The tug-of-war hierarchy

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/64119244.

Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: F/F
Fandom: Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi
Relationship: Onodera Ritsu/Takano Masamune
Characters: Takano Masamune, Onodera Ritsu, Yokozawa Takafumi
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Character Study, Romantic
Comedy
Language: English
Series: Part 5 of the yuri manga editing department
Stats: Published: 2025-03-24 Words: 9,717 Chapters: 1/1
 The tug-of-war hierarchy
by Eristastic

Summary

A part of her had probably been counting on the death of the relationship to sink its corpse
into her body and poison her. She didn’t know what to do now she’d been robbed of that.

“Genuinely, are you okay?”

Masako looked up like someone who had just swam a marathon. Maybe her expression spoke
volumes: Onodera blanched a bit.

“Would you care?”

***

If you really squint, this might count as emotional progress for them both.

Notes

i spent a month reading about nothing but insects and the reign of emperor claudius and i
came back hornier than ever
By the time you enter university, you can swim lazily through the marshland, and the weeds
don’t try to trip you up like they did. You go slowly, rivulet to rivulet, class to class, tussock
to tussock, new face to new face, all in bite-sized chunks, all in mouthfuls of air. Sometimes
you still sink under, but the years have helped. You don’t stay under long. You don’t open
your mouth to swallow the polluted water, so it doesn’t fill your lungs.

She meets you at one of the countless evenings out you enjoy on the dime of whichever circle
you’re pretending you might join. This one, you’re almost serious about, because it’s
literature, and you’ve never had any choice in liking that. You’re drinking and talking, and
you notice that she doesn’t leave after the usual polite amount of time. It’s a whirlwind of
meetings and partings, waiting to see who’ll stick; it seems she’s decided to stick to you. She
talks to you all that night, the conversation smooth and slippery between you — not a flash of
quicksilver, but a strong undercurrent of steel latching closed between the two of you. She
hates the same things you do, and mocks them the same way you do. She smiles snidely or
bitterly or not at all, and she makes decisions for you. She pulls you up out of the water and
onto the grass, and you lie there, muddied and wet, staring at her like a beached fish.

Semesters pass, and she takes you to new things. Studying, networking: these are things you
can do alone, because they’re for a future that some part of you supposes you ought to
protect, in case it’s happy. She pulls you to the other things. She pulls you to bars, to
museums, to sports games you couldn’t care less about and a single club that both of you
decide isn’t your thing. She pulls you into bed, and you go where she pulls. You will never
pull her. All you’d have for her is the splash back into stagnating water.

But months pass, and still you lie on the grass with her, contemplating the sky. The colours
are different out of the water. She has a third smile now: sometimes she looks affectionate.
She talks about wanting to cut her already short hair, she talks about her parents, she talks
about next year, and where she’ll apply to work. Where both of you will apply to work. It
sounds fine to you. You play with the surface of the water with the tips of your toes.
Sometimes, you think you might be dry one day.

But then you happen to run into someone who was in the year below you at your high school,
and he happens to tell you.

You don’t react at first. He says it like another delicacy offered up on a silver platter by an
obsequious servant, ready to bring out another course at the slightest sign of your displeasure,
so desperate is he to please, so desperate is he to get laid. You were getting used to not
reacting above a mild murmur and another drag on your cigarette: this is no different. You’re
silent, you let him talk. You feel the heat of the cigarette on your fingers, and your lungs call
for it. You don’t move. They began to scream, to squall like abandoned infants, and finally
you murmur, and breathe in. It tastes like marshwater.

At first, you felt nothing, and you thought it might be over. Congratulations: you finally did
it. You finally unhooked the hide from the drum so it wouldn’t resonate anymore.

You were wrong, though. You should have known your emotions would never be honourable
enough to hurt you face to face: they have to lurk in the shadows and stab you from behind.
That night, late that night in the shitty apartment you share with her, you sit by the window
and smoke cigarette after cigarette. You plead a hangover and skip class the next day, and
though she can drag you to university the day after, it’s not the same. You drink more. You
smoke more. You talk less. She tries to reach out and you wish she’d stop. Can’t she see it?
You’re leaking, the fetid water spilling over the floor, but you can’t clean it up anymore.

She tries to help. She tries to pull you back up, tries to dig her feet into the slippery grass and
hold you above the surface, but like a doll’s arm, your skin ruptures, the water sloshes out,
you fall back in, and you don’t think she can see it. No one can ever see it: this wound is
internal.

You had thought your heart gone, but it had just sunk to the bottom, and now it has burst,
pooling blood and festering inside of you.

People can pull you out of the marsh, but you think you understand now that it will never last
unless you climb out yourself.

The sky looks familiar from under the water. You turn over, close your eyes, and open your
mouth.

***

The beer wasn’t that good. Masako was slightly perturbed by the possibility that she might be
going off beer, which would have put a severe dampener on her lifestyle, but she decided not
to condemn herself before she’d tried the army of cans she had in her fridge back home.

“I never get out anymore,” Yokozawa grumbled into her own glass. “Can you believe that
woman? She thinks she owns every evening I have.”

Masako valiantly refrained from rolling her eyes around the gloomy bar. “Hate to say it, but it
sounds like you’re giving them to her.”

That earned her a glare, a nice nostalgic one. She smiled and took another drink as Yokozawa
proceeded to convince absolutely nobody that she didn’t like how she was being wrapped
around her milf’s little finger.

“I’d like to see you try and get out of what she does. You think you know exactly how a
conversation’s going to happen and then you come out of it a kidney short.”

“How many do you have left by now? You keep going back.”
Another glare, dirtier this time. “Sorry, are you on her side? I called you out here to complain
about her. Have some fucking decency and commiserate.” Luckily, she went on before
Masako had to. “It’s Aki: he’s got no one else to play baseball with him.”

Masako paused, frowning. “He doesn’t have friends?”

“He’s got loads of friends, actually. I didn’t even know kids could have that many friends.
But it’s not the same as having a dad there to play with you, apparently.”

“A dad.”

“Which obviously I’m not. But I can play baseball with him: I used to do it all the time in
high school. I told you about that.”

“I remember.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do.” Vaguely. “Didn’t you say you do the cooking too?”

“Yeah. So?”

“No reason.”

“What, you want me to let her keep feeding him take-out?”

“Can’t he feed himself?”

“What? He’s ten. How old do you think he is? He needs nutrients. And less salt.”

“Right.”

“It’s better than cooking for myself, anyway,” she said a little huffily, leaning over the table.
“And it’s good to get exercise: this office life’ll kill you. You need to run around sometimes.”

“Is that why you cut your hair?”

Yokozawa glowered at the table. “No, she—” she said, and, as if she’d realised what she’d
been about to say, paused. “I thought it was time for a change.”

“Mm. Does she like it?”

Yokozawa kicked her under the table, and Masako grinned, kicking her back. It had been
hard for a few months back there (or no, admittedly closer to a year), but she thought they
were getting back on track. Yokozawa invited her out sometimes now, and she went. They
talked more easily these days. They complained darkly about work together, they talked
about books: it was good. It was fine. The bar was gloomy, cramped and relatively quiet, for
people who just wanted to drink and get on with their lives rather than make a fuss about it.
She got out her lighter and offered Yokozawa the pack, and Yokozawa hesitated but declined,
saying she was trying to quit, and that was fine too. It was a small jolt, but Masako put the
lighter away, and it was fine. They continued to complain about work: a comforting
communal ground, that. No department was free of idiots, and no idiot was ever content with
just being stupidly unobtrusively. The night continued slowly like the weights of a
grandfather clock climbing slowly higher, until finally the clock finally came to a sudden,
sickening stop when Yokozawa said, “By the way, I’m going away for a long weekend, week
after next. The three of us are going away for my birthday.”

She let it hang in there, smoke in the air.

“That’s nice,” Masako said blandly. “Friday to Monday?”

“Saturday to Monday. Two entire days off? Do you think I’m demented?”

“People are going to find out, you know.” This was what happened when she didn’t have
anything to smoke and her glass was empty: she said things. “You know what the office is
like.”

“I know. Neither of us really care: she’s told everyone we’re close as sisters. Mostly to piss
me off, but it worked.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

Yokozawa gave her a look, one of the new ones she’d started having, oh, about a year ago,
just when her relationship had really started to set in. Not that Masako knew for sure: they
hadn’t been talking at that point.

But it soon disappeared. Yokozawa looked away, stood up, stretched, and said casually, “She
tells me she loves me.” Another stretch, and finally her eyes were back on Masako’s, through
the water. “I’ve got to go back: we’re going out tomorrow morning. Here: this should cover
my drink.” A pause. “My birthday’s the Friday: I’ll be in the office. Week after next.”

Then she was gone, the warning still ringing in Masako’s ears. It drowned out the other
voices in the bar, the dull sound of the people and cars outside. She understood the message.
She’d always understood Yokozawa, but she was now fearing Yokozawa might have started
to understand her.

***

Masako opened her eyes at the sound of the water running in the apartment next to hers.
She’d been awake for a while, being blessed with an excellent internal clock and cursed with
the inability to go back to sleep once awake, but it was that sound that told her it was time to
get moving.
Sometimes it was pure happenstance that led to her and Onodera commuting together, and
sometimes it wasn’t.

Onodera locked the door, looked up, saw her, and adopted an entirely inappropriate
expression with which to look at one’s boss. Masako told her so, and the look got worse.

“Actually, I think I left the oven on,” she said, getting her keys out again. “You can just go on
ahead, and—”

And she made a hilarious squawking sound as Masako led her to the lift by the collar.

“What if my flat burns down?!” she demanded to know as the doors slid open like the weary
sigh of someone who was used to them by now.

“Then my flat will also burn and that’ll teach me.”

“Then let me go back and turn it off!”

“You didn’t even turn it on.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know that you live on a diet of energy drinks and convenience store meals and can’t cook
to save your life.”

Onodera, unable to deny that, spluttered a bit, and finally said, “Well, you can’t either.”

Masako found herself smiling. Some people were better than an energy drink.

“How was your weekend?” she asked as they left the lift and, in unison, checked their
postboxes. Onodera looked at her suspiciously as they left empty-handed.

“Why do you want to know?”

“It’s called making conversation, Onodera. Some civilised people do it.”

“Oh, that’s why I’m not used to it from you.”

“Catty! That’s all right, I’ll give you enough work to get that out of you.”

“That’s power harassment,” Onodera grumbled, because it was one of her favourite things to
grumble and got no more effective the more she grumbled it. “I’ll report you.”

“Well, tell me before you go to HR so I can give you something to really complain about.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“Now, now, you’re not that stupid,” Masako corrected her, and reached out to feel up her ass.
It was partly to be provoking, and partly because Onodera was in a pencil skirt, and Masako
was only human. Professionally high heels, dark stockings, and a pencil skirt that was just a
little bit too small. Masako loved the days they had meetings and Onodera felt she had to
dress up. She was only showing her appreciation, but of course she was yelled at for it before
she’d even got a good grab in.

“How dare you?!” Onodera screeched. “In public!”

Not very public: it was late in the morning and the commuter rush was long gone. “So the
issue is that it was in public, not that I did it? I knew you’d start being honest one of these
days, but not so soon—”

“I’m going to go turn the oven off!”

“No, you’re not,” Masako said, grabbing her arm. The objections were only just drowned out
by the sound of the road down which they were walking, and a lone cyclist gave them a very
odd look as he went by. Seeming to realise she wasn’t going to escape, Onodera began to
grumble to herself, and Masako glanced down at her.

“Well, since you’re not going to be polite, I’ll tell you what I did over the weekend.”

“I don’t care!” Onodera said pettishly, still struggling against the hand on her arm.

“I tried out those foreign fantasy books you mentioned.”

The struggle stopped instantly. “What did you think of them?”

“Too much description. Western books are always like that, have you noticed? They describe
things for pages. I start editing them mentally.”

“I didn’t expect you to get it,” Onodera said acidly as they reached the entrance to the station
and began to walk underground. “It’s a state of mind: you have to make yourself receptive to
the way the story is being told, or you’ll never understand.”

“I thought the increasingly complex political webs were a lot of fun, though.”

“It’s incredible how she does it! It always goes deeper than you think it will: just when you
think it can’t get any more complicated, she throws another spanner into the works. It’s
fascinating.” She paused thoughtfully, touching her wallet to the ticket barrier as they went
through.

Masako raised an eyebrow. “You were just thinking about how you don’t get that in yuri
manga, weren’t you?”

She flushed. “Well, would I be wrong?”

“Not wrong, just disloyal and unprofessional.”

“That isn’t fair! I didn’t even say it!”

“Thought crimes,” Masako mused as they stood on the platform. Onodera shot her a look (as
usual) and wandered over to the vending machine. Masako stretched her neck briefly and
turned, saying, “Get me a coffee while you’re at it,” only to see that Onodera was already
holding one out to her.

Mutely, she took it. The train came; they boarded. Onodera glared at her. “You could at least
say thank you.”

“I was recovering from the shock of you being considerate for once.”

“I’ll have you know I’m very considerate!”

“You kept everyone in yesterday’s product meeting thirty minutes longer than you needed to.
Mino had to sprint to make the school run.”

“You were the one who refused to compromise!”

“I’m the boss: I don’t compromise. I dictate and you obey.”

Sometimes when she heard something outrageous, Onodera would simply fly into indignant
anger, but sometimes, when her indignation meter hadn’t quite maxed out, she had a habit of
widening her eyes and looking to the side as if to appeal to an imaginary audience, and she
was doing it now. It was one of the things Masako mentally imagined crossing out in red pen.
That would have to go: she’d never make it in this business until she could hear the stupidest
idea imaginable and nod and say of course, you’re so right, I don’t know why I never thought
of it myself, but have you considered—

There was a lot of Onodera that needed some red pen. Delightful as her pencil skirts were,
she needed new ones: Masako suspected she hadn’t bought new clothes in a while. She
needed to do something about the way her hair refused to stop bleaching a pleasant brown in
the sun: it wasn’t a professional colour, brown. She needed to lower her voice and get rid of
that ugly gaping fish imitation she put on sometimes when her indignation meter did max out.
She needed to straighten her back: she could be a solid 165cm if she tried, but she had the
deplorable tendency to hunch her shoulders. She needed to learn to laugh without managing
to sound sorry for herself as she did it, like she was bemoaning the knowledge that she would
never be fluent enough with humour to make jokes that made people laugh. She needed to
tone down her intensity when she talked about books, and she needed to learn how to pick
her fights. She needed to eat things that had seen a minimum of processing since being
harvested or killed. She needed to stop stubbornly standing as far from Masako as good
manners allowed her when they were in the train. She needed to learn how to receive kind
words and gestures without blinking her wide, mystifyingly green eyes and breaking into the
kind of genuinely grateful smile that marked her as prey for life. She needed to stop giving
that smile to other people.

Masako sighed and stretched out her long legs over almost the entire width of the train (it
wasn’t busy). Mentally, she scribbled over Onodera in red, trying to colour her into a person
everyone could look at and say, “Yeah, you know what? I’d have wasted a decade of my life
for her too.”

They got off at the same stop, of course. Onodera made a brave attempt at getting away, but
she had shorter legs and higher heels, and Masako kept pace with her easily. It had rained in
the night: the June air felt fresh and sweet in her lungs, though she doubted any analysis of
the air quality would have supported the feeling scientifically.

“Good point in the cycle,” she remarked to the sky. “It’s been a few weeks since we’ve gone
out: pencil in Friday night for me.”

Onodera looked at her with mild revulsion. “Hey, do you remember what I said the last
time?”

“It was something stupid about never being alone with me again.”

“Right, well, there’s your answer.”

“You’re alone with me now.”

“Not by choice.”

“You’re a born victim, you know that?”

“Listen to me very carefully,” she said through gritted teeth as the office came into view, “I
will not spend any more time with you outside of work and work functions, and especially
not when alcohol is involved!”

“It’s true, you’re the lightest lightweight I’ve ever met,” Masako said blithely, because she
didn’t believe a word of it. It was one of those forced beliefs, like she supposed some people
forced themselves to believe in a god who might save them one day, but it was belief
nevertheless.

They were nominally more sedate as they walked into the office, greeted the reception staff,
and took the lift up to their floor. Nobody was in their lily-strewn section yet, because Mino
(on a normal 9-5 shift) was out with her authors, and there were still thirty minutes left until
the later shift started for the rest of them.

They dropped their things, turned on their laptops, frowned at their emails and the stupid
opinions contained therein. Masako kicked off her shoes and slipped on the work shoes she
had under her desk and idly did her hair up as she marvelled at how incompetent the people
clamouring in her inbox could be. One email triggered a memory: without looking up, she
said, “How’s promotion going?”

She was referring to the upcoming tankobon release of Onodera’s very own villainess series,
and Onodera, fully in work mode, straightened up and reported, “I’ve sent the graphic
department’s specs to the author and checked that he feels confident about it. I have a
meeting with the promotional department tomorrow to discuss a fair in stores where sales of
the magazine have been particularly high. I was also thinking,” she said, an honour student to
her very bones, “that we might include an author interview in this month’s edition. Not that I
want to give my author preferential treatment—”

“Why wouldn’t you want that?”

“I’m familiar with our authors, yes.”

“—and I thought we might suggest a one-page special of them drawing each other’s
characters, with comments on what they like in each series,” she finished, very almost
concealing how poorly she felt she’d been used in the last few minutes.

Masako nodded, mulling it over. Onodera had matured to the point where she could simply
stand there and wait for the idea to be digested, and she had matured to the point where she
had good ideas.

“Sounds good,” Masako said, tossing her planner over for Onodera to struggle to catch (she
managed it, though). “Put in half an hour this week for you, me and Kisa.”

Diligently, Onodera nodded, pushing her hair behind an ear as she inspected the schedule. It
was a mystery why she bothered with her hair: it had too much volume to stay put. In three
seconds, it was back to waving gently around her admirable jawline and oddly thin neck, just
falling short of brushing her shoulders. Watching it try, Masako said, “And put some time in
on Friday for our date while you’re at it.”

Onodera visibly stiffened. It was also visible that she was thinking of hurling the planner
back into Masako’s face, but she swallowed the urge. With the air of the world’s most frigid
ice queen, she put the planner back on the desk and said, “No, thank you.”

“We’re at a good point in the cycle: you’ve got the time. We’ll talk about work a bit too,
you’ll like that.”

She was back to scrolling through her inbox, confident in her catch. The morning had been
good, the feeling was good. Going out on Friday would be great for her, and great for them.

“I’m going out with friends this Friday.”

Masako paused in her ruthless deleting of emails that weren’t worth her time. “That can’t be
right: you don’t have friends.”

“I do, actually, thank you very much! And one of them is getting married, so we’re going
out.”

“What friends? You’ve never had friends. From where?”

“From university.”

Masako looked at her. It didn’t seem to be a lie. She remembered how it had felt to fall back
into water that tasted of mud and death. How much nicer it might have been to be making
friends instead.

But then, with an ungainly yawn and a loud ‘good morning’, Kisa showed up, and that was
the end of that. The working day had started, there were meetings to go to, and all Masako
could do was sit like a bubbling pot, waiting for someone to take her off the heat, but no one
ever would, least of all Onodera.

Stupid to think she would ever get that. She never had before.

***

There had been no need to worry: Masako still liked beer fine. She got through enough of it
that Friday to tell.

She had a better flat for smoking in now. She’d pulled the sofa up to the window and had
been leaning against the windowsill, smoking, and leaking again. The night air was cool, the
city lights a blur, and the honking of cars rose up to the distant, veiled stars. Time went by,
cigarette by cigarette.

It wouldn’t usually have been like that. Rejection from Onodera wasn’t new. She wasn’t
usually this bad.

It was Yokozawa’s birthday, and it had just gone half-ten. She’d remembered. She’d put it in
her planner, even. From the moment she’d woken that morning, she’d known, and even if
she’d tried, there would be no way to feign ignorance: she had been told not to forget. She
had been warned. She knew Yokozawa well enough to recognise it for what it was, and
apparently Yokozawa now knew her well enough to give her the ultimatum.

The thing was that she had tried: she had spent all week piling work on top of herself to make
sure she was busy, so busy, terribly busy, far too busy to think about things like birthdays.
Work was the old ally, the old conspirator, the one that gave her an excuse to not pay her
social debts.

She always seemed to be in debt. It piled up like chains around her ankles, but it wasn’t
forever. It might not even be for tomorrow, the way things were going.

It was about time, she supposed. Yokozawa had spent too long pulling her: it was high time
she realised she could let go. It was high time she realised that Masako wasn’t happy for her,
and perhaps she might even realise why.

Yokozawa was happy now. It had been a long time since university: it had been easy to forget
how she looked when she was really, truly happy. Look at it from her perspective: she had
everything she wanted. She had someone she wanted, and who wanted her back. And the
unfortunate thing was that they were playing the same game, and only one of them was
winning; ergo, Masako was losing to her. She was losing, so she couldn’t acknowledge the
person she was losing to. She couldn’t reach out. She couldn’t need Yokozawa more than
Yokozawa needed her. There was an order to these things. There was a ranking. Yokozawa
always had to be the one beneath her — else, what would happen to her pride? She would
become a retroactive parasite.

She stubbed a cigarette out on the windowsill, idly hoping it would ruin the varnish.

Yokozawa probably wasn’t waiting for her anymore. Had she been waiting at all? Had she
seen in the bar that it was useless? Had her loving partner listened to the story and told her?
She had always been a little blind to these things herself. Maybe someone had had to tell her
it was pointless to wait for largesse from someone like Masako. There was no chance she was
still waiting to be called, texted, thought of at all. She would have given up long ago, and
there would be someone there to distract her. She would have written the whole thing, the
whole relationship off.

Masako could feel it. The thing they’d called a friendship was in its death throes now,
shuddering and dying in her hands, soon to be a corpse that she would swallow so it would
only poison her, its murderer, while Yokozawa went free. It died second by second, and she
sat there against the window, chain smoking and drinking, trying to drown with alcohol and
ash the pollution in her blood, because she knew, even as she felt the pathetic creature die in
her hands, that it wasn’t what had pulled her further under the water. That had been the
thought of Onodera out tonight, out and happy with people who weren’t her.

Regrets made her thoughts fizz like a bad chemical reaction. She should have done
something to stop it, if it was going to feel like this. She should have gone to wherever
Onodera was and dragged her away; she should have had the foresight to hide a tracking
device under own tongue and force it down that idiot’s throat for times like this, for times
when she was out with someone else, having fun with someone else, being fine with someone
else, so Masako could drag her back where she belonged.

But she couldn’t do that. It wasn’t a qualm of morality — her loyal department often told her
she had none of that. It was because she was unable to do it, plain as that. She could wait, for
years she could wait, and she could chase, and if worse came to worst, she could hunt, but
she couldn’t pull Onodera towards her anymore. What happened when Onodera pulled away,
leaving her to fall back into the water?

Funny to worry about that, as if she couldn’t feel the mud around her legs, pulling her ever
deeper.

She was upset, and she used it as an excuse. I’m upset, so I shouldn’t have to worry about
other people who are happier than me. I’m upset, so I can watch the clock tick its way to
eleven, and still do nothing, nothing but sit and watch the time pass, bear witness to the
pitiful death of the thing in my hands. It was the least she could do, if she wouldn’t save it.
No one else would care when it was gone.

She knocked ash over the windowsill and watched smoke cloud out the moon, just for a
moment. Fine night for a funeral. Fine night for everything to end, and for her to wake up
tomorrow just that little bit more alone, just that little bit worse.
The first knock didn’t register as a real sound. It was as distant as the cars many storeys
below on the murky night streets.

The second one was louder, angrier. This time, she frowned, stubbed out the cigarette, and
walked to the door. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t Onodera.

She was standing there, fuming in an unobjectionable blouse and skirt pair (they had to get
her new clothes, Masako thought distantly. She had to know she looked washed out in
anything but the sweaters she wore on her down days). She’d clearly tried to do something
with her hair, but the volume had bested her and it looked dangerously haystack-like now.
She’d tried makeup too, that was new. Her eyes looked greener and bigger. They also looked
more indignant.

“Sorry to bother you so late at night,” she said in a voice that suggested she in fact took grim
pleasure in the bothering, “but can I ask why my entire apartment smells like smoke?”

Masako’s mind hadn’t caught up yet: it was still back on the sofa, back at the funeral. “Did
you leave the oven on?”

Onodera looked liable to hit her. “I left a window open for air while I was out and now it’s
full of the smell of cigarette smoke.”

“I mean, that’s on you. You know I smoke.”

“It’s never been this bad before.”

“You leave your window open regularly?” She was mildly taken aback by the faith in
Tokyo’s air quality. “Does your air conditioning not work or something?”

“It works! It’s a preference! And sometimes your smoke gets in, but like a good neighbour I
don’t mention it, and it’s never this bad! Did you smoke an entire pack or something?!”

As if pretending to look for the offending empty packet, she peered past Masako’s arm;
perhaps she hadn’t expected to find it. It and its fellow were there, by the sofa, with the cans.
Onodera paused. She looked back at Masako with the air of a rabbit that had sensed a hawk;
she often looked like that. It was part of her ‘born victim’ bit. People might respect her more
if she did literally anything else, and Masako had told her so, but she wasn’t good at taking
personal criticism.

She was hopeless: that was it. She couldn’t dress herself, she couldn’t feed herself, she
certainly couldn’t be let out in society. But look at her: she’d tried. She’d dressed up. Who
had she dressed up for? Who had she done her makeup for? Why did they matter so much?
What would it take to make sure she never saw them again? What would it take to make her
come here instead? What would it take to make her stay?

Nothing was happening: Masako just stood there in the door, witnessing the time pass by. It
wasn’t that she didn’t know what she wanted, needed, to do, but she couldn’t move. Once
again, the ash and alcohol had let her down. She could feel the thing poisoning her even now.
“Um,” Onodera said. “Um. Is Yokozawa there?”

She might as well have asked if the prime minister was there. “What? What are you talking
about?”

“I was just asking!”

“Just asking a stupid question.”

“It’s not stupid! It’s her birthday today: I saw it in your planner, so I thought maybe she’d
come over for a drink and she might still be here so I should go — that’s a normal thing to
think!”

There was a creak from down the hall. Sadly, there were three apartments on this corridor:
Onodera grimaced at the thought of their neighbour coming out and complaining about them
making a fuss in a communal area at this time of night, and she made to flee, like she always
did — the difference was that this time, she fled through the open door into Masako’s flat
rather than her own.

“I guess she’s not here,” she said stupidly once she was inside and the door was closed. She
was holding herself stiffly, like she feared she might be attacked, like she hadn’t fucking run
in here of her own volition. She looked around, as if she hadn’t been here many times before,
and seemed to be searching for something. “So, uh. Did you go out with her?”

“Why do you keep talking about her?”

“Because I know she’s your friend and it’s her birthday and that’s a normal thing to ask about
in normal conversation?”

“Oh cool, you’ve been reading up on it.”

“I have not!”

“Shame: you need to.”

“It’s a Friday night! It’s normal to ask what people did on a Friday night, so that’s what I’m
doing!”

Masako clapped politely and was rewarded with a look of utter loathing. She mentally saved
it and kept it for later, when she might get a good laugh out of it.

Onodera had basically offered herself up on a plate here. She was dumb, but not dumb
enough to not know what entering this flat meant. It would have been so easy to reach out
and pull her over. Ordinarily, Masako would have done it.

Instead, she sat down heavily on the sofa, felt it yield under her, felt herself say, “No, we
didn’t go out. We’re adults, Onodera: we don’t need to meet up or send a cutesy little
message for every single birthday.”
Onodera looked at her. There was surprise first, and then she frowned like she was thinking
and it was using up a lot of energy. “She came over for your birthday.”

Of course she’d remember that. “That was different. It happened to be my birthday, that was
all.”

“Isn’t she the one who always invites you out too?”

“What? Why do you even know that?”

“Because she does it in the office. We’re all there.”

“You should be focused on your work, not personal conversations.”

“She shouts it across the entire floor!”

“And yet my comment remains the same.”

“Do you… I mean, do you like her?”

“Do I like her? Aren’t you the one who keeps telling me we’re not in high school anymore?”

She was biting her lip now. She didn’t do that often: Masako couldn’t bring herself to scratch
it out with red pen. Eventually she glanced around the room and finally forced herself to meet
Masako’s eyes to say, “I think you should text her.”

“What?”

“I think you should—”

“No, I heard you, I was just wondering how you got the hypocrisy out without choking.”

Something twitched under Onodera’s eye, and she paused as if for patience. That was no
good. Masako added, “Because I’m the one who had to make sure you didn’t ghost your ex-
fiancé right after breaking up—”

“Yeah, I get it, message received, lesson learnt, so how about you do the same thing and text
her?!” It came out in a spew of fury: she fumed like the little spitfire she was, and after a
moment’s thought, she said, “And you might want to offer to meet up sometime next week.”

Sitting limply on the sofa, Masako stared up at her over the rims of her reading glasses. It
was like they were speaking different languages.

Onodera glanced down at her watch and added, “You should probably hurry up, too.”

She must have spotted Masako’s phone on a bookcase: she picked it up, brought it over and
left it pointedly on the sofa, then went back to hovering awkwardly in the middle of the
room.

“Go on,” she said.

“We’re not at work.”

But she was here. Awkwardly, uncomfortably, but she was here.

Masako picked up the phone. She almost fumbled it, but she wasn’t that far gone. She opened
it, looked down at it.

“Do you always take this long?” There was a pause. Then, worried like she might actually
have to do it, “Do you need me to dictate something?”

“If you want me to edit it.”

“Then just do it!”

She did it. She couldn’t believe she was doing it, but she did it, and sent it, and looked at the
text on the screen. It couldn’t be undone now. It sat there, emasculating her.

There was something more to it, though, as she put the phone on the table gingerly. A part of
her had probably been counting on the death of the relationship to sink its corpse into her
body and poison her. She didn’t know what to do now she’d been robbed of that.

“Genuinely, are you okay?”

She looked up like someone who had just swam a marathon. Maybe her expression spoke
volumes: Onodera blanched a bit.

“Would you care?”

That put her back on track. “It’ll affect my work. We can’t have you off next week.”

“I’m not ill.”

“Oh. That’s fine, then.”

“Aren’t you back too early?”

It seemed to take her a moment to realise what she’d been asked. She still wasn’t sitting
down. “Too early? It’s almost midnight.” But she thought about it, and the accusation must
have fallen on fertile ground, because she added, “Anyway, they weren’t close friends or
anything. We just happened to be in the same seminars. It was a big group, and everyone’s
getting married or already married, so I left early. I do have friends,” she said firmly, “just not
them.”

Masako marvelled at her. She marvelled at the ability to say that, confess that. The taste of it
stuck on her tongue: when Onodera grumpily asked what she had been doing to distract her
from sending a single birthday message, she said, “I was smoking alone, letting it happen.”
There wasn’t an immediate answer to that. Onodera looked at her, looked across the carpet,
the table, the gap between them; there was always a gap, and Masako didn’t have the strength
to reach across it tonight. She didn’t have the pride, she didn’t have the face. She couldn’t
force what wouldn’t be led, and she could already taste the mildewy water in her lungs.

If she did nothing, nothing would happen: it was always like that. Onodera stood there
awkwardly in her stockings, shifting her weight over Masako’s floorboards, and it was
obvious she knew she should be saying something — perhaps it was even obvious that she
wanted to — but she wouldn’t. She never did. She was a self-obsessed, selfish creature, and
she would never give what was needed from her, ever.

What was Masako doing? It wasn’t just Onodera’s not-friends: marriage was an epidemic
right now among Masako’s acquaintances too. Everyone was off getting married, becoming
happy: even Yokozawa was happy now, leaving her behind. Why was she here, condemning
herself to spend the rest of her life chasing someone who would never come back to her?
Why was she going to spend the rest of her life in the stagnant waters of a swamp no one
would ever care enough to search for her?

Of course they wouldn’t search it. They couldn’t even see it.

Masako sat back on the sofa, running a hand down her face. She could see Onodera watching
her: there was genuine worry there, but it wasn’t worry for her, it was the worry of someone
coming across a dog off its chain and wondering how to get out without being bitten.

Unable to stop herself, she sank her face into her hands and opened her mouth to tell Onodera
to get out, and then she heard the fridge door opening.

Frowning, she looked up, wondering if she had it in her to ask what the hell kind of right
Onodera thought she had to go looking for snacks in someone else’s house, but it wasn’t
food. Onodera had pulled out a can of beer and was looking at it as if it had personally
offended her. Then, with a crack and a hiss, she opened it.

Looking back across the room, she took a breath and said, “So you know how you can get me
to do most things when I’m drunk?”

“What?”

“Don’t get used to it,” she said, and with full eye contact brought the can to her lips.

***
Predictably, it took just one and a half cans before the idiot was on the floor and bursting into
angry tears.

“It was awful,” she whined, furiously rubbing tears away from her eyes. Fascinatingly, she
had enough control left to only wipe the undersides of her eyes, leaving her eyeshadow
intact. “I knew it would be awful! I knew they’d all be talking about their husbands and their
babies and their boyfriends! I knew! I don’t know what I thought would happen! I started
talking to them and I just knew there was this wall there, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to
like them!”

Masako still couldn’t totally believe what was happening. “Why did you go if you knew?”

“Because I was trying! It never works, but I was trying!” She began to cry again. “I don’t
know why it doesn’t work! I don’t know why I just can’t get on with normal people! Why
does it always have to be you?”

Because that was what they’d become. That was what they’d made of each other: lonely,
abnormal people — but people who nevertheless understood each other, and would always
find their way back to each other.

Masako had to believe that, and moments like these made it easier.

“I don’t know,” she said truthfully, picking herself off the sofa with new strength, “but what
can we do?”

When she reached down to pick up the mess on her kitchen floor, Onodera let out a sound of
protest, tried to scoot backwards, but then when she felt arms around her, instantly hers were
around Masako’s neck, her face buried in her shoulder. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t pretty,
but Masako managed to pick her up, take a moment to catch her balance as Onodera
scrambled to not be dropped (thereby increasing her chances of being dropped) and then she
slowly made her way to the bedroom. The arms around her neck were tight, and her shoulder
was wet now. Onodera was still sniffling and mumbling protests, and nothing was right, but it
didn’t matter, because Masako was filled with the honey-coloured knowledge that Onodera
had — ungraciously, resentfully — come to her.

That was really all it had taken to make everything better. She was more hopeless than the
woman in her arms.

“I’ll always be here,” she heard herself say in a voice deeper than her own, stroking the
incorrigible hair under her jaw. “I’ll always understand you.”

Onodera shook her head earnestly, groaning an objection, and when she was finally dropped
onto the unmade bed, she let out a cry, tried to escape the arms that pinned her down, shook
her head, almost kicked — and yet when Masako straightened up, she looked up with tear-
filled eyes and said, “D-don’t go. I don’t know what to do when you’re gone.”

It wasn’t a romantic confession: it was just a plea. Masako smiled and bent down to kiss her.
For someone nearing thirty, she still didn’t kiss well. She was right back to the struggling, the
gulped cries that Masako muffled with her mouth, the futile hitting of Masako’s chest with
her palms, but when Masako broke away from her, she leaned right back up like she was
ravenous for whatever she thought she’d find in Masako’s mouth. She was bad at kissing, but
she was desperate for it, kissing everything she could find until Masako finally pinned her
down and made out with her like she wanted so badly. She seemed to sob, and writhed in the
arms that held her, but her mouth was open and pliant and willing. She tasted of beer, but it
was nothing like it tasted when drunk alone

“You taste so bad,” Onodera whined when she’d finally filled something of the hunger she
wouldn’t admit to. Wiping her mouth, wiping her eyes, she looked up angrily, tearfully, and
said with only a little slurring of her words, “You don’t, you don’t get to just do this to me.
This wasn’t why I drank it.”

“That’s just a blatant lie.”

“It’s not. It’s not,” she insisted when Masako tried to get her shirt off. She fought, trying to
pull the thin fabric back down, and a button went in front of her chest, making it gape over
her bra. Masako looked, touched: with just the one finger, she reached in the gap and found
Onodera’s breastbone, stroking down it slowly, watching how her tits rose and fell heavily.
She glanced up and saw that Onodera was watching her as if scared, as if starving, but now
she’d realised she was caught, she struggled again: “Stop, stop! You don’t get to do that!”

“I should fucking hope no one else does. That’s my right.”

“It’s not! Go away!”

She shook the hand off her and sat back against the headboard, chest heaving against the thin
fabric of her blouse, her skirt splayed over the bedsheets and her knees pressed tightly
together, rubbing against each other. Masako sat up on her shins again, watching them, and
not just because she wanted those thighs more than she could say. It was the way she was
being watched, the way the knees were moving: there was a story there. Onodera was always
telling it in one way or another, but it wasn’t usually this obvious.

“Fine,” she said, and almost smiled at how Onodera’s eyes widened. “Fine, but you’ve played
me around enough: you can do something for me, can’t you?”

Onodera glared at her, but her knees were still rubbing against each other.

“You can get on your knees for me, can’t you?”

Onodera continued to glare, but there was something in the set of her mouth now. Masako
left it enough time to sink in, and then said, “Don’t be a fucking tease: it’s just kneeling.”

“I’m not a tease,” Onodera grumbled, but she changed her position so she was sitting up on
her knees, defiant for some reason.

“And you can turn around for me, can’t you?’’

“Oh my god, I’m not asking for the world: I’m asking you to turn around.”

Another glare, another grumble, but she did it.

“And you can lift your skirt up for me, can’t you?”

The grumbling paused for a moment. Of course, they couldn’t see each other like this: that
had been the point. She needed to ramp up slowly, because she was an idiot.

“Can’t you?”

Slower than could really be forgiven, she picked up the hem of her flouncy skirt and lifted it
up. Her thighs were quivering.

“You can lift it higher than that, can’t you?”

And she did. She lifted it until the hem was just underneath her ass, and her thighs rubbed
together with nerves or anticipation.

“Good girl,” Masako said, and saw her body jolt. “You’re almost there. You can bend over
for me, can’t you?”

There was no hesitation this time: still holding her skirt up, she bent over, resting her cheek
on the pillows: she was squeezing her eyes shut, but Masako wasn’t looking at her face. She
was looking at the way Onodera’s stockings darkened just the right curves, the way her thighs
shivered with want, the way she was visibly wet, and visibly arching her back to give a better
view, like she was waiting for approval.

She could have that, if she liked.

As usual, she cried out in protest when she felt Masako’s body over her back, but choked on
those same protests when a demanding hand started feeling up her cunt, stroking her and
playing with her through the fabric. She moaned with the kind of pleasure she should never
show anyone else, her arms giving out as she collapsed into the pillows, but Masako held her
hips up, holding all the weight of her limp body, controlling her, owning her — it should
always be like this, she thought fiercely as she leaned closer and felt their body heat together.
Onodera never wore a very high denier count: it was the work of one sharp nail to rip the
stockings and pull the useless things away, move aside the soaked fabric and push fingers
inside her, rubbing up and scraping against her clit when she started to struggle again.

Like someone who’d never learnt to hide their feelings, she was gasping and crying into the
pillows. She kept trying to close her thighs and Masako kept forcing them open, finally
forcing her cunt open too, holding it there so she would feel the cold, the lack — and when
she let out a sob, Masako pushed her over onto her back.

“No,” she was saying, covering her face with her hands, “don’t!”
But she was a mess of dishevelled and ripped clothing, and her thighs were wet. Masako
pulled the stockings off, did her the favour of unzipping the skirt rather than ripping that too,
unbuttoned the blouse and got rid of it, and it was only when she got her hands on the bra that
Onodera finally managed to intervene.

“Stop,” she was saying, shaking her head like her fingers weren’t frantically tracing over
Masako’s rather than gripping them. “You can’t, you can’t.”

“Here’s a tip: when it comes to your body, there’s nothing I can’t do. Look at you,” she said
proudly, wiping her fingers on the shivering upper thighs before her and mercilessly
displaying them under the lights where they’d glisten. “You wanted this, remember.”

“I didn’t, I never said that,” she insisted, but she and her body must have been on different
pages, because she was rutting against Masako’s thigh helplessly. She was wet and she was
soft and she was desperate and she was pleading. Masako watched this, warmth tightening in
the pit of her gut, and with a grin, she pushed Onodera’s bra over her tits and bent to kiss
them.

“You know you’re giving all women a bad name with that ‘no, no’ schtick, right?” she asked,
her voice slightly muffled on account of her mouth being occupied. “Look at how much you
actually want it. You’re the reason men get the wrong idea.”

Sitting up, letting her hands take over, she shoved her thigh hard against Onodera’s pussy and
smiled at how that made her choke. She rubbed it in, stroking her inner thighs to coax them
further apart, get her wider, wetter, even more wanting until all she’d think about was what
Masako could give her. She was a mess: hands to her mouth, tits out and red with lovebites,
and she couldn’t make eye contact, she never would, but she was receptive to the coaxing,
and she spread her legs wider in surrender. Masako smiled, something roaring with pleasure
in the pit of her gut. She pushed her fingers back in Onodera’s pussy and rubbing hard, hard
enough that she could see the shape of them, hard enough that she could delude herself into
thinking she was marking her territory, and said, “Not that I’m ever letting a man get his
hands on you again.”

At that, Onodera looked up with dazed eyes. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips slightly
swollen, and she was crying again. That was another thing that needed to be edited with red
pen: she should be a prettier crier, if she was going to do it so much.

Smiling, Masako leaned down to kiss the tears away, but to her surprise, Onodera didn’t just
let it happen. She sat up, making Masako sit up too, and put arms around her neck, pulling
her closer, kissing her, kissing her, grinding up on her thigh, sighing like a whore with the
pleasure of it, and probably still believing she wasn’t a lesbian.

And that was fine. It was fine for now. Masako kissed her back and reached down to take
care of them both, but to her surprise, again, Onodera began to kiss down her body. It was her
neck, hungrily, and then, as Masako hurriedly pulled her shirt off, down her chest to her
stomach, and by that time she was all but prostrating herself on the bed; with glazed eyes, she
looked up and began with unsteady fingers to undo the zip in front of her.
Masako didn’t understand what was happening. This never happened. Onodera never did this.
She had to have help in removing the jeans, and she’d chosen a stupid position to do this, but
she didn’t back away, not even when she had Masako’s cunt in front of her face. She only
hesitated, licking her lips, and looked up with wide, lost eyes.

They knew each other too well. Masako carded fingers into Onodera’s hair and forced her
head into position, and only then was there a shuddering sigh and the first inexperienced kiss.

It was what she wanted. She wanted to be held down, she needed to be forced, she needed to
be caught and manhandled into it to get over the barrier of her personality, and Masako was
never able to do it in the right way because of the rot in hers.

What a pair they made.

No amount of guiding was going to make Onodera good at eating pussy, but she tried so hard
it was impossible not to respond. She shuddered with desire, moaning and kissing and
sucking and yielding to every instructive push on the back of her head, her fingers alternately
stroking and digging into flesh for support, and she was grinding against the sheets, so
hungry, so desperate, so willingly servile. She served like she’d been dreaming of it for years,
like she’d wanted nothing more than the firm hands around her head to tell her what to do, to
tell her she was wanted. The sounds she made should have been criminal, and when Masako
finally lifted her back up, she fixed hazy eyes on her and licked her own wet lips.

Masako kissed her, because she thought she’d go mad if she didn’t. She needed her all the
time, in every way — why wouldn’t she understand that? Pushing her back onto the bed, she
hooked Onodera’s leg over her hip and slotted them together, kissing away the frantic cries of
alarm that soon melted into breathy pleasure as Masako began to roll against her. It was hot
and they were too desperate, they needed each other too much, and Onodera clearly didn’t
know what this was or why she was feeling it all through her body because although she was
moving too, she was looking up for help. She looked lost, dizzied, terrified by the enormity
of her own pleasure, so Masako kissed her. She kissed away her fear and brought them closer,
closer together, swearing hoarsely at how good their cunts felt together, and she promised
herself she’d buy toys for next time, because if she couldn’t chain this idiot to her, she could
at least fuck her senseless.

***

The morning came grey and damp. Masako looked at it idly through the window before
finally looking down at the phone that had woken her up with its buzz.
It was Yokozawa. She was complaining that the birthday message had been way too late, that
they had seen each other in the office that day and she could have just said it then. It would
have been a fair point to a normal person. She also included a photo of a meal.

‘Aki made it for me with his useless mother.’

It looked, frankly, terrible. She considered saying so, but to her surprise, the poison wasn’t in
her fingertips.

‘I’ll be quicker next year,’ she said. ‘Food looks great.’

Then, she turned her phone off and turned to gently put her arms around the woman sleeping
next to her. She knew she’d be shouted at when Onodera finally woke up. She knew there
would be outrage and hysterics and accusations (mostly founded) and threats, and everything
would go back to normal, but she didn’t mind. The water didn’t feel so polluted when there
was someone there with her.
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