The Trail We Blaze

Koushi breathed in deep, and a smile blossomed on his face as the scent of sap and grass and loamy soil flooded his nose along with the crisp, fresh early morning air. He sucked in until his chest swelled, pairing it with a great big stretch of his arms over his head. Then, he let it all go, exhaling with a gleeful shout of, “What a great morning for a run!”

It really was. The sun had just risen, so the air was that perfect mix of warmth with a touch of the lingering night’s chill. The birds chirped in the trees, dew clung to the grass, the leaves whistled in the breeze… A picturesque spring morning, and it filled Koushi with energy. He half-trotted, half-danced up to the entrance of the jogging trail, which snaked its way through the scenic city park surrounding him. It meandered this way and that like a river of black, the first half shrouded in patches of cool forest and the other open to the sunny park; it curved around ponds and rose over small hills to circle back to its origin, about a mile in total distance.

Koushi had always been grateful that such a nice running spot was within walking distance of his apartment; trying to jog when everyone was hither and thither on their morning commutes—the air filled with suburban noise–had always been a little grating. In comparison, the park was tranquil and quiet, especially so early in the day. It made him look forward to his daily run that much more.

As Koushi fell into a lunge for one final set of stretches, he caught sight of something in his peripheral vision—something shimmering just off to his right. Curious, he turned his head to look. His mouth dropped open in shock. He hadn’t exactly been expecting anything in particular, but he could definitely say he had not been expecting to see what he did.

Hovering in the air just a yard away from him was a strange cloud of glimmering, dark purple mist. There was a large ball of it concentrated at the trail entrance, and a ribbon-like swathe of it budded off to meander down the path and disappear around the bend. The mysterious color trail was sheer, dying everything behind it in that elegant violet hue. Its opacity deepened the further away from the origin it traveled, indicating that it was in fact diminishing with time.

It could only be one thing: a soulmate aura. His soulmate aura, to be precise. A color trail that only his eyes could perceive, marking the movements of his soulmate.

People often asked him how he thought he’d react when he discovered his soulmate’s aura for the first time. Honestly, Koushi had thought he’d be pretty ambivalent about it. Finding his soulmate had always been lower on his priority list; he’d been too busy focusing on performing well in school to get into a good college and, now, graduating from said college so he could start his teaching career. He always assumed that once he settled into the daily grind of adult life, he’d finally get around to actually looking. He even said that he might ignore it altogether if he found it early, since a relationship might complicate things.

Yeah, Koushi had been kidding himself. He was stoked! Koushi wasn’t sure if it was an inborn reaction or what, but as soon as he clapped eyes on that shimmering trail of violet, he was gripped by a primal urge to follow. Somehow, he managed to suppress the compulsion and think logically. The last thing he needed to do was work himself up only to be bitterly disappointed.

Koushi closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. Once he was pretty confident that he could think clearly, he opened his eyes again and returned his attention to the aura.

His heart skipped a beat as he stared owlishly at the flickering purple mist. Could his soulmate be on this jogging path right now? He fidgeted impatiently as he dug in his memory for the conversations he’d had about soulmate trails. The trail looked faded, but rumor had it that these trails completely disappeared within… Oh, what had Daichi told him?

Half an hour. There it was! He remembered now! Yes, auras completely faded within a half hour. If Koushi could see it, that meant that he had a chance of catching up!

“What the heck are you just standing there for, Koushi?!” he scolded himself. “Get a move on!”

So he did, springing right out of his lunge to begin sprinting down the asphalt track. The slapping of the soles of his sneakers mirrored the beat of his bounding heart, thumping with a mixture of adrenaline and excitement; not that he could really hear it over the wind and blood rushing in his ears. Beside him, the stream of purple haze grew denser and denser until Koushi couldn’t see through it at all.

He was so close that he could taste it.

Way closer than he anticipated, actually. In his eagerness, Koushi hadn’t exactly thought this through. He was so focused on getting to the end of the aura as quickly as possible that he’d neglected to recall that there would, in fact, be a person there, and sprinting at a person generally did not end well. Koushi was about to remember that the hard way.

He was currently dashing down a secluded section of the walking track that was enclosed in dense deciduous forest, all broad leaves, thick tree trunks, and chaotically tangled undergrowth. So, he couldn’t see around the bend as he careened around it, not caring to slow his pace in the slightest because the idea there could be an obstacle didn’t occur to him. As such, he was completely unprepared to be met with the form of a young woman. Despite her abrupt appearance, Koushi did have good reflexes—enough to start pinwheeling his arms and trying to skid to a stop. But he had too much momentum, and the girl was too close.

Even though she’d heard Koushi’s thundering footsteps coming, there wasn’t nearly enough time for her to move out of the way, either. She’d barely managed to turn and look over her shoulder before Koushi crashed into her. She released an alarmed shriek at the same moment Koushi yelled out in surprise, and both of them were cut off by the “_oof!_s” of the breath being forced from their lungs when they roughly collided.

As Koushi bowled her over, he instinctively grabbed onto her body, thus carrying her with him as he tumbled to the ground. He attempted to angle his body so that he could roll under her and cushion her fall, but it was way harder than the way they made it seem in the movies; he only about half-managed it, landing harshly on his side shoulder-first. The girl ended up rolling right over him to land behind his back with a pained “oomph!”

Somehow, Koushi managed to avoid cracking his head against the pavement, but he was still pretty dazed. His head lolled from the vertigo, vision swimming and head ringing. He tried to apologize, but his brain was way too preoccupied with the complete and utter lack of equilibrium to even begin to make his tongue work; what came out was some garbled moan that wasn’t remotely reminiscent of intelligible language. Just as the double images of his surroundings began to re-align themselves, the girl twisted a hand into the front of his tee-shirt and roughly flipped him onto his back.

“What the—oof!” His startled cry was interrupted by all the breath leaving his body for a second time; the girl had clambered on top of him and drove her knee into his stomach, pushing down hard enough to leave him gasping for breath. She yanked him up by the front of his shirt so hard that his back arched and his head craned back. Though it was an effort, he weakly lifted his head to groggily look up at her in utter bewilderment.

Oh, shit. She looked pissed.

She leaned down over him as she straddled his waist, giving her the leverage to keep her knee planted in his abdomen. With every one of her panting breaths, her knee dug in a little deeper, sending tendrils of pain spiralling out of the epicenter of sharp burning. With a growl, she leanined in a little more, bringing her face close to Koushi’s—plenty close enough to tell just how furious she was. Her cheeks were blotchy with an angry flush. Swathes of her wavy black hair had been pulled from her bun, and several strands of it stuck to her gleaming, sweat-sheened face. Her steely gray eyes burned with an intense rage, and her lips were twisted into a fierce scowl. She looked like a war goddess ready to smite Koushi, and he was simultaneously terrified and, admittedly, a little aroused.

“Did you think it would be that easy?” she spat, using her grip on his shirt to violently shake him back and forth.

“Wha-wha-what?” Koushi stammered. It was hard to be coherent when his eyes were rolling around in his skull.

“Don’t play dumb! I know exactly what you were trying to do!” she snapped. With a disgusted huff, she released his shirt, and his upper half flopped back against the track. She crossed her arms—or at least, Koushi thought she did, since he was seeing double again.

“I-I don’t think you do,” he groaned. Oh, man, he felt like he’d been steamrollered. Still, it was obvious that this girl had the very wrong impression of him, and he needed to fix that, fast. “I was just—”

“Just trying to what?” she demanded before he could even hope to finish. “What other reason does a man come charging at a woman out of the blue, in a secluded area, with no one around, other than to try and have his way with her? Own up! You’re a creep!”

“I’m really not!” he protested in a high-pitched whine. “I just—I saw my soulmate trail, okay? And I got way too enthusiastic about following it. Enthusiastic meaning sprinting like a maniac. I ran into you on accident, I swear! I’m a dumbass, I’ll give you that, but I’m not a creep!”

Whatever excuses she’d expected him to spout, it clearly wasn’t that one. Her entire demeanor changed instantaneously. The girl’s tense posture relaxed, her body slumping and arms slowly falling to her sides; her eyes blew wide, and her mouth slowly fell into a stupefied gape. They just sat there like that for several minutes—her gaping down at him in stunned silence, and Koushi giving her a desperate, pleading grimace.

Then she stirred, like a statue twitching to life. Like she’d suddenly noticed something, she whipped her head around to look in the direction that Koushi had come from—and she gasped. She just continued staring, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Koushi frowned, then followed her gaze. He didn’t see anything aside from the purple color trail—

Wait a second.

He swallowed thickly as he slowly followed the color trail. It slowly weaved around the corner… then suddenly dived down, clouding up in a dark haze just behind the girl who was currently sitting on top of him. If he was seeing that… that means that she was seeing…

“Oh,” she breathed softly, and when she turned back to him, her angry expression had been replaced by a shy and tender one. “I see. I’m sorry for making such a rash assumption.”

“I’d say it was a pretty fair assumption to make, considering I came out of nowhere and took you out like that,” Koushi laughed. The girl laughed, too, and Koushi’s heart fluttered—it was such a beautiful sound. So beautiful that it once again scrambled the part of his brain responsible for language; it took him several seconds to get his tongue working well enough to proceed with the conversation.

“My name’s Koushi Sugawara,” he said finally. He then added with a sly grin, “If it’s not too creepy, can I have your name?”

“Careful; I was just beginning to believe you,” the girl teased back. She tucked a strand of her black hair behind her ear as her smile turned demure, and she answered, “My name is Kiyoko Shimizu.”

“Kiyoko,” Koushi couldn’t help but murmur. He wasn’t sure how, but the name just sounded like it belonged on his tongue. Of course, he wasn’t going to say that out loud. He wouldn’t like to slip back into the creep zone. Koushi didn’t want to be in that zone with anybody, much less his soulmate! “I wish it were under less awkward circumstances, but it’s nice to meet you, Kiyoko.”

“It’s okay,” she assured him with a giggle. “At the very least, you made it interesting. I was sure I was going to meet you in a supermarket like half the population.”

“Darn. I had so many grocery-based puns just lined up for just the occasion.”

Kiyoko laughed again, and Koushi couldn’t help but melt at the sound of it. Damn, it really was beautiful. He undoubtedly got a dreamy, starry-eyed look on his face, because Kiyoko blushed and meekly asked, “What?” while nervously adjusting her hair again.

It might land him back in the creep zone, but Koushi didn’t care. He looked her dead in the eyes as he murmured, “Your laugh is the most gorgeous sound I’ve ever heard. I could listen to it forever.”

Kiyoko averted her gaze with an embarrassed half-choke, half-snort; based on the giddy grin that she tried to hide behind her hand, however, Koushi was reassured that his honesty had worked in his favor. Still refusing to look at him, Kiyoko climbed off of him, stood up, and silently offered a hand to help him up. Koushi took it gratefully, and when he’d pushed himself to his feet and was brushing the dirt off of his clothes, Kiyoko cleared her throat. He glanced at her to find that she was finally meeting his gaze again, albeit with a face as red as a tomato.

“I-if you’d like to make me laugh more, then you can take me out the right way… O-on a date, I mean.”

“I’d love to,” Koushi smiled sweetly. “Would you like to finish our morning runs together? There’s a café I always stop at afterward that has croissants to die for.”

“I’d be a little disappointed if you died. I’ve only just met you,” Kiyoko smirked playfully and gave him a light nudge in the ribs with her elbow. Koushi nudged her back, but the unspoken “I want to know you more” had butterflies fluttering in his stomach and a warm, fuzzy feeling spreading from the tips of his toes to the crown of his head. He wondered if Kiyoko was feeling the same; he’d like to think so, based on the gleam in her steely gray eyes and the warm smile playing over her lips.

Koushi had always looked forward to his morning runs, especially once he’d found this secluded park. A thousand times he’d blazed this trail, and each time it had been a little different. Now, he was happily going to blaze it with Kiyoko, his soulmate; they would paint it in their colors, marking the path of the hopefully long and blissful journey they had only just begun.

Koushi couldn’t wait.