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December
Fukunaga Mitsuka doesn’t believe in soulmates. She’s known plenty of people who insisted upon their being out there somewhere - nerdy Uchida Minami in her chemistry class who she’d only pretended not to like, the first boy she had kissed - but she won’t be convinced that there’s a person alive who was born to be loved by her.
It’s ridiculous. Preposterous. No one deserves that kind of love. Not even Minami, whose eyes were so sweet behind wire-rimmed glasses, whom Mitsuka’s friends had hated so much because she was dumpy and awkward and naive - not even Minami, who tried so hard, was so pure, deserved that. People aren’t good. People don’t deserve good things. Mitsuka’s mother hadn’t, and she’d gotten the misery she deserved. Her friends, perpetually unfulfilled, had gotten the misery they deserved. Mitsuka, who let herself be hollowed out because she is nothing without others’ approval - she got the misery she deserved.
But, as it does, life or whatever makes it go around simply does not care what Fukunaga Mitsuka believes in.
Thus: Fukunaga Mitsuka meets her soulmate at eight-thirteen on a Monday in December, and when she sees him for the first time he is shoving an entire grilled cheese in his mouth at once and if that is not grounds for love at first sight, she has no idea what is.
(It’s not, though - love at first sight. Merely interest. Love is a corporate scam. Attraction is the only truth and it’s a shoddy one.)
Yuuta had insisted on walking her to class even though she knows how to get there herself and she loves the way he’d offered his arm to her for security, even though she hadn’t taken it. (He’s Maki’s. Even if she wanted him, she’d have to be stupid to get in Maki’s way.) But he still hangs close to her, and when they cross paths with a boy wearing a cowl around his neck and shoving a grilled cheese down his throat, Yuuta stops, waves his hand - “Toge-kun!”
The boy looks up.
Oh, Mitsuka thinks, scanning his face - tawny hair, spiral tattoos on either side of his mouth, bemused violet eyes - and deciding within about a millisecond that she likes what she sees. Yuuta had shown her this boy’s picture back when they’d been staying at the Miyagi Grand Hotel together, but there’s something about him that’s different in person. His lashes are long, his frame is lean, and he looks shy as a deer as he tears his eyes from Yuuta’s to meet hers.
The boy - Inumaki, Mitsuka remembers - can’t talk. Not normally, at least. But he looks her in the eyes and gives a little sideways tilt of his head, and some traitorous bundle of nerves commands the muscles in her lips to smile.
Hi, he’s saying.
Mitsuka doesn’t like to smile. It gives away too much. But she can’t seem not to, and in the spirit of mutuality, she smiles with her eyes and mouths “hi, Toge-kun.”
Toge looks dumbstruck.
Mitsuka looks so conflicted that she might combust.
Yuuta looks off into the distance, having forgotten where he is and whom he’s introducing when the question of why Maki is late this morning entered his mind.
Mitsuka straightens the short pleated skirt of her old high school uniform, hoping he doesn’t think it’s odd that she doesn’t have a Tech uniform because no one has time to worry about getting her one right now.
Toge clears his throat, then coughs into his hand.
Yuuta scans the area beyond the clearing in front of the classroom for any sign of Maki.
Neither of them comes any closer.
“Did you like the grilled cheese?” Mitsuka asks.
Toge nods his head.
“It looked good,” Mitsuka replies, because not a single neuron in her brain is firing correctly, and she’s found herself without a single ounce of the resolve it takes to make a good first impression.
Girls who go places don’t slip up. Girls who go places don’t eat or even admire grilled cheese. Girls who go places are cool, poised, and ever-faultless.
But Inumaki Toge looks at her with his big doe eyes and his curious head tilt and suddenly she wonders if that grilled cheese had had mayonnaise on it like the ones her friend Tomo’s mother had made for them when she came over before her own mother had found out and ordered her not to eat them anymore.
“I bet it was good,” she tells him.
Inumaki Toge smiles.
Girls who go places are not sentimental, but Fukunaga Mitsuka doesn’t feel like going anywhere, and Inumaki Toge has a beautiful smile.
**
Maki had said that she would help Mitsuka unpack, a gesture so un-Maki-like (she knows this even after two days of acquaintance) that it has to have been Yuuta’s idea. Still, Mitsuka will take whatever excuse she can not to be alone with her thoughts, and it’s sort of comforting, even though Maki is still a stranger, to know that she’ll be back with another box each time she leaves.
“You and Toge,” she says, after one run, while Mitsuka is tacking up a poster from FIYAH’s last tour. (She had had to pay Uchida Minami, whose reputation could afford to take the hit of loving the most basic boy band in human history, to bring it back for her from their Osaka concert.)
Mitsuka, who’s barely holding it together as it is with the embarrassment of being caught decorating her room with boy band merchandise hanging over her, starts at Maki’s voice. “Me and who?”
“Toge. Inumaki? Onigiri boy?”
“I know who Inumaki is,” Mitsuka stammers, flushing.
“Then why’d you ask me who he was?”
“Because I didn’t know his first name,” she fibs. “Obviously.”
“You two were making eyes at each other all through homeroom,” Maki tells her. “What was that about?”
“We weren’t making eyes at each other,” Mitsuka protests weakly.
“Sorry, would you prefer ‘staring’?”
“I saw him swallowing a grilled cheese whole this morning,” she says, deflecting. “Does he always do that?”
“Fukunaga,” Maki says shortly, “can you just admit you’re into him already?”
“I barely know him,” Mitsuka counters, finally regaining her composure. “How could I be into him?”
“Plenty of people have thought more of less.” Maki shrugs. “Look. All I’m saying is that Inumaki is a good guy and he doesn’t exactly get girls-”
“And?”
“Don’t play with him, Fukunaga.”
No honorific. It sort of smarts.
“I won’t,” Mitsuka replies. “Because I’m not into him.”
“Right.” Maki shakes her head. “Well. I’m gonna go, now that we’ve got all of your stuff in here.”
“Right. Thanks.” Mitsuka figures she owes Maki that much. “But I’m not into Inumaki-san. Seriously.”
Maki turns without even a backwards glance.
Ouch.
**
March
Mornings have always been a slog: dragging herself out of bed, dead-eyed, to face another day of a life she never asked for; taking too long to apply makeup that it’ll make it seem like she isn’t wearing any, shoving down the pangs of hunger-
Mornings aren’t like that anymore.
There’s no rule saying that they must, but the first and second-years always end up in the common room before classes, too morose to joke and too scared of breaking apart again to separate even to eat. They all eat what they make for themselves, separately, but always at the table or in the same cluster on the couches and armchairs in front of the television; sometimes the conversation is lively and sometimes it’s not, but when it is, it feels like it’s meant to cover something up. Mitsuka would be bothered by the tension no one wants to acknowledge if she weren’t so grateful to have somewhere to go.
Besides, there’s something about this group that she knows she can’t ever comprehend.
This life - whatever life they build - is always going to be After Shibuya. Mitsuka’s is After Sendai, After School, After Sorcery. After her mother, after the friends who’d forced her to bury her heart so deeply she’d almost forgotten she had it. But Shibuya is nothing to her but a train station, and to these people who let her into their process of remembering and mourning and moving past events that she did not experience, it is everything.
To Maki, it’s a map of scars drawn across her arms and face and torso. To Nobara it is a reminder that she’s lucky just to be here, to be picking at a bowl of rice, half-asleep, tired of pretending to be excited about another day of learning how she might really die next time. To Yuuji it’s the insurmountable guilt of unforgivable mistakes and to Megumi it’s the guilt of survival; to Yuuta, it’s his responsibility, something he should have been able to stop. To Toge it’s a phantom arm, regrown but uncomfortable in place of the one he was born with. And to Mitsuka, it is nothing.
She does not belong.
And yet she does, in a way that she’s never belonged anywhere else.
Yuuta has a sort of smile that’s just for her.
Nobara lets her paint her nails.
Maki pulls out the chair next to hers when they gather at the dining table and gives Mitsuka a look that tells her she had better take it.
And Toge…
Well. She doesn’t have the faintest idea of what he thinks, but he lets her in, too, and even though her heart pangs inexplicably when she thinks about the fact that he probably thinks little of her, that is enough.
For now.
At least, that’s what she tells herself.
**
Inumaki Toge can’t say it in words, but he’s fascinated, transfixed - this innocent girl, untouched by the ravages of sorcery, who is so afraid to show her classmates her boundless enthusiasm, her overflowing heart. Yuuta had said she loved Korean boy bands and Final Fantasy and she’d brought a manga collection and heaps of emotional baggage with her to Jujutsu High, but she never admits it. It only comes out in snatches.
She dances in front of the girls’ bathroom mirror, brushing her teeth, and Maki and Nobara ignore her for fear that they’ll make her stop. When Yuuji and Toge play each other at Mario Kart, she wedges her way between them and snatches the win. (He has never thought a woman more worthy of his undying devotion than he did when Mitsuka had accidentally thrown her remote across the room in her excitement at having beaten them.) She likes to slip pop culture references she doesn’t expect anyone to understand (Toge does - always does) into conversations, texts more memes than words. Once, she expresses her grief at having lost the round of Mario Kart that followed her miraculous win with the most mournful pterodactyl noises she’s capable of producing. But usually, she hides, keeps her exterior hardened. Nobody says it, but no one believes her. No one believes that she’s not doing it on purpose. They all know she knows they know. And for that, she is a paradox.
Toge is not a thinker. He’d rather not, really. The less he has to put his brain to the work of philosophizing, the better-off he thinks he is. But Fukunaga Mitsuka is the kind of puzzle he doesn’t mind trying to take apart.
She’s hardened, but she is kind: he knows because even when she won’t say it, the way that she looks at him when he touches his arm where it should be a stump shows him that she is. She cares for her class, even though their acquaintance is brand-new, and she likes their company. She’s beautiful: that, Toge has always known, green-eyed and button-nosed with a small face and hair such a dark blue that it’s almost black, small-framed enough that he thinks his arms would swallow her if he ever got to hold her. And beneath her facade is a girl who wishes she didn’t feel so embarrassed every time she admits to having beaten Toge’s personal bests at every video game he plays.
Toge might just be deprived of the company of women who aren’t Maki and unused to the idea of romance, but he thinks she is perfect. And he thinks that if he ever tried to tell her that, she would run, or laugh, or think he was joking.
Still, she is a thing he would much rather think about than Shibuya, and he thinks that she must’ve been sent here for the express purpose of setting their broken world back in place. And when Maki pulls out a seat for her, Toge - invariably - takes the one beside it.
**
May
She shouldn’t.
Fukunaga Hisae has many thoughts, and she’d passed them on to Mitsuka as best she could. Some (the pricelessness of Botox) hadn’t taken; others had. One of those: “never eat at night.”
Mitsuka is perfectly used to going to bed hungry. She never breaks that rule. “Quickest way to gain weight,” her mother had told her - the quickest way to deny herself the security of a wealthy man’s affections, the only thing Hisae had ever wanted her daughter to chase. But tonight, she can’t do it - can’t be the daughter her wretched mother had wanted, had trained her to be.
She’s hungry. After a day of training, the effort of refusing to listen to that voice is too great.
The hallway between her dormitory and the common kitchen is dark, but she starts to make out a faint light in the kitchen when she approaches, and she almost turns back. It’s one thing to eat at night alone in the kitchen, and another to do it in front of somebody who - like her mother, like her old diet-obsessed friends - might censure her for feeding her body when it told her to. But her stomach growls; she presses on, oversized t-shirt (stolen from her last boyfriend, whom she wishes she could forget, but who had given her excellent shirts) swinging against her thighs.
The light over the stove is on. She freezes.
Toge starts at the sound of her approach. He turns.
Mitsuka gapes. Something crackles on the stove, like butter browning on bread.
(She peaks. It is bread. A sandwich. A grilled cheese - it has to be.)
Toge wears only a t-shirt and a pair of boxer briefs. His thighs are lean, muscled but not bulky. She does not stare.
(Mitsuka wears only a shirt which fits like a dress. He does not stare.)
Mitsuka turns to leave; Toge crosses the kitchen, touches her shoulder. Her eyes widen and her cheeks flush and she wishes that this were not the reason she was seeing Inumaki Toge in his underwear.
He jerks his head towards the stove and, frozen, Mitsuka mindlessly follows. He lifts two slices of bread from the bag on the counter, a piece of cheese, gives her a questioning look - “konbu?”
And it dawns on her - he is inviting her, a girl whose name he can’t even say aloud, to share in the most sacred ritual he knows: of grilled cheese at three in the morning, of secret-sharing, of living a life that a seventeen-year-old should and not the one that he was forced into. She is breaking every rule she’s ever been taught, but her smile widens until it spans her whole face.
“Grilled cheese sounds good.”
She doesn’t really resist when Toge cuts both sandwiches down the middle (“diagonal,” Mitsuka requests, and he does, even though he cuts his straight) and sets them on the same plate, gesturing for her to follow. She follows him down the hall to his dormitory.
She should resist, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even want to. A boy has never invited her into his bedroom for such a noble reason before.
“Thanks for the food,” she says, once they’ve sat down at the edge of Toge’s bed, and he nods. This time, he doesn’t shove the whole thing into his mouth at once - nowhere close. He takes a single bite of his sandwich, chews contemplatively, swallows, then turns to see if Mitsuka has taken hers. She hasn’t. He nudges her so gently that she thinks she might cry, and she does what he silently asks.
Good, her mind and her whole body cry, bread crackling when she bites through its golden outside, cheese - probably not the good kind that her mother had always lamented her love for - perfectly melted and warm against her tongue. It’s been so long since she tasted anything so rich, or enjoyed it without any shame. She chews as slowly as she can.
Toge’s knee touches hers. She doesn’t push it away.
“It’s so good,” she murmurs, in a rare moment of total honesty, and she cannot decide whether she’s talking about the sandwich or the boy whose nervous hands had buttered the bread and cut it in two and who had brought her into the most private place he has to let her be free for a little while.
“Shake,” Toge murmurs, taking a bite of his own.
They eat in silence from the same plate.
Mitsuka, emboldened, so different now that her body is nourished like it hasn’t been in ages, touches Toge’s arm. “Thank you,” she says, afraid to break the quiet.
She could kiss him. It terrifies her, how easily she could lean in and kiss him, grilled cheese on his lips. Mitsuka had pushed away the boys who’d wanted that from her before but it would be so easy, now, to kiss this boy, who had fed her when her own mother never would, whom she still barely knows, and to explore him, and perhaps - if she is capable of such a thing - to fall for him.
“Tell me about yourself,” she says instead.
He looks up at her in shock and she wonders if he, too, is surprised when someone wants to know him. So few people ever have.
“Toge-kun,” she says, laying her hand on his bare thigh, her heart thudding when his cheeks pink and he looks down at her hand like he’s never seen one before. She doesn’t care if she’s overstepping but, in his eyes, she’s not - what a wonderful thing, knowing that her wanting is wanted.
“Sh-shake,” he stammers.
“Text it to me,” she says, again. “I feel like I barely know you.”
**
He does as she asks. He types frantically - tells her about his parents, long dead. He tells her about grandparents who’d begged the people in power to give him a place at this school, just to get him out. He tells her how he’d cursed his cousin when he was six and nearly killed her, how he’d had to pretend he couldn’t speak or hear and attend a school for the deaf before he’d come here. He tells her about Shibuya, about his friends. Mitsuka has never read anything faster than she reads his messages.
She has never told anyone how her mother used to starve her and slather her in sunscreen, never let her in the sun or an ice cream store. Some know her father left for the conbini one night and never returned, but they all know because she had made a joke of it, and Toge knows now that she still feels as if she failed because he had not stayed. She tells him how much she’d had to hide and how much she regrets the way her friends had been, and about Minami, who she wishes she had been kinder to.
He listens.
He proofreads a message to Minami that she’d never thought she’d be able to send.
He touches her thigh, too. It’s all they’ll risk.
Fukunaga Mitsuka doesn’t believe in love, the way they show it in movies made for those who need to make themselves believe that life is more than it is. She doesn’t think she ever will. But she does believe in empty plates and grilled cheese crumbs and thumbs wiping away tears, and shaky laughter, and exchanging Final Fantasy stats.
Fukunaga Mitsuka doesn’t believe in love, but she does believe in Inumaki Toge.
**
July
It is the first weekend of summer break, and everyone is at a waterpark, trying to forget that they’ll never be teenagers on vacation again, but Mitsuka is not.
“I can’t swim,” she tells them all when they ask why she’s not going. Megumi, whose Zenin funds paid for the tickets, and who she’s never really considered a close friend, points out that cost is no object - it’s probably the nicest thing he’s ever said to her. But she shakes her head.
“Going and watching you all on the waterslides when I can’t swim would just bum me out,” she says - brighter, cheerier than she could’ve conceived of being even a few months ago. Never would Mitsuka-from-Sendai have thought she’d be the type to say something like ‘bum me out’ and she’s not upset that she can now. But it’s still a lie. “So I’ll just hang back.”
Really, she can swim fine, and she’d love to join them. She’s never had friends who would want to do something so innocently enjoyable before.
But Toge can’t.
They’re not anything more than close friends, though it’s obvious to both of them that they both want to be. But they’re still together as much as they can be, and they take notice of little things about the other that their friends don’t - like that Toge, who’s down with the flu (who gets the flu in the middle of summer, anyway?), is going to hate hanging around the dorms while everyone else has their fun.
So they all go off in their board shorts and bright cover-ups, carrying towels and smelling of sunscreen, but Mitsuka, ever-faithful, grabs a stack of manga from the pile next to her bed (it grows every time someone has an occasion to give her a gift now that everyone knows how much she likes it) and plops herself down in a folding chair next to Toge’s bed.
The lights are dim, because apparently Toge has what he insists is a migraine (like most boys Mitsuka has known, he’s kind of a baby) and light hurts his eyes. It’s way too hot in this room for someone with a fever and Megumi, whose favorite coping mechanism is appointing himself class monitor and nitpicking everyone in his path, won’t turn on the air conditioner without a faculty member’s permission. And Toge, tossing and turning over the six blankets Maki had thrown over him earlier (“you gotta sweat out a fever,” she’d insisted, and she probably has no idea what she’s talking about), seems abjectly miserable.
He’s asleep, though, so at least for now Mitsuka isn’t in charge of making sure he gets down the hall to the boys’ bathroom in time if he thinks he’s going to throw up again. All she needs to do is keep supplies handy: flu meds, tissues, a wastebasket she’d picked up because she couldn’t find a bucket, a glass of ice water that sweats in the heat.
It’s not like it’s a bad gig, anyway. She’s been meaning to catch up on her surplus stack of manga, and maybe if Toge wakes up with his headache gone he’ll be in the mood for a gaming session. Maybe he’ll be up for another kind of session. Mitsuka is pretty sure it’s wrong to want to make out with someone who could very easily and probably will infect her, but she doesn’t really care.
She’ll do that a lot, joke about the way he makes her sweat under the collar because she doesn’t want to try to explain that what really makes him special is the tenderness she feels for him - she, who’s never had a reason to feel tender towards anyone before. She wants to kiss him until both of them run out of air in their lungs, yes, but sometimes, when she catches him looking off sadly into the distance, she longs to cradle his head to her chest and stroke his hair like she’d always wanted her mother to when she was a child. Sometimes she wishes their minds were linked so her voice - and she’d never thought about it before him, what a gift a voice is - could tell the world what his couldn’t. Sometimes she thinks awful, awful thoughts of shared homes and quick, affectionate kisses before work and other things her mother had been abundantly clear were far out of reach.
He makes her feel so warm - makes her want to be gentle. No one has ever made her want to be gentle before.
(He pretends not to wake when her lips, feather-light, press his forehead.)
**
“Umeboshi.”
Mitsuka looks up at the rare sound of Toge’s voice and tilts her head curiously. “You want pickled plum?”
His cheeks flush, and he shakes his head, reaching for her hand. Maybe it’s the fever talking, but the look in his eyes is unmistakably fond as he takes her hand and shapes her fingers so they point at the center of her chest.
“Umeboshi,” he repeats.
“Me?” Mitsuka asks. “Umeboshi is me?”
Toge nods, lighting up.
“You gave me an ingredient,” Mitsuka realizes, and her face lights up, too. “That’s…that’s so sweet.”
“Ume-chan?”
He’s asking, she realizes - asking if it’s all right that he’d chosen an ingredient to mean her name, something she’s never seen him do for anyone, if it’s all right that he’d shortened it and made it sweeter and softer and more intimate even than that.
“Yeah,” she murmurs, heart fluttering. She hadn’t known that hearts could do that. “Ume-chan is good.”
**
September
Mitsuka knows that everybody knows she only volunteered for the snack run her classmates had requested because Toge had already offered, but she doesn’t care. She’s not used to things moving slowly and even though it’s better than being maybe-something with a boy who wants more than she does and won’t let her forget it, it’s not her favorite. It’s been almost a year. That’s too long. She’ll take any excuse to get alone with him, even if she thinks it’ll come to nothing.
But he’s not exactly easy to find when he disappears into the supermarket aisles, and finding him puts a severe damper on the romance of the whole thing.
Chips, he’d last texted her. But he wasn’t in the chips aisle when she went to find him, so that must’ve been old. No luck in the surrounding aisles, either. Where r u?????, she texts him, but he doesn’t reply. Check ur phone, she writes a few seconds later. Toge????
(He’s never Inumaki anymore. Why would he be?)
Nothing.
Mitsuka’s lips purse. She’s gotten strong enough not to mind a case of Ramune in her arms, but it’s starting to drive her crazy, and she’s sick of carting it around.
Meet me in soda or I’m gonna start doing the mating call, she tells him.
It is a legitimate threat. They’d watched some documentary about whales a while back, the result of some late-night hangout and the strange things channels air when they’re not likely to be watched. They’d tried to be quiet as they practically fell off the couch laughing, trying to imitate the whales’ mating calls without waking their classmates. (It had woken Megumi anyway.) She knows he’ll know she’s serious.
Still nothing.
“I hate you,” Mitsuka mutters, already planning to pay reparations to the part of her that still cares what people think of her even in a supermarket at eight in the evening, then throws back her head and lets out the best and most passionate imitation of the mating call of the humpback whale of which she is capable.
The lady buying celery in the vegetable section along the back wall of the soda aisle gives her a very distasteful look. Her face flushes crimson. There is still no sign of Toge.
I hate my life, she thinks.
She bellows, once more, like a lonely humpback separated by thousands of miles from companionship, mournfully bereft, yet hopeful-
“Shake?”
Toge shuffles into the aisle, clutching the handle of a basket of chips.
“Check your damn phone,” Mitsuka snaps, turning away so he won’t see her blushing and trying not to laugh all at once. But Toge is not even slightly deterred.
He tips his head back and lets out a call as poignant as Mitsuka’s own.
“Very seductive. I’d hit that,” she tells him. “If I were a whale.”
Or if he were a human. There’s no need to get into that.
For now, thoroughly vindicated, she takes Toge’s hand and yanks him to the cash register before she can lose him again.
**
“You know, I’m sure he feels the same way.”
Mitsuka swallows hard, arms wrapped around her knees. “I know he does.”
“Then why haven’t you said anything?”
There’s no accusation in Yuuta’s voice, only concern - as if it hurts him to know that two people he loves love each other and won’t do anything about it. Knowing Yuuta, it probably does, and Mitsuka loves him for it, but…
He wouldn’t get it.
He wouldn’t get how it is to have been told, for seventeen years and without a break, that love demands perfection, and never lasts - that it’s an illusion that has to be maintained until it falls apart, that there will always be another man to cast a spell over when it does. And Mitsuka knows that isn’t true now. But she can’t shake the feeling that what she might have with Toge is too good to be true.
“I don’t know,” she says wearily.
“You should, Mitsu-chan.” Yuuta puts his arm around her shoulders - Maki can’t object anymore, not when she loves to hold Mitsuka (they all do) as much as he does. “You guys deserve each other.”
No one deserves to have to put up with me, she doesn’t reply.
“Maybe,” she concedes.
**
December
“Isn’t it weird that we’ve known each other for a year now?”
“Okaka.”
No. Not an ounce of hesitation. He’s holding her hand - it’s one of the things they’re allowed to do for each other without questioning what they are - and something warm pools in Mitsuka’s belly.
“I dunno,” Mitsuka replies. “I guess…nothing’s permanent in my life. My friends, classes and stuff. My mom’s boyfriends.” She laughs, because it’s better to laugh than to cry, she supposes. “So a year with one person kinda feels like a long time.”
He’s looking at her. She’s not looking at him, but there’s no doubt in her mind that he’s looking at her.
You just see right through me, she thinks, her whole body a little trembly, when she looks up to find his violet doe’s eyes trained on her. Don’t you?
“Umeboshi,” he murmurs, and it doesn’t seem like he’s saying a name - because that is her name, Umeboshi, Ume-chan, but this way it sounds like a confession, and like all of the things Mitsuka is afraid of, and this is not how she had imagined all of this going, sitting on her bed, talking about her mother, of all things.
“Toge-kun,” she tells him, turning her body so that if he wanted to reach for her - how she hopes he’ll reach for her - he could. “I don’t want you to go away, too.”
“Mitsu,” he murmurs, voice cracking a little. “Mitsuka…”
He has never said her name like that before.
“You already saw all the bad parts of me,” she goes on, heart pounding. “But you’re still around, so I guess I get to keep you. My mom said that wouldn’t happen.”
Mitsuka doesn’t even know what she’s doing when she takes Toge’s hand and opens his clenched fingers. But he stares, transfixed, and she can hear his breath catch when she brings her lips to the center of his palm.
Please, she thinks, like a prayer, pressing that hand to her cheek after she’s done, let these hands want to do what mine want to do to him.
“M-Mitsuka,” he stammers, “I-”
“Shh,” she murmurs, letting his hand fall from her cheek, “don’t strain your voice-”
“I…”
“Toge-”
“Ume-chan,” he cuts her off, desperate, straining to rein in his technique because he has to say these words out loud - “can…can I k-kiss you?”
**
She’s so small.
Everything Toge touches feels swallowed by his hands as he kisses her - her face, her waist that’s small enough to wrap his hands around. (It’s too small and he wishes that she’d believe that, but she is no less beautiful for it, no less a revelation beneath his fingers.) She’s trembling, just a little, but she’d said that she wanted this; he’s probably shaking, too. She’s scared. He can feel that. He’ll stop the moment she tells him so.
But she doesn’t, and the way that she is kissing him - the way that her hand is tangled in his hair and the other is at his shoulder, clutching him - tells him that she wants nothing less than to stop, scared or not.
“I think I’m in love with you,” she admits, breathless, when she breaks away, and then, “this wasn’t supposed to happen,” and Toge is dumbfounded because he doesn’t think anything has ever been so right.
“Umeboshi,” he murmurs - a confession, just like it sort of always has been. It means Mitsuka but it’s never really only meant her name. Umeboshi is a catchall by now, the thing to say when he knows nothing except that he loves Fukunaga Mitsuka.
Maybe he doesn’t know what love is, but if it isn’t this, he doesn’t want to know the right answer.
In ten minutes, it’ll be December 20th - a year and a day. Mitsuka settles herself in his lap and he’s amazed at how easily she does it.
“Does that mean you’ll stay?” she asks, wrapping her arms around him, resting her head against his heartbeat. They could kiss this way but it’s the furthest thing from her mind, and he clutches her small body to his and thinks it must be the furthest thing from his, too. He kisses her head, lets out a dim refrain of the mating call of the humpback whale against her hair.
He couldn’t leave her if he tried.