High Noon [4]
A year had passed since Seol-ah and I began living together.
Nothing romantic had come of it, of course. I had only spent the time gathering what I could on the True Sun Fruit and drilling my cultivation without rest. What mattered most was this: I had climbed to the furthest extreme of the Transcendent First-Rate realm.
"Hah... I don't think there's anyone whose martial skill rises as steeply as yours."
Seol-ah let out a thin little laugh as she scooped spring water into the gourd ladle I had carved and held it out to me.
"Thanks."
I took it with a deep smile. The water was sweet.
"Is it because you drew it? It tastes good."
"Wh-what are you saying..."
Seol-ah flushed, and she was still cute. No—she only seemed to grow cuter.
Unable to hold the impulse back, I stroked her hair.
"Mmm..."
A smile rose at the corner of her mouth, and her whole face went slack with a drowsy contentment.
I chuckled at the sight.
"Want to go in and sleep ahead of me? I'll go find us something to eat for a while."
We used to go down to the village to buy food, or eat there and come back, but hunting it myself was faster, so this had become the way of things. She had to know that perfectly well, and still her shoulders sank and her lips pushed into a pout.
"Hmph. You know I can't sleep if you aren't here."
"...You slept just fine on your own before you met me. Why do you keep this up? Keep it up, and the moment I'm not beside you you'll be awake all night."
"We'll just stay stuck together, so it's fine! We're going to live together our whole lives anyway!"
She wasn't wrong, but something in the phrasing sat strangely.
"...Yeah, well. So long as you don't push me away, I'll keep being here."
"You think I'd push you away? I never would!"
"I wonder. Once you find someone you like, you'll have to get married too..."
"I am going to get married, though?"
She said it with a playful smile lingering on her face.
"...You said the two of us would live together."
Looking at her, I spoke before I knew it, stung. Was this what a father felt, sending his daughter off to be married? ...It seemed a little different from that.
"Right. The two of us have to live together. For life."
"...? But you just said you're getting married."
I stared at her, blank, while she laughed.
"Hehe. Dummy."
"...? Out of nowhere?"
The truth was, Seol-ah did this from time to time. She would do something I couldn't understand and wear a look I couldn't read.
"Anyway, nothing like that is going to happen, so don't worry!"
"...Well. All right."
In the end I surrendered to how cute she was and let myself be half-convinced. The further this went, the weaker I seemed to get, and only with Seol-ah. I really needed to think of some kind of countermeasure, and soon.
"Then I'll be back quickly."
"Come back safe. You are absolutely not allowed to get hurt!"
"Have you forgotten what realm I'm at?"
"Even so..."
She blew her cheeks full and grumbled through a pout. She was honestly too cute.
I pressed both her cheeks between my hands until the air went out of them, then added, chuckling, "And I don't die easily. I have to live with you."
"...Hup."
The moment she heard me, Seol-ah sucked in a sharp breath and color flooded her face.
"So don't worry."
"O-okay, ehehe..."
She ducked her head and answered with a crooked little grin. I didn't know why she was acting like that, but she was cute regardless.
"Heh. I'll be back as fast as I can."
I stroked her hair once more, then unfolded a lightness art several times faster than before and slipped into the forest.
Less than ten minutes later I was back at the hut with a few wild boars and a handful of fruit. I set it all down in the storehouse I had built apart from the house, then stepped inside.
I ought to have washed. But if I came back and she didn't see my face even once, our Seol-ah would sulk.
"I'm home."
"Waah! You're back?"
At the sound of my voice she came running, nearly a cheer. What was she, a puppy?
The problem was that she had meant to throw her arms around me.
"Hey, hey. Don't hug me."
I said it while backing away.
"...Why?"
Her face went cold at once. Was not hugging her on the spot really something to sulk over?
"I haven't washed yet."
"Oh, perfect. I haven't washed either. Let's wash together!"
There she went again. For nearly a year now, the girl had been growing steadily stranger.
"...Don't talk nonsense."
"Tch..."
Watching her pout and shoot me a sidelong glare, what I felt was complicated.
She isn't the sort of person to act like this.
...Was she? No. She wasn't. That wasn't merely what I wanted to believe. Right.
But if she wasn't, that was its own problem. It would mean she did this with other people too.
Right. I would use this chance to plant a little proper sense in her. She had been odd lately.
"Even as a joke, asking some man who isn't family to bathe with you isn't right."
She didn't so much as pretend to listen. Cheeks puffed, she answered.
"You're a man who isn't family? ...And that wasn't a joke."
The last of it she said like a whisper, but not so softly that I failed to hear it.
"..."
My face felt strangely hot, but I pressed it down and went on.
"...It's still a problem. You can't trust people that easily. And you're pretty, on top of it. Something terrible will happen."
"I don't do it with anyone but you, so it doesn't matter, does it?"
"No. I'm a man too..."
"I know. That's why I'm saying it."
She wore a playful smile, but her face had ripened red and her eyes were spinning.
"Haa..."
"Ah, um... are you really mad? Sor—"
I pushed her down onto the bedding spread across the floor.
"Kyaa...?!"
She wasn't hurt, was she?
I'm sorry, Seol-ah. If this kept up, something truly serious was going to happen someday.
On the verge of tears inside, I brought my face close to hers where she lay.
"So. What were you going to do if I did this?"
Perhaps because I had never reacted this way before, she looked thoroughly shaken.
"..."
Her face had gone nearly beet-red, her mouth opening and closing without a sound. Her breathing was rougher than usual, and the quick beat of her heart reached my ears.
She wouldn't be able to hear it, but my own heart was racing no less than hers.
An arrhythmia, was it.
When I kept meeting her eyes, she looked away and quietly reddened.
...This isn't how it was supposed to go.
Fluster her, and while she was flustered—while she was still the sort to say she was sorry—give her a warning. That had been the plan.
Somehow the air had turned strange.
When I tried to ease myself up, Seol-ah, still avoiding my eyes, caught hold of my collar.
"..."
"..."
Close enough that our breaths touched. Both of us, faces flushed, looked at each other.
Thump. Thump.
A heartbeat I could not assign to either of us drove into my ears, and the sweet scent of her pricked my nose. Both of us had been breathing hard for a long while already.
I have to hold back...
There was no way Seol-ah liked me. So that reaction had to be nothing but fluster.
A girl more than twenty years younger than me in spirit—how could I do anything to her in the space of her confusion?
I really can't.
All the more because she was precious to me. Hurting her out of my own selfishness was the one thing I must never do.
Even so, reason was steadily going numb.
And what I stared at through half-unfocused eyes, within that numbness, was her lips.
Ripe and pale pink, soft and yielding at a glance, they kept stealing my gaze for no reason I could name. An impulse that would not stop scrambling my head.
...I want to lay my lips over those.
A strange feeling. Before I met Seol-ah, I had never once felt anything like it.
So why. Why, these days, did I want this?
"..."
"..."
In the hazy stillness our silence had made—
thud, thud.
Only the hammering of a heart was far too loud.
Ah. This is the sound of my heart.
Every time it struck, the vessels through my whole body pulsed and heat climbed in me. My heartbeat was so great it had buried the small sound of hers completely.
It seemed the time had come to admit what I felt. The heart I had worked so hard to look away from.
I, toward Seol-ah...
I liked her. As a man likes a woman.
Since when?
....
Probably that night she came to me, when I was closest to breaking.
...Or perhaps I had fallen at a single glance.
From the moment I saw the brightness she carried, a brightness nothing like my own, I must have begun to love her. However great or small that love had grown, of this I was certain.
The moment we first met, I thought Seol-ah resembled the sun. A person like the sun itself, sharing a clear, clean light in which no shadow could be seen—and a person so radiant that someone like me could hardly dare to look at her. That was what I thought.
Then I spent time with her, and learned that even that dazzling sun, the one I had believed forever out of reach, possessed a shadow of its own. That sun became my sun. My sun, lighting a man who had walked nothing but a night road without a single point of light.
Little by little that bright sun rose in my heart, and now it had reached its high noon.
The darkness I had walked existed only for her. I believed that without a doubt.
Mine had been a life in which a very brief day passed and only a deep dark remained. Now I was living a daytime beneath a sun brighter than anything. Even if night came for me from here on, so long as Seol-ah was there, day would come again.
A person can live on a single ray of sunlight. And so life itself is hope.
I felt something like the wall of the Peak Realm giving way, but that was not what mattered now.
I carefully cupped Seol-ah's cheeks in my hands and studied her face. She was pretending her eyes were closed while peeking through them, her lips offered just slightly forward. Her clear white skin had flushed red, and at the corner of her eye a faint tear, its meaning unclear, had gathered. Sweat gleamed on her face, and her silver-white hair clung to her brow.
Ah...
Having confirmed, along with my own heart, the heart of hers that I had also been turning away from, I slowly lowered my head.
And then our lips met.
Seol-ah's lips were warm. Warmer than anything.