Chapter Text
The ceiling fan turned in lazy circles above her, three blades cutting through the humid air that even the open window couldn't fully chase out. Utahime stared up at it, counting the rotations the way some people counted sheep, except she wasn't trying to fall asleep. She was trying to convince herself to get up.
The baby had other plans.
A foot, or maybe an elbow, she'd long given up trying to identify which limb was which— pressed firmly against the right side of her belly, sliding across in a slow stretch. She huffed out a laugh that came from her nose more than her chest, because actual laughter cost too much oxygen these days.
"Okay," she murmured, sleepy. "Okay, I hear you."
Her hand came up to rub the spot, fingers splayed wide across the taut skin beneath her thin cotton sleep shirt. Thirty-three weeks. Thirty-three weeks and her body felt heavy as a wrecking ball. Her lower back throbbed. Her ankles, she could already feel without looking, were swollen again.
She closed her eyes. Just one more minute. Just one.
The baby kicked again, harder this time, right under her ribs.
"You're as bad as your father," she muttered, and then immediately wished she hadn't said it out loud, even to an empty room. The words sat in the air like dirt she'd kicked, and she had to lie there until they settled.
She rolled, which was a process now, a coordinated effort that involved her arms, a pillow she'd shoved between her knees sometime in the night, and a careful pivot of her hips. She got herself sitting on the edge of the bed and waited for the head rush to pass. Outside her open window, the morning was still soft. Pale light, the kind that hadn't decided yet if it was going to be hot today or just warm. Somewhere down the slope, a rooster was making it everyone's problem.
Her feet found the wooden floor. She'd gotten used to it, the way the boards were worn smooth in the path between the bed and the bathroom, polished by decades of other tenants before her. The Nakamura family had owned this property since the seventies, Mrs. Nakamura had told her on her first day, and the little ohana unit had housed cousins and college students and a brief attempt at a vacation rental before Utahime had shown up with cash for three months upfront and a quiet, exhausted look that had made the older woman not ask too many questions.
She made it to the bathroom. She peed. She splashed water on her face and gripped the edges of the sink with both hands, looking at herself in the mirror.
The woman looking back was not someone she fully recognized yet.
Her hair was longer now, past her shoulders, the white ribbon she used to wear left in a drawer somewhere in a Kyoto apartment she’d never see again. She kept it loose, or tied up in a low, lazy bun. Her face was rounder, but the scar still traced along her right cheekbone. There was a smattering of new freckles across her nose and cheekbones from the sun, and a darker line, the linea nigra, the midwife had called it, very matter-of-fact, like she was naming a street— running down the center of her belly. Her breasts ached. Her hair, ironically, had never looked better.
She turned slightly and lifted the hem of her shirt to see the tattoo under her left rib.
It was small. A circle, a series of geometric notations inside it, a single character at its heart. She'd had it done in a back room above a noodle shop in Naha three days before she'd boarded the plane. The man who'd done it hadn't been a sorcerer himself, but his grandmother had been, and that had been close enough. He'd known what she was asking for. He'd taken her cash and her silence in equal measure.
It had hurt. Not the needle, but the activation, when the ink had bonded with her cursed energy and pulled it inward, locking it down. She'd lost her breath for almost a full minute. She'd thrown up in the alley behind the shop afterward and cried in the taxi back to her hotel. The next morning she'd flown to Honolulu, and from Honolulu she'd taken a smaller plane to here, and she had not lit up on a single sorcerer's radar since.
That was the deal she'd made with herself. The baby comes first. The clan does not get this child. He does not get to find me until I decide he does.
She let her shirt fall back down.
In the kitchen, she put the kettle on. She'd switched from coffee to ginger tea around week ten, when even the smell of coffee had sent her sprinting for a sink, and she hadn't found her way back to it. She moved slowly. She buttered a piece of toast and ate it standing at the counter, because sitting and getting back up again was a whole event now, and she needed to be somewhere by ten.
Her phone buzzed on the counter. A text from Mei— who managed the Airbnb where Utahime worked, not the other Mei, never that other Mei— confirming her shift.
Bar tonight, 6-10.
Tour at 11 tomorrow if you're up for it.
Lemme know. xx
She typed back a 👍 and a yes to both and set the phone down.
It was strange, she thought, how quickly a life could become a life. Six months ago she had been a teacher at Kyoto Jujutsu High. She had been discussing with Gakuganji about lesson plans. She had been trying to pretend, mostly successfully, that her thing with Satoru Gojo was a thing she had under control. She had been a sorcerer. She had been Iori-sensei to her students, and Hime in a hotel room in Tokyo every few weeks when he texted her hey, you free? and she said yes when she should have said no.
Now she lived in a one-bedroom apartment up a steep gravel road on the windward side of an island in the middle of the Pacific. She sang three nights a week in the open-air lounge of a boutique Airbnb where the owners had figured out that "live entertainment" let them charge twenty percent more per night. She tended bar two nights. She ran tours when one of the regular guides was sick or hungover. She'd done a stint as the morning concierge for a week while the actual concierge had been dealing with a family emergency, and she'd been so good at it— calm, organized, fluent in Japanese for the honeymooners from Osaka— that they'd started calling her in for that too.
She made enough to cover rent. She made enough to put a little aside. She had a cash envelope under a loose floorboard in her closet that she added to whenever a tip was generous, and she did not think too hard about what that envelope was for. Going home. Not going home. Running again, if she had to. A hospital bill.
By the time she walked down the hill to the property, the day had decided to be hot and bright. She wore a loose linen sundress, white with little blue flowers, and a pair of slip-on sandals because anything with a strap was a war crime against her feet now. Her hair was up. She had her tote bag with her water bottle and a granola bar and a hair tie she'd already broken once this week.
The Airbnb was called Hᾰ︎ℓḙ Pṳᾰ︎. Five suites arranged around a central courtyard, a small saltwater pool, a kitchen for the included breakfast, and an open-walled lounge where in the evenings they served cocktails and pupus and someone, usually her these days, sat in the corner with a guitar, singing softly as she played while guests pretended they weren’t listening.
Mei was at the front desk when she came in. Mei was twenty-six, half-Japanese, half-Filipino, with a sleeve of tattoos Utahime had asked about exactly once and then decided was not her business. She looked up and grinned.
"There she is. How's the tenant?"
"Active." Utahime set her bag down behind the desk. "He woke me up at five-thirty doing capoeira."
"He, huh?"
"Slip of the tongue."
"Mmhm." Mei did not push. That was one of the things Utahime liked about her. Mei was nosy in the abstract and respectful in the specific. "You good for the bar tonight? I can call Kainoa if you're tired."
"I'm fine. Sitting on a stool for four hours pouring rum is honestly easier than my couch."
"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. Okay. We've got the Tanaka family in Suite Two, they asked if you'd do a song after dinner— the wife wants to hear Tsuki no Shizuku, apparently it was their wedding song, please do not make her cry, last time you did Hanamizuki, a woman cried so hard she had to go lie down."
"That's not my fault. That song is engineered to make people cry."
"Just... pick something cheerful. Or at least neutral. I don't want to deal with another emotional incident."
"I will sing a song about a cheerful frog."
"Thank you."
Utahime laughed and went to get herself a glass of water from the kitchen.
The morning passed the way her mornings tended to pass now, in small, manageable pieces. She helped a guest figure out the rental car app. She emailed a tour company about a snorkel trip a couple wanted to book. She ate the granola bar. She sang and played her guitar for forty minutes, running through her set for the night, shifting it higher on her lap than she used to to make room for her belly. The baby kicked along to the higher notes. She didn’t know if that meant anything.
She took a long break in the middle of the afternoon. Mei was good about that— go put your feet up, please, I cannot keep watching you waddle— and so she went back up the hill to her apartment and lay on the couch with her feet on a stack of pillows and dozed for an hour and a half. The baby was quiet during the day, mostly. He saved his real performances for one to four a.m., which she'd been told was normal, which did not make it less annoying.
When she woke up, the heat had broken a little, and there was a breeze coming through the screen door. She lay there listening to it. The Nakamuras' wind chimes tinkled in the yard above hers. Somewhere, a dog barked twice and stopped.
She thought, the way she sometimes let herself think, about what she would say to him.
If he ever found her. When, maybe— she wasn't naive enough to think if was guaranteed, even with the seal. He was Satoru Gojo. The world's strongest. She had watched him locate single curses across half a continent on a hunch.
But he wasn't looking for her. That was the part she had to keep reminding herself of. He had no reason to look. They hadn't been a thing. They had been a thing in quotation marks. They had been don't make it weird, Hime, and I'm not making it weird, you're making it weird, and a hundred mornings she'd left his hotel room before he woke up, and a hundred more where she'd just stayed and pretended that wasn't the same as not leaving. She had told him she was taking a sabbatical. She'd told Gakuganji, in writing, that she was resigning. She had not told either of them anything else, and she had paid for everything in cash from the moment she'd decided.
He'd texted her, twice, after she left. She'd seen the messages on the burner phone she'd kept just long enough to know she wasn't being officially looked for, and then she'd dropped that phone in the ocean off Lanikai Beach in week twelve.
The first text had said: heard you quit?? what gives
The second, three days later: you good?
Two messages. Three days apart. A man whose attention she had once thought she might be addicted to, and that was what her absence had cost him: two messages and a question mark.
She had cried for a long time after the second one. Not because it was so little. Because it was exactly what she should have expected, and she had still, somewhere, been hoping for more.
She put a hand on her belly now and pressed gently until she felt the baby shift in response.
"It's just us, kid," she said. "I know it's not what they put in the brochure. But it's going to be okay. I promise you it's going to be okay."
The baby kicked her, hard, in the kidney.
"Okay, you're right, I shouldn't make promises like that. Let's say— I'm going to try. How about that. I'm going to try really hard."
That, the baby seemed to accept.
She went back down for the evening shift in a different dress, navy blue, her hair loose now because by six p.m. her scalp was tired of being pulled. She'd put on a little makeup. Tinted balm, mascara. There was no one to look nice for, but she'd learned early that looking nice made her feel like a person, and feeling like a person was a non-negotiable part of getting through a fourteen-hour day at thirty-three weeks.
The bar at Hale Pua was small. Eight stools. A short menu of cocktails she could make in her sleep, three local beers, four wines, and a list of mocktails she'd designed herself when she'd realized that pregnancy meant she could no longer taste-test the rum-based ones. She tied an apron above her bump and pulled her hair into a low knot at the nape of her neck and got to work.
It was a slow night. The Tanakas came down for dinner and waved at her, and after their meal Mr. Tanaka came over and asked, very politely, if she would still perform. She left the bar in Mei's hands for fifteen minutes and went to the piano.
She played Tsuki no Shizuku. She didn't sing it— she wasn't going to set Mrs. Tanaka up to sob— but she played it beautifully, the way the song wanted to be played, and Mr. Tanaka stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes closed, and when she finished he bowed to her, deeply, and put a hundred-dollar bill in the tip jar. Mrs. Tanaka, across the lounge, dabbed at her eyes with a napkin and pretended she wasn't.
Utahime caught Mei's eye. Mei mouthed, I told you.
Utahime mouthed back, worth it, and went back to the bar.
Around nine, when there was no one at the bar and the lounge had emptied out except for a single guest reading on a couch with a glass of wine, she finally let herself sit on the high stool behind the counter. Her feet were screaming. Her back was a study in geological pressure. The baby was awake again and doing something complicated with his feet that she could see, actually see, ripple across the front of her dress.
She put a hand on her belly and rubbed in slow circles.
"Almost done," she told him. "Almost done with today."
She thought, just for a second, about a white-haired man in a hotel room in Tokyo laughing at her while she tried to put her hair back up. You always do it so neat. Make a mess. Live a little, Hime. She thought about how she'd thrown a pillow at his head and how he'd caught it without looking. She thought about him asking her, once, if she ever wanted kids, and how she'd said not with someone like you, and how he had laughed, but his eyes hadn't.
She breathed out. The thought went away, the way she'd trained it to.
The guest on the couch finished her wine and brought the glass over. "Long night?" the woman asked, kindly.
"Long pregnancy," Utahime said, and the woman laughed.
"How far along?"
"Thirty-three weeks."
"Boy or girl?"
"Boy."
"Got a name?"
Utahime smiled. She had a name. She'd had it for two months. She wasn't telling anyone yet, not even Mei, because saying it out loud felt like signing something she wasn't ready to sign. She just shook her head.
"Working on it."
"You'll know," the woman said. "When you see him."
She left a tip and went to bed.
Utahime closed out the bar at ten. She walked home up the hill in the dark, the gravel crunching under her sandals, the air cool now and smelling like wet leaves and plumeria and somewhere, distantly, the ocean. The Nakamuras' porch light was on. Mrs. Nakamura had left a small covered plate on her doorstep— she did this sometimes, leftovers, a piece of fruit, once an entire mango— and Utahime picked it up and let herself in.
She ate standing at the counter. She drank a glass of water. She brushed her teeth, slowly, because her gums bled if she went too fast. She lay down in bed and arranged her body around the pillow between her knees and the smaller pillow under her belly and the third pillow she used to prop up her shoulders so she could breathe.
Outside, a gecko chirped on the screen.
She put a hand on her belly. The baby pushed back, lazily, like he was settling in too.
"Goodnight," she whispered, to him, to the house, to the version of her life that was still being built one shift and one song and one careful day at a time.
She closed her eyes. The ceiling fan turned in lazy circles above her. Eventually, she slept.