Chapter Text
"A person inside a person inside a life. That's called parataxis. That's called the future."
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
It starts, as most things do, with Yoimiya.
Sara is heading to refill her coffee from the fancy French press they bought for the staff room last month and wrote off as a business expense (“It is a business expense,” insisted Thoma. “It improves all the employees’ quality of life. Just don’t tell Yae and everything will be fine.”) on her morning break. She sees Yoimiya’s blonde head peek over her cubicle, the little name tag stuck to the divider saying NAGANOHARA YOIMIYA, QUALITY ASSURANCE with a smiley face and a heart doodle stuck on the end. It is hilariously Yoimiya-esque.
“Sara?”
Her fingers tighten around her mug. She’s running on caffeine, the gears of her brain gunked up with coffee grounds. It’s shaping up to be a long day already and she’s only been in the office for two hours. “What is it?”
“I have something you might want to know.” Her voice is stupidly, ridiculously gentle, and Sara hates it: Yoimiya’s kindness, her ability to meet every harsh word that comes her way with tenderness to match. A system of punishment inverse to its protector. Sara doesn’t know what to do in the face of it; she shies away like a spooked animal.
“It’s not going to hurt you,” Yoimiya adds cautiously. Reassurance for a worry Sara didn’t even feel.
“I didn’t think it would,” she says eventually, but walks over to Yoimiya’s cubicle.
“Actually, can we take this outside? I’d rather not…” she hesitates, jerking her head toward Sayu, who doesn’t even look like she’s fully awake yet. “You know how it is.”
“Of course,” she answers automatically, even though she really has no fucking idea how it is. She’s been sleepwalking through work for god knows how long and became painfully aware of it recently.
They step out into the empty hall. One floor down from them is an acupuncture clinic, while the building on the other side of the street hosts a newly-converted weed shop. Out of the corner of her eye, the leaf on the shopfront out the window and the elevator directory sign melt into a blur, the streetlights a crossfade of green.
Goddamn. Maybe she shouldn’t have left the Tylenol at home.
“Listen,” says Yoimiya quietly. The set of her mouth is firm. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, so I’ll just start by saying nothing has been confirmed. But I’ve heard some things—” which happens all the time, because Yoimiya is so nice that people will say anything around her without worrying about their advantage being pressed. Sara has never been trusted like that. “—And I thought you should know first. Considering that you…” she presses her lips together.
“Just tell me,” replies Sara, a headache persisting at her temples. “I can handle it.”
“I know you can, I just want to make sure you don’t interpret it wrong, because—”
“Yoimiya.”
“Fine,” she says. “I heard Ei on the phone the other day. I think she’s planning to find another job.”
For a second, the traffic outside goes silent, the lights dim, and everything stops.
Sara feels an ache in her jaw, so strong that her teeth rattle. It’s like a blade slipped clean through her stomach. “I…where would she go?” And it’s a question of what company is good enough for her, not which one would take her, because not many places deserve someone like Ei. CEO of a software startup and previously a Microsoft intern, graduated top of her class at UBC Sauder—the same year that Sara entered the university. (Parallel planes, never crossing.) Excellent time management and secure work ethic.
Sara could write Ei’s resume, she thinks, and probably her cover letter too. Driven individual with a gift for administrative activities. Five years of experience in a managerial position. Can navigate the SkyTrain system like the back of her hand. The best person to ask on a date because she’ll arrive ten minutes early every time; no more, no less. No one has or will ever kiss like her. She was in the orchestra in high school: first flute player, Sara remembers dimly, then she tries to recall when Ei told her that—probably after they had sex, she was always most vulnerable then, the only time Sara ever believed that Ei was seeing her instead of seeing through her. Her fingers gliding across Sara’s skin, touches mapping out a lifetime.
Too bad job applications don’t include romantic history.
Yoimiya rolls her shoulders back. The tattoo on her arm glints in the golden sunlight, flames sparking and leaping up to her bicep. “It was an old friend of hers from college. A job opening in Seoul.”
She can barely hear herself over the thundering in her ears. “South Korea?”
Yoimiya nods.
“What kind of job?”
“Administration, from what I’ve heard,” she says. “But obviously it’s more than that. She wouldn’t choose to leave if it was a downgrade from her current position, unless—” she stops talking. Looks at her. Her gaze is thoughtful, and it’s this thoughtfulness that breaks Sara.
She swallows hard. “It’s her business.” The sound comes out shallow and weak; she coughs to clear it. “I mean. Good for her. Maybe she wants a challenge. She’s probably bored of working here for so long.”
Bored of you, the tiny voice in her head whispers. She dismisses it.
If anything, Sara is surprised that Ei hadn’t left earlier—that she hadn’t been the one to break the stilted, awkward stalemate between them that had eaten away at the atmosphere long after the breakup.
But now that it’s truly happening, she can’t quite comprehend it.
“I’m going to head back,” Yoimiya tells her carefully, like she’s trying to tame a caged bird. “Take as much time as you need, okay? I’ll get your coffee for you.” She pries the mug out from where Sara is clenching it, white-knuckled.
“Tell Thoma he has to clean the coffee filter,” she says robotically. “And we need more oat milk. Forty-two percent of us are lactose intolerant.” The percentage slips out without her intending for it to.
“On it.”
And then Yoimiya is gone, and Sara’s chest has frozen over with something close to grief. A hand, outstretched, is a memory, which is a ghost which is a sadness which is a city.
It seems impossible that so much had shifted after one conversation, but Sara wants to slap herself for not seeing the signs earlier. She slides down the wall, knees tucked to her chest, and stares at the carpet seeing nothing at all.
━━━━━━
When Sara saw the job offer, at first, she thought it was a joke. Someone had posted it up in her apartment complex and she looked at it for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Software engineer and salesperson wanted at Hanamizaka Labs. Startup located close to Pacific Center. (The traffic was atrocious but the SkyTrain stop was right next door, Sara reasoned, so it wasn’t all bad.) $130,000 a year plus employee bonuses, retirement benefits, and all kinds of medical insurance covered. Living in Vancouver, Sara needed everything she could get—and she knew who else could use the help.
“Hey,” she said to Itto, pushing open the door to their apartment. Her fingers were caked with coffee dregs after working all day and her university degree languished, rotting without use. “I saw a job listing for a tech company on Georgia Street. They want a software engineer and sales associate. 130k a year. How do you feel about it?”
Itto raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”
Between shifts at the coffee shop, Sara worked on her application. Late into the night she and Itto would polish their resumes, surrounded by bubble tea and takeout, giggle-high and hopeful that maybe this would be it. That maybe they would make enough to not simply break even on rent but to save, to have enough for weekend trips or time off, money sent back home to family in Japan.
They went in for their interviews together, marketed themselves as a pair. “If one of us gets hired, the other does,” said Sara, and then Itto nodded, and their interviewer (who introduced himself as Ayato) raised an eyebrow.
“I see.”
Ayato was supposedly in charge of their orientation, but it was Yoimiya who dove in feet-first. She ferried Sara and Itto around to every cubicle in the room to introduce themselves, starting at her own.
“I do quality assurance,” she said. “That’s Sayu’s chair, but she never starts work before lunchtime. She’s supposed to be in customer relations. I don’t know. She doesn’t do a whole lot of work, you feel me?”
Sara frowned. “Okay.”
Yomiya continued the tour. “The girl you saw on your way in was Kokomi! Business relations and receptionist. The only one who actually speaks French fluently. The rest of us are high-school level at best.”
“French?” asked Sara.
“Passed my C2 exam last year,” Kokomi told her brightly. “I speak four languages.”
Yoimiya giggled. “I have no idea how she does it. You can ask her later. Anyway—that office over there is for Yae Miko, our CFO. Just don’t piss her off and you’ll be fine. Then these two are for Ayato and our new salesperson.” She nodded her head toward Itto. “The desk here is Kazuha’s, he’s in charge of UI and UX design for all outgoing products. I think he only got his own desk because he said he needed a zen ambiance to do his work.”
“Right,” Itto agreed. “Peaceful spaces are important.”
Sara thought privately that Itto had never existed in a peaceful space.
Yoimiya looked surprised. “That’s interesting. I find that I work better with some background noise, but everyone is different. Over in that corner, we have Gorou, who does tech troubleshooting and product development if he’s in a good mood. Otherwise, he just sits around for half the day because we don’t get enough tech support requests to fill up all his time.”
Gorou stood up. “Untrue!” he called. “I am a very busy person.”
Yoimiya laughed. “Prove it,” she replied, then turned back to the two of them. “That almost wraps up the team. The office across the room belongs to our CEO, Ei. She travels a lot, I don’t think she’ll be back until Thursday. And then here’s your space, Sara. There’s Ayaka and Thoma, both software engineers. Ayaka is Ayato’s sister, in case you missed it.”
The KAMISATO sticky note on both of their desks was unmistakable, and so was the resemblance between them, but Sara didn’t mention it.
“Thoma is also responsible for buying snacks every week. He’s over there making tea right now. Questions?”
Itto had already sat down at his desk. “This chair is awesome,” he said enthusiastically. “Very ergonomic.”
Yoimiya flashed a thumbs-up. “I’m glad to hear it! Don’t be afraid to tell us any of your questions or concerns. We’re all a big family here. Kind of a dysfunctional one, but—”
On the other side of the room, Thoma dropped his tea. The cup shattered as it hit the ground.
Kokomi looked up. “Third one this week, Thoma? Really?”
Meeting Sara’s gaze, Ayaka smiled. “Ignore it,” she advised. “This happens all the time.”
“Yes,” said Sara because she couldn’t think of any other way to respond and she didn’t want her new coworker to think she was anything less than competent. Her palms were sweaty. “Of course it does.”
“So,” Ayaka began, no further opening necessary. Her mouse clicked three times and Sara quickly turned to switch on her monitor. “What’s your story?”
“My story?”
“You know. Things you say to prove that you’re a person. The food you love, pets, work history. Were you born in Japan too?”
“I was,” Sara admitted. “I came here in high school with my parents before they moved back.” Since then she had come to love it, despite the imperfections: the bubble tea shops sandwiched on every corner, the Chinatown visits after work and for lunch on rainy Saturdays, late-night buskers and buildings scraping the sky. Bike rides on the coast, downtown expeditions to scope out the best Japanese food that would taste like even the palest imitation of her grandma’s egg rolls. Asian grocery store trips twice a month so she and Itto could attempt to recreate takoyaki in their tiny apartment. “I’ve lived here ever since.”
Ayaka’s eyes curled up at the corners. “Ayato and I came in middle school,” she told her. “We aren’t so different, then. Do you have any siblings?”
“No siblings, but Itto is practically one. We met in university.”
“Ah. Forgive me, I didn’t want to ask but I wasn’t sure if you two had a—”
“Not together,” she says, grimacing. “He’s a good person, definitely. Not my type, though. We tried once, it didn’t—didn’t work out.”
“Right,” said Ayaka. “Well. It’s nice to meet you, Kujou Sara.” She extended a hand. “I look forward to working with you.”
Sara took it.
━━━━━━
“Itto,” says Sara when she pushes open the front door. Itto is already seated on the couch, buttons straining to pop against his dress shirt (because he’s worn the same size since sophomore year of university and refuses to buy new shirts to accommodate his pecs) and cowlicks starting to escape from the gel he applied in the morning. “Did you know?”
“Know what?” he asks, gaze glued to an episode of Love It or List It.
“Yoimiya told me.” She feels strangely emptied-out, as if she’s been holding onto these leftover, pent-up emotions for so long that they’ve left her drained and just…hollow. “Ei’s thinking of stepping down. Her friend has a position for her in Seoul.” She pulls her shoes off and opens the pantry to find a half-finished bag of arare crackers. “Did you know? That she was planning to leave?”
His eyes soften. “I wasn’t sure. I guessed, but…” he shrugs, leaving the rest of the sentence unsaid. “I didn’t know about the Seoul part. That’s further than—further than I expected. Does she have a plan for her replacement?”
She swallows. Breathes. “Probably. She’s Ei. I’m sure she has it figured out.” Her voice wobbles in the middle: tripwire tension that refuses to snap.
“Right. She’s Ei,” Itto echoes. He fumbles for the TV remote and switches it off. “Did you see her at work today?”
Sara shakes her head. “She hasn’t been here for the past week. Still in San Francisco.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding. “She’ll probably announce it when she comes back, then. Or not,” he adds after a moment. “It still might not happen.”
The attempt at reassurance falls flat. Both of them know the chance of it not going through is hopelessly slim.
“I mean, it was stupid of me to think she would stay here forever anyway,” Sara says. For once, Itto is quiet. A furrow appears between his eyebrows. “I guess I just. I hadn’t thought that much about it, right? About the future.”
Ei’s mouth closed around a straw. Her lips open and wet. Sara, chewing on a tapioca pearl, thick and suffocating, a stopper in her throat. I don’t know if this is working out.
Ei. Face vacant and shuttered, purple hair falling into her face. If you think so. And back then Sara had wished she would say something, feel something, show something other than her typical blankness, just so Sara would know their relationship had meant half as much to Ei as it did to her. For her to know someone had loved her at all.
But of course it was too much to expect. Of course a person as good as Ei wouldn’t have felt anything toward her, no matter how hard Sara tried to pretend otherwise, no matter how many looks she read too much into, no matter how many kisses she stole under the cover of night or mornings when—
“Sara?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing. Sorry. Let’s—let’s go shopping, okay? We need to stop by the H-Mart downtown anyway. We can have dinner from Sashimiya too. My treat.” Her eyes sting and she blinks twice, fast.
“It’s only Wednesday,” Itto points out. “Friday is takeout day.” Honest to a fault, especially when he knows it will preserve Sara’s sense of structure. The tiny details she clings onto to stop her life from falling apart around her.
“Still,” she pushes, trying to dispel the sourness in her stomach. “We’ll just cook this Friday. It’s not a big deal.”
He chews on his lower lip. “Sure,” he agrees. “We can do that.”
They get their dinner to-go and end up taking the SkyTrain to Chinatown, where they eat at an empty table made of rickety red plastic; two legs balanced on the pavement and two on the main road. The smell of cooking food envelopes them in steam and grease and Sara pulls her chopsticks apart, the wood paring evenly.
“I don’t know how you do that,” remarks Itto. When he pulls his, one side ends up bigger than the other. “Teach me your ways.”
“It’s practice,” she says just to humour him. “You’ll get it eventually.”
“I won’t, but thanks,” he says, laughing. “Do you know when Ei is coming back? I think Yae’s planning for the quarterly financial report soon, so the office will be busy. I’ve heard Kokomi talking about offering internships as a possibility for the summer.”
“I think Ei is due back on Friday,” Sara answers, fiddling with her chopsticks. As much as she wishes she didn’t, every part of Ei’s schedule is burned into her brain, the first name she looks for on the team’s Google Calendar. Letting go is impossible when your ex is also your boss, and Sara had to learn that the hard way.
It would help, too, if she didn’t wake up every day feeling like she regretted breaking up anyway. Seeing as she’s been heartbroken for—nearly a full year.
But if Ei didn’t want to go through with it, didn’t want to make it work again, there was no point in trying to get lightning to strike twice.
Sara was lucky enough to have even called Ei her own, once. That kind of magic doesn’t happen often.
“You’re going to be okay?” Itto asks. “With—” he pauses. “With knowing?”
Her chest is tight with unspoken sadness. She tamps it down, refuses to acknowledge the pressure building behind her eyes. “Of course I’m okay. I would have ended up finding out sooner or later.” A non-response to a non-question. “And I have more time to prepare anyway.” Both of them are silent, but the street still hums with chatter, food stalls lining the pavement and people yelling out of windows on the second floor, everyone around them wandering, eating food, enjoying the company of those they love. Sara wishes she could say the same. “I can’t imagine what things will look like without her.”
“Me neither,” she says, and it rings true: ever since they started working at Hanamizaka Labs, Ei has been an inextricable part of their day-to-day operations. Even when she wasn’t there, even before they got together—Ei was always there. Sara always wanted Ei, wanted her in any capacity she could get her. Wanted for Ei to look at her just once. Maybe it would be less painful now if Ei simply hadn’t seen her at all, back then.
“We should go home,” offers Itto. Chinatown is winding down into relaxation; a karaoke bar’s neon sign lights up across the street and smoke curls through the air in paper ribbons. Late spring makes everything drip with humidity despite the gray sky.
“You’re right,” Sara says. Her voice sounds far away and blurry, like she’s hearing it through the underside of a fishbowl. She stands up. “Let’s go.”
━━━━━━
It was her third day on the job when she met Ei. By then she was already well accustomed to the clusterfuck that was the Hanamizaka Labs office, and she didn’t even blink when Kazuha walked out in the middle of the workday, carrying his Wacom tablet under one arm and half-finished nitro cold brew in the other as he muttered about the terrible atmosphere for focus.
“Ignore him,” said Ayato from behind her.
“Already have.”
“Kazuha does that sometimes,” Thoma added, coming up next to him. Sara wondered if either of them were aware of the way they leaned into each other, the distance between them slowly closing out of instinct. Two opposing poles that couldn’t help but attract. “I think he’s just annoyed that Sayu told a client we could totally design the logo they had in mind, even though it’s the ugliest thing any of us have ever seen.” He laughed. “It probably disturbs Kazuha’s delicate aesthetic senses.”
The corner of Ayato’s mouth lifted. “You might be right.”
Thoma nodded. “You would agree if you saw the design brief,” he said, turning to Sara. “God. It was fucking terrible. I don’t say that lightly. And colour-wise, the scheme really did not work, especially with that geometric pattern they wanted to go with. Point is, give him some time. Besides, put yourself in his shoes, having to do—” he paled suddenly, looking at something over Sara’s head. “Oh.”
“What?” asked Sara.
“Kujou Sara,” a woman said behind her.
She jumped. “Yes. That’s me.”
“You’re the new hire?”
“I am.”
“Sara,” Ayato said slowly. “This is Ei. Our CEO. I don’t believe you’ve met her yet?”
Sara swallowed and turned around to say hello.
She hadn’t expected Ei to be pretty, was the thing—hadn’t expected her to have a voice that went down like mulberry wine, rich and sweet, thick purple hair threaded through with lighter strands and a braid tossed over her shoulder. Her eyes began dark violet in the center and faded out to a lighter purple. She didn’t break eye contact with Sara as she pulled off her suit jacket and hung it on the wall.
Jesus Christ.
“No,” she answered. “I haven’t met her yet. I’m pleased to be working with you,” she said steadily, although what she wanted to say was please pin me to a wall somewhere and kiss me until I forget my own name.
Look. A girl had needs. It wasn’t Sara’s fault that her boss happened to be the most beautiful person she’d ever seen. She couldn’t be held personally liable for anything that happened after that, really—not the kiss or the first date or the walk home back to Ei’s apartment together, not the feeling of craving so much you thought you might collapse under the pressure of it on your heart. None of it.
“Likewise,” Ei said. There was no humour in her face, just a stoic severity that bordered on demeaning. Sara didn’t even flinch. “I look forward to seeing what you can do, Kujou Sara.” Her name rolled off Ei’s tongue with calm ease, every syllable musical.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s great to finally meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
The expression on Ei’s face changed. If Sara didn’t know better she would have thought it was close to a smile. “Really. That’s good to know.” She disappeared into her office.
When Sara sat back down, Thoma and Ayato were both staring at her. “What?”
“I was terrified of her when I first saw her,” said Thoma, wonderingly. “How do you do it?”
She shrugged. “I’ve met a lot of scary people. She isn’t that bad.” But she was stupidly hot, and that added to the intimidation factor at least threefold.
Thoma’s eyes widened. “You’ll have to teach me your secrets one day,” he said, and he dropped a hand on Ayato’s shoulder without even blinking. “Do you want coffee?”
Ayato nodded. “One sugar?”
“Always,” Thoma said, flashing a smile. He wandered off to the coffee machine.
Ayato went back to his desk and Ayaka rolled her chair over to Sara’s cubicle without preamble, as if she’d been waiting for the others to go away. “Hey, I’ve been thinking about a new approach to our last product design.”
Sara forcefully shoved all thoughts of Ei out of her mind. “Sure. What’s up?”
━━━━━━
“Sara. May I speak with you?” Yae Miko’s voice interrupted Sara’s train of thought, a shadow approaching behind her cubicle.
“Of course,” said Sara hastily. “What is it?” She hoped to god it wasn’t about her quality of work; she’d been at Hanamizaka Labs for upwards of six months now and her last monthly report didn’t raise any issues she could remember.
Yae coughed. “Please step into my office.”
Apprehension crawled up her spine, but she followed Yae into the office dutifully. “Are there any problems? I promise I’ll try to resolve them if I can. Or if it’s about the bug fixes for last month’s development update, I think that—”
“It’s not about that,” Yae interrupted. “Although I’m sure it would be good to check up on the bug fixes as well.”
Sara frowned. “Oh. What’s wrong?”
She should have noticed earlier, probably, that Yae looked simultaneously smug and puzzled, a little bit as if she’d eaten something foul.
“I don’t wish to overstep,” Yae said firmly. “But I would like to know your…intentions. With Ei.”
Sara’s brain glitched and sparked out before finally blue-screening-of-death. “My…intentions?”
“Romantic ones,” clarified Yae. “Or the lack thereof.”
She swallowed. “I—um. I’m not really sure what you mean. If I’ve committed any workplace conduct transgressions that would be great to know, but. Uh.”
Yae looked up at the ceiling, the slightest of eye-rolls. “Not exactly. I’d like to find out if you have any romantic inclinations toward Ei.”
“Why?” Sara blinked twice, not completely following.
She sighed. “I have reason to believe that Ei may feel—a certain type of way with regards to you. And it would be prudent to gather more details on the potential…reciprocation of those feelings, since Ei seems to have no intentions of acting on them herself. Do you understand?”
Sara nearly choked on her spit. “Maybe?”
“Good. Would it be reasonable to assume that you also share—similar affections?”
“Will saying yes or no get me fired?”
Yae’s eyes flashed. “I wouldn’t fire you for answering a question I asked in the first place.”
She leaned against the wall, something unspooling in her stomach. “I think I do. Like her,” she admitted, despite how ridiculous and juvenile it felt to say it like that. Particularly to her boss.
“Why?”
“What?”
Yae raised an eyebrow. “Why do you like her?” At Sara’s look of confusion, she added, “Forgive me for the screening. I’m simply curious.”
The question made her think, because it wasn’t like she could really narrow it down to one point. It was more like an amalgamation of them, hundreds of small moments barreling into each other at light speed and becoming a tangled mess. Hair tumbling over Ei’s shoulder. Ei chewed on the end of her pen out of nervous habit; her voice was soft and warm when she tossed a two-dollar coin to the teenage boy who busked outside their office building.
Something tranquil always came over Ei’s face when he started playing, like she could sit there forever and just listen to the plucked guitar strains. Sara had three different bubble tea orders and Ei could always read her, predict which one she wanted without Sara saying it. On lunch break, she would look up to see a cup already balanced next to her desk with ‘SARA’ written on it in neat Sharpie.
“She’s thoughtful,” Sara decided on saying eventually. “She seems to really care about everyone here, and she’s less…less cold than she looks.” Just as perfect, though.
Yae nodded. “You’re right. Ei—has trouble sometimes, saying what she means. But it doesn’t make her any less kind. She’s always been like this.”
“When did you meet her?”
“We went to high school together,” answered Yae. “And reconnected near the end of university. At that point, I was thinking of going into accounting, but Ei approached me to ask what I thought of starting a software company. And now…” she spread her arms. “It’s led us here.”
“Did you go to university with her?”
Yae shook her head. “I was at U of T, actually. Ei was going to Sauder at the time, and I came back for the summer and we met again. Life has a strange way of working out, don’t you agree?”
“Yes.”
Clapping her hands, Yae stepped backward. “This was a lovely conversation. It was wonderful getting to know you better. While I don’t want to intrude on your private business or whatever you and Ei may have, I will—gently encourage you to speak to her. You may find that your feelings have a strong chance of being returned.”
And that, perhaps, was the part most difficult to grasp: that Ei might have felt the same way about her. That Ei, this girl who was everything Sara thought she ever could have wanted, might want someone like Sara, too.
It wasn’t the first time she had considered it, but it was the closest it had come to ever being real. And that was…fucking terrifying, really, a fear almost paralyzing in its enormity, a paper crane of delicate hope crumpling under this massive weight. It felt like her lungs were filling with sand.
“Don’t panic,” Yae interrupted. She sounded sure. Composed, unbothered, assertive, as if she dealt with people like Sara every day. She probably did. “If it’s of major concern, you don’t need to say anything. I was merely offering it as an option.”
“Right,” Sara managed to get out. “I just.” She blinked. There was a stinging sensation behind her nose. “I hadn’t considered that. At all.”
Yae made a sound through her nose, something close to a sigh of exasperation. “I would be more than happy to help you through this, but I don’t believe it falls under my area of expertise. You would be better off consulting someone else.”
“Okay,” she said, and then Yae walked off, pink hair swishing behind her as she headed back to her office. Sara stood there for a good ten minutes processing all of it, so long that Ei herself arrived.
“Kujou Sara?”
There was something about the way Ei said her name; like it was important, a closely-guarded secret. She said it in full every time, too, the greatness of it larger than a few syllables could convey.
“Yes?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No! Nothing’s wrong,” she answered quickly. “I was speaking to Yae. That’s all.”
A furrow appeared on Ei's forehead. “Hm. Did she say something to you in particular?”
“Nope,” replied Sara, as flustered as she had ever been. “Nothing specific. Have you eaten yet today?” she asked, changing the subject.
Ei’s eyes lightened, the look of concentration on her face melting into unflappable serenity. “I have. And you?”
“Not yet, but I will later,” she said distractedly. “There’s a ramen place up by Main Street that I’ve heard good things about. I think I’ll go there this weekend.”
“You’ll have to let me know what it tastes like,” Ei replied. “I trust your judgement.”
Sara fumbled. “Well, I—that’s—”
But before she could form a proper sentence Ei had already disappeared back into the main office, and Sara couldn’t do anything but follow her. Always in pursuit, always chasing after something not-quite-there, a perfection so precise and exact Sara half-disbelieved it. A shadow that would disappear as soon as the sun sank past the sky.
━━━━━━
The day Ei comes back from San Francisco—the same week Yoimiya drops the bombshell news—it’s just Sara’s luck that she runs into her on the elevator.
Back when they were dating they used to come to work together at 8 am on the dot. Sara slipped out of the apartment early, when the sun was barely pinking the undersides of clouds, careful not to wake Itto. She met Ei at the train station.
From there it morphed into so much more. Sleepy morning hugs, arms wrapped around Sara’s waist when both of them were too tired to function, hands held loosely as they sat on the train and watched the city go by. Stolen kisses in the elevator every morning. No one else ever arrived until 9 am and it was like a time all their own, their space to make coffee and field phone calls and answer emails, never letting go of each other.
They always needed some kind of contact, the same way thirst needed water—hand on hip, ankles brushing, a palm cupping the back of Sara’s neck lightly. There was only so long either of them could last without touching. An upper threshold of forbearance. They didn’t want to reach maximum capacity.
After the breakup, Sara started getting to work at 9, the regular time. She took the train with Itto instead, turned up the music blaring in her earbuds so she wouldn’t have to hear one side of the irritated phone calls of commuting businessmen. She avoided Ei’s gaze through the whole workday, a gash that refused to cauterize. A sore festering and bubbling.
It hurt less as time went on, but she never went back to taking the 7:45 train again.
Now, Sara walks into the elevator at 8:30. Itto is still knocked out cold from drinking too much sake the night before. She sees Ei already standing there. She had assumed that maybe Ei would have come to work later with her flight landing only 45 minutes ago. Apparently not.
She should have known, should have known Ei better and known that she would be here come hell or high water. It feels like a sucker punch to the gut. The force of it nearly knocks Sara off her feet.
She doesn’t let it show on her face, though, merely steps into the elevator and stares blankly at the buttons, watching the floor numbers change.
“Good morning,” she says after a moment.
Ei looks at her and moves an inch away. Sara can’t say she blames her, but that extra distance between them hurts like a burn. “Good morning.” The fact that she answered in the first place is shocking.
“How was San Francisco?”
Ei takes a few seconds to reply. “Not bad. I enjoyed the food.”
“Right,” she says. “Good food is…good.” The stupidity of her own response makes her want to walk straight into oncoming traffic. Well, maybe not. But something along those lines.
Ei just hums.
The sign switches from 2 to 3. Right as the elevator doors slide open and they step out, it just slips out of Sara’s mouth. “You can’t leave,” she blurts out. “I—how would Hanamizaka function without you?”
Ei turns around and looks at her. Nothing in her face betrays her thoughts, and Sara remembers it being this way when they dated, too, how badly Sara wished she knew what Ei was thinking. Like she even had the right to. And that was the other thing: Sara didn’t know which things she deserved to know, didn’t know what should be kept secret and what should be shared. It wasn’t her first relationship but it was her first real one, and she was certain that Ei deserved everything she had and more, deserved the kind of boundaries Sara tried so hard to provide and the love she could give.
She was uncertain about every detail. Stumbling blindly through a minefield, just hoping nothing would explode in her face.
Both of them knew it wouldn’t last.
Maybe it was good that it ended when it did; maybe the duration of it was a testament to Sara’s determination to keep it going, to fan the flames desperately through the snow. She felt like no one else was even trying to keep it alight, or if they were then they shouldn’t have been wasting their time. Ei shouldn’t have been wasting her time with Sara.
“How did you hear that I was leaving?”
So it’s true, she thinks numbly, feeling wind and rain whip through her hair even though they’re in the corridor of an office building. “Someone overheard you on a phone call,” she says aloud.
Ei lifts a brow. “Yoimiya?”
“It’s not her fault,” Sara tells her.
“It was going to come out sooner or later,” says Ei, looking far too wrung-out for 9 am. “Does anyone else know?”
“Just Yoimiya and me. And Itto.”
“So soon everyone will know.”
Sara has to concede. “Basically, yes. I don’t…I’m not going to ask why—” even though the urge to do so is like tar filling her throat “—but I don’t know if we can continue without you. And I know everyone will miss you.”
Ei’s face does something strange. “I didn’t know you still cared what I did.”
She breathes, the weight on her chest nearly unbearable. “I care. Moving to South Korea is a big deal.”
“You went to Japan. Is it so different?”
Sara feels like the rug has been swept out from beneath her feet; she floats endlessly, helpless in pushing back against the force of gravity. She floats, and she tries not to let herself choke up. “Well—you’re right, but that was only for a few months. Basically nothing. Changing jobs is forever, isn’t it?”
She has to stop herself before she starts thinking about how for the whole two months she sent no more than three emails, all to Ayaka because she couldn’t bear speaking directly to Ei or Yae. How they didn’t find a temporary substitute for her, even though they were more than in their right to, how she didn’t think until the last two weeks that she would be coming back, until one day she sat up in bed and decided it had gone on long enough.
Ei’s gaze is somehow piercing and far away all at once, an insect trapped in amber and struggling to escape. Pools of violet, impenetrable and unreadable. “We didn’t know that at the time.”
The carpet is a shade of light blue, faded with thousands of footsteps treading over it every day for years. Sara has never kept eye contact with it for this long. “Well. I’m back now.”
Ei closes her eyes. “Why do you want to know whether I leave or not?” It’s barely a question as is.
“It’s for the company, isn’t it? Not just a personal decision.”
“For the company,” Ei repeats, her face going slightly wooden. She looks away. Her eyelashes frame the rest of her sharp features in shadow, blurry and out of focus. She’s so beautiful it nearly hurts to look away, but Sara doesn’t trust herself to ever stop looking if she doesn’t now. “I’ll see you later today. Don’t forget to eat lunch.”
Sara doesn’t know what she’s done wrong, but she knows it has to have been something, and she’s split between hating herself for that and for still receiving those tiny acts of kindness from Ei, the reassurances she hoards selfishly but is fully aware she hasn’t earned. Perhaps never earned at all.
━━━━━━
The week after she broke up with Ei, Sara flew back to Japan.
She hadn’t been there since she was sixteen, and it was as spontaneous a decision as any. But she didn’t couldn’t stomach going to the office, couldn’t handle seeing Ei and maybe beginning to regret what she had done. For the whole flight, she inhaled the scent of flowery mist and stale plane air and played with the button on her phone. Click, click, click-click-click—
It was the first day of January and was supposed to be a new start. No one around her knew that her heart was still back in Vancouver, held captive by a girl she had wanted for so long but had just fucked everything up with.
There was something comforting about the anonymity in that plane cabin. Sara could pretend she hadn’t just messed it all up. Pretend she could no longer recall the smell of caramelized brown sugar wafting from the backroom of the bubble tea shop, the hardened look in Ei’s eyes and the subtle parting of her lips, perhaps the only sign that what Sara said meant anything to her.
Maybe Sara had just wanted to be known, then. God fucking dammit. Maybe sitting her down to say we should break this off before it gets too serious was the only way she knew how to do it—instead of telling Ei I want this to be more or I would marry you if you asked like she truly wanted. Had she ever actually known what she wanted? Probably not.
When she landed in Japan she greeted her parents. Her father looked at her, forehead creased. “Sara? Did something happen?”
“I missed home,” she said as an excuse. “I wanted to come to visit. If that’s okay,” she added hastily, and her mother stepped forward.
“Of course it’s okay. We’ve missed you too.”
After eating lunch, she went straight to her old bedroom and sat there, looking at the posters and decorations she had amassed in the first fifteen years of her life.
It was like seeing a different person altogether. Viewing her childhood through the lens of a stranger, the bottom of a beer bottle that warped her entire line of sight. She had never felt so untethered.
After she got into UBC Sara’s parents flew back to Japan, leaving her alone in a city she had only known for three years, tops. That didn’t come close to what she was feeling now, completely detached from reality and yet too near all at the same time.
She laid down and fell asleep for three hours.
“Sara,” her mother began after dinner, “are you sure nothing happened? Not that we aren’t very happy to see you, but it does feel slightly…rushed.”
“Sorry,” she said, already in defensive mode, glancing down. I—I broke up with someone. That I was seeing for a long time. I guess I just wanted to get away from it all.”
Her mother’s expression morphed into one of pity. “Oh, Sara.”
The rice tasted like sawdust in her mouth. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Was he nice?”
He, thought Sara, a brief moment of lucidity in her haze. For some reason, she latched onto it and barely managed to stop a sob from escaping. “Yeah. He was nice.” The lie felt like an admission of her own guilt. “It just wasn’t working.”
“Well,” her mother said reassuringly, “I’m sure he didn’t deserve you anyway.”
It’s the other way around, Sara wanted to tell her. All along she had been the one chasing, following behind Ei, wanting to do more and give more than she could ever handle, just for Ei.
Ei was always doing things for her—reminding her to eat lunch, buying her a new Compass Card when Sara’s ran out, getting her dinner from her favourite restaurants because Ei was shit at cooking. Showing up in the middle of the night at Sara’s apartment and sleeping next to her until the sun rose, just because.
She gave a watery laugh and lifted her shoulders. “Maybe.” She bit her lip, feeling her teeth dig into the skin and draw blood. “I’m going to go out tonight.”
Her mother nodded and placed a hand on her shoulder. Small comforts, really. “Be safe.”
Everything after that was a fever dream. New Year’s Day and Sara decided there was no better way to celebrate the worst week of her life than getting herself a seat at the local bar and drinking until her brain was too foggy to think about what went wrong (everything, always).
Sake splashed over her hand and she just stared at the spill blankly. She couldn’t drum up the energy to mop it up and the bartender approached her: “It might be time to go home now,” the girl said, taking Sara’s most recent glass.
Sara blinked. “Oh,” she said, voice scratchy and fuzzed from alcohol. “Okay.”
“Will you be alright?”
“Yeah,” said Sara. She was only half sure that it was the truth. “I think so. Thank you.”
“No problem,” the bartender answered. “Get home safe.”
Except she didn’t get home. She went and sat in a nearby park, waiting for her head to clear and thinking, what the hell am I doing with my life?
There was a moment, too, where her finger hovered over the ‘call’ button. She wanted to hear Ei’s voice, wanted to tell her that she had made a mistake.
She wanted so much. Instead of going after any of it, though, she was so drunk she could barely stand up straight, stumbling around a park in Kyoto. With the time difference, Ei would be waking up now and getting ready to go to work, seventeen hours in the past.
Wasn’t that a thought.
She made a split-second decision, swiped out of Ei’s contact, and tapped on Itto’s. The phone rang seven times before he picked up.
“Sara?” His voice was thick with sleep, tinny in the speakers.
“Hi,” she said, already struggling to breathe. “Um. I’m going to regret this. But I’m drunk out of my mind right now and the jet lag is really getting to me and I…I want to call her.”
Itto was quiet for a long time.
“I might have messed up,” she whispered. She didn’t know if the emotions or the cups of sake were making her eyes sting. Probably a mixture of both. “But I can’t take it back, right?” She laughed, wet. “And I wouldn’t know how either.”
He sighed. “How long will you be in Japan?”
She licked her lips. “I don’t know. More than a month, at least. I’ll Venmo you for the rent every first of the month.”
Itto made a sound of affirmation. “I saw Ei at the office today.”
The universe came to a standstill.
“What did—” she coughed. “Did she…did something look off?” asked Sara. Call her selfish but she needed this, needed to know some way, somehow, that she had left a mark on Ei’s life. That they had meant something to Ei, that her existence was more meaningful than a remark about the weather or a new sushi restaurant popping up across the street. She needed to be known.
Ei was always so good. Sara just never knew how much of it was sympathy and how much was really love. The lines had blurred so far that everything read as pity.
“She looked sad,” Itto said, matter-of-fact. He told it like it was every time, and in her drunken dimness, Sara couldn’t have asked for anything else. “Kind of shocked. What’s the word…robotic?”
Sara rolled it around in her mouth, trying to imagine it. “Robotic.”
“Yeah. Like she was doing everything on autopilot. Kokomi asked after you too,” Itto said as an afterthought. “I think everyone misses you.”
“I’m sorry,” Sara mumbled weakly. She cleared her throat. “I’ll be back soon, I just have to get my head on straight.”
“I know,” Itto said comfortingly. “I know. Take care of yourself, okay? I need to get up. I’ll call you back.”
━━━━━━
Sara met Itto in college. Everything snowballed from there.
The short answer is that they were in the Asian-American association together, but the longer (and more accurate) one is that their friendship was built on hundreds of small coincidences; they frequented the same takoyaki shop and took the same Statistics course in sophomore year despite being in two different majors, raised their hands to ask questions at the same time, visited the same cat on the walk back to their respective dorms at night.
He was annoying at first, but eventually, he grew on Sara, and it came to the point where they walked to class together, waited for each other before going to grab bubble tea. At the halfway point of their senior year, Sara sat him down and said, “Look. I’ve been thinking—”
“Oh no,” Itto answered automatically.
She elbowed him in the rib. “You’re planning to stay here, right?”
Itto nodded. “Right.”
“And I think we both know that we could never afford the rent alone. Why don’t we get an apartment together?”
Itto narrowed his eyes. “Is this a prank?”
Sara met his gaze dead-on. “Does it seem like a prank?”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
She exhaled loudly. “No. It’s not a prank.”
“Oh,” Itto said, still eyeing her warily. “Okay.”
“I thought you’d be more excited.”
“I am,” insisted Itto. “Just give me a minute. I need it to sink in.”
She waited patiently.
Finally, Itto sprang up. “Okay. Okay! This is going to be good.”
“Will it?” she asked tiredly, rubbing her face with a hand. She would have said she regretted it, but she didn’t; despite everything that might indicate otherwise, Itto was reliable. Sara would mind living with him least of everyone she knew.
“Of course it will! Thank you,” he said seriously. “I really appreciate it. And we’re friends, so it will all work out.”
Sara didn’t admit that she was more than a little touched by the sentiment. She trusted Itto, anyway, so what was the harm?
They moved into their apartment, graduated, and hadn’t left since. Hadn’t stopped complaining about the housing prices, hadn’t stopped movie nights on Fridays or doing seasonal deep-cleans. Sara was responsible for about ninety-nine percent of the results.
Vancouver Island trips on the weekends (because Itto went feral for a bakery on the main street) were their norm, and so were occasional nights out to Davie Village. Where despite the options, Sara had never really connected with anyone. She tried online dating, went out to bars, hooked up with faceless strangers—but never once had she wanted to have them, to know them and only them, entirely purposeful and entirely possessive. Greedy in her all-consuming singularity.
Never before Ei.
━━━━━━
Sara loves and hates Vancouver in equal measure. The best and worst part is the food, a source of simultaneous joy and pain for hundreds of reasons.
She keeps a list in her head: the okonomiyaki fried every morning by an elderly couple just off Georgia Street, the never-ending Rolodex of ramen places she and Itto haven’t eaten, how they try to check off one every few weeks but somehow the list never gets shorter. Pulled-pork poutine, which Sara hates but Itto can never get enough of.
Sara and Ei broke up at a bubble tea shop.
And nowadays it’s a fact that’s difficult to breathe through, like toxic fluorescence building up in her lungs, because there are so many fucking bubble tea shops downtown—every street corner, every thoroughfare, every back alley—that whenever she passes by one, it looks exactly like the scene of the crime. As if the city itself wants to punish her for her own foolishness.
Nowadays she goes to get bubble tea after work and the sounds, the brown-sugar scent, the warmth against the northern wind, all feel like a harsh reminder of what she no longer has.
She and Itto chose their apartment, first and foremost, for the price. Back then it didn’t cost half as much as now, and unlike most others, didn’t have a ban on pets. Itto was toying with the idea of adopting a dog.
“You can barely take care of yourself,” said Sara firmly. That was that.
They also picked it for its proximity to every place that reminded Sara of home. When they couldn’t go to a shrine for hatsumode, Sara ordered omamori off Etsy and Itto bought some cheaply made fortunes from the local Japanese grocery store.
Sometimes they spoke Japanese on New Year’s Day, a kind of homage to their parents’ sacrifices, but more often than not they just couldn’t do it. The homesickness was raw and their tongues were stunted, bisected into forgotten memories and an erasure they didn’t notice until it was too late. Truly—what was the point in trying?
So. Once upon a time, their location had been awfully convenient, and now it just serves to slap Sara full in the face if she dares think that she might be adjusting to life without Ei.
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she asks Itto, slipping her shoes off. She chews on a tapioca pearl, rolling it across her tongue and biting it into two parts.
Itto just looks at her. He has a controller in one hand and FIFA 2021’s loading screen glows on the TV. Sara wonders if a television was the smartest investment for either of them, because at this point they only use it for HGTV episodes and video games geared towards fourteen-year-old boys. “What brought this on?”
“Not much,” she says. “I’ve been…thinking. You know.”
“A dangerous pastime,” he replies sagely, and she rolls her eyes, walking over to swat him.
“Cut the shit. Just answer me. Please,” she adds. The vulnerability in her voice makes her wince, but it’s nothing Itto hasn’t heard before.
“No,” he says immediately. “You’re not a bad person. Not at all.”
Sara sits down, heavy. “I think—I don’t know. I feel like I used to see myself as the villain. Always. Every time, every story, I was the worst character in it. And maybe now I’m…reformed, or whatever. Like I’ve become better through the power of—” love. “Whatever the hell it is that people do to repent for their sins. But I still do bad things, and I’m still a bad person.”
Itto clicks through the FIFA starting page. “You weren’t the villain. You aren’t now, either.”
She laughs, raw and grating. “Well, it’s not like I was the hero.”
He frowns. “What makes you say so?”
She has to cast her mind back to answer that one, back to the blue-flamed candlelight nights of Ei’s love, back to bruises painted under her eyes from lack of sleep, back to I don’t know if this is working out and if you think so. To Ei’s hand, pressed against her rib-cage, to Sara feeling skinned and exposed in her tank top that barely hid anything. Don’t be nervous. Her giggle, so out of character, discomposed, dishevelled, a strand of hair stuck in the lip gloss she had put on just so Ei would kiss it off her mouth. Voice high-pitched and reedy. I don’t know how not to.
She swallows. “Forget about it. I’m in a weird mood, it’s—do we have shrimp chips?”
Itto pauses his game. “Don’t change the subject.”
“What do you want me to say?” she snaps, combing out her hair with her fingers. She snags on a knot and almost rips it out.
“Be careful,” says Itto gently. He’s rarely gentle like this, like he thinks Sara might shatter into a million pieces. She has never felt so conscious of her own fragility, and that’s the part that stops her from getting up to leave. “You’re not the villain, Sara. You never were.”
She exhales harshly. In out, in out, in out— “That’s what Ei told me too when we started dating—and it’s funny because the only reason I thought I was the bad person in the first place was that the heroes were always the lovable ones. And there was this part of me, this…small, terrible, irreversibly broken part of me, but maybe it was all of me, maybe it was just me, maybe it had been like that for my entire life, and it would make me unlovable forever, so I had to be the villain, right? I mean—”
“Breathe,” Itto interrupts reasonably.
Sara breathes. Big, gulping gasps that she would be trying to conceal if it were anyone other than Itto, but being that they’ve lived together for years and he’s seen her at rock bottom, this is practically nothing.
For all the love she had with Ei, she didn’t, couldn’t let herself go in front of her. Like if she did, Ei would find a reason to leave.
After they got together Sara had spent hours imagining a future with her. One in which they had an apartment where sunlight stripped the window in the afternoons, in which they owned a cat, in which they drove out to the mountains on the weekends and watched snow settle over the ground. In which Sara’s heart drifted and found solid ground just like the snow, and the roaring in her ears quieted for once. In which they got married too, if Sara ever got past her ever-present fear of making it concrete, or if Ei wanted marriage as an endpoint. If she didn’t, Sara would be happy with simple togetherness.
But sooner or later there would be some kind of roadblock. A hand on her arm, barring entrance. You shall not pass, she thinks hysterically, and nearly cracks. Despite the Lord of the Rings references and the last shards of her willpower, despite how much she wanted to imagine Ei with a ring slipped on her finger, the wall never disappeared. Never weakened. Never crumbled.
Whatever thoughts she may have had about Ei were fantasies, happily-ever-afters candy-spun in the recesses of her memory.
And villains weren’t supposed to find happiness. Those were the rules. They still are.
“Sara?” Itto has shut the television off completely, and it pulses black, the final vestiges of a game burnt into the screen.
“Nothing,” she tells him, blinking hard. “What was I saying?”
He watches her closely. She refuses to let herself cry under the scrutiny, but it’s a mortifyingly close thing. “You think you’re unlovable?”
She sucks in a breath through her nose. “I can back it up with citations if you’d prefer. It isn’t an—unsourced claim.”
Itto’s eyebrows clamber up to his hairline. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to explain this with footnotes.”
“Probably just the bibliography.”
“Close enough. What style?”
“APA. For behavioural sciences,” she elaborates, getting a distinct feeling that explaining the joke made it less funny than it already was.
Itto slaps her on the shoulder. “This is how I know you’re feeling better. Bad jokes. I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he continues. “D’you want Chipotle for dinner? I have a coupon. I’m feeling a burrito bowl on this lovely Thursday night.”
The change in topic is so smooth that Itto doesn’t notice, and Sara smiles. “Why not?”
━━━━━━
Her first date with Ei was the most nerve-wracking day of Sara’s life. A hasty confession and a restaurant search later, she was in front of a ramen restaurant, waiting for Ei. The ramen was a deliberate choice; if things went pear-shaped they could get out of their seats quickly, citing the long queue outside, and if she was too scared to look Ei in the eye she could just watch the chef knead noodles behind the counter.
It was too bad that Ei arrived and Sara couldn’t take her eyes off her—a purple cable-knit sweater, a pair of pressed slacks, hair pinned up neatly and a flower pin tucked behind her ear. Her eyeliner flicked out at the ends, perfectly drawn and perfectly lethal.
Sara wiped her hands on her skirt as Ei approached. “You look great,” she stammered out. “Really good.”
“Thank you,” Ei replied. “Should we go in?”
The restaurant was warm with the chatter and the scent of broth permeating the air, and Sara silently wished she had worn longer socks. “Have you ever been here?” she asked as they sat down and opened their menus.
Ei shook her head. “I have heard that the food is good, though. I think Miko visits often.”
Right—she and Yae were close friends. Sara nodded. “I haven’t tried it before either. I saw a lot of good online reviews.”
She didn’t stop talking except to eat, too nervous about how oppressive the silence might feel. Walls, walls, walls closing in on them. Her mouth hurt and her throat went dry, but she kept talking as long as Ei would listen. “I haven’t travelled outside Canada for years, but if I could go anywhere it would be Japan. It’s been a long time since I saw my parents,” she added, her mouth twisting slightly.
Ei looked up. “How long?”
“Oh,” Sara said, her voice as light as she could feign. “Six? Seven? Since I graduated high school.”
“You miss them,” Ei responded, an objective statement. It would be nothing coming from anyone else, but the fact that it was Ei saying it, acknowledging that she heard and internalized what Sara said, that she saw Sara at all, made it feel like the entire Earth shifted beneath her feet.
“Of course I do,” she agrees. “It’s hard not to, right?” After a beat of silence passed, she ventured to ask: “What about your parents?”
Ei’s gaze hardened, but not directed towards Sara. It seemed like she was thinking of something far away, distant and gauzy in the way only memories could be. “We are no longer on…speaking terms.”
“Oh. I—” she nearly knocked over the sesame seed dispenser. “May I ask why?”
Ei looked like she was searching for the right words. Rested on the table, her hands clenched and unclenched, knuckles straining against the skin. “They weren’t…didn’t appreciate my lifestyle choices. Or romantic ones.”
Sara swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago,” answered Ei. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
Ei cut her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—it’s hard. Not knowing where you stand with your family. Feeling like you have to hide yourself.”
Ei lifts one precise brow. “Is your family…”
She wrings her hands out. “Sort of. I mean, I’ve never told them otherwise, and I’ve posted pictures that they could see, but I don’t want them to—cut me off. I love them,” she adds, knowing full well that she’s gotten a lot rawer than a first date generally warrants. “I don’t want anything to happen.”
“Right,” Ei responds.
“Obviously it’ll get harder,” she goes on, “when—if I get married, or move in with a partner, but right now it’s painless.” A wound, bloodless. “They’re so far away that they don’t really know anymore. Anyway, I’ve talked enough about myself,” she says, letting a smile spread across her face. “How was your day?”
Ei was looking at her. It stood out among every other moment of the night because she was wearing a strange expression, something caught in the crosshairs between wonder and surprise. Sara wouldn’t believe it was directed at her if she wasn’t the only person in Ei’s line of sight.
Just as she opened her mouth, their bowls arrived at the table. “Thank you,” she said to the waiter, and saw Ei already diligently sprinkling sesame seeds over her noodles.
They didn’t talk much for the rest of the night, first intent on eating and then having to rush out of the restaurant to make way for the quickly-growing line outside.
“Good thing we got here early,” observed Sara.
Ei hummed in reply. “It’s impossible to get anything if you arrive after eight-thirty.”
“I bet,” she said, grimacing. “Well—I should be getting home.” She checked her phone: nine at night. What was the etiquette for first dates? Ei didn’t seem like the type to sleep over in the first week, let alone the first month. Sara’s arms hung by her sides. She didn’t let herself reach out. “I think Itto will be waiting up for me to come back.”
Ei nodded. “It was nice to see you, Kujou Sara.”
Sara laughed. “Please just call me Sara. Thank you for the formality, but you know…” she waved her arms, trying to get the gestures to speak for themselves. “I’ll see you on Monday?”
“You will.” Ei turned around and walked down the street in the opposite direction from Sara’s apartment, their paths diverging in front of this warm, loud ramen restaurant, Vancouver awash in psychedelic neon lights and the smell of frying food.
Ei, hair braided flat against her back in purple streaks, stunning in the afterglow.
Sara watched for another minute, the last image of Ei still stamped into her brain, burnished silver. She spun on her heel and walked away.