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You make mackerel for breakfast.
It crackles as you lay it in the pan. You watch as the skin starts to sear, and you think of the scorch marks a lightning strike leaves behind.
Suguru is warm next to you, deftly cutting a cucumber into perfect little medallions. The quiet, hollow thud of your sharpest chef’s knife rings in your ears.
(He took it from you with gentle, firm fingers, his big hand wrapping around yours on the handle. The blade flashed in the watery morning light, a quicksilver gleam.
You could feel his dark eyes on you. Idly, you wondered where he was slotting you in his ever-shifting equation.
He swept his thumb over your skin. The touch was soft. Familiar.
You let go of the knife.)
Suguru pauses mid-cut.
“The girls are awake,” he says, just as you feel his curse—swirling slowly around your guest room, a lazy seaweed drift—stutter to a halt.
“Go,” you say. “I'll finish up here.”
He’s broad against your back as he slips by, and you know that if you turned around, he’d curve around you like the sky, vast and unending. His fingertips ghost over the small of your back, leaving little imprints against your skin, even through your shirt. Then the heat of him is gone; you hear him pad down the hallway.
He leaves the knife.
For a moment, you stare at it. It's glinting on the cutting board, wet with cucumber seeds. Your fingers twitch.
You flip the mackerel over.
You’re watching the edges blacken when Suguru reaches past you and turns off the burner. He moves the pan to the side. When he pulls back, he catches your chin in one big hand and makes you face him.
His eyes—night-sky dark and gleaming like starshine—trace over you. He has Nanako balanced on his hip; Mimiko is holding on to his pant leg, her knuckles white. She stares up at you with big eyes. There are bruises scattered over her face like storm clouds, deep and dark.
Your chest hurts, a bone-deep ache, like your ribs are collapsing in on themselves, an eggshell cage.
Suguru’s grip tightens on your chin. He looks you over, his gaze flaying, stripping you down to your marrow, an autopsy cut. You don’t know what he sees in your face, but he sweeps his thumb over your bottom lip, slow and heavy.
When he lets go of you, the breath you were holding spills out of you. You watch silently as he puts Nanako down. He kneels in front of both girls to speak to them, but you don’t hear him, not really. The words are beyond your grasp; there’s only the sound of Suguru’s voice, warm and rich, dripping over you like resin. You think of insects caught in sunlit amber, how perfectly they’re preserved in their final moments.
The girls disappear into the dining area, accompanied by one of Suguru’s more playful curses. It darts around them, hovering nearby and nudging at them when they turn to look back at him.
There’s something in Suguru’s face each time they turn around; a terrible, tender twist of his lips.
You turn back to the stove.
Suguru settles at your side. “I think it’s beyond saving,” he says, watching you poke at the mackerel with a chopstick.
“It’s not.”
The skin crunches, a few bits of char flaking away.
He wraps a hand around your wrist. When you glance at him, his dark eyes pierce through you. “Yes,” he says. “It is.”
He watches you. You bite your lip and nod.
The sound of him emptying the pan into the trash makes you wince. Each scrape of the knife echoes, a whining animal noise that makes your bones ache.
Suguru sets the pan into the sink with a hollow thud.
“I have eggs,” you offer.
“Tamagoyaki?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds good.”
You gather everything you need; Suguru goes back to the cucumbers, the knife singing as it slices through them, its blade slick. You try not to watch, instead staring down into the frothy swirl of eggs.
It’s quiet.
In the distance, you can hear the girls talking to each other softly, their voices barely over a whisper, all shivering leaves. It makes something in your chest go tight, how quiet they are.
“You would have taken them too.”
You go still. You don’t look at Suguru.
“Yes,” you say. “I would have.”
He hums; it sounds pleased. You swallow down the bile.
The two of you don’t speak again.
Breakfast is a quiet affair. The girls stare at you from across the kotatsu, where they’re pressed in against Suguru’s sides like little limpets. They flinch when you move, their honey-brown eyes widening. It makes your stomach roil, a storm-struck sea.
Suguru talks, but you barely hear him. When you have to ask him to repeat himself for the fourth time, he pauses, his dark eyes flickering over you.
He shoos the girls into your living room, sending yet another curse flitting after them, a little darting fish with too many eyes.
“Come here,” he says, and you do.
When you settle next to him, he raises a hand and cups your cheek. You turn into his touch without thinking, your lips pressing against the leylines of his palm. You wonder if his future is written there.
(You think yours might be.)
He examines you for a moment. Suguru has always been able to flay you down to your marrow, but this time, it feels sharper, a slit into the very heart of you.
He strokes a thumb over the apple of your cheek, shifting so that he cradles your jaw. Your lips part; you unfurl for him, petal-bodied. He leans in.
“Don’t,” you murmur.
He pauses.
For a moment, he lingers, his lips almost brushing yours. His breath ghosts hot across your lips; when he breathes in, he takes your air, makes it his own.
“You’re not coming.”
“No,” you whisper. “I’m not.”
His fingers tighten on your jaw. You take in a sharp breath and they loosen again, before his hand falls away entirely.
When you look at him, his face is perfectly blank, a rising new moon fading into the sky. There’s something secret tucked up into the corner of his lips, too faint for you to decipher.
“Suguru—”
He pushes to his feet gracefully. He gazes down at you, still on your knees before him. Like this, he takes up your entire world, his broad form the earth and the sky alike. He gazes down at you, and for a moment, you don’t know him at all.
He steps around you, heading towards the living room.
Something in you cracks open, a wound of your own making. You swallow down the sob.
“I’m sorry,” you say to the empty room.
Only silence answers you.
Suguru leaves.
Mimiko is cradled against his shoulder, her little body furled in tight against him. You think of early spring blooms, still delicate in the aftermath of winter’s harsh touch. Nanako is pressing close to his leg, her hand engulfed in his steady grip. He’s slowed his pace for her.
You watch them until they disappear.
Suguru never looks back.
“Principal Yaga?” you say into the phone. “I need to make a report.”