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Utena’s hands were small, but not delicate. She wielded the kitchen knife clumsily, jerky and angular in an inexperienced attempt at control—or perhaps a lifetime of bad habit with no one to correct her—a far cry from her aptitude with a sword. But Anthy knew that, had she risen from her seat at the table and crept behind her to crease cotton against silk, to press the air between their legs paper thin as she slid hand over hand, Utena would soften against her, all the artifice of mastery draining from her body to seep into the floorboards and the earth below them, and the flex of her muscles would take on a new tension, sinuous and graceful as she leant away from the countertop edge and into the contact, her wrist relaxing into a gentle extension of the blade in her grip.
Anthy made no move. The knife continued its haphazard hacking along the stalks, a piecemeal gradient fanning out behind it, until the the very last crisp, green rounds had settled against each other like tired lovers, and the whites lay scattered beside them, collapsed in the thick summer air.
Rubber hammered against metal as the valve turned, squealing. In the following silence, an unborn wince sat heavy in the air. The knife flashed one bright, open eye as it slid beneath the stream. Where it severed the water, twin sheets arced from its flat, sheer-bodied.
“Say—we should plant shiso.”
Utena’s hair bruised peach, mauve, purple in the flickering kitchen light. She threw her head to the side, huffing away a stray lock as she scratched her cheek against her shoulder, hands cupped beneath the flow.
“It’s getting long,” Anthy said. “Should I cut it?”
A smile dropped her toned shoulders—embarrassed and unabashedly open, by the angle of her hip—and loosened her limbs like shedding hair awaiting a brush to tangle it free. “Yeah. I meant to ask you last week, but I kept forgetting. It’s been so warm lately. All I want to do is nap until it finally cools off.”
Anthy hummed. “Tomorrow?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
The pot lifted easily. Utena’s hand clenched around the handle, one lean, practiced gesture up the length of her arm. Anthy traced the line. Relished the supple force of it: the press of her fingers diffused across five points of contact; the flex of her wrist like the base of a branch; her forearm contracted in perpetual strain, always on the precipice of release; her shoulder the absolute origin of control. Bearing down with tender, unrelenting strength.
“We’d have to harvest it young,” she replied.
“Huh?—shit, wait—”
Utena’s fingers slackened. The pot wavered, jamming the handle against her palm. She hissed as it sloshed broth, deep and creamy, into the sink, where it trickled down the rim, leaving a faint, eggshell trail on the steel in its wake. Anthy breathed, silent.
“Saved it! Where were we?” Utena settled the pot on a bamboo trivet. Water shivered from the tap and swept away the stain. Her thumb swiped after it, checking. No chalk against the pad. “Oh, right—the shiso. Why?”
The dishtowel twisted beneath her fingers like an arm. She was wringing either it or her hands dry—Anthy couldn’t tell. Maybe both. She hooked a foot around a chair leg, rolling her tendons along the wood grain. “It spreads. We won’t have a corner of the garden free from it.”
“Ah. I wanted it for garnishes, so that works. It’s a bit boring to do scallions all the time.” The ladle slid beneath the surface with hardly a ripple, the filmy skin constricting around the handle as it gave way. Across the scant few feet that separated them, Anthy could taste it in the air: salty heat flooding around a thick, savoury base. It left her mouth tingling. She pressed her tongue to the roof and swallowed.
“We could sprout it.” Her voice emanated from somewhere around the nape of Utena’s neck. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry.”
“And eat it with sashimi?” Utena’s voice was light, teasing. It skimmed across the gulf between them, flecking colour into the air as it flew. Anthy tracked each particle with meticulous precision. She was at once all of them rushing toward her body, shimmering briefly into existence a hundred times over, before she vanished into herself. Like him, she was insatiable.
“I was thinking salad.”
Hunger threatened to engulf her. She fixed her eyes on the bowls and crushed her palms together in her lap, waiting.
“We’d have to grow other greens, too, for salad.” Utena’s hands slipped around the rims. In the pits of their bellies like stones: thick, white noodles nesting in a murky cloud, threatening to erupt; thin slices of tofu suspended, testing their own weight against the buoyancy of the broth; slivered green ovals scattered unevenly across the surface, blinking up at her as they eddied about; everywhere else, tiny pinpricks of shadow so slight they threatened to drift out of focus no matter how she strained, blurring into one dark mass.
“Thank you for cooking tonight.”
The chopsticks were in her hand. Across the table, Utena offered a sheepish grin, her own fingers buried in her hair, tugging habitually at the roots.
“Don’t thank me until you’ve had some.”
They ate in silence. As in a lake swept by a heady wind, distorting their reflection with line after line of movement, Anthy watched Utena from the corner of her vision. They were, the two of them, she thought, deceptively slight. But though they were strong and, on occasion, brash—hard, even, though less often, now—Utena’s hands were kind.
She imagined herself beneath those hands, obediently slack. Gratitude rising like a sun in her chest, bursting up her throat and out between her lips, rays of light boring their paths out from her skull, shooting into the world. A night sky racing after, unfurling at midday to eclipse itself. The universe hurtling outwards from her body, her eyes blowing open to accommodate it, until, with a terrifying rush of air, it snapped back into place and left her trembling, uncertain whether or not her skin could contain her in her entirety, so placid was the glistening clarity of an aftermath.
“Anthy?”
Her own movement had ceased. The chopsticks posed mid-flight above her bowl. She raised her eyes.
There, no more than two arm-lengths away across the chipped lacquer, Utena regarded her. Something lifted from that gaze on contact, opening reflexively into such unguarded tenderness, sharp with concern, that it pierced clean through her lungs, and sent her breath rushing from its cage. “Want me to wash your hair for you tonight? Seeing as you’re cutting mine tomorrow.”
She wanted to run. She wanted to weep. She dipped her chopsticks into the broth.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Thank you. That would be nice.”