her the serenity of quietness, a faithful shadow by her side, radiating protectiveness as he led her through the streets by hand.
“Thank you,” she said, what felt like forever later. “I’m sorry I disturbed your sleep.”
“I can’t sleep without you at peace, Maki.”
He was always straightforward, unabashed, and emboldened in his feelings. Yuuta had grown in his absence. This Yuuta carried himself differently, no longer hunching in as if he wished to take up less space.
He’d found the courage to live.
Maki was so proud and so envious of him.
The press of lips on her knuckles jolted her. She looked at him and found him smiling. “Stop thinking,” he chastised.
She cracked a sardonic smile. “Do I ever?”
An interesting blush shone in his cheeks, and he looked away. “Sometimes. When we are together.”
Yes, Yuuta had noticed. He could make her forget with touch and sweet words and loving confessions. He could make her thoughts silent, flush out worry and pain with pleasure and tenderness.
Maki bit her lip, leaning closer to press her head to his bicep. “Only you can do that.”
Yuuta seemed to glow with her words, smiling to himself like she’d given him a precious gift.
“I want you to think happy things when we’re together,” he confessed, thumb drawing circles on the back of her hand. “What’s your favourite happy thought?”
Maki didn’t have a favourite one, but she thought the meager collection she kept close to her heart held a common denominator. “You,” she said, surprised by the raw honesty of her words.
Yuuta jerked slightly, head whipping towards her. The blush returned, ever endearing.
“Maki,” he said, moved.
They slowed to a stop as Yuuta tugged her closer, right into his chest where it was warm and safe, and only happy thoughts permeated her mind. “You can’t say something so sweet and expect me to maintain my composure.”
She hadn’t. Hadn’t even meant to say that out loud, it just escaped. Maki wasn’t sentimental, but Yuuta managed to bring new feelings out of her without trying.
He rubbed the side of his head against hers, like a particularly affectionate pet, melting up the corners of her heart. “You’re my favourite happy thought, too,” he crooned, nuzzling her cheek. The tip of his nose was cold, and Maki turned her head, foreheads bumping together to receive his kiss.
She sighed, more at peace than she’d felt in days. “I love you,” he murmured to the press of warm, chapped lips.
Those three little words always undid her. Heart soaring, stomach swooping, they always left her dizzy and unbalanced.
Maki cupped his cheeks as she nibbled on his lips, meshing their mouths together until it quietened the raging of her thoughts. “I love you,” she returned, much softer, the words nearly inaudible, mere impressions on his lips. It was safer this way.
Yuuta deserved to be loved in every way, but Maki preferred to do it quietly, where no one could see, lest the world doomed her for it.
She rose on her tiptoes, leaning into him, allowing the brief contact to deepen and lengthen, until her mind was as silent as the night.
“My love,” he sighed longingly, cradling her head, stealing more breaths from the seams of her lips. “My sweet darling.”
Maki’s knees were going weak. Those words would have sounded too cheesy, too cliche, from anyone else. From Yuuta’s lips, they tasted like salvation. In Yuuta’s velvety voice, they were liquid warmth poured down her veins.
His love, his sweet darling. Someone to be cherished. Yuuta knew the places Maki ached, knew how to mend the cracks others left. Yuuta took her, so twisted out of shape, and he put her back together just right so that for a while, Maki could believe all was right with the world again.
They returned at five, fingers numb with the cold, but mouths warm and kiss-bruised. When Maki slipped into the rumbled bed with Yuuta, her earlier panic was absent. All was right again.
Maki had a suspicion everything would always work itself out as long as he was there by her side. If anything, just the sheer force of his optimistic determination was enough. Yuuta once told her she was like the sun in the winter sky, eclipsing the cold. But she thought now that he was wrong.
Maki was the frosted sky, and Yuuta was the sun itself; warmth reaching out to her with tentative fingers, chasing her across the galaxy. He was the center, gravity. It all led back to him.
She had an epiphany of finding the words; taking all those vast, nebulous feelings and shaping them into thoughts, whispering them into his skin. Maki turned, curling into him, and basked in his woodsy, masculine scent. “Do you ever not find the words?”
Yuuta’s fingers stroked her hair. “I try,” he said. “You make it hard sometimes, but I try.”
“I want to try too,” she breathed, neck craning to watch him.
The open adoration on his face was unraveling. Whatever she did to deserve such a beautiful, devoted expression, Maki could never guess.
“Tell me,” he murmured, the backs of his fingers sweeping down her scarred cheeks.
Maki swallowed tremulously. “I always had one purpose,” she said, peering into his eyes. Yuuta this close was a bottomless will of emotions. Maki wondered about drowning, and how much more inviting it was than burning. “But vengeance is lonely, Yuuta.”
“You were so brave.” Lips pressed to her forehead, fluttered over her eyelashes. “You never settle, I admire that about you.”
Maki swallowed. “You make me want to. Settle, I mean.”
His lips paused, and he leaned back to survey her. “Yeah?”
It was hard to say. Almost impossible. Maki pushed it out regardless. “Yeah. I wasn’t looking, but I found what I needed. I found you.”
Yuuta smiled, and it was radiant. He pressed her open palm to his chest where his heart beat a broken cacophony. “Can I say something completely sappy?”
“You always do,” she chuckled weakly. “Tell me.”
Yuuta’s head bowed against hers. “You’re more than a need,” he husked. “You’re a want, a choice, one I would make over and over forever if you’d let me.”
Her breath caught at the open sincerity in his words. “Scary isn’t it?” His voice quietened, blended with the dawn. “To want someone like that. It doesn’t scare me. I feel you in my bones, I was always meant to find my way to you.”
What little words she thought she could muster dissolved. Maki wasn’t like Yuuta, she didn’t do feelings as well as him. But she felt them just as deeply, and right then, she was certain she would never recover from the violent wash of emotions cascading over her.
Maki didn’t stand a chance.
She kissed him, trying to communicate through touch where words failed her. Yuuta was not a choice, she wanted to tell him. Yuuta was an inevitability. A planetary force and she was caught in its orbit.
But that was okay. There was nowhere else she’d rather be.