Mimosa | The Love She Mistook for Debt

The room holds its usual half-dark, curtains drawn tight enough that the desk lamp is the only real light, throwing pale blue across two monitors.

One a wall of candlestick charts, red and green ticking in silence, the other mid-animation, a gacha banner spinning through its pull sequence for the third time this hour. ten more shards and I can guarantee the next one Mimosa doesn't look away from the screens when the door opens. She knows the sound of it

The particular give of the hinge, the weight of the footsteps that follow. Not a stranger's rhythm. She doesn't turn. it's just him

She keeps her eyes on the trade window, thumb hovering over a sell order she's been sitting on for a bit too long, and it isn't until she feels him settle in beside her, close enough that the mattress dips, that something in her spine actually acknowledges he's arrived at all.

She notices, more than sees, a piece of cloth lift from the floor near her feet. One of the shirts she'd stopped keeping track of days ago, dark with something she doesn't want to name closely.

The realization of what's being picked up, and why, arrives a half-second late.

"You don't have to do that," she says, voice flat and small, eyes still on the chart, the protest arriving with no weight behind it at all. The kind of sentence said because it's expected to be said, not because she believes it'll change anything. he's going to do it anyway... he always does

She lets the sell order execute. Green flashes briefly on the corner of the screen, a small profit, nothing worth mentioning.

The gacha banner finishes its spin behind it; she doesn't check the result. Whatever she pulled, it can wait. Everything can wait. She closes both windows only when there's nothing left pretending to need her attention, and only then does she finally turn from the desk, the chair creaking under the shift of her weight, toward the bed she hasn't properly made in longer than she'd ever say out loud.

The shirt she's wearing, his, once, a long time ago, though neither of them mention that anymore, slips loose at the shoulder as she moves, and she doesn't correct it, doesn't seem to register it at all. There is no one here to be looked at for.

She sits on the edge of the mattress, knees pulled up loosely, ears low but not flat.

A neutral kind of tired rather than a guarded one and she finally lifts her eyes toward wherever he's settled in the room, the first real look she's given him since he walked in.

"You can sit. If you want." A beat, her gaze drifting back toward the floor near her own feet, toward the small mess she still hasn't found the energy to be ashamed of properly. "I'm not... doing anything else today."

The dream had her twelve years younger than she is now. Back on the academy field, exam papers face-down on the desk in front of her, the particular quiet before results that she's never once forgotten the shape of. She fails again, the same way, the same numbers, and the crowd around her is talking, always talking, though she can never catch a single full sentence, just the tone of it. That specific disappointed cadence her father's voice takes when he's trying not to sound disappointed. Her mother says something encouraging, something soft and useless, and even in the dream Mimosa hears it wrong, hears it the way she always does now. As one more voice confirming what she already suspects about herself. She wakes to the ceiling, breath uneven, the room dark and unfamiliar-familiar the way it always is right after. Her hand finds the other side of the bed on reflex before the rest of her catches up. he's not here. He'd be at work, he told you that, you knew that

The trading app is still open on her phone when she checks it, and the numbers are worse than she remembered leaving them. A string of small losses stacked up overnight, net still positive but barely, nothing like the cushion she'd been sitting on the day before. On the second monitor, the pull results she never checked yesterday are still sitting there. A guaranteed SSR, spent on the wrong banner, some standard pull she'd been saving shards for weeks to avoid. She stares at it a moment too long before closing the tab, unable to even summon which specific game it belongs to anymore; there are too many open on rotation, too many places she goes to feel like she's still, technically, playing something.

She gets up only because her body insists on it eventually. The fridge light is harsher than the room's, and there, on the second shelf, untouched since he left it there. A small cup of pudding, the kind he knows she likes, the kind he probably bought specifically because she likes it. The lid comes off easy. It shouldn't smell like that. She stares at the surface of it a moment, at the pale, unmistakable bloom across the top, doing the math without wanting to. Not days. Weeks. The last thing she ate that wasn't a wrapper or a delivery box eaten cold at 3am was whatever this used to be. She puts it back. Doesn't cry, exactly, but sits on the kitchen floor for a while with her knees against her chest, ears low, tail curled tight and still around herself, until the light outside the curtain gap has gone from afternoon flat to evening orange without her noticing the shift happen.

The door, when it finally opens, sounds like relief before she's consciously registered why. he's here She's up before she means to be, out to the doorway of her own room to meet him. But nothing comes out when she opens her mouth. No greeting, no explanation, nothing about the pudding or the exam or the numbers. Instead her hand finds the edge of his sleeve, fingers curling into the fabric, and she tugs. small, insistent, wordless. Back toward her bedroom, toward the bed, toward anything that isn't the kitchen floor and the smell of spoiled pudding and a version of herself twelve years younger failing the same exam over and over. She doesn't look at his face while she does it. She's not sure what she'd do if she saw hesitation there.

The room smells different tonight. Not clean exactly, but closer to it than it's been in longer than she can place. Something home-cooked still sits faintly in the air, a smell she associates, without meaning to, with evenings that don't feel like the rest of her week. The plates are gone from where they must have been, and none of that matters as much as the fact that she's not at her desk, not at the window, not anywhere near the part of the room that usually holds her upright by habit.

She's asleep on his shoulder. No dream in it, or none she can find when she starts to surface. No exam, no crowd, no voices wearing her parents' tone. Just the low, uneventful dark of an ordinary sleep, the kind she can't remember the last time she had.

She wakes slowly, the way a person does when nothing startled them into it. There's a moment where she isn't fully aware of anything beyond warmth and weight and the fact that whatever she's leaning against is breathing steadily under her cheek. Awareness arrives in pieces. His shoulder, his shirt under her face, the low, settled quiet of the room around them both. Her tail moves before she gives it permission to, curling loosely around whatever part of him it can reach, unhurried, unconscious, the kind of gesture she'd never do on purpose if she were thinking clearly. She notices it a second after it's already happened and doesn't pull it back. She stays like that a moment longer than she needs to, not moving to sit up, not checking her phone, not doing any of the small automatic things that usually pull her back into herself the second she's conscious. Her ears stay low but loose. Not the flattened, anxious low of a bad night, just quiet, settled, unguarded in a way she doesn't often let herself be even alone.

When she finally speaks, her voice comes out rougher than usual, still half in the sleep she just left. "Is this okay?" A pause, her head not lifting from his shoulder, eyes still half-closed. "I mean... you staying like this." Another beat, quieter, more admission than question. "I wouldn't mind. If you wanted something. Right now." She doesn't specify what "something" means, doesn't clarify further, leaves it sitting in the space between them the way she leaves most things she actually wants. Offered sideways, without quite enough shape to be refused kindly, or accepted directly.

The lamp's been off for a while now, the room lit only by the thin blue seep of a streetlight through the curtain gap. Everything after has gone quiet in the particular way it always does. No words needed yet, just the settling weight of two people who aren't in any hurry to become separate again. Mimosa is the one holding on this time. Her arm stays where it landed, over him, under the sheet, and she doesn't move it even once her breathing's gone even again. She's noticed, lately, in a way she hasn't noticed too closely, that she doesn't want the mornings to end as fast as they used to. That some quiet, unfamiliar part of her tracks the exact moment he starts to shift like he might get up, and resents it a little, wordlessly, before she can stop herself. why does it matter if he stays five more minutes. It never used to matter She doesn't say anything for a while. Her fingers stay curled loosely against his side, tail still, ears low but calm, the kind of low that isn't distress, just quiet.

When she finally speaks, it comes out smaller than she means it to. "Can you..." She stops. Starts again, the words arriving slower, like she's checking each one before she lets it out. "Just stay like this. Keep us close." A pause, her face still turned into his shoulder, not looking up. "I'm cold." It isn't entirely a lie, though the room isn't cold at all, and some distant part of her knows that, turns it over, doesn't have a better word for the actual thing sitting underneath it. She doesn't chase the thought further than that, doesn't know yet what she's asking for, only that the asking itself feels different than it used to. Less like repayment. Less like anything she has a name for. She just stays, tail curling slightly tighter without her noticing, and waits to see if he'll do what she asked without needing her to explain any further than that.