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Mitsuri is in green. Kyoujurou still isn’t used to seeing her wear so much.
The dress is Western, a light spring-green muslin with a white ribbon that ties just beneath the bust and a skirt that brushes the dainty lace-up boots where they end at her high ankle. There is a parasol, too, same-colored, and more than once Kyoujurou has amused himself plucking it from her hands and twirling it through his fingers like he might have the hilt of his sword if he were ever more inclined. She smiles when he does, and once when he passes it back into her hand he removes the glove from her left hand and palms it into the breast pocket of this dreadful suit coat which is only useful for the places it has to store things with a flick of his wrist and an impish smile.
“I don’t think I like these glove things very much,” he tells her, and he does not have to specify that this is because they discourage his holding her hands.
Mitsuri’s hands are neither small nor delicate but they are both next to Kyoujurou’s, already large and roughened with a lifetime’s training with a sword; he always feels like he’s getting them mussed-up somehow, like he is too indelicate to be entrusted with the gift of a lady’s hand. But this does not stop him from attempting. Mitsuri shifts her parasol to hang from the opposite arm, and this frees her hand to settle in Kyoujurou’s when he extends his own.
“All the ladies overseas are wearing these,” Mitsuri informs him, tipping up her chin. “It’s not considered proper to be seen without them.”
Kyoujurou recalls the way she used to dress when she spent most of her days in uniform and reddens a little, but he has too much tact to point out that she has never seemed over-concerned with that sort of propriety before. That or she would tease him.
Probably she would. She does so like causing mischief when she’s bored.
“Overseas,” he says innocently, and with the pointer finger of his free hand he taps the tip of her nose. “But we’re not overseas now, are we, my love?”
She laughs. “Perhaps not.”
“Hm, that’s what I thought.”
“Which is a pity,” she says, “because if we were, I could kiss you.”
“I wasn’t aware we had a law against doing that at home.”
“Well, in all the Western movies, they kiss all over the place,” Mitsuri says, “and they’ve got to be based off of something.”
“Yes, because the pictures are a perfect representation of-“
“Art imitates life, darling, they always say that.”
And then Mitsuri tips her head back again to look up at Kyoujurou, and he cannot keep from laughing when she smiles self-satisfied up at him; he figures the brim of her straw hat provides at least a little privacy.
“Yes, dear,” he says, and gives her the quickest kiss he can manage. “They do say that.”
Mitsuri’s cheeks flush with pleasure. “My, someone’s feeling bold.”
“Hm, you look lovely.” They are turning a corner onto a wide thoroughfare now, and in the interest of discretion Mitsuri drops his hand and drapes her fingers lightly over his forearm instead. “I thought I might take a few liberties.”
He would never have thought himself the type to do that a few years ago, but then, he would also not have thought himself the type to patronize a dance hall, or go to one of those newfangled yoshoku places and order plate after plate of juicy tonkatsu until the waitstaff began to give him wary looks for his gluttony, or marry his former tsuguko. Life is rather full of surprises that way. And one might as well take a couple of liberties when it is.
“Did you?” Mitsuri asks impishly.
“Green is a good color on you.”
“You said that before,” she says. “Why do you think I wore it?”
His cheeks heat the way they still always do when he realizes a beat too late that something his wife has done which he enjoyed was a deliberate attempt to please him. Still he has not managed to wrap his head around the fact that she would remember his preferences and cater to them on purpose; it seems absurd, a concession he would never expect nor ask of her, and that she feels so inclined without any prompting at all continues to baffle him.
Mitsuri says this means he still doesn’t understand modern romance, whatever that means. He cannot say he does. Up to about two years ago he’d have expected, after all, to be betrothed to a woman from a suitable family without much of his own input in order to produce flame-breathing heirs; modern is a word for steam locomotives and telephones, not marriage. And yet.
“The yoshoku place we like is serving some new thing called a hamburg steak,” Mitsuri informs him, evidently unaware that her husband has still not entirely processed her wearing his favorite color on purpose. “I thought you’d like it.”
“Oh, ah, yes,” he says absently. “I’m sure.”
“It’s supposed to be the new fad. I ran into one of the cooks at the market in Kanda,” Mitsuri tells him, “the last time I went shopping, and he said the fancy folks they get over there are all about it.”
“Are they?”
“Hm, so I’ve heard.” Mitsuri leans cozily into his arm. “You hungry yet?”
“Why, are you?”
“Well, they’re showing Nasanu Naka and a whole bunch of other stuff in” – Mitsuri gently takes his wrist to examine his wristwatch – “fifteen minutes.”
“And then?”
“An hour and fifteen minutes.”
“Hm, that’s not too long.”
“I can’t eat in an hour,” Mitsuri protests. “I’d never be full.”
Well, she does make a point, but mostly he suspects she’s just anxious to get around to the only thing more exciting to her than food.
Very little fascinates Mitsuri like the cinema. Any set of films, Japanese or Western; any narrator; it matters little – Mitsuri, from the day he took her on a tentative hope that she would find it novel enough to be pleased with him, has been hooked. She has that sort of hankering for anything modern or foreign, granted, but nothing so much as the movies, and she rarely seems quite so happy as she does snuggling discreetly into the space beneath his arm when the lights go down. She does the same today.
It is only natural for Kyoujurou, then, to whisk her hat off her head and plant a stout kiss to her mussed hair, and she laughs quietly before she presses her cheek against him.
How strange it is to be this way, a plain old man and women who go to the pictures and lunch afterwards, and who worry mostly about finding subtle ways to ensure that even in public they are always touching, and who will go home and have a nice long bath though their muscles are no longer sore from training and fall asleep warm and content in each other’s arms. He would never have imagined it.
But then, Kyoujurou never has been very prescient. Just last year he’d hardly have expected to last the year, and he can no more know what will await him in the next.
He squeezes Mitsuri’s hip and nuzzles his nose into her hair, fresh with the clean smell of soap, and decides it is perfectly all right not to know, if this is the way things work themselves out when he does.