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“Here’s your strawberry–oh.”
Aki pauses, first at the sentence abruptly cut-off and then at the voice. She glances up to find Shiho glaring at her, dressed in the all-black uniform with a shiny silver name tag to boot, one hand cocked on her hip.
“What are you doing here?” she snaps, all brash. Good to know that she hasn’t changed at all in the months they’ve been apart.
Aki raises one eyebrow coolly, giving her uniform a once-over and Shiho flushes red to her ears with anger as she slaps one sweaty palm over the name tag.
“Isn’t that what I should be asking?”
Shiho looms above her, so much anger compressed into her tiny frame, trapped behind her eyes as she seethes, her whole body shaking like it’s trying to vibrate straight out of her skin. Aki stares up at her, caught in her shadow, and wonders if this is how it’s always going to be between them, caught forever in this tipped scale.
Her knuckles turn white against the table.
“Are you going to tell on me?” Shiho asks quietly and Aki tips her head. On one hand, it would be a nice way to kick her in the gut after her knife in the back. Shiho could probably pick up shifts at another place but it’d be a hassle going back through the job application hellhole again. On the other hand, Aki’s not an asshole.
“Why are you working here?” she asks instead. “Shouldn’t you be off practicing every second of your life, like ‘real musicians’ do?”
Shiho scowls at her again and Aki has to clamp down on the impulse to reach one hand out and smooth out the wrinkles, rub them out of her skin with her thumb. Instead, Aki shifts her weight so she’s sitting flat on her own palm.
“I need money for a new guitar. A proper one.”
“Right.” Aki takes another sip of her coffee and Shiho’s shoe taps insistently against the floor.
“So?”
“Oh! No, I won’t tell.” Aki thinks she sees the muscle in Shiho’s forehead relax, a snapshot of relief, but it’s gone before she can be certain.
“Okay,” Shiho spits out because she still doesn’t know how to properly say “thank you”.
“You’re welcome.” And now Shiho’s back to glaring at her like an overager chihuahua. Like one of those really small dogs, all bark and no bite. Aki glances back down at her cake, the two layers of cream with strawberries and vanilla batter squashed in between.
“Do you want some?” she asks, pointing down at the plate. Shiho’s stomach has always been a black hole for food and Aki used to carry around granola bars for her to snack on between rehearsals.
“I-I have customers to attend to,” she stammers, turning her nose up. Aki leans back in her chair and glances around at the empty cafe.
“Are the customers in the cafe with us?” Shiho grinds her teeth at her in reply, ribbon swinging behind her as she shakes her head.
“I–” Aki takes advantage of her open mouth to reach forward and lodge the spoon between her teeth. She’s a little off the mark and some of the cream lands on the corner instead.
“Good, right?” Aki asks and doesn’t wait for a reply before she helps herself. She digs her spoon into the same spot and shovels a giant piece into her mouth–it’s as sweet as the giant promo poster outside the door had promised. “Wow, this is life-changing!”
“It’s just cake,” Shiho says sourly but Aki didn’t miss the way her eyes lit up when she swallowed. So strawberry probably still is her favorite. She dusts off the end of her skirt and steps back, the empty tray tucked under one arm.
“Now if you could stop distracting me so that I can do my job–”
“You have cake on your mouth.”
Shiho flushes bright red up to her ears again and scrubs at her mouth aggressively with her sleeve.
“Now,” Shiho grinds out. “Excuse me, I have work to do.”
She turns her back on her and Aki is thrust violently back into the past, stuck staring at her silhouette, her back a smaller and smaller point in the distance until it vanishes completely. Panic closes like a cold fist around her gut because she refuses to let her go again, to lose her twice when the first time had been painful enough and her mouth opens before she has time to process the words.
“Tell me why you really left.” The question that she’s been molding between her palms for months, that has been festering like an open wound in all their weeks of silence comes tumbling awkwardly out of her mouth. “Was it because of me?”
Shiho glares at her, fuming silently and that itself is enough of an answer, isn’t it? Aki squeezes her eyes shut so that she doesn’t have to stare at her expression any longer but the mixture of pain and fear frozen on her face cuts through her like a bullet to the chest. The split-second she glimpsed it had been enough.
“What a loser.” Shiho folds her arms over her chest and glares at her. “You don’t have anything better to do on Christmas Eve than sit alone in a cafe?”
Aki blinks at the sudden whiplash in the conversation and pointedly does not mention how Shiho is also in the same cafe and also alone. She opts for shrugging instead.
“Where’s Yori?”
She tries to rack her brain for the plans Yori mentioned off-handedly.
“With Hima-chan at a… tree lighting, I think.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?” Shiho presses.
Aki stops, her mouth wide open. Yori and Hima spending the holidays together holding hands and doing lovey-dovey couple stuff would have had her huddled under her blanket, commiserating over a lone mug of hot cocoa a couple months ago but now? She just feels empty, blank with maybe a thin layer of happiness that her naturally reserved friend has found someone who drags her a little out of her comfort zone and makes her happy. The fact still burns but it rubs at a healed-over scar instead of salt in an open wound.
“No,” she says and finds that she means it. “It doesn’t.”
Shiho’s eyes flick across her face like she’s studying Aki’s expression for something. Whatever it is, she must not find it because she surges forward and the plastic tray goes rattling to the ground as she grabs her by the lapels and hoists her up to her feet.
“That’s it?!” she shrieks and Aki nearly forgot what it was like to be on the other end of Shiho Izumi’s full attention, to stand in the face of a hurricane. It’s exhilarating and Aki hears her heartbeat roaring in her own ears. “That’s all you have to say?! I-I, SSSGIRLS wasn’t like anything I had ever been a part of before but I couldn’t stay with the way you and Yori were, I couldn’t even bear to look at you two!”
“So you did leave because of me!” Aki hollers, triumphant at the admission but she stops as she retraces the hops in the conversation. “Wait, what does Yori have to do with this?”
Shiho groans, one hand over her face, and the steam is practically pouring out of her ears at this point.
“Because I was in love with you and I couldn’t bear to see you love someone else!” Shiho’s red-faced from the confession, uniform wrinkled and chest heaving as she struggles to catch her breath. Aki feels something in her snap as she pores over each memory again with a new lens, re-examines their months together in light of this revelation. Every lingering touch, every small smile, every quick glance carries a second meaning.
Shiho turns to go and Aki grabs her by the wrist because she’ll be damned before she lets her go again.
“Were you happy with us?” Shiho has her face stubbornly tipped away but Aki has to see her in this moment to know that she’s telling the truth and so she tugs on her sleeve, a desperate plea and an apology rolled up in one.
When Shiho turns, there’s tears in her eyes.
“The happiest I’ve ever been.”
Aki’s heart feels like it’s breaking for the second time. She thinks how could I have done this to her? and how could I have not seen this before? as she takes her other hand in her own. She thinks of all those minutes spent watching her play, drawn to her like a gravitational pull, and wonders when she started watching her and if she truly ever stopped. She stares at the mess of a girl in front of her, all rough edges and raw ambition and thinks I love her, I love her, I love her.
“Then let me make you happy again,” she says quietly and she watches as Shiho’s expression cycles violently through emotions: first shock that bleeds into curiosity before edging into relief.
Shiho takes her hands back to scrub violently at her eyes, turning the skin there red. Aki wants to smooth it over gently with her thumb so she reaches one hand out and does.
“You better not mess it up this time,” Shiho sniffles before she launches herself at her with no warning. Aki catches her in her arms and leans forward to meet her halfway for the kiss.