a late update, sorry everyone...

As usual, disclaimer : original characters belong to the mangaka. I'm just messing around here.

thank you for everyone who had given the story a comment or two. very much appreciated. this is for you.


Venus

I'm sorry Wendy, but I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die

Southpark

He called Akira the moment he stopped running. It was almost insulting to think that he had let Yuki slipped right under his eyes. She had disappeared into the sea of moving crowds when he finally set his foot off the restaurant. The sun and afternoon heat had finally giving way to the dark, to which he did not appreciate since it made her escape all the more easier.

'What?' Akira was surprised to hear from him. But not as surprised as when he told him about his finding.

'It's her. She ran away when she realized I was standing behind her.'

'And you couldn't manage to outrun her? Soujiro, if I didn't know better...'

'Oh cut the crap, Akira. That is fucking hilarious. I'm not in the mood to humor your insult. I need you to help me find her.'

He would have looked for her himself if only he knew how, but knowing Akira, he probably had people working for him in an underground circle in almost any given country.

'How was she?' Akira's voice had lost its smirk. He liked to test Soujiro's limit and boundary once in a while, enjoying his friend's wrath when the teasing had come face to face with the edge of his limited patience. But he was first and foremost his best friend, he always knew when to stop.

'She looked… the same, happy almost.' Soujiro sighed in an almost defeat. Because there was a time when he could never have imagined a world where Yuki would be happy without him. It was almost an unbearable thought.

'I'll see what I can do. Just go and get some sleep. I'll see you tomorrow…. You're going back to Japan tomorrow, aren't you?'

He was lost in thought for a while.

'How long do you think it will take before you can get me anything?'

***

Nishikado Soujiro. Heir to a multi billion dollars empire and womanizer extraordinaire had never thought the day would come when he would have to surrender a crushing defeat, to admit that he had fallen, fatally, irrevocably, in love with a common girl from a common background. But he did. God is a fucking comedian with a terrible sense of humor; he realized it now that it was too late.

He did not even realize the obvious fact until Akira pointed it out to him. It was Yuki's last year in college. He had been unofficially seeing her on and off for close to three years then, although their private meetings had always been in secrets, when he realized something had changed so much in the dynamics of his everyday life.

Akira was the first one to mention that he didn't seem to enjoy their nightly adventures anymore. They were sitting at their usual hang out place at that time. He had laughed off the sentiment as a mere snide and continued to pour the liquor into his half empty glass. But Akira pointed out the fact that there had been two new girls at the bar since their arrival that night, beautiful to boot, and he had been ignoring them, choosing to drink and day dreaming instead.

He couldn't have very well told his best friend that he had been thinking about his last encounter with Yuki just the day before. She had been uncharacteristically impatient at their foreplay, ripping his shirt in her haste to rid of his clothing.

'Mmmm, someone wants her candy badly,' he laughed while she rolled her eyes to heaven but didn't slow down her quest to get him off his clothes. He never mentioned it to her, but he liked the way she transformed before his very eyes from the shy and unassuming college girl type everyone had come to know and love to a sex vixen she really was.

It had been surprising, to say the least, how their relationship had developed from a mere one sided infatuation to a full blown sexcapade for both parties involved.

He had been gentle with her at first, showing her how she could enjoy their sexual experiments to the highest degree. But he had not counted on her giving him the high that almost drove him nuts. And he wasn't only talking about physical gratification. Although that alone would have been enough to send him up space and back in time ready for the second assault.

'In a way, tea ceremony is like sex itself,' he said to Yuki during their first encounter, half joking but not really. 'The first taste was always the hardest. You learned to appreciate the taste more after a few tries.'

She had been too embarrassed to reply, what with her trying to hide her exposed body under the sheet, and he playfully tried to snatch the sheet from her grasp.

It was never his intention, to drag along their quasi-relationship further than was necessary. He had thought that that one morning with her was enough for both of them to put a period to the somewhat uncomfortable positions they both held in their circle of friends. He knew for a fact that Makino had publicly stated her disapproval of Yuki's infatuation on him. In a way, it was somewhat more than insulting, because he was actually a decent guy once people get passed his choice of lifestyle.

She was a good student, eager to learn and eager to please. He supposed, it was his downfall, along with the sparks and fire works their bodies seemed to create almost immediately once he had touched her, really touched her. It was almost obscene, he thought, of how he felt himself almost breathless in anticipation when his fingers deftly unbuttoned her striped white and pink top. He had guarded his reaction almost obsessively, not letting her saw how strange she had made him feel, in part because he had convinced himself to a degree that he was not the type of man she had imagined him to be.

And so, he was glad that she had decided to stop her text messages and phone calls once the day was over. He was glad that it had ended in the best possible way, with her the one who said good bye. He was glad, except for the nagging feeling he could not shake in its entirety. The empty feeling that surfaced once she disappeared into the abyss of normal life, for she had taken to reject all invitation from Tsukushi to attend any of their gatherings, if it meant there was an iota of possibility of meeting him. Even Rui had started to acknowledge her absence in Tsukushi's life. And you know it was serious when Rui had started to notice something other than his mattress and pillows.

***

One year.

It took him one year and more than thirty women to realize how much he actually wanted and missed her, and how little those other women he had chosen over her gave him pleasure in comparison to the all the little things, those little quirks that she did, the sighs that she made, the shivers she caused, the high she conjured. She was his adrenaline, his heroin, his drug, his addiction, tried as he might to dismiss the sentiment.

It took him one year and a birthday party for Makino, watching her came into the room arm tangled with a man who wasn't him, to realize that he didn't want any fucking commoners –or, non commoners for that matter- to ever touch her the same way he did.

She looked so much thinner than the last time he had seen her. Bony and at the same time ethereal almost in her appearance with her short black dress and the up do hair, fragile as if one might be able to break her bones if they only tried hard enough. He watched with annoyance how Makino fussed over her date for the night, convinced that he must be some worthless guy she was prone to fall head over heel in love with. Forgetting that the accusation had only succeeded in making him fall into the same category as others did.

It took him another half an hour of watching her swayed on the dance floor to go and took her hand, comfortably placing his hand on her back, dangerously low he felt the start of the swell of her butt.

He found himself picking her up the next day for a dinner in town. It only went downhill from there. Or uphill. Depends on the way you see it.

***

Soujiro was by no means a diligent student back in the day. But as any of his teachers would testify, he was always meticulous in his method. He had a set of rules that he followed almost religiously. A lover of tradition, he never wanted to break any of the laws he had set up for himself, which extended to the girls he liked to be associated with.

He didn't like to be around nice girls, innocent girls, as he'd say it. Finding them too much of a trouble to bother with. He didn't like to date anyone who was in any way associated with any of his friends. Because it caused a lot of complications with the way he's playing. It annoyed him that Yuki was all those and yet she had almost effortlessly made him break all those rules even without her asking.

In the span of time they had been together, she had never mentioned her opposition to his life style. She might have hated it, but she was too proud, or too scared, to mention it. It annoyed him because he knew she was crushed, but he was a kind of person who didn't like to make things easy for everyone including himself. It had become his personal battle, his holy grail, to make Yuki ask him to stop his childish actions, to ask him to reconsider whatever his twisted moral value held, which she never did. Maybe out of her pig headedness, or her lack of self confidence when it came to him, he would never know. Because it was all too late when he realized that she was gone one day.

***

It was six months to the day of Tsukasa's wedding.

He knew because he was always a master in taking notes, in storing data, in remembering every detail.

For a reason he couldn't understand, Yuki had avoided him like plague for weeks before her disappearance. She had quit her part time job at the dango shop once she had secured a job with a multi-national company. He had tried to contact her with no avail, and it was close to six weeks since their last phone conversation when a frantic Makino called him out of the blue.

'It's you, isn't it? It must be you. I knew it!' she was almost in hysterics when he picked up the phone. The shouting was not that surprising when it came to Makino, but the fact didn't make him receive the tone too kindly either.

'What are you talking about?'

'I called her apartment but someone else was taking the call.'

'Say it slowly, Makino. What are you talking about?'

'YUKI! She's gone!'

'What?'

'She's gone! What part of my sentence don't you understand? Gone. Vanished. I called her parents but they wouldn't tell me anything.'

It had to be some kind of cruel jokes fate kept throwing at him. He was sincere with his feeling even though he never let her saw that other side of him. Insecurity and loneliness were two dirty words that he didn't like to be associated with, so much so that he was most well known to be the hottest Casanova in town. He realized with much grieves that there was only one person ever that could see him through. With her disappearance, the most important pieces of his broken faith had also gone.

He was right all along. He never should have veered from tradition, from those set of rules. Because once you broke them, it was damn hard to mend the broken pieces back together. Sara had caused him damage. A limp that for a while plagued a runner's stride, a dent on the otherwise smooth surface of his polished life. But Yuki had left him shattered, because after she was gone, he couldn't even look at those other girls without feeling that cold emptiness inside. With Sara at least he knew why she had chosen the path away from him. But with Yuki, he had no idea. And it was worse than knowing that you had messed up somewhere along the way, because he could always ask for repentance. And for a long time he hated her for that very fact.

***

The sky had gone totally dark when he walked back slowly to the hotel. From his shirt pocket he pulled a pack of cigarettes. Sighing, he lighted one and inhaled the mixture of so many chemical components into his lungs, feeling that satisfying burn in his throat. Once upon a time there was this girl who would crush his cigarettes in return for a kiss. He intended to find her and make her his.