Kaneki still couldn't believe what was happening.
He was in bed with a girl wrapped around him. This was what men dreamed of!
And this girl was…his girl.
Kaneki sighed. It was something he had never let himself hope for.
And then of course. The reminder came. A sound of ghouls crying in the night.
Kuri whimpered next to him.
"You can hear them?" He asked incredulously. Only ghouls could hear a sound that far into the woods. "Why aren't you like me?"
He had done it now! He asked the question that had burned in him for years. Why he had returned to her that day, and seen only a human girl.
"I wish I was."
The moonlight illuminated the sharp, horrible scars on her chest, carving out her breasts and over her soft skin.
His breath caught in his throat and his hands began to crack in rage.
"What…happened…?" He choked out through his anger.
"After I didn't transform, the ghoul flesh in me remained." Kuri sighed. "It blighted my body. The doctors mistook it for cancer. But they couldn't rid me of it. Years of experimental treatments, and eventually they just carved it out of me."
Kaneki stared at her in shock, finally realizing why there was such longing in her eyes when she looked at him as a ghoul. She wanted so badly to have had anything, anything other than that suffering.
He had thought in all the world, his suffering was the worst. But this was…
Unthinkingly he traced her scars, and she let him.
"I still have trouble eating in the winter." Kuri said sadly. "Sometime I get the urge to run into the woods and hunt. And every single time I saw you…I wanted to follow."
"I was waiting for you to do that." Kaneki whispered. "But instead I ended up following you.