Chapter 3: Does Rain Always Come Without A Warning? (III)

[E/D: Prepare your google translate, lol]

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“…Kousaka-san?”

My voice croaked like gravel, bleary even.

“No.” she responded without looking around. “I'm just a fever dream.”

Her voice was too flat to be warm, but not cold enough to be distant. Like she'd been standing in the middle of concern and denial for the last hour.

Stupidly enough, I pinched my skin to confirm if this is just an alternate reality.

“...Why are you here?”

It's not like she just graduated from her indifference and decided to visit a sick man out of nowhere.

“Returning something.”

She gestured vaguely at the black umbrella hanging next to my damp uniform.

“…So you broke into my apartment?”

“I knocked. I have manners. You didn’t answer.”

“I was dying.”

“Well, you left the door unlocked. That’s on you.”

I blinked. Twice.

She had a point.

“...Still, that doesn’t explain the groceries. Or porridge. Or the fact that you’re cooking my own disaster.”

“I was sketching in a coffee shop across Sannomiya,” she said, finally turning to face me. “Saw you walking in the rain like you're carrying the weight of your existence.”

Well...that's boldly accurate in a sense.

“I dropped my things for the meantime and went out again to buy ingredients. Figured the guy who gives away umbrellas in the rain probably doesn’t keep food in stock.”

My fevered brain worked slowly through the logic. "...So you broke into my home, spent money, cooked unsolicited okayu and miso and insulted me in one breath?"

“I didn't break into your home.” as she raised a kitchen knife.

My first instinct was to apologize for my oversight, but she lowered it right away and it's a relief that she used it on dicing green onions rather than flaying me open.

"But correct." as she poured the onions into the pot with deliberate sass. “Die ren.”

I sat up with a groan.

"Don’t take this the wrong way but—who the hell just walks into someone’s home and starts cooking?”

She tilted her head, mock-thoughtfully. “French people.”

I blinked again.

“What?”

I knew that Kousaka-san was half-French, but I thought that she was raised locally, maybe in the high-rises of Tokyo, and landed on Kobe for a vacation.

“In Marseille, every stranger colonized kitchens. It’s cultural.”

That answered my question. She's a croissant imported to a country of sushi.

“…Is that racism?” the words slipped from my mouth before I could stop it.

“Only if you say it.” She stirred the pot with my trusty wooden ladle. “Besides, this barely qualifies as a kitchen.”

I looked around, disoriented but still mildly insulted.

"Rotting walls, no heater, and no microwave. Are you planning to die mid-winter?"

“So you'll stop trespassing.”

"Va te faire foutre."

She's been phrasing words recently that I had no way of understanding. But this one, it held something sharp and dangerous in tone. It really sounded like a war crime or something personal.

I dragged my hip backward so I could lean on the wall.

"You’re lucky I’m too weak to stand, or I’d throw you out. Who cooks for a guy she barely knows?"

"Who gives his umbrella to a girl he never talks to?" she shot back.

Touché.

I sighed. "...You really didn’t have to. I don't need it."

"Didn't need the umbrella either. So maybe this is equal."

But simply giving someone an umbrella takes less effort than cooking for someone sick. That's not equality, based on the amount of effort input, but maybe equity, because we both achieved our own ends.

"...Pretty sure this meal is worth more than the umbrella."

"Then consider it interest. I’m generous."

"Debatable. Don't think Frenchwomen are that generous."

She smirked, and that's one more surprising than this golden-spiked porcupine on my apartment.

As we were both waiting for the meals to cook, Kousaka-san glanced around the room and snorted, hiding the edge of a smile behind her hair. "You really live alone in this dump, huh?"

I didn’t answer right away.

Then quietly, "Yeah. The five-star hotel was out of budget. The two directors have stepped down from their office."

She ignored the joke. Her eyebrows were scrunched, as if testing what she heard.

"...How long?"

"Since I was eleven."

Her eyes flicked toward the old medicine cabinet, the bathroom with a chipped door, the stack of unwashed laundry, then the rusted futon frame. Then me.

"...Putain, je ne peux pas imaginer vivre dans cette merde..."

"Yeah. I also love Paul Cezanne."

"I sketch, not paint."

“Sketches are manga-fied paintings.”

She spun around with a huff, and returned to working in the kitchen.

The impasse felt more relieving than anything, because I was able to seep in the feeling of borrowing peace from the highschool girl before me.

I had never been with anyone in this room aside from my parents, and now, I'm with the most beautiful girl in the school and she was cooking for me.

Plot for a movie, right? Healthy me would've considered this moment as delusions taking over rationality.

After a few minutes, with her usual blunt grace, Kousaka-san announced, “You look like death reheated. Eat something before you flatline.”

She turned around towards me and handed the meals into two separate bowls.

She sat cross legged from a considerable distance, as if she owned the place.

The small bowl stared back at me, steam curling from the rice porridge like a peace offering.

“Don’t spill it. I’m not cleaning this moldy floor.”

The usual sharpness in her gaze had softened, just barely.

“I would, but I think my limbs are on strike.”

I mustered my strength to lift a finger, but my body screamed in retirement. I don't know if that's the fatigue caused by fever, or the weakness brought by hunger. I just remembered that the last time I ate was yesterday in the school cafeteria during lunch break.

She shook her head, not from rejection, but disappointment.

“Then open your mouth. I’m feeding you.”

I stared at her.

Blankly.

Like I’d misheard.

She tilted her head, expression unreadable but already annoyed. “Do you need a countdown?”

I parted my lips slightly—not out of obedience, but disbelief.

"...What kind of roleplay is this? Are you suddenly wanting to realize my kinks?"

I think I'm astounded at my sudden raw honesty.

Nothing beats a sharp and beautiful woman that spoils you with her implicit kindness, if that's what she calls it.

"Don’t make me smack you with the ladle, Shimizu. We're too old to beat around the bushes."

Femme fatale.

I let out a quiet laugh as she held up the spoon with theatrical disdain.

It felt ridiculous. This wasn't just a dream. This is Shimizu Itsuki getting spoon fed by the most beautiful girl in the school he's just watching across his mitarashi dango castle.

I thought that she redrew the lines immediately after I stepped on it. Now, she's the one crossing it without hesitations.

For the long time I have avoided extra interactions with people, this was surprisingly welcome.

And just like that, she scooped a spoonful of rice porridge and brought it to my mouth. Bland flavors reached me, amplified by the hunger I've been enduring for a whole day.

There could be dramatic music swelling in the background, or time slowing down. But we both didn't have that.

Because we're not expecting anything from each other.

This is just callous efficiency, from two people who refuse kindness.

But I'm glad that someone stayed and made it for me.

I chewed slowly, eyes fixed on the blanket covering me. My thoughts scrambled like static, and something in my chest tensed and didn’t let go.

No one had ever fed me before.

Not like this.

Not after my parents.

Not since everything cracked and collapsed and left me with nothing but dented pride and routines sharp enough to cut emotion out of the equation.

Her fingers brushed my chin accidentally as she raised the next spoonful.

I flinched, expecting the worst.

The last one that touched her stepped down from her classroom rep position, and the last one that joked on her nursed a neck injury for weeks.

The Kousaka Akari right here didn't react.

That made it worse.

I’d forgotten what it was like to be taken care of. And now, in the middle of this worn-down room, with my stomach growling and my body on the verge of burning out, the gesture hit too deep.

I looked at her.

At her golden hair. At her furrowed brows—not in anger, but concentration.

But there was something else.

Something quieter.

Her lips were slightly cracked into a thin line, giving the spoon curt blows as if it's going to burn my tongue without.

As if she’d already fed sick people before, like she used to take care of someone so close to the edge of life and death.

I wanted to ask, but the words died in my mouth.

“You shouldn’t get used to this,” she said, finally dropping the spoon back to the bowl.

I didn’t know if she meant the food…or her.

But I didn’t answer.

Because for the first time in a long while, someone stayed beside me when I was sick.

Even if she came in through the door I forgot to lock.