Chapter Three: “The Clod of Earth Dreams of Snow” — Part Seventeen
Words rose in my throat before sound, and I caught myself, startled. What? What had I been about to say?
I could tell my eyes were wide with shock.
What had I just been about to ask for?
Not content with the isolated island of pleasure in my right foot alone, I felt almost drunk on the hallucination of it coursing up my leg, flowing upstream into somewhere even deeper.
None of this was sane.
“Hey…”
Get tired of this already. Please.
Or these disordered thoughts would just keep piling up. Filling my head with things I never asked for, that had shown up uninvited and were now complaining about the lack of room, and I was afraid that everything I’d carefully stacked up until now might collapse and get thrown out along with them.
“You…”
My mouth wouldn’t stop. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about Kai.
Why did Kai want me this badly. I kept searching for the answer. Even though I already knew it.
Even though saying it out loud would mean there was no going back.
Which meant Kai might have chosen to stay silent about it, if I hadn’t asked.
So why was I asking anyway.
“…Do you… like me?”
Don’t ask that, I thought, heat flooding my face all at once.
I half-hoped she’d laugh it off, call me an oba-san reading too much into things.
Kai didn’t stop what she was doing. Her eyes narrowed.
And she said:
“I wouldn’t want to lick the feet of someone I didn’t like.”
Making a sound like a kitten lapping up water, Kai laid bare a sharp, cutting affection.
Hurling torn petals at me, burying my heart beneath them.
It was a confession encircled by lustrous flowers that were destined only to wither, gleaming only for this brief moment.
Like. Someone she liked. Me.
………..Me?
My mind nearly went somewhere else entirely.
“L—”
“Yes?”
“Like, but… normally, people don’t lick, for that.”
I latched onto some irrelevant detail, fighting off the dizziness threatening to take over.
“Is that how it works?”
As if none of that had anything to do with her, the tip of Kai’s tongue tickled the underside of my toes. But my mind was so numb that even the sensation of her tongue felt muted.
Liked. Kai liked me.
Said outright, plainly.
I’d sensed it, of course, some part of me had. That look in her eyes, that way of touching me.
But she was fourteen. I had a family. And, we were both women.
Whatever “maybe” I’d let myself half-believe had no business becoming real, an entire world I had no map for.
I wanted to trade out my own heart. It wasn’t just malfunctioning, it was actively misfiring.
Every sound around me receding, like I was suffocating, dying by degrees.
“…Being told you like me, doesn’t…”
“You’re the one who made me say it.”
“…Right. You’re right. But, still, this can’t happen.”
Why had I asked? Why couldn’t I have just held it in, left it unsaid?
I regretted, violently, having forced it out into the open. A cold sweat broke across my back like rain.
“If you like me… then, I can’t come see you anymore.”
“…? Why not?”
A shudder ran down my spine as Kai licked thoroughly all the way up the sole of my foot with a wet, heavy drag of her tongue.
“Stop, that’s enough.”
“Why?”
“I’m trying to have a serious conversation right now.”
“I’m being serious too. This might never happen again.”
“It won’t. It absolutely won’t happen again.”
“That’s… a shame, then.”
Kai released my foot, and rose, half-crouched, pressing my shoulders down.
With my body already unbalanced, I offered no resistance and was pushed flat onto the bed. Kai kept her hands on my shoulders, casting her shadow over me. If she eased that grip even slightly, she’d simply collapse on me completely. And if that happened, I would have to fight her off.
For my own position, for the family I loved, I needed to hold firm and turn her away.
If I’d truly meant that, I should never have let her this close in the first place.
Blocking the light from the ceiling, wrapped in shadow, Kai’s eyes stared down at me, and I caught my breath.
Looking into them felt like gravity itself, like that green star might fall straight out of the sky onto me.
“You… like me… don’t you?”
I turned my head sharply away. The clock beside the bed told me exactly how long this detour had already stretched.
I had to get home. On feet still covered in Kai’s saliva. Stand, and walk.
“Yes. I like you.”
Kai’s gaze, her feeling, poured down onto me without wavering, not once.
Liked. She liked me.
Why did I keep circling back to that fact, over and over, trying to walk past it and failing every time?
“That’s… what kind of liking?”
A ridiculous question, given the situation.
Realising, too late, that the question sounded almost like I wanted her to say it, the blood drained from my face.
“There are a lot of ways to put it, but… given the current situation, ‘the kind of liking that wants to push Yuki-san down onto a hotel bed’ feels about right.”
Kai threw her feelings at me with brutal honesty, hiding nothing of the desire in them. Her palm, resting on my shoulder, burned through the fabric of my clothes.
A middle school girl, in love with a woman. With me.
A dizzying, perverse sense of unreality, being pinned down by a fourteen-year-old.
“…You’re a woman, though.”
“So you see me as a woman now, instead of a shameless brat?”
Kai’s mouth curved into something like a crescent.
In my unsteady vision, her eyes swayed like a pendulum.
This girl was a brat, and a woman. A woman after me. An enemy. An enemy threatening the calm, settled peace of my family.
Which meant I shouldn’t be kind to her, I should push back, arm myself, raise something, resist.
“I have a husband. A daughter.”
“I know.”
Kai received my feeble declaration of war without flinching.
“You understand what that means, don’t you?”
Right, I was a grown woman in my late thirties. Kai was still an unformed child. As an adult, I needed to understand a child’s feelings and guide her past them gently. I was her guardian, after all.
“That’s your situation, though.”
“Someone who doesn’t even consider someone else’s situation, and you think… you think you deserve to be liked?”
Who even was Yuki-san, anyway?
This woman, right now, about to be covered by a child.
So who exactly was that person?
“…Just like you said, I’m an oba-san, aren’t I?”
“An erotic oba-san. Erotic. Just looking at you feels like it could drive a person out of their mind, Yuki-san, you’re that erotic.”
Heat filled her voice, matching the heat in her mouth earlier. Erotic, erotic, erotic, endlessly.
“You just… say that word constantly.”
“Say what?”
She played dumb, clearly wanting me to spell it out myself. I couldn’t afford to get embarrassed and back down here. If Kai took control of this exchange, I had no idea what would happen next.
“E, ro, tic, is that all you ever think about?”
“I told you already, I’m in my second year of middle school.”
“Even accounting for adolescence, not every teenager is a, an erotic brat.”
“Heh,” Kai laughed, with an infuriating, knowing look. And then, right after.
“And besides, I’m from the Chitaira house.”
It was, unusually, close to an admission, delivered with a voice and a laugh that carried real desolation underneath.
Chitaira. That deranged household. Its child.
The very thing I wanted to sever Kai from entirely.
“So what, if you’re a Chitaira? You can just live your life without letting that house define you.”
“I wish that were true.”
Kai closed her eyes, as if giving something up.
“Ah, I like that kindness of yours too.”
That belated, tacked-on afterthought irritated me.
“That sounds like a reason pulled out of nowhere.”
Wasn’t there anything else? Looking at everything I’d done for her, wasn’t there anything else worth naming?
After everything I’ve thought about you, I nearly snapped, catching myself just in time.
I wanted to hit myself for how furious I felt that this was all Kai chose to value.
That’s not, that’s not what I wanted to be talking about here. I shouldn’t be talking about this at all. My own hurt feelings didn’t matter.
“I’m married. I have a child. I can’t return your feelings.”
I built the wall hastily, ignoring the actual thread of the conversation entirely. Confessed to, and refused. Not the first time in my life I’d had to do that. This was just one more instance of it.
And yet, when Kai’s open eyes found mine again, something like awe, something like reverence, moved through me anyway.
Those eyes felt, always, at every moment, absolute to me.
“Well… I suppose that’s right.”
Something in the shape of Kai’s understanding nod seemed to carry an unspoken addition, formed only in the movement of her lips.
It read, unmistakably, as for now.
“Wouldn’t it hurt, though? Seeing someone like that?”
These feelings would never be returned. At best, licking a foot, once, and never again after this.
Kai’s feelings were only ever going to be fuel for her own suffering. Something that would only hurt her, endlessly.
Which was exactly why I shouldn’t stay connected to her at all, not one more inch. That’s what I told myself.
“Not particularly.”
Kai denied it, flatly.
“If you’re saying we can’t see each other because I’d be hurt, I’m not, particularly hurt. So there’s no problem continuing to see each other the way we have been, is there?”
Her voice carried no different weight than usual. And in that same flat, ordinary tone, she was saying something completely unreasonable.
“Not hurt… you…”
Do you really like me? I wanted to ask. Unrequited love couldn’t possibly come without pain.
“You don’t feel anything for me anyway, do you, Yuki-san?”
I could only see the lower half of her face. I watched her lips move, and only that. Like reading terms you should never, ever sign, her voice was steering, carefully, toward wherever she wanted my feelings to land.
“Not nothing, exactly… more like, a handful of a child, I suppose, is how I’d describe it.”
“Then, it’s fine, isn’t it?”
“Ah—”
A short gasp escaped me. Kai licked the side of my neck. Her thin lips pressed down hard, suctioning against me before pulling away with a wet pop, leaving me with a sense of loss as though my very soul had been drained out, sending a shudder through me.