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It isn’t until they’re actually on the beach that Kaede learns Shuuichi is, in fact, deathly afraid of swimming in the ocean.
“But Shuuichi,” she says, a little shocked, a little exasperated, “you’ve gone to the pool with me a million times and been totally fine.”
“I mean, yeah,” he says meekly, absentmindedly playing with the hair on his nape with one hand. Kaede can tell that he’s already regretting bringing it up, and that frustrates her more than him not wanting to go swimming possibly could. “But it’s different in the sea, I guess. It’s so much bigger, and…and vast, and I just…I don’t know. It makes me nervous.
“I’m sorry,” he adds, looking away. “It’s stupid. I know you really wanted to go swimming.”
“Don’t be silly!” She reaches down to link their fingers together. “I want to spend time with you. I just wish you’d let me know earlier so we could’ve skipped the trip and gone out to do something we both like.”
“It’s fine,” he mutters. Shrugs and looks down at his flip-flops. “It’s my fault for not bringing it up.”
She frowns. “Shuuichi…”
In two weeks it will be their three-month anniversary, but unfortunately Shuuichi is no better at conveying his wants and needs than he’d been for the majority of their first two years together at Hope’s Peak. She wants so badly to be someone he can rely on with no hesitation, but she knows that there’s just no forcing these kinds of things; so much time by the side of the likes of their untrusting classmates has proven that fact many times over. She does wish that there was a magical way for her to learn how to perfectly handle Shuuichi’s anxiety, though.
That does give her an idea, though. She lets go of Shuuichi’s hands and curls her own into fists, pumping them in the air with a newfound determination.
“Shuuichi!” she exclaims, leaning down to position herself so he’ll have to look right at her face.
Shuuichi peers down at her.
“Um,” he says slowly, hair falling around his cheeks and framing his face, “hi.”
“It’s ten o’clock,” she says fiercely. “We’ve got the whole day to figure out something fun for us to do together at the beach.”
She accentuates her statement with a clap of her right fist to her left palm. “And I’m gonna make sure that we have an awesome day together! No matter what!”
He opens his mouth to speak—probably something typical, something among the lines of it’s honestly fine, you can go and have fun, don’t worry about me—but after he looks at her for another second and evidently gauges correctly that she won’t budge on this point, he decides against saying whatever he was going to. He just lets the corners of his mouth quirk up and nods.
“Alright,” he says, with that smile of his that makes Kaede feel all warm and bubbly on the inside. “Let’s get going, then.”
—
Luckily for them, there’s a lot of things to do at the beach.
It’s a big place, after all, with lots to explore; and with the addition of Hope’s Peak Academy’s class 79-B to its regular copious amount of tourists, there is the statistical chance that harebrained scenarios will arise is significantly higher. And probably dangerous ones, too. Most likely a combination of both.
The first thing that catches Kaede’s eye is the volleyball net being set up by Maki and Rantarou a hundred yards or so away from where she and Shuuichi had decided to set down their belongings. Casual sports are something that seem, to her, more among the lines of what Kaito—who organized the entire class trip in the first place, completely on a whim—and Ryouma would enjoy, but both are currently nowhere to be found near the prospect of beach volleyball; the former is waist-deep in the water chicken-fighting with Miu on his shoulders against Tenko and Angie, and the latter, settled comfortably onto his blue-striped foldable chair, peers at a worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo over the edge of white-framed sunglasses. Playing a physical game isn’t something Shuuichi would like, Kaede already knows—he’s told her he despises the feeling of sand getting between his toes, and he’s borderline asthmatic, anyway—but she does want to chat with their friends. She takes hold of his arm, pulling him alongside her lightly, and receives no complaints.
“Hey, you two,” Rantarou says with a light smile as he fastens the net to one pole, turning his head over his shoulder to look at them as they draw near to him and Maki. “Care to join us? Bit of a two-versus-two?”
“We were gonna go find something else to do together, actually,” Kaede says quickly, envisioning in her mind’s eye the exact look of discomfort that has crawled its way onto Shuuichi’s face. In her peripheral vision, she sees his shoulders relax at her words. “But we wanted to come and say hi first.”
“No problem,” Rantarou says, still smiling. “It’ll probably get too hot to play anyways.”
“This weather is intolerable,” is Maki’s mumbled agreement as she reaches up to wipe a thick sheen of sweat off of her forehead. She isn’t wrong; it’s almost thirty degrees out already, and it’s only supposed to get hotter as the day goes on. “Momota couldn’t have chosen a worse day for this.”
“He can’t control the weather, Harukawa,” Rantarou points out, and Kaede giggles. Maki just rolls her eyes at him, moving to pick up a bottle of sunscreen off the ground.
“Anyways,” Kaede says. “We were wondering if you guys maybe knew about fun stuff to do on the beach or somewhere nearby.”
“I personally don’t,” Rantarou says, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “I’ve never been to this area before. I brought my own things to do.”
“Yumeno used to live around here,” Maki chimes in flatly, turning the volleyball she’s holding over in her hands, expecting it from all angles. “She was talking about it a little on the ride over. I would ask her if I were you.”
“Oh, really? When?”
“As a little girl, apparently,” Maki says. “Checks out, honestly. I did see more than one magic shop on the walk over here.”
“She probably started those herself,” Shuuichi says flatly, and Kaede laughs.
“Thanks, guys,” she says, reaching down to hold Shuuichi’s hand in her own again. “See you later.”
They only have to wander for a little while before they come across Himiko. She’s sat comfortably at a table placed in front of a small restaurant just off the side of the sand, relishing in the shade a striped parasol provides as she shuffles a deck of cards. On occasion she pauses to take a sip out of a glass of orange-colored cream soda. Looking around at the area Kaede happens to see Gonta ordering food a little ways away, with Korekiyo standing beside him, craning his neck to peer at the menu around his large frame.
Himiko lowers her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose as she sees the two of them walk up, setting her cards down in a neat pile. “Well, well,” she drawls. “Looks like I’ve amassed an audience.”
“Hi, Yumeno,” Shuuichi says.
“Eh…you can’t have any of my soda, if that’s what you came over here to ask,” she says, wrapping a hand around her cup protectively. She curls her lips around her straw to take another long drink. “It was way too expensive.”
“No, no,” Kaede says with a laugh. “Amami and Harukawa told us that you grew up around here? So we thought that you might know about stuff to do around here.”
“Hm,” Himiko hums. She props her chin up on the palm of one of her hands, closing her eyes in thought while taking another sip of her soda. “I can’t say I do, really.”
Kaede blinks.
“What?” she asks. “But Amami and Harukawa said—”
“I did live here,” Himiko says flatly, droopy eyes threatening to shut completely. As usual, she seems tired. “But only when I was really little. So I didn’t go out to do much.
“I did see some stuff nearby on the walk over here, though,” she continues, before Kaede can respond. She pauses to yawn before continuing, “a bookstore. An arcade, I think. Um…maybe an ice cream shop, too. I’m not sure…I’m kind of sleepy…”
Kaede isn’t particularly partial to any of those options—she doesn’t want to be shut up in a bookstore on such a beautiful day, neither she nor Shuuichi are particularly fond of video games, and she prefers to have ice cream as an afternoon treat—but she still smiles at Himiko and thanks her for her time. She leads Shuuichi back onto the beach.
They do try and ask the others, but they have similar results: Tsumugi’s suggestion of building sandcastles is disregarded because Kaede holds a strong vendetta against sand that gets under her fingernails; Keebo recommends searching for interesting seashells, but that gets old fast, and anyways Kaede doesn’t really think she can top the intact shell of a hermit crab that Shuuichi manages to dig up; Kirumi points out a nearby stand offering surfing lessons by the hour, but Kaede is sure that would amplify Shuuichi’s fears of the water tenfold, and the way his face greens when the suggestion comes up is telling enough; Kokichi is Kokichi, and therefore entirely unhelpful. At twelve-thirty, they collapse back onto their beach towels, doing their best to shield their faces from the sun. Kaede feels hot and sticky and tired and even though it isn’t her fault they can’t find something to do, she still feels kind of bad about it. She groans into the straw of her beach hat.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t find anything to do,” she says after a moment, despite herself. Unfortunately enough, some of his behaviors have evidently rubbed off on her. She supposes that now she knows how he feels when he’s on an apologizing streak.
“That’s okay,” he says, voice muffled underneath the fabric of the jacket he’s using as a makeshift shield from the sun’s rays. He reaches over blindly to grip her hand in his, and she squeezes it despite the mutual clamminess that the warmth brings.
“Really, though,” she says, feeling altogether sad. “I wanted us to have fun today.”
Shuuichi is silent for a moment, and his grip on her hand slackens ever so slightly. And when he talks once again, she can hear the confusion in his voice.
“Wait,” he says, voice perplexed, “you don’t think I’m having fun?”
She frowns, at that. Reaches up to peel the hat off of her face so she can look at him properly.
“Well,” she says, turning her head to face him, “I guess not? We’ve kind of just been wandering around. I mean, I’ve been having a good time, but I thought maybe you would’ve liked to do something a little more stimulating.”
“We did lots of fun stuff, though,” Shuuichi points out matter-of-factly. He shrugs and takes the fabric off of his face. “We saw all of our friends. I found that cool conch shell to take back to my uncle. And that juice we split was really good.” He looks away from her, leaning his head further back into his soft beach towel, squinting up at the sky. “I don’t think we need to do anything particularly extravagant in order to declare a day a success. I don’t think we should judge them as successful or unsuccessful in the first place, really.
“I just like spending time with you,” he continues, “and that’s enough for me. Even if all we’re doing is sitting around. ‘Cause that’s what I came here to do.”
The smile that finds its way onto her face is so big that it hurts the corners of her mouth. She turns away to bury her face into her opposite shoulder to hide herself as she giggles.
“Okay,” she responds, feeling the flush creep up her neck, the butterflies in her stomach. “I’m really happy that you said that.”
“And for the record,” she says, reaching over to shove at his shoulder with a snort. “I like spending time with you, too.”
Kaede can’t see his face, but she knows Shuuichi is smiling, too. Giddy is the only word she can use to describe how she feels. Their hands tighten around each other’s at the same time.
“In that case,” he replies, “you wouldn’t mind leaving to find somewhere shady to lie down for a couple more minutes, would you? This heat is killing me. I gotta lay down for a second.”
Kaede blinks at him before laughing and saying yes. They stand up and she curls her arm around his even though it’s way too hot to touch, and she leans her head into his side even though he’s always been kind of bony, and it’s uncomfortable, and she’s really, really sweaty, but she feels content and light and completely relaxed anyways. She supposes, for the first time, that love like this isn’t just something that you read out of a romance book.
“We could go to the bookstore,” she teases, halfway to the street.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that to you,” he says, hoodie back on and staring down at his feet once again. She laughs and feels happy.