ENTITLED: I'd Rather Pretend
FANDOM: Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun
DISCLAIMER: I feel like so much time has passed that I no longer really even own the early chapters of this story?
NOTE: Okay, this time the reason it took me so long to update was a combination of my laptop selfishly self-destructing, the loss of all my files, the slow recovery of said files, the insertion of a sexy English man into my life, a proceeding seven months of general distraction re: sexy English man (project: on going), and the general upheaval of my world. Thinking back, as it has now been 1.75 years since I have started writing this story, you have all seen me influenced by very different relationships! This is all a roundabout way of saying: my dating situation will probably affect how happy the ending is, so for your sake you had better wish me luck convincing Dreamboat to wait a year for me.
NOTE2: I literally just realized that between chapters five and six, I switched from present to past tense. Oh my god. This is what happens when you don't update for half a year. After some thought, I've decided to stick with the past tense, as I think it fits the tone of the story better. If I am one day not as lazy as usual, I will go back and fix the earlier chapters. Until then, just…I'm sorry.
CHAPTER EIGHT; Accidental Happenings
"It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility towards that love."
"every day", David Levithan
The end.
That was it. She'd said it. The Love word. The big one. What else was there for her to possibly do? What else could she hope to accomplish?
Natsume lay in bed for some hours after Sasayan had gone, frowning at the ceiling, replaying, over and over again, the shy, delighted smile he'd given her, and then the warmth of his cheek on hers, as he'd pressed his face childishly against her own. The memory alone was enough to fill her stomach with delighted, trembling butterflies of feeling.
And yet.
Natsume rolled onto her side, arms clamped tightly around her pillow, and scowled towards the wall. Did she love him? Really? What was love, anyway? Had she just—spit it out, in another act of damaging impulsivity? Wasn't it true that she wanted to be loved, and to love in return, and perhaps she had ruined everything again, only in a sense of unprecedented potential damage?
It had certainly felt real enough, when she'd said it. Natsume blushed, remembering the swollen, desperate, hungry feeling that had stuffed up her chest, that had made her look at Sasayan with her eyes almost wet with wanting, her mad desire to seize him around the chest and push against him until she simply dissolved away, safely inside.
Her feelings for Micchan hadn't been like that at all. They'd been—simpler, maybe. She hadn't wanted him in the same very physical way that she wanted Sasayan, but nor could she ever imagine allowing Micchan to see more than her shiniest of veneers, the glittery tip of the iceberg. Only Sasayan was allowed to break himself against the weight of what went unseen. If that wasn't love, then what should she call it?
Still, Natsume turned over, cramps digging into her stomach, a restless unease stalking her sleep. Her eyes, which had been staring into space, suddenly focused on the calendar.
Of course.
None of it mattered at all, in the end, if she was too late to have realized it anyway.
She trotted out early the next morning, leaving the empty house behind her. She wondered why she'd hadn't invited him to stay, it wasn't as though they were in danger of her parents coming home and finding them, and it would be simple enough for him to lie to his mother—that was the problem with her, wasn't it? She never thought of letting people in, the normal way.
She met Sasayan for breakfast, like they'd agreed upon. She'd spent the better part of the morning wondering how to talk to him, now that he'd seen her naked. Did people acknowledge that sort of thing?
"Hey," Sasayan said.
"Yes, it is indeed nice to see you," Natsume said stiffly, warily. Sasayan gave her a weird look, and a coffee he'd thought to order her.
"You are very thoughtful, and have my thanks."
"Get over yourself," Sasayan ordered. "You're embarrassing me."
Natsume bared her teeth at him as she sipped. It burned her tongue, and she yelped.
Sasayan leaned across the counter towards her, resting on his elbows. He looked at her pensively. "So I figured you'd probably be freaking out about what happened."
Natsume did not gasp with denials, but rather chose the route of dignified silence. She congratulated herself on this monumental step in her growth process.
"Anyway. I just wanted to say. Well, anyway—we're together again, right?"
"Huh?!" Natsume snapped, the horror of not being together still throbbing in her stomach. "Of course we are! Like we wouldn't be."
"Well, I mean. You dumped me."
"That was. Shut up. It's too late for you now. You're stuck with me so just be quiet!" She was embarrassed enough make another attempt at her coffee, and burned herself yet again.
"You're cute."
"Shut up! I hate that word!"
"No, I mean your bad personality. It's nice. Like a TV character," he laughed, then suddenly touched her hand, "Anyway, I wanted to say—I mean, I know it was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I'm glad it happened, I liked it, but I get it if you aren't ready to do that sort of thing again—"
"WE ARE NOT SETTING OUT TARGET DATES FOR OUR SEX LIFE," Natsume exploded, and then they had to leave the café.
He took her down by the river, and they found things to throw over the bridge. She could remember, just months before, shoving him into the water.
"There was something else I wanted to talk to you about, actually," he said, as he skipped a flat rock down the current, "Assuming that whatever's between us is good."
Natsume swallowed. She resolved to be free. "It's good."
"What were you thinking of doing, after you graduate, anyway?" Sasayan asked. He slugged a rock at the bottle floating underneath their feet, away downstream. She wondered if it would make it anywhere important—a lake, the ocean?—or if it would end itself, dashed against the riverbank, curled up in the roots of a tree.
Natsume bit her lip. She looked down into the water, moving somewhere beyond her. She wondered how to tell him, that she'd never been more than twenty miles away from the house she'd been born into.
"You sound like an adult."
"I am an adult," Sasayan said, completely unabashed. "So are you. We're both eighteen now. Maybe it still feels the same as before but this is the time when you have to decide, you know?"
"What if I don't know how to decide?" Natsume asked bitterly. Sasayan was quiet for a half-second too long. In the place of his failed reassurances, she attacked.
"Listen. I'm not like the rest of you. You've got baseball, and Mitty and Haru both have their brains. I'm not into school, or sports, or anything, really. I'm not even good at talking to people."
"You'd be the prettiest NEET out there," Sasayan said, and threw another rock, this time at a bit of wood. Just like last time, he hit it dead-on, and the hollow thwacking noise produced was enough to make Natsume flinch.
"That's not good enough. Being pretty isn't enough for anything, anymore. I think. Are geishas extinct?"
"You could say that," Sasayan said wryly. He glanced at her. "Hey. Listen. How about coming with me?"
"What?" Natsume blurted, before even trying to think of anything else. Her nose crinkled. Sasayan passed her a rock. She threw it haphazardly and wound up miraculously striking a Styrofoam cup. This river was filthy. "What do you mean, come with you? Where are you even going? What would I do? Where would I live? What would I even tell my parents?"
Sasayan made a face at her, "Oh come on, do you seriously not know what my plans are? We've been dating for months. What about my birthday? Do you know when it's my birthday?"
Natsume pressed her lips together sullenly. She created immediate diversions, "What does any of this have to do with your dumb plan?! Don't distract me."
"You don't know when my birthday is. Unbelievable."
"Be quiet."
"Well, anyway, I was thinking. Maybe, if you wanted, you could come to the city with me. If you didn't want to go to university on your own. I mean, we'd both have to get jobs, and probably we'd have to live somewhere cheap, but—a job is a job, right? If it's the same staying home or moving out, then why not come to where I'll be?"
Natsume's insides turned over. She started towards Sasayan with a mixture of sweet gratitude and resentful dread turning over in her stomach. Finally, she dropped her gaze and mumbled, "I don't know. Maybe."
He didn't say anything for a second, then he reached out and pulled her into him. She felt her body's velocity be stopped by his own, his muscles and skin and bones absorbing and accepting her impact. She turned her face into his neck, to hide her hot breaths, the water she carried around inside her, in a jar that was a little too full.
"I don't want to put pressure on you. Please don't freak out, when I say this. What I mean is, it's just a future you can count on. I want to make this work. I will do whatever I can to make it work for us. I love you."
He was so warm. It was difficult to breath, with her nose and mouth pressed into him like this. That was fine. Suffocation was worth it. She looped her arms around his waist. "How did you get to be so good?"
"I'm not. This is selfish."
The problem was, who was she supposed to talk to?
That was what happened, being the deadbeat friend. How do you say, "Everyone's always told me which way I was supposed to go. I don't know what to do now, that all the roads are supposed to be open, but I shut all the gates?"
Natsume stared at her trigonometry review sheet, and admitted to herself that she understood none of it, and hadn't for about three years now. She really, honest to god, had his the point where trying hard was out of the question.
She blew out a great, gusting sigh, and then plopped down on her rear. Her legs were just barely thin enough to squeeze between the bars running along the school roof, to dangle over the edge and kick about. The view was too good. She tried flopping onto her back, but the sun was too bright. Natsume threw her arms across her face and moaned, letting her heels thud against the school wall. Why couldn't there be a course for professional pouters? Grand slam.
Natsume squinted her eyes open, peaking into the great endless blue above her. "You are consistently untalented," she said.
"Don't be absurd," answered Iyo's voice, and Natsume screeched. She jerked instinctively to the side and then yelped as her legs wrenched against the bars. She shot up to rub them.
"Wh-wh-what?"
"Like you're the only one who likes to mope!" Iyo huffed, and then blew what had to be the sassiest gum-bubble in history. It popped onto her chin. Natsume blinked. Iyo obviously decided that the only thing for it was to charge ahead confidently. "What're you so sad about! You have a boyfriend. Iyo still hasn't gone on a single date with Haru-senpai. It's tragic."
Natsume made the same noncommittal noise she always made when Iyo, who she was really very fond of, insisted on putting her in the middle. "J-just because I'm seeing Sasayan now, that doesn't matter! We're graduating soon."
"So?" Iyo said, "What's the big deal? You want to go somewhere far away from him? Just see him on the weekends."
Natsume grunted. Iyo finally began picking the gum off her chin, her cool expression never faltering. Her unmistakable resemblance to her brother made the moment somehow even more emotionally complicated for Natsume.
"You pout too much, senpai!" Iyo said, with a firm nod, "Iyo knows. Because it's easy to get stupid men to buy you things if you act a little sad. But, does that road lead to true happiness? No! The best thing is to marry somehow sexy AND rich who gives you a copy of his credit card!"
Natsume thought she should raise some objection, but the fantasy Iyo had presented her was too spectacularly appetizing to really criticize on the grounds of decency and financial independence. Instead, Natsume confessed, "Honestly, it's not a question of how far apart we are, though I guess there is that. It's more that…just…I don't want to just be dragged around behind him. I want—I want—I want to be good at something, to be valued for something, you know?"
Iyo stared at Natsume for a moment, and then said flatly, "Senapi, you can be a real dummy."
Natsume spluttered. "I know, that's the problem"
"Hmph. Fine. You want to know what the secret of rich people is?"
"Yes!" Natsume shouted.
"Stop playing games you're going to lose. So maybe you're dumb, so what? Don't freak out over what you don't have, and think about you've got, what you're good at."
"I'M NOT GOOD AT ANYTHING!" Natsume roared instantly. Iyo blew another cool bubble. This time she caught it in her mouth.
"Hmph! Senpai, everyone is good at things! Maybe you just haven't thought of it because everyone's always told you it was a bad thing."
Natsume thought for a second, "I am good at ruining my own life."
"Great. We're going to an audition this weekend, so make sure you wear something cute."
Iyo strode coolly away. Natsume was left gaping, and shouting, "Iyo? Iyo, an audition for what?"
As Saturday rolled around, Natsume felt fairly confident that Iyo's threats/promises would bear no fruit. For one thing, it seemed extremely unlikely that Iyo would remember the incident, and also that she would sacrifice a spa day to torturing Natsume.
This hypothesis was disproven at roughly five in the morning, when Iyo slammed open Natsume's bedroom door.
"Senpai! What do you think you're doing! You should always sleep with a cold cream on your face."
Natsume made strange babbling noises.
"Don't worry, I've got your clothes here," Iyo said, and then began shoving Natsume's limbs into an extremely trendy, and extremely-high end outfit, judging by the quality of the fabric and the flash of brand-names Natsume just barely had time to glimpse.
"We're going to have to do your makeup in the car. We have to leave right now if we want to get to Tokyo in time for your audition."
"Who are you?" Natsume stammered, as she was poked and prodded out of her house, past her sleepy, puzzled parents, and into a gleaming black car. Iyo slammed the door shut behind them, and slid on a pair of exquisitely black sunglasses. Never mind that the sun was still rising.
"Your manager."
"Daddy I told you, I'm using the company car for business reasons!" Iyo screamed into her cellphone half an hour later. Natsume, still stunned, stared blankly at the script in her lap. Michiko, the valedictorian, had just discovered that her identical twin sister had been regularly assuming Michiko's identity to sleep with her boyfriend. The injustice was real.
"I'm scouting someone! She's going to be famous! Of course I had her sign off twenty percent of generated revenue for all her future studio contracts!"
Natsume blinked. That sounded suspicious. But not as suspicious as Michiko's idiot boyfriend who apparently couldn't see through lines as transparent as "Oh, my hair cut? To be honest, it's always like this. I just wear a wig most of the time. But I thought you, my darling, should be allowed to see…the real me."
Evil twin then flashed idiot boyfriend while Michiko watched, horrified, through the living room window. Natsume's heart rate accelerated.
"You know," the girl who had been called up before Natsume was wrapping up the last question one of the audition board members had directed towards her. "If you want to ask my opinion? Michiko's a crap character. She's all black and white. Everything she does is to the best of her ability, even her own morality. She's always striving to be this great person but you know what? It's just not that interesting. I think she should get a few more plot lines written in."
The girl was thanked, and sent off. Natsume's name was called.
It occurred to her, as she was walking up to the stage, to be nervous. But there was no time for that! Her head was swirling with thoughts of Michiko as she regarded the young man opposite her, who was to play her counterpart in the scene as Michiko's boyfriend.
Boyfriend cleared his throat, "I'm telling you Michiko, I had no idea! You two look identical! You have to believe me, I never would have done what I did if I had known it was that slut, and not you."
Michiko was soft, demure, virginal. The girls before Natsume had all said her lines with quiet, apologetically lowered eyes, shoulders raised up to their ears, playing the role of an enormous girl-shaped bruise.
Natsume's voice was flat, icy, when she said, "She is my sister." How dare you talk about her that way.
The young man flinched. His reaction was real. But he didn't lose his place, "Exactly, your sister. You're identical. Believe me, if I could do anything to take it back, I would. I love you, you know that."
"Love," Natsume repeated. "Yes. You told me that. And I love her as well, in spite of this. She is her own person, with her own troubles. And perhaps her only crime was in loving you."
"Love? That girl doesn't know how to love, she only knows how to get in the way and destroy—"
"It isn't that simple!" Natsume screamed instead of murmured, her eyes glazing with tears, a real quiver of pain shaking up her voice. "It is so, so hard for her, to never know her place, which was she ought to go. Nobody does these kinds of things because they want to really hurt someone else, it's because she is trying to survive."
She stopped, breathless, and turned quickly away, struggling to compose herself. There was a half-second's pause, and then the young actor touched her shoulder. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Michiko. I shouldn't have been so harsh. I was just—so angry, that she tricked me into doing something that would hurt you."
Natsume nodded once, looking at the way her shadow hit the floor. Years of taking photographs of herself for the internet made her understand, suddenly, where her face would be most flattered by the light.
She turned back to face her counterpart, and pressed a hand to his chest. She ducked her head, then slowly raised her face to stare up into his own, the beginnings of a tender reconciliation glinting there. "I know."
"Iyo is not surprised." Iyo announced on the drive home. Natsume stared suspiciously at the thick folder Iyo kept shuffling around on her lap, occasionally smiling at the contents.
"Well, I am!"
"No. Because you were always a drama queen. And Senpai has nice thighs, which is important in today's industry."
Natsume choked, as Iyo took another languid sip of her Frappuccino, then began barking instructions at the driver to take Natsume home.
Natsume didn't say anything to Sasayan about her adventure until weeks later, when her letter of acceptance arrived in the mail. Her mother had opened it first, and shouted excitedly at Natsume for a while about shocked she was that Natsume had been accepted to a school—and one for acting! Well, who knew.
In fact, she didn't say anything at all to him, until the night before their final exams. They'd stayed behind to clean the classroom, and whe'd meant to say, "I got accepted to a school, it's for acting, and it's pretty close to yours—" but instead, what came out was, "I'm going to be an actress, maybe, I guess. I don't know what that means for us."
Sasayan tipped his head to the side. "Well. I like actresses."
She giggled in spite of herself, and then looked at her feet. She clicked her heels together, twice. "I'm not saying I want to break up. I just. There's just a lot that I'm uncertain about, with my future. I want to be with you, but I can't—I can't let myself just be dragged along behind you. I have to move forward, too."
"Natsume," Sasayan sighed, but he pulled on her hair a little as he did so. "You're always uncertain."
"I know. I know, I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't been me, when we'd met. I wish I'd been some other, less twisted up girl, who could have loved you immediately, and hadn't wasted so much time. I wish I had done everything differently. You have no idea, how much I hate being me."
"I could never understand that, stupid," Sasayan huffed. "I said I loved you, right? It's on repeat in my head, so I forget to say the important things, sometimes."
Natsume swallowed, her throat suddenly thick with emotion. "You—! Stupid! What am I supposed to do when you say things like that?"
"We could make out," he suggested. Natsume ignored him.
"I'm trying to tell you, I want to stay with you. But I don't know how. I don't know how to be anything but difficult, so I don't know if I can. My grades aren't that good but I've made up my mind to try, at this other thing, this acting thing. But even before that, I'll do my best on the exams. I have been studying a bit, you know, and I think—I think I write pretty well, actually, since I've been doing so much on the net lately. So who knows, maybe I'll somehow pull it together. I want to try, anyway. I've never done anything for myself before, really."
Sasayan said nothing. Natsume looked quickly back at her feet. Of course he would be upset with her. Nobody should have to endure being thrown away so many times.
"I'm proud of you," he said.
"What?" She looked up. He smiled at her, and his eyes were very sad.
"Nothing. Let's both do our best tomorrow."
"Oh. Oh, right!" Natsume stammered, and her heart dropped into her stomach, as she watched Sasayan nod, and without so much as a kiss goodnight, he went out into the hallway, and left her alone in the dusky classroom, with only the echo of his footsteps.
Dazed, she eventually wandered towards home, but abruptly veered into a neighboring elementary school. She had been a student here, just a few years ago. The playground was smaller than she remembered. She sat on one of the swings, letting her heels drag idly on the ground. She stared at the scuffs of dust on her clean new shoes. She'd always gotten in trouble for that, when she was a kid. She wore her clothes down fast, and her mother would yell at her for being too careless, too reckless. Not much had changed, it seemed.
Natsume rolled back, pulling hard on the swing's chains. Her legs pumped.
Everything she had said to Sasayan was true. All of it. She wasn't the sort of girl who could lie. Some part of her liked the idea of them falling into bed together, in their tiny apartment in the heart of a too-full city, laughing through the exhaustion of their long days and longer dreams. Her parents would have been furious, of course. Too traditional. But the months, the years would pass, and they would grow accustomed to it, wouldn't they?
Natsume closed her eyes, feeling her body move through the air, the shift of weight in her stomach. She tipped her head back as far as she dared, and let her legs shoot out for a moment, slackened.
She pictured herself, for the first time, married to Sasayan. It was surprisingly easy to imagine. She knew exactly which chores would be hers to complete (the laundry, the dishes) and what presents she would buy him for their anniversaries (fancy leather shoes, plane tickets to Guam), and something about the imagining both reassured her, and frightened her. She was always like that, always at two ends of the extremes, simultaneously.
Of course she loved him. Of course she wanted to stay with him. It was obvious, so obvious. But what if—
What if they didn't work out? What if she ended up alone at home all day, every day, getting fat and overly familiar with the TV Soaps? What if there was something she was meant to do after all, something she was good at, that had nothing to do with Sasayan? Something that she could love as much as Mitty loved studying, or Haru loved adventures, or—or—
Because what was she, really, without him?
Natsume let go, at the very highest point in the swing's arc, something she hadn't done since she was a little girl. She'd grown afraid, somewhere along the way, of the impact. The smash of leg into ankle into foot.
She was afraid of everything, maybe.