They walked to campus the way they always did now.
His pace. Her pace. Somewhere in the middle, arrived at without negotiation. Her hand found his sleeve around the first block. Neither of them said anything about it.
"The economics reading was confusing," she said.
"Which part."
"The supply curve section. It kept contradicting itself."
"It doesn't contradict. It's just counterintuitive."
She looked at him. "That's the same thing."
"It really isn't."
She opened her mouth to argue and they walked through the campus gate and she forgot what she was going to say because the morning was good and his sleeve was warm and the argument could wait.
The shoe area was the usual organised chaos — lockers, students, bags, the compressed energy of people transitioning from outside to inside. They found their lockers. He was already changing his shoes when she heard it.
"Good morning."
Yoru looked up.
Minami Tsukasa stood two lockers down. Already changed, bag adjusted, hair slightly to the side in the new configuration it had been wearing lately. She looked at both of them — a brief, acknowledging look at Yoru, the kind that saw everything and filed it — and then looked at Kaito.
Her face did the warm thing.
"Morning," Kaito said.
Yoru said nothing.
She was looking at Minami with the focused, assessing attention of a scientist who has finally gotten the specimen under direct observation. Not hostile. Worse than hostile. Measuring.
Minami looked at Kaito.
"Class is about to start," she said quietly. "We should go."
"Right," he said.
And then Minami reached out.
Smooth. Natural. No announcement. Her hands closed around his wrist and slid down and took his hand and tucked it — both her hands, his one — against her chest. Her very soft, very present, very there chest. She turned toward the corridor with the unhurried energy of someone who had decided and was executing.
"Let's go," she said softly.
They went.
Yoru watched them go.
The shoe area continued around her. Lockers. Students. Morning noise. None of it reached her.
She was watching the corridor entrance.
They rounded the corner.
Gone.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
"WHAT."
Three nearby students physically flinched.
"WHAT DID SHE JUST—" Yoru pressed both hands over her mouth. Took a breath. Took another one. Her eyes were doing something that required active management.
She picked up her bag from the floor — she had apparently set it down at some point — and walked to the humanities corridor.
The walk had the energy of a natural disaster that had been asked to use the indoor voice.
She pulled out her phone. Pressed call.
One ring.
"Yoru-chan." Nana's voice. Already knowing.
"She," Yoru said, very quietly, walking past a group of students who immediately found other places to look, "took his hand."
"Both hands?"
"Both hands."
"Where."
Yoru's eye twitched. "Her chest."
Silence.
"I see," Nana said. The voice of a woman updating a spreadsheet she hadn't admitted to keeping.
"In front of me," Yoru said. "She looked at me first. She looked at me and THEN she—"
"Breathe."
"I AM breathing."
"Breathe like a person."
Yoru breathed like a person. She pushed open the humanities building door and walked through it and breathed and felt the dangerous energy looking for somewhere to land.
"Tonight," Nana said calmly. "We talk tonight."
"Tonight," Yoru agreed.
She hung up.
Walked into her classroom.
The girl in the seat next to hers took one look at the expression and quietly moved one seat over without being asked.
Yoru sat down.
Opened her textbook.
Read the same line nine times.
Both hands, she thought.
Against her—
She closed the textbook.
Opened it again.
Fine, she thought, with the particular quality of fine that meant several other things. Fine. Fine. Fine.
The lecture started.
She understood none of it.