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“My intentions?” Utage repeats.
Keito levels her with an unimpressed look. “That’s what I said.”
Haven’t I made those clear, she thinks through the low hum of building utilities, but—has she? Hasn’t she?
She’s said it more than enough times: to Keito, to Tamon, to herself again and again and ad nauseam: Utage is Tamon’s house-cleaner. Nothing more—nothing less, but mostly nothing more. That’s what she wants to be, that’s what she doesn’t want to be, that’s what she will be, and nothing else matters. Those are her intentions.
But here she still is in Keito’s apartment (Tamon’s group’s leader’s apartment) (close to Tamon’s apartment but still not a place she can visit on accident) (Tamon’s friend’s apartment) sitting at Keito’s kitchen table in the summer heat. (Keito isn’t running the air conditioning.) The lazy, lugging fan. Thick, humid air.
She can see:
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BE FRUGAL thumb-tacked to the wall
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A grocery list by the empty counter
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a list of DO and DO NOT in bold and underlined, stuck to the fridge door
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DO NOT: OPEN THE FRIDGE FOR MORE THAN TEN SECONDS
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DO NOT: RUN THE WATER WHILE AWAY FROM THE SINK
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DO NOT: LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN
- DO NOT: OPEN THE STORM WINDOW
Intellectually, she now knows he likes her.
If Keito didn’t like her, Utage wouldn’t be here to stare at his dos and DO-NOTs. Utage wouldn’t be looking away from him. Keito wouldn’t be looking at her like that.
He’s the largest critic she has outside her head, and outside of implication. Keito says it outright: he doesn’t approve, are you two stupid!? Somehow when he reflects her sentiment, it makes her want to defend herself against her own accusations.
A secret:
Utage wants a gentle lover.
She fantasizes sometimes, in a delicate and more dangerous way than she ever could have before she met him, of that Tamon that doesn’t or does exist.
In her head, Tamon reads her stories at night; they’d read all his childhood favorites, and maybe he’d like some of hers. He cooks her breakfast in bed, brushes her hair back, and smiles or maybe smirks. The distinction doesn’t matter. She used to write fan-fiction where he kidnapped her and kept her in his penthouse. That Tamon tells her she’s allowed to exist, the same way she says to him. He’s always been a steady, euphoric lifeline in her life—her reason to live before she met him, the only way she managed to work herself into getting a job. Utage is such a stupid, useless person; she can’t do anything, if it’s not for something she wants fully and completely to do, and there are very few things Utage truly wants to do.
The Tamon that could pretend to exist for her, and therefore truly in fact exist just for her, tells her what she should want and reads her mind as to why she does not want it.
Things she can’t be and can’t say—more importantly, things he can’t do and she can’t ask of him. The image blurs in her head, in the oil of her lashes. Is that still Tamon at all?
“Why do you look like that?” Keito asks abruptly, almost alarmed. He’s still standing at the stove.
Utage doesn’t know the expression on her face.
If Utage could leave admissions at Keito’s feet, it might even almost alleviate her shame. He makes her want to play confessional.
Warm sweat at the back of her neck.
Keito turns the burner dial left; it shifts off with a dull, quiet click. The truth comes without intention: “I don’t know.”
And it’s still so shameful.