“It’s not your fault. Well, it might be,” he added with a grin.
“Not funny.”
“Warui,” he apologized, but he didn’t wipe the grin off his face. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue handkerchief with a cute cartoon elephant on it. He gently wiped the ink off my face with it before pressing it into my hands. The elephant’s adorable smile stared up at me.
Tomohiro, the kendo star of Suntaba School, the unreachable tough guy who sparked rumors and pretended to be badass, carried around this adorable cartoon-elephant hanky. I couldn’t help smiling a little as I mopped at the ink dripping down my arms. Poor Mr. Elephant turned pitch-black as the ink soaked into his smiling face.
The train car flooded with people, but more festivalgoers kept boarding, trying to escape the inky rain. We couldn’t possibly all fit, could we? It was like a nightmare rush hour at Tokyo Station, the kind that needed professional people pushers to close the doors. The flustered crowd swelled around us, elbows and shoulders prodding into me, squishing me until I felt a claustrophobic panic attack coming on. It reminded me of Mom’s funeral, the heat and sweat of all the bodies circling around me, too close.
“Here,” Tomo said, pressing his hands against the wall on either side of me. The crowd continued to push toward us, but Tomohiro took the brunt of it, forced closer and closer toward me.
“Thanks,” I said. He nodded once, bracing himself against the umbrellas and bags that jabbed into his arms and legs. We were pressed together like sardines; his breath was warm against my neck, and I could see the ribbons of badly healed scars trailing up his right arm. The biggest, where the painting of the kanji for sword had sliced him in elementary school, was mostly hidden under his soft wristband, but the edges of the scar trailed toward his palm and up his arm.
He hunched over me, trying not to press his body against mine, trying to give me some kind of modest space. This was the kind of guy he was, I reminded myself. Not the one who could lurk in dark alleys and call up people-eating dragons just by sketching them on paper.
But that was him, too.
The buzz of worried conversation hummed through the train car. No one would hear us, I thought. We were pressed so close together anyway.
“It was a warning, wasn’t it?” I whispered, hoping everyone else would just think I was the foreigner who didn’t really understand the Japanese she was using. “Those ink fireworks.”
“A warning? Since when have there been warnings?”
“I don’t know, it just feels like it. It’s like when my doodles came at me that time. Or when the picture of Shiori looked at me.” Like they were letting me know that they saw me, that they wanted to reach me.
“The doodles were an attack, not a warning,” Tomo said. “And are you sure the message wasn’t meant for me?”
“It knows I stayed in Japan. It’s not going to stop, Tomo.”
“You mean I’m not going to stop.”
“Don’t say that. It’s creepy.”
“Well, you talk about the ink like it has a life of its own.” He looked around to make sure no one was listening, and lowered his face only a few inches from mine. “It’s me, Katie. I’m the Kami. I’m the one drawing the pictures, not the other way around.”
“Right, but the ink in you has its own agenda. If we can figure it out—if we can figure out how I fit into all this—we can stop it.”
Tomo’s voice was breathy and dark. “I think there’s only one way to stop me.”
I shivered.
The ink dripped off Tomohiro’s bangs and curved down his cheeks. I reached up with the elephant towel and dabbed his face. “Arigatou,” he said quietly, and I wanted to kiss him right there on the train, to tell him everything would be okay.
“What about the other Kami?” The k came out so loudly. We shouldn’t be talking on the train; it wasn’t safe. I pressed my lips right to his ear. “What if one of them suddenly loses control? Although you’re the only one I’ve seen that’s so powerful, except for J—” Oops. “Um, I mean...”
If he was hurt by my comment, he hid it really well. “It’s okay. Except for Takahashi. He’s strong. I know it.”
“But you can’t be the only two. Has anything ever happened before? Some other you-know-what losing control?”
Tomo scrunched up his nose a little while he thought. The train curved around the Abe River and tilted us to the side. Someone behind Tomo stumbled, their bag smacking him hard in the leg. He buckled forward, stopping himself from falling over by pressing harder against the wall. He grimaced as they apologized, but all I could think about was how he was pressed up against me, the warmth of his body against mine.
He didn’t seem to notice, still lost in thought. “I don’t know. Except for Takahashi and his groupies I don’t know any others. Except my mom, and I can’t ask her.”
I thought about what Jun had said, about how the ink in me was pulled like a magnet to the ink in him and Tomo. If I was going to get anywhere, I needed to know more about how it all worked.
“Maybe Jun can...” I trailed off. The look on Tomo’s face made me stop in my tracks.
“You can’t trust him. He wanted to use us.”
“I know,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Maybe I’d overreacted. Sure, he was a little messed up in the head, but he’d done a lot more kind things for me than creepy. I mean, was it really such a bad thing that he wanted to take out gangsters and world crime? His methods were questionable, but his intentions?
The train ground to a stop and Tomo leaned into me as the doors sprang open beside us. We were pressed so close his cheek was against my ear, his bangs tickling my skin.
“We need to figure it out,” I whispered, pretending that’s what I was still thinking about. Only a few weeks apart, and I’d become this nervous around him again? Must not think about his body pressed against mine. Must not think about how good he smells, like vanilla and miso.
And then he pressed his lips against my neck, and my thoughts exploded.
“We can figure it out without Takahashi,” he mumbled, his words tickling as they vibrated against my skin. “I’ve lived my whole life like this. Marked, stained, however you think of it. It’s not going to go away. I’m not normal, Katie. I can never be normal.”
You don’t have to be normal, I thought. You just have to be in control, so no one gets hurt. Especially us. But the words never made it to my lips. I wished we weren’t on the train, that we weren’t surrounded by a hundred people pretending not to see him kissing my neck. I wished we could be alone in Toro Iseki, surrounded by furin and wagtail birds and a starlit sky. But we could never be there alone again, not with his drawings around us. Things would never be the same now that renovations at the site were done.
Shin-shizuoka was the next station and we stumbled out of the train, hands entwined. Tomo walked me the whole way to Diane’s mansion—my mansion, I reminded myself. There was no time limit now. This was home, as long as I wanted it to be.
Tomohiro grasped both of my hands.
“I have to go,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
“I know.”
“It would be easier to leave if you let go of my hands.”
“I know.”
“Tomo.”
“You’re really here,” he said, giving my hands a tug so I stumbled forward. “I have to protect you. I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I’m here to fix things, so don’t worry, okay? I can take care of myself.”
“Call me if the Kami or the Yakuza try to contact you. And I need to tell you something else.”