august

"Mm?" You pull back an inch, confused, already smiling. "Don't move, why, is this a bit—"

"I'm serious. Don't move." His voice has dropped into a register you've genuinely never heard from him before— flat, careful, controlled in a way that immediately sets off every alarm bell you own. His eyes have gone somewhere past your shoulder, fixed, unblinking, tracking something with the exact focus of a man defusing a bomb.

"Megumi, you're freaking me out, what—"

"There's a spider on your shoulder."

The words take a full second to land. Then they land completely.

"WHERE."

"Don't—" Too late. You are already off the bed. You are already three feet away, standing on the mattress at a truly unsafe angle, both hands slapping frantically at your own shoulder, your arm, your entire left side, spinning in a full panicked circle like you're trying to physically outrun your own body.

"GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF, WHERE DID IT GO, IS IT STILL ON ME—"

"I told you to stay still—"

"THAT WAS NEVER GOING TO WORK, THAT WAS A BAD PLAN FROM THE START, WHO SAYS 'DON'T MOVE' TO A PERSON AND EXPECTS COMPLIANCE—"

"Most people, generally—"

"I AM NOT MOST PEOPLE, I AM A PERSON WITH A SPIDER SOMEWHERE ON MY BODY, MEGUMI, DIFFERENT RULES APPLY—" You're patting yourself down with the specific, full-body violence of someone convinced there are several spiders now, possibly a colony.. "IS IT ON THE BED. DID IT GO ON THE BED. I CANNOT GET BACK IN THAT BED IF IT WENT ON THE BED—"

"I don't know, you launched off the bed so fast you might've flung it into another area—"

"GOOD. GREAT. IT CAN LIVE THERE NOW. NEW LIFE. FRESH START. I WISH IT WELL, JUST NOT NEAR ME—"

He's sitting up now, one hand pressed over his mouth, shoulders shaking, and you point at him with the full righteous fury of someone who has just survived a genuine ordeal.

"Are you laughing."

"I'm not—" He absolutely is. "I'm not laughing—"

"YOU ARE LITERALLY LAUGHING RIGHT NOW, THERE WAS A SPIDER ON MY BODY, MEGUMI, THIS IS NOT A LAUGHING SITUATION—"

"You went from zero to launching yourself off a bed in under a second, I've genuinely never seen you move that fast, you don't move that fast when we're late for things—"

"BECAUSE THINGS BEING LATE DON'T HAVE LEGS—"

"It had, like, six legs, it was tiny, it was smaller than my thumbnail—"

"SIX IS TOO MANY, ANY NUMBER OVER FOUR IS TOO MANY, THAT'S JUST MATH—"

He's laughing fully now, doubled over slightly, the lamp light catching the shake of his shoulders, and despite the fact that you are currently standing on his bed in a full defensive crouch scanning the sheets for movement, some small traitorous part of you registers that he looks unbearably cute doing it, which is deeply inconvenient given the circumstances.

"Don't just laugh at me, help, do something useful, you're supposed to be the brave one in this relationship—"

"I told you it was there! I was handling it! You're the one who launched into orbit before I could actually do anything about it—"

"YOUR HANDLING METHOD WAS TELLING ME NOT TO MOVE, WHICH, AGAIN, WAS NEVER A REALISTIC OPTION—"

"Fine, fine—" He's up now too, still grinning, scanning the sheets with significantly more composure than you, lifting the corner of the comforter, checking the pillow, moving with the calm efficiency of someone who has clearly dealt with a hundred more spiders in his life than you have and is not remotely rattled by this one. "I don't see it anymore. It's probably long gone. You scared it half to death too, probably."

"GOOD. IT DESERVES TO BE SCARED. IT STARTED THIS."

"It was just sitting there. It didn't start anything."

"IT WAS SITTING ON ME, THAT'S AN ACT OF AGGRESSION, THAT'S BASICALLY A DECLARATION OF WAR—"

He finally straightens up, looking at you— still crouched defensively on the mattress, hair mussed, eyes wide, absolutely ready to bolt again at the first sign of movement anywhere in a five-foot radius, and something in his expression softens past the laughter into pure, helpless fondness.

"Come here," he says, holding a hand out.

"Is it gone."

"It's gone."

"Are you sure—"

"I am extremely sure. Come here."

You inch toward him with the exact caution of someone re-entering a crime scene, letting him pull you back down onto the bed, though you keep one eye on the sheets the entire time, scanning for movement.

"You know," he says, arm settling around you, still fighting a smile, "for someone who talks a whole planet's worth every night without running out of energy, you sure found a way to sprint."

"I contain multitudes, Megumi, I told you this already, sometimes those multitudes include Olympic level spider evasion—"

"That wasn't evasion, that was just you  screaming and jumping."

"Same thing."

"Not remotely the same thing."

You settle back against him, still not fully relaxed, eyes doing one more slow sweep of the pillowcase before you allow yourself to actually lie down properly, and he watches this with open, undisguised delight, pressing a kiss to your temple.

"For the record," you mutter, "I'm never letting you say 'don't move' to me again. That phrase is banned. New house rule."

"Even if there's an actual emergency?"

"Especially if there's an actual emergency, that's exactly the kind of moment where I need to be moving, Megumi, staying still is how you get eaten—"

"By the spider."

"By ANYTHING. It's a general life philosophy now. I'm implementing it retroactively."

He laughs again, quieter this time, pulling you in properly, and you let him, finally settling with your head back on his chest, heart rate slowly returning to something resembling normal, though you do keep one hand loosely fisted in his shirt, just in case, just for backup, just so you have a head start if round two ever comes.

"I love you," he says, into your hair, still smiling, "even when you scream loud enough to wake the neighbors over something the size of a raisin."

"I love you too," you say, "even though your emergency protocol is apparently 'ask the victim to stay calm and stationary,' which, frankly, I'm reporting to whoever trains people on that—"

"Go to sleep."

"Check the bed one more time first."

"I already checked."

"Check again."

He checks again. There is, predictably, no spider. You fall asleep anyway with the lamp still on, just this once, because— you inform him, very seriously, very late, right on the edge of sleep— "a person needs visibility after an incident like that," and he doesn't argue, just leaves it burning low and gold on the nightstand, one arm around you the whole night, keeping first watch.

…

You don't actually know how to crochet. This becomes evident within the first ninety seconds.

"Okay, so," you say, holding the hook like a tiny sword, "you do this thing. With the yarn. Where it goes over."

"Over what."

"The hook."

"That's what I assumed the hook was for, yes."

"Don't be smart with me, I watched a video."

"Did you finish the video?"

You did not finish the video. You watched enough of the video to feel confident, which— you're realizing now, yarn already tangled around two of your fingers like it's trying to communicate something urgent— was a mistake.

"It's a slip knot first," you mutter, mostly to yourself, flipping your phone around to squint at a paused frame. "Okay. Loop. Loop it like— like this—"

Megumi watches you with the particular quiet focus he brings to everything, the same look he gets watching you attempt (and fail) to parallel park, or the time you tried to assemble a bookshelf without reading the instructions and ended up with what could generously be called abstract art. He doesn't laugh at you. He never really laughs at you, not out loud— it's all in the eyes, in the small quirk at the corner of his mouth he thinks he hides better than he does.

"You're going to stab yourself," he says.

"I am not."

"You're holding it like you're mad at it."

"I am mad at it, it won't loop right."

He reaches over— unhurried, like he has all the time in the world, which, on a Tuesday evening in your apartment with nowhere else he'd rather be, he kind of does— and takes the hook out of your hand. Not to take over. Just to look at it, turn it over once, like he's sizing up an opponent.

"Hand me the yarn."

"Wait, no, I wanted to figure it out myself—"

"You've had it upside down for the last two minutes."

You look down. You have, in fact, had it upside down.

"That was a choice," you say. "An artistic one."

"Sure."

He gives the hook back. He doesn't do it for you, doesn't make the loop himself, just watches, patient in that quietly unshakeable way he has, and something about it— him just being there, half interested, not laughing, not leaving— makes your chest go warm and stupid and full.

You get the slip knot eventually. It takes nine tries and one minor yarn related injury to your pride.

"There," you announce, holding up the small, lumpy loop like you've split the atom. "See? I'm basically a professional."

"Sure," Megumi says again, and there it is— that almost smile.

…

Twenty minutes in, you've made something that is, technically, chains. A long, uneven, occasionally doubled back string of chains that looks less like the beginning of a scarf and more like something a spider made after a rough week.

"I think this is going great," you say.

"It's not."

"You don't know that."

"I do. I'm looking at it."

"It has character."

Megumi, for his part, has made exactly four chains and then stopped, hook resting loose in his hand, watching you with an expression you can't quite name— not amused, not bored, something quieter than both. He's not really trying. You know he's not really trying. He's here because you asked and because it's Tuesday and because some tiny, secret, marshmallow-soft part of him apparently cannot say no to you when you look at him like this, hopeful and a little ridiculous, yarn stuck to your sweater, hook held wrong.

"You're not even doing it," you accuse.

"I'm doing it."

"You've made, what, an inch."

"An inch of correct chains beats a foot of whatever that is."

"Rude."

"Accurate."

You throw a small ball of yarn at him. He catches it without even looking up, which is somehow the most annoying thing he's done all night, and sets it down beside him like it's nothing, like his reflexes aren't unfairly, infuriatingly good, like he isn't smirking just slightly at your affronted little noise.

"I'm going to make something so cute," you tell him, "that you're going to cry."

"I don't cry."

"You will. Over my crochet. It's going to be a whole thing."

"What are you even making?"

You pause.

You had not, in fact, thought this far ahead.

"...A blanket."

"You've made eleven inches of chain stitch."

"A small blanket."

"For an ant."

"For us," you say, indignant, "for our future apartment, for our future dog, it's going to be on the back of the couch and everyone who visits is going to say wow, who made this, and I'm going to say me, I did, with my own two hands—"

"You've been working on it for twenty minutes and it already has a hole in it."

You look down. It does, in fact, already have a hole in it. A significant one. The kind of hole that suggests structural failure rather than intentional design.

"That's— a design choice."

"It's a mistake."

"It's an avant-garde design choice."

Megumi picks his hook back up, and this time you watch his hands instead of your own— the deft, unhurried way he loops the yarn, no hesitation, like his fingers already know something yours don't. Four chains become eight. Eight become a neat little row, and then he does something you don't even understand, some kind of turn, and there's a second row underneath the first, small and even and correct in a way your work has not once managed to be.

"Wait," you say. "How'd you do that."

"I watched the part of the video you skipped."

"You what."

"While you were ordering yarn at one in the morning I looked up an actual tutorial."

You stare at him. He doesn't look up from his hands, but the tips of his ears have gone slightly pink, which is the closest thing to I did this because I wanted to be good at something you'd like that Megumi Fushiguro is constitutionally capable of admitting.

"You sneak," you breathe. "You absolute— you let me struggle for twenty minutes—"

"You seemed like you were having fun struggling."

"I was not having fun, I was being betrayed—"

"You threw yarn at me and called it a design choice ten seconds ago."

"That's not the point—"

"What's the point."

"The point is you're supposed to be bad at this with me! That was the whole— that was the bit, Megumi, we were supposed to be bad at it together, and now you're just— you're just good, like it's nothing—"

…

Somewhere around the forty-minute mark, things start to go downhill.

Not for Megumi. Megumi's little swatch of double crochet is neat and square and— you hate this, you hate this so much— good, actually good, the kind of good where if he added a border it could genuinely pass for something a person bought at a store that specializes in expensive, minimalist home goods. He's not even really trying anymore, either— his hook moves almost absently now, half his attention on you, on the little furrow between your eyebrows, on the way you keep muttering at your yarn like it's done something to personally offend you.

Which it has. You are certain of this.

"It keeps doing that," you say, holding up your work— if it can be called that— where somewhere in the last six rows an entire section has ballooned outward like a poorly patched tire. "Why does it keep doing that."

"You're adding stitches you don't mean to."

"I'm not adding anything, I'm doing the same thing every time—"

"You're not. Look." He leans over, and for a second you're distracted by how close he is, by the specific, warm, laundry-and-something-that's-just-him smell of his hoodie, before he taps a spot on your work with one finger. "Here. You went into the same stitch twice."

"I did not."

"You did."

"I would know if I did that, Megumi, I'm not— I'm not an idiot, I can count—"

"I'm not saying you're an idiot. I'm saying you went into the same stitch twice."

"That is exactly what you're saying."

You yank at the yarn— too hard, too fast, the kind of pull that comes from frustration rather than fixing anything— and something gives with a small, awful twang, and now there's a loop hanging loose off the end of your hook, unravelling, the last fifteen minutes of work sliding backward through your fingers like sand.

You stare at it.

"No," you say, very quietly. "No, no, no—"

"Just pick the stitches back up, it's fine—"

"It's not fine, Megumi, it's— look at it, it's just—" You hold it up. It is, undeniably, a disaster. Lopsided. Holey. Half-unravelled. Nothing at all like the small, sturdy, competent square sitting neatly on the floor in front of him. "It's ruined."

"It's not ruined, you can just—"

"I don't want to just," you say, and your voice cracks in a way that surprises you both, sharper and thinner than you meant it to come out, and suddenly your eyes are stinging in a way that is deeply, embarrassingly out of proportion to a piece of yarn. "I wanted to make something. I wanted to make something cute, and nice, and give it to you, and I can't even — I can't even make a square, Megumi, you made a square in twenty minutes without even trying and I've been at this for almost an hour and all I have is garbage—"

You drop the hook. It clatters against the coffee table, and you press the heel of your hand against one eye, furious at yourself, furious at the yarn, furious at the stupid hot prickling behind your nose that has no business showing up over crochet, of all things, over something so small and dumb and—

"Hey."

Megumi's voice has changed. Gone is the flat, teasing dryness from ten minutes ago; this is quieter, careful, the voice he uses maybe four times a year, reserved for when something actually matters.

"It's not garbage," he says.

"It is, look at it—"

"I'm not looking at the yarn. I'm looking at you."

That, somehow, makes it worse— you feel your face crumple, and you hate it, hate that you're getting worked up over something this small, hate that of all the things to finally crack you open after a long stretch of okay, fine, manageable weeks, it's a nine-dollar skein of acrylic yarn and your own inability to make a single competent stitch.

"I just wanted this to be a nice thing," you say, and it comes out small. "A dumb, nice, cute thing. Us doing something dumb and domestic together. And instead I just feel like— like I can't even do the easy version of the thing, and you did it perfectly without even caring, and I don't know why that's making me feel like this, it's stupid—"

"It's not stupid."

"It is, it's crochet, Megumi, nobody's supposed to cry over crochet—"

"You're not crying over crochet."

You blink at him. He's set his own hook down now, completely, has scooted closer across the small stretch of carpet between you until his knee is pressed against yours, until he can reach up and, with a gentleness that still— after eight months— sometimes catches you off guard, brush his thumb under your eye to catch the one tear that actually falls.

"You've had a long few weeks," he says. "Midterms. That group project. Your mom calling about— whatever that was, you didn't want to talk about it, and I didn't push, but I noticed. You've been running on fumes for two weeks and tonight the first thing that went wrong was a piece of yarn, so that's where it's all coming out. That's not stupid. That's just where the crack showed up."

You stare at him. Somewhere in your chest, something that had been wound tight for what feels like weeks— quietly, without your noticing— loosens, just slightly, at being seen like that, at being handed back a version of yourself that makes sense instead of one that's just embarrassing.

"I didn't think you noticed all that," you say, voice still thick.

"I notice things."

"You never say anything."

"I'm saying something now."

You laugh— a wet, hiccupping thing, not quite steady yet, but real. "Only because I cried on your yarn."

"You didn't cry on it. You cried near it. There's a difference."

"Megumi."

"What."

"You're doing the thing where you make a joke because I'm sad and you don't know what to do with it."

"...Maybe."

"It's working. A little."

"Good," he says, and there's something almost shy in it, in the way he says it, like he's relieved, like he'd been quietly worried he'd get it wrong.

You sniff, wipe your face properly this time with your sleeve instead of leaving it to him, and look down at the small, sad, unravelling mess still hanging off your abandoned hook.

"I really did want to make you something," you say. "That was the whole point. Not— not a good scarf, or whatever, I know I'm bad at it, I just wanted to make something with my hands and give it to you and have it mean something, because you matter to me, and I wanted to show that in some dumb domestic little-old-lady-hobby way, and instead I just made a hole-covered mess and cried on the floor."

Megumi is quiet for a moment. Then he picks his own square up off the floor— small, neat, maybe four inches across, nothing fancy, no border, no shape beyond square— and turns it over in his hands like he's deciding something.

"Give me your yarn," he says.

"What? Why?"

"Just give it to me."

You hand it over, defeated, half-unravelled, hook still hanging loose from the end. He takes it, and your abandoned mess, and sets both in his lap alongside his own small square, and picks the hook back up.

"You don't have to fix mine," you say. "It's fine. I'll just— I'll try again some other—"

"I'm not fixing yours."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Give me a minute."

…

You watch him work in silence for a while— the good kind of silence, the kind that only exists between two people who've spent enough Tuesdays together that quiet doesn't need filling. Outside, the neighbour's dog has finally settled down. Your coffee's gone cold on the side table. The evening's gone that soft, blue-grey color it gets right before it's fully dark, streetlight not on yet, everything a little dim and hushed.

Megumi's hands move steady and sure, the frustration-stitches you'd put into your section quietly unpicked and reworked, folded somehow into something with his own neat square, joined at one edge with small, careful stitches you don't fully understand the mechanics of. He doesn't explain what he's doing. You don't ask. There's something nice about just watching, about letting him do this without narrating it, without turning it into a lesson— just his hands, and the yarn, and the small furrow of concentration between his brows that you love more than you'll ever tell him outright, because he'd get embarrassed and pretend he didn't hear you.

It takes him maybe fifteen minutes.

When he holds it up, it's small— small enough to fit in two cupped hands, no bigger than a coaster, really— but it's not a square anymore. It's got a shape to it, rounded at the top, a little uneven at the edges in a way that somehow reads as intentional rather than sloppy.

It's an ear. Two of them, actually, once you look closer— small, soft, slightly lopsided fox ears, made from his neat square folded and stitched at the base, your ruined chain-mess unpicked and rewoven into a small strip that loops the two ears together like a headband, something small and lumpy at the front that might, generously, be called a nose if you squint.

"Is that," you say, and your voice catches somewhere you didn't expect it to, "are those—"

"They're supposed to be ears."

"Fox ears."

"...Yeah."

"Megumi."

"It's not that deep," he says quickly, ears going pink again, refusing to meet your eyes. "You just — you kept saying you wanted to make something cute, and yours kept falling apart, so I figured— I don't know. Small. Something small that would actually work with a beginner's yarn. It's not— it doesn't have to mean anything."

"It's fox ears," you say again, because you need a second to process the fact that Megumi Fushiguro— dry, deadpan, allergic to sentiment Megumi Fushiguro— spent fifteen quiet minutes turning your crying induced disaster and his own effortless perfect square into a pair of small crocheted fox ears, presumably because of the two dogs you'd once made him watch a documentary about, the one where he'd gotten unreasonably invested in fennec foxes and then denied being invested for a week afterward.

"You remembered the fox thing," you say.

"It was one documentary."

"YOU MADE ME TRADE YOU A FENNEC FOX IN ADOPT ME, and you also said foxes were, quote, fine, I guess, and then looked up fennec fox rescue videos for forty minutes after I went to bed. I saw your search history. You left your laptop open."

"That's an invasion of privacy."

"You made me fox ears, Megumi."

"It's crochet. It's not a marriage proposal."

But he's still not looking at you, and his ears are very red now, and when you finally reach out and take the small, lumpy, uneven, achingly sweet little thing out of his hands, he lets you, watching your face instead, careful and a little anxious in a way he'd never admit to.

"I wanted to make you something," you say quietly, turning it over in your hands. "And you ended up making me something instead. That feels backwards."

"You made half of it. Technically. The chain part."

"The chain part that fell apart and made me cry."

"It didn't fall apart. It got repurposed." He reaches out, gently, and takes it back from you for a second— and before you can ask what he's doing, he leans forward and settles it, headband-style, over your hair, the two small fox ears sitting slightly crooked, slightly lopsided, undeniably a little bit ugly in the specific way homemade things sometimes are.

And undeniably, achingly cute.

"There," he says, and for a second— just a second— something in his face goes unguarded, soft in a way he doesn't let show very often, like he's looking at something he can't quite believe is his to look at. "Cute."

You feel your whole chest go warm and full again, but this time it doesn't sting behind your eyes— it just sits there, steady and glowing, the good kind of overwhelmed.

"You're not allowed to say things like that and then act like you didn't," you say, voice a little unsteady.

"Didn't say anything."

"You said cute."

"I was talking about the ears."

"You were not, you were looking right at me—"

"The ears were on your head. Obviosuly, I had to look at you to see them."

"Megumi Fushiguro, I swear—"

He doesn't let you finish— just leans in, unhurried, and kisses you, soft and a little clumsy in the way that only happens when neither of you are trying to be smooth about it, just two people on the floor of an apartment surrounded by yarn and half-finished chaos, one of you wearing crooked crocheted fox ears, the crying from twenty minutes ago already feeling very far away.

"Better?" he asks, when he pulls back, thumb brushing once more under your eye out of habit more than necessity now.

"Better," you admit.

"Good." He picks his hook back up, glancing at the mess of yarn still scattered across your coffee table like he's steeling himself for something. "Now show me what you were trying to do with the blanket. Properly this time. I'll actually help."

"You're going to make fun of me."

"Probably. But I'll also help."

You look at him— at the soft, stubborn, quietly devoted mess of a boy who turned your worst crafting attempt into the sweetest thing anyone's ever made you, who noticed weeks of exhaustion you thought you'd hidden well enough, who said it's not stupid, that's just where the crack showed up like it was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world— and you think, not for the first time, that you got extremely, unreasonably lucky.

"Okay," you say, picking your hook back up, fox ears still crooked on your head, yarn still tangled everywhere, Tuesday evening settling soft and blue-dark outside the window. "Show me the part of the video I skipped."

He does.

You still make a terrible blanket. It takes three more weeks, six more meltdowns (smaller ones, the kind that end in laughing instead of crying), bbbbbbbut the blanket gets made. Lopsided, holey in one very specific spot you refuse to fix out of principle, colors that don't quite match because you ran out of the first skein halfway through— and it goes on the back of your couch exactly like you said it would, and when people visit and ask who made it, you ENSURE they know you did it, and Megumi, standing in the kitchen doorway pretending not to listen, doesn't correct you.

tags: @udarealgumi