Motoki walked over to the hamper, pulling his clothes out. He pulled his jeans on quickly, swallowing a number of curses when they failed to zip easily. He put his arms through the button-down but didn’t bother to do it up. He turned back and saw Reika staring at him, crying silently.
“You’re leaving.”
He nodded. “I don’t see much point in staying,” he told her, regretting it when he saw her face screw up in pain. He hated doing that. It made him want to break his own nose, but there were things he had to say and do to get the message across. “Unless you give me a reason.”
Reika looked at him, hands waving in vague, helpless gestures. He’d never seen her like this before. He didn’t like it. “I don’t want you to go,” she whispered brokenly.
Any other time her plea would have been enough. “Neither do I,” he confessed, meaning it perhaps more than he ever had in his life. “I love you, Reika. You know that, and you should know…” he trailed off. Wasted words, wasted time. “Give me a reason, Reika. Please, please give me a reason.”
Reika just kept looking at him. The quiet went on for so long that Motoki wondered if maybe they’d both gone deaf. He couldn’t hear the normal city sounds or the people in the flat above them wandering about. Not even his own breathing reached his ears. Nothing mattered right now except Reika’s voice telling him what he needed to hear to make him kiss her and whisper that he would never bring this moment up again.
“I’m afraid, Motoki,” she said finally, her voice quiet. “You can’t blame me for being afraid.”
He shut his eyes and bowed his head. He took a few deep breaths and tried to think of how everything could suddenly go so horribly wrong.
“I can, actually,” Motoki said, turning to go. “Good-bye, Reika.”
There wasn’t so much as a second between the moment he threatened to go and the moment she wrapped her arms around his waist, holding him. Her face was wet against his back. “Motoki, don’t.”
Motoki sighed, clenching both of his fists. Nothing had ever been this hard before. “If you’re really that afraid we won’t make it, Reika, then I don’t see the point,” Motoki murmured, his heart shattering in his chest.
Reika froze. “The point in staying, or… the point in being with me?”
It took him several tries before he could actually speak. “You’ll be accepted, Reika. I know you will, even if you don’t. And if you’re going to spend the whole year thinking I’m having it off with other girls, and if you think you can’t… can’t trust me.” He swallowed, trying to stop his mouth from being so dry. “Then maybe we shouldn’t.”
Reika went stiff as a corpse behind him. He felt her breath shudder, and she buried her nose into his back. He wanted to say something to make it better, but he couldn’t think of what that could possibly be. Besides, it would sound hollow.
He decided that he’d better get out now before she got angry and made the argument stretch out until they couldn’t even remember a time when they’d cared. He exhaled unsteadily and started to pull himself out of her desperate embrace.
Suddenly, Reika’s arms were gone, and he felt her fingers latching on to his arm. He was spun around violently, flinching in anticipation of a slap that never came. Before he could twitch, her lips were on his with enough force to bruise. He’d read kissing described as drowning before and always thought it was rubbish, but now he understood. He couldn’t catch his breath. He felt so utterly overwhelmed that he had to grasp her arms to hold himself up. Skin touched skin, and he remembered that she wasn’t wearing anything more than a towel. He quickly extricated his body from hers, forcing himself to stand on his own so that he could keep his hands to himself. If this really was their last kiss, it was going to be just that. He wouldn’t do that to her, and he wasn’t stupid enough to do that to himself.
After what he wished had been hours, she pulled back just enough to let him know it was finished. She took a few deep breaths, panting, and hissed against his lips. “Get out.”
He heard her walk back into the bathroom, shutting the door calmly behind her. She was upset, but she wasn’t going to let him see it. He didn’t have that right anymore.
Motoki once again made to leave. He kept his eyes closed the entire time, narrowly avoiding furniture and tripping over the rug. He didn’t want a last look around the apartment. He didn’t want to gather up the possessions that had accumulated over time. He only wanted to escape, terrified that if he stopped and saw a picture of happier times, he would break apart like glass, shattered and useless on the floor.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
Originally, the Motoki/Reika stuff was all at the top of the chapter, but one of my betas suggested that the actual fight might work better in flashback form, just to mix it up a bit and not have a twenty-page scene dealing with secondary characters. When I wrote it like that, it became clear that Motoki wasn't likely to relate something this personal to Mamoru, so it had no business being in the flashback. I think it's sad because it's rather touching, but ultimately, it was for the best.
