Part seven, drabble 19: Liar
"Liar."
Mamoru halted mid-diatribe, utterly confounded by the simple statement issued from Tsukino Usagi's lips. Mentally, he went over the conversation to find his place. Had he insulted her meager vocabulary? Yes. Her grades? More so than usual. Her clumsiness? It would seem so. Where had he left off, then? With her hair? He raked his fingers through his hair, and went for the obvious route…asking her directly.
"What did you say?" he queried.
"I called you a liar," she said, grinning cheekily up at him from her seat at the counter. She swirled her straw in her chocolate milkshake, and brushed her bangs back from her face.
"Please, do enlighten me. How am I a liar?" he asked. Her lips twitched with mirth, and those blue eyes sparkled just so perfectly that he found himself entranced.
"Oh, you know," she said, "it's just that I know you don't hate my hair."
"I don't?"
"No," she said. "In fact, I think you rather like it." She flipped the aforementioned hair over her shoulder, watching him watching it cascade down her back. "See?"
"I…I never said I hated your hair," he defended, hoping it was true. Was it? He'd called it many things, but had he said he hated it?
"Oh, not in so many words," she agreed. "But you've said it was too long, too yellow, not yellow enough, that it got everywhere, that I shed like a dog…" she ticked the insults off on her fingers. "But you don't have to pretend. I already know that you like my hair."
"How could you possibly know a thing like that?" he stared down at her with what he hoped was a stern, forbidding expression. But she seemed completely oblivious to it.
"Because," she said simply, hopping off the stool and tossing a few hundred yen on the counter to cover her tab, "you love me."
"What?" Mamoru croaked, more than a little taken aback at her blunt statement. She waved away his incredulity as though it were a fly to be shooed away.
"Oh, I've know it for a long time, now," she laughed. "Goodbye, Mamoru-baka. See you tomorrow!"
She skipped out of the arcade, blissfully ignorant of the absolute shambles in which she had left Mamoru's normally unshakable control.