InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Purity 10: Anomaly ❯ Always a Bridesmaid ( Chapter 5 )

"So how long are you going to be in New York City?"

Mikio blinked and shot Madison a quick glance.  They hadn't spoken much in the few hours since she'd stopped to pick him up at the Zelig mansion.  She'd said it would take about eight hours, give or take, to make the drive to the city, so they were probably about halfway there.

It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to her, no.  It was more like, everything he thought to say to her sounded stupid in his own mind, so he'd kept his mouth shut for the most part.

'But she hasn't thought you were stupid yet.'

He snorted inwardly.  'That's because I haven't said any of the things that I thought of.'

"I, uh . . . I'm not really sure," he heard himself answering.  "I mean, it kind of depends upon how long it takes to get this whole situation straightened out."

She nodded slowly.  "And you'll be staying at your uncle's place?"

"Yes," he replied, wondering vaguely if she was thinking about his family's overwhelming concern that she, unfortunately, had witnessed.

Gin hurried out of the mansion, leading the way for Cain, who held a huge box.   Intercepting Mikio's curious stare, the North American tai-youkai rolled his eyes.  "Food because they think you'll starve," he said.

"Most of it can be microwaved," Gin explained, fiddling with the cold packs she'd arranged on top of the rest of the box's contents.  "Those should keep everything nice and cold till you get to the city."

"Thank you," Mikio remarked, smiling at his sister and shaking his head slowly.

"Oh, Madison-san, you've lived in the city for a while, haven't you?  Maybe you could spare some time to give Mikio a tour?" Kagome asked as InuYasha, despite Mikio's assertions that he really could get his own suitcase, loaded it into the trunk of Madison's cherry red Lasier convertible.

"That'd be fine," Madison said with a smile.  "I mean, if he'd like to, anyway."

The legendary miko bit her lip as she tried to hide the worry that drew her brows together.  "Mikio, you have your cell phone?  And your brother got these for you, just in case your motion sickness comes back . . ."

Mikio's smile was tolerant, at best, as Kagome handed him a small amber bottle of pills, and he tried to tamp down the irritation that the women's conversation about him wasn't directed at him.  "Thank you," he murmured, hoping that his impatience wasn't as obvious as he was afraid it was.  Casting Madison a surreptitious glance, he couldn't quite see her face, which was probably for the best since she couldn't possibly be missing the whole debacle.  All in all, he felt like he was little more than a pup all over again, and it was something that he sorely despised, considering he was nearly forty-five years old.

"Call me if you need anything at all," Kagome went on, forcing a too-bright smile as she smoothed Mikio's bangs out of his face.

"If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, wench: stop hovering over him," InuYasha grumbled.  "Just do your mother a favor and let her know when you get there."

Mikio nodded as he stooped down to give his younger sister a hug.  Then InuYasha picked up Takara so that Mikio could get into the car . . .

"You know, it's only a couple blocks from my apartment," Madison went on casually—almost too casually—drawing him out of his reverie and leaving Mikio wondering if she weren't simply making conversation to fill the troublesome silence.  "I could show you around, if you'd like . . . Well, I do have a couple appointments this week, but my schedule's pretty flexible . . ."

He grimaced inwardly.  There was a nice, perfunctory sound to those words, wasn't there?

'Or maybe it's all in your head.'

'Don't be stupid,' he told his youkai-voice.  'A woman like her?  She'd never . . . Never want to hang out with me.  Sure, she said told Mama she would, but Mama kind of put her on the spot . . . and besides . . .' He made a face.  'It's not like I'm actually looking for . . . for a mate or anything even remotely close to that . . .'

His youkai-voice sighed softly.  After all, it wasn't a new discussion or anything.  Mikio . . . Well, he knew, didn't he?  No woman—human, hanyou, youkai—would want to have a mate whose family seemed to forget that he really was a fully grown adult, not to mention one who had distinct trouble, staying on his feet—a mate who couldn't rightfully protect his own, and besides that . . .

"It's all right," he forced himself to say, careful to keep his tone much more carefree than he was actually feeling.  "Y-You're busy, and . . . and it's not like you have any obligation to me."  He sighed.  "I . . . I'm sorry that Mama asked you to do that.  She shouldn't have put you on the spot . . ."

She giggled suddenly, as though something he'd said was amusing to her.  "I'd hardly call you an obligation, Mikio, and I would have offered, even if your mother hadn't asked me to," she chided, her laughter still evident in her tone.  "I wouldn't mind, at all.  In fact, I think it'd be fun!  I mean, I haven't done the whole 'tourist' thing in years, not since I first moved to the city and had Evan show me around, but it was pretty fun then.  There are some really awesome places in the area, too, but many of them are kind of small, kind of out of the way, so if you don't know where you're going, you could miss them completely, and that really would be a shame . . ."

A strange sense of warmth seemed to flicker to life somewhere deep down inside him, and Mikio couldn't help the thoughtful frown he shot her.  She didn't see it since she was paying attention to the highway.  Hair drawn up in a casual ponytail did little to detract from the overall polish of her outward façade.  He was pretty certain that she wasn't wearing makeup, either, not that he thought she'd need it at all.  No, her eyes were framed by the thickest, darkest, longest lashes he'd ever seen, and her flawless skin?  But it wasn't her outer beauty that he'd noticed from the start, either.  There was simply a radiance about her—a glow that came from somewhere deep inside her.  Those startling violet eyes of hers mirrored her emotions, and even now, hidden behind the shadows of the sunglasses she wore to reduce the early afternoon glare, he could feel the warmth of her gaze whenever she glanced at him . . . She was one of those women who simply didn't need the enhancements that others wore like a second skin.

The idea of spending any length of time with the gorgeous woman?  He'd be a liar if he tried to tell himself that he didn't want to, and yet, he could sense the hint of trouble that spoke to him in whispers and murmurs.  "Uh, m-maybe," he muttered, hesitant to commit himself to anything when he wasn't entirely sure that spending more time with Cartham Madison was such a good idea, after all.

"I'll give you my number when we get there," she offered, sparing a moment to cast him a brilliant smile—one that made him blink.

"Uh, oh . . . o-okay . . ."

"Then I'll look forward to your call," she assured him.  "So, don't forget."

"I . . . I'm not really sure how to eat this . . ."

Madison stopped, her hand suspended above the pail of steamed crabs as she stared at Mikio for a moment.  She'd insisted that they stop at the run-down looking crab shack, insisting that they had the best seafood, bar none.  "Really?" she blurted, her cheeks pinking as she quickly shook her head.  "I mean, you're Japanese.  You eat seafood all the time, don't you?"

Mikio chuckled despite the blush that suffused his skin.  "Seafood, yes, and even crab sometimes, but Papa doesn't like it as much, so we don't get it very often."   He paused, brow furrowing, as though he were thinking about something serious.  "He likes more shellfish and regular fish.  Actually, he tends to like fish just roasted over an open flame.  Mama always said it was closer to the kind of thing he used to eat, you know, way back when."

She laughed softly as she pulled a crab out of the silver pail.  "Ah, yes, and he doesn't like anything spicy, either, right?"

Mikio laughed, too, since her observation was more of an understatement.  "No, no, he doesn't."

She nodded and made a show of holding up her crab.  "Well, it's like this.  I could show you how to use utensils to get into these, but if you ask me, it's kind of a waste of time, and no self-respecting New Englander would bother with those, anyway."

"Oh?" Mikio replied, letting the cracker drop with a dull thud as he reached for a crab, too.

"Nope.  Just your hands," she said.  Then she made a face.  "I hope that's not your best shirt."

He chuckled again.  "It's not," he assured her.

She nodded.  "Good, because sometimes, this can get pretty messy."

He watched in silence as she grasped the top of the crab's shell and wrapped her fingers down along the side.  Using her claws to pry the shell open, she grinned at him as she set it aside after dumping the suspect-looking brown goo into a small cup, completely oblivious to the juices that were quick to cover her hands.  "Okay, you don't want to eat all this stuff," she said, gesturing at the gills.  "Just tear those out, then pull out the mouth and the guts and anything else loose in here . . ."  He did as she instructed, and she waited for him to catch up before giving him a little wink and smile and flipping the body of the crab over.  "Now you want to get rid of this apron part of the shell, but lift it from the side because it's sharp . . . Tug it off, and that's pretty much it except for . . ."  She tore off the legs of the crab, then snapped the body in half before tearing a small hunk of meat out of the shell that she dunked into the goo before popping it into her mouth.  "Mmm," she moaned, her eyes drifting closed as she slowly chewed.

He wasn't quite as fast as she was, but he didn't do too badly, he had to admit, and the crab was absolutely delicious.  He wasn't entirely sure about the rather nasty looking goo, and Madison must have recognized his reluctance because she giggled.  "That's the crab butter," she explained.  "Looks kind of gross, but it's really good."

"I think that I'd prefer the regular yellow butter," he remarked, handing her the shell to add to the small bowl.

"Evan and I used to stop here every time we'd go home for a visit," she said, wiping her hands on a huge red and white checked napkin before reaching for her beer.  "I’m sure he still does.  In fact, Valerie mentioned it, so I know he's brought her here, too."

Mikio cracked a crab leg and carefully pulled out the long piece of meat.  "If all New Englanders crack these with their bare hands, why are there utensils on the table?" he asked as he dipped the strip of meat into the clarified butter.

"Well, they do get a lot of vacationers in this area," she allowed with an offhanded shrug.  "Of course, even most New Englanders have to use the mallet to crack the claws . . ."

He chuckled as she grasped the aforementioned claw and easily snapped hers with her hands and popped the meat into her mouth.  Sparing a moment to smile as she surveyed the mess on her hands, she seemed to give a mental shrug as she cracked another leg.

"Could I have another beer?" Madison asked a passing waitress, tilting her head to catch a drip of juice that ran down her hand.  "Oh, make that two . . ."

"Sure thing!" the girl said before hurrying away.

Letting out a deep breath as he tried to keep himself from staring at her—or more precisely, at her tongue that flicked out to catch the drip—he meticulously wiped his hands on the napkin before reaching for another crab leg, and he shrugged in what he hoped was a nonchalant kind of way.  Why was it that her innocent enough action sent his brain in an entirely different direction, anyway?

'Because,' his youkai-voice muttered in a rather distracted kind of way, 'there's something sexy about that.'

He could feel his cheeks warming at that thought, though she didn't seem to notice the flush, and for that, he was grateful enough.  'That's . . . entirely inappropriate,' he pointed out.

'Inappropriate or not, Mikio, it's also entirely true.'

Heaving an inward sigh, Mikio drained the rest of his beer just before the waitress returned with the next round.  'O . . . Okay, yeah . . . It's true . . .' he had to admit.

"Takara seemed like she was pretty unhappy when we left," Madison remarked, interrupting Mikio's inner dialogue.

"I guess she sees me more than anyone other than Mama and Papa," he admitted simply, taking a moment to redirect his wayward thoughts.  Somehow, talking about his baby sister was like the proverbial dousing with a bucket of cold water, which, he figured, was probably a good thing.  "And . . . she's pretty used to getting her way . . ."

"Not your fault, certainly," Madison said with a conspiratorial wink.

"Who?  Me?  I-I-I don't let her—" Cutting himself off abruptly, he couldn't help the nervous little smile that surfaced.  "Maybe a little."

Reaching for another crab, Madison took her time, popping off the top shell, and her gaze seemed to be studiously trained on her task.  "You seem like a good big brother," she murmured, and Mikio was surprised when he saw the hint of pink creep into her cheeks.

For some reason, the idea that she thought he would be a good big brother pleased him, though he couldn't really pinpoint why that might be.  "It's easy with her," he mumbled, feeling unaccountably flustered by her quiet assessment.

Her smile lingered, and she sighed.  "I admit, I'm kind of worried about what kind of sister I'm going to be," she confessed.  "I mean, I want to think that I'll be the most awesome sister, ever, but sometimes I wonder if I won't be too busy all the time . . . New York City's nice, but it's awfully far away from Maine."

"It's not that far," Mikio assured her.  "You care, so you'll make the time . . . That's what I think, anyway."

"You make it sound easy."

"Isn't life only as hard as you make it?"

She considered that for a long moment, as though the idea of it had never occurred to her before.  Then she smiled.  "You're right," she allowed at last, her smile warming a few degrees.  "You're absolutely right."

"Her e you go," Madison said, putting the last of the food away that Gin had hurriedly packed up for Mikio.  Crossing her arms over her chest as she let the refrigerator swing closed, she took a few meandering steps forward, gaze raised to slowly take in the room.  "Very nice, and hardly the apartment that Evan made it out to be.  It's definitely a penthouse suite," she mused, her eyes shining in obvious approval.  "I've never been in here before . . . Of course, Evan always said it was as stuffy and uptight as his uncle, but it's really not . . ."

Mikio's mouth fell open at her casual statement.  Then he snapped it closed as he barked out a chuckle despite himself.  "You . . . You think Sesshoumaru-oji-san is uptight?"

Finally lowering her gaze to meet his, he didn't miss the mischievous glint in her eyes.  "Don't you?"

"W—I—He—"  He grimaced.  "Okay, yes, he . . . He kind of is," he allowed, breaking into a very slight, if not entirely endearing kind of smile.  "Not many understand him," he went on with a shrug, "but he's really not as stern as he seems . . . He looks out for the family, even if we don't always realize that that's what he's doing."

"Oh?  Does he look out for you, too?"

The smile faded just a little as Mikio considered her question.  There were many times that he could recall when he'd felt as though Sesshoumaru might well have engineered things—nothing that would make that big of an impact or sway any kinds of opinions, but . . . "Yes," he admitted with a soft sigh, digging his hands into his pockets as he leaned back against the counter.

"Like what?"

"Like . . . Well, I don't know for sure, but I think . . . I think he might have given me reasons not to fly to Gavin and Jillian's wedding.  I mean, I wanted to go, but . . ."

"But flying's pretty hard on you," she finished when he trailed off.  Then she nodded.  "So he made up something that he needed you to do for him to save you from having to travel?"

He shook his head quickly.  "No, no . . . More like, he stressed the importance of a couple things I was working on at the time, and it's true that I might have been able to get them done, even if I had gone to the wedding, but then, maybe not. They really were important, though.  It wasn't like he lied or anything . . ."

She digested that in silence for a moment.  "How did you figure out that he'd done that?"

He shrugged.  "I just kind of knew," he admitted softly.  "No one told me.  It was just a feeling, and I'm sure that if I were to ask him, he'd deny it, but . . ."

She laughed.  "It was a lovely wedding," she told him with a wink.  "My first as a maid of honor, and obviously, not my last."

"But you did catch the bouquet this time," he reminded her.  Then he realized exactly what he'd just said—what he'd implied, and he couldn't repress the flush that rose to his face, either.  "I mean—"

Her laughter cut him off, and he blinked as he stared at her.  The amusement that lent her eyes a definite sparkle, the brightness that seemed to radiate from her—as brilliant as the sunshine—as clear as the noon-day sky . . . A curious sense of the earth shifting under his feet, though he didn't feel as though he was losing his balance at all . . . No, it was an infinitely pleasant sensation—and somehow, scary as hell, too . . .

Waving a hand as if to apologize for her amusement, she wound down slowly, though her smile remained.  "Sorry," she said, her cheeks still brushed with a pretty flush.  "I swear I wasn't laughing at you."

"I . . . I didn't think you were," he replied.

She sighed.  "I guess it's just funny, you know?  I mean, look at Evan and V, right?  If anyone had said that they'd be married now a year ago, who would have believed that?"

"Evan's always been a little wild," Mikio allowed.

She nodded, brushing an errant lock of hair back out of her face with the back of her hand.  "She was engaged to this little . . . man . . . at the time," she went on.  He didn't miss the almost derisive way she'd emphasized the word 'man', either.  "It never made sense to me, though, why someone like V was engaged to someone like Marvin Pinkle."

Mikio blinked and pressed his lips together for a moment before clearing his throat.  "Pinkle?"

Madison's look wasn't exactly amused, but it wasn't exactly not amused, either.  "His name fits him to a T," she assured him.  "If I were to borrow Gin's word, I'd say that he's a heinie."

"That bad?"

Again, she nodded as she turned away and stepped over to the refrigerator.  Other than the premade meals Gin had sent along, there wasn't much inside it, but there were a few bottles of spring water, and she grabbed two and offered one to Mikio.  "Yes, terrible . . . Not really," she admitted, breaking the seal on her bottle and slowly twisting it.  "He's a medical researcher, which is great, but he just never acted like she was more than a second thought to him.  Of course, V didn't really care, either, which speaks volumes about their relationship, so I guess, to be fair, I'd have to say that neither one of them cared enough, if that makes any sense.  I don't doubt at all that she cared about Marvin and probably still does.  But she never loved him—at least, not in the way that mattered."

"That's kind of sad," Mikio allowed, lifting the bottle of water to his lips.She nodded.  "No, it's good, because if she did love Marvin in that way, she wouldn't have given Evan the time of day, and those two are so disgustingly in love that it's . . . well, it's actually pretty nauseating."

He barked out a laugh at her choice of words, not to mention the rather disturbed expression on her face.  "Don't tell me you share Gunnar's weird ideas about mates."

At that, she laughed.  "Oh, of course not," she insisted.  "How did he end up with such jaded views on the whole thing?"

Biting his lip, Mikio reached up to fiddle with his twitching left ear.  In truth, Gunnar's adamant insistence that he'd never end up with a true mate made a little more sense to him than he wanted to admit, but for entirely different reasons altogether, mostly because he himself had decided years ago that he wasn't interested in finding his, either.  "I don't know," he ventured at length, his gaze shifting to the window across the room where the hazy orangey glow of a safety light burned in the distance.  "I guess that some people just . . . aren't interested in all that."

"I guess," Madison concluded, oblivious to the darkened thoughts that were shifting around in Mikio's head.

' Give me one good reason why you didn't take Madison up on her offer to go out to dinner.'

Rubbing his forehead as he pulled the new alarm clock out of the box, Mikio frowned.  'Not hungry,' he insisted.

'As if that would have mattered when we could have sat there and just watched her,' his youkai-voice scoffed.  'That woman is beyond hot . . .'

'She's . . . She's not my type.'

'She's not your—? What the hell do you mean, she's not your type?  Because she's sure as hell my type, baka.'

'I don't have a type,' Mikio insisted.  'Just forget about . . . about her.'

His youkai sighed.  'So we're back to that, are we?'

Leaning to the side, reaching down behind the nightstand to plug in the clock, Mikio made a face.  'Never moved away from it,' he countered evenly.

'Okay, maybe—and that's a big 'maybe'—you've got a point.  It makes sense, sure, but life isn't exactly about making points or even keeping to those points you've already made.  There's nothing really wrong with spending some time with her, now is there?'

Making a face as he accidentally scrolled past seven a.m. as he set the alarm, he wasn't entirely sure that his youkai-voice deserved a response for that.  'It's not like we're going to be here that long,' Mikio pointed out instead.

'That's not true.  It could take months to straighten out the mess that Gavin's in, you know.  So, what?  We're just going to sit here, day in and day out and avoid the rest of the world?'

'That's laying it on kind of thick, don't you think?'

'Only if it isn't true.'

'It's . . . It's better this way.  Besides, she owns her own business—a chain of them.  I'm sure she really is too busy for me to drag her all over the city, no matter what she says.'

'. . . You're scared of her, aren't you?'

Uttering a terse snort as he stretched out on top of the covers, Mikio shut off the lamp and scowled at the darkened ceiling.  'Scared?  Of Madison?'

'Yeah, scared of Madison.  You're afraid that you're just not going to measure up to the guys in her past, or maybe you'll discover that you like being with her, right?'

The guys in her past?  The guys like Evan . . .? Flashy guys who had never dealt with the kind of things that Mikio had to accept as par for course—things like moving too fast because that would often lead to dizziness and loss of balance, or the idea that he could and sometimes did trip over his own feet whenever the room started to sway around him . . . Evan and Madison . . . How often had Bas mentioned things over time?  Things that now, Mikio kind of wished he hadn't heard . . . And those things just served to remind Mikio all over again, didn't they?  Remind him of the things that he knew better than anyone—things he couldn't change, things that served to keep everything in perspective.

He'd thought about it a lot through the years, ever since he had started to realize that he really wasn't like anyone else.  Youkai and hanyou were supposed to be tougher, stronger, than any other beings on earth, but even as a child, Mikio wasn't like that.  A childhood punctuated by falls and missteps, it hadn't occurred to him that he was so different until the other boys of his generation had started getting instruction from InuYasha on sword skills and fighting techniques.  It just wasn't something that InuYasha had ever even tried to teach Mikio, but it wasn't until later that Mikio realized why that was.

They were all afraid, weren't they?  Afraid that Mikio, with his balance issues, just wasn't steady enough to handle a real weapon—a youkai weapon . . . Afraid that Mikio would end up hurting himself or someone else—not on purpose, of course, but it didn't have to be if the end result was injury . . . No one had actually said a thing to him about it, and that bothered him more than he'd like to admit.

He wasn't like the others, and he never would be.

The closest he came to being trained in any kind of true fighting skill—he didn't consider his firearms training as a real fighting skill—was when Kagome, in one of her more inspired moments, had decided that Mikio could and should learn how to use a bow and arrow.  Even so, that was hardly on par with the rest of them, and he knew that, too.  He'd agreed to learn, mostly to humor Kagome, after all.  Yet he could still remember the embarrassment that he'd had to tamp down, to hide, as he'd gone through the motions while his contemporaries had sparred nearby . . .

But he didn't really know when he'd made the decision that he didn't want to find his mate, if there even was one out there for someone like him.  Maybe it hadn't been a conscious decision, at all.  It was true that girls seemed interested in him from time to time, but the nagging thought always lingered in the back of his mind; the idea that no woman would really want to be with him once they figured out that he was clumsy to a fault, and it was that thought that kept him from ever pursuing anyone.

And it was all right, he told himself.  He had family, he had friends, and he had his work, too.  He wasn't just sitting back, feeling sorry for himself, feeling angry at his own limitations, and it wasn't really something that he thought about all that often, either.

So, why?  Why was he suddenly thinking about all of it now . . .?