It was over.
He was surprised at how quickly it had all happened. His body had reacted much faster than his mind had, and he had finished almost immediately, embarrassingly quickly. She hadn't seemed to care. She had kept going until she was done, and his body had accommodated her on its own, even while he lay there in a daze.
And then suddenly she had stopped. She was hovering over him on the bed, propped up on her arms, quiet. She was looking down at him with an intense stare, her breaths coming quick and shallow, a bead of sweat coming down her neck. She looked the way she always did when she had finished sparring—except that this time, there was no mask to pull off. There was nothing.
She got off him. In one fluid motion, she swung her body off the bed, and without the least bit of shakiness, she marched to the nearby dresser. She pulled out two small towels, tossed one of them on his chest. Miki glanced away bashfully when he saw that she was using the other one to clean herself up. In spite of what they had just done, something about watching this felt too painfully intimate.
His eyes fell on the bundle of orange roses that lay on Juri's desk. Only fifteen minutes before, he had been clutching them furtively outside her door.
"Congratulations, Juri-san!" he had told her.
"Ah, is this my graduation present?" she had asked, accepting his flowers with a smile.
Juri hadn't kissed him on the mouth. Somehow she had escalated the situation without that obvious icebreaker. She had kissed him on the neck, and on the chest, and she had caressed the front of his body with an audacity that had startled him, but she hadn't kissed him on the mouth even once.
Miki clenched his hand on reflex. It felt very suddenly empty, but his stopwatch was inside the pocket of his trousers, and Juri had tossed those somewhere out of reach. He sat up and winced when he pressed the towel between his legs. The fabric was just a bit too rough.
When he finally found the courage to glance over at her again, she was already putting her uniform back on. She looked a bit mussed, her hair tousled, but otherwise her demeanor was so ordinary that it was already starting to feel like nothing had happened at all.
He had never pictured that the first time for him would have been like this. He wasn't sure what he had pictured, really—but it hadn't been this at all. And while Juri was very beautiful, and he had become aroused before she had even finished undressing him, he had never imagined himself with her that way before.
He couldn't understand why she had done it, either. After she had seized him and pressed him hard against the bed, he had only stared up at her in shock, trying to read the small twitches of emotion behind that otherwise impenetrable expression. He had a strange inkling that it was the same face that she would make when she'd take him in a fencing match, but he couldn't be completely sure, since there was always a layer of mesh that obscured her during those times.
Miki noticed then that she had stopped. Most of her clothes were on, but her top was only half-buttoned, and her fingers had paused suddenly over the fasteners. It was like some of her inertia had run out. She pressed a hand to the side of her face and let out a huff—something like a sigh—but soon enough she finished dressing herself.
After, she took a small step towards her desk. Her eyes were unfocused and she seemed to be gazing at something far away, but her fingers traced the petals of Miki's roses softly. Miki stared at her. The straight lines of her uniform began to waver, to become a bit blurred, and it was then that he recognized the warmth that had come over his eyes.
Juri turned to him. Her expression immediately shifted into one of light surprise. "Why are you crying?" she said.
He felt the tears hotly on his cheeks then. He wasn't sure how long they had been there, but he wiped them quickly. It seemed that they had all come out in one single gush, because no more came after, but even still he couldn't hide his embarrassment.
When he didn't answer her question, Juri turned back to the desk. She tapped her fingers against the wood. "Did I take your virginity?" she asked. "I'm sorry."
Miki shrugged a little. His shoulders were stiff. "Juri-san doesn't have to be sorry," he said.
Juri played with the stem of a rose absentmindedly. Her fingertip grazed one of the thorns, and it made Miki wince just to watch. "Most people want the occasion to be romantic, don't they?" There was cynical smirk that came over her face just then, but it was smudged with some nostalgia.
"I'm not sure what I wanted. I hadn't really pictured it before. Juri-san just...surprised me, that's all." He slid partly off the bed. He pressed his hands together nervously. He wasn't sure whether to bring it up, but after a moment's pause, he did: "And, to be honest, I had assumed that you and Shiori-san were…."
"We are," she said.
Miki furrowed his brow. "But—"
"So it seems," Juri continued, her smirk fading, "that today I have become a philanderer. How unprincipled of me."
"Oh." It was all Miki could think to say. A few conflicting thoughts came to the top of his mind. He stared hard at the roses on Juri's desk with some guilt; it had actually been Shiori-san who had sent him to deliver them. "Are you going to tell her?"
"No." There was no pause of hesitation in her response. Her hand had traveled to the center of a rose, and she had dipped her fingertips inside the folds. She looked hard at the desk, as if she were seeing through it. "I wish…," she began. She turned to suddenly look at him. "I really do wish that this could have been a happy occasion. I wish that you and I could have met under different circumstances, in another world, without the weight of all this baggage that we both carry. I wish that Ohtori allowed for that kind of honesty and freedom."
"Juri-san…." Miki stared at her. He hadn't expected such a confession, especially at a time when it seemingly no longer mattered. For the first time, he noticed the full tension underneath her expression, the pain that bubbled underneath the surface.
"I didn't want to graduate without something from you. Maybe it's that silly, idealistic part of me."
And then she turned away and began shuffling towards the door. She cleared her throat. The vulnerability had quickly disappeared from her face. "I don't mean to hurry you," she said over her shoulder, "but today is my last day of practice, and we really shouldn't be late. They're waiting for us."
Not knowing what else to do, Miki lay the hand towel gently beside him on the bed and stooped down to the floor to pick up his uniform. Once he was dressed, he caught up to her, and they both stood side by side before the threshold, neither making the final move to leave.
When Miki finally reached for the doorknob, Juri caught him by the wrist. He glanced at her with surprise and found her leaning over him.
"Someday, maybe—in the outside world," she said suddenly. She pressed her free hand to his face and caressed him, and he stared at her with wide eyes.
They kissed. It was Juri who stooped down first, but without a second thought, he stretched up to meet her. Her mouth opened on his; it was quick, but it was not chaste.
When they pulled apart, Juri opened the door, and she pushed him to step out into the world first.
That evening, Kozue was irritated with him for some reason.
She had snapped at him when he had asked her how her day went, and at dinner time she had hidden his chopsticks, so that he had to search through every cupboard to find them. After dinner, she had walked into their room and loudly announced that she had drawn the bath, but when he turned back to his homework and dismissively told her to go in ahead of him, she had refused. She sat in the corner of the dormitory and sulked in silence.
Once he had ignored her for long enough, the loud sighing began.
"What?" Miki finally asked. "What on earth is it?"
"You should take a bath. You need to wash your dirty face," she said. Her tone was one of clear accusation.
He looked at her like she was crazy. "What are you talking about?" He pressed his hand to his cheek, but he couldn't feel anything besides a few of the bumps that had presented themselves with puberty.
She crossed her arms and threw daggers at him with her glance. "Who have you been picking flowers for?" she said.
He raised an eyebrow. "Huh? No one. What are you going on about?"
"Liar. There's a smudge of pollen on your face."
At that, he froze for a moment in surprise, but before long his posture loosened slightly and his brow furrowed. "So what if there's pollen? It's the springtime. That could have come from anywhere." He wiped at his face with the back of his sleeve. He couldn't fathom how she had noticed such a small thing.
Kozue stared at him for a long time. "That's not it," she said. "There's something else. There's something different about you—and I don't like it."
Of course she doesn't, he thought. The truth was that she never seemed to like it when anything about him changed at all, which had been problematic lately, as his body had been changing on its own. He was conscious now more than ever of everything that he had done to appease her over the years, all the little ways that he had side-stepped changes that he knew she would be uncomfortable with.
Somehow, she seemed to intuitively know about his latest transformation. Maybe she smelled it on him, the scent of Juri's roses. It wasn't a change that he was willing to turn back from.
He twisted around in his chair, suddenly overcome with a singular thought. He looked at Kozue so intensely that she seemed to get a bit nervous herself, and she finally broke the mutual gaze.
"I want to move out," Miki said. At first, the words had shocked him nearly as much as they seemed to shake his sister. But as he heard his own voice echo in his mind, he only grew more confident in it. He sat up straight. "Let's live separately when the new term starts."
"What? No, I—we—but you can't," Kozue stuttered. She seemed to collect herself after a moment. "Not that I care, but where would you even go?"
"Juri-san's room," he said. He shut the book upon his desk with a thud of finality, then started to get up. "It's opening up when she graduates in a few days, and it's in a good location, close to all of my classes."
He couldn't really hear any of her manufactured objections after that. He walked down the hall to the bathroom and washed himself off before getting into the tub. Once he leaned back and relaxed into the warmth, he realized that he had forgotten to clean his face.
He couldn't help but smile. He pressed a hand to his cheek and felt a strange comfort in the midst of all this newness, and in his mind's eye he could still picture the vulnerable expression of the young woman who had pollinated him.
A/N
Hello there! This is my first (public) contribution to the Utena fandom, and it comes in the guise of the only het couple I like on that show.
This might sound weird, but I always considered Juri and Miki's relationship to be queer. It's hard to compare what they have to the dynamic of other het relationships. While it wasn't romantic in canon, it could have been, I think (if Juri had been capable of looking away from Shiori for a split second), but I still couldn't really picture it within the confines of a typical heterosexual model. For this reason, I find their friendship and their occasional canon flirtations (mostly from Juri's end) to be really interesting.
Anyway, happy holidays and thanks for reading!