Ink Stained

39: red is for blood, red is for Mask*

赤い血のためである、赤はマスク用

It was disturbing how instinctual it was, an automated reflex, to lie when Shiori and Aoi asked her if she'd found Kurebayashi and told him about joining the astronomy club. She told them that she hadn't found him in the staff room and had spent the better part of her time looking for him, to no avail. When Shiori asked her about the oolong tea she'd planned to get, Pai could only stare blankly at her for a few seconds before remembering. She lied again and said that she didn't have time to before the bell rang for class.

She wasn't even sure why she lied. Of course, to Aoi, Natsume, and Shuusei, she knew why – there was no way she could tell them that she'd been talking to a Daitengu on the roof of the multi-purpose hall. They would think she was insane, and she might embarrass Shiori if she said anything.

But to Shiori...why didn't she say the truth?

As she twirled her pen around her thumb, something Shiori was always trying to do yet unable to, she realized that she hadn't said anything about it because their conversation on the roof was private. It wasn't something to be shared, where every word the other spoke had to be broken down, dissected, studied, in order to understand the overall meaning of what had been said. What Shin said to her, what she said to him, none of that was something that needed to be shared. It was only for her, and him.

That wasn't what bothered her though. It was how easily the lie came to her, how she felt no real guilt over it. She knew she should feel guilty about it, but she didn't.

The rest of the day passed by uninterestingly. Haru was downright terrified when Shiori walked into the FT room with the rest of the class and glared at him, though she said nothing. Pai couldn't imagine what kinds of pranks Shiori was coming up with. She was sure Haru could; he was probably dreading the day Shiori acted on those ideas.

Despite that, Aoi and Natsume's evaluation of Haru's skills as a teacher proved true; he could cook, and he could teach the other students how to cook as well. They, like Aoi and Shuusei's class, made benihana. Most of the students chose to eat their benihana in the fifteen minutes left of the class after it ended early before the next class began. The others packed their benihana in their bento, to eat after or before the club activities after school.

Pai was seated on the bleachers at the very top in the multi-purpose hall, getting an early start on her English homework as Shiori was in basketball practise down below. The girls' basketball team was warming up by jogging around the hall while dribbling basketballs at their sides. The hall was filled with the sounds of the balls striking the surface of the floor, and a dozen of sneakers squeaking as the girls ran.

Even as she worked on her homework, Pai found it difficult to focus on any of it. Her mind, as it had been throughout the day, strayed to her conversation with Shin on the roof. She managed to pull her thoughts away from speculations of why she blushed, but her heart thudded in her chest every time she remembered the way Shin offered her comfort in the exact way she needed it without even asking. Without hesitation. Like he knew her well enough to know just what she needed in that moment.

It was more difficult to avoid the thoughts that plagued her about what he said happened in the Torimaku.

She scribbled randomly in the back of her notebook as she put her chin in the cup of her palm and stared down at the kanji, pen pressing in unnecessarily hard. Underneath it, she wrote it several more times, each word below the preceding one. Her hand swept down the page, running on automaton. Her eyes were on the page, but she wasn't really paying attention to the white paper, her gaze going cross-eyed as she drifted off.