Ch.15
I woke up to an elbow in my ribs. Rias was stretching, both arms above her head, back arching off the mattress, toes pointing under the sheets. For about five seconds she had no idea where she was. Her eyes were half-open, her mouth was soft, her crimson hair was tangled across my pillow and her pillow and the gap between them. She looked like a girl waking up next to someone she liked, and the morning light coming through the curtain caught the red mark on her collarbone and the mess of her hair and made both of them glow.
Then she opened her eyes all the way and saw my ceiling and my walls and me, and the Gremory composure tried to reassemble itself. Her spine straightened. Her chin came up. She started to sit up, and the sheet fell to her waist and she was naked and the morning light was on her breasts and she realized this simultaneously and grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to her collarbone.
"Good morning," she said. Her voice was careful. The heiress was trying to climb back into the driver's seat.
I reached over and pulled her back down. One arm around her waist, her back against my chest, her head on my pillow.
"Five more minutes."
She went stiff for a second. Then she relaxed. Her body settled against mine and her hand found my arm across her stomach and her fingers laced through mine.
"Five minutes," she said. Her voice was different. Smaller. Warm.
We lay there. Her hair smelled like last night. My arm was across her bare stomach and her breathing was slow and steady under it, and the new power in my muscles hummed quietly alongside my heartbeat. My hand was looser on her waist than I meant it to be and tighter than she expected, and when I squeezed she made a small sound and pressed closer.
Outside, a bird was being obnoxious on the power line. Repetitive, two notes, over and over. On a different morning I would have thrown a shoe at the window.
Five minutes turned into ten. I didn't count.
Eventually Rias sat up. She looked at the room, the mess of sheets, her nightgown still on the floor where it had fallen. She looked at me.
"I need clothes," she said.
I pointed at my closet. She opened it, rummaged, and pulled out a t-shirt that was too wide in the shoulders and fell to mid-thigh on her. She put it on and studied herself in the back of the closet door and her mouth pressed together in a line that was trying to suppress a smile.
Rias Gremory in my shirt, hair wrecked, composure shot, a red mark on her neck she hadn't noticed yet. This was going to be a good day.
The smell hit us at the top of the stairs. Miso. Rice. Something frying. Asia was in the kitchen.
She was wearing the Kuoh girls' uniform, which Rias must have arranged through the school, and her blonde hair was tied back with a ribbon and she was standing at the stove with a spatula in one hand and a look of intense concentration on her face. My mom had apparently given her a cooking lesson at some point, because the tamagoyaki she was rolling looked professional.
She turned when she heard us on the stairs. Her green eyes went from me to Rias to the shirt Rias was wearing to me again. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Her grip on the spatula tightened and her chin wobbled and her eyes went bright and wet and then she pressed her lips together hard and swallowed and the wobble steadied into a smile.
She was determined to be okay about what she was looking at. Her jaw said so. The boy who'd saved her life deserved to be happy, even if the happiness looked different from what she'd been imagining in the guest room across the hall.
"Good morning, Issei-san! Rias-san!" Her voice was bright and only cracked on the second name. "I made breakfast. There's enough for everyone."
She set a third plate.
I watched her do it. Chopsticks perfectly aligned. Placemat smoothed. Tea poured into a third cup. She'd made breakfast for two and added a third setting in the time it took us to reach the kitchen.
"Thank you, Asia," Rias said. Her voice was gentle. She sat at the table and tucked her legs under her and her crimson hair fell across the collar of my shirt and she looked beautiful and completely out of place in a suburban Japanese kitchen.
"This is delicious," I said, because the tamagoyaki was good and Asia needed to hear it and the silence at the table was getting loud.
Asia smiled. Steadier this time. "Thank you. Your mother showed me how to fold it properly."
We ate. The kitchen was warm. The bird outside was still going, two notes, relentless. Rias ate neatly. Asia ate with small precise bites, eyes on her plate. My grip on the chopsticks felt different. Stronger. I picked up a piece of tamagoyaki and the chopsticks flexed in my hand in a way they hadn't yesterday.
I eased my grip. The new baseline was going to take getting used to.
Rias left through a magic circle after breakfast, changing into her school uniform in a shimmer of crimson light that filled the kitchen for a second and made Asia stare. She told me she'd see me at school, and the look she gave me on the way out said the five minutes this morning had mattered more than three rounds last night. Then she was gone, and it was just me and Asia in the kitchen, and the silence was different from the silence before.
Asia was washing dishes. I picked up a towel and dried.
"She's very beautiful," Asia said. She didn't look at me.
"Yeah."
"Is she... important to you?"
"She's getting there."
Asia nodded. Her hands were in the soapy water and she was scrubbing the same plate she'd already cleaned. "I'm glad," she said, and her voice was steady and sincere and I didn't believe it all the way.
I let it go. Some conversations needed more time than a kitchen gave them.
School was the same building it had been yesterday and a different planet. I walked through the gate with Asia, who'd been enrolled as a transfer student in my class, and the normalcy of it was surreal. Students in uniform. The courtyard. The shoe lockers. A second-year whose name I didn't know was trying to carry an easel through a doorway that was clearly too narrow and losing badly.
I found my seat. Same chair, same desk, same view of the courtyard from the second-floor window. All of it identical to yesterday.
During the first class, I was taking notes and my pen cracked in my hand. Just snapped. Cheap plastic giving way under fingers that had been gripping at the same pressure as yesterday except yesterday that pressure hadn't been enough to break a pen. I stared at the two halves in my hand. Blue ink on my fingers.
The girl in the seat next to me offered me a tissue. I cleaned my hand and borrowed a pencil and made a note to be more careful with everything I touched for the next few days.
"Your fine motor control will require recalibration," Ddraig said, quiet, from the back of my skull. "Your muscles are operating at a higher baseline. You will break things until your proprioception adjusts."
Great. I was going to be the guy who destroyed door handles and crushed soda cans for a week.
At lunch, Rias walked through the courtyard. She was a hundred meters away, surrounded by third-year girls, moving through the crowd with the composed grace she wore like armor. Her crimson hair caught the sunlight and turned to fire and she turned her head and found me across the courtyard and her eyes locked on mine and the composure cracked for half a second into the girl who'd said "five more minutes" in my bed this morning.
Half a second. Then the mask was back and she kept walking and the third-years around her didn't notice because they'd never seen the version of Rias that existed underneath.
Akeno noticed.
She was standing by the ORC building entrance, teacup in hand, and her violet eyes had been tracking Rias across the courtyard. When Rias looked at me, Akeno's gaze followed Rias's gaze, and when the look broke, Akeno was still watching.
Her eyes came to me. The teacup paused at her lips. She sipped, smiled behind the rim, and went inside.
After school. The ORC clubroom. Rias was in a meeting with Sona Sitri about territory management, because the supernatural world apparently ran on bureaucracy even when the bureaucrats were teenage Devils with enough firepower to level city blocks. Kiba was training in the yard. Asia was sitting on the couch reading a textbook, her lips moving silently as she practiced kanji.
I was standing by the window when Akeno materialized beside me. She'd been across the room a second ago. Queen-speed movement, casual, deployed like a hallway is a suggestion.
"Ara ara." Her voice was low, pitched for me and not the room. "So it finally happened."
I looked at her. She was holding a fresh cup of tea and her ponytail was hanging over one shoulder and her violet eyes were amused and bright and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with her lightning.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Ufufu." She set the tea down on the windowsill and turned to face me. Close. Closer than a classmate should stand. Her fingers found my forearm and walked up it, two fingers stepping lightly over the fabric of my sleeve, and the incense was the same scent I'd caught when she healed me after the fountain, mixed with warm skin underneath.
"I hope you know," she said, and her fingers reached my bicep and her thumb pressed in, testing the muscle underneath, "that Rias isn't good at sharing."
Her mouth was near my ear. Her breath was warm.
"But I am."
I caught her wrist.
My fingers closed around it the same way they'd closed around Raynare's wrist at the fountain and in the church basement. Thumb on her pulse. The grip that said I wasn't backing away.
Akeno's eyes widened. Just for a second. Her pulse kicked against my thumb, once, hard, and her lips parted and she looked at where my hand was gripping her wrist and then she looked at my face and her expression changed. The playful teasing Queen was still there but underneath it was a girl who hadn't expected to feel her own heartbeat respond to someone else's grip.
I held on. A second. Two. Her pulse was fast under my thumb.
I let go. Slowly. My fingers unwinding from her wrist, releasing her. I hadn't said no. I hadn't said yes. She noticed.
Akeno's smile widened. Wider than the teasing one. This one had weight behind it.
"Interesting," she said. She picked up the tea from the windowsill and walked back toward the kitchenette. At the doorway she paused, one hand on the frame, and looked back at me over her shoulder.
"Rias was right about you. You're nothing like what we expected."
She disappeared into the kitchenette. I heard the sound of running water and the clink of porcelain.
A minute later, Koneko walked past me.
She was carrying a bag of chips and a juice box and her gold eyes were fixed straight ahead. She walked past, paused, and her nose wrinkled. She sniffed once. Short, precise.
"You smell like Buchou."
I looked at her.
"…All over."
She walked to her chair, sat down, opened the chips, and started eating without elaborating.
That girl was going to be a problem.
Asia looked up from her textbook. She'd been watching the last two interactions with eyes that were getting wider and greener by the minute. Her mouth opened, closed, and she went back to her kanji.
I sat down on the couch. The cushion creaked. My fingers were still warm where I'd held Akeno's wrist, the incense still on my skin, and through the window Rias was crossing the courtyard from Sona's building, her crimson hair catching the afternoon sun.
"Partner," Ddraig said. Quiet. Amused. "At this rate, you will need to start keeping a schedule."
I didn't respond. She wasn't wrong.