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Kanto’s day had not been the best.
He didn’t anger easily. He didn’t really like being angry in the first place. But when he got angry, he got angry .
The last thing he wanted was to have to deal with any more shit from his boss or his idiotic co-workers, but he had to push through because he truly liked his job, he just wished he could do it on his own, do it independently. It just wasn’t something he could swing just yet, unfortunately.
The thing was that there was a certain way things had to be done for them to operate at his job, and no one but him had the brainpower to grasp that, apparently.
His colleagues claim to have had an education in the field of botany, but they were fools when it came to putting it into practice. Constantly, they wondered why it was that certain plant species didn’t thrive, why they didn’t do as well as they had hoped for as long as they had hoped. But Kanto knew that it was because they weren’t really looking — they were eating shit. That’s what they were doing.
It was funny how one of the job requirements for his position and higher-ups’ positions was to have a basic understanding of plant life, processes, traits, scientific principles, and environmental concerns, and the dumbasses could barely discern what kind of weather a white jade bush shriveled up in.
Kanto had decided that day that enough was enough, so he waltzed up to his boss’ office and sat down for a chat with him. He figured he would sit down, explain his issues, and hope for a resolution. Just a civil conversation, in truth.
Except… It wasn't really as much of a conversation as it was a confrontation.
He ended up rambling, then ranting, then shouting when his boss decided he would try to defend all of his and his team’s oversights that killed many a plant in their nursery from the very moment Kanto was hired.
It took his boss all of ten seconds after Kanto finished his rampage to tell him to pack his things and fired him.
Maybe he was better off keeping his mouth shut because now he was out of a job and finding one in botany in the area where he lived was going to be a pain in the ass.
So as soon as he was booted from his workplace, he did just that, getting into his car and not looking back, not even when he made it to some random bar in the middle of Bumblefuck Nowhere. He just needed a break. He was exhausted and he was almost certain that he would have kicked someone’s ass had he not up and left when he was told to.
And alcohol seemed to be the answer to all his woes that evening.
So there he was, sitting at a bar working on his fifth or sixth drink within thirty minutes, trying to take the edge off his absolutely horrible day.
It seemed to be working because his faculties were no longer as sharp as they once were and he was almost sure that the barkeep had not been working with his twin when he first arrived because Kanto was seeing two of him. That couldn’t have been normal.
He made a gesture at the twins, indicating that he wanted another of whatever he was drinking. At this point, what he was drinking was a bit lost on him. He had started with beer, then he moved on to shots of whatever the fuck, so he figured that the barkeep(s) would provide him with those.
Once given another beautiful glass of something on the rocks, Kanto slammed it back, enjoying the burn that followed the liquid down his throat.
He let the feeling settle, and for the first time since he arrived at the bar, he looked to his side to find a most stunning sight. There was a woman beside him, one who looked just as — if not more — pissed off than he had been. The way she was scowling at her drink was what gave it away, but as he observed her more, he noticed how tight her lips were, how her knuckles were a bit red from how firmly she was gripping her glass.
He was mesmerized by the way she looked, even as pissed off as he assumed she was. His eyes followed her glass as she brought it to her lips to swallow what was left of her drink and immediately call for another.
Spirits, was she pissed off. And she had a pretty reasonable explanation to be if she did say so herself.
For months, she had been waiting on approval for her Chow Gar dojo expansion, and for months, she had to keep bugging the people in charge about looking into it. Students were beginning to crowd whenever a class was scheduled and having only one room wasn’t going to work for her; she and her students needed more space. So she poked these people and poked them to no avail until she decided that day to trot into their office and break out all hell.
They gave her all kinds of excuses as to why her approval request had not been processed and she called them out on their bluff, having told them that they had to get off their sorry asses and do their damn job for once in their life. And she stormed out, but not before spewing a very distinctive oversupply of expletives at them while violently waving her collapsable cane at anyone who came too close.
In retrospect… it was probably not the best call she had ever made, but she felt like it had to be done.
Still after all of that, however, she was livid , so she decided she would take a walk. A long walk. A long walk to a place that wasn’t the damn approval office because she needed the fresh air.
So there Toph sat, in the middle of an unknown bar she had come across after almost busting her ass on a hole in the sidewalk, earbuds blasting angry-sounding music from one of her angry-sounding playlists, as she drank her sanhuajiu and tried to… ease up a bit.
And… it wasn't working.
The fact that Toph could feel her neck prickling with awareness wasn’t helping matters much, either, and she tried hard to ignore it only because she really didn’t feel much like dealing with the person staring at her a few feet away.
After a beat or two or three, she shifted slightly in her barstool before slamming down the glass she had just emptied and hissing, “Can I help you?”
The man sitting beside her was notably startled and had she not been quite as pissed off — or inebriated — as she was, she might have laughed at his reaction. He very well almost busted his ass off of the stool he was sitting on what with the grunting and gasping he was doing. “I—I’m sorry. You’re just—”
“Gorgeous? Ravishing?” she asked, her voice slurring only slightly. Then, she turned to face him, her sunglasses proudly perched on the bridge of her nose. “Look, Hotshot, I’m not really in the mood to be flirted with right now, and I am in much less of a mood to deal with someone who probably — no, definitely — just wants to get into my pants, so I advise that you quit while you’re ahead, capiche?”
He snorted. “Bold of you to assume I was going to do either of those things.”
Despite herself and her horrible attitude, Toph’s lips twitched upward. “What are you drinking?”
“Good question, honestly. I don’t… really know. But it’s good, I do know that much,” he replied. She could hear the smile in his voice when he asked, “Why? You want to buy me another?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, I was only wondering. Though, I am curious as to when you’re going to offer to buy me one.”
This must have caught him by surprise as he leaned back on his stool and almost fell back again in the process. It took him a few seconds to regain his balance upon where he sat to say, “You want me to buy you a drink when I don’t even know your name. Sounds a bit unfair to me, don’t you think?”
“That can be easily remedied,” she replied, cocking her head to the side and nudging at her sunglasses with her knuckle. “But that would ruin the mystery, wouldn’t it?”
He just let out a surprised chuckle. “Yeah, I suppose it would.”
“I take my sanhuajiu straight-up, by the way. I don’t need ice watering my alcohol down—” Toph said, hearing the sound of the ice in the glass in front of him shift as it melted — “unlike some people.”
“Hey, hey — alcohol is alcohol no matter how you dice it.”
“Sure.”
Toph was surprised at herself for instantly cooling off as she conversed and, admittedly, flirted with this stranger, considering how whenever she was in a shit mood, she wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything. She would much rather be alone. But there was something about this guy that had her questioning her very actions. Or maybe it was the alcohol and she just wasn’t thinking straight.
She didn’t know, but she sure was enjoying herself, so much so that the two of them — she and the nameless man — spent hours sitting next to each other at the bar, stools getting close and closer with every passing second. Their touches lingered more and more as they spoke, and Toph was hanging onto his every word.
Again, she wondered whether it was the alcohol making her act a fool and whether she would remember any of it in the morning.
She sure hoped she did.
Something loud woke him up and he could not have been more dismayed. His head was pounding painfully and it took everything he had to force himself to stand and throw up into a potted plant he located in the corner of the room.
… the room that wasn’t his.
Where was he?
Last he remembered, he was at a bar somewhere far off, and now he was… he didn’t know where he was. All he knew was that he was somewhere unfamiliar.
Kanto sluggishly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned back against the side of the bed he had just all but fallen out of. His hand then went to his head as the headache was not taking any mercy on him and the slight bout of vertigo he was feeling wasn’t helping matters much, either. He shut his eyes in an attempt to ease his symptoms.
Not even seconds later, there was a loud snore above him and he jumped, not having realized that there was anyone with him until that very moment. His eyes widened and he tried hard to recall what the hell he had done that could have landed him with an absolute stranger.
A pretty stranger, he regarded as he examined her features despite her unconscious state, but a stranger nevertheless.
Spirits, this was just making his hangover worse.
Abruptly, he pulled himself to his feet using the support of the bed and began to gently poke at the woman’s shoulder, then her bicep, then her cheek. She finally awoke with a startled snort when he decided to repeatedly poke at her ribs.
“Hi there, Stranger,” he said pathetically.
His identity, evidently, was not at the forefront of her mind because the first thing she said, after taking a moment to presumably try to remember where she was or what happened, was, “Did we…?”
“I don't— did we?” It was then that Kanto noticed that he was half-naked, only his pants and undergarments on. Some degree of relief washed over him.
“No,” the woman shook her head, patting her body to find only her top missing. Kanto tried to not stare at her covered chest or bare shoulders as she spoke again, “No, right?”
He shook his head to himself before answering, “No… but also, who are you?”
“Who are you ?”
“I asked you first.”
A scoff. “Real mature.”
“I did ask first,” Kanto reasoned with a shrug, spotting his shirt on the other side of the room. He stood and grabbed it to shrug it on and quickly button up. “It’s only right that you tell me your name.”
The woman groaned and brought her hand to her head just as he had done earlier. “It’s Toph, okay?”
Kanto grinned despite his headache. “Was that so hard, Toph?”
“Yeah, actually,” Toph rolled her eyes as she laid back against the headboard. “Can you tell me who you are now?”
“Kanto.”
“Oh, well, that certainly clears things up.”
He huffed, trying to think of the best way to begin to remember what they’d done that landed them in a Motel 6-looking room in the middle of who-knows-where. An idea popped into his head. “What if we do breakfast and we… we try to piece last night together, so we can figure out what the hell got us… here?”
Kanto could tell that she was wondering whether or not she should accept his request, but he could also tell that she was fighting hard to keep her stomach at bay what with the way her face was contorting every few seconds. Even despite that, she was stunning and as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t deny it.
She finally sighed, crossing her arms over her chest. “I should know better than to accept breakfast from someone who can be a murderer for all I fucking know, but I can take you if it comes to it.”
“Glad to hear it because this murderer is starving,” he joked, looking around the room, attempting to find something that would help jog his memory of the previous night at all. There was nothing of note as his eyes swept the room, though he did see discarded clothing and something green and white folded four times — it looked metal. He turned to look at Toph, who had managed to grab hold of an ice bucket to likely be sick in, and examined her eyes. Then, he looked back at the object on the ground, nodding to himself. “Do— do you need your, uh, cane?”
Her eyebrows raised. “That would be nice. Do you see it?”
Without being told to, he stood up, grabbed the discarded black t-shirt and the cane, and handed them to her. Toph nodded at him once as a way to thank him, he assumed, and quickly pulled the shirt over her head before managing to push herself up and out of the bed. She was standing for all of ten seconds before she turned toward the ice bucket again and threw up all of the contents inhabiting her stomach.
Kanto winced and went around the bed to awkwardly rub her back as she retched. The smell was making his own stomach flip again, but he tried his best to deal with it as she finished.
“Thanks,” she sniffled, wiping her mouth with her hand.
“Sure, yeah, uh,” Kanto said, bringing his hand to the back of his neck and rubbing, “I’m going to, uh, freshen up a bit before we leave. You’re— you’re welcome to do the same thing.”
“I appreciate the permission.”
His eyes widened. “No, that wasn’t— I didn’t mean to—”
“Relax,” Toph said with a small smirk on her face as she unfolded her cane and sat back down on the bed. “Go wash yourself. You stink.”
“Uh-huh, you’re not smelling too hot, either, so I recommend you mosey on in after me.”
She snorted at that. “ Mosey ? What are you? Living in a nineteenth-century western film?”
He just looked at her for a second, deciding whether he wanted to dignify her teasing with a response. “Go get rid of your barf — I’ll be done in a second.”
She laughed. And despite his hangover, it was the best sound he’d ever heard, he reckoned.
Toph didn’t usually do this. The whole ‘travel Spirits know what distance and drink herself into oblivion and not remember the events of the night before’ thing wasn’t her typical weeknight. The fact that she awoke with no recollection of the previous night next to some guy she hit it off with was only a bit unsettling. But, considering how utterly pissed off she was most of the afternoon, she figured that it wasn’t the worst way she could have ended up. Kanto could have very well smothered her with a pillow in her sleep and he didn’t, so that was a great start in her book.
As she freshened herself up in the bathroom, Toph wondered about the man she woke up with. From their very short conversation this morning, it seemed as though he was a decent guy. He smelled alright beneath all the booze residue and the vomit. His voice wasn’t bad either, she had to admit.
Drunk-Toph had the right idea, she decided. The fact that he hadn’t murdered her was the first indicator of that.
Resentment for Drunk-Toph arose, however, when she finished readying herself for their day of sober recollection.
Not even her blindness was able to aid her as she stepped outside and into the sun. The pounding in her head increased ten-fold with the heat and she wanted nothing more than for it to cease. And the strange man standing at her side, freaking out over the fact that his car was missing, was not helping matters much.
“My car,” Kanto mumbled as he paced around the motel parking lot. “My car. I arrived at the bar in my car . And I don’t know where we are. I have my keys, but no car. I– How — how , Toph — am I supposed to find my car if I don’t know where the hell I am?”
She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t know, Hotshot, but if you think we’re going to find an answer in the gravel of this car park, you’re screwed.”
“Hotshot.”
“That’s what I said.”
Kanto groaned. “Right, but you also said it last night. I think. It sounds familiar. Fresh.”
“Fresh?” What the fuck was this man on?
“I just— I know I heard it, okay? So that, dear Toph, is a lead.”
Toph huffed loudly and walked up to him, whacking him with her cane. “Look, I just want to get back to civilization and we can just, I don’t know, get on with our lives and never see each other again.”
“Well, why do you think I’m trying to investigate? I don’t want to be here any more than you do, you know.”
He was making her want to puke all over again and she had just been able to get over the whirling in her stomach, so she smacked him with her cane again for good measure, and said, “We should get going because I’m starving and I think I’ll need all the energy I can muster to deal with your ass today.”
“That’s so mean—”
“Cry about it.”
With a groan, Kanto took a few steps to her right and took a deep breath before beginning to pace, mumbling a bunch of things to himself that she couldn’t be bothered to try to decipher. Then, he stopped. “Okay! It’s fine. We’re okay, we just need to find somewhere to eat and we’ll go from there.”
“Was that not the plan the whole time?” Toph asked, her eyebrow up in her hairline as she began walking in the opposite direction of the motel. Standing around in a sandy, sketchy, and foul-smelling parking lot wasn’t going to do anything to help matters, and she was starving, which wasn’t helping her mood, either.
It took Kanto a few seconds to realize that she had walked off and a few more to catch up to her with a jog. He began talking to her about how there was no service in the area, so he couldn’t really do much to find out where they were or where they had been, then he started talking about other nonsense she didn’t care to listen to. All she did was nod a few times until she got sick of it.
Interrupting him during his soliloquy about the lack of coneflowers around them, despite the dry climate, she asked, “Why are you being so annoying?”
“I hardly think that dry climate flora commentary is—”
“I'm hungover, and I don’t care. So cut it out, will you? At least until I eat something.”
It took them about ten minutes to finally come upon a place to eat. It wasn’t exactly a breakfast joint, but it was going to have to do. They were both hungry after the night and subsequent morning they’d had.
Kanto rather thought that Toph was probably hungrier than he was considering how crabby she was. He didn’t mind, though.
The place was decent. It wasn’t fancy but it wasn’t dingey, either. It was a nice in-between.
“So what made you want to drink and forget?” Toph asked him once they were seated and she made herself comfortable in their booth. She was sitting atop her crossed legs and her head was laying against the seat’s backplate. “There’s always a reason.”
He laughed as he skimmed the restaurant’s menu. His stomach felt empty and he was sure that he was going to need something to aid his hunger before he ended up passing out. So he told her to hold that thought and tell him what she was going to eat after he listed the menu options for her. Waving a hand of dismissal at him as the waiter came up to them; she said that she wanted a stir fry and that she wanted to be surprised by the meat it was cooked in. The waiter simply nodded and turned to Kanto, who said, “Yeah, no, uh, same as her,” and stuck with water for drinks.
It was the wisest decision.
As soon as the waiter was gone, he folded his arms against the tabletop and said, “To answer your question, I was fired from my job.”
She winced sympathetically. “Sucks. Did they give you a reason? Or did they just give you the boot with no explanation?”
“Uh, no, they had a pretty good reason.”
There was some expectant silence, and then a snort. “Are you not going to tell me?”
“Right.” He ran a hand down his face at the memory of his last day in the office the afternoon before. “So, I might have gotten fed up with my boss because he’s doing a shit job with his company and therefore, is killing plants for sport, stormed into his office, and kind of told him off in a very, uh, unkind way.”
Rather than just snorting, Toph slammed her palm against the table and burst into laughter. Even though it was at his situation, he found himself trying to swallow his own string of laughs at the sight and sound of her laughs. He shook his head — he just met her, what was he thinking?
When her laughs died down, she wiped away a tear and said, “That’s great. I’m glad you stood up for yourself and your… plants.”
“That sounded really judgy.”
“It was not judgy.”
“Well, it sounded judgy.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t. I just don’t know shit about plants, Hotshot.”
He raised an eyebrow in intrigue. “Well, good thing you’ve made my acquaintance because plants are one of my favorite topics. I just— I enjoy working with them so much and now that I’m out of a job, I’m afraid I won’t be able to study them as much as I did and, Spirits, it sucks.”
“And what is it you do?”
“Botany. I, uh, specialize in plant breeding.”
She nodded, taking in the information. “So then do it independently.”
“Yeah,” he chuckled dryly, leaning back into his side of the booth just as the waiter brought two plates of food. It looked like he got chicken and she got beef. “If only it were that simple.”
She furrowed her eyebrows, pulled her chopsticks out, and dug into her meal. “It’s a money issue, then.”
It wasn’t a question; she was just stating something she believed to be true. And of course, she was right. Normally, Kanto would have gotten defensive over the question and would have told whoever asked that it was none of their business. But he could tell that there was no malice behind Toph’s curiosity, so he just sighed.
“Indeed a money issue.”
She was quiet as she nodded, chewing on her noodles, and there was some kind of look on her face that he just couldn’t put his finger on. It didn’t take long for him to understand the look, however, because seconds later she said, “Are you looking for investors?”
Kanto looked at her, gaping, his chopsticks falling onto his plate with a clang . He was sure his expression resembled a fish with how much he opened and closed his mouth. When he finally snapped back into the conversation, he stammered, “No. I— no. I can’t let you do that. That— no . It’s too much to ask of anyone, especially of a stranger. A— a kind stranger, but a— a stranger, no less.”
He could see the exasperation on her face as she popped a single piece of beef into her mouth. She dropped her chopsticks and slid her plate over to let her hands rest on the table. The way her face was directed at him, her milky eyes boring into his, unsettled him due to the accuracy with which it was done, but he couldn’t find it in himself to look away.
“Look,” she said, beef still half-chewed in her mouth, “I have more money saved than what I’d ever use, honestly, and the fact that this lovely opportunity has presented itself is giving me a perfect reason to put it to good use. It’s not pity, it’s not me giving it to you… it’s an investment , Hotshot. You get to pay it back with all of your plant growing and whatnot, so take it or leave it.”
The offer was tempting — tempting enough to get him to seriously consider it — but he couldn’t do that without feeling as though he was taking advantage of her. He could tell that Toph was offering to invest out of the goodness of her heart, but the chances of this backfiring were high and he couldn’t do that to her; it wouldn’t have been right.
“You just met me yesterday! Or, uh, today , more like… since we don’t really remember anything about yesterday…”
“Okay, and?”
He sighed and said, “I appreciate it, but—”
“I’ve already got my mind made up,” Toph shrugged after slurping on a noodle. “There’s nothing you can do to sway me when I’ve made up my mind about something unless there’s a good reason to get me to do so. But… I don’t hear a reason coming out of your mouth other than ‘it’s too much, Toph.’ Quit being a pansy and just say yes.”
A pause to gape at her brashness. “I— can I at least think about it before you put anything on paper??”
“I suppose.”
It was the best he was going to get with her stubborn ass, he was certain.
Truly, she hadn’t known what had come over her. One moment, she was severely annoyed by him, and the other she was offering to invest in his still-nonexistent business.
Toph wasn’t an impulsive person. She thought things through and waited for the best moment to do things. It was the way she approached fights and confrontations, it was the way she approached all of the situations in her life, and it wasn’t something she ever thought she would change because it worked for her.
But now she decided to, on impulse, offer up her money to Some Guy she just met, not knowing whether or not he would scam her out of her money eventually.
Still, there was something that told her that he wouldn’t be an issue for her. He seemed like a nice guy. Genuine. Besides, it’d be a great way to meet with him again after all was said and done with this day.
Her initial uncertainty melted away as he rambled on and on about plant anatomy and which plants bred best with the other. And as much as she pretended not to be interested in what he was telling her, she found herself listening anyway while she ate away at her meal.
“Did you know that strawberries are the only fruit that has seeds on their outside?” Kanto asked, slurping up his noodles.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not!” he exclaimed, excitedly slamming his hand against the surface of the table. “They have, like, two-hundred seeds on average. It’s crazy.”
“ So crazy.”
Kanto was about to say something else, but he loudly sighed. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?” Toph asked, innocently chewing on her chopstick. She was trying hard to keep the mocking smile off her face, though it was proving to be rather hard.
“You— you’re making fun of me.”
“I’m doing no such thing, Hotshot, and I am offended at the accusation. I find the inner and outer workings of strawberries very interesting.”
He kicked her beneath the table, making her snort. “Yeah, alright. I’ve been rambling. Tell me about you.”
“What… about me?”
“Well,” he pushed his now empty plate aside and rested his forearms on the table, “I’ve told you, like, a billion things about my job, and I suppose you’ve gotten a good sense of who I am based on that. So tell me about you. What do you do? Tell me your story. And about what got you drunkenly displaced.”
Toph paused mid-chew. No one but her friends really gave a shit about her story or what she did. Her job was always something she kept to herself and only divulged whenever she was around wanted company. She loved it so much that she knew that she would end up being a rambling mess the way Kanto had been moments ago if she started talking about work.
She put down her chopsticks and used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth slowly. “Ah, well, I guess I should start with why I got, as you so gracefully put it, drunkenly displaced. Give you a sense of who I am.
“So, I own a Chow Gar dojo down by Weiyang in Gaoling. I’ve been at it for about six, seven years or so. Since I first started admitting students, I figured that I’d have to start expanding and whatnot because, at the rate that they were coming in, they were going to start crowding up eventually, and there’d be no room.”
Kanto huffed. “Let me guess. You tried getting the expansion permits and they weren’t having it.”
“Spot on, Hotshot.” Toph clicked her tongue, an impressed eyebrow raised at him. “Thing is that I spent the better part of a year on their asses about giving me the clearance to get the expansion done, and that never came, so I stormed into their offices and told them off yesterday. I was so fed up. I didn’t even let them get a word in.
“After that, I decided I needed some air and ended up walking aimlessly in the opposite direction of their offices and came upon the bar,” she said with a shrug. “The end.”
He leaned back on his side of the booth with a whistle. “Shit, so do you think you’ll ever get that expansion?”
“All I know is that I’ll fight like hell to get it. I’m good at what I do, and I don’t plan on stopping because a bunch of old men don’t do their damn jobs right.”
“No, yeah. Good call,” he said, a smile in his voice. Then, he cleared his throat. “You know, I have a buddy who owns some property near Gaoling…”
From the moment he said the word ‘buddy,’ Toph knew where his sentence was going. She was already shaking her head. Obviously, he was only extending the offer to her because of the one she put on the table for him. She wasn’t trying to get any charity from him by making her investment offer; she was just trying to be nice, not looking for anything in return.
“No.” Toph shook her head one last time. “I can do this on my own. I appreciate it, but no. It’s not your problem.”
Leaning further into the table and toward her, Kanto said, “That’s awesome and all, and I’m sure it’s true, but I think you should meet with the guy. See what he tells you about establishing your dojo there.”
Toph still wasn’t keen on accepting his help, but she found it hypocritical for her to be refusing his proposition when she herself was waiting for him to accept her own to invest in his idea. So she glared in his direction and simply said, “I’ll think about it.”
It took them about an hour to actually want to get up and leave the restaurant they were at. For Kanto, it was becoming more and more difficult to stop listening to Toph talk and focus on the task at hand.
He was enjoying her company so much that he, frankly, didn’t want the day to end, or for them to have to go back to the lives they were living.
They had managed to walk about two miles back toward the motel and a few more to the west of it and Kanto wasn’t feeling any closer to home. It felt like they had been walking forever, but the conversations they were having were making the heat and the walk bearable.
Kanto learned more about Toph than he would have thought she would tell him. He learned that she enjoyed listening to music more than she did anything else, she loved fighting, her best friends were all successful in their fields of medicine, and engineering, and whathaveyou. She was an impressive woman and he couldn’t help but feel in awe of her the more he discovered about her.
As they were walking, she suddenly tripped and let out a string of curses as Kanto managed to catch her arm before she hit the ground. She was about to mumble words of appreciation, he thought, until she furrowed her brows and tapped her cane around for a few seconds.
“Toph?”
“I know that bump,” she muttered.
He made a face at her. “What—”
“The bump. I know it, and I think I tripped on it yesterday before making it to the bar.”
Kanto sighed and looked around for a few moments before his eyes came upon the dull and translated Chung’s Bar N’ Grill sign just about a block in front of them. Without warning, Kanto pulled Toph into an embrace that she did not return until seconds later, and he excitedly pulled her with him in a sprint.
She was trailing behind him, muttering a bunch of expletives that made him want to laugh at her, and he would have if he hadn’t been so deadset on reaching the bar within ten seconds of having seen it.
As soon as they came to a stop, she gave him a notorious smack in the shin with her cane before grunting and leaning against a lamppost behind her, just in front of—
“My car!” Kanto cried, throwing himself against the hood. “I thought I lost you.”
Toph rolled her eyes. “Do you two need a moment? I can go; give you some privacy if you need it.”
Sheepishly, Kanto straightened himself out and cleared his throat. He mimicked her stance against his own car and crossed his arms over his chest. Before he was able to give her a retort, he felt his phone buzzing in his pocket at the same time he heard Toph’s phone go off.
“Signal!” he exclaimed as soon as he looked over his phone notifications. Most of his messages and missed calls were from his boss and his buddy Jiahao, who was growing more and more worried for him based on the progressive capitalization in his texts. “Spirits, we can get out of here.”
“Right.” Toph nodded slowly for a moment, clicking her tongue before she pushed herself off the lamppost and found her way to his car. She scratched her head. “Mind giving me a ride?”
Kanto didn’t like the way the energy shifted all of a sudden. Something was different and he wasn’t exactly sure what was. The two of them had managed their time together without any tension or issues between them, despite the way their day began. So, then, what was so different now as he ducked into his car, watching her do the same?
One thing Toph hated more than small talk was uncomfortable silences, the very same kind of uncomfortable silence she was sharing with Kanto as they rode off in the direction of her apartment in Gaoling.
When he’d asked him where he should drop her, she had just shrugged and told him the name of her dojo so he could type it into his navigation app. She had a feeling the dojo would be closer to the bar they were riding back from and figured he would favor that since he was so eager to part ways, anyhow.
Kanto shook his head, however, and incredulously said, “No. Let me take you home.”
“Didn’t get enough of me last night?” she asked him in jest. It came out before she could even stop herself. A most natural response.
He began to stammer and before he ended up crashing the car, she told him to relax and that the dojo was fine. The drama queen ended up pulling over on the side of the road and telling her that she either told him her home address or he would just sit there until she did.
Toph grunted at that, kicking off her sneakers and resting them against the dashboard as she muttered the address to her apartment complex, the very same one she shared with Katara. Satisfactorily, Kanto thanked her and started the car again after punching in her address. She figured she’d pull out her earphones and listen to music considering the very lively conversation taking place in the car.
During the extremely tense ride, as she listened to some underground band through her buds, Toph’s mind drifted to Katara, who had left her several frenzied voicemails and texts. All Toph responded with was a simple “I’m fine, quit freaking out.”
Katara replied with an “I hate you.”
The exchange was the epitome of their friendship, really.
She wondered what Katara would say about her odyssey. It was a given that the medical intern would likely give her a speech on the risks of excessive drinking and getting caught up with total strangers who could have very well chopped her up into bits and spread her around the country like crumbs.
Katara watched too many true crime documentaries. What would she know?
After a while, fifteen minutes apparently, according to him, Kanto shyly tapped her shoulder and she pulled out one of her earbuds.
“What.”
“Uh,” he started, shifting the car to Park. “We’re here.”
Something within Toph was telling her to not just up and leave, but she ignored it, giving him a nod. Then, she dryly said, “Cool. Uh, thanks for the ride. And for, you know, not killing me in my sleep or at any point in the day.”
Kanto breathed out a laugh. “Any time. Likewise.”
Toph clicked her tongue, hoping to come up with something clever or witty to tell him before she left, even debating asking him for his number, but she decided against it.
And she opened the door.
And she got out of the car.
And she left.
And he didn’t even follow her.
She rolled her eyes as she walked into her complex, her cane’s tapping echoing through the quiet lobby. The idea of Kanto was intriguing, she had to admit. And despite her attitude toward him throughout the day, she enjoyed his company.
Too bad their acquaintanceship was so short-lived.
Toph jammed her elbow into the elevator button and waited for the ding. Regardless of the way the day had started and them not really remembering the way they met, she enjoyed her time with Kanto. She wished him the best, especially with his business endeavors.
At that, as the ding sounded around the lobby, her eyes widened. She never gave him her information for him to use in order to reach out about the investment, did she? Her heart dropped into her stomach, and for a moment, she debated on whether or not she should run outside and hope against hope that his car was still up front. It was a long shot, but she still turned on her heel and walked at a swift pace in the direction of the exit.
On her way out, though, she bumped into someone. With a groan, she said, “Would be nice if you watched where you’re going next time.”
“I’d say the same to you, but you know.”
Toph had to bite her cheek to keep from smiling as largely as she suspected she would at the sound of his voice. “You’re not funny,” she managed to say, backing into the complex again.
“I beg to differ, but to each their own,” Kanto said with a shrug as he followed suit. He sounded out of breath and her hands clammed up at the thought of him rushing up to meet her. Then, she promptly scolded herself for thinking such a thing.
She wasn’t able to chastise herself further because, before she could, he cleared his throat and spoke again. “I, uh, forgot to give you my buddy’s number. For, uh, for the—”
“His property?”
“Yeah, that,” he confirmed, asking for her phone to add in the guy’s information. He handed it back to her a few moments later. “I, uh, also added my phone number in there. For the—”
“The investment?”
“The investment, which I haven’t decided on, by the way.”
“Good, because I haven’t decided on the property.”
A bit of silence followed. It wasn’t quite as tense as it had been on the car ride over, but it was something. Energy-filled or suspenseful. Something . And it was annoying her.
It occurred to her that she had begun the day wanting to find her way back home and be rid of this man once and for all. He was bugging her and he was nothing but a person she woke up next to — a failed one-night stand. But now, she wanted to know him. She wanted to spend her time with him and hear about why the white jade bush was often confused for the white dragon bush or why it was that strawberries had more than two-hundred seeds.
There was more to him than what met the eye and she was intrigued by him. By everything about him.
“When can I see you again?” he blurted before she could say anything to him. “I mean— you— I want to see you again, Toph.”
She bit back another smile, and without thinking, she whacked him in the shin with her cane again, and when he bent over to nurse himself, she pressed a kiss to his cheekbone.
“Are you free tomorrow?”