In the living room, Chinatsu and I take a seat on a floor cushion in front of Mama and Dad. Chinatsu takes my hand and holds it tightly, so I squeeze it back to try to reassure her that it will be fine. Although, I’m not even sure it will be, myself.
Taking a deep breath, I look at them and say, “Mama, Dad, we need to talk to you.”
Dad turns off the TV and gestures for me to continue. “Umm, I’m not really sure how to tell you everything, so I’m just going to say it. Before we left, I had Kotomi take some of my nanites and test them on condoms to see what they would do.” Dad frowns and Mama’s eyes widen at my statement, but, thankfully, they don’t say anything. “She found out they have no effect on condoms, so they will work as birth control.”
Pressing on, I continue. “Ryu asked us to marry him and we both said yes. Now, we know we’re too young to get married, but we wanted a commitment from him and I found out about a thing called a Blessing Ceremony. We had one in Okinawa.”
Dad interrupts me at that point to ask, “What exactly is a blessing ceremony?”
I sort of expected that question. “It’s exactly like a wedding ceremony, only it isn’t legal. We just promise ourselves to each other before God. We exchange rings,” Chinatsu and I hold up our left hands to show them, “and vows to each other.”
Dad looks at us with a serious, thoughtful expression for a moment and asks, “Don’t you two think you’re a little young for that type of commitment?”
I get out, “Dad…” before Chinatsu interrupts me to say, “Yes, we’re young, but you have to admit that we’re mature for our age.” Mama and Dad both nod in agreement. “We know our hearts. We love Ryu and he loves us. We want him for our husband and to spend our lives with him. We aren’t going to change our minds. He’s the one for us, period.”
Nodding in agreement, I think, ‘Very well put.’ Taking a breath, I pick up where she left off. “Mama, Dad, we know what we promised you and that this is probably going to make you angry at us, but we had sex with Ryu.”
Dad’s expression immediately becomes angry, but Mama touches his arm. He looks at her and she shakes her head. Looking back to us, she says one word, “Why?”
Truthfully, Mama’s calm ‘Why?’ scares me far more than if Dad had blown up at us. Looking her in the eyes, I reply, “Well, that’s not such an easy question to answer. We didn’t lightly break our promise to you either. We tried oral sex and while it was wonderful, it just left us aching and wanting more. Mom, you know what the nanites do to us since they do the same to you.” She nods.
I pause and look back to Dad, “I will say this: no matter what our nanites do to us, we’d never have sex with just anyone. Ryu is serious about us, as we are about him. We can’t help how we are, so isn’t it better that we have Ryu? Someone who loves us and is going to marry us? Someone who’ll never pressure us to have unprotected sex? Someone that will be the father of our children at some point? Even so, we were careful. We used condoms every single time. Believe me, no matter what our hormones are demanding of us, we’re not ready to become mothers yet.”
Dad blows out his breath and shakes his head slightly. “Sora, you leave me no room to argue with you. Listen girls, I like Ryu as well. I know how you two feel about him, but I’m more upset that you did this without talking to either me or your mother than anything else. We’ve raised you to think for yourself and we try to let you make your own decisions, but we expect you to allow us to voice our opinions before you make them and you didn’t let us.”
Mama chimes in at this point. “Girls, what your father is trying to say, poorly, is that it hurts us to think that you two don’t trust us enough to come to us and talk about it before you do something so life changing.”
Chinatsu says, “Mom, we’re more sorry than you know for hurting you. That wasn’t the intent. Believe me when I say we trust you two. Be honest though, if we’d come to you about this before we left, what would you have said?”
Mama smiles sadly. “I see Sora has been rubbing off on you. You’re right, we wouldn’t have wanted you to have sex.”
Chinatsu nods and I pick up the conversation. “Mama, you know how intolerable our nanites make things for all of us when it comes to this. You know it all too well since you’ve told me as much. You’d expect us to be able to hold back when you can’t?”
“Your father and I are married, you aren’t.”
I nod in agreement. “That’s true, we aren’t, but we are engaged and we are promised to each other before God. Again, we will be marrying Ryu and I promise you that we’ll always be careful when it comes to having sex with him.” I pause and look back and forth between them. I almost beg them when I say, “Mama, Dad, please. I know we broke a promise to you and we’re sorry for that, but please, continue to trust us and believe that we’ll do the smart thing. Until this moment, have we ever let you down before?”
Mama touches Dad’s arm again. When he looks at her, she murmurs, “Honey, how can we not trust them after that? After all, they did tell us and they didn’t have to do that.”
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Dad rubs his face and then looks at us to say, “Never again, do you understand me? From now on you will never break another promise to us. You will talk to us before you do something so drastic, alright?”
We reply, “We understand and we will.”
He nods. “Good. Now that that’s settled, call Ryu and have him come over. I’d like to have a conversation with him. Alone.”
Now this part is something I promised Chinatsu I’d bring up soon with Dad, so now is as good a time as any. “Umm, Dad, before I do, I have something else I’d like to talk about.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Chinatsu and I would like you to file a lawsuit for us so we can get married. It’s not right that just because we’re fertile that we can’t marry each other.”
He sighs. “Sora, you’re opening a huge can of worms here. Isn’t it enough that you two will be together?”
Looking him in the eye with a serious expression, I say, “Would it have been enough for you to just be together with Mom and not be able to marry her? The same goes for us. I want to be able to say Chinatsu is my wife just as much as I want to have Ryu as my husband.”
“Sweetheart, you don’t know what you’re asking.”
I adamantly state, “Oh, yes we do. They allow polygamous marriages for men, so why not us, too? Dad, we want to have each other’s children. Our children will be all girls with the same benefits as us. That should be a good thing. Those men in the Diet are always complaining about how there isn’t enough fertile women to maintain the population. All of our children will be fertile, will be immune to the virus, will never get sick, and will live for a very long time. You already know all of this, so you can make an argument based on that. Even our children with Ryu will have our nanites and the benefits they give us whether they are boys or girls. Dad, please, do this for us.”
“Sweetheart, the government could very well take you away from us if we fail. Are you sure?”
I glance at Chinatsu, who nods, and then turn back to Dad. Smiling confidently at him, I reply, “We’re absolutely sure. We know you won’t let us down. We believe in you, Daddy,” and I see Chinatsu nod in agreement out of the corner of my eye.
He sighs, nods and says, “Alright. I think this is a bad idea, but I’ll do it.”
We tell him, “Thank you Dad.”
Taking out my phone, I text Ryu. ‘Honey, I don’t think it’s anything bad, but Dad would like you to come over now and talk to him.’
Less than a minute later, my phone chimes. Ryu replies, ‘I’ll be right over, but regardless of what you said, I’m still nervous.’
Looking up at Dad, I tell him, “Ryu said he’d be right over.”
“Good. Girls, go on up to your room. We’ll let you know when you can come down.”
Chinatsu and I stand up and head to our room. Once inside, I lock the door and when I turn around her grin tells me exactly how we’ll be spending the time waiting.
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