Sons of Plunder / My letter #2
Mai’s recovery was accepted by the group without discussion, as a quarrel between lovers might have been accepted once it was resolved. None of them wanted to reopen the wound again.
Midori eased the van into one of the many open parking spots on Goza’s main drag, a street about a mile long, filled with bars, deliberately quaint clothing stores, a grocery store, a movie theater, and enough little restaurants to make your stomach bulge out of your pants just looking at them. She was a lot better at parking than Reito, who didn’t seem to mind this.
As the twelve of them finished piling out and Midori locked the car up, it occurred to all of them, more or less simultaneously, that none of them had any sort of idea what they were going to do. They had all come with different ideas in mind, and now that they were here, in a group, they all realized that arguing over it would make them much like a starfish whose legs all wanted to move in different directions.
Thus, they all remained quiet for about a minute, all wanting to speak, all wanting different things:
Aoi, who was generally passive, really wanted to go looking for a new swimsuit, mostly because she had unintentionally peed in her old one a little while Chie teased her, and she didn’t really want to wash it out for fear of being questioned about it. Also, she generally just enjoyed shopping as a pastime. Her secret dirty habit. She was, however, willing to go with just about anything that Chie proposed.
As it happened, Chie wouldn’t have minded helping Aoi pick out a new swimsuit. She also wouldn’t have minded letting Tate help her pick out a new swimsuit, although she’d never say anything of the sort. He was cute, but he was Mai’s. But a girl can daydream, can’t she? But she respected his and Mai’s unspoken relationship all the same. The girl had enough trouble as it was, she thought. No reason to make more for her.
Shiho wouldn’t have minded letting Tate pick her out a swimsuit either, but she wasn’t thinking about that; she was actually thinking of the massive pit in her stomach. She hadn’t really gotten much food.
Midori, of course, wanted to sample several bars’ goods before the night came and she was forced to choose between them. She had her fake I.D. with her, and god damnit, she was thirsty.
Akane and Kazuya were the only two people who generally agreed on what they wanted to do, which was find a place to be alone, away from that damned camera-phone of Chie’s. (She had gotten the picture she had been after, though she promised not to do anything evil with it, provided they got their asses in gear and piled into the car. She had ways of getting what she wanted.)
Natsuki, as embarrassing as it was, actually did want to find some local color to add to her collection. She couldn’t help feeling that she’d forgotten something back at the cabin, though.
Shizuru knew what Natsuki wanted, and to help her out with that. Failing that, she wouldn’t have minded a movie.
What Tate really wanted was some time to talk with Mai, but the added weight on his arm, along with Reito’s subtle grin at him, basically signaling to the younger boy that I do indeed remember our agreement, and you damned well better, as well, told him that this was not happening anytime soon.
Mikoto wanted to go to a grocery store with Mai. She also wanted Mai to cook whatever she bought in this grocery store, in the grocery store. It didn’t sound strange to her.
Mai, however, already had her eyes locked onto the Karaoke joint they had parked not fifty yards from. It was fairly clear that those eyes weren’t letting go until somebody promised her that she was going to be singing that night.
Reito wanted to follow somebody else around, for once. Aside from that, he had no preference; in reality, he had a very private distaste for the town, and small towns in general.
Midori could almost sense the explosion coming, and knew she had to act fast to avert disaster. She watched Mikoto licking her lips, preparing to speak as soon as somebody else did; saw Chie’s eyes flicking around, prepared for a verbal battle the likes of which this small town had never seen.
You have to talk fast, or there will be a ruckus. In a moment of wild fantasy, Midori envisioned the “ruckus” spiraling out of control, to a point where the chaos was absolute, destruction imminent, and where only her good looks and talent stood between the town and annihilation at the hands of a bunch of you’re just as young as they are.
Another fantasy ruined at the hands of her young age and old wisdom. Wisdom she had gotten from…
“We should all split up,” Natsuki said firmly. “I have a few things I want to check out on my own.” Midori’s face sank, and she cursed her
immaturity
lack of speed.
“Alright,” she said, taking charge. “We can meet back here in…” she checked her watch. “Four hours.”
Drinking before 5, Midori? A little voice in her head chastised. She called it “sensibility.” Tsk tsk. Somebody said something, and people began to move, but she was no longer paying attention.
I’m not drinking. I’m sampling. She rebutted.
“Sampling” until you inebriate yourself. How many nights have you actually been sober since—
don’t think about that…don’t think about that…don’t think about that…
Why? Afraid to admit that maybe all of that most precious one shit was about as valuable as what you vomit up when you’re drunk?
…don’t think about that. NOT THINKING ABOUT THAT. HAVING A GOOD TIME ON VACATION NOT THINKING ABOUT THAT.
“Midori,” said a formal voice; it wasn't unpleasant at all, but it was nonetheless just about the last thing she wanted: Male interference. She looked up and saw Reito standing in front of her inoffensively. “I don’t have anywhere in particular to go, so I wonder if you might want some company.”
“I don’t think you’d enjoy the places I’m going,” Midori said, a little too coldly.
“I might surprise you,” Reito smiled. He really did have a lovely smile. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was being disingenuous, but his smile really was…
She felt like she had to throw up. If she continued this conversation, she probably would have to throw up. Of course, if she did what she was planning to do, she would throw up many times, but that was different. (She’d have liked to be able to say that she held her liquor well, but she didn’t; she was a small Japanese woman who couldn’t have weighed more than 135 after a big meal, and most of what she did weigh was from muscle, not fat).
“Sorry,” she shrugged. “I’m not…” she let it hang.
He frowned. “You’re not what?”
She frowned back after a moment. What had I meant to say? That I’m not “that kind of woman”? What kind of woman is that, exactly?
“You know what? I honestly have no idea.”
He gave her a strange look, and she wondered how much about her own situation he knew.
“Then I’ll come with you.”
She shook her head again. “Nuh-uh. You’re too nice a boy for that kind of business.”
He gave her a stranger look, and she cursed at herself. “Not that kind of business, you pervert!” She realized she’d said this a bit too loud, and looked around quickly, only to find that everybody else had dispersed. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” His smile was a little warmer now. A little more lady-killing. “You’re going bar-hopping, right?”
She sputtered a little. She had only ever called it that to Youko, who would only nod and demand that she quit dragging her ass. To the few others
one other
she had ever had to explain it to, she called it “creative sightseeing” or, if absolutely necessary, “going out for a sip.”
“Yeah,” she muttered.
“It’s been a while, but I think I can still do the dance.”
She blinked once, twice, three times a lady and she still didn’t believe it. “You.”
“Me.”
“Are you sure somebody didn’t just drop your unconscious body into a puddle of beer once?”
“Positive.”
“You,” she repeated, completely unable to reconcile the stand-up, straight-backed Reito standing in front of her with her image of the standard male barfly that she encountered: Stained shirt, unfocused eyes, large (or small) erection that he tried desperately to conceal while he talked to her in a vain attempt to get the opportunity to use it.
“Is it really that hard to believe?”
The polite thing to say would have been, well, it’s a little out-of-character for you, which was probably why her vehement reply was something like, “Yes!”
“I do go to a university now; in fact, I go to the same one that you do,” he offered in a brotherly, you know how it goes tone. He seemed genuinely confused by her reaction, but that, she knew, could have been as much of an act as half of the other faces he put forth to the world.
“And?”
He shook his head. “You don’t get around there much, do you?”
He struck a nerve without meaning to, and she clamped her teeth down on her tongue to stop herself from screaming something to the effect of, What the fuck do you mean by that, you snide piece of blue-blooded shit Instead, she just glared, and he backed down a little.
There was silence for a moment as the tension in the air built to a climax. Midori wanted him gone. She wanted him gone right now. She wanted to be by herself for a while and build up a nice healthy buzz so that she could deal with him again, because she would have to deal with him eventually. They were living in the same cabin.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, meeting her glare with a soft gaze of his own. “I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”
“How did you mean it, exactly?”
He frowned. “There’s no way to say it right now without digging myself into a deeper pit than I’m already in.”
“It’s pretty hard to dig yourself any deeper than where you are right now,” she countered. “Try me.”
“I just meant that I never see you around the campus is all. We go to the same university, and I know you’re working pretty hard on your thesis, but—”
“I’m not working on my thesis anymore,” she said quietly. “There’s no reason to.”
“Why? Just because the HiME star is gone, that means there’s no reason to make a comprehensive chronicle of its existence?”
You don’t get it, you snide fuck, and I don’t think you ever will. “Leave me alone, Reito,” she said evenly. “I don’t want any of what you’re offering.”
“I’m not sure I understand, but I’ll do as you ask,” he smiled, his voice strangely devoid of any sense of defeat. At that, he turned, almost on his heel, and walked off without another word, his gait neither cheery nor dejected.
Reito stuck one hand in his pocket and shook his head, genuinely concerned about Midori. In spite of being a closet letch, an excellent actor, and a big fat phony sometimes, he was still a decent human being, and he felt a hefty dose of decent human concern at this point for the girl, who had reacted so intensely when the subject of the university and her thesis had been brought up.
And there she goes into a bar she’s never been in before at one in the afternoon, when only the really shitty drunks are in, to work herself into a nice slobbery stupor in a town that fills up with thousands of tourists sometime near dark. There was nothing more dangerous than getting drunk by yourself in a place where nobody knew you and you returned the favor, except maybe for getting drunk in a place where nobody knew anybody else at all, and she was about to combine the two.
This certainly wasn’t the first underhanded act Reito Kanzaki had ever engaged in, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, either. In what appeared to be selection by an impartial judge, Midori started off towards a bar chosen at random, (there were several on the street), and as soon as she entered it, Reito started moving.
Why do I put up with this assignment? It’s certainly not for the money—it’s not like I need any more of that in my lifetime. Indeed, this was truer than it would be for most people in the world: The Sino-Russian conflict alone had earned him more money in two years than most people made in a lifetime. He had embraced several years ago the fact that the only reason he still whored his gun out was because he had nothing else to do, and it made him feel like maybe he wasn’t getting older after all.
Some people would call that sick, but some people don’t understand the way this profession works. If I didn’t get hired to do a job, somebody else would. There’s plenty of us out there, and I’ve got more discretion than most of them anyway. He said this to himself frequently. Moreso lately.
Maybe the reason he didn’t just break contract and run was because he wanted the relief, yes. Or maybe it was something else.
Maybe you just don’t want to admit that scratch-ass scares the piss out of you.
Which was absurd, since he’d only ever heard his voice over the phone.
If either of you dies, we’ll shoot the other.
Maybe it was the creepy ambiguity of the whole thing; but then again, he usually didn’t meet his employers face to face. But most of my employers don’t talk like a middle-aged version of deep-throat, either.
He shook his head, forcing himself back to the present before he wandered into the street by accident and got himself run over in quite possibly the most embarrassing way he could imagine, on the worst day he’d had in quite some time. He wanted to go out on a good day, anyway.
He found his way onto the main drag of this little tourist trap of a town; not hard to do since the rest of it only encompassed a few square blocks in the direction he’d come from. He looked up, and almost by accident, he discovered that maybe it wasn’t such a bad day after all.
His mark was twenty yards in front of him, and she was walking right into a store that appeared to specialize in lingerie.
What concerned the figure was the man with the sniper rifle aimed at the cabin. He was patient, but so was the figure, who could wait as long as was necessary to ascertain every detail of the situation.
Or at least, as long it took to convince the figure that the man needed to die. The figure’s knives were always sharp.
Nonetheless, Natsuki, ever the “stuff it in” type, pushed her discomfort aside. A display of her discomfort, she knew, would only make the situation worse.
Natsuki didn’t suppose that Shizuru would appreciate being referred to as a situation.
The store was more or less the same as the rest of the town—quaint and yet inviting enough to make one want to spend (a lot of) money there—with one major difference: Unlike the rest of the town, the store sold lingerie. As Natsuki was rapidly discovering, quaint lingerie stores were really just log cabins with enough of a repressed sexual undertone to make it feel, to her, like stepping onto the set of a pornographic movie. Once again, she pushed the feeling aside with a measure of success and began browsing as she always did, acting as though she was not browsing by moving brusquely through the aisles like she was looking for something in particular. (Though she felt she had lightened up considerably since the destruction of the HiME star, Mai often insisted that she still needed to stop being so serious all the time).
This worked quite well for her as she quickly looked through the racks full of panties and bras, aptly ignoring another undeniable fact of life: That any store specializing in lingerie was bound to be concerned primarily with the raunchier side of the garment. She would select four items and leave, as simple as that. She rarely indulged in the vaguely sexual glee that naturally accompanied lingerie shopping, and never when others were around to see the color in her cheeks as she did so.
She was able to focus on this right up until Shizuru, who had wandered off for a moment, appeared next to her, holding up what was quite possibly the raunchiest set of panties she had ever seen: They were a deep, suggestive red, made entirely from lace so that they were just barely transparent; the waist was small, the butt nonexistent. Oh, and they were crotchless.
Shizuru had the most adorable grin on as she held them up for Natsuki to observe.
“What do you think, Natsuki?” Shizuru asked as though she couldn’t see the deep blush invading Natsuki’s face.
Natsuki could only stare. Up until last year, her collection had consisted entirely of plain white granny-panties and bras. Following the attack of a particularly perverse Orphan, however, the entire collection was destroyed and she was encouraged (by a certain brown-haired “friend,” no less) to branch out a little as she rebuilt, to indulge her “creativity” as she hadn’t done in the past.
For Natsuki, however, creativity stopped at the color blue and a single thong. She didn’t even think something like this existed. She could only gape and blush a crimson as deep as that…
She shook her head. Something very deep inside of her wanted that little thing very, very badly. The rest of her wanted it gone before she had a meltdown. A big meltdown.
In the midst of her shock, and maybe with a little help from the soft power that Shizuru possessed, but rarely employed, Natsuki found herself unable to resist as Shizuru guided her towards the dressing room. She found her legs and Fujino’s moving in complete synchronization, and she was utterly oblivious to the odd looks the shopkeepers were giving her.
She snapped out of this half-trance about five feet before what she was suddenly certain was her imminent demise within the confines of a dressing room. She didn’t know what had put her there in the first place, but she was convinced that she needed to leave right. now. before Shizuru did something like suggest that she
“Go on, try it on.”
Natsuki froze.
Her mouth wrapped around Natsuki’s breast, Shizuru whispers, “Go on, try it on,”
“Don’t worry,” Shizuru gave her a soft grin. “I’ll be out here.”
“I-don’t-th-th-think,” Natsuki was stuttering. Fear gripped her chest for the second time this trip, and it seemed to affect her more than being shot at; when she was being shot at, at least she knew what to do. What Shizuru was suggesting…
“Why not?” Shizuru asked like she wasn’t suggesting anything.
“This isn’t really my…my kind of thing.”
“Are you talking about this,” Shizuru nodded at the panties, “or…” She let it hang.
There was silence between them for a moment, and suddenly Natsuki realized that they were in a place where nobody could see them, a corner blocked from view by a wall. How had she let herself get here in the first place? She never locked up like that.
The bell attached to the front door rang, and the shopkeeper’s voice rang out, “Hello, wel—um,” a shocked pause; it took the old lady a moment to recover. “Welcome to our shop, sir.”
Sir? Both of them froze.
“Don’t worry about me, ma’am. I’m just here to pick up a replacement for something of my girlfriend’s,” ‘sir’ said. His voice was calm, with a touch of dry humor to it, and smooth as a field of grass blowing in the wind. “She’s having her mother over, you see, and she spilled miso all down her front.”
“And she had no other replacements with her?”
“We’re staying over at the lodge by the beach, and she had nothing left. I won’t be but a minute.”
The old lady’s voice was still suspicious, but she seemed a little more accommodating. “Alright, but don’t go near those changing rooms. There are a pair of young ladies back there right now.” He made a noise of agreement. “Also, you’ll have to leave your backpack at the counter.”
“Alright, but I’d prefer you didn’t open it. It’s rather private.”
The shopkeeper’s voice was sharp. “I wasn’t going to open it.”
“Sorry, sorry. Just a habit.”
There was a heavy metallic thud, and the old woman said, “Oi, what do you have in there?”
“Like I said,” the man said wryly, “private.”
“All right, all right, go find whatever you’re looking for.”
“Yessum,” the man laughed a little, and, surprisingly, the woman laughed with him.
Natsuki relaxed a little, found Shizuru to be gazing into her eyes. She jumped a little.
“Natsuki,” Shizuru asked quietly. “Are you afraid of me?”
The question took her more off-guard than the gaze, and suddenly, she couldn’t think of an answer to such a simple question. Words like “yes” and “no” seemed insufficient for some reason.
“I wouldn’t want to cause you any discomfort, Natsuki,” Shizuru continued. “But…I don’t want you to be…”
“Shizuru,” Natsuki said a bit awkwardly, “You’re not—”
“I know I make you a little bit uncomfortable. I know I have since I did those things…those crazy things, without even thinking about it, really. I had hoped you could move past them, but if you’re not ready to, then you should tell me.”
Natsuki didn’t know what to say to this, but Shizuru didn’t seem to be ready for a response anyway. “Because I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have. But at the same time, I don’t want to keep being hurt by you.
“Because I never get anything from you. Never a yes, never a no. Never even a maybe. And I don’t know what to do about that, Natsuki. I really don’t.” She spoke calmly, without so much as a tremble in her voice. At the same time, though, Natsuki could hear the girl’s sincerity in the simplicity of her tone. “And that causes me some discomfort, too.”
This hit Natsuki harder than she’d thought it would; she felt like she’d been slapped by this calm, neutral voice coming from this pretty, cool-headed girl.
She inhales. I inhale. She exhales. I exhale.
The silence was thick. Natsuki felt suddenly as though she was going to choke on it.
“You know why that is?”
She inhales. I inhale.
She exhales.
“I love you, Natsuki.”
I exhale.
She’s leaning in towards me.
I can’t do this.
Her breath tickles my cheek.
I can’t do this.
Her lips are
warm
soft
moist.
I can’t. Natsuki turned her head away, and Shizuru let out a breath that could have been as much frustration as it was disappointment.
“I wish you would tell me to leave,” Shizuru murmured, “if that was what you wanted.”
I don’t.
Natsuki shook her head. “I’m sorry, Shizuru. I’m not ready for something like that. Not yet. Not now.”
“Is there somebody else?”
In a moment of bitterness, Natsuki said, “Who else would there be, Shizuru? There isn’t anybody.”
“Then you haven’t forgotten about that yet.”
“No, I haven’t. I can be around you and be all right, but I can’t…I can’t trust you. Not really.”
Shizuru sighed. “I’m sorry, then. I’m sorry for that.”
Don’t be.
She turned and started to walk away. “I’ll wait outside for you.”
She’s walking away. She’s leaving. Fear greater even than before gripped Natsuki’s chest like a vise. “Don’t—” but it was too late. She was gone.
She was gone and Natsuki was still there.
Natsuki sighed, her head clearing as it always did after the
Shizuru's
pressure was off, and after a moment’s consideration, she tried the panties on.
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