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Their first kiss happens on a winter day. It happens under the lightest sprinkling of snow, in warm gloves and cold feet, flushed faces against a blinding white background.
They’re walking home the last day before winter break in their first year of high school. They’ve outgrown the need to find excuses to see each other outside of school, and the two young hearts are bursting in excitement as they prattle off plans and contest ideas for the chilly season. Nishikata mentions taking a trip on Christmas to see some tree decorating event he heard about on TV, and Takagi teases that she hadn’t even agreed to spend Christmas with him yet. Nishikata panics, then blushes and rolls his eyes when he catches on to her playful smile, and Takagi laughs brightly, looping her arms around his and leaning her head on his shoulder. In the cold winter air, his red-hot ears emit visible steam.
He’s proud to say he’s gotten a lot more comfortable with Takagi-san in the past year and a half of kind-of-officially dating her. Getting closer came so naturally that they never got around to the whole, big confession, declaration of love, thing. Instead, they reached for each other’s hands more often while walking, leaned their heads together sometimes when enjoying the peace and quiet of their spot behind the shrine, and gave polite (or awkward, in Nishikata’s case) smiles of acknowledgement when people at school assumed their relationship. So Nishikata would say he’s come a long way from the bumbling, stubbornly in denial, flustered mess he used to be.
But sometimes, like right now, when Takagi loosens from her perfectly cool composure and latches on to Nishikata with such carefree affection, Nishikata feels thrust back to square one.
He stares at the snowflakes catching on her thick eyelashes, the rosy tint on the apples of her cheeks and the delicate tip of her nose. He doesn’t know if it’s the progression of their relationship or just the work of time, but she seems to get prettier by the day. He tries not to think about it too much, tries to keep his mind on their games and his next plan, otherwise the quickness with which his heart reacts to her is pathetically dismantling. Wait, is that how she keeps catching him off guard and winning no matter what he tries? Does being cute count as cheating? Nishikata begins to space out, wondering how the odds might change if she were a little less… appealing. No, that sounds creepy, Nishikata scolds himself. Distracting . That’s it. Less distrac-
“Nishikata?” Takagi’s soft voice shakes him out of his thoughts. “If you keep staring at me like that, I might blush.”
“What?!” Nishikata stumbles, mouth gaping in horror. Was he really staring for that long? “I was just! There were so many snowflakes on your eyelashes I was wondering if they would melt into your eyes and blind you, and then I could challenge you to a… a seeing contest… or something…” He trails off in shame, averting his gaze in guilt.
“Hm~ So you were staring at my eyes?” Takagi counters easily.
“That’s not how I said it!”
“And what would a ‘seeing contest’ even be?” Takagi giggles. “Really, I think you deserve a punishment just for lying so poorly.”
“That’s not fair!” Nishikata objects, finally turning to face her again. As soon as their eyes meet, he simmers down and clears his throat. “I mean… I am sorry… for lying.”
“That’s okay, it was funny. But you know, it’s pretty normal for most people to stare at their girlfriend, just because.”
Girlfriend. Nishikata might not be nervous about being seen as a couple anymore, but he had yet to use such mature labels. He stares at the ground and the two trudge along in silence, snow crunching under their boots in tandem rhythm.
“Hey, Nishikata, have you ever heard of an Inuit kiss?”
“You mean like an eskimo kiss? When they rub their noses?”
“That’s one version, but the Inuit kiss is pressing your nose to someone’s cheek and sniffing. Do you know why it started?”
Nishikata shakes his head, something in his intuition telling him to be wary of an oncoming trick or tease.
“It’s so cold where the Inuits live that they have to cover everything except the middle part of their face, so they can’t kiss each other’s cheeks with their lips easily. In fact, if a couple wanted to kiss outside, their lips might get stuck together.”
A sucker for random factoids and lore, Nishikata can’t conceal his excited intrigue.
“Really?! That cold? That’s insane, you probably can’t hang your clothes outside to dry then either.”
“Yep… Good thing it doesn’t get as cold here in Japan, right? Can you imagine if couples kept getting their lips frozen together?”
Nishikata blinks at the strange image in his head that conjures—Couples attached at the lips awkwardly shuffling to the train station together, or having to show up at the hospital to get some special treatment to separate their lips. Naturally, his face begins to heat, but a glance over at Takagi shows her as cool and calm as ever. He should try to be cool about these things too, and get his embarrassment under control lest she one-up him in maturity. Huffing out a determined breath, he relaxes the tension in his shoulders and tries to relax his face as well. Couples making out is no big deal, he tells himself, forcing his eyelids to lower to what (he hoped) looked like a stoic, mature nonchalance. Yes, couples make out all the time and it doesn’t bother him one bit.
Couples… He supposes he and Takagi are part of that group now, too.
Crap.
Nishikata feels all his forced relaxation earlier reverse back in a split second, blood heating, heart racing, and face freezing in a grimace. Because unfortunately for him, the otherwise innocent thought, joined with the original topic, forced a mental image of being stuck to Takagi by the lips. He trips on nothing, and almost stops walking completely, but forces his feet to keep moving in the most unsuspicious way possible he could manage. He almost glances at Takagi again to see if she’s noticed his change in behavior, but whips his head right back when her lips come into view.
He tries desperately to shake the image out of his head, but the more he tries to think about not thinking about it, the more he sees it. They haven’t kissed (unsurprising given the time it took them just to get to this point), and the few times he’s thought about it, it was more of a vague feeling in the moment, like a quiet urge to lean in close. But he doesn’t know where she stands, whether she’s felt that quiet urging yet, so he feels pretty rotten for imagining it so vividly when it’s not something she would agree to in real life. Head still stiffly facing forward and eyes stubbornly trained on the side of the road away from Takagi, Nishikata wonders how subtly he could dunk his face in the snow to cool down.
“Let’s play a game,” Takagi suddenly says, and he almost screams out of relief. Yes! A game will take his mind off the intruding thoughts.
“Good idea!” he says, a little too loud and rushed, and Takagi gives an amused look. Letting go of his arm, she steps in front of him, leaning slightly in, and Nishikata’s eyeballs almost burn with the willpower it takes to not let them slip down to her lips . “Um, do you have a game in mind?” he stutters, eager to redirect his focus.
“Guess why I brought up the Inuit kiss.”
Nishikata chokes on his own saliva. Today was not a lucky day for him.
“You get three guesses. Loser buys hot chocolate tomorrow morning from that stand we saw on the way to school.”
Glaring upwards, to think and also out of sheer desperation to get away from her face, Nishikata tries to center his mind back to logic. If it were him, he would’ve brought up any cool fact he learned just to share it, or maybe to embarrass her for not knowing it. Takagi didn’t mock him for not knowing the eskimo kiss origins though. Bringing it up ‘just because’ wasn’t like her, and was too simple of an answer… But maybe that was her game! Hiding the most simple answer in plain sight so he wouldn’t guess it. Smirking, he lets his eyes drop down to meet hers again.
“You brought it up… for no deep reason. Just because you thought it was a cool fact,” he states confidently.
“Bzzt. Wrong,” she replies easily, and he scowls.
Okay… he has to think more like her and less like him. When has Takagi brought up trivia randomly before? As it dawns on him, he can almost hear the lightbulb click in his brain. She’s always said these things suddenly in the past when she was messing with him. Like the myth about falling in love with the person you end the campfire dance with, and the eraser crush thing.
“Ah, Takagi-san,” he chuckles dramatically. “You’re so used to being the mind-reader that you’ve underestimated how well I know you, too. I, too, am an observer of human behavior, and after all the time we’ve spent together, I know your tricks like the back of my hand.”
“Oh, really?” she only says, with the tone of a mother humoring their child’s imagination. Nishikata’s eyebrow twitches in irritation at her lack of worry.
“Yes, really! You forget that you’re also human, and therefore, just as predictable.” Nishikata takes a deep breath before his big reveal, reveling in the moment before his first win. “You brought up the Inuit kiss and getting frozen lips to tease me, knowing that it would make me imagine couples kissing, and I would get embarrassed!”
Takagi’s mouth parts a little, eyes widening almost imperceptibly, and Nishikata closes his eyes in triumph. She’s surprised. He finally got her. After all these years—
“Oh, that’s really close, Nishikata!”
His eyes fly back open, unable to say anything except make some incomprehensible sounds of indignation. Takagi merely smiles back, and he locks his jaw, fists clenching at his sides.
“If you’re counting it wrong just for some minor technicality, like you wanted to fluster me and not embarrass me, that won’t be fair. If it means the same thing, it counts.”
“What kind of person do you think I am, Nishikata? Really, I’m not that petty, and I wouldn’t lie to you,” Takagi laughs.
He sighs in acceptance, trying to make this last guess count. ‘Close’ should be a huge hint… But he could be just slightly off in so many ways.
“Here, since you were so close, I’ll give you a hint,” Takagi says, seeming to take pity on his frustration and leaning in closer. “Everything was right, except… I didn’t want you to imagine other couples kissing.” She leans back again, standing upright with her hands clasped behind her back, an innocent smile on her face as if she didn’t just stop his world.
Nishikata can hardly hear his own thoughts over the blood rushing in his ears. The emphasis on other . Other couples. Meaning… meaning she wanted him to… think about this couple? As in, them? Like, she wanted him to imagine kissing her? He feels too cold and hot at the same time, goosebumps on his skin and a shiver in his spine, but sweat on his palms and a heat in his stomach. He tries to consider any other possible implication. But unless he imagined that emphasis on ‘other,’ she’s laid the answer all out on the table for him. The problem is, how can he possibly say that out loud? His hands flex and unflex as he tries to figure out the best escape route. If he says what he thinks it is, and he’s wrong, not only would it be embarrassing, but he would come off totally presumptuous and self-centered. If he says it, and he’s right, well… What do two people even say to each other after acknowledging they were both thinking about kissing? His throat tightens. No, it would be just as awkward and suffocating as being wrong. There’s no way out. Unless…
“I dunno,” Nishikata mutters, dropping his head, shoulders slumping in defeat. “I give up, I’ll just get the hot chocolate tomorrow.”
If he had kept his head up, he might’ve noticed the fraction of a second in which Takagi’s eyes fell, before quickly slipping back to normal and reinforcing her easygoing smile.
“Hm, thought so,” she hums, slipping her gloved hand back in his bare one and continuing their walk home like nothing happened. It was true, she did kind of see this coming, so even if she’s a bit disappointed, she doesn’t feel all that surprised.
Nishikata’s so focused on staring at the ground, battling his inner turmoil for the rest of the walk, that when Takagi stops walking and he looks up, he’s startled by the sight of the cobbled wall surrounding her house. Tilting his head back, he sees the familiar curtains of her bedroom window on the second floor peeking over. Yep, he confirms with a sinking heart. It’s definitely her house, and her gate is right around the corner. Normally he would be happy to end the day here, strolling to his own house with a warmth in his chest and excitement for their time together tomorrow. But today, something feels unfinished between them.
“Well, then,” Takagi simply says, voice so soft and airy it’s almost a whisper. She turns to face Nishikata, hands still linked. His wide eyes, furrowed brows, mouth opening and closing a few times before locking his jaw closed, all tell her that he’s determined to say or do something, but he doesn’t know what. It grips her heart, how he tries so hard for her, even when he doesn’t have to, even when he could so easily give up on their challenges, give up on her . For the less sure-footed Nishikata, her games and hints can’t be easy to decipher. And maybe it would be easier on both of them if she just got over that invisible barrier keeping her from asking for things directly. Maybe if she could just spell things out for him, no games or hints, they could move a lot faster.
But as she takes him in, his tousled hair and red cheeks, the emotions playing on his face like a movie, she decides it’s okay. They’re okay. As long as she can always see his sincerity, his complete devotion to figuring her out, radiating off of him like it is now, she’s okay with keeping things the way they are and waiting for him. Even if she has to wait her whole life.
“I guess we’ll see each other tomorrow morning, then,” she says with a warm, reassuring smile. Nishikata gulps, resisting the urge to grip her hand tighter to keep her from leaving.
Should he kiss her? He wants to, so fiercely it’s shortening his breath. Now that he’s considered the possibility she wants him to, it’s evolved far beyond the quiet urges he felt before, like the world’s strongest magnet pulling him to her, and it’s taking more strength to not kiss her than it is to kiss her. But he’s still not 100% certain it’s what she wants, and Nishikata’s not that guy. He’s not the guy who dates a girl just to get close and do things with her. He’s not the guy who pushes when there is even an ounce of doubt.
Takagi’s hand begins to slip from his, and right before she turns around to head inside, he catches the faintest sigh, followed by the drop of her curved lips.
Nishikata’s also not the guy who lets his girl go home disappointed.
He latches back on to her hand, and in one swift move, whips her back around to face him and pulls her close enough for their chests to almost touch. It happens too quickly for her to stop the gasp that leaves her, and the two stare at each other with wide eyes, for once both looking equally as nervous, overwhelmed, young and unsure. Their staggered breaths fill the air between them with puffs of fog that waft up and intertwine just over their heads before fading.
He lets his eyes drop to her lips, then back up to her eyes, searching for any last signs of disgust or fear or panic, but all he finds is warmth and anticipation. Nishikata’s never played poker before, but he’s seen it enough in his western movies to know it is as high risk as it is high reward, and as he takes in one last steadying breath and begins to lean in, he imagines this is what ‘going all in,’ surrendering every last resource with no one but fate to confirm if you’ve made the right choice, feels like.
Takagi begins to lean in, too, and he decides this must be what winning it all back feels like.
They meet in the middle, eyes shuttering closed as her soft lips meet his slightly chapped ones. Snowflakes land sparsely on their cheeks and fireworks burst behind their eyelids. Every nerve is abuzz, every thought is deafened, and without realizing it, they both press closer and closer to each other until her free hand is clutching his uniform and their bodies are flush together. He’s worried his heart might be sparking actual electricity and burning his insides; She’s worried she’ll never love more than she does now. Neither of them know what they’re doing, if they’re kissing right or wrong or good or bad, but they know no other place has ever fit them so well before.
A nearby tree rustles under the weight of a landing bird, and at the reminder the rest of the world is still moving and existing, the two break away, eyes opening slowly. Nishikata unconsciously licks his lips, and tastes the sweet dusting on the manjus Mina shared with the class. Realizing it’s from Takagi’s lips and not his own, he turns flame-red and awkwardly flounders for the right thing to say. Takagi looks over his shoulder.
“Oh, hi Dad.”
A cartoon anvil may as well have dropped from the sky and smashed him into the floor considering the quickness with which he spun around and dropped to his hands and knees to beg for forgiveness.
“Sir, I am so sorry! Please-” He’s cut off by Takagi’s laughter. At first, he’s ticked that she can laugh at a time when his future is so grave, but then he slowly lifts his head to see that there’s no one in front of him. He quickly stands up again, dusting off the snow on his uniform and glaring at a still-laughing Takagi. She’s laughing so hard she has to wipe at the tears leaking out.
“It’s not that funny!” he pouts. “Actually, it’s not funny at all, I thought I was a dead man!” Takagi finally slows down enough to breathe, though hiccups of laughter still bubble through.
“I’m sorry, Nishikata, it’s just, you looked so nervous after that I wanted to distract you and take some pressure off. I didn’t know you were that scared of my parents,” she explains, a Cheshire-like grin contradicting any remorse for the prank.
“Anyone would be scared of meeting parents after getting caught kissing their precious child!” Nishikata defends, rolling his eyes. Takagi’s eyes light up.
“So you admit it, we kissed.”
“Well, I mean, yeah,” Nishikata frowns, confused why it would be debatable when they were both present for it.
“I kind of thought you were going to deny it and pretend it never happened,” she teases, making his eye twitch.
“I’m not that childish!”
“No, I guess you’re not,” she hums in agreement. Then, leaning in with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, “I guess we’re both kind of grown up now.”
Nishikata can only stare back dumbly at that, feeling the oddest mix of accomplishment and fraudulence, like winning an award for something you didn’t do. They are growing up, and the kiss was a milestone indicator of that. But he doesn’t feel grown up or all that different. He feels exhilarated and fluttery, lucky and dreamily content. But for all his preemptive anxieties about making such an irreversible change to their relationship, he still feels like Nishikata and she still feels like Takagi.
Maybe the adults are right, and they’re just growing up faster than they can realize right now. Maybe in the future they’ll look back on this moment and think about how much it changed them, and how much they’ve changed since then.
But he kind of hopes they don’t.
He hopes for future Nishikata and future Takagi, no matter how much they grow or how many milestones they pass, they never stop feeling like first loves and first kisses.