Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Nine
“Excuse me?”
Kai pushed her hair aside and pinched her own ear.
“I saw Kara-nee-san having some woman do it for her once. She looked ticklish.”
“First of all, calling women ‘some woman’ like that is rude, drop it. And, ear cleaning? Yours?”
I’d barely looked closely into my own family’s ears, so why on earth would I need to peer intently into hers. Having just resolved not to go easy on her, I made an effort to hold a stern expression.
“Yes.”
“Yes isn’t an answer.”
Get your own mother to do it wasn’t something I could actually say to her. Which is exactly why I’m weak to her. Sentimental over this child’s loneliness.
“I don’t even have the equipment for it…”
Kai stood up as if she’d just extracted a promise.
“So it’s fine as long as there’s equipment.”
“You really do love pinning people down with logic like that…”
Reasoning that ran through her like a formula, matching feelings to variables until it produced an answer.
“I’ll borrow some from a hotel friend.”
“You don’t need to go that far—”
Ignoring my objection entirely, Kai walked briskly out of the room. Watching that lightness in her step, feeling the youth in it, I picked up my cup alone. Adding it to the coffee, I suspected my own sweetness would win out easily, and felt faintly disgusted with myself. I leaned back against the chair, let out a slack “ahh,” and tipped my head toward the ceiling.
Was there anything I wouldn’t do, if Kai asked for it?
I hated how easily I let myself be carried along. But keeping my connection to Kai a secret from my family was entirely my own doing. Which meant no one was there to notice I was drifting. If I wanted saving from it, I’d have to manage that myself.
A few minutes later, Kai came back at speed with a cotton bud in hand.
“All set.”
“Good effort…”
A weak little jab that accomplished nothing. Kai climbed onto the bed and looked at me steadily. With anticipation swirling in her eyes like that, she looked exactly her age for once, and I was weak to it. I was weak to Kai like that. Weak to Kai in general, honestly. I tried to remember whether I’d actually agreed to this at any point, went back through the exchange, confirmed I hadn’t, and gave up regardless, standing.
I climbed onto the bed too, and Kai leaned toward me. She let her head drop toward me, and I caught it, guided it, and reluctantly set it down on my lap. Kai looked up at me once, smiled, then closed her eyes.
There was nothing here of a girl resistant to being touched. If anything, something like quiet relief.
The head resting on my lap was almost weightless, fragile.
“Your head’s light.”
“Thanks. People tell me that sometimes.”
Who, exactly?
And so, here we are.
“Whoa, that’s a huge one…”
Something entirely lacking in fragility emerged. I flicked it off onto the tissue I’d spread out.
“My ear feels so clear.”
“I bet it does.”
I’d half-expected disaster, but there wasn’t exactly a cobweb of built-up wax in there. Perhaps ear cleaning wasn’t strictly necessary after all. Working inside someone else’s ear canal carried its own faint nervousness. Like clearing out a long-neglected house, step by step, one careful pass of the cotton bud at a time. The last time I’d cleaned anyone’s ears had been my daughter’s, when she was small. I’d never done it for my husband, not once.
Where Kai’s cheek pressed against my leg, even through the tights, it felt cold, thin enough with so little on it to feel like cold flooring.
“The other person must have been surprised, being asked to lend a cotton bud out of nowhere.”
“Not at all. Half-asleep, and just said sure, happily.”
I checked the clock, since it seemed a little early for anyone to be half-asleep already. Seven-thirty. Thirty minutes left.
“The genius from before?”
“A different hotel friend. How to put it… a cosmic sort of person.”
“Is that a word people usually apply to actual humans?”
“Extremely tall, maybe two metres. Apparently there’s nothing else to do, so they walk to the hot spring nearby every day eating ice cream. Their hair’s, prismatic, I think, changes colour depending on the angle. Said they were about five million years old.”
“That sounds like something out of a dream you had last night, not a person.”
“Their name’s Yashiro-something. They’re often in the hotel lobby, so you might run into them eventually, Yuki-san.”
“I’d honestly rather not.”
I didn’t need any more strange characters entering my life. Family, work, and Kai were already stretching me thin as it was.
Stroking Kai’s neck, the skin behind her ear, her hair, brought her voice to mind, that pale, delicate quality. The texture of a child still waiting for a growth spurt that had somehow fallen behind schedule. That innocent physicality and the middle school uniform refused to line up neatly in my mind, and my vision blurred slightly at the mismatch.
“You’re pretty bold, Yuki-san, aren’t you.”
“I told you not to move your head, it’s dangerous.”
A light press of my hand and the resistance finally stopped. Stopped, but she kept rubbing her cheek against my leg in small motions, ticklish. The same gesture Maron used against my husband’s leg.
“So, what were you saying?”
“About me.”
“What about you?”
“From the outside, this probably just looks like you’re keeping a minor confined in a hotel room, Yuki-san.”
“…………………………………”
Not looks like. That was, in plain fact, exactly what I was doing. The only real differences were that I wanted nothing indecent from Kai, and that I wished for her safety. What I was doing was, strictly, protection.
I didn’t think the world at large would see it that way, though. Even if I explained the sheer wrongness of the Chitaira household, the fact would remain that Kai had nowhere else to be. Problems piled high enough to collapse under their own weight, and here I was, adding to the pile while cleaning her ears.
“A bit late to bring that up now.”
“It really is.”
I turned Kai over to work on the other ear. Her face came around to mine, and our eyes met.
No matter how many times it happened, being caught in that gaze never settled easily. Something stirred restlessly in my chest.
“I like this. Ear cleaning.”
Kai’s cheeks softened, the light in her eyes shifting shape, and I couldn’t look away. There was a real gravity in Kai’s eyes, pulling me toward her. Strangely, the men of the Chitaira house carried the exact same colour, and yet none of that pull existed there at all.
“Because it lets me be close to you, Yuki-san.”
Her finger traced slowly down my inner thigh through the tights, and my leg jerked in response hard enough to nearly kick her off the bed. Kai’s eyes went wide at the sudden jolt, then she laughed.
“Got a better reaction than I expected.”
“Anyone would jump if you touched them there out of nowhere. And besides, don’t touch.”
“But resting my head there is fine?”
Like this, Kai said, nuzzling her cheek against me again, and I caught her head to stop it.
“That’s the exact same thing our dog does to my husband.”
“I like that.”
Nothing about it was likeable.
Running the cotton bud along her right ear made Kai cough. I stopped, went a little deeper again, and she coughed again.
“New discovery, apparently touching my right ear makes me cough.”
“How strange.”
I vaguely recalled hearing about that happening to someone before, so perhaps it wasn’t so rare after all. I kept working, her coughing through it a few more times. Kai, sitting still like this, seemed far younger than someone my daughter’s own age, a child who plainly needed protecting. It let me believe that what I was doing here wasn’t wrong.
But even if it was true right now, I couldn’t afford to let my guard down.
Because with every gust of wind, Kai could turn back into either a child, or that yellow-green-eyed thing that wasn’t quite one at all.