{12--Ohno Satoshi/Katase Nana} days spent with you (JE White Day 2011)
Title: days spent with you
Pairing: Ohno Satoshi/Katase Nana
Rating: PG
Words: 5,700~
Summary: AU. Ohno moves to a city where he all does is eat Nana’s French baguettes and spends his time fishing.
Author’s Note: This was written for nicefinalbeam . Much love to my awesome beta frostbittenlove for inserting all the html tags and sending this to the mods on my behalf. I was on my way to Washington D.C. when this was due so she helped me with every step of the way. ♥
Warning: AU
“Have you caught any?”
“No, not yet.”
He looks up from his fishing rod and sees a young woman dressed in a pale yellow summer dress and matching wedges hovering over the rest of his gear. Her long, wavy tresses are tucked underneath a straw hat, which she has secured on top of her head with one hand. In her other hand is a wicker basket filled with three freshly baked French baguettes, a glass container of orange juice, two plastic cups, butter, knives, plates and some napkins. She is smiling warmly at him, and he looks away rather shyly as he tells her to sit with him. She does just that, smoothing out her dress as she settles next to him, the basket cradled in her embrace.
They sit there in silence as they listen to the soft sea winds circle around them, and he breaks the silence with a chuckle when her hat is almost blown away and she struggles to keep it down.
“Oh-chan,” she chides softly, turning over to him with her sharp eyes.
He looks at his fishing rod immediately, his cheeks slightly burning (from her stare or from the blazing sun?) as his grip around it tightens.
It’s her turn to chuckle.
*
He stepped into Rosalié, a French-inspired bakery situated two blocks away from where he had moved to in Kesennuma. (Kesennuma is the capital of commercial fishing in Japan and no one batted an eyelash when he told them he was going to move there. Have fun fishing, they had told him, patting his shoulder for encouragement as they had done when he went to Okinawa last year. This was just, after all, another one of his bizarrely odd decisions that involved fishing and nothing but.)
The first time he stepped into that dainty bakery that smelled like butter and sugar, he thought he was in bread heaven, despite the large selection of cakes and tarts and cookies that filled the premises. All he could see though, as an ardent fan of bread, were rolls upon rolls of French baguettes.
Behind the glass display that held those baguettes was a woman with her long hair tied up in a pony tail and secured in place with a large purple flower that matched with her dress. She had been holding a tray of freshly baked goods and she glanced over at him with a polite smile and bow, her eyes gleaming as she welcomed him into her bakery Rosalié, which she had pronounced in the French way.
He smiled back rather stiffly and ordered three baguettes to go. “I hope you like them,” she said sincerely as she slipped the three rolls into a paper bag with the bakery’s name printed across the front in cursive script. “Come back for more,” she told him, handing the bag and collecting his money. He had nodded at that and left right after she had handed him his change.
*
“How long have you been sitting here today?” she asks, handing him half of a roll smeared with butter and wrapped with a napkin.
“Five hours,” he answers, biting into the roll as he places his rod against the cement ground. The warm butter spreads around the walls of his mouth as he chews and a smile surfaces on his face as he declares it to be delectable, earning another chuckle from her. She shifts closer to him at that and takes a sip of orange juice from her cup as her feet dangle off the side of the bridge that they’re sitting on.
She glances at him and notices that his bare arm is slightly pink, and she heaves a sigh. “Oh-chan, did you put on some sunscreen?” she inquires, her eyes narrowing at him.
He stops chewing and tilts his head sideways to give her a sheepish smile that simply translates into the answer that she already knows.
“I told you that if you’re going to be out in the sun for the entire day that you should at least put some sunscreen on. Your goal in life is to fish, not to develop skin cancer at the age of thirty,” she says sternly as she places her cup on the ground and gets up.
She stalks off, her wedges clunking loudly as she moves, her hair flying behind her, and he doesn’t even call out to ask where she’s going. He knows exactly where by now.
*
He returned to Rosalié the very next morning after having decided that the baguettes were one of the best that he had ever had. When he walked in, he had expected to see her again, the woman in a purple dress and a flower in her hair, but she was replaced by a teenage girl with in a white frilly blouse and soft pink fingernails. “Welcome to Rosalié,” she greeted him, and he noticed that she had left out the accent on the last letter of the name, and somehow he found it unpleasant and irritating.
“Can I help you with anything?” she asked eagerly, unlike the other woman who had waited on him quietly, albeit her gaze on him had been quite sharp. He took a step back as he looked at the glass display and a wave of disappointment swept over him when he couldn’t find any French baguettes in sight.
But there had been a ton of them there just yesterday, he thought to himself. “You don’t have any baguettes today?” he asked, his eyes kept on the empty tray inside the display.
“They’re still in the oven right now,” she answered apologetically as she motioned to the double swinging doors behind the counter that led to the kitchen. “They should be done in about forty-five minutes, and if you’d like, we could deliver your order directly to you if you are unable to wait.”
“Delivery?” he asked with his eyes widened. He could not recall ever having his bread delivered to him, not in Tokyo or anywhere else, and didn’t think that it was even possible.
The girl nodded with a wide smile, showing some perfectly aligned teeth. “We do it all the time here. If you write down your name, address and order, we can certainly deliver baked goods to you free of charge. Or if you’re heading out to sea, just let us know what the name of your boat is or which location you’ll be at.” She handed him a piece of paper and a pen, and he immediately wrote out the spot that he had set his sights on for the day, the number of baguettes he wanted and handed it back to her. She looked it over and nodded understandingly, “Ah, you’ll be close by. Next to Kurokawa-san’s boat. Okay, we will have your baguettes delivered once they are ready.”
He thanked her with a tiny smile and left the bakery with anticipation.
“Have you caught any?”
“No, not yet.”
He looked up, his legs frozen in place when he saw that it wasn’t the teenage girl who was delivering his baguettes. It was the woman from yesterday, except her hair wasn’t tied up and she wasn’t wearing a purple dress. She was wearing a loose off-white tee shirt and a pair of denim shorts that revealed her long, slim legs. Her feet were slipped into a pair of high-heeled wedges and her toenails were painted in a soft blue that reminded him of the cloudless sky on a sunny afternoon.
He looked up at her and she had that same polite smile from yesterday, and without any warning, she crouched down to his level and handed him a basket. His order of half a dozen baguettes and an extra one. “Ohno-san, sorry these took so long. I usually have them ready early in the morning but I’d been busy decorating a wedding cake for a customer that I’d forgotten,” she explained, tucking her hair behind her ears. “So this extra one is on the bakery.”
“Thanks,” he answered in a dry voice, and then clears his throat. “How did you know my name?” he asked, as he took his wallet out from the back pocket of his chino shorts. He handed her the bills and some change, and was taken aback by the softness of her skin. He didn’t know too much about the hands of a baker, but hers resembled more like one of those women who were barred from doing any chores around the house.
“You wrote it on the order form,” she pointed out with a laugh, and stuffed the money into her pocket without counting. He nodded absentmindedly, finally recalling that he had written his name on the piece of paper the teenage girl had given him, but what caught him off guard was her laugh, and how carefree and smooth it was. “Say, Ohno-san,” she said, as she set the basket down on the space next to him and sat down. “Do you have any sunscreen on?”
It was such a random question, but he could tell from the look on her face that she was genuinely interested in knowing whether he had applied sunscreen or not. “No,” he said, with a shake of his head, and smiled guiltily.
“Ohno-san,” she said, “No fisherman should ever go out in the sun without any sunscreen. Unless they’re aiming to develop skin cancer.” He nodded at that, but sat still and waited to see if she would continue, and when she didn’t, he simply looked at his hands.
“I’ll be back,” she said at the moment he started to space out, and she got up so briskly that he didn’t register what had just happened.
Fifteen minutes later, she came back with a small plastic bag swinging in one hand and the other hand stuffed into her pocket.
She sat down next to him again and peered into the basket and smiled, and he guessed it had to be because he had eaten one of the rolls already. Then she glanced over at him and giggled as she pointed to the corner of his mouth. “Crumbs, Ohno-san. You were that famished, weren’t you,” she teased as he reached to wipe the crumbs away with a napkin.
He nodded back and touched the back of his neck. “I was,” he admitted, and looked at the bag in her lap. “You went shopping?” he asked, motioning to the line of stores that stood behind the boats.
“I went to get you sunscreen,” she said, pulling the tube out of the bag and handing it to him. “Really, if you plan on fishing with your grandchildren when you’re an old man, then you should really think about your health right now.”
“Ah, um, thank you…” his voice trailed off, suddenly realizing that she knew his name, but he didn’t know hers. His grip around his fishing rod and the tube of sunscreen tightened as he met her eyes. She was staring at him with the same amount of intensity from yesterday, but this time he found a degree of softness in them as well.
“Call me Nana,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “Most people here call me Nana-chan, though,” she continued, wiggling her eyebrows as if trying to convince him that he should follow suit and call her that.
“Nana-chan,” he said, cautiously, thinking that most people would not be so friendly with someone they had just met. But then again, this was not Tokyo and he had suspected that small towns were a lot friendlier. After all, she did run off to buy him sunscreen. It was a little too generous of her, but his mother had always taught him to believe in the good of people and so he relaxed a bit and said her name as casually as he could. “Nana-chan.”
She nodded with approval and gave him a thumbs-up sign, and that made him smile.
*
“Nana-chan,” he says softly as she rubs sunscreen on his bare arms, and her soft skin against his makes him tingle with delight. It has been a while, after all. “Nana-chan,” he repeats in the same voice, and it dawns on him how he has gotten used to saying her name as opposed to the first time he said it. The familiarity is comforting, and he likes that. A lot.
“Nana-chan,” he says her name again but in a louder tone, and she finally looks at him but with her angry eyes.
He gives her a sheepish smile and says, “Sorry. I simply forgot to bring sunscreen, that’s all.”
“Oh-chan, I was gone for two weeks, so that means that you’ve forgotten to put sunscreen every day since I left. Your skin doesn’t lie,” she says, giving his arm a slap. “I wouldn’t have promised you the baguettes if I had known you were like this.”
She shakes her head as she fusses over his neck, and complains how that part is also a lot darker than she remembers. She shifts and gets on her knees beside him, smears some sunscreen there and he chuckles at her touch when she pretends to strangle him.
“That tickles,” he says, looking up at her and sees her smile at his childish protest. Her grip loosens, and she dutifully spreads the lotion around his neck, massaging it with her fingers.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he says, quietly.
“Me too.”
*
“So when he comes back here, I’m going to sell Rosalié, get married to him and raise our children,” she said, tearing a piece of bread and then popping it into her mouth. She started to kick the water, causing some gentle splashes over his chino shorts, and she looked at him with a twinkle in her eye.
He only chuckled at that and asked her why she had done that, only to have her splash harder; he shifted away from her, pleading her to stop but with a gentle grin on his face. “Nana-chan.”
They had been talking almost every day now since the first day he met her, and she would keep him company from nine to two if there were no custom orders at the bakery. Everything was left to Umika, the teenage girl he had met there. That gave Nana ample time to spend with him while he sat there at the same location to fish for five hours until he went to his part-time job at the Open Fish Market a mile away from his house.
He never questioned why she liked to talk to him, he was grateful for the company and the delicious baguettes she would bring him. It was fascinating to him how she was able to disclose so many details about her personal life with him, and how close they had gotten-close enough for her to call him by a nickname.
“I just wanted to make sure that you were listening, Oh-chan.” She scooted back and crossed her legs. “So what was I saying?”
“You said,” he started, and paused. He glanced over at her and saw that her eyes were narrowing at him, so he started again. “You said, if your fiancé returns from Tokyo, you’d sell Rosalie… and what was the last thing again?”
She shook her head and laughed, “Forget it, Oh-chan. At least you got the first two.” Then she picked up a baguette and handed it to him, as if that was his prize for actually listening to her story. He took it from her and bit into it, all while wondering how he had managed to catch most of what she had said when his mind had been blank at the time. Maybe he had been listening, or maybe he had not. He wasn’t so certain about that himself.
A long silence swept over them after that, and she hugged her knees as she stared out into the open sea. When he finished his baguette, he looked at her for another roll but then saw a perplexed expression on her face. It was soon replaced with a weak smile when she locked eyes with him. “Oh-chan,” she said, and then that was when he noticed that her smile was wavering, her eyes moist. “He isn’t coming back,” she says to him, although it seemed like it was directed towards herself.
He had never been the type to actually offer words of comfort because he simply didn’t know what to say, so he just blinked at her. But a beat later, three words eventually came to his mind and he said them sincerely.
“I am here.”
Her wavering smile steadied shortly after that.
Two days later, Nana came with his usual order of baguettes and a tear-stained face.
He froze in place the moment she sat down with the basket in her lap and buried her face into his shoulder without a word. All he could hear after that, besides the sea waves, were soft whimpers that made him put his fishing rod down and reach over to pat the top of her head. Those whimpers eventually escalated to wails, and then he heard her muffled speech that brought a lopsided smile to his face as he tried to make out what exactly she was trying to say. All he could catch was “fiancé”, “break-up” and “Tokyo” and because those three words were already enough to string together a coherent story, he remained silent.
Her babbling died down shortly after her wails did and she fell into silence after that.
By the time he looked down at her, her hair had fallen across her cheeks and she had already closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
That was when he felt his heart skip a couple of beats. And the more his eyes lingered on her, the more beats his heart skipped.
He reverted to looking out into the sea instead.
“Oh-chan,” she murmured groggily as she rubbed her eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Three hours,” he answered in a raspy voice. His entire left side was completely numb and sweat covered his neck and face. He had tried twice during those three hours to reach over to his bag and grab his water bottle, but he had thought about how she would topple over if he moved, so he ended up sitting there under the blazing sun and repeatedly licked his lips to keep himself hydrated. Which, to be honest, worked out fine at the beginning but as the minutes ticked away, he found that he was too tired to even move his tongue.
She sat up and looked at him, her eyes still adjusting to her surroundings. “Oh-chan, I forgot to use sunscreen today,” she said, a frown forming on her pinkish face. “I’d run out of the apartment after having a fight with my fiancé over the phone, and having SPF on was the last thing on my mind.”
He decided to ignore the part about her fight with her fiancé, and only gave her a proud smile as he said, “There’s nothing wrong with being tanned.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know what they fought about; he wanted to talk about other things that wouldn’t remind her of her fiancé.
“For you there isn’t,” she said, pushing him away in a playful manner, her hands landing right on the spot where she had slept. He made a face at the contract as he was still numb there, and she looked at him in horror as she had forgotten how long she’d taken up that space. “You could have just told me to wake up,” she said, kneeling behind him as she placed her hands on his shoulders. “But I know you were probably freaked out by my crying face that you’d rather just let me sleep.”
He let out a soft chuckle and closed his eyes as she began to knead his shoulders. “That’s not true,” he replied, throwing his head back in a relaxing way. “I was a little worried but not freaked out.”
“I know,” she said, and he heard her smile. “And I’m sorry.”
He shook his head and dismissed her apology. “Are you feeling better now?”
She gave him a tiny squeeze on the shoulders and her soft laughter echoed into his ears as the ends of her hair brushed against the back of his neck. “Yes,” she replied in a singsong voice, and he felt her move enthusiastically as her hands continued to loosen the muscles of his shoulders.
He smiled, and thought back to when his heart skipped a few beats when he saw her sleeping face.
There was something about all of this that made his smile grow wider.
*
She leans onto him and links her arm around his, letting her chin rest on his shoulder. “It feels like I never left,” she says out of the blue and gazes at him with a gentle smile. “We’re sitting at the same spot as always and you’re still not having any luck with fishing.” The bucket that he always had with him and his net are still as dry as they were from the very beginning. He was lucky enough to have earned himself a part-time job at the local fish market or else he would never have made it this far with the total of successful catches he has had since coming to Kesennuma.
“I wanted to move over there,” he says, pointing to a bridge on the other side of the harbor. “I heard there’s a lot more traffic over there, but I’ve gotten used to coming here so it just feels natural to keep doing that. And I thought if I had moved without telling you, you’d probably stop bringing me baguettes.”
She laughs at him as she takes his hand into her own, their arms still linked. “Let’s go make some baguettes after this. Do you still remember how to make them?”
“Not all of the steps,” he admits, looking at her and then at their joined hands. It doesn’t feel the least bit awkward to him. In fact, he feels like this is one of the many things that they should have done a long time ago, back in the kitchen at Rosalié that one particular night. “But I remember the kneading.”
*
He was standing in the kitchen at Rosalié with an apron on as he watched her pipe rows of little white sugar daisies on parchment paper on a tray. After she was finished with that, she pulled out a small bowl of tiny yellow sugar pearls and placed one at the center of each flower. Then she carefully slid the completed products into a long container and sealed it airtight before setting it aside to work on her next project.
It was the first time he had seen her make anything inside of the bakery. When he wasn’t fishing, he was working at the fish market and barely had time to visit her, so it wasn’t until now that he got to see what it was like to be inside her kitchen.
What surprised him when he first walked into it was the fact that it resembled nothing like the professional kitchens that he had seen on television and in magazines. Instead, she owned only two high-tech ovens, a matching refrigerator with a ton of buttons that he had never seen before and a large rectangular steel table. Everything else seemed to belong in someone’s home. The cabinets were made out of wood and painted a soft shade of butter yellow as were the walls and the tiles on the floor. The pans and other utensils were piled neatly under the steel table for easy access.
There was a homey feeling to it and a degree of professionalism at the same time and that awed him, as he continued to watch her. She had been piping with such ease that he wondered if she was born with that piping bag in her hand. He knew it was a silly thought, but that image entertained him until she caught his attention.
“We’re now going to make your beloved baguettes,” she announced as she walked over to the sink and washed her hands thoroughly with soap and warm water.
“Really?” he asked, a smile tugging at his lips as he scratched the back of his ear in disbelief. “Really?” he reiterated.
“Yes, Oh-chan. We don’t have all day so let’s get started,” she said, drying her hands with a clean towel.
He rolled up his sleeves immediately.
About four hours later, they were getting around to kneading the dough for the first time. It had been left to rest for three hours, and they had spent that time back at his favorite fishing spot eating curry bread that she had made the day before. She had been unusually quiet as they ate, and he didn’t say a word either as he thought she was probably contemplating some personal matters. At that moment, he felt strangely distant from her, as if she was in a different world than he was, even though they were looking out into the same view.
But he didn’t let himself get carried away with that thought; she didn’t either because as soon as the three hours were up, she pulled him along to finish what they had started.
“This is the first kneading,” she said, uncovering the dough from the towel that they had used. She placed it onto a surface of flour and placed her palms against it. “It’s kind of giving someone a massage,” she explained, and went ahead to show him a live example.
He watched as her hands pressed and pushed their way into the dough, and it reminded him of the way she had had her hands on his shoulders just days before. Somehow that led him to think of the chain of events leading up to that particular day, and he had a flashback of her face against his shoulder.
He knew what all of that meant to him, even though he couldn’t possibly describe it to anyone else.
“Oh-chan, you finish this while I get the bowl ready,” she said, breaking into his thoughts.
He blinked repeatedly at her and finally nodded when she had started to cast her intense eyes at him.
By the time she had already finished oiling the bowl to set the dough in, his apron had already been covered with flour, and she had only spent three minutes being away.
He was pretty certain that his face had some stains as well, though he couldn’t understand how they had gotten that far. He knew he must have looked funny because when she turned around and looked at him, she broke into a huge grin, and he could see it reach as far as the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes.
She walked over to him as she shook her head with amusement. “I don’t think that’s an efficient way to whiten your skin, Oh-chan.” And before he could say something back about that remark of hers, she had reached over to wipe the tip of his nose with her fingers, and then when he finally realized what she had done, her hands were already on his cheeks, brushing away the flour from there as well. He felt himself grow hot, but he still managed to look her in the eye.
She looked back at him, and their gazes locked for a brief moment before she took a step closer towards him. Her hands were still in close proximity to his face and he inched forward so they were barely centimeters apart.
Her lips parted.
So did his.
Her lips brushed against his.
He wanted to respond.
Except he saw something flash in her eyes that instant, something that seemed like shock and regret, and the next second she was already stepping back from him with flushed cheeks. It was the first time he saw that color on her face, and he looked at her for the longest time before she snapped at him.
“Oh-chan, we’ve got baguettes to make!”
*
“Of course you remember the kneading,” she laughs, bumping her shoulder against his as her feet kicks the water excitedly. “I’d never seen anyone end up with so much flour all over himself in a matter of minutes. What exactly were you thinking at the time?”
“Nothing,” he admits with a firm nod. “Honestly, nothing.”
“As always,” she remarks, scowling at him. “I am not surprised.”
He thinks for a moment, and then shakes his head at her as he says, “Not true. I was thinking of something when you left.” He remembers what he wanted to say at the time but he kept it inside of him because he was aware that she was not ready for him yet. Had the circumstances been different though, those words would have already flown out of his mouth as he is the type of person to confess as soon as he realizes that he has feelings for someone.
She perks up in interest and looks at him with an incredulous expression. Then her features soften a few seconds later, and she smiles.
*
Their relationship gradually came to an impasse after that. They still talked and laughed, but he was vaguely aware that there was something different that hung in the air between them, especially when they fell into periods of silence. It was if that awkwardness that came between them in the kitchen had carried onto their time spent together, and even sitting at their usual spot felt so out of place.
A week later, she came to tell him that she was going to Tokyo for a fortnight and that she was leaving the next morning, but she revealed very little about why she was going. “I just have some things to take care of,” she told him with a reassuring smile. “Two weeks isn’t so long, Oh-chan,” she added, patting his shoulder. “You won’t miss me much.”
He didn’t really want to, but he nodded slowly in agreement. “Just have fun,” he told her, and she promised him that she would try.
He knew she was going to come back, but it didn’t make him feel any better about how they were right now. If anything, her departure would probably drive them even further apart. And he really, really wanted to tell her how much he-
“I need to get back to the bakery now,” she said to him and stood up, patting the back of her denim shorts. “I have to organize everything so that Umika and the others will know what to do when I’m not here.” She looked down at him and waved with a smile that seemed foreign to him. “Bye, Oh-chan.”
He lifted his hand reluctantly and waved back. “I’ll see you in two weeks?”
“Two weeks,” she confirmed, and then she walked away rather quickly.
He watched her until she disappeared around a corner, and then he squinted out at the sea, wondering if he should have just gone ahead and said what he needed and wanted to tell her.
She called him out of the blue, two days before she was due back. There was relief in her voice, as if she had let go of something heavy that she had been holding in for a very long time. There was a short moment of silence after the usual greetings, and then he waited for her to tell him what she wanted him to know.
“I came to Tokyo to return the money that my ex-fiancé had lent me to open Rosalié. I figured that since we are no longer together then I should pay him back as soon as I can. I’m still working on that right now as the bakery isn’t making much at the moment, but that’s the only thing that’s left between us,” she said with a nervous laugh, and then she continued in a more serious voice. “The other reason why I came here is because I needed to sort out my feelings.”
He said nothing to that, though his mouth was hanging open with his jaw jutted out. He was under the impression that she had meant to sort out her feelings for him. Feelings that he had thought didn’t exist.
“How did we get to this point?” she asked, and he heard her smile. “Do you know?
He answered her in the same honest way that he answered all of her questions. “I don’t.”
Her reaction to that was a low chuckle followed by, “So I guess I’ll need to come back and figure this one out with you.”
“And bring me some baguettes?”
“Baguettes included.”
*
“And what were you thinking about when I left?” she asks, playing with their intertwined hands. “You can tell me now since I’m back and I won’t be going anywhere for a while.”
He turns to her with a bashful smile as he touches the back of his neck. Somehow keeping it in for so long has made him feel unusually awkward to tell her what he wanted to say two weeks ago. But he decides to go ahead with it anyway, even if he knows that she already knows what it is because it’s that obvious, so he gazes into her eyes, and says, “I like you, Nana.” Very much, he wants to add, but he figures there might be a more direct way to let her know.
He leans closer to her and then he watches as she closes her eyes while he presses his lips against hers. This time, she doesn’t jerk back; instead she chooses to kiss him back, shifting forward as her free hand lands on the back of his neck and pulls him closer as their tongues finally meet.
This kiss is a little late but he thinks there will be more to come.
And baguettes. Definitely those too.
*
Fin.
*
End Notes: Kesennuma is the capital of commercial fishing in Japan, at the time of writing - the quaint little fishing city port has been devastated by fire during the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last 11 March 2011. This author is hoping and praying that the city and its residents pick themselves up and rebuild their lives from the tragedy. The author hopes the reader will, too.
Pairing: Ohno Satoshi/Katase Nana
Rating: PG
Words: 5,700~
Summary: AU. Ohno moves to a city where he all does is eat Nana’s French baguettes and spends his time fishing.
Author’s Note: This was written for nicefinalbeam . Much love to my awesome beta frostbittenlove for inserting all the html tags and sending this to the mods on my behalf. I was on my way to Washington D.C. when this was due so she helped me with every step of the way. ♥
Warning: AU
“Have you caught any?”
“No, not yet.”
He looks up from his fishing rod and sees a young woman dressed in a pale yellow summer dress and matching wedges hovering over the rest of his gear. Her long, wavy tresses are tucked underneath a straw hat, which she has secured on top of her head with one hand. In her other hand is a wicker basket filled with three freshly baked French baguettes, a glass container of orange juice, two plastic cups, butter, knives, plates and some napkins. She is smiling warmly at him, and he looks away rather shyly as he tells her to sit with him. She does just that, smoothing out her dress as she settles next to him, the basket cradled in her embrace.
They sit there in silence as they listen to the soft sea winds circle around them, and he breaks the silence with a chuckle when her hat is almost blown away and she struggles to keep it down.
“Oh-chan,” she chides softly, turning over to him with her sharp eyes.
He looks at his fishing rod immediately, his cheeks slightly burning (from her stare or from the blazing sun?) as his grip around it tightens.
It’s her turn to chuckle.
*
He stepped into Rosalié, a French-inspired bakery situated two blocks away from where he had moved to in Kesennuma. (Kesennuma is the capital of commercial fishing in Japan and no one batted an eyelash when he told them he was going to move there. Have fun fishing, they had told him, patting his shoulder for encouragement as they had done when he went to Okinawa last year. This was just, after all, another one of his bizarrely odd decisions that involved fishing and nothing but.)
The first time he stepped into that dainty bakery that smelled like butter and sugar, he thought he was in bread heaven, despite the large selection of cakes and tarts and cookies that filled the premises. All he could see though, as an ardent fan of bread, were rolls upon rolls of French baguettes.
Behind the glass display that held those baguettes was a woman with her long hair tied up in a pony tail and secured in place with a large purple flower that matched with her dress. She had been holding a tray of freshly baked goods and she glanced over at him with a polite smile and bow, her eyes gleaming as she welcomed him into her bakery Rosalié, which she had pronounced in the French way.
He smiled back rather stiffly and ordered three baguettes to go. “I hope you like them,” she said sincerely as she slipped the three rolls into a paper bag with the bakery’s name printed across the front in cursive script. “Come back for more,” she told him, handing the bag and collecting his money. He had nodded at that and left right after she had handed him his change.
*
“How long have you been sitting here today?” she asks, handing him half of a roll smeared with butter and wrapped with a napkin.
“Five hours,” he answers, biting into the roll as he places his rod against the cement ground. The warm butter spreads around the walls of his mouth as he chews and a smile surfaces on his face as he declares it to be delectable, earning another chuckle from her. She shifts closer to him at that and takes a sip of orange juice from her cup as her feet dangle off the side of the bridge that they’re sitting on.
She glances at him and notices that his bare arm is slightly pink, and she heaves a sigh. “Oh-chan, did you put on some sunscreen?” she inquires, her eyes narrowing at him.
He stops chewing and tilts his head sideways to give her a sheepish smile that simply translates into the answer that she already knows.
“I told you that if you’re going to be out in the sun for the entire day that you should at least put some sunscreen on. Your goal in life is to fish, not to develop skin cancer at the age of thirty,” she says sternly as she places her cup on the ground and gets up.
She stalks off, her wedges clunking loudly as she moves, her hair flying behind her, and he doesn’t even call out to ask where she’s going. He knows exactly where by now.
*
He returned to Rosalié the very next morning after having decided that the baguettes were one of the best that he had ever had. When he walked in, he had expected to see her again, the woman in a purple dress and a flower in her hair, but she was replaced by a teenage girl with in a white frilly blouse and soft pink fingernails. “Welcome to Rosalié,” she greeted him, and he noticed that she had left out the accent on the last letter of the name, and somehow he found it unpleasant and irritating.
“Can I help you with anything?” she asked eagerly, unlike the other woman who had waited on him quietly, albeit her gaze on him had been quite sharp. He took a step back as he looked at the glass display and a wave of disappointment swept over him when he couldn’t find any French baguettes in sight.
But there had been a ton of them there just yesterday, he thought to himself. “You don’t have any baguettes today?” he asked, his eyes kept on the empty tray inside the display.
“They’re still in the oven right now,” she answered apologetically as she motioned to the double swinging doors behind the counter that led to the kitchen. “They should be done in about forty-five minutes, and if you’d like, we could deliver your order directly to you if you are unable to wait.”
“Delivery?” he asked with his eyes widened. He could not recall ever having his bread delivered to him, not in Tokyo or anywhere else, and didn’t think that it was even possible.
The girl nodded with a wide smile, showing some perfectly aligned teeth. “We do it all the time here. If you write down your name, address and order, we can certainly deliver baked goods to you free of charge. Or if you’re heading out to sea, just let us know what the name of your boat is or which location you’ll be at.” She handed him a piece of paper and a pen, and he immediately wrote out the spot that he had set his sights on for the day, the number of baguettes he wanted and handed it back to her. She looked it over and nodded understandingly, “Ah, you’ll be close by. Next to Kurokawa-san’s boat. Okay, we will have your baguettes delivered once they are ready.”
He thanked her with a tiny smile and left the bakery with anticipation.
“Have you caught any?”
“No, not yet.”
He looked up, his legs frozen in place when he saw that it wasn’t the teenage girl who was delivering his baguettes. It was the woman from yesterday, except her hair wasn’t tied up and she wasn’t wearing a purple dress. She was wearing a loose off-white tee shirt and a pair of denim shorts that revealed her long, slim legs. Her feet were slipped into a pair of high-heeled wedges and her toenails were painted in a soft blue that reminded him of the cloudless sky on a sunny afternoon.
He looked up at her and she had that same polite smile from yesterday, and without any warning, she crouched down to his level and handed him a basket. His order of half a dozen baguettes and an extra one. “Ohno-san, sorry these took so long. I usually have them ready early in the morning but I’d been busy decorating a wedding cake for a customer that I’d forgotten,” she explained, tucking her hair behind her ears. “So this extra one is on the bakery.”
“Thanks,” he answered in a dry voice, and then clears his throat. “How did you know my name?” he asked, as he took his wallet out from the back pocket of his chino shorts. He handed her the bills and some change, and was taken aback by the softness of her skin. He didn’t know too much about the hands of a baker, but hers resembled more like one of those women who were barred from doing any chores around the house.
“You wrote it on the order form,” she pointed out with a laugh, and stuffed the money into her pocket without counting. He nodded absentmindedly, finally recalling that he had written his name on the piece of paper the teenage girl had given him, but what caught him off guard was her laugh, and how carefree and smooth it was. “Say, Ohno-san,” she said, as she set the basket down on the space next to him and sat down. “Do you have any sunscreen on?”
It was such a random question, but he could tell from the look on her face that she was genuinely interested in knowing whether he had applied sunscreen or not. “No,” he said, with a shake of his head, and smiled guiltily.
“Ohno-san,” she said, “No fisherman should ever go out in the sun without any sunscreen. Unless they’re aiming to develop skin cancer.” He nodded at that, but sat still and waited to see if she would continue, and when she didn’t, he simply looked at his hands.
“I’ll be back,” she said at the moment he started to space out, and she got up so briskly that he didn’t register what had just happened.
Fifteen minutes later, she came back with a small plastic bag swinging in one hand and the other hand stuffed into her pocket.
She sat down next to him again and peered into the basket and smiled, and he guessed it had to be because he had eaten one of the rolls already. Then she glanced over at him and giggled as she pointed to the corner of his mouth. “Crumbs, Ohno-san. You were that famished, weren’t you,” she teased as he reached to wipe the crumbs away with a napkin.
He nodded back and touched the back of his neck. “I was,” he admitted, and looked at the bag in her lap. “You went shopping?” he asked, motioning to the line of stores that stood behind the boats.
“I went to get you sunscreen,” she said, pulling the tube out of the bag and handing it to him. “Really, if you plan on fishing with your grandchildren when you’re an old man, then you should really think about your health right now.”
“Ah, um, thank you…” his voice trailed off, suddenly realizing that she knew his name, but he didn’t know hers. His grip around his fishing rod and the tube of sunscreen tightened as he met her eyes. She was staring at him with the same amount of intensity from yesterday, but this time he found a degree of softness in them as well.
“Call me Nana,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “Most people here call me Nana-chan, though,” she continued, wiggling her eyebrows as if trying to convince him that he should follow suit and call her that.
“Nana-chan,” he said, cautiously, thinking that most people would not be so friendly with someone they had just met. But then again, this was not Tokyo and he had suspected that small towns were a lot friendlier. After all, she did run off to buy him sunscreen. It was a little too generous of her, but his mother had always taught him to believe in the good of people and so he relaxed a bit and said her name as casually as he could. “Nana-chan.”
She nodded with approval and gave him a thumbs-up sign, and that made him smile.
*
“Nana-chan,” he says softly as she rubs sunscreen on his bare arms, and her soft skin against his makes him tingle with delight. It has been a while, after all. “Nana-chan,” he repeats in the same voice, and it dawns on him how he has gotten used to saying her name as opposed to the first time he said it. The familiarity is comforting, and he likes that. A lot.
“Nana-chan,” he says her name again but in a louder tone, and she finally looks at him but with her angry eyes.
He gives her a sheepish smile and says, “Sorry. I simply forgot to bring sunscreen, that’s all.”
“Oh-chan, I was gone for two weeks, so that means that you’ve forgotten to put sunscreen every day since I left. Your skin doesn’t lie,” she says, giving his arm a slap. “I wouldn’t have promised you the baguettes if I had known you were like this.”
She shakes her head as she fusses over his neck, and complains how that part is also a lot darker than she remembers. She shifts and gets on her knees beside him, smears some sunscreen there and he chuckles at her touch when she pretends to strangle him.
“That tickles,” he says, looking up at her and sees her smile at his childish protest. Her grip loosens, and she dutifully spreads the lotion around his neck, massaging it with her fingers.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he says, quietly.
“Me too.”
*
“So when he comes back here, I’m going to sell Rosalié, get married to him and raise our children,” she said, tearing a piece of bread and then popping it into her mouth. She started to kick the water, causing some gentle splashes over his chino shorts, and she looked at him with a twinkle in her eye.
He only chuckled at that and asked her why she had done that, only to have her splash harder; he shifted away from her, pleading her to stop but with a gentle grin on his face. “Nana-chan.”
They had been talking almost every day now since the first day he met her, and she would keep him company from nine to two if there were no custom orders at the bakery. Everything was left to Umika, the teenage girl he had met there. That gave Nana ample time to spend with him while he sat there at the same location to fish for five hours until he went to his part-time job at the Open Fish Market a mile away from his house.
He never questioned why she liked to talk to him, he was grateful for the company and the delicious baguettes she would bring him. It was fascinating to him how she was able to disclose so many details about her personal life with him, and how close they had gotten-close enough for her to call him by a nickname.
“I just wanted to make sure that you were listening, Oh-chan.” She scooted back and crossed her legs. “So what was I saying?”
“You said,” he started, and paused. He glanced over at her and saw that her eyes were narrowing at him, so he started again. “You said, if your fiancé returns from Tokyo, you’d sell Rosalie… and what was the last thing again?”
She shook her head and laughed, “Forget it, Oh-chan. At least you got the first two.” Then she picked up a baguette and handed it to him, as if that was his prize for actually listening to her story. He took it from her and bit into it, all while wondering how he had managed to catch most of what she had said when his mind had been blank at the time. Maybe he had been listening, or maybe he had not. He wasn’t so certain about that himself.
A long silence swept over them after that, and she hugged her knees as she stared out into the open sea. When he finished his baguette, he looked at her for another roll but then saw a perplexed expression on her face. It was soon replaced with a weak smile when she locked eyes with him. “Oh-chan,” she said, and then that was when he noticed that her smile was wavering, her eyes moist. “He isn’t coming back,” she says to him, although it seemed like it was directed towards herself.
He had never been the type to actually offer words of comfort because he simply didn’t know what to say, so he just blinked at her. But a beat later, three words eventually came to his mind and he said them sincerely.
“I am here.”
Her wavering smile steadied shortly after that.
Two days later, Nana came with his usual order of baguettes and a tear-stained face.
He froze in place the moment she sat down with the basket in her lap and buried her face into his shoulder without a word. All he could hear after that, besides the sea waves, were soft whimpers that made him put his fishing rod down and reach over to pat the top of her head. Those whimpers eventually escalated to wails, and then he heard her muffled speech that brought a lopsided smile to his face as he tried to make out what exactly she was trying to say. All he could catch was “fiancé”, “break-up” and “Tokyo” and because those three words were already enough to string together a coherent story, he remained silent.
Her babbling died down shortly after her wails did and she fell into silence after that.
By the time he looked down at her, her hair had fallen across her cheeks and she had already closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
That was when he felt his heart skip a couple of beats. And the more his eyes lingered on her, the more beats his heart skipped.
He reverted to looking out into the sea instead.
“Oh-chan,” she murmured groggily as she rubbed her eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Three hours,” he answered in a raspy voice. His entire left side was completely numb and sweat covered his neck and face. He had tried twice during those three hours to reach over to his bag and grab his water bottle, but he had thought about how she would topple over if he moved, so he ended up sitting there under the blazing sun and repeatedly licked his lips to keep himself hydrated. Which, to be honest, worked out fine at the beginning but as the minutes ticked away, he found that he was too tired to even move his tongue.
She sat up and looked at him, her eyes still adjusting to her surroundings. “Oh-chan, I forgot to use sunscreen today,” she said, a frown forming on her pinkish face. “I’d run out of the apartment after having a fight with my fiancé over the phone, and having SPF on was the last thing on my mind.”
He decided to ignore the part about her fight with her fiancé, and only gave her a proud smile as he said, “There’s nothing wrong with being tanned.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know what they fought about; he wanted to talk about other things that wouldn’t remind her of her fiancé.
“For you there isn’t,” she said, pushing him away in a playful manner, her hands landing right on the spot where she had slept. He made a face at the contract as he was still numb there, and she looked at him in horror as she had forgotten how long she’d taken up that space. “You could have just told me to wake up,” she said, kneeling behind him as she placed her hands on his shoulders. “But I know you were probably freaked out by my crying face that you’d rather just let me sleep.”
He let out a soft chuckle and closed his eyes as she began to knead his shoulders. “That’s not true,” he replied, throwing his head back in a relaxing way. “I was a little worried but not freaked out.”
“I know,” she said, and he heard her smile. “And I’m sorry.”
He shook his head and dismissed her apology. “Are you feeling better now?”
She gave him a tiny squeeze on the shoulders and her soft laughter echoed into his ears as the ends of her hair brushed against the back of his neck. “Yes,” she replied in a singsong voice, and he felt her move enthusiastically as her hands continued to loosen the muscles of his shoulders.
He smiled, and thought back to when his heart skipped a few beats when he saw her sleeping face.
There was something about all of this that made his smile grow wider.
*
She leans onto him and links her arm around his, letting her chin rest on his shoulder. “It feels like I never left,” she says out of the blue and gazes at him with a gentle smile. “We’re sitting at the same spot as always and you’re still not having any luck with fishing.” The bucket that he always had with him and his net are still as dry as they were from the very beginning. He was lucky enough to have earned himself a part-time job at the local fish market or else he would never have made it this far with the total of successful catches he has had since coming to Kesennuma.
“I wanted to move over there,” he says, pointing to a bridge on the other side of the harbor. “I heard there’s a lot more traffic over there, but I’ve gotten used to coming here so it just feels natural to keep doing that. And I thought if I had moved without telling you, you’d probably stop bringing me baguettes.”
She laughs at him as she takes his hand into her own, their arms still linked. “Let’s go make some baguettes after this. Do you still remember how to make them?”
“Not all of the steps,” he admits, looking at her and then at their joined hands. It doesn’t feel the least bit awkward to him. In fact, he feels like this is one of the many things that they should have done a long time ago, back in the kitchen at Rosalié that one particular night. “But I remember the kneading.”
*
He was standing in the kitchen at Rosalié with an apron on as he watched her pipe rows of little white sugar daisies on parchment paper on a tray. After she was finished with that, she pulled out a small bowl of tiny yellow sugar pearls and placed one at the center of each flower. Then she carefully slid the completed products into a long container and sealed it airtight before setting it aside to work on her next project.
It was the first time he had seen her make anything inside of the bakery. When he wasn’t fishing, he was working at the fish market and barely had time to visit her, so it wasn’t until now that he got to see what it was like to be inside her kitchen.
What surprised him when he first walked into it was the fact that it resembled nothing like the professional kitchens that he had seen on television and in magazines. Instead, she owned only two high-tech ovens, a matching refrigerator with a ton of buttons that he had never seen before and a large rectangular steel table. Everything else seemed to belong in someone’s home. The cabinets were made out of wood and painted a soft shade of butter yellow as were the walls and the tiles on the floor. The pans and other utensils were piled neatly under the steel table for easy access.
There was a homey feeling to it and a degree of professionalism at the same time and that awed him, as he continued to watch her. She had been piping with such ease that he wondered if she was born with that piping bag in her hand. He knew it was a silly thought, but that image entertained him until she caught his attention.
“We’re now going to make your beloved baguettes,” she announced as she walked over to the sink and washed her hands thoroughly with soap and warm water.
“Really?” he asked, a smile tugging at his lips as he scratched the back of his ear in disbelief. “Really?” he reiterated.
“Yes, Oh-chan. We don’t have all day so let’s get started,” she said, drying her hands with a clean towel.
He rolled up his sleeves immediately.
About four hours later, they were getting around to kneading the dough for the first time. It had been left to rest for three hours, and they had spent that time back at his favorite fishing spot eating curry bread that she had made the day before. She had been unusually quiet as they ate, and he didn’t say a word either as he thought she was probably contemplating some personal matters. At that moment, he felt strangely distant from her, as if she was in a different world than he was, even though they were looking out into the same view.
But he didn’t let himself get carried away with that thought; she didn’t either because as soon as the three hours were up, she pulled him along to finish what they had started.
“This is the first kneading,” she said, uncovering the dough from the towel that they had used. She placed it onto a surface of flour and placed her palms against it. “It’s kind of giving someone a massage,” she explained, and went ahead to show him a live example.
He watched as her hands pressed and pushed their way into the dough, and it reminded him of the way she had had her hands on his shoulders just days before. Somehow that led him to think of the chain of events leading up to that particular day, and he had a flashback of her face against his shoulder.
He knew what all of that meant to him, even though he couldn’t possibly describe it to anyone else.
“Oh-chan, you finish this while I get the bowl ready,” she said, breaking into his thoughts.
He blinked repeatedly at her and finally nodded when she had started to cast her intense eyes at him.
By the time she had already finished oiling the bowl to set the dough in, his apron had already been covered with flour, and she had only spent three minutes being away.
He was pretty certain that his face had some stains as well, though he couldn’t understand how they had gotten that far. He knew he must have looked funny because when she turned around and looked at him, she broke into a huge grin, and he could see it reach as far as the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes.
She walked over to him as she shook her head with amusement. “I don’t think that’s an efficient way to whiten your skin, Oh-chan.” And before he could say something back about that remark of hers, she had reached over to wipe the tip of his nose with her fingers, and then when he finally realized what she had done, her hands were already on his cheeks, brushing away the flour from there as well. He felt himself grow hot, but he still managed to look her in the eye.
She looked back at him, and their gazes locked for a brief moment before she took a step closer towards him. Her hands were still in close proximity to his face and he inched forward so they were barely centimeters apart.
Her lips parted.
So did his.
Her lips brushed against his.
He wanted to respond.
Except he saw something flash in her eyes that instant, something that seemed like shock and regret, and the next second she was already stepping back from him with flushed cheeks. It was the first time he saw that color on her face, and he looked at her for the longest time before she snapped at him.
“Oh-chan, we’ve got baguettes to make!”
*
“Of course you remember the kneading,” she laughs, bumping her shoulder against his as her feet kicks the water excitedly. “I’d never seen anyone end up with so much flour all over himself in a matter of minutes. What exactly were you thinking at the time?”
“Nothing,” he admits with a firm nod. “Honestly, nothing.”
“As always,” she remarks, scowling at him. “I am not surprised.”
He thinks for a moment, and then shakes his head at her as he says, “Not true. I was thinking of something when you left.” He remembers what he wanted to say at the time but he kept it inside of him because he was aware that she was not ready for him yet. Had the circumstances been different though, those words would have already flown out of his mouth as he is the type of person to confess as soon as he realizes that he has feelings for someone.
She perks up in interest and looks at him with an incredulous expression. Then her features soften a few seconds later, and she smiles.
*
Their relationship gradually came to an impasse after that. They still talked and laughed, but he was vaguely aware that there was something different that hung in the air between them, especially when they fell into periods of silence. It was if that awkwardness that came between them in the kitchen had carried onto their time spent together, and even sitting at their usual spot felt so out of place.
A week later, she came to tell him that she was going to Tokyo for a fortnight and that she was leaving the next morning, but she revealed very little about why she was going. “I just have some things to take care of,” she told him with a reassuring smile. “Two weeks isn’t so long, Oh-chan,” she added, patting his shoulder. “You won’t miss me much.”
He didn’t really want to, but he nodded slowly in agreement. “Just have fun,” he told her, and she promised him that she would try.
He knew she was going to come back, but it didn’t make him feel any better about how they were right now. If anything, her departure would probably drive them even further apart. And he really, really wanted to tell her how much he-
“I need to get back to the bakery now,” she said to him and stood up, patting the back of her denim shorts. “I have to organize everything so that Umika and the others will know what to do when I’m not here.” She looked down at him and waved with a smile that seemed foreign to him. “Bye, Oh-chan.”
He lifted his hand reluctantly and waved back. “I’ll see you in two weeks?”
“Two weeks,” she confirmed, and then she walked away rather quickly.
He watched her until she disappeared around a corner, and then he squinted out at the sea, wondering if he should have just gone ahead and said what he needed and wanted to tell her.
She called him out of the blue, two days before she was due back. There was relief in her voice, as if she had let go of something heavy that she had been holding in for a very long time. There was a short moment of silence after the usual greetings, and then he waited for her to tell him what she wanted him to know.
“I came to Tokyo to return the money that my ex-fiancé had lent me to open Rosalié. I figured that since we are no longer together then I should pay him back as soon as I can. I’m still working on that right now as the bakery isn’t making much at the moment, but that’s the only thing that’s left between us,” she said with a nervous laugh, and then she continued in a more serious voice. “The other reason why I came here is because I needed to sort out my feelings.”
He said nothing to that, though his mouth was hanging open with his jaw jutted out. He was under the impression that she had meant to sort out her feelings for him. Feelings that he had thought didn’t exist.
“How did we get to this point?” she asked, and he heard her smile. “Do you know?
He answered her in the same honest way that he answered all of her questions. “I don’t.”
Her reaction to that was a low chuckle followed by, “So I guess I’ll need to come back and figure this one out with you.”
“And bring me some baguettes?”
“Baguettes included.”
*
“And what were you thinking about when I left?” she asks, playing with their intertwined hands. “You can tell me now since I’m back and I won’t be going anywhere for a while.”
He turns to her with a bashful smile as he touches the back of his neck. Somehow keeping it in for so long has made him feel unusually awkward to tell her what he wanted to say two weeks ago. But he decides to go ahead with it anyway, even if he knows that she already knows what it is because it’s that obvious, so he gazes into her eyes, and says, “I like you, Nana.” Very much, he wants to add, but he figures there might be a more direct way to let her know.
He leans closer to her and then he watches as she closes her eyes while he presses his lips against hers. This time, she doesn’t jerk back; instead she chooses to kiss him back, shifting forward as her free hand lands on the back of his neck and pulls him closer as their tongues finally meet.
This kiss is a little late but he thinks there will be more to come.
And baguettes. Definitely those too.
*
Fin.
*
End Notes: Kesennuma is the capital of commercial fishing in Japan, at the time of writing - the quaint little fishing city port has been devastated by fire during the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last 11 March 2011. This author is hoping and praying that the city and its residents pick themselves up and rebuild their lives from the tragedy. The author hopes the reader will, too.