Adachi to Shimamura - Volume 11 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1:

A Bright Star on a Dark Night

FOR VARIOUS REASONS—various, varied, variable reasons—Adachi was trembling, and I was gripping her right leg in my hand, entranced. “Entranced”? Don’t ask. Like a cicada, the vibrations rose from deep within her. 

My ears resounded with the tick, tock of the clock on the shelf; with perfect clarity, I could see every dust mote in the air. My five senses were heightened…and yet my brain was filled with static.

Now that she was at my house, we were supposed to be planning our trip, and I was having trouble remembering how exactly that turned into this. Perhaps the all-engulfing summer heat had dehydrated my common sense. 

You know, as a joke. 

Incidentally, we were playing a little game called “see who can make the other blush the hardest with a kiss.” Naturally, the one who blushed the hardest lost. Kissing in an “unusual” spot scored highly, and we awarded points based on our own judgment. So far, I was the undefeated champion. 

My prize: this suffocating heat and not much else. 

So there I was, gazing at Adachi’s leg up close and debating where to kiss next. At this point, she was blushing all the way down to the soles of her feet. Then again, I didn’t exactly spend much time looking at other people’s feet, so for all I knew, maybe they were always red. Her toes were as slender as the rest of her; curiously, I gave one a poke, and her entire ankle joint flinched. Only then did it finally occur to me that maybe, just maybe, I was being a bully.

“What do you think, Adachi?”

“Huhwha? About what?” 

Her ears were like the wings of a bright red butterfly—how artistic. An idea struck: I could kiss her ear. But were ears an “unusual” place to kiss? Given that it was left to my own judgment, the rules of this game had fallen apart right out of the gate. 

But as long as the game itself was fun, the rules didn’t matter; in fact, if the pointless rules added to the fun, then we were better off embracing it. And yes, this game was indeed fun—well, “fun” wasn’t the right word. Addicting, I guess. When was it that the act of touching Adachi started to hold such deep meaning to me?

The way her eyes had darted around nonstop for the past thirty minutes, I had to wonder if her face ever got tired. The answer, in her case, was no. Maybe she stored up a lot of excess energy whenever I wasn’t around. 

“Hmmm…”

“Y-y-yes…?”

“Are you looking forward to the trip?” Might as well get back on topic, I figured.

“The trip…?” she replied weakly, like a deflated balloon, reminiscent of when we were in high school. “Y-yeah…I guess.” 

She raised her chin like she was fighting not to drown, choking out the best answer she could manage. Evidently, she wasn’t getting enough oxygen up there on the second floor. I gazed at her lower lip and the tongue that occasionally peeked out from behind it.

“Me, too. We’re gonna go on a journey together! A journey. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Uh…more importantly, Shimamura…”

“Shimamura speaking,” I answered in my over-the-phone voice.

Everything about this was silly, but I decided to blame it on the season. This was simply the way some summers went. Sure, the heat and the cicadas seemed the same, but each year—even if I kept doing the same things with the same person each time—summer was always something new.

“Never mind…” As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Adachi’s voice sank to rock-bottom, like shaved ice melting and mingling with its syrup. 

“It’s okay. I think I know what you were going to say.”

“Really? You could tell?”

“Of course!” Not. If I was a mind reader, my life would be pretty dull. 

She clapped her hands to those cherry cheeks flooded with love, her eyes wide, as if me knowing was a problem in and of itself. She had mellowed out a lot in adulthood, but in close proximity she let her old self show. It was her most noble trait. 

“Noble”? I had the tendency to make things needlessly complicated where “cute” would suffice.

With perfect timing, just as the drone of the cicadas drifted off, a wave of memories rolled in—so hard and fast, it threatened to bowl me over at the knees. Shivering from the chill of my wet feet, I squinted out at the sea in front of me. The distant stars each projected a different memory of summer onto the dark ocean. But I couldn’t swim out to them—the past was too far gone. I could only stand on the shore and look back.

“Sh-Shimamura?” 

As I knelt there, unmoving, with her leg still firmly in my grasp, Adachi was growing increasingly perplexed. She probably didn’t have the slightest inkling that I was the sentimental to her sensitive. 

Adachi. Old memories. When I tried to look at both at the same time, my eyes crossed, and all I saw were dozens of fragmented Adachis. So I lifted a hand over her head and prayed that this moment, too, would one day join the sea. “I wish you the best.”

“Um…uhhh…what?”

Neh heh heh heh heh heh! 

Adachi and Shimamura, age twenty-two. At last, we were old enough to take our first big steps on a real journey.