Me like L'Arc-En-Ciel :-)
Chapter Nine
Morning again, and the weak sunlight poured through the huge windows, throwing reflections everywhere, spilling puddles of light all around the room. Anna pressed her nose to the glass. The cherry tree outside seemed to have burst into fruit overnight, displaying hundreds of gaudy red cherries. One single solitary sakura blossom was still left, right at the top of the tree, sticking out like a very strange kind of sore thumb. The grass was littered with a blanket of pale pink petals, dropped there to signify the end of spring. Like the flowers, her joy was short-lived. She had Hao to put up with now. He'd sort of become more of a chore than a spouse, and needed taking care of or else he threw a massive strop. She giggled, remembering the last night, when he'd thrown a lampshade at her for making teriyaki instead of ramen. Did it matter that much that it was burnt? She threw a disgusted glare at him, to no avail, as he was still asleep, his arms wrapped round the pillow, smiling innocently. As if someone like him could ever be innocent.
Back in Yokohama, Yoh was packing up the hotel room, shoving clothes and a de-lux tube of hair gel pell-mell into a suitcase. He sat on it, trying to zip it up, but the zip refused to move. There was too much in it.
He sighed, and opened the wardrobe again. Most of the things still left were Anna's. Almost supernatural mementoes of the extremely recent. A gold necklace. A blue kimono. A box full of earrings. A cracked leather handbag. A pair of beaded Chinese slippers, sequins falling off the butterfly design, soles peeling. Various underwear all over the floor. He pulled most of the things off their hangers, out of their drawers and into another suitcase. He left the slippers behind.
Suddenly, he had an idea. He dived into one of the bags and fished out a small silver mobile phone. He muttered to himself, scrolling through the numbers of people he knew. They seemed like dusty broken statues, thrown into a back garden somewhere.
"Tao Ren...Tamao...how did I get her number? Usui Horokeu...nobody calls him that...aha, Manta-kun."
A long while later, when the sunlight was rapidly fading, Yoh found himself lying on a single bed in Manta's house, all by himself. He sighed loudly. The smells of cooking wafted up from downstairs, tempting him. Still he didn't move. He reminded himself from now on, there was no Anna, she wasn't there. He tried to forget she had ever existed in his presence, but her image floated to the front of his head again and again. The pillow even seemed to smell like her. Shadows, transparent models of her drifted about inside his brain, driving him mad.
"Yoh! I knew you'd find me!"
"Eurgh! How much do you sweat?"
"...and don't drag me!"
Now there was nobody to embrace, nobody's hair to smell, nobody to lie and be watched sleeping by him, nobody to whisper sweet nothings in his ear when he was pretending to be asleep, nobody to nag him about cooking, cleaning or money.
Had there ever been an Anna in the first place?