Chapter 45:
An’an’s alcohol tolerance was very average.
Once she passed her limit, she would definitely get drunk. Her behavior when drunk was as much of a handful as her messy sleeping habits, and she would wake up the next day with a splitting hangover. Ramune and freshly squeezed juice were her true comfort zone.
“But that doesn’t mean I black out,” An’an said. “When I’m dizzy, I can’t remember anything, but after I sober up, it all gradually comes back to me.”
The scene rewound in her mind, frame by frame, every detail crystal clear: her drunken, mischievous intentions, her restless refusal to listen, her thrashing about while trapped in the man’s arms…
The moment her lips brushed against his cheek, neither of them had reacted to what had happened.
The wet lipstick left a mark on the blond young man’s cheek, which was then smeared into a long streak, becoming an ambiguous, blurry color.
The girl looked up, and in her ink-black pupils, Amuro saw the reflection of himself and that beautiful crimson.
He subconsciously covered An’an’s eyes, but forgot that she had already seen it.
“Why did you cover my eyes?”
In the secluded corner of the open-air bar, the girl, sitting on a high stool, gently swung her feet. “It was just a lipstick mark. You could have just wiped it off.”
It was just an accident. He could have faced it with a calm attitude, and there wouldn’t have been any bad consequences.
Instead, he chose a cover-up that only drew more attention to it.
And so, something that could have been brushed aside was shrouded in a murky, ambiguous color, and that night itself became difficult to speak of.
As if just mentioning it would disturb something, shattering the peace of their daily lives.
Amuro Tooru had never taken the initiative to bring up that drunken night. The last message he had left for An’an was a statement that he would be busy with work for a while, and that they might not have a chance to see each other for a long time.
Was it embarrassment, or avoidance? An’an couldn’t tell for a moment.
It could also have been the truth. Although she didn’t know the specifics of Mr. Amuro’s work, judging by the frequency with which she had mooched his late-night snacks, it seemed he never had a day where he didn’t work overtime. Pulling all-nighters was the norm.
In that case, there was nothing to be done. She could only let it cool down, until one day, by a twist of fate, the two of them met again.
It was just an accident of less than a second on a drunken night, An’an thought. If a long time passed, probably no one would care anymore.
Her worries were very reasonable, but fate doesn’t follow reason.
“The time we haven’t seen each other… it hasn’t even been three days, has it?” The dark-haired girl counted on her fingers, unable to even use up one hand.
“Mr. Amuro’s memory should last at least three days, right?” An’an suddenly grew worried. “I almost forgot we’re on the sea. If you’ve unfortunately been infected with a fish’s memory…”
Amuro Tooru had to speak up to defend himself. He had not. Please don’t compare a person to a sunfish at the drop of a hat.
“I thought you wouldn’t remember anything after you woke up,” the blond Public Security agent said, his eyes lowered as he dismantled the bomb’s casing. “Did you take the hangover medicine?”
“I did, and I drank the honey water too,” An’an said, her fingertip gently poking the ice sphere in her glass. “Thank you. The lipstick was removed very cleanly.”
Snip. Amuro steadily cut the bomb wire. He said nonchalantly, “You’re welcome. It was nothing.”
“Let’s go to the next place,” Amuro said. He was a little thirsty. He picked up the glass on the table and tilted his head back to take a drink.
An’an’s hand, trying to stop him, couldn’t keep up with the speed at which Amuro was drinking. She let out a small “uh.” “Although I don’t mind… that’s my glass.”
Him: “Cough, cough!”
The whisky brought a burning heat to his throat. Amuro had never found Bourbon so difficult to swallow.
This glass had been placed closer to him, and An’an had been poking the ice sphere in the other glass while she was talking. Was she doing this on purpose?
“I thought you weren’t drinking,” An’an said honestly. “You have to stay sober to defuse the bomb, so you can’t touch alcohol or something… so I took your glass to play with.”
Poking the ice sphere was unhygienic. She had even deliberately pushed the clean glass further away. Who would have thought that Amuro would be so focused on defusing the bomb that he hadn’t noticed the girl was playing a shell game?
But An’an really didn’t mind. “We’re already in a lovers’ suicide pact. Sharing a glass is nothing.”
She firmly remembered the purpose of their late-night wandering on the cruise ship. This was a very important metaphysical concept.
The girl casually hopped off the high stool. Her nonchalance, in contrast, made Amuro’s reaction seem over the top.
His Adam’s apple bobbed. He licked the corner of his lips, wet with alcohol.
The glass they had both drunk from still had a third of the Bourbon left. An’an naturally reached for it.
She couldn’t get it. She looked up, puzzled. “Aren’t you giving it back to me? Such a domineering person.”
Amuro Tooru: Who’s the domineering one here?
He didn’t know how she could do these flustering things with such a straight face. He only knew that he was being completely led by the nose by An’an.
The remaining Bourbon in the glass was downed in one go. Amuro Tooru set the empty glass on the table.
“It’s gone,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “Shall I order you another?”
The dark-haired girl looked at him for a moment. She pulled up the mask on her face, once again covering most of it, and shook her head. “I’m not thirsty.”
As for why she, despite saying she wasn’t thirsty, had wanted to take back the glass Amuro had mistakenly drunk from, she didn’t explain, and he didn’t ask.
The atmosphere was very subtle along the way. But the atmosphere didn’t affect the conceptual god’s performance. An’an found a bomb on the stage of the music festival, and another under a dining cart in the buffet restaurant.
The angles at which Gin hid the bombs were truly devious. But when the undercover Public Security agent thought about how An’an had found these places under the premise of looking for a lovers’ suicide spot, Gin’s deviousness seemed exceptionally normal.
“My intuition tells me, there’s one more,” the girl said, pinching her chin in thought. “Let me think, where else could it be?”
They had almost walked through the entire cruise ship. Some areas forbidden to tourists were being patrolled by the Coast Guard who had boarded the ship. Her inspiration wasn’t stirred; they weren’t in those places.
The two of them hadn’t set foot in the areas patrolled by the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard had noticed them.
In the dead of night, when even the rock-and-roll boys who had been screaming their lungs out at the KTV were snoring like pigs, what were these two doing, sneaking around?
A Coast Guard officer, holding a baton, blocked the center of the corridor, his gaze sharp as a torch.
These were extraordinary times. The stolen goods from a cultural relic theft case had actually appeared on the cruise ship. Although the police had successfully recovered the artifact, the enthusiastic citizen who had reported the smuggling case had disappeared!
The room was empty. The police had searched the entire ship but couldn’t find any trace of the enthusiastic citizen.
This was the open sea. How could a person just suddenly disappear? The police had no choice but to accept the harsh reality: the enthusiastic citizen had likely fled to escape punishment.
He was just like the kind-hearted Russian who happened to be passing by on the streets of Yokohama—not enthusiastic, and not a good person.
This case is too complex, really too complex. It’s better to hand it over to the Public Security Bureau later. The Coast Guard is only responsible for matters at sea.
And this was a matter at sea. The Coast Guard officer asked sternly, “I’ve been watching you for a long time. You’ve been wandering back and forth on the cruise ship, not returning to your rooms to rest. What exactly are you doing?”
An’an was an honest person. She often spoke the plain truth in a sincere tone that disregarded the life or death of others.
Honesty is a virtue, but what was needed now was a white lie. Amuro Tooru couldn’t imagine the expression on the Coast Guard officer’s face if he heard An’an casually say, “We’re looking for a suitable place on the cruise ship for a lovers’ suicide. In the process, we’ve incidentally defused one, two, three bombs. Now there’s still one bomb left to be found.”
Spare the man. A Coast Guard’s life is a life too.
Before the girl could speak, Amuro silently took her hand and gently squeezed her palm.
An’an turned her head and saw the blond young man give an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
His hint was so obvious, of course An’an could understand.
Seeing the girl nod, Amuro breathed a sigh of relief and quickly tried to think of an excuse to bluff his way through.
“We’re on a date.”
The dark-haired girl said, taking off her mask to reveal her whole face.
“Because of my work, I can only go for a walk at night. Please understand.”
She touched a finger to her lips and shushed. “You’ll keep it a secret, right, Officer?”
The Coast Guard officer’s eyes widened. “You- you are—I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I won’t tell anyone!”
He nervously rubbed his hands together. “Um, can I have an autograph…”
Of course, no problem. An’an bit off the pen cap and seriously signed her name.
“Let’s go,” she said, tugging on Amuro’s hand and whispering, “Let’s go to the cargo hold.”
The cargo hold was not a place tourists could just wander into, so An’an hadn’t thought of it at first. But with one last bomb left to be found, her intuition told her she should go and take a look.
Their hands were loosely held together. A slightly larger step would have broken their grip like a snapped rope.
But the Coast Guard officer was still standing there, watching them go. Amuro could only maintain the intimate posture, carefully holding the girl’s fingers.
It wasn’t until they had rounded a corner that he glanced at the dark-haired girl walking beside him.
An’an had no particular expression. She was holding the tour map in one hand, seriously looking at the path.
“It looks like we can take the staff passage,” An’an mused. “If we get caught, let’s just bluff our way through with our faces.”
She wasn’t worried about her reputation in the entertainment industry at all. From the day Miss An had debuted as a front-page story in the crime section, the judgment of the secular world could no longer shake her in the slightest.
Bluff their way through with their faces… did that mean An’an was going to say “we’re on a date” to everyone they met? Amuro took a deep breath.
“I know a way we can go without running into anyone,” he said.
Amuro led the way. Whether intentionally or not, their loosely held hands remained intertwined as they walked all the way to the cargo hold.
“Found it,” An’an said, finding the bomb’s location with practiced ease and pointing it out to the undercover Public Security agent.
The last one. After this, tonight would be over.
Amuro let go of the girl’s hand. He squatted in front of the bomb and began to defuse it.
There was no one around. An’an didn’t need to help keep a lookout. She squatted down beside him, like the blond young man, and rested her chin on her hands, watching him dismantle the parts bit by bit.
“It’s like the night of the power outage,” the girl’s eyes curved. “It was like this then too. A night with no one around. You were fixing the breaker box, and I was squatting beside you, watching.”
Amuro’s memory was pulled back by her words to that hot summer night. The dark-haired girl in a slip dress with her hair in a bun was close beside him, the white peach scent of her hair intoxicating.
When had it started? When had his concern for her crossed the line?
The ticking of the bomb brought the blond Public Security agent’s attention back. He forced himself to concentrate, to focus on defusing the bomb.
The cargo hold was not like the deck. The air was stuffy and hot. Sweat dripped from Amuro’s bangs, slid down the young man’s handsome cheek, and landed on the hollow of his collarbone.
The dark-haired girl reached out, the pad of her finger wiping away the sweat on his collarbone.
She rubbed her fingertips together and suddenly asked:
“Do you want to try dating me?”
Amuro’s hand trembled, and he almost cut the wrong wire.