She dragged her teeth along a cottony tongue. After speaking along with Rhythm Heaven for 50 uninterrupted minutes, her saliva was stringy and floccal. The effort of the rapid-fire onomatopoeicbursts had left her cheeks totally spent. Her lips ached; Laplus rubbed a finger back and forth on the commissure, erasing away the spittle that had frothed and built up there, and then rubbed her fingers together until the sticky residue had been absorbed into their pads.

Laplus looked back at Lui but she was already thumbing her phone with a severe, focused look. The throng of fans commenting on social media had left a veritable tidal wave of messages that had to be carefully sifted throughand replied to. Laplus herself, despite her total addiction to social media, didn't possess the strength to dredge through fan comments the very moment this performance ended. She trotted over to Lui's futon and flopped down on her stomach, kicking two socked feet into the air.

Five minutes passed. Laplus shifted to lay on her side, taking out her own cell phone and egosearching. As usual, Plusmates were showering her with the distant affection fans are apt to dispense upon the object of their admiration. Fifteen minutes passed. Lui, still as a stone while responding to her fan messages, suddenly jolted upright and stepped out of the room to take a personal call. I wonder if it's her family calling, Laplus mused, as she put her phone down and thought about her mother.

Thirty minutes passed. Laplus, bored of responding on Twitter, stood up and looked around Lui's room. It was homey, but empty. Where photos of family and friends might have been, instead were potted succulents and acrylic stands. A calendar with Lui's favorite seiyuu was pinned to the wall. March 2019; it had not been changed for nearly two years. A journal was on the desk next to the PC. Laplus allowed burning curiosity to commandeer her body and cracked the journal open to a random page only to glimpse a sentence with her name in it.

Footfalls echoed in the hallway and Laplus, panicking, climbed back onto the futon and lay facing the wall, pretending to have fallen asleep. Lui opened the door with the staggering, defeated gesture that she had become accustomed to over several years. When she saw Laplus on her futon, her breath rushed out in an involuntary expression of relief. Lui turned out the lights as the wrinkles that had begun to advance across her brow softened.

She must be a lonely woman, Laplus thought as Lui buried her face into the small of Laplus' back. Laplus could feel Lui's cheekbones probing the valley between her shoulder blades, their skin separated only by a cotton t-shirt mildly damp with sweat. Lui's clean and cozy room, so different from the fetid air and burning fluorescent lights of Laplus's own apartment, cast a stifling drowsiness on Laplus' countenance and her pretend sleep fell headlong into a genuine one, untroubled by the usual hissing of cockroaches and rustle of ants clawing their way through the detritus among the tatami floor.

Edit Report
Pub: 27 Dec 2021 04:53 UTC
Views: 551