The grammar I was taught still hurts.
(Julie Delporte)
Sora will not do everything for love.
Still, there remains a part of her that believes love is not earned and not promised, so it must be safeguarded. Over the years she has learned how to keep the things each one leaves behind inside her. She still folds and organizes her laundry the way her mother would, shapes the inked lines of her handwritten characters the way her father does, peels oranges the way Yamato had, drinks black tea the way Ryo liked it. She washes all her dishes by hand even after moving into a flat that had an electric one, because Yukio had said that was his favorite part of their day, standing side by side with each other at the sink, elbows touching, fingers wrinkled and pale.
It's impossible for her to look through a camera lens and not see the world the way Yukio did. He took her to her first gallery exhibition, a small photography show by another one of his former students. She had always been a maker, kept her hands busy, like they were trying to keep up with the pace of her thoughts, all the things she knew not to say aloud. But Sora had never imagined a simple picture all on its own could do something like that, rend her heart open just from standing in front of it, unable to look away, even blink. Bought herself a small handheld sketch pad and a box of graphite pencils the same weekend, and drew him in profile while he slept naked across her bare lap on a Saturday morning. When he saw the crude effort, he told her that her hands were meant for something more than caring for everyone else but herself, that she had potential. She changed her concentration the same week, enrolled in every drawing class she could fit into her schedule. Anything, anything that would make him still see all the things inside her she never could on her own. She had loved being loved by him that much.
She still wonders how he is. His niece would have started college by now, too. Sora remembers watching video tutorials online to learn how to braid hair into twin pleats the night he'd told her he didn't love her anymore. He'd said it so casually, but looked her in the eyes all the while, with real concern. Her exes tended to be most concerned with her feelings when they were getting ready to deny them, wash their hands of it. Something about her made them so guilty for choosing themselves, though not enough to not make a different choice. Sora isn't sure what it could be, so it remained there, somewhere at her core, unchanged behaviors.
After Dien inevitably chooses himself, two and half years in, she thinks it's time she tries it out, too. Then come home, Mimi had said to her, clear headed. But Sora hadn't wanted to give up, committed to being better, to making this one work. As aware as any of them the litany of bad choices left in her wake. The idea that a bad choice is what she might become to someone, to anyone, made something break in her head one very bad day. In response, Dien had changed the locks to their apartment and blocked her number. She had left Vancouver the same evening, drove an airport rental car in no direction after she'd landed, unable to see the traffic lights through her sobs. When a delivery truck had clipped her left taillight, she'd sat idled on the side of the road until all the gas ran out, unable to remember where she was, what she had done, how she had gotten there. Called Jou in a moment of clarity, too ashamed to hear all the love Mimi would still have for her, nothing she could do about it. He'd answered before the first ring had even finished, because he loved her once, too.
"Since he was, like, fourteen." Mimi runs her fingertips over the tops of Sora's dried paintbrushes, fascinated by the whole of the world, unable to hold still.
"I don't think that's true." Pulls stray hairs behind her right ear, red cheeks hidden under her palms. Embarrassed, because she remembers when it had been.
Sora tries not to think about those awkward months. When she began filling out her sweaters more, earlier than all the other girls in her year, her mother had told her to expect the boys to see her differently soon, because all boys did, if they were into that sort of thing. Taichi gave her a pair of ugly plastic barrettes bought with his meager allowance, Koushiro voluntarily joined her even on the boring errands to the shops, Jou simply stopped looking directly at her for almost a whole year. Yamato, the only one who'd used his words.
Mimi rolls her eyes. "I want you to let people love you more," she says, this careless and earnest declaration.
Sora smiles rather than reply, because she's the type to hurt her own feelings if it means not hurting someone else's. It's why she lets Mimi believe she'd been the one to break up with Yukio, Ryo, all the others. She doesn't want her friends' opinion of her to change, disappoint them by seeing her let the world happen to her, have its way. She remembers not always being like this, but she doesn't know when that had been. Maybe you just came unassembled, Dien had said once, unprompted, as though she'd asked him. All in little pieces.
"I got Shuu to loan us their family cabin for the holiday. Everyone's coming, so you have to as well," Mimi's saying now. She's circled the small studio room three times over by then, not enough space to be so nosy, but somehow manages it. Stops in front of an easel Sora's borrowing from the department, carried on two bus trips and a train ride to her flatshare far from the main campus of her graduate program. It had been the only rental she could find in her budget that had east facing windows. Sora thinks she makes her best work in early morning light. This, she tells herself, is the reason she's stopped sleeping through the night, using those quiet hours instead to prep and ready her paints so she can be ready for the few moments when the world seems its most forgiving.
Tilts her head to the side, studies the progress softly. Her eyes light up all the way when Sora comes to stand next to her. "This is really pretty!"
"Is it." Pretty on the list of words not allowed in MFA circles, so she forgets to make this a question, jarred by the label. Swallows the dismay, this simple reduction, afraid now that that's all the painting wants to say in the end. Sora has trouble accepting her work on its own terms.
Mimi grabs her arm, hugs her elbow to her own chest. "It is! I like the colors you've mixed together."
This time Sora does make a genuine smile. "It's not mixed. They're color pours." Experiments really. Matter in search of form.
Mimi hums, happy to not understand, or else happy to not know there were things she didn't. Sora stays quiet, lets her cuddle into her side as they stand together in front of the small canvas. After thinking about it for three weeks, she'd set it vertically, let the paint pull forward by its own gravity, a passive movement. A clean border where the work begins around the wrapped edge of the stretched panel, and then dissolving into thin vertical lines. Sustained descent, arrested falls. Sora thinks of them as self portraits, a color for every feeling she knows she ought to have, buried behind each other into nothing.
Squeezes her arm again. "So will you? You will, won't you? Right?"
Hears herself giving in, distracted by an errant line of paint running off course, deviant. She hadn't noticed it before. "I'll have crits the day before—,"
"So come the day after," says Mimi, a solution discovered and supplied in the same breath, not a thought wasted further. "Mantarō said Jun has to work late anyway, so you could join up with them. And make Jun drive so you can get to know him more!"
"You really like him that much?" Laughs as she says this, so Mimi knows she means well. Not that this is ever in question. Mimi thinks the best of everyone, even after they fail her. Maybe especially then. Sora has tried to understand it, because she believes she benefits from it more than most.
Mimi sighs, a throaty whine. "So I want you to like him, too."
"If he treats you nicely, I will," and means it.
This has the desired effect, distracting her friend from any more talk about the painting in progress. Sora decides it's the pigment that's the problem. She should have made a better effort from the start. Comes to a decision, and looks at Mimi with her eyes set. "I'll come after crits. I promise."
So happy she squeals, buries her face in Sora's shoulder. "I want us all to have lots of fun! It's our last chance—,"
Winces at this, quick to change the subject. "I moved countries, too, and we still stayed in touch."
"Like I'd let you get away that easily," scoffs Mimi, finally letting go. Does a last round about the studio, taking everything in with an approving nod. "And if Yamato thinks he can get away from me, too, he's not as smart as everyone says."
Unable to stop herself, Sora stares at the canvas again, the disobedient forms. It looks like a crisis. "It's a prestigious fellowship."
"Doesn't mean he has to go with her," grumbles Mimi.
"You like Anna." There isn't anything about her any of them don't like, even after Yamato had told them he'd be going to Saint Petersburg, too, for the summer term, after his exams. This news on the heels of Taichi accepting his first foreign service appointment to New York so he could finally stop being long-distance with Michael, and Koushiro's company headquarters breaking permanent ground in Nagoya, a real estate bid that had taken even Sora by surprise, until he'd explained that Noriko's grandmother had grown too ill to be on her own. The things men do, when they love you.
"I don't like when you all leave me," says Mimi, in the end. Wears vulnerability like a badge of honor, to have survived, to have kept surviving.
Sora stops frowning at her canvas, turns from the easel, opens both arms. "I'm not leaving." She knows this, not just means it, because she's tried. Failure, it turns out, is her most natural state. Errant lines, all these little pieces.
"Pit crit?"
They're still lingering over a late lunch, recovering from the night before. Seated next to Noriko nursing a cup of Mimi's failsafe hangover tea, Mantarō nods, motions a round enclosure with his hands. "Not literally, but you sort of feel like you're in one."
Taichi takes a fried potato wedge off of Mimi's plate. She either ignores this, or is too lost picturing such a horror scene. Stares at Mantarō with the widest eyes. "That doesn't sound very nice."
"It's not about being nice." Yamato's patience always thinnest with Mimi's flights of drama, but he usually regrets this when her eyes get watery. She looks over at Jou this time, because he can make anything better.
"It's tough but they have a purpose to them," says Jou, mostly to Mimi, comforting how he can, gentle explanations. "The goal is to improve."
"To good or good enough?" starts Taichi, then chokes over a full mouthed chuckle when Yamato knocks into his shoulder, hard, on purpose, standing up from their table. Anna pats him on the back, while Michael tries not altogether very hard to look sympathetic, because he understands Taichi deserved it. This, one of the many reasons Yamato likes him, glad Taichi finally committed to something, an embarrassingly long string of off and on relationships behind him. It helps that Michael has political aspirations of his own, competition apparently a potent romantic force, though Taichi doesn't have a jealous bone in his body. Have you seen me? and genuinely means it, not even arrogantly. Could write the book on oblivious self-confidence, lucky and ambitious all rolled into one, making everything he even thinks about touching look easy. If he didn't love him so much, Yamato wouldn't stand him for a second.
"I think maybe we just avoid talking about it," says Jun, sipping her third peach mimosa that morning. "She didn't even talk at all the drive up , remember? It was weird. And she's, like, already super weird." Drops her voice, gossipy, "You know what really happened with Dien, right? How she g—?"
"What happened to not talking about it?" asks Yamato, half under his breath. Jun flinches a little, but only looks guilty when Shuu moves to get up, too, also leaving the conversation.
"Let's give her the morning," says Shuu, agreeing, smoothly shifting the subject. "We can put a plate aside."
Jun nods, face red as her hair, ashamed to silence. Her crush an open secret, though Shuu's too polite to directly turn her down the way Yamato then Taichi then Jou had, Mimi the only with sympathy for her, taking her under a matchmaking wing. Mantarō being Jun's best friend a convenient benefit, Mimi's eyes set on him long ago. I always get what I want, she'd told Yamato when he cast doubt on the elaborately complex scheme, these machinations another reason for his short patience with her.
At the kitchen sink, Koushiro takes the plate Yamato hands him, passes him a kind smile, then glances outside again. The window over the sink shows a darkening sky, clouded in heavy grey weight. Yamato agrees with him without their having to say anything out loud. Leaving the others lightly squabbling with each other at the table, he fills a mug with lukewarm coffee and opens the kitchen door, stepping onto the rear porch of the Kido family cabin.
Sora still sits on the second stair down off the porch, the side of her head resting on a post. It's hand carved wood, roughly shorn by the mountain weather over the years, splintering the edges. Yamato puts the cup on the top step, then closes his hands in his pockets to keep them to himself, ease her soft skin off the rough surface, protect her when she hadn't asked him. It's why he avoids the subject, too, does her the favor, but not in the obvious way the others might. Instead, he just tells her, "Shuu kept a plate for you, from lunch."
She stirs at his voice, pulls herself halfway together. Doesn't look up, but he counts this as progress. None of them really remember how long she'd been out there, when she'd slipped out in the early morning hours. Yamato just knows that her hands are mittenless, and her skin pink from the cold, and that she'd been crying before the others got up, because he'd heard her earlier, and hadn't done anything about it then. "Oh."
"Not now," finding a place for himself on the other end of the first step. A respectful distance. "When you get hungry."
"Mm." A restless murmur of agreement, carrying the whole of her self. Like she'd rather anything else do the carrying for her.
Yamato looks away, tries to keep his head clear. Anna had told him how hard the first year of graduate painting programs could be, felt something like a kinship as he approached his quals. Four different exams, each with their own problem sets, from classical to quantum mechanics. Barely at his apartment these days, camped out at the university library through the late night, Anna joking about his obsessive study habits, calling him a sexy gremlin. She gave him time, though, understanding. He knows he needs to do well not only to advance in his degree, but to pay her back for all she'd waited for investing in him, believing them worth it.
He thinks of something to say, finally, just as Sora lifts her head at last. "I'm being selfish, aren't I?"
She hadn't joined the board games, the spontaneous rounds of karaoke. Hadn't stayed up for the film marathon, joined for a late morning hike, helped with meals. Didn't talk much, wouldn't sit long, couldn't pretend otherwise. Mimi's empathy boundless and ever forgiving, Koushiro covering for her antisociality without being asked, but even Taichi had gotten frustrated, unable to understand her.
He doesn't lie to her. "No," and then, "you know we're here."
Sora nods. Smiles a very little, the corner of her both lifting. Her head is balanced in her hands now, elbows on her knees. "Not for long, apparently."
"You, too?" Mildly grumbly with the theatrical show of sentiment, as though none of them hadn't gone far from each other before him.
"It feels different this time." Sora shrugs a shoulder, wears an oversized jumper that might be from Jou, or Taichi. Any of them, really. Yamato suspects half his clothes are scattered across half their closets at any given time, inventing new attachment disorders. Maybe distance is a good, needed thing.
"Well. You started it."
She laughs into both palms, which surprises him, because he hadn't been joking. His life felt fuller, after she'd come home, all of them in one place. That they are all about not to be anymore, and her the one to stay back, should be more ironic than it feels. Instead, Yamato just feels awful. He doesn't want to be away from his friends.
Her laughter fading now, nails scratching at her scalp, fingers wound through the short, stiff cut of her uneven bangs. He thinks her cheeks are more hollow than he remembers. Ready to speak now, maybe because it's just him. "Crits are supposed to get easier."
"Are they." He forgets to make it a question until it's too late, so he corrects course quickly, worried he's come off like an asshole or, worse, like Taichi. "Maybe that's the point."
Sora looks at him then, the exhaustion dumbing her reaction. "What?"
Yamato doesn't know how else to put it. "If it were easy, would you really want to do it?"
"It's not about what I—," and cuts herself off, breathing through her nose, mouth closed tight. She shakes her head, then releases her breath suddenly. "It's not that. It's that nothing happened. No one said anything. Eleven other students, three professors, two visiting critics," she exhales again, all out of defeat, "and no one said anything to me."
Yamato feels his nerves dim to sense. Something dark at the periphery of his vision, encroaching. Abandonment. Mumbles the next part, uncharacteristic, "Maybe they w—,"
"And I don't think they should have," she goes on, this empty voice. "I didn't show good work."
Mimi would deny the very idea, Koushiro point out the context, Taichi move everything along to the next effort, Jou encourage learned lessons. Yamato just wants to understand. "What didn't work for you?"
Sora looks at him, something like surprise, to be allowed herself in her own words. Thinks it over carefully, taking it serious, so that when she does speak it isn't unsure. Even turns to face him, her back against the post now. "I wanted to let it grow on its own," she says, slowly. "So it could find itself. But I'm not happy with what it found." His brows furrow, working through the problem set, so she keeps going. "It's not the canvas, or the pour, or my angles, or the layers—there's just, there's something else, something about the paint, or the—,"
"—pigments," with a little surprise of his own, for having said it before he'd finished the thought. It's not like him. Sora closes her mouth. A lock of her hair, windswept, is stuck to the corner. Yamato is aware, in the moment, that if he stretched his hand he could tuck it back for her with the pad of his thumb. He remembers when he used to do such things. Curls his hands into his pockets, digging deep, blinking quickly. "If the density of your pigments are in conflict, they'll force different behaviors. If they're in harmony, their behaviors will be more understanding." Tries not to think about how boring he sounds, these dumb and unhelpful reductions. So he finds something to frown about, narrowing on the growing storm clouds in the gathering distance. Mumbles it again, "It's just physics."
Sora turns from him, watches the sky, too. When she gets quiet too long, he believes he's overstayed the welcome, and moves his hands to his sides, palms to the paneled wood floor, and gets to his feet. He takes a step, and she's speaking again. Her eyes even look a little warmer, when she smiles up at him, picks up the coffee he'd left. "Did you know I used to make my own pigments from tree bark?"
Yamato's half turned from her, to return to the others, and half back, looking to stay. "Yeah?"
Shakes her head, modest. "Anyone can. It's not impressive."
"Yes, you are." Again, before he can think about what he's said. Before he knows what it will mean. Looking at her.
A few hours before dawn, Yamato wakes to a thunderstorm, the world cracking in two. Holds his breath, staring up into the dark. Beside him on their shared mat on the living room floor, everyone else passed out where they'd given in to a long night of drunken games they're too old to still be playing, Anna sighs in her sleep, her back to him. A flicker of lightning pans across her shoulder, but she doesn't stir. He gets up on his elbows, pulls the quilt around her.
That's when he hears.
A soft, murmured sound. Needy, intimate, a bodied rhythm being found. From the other end of the room, in between the rain pounding at the windows, the walls, the roof. On her stomach, shirt pushed up, panties pulled down, rug burned knees. Her lips parted, stray strands of her hair caught between them, sucking on two of Shuu's fingers hooked to the corner of her mouth. He angles his hips, rutting into her with a low groan as thunder rolls through the splitting world, and Sora comes hard beneath him, teeth sinking into the flesh of her own palm, trying to keep quiet. Eyes wild, her body raw, made undone.
Looks up, sees him.
Yamato snaps his head around, releases his held breath, feigning turning over in his sleep. Blame the long day behind, or the storm ahead. All in his mind, hearing things wrong, imagined scenes. Lets the night stretch on as he listens, without meaning to, without stopping himself, as she comes a second time.
The same morning, their last one before they'd have to pack up the cars, Taichi wakes Yamato up by climbing on top of him, wanting cuddles. Kicks him off, or tries to, but he's heavy, a dead weight. "I dreamt that you went to space and never came back," says Taichi, yawning.
"Give me space then," in a huffed snap, Taichi's elbow pinching his throat.
Manages to free himself, heave off the quilt Anna had left tucked around his shoulders, too. His head turns without his thinking to turn it, looks at the empty corner of the room, the rug that lays there, its corner slightly curled. The sounds Sora had tried not to make, holding her pleasure in. Something he can't name presses his tongue to the room of his mouth, makes him keep it closed when Anna bends to kiss him hello.
"Everyone else is up," she says. He doesn't like the idea of being last, left behind. Anna knows this from the look on his face, reads him so well. "It's your holiday, too, you know."
Jou and Noriko make breakfast, Koushiro and Michael tidy and set the table. Mimi back to playing matchmaker, talking to Jun and Shuu on the wind swept garden patio, Mantarō checking the plants they'd brought in the night before. Taichi helps Anna fold and put away the pillows and sheets from the living room, joking with each other. Yamato stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, half-way cleaned up. His eyes are a shade darker than usual, heavy bags under them. Remembers how loud the thunderstorm had been, all in his head.
He finishes an abbreviated morning routine, steps into the hallway as Sora walks out of the second bathroom. Her hair is just slightly damp from an incomplete blow dry, clumped around the nape of her neck. Everyone else is still in lounge clothes, but she wears the same oversized sweatshirt with a different pair of long pants made of forest green polyester, waterproof. He's startled, then protective, jumping to distracted conclusions. "You're going out now? After that storm?" Hears the odd strain in his tone as he says it, but it's too late to pretend now.
She pushes her bangs aside. Her cheeks are tinged in pink, warmed by the steam of the bath. Her eyes aren't wild anymore, tamed to something softer. Not quite guarded, just swept neatly away, out of sight. Even her voice is hers again, nothing like how he'd heard it sound in her private hours. "I used to go after storms in Vancouver, too, to look for fallen bark I could use." Looks behind her to the window cut into the wall at the end of the narrowed corridor, then at him again. Backlit in new sunlight, a fresh day opening up to them, like nothing had ever gone all wrong before this. "Do you want to come with me?"
He tells himself he goes so she won't go alone, wander far, get lost and delay their departure. That the storm had pulled the world up by its roots, in need of careful treading now. That she is the most careful of all of them, sturdy in her feet and fixed in her habits, but that she had also fucked their best friend's brother on the living room floor last night while everyone slept around them, sober-minded and on purpose, familiar, like it hadn't been their first time, even though they didn't belong to each other. That everyone has a dark side, and then a darker one still. That he understands the duality of the mind, the heart, but cannot make the same sense of the body, split in two. In the end, Yamato goes because of the unnamed thing that shapes his mouth to say yes to her, and probably always would have.
Anna isn't happy but she lets him have his choices. Mimi pouts that their breakfast will go cold, and Taichi can't find his boots to join, too. Yamato gets his on, listens to Shuu remind Sora about the place where the footpath curves left, the groundfill unstable there even before the storm. Lets the back of his knuckles skim her neck where he adjusts the collar of her windbreaker, a private affection, when no one else is paying attention. Smiles a little at Yamato when they head out, the way men do when they want to trust each other.
They don't talk the first half hour, concentrating on each place their feet fall. Muddied ground, loose rocks, felled branches interrupt their progress, making the hike slow and uneasy. The air is cold and damp, sticking to Yamato's skin like wet paper. He's about to ask if they should go back, try again after they've had a meal in, worried about the others, how he looks to them, walking out the door with her on their last morning together, misheard his insistence on accompanying her as something other than he'd meant. The guilt wants to sink his feet into the earth. He follows her anyway.
"Sora," when it goes on too much, too long. "Maybe we—,"
"You won't tell them. Right?" At the head of a sloping path, Sora turns to him still some paces behind. Digs the toe of her hiking boot into the mud, anchored hold, so she can look at him without worry. Her eyes are calm. "It's not serious. Shuu would appreciate it."
Yamato lets his head go blank. He doesn't want to think about them, what he'd heard. The wind picks up, snaps the air around them both, whips her hair out from under the thick wool hat Anna had let her borrow for the short hike, keep her still drying hair safe in the morning cold. She tries to tuck the ends back, misses a few strands, caught on a full bottom lip, and Yamato finds the name for the unnamed thing, pressing down on his tongue. Desire.
"No," he agrees, helpless. "It's not serious."
Sora looks at him, smiles her gratitude. It's gone before it reaches all the way to her eyes, and she's turned away now. Continues their hike, steps ahead of him, the new day already behind her. He follows her anyway.