Chapter one, 2018, Hatsumode, segment ten

Noriko looked at Kuri and hoped it wasn’t a glare. Urufu’s bantering with his former girlfriend still made her feel uneasy. It was something very close to jealousy, but Noriko hoped she hadn’t gone all the way there.

She hooked her arm around Urufu’s, but that just forced him to have his hanging down by his side, and right now she wanted to feel him hugging her. No, that wasn’t it. Right now she wanted him to show how she belonged to him, because that meant he belonged to her. It didn’t make a lot of sense, and Noriko knew it went contrary to everything Urufu believed in, but she didn’t care.

She slipped her hand out of his arm and threw it around his waist. To her huge satisfaction he moved the arm she had just freed up and placed it around her shoulder, allowing her to snuggle closer.

Ryu frowned at her and she stuck her tongue out at him. Childish or not; who cared? He’s mine! Nothing you do will make me leave his side. She glared back at her brother.

She felt how Urufu looked down at her head. “Something’s up?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Cute.” His head came down and suddenly his nose dug into her hair. “And you smell good.”

Try as she did, from time to time, to coerce him into her bed she still wasn’t used to him being so physically close. Noriko quickly found herself with absolutely no need for a muffler to warm her in the waning January day.

“It’s embarrassing,” she mumbled.

“Want me to stop?” his voice said just by her ear, and she felt lips touching it.

If anything she blushed even harder, but when she felt his head rise again she quickly threw her free arm around it and pulled him down. “No, please stay!”

He obliged, and Noriko turned in his one handed embrace and threw both arms around him. Feeling this close was a luxury she experienced far too seldom. When she finally let go of him the rest of the gang had vanished to leave them both a modicum of privacy. Even her idiot brother had made them company.

“Where did they go?” she wondered.

“Parking lot, I guess,” Urufu said. He took her hand and pulled hesitantly. “Join them?”

She might not want to, but Noriko understood their friends would wait for them. To gather once again after they left the shrine maybe didn’t make much sense, but it was a thing friends did. She allowed herself to be pulled through the crowd, passing between stalls and people until they finally made it to the steep stairs.

Walking down them she let go of Urufu’s hand and used the railing. They met people going up, and behind her she heard others going down just like she was. This year’s hatsumode was about to end for her. In difference from last year it promised to be a good memory and a promise of a better year ahead of them.

Of course it’ll be a better year. Last had been hell. Well, with one exception, and he walked by her side.

Below the stairs the street split in two. Whoever once decided the location for the shrine wanted it at a crossroads of sorts. One of the streets hugging the hill the shrine was located on emptied into a parking lot, and Noriko assumed that was where they were headed. She took the lead, but only a few steps further ahead on the pavement Urufu caught up with her just as she passed beneath a low branch jutting out from the hillside.

“I enjoyed hatsumode this year,” he said and mirrored her thoughts.

Noriko decided to keep her silence. She might have taken him from Kuri, but the tall girl still remained a dear friend of hers, and Kuri was very, very important to Urufu. In ways, Noriko knew, Kuri had made it possible for her to become a couple with Urufu. Kuri’s sacrifice. Noriko didn’t intend to forget that.

When they arrived at the parking lot Ryu was already gone, and so was Kuri. When she looked again Noriko noticed that Tomasu and Yukio were gone a well.

“What’s going on?” Noriko asked and looked around her.

“Toilet,” Kyoko said.

Noriko shook her head. “Look, you’re taking the joke too far.”

Jeniferu shook her head and giggled together with Kyoko and Hitomi. “Different joke,” Jeniferu said.

Different joke? Noriko frantically searched her surrounding for whatever the morons had come up with this time. At the far end of the parking lot she found the public toilets in question. By it Kuri’s bodyguards stood stone faced and very pointedly didn’t look at Tomasu who was working on something together with Yukio.

“Guys, they aren’t really...” Noriko began when she slowly understood what was going on. “Kuri’s going to have a fit.”

“Inside.” Hitomi said.

“Inside?”

“She knows what’s going to happen. She’s inside with Ryu.”

That explained why the body guards didn’t do anything. Noriko threw Hitomi a glare anyway. Then she stared at Kyoko. “You should know better!”

Kyoko just returned a huge grin. “Fun, isn’t it?”

Noriko shook her head. “Really! Grow up!”

“Noriko,” Yukio shouted as he and Tomasu returned, “keys.” With that he lobbed two padlock keys to her.

What the hell! With a grin on her face Noriko stared at the small building. Then she weighed the keys in her hand.

At least her mom laughed hysterically when Noriko explained why Ryu hadn’t followed her home, but the same couldn’t be said of her father.

“Threw them away? That’s very bad of you,” her mother had said before she collapsed in laughing fit. That was when Noriko came home a few minutes earlier.

Her mother was still giggling when Noriko’s father came down the stairs with car keys in his hand.

He growled as he went to the garage for his toolbox. On his way there he turned once and glared at them. “Not funny you two. Not funny at all!”