Chapter Two: “The Snow Finds the Clod of Earth” — Part Twenty
“…Cold.”
I’d felt it already stepping out of the car in the hotel car park, but this close to the sea the air carried a temperature all its own. On top of that, gusts kept sweeping through, dragging at our hair. Facing that wind head-on, I found myself half-worried Kai might simply come apart at the seams. Holding down her whipping hair, Kai murmured.
“The wind’s getting colder.”
“It is. Winter’s close.”
“But I…”
Kai started to continue, then pressed her eyes and lips shut into a single flat line, as if erasing the sentence. A brief silence, some darkness passed between us, and then she released both and looked up at me.
“Sorry. I was trying to say something clever and couldn’t think of anything.”
“Quite the gracious surrender.”
I stood beside her and took a deep breath. The cold moved through me, sharpening my head.
“So, Yuki-san, your turn.”
“What—”
An impossible hand-off, and I didn’t even understand the assignment.
“How did it go again… the wind’s cold, winter’s close, but… something like that?”
Kai nodded, yes, yes, as if that helped at all. Wind, cold. Winter, close. My thoughts stuttered into fragments. The wind is cold, and winter is close, but I… am standing in a nice room. Absolutely not that.
The sound of waves against the sand carried further in the dark, stripped of whatever the daylight normally muffled, close enough to soak straight into our ears rather than staying out on the beach. Perhaps some things really were felt more clearly in the dark. And so what. I traced the scenery with my mind like tracing it with a finger, and only wandered further off course. Kai kept her eyes fixed on me, waiting for an answer. Being cornered by that gaze made me flustered. I wished she’d just look straight ahead instead.
“But I… um, when that cold brushes my cheek and I shiver, I feel, sort of, drawn tight.”
“Hm.”
Kai’s reaction was unmistakably unimpressed. If graded out of five, I doubted I’d cleared even one.
“Ah, wait… breathing the night air deep into my lungs and trembling…”
“You really like trembling, don’t you.”
“Quiet. No, I’ve got nothing. Done.”
I gave up before embarrassing myself any further.
Thinking about my husband waiting at home with dinner while I did whatever this was made something inside me jump unpleasantly, so I turned my attention elsewhere.
“I was always more of a science person, honestly.”
Offering that excuse, Kai smiled and leaned against the railing.
“That answer was too much to ask of either of us.”
“You’re wrapping up a total dead end with something poetic.”
Kai clearly had far more talent for this than I did. I propped my cheek on my hand against the railing too, looking out over the view.
“How was school?”
It struck me, oddly, as something close to a question you’d ask your own daughter, and I nearly laughed at myself for it.
“Same as always. The school already knows my house has a reputation, so my homeroom teacher doesn’t say anything about it.”
“Is that all right, though.”
Expecting everything from a teacher might be unreasonable, but shouldn’t there be at least some concern.
“The teachers are ordinary. You’re the one who’s… fearless, Yuki-san.”
“…Well, I do think there’s something wrong with the people in your house.”
“Put in terms you’d actually understand, Yuki-san, everyone living in that house is a criminal.”
“…………………………………”
Kai putting it that plainly finally let the danger of it sink in properly. To begin with, people capable of routinely hurting a child like this simply fell outside anything I could have imagined.
Only now did I regret how careless my visit there might have been.
But then, if there had been no contact at all, that would ordinarily have caused far more of a problem, and the fact that ordinary simply didn’t apply to these people meant, I supposed, that my sense of how things worked genuinely couldn’t get purchase on them.
I fell silent for a while. One more piece of anguish added to the pile that came with being involved with Kai.
And realising that this kind of thing would keep trailing after me, I understood, all over again: it really was too late to pull my hand back now.
“If the distance between winter and the spring watching over it matches the shape of my feelings, then no thaw can be hoped for.”
As the wind picked up, Kai suddenly recited something that sounded like a line of poetry. Unfortunately, it meant nothing to me.
“What’s that?”
“Kara-nee-san used it as a pickup line. Either it means nothing, or she stole it from somewhere.”
“Kara-nee-san… the one who, um, tried to—”
“Assault me. Yes.”
“Hold on—”
The bluntness of it was aggressive enough to leave me at a loss. Kai continued regardless.
“A hedonist, and pretty clearly not bright. About the only things worth complimenting are her looks and the fact that she’s got no hidden layers. Face and figure are genuinely striking, not really my type though. Smells like mint. If you ever met her, Yuki-san, I think she’d try it on you too.”
“Try it on…”
“Please turn her down coldly if she does.”
“Well, I’m married, so… actually, before that—”
I found myself gesturing, wait, hold on. She’d been talking about all of this so matter-of-factly all along, but there was something underneath it that had actually been catching on me.
“Your… nee-sans, both of them… are women who love women?”
I finally brought up the part that had been a little hard to touch. It had come up so casually each time that I’d never had a natural opening, but it had been on my mind. Kai gave a small “hm,” a faint hesitation before answering.
“If love means directing desire toward the woman you’re drawn to, then yes.”
“…So they’re both, at least in that sense, attracted to women.”
Sexual orientation… preference? I wasn’t familiar enough with the terms to know if I had them right, but that was the shape of it. No one close to me had ever been open about that, so I’d never had much occasion to think about it directly.
But, I thought, and turned toward Kai, and found her eyes already waiting, meeting mine instantly.
As if everything in me were being drawn into that gaze, my body felt, for a moment, like it had lifted off the ground.
“Does that kind of love bother you, Yuki-san?”
Whether there was something loaded underneath Kai’s phrasing, I couldn’t tell if that was my own bias reading into it. She’d asked a question that was hard to answer cleanly in this day and age, and yet impossible to sidestep.
Woman and woman.
The memory of that airless catch in my throat, from when Kai had licked my finger, threatened to surface, and I shook my head to clear it.
“I suppose some people are like that. It’s just never had anything to do with me.”
For some reason, even speaking normally, the words felt like they were tumbling out too fast.
My own eyes felt as though they were looking at the sea and finding only dissolving dark, nothing more.
I had no real sense that the answer had come from my own mouth.
“I see.”
“Mm.”
Keeping myself braced, not wanting to show any opening, my voice and my answers both stayed short. The elbow resting on the railing was starting to ache under its own weight. Something felt heavier by degrees, and my head wanted to bow under it, breath growing tighter.
And this time, no one was even touching my fingers.
If her cousins were like that.
What about Kai?
I couldn’t ask. And before I could find a way to, Kai had already changed the subject.