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The three unbreakable rules for hosting a successful Shiraishi house party are as follows:
- Keep the circle of attendees small,
- Baby proof the living room coffee table, and most importantly,
- Do not let Mizuki plan the party.
Everything else is more or less irrelevant because the core of the argument is that rule one keeps them relaxed, rule two keeps them safe, and rule three keeps them sane. It’s why An doesn’t mind that their house (with rent split between her, Akito, Touya, and Mizuki, through a series of panicked texts and unanswered phone calls she has trouble remembering) is usually the go-to spot for gatherings. Their parties run smoothly and they always wake up somewhat intact the next morning—as long as An is the one planning them. It’s tiring, but it’s worth it, and it works.
One day, she comes home from her night class and is immediately met with streamers and balloons and Mizuki in her face telling her about how they planned the perfect surprise birthday party, and then it doesn’t work.
“Happy birthday, An!” Mizuki says, throwing an arm around her shoulder and nudging her side with their elbow. “Well, it’s tomorrow, but that might as well be tonight.” They gesture around the house, leading An’s attention away from the un-baby-proofed table to Akito cutting cake with a pair of chopsticks to Touya holding three party horns in his mouth. “What do you think? Pretty nice, isn’t it?”
An inhales a little too fast and accidentally breathes in some shredded confetti. “Yeah,” she says between coughs. “Yeah, it looks awesome. You shouldn’t have.”
The thing is, it does look great. Mizuki is nothing if not good at almost everything they do, especially in terms of design, leaving the house decorated in bright blue and white and pink throughout the balloon letters and the flowers and the printed picture of An’s face on the wall. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that when Mizuki plans parties, they invite just about everyone they know, including their girlfriend, their girlfriend’s friends, their girlfriend’s friends’ siblings, and so on. It is a very large crowd. It is also a violation of rule one, and like that, all three of An’s sacred rules have been broken.
The doorbell rings not even a second after An has put her bag down. It’s Haruka with Minori wrapped around her, having driven from her own campus to here, holding a gift bag and wishing her a happy early birthday. Airi and Shizuku arrive together after, followed by some people An can only vaguely remember who clearly see it as more of a general party than a birthday party. And while An likes socialising, likes being around people more than she does being alone, she just finished a three hour lecture and summer break is almost there but still out of reach and she’s tired. She’s too tired to handle it all. Even with all of the laughter, exchanged smiles, muted conversation, there’s only one person she really wants to see.
(“She’s coming later,” Touya tells her in the corner of the kitchen, nursing a brewed cup of chamomile tea that’s characteristically unfitting for a party. He mixes it with a metal spoon that An knows isn't from their normal cutlery set—it must be something he bought on his own, or something gifted to him. “She has to get something.”
It sometimes surprises An how close Kohane and Touya are, to the point that apparently, she'd sooner tell Touya about her alleged secret gift for An than any of her other friends, like Minori and Shiho, both of whom she lives with. To be fair, they've been a group for a long time, and their personalities complement each other strangely well. It's funny to watch because Kohane wears her emotions on her sleeve and Touya generally can't unless he really tries to, but it also works, and An is glad it does. It's like having family approve of your partner. The more she thinks about it, the funnier it is.
The only times it isn't funny are times like these, when she's trying to get something out of Touya and his perpetual silence does more harm than good.
An narrows her eyes. “You won’t tell me what it is, will you?”
“No,” Touya replies. He takes a sip. “I won’t.”)
It’s a lot of wandering in between groups of people, a lot of shared looks that sometimes end before they can even begin. Mizuki gives her a paper cup full of a very sparkly concoction, likely a mix of all the drinks and soda they keep in the fridge. She carries it with her like it’s an excuse—to not talk, to stand around, to pretend she has something to take care of. At some point, she ends up talking to Ena, who gives her a ribbon-tied hair clip and promptly apologises for the fact that she lives with her brother, I don’t know how you do it, I don’t know how his boyfriend does it. An smiles and gives some half-assed banter in reply.
She holds onto her paper cup and glances at the door. Beside it is the clock, only there because Mizuki insisted on having it, an entire two hours too early.
Akito’s poorly cut cake sits on the kitchen island, saved only by Touya redoing it with a thin plastic knife and sliding them onto plates to take. Mizuki hands her one and calls for cheers, lifting their own mix of vibrant punch in hopes that everyone else will do the same. An bumps her own cup against Haruka’s, pretends to be able to hear what she says to her, and puts it to her lips. The cake is twenty percent too sweet in a way that tells her it was Akito’s pick at the grocery store.
Objectively, An has fun. It’s almost her second nature to reciprocate every smile sent her way, to thank everybody there with a hug and a laugh. But at some point, when it’s Touya’s third turn on the aux and her hundredth time staring at the door unconsciously, she finds her expression going stale. Like she’s enjoying herself only because she should be.
She stumbles over to open the window before realising she can’t unless she wants another noise complaint from the neighbours (although someone will eventually open it anyways). Instead, she slips through the hallway to the staircase and drags herself up, keeping to the shadows. She watches the door disappear behind clustered shadows and blurry silhouettes.
The thrum of the bass echoes through the walls into the carpet of the second floor, pulsing under her slippers, travelling through cotton to the tips of her fingers. An holds onto the wall as she sets her eyes on her bedroom door, left half open from the morning, and she’s drawn towards it like a magnet, away from the house and into the farthest corner of what she can call safety.
It’s less entering her room and more diving into it. The music below her is muffled, barely there in washed out waves. The door to the balcony is open. Unsafe, probably, but it faces their backyard and its surrounding forests so she doesn’t care. The room itself is small, but it’s a compromise she’s willing to make—one that she has made.
(“We should have picked rooms earlier,” Touya says, lugging his suitcases into the middle of the hallway. An can’t nag at him for saying so now, because it’s true, but it’s also too late for them to be fair about it. It’s past twelve. An, for once, just wants to shut herself into her room and sleep.
The next best thing is dictatorship. “I mean,” An says, peeking into the bedrooms, “we can decide that now. None of the rooms are bad. There’s the biggest one, the one with the best view, the one with the balcony, and Akito’s room.”
“What?” Akito opens his mouth, snaps it shut, and then gradually forces it open again. “What?”
Mizuki, playing along (they've had more than enough experience with An's banter), hums and pushes past Akito. “I’m calling dibs on the view,” they say, waving as they disappear into the middle room.
“Then Touya can have the biggest. I’ll take the one with the balcony.” An waves as she rolls her suitcase through the entrance. “See? Easy.”)
On some days, it isn’t worth it. On most nights, it is. The door slides open with loose hinges, letting the sweeping chill seep into the room, replacing humid, hot air with a thinner breath of wind. It isn’t perfect—the balcony itself needs some serious repair, which is concerning because their aforementioned backyard is more of a ditch—but An sits down on the thin line between the room and the balcony and it’s enough.
From this angle, she peers through the spaces of the railing to the feathered edge of the forest. Beyond that is a glimpse of the city, only dark shapes and dotted lights from this distance, sounds of cars and billboard lights. The perimeters of the campus (and the neighbourhood around it, for that matter) touch the borders of the city. Close enough to get there by train. Far enough that An considers herself estranged from it all the same.
She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her cheek on her arm. Her skin is temperate, buzzing at any faint touch, even her own. Especially her own.
The longer An sits there, the more she finds herself being absorbed into the bubble of mimicked silence around her, the faster she lets herself be greedy as she's swallowed up by the solitude. There’s something to be said about sitting out of your own birthday party, and one planned by your friends at that—An imagines moving lips, distorted voices, all the wrong words she wants to hear. She feels bad, or at least knows she should feel bad. There’s a faint burst of laughter from the first floor.
If someone were to have noticed her absence, she would guess it to be Haruka or Touya. Nobody has. She doesn’t really mind.
But then there’s a sharp squeak that floats upwards from the chatter, a creak she knows comes from the floorboard by the bottom of the stairs. She traces that sound as it shifts into something else—the notes of each step as it crawls upwards, the gentle padding that reaches the top and spreads into a thin layer of pooling footsteps. It pauses outside her bedroom door. There’s a soft knock, followed by two more in succession.
An doesn’t answer. The door opens anyways.
She waits until the sound becomes something more than that (an outline, pink lips, an expanse she can fit into) and settles down beside her to speak. “Did you ask them where I was?” she says, small and unassuming.
There’s a touch to her arm that lights her skin ablaze. “No,” she hears. “I didn’t.”
And before she makes eye contact, she feels it first: a hand on top of hers, the space between her fingers locked into place. It’s the brush of her knuckles against a reflection of her own self-absorption. It’s the way the trees melt into each other, one becoming two becoming a dozen. It’s the smile she sees in the corner of her eyes, the scattered moles on one side, how they dip into dimpled cheeks.
An, turning her head, smiles back. “Hey,” she says.
She squeezes her hand. Kohane, between the bedroom and the balcony like she is, squeezes back. “Hi, An-chan.”
For the first time that night, An relaxes. She lets her legs go limp and stretches them out onto the balcony, drifting into relaxation drowsily as her exhaustion leaves her in a soft cloud of breath. “You know,” she says, eyes tracing the folds of her clothes, the curve of her nose, “you look good today.”
“Do I really?” Kohane replies lightheartedly, giving her own outfit a quick glance. “I didn’t put much thought into it, but if you think it’s nice…”
It’s admittedly very obvious that Kohane threw it together on a whim—it’s a plain shirt she’s had since before they got together tucked into her favourite jeans, made with smooth denim and cuffed ends. She’s traded her usual hat for a cluster of hair clips on one side and a few other accessories. A thin wristwatch. A necklace around her neck, pulled down by a silver band, glinting pink when the light finds it from a certain angle. Seeing it, An’s hand moves to her ear on instinct, feeling smooth metal and carved bumps.
It isn’t fancy or stylish or anything Kohane would normally wear out (to a date, to an event, or to their performances). It’s just Kohane, dressed in boring clothes and dull colours, and maybe that’s what An likes so much about it.
She chooses not to explain. Instead, she takes Kohane’s hand and moves it into her lap, pulling her to the side so her head rests on her shoulder. “I’m glad you made it,” she tells her. “I almost thought you wouldn’t.”
“It’s your birthday party, An-chan,” Kohane replies. She shuffles a little closer, holds on a little tighter. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. And I’m glad to be here, although-” She pauses, body still. “That doesn’t apply to you, maybe?”
“I’m thankful, don’t get me wrong,” she says, even though she knows Kohane wouldn’t. “It’s cool. I can tell Mizuki put a lot of thought into it. I really do appreciate it. But…”
Breathily, Kohane hums. “But?”
“I don’t know.” It’s a half-truth and a more-than-half lie, making up a whole that’s a little too much of everything. “It’s been a long day. I thought I’d come up here for a while.”
“For a while,” Kohane repeats. “Will you go back downstairs later?”
The sound of the air conditioning flickers into a steady buzz, spilling out of the vents in steady pulses of cold air. It doesn’t really do much—July nights are hot in the cloudy, humid way that rests heavy on the ground—but the sound pushes An to her side, lined up to Kohane’s body. “No,” she answers. “Probably not.”
The silence she’s met with is more than enough of a reply. Kohane wiggles her hand out of An’s hold to shift around, curls their arms together with even less space between them than before, and traces the creases of An’s palm with her pinky. An’s cheek settles on top of Kohane’s head, and with Kohane herself fixed inside the curve of her neck and shoulder, it’s nothing short of perfect.
In the past, cuddling Kohane like this was always sort of a recharge: with ten minutes of her arms around her waist, she could power through another thirty minutes of work, or with a kiss on her cheek and a whisper of good luck, she could win an entire basketball tournament. In some ways, it still is, but along the way, it’s also become something completely different. A sink to let go of whatever energy she doesn’t want. A chance to lose focus of everything else.
When she thinks about it that way, Kohane’s a bit of a home. When she thinks about it harder, Kohane might be more than that.
An opens her mouth—whatever she wanted to say, she doesn’t know—but there’s a yell coming from downstairs, loud enough that she’ll have to make Akito apologise to the neighbours tomorrow, and then a collective string of words that sounds like Don’t stand on that, who stepped on Shiho’s glasses, I can’t find my drivers’ licence. At the mention of her housemate’s name, Kohane laughs into her sleeve, coming out as more of a snort than anything else. “That would be the third time Shiho-chan’s glasses have broken this month,” she says, barely even trying to hide her smile. “The first two times were both because of Minori-chan.”
It’s kind of cute to An that Kohane and her friend group ended up not only going to the same university, but also sharing a house in one of the other nearby student neighbourhoods. Realistically, An is very aware of the fact that she finds it cute mainly because it involves Kohane. “You think Minori might have stepped on them just now, too?”
“It could be.” Her fingers dance around her veins, pressing whispers of a kiss on her skin. “We’ll never know.”
The sky, suddenly, is a stale sight. An glances behind her, back into her bedroom in its half-lit state, grazed by the light from underneath the door and the flickering yellow-orange of the lamp. On her desk is a mix of papers, stacked in messy towers that pile onto each other. Textbooks, music scores, class notes, posters. One of them—an advertisement from their university’s music festival last year, where they’d snagged a chance to perform on stage as a group—is hanging off the edge of the table, dangling above the chair.
There are more things. Candles she doesn’t use, offers from events, unopened packages, but in the end, her attention is pulled back to Kohane on a thin, shining thread. She’s reaching into her pocket, and when she notices An’s interest, she takes it out. A little fabric drawstring bag, blank on all sides.
Kohane draws her legs in, uses them to tilt her body towards An as she fiddles with the bag, thumbing crease over fold. The change of angle makes her necklace glint in the moonlight. “This is for you,” she says quietly. “It’s also, uhm- why I was late.”
And when Kohane talks like that, it’s somewhere between a whisper and a breath, barely audible but resonating clearly in An’s ears anyways. She imagines punctured ripples and the sound of water as it floods her ears. She imagines a blanket draped over her legs, over the two of them as they smile at nothing and laugh at everything. “For my birthday?” she asks, watching as Kohane untangles her arm to make An hold her palm out and puts the bag there. “A last-minute gift, huh? Classic, Kohane.”
“T-That’s not it,” Kohane mumbles, looking down at the floor. The wind blows a strand of her hair against her cheek. “I thought I ordered it early, but I had to pick it up and it wasn’t ready, because-” She stops herself with a bite to her lip. “You’ll see, An-chan.”
“I’ll see,” An repeats. She lifts the bag up and down, guesses its weight, measures how it feels in her palm as opposed to when she holds Kohane’s hand. “Can I open it now?”
“Oh,” Kohane says, like she didn’t expect to be asked (given how nervous she seemed even talking about it, An doesn’t blame her). “It’s fine. I mean- you can open it.”
So An moves to, except before she actually does she touches around the bag with her thumb, pressing against the corners of what might be a box. She hooks her pinky into the top and tugs it open, digs into the bag to be met with the texture of velvet and something sturdier, something kept inside and meant to be taken out.
It is a box. It’s made of silver trim and pleated edges, hinged at the back. An’s fingers freeze from where they hold the top, almost-barely-maybe about to open it. She doesn’t, because she looks at Kohane and takes note of how Kohane won’t return her gaze.
This time, it’s An’s turn to say Oh, rolling off of her tongue like she hadn’t meant to let it slip.
“Just open it,” Kohane insists, mustering up what courage she has to give An a nudge, pressing against her shoulder. She buries her face in her arms immediately after—closing her eyes, opening them, peeking from just above where her vision eclipses.
An takes her time. It isn’t a conscious choice, but it’s one that she’s forced to make with how weighted her hands suddenly are, a minute behind what she wants them to do. The box opens with a smooth click, fabric against fabric. Within it is a cushion, layers of baby blue velvet, and within that- wedged inside of it, centered- is a silver band.
Then she holds the box up a little more, so it’s overrun by the lamp on one side and the promise of the city on the other, and sees that it isn’t. It’s two different charms, nestled side by side, made of metallic shine and quiet hints of gemstones. Transparent beads. She’s careful taking them out, wary of the thin rings that hook onto their frames, and sets the box down to lay them flat on her palm.
From her place next to her, curled up into her own thoughts, Kohane watches.
The charms are some shape An can’t discern. On their own, they’re basically just a few nondescript splashes, made of a line that bends and curves until it meets itself again. An pushes them together, and with a bit of manoeuvring, they press into place. Even then, they don’t make up anything meaningful. They sit like two puzzle pieces without the corners and the ridges, only scribbled outlines and smooth edges. The gems embedded in them, glassy and protruding, are scattered across the entire pair.
But An likes them. She likes them because they’re from Kohane, but she likes them even more because she can’t understand them.
There’s a fuzzy cast of soft-spilling sparks that blankets her, around her shoulders, touching her cheeks. “I’m going to sound really stupid right now,” An warns, “but what does it mean?”
It prompts Kohane to relax, and she laughs (An realises now that she’s said exactly what Kohane thought she would). “The shape doesn’t mean anything in particular,” she says, leaning into her. “I drew it, actually. I asked for it to be made that way.” Like always, An ends up lured back to her, by the stars in her eyes and the clouds made of her words. “To me, I thought it’d be nice. I think this way- it doesn’t have to mean anything, but it can mean something to us.”
“Kohane,” An says. Clear waves crash at her feet and splash onto her body.
“Turn them over,” Kohane tells her. Her smile curves upwards. “There’s more.”
More means a series of engraved numbers on the silver backing, ending abruptly on one charm so it can be completed on the next. An stares at them and wonders if they’re supposed to be something she has to solve or if they’re a number she should remember. “I’m going to sound even more stupid than before.”
She doesn’t have the chance to continue. Kohane reaches out to tap on the numbers, and then on the edge of An’s palm. “Do you remember?” she says, wispy. “It was in high school. When we went stargazing, and you named a constellation after me, and I tried to name one after you.”
An remembers. There’s no way she could forget.
(She points at the spot in the sky right above where they’re lying down. The stars flicker behind her finger, appearing and disappearing as her arm shakes. “See that cluster right there? That’s the Sagittarius constellation.”
Kohane, tucked into her side, squints—the corners of her eyes crinkle, and her nose scrunches up in clear concentration, and with the dust of the night against her cheeks, An can’t help but fall deeper. “Really?”
“Nah,” An replies, giving up on hiding the grin she wears. “I have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re just really cute when you’re concentrating.”
She gets a weak punch to her arm, all with lazy banter and secret affection, and maybe she deserves it, so she laughs it off. Kohane says something, and even though An replies, she’s focused on something else—how the dim starlight pools around Kohane, how she swims in it like she’d been born amidst them. When she looks back up at the sky, it’s with half a promise of finding constellations and more than half of wanting to spend more time here, alone in the empty field. “Look up there,” she tells Kohane, holding her wrist and aligning their hands.
Kohane’s nose scrunches again. “What’s that?”
“The Azusawa cluster,” An says. “Also known as ‘the Hamster’ .” She shifts their hands, a bit to the right, barely anything. “And beside it is Shiraishi, ‘the Hamster’s Girlfriend’ .”
Kohane smiles. “Did you study these too?”
“I learned about them ten seconds ago, so yeah,” An responds.)
It’s a memory she’s always kept close to her heart. It was one night of the hundreds they’ve spent together. It’s special because it isn’t.
“It was the Azusawa Cluster,” she says. “And then my cluster.”
Kohane smiles, and An doesn’t have to look to know Kohane’s been replaying the same scene in her head. “It was hard to find, but I asked Honami-chan for help and tried my best.” She takes a shallow breath. “The coordinates, I mean. Of our stars together. That’s what the little crystals are.”
The numbers are carved. An presses her finger down on them and feels their silhouettes dig into her skin, barely there. Barely anything. “Our stars,” An mumbles to herself, unmoving.
And maybe the last thing she notices—has the capacity to notice, really—is that they’re charms for a reason. She takes one of them into her other hand and sets the other down, right on top of the box, and turns her body to face Kohane properly. The ring attached to her necklace sits against her skin. An’s hands have stopped shaking, something she didn’t even know had started in the first place.
She unclasps the ring of the charm and hooks it onto the necklace. It falls beside the ring, small enough to fit through it, only stopped by how they’re attached. Kohane waves An’s hands away, gently sets them down on the floor to give herself space, and takes the other charm from the box to do the same for An—brings it to her ear, hangs it on the silver ring she’s been wearing on her lobe for years.
The charms are pretty on their own. They’re pretty put together, and even prettier when they’re apart, accenting the rings she and Kohane have had since that one day—Kohane’s birthday. The ones An gave her, when they were sitting on the swingset with the bitter undercurrent of winter-spring on their lips and aspirations full of childlike charms and dizzy dreams.
The bump of the charm on her earring is distant even in its proximity. They’re older, they’ve achieved a few of their goals, they’ve added more to the list. An is older, will be both a year and a day older when tomorrow comes, and they’ll have the same number to their ages once the next March passes. She’s waiting, like she’s always been.
Some things are different. Some things are the same. Kohane looks at her with the universe in her gaze and An surges forward.
Like most things about her, Kohane’s lips are soft, fitting perfectly against An’s in the same way everything else about them does (how the gaps between An’s fingers are made for Kohane to fill, how the circumference of her arms keeps Kohane close). An tastes sweet hints of strawberry, lets her lipstick be ruined by Kohane’s lip gloss, and the intangible blanket over her back spreads farther and farther until it envelops Kohane too.
Each fragment of a break she dares to take is calculated, inhaled to be turned into one letter at a time. “Fuck, Kohane,” she says against her breath, through the laugh that bubbles out of her throat. “We’re not astrology people. We don’t know anything about the stars.”
“We really don’t.” Kohane plants a kiss to the corner of her mouth, slow, patient. “I’m as clueless as you are, An-chan.”
“Fuck,” An says again, and when she cups Kohane’s cheek with her hand she feels the fire under her cheeks, burning in pulses of floccose heat. “I swear, when I’m with you I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea what to do. I’m-” The floorboards creak. The party blends into one constant stream of white noise. “Tell me what to do.”
“I don’t think I’m the best person to ask,” Kohane replies. Her eyes are glossy, shining with tears that swell around her eyelashes. "Let's figure it out together."
It's only when An tries to blink her blurry vision away that she realises she's crying too. It's a thin line drawn towards her mouth, where she tastes seawater below her tongue There’s a flash of deep blue that melts into a sandy gradient of the colours surrounding them—the white of Kohane’s shirt, the smudged pink on her lips from An’s own, the swimming drops of purple and teal in her eyes. Her ears are ringing, but Kohane’s voice pushes past it, soothing. “Yeah,” An mutters. “Yeah. We’ll figure it out together. Shit, I love you. I love you, we’ll get through it. Anything. I love you.”
“I love you, An-chan,” and maybe An is going crazy, maybe she’s too out of it, but the lack of a too at the end of Kohane’s expression makes her want to say it more, say it over and over again. “I really do. For the rest of our life, let’s- together-”
“Just us two,” she finishes. “Let’s sing forever.”
Kohane closes her eyes. Her lashes flutter against the wet stains on her cheekbones. “Happy birthday, An-chan.”
(When An gives her the gift, a ring on a necklace that matches the one on her ear, Kohane cries. She doesn’t try to hide it—she lets her tears fall freely and cries even more when An holds her hand and asks her if she wants to marry her. It’s somewhere between a joke and a serious question: because they’re only in high school and there are better places to propose than the old park in Kohane’s neighbourhood, but An really will marry her one day.
“I don’t know what to say, An-chan,” Kohane mumbles through her sniffles as An clasps the necklace around her neck. She looks down at it, her bangs falling forward against her forehead, and she holds her breath with a puff of her cheeks.
It’s cute. The necklace is cute too, but her focus is only on Kohane, like it’s always been. “As I thought, it looks the best when you’re wearing it,” she says offhandedly, tilting her head to see how the necklace glints in the little light there is. “Not bad for a proposal, don’t you think?”
Except in some ways, it is bad. It’s terrible, but this is only the first of what An hopes will be many. Proposing on a birthday is, undoubtedly, a horrible idea though. “So we’re getting married now, An-chan?” Kohane laughs.
It’s too easy to say yes. It’s too easy to sit on the swings, listen to them creak back and forth, to talk about what kind of house they’ll live in and what kinds of things they’ll do. She kicks at the sand of the playground. The chain of the swings are cold on her hand. When An tells Kohane they should just go and get married now, Kohane answers by saying they’re too young, that they’ll have to wait a few more years.
“That’s fine,” An says, grinning, unashamed. “I’ll just propose to you every day, until we really do get married.”)
So they’re older. The entire party is to celebrate An growing older, but An feels the same as she did back then nevertheless; a thrum under her skin, a missing thump of her heartbeat, a force she can’t see that draws the corners of her lips up without fail every time. They’re older, but they’re young and dumb and in love, and it’s everything. It’s nothing. It’s meaningless and it’s perfect.
“Listen,” An whispers, forehead bumping against Kohane’s as she leans in. “When one of us proposes- and it’s going to be me first, by the way- it can’t be on a birthday. I want to have as many days to celebrate as possible, so let’s do it on its own day.”
Kohane hums in agreement. “I’m okay with that,” she says, “but that reminds me- it’s going to be midnight soon, An-chan.” She blinks owlishly, curious. “Should we... do you want to go downstairs? They'll start to look for you soon."
In stark contrast to how she'd felt when she first came home, An doesn’t think she’d mind going back down anymore. She knows she’ll have to eventually, even if only to make sure everyone’s safe and away from the sharp corners of the living room table, and in the end she wants to celebrate her birthday with her friends (and friends’ friends) around her. She could go and enjoy herself. Now that Kohane is here, she doesn’t have any reason to sulk around.
She also doesn’t have a reason to pull Kohane into another kiss, but she does regardless, and to her it's worth everything. “Let’s stay for a little longer,” she says, hand finding its way to Kohane’s wrist and holding it, sliding her grasp upwards like how she would if they were slow dancing. “They can come and look for me if they want to. Besides, don’t you want to be the first to wish me a happy birthday?”
“That- I think that would be a little unfair of me,” Kohane murmurs.
“Yeah,” An agrees. She grins. “You’re not denying it, though.”
It’s Kohane who kisses her first this time, probably just to shut her up. But a kiss is a kiss, and An takes it in stride, tangling their fingers together with knuckles against knuckles, nails against palms. If Kohane thinks of herself as unfair, then An must be painfully selfish with the way she swallows up all of Kohane’s I love you s, the way she tunes everything else around them out, the way she wears promises that only they would understand.
She is. She admits it. Being selfish isn’t hard, but Kohane makes it even easier.