Speak the truth or make your peace on my way / I never knew / but I believe that your trust in me will speak to me
Speak
Like I said before, my mind tends to gloss over little details that should be very important to me: The smell of fish cooking to inform me that I’m about to be treated to a meal; the chill in an autumn wind telling me that winter is coming; the side of a tree that moss grows on, pointing me to where I should be going.
Sometimes my mind makes unforgivable mistakes, too. Things that I can never excuse it for.
My mind made one of those mistakes that day.
As well as I knew it at a level below my own, as often as I’d had a chance to experience this particular sensation, my mind, as it always did, failed to inform me how good Aoi’s hand really felt in my own.
“Oi!” I called, waving at her. “Mai!”
She stopped, blinked, recognized me, scampered towards us. I say “scampered” because it’s really the only way to describe Mai when she’s utterly at peace, content with herself and the world; she’s really as much of a cat as that girl of hers Mikoto is; she just hides it better.
“How’re you doing?” Mai said, flashing that man-killing smile of hers at us. The worst of it is that she’s got no real clue the kind of affect her smile has on other people, namely on other men. And me, as we’ve established already by the fact that I was, indeed, sweating and holding hands with Aoi.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Aoi cut me off. “We’re quite well,” she said with a big grin—her smile was easily as deadly as Mai’s, but only when it was more than a humored grin, which it most definitely was at this moment—“but listen, we’ve got kind of a problem. Have you seen anybody around here in the past five minutes or so?”
Has she been waiting around here for five minutes? I wondered briefly. A few seconds later, I decided that she had probably been within view of the fountain for five minutes, and a second after that, my bullshit detector started blaring at me.
Maybe I was just overthinking it.
“I haven’t seen anybody,” Mai said with a frown. “But I did see something stuck to the other side of the fountain.”
I frowned and said, “What kind of thing?”
“No idea,” Mai shrugged. “It looked like a piece of paper. Here, one second, I’ll go and get it.”
I started to protest, but before I could, she had gone to retrieve whatever it was, and I felt a little bit of dread creep in amidst my annoyance. Not only had the bastard made Aoi
look at me like that
sad, but he had either stood us up, or…
Or what I was dreading would come true, and this was going to turn into some goddamn pseudo-romantic wild duck hunt. I say “hunt” because I was going to shoot him as soon as I had a clear shot.
Mai came back holding something with pink frills and a crease roughly down the center, and I began to wish that I’d asked my mother for a shotgun for my birthday instead of a new camera. Mai started to open it, and my eyes bugged out. The next second, moving with a speed I never knew I possessed and a dexterity I certainly didn’t, I knocked it out of her hands; I had intended to snatch it from her grasp, but my fingers weren’t that nimble.
Glancing back at Aoi, I saw a flash of that look on her face again, and it only imbued my resolve; I considered different ways to use my limited abilities in the fields of math, science, and a little thing called “aim” to construct and employ a crude bow-and-arrow.
Instead, I picked the card up and read it, first to myself to make sure it wasn’t horrifically embarrassing, and then aloud. Once again, the card was a little corny.
“Please,” I said quietly, not wanting to broadcast somebody’s message of undying love (though certainly not mine) to everybody else, mostly for their sake, “forgive this misdirection of the flesh. I swear to you I have not deceived your heart, and I will show you if you will meet me in the forest at the base of the mountain trail.”
When I looked up, Mai was smirking at me, and Aoi was cleverly studying the cement under her feet. Put two and two together, and you got me ripping the cement out from under Aoi so she’d stop staring at it so intently, and using it to pound the smart-ass out of Mai.
I’d never do that, of course. I’m a devoted pacifist, honest.
“I guess you’d better head out then, shouldn’t you?” Mai said, her smartassed grin still begging for contact with pavement. “You wouldn’t want him to think that you thought your heart had been misdirected too, would you?”
“Fuck you,” I muttered, crumpling the paper up and throwing it in the fountain. “I’m going to do something to his heart, but it’s not going to have anything to do with misdirection.”
I swear I’m not usually this violent. At the time, I had no idea what was eating at me so hard.
It had something to do, I think, with the way Aoi said, her voice a little weak, as though she was struggling to say what she wanted to say, “can I still come with you?”
As though she thought that maybe I would say no.
Instead, I grabbed her hand and smiled at her, forcing her to look up at me, to meet my gaze, which I hoped was reassuring and fierce all at once. “Of course you can,” I said. “How can I be lesbian flambé all by myself? We’re going to get this guy, Aoi. Promise.”
Mai said from behind me, cleverly out of my peripheral vision so I couldn’t bean her with something, “Chie is scary when people ask her out without her permission.”
Also from behind me, somebody else said, “Mai, what’s ‘lesbian’? Is it a kind of food?”
Mai snorted, and I realized that ‘somebody else’ was Mikoto, the only person who could possibly say something so true while remaining so unbearably innocent. She had probably come up behind Mai when I was in the middle of premeditating murder.
I turned around to find, as expected, a curious-faced Mikoto, hanging off of Mai’s arm. Mai looked at her with the same resigned look of affection that I had always seen in Aoi’s mildly conservative, yet ultimately accepting parents. I had never really known what it meant; she had never been the clingy type around them, and the few times I had had dinner at her house, I had always sensed a dull tension between them: Not the kind of tension you get when you’re about to explode, but the kind of tension you might get with your lover a day after a fight. I guess it was something nearer to an excess of delicacy.
I wondered briefly why there was an excess of delicacy between Mikoto and Mai, and then dismissed it. She’d tell me eventually if she was going to tell me. I hoped that she was going to tell me. In hindsight, I knew exactly why it was, and really, it only took me a few moments to catch on.
I wanted to make sure she did tell me, though, and for the first time in a long time I felt a pang of guilt at something I’d done. To Mai, no less; not my closest friend, but far from my most distant; I trusted her, and she trusted me, and the thought that I’d lose her trust was suddenly eating at me a lot more than it probably should have been considering I hadn’t done anything horrible to her.
Or maybe I had. She was a shy girl. She didn’t like those things getting spread all over the school.
Maybe Aoi saw it in my face like a psychic, or maybe she was just more cunning than I gave her credit for, because a second later, she said, “I’m just going to go wait ahead for you, okay? I’ll wait by the edge of the forest.”
I nodded to her, and a moment later, she left, ushering Mikoto off with her, losing all pretense at that point. Now it was just me and Mai, facing each other
excess of delicacy
not entirely comfortably. The moment of silence that followed threatened to open its yaw and stretch itself into infinity; she just looked at me, her gaze not entirely happy, and I found myself looking away, unable to speak for that moment.
excess
Fuck that.
“Mai,” I said, my tone louder than that of the average apology, “I’m really sorry about telling Mikoto about your thing with Tate. I…” didn’t know she was going to write it on about fifteen different blackboards around the school for fun. She’s not usually like that; it’s almost like she was trying to fuck with your mind but I didn’t want that honestly I didn’t I hated that look on your face when you walked in and saw it and saw her and people were laughing and Mikoto didn’t look confused like she usually does she looked like she “wasn’t thinking. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, but—”
Mai rarely cuts people off mid-sentence, even if she wants to scream at them, so when she does, you shut up and pay attention. “Why would you tell that to anybody, much less Mikoto, Chie?” I shut up and paid attention, because even if her tone was quiet, her voice was hard. “Even before this, she’d been clinging onto me literally all the time.” She looked like she kind of wanted to stop, but wanted more to continue, and I didn’t stop her; the fact that I hadn’t heard Mai complain about anything more than about three times in my life held me in rapt attention, and it certainly didn’t hurt that healthy guilt complex that my subconscious was busily constructing. “And…and she actually pouts when I go to spend time with Yuuichi. I’ve never seen her act like this before, and…” “She’s acting like…like Yuuichi did. Before.”
I knew what she meant. She was acting like Yuuichi had when he had thought Mai had agreed to cheer that clingy little kid Shiho on. Hurt, betrayed, and as immature as he could manage. It sounded to me like Mikoto was just acting like a jealous ex-girlfriend, and, unfortunately, this didn’t surprise me. In reality, I had expected this for a long time; Mikoto had been musing forever about how Mai was hers and how Yuuichi and Reito should give up on her, and it was only a matter of time before she started becoming bitter at the prospect of these musings never turning into something more. I honestly think she was in love with Mai, but she probably had absolutely no idea what to do with that love. Mikoto was immature, at best, though not generally childish, and after a while, all first loves turn into bitterness.
And then they’re over with, and it’s like it never happened. But what do you do when you live with your first love? Does it just vanish like that?
Fucked if I know. My first love was my second grade teacher; he was really creepy, in retrospect, but he treated me well, and paid attention to me, told me I was a good kid. That only made it creepier, but at the time, I was convinced I would be married to him as soon as I came of age and graduated from second grade.
I sighed. “I’m sorry, Mai. Really, I am; what’s going on is probably going to be hard on both you and Mikoto.”
“I know that,” Mai said quietly, her voice more bitter than I was used to from her. “I already know all of that, but even so,” she shook her head, “I wish there was something I could do about it.”
She understood too. Mai was sharp; there wasn’t a soul on earth that could deny that. I went to her then, and put my arms around her, squeezing as tight as I could, whispering to her that I was sorry.
After a few seconds, she returned my hug, buried her head in my neck; a moment later, I felt something hot and moist drip down my shirt; her tears mingled with the sweat on my breasts, and while I’m sure somebody would have found it attractive, there was simply no way to make it anything but sorrowful at that moment.
Maybe a minute later, she broke the hug, looked me in the eye. “You’re lucky,” she said. “Your other best friend isn’t a kid.”
I laughed at this. I laughed because I didn’t want to admit that what Mai said was practically news to me; I still saw Aoi as a sort of student at that point. Even teachers barely older than those they teach see all students as children. I laughed because she was right. “Forgive me?” She nodded, and I grinned at her and said, my tone lighter, “Good. Then I’m allowed to tell you not to think of Mikoto as a kid for too much longer. She’s not; she’s just had no role model to base romance in her life on.”
“And what about Aoi?” Mai asked. This confused me and hit me in the stomach pretty hard, all at once, and I had no idea why.
“What about her?” I answered, lacking anything wittier to say.
She chuckled and shook her head. “Nothing. You should probably catch up to her.”
I stared at her for a minute, trying to decide what she meant by that. Maybe she didn’t mean anything. Maybe I was just turning paranoid. This letter thing had put me pretty on-edge pretty quick; I wasn’t normally this high-strung. Was something happening to me?
I put it out of my head. I was probably just pissed because of how Aoi had looked
eyes downcast fingers wringing together
hurt. I was very protective of her.
“Alright,” I said without thinking about it, in lieu of a better excuse to leave. “I’ll do that.”
Mai had this funny look on her face when I left. I didn’t understand it for a long time; at that moment I gave it barely a pause to consider as I took off for the edge of the forest, at the base of a little path that, if followed long enough, led to the top of the mountain that bathed our school in shadow every sunset.
It wasn’t a long jog; five minutes, tops, and it didn’t particularly affect me. Maybe that was from the mile run; my blood was already moving, and my adrenaline was really just lying under the grass, waiting to pounce. When I got there, however, Aoi was panting; like though she was being exhausted for me. Oh, don’t you worry about that exhaustion, ma’am; I’ll just take that for you.
I frowned at her, and she looked at me with as much of a grin as she could muster through her sheen of hot lesbian sweat. Sorry, our sheen of hot lesbian sweat. I grabbed her hand, curious about why she looked so breathless, and wanting desperately to ask, but more concerned about what I saw in her eyes: Anxiety. She was nervous about something, as, I realized, she had been all night. I wondered what it was, but for the first time in as long as I could remember, I cared more about making it go away than about finding out what was up; I was a knowledge hog, but I was also Aoi’s friend.
So I grabbed her hand and pulled her along as I took off into a jog up the small incline. “Come on,” I said. “We’re going hunting; no time to be exhausted now, sweetheart.”
She looked fairly startled by my sudden burst of energy. I guess I was too.
But we went together anyway. It felt good.
The trees, though. It was the trees that really got to me; the older trees were huge and overpowering; in their shadow, the growing, thinner trees, sheltered from the wind and the storms by what I could only call their parents. Their bark was just a shade lighter than the brown of the earth; their leaves a shade darker than the green of the grass. They surrounded you, protecting both you and themselves. That’s really the best way I can describe it.
Aoi and I didn’t say anything while we walked up the forest path, which led to a mountain trail after about a ten minute walk. We didn’t need to. Her hand was warm, soft, and a little moist in mine, and it felt damned good. Even if we were only lesbians for a day, it really did feel good.
It almost didn’t surprise me when, at the base of the mountain trail, another note was tacked to the same tree that served as a sign for students that the trail was about to turn steep. The tree itself was really two trees that had grown out of the same trunk, branching opposite each other, forming a crude V.
The note read, Please, meet me at the peak of this trail, at the plateau that overlooks the ocean. I’ll be waiting there. No more tricks, I promise.
Less mushy than the rest of them; it surprised me. This time, Aoi didn’t react when I gently folded the note up and stuck it in my pocket. I looked at her seriously, and for the first time today, I asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Positive.”
“Are you okay?” I asked like I didn’t know why I was asking. Maybe I didn’t.
“Fine,” she said, her voice firm.
I nodded, looked up at the trail. “Shall we go, then?”
She smiled at me.
“Yes,” she said. “We shall.”
We were still holding hands.
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