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“You wanna do what?”
Maki grips the doorframe with the hand that supports her weight like she’s trying to rip it out of the wall, and if Noritoshi were smarter or any less determined, he would probably take that as a cue to start running. But, as this is not an option, he coughs into his closed fist to clear his throat, then looks Maki dead in the eye and repeats, “we’ve been talking about getting married.
Maki still hasn’t slackened her grip on the doorframe. He’s starting to think that this may have been a mistake.
“Huh,” is all she says.
“You probably think this is kind of outdated,” he says, flushed with a heady combination of embarrassment and terror. “But you, uh, I...Mai...”
Maki sets her free hand on her hip. “Mai what?”
“I just thought Mai would want to know that you were okay with it before I...we...”
“Nah,” Maki says. “She doesn’t care.”
Maki likes playing with her food. Noritoshi has known this for as long as he and Maki have been anything close to friends, but he always seems to forget it when it matters. Unfortunate that Mai’s only living family feels the need to make his life difficult.
“Maybe it matters to me, then,” he says.
Maki looks at him for another long moment, then lets go of the doorframe (finally), opens the door, and waves Noritoshi through.
He would breathe a little easier if any part of him thought that was a good sign.
“So,” she says, standing with her hands on her hips as if he’s taking too long to take off his shoes. “You’re getting hitched.”
“No,” he says, setting his shoes neatly beside an upside-down pair that Maki probably kicked off at the door. “We’re just talking about it.”
“So you’re getting hitched.”
He knows he needs to stay on her good side, but he gives her a look.
“Why, though?” she asks.
“Well, because,” he says, feeling his cheeks start to warm. “Because.”
Maki looks like more entertained than she should be. “I don’t bite, you know.”
“Are you sure about that?”
She laughs, loud and brash, and waves him past the doorway. She pulls out a barstool and slings one leg over it, then leans her elbow against the counter; he follows.
“Seriously,” she says. “Why now?”
He shrugs.
“I would’ve guessed Mai wasn’t the marrying type.”
If Maki really thinks that, Noritoshi thinks, she’s probably projecting, because it’s her who’s always had a chip on her shoulder, not Mai. Maki’s the one who wants to push back, who had felt like it was a concession to admit that she cared for a man – Mai has never had that fight in her. It’s something that worries him about in both of them, that Maki will sabotage her own happiness on principle and that Mai won’t even know she can ask for hers, and that they’ll never really know why they don’t see eye to eye.
Still. That’s Maki’s read of the situation, not Mai’s.
“She’s open to it.”
“Open to it.” Maki frowns. “That’s not exactly glowing.”
“It’s Mai,” he says. “’I guess you don’t suck’ means ‘I love you.’”
Maki doesn’t look any less sour, but she shrugs. It’s very hard for anybody who has ever been loved by Mai not to agree with that.
“Did she bring it up or did you?”
“I did.”
“Hmph.”
“What’s that mean?”
Maki crosses her arms. “I expected as much.”
“Sorry?”
“It just tracks.”
Noritoshi sighs. “What does that mean, Maki?”
She doesn’t say anything, which is typical of Maki, who rarely feels that she owes anyone an explanation. He takes that to mean that the ball is in her court, and that if he wants anything good to come out of this conversation, he should probably leave it there.
“Nori?”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you wanna marry her?”
Of all the questions. “We’ve been together for four years, Maki.”
“Yeah, so why get married and not break up?”
“Break up?”
“I mean, you could.”
“Why would I want to?”
“Why would you not want to?”
He knows better than to take that as an insult to Mai, but the phrasing still irks him.
“I want to spend the rest of my life with her,” he says, painfully red-faced. “And as far as I know, she, um, she...” he swallows – “feels the same way.”
“Simp.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“What?” Maki asks. “You gonna deny it?”
“I care a lot about Mai,” he says, rubbing his sweaty palms on his jeans. “That doesn’t make me-“
“Would it kill you to act like a human?”
“Maki-san-“
“Just say you love her,” Maki says. “Honestly. How hard is it?”
“Like you would.”
Maki lifts the necklace chain from her shirt and shakes her engagement ring on the chain for effect. “Already have, actually.”
“Yeah, but if I asked you if you loved Yuuta,” he says, wishing he had a wet towel to wipe his face, “you would complain about him for an hour and then tell me you guessed he was okay, so I don’t know why you would ever think that I would tell my girlfriend’s sister that-“
“I don’t do that,” Maki protests, interrupting him.
“Yes, you do.”
Maki’s frown is starting to look more like a pout now. “I’m nice to Yuuta.”
“Eh...”
“Well, what I would do isn’t important.”
“I was just saying-“
“I wanna know,” she says, “why else.”
“I just...think it’s time.”
The tension leaves Maki’s brows first, then her set jaw, and after a moment, when she looks at him, she almost looks defeated. Noritoshi wishes he knew why.
“I’d be good to her,” he says, swallowing hard. “Well...I’d do my best.”
“I know, Nori.”
“Then why the interrogation?”
“Because I’m pretty sure this is about your mom, not my sister.”
Oh. Of course.
If there’s anything that Maki can be relied on to do more than poking the bear, playing with her food, and hiding her true feelings behind five layers of prickliness, it’s reading Noritoshi like a book. People who grow up rich and under pressure and fall from grace before their high school graduations tend to be able to do that.
Or maybe it’s just Maki.
“I did think about that,” he admits.
“She’s not pregnant, is she?”
His eyes goggle. “Pregnant? No.”
“Just makin’ sure.” Her eyes narrow. “’Cause if you knocked up my sister-“
“No,” he cuts in before she can say anything like that again, because the thought of what she would do to him if Mai were pregnant is far too horrifying to entertain. “No.”
There’s a glint in her eye that is at once knowing and a little threatening. “Thought so.”
“I just...know what people say,” he says, looking down. “About women like Mai.”
“Yeah.”
“And I don’t want to be like my father.”
“Nori?”
“Yeah?”
“If I thought you were gonna be anything like your old man,” Maki says, “I would’ve killed ya the day you asked her out.”
She would have; this had been one of his greatest consolations when he was trying to talk himself up to do this, that Maki would’ve done away with him already if she thought as little of him as he sometimes does of himself. He nods solemnly in acknowledgement of this most incontrovertible of facts.
“I know,” he replies. “I just always used to think about how different my mom’s life would’ve been if he’d been decent enough to marry her instead of getting his heir and then throwing her to the wolves.”
“Probably worse,” Maki says uncharitably. “He was a dick.”
Noritoshi, who was brought up under too many watchful eyes not to be at least a little bit shocked when someone swears in his presence even after all these years with Mai, flushes.
“Oh, grow up,” Maki scoffs. “You know I’m right.”
She is, as usual. That doesn’t make him any more a fan of her delivery.
“Look,” she says, softer this time, after a moment of awkward silence. “I get it, I do. But...I don’t think Mai would wanna marry you because you thought you had to protect her.”
“Well, when you look at the way people talk to women these days,” he says, a little embarrassed, “it just feels like the honorable thing to do.”
“But what if it wasn’t?” Maki asks. “What if no one was ever gonna say anything about either of you if you didn’t marry her?”
“That’s not how things work, Maki.”
“Yeah, but what if it was? Would you still want this?”
Inside, Noritoshi takes no time to answer. Of course he would. He’s the kind of person who likes when his ducks are in neat rows, and when he can sign a piece of paper to confirm that he loves Zenin Mai instead of having to peep out of his comfortable burrow and say it whenever somebody doesn’t realize what they are to each other. He wants to wake up with her, water her little cactus pots before she wakes up because he rises early and she rises late – if she yells at him for watering them too much, he’ll take it. He wants a promise that goes both ways that those things are permanencies, and he wants to be taught over a span of decades to understand Mai’s filthy jokes, and why her brain works the way it does. He wants lazy mornings and everything he owns in both of their names much more than he wants to shield her from a public that has never been kind to either of them.
But neither he nor Maki are the types to express fine feelings like those, and he knows when he looks up at her helplessly that she’d never really been expecting him to.
“Yeah,” he says. “I would.”
“And would she?”
He remembers last Thursday, carrying her in from the car when she’d fallen asleep in his passenger seat and refused to wake up, and the way she’d swatted at him but nestled herself against his chest anyway, and a smile tugs at his lips, because that is as much of an answer as Mai is ever going to give.
“I think so.”
Maki looks down at her feet, probably too uncomfortable with his sudden sincerity to reply. Noritoshi knows the feeling well.
“You’re the person whose opinion she cares about the most,” he says. “And if I’m going to marry her, I want her to know that you signed off on it.”
“My sister can do what she wants,” Maki says.
“Stop dodging the question, Maki-san.”
“But if I had to pick someone, I guess you’re not that bad.”
In Maki-speak, that is a glowing endorsement. He feels rather proud of having earned it.
“So kind of you to say that I’m not a complete degenerate,” he tells her. “I’m shocked you would say something so sentimental.”
“I’ll kill you,” she says.
“I know.”
“And it sounds like Mai wouldn’t like that very much, so I think you should shut up.”
“Probably,” he says, laughing.
Apparently this is not the response he was supposed to give, because Maki glares daggers at him. “I’ll kill you if you hurt her, too, you know.”
“I would never-“
“And I’ll kill you twice if you knock her up.”
Now, relieved, he’s merely amused by her threats. “What if she wanted me to?”
“Still.”
“We’ll renegotiate,” he says.
“No, we won’t.”
“You know that I was going to marry her whether you said yes or not, right?”
“Duh.”
“So why would I let you make the rules?”
“Because I’d kill you.”
“You gotta come up with a better way of congratulating people, Maki,” he says. “The whole ‘I’ll kill you’ act isn’t very versatile.”
“Sure it is.”
He wisely chooses not to express what he thinks about that.
“Anyways,” he says. “You’d support me proposing to Mai?”
“Support it? Nah. Gross.” She smiles, though. “But I’m not gonna stop ya.”
“Thank you.” It hits him, finally, what she’s really saying, and he grins – “thank you so much, Maki-chan.”
“’Course.”
“So, uh...we’re good?”
“I mean, no, but...”
“So we’re good.”
“She’s always wanted to go to Phuket,” Maki says. “Just so you know.”
“I do know.” He smiles – “is this your way of saying you want to get a vacation out of our wedding?”
“Maybe,” Maki says, smiling. “It’s the least you can do for being weird with my sister.”
“We’re not weird,” he says, but he gets it. It must be strange, thinking about her twin like that.
“Yeah, you are.”
He doesn’t choose to tell her that he thinks they must all be weird. After all, none of them ever would have found each other if they weren’t.