Work Text:
Yuuji thinks this is going to be a good thing to try, and Choso is just about out of those, but that doesn’t mean he quite knows what to do with this one.
The app’s interface is a shade of orange that he is almost certain isn’t found in nature. When he clicks the pencil-shaped icon in the top right corner of the screen, there about seven blank white boxes to fill. He does not know what to put in any of them. None of these facts is doing anything for his nerves.
But Yuuji had said that making a ChatUp profile would be good for him, so he inputs his name, his age (thirty-four), his occupation (nurse), and his interests (brothers, swimming, gardening, listening to audiobooks), before he comes to a box labeled tell potential dates about yourself! and hits a wall.
Yuuji, when messaged for information, calls him by way of a reply, and doesn’t really bother with a polite greeting when Choso picks up.
“Dude,” he says, patiently exasperated, “just talk about yourself.”
“But isn’t that what all of the other boxes are for?”
“No, that stuff’s, like, basic. But you want this one to be like a bio.”
“A bio…graphy?”
“…you’ve never made a bio before, have you.”
“No,” Choso says, wondering why this is surprising. “Is that a normal thing to do?”
“Uh…yeah?”
“…oh.”
“You wanna just, I dunno. Write stuff that would make someone wanna go out with you.”
Choso frowns. “Why would I be making a profile on a dating app if I knew how to make people want to go out with me?”
Never mind that he doubts he’d apply the knowledge even if he had it. The idea of going for dinner or drinks for several hours with a woman he doesn’t know sounds quite terribly upsetting, honestly, and there’s a reason besides general obliviousness that Choso has never dated anyone.
Yuuji thinks it would make him happy, though, and even though usually he’d protest, he has been running short on things like that lately.
“It’s not that deep,” Yuuji says, no doubt trying to be reassuring but only confusing his brother more in the process. “Just, I dunno…say why you made this account.”
“Oh.”
Choso, enlightened, dutifully types: my brother thought it would be a good idea for me to make this account because I’m a little lonely. I would like to meet some nice people.
“I understand,” he says after that pause. Yuuji seems pleased, and perhaps less suspicious than he ought to be; Choso thinks about it for a moment after that and decides that might not have been the best phrasing, since it sounds rather disloyal the way it is. I would like to meet somebody nice, he decides, is safer, and adds who could enjoy our time together with me.
He fills in the first possible answers to questions he doesn’t understand, scans the page, and presses Save upon deciding it is satisfactory.
Maybe he is taking a step forwards.
**
Choso takes about an hour to begin to understand that perhaps he is not marketing himself quite right.
After he fills out a questionnaire about what kinds of things he wants in a date, the app begins to recommend the profiles of women who’d said similar things. But none of them seem to have interpreted the unspoken rules of the app the same way he did.
One woman whose entire page reads like an advertisement for her vegan startup declares that she’s a “plant mom.”
(Difference in strategies aside, Choso smiles, because he has never heard that one before, and he likes the sound of plant dad.)
Another recommended profile tells him that its owner is “here for a good time, not a long time,” and in one of her photos she is holding a margarita the size of her face in one hand with a large green snake wrapped like a bandage around the other.
(There is a heart button. He clicks it, because he thinks her snake is quite lovely, but does not know if that’s even what it means.)
There is also someone from the next town over who he’s pretty sure he’s seen before, and several women who look to be half his age, which worries him deeply, and also a woman who claims to be the daughter of a yakuza boss, and before he knows it all he’s using this app for is swiping women whose profiles frighten him off of his screen.
Then the messages start flooding his inbox.
Choso didn’t even know he had an inbox on this app, but apparently he does, and soon it starts to ping with the arrival of messages from-
“Wait,” he mutters, distressed. “Is that the yakuza woman?”
Examination of her profile picture confirms that the user who’d messaged him “you feeling lonely? I think I could help with that ;)” is, indeed, the so-called daughter of a criminal overlord, and Choso is really quite perturbed.
I’m sorry, I don’t know you well enough for that, he replies, then – miracle of miracles – learns how to block someone.
He uses this new privilege of his quite liberally, but only after informing several women under the age of twenty who have all replied to a message he cannot remember sending and telling them that they ought to be very cautious on apps like these, and did they look at his profile?, because they would have known that he was too old for them if they had, and that they really ought to be careful, because he’s already distressed just thinking about what could happen, and he is about to delete the stress-inducing profile entirely when he receives a notification informing him of a new match.
This woman is neither eighteen nor a self-proclaimed yakuza heiress nor trying to sell him vegan products.
She is thirty-six, according to her profile. She lives in the next prefecture over, she runs an auto shop, and she is taller than Choso by a good deal. A motorcycle features in most of her photos. In some, she is wearing a martial arts gi, and her interests, apparently, are karate, motorcycling, and noodles.
Just noodles.
She is also very, very beautiful, and Choso’s face reddens when he thinks about her sending the kinds of messages that many of the other women have. This, naturally, means that he has no choice but to swipe her profile off the screen before he can even entertain the idea of using the app for the purpose it was made for.
He is just deciding that an app he’s too afraid to use has no real use at all when his phone pings with a notification, and the ChatUp icon appears beside a message:
What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?
**
“Uh, Choso?”
Yuuji, bent over his brother’s phone, sounds worried, and that is a very bad sign. Choso preemptively winces. “Yes?”
“You swiped right on eighteen people?”
“Swiped right?”
Yuuji looks at him like he is a good ways beyond hope, which is equally worrisome, and for a moment, neither of them says anything. Then, he can’t help but ask: “have you seen a bunch of girls you liked?”
“Um, no,” he says. “Just…one. And I’d, well, I just don’t think I could ever…” his shoulders round. “I don’t think this profile was a good idea.”
“And that one girl was the one who just messaged you, right?” he asks. “Tsukumo Yuki?”
He nods, his cheeks flushing slightly. Putting a name to the face makes it feel much more real than he wants it to.
“And what did you do when you saw profiles you didn’t like?” Yuuji asks.
“I swiped,” he says. “It gets them off the screen.”
Yuuji gives him another long, hopeless look, then says, “did you skip the tutorial?”
“Yes,” Choso says, perturbed. “Why?”
“Because swiping right on a profile is what you do when you like it.”
“You mean I…I told them…” Choso pauses, blanches, then murmurs, “oh no.”
“I mean, it’s not that big of a deal-“
“You mean I’ve been…making advances on them?”
“I mean, swiping doesn’t really mean that much on an app like this,” Yuuji tries to reassure him, then, noticing his stricken expression, asks, “what?”
“One of those girls was in high school,” he says, hushed.
Yuuji raises an eyebrow. “I mean, that’s kinda sus, yeah, but-“
“Give me that,” Choso says, snatching back his phone, and frantically (if clumsily) navigates to the list of users he’s blocked.
Fourteen of them. Yikes.
“I have to fix this,” he says, then scrolls down the list until he reaches a name he remembers. He unblocks it, pulls up the chat window, and is halfway through a message when Yuuji peers over his shoulder.
“I wanted to explain how sorry I am that I propositioned you,” Yuuji reads. “Seriously?”
“She’s eighteen!”
“But you literally didn’t do anything!”
“I made it look like I was interested in a girl who could be my daughter!”
“You blocked her, though?”
“And?”
“She’s not gonna think anything if you blocked her.”
“But…but…”
“Choso,” Yuuji says patiently, pressing on his arm to keep him from typing, “what about the girl you did like?”
Choso, flushed, looks up. “What do you mean, what about her?”
“Did you respond to her message?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“But why?” he presses. “That’s the whole point of you being on here.”
“She’s…” he flounders for an answer. “She’s not attainable, all right? She’s not.”
“Says who?”
“I don’t…I don’t even know how to use this app,” he says. “What would she want someone like me for?”
“Choso. Dude. How’re you gonna know if you just decide that without even asking?”
“Because she just…she wouldn’t.”
“She messaged you,” he points out. “Actually, all these girls messaged you. You realize that they didn’t have to do that, right?”
“They didn’t?”
“What, did you think the app was gonna force them message every guy who swiped right on them?”
“I…don’t know,” Choso admits.
“It doesn’t.” Yuuji grins, maybe a little smug – he can’t quite tell. “If all those girls messaged you, it means they thought you were cool.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Cool?”
“…or maybe just hot,” Yuuji acquiesces.
That perturbs him even more. “Hot?”
“And, I mean, this Tsukumo lady.” He gently wrests Choso’s phone from his hand and pulls up the woman’s profile, eyes widening as he flicks through her photo album. “Damn, Choso, seriously?”
“Seriously what?”
“This,” he tells him, tapping his shoulder with his phone – “this is a woman, Choso.”
Yuuji probably only says that because she’s tall, ripped, and posts too many pictures of food, but then again, Choso’s first impression had been rather similar.
“I…I do think I would like her,” he says, averting his face so Yuuji won’t see him blush.
“And what’d she say? What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” he reads. “You gotta come up with something good to say back.”
“Yuuji, I don’t want-“
“Even if you don’t wanna go out with her, wouldn’t it be nice to just…meet someone really cool?”
Choso, who has never really considered meeting people a particular pleasure, blinks at him.
“To hang out with?” he clarifies.
“Uh…”
“It would be good for you.”
“But-“
“How about looking for a girl like you?” Yuuji suggests.
Choso’s face feels hot just thinking about saying something so ridiculous. “That would be dishonest.”
“It’s a dating app,” Yuuji says. “No one’s honest.”
“But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of wanting to meet someone compatible?”
Yuuji, whose answer to this would probably crush Choso’s soul or something, chooses not to say anything, but hands the phone back anyway. “I guess you should probably be yourself,” he says.
Choso, who agrees, and is probably more emboldened by Yuuji’s insistence than he ought to be, erases that message from the chat window and inputs my brother thought this would be a good way for me to meet interesting people instead.
**
Choso, as the eldest sibling, likes to think that he has a moral obligation to be right more often than any of his brothers, especially Yuuji, who so rarely exercises any common sense – but sometimes he has to concede that he cannot always win.
Talking to Tsukumo on ChatUp is making him think that maybe Yuuji was not as flagrantly wrong about meeting people as he wanted to believe.
Choso is not oblivious enough not to know that she probably doesn’t know what to make of him, but that doesn’t seem to bother her very much. At least, not enough that she refrains from sending him, a day into their acquaintance, a picture of her lounging in a hammock with a green iguana the length of her arm draped across her chest.
His name is Garuda, apparently. Tsukumo says all the men in her life have to pass his “vibe check,” whatever that means.
(Eso and Kechizuo helpfully inform Choso, upon seeing a screenshot of this exchange in the family group chat, that she’s messing with him.)
I like reptiles, Choso politely replies when she sends the picture, because he does not know, of course, that apparently Yuki doesn’t really use this lizard to judge the worthiness of her potential boyfriends. And besides, it’s a nice-looking animal, and what he’s said isn’t at all untrue. They’re quiet, misunderstood – maybe, he thinks, he feels a certain kinship with things with scales.
It is because of this apparently-adequate response that Tsukumo, clearly amused, sends him a video in which she, with Garuda on her shoulder, declares (he has never, he realizes, heard her voice before that) that “he likes you already.”
Oh, he wants to lament, wringing his hands, what is this?, because Choso likes to like things, but all of the things he likes are so much simpler and less frightening than a beautiful woman who doesn’t scoff and tell him he’s lame for liking to cultivate exotic plants instead of human friendships and says her pet iguana likes him.
Yuuji, upon hearing this over the results of Choso’s attempt to practice the udon recipe Tsukumo sent him, swallows a bite and then solemnly informs him that he might have located his soulmate.
Choso takes a good three minutes to cough up the broth he chokes on at that.
**
He graduates to phone calls after eight days of talking and thinks he is very brave.
Tsukumo (“call me Yuki,” she insists, but he still doesn’t) had asked if she could at least get some kind of reassurance that he wasn’t catfishing her, to which he’d readily agreed, and he likes their calls. Her voice is nice to listen to, and with no face to match to it, there’s something safer about phone calls. It’s like having an audiobook on while he cleans or makes dinner or works on his plants, except that she talks back.
Having never really had anyone to talk to but his brothers, and no need to call them when they’re all over at the house so often, Choso hasn’t had a chance to realize that talking on the phone is a nicer way to pass the time than he would’ve thought. Today, she had said my assistant almost got us both beaten up today, and naturally he had requested a follow-up over the phone.
“No, I swear, he’s like, ninety,” she insists. Choso, raising his eyebrows, continues chopping carrots. “So he’s gotta be almost deaf, right? And he comes in asking about this stereo system he wants installed and my assistant, you remember Aoi, right?, well, he just takes one look at the guy and goes, ‘if you’re going deaf, shouldn’t you not get new speakers and make it worse?,’ and I swear, the look on his face…”
She trails off.
“Well, he’s right,” Choso says, even though he doesn’t think this is the answer he’s supposed to give. “He probably should protect his hearing if it’s already getting worse.”
“Yeah, but the dude, like, grabs his collar and starts trying to shake him, which…it’s Aoi, good luck. But like, yeesh, dude was violent. Wasn’t expecting that one. So, like, I kick him out, but Aoi, he looks so shocked, because, like, he’s a massive dude, right? No one just…comes up to Aoi and starts trying to shake ‘im down. And I know, I’m awful, it’s not funny, but…” she pauses to sigh. “Isn’t it?”
“Are you always in that much danger at work?” Choso asks, growing rather worried if this is the kind of customer she always gets.
“Danger? Please.”
“But you had a violent customer.”
“A shrunken old geezer half my height,” she says, laughing. “He was like a chihuahua. All bark.”
“But Aoi-“
“Aoi just isn’t used to being messed with,” she says, then adds, “unless it’s me.”
“Unless it’s you?”
“Well, yeah, do you not rough up your subordinates in the dojo every so often?”
“I don’t have subordinates,” he says, even though he knows that was a rhetorical question. “I think I am subordinates, actually.”
“…oh.”
“Tsukumo,” he tells her, “you have a strange work environment.”
She laughs again, and he feels a curious tightening in his chest. He wants to pretend that he doesn’t know what that means.
“I guess I do,” she says. “But don’t we all?”
“The weirdest thing that ever happens at my work is that I take too long to find a vein and the patient glares at me,” he says. “And that doesn’t even happen that often.”
“Suits ya, though. You seem like a low-stakes kinda guy.”
“I guess,” Choso says, even though that’s true, because it sounds dishearteningly like an insult.
“And honestly, I don’t get how you do it,” she says. “I’d get so bored.”
There is very little that is boring about managing patients who look like the puppet-strings of social convention that keep them from cursing him out on the exam table when he comes in to help Shoko with their checkups are a hair’s breadth from snapping, but to someone whose life is as apparently full of excitement as Tsukumo’s is, it probably seems that way. He wilts a little.
“You probably would,” he says, and before he can think better of it, he says, “but I think you might get bored of me, too.”
“Hm?”
“I mean, I’m not very exciting,” he says, feeling his cheeks grow hot. “That’s all.”
“Choso,” she says, almost fond, “I was talking about a job, not a person.”
“I…I don’t follow.”
“Is that why you haven’t wanted to go out yet?” she asks, not really bothering to explain what she’d meant. “Because you don’t think I would still like you?”
“No!” he says, too hasty, then, with far less conviction, “…no.”
“You don’t sound very sure about that.”
“I…I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he admits. “I just don’t really know what the timeline for these kinds of things is supposed to be” – true but irrelevant – “and I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t know when…would be appropriate?”
“You mean, like, not ever?”
“No,” he admits, and realizes too late that a normal person would probably feel ashamed of that. “I…never wanted to.”
“Hm. Honestly, fair.”
“And…and honestly, I only got ChatUp because my little brother told me to,” he says, talking too fast so he won’t be able to stop himself, “and I didn’t realize that swiping all the profiles I didn’t like off my screen was actually...contacting them, and…and a bunch of teenagers messaged me, and then I saw you and I…I…”
“Wait,” she says, faintly amused. “You swiped right on me by accident?”
“I…I was nervous.”
“Wow,” she teases. “I’m hurt, Choso. Here I was thinking you liked me.”
“I…I did!” he insists. “I mean…I do. It’s just…I didn’t want to, to…contact someone I thought would be…I don’t know.”
Horrifically out of my league, he chooses not to finish.
“All this time,” she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice, “I was wondering what made you want to swipe right on me, and all along it was an accident?”
“I know it sounds bad-“
“Please,” she laughs. “It’s adorable.”
“It…is?”
“You’re such a grandpa,” she says, and somehow this doesn’t sound like an insult. “it’s refreshing, I guess. Someone like you being on an app like ChatUp.”
Choso thinks his ears are probably red by now, and that only happens when he’s so thoroughly embarrassed that he wants to crawl into a cave and hibernate for the winter. “What do you mean, someone like me?
“I mean, most people are on ChatUp for hookups,” she says. “I was on there because this one time I was drinking with Aoi and this girl from my hometown who was around on business and we thought it would be funny to make a weird profile and use it to mess with people.”
He can’t say he’s surprised by her reasons after talking to her for a few weeks, but he raises his eyebrows. “Really? Just for hookups?”
“Choso, what did you think ChatUp was for?”
“…dating,” he says, starting to feel a little woozy. “It’s called a dating app.”
“I mean, sometimes, but usually…” she trails off. “Let’s just say it’s not really a place where people are honest about themselves.”
“Wait, so…”
“I get a message from a guy who says he joined because he’s lonely and I’m just, like, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, beginning to get the sense that he’s lost at something. “I…I don’t really know how to do these things.”
“No, but I saw that and I was curious, so I was like, why not get to know him? And then, well, I mean…”
“Wait, so,” he asks, “you weren’t looking for a boyfriend?”
“I mean, I wasn’t opposed to it, I guess.”
“But…but…”
“That’s the whole point,” she says. “I wasn’t looking. Which is why it was kinda funny to meet you and then realize, like, wait, there are actual humans on here? Ones I actually like?”
“I’m…I’m sorry?”
“I mean, that I actually wanted to get to know you,” she clarifies. “And that I wasn’t messing with you.”
His eyes widen. “Even about the iguana?”
“…what’s that mean?”
“My brother said your whole thing about…about the iguana approving of men was a joke,” he says. “Probably. But…you weren’t messing with me?”
“Of all the things,” she laughs, “that’s what you think I would’ve made up to mess with you?”
“…yes?”
“Nope, sorry, he’s real.”
“No, I know he’s real,” Choso says. “I saw the picture. It’s just…”
“Nah, Garuda’s a great judge of character,” she says. “If he doesn’t like you, then I know you suck.”
“Um,” he says, rendered rather nervous by this information, “how exactly does he…express how he feels about the people you’re interested in?”
“Oh, it’s just a vibe he gives off,” she says.
“A vibe?”
“Yeah. You know, he’s just in his zone,” she tells him, as if any of this makes sense. “When he really vibes with someone. And if he’s not, he’ll get all tetchy.”
“And he can sense these,” he asks, “vibes through the phone?”
“I mean, I think it’s more like, he reads me, y’know?” she says. “Like, he’s around me so much that he just gets the vibe of the relationship.”
“Um, I see,” he says, even though he doesn’t.
“I mean, I don’t exactly have evidence,” she admits, “but one time when I was, like, twenty-two, I was going out with this creep in college – did I tell you that? I was a philosophy major, actually, then I realized that degree was basically just a piece of paper and I opened the garage, anyway, yeah, philosophy guys are weird. And that was when Garuda was a baby” – she pitches her voice upwards – “just a little tiny dude! And he, just, I dunno. He hated my boyfriend. And then I realized he was a creep, and I was like, ‘huh, I should’ve listened to the lizard, I guess,’ so now he has to approve anyone I wanna go out with first.”
This seems like a suspicious means of discerning whether or not somebody is a creep, but so long as the iguana has already signed off on him, Choso doesn’t feel the need to point that out. “Has he ever actually approved of anyone?”
“Once, but then I found out he was cheating, so…”
So the iguana method does have its shortcomings. “That’s terrible,” Choso tells her.
“Nah. It was about time I got rid of him anyway.” She sighs. “But, yeah. I figure a fifty-fifty record is better than nothing, right?”
Choso, who can’t think of an adequate response, doesn’t offer one, and Yuki sighs again.
“Y’know,” she says, “I think that’s what I like the most about you.”
“What is?”
“Just…your vibe.”
Choso frowns. “I have a vibe?”
“I mean, both of the guys I went out with in college were just…cool, you know? Like, on paper, they were great. Looked put-together. Knew how to make themselves look good. Knew how to make me think they were great.” She pauses – he imagines it’s to smile fondly, and then wonders where that thought came from. “But you…”
“I’m not cool,” he offers, because it’s always easier to rip off the band-aid. “In the slightest.”
“You’re not slick,” she says. “I will say that.”
“Tsukumo,” he says, “I’m fully aware of that.”
“No, no, I swear that’s a compliment!”
“Is it?” he asks. “Kechizu always says I’m kind of a loser.”
“Kechizu is a loser, then. Clearly.”
“Don’t call him that.”
She ignores him – sibling things, she probably figures. “You’re not their punching bag, though.”
“Of course not,” he replies. “Kechizu just thinks I’m a loser.”
“Which is-“
“It’s not his fault,” Choso says, wishing he hadn’t gone down this rabbit hole to begin with. “I’m not so great with people.”
“Yeah, but you’re honest. I like that.”
And Yuuji had told him to try to be cool. He feels rather vindicated.
“I’m glad you think so,” he says, feeling rather shy. “I…I like your…vibe, too.”
She laughs, and there, again, is that squeezing sensation in his chest. “Enough to get dinner on Friday?”
Eight days ago, the thought of hearing those words from someone he liked would have made Choso sweat through a ski jacket. Now, even though he feels like there’s a herd of wildebeest migrating from his stomach to his lungs, the things he feels when he hears them are not remotely unpleasant.
“Yes,” he says. “I would love that.”
**
“You okay there?”
Choso is not.
He most certainly is not, and he knows that he should be more okay than he ever has been in his life, because – thirty-four years and he’s finally scored himself a date, and she’s gorgeous, why shouldn’t he be? But, no, that is not to be.
The photos on Yuki’s profile had all been casual: group pictures from the dojo in her karate clothes, shorts and tank tops by the pool, one of her and Aoi at the garage in blue jumpsuits that only look the same in cut, material, and style (and really, how much do those similarities mean when one is worn by a human tank and the other by Tsukumo Yuki?). So, foolishly, he had not anticipated this.
At all.
He’d chosen the restaurant and known it was fancy, and yet her choice of teal halter top tucked into high-waisted pants with wide legs that barely let the toes of her shoes peep out at the bottom is more than he thinks he can stand.
“Of course,” he says, thrusting a bouquet of sunflowers into her arms with an expression that probably makes him look like at least a little bit of an idiot. “Are you?”
She gives him a brief, confused look before she laughs.
“Yes,” she says, a little wheezy between giggles. “I think I would say that I’m okay.”
**
The thing about having a girlfriend which Choso has no reason to have known is that it’s not always as exciting as the first dinner date, but that this does not even slightly diminish the mortal fear of heart attack that he feels every time Yuki shows up to something in high-waisted pants.
(He is not a man who has extensive experience with the female form, or any, really. This is a development for which he had been entirely unprepared.)
This time, when she opens her door, she’s in baggy grey cargo pants that tie at the waist, and Yuuji, who has been telling him for weeks that if he doesn’t get to meet his brother’s girlfriend’s pet iguana he’s actually going to explode, watches Choso’s reaction and looks like it takes a valiant effort not to bust a gut.
“So you’re the mastermind behind that ChatUp profile,” Yuki greets him, and Yuuji, who had already decided from her profile that she was a first-rate girl, looks pleased enough to burst that she’d recognized him.
“Nah, not really,” he tells her, kicking off his shoes at the door. “I just made him sign up.”
Choso is grateful for this very convenient excuse not to have to say anything, both because he’s not quite over the pants yet and because, on the top of a bookshelf over Yuki’s right shoulder, he can see a bouquet of long-dead sunflowers in a drinking glass full of murky water, and he knows exactly where they came from.
“Well, thanks anyway.” She pats his shoulder with unnecessary roughness and then beckons for them to follow her inside. “Choso tells me you’re kinda fired up about the iguana.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m fired up,” Yuuji says, his face reddening. Yuki had probably known he’d react that way and Choso can’t help but smile. “I just…think it’s…cool.”
“He is cool,” she agrees. “Probably older than you.”
“You mean like-“
“Yeah, they do live that long,” Yuki says – evidently he isn’t the first to be confused. “Wild, right? Anyway. He’s going on seventeen.”
Then Yuuji wilts, because it’s only now sinking in that she’s just accused him of being a teenager, and sulkily says, “I’m twenty.”
She reaches over and ruffles his hair. “Oh, wow. Sorry. You got babyface.”
Choso is the last person in the world who would ever be inclined to find his little brother’s distress amusing, but he has to admit that watching his expression shift from confusion to peevishness to outright offense when he realizes what Yuki is saying is amusing.
Yuki has a way of bringing the humor out of things. It’s one of the things he loves best about her.
In truth, though, he’s been holding off on this meeting for a while. Yuki has been bugging him about when she’s going to meet the brothers he never shuts up about for weeks, and Choso had always had excuses – Kechizu and Eso commute to school and are rarely free, Yuuji’s work hours are unpredictable, he hasn’t gotten time to clean the house. But this time, Yuuji had inserted himself into the conversation by force after he stopped by the house for food while Yuki was over and learned that his brother’s new girlfriend owned an iguana.
It really had all been over, he realizes, once Yuuji found out about the iguana.
He needn’t have worried, though. Yuki is the kind of person who can get along with anybody – what other type of person would have ended up going out with somebody like him? – and even if Yuuji is irritated with her now, he has a feeling that he’ll come around within a few minutes. Yuuji, too, is almost pathologically good-natured. All it takes is an iguana to smooth things over.
Choso thinks his audible gasp when they reach the room she keeps Garuda’s cage in confirms this hypothesis.
(He can’t decide which part of this is most ridiculous: his little brother holding a lizard almost as old as he is across his shoulders and looking as pleased as he’s ever seen him; Yuki, cackling and taking pictures; the fact that this is all happening because Choso has a girlfriend. Maybe all of it is.
Maybe it’s kind of nice to be shown that things don’t have to make sense to be good.)
**
“You like ‘im, don’tcha.”
Yuuji, at the moment rather entranced by the realization that Garuda likes being scratched under the chin, looks up. “You kicked Choso out to ask me if I like your lizard?”
“No, I kicked Choso out because you’re the only person close to him who I’ve ever talked to,” she says, sinking elegantly into an overstuffed armchair across from Garuda’s habitat. “I don’t need to ask if you like my son.”
“Your son,” Yuuji says, a little incredulous.
“My son.”
Yuuji blinks a couple of times, then decides this is perfectly logical. He nods.
“So,” he says, “what did you actually wanna talk about?”
“I dunno, just…” she shrugs. “Insight, I guess. What makes him tick?”
Yuuji tilts his head. “Makes him tick?”
Yuki quickly begins to grasp several things about Yuuji in the space of that gesture alone.
“Just…I dunno, tell me things about ‘im,” she says. “What would you want me to know?”
“Why are you asking your boyfriend’s kid brother about this?”
“Because my boyfriend doesn’t talk to anyone else, Yuuji.”
Fair enough. “He doesn’t like putting himself out there,” Yuuji offers. “But then once he does, he’s always a lot happier.”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling to herself. “I can see that.”
“You make him really happy, you know that?”
This time, she lets him in on the smile. “Do I?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s the goal,” she says, laughing a little stiffly. “So…good job, self. I guess.”
“Honestly, I just had him make that profile ‘cause I thought he needed to practice being social,” Yuuji admits. “I didn’t think he was actually gonna meet someone he liked on there.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Seems kinda cruel.”
“I mean…ChatUp is for hookups,” Yuuji says. “And he wasn’t gonna go for that, right? So I thought…I don’t know, it would be safe. Help him practice getting himself out there.”
“Weird logic, but okay,” Yuki replies.
“But then he accidentally swipes on this girl” – he pauses – “sorry, this lady. Sorry.” Clearly he’s a little bit afraid of her, who knows why. “Who’s…super pretty and has a motorcycle and a giant lizard-“
“You think I’m pretty?” she interrupts him to ask.
Yuuji’s cheeks redden about seven shades in three seconds. Yuki can’t help but laugh.
“Sorry,” she says. “You’re just really easy.”
“-and then he ends up going out with her,” he says. “And he likes her. And she likes him. And I’m like, what? Because Choso’s, like, thirty-four and he’s never had a girlfriend in his life, and the second he makes a ChatUp, he finds, like, the coolest lady ever? Like…how?”
“Oh,” she laughs, thoroughly charmed. “It does run in the family.”
Yuuji looks at her askance. “What does?”
“You’re all such sweethearts.”
That makes him blush again, which Yuki finds rather more amusing than she should.
“And…now he actually has plans sometimes,” Yuuji goes down, watching Garuda intently so he won’t have to look at Yuki. “He actually sometimes doesn’t answer when I call him. And do you know how nuts that is?”
“I’m sorry-“
“No, don’t. Seriously.” He does, when he looks up at her, seem earnest, to his credit. “It’s just wild, because like, before, we were pretty much all he had, you know? Me and our other brothers. And now, for him to not answer calls…”
Something about that makes Yuki’s chest ache, but she can’t tell whether it’s the thought of Choso having no one but his brothers or the fact that she’d changed that.
“He really needed to find you,” Yuuji says, looking back down at Garuda. “So…I’m glad he did.”
“Pleasure’s mine,” she says, cavalier so she won’t sound as shaky as she feels.
It really is. She wishes she knew how to express that – that she had needed to find Choso as much as Yuuji thinks Choso needed to find her. That she hadn’t been quite as alone as he is, but that she’s not someone with much to call her own, either.
“You make him feel like somebody,” Yuuji says. “You don’t know how long we’ve all been trying to do that.”
**
It’s a little awkward to return to the somber silence of the guest room without know what’s happened to prompt that silence. But Yuki, ever the injector of levity, quickly breaks the ice by reclaiming Garuda from his newest admirer, holding him up by the middle, and planting a kiss on his mouth.
Choso, who is almost certain he loves this woman, has to admit that even now that sort of thing makes him recoil. Yuuji appears to agree.
“You kiss my brother with that mouth?” he asks, incredulous, and Choso-
Well. It’s not as if it’s true, but it’s funny, somehow, and he cannot remember the last time it happened, but he laughs, and laughs, and laughs at that.
“I would,” Yuki says, barely containing her own laughter, “if he’d let me.”
Choso mutters something about salmonella to salvage what’s left of his dignity. Then again, though, he probably forfeited that when he let his brother sign him up for a dating app he didn’t know how to use in the first place, and that turned out pretty well.
“Oh, shush,” she says, fondly swatting his arm. “What do you want me to do, wash my mouth out with soap?”
“Literally, yes.”
She laughs, leaning her head on his shoulder, and without thinking about the audience or the fact that nothing like this comes naturally to him, Choso slips his arm around her waist and gives her hip a gentle squeeze.
Maybe dignity really is a little overrated.