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Okkotsu Yuuta knows all about problems.
If problem-having were a major, he’d have graduated four semesters early and summa cum laude. He’s an expert: if he were asked to write a thesis on problems, he wouldn’t quite know which kind to pick. Family problems, he knows; school problems, love problems, health problems, math problems (those are the worst kind) – he could fill a notebook on any of them. Problems with a hip injury from high school cross-country that still hasn’t healed. Problems with parents who all but forgot he existed when he told them he wanted to major in literature. Problems like grief and loneliness and the listlessness that sits behind his heart like a lump in his chest cavity, always wanting something more. But the worst kind of problem, he’s decided, is the kind that should be impossibly easy to solve, but…isn’t.
Zenin Maki is exactly that kind of problem.
Truthfully, Yuuta knows almost nothing about her, except that she is rich and beautiful and has the kind of biceps – always bare – that he sort of wishes he could meet his end between. She sits next to him in Modern Japanese Literature. Their professor gives in-class essays as exams and is insistent that writing in pen is unacceptable. She has pencils. He needs one. Failing to tap the prettiest girl he’s ever seen on the shoulder and ask if, excuse me, may he please borrow a pencil? He’s really so sorry – might mean failing the class.
But he cannot, cannot, cannot get his hand to move.
“You’re staring,” Maki informs him, unimpressed, after about forty frozen seconds of working himself up to the task of asking her to help him save his grade. He gulps. She’s never spoken to him before. Not like that.
“S-sorry,” Yuuta mumbles, turning his face away. “I’m s-sorry, I didn’t-“
“Something on my face?” she asks, clipped, challenging.
“N-no! No. I…I just…I just n-need to b-borrow-“
“Ah.” Maki cuts him off, sliding a pencil across the table to him. “Shoulda led with that.”
**
It ’ s just a pencil, dude.
Yuuta shakes his head. “You don’t get it,” he says, hushed, and behind him, his roommate starts typing again –at least, if the three dots at the bottom of his home screen say anything. (They have a good thing going. Yuuta is afraid of talking; Toge, whose speech impediment makes speaking aloud both difficult and stressful, texts.) “You don’t know who gave me this.”
Yes, I do, Toge texts him. You never shut up about her.
“Okay, but…it’s Zenin-san.”
You’re an idiot, Toge informs him.
“I didn’t even have to ask her, Toge,” he replies archly. “She just. Gave it to me.”
?????? so she was nice to you one time???
“She was looking at me like she wanted to kill me, Toge.”
Because you were staring?
“And she still gave me that pencil-“
The bar is on the floor, Toge interjects.
“Toge,” Yuuta whines, “she’s hot.”
And here I thought I was the shallow one, he types.
“No, but, like…she’s really smart,” he offers. “Like, she’s not even a lit major, but she always has the best insights, and her book is always all marked-up, and I can tell she really likes that class, and her arms look like they could crush me-“
Bonk, Toge texts him.
“What?”
Bonk, Toge texts him again. Horny jail.
“Toge!” Yuuta yelps, blood rushing to his face.
Am I wrong tho?
“You’re one to talk!”
Toge doesn’t dignify that with any more substantial response than a string of smirking emoticons. Figures. He’s been unbearable ever since that cute communications major from his English class asked him out.
(Yuuta’s not jealous. He’s not.)
It’s not my fault I have game, Toge replies.
“Toge…”
Sorry, my guy, he texts. Maybe if you could say more than two words to her, you’d get better results :)
Yuuta huffs, throwing his phone aside - his soul nearly exits his body when it comes close to bouncing off the mattress and onto the floor - as he slumps back against the pillows. Toge snickers, his fingers moving across the keys of his controller too quickly to see. They’re both creatures of habit but while Yuuta spends his days catching up on course readings and staring at the blank document that’s supposed to become his magnum opus, Toge splits his evenly between studying and Final Fantasy. Yuuta’s existential agony, then, has a constant soundtrack of battle music and video game sound effects, which…
Fair enough.
Fitting enough.
He knows that he probably shouldn’t be thinking so much about a girl he doesn’t really know. There’s no grounds for his belief that she’s worth that much of his attention. Yes, she’s beautiful; yes, she’s clearly strong; yes, her books are always marked-up and dog-eared and full of sticky notes, and she always has something to say about their readings – but that is all. He doesn’t know what she’s like when she gets to relax, or if she even does. He remembers that she said she was in some sort of science major, but he can’t remember what it is. He doesn’t know what she wants, what drives her – he doesn’t think that attraction is worthwhile if he can’t know those things, because without the knowledge of the little fragments that coalesce to form the girl who sits next to him in Modern Japanese Lit, he can’t claim that his feelings are noble, or anything more than a base attraction, and-
What he does know is that Zenin Maki is not the kind of woman one ought simply to be attracted to.
(Toge wouldn’t get that. Wouldn’t want to.)
**
This Okkotsu kid looks harmless.
Sure, he stares, and Maki hates men who stare, but she honestly gets the feeling he’s just too scared of her not to freeze up when he looks at her, so she always lets it slide. Maybe she shouldn’t – and she does, truthfully, wish that he wouldn’t do that – but nevertheless, she does. It’s one of her fatal flaws, clemency is; it’s probably going to get her killed.
Or something.
“You,” she says, poking his arm with her pen before their next Modern Japanese Lit class. “You awake?”
It’s an honest question. The bags under her eyes always leave that up to chance.
“Eh?” he startles. “Oh, uh…yeah, I’m up.” Okkotsu scratches the back of his neck and laughs sheepishly. “Sorry ‘bout that. Lost in thought, I guess.”
Damn. That smile.
“Anyway,” he goes on. “What’s up?”
Since when is Maki so bothered by smiles, of all things? Ugh. She shouldn’t have noticed that at all. “Um,” she starts, uncharacteristically flustered. “You look hungry.”
What the hell, Maki?
“Oh, what?” he starts to retreat back into his default skittishness, wincing. “Um, I…I do?”
“Yeah. You do.” Does he? Maki hadn’t really thought so until she’d decided he needed to have lunch with her. “Eat with me later.”
His face flushes bright-red. “Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, um…why?”
She doesn’t really know. She rarely eats on campus anyways, and she’s never felt the need to invite a friend –either some random classmate she can half-stand asks her to get lunch or she goes back to her apartment and pulls from an endless supply of konbini snacks she keeps on hand, tacitly ignoring her sister’s presence in the living room. She doesn’t even know this guy – she knows his name and his in-depth thoughts on Soseki’s I Am a Cat, but that’s about it. It isn’t as if they’re friends and she’s never really been interested in them, anyway. So why is a particularly thorny question to answer.
“Because you look hungry,” she repeats.
“Wh…what?”
“You look hungry,” she tells him. “Look at you. You’re a mess.”
His face falls. Something about the way it does that makes Maki feel like she’s just kicked a stray puppy. She wants to tell him she didn’t mean that and reach over and pat his head or something.
What the actual hell, Maki.
“I mean,” she restarts, because ‘sorry’ is just too hard a word to blurt out like this, “someone has to make sure you take care of yourself.”
He sinks back into his chair, and if it’s possible, his (broad, surprisingly-built, does this guy lift or something?) shoulders slump even further than they already had. He still looks crestfallen, and now he won’t even meet Maki’s eyes. “I do take care of myself,” he mumbles, picking at an imaginary piece of lint on his pants.
Now Maki really feels like she’s kicked a puppy. Empathy – not one of mankind’s more useful attributes. “I…”
“Look,” he says shakily, “it’s nice of you and all, but I’m okay. Thanks for the pencil and all, but-“
“Wait,” she blurts out.
He looks up, clearly not expecting much.
“I…I want to,” she stammers. “I…am trying to be less antisocial.”
Okkotsu’s eyebrows rise. “What?”
“My…my sister says I’m repulsive,” she explains, then wonders why she’s trying to explain, then adds, “and…and socially deficient.”
Okkotsu’s eyes widen. “That’s terrible-“
“She’s right,” Maki cuts him off. “And…and you look harmless.”
“I…thanks?”
“So.” She meets his eyes, wondering where this determination came from. “Eat with me.”
“Is…is this your way of saying you want to be friends?”
Maki’s face burns. “I…I never said that-“
“Zenin-san, I’m confused.”
“I just want you to eat me!”
Yuuta blanches.
Great.
“Eat with me!” Maki amends, hoping fervently to be struck by a meteor.
“Oh.” Yuuta looks embarrassingly relieved. “Um. I mean, yeah, I guess?”
“Cool,” she says tightly. “Cool.”
“Twelve?”
“Cafeteria?”
“Wait, I’m stupid, we could just-“
“Walk over together.” Get it together, Maki. “Yeah. I know.”
**
They do.
Walk together. And eat. With each other. Not each other. That would be…that would be…Yuuta doesn’t want to think about it. Yuuta doesn’t want to think about anything.
Yuuta doesn’t think a sandwich from a vending machine has ever tasted so stressful.
Maki doesn’t think she’s ever more ardently wished she were dead.
Yuuta asks, twice, if she needs a home intervention because it really seems like her sister is causing harm to her well-being, and Maki tells him, twice, that she’ll deck him if he brings up her sister again.
Twice, Yuuta looks like she’s kicked him in the kidneys. Twice, Maki feels the strangest twist in her gut. She nearly apologizes.
It’s one of the less pleasant lunches either of them has ever had.
“Tomorrow?” Yuuta asks.
Maki nods. What kind of a question is that? Of course she wants to do it again tomorrow.
**
“My family owns a company,” Maki tells Yuuta, with absolutely no prelude, after weeks of those lunches together. She thinks it’s sort of stupid that neither of them has managed to break off the arrangement yet when they don’t really seem to enjoy each other’s company all that much, but she’d rather talk to Yuuta than to no one, and her stomach twists at the thought of telling him ‘no,’ so she goes with it. “They all suck.”
“My family, too,” Yuuta offers. “I mean. They don’t really talk to me anymore.”
“I wish mine didn’t talk to me.”
“I dated the same girl from seventh grade to my last year of high school,” he explains. “She was basically a member of the family. So when she dumped me…”
“They weren’t happy?” Maki guesses.
“Livid would be more like it.”
“Well, you thought you needed to make a call on my sister, and she’s the most bearable relative I have, so I feel that.”
“Then they told me they wouldn’t help me pay tuition unless I studied medicine,” he tells her. “But I have this weird rich uncle-“
“Don’t we all,” Maki sighs.
“You, too?”
“Too many.” She shoves the last bite of an onigiri into her mouth. “Whole family’s loaded.”
“That’s…nice?”
She shoots him a look. “Is not.”
“Oh.”
“Anyways.” She’s eager to get back to any topic but that of her family. “You have a weird rich uncle?”
“Yeah. He’s helping with tuition. Gave me a job.”
“That’s nice.”
“He’s a politician,” Yuuta tells her. “I write his speeches.”
“Seriously? Don’t they usually hire trained professionals for that?”
“I can write, and I’ll work for cheap, so I guess not.” He shrugs. “He never stays on-script anyway. So anything I write gets turned into talking points.” Yuuta’s shoulders slump. “No matter how good it is. At least it’s a salary, though.”
“Sounds like a real-“
“I owe him a lot,” Yuuta interrupts.
“But he still-“
“I like his wife better than I like him.” Yuuta coughs into his hand to clear his throat without clearing his throat. “My aunt. She’s sweet.”
“But she married a dude who pays you to write whole speeches and uses them as guidelines?”
“Yeah, beats me too.” He laughs, tucking his legs to his chest. He’s too tall for it, but he doesn’t seem to care. “But she’s great. Feeds me sometimes.”
“Well, someone has to.”
“I can feed myself just fine,” he says flatly.
“But will you?”
He doesn’t answer that. Typical.
“She used to be his press secretary,” he goes on. “I don’t think that’s supposed to be allowed.”
“Yeah, my whole family would stab you if you worked for them and tried to date one of the board members.”
“Your family sounds terrifying,” Yuuta tells her.
“Eh, you get used to it.”
“I’m having dinner with them tomorrow night,” he says. “You should come.”
“Why?”
“Because why not?” Yuuta has gotten a little bolder as they’ve gotten to know each other – they may not be overfond of each other, but they’re friends. Necessity-friends, mind you, but that counts. “We eat together all the time anyway.”
“Yeah. So why would I need to do it more?”
Because you want to, says a voice at the back of Maki’s mind. Because you really, really want to.
She does. Something about Yuuta’s floppy black hair makes her want to brush it out of his eyes. But she can’t just say that.
“You seriously don’t like me, do you.”
“I don’t dislike you,” Maki concedes.
“Then why do we eat lunch together almost every day?”
“Because neither of us have anything better to do?”
“I…you could meet my baby niece,” he offers, but he already looks crestfallen. Again. Either it’s his default state or Maki is just mean and she doesn’t know which it is or maybe it’s both and both would be awful because-
Well…
I’m not your girlfriend, she thinks, and if I met these people everyone would think I was, and I’m not, and you’d never want me to be-
That. That.
“They won’t think it’s weird if I show up?”
“Nah. They’re always hounding me to meet people.” He smiles. “And my aunt doesn’t get a whole lot of visitors ‘cause she’s on maternity leave, and she’d like it if I brought someone home, so I know they wouldn’t be weird about it, and I promise I can make sure my uncle doesn’t ask you weird questions about being my girlfriend-“
“Do you want me to be your girlfriend?”
Yuuta looks up at her, stunned. “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
“Wh…why would you ask something like that?”
“Because you asked-“
“I just thought-“
“You don’t even like me as a friend, Zenin-san. I don’t know why you’d think I thought you liked me like that.”He smiles sadly. “You probably think I’m kinda pathetic, huh?”
“A little.” She shoves her hands in her pockets. “I do like you.”
“…oh.”
“How’s your aunt have time to cook if she just had a kid?”
“She doesn’t. We’re getting takeout.” Yuuta grins. “Fried chicken.”
“Friend chicken’s good.”
“It is.”
That, Yuuta knows, is as close to a straight ‘yes’ as he’s going to get.
**
“You’re leaving.”
“Yes, obviously,” Maki snaps, grabbing her keys from the hook by the door and dropping them into her purse. “Why?”
“You never go anywhere.” Mai, standing in the hallway behind her, crosses her arms. “What gives? You managed to find a guy who doesn’t run screaming at the sight of you?”
“No,” Maki says crossly.
“Sorry, a girl?”
“We’re friends,” she snaps. “I’m going to dinner.”
“That sounds like a date.”
“With his crazy rich uncle and aunt.”
“That sounds like a marriage proposal, honestly.”
Maki would tell Mai to do something unsavory if she were wrong. That, really, is exactly what she’s worried about. “We’re just friends,” she repeats. “He’s not even hot.”
Actually – concerningly – he’s very hot. Maki realized this about two hours ago, and she’s still not sure what to think of the fact that she – apparently – has a thing for men who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly or get a solid eight hours of sleep if their lives depended on it.
Okay. She might as well admit that she’s probably wanted to grab him and kiss that stupid bewildered look (that stupid, adorable bewildered look) off his face since the day he couldn’t figure out how to ask if she had a pencil he could borrow. But-
“It’s not like that,” Maki repeats.
Mai’s lips curl into a sardonic smile. “Have fun, hm?”
“Piss off.”
“But not too much-“
“I said piss off-“
“Don’t add to or subtract from the population-“
“Ew.”
“What? You’re obviously into the guy.”
“Can you do me a favor and move out already?”
Mai snickers. “Can you?”
They like to get at each other’s throats sometimes. It’s just what’s always come most easily to them – God knows no one was ever going to teach them to treat each other decently. No wonder she thinks I’m repulsive.
No wonder Yuuta is scared of her.
(The thought makes her heart sink. Would he still feel that way if he knew what she’d just realized?)
**
“Didn’t think you’d actually come.”
Maki glares at him. “Of course I came.”
“Well-“
“You look nice,” she cuts him off.
She’s never been good at beating around the bush, or at hiding what she feels. However embarrassingly short the turnaround time between her last insult and her realization that she might’ve been just a little bit into him had been, she doesn’t see the need for subtlety, or to gradually build to this kind of bluntness. Best to come out with it.
And he does, in dark jeans and a blue sweater vest over a white button-up that manages to look at least forty times less old-mannish than it should. It’s a very Yuuta thing to wear: a little geeky, a little out-of-style, oddly sweet and surprisingly good-looking. Like him, kind of. He’s sweet, through and through – he never snaps back when she snaps at him, he listens more intently to her than anyone ever has, and he’s so polite that she’d wanted to punch him when they’d first met. (She’s long accepted that she’s strange that way – kindness will always strike her as strange, feather-ruffling when she’s so unused to it.) He’s a gentle soul in a lanky body and neither of those are things Maki thinks she finds attractive, but…
But Yuuta.
He looks like the kind of person who’d run to her apartment in a snowstorm just to wrap her in his arms if she told him about a stressful meeting with her family and he thought that she was crying.
At least, he probably would if she could get herself to stop being so mean to him without even wanting to be. That…that is a bit of an issue. Admittedly. Something to work on.
Hence: “you look nice.”
His cheeks turn pink, delightfully, and Maki finds herself thinking that that might be one of the most wonderful things she’s ever seen – Yuuta, flustered, smiling, because of her. She can’t remember the last time she made a friend or felt the urge to reach for someone the way she wants to take hold of Yuuta’s hand and-
Get yourself together, Maki.
“I do?” he asks, and she nods tactfully.
“The sweater vest look suits you,” she says.
“Oh, um…you…you look nice, too,” he offers, gesturing to her puffy plum coat and the skinny jeans beneath. She isn’t even wearing her nice boots, or her nice coat (they’re both plum) – snow boots for the ice, a parka for the chill. In all honesty, she hadn’t given a thought to the way she looked tonight.
Maybe she should’ve.
“That’s, um, your…your coat, um…it looks nice on you.”
Who knows what that means.
“Thanks,” she tells him, looking at her feet, wondering how long it’s been since she started going soft.
**
“I can’t believe how big she’s getting.” That sounds like a lie. “I saw her two weeks ago and…already.”
Yuuta trails off, lost in thought. Maki fights the urge to roll her eyes and the stronger urge to kiss him senseless and the even-stronger urge to run from the room because she has no business feeling things at the sight of a dork who couldn’t ask her for a pencil in Modern Japanese Literature cooing over a baby.
None. None at all.
And yet here she is.
“She is, isn’t she?” Okkotsu’s aunt leans over his shoulder, looking down at her baby (still red, still – in Maki’s uncharitable estimation – hideously ugly) in his arms. She’s so much shorter than him that she has to stand on her toes to peek, but she doesn’t seem to mind the reach or the proximity.
Which is weird.
Zenins don’t touch each other. It may well be normal to anyone else, but whatever Okkotsu and his aunt are doing right now would probably get any two Zenins an official reprimand from the Board of Directors.
Very weird.
“You’re so pretty already,” Yuuta murmurs, stroking the baby’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. He’s usually so clumsy that it shocks Maki that he knows how to be this gentle when it’s called-for. “You didn’t get many of tou-chan’s genes, did you?”
She’s not pretty. Maki can absolutely confirm that Okkotsu’s niece is not pretty. Babies, until they’re about three months old (at which time she stops looking at them because the urge to squish their cheeks makes her deeply uncomfortable), are hideous. This one is no exception, no matter what Okkotsu says.
“Be nice, Yuuta-kun,” his aunt chides, but it doesn’t sound like she really means it. Both Yuuta and his aunt seem to get a kick out of mocking his uncle. (If his uncle is anything like most politicians, she gets it. She really does.) “She got some.”
“Just the eyes,” Yuuta remarks. Which – well, duh. His aunt’s eyes are brown, and the baby’s are a brilliant blue so clear it’s almost creepy.
“Her nose,” his aunt adds.
“Mm…I guess?”
Babies don’t look like anyone when they’re this young, Maki wants to cut in, but even she’s not that rude. She settles for staring at the top right corner of the room.
(No one needs to know if she comes away from that horrifying encounter with a picture of Yuuta, looking down at his niece with the kind of smile he’ll probably never turn on her, that she’d kill someone before she’d admit to having taken.)
**
“Yuuta-kun here is what we like to call ‘antisocial.’”
“Ojisan, can you please-“
“Be nice, Satorun,” Utahime chides, poking her husband’s arm. “We have guests.”
“He’s not, though,” Maki cuts in, as if this exchange called for another opinion. “He talks to me fine.”
Yuuta almost can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You told me I was pathetic two days ago!”
“Yeah, but you’re not antisocial.”
It might be the sweetest thing she’s ever said to him, and, in her own way, she’s said a lot of them. Maki hides her feelings beneath layers of derision – he knows that well now – but she’s said plenty he can read to mean that her scorn is toothless. He dares not presume that she actually likes him, but she’s said plenty of kind things, only…Maki-ishly. (He’s found himself using that made-up adjective all the time – works just as well as an adverb. And he wonders if she’d think that was weird, having a whole new word made up to describe the way she looks at the world. Probably.) But this one is entirely unprecedented.
About as unprecedented as “you look nice.”
And yes, she’s brusque, and yes, she’s rude, and no, she doesn’t have a single spec of goodwill towards mankind in her body when she doesn’t feel like it, but Zenin Maki ribs him with a kind of sweetness he’s glad he hasn’t allowed himself to overlook.
“Th-thanks,” he stammers.
“Aw.” Utahime’s nose wrinkles. “Young love…”
“Be nice, Hime,” Gojo teases, throwing her words back at her. Just for effect, he takes their daughter’s tiny fist and bumps it against Utahime’s arm. “What’s the saying? ‘A watched pot never boils’?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“We’re not in love,” Maki says flatly.
“Definitely not,” because ‘I think I’m in love with her’ (he can say that now, because he knows her) and ‘we’re in love’ are two very, tragically different things.
He knows where the boundaries lie. She likes him more than she lets on, as does he, but he won’t ask for more than that.
**
“Hey. Okkotsu.”
“Mngh?”
Maki digs an elbow into Yuuta’s side, hard enough to jolt him against the windowsill. He mutters something unintelligible and rubs his head. “Wha’?”
“Were you sleeping?”
“Mmhm,” he mumbles drowsily. “Wha’s it?”
“I’m pretty sure my family wouldn’t let me date you even if I wanted to.” She pauses. “Which I don’t.”
He gives her a look. “Then why are you bringing it up?”
“Because I can’t. If I wanted to.” She shrugs. “Which I don’t.”
“Maki-“
“All of the Zenins who don’t live with board members have people assigned to check up on their personal lives. To keep them from damaging the company image and whatever.” Maki can’t really stop herself now that she’s gotten started. “Apparently dating people they don’t like is damaging the company image.”
“I’m…confused.”
“And they definitely wouldn’t like you,” she goes on. “They’re snobs like that.”
He rubs at his forehead. “Wha…”
“Because you’re not from, like, one of five families that they approve of.”
“Maki, what are you talking about?”
“Us dating,” Maki tells him. “We can’t.”
“Us…dating?”
“Yeah. Not gonna happen.”
He blinks slowly, trying to clear his sleep-foggy vision. “Wh…what made you think…”
“I just,” she says, swallowing hard, “wanted to let you know.”
“Is that why you’re being nice to me all of the sudden?”
“I’m not being nice, I’m being realistic.”
“You told me I looked nice,” he protests. “How is that realistic?”
“Because you did look nice.” She huffs. “Dumbass.”
“But why did you tell me that?” Yuuta’s eyes are wide, a little frantic. “I’m not following, Maki.”
“Because you looked nice,” she repeated. “You’re good-looking. People like it when you tell them that.”
Yuuta chokes on nothing. She takes that as a cue to continue.
“I’m not going to date you,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t.”
“Ma…ki…?”
“You’re sweet,” she lists. “You’re good-looking. It baffles me that I’m attracted to you, but here we are.”
Yuuta looks like he’s taken a brick to the face. “But…but…”
“I just don’t know what to do with that.” She shrugs. “And it’s not like I could do anything. Because my family would forcibly separate us or whatever.”
“That sounds illegal,” Yuuta says faintly.
“It is, but anyone can be bought off, and it’s not like they’re going to kill you, but they’d definitely never let us see each other.” Maki doesn’t flinch, saying those words – she’s gotten good at burying her feelings so they won’t break the surface and remind her that none of this is supposed to be okay. “So I kinda can’t date you.”
“Wait, you…like me?”
She glares daggers at him. “What did you think I was saying just now, dumbass?”
**
“And then she goes and tells me her family would force us to break up.” Yuuta groans into his pillow, lifting his foot and letting it drop back down to the mattress. “Why even tell me at all?”
His phone dings. He raises his head for long enough to check Toge’s message – tough luck, bro. Great.
“She likes me,” he mumbles, flopping back down against his pillow. “She actually told me she likes me.”
U said that, Toge texts him.
“She has a picture of me holding my niece in her phone.”
Y tho?
“Beats me. But a hot girl likes looking at a picture of me holding a baby. Gift horse, mouth.”
Toge rolls his eyes, because of course that would do it for Yuuta. They’d asked each other about career goals once – a formality – and he’d said he would be satisfied with any job that was not, in his words, “a farce,” and a calm, happy home life planted firmly behind a white picket fence. He’s probably seeing stars right now.
Ur weird, he tells him, unhelpfully. Toge is quite good at being unhelpful when he wants to be.
“And I like her,” he says mournfully. “I like her so much, Toge-kun.”
And???
“What do I do?”
You could always just kiss her and say you don’t care about the consequences, Toge texts him. Girls think that’s hot ;)
“I don’t think-“
Which one of us has a gf???
Yuuta sighs and sets his phone aside.
**
“Zenin-san!”
Maki says nothing, because she’s too far away from their usual table to make responding to him feel reasonable. It would look strange if she yelled at him across the cafeteria – she wishes he hadn’t felt the need to call attention to her when someone relevant is probably around to hear. Still.
“Keep your voice down,” she tells him as soon as she sits down. “It’s not like I couldn’t see you.”
“Sorry.” Yuuta’s cheeks flush, and he looks down at the table before he manages to look Maki in the eye. “Um. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss me.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t really ever a risk.” Maki rests her chin on a fist. “Something up?”
“Actually, yeah.” He smiles brightly. “You said you’d date me.”
“Hold on, no-“
“And I totally get that there’s probably a lot of problems with that because of, like, your family being all crazy and stalking you and stuff, but the thing is that I really like you.” He’s still beaming. “And I know you’re not gonna admit it because you don’t really do that, but you just told me you liked me too, and I think…I think we should give it a try.”
Maki’s heartbeat (fifty-nine beats per minute, she’s measured) stutters. Since when does Maki’s heart ever stutter?
“You realize that my family has access to every CCTV and security feed on this campus, right?”
“Yeah, but why do we have to stay on campus?” Yuuta shrugs. “We could hang out at my uncle’s house. My aunt would probably take a baseball bat to any of your company’s people if they showed up looking for you.”
Maki is fully aware of that, but she doesn’t feel especially compelled to spend more time with Gojo Satoru than is strictly necessary. Pass.
“That would be even worse,” she tells him. “They see me hanging around some politician who they don’t have in their pockets and they’re going to lose their damn minds.”
“Okay, then-“
“Okkotsu, lemme break this down for you.” It’s not as if she thinks he’s stupid – she’s read his papers, he’s definitely anything but – but he’s got the common sense of a flip-flop. She would be naïve not to have noticed that. “The only way that this” – she gestures to him, then back at herself – “is ever going to happen is if all it ever amounts to is a series of hookups in janitor’s closets.”
Yuuta’s face falls. Took him long enough.
(Maki wants to hit herself in the back of the ankle with a scooter for that thought.)
“I never said anything about hooking up in closets,” he mumbles, folding his arms across his middle. “I just thought…”
“Sorry,” Maki stammers. “That…that came out wrong.”
“N-no, I don’t think it did.”
“Seriously.” Her voice strains. “It’s…that isn’t what I would want us to be, either.”
“Hm?”
“The whole point of this” – Maki’s voice begins to crack – “is that I don’t want to be with you like that.”
“You mean you don’t want to, um…to hook up with me or…or whatever,” he clarifies.
That’s…that’s very much not it and a stiff blush rises in Maki’s cheeks at the implications. “I mean if it can’t be anything more than sneaking around, I…I don’t want it.”
“You don’t?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t hang out with you because I want to jump you or something. I hang out with you because I like hanging out with you.”
“Um, well, to be fair, I never suspected you of wanting to jump me.” Yuuta laughs nervously, scratching at the back of his neck. “Uh…so…”
“I don’t date. But…but if I did, I would…just want to be like…friends that make out or something.” Maki wonders how fast she could get that scooter shipped to her if she paid off the right people. “Not people who get it on in closets and can’t be together in public because someone’s probably watching.”
“Me, too,” Yuuta mumbles, staring down at the table.
“Okkotsu,” she says, her voice softer now. “I mean. Yuuta-kun.”
He looks up. She never calls him that.
“Yuuta-kun,” she repeats. “It’s…I’m sorry. This is coming out wrong.”
“No, I get it,” he sighs. “It’s…it’s not like you’re saying all of this for no reason.”
“I’m making it sound like I hate you. Why do I always do that?” Maki picks at her cuticles, pretending to be bored because that’s always been a reliable method of pretending not to care. “I don’t.”
“I figured that was just how you were.”
“Yeah, but you always look so upset when I get like this.” She looks up at him to gauge his reaction – none yet. From someone who wears his heart on his sleeve the way Yuuta does, that’s odd. “I hate that.”
“It’s…it’s fine. If I actually thought you hated me, I wouldn’t have kept asking you to get lunch, right?” Yuuta smiles, as if that’s going to convince her of anything. “I wanted to figure you out. You were just…helping me do that.”
“You don’t have to be nice, y’know.”
“No, but…that’s just how you are-“
“But why?” she pinches her eyes shut, squeezes the bridge of her nose. “I…I like you and I act like this. And…and I don’t know why.”
“Weird family?” Yuuta offers. “Bad at feelings?”
She swats his arm halfheartedly, even though it’s true.
“You can be kinda mean, yeah,” Yuuta admits. “But I still like you. And…and half the time you’re right.”
“Hah?”
“I’m kind of a loser.” He laughs sheepishly. “Unemployable major, almost no friends, no girlfriend, and I never do anything but go to classes and pretend I’m writing while I actually just stare at my screen and watch the cursor blink-“
“Dumbass,” Maki scoffs. “You’re not a loser.”
“You call me that a lot.”
“Yeah, because you have no…” she trails off. “Sorry. That was rude, wasn’t it.”
“No, go on, say it. It’s probably true.”
“…common sense,” she tells him. “It is true, but…maybe I didn’t need to bring it up.”
“No, you’re totally right.” He reaches across the table and pats her hand. “I don’t think it’s mean to be blunt if you’re saying it with good intentions.”
“Am I, though?”
Yuuta pauses to think.
“Maybe that was kinda mean,” he concedes.
Maki droops like wilted lettuce. It’s a truly unflattering deportment.
“But I know you didn’t mean to hurt me,” he goes on. “And it isn’t your fault that your family taught you to be rough on people.”
“You’re too nice for people to be rough on you,” she says miserably.
“Maki – I mean, Zenin-san-“
“Maki.” She interrupts him, then swallows hard. “You can…you should call me Maki.”
“Maki,” he tells her, “I know you have some…rough edges. But I still want to be with you.”
“Well, that’s great, but we can’t.”
“There’s no way?”
“It would take years to be financially stable enough on my own to cut my family off, and honestly, that’s the only way I’m going to be able to date someone they don’t approve of. They’re…really intense about…class-mixing and succession and stuff. Stupid stuff,” she says, “but they’re still obsessed with it. And I haven’t really asked how they feel about it, but you being related to a political family-“
“How did you know that?”
“We kinda had to learn who was who growing up. And everyone knows Gojo Satoru.” She sighs. “And everyone knew Gojo Mineyoshi before him, and Gojo Hirotake before him-“
“Okay, okay, I get it.”
“Yeah, uh, I try not to learn more about my family than I have to, but I don’t really think they like the Gojos much. So unless I leave them, get myself written out of the will, and tell them I’m not a Zenin anymore…”
It’s not going to happen, she doesn’t need to finish.
“I’m sure that my uncle would help us if-“
“No, Yuuta.”
Now it’s Yuuta who wilts. What a sorry pair they are.
“All right,” he says weakly.
“Sorry. I know.”
“It was worth a shot, I guess.”
Maki shrugs. Whatever.
**
Life goes on. It always does – Yuuta could’ve told anyone that, because he’s taken enough knocks to know that they never last. (At least, not on the outside.) And the matter of Zenin Maki is no different.
“Ew,” she scoffs, inching away from him. “Worst flavor by far.”
“Worst?” Yuuta looks offended. “Maybe it’s not the best, but are you actually telling me that the egg salad sandwich is better than the ebi katsu one?”
“Yes, it’s better!” Maki swats him with her own (tonkatsu) sandwich. “Literally everything is better than ebi katsu!”
“But it’s good!”
“It is not, Yuuta-kun.”
Maki hates honorifics, and he still has no idea why she uses one for him, and he knows perfectly well that she’ll never be his, but damn, if Yuuta doesn’t still think he could get drunk off of the way she says his name. He’ll take what he can get.
“I ate these five nights in a row our first quarter of first year,” he tells her. “I was thinking about my ex and got all depressed, so Toge bought a bunch of konbini snacks and told me I had to eat something, and for some reason he only got ebi katsu sandwiches and I ended up eating five in a row-“
“Ew.”
“It was very kind of him!”
“No, it wasn’t. Who buys their depressed roommate ebi katsu? If he really wanted to help, he would’ve gotten you the fruit ones.”
Ah, she knows him well. A sweet tooth is perhaps the only Gojo family trait that Yuuta, who dropped from an obscure branch of the family that almost always goes unseen by those at the top, inherited.
“He got other things,” Yuuta says under his breath, dropping the aforementioned sandwich into his shopping basket.
“You gotta at least get something decent,” Maki insists, dropping a fruit sandwich into his cart and then reaching a few shelves up for an onigiri.
“I did get something decent.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Keep your voice down,” she hisses, even though she was the one who’d started this.
It’s late – late enough that shifts are changing and the shelves are so picked-over that Maki’s beloved ham sandwich is out of stock – and the only people around to hear them are the high school students who staff the store on summer break and couldn’t care less that their only two customers are fighting over sandwich flavors. But it still seems imprudent to make a scene.
It always is. They’re friends, and they’re able to say that honestly if questioned. But the innocence of their intentions won’t keep the Zenin Corporation from keeping tabs on its children, and even in the most private places they can find, Maki is wary of making a scene. It’s never a good idea to draw attention to the fact that she’s out with a boy her age, alone, in the middle of the night. He’d invited her back to his apartment to watch the drama he keeps on insisting she has to watch. She’d had to decline.
(Nothing sounds better than that, lying on the couch with her limbs tangled up in Yuuta’s, listening to the corny soundtrack of a badly-acted drama and the thump-thump-thump-thump of Yuuta’s heartbeat, and he knows that, and she knows that he knows that. But it’s something neither would prefer to have to verbalize, so neither does. They’ll settle for konbini snacks and arguments meant to hide the things they can’t admit.)
“You’re so skinny,” Maki tells him, poking his arm. “It’s probably all of the ebi katsu.”
“Ebi katsu is high in calories,” he says, but his heart obviously isn’t in it. Something’s shifted since she reminded him of their predicament. “So if I’m too skinny, it’s not because of that.”
“It’s so disgusting that your body rejects the calories,” she posits.
“That’s definitely not a thing.”
“It’s gotta be. That stuff barely even counts as food.”
He looks up at Maki. She looks up at him. He sets his basket – ebi katsu sandwich, fruit sandwich, bag of chips, cup of cut fruit, Ramune – at his feet. She clutches the handle of hers as tightly as she can. His eyes dart around the store. He’s looking for security cameras, she quickly realizes. “We’re in the blind spot,” she tells him, because she’s already cased the place.
“Oh,” he says. “Thanks.”
She thinks he’s going to kiss her – swears he’s going to kiss her, right here in front of the refrigerator in a konbini three stations from their apartments in the middle of the night – but he doesn’t. He reaches out and brushes a lock of hair out of her eyes instead, his slender fingers brushing her cheek just slowly enough for Maki to realize that she wants to freeze them in place, save the gentleness of that touch for as long as she’s got a brain to remember it with.
“Sorry,” he says. “I just…wanted to fix that for you.”
“Don’t worry about it.” A faint blush tinges Maki’s cheeks. “Thought you were gonna kiss me.”
He swallows. “Did you want me to?”
She nods.
“I wanted to,” he admits.
“Then why didn’t you?”
He smiles sadly. You know why, Maki.
“Oh,” she says, swallowing. “Okay.”
“You’re beautiful,” he tells her, for no reason, apparently.
“That’s irrelevant.”
“How?”
“And I’m not.”
“You really are.”
Which is a ridiculous notion. She’s in her rattiest leggings (there’s a hole in the inside seam halfway up her left calf) and a sweatshirt that reaches to her mid-thigh; her hair is tied back so messily that it might as well be down; she’s exhausted after an interminable dinner with her extended family – Maki doesn’t think she’s ever been particularly beautiful, but she’s certain that she’s never looked less beautiful than she does tonight. She’d asked him if he’d go somewhere with her tonight because she’d needed the company, not because she was in any shape to make a move on him, or trying to.
He’s seeing things. He has to be.
**
“You look worse than usual tonight.”
Maki looks up and shoots Mai a glare that almost makes her regret her choice of greetings. “…oh,” she mutters. “You’re in one of those moods.”
Maki doesn’t say anything, storming into the hallway and slaming her bedroom door. Mai raises her eyebrows – she usually doesn’t lose her cool like this, no matter how much Mai goads her, unless she’s just met with the family. And if she has, that seems like something Mai should know. It’s an unspoken agreement: if no one else is going to take their side, Maki and Mai have to stick together. No matter how much they hate each other, no matter how much more likely they both are to address the other as ‘hey, bitch’ than they are to use her name –it’s their cardinal rule.
This seems like the kind of thing that calls for an unwanted intervention.
“I know you’re in there,” Mai calls, pounding at Maki’s locked bedroom door. “What’d they do this time?”
No answer. That’s worse than any string of vulgarities she could’ve let out at Mai’s intrusion.
“Maki,” she tries again, “I have a spare key.”
Still nothing. That’s a very bad sign indeed. She reaches for the spare key that Maki keeps on top of her doorframe and jimmies it open to find her…
Sitting on her bed, reading a book with almost as many sticky tabs as it has pages in its first half, looking as if absolutely nothing is wrong. What?
“Are you going to tell me what happened to you or not?”
Maki looks up. There’s nothing of the anger of a minute ago in her expression or her voice. “Nothing happened, Mai.”
“Then what was that back there?”
“I’m frustrated,” she says flatly.
“Okay, but with what?”
“Doesn’t concern you.”
Mai bumps the door open with her shoulder and leans against the doorframe. “I live with you, dumbass. Of course it concerns me.”
“Go away, Mai.”
“Is it that guy?”
Maki’s cheeks flush. “There is no ‘guy’.”
“Then who are you always going out with?”
“A friend.”
“Who happens to be a guy?”
“Well, yes-“
“Then there is a guy.”
“It’s complicated, okay?”
Normally, Mai would gloat, rub it in Maki’s face that she’d managed to get it out of her (not that she’d needed a confession to know, but still). But she can’t bring herself to do it. Maki might not have wanted to tell her anything about whoever this person is, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t seen his afterimage in Maki’s frustrated sighs and furtive half-smiles when she thinks no one is looking, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she has any right to gloat over.
“You’re dating him, then?”
Maki glares at her, setting her book face-down beside her. “I’m definitely not.”
“Okay, why?”
“Because I’m not allowed to.”
“Like you’ve ever not done something before because it wasn’t allowed.”
“He’s a classmate.” She winces. “And a tangential Gojo.”
Ah.
Maki won’t do her research, but Mai has, and she knows who all the Zenin Corporation hates. Previous Gojos in government have been far too fond of regulatory legislation for the Board’s taste and, though they can never seem to topple the dynasty, they’d have the fit of the century if one of their own was seeing a Gojo, tangential or not. She wonders if Maki knows that but suspects she doesn’t.
“So you’ve been sneaking around,” Mai guesses.
“As friends.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious.” She gives Mai a sore look. “We’re not.”
“Not what?”
“Seeing each other.”
“And why aren’t you?”
“Because we can’t, Mai. I know you’re not really this stupid.”
They swap insults so regularly that few of them ever sting anymore, but that one does. “That’s not an answer.”
“What do you mean it’s-“
“You’ve never let the Board tell you not to do anything. So why this?”
Maki looks down at her comforter, picking at a piece of lint, and doesn’t answer.
So this is how it is.
**
“What’s wrong with you this time, kid?”
Yuuta flops back onto the couch like he’s about to faint, which – while it probably has a touch more of his uncle’s influence in it than he’d like to admit – doesn’t feel like an inaccurate description of how he feels right now. “Maki,” he says.
There’s no point in trying to sneak anything past Utahime. She always knows.
“Ah. Girlfriend trouble.” She reaches over and ruffles his hair. “I get that.”
He has no idea how when she’s happily married to a man who will bend over backwards to give her and their daughter some semblance of a normal life in spite of all odds, but he’s too tired to protest. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Wait, what?”
“She’s from this family that owns-“
“The Zenin Corporation, yes, I gathered.”
Of course she did. Nothing gets past Utahime. “Yeah. Anyway. They apparently won’t let her date anyone they haven’t pre-approved, so…not me.”
“Has she actually told you this?”
“Yeah.”
“And she’s said she’d be interested in you otherwise?”
“Mmhm.”
“Well, that just blows,” Utahime tells him.
“I’m fully aware.”
“Is there any way-“
“Graduating,” he says. “Getting a good job so she can afford to cut off her family if it comes to that.”
“Is that what you’re planning on?”
“I wish.” Yuuta grabs one of the throw pillows from the nearest end of the couch and clutches it to his chest. “But nah. I wouldn’t ask that of her.”
“Understandable, but-“
“I can’t ask that of her.”
“Yuuta,” she starts, changing tactics, “do you love her?”
He feels like he should hesitate, but he doesn’t – not for a second. “I do.”
How could he give any other answer? It’s been over a year now, almost two since their first meeting, and he thinks he knows her well enough now – her strengths and weaknesses, her sorrows and hopes, her ranked list of every flavor of konbini sandwich (there are twenty-three and he knows the order of the first ten by heart) – to be able to say that. No longer is she the seatmate he thought was attractive and admired from afar. They’ve spent so much time together now that it’s breathed new life into the way he sees her, fleshed out the two-dimensional picture in his head until it’s flesh and bone. That, he thinks – that is the one and only prerequisite for such a bold statement, because to know someone is to open oneself up to loving them, and that’s exactly what he’s done and exactly what he does.
So perhaps he should hesitate, but he doesn’t. He knows Zenin Maki like the back of his hand now, and to know her is to love her, and to love her is to want her, and to want her is to mourn. And he, her hopeless admirer, wears an internal suit of funerary black, and it is because of that grief that he is far too weary to tell Utahime anything but the truth.
“I do love her,” he repeats.
“And does she love you?”
To that, Yuuta shrugs. Sometimes he wonders. If she did love you, one side argues, she would find a way. But the other side makes a different case: she doesn’t have a choice. There is no way to find. You don’t know anything.
“Well, could she?”
He has to nod, even though the thought makes his cheeks burn. It’s what he wants, but he’s never been sure that he’s worthy of it. The thought of such an honor is almost embarrassing.
“Tell her that, then.” Utahime always has liked to cut to the chase. “You can’t ask her to give up her family, no, but you don’t have to push things down.”
He looks down at her incredulously. “How am I supposed to say ‘I want you to wait for me’ without sounding like a grade-A jerk?”
“I didn’t tell you to ask her to wait for you, Yuuta, I said-“
“She has about a million more important things to worry about than how I feel,” he protests.
“Has she said that?”
Yuuta is silent. Utahime reaches over and pats his head.
“Quit being so noble,” she tells him. He glares at her; she raises her hands in submission. “Just saying. Trying to follow the rules and go through the right channels would never have worked for me, and look where I ended up.”
Perpetually exhausted, married to someone whose best efforts at normalcy can’t keep her out of the spotlight, forever fending off reporters when she’s already running low on sleep because her eighteen-month-old keeps her on constant alert – somehow, happy, and…
Well, she’s happy, and surrounding by the warming affection of people who care for her, and thought Yuuta could do without the paparazzi, he can’t and doesn’t want to see his future playing out any other way.
“I guess,” he sighs.
**
“You rarely socialize except with one particular classmate of yours.” Naobito taps a file folder that probably, Maki figures, contains all the incriminating information there is to be had on her. “Care to explain?”
“Yeah,” she scoffs. “I hate most people.”
“And why not this one?”
“Because he’s tolerable.”
“Maki, I know you know what I’m asking you.”
“I’m not dating him,” she says, trying to keep her voice impassive even as her face splotches with color.
“You know,” Naobito tells her, drumming his fingers against the tabletop, “I could always write you out of the will.”
She almost wishes that he would. “I know that.”
“So if you don’t give me what I need-“
“I’m not dating him. That’s all there is to it.” She straightens her spine. “We’re friends, we spend a lot of time together, and that’s it. You got that?”
Naobito sneers. “An easy excuse for an easy woman.”
“Is that the best insult you could come up with? Really?” Maki’s lips curl into a matching sneer. “How original.”
“You know, if you haven’t been seeing this Okkotsu boy, I’m positive it’s got something to do with your sister.”Naobito’s eyes glint. “I could always write you both out of the will.” Maki’s face blanches, and Naobito’s sneer stretches into a smirk. “Ah. So that was it.”
“Leave her out of this.”
“Protecting her, are you?” he begins to tap his fingers again. “If that’s the case, you might actually be telling the truth. Shocking, I know.”
“I won’t warn you twice,” she snaps, her hands curling into fists. “Leave Mai out of this.”
Maki has always thought that Zenin Naobito was a remarkably stupid man, an opinion of which she made no secret. He’s only gotten this far with the help of countless advisors – young, credentialed graduates of the top universities with minds and skills far superior to his. But the one thing he’s always been able to do is pinpoint a weakness with deadly accuracy, and though Maki has tried her best not to let it show, he knows hers.
Mai, for all her bluster, is the obedient one, the fearful one, the one whose arm the clan would try to twist if they wanted something from the twins. And Naobito knows that. If he wants to punish Maki, or to keep her on the path the Zenin Corporation expects her to walk, he’s going to take it out on Mai – write her out of the will, cut her off from the stipend the company pays its relatives for their education, order their parents not to support them.
It is, above all else, and unacknowledged or not, why she can’t give in – can’t stay over, can’t kiss Yuuta in the light of a convenience store refrigerator, can’t turn her back on the Zenin Corporation like she’s always wanted to. And Naobito knows that all too well.
“You ought to be careful who you consort with if you want me to do that,” he warns her.
**
She calls Yuuta that night, tells him everything. It is her final mistake.
Two days later, Mai throws open her bedroom door with tears in her eyes.
**
“I can help you, Maki-chan.”
“You shouldn’t have to.” Maki’s throat feels tight, and there’s no point in trying to keep herself together, but she still does. She can’t not. “The last thing I want-“
“I know, Maki.” He smooths his hand through her hair – he’s never sat with her like this, curled up on the sofa, and it would be heavenly if not for the nightmare she’s facing. “But you have to figure something out, and-“
“I’ll figure something out,” she finishes for him. “That barbecue place across the street is hiring.”
They both know what she’s thinking, though. Even with their parents still paying tuition, their stipend is cut off, and she can’t support her sister’s living expenses with a part-time job as a waitress. Naobito isn’t dumb enough not to realize that she was probably going to go running straight into the arms of the person who’d stirred up all this trouble to begin with if they couldn’t do anything to punish Mai; hers will be next-
“My uncle would probably love a chance to spite the Zenins,” Yuuta points out, trying to lighten the mood.
“I can take care of myself,” she scoffs. As if she’s been brought low enough to accept help from a politician. She doesn’t care how sweet he is with his wife and daughter, or that he’s paying Yuuta’s tuition; they’re all slimy somehow. And besides, the man makes her want to hit something breakable with a baseball bat. And she doesn’t need help.
Definitely not.
**
This is the fourth night in a row of convenience store sandwiches for dinner. It’s surprisingly bearable, learning how to be broke.
Yuuta, for the fourth night in a row, chooses ebi katsu. Mai stares at him across the table like she would punt him out the window with her eyes, were that possible.
Maybe that’s just because her twin sister is resting her feet in his lap while they eat. Maybe it’s his choice of flavors.
Maybe it’s both.
**
“You’re a Zenin, right?”
Maki starts when a sullen, spiky-haired boy approaches her at the outdoor table she and Yuuta have started frequenting now that it’s spring. “Yeah,” she asks cautiously. “Why?”
“They cut me off, too,” he tells her.
Solidarity, for whatever it’s worth, is sweet.
**
“He wasn’t supposed to date me,” the orange-haired girl who Maki’s (apparently?) distant cousin introduced as his girlfriend tells them all. “And his dad apparently kinda pissed off the boss back in the day, so he tells them he’s not gonna dump me and whaddaya know? Outta the will. And now-“
“Can we not talk about this?” Spiky-Hair cuts in.
“You’re the one who brought it up!”
**
“Yeah, so, this dude who has a bone to pick with the Zenins sorta took him in, and he’s loaded, right? So actually, Gumi here got the good end of that deal-“
“Nobara-chan,” he calls across the couch, from the end where he and Yuuta sit awkwardly on either side of Mai, to the end where she and Maki are huddled up, gossiping. Yuuta is flabbergasted, honestly, that Maki –who only seems to be able to make friends by insulting them – is already so friendly with this girl. “Can you not?”
“It’s relevant information!” Nobara protests. “She needs to know!”
“I do need to know,” Maki agrees.
Yuuta shakes his head. That sort of loyalty took him years to gain.
**
Maki is never making the mistake of picking up a phone call from an unknown number again.
“Hello?” she asks, cautious, figuring it’s probably someone from the university about her unpaid bills.
“Heya, Maki! My nephew tells me the Zenins-“
“Who are you, again?”
Maki can’t help it. She knows nothing in the world would offend Gojo Satoru more than failing to be recognized.
(His wife bursts out laughing loudly enough to be heard on the other end of the line in the background, and she smirks.)
“That isn’t funny, Maki. You’re practically my niece-in-law.”
“Yuuta and I technically aren’t a thing,” she says, even though the only thing they haven’t done is put words to their status. Whatever the limbo between casual affection and anything official is.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Have you asked him why? Sometimes Yuuta-kun needs a little push-“
“Satorun,” Utahime calls in the background, “leave her alone!”
“Yes, please do,” she tells him.
He hangs up.
**
“Hey! Waitress lady!”
Maki sighs, turning towards the offending table. Nobara waves her hands like she’s trying to tell an airplane where to land. It’s all she can do to bring herself to approach the table and force herself to ask, “yes?”
“More bulgogi?” she asks, smiling innocently.
Megumi looks like he’d rather not be here. Mai, whose favorite hobby is still embarrassing her sister even after all she’s done for her (how rude), smirks. At least Yuuta has the decency to look embarrassed, though his roommate and said roommate’s girlfriend – a girl the size of a paper clip with a button nose and the filthiest sense of humor Maki’s ever encountered – don’t.
“If you people don’t tip me, I’m quitting,” she scoffs, jotting down ‘bulgogi’.
No one tips, but that American sitcom about the staff of a dingy Italian restaurant that Mai used to love talked about it like it was the end-all, be-all of human existence, and frankly, she thinks they owe it to her after all of the haranguing they’ve put her through today.
She walks off to alert the back of the house to bring out more meat and curses Zenin Naobito under her breath.
**
Barbecue, as predicted, just isn’t enough. But maybe the reduction in rent that comes from the cheapest house around shared by seven people could be; maybe chipping in for groceries, everyone picking up shifts where they can – she’s not the only one the Zenins are putting in a bind, and she supposes she can accept help with groceries if it means that Yuuta’s irritating uncle will buy her premium-brand ice cream. She’s all right with help with rent if it’s because she shares a house with enough people to make her head spin. She can even tolerate Inumaki and his girlfriend making out on the couch in full view of the rest of their housemates if it means staying alive and supporting Mai and graduating college.
It’s a lively house, and it isn’t long before Nobara is as comfortable trading insults with the twins as they are with each other, and Megumi winds up sulking on the engawa in the dead of winter because he can’t take one second more of Inumaki and his girlfriend and the Gojos drop by for an unannounced visit and leave everyone but Maki and Megumi cooing over their daughter. (She supposes she can’t really complain about that anymore.) She’s never had a place like this to call home before.
She privately thinks that the realization that she never wants to leave frightens her character development back by at least six months.
**
Graduation means work and money and the startling realization that Yuuta doesn’t need to stay where he’s spent the past two years. It’s not a particularly cozy idea, leaving. But he supposes he needs to entertain it.
He could share an apartment with Toge again, he supposes, though he doubts Toge would want that now that he and his girlfriend have been together for so long. Megumi might share, given that he refuses to share a bedroom with his girlfriend because it ‘isn’t proper,’ but quite honestly, Yuuta is sort of afraid of him, so that’s quickly ruled out. He could move in with his aunt and uncle, but that would be about six steps down.
He’d rather stay, really. There’s something comforting about this place, and besides, it has Maki.
“You’re thinking too much again,” she murmurs, looking up from her book and leaning over to brush a lock of hair out of his eyes.
He bookmarks his page and sets it on the nightstand, turning to Maki. She wanders in here sometimes at night, checking on him – sometimes she stays. He likes those nights. “Am I?”
“You look like it. Your face is all scrunched up.” She pokes his cheek and sits down on the edge of the bed. “Wanna tell me what you’re thinking too much about?”
“Leaving,” he admits.
“What?”
“This place. I don’t want to.” He turns onto his side, propping himself up so he can look at her. “Leave, I mean.”
“Then don’t. It’s economical.”
“It is,” he agrees. “And it has Maki.”
“Dumbass,” she mutters, then leans across the bed to steal a quick kiss. “You can’t get rid of me.”
He presses her forehead to his, touches her cheek so she won’t pull back. “I don’t want to.”
“Yeah,” she says, swallowing hard. “A little late for that.”
“’m gonna marry you one day,” he tells her.
“Okay,” she laughs, because he tells her this at least twice a week and she’s used to it by now. Yuuta is strange like that but it isn’t unexpected.
He’s the type to want that – the happily-ever-after ending, somebody asleep in his arms, a place to call home, a family of four or five or six. It’s a very Yuuta thing to want. It’s not a Maki thing to want, but she doesn’t really see the downside anymore, if she’s being honest (six, though, is entirely too large a family). It’s sweet, really. He wants her. He doesn’t want to be rid of her. What a novel concept.
“I am, Maki,” he repeats, rubbing his nose against hers. “You believe me?”
“I do,” she laughs, because that’s her way of saying go ahead and dream. I’ll do my best. Mostly because she never wants to stop, and she never wants to leave. She’s never had a place that she didn’t want to leave before. “You want to know something stupid?”
“Yeah,” he says, eyes shining. “I do.”
“Naobito actually thought he could get me to forget about you.” A laugh catches in her throat, then bubbles up to release, effervescent, in the stillness of his (their?) bedroom. “Isn’t that stupid?”
He flops onto his stomach, then takes her chin in his and pulls her down to kiss him, slow and sweet.
“I’m really glad it was stupid,” he says, his whole face smiling, his whole body warm and heavy with content.
Of course it was, Maki thinks, loud enough to be heard above the reverent hush that falls over the room when he’s done speaking. It takes a lot to make a person forget the way back home.