Higurashi, Kagome

Not every night, but perhaps once a week, Higurashi Kagome would awaken to find Houjou Inuyasha sitting quietly on the floor near the window. He was there even more often than that; she could tell by the small traces he occasionally left behind. These were not dirty footprints or handprints as she had sometimes found when he came from the other side (he was now a young man of her realm and understood the need to keep the outside world outside), but still, traces: the desk chair pushed aside, a 10-yen coin on the floor, a stick of chewing gum dropped on the balcony outside her window.

Some nights, she knew, he walked or ran; some nights he rode his bike, circling around the dark streets behind the shrine complex to the alley that led to the narrow service drive. If he rode, he would park the bike just out of sight of the house, behind the storage shed. He wore shoes on those nights—soft-soled deerskin moccasins from America or, as the weather grew warmer, rubber flip-flops—carefully removing them as he slipped in through the window, leaving them on the sill or holding them in his lap.

In the first few weeks she would slide down to meet him on the floor, or stay perched on her bed as he sat on the tatami. They would talk quietly, embrace briefly, and he was gone, out the window and back home. Then the holidays came and went, winter set in, and one night she was awakened by a cold blast of air from the window.

He sat silent in the dimness, cross-legged, arms folded. He was underdressed for the weather in sweats, the gray pants and crimson hooded jacket that were the warm-up gear of the Nakashima High School baseball team. His feet were bare. Usually she would find him watching her, but this time he was looking away, off to the dark corners of the room. A thought struck her, and immediately disturbed her, so she said nothing, and only lifted herself up on one elbow. After a moment, he said, "You awake?" His voice sounded strange, coarse. "Uh-huh," she answered.

To her surprise, he was silent again, his face still turned away from her. When he finally spoke, after a long couple of minutes, his voice was still oddly husky. "While you were in archery practice this afternoon," he said, and fell silent again.

She waited a moment, then prompted, "While I was in archery practice…"

"Your grandpa let me read the stuff in the shrine office," he said. "The story about…when I died and everything."

"Ah," she said. There was another long pause; in the dim light she could see him looking down at the floor. His hair had grown almost to his collarbone, and fell dark around his face in the gloom.

"So," he said at last. "I guess you weren't there when they buried me."

She sat up, shaking her head. "I was there," she said. "I wouldn't have gone away before you were…" She let her voice trail off, uncertain of how to complete that sentence.

He sighed and tilted his head backward, his glasses catching just a glint of light from the window. "Okay," he said. "The story your grandpa showed me…it says you…gave me to Miroku and Kaede and went home. I was thinking maybe you just…dropped me off and…I don't know." He paused again, and turned his face away from her. He hadn't actually looked at her since she'd awakened. "So," he said, "so where did you guys bury me? I mean, in…in Kikyou's old grave, or…or what?"

What was going on? Kagome pulled the blankets close around herself and looked thoughtfully at the boy who was huddled on the floor. The room was cold, and it suddenly occurred to her that he was shivering.

Kikyou's grave had stood on the grounds of shrine outside the forest where he had spent fifty long years pinned to a tree, an arrow stopping his heart. One day early in their quest they had hurried back to the shrine to find Kaede injured and her sister's grave desecrated, the bones and the soil that had held them scooped from the earth by the hag Urasue. Urasue herself had been the first to die at the hands of her construct, the creature with Kikyou's face and form but only a fraction of Kikyou's soul…just enough to hate, just enough to love and be loved, Kagome thought. And now the soul and mind of the lover who had given his life for Kikyou were here in this boy who crouched beneath the window of her room, shivering convulsively.

"We buried you under goshinboku," she said quietly, "beneath the spot where you were held by the arrow. The place where you and I first met." The place, she did not say, where you embraced Kikyou, and promised to protect her, and she swore she would not be touched by any other man. The place that I thought was ours. The place where you broke my heart. He sat silent, trying, she realized, to hide the spasms of shaking that seized him every few seconds. She continued, keeping her voice gentle. "Miroku dug the grave, and we were all there. We…we were very sad. Everybody cried, even Miroku. Kikyou was there, Inuyasha. She cried for you. She cried really hard."

He was quiet again for a moment, then said. "You cried, too."

She nodded. "I cried every day for months. I cried until I couldn't cry any more. I thought I would never stop crying."

He looked down again. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean to make you cry. Not any of the times." She heard him take a deep breath. "Did it help at all? My coming to you on this side, the way I am now? Did it help a little bit?"

She smiled. "It helped a lot," she told him. "I'm really glad you're here."

A few minutes earlier, when she had first seen him sitting there, she had had the terrible thought: He looks almost like the real Inuyasha.

At last he looked up at her, and in the moonlight he looked only like himself, like the sweet-faced boy from her class, the dark eyes wide behind owlish spectacles. He clenched his jaw, shivering again. She lay down on her side, lifting the covers with one hand. "Come in and get warm," she said. "I can hear your teeth chattering all the way over here."

She had to laugh at the change in his face. Pure deer-in-the-headlights: his mouth dropped open, his eyes widened until she thought they would pop from his head. "You mean," he said, "in bed with you? You don't…I can't…"

She laughed again. "Just to get warm," she said. "You can keep all your clothes on and everything. Come on, it's cold."

He looked all around, as though there were somebody there to catch him. Poor boy, all those parents and nannies and tutors and committee ladies hovering over him, all those Samurai Lectures. At last he took a deep breath and, again looking away from her, sat on the edge of her bed—he was still wearing his hooded jacket—swung his legs upward and reclined next to her. She pulled the covers over his shoulders and pressed close to him. He seemed to radiate cold.

He greeted her warmth with an audible sigh, a sigh she would come to know well. Over the years as he struggled with tests and papers and proposals and monographs and his dissertation, there would be nights when she worried that he was avoiding her, finding excuses to keep from sharing her bed. And then he would fall in beside her with that grateful sigh, pressing against her warmth, intertwining his arms and legs with her own, turning to nuzzle her neck and breathe her scent, his hands stroking her hip or cupping her breasts, and she would be reassured.

Now, this first time in her bed, he lay flat on his back, looking straight up, away from her. "You might take off your jacket," she said after a moment. "You'll probably be more comfortable, and you'll actually get warmer faster."

"Okay," he said. He sat up and busied himself with the zipper. She couldn't see in the dim light, but she knew his face and ears were flaming red. He pulled off the jacket and looked at it dumbly. He wore a t-shirt underneath. "Hang it on the bedpost so you can find it," she directed. He complied and started to settle down again. "You should take off your glasses, too," she said, "so you don't bend them. Put them on the desk," she instructed, as he pulled them off and stared at them, lost. He did as she told him and then lay down again. After a moment she felt him relax, his breathing becoming regular.

Suddenly he sat up. "This is no good," he said. "I'm dozing off. If I'm here in the morning we're both going to catch hell."

She sat up next to him. "Grab my clock radio," she said. "What time do you want to be out of here? I'll set the alarm."

"I don't know when your mom wakes up," he said. "If my dad has an early meeting he gets up around five. Wait a minute," he added, "I've got an alarm on my watch. I'll just set that." The face of the watch glowed aqua. "Four-thirty?" he considered. "Maybe four-fifteen."

She had known him long enough to know that he loved his watch almost as much as he loved his katana. It was a skin diver's watch, waterproof even under pressure. "Oh," she had said, "you go skin diving?" "Well, no," he had replied. "But it could be really useful. Like when a bridge collapses under me or something." He had said this in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, as though bridges crumbled beneath his feet every day of his life.

His watch set, he lay down again, pressed close to her side in the narrow bed. She reached a tentative arm across his chest. After a moment, his right hand reached up to rest on her arm. At last he looked at her, favoring her with a nervous smile.

He had been so cold, so gray, so silent.

Kagome squeezed her eyes shut and blew out a sharp breath, pushing the memory away.

She opened her eyes. He was staring at her, his eyes dark beneath the beautiful lashes, the expressive eyebrows concerned. She smiled up at him; he didn't smile back, but slid his left arm underneath her to cradle her against his shoulder, his hand with its elegant fingers gently cupping her elbow. She looked with pleasure at the shape of his arm—he was wiry, muscular but not muscle-bound, the tendons of the forearm cleanly delineated. She closed her eyes and felt him relax against her as well. It seemed only a moment later she blinked awake, bewildered by a tinny, pulsating sound. "That's my watch," he was whispering. "Gotta go." He kissed her and slid from the covers, grabbing glasses and jacket, and then he was gone.

***

That was the first time. The second time he was shy, unwilling to presume on her kindness. He felt a glow of pleasure at being invited back under the sheets, and they spent a happy half-hour or so in pleasant pillow talk—chat about school, mostly—before drifting off to sleep.

Over the next weeks their talk was sometimes intense, sometimes playful. The intense nights were marked by long, fervent embraces, but it was on the playful ones that they became adventurous, his hand slipping under her pajama top, hers stroking the inside of his thigh. They would bite and scratch, tickle and wrestle. He would kneel over her, pinning her wrists, she would suddenly hook a leg upward and throw him. He would hiss, "Aha!" She would giggle. Then they would shush each other, falling into a clinch.

One spring night he dragged his fingernails across the crotch of her pajama bottoms. With a gasp, she pulled him close into an open-mouthed kiss, and he wrapped his legs around hers, intoxicated by the way her scent intensified, by her sudden heat, by the way she pressed against him, by the feel of her hands sliding under the elastic waistband of his sweatpants to caress his bare skin. The hem of her pajama top was bunched up over her collarbone, and he pulled his t-shirt up as well to lie skin-to-skin on top of her, nibbling and sucking the soft juncture of her neck and shoulder.

She reached upward to stroke his ear and then dragged her nails forward along his cheek, setting off a storm of sensation in his groin. He began rocking against her, his mouth sliding down to seek out a bare nipple. He was moaning to her, words, sounds, nonsense, she was saying his name and telling him to go ahead, to do whatever he wanted to do, and suddenly his brain registered the warning his nose had been shrieking.

There was no time to head out the window. Fortunately, the evening was warm and he'd worn no jacket; somehow he had the presence of mind to grab his glasses off her desk as he half-somersaulted to the floor, pulling his shirt down and pants up as he traveled. Her mother inadvertently bought them time by pausing outside the door to call out, "Kagome, what's that noise?" Kagome, amazingly resourceful as always, leaned forward and hit the "On" button on her clock radio even as she pulled her pajama top down and the sheet up, covering the pajama bottoms that were down around her knees. A moment after he scrambled under the bed he heard the door open and knew her mother had found her daughter sitting tousled and bleary-eyed as the radio blared out a conversation between a talk-show host and some female caller. "Kagome," she said again, "what—"

"I don't know," Kagome said in her sleepiest voice. "I think I set the alarm wrong." He could hear her fumble with the radio as she muttered an apology.

Her mother walked to the middle of the room, and then, apparently seeing nothing amiss, turned back to the door. "Are you all right with that window open?" she asked.

"Mm-hm," Kagome said, the springs squeaking above his head as she snuggled back down. "I like the fresh air. Goodnight again, Mama," she said.

"Goodnight," said her mother. "Try to get back to sleep."

He waited for the scent of Mrs. Higurashi to disappear down the hall, and then rolled out from under the bed to see Kagome's head peering down at him, her long hair hanging down almost to his face. He sat up and planted a quick kiss on her lips (what if he were to climb back in next to her?) before leaping to his feet and swinging a leg over the windowsill. "See you tomorrow," he whispered. He found his shoes on the balcony and clambered down the tree, heading not across the grounds of the shrine but the long way down the service drive and through the back alleys, in case Kagome's mother should be sitting awake, watching out the window.

***

On the walk to school the next morning he avoided her eyes. Finally, she asked, "Is everything OK?"

"Yeah," he answered. "It just got kind of weird last night." He folded his arms and looked away from her, and they walked the rest of the way in silence. Kagome watched the ground, her long hair sheltering her face. Was he just embarrassed, or had she been rejected?

She sighed, suddenly remembering that night in the forest, the two figures under goshinboku.

That day was a busy one. The next day the choir would travel by bus to a resort where they were to give a concert at a conference of grocers from all over Japan. They would travel, rehearse, perform, stay the night, and then return the next morning. After that, experience told her, despite all efforts to distract him, Inuyasha would get increasingly sulky, caustic, and argumentative until he finally slumped, thin-lipped and scowling, in the back seat of the family car as he, his parents, and the nannies headed to the airport for the long plane ride to Canada and the annual meeting of his mother's committee.

This last day of school before Golden Week was to be filled with rehearsals, meetings, and checklists, after which he would go home to pack and she would go shop for a few odds and ends. Although they were in the same room most of the day, there was no time to talk, but even when she looked at him, he avoided her eyes.

After school she bought three pairs of navy blue tights, a pair of black shoes, a package of bikini underpants, a new white brassiere, a long, floppy nightshirt, and a modest but feminine nightgown, cotton jersey knit but romantic-looking with a long skirt and scooped neckline. That night she wore the nightgown to bed, but he didn't come through her window, and when her alarm went off she awakened alone. Disappointed, she folded the nightie and slipped it into her suitcase, then hurried to dress so she wouldn't miss the bus.