FicWad

CHAPTER FOUR: APRIL AND MAY(CONFESSIONS)

Ranma had not left his apartment for more than a month.

Now he was here with Nabiki. She stood close beside him as a cool early May shower rapped softly against the panels of the umbrella he held above them. Nabiki was wearing a black trench coat over asimple black A-line dress with black leggings and heels. He was in a black suit with a black tie and shirt. A black KN95 mask was over his mouth and nose, heavy and stifling.

They were standing amongst the graves along with five other pairs of people, all socially distanced in a neat circle around a new plot of freshly dug earth. An Episcopalian minister stood in the center next to the new waiting grave, reciting the final rites. She was numb and distant as she leaned back listlessly against him, listening without listening to the man's droning voice.

"We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…."

The old man, her patient and benefactor, was dead. His obligatorily cremated mortal remains sat in a small, unassuming urn made of English oak atop a small graveside altar. Nabiki had been in the room with him when he died almost two weeks ago.

Ranma remembered Nabiki calling to tell him the news. He had been looking forward to seeing Nabiki, having missed her more than he could have imagined missing anyone. He still regretted that they had fought the last time they had seen each other. She had been on her final day of conscripted duty in the new hastily constructed COVID ICU, about to come off after a punishing, soul-draining month of nights.

# # # ##

In the desperate days and weeks after New Rochelle and the WHO declaration, critically acute staffing shortages emerged and took the School of Medicine and the university hospital to the brink of operational collapse. The Brigham, MGH, Presby, Bellevue, Montefiore, HUP, Grady, Cook County, Barnes-Jewish, Parkland, SF General – anywhere and everywhere was the same. Nurses, house officers, and attendings with critical care certification met or exceeded their duty hour limits by dangerous margins or were dropping ill like flies.

The hastily set-up crisis command team decided that non-critical care attendings and fellows should be conscripted to fill the scheduling gaps created by the seemingly endless expansion of need and to cover those who had become sick and could no longer work. An early graduation option would be offered to final year medical students willing to join in with the frontline house staff. Any faculty or trainees refusing orders to deploy would face immediate termination.

Nabiki decided not to see him in her month of service and for at least a week after. She was terrified of becoming aTrojan horse vector and bringing the virus to him. They argued bitterly about it the last time she saw him before beginning her month of nights. The truth, though, was that a good number of things that she had been badgering him about to protect himself from the virus had come to a head by that time.

At the beginning, he had been pleasantly surprised and excited to find that they unexpectedly had more time to spend together. He was working entirely from home. For Nabiki, all university research including the work in her lab and in her clinical research center was suspended, and the outpatient clinics had converted over completely to atelemedicine platform overnight. She had been able to work remotely from his place for most days of the week, allowing her effectively to move in.

She turned out to have ulterior motives for doing so. The nagging started initially in the form of friendly, well-intended suggestions. She began urging him to avoid going out for groceries or food all together. She either would be happy to shop for him, or they should utilise delivery services at every opportunity. She began cleaning everything that came to his apartment: grocery item packaging, online shipping purchases, her own purse and briefcase every single time she came and went. She was also immediately heating any takeout that they would order and discarding all of the restaurant packaging. She had pulled on her privileges as aphysician to circumvent the supply bottleneck and purchase several boxes of KN95 masks and disposable face shields online.

That she was going to disappear on him was the final straw. Everything exploded into the open the final night before she left. He was no longer able to control himself, screaming as he accused her of irrational paranoia.

His accusation made her apoplectic. Afterall, everything she was saying and doing was for him. She would protect him even if he didn't believe her about the danger. His life meant too much for it to be any other way.

"You'll die if you get this virus. You know that, right? Between the tacro for your transplant and the rituximab, you do realise you don't have rubbish for an immune system, yes? If that's how you feel about me saying and doing these things and you don't care, so be it, but you being alive thinking that I'm a crazy psycho b-#ch is still far better than you being dead with me having to come by to stomp on your grave and hating you forever for being such a stupid f-#k! I'm not going to let you die!" she had screamed.

He was surprised to see tears in her eyes as she beat her fist angrily against his chest.

"Nabiki, I will be careful, and no one's going to die," he said in resigned exasperation. He sighed as he folded her in his arms, stroked her hair, and let her vent. Her obvious distress and anguish had killed the fight in him. "If this is the last time that I get to see ya for a month and a half, I don't wanna spend it fighting with ya.

"I'll text and call every day. Ranma, if something happens to me – "

"It won't," he said, taking her firmly by the shoulders. "You know better than anybody what you're doing."

He felt like he was a wife sending ahusband off to war.

# # # ##

Nabiki was deadly prophetic, to Ranma's eternal chagrin.

The old man too had been careful to an obsessive degree. He had lived in a meticulously arranged bubble of sterility, going so far as to let his housekeeper and driver go to cut off any movement into and out of that bubble. He had not left his home since the evening of the docent tour save for once to venture to the citadel fortress of the medical center campus for the routine maintenance rituximab infusion that would keep his disease under control. Within a week of that session, he was admitted and fighting for his life, a prone, half-dead corpse barely hanging on with ECMO, the final Hail Mary of respiratory support.

His disease too had been reactivated by the virus, quickly rotting out and shutting down his kidneys and causing his lungs to hemorrhage, bleeding him out to the point of being dependent on near-daily blood transfusions. The maintenance dose had been too little and too late to hold it all back against that potent of an immune provocation.

Nabiki was the one to pick him up. She managed him with the critical care attending as the primary by night and followed him as the attending specialist by day. She agonised for days and nights over the decision to pulse him with IV Medrol, knowing that though the mega doses of steroids would help the disease, there was also an incalculable risk of catastrophically worsening the viremia.

In the end, she gambled – and almost won. They were rolling dice in the dark back then, months before Oxford researchers would reach the compelling conclusion that steroids were crucial to greatly reducing the risk of fatal outcomes in severe COVID. The Medrol inadvertently also turned the tide from a cardiopulmonary standpoint. By the end of the first week, the old man progressed miraculously off ECMO to a standard vent, in stark contrast to many of the other beds on the floor also on her census. As the second week came to a close, they were looking to downgrade him out of the Unit and onto the floor. He woke up, managed to tolerate extubation, and was in good spirits knowing that it was Nabiki who had taken him back again from the brink. They were very close now.

Then it happened. She was rounding on him with her fellow the morning that his downgrade was to take place. They were in the room gowned, gloved, and masked with face shields when he had coded. Nabiki jumped on the bed and did the compressions herself as the code team poured in around her. She forged on until she was on the verge of passing out from exhaustion, but he had been on a tortured road to nowhere from the beginning. It had been a pulseless electrical arrest, not shockable with a defibrillator. A bedside cardiac echo revealed severe RV strain consistent with a probable catastrophic acute pulmonary embolus.

Nabiki insisted on being the one to call the old man's daughter, the one who was her old friend and university housemate.

# # # ##

The Nabiki who came back to him was ahaunted, shell-shocked shadow of the dragon that he had sent off just weeks before. It felt like a lifetime had passed though. She had come the night before, tired, dishevelled, looking like a waif half-buried in a black hoodie and baggy, wrinkled grey scrubs. Yet, even in this derelict, dishevelled state, she was still even more beautiful to him than he remembered. He folded her delicately in his arms, letting her cling desperately to him as she wept wordlessly for a very long time.

The haunted look in her eyes was something he had seen once before. That had been when he was last in Ilocos Norte digging survivors out of the mud in the Cagayan Valley. The ground reports he had also been receiving throughout the preceding weeks from the struggling hospitals that they had been fighting to bring into operation in Thimphu Dzongkhag were also terrible, no longer leaving him with any doubt that death was hanging over every corner of the world. Nabiki had been right.

He knew he could not conceive of the horrors that she must have seen or imagine how many times she must have gone to the edge of madness, reliving what she had seen over and over in the solitude of her self-imposed post-service quarantine as she counted down the days before she would let herself see him again. He ached thinking about these things, but now she was here again, and he was grateful.

"There was so much suffering and death and so little we could do," she told him. "You cannot tell them that things will be okay. They almost always seemed to leave in the night. Over and over, we were bringing our phones into the rooms to stream their loved ones in so they could say good-bye." Visitors were banned from coming to the hospital for any reason.

A socially distanced graveside funeral was held the next day. There had been no choice but to cremate the remains because of the contagion risk. The old man had been a widower for a long time. Only Elizabeth George-Chamberlain had been able to come to represent the family, being the only kin already in the country. She was visibly heavily pregnant.

"I'm sorry, Lisette," Nabiki said as she stepped forward in front of Ranma. She willed her voice to not waver and for her eyes to stay fixed on those of the old man's daughter staring back across the freshly covered plot of earth. Her balled fists and compressed lips, he noted, however, betrayed her nervousness and the anguish of her self-loathing. "I wasn't good enough."

The British lady vigorously shook her head from side to side. "No. You were his hero, Kiki. He often said he was already on time that you had borrowed for him from God. We are grateful that it was you, and because you were there - because it was you - we know that everything that could be done was done. When this is over, come with your man and laugh and cry with me. I love you, Kiki. Daddy did too."

"Lisette, I – "

"Remember to love yourself and to let yourself be loved. That will be the only truth you can have for yourself in the end. Let that be the bedrock of your aequanimitas when you go back – and you had better f-#king go back to finish this. For all of us."

# # # ##

Nabiki remained lost in her own thoughts after the funeral, quiet and subdued, there but not there, responding to him only when prompted. For hours, she was a statue closely hugging her knees to herself, sitting on her blue couch under the shadow of her Kandinsky, staring but not seeing out the East-facing window in her den. The rain continued to fall over the harbor as the afternoon drifted into dusk, stopping only as acold, starless night settled in.

Ranma kept back at a quiet, respectful distance. He was fairly certain that she would come to him when she was ready. He had come to know quite a bit about grief and the stages of its progression in his own right.

Unconsciously, he found himself rubbing at the old scar on his chest and the three others on his abdomen. He knew only Nabiki could understand what those scars meant. She had gently run her fingers over them in the dark that night when she had kissed him for the first time. They were the scars from the old Hickman and the laparoscopic ports for when he had received the cadaveric kidney. She had been with him here too in this same room on her blue couch under the shadow of her Kandinsky in the darkness. She too had kept back at a quiet, respectful distance, never actually having once asked for the story about the scars.

Akane's ghost had been his only companion back then as he had lain in a hospital bed in a foreign country, alone and dying from necrotizing glomerulonephritis and acute kidney failure at the age of 21. The onset of the disease had been brutal. It had taken his body from the perfect picture of health to all but being a corpse in less than a week. That had been his first brush with the disease and the first time he had actually considered and understood that he could die.

He had almost given up. His father had disowned him in all but name when he had left Japan after Akane's death. His sickness had made it official. He was simply too weak in both mind and body to be worth anything to anyone. With Akane gone, he had thought no one would have cared if he had died except maybe his mother. He did not even care.

Yet, somehow, he had survived, but he had been rendered a dialysis-dependent cripple, a Hickman sticking out of his chest like the finger of Frankenstein, ever present to torment and remind him. A year later, he somehow received the reprieve of a second chance, but at a terrible cost. He was, of course, not allowed to know the details, but the transplanted kidney he received had been from a ten-year-old girl whose neck had been broken in a botched home robbery attempt.

Only his mother Nodoka had been there with him on the day of his surgery and in the weeks after, but she was dead now too.

Nothing about any of it had been fair. All of the good things that had been taken from him in life had always been taken without warning. Even now, it still was not over, just a matter of time. The transplant would eventually fail; they always did if you waited long enough. He would eventually need another.

All the more, he found Nabiki even more precious and dear to him. She was, he realised, all that he had left of his past. She was also, in all the many long years since Akane's death, the only person aside from his mother who had ever come and been there for him.

During Nabiki's month of nights, he came across a contributed editorial in a prominent current affairs magazine about an ER doctor roughly his age who was a single mother. She had written about being too afraid to live at home for fear of unwittingly exposing her kids to the virus. She talked about having written a will shortly after the pandemic began. Ranma realised as he read that piece that he needed to do whatever he possibly could to hold on to Nabiki.

Lisette George-Chamberlain's words came back to haunt Ranma.

He was in love with Nabiki. He could admit that to himself now, but would Nabiki allow him to love her?

At half past seven, he cobbled together what he could from her near empty fridge onto a small plate and placed it on the Noguchi-style coffee table.

She did not touch it.

A few hours later, he came and placed athrow over blanket over her shoulders and a warm tumbler of bancha next to the untouched plate.

She told him to go to bed.

At some point in the night, he woke to find Nabiki sitting by the bed, studying him in the darkness. The blanket that he had given her was still over her shoulders.

"You should go back to sleep," she said.

"I'm fine. Did ya wanna talk?"

"We can talk in the morning."

"It's okay. I'm here now," he said, pushing himself up to a sit.

"Leave it off," she whispered. Her hand reached out to stop his as he started to move toward the light."Take me somewhere with you. Anywhere but here, any time but now. Just take me with you. Please."

He understood.

He started to talk about the time he had gone to Iceland in early March. It had been a layover option on his way back from Baia Mare. That anyone would come to tour at that time of year, he was surprised to find, caused some amusement with the locals. He had gotten himself pictured in the local newspaper in one of the small fishing villages because of it.

As the bus from Keflavik International Airport made its inbound approach to Reykjavik, the alleged city had actually appeared more like a small village by the sea. Rows of plain, white-walled homes and businesses individualised with colorful rooftops were sprawled by the shore with Mount Esja in the distance looking back across the blue waters of Faxaflói Bay. It was pleasant, friendly, unassuming, and surprisingly warm considering its extreme Northern latitude on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Everything had been so clean, meticulously ordered with trademark Scandinavian precision, and cleverly engineered with fit-for-purpose common sense practicality.

Outside Reykjavik, though, the world was entirely different, a land on the edge of the Earth untouched by human hands, viciously wild and ferociously alive. The weather was crazy. In Reykjavik, you could stroll around in the shallow Northern sun in a windbreaker. Go a half hour to the east, and maybe it would be drizzling like it were a Spring morning in Tokyo. Drive a half hour west, and you could bundle up with as much as 7layers and still feel like you were wearing nothing.

The most bitter cold he had ever experienced had been there when he had walked in the Gullfossgjúfur canyon. The high rock walls spoke of Time and forces more ancient and far more profound than anything human, their wordless voices mingling in the howl of the frigid, biting wind viciously blasting through between them. Suddenly, the path opened up onto a majestic perch overlooking an enormous waterfall higher and wider than Niagara, frozen completely solid, savagely entombed in the bitter, unrepentant grip of the Winter ice. The air here was filled with the roaring void of the most deafening silence he had ever heard, as if a powerful point deeper than Time and Existence had been made, leaving nothing more left to say. It was strangely comforting, peaceful, even reassuring, knowing that such aplace could still exist in the world.

To the south, there had been pristine, untouched beaches of midnight black sand. Behind them were mighty cliffs of volcanic rock rising high above and overlooking the cleanest and clearest water he had ever seen. In those waters, one could see the black icy seabed stretching out without apparent end toward the horizon. Had that water not been so deathly cold, you could have waded out at waist height forever and ever and ever.

To the west, there had been the ancient glacial peak of Snæfellsjökull sitting at the ends of the Earth. Quicksand had lurked hidden all around the edges of where the ice met the earth. From the summit, there had been the endless icy sea stretching out forever to the north, south and west. East of the mountain had been the barren landscape of the moon itself staring back across the vastness of timeless eternal Time itself. The actual passage straight to the center of the Earth itself, however, had been nowhere to be found.

Nabiki laughed through her tears. "I loved Jules Verne as a child," she told him. "Akane and I used to play that game in the backyard when we were kids, looking for that passage to the center of the world. So, he made it up after all, huh."

"Seems so," he replied, forcing a smile. Inside, he could not help wincing at the mention of Akane's name. He began to suspect that Nabiki's request for a moment of escape had by no means been innocent, that she was leading him somewhere again with a purpose.

"I'm damaged goods, Ranma. I didn't sign up to be a soldier. I wasn't even one of those kids who grew up their whole lives knowing that they wanted to become a doctor. That came much later for me. I'm no hero or whatever Lisette or her father want to think I am, and there's nothing larger than life about me like there always is for you and like there was for Akane. I've been lucky a few times, and I work hard, but the truth is that I'm just an ordinary mortal human girl living in the shadows of people like you and her.

"Nabiki, that's not true. You are –"

"I'm not brave or strong like you and her. You're here because you have found ways time and time again to live despite terribly rotten odds. When Mum died, Akane and even Kasumi both found ways to live. Akane through her love of the Art. Kasumi did it by trying to step in to do all the things that Mum would no longer be able to do. Me, I told you, I just ran away and hid in myself. And when Akane died, I did the same. I left Japan, ran away again and created Kiki Tendou."

"Nabiki, don't do this to yourself," Ranma was saying now. His chest hurt as he saw the haunted, tormented lines etched on her beautiful heart-shaped face. His suspicions were now a blaring siren of dread as the chilling realisation hit him. He knew what she was trying to do. Her friend had understood too.

Remember to love yourself and to let yourself be loved.

"Akane was there with me in the Unit on all those nights when I had someone die. I needed her memory there to tell me that I had to keep going, to keep coming back night after night to that long road to Hell because it was my duty and my fate. She always was the most passionate and earnest one of us, always steadfast and brave. She was driven by actual convictions – so unlike me."

Ranma barked a mirthless laugh."Nabiki, you're as much of a dragon as Akane ever was. There's no mistaking ya for a Tendou sister."

She did not hear him. She kept going, doing all she could, he suddenly realised, to not hear him. "I never told Akane or anyone how much I wanted to be like her growing up. I wish I had. Icould see why every guy in the world would fall for her - including you. I'm just Nabiki. I'm not Akane, and if she had lived, she would be your wife, and Iwould be your sister."

Now, he was angry. "Why are you doing this, trying so hard to leave?! Acting like you and I are suddenly some sort of big mistake?!" he spat out. There, he said it. It was a fight now, and Ranma Saotome was good at fighting. Maybe he didn't always win – he could admit that now – but he was always prepared to fight to the death when he did fight.

"Ranma," she started again, his name infused with heartbroken tenderness. "They could call me back at any time. They probably will. One day, I may not be able to come back. People, alot of the other doctors and nurses, are writing wills and advanced directives, Ranma, finding ways to be prepared to say good-bye."

"I've heard about that. Did ya write a will?"

She was silent. The answer was in her eyes.

"Nabiki," he breathed as he reached out, touching her cheek and brushing her tears away.

She brushed his arm aside and tore away, fiercely gritting her teeth as she told him, "I'm. Not. Akane."

Instinctively, he was seized with every fiber of his being by the realisation that if it was meant to be, then the time for his move was now. Whatever was about to happen, he knew he would always look back knowing that this had been one of the great pivotal moments that underpinned the course of the rest of his entire life.

"No, you're not," he agreed,"and that has nothing - nothing at all - to do with why I've fallen in love with you. You're everyone's hero now -- mine included -- and you are the one between us who's really larger than life. I want you, and I need you. Your beautiful face is the first thing I want to see when I wake up every morning, and your voice is the last thing I want to hear each night when I go to sleep. Imay have needed to love Akane in order to live and grow up, to be ready to love someone as strong and beautiful and kind and real as you. Maybe you're right that if Akane had lived, she would have been my wife, and you would be my sister, but that's not what happened or who we've become. I'm here now, and Ilove you. I love you because you are and only you will ever be Nabiki."

She had no words left for him as her small body exploded and broke apart with bawling sobs.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once in the sky, that would be the splendor of the mighty One. Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds….

Only by dying does the world learn to live….

Vishnu is Shiva. Shiva is Vishnu.

He had looked it up after she had said it that morning now so long ago.

He seized her and held on with his whole being. His entire world and all that mattered now was ensconced only in his arms. This time she did not push him away, for which he was grateful.

"I love you, Nabiki," he whispered in her ear when she had spent herself back into a weary, exhausted silence. "All ya have to tell me is that ya don't love me, and I promise that I won't ever bother ya again if ya do."

"No one has ever told me that they love me before. Not like that. I've always been alone."

"Tell me ya don't love me."

"I…. I can't," she rasped, her voice broken and defeated. "I can't."

"Then don't."

"You've really grown up, Ranma."

"No choice. We both have."

An eternal moment went by in the darkness. There was only the ticking of the wall clock in the distance. He studied her face in the silence, watching her as she waged an internal war within herself. He knew that he could only wait for the verdict.

Her jaw eventually settled into a hard, firm line. He held his breath, knowing she had made a decision.

"I do love you, Ranma," she finally said as she threw her arms tightly around him. "Maybe I also needed to have a sister like Akane in order to be able to live and grow up, to be ready to love someone as complete and strong and as stupidly insane as you…."

A tremendous wave of relief washed over him. He was emboldened to aspire for new soaring heights now. "Don't leave, Nabiki. Please. You said dying itself is not the most terrible thing that can happen to a person. It's dying alone. But you're only half right. It's also about living and not doing that alone. Ya don't live to die. Ya live because ya know that ya will die. Ya just don't know how or when."

She nodded. "I will not leave you alone. I…. I can't."

Vishnu is Shiva, and shiva is Vishnu.

# # # ##

"I'm not like Akane and Kasumi. I was born in Kyoto," Nabiki told him.

They were at Fushimi Inari Taisha now on the wooded slopes of Mount Inari, ascending the ancient, haunted stairway running forever and forever under the orange shadows of the Senbon Torii. His hand was firmly in hers as she led him higher and higher toward the Yotsutsuji intersection.

Tourists were all around them snapping pictures and sifting through guidebooks. A foreign woman was posing cutely ahead of them in a wedding dress. She obviously did not realise that they were actually standing in the middle of an ancient graveyard, full of centuries of countless prayers and wishes laden with heartfelt offerings. Nabiki the child had been offended; Nabiki the woman envied her ignorance more than she could express in words.

"I've never been to Kyoto," Ranma admitted. "Of all the places I've been, somehow not here."

They were at the intersection now. The city stretched out before them in the valley below under the late setting Spring sun. It was descending lazily behind the mountains in the distance. The air was warm and pleasant, infused with the sense of magic only found in memories.

"Akane was always here waiting for me at Yotsutsuji when she would come in my dreams during that month of nights. She was my best friend, always my partner in crime. We were playing here with Kasumi and broke the face of my Mum's watch the last time we all came together. Kasumi still used to play with us back then."

Nabiki rubbed tears from her eyes. Awistful sigh rattled in her chest before she continued. "It was the last birthday present Daddy gave Mum, just weeks before she left. She was a Kansai girl. She had wanted to come home one last time to say goodbye.We were all too little. We didn't know. We didn't understand."

Ranma gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

"I miss Akane. I miss my Mum. Daddy too. I wish I could tell them about you and me. If the day comes when I can't come home to be with you, when everything is over, I'd be grateful if you could bring what's left of me back here, to where my innocence ended."

"Nabiki…."

The spell had been broken. The light and the magic receded back into the darkness. They were again in her flat under the shadow of her Kandinsky looking out together at the black, starless night sitting over the harbor. They had never left.

"You remember our deal?" she asked suddenly.

He nodded. That had been the morning when everything had changed, when he had blurted out that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met, inside and out. Nabiki had been cautious and guarded.

If in a year, give or take, you can still tell me those words and mean them, there are things I want to tell you, important things, she had said.

"I release you. Those important things I have to say, it doesn't matter anymore when I tell you."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. There are just three things. You already know the first - that I love you."

"The second?"

"I've always liked you, even from the beginning when you and your father first came into our lives. You were my first real crush, always larger than life. You made me realise that there were things about the world that I truly didn't understand, and you made me believe again in possibilities.”

“Oh.”  Something suddenly occurred to him.  “That time when Akane tossed me and the honor engagement to ya — “

“And I told you that night in my room that I loved you? That I’d felt that way for some time?”

He nodded.

“Maybe ‘love’ was a little too strong of aword back then. After all, what do teenage girls in general really know about love, right? The essence of what I said though? I wasn’t lying.”

He was stunned as a sense of unrealised possibilities washed over him. He could admit now that he did have feelings for Akane then, but even in retrospect, would he use the word “love” to describe what those feelings were at that point in their relationship? He was not sure.

“You wonder about it too, don’t you,” she said, suddenly unable to meet his gaze. “I was ashamed and angry about my feelings. I had to give you back. You were Akane's, and you were off limits. That was the real reason that I was so mean to you back then. I’m sorry. I was immature."

He sighed. “We both were."

“I know.”

“Your act when ya gave me back was pretty good though.” He smiled to try and lighten the mood. “I really had no idea."

He was glad to see the appreciative smile that his words elicited in the darkness. "I was a much better liar back then, huh. Guess I've become soft and rusted with honesty in my old age."

“I really like the honest you,” he said.“It’s cute.”

“Yeah?” she asked.

He nodded before remembering that there was something else. “What’s the third thing?"

Nabiki fell silent and turned away as abrilliant crimson flush exploded across her cheeks. Another long moment passed as she pulled the throw over blanket he had given her earlier in the evening close to herself, searching again for her own voice. "I've never fully shared myself with a man. I'd be lying if I told you that I've not teased and played, yes, and maybe I'm actually even good at that, but I've never, you know…."

He was stunned beyond words, but then he wondered if maybe he shouldn't have been. Suddenly, he also realised what she must have been asking about him. "I…."

Now she was laughing. He could only imagine what expression she was seeing on his face. "It's okay, Ranma. I'm not asking what you've done or haven't done before. I'm just… talking about me."

"Well, the truth is, I, well, I…."

She laughed again, even more amused this time. "I'm a woman, Ranma. You don't have to say anything if you don't want to. I can tell."

"Oh." He was relieved.

"Do you…. Would you… want me like that?" she ventured with surprising shyness.

An intense, highly charged silence fell between them. Then the world exploded feverishly without warning in a fiery blaze of heat and light as they tore at each other's clothes. He greedily crushed his lips against hers and voraciously devoured the wet strawberry sweetness of her tongue as he cupped the soft and tender fullness of her warm breasts in his hands and felt himself inside of her for the very first time.

The world had just irrevocably tilted on its axis - again.

# # # ##

The next day, the sun was bright, the sky was clear, and the air was surprisingly warm. They decided to drive out of the city. There was no destination – just out.

With his eyes closed, he took in the deep-throated growl of the inline-six. Its vibrations hummed sonorously throughout the rigid chassis and into the seat beneath him. A cool breeze whipped around the uncovered windscreen and beat pleasantly on his face, through his hair, and in his ears. The BMW E85 Z-roadster was hardly new –nearly 10 years old - but it was visceral and alive. He truly understood why she preferred this over something modern and new.

A sweet, delicate waft of peach blossoms drifted by, snapping his eyes open. She was beside him in the driver's seat wearing a mini-length white shirtdress, a royal blue leather belt cinched around her slim waist, and a silk chiffon scarf with blue irises on a midnight black background done up in an elegant cowl around her neck. Glancing down, he caught sight of her slender, delicate arm again confidently clicking through the long, visceral throws of the six-speed gearbox. Her bare legs were exposed to the sun, and her feet were adorned in strappy white wedge pumps.

Sensing his eyes on her, she turned her head and answered him with a warm, knowing smile. Then she slammed the throttle pedal hard into the floorboard. The car shot forward toward the Bay Bridge, which loomed majestically just over the horizon.

His chest throbbed with the weight of something deep and profound as he found himself realising all over again just how beautiful she truly was.  Her angelic face was delicate and heart-shaped with a porcelain doll complexion. Her hair was dark, shiny, silken, and cut in an elegantly smart and practical Italian bob style. Her brown eyes were fierce, luminous, and soul-piercing.

The world had just irrevocably tilted again on its axis. Even in such a time as this, that world was still bright and full of endless possibilities.