pretend relationship of two willing parties
Kyoko lives in a way that offends the time, in split seconds, in a downstream rather than a flow. There’s no build-up. There’s a crash and the next there’s a full circle made, the way it takes approximately 45 seconds for the blood within the human body to make a full round. Speed is a luxury only the living can afford.
None of this preface matters, however, in the face of Ayaka’s indignant rage.
The uneven crook of her lips denotes an urge to slap Kyoko unconscious and Kyoko’s thin line of defense is the fact that they’re meeting up in a family restaurant. Careful planning on Kyoko’s part has them seated near a group of moms with a demonic offspring each celebrating the birthday of one of its kind. Ayaka likes kids and hates being the center of public attention. So, no slapping.
Ayaka likes kids, hates being the center of public attention, and loathes Kyoko with everything she has. This wisdom is exclusive to a person who had dated Ayaka for three years and known her for another four; bits of knowledge possessed, manned, and strongly held onto by Kyoko and Kyoko only.
But she digresses.
Their orders arrive. Kyoko sips on her lemon tea with the enthusiasm of a vacuum cleaner. Ayaka is glaring at her, but Kyoko’s eyes are on the twinning lunch set she had bought for them each.
So, Kyoko takes the matter into her own hand. All the while still not making a single eye contact. “It’s my treat.”
“Oh my fucking god. You and I know that’s not the problem here.”
“You never had any problem with this place when we - ”
“It’s not the place,” Ayaka pauses to grind her teeth, to swallow down curses, “I wanna know what even goes on in your head. Renting me to be your - girlfriend .”
“I’m contributing to your paycheck.”
“We broke up a year ago, like, exactly a year ago,” Ayaka hisses, “this is the worst . This, this sounds like something from a bad. Bad . Cable drama.”
Kyoko stuffs herself with fries, pretending like the month off their relationship felt like an actual month and not an elongated eternity.
Ayaka, a woman scorned, adds, “In case you forgot.”
“Man, I wish I could forget our break-up.” Kyoko fishes her phone from her bag, careful as to not squeeze it into pieces in fury. “How many hours do we have?”
“Another two according to your advance payment.”
Kyoko’s home screen informs her that it’s 13.14, meaning it’s 12.59 right now. “Do you like art museums?”
Ayaka’s disinterest is apparent as she starts digging into her lunch set. “Not at all.”
Kyoko knew that already anyway. “Okay. Finish your meal in a quarter.”
“Aya - ”
“It’s Hazuki Maho .”
“Fine. Maho - ”
“Yes, Saito-san ?”
“Do they make you refer to your client by their last name?”
“Nah.”
“Oh…”
They almost miss their bus stop. Ayaka because she doesn’t know where they’re even going; Kyoko because her mind is several stops away.
They go to the Yamatane Museum exactly because it’s a waste of time for one Saito Kyoko and one Takamoto Ayaka as none of them knows how to decode paintings beyond what’s seen, which makes it a picture-perfect date spot to to take your ex-girlfriend who dumped you via voicemail to.
Still, work is work for the rental lover agency’s rising star. Ayaka makes light conversations, drops well-timed feather-touch PDAs that last a split second each and occasionally holds her hand when things get quiet. To which Kyoko doesn’t hold back, but she can’t deny that it sends her heart borderline arrhythmic.
Don’t tell Ayaka about this. Never tell Ayaka any of this.
Looking back on it, there were lots of variables that went into their falling out. Though if Kyoko were to have the decency to be more self-aware, the first stone thrown was obviously the fact that she had never said anything about Ayaka’s hustle in the rental girlfriend service.
Or the fact that in the non-brief brief relationship they had for three years, they’ve broken up five times in total.
Can she even call it a relationship?
Also: Ayaka has a boyfriend now.
The brains behind Kyoko’s impulsive decision of booking her ex-girlfriend for a paid three-hours date is, in fact, Kato Shiho, who had sponsored the first hour in exchange for gossip.
They have their super secret rendezvous in the cafeteria of Shiho’s department. So as to not waste the time she can use to catch up on her reports due tomorrow, Kyoko does a boneless retelling of her paid date to Shiho, whose undivided attention lays on her phone. Kyoko studies the furious clicks and typings and concludes that Shiho is most likely in the middle of a fight with her boyfriend.
“... and that’s how she blocked me on LINE.” Kyoko inhales a huge amount, her lungs spent by her compact story-telling.
“Oh my god,” Shiho says to her phone screen, “dumbass.”
Kyoko isn’t even sure if that was for her or Mr. Boyfriend. “Sponsor me another hour.”
That finally rips Shiho’s attention off her phone. “What the hell?”
“Told you she blocked me on LINE. I gotta fix things somehow.”
Shiho looks to be racking her brains for a solution to their predicament, which means she’s been listening. “We’re getting you another sponsor so we can split the bill by three.”
At the beckoning of Shiho, Kumi makes her entry with the stride of someone who was told of an emergency.
Kyoko shoots Shiho her nastiest possible glare before washing clean every trace of it to welcome Kumi into their table of two.
“Shiho told me something happened,” Kumi musters between slightly ragged breathing.
“It’s… not that big of a deal,” is Kyoko’s answer as her heel digs into Shiho’s foot.
Kumi, incarnation of everything virtuous, replies, “No problem. So long as it’s nothing impossible for me, man.”
Shiho is quick to get onto the business as she weaves a dramaticized “retelling” of Kyoko’s paid date that gradually sounds further away from how it went down by every passing passage.
In Shiho’s rendition with ten folds the selling point of the original, Kyoko is quite a laudable woman just trying her very best for a second chance with the woman of her dreams and Ayaka is, well, the woman of her dreams, and not the amalgamation of nightmares and everything terrible that she actually is.
“... and Kyoko, like, held her wrist. “Please,” she said. Ayaka then was like, teary, and was like, “I can’t. I don’t have much time left, Kyoko.” And like, their time was up. All three hours…”
Kyoko sips on her milkshake. Else she would laugh through her nostrils.
She leaves for the restroom when she’s an inch away from getting ruptured into a mess of laughter. When Kyoko comes back to their table, Kyoko has no clue how, but somehow Kumi has sealed the deal and Shiho has Kyoko’s phone opened to the front page of Kyun! Girlfriend Rental Service ’s mobile application.
Now a four-legged team, they give “Hazuki Maho” another book on a fine Sunday.
To prevent a direct, personal contact between the client and the The Girlfriend, the application serves an ingrained personal chat feature with The Girlfriend, which only comes available after the client made their purchase.
As much of a fraud the “personal” aspect of the Personal Chat Feature is, this is Kyoko’s last thread of communication with Ayaka barring the last resort usage of emails . Even if that means having the underpaid IT man behind the desk spectate their gives and takes.
aya
unblock me
coward
Mahopoyo: good afternoon Saito-san!
Mahopoyo: soooo Sunday it is? ;)
Im so sorry
unblock me on LINE
ive apologized
Mahopoyo: Sunday it is~
Is this an automated reply
Are you the IT MAN?
Mahopoyo: anything you want me to wear? Nothing too risque though hehe
sleeveless
top
miniskirts
Mahopoyo: Hmmm.
Mahopoyo: See you on Sunday!!!
In-between the scheduled emotional breakdowns typical of a medical school attendee, she had Takamoto Ayaka.
Ayaka was never an ideal girlfriend and probably had demanded too much from someone with the emotional capabilities of a shoe, but the fact that Ayaka had asked her out in their last year of high school meant Kyoko possessed something desirable that none of the hundred anonymous somepersons didn’t.
Lacking the creativity to be subtle, she popped the question to Ayaka once. Why me?
And Ayaka had told her, you’re terrible, like, bottom of the barrel terrible, but you’re… kind .
And that time Kyoko had pretended to buy it, smiled over it even, as if they hadn’t just been done with an argument where Ayaka wished death on her.
While their relationship was something that made very little sense, Ayaka was the one variable that had her logical thinking torn asunder, and most of all: she made her happy. She then realized, in their second year of relationship, that she liked Ayaka.
Even now, she still likes Ayaka enough to spend actual money for three precious hours of Ayaka sitting across from her in a public library, watching her rush her report due tomorrow.
Ayaka hates libraries. A wisdom dearly held by Kyoko and some few others.
“So we’re just,” Ayaka starts, all sleeveless top and miniskirts, “just, going to be here until you’re done, or.”
Kyoko glances at her jumbled mess of a report and says in her surest voice, “Don’t think it’s going to be done anytime soon.”
“So, so basically, I’m just gonna be sitting here watching you type.”
“Yeah, kind of.”
There’s silence, because Ayaka might be an evil incarnate, but she draws the line at being a bother to others. And Kyoko counts as an Other, in more ways than one.
Ayaka goes back into fiddling with her phone.
“It’s a win for both of us, Aya. You get to get paid doing nothing for hours, and I…”
“And you ?”
Kyoko lets her sentence hang and instead, drinks in the details to Ayaka’s furrowed brows and downturned lips. It’s not the Ayaka from then who’d smile at her like she hung the first sun in December, but Kyoko is fine with convenient losses when there’s something bigger to win.
“Can I sit beside you, Saito-san?”
Saito-san means Ayaka has eased herself into The Girlfriend Mode, which doubles as a way to let Kyoko know that she’s bored as hell.
“No.”
“You really paid me to - sit across you WATCHING you type?”
Kyoko hisses to keep her anger in the lowest possible voice. “I need to concentrate !”
“Do it on your own then!”
The glare from the man sitting not far from them doesn’t go unnoticed. “Mind your voice, I don’t wanna get kicked out. The air conditioning here is nice.”
“If I scream, will you get banned for good?”
Ayaka looks deathly serious, so it’s Kyoko’s cue to let up. “Don’t you need to text back your man?”
“How did you know I have a boyfriend?”
Kyoko is painfully aware of the leaps her heart does when she so much as tries to lie, so she channels everything she has to all the eleven working muscles one needs to frown. “Shiho mentioned to me in passing some time ago.”
“Oh. I thought you scoured through my Insta daily or something.”
“Haha, no way.” Kyoko grimaces at how unnatural she sounded. “I guess you’ve got yourself some quality boyfriend looking at how he allows you to be some dozen others’ play-girlfriend.”
“He’s mature enough to tell that I’m just acting.” Ayaka places her chin atop a palm. Her other hand reaches for Kyoko’s left.
And Kyoko pulls her hand back with the speed of a hormonal grade school boy. “I need my hand to type. Like, both hands.”
“Oh my god . I don’t know how I went from you to someone so mature for his age. Thinking about it, I don’t know how I handled you at all.”
“Oh.”
“Can you believe that we’ve never had a single argument? I think I deserved that much after going through you .”
“In my defense, he’s 25.”
“How did you - ”
“Shiho, uh, Shiho mentioned it, you know, in passing.” Kyoko tries, desperate. She clears her throat, a meager attempt to unfurl herself.
Ayaka rolls her eyes, and it’s a lovely sight. “You suck at lying. Never change, Kyoko.”
Kyoko manages to type a full sentence before Ayaka decides that she’s not having it, again.
“Can I hold your hand at the very least?”
It would make the total of 24,000 yen spent worth it. It would feel great having Ayaka’s bony hand cups her smaller one the way she remembers how it went back then; the Sundays fossilized in Kyoko’s memories, the curl in Ayaka’s mouth as she brought Kyoko’s palm to her lips; the everything in-between. Kyoko’s memories are hazier on the in-betweens. But they’re all pleasant memories.
Hand-holding is off-limits for the day, as Kyoko internally processes glumly, because she needs to finish two-thirds of her report today if she wants to go with her day tomorrow without dumping an energy drink into her morning coffee. Ayaka’s company itself is enough. And she can always just make things up for her post-date report to her sponsors.
“Can I?” Ayaka tries again, and her eyes are softer this time, and.
And Kyoko could’ve said something deflective and despondent in tone, but her heart does that thing again, where there’s a rush of the adrenaline hormone that feints her heart to pump the blood faster, so fast that Kyoko feels alive and light-headed at the same time.
It’s the epinephrine. That’s him right there, officer.
And she’s going to assume that Ayaka has a doctorate in the engineering of her heart, because Ayaka leaves her seat for the vacan one beside Kyoko’s and Kyoko gets to see the way she swings a leg on top of another (and the way her skirt, does, the thing , where it goes up some microscopic length), and she takes Kyoko’s hand in hers, fingers an entangled mess, and before Kyoko could start short-circuiting, she says:
(There’s her brittle laugh that lasts a second at most, the hehe as you remember it to be,) “You know how your hand is almost half the size of mine, Kyoko? It’s cute.”
Kyoko lives in a way that offends the time itself - her timeliest spectator. Everything happens in a crash, but it’s the suddenness of things that keep her on her feet, that houses her want to live.
But Ayaka - is something, is everything, is too much of things.
And Kyoko short-circuits.