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Amane meets her at the bus stop on the far side of campus bright and early, camera around his neck, easygoing smile on his face. His bangs are all in a disarray from the wind, but figuratively, he doesn’t have a hair out of place: his clothes are the same as usual, and his little wave is the same as usual, and the greetings and exchanges and topics of conversation are all the same as usual, too.
And Nene doesn’t let herself feel disappointed, not even when the bus rounds the corner and Amane boards first. Staring at his back, Nene follows him down the aisle and doesn’t object when he ushers her into the window seat ahead of him
The sun is bright today, even through the clouds. Nene rests her elbow on the sill and her chin on her hand and looks out anyway, gathering the strength to face him.
Maybe some part of her had still been hoping he’d say no.
A click catches her attention, and when she turns curiously around, Amane is only just lowering the camera. “There’s photo number one,” he says conversationally as the bus rumbles to life underneath them, nearly drowning his words. “Well on our way to your completed dating profile.”
Nene fights back a wince at the reason for their outing today and smiles as enthusiastically as she’s able. “How is it?” she asks, leaning into his seat to look at the camera. “Do I look dateable?”
Amane doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to; Nene merely glances the photo without his commentary. Certainly, dressed and made up, Nene is not undateable, especially not with the bust-up shot hiding her embarrassing ankles. She would even venture that she looks pretty; it’s a flattering picture, with the daylight lining her face, most of her features hidden, the curve of her neck exposed.
But it’s a distant photo, too — lonely. Nene chews her lip, unsure it would lure many men on a dating app — unless they were into that sort of thing, though Nene isn’t good at that either. If anything, she isn’t distant enough: too clingy, too emotional, too bared open. It’s already ruined things with several potential one-day daydreamed paramours; Amane is only the most recent of those.
His wrist under her hand recoils, and Nene longs even now to dig her claws in — but she doesn’t. She lets go.
“Don’t worry, Yashiro,” Amane says, so strained its almost wistful. “We’ll find you a boyfriend yet.”
It would be polite to respond; Amane had only come on her request, after all. But even as the last stretch of campus flashes past the windows and their destination comes ever and ever nearer, Nene can’t find the words.
—
The botanical gardens are free for students on Sundays, but when Nene realizes at the gates that she forgot her school ID, Amane pays for her ticket. “You really don’t have to,” she’s stage-whispering even as the attendant is stamping her hand, but Amane shrugs it off and shoves the receipt in his pocket, out of sight.
“I know,” he says, and that’s it, and Nene is left to do nothing but follow after him once again.
Despite the mishap at the gates, though, the garden is lovely. Amane holds the map and Nene points out all the places she thinks will make the best backdrops: the rose gardens, maybe, or the tea garden, with all its trickling water and gracefully wilting wisteria.
But no matter how Nene poses, smiles, smooths her dress down, tucks her hair carefully out of her face — none of the photos come out right. Amane is always standing too close, or too far, his camera cocked at an odd angle, his fingers a smudged shadow in the corner. Seated on a bench beside him, Nene giggles and crosses her ankles, flushed with heat and sun.
“What are you even learning in that photography class of yours?” she teases, flicking carelessly through the most recent of Amane’s questionable work, squinting at every awkward angle or expression out of focus.
Amane seems strangely content, though. “Be gentle with that. It’s a rental.”
The heat must be bugging him, too; reclined on a hand, he’s fanning himself with the folded up map, fringe pushed off his face. Nene finds him handsome immediately and then just as immediately berates herself for finding him handsome; she has already discovered, after all, that Amane is fully off the table. It wouldn’t do either of them any good for any attachments of hers beyond platonic to linger.
It had maybe been a little bit sneaky of Nene to push the issue yesterday evening. They’d both had a few drinks, and Amane had commented on the late hour and offered to walk Nene back to her apartment, and Nene had asked Amane about making a dating profile. “What do think about it?” she prodded, eyes wide, expression expectant. Because Nene had already pieced together all the hints, all the oddities, and she was sort of, relatively, mostly certain that Amane probably most definitely had a crush on her. “What do you think?”
But Amane’s face was as unreadable as anything: strangely slack, strangely blank. “A dating app, huh?” he said, brisk pace not slowing in the slightest. “It’s not the best place to meet people.”
The conversation only went downhill from there.
In a strange way, it’s a relief to be able to sit next to Amane now and have things feel normal again. The energy last night had been so weird — but even if it had been embarrassing to be rejected like that, she doesn’t want to lose Amane entirely. Better to be his friend than nothing at all; all the better if he’s a good enough sport about it to follow through with her insincere request that he take her picture.
With his head leaned on her shoulder, eyes closed and content, Amane doesn’t seem any different from how he usually is. Maybe he’s this affectionate with everyone, Nene theorizes, though the thought makes something ugly and jealous spring up her throat. Maybe she just misread him. Didn’t he say he already had someone he likes?
Nene jolts so suddenly she flings Amane off her shoulder; to mask the blunder, she springs to her feet and consults the map again. “Let’s try to take a few more pictures before we go,” she wheedles with a smile she hopes looks less forced than it feels.
Amane pauses, and Nene thinks for a moment that he might comment on it — but his hands just ball into fists at his sides before he releases a long, fluid exhale and stands. “Lead the way.”
—
Their empty stomachs eject them from the gardens before anything else does. Nene thinks they’re heading home, but Amane pulls her off the bus several stops before campus, his grip warm and pressing around her wrist.
He’d grabbed her like this last night, too, when he’d said the words that split a fissure down her heart: “I already have someone I like,” all heavy and intense like he was begging her to understand.
Amane doesn’t need to explain anything to her; he’s her friend, and Nene doesn’t want to push a friend in that way. And anyway, even if she doesn’t know who captured Amane’s heart, or how — she can understand liking someone, at least.
The restaurant they stop at is casual and cheap. They share an appetizer and Amane lets Nene steal a fry, even after she said she didn’t want any. It’s a bit hokey, all rounded-out letters on the laminated menus and neon lights on the walls, but she can’t complain, not really; in a way, it’s all a little romantic, anyway. Nene loves a theme, and this place certainly commits: with its squeaky booths and jukeboxes and polished chrome, it looks like something out of a movie.
By now, the click of the camera doesn’t do much to startle her. “Wait,” she objects anyway, putting her elbows on the table and peering as far across as she can, “my hair is all messed up, and the lighting in here is — I mean, is it good? Is it cute?”
Hiding the camera in his lap, Amane stares down at it a long second, mouth tight, expression unreadable. Then he shrugs, and the easy playfulness to him is back, as quick as it left. “It looks okay. I’ll show you later.”
It sounds like a lie, though Nene doesn’t know why it would be. But then their waiter comes back with the check, and Amane hands him his card, and Nene is distracted by her insistence that he really doesn’t have to pay for everything, honestly Amane, they can split the bill.
—
The bus home isn’t set to come for another couple hours. Nene expects Amane to complain about poor planning but he looks remarkably unsurprised, shaking his camera and asking with a grin if Nene wouldn’t like a few more photos, since they’re already here.
Spring fills the streets and walkways with people, but this late in the day, the beach is blissfully empty. Nene wiggles her toes in the soft sand, sandals in one hand, the other keeping Amane’s jacket safely over her shoulders. He’d made a joke about her blowing away without it, though it isn’t very cold yet; even the breeze floating over the ocean is gentle, carrying with it the familiar, comforting smell of salt.
Despite her reluctance and fresh heartbreak and still-recovering pride, Nene had fun today. There have been moments of strangeness between the two of them but Amane had still come; he’d still taken her picture. In a way, it feels gentle, kind — a I won’t date you, but I still want you to be happy. In a way, too, it’s an even harder rejection.
In spite of herself, Nene can’t stop asking herself even now where she got it wrong. Isn’t it true, that Amane gives her special treatment, picks her up and walks her home, touches her more than is strictly necessary? Was it so foolish of her to assume that was love?
She hadn’t meant to fall for him.
Maybe it’s the wind, or her hair blowing all around her; maybe she’s too lost in thought, or just a few too many paces from him. Maybe Amane doesn’t actually take any photos at all.
Nonetheless, when Nene turns her back to the sea and sunset and all their colors, she finds Amane’s figure stark against the sand, lowering his camera down from his face. It’s hard to tell, even with the orange glow of the sky, even from this near of a distance — but she thinks she sees him swallow.
—
“It’s not the best place to meet people,” Amane says. Nene isn’t sure if he means for his expression to be so closed off but it is anyway, just as gloomy and cold as the evening rapidly darkening around them.
Nene takes all of this in. “So then — you’ve tried it?” she asks, chewing a lip, and then, not wanting to hear his answer, “But doesn’t it sound fun, Amane? I think I could have fun. I could… meet people! New people! And you’ve been taking that photography class, so you must be pretty handy with a camera, and I don’t have any recent candids. And…”
If she’d been hoping for some big, jealous, explosive reaction that would somehow confirm his feelings for her, she doesn’t get one. Amane just sighs and squeezes his eyes shut. “New people,” he echoes in a mumble, and even when he opens his eyes, he keeps them fixed firmly up.
It isn’t enough; he’s barely saying anything at all. Nene keeps herself afloat in the silence another moment, then two, their steps loud against the sidewalk.
“Unless,” she starts, hesitant. “I mean. Unless you want to…?”
A step ahead, Amane stops walking so suddenly she nearly runs into him. “Don’t tell me,” he says, a mean-edged shark smile on his lips as he turns, “the great Yashiro Nene, expert in all things romance, needs my help getting a boyfriend?”
It’s a stupid, impulsive thing to say, but full of ill-advised courage and cheap liquor, she says it anyway. “I don’t see anyone else volunteering.”
But Amane doesn’t rise to the cue; he doesn’t say his lines. He just stares at her, flat and searching, eyes dragging across every inch of her face so intimately that it’s like he’s touching her.
The wind blows suddenly just as he opens his mouth, and Nene loses the words.
“What?” she asks, desperately shoving her mussed hair over her shoulder. “What did you say?”
The silence drags thick once more. Nene shifts her weight, uncertain in the face of it; has it ever been this heavy, with Amane? Has it ever been this difficult?
Is it her fault?
Amane seems to find some decision in her face, even when she doesn’t. “Nothing,” he says, turning around and walking a few more paces, leaving her behind. “So — dating apps. Boyfriend help. New people. Exactly my area of expertise.”
A spark of hope flies into Nene’s mouth at the sarcasm as she scurries after him. “You haven’t done it? Online dating?”
“Why would I?” Amane asks the night sky. Reaching blindly behind him, he grabs hold of her wrist, and won't look at her. “I already have someone I like.”
And it wasn’t a cold night; really, it wasn’t. Nene’s high pulse and stomach full of booze and Amane’s jacket heavy over her shoulders does the job in keeping her nice and toasty. But the words settle like in a shiver up her back anyway, pushing the air from her lungs.
“Oh,” she says, small.
They walk in relative silence for a while before Amane shakes his head like shaking off his bad mood and looks over his shoulder at her. His hand releases her wrist. “So, you just want a date? Any will do?”
Nene’s chronic optimism flares like an infection. “Well not anyone; the right date, Amane! You know!”
Not anyone, she’s thinking, just you. Say it’s you.
Amane hums. She wishes she could see more of his face. “Okay,” all guarded and biting, “the right date. Not just anyone will do. You’re meeting new people, to find the right guy. And you want me to help you, to take pictures of you. Right.”
To be honest, Nene is a little confused, and she can’t blame everything on being tipsy. It’s almost like Amane is talking to himself, like he’s already decided Nene’s responses and anything she says from here on out are no longer a part of the conversation. Even as he walks her all the way to her door, he looks so distant.
“You do understand what I’m trying to say,” she blurts to his back, heart thumping so loudly she's certain he must be able to hear it, “don’t you, Amane?”
This time, he doesn’t turn around. “I hear you, Yashiro,” he assures, clipped and tired. “I hear you loud and clear.”
—
Nene doesn’t wake until the bus rounds a corner too fast, and a click sounds suspiciously close to her face. Still groggy, she goes to bat the camera away but finds Amane’s hand instead and loses sight of the mission to twine their fingers together.
“Are we home?” she asks sleepily, eager to be close to him again even just upon waking, last night’s memory fresh in her mind.
The distance isn’t gone, not entirely — but Amane still lets her hold his hand a second longer before slipping away. “Just about,” he says in a whisper, like she’s still asleep, and when she thinks back on it later, she can’t tell if she’s imagining the way he brushed her bangs from her face with so much tenderness.
—
Awaiting news of her photos takes the patience of a saint. Nene is not very genuinely interested in actually setting up a profile on a dating app but she still wants to see how Amane sees her, all the shots he stole when she wasn’t looking, whatever he found worth recording.
Then, just as she’s preparing to give up and go to bed, Amane sends her the photos in an unceremonious email with no subject line. Flopping onto her front, she opens the first one, eager and impatient.
And pauses. The first photo is… Well, Amane is still learning; he’s still in his photography class; this is a rental camera that he might not be used to, and he will certainly get better. But the first photo is pretty bad. It’s Nene at the beach, but it’s hard to see her at all; the shot is all out of focus, blurring her out into nothing.
Forcefully tugging her enthusiasm behind her, Nene flips to the next image. It’s just as bad.
Actually, upon further examination, none of the photos are very good. Some of them don’t have Nene at all; there’s one from lunch, but it’s largely centering the table. Only Nene’s hands are in the shot.
Still, Nene is pretty sure there are more photos! There must be more! Surely this whole outing couldn’t have only produced such lackluster results!
Amane doesn’t pick up the first call; it takes him three whole rings on the second. “Yashiro?” he asks, less groggy than she’d expected; she’d been thinking that maybe he had gone to bed already. “What is this, a booty call?”
It still stings a little, after the roundabout rejection, but Nene jokes back with him anyway. “You wish.”
Maybe it’s just the filter of the phone, but Amane’s laugh sounds more forced than usual. “Did you get the pictures?”
“Oh — yeah! That’s… why I was calling actually.”
Now that she’s here, talking to him, it seems a little rude to just say outright that his photos are unusable. She’s sure Amane did his best! He always does his best. This is a matter that requires the utmost care and tact.
“So… the pictures,” she stalls.
There’s a smile in Amane’s voice that she doesn’t quite know how to interpret. “What, didn’t you like them?”
Nene stays conspicuously silent. Amane gasps dramatically.
“You didn’t? Oh, I’m wounded, Yashiro; you’ve broken this poor photographer’s heart. What about my career? My livelihood?” The dramatics cut off all at once, dry and short. “What about your poor, decrepit dating app profile?”
“But Amane,” Nene forges on, “you did take more photos, didn’t you? You did, right?”
A pause, just a little too long to be natural. “No? I’m afraid that’s all of them.”
But Nene remembers the camera shutter on the bus ride there, and on the way back, and the one in the diner that had him staring down and hiding the camera, and finds it hard to completely believe him. “Are you home?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Okay, good.” And then she hangs up.
Five minutes later, she knocks diligently on his front door. Amane opens it with an incredulous look on his face.
“You walked here by yourself?” he asks, leaning nearer to peer out the door; Nene smells his laundry soap, his familiar shampoo. “At night? In just your pajamas?”
But Nene ignores him. The moment she’s shoeless and inside, she plops down on his couch and opens her arms. “Okay, show me.”
Amane looks uncertainly at her, shutting and locking the door. “Show you what?”
“The photos! The other photos! I want to see!”
His eyes set intense. It’s almost unfairly attractive. “There are no other photos.”
“The camera, then,” she says cooperatively, an instant before she spots it on the coffee table. Amane spots her spotting it, and there is a slow-motion second where neither moves at all.
They both lunge for the camera at once, but when the corner bangs up against the corner, Amane recoils. “Careful, it’s a rental,” he gripes instinctively before diving back into the fray to wrestle for it again — but he only succeeds in pushing Nene, camera in hand, onto her back on the couch, kneeling over her as she scrambles to open the gallery.
Nene was right: there are more photos. Lots more; even more than she guessed. Times when she was looking away, when she wasn’t paying attention, brushing her hair from her face or eyes closed, dozing. The photos he’d sent her are still there, of course, but the juxtaposition only makes them seem all the worse; for every photo awkwardly zoomed in or with Amane’s fingers on the edge, there’s five that are workable at the least and downright lovely at best.
There is something strange, though. With the exception of just a few, during their mini shoot at the gardens — Nene is always looking away.
Staring out the window, staring at the sea, staring at the decorations on the restaurant walls, staring at something in the distance, flowers in full bloom all around her — Nene is coated in sunlight like a second skin, practically glowing. Radiant, and distant; as untouchable as a star.
“Oh,” Nene says breathlessly, flipping through them more slowly. “Amane, did you by chance… send me the wrong ones?”
Kneeling on the couch before her, arms limp at his sides and hands in tight fists, Amane doesn’t answer. Nene looks at him only briefly before she flips backwards to the next photo, and pauses. This one is at the beach, with the sunset; Nene is looking up at the sky with a wistful expression on her face, her hair and dress blowing artfully behind her in a breeze Nene can’t even remember. Amane’s dark jacket over her shoulders nearly dwarfs her, making her seem smaller than she is — barley human, barely there at all.
Color floods her. “You’re really a very good photographer,” Nene babbles to distract herself. “I’m sure you’ll get full marks in your class, Amane! It must be a really good class; maybe I should take it too, and then you can give me pointers, and — ”
“You’re not going to ask why?”
Suddenly, Nene is very grateful for the camera in between their faces. “Why what?”
When Amane doesn’t say anything, Nene eventually lowers the camera, looking at him over it, only her eyes showing. He has that curiously blank look on him, all tensed up with nowhere to go like a broken wind-up toy. He meets her eyes cooly, but if Nene didn’t know any better, she’d think he was nervous.
Then he grins. “Do you really think I’m a good photographer?”
The topic change is like a breath of fresh air. Nene nods eagerly. “Oh — yes, definitely! I mean, these are really beautiful; I really didn’t expect — Not that I thought you’d be a bad photographer, Amane, but just that when I asked, I didn’t expect there to be such — ”
“But I sent you the worst of them anyway, didn’t I?”
His smile is frozen on his face, a static image. Nene feels hers freeze right alongside it.
“Um,” she starts, “you’re not… Amane, you’re not telling me that you sabotaged the photos on purpose, are you?”
A muscle in Amane’s jaw jumps, the only sign of life in him. “It was a little cruel to ask this of the guy you just rejected,” he says, anger simmering quiet and low. “Don’t you think so, Yashiro?”
“Rejected?” she squeaks. “Is that what you think was happening?”
“What else?” he asks, all vengeful self-certainty.
“But you… You said you had someone you liked!”
“I did,” Amane confirms, looming over her, eyes half-lidded. “I do.”
Would it kill him to speak plainly for once? Nene’s head is spinning; her face is lighting up pink at the implication. “You said you understood! Last night, right before we agreed on when to meet! You said you understood what I was trying to say!”
“And I said I heard you loud and clear. You want to date new people; what else could you mean, Yashiro, asking that of me? To help you with that? I’m fine just being friends — ” His jaw clenches visibly, teeth gnashing. “ — but some time to get over it would be appreciated before you drag some poor sap home with you with the photos I took.”
Nene is downright flabbergasted; sputtering and mad and still recovering from the revelation that Amane likes her, must like her, to be saying these things — she grabs a handhold of his shirt and smashes their mouths together.
And then throws him away and off of her, before he can even kiss her back. “Amane, I was coming onto you!” she exclaims. “When you said you had someone you liked, I thought you were rejecting me.”
Amane scowls at her like she’s telling some mean joke, and Nene thinks he would keep on arguing until one of them dropped dead.
But Nene doesn’t want to argue. Pulling him back down, she kisses him until that stubbornness turns to incredulity, until that incredulity turns to belief, until he starts murmuring low words against her mouth.
—
The next morning after breakfast, Nene flips through the photos again. “It is really remarkable how much of a difference it makes,” she says, genuine and complimentary, “when you want it to come out well. You really are very talented, Amane!”
From his place behind her, combing his fingers through her hair and clumsily working out tangles and snags, Amane laughs. That guarded edge is softened with affection and sleepiness. “It’s true, I’m a true virtuoso. But give yourself some credit too, Yashiro.”
Stalling on a photo from the restaurant, Nene sees herself through the lens, through Amane’s eyes and intentions. The neon signs reflect absolutely everywhere, even though Nene hadn’t noticed them much while she was there; there’s pink in her hair, and green in her eyes, and red lighting somewhere behind her, fuzzy and vague. She does look a little bit messy, just as she feared, makeup smudged under her eye, one sleeve of her dress slipping down ever so slightly.
But it’s a lovely photo.
“This one is nice,” she wheedles.
Amane doesn’t say anything for a second; his hands, too, pause. “It’s,” he starts eventually, halting, uncharacteristically hesitant, “hard to capture how you looked. Like that.”
Nene scrunches her nose and hopes her blush hasn’t spread so far back her neck that Amane can see it. “You’re making fun of me.”
But he doesn’t give in to her goading; he just hums, and grabs an elastic off the kitchen table.
Tilting her head, Nene looks longer at the photo. Her breath catches. “You know, you’re in this one, too.”
By the sound of it, he doesn’t believe her. “I’m not in any of these.”
“But you’re in this one! Look.”
And there, in the window’s slight reflection, only barely visible, is Amane. There’s a look on his face that Nene is intimately familiar with and that, until now, she’d never placed much thought in: wide-open and fiercely closed, with a deep intensity to it. Looking, watching. Watching her.
“I always wondered,” she hears herself say, “what that look meant.”
Behind her, Amane is quiet, and Nene wonders if she’s embarrassed him. But he grins at her when she glances over her shoulder; only the scarlet tips of his ears betray any nerves at all.
“I guess I won’t need that dating profile after all,” Nene says as she puts the camera down.
His fingers brush a hickey on her neck, bright and fresh and sore. “I guess not,” he says, all slow and pulled out like warm taffy.
It warms Nene, too. Sitting happily at Amane’s kitchen table, his hands in her hair and his shirt on her back, she thinks proudly that her plan did work in the end, sort of — only with a bit more work and direct interference on her part.
This time, when Amane walks her home and pulls his jacket on over her shoulders, she doesn’t give it back. Even back in the cozy comfort of her own apartment, she wears it all day long.