They had sex again. The ejaculation seemed to drain his cheekbones, but he didn’t complain, didn’t say anything, even though his penis felt like rubber to him. He knew he only had to hang on a little while longer. Now she did most of the talking. He listened to her, meanwhile applying pressure to his groin, trying to look casual about it. She talked about how she felt like she was on holiday, way different from her everyday mode, how Shibuya felt like a foreign country when they were out walking, and while she talked she stretched her left leg up towards the ceiling. She spoke each word as if she was finding it on the street and picking it up. And then she changed the leg she was stretching. He thought about what she was saying as he watched her stretching her legs and said, so what would you call what we’re doing now? What is this, a life? A way of life? Whatever, to be blunt, when I think about just keeping on like this, I mean think about it, it’s impossible, right? We’ve got to face the facts. We don’t have the money, for one thing. And really, how long can we keep this up, anyway?
He kept on talking: So, as far as money goes, I’ve got only like ¥2,000 yen on me. I know, sorry about that. But if we go to an ATM, I should have maybe ¥30,000 or ¥40,000 in the bank. My job pays once a month, so it’s a low period for me now… It was at this point that the two of them decided to call it. The day after tomorrow we’ll leave here and go back to our own places and by then the war’ll probably be over. When he said this, her response was, it’ll be like going home not knowing if Japan won their World Cup match today and then putting on the news to find out, you know, that kind of nervous feeling.
Neither one of them was certain who was the first to suggest they end it on the fifth day. Maybe he said to her: I mean I can’t imagine you could’ve been thinking you wanted to stay here like this with me forever anyway, right? And you can say it. I mean I feel the same way, so we might as well both say it. She said, okay, and he said, okay. They both had a feeling of release, like a fake tear duct that suddenly came unblocked. When they both said okay, by chance their voices overlapped perfectly, seamlessly, in a way that felt almost like another miracle. Their voices had matched so perfectly that they couldn’t even crack a joke about it. Instead they both tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. Then he started talking again, and like, this thing between us, it’s probably not going to turn into like a lifelong connection, is it? But, and this is just what I think, but it’s not that a lifelong connection is somehow more special, or that we didn’t make a lifelong connection because this wasn’t special, or because we couldn’t make that kind of connection, it’s not like that at all. You get what I’m saying, right? She said she got it. And, he went on, I think that’s like luck, I mean I think that spending time, days, like this with someone who understands that, that’s incredible. Not everybody would understand that. I think it’s super-incredible. But you could see someone saying, what’s so incredible about it? All you two did was fuck the whole time.
They needed to check what time it was. First, they had sex. It felt different from before because time was back in the picture. He pulled the phone out of his bag, which had been tossed in the corner of the room. Their moment that seemed to go on forever was coming to an end. The LCD screen showed three in the afternoon. They had guessed it was night, and only a few hours left before morning. He turned the phone off. Since they had more time than expected, they had sex some more, casually. She was worrying about the pain in his groin, but he said he was fine, so she made up her mind not to worry about it. They spent the time until the morning having sex, and resting, and every so often he reached for his phone to check the
