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She’d been talking.
Nonstop.
Normally, that kind of behavior would have pissed Kuroiwa off and then some.
Normally. Right.
Something about him had changed.
Changes such as that would have been a terrible, terrible thing for him. Not that it mattered anymore. He was satisfied with it.
The young woman who came into his life wasn’t a bad change at all. At least, after a while.
Kuroiwa shifted the notebook that lay in front of the two of them. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing anymore. There was nothing of importance in what he had forced himself to read over.
Perhaps he wanted an excuse to do something, anything. To sit with her, pretending to work. Nonetheless, he would’ve preferred to do so in silence.
He leaned back in the seat, looking up at the ceiling. It was a dull white color, nothing about it ever changed after many years, unlike him.
Unless it did, too.
…Of course it did. It’d been chipped a few times, plenty of times. And it used to sit above one person — the one and only Mitsuru Kuroiwa — but now it sat above two.
After a minute of silence, another sentence slipped out of her mouth, but Kuroiwa snapped before she could finish.
“For someone so shy, you are such a damn babbler.”
Kae’s eyelashes quickly batted as she flashed him a snobbish grin. “Why don’t you shut me up, then?” she teased as she pressed the side of her index finger against her mouth, mimicking a shushing gesture.
Briefly, he paused, and then started up again, “…I like hearing you speak.”
A contradictory statement.
Whatever.
It was true, though.
Defeatedly, her eyes darted to the opened notebook on the desk — the very one that Kuroiwa was previously looking over, or so he claimed to be, and she skimmed along the lines until her gaze landed on what seemed to be a small yet detailed portrait of her likeness at the bottom-right corner of the page.
“Micchan?” she began, her curiosity piqued. “Did you draw that?”
Kuroiwa peered over her shoulder.
It was an old drawing; one of the first of many drawings of her while she visited him almost everyday for months after meeting him, much to his dismay. By that point, he’d remembered her face so well that he could sketch her appearance simply from memory.
He would do it too frequently. The thoughts of that meddling young lady always distracted him from his work — he’d sometimes wonder if she would style her hair up in a tangly bun or have it down and naturally curled, and he’d draw her all over his notes about cases he had been preoccupied with over time. He’d anticipate a visit once he stepped foot out of the station, and some days he would wait even longer if she ended up being late.
Be that as it may, it wasn’t as though he liked her at the time. That couldn’t have been the case. To him, she was merely an annoying girl he just liked to draw a lot. A muse to hone his skills. It was all part of his plan — he’d get better at illustrating feminine suspects, which would make him much more useful in the eyes of his superiors.
Despite those made-up thoughts that concealed his true feelings, that annoying girl he drew so much was now sitting on his lap, staring at the lines of graphite that formed her image on the piece of paper.
“I did,” he finally replied, a tinge of bashfulness in his voice that was difficult to catch.
Her fingers flipped through more of the contents of his notebook. With each flip, portraits grew into half-body illustrations, and eventually, full-bodies.
She could only think, he’s much more talented than I am.
Slowly, she turned the page one last time. It was different from the rest, a single page reserved for slightly bigger drawings that featured two subjects rather than one.
The palm of his hand slammed onto the paper with a firm thud, his splayed fingers obscuring the images from her view.
“Why the hell did you do that?” she asked, startled. It was hard to see much of anything at all besides her name written in both English letters and katakana a few times at the side. “Why won’t you let me see this?”
“It’s confidential. Nothing of your concern,” he muttered, closing the notebook. His left arm snaked around her waist as he twisted her body against his chest.
She let out a frustrated groan.
“You’re hiding something!”
She continued to whine; she was nosey, curious, and a bit obnoxious. How cute, he thought, and he couldn’t help but gawk at her pouting lips in between desperate pleads each time she looked up at him.
Then, her fingers clawed at his dress shirt as if she were a cat.
It drained a lot out of his energy not to harm her; the urge to rip her apart with nothing but his bare hands and brute strength was so intense that it just about made him feel lightheaded.
If only she had many lives; if only she couldn’t feel pain, if only she would enjoy being killed multiple times, if only. It would be a continuous cycle of pleasure and death — rinse and repeat. In any case, it was completely her fault for being too cute for him to handle.
Cuteness aggression was something he needed to get adjusted to. Or, rather, work on. Having both an adorable lover and murderous tendencies certainly did not go hand-in-hand.
Abruptly, he took hold of her jaw and said, “I’ve had enough.”
So, he kissed her. Embarrassingly so.
It wasn’t the first time they’d kissed each other. He’d never been bad at it, either. Maybe he was too enraptured by her charm that it threw him off, or it was merely the awkward position they were in.
While his tongue grazed along the edges of her teeth, her hand slid across the desktop until she hit the jackpot.
She snagged the notebook, pulling away from his face.
“I got it…” Kae sang.
Kuroiwa mumbled dazedly, “I no longer care.”
She opened it up to the page — the page that was almost filled with drawings of the both of them.
There was one of Kuroiwa standing next to her, his right arm wrapped around her waist as she leaned a bit forward with her own arms behind her back, a smile on her well-drawn face.
Aww!
Another doodle caught her eye; she was embracing him tightly, her lips against his cheek, and her eyes shut in bliss. She had hugged him before, she hugged him a lot.
But, there had been a time when she embraced him that he couldn’t ever get out of his mind; he remembered the exact day he stayed in the lot of the police department and dilly-dallied because she was over an hour late to visit, he remembered the excitement in her voice when she playfully poked at him, and he especially remembered her warm body against his own as she held onto him for being so kind to wait for her arrival.
It had been the first time she’d gotten so close to him and he’d be damned if he said he didn’t enjoy every fucking second of it. Ever since that day, he craved more of her touch, her teasing, everything. Everything about her that irritated him the most, he needed. Desired.
Whether what he was feeling was love, obsession, or whatever, the label wasn’t relevant to him. He just knew he had to have her no matter what it took.
That hug was what prompted him to draw everything that was on the page — he didn’t give a single shit if it wasn’t appropriate to do, he was deep in love and had been slowly coming to terms with it, despite his denial that seemed unwavering at first.
He pursued what mattered to him, and she happened to be an addition to the list.
“Oh, Micchan,” Kae whispered, “you are so obsessed with me.”
She must’ve thought those drawings were recent.
Good.
He wouldn’t be seen as a creep, then.
…Even though there were many drawings of her in there, dated many days prior to them getting together. On top of that, she didn’t find it weird.
She was weird.
She was annoying, weird, and cute.
And that was just perfect.
Eventually, he responded with confidence, “I am.”