The Rose of Sharon (4)
The movie ended, and two women came out of the theater.
No one else had been watching that film in this timeslot, so of course it was Ninomae Hitomi and Han Seoyeon.
"Ugh..."
Hitomi, though, had her right hand laid over the nape of her neck, as if to hide it. She walked out beside Seoyeon in that posture, eyes darting this way and that at the theater staff.
From a staff member's point of view, the natural question would have been what on earth was wrong with her. Even knowing that behaving like this would only make her look more suspicious, a person's heart simply doesn't leave them any other choice.
"...Even so, what were you thinking, leaving a mark bad enough to stay?"
"I'm sorry..."
Only after they had left the theater and stepped onto the dark street did Hitomi carefully take her hand from her neck. A red mark remained where it had been. This was no mere flush of heated skin; a bruise lingered there with a faint bluish cast. It was what people call a kiss mark—not something a light touch could leave, but the kind that stays only when you've sucked hard enough to burst the finest blood vessels.
The culprit who had left the blemish was, of course, Han Seoyeon right beside her. She scratched at her cheek, looking awkward.
"But I thought it would be fine so long as I healed it before we left the theater... No. It's nothing."
She had started to tack that on like an excuse, then stopped. Not because the excuse was hollow. She really had thought as much, which was why she had left a rather aggressive trace on Hitomi's skin. But if she began picking apart why that prediction had gone wrong, she risked handing Hitomi a fresh bout of shame. Not that cutting herself off would help—Hitomi had surely already caught what she'd been about to say.
"That's right! It's my fault anyway, for making it so it couldn't be fixed."
Hitomi flushed and puffed her cheeks, just a little. The grumbling was also her laying it on thicker on purpose, because she knew perfectly well that some of the blame was hers. Given her usual temperament, she would have humbly accepted anything that was truly her own fault—but even so, this time was different.
There was simply no way she could come out and say that the Honey, I Wuv You ♥ power had been so overwhelming that the kiss mark was never even registered as something in need of treatment. Hitomi's face was not that thick.
As a rule, anomalies of the purification type don't produce one fixed effect so much as they bend heavily under psychology and circumstance. If they didn't, then every time someone from the Church offered up a purification prayer, victims would have piled up from having even their gut flora sterilized along with everything else.
The power of healing was not much different. Hitomi, at least, had never heard of a cleric praying over the sick only for the cancer cells to take it as encouragement and multiply on their own.
In short, purification purifies only what truly ought to be purified, and healing heals only what truly ought to be healed. And in most cases, the measure of truly is human perception. Suppose someone with six fingers is perfectly content, insisting the extra one is more convenient. If you lop it off in the name of restoring them to normal, that isn't treatment. It's bodily harm.
Of course, in most cases the caster's perception weighs more heavily than the subject's, so it wasn't a perfectly fitting analogy... The trouble was that the one who had tried to heal this bruise was Hitomi herself. Which was to say: because the practitioner's own unconscious had quietly, willingly been accepting the mark, the healing never took.
And Han Seoyeon, who had watched it happen, was the greatest healer of the present age—a woman who could mend even death. There was no chance someone who had this mechanism threaded through her fingers would fail to grasp the true intent buried in Hitomi's failed cure. The unconscious wish to keep, on her own body, a trace of having made love with Seoyeon. Seoyeon had seen straight through it.
After that, not even Han Seoyeon could heal her. When both the one casting and the one receiving had not merely accepted the contusion but were drawing a faintly sinful thrill from it, a miracle of healing was hardly about to lend a hand. And so Hitomi had no choice but to walk out of the theater with the kiss mark still on the nape of her neck.
"So, um... shall we go to karaoke?"
"Like this?"
"Mmm..."
They could buy a bandage or something nearby and stick it on before they went... Han Seoyeon followed the thought that far, then shook her head. It was summer now, and even the night carried a faint, muggy warmth. The open air, at least, was nowhere near enough to cool the heat left by several dozen minutes of kissing in the theater. Walk into a karaoke room—that dark little sealed box—in this condition, and the ending was obvious. If it were like the theater, where they'd gone in with some other aim and simply happened to catch fire on each other, that would be one thing. Going to a public facility while knowing full well it would curdle into something indecent pricked at her conscience.
"It can't be helped. We'll put karaoke off until next time and head home..."
Han Seoyeon soon reached her conclusion and made her wishes known to Hitomi. More precisely, she shut her mouth again halfway through, because Hitomi had caught her by the sleeve.
Hitomi, her face flushed even deeper than a moment ago, was pointing with her free hand at a building nearby.
"I-I mean, the problem is going to karaoke while you're harboring weird thoughts and pretending it's for something else, right...?"
Pink signage was common enough on shops that courted women... but a hot pink that bright, bright enough to sting the eyes a little, was rare. Rarer still when the sign itself was heart-shaped.
"If it's a place whose actual purpose is making those weird thoughts come true... that would be all right, wouldn't it...?"
"..."
What the tip of that finger indicated was an establishment saddled with a needlessly long name in katakana. And the word tacked onto the tail of that long name was, past any possible confusion, a perfectly legible love hotel.
"...Hitomi."
"No, I—I'm not saying we absolutely have to do that?"
Hitomi murmured it as if shy, and turned her eyes away. But a moment later, as if she'd changed her mind, she turned back and met Seoyeon's gaze.
"Actually, no. Yeah. I am saying we should do exactly that. Honestly, kissing me like that and then expecting me to just hold it in is ridiculous."
She was still smiling that bashful little smile, as if embarrassed. And yet, innocent as it was—the same smile as always—Han Seoyeon could make out something feral in her eyes.
"You've grown quite bold, Hitomi."
"Do you dislike a wife like this?"
"How could I?"
Immediate. The answer leapt out ahead of the thought. From the start, no matter what condition was stapled onto the front of it, any question shaped like do you dislike it had been ordained to be answered in the negative—even if the world split clean in two.
"Then let's go."
Hitomi urged her on while wrapping one of Seoyeon's arms against herself, a faint nasal sweetness threaded through the words. She was, without question, far more forward than usual. Just as she'd said, it seemed dozens of minutes of nothing but kissing had left her body running considerably hot. Once her head cooled she might well be kicking the blankets in mortification, but the Hitomi of this moment wanted it, and so Seoyeon decided to climb aboard the suggestion.
The two of them slipped into the love hotel, glancing around for no good reason.
The interior was washed in fairly dim light, and the moment they stepped in, a machine that looked like a kiosk stood directly before them.
"It's unmanned... Is this place unusual?"
"Mmm, I wonder...?"
It was the first love hotel for both of them, so there was nothing to compare it against. Neither could answer the question. Still, if the arrangement had required them to tell an employee, in so many words, We're about to have sex, it would have been mortifying. In that respect, they ought to be grateful it was unmanned.
Unfamiliar as they were, they somehow managed to rent a room and come away with a key. Then, though they hadn't committed any particular sin, they climbed the stairs all hunched and fidgety and stopped before the room number written on the key.
It was a profoundly strange feeling. This wasn't even the first time they'd been together. Shouldn't they have grown used to it by now? She couldn't understand why she was this tense.
And then, all at once, Hitomi understood why. There had certainly been plenty of times the mood carried them into the act. More than once, ordinary closeness had caught fire between them and led the same way. But paying money to secure a time and a place for no purpose other than that—this was close enough to the first time that it might as well have been.
A chance to stop, to turn back? Time to think it through with a cool head? They'd had both in abundance. Several times over, even while they fumbled and strained in front of the unmanned kiosk. And still, with a mind and a will that were one hundred percent lucid, they had written that into the rest of the evening's schedule. The realization alone brought with it a feeling she couldn't quite name—something sinful.
Hitomi swallowed hard, then turned the key and opened the door.
At once her eyes went round at the reddish light unfurling before her. No—even so, she hadn't imagined anything this committed.
"It's much more... um. Than I expected."
An atmosphere in which even the excuse that they'd only come to spend the night would never, ever make it out of a person's mouth. Looking around a beat too late, she realized the lights could be switched to an ordinary daylight white—but that did nothing to erase the intensity of the image from the moment she'd first seen it.
"..."
Before long the two of them had gone entirely wordless. All that came out was mmm, mmm—sounds that might have been admiration, or might have been something else entirely. They couldn't even properly look at one another. Examining only the decor, each made the same excuse to herself: I'm only observing. This is an unfamiliar sight.
"Nnh..."
And then Hitomi's gaze found the desk in the corner of the room, and the things laid out on top of it. Black leather and silver chain. Several pieces of gear that looked like a matched set rested on the desk—implements made for no purpose but binding a human body, and besides those a few more that seemed intended to deal out a little pain, or else a great deal of pleasure.
The moment she saw them, she drew a breath she hadn't meant to take. Things she had only ever seen through a screen. Slowly she turned her head and stole a glance Seoyeon's way. She knew the feeling rising from deep in her chest was not a good one, and still it was terribly hard to resist the impulse—something that fizzed like carbonation and prickled her from the inside.
"Um... Shion?"
"Y-yes. What is it?"
Perhaps it was the weight of a room built for that and nothing else. Han Seoyeon answered with a tension quite unlike her usual self. To that woman, Hitomi spoke carefully—and with an expectation and excitement she made no effort to hide.
"The game we played at the theater. We never decided what the penalty was, did we...?"
Gulp. Without even realizing it, Ninomae Hitomi swallowed the saliva gathering in her mouth.