Chapter Text
It's Usagi’s twenty-fifth birthday. Being twenty-five and mother to a four year old isn't always the most glamorous life - especially when your husband is working on a generously funded neuroscience PhD that’s probably going to save lives but doesn’t leave him with much free time.
But tonight is going to be special! Her parents have Chibiusa for the night, and Mina chose her dress and the shapewear that makes it actually fit, and Mako got them reservations at a super fancy place that's up to even Mamo’s standards, so it doesn't even matter that she can't eat as much as she wants to in all this tight clothing, because she probably won't really like the food anyway!
And who cares about pizza, when Mamo picks her up at home with a warm smile, helps her into the car with his hand on her lower back, and tells her she looks nice? Nice! It's embarrassing how her insides burn when he reaches under the table to pat her knee, but this might be the most he's touched her in months and her body is a little uncalibrated. He looks into her eyes while he tells her about school, and he only checks his email on his phone mid-sentence three times. Each time, the world seems to turn a little grey as she recognizes the way his finger tugs down to refresh his inbox - but she isn't mad! Because his work is important. If only she could make herself be more understanding, and do away with the selfish urge to be the center of attention all the time.
He holds her hand across the table, and the server coos at her engagement ring because they look so young and in love she thinks it must be new, and she doesn't notice the plain wedding band nestled on top. Usagi can't meet her eyes when she explains she's had it for nearly ten years. That used to feel romantic, but it's a little embarrassing now. She doesn't know much more about the world than when she was fifteen.
Back home, she's bouncing on the balls of her feet as she skips towards the bathroom to ‘freshen up’. Hidden in the laundry hamper in the bathroom is a silky bag bearing the branding of a luxury lingerie retailer. Inside, a gift message printed on fancy embossed card promises that he’ll be ripping it off you, courtesy of a certain Venus, goddess of love.
Mamo raises an eyebrow. “Are you drunk?”
Usagi pauses mid-skip. He knows she only had one glass of champagne to mark the occasion, same as him, and she isn’t a total kid anymore. Even if she did spend her formative alcohol-tolerance-developing years drowning in a sea of diapers and projectile vomit. But she shouldn’t think about projectile vomit right now!
Soberly, she slips into the en-suite. Once the door closes behind her, she rips the bag from the hamper in a spray of dirty clothes and empties the contents onto the floor.
The skin of her thighs prickles with anticipation as she slides silky stockings over her calves. She turns to admire her own reflection, twisting her hips to see behind. The ruffly lace bands of the hold-ups cradle the widest part of her thighs perfectly, making them look almost delicate, and the way the corset’s suspender straps strain over her butt isn’t entirely unenticing. Mina really is a genius! She gives it a quiet slap, trying not to giggle at the thought of Mamo ever doing the same.
When she emerges from the bathroom, Mamoru is in bed. He’s wearing reading glasses, and at first he doesn’t see her over the medical journal he’s engrossed in.
She tries to slip back into the bathroom, heart pounding, but he glances up.
He’s so calm. He’s always calm. “Oh.” He gently, patiently puts the journal aside. There's no sign of any appetite for tearing off anything. “I didn't realize you—”
Usagi's fists clench at her sides. Her lower lip wobbles. She's trained herself out of her childish tantrums by now, or so she thought, but as the rickety weight of her own sex drive collapses over her head, the words just fly out. “Right. It's my twenty-fifth birthday and you didn't think I’d want to have sex. I'm sorry I'm so childish that my idea of a perfect night isn't to tuck in at nine with a medical journal! I mean who even gets those in print anymore!”
“Usako, wait, I—”
The corset squashes her organs to match how she feels inside, trying to be grown-up enough for him. Nausea thick enough to make her see spots. Why can't she just keep it together? But why couldn't he just—?
“I'm going to sleep in Chibiusa’s room.”
Mamoru looks up, sad eyed, looking middle-aged in his light blue pajamas. “If you think that would be best.”
Foetal in her daughter's three-quarter size bed, Usagi simmers out completely. She doesn't even have the energy to cry.
It's a good thing she's so tired, because otherwise, that explosive trapped-animal feeling might have made her run further than here. Mamoru is her soulmate. Her first love. He’s tall and smart and he has great hair and a great job. And he's a great dad to Chibiusa. Would she really throw a relationship like this away over something so trivial? What would she say to her friends? They would hate her for throwing away a man like Mamoru for no good reason at all. She would hate herself. And Chibiusa would hate her too, when she was old enough to understand.
Her phone buzzes. It’s Minako, with a string of suggestive emojis, a thumbs-up, and a question mark. Her palpable giddiness hits Usagi straight in the chest.
Mina, that’s personal.
Mina sends a longer, lewder list of emojis, to which Usagi reacts a heart, and tosses her phone blindly across the floor.
It seems like all her conversations with Mina lately are about Mamoru, in one way or another: Mina going on a bad date and wishing she was lucky enough to meet the love of her life in high school, or Usagi copy-pasting the same message to almost everyone she knows with the picture of the one-hundred expensive red roses Mamo had delivered for their anniversary.
They were so pretty. So expensive. And the clamor of jealous responses helped stifle the small part of herself that had been disappointed ever since she ran to the door and found that the person hidden behind the enormous armful of roses was not Mamo, home early to surprise her with a picnic or a visit to the arcade, but a stranger.
Part of the problem is that she gives Mamoru all of herself. Even her friends love him, while she started politely excusing herself from his circle after one of them mistook her for the waitress at a party for his PhD program. At school, there's a whole side of him she never sees, while she just works part-time as a TA at Chibiusa’s kindergarten. They both know it’s mostly just to get her out of the house for a few hours so she doesn't go crazy.
He's seen her give birth; there’s no curiosity left. So, what if Usagi had something of her own? She could go to a dance class - if someone could look after Chibiusa at the same time each week. Or she could learn a language - but if she got confused by the grammar and gave up after a week, she’d only look more childish. Maybe she could learn an instrument? Or… but her eyelids are heavy.
In the morning she makes Mamoru breakfast and kisses his cheek to wake him. “I'm sorry.”
She woke in the middle of the night, in a strangely pleasant mood, and set three alarms on her phone to make sure she’d catch him before he left.
He accepts a slice of well-done toast and sits up to ruffle her hair. “It's okay, Usako, let's not talk about it.”
After Mamoru leaves - he kissed her at the door like always - Usagi washes up their breakfast things while Chibiusa colors at the table. It’s not until the urgency of getting breakfast ready in time recedes that she remembers her dream, and drops the dish she's holding back into the water. A little bit of dirty dishwater splashes up into her mouth.
There’s a blurry recollection, a dark head moving between her legs. She can still remember how her body tingled, and how it felt to have hands gripping her thighs hungrily. It's so lewd!
But…just from that dream, the noxious cocktail of shame and resentment and fury and misery was almost all gone. She had such a nice morning with Mamoru, and she hardly thought about it!
And she did want something for herself… Is there not some way she could—?
But that's crazy! She can't cheat on Mamoru. She isn't a cheater. She's nice! If Mamo found out, he would hate her. And what if she got pregnant?
It's so scandalous. She's blushing just thinking about it. The most scandalous thing she's ever done before is… She puts a finger to her lips. It was probably dating Mamo in the first place, when she was only fourteen.
So cheating is out. But last night was the edge of a precipice. For a moment she could really imagine wiggling the ring off her finger and calling a taxi to her parents’ place. And then what, be a single mom living in her old childhood bedroom? So that's definitely out.
The weird thing is. The person in her dream was maybe, kind of, possibly, a WOMAN. She didn't see more than dark hair and a pretty, freckled back, or hear more than indistinct moaning, but she's certain of it.
She did used to have that teeny-tiny sort of semi-crush on Rei; Rei was just so boyish sometimes, and she was a hormonal teenager, so she got confused, that was all. It faded years ago, and it was never serious because she always knew she wanted to be a wife and a mom. Even when Rei had started dating women, Usagi was too neck-deep in diapers by then to even process it. But that's kind of exotic, right? Mysterious? She feels a little into herself just from the thought, this buttoned-up suburban mom with a secret… You-know! Love affair! Yeah, a sexually adventurous, modern woman.
Bonus: she can't get pregnant. And it doesn't fully count because Usagi isn't you-know, like that, so no one is replacing Mamoru in her heart. It's like buying a vibrator, except the vibrator will call her pretty and Mamo won’t wake up and ask what the hell she’s doing.
She gets out her phone to text Rei, but what is she supposed to say? Just to make herself laugh, she types it out: hi, I know we haven't seen as much of each other since Chibiusa was born and I know I always say we have to catch up and then we don't catch up, but do you want to come over and have kind-of sex that doesn't count with me?
She locks her phone in frustration, and the lockscreen informs her that she should have left with Chibiusa fifteen minutes ago.
Her confusing day goes from sort-of-okay to ughhhh when she remembers Monday is guitar lesson day.
She usually supervises while the class teacher takes her break. The kids are adorable to watch, in a little circle with their tiny fingers fumbling over still too big junior-size guitars. The way they bob their heads with each pluck like little fluffy chickens.
But the tutor is an asshole. He lets the kids call him Seiya. He doesn't address her as a superior, though she's got to be older than him: He's a little taller than her but still short for a man, with a boyish face; he dresses like a teenager, and has the same sense of humor as the kindergarteners. His clothes are not appropriate - one time he came to work in a cropped shirt! And that is super bad and unprofessional, because what if one of his coworkers was trying to tell a story about her romantic weekend break and trailed off mid-sentence in front of everyone in the staffroom when he stretched up in a yawn and his shirt rose halfway up his stomach? It’s just freakish!
He's kind of handsy, too, and Usagi’s deprived condition is bad enough that she gets butterflies when her husband touches her knee, so she really doesn't need this guy brushing her bare arm with his calloused fingers when he speaks to her.
She ate lunch at the desk in the classroom while the kids were outside, head spinning with affair dissatisfied divorce selfish exciting women modern family mature affair affair affair, so she’s already waiting when Seiya shows up just before the kids.
He leans down slightly as he brushes past her. “You have sauce on your chin.”
Usually, she would argue back, but this might be the final straw in her humiliating life. She clicks her tongue, annoyed, as she swipes her hand across her mouth, shoulders slumped.
Seiya’s smile flickers, but then the children burst back in in a rush of post-play chatter. Usagi ignores them for a while as they distribute the plasticky class guitars and tune up, but then Seiya swivels back to her. He pats the space he's left beside him in their floor circle.
“‘Kay little dudes and dudettes,” he says as she settles beside him, “let's show Ms. Chiba what we got.”
“Mrs,” she hisses, trying to stay out of earshot of the kids. “You know it's Mrs.”
He rocks onto the side of one thigh to lean close. “Sorry, I just can’t believe someone so young and beautiful is tied down already.”
Now her cheeks burn. He's making fun of her like always. He probably thinks she's closer to thirty, and what he said is funny and flattering because it’s so untrue. If she was single, she could see how his playful needling might be fun, if she played into it. But since she isn't, all she gets is annoyed.
She can’t answer back because the kids have started playing. Seiya keeps glancing at her with an unreadable expression. He has a guitar pick between his teeth and he flicks it up and down idly while they play, white bottom teeth flashing. The underside of his tongue. If he's doing that on purpose it's unthinkably crude, but he’s so focused on the kids, grinning around the pick when they make it through the semiquavers, that it must be unconscious.
Flick, flick, flick goes the pick. Usagi dreams of him that night.