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When Sae opens the door of her apartment to find a naked girl in their shared living room, her immediate reaction is not to scream and reach for the baseball bat she keeps in the genkan. It’s also not to assume that Rin has a girlfriend—that would be crazy. Instead, it’s just a feeling of wary confusion.
(Okay, if Sae was being honest with herself, her reaction was actually DEAR GOD, HER TITS. Then surprise, then wary confusion. But Sae is well-versed in the art of repression.)
“Wow,” the girl says while Sae is still recovering. She grabs a gaudy, bedazzled shirt from the pile of clothes on the couch and pulls it over her head, nice and leisurely. The shirt is tight and squeezes her boobs as she yanks it over them. No bra, so her piercings and nipples still show through it. Cropped, so her tan abs are on display. “Your eyelashes are just as crazy as his.”
The girl is still pantsless, but Sae wrenches her gaze upwards with an iron will. She’s one to talk—her eyelashes are starkly blonde against her eyeliner, so long and fanned they look fake. But never mind that. “Who the hell are you?”
“Wow, you’re just as rude as him, too.” A smile forms on her lips as she pulls on her bottoms. Sae refuses to look, but there’s a flash of flimsy hot pink that gets covered up by something else. “I’m Shidou Ryuusei! And you must be onee-chan-sama, right?”
The title stings. Rin hasn’t called her nee-chan in a year now.
“Sae,” she corrects.
Rin makes his entrance then, towel hanging low on his hips, soaked hair dripping onto his naked torso. Sae has an iron will. She looks away as quickly as she looked. “You’re still here?” he says, snappish and irritated the way he always is these days.
“Jeez, such a gentleman,” Shidou says with a giggle, grabbing her bag. It jangles like a windchime from all the keychains and buttons stuck to it. “See you later, Rin-Rin.”
Rin goes stiff in Sae’s peripheral vision. “Don’t call me that.”
“Nice meeting you, Sae-onee-chan,” she says with a wink.
That was the first time Sae saw Shidou Ryuusei with her abs and big boobs and nipple piercings poking through her shirt at their apartment, but it would be far from the last. It becomes a regular thing for Sae to come home right as Shidou is leaving.
“We’re partners for an assignment,” Rin says when Sae asks about her, his eyebrows scrunching in irritation—whether directed at Sae or at the thought of Shidou, Sae isn’t sure.
She doesn’t bring up the whole nudity thing from that first time. If she’d walked in on the aftermath of… something, then she doesn’t want to know. It’s better if she doesn’t know, and she can pretend that Rin’s never given himself over to anyone.
Sae is late today. She’d let Aiku drag her to the campus cafeteria for dinner after class, and then had been stuck listening to stupid Sendou talk about her terrible boyfriend. And after bitching about him for a whole half hour, she’d acted affronted when Sae told her plainly to break up with him. Now she’s tired and irritated and she has to submit an anatomy quiz online before midnight.
So, suffice it to say, when she opens the door and catches Rin lying flat on the ground and Shidou sprawled over top of him and giggling, her reaction isn’t the best.
“Seriously? In the living room?” she snaps.
Rin doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. He just glares at her, like she’d said something unreasonable. Meanwhile, Shidou is just grinning, unrepentant. She doesn’t move until Rin pushes her off.
“As if you weren’t going to lock yourself in your room anyway,” Rin says.
Sae was. But how would he know how much time she spends locked in her room? He’s always locked in his room, too. “Clean up your mess,” she says, jerking her head at the art supplies scattered about the room. Like a nagging parent. She waits until she’s safely down the hallway before cringing at herself.
At one point, they were both going to be artists.
For a lot of personal reasons that are none of Rin’s business, in her second year of university, Sae switched to pre-med instead. She never wanted Rin to stop pursuing art, and he hasn’t, but he took her decision really hard. They’d fought, for the first time ever. He was talking crazy, and she’d gotten really scared, thinking that he was going to throw away his brilliant future just because of her change of heart. So she got mean. Tried to ruin whatever dream version of her he’d gotten so attached to.
It worked.
It didn’t stop him from coming here to their dream uni, but the art programs here have always been amazing. It didn’t stop him from moving in with her, but that’s probably just so he doesn’t have to talk to their parents about paying for another place.
Sae is selfish, though. She’s glad he’s close, even if he barely speaks to her. Even if it makes her heart ache.
Even if it means she has to watch him befriend and fall in love with some gorgeous gyaru from his art program.
So Sae tries not to notice the dreamy expressions on Shidou’s face when she leaves their apartment, or the way Rin has started wearing nail polish and earrings. She tries not to notice how good they look next to each other, all pretty contrasts and arms so well-defined that Sae can practice reciting all the muscles’ origins and insertions just by watching them flex under their skin. She tries not to notice the way Shidou can make Rin raise his voice, lively and affronted, all while she laughs brightly at him.
This is what she wanted, right? For Rin to find a life outside of her?
“Oh, Sae-chan!”
Sae starts packing her bag faster.
It doesn’t matter. Shidou slaps her hands down on Sae’s table in excitement. Her acrylics are pink and sharp, except for the middle and ring fingers of her right hand, which are short and round. Sae has an iron will. She does not think about those fingers going inside her.
“Fancy meeting you here!”
“It’s the campus cafeteria,” Sae says flatly, standing up from her chair. She doesn’t want to see Shidou any more than she already has to.
“Well, I never see you outside of your place, and Rin is so weird about you!” Shidou’s wearing her hair in twintails today. The pink ends swish as she skips to catch up with Sae. “It pisses me off that he’s gatekeeping a pretty little thing like you.”
Sae’s not so easy as to blush at a line like that, but it does make her glance at Shidou’s smirking face. Sae wonders what flavor her lip gloss is. “I have to get to a lecture,” she says.
Shidou pouts those glossy lips at her. “Right now?”
“Yes.” They push through the cafeteria doors and out into the cold air. Sae shivers at the sudden change. It was warmer during her earlier classes, and she didn’t pack a jacket.
Shidou shoves a black bundle of cloth into her arms. “Don’t catch a cold!”
Sae starts to protest, but Shidou is already waving and heading off in the opposite direction of Sae. She wants to stubbornly refuse this girl’s help, but Shidou’s already gone, disappeared around a corner, so… Sae shakes out the bundle—it’s a hoodie with spiky romaji printed on the front. Some metal band’s merch, maybe? She pulls it on. It smells sweet and a little citrusy.
She’s cozy and warm for the rest of the day.
When she gets home, Rin is sitting on the couch, alone, his sketchbook in hand. Sae is busy taking off her shoes in the genkan when he makes a strangled little sound.
“What?”
He looks pained. “Why are you wearing that?”
Sae fidgets with the sleeves. “Shidou-chan let me borrow it.”
“I forgot I let her wear it in class,” Rin mutters.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s mine.”
A roiling, conflicted emotion forms in Sae’s stomach. Delight to be wearing Rin’s hoodie. Despair that he’d actually lent it to Shidou. Shame that she’d enjoyed the fantasy of Shidou giving it to her. “Oh.” She reaches for the hem. “You can have it back.”
“No!” Rin blurts out. The outburst makes them both jump. Rin swallows. “You look…” He looks away, glaring at the wall. “Just keep it.”
Sae waits a moment, but he doesn’t meet her eyes again. “Okay,” she says, even more conflicted than before, but she wears the hoodie to bed that night, burying her face in it and breathing in sugary citrus. She dreams about pale skin and dark hair, dark skin and pale hair, two pairs of bright eyes framed by long, fluttering lashes.
She wears it as she makes her morning tea. Maybe because of the sleepy, soft surprise on Rin’s face when he catches her in the kitchen, Sae decides to do her schoolwork in the living room today. She brings her textbooks and laptop to the couch before Rin’s done making his coffee. When he settles down on the opposite side of the couch with his own pile of textbooks and his drawing tablet, she tries not to look too pleased.
It’s not like Sae and Rin go back to normal, or anything, but the apartment stops feeling so oppressively moody and miserable. Instead, there’s a tentative truce between them. Neither of them really asks about each other’s schoolwork—that’s still too sensitive of a topic—but they study their separate subjects together on the couch. Shidou starts coming over more and more, and Sae doesn’t lock herself in her room. She can accept reality. And besides, her fondness for Shidou and how much she can rile up Rin has only grown.
Never mind that her fondness for Shidou might have grown way bigger than it should. Sae doesn’t think about that.
She also refuses to return Rin’s hoodie. It’s a nice, cozy hoodie, that’s all.
Too cozy for right now, maybe. Sae sets her notebook and highlighter down and regretfully slips Rin’s hoodie off.
Shidou whistles obnoxiously from her spot on the floor.
“Stop flirting with my sister,” Rin mutters, erasing something in his sketchbook.
“Please,” Sae says. She picks up her notebook again. “We all know Shidou-chan loves you, Rin.”
Heavy silence descends upon the room. Warily, Sae looks up. Shidou and Rin are both staring at her in shock.
“Oh, come on. Did you think you were being secretive?”
“Secretive about what?” Rin asks.
Sae snaps her notebook shut. “About the way the two of you are obviously dating!”
Shidou collapses backward onto the floor, laughing hysterically. Rin drops his pencil, mouth agape. “We are not dating!”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“We’re not!” Rin looks horrified.
“What about when I came home and she was on top of you?”
Rin flushes, as if he only just now understands what that looked like. How oblivious is he? “She’s a black belt. We were arguing and she pulled some move on me and flipped me onto the ground—she’s crazy!”
“Ohmygod, I can’t breathe,” Shidou sobs from the ground.
“Then why was she naked in our apartment the first time I met her?!”
“You were what?”
Between laughs, Shidou gasps out, “That time I used the shower! Sae-chan caught me before I got dressed!”
“We ended up covered in paint that day,” Rin says despairingly. “She rides the train home, so she showered off here first. I didn’t know she was walking around naked afterward.”
“I like to air dry,” Shidou giggles.
“I hate you.”
“So you two aren’t…?”
“No!” Rin says right as Shidou says, “We did make out at a party once.”
Sae levels Rin with a look.
“She makes out with people all the time,” he rushes to explain. “It didn’t mean anything!”
“It meant something to me,” Shidou says sweetly.
Rin shuts up, startled, and stares at her.
“And I was flirting with you,” Shidou tells Sae next, fluttering those long blonde lashes at her.
Sae scrunches her eyebrows in confusion, but Shidou isn’t done.
“And why do you wear his hoodie every day? Why do you have a sketchbook full of nothing but sketches of her?”
Rin turns bright red. “I—”
“Really?”
“Oh my God, Rin-Rin, just show her the sketchbook.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Rin hisses.
“It’s that red one,” Shidou says, pointing to a small one in the stack next to Rin.
On a whim, Sae lunges across the couch.
Her and Rin wrestle for the sketchbook, panic on his face, but when Shidou joins the fray and puts him in a headlock, Sae manages to wrench it out of his grasp. Rin freezes as she opens it.
Shidou wasn’t lying. It’s full of nothing but her: Figure drawings of her doing yoga; stylized doodles of her pouting and glaring; toward the back, endless detailed sketches of her studying and reading, clearly drawn from live reference; vague, soft, scribbly impressions of her smiling, clearly from memory and imagination. Sae can’t remember the last time she smiled, let alone in front of Rin.
“You don’t hate me?” she asks, voice small.
Rin’s expression cycles through several emotions before settling on a frown. Shidou releases him and he slumps, all the fight gone. “That’s my line.”
Sae’s heart upends inside her chest, spilling all the love she’s been keeping locked away. She throws her arms around him. “I could never hate you.”
“Nee-chan…” After a moment of hesitation, his arms pull her in close, hugging her tight. She’s practically in his lap, now. Shidou awwws at them.
When Sae pulls back to look at him, Rin surges forward and kisses her soft and sweet on the mouth. Shidou cheers. Sae squeezes her eyes shut and tries to kiss back with all the tenderness overflowing inside her.
When she opens her eyes again, she doesn’t wake up alone in bed. This dream is real. All she sees are Rin’s eyes fluttering open too, full of wonder and happiness—and then a tan hand shoving his blushing face away.
“Okay, move! It’s my turn!”
“I hate you so much,” Rin grumbles, but he lets himself be pushed down into the corner of the couch.
Shidou doesn’t kiss gently or sweetly, just grabs her face and smooches her hard. Her enthusiasm sparks through Sae like an electric shock. She pulls Shidou further in by the waist, hyperaware of Rin’s hands resting on her thighs.
Shidou’s tongue is in her mouth when Rin finally makes a growly noise of protest.
“Jealous?” Shidou teases.
“Yes!”
Shidou dips down to kiss him next, leaving Sae to catch her breath and feel annoyed at how cramped the couch is when they’re all in a pile.
“Let’s move to a bed,” Sae decides, climbing to her feet and heading for her room. It’s cute how quickly they pry their mouths apart and scramble to follow her.
Sae has barely settled on the edge of the bed before Rin is shoving her down and crawling over top of her. While they kiss, they pull Shidou onto the bed, too, and everything devolves into a tangle of limbs and kisses and Shidou’s giggles. In an hour, Sae will remember that she has organic chemistry homework due, and she will kick her whiny, needy, half-undressed partners out of her room to study, but for now…
For now, Shidou slips a welcome hand up her shirt, and Sae smiles against Rin’s mouth.