Work Text:
The Ichikawa family garage looked as busy as ever when I showed up. Near the back of the shop I saw a splash of dark red quickly duck behind a car.
Yeah, it's what I thought. Nattsun was avoiding me. That really wasn't like her, but like, I got it. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't also scared to talk. Well, you know what they say, initiative is everything.
I casually walked towards the back of the shop, making sure to peek around a bit. We were clearly in a situation where Nattsun was already in a defensive posture. Pressing the attack too hard too early would open some room for a counterattack. Feel out the situation first before you commit.
"Nattsun~, you here?"
I heard a ratchet start turning loudly from beneath a big kei truck. Definitely keeping her stance up, but she'd made a fundamental strategic error. She still hadn't figured out what to do by the time I called out to her. I smiled to myself. That was always the one crack in her defense…even when she couldn't bring herself to see me, she couldn't help but want to. I pretended I didn't notice and put on my cheerful face.
Nattsun's coveralls looked less dirty than normal today. That figured. Today was Sunday, and the Ichikawas rarely did mechanical work unless they had a client emergency or had a backlog of work to clear. She'd probably been taking inventory or handling paperwork when she spotted me walking up.
I squatted down and looked over to Nattsun. I always liked seeing her stretched out on her back like this, especially when her bulging forearms twisted and tightened with every turn of the ratchet. I see. She'd recovered from her earlier mistake and committed to the tactic of investing herself in work, so that she definitely wouldn't be able to make eye contact when I showed up.
"Hey Nattsun~, busy weekend?"
She stopped turning the wrench and looked towards me. She did it so naturally, too - if I hadn't seen her duck behind the truck earlier I really would have believed she had been hard at work. That's one of the things I liked about her: once she committed to something she could be absolutely tenacious, if not pigheaded.
"Yeah. It's been a while since I've seen Daddy so busy. I think he got feeling cooped up in the hospital and bit off a little more than he was ready to chew."
"I see. Is this a bad time?"
She thought for a moment before taking a peek at her watch. "No, it's getting late anyway."
She put down her ratchet and rolled out from under the truck. I was a little confused that she'd given in so easily. The sudden change of heart put me a bit on my back foot. I guessed deep down she really did want to talk. I'd have to be careful as I felt out the situation between us.
"Happy to hear it!" I held out my hand to help her sit up. "It's been a little while since we've hung out."
"Yeah, well, like I said, it's been busy here. Figured since you hadn't texted much you were busy with classes too."
"Yeah, guess I have been."
"Sorry to drag you out the other day then."
Okay. Careful might have been too light of a word. I was going to have to be downright delicate. She had definitely just given me a warning shot, telling me to take this seriously and get to the point.
To be clear, I had definitely texted her about the usual amount. I hadn't exactly tried to forget that she'd drunkenly confessed, but I'd wanted a bit of time to sort out my own feelings and make sure things had settled between us before we met up. The last thing I wanted to do was make her feel cornered - that's when the situation gets the most dangerous.
Had I been too cautious?
I smiled and waved my hand. "Hey, hey, don't worry about it. You know you can always count on me when you need a hand. So what were you and Kamikoshi-senpai talking about anyway? I thought you two didn't get along super well."
Her expression softened a little bit. "Yeah, well, you know. We found some common ground."
She hadn't really answered the question, but her deliberately vague reply had a meaning as clear as day. She was telling me, 'I gave you the initiative last week, Akari. Take it before I get mad.'
Still, it was a little early in our sparring match to press that hard. You gotta work the body a little bit.
"Did you talk about relationships or something? I think Kamikoshi-senpai and Nishina-senpai got together at some point recently."
Nattsun's face darkened. "Oh yeah? How'd you figure that?"
Well, for one Nattsun never drank harder than when the topic of other peoples' relationships came up. It had gotten bad enough recently that I'd started avoiding the topic around her. I'm not sure I could think of another topic that would get her as drunk as she'd gotten with Senpai.
As for Senpai getting together with Nishina-senpai, I'd seen them together on campus the other day. To me, it was glaringly obvious that their body language with one another had changed. Senpai clearly was less on guard when Nishina-senpai was sitting beside her. In fact, she seemed to have lost all sense of doubt and was even taking the initiative to hold Nishima-senpai's hand. Good job, Senpai! There might be a bit of a martial artist in you after all! Anyway, this would be hard to explain to someone without martial arts training.
So I simply said, "They seem a little more familiar with one another. In karate, you notice little changes in body language like that."
"Huh. Good for them." Her tone was a little petulant. I could tell her temper was starting to come up, and I realized I really needed to cut to the point. This wasn't a finesse situation.
"So, hey. Look. When I was carrying you home, you told me you love me. Did you mean it?"
"I had too much to drink. You know how it can be." Even as she lightly brushed it off, she gave me an expectant look.
"Hey, that wasn't the first time."
"Huh, you noticed?"
Woah, another jab. Nattsun might have handed me the initiative, but she wasn't giving me an opening.
I guess I should have expected that. When it comes to matters of love, once might be happenstance, twice is sending a message. I knew that, and yet…okay, yeah, I probably shouldn't have waited as long to talk to her about this as I had.
"I did, actually."
"So why didn't you say anything?"
"Nattsun, I…" I trailed off, unable to find the words. What I wanted to say was a punch that was hard to pull.
"That's what I figured."
As I hesitated, Nattsun took an uncharacteristically bold shot at me. It felt like she was trying to push me off balance. All it had done was open her up.
Okay then. I guess Nattsun would be getting a punch at full power. I'm being serious here, too. It's not like I showed up unprepared to talk about this.
"What did you figure? That I'd be your girlfriend based on something you said while you were piss drunk?"
"..."
Decisive hit.
Pressing the attack, I continued, "Yeah, that's what I figured. So let's talk. You've been avoiding me and I got worried. I couldn't tell if you were serious or i-"
"Don't treat me like I'm stupid, Akari. I might have regretted what I said after I sobered up, but I meant it. Every word. I love you, and you can either take it or leave it. But don't make me wait a week to talk about it. It pissed me off." Her voice was hard, but it was starting to crack. Her eyes also looked watery. "That's what I was talking to Kamikoshi-senpai about."
"Wait wait what? Senpai was asking about our relationship status?" That seemed really unlike her to go barging into someone else's business.
"No…" she sighed. "When Kamikoshi-senpai asked me for advice, I thought she was trying to make fun of me. But she was really just trying to figure things out with Nishina-senpai. I was so embarrassed."
Now I was really confused. Nattsun sniffled, then continued. "And at some point I realized I was angry at her, because it sounded like she was stringing Nishina-senpai along…and then I realized she genuinely didn't understand her own feelings. There I was, pissed off at someone who was scared to be in a situation I'd always been afraid of. So I decided to stop being a hypocrite and demanded that she call you so I could confess to you then and there." As she finished she broke down completely. "That was so stupid of me…I'm sorry."
Wow. I really didn't know what else to say, so I pulled Nattsun into a hug. As I pulled her close, the smell of the garage got stronger. I realized the entire place smelled like Nattsun.
No wonder I like coming to hang out over here…
I patted Nattsun on the back as she sobbed into my shoulder. She would need a little bit to get it out of her system, so I took advantage of this break to think what I would say next very carefully.
Here's the truth: I'd never thought of Nattsun as anything more than a close friend. As kids, we were something closer to kindred spirits, with a mutual, unspoken understanding. Boys were uninteresting. That made us different from everyone around us, and so we only had each other.
Back before I started learning karate, Nattsun had been my protector. I think it was a natural role for her to fall into. She'd grown up in the garage, and even if she'd only spent her time back then fetching parts or sweeping floors, it had made her pretty strong for her age. Seeing her dad argue with customers on occasion paired her short temper with an ability to step in and shut people down. She was quick to do that whenever a boy got too pushy with trying to be my friend.
There was a powerful grace in the way she acted to protect me, and I wanted to be around it all the time. When one of the neighborhood kids moved away, I realized Nattsun wouldn't always be around to protect me. I don't even think it was fair for me to expect her to. I wanted to be like that too, so I convinced my parents to let me do something that would make me cool like Nattsun. That's how I started taking karate classes.
I wanted us to be on equal footing, but what ended up happening is that I became her protector. In high school, someone figured out that Nattsun was lesbian. Really vicious rumors started going around, and other girls started avoiding her entirely. Some of the guys would also say really sexist things about her. I got between her and some of the nastier people involved, and after a few incidents like that people started getting the message and left her alone.
I think the bullying hurt her more than she'd care to admit. She'd always proudly displayed her toughness, but she started leaning more and more into a delinquent persona, screaming at people to stay away and skipping class. At one point she'd started smoking on the school roof until her father caught wind and yelled at her about it. Her scary temper was often directed at me. Whenever I thought back to those days I wondered if maybe she'd been angry that I was sticking up for her rather than letting her stick up for herself.
As the end of high school approached, our friendship recovered. I could tell that there was a change in our dynamic, but I couldn't really put my finger on how it had changed.
I remember how sad she was when my parents started talking about moving. Whenever I would say that I would feel homesick if I moved, she'd declare she'd be a Saitama girl until the day she died. When it looked like our move would happen, she'd unconvincingly insist she could move anywhere there were cars that needed maintenance. Judging from her reaction, the day I told her I was going to attend Saitama University and stay local had been the best day of her life.
At the time I thought her attachment to me was because I was her only close friend, but in light of the conversation we were having now….well, they say hindsight is 20/20.
Maybe it was because we were so close I had never considered her as a prospective girlfriend. It wasn't like I didn't find her attractive. Watching her work, her ability to apply brute force with a machinist's precision always left me feeling starry-eyed.
No, Nattsun just never seemed like an option, I guess. I had never experienced the symptoms of falling in love with her. I didn't feel that period of infatuation, none of that feeling like I needed to be closer to her. What we had already made me happy.
Was it because I didn't like her in that way, or had that bond been formed so long ago that I'd lost the muscle memory of that feeling? She always had my attention. She had always been close.
Friend. Confidante. …Lover? The word had an odd spikiness to me. Could I accept that?
Nattsun had pulled up a couple of chairs in her kitchen. Her eyes were still red from crying, but now that the wave of emotion that had crashed over her was starting to retreat, I could see the fighting spirit returning to her eyes.
I decided to take the initiative, because Nattsun would start spiralling again if I didn't set the tempo of this conversation. "Nattsun, I'm sorry it took me so long to talk. It's just…I don't really know how I feel about a relationship."
As I expected, she looked shocked, "Huh? Huh?" Then she buried her hands in her face. "I should have known better. I'm so embarrassed."
"Look, Nattsun. I'm not saying no."
"Ahhhh, don't toy with me like this, Akari!"
"I'm not toying with you. I'm trying to figure my feelings out." I reached out and took her trembling hand, and tried to put on a reassuring smile. I don't think she saw it. Her gaze had locked to my hand, and the color was draining from her face. "Hey. No matter how this ends, we can still be friends."
Nattsun nodded slightly and squeaked out a single "Ok." She looked up at me and tried to form a smile that died on her lips.
That look told me everything. I could tell that with all her heart she didn't want to pressure me into saying yes. She didn't want me just to say yes. But giving me the space to lay out my honest opinion was hurting her emotionally. I knew that if my answer was no, she couldn't bear the rejection. Continuing to see me would only bring her pain. My heart hurt to see her torn up like this.
"So we're already pretty good friends, right?" Nattsun looked hurt by this question. "What I mean is, we know a lot about each other, don't we?"
"Yeah, I s'pose."
"I think that's part of the problem. When I fall in love, I'm excited about that sense of mystery."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know, that 'getting to know you' phase of a relationship. There's that amazing sense of exploration, of new possibilities. It's like your mutual infatuation could shape the whole world."
"I guess."
"Did you ever feel that way?"
"I felt that way about you at one point."
My heart fell. "When?"
"Back in high school, when we made up."
"I see."
"I was so excited to see us getting close again, that I felt like I could be myself after shitty people started leaving me alone for being lesbian. I knew you were lesbian, and you knew I was, and I was kinda hoping we would get together back then."
"Oh Nattsun, why didn't you ask me?"
"I was so sure you were going to go away from me. Your parents were talking about moving, and you were spending all your time on college prep courses. I figured you'd end up with another college girl who could capture your heart better than a mechanic could ever hope to. I just wanted us to be happy with the time we had."
"But I stayed."
"I was happy about that…but there had been that girl you were interested in back then, remember?"
I did, vaguely. I had met her at a karate tournament and it seemed like we had hit it off. We'd exchanged numbers and spent a lot of our time between matches talking about how we approached our fighting. We must have chatted a few times a week for a couple months before I asked her out, but it turned out she didn't spar on this side of the mat. "Ah. Nattsun, you're such a good friend."
"I don't feel like one."
"Huh?" I was a surprised to hear her say that. Nattsun had her rough edges for sure, but if she had put aside her own desires to see me be happy, that was worth something, right?
"I've treated Kamikoshi-senpai like shit. I thought she was trying to take you from me."
That was another surprise. I knew Nattsun didn't get along well with Senpai, but I thought it was because Nattsun was a pretty intimidating person. Even someone as indifferent towards people as Senpai could be might think twice about trying to talk to her.
And yet, it made sense. I remembered they'd been arguing about me on my doorstep when Senpai had come over to ask me about Uruma-sensei, but I didn't know what had started it. So Nattsun had been trying to run her off…
"Maybe…I was hoping she would."
"Huh?" Natsumi turned pale.
"It's like I was saying about romance and a sense of mystery. Kamikoshi-senpai is sooo cool, and I feel a little awestruck when I'm around her. I know she hasn't been interested in me, but it only made me more fascinated by her."
"Uh huh. It kinda pisses me off that you always fall for women who don't pay attention to you. You can do better for yourself."
Thinking back, Nattsun had started drinking more heavily when we hung out after Kamikoshi-senpai helped me out with the Ninja Cats. Maybe I'd given her the impression I'd finally met The One?
"I'm sorry, Nattsun. Maybe I should have paid a little closer attention to you." I was starting to feel a little disoriented. Maybe I didn't know Nattsun as well as I thought I did. I gripped the corners of my chair and leaned forward. "I think if I had, I would have fallen in love."
"Would have??"
"Ah. How should I put this…?" I crossed my arms and put a hand to my mouth. I'd actually seen Senpai make this expression a lot. Half the time it seemed like she was just pretending to concentrate so people would ignore her for a bit in conversation, but you know, it always seemed to work. Thank you Senpai for the inspiration! I need a time out.
Although Nattsun was mostly hearing me out, her direct approach was keeping me off balance. Her intensity could bulldoze me in a second if I wasn't careful, so I didn't want to give her a direct yes or no. No matter how much I wanted to. But this entire conversation was as if she were goading me into making a direct response.
"What I mean is…there's nothing about you that says I wouldn't fall in love with you if I'd just met you. I've always been fond of your intensity, and you're beautiful to boot. But for some reason that didn't happen…"
I started losing the conviction behind what I was saying. This was bad. The last thing you want to do in karate is start questioning your commitment to a strike. It throws off your form, which continues through to your rhythm.
But the question of why I hadn't fallen in love with Nattsun nagged at me. When I'd walked into the garage, I'd thought of love as a bond forged in the excitement of infatuation. But was that really it? Nattsun had gotten infatuated in high school.
Suddenly a childhood memory flashed to mind. When I was seven or eight and some boy had given me grief about something. I didn't remember why he was acting like that since that sort of thing had happened so often. What I do remember is how smoothly and confidently Nattsun stepped in between me and the boy, and the care she took to make sure I was okay afterwards. That was the moment I had wanted to become more like Nattsun.
Thinking about it now, I think that had been a form of infatuation, but I was so young that I couldn't place it as love. How could I? I had a child's understanding of love, of whom love could bloom between.
"Nattsun, what do you think the difference is between infatuation and love?"
"It's like spot welding and seam welding, I think."
"What do you mean?"
"When I do welding, a spot weld is like a quick way to hold things together. A seam weld takes a while longer but it makes for a stronger connection."
"I see. So love is finding more points of connection."
Natsumi rubbed the back of her head. "No, I think it's more about taking the time and care to make sure it's sturdy…though I guess the spot welds are handy to hold things in place while you work on that. Sometimes they're all you need. But if we're talking about relationships here I don't think that would be very satisfying."
"Ah."
It was starting to make sense to me. If infatuation is a weld that holds a relationship together, then Nattsun and I had held the pieces together wrong. The result was this misshapen, unhappy thing that didn't leave us with much room to form a stronger weld.
Maybe the initial feeling of infatuation was what drew people together. That feeling of a quick connection had really appealed to me, but those relationships had always been fragile. Maybe a successful relationship wasn't the excitement of learning about a new partner. Maybe it was really the shared excitement of exploring one another to the deepest cores of our being?
My mind drifted back to how Nattsun had felt about Senpai. Nattsun still had secrets like this. Thinking about it, I wondered how much we hadn't shared with one another. How many areas of our lives had we not even thought to explore together?
Even just at the surface level it didn't seem like we talked about too much - a couple of stories from the university or the garage, or some light chatter about silly stuff we'd seen on TV…but not much about who we wanted to be, what we wanted to be doing.
I rubbed my temples. What did I want to be doing? I was pretty sure Nattsun wanted to take over the Ichikawa family garage – could the future I imagine even be shaped around that. Suddenly the implications of telling Natsumi "yes" seemed incredibly overwhelming. In a match, indecisiveness meant disas–
"What's wrong, Akari? You've gotten quiet."
"I'm just thinking."
"You can just tell me that you don't like me like that. It's okay." Tears were coming to her eyes, but she looked resolute.
"It-it's not that, okay? The thing is…I suddenly can't make sense of the relationship we have now. I like you a lot as a friend…and I'm certain I can see you as being more than that. But…"
"But what? This is a yes/no thing, isn't it?"
"It's not."
I realized that from the moment I had walked in, I had been approaching this conversation all wrong. In a karate match, there's a winner and a loser. Even if the opponents draw on points, judges will decide the outcome.
But now that Nattsun made it clear that she was thinking of this as a yes/no question, I realized that my feelings didn't fit into a yes/no answer. And since I had been thinking of this as a sparring match, I had been treating it as if one of these answers would win out on points. But that's approaching love as a fight…and maybe it's more like a training regimen? This was confusing.
"What I mean is…well, I'm open to it, I think. A closer relationship. From my point of view I didn't think there wasn't space for that kind of thing to grow. But talking to you maybe there is."
Nattsun looked more bewildered than anything. Then, changing expressions with terrifying speed, she looked at me with an intense stare. "What's that supposed to mean? No room to grow?"
"Like I was saying earlier, about that period of getting to know one another defined love for me. I thought that maybe the way our friendship was meant we missed that step."
"Ah, like when you're doing a rebuild and picking a part rules out certain things you can do."
"Yeah, it's like that. How often do you hear of childhood friends getting together two years after high school?"
Natsumi grinned. "Heh, leave it to a mechanic to make the impossible happen. Most of the people who come here for repairs don't care about how we rebuild it, they just care that it works."
"I get it! But if we're going to keep following your analogy, I'm someone who doesn't know exactly what they want the rebuild to look like."
She laughed. "You scare me. You're sounding more and more like Kamikoshi-senpai when she came in here with that farm equipment. Don't tell me you're going to be an expensive girlfriend."
I laughed too. "Well, I am a university girl with refined tastes, you know."
For a moment we sat there basking in one anothers' warm presence. Then, I spoke again.
"So rather than give you a yes or no answer, I think we should take some time to talk about what a relationship would look like, for both of us. Does that sound okay?"
Natsumi nodded. "Okay."
I looked at my watch. "Hey, so, CookSoc wants me to present a recipe tomorrow. I wanted to practice tonight and have the samples ready to hand out…so how about we talk about this over dinner?"
"Sure, I have a little bit of work to finish here. Can we meet at your place in an hour?"
"I've got a better idea. I need to go grocery shopping, so how about I go take care of that, and then we can walk over together."
"I'd like that." Nattsun blushed. Now that I thought about it, it had been a long time since we had walked over to one another's houses together. It was like as soon as we'd reached a certain age we just trusted one another to get there on our own.
Filled with warm feelings that we were already finding ways to be closer, I left for the supermarket.