All Mary knew was this distance, right now — the exact distance at which each of them could just make out their own reflection in the other's pupils.
That alone was enough.
Enough that she would remember every detail of this moment — the light, the warmth, and the eyes of the boy in front of her.
The girl drew back a little.
Such a small movement, and yet it shattered the ambiguous mood completely.
"What are you thinking about?"
Mary spoke first, breaking the silence.
"I was thinking..." Russell started to answer, meaning to defuse the awkwardness with some joke.
He wanted to ask what she had been thinking just now, what she had meant to do. He had a great many questions.
But the words rose to his lips and he swallowed every one of them back down, until all that came out was:
"...Your perfume smells nice today."
Mary froze for a moment.
Something flickered in those deep blue eyes.
"..."
The girl blinked again, momentarily without a single word to say.
She wanted to laugh. What she wanted more, just then, was to sigh.
"That's it?"
There was something complicated in her voice — not disappointment exactly, and not reproach, but a kind of genuine, unforeseen surprise.
Was he doing this on purpose?
At this distance. In this atmosphere. At the exact moment she had staked every last scrap of her courage on the table.
And he tossed out something that light — your perfume smells nice?
What was she supposed to do with that?
All that atmosphere she had worked so hard to build, wrecked by a single line. What an absolutely hopeless, tone-deaf idiot.
And yet... why was it that the urge to lean closer hadn't faded at all? Why had it only grown stronger?
The girl lifted her head and looked at Russell again, properly this time.
And then, all at once, she understood.
Ah. He was running away. This was simply how he did it.
They had been so close a moment ago — close enough to see their reflections in each other's eyes, close enough that their breathing tangled together until you couldn't tell whose was whose.
He had been there too. He had been standing on his own side of that line too. He had been holding back the same impulse to take one step forward, exactly as she had.
And now, of all things, he was using one weightless little sentence to pour everything that had been about to spill over back into the bottle, as though nothing had happened at all.
How... how genuinely mean of him.
She thought.
I'm not letting you get away that easily.
The flame that should have gone out flared back to life.
Mary laughed softly, and then leaned forward — all of her.
No. "Leaned" wasn't the word.
To be precise, she came at him.
The scent of white camellia washed over him, that delicate face swelling in his vision.
Russell didn't have time to react at all before he felt something soft and warm settle against his shoulder.
The girl reached out and looped her arms around his neck.
The movement was light, gentle, as though she were afraid of disturbing something precious.
She didn't pull. She simply drew his head toward her.
And then Russell felt the world go dark.
The side of his face was wrapped in something soft and warm.
That was — that was her shoulder, or the hollow of her neck. He couldn't tell which.
All he knew was that the scent of white camellia was everywhere around him, so thick it wouldn't dissolve, a warm ocean of it closing over his head.
Silver hair fell around him like a gauze curtain, shutting out the light, shutting out everything beyond.
There was only that softness, that warmth, and that overwhelming white camellia scent.
The tip of his nose pressed against her soft cashmere scarf. He could feel the fine line of the collarbone beneath it, and the warmth of her — a girl's warmth.
He could hear her heartbeat.
It was close.
Close enough that it might as well have been beating against his ear.
And it was fast. Faster than he would have guessed. It gave her away.
She wasn't nearly as composed, nearly as effortlessly in control, as she looked.
She just held him there, the way you hold something precious that had tried to sneak off and had been caught and hauled back.
Russell had gone rigid from head to toe.
"You really are mean," he heard the girl murmur beside his ear, very softly, half a complaint.
Her hand stroked the back of his head, so gently it might have been soothing some small, frightened animal.
He could feel her body heat. He could feel her heartbeat. He could feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, faint, brushing his cheek with each breath.
He could even feel her lips.
Right beside his ear.
Very close.
Close enough that if she turned her head even slightly, they would touch the curve of it.
Russell's mind had gone completely blank.
He had no idea what his face was doing. The one thing he did know was that it had to be burning.
Burning like it was about to catch fire.
Without thinking, he raised his hands, and they hovered behind Mary's back, wanting to close around her.
From where Russell was, all he could see was half of her profile. Nothing more.
She simply held him like that, the way a mother holds her child, his face buried in the hollow of her shoulder, the white camellia scent wrapped around every part of him.
Her breathing was light — and hidden inside that lightness was the faintest tremor.
Just like her heartbeat: racing, and trying so hard to pretend it was calm.
"If it smells nice," her voice came from above him, soft, barely more than a whisper, "then breathe it in a while longer."
And as she said it she held him tighter, as though she meant to leave her scent on him for good.
This wasn't a lover's embrace. It was a hunter's.
The kind meant to mark the prey, to sink it in so deep it had nowhere left to run and no wish to run at all.
This was the girl's revenge.
Revenge for his daring to think one weightless little sentence could stuff everything that had been spilling over back where it came from.
This was her way of telling him: it doesn't go back in.
It doesn't go back in. You can't put it back.
Footsteps sounded out in the corridor. Someone passed by, and then the sound faded away.
How long it lasted, neither of them could have said. At last Mary let go.
She drew back, opened a little space between them, and settled again into the seat across from Russell.
Sunlight fell across the girl's cheek, lighting up those deep blue eyes and the laughter in them — and the faint flush she hadn't quite managed to chase off yet.
Even for her, that had been far too bold.
It was only a hug, and yet her heart was hammering hard enough to leap out of her chest.
A move like that... truly, it wounded the enemy a thousand and cost her eight hundred of her own.
Mary drew a deep breath, got herself back under control, and lifted her head to look at Russell.
Russell was still dazed, his hair sticking up in places — she had mussed it.
Watching him fail to reassemble his language faculties, she laughed out loud.
Russell looked at her.
At the eyes curved into crescents, at the sly little smile at the corner of her mouth, at the few strands of silver hair shaken loose by everything just now, hanging beside her cheek.
He started to say something, and in the end only sighed.
"You..."
There was no reproach in it. Only a helpless kind of amusement.
Mary tilted her head, smiling like a child whose prank had landed perfectly.
"What is it?" she answered, her voice soft, with a coaxing lilt to it.
Russell looked at her, then shook his head.
"Never mind."
Outside the window the sunlight was perfect, settling on the crown of the girl's silver hair and gilding it with a pale gold halo.
The classroom was very quiet.
That invisible line was still there. But it seemed a little thinner than before.
Only a little.
But for the girl, that was already enough.
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