She no longer said I’m home to anyone.
Shinomiya followed the familiar route back and let herself in, locking the door behind her with one hand while the other found the switch on the wall. Warm orange light came on in the entrance, and from there pushed faintly into the living room and bedroom — making the rest of the flat feel darker for it, somehow. She stood in the hallway for a moment, not quite ready to move, as her tangled thoughts blocked each other and no path through them opened. A little over a minute of that, and she drifted out of her shoes and in.
She didn’t turn the lights on. She set her bag on the sofa and was about to sit when she caught sight of the two lanterns on the shelf. She stood looking at them for a moment in the dim room, then reached up and took one down.
Shinomiya, in bold, confident brushwork. Hatano’s gift.
She sat heavily on the sofa and found the switch on the base. The modern LED lantern came on, and a soft warm glow spread through the room. She set it on the table and looked at it, narrowing her eyes against the gentle light.
It didn’t have the lively flicker of candlelight, but there was a comfort in it — a sense that it would be all right to simply fall asleep right here.
She pulled her knees up and looked at it properly. The beautiful calligraphy, and the not-quite-there drawings: a cat, a frog, a star, a heart, a scatter of things that looked like something a primary schooler might produce. One lopsided frog had a speech bubble attached, with the word kaeru written small inside it. Not kero, not geko — just kaeru. The word for frog, stated plainly, with no attempt at atmosphere. She laughed before she could stop herself, and then the warmth of the light carried her backward into the days they’d shared.
If you couldn’t pick up the brush today, I didn’t want you to feel bad about it — that was what Hatano had said about the drawings, and then immediately taken it back. She was a liar, but a soft-hearted one, and what her real intention had been was hard to pin down. Still, if Hatano had been connected to Rōkai all along, maybe it had been a lie to cover something more carefully accomplished. The suspicion formed, and immediately she despised herself for having it. She bit her lip.
Something warm ran down her cheek from the corner of her eye. She stared at the ceiling, checking for a leak, and then realised a beat later that it was tears, and wiped them with her sleeve. She turned her eyes away from the lantern, and they landed on the bookshelf.
On the middle shelf, where she kept things she’d wanted to keep without quite admitting she wanted to: a single sheet of drawing paper marking a place, alongside everything from her childhood through to the present. The most recent thing there caught her eye.
She crossed to it, pulled the slip of paper from between the books. The aquarium ticket, from the visit with Hatano.
The drama club visit to the aquarium — most of it gone from memory, including the people, the timing, nearly everything. The ticket had gone with it. But the ticket from this visit, she’d saved. Why had she kept it?
I make things too, or try to, so I think I can understand at least a small piece of what you’re carrying. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. But if getting it out would help, I’ll listen. Had anyone ever said anything like that to her? Without her having to bring it up, without her even fully knowing it herself — Hatano had noticed what was gathering at the bottom of her, and reached toward it. Not desire, not envy, not family connection. Just straightforward affection, the cleanest thing she’d ever been given, and the most comfortable.
She stood looking at the ticket.
Every moment they’d shared rose to the surface, one after another, with no limit. Hatano’s words, her eyes, her breath, her voice, her warmth. The blur of it made her eyes hot. Everything they’d done: the night she barely remembered, the food truck and the aquarium, the museum, running into each other at the izakaya, the night they’d spent in the same room, the lantern painting together. She had never been fond of anyone like this before, and she had no idea what to do with the gap that had opened in her chest or how to hold back the wanting. She bit her lip, and the tears fell anyway. Did you enjoy today? — and her own nod, and Hatano’s face when she heard it, that warm I see. The moment it surfaced, a drop hit the floor.
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and pressed the ticket carefully back into the shelf, away from the wet. The voice and words she couldn’t dislodge, circling in her mind again and again. She wanted to stop feeling like this, to sleep, to put it all somewhere dark for a while. She reached for the blanket on the sofa.
And then she saw the lantern on the table.
It was a painting of memory. The lantern she’d made, sitting quietly in shadow, held the images of days with a person she loved to the point of aching, and somewhere inside the careful observation of it she could just see herself — her actual self. Your paintings — I’d have liked to have seen them. Hatano’s wistful words came back to her, and she sat crying quietly in the dim room, looking at the lantern with swollen eyes.
Then, without quite deciding to, she went to the easel propped against the wall and started setting it up.
The version of herself who had once loved painting, who had broken under the weight of it, who had sunk into the years of drifting, and the version who had changed — even a little — in the time she’d spent beside Hatano: all of them together were pushing her from behind now.
The tears didn’t stop. But her hands didn’t stop either.
She lifted the old canvas onto the assembled easel. The warm orange from the hallway, the light from beyond the window — stars, and the layered glow of the city. In the dim room she couldn’t be sure of the true colours, and her eyes were too blurred to see the outlines she was making clearly. She had no excuses she felt like using. She wiped her eyes one hard, final time, sniffed, and settled into the chair on its castors. She reached for the brush.
No sketch. Not a trace of fear.
She dissolved the dried transparent watercolour with water and began mixing the colours of the city beyond the window, the room around her. Then she brought the brush toward the canvas.
She had been too frightened before. The gap in talent, the voices pouring scorn on her, the disappointment and contempt — the act of touching brush to canvas had become something she couldn’t face.
But tonight, strangely, there was nothing to be frightened of. The lantern on the shelf, and the memory it carried, pushed at her back and seemed to inhabit the brush itself. Driven forward by everything that had accumulated between them, she put the brush to the canvas in one unhesitating motion.
Canvas and heart came together. The colour settled, when it was ready.
After five years, colour came to life on the old fabric at last.
She couldn’t be sure of the true colours in this dim room. She didn’t know if the old canvas would take the colour well. But her colour was on it. That was real.
Five years — an almost unreasonably long time. And yet it felt, at last, like a first step.
There was no time for that feeling, though. She painted without pause, pouring the scene in front of her eyes and the feeling in her heart into colour, carrying them onto the canvas. Watercolour dissolved in water expressing everything she held in herself, rendering the blurred scene her wet eyes showed her.
She had never understood before why she should pick up a brush. The fear, the hatred of it — she hadn’t known why she had to face something that only caused pain. If it was only suffering, she had no reason to endure it; if no one would praise her, she had no energy to persist.
She had thought all of that. And yet now, simply wanting one person to see it was what moved the brush. Twenty years old, and this feeling was new in her life.
The second hand circled. The minute hand followed behind it. Lost in the landscape and the feeling, she poured everything she had into the canvas.
Two hours later, the brush finally stilled.
She came back to herself, blinking her swollen eyes wide. She wiped the corners with the back of a paint-stained hand and sniffed, and looked down at what she had made.
The night view through the window of a rented room, on an evening suspended between instinct and reason.
The painting was blurred with tears and profoundly melancholy, and at the same time she felt, with complete certainty, that it was the finest thing she had made in her twenty years of life.
She set the brush on the cloth. After a few seconds, the gap in her chest made itself felt, larger than before.
She had climbed past the family’s weight, shaken free of the obsession, and taken a step at last. But the step had been taken through pain and grief, and she hadn’t taken it because she wanted to paint. Whether it was good or bad, whether she liked it or not, whether she was able or not — none of that had mattered.
She wiped the tears that had gathered at the corners of her eyes and pressed her lips together.
She had wanted someone to say it. One word, from someone. From her. But those words would never reach her now. She held the wish inside her and reached for the brushes to put things away.
Then a voice came from the direction of the entrance.
“I knew it. Your painting really is good, you know.”
The voice of the person who mattered most, moving through her like something felt rather than heard. Shinomiya turned toward it, wordless.
In the entrance, in the warm orange light: her, the cold of winter still pink on her cheeks and the tip of her nose. The exact words Shinomiya had most wanted, given as though she had known — as though she had reached into her chest and found them there. Shinomiya felt her thoughts go slow and thick, like something rusting. Why was she here.
“…How.”
She asked it in a daze. The meeting she’d wanted to cry at and the arrival she’d wanted to be startled by — but the first thing through was the simple fact of her presence, which was impossible. Then, a moment after asking, Shinomiya remembered: I’ll come again.
Hatano stood with one hand in her pocket and the other holding something up, turning it in the light — small and silver. Slightly out of breath, a little tired-looking, she smiled. The spare key Shinomiya had given her, held up plainly. She murmured “breaking and entering” like a small joke.
The key. She had used the key.
Shinomiya understood how, but not why. How, when she had pushed her away like that, Hatano was standing here.
“Sorry. Coming in without asking.”
She said it with a gentle expression and stepped into the living room. Shinomiya had a tangle of things she wanted to say and ask and show, all of them running into each other. No coherent sentence came. What came instead, following the feeling, was just her name.
“Senpai.”
Hatano stood in front of her and looked at her with an expression that was serious and soft at once. Then she reached out both hands to Shinomiya’s cheeks and began kneading them with gentle, unhurried thoroughness. Shinomiya went rigid, confused, a question forming on her face. Hatano drew a small breath and spoke.
“I kept something from you. I know that’s already cost me your trust, and I didn’t have an answer to your question, and because of that I left you frightened and hurt. There are things I need to say. But first — I want to ask you something.”
Honest and direct and unadorned. Shinomiya couldn’t look away from those deep, dark eyes, the kind you could fall into, holding her steadily. The tight, tangled mess of feeling in her began to loosen, strand by strand. She felt the heat rising behind her eyes.
Hatano tightened her grip on Shinomiya’s face, and said it with a look that left nothing behind it.
“Do you really think I’m the kind of person who moves just because someone tells her to?”
Hatano was a very strange person.
She had joined the Literary Appreciation Club to be near Shijima, and it had been exactly what she’d expected: a social circle with no real activity to speak of. Among members who were mostly living by their immediate appetites, there was one person who took writing seriously in the same way Shijima did — but unlike him, had nothing to show for it in terms of results. Someone who wasn’t antisocial, who had friends, but who didn’t get pushed around by other people’s opinions, and who seemed to have chosen her own way of living with full awareness. A strange person.
Nothing more than that. Or — if pressed — Shinomiya had categorised her as the kind of person she found hardest to be around, someone who didn’t respond to her the way she was used to, and had sensed something close to mild contempt being directed at her way of living in return.
The turning point had been a late-autumn drinks night. Coming out of the satisfaction of having finished a competition entry, Hatano had done the remarkable thing of attending a drinks event and then, more remarkably, taking a completely drunk Shinomiya home and letting her sleep there. Neither of them knew exactly what had happened that night, but it had started something — a thread connecting them, and from it, all the time they’d since shared. Hatano had looked for what she could do and reached out to her. Had suggested the aquarium, which she’d never properly seen. Had named herself Shinomiya’s friend in front of Rōkai’s associates. Had come when she heard she was unwell, had sat with her loneliness, had put the brush in her hand again, had kept her hand in hers.
She had believed all of it was Rōkai’s doing.
She had thought Hatano was acting on her sister’s prompting. But was she? The question found her, and something in her chest took a half-step back, and the narrow field of vision she’d been seeing through widened, a fraction.
A few months ago she would have refused her without hesitation. Rōkai’s agent, no question.
But knowing the soft-hearted person in front of her now — could she still say that and mean it? Hadn’t she watched her, again and again, refusing to take any action that ran against her own will? Even if Rōkai had said something to her, it was probably because Rōkai’s wishes and Hatano’s own had pointed in the same direction. That was why she had moved.
She wasn’t a person of convenient flexibility. Shinomiya knew that about her.
And so the actions of the person she’d fallen for were not things to doubt.
Had never been things to doubt.
Her eyes filled. The heat in them spilled over. She had wanted to not show a pathetic face at this reunion she’d been longing for, and she gripped her own fist and pressed her lips together and fought the tears, wanting to apologise first. But the loosened tension refused to brace again, and a small sob came free. Her lips trembled. The tears wouldn’t stop. She wiped them with the heel of her hand.
Hatano had acted for her sake because she was on her side — that was what Shinomiya had assumed, without being told, and simply believed. So when she found out the Rōkai connection had been hidden, she’d thought: she was never on my side after all, and she had been hurt, and she had leapt to the wrong conclusion.
That Hatano had hidden the connection was true. That she’d never explained why she was helping was true. But thinking she had been acting against her own nature because someone asked her to — that had been a serious mistake. She was looking at her. She had been looking at her all along.
Understanding this, Shinomiya apologised.
“I’m — sorry!”
The slender frame shaking with sobs was pulled gently into Hatano’s arms.
And Hatano, smiling quietly, patted her back.
“Yeah. I’m sorry too — for frightening you.”
“Feeling better?”
When the sobbing had quieted, Hatano asked it of the face pressed against her chest. Shinomiya had been crying into her for several minutes; the sound was settling at last.
The room was lit only by what came through the window, and Hatano’s eyes had adjusted enough to look down at her. Shinomiya, still holding on, sniffled, and then tightened her grip and pressed her forehead into Hatano’s shoulder like a small animal. “Easy,” said Hatano with a quiet laugh, and rubbed her back, and eventually Shinomiya pulled herself upright, wiped the corners of her eyes, and shifted to sit beside her with her head resting on Hatano’s shoulder.
“…Why did you come?”
“Because I thought you’d be crying.”
A deflection, and Shinomiya’s expression went faintly dissatisfied at it. But the answer was still the right shape, still warm enough, and she said “then I’m glad I cried” and wiped at her eyes.
Hatano put her arm around Shinomiya’s waist and drew her in, and with her free hand glanced at the canvas on the easel. The blurred night view — a painting that took the breath away — she looked at it carefully, eyes closing for a moment, a small smile coming through. Then she took out her phone.
“To go over everything properly: my contact with Rōkai started after I already knew you. You remember the museum? She had heard about us through her patron’s people, and she was waiting at the station after I walked you home. She brought me to a bar afterward.”
She said this while pulling up the message history with Rōkai and holding the screen toward Shinomiya. Private exchanges weren’t something she’d normally show, but she had called them accomplices, had said that their shared problem was theirs to share. This one was for Shinomiya. She would get the retrospective permission.
Shinomiya took the phone carefully between fingers still lightly stained with paint, scrolling without touching the screen more than she had to. She went back to the oldest message in the thread and confirmed the timestamp: the night of the museum visit, just after midnight. She handed the phone back.
“I should have…asked, rather than just assuming. I hurt myself with my own imagination and then ran away. I’m so sorry.”
The misery in those words made Hatano sigh. She gave her a gentle knock on the temple with her own head.
“On my side: I should have talked to you properly, and I’m sorry for staying silent.”
“But — that was you trying to protect me, wasn’t it.”
“Which is why this isn’t about who’s at fault. Next time I’ll talk to you, and next time I need you to hear me. I’m not someone who goes behind anyone’s back.”
A silence. She heard, without asking, that Shinomiya was taking this in. After a few seconds, she nodded, once, with weight behind it.
“I promise.”
Hatano heard it, smiled faintly, and nodded back.
She had been very unsteady. The accumulated changes — the family, the painting, everything happening at once as she was beginning to shift — had been what made the fall this bad. But looking at her face now, the eyes looking straight back: no more worrying needed. Hatano glanced once more at the painting on the easel and settled her assessment of where Shinomiya was.
“There’s one more thing I need to say. The answer to your question — why I’m kind to you.”
To call this matter resolved without answering it would make the past few days of pain utterly pointless. She’d known she had to give the answer, and said so, and Shinomiya straightened and looked at her with a serious expression.
“I’ve been thinking it through, and talking it over with various people. Honestly — I hadn’t been examining my own actions very closely. I was following feeling over reason, and when something seemed like the right thing to do I did it, and I told myself no one was being hurt by it. And then I did end up hurting you. I was enjoying the comfort of giving without thinking about how it felt to receive.”
She put the apology into the words, and Shinomiya’s face said she wanted to object.
“It wasn’t like that. I was the one who got frightened on my own.”
“Anxiety between two people isn’t something either person generates alone. Feelings that come from a relationship come from the things that happen in it. If I’m going to keep building something with you — and I am — I want there to be nothing left to cause this later.”
Her own feelings were in that, too. Shinomiya couldn’t find a counter-argument and let her shoulders drop. The effort to make sure she wasn’t made the wrongdoer was transparent and dear, and Hatano felt it and knew, in the same moment, that this particular quality was one of the things she was falling for.
“I—”
She began, with a faint smile.
“I think I’m indignant.”
Shinomiya looked at her in surprise.
The word Shijima had given her — you don’t want someone you care about to dislike what you love — she had turned it over and taken it apart and put it back together, and what she’d arrived at, in her own language, was this.
“Indignant?” Shinomiya tried the word, uncertain of where it pointed.
“Yes. I know I’m not a professional — Shijima might reasonably ask who do I think I am — but I know from the inside what it costs to reach for something, and the feeling behind it. So when someone who’s been reaching hard doesn’t get anything back, I can’t stand it.”
She looked vaguely at the window, at the faint reflection of her own face in the night glass. Something in it was looking back at an earlier version of herself.
“I’ve been lucky. No one in my family has ever laughed at the dream — not once, not a single time. They’ve pushed me along even when there was nothing to show for it, and they’ve never told me to give up. I have a professional among my friends, and readers who come back. I’ve had everything I need to keep going, and no results to speak of, and I just go on struggling. Maybe that’s why.”
A few people had made her feel small, like Iizuka. But everyone close to her had always pushed the back of this foolish would-be artist. Not everyone had that.
She looked at Shinomiya, whose face had softened into something that held both warmth and a kind of wistfulness.
“Someone with all of that behind her and still no results keeps being encouraged. And meanwhile, someone who kept going without anyone’s acknowledgement, whose effort was denied rather than supported, and who broke under it — she’s right here. It started with a chance connection, and then the gap between what you showed and what you actually were made me want to get closer. But if there’s a reason I’ve been kind to you, it’s that I couldn’t bear it. Simple as that.”
Shinomiya listened in silence as Hatano put her feelings into words.
Hatano glanced at her face, and laughed, quietly and at herself.
“You might think I’m being ridiculous. But — I want people who try hard to be rewarded.”
At those words, Shinomiya’s expression froze, and her eyes went wide. Then her face, fighting not to cry, crumpled into something that tried to be a smile, and she shook her head.
“I didn’t try hard at all. While I was wasting my time, there were people who kept going properly. So you can’t say something like—”
“Effort isn’t measured against other people. What does comparing yourself to anyone accomplish?”
The refusal made Shinomiya’s face twist further.
She had stumbled and taken a wrong path, yes. The years in between might not look like effort by any common measure. But they had come from a place where effort had been denied and punished, and they had been the long run-up to being able to try again. The years she couldn’t see weren’t nothing. She was allowed to count them.
“Art might be entirely about results. But the process never disappears. However far you’ve wandered, however long you’ve stood still, your footsteps remain in your life. Whatever state you’re in right now, the effort you put in doesn’t vanish.”
She wasn’t going to claim effort will always be rewarded — she knew it wouldn’t, that unrewarded effort was the majority of all effort. Successful people would say the method was wrong, while offering no guidance on the right one. She knew all of that.
But even without results, it was effort. Even if it hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped, someday, somewhere, in some form — why shouldn’t that be allowed.
Hatano said this with full seriousness, and Shinomiya bent under it, face twisting downward.
There wasn’t much Hatano knew about her, not really. A shallow accumulation of shared time, and a past learned only through words. But in this room, on the easel, the old canvas told everything that words hadn’t: the pain she had carried through it all, the long and difficult road.
There would be people with more skill than her. People who had kept going more honestly, without faltering. That was certainly true.
Even so.
“You tried hard, didn’t you.”
Said quietly. Shinomiya’s eyes shook, her lips pressed together, the fist in her lap trembling with the depth of the fight inside her. When the tears fell, her face broke, and she sniffled, and after a moment she gave one small nod. Just “yes” — one syllable, at last.
Hatano waited quietly beside her while she worked to wipe her eyes.
The moment you decide that unrewarded effort is meaningless, you begin to rot. The moment you decide that effort without results is wasted, the dream dies. Since not everyone can get the outcome they want, the least you could do — at a minimum, yourself — was acknowledge your own effort. That was what Hatano believed.
Eventually the small sobs fell quiet. Hatano brought things to a close.
“That’s my answer. Does it help?”
Shinomiya wiped the corners of her eyes. They were already thoroughly red, the lids swollen.
She was still faintly tearful, but a soft smile came through, and she nodded.
“…Yes. I’m all right now.”
Said gently, without a trace of uncertainty.
Hatano heard it and relaxed completely, a sigh leaving her as she looked up at the ceiling. Shinomiya, watching her with an expression that was simultaneously apologetic and happy, narrowed her eyes slightly and opened her mouth.
“…Do you remember what I said at the museum?”
An unexpected question. The phone call at the station flashed through her, but there was no pressure in this — she could get it wrong without consequence. She let herself think, running back through what she remembered, trying to work out what Shinomiya had in mind.
“That Rōkai is a genius?”
“Wrong.”
“Your father’s words.”
“Wrong again.”
“…Hm.”
She thought a little longer, and then named what she believed was the one.
“‘If you’re hoping for something different from me — please give up and let me go.’”
She said it with a slight smile, recalling the words, and Shinomiya went pink and said “correct” with an embarrassed laugh. She fanned her face with one hand and searched for words, eyes closing as she thought. After a while she opened her mouth with an expression of someone accepting a penalty.
“I want to take that back.”
Hatano laughed, wanting to tease her — but if she pushed too hard and Shinomiya retreated, that would be her own problem. She covered her loosening expression with her hand and kept the sidelong look.
Shinomiya, still faintly pink, let what she’d been holding come out.
“I knew the way I was living was going nowhere. But it was still my life, even so, and I was afraid to deny it. I knew, really, that nothing was ever being filled up by that — and I was afraid to change anyway.”
“But,” she continued.
“You gave me the courage and the strength to take a step. You showed me how to fill what was dry. So I — I want to change.”
It was a declaration to Hatano, and a farewell to herself at the same time. A goodbye to the past version who had sunk into the hollowed-out life, a threshold crossed on the way to what came next.
Hatano had been planning to watch over her, patiently, until she was ready to move. To hold things steady until that day. She let a little surprise show, and then felt, in the same moment, that she had probably been underestimating Shinomiya too. Her expression softened.
Shinomiya looked at the easel by the window, at the painting on it. The blurred night view on the old canvas, in transparent watercolour — perhaps technically lesser than Rōkai’s, but to the two of them, worth more than anything with a price on it.
It was the crystallisation of years of pain and conflict, the answer arrived at after a long and difficult road. The footprint of a first step taken after years of hesitation. Imperfect, unpolished — but it existed because she had turned to face forward.
Shinomiya looked through the window’s blurred night view, at the stars beyond, and said it quietly, like making a wish.
“I think I want to dream again.”
Hatano looked at her profile in silence.
Hatano picked up a pen for the same reason she put it down: to push someone forward. A writer’s argument couldn’t reach a reader without the work to carry it, and whether it had become self-indulgent rather than useful was a concern that never entirely went away. She had worried about it in relation to Shinomiya too, throughout. Had it been too one-sided, too much of what she wanted rather than what was needed?
So hearing those words, and seeing that face — that was enough. She had just made a speech about effort deserving its reward, and it would ring hollow if she didn’t embody it. She pressed the expression and the voice into her memory like something she needed to keep.
“…There’ll probably be days when it gets hateful again. Days when you want to run. I can’t promise who’ll be there for you then. But if you want to change — there will be someone who supports you, whoever it is. And if there’s no one — whatever fight we’ve had to get there — call me.”
Shinomiya listened as though she were taking the words in through her whole body.
“I’ll push your back.”
Said plainly, and Shinomiya smiled at the characteristic bluntness of it, cheeks loosening. “That’s violence,” she said dreamily, like a line of poetry. Then she looked at Hatano with eyes and face full of meaning, and said: “…You really are soft-hearted, you know.”
Hatano shrugged and smiled back.
“I’m not this soft with everyone. To be willing to do this for someone, they’d have to be someone I—”
“S-stop! Stop right there! You can’t! You absolutely cannot!”
Fingers crossed in an X were pressed to her mouth before the sentence could finish. She blinked, startled, and looked at Shinomiya. Shinomiya was clearly panicked, visibly trying to stop Hatano’s words — and her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes, looking up at Hatano, held something sweet and urgent in them.
Hatano tilted her head.
“What?”
Shinomiya pressed her lips together and looked away, searching for words. As she struggled, her face went redder and redder, the heat reaching the tips of her fingers where they touched Hatano’s mouth. She turned back, and held Hatano’s eyes for a moment, and then looked down in mortification, ears scarlet, and forced the words out in a trembling voice.
“…If you say that now, I’ll definitely fall.”
Hatano went still.
“I’ll fall for you. So you can’t.”
Said in a small, exposed voice, barely held together.
Shinomiya raised her face tentatively, and Hatano was looking at her with wide eyes and no words. She sat there turning those words over in her head, and then the fact of it — this particular person, showing this particular face — reached her, and something happy moved through her. She thought, too, with mild amusement, that this was probably how it had always worked: someone had encountered this and lost their self-possession and become whatever Shinomiya needed.
The joke was that Hatano had become exactly that. She reached up and took the crossed fingers away from her mouth. Then she brought her index finger to Shinomiya’s chin, and touched the soft pink of her lips with her thumb. Shinomiya went rigid, eyes uncertain and expectant.
Hatano murmured against the silence.
“You silly… it’s too late for that.”
Telling her that would only make it worse — anyone could see that.
In the quiet of the night, in that small room, Shinomiya closed her eyes and let herself be held. No formal confession had come yet, and the order of things was, once again, entirely backwards — but thinking about that led to thinking about how this had all started, and that made formal ordering seem rather beside the point. Though if she were going to invoke that logic, there was something she’d still need to say afterward.
The thought dissolved in the softness of Shinomiya’s lips.