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“Checkmate,” Dazai says, reaching over to swipe Dostoevsky’s king piece off of the chessboard to bop her on the head with it. “I won. Again. Come on, you’re getting soft with me, this is hardly a challenge anymore if you let me win!”
Dostoevsky laughs as Dazai reaches over and fixes the lavender sprig that he almost wrenched loose from her braid, but to tell the truth—she has something on her mind. She tilts her head at him, fixing him with a gentle smile.
“I’m not letting you win today,” she admits, “I just have something to talk to you about so I’ve been a bit distracted.”
Dazai tilts his head back, mimicking her, and the bandages on his neck slip down slightly to show off a purple mark on the left side of his throat that she’d mouthed into his flesh two nights before. Her lips twitch a bit farther upward as she sees it.
“You are beautiful,” she says, and Dazai suppresses a guffaw behind a half-bandaged hand, which had specifically been a result of him falling into one of her blackberry bushes rather than his abnormal preference for cosmetics.
“That’s a weird thing to want to talk to me about.” Dazai leans back and runs a hand through his shaggy hair—he hadn’t cut it since Dostoevsky found him (miserable, at a small bar, pointing to drinks to order as he hadn’t thought to learn a lick of Russian, and without a single document to his name).
‘I don’t like salons,’ he told her on his nineteenth birthday, as she had been running her fingers through his wind-tousled hair, ‘because I don’t like being touched.’ And she had felt special then when he craned his neck to kiss her on the mouth. A warm lick of flame melting the icy heart she’d built up gradually, over many chilly Russian winters and many men who came to stain their mouths with blackberry juice in the summer only to leave before the first frost. That was when she decided to learn an instrument, to soothe the dark circles under his eyes and night terrors that plagued him each sundown. Dazai picked the cello. His night terrors seemed to get better after she began to play for him.
“It isn’t,” Dostoevsky insists, “but that wasn’t what I was going to say, anyway.”
Dazai flutters his long eyelashes at her. “You were too distracted by my handsome face?”
“Something like that, I think.”
Dazai had been forced to abandon his hormone treatments when he was eighteen for the same reason that he’d come to Russia with no documents—a reason Fyodor wasn’t privy to, in fact, but she wouldn’t bring it up herself. His voice is half-transitioned, and his fat redistribution slowly began to revert over the two years (give or take a few months) that she’s known him. Dostoevsky thinks he’s interesting. Dazai says he’s ugly. She does not agree to disagree but Dazai is a very stubborn man. She likes it when he’s nice to himself.
She’s offered to try to get Dazai to a new doctor a few times, but he’s always gotten a dull look in his eyes and told her not to worry about it. She isn’t truly sure why, because he is so jumpy about his returning softness, but then again, she isn’t sure why he flinched the first time she touched his thighs either, even if she has a few guesses. She isn’t sure about a lot of things, when it comes to Dazai, but she understands him better than she’d ever understood anyone else.
“What did you actually want to talk about?” Dazai is playing with the green carnations in the vase on the table, rubbing the petals between his fingers.
'Flowers are ephemeral once you cut them,’ Dazai always tells her, but every time she places fresh carnations in the vase on the table she catches him smiling from the shadows out of the corner of her eye. He is like a little specter haunting her home, sometimes, peering around corners and peeking out from under blankets. Maybe less of a specter and more of a pet cat. Dazai tends to pluck the petals off of the carnations when he plays with them, but Dostoevsky is patient with him. She can always pick out new ones, and watch him smile again from his lurking spot on the loveseat.
Dostoevsky watches his fingers caress the spring-green petal for a few more heartbeats before she speaks up. “You’re leaving in a few weeks.”
Dazai’s gaze is torn from the flower, and without his focus on it, one of his nails accidentally tears a petal. That’s okay. Dostoevsky can pick a new one.
“Yeah. I’m going back to Japan. I’ve got a job set up for me in Yokohama,” he says, without elaborating much.
Dostoevsky nods. “That sounds nice,” she says. “I’ll have to pack my chessboard.”
“Why’s that?”
“So we can keep playing chess, of course. I want to come with you.”
The owner of the bar Dostoevsky had met Dazai in owned an old glass chessboard, and when Dazai—quite eighteen, quite obsessed with peculiar items, and quite drunk—had seen it, and seen her, he’d begged the owner to let them use it. Dostoevsky, who was not quite as eighteen, nor quite as drunk, but just as interested in all things pretty and fragile, had translated for him and promised to take care of it, and the owner had relented. The chessboard had to have been handmade, and the pieces were elegantly carved crystal, one half frosted and the other half clear, instead of separated into black and white. Dostoevsky had never seen anything like it before; despite the similarities to more affordable, simpler glass chessboards, this one had its own unique carvings to designate pieces. The glass of the board itself was covered in little scratches from the movements of the chess pieces during the hundreds, maybe thousands, of games it had seen over the decades.
‘You should be happy I studied as many languages as I could as a child,’ Dostoevsky chided Dazai in Japanese, as she carefully set down the chessboard in their booth. ‘Who moves somewhere without learning the language?’ (Of course, he ended up picking it up with ease, within only a few months, after she’d met him.)
Dazai gazed up at her with hazy eyes and smiled. ‘I guess I am happy.’
‘You won’t be able to play while you are drunk.’
‘I shall!’ Dazai insisted, and chose the frosted pieces (and would continue to do so for the next two years). ‘Anything to impress a pretty lady.’
Dostoevsky shook her head, smiling. ‘You cannot impress a lady with drunk chess, and besides, how do you know I am a lady?’
Dazai had taken a second to think, then.
He’d cocked his head like a Labrador Retriever and glanced at her with interest, now. ‘If not a lady, what?’
At this time Dostoevsky hadn’t realized the other’s fascination with gender because Dazai’s breasts were bound heavy with bandages and she’d been a little too tipsy on vodka herself to make much sense of him or bother with an explanation of her being, so she’d responded with, ‘Something special.’
And Dazai had nodded, and they played chess.
That reaction—and the subsequent fact that she struggled a little in checkmating a drunk eighteen year old—endeared Dazai to her. Dostoevsky continued to play games with him that night. More chess, which became even more stimulating when Dazai sobered up a bit even though she still won each game; darts, which Dazai bested her at with little to no effort at all; Dazai finally dared her to play hawk-dove with him, the first to back away from the other’s face would have to pay the tab.
Dostoevsky had laughed. ‘What a childish way to try to get someone to kiss you.’
Dazai insisted that wasn’t the case and then neither of them pulled away, until Dazai had already managed to slip his tongue into her mouth, and they finally both needed to breathe. They could not decide who won, but Dostoevsky paid the tab anyway.
The bar owner offered Dostoevsky the chessboard as a gift when she left with Dazai. ‘My wife was a glassworker, and made the board, and carved the crystals herself, and gave it to me instead of a ring when we were to be wed six decades ago. I’ve been a widow for three decades. It is time to give this to a new love.’
‘I mustn’t,’ Dostoevsky insisted, but then Dazai had wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his nose into her neck from behind and her heart had soared.
‘I think you should,’ the old woman told her when she saw the look in her eyes, packing up the chessboard in its box and handing it to her. With Dazai’s hair tickling her skin, she accepted the gift.
Dazai raises his eyebrows at her, and she looks back at him with a mild expression. “What do you mean?”
“We are going to Yokohama,” Dostoevsky says. “I must bring our chessboard. I can speak well enough, but I will have to work on my handwriting.”
Dazai goes back to playing with the petals of the same green carnation in the vase, this time plucking them one by one and rearranging them on the table into a mimicry of the flower.
“What’s wrong?” She asks, puzzled. “Are you not excited?”
Dazai glances at her, running his nails over the single ripped petal. He stands from his seat and takes an apple from the fruit basket on the table. He sinks his teeth into the speckled red and yellow flesh, chewing thoughtfully. He swallows, drawing Dostoevsky’s attention to the vague outline of an adam’s apple on his throat when it bobs slightly.
He steps up to her and leans down, his lips glossy with the juice from the apple, and kisses her, his tongue sweet with the sugary tang of the fruit. He plays with her braid with a gentle hand, careful not to disturb the lavender woven into it, while she licks the juice from his sticky lips. He pulls back with a soft breath and looks her over.
“It was nice playing games while it lasted. I’ll remember you. I had better stop spending time here, though, so I don’t get distracted and miss my flight back to Yokohama soon. Good-bye, Dostoevsky.”
She cannot find the words to respond to Dazai as he walks out of her home, taking the apple, and her tethered heart, along with him.
I’ll remember you too, she decides as the door shuts, and she smashes the chessboard on the floor, and then takes each of the crystal chess pieces outside, and beats them into little fragments with her shovel, saving the frosted king for last.
She does not break her cello, but restrings it, as Dazai had been the last one to do so, and the thought of his fingerprints on her cello strings makes her feel ill.
And the next day she carefully unravels her braid, and places each sprig of lavender in a line on her coffee table from longest to shortest. She gathers up glass bottles to preserve the flowers and the next day after that, she casts them in epoxy resin, capping each little bottle to seal the blooms away forever. After every single bottle is capped, her house quickly loses its endemic scent of honey-lavender. She has no reason to make pancakes for breakfast every day and drizzle them with honey and whatever fresh berries she’s picked from her garden, so she stops.
She doesn’t even like honey.
She takes a seat in front of her dresser mirror, and takes a pair of garden shears to her hair.