Our appetites got the better of us, so we cast aside all pretense and greedily ate our fill. I had a steak, some soup, a steamed egg custard with chicken, some pizza, some macaroni au gratin, and plenty of desserts to top it all off. By the end of our feast, we were both stuffed to the gills.
Akira leaned back in her chair and rubbed her belly with satisfaction. “Aw man, I’m so full. Haven’t eaten that much in a long time…”
“Yeah, same,” I said. “Ugh… Feeling pretty bloated, actually…”
We headed upstairs to find ourselves a couple of rooms to stay in for the night, both of us hunched forward in pain a little bit as though we might keel over at any minute. Luckily, we found two guest rooms right next to each other that were both open. I headed into mine and promptly collapsed onto the bed, going into a food coma for a little while. Painful as it was, it felt good to be alive with a full belly.
Once my stomach settled down a bit, I sat up and pulled out a notebook I’d stolen from a convenience store the other day. I walked over to the desk in a corner of the room, grabbed the hotel-branded pen, and started scribbling words across the page. But a few minutes in, I heard a knock on the door, so I set my pen down and got up from my chair to go answer it. When I opened the door, I was greeted by the sight of Akira standing in the hallway with a deck of cards in one hand.
“Hey!” she said. “So I found these down at the front desk… Figured we could play some games with ’em, maybe? Heh heh…”
This bashful laugh of hers—along with all of her other cutesy, innocent mannerisms that she showed little hints of from time to time—was so endearing, it was enough to gouge my heart right out of my chest. I was very weak to stuff like this.
“S-sure thing,” I said. “Come on in.”
“Cool, thanks.” It only took Akira a few steps into my room to notice the notebook I’d left open on the desk. “Oh, were you writing something?”
“Yeah, kinda.” I sat back down in my chair as Akira took a seat on the bed. “Figured since we might lose our memories once the timefreeze ends, it’d be a good idea to leave a written record of our trip so that we can at least know what happened, even if we can’t remember any of it.”
“Oh yeah, you mentioned you wanted to do that, didn’t you?” said Akira as she slid the playing cards out of the box and shuffled them. “Man, it’s kind of depressing to think we’re just gonna forget about all of this, isn’t it?”
“…Yeah. It is.”
An awkward silence fell over the room.
Crap. I didn’t mean to kill the mood. Nor was I trying to have a real downer of a conversation right now. I had to salvage this somehow.
“Well, it’s not like we know for sure we’ll forget,” I said. “Just think of it as a little extra insurance. You could try writing one for yourself too, you know. It’s pretty fun, actually.”
“Hrm. Yeah, maybe I’ll give it a shot.”
“Do it.”
She leaned over my shoulder to peek at my notebook. “You’d better be making me sound cool in here, or else.”
“I’m just writing things as they happened, honestly. Right now I’m up to the part where we spent the night at the elementary school, and you touched my arm.”
“Wait, what? You’re including that? You’re gonna make me seem like a horrible person to your future memory-wiped self.”
“Nah, don’t worry. I’ve written plenty of good stuff about you too already.”
“Y-you have? Well, all right. Just keep doing what you’re doing, then…”
I closed my notebook and sat on the bed with her. The room was a single, so this was the only flat surface with enough room for us to play cards together. We could have moved down to the lobby or somewhere else, but Akira didn’t seem to mind.
We dealt the cards out on the bed and started by playing a few rounds of Speed. Then we played Blackjack, Cheat, Concentration, Poker—pretty much every card game we could remember the rules to, we played at least once.
“Nice, looks like yours truly wins again!” Akira boasted after a round of President in which she truly decimated me. As loser, it was now my job to shuffle the deck. As I cut and riffled the cards with a technique that had become all too familiar for me over the past hour or so, I happened to look up and noticed that Akira was staring at me.
“Wh-what is it?” I asked.
“Nothing, just noticing that your hair’s gotten really long,” she said. “Not that it wasn’t pretty long already when we first met, obviously.”
“Oh, yeah… I guess it has, huh? Kinda just let it grow out most of the time.” I set the deck of cards down and started fiddling with my bangs. They had already been hanging over my eyes when our journey began, but now they were long enough to brush the tip of my nose. Which made sense—obviously, hair was going to keep growing if you didn’t cut it, and it had been about a month since we left Hakodate at this point.
“Speaking of, does that mean you don’t mind people touching your hair, then?”
“Mmmm… I’d say it’s a little bit of a gray area, maybe. Definitely don’t like it being stroked or anything, but if it’s just brushing the tips or whatever, it’s not so bad.”
“You don’t say… Dang, I feel kinda bad for your hairstylist.”
“Oh, I don’t go to the salon.”
“Huh? Ohhh, sorry. Barbershop, I guess?”
“Er, no… I don’t have a barber either.”
Akira tilted her head curiously. “Wait, what? Then how do you get it cut?”