Chapter One: “The Clod of Earth Awaits the Snow” — Part Fourteen
“I’m sorry, I was too close.”
There was not a trace of sincerity in the apology.
“I see.”
“Yes.”
“Be more careful next time.”
“There’s going to be a next time?”
“There isn’t.”
Voices pressed out like shapes from a mould, one after another.
Why was I shaken to begin with. …No, that part was probably normal.
Anyone would be shaken if someone suddenly pressed their lips against theirs. That was a perfectly reasonable human response. So that part wasn’t the problem. Probably. And on top of that, the other person was a stranger, a stranger, a stranger, a stranger, a stranger, a stranger… a girl.
A purely, entirely, other person, with nothing whatsoever flowing between us.
“I’ll say this for the record — what you just did is a crime.”
Kai was still in the car and I nearly drove off anyway. Somehow I let the air out of my breath and my shoulders.
As if it had been tossed over along with the kiss, my heart was beating enough for both of us.
“What kind of crime?”
“…A sexual one.”
That would apply between women too.
“Not adultery?”
“Adultery…? That’s… no.”
“Isn’t it?”
“It’s not… no.”
Adultery would imply I had consented, so naturally, no.
Though it was true that the word had sent a spike of agitation through me… no, but still.
“It’s a first offence, so let’s both forget it.”
I kept my composure, as the adult in the situation. The other party was a child, fourteen, the same age as my daughter.
I needed to demonstrate what it meant to have twenty-four years’ more life experience.
“It’s the kind of thing that’s fine to forget.”
The palms of my hands plastered to the steering wheel were becoming unpleasantly damp with sweat.
“Excuse me.”
“What?”
“Only your lips have been moving for a while now, are you all right?”
“Ah, that explains why my eyes felt so dry.”
I blinked rapidly, again and again. A fallen lash had apparently stuck to the corner of my eye, and the irritating sensation wouldn’t go away. Kai’s fingers reached for it as if she’d noticed, and my shoulder jerked and I recoiled, hitting the back of my head hard against the window.
My vision spun with the impact.
Kai looked on with a satisfied expression, and her lips parted to show her teeth.
The white teeth framed between those moving lips bit into the darkness, curving like a half-moon.
“I hope you manage to forget.”
I had never met a devil before.
But surely one would have a voice exactly like that, bewitching and hushed.
Just before she closed the door, Kai was smiling that smile.
I matched myself to the movement of the wipers throwing off the rain on the windscreen. I followed their steady rhythm, trying to recover my scattered breathing and the ordinary pace of my days. Right, then left. My heart too, returning to something that moved only within its prescribed range.
Alone, going nowhere, like a pet dog that had forgotten the way home.
I let the time pass, enough time that forgetting to breathe could have been the end of me.
“…I dropped her off.”
The wiper went right. I followed it with my eyes.
“I need to go home.”
It went left. I could face forward again without following it.
A simple movement practised in the heart, and finally I could leave this spot. The car turned and started moving, as if turning its back on Kai and her house, long since out of sight.
There was no need to think deeply about it. This kind of thing happened. Did it?
A fourteen-year-old girl had kissed me with a touch of mischief in it, nothing more, the most ordinary thing.
Did it?
At the very least, I had never kissed my own daughter since she turned fourteen.
Even as the car moved, the lips I was holding firmly together pressed against each other, upper and lower, and the sensation kept replaying itself unbidden, as if to hold together something that might otherwise scatter to pieces.
Heedless of the voice telling it to stop, the feeling of Kai’s thin lips came back again and again.
What had been in Kai’s eyes, arriving at a distance close enough to press directly against my heart.
Rapture.
From the way those eyes had melted, I was certain it hadn’t been an accident. It had been deliberate. And.
What had been in my own eyes, receiving that gaze from a distance of almost nothing.
I pulled over, still only halfway home, and looked away from the road ahead as if giving up.
“What is that girl…”
My forehead against the steering wheel, something like anguish ran down my jaw like sweat.
Kisses just the two of us, our daughter not awake, inside the house.
The conditions I had set myself. Rising in my mind now, for some reason.
This is a story of my losses.
From meeting Chitaira Kai, a girl with eyes that burned themselves into you forever from a single glance.
So very many things.
Facing only forward, I would come to leave them behind.