Chapter Two: “The Snow Finds the Clod of Earth” — Part Three
Her voice suddenly brightened, and I felt the current shift.
“…Does that sentence connect to what came before it?”
“In my head it connects perfectly.”
I wondered about this child’s marks in Japanese. My daughter needed to teach her more properly.
“A request, meaning…”
“You could also call it wheedling.”
Nothing good in that word. And our proximity and the situation between us conjured the moment of the kiss whether I wanted it to or not. That needed to be pre-empted.
“As long as you’re not about to say kiss me.”
“So anything else is fine?”
She moved to pin down a dangerous concession.
“Within the bounds of common sense. Strictly within those bounds. Understood?”
I put up barricades, layer upon layer. But Kai, with a leap that her height should have made impossible, cleared them with ease.
“Then please let me lick the finger that hit me.”
“…………..What?”
That finger, this one? Without moving my face I looked at my right hand.
Kai’s eyes moved too, saying that one.
…………..Lick it, meaning what exactly.
“Do you understand what common sense means?”
“What a person can permit.”
“You do seem to… understand it…”
Understanding it perfectly, Kai took my right hand as if borrowing it.
“Just a moment—”
The instant Kai’s thin lips closed around my fingertip, something ran down my spine. The difference in temperature, one thing. Knowing the feeling of those dry lips, another. The composition of it, one more.
“Wait. What is this.”
“Treatment.”
“What? Treat—”
A strangled sound escaped through the gap where my back teeth wouldn’t quite meet. It was the sound wrung out of me by the sight of my middle finger being taken into Kai’s mouth. Watching a child with an innocent face receive my middle finger into that small mouth, the argument in me was shredded to pieces. Without even seeing inside Kai’s mouth, its temperature seemed to reach me anyway.
There was something unknown living there. A slightly textured tongue moved over my middle finger unhurriedly, concealing nothing, thorough. As if trying to dissolve my finger entirely, when the tongue occasionally flicked upward my hips jolted from the seat and I felt cornered. What, what on earth was happening.
In the home garage, if anyone, if family happened to glance over, no excuse would hold.
“Why are you licking my finger?”
The question came out idiotic.
“Bhecauthe, ith—”
I wished she would stop trying to talk with a finger in her mouth. The earnest breath against my finger on top of everything else was sending my head somewhere it shouldn’t go. Was going, present tense.
“I don’t understand, so.”
Only at that did Kai release my middle finger.
The small pah of her breath as she did so seemed to steal the air from my lungs.
“Treatment… the finger that hit me was hot, so I wanted to cool it down.”
While taking some relief in the fact that the released finger was still in its original form, that it hadn’t been changed into something else, I moved to object to Kai’s reasoning, and immediately had my finger taken back into her mouth. Looked up at from below while it was held there, I felt heat gathering somewhere that had nothing to do with cooling down.
My face hurt. Like sparks flying from a burning building were scorching and cutting my cheeks. Kai’s ears had already gone completely red too, her whole attention on my finger. Nothing resembling composure, a Kai entirely unguarded, and the sight of it stopped up my chest.
Occasionally the clouded sound of accumulated saliva spilling over threatened to drown my brain.
“…………ah…………”
That face flushed with rapture, that face beginning to come apart under breathlessness, that figure still running its tongue regardless. Something nearly slipped out that I pulled back before it could fall toward Kai.
What was I about to say. Something I had barely used in my entire life.
Having lived as someone considered refined, someone far removed from that kind of thing.
I was about to come undone as easily as sticking out my tongue.
“It’s, over now… it’s over.”
Reaching the limit of what I could safely hold, I pushed Kai’s shoulder. Kai, as if reluctant to let go, dragged her tongue from the base of my middle finger to its tip as she withdrew, and the chill running down my back wouldn’t stop.
Watching Kai’s mouth, now without its finger, open and close in small movements as if bereft, my heart fell into black and white again. Every exchange with Kai drew me into a black and white sea.
Walking alone on a monochrome shore, a pitch-black ocean quietly wetting my ankles. Shivering at the difference in temperature I looked up at a dark sky, and the sky rapidly drew in the ocean, the sand, me, folding everything like origami and carrying me somewhere else entirely.
In that place, in a world of black and white and cold, only those yellow-green eyes floated.
“Can I stay late to study again?”
A whisper with the quality of a certainty, and my shoulders jumped.
A question that ran directly against my standing instruction to return home before it got late.
Staying late to study at my house. Which meant me driving her home. Which meant the two of us alone.
It was as good as asking for permission to continue everything that had grown out of an ordinary friendship.
It was the same kind of provocation as when she had arrived at the house today. She had been goading me. But this time I couldn’t raise my hand, couldn’t do anything, and the ringing in my ears went on like rain. The connection was terrible.
A fatal misalignment between everything I had built up as natural over my life, and what I was now. That was why the ringing continued, why my hands and feet moved sluggishly, why breathing was clumsy even when I concentrated on it, why I was at the mercy of every shift in temperature.
The feeling of my middle finger making contact with the steering wheel, like an emergency landing, was almost enough to make a sound escape me.
The heat and frustration I was desperately trying to domesticate made it impossible to return to conversation.
I did not say yes.
And without saying no either, I finally started the car.
At the time, I had no idea at all what my involvement with Kai meant.
And even now, I may not fully understand it.
It was still the period when bewilderment outweighed everything else about having my finger licked.
Even so, the reason I gave in was that I wanted to see Kai’s undone face again.