Work Text:
Her fingers uncurled from a fist the moment she closed the door to their hotel room.
She stumbled into the room and past Noriko, her de facto roommate since somewhere in Hong Kong.
She took a strained breath. Another. Breathing and breathing until her chest hurt.
Jotoko shrugged off her jacket and chucked it onto the carpet in a dishevelled pile. Her shoes soon followed, then her hat, then her belts, until the floor of their hotel room looked like Jotoko’s makeshift closet. She let out a sigh and flopped down face-first onto her bed, letting the tension in her body relax for the first time in what felt like weeks.
They had been travelling for some time now, and although she kept up a tough appearance in front of the other women, she was missing home and desperate for a break.
Thinking about her dad didn’t help much either.
If Noriko had a comment to make about Jotoko’s floordrobe situation, she kept it to herself. Instead, she brought out a leather bag onto the cover of her bed and began searching through its contents with a loud rattle.
Jotoko propped herself up on her elbows and opened one eye, studying the girl on the other bed with a half-interested curiosity.
She watched as Noriko pulled out a bottle of nail polish, unscrewed the stopper and began applying a coat to cover the peeling paint on her nails. The colour was bright red, as red as the wood of a Shinto gate and those cherries she was always craving. It was almost the same shade as her hair.
Noriko painted quickly and soon the chipped polish underneath was hidden by a fresh coat. Good as new.
“Why?” Jotoko asked bluntly, severing the silence.
“Why what?” the redhead countered without even looking up from her hand.
“Your nails. Why do you bother painting them when they always end up getting chipped anyway?”
Noriko paused her painting to think for a second. “I guess I’ve always liked having something to keep my hands busy. Plus, I can’t change clothes as easily while we’re on the road. It’s nice to have something about myself that I can personalise,” she mused thoughtfully, fanning her hands to dry them quicker. “Why don’t you paint yours?”
Jotoko snorted and rolled onto her back. “Can you imagine me beating someone up with bright red nails? I don’t think so.”
“I have more than just red,” Noriko said, pulling out her bag of bottles to show off the wide range of shades. A moment passed as Jotoko fully registered the implication.
“Good grief. You can’t possibly be serious.”
Noriko’s sudden grin told her that she was, indeed, serious. Very serious.
“Come on, I think you’ll look nice. And I have a bunch of colours to choose from. I’ll even let you pick which one you want.”
“I’m not letting you paint my nails!” Jotoko sat straight up on her bed. She grabbed a pillow and launched it at Noriko’s head, which she dodged without trouble, then folded her arms in defiance.
But Noriko would not let up that easily.
“Don’t make me use Hierophant on you,” she threatened with an unsettlingly sweet smile. A ghostly green tendril appeared just behind her shoulder, as if to add credibility to the threat.
Jotoko glared right back at her, silently weighing up her options. She could’ve easily fought her again right then and there, would’ve probably won too, but she suspected that her grandmother wouldn’t be too happy if she had to pay for yet another destroyed hotel room. But it was either that, or…
The silence hung in the air for a few seconds, before Jotoko sighed and snatched the bag of bottles from Noriko’s bed, defeated. “Fine. Whatever.”
The redhead clapped with delight while Jotoko rolled her eyes.
She thought about being stubborn and going with a clear gloss just to piss Noriko off. But the more she sorted through the bottles of colourful paint, the more she felt drawn to a certain shade of purple. It was so dark that it was almost black, but when the bottle caught the light at just the right angle it revealed a shade of violet with small flecks of glitter like the night sky in the desert.
“This one,” Jotoko mumbled, passing over the polish.
“Excellent choice!” Noriko smiled. “You picked a really pretty colour.”
“Let’s just get this over with.”
The redheaded student took that as an invitation and climbed over onto the other bed, kneeling between Jotoko’s legs without even a word of forewarning. Before Jotoko could protest or push her off, she had already comfortably settled herself in and was unscrewing the stopper of the bottle.
God damn. Jotoko had not expected her to get that close. The sugary scent of her cherry body spray combined with their sudden close proximity was beginning to make her feel a little lightheaded.
Noriko gently took hold of her right hand and began to paint.
The liquid felt cool against her nail, contrasted by the warm touch of Noriko’s palm cradling her own. It was a strange feeling, but not exactly an unpleasant one. Surprisingly enough, Jotoko didn’t even feel like punching her face in.
She studied the way Noriko painted each nail from top to bottom, coating each one with a smooth layer of varnish. Her brush strokes were neat and even — clearly the work of an artist. Jotoko remembered that she’d told her once that she was a painter back home. If this was what her work looked like on such a small scale, she couldn’t help wondering what it would look like full-sized on a canvas.
Not that she cared or anything. She was just curious.
“Your right hand is done,” Noriko announced after a couple of minutes. “Left, please.” Jotoko did as she was told and switched the hand that was being held, letting the other rest on her thigh so as not to smudge the wet purple paint.
The small brush glided back and forth across her nails in a hypnotically rhythmic motion, but Jotoko found her attention held by something else entirely.
Or rather, someone else.
The more she looked, the more Jotoko found herself noticing small things about Noriko that she’d never paused for long enough to see.
The strands of hair falling down in her face that she was too focused to tuck behind her ear. The grip she held Jotoko’s hand in as she painted — firm, but gentle, like she was trying to avoid hurting her bruised knuckles. The slight glimpse of her tongue held between her teeth while she concentrated, seemingly unaware she was even doing it. The colour of her nails that matched with the reddish tint of her lips.
They looked so soft. Jotoko bet they were soft.
She forced herself to tear her eyes away and stare at a damp patch on the ceiling instead.
It was stupid. Why was she even thinking like this? She tried to convince herself that the unusual fondness she felt towards Noriko was because they were both students, that must be it. Nothing else.
(And that strange dizzy feeling accompanied by a steadily increasing pounding in her chest? Must be the nail polish fumes. Yup. That was definitely it.)
She stamped the traitorous feelings down before she could think about them for too long.
Jotoko hadn’t even realised that her nails were done until the redhead screwed the lid back on the bottle of polish and sat back triumphantly, admiring her own work.
“What do you think?” Noriko asked, holding up both of her hands so Jotoko could get a look at her freshly painted fingernails.
Jotoko flexed her fingers one at a time, admiring the detail and care taken to paint each nail. She couldn’t lie, they actually came out really nice. The subtle purple glitter shined like stardust when she tilted them at just the right angle. Jotoko almost smiled, but she quickly covered it up with a scowl and a cough instead. “Looks good.”
Noriko glowed at the praise. “I’m glad you like them, Jojo,” she said, beaming. ”The colour really compliments your eyes.”
Jotoko fell quiet and looked away before Noriko could see her face reddening.
Hotel smoke detectors be damned, she wanted a cigarette. But when she attempted to sit up and roll off the bed to grab her jacket, she found herself unable to move, pinned to the mattress by the other girl in her lap. Their legs had become entwined at some point during the painting process, their chests now mere inches from touching. The bow on Noriko’s seifuku hovered just over the neckline of Jotoko’s tank top, and the delinquent was suddenly aware of just how little space there was between their bodies.
And even more worryingly, she realised with rising waves of alarm, she didn’t even mind.
“Better not move…” cautioned Noriko. “In case you, you know. Smudge your nails.” Noticeably, she didn’t release Jotoko’s hands.
“Yeah. My nails.” Jotoko swallowed hard, the slight hesitation to her words betraying her attempt at seeming totally cool and composed. “How long does this paint take to dry, anyway?”
“It depends, but usually up to fifteen minutes.”
“Looks like we’re going to be here for a while then.”
“Yes, it does look that way indeed.” Noriko smiled, not her creepy smile from earlier, just a small, perhaps even bashful smile. Jotoko noticed a hint of something in her voice. Nervousness? Was Noriko blushing?
She resolved not to think about it as she felt Noriko making herself comfortable in the gap between her legs.
Nails were forgotten as they began to talk. About everything.
About the ocean, about all the things they missed back home in Japan, about movies and music and TV.
Noriko liked sumo. Jotoko liked sumo as well. Noriko was funny, even if her sense of humour tended to veer into the disturbing. Jotoko couldn’t put it into words but she felt like she was standing at the seashore whenever she made Noriko laugh.
Fifteen minutes passed. They didn’t move.
Even after an hour passed and conversation had been replaced by the quiet hum of the radiator, neither one broke from the entangled embrace.
It only struck Jotoko that they hadn’t moved a muscle when she felt like her legs and lower body had turned into sea jelly.
“Oi. Noriko.”
She nudged her shoulder a little bit, just enough to get a reaction. No response. The other girl was most certainly out cold.
Jotoko felt her eyes beginning to close on their own. She couldn’t see the alarm clock from this angle, but she’d bet money that the hour was in the single digits. She was so tired that she felt like she could fall asleep any second, and yet she just wanted to stay like that forever. Wrapped up in Noriko’s gentle embrace where she didn't need to put on a brave face or hide behind her unshakeable delinquent persona.
She could just be.
Jotoko ran her dark purple nails through the other girl’s hair. The cool purple tone contrasted with the vivid, shocking red.
Though she anticipated the teasing she would no doubt receive later from the other women ("Awwww, Jojo, your nails are très chic!"), Jotoko found that she didn’t really mind.
She brushed a stray strand of hair behind Noriko’s ear, threaded her fingers through Noriko’s own, and then she fell asleep.
(The polish would, unshockingly, chip within days, and Noriko would find endless joy in teasing Jotoko over her mumbled request to “paint them again, or whatever.”)