Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Ten
“Kai, can I ask you something? …I’m not sure if I should, but…”
“You can ask me anything. We’re supposed to be talking today, after all.”
Right, that’s what I’d come for. Talking. Somehow this had turned into ear cleaning along the way.
But maybe this kind of touch was actually a fitting moment to ask.
I asked her.
“Being touched like this by someone… does it bother you? Are you all right with it?”
For Kai, contact with another person was probably steeped in something closer to violence, most of the time. Whatever I’d been through myself, next to Kai’s pain and injuries, felt like child’s play by comparison, but I still carried that kind of memory somewhere. Even now it was part of me, a seed of self-denial. Whatever Kai’s own heart had, growing in that small body all this time, whatever it was, that was probably all it had ever had to work with.
There was a small pause before her answer.
“I don’t mind you touching me, but I’m not exactly all right with it either.”
Not liking it, not disliking it. A strangely balanced answer.
“What does that even mean?”
Kai laid her small palm across my thigh. Before I could get annoyed, not this again, she spoke first.
“Because you’re an erotic oba-san, probably.”
Delivered like something meaningful, though the content was pure nonsense.
“Just so we’re clear, that’s an insult.”
Watching her, it seemed like she treated the phrase almost like a compliment.
“Oba-san aside, I think erotic is something you feel at the most basic, primitive level.”
“That’s just instinct being crude.”
“Right, instinctive.”
Kai didn’t push back on it. Which meant she really did mean erotic as a compliment.
Erotic meaning, essentially… appealing, I suppose. Attractive.
Trying to think through the meaning of that too closely, combined with the fact of sitting in this room with her, produced something like an error in my head. I was, functionally, her guardian, dropping by in the gaps of my day to check on her. That, and only that, was supposed to be why I was here.
So I set that thought aside. Whether there was anything left to carry once I set it aside was another question entirely.
From there I stopped thinking and just cleaned, quietly.
Kai stayed so still I checked more than once whether she’d fallen asleep.
“Done.”
“Thank you.”
Kai made no move to get up. Her feet swayed a little, back still curled against me.
“…Whose turn was it to ask something?”
“Yours, Yuki-san.”
“Is that true…?”
I let her keep her head in my lap and talked a little longer.
Favourite subjects. Music she liked. Food she disliked. Favourite season. Stories about teachers. Stories about my daughter. Stories about the hotel staff. The view. The sea. Small, unremarkable exchanges passed back and forth between us, and it felt almost like sheltering from the rain together. A brief, chance closeness, comfortable in the way small, inconsequential topics sometimes are, with nowhere further to go.
And then dirty jokes, which I shut down with a scolding.
“All right, up you get.”
At my prompting, Kai obeyed, unusually compliant, and sat up. She took the remaining cotton bud, spread her legs, and arranged herself to receive me the same way.
“Since we’re at it, your turn, Yuki-san.”
She patted her own lap briskly, invitingly.
Don’t turn that into harassment by not patting your own leg while you say that.
“…Ear cleaning?”
“Yes.”
“No… I’m fine.”
“You don’t trust me? Me?”
“Not especially, no…”
“Seriously?”
Ignoring her wounded, narrowed eyes for the moment, I found myself worried about resting my head on legs that looked like birch branches, thin enough to snap. It struck me as far too fragile even to imagine. Even the thought felt wrong, but a light kick and I half-believed they might genuinely break. I found myself wishing the chicken soboro would put up a little more fight, nutritionally.
Her legs, hidden under white tights, looked peaceful enough at a glance. I’d seen them bare before too, and no obvious injuries or bruises anywhere visible.
I remembered Kai once saying, laughing, that she never let marks show anywhere visible.
Which meant, perhaps, that further up, where the skirt and tights hid everything, some record of someone’s malice was still written into her skin. If I actually saw scars that old, I might come completely undone with nowhere to put that anger. I hated, plainly, anything that hurt a child.
But Kai was already hurt, so much of it already unrecoverable, and while that thought flickered like flame across my vision, distorting it, Kai pressed her skirt down and stared straight at me. What was that look for, I nearly snapped back, then, a beat too late, understood the accusation in it. “It’s not what you think,” I protested. She’d apparently assumed I was trying to peek up her skirt.
My eyes had, admittedly, drifted that way, but the intent was entirely innocent.
Caught, no doubt, looking like some deeply suspicious person staring fixedly at a skirt and a pair of legs, and yet wrongly accused all the same.
“You really are an erotic oba-san.”
“No, I’m no-ot.”
“…Do you want to see? Under my skirt?”
Would she please stop that habit of glancing sideways at me like that.
“Enough. If you’re doing this, hurry up.”
I escaped the confrontation by lying down, using her legs as a pillow. There’d been other reasons I’d wanted to refuse too, but I buried them all under the excuse.
“Your head’s heavy.”
“You’re just light.”
“People tell me that sometimes.”
So, again, who exactly?
Having thrown myself down on impulse, this close to Kai, worry arrived a beat late over whether this was really all right. Obviously, she was close. Her leg right in front of my eyes. That distinctive texture of tights against skin. The skirt, right there. The skirt was fine. But there was a scent. Kai’s uniform carried its faint, dry note.
Which had, by now, also become the scent of Kai to me.
“Can I touch your hair?”
Perhaps because I’d scolded her once before, however lightly, she checked first this time.
“Go ahead.”
Kai’s thin fingers pushed my hair aside, and the moment they brushed my ear, my back very nearly jumped.
“…That’s erotic, isn’t it.”
“Sorry, what was that?”
“Now, my first ever ear cleaning begins.”
“Wait—”
Please don’t casually turn someone’s heart into a windswept wasteland with a comment like that. She wasn’t wrong, though. My own mistake, entirely, entrusting my ear to someone who’d never even cleaned her own.
“Be careful with that. You understand? Careful.”
“You be careful too, Yuki-san, don’t go flipping up my skirt just because you’re bored.”
“Just focus on the ear cleaning.”
My heart was pounding, in the bad sense. Braced, anticipating pain.
The cotton bud touched my ear gently, and my neck went rigid.
“…Fine, I give up.”
“What?”
Kai abandoned the cotton bud, just like that. Just as I was thinking, well, I lay down for nothing, her fingers moved to stroke my hair and head instead. Being touched, I registered consciously, and yet, oddly, no discomfort followed. It didn’t come.
It didn’t come, until it suddenly did, heat flaring at the edge of my eyes.
Something warm and damp settled over the base of my earring.
Recoiling in a way that couldn’t have been good for my neck, heart and breath both scattering, I confirmed it: Kai’s tongue had been the source of that warmth. Without any warning at all, Kai had licked my ear, and now withdrew her tongue, entirely unrepentant.