Last night was a mistake.
Rather, that's what Kyoko continued to chant in her head from the time she left his apartment. She hoped the repetition would be enough to convince her that it was true. That the real mistake wasn't leaving Kuon behind. Naturally, it didn't work.
Nor did the hot bath she took upon returning home or the dutiful commute to work. Nothing could distract her mind from replaying the previous night on repeat. A realisation had dawned on her. One she tried to escape as fervently as she tried to scrub Kuon's plea from her ears.
"Don't go through with it."
They sliced at her heart with the precision and keenness of a scalpel and, even in his absence, the echoing of them still threatened to bring her to tears. They were a near thing too, just waiting at the corners of her burning eyes. She'd exhausted her supply of stalwart resistance the night before trying to pretend as if what happened meant nothing.
Trying to pretend that the careful, thoughtful way he gradually took her apart with his mouth, his hands, his entire body meant nothing. When it meant everything.
What they'd done was not an act of mindless lust. Well it was more than that, to be precise. It was an act of desperation. For both of them. Whether her desperation assumed the same form as his, she couldn't be sure. And it killed her to hope that it might.
Acting was a blessed skill to have in times like these. It was the opportunity to become someone else entirely. Kyoko fell into character from the moment the director called for action and firmly stayed there for the rest of the day. Her character didn't have the same worries she did. It was a refuge from the newest shambles she'd recently left her life in.
"You really gave it your all today," the director observed with a pleased smile. "Thank you for your hard work." Kyoko's answering one felt a little too much like that of a certain senpai of hers.
"Everyone here is so dedicated, I couldn't help but try my hardest to meet their level of commitment."
Even the tone of her reply made her stomach twist into sick knots of recognition. It only made the distress she carried with her all day exponentially worse. They really have spent entirely too much time together. She sounded just like him.
She politely made her hasty exit, claiming she needed to meet with her manager. There was no meeting. There was only the explicit need to get out of there and return home as quickly as possible. The burning behind her eyes had returned with greater force and she was loath to break down anywhere with innocent bystanders.
That desire alone was what kept her together for the entire ride back to her apartment, through the agonisingly long elevator ride to her floor and right up until she unlocked her door. By then, the veritable monsoon was raring to get started. But, just as the first drop started to fall, she caught sight of the person sitting in her living room. In the dark.
Ah, yes, she had given him a spare key when she moved in all those months ago. Kyoko never regretted that decision until now. Doubly so once he turned to look at her and the sorrowful shine glazing his own eyes stole all breath from her lungs. His mouth opened to speak and she would've traded all she had in that moment to stop him.
"I've been thinking."
She wanted to retort with something cutting and filled with sarcasm but his eyes rendered her woefully lacking. He breathed. She waited.
"It never was an incompatibility of wants, was it?"
With his attention deliciously directed elsewhere, Kyoko was grateful to have only the faint orange glow from the lamp on the ceiling to stare at. Not only because the swirling of his tongue made her head swim in the most incredible way possible. Not because the pressing of his fingers in just the right spot nearly lifted her clear off the bed.
Her true gratitude lay in the fact that she didn't have to look into those damned eyes of his. She didn't much care for how ecstasy and utter desolation could reside in the same place like that. Mostly because it mirrored her own heart. They had bared themselves to each other in every way possible. Now that this last wall had fallen, the truth was unavoidable.
But Kyoko was nothing if not a fighter and she took him in her hands when he crawled back up her body to press gentle open-mouthed kisses to her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. Her caresses forced those pitiable eyes of his closed. The deep moans she wrought from him were more than enough to keep her from acknowledging the truth.
The truth that they had both been lying for years. To themselves and to each other.
"No." It came out rattled, waterlogged. "It wasn't."
She had no more pretending left in her. All that was there was an actuality that left her raw and devastated. Hiding was no longer an option, distraction was nowhere to be found. Dropping her belongings to the ground, she approached him without bothering to wipe the wetness from her cheeks. A hollow, self-deprecating laugh left him.
"It's always us standing in our own way."
She nodded once before settling herself beside him. "In our defence, we've had years to perfect the art."
"We denied it for so long with excuse after excuse."
And wasn't that the part that hurt the worst? Knowing that they could have loved each other (and, in reality, had done) in the way they kept claiming they could not. All those conversations about what a downright shame it was that their own inherent issues held them back from a true relationship, nothing but a mask to conceal the fact that they were scared to put a definitive label on the one they already had. Together, they drew from the well of denial until only silt and stone and dust remained.
"Well, I think we've finally run out of them."
"Where do we go, then; now that there's nothing left?"
"Where do we go?!" Kyoko looked skyward for help that she knew wasn't coming. "We're already there!"
Another empty laugh. "Right, we just refused to give it a name."
"I think you tried last night, though it wasn't in a language I understood."
Not that it mattered, really. Kyoko didn't have to know what language he spoke when she already knew what his heart had been dying to scream at hers for so long. And what hers wanted to scream in return.
The words he cooed at her meant little in terms of pure translation, though the sounds at least were pleasing to her ears. But she felt their meaning. She felt every nuance and definition telegraphing a shuddering ache through her at every point where her body touched his. Speaking the words aloud, encoded as they were, only served to confirm that this wasn't just a conjuring of her imagination.
He was giving himself to her in the only way he had not up until that point and, oh, how she wanted to accept him.
How she wanted the pounding of her heart to match the pace at which he drove into her, pulling breathy cries from them both, because that was the only thing between them that wasn't flawlessly synchronised.
How she wanted to hold him inside her for as long as she dared, to relish in the reality that they fit perfectly together like puzzle pieces in every possible way when she wrapped her legs tightly around him for a beat, only to release him and push her head away to hide the embarrassment of her own need.
Instead, she let his words wash over her in a lavish shower and focused on the feel of every inch of him filling her to completeness over and over and over again. There was a wholeness he gave her that she knew with a terrifying certainty she'd never find anywhere else. And, now that it had been realised, she would forever feel bereft without it. The punishing, excruciating effect only worsened when he made his heartfelt appeal.
"Don't go through with it."
She didn't want to. If she had been honest, she'd have confessed the reason she even told him about the ridiculous marriage arrangement was so that he would somehow talk her out of it. Perhaps she even wanted them to just finally admit the things they hadn't wanted to say out loud. Instead she got a night of incomparable passion that would cast a shadow on any other interactions she could have in the future and a single entreaty uttered in the midst of post-coital bliss. Kyoko could have been angry at him; maybe even should have. Yet the events of that night, and every night leading up to it, proved that they were both to blame.
They'd danced around the issue for years, knowing full well that the ballroom shrank around them with each passing day.
A thumb came up to wipe at her tears and Kyoko was lost enough in thought that it didn't register that the thumb belonged to someone else for several seconds. Once it did, she drew back, her gaze meeting Kuon's in the city lights that blared through the nearby window. Depths of greens that spoke of forests and meadows stared back at her. There was a time before he publicly reclaimed his true identity when she loved when he would remove his contacts because she knew he did it only for her.
"I'm ready if you are."
His voice was a whisper full to bursting with promises she wanted nothing more than to believe in. She breathed. He waited.
"That was the problem, wasn't it? We've both been ready."
"Then let's dispense with the problem."
Kuon brought his other hand up to softly cup her face between them. He stooped his head for a moment and Kyoko saw the tension in his shoulders tighten and release, like he'd mustered all the courage he was able. A funny thing, to be sure, that he needed courage to confirm a foregone conclusion. Even funnier that she found herself doing the same thing, summoning the last reserves of her strength for when he looked at her once more.
"Kyoko Mogami, will you let me love you?" he asked. "Openly, officially love you?"
Kyoko banished the urge to look away when his eyes searched hers. Now was not the time for that. Now was the time to finally speak the words she'd withheld for fear of what came after. Now was the time to make the notion they created between themselves tangible; to make the unknown wholly and unabashedly known.
"Only if you'll allow me the same."
Not even the glitzy, garish lights of the city could rival the way his face lit up. Moving closer, he pressed his forehead to hers and sighed.
"So it required either an act of god or the threat of a fake marriage for us to finally get to this point."
"We certainly deserve each other."
Fighting against the mordant twist of her lips was a losing battle as soon as the words left her lips. Kuon's laugh was, at last, real and whole. She could have warmed herself in it for all of the sunshine that filled his voice.
"In the best way," he agreed. "And also the worst."