It took a few years, but Takeru has learned to never assume with her, and to always ask the question aloud: "What are you thinking about?"
Hikari shakes her head. Her hand cups her own chin, cradles herself close. "That I'm going to unlove you after tomorrow."
He blinks, startled. His cigarette hangs between his teeth. "Just like that?" because for all his usual wit, he can't think of anything else to say. Rarely worth the reply, in his experience, after Hikari makes up her mind.
She hums agreeably, a quiet resignation. Gets off the edge of the mattress and walks to where he's leaning his hip against the wall by the window, the glass cracked open just enough to let the smoke out, keep the warmth in. She pulls the cigarette from his mouth, sets it against the rim of the takeaway coffee lid he'd been using as an ashtray. He's put his sweater back on, and his boxers, but she's been walking around the motel room naked since before he'd arrived, stopped him mid-word when he'd opened the door to her pretty and waiting, a gorgeous sunkissed tan over every inch of her bare skin. Takeru doesn't understand why no one will believe him when he tells them Hikari's the cruelest person he knows.
"Just like that." Smiling when she takes his face in his hands, and makes him kiss her, one last time. He keeps his mouth closed, which makes her laugh. "Why're you surprised?"
"I'm not." Holds her elbows in both palms, draws her back. The thumb of his right hand pressed to the hollow of her pulse. "Take your ring off when you kiss me."
Hikari looks down at the sparkling band. "I'm trying to get used to it."
Takeru presses his mouth to the corner of hers, lets his teeth scrape her bottom lip. "Get used to it on your own."
Hikari rolls her eyes then, steps back all the same, a modest distance opening between them. "Why should I want to get used to that?" Her face scrunches up, this pinched little frown. The welt his mouth made last night blooms quietly over her left collarbone. A part of him is counting on them getting what's coming to them. He doesn't feel great about their obvious games, but he also won't be the one to put a stop to it.
"You're the one who's saying yes." Meaning, you figure it out.
She looks at him blankly, eyes clear when she blinks them, slow and calm. Thinking things over. "Well, that was the idea yesterday. Who knows tomorrow?" Therein the crux of this thing between them, these problems and tomorrows: he thinks they have one, and she doesn't.
Takeru tilts his head, chin jutting to the window. "Big news, but tomorrow's here."
She clasps her hands behind her, rises to the tips of her toes, rocking on the balls of her feet. "Yes. It is." Doe-eyed smile, beaming and pleasant, like she hadn't been asking him to come inside her an hour ago, clinging ankles crossed at his lower back to beg him deeper, bury her with him. "What are you going to do about it?"
He takes off his sweater himself but lets her pull him from his boxers, push them down just past his knees, tripping over each other in their rush to make it back to her bed. Somehow always in a hurry when they've got nothing but time.
Hikari chews on the nail of her ring finger when she reads. Always the left one, and always only that one finger, for however long she can remember. It's not a habit she likes about herself, but then habits aren't likable things.
"There isn't anything I don't like about you," Shin's sincere reply, when she'd lamented about the state of her nails and her gross ways, but that wasn't the point. If she'd known he was going to propose, she'd have been more conscious about her absentminded instincts, or at least gotten a manicure. He'd grabbed her hand after the fifth time she'd mentioned this non-complaint complaint, slipped the ring off in one seamless swoop, like it was nothing to put it on her, and even less to take it back.
Hikari had shrieked, tackled him off his sofa, scraped up her knee so bad she'd cried from shock. Shin'd picked her up off the floor, sat her on the bathroom counter, cleaned up the raw, peeled skin, let her be a baby about it. With fifteen years between them, the age difference raised eyebrows, made people wonder what on two worlds they could possibly have in common. It was simple, really. He lets me need him.
Others had, too, to be fair. Hikari knows she is very pretty, and very pleasant to be around, interested and interesting. She can talk to anyone, a trait she shares with every person in her family. Susumu's collegiality, Yuuko's generosity, Taichi's magnetism, all wrapped in a sweet exterior you just couldn't help but like and want to be liked by. She'd always been popular in school, rarely on her own if she isn't planning to be. If this depleted her, Hikari had always been too polite to say so, especially if she didn't know the person long, which is her preferred social barometer. There are sides to her some had seen that others hadn't, and wouldn't, simply because of how long it'd take to show them.
Even so, her philosophy on dating had been to be open to the experience. Hikari likes getting to know someone. People's interior worlds fascinated her. She's aware this is because she does not know her own. Life happens to her, or perhaps just at her. Hikari doesn't mind either way. It's not that she prefers not to involve herself; if the situation is a righteous one, she'd never hesitate. Situations that require her being centered are the ones she has deftly avoided all her life. This, interestingly, is also something she shares with her family. The Yagamis never had problems connecting people or with them; it was everything under the surface that remained the ghost in every room.
Life had been happening at her on the Sunday she'd met Shin, too, though she'd actually met him before then, several times. There'd been the handful of times during those early battles, before the Digital World had become known, of course, and then some family events in the years since, during that period when the group swapped attendance at familial get togethers like trading cards. That's how she found herself as Daisuke's date at Shin's first wedding, stood outside the reception hall washrooms holding Jun's purse while she'd gone inside to pee, at the stage of pregnancy that required bathroom breaks even for the shortest walks. Shin wore a groom's suit with white gloves, which should have tipped Hikari off, but she must have been scattered that day because she'd talked to him for five minutes before realizing who this was. He'd started wearing contacts at his fiancée's insistence, and his hair had gone full grey around the temple, and he hadn't even blinked when she'd called him Dr. Kido like his father, though to be fair all of them had had that title by then.
"Maybe I have a daddy kink," she says to him later, something like two years after that. They are on the rug on the floor of her studio flat in the teachers' subsidized municipal housing complex, advertised as a perk of the job she'd taken as a part time classroom aide in the country's poorest prefecture. There is no central heat and the windows couldn't close all the way, but she'd put up pictures she took of friends and family all over the walls, covering the peeling paper and yellowed plasterwork until it felt permissibly like home.
"Well, I like your dad." Shin is laying with his head on her bare stomach, and she'd taken off his glasses to squint through them herself, even if he'd warned her about the headache. Her eyes had started hurting the moment she put the frames on, but what she liked was how he'd told her they would. Shin never delivered things to her as instructions, or admonishments, or counsel. Her choices were her own.
Hikari didn't know respect for her interiority, without blame or expectation, could feel like this. She is convinced she loves him. It hadn't been going on very long, because he had asked to wait until his divorce petition had been successful, and she had been so enamored by his sense of goodness to others and his obligation to his word that she went pantieless to their first date eighteen months later, and to every date since. Eventually bought a lacy pink pair not to wear but to tuck into every drawer of his walk-in closet at his tastefully decorated penthouse, claim him hers without saying a word to that effect. She likes that they don't have to say many words to each other, to be understood.
"Not the way I like your dad." She's teasing him, and he seems to pick up on it then, finally. Tilts his chin so he can look up at her upside down. He has such a handsome smile. Hikari doesn't know what to do with herself, with the ache that blooms right at the center between her legs, when Shin looks at her like he sees her. Not through her, not inside her, not past her. Just her.
"I take after him the most, you know," in this calm and matter of fact diction, like he's reading the afternoon weather report. She feels herself getting wet again, wants it bad. Hikari loves being a teacher, but being a mother hadn't held as much sway as it does when she thinks about his making her one, seizing her with a conviction that has her biting back her bottom lip, make sure he's watching when she does. His eyebrow lifts a little, gaze settling on her mouth. She licks the corner with the tip of her tongue, and he exhales through his nose, but that's all he gives away. Hikari is obsessed with the things Shin doesn't give away. Everything about Miyako's excessive approach to love and its loudest expressions suddenly makes an abundance of sense.
Clearly, Takeru had been wrong about her. She's not just capable of wild, reckless love; she could wreck herself over it, too, if she wanted.
Maria breaks up with him because Takeru can't tell her why he likes being with her. Honestly, he'd dump himself, too. He objectively understands it should not be this difficult. He's a writer; words are his beer and butter. And he likes a lot of things about her, admires a lot more. When Koushiro had first put them in touch, she'd immediately invited him to her research outpost in Patagonia to see the activity himself, document the work the camp was doing, meet more humans who believed, like she and her partners did, that the physical relationship between the Human and Digital Worlds was evidence of a fundamental restructuring of not the fabric of reality, but the fabric of scientific reality.
He'd packed expecting to visit the encampment for three weeks, and stayed thirteen months. She wrote her parents postcards signed from the both of them, and he'd helped her sister plan a surprise party for her birthday. He knew how she took her coffee and how she ranked her hair ties by elasticity and tautness. She taught him how to worship a woman, and got him cursing in his native French during orgasm, it was that out-of-body good. He arranged for an old editor friend to connect her team with a prominent university journal, so their research could be published as widely as possible, because he believed in it, in her, that much. She knit him the wool hat he still wears, because it's still the most comfortable piece of clothing he owns, and Takeru doesn't own much. He'd become more and more rootless with age, drawn to a life on the road, to hearing people's stories and sharing them with the world.
He had no answer for why Yamato didn't know Takeru was seeing anyone, or even Maria's name, fumbling through an awkward hello on a rare video call home over a year into their relationship. But then, when she'd called it a relationship, he had only looked back in surprise, like he'd never even heard of the word, or like it wasn't a word he associated with her. This is how she'd read the look on his face, when it was too late to tell her the truth.
"Then why are you with me?" she'd sobbed.
Takeru couldn't answer, because he doesn't think it would be one she would understand. You aren't Hikari. As in, he didn't want her to be. As in, that's a good thing. As in, I can't wreck myself like that again. As in, that's the good thing.
He'd kissed her for the first time the spring after their first year of uni, on a Saturday night spent at the Motomiya family flat, because that was simply what they did on Saturday nights. Miyako had come home for the weekend, too, and Ken had bought all of them takeaway dinner for the occasion, and afterwards they'd played video games on the living room television set. Hikari had declined her turn on the spare controller, preferring to spend it eating the last choco monaka bar left in Daisuke's fridge, discovered behind tubs of experimental beef stock and freshwater fish Iori still catches, cleans, and cuts up for him, even now. They'd always spoiled Daisuke in the little ways, the least they could offer as repayment for how big his heart gets when it comes to each of them, careful not to make it too obvious lest the gestures go to his head.
That was why Takeru hadn't a shred of remorse after easily killing Ken's avatar, grinning at Daisuke and Miyako's defensive protests and Ken and Iori's nonchalant acceptance, waiting for their characters to respawn. Looked over at the couch where Hikari was lying, engrossed in a novel he had recommended, her bare ankle draped across the arm, swinging absently. In town on business, Mimi had taken her to get pedicures earlier in the week, and she'd chosen an uncharacteristic lime green, with tiny kiwi slices painted on the big toes. Takeru liked them, so much so that he hadn't realized he was staring until Miyako snatched the controller out of his hands, usurping his turn, seeking vengeance on behalf of her agnostic boyfriend. Hikari'd turned her neck only to see what the ruckus was about. The corner of her sticky lips still had a slick of vanilla cream on them.
Takeru had at least waited for the others to fall asleep before asking if he could kiss her. She'd laughed into his mouth. What took you so long, Takaishi?