I woke up the next morning flat on my back, half-uncovered, twisted into some contorted pretzel shape. My muscles were aching, desperately begging for a workout. I sat up and stretched. I turned my head to look over at Christina's bed.
Total wreckage. The sheet was yanked so far back you could see a slab of bare mattress. Looks like she wasn't lying after all about tossing and turning. It looked less like she'd slept and more like she'd fought off a home intruder.
I stood up and trudged toward the bathroom. The door was swung wide open, a total "come on in, take what you want" situation.
Christina was standing in front of the mirror, practically hypnotizing the toothbrush in her hand. She let out a long breath, like she was psyching herself up for a heroic sacrifice, shoved the brush into her mouth, and started scrubbing at high speed. Then she glanced up at the mirror, caught my reflection, and froze for two whole seconds. She jerked her chin up. "What's your deal?"
I'd warned her last night that I'd used that exact brush. She'd definitely forgotten.
"Why didn't you just grab a new one?" I asked, meeting her eyes in the reflection.
"This one's fine," Christina muttered. But then memory seemed to hit her, and she paused again for a second before spitting. "We exhaled more bacteria into the air last night than I'm gonna swallow off a toothbrush anyway."
She popped the brush back in her mouth, stooped down, opened the cabinet under the sink, and pulled out another wrapped brush.
"Here. Yours now," she said, standing up and dropping it on the counter.
I squeezed past her to the sink, grabbed the brush, unwrapped it, and immediately bit into the plastic handle. Had to mark my territory somehow. They looked identical. Christina picked up the toothpaste tube and reached out. I held my brush under her hand. She glitched for a second, clearly not fully awake yet. I reached for the tube myself, but she squeezed a dollop straight onto my bristles.
I started brushing, and about ten seconds in, I caught her smirking.
"What?" I tilted my head back so I wouldn't drip foam down my chin.
"Nothing," Christina smirked, her face pure evil.
"Did you spit in the paste?"
"Nope."
I stared at her more closely. I don't know. Her eyelashes were wet, so she'd already washed her face. Maybe there was something on me? I smoothed down my bedhead and checked my reflection. Looked fine. No toothpaste smeared on my chin or anything.
Wait a minute... Is Christina mirroring me?
She was totally mocking me. What a menace. Alright, game on.
I started operating my hand like an electric toothbrush on overdrive, violently switching sides without warning. Christina lost the rhythm, but she kept going with less enthusiasm, missing beats but still copycatting me. I jabbed a finger straight into her ribs, and she practically jumped out of her skin.
"You missed a beat," I mumbled, nearly spraying the mirror, pulled off two victorious final strokes, and spat out the foam.
"Take that!" Christina grabbed my ribs with both hands right as I was cupping my palms to scoop up some water.
The sudden tickle hit me so hard I spilled the water everywhere and tried to pin my elbows to my sides, but her fingers kept squirming anyway. I tried to tough it out, but it was unbearable. A laugh broke through my lips against my will. I straightened up. Christina slipped behind my back. I tried to twist away, but she had a vice grip on me.
"I yield!" I begged for mercy, throwing my hands up.
The tickling instantly stopped. Christina rubbed both hands over my ribs to soothe the leftover tension, then casually went back to finish brushing her teeth as if nothing had happened. I didn't retaliate, even though her own ribs were wide open for a counterattack.
She finished rinsing, stepped aside for me, grabbed a comb from the open cabinet on the other side, and started brushing her hair while staring over my shoulder into the mirror.
Even after I walked back out into the room, she was still in there, preening.
We ended up eating scrambled eggs again, or rather, an omelet with canned peas. Christina didn't feel like waiting for an order to be cooked from scratch, and I couldn't be bothered to choose.
"So, what's the game plan?" Christina drifted over to her bed and started smoothing out the sheets.
"Unless you count talking, we've got basically zero options," I said, scanning the room in the desperate hope of spotting something interactive.
"Let's play I'm Packing My Bag or the letter game," Christina suggested, flopping face-down onto the mattress.
"Lying on your stomach right after eating is terrible for your digestion," I warned her.
"Doing it once isn't gonna kill me," Christina said, twisting her head toward me.
"Did you not sleep enough?"
"I slept fine," she said, her blue eyes locked onto mine. "I'm just getting that post-food slump."
"Are you coming down with something?" I asked, actually starting to worry a little.
"No, I'm fine. I'm always like this. If there's nothing to do, my brain just enters sleep mode."
"Oh! Tell me how you usually spend your weekends, then."
"Scroll online, hit the mall... play the flute..." Christina pursed her lips and started whistling a song that sounded vaguely familiar.
Quite a bit of time passed. Christina eventually got tired of whistling and just drifted off to sleep.
"Hey," I spoke up, mostly because the quiet was starting to get on my nerves, my discomfort finally beating out my laziness.
"Mm?" Christina opened one eye instantly.
"If I were a conductor, would you have married me?"
"You've already got Christina."
"What does she have to do with this?"
"It's kind of trashy to hit on another girl when you love your wife."
"I'm not trying to hit on you. UKARI is listening to us, remember? I just want to help it understand why we're not right for each other."
"Then you should have just asked, 'Why aren't we right for each other?'"
"That would've been fake. We'd just end up making excuses instead of finding real reasons. But if we start imagining we're actually getting married, all the actual problems immediately float to the surface. Like, I don't even know how to approach you. The first time I came over to your place and saw you in your loungewear, I totally froze."
"You just need to tell me straight up what you want."
"You're so spacey you'd forget one second later..." But I caught myself, realizing I hadn't actually known that about her back then.
"Look, if it's actually important to you, I won't forget. But I'm gonna do things the way I think is right, not to get parental approval or for a photo on social media. You, or rather, my husband, are going to be living with me, not with a walking checklist..."
"Wait, wait," I cut her off. "We're supposed to be uncovering problems here, not solving them. Just forget for a second that you need a conductor and that you're supposed to marry me. What's the first obstacle you'd hit?"
"You love someone else."
"Well, yeah. Can't really argue with that," I agreed.
"Even if we assume I don't care, purely hypothetically, Christina definitely isn't handing you over to me. And I'm not fighting my friend for a guy. That's just zero self-respect. Plus, she's clearly a way better fit for you than I am."
"She said the exact same thing," I chimed in, making sure to shut down any potential rift between them and show that they held each other in high regard.
Christina raised her eyebrows in genuine shock, then immediately launched into lecturing me about how I needed to protect people's feelings, how messed up it was to compare your future wife to another girl just to declare she was a "better fit." I tried to defend myself, insisting I hadn't said anything of the sort, and that Christina No. 1 had come to that conclusion on her own because she saw how well the two of us clicked.
"Which is precisely why you need to watch your step," Christina grumbled, turning her back to me again. "I'm not your childhood friend. What happens if you fall for me?"
"I'll manage," I said, remembering how I'd actually started falling for her right at the beginning just from her photo, right up until the moment I turned out not to be a conductor. "It's not like—"
"What if I do?" Christina cut in before I could even finish, stopping right there to give me time to process.