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It’s nighttime when she first catches him. She digs teeth older than mercy into the soft column of his neck, and, bleary-eyed and brain throbbing with dopamine, he doesn’t even feel them sink in.
It’s inevitable, really. By the time she’d caught him, Adachi had already found himself addicted to the sickly sort of comfort that nightfall brings--he likes the quiet streets, likes how few eyes are on him, likes being on the clock without any actual work to do. He’s spotlit in a liminal sort of streetlight, new enough to fluoresce a sickly sodium vapor orange yet old enough to flicker in a way that makes his head pound, and for a too-brief second feels like the king of the world.
He takes his gun out of its holster with inappropriate theatrics and pretends to pump his imaginary enemies full of holes, blowing away the imaginary smoke pouring from its not-really-smoldering barrel as their limp bodies clatter to the ground. He smiles to himself, coolly sliding the gun back into place like the misunderstood hero he’d deluded himself into thinking the world has forced him to be.
He is the only one left in the parking lot, he thinks, taking an inelegant seat on the curb outside the Moel gas station. He always liked the place--chain establishments comforted him, always had, but especially out here in the sticks. They’re ubiquitous and modern and always feel the same inside no matter where they are. Besides Junes, it was the only bastion of urban dignity the sleepy town had; the final tangible vestige of his roots in the big city and the one thing still there to reassure him that he wouldn’t feel like a complete stranger if one day he ever made it big enough to come back home.
He feels like a broken-winged hawk--a predator that once cut through the skies like paper but now shackled and listless and growing more and more used to being fed hand-cut meat by forceps, and fears that he’ll never regain his edge even when they let him back into the wilderness--but for just one moment he feels the wind in his wild feathers again.
He notices the smell of cigarette smoke before he notices her, yet still manages to be surprised when she's suddenly kneeling next to him, appearing silently like a thick fog. He can scarcely make out her features in the dim light--she’s wearing a lopsided, brusque approximation of a smile, the kind you can only see if you're especially hopeful that a girl might be smiling at you tonight. He blinks.
“Hey, keijisan.”
“Can I help you?”
(He thought he’d practiced his methodically easygoing voice to exhaustive perfection, and recoils at how his voice cracks when speaking to her. The smile he returns to her feels coy and unnatural on his face.)
“Jus’ wanted to thank you, I guess. You guys at the station do a lot for us, y’know?” There’s a sort of lackadaisical dishonesty in her voice that plucks a certain chord in Adachi’s chest, like he’s looking at his own reflection in a funhouse mirror. “I don’t know who else to thank for making it so I can stand out here on the graveyard shift ‘n not think I’m gonna die, so. Thanks.”
She extends a hand and he laughs like she’d just told him the funniest joke in the world. Sure, anyone in their right mind would scoff at someone calling Adachi some kind of model officer, but he’s trained himself to outwardly appear like he really does care for the little town and preserving all the justice he can in it, even if he’s not always the hardest worker. For some reason, the attendant makes him feel like there’s no need to pretend.
His laughter dies in his throat when he hears her start laughing too--it's the kind of laugh you strain your ears to hear more of, the kind that gets stuck in your chest until your heartbeat thumps to its rhythm.
“You’re funny, seriously. Everyone knows I don’t do shit out here.”
“I know,” she says with an almost ancient, matronly fondness, “I wanted to say hi ‘cause you always tell me to keep the change when you buy something. I just wanted to butter you up a little.”
“Hell, a girl going out of her way to say hi to me just to say hi? C’mon. Do I look the type to need more than that to make my night?”
“Haw. Could’ve guessed by looking at you.”
“Am I that bad?”
“The way you squirm gives it away. Not in a bad way, though. I kinda like it.”
She reextends her hand to him, and this time he takes it. Her grip is just a little too firm and a little too fond and lasts just a little too long--she’s just a little too hesitant to let go--for him to think of it like a normal handshake. He feels something in his chest shift and wonders how long it’s been since a girl last touched him at all. He’s suddenly dizzy, and blinks hard to steady himself and resist the urge to vomit in front of the first girl who’s talked to him on purpose for an embarrassingly long time. He feels a strange vibration in his teeth, through his whole body, leaving the lingering taste of iron in his mouth.
“A-Adachi Tohru," he says after regaining a bit of composure. "You’ve got a name, don’t you?”
“Just Nami’s fine.”
“One name? Are you a hooker or something?”
She snorts. “You wish. I’m just not gonna be in Inaba forever, so there’s no use in getting my name stuck here."
"Stuck?"
"I don't like it on people's tongues when it doesn't need to be. Not the sort of people around here, at least. Not now."
"Not even me?"
A dry laugh. "Maybe. Give me a little while, I'll think about it." She looks at him with intense eyes, pupils constricted like a tiger tailing a loose goat. "Don't get attached, though--just came here ‘cause the rent’s cheap. Once I’m done saving up and had enough of people watching, I’m gone, and I want it to be like I was never here in the first place.”
“That must be why everyone’s here. Can’t imagine any other reason anyone’d live here on purpose.”
“You’re telling me. This place’s the pits.”
“Haha. Good luck getting out, if that's really your plan. This town’s a death trap. Inverted thorns, or something. Once you’re here there’s no getting out." Adachi sighs. "You never really get used to it. I’ve been trying to for months.”
“What brought you here, then? Same reason?”
“Ah, no. Got demoted. It’s over for me.”
“Well, ‘f it’s any consolation, I get the feeling you can do it.” She takes a long drag from her cigarette before putting it out on the cold pavement. He looks down and realizes there’s probably a dozen burn marks on the curb, likely almost all of them hers. “There’s something about you, I can tell. I'm looking forward to keeping my eye on you.”
Before he knows it, her smoke break ends and she disappears as suddenly as she arrived, as if she were made of fog. The streets are quiet again, and for the first time since he arrived in Inaba, Adachi resents being left alone. That certain dry laugh of hers, brittle and poisonous and addictive, follows him all the way down the street, into his apartment, ringing like TV static long after the echo stops.
Desperate to force her out of his head, he sits cross-legged in front of the TV and plays a taped rerun of an interview his beloved Mayumi conducted. He’s never met the woman, but has spent so many months enraptured by her stage presence and natural charm through the screen that he feels like he’s spent a lifetime with her. Tonight, though, his focus wavers--normally he watches her with the same attentiveness of a leopard stalking an unfortunate and tantalizingly unaware bird, but tonight his mind keeps wandering elsewhere. He rests his head in his hand, staring at her from an awkard angle trying to find answers in her face, but can’t see past the red, blue and green color bars that crudely form it. For once, her image feels synthetic and flat.
He’s just had his first real non-professional interaction with a woman in months, and the incongruencies between how Mayumi acts in his idealized fantasy world and how Nami treated him are bothering him. For the very first time, the demure and servile well of affection he’s allowed her to become in his daydreams has become unappealing to him, almost uncanny.
He likes the sort of gentle gruffness of Nami. He sees himself in her--it’s not like interacting with some elegant alien like he always pictured talking to a woman seriously would be like. He’s never known a woman he’s been on the same wavelength on; he’d resigned himself to thinking all girls were the same--unreadable, arcane and fickle, beautiful yet distant, made of cold, fragile emotional porcelain--so he imagined his imaginary future with Mayumi the same way. Turning the memory of Nami’s sandpaper laugh and calloused, lingering hands in his mind like a pearl, he starts to question if that’s true, or if that’s what he wants at all anymore.
He imagines Mayumi off-camera to have that same scintillating inelegance that Nami had, and he’s so thrilled by it he’s dizzy. There’s a sickly warmth in his boxers, and he feels like he could reach through the TV and touch her face.
That’s stupid, isn’t it? he thinks to himself. He must be exhausted. Adachi elects to take himself to bed before his delirium grows any further.
He stares at the ceiling thinking about her in his futon for far too long. When was the last time a girl talked to him like that? When was the last time a girl talked to him at all outside of work? Again and again he replays the handshake in his head, details fuzzier each time. His memory of it becomes so misshapen that he’s able to delude himself into thinking she held his hand for real before eventually letting his restless mind be claimed to a fitful slumber.
He dreams of a mist that wraps around his body and holds him, tenderly, like he’s never been held before. It gets so close it constricts him, snakes down his throat to the point of anaphylaxis, and he wakes up cold.