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Giyuu wants her for his wife.
Shinobu does not at first believe that he means it when he turns up at her house to say so. He’s probably just too vulnerable to the power of suggestion; someone said it was sensible to find a wife, and he decided thoughtlessly that they were correct. He does not want it. Only finds it reasonable. That’s what she concludes.
That is also the reason that she agrees, because it may well be. Sensible, that is. They are neither one exactly whole. And because Shinobu is nothing if not practical, they are married without fanfare or excitement in the middle of May.
She surmises when he bends down that night and kisses her with so little finesse that their foreheads knock painfully that she has made a rather egregious error in her calculations.
**
There are practical benefits to this arrangement. About that, Shinobu had not been mistaken. He can reach things on high shelves and she can tie knots that one hand cannot. There is someone to bring her porridge and water when she’s ill. She has allowed him enough kisses out of scientific curiosity that he has almost become pleasant at it. This, too, is rather practical.
Then there are the parts that are not.
People tease her. People ask her when there is going to be a little Tomioka heir. She is starting to feel a strange pulsating sickness in her stomach and sometimes her chest when she sees that Giyuu is looking at her too intently. And Giyuu is often doing that now.
She calls his bluff, once, when she wears a new kimono she’s just purchased and she finds his eyes moving methodically up from the floor-sweeping hem until they reach her face and he realizes that he’s been caught. And he only blushes and stammers, but it is nevertheless a revelation.
Her husband perhaps has more in common with the average man of his age than Shinobu had thought. And it makes her feel powerful, as though she holds the cards, but after that the thought loses its savor.
Probably he had wanted a proper wife, one who was gentle and fond of him and who would have gone about making things typical so that he would never have to admit he wished they were. Probably he’d hoped to have a baby by now. Probably it upsets him that she has shown no more interest in that or in the things which might make it happen than she would in a foreign newspaper she couldn’t read.
She wears only her oldest and plainest kimonos for a while after that.
**
They’re grinding herbs for poultices one day about a year and a half into their sham of a marriage when Giyuu asks.
He’s quite good with a mortar and pestle now, even single-handed. And Shinobu is thinking about that when he asks, “why did you marry me?”
“Well, it was a reasonable thing to do.”
He seems confused, and Shinobu clarifies: he was and is kind, docile, understanding of the unusual position in which she finds herself, and well-financed. They are both, after everything, in need of a helper.
He frowns at this explanation, and she knows – even if Giyuu himself does not – that he does so because he had hoped to hear in some oblique way that she loved him.
And he may soon come to find her cold for it, but that is only because she cannot risk the embarrassment of admitting any of the things which might acquit her. He need never know that he has become to Shinobu all that is solid and true and comfortable.
No, he need never know that.
**
One night Giyuu wakes panting with the pinched face of somebody in great pain.
This is not unusual but Shinobu is not given to waking when he does. Tonight is unusual because his caught breath several feet away rouses her. And because it does, when she’s called his name groggily and heard no answer, she crosses the distance to his futon and puts her hand on his sweaty cheek.
He clutches at it fiercely. And then he takes her whole small body into his engulfing arms and holds her the way she has seen him hold an extra pillow against himself when he can’t sleep.
That is the first night that Shinobu sleeps in her husband’s arms. The morning is the first that she’s the one to kiss him first. And it is probably – she knows him enough to say so with confidence – the first in which her husband becomes aware that it need not necessarily be his mouth which tells her first that he loves her.
His hands do a fine enough job of that. Unsurprising.
What is not unsurprising: that Shinobu’s do, too.
**
It takes him four years to say it, for Giyuu is not a romantic sort of man. But once he thought he might never have made it to this morning, one past his twenty-fifth birthday. Perhaps that’s what does it.
They are facing each other in his futon. He reaches out to graze his fingers across her cheek. And Shinobu is not sure what she’s meant to expect of him then, but it is not this:
“My love.”
Shinobu is certain she reddens to the roots of her hair. Words have a piercing kind of quality and she is used to their being treated with near-paralyzing hesitation.
Still, she replies: “yes?”
“I’m…glad I didn’t die.”
It is with a giggle of disbelief and of relief and of twelve dozen other things beyond her capacity to articulate just now that Shinobu kisses him.
**
She usually finds him on the engawa now that it’s spring.
Giyuu has come to like the sunshine. And he likes especially to sit out and feel the breeze. He sits the same way, always, one leg folded up beneath him and one arm folded like hospital bedsheets crisply against his chest as a cradle.
Their son just fits in the crook of his arm. And usually when Shinobu finds him, Giyuu is sitting and watching his little face in its sleep or its wide-eyed curiosity with a tenderness that even now Shinobu is a little bit frightened of.
To be loved is to be profoundly uncomfortable. Shinobu has discovered this. But it is also to be tended-to and well-fed and thoughtlessly kissed upon the forehead when he’s passing by. It is to be able to take her chubby child from his arm and kiss his mooncake cheek.
Tomioka Shinobu is a prickly creature, unpleasant, untamed. She is not practiced in showing affection and she may never truly like it. But she likes that their baby has his nose; she believes that must count for something. So must that look they exchange when Shinobu settles the baby against her chest and meets his eyes.
He is happy, undeniably, the corners of his eyes crinkling with it. And he looks at Shinobu as though she is the one entirely responsible.
And maybe she isn’t, but it is no small thing to be the first real happiness a person has known in years. Perhaps it is an honor she is best-off accepting.