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Reze catches him in the rain and giggles like the thunder and lightning. When the sunlight slips out from clouds, she’s all teeth.
There’s something about Reze that reminds Denji of Makima.
He doesn’t think about it too hard. He just thinks about them in conjunction. Naked, not naked, lingerie, no lingerie, Makima’s button down shirts and Reze’s t-shirts and small town snorts and giggles.
He’s one slip of the wrist away from thinking about Reze in far more of a sexual way than Makima, but then Makima’s appears in his head, and like a ball and chain tugs on his neck and then his dick. And he’s the same as ever, dizzy and dazed about why this matters and why he can’t stop thinking. He thinks about Himeno sometimes even though…
Why bother spending time or wasting time on one and not the other?
Well, Makima.
Makima and her eyes and her hair and sometimes, her voice goes soft at the end of Denji’s name and he can almost swallow it whole.
He shouldn’t think about it too hard.
Does he think it's because of guilt? Is this guilt? Why guilt? Who’s between the pews and at the cross? Since when has any of that mattered to him? He wasn’t taught to pray.
Since when? Well, since Makima.
Makima in rose colors, rose scents, rose necklaces, roses shoved into his nose on a brief autumn day.
Why guilt?
There’s roses and Makima’s tits. No room for guilt.
Though, the frustration gets to him. Why does it make him want to yell? Why does it make him wanna cry, make him wanna die, make him wanna—
Reze laughs obnoxiously loud next to him. Laughing at something he said that wasn’t a joke, Makima doesn’t laugh like that at his jokes, he’s just talking, it’s not all that funny, but it spreads something warm in his chest.
That’s probably just the sunlight.
All some ridiculous side effect from wanting to touch.
Yearn is sexual. He’s been called gross and vulgar. It shouldn’t really matter. The touch doesn’t really matter either. It’s not about the touch, it’s about… what is it about?
There’s a word for the something he feels about wanting Makima. The, something, is vulgar and makes him feel gross, but god, so good, so who cares about the gross? Who cares if Aki finds him repulsive?
He cares so much so about Makima thinking he’s gross. She never said so. She hired him and fed him noodles.
Reze is touching him and he’s feeling something burn distantly. This, something, is not the same something in regards to wanting Makima.
Maybe it’s less harsh. Less biting.
Reze is pretty. Write a poem type of pretty. Denji can’t write poems. Denji spat up a flower.
She seemed happy with that. Maybe that’s enough?
Maybe that’s enough to get him to where he can touch—
He does touch her. She lets him. She initiates. She slaps him on the arm, she grabs his arm and holds it, she tugs on his hand, she stares and blushes and laughs. He wants to say she reminds him of cherries, but that’s not quite right. He thinks that’s rather stupid.
Far more stupid, sometimes Denji feels like he doesn’t want to touch her at all. It’s an odd feeling, without a name, it confuses him and sits in his chest and mouth like something dead and something to be desired. It’s rotting, rotted, unhopeful, and unhelpful.
He’d like to fry it like an egg in Aki’s pan and give it form. He doesn’t. He lets Reze tug him along and burst out into cackles that are too, too, too loud for anything he says.
He wants Makima.
He dreams about Makima. Always.
Routinely.
Sometimes, she sits in his palms, half-eaten, like a skinned peach, juice dripping so much so it stings small cuts on the backs of his hands. In those dreams, she lets him bite.
In dreams, she laughs and runs to him, right before she disappears within reach.
The vulgar dreams lie in a puddle at the edge of his bed. They’re like the stains on old t-shirts and the way he takes way too many showers, so Aki doesn’t hear him. In those dreams, he unbuttons her shirt without shaking, he licks into her mouth without hesitating, grabs her hair and yanks hard and watches her mouth open in desire in return.
There are the dreams where he cuddles into her shoulder and bites her neck. Gnaws on collarbones until they’re a hue of puce and mauve and what the sunset looks like before a thunderstorm. In his dreams, she smells like laundry detergent and something like vanilla.
His favorite dream consisted of her initiating a kiss at a park with a garden. Daises scattered themselves in disarray with white, yellow, pink shimmering in the wind. Hitting her arms. Whacking the bottom of his shoes. Her hair was out of the braid, in a messy ponytail, a pink ribbon tied in the middle of it. She didn’t seem to care about it. She kissed him softly, gently, precisely and then all once. It was with rhythm that didn’t jostle his bones or leave him frightened, he didn’t jump at her or hesitate with embarrassment creeping up his ribs. He allowed the thought to form, the desire to mold it all into a cinder block in his gut.
It bursts like watery-candy when he tasted the inside of her teeth. Like figs and wine and the call of Aki’s cigarettes all into one, part-of-a-whole-whole.
Makima, in his best dreams, in his feathered-goose pillow borderline hallucinations, hums and never pants. Breathes deeply into his mouth, she purrs like starlight shot to the engine in his chest. She squeaks and he realizes he really likes having his hands on her thighs.
In his dreams, he’s not imprudently staring at her chest and drooling like some rabid dog that Aki swears he is. In his dreams, there’s a light breeze that tickles cheek fuzz and Denji really likes Makima’s thighs. With clothing or not. He finds it grounds him. Maybe it’s her extension to the Earth; he’s stuck at her kneecaps, worshiping what holds her upright.
And like he routinely dreams of Makima, he routinely wakes to find reality without the bragging rights of sleeping with a god. He swears, in the rough, bruised morning, he can still smell the perfumed air of his dream, the way her hair felt between his fingers. He swears he can see her swirling eyes, mellowed out into mustard without hypnotism.
He swears. He swears. He swears.
He rolls over on Aki’s tatami mat floor, inhaling stale overnight noodles and old soda.
Makima invites him to her office. A day after their date.
Mildly, performatively, Denji wants to argue with someone. He wishes he could have held her hand. At the very least. She didn’t initiate contact. Denji didn’t want to admit that he found most of the movies boring; he did admit they were boring, but not as honest as he’d like to be. He didn’t think that’d impress her very much.
Though, he thinks he does a good job of impressing her.
Doesn’t he?
Who impresses Makima?
Her hair is the same as always. Pretty. Her eyes are the same as always. Pretty. Her outfit, the same, her body, the same, the way she stares at him with hooded eyes or maybe something like curiosity. Pretty. Pretty. Pretty.
He thinks she stares at him with desire sometimes, maybe he’s the hopeful idiot in his head, in his pants, in his desire to touch.
She’s talking, like she always does, pretty, commanding, he’s not listening. He’s staring and drooling and thinking about her hands on him and his on her. Mostly, lately, he can’t stop thinking about her hands on him.
He’s not actually drooling, but he thinks maybe if he drooled on her chest, something might work or restart inside this head of his.
Something in his head must be working with an engine that’s not his because:
“Why is the angel with Hayakawa now?” He tries to be formal, to make it appear like he’s not just here for a meal and the view. He wishes he could touch her with his mind.
Impassively, Makima cocks her head gently, “Hm?”
“I’d never seen the angel with Aki before.”
“Thought he’d like the company.” She says simply, staring hypnotic holes into Denji. Frankly, he’s obsessed with her eyes. He’d like to spin on a loop within them. He’d like more than food and debt paid off, he’d like her hands, and for her to define prayer. He stops that train of thought, goes back to the one where he’s dreaming of her chest and something about his own interest in the angel devil.
“I thought me and Power were the company?”
“You are.”
Denji’s getting bored, he’d rather ask why she summoned him. “Why did you call me today?”
He wants a second date.
Makima almost smiles.
When Denji was twelve there was a girl he liked to ogle at in the park.
The park was an extension of some junior high school across the street. Many of the students played there. She had two long red braids that would swing up and down with her. Hit the back of her bumblebee coat. She wore bright red boots with stars on them. He always thought her outfits were kind of funny, but he was wearing rags so he’d never say anything if he got the opportunity to talk.
It’s not like he’d ever be able to speak to her. He never went to school. Some of the kids that went and knew him, thought of him as weird. Maybe gross.
He settled with staring.
Behind bushes, behind trees, covered by fences, a masquerade of whatever he could use to build and conceal himself. He’d watch her long red-honey hair smack her back over and over. He’d like to think he could feel the red on his tongues.
Did sanguine-color have a taste? His knees did when he scraped them running.
He deciphered and labeled her eyes as honey-brown. He pretended to play on the playground just to peek at her freckles in the sun. Instead, he labeled the color of her eyes and took that as prettier than the sunflower color of the slide.
The unnamed, braided, honey-brown girl liked to spin with her hands outstretched toward the sky. As if she was unintentionally trying to fit the sun in one palm and the moon in the other. The problem was, that only one was out at once. Their dual appearance was rare, but she spun around like a marionette on a string, reaching for the cosmos. Denji simply stared.
Is that when the yearning began? The urge to yank, grab, hold, rip out of the sky? Did he inherit someone else’s desire, simply by watching?
One day, she stopped coming to the park.
He saw her only once again, long hair out of braids, blowing in the wind as she held a dark-haired boy’s hand. A beautiful boy with a beautifully ironed shirt, a boy so pretty he looked like a girl, and his shoes were new and so was her hair and so was the gentle clasp of their hands together.
They ate bento together. Denji didn’t know bento’s came in floral colors, in different shapes, in navy blues and bright greens.
Denji stopped going to that park.
The first time Reze kisses Denji, he freezes. He’s nothing like his dream-self. Concocted of coolness and self assuredness and having bagged Makima. He’s frozen. He’s guilty. He’s confused. He likes it. Is that enough? To like and then want and then change? Does the thought have to be moored and full of breath like the certainty of human anatomy?
He likes it. Her mouth is warm. It moves like it wants him and maybe that’s why he likes it. Maybe he likes it because she wants him and that’s as far as he has to take a train. The destination is yearn, desire, and being wanted.
Reze is still kissing him. He’s a cemented idiot. Like an earthquake, he cracks the foundation of indecisiveness and gently grabs her wrist. He kisses her back.
It gets better.
Somehow the warmth from her mouth spreads to his own, like Makima’s hum turning on an engine in his chest, but Reze’s holds the sun between their mouths. He didn’t know you could taste the sun. He wants to taste more. It’s hot.
He jams his tongue into her mouth. Instead of an insult to pardon his raucousness, she giggles into his mouth. Kisses him harder too. They’re standing, he’s not gripping her thighs for a tether to reality, he brushes his thumb over her wrist. She intertwines their hands.
When she parts from his mouth, her green eyes are blown. Black taking over bright green. Denji didn’t know eyes could look like that. Look like that looking at him, for that matter.
He didn’t even try to grab her tits.
He blinks, his mouth hanging limply open, feeling stupid, feeling ridiculous, feeling like he wants to see what else green eyes can do and how much red can spread on her face. He keeps his hands to himself, star-struck.
And then he feels guilty.
Isn’t he in love with Makima?
The tug and lull of being wanted by Reze, by Himeno, leaves guilty handprints in all the wrong places. He didn’t think you could slap the underside of a tongue? Sometimes he finds guilt while rinsing out the shampoo in his hair. Finds it in Aki’s laundry. In Power’s relentless screeching.
He goes with whoever wants him that day. There’s a level he can’t control. There’s a level of being wanted that turns him on. There’s a level of guilt that’s nonexistent, there’s a level of nonsense he can tolerate.
A very small voice, one that’s unheard, that says it’s not about being wanted.
BESIDES:
Makima is different. He wants Makima. Makima isn’t chasing him. She’s set aside from the rest. It’s not like she’s touching him and begging for a reaction. She’s not yearning or wanting or trying to sleep with him. It’s different.
Aki makes him onigiri for work one day. He thinks of it as guilt-shaped. Something to chew on absentmindedly while he finishes a boring day at work. He wants to kiss Makima. The guilt, shaped like an onigiri, doesn’t sit very well in his stomach. Makima gave him so much. It makes her different. It makes him different.
A meal is worth more than desire. Desire makes him an idiot, but he’s fed and Makima’s pretty and cute without the kisses, without putting hands on him.
Reze takes him to a library. If Aki took him here, he’d throw a fit with Power. He complains mildly to her, she giggles, like she always does, like she’s from small-towns with houses with roofs, but drags him along anyway.
Does she really think I’m that funny?
She tugs a book from the history section. She talks about a war general and beautifully sewn outfits meant for men to wear and kill other men in them.
“We can really study, you know.” She peers at him from over a bookshelf on the other side. Green blinking eyes like a traffic light. Denji doesn’t wait for them to turn red. He goes, goes, goes, goes, goes, goes. “I’d love to really study.”
Denji feels a few things crawl up inside him. As if an ominous spider crawled up the wall to web itself in the corner of his room, all because he didn’t clean and close the windows. Instead of dwelling, he nods and agrees.
“Really?” Her big eyes light up from across him.
“Really.”
She smiles. Red on her cheeks.
Denji read a really stupid book about insects once. It was for the pictures. He liked spiders. Well, pictures of spiders. Their webs were all so intricate and different.
Jumping spiders can jump up to fifty times their own body length.
Denji and Reze do study.
Denji learns big words like forgiveness, but forgets them. (It’s not that big of a word). They end up studying other, far more important things. At least, more important to him.
Once Reze’s boss gave Reze the keys to lock up, their focus fizzled and crackled somewhere different.
The cafe is empty other than lemon stained splotches on the tables from the lights. Reze lies flat down on the table. He stands above her.
He studies the way yellow circles and punctures green in her eyes and how her hair falls out of her face when she’s staring up at him, lying flat on her back. She names her fingers and the bones in them. Then she names her wrist bones and her arm bones. Denji forgets the names instantly. There’s yellow everywhere. Reze’s chest falls every time she exhales.
“Name the bones in my fingers.” She holds her hand out. Her tongue catches on her teeth in a way Denji really likes. Knowing more than one language makes you pretty. He thinks. Maybe that’s stupid. “I just said them, did you forget already?” She giggles and giggles. There’s yellow spread around the room like blood.
She’s wiggling her fingers in front of him. He doesn’t imagine what his face looks like. He takes her hand. “Phalanges.” He states. Holding her hand with both of his. Gently. He feels around, looking for her pulse. Nothing grabby, just rubbing his hands along the veins, hoping the heartbeat hits his nerves and fingerprints. “The proximal phalanx is…” He runs his thumb down to the lower part of the first finger, “The bone closest to the palm.”
She tilts her head, so one side of her face is hidden. “Yes.”
“I forgot the other’s, but the wrist,” he slides his hand down to her wrist, where he knows you can find a pulse, “there’s eight bones in the wrist. This is the Lunate bone.” He presses down. “I don’t remember the rest.”
He thinks she’s turning redder. The golden lights illuminate a shiny point on her nose.
He moves down her arm. Pushing down on her forearm, massaging where it gets tense about midway through. She exhales through her nose deeply. Her breath catches in her throat. Denji releases pressure. Afraid he hurt her. He almost lets go, but sees how red and glowy her ears are and blinks a couple of times instead.
Her arm burns in his hands.
He reaches her elbow. “Olecranon.”
She turns to face him. “So,” She huffs, “you remember that one, but not the rest of the fingers?”
“I like the name.” He responds, almost shyly. Feeling her gaze, feeling the heat of her arm.
She carefully slides her arm out of his grasp, sits up, her hair falling back into her eyes and forehead. Some of it dangling at her cheek. Like a jewel to swat at like a cat. She raises her hands and puts his face between them. Her palms are hot when they connect with his cheeks, her hands entwine behind his neck and she yanks him closer. He hits her nose with his. She smells like coffee. Coffee and something sweet he can’t name. Maybe soap.
He thinks about the vanilla scented Makima from his dreams and thinks about how Makima doesn’t smell like anything whenever he’s near her in real life. He discards the thought.
Reze breathes. “I like you.”
Denji feels frozen. Once again, nothing like the charming person he is in his dreams. Stuck. Weighing over options in his head, but never really being able to get the thought of his dick out of it.
Denji’s not sure he likes her. He does. He clearly does. But he likes Makima. But he wants to be touched and wants to touch, and maybe that’s the never-ending predicament swirling in his brain and all he's ever going to know.
So, he lets her again, shove her mouth onto his. She immediately licks his teeth. There’s a taste of caramel in his mouth. He can identify it because now he’s had caramel corn and her mouth tastes like caramel. He leans in, presses his mouth to kiss back and feels hot. The sun between their teeth stretching all the way to the back of his mouth, the tips of his ears, underneath his collarbones. She aggressively yanks him toward her, wrapping her legs around his and pulling, pulling, pulling. His thighs hit the table and he involuntarily groans.
She lets out a quick sigh; his groan seemed to egg her on more. She bites his lip and sucks and releases and they chase each other’s mouths so quickly that their front teeth collide.
Denji doesn’t care.
His thoughts are hot and rapid and full of shaking palms because of how badly he wants her. Maybe how badly he wants Makima. Maybe it didn’t matter because Reze is touching him. Her hands start to wander away from his neck, working their way to his shoulders, his back, his chest.
Denji only feels hot all over. Like he can’t get his mind to work. He’s overwhelmed with the daze of wanting more and more and more and more and more.
“Relax.” Reze cuts through disorganization, through fever and blistering sun and heat stroke. She releases him and gingerly takes his hands and puts them on her shoulders. “Relax.”
Denji nods rapidly. He’ll do whatever she says, he’ll do—
“Do what you feel.” She says softly. Sweetly. Red burnt on the tips of her ears. Denji blinks.
What he feels.
Makima?
Reze goes in for another kiss. Denji, experimentally, moves his hands on Reze’s shoulders. Shaking and moving them in the slightest bit. He can’t stop shaking. He inhales, but kisses Reze and wills his mind to stop running in rabid circles. He slides them down her arms, he puts one of them on her back and tangles one in her hair. Her hair feels nice. Soft. It falls from his fingertips and he returns to tangle in it again. It falls out of its hair tie and Reze wraps her legs back around him and grinds into him.
Now, that gets him to shake again. He lets out an embarrassing moan that also turns into a cough.
Reze is giggling. She’s always laughing. Always like daisies and pool water and maybe why stars glow, burn and blow.
“You like?” She cocks her head sideways before Denji can help himself; he jumps for her mouth again, and she's bursting laughter into his mouth like dynamite fizzing towards the end of its rope. She grinds into him again and he feels himself wanting to pant like a dog.
“Relax, Denji.” She’s laughing, all soft and brilliant and the yellow isn’t gone, but it’s the yellow of the sun between their nerves, between their mouths, between their skin touching.
“I can’t.” Honesty slips up.
“Try.” She kisses his nose and for some reason that also does something to him. Something that Makima can’t—
“I’ll do whatever you want.” Her voice cuts through him like a knife. “Whatever you please.” Her head moves from one side to the other, shyly, wanting, thinking, blinking, breaking, losing. “You can relax. I won’t go anywhere until you’re satisfied.”
“I don’t—”
She pushes up and kisses his nose again. “I promise.”
He freezes. For the four hundredth time. He doesn’t want to ask anything of her. Not really. Not genuinely. Kissing is good. The touching. She places her hands on his chest. They’re hot. They’re like the yellow lights. She slides them down his abdomen. Gets to his hipbones and wraps her hands around his waist. Pushing at his hipbones.
“I swear, Denji. Whatever you want.”
Denji thinks he might come if he touches her tits, but he doesn’t say that outloud. He feels something bubble up in his throat, as she pushes down harder, right underneath his hipbones.
Whatever he wants sounds too good to be true. Whatever he wants sounds like he’s falling into a venus fly trap. Whatever he wants sounds like something impossible.
And yet, Reze performs like she said she could. Sometimes without asking, she bites the right place. They collide and crash on a cafe table and Denji keeps thinking about selfishness, but Reze is there to deliver what selfishness wants. It feels good. It’s dizzy. He realizes he likes kissing more than anything else. He realizes that he doesn’t have to touch her chest to come, he realizes, Reze is honest about satisfaction and just because he pants like a dog during and after, doesn’t mean he’s on her leash.
She blows him to smithereens more times than he can count. His head blurring to dizzy and dark and black each time she explodes the two of them. Denji left like mutilated parts of human and machinery, and Reze never has the decency to fizzle out like dynamite this time around. She has the trigger finger and it’s not peeling Denji open like an orange, it’s squeezing him into a liquid, a different form, a liquid, not a solid to consume.
His memory is hazy. He remembers bits and pieces, and bombs and being blown to shit. Everything blows to shit.
In the midst of having to fight, because now they write a poem, Reze beelines for his neck, but this time for the guillotine, not a love-bite. He thinks he still has her teeth imprinted on his veins, at his hipbone. She blew him up so many times, that he forgot the new body regenerated without them. Destruction of what was never hers to begin with.
Denji, while being blown up once again, feels an echo growing in his chest where he hears their breathing and moans in a coffeeshop after midnight and with that thought, he’s gone again.
Aki’s driving a car. The pretty angel is beside him. He wonders if Akit thinks about him like he thinks about Makima. He wonders where Makima is, while the city is blown to gargantuan pieces. He wonders if he had a heart that wasn’t Pochita, if it would break, like the buildings made of cinder blocks and concrete.
Aki is getting worked up and they are blown up again.
Denji has to fight the girl who’s not a girl, but a bomb. Reze has to fight the boy who's not a boy, but a chainsaw. He should have pulled her pin a long time ago. Grenade in the midst of their mouths.
He wants to pull the pin for them now. Ask her to relax the way she asked him.
He has to fight, because it’s his job. Also, she can go fuck herself for this.
As they sink to the bottom of the ocean, Denji thinks about hands and the anatomy she taught him to find the bones in everyone’s hands. He tied her hands up to stop her from blowing him and the rest of the city to shit. He remembers the bones. She’s stuck. On top of him. The first time she’s touching him and doesn’t want to be.
The bones come to Denji’s mind like a record with her laugh pasted to the bottom of it. There are fourteen phalanges in total. Four of the fingers have three phalanges. The closest to the palm are proximal, the ones with fingernails are distal. The thumb only has proximal and distal and there’s no middle. Reze’s thumb never flicked the light to blow them up, maybe she could have succeeded if her thumb had three phalanges instead of two.
The wrist is more complicated. Intricate. She can’t light a bomb from the wrist. Wait, no she can. She can stitch herself up to blow off her hands and those eight fragile bones go with it. Denji thinks those bones are gone when she’s a human bomb. The proximal row of wrist bones are close to the forearm. The lunate bone is moon-shaped. Denji, in all his zero attempts at romantic-ness and romance and poems, wants to call Reze moon-shaped as he drowns them and the weight of the ocean refuses to crush two hybrid-humans made of metal and gunpowder.
He doesn’t think naming them does much good. He doesn’t even know if he’ll successfully stop her. Maybe that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the gunpowder lost its oxygen and Denji lost something too.
She kisses him again on the shore of a seaside, but the moon’s not up, so Denji doesn’t know if she’s being honest.
Reze doesn’t come. Even though he has hundreds of daisies for her. He heads home eventually and pathetically comes on white-tiled bathroom floor. He thought about Makima while doing it. She was easier. She was simple. She called him when she needed to and she didn’t touch him at all. She didn’t need forgiveness on a beach, when Denji didn’t really know what the word felt like, didn’t know what that word was supposed to do, how it functioned.
He’s never had anyone to forgive.
Maybe the word was for Reze and a secret for the mind of her own.
He thinks he could have another go in the shower, maybe think about how Makima will never touch him while doing it. If asked, he’d say he thinks about her tits. Drooling on them.
Aki might bang on the door soon if he continues down this path.
Besides, he feels terrible. Not terrible enough to dwell, but terrible enough that he might eat all the flowers in the bouquet, even though he stopped about halfway through.
Denji thinks he knows why Makima likes loyalty. Makima isn’t kissing and touching and trying to hold the sun between her mouth and someone else's. As much as Denji would like to try, he thinks playing with fire was for bomb-girls. Makima was out of sight and out of mind when a bomb came and blew him up four-thousand times.
Denji feels terrible, but Aki’s potentially preparing their dinner. He wishes he could be like Makima and want loyalty as the main course meal.
His dreams are usually poor, regardless of the fantasies revolving around girls. Regardless, for a second longer, he dreams awake. Instead of getting off again, Denji closes his eyes and thinks about the clouds and sky rolling and calling. He thinks about grasping Reze’s hand, running for freedom with beat-up sneakers. She could explode in the forest, knock down the trees, in the middle of nowhere, without a soul to hear. He could touch the moon-shaped wrist bone and ask about the bones in their legs.
He could examine her knee-caps.
Are there sun-shaped bones?
They could hold the sun between their mouths forever.
The shower-head falls and smacks him in the head.
Denji forces his eyes open. He rolls his eyes, huffs out annoyance with the shower steam; he will take the meal and bed over something he defines as nebulous. Who cares about dreams? Ah, oh yeah, there’s another word for the lesson. Reze taught him nebulae.
Later, he gets off thinking about Makima, anyway.
Reze didn’t think she’d have to kill a boy who contemplated skinny-dipping with her and made her roll over in laughter.
She falls asleep on Makima. She knows why Denji likes it. Likes her. He won’t bring the daisies to her grave.
She hopes, she dreams, right before she falls asleep, that all those daisies won’t go to Makima.