“Ran,” you say, just loudly enough to get her attention as you try to slip by the shikigami. The tiny, aisle-like kitchen is only wide enough to let one person move comfortably around in, to say nothing about one person with a large volume of tails. Of course, only now do you need to get the astral diamond you tucked into the drawer under the sink to her right, a task you realize is impossible given the volume she takes up.
Of course, she would choose now to prepare the lemon butter, stirring the eggs-and-juice dish furiously over low heat to keep its consistency smooth. There’s no way you’re asking her to walk out of the kitchen long enough for you to get in – the dish will be ruined, clumping irreversibly in that little time. But the [i]arcane lock[/i] you put on the drawer will only respond to your touch, so you can’t even ask her to go get it while you take over the stirring.
Despite her focus on the dish, she spares you a slightly embarrassed glance. “Oh – just – you’re in a hurry, I understand – just squeeze on by, we can be mature about this,” she mutters in a low voice – almost as if she were talking to herself. As she presses her body against the front of the stove, her tails bend up towards her head and forward as if hugging her own body, opening up a few spare inches.
“Well – excuse me.” With a sigh, you avert align your body with the back wall and start sidling through. Even when you turn your head away from her, you still end up with a faceful of tails. The texture of her fur against your skin is surprisingly luxurious – yes, you’ve seen her spend spare hours doing nothing more than painstakingly groom each of the nine appendages until they’re sleek and smooth, and surely the chest of cosmetics in the bathhouse includes some amount of conditioning substances – but this is the first time you’ve touched them. And they’re soft – so soft, even softer than the enchanted furs from your childhood times, but your bed never came already [i]warm[/i], and your bed wasn’t [i]alive[/i], sliding gently against your body until both of you are slightly more comfortable with the position, and –
– it then occurs to you that you’ve been standing there for a few seconds, and that the metallic rasp of the whisk against the metal pot has [i]stopped[/i] –
– the sound resumes right as you cough and roughly push past the remaining tails into the empty space to Ran’s right. You steal a sideways look at her as you kneel down to access the locked drawer, noting that her face is just as red as yours feels, her ears pressed flat against her head underneath her cap in embarrassment, eyes tightly squeezed shut. They flicker open just as you cast your eyes back downward at the drawer, hoping she didn’t catch your own glance.
You don’t linger as you slip back out, sliding through the tails without pause this time, but neither of you comment further before you hastily exit the kitchen and set off towards the village.
Neither of you comment when there’s no lemon butter for the dinner dessert either.