Episode 74: No One Can Touch It

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched Shion play piano. In its place, I look at her beauty from up close — the closest distance. When we kiss: the whiteness of her closed eyelids, her flushed cheeks, the gesture of her fingers gripping my uniform tight, the soft sound of fabric against fabric, the moment where warmth dissolves into warmth.

The ideal of beauty is nearest to me now. Nearer than it has ever been in my life, the deepest contact I’ve ever had with it. It should be the height of happiness — and there should be no greater happiness than this, anywhere.

And yet somewhere I’m lonely, somewhere unsatisfied. Part of me is greedy, wanting to be closer still — and at the same time, another part of me longs for the distance we had before.

When Shion plays piano, I can only watch from a certain remove. There’s a distance to which I can approach, and no further. No one can touch Shion in the middle of a performance. The embraces and kisses we share now bring me far closer to her beauty than anything before.

And yet it’s that older distance I find myself missing. When we kiss, what fills my vision is my own desire — and desire is too close a lens to take in Shion’s full shape.

The time spent sitting in that usual seat of honour in the old music room, watching her play. Her fingers dancing white over the keys. Her silver hair catching and scattering the sunlight. The sound of her, transparent as water, flowing. An open field of vision from which all of Shion’s beauty was visible.

I’m satisfied by touch, and yet I long for the distance that can’t be touched. That contradiction deepens day by day.

But I’m afraid of saying it and hurting her — afraid of adding to whatever has been weighing Shion down lately — so it stays unspoken, undelivered. And besides, the kisses and embraces with Shion genuinely feel good, and there’s a weakness in me that can’t let go of being wanted by the very person who was the origin of everything, the living embodiment of everything I once admired. That weakness keeps my mouth shut tight. And as if to look away from that weakness, as a substitute for telling Shion — only in the novel did I keep writing the music room filled with piano sound.

Yes: sound fills only the novel now. We no longer even sit in the old wooden chair — we lean against the wall instead, both pairs of legs sprawled across the floor.

“Uta…”

Shion murmurs it like a reaching for something. We’re already holding each other, so I put my hand over her ear to cup it closed and press my lips to hers.

Kisses grow longer each time. A crackling pleasure numbs my brain with sweetness, and I lose myself in the mixture of that sweetness and her warmth and her scent. Because I can’t tell whether she feels it the same way I do, I want to go deeper, want to touch further, and when a small sound escapes her throat I feel a brief gladness. And then, after that instant of satisfaction, the thirst surfaces again and I’m never satisfied — so there’s nothing to do but sink.

Sinking into someone has no end to it, and that frightened me. No end should be close in shape to the promise of always being together — and yet it felt as though it were heading somewhere different, and the anxiety of that burned through my chest. We were touching closer than we’d ever been, and yet the texture of the fear resembled loneliness, and it left me desperately, aimlessly sad.

As if tracing that sadness, Shion’s voice sounded in the space between one kiss and the next.

“Uta… don’t leave me.”

This close, and she keeps saying it. The words could mean continuing what we have right now; they could mean reaching desperately for something receding; they could be a lament for something already gone. Shion’s words always overflow with what lies between them, and I see infinite space in those gaps, and I can’t grasp what lives there — it’s maddening.

“I’m not leaving.”

So in the end I always arrive at the same words. I repeat her words back to her, unable to touch the real nature of her sadness, managing nothing beyond cheap stopgap phrases. We repeat the same exchange, again and again, circling the same place, sinking. Hold hands, pull close, kiss. Drawing nearer, and seeing less and less.

When the kiss reached a rest, I murmured — reaching for some way through the impasse:

“After this — want to go somewhere? It’s been a while.”

At my question, Shion opened her closed eyes and fixed her violet-indigo gaze on mine.

“I want to go to karaoke. I want to hear your voice. Your words.”
“All right. Let’s go.”

I looked away from the irony — that even this attempt to escape the repetition leads back to something we’ve done before — and murmured it.