Chapter 2: In Her Favor

"And...coming out...of his mouse...was a sharp...double-edged sword. His face was like—"

"It's 'mouth,'" Sei corrected gently in English. She was leaning back in her chair, her hands folded behind her head, her legs crossed at her ankles. For awhile now, she had been staring out the window, watching the street lights turn on like fireflies across the landscape.

The young woman sitting at the low table nearby scratched her head. "Yeah, that's what I said: 'mouse.'"

"Mouthhh," Sei repeated, emphasizing the last two consonants. She finally looked over at her study partner. "You gotta say the last part like you have a lisp, Katou."

Truth be told, Sei couldn't help but feel a bit like a fraud since she had only just learned how to make that sound herself a couple of years before. The more time she spent studying her major, the more she got used to this feeling, though.

"Ah hell," Kei said, letting her book drop onto the table. "What difference does it make, anyway? You don't need to know how to pronounce English to pass a written test."

Sei wagged her finger in playful rebuke. "Tsk, tsk, Katou. English is the lingua franca right now. If you run into a foreigner, he's not going to give you a sheet of paper with multiple-choice questions. He's just going to stare at you in confusion. Do you want to pass a class or speak the language of the world?"

"Both, ideally—but I'll take what I can get." Kei pursed her lips, flipping through the pages in front of her. "And I'd tell you to go to hell for lecturing me like that, but right now you seem to be my only hope."

"Glad that you finally admit it," Sei said, only to be met with a glare. "That's me: Satou Sei, everyone's last resort. You're not the only one, either. Remember that girl from your statistics class? She's taking English this semester, too, and she won't stop calling me. I've tutored her like three times this week."

"And you have yet to properly thank me for the referral, not to mention the other half-dozen people I've sent your way."

Sei shot her a suggestive glance. "Oh? And how should I 'properly' thank you? Is there a special favor you had in mind?"

As Sei expected, Kei merely rolled her eyes sarcastically and let out a huff. "You can start by giving me a cut of the money they've been paying you," she said.

Sei shrugged. "It's not much. Beer money, just about." She had to silently admit, though, that Kei had accidentally helped her start a fledgling business. Even people whom neither of them knew had been approaching her lately, just through word of mouth.

"Don't let it get to your head too much, Satou-san," Kei said, as if she had heard her thoughts. "They're probably seeking you out because of your looks more than anything else. You know how people are."

"Really? I mean, I know I'm painfully good-looking and all the girls are fawning over me day and night, but I'm sure at least some of my customers are in it for the actual English lessons." Sei paused. "Wait, does this make you kind of like a pimp, then?"

Kei threw her yet another disapproving glance. "That's not what I mean. Obviously, you look foreign. Anybody who doesn't know you would think you're at least a haafu, if not fully European. They're going to assume you speak English well."

"Hm, you think so?" Sei scratched her chin thoughtfully. "Guess it works in my favor, then—especially since I don't." The last part was supposed to be a joke, but her tone came out a touch too serious. She sighed and moved her attention back to the window, peering out into the now dimly-lit street, which she could just see beyond the thick foliage of the yard.

After a long moment passed, she suddenly realized with genuine surprise that Kei had been staring at her. Sei cracked a smile, ready to smooth out the sudden tension with another rude remark, but something in Kei's expression made her stop.

"Satou-san," Kei began. "I've been meaning to ask you something lately."

"Yes?" Sei said, confused.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but...is there something going on with you?"

"Huh?" Now Sei was intrigued. She hadn't known Kei to be quite this perceptive, especially since Sei couldn't remember doing anything out of the ordinary—nothing that would tip most people off, anyway. "There is something," she admitted, still smiling. "But how would you know that?"

"I don't know. You've just been...quiet lately, a little weirder than usual."

"Than usual?" Sei decided to ignore the last part. She stretched her arms over her head lazily, then slumped back into her chair. "Mm, I guess it's all the studying I've been doing lately, along with all the tutoring. My brain's in a fog."

"Satou," Kei said. In just those two syllables, Sei could somehow hear the echo of a much more unsavory phrase: "Quit your bullshit."

"All right, all right," Sei said, throwing her hands up. "You got me. It's because of a girl."

Kei raised an eyebrow, looking mildly surprised. "Seriously? I've never seen you this hung up about a girl before. You've been staring out of windows and brooding like a high schooler all week. What is she doing to you, playing hard-to-get?"

"Eh, not exactly." I'm the one who's hard to get, for once, Sei thought. "I guess you could say it's more the circumstances that I met her in. It made me think about stuff—about the past."

"The past?"

Sei started to slide off her chair and onto one of the floor cushions. Instead of sitting up, though, she let her whole body go slack until she was lying with her back against the tatami mat. She could feel Kei's gaze trained on her.

"You ever go through a bad experience, grow from it, and think to yourself, 'oh, I'm glad I'll never have to go through something like that again'? Not because that kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore, but because you're a different person and you think you can handle it easily if it happens again?" Sei said.

Kei stared at her. "...Yes. I suppose so. I think I know what you mean. Things are usually easier the second time around."

"Right. Usually they are. This time, though, I'm not so sure. Or...maybe I just didn't grow to be as strong as I thought."

"You're being really vague."

Sei sighed, nodding in agreement, but not making any effort to elaborate. She felt that familiar heavy feeling from the other night, except that it had traveled from her legs up to the rest of her body. It was some kind of resistance—to what, she wasn't sure.

"When I was in high school," she began after a moment, "I fell in love with this girl who was in the grade below me. Like, feverishly in love. I was so in love, it was like a sickness. At first, I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that the moment I saw her, I was completely drawn to her with every ounce of my being." She turned over onto her side and looked over at Kei. "Eventually, we had to be separated. We tried to run away together and everything."

Kei smiled at her sadly, sympathetically. "Young love can be completely irrational, that's for sure."

"It is irrational," Sei said. "I was irrational, entirely so—and selfish. For a long time, I wallowed in my pain, but eventually I realized that I had hurt her just as much. And I guess you can say that I haven't really trusted myself with romance since then. It's why I don't really date much. It's why I tend to hold back whenever I feel anything close to those initial feelings of attraction. I don't want to get sucked back into that vortex out of my own stupidity, only to have to tear myself away from it again."

"So, you're afraid of love's impermanence?" Kei asked. Her eyes seemed to search the room for the photo of her mother and father that she always kept on the desk. "No love is going to last forever. That doesn't mean it isn't worth it."

Sei shook her head. "I understand that. The friendship I had with that girl wasn't painful so much because it was cut short—it was more like the pain was a feature of the relationship itself. Having those kinds of passionate feelings for someone, you're bound to go crazy in some way. I just can't see myself thrusting all of my feelings onto someone like that again; it's a little too dangerous. Sometimes it's just better to compartmentalize things."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, ever since then, I've kept most of my close relationships platonic, more or less. And the few girls that I've slept with, I haven't been very close with. Some of them I've never met more than once or twice."

"That doesn't sound very romantic."

"Yes, exactly," Sei said. "My relationship with Yumi is probably more romantic than the one I had with the last girl I went out with."

"Somehow, I can't imagine you out on a formal date with anyone." Kei seemed to pause then, bringing her hand to her chin pensively. "To be honest, for awhile I thought that you and Fukuzawa—"

"No." Sei chuckled a little. "Don't get me wrong, we do like each other. There's something there, for sure—but no, that's never going to happen. We've known each other for too long, I think, and we met under the wrong circumstances. Besides, that kid is still completely obsessed with an upperclassman that she was soeurs with in high school."

"All right," Kei said, waving a dismissive hand, "but this still doesn't explain why you've been sulking like this lately. What happened with this new girl you met?"

Sei very deliberately looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. "For the first time in a long time, I had...that feeling again."

"What feeling?"

"I looked at this girl, and the more I talked to her, the more I felt magnetically drawn to her. I was insanely curious about her, almost instantly attracted. It wasn't just a physical attraction, either, though that was definitely there. Something like that hadn't happened to me for years, since high school. I thought it would never happen again, after…."

"So what did you do?" Kei asked, and then, apparently thinking better of it, added, "Spare me the graphic details, though."

Sei laughed. "There's not much to tell. Of course I hesitated at first, but eventually I couldn't stop myself. I made a move on her, and then...it was like the universe had played a cruel joke on me."

"She was straight?"

"No," Sei said. "I can deal with that. This, though, I don't think I can deal with."

Kei was quiet for a long moment, waiting for Sei to explain. When she didn't, Kei started to get up. She grabbed a tray of empty tea cups from the table and looked down at her friend. "Hopefully, you'll find a way, Satou-san," she said. "For someone with such a positive attitude, you sure have a way of resisting love."

"You're just saying that because it never worked out between you and me." Sei winked at her, and for a second Kei looked like she was about to throw the tray at her grinning face.

By the time Sei was wandering the streets on her way home, it was well after dark. The M bus would still be running for a few more hours, but she knew that she'd have to pass by the school to get to the stop, and she wasn't in the mood to run into anyone she knew.

So she sped up her pace as she passed the outside of Lillian's gates, a little relieved that there was only a slow trickle of students leaving the school at this hour. Mostly, they looked like the studious types, heading out from the library after cramming for their exams.

Just as she was nearly in the clear, she heard a pair of footfalls coming in closely behind her. Even though they didn't sound particularly fast or desperate, she somehow knew that whoever it was intended to make a bee-line for her.

"Satou-san!" a sort-of-familiar voice called after her.

Sei debated pretending that she hadn't heard, but since the girl had gone so far as to call out to her across the block, she figured that it was only right to be generous. Sei spun around, nodding politely as her kohai half-bowed to her.

"Ah, eh…," Sei said, trying hard to rack her brain for the girl's name. Finally, it came: "Kawakami-san. What's up?"

"How rude!" Kawakami said. "I've been looking for you all day, and all you have to say to me is 'What's up'? Anyway, I told you to call me by my first name, didn't I?"

Sei couldn't remember her first name, either.

She looked at Sei with eyes that reminded her a bit of a deer—or something like that—all eyelashes and dilated pupils. For the first time, it struck Sei that the girl was being coquettish, possibly. It was true that she had been a bit touchy-feely during their tutoring sessions.

It was only then that she noticed the middle-aged man who was standing by the girl's side. He was slightly shorter than average, wore a salaryman-style suit, and had a good-natured smile on his face. Oddly enough, something about his features looked familiar, but Sei couldn't place where—or if—she had seen him before. That's been happening a lot lately, she thought. Regardless, Sei nodded to him, too, inclining her head a bit deeper than she had towards her schoolmate.

"Did you forget that you're giving me an English lesson tonight, Satou-san?" Kawakami asked.

Is that what I'm giving you? Sei thought, and she fought the urge to say it out loud. "Yep, I forgot," she said instead. "What time was that again?"

Kawakami turned to the man next to her, who seemed amused by the exchange. "See how Satou-san abuses me? I told you." Then she added, with a twinkle in her eye, "She's the best, though. A real expert when it comes to language."

"Uh, thanks." Sei looked over her shoulder quickly and caught sight of the M bus just as it was leaving the stop. She silently cursed to herself.

"Since the library's closed now, why don't we just go to my place to study tonight?" Kawakami said, a tiny smile spreading across her lips. "I have a private apartment off campus." Then she suddenly seemed to remember something. "Oh my!" she exclaimed, turning to the man who had been patiently standing nearby the whole time. "Where are my manners? This is my uncle, from my mother's side!"

Sei recreated her previous bow, but zoned out as the man told her his name and occupation. "Satou Sei, third year Lillian University student. How do you do?" she murmured, the usual formal greeting coming out of her rather robotically.

"It's such a happy coincidence that I should see you here. I ran into Uncle not too long ago and promised him that I'd introduce you tonight when we met up for our tutoring session, but I guess that won't be necessary now that you've seen each other."

"Introduce us?" Sei gave her a strange look. What for? she thought.

Sensing her confusion, the man smiled again and stepped forward. "I'm sorry, Satou-san, my niece is very poor when it comes to introductions. I have a university-aged son, you see, and I was hoping you could tutor him as well. He's been doing just terribly in his English classes lately."

"He's supposed to take over the family import-export business some day, so you can see how this might be a problem," Kawakami explained.

Her uncle gave her a wry look. "Now, now," he said, "there's no need to burden Satou-san with our family troubles. All I want to do is offer her a job." He turned to Sei. "Are you free Monday and Wednesday nights?"

Sei stared back and forth between him and Kawakami. They both looked at her with expectation.

"Uh," Sei finally said, "unfortunately, I've had a lot of similar requests lately, and between my own schoolwork and—"

"I promise I'll make it worth your while, Satou-san," he said, his smile growing a bit more pleading. "If what my niece says about you is true, then I'm sure you'll be able to work a few miracles, and I'm willing to pay just about any price for that." He pulled his card-wallet out of his suit pocket and handed Sei his business card.

On reflex, Sei accepted it with two hands and pretended to look it over for the required number of seconds. She looked up at him and sighed, giving him a hesitant glance. "I will consider it," she said finally.

"Just call the number on the front and ask my secretary for my home address. If it's all right with you, I'd like you to start right away, the sooner the better. Next Monday would be perfect." He nodded to both Kawakami and Sei, already starting to back away. "I have to run now, but please give my offer a fair consideration, Satou-san."

With that, he had turned and disappeared among the small crowd of students that were now spilling out onto the sidewalk.

Kawakami grabbed Sei by the arm with both hands, momentarily startling her. She looked up into Sei's eyes. That bashful, flirtatious smile had come back to the girl's face. "Shall we go now?" she asked.

As they turned to walk towards the bus terminal, Sei couldn't help but look over her shoulder, in the direction that Kawakami's uncle had run off to. "What exactly did you tell him about me, anyway?"

Kawakami's smile deepened and her face filled with admiration. "Just the truth: that you're at the top of your class, that you're an English literature major, and that you've been speaking English all your life because your parents are from America."

"What?" Sei said, surprised at the last part. "That's news to me."

So Kei had been right.

"Oh, don't be so modest, Satou-san!" her schoolmate said, pressing herself against Sei, murmuring something about the cool night air, as if to justify the close proximity. But it wasn't cold at all.

Sei shook her head in defeat and decided not to correct Kawakami. Who am I to shatter her fantasies? she thought. Besides, if it works in my favor….

Yumi stepped onto the mostly-empty train and looked back and forth across the aisle. She gave a sigh of relief when she saw no familiar faces, and slumped into the first seat that she could find.

She wondered why it was so hard to keep from running into someone precisely when you were trying to avoid them the most. Before, she would only ever notice Alice-kun's face among the throngs on her way to school every once in a blue moon, but now it seemed like she was seeing her everywhere. She had luckily been able to dodge her gaze on all of those occasions so far.

It was nothing personal. It was just that, as much as Yumi liked to think that she had developed into the perfect picture of a well-composed lady after all her years at Lillian, she was still very bad at hiding her embarrassment. She simply could not face Alice after hearing such a scandalous story about her and Sei-sama.

And worse, what if by some stroke of very bad luck, Alice wanted to actually talk about it with her for some reason? Yumi doubted she had anyone else to discuss it with, and if she was anything like Yumi herself, she was probably burning with the desire to tell somebody—anybody. Yumi was determined that this "somebody" would not be her.

How long could this possibly go on, though? She couldn't help but ask herself what she would do if Alice happened to see her first and approached her. What if Yuuki invited her over? How could she avoid her then?

Very suddenly, she felt a body carelessly flopping into the seat right next to her, bursting her out of her thoughts. She let out an unladylike shriek.

A few of the other train passengers turned to look at her with mild interest, and she quickly covered her mouth, though it was much too late. Coming to her senses finally, she jerked her neck to the side to see who had sat down next to her.

"Jeez, Yumi-chan, four years we've known each other, and you still greet me with that same little scream." Satou Sei reached over and pinched her cheek. "Come home with me tonight, and I'll give you something good to scream about."

Yumi swatted her hand away, irritated. "You could have announced your presence like a normal person, you know."

"If I did that, then how would I have gotten this great reaction from you?"

Yumi pursed her lips, the adrenaline of the moment wearing off a bit. Sei was sitting close by her, their sides touching slightly, and Yumi couldn't help but relax a bit against her warmth.

"Where have you been tonight, Yumi?" Sei asked. "This is a little late for you to be going home from school, isn't it?"

"What, do you keep tabs on my schedule or something?" When Sei only smiled in response, Yumi rolled her eyes and answered: "I was out shopping with Yoshino-san."

"Ahhh, nice. Did you buy me anything?"

"The only thing I would ever buy you are wasabi-flavored chocolates," Yumi said, but there was no malice in her voice. She gave Sei a genuine smile of affection. "What are you doing here this late, anyway? We get out of school at about the same time on Fridays, don't we?"

Sei grinned at Yumi, poking her in the side and making her wiggle a bit. "I was on a date," she said.

"A date? Really?"

"Why do you seem so shocked?" Sei complained. "And, no, not really. I was actually tutoring someone, but I think she was trying to turn it into a date."

"Oh? How do you figure?"

"She grabbed my leg."

"Really? Are you sure she didn't just trip and fall and your leg was the only thing she could grab onto to catch herself?" This time it was Yumi's turn to tease her.

"Again, why do you seem so shocked by this?" Sei pouted a little. "She was touching my leg under the table, getting quite handsy while I was trying to explain how to conjugate English verbs."

"Maybe your lessons are just so boring that she couldn't figure out anything else to do."

"Sheesh, you're breaking my heart tonight, Yumi-chan," Sei said, pressing her hand to her own chest in a gesture of mock hurt. "Besides, even the most boring tutor wouldn't drive anybody to do what she did next."

"What?"

"Her hands started to travel more and more, and eventually she grabbed my crotch! Just went and grabbed a handful of my bits! Can you believe that?"

"Shhhh! Not so loud!" Yumi looked around the train, though the other passengers were quite scattered, and she doubted that they could have heard. Yumi turned back to Sei after a moment. "I don't believe you," she said.

"Fine, don't." Sei shrugged. "It's the truth, though. I'm pretty sure she's the kind of girl who's only dated men up to this point. I guess she decided to just try what's worked for her so far."

"So it doesn't work on you? I always thought you were like an old man."

Sei ignored the last part. "No, it didn't work on me this time—at least not with Kawakami Kyoko doing the crotch-grabbing, anyway. I ended up looking at my watch and excusing myself early."

"Kawakami? Isn't that the girl in Onee-sama's class? I thought her first name was Keiko."

"Is it?" Sei said, looking at Yumi with vague curiosity.

Yumi huffed. "God, I can't believe that this girl practically had her hands down your pants, and you can't remember what her name is," she said, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be disbelieving Sei's story. "Hopefully your flimsy excuses were enough to discourage her."

"Nope, I don't think so. That girl is incorrigible, and pretty bad at taking a hint, too. She even asked me when the next time we could meet was." Sei scratched her head, her gaze falling out the window and towards the quickly-shifting landscape outside. "It's just as well," she said after a moment. "Maybe it's a sign that I should take her uncle's offer after all. He is supposed to be paying well."

"Hm?" Yumi pressed her hand lightly against Sei's leg, trying to regain her attention. "What uncle?"

Sei looked down at her. "Oh, she apparently told her uncle all about me and my genius, and he wants me to tutor his son."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Eh, I don't know. I've been busy lately, and if he's anything like the rest of his family, he'll be a little vapid and pushy." Then she added, a bit sheepishly, "Besides...all the students that I've tutored so far were from Lillian, so they were all girls."

"So?"

"So...I don't know. I've just never tutored a boy before. I'm not sure if it'll be any different. Do we have to study with the door open or something?" Sei grinned at Yumi's wry expression.

"You can't live in a garden of maidens forever, Sei-sama," she said.

"Right you are, Yumi-chan, right you are." Sei threw an arm around Yumi, pulling her closer.

As much as Yumi tried to stay casually alert, she couldn't help but close her eyes for a moment and inhale Satou Sei's pleasantly familiar scent.

When Monday evening rolled around, somehow Sei found herself standing at the gate of a conspicuously large house. The front yard was adorned with topiaries and small statues, and Sei was half-surprised that there wasn't a fountain complete with a stereotypically naked cupid.

"When you get to the house, just press the intercom button and they'll buzz you right in," the secretary had explained over the phone.

Since her new pupil's home turned out not to be that far from her own, she had skipped the car for the day and taken a bus. Now she idly thought to herself how uncool it looked to be standing in front of such huge gates without a car to roll in with.

She bent down and pressed the button on the intercom.

A bit of static popped from the speaker. "Good day! How can I be of service?" the lively and overly-polite voice of a woman emerged from the other side. Truth be told, it made Sei jump back a little.

"Uh, good evening," Sei said. "I'm here to tutor…," and that's when she realized that she had never caught the kid's name. "This is the tutor speaking," she said instead, changing tactics.

"Oh? Oh! Perfect! I'll let you right in!"

In mere seconds, the gates whined open and Sei made her way through the walkway up to the door.

"Excuse me for intruding," she said politely, as soon as a middle-aged woman opened the door.

"Oh, not at all!" said the woman, who Sei guessed was the mother. "Come in, come in!"

Once they were in the light of the foyer, Sei could more clearly see the tight lines of the woman's stiff expression. It was like her smile had been painted on or carved out of wax—and not very well. For a split second, she even seemed to give Sei a disapproving glance as she got a good look at her.

Almost immediately, she was right back to her superficial politeness, though. "Come over here, Kin-kun!" she called out towards the hall, which was very dimly lit. "Your new tutor is here!"

When her son emerged from the shadows, Sei had to blink a few times to make sure she wasn't just seeing things.

She actually tilted her head to get a better look and stared hard, throwing her manners to the wayside.

No way.

"I'm Arisugawa Chieko," the woman said, bowing formally, "and this is my son, Arisugawa Kintarou."

Sei could only stand there and look at him, unable to speak. For his part, the younger Arisugawa also appeared at a loss for words. A look of realization had come over his face and his mouth dropped slightly as their gazes met.

Right there, in front of Sei—donning a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks that were much too formal—was the unmistakable shape of Alice, the girl from the bar. Through the guise of an awkward young man, she stared back at Sei with a pair of expressive eyes.