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“Your ears are lopsided,” Joey said.
Kaiba looked up at Joey with an unamused glance, before turning back down to his menu. These dinners had been weekly, tentative, with Joey always checking that they were still doing this. This still didn’t feel real to him. These weren’t dates, no. They were just...friend dinners?
Since when had he actually called Kaiba a ‘friend’? Somewhere, they managed to skip that qualifier.
“I’m serious. Look up here,” he said. A dessert menu was picked up and used like a tool. Kaiba’s head was up for the briefest moment, enough for Joey to capture it. “Yep. Lopsided.”
“What are you going on about?”
“Nothing just,...um...” Joey looked away, blush growing in his cheeks. “Something that the uh...I was...jus’, ya know, tryin’ to prove to myself.”
“What could you possibly be proving?”
Joey bit his lip. “Without me bein’ mean? That.. you ain’t perfect.”
Kaiba set the menu down so he could stare at Joey, hoping to get a better grasp of what was being said. That he wasn’t perfect? Where was that mindset coming from all of a sudden. Joey often joked that he was robotic, but that couldn’t be it, could it? And since when did it come down to measuring ears? Wasn’t that a different sort of measurement?
“So you believe you’ve found definitive evidence that I’m not perfect because my ears are asymmetrical?”
“Yeah. I mean, ya always have this self-confidence, an’ every hair is in place. Ya never look tired, even when ya haven’t slept. The suits are always pressed an’ your shoes are always shined. Ya know, all that stuff.”
Kaiba folded his hands, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The more Joey spoke, the more this sounded familiar. “You’ve been reading tabloids, haven’t you?”
“N-no!”
A smirk wormed it’s way onto Kaiba’s face. “Mokuba threw that one on my desk a few days ago. ‘Seto Kaiba, A Robot?’. He liked that one. Wanted to put it in a scrapbook.”
Joey looked away, around to the remainder of the restaurant, before finally bringing his eyes to Kaiba again. “I can’t tell if your angry or not.”
A nonchalant shrug, and Kaiba turned back to the menu. “Then I’ll leave you in suspense.”
“Look, I—,” Joey strained for a moment, not entirely sure how to say what he wanted to say. “I don’t know, or I jus’ sometimes think, when I’m gettin’ ready for this whatever-it-is-dinner thing, that I’m gonna get here and you’re gonna rag on my shirt because it’s lame or...something, I don’t know.”
Kaiba looked over Joey with just as much curiosity as before, though these questions seemed to make a little more sense, at least to capture Joey’s state of mind in these dinner dates. “You’re an idiot.”
“Hey! I’m just bein’ honest, a’right? You’re over here bein’ called Mr. Perfect an’ I sometimes wonder if I’m just so....what the hell are those?”
Joey stopped mid-sentence, his insecurities being laid on the table before drinks had even arrived, and he saw Kaiba slip something out of his blazer pocket. A pair of wire-frame glasses, sleek but boring, were pushed up onto his nose. They fell back down to the tip immediately.
“All the better to see your shirt with.”
Joey’s ears reddened. “Since when did you wear glasses?” A scoff, and the menu flopped back up without a response. Almost chewing through his lip, Joey searched for something to say, but found himself staring instead. It painted his face a completely different way.
“They look good on you,” Joey said, and he clamped his hands over his mouth immediately after.
Kaiba cased Joey from over the rims, and he hid his smile behind the menu. “And your shirt suits you well, pup.”