"...because I... didn't know? I, a decade, Akira, I—led you on. For a decade. And I'm sad about that because you're my friend and I hurt you and I didn't notice—"

"No, you know what, go back to shutting up. God, I did not need to add 'empathetically regretful of the ways you hurt other people' to the list of reasons to like you, just, just. Just eat your goddamn sushi, it's gonna go bad if you just whine around it."

...okay. He can shut up and put his cigarette out and eat delicious sushi. That's a thing he can do which will (probably) not accidentally hurt anyone while he's not looking.

Yeah. Whatever. Asshole. Akira's gonna eat some delicious sushi, too, and not look at Yutaka.

On the bright side they aren't at that stupid fucking party a week before they all died having to pretend they're fine in front of half of the Tokyo elite.

"Well, do you have a picture of him?" he asks eventually, after he's done with most of his food. "This mysterious boy?"

"...uh—yeah." He took a couple more semi-candid pics while Haru was puttering about the kitchen which feel—a bit less personal than a selfie Haru personally took for him, even if it was just an offhand pic this morning.

"...okay, let it never be said you don't have good taste," Akira says, grudgingly.

He nods and puts his phone back in his pocket.

"Why are you not bragging, Iwasaki?"

"—that'd be really insensitive!"

"Man, how the hell did you change so much over two weeks. Are you putting on an act or, what gives?"

He literally can't tell Akira the answer to that question, so he just shrugs.

"Well, whatever. Brag anyway. Tell me about this guy who managed to succeed where all of the richest and most powerful teenage gays in Tokyo failed."

"Um."

"I'm serious. What's he like?"

...well. Okay. Yutaka can in fact wax poetic about Haru. He really is completely crazy over that boy.

...man.

Well, that... happened, he says, after he and Akira have parted ways.

In a bad way?

I honestly don't know. It was—a lot. He didn't cry? Which I guess is an improvement over last time. But he said he's had a crush on me for a decade and I literally didn't notice until he told me with his facemouth.

...he's our age, right, he must have been awfully precocious.

Didn't you have puppy crushes when you were eight? I did but in retrospect they were all there just to please my father.

I really didn't, it all came in over the course of my being like fourteen.

Anything I say about what I was like back then will just be something I'm making up, I was whatever I thought my father would have wanted me to be and I didn't pay attention to what I wanted until it was much much more obvious that what I wanted would never be something he'd approve of.