Chapter Text
The thing about being the sole heir to the Gojo conglomerate was that nobody ever warned you about the ties.
Not the metaphorical kind—though those were terrible too, a thousand invisible strings connecting Yuuta to boardrooms and quarterly reports and a family legacy that felt tangled and suffocating—but the literal, physical, silk-and-thread kind. The kind his uncle Satoru kept gifting him with the breezy energy of a man who had never once in his life worried about money and could not fathom why anyone else would.
“This one’s from Milan,” Satoru had announced last week, draping a strip of pale blue Italian silk over Yuuta’s shoulder like he was decorating a Christmas tree. “Hand-stitched. Limited run. Very expensive. Don’t make that face, Yuuta.”
Yuuta had made the face anyway.
And now the tie was dying.
It had happened so fast. One moment, Yuuta was sitting at his desk at 10 PM, dutifully reviewing notes for tomorrow’s corporate finance lecture—ironic, considering his family owned several of the companies in the textbook—with a cup of dark roast balanced on a stack of folders because his desk was too cluttered to hold both a mug and a human being’s will to live. The next moment, his elbow had caught the edge of the cup on a particularly aggressive page-turn. The coffee had launched itself with a trajectory so precise, so targeted, that it bypassed the folders, the laptop, the open textbook, and his entire body to land squarely, exclusively, on the tie hanging over the back of his chair.
Yuuta had watched it happen in slow motion. The arc of dark liquid. The graceful splatter pattern across pale blue silk. The way the stain spread like a bruise, seeping into the weave with the quiet finality of something that could not be undone.
He’d lunged for it, of course. He’d grabbed it off the chair and held it under the desk lamp like a surgeon examining a wound, turning it over in his hands, reviewing the damage. The stain was massive—a dark, ugly bloom that covered most of the front panel, soaking through to the lining. The silk had already begun to pucker where the hot liquid had warped the fibers, and when Yuuta pressed a tentative thumb to the edge of the stain, the fabric felt stiff and wrong beneath his skin.
“No, no, no, no—”
He’d blotted it with a napkin. That made it worse. He’d held it under the bathroom faucet for two panicked seconds before remembering that you were absolutely, specifically not supposed to put silk under running water. He’d tried dabbing it with a damp cloth, which accomplished nothing except spreading the stain more. He’d briefly considered calling Satoru, imagined the conversation—"Uncle, I destroyed the Milan tie”, “Which Milan tie, I’ve given you nine”—and decided he would rather die.
So now it was 12:20 AM. The tie was draped over his desk chair as evidence of his crime. Yuuta was sitting cross-legged on his bed in a t-shirt and boxers, laptop open on his knees, running on his third cup of the very coffee that had started this catastrophe, his apartment dark except for the pale glow of the screen.
Google it was.
how to remove coffee stain from silk tie
The results were not encouraging. The first link was a 2014 forum post recommending “just throwing it in the washing machine on gentle cycle,” which had elicited 17 replies, ranging from mild horror to outright disgust. The second was a WikiHow article with step-by-step instructions that included the phrase “scrub vigorously with a toothbrush” alongside a cartoon illustration of a cheerful stick figure doing exactly that to what appeared to be a napkin, not a three-hundred-thousand-yen strip of hand-stitched Italian silk. The third was a YouTube video where a woman with the energy of a drill sergeant brandished a bottle of white vinegar at the camera and proclaimed that it could remove “literally any stain from literally any fabric”, a claim Yuuta did not trust for reasons he could not articulate but felt deeply in his bones.
He scrolled further. A blog post about club soda. A Reddit thread where every single response contradicted the one before it. A sketchy-looking cleaning product website with a before-and-after photo that was so obviously Photoshopped that the “after” tie wasn’t even the same color as the “before” tie.
Yuuta rubbed his eyes. His vision was blurring. The cursor drifted aimlessly across the screen as his focus slipped, dragging through a wasteland of sidebar ads and pop-ups he’d long stopped seeing—weight loss supplements, mobile games, a flashing banner for something that promised to “CHANGE YOUR LIFE TONIGHT” in aggressive red font—
His thumb slipped on the trackpad.
He felt the click before he registered it, that tiny haptic tap of the pad depressing under the meat of his thumb, and by the time his brain caught up with his hand, the screen had already changed.
A new tab. Dark background, sleek interface, a layout of thumbnails and categories, and a navigation bar that immediately and unmistakably screamed that this was not a tie-cleaning tutorial. The color scheme was dark plum and black. The thumbnails were—
Yuuta’s entire face went hot.
“Oh no,” he whispered to his empty apartment. “Oh, no no no—”
He quickly reached for the mouse to close the tab. The cursor found the little X in the corner, hovering, ready to click, already composing the apology he would give to absolutely no one—to God, maybe, or to the concept of dignity in general—for accidentally seeing a website he was not supposed to—
And then a sound came through his laptop speakers.
The tab had auto-loaded a featured stream, one of those platform spotlights that started playing the moment you landed on the page, and the first thing that came through—before the video even finished buffering, before the image resolved from a blur of warm light and pale skin into anything recognizable—was a sound.
It was a sigh.
It was soft and low and a little raspy, like the exhale had scraped against something tender on its way out. It bled through the microphone with a warmth and closeness that meant the speaker was right there—lips nearly touching the mic, breath ghosting across the mesh in a way that made the audio feel three-dimensional, as if the sound was right next to Yuuta’s ear, pressing gently against the inside of his skull.
It was barely a sound at all. Just air, shaped into something that felt, inexplicably, impossibly, like being touched.
Yuuta’s hand froze on the mouse.
His cursor hovered over the X but he didn’t click.
The video finished buffering.
The stream was not what Yuuta expected. He wasn’t sure what he had expected—something garish, maybe, or aggressive, the kind of over-lit, in-your-face performance he associated vaguely with the concept of adult streaming, not that he had any frame of reference, not that he had ever—
This wasn’t that.
The username read Inumaki_T in clean white font against the dark interface, and beneath it, a viewer count climbing steadily past 800. The camera showed a boy—probably around Yuuta’s age, maybe a year or two younger—with silver hair that fell messily across his forehead, catching the warm golden light of a ring lamp just off-screen. The background was minimal: a plain dark wall, the blurred flicker of fairy lights strung along a headboard, the edge of what might have been a pillow. It looked like a bedroom. It looked intimate.
The boy was wearing an oversized cream-colored knit sweater.
It hung off one shoulder, baring the clean line of a collarbone and the pale, smooth slope of skin beneath it. The neckline dipped low enough to make it very, very clear there was nothing underneath, just bare skin disappearing into soft wool, and the faintest shadow of a clavicle that the warm light turned golden.
The sweater was big enough to swallow him. He’d pulled the sleeves down over his hands so only his fingertips peeked out. The hem pooled in his lap. The overall effect was something that shouldn’t have worked on a platform like this—cozy, almost innocent, like someone curled up on a rainy afternoon—except that every few seconds the fabric shifted when he moved, slipping another half an inch, almost revealing what was underneath, and the almost was doing a tremendous amount of heavy lifting.
His face was—
Yuuta swallowed. His throat clicked.
—devastating. There was no other word. Yuuta’s sleep-deprived brain wasn’t capable of finding a more sophisticated one, so devastating it was. The boy had a sharp jaw and full lips, slightly parted, the lower one bitten pink. His pale violet eyes framed by lashes so long they cast actual shadows on his cheekbones when he blinked at the camera. He had two faint marks on his cheeks—tattoos? makeup?—small, symmetrical lines at the corners of his mouth that gave him a vaguely feline look, like a cat that knew exactly how pretty it was and had long since decided to use this information for evil.
He looked like he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed and hadn’t bothered to fix himself. All soft edges and bedroom warmth and a quiet, unbothered confidence that translated perfectly through the screen.
The chat was moving at a pace that suggested Yuuta was not the only person on this platform to have noticed.
Hundreds of messages scrolling in real time. All were either thirsty, adoring, desperate, or flat-out unhinged. There were combinations of emojis Yuuta didn’t understand, and a few he did understand and immediately wished he hadn’t. Usernames in every color competing for attention, the text moving so fast that Yuuta could barely read anything.
This was a camboy site. That was a camboy. Yuuta, the heir to the Gojo conglomerate, was sitting in his boxers at nearly two in the morning, watching a—
A robotic, text-to-speech voice filled the stream.
“Thanks for the sub, ghostpep99. Appreciate it.”
Yuuta blinked.
The TTS was a standard computer-generated voice, genderless and pleasant, the kind you’d hear giving directions on a GPS. On screen, Inumaki_T didn’t speak. He just lifted one sweater-pawed hand in a small, lazy wave. Actually, it was more like a two-fingered salute, really, his index and middle finger flicking outward in a gesture so casual it bordered on dismissive. His eyes curved into a faint smile that didn’t quite reach his lips. The gesture was charming in a way that felt both effortless and completely deliberate.
More messages poured in. More TTS responses. The chat was begging—pleading—for him to do various things that made Yuuta’s ears turn the color of a fire hydrant and his soul attempt to leave his body. Inumaki_T responded to all of it through the text-to-speech, completely unbothered by the nature of those requests, his face steady as if he was reading a grocery list:
“Patience. We’ll get there.”
“You’re so demanding tonight. I like it.”
“Hmm, that one’s creative. Points for effort.”
“You want me to what? At least buy me dinner first.”
He typed the responses and let the robot voice say them, and somehow the dissonance between the filthy, desperate requests and the pleasant, emotionless TTS readback was funny—dry and deadpan in a way that shouldn’t have worked but absolutely did. The chat clearly loved it, because the laughing emojis flew just as fast as the heart-eyes, and there was a rhythm to the whole thing, a kind of comedy built on the gap between what the audience wanted and the infuriatingly calm way the streamer acknowledged it.
On screen, Inumaki_T’s lips twitched into a small self-satisfied grin, but he still didn’t speak. He communicated through TTS, small gestures, the tilt of his head, and the movement of his hands.
For example, a pointed look at the camera when someone said something particularly bold, one eyebrow raised just a fraction. Or an exaggerated eye-roll when someone’s request crossed the line from horny into absurd. Or a chin propped on one sweater-covered palm, fingertips tapping thoughtfully against his own cheek, like he was genuinely considering the proposition instead of performing consideration.
Every movement was intentional. Every expression was curated. He had the audience in the palm of his hand, and he knew it, and the knowing was half the appeal—this gorgeous, silent boy who could have given them anything and instead gave them exactly what he wanted to, at the pace he chose, and dared them to be grateful.
He was magnetic without ever saying a word out loud. Everything was completely and devastatingly in his control.
Yuuta should have closed the tab.
He absolutely should have closed the tab. The tie was still ruined, draped over his chair like a silk casualty of war. He still had a lecture in six hours. He was crouched in bed with his laptop balanced on his knees and his blanket pulled up to his chin like a child hiding from a thunderstorm, and he was watching a camboy stream that he had found by accident, and this was not—he was not the kind of person who—he had never—
He stayed.
He stayed, and he couldn’t even say why, except that the silence made everything louder.
The soft lo-fi music was playing in the background, a hazy beat with no vocals that floated beneath the stream. The barely-there rustle of fabric moved against skin when the streamer moved—the sweater slipping another inch down his shoulder, the hem riding up just enough to flash a strip of bare thigh before he tugged it back down with a teasing hand, fingertips dragging slowly across his own skin like an afterthought. Yuuta heard the faint creak of the bed when he shifted his weight and the rustling sound of sheets.
And beneath all of it, threading through the gaps, was the sound of breathing.
It was not a performative nor exaggerated breathing like the ASMR videos Yuuta had seen and hated. It was just the natural, quiet rhythm of a person sitting close to a very good microphone—close enough that every micro-sound was captured with startling fidelity. An inhale caught slightly at the top, a tiny hitch in the throat. An exhale softened at the edges, tapering into something almost fragile and a little shaky sometimes when he shifted in certain ways.
It was the most distracting thing Yuuta had ever heard in his life, and the boy wasn’t even trying.
Yuuta pressed his face into his pillow and tried to remember how his own lungs worked.
It went on like this for what felt like hours but was probably thirty minutes. Maybe forty. Time had stopped meaning anything. The chat hit donation goals one by one. The progress bar rose in the corner of the screen. Inumaki_T delivered on each milestone.
The first goal unlocked what the chat called “sweater weather.”
Inumaki_T glanced at the progress bar, then back at the camera, and the TTS said, flatly: “A deal’s a deal.”
Then, he uncurled from his sitting position—he’d been cross-legged on what was clearly a bed, sheets pooled around him carelessly—and shifted onto his knees. The movement was unhurried, almost lazy. The sweater rode up his thighs as he moved, revealing the long lines of his legs and the barest glimpse of black sleep shorts nearly hidden beneath the hem.
The chat erupted. He ignored them. He reached down with both hands, gripped the hem of the sweater, and pulled it up—slowly, agonizingly slowly—until it cleared his ribs. The smooth plane of his stomach caught the warm light, the faintest definition of muscle visible beneath soft skin. He held it there for exactly three seconds, the fabric bunched in his fists, his mouth curved into a small, unbearable smile, violet eyes bright with amusement.
Then he dropped it back down.
The TTS said: “Oops. Slipped.”
The chat rioted. Someone donated ¥3,000 out of what appeared to be pure rage. The TTS read: “Frustration donations are my favorite kind. Thank you.”
Yuuta was going to combust. He was going to spontaneously ignite, and they would find his ashes in this bed, and his browser history would be on the laptop, and he would die twice—once from the fire and once from the embarrassment.
He almost closed the tab then. He actually moved the cursor back to the X, his hand shaking slightly, his conscience screaming at him that this was someone’s livelihood and he was lurking without even a username and he should either close the tab like a decent human being or leave like a decent human being or—
Inumaki_T yawned.
It was completely unscripted—a real yawn, caught mid-stream. His mouth opened just enough to show the pink of his tongue before he covered it with one sweater-pawed hand. His eyes squeezed shut, and his nose scrunched. In those two seconds, he wasn’t a performer, or a camboy, or a carefully curated fantasy. He was just a boy in an oversized sweater, yawning because he was tired. It was so disarmingly cute that Yuuta’s cursor drifted away from the X without his permission.
The TTS said: “Sorry. Long day. Where were we?”
The chat flooded with heart emojis. Someone typed: “PROTECT HIM AT ALL COSTS”. Someone else typed: “marry me immediately please”. Yuuta, who agreed with both sentiments more than he was comfortable admitting, sank lower into his blanket cocoon and accepted his fate.
The second goal was more intense. Inumaki_T shifted to lie on his stomach beneath the slightly elevated camera, propping himself up on his elbows, so the audience was looking just a little down at him—at the sharp line of his jaw, the sweep of his lashes, the way his lips parted when he let out a sigh that the microphone turned into something obscene.
The sweater had ridden up in the back. He reached behind himself with one hand to tug it down. The hand stayed for way longer than needed, his fingers trailing along his own lower back, his spine dipping into a subtle arch that made the fabric stretch tight across his shoulders before he let it fall loose again.
Then he let himself sink lower into the sheets, stretching his arms above his head until the sweater rode up again, causing the chat to fill the screen with thirsty emojis in a matter of seconds. When he pushed back onto one elbow, he trailed a hand up his own neck, fingertips pressing lightly into the skin just below his jaw. He tipped his head back to give the camera an unobstructed view of his throat—smooth and vulnerably bare, the movement of a swallow visible beneath the skin.
He gave them exactly enough and not an inch more. Every reveal was a negotiation, every inch of skin a currency he spent with precision. The sweater came completely off one shoulder, and the chat exploded. He let them look for exactly long enough before pulling it back up with a smirk that the camera barely caught. He ran his fingers through his own hair and tipped his head to one side, and the movement bared the curve of his ear and the skin behind it. Yuuta’s ears burned when he saw that because that somehow felt worse than anything else—the hidden places that the camera wasn’t supposed to reach.
At one point, Inumaki_T picked up a water bottle from somewhere off-screen and took a sip. A single drop escaped the corner of his mouth—intentional or not, Yuuta couldn’t tell, and at this point, he wasn’t sure it mattered—and it trailed down his chin to the line of his throat. He caught it with his thumb, then brought the thumb to his lips and licked it. The TTS said pleasantly, “Staying hydrated. You should too.” The chat collectively ascended to a higher plane of existence.
And through it all, he didn’t say a single word out loud. The TTS maintained its pleasant narration in a teasing, flirtatious, wickedly funny tone. His face and hands did the rest. And somehow that silence, that control, made the whole thing feel unbearably intimate. Like every sound that did escape—every breath, every rustle, every tiny involuntary noise—was a secret the microphone had stolen. Like being let into a private room where someone had chosen to perform for everyone but speak for no one.
Then a donation came through.
The alert popped up on screen with a cheerful chime—¥30,000 from koi_king_92—and the chat rippled with impressed emojis and congratulatory spam. A decent sum. Generous, even by normal streaming standards.
On screen, Inumaki_T stilled.
He’d been mid-gesture, one hand trailing along his own collarbone, fingertips dipping just beneath the neckline of the sweater, when he stopped. His fingers rested against the base of his throat, and he looked directly into the camera.
The chat went quiet. The messages still trickled in, but the frantic pace had slowed, an audience holding its collective breath. They knew what was coming. Yuuta didn’t, but the shift in energy was palpable, even through a screen.
Inumaki_T tilted his head just slightly. A gesture so small it might have been unconscious. His lips parted, and he spoke.
“Thank you.”
Two words.
His voice was low and a little rough. It came through the microphone with a closeness that made Yuuta’s stomach drop straight through the mattress, this soft, careful murmur spoken into the mic like a confession. Like a secret meant for one person that eight hundred people happened to overhear. The rasp caught on the th and lingered on the you, dragging it out half a beat longer than necessary, the vowel stretching warm and slow like honey pulled from a spoon. His lips barely moved when he said it, and his eyes crinkled at the corner, pleased and heavy-lidded. For one impossible second, he looked directly into the camera, and Yuuta saw those eyes, and—
Yuuta made a sound.
It was not a dignified sound. It was a strangled, choked, half-swallowed thing—the kind of sound a man makes when he has just discovered something very important and very inconvenient about himself at nearly one in the morning, alone in his apartment, hiding under a blanket, on a website he found by accident.
His face was on fire. His ears burned. The back of his neck burned. His heart was hammering against his ribs like it was trying to escape, and his hands had gone clammy against the laptop keyboard, and all the boy had done was say thank you. Two words. Two syllables. Delivered in a voice that had absolutely no business sounding like that—like honey and smoke and the last warm breath before sleep, like something designed in a laboratory specifically to make Okkotsu Yuuta lose his entire mind.
“Oh,” Yuuta said faintly to no one. “Oh, I’m in trouble.”
He watched the rest of the stream with the blanket pulled fully over his head, peering at the screen through a gap he held open with trembling fingers like he was watching a horror movie he couldn’t look away from. His coffee had gone cold on the desk. The tie was still dying on the chair. His 7 AM alarm was set and waiting like a guillotine. None of this mattered. Nothing in the world mattered except the sounds coming through his laptop speakers and the devastating boy making them.
The pattern became devastatingly clear within minutes.
Inumaki_T used text-to-speech for everything, from chat interactions and flirting to teasing, dirty talk, and audience management. All filtered through the robotic voice while he performed on camera in devastating, exquisite silence. He was magnetic and funny and filthy without ever opening his mouth. His body, his face, and his hands did the talking, and the TTS filled in the rest.
His real voice was reserved only for big donations. The ones that crossed a certain threshold that Yuuta hadn’t quite pinpointed yet, but that the chat clearly understood, because every time a large sum came through, the messages slowed with anticipation, waiting. And then Inumaki_T would pause whatever he was doing, letting his hands go still and looking directly at the camera, before he’d say, with that devastating raspy voice, two simple words, “Thank you”, to the mic.
Sometimes it came with a name. “Thank you, mochimaru”. Sometimes, with a tiny addition that made the chat go feral: “Thank you for the support”. Once, he added a quiet “You’re sweet” at the end, barely above a whisper, and Yuuta watched three people in the chat announce that they were literally deceased.
And once—this was the one that nearly killed Yuuta, the one that made him press his face so hard into his pillow he briefly couldn’t breathe—there was a soft, breathy laugh that preceded it. Just a quiet huff of air, surprised and warm, like the donation message had genuinely caught him off guard. And the thank came out on the tail end of that chuckle, half-swallowed and rough and so real it didn’t sound like performance anymore. It sounded like a boy in his bedroom, laughing softly, thanking someone he meant it for.
The chat lost its collective mind.
Yuuta understood. God, did he understand.
When the stream was about to end, Inumaki_T tugged his sweater back into place with a stretch, his spine a smooth curve. He didn’t bother to hide his yawn before waving at the camera with two lazy fingers while the TTS chirped a cheerful “Goodnight, everyone. Same time tomorrow. Hydrate”. His lips curved into a satisfied little smile. And the screen turned black.
Yuuta was lying flat on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling, laptop still open on his chest, completely and utterly destroyed. He lay there for a long time. The ceiling of his apartment was very white and very boring, and he stared at it like it held the answers to questions he wasn’t brave enough to ask.
The stream’s end screen glowed softly from his chest—a simple page with an idle background animation of a white cat licking its paw and Inumaki_T’s schedule, his tip menu, a few social links, and a small bio that read: “voice requests will be ignored ♡”. Yuuta read that sentence four times. He felt, distantly, like he’d been hit by a car.
His pulse was still too fast. His face was still hot. There was a feeling in his chest like a fist slowly unclenching, and he didn’t know what to do with it, so he just lay there and breathed and thought about the sound of someone else breathing and how that had apparently been enough to rewire his entire brain chemistry in under an hour.
The apartment was silent. Outside, Tokyo hummed its early morning mixture of sounds: distant taxis, the faint rattle of the train, the particular quality of quiet that only existed in a city that never fully slept. Yuuta’s desk lamp was still on. The coffee mug sat cold and forgotten next to his textbook, a dark ring already forming on the page beneath it. Another stain that he couldn’t bring himself to care about.
He closed the stream tab. Opened it again. Closed it. Pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw stars, then opened the tab one more time, just to read the bio again.
He closed the tab for good this time and lay back down.
He had a voice kink.
He had a voice kink. He’d discovered it at 2:30 AM on a camboy site he’d found by accidentally clicking an ad while trying to save a coffee-stained tie. And the voice in question belonged to a beautiful stranger who did unspeakable things on camera in complete silence and communicated primarily through a text-to-speech robot and devastating eye contact.
More than that, of all the things on that stream that should have wrecked Yuuta—and there were many, an objectively overwhelming number of things involving bare skin and suggestive angles and the kind of body language that would make a poet weep—the thing that had actually broken his brain was two whispered words of thank you.
This was fine. This was completely fine.
Yuuta pressed both palms over his burning face and groaned into the dark.
He should close the laptop, then go to sleep, and forget this ever happened. He would wake up tomorrow—in five hours, God—and attend his lecture. Then he would call the dry cleaner about the tie, and never, ever think about the way a stranger’s voice had made his entire nervous system short-circuit like a cheap fuse box in a rainstorm.
Instead—because Yuuta was, at his core, a deeply, profoundly, irredeemably foolish man—he sat up, pulled the laptop back onto his knees, and opened the streamer’s profile page.
Everything was still as he left them. The stream was still offline. The end screen was still playing the same idle animation. The donate button sat there, pale grey and unassuming, requiring no account to use.
He would not click it.
He thought about thank you, murmured low and soft into a microphone. The rasp of it. The sweetness of it.
He clicked it and stared blankly at the interface. The clock at the edge of his screen read 2:41 AM, and the morning was going to be a disaster, and his fingers were hovering over the keyboard anyway.
The minimum donation was ¥500. The chat had established, through collective experience, that the voice came out at the higher tiers—¥30,000 and above seemed to be the consensus. But the stream was already offline. Any donation now would just sit there, a notification waiting for the next broadcast. It wouldn’t trigger a live response. There was absolutely no logical reason to do this. Zero. Yuuta could not construct a single rational argument for what he was about to do.
He typed ¥29,000 into the box.
His thumb hovered over the send button. He stared at the number for a long time.
He thought about the fact that this was, by any reasonable metric, an insane amount of money to give to a stranger on the internet because their voice had made him feel like his skeleton was trying to crawl out of his body. He thought about Uncle Satoru’s black card, linked to the family account, which had a monthly allowance that could generously be described as “more money than most people see in a year” and which Satoru had described, verbatim, as “pocket change, Yuuta, buy yourself something fun, you’re twenty-one, and you live like a monk, it’s honestly depressing.”
He thought about that laugh, that tiny, surprised huff of air before the thank you.
He thought about you’re sweet, barely above a whisper.
He hit send.
The confirmation screen popped up with a shower of digital confetti: ¥29,000 donated to Inumaki_T! 🎉
Yuuta slammed his laptop shut so hard the screen wobbled. He shoved it under his pillow like evidence at a crime scene and yanked the blanket over his entire body until he was a shapeless, overheated lump in the middle of his king-sized bed—a bed that was, itself, absurdly expensive, because everything in his life was absurdly expensive, because he was the heir to a financial empire and he had just spent that empire’s pocket change on a camboy—
He pressed his burning face into the mattress and thought to himself.
That was the only time. That was a one-time thing. That will never happen again.
He meant it. He genuinely, completely meant it.
At 3:12 AM, Yuuta reached out from underneath his blanket for his phone on the nightstand and set a second alarm—fifteen minutes before the next stream started.
The tie never did get cleaned.