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“—Well, fine, apology accepted, but that still doesn’t fix the problem— No. No. Yes. Fine. Two days? That’s—“ Sojiro sighed. “Fine. You too.” He hung the phone back up on the wall and stared at the receiver for a moment as if it had personally wronged him.
“Moldy potatoes,” he said in disgust, coming back into the front of the cafe. “How hard is it to actually inspect your shipments, rather than just giving them a quick glance on the way out the door? One more mistake like this and I’m switching to Sumida Supply, I don’t care how much more expensive they are.”
“Bastards,” Futaba agreed, jumping off the stool behind the register.
“Hey, language,” Sojiro said with a raised eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging out with that Sakamoto kid too much.”
Futaba rolled her eyes, biting back the response that she’d been online practically since she could read, and she knew some words that Ryuji couldn’t even imagine. “So they’re replacing them, right?”
“Yes, but they’ve got a tight schedule, so they can’t send my shipment until Monday.” He shook his head. “I don’t even have enough potatoes for the dinner batch of curry, as it is. Sorry, but can you run down the street and buy a bag? I can’t say I mind the increased custom lately, but it does make it hard to leave and run errands.” As he spoke, the bell above the shop door jingled and a pair of housewives entered, looking around with interest before approaching the counter.
Futaba, who had been having some fun lately reinventing the online guerrilla marketing campaign, nodded and reached for her apron ties. Gotta level up my customer service, she thought to herself, watching Sojiro greet the new arrivals and take their orders. With Akira gone for the rest of his third year of high school— none of them doubted that he’d get into whichever Tokyo university he wanted, which made the next few months easier to bear— Futaba had gritted her teeth, stepped up to the plate, and informed Sojiro that it was time she started pulling her weight around the cafe. It was going… all right. Working the cash register was easy, and she could make a decent cup of coffee if the customer knew what they wanted, and say hello and goodbye properly. Once she’d realized it was like being an NPC shopkeeper, it got a little easier— use the same lines on everyone, move around some money, and relax confident in the fact that nobody remembers an NPC for long. But anything that deviated from the shaky foundation of skills she’d built was still trouble. Small talk was awkward, and a customer asking for a recommendation always made her freeze up. Sojiro never left her alone in the cafe, always acting as her safety net, which was a relief at the same time as it was a reminder that she still had a long way to go. If she was able to watch the store, or if he didn’t have to account for her anxiety, where would he really prefer to get supplies from?
“Sure, but…” she pulled the apron over her head, and pushed her hair out of her face. “You always say Yamada-san overcharges for produce. Want me to go to the OK Supermarket in Hatsudai?”
Sojiro raised his eyebrows, surprised, as he scooped out two servings of curry. “There you are, ladies. My daughter will ring you up.” Once Futaba had given them their change (without dropping it) and wished them a good afternoon (without stuttering), Sojiro turned to her. “The prices are better there, true, but it’s only a couple of bags of potatoes. Besides, it’s getting on towards rush hour, and that supermarket is usually packed in the evenings. Are you sure?”
“Don’t underestimate me!” Futaba said with confidence. “You forget, I’ve taken on Akihabara as a solo mission. Housewives are nothing, compared to the zerg rush of an otaku horde.” She averted her eyes, then, compelled by honesty to admit, “B-besides, I thought I could ask Yusuke to come with me. He wanted to see me today, but I’d already told you I’d help out here at Leblanc, so…”
“Ah, I see… you’d rather hang out with your boyfriend than your old man, is that it?” Futaba made a halfhearted face at him, embarrassed, as Sojiro let out a wry chuckle. “Well, if you’re set on going that far, there are a couple things we could use around the house. I’ll give you a list. Pick up something for dinner, too. If you’re going to drag that boy all around creation, the least I can do is feed him when you get back.”
Futaba grinned. Sojiro might be a cranky old goat, but he always sent along extra food in her lunches meant for sharing, or waved away an offer of payment from one of the former Phantom Thieves with a ‘just this once’ that never seemed to expire. Actions always meant more than words with him; she wished she’d realized what the slowly cooling dinners left outside her barricaded bedroom door every evening last year had meant at the time. “Okay, but he’s gonna see this as me doing him a favor. He loves the supermarket.”
Sojiro raised an eyebrow. “I think he’s pulling your leg. Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of anyone loving the supermarket, much less a teenage boy.”
“Just trust me.”
———
“What flavor!” Yusuke exclaimed, finishing the small bite-sized sample cup of prepared frozen fried rice. “And the texture… perfectly balanced, not soggy at all. Your preparation skills are to be commended.”
The high-school girl standing behind the sample table smiled uncertainly, looking like she was unsure whether she was being made fun of or not. Futaba scraped the last few grains of her sample out of her cup and popped the tiny disposable spoon into her mouth, savoring the flavor with a grin as she watched Yusuke bluntly deflect the girl’s halfhearted attempts to offer him a bag to purchase. The nice thing about being out with Yusuke, especially when he was excited about something, is that he served as the party tank, drawing enemy attention and letting her go about her mission in peace.
“While I always appreciate the free meal,” Yusuke commented as they entered the produce section, “I can’t help but wonder how much benefit the company actually gains from providing food for free.”
“It’s basic psychology,” Futaba explained airily, checking the shopping list on her phone. “The few thousand yen the company wastes giving samples away for free, they make back tenfold! Either you’ll go ‘wow, that was good, I’ll take ten!’, or you feel guilty getting something for free, so they score a pity buy. Do you see the cabbages anywhere?”
Yusuke, who had quite possibly never in his life objected to getting something for free, tilted his head smugly. “Ah, but in me, they have met their match. There’s no possibility of me buying their product for any reason, as I never have the money to spare.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t have the money to spare when you bought that cursed photo at the flea market last week, either.”
“It’s not cursed. In fact, that’s exactly my point. The accidental double exposure is similar to that seen in many hoax photographs used as evidence for hauntings. If I could replicate the uneven transparency in oils, I might arrive at something truly unsettling, an error of technology reproduced in traditional—“
“It’s cursed, it’s haunted, and you’re gonna wake up to someone’s grandpa standing at the foot of your bed making spooky noises and asking you for your wi-fi password.”
“It’s not— why does he want my wi-fi password?” Yusuke asked, frowning, looking up from the pile of cabbages he had been choosing from.
“Well, just ‘cause the photo’s old doesn’t mean the subject died way back when,” Futaba explained, taking the cabbage out of Yusuke’s hands and dropping it in her shopping basket. “Ghosts are gonna go modern one of these days. Maybe grandpa had a smartphone. ‘Sides, I can’t think of anything scarier than some old fart throttling my connection with a buncha spyware. You know he’d open all those e-mails from Nigerian princes. I think I saw some meatballs over by the frozen foods section, you wanna grab ‘em?”
The meatballs were nothing to write home about; the shrimp-flavored chips were better, and Futaba snuck an extra portion into the pocket of her voluminous coat. Yusuke began to look slightly woebegone around the table of expensive imported cheeses, and Futaba tilted her head. She knew that look, and she knew that if she didn’t head it off at the pass, there was going to be no pulling him back from whatever dramatic precipice he was approaching. For such a calm and collected guy, he sure could go hard on the histrionics.
(And, you know, she liked him and didn’t want to see him upset, or whatever. Shut up.)
“What’s up?” she said, bumping her head into his shoulder like a friendly cat. “I know you’re lactose intolerant, but you can probably have one, right?”
“It’s not that,” he said, frowning and picking up three squares of cheese and a cracker to pair with them. “It’s simply… well, I myself can enjoy a cunning ploy to get a free meal from samples. I don’t need much food in the first place. But I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that I can’t treat you to the things you deserve. I should be taking you on a date to the finest sushi restaurant in the city, not to the supermarket.”
“Oh.” Futaba chewed on a fingernail, and thought about that for a long minute. Yusuke finished his cheese, thanked the sample girl politely, and Futaba followed him into the noodle aisle. Finally, she came to a conclusion, and put her hands on her hips. “That’s dumb.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If you actually thought about it, you’d know I’m right!” she lectured, wagging a finger in his face. He was looking perturbed and wounded, and she winced, clasping her hands in front of her. “Sorry. I mean, I’m glad you wanna do nice things for me. Really. And I know you like doing big grandiose stuff,” she added, thinking ruefully of the six-foot-tall painting of her he’d entered in a gallery show last month and then tried to gift to her, as though it would even fit through the door of the house, or as if she’d be able to live through the embarrassment of Sojiro seeing it. She was mostly used to it by now, even if she still wasn’t quite sure she deserved it, but it sounded as if he worried that she expected it. “But I actually really like stuff like this. You know, just, doing normal things together.”
“Are you sure?” He was looking concerned now, instead of wounded, and Futaba breathed an inward sigh of relief.
“Positive. I mean, think about it. I spent months in my room. A supermarket’s a step up,” she said with rueful self-deprecation.
“Hm,” Yusuke responded. They’d made it to the meat counter, and Futaba checked the list on her phone to check how much pork Sojiro had asked her to get. “Well… I can understand that. As long as you know that I—“
“I know,” Futaba said hastily, interrupting him before he could say something embarrassing in front of the butcher. “A-a ground of pound pork, please. I mean, a pound of ground pork.” She shuffled behind Yusuke in embarrassment as the butcher went about his business; Yusuke half-turned and casually patted her head in reassurance, resting his hand there for a moment before stepping forward to take the meat from the butcher.
Step it up, Sakura, Futaba thought irritably, Here was Yusuke, working hard to rein in his natural impulse to be as grandiose as possible for her comfort, and what was she doing? Cringing back from anything that could indicate to anyone around them that they were dating. Yusuke had reassured her several times that her comfort level with things was the most important to him, and she believed him, she really did, but that didn’t stop her traitorous lizard brain from telling her that one day, he was bound to get tired of her inability to act like a normal girl.
She shook her head furiously and patted her cheeks, Yusuke looking at her curiously as he followed her into the next aisle. In one of her frequent anxiety-fueled 3 AM text exchanges with Akira, he’d suggested that every time she felt like she was going to fall into the trap of ruminating on her shortcomings, she treat it instead as an opportunity to improve her weak points. It went against her usual min-max strategy, but she owed it to Akira to try, at least.
“Who designs these mascots?” Yusuke was saying, peering at the top shelf of the snack aisle with a level of disappointment out of proportion to the situation. “What empty eyes. I’m surprised they don’t terrify more children than they attract.” Futaba put a couple of his favorite Jagariko snacks into the basket while he was distracted, reassured by his continued tirade. That’s right. Thinking realistically, Yusuke would have zero interest in dating a normal person. No matter what other insecurities might bubble up in her brain, there was no possible way for her to be too weird for him.
That didn’t mean she shouldn’t try to improve, though, and she saw her opportunity on the sample tray at the end of the aisle. If he’d been able to dial back his enthusiastic gestures from 10 to 8, she should be able to up her boldness from 1 to 4.
Futaba did a quick stat check as she stared at the small chunks of castella cake on the tray, each speared with their own individual toothpick. HP, 730/850. Status effects: none. Current buffs: +3 confidence from additional party member. Current debuffs: -2 stamina from environmental effect. Quest items still needed: russet potatoes, dumpling wrappers. Current mission: do something couple-y to express your feelings. Okay… not half bad. Although she should probably go for it before she could think too much about how embarrassing it could be.
She picked up a sample as Yusuke came up behind her, done with his pop art criticism. Turning around, she lifted the square of cake to his mouth, flushing red to the roots of her hair. “H-here,” she offered, willing her hand to stop shaking.
Yusuke looked surprised for a moment, then smiled, his eyes soft. He took her small hand in his and leaned down to bite the cake off the toothpick. He chewed and swallowed, then said “Lovely,” in a way that curled warmly in the pit of Futaba’s stomach, because he didn’t sound like he was talking about the cake at all.
But an ambush can come at any time in a PVP zone, and this one came from a stooped grandma walking by, leaning on her pushcart; she scoffed in a disapproving way, and Futaba was suddenly sure that the girl manning the sample table must be rolling her eyes, and oh my God she was in public; she pulled back quickly and activated her special skill, Flee In Terror.
———
The nice thing about being short and skinny, Futaba reflected, was that it made finding a place to hide much easier. When Yusuke found her, some five minutes later, she was nestled in among a stack of forty pound bags of rice, sitting on the bottom level of the large rack. Her knees were tucked up, with her arms wrapped around them, and she greeted him with a small, sheepish wave.
“Do you need to leave?” he asked, crouching down and placing the basket of groceries on the floor, eyes concerned. “Sorry. Should I not have done that?”
She shook her head. “N-no, I didn’t mind. And I’m almost recharged. Just kinda, y’know. Forgot we were in public for a second.” She shifted, ears still red, and twined her fingers together, tilting her head. “You know. Um. If I were more like you, and said really embarrassing things aloud all the time without thinking about them—“
“Thank you. I appreciate your tact as always.”
“—I might say something like, like…” She pitched her voice lower, in a facsimile of a suave hero, because if she sounded like she was teasing, it was easier to get the words out. “When I’m with you, I sometimes forget that there’s anyone else in the room… and it gives me courage.”
Futaba’s hands flew up to cover her burning cheeks; Yusuke caught her wrists in midair, a slowly spreading smile on his face. “I want to assure you that crouched down among the rice as you are, you are entirely hidden from view,” he reassured her in a conversational tone that did absolutely nothing to stop the thumping in her chest. And then he leaned forward and kissed her soundly, fingers entwining in hers, which did even less to calm her down; but, all things considered, that was all right.
He was smiling when he leaned back, and Futaba found that she was, too.
“W-well,” she said, in the poorest attempt at nonchalance ever made by humankind. “Now that we’re done, y’know, baring our souls and all. You wanna go watch the lobsters in the seafood tank fight?”
Yusuke unfolded himself to his full height, pulling Futaba up with him by their conjoined hands. “I would enjoy nothing more,” he said solemnly, “Although I warn you, if one appears to be losing too badly, I may be compelled to rescue him.”
“Sounds good! I’m sure Sojiro can whip up something tasty with a lobster.”
“I refuse to rise to your bait.”
“Lobster bisque… broiled lobster tails… ooh, I haven’t had lobster rolls in ages!”
“And it will remain that way, you hellion.”
“Lobster otaku.”
“Eating my source of inspiration… how could you be so shellfish?”
That one made Futaba stop in her tracks, caught in an uncontrollable full-body wince at the pun. Yusuke turned to look at her, smugly, waiting for a reaction.
She sighed.
“You know puns make me crabby,” she grumbled, and Yusuke’s sudden peal of laughter almost made up for him forcing her to participate in the worst form of humor.
Relationships, after all, are about compromise.