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Rei had been dreaming. It was a dream that hadn’t made any sense, one without coherent vision, only swathes of colors and vague sensations. She couldn’t make out a single object in the dream. She felt only a wave of warm energy flowing over her, and a comforting hand that stroked the side of her body, then her belly, and then…Rei opened her eyes. The room was almost completely dark, and what little light escaped between the drawn curtains only afforded fuzzy silhouettes of furniture that she didn’t recognize. There was a couch in the corner and a night table beside her. At the foot of the bed, there seemed to be two thick posts leading up to a high canopy.There were clothes strewn about the floor; some of it was hers.At first, she couldn’t remember where she was, and it took a few seconds for her to realize. The smell of the room was overall unfamiliar—and a bit too pristine—but underneath it she picked up a subtle scent that jogged her memory. It permeated the sheets and the pillows. It was a smell that mixed some part of her with someone else. It made her suddenly overly conscious of the feeling of her naked skin against the warm cocoon of the blankets, and of the hand that had sneaked underneath to caress her.
Sachiko.
Rei turned to her left and she could see the outline of Sachiko’s face in the darkness. Her friend was smiling a dreamy smile. She was leaning close, her mouth pressed lightly against Rei’s shoulder, her eyes half-open.The memories were slowly floating back. Rei could remember that they had slipped quietly into that hotel room hours before—but as it always seemed to turn out, Rei had no idea how they had even ended up there.The day had been perfectly normal at first, besides the fact that she had left school early. Since her club activities had wrapped up sooner than she had expected, she had been able to hop onto a train and arrive in Tokyo earlier than planned.But instead of calling her family when she reached the station, her thumb had kept scrolling through the address book of her phone. She had called Sachiko for some reason, and then—also for some reason—Sachiko had asked to meet in the restaurant of a hotel that Rei had never visited before.As the evening wore on and they talked with a pair of candles lit between them on the table, a strange air had begun to permeate the space. It was the same unnameable thing that Rei had felt at the bathhouse during the summer.Sachiko’s hand had brushed against Rei’s several times while reaching for the shared dessert. There had been a strange expression on her face. At some point, Sachiko had taken a breath and carefully laid her spoon on the edge of her plate, and then she had managed to suggest with a wavering gaze, “Let’s go up to the room.”Rei had looked at her, dumbfounded. It had been the first that she had heard of any room. It had been only then that she had realized that Sachiko had been nervously waiting to broach the subject the whole time.Still, Sachiko hadn’t allowed her much time to be astonished. Her friend had led her to the elevator and to a room in one of the top floors, and the moment that they had found themselves in privacy, the confusion had dissipated in an array of groping hands and open mouths.And now they were lying in bed together, closed off from the rest of the world, enjoying a building warmth beneath the comforters that covered them. Rei smiled softly across the rumpled sheets, even as some intrusive thoughts about her outside life began worming their way in. She tried not to look at the clock, but she couldn’t help it. On its own, her head tilted a bit towards the other night table behind Sachiko, at the source of those glowing numbers that had been playing in the corner of her eye.Sachiko pressed her hand to the side of Rei’s face and gently coaxed her gaze back down. “We still have two hours left until sunrise,” Sachiko whispered, as if she had realized what Rei had been thinking.“I do need to leave soon. I have to get home pretty early. If I don’t, they’ll worry that I—”Sachiko shook her head. “We have time. It’s not like you’re going to turn into a pumpkin, are you?”Rei raised an eyebrow, but felt the tension in her neck soften. The side of her face collapsed deeper into the pillow and she sighed. “I guess not,” she whispered back. “Thank you for keeping track of the time, though. I would have slept right through the morning.”“Oh, that’s not why I woke you up.” There was a playful smile on Sachiko’s face.Rei blushed. * * * Sachiko had kissed her in the elevator. For some reason, this surprised Rei even more than anything else that had happened the evening before. True that it was just a light ghost of a kiss on the lips, and that Sachiko had done it quickly before the doors to the elevator had opened, but Rei hadn’t expected something as improper as public affection to come from a daughter of the Ogasawara family.The gesture had made Rei want to grab Sachiko by the hand and forcefully lead her back up to the room. She resisted this impulse, though. She merely stared with astonishment at the side of her friend’s blushing face until the elevator reached the lobby.Her friend. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized how foreign the word suddenly felt, how inadequate. Some of the things we’ve been doing lately haven’t been merely friendly, Rei thought. But what else do we really have? There’s no word for this.With or without words, she had no idea what “this” was.They parted at the front of the hotel.“My family doesn’t realize where I am, either,” Sachiko admitted, as she poised herself to cross the street in the direction of the train station. “I left after you called, but they probably assumed that I had gone to bed.” She threw Rei a warm smile before the traffic light changed. “Thank you for meeting with me. And do let me know if you’ll be coming to the New Year’s party next week.”Rei watched her go. When the shape of Ogasawara Sachiko had rounded a corner and disappeared in the distance, she felt the energy returning to her legs, and she turned down the street to head back home.She passed a bus stop and briefly considered the idea of hitching the earliest bus back, but as she turned towards the east and saw only the barest beginnings of sun coming up on the horizon, she decided that she had enough time to walk.She needed to clear her head. She shuffled off in the direction of the nearest neighborhood street and started reluctantly heading home. After some time, she passed by familiar shops and cafes, then passed by the Lillian campus.As the winter sun grew a little higher and started beating against the side of her face, she ducked into a small park to enjoy the shade under a row of trees. It was a park that she had sometimes visited during her time in Tokyo, a landmark that signaled that she was fairly close to home.She decided to take the longest possible way through the park. In the back of her mind, she knew who she would find waiting for her in her house, and though she was fueled by her urgency to make it home early enough to avoid awkward questions, she was also repelled by the presence of Yoshino. It was as if some mystical force were pushing her away.But she knew that it was only fear. She could only resist the inevitable for so long.In a sleepy daze, she wandered through the trail of the arboretum, through a thatch of perennial flowers that had somehow survived the cold so far. The park felt empty. Her steps seemed to echo in a large void when she emerged from the trees. It was not until she found herself crossing a basketball court that she noticed another soul—and the person was off in the distance, pounding a ball against the pavement, chucking it occasionally towards the backboard.Rei ignored them and kept walking, yawning as the sun rays started shining directly in her eyes again. She blinked against the light. She thought she heard something in the wind—a whistle that sounded like her name—but she decided that it had been her imagination and she ignored that, too.When she had nearly crossed the full length of the court, she heard it again. It was louder, clearer.And it wasn’t her name.“Hey Bigfoot, is that you?” a voice rang across the court. Rei looked over on reflex before she could even be irritated. “It is you!” The person who had been tossing the ball around waved with a summoning hand. “Come over here, come over here!”That was when Rei realized who it was. She didn’t know anyone else who could come up with such silly nicknames, or anyone who had the gall to actually use them, for that matter. Still, because she had been raised at Lillian and she knew better than to dismiss a senpai, she rolled her eyes and walked over.Rei inclined her head briefly as she reached the other side of the court. “Good morning, Sei-sama,” she offered politely.“Enough with the formalities. You can call me Satou-san now,” said the crazy woman with a crazy grin. “You don’t even go to Lillian anymore. No need to attach yourself to tradition so much.”Rei began nodding, but not so much because she agreed with Sei’s reasons; it was more because she figured that if Sei could call her “bigfoot,” then Sei at the very least deserved to be demoted to “Satou-san.”“What brings you out to the park today, Rei-kun?” Sei continued. “It’s not even seven in the morning!”So it was “Rei-kun” now. She wasn’t quite sure why Sei had chosen that honorific specifically, but it was certainly a step up from being called a sasquatch, so she didn’t object.Rei shrugged dismissively. “I’m on my way home. I just got into town.”“Oh, that’s right, you left Tokyo for school, didn’t you?” Sei asked. She glanced down at the small suitcase that Rei was carrying. “Did you just get off at the train station? You didn’t seem to be coming from that direction.”“Uh, no,” Rei said quickly, “I was visiting with a friend.”“So early in the morning?” Sei tilted her head. “What, did your train come in the middle of the night or something? Midnight express?”Rei couldn’t stop herself from growing slightly annoyed at all the questions, but she tried to hide it in her tone. “No,” she said, and she couldn’t fathom why Sei-sama even cared. “The train came in last night.”“Hm.” Sei bounced the basketball once. The sound echoed through the otherwise empty courtyard. There was a growing smile on her face—a wicked smile—and Rei had no idea what it meant.“What?” Rei finally asked.Sei’s eyebrows flicked up and she let out a loud snicker. “Looks like I’ve interrupted Bigfoot’s Walk of Shame, eh?” She turned and shot the ball towards the nearby hoop, but it bounced hard off the rim and flew off to the side. Sei didn’t even try to catch the rebound.“Walk of shame?” Rei felt heat immediately rushing up to her cheeks.Sei turned back to her. “Yeah, isn’t that what you’re up to?” She grinned and reached over and gave Rei a light punch on the shoulder. “Dragging yourself back home after a liaison with your secret lover? Tell me all about it! How was it?”“What?” Rei crossed her arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Yet, in the privacy of her mind, Rei was flabbergasted at Sei’s apparent ESP. How the hell does she know?“Oh, come on, don’t play coy with me,” Sei said, laughing even more. “What kind of ‘friend’ do you stay out with until the wee hours of the morning?”“There’s nothing strange about sleeping over with a friend.”“Sure,” Sei said, stepping over towards where the basketball had fallen. She rolled it a bit closer with her foot, then kicked it towards Rei. “But usually when you spend the night at a friend’s house, you go back home at a normal hour, or you even stay for a bit until the middle of the day. If it was just a friend, why would you have to sneak back home so early in the morning, like you’re hiding where you’ve been?”“I’m not sneaking,” Rei protested, “and I’m not hiding anything.” She caught Sei’s pass with the side of her foot, out of reflex more than anything else. “What about Sei-sama? Why are you here so early in the morning?” She kicked the ball back to Sei, a little harder than intended. It bounced against the pavement and hit the front of Sei’s leg with audible force.“Ah, sorry!” Rei shouted.Sei merely laughed. She picked up the ball and winked at Rei. “All right, fine. We’ll pretend you’re completely innocent.” She offered Rei a chest pass this time, which Rei caught with one hand. “If you’re not actually trying to sneak back home before everyone wakes up, then it’s no big deal if you play ball with me for a little bit, is it?”“I didn’t know you liked basketball, Sei-sama.” Rei dropped her suitcase and examined the dirty ball.“Oh, I don’t. I suck at most sports. I was just walking through here early in the morning, same as you, and I saw this old ball on the ground, so I decided to go ahead and play for a bit, take my mind off things.”“Things?”Sei turned and looked back over at the hoop behind her. “Yep,” she said, without offering any further explanation.Rei silently grumbled. It was so typical of Sei-sama to pry into other people’s lives while insisting on an air of mystery for her own. It was then that Rei decided not to offer any more information—otherwise, things would become way too unbalanced, wouldn’t they?Rei made a shot. She didn’t know much about basketball, either, but she had played a little bit during gym class, enough that she had gotten the basic forms down. The ball swished through the hoop and fell down to the pavement, where it bounced a few times.“Good shot!” Sei said, catching the rebound. “Let’s play some one-on-one.”Rei scratched the back of her head sheepishly. “Sorry, I don’t know much about basketball. How do you play that again?”Sei shrugged without an ounce of shame. “How should I know?” Her grin hadn’t faded in the slightest. “I was hoping the lumbering giant could tell me.” She posed to make a shot, stopped to adjust her footing, then tossed the ball towards the basket. It whacked against the backboard and careened towards them again, narrowly missing Rei’s face by a few centimeters.But Rei didn’t cower away. She caught it without even thinking. Sei looked over at her, clearly impressed.“Some of the sports I played have skills in common with basketball. There’s a lot of overlap, but I don’t know any of the rules,” Rei explained sheepishly.“All right, then we can just do this. Take some shots. Doesn’t have to be complicated.”Rei raised an eyebrow. She found it kind of funny that Sei was trying to keep her around, but she felt it would be too impolite to ask why. She figured she could humor her for a few minutes and then make an excuse to leave. If anything, it would give her some extra time to avoid the inevitable—the meeting that she had been resisting for months.Sei smirked at her, as if she already knew what she was thinking. “I don’t have ulterior motives. I just welcome the distraction. It’s fun to catch up with old friends sometimes, don’t you think?” She paused. “It’s okay if you want to go, Rei.”“No, I—” Her manners always had a way of overriding her instincts.“Great, then it’s your turn.” She tossed the ball to Rei.Rei held the ball up and bent her knees, ready to shoot.“Hey, wait!” Sei said, her face suddenly becoming pensive. “This is boring, isn’t it? Right, right. There’s no reason we can’t just make up our own game, with our own rules.”Rei relaxed her pose. “Huh? Well, what do you suggest?”“Hmm.” Sei rubbed her chin. “How about, every time you miss a shot, you have to do something.”“Like a penalty game?” The thought was already making Rei wince.“Yeah. I don’t want to make you eat ants or anything, though. We need something more interesting than that.”“Like what?” Rei said, turning back to the hoop, readying herself to launch the ball forward.“When you miss, you have to tell me one of your secrets.”Rei had already let go of the ball. It flew through the air, but the trajectory was crooked because her hand had slipped as soon as she had heard what Sei said. The ball hit the corner of the backboard and flew across the court.Sei stared at her with a full grin. “Wow. Already, huh?” She walked over to where the ball had landed. “I wonder what I’ll ask you. I haven’t even had a chance to think about it yet.”“That doesn’t count!” Rei protested.“Fine, fine. No need to go on a rampage now, Bigfoot,” Sei said. She walked back over to stand next to Rei. “How about we start at this line here, and take a step backwards each time? That’ll make it challenging, nah? We can end the game when we reach the other side of the court.”“Well, what if you miss, Sei-sama? It isn’t fair if it’s just me, is it?”“True enough,” Sei conceded. She scratched her chin again with her free hand. “Hmm, how about the same for me? Every time I miss, you can ask me anything you want, and I’ll answer—even if it’s about someone else. I’ll sing like a bird.”Rei threw her a sour look. “Wouldn’t it be wrong to tell other people’s secrets?”“Right you are.” Sei aimed the ball and took a shot. “So don’t ask me about other people, then,” she said.The ball actually hit the rim that time, but rolled twice and eventually tipped over the wrong side of the edge. Sei turned to her with expectation. When Rei merely stared, Sei reached over and gave her arm a light tap.“I missed. C’mon, ask your question.”Rei looked at the ground. It felt weird. The first thing that popped into her mind was something that she felt she shouldn’t be thinking at all, let alone asking.Sei smacked her arm again. “Go on,” she said. “It won’t embarrass me. You can ask whatever you want. Forget your manners.”Rei rubbed the back of her own head. “Uh, well…okay....” She paused. “When did you first know that you were...uh...that you…?”“When I was sixteen,” Sei answered, without needing Rei to finish. She picked up the ball and handed it to Rei.Rei let out a breath that she didn’t know she had been holding. She dribbled the ball a couple of times as a distraction, as a way to avert her gaze. Sei-sama didn’t seem to be bothered, though.“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Out of the corner of her eye, Rei could see Sei smirking at her. “You’ll have to come up with some better questions if you want me to hesitate answering them.”Rei didn’t reply and instead took the shot. She was a bit too flustered, though, and she knew as soon as the ball had left her hands that it would miss the rim by half an arm’s length. It bounced against the backboard and flew back in Rei’s direction. She caught it, but just barely, and it stubbed one of her fingers painfully enough that she almost dropped it as soon as it had reached her.Sei was already rubbing her hands together. “Well, well, well,” she said. “I see that the mighty have fallen.”Rei pursed her lips. “Don’t ask me about anyone else, though,” she warned. “I’m not spilling anybody’s secrets.”“Oh, don’t worry. My inappropriate questions are all for you. You won’t have to share the fun with anyone else.” Sei took the ball and seemed to practice her stance for a moment. Finally, she turned to Rei. “When was the last time you saw someone else naked?”Rei’s face erupted in a burning blush. Her eyes widened and she turned away, looked off towards the trees.“Oh, did I strike gold already?” Sei asked. “Man, maybe I should have worked up to that one.” She waited for a moment. “C’mon, now. Spill it.”Rei let out a sigh, and she still wouldn’t look at Sei. In a quiet voice, she admitted, “Maybe an hour ago. I think.”“Nice,” Sei said. Rei wasn’t looking at her face, but she could hear the grin in her voice. “So that’s what you were up to after all, huh? I knew it. I could see that Walk of Shame from a mile away.”“I’m not ashamed,” Rei blurted out, though she wasn’t sure why. She turned back around and looked at Sei, who was indeed smiling back at her. “It’s your turn,” Rei said quickly. They both took a single step back.Sei threw the ball. It landed softly on the rim, teetered for a moment, then it rolled off and didn’t make it in. “Damn, is there like a forcefield repelling it or what?” The smile on Sei’s face didn’t fade even slightly, though. “All right, what’ll it be, you lumbering giant?”“I thought I was Bigfoot,” Rei murmured, though she wasn’t paying much attention. She was staring off across the length of the park. A playground in the distance had caught her eye, a jungle gym that she and Yoshino used to play in when they were kids.She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and shook her head. She accepted the ball from Sei.“Same question, I guess,” Rei said, aiming for her own shot already. She felt less embarrassed asking this time, especially since Sei had crossed that line before her.Sei squinted her eyes in thought. “Mmm, I saw someone naked last week, I think,” she said after a second. “I have this friend. I see her naked sometimes.”“Sometimes?” Rei smirked at that.“Yeah. She likes guys mostly, so she’ll only do that kind of thing with me every once in awhile. She’s...normal, I suppose? Not like us. Whatever people call it.”“What do you mean by ‘us’?” Rei cleared her throat awkwardly. She turned her gaze back up towards the hoop and swallowed.But Sei didn’t answer her. “The person you just came from seeing,” she said instead, “that was a woman, wasn’t it?”Rei took the shot and missed. It bounced off the corner of the rim and landed lightly on the ground. After an astonished pause, Rei jerked her head to the side and stared at Sei. “How did you know that?” she asked as soon as she had regained her voice.Sei looked at her with amusement. “No offense, but it doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure that one out. I always kind of assumed we were members of the same lily tribe, if you know what I mean.”As dumb as it made Rei suddenly feel, the truth was that Rei had never really thought about it before. She had no idea what “tribe” she belonged to in that respect. It had never seemed important. She had been with women, yes—actually, she had only been with women so far—but who was to say that both of those women weren’t simply exceptions and not the rule?“I don’t know,” Rei said. The ball had rolled over towards her feet and she stooped to grab it. “It’s not like I go around chasing girls. It just sort of happens.” She felt her blush returning. She second-guessed herself immediately, wondering if she was getting too comfortable and had said too much.“Just happens, huh?” Sei laughed. “Well, you’re a handsome one. I could see the girls lining up to get in your pants.”The blush deepened.“You owe me another one of your secrets, though, don’t you?” Sei said, accepting the ball from Rei once again.“Haven’t I told you enough already?” Rei pleaded, but her tone was nonetheless wry.“Yeah, you’ve been a good old sport. I’ll go easy on you this time and ask something less embarrassing, then,” Sei said casually, bouncing the ball from one hand to the other. She seemed to think about it for a moment. “All right: who was your second kiss?”“Eh?”“The second person you kissed,” Sei explained. “Who was it? The first kiss is usually from someone boring, I find. The second one will tend to be way more interesting. Besides, I probably already know who your first kiss was, so it would be pointless to ask.” Rei gave her a surprised look and Sei shrugged at her. “It was Yoshino-chan, right?”This time, Rei look a physical step away from her, her eyes widening.“Oh, relax. It’s not that big of a deal. You guys grew up together, didn’t you? I figured you’d probably kissed her as a kid or something normal like that, so I thought it’d be a waste of a question.” Sei moved back, in accordance with their rules. She appeared to be studying the hoop for a moment, but Rei could still feel her sideways gaze. “So who was the second one?”Rei looked at the ground again with sheepish hesitation. She shuffled her feet against the pavement. This time, she was sure that Sei had no way of knowing the answer. Maybe she could politely lie to Sei, Rei thought, but she wondered who she could possibly implicate and whether it would even sound believable. Rei had never been a great liar. Much better liars—such as Satou Sei—could probably see right through those sorts of flimsy stories, anyway.Rei took a step back to stand beside Sei again. She shook her head with resolve. “I can’t tell you,” she decided. “If I did, that would be telling someone else’s secret. I told you I’m not going to do that.”“Oh, so it’s someone I know?” Sei replied with a sly grin.“I—I didn’t say that.”“Why would you need to honor their confidence, then? If it was simply a generic stranger, it would make no difference if you told me, would it? Secrets are relative like that; they depend on how much information someone already knows.”Rei didn’t know how to answer that. Sei was right, but—“Was it someone from the Yamayurikai?”“I...I don’t…,” Rei stammered, growing even more flustered. The overly-confident smirk on Sei’s face didn’t help. “Stop. I’m not going to tell you who it—”“Well damn, I can’t imagine it was Eriko, was it?”“Of course not!” Rei bellowed, before she could control her voice. Kissing Eriko-onee-sama? Even just the thought was disturbing, and she certainly didn’t need Sei-sama implanting those kinds of images in her head. In the back of her mind, though, she was a bit relieved that Sei had been so far off the mark.Once she had calmed down for a moment, though, she looked over at Sei and found that the older woman had grown strangely quiet. She was staring at Rei’s face with a steady, pensive gaze.“What?” Rei asked through gritted teeth, now growing a bit annoyed.“Oh nothing, nothing.” Sei said. She turned her glance back up to the basket. “Don’t worry,” she said after a moment. “I won’t tell anyone who it was. All this stuff stays here, between you and me. Let’s say that the second I leave this park, my memory will be wiped by magic.”“I already said that I’m not telling you.”At that, Sei grinned. “But you’ve already told me.” She made her throw without saying anything else and Rei raised an eyebrow in confusion. This time, the ball didn’t even graze the rim. The shot came up totally short and simply arched onto the ground. “Whoops!” Sei said happily.Rei stared at her. She had never met anyone who could be so nonchalant about absolutely everything. Occasionally, she wondered how much of it was a facade. Every once in awhile, she had gotten an inkling that there was some tragic story underneath it all, but she had always kept her distance, so she would probably never learn what it was.When Sei glanced at her again with expectation, Rei realized that it was her turn to ask. She took a deep breath. For the first time, she studied Sei’s face closely, and found that the smile was genuine—but that the eyes were a bit too intelligent to be as carefree as they seemed before.“What?” Sei echoed Rei’s words, but there was no shred of annoyance, only pure curiosity.Rei shook her head. “You said before that you came here to take your mind off things,” she murmured, a bit reluctantly. “What were those things?” As soon as she said it, though, she brought her hands up in front of her in a placating gesture. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, though.”“Nah, it’s okay.” Sei gave another casual shrug, the kind that seemed to let the world roll off her shoulders. “It was my birthday a few days ago, on Christmas.”“Oh, happy birthday,” Rei replied. At first, it had come out on reflex, but midway through the sentence, it transformed into a genuine sentiment. “Congratulations. This is birthday number twenty, right?”“Yep. I can legally drown my sorrows in booze now,” she said. She had picked up the ball and was trying to spin it around in her hands.Rei looked at her with amusement. “Are you afraid of getting old?”“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just….” She paused. The perpetual smile faded from her face for a moment, and Rei worried that she had unknowingly hit a nerve with the question. Before she could backtrack, though, Sei gave the answer: “My seventeenth birthday wasn’t all that great. Every year since then, I always get a little sentimental for a few days around this time of year.”Rei nodded, a few memories from high school floating back into her brain. “Did this have something to do with those rumors that were spreading around school years ago?”“Yeah,” Sei told her. She offered nothing more. Instead, she tossed the ball towards Rei and fixed her stare back towards the front of the court.Rei barely caught the pass. Her mood a bit dampened, she made her shot with a lackluster follow-through, and the ball just touched the rim without going inside.Sei didn’t make a big production about it this time. “So who was the third person you kissed?” she asked simply.The both of them took a step back in unison after Rei had picked up the ball and handed it to Sei. “I haven’t had a third person yet,” Rei admitted. She said it without thinking, and briefly wondered if she should have refused the answer. The more she thought about it, though, the more she figured it couldn’t hurt.But then she glanced at Sei and found that the woman was grinning from ear to ear again. It was a grin that awakened a panicked voice in the back of Rei’s mind.“So, it was her,” Sei said.“Huh?”Sei looked at Rei like everything should have been obvious. “Sachiko.”Rei’s mouth dropped open. “What? How did…?” She couldn’t believe it. Within a matter of seconds, though, she closed her jaw with a loud, cracking bite. Her eyebrows furrowed. Her confusion boiled over into anger. “How the hell do you—?”“Whoa, you get scary when you’re aggravated, Bigfoot! Do I have to go run up a tree to save myself?”Rei pressed a hand to her forehead and huffed. “Sorry,” she said after the blood started to drain a bit from her head. “I’m trying really hard to understand how you could possibly know who I’ve kissed. Were you following me around with a hidden camera or something?”“No. Just simple deduction,” Sei replied, her voice still rather casual. “But anyway, I wasn’t really talking about who you’ve kissed. I was talking about who you were with this morning. It was Sachiko, right?”Rei nearly choked, her face twisting with even more shock.“You told me that you couldn’t say who you had swapped spit with, you see, which made it really clear that it was someone I knew. After all, you could have just said, ‘Oh, some girl at school,’ or, ‘A kohai from the kendo club,’ something generic like that—but you didn’t,” Sei explained, dribbling the ball back and forth between her hands, as if she were smacking the sides of a pendulum, “which also told me that it was probably someone close to you. I figured it might have been someone from the student council, but—besides Yoshino-chan—there were really only two remotely plausible choices. Once you basically confirmed for me that it was a council member, and we ruled out Eriko—who, I’ll admit, was a bit of a longshot—the only other possibility was Sachiko.”“Uh...I...gah…,” Rei rambled, the words not forming properly in her mouth, the thoughts only coming in incoherent pieces.“Then,” Sei continued, “you said that you hadn’t made out with more than two people, right? So if that was the case, then the person you had met with for your secret liaison could only have been one of those two: Yoshino-chan or Sachiko. Since Yoshino-chan practically lives at your house, it wouldn’t be suspicious to meet with her there, and there would be no reason for you to run off to some third location to do the deed, right? So, by logical deduction, it must have been with Sachiko.” Sei smiled at her pleasantly. “Besides, I always noticed that girl giving you sideways glances while we were in school together.”Rei wanted to say something, but found that she still couldn’t. She sat down, right in the middle of the court, her shoes scraping against the concrete. She looked off into the distance, in a daze.“You figured all of this out just from what I said?” Rei whispered.Sei was quiet for a long time. She started to aim the ball, but made no move to shoot. “Nah, I’m not that good,” she said finally. “To tell you the truth, I was walking down the street and happened to see the two of you going into that fancy hotel last night. At first, I assumed it had all been innocent, but then I saw you dragging yourself across the park this morning like you were hung over or something. When I teased you about it, it only made things more obvious.”“Obvious…?” Rei covered her face with her hands. “I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about anyone seeing us.” She heard some shuffling sounds, and when she looked up she noticed that Sei had sat down in front of her.“Relax. Nobody knows—and I won’t tell anyone.” She offered a gentle smile. “Besides, who cares if people know? If I may be so bold, I think it’s good that you’re fooling around with someone besides your imouto. It’s healthy. You’re starting to detach yourself from that old life.”“Old life?”“Yeah,” Sei said, “the one where your whole existence revolves around some girl that you put on an unattainable pedestal. Been there and done that myself. It sucks, let me tell you.”Rei let out a sigh and forced herself to begin standing up. Once she had stretched her legs, Sei picked up the ball again and stood next to her.“Guess it’s my turn,” Sei said.“I don’t want to play anymore.”Sei was quiet again. Neither of them made a move to leave, though. They both stood side by side, gazing at the opposite side of the court. Now that they had taken so many backwards steps, the hoop seemed so far away. Rei wondered if there was even a point in taking a shot.“We’re turning into pathetic, mopey geezers,” Sei complained after some time had passed. “Let’s do something that’ll cheer us up!”“Like what?” Rei asked with a wry smile.Sei looked up at the hoop. “I’ll tell you what: Forget about the personal questions. If I sink this shot, then you have to give me a birthday present. If I miss, then I give you a Christmas present. Fair enough?”At that, Rei chuckled. “I’m pretty broke.”“Fine. We’ll make a 500 yen limit. I won’t ask for anything that costs more than that, but you have to give me exactly what I want. Same goes for you if I don’t make the shot: I’ll get you whatever you want that’s below the budget.” Sei dribbled the ball a couple of times. “What do you say, Gigantopithecus? You accept the terms? Do we have a bet?”“Sure, why not?” Rei shrugged. It wasn’t much of a bet—and besides, Rei was sure to win. There was simply no way that Sei could land the throw when they were standing nearly at the half-court line. She had already missed every single shot, even the ones she had taken only two meters from the basket.“And just as an extra consolation,” Sei said as she was lining up the shot, “I’ll confess one more secret: there’s something I’ve been keeping from you this whole time, Rei-kun.”Rei threw her a weak smirk. “What’s that?”Suddenly, Sei’s stance changed completely. Her feet faced forward, her knees bent just the right way, her hands grew steady. She looked at Rei with a grin. “I played basketball in middle school.”“Eh?”Sei took the shot with perfect form. The ball sailed through the air in a high arch, and when it reached the basket, it barely grazed the rim before falling through the net with a swish.Rei gaped at her.“Yep,” Sei said, stretching her hands above her head. “I still got it, I guess.”Rei watched the ball bounce a few times against the ground and then roll into the grass. She turned to give Sei an mildly outraged look. “You pretended to suck this whole time? Why?”“Missing the shot was a lot more interesting than making it, don’t you think?” Sei started to walk away from the court, and Rei merely stared at her with a mix of confusion and annoyance. Once Sei was a few meters away, she called back towards Rei, “You coming or what?”“Where?”“To give me my birthday present obviously.”Rei picked up her suitcase and rolled her eyes, reluctantly shuffling across the court to catch up with her. “Fine, fine,” she said. “What store did you want to go to?”“Oh, there’s no store where you can get this,” Sei replied, looking over her shoulder with a smirk. “We agreed to anything under 500 yen, right? Lucky for you, what I want is free.”Rei made a face. “Okay,” she said. She waited for more, but Sei didn’t elaborate. Rei had a sinking feeling that she was being tricked again. “What is it, then?” she finally asked, once she had caught up and they were walking side by side.“Your third kiss, obviously.”“Hah?” Rei nearly tripped. She had to hop a couple of steps to regain her footing. “What are you talking about?”“You said you’ve only canoodled with two people. Three is better. I’ll be the third,” Sei informed her, the casual tone of her explanation belying the ridiculous things that she was saying. “That’s all I want for my birthday.” * * * Even underneath the shade of the trees, where they had hidden themselves behind a public washroom, Rei was paranoid that someone would see. She had thought about running away, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had found herself caught in the gaze of the woman with the strange, Western features that she had never really scrutinized until then—and she had found, after only a few moments, that she was actually curious about her.The shadows of the evergreen leaves above played on Sei’s face. The wind was blowing the woman’s hair around, so that the strands lightly licked Rei’s cheek as Sei leaned closer.Sei stopped short a few centimeters away. She was smirking. It was a smirk that made Rei wonder if the whole thing had been a joke after all.“Aren’t you going to run away?” Sei asked, in a voice that sounded lightly surprised.So it had been a joke, Rei thought. Even after Sei had said that, though—after she had basically given Rei permission to back out—Rei felt no further impulse to pull away. She stared awkwardly into her senpai’s face, her gaze flicking down to the woman’s shameless smile, then back up to the woman’s eyes.“You were acting scared before, Bigfoot. What’s gotten into you now? Calling my bluff, are you? Well, there’s no use trying to play that game with me because I always win. No matter how much you might—”On its own accord, as if the wind itself had puffed an unnameable energy through her muscles, Rei’s body jerked forward. She clasped her hands on either side of Sei’s shoulders. She brushed her lips against Sei’s lips.The older woman stiffened. In spite of her ramblings, she had obviously been caught by complete surprise, and so Rei was quickly knocked back into reality as well. Not knowing what had come over her, Rei pulled away immediately in embarrassment, after only the slightest of touch; she turned around and took one speedy step in the opposite direction, poised to run off before she could even take in Sei’s reaction.But Rei felt a hand grab her by the arm. One sharp yank spun her around, and she came face-to-face with a pale woman whose ears were blushing bright red.“Oh no,” Sei muttered after a moment, and Rei could only stare at her with wide eyes. “No, no. That won’t do. I’m looking for a new, more pleasant Christmas memory that I can look back on—and that wasn’t nearly memorable enough.”So Sei grabbed a handful of Rei’s coat and pulled her in and kissed her properly. At first, it was with a closed mouth, but as they stood pressed against each other, and their breaths mingled, and a small bit of trust formed between them, the kiss grew deeper.There was not much affection in it. It was a kiss of exploration, one that Rei allowed herself to taste with curiosity. It was over quickly. Nonetheless, it had stirred some of Rei’s lower animal, because—even if Rei wasn’t personally attracted to her—Satou Sei was a beautiful young woman, after all.When they had pulled apart, Rei turned again, and this time she couldn’t bear to look back. This time, Sei didn’t try to stop her, either. With a rush of hot blood coursing into her face, Rei fled down the path flanked by the trees, gripping her suitcase tightly, until the cold winter air had dried out the edges of her throat.Even still, she ran faster, in the direction of her house, her hesitation falling away. She sucked in more air, and—with a wide open mouth, with a crazed emotion that burst up out of her chest—she laughed.