InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ The Last Girlfriend ❯ Chapter 8 ( Chapter 8 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Disclaimer:Own Inu-chan I do not.
Own Itokuzu-pi(Sesshoumaru) I do not.
Own Miroku-san and Sango-san?
.......... -.- I don't and I wish I did.

Additional Disclaimer: I don't own author Valerie Frankel's book "The Girlfriend Curse", from which this story I've made a parody of(somewhat). So nobody sue me, or accuse me of plagiarism if you've read the book. I'm just altering some stuff, but the storyline remains indifferent all the same.

X) Oh yeah. The names of the characters, locations and events are plain fictitious.

Here you are and voila. The horrible chapter 8. I've been yakking in two chapters why you'll kill me after reading this. Why? Clue: Because I can't change how the story should go, therefore I HAVE to go along with the program and be cooperative, no matter how much I HATE how it turns out! So please work with me here, and continue to read and review moi!

(8( Pweeeeeeeeeeessss!!!

So, I'm afraid you'll all have to deal with every little event, including the one that's about to make its show right here and RIGHT NOW!!! READ!!!

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

The trip ended three hours later in Shirokawa Junction, Hokkaido. Sango's next stop, after an hour-and-a-half-long ferry cruise and a fifteen-minute taxi ride, was the Subaru dealership in Sapporo, where a brand-new Outback was waiting for her. Sango got her driver's license only a week ago. A city kid, she'd always taken the subway, taxis, or walked. She was looking forward to operating heavy machinery. She just wished that, on her maiden voyage, she weren't so tipsy.

The car salesman had her fill out the paperwork, fork over her credit card, and then walked her onto the lot. She tried to focus on his recitation about the past week's weather patterns, but Sango's mind drifted like a log on phloem back to Kuranosuke Takeda.

His kisses were salty(from the crackers) and hot(from heat). They'd made out for the last two hours of the train trip, and thirty minutes on the ferry. No need to talk once they'd discovered their mutual defect. Why talk anyway, when their mouths were put to better use in other ways?

They had held hands exiting the train, and had linked arms aborting the ferry, and had to pry their lips apart on the port.

"Are you going straight to your farm?" he'd asked. "Can I call you there? I'll sneak off. Whatever I have to do."

"I'm not hooked up yet at the farm." she'd told him. "But I can give you my cell number."

They'd programmed each other's number into their mobile phones.

"Reception is spotty in the mountains." Kuranosuke had cautioned her.

"Take my address, too." she'd then offered. "Come over, if you can make a break for it."

She'd scribbled her address on the back of his ferry ticket.

He'd looked at the writing. "You live on Chuukodaku no Yagi Road?" he'd asked, slaying her with his smile.

"Better than Wakaidaku no Yagi Road." she'd returned it. "Those young dirty goats, they throw wild parties, drink, do drugs, and listen to rock-and-roll music."

From what I hear, the old dirty goats are just as bad." he'd stated.

They'd both laughed.

"You've had quite enough Gatorade for one day." Sango had told him with a grin.

He had planted another smooch on her. Sango had dropped her suitcase on the ground to put her arms around his neck.

"Where were you three months ago?" he'd pulled back. "I wouldn't have signed up for Inward Bound."

"The program is just four weeks." she had said to him.

He'd looked down at her, dark toffee eyes sweet and gooey. "I can't wait that long to have you."

It had sent Sango's heart racing.

"You've got five gears, and reverse." the Subaru dealer said loudly, breaking into her thoughts. He was giving Sango the spiel. "This is the remote. You can lock and unlock the doors, turn on the ignition, start the heater, even switch on the CD player. It's a nifty little gadget. I tell you, they get more advanced each year."

"You don't have to sell me." she said. "I already paid. Unless you need the practice."

He stopped abruptly.

"Here it is." he said. "Two-thousand five Subaru Outback, fully loaded, standard transmission. Metallic black."

He dropped the keys into her palm.

"My first car." she sighed wistfully. "So I put the key into the slot, and twist to turn it on, right?"

The dealer nodded, and said with all earnestness, "Gas pedal on the right. Brake in the middle. Clutch on the left."

"I know, I know." she told him. "I was trying to be funny."

"What's funny about not knowing how to drive?"

"Nothing." she answered. "Just a little sarcasm."

"Sarcasm?" as if it was an alien concept to him. "Oh, yes. I've heard they do that in Tokyo."

Clearly, they do it in Hokkaido too, thought Sango.

She got in her car, checked her mapquest directions and drove. She got all the way out of the lot before she stalled. Then she cruised down Sapporo's Ichiban Street--four blocks, with a general store, a post office, a restaurant, an inn and a bookstore. Another few miles down a paved road, then a left(stall) and a right. At the turn for Chuukodaku no Yagi Road(stall), the road changed from blacktop to graded dirt. Sango thought of an old anime: an illustration of a car on a highway, passing a sign that read, "Welcome to Hokkaido. Pavement ends."

She drove along the road narrowing into a single-lane squeeze under a canopy of elms, maples and several sakura trees, with wild daisies dotting the ditches on the sides of the road. Sango drove slowly, getting a feel for her new car, watching butterflies and dragonflies flitting by the flowers. She came to a full stop(slam on the breaks, stall) to avoid hitting a deer and two fawns in the road. She watched the furry family disappear into the woods, her heart thundering from nearly killing them. She'd have to get used to living so closely with animals.

But that's how the world should be, she thought, getting the car back in gear. Humans and animals co-existing and sharing Earth's bounty.

Sango smiled to herself. Moving was the best decision she'd ever made. She could feel herself shedding the artifice of Tokyo, the overcivilized pretentiousness that defined city life. Bring on the deer. They'd become her prancing pals. Feral pets. She could leave out food for them in a dish on her porch.

This is heaven, or Eden, she thought as she turned into her gravel driveway, which was exactly where it was supposed to be, 2.39 miles from the turn.

Sango turned off the ignition and stepped out of her new car to look at her new home. The photos did not do the place justice. The small two-story house, white with navy trim, had a triangular aluminum roof, four-panel glass windows, dormers, extended eaves. It was a classic, and yet modern, country home. Modest, muscular, neat, no frills.

Just like me, she thought proudly.

They were a perfect match. And then, another notion: Won't Kuranosuke be impressed?

Sango approached the front door with some trepidation. Sure, the outside looked great, exactly like the photos. But she hadn't seen any pictures of the inside. All she had to go on was the word of Kaede the broker. Sango was a realist. She expected to find something wrong. Water damage, or a rotting floor.

She used her key(the broker had mailed it to her in Tokyo). No problem with the lock, or the solid oak door. She entered a square mudroom: terra-cotta brick floor, white walls with a few wrought-iron hooks. She hung up her purse and dropped her suitcase(full of clothes, some sheets and her brokerage account info--all she'd brought to start her new life). She ventured straight ahead, into the kitchen. She peeked at the deep, stainless-steel sink. She turned on the faucet. She'd expected a clattering blast of liquid rust. But the water flowed soundlessly, colorless and odorless. The downstairs bathroom looked good too. She flushed the toilet. No muddy backflow.

Sango started to relax. Faster now, she prowled from room to room on the first floor. The ceiling beams and wide-plank floors were solid, seamless. The mantel and fireplace were swept. Sango lit a match in the flue, and watched with joy as the flame fluttered and then steadied. Chimney clear, good. Good. She walked through the shoji doors of the living room and out onto the deck to look at her land.

Seeing her property, that first look, almost hurt from the beauty. Ten acres, all hers. The view directly in front--the four acres of flat pasture--would be turned into her flower farm. Sango admired the swell of a hill to the left, about an acre or two, covered in a carpet of yellow, purple and white wildflowers. A wind lifted suddenly, and she caught the scent of mint and grass. Sango cast her eyes on a pond to the right of her future garden, water surface rippling, a willow tree bending on the bank, a frog leaping into the water, causing more ripples to ensue. It was a small pond. Barely big enough for swimming laps. But plenty sizeable for cooling off.

Sango scanned the horizon. She couldn't believe she was the owner of all she surveyed. She had to see it up close. Deciding to take a wander through her pasture, Sango ran back to the mudroom to grab her suitcase. She carted it up the steep, banisterless staircase, up to the second floor.

The upstairs had two bedrooms and another bathroom. She entered the larger bedroom, and threw her suitcase on the floor. As per her instructions, the real estate broker had arranged for a mattress to be delivered pending her arrival. And there it was, wrapped in plastic, leaning upright against the wall.

Sango stripped out of her traveling clothes. In the privacy of her own home, she stood naked, arms stretched to the ceiling. The months of planning, the excruciating decisions, the stress of selling, buying, all seemed worth it now. This was the life she wanted, in the setting of her dreams. The fact that she'd met Kuranosuke on the way up was a sign that she'd done the right thing. No mistakes, no surprises. It was all going off without a hitch. Maybe the pieces of her life were finally coming together.

Sango rummaged in her suitcase for a towel, toothbrush and toothpaste. She had a million things to do, buy and see, but first, before anything, she'd shower.

The upstairs bathroom had a toilet, a sink and a big, porcelain tub, which she'd been expecting would have been one of those old wooden ones you had to warm using firewood. The window by the tub let in beams of light as the sun slowly sank into the mountains. She could gaze out of this window at her pasture while taking long soaks, smelling the minty air. Her entire body softened, her muscles unclenching for the first time in ten years, Smiling at herself in the framed mirror above the sink(she'd have to buy a medicine cabinet), Sango was bursting with pride. She loved her car, her house, her previously untapped adventurousness. She even loved her bangs.

Sango brushed her teeth quickly. She decided that, in the absence of a medicine cabinet, she would store her toiletries in the cabinet under the sink. She opened the cabinet door. Light from the window shined into the space.

What came out of the space: a gray swarm. A few at first and then scores of mice raced out of the cabinet, darted around the bathroom, across her naked toes and into the hallway, where they dispersed like scattered marbles.

Part of her brain realized how terrified the critters had to be. She was a 125-pound woman, and they were tiny creatures. The rest of her brain was going on pure instinct, instructing her muscles to jump up and down, setting off her vocal cords to emit an ear-piercing scream with the power and wind of two healthy lungs behind it.

Sango wasn't afraid of water bugs and cockroaches. She'd killed many large, hard-shelled insects, even taking pleasure as they crunched under her shoe. Rats were another story. They were horrible. But Sango saw them only at a safe distance--in sewers, running along subway tracks. A rat sighting, while waiting for a train, could be entertaining.

But there was nothing entertaining about these mice, scurrying over her unshod feet, spilling from the cabinet as if poured from hell's bucket into her bathroom. The place where she would do personal, naked things. She watched a mouse crawl across the toilet seat. This unleashed a surge of horror in Sango. The surge careened inside her blood and bones, like the mice on the floor, maniacally and without direction or purpose, until she thought she would pass out or throw up. Or both.

Stumbling on pure adrenaline, Sango ran out of the bathroom and slammed the door. In a blind panic, she rushed back into the master bedroom and bumped into the mattress leaning against the wall. It fell to the floor with a violent splat, letting fly another burst of gray. More mice darted in wild fright from the underside of the mattress.

A new blast of screaming and the hot-foot dance from Sango as disgust crept upward from her toes to the ends of her hair. The plastic wrapping of the mattress had been gnawed away, along with a plate-sized hole in the padding. A family of rodents had fashioned a comfortable nest of stuffing and droppings there. One brave mouse hadn't fled. He remained in his nest, chewing unfettered at the padding upon which Sango was to have slept. He stopped for a moment and looked up at her with his black bead eyes, as if daring her to make him stop, even for a second.

Sango grabbed her suitcase, her purse, her pile of clothes on the floor, and rushed down the stairs, out the door and into her Subaru, where she sat in the front seat, leather sticking to her bare bottom, screaming.

She used the nifty remote gadget to roll up the windows and lock the car doors.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Chuukodaku no Yagi - means "Old Dirty Goat". X) Sorry if you didn't get the punchline up there.

Wakaidaku no Yagi - Young Dirty Goat

A/N: (:( Now. Are you guys gonna kill me, after what you'd just read? Witnessed? Seen? Whatever? The rat attack, or Kuranosuke and his dreamgirl making out? Hmmm? Or am I just overreacting here...? e.e Well for me, it's so NOT okay! X( Especially the rats! Ewwwwwwwww!!!
):) Well anyway, R&R please!