Chapter 41: 41. I Don’t Need A Girlfriend, But I Need A Lot of Them to Be Taken By Me

"Can I ask about..." Haruka said carefully, "...Why is he called Mikey? Is it because of Mike?"

"Yes," Ellie said, as if this were slightly obvious but she were going to explain it anyway because explaining things was something she enjoyed. "His name is Mike, and when we were kids there were two Mikes in our class for a while, so one of them became Mikey, and it stuck even after the other Mike left because that’s how nicknames work."

"They outlive their reason."

"I didn’t know that about you," Haruka said, looking at Mike.

"You’ve only known me for five days," Mike said.

"That’s true," she acknowledged. "But still."

"What program are you in?" Mike asked Ellie, which redirected the conversation in the way that asking someone about their program does when they’re the kind of person who cares about it.

Ellie was in the architecture faculty, which she described with the enthusiasm of someone who had arrived at the right field after brief detours through two wrong ones and where she had been at Valcrest studying for six months.

Stanley was in urban planning, a decision that they had apparently made almost simultaneously because both of them wanted to work on similar problems and had reverse-engineered their educational paths to achieve that goal.

"You planned your degrees together?" Haruka said this in a tone that suggested she found the idea extremely romantic, though she was not entirely sure if she should express that.

"We planned a lot of things together," Ellie said, and she and Stanley exchanged the brief, unconscious look of two people who had been together long enough that their communication had developed shortcuts.

"That’s so romantic~!"

After that, they talked for a while.

...

At the end of the lunch break, they left the canteen, with Ellie insisting on getting Mike’s number before he left. Mike agreed, received both Ellie’s and Stanley’s numbers, and made an intentionally vague plan for when he would visit the place in District 5, as he believed vague plans were easier to manage than specific ones.

Ellie hugged him at the door, a hug that conveyed sincerity rather than mere obligation. Mike accepted it with the small, genuine warmth he reserved for a select few.

Stanley shook Mike’s hand again.

"It’s good," he said, a phrase that, in Stanley’s succinct manner, conveyed multiple meanings at once.

"Yeah," Mike said.

They parted at the entrance of the building, and then Mike and Haruka walked through the campus toward the transit stop in the afternoon.

The District 2 line in the early evening was quieter than in the morning, filled with a settled atmosphere of people returning home rather than heading out. Haruka sat beside him, remaining quiet for about four minutes—an unusually long silence for her that indicated she was deep in thought rather than simply pausing between ideas.

"Your childhood friend..." she said finally. "I really liked them."

"Good to know," Mike said.

"Ellie is exactly like I’d imagine someone who was friends with you to be. Like she doesn’t let anything go unexamined." She paused. "And Stanley is very calm."

"He always was," Mike said. "He was the calm one when we were kids too."

"Ellie talked loud a lot, and Stanley thought about what she said, and then they’d decide something together."

"They’re very matched," Haruka said.

"They are."

"I think that’s the nicest thing," she said. "When you can see two people and they just... fit."

"Not because they’re the same but because the ways they’re different work." She looked at her hands in her lap. "I want that kind of relationship with Ren eventually."

"We fit in some ways, but we’re still figuring out the other ways."

"Two years is early," Mike said.

"Three years," she corrected. "Three years in June."

"Still early."

"I know." She looked out the window at the city going by. "It’s just that seeing them in that house together, with their degrees and their plans, and thinking about the next two years while Ren is in a different country..."

She trailed off. "It makes me feel very far away from that."

Mike said nothing for a moment, which was the right response when someone was finishing a thought rather than asking for a reply.

"So, uhm... Ellie thought I was your girlfriend," Haruka said, with the slight change in tone of someone transitioning to a different topic.

"She jumps to conclusions a lot," Mike said. "Better get used to it."

"She said you need one."

"She said a lot of things in a short amount of time, yeah, I notice."

"But she’s right, isn’t she?" Haruka looked at him sideways, with the curious frankness of someone who asked the questions they thought of rather than filtering them first. "You don’t have anyone here."

"I know people," Mike said.

"That’s not the same thing," she said. "I know people too."

"But it’s not the same as someone."

Mike glanced at her. She was observing him with the open, non-judgmental attention that was distinctly Haruka—curious without being intrusive, direct without being aggressive.

She possessed the quality of someone who found other people genuinely interesting rather than merely useful, a trait so rare that he had noticed it within the first five minutes of meeting her and continued to appreciate it since.

"You’re saying I should have someone that I love, huh?" he said.

"I’m saying you seem like someone who would be good at it," she said. "When you decide to be, that is..."

"You’re steady and you notice things and you say what you mean, which is actually really hard to find."

"High praise," Mike said.

"It’s just true." She turned back to the window. "I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just saying."

She paused. "You could find someone here pretty easily, I think..."

"You’re—" she stopped.

"Go on," Mike said. ’God, I love to hear it when a woman starts to see my charms... I know that they can’t resist it all.’

She looked at him, and the frankness in her gaze wavered slightly, revealing a hint of uncertainty. "You’re... very good-looking," she stated, using a careful and deliberate tone, as if she were affirming a fact that she wanted to be noted.

"I mean, objectively speaking, I noticed your attractiveness on the first day, and I continue to notice it, which indicates that it’s not just a first impression."

Mike looked at her.

She looked back at him with an expression that suggested she had said what she meant and was now waiting for his reaction. He had come to understand that this was simply how she operated—without calculation, without performance.

It was just Haruka Kanata stating what was true in her experience and observing where it landed.

"I’m not interested in being objectively good-looking," Mike said.

"No," she agreed. "That’s the thing about you..."

"You’re not interested in the fact, just in what you do with it." She tilted her head. "What do you do with it?"

"Whatever’s useful," Mike said.

She laughed, surprised by the honesty of it, and the laugh lit up her face the way it always did, the whole thing at once and unreserved.

"That’s kind of terrifying," she said.

"Probably," Mike agreed.

[DESIRE LEVEL: HARUKA KANATA — 22/100]

The notification was quiet at the edge of his screen. He didn’t look at the system’s interface, but he looked at the city outside the window and thought about the transit ride, which had another six minutes left, and about the evening ahead.

...

He made dinner at home for the first time—a simple dish of pasta and a jarred sauce, since he hadn’t stocked up properly yet. It was edible, warm, and felt like his own creation. He ate it at his desk while reading twenty pages of assigned material for Thursday’s seminar.

By nine, he was done with the reading and had been sitting in the chair for long enough that the stillness of the apartment was the comfortable kind rather than the restless kind.

He picked up his phone.

’Now’s the perfect time to have sex with someone because my cock can’t take it any longer after yesterday...’

’Petricia’s desire is going to be maxed out now... and I’ll make sure of it.’

He opened his messages and located Petricia’s name. They had exchanged texts several times over the past week—mostly about practical matters, like her checking in on the building and him responding.

Occasionally, non-practical topics had slipped in alongside the practical ones.

He typed: "Are you still up?"

The response came in forty seconds: "Just finishing some paperwork. Why?"

"I was going to make tea," he sent. "Thought I’d ask if you wanted some."

There was a pause that lasted longer than the previous one. "Gerald went to bed an hour ago."

"I know," Mike replied, which was true only because Gerald’s light had been off when Mike entered, and the building had the distinct settled quiet of a place where most occupants had stopped moving.

Another pause. It stretched longer than before.

He waited.

He was good at waiting.

"Give me a few minutes," she sent. "Come up, or should I...?"

"Come up," he sent.

He set his phone face-down on the desk and leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling.

He didn’t make tea. He knew, with the calm certainty of someone who had read the situation accurately, that tea was not what either of them was interested in at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night with Gerald asleep downstairs and eighty percent desire and a flower that had been replaced with a succulent because something had changed last Friday and she was still navigating what that meant.

He sat in the quiet apartment.

Below him, somewhere in the building, he heard the faint sound of a door.

Footsteps followed on the stairs.

Then, silence.

A soft knock came at his door.