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Hitoka does not expect Shimizu to say yes.
She had written the letter in thin, even strokes on heavy cardstock, expressing her admiration and affection and developing loyalty in black ink. She had licked the envelope closed and pressed a strawberry-shaped sticker to its seam. She had done this all with an air of frightening calm, not unlike a man stranded in the middle of the ocean when he realizes he has no fresh water left to drink.
So when Shimizu breaks into a genuine smile, perfect teeth and all, Hitoka feels herself go a little weak at the knees. This whole affair had started, as such things usually do, with a too-bright smile and a high, clear laugh. Seeing this echoed back in what must surely be the climax of her entire life makes her stomach flip seven hundred and twenty degrees.
“Hitoka-chan,” Shimizu says, and she’s grinning widely. The letter, open and read twice through, is clasped between her hands. She runs her fingertips over its edges while she talks, her touch feather-light like she’s not aware she’s doing it.
“Shimizu-senpai,” Hitoka says. Stops. Clears her throat. “I—“
Shimizu leans against the gym’s door frame. She’s changed back into her school uniform and she’s beautiful like this, melting into the setting sunlight. Her glasses are iridescent pools of refracted light. Hitoka wants to kiss her, or touch her, or say something even more stupidly brave than she had in the letter.
“Kiyoko,” Shimizu says. Her voice is light, reassuring, and above all, sure. She’s flushed behind the glare of her glasses, but she’s still smiling like she had the first time Hitoka had met her. “Just Kiyoko is fine.”
Hitoka’s stomach flips right through the floor.
Kiyoko holds her hand on the way to the bus stop and Hitoka wants to die.
Not actually—of course not, this moment ranks well within the top five moments of her sixteen-and-one-sixth years of existence—but. Well. She can hardly focus on the conversation, mesmerized by the feel of Kiyoko’s hand in hers. Her skin is soft, smooth, marbled. Perfect. Kiyoko is a perfect human specimen.
Shimizu Kiyoko is a goddess, Hitoka has heard boys in her year say. Shimizu Kiyoko of the boys’ volleyball team is a fucking goddess. I’d pay a thousand yen for pictures of her. I’d confess if I had the courage. Shimizu Kiyoko is the be-all, end-all. She is everything. I heard she smiled at Kazuma the other day. I wonder what he’s doing right.
Unlike the boys in her year, Hitoka is not as preoccupied with seeing Kiyoko naked as she is with holding hands as they walk down the street. There is something so hopeful, so intimate, about the feel of someone else’s hand in your own. The feel of skin on skin, heartbeat on heartbeat. Kiyoko is usually a fast walker, the result of years given over to track and field, but she slows for Hitoka. This simple kindness has Hitoka reeling. Is this how she’s meant to feel, as if she’s performing the most delicate of balancing acts?
“Kiyoko,” she tries, just slightly breathless. The name rolls off her tongue in her halting voice, pitched an octave too high. Kiyoko stops.
“Hitoka-chan?” she says, questioning, and her voice sounds like spun sugar. Her breath is barely visible in the cooling air. Hitoka wants to catch it in her mouth.
“Sorry,” she says quickly. “I was just—uh. Trying to see how it sounded.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Then, quieter:
“I like it.”
Hitoka is going to die.
She’s never been very good with words. Her thoughts come out jumbled, too far-fetched, too judgmental. Her brain-to-mouth translator has gone off on a three-month vacation to Niigata but has made no plans to return. She has yet to find a replacement.
“Hitoka-chan?”
Kiyoko slips into the locker room, shutting the door softly behind her. She hasn’t changed out of her sports uniform yet. Hitoka adjusts her tie, suddenly very nervous.
“Hi,” she says, and then, because she’s feeling a little brave, “Kiyoko.”
She hears Kiyoko’s smile, her little huff of laughter, and if she was any braver she’d turn around to see it.
“Hitoka-chan. Would you mind if I walked you to your bus stop again?”
Hitoka’s veins are liquid nitrogen when she squeaks, “Ah, not at all, that’d be really nice, please do.”
There’s that laugh-smile again. Kiyoko is predictable. Or maybe—maybe it’s just that Hitoka has, both consciously and unconsciously, picked up on a great many of Kiyoko’s mannerisms. Maybe this is what it means to love: to understand the barest of intricacies of a person and still want to learn more.
She spends too long adjusting her tie. It’s awkward, after, just standing there. Would it be rude to look anywhere besides her locker? Probably. She fidgets with the handle, cool metal stealing the heat from her palms.
“Did you have a good day?” Kiyoko’s voice is muffled, like she’s speaking through her sweater.
“Ah, I guess so. What about you?”
A pause. “I think it went well. For the most part, anyway. I’m never very good at reading in front of the whole class.”
I’m sure you’re great, Hitoka wants to say. I’d listen to your voice for hours. You could make even the most boring of books sound interesting. But she’s never been great at reading out loud either, and her voice sticks in her throat, and so she stays silent.
“I’ll be ready in a minute.” Kiyoko. The sound of elastic on skin. The sound of cotton on elastic on skin. The light flickers above them.
Hitoka hears a zipper, counts to five, and turns around. Kiyoko smiles at her as she dusts off the front of her skirt. “Okay,” she says, pushing her glasses higher up the bridge of her nose. “Are you ready?”
Hitoka hitches her bag further up on her shoulder and nods. She doesn't trust herself to speak when Kiyoko smiles like that, secret, like they’re the only two people in the world. Like they have everything. Hitoka does not have everything. Someday she’s going to trip over her own words and say something stupid and send the both of them tumbling down an impossibly steep hill, the kind that you can’t climb back up. She is going to bring on Armageddon. She is going to bring on oblivion.
Kiyoko holds the door open for her, and Hitoka flicks off the lights.
“I don’t have very many friends,” Kiyoko confesses one day. It’s starting to get colder, finally, and their winter uniforms are a little too loose in the shoulders when they put them on for the first time. They’re sitting in the hallway between buildings, huddled closer together than usual on account of the wind. Kiyoko’s scarf is draped loosely around her neck, and she’s playing with the tassels.
“What do you mean? What about Sugawara-senpai and Sawamura-senpai and—“
“Ah, I meant outside of the club.” She tucks a few stray hairs behind her ear. Hitoka burns with a hot, sudden desire to do it for her. “And they’ve helped, definitely. Before I joined, I only knew a few people because we’d done track together. I think people might find me...unapproachable.”
“Oh, no, that’s—you’re not—“ Hitoka starts, then pauses. She recalls the day Kiyoko stopped her in the hall, the way she’d taken her hand in both of her own, the way she’d held the stars in her eyes while she waited for Hitoka’s yes or no.
“I think,” she says haltingly, feeling heat bloom heavy in her cheeks, “I think that you’re, uh. You know. And other people, too, but I—ah…”
“Hitoka-chan,” Kiyoko says, and Hitoka knows she’s smiling without even having to look up. “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”
“It’s embarrassing,” she squeaks out. They are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the raised concrete, and she feels every move Kiyoko makes with her entire body.
“I’m not going to make you say anything,” Kiyoko says.
“But?”
She nudges Hitoka’s shoulder with her own. Hitoka feels her cheeks burn.
“Ah, okay. Okay.” She takes a deep breath in. “This is, uh, kind of...um. I just...thought, when I first met you. That you were, uh, pretty. Really pretty. Ah, like a model, sort of, you could totally be a model if you wanted to! Although that’s not what I...you’re very capable, too, and, ah…”
Hitoka claws her way through the dictionary inside of her heart and still cannot find the words to describe how Kiyoko’s eyelashes caught the afternoon light, how her eyes were set with the kind of determination Hitoka wished hers were, how the unassuming mole beneath her lip was all that had registered in Hitoka’s mind for the first fifteen seconds.
“I just thought you had a really nice smile,” she says hopelessly, letting her head fall into her hands.
It’s silent for a long moment, nothing but the wind to ease the stifling embarrassment that has Hitoka’s cheeks red and palms sweaty.
“Hitoka-chan.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly.
Kiyoko’s fingers find her chin, the curve of her jaw, and she tilts Hitoka’s head up very gently. Hitoka blinks once, twice, and finally looks Kiyoko in the eye. Her heartbeat picks up, a rapid staccato beat against her ribs and her sternum and her fingertips.
“Thank you,” Kiyoko says very seriously. Her eyes are bright through the slight warp of her glasses. “I really mean it, Hitoka-chan. Thank you.”
I think I’m probably in love with you, Hitoka thinks, watching the slow curve of Kiyoko’s tongue as she runs it over her bottom lip, and then Kiyoko leans in and kisses her for the first time and for once in her life, the world goes still.
Maybe this is what she was born for. Maybe this is her purpose: hands, lips, teeth. Shimizu Kiyoko is a temple. Hitoka traces over her collarbones and the gong inside her heart rings out with all the force of her affection.
You’re wonderful, she thinks, and then, please let me stay a little longer.