Work Text:
It would be much easier for Kanade if this burning question of Mafuyu’s was answered with one incident. How...exactly were you supposed to deal with a friend who kept asking to kiss you so she could eventually try to figure out the reasons behind why she wanted to?
That’s a stupid question, really. The answer for most people would be to politely turn it down and try and figure it out some other, saner way. Unfortunately, Kanade was apparently not ‘most people.’ She would definitely acknowledge that it was a stupid idea to give Mafuyu permission to do something like that, but just because it was a stupid idea doesn’t really guarantee that she won’t agree to it.
Was she saying she hated it? Not at all, really. Well...it was complicated. She didn’t hate it, though she couldn’t say she didn’t hate that she didn’t hate it. But if she tried too hard to explain that in proper words it would start sounding pretty confusing. Mafuyu was a talented, intelligent, beautiful young woman. She had a lot potentially going for her. Kanade couldn’t really say that the idea of someone like Mafuyu wanting to kiss someone like her fit the bill quite right. That was only the surface level of this...iceberg of a problem, though.
She wished she could say her roommate wanting to kiss her was the entire problem!
Mafuyu had her chair pulled into the room and up next to Kanade as they worked in front of Kanade’s setup, writing pad in Mafuyu’s lap and Kanade passing ideas around with Ena and Mizuki. The usual kind of late night for their group. Mafuyu’s laptop sat at the edge of the desk, just another part of the eventual integration of their workspaces on the frequent nights that they decided it was simply easier if they both worked in the same room.
“You said you were going to have the lyrics typed up tonight, right?” Ena’s voice comes through their headsets as Mafuyu scanned over her writing.
“I was about to start now, yes.”
“All right. When you feel like you have enough to give me an idea of something, go ahead and send me a sample, okay?”
“Okay.” Out of habit, Mafuyu simply muted herself after the agreement. Unless she had something to remark on, she wasn’t exactly the chattiest member of the group, especially when she was working on her lyrics actively. Over time, she took to just...muting without really letting the others know, but the rest of them caught on easily enough.
After giving her a quick glance, Kanade turned her attention back to her own computer, her left foot pulled up onto the chair and her leg folded in front of her as she reviewed the demo she had so far. The work was pretty uneventful tonight, honestly. Aside from the idle chitchat on Ena and Mizuki’s end with Kanade’s occasional response, they were all pretty focused on one thing or another. It was a nice, familiar energy to Kanade, honestly. Finally managing to beat her slump enough to get a few demo ideas, she finally felt capable of actually being productive.
Maybe a couple hours in, and Mafuyu had enough typed up to sample to Ena and Mizuki before getting back to reviewing for potential changes. Kanade was still thoroughly distracted with her sheet music. For the most part, she had a lot of everything else being said tuned out as background noise at this rate.
So...when there’s suddenly a hand on top of her folded knee, it startles the hell out of her. Jumping in her seat, Kanade let out an embarrassingly audible startled noise, looking over at Mafuyu with wide eyes.
“Whoa, what was that?”
“Kanade? Everything okay?”
“I-I’m fine, sorry. Just...dropped something, it scared me is all.”
“Ehh...Mafuyu?” Ena sounded reasonably skeptical. They all knew better when it came to Kanade, after all. Kanade glanced over at Mafuyu, who merely stared at her for a moment before unmuting with a tap of her finger to her keyboard.
“She did. She was just too focused on what she was doing, so it scared her.”
“I see. All right, all right.” Ena seemed to drop it easily after Mafuyu confirmed Kanade’s clumsy lie as the truth. Muting once again, Mafuyu looked back over at Kanade, who did the same to keep Mafuyu from being overheard on her own end.
“You’ve been sitting like that this entire time. I was going to tell you not to stay like that.”
“Ah...right. Sorry.” Dropping her leg, Kanade sighed. She arched her back forward a little bit, allowing herself a moment to stretch when she realized there was a little bit of an ache from her poor posture. Watching for a moment, Mafuyu seemed to wait until Kanade finally actually noticed she was in fact, still staring at her before speaking up again.
“You also haven’t slept much at all today.”
“Oh...I’m not really tired enough to sleep, though. It’s fine.” Particularly blunt with the suggestions today, wasn’t she? Not that she could blame her. It still wasn’t exactly her strong suite, taking care of herself.
Mafuyu’s chair scoots a little bit closer, and Kanade jolts in her own when the other girl leans in closer, her hand reaching over to the smaller one that rested on the half-filled music sheet. “I still think you should take a break.”
“M-Mafuyu, really, I’m good—”
“Then, I would like to take one.” Well, there goes Kanade’s poorly held together composure. She sputters, caught on a half-said word as Mafuyu’s finger brushed against the back of her hand and wrist. It was really no different from how she acted all this time, but ever since the kisses started, even the usual physical contact was honestly kind of nerve-wracking to suddenly be subjected to.
“Th-this is...a strange way to try and rope me into taking a break…”
“Is it?”
“Yes?!”
“You’re speaking like you already know what I’m trying to do.”
“Well I—well...um.” Hm. There’s always been times when despite Mafuyu’s disposition, she had an odd sense of humor. She liked to crack deadpan jokes, she liked making Ena irritable over little things, and she said things that were a little bit scary to the rest of them. Not that she ever said blatantly that she was doing any of it out of amusement, but it was just one of those things that became easy to pick up on. Well...it was easy to pick up on if you weren’t the target, of course.
It was honestly kind of...charming, in its own right. It would be a lot more charming right now if it didn’t make Kanade look like a proper idiot at the moment. Beet red, Kanade just looked away, not really sure what she could say to pick her dignity up off the floor from that slip-up. Staring at her for a good few seconds, Mafuyu simply reaches over, gently sliding the headset off of Kanade’s head and placing it on the desk. Getting a hold of the composer’s arm rests, she turned the chair towards her and got the alarmed girl to look at her again.
“What?” Couldn’t she just say something? Instead, Kanade watched nervously as Mafuyu got out of her own chair. One knee slid onto Kanade’s chair while the rest of Mafuyu leaned towards Kanade, her hands still on the arm rests for support. The back of Kanade’s head pushed against the back of her chair, blue eyes staring back at Mafuyu with the look of a cornered mouse.
“M-Mafuyu?!”
Well...she didn’t say Kanade’s assumptions were probably wrong. Then again, she didn’t even say what she thought Mafuyu wanted in the first place. The truth was, they were both smart enough adults at this point to know what sort of request this was leading to anyway. At least, when recent incidents were considered, it was easy to figure it out without saying.
“W-we’re still on call you know—”
“Everyone’s muted.” That’s supposed to make it fine?! Mafuyu’s raised right hand rests against Kanade’s cheek, sliding back slowly as her fingers slide past the girl’s ear. “So? Can we?” Kanade’s fingers bunch up into her jacket, hands fixed down in her lap nervously.
“I-I’m...um...s-sure…” Why is she agreeing to this again? She could turn Mafuyu down and gently tell her that this probably wasn’t a very good idea. She could! She could do it right now!
“Really?” There she is even, giving Kanade another chance to have an out. Speak up, idiot! Mafuyu even sounds a little surprised when she asks, as if she didn’t expect the agreement to come so easily. Still, the way Mafuyu’s fingers brush behind her ear barely tickles in a way that makes the smallest little shiver hurry up her spine, and despite her common sense screaming to the void, the word that stumbles out of her mouth is anything but sensible.
“Y-yeah.”
Mafuyu’s hand pulls itself back a little bit to stop underneath Kanade’s chin and tilt the girl’s head upwards a bit—enough to make it easier when she leans in for that kiss. A thumb rests in front of Kanade’s chin while Mafuyu pushes a little more into the kiss, significantly less hesitant than she was before. Kanade’s hands rise for a moment, fumbling in the air for a beat before clinging weakly to the fabric of Mafuyu’s sleeves. There was a small noise in the back of her throat when Mafuyu brazenly pushed her tongue into the kiss, a hand returning to the composer’s face while her other slid fingers behind her neck. All the control of the kiss was pretty much in Mafuyu’s hands at this point, but Kanade wasn’t sure she minded that much. Not that she could do much about it either way.
Though...unlike before, there were small breaks in the young woman’s kisses, allowing Kanade a shaky breath or a small gasp. It was a little mortifying to consider, but Kanade couldn’t help but assume that she was very deliberately making sure Kanade wouldn’t tap out just because she couldn’t breathe, like she did the first time. It’s the least of Kanade’s problems, at this point. It at least fell lower on her priorities compared to the fact that Mafuyu made her heart race and her head spin in ways that she’s never really had to deal with before—or the fact that she knew alarmingly well how much she liked what Mafuyu was doing.
Honestly, she felt guilty about that. Mafuyu was...trying to figure things out, and she just felt like she was taking advantage, somehow. She shouldn’t be indulging that much personally in an act that could mean something entirely different to Mafuyu. Not that...well, not that she knew what it meant to Mafuyu. That just made it more confusing to deal with. It wasn’t as if she was hoping that Mafuyu would look at her in such a way (if anything, Mafuyu was better off not even considering it), but the storm it brewed in Kanade’s own head was...a lot. She didn’t deserve something that nice in the first place, but torturing herself with a guilty pleasure like getting any kind of closeness or affection from someone like Mafuyu felt closer to putting herself through some stage of legitimate Hell. What made it worse was her own burning curiosity about where Mafuyu was going with all these experiments and questions of hers. No matter how off-limits the very idea was, Kanade couldn’t stop trying to figure this out with Mafuyu.
Is that what they mean when they say someone is a glutton for punishment?
Kanade felt like she was in a daze by the time Mafuyu finally interrupted her own barrage of kisses, biting down on Kanade’s bottom lip with surprising gentleness. Oh. Flustered and red up to her ears by now, Kanade quietly caught her breath as Mafuyu’s kisses resume, this time a single one pressing against the corner of her lips. Another one trails just behind that one, and then another on her cheek. Lips press to her nose, then another at her cheek, and then a little higher up on that cheek. A few slower ones follow the trail of her jaw line, one of Kanade’s eyes sliding shut as she glanced over at the computer screen, eyeing the chat.
There’s a notification or two, mostly just Ena trying to see if one of them were looking so she could get some input on something.
“M-Mafuyu.” Reluctantly, the girl stops at the call of her name. Straightening up a little bit, she looks Kanade over, a soft, barely visible shade of color on her own cheeks. Eventually, she averts her eyes and twists around a little bit so she could see the Nightcord chat. Glancing down for a moment, she seemed to be weighing her options before she finally backed off, knee sliding off of Kanade’s chair and her hands reaching for her own headset and laptop instead. Kanade exhaled, almost visibly slinking into her chair as if she was hoping she would simply vanish into it somehow.
“Ena. Mizuki.”
“There you are! Geez, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for a whole two minutes you know!” Ena seemed agitated, but that was expected at this point.
“Sorry. I stepped away to get something to drink, and Kanade’s…” She trailed off, glancing over at the girl who was still muted and honestly hadn’t even reached for her headset yet. Blinking, Mafuyu just looked back at her own laptop. “She was nodding off a little. So I was going to suggest that maybe Kanade and I would just call it a night, if that’s okay.”
Kanade sat up a little bit more, surprised. She didn’t fully have it in her to be more openly upset about the decision like she had been before about merely taking a break. She had to admit, she didn’t like the idea of just putting her work down just because a kiss winded her, but Mafuyu sounded a little too decided about all of that.
“Yeah, I guess that would be a good idea huh? Can’t make much progress asleep at the wheel.” Mizuki chuckled, posting a thumbs up in the chat. Ena just sighed, but she did seem to relax more at the explanation.
“True. And well, we do count on the person living over there to make sure Kanade keeps herself in check. I’m gonna keep working on this rough sketch and I’ll post it when I’ve got something to show so you three can look at it on your own time. That work?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Well, good night then.”
“Yep! Night everyone!”
“Good night.”
With everyone’s good nights granted, Mafuyu muted and disconnected her headset before signing out of the chat entirely.
“You didn’t have to lie for me or anything like that…” Kanade sighed, running a hand through her hair a little bit. “And I would have gotten back to work. I just...I just needed a minute,” Kanade muttered, her palm coming to rest on her cheek as she looked off to the side.
Mafuyu quietly pulled her laptop shut. “...I wasn’t really done.”
A shade of red lingered on Kanade’s still warm face at that quiet admittance. God. How is she supposed to react to that anyway? Rubbing at her cheek, she just lowers her hand to her lap and glances meekly over. She feels strangely...tense.
“Mafuyu, can I ask...do you still not know what makes you want to do that?”
The question does pull Mafuyu’s attention back to Kanade, though for a moment all she does is stare back. Kanade reconsiders her words, and simply sighs. “How did you...er, feel, about all that? Isn’t there anything driving what you’re doing, when you’re...k-kissing me?” Oh, what kind of loser can’t even address it without stammering like that?
“I...don’t know what to call it. There is something...but it’s hard to describe.”
It’s an unsurprisingly complicated answer. Mafuyu did look a little...different than usual, for a moment earlier, but that didn’t really stick around long enough for Kanade to fully notice it enough or linger on it. Still...if they approached it differently, would that maybe give Mafuyu something different to work off of?
Wasn’t she just warning herself away from humoring this kind of thing? If this kept going...it couldn’t be anything but ugly for both of them.
On the other hand, if she at least helped Mafuyu with this one little thing, maybe she’d let it go. It wasn’t like it had to be any more than some passing curiosity. One wasted on Kanade, of all people. Kanade leaned forward in her chair, looking at the floor for a moment as she thought about it. Yeah...that could work. It wasn’t all bad anyway. If she helped Mafuyu with something even as small as this, then she’d probably accomplish something productive for Mafuyu’s recovery, right?
The recoil already felt a little too overwhelming. Aside from the fact that she was as bold as a weak kitten, this really felt like a personally destructive idea. What better slap in the face to her own feelings than to burn them down in such a brazen, stupid way?
Well...
Maybe that’s what she needed.
She stood up a little too quickly. Mafuyu looked over at her curiously, but Kanade did have to take a moment to wait out the wave of lightheaded feelings that hit her pretty hard. She deserved that, probably. Without looking at Mafuyu, Kanade simply crossed her room and took a seat on the edge of her messy bed, raising her hands and giving herself a firm pat on either side of her face in a pathetic attempt to ease the anxiety.
“...are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m...I’m fine. L-look, um…” Kanade grimaced, unable to keep the heat from returning to her face full force. Ugh. “Just...c-could you come here, Mafuyu?”
For a few seconds, it’s hard to tell if Mafuyu was actually going to do that. Eventually, she does stand up and make her way over, stopping in front of Kanade with her head cocked to the side a bit. Taking a quick breath, Kanade reaches out and grabs Mafuyu’s wrist, pulling her down closer. Of course, she does fail to realize that this isn’t really the ideal way to get someone close enough to do...well, anything. By the time she does realize it, things have already gone wrong. Stumbling, Mafuyu’s head ends up colliding with Kanade’s face pretty damn hard.
Letting Mafuyu go, Kanade pressed her hands to her face and groaned while Mafuyu herself stumbled backwards onto the floor, barely catching herself with her hands. She winced, fingers running along the bridge of her nose. It isn’t until Kanade finally lowered her hands to squint in Mafuyu’s general direction that she even realized the other girl was on the floor. Panicking, Kanade slipped off the bed in a hurry to check on her, hurrying over to her side.
“Mafuyu! Sorry—s-sorry, are you okay?!”
Mafuyu nodded, looking over at her and lowering her own hand to the floor. “I’ll be fine. Are you?”
“Yeah...I mean—well, no that really hurt actually. But it’ll be fine.”
“What were you even trying to do?”
“W-well I…” Kanade stopped and just sighed. Ignoring the dull ache in her head for now, she quickly leaned in, tilting her head and pushing her lips to Mafuyu’s. Mafuyu flinched, eyes showing actual surprise for a moment. Kanade’s hand grasped at the front of Mafuyu’s shirt, bunching into it as the composer bluntly commanded for all of her attention at the moment. Honestly, her kisses were clumsy, timid imitations of what Mafuyu’s done to her, but Kanade committed to it regardless. She went as far as to break away from the kiss if only to duck her head a bit more and briefly dig her teeth against skin just under Mafuyu’s jaw line. Taking a quick breath in, Mafuyu found herself feeling...very caught off guard, by the time Kanade finally did let up and back off a little bit, her hands rising up to Mafuyu’s hair to gently fix how messy it had gotten from the collision and fall.
Kanade’s face was beet red by now. Still, she managed to look at Mafuyu with a more serious, yet curious expression. She studied the way Mafuyu looked back at her, and the more visible traces of a flustered blush. “That. How did that make you feel, then?”
As Kanade’s fist loosens its hold on Mafuyu’s clothes, Mafuyu suddenly moves, her left hand snatching Kanade’s wrist before it can retreat, and her right grabbing Kanade’s shirt instead.
“Wh—ah?!” With a thud, Kanade’s torso hits the floor, though she’s at least aware enough to keep her head from sharing the same fate as roughly. The last thing she needed right now was an untimely concussion. Getting a better look at Mafuyu, the other girl was now on top of her, hands on the floor and Kanade’s wrist pinned firmly underneath one of them. Mafuyu looked to the side for a moment, thoughtful. Her purple gaze drifts back to Kanade’s face though, and she carefully dips her head down lower until she’s close enough for Kanade to feel her breathing.
“You kissed me…”
“I thought that maybe if I did it instead...m-maybe it would be easier for you to figure out your reactions…” Mafuyu picked her head back up, but only by about...an inch or two. Looking off to the side thoughtfully, she was quiet for several seconds actually trying to pull her words together.
“My chest feels tight. But...warm. It felt like when I get anxious over something, but less scary and more...nerve-wracking. I thought it was strange—lately it feels like those things I feel when your songs and presence makes me feel better, but different. There’s more things there.”
This girl’s descriptions would never stop sounding strange, would they? Kanade didn’t mind, though at times it was a little hard to parse. Still, somehow something about how Mafuyu explains it makes her nervous. Like…
“I like you, Kanade.” Like that. The way the admission so easily flows past Mafuyu’s lips, Kanade quietly questioned how long ago she actually arrived at that realization, because there was no way it was just now.
“Y-you…” The hand of her pinned wrist flinches, slowly curving into a weak, uncertain fist. “You really shouldn’t.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t change anything.” That truth stings a little. It really didn’t, for either of them. Even if Kanade herself knew how wrong it was of her to feel how she did about this, at the end of the day there was nothing she could do to carve those feelings out of herself. They were just there, all the time.
Ironic. Of all the things those little blades she hid around could potentially cut out, and even out of all the feelings that they could numb, her feelings would remain in her, until the day she finally stopped breathing. They might change, or they might fade on their own, but there would always be feelings she wished she didn’t carry around, festering inside her and feeding her guilt and shame.
“Your feelings are similar, aren’t they? You don’t hide it very well.” How blunt, as always.
“...they are. But I shouldn’t either.”
The hand pushing down on Kanade’s wrist curled, fingers wrapping around and holding instead. “That’s wrong. Why should you be allowed to push me to discover my feelings, but when I find one, you also get to decide what’s right and wrong?” Mafuyu’s tone was firm and curt—she was agitated, clearly. Even that managed to show through her blunt and flat voice. Kanade glanced up at her with a small frown, her free hand reaching up to try and shove Mafuyu away.
“Get off of me.”
“No.” Mafuyu grabbed that hand easily, pushing it back down onto the floor and pinning it with her own. “We need to talk about this. Stop avoiding it.”
“I’m not avoiding it. I just don’t want to.”
“This is no longer just about your feelings. This is about mine too, Kanade. You don’t get to wipe it off the board on your own.”
“Don’t do this.”
“You’ve never seemed like the type to just let someone else do what I’ve been doing for no reason. You might hold me close by, but you’re not that stupid.”
Kanade fell quiet, turning her head to the side and simply looking...anywhere else.
“You know...if this was us two years ago I wouldn’t even humor the idea. Not where either of us were at that point. But you...your distance is for a different reason. It’s cold, Kanade. Living like that.”
“And what if it is? I’m ready to accept that kind of life, I think. I accepted it a long time ago, even.”
Mafuyu’s lips pursed, the muted frustration in her stare digging a hole in Kanade. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I don’t deserve this. This...you, any of it. I wasn’t meant to have things like this. It doesn’t fit.”
“That’s exactly why I feel like I can’t accept your answer without arguing. But...if that was always the case, why even let me kiss you in the first place?”
Kanade didn’t answer that. She didn’t have an answer. She just...couldn’t turn Mafuyu down. Apparently, she simply couldn’t resist the chance to indulge in a fantasy.
Mafuyu was quiet now too, forcing the tension out of her shoulders, but not letting Kanade go yet. After what felt like several minutes (yet likely wasn’t), she did finally speak up again, quiet at first.
“That’s not fair.”
Kanade turned back to Mafuyu, eyeing her with a solemn expression. The frustration still lingered in the other girl’s eyes, but she seemed...conflicted, too. She...really was trying so much harder than she needed to. Maybe she was right. No, she was absolutely right. Kanade was trying to help her. It wasn’t really her place though to police what Mafuyu was allowed to feel. That was the exact thing she shouldn’t be doing, after Mafuyu’s past experiences with her own mother.
“...I’m sorry. I’m not going to try and change your mind. But it doesn’t change the fact that I just...you can’t get that close to me.”
“It’s a little late for that.” Mafuyu sighed, meeting her gaze briefly before closing her eyes for a moment. “...Kanade, you’ve devoted too much of your life to just...trying to help me. Even the others are better at keeping their hands extended to you back, than I am. So this once...let me set a goal for you, too.”
“Huh?”
Mafuyu opened her eyes and looked over at Kanade’s pinned hand. Tentatively, her hand loosened and turned, her fingers slipping between each of Kanade’s until she properly held the girl’s hand in hers. “I’m not really the best suited for this kind of thing, when I’m still clueless myself sometimes. But I want to show you that you do deserve to have someone that wants to keep you that close, even if you don’t feel like you do. I want to show you that you’re wrong.”
What kind of deal was this? It wasn’t going to work. Kanade may have let many of her friends’ lessons seep in over the years before, but there were just some things that just...she couldn’t see it any other way. Not that easily.
Without a response, Mafuyu just continued. “I don’t really care if it takes a long time. You’ve spent this long on someone like me—you deserve no less.”
“Why are you trying to do this?”
“That’s a stupid question. You know the answer to that already; don’t act like you don’t.”
Mafuyu finally release Kanade’s wrist, placing that hand on the floor instead as she stared down at Kanade. “I know that you’re not so cold that you would push me away the one time I want to be the one to help you. So, the question isn’t really if you can or should try. Do you want to? That’s how I want you to think about it right now.”
Was she using the same tactics as Ena did with her before? Did she pick that up from her or were they all just stubborn like this? That wasn’t fair either, because...the things she felt contradicted what she believed of herself. All the time. Mafuyu’s hand tightened around hers and like a natural reflex, her fingers curled around it. She was already knee-deep in something that she was going to regret later, when somehow, some way, things got worse for her for her negligence. When she paid for not keeping her head down and quietly composing instead of...whatever this was supposed to be.
She still didn’t feel like she deserved to be seen in the kind of light Mafuyu was seeing her in, but...did she want to know what that was like, at least?
God, of course she did. And for it to be Mafuyu, of all people? If it wasn’t for the subtle ache in her head from the collision earlier, she would just think that this was a fever dream.
“Kanade.”
Blinking, the composer looked up at Mafuyu, a soft blush finding its way back to her face as she meekly averted her eyes with a sigh. “You can’t...ask like that. It’s not fair. I can’t even lie.”
“That’s the point.” Nothing really is stopping Kanade from lying her way out of it. Mafuyu knew that, of course. She wouldn’t have stopped her, either. If Kanade had just told her for sure she didn’t want to, even if it was a lie...that would be that. At least Mafuyu couldn’t say that she didn’t try. She had a feeling it would hurt, at least for a little while, but it at least wouldn’t be the worst hurt she’s felt so far.
“Will you let me up now?”
“Not yet.” There’s that atmosphere shift, again. It was hard to keep up with this girl. Leaning down again, Mafuyu pushed another kiss against Kanade’s lips, doing what she had almost done earlier before they got into that heavier conversation. Mafuyu’s hand slipped out of Kanade’s, giving the girl her freedom to move back fully in favor of having a hand free to place against the front of Kanade’s shoulder. Slowly, her fingers brush to the collar of Kanade’s jacket, squirming just underneath it so her fingertips could rest near Kanade’s shoulders. The kisses stopped with a distracted pause as Mafuyu brushed her fingertips closer towards Kanade’s neck. The composer flinched as they pushed along the sides of her neck, splaying out curiously and just...touching her, really.
She wasn’t used to any of this. This much attention, the affection, the kisses, or the touching...her heart was starting to race again, leaving her wondering just how much strain Mafuyu’s overly-direct attention was putting on her comically pathetic health. It...probably didn’t help that no matter how serious she was trying to be before, she folded like paper the minute Mafuyu put her lips back on her.
Kanade reached up, unsteady hands sliding to the sides of Mafuyu’s face to get her attention back. With the slightest rise of her head, Kanade pulled the other girl back into another kiss, not bothering to mask or ignore her interest in more of them anymore. Her nervous hands just slid back down to Mafuyu’s cardigan and clung to it and her, while any train of thought she might have had before now slowly faded into a distracted buzz in her head. A small bite to her lip from Mafuyu gets her to push back into the kiss a little more insistently, a quiet and shaky little gasp making it out of Kanade. Mafuyu’s heartbeat feels a little more vivid than it normally did. Kanade’s nervous gasp was cute, and so were her quietly excitable attempts at somewhat meeting Mafuyu’s subtly aggressive pace. With a half-lidded eye open, Mafuyu moved her hand away from Kanade’s neck and slipped it inside of Kanade’s jacket instead, eliciting another startled flinch from the smaller girl. It turned into more of a squirm as the hidden-away hand pushed itself behind Kanade’s back and slipped itself underneath her shirts. Mafuyu’s hand slides itself gently across Kanade’s lower back before simply resting there, though it’s enough to get another squirm and subtle arch out of Kanade.
Restlessly, Mafuyu pulled away from her kiss and instead bit briefly at the girl’s jaw. She lowered her head still, face lingering against the dip that shaped the side of Kanade’s neck. Her slightly breathless huff of breath washed over Kanade’s neck, a flood of goosebumps rising along her arm in response. The lingering kiss there that followed didn’t do a lot to calm her back down, but all Kanade had in her as a response right away was probably best described as barely a squeak that pathetically tapered off when Mafuyu decided her next move would be a bite lower down the neck. Teeth dug with a firm and surprising rush of...contained aggression—not something that hurt, technically. It did sting, but the sensation wasn’t really off-putting or unpleasant. If anything, all that realization did was make Kanade’s head spin. Her head tilted slightly while Mafuyu took some advantage of the inviting change in pose, the hand on Kanade’s back pulling at the young woman a little bit.
Shaky breaths and anxious squirms make up most of Kanade at the moment. Her pulse was rushing in her ears right now, and there was so much going on both in her head and in her body that she was starting to fail miserably at actually keeping up anymore.
“M-Mafuyu…” The other girl’s name manages to weakly slip past Kanade’s lips, her tone a flustered, messy whine. The look in Mafuyu’s eyes change, even if subtle and quick, when she hears it. Her bite finally lets up and she breathes out, wrapping her mind around yet another strange, vivid change in the sea of feelings Kanade brought with her. It’s a nice sound. Soft and surprisingly vulnerable, and yet...open. Unfiltered, in a way.
Suddenly, Mafuyu sits up a little bit more, her other arm slipping behind Kanade to support her while she pulled the other girl up into a sitting position and more firmly into a full, firm embrace. With the slightest nuzzle of her head, Mafuyu buried and hid her face against the dip of Kanade’s neck and shoulder. Her arms held tight, the fingers still against Kanade’s back curling slightly with an almost...desperate kind of pull. Slowly, Kanade’s own arms slipped further around Mafuyu. She didn’t know what prompted the sudden stop or embrace, though the moment to pull herself back together was appreciated regardless.
“...w-what’s wrong?” Kanade finally asks.
“Nothing.” The answer itself is short and concise, but Mafuyu adds to it shortly after, thoughtful. “Just...some sudden thoughts. Nothing bad. But…”
“But?”
For a brief moment, Mafuyu’s embrace tightens just a little bit before relaxing again. “I’d like to stay like this for a little while. It’s nice.”
Kanade’s head rested against Mafuyu’s, still blushing softly, but sparing the faintest smile at the remarks.
...cute.
“Yeah...it is.”