Second Thoughts
1153 Words
Mio
“Fine.”
I barely had time to understand the word before Rei crossed the space between us.
Apparently, convincing him had been the difficult part.
Everything after that happened much faster.
One moment he was standing several feet away, looking at me as though my question had personally offended every sensible instinct he possessed.
The next, he was close enough that I forgot what I had planned to say.
Not that I had planned much.
My preparation for this afternoon had mostly consisted of working, worrying, and occasionally considering fleeing Kurehama.
I had not prepared for Rei saying yes.
His composure had changed.
Not disappeared.
Rei Kurose seemed like the sort of man whose composure would survive being struck by a vehicle.
But something underneath it had broken loose.
I saw it in the set of his jaw. In the way his attention stayed fixed on me instead of politely drifting elsewhere whenever I caught him looking.
It should have made me nervous.
It did.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the only thing it made me.
My hands shook.
Rei noticed.
Of course he did.
His expression tightened, but he didn't ask whether I was sure again.
He had already done that.
Twice.
Instead, he said my name.
“Mio.”
Just that.
It sounded nothing like Aizawa-san.
My heart reacted embarrassingly.
I had spent months trying not to notice how carefully he avoided saying my first name whenever he came to speak with my father.
Apparently, I had noticed very thoroughly.
I looked up at him.
For one strange second, neither of us moved.
Then the distance between us disappeared.
I had imagined this moment approximately four hundred times.
Give or take.
His fingertips were rough.
I had known they would be.
That was the strange thing about knowing someone before you even understood what loving somebody meant. You collected useless facts.
Rei's left hand had always been rougher than his right.
He used to tell me everything. How salty his mother's miso soup had been that morning. Which baseball player he was trying to imitate. What he wanted to buy if he ever became rich enough to stop counting coins before entering a convenience store.
Now I didn't even know what he did every day.
I knew enough to understand that whatever work had replaced baseball had not been kind to his hands.
Knowing a fact and feeling it were apparently different things.
His hand rested carefully against my jaw.
My brain, for reasons known only to itself, attempted to take notes.
I had a plan.
If it could be called that.
The plan was to stand still, behave like an adult, and allow whatever happened next to happen without humiliating myself.
The plan survived approximately two seconds.
Rei tilted his head.
Oh.
He was going to kiss me.
Every version of this moment I had imagined since I was fourteen immediately became useless.
He kissed me.
The first thing I learned was that kissing involved considerably more coordination than movies suggested.
The second was that I had never once considered what people did with their noses.
This felt like an important omission.
I moved left.
Rei moved right.
Apparently that was correct.
Before we arrived at the correct arrangement, however, our noses bumped.
My entire face became hot.
Rei didn't laugh.
That was generous of him.
He didn't pull away either.
That was better.
The third was that kissing has a taste -- warmth. Warmth is not a taste, but every kiss I will have will be compared to this. Which seems unfair to those non-existent kisses.
I had imagined kissing him for years.
None of those imaginings had accounted for how overwhelmingly real it would feel.
Not perfect in the polished way fantasies were perfect.
Real.
His hair wasn't blond anymore.
His suit probably cost more than everything currently remaining in our living room.
There was a faint crease between his eyebrows that hadn't been there when we were children.
And he was kissing me.
Rei.
The same Rei.
Except not the same at all.
My thoughts became less useful after that.
There were probably important conclusions I should have been reaching.
Instead, I discovered that I had dramatically overestimated the reliability of my knees.
They buckled.
Not softened.
Not wobbled.
Buckled.
A structural failure.
A complete betrayal of the basic agreement between my brain and legs that said, we will keep you upright during important moments so you do not humiliate yourself in front of the man you have loved since you were six.
Rei caught me.
Of course he did.
I grabbed his shirt without meaning to.
For one horrifying second, neither of us said anything.
Then I muttered, “My knees stopped working.”
His mouth moved.
I stared at him.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No.”
“You're thinking about it.”
“No.”
“You're a terrible liar.”
That erased whatever almost-smile had been there.
Something changed in his face.
Only for a second.
But I remembered.
One eyebrow.
When Rei lied as a child, one eyebrow always moved first.
My chest tightened.
I was suddenly six years old again, sitting beside him on a concrete stairwell while he divided one convenience-store bun exactly in half because I had insisted I wasn't hungry.
Eight, watching him complain about his mother's cooking while finishing a second bowl.
Fourteen, standing beneath our building while he told me he was leaving and wouldn't explain why.
Then sixteen.
Seventeen.
Eighteen.
Every birthday afterward.
Every stupid moment I had wondered what he was doing.
Whether he was eating properly.
Whether he still liked baseball.
Whether he ever thought about me.
I hadn't expected those years to come back while he was standing right in front of me.
My eyes burned.
Rei noticed immediately.
His expression changed.
“Mio?”
I blinked quickly.
“Nothing.”
His attention sharpened.
“Mio.”
“I said nothing.”
My voice betrayed me somewhere around the second syllable.
Wonderful.
I looked down before the tears could become more embarrassing than they already were.
“Sorry.”
“Don't apologize.”
That only made my throat hurt more.
I laughed weakly and wiped under one eye.
“I wasn't planning this part.”
“What part?”
“Crying.”
Rei went very still.
I looked at him.
Really looked.
The dark hair still felt wrong.
The suit felt wrong.
Even the way he held himself felt wrong.
But underneath all of it were these tiny things I remembered so clearly that it hurt.
“I missed you, Rei.”
His face emptied.
I should have stopped.
Instead, ten years came out with the next sentence.
“I've missed you so much.”
Silence.
Then Rei stepped away from me.
And just like that, whatever had been burning between us disappeared.
“This stops here.”
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