Double Dip

Mao should really adopt 'jailbait' as her middle name.

"What?" she snaps, bristling at the cover, "Are you stupid or something? We look nothing alike. And I'm too old to be your daughter—you'd have had to be, what, ten?"

"I'm almost thirty," Okamura says through his teeth, and doesn't know how he feels when her eye brows shoot up like that, her nose scrunches and eyes darken.

"Eleven," she insists, and jabs him in the chest, "Too old."

"We have to tell them something!" he hisses, and narrows his eyes at this utterly infuriating scrap of a woman, (she isn't, she isn't yet,) and wonders how that boy could stand her.

Mao turns to the side and relaxes into her car seat, throwing her feet up on the dashboard casually. "Don't be stupid. Let them assume what they want."

"But you're—"

Her eyes flash, "I look older than I am."

"Not old enough," he mutters under his breath, and focuses on the road. Mao snorts. Okamura needs a damn cig.

"It's not like anyone'd be rude enough to ask, anyways," she adds a second later, "It's none of their business."

"Despite the jaded pessimism of your youth," he remarks dryly, "Someone will."

"Doesn't that make you the pessimist?" she quips, and he gives up.

"Cheers."

"I am not acknowledging this," he says into his hands, and glares at her stonily over the counter top, "Do you enjoy making me the vile corruptor?"

"Don't be so melodramatic," Mao snaps, and clicks her glass against his own, stationary on the table top. Some of her hair slips over her shoulders to hang around her neck, and her eyes are very bright, in the gloom.

He looks away.

"You shouldn't be drinking," he says, in his sternest voice, and Mao huffs, and then tips it back like a pro. For all he knows, she is.

"You shouldn't be smoking," she parrots, and he doesn't question how she knows that he's been sneaking some.

Okamura shrugs, though some part of him is still uncomfortable with the way her cheeks have flushed, "It's too late for me."

Mao studies his face with an aged intensity, before looking away from him and out the window. "Me too," she says softly, and takes another drink.

He thinks she's a little bit irrational.

But irrational isn't the word that pops to his mind, when the thought runs through his head. It's stupid, because some base part of him sees a teenage girl chasing her boyfriend into the undergrounds of the world, and he's too cynical and too tired to see anything other than naivety.

She is that. She might have been raised by the yakuza, but there is some part of Mao, of brazen, brilliant, beautiful Mao, that is little more than a child. There is some part of her exhaustibly old—kind of like him.

"What is it about this kid?" he finally cracks, because there's only so far you can go for a person, and he'd been banking on her quitting by now, "You know how these things are, don't you? It's high school. It never lasts."

Mao's face twists. It's strange that he'd thought her beautiful, when he can objectively see that she isn't that pretty—she's not.

"It's only over when you give up," she says hotly, challenging, and Okamura rubs the dark circles under his eyes.

When he opens them again, he thinks that she's lovely, and buries his face in his hands.