Everyone, I'm sorry for being such a bad authoress! The haze of spring fever and summer haze descended upon me and I got super lazy. However, Mai's and Kaiba's stories need to be told! Just one question before I proceed. Should Thinking of Him be solely in Mai's POV or should Kaiba's side of the story be told as well? In this case, I think the readers know best.

A/N: The title of this chapter is a song by J-pop singer May J. I kept listening to that song over and over while writing this chapter. It's Mai's theme song!

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Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh!

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Nothing was going her way.

Nothing at all.

Not even sleep.

Mai squeezed her long-lashed eyes shut tighter in hopes of finding unconsciousness. Such attempts were as vain as she once was.

But not even Kaiba's influence could squelch her stubbornness, so she defiantly tried to win the battle against her body.

I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired, she told herself.

No such luck.

Impatiently, the fair-skinned woman sat up. Crisp linen sheets pooled over her bare thighs. Mai yanked the white material from her body and absent-mindedly placed her hands to her purple silk negligee-clad abdomen. She felt a tiny movement, but wasn't sure if the lurch could be attributed to hunger. She didn't feel hungry, but then again, Mai wasn't sure of what she was feeling anymore.

Feeling as lost and vulnerable as a drowning newborn kitten, Mai's exotic eyes frantically darted about the room she shared with him. The first thing her pupils brought into focus was the vanity table he had bought for her a long time ago. She smiled faintly at his response to her ecstatic reaction to the gift: a slight brush of color on his face, his eyes steadily focused on her. One would assume his gaze was stoically intense if one did not know him. But only she knew the underlying affection that swirled in his eyes...

Mai's irises reflected the pain in her heart before she shook her head as if to scramble the memory. She was doing what she swore she wouldn't do: she was living in the past again. Nearly straining her eyes with the effort, Mai focused with laser-hot intensity on the pallid glass image of herself.

Stringy, dull blonde hair.

Tired violet eyes framed with red veins.

The defeated slope in her shoulders of a woman who'd surrendered her vibrancy to the harshness of life.

This was her reality.

I just want to go to fucking sleep, she thought to herself helplessly as she fell back on the duvet that was about to fall off of the bed. She bent a slim arm at the elbow and splashed it over her roasting brow. It was probably the intense heat and not a malfunction in her health. She told herself she didn't feel sick, but perhaps that was a lie.

Actually, Mai knew it was a lie. Perhaps not physically, but emotionally Mai felt just about ready to hurl.

"Today," she muttered in a sizzling voice. "Today..."

With a groan, Mai sprang back up and swung her long legs elegantly over the edge of the bed. She staggered to her feet. Her pearl-white toenails glimmered in the new morning sun as she made her way to the adjourning bathroom.

When she emerged, her face was clean and her teeth were brushed, but she shuffled to the door without even thinking of brushing her tangled hair or applying color to her pale lips. She was too nervous to think much about anything. All sound and even her surroundings weren't even duly noted.

Until she walked into the living room.

Loud voices.

Men walking in and out of the penthouse.

Cardboard boxes forming castles on the waxed marble floor.

And in the middle of all this chaos, overseeing the productivity of the men like an arrogant king, was Seto Kaiba the asshole.

Finally, his royal highness's eyes deigned to descend frostily upon his girlfriend. His eyes worked down from her tousled hair to her barely-covered lace-edged breasts, to her hips and slid slowly down slim legs to her feet. A frown made the corners of his lips reach for his chin.

Crossing his arms, he said flatly, "Get dressed."

Mai's eyes grazed her surroundings once more. A few men met her eyes and grinned, admiring the beauty of their employer's girlfriend. Mai's eyes worked their way back to Kaiba. "What's going on here?" she asked coolly, raising a perfectly waxed eyebrow.

He closed his eyes with a humorless laugh that sounded more like a cruel bark. "I thought you were smart, Mai." She could finally see his eyes again, but the sight of those arctic blue irises did nothing to calm her. "As you can see, we're moving. Now run along and get dressed. In the... state you're in, you've become quite an embarrassment."

Mai's voice surged to a high pitch that was an almost-yell. "Embarrassment? "I never knew the all-powerful Seto Kaiba could get embarrassed over anything. And in any case, you're directing your anger at the wrong person."

After taking a couple of purposeful strides towards her, he stopped to place strong hands on her shoulders. But far from being comforting, the gesture cruelly dragged the young woman into his possession. Mai shivered beneath his fingers, loathing him with all of her heart and hoping that only this sentiment was getting through to him. Not her indecisiveness, not her nervousness, not even her fear, but this raw emotion that filled her with a vindictive sort of strength. As small as this strength was, Mai held onto the emotion and willed it to swell into an ocean.

"You're sorely mistaken, Kujaku," Kaiba hissed, squeezing his fingers into her shoulders.

"I bet you're embarrassed because you realize for the first time that you're head's up your ass and everyone knows it!" she shrieked wildly.

By this time, a few of the moving men had stopped carrying boxes down to the truck and wore looks of consternation on their faces. One of them addressed Kaiba, but Mai didn't hear anything except the rush of blood in her ears.

"Do you want to repeat that a little louder?"

"Or what? You'll hit me? I dare you, Kaiba. Hit me." By this time, Mai was completely hysterical, a fact that shone in her shaking voice. Her body quaked with anger as her delicate butterfly wing hands hardened into fists. With wide eyes, she taunted, "Come on. Hit me. Hit me. I'm sure you want to hit me so bad, though I'm not sure why. You know what you are, Kaiba? A fucking coward. You can't even tell me why you won't talk to me! Just tell me you don't love me! I'm a big girl. I can fucking handle it."

With a growl, Kaiba tore his hands from her shoulders to angrily stalk to the window. Mai blew an exasperated sigh from her lips.

"Are you going to deal with me or are you going to look out the window?"

Kaiba finally turned around. "You're not a little kid, even though you're acting like one," he ground out between tightly clenched teeth.

Hands on her hips, Mai challenged, "Then why are you with me?"

With a groan, Kaiba strode into the kitchen.

But Mai was adamant. Her bare feet padded against the smooth coolness of the floor. Small hollow footsteps like the sound of a kitten's paws softly trailed after him. "Why do you even bother being with me? You think I don't know how you feel? You hate me, admit it! You can't stand me, but you don't want to break up with me for whatever reason. Yet you're miserable, or you're waiting for me to make the first move. How stupid can you be? Why can't you just be honest with me, you sonofabi--?"

"THAT'S ENOUGH!!!"

Mai involuntarily recoiled at the harsh snap of his elevated voice as if he had punched her. With furrowed brows and a grimace on his face, he whirled around to tower over her.

"How stupid can you be?" Kaiba hissed. "You're yelling at me like it's my fault you're such a dumbass. You don't like being with me? Fine. But don't expect me to solve your problems for you. This is how I am, Kujaku. Deal with it."

Mai quivered with more sadness and frustration than anger. To her mortification, the whites of her eyes had turned opalescent with the appearance of tears. Unrestrained, they flew down her cheeks like badges of defeat.

"A little boy," Mai whispered in faint horror. "You really are just a little boy. This is all my fault? What about you, Kaiba? You're the one who started all this bullshit, not me. And don't give me that shit about how you're always like this."

Frustrated, Kaiba whipped his head over his shoulder. He snapped at the audience pooling around the entrance of the kitchen that this wasn't a free show. Intimidated, the men resumed their work. Soon, he faced the upset Mai again.

"Well, thanks for clearing things up for me." She hiccuped before continuing with, "I guess... I understand... exactly what I mean to you, which is fucking nothing." Mai was surprised that she could keep some sort of balance in her emotion-ravaged voice, but didn't deem this the time to applaud her accomplishment. Despite the levelness in her tone, she couldn't accomplish the same with her chin. Mai kept her eyes on the floor. "Maybe I never meant anything to you."

A tiny shard. Only one shard of the hard shell of anger he'd coated himself in fell when he spoke. "Mai..."

But she didn't notice. She couldn't notice. Not when her own emotions were crashing into her so intensely. "I don't know anything because you're not telling me anything. Not why we're moving, or why you started ignoring me, why you stopped... saying you love me. Why can't you just tell me the truth? Why did you change...?"

"I didn't change."

"You didn't change, huh. Well, I did."

Wide dull purple eyes finally turned to his.

"I've changed, starting right now."

One last tear crumpled down her face. She yanked the corners of her mouth into a wide, faint pink smile.

"I'm moving as well, but not with you. Someplace far, far away from you because I just can't take it anymore."

Mai walked past him, moving her shoulder away in a graceful arc so her skin wouldn't make contact with him. Likewise, Kaiba's shoulder rolled in toward his frame.

Mai bit her lower lip so hard, she could taste blood. He didn't reach out his hand to stop her, he didn't apologize. He did nothing.

She thought she was used to nothing, but Kaiba could hurt her in deeper ways than she ever knew. Mai understood that now.

But this hurt wouldn't disable her from walking away. Instead of accepting the cards she was dealt, she would walk away from him. Mai wasn't weak anymore. She was strong.

If only she could tell her quaking body the same.

But before she could toss her belongings into suitcases and bags, she turned around and offered one last message to him.

"Have a nice life, you fucking douche."