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He doesn't understand it. He has never understood it. And the longer he lives among ordinary people, the less he wants to.
Maybe it was his powers, or perhaps he was just like this. He just can't imagine being with someone he can hardly look at.
And he certainly can't fathom why anyone would want to be with him if they knew he didn't find them attractive.
The problem with Teruhashi Kokomi is not that she is unpleasant to look at.
Kusuo is not blind, nor is he incapable of observing that her face achieves something statistically improbable, a symmetry that makes other people's brains briefly short-circuit. He has observed this phenomenon with the same detached scientific curiosity he applies to most things. Interesting. Pointless, but interesting.
The problem with Teruhashi Kokomi is not even that she is unintelligent. She is not. There is a ruthless kind of intelligence in the way she manages people, the way she has constructed herself like a fortress, pretty stones on the outside, every crack mortared over before anyone can see it. He can respect the labor of that, even if he finds the labor itself incomprehensible.
The problem with Teruhashi Kokomi is that she has decided, with the full weight of her considerable will, that Saiki Kusuo is in love with her. And she has further decided, this is the part that truly baffles him, that this makes him hers. Not potentially hers. Not hers if things go a certain way. Already hers. As though the conclusion has already been written and they are simply waiting for him to catch up with the narrative she has authored.
He finds this revolting.
Not Teruhashi herself. He has some limited capacity to see past the performance to the person operating it. What revolts him is her certainty, the way she looks at him sometimes with the patient satisfaction of someone who has already won a game he didn't know he was playing. She is not pursuing him. In her mind, she does not need to pursue him. The matter is simply settled.
'She thinks she's in love with me,' he thinks, which is almost funny. 'She has convinced herself of this.'
He has read enough of her thoughts to know the full structure of her self-deception. She tells herself the story of Saiki Kusuo, the one boy who resists her, the one who must therefore feel something deeper than the rest, and she has told it so many times that it has calcified into belief. It no longer reads as a story to her. It reads as fact. As destiny. As something she deserves.
She does not know him. She has never tried to know him. She has assembled a silhouette from his resistance and called it love. It isn't really her fault; her only experience with love was being adored. Teruhashi adored him for not treating her like a pretty object, he could agree with that. She did not love him.
'She's doing it again.'
He doesn't turn around. He doesn't have to. He can feel her, forty-seven degrees to his left, performing what she believes to be a casual hair flip with the precision of a military exercise. She is projecting, loudly, the following narrative: 'He is secretly watching. He is struggling. He is fighting the inevitable conclusion that I am the most beautiful, most perfect girl in existence. He must love me.'
He is at his desk, sitting as still as possible and waiting for class to start.
He is not struggling.
This is the thing that would, if he were a different kind of person, make him want to laugh: she has no mechanism for considering that she might be wrong. Every piece of evidence against her thesis gets absorbed into it. He ignores her? He's restraining himself. He leaves the room? He needed space, which proves something. He sits with Aiura and talks to her in the easy, unguarded way that is the closest he gets to relaxed in another person's company-
He stops that thought. Because that one, specifically, is not funny. That one makes something in him go cold and a little ugly.
He had been sitting with Aiura in the courtyard two weeks ago, a Tuesday, bright and unremarkable, when he felt the surveillance begin. Teruhashi, from across the courtyard, watching them with the focused attention of someone conducting an investigation. He had heard her thoughts: 'Is he... what is this?! Why is he comfortable with her! Does she know something. Is she trying to-'
And beneath that, unexamined, the assumption underneath all her other assumptions:
'He belongs to me. What is she doing near what's mine?!'
Aiura had shared something absurd on her phone and he had failed to respond with appropriate sarcasm because he was busy being quietly annoyed on Aiura's behalf. And on his own. And on behalf of the version of this courtyard that existed before Teruhashi turned it into a stage.
He cannot even sit with a friend, and Aiura is, despite every complication, a friend, without it becoming material for Teruhashi's narrative. Without her watching to see how it fits into the story she's already written. Without him feeling like a prop in someone else's performance of an emotion she hasn't actually examined.
'This is the part I will never understand,' he thinks. 'She doesn't want me. She wants a reflection. She wants to watch herself being loved by someone who refused to be obvious about it, so it feels more like a conquest. And she has convinced herself that wanting this is the same as loving someone.'
He has watched her, over months, perform this ritual with every boy. They crumble to her performance, which feeds her ego, but bores her. She's been adored by everyone all her life, so she just expects everyone to fall to their knees in admiration.
The one fatal miscalculation Kusuo had made when it came to her, was ignoring her very existence; she wouldn't be pursuing him so hard if he had at least acknowledged her presence. He'd learned this by watching her interact with Hairo; she didn't mind at all that he didn't worship her or go "oh wow".
She pursues Kusuo with a focused intensity that he might have called admirable, if the pursuit were in the direction of something real.
It is not love. He is not sure she knows what love requires, that it requires curiosity about the other person, requires tolerating an answer you didn't script, requires asking who are you and then actually listening.
She has never asked him anything. She has only ever watched to see if he'll confirm what she's already decided.
'Does she know,' he wonders, 'that she's doing it? Does she know she's never actually looked at me? Would she believe me if I told her?'
He knows the answers. No. No. No.
He does not want to be conquered. He does not want to be a conquest. He does not want to exist inside someone's delusion, present and never consulted.
'If she would just talk to me,' he thinks. 'If she would just-'
The thought is strange and he releases it quickly. He doesn't linger on it, but it is true, the way that inconvenient truths are. There are moments when Teruhashi says something sharp and quick and unguarded, before she remembers to be perfect again, and Saiki catches a glimpse of someone who might be genuinely interesting if she'd stop performing for five consecutive minutes. Someone who worked very hard and felt things very sharply and had decided, somewhere along the way, that the best defense was to be too perfect to touch.
He understands that logic better than he'd like to.
Kusuo thinks, 'Does she realize she treats me the way men treat her?'
He picks up his bag and leaves when the bell rings. She watches him go, probably composing a story about why he left without saying goodbye that suits her narrative.
He does not look back. There is nothing to look back at, except a story he was never part of.
He is already thinking about lunch.
The Yumehara situation, at least, has taken care of itself.
Again.
Again is the functional word. He keeps returning to it, because there's something wrong about it.
The first time, it had been Shinoda Takeru. The transition happened mid-week: Yumehara had been broadcasting elaborate interior cinema about Saiki Kusuo (he was brooding handsomely but he hadn't reacted to any of her schemes), and by one rainy afternoon she had pivoted entirely to a boy that threw her a one liner about being the umbrella to her heart. She found that profoundly significant. The entire accumulated fantasy she had built around Saiki, weeks of it, intricately detailed, had been demolished right then and rebuilt, at the same scale, facing a different direction.
Saiki had registered this with mild surprise.
He had not been hurt. He had been briefly disoriented by the efficiency of it. By the completeness of the demolition. One day she was in love with him, the next day she simply wasn't, and the space where the feeling had been was already full of something else.
He had filed it away. He had moved on. He had been relieved.
And then the Shinoda situation also resolved itself, through means he had not closely followed, and some weeks later he had become aware, again, that Yumehara Chiyo had decided she was in love with Saiki Kusuo again.
He had not dignified this with a reaction.
It resolved itself, again, in the way these things tend to resolve themselves when you are unable to play along: through attrition, through the slow withdrawal of fuel from a fire, until it sputtered and found other kindling.
The other kindling, in this case, was Kaidou Shun.
Kusuo had been sitting in the shade under the parasol, reading a book, at the beach during their Okinawa trip, when he caught the thought, bright and vivid as a television broadcast, emanating from Yumehara:
'Kaidou has such a tragic face. Like a hero who's been through so much. I wonder if he's ever been in love before-'
He had set down his book very deliberately with a grimace, then he had picked it back up with a flop from the pages.
It was relief, he told himself. The kind that came from a headache that had simply stopped.
Except, and he is not proud of this, because it is irrational, there was also something else. Something that might, in a less rigorously self-aware person, be called irritation. Not because he wanted Yumehara's attention. He very explicitly did not want Yumehara's attention, but there was something dizzying about watching her pivot from weeks of elaborate romantic fantasies about him to elaborate romantic fantasies about Kaidou, like rotating a dial from one station to another.
'Was I ever a person to you?' he had thought, and then immediately discarded the thought, because it was both melodramatic and self-defeating. He was a projection screen. He had always been a projection screen to her, a blank canvas to portray whatever dream boy she fancied. That was the whole problem.
He watched her swoon over Kaidou, who she thinks just saved her from two punks, and thought: 'Well, Good luck, Yumehara. I wish you the best of luck gaining his attention.'
He meant it. He mostly meant it. He thought about it later, alone in his room, in the dark.
There is something very strange, he thinks, about being someone that people believe they desire without ever asking what you are. What you actually want. Whether you want anything at all in the way they mean it.
'I don't,' he tells himself; sometimes he has to tell himself things in order for them to become solid. 'I don't want it. Not from her, not from anyone. That is not a wound. That is not a lack. That is simply what I am.'
The thought settles and he goes to sleep.
The Aiura situation is the one he cannot fully resolve, and this is what makes it the most frustrating.
Because he likes Aiura Mikoto.
This is not something he admits often or lightly. He is not in the habit of liking people. He tolerates people. He endures people. He occasionally, begrudgingly, feels something that functions like fondness for people who have lodged themselves in his life through sheer persistence: Nendou, absurdly; Kaidou, embarrassingly. But liking is different.
He likes Aiura because she is strange and she knows it and she does not care. He likes her because she bargains with the universe and complains when the universe doesn't hold up its end. He likes her because she says exactly what she thinks and then a moment later says the opposite and seems unbothered by the contradiction. He likes her company because she is psychic and she doesn't make a big deal out of him being overpoweringly psychic. It's easy to talk to her and he likes her the way he liked the other nuisances.
The problem is that Aiura has decided she likes him differently.
And the further problem, the one that makes this genuinely complicated rather than just exhausting, is that she is not entirely wrong.
'She's not wrong that we have something,' he thinks, which is as close as he gets to conceding a point to the universe. He does not hand out concessions. He guards them like the last coffee jelly on the shelf. 'She's just misidentifying what it is.'
He knows she is right about the soulmate thing. He has known it with the reluctant certainty of someone who has tried very hard to classify a thing and found that it resists classification. They have something. Whatever the word is for the specific quality of understanding between two people who came at the world from the outside and found each other there… they have that. She reads him accurately not because she is psychic, though she is, but because she is paying attention and she interacts with him regardless of his disinterest and challenges him to be a better person. He cannot say this about many people. He cannot say it about almost anyone.
She had grabbed his sleeve last Tuesday with both hands and looked up at him with an expression she probably thought was alluring, and it probably would have worked on some other guy. "Kusuo," she had said, "don't you think we have a connection?"
"You have predicted seventeen things about me this month," he said. "Sixteen were correct." They were all correct, but he wasn't going to tell her that.
"That's fate-"
"That's a reasonable success rate for a competent psychic operating on limited data."
She had made a sound of frustration.
But she is right about fate… or something adjacent to it. He could not say he didn't believe in fate because then there would be nothing to explain his own parents. But he is too aware of how much of what people call fate is simply pattern recognition with the logical steps removed. He believes in this, though: that Aiura Mikoto was always going to end up somewhere near Saiki Kusuo, and that Saiki Kusuo was always going to find in her something he finds almost nowhere else. A person that does not demand he be something other than what he is.
'We are soulmates,' he thinks, which is not a sentence he expected to think in his lifetime. 'I think we probably are. Just not the kind she's decided we are.'
She wants something from him that he cannot give her. There is a… a frequency she is tuned into: warm, physical, romantic, the whole apparatus of it, and he simply does not receive that signal. It is not there. It is not hiding. It is not waiting for the right circumstances to emerge.
He has examined this more carefully than he has examined most things about himself, and the conclusion is the same every time. There is nothing in him that wants what she wants from him, and there is nothing she can do to make that different, and the wanting it to be different, on her part, is the one part of her he finds genuinely difficult.
'I don't want to hurt her,' he thinks. He does not care about not hurting people as a general policy. He is not indifferent to it, but it is not usually the thing that surfaces first.
He hopes she won't be too upset about it. This is also a strange thought and he turns it over with the careful suspicion he applies to all his own unexpected feelings. He hopes she won't be too upset because she is, underneath the romantic ambition, the allure, and the theatrical complaints and the sleeve-grabbing, someone he genuinely does not want to see hurt. He would like to go on being her friend, which is a word he uses very rarely.
'Just not the way she wants,' he thinks. 'Which is unfortunate, but not something I can fix by wanting it differently.'
He can feel fond of her and feel the exhaustion of being wanted in the specific way she wants him.
'I wish she would stop,' he thinks, not unkindly. 'I wish she would just… stop, and let it be what it is. We're good friends, maybe even best friends. That's enough.'
He doesn't know how to tell her this in a way she would believe. He barely knows how to tell himself.
'And I hope when she does eventually stop, that what's left is something she can still want. Because what's left is real. It is just not what she is looking for.'
Here is what Kusuo has observed, after seventeen (are we still counting?) years of living among humans:
People are desperate to be wanted in the right way, by the right person, at the right time, and this desperation makes them… not bad, precisely, but loud. It makes them perform. It makes them search each other's faces for evidence of the desired emotion the way he searches for the last traces of coffee jelly in a container: thoroughly, hopefully, with a certain grief when there is nothing to find.
He does not want to be searched.
He does not want to be the thing someone is hoping to find.
He wants to sit somewhere quiet and eat something good and have it simply be enough.
Is that so much to ask?
'Apparently,' he thinks dryly.
Café Mami is not famous for anything. It has no signature drink, no notable aesthetic, no reason to be sought out. It simply exists, smelling of roasted coffee and something faintly sweet. Kusuo found it at the beginning of the year by accident and has since returned fifteen times.
He finds a corner booth. Outside, it has started to drizzle. Through the glass, pedestrians perform their small adjustments: hoods up, umbrellas deployed, speeds increased. He watches them with the mild interest of someone observing a nature documentary.
He has ordered the coffee jelly of course. It arrives exactly as advertised: jelly dark and bitter at the base, cream loose, cold and sweet on top. He admires it for a moment before picking up his spoon.
'No Teruhashi sending people after me. No Yumehara fantasy-broadcasting. No Aiura grabbing my sleeve. Just this.'
Something in him unknots, slowly, the way cold muscles unknot in warmth.
He takes a bite. The bitterness of the jelly hits first, then the cream sweetens it out. He takes another bite, and then another.
He is, he realizes, as close to content as he gets.
And then he tenses.
There is a distinct shift in the set of his shoulders and the angle of his spoon. He has caught an approaching presence before it rounds the corner from the service counter, and he knows it's his classmate.
'Mera Chisato… she's working today. Of course.'
Kusuo tries to avoid her. Not because she had done anything wrong, but because she knew him and he'd just rather not have to deal with the social interaction. She was tolerable, more tolerable than most, but also one of the scariest people he's met. 'She'll steal all the food if I'm not looking.'
He watches her approach over his spoon with an expression he hopes reads as neutral. She is wearing the café apron over her maid uniform with the energy of someone who has been employed longer than they expected to be and has long since stopped caring about impressions. She is carrying a small tray with a cloth on it.
She stops at his table.
He waits.
She looks at his half eaten coffee jelly. There is a very brief, very pure expression on her face, which he understands as longing; the expression of someone who has looked at the concept of food and felt it as a cosmic truth. He understands that very well.
Then she looks up at him, and her expression turns into a nervous smile of someone who has learned to keep her feelings between herself and the menu or else she'll lose her job.
"Saiki," she says.
"Mera," he says.
She does not ask if she can sit down. She does not tell him he seems lonely. She does not attempt to read his aura, interpret his reticence as longing, or inform him of her feelings while standing in the middle of a café. She just wants to know:
"Is the jelly good?"
He considers this. "Yes."
"I thought so." She looks at it for another moment. "Good ratio on the cream."
"Yes."
A brief silence, which is not uncomfortable in any direction.
"Are you going to eat all of it," she asks. The question is entirely without pretense. It is simply the question of someone who would very much like to know the answer.
"Yes," he says.
She nods. This is a fair and honest response and she respects it. She adjusts the cloth on her tray. "I'll come back if you change your mind."
"You will not be receiving any of it," he tells her.
"Understood." She doesn't look particularly crushed, she never does. She's always smiling no matter what outcome she faces. She has, he suspects, made her peace with a great many disappointing outcomes.
She turns and goes.
He continues eating while looking out at the rain.
He thinks, without meaning to, about Mera's situation. He is not trying to think about it. It just surfaces the way unpleasant thoughts do. He knows, with the thoroughness of someone who has read thousands of people's innermost thoughts, that hunger she carries is not something you switch off at the end of a shift. That she is cataloguing every item on this café's menu with the focused attention other people give to important documents. That she looked at his coffee jelly the way someone looks at something they have already accepted they cannot have.
He flags down another server.
"One more coffee jelly," he says.
Kusuo is not doing this because of any feeling that requires examination. He is doing this because he knows the full weight of Mera's circumstances, and he finds it unreasonable. Even to someone like him who lived the fundamental unfairness of existence. She works very hard and eats scraps and foraging and asks for nothing except, occasionally, a bite of someone else's food.
'It's pity,' he tells himself without sentiment. 'Don't complicate it.'
When Mera comes back with the second dessert on her tray, she sets it down in front of him and then stops. Looks at it. Looks at the first glass, already half-finished at his elbow.
"That's-" She does the math quickly. "You ordered another?"
"You'll take it when your break starts," he says, not looking up from his spoon. "Don't make a thing of it."
A pause.
"Saiki… Thank you so much!"
She picks up the coffee jelly with both hands, with the careful deliberateness of someone handling something precious. He keeps his eyes on the rain and hears her walk back toward the counter.
He takes another bite of his own.
'Pity,' he thinks again, firmly. 'That's all.'
He believes it. It is almost entirely true.
There is a structure of human interaction that Kusuo has constructed over the years.
At the top of the structure sit the people who require the most management: the ones who want things from him, who project things onto him, who have decided the story of Saiki Kusuo and cast themselves as the lead. Teruhashi, with her fortress of perfection and her demands that he confirm her worldview. Aiura, with her genuine feeling misdirected into a shape he cannot reciprocate. Yumehara, who had used him as a placeholder until something better suited her narrative came along.
Somewhere in the middle of the structure sit people who are just there. Nendou, catastrophically obtuse but asking for nothing but company, and ramen. Kaidou, performing his drama for an audience of himself. Even Hairo, relentlessly enthusiastic about things that require nothing of Kusuo emotionally except to have a moral compass.
And then there is Mera, who exists entirely outside the structure he has built. Because what Mera wants from him is simple: she wants, periodically, a bite of whatever he is eating. When he says no, she accepts it. When he occasionally, out of something he refuses to analyze too closely, does not say no, she eats it with focused gratitude and does not read anything into it.
'Mera, the most tolerable person I know,' he thinks, which is not a sentence he expected to think today, or possibly ever.
Outside, the city does its usual things: loves urgently, hungers loudly, performs the whole crushing spectacle of wanting and being wanted and wanting to be seen wanting. He can feel all of it at the edges of his awareness, the overlapping signals of a thousand people broadcasting their desires into the air.
He looks out at the rain.
'I don't need any of it,' he thinks. And then, with the honesty he only allows himself in quiet moments:
'I just need this to keep being enough.'