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“Who are you trying to impress?”
Tengen, when his broody silence is so brazenly infringed-upon, is aimlessly watching the coffee machine deposit its contents drip by drip into Kyojuro’s Association of Future Educators of Japan mug. But he isn’t incredibly bothered, not really, because there’s a flirtatious lilt to the voice, and though he knows its owner means no such thing by it, this is – he’s convinced – the most pleasant way to talk to a woman by far.
“My lovely housemates,” he says lightly. He flicks the coffee machine’s power switch to off and then turns with the mug in his hands, still too hot for comfort. “Obviously.”
Kanae is behind him at the stove, checking on the kettle she must’ve put on before he came down here, and she looks over her shoulder with what he now recognizes as her you’re-so-full-of-it smile. “Job interview, networking, or family dinner?”
“Date, actually.”
Kanae raises her eyebrows. “You’re going on a date.”
“What, you think I can’t get one?”
“Oh, I’m sure you get plenty,” she says. “But this” – she gestures to his pressed suit – “is a level of effort I don’t expect.”
“You wound me, Kochou dearest.”
“You wound yourself.” Kanae’s kettle sings, and she turns the stove off and pours a mug of the boiling water with her usual practiced efficiency. “Who’s the girl?”
“A washing machine heiress.”
Kanae snorts. “Your father’s choice?”
“Her family’s worth billions.”
“Charming,” Kanae says. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything else about her?”
“She’s a looker and she’s dull,” Tengen replies. “Otherwise he’d never have picked her.”
“Does he do this often? Sending you on dates with heiresses?”
“Tries to.”
Kanae chuckles. “And you resist.”
“Valiantly.”
“What’d he have to do this time?” Kanae asks. “To convince you to go?”
“I gotta give in every so often or he’ll double down.” Tengen shrugs. “I figured this one can’t be worse than any of the others.”
“Does he want you to marry her or something?”
“Nominally.” He takes a sip of his coffee and hisses – still too hot. “For the alliance, you know. Then we’ll both go off with whoever we actually wanted in the first place and keep it all very hush-hush, you know what I mean.” Tengen leans against the countertop. “I don’t think he’s very happy that I’m doing the second part but not the first.”
Kanae, to Tengen’s surprise, looks a little troubled by this.
“That must be terrible for them,” she finally says.
“For who?”
“Everyone. Getting married when it doesn’t mean anything, then being cheated on left and right, that just being…normal.” She’s been attending to the brewing of her tea, but at this she turns, looks up, and searches his face for something. “It just sounds sad to me.”
“It’s not that bad.” Tengen crosses the kitchen to stand beside Kanae, ruffles her hair. “Not everyone is you.”
“Hah?”
“The white picket fence type.”
Kanae flushes. “I’m not the white picket fence type.”
“Oh, really, miss ‘four kids and a dog.’”
She said that once – that she wanted that – with so little embarrassment that Tengen had at first thought she was joking. They’d only been living together for a few weeks back then but it had taken very little to confirm that she hadn’t been.
“I shared that,” she says loftily, “in a moment of vulnerability, Tengen, so don’t even start.”
“You did not.”
“Did too.”
“So that’s why you were telling it to two random guys you’d met two weeks before?”
Kanae looks at him crossly. “I don’t think you have to have…domestic aspirations to think it’s pretty lousy to have to marry someone you don’t love while they run around on you like it never happened.”
“Not half as bad as marrying someone you do love.”
Kanae glares at him. He lifts his hands in a statement of innocence he knows she won’t believe.
“Anyway,” he says. “I’m gonna take this girl to dinner and forget I ever met ‘er, so you don’t need to be worried about that.”
“Hmph.”
“Just to shut him up.”
“If you say so.”
**
Kanae loves the Wisteria Sharehouse, and with that comes a strange kind of ownership.
She had been its first tenant, after all. Himejima offered her a guest room in his family’s old home when she began attending university nearby. And then he’d gotten it into his head that he ought to let some of those empty rooms, so in her second year he’d found two first-year boys in need of cheap rent and they had joined the ranks. This year, they’d added three more. And the more it grows, the more Kanae’s conviction is reinforced: she loves this house. It’s hers.
Maybe it’s a function of being the oldest, or for so long the only girl, but she feels a certain responsibility towards it. It ought to be kept up and running, and it ought to be welcoming, and they ought to all be friends if they’re going to be sharing a house for the next handful of years. Attending to those things, doing the delicate social maneuvering it takes to get them to know each other, is both a challenge and a joy. So there’s no question whatsoever of waiting up.
Uzui Tengen is a special project, and he knows this and resists, but she’s seen him warm to them all, seen how big a heart he has beneath all the layers of protection it took to get by in a loveless home for so many years. She has a vested interest now in what he will turn out to be. And she likes him, appalling ghosting habit and all. When he returns from his family-mandated date, then, she will be there to ask the necessary questions.
Shinobu always calls her a busybody. This, while hypocritical of Shinobu, is not untrue. But it does have its uses.
The doorknob turns, and she’s waiting – dressed for bed, skimming a set of notes for a quiz tomorrow – when he troops in looking henpecked.
“Dull-and-Gorgeous had claws, didn’t she,” Kanae greets him, and Tengen lets out a shuddery sigh that makes her laugh a little by sheer force of surprise.
“Dull-and-Gorgeous,” he says, “was not under contract.”
“Huh?”
“The scheming type. Wants big things for the laundry biz.” He throws his coat over the back of the sofa before he flops down. “Apparently big things involve my parents’ backing.”
“Which she wants-“
“From me, naturally. I’d bet you my car she set this up herself.”
“You have at least three cars,” Kanae replies. “That doesn’t mean very much.”
“I’d bet all of them.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Did you like her?”
“I mean, I do like a girl who calls the shots,” he says. “But I don’t hate myself enough to let her call ‘em.”
“Hm, pity. She sounds perfect for you.” Kanae fixes him with a look of slight but vague disapproval. “Drives a hard bargain.”
“Am I missing something, Kochou,” Tengen asks, “or am I being insulted?”
Kanae smiles innocently. “Well, I’m sure she wouldn’t let you ghost her.”
Tengen swats her with the fringe end of the blanket that hangs over the back of the couch. “You’re so mean to me, Kochou.”
“Shape up and I won’t have to be.”
“You know,” he says, “you’re the only woman I know who could say that and not have me convinced she wanted me.”
“Because I don’t,” Kanae replies.
He pats her head. “I know you don’t.”
She truly doesn’t. Still, Tengen’s the kind of person who never opens up if it’s serious, and Kanae is nothing if not a strategist. And it’s inconceivable to either of them that she’d mean anything flirtatious by it. Kanae is going to fall in love with someone thoroughly sensible and they’re going to date and marry without theatrics and raise children and large, agreeable dogs in the suburbs. Everybody who knows Kanae knows this. And everybody who knows Tengen knows that if he ever marries at all, he’ll be in divorce court within a month, which is mostly why he’d rather avoid it outright. Each is as rigid in this conviction as the other.
Which is why she can say these sorts of things and not be kissed for them.
And which is also why she gets the idea she does.
“But,” she says, “wouldn’t that make me the perfect fake date?”
Tengen blinks at her.
“You know,” she says. “Next time your father is hounding you, you tell him, ‘all right, I’ll find my own.’ And he never has to know it’s your bossy housemate who’s only in it for the fancy food.”
“…are you nuts, Kochou?”
“What? Wouldn’t it be less of a headache?”
“Won’t work if your father’s not a billionaire.”
“My parents were in excellent standing, I’ll have you know.”
Tengen flushes a little. He always does, curiously, when he’s reminded that Kanae’s technically an orphan. “I still don’t think my father-“
“Will he even ask?”
Tengen thinks for a moment.
“…I dunno,” he says. “Still kinda sounds like a bad idea.”
“Well, something to keep in your pocket.” Kanae smiles, closes her laptop. “Since Washing Machine-sama isn’t it.”
“If I didn’t know any better, Kochou,” he says, “I would really be thinking you were after my money right now.”
“Yes, for the dinner bill.” She pats his arm. “Bet you’d take me somewhere nice.”
“You’re no different than the rest of them, are you.”
Kanae laughs. “Of course I am, Uzui-kun,” she says. “I’m not looking for anything serious with your credit card.”
“Thought you didn’t do one-night stands.”
“I don’t, unless they have no credit limit.”
“You definitely don’t do those either.”
Sometimes – Kanae would never admit this to anyone but Tengen – it’s sort of fun playing the flirt, the schemer, the bad-girl-in-disguise she could never actually be. Tengen lets her because he knows as soon as she goes upstairs she’ll go to bed while the hour is still sensible and that it’s all an act she wears like a child playing dress-up. And it’s probably why he indulges her now, though her late parents’ stellar reputation in the medical community would mean nothing to Tengen’s father if he ever bothered to ask.
“No,” she tells him. “But it’ll get your father to let you be, maybe.”
“Hm. Maybe.”
**
Tengen doesn’t think about Kanae’s offer much after that. The washing machine heiress propitiates his father at least a little, though he refuses her strongly-worded offer of a second date, and he promptly forgets this whole hasslesome revolving door of heiresses even exists. He tends to do that when he’s in between forced blind dates. It’s the only way it’s ever bearable – pretending not to see it when it isn’t in front of him. So Kanae’s off-the-cuff suggestion of a fake date holds little weight through the spring term, and then well into the summer.
Not until September, towards the tail-end of summer break when Tengen is supposed to be working a nonexistent internship of which he forged proof and paper trail at a dear cost with the help of a savvier friend from class, does his father inform him that he will be going out with a girl whose father is on the board of a Taiwanese microchip company.
Tengen, upon receiving this news, glances over at the girl sprawled out in her sleep across his unmade bed and sighs.
Not that his father would mind that – the half-naked girl whose name his son barely remembers, that is. He probably has one of his own. But Tengen doesn’t like the way they converge. This particular girl had looked at him last night with particularly adoring eyes and the ones who do that always make him uncomfortable. It’s those ones who, when his father calls about a woman he wants him to marry for a business deal, make Tengen feel like he’s supposed to feel guilty about something.
“I’m, uh, seeing someone,” he finds himself saying.
“I beg your pardon?”
He clears his throat. “I’ve got a girl…friend.”
“You never reported that to me, Tengen.”
“Yeah, why would I? You’d probably try to steal her.”
It’s an excuse and a lie but the thought still makes Tengen’s stomach twist. Poor Kanae.
“I don’t find that amusing,” his father says coldly.
“Knew you wouldn’t. Anyway, no can do on the date thing.”
“Would you please inform me who this person is?” his father asks.
“Nah. Good family, though.”
“Exactly what kind of good family, Tengen?”
“Oh, real solid people. Pillar-of-the-community types. Real big deal in medicine, I guess. She’s the white picket fence type.”
“She sounds unsuitable.”
“She’s a peach,” Tengen tells his father, then, with no further prelude, “bye now.”
“Uzui Tengen-“
Click.
Tengen hangs up, then takes a moment to breathe, and that’s about when it sinks in and he takes his head in his hands and groans.
The girl begins to stir, though he doesn’t see it, and by the time he raises his head she’s looking at him. She reaches across to the nightstand for her glasses, shakes her hair out of her face, and he thinks – damn, too bad, she’s cute – that life must hate him just about now.
“Family stuff,” he says. “Sorry.”
First he rushes the girl out the door, clothed and by a route where Kyoujurou isn’t going to see them. (That Iguro is standing in the kitchen and glares when he sees them go by is of very little import just now.) And then, this aside, he walks the plank down the hall to Kanae’s downstairs double and knocks.
“Come in,” Mitsuri calls from inside.
This will be incredibly awkward, he thinks, if it turns out that Kanae is out. He doesn’t know Mitsuri too well yet, but he can tell already that she’s the type to make too much of a guy and a girl doing anything together. And she’s most certainly going to assume things if he breathes a word of this awful, awful plan in front of her.
But Kanae is in. She’s taking notes from a textbook on her tablet, a thick terry cloth headband keeping her hair out of the sheet mask on her face, and she looks up when Tengen comes in.
“Kochou,” he says. “Got a second?”
“Uh…for what?”
“I kinda need to take you up on that offer.”
**
Tengen’s father calls him again over the fancy tea latte that Kanae makes him buy her in return for hearing him out in his hour of need. He ignores it.
“He’s just going to say the same thing over and over until I give up or it’s too late,” he tells her.
“Hm, all right.” Kanae lifts her latte to her mouth and appraises Tengen as she sips. “Did you have to tell him we were seeing each other?”
“I’ll tell him next time that you ended it.”
“Oh, I’m the one ending this?”
“You didn’t think I was responsible enough,” he says. “And my genes weren’t good enough for your children.”
Kanae kicks him harder than such a slender girl ought to be able to under the table. He reaches down to rub at the back of his calf and glares at her.
“We wanted different things out of life,” she tells him. “You can tell him that.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“It is decidedly not.”
“Okay, fine, we wanted different things out of life. That make ya feel better?”
“Does he actually know anything about me?” she asks.
“Nope.”
“Keep it that way. I don’t want to be followed.” She sets down her mug with a clink that sounds, somehow, exactly like Kanae. “How soon are we getting this over with?”
“I’m hurt, Kochou, you’re not excited?”
“It can’t be too soon or you won’t get a good reservation.”
Tengen snorts. This shameless opportunist. “I have my ways.”
“So you’re thinking we get this over with now?”
“How’s Friday?”
“Tengen, it’s Tuesday.”
“Yeah, and?”
“You know what, fine.”
“Great, see ya there.” He leans across the table to pat her head. “Thanks a million for the bail-out, by the way, I totally woulda been screwed if you said no.”
“Maybe I should’ve,” she says. “Maybe I’m enabling your childishness.”
“What childishness?”
**
Kyoujurou is no stranger to Tengen’s brand of decision-making. Sharing a bedroom will do that; much depends upon his ability to anticipate when he should plan on sleeping in the living room. So he doesn’t think, after a year and a half of life with Tengen, that any choice he makes about a woman should surprise him much anymore.
This is not correct.
He’s forlornly moving his futon into the living room (really, Tengen’s a nice guy, but he’s terrible at sharing a room) when Mitsuri happens to come downstairs, pause in the doorway, survey the scene, and frown. And it certainly takes him by surprise when all she says is, “I don’t think he’d be bringing a girl over, would he?”
Kyoujurou straightens, tries to tell himself the flush in his cheeks is just from bending over his futon. “It’s always fifty-fifty on a Thursday night.”
“No, he won’t be,” Mitsuri says with confidence. Then, in spite of herself, she starts to smile. “Not tonight.”
“…sorry, did I miss something?”
He didn’t. Mitsuri, it appears, was just waiting for an excuse to say it, because she runs over to the couch to join him and leans close to whisper, “I think he actually likes somebody this time.”
“Oh?” Kyoujurou asks.
“Kanae-chan” – Mitsuri is practically vibrating with excitement now – “told me they’re going out to dinner tomorrow night!”
“They’re what?”
“Like, on a date!” Mitsuri practically squeals, trying as she evidently is to be quiet. “And, like, she said it’s just pretend to get his dad off his back, but, like, how many dramas start exactly like that and then they actually fall in love?” She clasps her hands to her chest and seems to be doing everything in her power not to shriek. “And he totally wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t have feelings for her, so he must!”
Oh.
Oh, my.
“That is unusual for him,” Kyoujurou admits.
“Which has to mean he likes her, doesn’t it?” Mitsuri, once more, seems likely to start vibrating any moment now. “And wouldn’t it be so romantic?”
“Uh…I…I’m not sure I follow.”
“It is!” Mitsuri grabs Kyoujurou by the shoulder with her usual unknowingly unnecessary force and shakes it. “Think about it, Kyou-kun. It’s like…the sweet, elegant good-girl type and a serial philanderer felled by true love, isn’t it?”
Felled by true love. The words bounce around in Kyoujurou’s brain without landing anywhere in particular for a moment before he grasps her meaning, and by then he is at once so baffled at her conclusion and so embarrassed by how much it charms him that he can say nothing but, “true love may be a stretch.”
“Maybe now,” Mitsuri says. “But not forever.”
Kyoujurou, as lovely as it might be to subscribe to Mitsuri’s reading of Tengen’s intentions, does not entirely buy this. But he does buy, because Kyoujurou doubts they would be friends if it weren’t true, that Tengen respects the people he likes for reasons unrelated to their figures enough not to bring home a fling the night before this pretend date with somebody he won’t be able to avoid if all goes south. The futon is rolled up and returned to its place in his closet.
Tengen returns home, to Kyoujurou’s immense relief, by himself. He flops into bed still clothed with a weariness he’s usually too guarded to express. And that, when taken beside Mitsuri’s words last night, makes him pause.
“Tengen-kun?” he asks.
Tengen barely lifts his head. “Yeah?”
“Are you…maybe…interested in a girl?” Kyoujurou pauses, then clarifies: “not as a fling?”
“Wha…?”
Kyoujurou doesn’t know later quite what made him say it. He tries not to meddle overmuch in Tengen’s tangled-up affairs, knowing his words will have no effect if he does, and certainly wouldn’t say something like this. He doesn’t even know if he believes that there’s a chance Tengen does care for Kanae in that way. But it feels in the moment like something he’s just got to get out.
“If you really are,” he says, “you should make sure she has the right idea.”
“I never said-“
“Or else you might miss your chance.”
“Kyoujurou,” Tengen says, “I don’t want Kochou like that.”
“…oh.”
“We’re goin’ out to get my dad to leave me alone, if that’s what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I heard.”
“It’s fake.”
“What do you-“
“She’s like that aunt who keeps on telling you she met you as a baby to me.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Hah?”
“Kochou-senpai is the kindest-“
“Dude, she’s the best,” Tengen cuts him off. “She’s still like a weird aunt to me.”
Kyoujurou frowns. This does not entirely compute.
“Well,” he says. “Please try to do right by her anyway.”
“It’s just dinner.”
“Still.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
This does not make Kyoujurou trust him, necessarily. But it will have to do.
**
This is most definitely a ridiculous thing to have agreed to.
The thought crosses Kanae’s mind more than once before Friday. She hasn’t been on a date since before the accident; Uzui Tengen is the last person on earth she’d hope would ask her out in earnest; there’s half a chance his father will have her followed. If he does, the ordinary daughter of two long-dead doctors who can barely walk without a cane won’t leave him the slightest bit satisfied that his son is plying the waters appropriately.
And yet.
“Say,” she asks Tengen, then pauses to paint her pursed lips an old-Hollywood red she’s always wished she had a better excuse to wear. “You know anything about throwing off a tail?”
Tengen’s “huh?” comes out garbled through a mouthful of shrimp puffs. Kanae, though one of her hands is still occupied in touching up her lipstick, reaches back and takes the bag from his hands.
“You’ll get crumbs in the carpet,” she says. “You know anything about throwing off a tail?”
“A tail, Kochou?”
“Well, your father seems like the type to have us followed.”
Tengen snorts. “You think he cares enough to tail me?”
“He cares enough to make you go on these dates, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t set this one up.” Tengen (curse the length of his arms) grabs the shrimp puffs from her vanity while Kanae is occupied, having moved on to her eyeliner. “No personal investment.”
“I said you’d get crumbs in the carpet.”
“So I doubt he’d bother sending someone to scout.”
“Tengen-kun.” Kanae opens and closes her hand at him. “The shrimp puffs, please.”
He holds them to his chest. “They’re mine.”
“And the carpet’s mine.”
“What are you going to do if we are followed?”
“I’m starting to think you want us to be followed.” Tengen, with the air of a cat knocking a glass of water off of a table, shoves a handful of shrimp puffs in his mouth. “Is your life really that boring?”
“My life is extremely fulfilling, I’ll have you know.”
“Really, now.”
Kanae makes a face at him. “Some of us enjoy our classes.”
“I like mine plenty.”
She considers pointing out that she also enjoys going to open lap swim in the early morning, and trying cafés and poking around in antique stores and mentoring high school girls from troubled homes, but then considers also that Tengen would probably snort at her, because Tengen appears to think anything wholesome is somewhat brainless, and she does not.
“Just because I don’t go around seducing people and then ghosting them-“
“You’re real pretty, you know,” Tengen interrupts her. “You could.”
She sniffs. “I have a nice face, so I should ghost people?”
“I mean, you won’t, but you could.”
“What I want,” she says, “Tengen, is to find a kind man with good manners who cares for me and live a normal, sensible life.”
“You’d get bored.”
“I would not.”
“Normal? Sensible?” Tengen crosses his arms. “You don’t know yourself at all.”
“I’ll have you know I’m very self-reflective!”
“And somehow you still have no idea how much fun you are.”
Kanae, who hates the way she blushes and wishes desperately she could avoid it, turns splotchily pink. “Is that a come-on?”
“No, it’s a statement. You’re a lot of fun.” He pokes the back of her shoulder with his shrimp puff dust-coated pointer finger. “And you think you want some dull salaryman with old-man hobbies who calls it making love?”
“What’s wrong with calling it making love?”
“Kochou, c’mon.”
“Just because I’m not like you-“
“You gotta find someone who likes you because you’re the kind of girl who offers to be someone’s fake date for the free dinner.” Tengen reaches over and pats her head. “’cause you’d be just as miserable with some boring, milquetoast suit guy as you would with me.”
She gives him a sour look. “One man’s milquetoast is another woman’s husband material.”
“Yeah, but not yours.”
“Why is this any of your business, Tengen?”
“As your friend-“
“And why should I take any romantic advice from you?”
“Mm…’cause I know what doesn’t work?”
“And what would you know about wanting to settle down, anyhow?”
“Settle down?” Tengen affects shock. “You kill me, Kochou, are you trying to be miserable?”
“What’s so wrong about wanting a nice, stable life, anyhow?”
“Just…be nice and stable with someone who’s crazy about you.”
**
Kanae had requested French food, because if she’s going to go through all of this it might as well be something she’d never pay for herself. And Tengen has to admit it’s sort of fun to walk in with Kanae on his arm wearing black and the perfect vermillion pout of a Showa-era starlet, letting everyone believe they’re glamorous newlyweds or a high-society couple carrying out a scandalous affair. Like having an accomplice. Kanae must be rubbing off on him because he’s liking this whole game of pretend much more than he’d thought.
“I should’ve offered to be your fake date sooner,” she says, and looks up from the menu at him and smiles.
And Tengen thinks: it won’t be him, but there’s some man out there in the world who’ll take one look at that smile and know he’s going to spend the rest of his life with her.
It isn’t a very comfortable thought, because Tengen is entirely accustomed to finding just about everyone likeable and virtually none of them lovable. There is roughly nothing that could make him want to take a girl whose idea of fun is eating cake with her high school mentee to bed, but he thinks all the same that he’d deck anyone who messed with her. It’s a strange and not-quite-welcome feeling. And she herself isn’t helping him sort through it.”
She orders coq au vin and a glass of wine, then looks up at Tengen and studies him for a moment before she asks: “why are you the way you are?”
Tengen raises his eyebrows. “Isn’t that a little existential for a first date?”
“No, I’ve really been thinking about it,” she says. “How is it that you’re sometimes so considerate and others such a cad?”
Tengen snorts. “A cad, Kochou?”
“It’s a very good word.”
“You been watching those old dramas again?”
“…maybe.” Kanae’s cheeks color. “It’s still a good word.”
“If you say so.”
“So answer me, then. Why is it you’ll say something so sweet to me and then turn around and make your poor roommate sleep on the couch so you can have your way with a girl you’ll never speak to again?”
“I never ask him to sleep on the couch.”
Kanae crosses her arms. “What do you expect him to do when you bring home a girl?”
“Uh…I dunno.”
“Because you’re a cad,” Kanae sniffs. “Did I ever tell you I had a project with one of your flings in my anatomy class last semester?”
“And she told you that?”
“No, she just described the guy she was crying over and I put the pieces together.”
“Ah.”
“This is the kind of legacy you’re building, Tengen.” She looks like she might be half-kidding, but definitely no more than half. “And then you’ll go and tell me something you’d only tell me if you really cared about my being happy and I don’t get it.”
“Easy.” Tengen, for effect, takes a long, contemplative sip of his wine before he goes on. “I just usually don’t care.”
“About your roommate?”
“Oh, uh, he’s…he’s all right.”
“That man has the patience of a saint,” Kanae mutters. “I’d have moved out months ago.”
“You would not.”
“The fact that Kyoujurou is even still trying to be your friend blows my mind.” Kanae’s follow-up look is mercilessly unimpressed. “So what gives?”
“What do you mean, what gives?”
“Well? Why are you like this?”
“Can I rain check that one?”
Kanae frowns. This, when she’s wearing red lipstick, is quite effective.
“Sure,” she says. “Fine.”
**
The coq au vin, to Tengen’s credit, is excellent. Kanae’s never had it, but she imagines it’s meant to taste like this, and this pleases her immensely. A happy hum accompanies her last bite and she opens her eyes to find Tengen smiling at her.
“Eh?” she asks.
“You close your eyes when you eat.” She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen his face so unguarded before. “Never noticed that.”
“You’d better not be falling in love with me, Uzui Tengen.”
“Hell no,” he reassures her. “I’m never moving to the ‘burbs.”
“Good, glad to know.”
“Still.”
Kanae looks down at her plate but after a second her eyes flick back up to his. “You think I’m cute.”
“Objective fact. Nothin’ personal.”
“How is that objective?”
“Just is. Dunno what else to say.”
“Do you say that about all your girls?”
“I called you cute, not sexy.”
“I’m not sexy.”
“Hell no,” he repeats.
Kanae’s trying not to smile as she narrows her eyes. “And why’s that?”
“Can’t do all that with a girl who’s got baby names picked out,” he says. “Thinking about you like that makes me queasy.”
“Am I supposed to be insulted or relieved?”
“Relieved, obviously.”
Kanae raises her eyebrows. “Should I be?”
“I don’t go for cute, and you don’t go for…what’s that word you used…?”
“Cads.”
“Yeah, that.”
“Fair enough.”
“Those things don’t mix, I think. Cute and sexy. Different types.” He gestures at her with his fork. “You’ve got to find the kind of guy who doesn’t know the difference.”
“You of all people cannot possibly speak for…” Now Kanae gestures at him with her own fork. “Your entire kind.”
“I know enough.”
“Your mindset is a complete mess.”
“So is yours.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think you want a guy who’s never had an opinion about anything in his life and call it ‘sensible.’”
“I did not say that!”
“Fine, then. What kind of guy would you pick?”
“I don’t have to tell you this.”
“Humor me.”
Kanae sighs. “I don’t know. Someone who remembers things I tell him, and…and…takes good care of things.” She pauses to consider how Tengen might understand this best. “That person at a family reunion who’ll go sit at the kids table on purpose because it’s more fun. Someone who wouldn’t let your plant die when you went away on business.”
“And?”
“This is embarrassing enough already.”
“You tell me and I’ll tell you about the time a girl locked me on her porch in my underwear.”
Kanae raises her eyebrows. “You probably deserved it.”
“You wound me, Kochou.”
“You definitely did.” She smiles, then sighs. “I guess…the type of person who doesn’t try to help me when I didn’t ask for it because he doesn’t look at my leg and see something to protect.”
“Wouldn’t someone who liked you want to do that?”
“Would you?”
“I mean, look how Kyoujurou holds doors for you.”
“Kyoujurou holds doors for everyone.”
“Okay, well, still.”
“And…I don’t know…it’s silly.”
“Is it?”
“To want someone who saw you for the first time and immediately thought, she’s beautiful?”
Tengen takes a second to answer, which makes Kanae regret all the more that she said that in the first place. Then he snorts.
“That one is kinda cringe, not gonna lie.”
Kanae kicks him.
“Ow,” he says acidly. “I said cringe, not unrealistic.”
“What a wonderful clarification, Tengen, thank you so very much.”
“I mean, good on ya if you find it,” he adds. “But, like, because you’re the kinda girl who’d call someone my love and really think she did something.”
Kanae’s face heads. “And what if he happens to find that romantic?”
“Then good for you,” Tengen says. “I just don’t wanna be around to see it.”
“You’re being a cad again.”
“Nah.” He looks very pleased with himself for this. “You’re cute. Objective fact. You’re also cringe. Equally objective fact.”
“What’s cringe is treating sincere enthusiasm like a problem to be fixed,” Kanae sniffs.
“Hey, man, I never said I didn’t like people who were kinda cringe.”
“Wow. Thank you so much for that equally wonderful clarification.”
**
Tengen has to order her tarte tatin after this.
He does not like tarte tatin, or really anything sweet, but it starts to look tasty after a few minutes of watching Kanae eat in vengeful silence. He steals a bite. She glares at him but doesn’t smack his fork away.
“Not bad,” he remarks.
“Tengen.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you have enough money to bribe these people to give me an extra piece of this to take home?”
Ordering takeout at a place like this is a preposterous suggestion, let alone of something as labor-intensive as a tarte tatin, and the idea that his money is simply hers for the night is a stretch to say the least. But it also makes him laugh, and there is not a great deal capable of doing that.
Arrangements are made. A second slice is requested so Kanroji can have some, because it gets into Kanae’s head at the eleventh hour that she would like it. And she gets it, of course, with that lipstick-stained starlet smile, because she’s Kanae and when it’s Kanae it simply makes sense.
Kanae, Tengen thinks, is going to meet a man someday who loses his head with abandon at his first glimpse of this side of her, the one that is no longer playing at responsible adulthood and admits wholeheartedly the stupid thing she thinks or wants to do. And that man is going to adore this woman. There will be many children and at least a few large, boisterous dogs. Neither of them will be able to keep their hands off the other and no one will think it at all strange or unnatural that he only ever calls it making love.
His father would hate her. She’s earnest and a little silly and she needs a cane to walk and her parents, however respectable, are dead. She’d pelt a man with every shoe in her house as he ran for his life if he so much as considered running around on her even once. And she’s not the type Tengen favors, slick and knowledgeable and none too concerned about the state of anybody’s heart. But she’s special all the same.
She had better find the dweeb she’s meant to spend her life with and she had better find him soon.
Then Tengen, carrying two boxes of tarte tatin in his free hand, realizes exactly how soft he must be going and shakes his head.
He would say, generally, that he enjoys the company of women he isn’t looking to sleep with more than just about anybody else. But they have the most curious way of worming their way into his brain and turning it to mush, and this one – he looks down at Kanae on his arm, smiling and inclining her head at every staffer they pass – is the worst of the lot.
He wasn’t brought up that way, to think of people as precious, to feel protectiveness or affection. Certainly not to see the lovability in any of them. And Kanae is terrible for his killer instinct. But she’s sort of doing him a favor, and everything she does is so damn unexpected in such an entertaining way that he can barely begrudge her for making him feel things he shouldn’t.
“Yannow,” he says, “I don’t think this is gonna work out between us.”
Kanae leans her head against his shoulder and laughs.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think it will.”
**
Kanae can feel Mitsuri’s eyes on her back as she takes off her earrings and hangs them carefully from the stand on her vanity, and not until she’s finished does she turn in her chair.
“Mitsuri-chan,” she says, fond but exasperated, arms crossed, “Tengen does not have feelings for me.”
“But-!”
“I offered because he was an idiot and told his dad he had a girlfriend. We had a nice time, he can’t have a five-minute conversation with a woman without managing to bring up sex, and I wish him all the happiness in the world, but I don’t feel like spending my day off at the divorce court.” She smiles. “The food was delicious, though.”
This does not quite Mitsuri’s protestations, but the extra slice of tarte tatin does. Her eyes widen and her cheeks flush with perfunctory pleasure when she sees it, more so when she returns from the kitchen with the box still warm from the microwave. And she wiggles her shoulders in delight at the first bite of it.
If nothing else, Kanae thinks, it was worth it for that – a little chance to make her dear friends smile.
“I also don’t like muscle guys,” she informs Mitsuri, when she’s gotten used enough to the tarte tatin that she isn’t occupied anymore in making happy sounds with each bite. “I’m more into that lean cardio-guy build.”
“Mm, fair, I guess.”
“But,” she says, “free dessert.”
They clink forks.
Yes – if only for this, tonight was worth it.