This picks up where
Love x ∞ left off in the "other world" Aya was thrown into. What if at that point, Aya returned to her own world, but another copy of her remained in the other world? One answer to such a question, told from Miki's POV.
No
huge plans for this one. A few chapters of exploration. Let's see where this one winds up...
Restart
Chapter 1 I woke up suddenly. My eyes just snapped open and I saw a sight completely different from what I usually saw in the mornings. I was lying beside someone I'd only met two months ago. A girl with long, dark hair and light, creamy skin that most people in the world would only ever see in moisturizer commercials.
Dear god, what did I do??
I panicked and started to hyperventilate as I rolled onto my back and looked at the unfamiliar hotel room ceiling.
I had cheated on my boyfriend, my almost-fiancé, with a famous idol. Willingly. And she was a girl. I had stayed overnight in a hotel where guests of guests were not allowed to do so. And I'd forgotten to call my parents to tell them I wouldn't be home for the night! Somehow, even that last one seemed vitally important to note during my crisis.
My parents. Oh, my poor parents! If they ever discovered what the precious baby of the family was secretly doing behind closed doors, they'd never forgive themselves (or their precious baby). I'd be disowned, ridiculed, shamed, gossiped about, run out of town...
But wait. I was being selfish. What about Aya? Her career would be destroyed. Her life would be even more ruined than mine. I was just some country daughter, but she was nation-wide famous. She wouldn't be able to walk to the store without being stared at or whispered about. Her face would be plastered on all the gossip magazines and the newspapers. Maybe they'd say she'd been seduced by some crazy Hokkaido delinquent whose goal was to tarnish the reputation of her most hated idol.
No, wait another minute. That would hardly seem fair. If anybody had been seduced, it had been me. She was the one who had come here to this town, gotten to know me, kissed me, and then had made me stay overnight after she wouldn't let me get up from her bed. She had led it all. The attack. She knew exactly what it all meant, and she knew exactly what to do with me and how to keep me there all night without a complaint.
Okay, so I had asked for it. I had wanted it.
At the time. I was feeling sad because she was leaving, confused because Hiroshi had proposed, and bewildered about a million other things. But it had to have been a momentary lapse in judgement.
What am I going to do? I thought in desperation.
I blinked. Maybe it had all been a hallucination. But no, she was still there, curled up under the covers and facing away. I couldn't see her face. It was covered by her hair. All I could see was the back of her head. I knew she was asleep because of her breathing. It was slow and steady, hardly making a sound.
What time is it? I wondered.
I looked at the bedside table at the standard hotel-issue alarm clock. It read eight-thirty-eight. Considering her flight time, I did the math and figured out that she'd probably want to be getting up in an hour to get ready to leave.
What was I supposed to do? Stay? Maybe I could sneak out and just let her go back to Tokyo, pretending this had never happened.
That's what I decided to do. I'd leave before she woke up. It would be perfect. Nobody would ever find out. I'd tell my parents I'd stayed at a friend's house, and Aya could go back to Tokyo peacefully without having to exchange any awkward words and excuses with me. We'd never have to meet again.
That's what I would do.
And yet I continued to lie there on my side and stare at the back of her head. I found myself wondering what would happen if I stayed.
If I stayed, I could find out her true reaction. If I stayed, I could ask her all the questions in my head about what it all meant to her and why she did it.
My heart lurched when I thought of Hiroshi. What would he think if he saw me now? Or worse, what would he have thought if he had seen me last night, wrapped in someone else's arms as she said things to me that made me want to forget every point of my comparatively miserable existence until I met her.
What if I didn't really care what he thought?
That struck me as an oddity because I still really loved him. Very much. He was a lot like me. Normal, but with a hidden quirky streak (although he was much weirder). Raised in a small town but yearning to break out of this enclosed life and strive for something more. He'd tried to do that by going to university in Sapporo, but somehow we both knew that he'd wind up coming back here to this rundown town to live.
For a brief moment as I lay there, I wanted nothing more than to marry him. I had to. We were a perfect match.
But the uncertainty came back. If we got married to each other, we wouldn't escape that thing we both hated. We'd be clinging onto each other because it would be the safe thing to do. What we wanted, though, was to reach out and grab a bit of excitement, and we weren't able to provide that for each other.
With Aya, that had changed for me. The minute she came to town, everything changed. The time we spent together was the best I'd ever had. She had piles of things to offer me. She had a way of connecting with me that made me want nothing else. Being with her may not have been safe or secure, but it felt more like living. Maybe Hiroshi would understand that I couldn't marry him. It would be for our own goods.
Just then, Aya stirred and my thoughts came to a halt. Was she going to wake up?
She turned around and settled onto her side so that she was facing me, but her eyes were still closed. She didn't seem ready to wake up. She was teetering on the edge of consciousness, just barely there. Her face looked radiant to me, even in such a state of sleep. It looked like she was smiling.
I grew impatient, and with a bout of self-confidence that flew at me from nowhere, I reached my hand out and tapped her wrist, which was curled in front of her chin.
"Good morning," I whispered.
The first half of my greeting came out nice and strongly, but the confidence slipped out of my grasp in mid-word, and so the second half ended up weak and mumbled.
What was I doing??
Aya's eyelids fluttered open slowly, and I shrank back a bit as she focused on my face.
"Hmmm. Good morning," she purred back with a sleepy smile.
How did she do that? She sounded so at ease. As if this was the most normal thing in the world. It was baffling. I smiled warily at her, and the smile dropped from her face.
"Bombs away!" I heard a little voice in a fighter plane yell as Aya's expression quickly sped from content to something closer to the opposite end of the spectrum.
"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I got a little carried away."
A little? I'd say a lot. She got so carried away that there I was in bed with her the next morning, completely naked, might I add, and I'm sure with not just a few red marks here and there.
I didn't say anything to her because I had no clue what to say. What was I supposed to say? I didn't even know how I felt. How could I get her to try and understand anything in my brain when I couldn't understand it?
She must have mistaken my silence for anger or discomfort.
"But you kind of asked for it," she said, giving me a pointed look.
I certainly
had asked for it after she'd stirred up my curiosity.
"I'm not upset," I said quickly.
I was clear on that much. I wasn't upset. Just confused.
"You look upset," she countered, sounding so sure of herself.
I
wasn't upset. She was wrong. But then it struck me that maybe this was her method of trying to give me a way out. I could leave and it would all be okay. We wouldn't have to talk.
But that would be cowardly. The truth was that I wanted to stay. Stick it out. Figure it all out.
"I'm not," I said firmly. "I just want to ask you a question. What does this mean?"
I had done it. I had asked a good question.
"What does what mean?"
I didn't get annoyed by the question being thrown back at me because I knew she wasn't trying to be difficult and skirt the issue. There were many ways my question could be interpreted.
"Well, do you usually sleep with your friends?" I asked in a blunt and perhaps far too sly tone.
I couldn't help it! The idea of Aya being that type of person was foreign to me.
"No," she said, a look of surprise on her face.
Strangely enough, that was all she said.
"Then tell me why you did it," I demanded, gaining back my confidence.
"Couldn't you tell?" she asked so quietly that I had to strain my ears to hear her.
"Tell what?" I mumbled.
"Couldn't you tell last night why I did that?"
Her eyes pierced me with a look that I had seen the night before just as we had started down that long road that had led us here. It had been erased early on, but now it was back. A lost and needy look that was so out of place on her beautiful face.
I shook my head, and her gaze only intensified in its sadness.
The truth? I knew. Deep down inside, I knew. I saw it in those eyes the night before. Why she had made me - no,
let me - stay over. It was because she needed me. She wanted me. I didn't know how long she'd felt that way, but it was pretty obvious, especially after she'd almost uttered a confession during a very quiet moment we had shared.
She really almost had. We were lying facing each other. I was looking at her, and she had a hand on my shoulder, running her thumb lightly over my skin. A look came over her face and she took a breath to say something, but she never said it. She resigned herself to letting it go, and then distracted me from asking any questions (such as "what were you going to say?") by casually pushing me away and onto my back.
But that look. I knew that look. I'd seen it before twice. Once was when Hiroshi had uttered the words "I love you" for the first time. The other time was when Hiroshi had asked me to marry him, which had just been the other day.
The sheer absurdity of the latter being Aya's reason to almost speak, I assumed it was the former.
No, I didn't assume. I knew. There was no doubt that what was in her eyes was love, and I stupidly ignored it, brushing it off as a facial expression brought on by the heat of the moment.
The next morning, though, it was clear.
And what did I feel?
I didn't know. It couldn't be love. Not after two months. But chemistry? Yes, there was a whole lot of that. I couldn't deny it. But I needed to know something first.
"Why do you like me so much? You've only known me for a few months."
She stayed silent, her eyes downcast. I
had to fill up that silence.
"Is there something you want from me?"
I shouldn't have said that, but it just tumbled out of my mouth in a clumsy, unplanned way. Aya looked at me with a glare, under which I withered.
"You think I'm trying to get something from you?" she asked sharply.
In my weakened state, I only shook my head. She huffed out a breath of air.
"I knew this was a mistake. I should have sent you off home before it happened," she snapped self-admonishingly.
What was I? A kid that had to be told when to go home? What a condescending girl.
She started it. I just asked her to continue it, and she most certainly did continue it.
Living with my mother for twenty-five years, however, had forced me to learn how to not explode with anger. (My mom could be a scary woman when aggravated, and I sensed some of that in Aya.)
"I didn't mean it like that," I said evenly, but with a hard tone. "I guess I can't imagine why someone like you would be after someone like me."
I thought what I said was supposed to console her, but it had the opposite effect of making her angrier.
"Will you stop it with that?" she bit back. "Stop saying 'someone like you' as if we're from different worlds. Just because I'm on TV and people know my name, it-"
"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "I never said anything of the sort. I meant a person with a strong heart and mind like yours. I wasn't talking about fame or whatever. I don't give a crap about that."
She looked positively embarrassed for having misinterpreted my words, but she quickly relaxed
"Anyway," I continued. "My first question still stands. Why do you like me so much?"
"I can't explain it well without sounding crazy," she sighed, dropping the last vestiges of her guard. "I just know you and your heart better than you think. You complete something in me."
I couldn't deny that I felt something like that in the air between us. The feeling that together, we made an ultra duo. A perfectly working, well-oiled unit. We were in tune. I wouldn't call if love, but the potential for it was almost smothering.
"Oh," I said softly.
Her eyes flickered up to look at my face and gauge my true reaction. She saw me looking probably a little bewildered and shy.
"Anyway, forget it," she said quickly, rolling up to get out of bed. "It's crazy talk. I have to shower."
She grabbed the top blanket and covered herself to get out of bed, but I grabbed onto the edge because the rest of the sheets were tangled at the foot of the bed. I didn't want to be left lying there, exposed to the cold.
I also did it to entice her to stay for a moment.
She mumbled a distracted apology and reached for the other sheets, but I quickly took her wrist and forced her to lie down again, covering her up with the blanket I'd yanked away from her.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Let's stay here together a bit more," I said with newfound courage. "You don't have to get up this early."
But as usual, the courage left me and must have gone into her, because a look came over her face and she scared my by slithering up to me and planting a big, sleepy kiss on my lips. We'd done more than that the night before, yet it surprised me and froze me up. I thought that despite all our talk this morning, last night would have been it. There would be no continuation. We'd return to what we were before.
Then I thought,
Screw that.
It was us. We weren't computers that terminated programs and started new ones according to system and order. We were human beings with feelings that led us down winding corridors of discovery and excitement.
I wrapped my arms around her and let her climb onto me lazily. Before anything got very serious, however, she lay herself back down beside me, her chin on my shoulder.
I want her to stay, I thought suddenly.
I want her to stay here with me so that I can figure all this out.
She must have seen my look. Read it.
"I'm leaving today, you know?" she reminded me.
Everything inside me deflated. So she wasn't going to stay. I wasn't a good enough excuse to stay. I couldn't believe how much I suddenly wanted her here.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yeah."
I grew curious. She'd come here a few months ago claiming that she used to have family that lived here. She told me about the big project she'd abandoned, and how coming here was her escape.
But why here? Even if she once had had family here, what was the point? They seemed to all be gone. She didn't know anybody around here other than me, my family, and Baachan's family. If she had really wanted to escape, she could have just as easily gone overseas, or at least she could have gone somewhere with a more hospitable climate in the winter.
And why had she suddenly quit that Italy project? It didn't seem all that bad, and she wouldn't have been alone. Her best friend from her Hello! Project days would have joined up with her there along with another former co-worker. Aya avoided talking about it, though, and whenever I brought it up, she'd skilfully change the subject, although not without my noticing it.
"What was your point coming here?" I asked.
Maybe a bit forward, but then again we'd slept with each other the night before, so I assumed I held a bit of a privileged position that would allow me to be so direct.
I pulled away a bit so that I could see her face. She looked down. At first I thought she was just staring at my body and trying to make me feel uncomfortable, but then I realised it was because she was thinking hard.
"I came to find this," she finally answered, looking at my face as she spoke.
"Find what?" I asked, frowning.
"This," she repeated, and she put her arm around my stomach and hugged me to her.
She came to find me? This closeness? What did she mean?
"What do yo-"
She cut me off by putting her face right up to mine.
"Do you want me to leave?" she asked.
Was that a trick question?
"No," I mumbled.
"Do you want to come with me?"
I wondered if I had heard her properly. Come with her? To Tokyo? No. She must have just meant the station. Or the airport. I'd told her the night before that I'd wanted to go to Tokyo with her, but I'd gotten the sense that she hadn't taken me seriously.
I didn't even know if I had been serious.
"The airport?" I asked, pushing her away from me to see her face clearly.
She shook her head.
"Tokyo."
She meant it? Go to Tokyo with her? I wanted to. So desperate was I that I would have jumped up from the bed at that moment and run onto a plane completely nude if it was the only way.
I nodded my head, but then stopped.
"I don't have a job there. I'm in school. My parents-"
She cut me off with one of her special, fiery kisses, leaving me a bit dazed and embarrassed. Did she have to be so... touchy-feely? I was still trying to get used to being naked in front of her, even with a bed sheet covering me.
"Forget it all. Just come with me. We'll find you a job. You can stay with me until then. And we can... we can hang out."
Hang out? She meant do this every night, right?
"And Hiroshi?" I asked.
I saw her cringe as I said his name. I hadn't wanted to bring him up, but I wanted to know what she thought. I'd been going out with him for two years, and I'd been friends with him for even longer - about twelve years. I did have a sense of loyalty and commitment.
"He's not invited," she said, eyeing me carefully.
I looked to the side, staring at a tiny brown mole on her arm.
"Do I just leave him?" I asked her.
And I really did ask her. I wanted her opinion. Her advice. Biased or not.
"You do what you want. If you want to marry him, fine. I'll be going back to Tokyo. You can forget that this happened and I'll never bring it up again. If you want to leave him and come with me, then we'll be in it together."
Why did she want me in her life so badly? How could I have impressed her after two months of friendship? Was I really that great?
"What if you get bored of me?" I asked seriously.
It could happen. The underlying reasons for her coming here could have been to find a distraction from the pressures at work. Maybe she'd wanted to go somewhere that was familiar enough to her (within Japan) but far away enough from Tokyo so that she couldn't be traced as easily. The trip would have been an outlet for her stress. By finding some form of highly different entertainment - in this case, me - and amusing herself for a few months, she could work everything out of her system before going back and restarting her career.
Maybe she was a mind-reader, because she looked at me like I was a rare specimen of amoeba. She laughed, hugging me tightly and kissing my ear in a sloppy and wet way that kind of grossed me out, kind of made me feel mushy.
"You don't get it, do you," she giggled into said ear. "We're meant to be together. It's destined. It's written in the stars. It's not a question of getting bored of you."
"There's no such thing as destiny," I frowned, avoiding the issue for a moment.
She drew herself up and looked down at me again, smiling.
"I knew you'd say that. I just mean that I'm positive I want you to come with me. Last night changed everything."
It certainly had. I hadn't
seriously thought of following Aya to Tokyo until that morning.
So dump Hiroshi. Say goodbye to mom and dad. Let Baachan give someone else a chance to work in that wonderful environment. Drop school."Okay," I said.
"Okay what?" Aya asked.
"I'm coming with you."
Her face broke out into a smile, and she hugged me, putting her forehead against mine.
"See? It's meant to be."
I smiled back.
"But I can't leave this afternoon. I'll need a few days."
I would have to pack, fill out forms to officially drop my classes, talk to my parents, talk to Hiroshi, buy a plane ticket...
"Take your time," she said. "I'll be waiting for you in the capital."
"A few days only. I promise," I said unnecessarily.
In a few days it would be a new year. I wondered if it would be possible to get a flight or a shinkansen ticket on such short notice. Probably not, but I'd try.
"Do you have the money?" Aya asked.
A painful and potentially awkward question. Obviously, my family wasn't rolling in riches, but we were doing all right for ourselves. I did have enough money for a plane ticket and initial daily needs, but not enough to start a new life in a new city, especially a city that was said to be one of most expensive ones in the world. The rent would eat me alive.
I hesitated for too long.
"Just worry about your plane ticket. I'll take care of the rest."
"No," I protested. "I ca-"
"I still owe you for all that cooking at Baachan's"
"That's her place, not mine," I mumbled.
"And you know you're staying with me," she went on, ignoring me. "My bed's big enough for the both of us."
At my look of mortification, she made an exaggerated show of correcting her sentence.
"Oops. I mean my apartment's big enough for two."
Her eyes twinkled wickedly. Living with a beautiful devil child? It could be very fun. But I still had to turn down her offer.
"Aya-chan, I can't impose on you like that. You have a life. A job. You're busy. I'll get in the way. You-"
She put a hand over my mouth, and my words came out muffled and unintelligible.
"If there's anything I want from you," she started, making a pointed reference to my earlier stupid question, "it's for you to be beside me all the time."
I pulled her hand away with both of mine and rested those three hands on my stomach. I gave up.
"Okay."
A simple word and her face broke out into a radiant smile.
"But I'm going to find a job as soon as I land. Or, uh, maybe the next day," I insisted.
"Fine by me. I'll probably be getting fired while you're being hired," she laughed.
With that statement, I remembered that she was going to be in very big trouble when she got home. She had told me she'd probably be out of work, but I wondered what kind of company would be dumb enough to fire such a popular idol. She had come such a long way since her Hello! Project days and was arguably even more stable in her position as a familiar face than she'd ever been before. Unless they planned to deliberately sabotage her reputation so that no other agency would take her, they were better off keeping her.
She stayed like that for five minutes, breathing being the only sound that could be heard.
"I have to call Hiroshi," I said out of the blue.
"What will you say to him?"
"That I'm moving. That I can't marry him."
A deep silence greeted my reply.
"But not break up with him?" Aya asked curiously, betraying no other emotion.
"I'll do that, too," I said quietly.
Did she realise how painful it was for me? Did she really understand what I had with Hiroshi? He was first and foremost a childhood friend, and no matter how mysterious and weird he was, he'd been there with me during the big moments in my life. It was going to be difficult cutting off ties with a part of my history, especially such a safe one.
But Aya had a way of comforting me that nobody else had. Her hand tightened over mine as though she could sense the pain and the struggle in me.
"I'm really glad you're coming with me," she said quietly in a near whisper.
"Me too," I whispered back.
Breaking up with Hiroshi would be easier if I could hold Aya's hand while doing it. Maybe she did offer me some semblance of security after all. I felt like I could do anything if she was around.
When the time came, I helped her pack. We took showers, and I had to borrow more clothes from her. I knew, though, that I would be able to return them soon. I offered to go to the airport with her, but she told me to go home and start working on my parents. I was afraid they'd be hard to convince to let me go. I was the baby. They were used to having me there. My mother would miss having me around to shop together, to cook dinner together, and to have incredible disputes together.
We said goodbye in the hotel room. I would leave a few minutes before her to avoid the front desk's suspicions. Aya could have gotten into trouble for having a guest over against the rules, and walking out together would make it quite obvious she'd broken the rules.
The goodbye was uncomfortable on my part because I wasn't very good at that sort of thing.
"See you in a few days," I said, holding a bag with my still-wet clothes from the previous night's romp in the snow.
"I'll contact you when I land," Aya smiled brightly.
There was an awkward pause.
Were we supposed to hug?
I settled for nothing but a tight smile and a nod. I turned around and put my hand on the doorknob.
"Hey, Miki. Wait," Aya called out, making me stop instantly and turn around expectantly.
She studied me seriously for a moment and then smiled.
"Bye bye," was all she said with a loving look on her face that was starting to become familiar.
I smiled a big, relaxed smile.
"Bye bye."
I waved my hand, turned on my heels, and walked out feeling like a shooting star during its blaze of glory. I went down the elevator and strutted out of that hotel as if nothing were amiss. Nobody at the front desk said a word as I walked by, and I smiled secretly to myself. Maybe I
could make it in Tokyo. If I toughened up, nothing in the capital could take me.
And I knew for certain that if I had Aya there to help me, I'd surely go a long way.