Chapter Text
i. winter
(broken hearts in a drawer)
Shinazugawa Sanemi checks his fitbit, notes that it’s fifteen minutes past the designated appointment time, and promptly texts his assistant: tell the bride we’re no longer planning her wedding.
Genya texts him back so quickly he doesn’t even have a chance to stick the phone back in his pocket, fitbit and the device in hand vibrating and dinging in synchrony. Sanemi rolls his eyes so hard he thinks they may fall out of his head when he reads: Why can’t you do it?
And Genya, always one to multi-text since he can’t seem to come up with each of his thoughts and send them in one go, follows it up quickly with: You know I hate having to disappoint people :( :( :(
Sanemi slams the binders and scrapbooks—all of which he’ll have to dispose of, now—into his backpack with an ill controlled fury, though he isn’t sure who it’s directed at. The bride, for breaking the contract; his brother, for getting on his nerves at ten AM; or himself, for allowing any of this to happen in the first place.
Why did I decide to become a wedding planner? he wonders. What possessed me?
To Genya, he sends: you know we have a late show, two strikes cancellation policy in the contracts. now call the bride and tell her she violated it.
He’s pretty sure Genya’s sitting on his phone and not working on the other two wedding’s they’re planning, because he gets back almost immediately: but :( why :( me :(
The messages come in three separate texts, and Sanemi thinks about throwing his phone into traffic. Instead, he texts his brother-turned-assistant back: because it’s part of your job, and turns his phone onto Do Not Disturb.
Remembering to grab his tea from the table top on the way out, he leaves the shop: He has an hour and forty three minutes before his next appointment for the day, and about a hundred and ten things to do between now and then. Mostly administrative duties: emails he’s been putting off for days, things he needs to shift on his calendar, action items for other weddings he needs to double check.
Of course he’s going to use the canceled time to catch up on other tasks. Yes, he’s going to lose money because of his own policies, but he’s been in the business long enough to know that other brides will come to him quickly. His services are a commodity, and he’s one of the best wedding planners in this part of Japan; people need him, people want him, even if they don’t necessarily like him.
Outside, the sidewalk is crowded. People walk nearly shoulder to shoulder in the winter cold, many of them hatted and scarved and heavily coated.
Sanemi walks with his light jacket slung over his shoulder, piping hot tea in one hand and his phone in the other, eyes flicking between the screen of the device and the flow of foot traffic every few seconds so he can avoid running into anyone.
He’s blocks away from the pastry shop and about six emails deep when he looks up about a half second too late to step out of the way of someone else on their phone, also not paying attention.
He makes an aborted move, as if it’s going to help him avoid crashing chest first into the person coming at him.
He and the oncomer come together in a spectacular fashion, tea drenching their fronts and their phones; the man Sanemi barrelled into falls backward onto the sidewalk, Sanemi going down with him. He has the wherewithal to throw his hands out in an attempt to break his fall, landing hard on his knees, one elbow on one side of the man’s face and his other hand, palm flat and phone skittering across the pavement, on the other side.
Winded and breathless, Sanemi breathes in a shuddering breath as he tries to get his wits about him, vision swimming.
He’s about to apologize to the man beneath him, offer to help him up, buy him a new cup of tea, possibly cover the cost of his phone, when his vision clears.
“Uh,” he manages, throat feeling as though it’s closing up.
“Please get off of me,” his ex-boyfriend says, face devoid of emotion, hands carefully pressed against his sides.
Sanemi scrambles to his feet, the memory of Giyuu’s face so close to his—again—pressed into the back of his eyes like a brand. The right knee of his jeans are torn, blood leaking into the fabric, and the palm of his hand is hamburger. The elbow he landed on aches fiercely, and though he can’t see it, he’s pretty sure he’s torn a hole in the sleeve of his shirt, too.
Giyuu rises from the ground gingerly, dusting himself off, and Sanemi wonders why—why—out of all of the people he could have physically mowed down in this city, it had to be his ex-boyfriend. The very last person on the entire goddamn earth that he would ever want to see again.
Sanemi watches quietly, unsure of what to do, as Giyuu then retrieves his phone—screen cracked straight down the middle—from the ground, and his empty, battered paper tea cup.
Once he’s gotten his things together, Giyuu gives him one long, measured look, nods at him, and then keeps heading in the direction Sanemi had come from, as though nothing had happened. As though they haven’t spoken in six long, excruciating months. As if Sanemi had thought he’d never see him again, even if they do live in the same big, wide city and run in the same small circles.
After a few agonizing seconds, Sanemi picks his jaw up off of the sidewalk, followed by his bag and his phone. Gives himself another three seconds to properly pull himself together before checking his fitbit and doing the math—he has just enough time to run back to his apartment and change before his next meeting, which is at . . .
He brings up the hand that holds his phone to check his calendar in order to reorient himself and ground himself back in his world, back in the world he’s carefully reconstructed without Giyuu in it.
His phone screen is cracked into a million little pieces, a chunk of it missing, the rest of it lit up in a rainbow.
Under his breath, Sanemi says, “Fuck.”
He knows he’s going to have to make time, somewhere, to go and buy a new phone. He doesn’t have a back up stored anywhere in his office, but all of his data is stored in the cloud.
Worse yet, he doesn't have a way to call Genya and tell him what happened, or what he needs, because Genya could go and get him a new phone while Sanemi goes and changes his clothes and goes about his business of running their small, if noteworthy, company.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Grinding his teeth, Sanemi sets out on the path before him, shoving his broken phone into his bag. No use worrying about it now; he knows the general outline of his day, knows when and where he should be and at what time. He can double check it when he goes to change his clothes.
It’ll be fine.
Everything.
Will be.
Fine.
Giyuu makes it a full block and a half before he allows himself to even think about what happened.
Yes, he hadn’t been paying attention, too busy trying to solve a puzzle that wasn’t clicking together in his head on his phone to watch where he was going. A mistake he won’t repeat, surely.
But did it really have to be him? Did the universe have to collude against him, specifically, for him to end up entangled with the worst decision of his life on the sidewalk?
Certainly, his work life is going well enough. He’s the most sought after match maker in the country, his calendar is booked, he’s constantly busy taking on new clients as he offboards happy couples. Everything is going great there.
It’s his personal life that’s in shambles, and seeing Sanemi today helped nothing. Some might say that six months should have been more than long enough to get over him, to get over them, and Giyuu had thought that he was improving. That things were getting better, that he was just about ready to get back out there and try again, for himself.
Oh, how foolish he was. The incident on the sidewalk minutes ago has only reminded him of how little he’s grown in the last six months, how little he’s healed. Of how much further he has to go.
His back and his butt hurt from where he landed, and he knows he’s lucky he got away with a half spilled cup of tea and a damp jacket. Dented emotions, right now, are the least of his worries.
He raises his phone to check the time, only to find that the device has been cracked straight down the middle of the screen.
And the lockscreen, a picture of some kind of beetle, isn’t his.
He comes to an abrupt stop in the middle of the sidewalk, heart thundering in his chest as he glares at the phone in his hand. He was so, so sure he had picked up his own phone. So certain he had grabbed the right one.
Worse, he’s almost late to his appointment. He doesn't have time to turn around and track down Sanemi—Sanemi, who he knows keeps his entire life in the phone Giyuu holds in his hands. He’s practically lost without the thing, and the urge to go and return it immediately rises up in him like the tide, fierce and all consuming.
Giyuu tamps it down. Controls it. He has more important matters to attend to than returning his ex’s phone; though, he knows that if he has Sanemi’s phone, that means that Sanemi likely has his. Returning it as soon as possible would benefit the both of them.
But first: his appointment.
He starts to jog lightly towards his destination—Tomioka Giyuu has a reputation to uphold, and being late even by a few minutes wouldn’t help anything. He’s going to make it, mostly on time, even if he is a little scuffed up and covered in his ex boyfriend’s tea.
He makes it to the door of the tea shop an entire ninety seconds past the time he was supposed to be there, hands a little clammy and his heart racing. He hates being late, knows it sets a bad precedent, sets off warning bells in his head almost like nothing else.
Taking a deep breath in an attempt to calm himself—which works, halfway—he opens the door and steps inside, depositing his crumpled, miraculously still half-full paper cup into the bin beside the door before scanning the room for the couple he’s supposed to meet.
Mitsuri and Obanai sit at a corner table, scarves wrapped around their necks, steaming mugs of tea on the table in front of them. There’s a third mug of hot tea on the table top, placed at one of the chairs directly across from them, and Giyuu knows without a doubt that it’s for him.
He lingers for a moment longer just inside the entryway by the bin, studying them. They look ridiculously happy, wide smile on Mitsuri’s round face, a look of love so deep in Iguro’s eyes it makes Giyuu ache.
He really, really didn’t need that encounter on the sidewalk this morning.
Shaking himself out of his thoughts, he ventures deeper into the shop, ambling up to the table and sitting down quietly, placing the phone on the tabletop with the ruined screen down.
Somehow, Mitsuri’s smile grows brighter at the sight of him, green eyes sparkling in the soft light of the tea shop. “Giyuu!” she crows, throwing her hands in the air and nearly upsetting her mug of tea in the process. Obanai is quick enough, knows his girlfriend well enough, to reach out and steady the mug before it topples completely over, only a small spot of liquid sloshing over the rim. “You made it!”
Giyuu nods, wrapping his cold hands around the warm cup in front of him, then slides his gaze to Obanai, who’s eyeballing the wet spots on his winter jacket.
“It’s not raining out,” he says, eyes flicking up to Giyuu’s face.
“It’s tea,” Giyuu says, and leaves it at that. They don’t need to know exactly what happened, or who it happened with. He can be miserable about it all by himself.
The thing about Mitsuri and Obanai is that they were friends of his, independently, before they came to him a few weeks apart for his services. Giyuu had seen his chance, had seen the compatibility and, most importantly, had seen the pining and done something about it before anyone had a chance to lose their mind.
That had been nearly a year ago, and Giyuu doesn’t count them among his success stories because he never really counted them among his clients; honestly, as far as he’s concerned, he was just doing a favor for some friends who couldn’t see what was in front of them the whole time.
The two of them insist it was his matchmaking skills that made it happen, though, no matter how much he denies it.
Misturi settles back into her seat, grinning and energetic, and Obanai’s attention is immediately diverted half-back to her, as though she might have suddenly grown the need for something in the last three and a half seconds.
Giyuu thinks he might be safe, until Obanai asks, “How did you get tea all over you?”
Discomfort crawls through his stomach; he takes a drink of the tea in front of him, nearly burning his tongue off in the process, to avoid answering the question.
Obanai rolls his eyes and looks away, towards the rest of the tea shop, one arm slung across the back of the chair Mitsuri sits in.
They get together like this, the three of them, every few weeks. Giyuu likes doing this, getting tea or a meal with them; he finds that it keeps him grounded, keeps him connected to his friends and stops him from being consumed by his work. Something about just sitting with the two of them helps balance him out; at the same time, in the past six months, it’s reminded him why he does what he does.
They help him keep going, even if they don’t know it.
Normally, Mitsuri keeps the conversation flowing, doing more than enough talking for the three of them, and by the time Giyuu comes up with a reason to excuse himself, he’s all caught up on gossip he didn’t know he needed to hear, and more than ready to exclude himself from all conversations for the next several hours.
Today, however, Mitsuri looks like she’s about to burst at the seams with joy and excitement, as though she has something to tell him and might not be able to hold it in for much longer.
He turns his undivided attention to her, running his burnt tongue against the roof of his mouth as though it’s going to help heal his destroyed tastebuds any faster. Eating for the next few days isn’t going to be the best experience, but he’ll do anything at this point to avoid talking about him.
Mitsuri smiles at him, brighter than LED headlights on their hi-beams, and holds her left hand out to him rather than saying anything.
On her ring finger glitters a silver band with a decent sized diamond on it, catching the light.
“Congratulations,” Giyuu says, heartfelt, bottom of his tea mug clinking as it meets the tabletop. His eyes, against his will, glance towards the face down phone that sits next to him.
Mitsuri squeals in delight, drawing her hand back towards her chest, as well as the attention of half of the shop. The trio ignore all of the eyes on them, ensconced in their personal bubble. “You’re the first person we’ve told!” she informs him, excited. “This never would have happened, if it wasn’t for you!”
Giyuu’s heard the same words a number of times before: If it wasn’t for you, we never would have found each other. They’re always sincere, and he’s always invited to the ensuing wedding, but this time—this time, it hits differently. They’re his friends, after all, and he didn’t really have to do any real work.
He smiles at the two of them, corners of his mouth barely curling; it doesn't reach his eyes, though, because Obanai is looking at him as though he hasn’t had a meal in months, and Giyuu waits quietly for the other shoe to drop.
“We want your permission to ask Sanemi to plan our wedding,” Obanai says, ripping the bandage off in one fell tear.
And Giyuu—should have probably known this was coming. They were friends with Sanemi, too, after all. Knew and understood what he did for work. But it doesn’t stop his knee jerk reaction, the way he flinches and nearly knocks his mug of tea over, or the way his breath catches in his throat.
“Right,” he says, steadying the mug in front of him with both hands around it, leeching the warmth from it. “Of course, I—”
“Giyuu,” Mitsuri says gently, cutting him off. “We won’t ask him if you’re not comfortable with it. Asking him to plan our wedding means he’ll be around a lot, and we don’t want to hurt you in any way, or bring up anything. We just, well, he’s just really good? At what he does?”
He more than understands where Mitsuri is coming from. And after all, Sanemi was their friend too, the last time Giyuu checked.
“No, no,” he says quickly, this morning's run in rearing its ugly head in the back of his head. “I understand.” He takes a breath, knowing that what he says next is going to doom him for the next eight to ten months, at least. “Of course you can ask him. I don’t see why he would say no to you two.”
Sanemi stumbles into his apartment, kicking his shoes off in a hurry as he checks his fitbit. He has, at most, seven minutes to change, patch up his knee, print out his schedule, and get back down the stairs if he wants to be on time to his next appointment.
His jeans are not a total loss—who doesn’t like jeans with a hole in the knee!--but he can’t wear them today, not when he’s got a business to run. He tries to shuck them off as he stumbles towards his room, getting them hooked around his ankle and falling into the wall for his troubles. He curses under his breath, reaches down to free his foot, and leaves his jeans where they lie as he begins to fight with his shirt, walking into his bedroom.
An outfit change had not been on the agenda today; he can only be thankful, after the fact, that the first couple was late and broke their contract. Who knows how much farther he’d be behind, otherwise. He’s sorry for the loss of business, but there’s plenty more to be had elsewhere; he’s a hot commodity among wedding planners, a rising star, and he’ll have that slot booked in no time.
He just needs to change and get to his next appointment first, is all.
He throws on the first button up he can get his hands on, a little wrinkled but workable, and fastens it up as quickly and efficiently as he can as he searches for a decent pair of pants while hauling his laptop out of his bag. Multitasking like this is the only way he can really get the most out of his life, and right now every second is critical.
Hauling a pair of pants off of the floor from the very bottom of his not-sure-if-it’s-dirty-or-clean pile, he presses the print button on his calendar for the day and hustles into his bathroom, throwing open the cupboard under the sink and hauling out a washcloth, an old box of bandaids, and a mostly used tube of ointment.
He realizes, midway through hissing as he cleans the blood off of his knee, that he doesn’t hear his printer running the way it should be. “Shit, shit, shit.” That dastardly thing isn’t even two years old yet, and he shouldn’t have to replace it, but it’s been giving him nothing but problems the last few weeks.
It appears that nothing today is going to go right for him, and he’s just going to have to live with it.
There’s still blood crusted on his knee and weeping from the scrape when he manages to muster some ointment out of the nearly empty tube and slaps several bandaids on the scrape, each of them varying sizes and colors because he doesn’t have one large enough to cover the entire area. He knows his mother would be horrified at the sight, but he bolts out of the bathroom anyway, making sure to shut off the light even as he leaves the mess behind him.
He finds his printer grinding and gagging, as though it’s gasping for its last breath, and he glares at it as though that’s enough to make it work.
Unsurprisingly, it does not.
The printer continues to make it’s technological death noises, and Sanemi begins to struggle his way into well-at-least-I-haven’t-worn-them-in-at-least-three-days pants as he hops over to it, eyes glancing down towards his fitbit, which is telling him he has less than two minutes to make it back out of his apartment and down onto the street.
He stands over the printer and—yes, it has paper. Yes, it’s connected to wifi. No, there’s not a paperjam. He pounds his fist into the top of it, and suddenly it begins to work again, as though it wasn’t just struggling with its most basic function thirty seconds ago.
“I’m replacing you as soon as possible,” he informs the little machine, acid in his voice as he buttons his pants.
In answer, the printer spits out a piece of paper with the day’s agenda on it, and Sanemi scoops it up, along with his bag, and bolts for the door. He’s a full minute and a half behind, and if doesn’t book it, he’s going to be late for the rest of the day.
It’s a bad look, him being late, especially with his own late-show policy in the contracts he has his clients sign. He can’t be late.
He realizes, two blocks away from his apartment with the broken phone in his bag, that he can’t even take the piece of shit off of Do Not Disturb to call Genya from his fitbit to let him know that he might be running a bit behind, and to see if Genya could flex things on his calendar so that Sanemi could have time to go and get a new phone.
In all of his rushing around, he hasn’t stopped once to think about the incident on the sidewalk.
He doesn’t have time to.
Giyuu bids his farewells to his newly engaged friends and strides purposely out of the tea shop, trying to make it look like he’s not running away from them and their happiness.
He’s pleased with the way things have gone for Mitsuri and Obanai, he really is, but his encounter on the sidewalk this morning paired with the happy couple wanting his ex-boyfriend to plan their wedding is just a little too much, all at once.
Looking down at the phone in his hand, beetle wallpaper lit up brightly like some kind of festive holiday decoration, he wonders what the best course of action might be. He has several hours before his next appointment, hours in which he has planned to go over client profiles and see what he could do with them, but having Sanemi’s phone in his possession—knowing that Sanemi likely has his—is off putting. He knows what this phone is to Sanemi, knows how much of his life is on it, but—
He doesn’t want to see him again. Not today, at least. Giyuu doesn’t think his bruised, aching heart could handle that.
Instead, he thinks about his other options, of which there are few. He knows he could unlock the phone and call Genya, because Sanemi rotates through the same four passcodes and Giyuu has each of them memorized still. It might be the easiest option: Genya, at least, still likes him. Genya, at least, could get the phone back to Sanemi and explain the mix-up in a way that doesn’t leave anything up to interpretation.
Or, he could go back inside and leave the phone with Mitsuri and Obanai, have them give it to him when they ask him to plan their wedding, but: well. That requires explaining what happened this morning to them, and he doesn’t want to tread over ground before examining it himself first.
Which makes him circle back to the Genya option, which does contain a flaw in his reasoning: Genya might still like him, but he’s going to want to know how he got Sanemi’s phone. He isn’t about to explain anything to Genya, either; Genya, who is probably going to get ideas.
None of those options sound appealing to him, so Giyuu shoves the phone in his pocket and sets off down the sidewalk instead, thinking of a different way to get it back to him. There’s no doubt in his mind that Sanemi is going to have it replaced by the end of today, or the end of tomorrow; he never could unplug for very long.
It’s just a little odd to him that it hasn’t gone off, not even once. Six months ago, Giyuu could remember it going off once at least every two minutes with an email, or a reminder, or a text, or some other notification that would make Sanemi’s eyes dart to the screen or his wrist instantly, so focused on his work that he had little time for anything—or anyone—else.
But none of that matters. They aren’t together anymore. Giyuu realizes, as he begins to walk down the sidewalk towards his own apartment, that getting the phone back to Sanemi isn’t really that big of a priority, anyway. It’s broken, after all, and he’s just going to go out and replace it.
He also knows that the chances of getting his own phone back are slim; there’s no way Sanemi is going through the same moral rigamarole he is, no way his stomach is twisting in knots at the very thought of not returning something he took accidentally.
If his phone is meant to find its way back to him, Giyuu decides, then it will. In the meantime, he’ll go and get a new one, and not worry about it any longer.
Sanemi has had a hellish day, trying to keep his schedule straight on paper when all three of the pens he carries with him in his bag are threatening to run out of ink.
But he’s nearly done at the local location of his cell carrier, cloud downloading to his new phone as the old one sits in his bag, broken and useless. He’s been out of contact with Genya all day, can only imagine the kind of bullshit his kid brother got up to while Sanemi wasn’t watching him, and knows that tomorrow—while it has a little bit of administrative time already scheduled on it—is going to be a huge day for him to try and catch up on everything he missed today, as well as everything he was already behind in.
Exhaustion drags at his body, and he’s pretty sure the sleeve of his shirt is permanently attached to the scrape he neglected to clean and bandage on his elbow. His knee aches from where he fell on it earlier, and he’s certain it’s bruised.
Tomorrow, he tells himself. Tomorrow is a new day.
Tomorrow, he can get done everything he didn’t manage to get done today because he was lacking a phone, plus more. He’s going to buckle down, dig in, and not come up for air until everything is done.
But for now, he has no choice but to sit in the little store-front of his cell carrier, impatiently waiting for all his data to download to his new phone and hope he isn’t missing too much from it. The last time it was backed up was early this morning, so he shouldn’t be missing anything too important.
Worse, there’s no space in here for him to work. He can’t spread out in the store, as that would be rude and there’s no such space for him to do so, and any of the other work he could do while he’s waiting would have to be done on the phone that he’s waiting for.
Which means he has nothing to preoccupy him, leaving his mind to wander back to the events of the morning that have physically haunted him and nearly made him late for all of his appointments for the day.
Seeing Giyuu again had been a gut punch. They hadn’t ended on the best of terms, to put it lightly, and even knowing that they ran in the same circles, Sanemi had thought he would have at least another six months before he saw his ex again.
It seemed the universe had other plans for him, making him run—quite literally—into him six months to the day after they fell apart. Leaving him with a shattered phone and a ruined schedule and, worse, leaving him as bloody and bruised as his heart still felt.
He has to be more careful, he knows; Giyuu could easily lurk around any corner, be at any bakery or shop he strides into, be at any gathering of friends that Sanemi attends. He just thought he would have healed a little quicker, is all, rather than feeling like someone had gone and ripped the scab off of a still healing wound at the very sight of his ex.
“Your phone’s ready,” the weedy kid behind the counter announces to him, motioning at the sleek device on the sales counter.
Wonderful, Sanemi thinks as he rises. He’s saved from having to look too deeply into himself and fearing what he finds there by some kid who can’t be older than sixteen.
He’s already paid for everything they’ve done today, so he swipes his new phone off of the counter, makes a mental note to buy a new case, and clicks the button on the side so that the lock screen lights up.
He has seven missed calls, sixteen unread text messages, a voicemail, and thirty new emails. There’s also two reminders: Dinner with Mom @ 7 one reads, while the other reads No, seriously, dinner with Mom @ 7.
“Fuck me,” he says, a little too loud for public.
It’s already 7:05, and he’s all the way across town.
He’ll mitigate the damage later, he supposes, as he sees that six of the missed calls are from Genya—probably about the dinner he’s missing—and the seventh is from Kanroji.
The voicemail, oddly enough, is also from Kanroji; he knows for a fact that there was nothing in his calendar regarding her that needed his immediate attention, and it piques his curiosity immediately.
Walking out of the shop, he listens to the voicemail: “Hi Shinazugawa!” She sounds as bubbly and bright as ever, laughter in her voice even as she leaves a message. “Please call me when you get this, it’s really important!”
Sanemi—knowing he’s already fucked himself over big time by missing dinner with his family—dials her back as soon as he deletes the voicemail.
She picks up on the first ring, as though she had been sitting on her phone; there’s a shuffling noise, and Sanemi knows without a doubt that he’s being put on speaker even as Kanroji chirrups, “Hello!” into his ear.
“Uh, hey,” he says back, having always preferred email and texting and in-person meetings to phone calls. Phone calls, while they certainly have a place in his business, don’t quite hit him like they should.
“Oh, oh good! You’ve finally called! Listen, listen, do you have a minute? I know you’re, like, really busy.”
Outside, the air is getting colder, and he almost wishes he had remembered to grab his jacket on his way out of his apartment the second time this morning. Instead, he hunches up his shoulders, shifting the bag higher up towards his neck, and says, “Yeah, I guess?”
Kanroji sounds breathless with excitement as she tells him, “Obanai and I are getting married.”
This? This he could have seen from a mile away. Of course those two are going to get married, he thinks, they’re made for each other. He could see it, and he knows that anyone who wasn’t privy to the situation could see it, too.
Giyuu, who had put them together in the first place, could definitely see it; Sanemi tamps down on that thought as quickly as he can.
“Congratulations.” The word comes out a little more stilted than he intends it to be, because his fitbit is vibrating with a new text message on his wrist.
Where are you, Genya is demanding.
Sanemi shakes his hand out as though he can shake the text away from him.
On the other end of the line, Kanroji is giggling. “Right! Anyway, Obanai and I have a favor to ask of you.”
And oh, here it comes.
“We want to pay you to plan our wedding.” He was expecting that, and yet he still doesn’t have a solid answer to give her. At his silence, Kanroji forges forward. “Shinazugawa, please! You’re so good at what you do, and Obanai and I don’t want to stress too much about the wedding, and you already know us—please.”
He knows he can’t say no. Not to Kanroji. Had Iguro asked, then he might have been able to.
But with the breaking of the contract earlier in the day, well—he’s suddenly got a bit of free space on his plate, work wise, and he knows that planning the wedding of Japan’s leading supermodel is not something he should be passing up.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he says, shaking his head and making sure to avoid running into anyone as he keeps his path forward on the sidewalk. “Just send me a text and we’ll get something running. Do you have a date in mind?”
“Next fall,” Kanroji answers, a little calmer now that he’s agreed to her request.
Fall. Nearly a year from now, just enough time for him to pull together that does her justice.
It’s only after he hangs up that his mind reconciles with what he’s agreed to on a more personal level. Being around Kanroji and Iguro, planning their wedding, means they’re going to want their other friends involved. Means they’re going to want Giyuu involved.
Mentally, he screams. Out loud, under his breath, he says, “Fuck me.”
His phone and fitbit vibrate and ding in unison, and then again. Two more messages from Genya:
You broke mom’s heart :(
You ruined family dinner :(
Sanemi shoves his phone in his pocket and rubs at his face with both hands.
He’s so, so tired. Of work, of planning weddings when he can’t legally have his own, of stumbling home to an empty apartment at the end of the day. Of the expectations quietly placed on his shoulders that he seems to be unable to meet at every turn.
Everything. He’s tired of everything, but he has to keep on.
In this case, it means pulling his phone back out of his pocket and ordering flowers to his mom’s house to be delivered the next day and sending the middle finger emoji to Genya.
For the next week, Giyuu keeps his head down and his nose to the grindstone.
He sets up first dates, he sets up second dates, he congratulates three more couples on their happy engagements, and off boards another six couples who have successfully dated for a full year and deem themselves no longer in need of his services.
He also attends a wedding, which leaves a weird pit in the hollow of his stomach; it shouldn’t, when he pulls the feeling out to examine it. He’s been to countless weddings for clients before, will likely be to countless weddings after this one, but.
But.
He’s not into any of what he’s been doing, and he thinks he’s aware of himself enough to know why.
It’s the looming idea of seeing Sanemi again in a controlled environment that’s putting him off of everything, he’s certain.
Mitsuri and Obanai invited him to the initial meeting with Sanemi, and he agreed to it. He isn’t sure why he was invited, or why he needs to be there, let alone why he agreed; he just knows that he said Yes when he should have said No.
Which is how he finds himself standing outside of a cafe he used to frequent with Sanemi, minutes before the meeting is scheduled, broken heart in his throat and the ends of his fingers wound up in the fringe of his scarf. He knows he needs to go inside, knows he needs to make his feet move, knows it will be as simple as opening the door and letting whatever happens, happen.
But he can’t make himself do it.
“Oh, good, you’re here!” Mitsuri gushes as the happy couple comes up behind him on the sidewalk; she gives him a hug immediately, wrapping both arms around his middle and squeezing, and Giyuu wonders just how, exactly, Mitsuri always seems to know what he needs just when he needs it.
Obanai gets the door for them, Mitsuri’s arm wrapped up in the crook of Giyuu’s as though she’s not quite prepared to let go of him. In the back of his mind, Giyuu pretends that she’s doing it to give him the strength to walk through the door.
There, in the corner with a table already staked out, sits Sanemi, thumbs flying across the screen of a new phone. Giyuu, too, has replaced his already, but seeing Sanemi sitting there on a device that rarely leaves his hands reminds Giyuu of the dead, broken phone in his nightstand drawer back in his apartment. Now would have been a great time to bring it back to him, to explain the mixup, but—
Well. He’s already replaced his own lost, broken phone, and Sanemi’s replaced his as well; likely threw the old one out without realizing it was Giyuu’s in the first place. There would be no point in doing any of it, no point in bringing any of it up in the first place.
Instead, Giyuu is bodily led to the table where his ex sits by a very jubilant bride-to-be, wishing he were anywhere else. At the noise Mitsuri is making, Sanemi finally looks up from his phone.
Something in his pale eyes shutters at the sight of Giyuu, but he’s smiling brightly at the happy couple with him. He already has tea on the table, having gotten everyone’s order beforehand for ‘efficiency’ or some other excuse Giyuu is sure he came up with.
Giyuu takes his seat at the table quietly, stomach turning when he sees that his intended seat is directly next to Sanemi, Mitsuri and Obanai across the table from them. It makes sense, he guesses, that the happy couple be seated next to each other with Sanemi across from them—makes it easier to conduct the business they’re there to do.
Giyuu just wishes there were somewhere else for him to sit.
He’s not even sure why his presence is necessary once the niceties are over and Sanemi jumps into business mode, peppering Mitsuri and Obanai with ten thousand questions about their budget and an exact date if they have one, and what their ideal wedding looks like, and what it might look like if the ideal wedding isn’t possible.
Tuning out the noise, Giyuu decides to take a look around the cafe he used to frequent. When he and Sanemi parted ways, he stopped going to the places where they used to go. He’s unsurprised to see that Sanemi, on the other hand, has not.
In the six months since they’ve broken up, none of the decor of the cafe has changed. Everything is the same, right down to the mug he’s drinking out of.
He supposes not everything is going to take notice of an event that shattered his life in a hundred tiny little pieces, but the idea of things noticing was comforting up until that moment. Now he’s just forced to sit quietly in a place where memories were made, trying to keep the hurt in his heart from rearing its ugly head.
He only snaps back to the conversation at hand when the tone shifts and Mitsuri laughs nervously. Giyuu latches onto it, eyes flicking to her; Mitsuri hasn’t been nervous about any part of Sanemi’s process until now, but he hasn’t been following along to really know where they are that’s made her so shifty.
“Well,” she says, rubbing at the back of her head with the hand that isn’t holding Obanai’s. “We just. We want. We think it would—”
“We want the two of you to work together on this. You know us better than anyone else.” There goes Obanai, blunt as ever.
Giyuu’s confused; next to him, he can feel Sanemi’s hackles rise at the implication he can’t plan their wedding on his own.
Giyuu’s the first to open his mouth, saying, “I know nothing about planning weddings.”
Sanemi’s jaw clicks shut, as though that was exactly what he was going to say—in a different way.
“We’ve thought it over,” Mitsuri says, a little less nervous to talk about it now that her request is out, “and the two of us think that since you’re both our friends, and Giyuu is the reason we’re all sitting here, that it’d be a nice touch if you both planned it.”
“But that’s literally what you’re hiring me for?” Sanemi says, somehow without a ‘fuck’ thrown in there. “It’s what I do for work?”
“We know,” Mitsuri says, voice gentle and gooey as she tries to ease the force of the blow she’s just struck. “Just—think of it as a gift? To us?”
“Our gift to you is working together on planning your wedding?” Sanemi asks, as though he’s still trying to wrap his mind around it. “Kanroji, this is literally my job.”
“You keep saying that like it means something,” Obanai drawls, clearly getting bored with the conversation.
“Listen up, fuckwad,” Sanemi snarls, rising out of his chair. Giyuu tucks his hands into his lap so he doesn’t hold Sanemi back like he’s itching to do; touching him could be catastrophic.
Instead, Mitsuri rises to her feet and plants her hands on her hips, leaning across the table into Sanemi’s space. The gravity of the room shifts and centers on her, and Giyuu’s known that she can command entire rooms and runways, but he hasn’t quite had the chance to see it.
“Shinazugawa Sanemi,” she says with such force, such gravity, that somehow she seems much larger than the man on the opposite side of the table. “I am asking for one thing. A personal touch to all of the other cookie cutter weddings you’ve put on. Please.”
He knows the look on Sanemi’s face; the other man wants to walk out of the cafe and directly into traffic.
Instead, he eases back down into his chair and says, “Fine. Giyuu can plan the wedding with me.”
Mitsuri claps her hands together several times in excitement as she sits back down. “Oh, this is going to be wonderful!”
Giyuu thinks he’s going to be sick.