Work Text:
paper rings
[taylor swift//prompt: emojis/miscommunication//modern AU]
kiss you once, ‘cause i know you had a long night
kiss you twice, ‘cause it’s gonna be alright
three times, ‘cause you’ve waited your whole life
i like shiny things, but i’d marry you with paper rings
(that’s right, darlin’—you’re the one i want)
and i hate accidents, except when we went from friends to this…
Kaoru wakes up all at once, a disappointing development for the beginning of the day after a night she doesn’t remember in the slightest. She hazily recognizes the feeling of carpet against her right cheek, the heel of a red stiletto pump—Megumi’s, probably—at eye level, the stiffness in her bones that is her just deserts for spending a drunken night passed out on the floor against a wall.
“Did you think this was funny?” A voice roars from above—Megumi’s, definitely—and Kaoru runs a hand over her face to wake herself up. Her hand catches on her nose in a weird way, but before she can investigate what that’s about, Megumi resumes her tirade. “You two disappear for hours, don’t answer your phones, and leave us to find you like this?”
Kaoru blinks blearily, confused about Megumi’s ire but knowing better than to interrupt. Without raising her head, she can see her luggage and Misao’s shoes strewn about the floor, so this is definitely the hotel room she’s supposed to be in. She’s more than a little hungover, but isn’t that the whole point of Vegas…?
Megumi is pacing the floor as she dresses Kaoru down, half-shouting words Kaoru half-hears but isn’t concentrating on as she tries to piece together the night previous. Dinner. Tickets to some cirque show she didn’t end up seeing because Enishi feigned ill to get away from Kenshin, because this combined bachelor/bachelorette vacation was a terrible idea. Kaoru followed him, because that’s what best friends do. But they didn’t go back to the hotel, because Enishi wasn’t actually sick, so they went to a fancy rooftop bar—
“Are you still so hung up on Kenshin that you’d ruin Tomoe’s bachelorette party this way?” Megumi seethes, and that filters into Kaoru’s consciousness in a very visceral way. She opens her mouth to disabuse her of the notion, because it’s not true, not anymore, not since—
“You’re so fucking loud.”
Kaoru starts at the unexpected injection of Enishi’s voice, disdainful as ever and effused with sleep, into the situation. More confusingly, the wall behind her begins to shift, making her stomach lurch until a hand—Enishi’s hand, she realizes belatedly—on her side stabilizes her.
Not a wall, then.
“And you,” Megumi doesn’t skip a beat before she addresses Enishi. “How could you do this to your sister? What could you possibly have to say for yourselves?!”
“I say it was fun, and I’m sorry everyone else missed it.” Kaoru doesn’t have to see Enishi’s face to know exactly the kind of self-satisfied smirk he’s leveling Megumi with right now. “But you can come with us to the jeweler later; you have pretty decent taste.”
Before Kaoru can pipe up with her own question: What the actual fuck?, Megumi huffs and indignantly tries to throw something at them. It’s paper, so it awkwardly floats to the ground, barely in Kaoru’s sight but for the block letters at the top:
State of Nevada. Marriage Certificate.
--
Having said her piece, apparently, Megumi disappears without another word. She slams the door with more force than is necessary, and the message is clearly received: Everyone is really, really pissed. Megumi is the ambassador for all of their ire, because she’s the best at being a bitch when the situation demands it. Or even when it doesn’t, really. But this situation certainly demands it, and Kaoru finds she can’t even muster a self-righteous defense. There probably isn’t one, even if she could remember what the hell happened.
She’s even already forgiven Misao for forking over her room key to Megumi, because stealing all of Tomoe and Kenshin’s attention away from them at their own pre-wedding party is enough to warrant being ratted out to the rest of the group—even if Kaoru has some secrets of Misao’s she’s sworn to take to the grave.
Kaoru lies on the floor, triaging the importance of each of the five apologies she’s going to have to make today, and tries to ignore Enishi’s expectant stare. Theirs is an emergency definitely more important than beseeching their friends for their forgiveness, but it feels like altogether too much on too little sleep and with too few electrolytes in her body to try to disentangle that fiasco right now. So she stares at the carpet and tries to ignore the way her stomach is clenching around nothingness, because—oh, yes, she remembers now: The curry she ordered at dinner was too spicy, and she didn’t have the wherewithal to ask the server to replace it.
That explains about one half of one percent of their situation.
“You feel like getting up off the floor?” Enishi asks. She thinks for a brief moment that there’s some level of compassion in his voice, and wonders if maybe she doesn’t hate him as much as she thinks she does. But then he adds: “Maybe consummate this marriage before Megumi uses that keycard again?”
No, she definitely hates him.
“I feel like a shower,” Kaoru grumbles in response, unceremoniously flopping over so as to better raise herself to her knees. The world flips on its axis, and then keeps on tumbling as she trudges to the bathroom. She doesn’t catch the way Enishi stares helplessly after her, but she does catch the lock on the door before dry heaving into the toilet.
It’s a nice bathroom, Kaoru thinks to herself as she sits in the shower and lets the hot water pelt her back. It’s not just nice by hotel bathroom standards, it’s genuinely nice. There’s no weird shiny plastic plating on the faucets or handles. The little bottles of shampoo and conditioner are some luxury brand that impressed even Megumi. The light fixture overhead looks like it’s made of blown glass. She could stretch out and take a legitimate bath in the tub if she wanted, and she thinks she may do just that sometime in the three remaining days they have in this godforsaken desert while she waits for her friends to want to speak to her again.
The bathroom is exactly why she knows this marriage is a sham.
A week in this hotel room, even with the cost split two ways, is more than Kaoru’s rent for the month—not to mention the airfare, all the meals, the evening activities. The dojo leaves her with less disposable income than everyone else, but this kind of expense would leave most of the rest of them considerably strapped for cash for a while—all but the Yukishiros and their family fortune, which is what’s funding this whole grand adventure for everyone. Enishi doesn’t talk much about it, but she knows it’s enough to have kept him from seriously dating anyone for the years she’s known him, the others’ jokes about a necessary pre-nup leaving a bitter taste in her mouth for reasons she always pretended not to understand.
Kaoru spares a passing thought for Kenshin in navigating that awkward conversation with Tomoe, Enishi, and their family lawyers, but it fades into the shower steam as Kaoru stares down at her hand and finds what caught on her face earlier. It’s a plastic ring, reminiscent of something she might’ve bugged her father to give her a quarter to get from the little machines in front of the grocery store as a child.
The marriage is definitely a joke, and Kaoru burns for more than the scalding hot shower water. She wants to blame Enishi—and there is much to blame him for, these histrionics a historic low, even for them—but beyond the obvious wreckage, she’s mostly angry at herself. Because while it’s uncouth for them to have been an obnoxious thorn in the side of Tomoe and Kenshin’s wedding, everyone knows it will go on regardless. This will be relegated to less than an asterisk in the greater scheme of Tomoe and Kenshin’s love story: Remember when Enishi and Kaoru got stupidly drunk and threw the attention onto themselves for a couple of days in Vegas? But Kaoru, herself, can never come back from this. She will never, ever be able to pretend this didn’t happen—that Enishi, however unwittingly, took her most fervent hope and twisted it into a prank for his own kind of dark amusement. And Kaoru, very wittingly, allowed him to—allowed herself to make a mockery of her own very real affection for him.
She’s too dehydrated to cry, so she just sits in the shower and sulks and hates the way the water never gets cold.
She doesn’t want to put last night’s clothes back on—it’s humid in the bathroom, for one, and the dress will stick uncomfortably to her body. For two, she’s going to burn that dress in effigy as soon as she gets home.
So she wraps herself in the overlarge bath sheet, gets the bitter taste of last night out of her mouth literally if not figuratively, and emerges from the bathroom with an apology on her lips. Misao first, which feels right—if Enishi is her best friend, Misao is her soul sister, and it will be easiest to get her forgiveness. It’s an easy win, good practice for the rest of the apologies to come.
But Misao isn’t in the room when she emerges. It’s just Enishi perched comfortably on the bed, changed out of last night’s clothes and into his stupidly bright athleisurewear that Kaoru absolutely hates. Misao’s shoes, she notes, are nowhere to be found. Neither is her luggage.
“The fuck?” Kaoru asks unceremoniously, mostly confused and only a little bit embarrassed that she’s standing in front of Enishi in just a bath towel.
“If that’s not a sight for sore eyes—”
“Can it. Where’s Misao?” Kaoru is barely keeping a lid on her fury. It’s checked only by her own low energy level and some recognizance that under Enishi’s easy demeanor is something reminiscent of apprehension, and that humanizes him a bit in her eyes.
“Ah—we, uh,” Enishi gestures to his own suitcase by the closet door. “Switched rooms, considering the circumstances.”
Panic seizes her heart. Misao is apparently a sellout, but Kaoru didn’t imagine a scenario in which a cold war between them lasted anything longer than an hour. “Fuck, they’re really mad, aren’t they?”
Enishi blinks like he doesn’t understand the words in the order Kaoru had strung them together. His own response is half-muddled, as if he can’t shake the confusion. “Everyone except Megumi is already over it. My sister and Himura are down at the pool—”
“Misao doesn’t even want to share a room with me anymore,” Kaoru huffs, crossing her arms over her chest. “That’s big mad, Enishi. Unprecedentedly mad.”
He stares at her for a length of time that just starts to brush against Kaoru’s impatience, before his eyes widen behind his eyeglass lenses and then narrow in understanding. “She’s not mad. It was a favor for the newlyweds—”
“Will you stop with this nonsense?”
“—‘cause it’d be awkward for us to sleep separately—”
Their words interrupt each other, but Enishi catches on to Kaoru’s drift before his words filter through her consciousness. If she looks frustrated, he looks hurt, and she understands all at once that she understands absolutely nothing at all about what’s going on.
“You don’t—Shit, Kaoru. Do you not—Fuck.” Enishi is sputtering, shaking his head and laughing in that sardonic way he does when he’s being particularly self-loathing. “Do you not remember anything?”
If her heart weren’t already broken, it would shatter under the weight of that question.
“I… Remember the rooftop bar we went to. It was pretty.” Kaoru’s words are strangled coming out of her mouth. Some kind of realization is hitting him like a freight train, and she would launch herself into the sun for Enishi if he asked, but she cannot watch that. Instead, she tears open a packet of Liquid IV with her teeth and dumps it into a water bottle. As she shakes the bottle, she wonders who actually broke whom in this situation, and if they’ll ever be able to recover.
“It was only—it was four drinks, Kaoru,” Enishi moans into his hands. “We had four rounds at the bar—”
“That’s a lot of alcohol, Enishi.”
He raises his head out of his hands to serve her a droll look. “Yours were mostly sugar.”
Playfighting is good. Playfighting is normal. “You’re not wrong, but you’re mean and you’re loud.” Kaoru takes a swig of her bottle and almost gags at the taste—in no world does watermelon taste like that. “And I didn’t eat dinner!”
“Yeah, that restaurant wasn’t very good,” Enishi mumbles in response, seeming to find the same kind of solace in their inane conversation that she is. But the reprieve lasts only a fleeting moment before the crushing weight of expectation settles back into the room. Kaoru shifts between her feet and tries not to stare at him, but her world seems to orbit almost exclusively around him so it’s hard to look away for long.
“I can—I will,” Enishi finally starts, not meeting Kaoru’s gaze. “Fix it. I mean. I’ll call the attorney—” He is uncharacteristically flummoxed, and it would be funny if it weren’t absolutely dismal.
“This is—wait,” Kaoru looks towards the document on the floor, squinting to make it out and failing. “Is that… real?”
“Not if you don’t want it to be.”
If the world had been tumbling off its axis before, it’s now come to a discrete halt. There are moments in life that demarcate a line before and after, but often Kaoru’s only recognized them as such after the fact, like the day she met Enishi or the moment the doctor walked back into the examination room with her father’s diagnosis. But this one, she recognizes as exactly as what it is.
“That’s…” She starts, trying to swallow down the lump in her throat, failing to find the words that will effectively kickstart the beginning of the rest of her life. “Well, um. That’s… unexpected.”
They’re not good words, not at all, and Enishi’s inability to hide his crestfallen expression reinforces what she already knows. He swipes his phone off of the nightstand and swings his feet to the floor, runs a hand through his hair before he spits out, “I’ll be right ba—”
“Wait!”
Maybe it’s the hangover, but Kaoru finds her own voice to be entirely too loud. It’s effective, however, and he stops moving. She stares at him staring at her and wonders if they’ll spend the rest of their married life—however long it lasts—talking around each other like they have been this morning. “Wait,” she repeats again, tone softer this time. “Explain to me what happened, please.”
“If you don’t remember, maybe that’s just for the best,” Enishi grumbles, but he does sit back down on the edge of the bed. Kaoru moves to sit next to him, leaning her head into his shoulder like they’re about to watch a movie at his place. In a weird, roundabout way they kind of are—it’s just that the movie will be the retelling of Kaoru’s forgotten memories, which makes it straight-to-video quality at best. “You maybe want to change into some real clothes?” he asks. His voice sounds tired.
“Not really,” she hums, more placidly than the situation probably warrants. It was starting to get cold in that damp towel, but he is very warm, and solid, and there—and her husband, at least for right now, as much as she cannot possibly believe it. “So we had four drinks, and then what?” she prompts.
“Here.” He unlocks his phone, opens Photos, and hands it over. “There are more pictures on your phone, which I plugged in while you were in the shower. It should be charged now, if you want—”
And deal with the barrage of angry text messages she’s sure to find? “No, thanks, I’m good.”
She scrolls through thumbnails and tries not to look too hard at any of them, until she finds the last picture she remembers: It’s part of a series of selfies, of course, because she looked good and Enishi’s phone is newer and, therefore, has the better camera. There are some pictures of the two of them, and a few of the skyline in the background. And then, curiously, there’s a surreptitious picture of a group of women celebrating a bachelorette party—a really traditional bachelorette party, matching dresses and lots of pink.
“You remember anything?” He asks gently, maybe even hopefully.
“Not at all…” Kaoru murmurs, zooming in on the photo like that’s going to give her some kind of clue as to the significance of this group of strangers. It doesn’t, other than make Kaoru very grateful their party, as long and exhausting as it has been, hasn’t featured a single phallic-shaped object. “Why do you have a picture of a random group of girls on your phone?”
“Well, it sounds weird when you phrase it like that,” he counters. “We—I—kind of… owe them.” He clears his throat, sounding as awkward as Kaoru has ever heard him speak. “We met them—or really, the bride—when they were in the middle of their truth or dare game…”
“She was dared to kiss you!” Kaoru blurts out, a hazy recollection taking shape in her mind. She can’t recall the specifics, can’t pick out which girl in the photo is the subject of the tale, but she does remember the visceral feeling of jealousy that consumed her at the idea that she’d have to watch Enishi kiss some pretty blonde woman, that this woman could so much as ask for that with a smile and a giggle while Kaoru had been twisting herself into knots over the same desire for years. “Did she?”
“God, no. You looked about ready to kill.” She isn’t facing Enishi, but she’s pretty sure she hears the trace of a smile in his tone. “So she scampered off to make a fool of some other man, but the idea of the game stuck, so we played… a few rounds.”
Oh, no. “And, um. How did that go?” It’s a rather pedestrian question considering they’re married now, but there’s something to be said for pride, and Kaoru wants to know how little of it she has left in her personal arsenal. As if it might burn her, she hands Enishi’s phone back to him with a level of apprehension and self-disgust.
“I learned that you like Misao the best of all your girlfriends,” Enishi replies, mildly. “And that you’re very particular about the shade of blue of the hydrangeas you’d want in your bridal bouquet.” He pauses, thoughtfully, as Kaoru tries to puzzle through what he’s just told her. “And that, if you could bring anyone back for your wedding, it would be your dad.”
That gets her attention. Mentions of her father, only gone a couple of years now, are infrequent for no other reason than Kaoru doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to talk about him without crying a little. She swallows thickly, because none of this is made up—Misao would be her maid of honor, though it would be terrible to have to choose; hydrangeas are her favorite flower, all the better when there’s a little green and white amongst the blue petals; she loved her mother, but she always dreamed of her father walking her down the aisle, and she’s a little bitter she’ll never get that chance.
The through-line about weddings is obvious. But the way her conversation partner seems to be holding his breath means there’s something he isn’t saying, that there’s something beyond his sister’s upcoming nuptials that inspired the questioning. She half-takes the bait, her voice croaking out the question: “You used truth or dare to ask me questions you already basically knew the answer to?”
She tries to be funny, but irreverence leaves her at the intersection of hope and longing.
“I also asked you,” Enishi starts, a lifetime between each of his words for how long he’s taking to say them. “How you felt about me. First.” His hand is still holding the phone in front of them both, like his muscles will never move again, though the screen has long-since gone dark. “That’s the first thing I asked.”
The air leaves Kaoru’s lungs all at once, or else she might have laughed. Enishi is old money personified, but he is also new money—all of it made by never asking permission, never being unsure of his position. A feeling she has no name for creeps up her spine, something like power—if power wanted to both hoard his feelings and protect them. That he subjugated himself to ask instead of take feels meaningful, vulnerable in a way she has never associated with him.
“You didn’t know?” Are the words that come out of her mouth, unbidden. The Kaoru of yesterday and all the other days before it thought she had that secret kept safely hidden, but today she is wise in a peculiar way—hindsight, or hangover clarity, or hubris. “It wasn’t obvious?” She adds, whisper-quiet.
“I had hoped.” Enishi responds, his tone as quiet as hers. “Only hoped, never dreamed.”
Kaoru wants to kiss him, then—more than she has ever wanted anything. But they’re both looking straight ahead, secrets shared and suspended between them, a more intimate use of lips than any kiss ever could be.
“What did I tell you?” She doesn’t feel brave and that is more than the point. “When you asked that question?”
“You—” He pauses, the consideration of his next words a palpable thing. “You didn’t want to tell me,” he concedes, finally, barely stifling the laugh she knows he wants to let free. “You got flustered and begged off the question.”
“So then—how--?”
Enishi’s hand finally moves, fingers working to unlock his phone before handing it to Kaoru. In the movement she finally catches a brief glimpse of his face and finds his eyes less stormy, expression more relaxed—a twitch of amusement playing on his lips. “You ran to the bathroom and texted me.”
That sounds right. She can stare her father’s cancer diagnosis in the face, glare at the visage of a kendo opponent, but she absolutely could never look in Enishi’s beautiful turquoise eyes and tell him her most fragile truth. Twenty seven going on seventeen going on seven.
With a wry smile, Kaoru opens Enishi’s messages. She doesn’t mean to snoop, but her eyes catch on the first text in his inbox, unread:
Tomoe Yukishiro
I’ve always wanted a sister. <3
Her heart does a stupid, fluttering thing; forgiveness, indeed. But the whiplash when she goes down three more messages—passing messages from Megumi and some unknown number with an area code local to them—and sees a thumbnail of her face is immediate.
It’s just a line of eggplant emojis.
Kaoru has never wanted to launch a phone into the sun as much as she does at this precise moment. And if she’s lucky, she’ll follow close behind it.
With reluctant fingers, she opens the entirety of the text message thread. Her eyes flit to the top, where the thumbnail of a grinning photo of them—mostly her—she doesn’t remember taking greets her, alongside her new moniker: Wife.
“Wife?” Kaoru asks, her own voice an echo in the cavern of her body as she feels the vestige of her pride slip away with every utilization of the stupid eggplant emoji.
“You changed it,” Enishi’s words shrug in response, but she barely hears him as she reads.
Enishi, ugh
I LOCE YOU OKAY
****love
and not in the way i love everyone else
I mean i do love them a lot but
I love you in a
feelings way???
in a sexy way. i love you in a sexy way
And then, eight eggplant emojis.
Kaoru is mortified. Of all the ways to confess her feelings—and she had imagined so many of them—this feels like the most bizarre and impertinent way imaginable. She doesn’t even use the eggplant emoji in regular text parlance, so she had to have intentionally searched for it. Current- and Future-Kaoru are not often the beneficiaries of Past-Kaoru’s behavior, but Drunk-Past-Kaoru is a fucking menace, apparently. Worse still, except the bizarre capitalization and weird emojis, the stream-of-conscious approach to her messages isn’t too far off the mark, so Enishi would have no reason to suspect anything other than nervous, tipsy candor.
“And then what happened?” Kaoru asks, wondering if the quality of her life has possibly been demoted from straight-to-video quality to something worse. “You—uh, didn’t respond.”
“The most unattainable woman—the love of my life—sent me indisputable evidence that she thinks about my dick on a fairly regular basis. I needed a minute or two to formulate a proper response.”
Kaoru flushes, because the order in which he says those words juxtaposes crassness against romance, and she doesn’t know what to begin to do with that. There are so many reactions tugging at the corners of her body—her mouth, which wants to smile; her hands, which want to strangle him for how smug he sounds; her heart, which is beating at double-time and threatening to escape from her chest.
The love of my life.
“You never—” She stares down at her hand, at the little plastic ring on her finger. I love you in a feelings way. The fake stone in the middle is blue; another question he must have asked while he was reading between her lines. The most unattainable woman. “You never said anything—why?”
“Kaoru,” Enishi removes his phone from her hands; it slides off of the duvet and falls to the floor, forgotten. The way he says her name—the first time he’s said her name as the love of his life—lodges her traitorous heart in her throat. It feels so silly, to be effused with this much joy at his otherwise irreverent comment, when they’re married. But the ring doesn’t feel real, nor do the pictures or the text messages. But the words, said so casually, without a hint of pretense—that’s real.
He loves her.
When he grips her hands and bids her to angle her body towards his, she obliges; shy, almost, with this person who is more familiar to her than nearly anyone. She’s in a damp towel with poorly dried hair, balanced precariously on the edge of this overstuffed mattress, and she’s having the most important conversation she’ll ever have in her life—a future memory, even if so many that came before it are lost to alcohol-induced amnesia now. It’s almost funny, if there was anything funny about all of her dreams coalescing on a singlular point.
“I’ve loved you since that very first night.” Enishi smiles, one that reaches his eyes, blue topaz. “But I didn’t know that at eighteen. Or nineteen. Or twenty-five, really. I just knew that you were the first person I wanted to have all kinds of firsts with. Marriage. Kids.” His fingertips start glancing over the ring. “You’re the first person I want to tell good news to, and the first person I call when I’m upset. I get irrationally angry when bad things happen to you, and I want to protect you from all of it, and I—I’d never felt that way about anyone.”
She nods, because that’s all there is for it. The feelings he talks about are visceral, and live in the space between each of her heartbeats, something essential.
“And by the time I realized what it was—well, fuck, Kaoru. You’d been my best friend—my only real friend besides my sister—for so long. If I fucked up, I’d lose everything. I knew if I ever seriously entertained the idea of pursuing you, I could never go back to being your friend. Double-or-nothing, with an impossible risk to reward ratio. Could you have risked it?”
No, because she didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. She just threads her fingers with his, both of their hands thrumming with the energy of their sweet cowardice—a non-response for his non-question.
“So,” Enishi appears to be deflating before her eyes, no longer propped up by his adrenaline. “There you have it. After that ‘truth’ you used your turn to ‘dare’ me to kiss you.” He pauses here, breath hitched for the briefest of moments. “A lot, actually. You did that for three straight turns.”
Three times. That feels right. His smile is rakish. Kaoru supposes she can’t blame him. Drunk-Past-Kaoru is a menace, but she gets results.
“And then,” Enishi’s smile takes on a slightly different bent, softer around the edges. “We were halfway through our fourth drinks, and I had asked everything about weddings except the question. I was searching for pawn shops on my phone, under the table. I finally had you, and I just needed to—”
“Why not tonight?” Kaoru echoes the sounds reverberating in her brain. It’s less a genuine memory than it is a feeling, matted and sopping wet puzzle pieces colliding together haphazardly. But she grips onto it with clawed fingers, unrelenting. “Why not tonight?” She repeats, more solidly this time.
“Yeah,” he breathes. His hands, or hers, or both are trembling. “That’s what you said. And I couldn’t argue with that, so—we left the bar and walked the strip. I grabbed the ring from some stupid novelty shop next to a daiquiri stand, because you wanted a Slurpee and it was close enough—”
“Five drinks, then.” Kaoru squeezes his hands, smiling.
“Mostly sugar,” he counters, mirth in every syllable. “You wrapped the paper from the straw around my ring finger, and we called it good. I think you left your souvenir daiquiri cup in the chapel—we can grab another one later.”
Her stomach lurches at the thought of more alcohol being poured into it. “I’m okay. The marriage certificate is souvenir enough for me.”
“Custom daiquiri cups as reception favors?” He teases, but Kaoru can only barely hold onto the conversation for the reminder of how they’ve done everything backwards—the confession, the wedding—now, the dating, then the reception. He must see something in her face because he quickly adds, “I want you to have your blue-green hydrangeas. And dress shopping with Misao. And all the normal things you’ve dreamed about.” Enishi’s tone is almost too serious for a discussion of flowers and crinoline, but the gravitas fades away almost as soon as she notices it. “And I wouldn’t be opposed to taking a wedding dress off of you in a honeymoon suite.”
Kaoru’s inhale is sharp. Her mind has caught on to the idea that Enishi is her husband, and her heart is quickly following after. But her blood, murky with poor sleep and thiamine deficient, is not prepared for Enishi propositioning her as part of their new dynamic. It’s not at all unwelcome, except for the part where she will fall apart right now if handled as roughly as she wants Enishi to handle her.
Her brain latches on to the first sobering, if not dismal, thought: “The money, though.” The words escape from her, unbidden. They feel important and not. Consequential and meaningless. “The legal—”
“A pretense.” Enishi has the grace to look a little sheepish—for him. On any other face, the expression would be neutral, but the downturn of the corner of his eyes lets her know he feels a little bad, or something like it. “An easy ruse, with Tomoe in on the bluff and Himura following after. It was…helpful. You would bring the occasional boyfriend around, and then the questions about my dating life would come up. I couldn’t tell anyone that I was perpetually pining after you. It was an easy answer to their difficult questions.”
The perspective shift is sudden and jarring. Enishi, her husband—wanting her, pining after her, while she brought around boyfriends whose names she cannot remember now for all their insignificance. Kaoru, his wife—can have him, regardless of the number of zeros she does not have in her bank account and the dearth of CEOs in her familial lineage.
Her head spins, tertiary to the hangover.
“So we’re doing this, then. Right?” Kaoru asks, her eyes finding the last remaining hydration in her body to shed a few tears. “The forever thing?” Because it’s real and it’s not. It’s everything she’s ever wanted, offered up too easily--
“Yeah. The forever thing,” Enishi agrees at the end of a long exhale, more than a decade of longing imbued in the sigh.
--then again, maybe not easily at all.
The silence between them hangs suspended, weighty but not uncomfortable. He seems content to just stare at her with those piercing, crystalline eyes of his, and that won’t do while she’s got hangover written all over her red, blotchy face, married or no. “Hey, Enishi. Truth or dare.”
He doesn’t wait to answer; he just kisses her, for the first time she can remember. It’s soft and sweet and he tastes like forever and instant coffee—the realest thing.