"Akane's lips were… soft…"
The mumbled words, delivered with a groan of obvious teenage agony, seemed to hang in the air, shimmering in the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. My breath hitched. My heart, which had just started to slow its frantic pace, leaped into a chaotic rhythm again, echoing the wild, confused beat Luffy had described back at the bar. He thought my lips were soft? The rubber idiot who couldn't even tie his own shoes properly, who thought beetles were lunch, and whose idea of a compliment was "You're strong!"… he noticed that?
I stood frozen, halfway between the edge of the clearing and the mossy rock where he sat, his back still to me, radiating waves of pure, mortified heat. His ears, visible just beneath the brim of his straw hat, were still glowing a bright, embarrassed red. He buried his face back in his hands, his shoulders shaking with a mix of silent groans and perhaps, just perhaps, suppressed giggles.
He wasn't crying. He was just… having a moment. A deeply, profoundly awkward, mortified, and apparently slightly bewildered-by-physical-sensations moment.
And it was, infuriatingly, undeniably… adorable.
The thought solidified, pushing past my own lingering embarrassment, past the gnawing guilt of having made him run. Cute. Adorable. These weren't words I used often. They didn't fit into the grim reality of my life, the sharp edges I'd grown to survive. Yet, seeing him like this, stripped of his usual boisterous energy, reduced to a blushing, mumbling heap on a rock, the word felt utterly, perfectly right.
My feet moved again, this time not propelled by panic or rage, but by a hesitant, unfamiliar pull. I approached the rock slowly, each step deliberate on the soft forest floor. The clearing was quiet, peaceful. Sunlight slanted through the gaps in the canopy, painting golden patterns on the moss and fallen leaves. The air smelled of pine needles and damp earth, a familiar, grounding scent after months on the mountain. Birds chirped somewhere high above, their cheerful calls a stark contrast to the silent turmoil emanating from the boy on the rock.
I stopped a few feet away, unsure what to do or say. He still hadn't looked up. The silence stretched, thick with unspoken apologies and bewildering new feelings.
"Luffy?" My voice was barely above a whisper, a fragile sound in the quiet.
He flinched. His head snapped up, his eyes wide with alarm, as if he'd been caught doing something deeply scandalous. He saw me standing there and his entire body stiffened. His already flaming red face seemed to intensify, his ears practically vibrating with heat. He looked like a startled deer caught in a sudden spotlight, except the spotlight was just the gentle afternoon sun, and the deer was a rubbery, freckled boy in a straw hat.
He immediately averted his gaze, fixing his wide, panicked eyes on a distant tree trunk as if it held the secrets of the universe. He hugged his knees to his chest, making himself small. His breathing was shallow, quick.
"E-eh...? A-Akane…?" he stammered, his voice tight and high-pitched, like a banjo string stretched too tight.
More silence. The awkwardness was a tangible thing, shimmering between us in the quiet clearing. What did you say after you accidentally kissed someone, they fled in terror, and then you found them having a meltdown on a rock, muttering about your soft lips? There wasn't exactly a Marine handbook for this.
"I... I didn't mean to," I blurted out, the words tumbling clumsily. My own cheeks felt warm again under his intense (though averted) gaze. "Back at the bar... I mean. When I... when I tripped."
He didn't respond. He just kept staring at the tree, his face a picture of frozen embarrassment.
"Ace was just... being an idiot," I continued, trying to explain away the catastrophe. "He was teasing. And I just... I got mad. And I tripped. And... and you were there." It sounded pathetic.
He finally shifted, digging the toe of his sandal into the moss, still not looking at me. "Y-yeah," he mumbled, his voice muffled. "Tripped."
More silence. The ladybug from earlier crawled onto a blade of grass near his foot.
"Did I... did I scare you?" I asked softly, the question born of the genuine concern that had prompted me to seek him out. Making him run, making him scared... that felt like the worst outcome.
He hesitated. He twisted his fingers together, focusing intensely on the movement. "N-no," he said finally, his voice a little steadier, though still quiet. "Not... not scared." He paused, then added, "Just... surprised."
Surprised. Was that all? Or was that his way of saying 'utterly shocked and confused by a physical sensation I've never experienced before'?
"Okay," I said, taking a tentative step closer. "Good. Because... I didn't mean to make you run."
He finally, slowly, turned his head. His eyes met mine for a brief second before flicking away again, but in that fleeting moment, I saw something beyond the embarrassment – a flicker of something confused, curious, almost… shy.
"It's... it's okay," he mumbled, still looking past me. "My face just got... hot. And my heart was weird." He thumped his chest lightly, a familiar gesture, but this time the action was tentative, uncertain. "BWOOM BWOOM."
I couldn't help a small, shaky smile. "Yeah," I agreed softly. "Mine too. For a second." Purely from embarrassment, obviously. Definitely not from anything else.
He seemed to relax a fraction, the peak of the panic subsiding now that the immediate awkwardness was being… navigated. Slowly, hesitantly, he shifted on the rock, making a little space beside him. It wasn't a verbal invitation, but it felt like one.
I took another breath and walked the rest of the way to the rock, sitting down beside him. Not too close, but close enough that our knees were almost touching. The rock felt cool beneath my palms. The air between us felt… warm. Charged.
We sat in silence for a while, watching the ladybug crawl its way up the grass blade, then onto a leaf. The sounds of the forest seemed louder now – the distant tapping of a woodpecker, the rustle of wind through the leaves, the buzzing of a fly.
"Ace was being an idiot," I said again, quietly, needing to solidify the narrative, even though it felt increasingly flimsy. "With the 'wedding' stuff."
Luffy finally managed a small, shaky chuckle. "Yeah," he agreed. "Ace is loud."
More silence. The ladybug reached the edge of the leaf and tentatively extended an antenna into thin air.
"He said... he said you were completely... head-over-heels," Luffy mumbled, his voice barely audible, still not looking at me.
My face instantly flushed again. The audacity of Ace, even when he wasn't around! "He's lying," I said quickly, maybe a little too quickly. "He just... he just likes to tease."
Luffy hummed, a small, thoughtful sound. He was quiet for a long moment, watching the ladybug intently. Then, in a voice so quiet I almost didn't hear it, he said, "Was it... was it really... an accident?"
The question was soft, hesitant, innocent, yet it landed like a stone in a still pond, sending ripples through the carefully constructed surface of my denial. An accident? Was it? My lunge had been aimed at Ace, yes. But my momentum, my direction… Had some deeper, hidden impulse guided me forward, towards him? Towards the warmth? The kindness? The boy who saw a wanted criminal and offered friendship, who cried for a lost brother with open, honest grief, who made my heart do that weird, terrifying 'BWOOM BWOOM' thing?
My gaze instinctively drifted towards him, towards his profile silhouetted against the sunlight, his cheeks still flushed, his eyes fixed on the ladybug. He looked so young, so vulnerable, so genuinely confused by this new, unfamiliar feeling. He wasn't asking for confirmation of a grand declaration; he was genuinely trying to understand what had just happened, what it meant, why his heart felt so strange.
And looking at him, at the genuine bewilderment in his eyes, the innocent question hanging in the air, the words "It was an accident" felt like the biggest lie I could tell. They felt colder than the deepest ocean trench, sharper than the Kaenken's blade. After Hi-no-Kuni, after being branded a 'Divine Calamity', I was tired of lies. Even small, convenient ones.
My hand, acting with a will of its own, slowly reached out, tentatively, awkwardly. It hovered for a moment, trembling slightly, before settling gently on the back of his hand, which was resting on his knee. His skin was warm, soft, just like his lips.
He froze at the touch. His eyes snapped from the ladybug to my hand on his, then slowly, hesitantly, back to my face. The embarrassment was still there, but now it was mixed with a dawning, hopeful curiosity. His 'BWOOM BWOOM' heart seemed to vibrate through his skin into my fingertips.
I met his gaze, holding it this time. My own cheeks were burning, my heart doing a frantic samba in my chest. What was I doing? This was insane. He was a wanted criminal, a targeted survivor, carrying dangerous secrets and a destiny for vengeance. He was supposed to be focused, ruthless, driven. Not sitting on a rock in the forest, holding hands with a boy who made her heart flutter like a startled bird.
But holding his hand felt… right. It felt like a anchor in the storm, a small, warm point of connection in a cold, hostile world. It felt like the fragile beginning of something new, something terrifyingly vulnerable, but also something undeniably, profoundly… real.
I squeezed his hand gently, my thumb brushing softly against his skin. I didn't have a grand explanation. I didn't have a smooth answer. All I had was the truth, as confusing and messy as it felt.
I managed a small, shaky smile, meeting his wide, questioning eyes.
"No," I whispered, the word barely audible in the quiet clearing, a fragile, hesitant confession offered to the boy who had inadvertently stolen my first kiss and somehow, inexplicably, was stealing my heart too.
"It wasn't."