Indirect Kiss

Kiryu Yume went to the library to return books on Saturday.

He had finished copying the vocabulary list Ichinose Honami had given him, and the history reference book he had borrowed last week was due today.

He pushed open the library door. The slanting evening sunlight filtered through the blinds, cutting bands of light and shadow across the tables. The air carried the mingled scent of old paper and waxed wooden floors.

Someone was sitting at a table in the corner.

A math workbook lay open before Kamuro Masumi. Her left hand held down a sheet of scratch paper while her right gripped a pencil. Her purple hair draped over her shoulder, hiding half her face. The pencil scratched softly across the paper, thin and sharp as fingernails scraping sandpaper.

Kiryu Yume walked over and set his bag on the chair opposite her. The sound of the chair legs brushing the floor made her look up. Her gaze lingered on his face for half a beat before dropping back to her scratch paper.

"...What are you here for?"

"Returning books."

"Then leave after you return them."

"I'm borrowing new ones too." Kiryu Yume placed the due copy of A General History of Edo on the corner of the table.

Her pencil paused. "Sakayanagi told me to keep an eye on you. If you fail history again, you'll be squatting in the library alone for a week."

"Why doesn't she come herself?"

"...Her heart's bad. She gets out of breath climbing stairs." Her tone didn't rise or fall, as if she were reciting a memorized instruction manual. "And it's not like I'm that good at history either."

"Then why are you here?"

Her pencil circled once in the air. She didn't answer. Kiryu Yume watched her for a moment, waiting. She lowered her head and pressed the pencil back to the paper, continuing with her quadratic functions.

He got up and went to the shelves to look for reference books. The Japanese history rows were packed tight. He stretched up for a general history of the Edo period on the top shelf but couldn't reach it. Just as he was about to jump, a hand reached out from beside him and pulled the book down.

Kamuro Masumi shoved it into his arms and turned back toward the table.

The aisle was too narrow. Her shoulder brushed his arm, and when the thin fabric of her uniform sleeve slid against him, a faint spark of static snapped. They both felt it.

Her steps paused for half a beat before she kept walking.

Kiryu Yume followed behind her. The scent of her laundry detergent lingered two steps ahead in the narrow aisle between the shelves.

They sat facing each other. Kiryu Yume opened the book. In the top left corner of Tokugawa Ieyasu's page, someone had written tiny annotations for the era names in pencil. The handwriting was identical to the writing on Kamuro Masumi's scratch paper. He turned to the section on the isolation edicts and muttered the era name twice, getting it wrong.

"...1633." Kamuro Masumi didn't look up.

"Didn't you almost fail history too?"

"I never got the era names wrong." Her pencil scratched across the paper. Only after finishing a line did she add, in the same flat tone she had used while handing him the book, "There were five isolation edicts. The first was in the tenth year of the Kan'ei Era, and the last was in the sixteenth. The three in between won't be on the test."

Kiryu Yume copied the years into his notebook. When he finished, he looked up at her. She had her head lowered, purple hair slipping down from behind her ear to cover the side of her face.

"You didn't tell me any of that during the last tutoring session."

"...I forgot last time." She tucked her hair behind her ear, revealing a patch of faint pink at the base that had not quite faded.

It was quiet for a long while. Her pencil lead broke. She flicked the broken bit to the edge of the scratch paper, took out a sharpener from her pencil case, and turned it twice. Shavings fell onto the paper, and she flicked them into the trash one by one with her fingernail. A tiny shaving drifted onto his book page.

She didn't reach over to pick it up. Instead, she leaned forward slightly, lowered her head, and blew at it. The current of air brushed over the web between his thumb and forefinger, cool against his skin. When she was done, she didn't pull back immediately. She paused there and looked at him once before slowly leaning back into her chair.

Kiryu Yume lowered his head and continued turning pages. He didn't absorb a single word on that page. Even after the cool sensation on his hand faded, what remained still itched, as if someone had lightly plucked a string beneath his skin. He turned the page.

They worked on their respective problems. When Kiryu Yume rubbed his eyes, he noticed Kamuro Masumi lying facedown on the table, her cheek resting on her arm. Her eyes were half-open as she stared at the mostly finished math problems in front of her, her pencil lying beside her fingers untouched. Her purple hair hung over the edge of the table, the tips nearly reaching the floor. Her eyelashes were long, casting two pale gray shadows across her face when her eyes were half-closed. Her breathing was light, her shoulders slowly rising and falling.

Kiryu Yume stared at her eyelashes for several seconds before coming back to himself. He hurriedly pulled his gaze back to the book.

"...Sleepy?"

"Not sleepy." She answered with her eyes closed. After a while, she opened them, sat up straight again, and picked up her pencil. "One more question."

When she reached the final problem, she got the formula wrong again. Kiryu Yume reached out to point it out, but the fingers holding her pencil lightly pressed against the back of his hand.

"Don't point."

The metal band at the end of the pencil was cool, pressing against the knuckle on the back of his hand like a coin that had yet to warm up.

The pressure was lighter than a cat's step, but after she pressed down, her fingers did not lift away right away. They lingered on the back of his hand for a fraction of a second longer before withdrawing.

The patch of skin on the back of Kiryu Yume's hand still retained the coolness of the metal band. Yet beneath that coolness, his pulse was inexplicably faster than before. The pounding traveled up his arm to the roots of his ears. He drew a deep breath.

She redid the problem twice, then heavily dotted the end of the number with a period. The pencil tip pressed a tiny dent into the paper.

"Done." She pulled a bottle of strawberry milk from the side pocket of her bag and set it between them. Condensation beaded on the cap. "Sakayanagi gave this to you."

Kiryu Yume reached for it. As his fingers twisted open the cap, Kamuro Masumi's pencil tip paused.

"What?"

"...That's mine." She stared at the bottle in his hand, her pencil drawing a horizontal line that didn't exist on the paper. The cap had already been opened, and there was a faint ring of lip gloss around the bottle's mouth.

The bottle in his hand was one she had already drunk from.

Kiryu Yume's mind split in two at that moment. One half wondered why he hadn't noticed the cap was already open. The other half thought about how he had just drunk from the same spot she had. The two halves of his brain churned together, and his mouth opened before closing again.

"...Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

Kamuro Masumi snatched the bottle from his hand. It tilted, spilling two drops onto the back of his hand.

Her head was lowered, but her purple hair could not hide her ears—the pale pink at their base burned all the way to their tips, and the color spread across the side of her neck and into her collar. The fingers holding the bottle tightened around it, her knuckles turning faintly white.

"...You did that on purpose, didn't you?" Her voice was low, trembling at the end. She bit her lower lip.

Kiryu Yume opened his mouth to say he really hadn't noticed, but when the words reached his tongue, he didn't quite believe them himself. Maybe he had seen the lip print around the bottle's mouth. Maybe he had pretended not to. Even he couldn't tell anymore.

His heartbeat slammed so loudly in his ears that it drowned out every excuse he wanted to make. Then, in a voice low enough for only the two of them to hear, he quietly said, without daring to look at her face, "...It didn't taste good."

Kamuro Masumi froze for a moment.

She set the bottle to her left—on the side away from him—and picked up her pencil again. The pencil tip hovered over the paper for an entire moment before falling.

For several seconds, it was silent. The path her pencil took across the scratch paper was completely shapeless, as though she kept drawing circles and then crossing all of them out.

Her chest felt hot. That had nothing to do with the math problem. She didn't want to care what it was.

It was just drinking from the same bottle. Two girls who didn't know each other might do that while standing in line at a convenience store. But she had touched her lips to the place Kiryu Yume's lips had touched. That wasn't just drinking from the same bottle.

Her head was full of shut up, shut up, shut up, but she didn't say a word. She had relied on her own coldness for too long—so long that every quickened heartbeat felt like a betrayal of something.

Then she noticed that after the equals sign on the last line of the problem, she had written the first kana of Kiryu Yume's name. She hurriedly crossed it out, pressing so hard with her pencil that the paper nearly tore.

She picked up the bottle again.

"...What are you looking at?" she said.

The two drops of strawberry milk on the back of Kiryu Yume's hand slid over his knuckles and dripped onto the pages of A General History of Edo, soaking a small patch pale pink.

He lowered his head and turned a page. Tokugawa Iemitsu's name became three meaningless characters. He stared at them for a long time without taking in a single word. His Adam's apple bobbed as the fingers turning the page pinched a small crease into its corner. He didn't know why he was acting like this, but he didn't dare look up at her again. At least not for these few seconds.

They each finished the last few pages. Kamuro Masumi closed her scratch notebook first and stood, returning the math workbook to the shelf. He closed A General History of Edo as well.

They walked toward the exit. He was half a step behind her, and that layer of pink still lingered at the roots of her ears.

He stepped half a pace toward her and lowered his voice.

"Kamuro Mom."

Kamuro Masumi's shoulders stiffened for a beat. Her fingers paused on the spine of a book, then shoved it into the shelf—harder than she had put away any other book.

The color at her ears flared again, fiercer this time. From her earlobes to the tips of her ears to the side of her neck, everything turned red. She turned around and glared up at him, but halfway through the glare, her eyes darted away on their own and landed on the edge of the nearby shelf.

"...Don't call me that outside." Her voice was restrained, but there was a crack in her tone. She reached out and smacked his arm, so lightly it was like the hinge of a folder closing. Afterward, she quickly rubbed her fingers twice against her skirt.

Kiryu Yume watched her push open the door and leave, then stood before the shelves in a daze for a beat. The way her glare had fled halfway through made it impossible to suppress the curl at the corner of his lips. Something swelled in his chest, heavy and indistinct. He couldn't tell whether it was nervousness or something else.

The spot on his arm where she had hit him didn't hurt, but the sensation of that touch—her palm pressing against him and bouncing away before he could react—felt branded into his skin. He put A General History of Edo back onto the shelf. By the time he headed for the door, he realized the roots of his own ears were hot too, and he was walking half a beat slower than usual.

When he stepped out, Kamuro Masumi was already leaning against the hallway wall. She held his history notebook open to the page with the era names. When she saw him come out, she closed it and handed it back. Her gaze rested on his face for only an instant before drifting away.

"You copied the era names correctly."

"You checked them for me?"

"...I only happened to glance at them." She picked up the empty bottle and tossed it into the trash, then turned toward the stairs.

Her canvas shoes landed on the grout lines between the hallway tiles with every step. At the stairwell, she paused without turning around. Her hand clenched once at the side of her skirt, then loosened. Kiryu Yume didn't see it.

"Same time tomorrow. Sakayanagi said so."

Then she went up the stairs.

As Kiryu Yume passed the study room down the hall, he slowed his steps. The door was half-open, and five or six Class D students sat inside. Sudo Ken was sitting near the door with a history study guide spread out in front of him. From several steps away, Kiryu Yume could clearly see the covered years printed on its cover—it was an old edition, with the page layout off by a full two units.

The era names in Ike Kanji's notebook were old as well. No one in the study room noticed someone at the door. He hesitated there for a short while, then headed toward the Class D classroom.

The door to the Class D classroom was open. Horikita Suzune sat alone by the window with her head lowered over a book. The braid at her left temple hung over her shoulder, its white ribbon swaying gently in the cross-breeze.

He knocked on the open door.

Horikita Suzune looked up, her purple eyes meeting his. He didn't go inside.

"The history study guide your class is using is an old edition. It's missing two units."

Horikita Suzune looked at him for several seconds, her fingers gently brushing the edge of the open page.

"What?"

"Didn't your homeroom teacher tell you? The test coverage changed."

"No."

"That's pretty irresponsible, then."

There was a moment of silence. The cross-breeze blew in through the half-open window behind her, pulling several strands of hair from her braid before they settled back into place.

"...Understood. I'll verify it." She stood and walked to the door, nodding once. "Thank you."