Chapter 84: Don't You Have a Mom and Dad?
....
It was a small thing, in the end, that changed Enome's mind.
Not a grand gesture. Not a declaration. Just the simple, disorienting experience of being sick and not being alone in it.
She had been ill before — plenty of times, over the years. She knew exactly how it went. She would notice the first signs, say nothing to Eshune, wait until her daughter left for school, and then make the quiet, solitary trip to the clinic. Buy the medicine. Come home. Manage it herself. Put on a normal face when Eshune came back in the afternoon, because there was no point in making her worry about something that would pass on its own.
That was just how it was. That was what taking care of things yourself looked like, when there was no one to take care of them for you.
But Kihara had been there. And she had not had to pretend, or manage, or hold anything together. She had simply been unwell, and he had been present, and she had — for the first time in longer than she could precisely calculate — felt the specific, bone-deep relief of being someone's concern rather than her own.
It reached somewhere she hadn't realized had gone cold.
I could use a shoulder like that, she thought, with a clarity that surprised her. I could use a husband like that.
He had his complications — she wasn't under any illusions about his situation, or the number of people in it. But complications were not the same as dealbreakers. And outside of that, she was genuinely struggling to locate a single thing about him she didn't like.
Something moved in Kihara's expression — brief, warm, rapidly reined in. "Miss Enome. Right now what matters is that you rest. Everything else can wait until you're better."
"Wait — don't go—"
"I'm not going anywhere." He pulled the stool over and sat down beside the bed.
She relaxed back against the pillow.
After a moment, she became aware of something uncomfortable. The fever had broken at some point while she was unconscious, which meant the sheets beneath her and the clothes against her skin were both damp and unpleasant in the way that only comes from having sweated through something. She reached up and undid the top two buttons of her shirt.
The remaining buttons held a brief conference and arrived at a collective decision.
They gave way all at once.
She looked up at him, blue eyes soft with something that was partly fever and partly something else entirely. "Everything's damp. Could you... help me wipe down?"
He hesitated for exactly one beat. Then he nodded, stood, locked the ward door, and came back with a basin of warm water and a towel.
He helped her sit up — she was still weak enough that her body felt like it belonged to someone else — and eased her out of the guild uniform's red vest. Beneath it, her white shirt had gone translucent in patches from the sweat, and through the damp fabric he could make out the pale pink of her undergarment, fastened at the back.
Back clasp. He noted this, shifted his left hand to her shoulder for support, and worked his right index finger under the hem of the shirt to locate the clasp — found it, pressed thumb and middle finger against the fastening, and released it with a quiet click.
"You're very practiced at that," Enome observed. "I imagine your fiancées and girlfriends have benefited from that particular skill set."
"Would you prefer I make you do it yourself?"
"Hmph."
He almost smiled. The small sound she'd made — that faint, slightly sulky note that had no business being adorable on a grown woman — was not something he'd heard from her before. Illness, apparently, had peeled back a layer or two of her usual composure.
He turned to wring out the towel, and when he turned back, she had slipped out of both the shirt and the loosened undergarment entirely.
He went very still for a moment.
The line of her back was —
He breathed.
"Miss Enome," he said, keeping his voice level with an effort he chose not to quantify, "this is quite a significant test of my character."
"You came charging into our lives when you already had other commitments." There was a faint thread of mischief in her weakened voice. "Consider it a proportionate consequence."
"If this is what the consequence looks like, I'll accept it without complaint."
He laid the warm towel across her back and began to work carefully, moving in slow, deliberate strokes — the way you'd handle something valuable and fragile, something you didn't want to rush.
"Mm..."
"Too hot?"
"No. I just... no one's done this for me before. I'm not used to it."
"Then get used to it," he said, mildly.
She could feel his hand through the towel — the shape of his palm, the specific weight of it, the unhurried care in each pass. Her mind, unhelpfully, filled in the rest — what his expression probably looked like right now, the particular focused attention she'd seen him give to things that mattered to him.
Something sweet and insistent began to grow in her chest.
He was being so careful. So deliberate about the boundaries of what he was doing. Which made the occasional, inevitably unavoidable moments when the towel shifted and the warmth of his touch reached just slightly further — less like accident and more like a question she hadn't decided how to answer yet.
She was aware, distantly, of a small internal argument taking place.
One voice: He's here out of genuine care. You are a grown woman with a fever and absolutely no business letting your thoughts go anywhere near where they're currently going.
Another voice: You've been alone for years. He's already told you what he wants. The door is right there.
Neither voice was winning.
She made her own decision.
She turned.
The movement caught him off guard enough that when she pressed forward he didn't have anywhere to go — and then she was leaning over him, one hand braced on either side of him on the narrow hospital bed, close enough that the warmth between them had nowhere to dissipate.
"From now on," she said softly, looking down at him with an expression that had made its choice, "I'll be in your care. Darling."
In the shadow-space that existed just adjacent to the visible room, Shinobu had her donut in one hand and her cola in the other and was watching this development with the composed appreciation of a connoisseur at a gallery.
She had no intention of interrupting.
The lock, which Kihara had engaged from inside, turned out to be negotiable — a cheerful voice from the hallway announced that as a nurse she had master keys to every ward, and the mechanism clicked open with a small, bright sound that neither of the room's occupants registered.
The door opened.
Eshune and Hitamuki, arriving first, stopped in the doorway.
Tokishikko and Maidena, arriving behind them, found their path blocked. "What are you standing there for — move, we want to see how she's — "
They pushed through.
They saw.
Maidena's eyes rolled back. She went over.
The small oni nurse — who had, evidently, seen things in the course of her duties that had honed her reflexes considerably — caught Maidena before she connected with the floor.
Hanabata, behind everyone, assessed the scene, stepped back into the hallway, took hold of the ward door, and closed it. Firmly. The lock engaged with a sound like a full stop at the end of a very long sentence.
The noise reached the two people on the bed.
Enome's arms locked. Her neck rotated toward the door with the mechanical precision of a system operating on emergency protocols. When she found her voice, it had the quality of a recording played at the wrong speed: "That's not — I wasn't — we were just—"
Eshune was covering the lower half of her face with one hand. Her eyes, above it, contained approximately seventeen different varieties of knowing. She looked at her mother. She looked at Kihara, who was currently underneath her mother. She looked back at her mother.
"So," she said. "Mom was planning to give me a little sister." A thoughtful pause. "Actually, I'd like two, if that's on the table."
Maidena, who had just been restored to consciousness via the nurse's very practiced application of pressure to her philtrum, came back to the world, took one look at the situation, leaped to her feet, and pointed.
"IMPURE!!"
"I was being affectionate with my wife."
Kihara's tone was the tone of a man stating a simple and uncontroversial fact. "Don't you have parents? Did they not like each other?"
The theological counterattack landed with precision.
Maidena opened her mouth. Closed it. Searched the accumulated doctrine of the Finizask faith for any clause, sub-clause, or marginal annotation specifically prohibiting spousal affection.
She found nothing.
She stood there, mouth opening and closing, the picture of someone whose argument had dissolved under them.
Eshune, meanwhile, had stopped pretending to be composed. She was bouncing in place, both fists in the air, the way she did when something went exactly right:
"I HAVE A DAD!!"
Enome, still braced over Kihara with her hair falling around both of them in a golden curtain, turned a color that had no name in any standard vocabulary.
From the shadow-space, Shinobu raised her cola in a quiet toast.
About time, she thought.
....
Thank you for reading.