Chapter Text
When your father tells you that he’s hired a new cook for his restaurant, you have an immediate mental image of the new employee; middle-aged and probably balding, with enough hair on his chest to make up for the latter. Likely with a smoking habit and a slight beer gut, not unlike the rest of the kitchen staff.
“I think you’ll like him,” he says cryptically from his place on the couch. The Japanese news is on and you can only understand about half of the story, but the accompanying video footage helps to fill in some of the blanks.
“What do you mean?”
He just shrugs and you turn back to the television. You don’t know enough Japanese to push the subject further so you just don’t. It probably just means he’s missing a hand or something. Maybe he tells interesting stories about said missing hand, too. Either way, you shrug it off and turn to your phone because Hanamaki has sent you a string of texts about the genetics assignment he didn’t do and he’s finally put up something juicy on the table in exchange for help; two large brown sugar milk teas with tapioca.
You get up from the couch to prop open your laptop on the dining room table. The screen flickers to life and you find the notes on complementation with a bit of lag; it’s not surprising considering your computer is around six years old but you’re not really in the position to be looking for a replacement so you figure it’ll just have to do until the end of undergrad.
You forward the notes to him and let him know so, reminding him of his promise with a few well placed knife emojis for effect.
The night ends without much fanfare and you go to bed with half a dozen alarms set on your phone to ensure you’re up in time for your 9 AM lecture. You forget entirely about your father’s comment, which isn’t surprising since you never gave it much thought to begin with.
-
A tall shadow casts over your usual seat at the restaurant the next day. You finish typing up a sentence on the mouse as a model system in biology before looking up to face the sudden intrusion.
“Hi, can I—?” you begin, but your blunt line of questioning is immediately cut off because you’re promptly stunned into silence. There’s a stupidly amused smile on the stupidly attractive face of the man hovering above you and you know immediately then that you’re fucked. At least for the duration of this interaction. Yes, massively fucked.
“Hey,” he grins. “You work here, right?”
Your mouth has gone suspiciously dry now and your hand fumbles for the plastic water bottle you could’ve sworn was just to your right a second ago.
“Uh,” you manage to utter as your fingers grasp the soft plastic.
“Uh?” he parrots, tilting his head before repeating his question in Japanese.
“Uhh,” you say again, running your thumb over the ridges of the bottle’s cap. Your gaze darts to the hostess stand where Hinata usually sits, fiddling on his phone but he’s conveniently absent at this time.
“Or do you not work here?” he asks, this time in English. You detect the slightest hint of an accent but his demeanor is almost entirely Western.
“No, I work here,” you say, managing to finally unscrew the lid. “Kind of, I mean.”
The stranger’s face lights up and it almost gives you a heart palpitation. Your grip on the bottle tightens.
He holds out his hand and you stare at it for a second too long before finally coming to your senses and taking it. His hands are far from soft, but they’re warm and firm and much larger than yours.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, with a grin that raises the room’s temperature by at least ten degrees. “I’m Osamu, the new cook.”
Your father’s comment wiggles its way to the front of your mind and its meaning finally comes together like some sort of ominously attractive jigsaw puzzle. You look at where you’re currently physically contacting him and then at the other hand near his hip.
“But you have both hands,” you blurt out and Osamu’s eyebrows inch an impressive distance up his forehead. There’s the shortest moment of blissful ignorance before the realization of what you’ve just said hits you.
Oh, a voice in your brain says.
Oh no.
-
“Wait, you actually said that shit about his hands out loud?” Matsukawa jeers into his hot fudge sundae and you aim a swift kick at his shin. You miss.
“Shut up, Issei,” you grumble as he licks a gob of chocolate from the corner of his mouth. It leaves behind an unsavoury brown stain on his skin that you’re probably not going to tell him about later. After all, life’s about the small victories.
You’re at McDonald’s for the second time this week, watching as your so-called best friends work their way through enough fast food to feed a children’s soccer team. The air reeks of chlorine and fries and for some unholy reason, you catch a glimpse of Hanamaki spooning a bit of his McFlurry on a chicken nugget. Scowling, you feel the sudden urge to stand up and leave the premises. Maybe even delete his number from your phone.
“How old is he?” Iwaizumi probes. A couple of sandwich wrappers are folded into uneven squares at his side.
You shrug, “I don’t know. Didn’t look any older than us.”
“Does he go to school here?”
“Doesn’t seem like it,” you say, propping your head up with an arm. The table is sticky. You promptly detach your elbow from it.
“So is it gonna be a thing?”
“Hiro, he’s technically my employee,” you quip, picking at the pile of fries on the tray in front of you. “You can’t get involved with employees.”
“Correction,” he replies, after swallowing a spoonful of ice cream. “You shouldn’t get involved with employees. And hey, that never stopped anyone.”
“Yeah,” Matsukawa chirps. “Like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
“Or my mom’s coworker.”
“Or that guy from The Sound of Music.”
“That’s a movie, Issei.”
“A movie that’s based off of a true story,” Matsukawa shoots back knowingly and you frown.
“How do you even know that?”
“How do you not know that?”
You open your mouth a few times before closing it again. You don’t want to have this discussion right now.
“Do you think your dad would be okay with you dating him?” Iwaizumi asks, fiddling with the straw of his drink.
“Who said anything about dating him?” you exclaim, squishing the end of a fry between your forefinger and thumb. Soft white potato oozes from it sadly.
“You did. Up here,” Hanamaki adds gently, tapping the side of his temple. You roll your eyes.
“Aw, I didn’t know you could read minds now, Takahiro. Are all those pool chemicals turning you into a mutant?”
He snorts. “I wish. Then I wouldn’t be stuck here with you guys. I could be saving the world or something.”
“Anyways,” Matsukawa tacks on. “We spend just as much time in the pool and we’re not mutants. If anything, Tooru would be the mutant. He stayed behind at practice today to do a few more laps.”
“What an idiot,” Iwaizumi snorts. “He’s going to overwork himself and then have to sit out at the next meet.”
You fold your paper straw wrapper in halves. You still don’t know how you’d gotten yourself so involved with a good fraction of the university’s swim team. Initially, you had only been friends with Hanamaki after you’d been paired together for a geology project in a first year earth sciences course you had only taken for the credit. One thing had led to another and soon you were dragged into their friendship circle like the fifth point in their pentagram of assignment procrastination and occasional binge drinking.
“Man, we should’ve just went to your dad’s,” Hanamaki gripes. “He always gives us extra stuff for free.”
You roll your eyes. “Yeah, don’t think I’d be joining you guys for that,” you remark.
“We know,” Matsukawa sighs. “That would’ve been the best part.”
“Wow.”
“Plus we could’ve scoped out the subject of your future HR nightmare,” he adds, smirking around the straw of his diet coke.
“First of all,” you say, pointing a used plastic spoon at him. Droplets of melted soft serve fly through the air. “We’re a small family-owned business, meaning we don’t have an HR department.”
“Second of all, I’m not going to do anything that would warrant the involvement of HR in a regular workplace setting. He probably has a girlfriend or something anyway.” And you were pretty confident in the last part, too. After all, one couldn’t possibly live life looking like that and still be single.
The three of them exchange a Look. You narrow your eyes because you’re not sure if it’s the ‘we’re totally going to meddle with your love life’ Look or the ‘you have the sex appeal of a worm on a string so it wouldn’t matter if you tried anything’ Look. For your sanity, you hope it’s not the former.
“Please don’t,” you sigh, dropping the spoon onto the grease-soaked tray liner.
“Please don’t what?” Iwaizumi asks, feigning ignorance. What a shame, you think. He was always the worst at lying out of all of them.
“We’re not gonna do anything,” Hanamaki pipes up with a grin. There’s sweet and sour sauce under his nails and a glint in his eye that triggers your fight or flight instincts.
“You guys are horrible.”
Matsukawa chuckles and you wonder if it’s too late to find a new group of friends. Since you’re in the third year of your degree, it may very well be, but anything would be better than the future humiliation you were being promised in this very moment.
“Don’t worry,” he says, leaning in. You resist the urge to smear a gob of ketchup right on the tip of his nose.
“You’ll be thanking us later for sure.”
-
More often than not, the restaurant is empty for a good hour before the official closing time. It’s very rare to get stragglers and while it doesn’t bode well for business, you’re grateful for the time it gives you to start cleanup early.
The dining room (and everywhere else) is a modest size, so it never takes you long, but there’s just something satisfying about getting the fuck out of there as fast as you can so you make it your mission to do so for every closing shift.
Tonight, you’re halfway through wiping down all the tables when something clatters loudly behind you, causing you to drop the spray bottle of disinfectant. You whirl around to face the source of the intrusion and lock eyes with Osamu, who has both hands in the air and a bucket of dirty dishes at his feet.
“Sorry!” he calls out, leaning down to pick up the container by its handles again.
You grab the dropped bottle and straighten up. You hadn’t seen him all night, but you’d heard him conversing with your dad and the other cook on shift in quick, uninterrupted Japanese. Only half of what they said made sense to you but it wasn’t like you were trying to eavesdrop on their conversation anyway. However, from the sound of it, he spoke the language with an odd twang that your dad didn’t have. Probably some kind of regional accent.
“You don’t have to,” you say quickly as he loads the dishes onto a cart. “I usually take the dishes to the back at the end of the night anyway.”
He wipes his hands on the grease-stained apron still tied around his waist. A simple action like that shouldn’t be attractive, it really really shouldn’t, but for some ungodly reason it is. You feel yourself redden from a combination of witnessing this and then overthinking the fact that you’ve witnessed this. You are indeed your own worst enemy.
“It’s fine,” he says, winning smile and all. Is there no mercy? “I’m already out here anyway. Plus there’s uh, there’s not much to do right now.”
You spray some disinfectant on the nearby table and begin wiping circles with the rag. “Yeah, you should get used to that,” you say dismissively.
“What d’you mean?” he frowns.
“I mean,” you say, rubbing a soup stain out of the lacquered wood. “It’s pretty dead here a lot of the time. If you’re looking to work somewhere exciting, you applied to the wrong place.”
He grips the cart with one hand. “I think it’s been pretty exciting so far,” he remarks. “Your dad’s been teaching me like half the menu today.”
You make a noncommittal noise.
“No one here sucks so far,” he adds as if it’s something meaningful. And if it is, well, the bar is in hell for him then.
“Glad you don’t think I suck,” you say dryly.
He gives you a crooked smile. “So far.”
There’s a pause then as he searches your face for a reaction to what he’s just said. You force yourself to hold out for a moment, just to watch the panic flicker behind his eyes before grinning back at him.
“We’ll see,” you say, spraying the next table over, “how you feel about me by the time you stop working here.”
“Oh?” he says, tilting his head. Something glimmers under the light and you realize it’s a polished silver earring, partially obscured by the mess of dark hair. “I think I’m pretty interested to see how I’ll feel too.”
And with this, you’ve reached your limit. Heart pounding against your ribcage, you turn away and pretend to focus on a non-existent stain with the rag. This—whatever this was—was too much too soon and it was almost inevitable that you would make a fool of yourself within the next five minutes.
“So,” you say, clearing your throat. Like you weren’t just borderline flirting with him ten seconds ago and are now too flustered to continue. Nope, that isn’t you at all. “Why did you choose to apply here anyway?”
Thankfully he takes the conversation’s change of pace in stride. “Well, I’m pretty sure you know this,” he begins. “But this is probably one of the best places in Japantown. The food here’s authentic and I—not to sound like I’m sucking up or anything—but I want to learn from the best and your dad—”
“My dad?” you snort. “No, my dad isn’t…he’s not…”
He raises an eyebrow. “Your dad’s not what?”
You glance around at the empty restaurant, at the pile of sticky, unused menus and dusty paper lanterns hanging over each table. There’s something hollow about it all that makes it difficult for you to take his comment seriously.
After all, even if Osamu was right, how come it didn’t show? How come you spent more time cleaning or looking over assignments for school than actually waiting tables some nights? There’s something depressing, you think, about an empty restaurant whose tacky neon signs and dinner special offers do nothing to draw customers in.
“Nothing,” you say, shrugging off the thought. “It’s nothing.”
Your eyes flit to the clock hanging above the register. It’s five minutes until closing but you walk the short distance to lock the door anyway. You flip the sign so it reads ‘closed’ and return to the mindless task of cleaning tables.
Osamu hangs around near the entrance to the kitchen as if he’s debating on saying something more to you.
You hold your breath.
“Hey,” he begins and you sigh internally, waiting for the patronizing dialogue about hard work and sacrifice. Hell, he might even include something about filial piety and respect to really drive the guilt home. But to your surprise, it never comes.
“Work hard, okay?” is what he settles with. “Don’t wanna be stuck here too late waiting up for you.”
You snort. “Big words for a newbie,” you say, rearranging a bottle of shichimi. “Bet I’ll be done way before you.”
“Way before me?”
“You know it.”
“Okay,” he says, leaning against the worn doorframe. “What are we betting?”
You roll your eyes. “Nothing,” you say. “We’re betting nothing, Osamu. Get back in the kitchen so I don’t have to wait for you.”
Laughing, he holds his hands up in surrender. “Alright, alright. Whatever you say, boss.”
You watch as he strides away, pulling the cart of dirty dishes along with him. You turn back to the room around you, empty once more, and let out a breath. Something in the back of your mind tells you then that one Miya Osamu was about to run your dignity into the ground. And that maybe, just maybe, you’d enjoy it the whole way through.