A/N: A faster update! Woohoo! By the way, the next five or so chapters should be fun. At least, I hope they are. You be the judge. Thanks for reading!

xXx

ELEVEN

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The subtle clink and clank of utensils on dinner plates irritated Hana more than she expected it to. Her father's low, mumbled comments about his day served as white noise in her ears, not necessarily distracting her from what was on her mind, but rather aggravating the issue consuming her thoughts.

Her green eyes looked somberly down at her half-eaten dinner of coq au vin, a rustic French dish that her mother used to make for her when she was feeling particularly rotten. She was glad that her father had remembered such a tradition (if it could be called such), but he wasn't the cook her mother was, which he admitted. Mr. Kurosawa had not needed to ask his daughter what had happened regarding her project with Tai. He soon deduced the answer himself, especially when he observed that Hana was no longer telling him that she would be home late because she was at Tai's or at the library. That Hana refused to mention the boy's name and the sour expression she wore whenever he brought Tai up in conversation also confirmed his suspicions.

He glanced over at his daughter from across the dining table. She poked absently at her food with her dinner fork, her elbow on the table and her cheek resting on a balled fist.

"You doing all right with your school work, Han?" he asked her.

"Yeah," she said, disinterested in the topic. She didn't look at him.

"Your project's due soon. You seem to have the deadline written on several post-its across the apartment—in your room, on the refrigerator, on the computer monitor…"

"So it is."

"Are you and Tai going to put your work together soon?"

Hana sighed heavily through her nose.

"Yes, Dad. We'll get it done."

"I don't see how you will if you don't call him."

"I'll shoot him an e-mail," she replied bitterly.

In the days since she had last contemplated proposing a truce to Tai, Hana's practices with the corps had intensified now that Nakamura saw that she was capable of keeping up with the older dancers. Even the amount of caffeine she swallowed on a daily basis didn't give her enough energy to make serious headway with her science project. Her tri-weekly tutoring sessions with Izzy also weren't helping her sleep. As much as she hated admitting it, she needed help, but she stubbornly clung to her forced resentment. She would not make the first move to apologize.

To avoid talking with her father further on the subject, Hana excused herself from the table to go into the kitchen to get a glass of water. She had just turned on the faucet and ducked a cup under the running stream when the doorbell rang.

xXx

Tai used the time to walk from his apartment complex to Hana's neighborhood to think about what it was that he was doing—or rather, what he was about to do. He would have been lying to himself if he had said that the last week had gone on just swimmingly. It hadn't. Leaving the university library abruptly with his sister seemed the best idea at the time, but looking back on it, he couldn't have made a stupider decision. What did he know of black holes? Didn't he fail the exam on astronomy? Wasn't his project due soon?

It took a few days and a long conversation with Matt (along with a few well-deserved smacks on the forehead) to admit that he had done wrong to sever his early friendship with Hana so close to their assignment deadline. At the time, he wasn't ready to confess his guilt to his project partner, and when he had emailed her suggesting that they do their parts separately and then put things together the day before the due date, he omitted any form of an apology.

Hana had replied with a curt agreement, also refraining from mentioning the incident at the library, and Tai had read it as a confirmation that she hated him. He wasn't new to ticking girls off. He was apparently very gifted in saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but he nonetheless panicked about it, perhaps not necessarily because he was losing Hana as a friend, but more that, without her, he would surely fail their science class.

He hadn't bothered to call Hana beforehand to let her know that he was coming. He knew she would be at home, anyway, because he had called Izzy, who happened to have had a tutoring session with her earlier in the evening. What would he have done, anyway, if he had called her on the phone? Apologize and then wait for her to accept it, or, more likely, for her not to accept his apology at all? Or, worse, hang up immediately? Or, even more worse, listen to him and then tell him she'd call him back? In what? A millennium?

Tai knew he wouldn't have been able to endure the "what-ifs" for longer than twenty-four hours, so he found it best to first, catch Hana off-guard, and, second, to talk to her directly. Normally, he would have had to announce his arrival to Hana via the apartment intercom in order to be let into the building, but luckily someone was leaving the complex just as he arrived, allowing him to slip past the closing doors.

He pressed the doorbell to the Kurosawa residence without hesitation and stuffed his hands into his shorts' pockets to keep himself from poking the buzzer numerous times. His shoe tapped anxiously on the doormat.

With a click and a twist of the doorknob, the front door gave way, revealing Hana on the other side, her jaw dropping in surprise at his presence.

"Tai," she said, as if the name was foreign on her tongue. "What are you doing here?"

"I… uh…" He scratched his head and shifted his eyes away from her briefly. "I need to, er… talk to you."

Hana's brow furrowed and her green eyes scrutinized her project partner cruelly, skeptical of his request. Her anger ebbed almost as soon as it came, however, when she realized that he had come all the way from his own home to see her. The door was parted further.

"Come in, Tai," she said, turning around and beckoning him over her shoulder.

Mr. Kurosawa greeted Tai quickly, suddenly perceiving that his parental company was not only awkward, but undesired.

"I'll go grade some assignments," he said, excusing himself and going into his bedroom. He emerged shortly afterwards, saying that he had forgotten his students' papers in his car. When Mr. Kurosawa had grabbed his car keys and exited the apartment, Tai finally found room to speak, hoping that he wouldn't be interrupted.

Hana had gone back to her seat at the dinner table, her half-eaten meal still lying cold before her. She knew it was proper to have Tai sit down, but the invitation wouldn't come out of her mouth. She just sat in her chair, looking at him standing a ways off from her in the bit of hallway behind her father's chair at the head of the table. His unease was blatantly palpable.

"So you know how in my email I said that we could finish the project separately and then put our research together before its due?" he said, almost too hurriedly for Hana to understand right away.

"Yes," she said, after a long and uncomfortable pause. "Are we still sticking to that plan?"

"No." Tai was quick to reply. "I came here because I can't do my part without you."

Hana stared blankly back at him, unsure of what to make of his claim.

"I mean," he continued, reading her silence as a need to justify himself, "I failed the astronomy unit. Everything I read about black holes goes right over my head. Thinking back on it, I don't even know why I agreed to this topic because I know next to nothing about what makes the galaxy spin." He gestured to her. "You seemed to know what you were doing, so I let you take charge."

"You didn't have to agree with me, Tai," she said.

"That's not the point, Hana," he snapped, immediately regretting it afterwards. "If I had taken the lead, we'd be doing a project on volcanoes… or some other dumb thing." His mouth worked to form the right response. He got into too much trouble speaking before thinking, and so he would think long and hard about what he had to say in order to set things right again.

"I'm sorry about what I said at the library… about Ryo." The words seemed to escape his lips miserably. "It was a jerk move. I'm sorry. I just can't finish this project without your help."

Hana leaned back in her chair, bringing her knees up and resting them against the edge of the table, her heels perched on her seat. Her gaze softened on him in the time she took to assess his apology, though the perceptible sweat on his forehead did help him earn her pity.

She got up from her seat.

"Tai," she said gently. He tentatively raised an eyebrow at her.

"Yeah?"

"Do you want some ice cream?"

The question caught him so off guard that he didn't know how to respond. He stared at her, perplexed, wondering if she had really just replied to his apology with an invitation to eat dessert.

"Uh, sure?" he said, not really knowing what else to say.

Hana picked up her dinner plate and went into the kitchen, dumping it into the sink before opening the freezer and pulling out a carton of cookie dough ice cream. A short minute later and she was back in the dining room, two spoons in one hand.

"Sit," she said, pointing to her father's chair at the head of the table.

Tai sat, running a hand through his hair in his confusion. He had just spilled out his guts to Hana and she responded by offering him ice cream. It must have been a French thing.

Hana took the seat to his left and set the ice cream carton on the table somewhere in between the two of them. She gave him a spoon.

"You don't mind sharing, right?" she asked as she pried the lid off the dessert, her spoon already wedged between her teeth.

"Um… no." It was a lie. He would have preferred having his own bowl, but he was trying to appease her any way possible. She hadn't, after all, given him a clear sign that she had forgiven him, yet.

"Good. 'Cause when I went shopping with Sora this past weekend, I went to get ice cream and asked her if she wanted some, too. When I came back with one serving and two spoons she looked at me as if I'd grown two heads."

She laughed lightly afterwards, dunking her utensil into the frozen treat.

"I figured it was a Japanese thing," she said, swallowing a large dollop of ice cream, "to be so wary about who invades your space. She went along with it, though, and I assured her I wasn't going to spread her any disease."

As amusing as her story was, Tai couldn't remain distracted for too long. He hadn't even picked up his spoon nor even looked at the ice cream in front of him. He just kept looking at her, wondering how she could suddenly act as if she were his best friend when, moments earlier, she seemed to hate him to the core.

"Hana," he said sternly, interrupting her before she could stuff another spoonful into her mouth. "Are we…" He waved a hand in between them. "… okay?"

His project partner sucked subtly at her teeth before setting her spoon on the tabletop and leaning toward him.

"Yeah," she said, keeping his stare, "we are. And, for what it's worth, Tai, I'm sorry for what I did, too. If anyone pulled a jerk move first, it was me. I mean, I was the one who told you that that girl thought you were cute. I shouldn't have made fun of you when you actually went up to talk to her. I guess I wasn't expecting you to have the guts to do it."

He smiled faintly back at her.

"I thought she'd appreciate some enthusiasm," he admitted, picking up his spoon and dipping it into the carton.

"Nothing wrong with that," she replied, stealing the piece of cookie dough that he was aiming for. "Lots of girls like a guy with spunk."

"Yeah, well, it won't matter. I lost her number."

Hana startled him by giving him a nudge in the shin with her bare foot.

"All the more reason to go back to the library to find her again," she said, beaming back at him midchew.

"I have a feeling we're going to be there a lot over the next week."

"Oh? Why's that?"

He laughed feebly, his hand scratching the back of his head.

"Well… I haven't, um, exactly done anything for our project in the past week…"

Shortly after his confession, Hana stole the ice cream carton from him just as he was about to dive into it again and quickly put it back in the freezer.

"I'm afraid my hospitality ends there, Tai," she said, approaching him and poking his forehead with her index finger. "We have to put this sucker here to use." She couldn't help but smile at the disgruntled face he returned back at her, his stare gone crosseyed as he looked at her finger. She laughed.

"There's a lot of work to do."