Note on title change: Ergh, I went to check my reviews, and the very first one was this really scary note from some comic book company telling me I stole their title and that they would take me to court if I didn't ask permission. Since they left their e-mail address, I tried to ask, but for some reason the letter wouldn't go through. So I got really scared and decided to just change it. Yeah. True story.
"Drink up baby down
Are you in or are you out?
Leave your things behind
'Cause it's all going off without you
Excuse me, too busy, you're writing a tragedy
These mess-ups
You bubble-wrap
When you've no idea what you're like"
"Let Go," Frou Frou (the Garden State song!!)
The Things That Matter Most
The airport was populated sparsely, in the way that a store is populated before closing time, with piles of luggage scattered about as foothills to the sleepy, mountainous bodies of their owners.
Planes ran past the windows and out of sight, but the roar of them was a constant buzz in the background. The buzz went out and in, again and again, as if the planes were dragging it with them across the sky, talking back and forth in the rumbling language of mechanic birds.
Inuyasha stood awkwardly by his father in the waiting room, and felt around for something significant to say. But of course there was nothing. The boarding call had already been issued for his flight, number forty-six to Tokyo, and he was standing by his father, and both of them were stupidly silent. His duffel bag was his only companion.
Inuyasha's feet were preparing to leave, making shifting movements on the hard, wearied carpeting.
"It's been a pleasure having you stay, Inuyasha," said Touga. Even to Touga, it must have sounded like something a stranger would say, so he tried again. "I don't want to hear any bad news from that school of yours."
Inuyasha could safely say, "You won't."
"I hope not. Well... Ah...goodbye." And to make up for the something that was obviously lacking, Touga brought out his white, manicured hand. Inuyasha shook it unenthusiastically, suddenly sick with yearning both to be gone and to uncover that missing element.
"Bye," he said, as he walked away, past the rows of identical nest-shaped seats, and down the boarding tunnel. He hitched his bag higher on his shoulder, and stared straight ahead all the way.
Inuyasha found his seat, and sat heavily in it for five or six minutes, cradling his head in his hands. He looked up as a flight attendant passed by, smiling and perfect in her blue skirt and blazer.
"Excuse me, stuartess?" he said politely to catch her attention. "I need to get off the plane."
''''
Kagome's cousin rented a loft in Monterey where he lived. His name was Miroku Higurashi, and he left a lot of the space open for him to work. The hardwood floors were left unfurnished, and the couches were squashed into a corner as if huddling around the television.
Near that same corner was a door that led to an inconveniently small bathroom, and Miroku's own bedroom. The kitchen was down there too, and in it there was no table because the kitchen and the laundry room were the same, and the table would have left no room to do the laundry.
There had been a small laundry room and a second bedroom when Miroku moved in, but he knocked down the walls to make more room for his work. That was before he knew Kagome was coming.
Kagome ended up making her bed on a mattress that she moved about the floor wherever she liked, which worked out fine for her.
Usually, her mattress ended up close to the TV. Her feet sponged down into it as she returned to the couch, her hands full with the piping bag of microwave popcorn. The sofa welcomed her back, and she crossed her ankles, nestling a pillow between her body and the twin hills of her knees. The popcorn bag nuzzled her side.
On the TV screen a middle-eastern boy sang to Doris Day about the tourist trade, exposing rows of pearl-white teeth between his dusky brown lips. The phone rang just as Kagome was becoming comfortable, and drowned out whatever the boy sang next.
"I'm answering your phone, okay?" Sango called from the kitchen. The phone stopped ringing before Kagome could reply.
It was probably Miroku, trying to explain why he had kept Sango waiting for a half hour. Kagome smiled at the television. He would need good luck for that one.
But unexpectedly Sango's voice carried down the hall again. "Kagome, do you know someone named Inuyasha?"
Inu...yasha...?
Wonderingly, Kagome unfolded herself from the couch. She padded swiftly down the hall and snatched the kitchen phone from Sango. My god, she thought, because their meeting had been so surreal that she had convinced herself that, like a dream, it could never occur the same way again.
"Hello?" she said hesitantly into the receiver.
"Kagome," came the reply, in the inexplicably recognizable voice that was Inuyasha's. "Hi."
It was as if his reality was confirmed, and her memory of him jumped out at her in exquisite detail. She imagined strikingly violet eyes, a face harshly youthful, and shorn black hair. So black you could hang stars in it.
"Hi," Kagome echoed back. Her mouth twisted into a shape that resembled a smile, and she motioned Sango toward the door with a toss of her head.
Sango rolled her eyes, but left anyway.
"Um... how are you?" asked Kagome, while her toe made little circles on the floor. She felt nervous.
"A little cold, but alright, I guess."
Why did she feel nervous?
"I can't believe you called," she blurted, then made a face at her own awkwardness.
"Who else would I call in Monterey?"
"I don't know... You're the son of some rich guy, I just though you would have, you know, high society contacts, or something..."
"No," he said, so flatly that Kagome was taken aback.
"Oh. Well... I just can't believe you called me," she tried again.
"Hey," his voice buzzed into her ear, simultaneously close and far away. "I want to ask you something."
Irrational as it was, her heart thudded faster.
"What is it?"
"In person," said Inuyasha on the other end.
"Oh... Um..."
"What?" His voice had the stretched quality of a smile. "You don't want to see me?"
"Not really," Kagome giggled.
"Oh, so you were just jerking me around by giving me your number."
She smiled. "That's the idea."
"Wench."
"You'd better be nice to me. I don't go anywhere with strangers who don't treat me right," she told the receiver slyly, buffing her nails on her long flannel robe for effect that went unseen.
"But you do make a habit of going places with strangers?"
"Naturally," lied Kagome.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
There was silence on both ends.
"You hungry?" asked Inuyasha. "I'll buy you lunch."
And now whatever assurance she had gained from the conversation was stripped away like twigs against the prevailing force of the wind.
"Um..." She hooked the word on her lips and let it stretch. Yes? No? Did it matter? "Where are you?"
"I'm, ah..." In her mind's eye she could see him searching for something recognizable. "Heh. Where else? Cannery Row."
"Oh. That's not too far."
"Come on. I'll treat you."
Kagome remained silent for a long while.
"Kagome?"
"You said it was cold out, right?" she asked, watching her feet move slowly on the floor. What had she gotten herself into? "I'll bring a jacket. Meet me in the diner, okay?"
"Okay. Uh, see you."
"Bye."
The phone returned to its cradle with a click of plastic.
Inuyasha must have been used to getting what he wanted, Kagome reflected as she went to dress. He was good at it.
''''
Inuyasha watched the tin spoon fly slowly under the purposeful control of Kagome's hand. It dove deep into the mounds of whipped cream, which were tall and bilious like clouds, and sought out the white and pink gold of the ice cream. On a brown napkin nearby, an artificially red cherry was sweating and glistening in the dark spot of its own perspiration.
"Mmm," Kagome sighed as the clean spoon slid out from between her lips. Then again, "mmm."
Inuyasha's cheek pressed heavily into the palm of his hand, and his eyes, following the spoon, were idly half-lidded.
"Are you sure you don't want real food?" he asked, for the third time.
"This is real food," she replied. "The sundae is one of mankind's great achievements. It's like the fruit of... um..."
"A cow?" supplied Inuyasha, smirking.
She wrinkled her nose. "Cow-fruit?"
"Is that above you somehow?"
Kagome's tongue flashed at him, and it had a thin stripe of brown fudge down the center.
"That's disgusting," he noted absently.
"Jerk."
"And what of it?"
"You want some?" Kagome asked, instead of responding. "There's an extra spoon here." She wagged it in front of his eyes temptingly.
"No," he said bluntly.
"It's goo-ood..." She took a demonstrative bite with her own spoon, returning the extra to its place on the table.
"No." He folded his arms for good measure.
She loaded her spoon with a dripping pile of ice cream and whipped topping and extended it toward him. "Here."
Inuyasha allowed his eyes to speak for him.
"Oh, come on..." As Kagome leaned forward over the table her blouse revealed a generous dip of her cleavage between the open lapels of her coat.
"Uh..."
Laughing, she stuck the spoon into his gaping mouth, spilling the desert over his chin and the tip of his nose.
Immediately Inuyasha recoiled in surprise, sputtering. He groped for a napkin and covered his face with it. His eyes narrowed as they took in Kagome, giggling across from him.
Bitch, he thought, bitch! Had she done that on purpose? But there was no way to know, and looking at the plain long hair and smiling face he doubted she could be that manipulative.
An accident, then. The idea calmed him somewhat.
"You like it?" Kagome asked brightly.
And suddenly he was not so calm. But for his own sake he limited himself to glowering at her.
Wordlessly she pushed the extra spoon toward him. Inuyasha eyed it briefly. Whether he had liked it or not, his dignity wouldn't allow him to take another bite. Kagome shrugged and lifted her spoon again to her mouth.
"So..." She paused to swallow. "So, your life must be interesting. Tell me about yourself."
Tell me about yourself. Tell me, tell me... Something tightened inside him, rebelled violently against the idea.
"What are you, a paparazzi?" he asked irritably.
Her eye ticked. "What are you, a jerk?"
He stared at the white table top, feeling guilty. Why?
"I don't want to talk about me," Inuyasha told her sullenly.
"Hm... suspicious behavior..." she said, but didn't press, and he was oddly grateful even though he really didn't want to be. He had always hated being grateful to anyone.
"Fine," Kagome bounced back quickly, "let's talk about me, then."
He stared hard at her, taken aback by her sudden change of pace.
"Who are you?"
"That's what I'm about to tell you," she said, pulling her spoon slowly out of her mouth as she paused to think. "Hm. Let's see... I was born in Japan, and I lived there until I was almost sixteen. My family owned a shrine where we lived – ugh, my grandpa told the lamest legends ever..."
"You don't have much of an accent," Inuyasha observed.
"I know. I worked really hard on that, took speech lessons and everything."
"Why?"
"Oh..." Kagome's tapped her lip absently. "I guess it was a way of leaving my old life behind... I was so transfixed with getting away from home I was ready to jump down a well if it would take me someplace else. I could have, too; we had one on our property."
"Why would you want to leave?" he asked, a little interested in spite of himself.
As soon as he said it he could tell it was something he shouldn't have touched.
"It felt... fake."
"Oh."
Beat.
"Um... I had a younger brother. And a cat."
"You sort of lump those two together, don't you?"
"So would you," said Kagome smartly. The words were flowing easily between them again, awash in relief after the tension. "No, I love Sota. I miss him."
Inuyasha rolled his eyes. "How quaint."
"Pfft. Isn't it?" she said, one corner of her mouth turning up sardonically. "Don't you ever miss your bro –"
"No," he interjected shortly. "Why would I?"
"Jeez, you're irritable," she sighed. "I guess that was a stupid question, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, that's where you're supposed to say, 'it's alright, you couldn't have known.'" When he didn't reply, Kagome continued, "So, did you run away or did your family kick you out?"
"They didn't kick me out!" he snapped.
The suggestion was repugnant to him in some way that he couldn't decipher even from within his own mind. That, as much as Kagome's audacity, made him angry, but he couldn't afford to lose his temper with her. At this point, she was all he had.
Still he wondered, would his family have tossed him on his ear? Would it hurt - and then, reluctanly - how much?
No. He didn't care, didn't want to know.
"I left," said Inuyasha. "On my own."
"I'm happy for you," Kagome told him around a bite of sundae, which she made a production of swallowing after the fact.
"I need a place to stay," he said baldly, suddenly tired of talking, tired by the effort of simply being. It was the adverse effect of Kagome's energy, he thought, but maybe that wasn't it at all.
"Do you have money?" she asked, seeming to pay more attention to the task of eating her dessert than speaking with him.
"A little. Enough for a couple nights in a motel or something."
She hmm-ed thoughtfully, beginning with a long, "well..." and then trailing off to nothing.
Inuyasha sighed. This was going to be the grueling part. In his frustration he ran his fingers through his hair, and then grimaced at the length of it. He looked up in time to catch Kagome staring at him.
"What's wrong?" she asked. It sounded almost like she... cared. Or something.
He couldn't hold her gaze, and flicked his eyes down to the table top.
"Nothing."
Maybe she could tell it was a lie, because she fell quiet after that. The truth wasn't important anyway; he didn't owe it to her. He didn't owe her anything.
So why was there the ghost of the feeling that he did? What was it about Kagome that made him feel like he had always known her?
"Were you going to ask if you could stay with me?" said Kagome quietly.
Inuyasha glanced at her sharply, with wide eyes.
"Go on," she said, smiling secretively, "ask me."
"Feh." He folded his arms and looked away, hating her. "What do you know?"
"I know you're desperate," she said flatly.
For an endless while they matched stares.
"I can pay you rent once I turn eighteen," Inuyasha ceded finally, disoriented by the strange turnaround. This was not what he had expected, but then, neither was Kagome.
"And when is that?" she asked, seemingly curious.
"Soon..."
"Uh-huh. How old are you?"
"I'm seventeen," said Inuyasha. Then a beat later, "I'm very close to seventeen."
Kagome laughed. "I'm older than you!"
"By how much?"
"About a year, I guess. I'm very close to eighteen."
"That's nothing," he snorted.
Kagome shrugged in response, and there was another one of those short, thoughtful silences that seemed to mark their conversations like boulders parting a curtain of flowing water.
Inuyasha watched her circle her spoon in the tall sundae glass, which was now down to the dregs.
"Can I stay with you?" he asked finally. "I'll... I'll set you up."
"You will?"
"Yeah – when I'm done with you, you could be bigger than Warhol, bigger than Hockney, bigger than Takahashi!"
She blushed under the praise, but grinned widely.
"Um... Okay. Deal."
They shook hands over the table.
"Of course," she continued, "I'll have to convince Miroku – that's my cousin – but I think I can handle that... and you'll have to take the floor. Or the couch if you want it, but honestly the floor would probably be better for your back... Yeah. You can stay for a while."
"I'm going to pay you, you know. I don't take charity."
"I know," said Kagome simply. She pushed the nearly empty glass towards him. "Do you want the rest?"
Inuyasha eyed her warily.
"Why did you agree so quickly?"
"Don't make me think too hard about it," she said laughingly, but he felt it was important.
"Wait, I want to know."
Kagome looked out the window and twisted her lips. She turned back to him after only a moment.
"In the name of spontaneity," she said seriously.
"Right..."
"Do you want the rest?" she asked again.
His eyes went to the sundae glass and up to hers, and back down again. It came back to him at that moment that he hadn't eaten since early that morning.
Silently and grudgingly he finished off the last bites.
As they left, Inuyasha was still wondering. How did she do it? How did she turn things around that way? And what had he gotten himself into?
''''
A/N: Heh heh.... Inuyasha's line "I'm seventeen. I'm very close to seventeen." Is not mine. It is blatantly ripped off from the movie!! Bwaha! Anyway, we see a new side to our dear Kagome here... interesting. So, how did you like it? Was it too cold? Too hot? Jusssssst right? You can tell me, you know. I'll just be right over here. Waiting. (twiddles thumbs)