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“There’s something,” slurs Sora before she suddenly stops talking, crowds him in the corner, small as she is. Looking up at him hard, has to bend her neck nearly all the way back to do it, too. “On your face,” she finishes. A whole two minutes later. It had been an awkward silence.
Yamato considers moving to the side, politely giving her space and maybe a little privacy to get herself together where they are standing in the far back corner of the bar. Would have, too, if he hadn’t also noticed the awkward step she’d taken when he’d tried, and so he stays put, close, just in case she needs help staying up, eyeing her wobbly footing, which leads to seeing the rest of her. Mini skirt riding up. Thigh high leggings that went on for miles. Could keep following them down but he knows better, so he doesn’t. Kind of wishes the other drunk bar goers would know better, too.
It’d been hard, subtly trying to place himself between her and the more aggressive advances she’d attracted, always without being aware of it, because Sora never seems to be aware of things like that, all the eyes that follow her around, the heads she turns, the stares that linger. Twice Yamato’s had to swipe a drink someone bought for her right out of her hands before she could take a sip, knows she hadn’t seen the bartender make it. He hates Halloween.
“Do you need to sit down?” Gallant. Doesn’t buy into stereotypes, even if he likes leather jackets and skinny jeans and black nail polish and garage records and low riders. Cool and steady, most of the time. Except now. Definitely unsteady. Definitely uncool. Feels like his ears are going to burn off, the way she’s still staring at him, and still very, very close. Her eyes are really pretty. Stop. Look away, look away. No, not down!
Another full minute goes by. The plastic red horns she wears tip as she shakes her head. Taichi says she’s either a devil or a demon. Mimi says her little red wings—matching the shade of her horn headband—makes her a fallen angel. Koushiro had just said she looked nice, which Yamato finds to be the understatement of the century. Jou warns him she’s a bad drunk, as in bad at being drunk. Bolder. No filter. Out of her element.
As the designated adult of their group for the night (and also every night, if he’s bitterly honest), Yamato’s been charged with making sure everyone’s okay, not that he wouldn’t have been anyway. But he’d been keeping an eye on her. Er, looking out for her, that is, tonight especially, after Jou’s always prescient warnings. The looks she’d been getting since she’d stumbled in, already half gone, having succumbed to Mimi and Taichi’s peer pressure pregame rituals despite Koushiro’s efforts to temper their friends’ excitements and Jou’s futile lectures about pacing oneself for the night ahead. Kind of hard not to notice her, even if she doesn’t think that about herself, shrinks herself down.
Mimi once said that Sora does these things because her girlhood had taught her the need to keep her heart safe. Yamato doesn’t think he knows what Mimi had meant, but he knows how to do that. He’d say he keeps his locked down tight, too, but then Koushiro will take the time to call him just to say hello, or Jou will ask him what he’s done to take care of himself that day, or Taichi will smile at him like Yamato’s the best thing he’s ever seen, and Yamato knows the charade’s been over for a long time.
So he pays it forward, and looks after them, too. Why shouldn’t that mean one of his oldest friends as well? He’s always noticed Sora anyway. First, and usually only. Any room she’s in. Her eyes are really, really pretty.
Right now, they’re wide open. She could burn him with that stare and he’d probably just say thank you. Maybe even a yes ma'am and a more please, but he shuts that part of his brain down fast. Sora’s his friend. That, he can’t lose.
The bar is noisy and she comes closer and he curses in his head, alarms going off. “I said,” she’s shouting now, internal social etiquette regulator completely abandoned. Wow, she really is drunk, Jou hadn’t been joking, “you’ve got something on your face.”
He doesn’t. He’d refused to dress up, actually, hasn’t for years. The rest of them had followed suit on the group theme each year, but Yamato’s always been the last of them to have the steel to stand up to Mimi’s more tyrannical impulses. The bar required costumes, though, so she’d had wrestled the stupid wolf ear headband on him as he’d walked out the door. Told him she’d cry if he took it off. Really doesn’t put it past her to wheel out the waterworks if tested, so he decides not to run the risk. Everyone thinks Mimi’s a sweetheart, but Yamato knows better.
He points to the ears. “I’m a wolf.” Immediately hears how lame it sounds and wants to sink into the floor. Disappear forever. Never show his face around her again.
“No, you’re not.”
Yamato knows how to argue with very drunk people. There’s a fine art to it, avoiding bad decisions and keeping everyone in check long enough to survive intact until morning. Again, he’s accepted that this is to be his fate tonight. He’d already had to argue Taichi out of getting a piercing (Taichi’d refused to say where, just dropped suggestive hints), and Mimi from trying to pay everyone’s bar tab (as in everyone at the bar, not just their friends) with her dad’s emergency credit card. Koushiro’d been bribed with a small mountain of salty snacks to not try to fix the bartender’s register (which wasn’t broken); Jou, he’d finally convinced to share the karaoke mic with promises to rent a booth just for their friend group next weekend. (Under no circumstances was Yamato going to repeat this promise once Jou’d sobered up, or admit it was ever made.) Submitting to whatever Sora tells him to do without putting up a fight while she’s dressed in dominatrix black was something he’d always thought about—no.
“Okay,” he says instead.
“You’re Yamato.”
This is true. “Okay.”
He swears he knows more words than ‘Okay.’ Can’t think of a single example to this truth when she’s standing in front of him in a skin tight bodycon dress that spells out more curves than he’s ever dared dream, but he’s positive he knows at least ten more words. Maybe even twenty. Hopes no one asks him to prove it. His head is so empty, and he hasn’t had a single sip of anything. Just her, looking at him like that.
“Because you’re Yamato, and you never need to pretend.”
She’s all rambly, slow and distracted, unlike herself. So close now he can smell her perfume. She’d traded her usual jasmine white tea scent for a spicy rosewood. Maybe Givenchy’s Ange ou Démon. It’d certainly fit her look—stop. He absolutely should not know these details. Maybe he’s the creep he should be shielding her from.
She’s peering up at him, swaying a little. “What’s that like?”
Yamato focuses on her. “Being…myself?”
“Yeah.” Sora nods, voice so soft. Vulnerable. More alarms are going off in his head, a different kind.
Yamato doesn’t think he is, not all the time. Even he has expectations he puts on himself. All he wants is to know who he is, so he can be the person his friends need, and deserve. It’s work. A lot of it. But it matters, so work at it, he does.
He’s honest. “Not easy.”
Her eyes take on a certain watery shine that makes his stomach drop. No, please don’t cry. Please don’t let me have made you cry. Not you.
“That’s why I like you.”
“Huh?” Oh, for fuck’s sake. Does he really not know any other adult human words? “I mean — ,”
“I like that you know yourself.” She breaks into a smile. Disarms him completely. Knows she’s not going to remember any of this tomorrow, and so gets as bold as she can be. Like maybe something about standing next to him could help her feel safe enough to take the risk. “I’d like to know myself.”
Say it. Use your words. Use all the words.
“I'dliketoknowyoutoo.”
And the world hasn’t stopped, the axis still spins on. The floor hasn’t swallowed him whole. He hasn’t woken up. It’s not a dream.
But still, she just stares, unblinking. Her words repeat with utter disinterest. “There’s something on your face.”
Oh.
Maybe he’d said it in his head instead? Not aloud?
Sora steps closer, and smiles.
Oh.
Her smile is shy and devilish, all at once. Sees right through him with those really, really pretty eyes. Pokes a finger into Yamato’s cheek, at the dimples pinching his red cheeks, that blush that only seems to come around when Sora looks at him. The one he’d hoped no one else had noticed. “There it is.”