Komiko and Katie
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 14
The morning light was grey and thin through the bedroom window when Komiko woke.
Katie was warm against her side, still asleep, copper hair spread across the pillow, one hand resting flat on Komiko’s stomach with the easy possession of someone who had decided in sleep that this was where her hand belonged. The pendant caught the pale morning light. Her breathing was slow and even and entirely at peace.
Komiko lay still and looked at the ceiling and thought about what her mother had said.
Then she turned her head and looked at Katie.
Her person. Her love. Her collared girl sleeping in her arms in the grey January morning.
Her sister.
She almost smiled.
She was going to need to tell her.
She told her at breakfast.
Yoko had gone to the early certification follow-up at the county office — a final administrative requirement, the last piece of paperwork. Yuki was still upstairs. It was just the two of them at the kitchen table with their cereal and the quiet morning house around them.
Komiko set her spoon down.
“I need to tell you something.”
Katie looked up. That immediate reorientation, full attention, the way she always gave Komiko her complete focus when Komiko had something to say.
“My mother said something last night that I’ve been sitting with.”
“What did she say?”
Komiko looked at her steadily. “She told me to kiss my two sisters goodnight.”
Katie looked at her. Processing.
The word landed visibly — she watched it travel across Katie’s face, through the confusion and then the legal reality assembling itself and then the full weight of what it meant arriving all at once.
“Sisters,” Katie said.
“We are foster sisters,” Komiko said. “Legally. Officially. On paper. In the eyes of Sandra Reeves and the state and every document that was signed two days ago.”
Katie stared at her.
“You collared me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You put me in your bed.”
“Yes.”
“And we are legally — “ She stopped. Something moved through her face that was fighting itself — the outrage and the absurdity and something underneath both of those that was trying very hard not to be what it was.
She lost the fight.
The laugh came out — the real one, the unguarded one, the one that changed her whole face and made her younger and completely undefended. She pressed her hand over her mouth and it didn’t help at all.
Komiko watched her with the patient expression of someone who had expected approximately this response.
“This is — “ Katie managed between laughing, “this is objectively the most — Komiko, we are foster sisters who share a bed and you have me on a collar and —”
“Yes,” Komiko said.
“That’s insane.”
“Possibly.”
“It’s completely — “ She stopped laughing long enough to look at Komiko directly with those green eyes still bright with it. “Sister or not, I am not leaving your bed or your arms.” A beat. “I guess it’s true. Incest is best — keep it in the family.”
Komiko looked at her for a moment.
“Good,” she said. “Because I wasn’t asking.”
Katie grinned. That grin — the fully unguarded one that had appeared for the first time in an English classroom in September and had been getting easier and more frequent ever since. “No. You never are.”
She reached across the table and covered Komiko’s hand with hers.
The laughter faded into something quieter. She looked at their hands. Then up at Komiko.
“She chose me,” she said. Quietly. The real thing underneath the joke, finally surfacing. “Your mom. She didn’t just take a placement. She chose me and made it permanent and now I’m —”
She stopped.
“Family,” Komiko said.
Katie nodded. Her throat moved. She looked back down at their hands and didn’t say anything else.
She didn’t need to.
Komiko turned her hand over and laced their fingers together and they finished breakfast in the warm quiet kitchen and didn’t mention it again because they didn’t need to.
It was simply true now.
It would always be true.
School was ordinary in the way school was ordinary — classes, hallways, the social machinery of Jefferson High grinding through its January rhythms. They moved through it together the way they always did now, Komiko slightly ahead, Katie at her shoulder, the pendant visible at her throat, the current between them legible to anyone paying attention and invisible to almost everyone.
In English, Komiko drew circles on the back of Katie’s hand.
Katie looked at her notebook and breathed carefully and touched the pendant once with her free hand.
Ordinary. Completely ordinary.
Except that walking to third period Komiko said quietly, without preamble: “I need to tone it down with you for a while.”
Katie glanced at her. “What do you mean?”
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