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Orihime doesn’t actually believe him at first when he asks her out.
The weeks leading up to the wedding pass by in such a rush that she’s mostly just focused on planning her leaves at work and getting the veil done in time. Even though it was handy to have the Kurosaki Clinic as a meet-up location for everyone, she hadn’t actually planned to spend so much time there. There was so much to do off-late, and the last thing she wanted to do was distract Ichigo from his studies (contrary to his lackadaisical attitude, she knew he wanted to do well with his courses). But an evening had become many evenings, and Ichigo’s sisters were so sweetly persuasive that Orihime often found it hard to say no. The Kurosakis were a rowdy family, but they were warm and kind and welcoming in a way that was addictive to just lean into. Ichigo had to have gotten it from somewhere, after all.
And then the wedding happens, and Rukia actually wears the veil, and she’s so busy crying that she hardly has the time to process what it all means. Marriage had always been a distant concept to Orihime. Sora had never married, and she had never actually given much thought to it until she saw Rukia walk down the aisle with her own brother—somber and serious and beautiful. A bride.
It was only when her eyes met Renji’s that Rukia’s expression broke into a small, knowing smile. A Rukia smile, undoubtedly, with all its usual restraint, but there was a familiarity to it that gave Orihime pause. It felt like a secret shared. It felt intimate, a wisdom beyond Orihime’s years. For the briefest of seconds, she wondered what that must feel like. That closeness. That vulnerability.
Then she felt afraid—and promptly beat her curiosity back into submission.
So when Ichigo admits that he’s been thinking about her for a while, that he’s been harboring feelings for her, it doesn’t really—register. His eyes are uncertain, searching, and she instinctively wants to reach out to him, but she doesn't know how. She suspects she must have stuttered something back, but she is, ultimately, in utter shock. Four years of doodling his face on notebooks and following him to hell and back, and she never once thought about what would happen if he honestly, seriously, actually liked her back. It doesn’t make any sense.
In the end, she realizes she must have misunderstood him, which sounds a lot more like her the more she thinks about it. Her daydreams about Ichigo have always been vivid with detail, turning his mild affection into rapturous sentiment, so she files it away as her usual whimsy and moves on.
But then Ichigo asks her if she wants to go on a walk one day, and Orihime isn’t sure. They’ve done things like that before, but those instances were spontaneous—him walking her back home after she dropped her notes off at his house, or him lingering by her doorway, long after a hang-out with their friends. He’s never asked like this before and it feels—different.
And when she actually shows up to the end of her street where they were supposed to meet, he looks nervous. Worse, he can tell something is off.
“Is something wrong?” he asks with a small frown.
“No! No, of course not,” she blurts, then quickly smiles as if to pacify him.
They walk up to the river together and find themselves strolling along the bank for a while, but it’s quiet. Orihime keeps trying to recall what he said at the cafe the other day, about what he could have possibly meant when he said, I’m trying to be honest about my feelings and it’s okay if you want to stay friends.
Her nails dig into her palms.
“It’s kinda cloudy, huh,” Ichigo remarks, a little sheepish when he looks over his shoulder at her. Orihime’s stomach drops at the way he looks, windswept and casual with both hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket. His eyes are so warm, so kind, and she wonders if he knows that she loves him. Something lurches within her, and she almost feels sick as she stops in her footsteps.
"I'm sorry." She shakes her head. "I'm sorry, this is just. This is a lot."
"What is?"
"This," she whispers. She dares not call it what it isn’t, already wanting to flee. Ichigo’s eyes widen, and she can tell he’s realized, kind of, what she’s talking about. She pushes on, her voice small and guilty. "This doesn't feel very real to me."
A casual conversation with Ichigo is all well and good, even if it makes her stomach goopy sometimes and she’s got to scream herself hoarse into her pillow to beat down the rush. But she just can’t picture Ichigo doing that about her. Even her wildest imagination draws short.
“Are you talking about what I said the other day at the cafe?” he asks quietly.
Orihime nods, not really looking at him but out towards the Karakura horizon.
“Do you—do you not feel the same?”
The shock of that question instantly draws Orihime’s attention back to his face. She realizes he’s trying to brace himself, and the corners of his eyes are creased like it would…
(Like it would hurt if she says no)
“It’s not like that,” she mutters, mustering courage. But it falters when their eyes meet, and she flushes. Even saying that much is too much. Still, she finds her voice for long enough to say, “But, um. You said you liked me.”
It’s Ichigo’s turn to flush. “Y-yeah.”
Oh.
“As—as friends?” She wants to kick herself for asking the question, and then promptly wants the ground to swallow her up when Ichigo looks like he’s in pain.
“Ye-No—I mean.” He covers his mouth with a fist to clear his throat. “I just, uh. You know. I like being friends with you, obviously. But it’s—it’s not. Fully, like.”
Orihime nods quickly but completely devoid of comprehension.
“I think it’s been a little different for a while now,” he admits, almost guiltily. “Maybe for a long time, I don’t know.”
Orihime tries to breathe, to think of the implications. But in the end, she’s just swept away by the golden sunlight on his face, by the courage it must have taken for him to admit such a thing. She still has a hard time wrapping her head around it, but she recognizes, intuitively, that he’s trying to give her something. Something important. And she can’t not handle it with care. Not when it’s from him. Even if it feels like she’s cupping her hands around something tenuous.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” he adds, and she can tell from his tone that he’s serious. “I think I was trying to figure it out for myself.”
Orihime laughs feebly, embarrassed. “You don’t have to be sorry for something like that.”
Ichigo smiles a small smile back at her, both hands in his pockets. He still looks tense, uncertain, and Orihime wants to make him feel better, but between them is a wall that hasn’t come down before, and she doesn’t know what it’s going to feel like when it does, but she bets it's intense. It has to be. She hates to admit that she’s a little afraid of it.
“It doesn’t have to be anything you don’t want it to,” Ichigo says quietly. “We can forget this happened.”
Orihime watches him, the way the light hits his face as he waits for her answer. She shakes her head. “No, I just.” She braves herself to look up at him, to try and say what she has in her heart. “Can we take it a little slow, Kurosaki-kun?”
_____________________
Tatsuki calls her crazy for not jumping him the second he confessed, which is really typical of her, but Chad just frowns when she tells him what happened.
“You like him,” Chad points out.
Orihime nods. That’s not something she’ll ever deny.
“He likes you.”
She gnaws her lip, fighting down the anxious surge in her stomach.
“He does,” Chad insists. “I know him.”
For a minute, Orihime stews on his words, the two of them quiet as they walk along the side street together.
“Give him a chance,” Chad says, glancing down at her with a small smile. “Let him show you. Ichigo won’t let you down.”
_____________________
Orihime pays a little more attention.
There’s a little bookstore in midtown Karakura that she likes, and she builds the courage to ask him if he wants to go with her.
(“That sounds like a great idea, Inoue,” he’d breathed, and Orihime wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light or if he looked a little relieved by her initiative).
Either way, Orihime watches the slouch of his back, the thin, long lines of his fingers as he gently pulls books out of the shelves and frowns at the little blurbs on the back. His movements are so familiar to her by now, but she ends up watching him more than the books, fascinated by his every gesture, the firmness of his shoulders, his arms.
“Here,” he says, and she starts a little. He’s holding a book out to her with a little smile. “I think you’ll like this one.”
She takes it from him gingerly. It’s a heist adventure set in outer space—exactly the kind of thing she likes to get lost in during breaks at work, and it touches her deeply, the fact that he knows what she likes to read—that over years of borrowing and lending from each other, he’s learned. She smiles and holds the book to her chest, determined to find something for him too.
But fundamentally, the truth is that Ichigo is no different from who he used to be. Even as they talk about their friends, or when she brings him yakisoba and they sit by his bedroom window to eat it, he’s still the same he’s always been. He talks flippantly about his teachers but passionately about his classes. He scoffs at the ridiculous things she says and teases her about her wild imagination. He looks lost when she meanders her way through a story but listens patiently anyway. These are all things that the Ichigo of last year used to do. The Ichigo she knew and had grown comfortable with, to a point where she didn’t feel conscious about being in his room, or talking to him like this, with no one else around. It’s easy to forget that he likes her in those moments, which makes her think maybe he doesn’t like her that way at all—maybe he was just trying to tell her how much he values her as a friend, and she was reading into it too much, or projecting or—or—
(Or he’s always felt like this, her brain provides. She takes a gigantic hammer and smashes this thought, then steps on it with her foot for good measure.)
Orihime knows that Ichigo has always loved her—just like he’s loved Chad or Rukia or a person he just met that needed saving. Ichigo is a kind, giving person. She knows better than to mistake that for pining.
But there are times where his thigh brushes hers, or she laughs at something he says, and he gives her a look, a look that he’s never given her before, tentative, searching. She wonders what would happen if he would lean down and kiss her then, just his mouth on hers, nothing more. It’s nothing she hasn’t imagined before, but like all her other fantasies, it’s not something she’s ever thought would actually happen. She’s imagined burger kingdoms (because if there’s a Burger King, he has to have a home, right?) and clouds that taste like cotton candy, and this is just one of those things—perfect, but too good to be true.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she pictures telling him. “I like you,” she pictures telling him. She even knows the exact face he would make, a little stunned, because she’s always coming at him from a little left of center. A little tender, because he’s always been so kind to her. Ichigo would never hurt her, but she’s a coward all the same, satisfied with having him only in her burger-kingdom-candy-cloud fantasies. She’d never know what to do if he gave her his hand.
She throws her head into her pillow and screams. At least this hasn’t changed—and it provides her a little comfort.
_____________________
He’s walking her back home from his house one day when he says, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
Orihime whips her head up so fast she nearly gets dizzy. “What?”
He doesn’t look at her. “I’m terrible at this. Being a boyfriend.”
Orihime wants to reassure him of his merits, but she’s still stuck on boyfriend. Kurosaki-kun, her boyfriend. The shape of those words makes no sense, not in that order, not even rearranged. A hysterical part of her wants to laugh, and then lie down sideways and roll all the way home.
Ichigo lifts his gaze from the ground and frowns at her. “You don’t believe it.”
“Kurosaki-kun?”
He kicks at a pebble in his path and watches it totter out of the way. “You don’t believe that I like you.”
It’s only slightly accusing. He mostly just sounds sad, like there’s something wrong and he has no idea how to fix it.
“That’s not—” she begins. True, she wants to say, but she can’t bring herself to admit that it would be a little bit of a lie to say she had wholly embraced this idea that Ichigo was apparently in love with her. “Kurosaki-kun.” It comes out a little helpless, and she can’t help but stare up at him, hoping he’ll understand.
“I do, you know,” he says quietly. Stubbornly, almost. There’s a determination in his eyes that’s so familiar to her by now, a brimming thunder in him that speaks of hidden depths—things he feels that he can’t quite find the words for. Ichigo has always spoken so much with so little that when he says, “I do,” again, she knows. He’s been saying it to her in one form or another for a while now. Had he always been, even when he hadn’t quite known that that was what he was saying?
“I’m the terrible one.” she says finally, shaking her head. “Kurosaki-kun—Kurosaki-kun is so brave, so warm.” She looks up at him, and she tells herself she isn’t going to cry, even if she feels it at the base of her throat. “I wouldn’t even know what to do if you gave me your hand.”
Surprise breaks out on Ichigo’s face, followed by understanding.
“You could hold it,” he said quietly. And then color fills his cheeks, his own admission embarrassing him as he looks away from her face. “I-If you wanted to.”
Orihime lets out a breath, the thrill of possibility and permission making itself clear in the air between them. She stares at his hand, so large, so there, and lowers her own to lock their fingers together. Warm. His hand is warm. Her cheeks are on fire. Ichigo still doesn’t look at her, but his cheeks are pink too.
“I’ll hold it,” she decides, carefully cradling it with both her hands like it’s the most important thing in the world. Ichigo nods and squeezes his grip. She squeezes back.
They walk home that way. Neither of them says a word.
_____________________
Later that night, much, much later, Orihime rolls over in bed and stares out her window. It’s dark outside, quiet, and all she can think about is Ichigo. She’s spent a few nights like this before, her love for him so full that it had a presence of its own in the room. Ichigo, with his hand on his chin, talking about anything, everything. Ichigo at war, his back to her because he trusts her with it. Ichigo’s hand in hers, not limp, not asleep, but awake and alive and hers to hold.
I like you, she tries with her mouth. I like you.
She picks up the phone and dials his number without thinking about it, really.
There are one, two, three, four rings between them, and then his voice arrives on the other end, thick with sleep, concerned. “Hello?” A pause, like he’s pulled the phone away from his ear to see who’s calling. “Inoue?!”
“Kurosaki-kun,” she returns.
“What’s wrong? Are you in trouble?”
She smiles. “No. I just…I wanted to tell you…”
“Tell me what?”
“I like you, Kurosaki-kun,” she confesses, true and soft and clear. It’s only when she’s said it that she realizes it’s the first time she’s said it to him out loud, with him awake to hear it. “I like you,” she says again, stronger this time, more insistent—no room for error, or misunderstanding or doubt.
There’s a long silence on the other end, and it draws for so long that Orihime almost falls asleep to it, but for once she’s not afraid. She’s ready for the wall to come down, however long it takes, or however fast.
Finally, Ichigo laughs, just a heavy exhale from his nose. “Sheesh. Is that it? I thought you were seriously in trouble or something.” He doesn't sound disgruntled, though. He sounds pleased. Thrilled, really. It's like the warmth is emanating off of him, and Orihime can feel it all the way here, three blocks away. And then he says, “Me too,” and it’s like he’s here, burrowed in her ribs alongside that beating thing she calls a heart.
She falls asleep that way, her phone cradled to her chest, static waves connecting her to him. It’s the best sleep she’s gotten in years.
_____________________
Some time later, after a few days have passed, she takes him to the park for a date, his hand in hers as they walk between the trees. He’s in a light jacket that looks good on him; she’s in his coat, two sizes too big on her.
“I want to race you to the end of the park,” she declares, tilting her gaze towards him to see his reaction.
He blanches. “It’s the middle of winter.”
“That makes it sound like you don’t think you can win in these conditions,” she observes, tapping her chin with one finger. “Could it be that the mighty Kurosaki-kun is…slacking…?”
Ichigo frowns. “Oi.”
“It’s just a few hundred meters,” she assures him.
He sighs, letting go of her hand and heading over to the other side of the walkway so he can get into position. “Ready when you are,” he says.
Orihime grins. They ready, set, go it, and then she’s darting, dashing through the park like her feet can’t carry her fast enough. Ichigo is hot on her heels, but it’s clear she’s going to be the winner, wind whipping at her hair and her clothes. Something fuels her from within, gives her a boost that makes her reach the park’s edge a second faster than he does, shoes roughly scraping against the pavement upon her landing. She could have run forever with how buoyant this feeling is in her chest, but she settles for grinning, holding her hands out to him as he catches up to her. He’s sulking.
“I’ll buy you hot chocolate,” she promises soothingly, then laughs at the hope that strikes his face. It’s cute enough to deserve a kiss, so she stands up on tiptoes and plants one on him, her lips soft against his cheek. The boldness of her own gesture surprises her, and she withdraws with a blush.
“O-Okay,” he breathes, a little flush rising to his own cheeks.
“Let’s go!” She pumps one fist in the air.
Ichigo takes her other hand, tugging her back before she can walk into oncoming traffic. She settles back with a sheepish grin. He shakes his head. They look both ways this time.
Then they cross the street.