#michiru just sitting there living life and breathing air and haruka just HAS to give her a celebratory kiss

[miracle-romance]

! Great work, Baby !

[docholligay]

Silverleaf 7: Penthouse Floor

So many thanks to Ben on Patreon for sponsoring this series! Feel free to leave a thank you on this post! Or just leave me a comment, because my ego must be fed. All of Silverleaf is here. 

The building was as intimidating as Michiru herself, the marble of it gleaming even in the dim light provided by the moon and the streetlights. Even those were different here, fashioned in wrought iron and glowing softly in an old-world way, none of the harsh fluorescing of the streetlights back in her neighborhood.

She held her flowers a little tighter. She had even gone to a flower shop, along the way, not stopping at the grocery store as she usually did when she just wanted to brighten up her own home. Michiru deserved flowers from a shop. Fancier ones. But even they, those lilies that she had selected so carefully, cradled together with the classic roses, seemed cheap and inelegant compared with the marble building, the name of it carved in script at the door, the doorman in his neat wool coat cut to his figure as much a decoration for the place as any of the carvings near the entrance.

But she had known Michiru was wealthy when they had made the plans, and she couldn’t see herself giving up just because something was finer than she was used to. Silverleaf was finer than she was used to, wasn’t it? The cafeteria served balsamic glazed salmon, for God’s sake, and she’d done fine at the school, so far.

No, she pulled down on her vest and straightened her tie, there was no reason to fear something being a bit more formal than the world she lived in herself. She displayed her flowers proudly. The woman at the flower shop had tied a nice ribbon around them.

She strolled up to the doorman, who shifted just slightly, just enough to be blocking her way, with a smile on his face.

Haruka recognized it for what it was. “I’m here to see Michiru Kaioh.” She said, hoping it sounded confident.

He nodded, looking at her quickly, and opened the door. It was very likely that Michiru had told him she was coming, but she chose, at the moment, to believe that her confidence had carried her through, and allowed it to bolster her.

The entryway gave no relief from the feeling that her shirt was perhaps just a bit too tight around her neck, the inlaid stone weaving out intricate knotted designs on the floor, and Haruka could feel them grab at her legs like vines.

“Miss Tenoh?” The elevator operator called to her, gesturing toward the far elevator.

There was an elevator operator. Who knew her name.

The illusion that sheer bravado had gotten her through the front door was somewhat dulled.

She nodded, trying to take a deep breath, trying not to seem as endlessly nervous as she was,  and stepped into the small elevator at the end of the lobby. The operator reached in, slid a card through a scanner, and pushed a button that simply said ‘Kaioh’ and Haruka noted that there were only four buttons on the panel itself: Staff, Kaioh, K2, and Pool.

There wasn’t near enough air in this elevator, as far as Haruka could tell.

The elevator went up with a frightening speed, and before Haruka could rethink her tie, her choice in women, and, in fact, the whole of her very life, the doors opened before her, revealing a mahogany door with no name or number attached to it, the only thing in the tiny atrium.

The scent of her too-common lilies wafted up to her nose, the crystal chandelier on the ceiling throwing points of light like bullets on their petals.

She took a deep breath, and walked toward the door, the soles of her dress shoes gripping hard against the marble floor, and she found herself grateful she’d sprung for the Dockers with the grip.

What the hell are you thinking, standing in a place like this thinking Dockers are okay? One of her shoes probably cost as much as your entire outfit, look at what you’re wearing, I know for you a Men’s Wearhouse suit is nice, bu--

“Oh shut up,” she mumbled to herself, “she took me to a fancy restaurant in my workout clothes, she knows I’m not rich.”

These people are beyond rich, Haruka.

She only gave one knock before the door opened, a dour-looking man in a suit quickly glancing up and down at her outfit. “Miss Tenoh, I presume?”

Again with the knowing her name, without her saying. It was meant to be complimentary, Haruka supposed, in this type of world, reassuring that she was known before she ever had to say thing, but it did not make her feel known so much as examined, put under the microscope and found wanting.

She stepped inside, nodding her head.

“May I take your coat?”

“Oh, we won’t be but a moment,” Michiru did not walk into the entryway so much as she glided into it, the delicate chiffon of her mint dress wafting behind her and surrounding her, a nymph caught in  the forest mist, “I’m afraid the grand tour will have to wait for another time.” She gave an inauthentic laugh, the tone of glass beads falling on a tile floor.

Haruka extended the flowers out in front of her in a motion she hoped seemed more gallant than graceless. “These are for you.”

“Oh, how perfectly lovely.” She took them out of Haruka’s hands, smiling, as she opened the carved walnut cabinet against the wall, withdrawing a vase.

“I know they’re not really--”

Michiru turned back to her. “My grandmother told me once that it was presumptuous to reject one’s gift on behalf of another.” She gave a closed mouth smile. ‘The thought was that if the recipient enjoyed the gift, you were calling into question your recipient’s tastes, and that is rude, don’t you agree?”

Haruka was not entirely sure what she’s said, but she knew enough to know that it boiled down to: Stop trashing the flowers.

Michiru set the vase on the credenza, and took a pair of clippers out of the drawer, arranging the flowers artfully and quickly in the sparkling crystal. She indicated to the china vase on the credenza, filled with peonies spilling their petals like explosions into the world.

“Find a more appropriate home for that, I think.” She did not so much as glance at the butler, and he simply nodded, spiriting the arrangment away into another room.

“That’s a pretty vase.” Haruka offered.

“Oh, thank you, it’s a limited edition Martin Ryan. Waterford put it out last year, and Mother simply has to have the newest thing, sometimes.” She clipped a lily and set it near the top of her arrangement, and the flowers that had seemed so simple became art in her hands.

“You’re really good with flowers.”

Michiru looked back at her with what seemed to be a bit of pride. “Yes, well, Mother did have us trained in the classic arts.” She turned back to her flowers, just clipping the accents now, inserting them here and there. “I was also quite the painter, once upon a time. I was, of course, encouraged to follow music, as that’s my true gift, I think it could be fairly said.”

“You paint?” Haruka looked at her, wondering how so much talent could take place in one person. Haruka enjoyed artistic things, she supposed, or at least, she enjoyed going to the art museum, especially on cold days when there weren’t many people, just wandering around and looking at things. Different things gave her different feelings, and sometimes it was nice to be alone with them.

She couldn’t tell Michiru any of this, of course, because it might come out that she didn’t KNOW anything. She could tell you she liked the dark colors, the dramatic movement,  in that Italian painting, in a lot of those ones from the 1600s, but she couldn’t tell you about the movement itself, couldn’t always remember the names, didn’t understand the brushstrokes or anything, not like Michiru did. She didn’t know why the Impressionists painted so thick, like you could fall into a lake of paint and emotion, why it felt to her  that they painted how things felt rather than how they were. She couldn’t tell you why she sometimes felt sad when she looked at that modern Spanish painter, when everyone else just thought they looked weird, but it looked to her like a dream and a nightmare, and she felt like she was losing something when she looked at this paintings, but she didn’t know the year they weren’t painted, and couldn’t remember the style.

It would end up just being embarrassing, all the things she didn’t know, and so she didn't say any of these things, just stood and looked at MIchiru, waiting for an answer.

“Oh,” MIchiru waved her hand away, “only in the most casual sense.”

Right then, Haruka wanted to cancel every plan she’d made, wanted to sweep her away to one of those little bars where you pay to paint, wanted to see her hand glide across the canvas in the effortless way she did everything. She wanted to tell Michiru that she’d always wanted to try it, but never had the courage.

“Maybe you can show me sometime.” Is what she said.

It all seemed so easy sitting there with Mouse in her apartment, practicing what she would say, and how she would say it, but here, in MIchiru’s entryway, the scent of her lilies hung in the air against the scent Haruka could only understand as ‘wealth,’ that same scent that she’d smelled working as a catering waitress in college, her awkward black pencil skirt just hitting under the deep scar where the surgeon had cut her life away.

She stood in the entryway, standing out against like the shiny red raise of the same scar, which prickled uncomfortably against her pant leg.

“You look lovely.” Michiru’s voice lilted into the destruction of Haruka’s thoughts.

You idiot, you forgot to tell her how nice she looks. This is why Yu--

“You’re so beautiful, Michiru.” It came out of her mouth softly, almost stumbling out of it like water over rocks in a stream, and just as pure.

Michiru did not say anything for a moment, simply looked at Haruka with a look Haruka could not decipher, another piece of art that refused to give up its secrets to her. She touched the pearls with the pink hue around her neck.

“That is very kind of you to say,” she looked, for a moment, almost shy, but recovered herself, “And what might my gentlelady caller have in mind for this evening?”

“Well,” Haruka remembered herself and swooped around to her side, taking Michiru’s coat from the hands of the butler, who had magically reappeared, unbidden, and sliding it over her shoulders, so close to touching her skirt, as desired and forbidden as any canvas, “there’s this little wine bar over by my apartment, it’s nothing fancy, but...I thought you might like it.”

It was a lie, but only a small one. It was little, it was by her apartment, and she had thought Michiru would like it. By the light of day it was nothing much. It had been a stationery store in a another life. But in the night, it transformed, and  to her it was fancy, intimate tables swaddled in white linen cuddled together under low lights, like captured fireflies hung above the couples in love she looked in on with envy. The cool claret of dark wines painting the inside of thin crystal glasses. She dreamed of sharing that small chocolate cake, smiling as the tines of their forks touched.

It was fancy in the way she was fancy, common but dressed up in a nice enough package, shined and polished and beautiful enough under dim light. Fancy in the way Haruka felt when she made a nice meal for her and Mina, with a paired wine, nothing much to the world, but the world to her, something she thought she could never be.

She shrugged, and Michiru buttoned her coat, and looked up at Haruka.

“I think it sounds quite perfect.”