Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Fourteen
I’d thought there was no way the two of us could finish it between us, and yet Kai kept eating, clearly delighted, and somewhere along the way I found myself simply watching instead. Even the strawberries she supposedly disliked, the cream, everything, she seemed to be genuinely enjoying it all.
“How was it? Good?”
Kai set down her fork, licked her lips lightly, and her cheeks softened at the last traces of cream.
“Getting to meet a real Santa Claus, in this world… I really must be lucky, mustn’t I?”
Her response to the cake wasn’t the plain, straightforward kind of comment I’d expect from Kai, it spread outward, radiating in some other direction entirely.
Kai stood and took my hand. Guided by it, I rose from my chair.
Kai smiled and said:
“By the way, everything I said about the Santa costume earlier was a joke.”
“Liar, you complete liar.”
Her eyes, her whole reaction, had been dead serious.
“Thank you.”
Having said that, Kai just went ahead and hugged me.
Not the gentle dissolve of cake and cream, this was something thicker, stickier, sweetness that unsettled rather than soothed. A girl whose height and age both sat at roughly the same small number wrapped her arms around my waist and wouldn’t let go. Even sensing she was trying to deflect from something, I could feel myself nearly won over by the deflection anyway.
Touching her shoulders, I always felt afraid at how delicately fragile they were under my hands. If I gripped too hard, she seemed like she might genuinely shatter. Her limbs so slight, so underdeveloped, it was hard to believe they actually functioned properly, and that very frailty, the sense that she couldn’t fend off anything even if she tried, pressed hard against my chest.
Carefully, as though wrapping something, I drew Kai’s head in against me.
“Just say it plainly like that more often, in general.”
Kai, hugging me back, had hair that carried the same pleasant scent as the hotel room itself.
Everything felt soft, unfocused, both the feeling and the sensation of it. Something in me was gently stirred by the contact, and it wasn’t unpleasant. Something like watching a fountain rise, that particular mood you get from seeing something good.
If I wasn’t going to lie to myself, I’d started, somewhere along the way, to develop a real attachment to this child. Kai’s dishonest, roundabout feelings had been quietly paving a road toward me, one that kept arriving from directions I never expected.
And here I was, still without any map of my own, feeling my way blindly toward some way to reach her in return.
“Can I be spoiled today?”
“What?”
“It’s Christmas. You’re Santa. And I’m a good kid.”
Tacking it on like an afterthought wasn’t going to let her get away with it.
“Aren’t you already pretty spoiled most days?”
The ear cleaning, for one.
“…More than usual today.”
Held face to face, Kai’s head came up exactly to my chest, and I looked down, thinking, so small.
A child. Kai was still, unmistakably, a child.
And that child was asking to be spoiled, and I was weak to it.
Weak to everything about Kai, honestly.
“Depends what it is.”
“Let me lick your fingers.”
Something sharp seized in my chest, and I went completely still. The pain climbed, straight up to the crown of my head.
“…Again?”
“Toes, today.”
“No. That’s just, weird…”
Instant, reflexive rejection. Toes… wait, what exactly did that mean?
As I tried to pull back, Kai only held on harder, refusing to let me escape.
“Give me my Christmas present, please…”
The muffled plea repeated, insistent. She was clinging so desperately I nearly recoiled, is it that important to you? Her thin arms, however hard they held on, could easily be shrugged off if I genuinely tried.
But I could never actually do that to her.
“…Toes?”
“Yes.”
“Does it really have to be the toes? Nothing else?”
“If you’d actually grant requests, I have plenty of others, but…”
“Toes it is.”
I cut her off before she said something worse.
“……………Toes?”
It made no sense, however hard I tried to receive it.
Same as this whole relationship, no matter how many times I turned over everything I thought I knew, ordinary logic couldn’t produce an answer.
And in the middle of all that.
I was aware, only, of Kai.
Kai holding onto me, that was the only thing I understood clearly.
And so.
“…At least let me wash my feet first.”