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readying her nails to be painted, arashi hums as she files them. she pauses briefly, running the pad of her thumb along the edges of her nails until she finds a small bump and returns to filing. it’s better to find the little imperfections now, after all.
“nacchan,” ritsu says, sitting at the head of arashi’s bed. she’d painted his nails a nice glossy dark purple before she set to start her own. they should be dry by now she thinks.
“hm?” arashi doesn’t look over at him, instead checking once more to if the bump has been filed away. it’s then that arashi feels a slight warmth on her cheek, fleeting before she can even properly recognize it as ritsu’s lips.
she does look over at ritsu then, who stares innocently back at her. the only tells he gives are a slight twitch of his lips and the amused glint in his eyes.
the two of them flirt all the time, ritsu leaning into it far easier than she does. sometimes arashi wonders if there’s more to it, wonder if it’s weird that she wishes there was. she’s had plenty of crushes, but none of them were reciprocated. at least not in the way she wanted them to be.
but now, she can’t be sure where they stand.
heart racing in her chest, arashi whispers, “ritsu-chan?”
they flirt plenty, hold hands and lean on one another when they sit next to each other. ritsu sleeps in her lap more often than not, but that kiss felt different than their normal antics. it’d felt different, too, that time arashi had gotten so excited that ritsu had somehow found some items from a makeup collection that she’d grown fond of shortly before it was discontinued and given them to her for her birthday. she hugged him tight and kissed him firmly on the cheek. she’d been caught up in the moment, letting him go so she could sort through what all he’d gifted her, and the kiss hadn’t hit her until she was back in her dorm.
they’d continued on after that, seemingly pretending that it didn’t happen, which only made arashi more confused about what exactly they were.
ritsu looks at her curiously, maybe a bit concerned too at her reaction to a little cheek kiss.
arashi searches for what to say. should she ask if ritsu feels the same way she does? would that cross some sort of unspoken boundary between them? she doesn’t know. she could play this off as just a friendly little kiss, but she thinks she’s too far past that now. plus she’s been meaning to figure this out for a while now.
instead, “kiss me,” comes out of her mouth and despite not meaning to say it, she doesn’t completely regret it.
ritsu freezes them, eyes widening.
arashi tries her best to backtrack, feeling silly for having said that. she waves a hand in the air dismissively, a giggle pitched a little too high to be believable accompanying it. “ah, sorry,” she says, refusing to meet his eyes as she goes back to staring at her hands in her lap, one loosely wrapped around the file. “just ignore that, ritsu-chan.”
one of ritsu’s hands come into her vision, resting on her. she can hear him shift closer to her and part of her wants to shrink away, to laugh all of this off. it’s unfortunate she can’t say she has some prior engagement she has to go to and take the chance to run off; they’re in her dorm so she doesn’t have anywhere to hide out until the embarrassment of all of this wears off.
“nacchan, did you mean it?” he asks.
arashi bites her lip. she could say no and let this moment pass by and they’ll never talk about it again, but that also means they might never have a moment like this again. maybe ritsu would back off on the flirting after this. after all, who gets so flustered over a cheek kiss of all things? not wanting to regret her decision later, arashi gives a shy little nod, not quite trusting her voice to respond, not knowing what else might come out on accident.
with that, there’s a gentle pressure — ritsu’s fingers — turning her head to face him. arashi doesn’t have much of a chance to gauge his reaction to any of this as there’s a mouth on hers.
her eyes flutter shut as she leans ever so slightly into the kiss. there’s a strange sense of relief she feels as ritsu kisses her, his lips moving against hers slow and languid. as her stomach does flips, arashi’s hand finds ritsu’s arm. her fingers curl into the sleeve of his sweater to ground herself in the moment. it doesn’t feel real as she kisses back.
when ritsu breaks the kiss, arashi keeps her eyes closed, worried that she’ll wake from a dream. she focuses on the way her lips tingle, the way their fingers are laced together, though she isn’t sure when that happened.
there’s a light bump on her forehead that makes arashi open her eyes. she stares back at ritsu as he pulls back from having pressed their foreheads together for a brief second.
“you’re beautiful,” ritsu murmurs.
with that, arashi surges across the small distance between them, her hands cupping his cheeks as she kisses him herself this time. however, she puts a little too much force into it and she can feel one of his teeth poking her bottom lip. “sorry,” she says against his mouth. feeling the way his breath hitches as their lips brush gives arashi some courage, careful to kiss him more gently this time now that she’s already so close.
ritsu lets her lead this time in a kiss more eager than the first. arashi vaguely notes the hand he sets on her waist, too distracted by him kissing her back and how he’s trying to match her enthusiasm.
he lets her press a peck and then another to his lips as she reluctantly pulls back. ritsu gets a quick one on her in return before she’s fully retreated.
arashi’s hands fall back to her lap, uncertain of what to do with them now. ritsu’s cheeks are faintly red, lips tinted slightly darker from them kissing. the thing that gets to her, though, is the barely there sheen on and smudged slightly around ritsu’s mouth having been transferred from the gloss she has on.
it’s then that the last couple of minutes click for her. arashi feels hot and she hides her face in her hands. “oh my god,” she whispers. she’d forgotten for a moment that all of this is real and truly happening, that the two of them are sitting on her bed in her dorm, and she’s not having some hyperrealistic daydream.
after some shifting on the bed next to her, a knee bumping against her leg, a pair of arms loosely wrap around her waist and a head is tentatively placed on her shoulder. she’s all too used to ritsu holding onto her like this, using her as a crutch in his early morning sleepiness, although this time is more cautious than normal.
“i’ve wanted to kiss you for a while, nacchan,” ritsu admits after a beat.
arashi’s hands drop from her face as she turns to look at him, only to be met with a face full of his hair on her shoulder. “what?”
“i’ve wanted to kiss you for a while,” he repeats, turning his head so his chin brushes against her shoulder, hovering just enough above it so they could look at each other.
she stares at him. “really?” arashi, of course, has been hoping that whatever was going on between them is mutual, but with having confirmation of that, she doesn’t know what to do, what to make of it.
“did you think all the flirting was just for fun?”
arashi splutters at that. “ritsu-chan, that’s not fair. don’t make fun of me.”
his hold on her shifts as one of ritsu’s hands come up to trace her cheekbone. “but you’re so pretty when you’re all red, nacchan,” he says, a soft chuckle in his voice.
she bats his hand away with a huff. “i didn’t think you would…” she trails off. arashi had been scared about not being loved for who she is, though those concerns have been slowly lessening. she'd, of course, worried about the same thing with ritsu, but that passed quick with all of the kind words and compliments that got her into this whole questioning if her feelings were reciprocated mess. she knows he likes her as a friend at the very least and now... it seems like maybe it really wasn't one sided at all. “that you would want to kiss me.”
“hm? does that mean nacchan wanted to kiss me too?” ritsu rests his chin on her shoulder. the playful shine to his eyes and slowly growing smile lets arashi know this won’t be the end of hearing about this.
arashi turns her head the other way, crossing her arms over her chest. “you already know the answer to that. now stop or else i’ll toss you out.”
ritsu laughs, a pretty little sound, as his arms tighten around her. he nuzzles into her side, his head making its way to her neck where his nose rubs along the side of it. “i’m sorry, nacchan, don’t kick me out,” he says, hardly sounding apologetic.
arashi sighs, one arm lowering to rest on ritsu’s while the other goes up as she pats ritsu’s head. “fine,” she says. “i guess you can stay.”
ritsu hums happily, leaning into her touch as her fingers run through his hair. they sit like that for little longer. he pulls her closer and arashi lets herself lean against him, ritsu’s arms wrapped around her tight but not uncomfortably so. arashi thinks that there really was nothing to worry about.
she’d spent so much time fearing their friendship would be ruined if she ever said anything about her feelings. spent a few too many times burying her face in her pillow and making a variety of noises as she ran through something ritsu had done earlier in the day in her head. she’d even consulted nyanko about this all, only receiving a flick of a tail and a meow.
but seeing that arashi is fairly certain ritsu is falling asleep on her now, there was no reason to be so worried. they’ve stuck together through so much already, so some feelings wouldn’t have pulled them apart in the first place.
but where does that leave them now?
she decides that they’ll figure it out later; ritsu is definitely falling asleep on her and she doesn’t want to be stuck as his pillow just yet. “ritsu-chan, don’t fall asleep on me. i still have to paint my nails.”
ritsu grumbles. “i was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
arashi laughs, ruffling ritsu’s hair as he starts to move away from her. “it’d be hard to not notice, ritsu-chan. we don’t have much longer before tetora-kun will be back.”
after yawning, ritsu huffs. “why can’t we kick him out when he gets back?”
“ritsu-chan,” she scolds, standing to look through her nail polish collection to choose a color.
“what? it’s my nacchan time and i don’t want to be interrupted.”
arashi rolls her eyes, ignoring the fuzzy feelings she gets from him saying that. picking a color, she returns to her bed. ritsu reaches out towards the little bottle.
“let me do it,” he says.
“are you sure?”
ritsu nods resolutely, so she hands it to him. while he’s busy with that, arashi shifts to sit facing him. he looks up at her once the bottle is open and holds a hand out. she offers her right hand right and rather than beginning with her nails, ritsu leans in and kisses her again a little too long to be considered a peck.
with a proud little smile, ritsu starts on her nails.
it looks like she’ll have to get used to him kissing her. not that she minds.