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Her phone goes off at an hour too early to be respectful, a breach of decorum that Mimi makes immediately clear, too bleary eyed and furious to read the content of any of his messages. Daisuke doesn’t apologize, which should have been her first clue. He only fires off another string of emojis in such rapid, meaningless succession she’s not sure he isn’t just smashing the screen of his mobile with a frantic fist. When he graduates to all caps mixed with nonsense characters, Mimi blocks his number, turns the phone off, and goes back to sleep.
That’s why she misses Sora’s phone call, and Jou’s, too, a minute later, and three voice messages from Miyako. Not that she would know this, of course. She’s not thinking about any of her friends at the moment, not then, and not later from then, when she kicks up her long legs over the arm of her parents’ wicker lawn chair and stretches, yawning, as her mother hands her a cup of steeply brewed assam tea to cure the hangover she’d been passing off as jetlag and her father proclaims that the first one to finish the crossword puzzle in the local newspaper would get to choose how they’d spend the day. Mimi wins, naturally, and she doesn’t bring her phone with her to the botanical gardens, either, a decision for which she believes she deserves an award of some kind.
By lunch—which she ate completely without once borrowing one of her parents’ phones to snap a picture, even though it had been so deliciously pretty that her followers could have tasted the dish through the image itself—she’s pretty certain she’s reached a higher plane of nonmaterial enlightenment. As she’s wondering how much longer she can go and if there’s a record somewhere she ought to consider beating, her father tells her Yamato had texted him. That should have been her second clue.
She stares at him over the top of her round sunglasses. “He did?”
“He says he’s sorry to bother but you’re not answering your phone.”
“I left it at the house.”
Satoe poses for her tenth selfie of the hour. “I’m so proud of you, darling.”
“Yes, he says—oh, and Jou’s texting me, too.” He beams at his wife. “Honey, look how many messages I’ve gotten—I told you her friends would like us—,”
Satoe, in another world, is alarmed, if not personally offended. “Who wouldn’t like you?”
“Papa, your phone!”
“My what?” Keisuke looks down at his hand, then glows even brighter, puffed by the sudden attention. “Oh, look, now Sora’s texting me—,”
“No, she’s texting me!” Mimi snatches the cell from his loose hold, clambering off the picnic blanket on her way down the garden lawn.
Her mother’s fussing after her for that, her father still sorting out what happened as his fingers open and close several times over nothing, but she stomps away from all of it and lets herself get a good distance out of Satoe’s earshot before texting Sora to announce her piracy of Keisuke’s personal property.
Where have you been?!
What’s going on?
Don’t you have post notifications on for him??
I don’t have my phone!
Why???
What’d he do??
SORA
I’m not saying anything more on your dad’s number.
Just get to your Instagram, and delete this message thread.
That gets her attention.
She switches to Yamato's message thread with her father.
I wasn’t even the most drunk person at the party! How bad could the pictures be?
That’s not why you’re going to be mad.
She feels her stomach drop.
SCREENSHOT ME OR I SWEAR I WILL POST THAT PIC OF YOU
I AM NOT SENDING A SCREENSHOT OF THIS TO YOUR DAD’S NUMBER
Holding the phone between both palms as her fingers fly across the keypad, Mimi navigates to a web browser, opens a private tab, and logs into her Instagram page.
A new post has been added to her tagged pictures, and she recognizes who it is by the handle. She was the one who’d come up with it after months of pestering him to let her make him an account. He’d barely even glanced at it at the time, letting her do what she’d wanted while pretending to listen to her litany of experienced tips and tools of the trade. She’d been annoyed by his lack of interest at first, until it dawned on her that getting to curate his social media presence allowed her trial ideas she could then replicate to perfection on her own page, and proceeded to do exactly that, with no one the wiser for it. Over the course of the last few months, she’d created something beautiful, and she was proud of her work.
Until now, when the tagged post finishes loading, and her soul almost leaves her body.
It's not from last night's pre-holiday party, their last blowout before everyone split off to visit home and family.
Instead, it's from the beach for his own family trip, only no one's with him in the shot. He's plopped down on a navy beach towel after a swim, one leg pulled up and the other splayed astride, his left hand holding out the phone before him from below, a low angle that would have ruined the picture for anyone else, and the fact that it doesn't for him makes this so much worse. Or better? No. Definitely worse, she thinks, her heart creeping up her throat to pair the vibrant blush growing on her neck.
Her gaze drags from the bright sunlight behind him that sets off his tanned skin in a striking contrast to the broad hand raking back his wet mess of brown curls, cheeky dimpled smirk winking at the camera in a slight tilt of his head, and toned ridges of his bare torso dripping with seawater and specks of glittery sand. She swallows a choking whimper and follows the muscled lines down to orange trunks that are so soaked they're almost translucent, clinging just a bit too obviously to the wet outline of his hips, and likely a lot more if she pinches the screen to zoom in (which she absolutely does not do, never thought to do once, and she definitely doesn't yank off her sunglasses to get a better look, nope, not her, no no no).
For the caption, he's put did I tag this right? and added the three sweat droplets emoji.
That bastard.
She'd taught him how to use emojis.
How dare he apply that one so accurately.
An incoming message banner flashes across the top of the screen, startling her out of a slack-jawed stare.
I am so sorry to ask you again, sir, but I’m hoping Mimi’s with you?
No, Jou.
Mimi’s not with anyone.
Mimi's left this plane of existence.
MIMI
Delete this thread!
Stop texting me on your dad’s phone!
You started it!
YOU STARTED IT
HOW COULD YOU LET HIM HAVE HIS OWN INSTAGRAM?
HE’S GONE TRIGGER TAG HAPPY!
WHY AM I THE NIPPLE??
Mimi flips back to the Instagram photo, highlighting the other tags in a daze. Sure enough, he’d found a way to squeeze lots of them in the picture with him. He’s tagged her to his hair, while Jou shares the nipples with Yamato, Sora is centered to his chest, Takeru and Daisuke have his knees, Miyako and Iori the elbows, Ken his neck, and Koushiro’s, well—
Her finger starts to slide the screen back to the messaging app when she notices the comments. Among a growing pile-on of likes, emoticons, and increasingly shameless notes from literal strangers—how did he get so popular already? All right, with posts like this she knows how, but dammit!—are some from everyone he’d tagged, and her vision goes white in speechless hyperventilation.
lmaooooooooo the tags
you look great wet Tai
neat shorts
oh but to be buried in those shorts
Did you mean to tag me in this?
Take this to your OnlyFans page please.
I will pay you a million a day to wear exactly this and only this, forever. I’ll go into debt, I don’t even care.
you didn’t invite me to the family beach holiday!! am I not family??
thicc thighs save lives, and today I have been saved
Did Mimi not teach you tagging yet?
Maybe today’s Insta lesson is the thirst trap?
trap me pls
Why’s Kou on your crotch?
That snaps her back. Determined to rescue her best friend's honor from such an egregious violation of tag placement etiquette, she taps the comment box and types out, You're supposed to tag people who're actually in the photo, Taichi.
She refreshes the page.
Her father calls from across the garden patch, “Pumpkin, when’re you giving Papa back his phone?”
A new comment appears. His.
To hers, he’s replied, fixed thx, and added a praying hands emoji.
Overwhelmed by a wave of impending doom, she frantically refreshes again, and something very close to a whine of manic despair lodges in her gasping throat.
Maybe if he hadn't been swimming, or if he'd sat up in a proper pose, or if he'd just bothered to adjust the seams of his trunks, no one would have noticed the handful of faded red hickeys blooming up his inner thigh and disappearing into his swim shorts. Or, more likely, if he hadn't untagged everyone else, and moved hers alone to one of the darker marks she'd left on him, the one that had had him completely undone under her only the night before.
She blinks out of the hazy, hot memory to see the caption's been edited, too: thx for the tagging lessons ;)
Her soul finishes leaving her body as Keisuke inquires again, “Mimi, dear? My phone?”
“I’m burning it!”
A pause. “Okay, honey bear, good to know.”
The comments, likes, shares, and replies are pouring in like wildfire, and she can’t breathe, or, rather, can’t stop heavily breathing.
All three of them are texting her father—or her—now.
Want me to kill him?
I told you not to let him have his own account.
WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN???????
Satoe finishes uploading her favorite selfie to her own Instagram profile, spinning the screen around to show her adoring husband.
“Oh, sweetheart,” says Keisuke, “Takeru’s sent you a post.”
Mimi screams.