Chapter 20: 20. Let’s Focus on Raising One Woman’s Desire Level Till It Maxed Out.

It took an hour and a half.

Haruka talked for most of the conversation, which was fine because she was engaging to listen to. She shared stories about her hometown in Japan, a city near Osaka that she described as "comfortable and a little boring."

She recounted the two years she had spent trying to get into Valcrest and how, when she told her parents she was moving to Erosyne, her mother cried for forty minutes while her father advised her to "make sure the locks on the door are good" and then also cried.

She asked Mike where he was from, and he gave her the version he had been refining for weeks, accurate enough in feeling to be convincing and vague enough in detail to be safe.

"So you’ve lived in a lot of places," she said, trying to fold a blanket and clearly not succeeding because blankets are an inherently difficult textile.

"A few," Mike said.

He took the blanket from her and folded it in three seconds, which was something you learned when you had lived in enough places that packing efficiently became a survival skill.

She stared at him. "How did you do that?"

"Practice."

"Can you teach me? I’ve been failing at that particular blanket for a year."

"It’s just the corners," he said, and he showed her.

She watched with the full concentrated attention of someone who was actually going to remember this and attempt it later.

"Okay," she said. "I think I got it." Then, immediately, "Can I try?"

He handed her another blanket, and she did it reasonably successfully on the second try and looked pleased with herself in a way that was completely genuine and slightly contagious.

They got the last of her things in around noon. The apartment was not fully organized, but it was livable, with boxes stacked in sensible locations and the important things, her laptop, her chargers, and the framed photo of Ren Fujiwara, already out and placed.

"Thank you," Haruka said. "Seriously... I don’t know what I would have done without you."

"I probably finished all of this at midnight, hahaha..."

"You would have managed," Mike said.

"I would have dropped everything in the hallway and sat next to it for a while," she said, which was probably accurate. "Do you want lunch?"

"I can’t cook yet because I don’t have any ingredients, but I saw a place on the corner when I came in that looked good."

Mike looked at his watch. It was 12:10. "Sure."

"Great!" She grabbed her jacket from the hook she had just put up on the back of the door. "I want to try everything here."

"I read that Erosyne City has really good food because of how many people have come from different countries and brought their cuisines with them."

"You read that?"

"I read a lot about Erosyne before I came," she said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. "You should be prepared when you go somewhere new."

Mike held the door open. "Can’t argue with that."

They went downstairs. As they passed through the lobby, Petricia emerged from the office with her building inspector, raised a hand in a small acknowledgment to Mike, and looked at Haruka with the warm expression of someone who was pleased that the new tenant was already making connections.

Haruka waved back enthusiastically. Mike gave Petricia a look that she acknowledged, but after a half-second, she looked away.

He filed that look away.

’I need to focus on her first, but I try to raise this girl’s desire level.’

...

The place on the corner was a small café that did sandwiches and a rotating daily special, which on Friday was a lamb stew that Haruka ordered without hesitation because she said she had never had lamb stew before and that was precisely the kind of thing she was here to try.

She liked it. She also ate about two-thirds of Mike’s sandwich because she had apparently decided they were sharing before he had been consulted on the matter.

"Sorry," she said, not sounding truly sorry. "I eat when I’m excited."

"And I’m excited almost all the time."

"I noticed," Mike said.

"Is that annoying?"

"Nope," he said, and he meant it.

She was easy to be around, much like genuinely enthusiastic people are when their enthusiasm is authentic rather than performed. didn’t demand anything from him. It just existed.

They talked about Valcrest for most of lunch. She had questions about the orientation process, about which buildings were there, and about whether he knew anything about the professors in the IR faculty.

He didn’t know any of it yet, but he had read the orientation documents she’d mentioned, which the system had emailed him that morning, and he had a good enough memory that he could answer about half her questions from that alone.

She looked at him halfway through one of his answers and said, "You know, you’re really easy to talk to."

"I’ve been told," Mike said.

"By who?"

He thought about Petricia saying it in the restaurant on Callen Street, two floors below where he now slept. "People."

"Well, they were right." She stole another piece of his sandwich. "I was a little worried about moving somewhere I didn’t know anyone. But this is already much better."

"You’ve been here four hours," Mike said.

"A great four hours," she said firmly.

He looked at Ren Fujiwara in his head. The photo on the windowsill displayed his comfortable, unguarded smile.

Two years of long distance. The trust-is-just-a-choice theory.

He took a drink of his coffee, looked out the café window at Harwick Lane as it buzzed with activity on a Friday afternoon, and thought about the upcoming Monday.

Two new venues are set to open simultaneously: one right next door and another across the city.

Haruka was talking about something she had read about Erosyne’s public transit system and whether the District 2 line was reliable, and Mike listened to her with one part of his attention while the other part was already sorting through the information he had accumulated in the last twelve hours and organizing it into something that would be useful.

He was looking forward to Monday considerably more than he had been an hour ago.

[DESIRE LEVEL: HARUKA KANATA — 0/100]

[PROXIMITY: ADJACENT UNIT. DAILY CONTACT LIKELY.]

[SHARED ENVIRONMENT: VALCREST UNIVERSITY, STARTING MONDAY.]

[RELATIONSHIP STATUS: COMMITTED, LONG-DISTANCE, PARTNER UNAWARE OF HER DAILY LIFE HERE.]

[ASSESSMENT: CONDITIONS ARE FAVORABLE. DO NOT RUSH.]

’Not even raising it by one...?’ Mike thought. ’A loyal girlfriend, huh, I see how it is...’

Mike closed the notification.

"The District 2 line is fine," he said. "Takes about eighteen minutes from Harwick Lane to the Valcrest stop."

Haruka lit up. "You already checked?"

"It’s on the map."

"I have the map, but I didn’t look at the timing," she said. "See, this is why you need to make friends fast."

"Someone has already looked at the map."

Mike smiled at his coffee cup. "Glad to be useful."

By the time they walked back to the building at two in the afternoon, Haruka had made Mike promise to meet her at the front door on Monday morning to take the District 2 line together, a commitment he accepted without protest because there was no logical reason to object and several practical reasons to agree.

She went into unit five while waving his hands to Mike, and he went into unit six while nodding at her.

He sat in the chair at his new desk for a while, not doing anything in particular. The afternoon light came through the east window at an angle and landed on the floor in a long rectangle that moved slowly toward the wall as the hours went by.

"Now... let’s focus back on that baddie actress..."

He thought about the poker room. Madison Reed is folding a hand she could have won. And then he changed his mind fast about Haruka handing him a box to carry and immediately starting a new conversation before he had even shifted the weight of it.

Then back to the first main thing about Petricia’s messages at seven in the morning, the five of them were trying to put something back into a box it had already left.

He thought about Rex, who had sat in a room somewhere and written a document about a country and left it in a case with a man he trusted, he had never found out if any of it worked out.

"Oh, it worked out alright," Mike said to the room, which contained only him and the rectangle of afternoon light.

...

In the evening, he stretched and felt the specific protests of muscles that had carried more boxes in one morning than they were used to.

He stood, rotated his shoulders, and decided he needed air. He put his jacket on and went into the hallway.

The hallway was quiet in the way Friday evenings tend to be when most of the people in a building have settled into their weekends and aren’t going anywhere for a while. The sound of Haruka’s television came faintly through the wall of unit 5—something with a studio audience.

The older man in unit three had his radio on at a volume just below the threshold of being worth knocking about.

Mike started toward the stairs.

He passed the management office, noticing that the door was open.

He wasn’t sure why it was open at this hour. Petricia usually closed it by five on Fridays because Gerald was home on Friday evenings, or at least that had been the pattern so far.

However, the light was on inside, and the door was not only unlocked but also standing open at about a sixty-degree angle, which is typical when someone has passed through and forgotten to close it behind them.

He stopped.

Through the gap, he could see the desk with the lamp illuminated, and in the pool of light from the lamp, Petricia was sitting at the desk with her back mostly turned towards the door.

"Ahhnnn..."

"... ...!" Mike raised his eyebrows, noticing that she was masturbating with such careless behavior for letting the door open like that.

’What a damn fool... but still this is an opportunity for me.’

[DESIRE LEVEL: PETRICIA SCHNEIDER — 55/100]

[NOTE: FRIDAY EVENING. GERALD’S WHEREABOUTS: CURRENTLY UNKNOWN. OFFICE DOOR LEFT OPEN.]

[YOUR MOVE, HAWK.]

Mike looked at the open door, and then he already pulled out his phone to take a video of her.

"Let’s raise her desire even more... shall we...?"