yoru no uta

There’s blood in my mouth ‘cause I’ve been biting my tongue all week.
And the talking leads to touching and the touching leads to sex.
And then there is no mystery left.






________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tomoyo was perfect, and it was that simple. He hadn’t been looking for her, and when she appeared in that music room doorway all those months ago, his heart buzzed with premonitions, hopes and notions that were as surprising as they were delightful. He knew, just knew, that she would prove to be as she appeared. Her mind was a lullaby, her intelligence a subtle rhythm as were the chords she breathed upon. There wasn’t a thing that could be said that she wouldn’t understand.


Every emotion he expressed, ever word he said to her, she proved to already be a master of. She was warm, and her voice was the most intimate part of her. Her eyes—when she sang—faded into things that he was sure he would never see. She hit the high notes as though her soul had burst from her skin and was lingering just south of her own personal heaven. He was always left on earth, making the music that set her into flight.



Sometimes he believed that she would never return. That she would never belong to anyone—not even him. But then the song was through, her feet were back on the ground, and she was no more or less his than ever before in her life.




She was daydreaming with both hands on the steering wheel and her head canted just barely to the right. The radio was on, lulling her with distant soft rock, faded as a t-shirt. Snow fell around and past her on the other side of the window, and it left flecks of mobile white in her eyes—blue as the night sky they reflected. This was when he loved her the most: When it took her hours to descend, taking the clouds like stepping-stones until they became s.


He was lucky just to touch her at all, to breathe in the incense of her energy. Hers was an aroma not to be gathered or bottled. It was on no shelf, in no bedroom, dampening no wrists or collars. He wanted to be the only one who would ever know it. He wanted to steal her away and marry her.



But she would say no, he knew it.




“I don’t like driving in the snow.” She said. She spoke not unlike she sang, he suddenly started thinking.



“You’re doing alright,” he tried to keep his voice as soft as hers. No matter how deep his thoughts, she never quite broke the chain of silence. “It’s good practice.”



She was still learning to drive, three months past her sixteenth birthday. He was barely a month older, but he’d gone for his license as soon as the opportunity presented itself; to get away from his house full of noisy younger siblings, he guessed. He’d always been a thinker, unafraid of silence—as a child he longed to be deaf, to be like Beethoven and feel the rhythms of his own music through the bedroom floor. Music and thoughts, the only things in the world.



The fantasy was gone now, though he still wondered how different things would be. Would he still know her voice, would he bury himself in her chest and feel the rhythms pull like guitar strings through his blood?



She was where the world stopped, where the sound from the outside fluttered away like birds.



But she told him that she liked it at his house, when they were sitting around the coffee table in the livingroom. Constant interruptions from selfish crises. Someone pulled on a pigtail, or a toy was missing.



But even his restless siblings loved her. She had the compassionate voice that stopped them, spread civility over their busy noisy rapid world. His sister, who accused everyone in the free world of stealing, breaking, or otherwise vandalizing her dolls, would crawl into her lap unannounced and put her head on her chest.



Tomoyo seemed not to mind, humoring the idea, playing with the girl’s hair with one hand and scribbling through her homework with the other.



He favored the days when he could follow her home, though. Everything neat, perfect, and quiet. He loved the way her voice trailed (the only sound in the world) as she talked and climbed the stairs ahead of him, sweeping past millions in expenses of artwork and wallpaper and furniture like it was nothing. He loved that nobody was ever home. Just her.



“I feel like I’ll crash it,” she said.



“Try not to.”



She swallowed a small laugh, and flashed for that moment a measure of beauty that outdid itself. Everything about her was in order, but a single hair flew wildly from an otherwise flawless braid. The thought of it made him smile.



Her hair went on for miles, and when she set it free it was like a thousand pastel ribbons ind.ind. She unraveled when he kissed her…



She pulled the car flawlessly though the iron gates, which opened for her only when she lowered the window and punched a handful of numbers into an adjoining intercom. And she smiled like the half-moon when he took her hands at the doorway.



“Can I come inside?” He asked, and she smiled as she shook her head.



“I have to work on the costumes for the festival.”



“What about your solo? I could help—”



“No,” she whispered. Her eyes were full of the night sky. “I’ll manage.”



He leaned forward to kiss her goodbye, but she tapped his nose with her index finger. The warm cotton of her red glove reminded him of the cold air. She brushed her hand over his cheek, and her smile was that of the pale moonlight hovering her graphite hair.



“Does anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?” He said.



She raised half of her smile, as close as she would come to a grin. “Be careful driving home.”


________________________________________________________________________________________________________




The house was quiet when Tomoyo closed the door behind her, hiding away the sound of early December squalls. Thingre dre dim, giving away the presence of a shop that had been closed for the night. Empty, though full of things. She could see nothing past the stairs.
>
>

For a moment she leaned against the door, her hands still on the knob behind her, and listened to the silence. She could hear the grandfather clock ticking from the top of the staircase; her head still buzzed from the long noisy hours spent in the school auditorium. And Etsuya.



The familiar hurt of days with him surfaced between her thighs. It was always there now, buried beneath a pleated gray skirt, or whatever else she chose to wear. It was her secrShe She took it to bed at night, hiding it beneath pages of thoughts unrelated.



She was taking off her gloves and smoothing the snrom rom her braid as she climbed the stairs. To the left of the hallway’s threshold there was a short span of orange light. There she found her mother, cheek to the curl of her arm, slumped and sleeping over a stack of papers on her desk.



It was rare that the woman looked so calm or so quiet. Only like this could Tomoyo see traces of herself in her mother’s features. When she was still, when her eyes—the same blue—were closed, and her breaths were even. They had the same eyelashes, strange as that may have sounded: thick and elegant like an oil painting. The same defined chin, arching like a narrow bridge and poising all else of their faces perfectly. Refined, but childish in their own separate rights.



She stood in the doorway for a while, observing, thinking, fondling her gloves in her hands. When she left—and returned a few moments later—she was sliding a blanket over her mother’s shoulders.



This was the foundation of her story. A woman—once a girl—filled with memories that she would never say. Her heart was still swollen and bruised from stories she would not tell. What had it done to her, to be in love with someone who would never know the truth, carrying a child that came from a place without desire?



“Tomoyo?” There was a slight stir in the blanket when Sonomi raised her head, dizzy with sleep, blearily checking her watch. “Are you just getting home? It’s almost ten.”



“Yes…” Tomoyo kept her voice low, as though sleep was still resting somewhere in the room. “I stayed late to set up for the festival; I left a message on your voicemail.”



Sonomi sat upright slowly, blinking at the sleek black flip-phone just inches from where her cheek had been. Off.



“The calls have just been non-stop today,” she blurted tiredly, “I’m sorry.”



In the moment Tomoyo’s mind drifted to the mild throbbing beneath her skirt, she caught her mother staring at her. Sonomi stood, idly draping the blanket over the chair though not seeming to notice it. And she took her daughter’s face in her hands, gently, her touch warm as the lamplight.



“How are you? Are you okay?”



Tomoyo blinked away everything that was or could have been a secret thing ir. Wr. When she was small, and she was ill, voiceless, or otherwise distressed, her mother had a way of seeing through her attempts to hide it. I know because I am your mother, she would say, and I’m worried about you.



Regardless, she gave her sweetest smile. “Of course,” she said, “just tired.”



It was impossible to tell if her mother believed her. Her expressions were either unreadable, or foreign to anyone else’s logic. She was vague. Energetic most days, but vague.



“What do you think of spending Christmas in Toyama?”



“Christmas? Why?”



Sonomi dropped back into her seat, and absently rearranged the papers she had disarrayed in her sleep. “I thought we could go skiing.”



“But Christmas?”



“You could say no.” She wasn’t looking at her anymore, opening her phone and scrolling through the voicemail alerts. “Just think about it?”



Christmas after the festival. Away from all the noise and excitement.



Tomoyo closed her eyes in a long blink. The silence huffed in her ears like a virus. The ladders, pink snowflakes. And the music room, where he swept the hair from her face and kissed her, unaware of the green-eyed-wishes she held so tightly that it hurt. Hurt like the muscles between her thighs. This year, between the anticipation and the solace of the music room, she did not know which she would miss the most, or which she wouldn’t mind escaping for a while. She didn’t even feel her mind drifting away from thoughts of Christmas.



“…Mother?”



This was a habit, a frame. She’d loved Sakura since the third grade, when she smiled at her. All her cute little things, like erasers shaped like animals and wings on her backpack. None of that had faded, though she was older now and her thoughts had grown with her heart. She was in love with the boy who chided her when she fell but caught her nonetheless, and she was happy with him, high in her world of pink paper snowflakes.



“Hm?”



Tomoyo wasn’t jealous; she wasn’t. Hers was a different world, quiet and strange. It was gray and full of moonlight, and there was always a piano to coincide with the music sheets. Sometimes she thought she would die before the truth ever came out of her. So would that give her a wedding ring someday, and a child that came from a world without snowflakes? A child too observant not to see the very faint glimmer of loss in her mother’s eyes.



Just Sakura’s smile had been enough, all of these years. Until Etsuya kissed her, and the body of the piano was smooth on her arms when she leaned back. Then the thoughts that had been hiding for maybe a hundred months cameblinbling through her like red blood cells, and she saw the things Sakura must have known for so long. Bedsheets—a cafeteria lunch table, holding hands—a green curtain and the things they hid from the world.



There was so much more to love than love. There were kisses, fingertips triggering neurons that splashed and roused the still waters of an Observationalist. There was magic, there was sex. There were things about her that Tomoyo would never know.



She wasn’t jealous. But did that really mean that she was okay?



Her mother was one of the few things left in the world to both perplex and amaze her. The only person she’d ever genuinely loved was gone. Not shadowing another bedroom, not keeping a home in a distant town. Not in Toyama or the clouds, but truly gone. And the only one who could have possibly stood in her place was gone now too. But her eyes were no less blue. She’d always been vibrant, and if Tomoyo wanted for anything, it wasn’t her mother’s affection.



But she couldn’t imagine herself to be so strong, not if Sakura was absolutely nowhere to be touched or seen or heard from. She wouldn’t have the will to sing anymore, and didn’t dare wonder what her first thoughts would be at daybreak. There would be nothing left in her, least of all the courage to raise a child.



She could only admire her, and pray never to be tested in the same ways.



“Nothing,” she finally said, realizing she never had any intention to speak at all. “I’ll be in my room.”



“Are you hungry?”



“I ate on the way home from school. I really should start working on patterns for the play anyway. Casting just went up.”



Her mother looked at her, suddenly bright-eyed. “Will you be making Sakura’s costume again this year?”



That got a sincere and wistful smile out of Tomoyo, and she said, “Of course.”



“Show me your designs when you’re finished?”



Again, “Of course.” She turned to leave, but her mother touched her hand and she stopped.



“There isn’t anything on your mind? You’re really okay?”



She summoned back her costume smile. “Yes.”




She hoped that the lies she told in those few minutes would not be the first of many.



________________________________________________________________________________________________________




“But still, she’s been quiet, don’t you think?” Sakura had the visor-mirror down on the passenger side of the car, and she was rubbing at the dried paint on her cheek.



He shrugged, eyes forward over ste steering wheel. “She’s always quiet. I haven’t noticed anything.”



“But more than usual,” she pressed. And, “You didn’t tell me I had paint on my face.”



“I wasn’t paying attention.”



“You’re just full of observation, aren’t you?” There was jest to her tone, but he could feel her distant traces of worry. Before he could have added to or changed the subject, she said, “Stay over tonight. I don’t like being alone in the house when it’s so empty.”



She was shifting though her topics too quickly tonight, and—admittedly—he wasn’t paying much attention. Until that last line, to which he cleared his throat.



“My dad’s gone until the week before Christmas.” She flipped the mirror back into place overhead. “He took most of his class to Egypt for winter break.” Getting no immediate answer from him, she folded her arms and slumped in her seat. “I thought field trips stopped after high school, but I guess I was wrong.”



“So the house is yours for the entire month?” The thought appealed to him, for more reasons than those blatantly obvious. He’d been living alone for years. This excluded Meiling’s random and unannounced visits, or the obligatory return to Hong Kong every once in a while.



But then, quiet and solitude had never bothered him. Sakura was the one—when she spent the night—who filled each silence with conversations that became rhythmic to her nature, who was always finding something to do. He couldn’t remember a time she was ever able to sit still, and she was the only person alive who could carry on that way without just irritating the hell out of him.



“Mhm,” she hummed in response. She doubled forward to unzip her backpack on the car floor, but she didn’t appear to be looking for anything in particular. “Oniichan’s still moving his stuff to his new apartment, but he’s gone most of the time, really.”



He let one eye stray from the road to cast her a skeptical glare.



She looked up from her rummaging. “Really.”




The first thing Sakura heard when she opened the front door was: “Where have you been?”



Her brother was coming out of the kitchen with a half-devoured sugar cookie in his hand, and his eyes narrowed at the brown-eyed boy standing over the threshold. He could only hope that the scene did not answer his question.



She sighed, unable to decide between being uneasy or irritated while the dark pairs of eyes exchanged vicious sparks. “What are you doing here?”



“Asking you where you’ve been. It’s past ten.”



She hesitated, shifting on her heels and toes respectively, gnawing her lower lip and trying to decide on an answer. Finally, she matched his narrow eyes with a like expression of her own. This was frustration, not guilt. Offering nothing, she nudged Syaoran back outside, followed him, and closed the door.



“Good to know he’s really gone,” he said.



“Quiet.” She pressed her forehead against his, standing on the tips of her shoes to meet his height. And she gave him a quick kiss. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”



Her eyes were bright with stars and streetlights, ethereal celestial green, watermarked by the moon.



It was only when they were this close that their magic could merge, gentler than the faded stars over their heads. Her birthright. There was snow on her shoulders, he felt it crinkling against his gloves as he pushed the hair from her face. She fluttered at the touch, closing her eyes and taking a long gasp of a breath.



I love you, he wanted to say. But the frozen air that clouded between their mouths only made her skin seem that much warmer, and he pushed forward to kiss her instead.



She settled on his chest and coiled her arms around his shoulders. The cotton knuckles of her gloves swept the hairs on the back of his neck, and everything but the snowflakes sto aro around them.



I love you…



Her honey-amber crown of hair rustled under his chin; she settled her forehead to the rough shoulder of his black coat. And as her lungs selfishly drew all they could of the dry sweet aroma and her arms tightened on him in a desperate and grateful squeeze, he tried to steal all he could of the moment in his mind.



Her lips and tongue were warm on his skin; she was kissing his jaw-line, then—slowly—drawing away until instead of embracing him she was holding his wrists under her red gloves. She smiled a closed-mouth smile, radia the the notions of a child. She was a rush of a lover’s colors and warm blurs one moment, and just an innocent smile the next.



“Be careful driving home.” Her red glove swept some of the snow from his hair. “I mean it; the roads are horrible.”



Over her shoulder, the window blinds were parting and a narrow pair of dark eyes were staring them down. She, somehow sensing her brother’s ever-glaring presence, twisted away to return his less-than-happy gaze. The two of them weren’t very alike, as siblings went. Different stances and eyes and mannerisms. She was wonderful and he was… starting to get on Syaoran’s last nerve.



But sometimes, whether she was aware of it or not, Sakura was so like bro brother that it gave him a chill. This, as the two of them threw back and forth immature glances of annoyance.



“I’m sorry,” she said, turning back to him, “I really did want you to stay tonight.”



“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. Because her brother was still watching, she did not give him a last kiss goodbye. They both shared a secret grin before he stepped free of her hand, and somehow that was enough. She hugged her arms to her chest; the winter burned her wispy red cheeks and snowflake hair.



She bit back her lip in a smile that her brother—still spying—didn’t see. And as she watched him drive away, ghosts of a fleeting ecstasy traveled like waves between her thighs.