Chapter 13: A Marriage Arrangement

As promised, Onee-sama had been waiting for her. Even through the tinted windows and the mist that surrounded Yumi like a curtain, she could make out the shape of Sachiko's face and shoulders when she peered through the window. The driver—to whom she had apologized profusely—held his cap with one hand to keep it from blowing off in the wind and opened Yumi's door with the other.

The warm little cabin light gave Sachiko's skin a yellow glow, her usually pale complexion looking oddly grainy as well, like the low resolution of an old film. Yumi didn't linger and stare for long, though. She hurried into the car and was only slightly startled when she felt the door slamming behind her.

They pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road, and all the while Sachiko said nothing. She glanced at Yumi and slid over to make more room, but otherwise the backseat immediately fell into a strangely heavy silence.

Yumi wasn't sure what it was exactly, but she was fairly certain that the silence was a response to something that needed badly to be said. It was not their usual comfortable pause, the kind that came when Sachiko would lean against the seat and nod off without warning. In fact, Sachiko looked rather alert, her body in a weirdly tense stance, almost as if she were about to stand up at any moment—but of course that was impossible; the car was already hissing down a busy road.

For whatever reason, though—perhaps after being subjected to the emotional roller coaster of the past few weeks—Yumi's patience had already worn thin. There was also something else, a bewildering question that she had been unable to let go of for awhile now.

She looked carefully at Sachiko, trying to meet her gaze. "Onee-sama," she said, "how did you know what Sei-sama was up to this whole time?"

When Yumi said this, Sachiko's body seemed to relax a little, and she seemed to snap out of some train of thought that had been occupying her. She smiled and turned to Yumi. "Why, isn't that already obvious? You yourself heard her tell me in the car where she needed to go." Sachiko said this with a glimmer in her eye, very clearly not intending for Yumi to believe her.

So Yumi didn't. "But...Onee-sama seemed to know that Sei-sama needed to go somewhere even before we left the school. Actually, Onee-sama knew all kinds of details about what Sei-sama was going to do, and I didn't hear Sei-sama explain any of that."

"Mmm," Sachiko said, putting a finger to her chin. "Very true. I wonder how I knew, then?"

If it had been Sei who was teasing her like this, Yumi would have smacked her arm, but since it was Sachiko, she limited herself to a mere roll of her eyes. "Onee-sama," she grumbled, her tone insistent.

Finally, Sachiko let out a very showy sigh of exasperation, though her smile had not faded. She reached over and fondled a lock of Yumi's loose hair. "Suguru-san advised me of what was going on the other day. He told me that he thought Sei-sama would have trouble getting inside the hotel, and asked me to find her tonight and let her borrow our name."

"Our name," Yumi repeated in her mind. She had almost allowed herself to forget: Kashiwagi would soon become an Ogasawara himself.

"By a rather interesting coincidence," Sachiko continued, "you and I ran into her at the entrance and so we didn't have to go to the trouble of seeking her out." She paused, and added in a lower, more pensive tone, "Then again, maybe those sorts of things aren't coincidences at all." Her voice trailed off, as if she had more to say.

Yumi shifted uncomfortably in her seat. This conversation brought up yet another awkward question, something that they had somehow danced around and avoided addressing. At first, Yumi had figured that it was none of her business, but after everything that had happened, she couldn't help but feel that it made up an integral part of Sachiko's story of late.

She had to know. She had to summon the courage to ask.

Yumi cleared her throat and couldn't stop herself from averting her eyes. "Sachiko-sama," she began.

Sachiko's eyes quickly flicked over to meet hers and she looked at Yumi with renewed attention.

"Why are you marrying Kashiwagi-san?" Yumi finally asked. She turned her gaze down towards the floor. "A few years ago, during a New Year's party, you broke off the engagement. I was there, remember? You even told your mother and father that you wouldn't marry him. Why would you promise yourself to him again after all of that?"

Sachiko stared at her blankly for a second. It appeared that she hadn't expected this exact line of questioning, but before long she began to slowly nod. "I suppose...that does require an explanation."

Yumi quickly waved her hands. "Onee-sama doesn't owe me any—"

"No," Sachiko interrupted her. "You are my long-time schoolmate, my imouto, and quite frankly...my dearest friend in the world." Her cheeks turned a bit pink at this, but her face remained stern, determined. "You are basically family at this point. You, more than anyone, deserve an explanation."

Yumi said nothing. She waited. She reached out and put her hands on top of Sachiko's, their fingers sliding together in an unconscious caress.

This seemed to give Sachiko some jolt of energy. She looked at Yumi very directly. "The first reason—the most important one, even if it's the least mysterious—is that I love Suguru-san." When Yumi gave her an uneasy glance, Sachiko shook her head. "Yes, I know that he cannot romantically love a woman. I have accepted this, I think. It's enough of a reality in my mind that I can't see myself being tortured by it anymore. I love him, and he doesn't love me the same way—and that's perfectly fine."

Yumi nodded vaguely, though she was still rather confused. After all, Sachiko had loved Kashiwagi even years ago, but that didn't stop her from breaking the engagement.

"The second reason is less...pure," Sachiko said. This time it was her turn to look away in what seemed like embarrassment. She hesitated, but continued after a moment nonetheless, "Over time I discovered that I have certain things in common with Suguru-san, things that I cannot deny. Because of this, I came to realize that our marriage would work rather well. It would be difficult for me to marry another man, perhaps even unfair of me."

Upon hearing this, Yumi gave Sachiko a wide-eyed glance. Of course, she had already had a sort of inkling that Sachiko might have been interested in people who were not necessarily men, but she never thought that it was something that a high class Oujo-sama would ever openly admit. Speaking openly about one's sexuality—whatever that may be—was unwholesome, after all.

Sachiko tilted her head to the side. "I'm sure you've had your suspicions, Yumi, especially after what happened between us." She squeezed Yumi's hands as she appeared to steel herself for what she would say next. She let out a deep sigh. "I am able to love both men and women. Of late, I've only been interested in women. It's not difficult to see why, even from just a practical perspective, since I have almost no motivation to make friends with any men."

Yumi gave her hands a squeeze in response. She looked up at Sachiko with a smile. "You know that I would never judge you for that, Onee-sama. You should have just told me sooner."

"That's...not all of it," Sachiko whispered suddenly. A pained look came over her face. "These desires that I've had, I haven't been...expressing them appropriately. When you suppress something, it still tries to find a way out, doesn't it? These feelings certainly did that for me."

"What are you saying?" Yumi asked, her eyebrows knotting in confusion.

Sachiko's gaze wandered around the cabin, another wave of hesitation seemingly coming over her. She looked over towards the driver, then back at Yumi. "It's a long story," she finally said. "Perhaps it's best if we discuss this somewhere a bit more private. We can go to my room straight away when we get back."

Yumi followed her gaze and stared at the driver. She doubted that he had heard or was even paying attention, since Sachiko had kept her voice rather low and the sound of the light rain hitting the car could have easily drowned it out. If the details of what she was about to convey really were that scandalous, though, Yumi couldn't help but agree.

She found herself nodding towards Sachiko in silent concession. Before long, they had pulled apart and were sitting side-by-side again, each staring ahead at the foggy nightscape that rushed towards them through the screen of the windshield.

After a few turns of the crunching tires, though, a thought erupted in Yumi's mind. She turned her head towards Sachiko.

"Onee-sama," she said, "this thing that you'd rather explain in private—does Sei-sama already know about it?"

Unexpectedly, a warm smile spread across Sachiko's face almost immediately. She looked at Yumi with what almost seemed like a touch of pride. "Very good. You've been catching onto things quickly lately."

Yumi blushed at the compliment, but she knew that Sachiko's assessment wasn't quite right. It wasn't that Yumi had grown any sharper, it was simply that she had stopped avoiding all of the important questions.

"Would Ogasawara-sama care for a glass of wine on the house?" the waiter asked, an immaculate white towelette rolled up in his hand, puffs of steam still emerging from the well-engineered folds. He was offering it to Sei. She took it on reflex, the warmth of the fabric giving a pleasant contrast to the chilly atmosphere inside the restaurant.

But even while she accepted the moist towel and rubbed it on her hands, she shook her head dismissively. "That won't be necessary," she told him. "Just the food will be fine."

The truth was that she needed to keep her wits about her. She wasn't a very experienced drinker yet, and even a glass of wine was enough to lightly dull her senses. Her new name had given her access to the tower, but approaching the princess was still a completely different story.

At first, she hadn't the faintest idea of where to look. The top floor of the building was much more expansive than it had seemed from the outside, and once she had walked into the restaurant, she realized that it was sliced up by a labyrinth of paper dividers and strategically-placed walls. This seemed to have been designed to give the patrons a sense of privacy in such a large space, but it made it so that Sei could not easily see the whole room from her table.

Just as she had begun to debate how she might explore such a maze inconspicuously, she spotted a set of alcoves near a far wall. They were built into the structure of the building, each little nook sporting a fancy archway with what seemed like hand-carved molding. They were arranged side-by-side, as close as prison cells, but with expensive satin curtains adorning the entrances.

The curtains were open on most of them, and Sei could see that there were tables large enough to host a small family inside each. Some were empty and some were occupied, but she could catch glimpses between the cracks in the drawn curtains if she looked closely enough, and she could see that some of the more smartly dressed patrons were sitting in these private booths.

At the furthest section away from her, though, there was one alcove whose curtains were drawn particularly tightly. She immediately became obsessed with it, staring hard at the overlapping creases of the satin, trying in vain to see through it.

There, Sei thought. There was no question in her mind. She wasn't sure how she knew, but she couldn't help but imagine the stiff hands of the Arisugawa mother ripping those curtains closed with a harsh deliberateness.

It was similar to what Sei had done—just the opposite. Briefly, she remembered pulling open the row of heavy coats in the dressing room backstage at Lillian and exposing Alice's nakedness. In the same way, it was as if Alice's mother had come up behind her and closed them again.

She watched, like a guard perched at bastion, waiting to sense any evidence of movement. She was so entranced that she barely heard the waiter mumbling his pleasantries, and she barely noticed when he finally laid her food in front of her. He did it so carefully that the porcelain made no sound against the glass of the table. She was too distracted to appreciate the luxury of it.

As he bowed in silence and slipped away, Sei began to lower her gaze, to take a quick glance at the steamed oysters and snails whose scent was wafting upwards to agitate the knot in her stomach. Just as she stooped down, though, the billowing of fabric caught her eye.

She snapped her head up. She saw the conspicuous curtain open. She caught a glimpse of the family inside—and luckily, by the sheer coincidence of her positioning, they seemed to have completely missed her presence and her shameless stare.

It was only a brief flash. The curtain was open for two or three seconds. She saw a beautiful young woman dressed in traditional kimono, her hair styled up in large, flowing curls that reminded Sei of the waves of a dark ocean. The complexity of that kind of look had always simultaneously confused her and aroused her, and for a second she imagined Alice wearing that traditional garb, her hair adorned with white flowers, her face made up with the finest of paints.

But Alice's beautiful face was bare. Her hair was slicked back in an awkward attempt to make her already short locks seem shorter. Her body was wrapped in the husk of a Western-style formal suit and tie. She looked boyish and uncomfortable and completely out of place.

Alice was sitting across from the other girl. She stared at her partner with a blank, non-living stare, her body subtly angled away from her mother, who sat next to her. The contrast between the two young women at the table took Sei aback, even for those short seconds that she saw them.

Then she realized why the curtain had briefly flapped open. Alice's hand slipped between the hanging pieces of fabric again and she began to stand up as she opened them, bowing dutifully and mumbling something to the table in her usual humble manner. She escaped the cell momentarily. She turned on her heel. The flap fell closed again.

Sei followed Alice with her eyes as the girl shuffled nervously through the restaurant. She knew the look on Alice's face. Even with the myriad of walls that hid the patrons from each other fairly well, she knew that Alice felt a million invisible eyes on her. It was the look of someone who wanted to crawl into a hole and cover it with a rock.

Sei swallowed hard. For the first time, she noticed that a bead of sweat had accumulated just behind her left shoulder and that it was only now dropping down her back, leaving a cold trail in its wake. She nearly shuddered.

Now, Sei thought. It's now, or not at all.

She stood. She did it so clumsily that her thighs hit the table hard enough to rattle the plates. A few of the nearby patrons turned to look at her, but thankfully Alice was too far away to hear or notice.

Sei tossed the moist towel—which had now grown cold—onto the table with a plop. She turned, hesitated one last time, then sped along the aisle as quickly as she could without drawing too much attention to herself. She passed table after table, the gush of displaced air causing some of the table cloths to dance as she rushed by.

She lost Alice momentarily around a corner, but when she rounded it, she saw that the girl was headed straight for the men's lavatory. Sei raised an eyebrow.

Well, of course, Sei thought. Where else would she go in this state?

As the space between them shrank, though, the decision was growing ever more urgent. Sei looked around. They were in a hallway and no other patrons or servers were nearby. When she saw Alice pushing her way through the men's room door, she only slowed down for a moment, the socially conditioned forcefield managing to push her slightly back at first.

Still, it wasn't hard to fight against it. Before the door had even finished closing, Sei had slipped in behind her.

Alice still hadn't noticed her. The girl covered her face, her body deflating in a loud sigh that sounded like a sob. She went straight for one of the stalls, but as she moved to close it, Sei swallowed a huge breath, as if she were absorbing her courage from the air itself.

Sei came up behind Alice and slammed her hand against the stall door, so that it reopened immediately.

Alice spun around in a panic, completely startled, but before she could say anything, Sei smacked her hand over Alice's mouth to keep her from crying out. She pushed her deeper into the stall and closed the door behind them, flicking the lock shut.

"Shhhh!" she said to Alice before uncovering her mouth again. Alice hadn't even said anything yet, but Sei knew what the makings of a scream looked like even before the inevitable explosion. After all, she had made a few girls scream in her day.

To her surprise, Alice pushed her back, and rather vigorously, with more than a small dose of anger.

"What are you doing here, Satou-san?" Alice said, her tone hard, but her voice subdued to avoid making too much noise. It came off as a hissing whisper. "Are you trying to scare me half to death?" The edge of Alice's fist connected with Sei's shoulder. She batted away Sei's hands when Sei tried to reach for her with confusion. "Who told you I was here? Have you come here to watch me?" she rambled. "Have you come to see my like this? Have you—" Then her hands were on her own face again. A choked sob emerged, but Alice's face was dry from what Sei could see.

Sei grabbed Alice's wrists and ripped both her hands away from her face. "Look at me," she said. "Alice, I need to...I need to tell you…."

Alice's breathing had slowed. Her body seemed to melt slightly, to become looser near her shackled wrists. She looked up at Sei, her face a naked mixture of frustration and helplessness—and something else, a look that Sei had seen a few times before now. It was a look that made Sei lose all sense.

She dipped her head down at the same time that Alice stretched upwards. Her hands still clasped tightly against the girl's wrists, they kissed desperately, hungrily, without much regard to the volume of their ragged breaths or their loud shuffling.

Sei let go of Alice's arms only to reach up and take hold of her face. She kissed her hard and pushed her roughly against the stall wall, an angry metallic echo ringing through the room. Alice responded by biting Sei's lip with a deliberate, but not unpleasant, ferocity. Instead of pulling back from the pain, Sei groaned and deepened the kiss, intruded further into Alice's mouth.

She was getting carried away much too quickly. She knew it, but she couldn't stop. She was pressing a thigh between Alice's legs and she had taken hold of Alice's hand to direct it towards a more intimate place when the sound of a creaking door and a swoosh of air reached them.

They both froze. Sei leaned back slightly, her hand falling over Alice's mouth once again, since the girl's breaths had become particularly loud. Sei listened carefully as a set of footfalls bounded casually through the room, coming towards them, and then passing them, and then ending near a stall quite a few places away from where they stood.

Sei let out a silent breath. She let go of Alice and looked down at the floor with some concern. These were Western-style toilets, so the stall dividers did not reach all the way to the ground. It was already a miracle that there had been no bathroom attendant to observe them, but it was only a matter of time before an employee would notice the extra set of feet in the single stall.

She stared at Alice and tried hard not to let nature overtake her again. She tried hard to ignore the blush that colored the girl's cheeks, the harsh red that had tinted Alice's already attractive lips.

"We can't do this here," Sei whispered as quietly as she could.

Alice shook her head. "Sei-san," she murmured back to her, pressing her hands against Sei's chest, "we can't do this anywhere. You can't be here. You have to leave. I can't—"

"Talk to me." Sei turned and looked between the cracks of the stall door, out towards the sinks. She tried to catch a glimpse of the exit through the reflection in the mirrors. "Give me five minutes. They won't notice that you're gone." She turned back to Alice without waiting for a confirmation. "Where in this place are there the least people—besides here, obviously?"

Alice began to shrug, but then stopped. "The balcony," she said. "It was raining earlier tonight, so all the tables are soaked and no one wants to sit out there."

"Perfect," Sei said. She looked over her shoulder through the crack between the hinges of the stall door again, her gaze trained on the compartment that the other patron had disappeared into. "I'll leave first; it's less conspicuous. Meet me out on the balcony."

She didn't give Alice a chance to object. She unlatched the door and slipped out as quickly as she could, relieved when she found that the small hallway outside of the men's room was still mostly empty. Only a single waiter was walking by, and he didn't seem to notice that she had exited from the wrong version of the lavatory.

As she sauntered back into the main room, her eyes scanned quickly for this mythical balcony. She had actually not seen it when she walked into the restaurant, so she had no idea where it was. It seemed a little too late to ask about it as well, at least not without getting into some sort of discussion as to why she wanted to sit on a sopping wet iron chair on a cold spring night.

She had almost walked back to her table, to get her bearings, when she noticed the tall, wide glass panels that led to the outside. It confused her entirely that she hadn't noticed them before—but perhaps that was because the exit to the balcony was sitting not far from the private alcove from which Alice had emerged. In her fixation to see who was inside, she had completely missed the surroundings earlier.

Before another employee could accost her with any other attempts at service, she turned quickly and made a beeline for the elegant glass doors that she could see in the distance. She found it ironic that this was the most private place that Alice could suggest—after all, it was quite exposed from both the inside and the outside, a place of nearly complete transparency to the world. The only advantage was that because the lights were so bright in the restaurant, the spreading glass of the windows had become more like mirrors, so it was hard to make out exactly who was sitting outside.

Passing by Alice's table was particularly disturbing. She could barely hear some of the murmurs coming from inside, and she recognized a few of the voices. She side-stepped the area as best she could, as if some noxious smell were pushing her away.

When Sei made it through the glass doors unnoticed and she found that there were indeed no other patrons in the outdoor space, she breathed a sigh of relief. There was a small awning over one section that had protected a few tables from a direct hit of rain, and so she chose one of the chairs to sit.

Her body felt like it wanted to slump into the chair, out of sheer exhaustion, but her mind was keeping her wound up. She sat up stiffly. She put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. Her leg began bouncing up and down against her conscious choice.

Some seconds passed. Then minutes. For a flash, she felt a harsh, scraping feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was that cold emptiness—not unlike a hunger, but deeper—that she had felt at the train station five years before on Christmas Eve. A creeping sense of abandonment began to fill her. She felt herself begin to push her chair out, her legs swinging over so that she could jump out.

And that's when she saw it. It was almost like the outer world had been suspended for a moment and she could see the inner one more clearly. She suddenly could hear nothing except for her own breath in her ears.

She was very, very conscious of the fact that she wanted to run. She wanted to get up, to slip through the doors, to dash across the restaurant and dive into the elevator. She wanted to ride it down until she was buried in the depths of the basement.

I can't handle it.

It was a thought that rushed through her mind against her will.

I can't handle it. I can't do this again. I can't wait here again, for hours, for days, for years, for someone who will never come.

She felt her legs straightening, as if to push her out of the chair.

I can just remember that face, that last look I got of her pretty face, and that will be enough. The memory will be enough. It's so much nicer to think of what could have been than of what is.

She began to rise. Her hand grasped the armrest of the chair shakily.

Then she fell back down, hard, the thick metal of the backrest slamming against her spine. She winced. She felt an energy stewing deep in the small of her back, and the rattling of her bones only seemed to awaken it more.

She grasped the armrests again, but this time firmly.

"No," Sei said out loud. "I'm here."

And that was it. She stayed put.

Sei closed her eyes. It felt like ages had passed. She still felt the gnawing fear inside of her that Alice would never show up, that she had gone home, that she had disappeared off the face of the earth. She felt the fear, but she accepted it anyway.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that it had only been a few minutes, though. The door to the balcony gave a polite creak soon enough. She opened her eyes to find Alice standing bashfully near the entrance, rubbing her left arm with her hand.

Sei swallowed hard and cleared her throat, trying not to broadcast her earlier uncertainty too loudly. She tipped her head towards Alice and gestured for her to come.

Alice cautiously moved closer, with the same deliberate slowness that one uses when tentatively approaching a feral cat. Sei responded with an insistent look; she pointed at the chair in front of her.

"I can't stay long. I really can't," Alice said, her voice filled with genuine conflict. Sei ignored her plea and pointed again at the chair.

Finally, the girl obediently sat, but at first she would not meet her gaze.

"What did you want to talk about, Satou-san?" When Sei didn't answer right away, Alice seemed compelled to fill the silence: "I'm sorry, Satou-san," she blurted out. "I'm truly sorry. I don't know how to even begin to understand what happened between us these past few weeks, but...it just can't be. It's destined to fail. My family wants me to marry, and I'm just one person facing eons of tradition. Who am I to push against the rest of the world? And who are you, for that matter?" Alice appeared to grit her teeth. "What we have...whatever that is...it has no future, Satou-san. It only exists in the present, and what kind of a life is that?"

Sei stared at her. Her mind was blank. She only sat there and absorbed Alice's face with sharply focused eyes. There was something about the experience that she had had just before Alice came out to see her, something that had momentarily turned her into some kind of creature that existed solely to listen. Her fidgeting had stopped. She was completely still. She waited.

"Please understand, Satou-san." Alice's voice was wavering. "I need to do what's best for me."

Sei realized vaguely that she was being rejected. In this moment, she thought, Alice doesn't want me. The pain hit her for a few seconds, but she didn't suffer much from it, to her shock. The fear subsided. The thing she had resisted just happened, so there was nothing to fight against anymore.

A silence yawned between them. Sei noticed then that it was her turn to talk.

She didn't think about what she was going to say at all. It just came out: "You're right," she said to Alice. The girl noticeably sprung back a little, seemingly surprised at the curt answer. Nonetheless, Sei continued, "You'll be better off with that girl who is sitting inside, waiting for you right now. She's very beautiful, and she'll have beautiful children for you. Even if you can't muster up the will to do what needs to be done for that to happen, I'm sure she'll have plenty of other lovers lined up to do the job for you. She'll be discreet about it, too, and she'll preserve your good name. She'll allow you to live a normal life."

Alice stared at her, appalled into complete silence. She seemed to open her mouth nervously to respond, but instead she simply closed it again with a confused look on her face.

"On the other hand," Sei said, when that moment had passed and she saw that Alice had understood her perfectly. "I'm not discreet. I will do nothing behind your back. I live openly, and obviously, and embarrassingly, to the very last ounce of my being. I actually have a girlfriend right now—or something like that—and I have no intention of leaving her for you. You would have to live with the fact that I see other women and that I don't care if you know. In fact, I would want you to know. I wouldn't hide it even if you told me to. I would rip the veil from your eyes if you tried to pretend."

"Satou-san…!" Alice was the one fidgeting now. Her eyes were wide and she was gripping the edge of the table hard, her knuckles locking. "What are you talking about?"

But by the alarm on her face, Sei knew again that Alice had understood. "I'm not going to say that I can make you very happy, because I don't think that's true. Nothing I do will ever make you happy, but neither will anything anyone else does. I would make it hard for you to hide from yourself, though—which could potentially either make you very happy, or very miserable. There would be no pretenses about what we are and what this is, which would mean that others would definitely notice who you are. I'm not going to help you put on a costume. I'm not keen on a white wedding, so you can forget about that. I will not allow you to play groom, so you'll get no help from me there, either. I also have no intention of producing any heirs, so even that part of the facade would be off the table. For all intents and purposes, choosing me would be a raw deal and I don't recommend it."

"Satou-san," Alice repeated. She had already begun to push her chair back in a panic, but it was also clear that she could not pull her stare away from Sei. Her eyes were filled with a deep, curious interest, a resistance to that interest, and an overwhelming terror. "Satou-san, what are you saying?" she pleaded one last time.

Then it was Sei this time who understood more clearly than before. She understood the tone underneath the words, the tone that was begging her to offer a merciful way out.

But Sei had never been the merciful type.

"Isn't it obvious?" Sei said finally, before she even fully knew the answer herself. As she had half-expected, though, it came to her. Everything clicked, and she suddenly knew exactly what she had called Alice out there for. "I'm asking you to marry me, Alice."

The girl stood up, the subtle terror from before spreading over her face in a naked display. Slowly, however, in a matter of seconds, it began to melt into something else, to transform. Before long, Sei could recognize the tight lines at the edges of Alice's eyes and mouth, could sense the fury that was emerging from some unnameable place.

Alice slammed her hands against the table. "Who do you think you are, Satou?" she shouted. "You can't treat people like this! You can't saunter into somebody's life uninvited and ask for something so ridiculous and expect them to say yes! Does no one on the face of the earth ever say no to you? Has it gotten to the point where you have the nerve to just walk all over people like this? What do you take me for? Do you really think I have no dignity at all? I don't even know you!" Her voice broke suddenly, but the anger still raged. "You shouldn't toy with people like this, Sei." She covered her face with her hands.

For the first time in awhile, Sei moved. She leaned over the table, her arm reaching over towards Alice's side, though she couldn't quite touch her. At this point, the girl had stood and taken a few tentative steps away.

"I'm serious, Alice," Sei told her, though when she heard it echoing in her own ears, it had the effect of confirming her own intentions more than communicating them to anyone else. An odd, serene feeling washed over her.

She had put her raw self up in front of Alice. She had asked for the unacceptable. She was sitting there, entirely vulnerable, waiting for the blow of rejection. She was not only ready for it, but some morbid part of her wanted to experience every painful moment of it as completely as possible.

She wondered if Alice would have mercy on her and say no outright.

But before she could be the subject of another bout of the dainty girl's anger, the booming sound of vibrating glass broke through their sparring match and shattered their focus. Sei looked up to see a line of human figures queued up near the door, moving together as one amorphous ghostly presence. After blinking her eyes a few more times, she could make our their individuality.

There was a waiter, looking entirely confused. There were a few other people who looked the same—perhaps in Alice's party—but Sei's eyes quickly filtered past them with disinterest. Alice's father was the most expressive. He had a look of complete shock, his mouth hanging open, his eyebrows stretching high towards the top of his wide forehead. His wife was standing right beside him, her face similarly shocked, but it was definitely colored with the harshness of intense rage. She looked so furious that her jaw was visibly clenched and shaking with the words that she obviously wouldn't allow herself to scream in public.

Then the woman's hand came up to point squarely at Sei in some silent accusation. Alice looked back and forth between Sei and their growing audience with abject terror.

For the moment, Sei ignored them and locked her gaze on Alice. "Tell me no," she said.

Alice's breath hitched. She threw Sei a perplexed look, but underneath it there was still that thread of understanding that had run throughout the whole of their conversation.

"Tell me no, Alice," she repeated.

After a few more seconds with no response, she could no longer ignore the increasingly restless energy of the group that was now surrounding them.

"Good evening everyone," Sei called out. "Pardon us for the disturbance. It seems our spat became a little too heated." She stood up and bowed politely. She met eyes with the girl who was standing in the back, the girl who looked both weary and beautiful in her immaculate makeup and kimono. "My apologies," Sei said to her, "but I'm afraid that you cannot marry Arisugawa. You see, Arisugawa is already betrothed to someone else."

Alice's mother lowered her hand and instead stared at Sei in angry confusion. "To whom?"

"To me."

Then the Arisugawa mother pushed past the line of astonished bystanders, her body jerking in Sei's direction.

And all chaos broke loose.