Chapter Two: “The Snow Finds the Clod of Earth” — Part Four
Looks like I’m going to be late again.
Can’t be helped. I’ll drive you, so.
You don’t have to wait, go ahead and eat without me.
Yeah yeah, can’t be helped.
Can’t be helped.
My own surface-level conversation and inner state replayed like someone else’s business.
For a moment the part of me that wanted to escape what was happening right in front of me tried to flee, but Kai’s tongue dragged me forcibly back.
Alone together in the car again, I was accumulating more time I couldn’t account for.
Parked with Kai’s house visible in the distance, my finger was in Kai’s mouth again.
Tonight it was my ring finger. Was there a pattern to the fingers Kai chose. I tried to read her mood from her selection, but her mouth received whichever of my fingers it was given with what looked like equal tenderness, and I couldn’t tell any difference.
The sight of Kai’s lips holding my finger like a ring threatened to make me bury my face somewhere. There was something surging through me that needed a hard surface to be resolved against. I pushed my hair back, pressed my hand against my forehead, and held it in. My ears felt separate from the rest of me, so much blood had gathered there. I felt I could take flight.
The mark from the slap had long since faded. But looking down at Kai, face gone red from the effort of it all, I shuddered. The surface I had cultivated was being peeled away and leaving me raw. The common sense I had built up as a kind of scab over myself, Kai was stripping it back without any hesitation.
The essential self that had been kept so carefully protected was meeting the outside air, and finding that pain and stimulation waited there.
If I found something in that pain other than suffering, I might become a different person entirely.
“That’s… enough now.”
Unless I said so and ended it, Kai showed no sign of ever releasing my finger. The tongue wrapping itself around the finger on the way out had become a fixture, so I braced for it. As expected, as always, I had learned to endure Kai’s tongue making its sticky passage over my finger by imagining my arm going rigid from the elbow down. What was the point of getting used to something like this.
If striking her impulsively was the crime, then offering my finger in recompense was only natural… no, natural, what did that mean. That one day Kai’s tongue would wash my sins clean… I couldn’t quite believe that, given how thoroughly saliva-covered my finger was. With nothing making any sense, I was accepting something absurd. But I had hit her, and that guilt was my excuse.
Though if it was an excuse, I did believe that raising your hand against someone ought to carry that kind of weight. Perhaps that came from the trouble I had caused with impulsive violence once, long ago.
I hesitated to wipe my hand in front of her, and ended up simply staring at the wet finger. Lit by the interior light, Kai’s saliva gleamed, and it was not funny. And yet I was close to laughing, to disguise the fact that something in me was coming apart.
I glanced at Kai, and her lips were doing their small opening and closing again. It had become her habit after finishing with a finger. Her lips moved, probably without her knowing, as if to indicate that it wasn’t enough. That gesture was, how to put it… no, it was nothing.
I could hardly look her in the face and casually ask what she got out of licking someone’s fingers. Whatever answer came back, I would have to receive it.
“Do you know what your own fingers taste like?”
“…That’s a rather morbid-sounding question.”
Not many people in the world could claim that knowledge, I’d have thought. I considered myself part of the vast majority of humanity, and questions that fell outside common sense weren’t my strong suit.
“I don’t. Or rather… would you want to know?”
“I thought it might be an interesting topic for Yuki-san…”
“What exactly is your image of Yuki-san?”
“Erotic oba-san.”
“Oh, be quiet, you idiot.”
Little by little, even the restraint I had maintained because she was my daughter’s friend was eroding. It might simply be that my language had deteriorated from dealing with an impertinent child. My daughter was a good girl, after all.
Watching Kai laugh, I found something beginning to nag at me, and when I followed it, I had to admit that Kai’s sense of what topic might interest me had perhaps been correct. Arriving at that conclusion left me with complicated feelings.
“Is there really a distinct taste to someone’s skin?”
I had kissed my husband and never tasted anything in the lips themselves. Though I wouldn’t deny that the stimulation and change of the act itself might produce the illusion of taste. Even without being physically wounded, people were creatures who felt pain in that unfathomable thing called the heart.
“There is.”
What illusion was Kai savouring through this strange behaviour.
I wasn’t sure I should ask, and turned my face away as if avoiding sunlight that had no business reaching me.
“…What does it taste like?”
“A little salty.”
“That was a far more ordinary answer than I expected…”
Armed with a piece of knowledge about the taste of one’s own fingers that had no foreseeable application, the evening came to a close.
“Good night.”
At some point, I had started saying goodbye like this when we parted.
Kai’s cat-like eyes shimmered, laughing at some private mischief.
“Good night.”
What caught my attention was this: when she said her goodbye, laughed, and looked up.
When Kai turned her gaze on the house, a severity showed in her expression. Before I could ask about it, she moved away from the car. I watched that narrow back for the stretch of time the headlights reached.
Coming to my house, using studying as a reason, staying stubbornly late into the evening.
Kai might be trying to delay going home. That was what I had begun to feel lately.
So she was making reasons to stay late at my house… and licking my fingers was part of it, perhaps. That was surely it, I tried to tell myself, in a show of reasonableness. It was obviously not only that, anyone looking at Kai’s face could see it plainly enough. Meaning Kai’s behaviour served multiple ends at once, the product of something both strange and rational.
“…Salty.”
No matter how many times she licked, it was probably the taste of sweat rising with the act itself.
I moved to taste my own finger, then realised I had been about to choose the thoroughly saliva-covered ring finger, and hastily withdrew.