Chapter Text
The sign on the door was Duang's proudest achievement in life.
It was a little crooked.
It had been crooked since the day he put it up, and every time someone pointed that out, he said it added "character."
The sign read: CUPID CLUB Room 204 “ We Find You Your Person So You Don't Have To.”
Below that, in smaller letters that Pae had added without asking.
“No Weirdos.”
Jamie had made him cross that part out, but it was still slightly visible.
Duang pushed the door open with his shoulder, arms full, a plastic bag swinging from his wrist and two canned coffees balanced dangerously on top of a folder that said ACTIVE CASES in big red letters.
"I'm here, I'm here, I didn't forget about the meeting."
"You're twelve minutes late," Jamie said without looking up from his notebook.
"I brought snacks."
"You're forgiven."
Pae was already sprawled across two chairs on the other side of the small room, legs dangling over one armrest, scrolling through his phone.
He didn't look up either. "Did you get the shrimp crackers?"
"I got the shrimp crackers."
"Then you're more than forgiven. You're a hero."
Duang dumped everything onto the table and looked around the room with the satisfied feeling he always got when he walked in here.
It wasn't a big room.
It had three desks pushed together in the middle, a whiteboard that was covered in names and arrows and color-coded sticky notes, a small shelf of what Jamie called "reference materials".
Which was mostly romance manga and two actual books about psychology, and the wall.
The wall was Duang's second proudest achievement.
It was covered in photos, strings of ribbon connecting names to other names, little notes with hearts drawn around them.
At the top, a banner that said SUCCESS BOARD.
Every photo up there was a couple that the Cupid Club had helped get together.
There were fourteen of them now.
Fourteen.
Duang counted them every time he walked in.
He couldn't help it.
"Okay," he said, dropping into his chair and cracking open a can of coffee. "Weekly debrief. What's the status of our current cases?"
Jamie flipped open his notebook.
He always had a notebook.
Duang was pretty sure he slept with it.
"The Auau and Save situation is basically handled. Auau worked up the nerve to ask him to study together, he said yes, and according to my sources they spent three hours at the library and only twenty minutes of that was actual studying."
"Beautiful," Duang said.
"Gross," Pae said.
"That's love, Pae."
"That's wasted study time."
Jamie ignored both of them. "The other two cases are still in early stages. Nothing urgent."
He clicked his pen. "Which means we have capacity for a new client."
Duang perked up. "Did someone reach out?"
"Not yet. But it's only—" he checked the calender. "Tuesday. We usually get walk-ins on Tuesdays."
Pae finally looked up from his phone. "How do you know that?"
"I track it."
"You track what day of the week people come to ask us to fix their love lives?"
"I track everything." He said it like it was completely normal.
Pae looked at Duang.
Duang shrugged.
This was just Jamie.
They had both accepted this a long time ago.
Jamie had been Duang's friend since first year of middle school, back when they were both awkward and terrible and he had informed him, very directly, that Duang was going to help Jamie with his science project whether he liked it or not.
He had helped Jamie.
The project won second place.
Then Jamie said second place was unacceptable and then rewritten the entire thing and submitted it to a regional competition where it won first.
Duang had watched all of this happen and thought, I want to be this person's friend forever.
Pae had arrived later, in high school, through a very funny series of events involving a lost hamster, a vending machine, and a bet that Pae had made with himself and not surprisingly, lost.
He was loud and ridiculous and somehow always in the middle of whatever was happening, and the three of them fit together in a way that Duang still couldn't really explain.
They just did.
The Cupid Club had been Duang's idea, but it only worked because of the three of them.
Duang came up with the plans.
Jamie made sure the plans actually made sense.
Pae made sure the plans were fun.
It was a system.
"So," Duang said, leaning back in his chair and looking up at the success board, "while we wait for walk-ins, should we talk strategy? I was thinking about expanding our methods. Like, what if we started doing-"
The door opened.
All three of them looked up.
Two boys stood in the doorway, which was a little funny because they looked like they were trying to decide whether to walk in or run away.
One of them, shorter, round-faced, with his school tie slightly loose was gripping the door frame like it was keeping him upright.
The other one, a bit taller, quieter-looking, with his hands in his pockets was scanning the room with the expression of someone who had just realized they might have made a mistake.
"Is this," the round-faced one started, then stopped. "Is this the, uh. The club that. You know. The matchmaking one."
"Cupid Club," Duang said, already smiling.
He sat up straighter.
This was his favorite part. "That's us. Come in, come in."
They came in, a little uncertainly, and sat down in the two chairs on the other side of the table.
Up close, Duang could see that the round-faced one had an energy about him like a puppy who had just done something bad and wasn't sure if he was about to get in trouble.
The taller one had calmed down and was now just watching Duang with a careful, assessing look.
"Names?" Jamie said, pen already poised.
"I'm Kim," said the round-faced one. "And this is Tong."
Tong gave a small nod.
"Second year?" Jamie asked.
"Yeah."
"Okay. And what can we do for you?"
Kim glanced at Tong.
Tong gave him a look that clearly meant, ‘you're the one who wanted to come here, so you talk.’.
Kim turned back to the table and took a small breath.
"So," he started, "the thing is. We have a friend."
"A friend," Pae echoed, with the very neutral tone he used when he was trying not to smile.
Duang kicked him lightly under the table.
"His name is Qin," Kim said. "And he's been, okay so he's been single for a really long time. Like, his whole life, basically. And it's not because nobody likes him. People like him. Lots of people like him." He paused.
"Actually, maybe too many people like him. That's kind of the problem."
Duang leaned forward, interested. "What do you mean?"
"He just." Kim made a helpless gesture with his hands.
"He rejects everyone. Every single time. Someone confesses to him, he says no, very politely, and then just goes back to whatever he was doing like nothing happened. He doesn't do it to be mean. He's just..." He trailed off, searching for the word.
"Cold?" Pae offered.
"I was going to say selective," Kim said, but his expression suggested that cold was also not entirely wrong.
"He doesn't warm up to people easily. And we're his friends, so we know he's actually a good person, he's just quiet and a little hard to approach and he's never really met someone that made him want to, like. Try."
"So you want us to find him a match," Duang said.
"We want you to find him someone who can actually get through to him." Kim looked a little embarrassed.
"We've tried giving him suggestions before and he just looks at us like we've said something really stupid. So we figured. You know. Professionals."
Pae made a sound that was definitely almost a laugh.
Jamie wrote something in his notebook.
Duang looked at Kim and Tong and felt the familiar little spark that he always got at the beginning of a new case.
There was something about this one.
He couldn't put his finger on it yet, but something about the way Kim said he's a good person, he's just hard to approach made him want to know more.
"Tell me about him," Duang said. "What's he like?"
Kim and Tong exchanged a look. This time it was Tong who spoke, in a quieter voice than Kim's.
"He's in our class. Third seat from the window. He reads during breaks. He eats lunch with us but he doesn't talk much, he just kind of sits there and listens and sometimes he says one thing that's really accurate and kind of devastating and then goes back to his book."
A pause.
"He doesn't like loud people. He doesn't like being the center of attention. He's really neat about everything, his notes, his desk, his bag. Everything is in the right place." Another pause.
"He's pretty."
The word landed simply, stated like a fact.
"Pretty," Duang repeated.
"Yeah." Tong didn't seem self-conscious about it at all.
"Like, noticeably. That's part of why so many people confess to him. But he doesn't really care about that. He's not arrogant about it. He just doesn't think about it."
Duang nodded slowly.
He was already building a picture in his head.
Someone quiet and precise and a little difficult to reach, who had probably been approached by so many people with the wrong reasons that he'd learned to just close the door before they even knocked.
"Okay," Duang said.
He looked at Jamie.
Jamie was already looking at him with an expression he couldn't quite read. "We'll take the case."
Kim visibly relaxed. "Really?"
"Really. We have a pretty good track record." Duang gestured at the wall behind him.
Kim leaned slightly to look at the success board, and something in his face softened with relief.
"How does it work?" Kim asked.
"First we'll need to observe him a little," Duang said. "Not in a weird way," he added quickly, because Kim's expression had shifted.
"We just need to get a sense of who he is and what kind of person would actually be good for him. After that we'll come up with a plan. You'll be updated at every stage."
"That sounds very organized," Tong said, looking at Jamie.
"That's me," Jamie said.
They went through the rest of the basic intake questions, the kind the club had developed over time, little things like what are his interests, does he have any dealbreakers that you know of, is there anyone in school he seems to like more than others .
By the end, Jamie had three pages of notes and Duang had a very full head.
When Kim and Tong finally stood up to leave, Kim paused at the door.
"We just - we're not trying to force him into anything," he said, and he meant it, Duang could tell.
"We just think he deserves to have someone. He's been alone for a really long time and I think sometimes he doesn't even notice because he's so used to it. But I notice."
He gave a small, slightly embarrassed smile. "So. Yeah. That's why we came."
"We'll take care of it," Duang said.
Kim nodded.
Tong gave that same small nod from before, like a period at the end of a sentence.
And then they were gone, the door clicking shut behind them.
The room was quiet for a moment.
Duang stared at the closed door with the pleasant, purposeful feeling that a new case always gave him.
There was a person out there, quiet and pretty and a little closed off and somewhere there was someone right for him, and the Cupid Club was going to find that person.
Simple. Clean. Good.
"Well," Pae said.
Duang turned around.
Jamie and Pae were looking at each other.
It was one of those looks, the kind that happened between them sometimes when they were thinking the same thing and Duang was not part of the thinking.
He had learned to notice it over the years even if he never knew what it meant in the moment.
"What?" Duang said.
"Nothing," Jamie said, and wrote something in his notebook that he tilted very slightly away from Duang.
"You guys are being weird."
"We're always weird," Pae said. "You just usually don't notice."
This was also true, so Duang let it go.
He pulled the ACTIVE CASES folder toward him and wrote ‘QIN — NEW’ in the next empty slot.
"Alright," he said, uncapping a marker and turning to the whiteboard.
"Let's talk strategy. Step one: observation. I want to know who this person actually is before we start throwing candidates at him."
He wrote OBSERVE in a box.
Drew an arrow. "Step two—"
"Duang," Jamie said.
"Hm?"
"You didn't even ask for a photo."
Duang looked up from the whiteboard. "I'll see him when we observe him. It's fine."
Jamie wrote something else in his notebook.
This time he didn't bother tilting it away.
He would have seen it if he'd looked — just two words, underlined once.
Phase one.
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Later, when Duang had gone to ‘return’ the snack wrappers to the bin down the hall, Pae spun his chair around to face Jamie.
He had the look on his face of someone who had been holding something in for the past twenty minutes and was now going to let it out.
"Okay," he said. "So are we doing this."
"Doing what," Jamie said, not looking up.
"You know what."
Jamie did know what.
He had known since approximately the moment Kim said he's pretty and he had watched Duang's expression do a thing it didn't usually do.
Not the bright professional interest he got with every new case, but something else.
Something slower.
Something that he clearly hadn't noticed in himself yet.
He was very good at noticing things other people didn't, especially Duang.
He tapped his pen against his notebook twice.
"Kim and Tong came here to find their friend a match," he said.
"Yeah," Pae said.
"They said they want someone who can get through to him."
"Yeah," Pae said.
"Someone patient. Someone genuine. Someone who won't get put off by a little coldness, who'll just—" he made a small gesture with his hand. "Keep going."
Pae was grinning now.
He had a grin that took up most of his face when he really let it. "You're describing Duang."
"I'm not describing anyone," Jamie said. "I'm just summarizing the client's request."
"Jamie."
"Mm."
"Are we finding Qin a match," Pae said slowly, "or are we finding Duang one?"
Jamie looked up from his notebook for the first time.
He smiled.
It was a small smile.
The kind that meant he had already thought about this more than anyone.
The kind that, if Duang had been in the room, would have made him vaguely nervous without knowing why.
"Those don't have to be different things," he said.
Pae stared at him for a moment.
Then he clapped both hands over his mouth.
Then he said, muffled: "Oh this is going to be so good."
"Calm down."
"I cannot calm down, this is the most exciting case we've ever taken."
"It's not a case," Jamie said. "I don't know what you're talking about. We are helping Kim and Tong find their friend a match. That's all."
"Right," Pae said, still grinning enormous. "Totally. That's all we're doing."
The door opened and Duang came back in, brushing his hands on his pants.
"Okay, I was thinking for the observation phase we could start tomorrow during lunch — oh, why are you two making that face?"
"What face?" Pae said.
"That face."
"This is just my face."
Duang squinted at him.
Then at Jamie.
Jamie had his neutral expression on, which was Jamie’s most suspicious expression, but Duang never seemed to realize that.
"You're both being weird," he said again.
"You said that already," Jamie said. "Come look at the whiteboard. I want to talk about how we structure the observation phase."
Duang let himself be redirected, which was easy because he genuinely did want to talk about the whiteboard, and within about two minutes he was fully absorbed in planning again, marker in hand, talking about timing and approach and variables, all of it for the sake of a boy he hadn't even met yet.
Pae caught Jamie's eye over Duang's shoulder.
Jamie looked at the back of Duang's head for just a moment.
Then he looked back down at his notebook and turned to a fresh page.
At the top Jamie wrote, in small, neat letters: ‘OPERATION: BACKFIRE’.
Below that, he wrote, Phase one: observation.
He underlined it.
And smiled again, to himself, very small, while Duang kept talking happily about a case he had absolutely no idea was partly about him.