Chapter 82
Rin looked at the LINE notification for a moment with the expression of someone who had been hoping the afternoon would stay manageable and was watching that hope quietly expire.
Of course someone took photos. He had known, in the abstract way one knows about inconvenient possibilities, that walking through a residential neighborhood in casual clothes with a girl from school carried certain social risks in an environment where approximately half the student body treated gossip as a competitive sport. He had filed that knowledge away and gone anyway, because the alternative was leaving Yuigahama-san's problem unresolved, and that was not something he was willing to do.
Now Sakurajima Mai was asking questions over LINE and Utaha was sitting directly behind him radiating a very specific variety of displeasure, and neither situation was going to improve by being ignored.
He unlocked his phone and typed.
Rin Kuga: She and I are just acquaintances. Believe it or not, that's your business.
He sent it before he could second-guess the wording.
Then he stared at what he'd written for half a second and thought, with the particular, dry discomfort of a moment of honest self-recognition: that sounded exactly like the kind of thing a person says when they are being evasive. He was not being evasive. He was being accurate, and accurate sounded evasive, and there was nothing he could do about that without writing a longer message, which he was not going to do.
He set his phone face-down.
Behind him, Utaha's patience, which had already been operating at reduced capacity, finished its final reserves.
"You are genuinely unbelievable." She had leaned forward, close enough that her voice arrived at a volume designed for an audience of one. "I'm sitting right here. I asked you a direct question. You typed a message to someone else and then put your phone down. What is wrong with you?"
Rin turned in his chair just enough to look at her. His expression was the expression of someone who has decided that a situation requires the minimum viable response. "You didn't ask a question," he said. "You made a statement with upward inflection."
Utaha's pen found its way to the desk with a sound that expressed several things simultaneously.
"You," she said, "are going to explain yourself."
"There's nothing to explain."
"There is an entire photograph's worth of things to explain."
"A photograph of two people walking down a street."
"Together."
"People walk on streets."
"Rin-kun."
"Sometimes at the same time."
The vein that appeared at Utaha's temple was faint but visible, and she was clearly making a decision about whether to pursue this line of argument or find a more productive angle, which was the moment the classroom door opened.
Sakurajima Mai walked in the way she walked into most rooms: without announcing herself, without requiring anyone's permission, with the easy, total confidence of someone who has spent enough time being observed that she has stopped thinking about it. The black over-the-knee stockings. The particular quality of her posture that managed to be simultaneously unhurried and completely purposeful.
Her eyes found Rin, then Utaha, then the distance between them, which was not large. Something in her expression did a rapid, quiet adjustment.
She crossed the room.
Her hands moved, neat and decisive, and the space between Utaha and Rin became considerably larger than it had been a moment before.
"Give them some room," she said, which was technically addressed to the general situation rather than either specific person.
Utaha, who had been forcibly relocated from a conversation she had been in the middle of, turned to look at the new arrival with the expression of someone revising their immediate plans. "Excuse me," she said, in a tone that was polite in the way that certain very sharp things are smooth. "We were talking."
Mai did not look at her.
She was already standing in front of Rin, close enough that the conversation was clearly between the two of them and not available to outside parties. Up close, the expression on her face had the careful, slightly brittle quality of someone who is doing a reasonable job of managing how they look and a less reasonable job of managing how they feel.
"Tell me," she said. Her voice was even, measured, and contained approximately twice as much energy as a voice that even needed to be measured. "What exactly is going on with you and that girl?"
Rin looked at her.
She looked back.
He had known her long enough to read the layers of it: the surface question, which was about Yukino Yukinoshita and a photograph, and the real question underneath, which was older and more complicated and had nothing specifically to do with Yukino Yukinoshita at all. Mai had placed herself, somewhere in the course of the past weeks, in a position relative to him that neither of them had named or discussed, and photographs of him walking with other girls activated something in that unnamed position that she had not yet found a comfortable way to express.
He understood this. He even, if he was honest with himself, found it more than a little unreasonable to ignore.
But he was also sitting in a classroom with an audience, and Utaha was three feet away with a novelist's attention for detail, and the honest conversation that this situation probably warranted was not one that should happen here.
He stood up.
"It's nothing," he said. Not dismissively, not with the flat brevity he used when he actually meant nothing. But with the quiet, direct simplicity of someone who means exactly what they're saying and trusts the other person to recognize the difference. "Yukinoshita-san needed help with something. I helped her. That's the whole of it."
He looked at Mai for one more beat, long enough for it to be deliberate, and then he moved toward the door.
"Rin Kuga." Mai's voice, behind him. Dropped the honorific, which it only ever did when she meant it.
He paused with his hand on the door frame. Did not turn around.
"We'll talk later," he said. It was quiet enough that only she would catch it, and it was not an evasion. It was an actual promise, offered without performance, in the register he used when he meant things.
Then he stepped out into the hallway, and the door swung shut behind him.
In the classroom, the silence lasted for approximately three seconds.
Utaha looked at the door. Then at Mai. Then at the door again, with the thoughtful, slightly distant expression of someone filing a large amount of new information under a heading she hadn't created yet.
Mai stood where she was, her eyes still on the closed door, one hand at her side opening and closing once before she caught it.
We'll talk later.
She turned and walked back toward the door herself, without saying anything to Utaha, and the classroom returned to its ordinary business, slightly altered in some quality that was difficult to name but perfectly clear to everyone who had been paying attention.
Down the hallway, in the quiet of a stairwell landing that happened to be empty at this particular hour, Rin Kuga leaned against the wall, looked at the ceiling, and exhaled through his nose.
The photograph, he thought. Of course there was a photograph.
He was going to have to have an actual conversation with Mai. He knew this. He had known it the moment he said we'll talk later, which was not the kind of thing you said to someone unless you were prepared to follow through. And he was prepared to follow through. He simply needed to work out, in the quiet of the next few minutes, exactly what he was going to say and how much of the truth was appropriate to give her.
The truth, in its complete form, was complicated. The truth involved the Service Club and Shirogane's request and Yuigahama-san's haunted mirror and a girl in an alley two weeks ago who had asked for his name while barely able to stand, and none of those things were secret, exactly, but assembling them into a coherent explanation required a certain amount of care.
She deserves the care, he thought.
He looked at the ceiling for another moment.
Then he pushed off the wall and walked, and somewhere in the building behind him, three separate people were thinking about him in three different ways, and not one of them had the full picture, and the full picture was, in its own way, entirely ordinary.
Just someone helping where he could.
Not that he'd ever say it like that.