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"Naniwa Bay..."
Chihaya swallows, and breathes. This must be her thousandth match in this room with these two men. Maybe her millionth. The mat underneath them (furnished by Taichi, despite the fact that he doesn't even live here, Chihaya, why would he do that for us unless--) smells like home and hard work, and maybe a little bit like the beer they've all been sipping. It presses reliable lines into her palms.
"Here comes spring, now the flower blooms..."
She closes her eyes, and listens.
"Which is the pale moonlight, and--"
Th-thud.
Arata's hand hits empty mat first, followed a hair later by Chihaya's. A dead card.
A six-syllable dead card, and they both still moved.
"--which the piled-up snow?"
Their eyes meet, and Chihaya feels a shiver trickle from somewhere behind her belly-button up to the nape of her neck. Arata's as wound up as she is, or even more so. Despite having several years of Meijin and Queen matches under their belts (under their obis? Kana-chan would know.) they aren't accustomed to playing for such high stakes.
They settle under Taichi's even tones curling around the last two lines of the poem. "Here at dawn in Yoshino, it's impossible to know."
She closes her eyes, and sees the map of the cards on the insides of her eyelids.
"Su--"
Th-thud.
"--mi Bay's shores, on which the waves had gathered..."
Arata takes the card. One syllable, on her left side--Chihaya could admit it was well done. His teeth flash white, just for a moment.
("But if you make it two in a row, then..." "The pacing is better." "Yeah, you'll have enough clothes to keep up." They'd all laughed; they'd all agreed.)
She accepts the card he passes over (It is true I love), and slides it into its proper place.
"At night, I shall go to you in my dream," Taichi reads. Arata shifts his weight forward, eager in a way that gives Chihaya a thrill. "Let none know."
Chihaya closes her eyes. Is there a hesitation before he--
"By the wind--"
Dead card. While Arata's arm sweeps out in a lightning-quick arc, Chihaya just tenses her thighs. They listen to Taichi.
"From Mimuro's mountain slopes, maples leaves are torn."
There's a thread of anticipation in his voice, in the heavy pause before the second stanza. "Which turn the Tatsuta river into a rich brocade."
The first thing she's going to ask for is going to be Taichi's shirt.
"Im--" and she protects her own card, but. "--passioned vows exchanged..."
Arata easily takes Until the day from his own side and slides it onto At night.
The easy melody of the reading falters, just for a moment. That same shiver from earlier settles into Chihaya's stomach.
That was Arata's second consecutive card and they all know it.
In the gap before the last two lines, Arata clears his throat. "Chihaya," he says, and if he's feeling nervous it doesn't show in his voice. All she hears is confidence, keenness. "Socks."
For Arata, it makes sense to start slow. These days, she's seeing the value of that.
She smiles and says, "Sure."
It's strangely natural to half-sit on her right side, to reach back to take off her socks. She leaves them in a little messy pile to her left, and because her attention is trained on Taichi (if he's going to freak out, it's going to be soon), she notices his soft intake of breath.
He doesn't say anything else, though, as she re-situates herself under Arata's pleased regard. Maybe Taichi's just bothered by the care she clearly doesn't take with her socks--there's a hole in one toe, and she didn't bother folding them.
The final stanza rings out as if he'd never faltered: "Until the day waves crash, over Mount Sue no Matsu."
Chihaya can compete, too. She closes her eyes, and listens.
--
An hour ago, they'd been full of take-out, and relaxed, and glowing with good company. Chihaya had been thinking about what she'd wanted to do before bed that night, been thinking that she wanted Arata's lips on hers, had dared herself into hoping at last for Taichi...
But Taichi is always complicated.
There's so much behind them, is the problem. And while Chihaya prides herself on listening ahead, and Arata has reflexes that make his opponents feel like they're standing still, Taichi plays his game so, so mindful the past. What's been read governs what's likely to be read; somewhere in his heart he has a ledger reading "bully," "coward," "why play if you won't win?"
Chihaya suspects these entries have narrowed the shape of his future, but she won't let them. That's not how their team plays. They grow together: Chihaya's learned to defend, and Arata takes more risks, and Taichi's going to look at the present without running it through a filter of the past.
--
Her bare toes flex against the mat.
Dead card.
Arata moves smoothly through a practice swing, and she echoes him.
Dead card.
Taichi's looking at them, she can feel his gaze on her back. Arata adjusts his posture slightly under the attention.
"G--"
Chihaya moves.
"--ust of wind carries leaves from the trees." Chihaya stands and chases after the cards she'd sent flying, collects them from their position near the potted plant in the corner. "The autumn's greenery is wasted and driven."
She returns to her place on the mat with a sharp little smile. It's reflected back in a twitch of Arata's mouth, in the warmth of Taichi's careful, "Giving the name of 'storm', to the mountain wind."
The card goes beside her, and she promises it won't be alone for long.
She has to break her promise, though, because the next card is Arata's, batted from his own side with a punishing flick of his fingers. The one after that is a dead card. She sneaks a glance up at Taichi while he's reading it. His cheeks are slightly flushed, his eyebrows creeping towards a furrow of concentration. She looks back down before he sees her watching.
Next card. Arata's winning easily, and Chihaya won't take that.
"How can I tell her--" Chihaya unfolds easily to her feet and gives chase. "How fierce my love for her is? Will she understand?"
As she picks up her scattered cards, something of the poem seeps into her listening mind and her head snaps up. Taichi is focused on the card and not looking at her at all, but Arata catches her gaze, and his eyes are dark, dark.
She hums.
As they resettle their cards, she feels her skin crawl with anticipation of the closing stanza.
"I feel as though my body is on fire with ibuki mugwort." The words crash over her, something tangible.
Next card. She's going to ask for Taichi's shirt.
--
Taichi had been flushed like this when he'd confessed, too. It's years ago now that he'd snagged her hand after a good game, a great game, and he'd... Well, she hadn't known what to say. She'd known enough not to say her first thought, which was that this had been a betrayal of the three of them, that he'd tell her this but not him, that he'd say it weeks before Arata would move to Tokyo.
Her stubborn heart had seized upon that thought, and she'd frozen. (Since then, she's gotten better at reconciling wanting to kiss somebody while at the same time wanting to smack sense into them, but at the time she hadn't had the vocabulary for it.) They'd never talked about this thing between them. The cards hadn't been laid out--Arata not yet moved to Tokyo, Chihaya not yet settled on a university, Taichi not yet ready to do this fully, or honestly.
Taichi's confession had hung between the two of them like the first word of some strange new card. Then Taichi had shut down and defended, and she hadn't opened up the topic with him since then.
--
"While s--" Chihaya's fingertips dart to the edge of the card an instant before Arata's. It skids into his knees, and he sits back. "--ome dodge the famous waves--" Arata doesn't pass the card to her, so she gets it herself. It's close enough to him that she feels the warmth of his body on the back of her hand. "Of Takashi shore, to avoid getting wet..."
She settles I deflect your artful words on top of I feel as though, and grins. That's two in a row.
"Taichi!" The glee is probably apparent in her voice; she hopes it covers the nerves. "Shirt!"
For the first time since they started playing, he sputters and looks right at her. "Shirt?"
Arata's also surprised, his jaw dropping just the tiniest fraction, his eyes wide. He's been caught nearly as off-guard as Taichi, but Chihaya has no mercy for him.
"Yeah!" Chihaya doesn't know why they'd expect anything else from her, honestly. "We all agreed on the rules--oh, unless you want to stop playing?"
"He just asked for your socks," Taichi says.
"Arata's more patient than me," Chihaya says and watches, entranced, as Taichi bites his lip.
"That's true," Arata confirms. He's got a sly lilt to his tone that slips a couple memories over to Chihaya. Remember how patient I can be? You should.
Taichi doesn't have those memories yet, but judging by the colour his face is turning, he can take a good guess.
"You can stop the game if you want," Arata reminds him.
"Do you want me to?" Taichi asks quietly, and this time it's just for Arata. Chihaya's a good communicator, she's made it clear where she stands on the issue.
Arata can be a good communicator, too. "I--I'd like you to do what Chihaya asked," he says. "Ideally."
It's not exactly last night's Chihaya, I can't wait any more, he belongs-- but it's a start.
There's a bottle of beer on the windowsill, tall beside the yomifuda Taichi's been pulling from. She thinks it had been Arata's originally, but Taichi takes a long drink from it, so maybe it had been his all along.
"C'mon," she--well, whines, she's not too proud to admit it.
He takes off his t-shirt awkwardly, pulling both his arms into the sleeves so there's a moment where his torso and arms are all hiding together under the bright green fabric, before he strips it up and over his head.
Chihaya had been so focused on whether Taichi would or wouldn't take off his shirt that the end result of it, the sudden expanse of skin in front of her, comes as a surprise. It's possible she squeaks. She definitely claps a hand to her mouth to try to contain the grin bursting forth.
Taichi's in decent shape--not an athlete or anything, but still handsome--but right now he's eye-catching in a way that Chihaya finds hard to describe. It's nothing objective. It's just that Chihaya likes being able to see him. The shape of his body hadn't been a mystery, since he does like to wear fairly form-fitting shirts, but the precise lines of him, the three little moles scattered over his hip, the colour of his skin where it rarely sees the sun...
"Happy now?" Taichi folds his arms but retains his good posture.
"Yes," she proclaims, echoed faintly and sincerely a moment later by Arata.
--
As far as happiness goes, she'd probably been at this level when she'd won that first-ever card from Arata. Or when she and Arata had moved in together, she thinks. Or the first time she'd kissed him, after a tournament and buzzing with victory and unable to restrain herself.
They'd started seeing more of each other even outside of university classes and karuta, but they'd also had a mutual hesitation to say we're dating, this is my boyfriend, this is my girlfriend. Taichi had stopped speaking to both of them for three agonizing weeks after the first time he'd seen them kiss.
Chihaya and Arata had talked enough about Taichi to know that the two of them had lucked into the same shape of love, and she'd known Taichi long enough, well enough, that she couldn't kill her hope that he matched. (It helped that at New Year's, she'd gossiped with some of the old crowd over soba, and Tsutomu-kun had had some encouraging data to share.)
She'd been patient. She'd tried to be receptive, not aggressive. But Chihaya and Arata had moved in together in August, and it's winter now.
Besides, Taichi and Arata both know that her strength is in her offense.
--
They return, reluctantly, to their resting positions. The cards are objectively less exciting to look at than Taichi.
Taichi picks up the card that had won Chihaya his shirt, and finishes reading: "I deflect your artful words, to keep my sleeves dry."
The people in the apartment next door turn off their music, causing a subtle dip in the ambient noise.
"Would the--" Thud, and Taichi stumbles over, "--mountain cherry blossoms return my affection?" The last syllable dies off too quickly for proper form, but he obviously doesn't care. He cranes his neck to see from Arata's perspective, but Chihaya suspects he already knows what just happened.
Chihaya sits back on her heels and stares at Arata, who's shame-facedly replacing the card he'd hit. "That's the first time I've ever seen you fault," she says.
"I was distracted," he mutters.
Taichi's eyebrows are raised way up high. "By me?"
"Obviously," Arata says, pushing up his glasses.
Chihaya can absolutely not blame him for that. Still, she'd forgotten what Arata had been like those first few weeks of their relationship--surprised and smooth by turn, just as likely to jump under her touch as he'd been to take it as given.
"Did we even make a rule for faulting?" she asks. "Do you just get to pick what you take off?"
"That doesn't seem fair," Arata says. "I'm the one that faulted, and neither of you two got to choose."
"It should be your opponent's choice," Taichi says, but that won't do.
"No, no, no, that wouldn't be fair." Chihaya shakes her head. Her ponytail swishes pleasingly across the tops of her shoulders; she probably wouldn't notice normally, but right now she feels like she's occupying her body in a way she never usually does. She's full up. It's nice. "It should be the reader's choice, that way he actually gets to pick sometimes."
Her logic is irrefutable. "That makes sense," Arata says. He absently taps two fingers against his wrist, drumming in a code his body sends without thinking: Chihaya reads it as calm down, calm down, calm down.
Taichi knows not to fight a losing battle--it's one of the things Chihaya wishes he could unlearn, but here, it's working to her advantage. "Right," he says. He looks at Arata kneeling in front of him, and Chihaya feels that thrill in her stomach again. "I suppose... take off your sweater," he says.
"Of course." Arata complies easily, pulling his sweater over his head in a fluid motion. It leaves his hair staticky, slightly wild. He's looking at Taichi.
"Good call," Chihaya chirps, holding her hand up for a high five from Taichi. "This one cheated and wore too many layers."
Taichi slaps her hand like she'd known he would.
"It's not cheating to be strategic," Arata says. "I just grabbed this when I went to the bathroom, it was a little chilly."
"Sure," Taichi drawls, then looks taken aback at his own teasing tone. Chihaya suspects it still sometimes surprises him that he's comfortable poking fun of Arata.
Arata rolls some kinks out of his neck, the movement familiar from countless games that were nearly (nothing) like this one. This, she reads as go back, focus. "Are we going to keep playing, or should we just call it..."
"Hey!" Chihaya squawks. "I'm not done winning yet, don't deny me the pleasure of that!"
Arata laughs and shifts to hands and knees again. "That's the last thing we'd want to do."
Another sip of beer for Taichi, a quick clearing of his throat, and then: "For there is no one else out here." Perfectly intoned, as if to make up for his earlier transgression.
They fall into a rhythm between Taichi's voice, the unconscious snap of finger to card, and the funny everywhere sort of focus that their eyes have to adopt. Arata gets another card; there's a dead card; Chihaya steals the next from his strongest side and only gloats with her eyes; Arata immediately takes his revenge; dead card; dead card.
She can hear Arata take a long, deep breath, thinks about how Sumire-chan had teased them about couples rubbing off on each other. She should've thought about what it means when she takes a deep breath, though, because when she glances up she sees Arata's eyes glint with determination. Goosebumps run all over her arms, and her competitive side rebels against the small voice wondering, what's he got planned?
Dead card.
"So spring--" Chihaya moves on instinct, but hits the wall of Arata's knuckles. "--has passed, and summer has come again..."
This card gets placed on Arata's stack: crisp, matter-of-fact. "That's two in a row," he says.
"We know," Chihaya says. "You're so dramatic sometimes."
Taichi snorts. "Look who's talking." His shoulders are lower now than they'd been right after he'd taken off his shirt. Chihaya suspects he's getting used to not having it. Good.
"All you've lost so far is your socks, Chihaya," Arata says with a tinge of reproach.
"Don't you want to fix that?" she asks. She goes ahead and flutters her eyelashes; she's allowed to be dramatic, too.
Arata laughs, but Taichi doesn't. Still too tense, she diagnoses, but when she looks up at him, his lips have been coaxed into a smile. It even makes it all the way to his eyes. She winks at him, just to see, and wants to punch the air when, solemnly, he winks back.
"Chihaya," Arata says.
"Arata."
"Leggings," and he's smiling, too, the slightest bit predatory.
"Sure," she blusters, and stands up to tug them down in one fast move. Her shirt's long enough that it covers her underwear while she toes the rest of the way out of her leggings, but she suspects when she kneels it's not going to quite do the trick. She nudges the puddle of discarded fabric so it's sitting on top of her socks, and studies the line of her ankles.
She has nice legs. She nods. "Satisfied?" she asks Arata.
He nods too.
"Good, because your pants are next," she promises, and folds back down to her knees. She looks up at Taichi and says, "Now we're both half-naked. We match!"
Taichi's answering smile is just the slightest bit unsteady. "Chihaya..."
"Is it okay?" she asks him.
He'd been standing, but her question makes him move down to the ground, an even third point to their triangle on the mat. He pulls a cushion under himself, scratches at the back of his head.
"Taichi?" Arata sounds cautious.
"It's fine," he says, and Arata and Chihaya trade a look.
Arata sits and draws his legs up in front of him, wrapping his arms around them. "We can do something else, if you want."
"No, it's good," Taichi says. "It just felt weird, being up there, looking down on you."
"Weird?" Chihaya asks, "Or weird?"
"I don't know," Taichi says, running one hand over his shoulder. Chihaya wonders if he's cold. "I don't know what you mean, I'm not sure what I'm doing here." The last words run out of his mouth in a lump, but Chihaya hears them all.
--
Shortly after they'd moved in together, Chihaya and Arata had organised a night out with Taichi. Chihaya had had to teach the next morning, but her boys had stayed out late, and she'd woken up to Arata getting into bed uncharacteristically noisily. He's sorry he's not emailing me as much anymore. Chihaya, he lives all alone.
She'd been half-asleep, but had still managed to whisper reassurance into his hair.
--
Chihaya understands why Arata had held onto his own legs--he wants to reach out, and he doesn't know if he can. She's always been able to get to Taichi, though, so she puts her hand on his knee (the closest corner of his territory to neutral).
"We said, Taichi," she says. "When we made the rules, before, we said we wanted you with us forever."
Taichi tilts his head and doesn't look away.
Arata softens it to, "Or as long as you'd like." Taichi looks at him, expression loathsomely unreadable.
"No, no, we said forever, I don't--"
"Right," Taichi cuts her off. "And... both of you?"
"Unless that's a problem," Arata says, over Chihaya's emphatic "Yes." Her hand, before just resting on his knee, now tightens until she's clenching the fabric of his trousers.
He takes a deep breath. "Okay, I--okay." He traces a circle on the back of Chihaya's hand, eyes vaguely looking in its direction but not clearly focused. The hairs on the back of her arm stand up, and Taichi seems to reach a conclusion. "Can we just think about tonight? Not... forever?"
Her sister had always told her she'd get lines if she frowned, but Chihaya doesn't care. She frowns. "You don't want forever? We said--"
"We were kids," Taichi says, and they might've gone far off the path if Arata hadn't moved suddenly, drawing both of their attention.
The movement had been him letting go of his legs, leaning back to brace himself on his hands. He's looking up at the ceiling now, instead of at either of them, and Chihaya wants to fix that. Look at me. At us.
His neck seems very long from this angle; his lips are pressed together. "We're going in circles," he tells the light fixture above the three of them. "I wanted to..." He ducks his head and smiles ruefully. "We can just think about tonight, Taichi. Of course we can."
Chihaya's suddenly very aware of her grip on Taichi, and of the weave of the mat against her bare legs. She's going to have these marks pressed into her skin when she moves. "Yeah," she says after a beat. "But don't think that you can just try us out and disappear!"
She wants to touch Taichi's cheek, the rush of colour down his neck to his chest, to see if it feels as hot as it looks. She'll wait until later, though.
"Now white robes hang to dry on Mount Amanokagu."
--
Last week, she'd closed her eyes and pressed so close to Arata that they'd both been uncomfortable and sweaty.
"See?"
"I still think we might want a bigger bed."
"We'll never get anything done if we keep waiting."
They'd called it a draw, and then somehow had gotten onto the topic of whether their landlord would let them repaint. Arata had first painted a big project like that when he'd been living with his grandfather; they'd worked on the fence out front. Chihaya had tried to paint her sister's room when they'd been young, but her efforts had been... controversial.
When they'd fallen asleep, they'd disentangled everywhere except where they were holding hands and where Arata had a leg sprawled over Chihaya's, two warm spots in a cool night.
--
They keep playing--it's what they do. But it's different now, with Taichi sitting beside them on their level. When Arata stands up to chase a card across the room, his hand brushes across Taichi's shoulders as he passes him; when Chihaya takes a brief break to stretch her (bare!) legs out, she grins cheekily at Taichi. He rolls his eyes.
A constant thrum of anticipation is running through Chihaya's muscles and tendons. She and Arata are on pace with each other, alternating evenly through the next half-dozen readings, but she's still lagging a couple cards behind.
Minutes tiptoe onwards, divided into slices by the sounds of Taichi's reading and the impact of their hands on the ground.
Chihaya's card.
Dead card.
Arata's.
Dead.
Dead.
Chihaya's.
"Nothi--"
Chihaya hears first, moves first, and victory sings in the edge of her grin.
"--can be worse than living a moment longer when I cannot bear..." Taichi's voice tapers to silence. He hums, blinks at Chihaya as she reaches to retrieve the card. "Two in a row," he remarks mildly.
She points at Arata, Growing any weaker tucked between her first two fingers for added effect. "Pants!" she demands.
It's quiet enough that she can hear Taichi's scant gasp, the sound of the floor creaking as Arata stands, hands going easily to his belt. Arata stands straighter when he's nervous, and he makes a point of making eye contact. Right now, he's looking at Chihaya.
She looks right back at him and the picture he makes, until some sound under the threshold of identification draws her attention to Taichi. She watches him stare at Arata; the tips of his fingers are white where they're pressing into the floor. His breathing looks unsteady.
Arata complies with her request, and Taichi covers his mouth with his hand, eyes wide below the messy fringe of his hair.
Deliberately, Arata steps out of the puddle of trouser on the ground, nudges the pile of fabric to the side without looking down once.
Chihaya whistles and applauds, pleased with her revenge. Within a couple seconds, Taichi joins in the clapping.
"Satisfied?" Arata asks, cocking a wry eyebrow at them both. He's wearing his black underwear, the ones that Chihaya suspects are his lucky pair (though Arata still hasn't admitted any superstitions to her).
"Come here," Chihaya says, beckoning him back down to the mat.
He kneels and she shuffles close enough to kiss him quickly, cards be damned. The frame of his glasses is cold against her cheek.
"Well done," she says. "But I'm still going to win this game." She turns to Taichi, who's been suspiciously quiet other than the clapping. "Don't you think so, Taichi?"
He tears his gaze away from where Arata's polishing a smudge off his glasses, and nods.
--
Chihaya thinks this is going to work, she's always thought something like this would work for them.
For all his second-guessing, Taichi knows how to have faith in them when it counts.
--
Chihaya swears she hears the words before Taichi even opens his mouth.
"From Ts--" Thud. "--ukuba's peak, falling waters have become Mina's still, full flow."
She gives Arata I find myself longing and a wink.
Beside them, Taichi tips his beer back and drains the last mouthful before completing the card. His gulp is nearly loud in the stillness of the room.
"So my love has grown to be," he says. "Like the river's quiet deeps."
Arata makes a sound low in his throat. Chihaya keeps her eyes on the cards, the surest way of getting something she wants right now.
Taichi keeps reading.
--
Chihaya thinks he's learned how to have faith in himself, too. And even if he doesn't, they still do.
"We just need to do something," she'd told Arata, squeezing his hand under the covers. "Nothing happens on its own."
--
The tension ratchets up in the room over a long string of dead cards.
Taichi had been worried they'd get chilly, but Chihaya's feeling anything but.
She's never felt aware of her whole body like this while playing karuta. It had always been her ears, her eyes, and her fingers before, but now she's conscious of the flex of each toe against the mat, the power in her thighs, the smoothness of her teeth. She likes it, she thinks. It might be distracting in a competition, but--here, she's aware of Arata, too, and Taichi, and how there's something between all three of them that tugs them closer.
She blinks.
"Me--"
She moves.
"--eting on the path: But I cannot clearly know if it was he." Taichi shoots Chihaya a thumbs up as she sinks back down to the mat. She moves to cross her legs, but feels a little self-conscious, so she opts to tuck them to her side.
"You're on a streak," Arata tells her as she tucks Because the midnight moon neatly on top of its brethren.
"Welcome to my comeback, baby," she replies, straight-faced.
"Even you can't expect to beat her on one-syllable cards, Arata," Taichi chimes in.
She bestows a satisfied nod on Taichi. "Thank you," she says. "For that, you get to keep your pants."
He stretches, laughs. Warm, Chihaya thinks without any support.
Arata lifts his eyebrows. "Haven't I lost enough?" he asks. His eyes are bright with mischief, and Chihaya wants to win, of course, but right now that want is being dwarfed by how much she wants him, wants them.
"Not yet," she says, and adds: "Glasses," before she can think better of it.
There's traffic outside. She can hear cars passing by on the street far below. It might be raining--there's a splashiness to the intermittent rushes of noise that makes her suspect it is.
It sinks in what she'd asked, and she backpedals as fast as she can, "I didn't mean! I just, when I kissed you they got in the way, and I wanted to--you can put them back on right away after."
Arata's smiling, though, and Taichi's shoulders are still in a comfortable slouch. "Here," Arata says, and easily draws his glasses off his face. "Better?"
Chihaya's shuffled forwards and planted a kiss on him before he has time to put his glasses down. No cold metal presses into her face this time, and she smiles into his lips. "Better," she murmurs. When she pulls back enough to see his cheeks, they're touched with pink.
She turns to Taichi, catches a glimpse of his teeth dimpling his lower lip. "It really is nicer without the glasses," she tells him. "See, just--" she beckons Taichi closer, and he comes with only a hint of hesitation, sliding off the cushion he'd been sitting on and knee-walking to close the space between them before coming up short.
Their little triangle has tightened.
Chihaya puts her hand on Taichi's (bare) back, smiles at him from close range.
Arata finally puts down his patience and kisses him.
Taichi makes... she doesn't know what to call the noise. Maybe a whimper? Not a groan, but something wanting. Arata drops his glasses when he reaches up to thread fingers through Taichi's hair, and Chihaya thoughtfully picks them up. She folds them without looking away from Taichi's closed eyes, Arata's greedy hands. She wants her turn.
"I, I see," Taichi says with a thin thread of humour running through his voice. Chihaya's boys' heads are still tilted together, foreheads touching, but there's space now for them to breathe, for Arata to stare at Taichi with his pupils blown.
"My turn," Chihaya says. It takes her two tries to get the words out.
She can feel Arata close on her left side as she presses her lips to Taichi's. There's a little surge, a sparking current under her skin running from Taichi's mouth (warm against hers) to Arata's hand (curling around her elbow). She chases that feeling, pressing further forward into Taichi; Taichi relaxes into the touch.
Their lips part after... some amount of time, she can't tell.
Her head is so blank that it's genuinely a surprise when she hears herself offer to Arata, "Do you want your glasses back?"
He chuckles, and Taichi sags against her, gesturing to the cards-strewn-everywhere mess she's made of the playing space. "I think it might not be quite the right time," Taichi says.
"Besides, there's no point finishing the game now," Arata says, a lazy smile pulling at his lips. "We already won."
Chihaya laughs, feeling lighter and lighter, like she could drift off with a touch. She holds an arm of Arata's glasses and spins them around in a quick circle. "You sure you won't be needing these?"
"Here, be careful." If it weren't for the colour in his cheeks and his tousled hair, it'd seem like Taichi were scolding her. As it is, though... Chihaya surrenders the glasses easily to him, to be placed on the windowsill.
"Thanks," Arata tells Taichi, who doesn't seem to know where to look.
"I'll clean these up," he offers, and starts to clear away the cards.
Chihaya shakes her head and says, "No, no, they'll be fine!" She can touch him now, so she does, her hands covering his and stilling his motions. "I don't want to get distracted."
He huffs a sigh, because Taichi wouldn't be Taichi if he didn't feel he had to tease Chihaya. "Have it your way, princess," he says, and she can't let an opening like that pass by.
She swoops in for another kiss, less reverent, more gleeful. "I'll have you my way," she says.
"Chihaya..." Taichi groans. He's clearly aiming for 'put-upon,' but he lands closer to 'turned on.'
Arata swats at her for embarrassing Taichi, but he's laughing, too. He'd tidied up the cards from his side while Taichi had been occupying her, and now he scoops up Chihaya's cards--his hands are quick, practiced. "And what way is that?" he asks.
She sticks her tongue out at him in lieu of a proper response.
"Hm," he says, and taps a stack of cards on the ground to even out their edges.
Taichi's watching Arata's hands out of the corner of his eye, something longing in his gaze. Chihaya knows the feeling.
Her ponytail is seeming tight on her scalp now, so she tugs the elastic out as she stands up. The tension falls out of her hair, its waves loosening and brushing around her shoulders.
They both know her well enough to fill in the spaces where her request should go; Arata stands, but Taichi waits kneeling on the mat, looking up at her.
She holds out her hand. "C'mon, we'll be more comfortable."
His silence stretches out for a long second, but they're here now, and she's not letting that go. She taps her foot, three soft thwacks against the mat.
Fond and familiar, Arata brushes her hair away from her neck and plants a quick kiss, then pads over to the kitchen to turn off the light in there.
Taichi only takes her hand after he's gotten himself to his feet on his own.
"Okay," he says, and there's an echo of that giddy-relieved-lightness in his voice. "Lead on."