Better Than Wine (6)
A plan of operations is a thing discarded five minutes after the battle begins.
Whose words had those been? Ninomae Hitomi worried at the question for a moment, then gave it up. She had no attention to spare for anything so useless.
Why on earth am I just sitting here like this...?!
She sat on the living-room sofa with the television on and tore at her hair. Strictly speaking, nothing on the screen was getting through to her at all. Her eyes were aimed at it, and that was the most that could be said.
There had been a plan. Finish a pleasant date, eat through dinner, come home, and then—lightly, invitingly—tempt Han Seoyeon, and cross that last line with her. The trouble was that the part called tempt her had never actually been planned. She had only thought, vaguely, that she ought to sweet-talk Seoyeon into it, and the details were entirely blank.
She got home, had no idea what to do with herself, and dithered, and before she knew it the tub was full and Seoyeon had already gone in to wash. It was not that she had made no attempt at seduction. She simply had not been able to throw her shame away completely, and that was what undid her. She could not make her intentions plain; the words only hemmed and hawed. Even when some of them got through, the furthest the touch that came back ever went was a kiss. If she had pushed in those moments and demanded more, it might have come to something—but every time, she grew so glad she broke into a foolish grin and let the chance slip past.
"I think some of the blame belongs to Shion-san, too, for keeping my heart from settling no matter how many times we kiss! Mm... right?!"
No. This is entirely your own fault. The familiar watching at her side swallowed the words back down.
"Here."
In their place, it decided to hand her something she looked as though she might need.
"This is...?"
"A potion of courage."
"No. That's alcohol."
"A potion of courage."
"......"
Hitomi looked from the beer can she had been given to the face of the familiar in human form, and back again. Because the other had two pairs of eyes, a look that said what are you staring at and a look that said you haven't a prayer without this arrived at the same time.
"......Haah."
A long, drawn-out sigh. And before long, the snap of a can opening rang through the living room.
"...Whew."
She shut off the water and hung the showerhead back in its place. Lukewarm drops slid down her cheek. When she glanced at the fogged mirror, her own figure showed only faintly—so blurred that all she could make out was a bare body with black hair let down.
Well, it hardly mattered. What good was there in inspecting one's own body inch by inch? An extreme narcissist might have an answer. Han Seoyeon, at least, was a woman with no ties to narcissism whatsoever.
She soon lost interest in the mirror and turned her gaze, and the filled tub came into view. Seoyeon had always been content to finish with a shower, but after she began living with Hitomi, who bathed nearly every day, the habit had taken hold of her as well. She gathered her hair up with the tie she had set aside, so it would not soak once she sank into the water—
—bang!
"?!"
She froze exactly as she was.
The bathroom door had flown open without warning, and the cooler air from outside seeped in. Objectively, it was not particularly cold out there; the air within had simply been warmed through. What startled Han Seoyeon, of course, was not that invasion of outside air. It was the other presence that came in with it.
"E-excuse meee!"
"Ninomae...?!"
If someone else walked in while you were washing, surprise was only reasonable. Han Seoyeon was flustered enough that the old form of address slipped back out of her before she could stop it. The one who had burst in was naked besides, pale skin bare, which only deepened the bewilderment. From any angle, she had come in meaning to bathe together.
She was covering herself with a towel, at least... but it did not go past the literal fact of having covered herself. Short of one of those enormous towels sometimes left out at a public bath, wrapping the cloth all the way around Ninomae's body was impossible. The cause was a chest so large it bordered on violence, and no ordinary home owned a towel of that size, so the Hitomi of this moment had merely laid the towel over her breasts and let it hang. The tips were only just hidden, and the length fell so short that lowering one's eyes even a little raised the thought that what lay below might come into view.
"Th-this is... what in the world..."
"I came to wash with you."
Faced with that dizzying sight, Han Seoyeon unconsciously raised an arm and covered her own chest as well. Hitomi, for her part, seemed to know she ought to be ashamed of how she looked, and she avoided Seoyeon's eyes. She had only just stepped into the bathroom, and already her face was red—surely for the same reason.
"Mm. No. That's not it."
A moment later, though, she met Seoyeon's gaze. She bit her lip as if she might die of the shame, and yet somewhere in her eyes there was a resolute will. Holding the towel in place with one hand, Ninomae Hitomi took a single step closer.
"I came... to pounce on you, Shion-san. To go further."
"......?!"
The words were so blunt that Han Seoyeon's thoughts stopped dead. Hitomi's eyes stared straight at her as she backed away on reflex. Then Hitomi swallowed once, audibly, and began to close the distance in step with that retreat.
A soft tap. The parallel of their steps held only when Han Seoyeon's heel met the tub—when there was nowhere left to withdraw. Hitomi still came several paces nearer and faced her from the front.
"...Have you been drinking?"
"A little."
At the smell of alcohol that reached her at last, Seoyeon asked it quietly. Perhaps she was trying, somehow, to turn the subject. Or perhaps she wanted to hear, for certain, that the Hitomi doing this was not sober.
"I only drank one can of beer."
Hitomi agreed at once. It was not, however, the answer Han Seoyeon had been expecting inside.
Hitomi hardly drank, and Seoyeon had never once seen her do it. She did know the rough measure of her tolerance, from Hitomi's own mouth. A subjective estimate had to be allowed for, of course... Even granting that, Seoyeon's judgment was that this was not a person who would be dead drunk on a single can of beer. The Hitomi before her, in other words, was as near to sober as made no difference. Tipsy at the very most, and only slightly. In truth, and with every likelihood, the whole of the effect was the small comfort of telling herself that she had been drinking, that she was not entirely herself, and that if she gave her body over to impulse it could not be helped.
Put another way, this approach was entirely Ninomae Hitomi's own will. The fact seemed to leave Han Seoyeon all the more at a loss.
Hitomi looked up into Seoyeon's face, half the spirit gone out of it.
"Shion-san... do you not want to do that with me?"
"Ah—no... It is not that I do not, but......"
As if she had known that answer would come, Hitomi smiled, small. She already knew perfectly well that Han Seoyeon sometimes looked at her with heat in her eyes, so the question now was a kind of self-satisfaction, or nothing more than a formality of confirmation.
Softly, the cloth gave way. The moment she let go of the towel it slid down over her chest and dropped to the floor, and Hitomi's naked body was laid completely bare. She drew one deep breath, pulled Seoyeon's shoulders into her arms, rose onto her toes, and went for a kiss—
"......Shion-san?"
"A moment. One moment, please, Ninomae. Something like this... is not proper."
But in that instant Han Seoyeon caught Ninomae's shoulders and stopped her. Holding her down—no, pushing her away—Seoyeon held her off.
A refusal in all but name. Hitomi's eyes went wide, as though she had never expected a reaction of that kind.
"Why...?"
"......"
There was affection between them, and desire. Their hearts matched. Then what, exactly, was the problem? Perhaps because the courage she had finally gathered was being refused, Hitomi's shoulders flinched. There was no resentment in her. A little discontent was not entirely absent, but even that melted away the moment she looked Seoyeon in the face.
"...What is it that frightens you so?"
The voice that left her mouth was gentle enough to startle even her.
There was no chance Han Seoyeon would refuse Ninomae Hitomi. Even if she had not been a woman who loved women, she was the sort who would have given herself over had Hitomi asked for her body. So it was easy to guess what Seoyeon found so hard to accept. It was the reverse. What she rejected so fiercely was the prospect of wanting Hitomi's body herself.
No. More precisely than that...
I have no right to dare. Seoyeon's eyes seemed to say exactly that.
"...I am not a clean person."
Which was to say she could not presume to take her in her arms. From Han Seoyeon's opened mouth a faintly trembling voice then spilled, and she looked so frail it was difficult to connect her to her usual self. She murmured that she must not cross any line beyond this. It was not as though the thought failed to arise—that this was a strange thing to say only now, after all the ways they had already touched. But a line was a different thing for every person.
"A sinner whose very soul is caked in filth... I am that sort of person."
A first impression of Han Seoyeon came, in most cases, with extreme fear. Her eyes were severe to begin with, and yet even when one looked her over slowly and had to grant that she was, without question, beautiful, the reaction was often the same. The cause lay less in the chilling looks themselves than in a realm more spiritual and instinctive. It was close to the survival instinct a beast feels with its natural predator before its eyes.
To put it another way, the woman called Han Seoyeon was a being this world had acknowledged as humanity's natural enemy.
"Those I have killed with my own hands alone number in the thousands. If one counts the deaths I have contributed to indirectly, the figure would likely pass a hundred million."
The will to soil her hands without limit, and to slake her throat on sin. A being of whom canon law all but states, halfway to outright, that she is not holy. To become a Holy Knight was, originally, to mean exactly that. And among them, those who took the filthiest of the work upon themselves were given the title of Gravekeeper. Seoyeon was, even among those, a sinner who had taken an extreme number of lives. There had, of course, also been times she forced upon someone a fate worse than death.
"So it will not do. To ask anything further of you would be shameless beyond all..."
"Please be quiet."
But Ninomae Hitomi cut that confession off where it stood. Her eyes held Han Seoyeon, clear, without the slightest waver.
"I'm all right. No—I want you, Shion-san."
"The likes of me could not soil you, Ninomae, to that extent..."
"And who decided to treat me like a saint?"
"...I apologize."
A cat soaked through, drawn in on itself as small as it could go. Watching her, Hitomi found herself calling up that image, she could not have said why. Han Seoyeon was not a person who was strong at every moment, then. Reaching the thought, she let out a small sigh.
"A body whose soul is so filthy it shows in the air around you... and so it cannot be. That is what you said. I'm sure of it."
She said it, then lifted the corners of her mouth just slightly into a smile.
"Did you know? It was because of all that about your aura that I was able to open my heart to you, Shion-san."
"...Pardon?"
What came from her mouth next was something even Han Seoyeon was hearing for the first time.
"You know how it was. Back then, my whole everyday life was an act. That way, even if people hated me, I could tell myself it was the role getting cursed at—not me, the one playing it."
"That is... yes. Of that much, I am aware."
"And the moment I saw you, Shion-san, the act shattered."
"Why? Because I was scared out of my mind."
Hitomi said it, then laughed softly, as if her past self were absurd.
"I was supposed to be acting, and instead I showed a reaction that was frightened from the heart. For a while, that was how it was. I was in no state to use the excuse that this isn't me."
"Well. That's all it was."
Ninomae Hitomi gave a light shrug.
"Time passed like that, and... yes. The rest is as you know, Shion-san. It was thanks to that filth of yours that I could come to you in earnest."
Looking back, that aura had, for Hitomi herself at least, worked instead as a virtue.
"So please don't decide on your own that it's a flaw, or that it does me harm."
"Even so, it remains true that I have killed so many. Do you understand? Not a matter of one million, or of ten million..."
"So what? Was there anyone among them you killed for your own selfish gain?"
"......"
"There wasn't, was there? I thought there wouldn't be. Because it's you, Shion-san."
She had brought it out hoping to be feared and kept at a distance, but Hitomi only scoffed.
"It would have been your duty as a Holy Knight, or a kind of self-defense, to protect yourself and the people around you. So what about that is wrong?"
"That is not what I..."
"It is exactly that. No—I wouldn't care even if you had killed them out of selfishness to begin with."
Ninomae Hitomi took one more step. Close enough that their breasts brushed.
"No matter how much wrong you commit, Shion-san, no matter how gravely you sin... I'm all right. Let anyone in this world call it an evil that can never be forgiven. I'll forgive you. I will. Me, if no one else. Me alone."
"...Ninomae."
"Even if every person alive hates you and despises you, and so this world casts you out and heaps anathema down upon you."
Their gazes slowly caught and held.
"Whatever happens, I'm with you, Shion-san. If you're covered in filth, then dirty me the same way, and leave your stains. You've sinned? Then let's fall into hell together."
"......"
"......I..."
Han Seoyeon still seemed to be holding some fear. Her lips parted and closed, again and again, and then she murmured in a voice so small it was difficult to imagine from her usual assured self.
"...Hitomi."
Not Ninomae.
That was enough.
"I love you t—mmph?!"
Ninomae Hitomi sprang at her as if leaping and caught the lover before her in her arms. Riding that momentum, she kissed her. She had come in too fast; their teeth struck, and a sharp little pain lanced through—but even so, she smiled, bright and open. This time she was not pushed away, not even up to the instant their lips met. That fact alone filled her chest to the brim.
"Hmph. We're lovers, and you had the nerve to refuse something like this? You understand now, don't you?"
"...Yes. Then please, enjoy this body to your heart's content."
Only then did Han Seoyeon, as she always did, show that faint and hazy smile.