Chapter 41: Beneath the Skin

Ma En's research into the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records had stalled at the level of pure intuition. Anyone who thought in terms of logic would categorically reject conclusions verified by feeling alone, and Ma En was no exception. Even so, he recognized clearly that his understanding of the text had hit a ceiling he couldn't break through. Everything from here was repetition — the way particle physicists fired accelerator beams into atoms again and again, hoping to split something smaller, hoping their luck would hold.

At least those scientists had a logically sound theory to anchor their work. Ma En didn't even have that. When he opened the books on the Twenty-Four Solar Terms, his rational mind could not fully accept that his research direction was correct.

In all his years of pursuing the bizarre, nothing he'd ever investigated left him feeling as unmoored as this. At least the bizarre had legends attached to it — tangible stories you could chase, however gossamer. The Seven Transmutations? Even the name had appeared in his mind from nowhere, and he couldn't find a single reason to connect it to the solar terms.

He knew exactly what other people would think if they saw his research and his methods: This man is a delusional lunatic.

Past and present, he had no intention of telling anyone what he pursued or how he pursued it. Whether he was a lunatic was something only time could prove. But carrying that label would make everyday life impossible. He understood, deeply, how important it was for a person to consciously guard their secrets. And because he would not want others to pry into his hidden self — to reflexively treat the man with secrets as "a suspicious, dangerous person" — he extended the same principle to others.

He wasn't the only one with secrets in this room. Hirota almost certainly had her own.

The strange events trailing in Room 4's wake had a way of draping a strange atmosphere over perfectly ordinary things. Everyone who carried a secret became suspect under that atmosphere, examined through a lens of distrust without even meaning to. Ma En didn't know whether Hirota had been looking at him that way. But he'd been disciplining himself not to look at her that way.

He sat in this single woman's living room. The materials were open in front of him, but his mind refused to settle into its usual calm.

The TV murmured at a reasonable volume, but louder than that — much louder — was a voice inside him. A restless, urging voice. He couldn't quite make out what it was saying. Maybe he was choosing not to hear it.

Hirota had gone into her bedroom and hadn't come back out. He had no idea what she was doing in there, and he wasn't entirely unaware of wanting to know. He held his gaze forward, refusing to turn — as though looking would shatter a discipline he'd maintained his entire life. The feeling was one he recognized as dangerous.

But the TV only made the living room feel emptier. Gradually, the silence spread until it seemed to fill the whole apartment, as though he were the only person left. The quiet that usually felt normal now felt wrong — sharpening his awareness of the other person's absence, making it impossible not to listen for her.

Ma En could not enter his usual study state. He put down his pen without thinking, sinking deeper into the sofa. Still he didn't turn around. He took out a cigarette, thought about it, and set it aside.

He wanted to smoke badly. But this wasn't his room.

"Want to smoke?" Hirota's voice came from behind him.

He turned. She stood in the bedroom doorway, holding a stack of clothes.

The door was wide open. She'd made no move to close it. Through the gap he could see a pink so girlish it saturated every surface. Quite a contrast with her underwear, he thought. Unexpected.

"May I?"

"Go ahead. I don't have an ashtray, though — let me get you a glass." She said it naturally, crossing quickly to the sofa, setting down the clothes, and heading to the kitchen for a cup.

Ma En glanced at the stack on the armrest. Sleepwear — and on top, in plain view, a change of lingerie. Sheer, translucent, even more suggestive than what he'd glimpsed through her neckline. The kind that made you picture it on the woman who'd wear it before you could stop yourself.

Does she really wear this to bed?

The thought slid through his mind, and in its wake, a growing awareness: the signals coming from this newly met neighbor were getting harder to ignore.

He'd been forcing himself to read everything — her expressions, her words, her behavior — through a normal lens. But if what she meant was what it looked like, then this was moving too fast.

Fast enough to feel wrong.

They'd known each other for hours. Not even a full day. Was Hirota really so casual, so easily forward? Of course, they hadn't known each other long enough to determine what kind of person she was — that was only natural. Even so, something didn't sit right.

He felt like his logic should be connecting to something, but it wasn't. His inner voice was telling him the opposite: even if Hirota had fallen for him at first sight, that wasn't strange at all. It happened constantly in real life. This time it was just happening to him.

Maybe she wasn't normally this open. Maybe the signals she was giving off — in areas where a woman might otherwise be reserved — existed only because the object of them was him.

Hirota-san is in love with me.

The thought flashed and then planted itself. It wouldn't leave. He couldn't bring himself to deny it, as though he were forcing himself not to consider other possibilities. A few seconds — maybe — and he found himself accepting the conclusion more and more, expecting it, affirming it.

Nothing else in his mind.

He tugged unconsciously at his tie. His eyes wandered across the books and papers on the coffee table, unable to settle. He couldn't study, couldn't research. His head was full of nothing but Hirota.

Is this a good thing?

He asked himself. And the answer came back: Yes, it is. She's beautiful by any standard. If she wants something to happen, what reason do you have to refuse?

Yes — what reason?

The word "reason" drifted through his mind, and just like that, he went cold. The hazy, desire-laden daydream froze in an instant.

He had a reason. The very reason he'd left the homeland and come to Japan.

It was a reason as deep and sharp as a knife — one that had already severed his former life. Its weight was more than enough to crush these reckless fantasies.

If he were still back home, and a woman like this showed interest, he'd have tried to reciprocate without hesitation. But he'd left his family behind, left his country, precisely because he'd judged himself to be in danger — danger that would spread to anyone close to him. That judgment held in Japan too.

If Hirota truly loved him, he could not go along with it and drag a woman who cared for him into danger.

If she saw him as an ordinary friend and all of this was in his head, then he had even less reason to push the relationship deeper.

Being in her room this late was one thing — human warmth justified that. But more than the benefits of staying, he should be mindful of the danger he might bring.

I've been too relaxed.

He was beginning to realize this room affected him more than he'd anticipated.

The air here, the scent, the thoughts it produced, the feelings it quietly stirred, the fact of two people alone together — all of it had been pulling his body and mind into a subtle passivity, making him someone slightly different from who he usually was.

Thought, awareness, judgment — the mechanisms that governed his actions were dissolving in an atmosphere that was unfamiliar to him yet perfectly ordinary in other people's lives. He simply hadn't experienced it before.

"What are you thinking about?" Hirota's voice came from very close, at his side.

He snapped back. She was leaning down, setting the glass-turned-ashtray in front of him. The full curve of her chest was exposed to his line of sight again.

He hadn't sensed her approach at all. That, too, was a mistake he'd never make under normal circumstances.

He was making more and more errors in this room. And he couldn't blame any of them on Hirota.

"Nothing," he said. His eyes could not refuse the scenery she intermittently offered, and his reason and desire kept trading places — friction building between them, kindling a heat he couldn't put out.

Getting hotter.

He pulled at his tie again.

"Feeling warm?" Her voice landed as though she'd read his mind.

He wasn't sure if it was his imagination. Her voice seemed to carry its own heat — something that pressed against the hardest thing inside him, softening everything, loosening his whole body.

"Yeah," he heard himself say. "A little warm."

Then she closed the distance — her scent arriving first, something warm and layered that could have been perfume or could have been her — and Ma En leaned back instinctively, but the sofa, which should have been soft, pressed against his spine like a wall. Not a centimeter of retreat.

Her breath felt like it was touching his face. His gaze tracked from her chest to her neck to her eyes, entirely beyond rational control. And it stopped there.

Hirota's eyes were magnetic. Human eyes — and yet there was something in them, a haze that was beautiful and strange and made his heart hit harder. Something that hinted at a wonderful, inevitable connection. Every argument for refusal turned brittle in front of those eyes, then turned meaningless.

She felt his presence too. Equally intoxicating — as though somewhere, sometime, she'd experienced this before. As though it were pulling her back to a specific day in her past. Perhaps it had existed in the fantasies of her girlhood self. Perhaps that girl was the one responding now, answering a contact she'd been waiting for all along.

She knew where his eyes had been. That was not a place just any man was allowed to look — a place no man had seen since she'd become an adult. The skin there was so sensitive she could feel his gaze moving across it, as tangible as a physical touch. She didn't resist. She wanted him to see more, to touch more.

She couldn't think. Her body moved on its own and she surrendered to it, finding in his gaze and her own quickening pulse the confirmation that this was right.

As though a soul hidden deep within her had been carefully, boldly, orchestrating every move. She didn't mind. She didn't resist. Because Ma En was what she wanted.

She wanted to have him. To claim him. To take everything he was into herself, to let him taste what this body could offer, to make him understand that her soul was utterly captivated by his.

Even though they'd known each other for less than twenty-four hours.

Her breath came warm against his skin. Her palm traced along his thigh, sliding upward — pausing briefly at his lower back, then higher, across the taut plane of his stomach, coming to rest on the solid wall of his chest. One by one, she unfastened his buttons.

And in that instant, the words "Twenty-Four Solar Terms" erupted in Ma En's mind. The content he'd been studying — the data, the passages, all of it — slammed back into his consciousness like a fist, shoving rationality back into place.

He sat up. He wrapped his arms around her. Tight.

He didn't speak. He just held her, leaving no room for her to move, no space for anything else to happen.