Yoru No Uta

 Chapter 8

 

 By: somnambulated

 thefreeair@aol.com

 

 

 she turns out the light, anticipating night falling

 tenderly around her

 and watches the dusk;

 the words won't come.

 She carries the act so convincingly the fact is

 sometimes she believes it,

 that she can be happy the way things are

 be happy with the things she's done

 

 

 ________________________________________________________

 The girls didn’t say much for the rest of the day—a pattern that spread through the days that followed. Like black oil in water that had always been clear. 

 

 After the kiss, they were both left staring at the ground, fingertips on their own mouths. Guilt and confusion tumbled through Sakura in an almost nauseating frame. Tomoyo waited to be woken. They carried the taste on their tongues for days. 

 

 They’d walked to class in silence, they sat beside each other in silence. They avoided eyes in silence. 

 

 The conversation sat always on Sakura’s lips, un-had. It was new and disturbing to imagine the distance between them. They were, to each other, an escape from what they’d now become. Tomoyo couldn’t count the hours she’d spent listening, while Sakura murmured her thoughts like sleepover secrets in the bedroom of a little girl, twisting her skirt in her hands and sometimes trembling if there were tears on her face. The good things or the bitter things, or all between; they all came out eventually. 

 

 Or, they used to. 

 

 And Tomoyo knew there was something lurking inside of her, some kind of uncried tears because Sakura—for the first time—had nowhere to go with these things. These broken things. 

 

 It hurt to watch her, mumbling formalities as though they were strangers. 

 

 It didn’t take long for Etsuya to notice; he eyed the girls strangely and Tomoyo straightened across the classroom and looked away. She was grateful when he didn’t ask. 

 

 By midweek, the silence was so tight that the boys were itching under their skin. The girls were parallel at the table in the library, because neither would acknowledge that there was no reason to carry about as normal. The tops of their heads were staring each other down while their eyes busily pretended to read. Tomoyo was hiding in her notes, Sakura’s chair was unnaturally far from Syaoran’s. Her taste was fresher on Tomoyo’s lips than his; she’d been inching from his subtle touches. He reached for her hand under the table and she made a fist, meekly rebelling. Her neck was permanently arched toward the ground even when she walked. 

 

 “Okay…” Etsuya’s voice was soft, but it sent dark lines down Sakura and Tomoyo. He set The Scarlet Letter on the table before him with a definite slam. Sakura raised her shoulders uneasily; Tomoyo was just brave enough to look at him, but his eyes were moving between the two. Sakura refused to look up. 

 

 “Here’s a question I never thought I’d ask.” he said. “Are you two having some kind of a fight?” 

 

 It seemed the whole library had stopped to listen. Sakura darted her eyes to the right just to be sure it wasn’t so. And both of them must have been hoping for the other to answer, because nothing got said. It should have been an easy question, Tomoyo thought; why hadn’t Sakura answered it? Why hadn’t she answered it? 

 

 There was something chemically wrong with the concept. She couldn’t imagine bringing herself to feel any ill-intended emotions for Sakura. Or worse, the other way around. She looked at her notebook. 

 

 pp. 37-38: When the human mind feels it has committed a sin, it will punish itself 

 

 She heard the chair drag against the floor, and her head filled with images that she shot down instantly. In a blur through the corner of her vision, she saw Sakura stand. Before there was time to blink she was gone. 

 

 Etsuya looked to Syaoran, who was easily as confused though nowhere near as surprised. Nothing was said, and he followed her. Wherever she’d gone. 

 

 Tomoyo narrowed her eyes at the paper, and didn’t understand the throbbing pain behind her eyelids until the page started to blur. She was on the brink, and dangerously close to tears. But she wouldn’t show him, and she would deny that he already knew. 

 

 Syaoran caught up to Sakura in the hallway, but she ignored his calls. She was pacing, almost running, with her eyes on her shoes. Her skirt fluttered and panicked with the movement, twirling like there was some great wind. 

 

 She was fast but he was faster. He stole her wrist in his hand, forgetting to consider how heavily she’d been walking when he stopped. Her body jerked to a halt, and he cringed at the squeal her shoes made against the floor. 

 

 “Did I hurt you?” Was the first thing out of his mouth when he let go. She swallowed hard and shook her head. The tears had been in her eyes long before he touched her—they must have been; they were already tumbling from her chin like rain on the edge of a slanted roof. 

 

 “No,” she whispered. Her voice was eerily placid. “No, you didn’t.” 

 

 He waited in vain for the moment that she would put her forehead against his chest, or blurt words incoherently through a rage of sobs. She did neither; she wouldn’t even look at him. 

 

 “What did I do?” There was an uncharacteristic desperation in his voice. He grabbed her hands, and for the first time in days she didn’t pull herself free. “Why won’t you tell me?” 

 

 She looked at him for one gratifying instant, bleary-eyed, blinking, but beautiful as a blue Renoir in a way that only she could be. And then he was looking at the top of her head again, staring at the pale blue ribbon that held her half-ponytail. The jagged amber forefronts covered her eyes that way. 

 

 “I just need to be alone.” she murmured. 

 

 “You’ve been alone,” he pressed. “You haven’t talked to me—you haven’t talked to anyone, not even Daidouji. You haven’t eaten, you don’t even look like you’ve slept.” Suddenly his hands tightened around hers, and he leaned so close that she could almost hear his heart. He stuttered on an empty syllable and his cheeks turned red. 

 

 “You aren’t pregnant, are you?” 

 

 She raised her head sharply at that. The tears were dissipating now, sticking to her cheeks half-dry. She was looking right at him with bright, incredulous eyes. Her mouth twisted unpredictably, and finally she blurted out a laugh. He ignored the bright red blush throbbing in his cheeks. 

 

 “No—” she crinkled her nose, “—but thanks. I needed that.” 

 

 He shrunk. His heart pummeled and settled in the same instant, relief and confusion tumbling though his blood—but it was mostly relief. His cheeks hurt. 

 

 “Then what?” 

 

 And they were back to silence. She looked at her shoes, shuffling them on the smooth tiles. She couldn’t imagine his reaction well enough to fear it. He would never hurt her, she knew; but the damage this could do for him—for them—scared the hell out of her. And would he even be jealous? It was Tomoyo after all—Tomoyo, the least threatening being alive. And it was only a kiss, wasn’t it? She’d been under-slept and, dazed. It didn’t mean anything; they didn’t have those feelings for each other. They didn’t. 

 

 So why couldn’t she just tell him? Maybe he would even laugh. 

 

 “I’m hungry,” she finally said. 

 

 He blinked. “What?” 

 

 “I’m sick of studying.” She looked at him, suddenly smiling the close-mouthed half-moon that secretly drove him wild. “…and I’m hungry.” Her eyes were bright, and she broke away from his touch to rub away the dead tears. “Lets just go somewhere.” 

 

 He was just staring at her, expressionless. She knew he was observing. “Will you talk to me?” he said. 

 

 “We’re talking now.” She affectionately tightened her hand around his. 

 

 He sighed, disheartened, and he buried his agitation under a near unbearable mound of worry. He did not like her this way. But she was working so hard to hide whatever it was, in desperation smiling at him and hoping for it all to go away. She was hiding from him, which he was anything but used to. 

 

 “Sakura.” 

 

 Her smile faded like the eraser-lines of an artist who changed moods too often; her eyes darkened a little. 

 

 They had an otherworldly moment. There was no true word to describe it. Wordless thoughts and intangible tips of emotions that denied truth to their owners. He could see through her, understand her efforts and words but not her motives. Their presences mingled like ice in a wine glass on a hot day. Perspiring glass, their skin. And all those nights they spent together, the swell and stretch and shrink of their irises at the highest chords of physical lust. 

 

 She was unreal, so unfathomably ethereal that when he looked at her sometimes he didn’t believe she was human. Didn’t believe she could be molded like all the other girls, sharing their uniforms, their gestures. But she gave him the secret grins, her ribs like wings beneath her skin in the moonlight, and her mouth like copper. 

 

 He was worried. He loved her, didn’t she know? 

 

 He’d lost her eyes. They were asphyxiated with the ground again. She drew imaginary shapes with the tip of her shoe and traced them with her irises. Her weight shifted a few times. 

 

 “What are you thinking about?” He asked. 

 

 She said, “Fried shrimp.” 

 

 It wasn’t true, but knowing her he’d almost believe it. 

 

 “I like the way you make it,” she trailed, idly twisting her hips, “with the seasonings and stuff.” 

 

 He stared at her for a while, hoping to get her attention. She didn’t look up. Really, she was thinking of telling him about the other day. Only a kiss. 

 

 She remembered the first time she’d kissed him—it felt like forever ago, though it had only been a few short years back. The way they leaned into it and awkwardly withdrew to settle their nerves. Their foreheads were close and their hands were fidgeting. 

 

 Then it just happened, as though some great outside force pushed them together. And it was so easy, a nature that had always been inside of them though unacknowledged. If it had lasted just two seconds longer, she’d have married him. The edge of thirteen years old, the back of her mind listening cautiously for her brother’s unwanted approach from somewhere in the house. Those first few seconds meant more to her than words, more than rainy windows and thunder and sex. She’d changed so swiftly but so subtly from that moment, and now she frightened herself sometimes when she considered just how much she loved him. 

 

 Only a kiss? How could she think such a thing? 

 

 “Okay,” he finally said. “Let’s go; I’ll make dinner.” 

 

 Somehow, Syaoran ended up with the task of getting their books from the library. Sakura waited in the hall, fondling the edge of her skirt and counting the pleats. 

 

 Syaoran said nothing, carefully but quickly stuffing Sakura’s things into her messenger bag—slumped against the table leg until he grabbed it. 

 

 This time, Etsuya didn’t ask. He watched, which was more than Tomoyo would bring herself to do. She feared being looked to for an explanation, and she could feel the question marks sprouting like flowers from the corners of his mouth. She couldn’t tell him that this was her fault; it wasn’t her right to tell him that she still harbored the taste, that she drew it into her senses like a hurricane. She wouldn’t tell the story of the wall against the palm of her hand—its grainy texture on her nerve-endings still. The cherry explosion, candy-striped with a tongue that tasted pink. Or the warm breath in her mouth. Or the hot thoughts in her head. 

 

 She wouldn’t tell him that the girl he slept beside, whose hand he tangled in his own beneath the table… was the very same girl she loved more than anything. More than Etsuya—who she was trying to hate when he sat so close. More than the pre-Christmas-festival-delirious school. More than her voice, which meant less and less to her in these tight silences. 

 

 Nobody knew those things; not even Sakura. 

 

 “If she talks to you…” Syaoran’s voice interrupted her thought process, and Tomoyo knew he was looking at her. She forced herself to do the same, and found that the look in his eyes was a heartache. Serious and worried—so worried—and brown. His voice shrunk by half, “try and find out what’s really on her mind.” 

 

 A cold pain shot up her spine, and dissolved down like a melting glacier offering no comfort. She opened her mouth to speak, and a tenth of a syllable came out, but she decided against it and nodded in its place. 

 

 He didn’t suspect anything of her, Tomoyo knew. He had a way with those things. For one, his eyes would have been sharp and she would have felt them burning through her like paper under a magnifying glass in the sun. Instead, he was firm with concern, but soft at the core with compassion. 

 

 But that meant a lot, as anyone who knew him would have concluded, because—when it came to Sakura—he trusted no one. 

 

 When Syaoran was gone, Etsuya said, “Since when did Sakura-san get so high maintenance?” 

 

 “She isn’t.” Tomoyo didn’t miss a beat. She was taking notes from her open book now, though there were none left to take without being redundant. “She doesn’t ask for anything.” 

 

 “He’s acting like her slave,” he insisted. Tomoyo was certain he was only pressing her for conversation with a notion he only vaguely considered to venture. He knew the topics she was unable to resist replying to, and it was almost enough to frustrate her. 

 

 “Sakura doesn’t ask him for anything.” she repeated, simply. Her voice was always like song, though her eyes had nothing of optimism right then, filled with gray pages and black words. She could see the scarlet letter, hemmed and trimmed with bright white lace. She could see the stares, but she couldn’t feel the satisfaction of proving it to be something without shame. 

 

 She could, however, feel Etsuya’s soft stare. With his index finger he moved a lock of hair from her face and tucked it over her shoulder. She paused, closing her eyes in a long blink. “What?” she whispered. 

 

 “Are you mad at me?” 

 

 “No.” It was an easy enough question, one of the few without hurdles or paralleling answers. “I just want to get this done.” 

 

 His eyes were dark, and no matter which part of the page she stared at she could feel them. Un-accusing, but there. It would have been so much easier to hate him. If he could just do one thing wrong, one unforgivable thing to give her just cause to close her book and walk away. But she knew he wouldn’t; she knew that he would hand her the keys and they would drive home through the snow in his secondhand grass-green car. She knew, with or without denial, maybe just a little too much, she would miss him when he left her at the door. 

 

 He touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and she softly placed her own over it, and guided it away from her. Now he knew, and he wouldn’t touch her for the rest of the afternoon. 

 

 “I worry about you.” But he would talk. “Don’t.” she softly answered. “I’m quiet because I’ve got a lot of exams to study for. And, before you ask: no, I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep, but I don’t need much.” 

 

 That quieted him long enough to make her feel guilty. She hadn’t yelled—she replayed the words in her head a dozen times to be sure she remembered correctly. Then he leaned close to her, and his voice cooled. He spoke in ribbons of blue. 

 

 “Are you pregnant?” 

 

 An equal silence passed. She was frozen in time. Sitting there with her open book. 

 

 …and the child she called Pearl. …and the child she called Pearl. …and the child she called Pearl. 

 

 Her hair swung past her shoulder when she finally remembered to look at him. “What?” 

 

 “Well…” It was his turn to look away, and he shrunk just a little under her gentle but incredulous stare. 

 

 She blinked twice at his uneasy slump. Then she tucked back her lower lip, and giggled. 

 

 He looked up, met with her eyes—suddenly gleaming starlight grins. “No?” he timidly ventured. 

 

 She dipped her head in a soft laugh, and he lowered his gaze to follow her, still wary. Finally she stood, closing both book and notebook and neatly sliding them into her messenger bag. She was still laughing. 

 

 He watched dumbly. “Tomoyo? Where are you going?” 

 

 She patted the top of his head, still breathing in giggles. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

 

 It wasn’t until she was almost at the door that he thought to follow her. And he did, in quick tripping steps. “Wait,” he was saying, “that was a ‘no,’ right? Tomoyo? Tomoyo!” 

 

 ______________________________________________________________________________________ 

 

 “…and for tomorrow, the forecast will be cloudy, with just mild snowfall—” 

 

 The sudden silence was what woke her. Sakura opened her eyes, flooded with orange lamplight. The upholstery of the couch was pressed against her cheek. 

 

 “I was watching that…” she mumbled. 

 

 Her brother was standing over the now dead television, remote in hand. “The only thing you were watching was the inside of your eyelids.” he assured her, “I could hear you snoring from the kitchen.” 

 

 She sulked, her voice half its normal weight. She snuggled into the thick collar and sleeves of her uniform and tightened her fetal curl on the cushions. Her mind was sore from struggling through its nightmares; she tried, but could not remember them. That was a good thing, she decided. “I don’t snore.” 

 

 Touya was looking at her, she could feel it though she’d closed her eyes again. “Monsters…” he said coolly, “are natural-born noisemakers. Even if they’re asleep.” 

 

 “What did I ever do to you?” She sat up, groggy. Her hair was flat from the nap she’d taken; it was thin through her raking fingers. “Do I follow you around all day thinking it’s hilarious to annoy you?” Her eyes were tired, but burning. In the rare instances when she was upset, annoyed, or otherwise irritated, she looked even more like a child than when she smiled. It was almost cute, he thought. Almost. 

 

 “What’s wrong with you?” He said, simple. He was trying to sound casual, but Sakura suspected that she’d hit a worry-nerve in him. And she wasn’t as mad as she’d made herself to be. She stood, absently straightening the wrinkles in her skirt. She’d fallen asleep in her uniform. “Did you make dinner?” She said. 

 

 “A few hours ago. Yours is in the fridge.” He narrowed his eyes. “I thought you said the Brat fed you.” 

 

 She glared at that, running both hands through her hair to even its fall above her shoulders. “Don’t call him that. And he did, but I’m hungry again.” 

 

 He opened his mouth for another unwanted remark, but she was in front of him now, and she poked him firmly in the shoulder. “Shut up.” 

 

 At that, he did, and he watched her breeze past him for the kitchen. He hadn’t missed how pale her skin was, though his sister seemed unaware of it herself as she rummaged through the fridge, oblivious to his worried stare. 

 

 ______________________________________________________________________________________ 

 

 In the moon, it was pale yellow. The room was filled with starlight, drizzling like rain frozen mid-air from a window as high and as wide as the wall. The curtain was half drawn and it looked black in the dim. The desk was cluttered with scraps of fabric, loose threads, an open pair of scissors and a white strip of tape with numbers on it curled up like a snake. A project as-of-now abandoned. 

 

 Was this what a fight would feel like? 

 

 Tomoyo’s mind drifted in and out of a half-sleep that was lulled by the cool filmy gray, her own atmosphere. Etsuya was wrong to call it a fight. But she couldn’t remember a time she’d been away from Sakura for so long in spirit, and she let the illusion of squabbling lovers delude her. In her dreams, tangled and half-living, the kiss became endless, un-invaded by the bell. The halls became the thick cotton planes where she could feel her skin. And her eyes would be endless and green and bright, and the lights would be down and cool blue. And she would grin. 

 

 The cloth shuffled in her arms and she jarred at the ghost of a sound, flinching unwillingly back into reality. Her bed had never seemed so empty, and it hurt when she truly believed that she would only need to turn over to find Sakura sleeping there. 

 

 She swallowed something heavy and dry in her throat and pressed the dress close to her mouth. In the moon, it was pale yellow. She gave it a brief impassive kiss, and closed her eyes, and dreamt in thin ribbons of strawberry redolence.