Heya again

Heya again! Much thanks to reviewers of chaps 2 & 3, and thank you all for waiting patiently for the instalments! Hmm…not much else to say, really! Ah, wait, yes: everyone else seems to have a disclaimer in their stories, so I guess I ought to have one too, else I'll get sued (for about £40 max if you're lucky). Aside from Takeo (& his pals), my beloved Mr. Abe (he's my favourite :D) and any other minor characters, all characters belong to Naoko Takeuchi and anyone else who's received the rights to use them from her. i.e., not me. There. Peace! x

-

Oh, no. Airport again.

I felt so naked being swarmed on all sides by such a dense, bustling current of human warmth. I was so used to having my own space. But, with the airport, came the inevitable lack of personal privacy. I craned my neck over the crowds to lazily count the foam ceiling tiles, shuffling forwards uniformly, until I was huskily received by a male airport attendant who scanned my travel papers and various other bureaucratic paraphernalia with minimal enthusiasm, before casting me through the clacking metal turnstile. Pale-mint, well-buffed laminate floor tiles (which reminded me, incidentally, of the infirmary of my American elementary school), then bleak white double doors. Then, fresh air. Like a fish that had somehow escaped from its tiny pond to the sea.

The Terminal Waiting Lounge of Tokyo Airport was magnificently vast. With its huge, panoramic wall of glass, like some monolithic sunken glacier, and the giant cascading roof dizzyingly high above, a spider's web of matchstick iron girders, the building had the ominous, overwhelming presence of an Olympic stadium. And the noise was phenomenal: a fair-ground of low industrial hums, the chiming loudspeaker that resonated with a gospel-like quality, hisses, squeaks and wails of various machines, the shrill ring of tills, and wave upon wave of human chatter. Even this, such a mammoth, warehouse-like structure that seemed as if it would have the mind-boggling capacity to swallow up any amount of noise, was completely saturated with sound.

With my small gym bag over my shoulder, I made my snaking way through the crowds to get to the nearest refreshment stand. I was so painfully hungry that I was verging on nausea, and desperately needed a hot drink to settle my stomach, before I could even think about eating. After wandering about, slipping in personal silence through the stream of human traffic, I found a reasonably secluded coffee lounge in a corner, behind a duty-free perfume parlour decorated luxuriously in faux white marble and glass. The place had a few businessmen pattering keys and mulling over laptops between sips of tall lattes, and it had its own allotment of glass wall, with bruise-grey, drizzly views of the glum runway. Tiny drops of rainwater residue clung stone-still to the outside of the window, like tiny balled animals braving a winter storm, and the sky was obscured entirely by rolling, shadowed cloud that foretold of more rain to come. I strode morosely across the cheap wood-laminate floor to the counter. I could feel the bored barista's gaze trail after me.

"What can I get for you?"

I looked up, leaning against the counter with a flick of my fringe from my eyes. The barista lounged against her till, smiling coyly. Her black hair was swinging in a high ponytail and her thickly-mascara framed eyes glistened in a clearly indulgent assessment of my physique.

"Ah…just a straight black coffee for me," I drawled, delicately raising an eyebrow to her as her eyes playfully clocked mine. She raised her right hand to twist the silver stud in her small, milky earlobe between her fingers, parting her lips into an eased smile, before punching my order into the till.

"Okay, insert your credit card". She glanced up at me as I sifted through my worn wallet to retrieve my plastic card, and I caught sight of the plastic nametag that rested on her considerably large chest. Ayumi. She turned to get to brewing my order, hastening to add a smooth "Coming right up" as I removed my card from the machine and replaced it in my bag.

I rounded the commodities server and immediately spotted a deserted couch in the corner to settle into. I wound between islands of solitary, concentrating businessmen to chuck my bag unceremoniously beneath the marked and stained coffee table. I fell back gratefully into the couch, my feet gasping in relief from their painful tile-and-airport-carpet trek though security, and the darkly bitter aroma of smooth, grinding roasted coffee reached me from the bar. I already felt the stormy, choppy nausea bubbling in my belly being massaged gently into subsidence. The barista, Ayumi, rounded the bar with a tray in hand, and stepped precociously between tables to me.

She bent over slowly to place my tray, carrying my mug of steaming, tar-black coffee and my credit card receipt, onto the table. Her staff-issue navy-blue shirt was buttoned very low indeed.

"Here's your order". She righted herself and gave me a silky smile, biting her lip.

"Thanks". I feebly attempted a grin before she turned smartly on her heel and made her way back behind the bar.

I enjoyed the piping hot brew in silence, cupping the plain china mug in my hands gratefully. The smooth, hot liquid slid over my throat and into my stomach pleasantly, steamrolling out all unsettledness. I concentrated on its headily fragrant, bitter flavour as a substitute for thought. However, when an anonymous voice announced over the speaker, in monotones perfectly matched to the weather outside, that my flight was ready for boarding, I retrieved my gym bag from under the table and stood quietly to depart. My coffee cup sat emptily on its lonely ringed saucer, growing cold, as purposeless and impermanent as everything under that huge domed roof. As I slinked between tables, each with one or no occupants, I suddenly remembered the last time I'd been waiting for a flight.

As I crossed the highly-polished wasteland of inane, fleeting human drone, I found myself wishing that I still had that black and white photograph.

-

I sit at the breakfast bar, the same husky furrows of dusty-grey cloud as yesterday masking the sky outside. I chew slowly, leaning pensively on my elbow, as if my toast were rubber, mulling over the same blundering cityscape that I mull over every morning. Two pigeons gurgle in a bubbly slumber in the sheltered corner of the window's alcove, occasionally flustering in a fidget.

I sigh. Then yawn. Then frown, chewing my bottom lip furtively. Push my plate to one side. Sit for a moment. Still. Thought is escaping me, swirling, gaseous and elusive.

What is going on with me?

As I slip quietly over the under-floor hum of plumbing, my hair rustles closer to my cheeks. I make my solemn way into the bedroom to change. I lay my nightdress out precisely on the blank white sheets ready for tonight, then turn automatically to silently slide open my wardrobe with a swift prise. Clothes, waiting to attention, orderly, folded underwear stored on the top shelf, shoes in stiff pairs on the wire-mesh rack at the shadowy bottom. I dress, and still, no thought. I sit down to my dressing table, smoothing my skirt silently in my lap. The black and white newspaper clipping rests on the white-wash wooden surface of the table, folded quietly beneath a small silver trinket box, a gift from my grandmother. I take it, and study it, its wearing edges beginning to soften, now, with a shudder of a curl.

Friday. It is five days, now, since the Tenoh boy left. I meet my own eyes in the photograph, trying to remember how I felt that very moment when the sour, overweight New York photographer took it, his heavy-lidded frown resting above the camera, cigarette in his stubby hands. All these kinds of moments lie awake, each with its eyes and ears and worries and complaints, preserved perfectly. My memory is almost perfect. But each seems to echo with lonesomeness, as firm as the last and next, of the people it recalls; people who emerge, momentarily, from darkness. I try not to blink, knowing, somehow, as in the strange, abrupt physics of dreams, that the moment I do, they will disappear. But blinking is inevitable. All these insignificant, momentary friendships, scattered across the globe, decay wherever they fall to rest until there is nothing left. I wish that someone would wait here with me, undecayable, who would remain for more than a heartbeat or a blink, who, when I wake from sleeping, would still be there, staying. I open my eyes, and stare back into myself many times over in the mirror. I am still holding the picture, my fingers a little smudged from the ink.

The Tenoh boy has gone. I look again at the picture.

But he's coming back.

Maybe, for the moment, it's me who has to remain, waiting here, staying.

What is going on with me?

-

I sidle between chatting students funnelling loudly down the crisp, well-polished corridor. I am trying to push against the current of uniformed people to reach my locker, when I hear a high, shallow voice call my name impatiently.

"Michiru! Michiru! Wait!"

I turn, still trying to anchor myself stoutly against the pour of traffic, to watch Motoyo, my acquaintance from my History lesson, struggle loudly to me. Within moments, she reaches me, patting down her skirt with deliberation, barely six inches from me in our island in the crowd.

"Heya," she breathes tirelessly, smiling with a glance to me as she touches her fringe with her hand, shifting the weight of her gym bag on her shoulder. I wait for her to continue, my silence her prompt. She seems quite flustered.

"I'm really sorry," she continues, flitting eyes making minute judgements about the chattering individuals filing past us. "Takeo's friends with that new blond boy, right?"

I blink. I am aware of the hard muscles in my throat.

"What, the Tenoh boy-"

"-Yes!" Motoyo clicks her fingers with a peppy snap, a grin flaring on her flushed cheeks. "That's it! Him! Anyway," she continues, idly working her tongue in her cheek, unable to keep still, "He was out running the other day, and I was wondering if you knew where I could find him, or, if not him, would Takeo-"

"-He's not here". Her fidgety actions grind to a halt and all her separate trails of attention converge promptly into staring at me.

"What?"

"He's not here. He's abroad". I stood still, holding my case defensively in front of me. I didn't want to say, or think about, for that matter, any more than that.

Why should I?

"Oh," she murmurs, biting her small lip, blinking in thought.

I wait, again, for her to continue. As a bell signals the end of movement-time allowance, something shudders coldly in my chest. I want her to leave. This doesn't feel right.

"Well," she says brightly, again, looking back up to me, "that's a shame. I really wanted him to come to Athletics tryouts for our team: we've a competition fast approaching".

"That's unfortunate". I'm not looking at her.

"Are you alright?" she mutters, looking up at me, her brow knitted furtively as she scratches her elbow absent-mindedly. I can hear the distant bang of numerous lockers in the fizzing background of my thoughts, tangled with the dying sounds of students congregating to classes, disappearing behind anonymous frosted-glass doors. "Cheer up, Michiru. Junko told me you and Takeo are going out tonight anyway, aren't you?"

Oh. That.

I raise my gaze to smile at her in appreciation, before making a small excuse to be getting away to class. Motoyo gives me a final querying look before turning on her heel with a directionless, hasty farewell, striding in hollow taps off along the mirroring, polished grey floor of the corridor. I stand for a few moments, waiting for my head to clear. Inevitability weighs me down heavily, as if I'm trying to swim away from something despite being dragged by full clothing, unable to move my weight faster, unable to maintain my current pace and pattern of life until I deal with my demons. All I can do, for the time being, is make things here a little better, despite my seeming powerlessness. And wait.

-

I sit on a small table outside an Ice-Cream parlour, reading a French novel I'd neglected to finish on holiday. Late-afternoon traffic bores on behind the moving screen of hurried passers-by scurrying to and fro past me, handbags and briefcases swinging, coats buttoned right up, a bee-swarm of click-clacking heels drumming against the cold autumn concrete pavement. The overcast, cloud-swamped sky sags above me, like a soggy old duvet hung out to dry, though stray threads of pale sunlight occasionally puncture the frayed cloud, striking brazenly off car rooves or throwing blinding shards off glinting windows for a moment, but only before retreating back behind the heavy grey bog. I sit up straight in my clatter-legged silver chair under the blue café veranda, the lukewarm, tar-thick remnants of an empty cup of black coffee resting near a china bowl of sugar. Takeo is supposed to be meeting me here, but I'd decided to come a little earlier to have some time to myself outside the apartment, freshening my head.

A sudden flash of blonde hits the sunlight, like a huge split-second wave breaking on a rock.

I've seen her before.

It is Aino Minako, the Junior High-schooler who'd sang at the Orchestral Recital. She is taking occasional slurps of milkshake from a plastic multicoloured carton, her long hair pulled up into a high, swinging ponytail, an over-sized sports jumper almost completely hiding tiny denim cut-off shorts. She is laughing and chatting to a tall brunette in green leggings, white pumps and a black sleeveless roll-neck, with the most gorgeous miniature, pink rose ear studs.

"Oh, Ms. Kaioh!"

I sweep my gaze back to the Aino girl, who, smiling and waving to me with one hand, grabbing her friend with her other to halt her. When the tall girl rights herself and follows the other girl's gaze to me, her face immediately breaks into a warm grin of sudden recognition.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Minako".

The girls swiftly round the other tables outside the bustling parlour and I stand to bow my shoulders to them.

"Mako, this is the First Violinist, remember, from the recital?" coos the Aino girl, indicating me with an admiring sweep of her hand.

"I do, you were amazing, Ms. Kaioh!" her friend flushes, bowing to me. "Kino Makoto," she continues, adjusting the strap of her drawstring purse in a seemingly habitual manner. The Aino girl turns her head sideways to begin saying something to the Ms. Kino as they take a seat opposite me, and my mind is suddenly jerked into a reeling jolt of déjà vu.

"Were you at the Arcade on Sunday, talking to Tenoh Haruka?" I ask abruptly. Ms. Minako looks round to me, bemused a little.

"Yeah, with Tsukino Usagi, we were. We saw you there with Hideyoshi Takeo," she smiles, "I meant to greet you, but you left quite quickly".

"Oh".

Ms. Kino shifts in her seat, a bit confused, and turns to retrieve a cell phone from her purse. The Aino girl sighs, sinking into a small smile as she rests her head on her hand, twirling a slithering strand of silky blonde hair.

"Mr. Haruka was really great, wasn't he? Did you see, Ms. Kaioh?"

"Yes," I murmur pensively, my tongue resting thoughtfully against my teeth as my eyes slip in and out of focus. I rest my hands in my lap, twisting at each other, playing with my silver ring. "Yes he was".

"Ms. Kaioh?"

I lift my line of vision sharply back up to the Aino girl, blinking. Makoto Kino is chewing her pretty rosy lip over the laminated drinks menu, dark brows tense in thought. Ms. Minako, however, is smiling coyly at me, sly corners of her mouth cocked and ready.

"Yes?"

"I know it isn't really much of my business, but do you like him? Tenoh Haruka?"

The Aino girl's face is flooded with a wide smile, eyes glittering in full attention. I rest my hands to stone stillness in my lap, draping a heavy robe of composure over and around me, forcing a raised eyebrow. The matte cotton of my dress rustles quietly.

"Well, he seems very civil and polit-"

"-aah, that's not what I mean, Ms. Kaioh!" smiles Minako, her face alight. The Kino girl's face is turned reclusively to her lap, quite flushed.

"Ms. Kino are you alright?" I hasten smartly to ask. Her head resurfaces, and she places an uncertain palm to her cheeks. The Aino girl squeals delightedly, startling a young couple sharing a milkshake at the table next to us.

"Oh, Mako, you like him, don't you?" she gushes divinely, accosting her friend with giggles.

"Well, Mina, I…um…"

"Oh, Mako! You're so crush prone!"

"I know, but-"

"-but he is sucha cool guy! You should talk to him!"

A pliant, pleasant warmth bubbles inside my chest and I smile a little. A group of elderly women huddled around a selection of tea and cream biscuits raise their eyebrows, shuddering and bumbling in stubborn, mumbled disapproval. A child hurrying along the street with his flustered mother stops abruptly to gape at the giggling pair of girls before being chivvied on. City birds scuttle and coo between the forest of warm shifting, rocking legs on the patio of the café, scavenging jerkily for stray crumbs.

"Michiru? Michi?"

I slide round in my awkward silver chair to see Takeo raising his head over the crowd to scout for me.

"I'm here, Takeo!" I call gently as he writhes between the living funnel of human bodies streaming loudly on to skirt the balustrades marking the perimeter of the café. The two girls immediately halt their charade of shrill giggles as they clock Takeo approaches us steadily across the crowd.

"Oh my," breathes the Aino girl, clasping Ms. Kino's shoulder, "There he is! The other boy I told you about". The Kino girl's eyes glitter, inspired and fixated. She turns to me politely.

"Is that your boyfriend, Ms. Kaioh?"

"Yes, he is," I reply simply and tonelessly, pushing my hair quietly from my face, straight-backed.

"He's really well-known for his sports, even some girls at our school have crushes on him, though he rarely even comes there".

The girls continue to gaze, entranced, as he sidles discretely between silver chair backs. He reaches us and immediately runs an automatic hand through his messy shag of askew, fluffy black hair. He straightens out his charcoal-grey suit with a small tug as he leans round to kiss me lightly on the cheek with a smiled greeting of "Hey, 'Chiru". The two girls' faces melt into alert adoration, fingering buttons or hair slides with silently bubbling impatience. Takeo uncoils to his full athletic height, casting the girls a quick grin and bowing his broad swaggering shoulders, hands in pockets, introducing himself. The two meekly reply, biting their lips.

"Are you the Junior High girl who sang at the concert?" asks Takeo quizzically, raising his brow, unsure.

"Yeah, with my friend Hino Rei," breathes the Aino girl, eyes wide as a deer caught in headlights, shifting her hands in her lap. I catch Takeo quickly glance at her bare crossed legs as he smiles to her politely.

"Ah, then I guess you know Michiru from the concert". Ms. Minako throws the Kino girl a frightfully excited glance, before replying civilly, trying to steady her quivering voice. I lean back, poised in my chair, enjoying the conversation, before Takeo indicates to me with a smooth nod that it's time to be going. I glance darkly to him in return.

"Well," I murmur, unfolding slowly from the chair and smoothing out the drape of my dress, "we have a reservation to stick to, girls".

A brief disappoint flashes momentarily across the girls' faces, but they promptly smile and rise from their chairs, giggling in relish and waving enthusiastic goodbyes.

"See you soon, Ms. Kaioh!" they call as they file between chairs. Takeo silently lifts my coat onto my shoulders as I slip a folded note under the cold coffee cup. Hands in pockets, glancing out from under his dark fringe, he waits for me to make my way round the table wordlessly before following me from the café. The evening is beginning its quivering descent, striking up a fresh, cold blueness in the air and dragging lazy autumn breezes along the sharply-rapping click-clack concrete. The dusk eases into Tokyo, like a parent eases an exhausted child to bed, hazy and cumbersome. The edges round patches of shadow begin to fray and leak away into each other, and, at the dimming impression of sunlight suffocated more and more behind steadily blueing clouds, darknesses darken as they bleed into one another. It is the very end of the rush hour, and cars strike up distinctive growling cries as they round corners and flash under bridges. Other people pass us frequently, chatting or humming or musing to themselves, pace leisurely. Takeo is wordless as he paces coolly alongside me, glancing at me with continual attentiveness. The roads trickle away and the mechanised, bright, sickly tableaus of peppy shop windows are switched more and more for sleek, conspicuous residential apartment buildings, as he leads me out of town. A burly, coarsely-browed boy who I recognise as being on Takeo's American Football team gives Takeo a dark, sick grin, raising his hand in passing greeting. Takeo removes his hand from his pocket, and gently reaches to clasp mine. I let him take it, wrapping his fingers tightly round mine like an infant. His palm is very warm.

"Where are we going, Takeo?" I ask in a voice with a distinctly numb, quiet pallor. I reach with my free hand to pull my coat up round my neck as the air begins to settle in coolly. Takeo glances to me with a grin.

"It's a surprise, 'Chiru," he gleams, "I was very careful in choosing it, so I hope it cheers you up a bit".

I say nothing, instead tracking the pavement in front of my feet as we walk. The daylight has been swept away, insubstantial as dust, in one shivering, wintery heartbeat. Venus is peering out gorgeously from behind the sheer veil of a whispy cloud, before dimming mysteriously again. We turn at the croakily rusting railings above a concrete viaduct that feeds into a small canal, and Takeo leads me carefully down some cranky, decrepit iron-gauze steps that threaten, rickety, to buckle under me, half sleeping in a long early-evening shadow. We reach the lower level at the canal side, and make our way parallel to the still waters. A pleasant red-brick path, with slight flashes of weeds and grass budding in small, fresh hope about rusted moorings or between aged cracks, leads us along down from the city-street level. A solemn, thickly bracken-wracked row of dark trees obscure the residential buildings on the other side with scratchy black denseness. A little light laps and gulps fleetingly on the stirred surface of the deep canal waters near us, but the other half of the canal's width is cast under long, twisted shadows of the copses on the far side. The water there coils and stirs silently, barely moving, black and thick as tar and swallowing all light, instead of reflecting it. We continue on our evening path, and a pale breeze grates hoarsely at the dead branches of the undergrowth on the other side. My heels' rapping fills the silence of still water like small rhythmic firecrackers, a metronome for the quiet. Eventually, the canal picks up, sloping gently, and we reach the street level once more. The sky has been plunged into a surging tropical pool of brilliant Caribbean-blue, dyed deeply and fiercely; the bluest of blues, the electric colour of the bold building blocks and toys for nursery children. The cloud has dispersed reasonably, and grey hazes soften patches of azure sky. High up over the canal, the buildings of many charming, characteristic leisure businesses (restaurants, arcades, speciality shops), of the bohemian old-town style precinct of Tenth District grace the bottom floors of wonderfully mismatched bricked apartment buildings. Worn, old awnings, softly flapping out in the evening air, over-spilling clusters of colour-dotted wildflowers hanging in baskets on outside walls, next to winking wrought-iron sconces, all stir and twinkle beneath the evening sky. Couples laze out on mosaic tables out the front of cafés, smoking quietly. I am intrigued.

"Here we are," winks Takeo to me gently, before leading me by the hand towards the open French doors of a cosy candlelit restaurant. The large, baying windows of the front of the building are framed with shutters of peeling olive-green paint, and splitting grey-wooded tubs cascading with eccentric dappled mix of petals stand guard at the door. We enter, and it is warm inside, with many worn Middle-Eastern rugs askew over the smoothed terracotta floor and candles burning with lazy, drunken flickers at dark wooden tables, occasionally catching a glint of polished set cutlery waiting in place. It is a third or so full, and a bright young waitress immediately greets us, asking Takeo for the name of his reservation and taking our coats to hang on the grand old wooden coatstand next to the service station. She then leads us down into the restaurant, to a cosy table in a warm alcove across from the gently cackling fireplace. There are a few couples to either side of us, leaning in in conversation or silently sampling full plates of rich, aromatic food. She gracefully presents the open wine list to Takeo, before laying our open menus before us and asking whether we'd like a bottle of sparkling or still mineral water. Takeo silently studies the wine list, leaning his head to his palm. I scan the restaurant with interest, but not quite letting the low buzz of chatter fully penetrate my mind and soothe my thoughts into a lazy meditation. The clay-pink rendered walls are cluttered full of endless vintage posters, paintings and general bric-a-brac: wartime beverage adverts, opera posters and record covers from every era, newspaper clippings from anytime in the last 50 or so years, and bright gouache paintings of various landscapes, to name but a few. A husky Italian songbird trills a melancholy post-war ballad over the scratchy speakers, mingling with the background chatter of the restaurant clientele, and muffled clanking noises and the odd shout from the kitchen down the other end of the room.

"Do you like it here?" Takeo asks, looking up, brows raised in question, from the wine list as I bring my gaze back round to face him.

"It's very unusual. I didn't think there were places like this in Tokyo".

Takeo smiles, folding the wine list and laying in gently to one side on the scratched, worn old tabletop.

"It took me a while to find it," he murmurs, the candlelight basking his face with a slurred, jumpy orange glow. I wait for him to continue. I notice how much more pensive and reserved Takeo seems when not around his friends, though not in a defensive way, but in a more thoughtful, careful sort of way. He turns in his seat to remove his jacket, and then returns to face me, rolling up his shirt cuffs to bare his sports-tanned, nicely-toned forearms.

"You seemed a bit down recently. I thought maybe you were missing being back in Europe, so I thought this might cheer you up".

I push a smile to the forefront of my defences.

Well, I am pleased with how thoughtful he's being.

"This place has been run for almost 40 years by this Italian couple who came here at the end of the 60s," he muses, tapping his empty glass with his fingertips. "I did really well to find it".

I stare at him blankly as he adjusts his tie and checks his phone, then the waitress comes with our water, taking our drinks order. She clacks smartly away, ponytail swinging, to clear some plates on a table a little further from us. She seems to be managing the front of house all by herself.

"Takeo".

He looks up from his phone, sliding it back into his trouser pocket. He squats his elbows onto the table, leaning forward to me, though not touching me. There is an invisible veneer than keeps us apart with some sort of strange magnetism born from the personal rifts that are creaking wider in both of us.

"You okay?"

His black eyes hover, candlelight cradling them, like the sun catching the tin underbelly of some dark satellite. I am about the open my mouth to slowly construct an answer, but the waitress arrives, smiling, with a bottle of white wine nestled in her slim hands. Takeo nods, and she pours him a small glassful. He lifts it smartly to his nose, with a passing glance to me, before draining it with another silent nod. The waitress fills my glass, then his, and twists the bottle lightly in her strong hands to place it squarely on the table, before taking our food orders. We are still resting in quiet after she has left, and I sense Takeo wanting me to continue. Impatient as ever, he prompts me.

"Is it something to do with school, someone in school causing trouble?"

I glance back up to him. His mouth is parted, hands tight.

"No, it's not like that, please don't worry".

He thinks for a moment. The current track on the old speakers draws to a finale, and a new, more upbeat tune pipes up.

"Of course I'm worried".

I say nothing and raise my glass to my lips.

"Please tell me, Michi," he continues. He is not pleading, nor is he flat and blunt. He really is worried. "You're one of my closet friends, but I can never understand you, babe. I can never tell what's going on in your head".

I pause for a moment, sucking on my lip as I hold a mouthful of wine, before swallowing slowly.

"I'm sorry, Takeo".

He bites his lip, eyes darting to and from me.

"I don't want you to be sorry, I mean, that's who you are. You work that way. You're quiet. I dunno, I don't get you at all, but I don't want you to behave in any particular way differently or deliberately. Please don't think that. I don't want you to be a different person on my account".

I gently place the wine glass back on the surface of the rugged table top, then take my time in withdrawing my hand back up to rest under my chin. Only then do I look at him. The flickering antique wall sconce above him buzzes a low orange behind the stained glass, lending a faint orange halo to each askew strand of his crown of jet-black hair. This time, he suggests the problem, the problem which I can feel him begging in his head, please, don't let it be this.

"Is it the party I went to the Saturday night before the recital?"

We rest there for a moment. Whether that silence was a necessary or an uncomfortable one was unimportant and irrelevant. It was there, pressing at us both, as a shrill Italian opera diva rang with unearthly, swaying potency over the age-old, crackling speakers.

"Why, did something happen at this party?" I barely move my lips, barely breathe, regulating every body function to be without pitch or dimension or in the least bit questionable. Takeo sits up straighter, seeming uncharacteristically aware of his body language towards me. This change is unnatural and very disconcerting.

"Yes, it did. I'm not pretending it didn't, I'm s-"

"I know," I whisper, glancing down. He doesn't badger me nor make to continue or strain, but waits for me. "Who was she?"

He pauses for a moment, and I almost am convinced that maybe he doesn't even know her name, before he carefully constructs the simplest and most honest of answers.

"Nayu".

"Satoh?"

"Yes".

We sit there for a while, waiting for nothing, urging nothing. I remember the last time me and Takeo went out together, before the end of the academic year. He never stopped laughing nor smiling, talking and idolising me. He took me to a special, expensive Japanese-style restaurant whose speciality was the preparation of Eel. After, we walked through the park and visited the fairground there, where we walked amongst the schoolchildren, going on rides, before we took the bus out of town. He took me to a small shrine to the north of Tenth District, and we walked up the stone steps hand in hand. We drew our fortunes there under a tall birch tree, and Takeo bought me a tiny charm for 'Health'. He told me I didn't need one for 'Academic Success' or 'Acquisition of Wealth', as I was such a star, and as long as I had him I didn't need luck for 'Love'. I told him that you can never have enough luck. He held me, laughing, under that tree.

The waitress eventually brings our meals, setting them before us on mismatched place-mats, steaming, richly-smelling plates wafting, piping-hot, with aromatic Italian flavouring. Takeo slowly picks up a fork, glancing to me warily as if he worries I will disapprove of him lifting his cutlery, before breaking a tiny flake of steaming pink meat from his salmon steak. I wait there, letting him eat for a bit before I make an uneasy start to my seafood spaghetti. I know the food is delicious, the textures and mixture of flavours exquisite, but I enjoy my dish very little.

"Are you angry at me? Please be honest, I really want to know". Takeo is holding his fork halfway to his mouth, looking down at it, his hair falling in front of his brow, obscuring his eyes. He speaks in a small way that makes me feel a little bit shameful.

"No. I'm not".

"Okay".

Takeo continues to eat, taking slow, calculated movements that seem tiring to maintain, like an astronaut moving on the surface of the moon. My own food goes down like medicine, so I leave it. A large party of 12 or so arrives at the door, laughing and cajoling as they all remove their rugged coats and comb their windswept hair back into submission with their fingers. The sky outside has sunk into a very deep blue, a thick, dark swamp overhead. The candle light of the tables in the windows suspends warm, vapourous projections of astral diners who hover just beyond the walls of the building in the evening darkness. I remember the slippery, silver limbs of the birch tree that shivered in the summer courtyard of the shrine, adorned with a perfect green veil. I was happy, in some small way. Nothing has changed. Takeo sleeps with girls now, and slept with them then.

I'm just a little braver now to acknowledge things.

I don't want to ignore or pretend anymore.

Takeo puts down his fork, leaving half his salmon.

"Takeo".

"Yes?"

He looks me in the eye, holding my gaze in a quietly searching way. The tips of his front teeth gently tug on his bottom lip, furrowing and needy. He leans back into his seat, listening to the silence that stirs underneath the music and laughter and chatter of the restaurant, like a creature stirring on the ocean floor.

"Do…did you think I'd always be with you?"

He stops chewing his lip and just lets his mouth hover, slightly parted, caught gently off-guard. His eyes waver, frail under his brows.

"I always hoped so".

The waitress meanders over to us, just having finished a merry conversation with the booming party in the corner, cheeks flushed. She asks us if everything's okay, and her voice and smile slow off, trickling to a halt, as she senses the atmosphere that has frosted over us, and mutters that she'll come back later.

"Takeo?" I wait, after she has left us.

"I knew you wouldn't, though, I think".

"Do you think it's because of you?"

"Yes".

I finish off my glass of wine, rolling the cool, pressing surface of the clear neck between my fingers pensively, though my mind is, for the moment, blank. Takeo turns his sleeves over to touch his cufflinks in a delicately habitual manner, though he still watches me, his eyes studying mine, my nose, my hair, my neck, my lips and hands, as if trying to burn them onto his memory. He must be hurting. But I don't care, it doesn't affect me. Because only the people you care about, the things they do and their fates, can really hurt you. I have so many secrets from Takeo: he doesn't know me, though he tries, to help ease it all. All possibilities of empathy are numbed away. Why am I so cold?

"Please don't put the blame to yourself," I say, forming steady words with each slow twirl of my glass. "I'm not such a good person myself".

I watch his eyes harden by each passing moment, though they still reach out to feel each rise and cavity of my features with frail tenderness. His plate sits, lukewarm, on his mat, pathetically unmoving. I am so awful for my indifference to him. I wish I weren't. The lights dim in their dirty brass sockets as a cosier mood settles in the restaurant as the sky outside darkens still. The hissing speaker pours out slower, more woeful songs as the evening eases into night. The warm shadows are thrown up dark and longer against the walls, and the chatter in the restaurant softens.

"You don't love me". It isn't a question. Takeo's eyes fall to rest back on his plate. I see him glance to the waitress across the restaurant to come and clear our table. My hands fall to rest in my lap, and squeeze at each other gently. I blink hard.

"I wish this wouldn't hurt you this much".

"There you go then".

I look up, sudden, to meet Takeo's eyes, watching me surely, as the waitress silently glides over to our table, and the fire almost dies out in the grate.

"Even if, only a little bit… only a good person would say something like that, I think," he murmurs, resting his fingers on the tables. He slips a quiet word to the waitress for the bill as she sweeps our untouched plates cleanly from the table. As Takeo's eyes seem to sink away under the dimming old candelabras, darkly glowing orange, I remember how I'd stand to say goodbye to him after school as he mounted his motorbike in the fresh summer afternoon, girls gazing as they walked by in clusters.

"See you tomorrow, 'kay?"

"Okay".

"Love you, Mimi".

In my head, Takeo grins with a wink as he slaps down his helmet visor, and his motorbike wails, screeching off wildly, flying away, far away, further and further until absorbed into a steady hum of traffic, completely gone: a low, funeral rumble that plays on an uncertain loop in my head, reawakening from a lost time.

I begin to mention the bill, but Takeo raises a hand to cut me off. The enchantment of silence is broken by the waitress bringing the credit card machine. My imagination stirs, heavy and lethargic like a headful of treacle, slurring sleep tugging at my mind. But sleep can't soften the little gaps in my heart. Takeo glances up at me.

"I love you, Michiru".

-

Takeo has gone, round the corner of the street, the tapping of his path faded away. It is quite late, but the deserted lobby of my apartment building is completely, blankly lit for the juxtaposition of no one. I silently open the glass door and intrude on the whitewash UV silence with the high roll of my marble click-clack footsteps. Everything is dubiously sterile-still as I wait for the elevator, and my heartbeat hurries it on, hurrying the faceless metal doors to open, as if I'm playing chase. Everything beyond the foyer in the dark street is obscured by the hovering doppelganger of the deserted lobby that is sketched out, vapourous, with a pale ghostliness in the glass window that fronts the building. The silent elevator doors part cleanly, and I wait in a fresh funeral stillness to arrive at my floor. I lean against the cool metal handrail and, for a moment, remember the seafront quay of the Sardinian village. What was the name of that place? That village…the name, the name… The elevator sweeps to a steady halt, and the doors open. The low plumbing hum of the uncannily windowless corridor, with its uniform doors, materialises, uneasy, like an expressionless child in his Sunday best standing to attention, eyes blank. Something is dislocated from everything else: two forced pieces of a jigsaw. The kindergarten-red carpet wars with my sleep-drunken eyes as I pace along to my door on the left hand side, and a flickering light bracket flashes at me like a torch from the bottom of a well. I count numbers on doors. Here we go. My key clicks in the lock, tumblers groaning, and the metal handle clunks. I am very aware of the volume of this noise, looking for my chase playmate who isn't there.I am the only person on this floor, surely. Yes. Each apartment is deserted, on this floor, on every floor, and I am the only person in the whole building, this whole building that is quivering like a ghost with the terminal drone of waiting plumbing and dormant electrics and every corner bleached with this one, great all-devouring surgical light and filled with the sheep-skull-rattle echoes of my own footsteps chasing each other, round and round like eyes in a room full of mirrors.

I shut the door quickly behind me. I sigh, rattling deeply, hoarse.

I feel crazy. I have to clear my head.

I lean against the cool white-paint wood of the door, listening to the pale metronome of the kitchen clock click in the hollow room. There are no lights on, and all I can see is a white square of light that is draped awkwardly on the silent dining table like a white sheet, still. The peppering of star-like city lights swim and twinkle in the deep blue just beyond the indistinguishable black mass of the kitchen units, gradually bringing out cleaner, sharper lines in this unlit environment as my eyes adjust, like a blurred picture coming into focus. The whole space has the ethereal alien veneer and the flowing shadows of an aquarium, swimming in a subterranean darkness. My heartbeat is much, much calmer now, settling as I sink into my couch. Things flutter gently in the strange pressure outside the glass-tank apartment windows; small shapes sway in and out of the ribbons of light that find their way down onto the dark gravity of my apartment floor from the surface far above. They break the light with long black shadows like schools of silvering fish, slipping in and out of each tick of my clock. I am feeling acutely relaxed, a bizarre, medicinal relaxation which strikes me as obscurely unnatural. I feel like I should call Takeo, but I know that if I open my mouth to speak, no noise will come out, only a bubbling abstraction of some broken fragment of speech lost to the world. The stirring, shadowy pressure of the black seabed of my apartment crushes out all sound. I feel compelled to think and extract some sort of conclusive feeling from the simmering knot of melancholy in me. Every watery break of light seems awash with promise and mystery. I am feeling, strangely, compelled further yet.

-

Everything about the night is freezing concrete-smooth: sharp pinpricks of stars and the piercing tang of night air that bleaches my lungs. The operatic wails of motorbikes. I shift weight gently form foot to foot, blankly waiting at the sterile, deserted bus stop for the midnight bus. I clutch my bag with a reverent anxiousness soothed with dilute exhaustion. My body clearly doesn't have a clue what to do with itself. The sky is soaked with the stickiest black ink, the basin of the entire heavens loaded with a tiny smattering of stars, all choked by greedy, thick blackness. Nevertheless, they swim with a lustrous sheen.

What am I doing?

I glance morosely about me: the streets are like a deserted Hollywood film set. It is cold, and all the lights out. Streetlights cast expectant spotlights down to the still pavement, waiting for nothing to break their lumbered, constant, buzzing beam. A small black cat with a little red collar brushes airlessly over the opposite pavement, glancing to me, before pattering softly up some worn stone steps to sidle through the old cat flap of a townhouse. With a coiling flourish of a small black tail, it has slipped away and I am again left in peace in the bright, hard air of midnight. My breath forms little warm ghosts in front of me, before dissolving into the clear cold. As I shudder and pull my coat tighter round me, I hear a peaceful rumble accumulate steadily, nearing me from many blocks away in the still night.

As I breathe in deeply, the rumble of the night bus rounds the end of the street, bold white searchlights stretching out in front of it like feelers in the cold night. The large white bus smoothes to a halt in front of me, and its doors fold quietly open, spilling the warm amniotic flood of its internal lights out onto the icy grey midnight pavement. The middle-aged driver turns his sleepy face to watch me as I step deftly onto the bus. Inside, it is very warm and bright, the low buzzing lights flickering neon orange over the empty seats, the soft, pliant rumble of the waiting engine cushioning the air. The are only two other people on the bus: two older men, sat in silence next to each other, in jeans and black jackets, smoking tiresomely, an enchanted look freeze-framing their sloping, unshaved faces. The driver gives me a low smile as I place change in the scratched, clattering metal tray. He scoops it up into his stubby browned fingers, and hands me my torn ticket. On his dashboard are a fewer bumper stickers for various destinations in Japan, New Zealand and Malaysia, as well as worn photographs of what I assume to be his relatives, wife and children. I take an empty seat towards the back of the bus. The doors fold silently shut and the driver heaves a gear change. I lean my forehead against the cold sheen of the scratched window, cooling my pressed skin.

The bus rumbles louder, churning up speed as it steadily traverses the midnight street to the cross-roads at the end. I look out the window. In it, I see the spectral suspension of the wavering inside of the bus, mirrored, shivering breathlessly. Bright orange patches are sharp and fierce, overlaying the dark moving street outside with a hovering ghostliness, but the darker corners and extrusions of the twin, mysterious landscape of this other bus are lost to blackness. Michiru looks back to me, barely there she is so dark, the translucent veil of her silky-black skin only just distinguishable from the cold road that shudders along outside. But the orange hiss of light that settles to bathe on the swimming surface of her eyes dances back to me, clear and rounded, communicating. The bus speeds up and slows down gently, rising in gentle ebs and flows along the smooth cold earth of the night streets. I see the black shadow of the moving bus slip silently in and out of empty midnight shop windows, like a shark swimming in and out of blurred weeds in dark waters.

Nevertheless, I am calmer now. I remember how I panicked returning to my apartment.

It's strange not having Takeo.

I remember the last date we went on, when I met him at the arcade. I remember the Tenoh boy's face in profile, hearing nothing of his smiling, moving, living mouth through the swelling sea of noise that seemed to fill every cavity of my body there. And how I wanted his bright eyes, changing and ushering in the restless flare of orange light, to turn to me. His dark brow, gently questioning, and the strange effeminate softness of his round jaw. And the wry, curious smile of his pink, infantile mouth.

The bus heads North-West, rolling comfortably further of town, wheels grinding low grumbles in the quiet of the midnight outside. We pull up to a gentle halt outside a library. The two men stand up, and I look out to the black, deserted shell of the building, all lights out inside. The men descend from the bus, stopping to turn to each other as they step down to the brisk bus stop in the cool night air. As we pull away from them, I can see their mouths moving slightly as they say something indefinable to one another from afar. Then, we round a corner, and they are gone. I turn slowly back to gaze out of my window, and can see the rising black of the tree-speckled temple hill brimming over the apartment blocks and sleeping residential suburbs of houses. The streetlights blink past in steady Morse-code, blanking and ballooning soft pools of cold synthetic orange on the hard deserted pavement of the streets. Someone out on a bike flashes past in the opposite direction, down a road full of terraced residential family homes with clean, nondescript rendered walls high over small front gardens and concrete drives with uniform sleeping cars.

And again, from my mind's pool rises the image, the smell of the Tenoh boy, blurred just below the shivering surface until emerging, clear, stealing my breath. His tall, slender back, folding to his full height to gaze comfortably at me, not letting one thing slip. Biting his lip pensively. And the press of his brow into the crown of my hair, trying, somehow, to soak up something, and pushing for something to soak through into me. That moment tugged and strained, but wasn't quite released. Between us came that monsoon, once more, swelling up the river banks, trying to burst. He carries himself with an ironic, softly-sly discreteness, calculated and masculine, but I am drawn to this strange tenderness in him: the pliant, eased languidness of a prepubescent girl. His jeans hung off the fleshy bulge of his hips as his walked to the piano, before seating himself with a casual deftness to rest his neat fingers on the smooth keys.

I open my eyes. We are rolling, now, past individual homes with still smatterings of dark ivy nestling to the sleeping night-time walls. The deep, sweet smell of him rushes back to me at once with that dark, searching look, holding those flashes of sudden, intimate eyes that reflect a thousand times before that moment is extinguished. The film reel is looping again and again in my head: that look, urging until breaking point as he leans in the soft frame of his shoulders to press his lips to my cheek, and then gone.

A thousand times, fleeting first, then, once more, gone.

Bitter-sweetly, over and over.

How far is America?

This is crazy.

Now, trees disperse the houses, shadowy gatherings of black undergrowth indistinguishable by faint starlight. A dark carpet of black grass, stirring barely in the midnight chill, brims the cold pavement flashing by. Streetlamps are sparser. The slowing road rounds on itself, meandering from the foot of the hill. We flash past the stony entrance of the old temple, two stone lanterns bubbling flickering luminescence over the craggy, worn old stone steps, casting long orange shadows of mossy undergrowth up the red gate entrance. The bus pulls to a slow halt across from a lonely bus stop standing silently in front of a dark patch of trees that shields it thickly from a residential cul-de-sac slumbering just beyond. Through the twisted, black limbs of dense trees, I can see the fading orange twinge of a distant bedroom window.

The metal doors fold open once more. I ease myself up from the harsh-backed metal-rimmed seat, and stride down the hard walkway to the front of the bus. The driver gives me a small nod, and I step quietly down the metal steps and onto the cool concrete pavement. The brisk air of twilight catches me once more. The doors swish shut behind me, and the engine simmers up again, the bus rolling forward, picking up speed. I turn, pulling my coat closer to my neck, to watch the orange glow of the bus rumble quietly along the road, speeding away between dark rows of trees until it fades completely into the night. The cold air makes me strangely away of the tautness of my lungs with newfound iciness, and a fresh smattering of stars vaguely distinguish the black heavens from the black walls of bulky trees that isolate the road from the city, and continue up the other side up the slope of the hill. I start walking again with renewed alertness, awake, counting each swiftly-placed footstep along the untouched concrete. My eyes quiver on ahead of me, watching for a break in the glinting of streetlamp-light off stirring black leaves that will mark the mouth of the path to lead me up the hill. I pace on, duffel coat high on my neck, each breath like a deft painter's-stroke of cloudy warmth suspended momentarily before me. The narrow road is still, the odd leaf skittering across it in the stillness of night. The road continues to curve round the base of the hill into the trees until it is obscured from sight.

I can almost imagine the Tenoh boy's empty, silent car parked sleeping up on the pavement. I begin to let this fantasy carry my thoughts when my awareness crashes and stumbles back to reality as my eyes glance by chance upon the extrusion of some metal railing amongst the trees. I near it, and see that a wiggling series of steps, jittering to-and-fro up the hill as if someone had half-heartedly cast them there, snake up the hill between the trees.

I turn to look back behind myself down the desolate road, the dark shapes of houses hiding like children behind the forlorn, twisted undergrowth on the other side. Pressing a cold palm against the metal railing, I lift my foot and start up the concrete steps. I steadily heave my half-slumbering fleshy weight up each step: they are quite steep and seem quite old. A dark, indefinable layer of skeleton leaves hide the very edges of the steps, which are flanked on both sides by tall trees, densely enshrouding the hill in a thick coat of brambled twilight undergrowth. I work my way up the steps further, pushing on, my right hand clutching my bag as my left grasps the cold handrail.

I wonder when the last time was that anybody had used these steps. Gentle, bubbling, sleepy noises of nocturnal animals trickle out from the dark trees, calling and singing softly, lullabying in the star-punctured darkness. I look into the deep belly of the forest to my left: it is indistinguishably dark, all has receded into shadow, yet something in me can calculate some definable, palpable depth to its blackness. I wonder if some of the small creatures within it ever sit at the topmost canopies of the trees to see the stars. It is in this moment that I, myself, notice the clarity with which I can see the steps before me, yet there are no streetlamps.

Surely the stars aren't bright enough?

I look up as I push on up the old concrete steps, and for the first time tonight I see the moon: a full, porcelain moon hangs swinging in the sky, outshining the many stars that court it from all sides with a beaming whiteness, blank, distant and deep. I hammer on up the steps by moonlight, the air stirring cold as metal as I disturb its twilight settling amongst the trees. The steps continue, wiggling a vaguely upward path, hacking and slicing hastily between trees that rustle with nocturnal hum, despite which a pleasant silence still lies peacefully, enchanting all things at this hour. I reach to brush my hair back behind my ear, when I glance a thinning in the darkness of the trees to my left, a clearing closing in on the steps from just beyond them. I press on in the night, glancing to my left occasionally as I wind up the hillside between the flanks of trees slumbering in blanket darkness.

However, the density of the forest begins, too, to thin out, as the moonlit outlines crooked limbs of trees, sharpening now, distinct, and, eventually, the end of the steps come into sight up ahead. A few young trees now palely obscure the space to my left, just blurring the gaps there with a web of twisted, spindly branches hang with raggedy clumps of dank, leafy undergrowth like the corpse of tattered old black umbrellas. With a few more forced, upward-driven steps, faintly with quickened breath, I reach the top of the steps, and break out onto the open, clear grassy hilltop.

To my left, there is an opening in the trees wide enough to allow a car. I stride round to look down it, to see its is overgrown and littered with dark detritus and various man-made decay: the old splintered sides of rotting wooden crates, green bottles glistening with cold midnight dew, a broken cassette tape. All these, and the soot-black tangle of deep forest, are swallowed up by the depth of the hill, and the overgrown old driveway is dusted away into shadows as I look down. Before turning to start up over the very crest of the hill, I glance back down the higgledy steps that hack and wind skittishly down into moon-glinted blackness, and the shadowy hum of slumbering, bubbly nocturnal activity. The long grass in moist against my icy ankles, and my heels sink gently into the dank earth. It is so dark I cannot make out the ground, but press on up to the top of the hill. As I stride on, the vapourous orange glow of the city, like the ghost of a great forest fire just over the break of the hill, crowns the hill. It is so faint at first, I am unsure whether I am imagining it or not, and then, clearer, like the pale red-blood-vessel glow in the womb from the outside world, a soft, assured beacon that snatches the sharp silhouette of dewy grass with glittering blades of orange and white, accompanied by the ever-blossoming moonlight.

I round the top of the hill, and the twinkling cityscape, a mirror to the glittering heavens, explodes over the deep midnight horizon: a geometric parade of criss-crossing webs of Christmas-tree lights, yellow, orange, white, pink, fidgeting and winking brightly as far as I can see. The whole city cuddles close to the earth, shivering with endless scattered lights in pockets, lines, dancing clusters, as if stars had been sprinkled down, like tiny luminous snowflakes, from the deep, inky indigo of the twilight heavens. Against the sparkling night time city is the clean silhouette of a decrepit platform.

Ploughing on through the cool grass, I make my way to, as he had said, the deserted foundations of an old house. I pick my way through moss-blanketed debris, and climb carefully up a collapsed step whose rotten, splintered black moisture swims in blue moonlight. The stripped wooden floor creaks with hollow, aging groans as I walk with trepidation across the remains of the front room of the house. The whole wooden platform, facing high out from the top of the hill over the deep trees to the city, is the ground floor of what was once a very grand house. The walls are now but tiny, crumbling stumped partitions, but 6 inches high if anything, nonetheless casting long, romantic shadows in the moonlight. And, as the Tenoh boy had said, set against the city lights, is the slumbering, soft, old form of a sofa, sitting quietly in the remains of the South-East-most room, looking out over the panoramic midnight cityscape.

I pick my way over the cumbersome, dusty remains of walls in the moonlight, stars winking down on me from the great, deep inky dome of the heavens that enshroud the hilltop with the heavy, sleepy, navy-blue velvet of coolest night. I reach the sofa, and set my bag down at my feet, opening it to retrieve my soft, worn picnic blanket. The sofa is a great, grand old thing, a huge, deep, squashy 3-seater that one could easily sink into and get lost in. It is battered, but all its parts are intact and it looks, indeed, very sturdy. I throw my blanket over it, and turn to heave down onto it.

I then look up, and the view that meets me is greater still than when I first rounded the hilltop. It is as if I am looking down from heaven at all below me, twinkling and slumbering away. The night is cool and dewy-fresh, brisk on the twilight hilltop, but the passing, twinkling kisses blown by stars, and the deep, breathless musk of the ancient sofa that hugs me into it are warm and seduce me with heavy sleep. Below me, small sounds of the city float up to me comfortably. And the moon is clearer and brighter now than ever, seemingly almost closer, full, white and pregnant, beaming crisply down to me with remarkable health and unearthly shine. I could almost reach up to it to lay my palms on the cool, hard surface that emits this startling, glowing whiteness.

I close my eyes and a feeling escapes me with a ghostly sigh. I pull my coat tight to me, sinking back into the sofa. Can the Tenoh boy see this brilliant clear moon too?

The Pacific's a big thing.

A feverishly messy crop of long, blond hair that grazes his collar and his dark brow crowns the blurred image of him that runs in a slow-motion loop in my mind. I try to gather up these few select memories with reverent, frenzied haste like an evacuee quickly gathering their most treasured belongings. I am startled to find my eyes are open again, and gazing down at the city.

If he were there, sitting casually next to me, deep in thought, legs crossed musefully, turning to raise one aloof eyebrow in that strangely quizzical, warmly ironic way, before breaking the corners of his mouth into a small grin, running a fidgety palm through his hair, opening his mouth hesitantly to say something sparse I couldn't possibly begin to predict…

I wish I could just sit and let his quiet simplicity soak into me. He isn't simple, though. Again and again I stumble before myself and he's caught me off guard, and I'm wide eyed and breathless like a deer caught in headlamps. I can never read him. He reflects the full very depth and worry of mine, but somehow, he copes. He swallows it whole, and, strangely, smiles.

You're not kidding anybody, Michiru.

The stars are bright and small. The dark, sleeping forest hums in the breeze on the hilltop. The look of him and smell of him and the memory of the feel of him pacify me, soften and ease me into the night-time world. Everything, somehow, is rounded and brighter, blooming gently, and the noise less pressing.

And, before I even realise it's happening, I'm being lovingly dragged along by some breathless, hungry magnetism that holds me with a precise, well-practised firmness that knows my heart even more preciously, with even more subtlety, than I ever could. The ghostly sigh of the inky night folds in around me. It's a warm, brilliant ache.

-

Teddy was stood at the tall window looking out over the city by evening when I returned from the hall. His apartment was very spacious, but full of retro clutter and sports paraphernalia. He'd made it into a really indulgent, nostalgic bachelor pad for when he was away from his family home. The table and coffee lamps were on, glowing away meticulously under stretched, soft-coloured cotton shades, and the New York radio dribbled out from the old cassette player on the breakfast bar. The coffee machine was humming away busily. When he heard me enter, striding slowly and quietly over his askew Moroccan rugs to round his big, squashy couches, he turned and gave me a big grin over his beer.

"No luck?" he exclaiming warmly before raising his eyebrows, and turning to hoist his beefy frame down onto his worn couch.

"Unfortunately no".

"Well… I didn't think you'd get through to the school anyhow, they're probably closed". He looked up at me, and I resumed a place next to him.

"Did you try that… erm, Takeo, is it, guy?"

"Yeah, no luck". I leaned forward to pick up my bottle from the comfortably ring-stained wooden table, and Teddy flicked on the big TV. It was a noisy, buzzing American Football game. He leaned back to enjoy it.

"What about violin girl?"

"Huh?" I looked at him vacantly, warily. He gave me another stubbly grin.

"What's her name, Mer…Meh…"

"-Michiru?"

"Got it, kid".

He took another swig of beer, draping his browned arm over the back of the sofa, absorbed in the game. I waited a little while pensively before replying.

"Yeah, I did".

"And did you get through to her?" I couldn't tell how much attention he was paying me. I glanced at the deepening sunset over the balcony outside, the ripening stars.

"No".

"Gonna try her again tomorrow?"

I waited again, sitting up straight, fingering my shirt cuffs. I saw in the pale reflection of the windows that I was biting my lip.

"Well…I…"

My voice was lost.

Teddy laughed wonderfully, patting his thinning head with his free hand, grinning as he enjoyed more of his beer.

"Ms. Tenoh," he sang, deeply amused, "do you remember that young British guy we bumped into in that bar when you were staying here last September?"

"What… that one who called me, what was it…a 'fucking pillock'? He was a right little punk, what a creep. Had nothing better to do I suppose".

Teddy continued to watch the game on the TV with intent enjoyment. A new song started on the radio in the corner.

"That's the one".

I hesitated.

"What about him?"

Teddy grinned again.

"He was right, you know".

"What?"

I stared at him. He just continued to grin, eyes darting back to the game.

"Yeah, well. Just call her again tomorrow, okay?"

I paused.

"Okay".

Teddy chuckled.

"You really are slow, kid".

I retorted nothing, and drank my beer.

-

Instalment number 4, oh yes! A big one, yup, I'm quite proud. Sorry it's sooo late, but I've just started college again and I'm having to get back into the habit of getting down to homework BEFORE 6.30pm in the evening, hehe. Nevertheless, I've managed this one in my free minutes. I feel my writing improving with every chapter, and all constructive criticism to help me further improve would be most welcome :) stay tuned for the fateful reunion of our star-crossed lovers! 'til next time, peace x