Ink

“It was a deep cut. I had to go to the hospital for it.” He switched to English and tried to explain, and I got the message that he’d needed stitches and lost a lot of blood. All I could think of was how he’d put his friend Koji in the hospital, too. At the moment, he didn’t seem capable of it.

“Sorry,” I said, but he smiled grimly.

“Art is a dangerous hobby,” he said, and somehow I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“So how come you draw here?” I asked.

“It’s safer here.”

“You mean your dad doesn’t know?”

“Something like that. Anyway, look around the clearing. People lived here almost two thousand years ago. There are birds, trees, silence. Ever try to be alone in a city like Shizuoka?” He ran his hand through his copper hair and shook it from side to side, flower petals tumbling onto his notebook. I thought of Jun reaching for the flower petal in my hair. So beautiful. I quickly pushed the memory aside with shame. I felt like I’d betrayed Tomohiro by thinking of it, which was dumb, but I felt it anyway.

“You know you’re trespassing here,” I said. Tomohiro broke into a broad grin.

“A place like this doesn’t belong to anyone,” he said. “They can’t keep me out like they can’t keep the birds in.”

It was surreal among the ruins, and I could see why he risked coming in here. Besides, with his entitled attitude, the orange sign on the gate was probably a challenge, a dare, more than anything else.

He stopped sketching and a bead of sweat rolled down his face. He drew an ugly rigid line through his beautiful sketch of a Yayoi hut and slammed the cover of the notebook closed.

“Why’d you wreck it?” I asked as he shoved the notebook deep into his book bag. When I thought about it, he’d crossed out every single drawing.

He shrugged it off, but his eyes were dark. “They’re not good enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Go? Together? I struggled to push down the panic that rose to my throat and reminded myself what a jerk he could be. And he was a taken jerk, on top of it. Cheater. Pregnant girlfriend. Koji in the hospital. It was a mantra I repeated in my mind, but somehow it wasn’t working.

He strode ahead into the trees and I followed, reaching for my bike as he lifted his. When we were both through the chain-link fence, he let go and it clanged into place.

We leaped on our bikes, coasting across the street and up through the thickening maze of Shizuoka.

He led the way, but competitiveness overtook me and I pedaled past him, coasting in front and weaving around the traffic. He didn’t challenge me but sat back and relaxed, following my lead and riding in my wake.

Maybe there was something to his friendship with Tanaka.

He wasn’t acting the same as before, different than the Tomohiro that Myu had slapped.

Not different than the one who’d tenderly embraced his crying girlfriend in the park, though. The memory flashed through my mind like a good slap to the head.

We stopped at Shizuoka Station.

“I go north from here, to Otamachi,” he said.

“I live west,” I said. “Near Suruga.”

He nodded. “You hungry?”

I just stared at him. My hunger was definitely clawing at the sides of my stomach, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

It was like he knew what I was thinking. He smiled, then burst into another of his grins, looking down and shaking his head as he laughed.

“You should see your face,” he said between laughs. “Like I’d just asked you to jump off the top of Sunpu Castle!”

I flushed red.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s a good cafe in the station.”

I grasped for words, reasons, that I could not go.

“Won’t your girlfriend be upset?” I said.

He tilted his head to the side. “Girlfriend?”

“The pregnant one? Or do you have more than one?”

He stared at me blankly and then burst out laughing.

“So that made it into the rumor?” he managed to say.

He looked pretty pleased with himself. My face would have turned redder if I’d had any humiliation left in me.

When he saw how pissed I was, he stopped laughing. “Oh, right. You heard Myu say it. I don’t have a girlfriend. Especially a pregnant one.”

“But I saw you. In the park,” I said and regretted the words the minute they came out. His eyes went wide.

“You really have been spying, ne? ” he said. “Shiori’s not my girlfriend. She’s more like a sister, and I promised her mom I’d look out for her. Students are giving her a rough time because she’s keeping the baby.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Now, come on. I’m hungry.”

I protested, but he just walked his bike toward the station, waving his arm in the air like he wasn’t going to hear it.

I stood there for a moment, squeezing the handlebars of my bike. I could just take off for home and ignore him. But when he turned around to see if I was following, I hurried forward, like I didn’t control my own legs anymore.

I ordered a melon soda and he got a platter of tonkatsu curry.

“You sure you don’t want something to eat?” he said, breaking his wooden chopsticks apart. I held up my hand.

“I’m fine,” I said. He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I know what it is,” he said. “You’re scared I’m going to try and pay for you.”

The heat prickled up my neck. “It’s not that at all,” I stuttered.

“No problem,” he said, “because I’m not going to.”

“What?”

He raised an eyebrow and shone a cocky grin at me.

“I’m pretty broke at the moment. So order yourself something and I won’t protest, promise.”

“Fine,” I mumbled. I called the waitress over and ordered a bowl of gyudon. Tomohiro picked at his meal until mine came, and by then his curry was cold. But even though I insisted he go ahead and eat, he just prodded it.

When my bowl of teriyaki beef and rice arrived, Tomohiro just about leaped out of his seat.

“Itadakimasu!” he shouted, clasping his hands together and wolfing down the pork cutlet.

He took a gulp of his water to wash it down. “I’m starving,” he said, but the sound of the childish words he chose made me snort. “Peko peko” coming from the mouth of someone like Tomohiro.

“So are you convinced now that I’m not up to anything?”

he asked, his chopsticks suspended in the air between bites.

“Not even close,” I said. “But why did you do that to me, the day after I saw you with Myu?” I said. He raised his eyebrows and looked sincerely puzzled.

“Do what?”

“Oh, please, like you don’t remember. You waited for me at the gate, and then you walked past me all dangerous-like.”

And too close, I added to myself. The smell of his vanilla hair gel, the heat of his shoulder grazing mine. And then, you know, he proceeded to look up my skirt, but did we really need to remember that part?

I wondered if it was the wrong thing to say. It must have been, because Tomohiro’s grin faded, replaced by