Chapter 25: 25. Haruka Introduced Me To Her Boyfriend That Was Far Away (He’s Naive!)

Mike woke up on Saturday morning with the particular clarity that comes after a night where everything had gone exactly according to plan and sometimes even better than expected.

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.

"Phewwww~! That was a good blowjob from the landlady’s mouth," Mike laughed. "I can’t believe my cock finally has his fresh start."

"But now, as I start to feel it again, my own libido has triggered a chain reaction, making me want to have sex with different women."

Friday night had been productive. That was his word. Describing a controlled demolition as "efficient" is technically true, but it omits important details that may be significant to an outside observer.

He picked up his phone.

[DESIRE LEVEL: PETRICIA SCHNEIDER — 80/100]

Mike read the number twice.

Eighty. The system had registered the increase from fifty-five to eighty in just one Friday evening as significant enough to warrant no further commentary, despite its understated nature.

It was merely the number. He had come to understand this as the system’s way of showing its approval.

"Holy shit, I’m so fucking close~! But I think today is going to be another day where she’s acting all shy."

"Heh, silly woman."

[CURRENT TRAJECTORY: FINAL THRESHOLD WITHIN REACH. TWO TO THREE ADDITIONAL INTERACTIONS AT CURRENT INTENSITY.]

[NOTE: SUBJECT HAS CROSSED INTO ACTIVE WANT. DIFFERENT FROM PASSIVE LONGING. MANAGE ACCORDINGLY.]

"Aight, just let me cook more, but this time I’ll try a different approach that could actually benefit not only just Petricia, but..." Mike stared at the hall to Haruka’s room. "...to Haruka as well."

"I’ll make sure she heard us having sex until she starts to think about it."

He set the phone down on his chest and considered that distinction. Passive longing was the easy part, and it was what happened to people who were tired and lonely and in the company of someone who paid attention to them.

But... active want was something else. It meant she was thinking about it on her own time, and it meant she was no longer reacting, but she was anticipating.

That changed the texture of things.

He got up, showered, and made coffee. As usual, he started looking for the vendor cart at 8:15. The nursing student.

The city was embracing its Saturday routine, which felt noisier and slower than the weekday mornings in a pleasant way, as if everyone had collectively decided to take their time.

He went downstairs at nine.

The lobby was quiet except for the sound of the office door standing open, which he had started to read as Petricia’s way of not quite saying she was available. And the building inspector was long gone.

Gerald’s toolbox was positioned at the base of the stairs, just as it had been when he went to fix something in one of the upper units and was expected to return.

Petricia was at the front desk doing something with a folder of receipts when Mike came through.

She looked up.

There was a difference in how she looked at him now compared to how she had looked at him weeks ago when he’d walked through that same lobby for the first time and signed a lease at a table over horrible tea.

The landlady version of her face was still there, more or less, but it was sitting less firmly than it used to. The edges of it were softer in the specific way that suggested the thing underneath had been given some air recently and was now taking up slightly more room than it had before.

"Good morning," she said.

"Morning," Mike said.

He stopped at the desk instead of passing through, and she noticed this but chose not to comment on it. "Anything you need doing today?"

’She acts normally today... how unusual.’

"Gerald has the radiator for unit three," she said. "Nothing urgent after that."

She turned a page in the folder. "How are you settling in right now?"

"Better every day," he said, which was accurate on multiple levels.

She looked at him briefly, and there was something in that look that had not been there weeks ago, something that fell somewhere between acknowledgment and the careful, considered decision to not yet acknowledge it fully.

"Good," she said.

And then, after a beat that ran about two seconds longer than the conversation technically required, she asked, "Have you eaten breakfast yet?"

"Coffee counts as breakfast in some country," Mike said. "But , I guess yeah, I already had one."

"Coffee doesn’t count, silly," Petricia chuckled. "There’s bread, if you want."

"Sure," Mike said, and came around into the office.

...

Gerald came back from the radiator at nine-forty with the vaguely satisfied expression of a man who had fixed something successfully and therefore felt temporarily better about his place in the world.

He found Mike sitting at the small table in the corner of the office eating toast while Petricia went through paperwork across the room, and he took the scene in with the uncomplicated warmth of someone who saw what he expected to see a friendly tenant, an ordinary Saturday morning, nothing worth examining.

"Mike," he said. "You’re up early."

"It was my new habit now," Mike said.

"Give him some coffee, would you?" Gerald said to Petricia, which was the sort of thing a man says when he feels sociable and generous and is in the mood to make gestures that don’t cost him personally very much.

"He already has coffee," Petricia said, without looking up from the folder.

Gerald laughed, "Okay then, I guess I need to have a coffee too."

He poured himself a cup and sat down in the other chair at the table with the comfortable ease of a man who had made up his mind that the day was going to be a good Saturday.

He went on for a while about the radiator in unit three, about the particular bolt that required a particular wrench he hadn’t brought with him on the first trip, and about the general aggravation of old building infrastructure.

Mike listened and asked questions in the right places and let Gerald feel like the most interesting person in the room, which was something he could do with almost no effort and which cost him nothing.

Petricia passed by him once to get to a filing cabinet on Mike’s side of the room. Then she reached past him to open the top drawer, and her hand rested for about a second on the back of his chair in a way that was both perfectly explicable and also not accidental, and then she went back to the desk, and Gerald was in mid-sentence about the bolt and had not noticed.

’The fuck is she doing...?’

Mike continued his conversation with Gerald without any change in expression.

[DESIRE LEVEL: 81/100] 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

’Did she want to get a closer look at my morning wood...?’

He took a drink of his coffee.

’It only raised one, how sad...’

...

Mike was already back in his room at eleven, but then something he anticipated happened, which was Haruka knocking on his door while Mike was reading through the orientation material the system had sent him.

"Sorry to bother you. Are you in there, Mike?"

He opened the door.

"Haruka? What’s wrong?"

She was holding a tablet in front of her with both hands, the screen facing outward to display a live video call. On the screen, a young man appeared in what looked like a university dormitory room.

The space was moderately organized, featuring a poster on the wall behind him and the typical overhead lighting found in Japanese institutional buildings.

"Mike!" Haruka exclaimed, her excitement palpable as she prepared to introduce the two men. "This is Ren. Ren, this is Mike, my neighbor from unit six."

The man on the screen, Ren Fujiwara, who had the same friendly face as in the train station photo, lifted a hand in a wave. "Hey! Nice to meet you, Mike-san."

’Mike-san...? Ohh... it’s how Japanese call someone in a polite manner, huh?’

"You too," Mike said.

"Haruka mentioned that you helped her with all the moving yesterday," Ren said. "That was really kind of you."

"She said she would have been sitting in the hallway otherwise."

"Well, yeah. She did mention that," Mike agreed.

"She’s not wrong," Ren said cheerfully, and Haruka made an indignant noise and turned the tablet slightly away from Mike as if that would prevent him from hearing her argue the point.

The video call went on for another ten minutes, during which Ren asked Mike about the area and about Valcrest and about whether there were good places to eat nearby, and Mike answered all of it like someone making a good first impression.

Ren Fujiwara was exactly as straightforward as his photo suggested. He was clearly in love with Haruka in the easy, unguarded way of someone who had never had a reason to be otherwise, and he trusted Mike in the complete and uncomplicated way of someone who had not yet learned what category of people Mike belonged to.

At one point Ren said, "I’m really glad she’s got a good neighbor."

"It makes it easier, you know, being so far away." Ren chuckled. "I feel better knowing there’s someone keeping an eye out."

"Of course," Mike said. "She’s in good hands."

’Nahhhh... she’s getting fucked soon, son.’