Warnings: This story may have spoilers for the last volume. That, or I'm merely doing some wishful thinking here. Or I'm just messing with you. Which one is it, I wonder, and is the mystery worth the risk of reading on?

Additional warnings: Excessive use of incomplete sentences. Blatant abuse of parentheses. Also, the Talk.

easy breezy
by greengirlblue

The first brilliant thing that Kyo could think to say was: "This is awkward."

To which Tohru swiftly agreed, "It is, isn't it?!" as she stretched her lips over her teeth in what was probably supposed to be a smile but looked more like an impression of a shark if, you know, sharks were sweet and didn't go around eating people. So, not like a shark at all. Not that Kyo could come up with a better simile. Not that it mattered.

Although Kyo had kind of hoped to ease the tension between them, his statement only seemed to make it worse. He was keenly aware of Tohru sitting on the other side of the futon – expectant, shy, her bare arms neatly resting at her sides and the contour curve of her legs swooping to meet somewhere under the folds of her skirt. Kyo himself was sitting with his elbows on his thighs and mouth pressed into the heel of his palm as he avoiding looking her in the eye. And tried not to look at the hem of her skirt, which was incredibly, ridiculously hard not to do. Had it always been this hard, or was this something new?

Like Shigure, Kazuma had never been formally introduced to the concept of a central cooling system, so the room that Kyo and Tohru shared – a shoebox-sized room with cardboard boxes still piled high against a wall from the move – was the same temperature as your average Easy Bake Oven. Opening the windows hadn't helped much even after Tohru had scrounged around in their yet-to-be-organized boxes and found a small yellow electric fan that she placed on the windowsill. It didn't belong to her originally, the fan, and it definitely didn't belong to Kyo, but nobody else had claimed it, either; and when everything in Shigure's house was being divided between the four people who had lived there, Tohru and Kyo got it by default.

(Kyo suspected that both Yuki and Shigure were perfectly aware of who the fan belonged to, but Shigure didn't seem to care enough to point it out, and Yuki was too busy assuring Tohru that it was fine, no one is going to mind if you take it, so go ahead and take it. Kyo didn't have the slightest idea himself, but then again, he didn't remember half the stuff they went through before everyone, even Tohru, decided it was just too much and let's just dump the rest of it at the nearest charity drop-off or something.

"We have enough memories without all this," Yuki said, and it didn't sound at all corny like it should have when he said it, and Kyo quickly remembered why he hated Yuki. Or disliked him. Or… Damnit, Yuki was still an annoying bastard, okay?)

The fan, which was meant to sit on someone's desk and blow directly on that person's face, not sit on a windowsill trying to do the impossible, hummed and occasionally squeaked as Kyo and Tohru continued to sit facing each other without actually facing each other. That was what was awkward. Not the heat. Not the fan. Not that they were alone, precisely, because they had been alone together before, and they weren't 15 anymore. And maybe 18 wasn't that great of an age difference, but the point was that neither of them got nervous around each other when they were alone, except, apparently, right now.

Because they were alone, and they had Talked. Specifically, if they were Ready. For… You Know. That.

(And you should be grateful that I spared you the awkwardness of that conversation for two reasons. One, because neither Kyo nor Tohru could get past using the euphemism of "it" or "that" or pausing or trailing off in place of the actual term of the topic of their conversation. Two, because Kazuma unknowingly blundered into the middle of the Talk with a tray of burnt cookies before Kyo's knee-jerk reaction was to shove him back into the hallway and slam the door of the room in his face.

"Don't you knock?!" Kyo had shouted from the inside of the room while Tohru, in her quick, fluttering voice, probably apologized and asked if Kazuma was okay.

He was okay (although the cookies were not). Kazuma figured he probably should have been somewhat disturbed about the topic of their conversation, but… grandchildren. He kept thinking about grandchildren.

And oh, the many shades of red Kyo's face could have cycled through if he had heard that thought. They weren't 15 anymore, sure, but they were only 18. Not… not old.)

The futon moved slightly as Tohru shifted toward Kyo unexpectedly, and Kyo nearly died right then from a heart attack. (Yes, at age 18.) Then he figured out that Tohru wasn't making any untoward advances, she was just untucking her legs from underneath her so her shins folded against her thighs, like bird wings, on either side of her. Kyo took the next two or three minutes figuring out how to breathe again.

This wasn't awkward, he thought to himself miserably, closing his eyes, still breathing. This was masochistic. How the hell did anyone do this without first killing themselves out of embarrassment?

And as the silence to his question stretched on (and on and on), Tohru began playing nervously with the hem of her skirt.

"So… um…" she tried.

"Yeah?" Kyo replied, which came out a bit gruff, but… well, that was Kyo, after all. Then he wondered if Tohru was taking all this awkwardness on herself, thinking it was her fault. For some reason, it made him feel a little better, maybe because that was something that he knew how to deal with. Kyo leaned forward, the futon yielding under his shifting weight, and tried to cross the empty space between Tohru and himself.

"Yes, so I talked to Uo and Hana about what I should do," Tohru said quickly.

Kyo wasn't sure how it happened, but he suddenly had a face full of futon and cotton bed sheets going up his nose. He might have said something like "What?!" or "The hell?!", but it was hard to know for sure, since it was muffled into the above-mentioned futon and all. It took him a moment to realize he had face-planted on the futon, which was stupid, because face-planting was an overreaction that never actually happened in normal, everyday situations, only it just had.

Tohru, who was either too engrossed in her hands or too embarrassed herself to notice Kyo's plight, continued talking in a hurried pace.

"Neither of them have very much experience, either, I think, I mean, that's what they said – "

And that was a small blessing as far as Kyo was concerned, because that was something he didn't want to think about right then or, well, EVER.

" – although I probably shouldn't have said that, sorry, but Hana knew some very… uh… helpful books, and she lent me a few. I've been reading them for… um… when we decided to... do what we're going to do, and I thought…"

Kyo peeled himself off the futon as Tohru continued to ramble and found that even though her face was an incredible shade of red, she was grinning. She looked nervous and all, sure, but she was… yeah.

She was excited.

Kyo felt heat prickling against the back of his neck.

"… there was this one thing I wanted to try, maybe, and if it's okay with you…?"

With that, Tohru trailed off with a high-pitched squeak that was actually kind of nice in a weird, Tohru kind of way. She looked down at him hopefully, because she was still sitting on her end of the futon and Kyo hadn't completely picked himself up from falling over for her.

The heat that had started on the back of his neck spread, and he knew he was probably grinning like a complete doofus, but if she looked like that – bare arms and smiling and brandishing the pale hollow of her throat …

Kyo's hand finally found Tohru's skin, the calloused pads of his fingertips brushing over the soft angle of her cheek and brushing into her hair. He pulled her down, gently, and brought his lips against hers.

What he said next, he said quietly, because she was so close, right there, hair trembling against the back of his hand in the wimpy breeze from the useless fan on the windowsill.

"Sure," he said, and smiled (secretly, maybe even selfishly, because it was hidden right against her lips).

"It's okay with me."

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