What A Girl Wants

Nine

The rest of the team started showing up and things, in Sae's mind anyways, calmed. It further softened the blow that everyone was impressed with what she had done, eager to pick out sleep mats beside their friends and help themselves to handfuls of candy. She was feeling like a very triumphant captain indeed. More than once, she caught sight of Rin's bitter eye roll, and it was the cherry on top to this absolute win.

Without much effort or prompting on her part, the girls decided much on their own that they weren't yet hungry and they should start with nails. Which was fine by Sae, as long as they were busy and entertained and feeling like a team. She let them pair off and scramble all over the colours, save Rin, who plucked the black nail polish bottle right out of another girl's hand and stomped over to her own sleep mat, warning everyone else to leave her be.

Sae was happy to take whatever colour was left over, but Ryusei had other plans for her. She grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her over towards the mat she'd claimed and the one she believed to be Sae's.

"But I," Sae started to protest, pointing towards the nail polish, but not really pulling away.

"I've already got yours," Ryusei said, proudly displaying an incredibly obnoxious pink bottle in her free palm. Sae was about to protest more, but she caught on to the reasoning right before she said it. "So we can match."

She stopped fighting. She followed the direction her wrist was being pulled in and sat obediently upon the mat she was pretending was hers. It was hers, for now, for all intents and purposes, but the second she suspected the last girl had fallen asleep, she was sneaking right upstairs, equipped with a reasonably believably lie about being a light sleeper and early riser if anyone were to catch her.

She offered her first hand and found that the colour did indeed match Ryusei's nails almost uncannily. And as she watched her shake and open the bottle and start applying it to the first of her fingernails, Sae got her first real good look of Ryusei's bizarre nails.

She had acrylics. Sae had known this about her since she first approached her in the gym that day. But she'd never gotten a real good look at them. Since getting to know her, she knew Ryusei to have a temper, or allude to having one anyways, not that she'd really seen it, and had all these insane stories about how she spent her childhood and current day spare time. As such, Sae always thought she had picked up a habit of breaking her nails.

But it wasn't the case. They weren't sharp or jagged or misshapen. Some of them were made short and filed off that way intentionally.

"Why are your nails like that?" Sae asked as Ryusei started to apply the second coat on her first hand.

"Like what?" Ryusei asked, not looking up.

"Like," Sae said. "Some are short."

She looked up then. And until she did, Sae hadn't realized how close they were sitting or how that gaze would burn into her. There was something deadly in those pink eyes in this moment, and the smile that came with it didn't provide any salvation.

Ryusei's bottom lip twitched, like she was just on the verge of speech, but when she parted them, all that came out was laughter.

"What?" Sae asked.

These moments happened far too often for her liking. These moments of her missing out on some private joke of Ryusei's that she assumed was obvious. They frustrated her. For all the time she spent with her, she still didn't really understand her all that well.

"What?" Sae demanded again.

"Nothing, nothing," Ryusei said. She picked the nail polish brush back up and took Sae's hand back. Sae let her. "It's because, well, it's because,"