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You remember exactly where and when you met Tohru Adachi. Right down to the hour. Perhaps even the exact minute, if you tried hard enough.
(And you do, much to Tohru’s embarrassment. Monday, January 14th, 9:46am remains a special date in your memory.)
He was only supposed to be the new transfer in your department— nothing more, nothing less. It had been announced weeks ago. Everyone was expecting him, and so his arrival was not a surprise.
Everything else about him was a surprise, though.
You remember his eyes first. You remember catching them as he walked by, trailing behind your superior. They were brown.
How pretty, you found yourself thinking. Which was silly, because brown was one of the most common eye colors on the planet. There wasn’t anything inherently unique about that.
Nor about the rest of him. Tohru Adachi was thin, a little shorter than you, and didn’t quite know how to brush his (pretty brown) hair. His tie was almost always crooked, his slacks were occasionally wrinkled, and he forgot to tie the shoelaces on his left shoe from time to time.
Most of your coworkers hated him. The rest felt indifferent towards him.
“That guy’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” one of them murmured to you during lunch one afternoon. Tohru was across the breakroom, yawning and purchasing his usual can of coffee from one of the vending machines.
Your eyes followed the curve of his backside as he bent down to collect the can.
“Yes,” you muttered, with your chin in the palm of your hand, “I think so, too.”
Tohru Adachi sat in a cubicle adjacent to yours. There were no personal photos on his desk, no knick-knacks or plastic figures like you tended to collect along your monitor. He only had room for a cup of pens, a stapler and his computer mouse. The rest of his desk was usually taken up by paperwork.
Talking to him— whenever you managed to snag the chance— was a challenge. He didn’t like sharing things about himself, and you found yourself floundering for things to say to fill the silence. Anything to keep his attention for a millisecond longer, even if he often wound up giving you a funny look.
“Did you know cats share 96.5 percent of their genes with tigers?” You said one morning, holding up a little plastic figure of a chubby cat.
Tohru glanced towards you and the cat a little longer than usual as you stood at the entrance to his cubicle. Just as you suspected, even he wasn’t immune to cat figures.
“What’s that?” he eventually asked.
“I got it from the gacha this weekend. My baby cousin wanted to visit the arcade.”
The man hummed, eyes turned back to his computer monitor. You set the figure just next to his keyboard as he typed away.
“You can keep it,” You said, “I have another for my desk.”
He didn’t thank you, but he didn’t reject the gift, either. You silently congratulated yourself as you made your way to your desk, welcomed by your own little set of gacha figures.
Every time you passed by his cubicle, the cat figure smiled back at you mischievously from its spot on his desk, now sitting next to his cup of pens. And every time, you beamed. He hadn’t given it away.
“Is that all you’re eating?”
Tohru looked at you from the corner of his eye. You were peeking over one of the walls to his cubicle with your own lunch in hand.
“And what if it is?” he said.
You frowned at the two rice balls on his desk, wrapped in plastic from a convenience store.
“Those are snacks,” You said, “They can’t possibly fill you up.”
“What does it matter to you if I eat or not?”
“It doesn’t,” You said, because you certainly didn’t take notice of his poor diet from time to time, “But I packed too much for mine. I was going to offer you a bit if you were still hungry.”
You stepped into his cubicle, setting your boxed lunch— packed with rice, soy marinated salmon, neatly cut egg and a miso spinach salad— onto his desk. You didn’t miss the way Tohru’s eyes widened or how his stomach gave a little grumble.
“It really is too much,” you said again, “and I’d hate for it to go to waste.”
Tohru, begrudgingly, accepted the offer. When you happened to produce a second pair of chopsticks from your bag, he didn’t comment.
But he did ask around a mouthful of salmon, “Your girlfriend make this for you?”
“No. I’m not in a relationship.”
He hummed, then swallowed. He plucked a bit of egg from the bento. “So you made this.”
“Yes.”
More rice, followed by salmon. Tohru hadn’t even glanced at the two rice balls pushed aside on his desk.
He didn’t compliment you or your cooking, but you still felt as if you passed some sort of test.
It was a few days later that you heard someone mutter behind you as you scribbled away at your desk.
“Christ’s sake.” Tohru’s voice was unmistakable. Your heart skipped a beat. “You may as well have the entire gacha machine.”
Tohru leaned against the entrance of your cubicle, arms crossed over his chest. Your small army of plastic figures stared back at him.
For once, your scrambled mind couldn’t come up with anything to say. He was examining your entire desk from his spot, so close and so far, just a few feet from you in your cubicle. The entire world fell away. All that existed was this tiny box, and the two of you inside of it.
“Seta,” said Tohru after a moment, “Your name’s Seta, right?”
“Souji,” you said quickly, “you can call me Souji.”
Tohru frowned. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you do that?” The man narrowed his eyes. His arms were still crossed stiffly over his chest. He reminded you of an angry cat, poised to strike. “You keep trying to talk to me. Why?”
“I want to get to know you better.”
“But why?”
You slowly swiveled your chair to face him. Even here, you drank in the attention as he glared you down.
You realized in that moment that you could get used to being looked at like this, because he wasn’t really angry. You knew anger. You felt it whenever your parents decided to reach out to you to try to control your life from the other side of the globe.
Tohru was not angry. He was flustered. It was obvious that he wasn’t used to this type of attention.
You hadn’t planned on telling him like this, but…
“I like you,” You said simply.
“You hardly know me.” He shot back immediately. As if he had expected your answer and was waiting for this moment to reject you. Maybe he’d even rehearsed it in his head, played it all out over and over.
You smiled with a little tilt of your head. “Not for lack of trying.”
Tohru let out a noise somewhere between a huff and a groan.
“I like you, Adachi-san.” You said again, unashamed, despite knowing everyone in your neighboring cubicles was most likely listening in. “I want to get to know you better and talk to you because I like you. Is that so wrong?”
“It—” He began, but snapped his mouth shut. He glanced out towards the aisle before stepping into your cubicle space, voice hushed. “Do you have to spill your guts right here?”
“I’m only answering your question.”
“Well, to answer your question, it isn’t— wrong, but it’s…” He breathed out through his nose. The quiet buzz of the office continued on as he worked through whatever mental math equations he conjured up in his head.
You quietly basked in the fact that he was in your little office space, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and tie crooked as always. He looked good like this. Casual.
Another huff snapped you out of your daydreaming.
“After work,” said Tohru, turning on his heel to leave your cubicle, “meet me after work.”
You fought the urge to beam. The plastic figures along your desktop seemed to cheer as you turned back to your work.
You quickly learned two things about Tohru Adachi: he hated nimono, and his kisses were like lightning.
He was the first to kiss you, filled with all the confidence in the world after three glasses of beer and two months of dating. You had a piece of karaage halfway to your mouth when he suddenly leaned into your bubble and pressed his lips to the corner of yours. It was uncoordinated and he may have missed the mark by just a little, but you were quick to correct him when he came back for more. And more, and more and more, until you were both a tangled, tipsy mess on the floor of your apartment.
The take-out lay forgotten on the chabudai.
That next morning, you were the second to wake up. You don’t quite remember how or when you got to your bed, but there Tohru was, shirtless and sitting against your headboard.
His fingers had been running through your hair. When you blinked your eyes open, he drew them back.
“Well, fuck,” you remember him sighing, “I think I like you, too.”
You laughed into the sheets, still half-asleep and half-convinced this was all a dream.
Tohru liked you. He liked liked you, the confession said through gritted teeth when you needled him during breakfast. It wasn’t a dream.
Your coworkers didn’t understand.
Not that you particularly cared, though it was entertaining to see them scramble for some ridiculous reason— is he blackmailing you, Seta-san?— for your relationship. As if they simply couldn’t understand how someone like Tohru Adachi could ever end up with someone like you.
“I’m right there with them,” Tohru mumbled into his can of coffee during lunch one day, “I don’t know what you see in me, either.”
You handed a boxed lunch to him. “I can make a list, if you’d like.”
“Oh, sure. Give me more stuff to read over. Add it to my neverending workload.” He plucked the bento from your hands. “Working me to death. I think you’re after me for my money.”
You laughed harder than was polite. Tohru sputtered and squawked until he was red in the face.
Winter bloomed into spring, which melted into summer, and Tohru Adachi began staying over at your apartment more often. He complained up and down about a busted A/C— which always happened to be in perfect working condition whenever you visited his home— and thus preferred to ride back home with you after work.
A red toothbrush soon joined your yellow one in the bathroom. The shampoo he liked to use was shoved next to yours in the bath, and a few of his clothes found their way into your drawers and closet. He had a spare key to your apartment, and you had one for his.
Tohru’s desk, still covered in paperwork, housed his own little collection of gacha figures at that point. Cats of all types lined his desktop.
“Nanako invited me to a fireworks festival,” you said over dinner one evening, “Do you want to come?”
He gave a little shrug. “She didn’t invite me. She invited you.”
“And I’m inviting you.”
“I’m not good with kids.”
“She’s in junior high.”
Tohru kept his mouth full of food to avoid answering. He was out of retorts and excuses.
“You two will get along just fine,” you promised, slipping another soup dumpling onto his plate. Tohru looked unimpressed, but accepted the dumpling.
And just as you predicted, they got along quite well. Tohru wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t good with kids, but Nanako had always been something different. Your uncle had always said so and you had always known so.
You and your cousin watched with wide eyes and gaping mouths as Tohru shot down nearly every target at the shooting game booth on the night of the festival. While he failed— quite terribly, you loved to remind him— to catch a fish or win a yo-yo balloon, he fared exceptionally well with a toy gun.
Nanako got to pick out the prize. Even if she insisted she was too old for dolls or toys, she held her new stuffed rabbit close to her chest.
“I might have taken a few classes,” Tohru later confessed over takoyaki, “or gone to a shooting range once or twice.”
“You might have done well as a cop with those skills,” your uncle suggested.
Tohru made a noncommittal noise. “Maybe.”
The fireworks were beautiful from the secluded spot the four of you found yourselves in. Under cover of darkness, you slipped your hand into Tohru’s. He knocked his shoulder into yours and gave a little squeeze.
Later that night, when you had crawled into the spare futon in the spare room of the Dojima residence, head tucked under Tohru’s chin with his arm draped over your shoulder, you wondered if you were dreaming again.
Winter returned with snow, and with it came homemade hot cocoa in your apartment kitchen.
“Why can’t we just use the packs of cocoa mix?” Tohru grumbled as he stirred away at the pot of cocoa on the stove.
You added a spoonful of sugar to the mix. You breathed in the sweet smell of chocolate and sugar as it hit your nose. “Homemade anything tastes better than pre-packaged stuff. You’ve said my cooking is better than any convenience store food you’ve had.” You took a spoonful of cocoa to taste, minding the heat. “Mm— see for yourself. Careful, it’s hot.”
Tohru slurped at the same spoon when you offered it. He licked his lips. “I really hate when you’re right.”
“Cheer up,” you offered, stepping away to grab mugs, “I’ll let you pick the movie.”
By that next January, Tohru’s things were littered throughout your apartment in little ways. Everything was a synthesis of the two of you in one living space, a combination of your personalities in one small, boxy apartment.
He moved out of his apartment last month. You both shared your car. Tohru’s temporary transfer at the office was about to expire; he was applying to a police academy. There were even talks of adopting a cat.
As you stood outside your office building, watching the tiny flurries of snowflakes in the sky, your phone buzzed in your pocket. Tohru’s name and number were on screen.
“I’m pulling up right now,” he said, “Are you at the front?”
“Yes. Thanks again for coming to pick me up.”
“You shouldn’t have to work this late. It’s a Saturday.”
“I wanted to help out,” You shivered, wrapping your scarf around your throat. “We’ve been a little short staffed ever since you left. And a little lonely.”
“We already live together. You should be sick of me.”
“I could never— ah, I see you.”
Tohru pulled the car right up to you, snow crackling under the car’s tires. He had his glasses on, and one of your coats instead of his own over his house clothes.
You beamed from the passenger seat as he chatted away.
“I really ought to say something. They never had us staying this late when we worked together. It’s snowing, too! What if you had gotten into an accident or—”
You kissed the words out of his mouth. You knew that you would remember this little moment for the rest of your life, Tohru coming to your rescue in the snow. Your own prince charming in house slippers and messy hair. Someone who was only supposed to be a transfer from your department.
The snow continued to quietly fall outside, onto your car, over your heads, as you kissed him. It was like a dream.