All Beautiful Girls Want to Stick with Me

After Kotomi Izumi left, Ayani Kika stood at the entrance for a long time, her gradually solemn gaze seeming to ponder something.

Only after a long while did she slowly turn around. She did not turn on the lights. She was already used to walking in the dark.

When she reached the living room, Ayani Kika was not planning to sit on the sofa and watch television. Instead, she bent down and pulled open a drawer in the coffee table. Inside were not any precious items, but two walnuts and two sewing threads—one red, one white.

Ayani Kika wound the red and white threads around her fingers separately, then picked up the two walnuts and walked to the bedroom.

Standing in front of the bedroom door, she did not step inside. Instead, she reached out and turned off the bedroom light.

In an instant, the bedroom light went out, and that meant the last trace of brightness in the entire house disappeared as well.

In the darkness, Ayani Kika murmured softly. Her voice was like the fading notes of a piano, as though she were humming a nursery rhyme, or perhaps recounting a distant past.

As the murmuring continued, her gaze slowly lowered. She extended her hand and gently tossed the two walnuts from her palm.

Rumble rumble—

The two walnuts she had thrown seemed to gain life the moment they left her hand. They rolled freely across the floor with a soft rumble rumble, like two lost lambs wandering an endless wilderness, searching for a few strands of withered grass to prolong their lives—even if only for a little while.

Ayani Kika withdrew her hand and fixed her gaze tightly on the two walnuts rolling across the floor. Her heart was as still as a lake, and she continued murmuring in a low voice, sounding like a nursery rhyme, sounding like the past.

Tap tap.

Without her noticing, the already slow movement of the walnuts gradually became even slower, making it impossible to tell whether they would still be able to roll in the next second.

At last, as the sound of the walnuts rolling across the tatami grew softer and softer until it vanished completely, the two walnuts came to a stop at the edge of the bedding.

A moment later, the walnuts split apart with a crisp crack.

Looking at the two shattered walnuts, Ayani Kika’s eyes trembled briefly and violently, before slowly returning to calmness, as though she had accepted something in her heart.

”I didn’t expect it would be here...” Ayani Kika murmured to herself.

After the shells cracked open, the walnut meat scattered across the floor. She bent down, gently picked up a piece, placed it in her mouth, and slowly chewed.

”So this is what walnuts taste like...”

Her gaze lowered. This was her first time eating walnuts. To her, the taste could not be called pleasant. She did not like it.

After finishing the walnut meat, she no longer continued her murmuring. Instead, she unwound the two threads from her fingers and stretched them straight, placing the red thread in her right palm and the white thread in her left.

Ayani Kika took a deep breath, suppressing the gradually rising tremor in her heart. She pressed her palms together and passed second after second in silence within the darkness.

No one knew how much time had passed before she slowly opened her hands and looked at the two threads resting in her palms.

The red and white threads, after she opened her hands once more, had eerily entwined themselves together.

As though she found nothing strange about this bizarre sight, Ayani Kika’s hands—calm on the surface yet trembling faintly beneath—slowly reached toward the knot that bound the two threads together.

She wanted to untie it. But the instant her fingers touched it, her eyes suddenly widened, as though a sharp thorn had pierced her fingertip. The calm in her gaze finally shattered. She trembled uncontrollably as she stared at the red and white threads intertwined together.

A dead knot.

It was a dead knot.

Not only had the two threads in her palms automatically tangled together, the knot they formed was an unbreakable dead knot.

The walnuts splitting.

The dead knot formed by the red and white threads.

What these two omens signified, Ayani Kika understood all too clearly.

As for the walnuts cracking, she accepted it willingly. Rather, she had already prepared herself for the ”walnuts splitting” many years ago. Otherwise, she would not have eaten the walnut meat so calmly just now.

But at this moment, upon seeing the red and white threads twisted into a dead knot, Ayani Kika’s body suddenly went limp. She collapsed to the floor as though she had lost her legs. The copper wall and iron fortress she believed she had built over long years crumbled in this catastrophic tsunami.

She tightened the two threads around her fingers with all her strength. Even as the threads cut into her skin and drew blood, she refused to loosen her grip, trying to use that pain to ease the agony in her heart. Like someone dazed, she wept as she muttered,

”Am I going to run away again?”

The moment the thought of running surfaced, Ayani Kika instinctively walked to the bedroom cabinet and pulled open its doors. Inside was a wooden box. Two ropes were tied to its sides, serving as straps for carrying it on one’s back.

It was not a suitcase. But if she were to leave, Ayani Kika would rather abandon any luggage than leave this box behind.

Just as she was about to lift the box onto her back, her hand suddenly paused. A glimmer flickered deep within her eyes, as though she were struggling.

Run away? I’ve already been on the road of escape for so long. Am I really going to keep running? I’ve spent so many years fleeing that I’ve nearly forgotten what year I was even born...

She covered her face with her right hand. Through her tears, she spoke to herself and revealed a sorrowfully beautiful smile.

”Even if I run away, I’ll take Kotomi with me... Will Kotomi come with me? No matter how I think about it, that’s impossible... After all, she’s so happy. There are so many people who love her. If she doesn’t want to run away with me, then I won’t leave either...”

Stumbling, Ayani Kika turned on the bedroom light, making it the only source of illumination in the house.

She walked unsteadily to the low table, sat down, pulled open the drawer, and took out an old fountain pen and a stack of yellowed manuscript paper.

Her movements were slightly unfamiliar as she used the pen, the written words steadily filling one square after another on the aging paper.

When she saw the two walnuts crack, her heart had trembled only at first, then gradually fallen silent...

But after seeing the two threads tied into a dead knot, her heart plunged into an icy abyss. She wanted to run away, to take Kotomi far, far away to some distant place.

Yet when she thought of Kotomi, she gave up the idea of escape. Sitting down, she gripped the fountain pen that had accompanied her for so long and wrote, word for word, everything she wanted to tell Kotomi onto the manuscript paper.

So that if one day in the future she truly arrived...

Kotomi would be able to recall the memories that had long been buried in her mind.

”Kotomi, I promise you...”

Ayani Kika’s writing grew faster and faster, a resolute smile curving at her lips.

”This will definitely be a good ending. Because you are loved. You are blessed.”

The house was shrouded in darkness. The only source of light was the bedroom lamp.

If Kotomi Izumi had stayed just now, then at this moment, the house would have been brightly lit.

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