Time passed quickly, in the way it often does for the young, and in a few weeks Michiru found the struggle within her even greater still. Haruka was everything she had never longed for. She was rough and unpracticed and did not know the dance that she had learned from birth, of society and parties and behavior.

And yet, there was a brightness in her, some small spark that threatened to catch Michiru like tinder, to blow in her like a wildfire, and Michiru struggled to keep it at bay.

To be besotted was terribly unbecoming, and she would not promise this girl something she could not give.

All these thoughts floated through her head like errant clouds as Haruka studied her paintings closely in her apartment studio.

"This is so sad. Lonely." She gently touched the thin, dark lines, a frown on her face, and looked up at Michiru. "Why is it so sad?"

Michiru didn't know what to say for a moment. No one had ever asked her that. People asked her about her muse, her influences, her choice of color. But no one had ever simply asked her why her work was sad.

"I think it draws upon the universal feeling of yearning, of the inescapable sadness of desire." A practiced line came out of her mouth.

Haruka shook her head. "No."

But she did not press the issue, simply looked around Michiru's studio, touching her brushes and paintings, telling her what she liked about each one. She loved the one Michiru never brought to a gallery, the one of the goldfish elegantly swimming in a deep pool. Too representational. Too passe. It had been a dalliance for Michiru, something to paint because she had dreamed it, the fins of the goldfish flowing like organza in her mind.

"I like the way you can tell they're swimming even though it's a picture." Her grin was crooked and filled with warmth. "That takes a lot of talent. You're really good."

"I don't imagine you to be a scholar of the arts."

"Sure am not! But I like it anyway, I like to go to the museum on free days and look at the stuff." She continued across the studio, bigger, she told Michiru, than her bedroom at home. Her hands stopped on a tube of bright mustard paint. "You never use this color." She looked around at the paintings.

"True." Michiru sauntered toward her. "It is a waste of paint in my hands. That, and the vermillion, and the persimmon, and the primrose yellow."

"Naw." Haruka put a dab of the mustard on her finger and playfully transferred it to Michiru's nose. "See? Looks great on you."

Michiru was confused for a moment by the gesture. Women brought her lavish rose bouquets, though she preferred lilies, and took her to haute cuisine dinners and kissed her hand and recited poetry. They did not, as a rule, smear paint on her nose like she was a preschool child. But looking at her crooked smile, the line of her jaw in the dimming sun, the sparkle in her eyes that had never been tamed by propriety and training, suddenly she felt like straining against the lead she had tethered to all of her life.

She picked up the vermillion, smiled slyly with a rare freedom, pulled up Haruka's shirt, and smeared it on her stomach.

They lay in her bed, paint covering Michiru's fine sheets, smoke from their cigarettes curling in the air. Michiru was exhausted by Haruka's strength and power, coupled with her desire to please and eagerness to obey, her inability to tire. It was like having a border collie in bed with her, and it was more pleasant than any bump of cocaine, and much longer lasting. She knew she would crave it again.

She sat up on one elbow and looked over at Haruka. "How is it that you and Mina found each other?"

Haruka toyed with a bruise under her thumbnail. "The gal who owned the bodega down the way always teased me about picking up Mina because I wanted a pet." She laughed. "But she was so little. We both were, I guess. I used to play with her when our folks weren't around. Which was a lot." She sat up and ruffled her hair, then leaned back on her palms. "I started walking her to school when she was in kindergarten, and made her do her homework. I was never very smart, but Mina, she was always real bright. I made her pay attention. She had a lot of potential. I was good at odd jobs, and we shared dinners some, she was only a few doors down."

Michiru stared at her as she told the story of her inauspicious youth. Her driver had taken her to her private school every day from the age of 5 to 18, she had private tutors for any subject she desired, even those not offered in the school, but she could not speak of her school days with any sort of happiness or nostalgia. It felt more like training, building her to be the girl she needed to be, the perfect ornamental creature that some young captain of industry would take into her family. They had already introduced her to some girl they obviously intended for her to marry. She was nice enough. A Gray. But Michiru felt nothing. Until she met Haruka, she hadn't realized you were supposed to.

Haruka continued. "I got tired of the…situation at home. So I dropped out when I was 16."

Michiru looked horrified. "You dropped out of high school?"

"I have my GED. I don't need to know about Shakespeare or whatever to mop floors and tear down sheetrock." She shrugged. "Craig hired me to clean up the sites he was working on—I was too young to do any of the good paying work. I saved up, turned 18, applied for legal guardianship of Mina." At this she puffed out her chest and turned her head to Michiru, her bangs flopping playfully to one side. "And I will have you know that I went to the library and studied the law myself on abandonment and guardianship and all that shit, and the librarian helped me, and I didn't even hire a lawyer, I learned to read all of it myself. So, who needs your fancy college, even?" She shoved Michiru teasingly, who smiled brighter than she remembered how and linked her arms around Haruka.

"Clearly not you, you natural born barrister."

"Anyhow, contract work pays pretty good, so I got us a little apartment on the edge of the school district that had this whole fancy magnet program. I told Mina she had til my body wears out from physical labor to get us in good order." She laughed again, a low, cheerful chuckle of which Michiru was rapidly growing very fond.

She couldn't imagine Haruka's fine, strong body ever wearing out, but she could imagine several other things that it could be doing. It was a battle between curiousity and libido, now, in Michiru's head.

"Why, then, do you work as a janitor? To keep an eye on Mina?" Curiousity, it seemed, would win the day.

Haruka's eyes lit up. "Because, genius painter musician millionaire girl." She kissed Michiru on the nose. "Tuition is free for full-time employees' kids or fake kids or whatever. So I just weekend with Craig. Make money."

Michiru looked off into the dark of the apartment. "I have never known anyone like you, ever."

"I mean, it's not as impressive as all this." She indicated to the walls surrounding them. "It's a little life, but it's mine. No one can take it away from me."

"I think it sounds wonderful." She looked back up at Haruka. "It sounds free."

"Well, as my rent check will tell you, it is not free."

Michiru giggled and buried her face into Haruka's chest. "I've known people who wouldn't give up their spot on the country club waiting list for another person, much less their entire future."

"I didn't give up my future." Her voice reverberated through her chest. "I just brought Mina along with."

Michiru kissed her, hard. There was a passion in her now, a passion that lasted even when Haruka left that morning, a passion that drove her to her studio, to grab the red and oranges and yellows and dance them across the canvas. The lines were thick and strong and held none of the inconsequential mewling sadness of her earlier work, they were a secret garden that she had never known before. They were bright rays of sunlight jumping over the wall of her heart. They were a star in the velvet jewelbox of her own personal night, one only she could see.

They were Haruka.