As Usual

The longer train route. We'd taken it by accident the first time. Three weeks ago, maybe. 

I'd gotten on the wrong one while arguing with Tomoe over text — she had opinions about something, she always has opinions, the opinions arrive fully formed and with supporting citations — and Yuta had followed me on before either of us had looked at the route board. 

And then we'd looked. And looked at each other. And I said "this one goes the long way" and he said "yeah" in the tone of someone who is not bothered by this information.

We stayed.

We take it on purpose now. 

There's no agreement about this. 

We just both know. 

I'm not sure when that happened — when we became the kind of people who have a train route and both know it without discussing it. 

Somewhere between the festival and the market and the workshop room, I think. 

Things have a way of becoming true before you've decided to let them.

He had a book.

He wasn't reading it.

He was doing the thing where he looks out the window and processes something in his head without broadcasting what it is. Eyes going slightly soft. Not watching the city, really. 

Just letting it pass. 

I've learned not to ask. 

It's like interrupting a machine mid-cycle. 

It'll get there. It always gets there, and when it does, whatever it produces is worth waiting for.

I was on my phone.

Sort of.

I was mostly watching the window too. There's something about being in motion that makes thinking easier. Like your brain decides the body is already handling something and relaxes.

A couple got on at the next stop.

First years. Her bag was enormous — the kind of bag that suggests she's prepared for multiple contingencies and possibly a small emergency — and it immediately swung into his arm when she turned. 

He stepped back. 

It swung again. 

He stepped back again, patiently recalibrating.

She apologized.

He said it's fine.

She apologized again.

He said it was fine, really.

She apologized a third time, thoroughly and with feeling, and he finally looked at her and said "I promise it's fine" in a way that made her laugh. Something released in her when he said it. You could see it. Like she'd been holding onto the apology and he'd taken it from her hands and set it down somewhere.

Then he laughed too, and reached over and adjusted the strap of her bag so it stopped swinging, and she fixed his collar which he hadn't asked for and he looked briefly surprised and then not surprised. Like: of course. Like this was just what happened now, between them, and he was still getting used to it but was glad to be.

They sat down.

Twenty seconds. The whole thing.

I watched this happen.

Yuta watched this happen.

I glanced at him.

He glanced at me.

"They remind me of something," he said.

"Don't," I said.

"Early days."

"I said don't."

"The bag energy specifically."

"I never hit you with a bag," I pouted.

"No," he said. "But you apologized once for three minutes because you thought you'd taken too long to respond to a text."

"That was a reasonable concern."

"It was forty minutes."

"A lot can happen in forty minutes." I vehemently nodded. 

"It was Tuesday afternoon." He said, poking me.

"Tuesdays are unpredictable." I shrugged.

He looked at me with the patient, fond expression of someone who has made his peace with something.

"Not now though," he said. "The apologizing for everything."

"When did we stop being early days?" I said. "Specifically. By your metrics."

He thought about it. Actually thought, the real kind, not the placeholder kind.

"Workshop room," he said. "When you put your hand over mine. You stopped checking whether I was about to leave."

I processed this.

"I was doing that the whole time?"

"Yeah."

"Was it obvious?"

"To me."

"And you just— didn't say anything?"

"You weren't ready to hear it."

I stared at him.

He looked back.

Completely calm. 

The audacity. 

The patience. 

The specific combination of those two things that I had initially found maddening and now found — something else. 

Something that didn't have an easy word for it. Something I was not going to try to name on a train.

No one had ever been like that with me before.

"You're impossible," I said.

"I've been told."

"By who?"

"You, twice. Tomoe, once. An old man at a clock stall in Kaede who I'd never met before and haven't seen since."

"The clock stall man—"

"Heh," he let out a chuckle, "he said I had the energy of someone who makes things complicated."

"He's not wrong."

"I know." He went back to the window. "I thought it was a compliment."

I looked at the couple across the car.

They were sharing her phone now. He was leaning in to see it, close, unbothered by the closeness. She was explaining something, pointing at the screen. He was nodding with his whole face the way people do when they're actually listening, when they want you to know they're there, not just waiting for their turn.

"They're going to fumble it for a while," I said.

"Yeah," Yuta said.

"But they'll be fine."

"Yeah."

"How long do you think it'll take them to figure it out?"

He glanced at me.

A beat. 

"3 years," he said.

I pointed at him.

"Rude."

"I prefer the term 'accurate.'"

"I was in a corner for ninety seconds, not three years—"

"Fair enough," He said.

I looked at the window.

At the city going past. All those streets. All those buildings with people in them in the middle of something, mid-sentence, mid-decision, mid-whatever comes before the part where it makes sense. 

All those people who didn't know yet how it was going to go.

I reached over and fixed his watch strap, which had been sitting crooked since the market and had been bothering me since approximately then. I'd been looking at it every time I sat near him. 

I'd been not fixing it for reasons I couldn't fully explain, some residual instinct toward not-doing, toward holding back, toward checking first. And then today I just did it.

He looked at his wrist.

"That was bothering you," he said.

"Since Saturday."

"You could have just—"

"Now I did," I said.

He looked at the strap. Straight. Fixed. The small satisfaction of a thing in its right place.

"Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome."

The train slowed.

The couple got off. The enormous bag. His hand briefly on her back through the doors — just there for a second, steadying, then gone. The doors closed.

The city kept going.

"Hey," Yuta said.

"Mm?"

"The compass."

I looked at him.

"When I handed it to you," he said. "You just— held it. You didn't move."

"I was trying to get a read on it."

"I know." A pause. "It worked."

I thought about that. About the way the needle had drifted and drifted and then found somewhere to be. About his hands over mine, steadying, and then — not needing to anymore. About the fact that I'd been the one holding it at the end.

I thought about the corner. About coming back out. About a hallway and some pliers and a grade on a piece of paper I'd picked up second. About fourteen contingency plans and green having no column and not needing any of them.

About a needle that had forgotten where it was going and then remembered.

"It just needed someone to stop moving," I said.

He looked at me.

Not for long.

Just enough.

"Yeah," he said. "That's all it needed."

He went back to the window. The book still unread in his lap. The city still going.

I looked at the compass in my hand. The cloudy face. The brass worn soft at the edges from whoever had held it before me.

The needle wasn't moving.

It had somewhere to be and it knew it and that was —

"Okay," he said.

Not to anything. Not closing a door. Not putting a lid on a jar. Just — placing it down. The way he does. Like receiving something and setting it gently where it belongs.

Still here.

I looked up from the compass.

"Yeah," I said.

"Okay."