Chapter three, 2018, what happens in Kyoto, segment two

Ulf stared up the mountain in consternation. After half an hour and five failed tries to reach her phone he was on the verge of giving up on finding Noriko by himself.

One moment they spent their time in blissful solitude, the kind that made a truth of the joke that love is egoism for two, the next she was gone. Well, there had been the part of him scrounging up a vending machine with a little something for the two of them to drink. Noriko was panting heavily and Ulf decided that him spending maybe quarter of an hour in search of the drinks was the perfect excuse for her to get some well needed rest.

An hour earlier he returned with two bottles and two cans, but Noriko was nowhere to be seen. A line message told him something had come up and that she would be away for a short while. After that short while grew into half an hour Ulf tried to text her, then call her on line and in the end on her real number, but all to no avail.

Now he stood at the base of the hill and wondered what to do next. If worst came to worst he could just return to their hotel, pout a little about their date together going into the bin and wait for her to eventually show up. The thing was he really didn’t care for their date going to waste. It was a little selfish, perhaps even childish, but between work, training and school they found preciously little time to spend alone with each other.

Seems she hooked me up good in the end. He surprised himself with how much he had fallen in love with his own little bundle of cheerful happiness. Now, almost two years after he got to know her she was a very different person from back then. On the outside you were a lot more grown up. Ulf grinned at the memories, crossed the street and went for the closest place where he could sit down and gobble up Noriko’s share of the drinks he bought earlier. Well, and find a toilet as well. His own share made itself reminded by now.

An empty bladder later his thoughts were very different, and Ulf silently swore at himself for not having them earlier. Noriko was missing and he never even once wondered if something bad had happened to her. Instead he’d abandoned her somewhere up that hill, because only a moron-sama like himself believed one hour of silence counted as a short time.

Retracing his steps took another quarter of an hour. And just as Ulf was about to start a random search for Noriko his phone vibrated in his pocket and let out a short squeak.

Noriko? He frantically dug form it and flipped open the case. Noriko!

“Yell at Kuri! It’s her fault,” the short message said.

It didn’t matter that the words hardly counted as an explanation. The message in itself and a pointer at Kuri meant that she was safe. Safe and angry was still safe, and Ulf let out a long sigh of relief.

“Where are you?” he texted.

There was a long pause. Enough for him to feel wind in his hair and look up shortly from the screen and take in the city scape of Kyoto.

“Not telling,” came the reply.

Not telling? What’s going on? He smirked and stabbed in a few choice words before sending them her way.

This time there was no reply at all. Irritation grew in him as he gave up and made his way down the hill again. For whatever reason the date had gone south and he walked alone to the city centre. With Noriko by his side he’d picked a local train, but a few kilometres didn’t even count as a distance when he was on his own.

In the beginning he threw down his feet with a little more strength than was needed, but as the brisk walk got his body moving angry thoughts quickly gave way for the exhilaration he always felt during physical activity. This was his drug now, and he needed it since he never picked up the habit of smoking in this life.

Wherever Noriko was she was safe together with Kuri. Come evening they’d meet again and any interrogation could wait until then. Sure, there had better be a good reason for sabotaging their time alone.

He grinned and started taking note of his surroundings. Sightseeing wasn’t his goal, but rather his teenage body came with an appetite that subsided as he grew older and got used to handling a computer all day long. Right now he was ravenously hungry, and if he was to eat alone he could as well go for some food he suspected Noriko was less than keen to share with him. Something with big slabs of meat came to his mind which meant a western style steak house unless those were hysterically overpriced.

In the end they were, and he didn’t. At the central station he found a compromise that had to make do. There was meat, albeit not any big slabs, and there was more rice to go with it than he really wanted. Still, hunger was the best seasoning of them all, and Ulf wolfed down his meal together with a soft drink that was anything but traditionally Japanese.

After the meal he gave his message queue a cursory look. It was as lacking in updates as when he gave up on finding Noriko. With nothing better to do Ulf sauntered down-town for some lonesome sight seeing. He could at least relive some memories from days long gone when his parents brought him here in a world that was lost to him in more ways than one.

He walked straight street after straight street, and every time he stopped to give something a closer look he felt a pang of regret for not having Noriko beside him. He missed her voice and witty remarks. He missed the touch of her hand in his, and that very lack filled him with another realisation. He longed for Noriko and he hadn’t even given Christina as much as a thought. That in itself made missing his girl worth it, and Ulf felt a little less of an arse knowing how his feelings finally rooted themselves where they belonged.