soccer player wailing on the pitch after being gently bumped: i’ve been BRUTALLY ATTACKED! treason!!!!! i simply cannot go on!!! oh! oh referee!!! where is penalty? jail! jail for opponent for One Thousand Years!!!!
hockey player after being leveled by a hit, teeth on the ice, blood in his eyes: why’d you blow the whistle?? i can finish my shift! just scoop up my teeth and drop the puck.
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What do you mean people my age are just now finding out that the 2004 SpongeBob Movie is an Odyssey retelling? I figured that out when we went over parts of the story in my freshman year English class and I had a lightbulb moment so clear it was as if Homer himself whispered the revelation in my ear.
Tomura's been Dabi's stunt double for almost a decade, and he's not easily impressed, but when he squares up with you for a fight scene, he finds himself caught off-guard in more ways than one. As the shoot progresses and sparks fly between the two of you, Tomura has to decide if you're worth the risk -- or if the best sparring partner he's ever had is all you'll ever be. (cross-posted to Ao3)
Act 1 Act 2 Act 3 Act 4 Act 5
Act 6
You slide into the seat next to Tomura at the production meeting, and your hand brushes against Tomura’s, too deliberately to be an accident. Tomura capitalizes on it. He grabs your hand, lacing your fingers, and feels somehow less stressed and more tense when you squeeze his hand in response. He hasn’t seen you since you left with Dabi. Part of him was worried you’d sit next to Dabi instead of him.
But you’re here. And Tomura has questions. “What did he want?”
“You’ll know soon,” you say. You’ve known Dabi for two weeks. How come you know whatever it is before Tomura does? You answer Tomura’s question before he can even ask it. “He said he wanted to talk to somebody who didn’t have a stake in it. That’s why.”
Tomura definitely has a stake in Dabi’s career. What the hell is going on with Dabi’s career? Tomura glances around the hall and finds Dabi sitting next to Hawks. The two of them are talking, leaning over the empty seat between them. There’s an empty seat on Dabi’s other side too, between him and Himiko. Was there assigned seating or something? “Hey,” you say, and Tomura looks at you. “What did you do this afternoon?”
“Aizawa made me help run the rehearsals for the third fight scene. He’s aiming way above their skill level. It sucks.”
“I get the sense that most of this movie is aiming above its skill level,” you say, and Tomura nods. “I think it’s kind of nice.”
“Until it crashes and burns and none of us get paid,” Tomura says. You nod. “Why do you think it’s nice?”
You lean over until your head’s on Tomura’s shoulder. “I’ve been in a lot of shows. Directors have a choice about how they handle the ones that have been done before — play it straight or try to reimagine it into something new. The ones where it’s a reimagining always feel more exciting. The stakes are higher. Taking a big risk means you’re passionate about something. It’s more fun to be part of a show like that than the latest rerun of Hamlet or something.”
“I can see that,” Tomura says. He doesn’t think he’s ever worked on a movie like that. Except maybe this one, depending on how crazy Midoriya went this afternoon. “I still want to get paid, though.”
“Me too. I can only live on instant noodles for so long before I start pining for vegetables.” You sound like you might be joking. Tomura doesn’t know you well enough to tell, so he laughs. “What? You’re not a vegetable person?”
“I eat it. I don’t pine for it,” Tomura says. “I like strawberries.”
“Really?” You sit up to study Tomura. The look on your face makes Tomura wish he’d never opened his mouth. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. Do you like strawberry flavor or just real ones?”
“Why do you care? It’s not that weird.”
“Just trying to decide what flavor of edible underwear to buy,” you say, deadpan, and this time, Tomura knows you’re joking. He laughs. “You have a sense of humor. That’s a good sign.”
“A good sign for what?” Tomura asks, but you’ve clammed up. You look really embarrassed. “Hey —”
“Hi, everybody!” Midoriya’s here. Iida and Mirio are chasing after him, Iida carrying a stack of three-ring binders and Mirio toting a whiteboard with a sheet over it. “Thank you all for coming out here. I know things have been a little weird —”
Midoriya doesn’t look like a guy whose movie just got canceled. Tomura cautiously raises his hopes of getting paid. “But I’m really excited about the new direction we’re taking,” Midoriya continues. “If everybody could take their assigned seats —”
You squeeze Tomura’s hand and let go. “I have to go. See you soon, okay?”
Right. You’re an actor. You have an assigned seat. Tomura nods and watches you cross the room, sitting down in the seat between Dabi and Hawks. The seat between Dabi and Himiko stays empty, and Tomura drums his fingers against his arm, annoyed. Whoever this is, they’re holding things up, and Tomura can’t go back to sitting with you — or doing anything with you — until this stupid meeting is over.
Someone clears their throat, loudly. Tomura looks up. “What?”
“We’re waiting on you,” Iida says. He points at the chair between Dabi and Hawks. “Over there.”
“Why?”
“Now,” Iida says.
“If I were you, I’d haul ass,” Hawks says. “The sooner you sit down, the sooner we can leave.”
What the fuck? Tomura thought he knew what foreboding was after the sneak attack this afternoon, but this feels even worse. He looks at Dabi’s expression, then yours. Neither of you know what’s going on, or you’d have told him, and Iida’s poker face is unreal. Tomura gets up and makes his way over to the seat between Hawks and Dabi, at which point Iida bangs a giant three-ring binder down on the table in front of him.
“What is this?” Tomura snaps.
“Your copy of the new script,” Iida says. “Try to keep up.”
Before Tomura can call him an asshole, Midoriya speaks up. “I was going to try to explain a little bit beforehand, but I think it might be easier if you experience it the way audiences will. So we’ll be doing a table read, blind. Your scripts are personalized to make it easier — anything that’s highlighted is yours to read. We’ll start with Scene 1.”
If this is a table read, how come Tomura needs his own script? He does stunts. He doesn’t have any lines. But he’s not interested in getting shouted at, and he still wants this to be over as fast as possible. He cracks open the script to the opening scene. It’s still the failed transition from Apocalypse’s old body to the new one, the one that ends with him getting locked up under a pyramid for three thousand years. Not much has changed there.
In fact, not much changes at all until Apocalypse starts trying to recruit the Horsemen. He grabs Archangel, then Beast, then Psylocke —and then Tomura flips to the next page and sees Quicksilver’s name all over it. Huh?
He glances over at Dabi to see how Dabi’s taking it. Dabi looks sort of confused, but he starts reading off his lines anyway. You’ve got lines in that scene, too. Makes sense. If Midoriya really wants that romance subplot, he needs to start building it from a lot earlier in the movie. Tomura thinks that for a few more pages. Then he flips one, comes up with a page full of highlighted dialogue, and almost slams his binder shut. “What the fuck?”
“Shh,” Dabi hisses from next to him. “You’re ruining up my death scene.”
He sounds like he’s pissed, but he’s wearing a stupid smug grin. Death scene? Quicksilver doesn’t die in the original script. Tomura missed something while he was zoning out, thinking about how annoying it’s going to be to watch you pretend to fall in love with Dabi for the rest of the shoot. He flips back two pages and figures it out. Apocalypse asks Quicksilver to join the Horsemen. Quicksilver says no and tries to run, so he can warn everyone that Apocalypse is coming. Apocalypse orders Psylocke to freeze time and kill him. Which you do.
What the fuck. Hawks elbows Tomura out of nowhere, and Tomura jumps. Hawks is nodding down at Tomura’s script, which Dabi has been turning the pages of to get back to Tomura’s dialogue. Tomura’s entire fucking page of dialogue. “Uh —” What is Tomura supposed to do, anyway? Why is he even in this scene? Why is he in this script at all? “Fuck — You can’t die. The others need you. They can’t win without you.”
“I know.” Dabi fakes a convincing dying cough. “That’s why they’ll have you.”
Iida reads the stage directions aloud. “With his dying breath, Quicksilver passes his powers along to his twin brother, charging him with the task of both defeating Apocalypse and avenging his death. Quicksilver’s brother looks in the direction where Apocalypse vanished as the scene comes to a close.”
It’s quiet for a second. “Does Quicksilver’s brother have a name?” you ask.
“We’re working on that,” Midoriya says brightly. Tomura’s going to hurl. “Any other questions?”
“I’ve got one,” Hawks says. “Since when does Quicksilver have a twin?”
“In the comics he has a twin, but it’s a girl. Scarlet Witch. But we don’t have the IP for her, so —” Midoriya shrugs. “The point is that a twin for Quicksilver isn’t unprecedented. It’s also one of the only things the franchise hasn’t done. We’ve had resurrections, time travel, aliens, clones. The only thing we haven’t done is twins.”
“So why are we doing them now?” Dabi asks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m on board with this — this death scene is lit —but is it really just because my stunt double making out with Psylocke looked good on camera?”
“It looked great on camera,” Himiko says. “I saw.”
“How did you see? You weren’t even there.”
“I filmed it,” Dabi says, and Tomura turns to glare at him. “The angle was shit, but I got the point across.”
“Don’t fucking film me.”
“I was being a good friend! I wanted to capture your fifteen seconds of fame and the most action I’ve seen you get in half a —”
“Guys, can we focus for a second?” Midoriya protests. “It’s a fair question, Dabi. It’s not because Shigaraki and Psylocke have incredible chemistry. It’s because the X-Men franchise has a problem with stakes.”
It’s quiet for a few seconds. “Say what you mean, Deku!” Bakugou shouts from wherever he’s sitting. “You cut all my scenes. You’d better have a damn good reason!”
“I didn’t cut all your scenes. You have new scenes! In fact, everybody’s more involved in the plot now because —” Midoriya’s voice pitches up and cracks. He stops, sucks down a couple of deep breaths, and starts over. “Comic books in general have a problem with killing characters. Nobody dies for real except Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy, and even if somebody else does die, it’s always right at the end of the story, in this big, dramatic, heroic sacrifice. We all know that story. We know it so well that we can predict every last beat before the title card even shows.”
It’s weird to hear Midoriya say the kind of things Tomura complains about all the time. Movies are predictable. Superhero movies are even more predictable. “For this movie to work, we have to show that there are consequences. The heroes taking a big loss right at the beginning of the story establishes Apocalypse and the Horsemen as a real threat, and the fact that it happens this way shows that we’re not playing cartoon tropes straight. In a comic, Apocalypse would monologue for a while and give Quicksilver time to escape. In this one —”
Apocalypse orders Psylocke to kill Quicksilver, and she does it without hesitating. Is Tomura’s character really supposed to hook up with yours after watching you murder his brother? “Yeah,” Midoriya says into the silence. “Quicksilver’s death sets the tone for how this movie is going to work. It’s a superhero movie, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Quicksilver’s powers stay in the game, but they’re with somebody who doesn’t have his experience and who isn’t reincarnated and so on and so forth — like I said, it’s faster if we just read it.”
“Yes,” Iida says loudly, over Bakugou’s arguing that he should have been the one with an important death scene. “Scene six. The interior of the Professor’s shrine —”
The table read continues. Tomura feels like he’s in an alternate reality. Maybe he died or something, because there’s no way he’s reading lines while Dabi sits next to him, chugging water and eating candy out of the loudest package in existence. There’s no way he’s trading lines of dialogue with you in scenes that seem written to kill him specifically. Quicksilver’s not the only character who dies. Midoriya offs Cyclops, too, in an effort to protect Phoenix that ends up failing. That leaves the heroes’ side without a telekinetic character, or a psychic character who can physically fight, too. And they have to go fight Apocalypse anyway.
That’s where Psylocke comes in. After a whole script setting up your thing with Quicksilver and your internal conflict over all the shit Apocalypse orders you to do, Midoriya lets you switch sides mid-battle and help the heroes take Apocalypse down. There’s a pretty good scene afterwards where the heroes decide that new Quicksilver should choose what happens to Psylocke, since she killed his brother. So Tomura gets to spare your life. You get to be weird about it, since you thought you were going to die in battle and atone for your sins that way. And he gets to kiss you again in front of everybody.
Tomura started this meeting hating Midoriya. He still sort of hates Midoriya. But he fucking loves Midoriya’s script.
Dabi seems to like it, too. The other actors whose characters are killed don’t look mad about it. Bakugou’s been appeased because his death scene is more epic than Quicksilver’s, and Uraraka’s been smiling since Iida read the stage direction about Phoenix dying. Present Mic, who’s sitting against the far wall with the rest of the crew, even comments on it. “What’s got you so hyped?”
“I’m not playing half of the superhero genre’s most annoying straight couple anymore,” Uraraka says. “I can finally come out.”
“You — huh?” Present Mic looks shocked. “My gaydar must be busted as fuck. I didn’t have a clue.”
“I’m a good actor.”
Tomura glances over at Himiko and notes that Himiko’s eyes are basically bugging out of her head. He’s going to pick on her about that later. He elbows Dabi, nodding in Himiko’s direction. “Do you see this shit?”
“I see my thunder getting stolen,” Dabi grumbles. It takes Tomura a second too long to figure that out. “I’m bi too. If anyone gives a shit.”
“I give a shit,” you say. Tomura leans out around Dabi to look at you and sees you smiling. “Now you can play something other than Good Luck, Babe, on a loop.”
“You’re bi?” Himiko says, shocked. “Since when?”
“Since the whole time,” Dabi says. He flops back in his chair. “It feels good to get that off my chest.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Spinner’s gotten up from the back wall and come over. “Did you think we’d be dicks?”
“Wasn’t about you,” Dabi says. “My fucking dad.”
Oh. Dabi and Tomura both won the asshole dad lottery, but Tomura’s dad isn’t a famous director and producer who micromanages his every move. The way Tomura heard it, Todoroki Enji wanted to be an actor but couldn’t hack it, so he’s settled for being a director and running Dabi’s life out of a corner office in Los Angeles. He’ll be pissed when he finds out Dabi isn’t straight. And that’s not even the only thing. “What do you think he’ll be madder about? You coming out or your character getting killed off?”
“Flip a coin,” Dabi says, and snorts. “I hope he has a heart attack.”
“Is anybody else queer?” Magne asks. She’s come over, too, pulling Twice with her. “One more and we’ve got the majority. Twice, baby, what about you?”
“I’m straight as a three-dollar bill!”
“Straight,” Spinner says. “Sorry.”
“You should be sorry,” Dabi says, and Himiko cackles. “What about you, Shigaraki? How do you identify?”
Tomura figured out that he liked women and stopped thinking about it. “Not available.”
The instant he realizes what he said, he cringes. Not available? What the fuck does that mean? It’s not like you and Tomura have had some kind of talk. You haven’t even gotten past second base. Tomura’s a moron. “Damn,” Magne says, and sighs. “We almost had it.”
“If it helps, I’m bi,” you say. Magne grins. “But I’m not available, either.”
“Tomura-kun has a girlfriend!” Himiko hugs you one-armed. “I want a girlfriend, too.”
“I thought you wanted a boyfriend.”
“Maybe one of each.”
“Everybody! Please pay attention!” Midoriya’s whipped out the megaphone. “I’ve sent contract updates to your agents to review — for those of you who need updates, at least. Take your scripts with you. Don’t let them out of your sight. And get some sleep, please. Reshoots start tomorrow, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
There are a lot of changes to the script. Based on what Tomura saw, they’re going to have to reshoot at least half the movie. He spends half a second wondering how they’re going to finance it, then remembers that Midoriya’s producer is the only guy in the movie industry with more money than Dabi’s dad. Money’s not going to be a problem. What is going to be a problem, though — Tomura’s phone pings with a text from his agent, congratulating him on his upgrade from stuntman to actor, and his insides pull themselves into a knot. Tomura may have started out wanting to be an actor, but it’s been a long time since he did any acting. And his part isn’t anything close to small. What the hell is he going to do, other than all his own stunts?
Dabi gets a call — from his dad — and leaves to go take it in private, followed by Himiko, Twice, Magne, Spinner, and Hawks. You sit down in his old chair. “You look like I felt when I got the call,” you say to Tomura. “How are you doing?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m fucked.” Tomura leaves his hand open on his thigh, wondering if you’ll take it, and when you do, he feels his stomach untwist itself slightly. “This isn’t going back to acting. This is getting launched into it out of a cannon.”
“Or off that launchpad Hatsume built,” you say. Tomura could have done without being reminded. “Keep talking.”
“It’s not like with you. You might not have been in movies before, but you were at least acting the whole time. I haven’t.” Tomura glances your way and finds you watching him, your elbow on the table and your chin in your free hand. You’re listening way too closely to whatever stupid thing he’s going to say. “This is a huge role. I don’t see how I’m not going to fuck it up.”
“You’re going to fuck it up,” you say. “Everybody fucks it up. There hasn’t been one scene in this movie that was shot in one take.”
“Your fight scene.”
“You’re in that one with me,” you say. You smile at Tomura. “Come on. You’re not even a little bit excited? What would little-kid you say if you time-warped back twenty-five years and told him you were playing a superhero in a big-budget film?”
Little-kid Tomura would be so hyped he’d piss himself, faint, or both. But little-kid Tomura hadn’t figured out the way the world really works. Little-kid Tomura was still dumb enough to hope for things. “Do you ever think shit is going a little too well?” he asks you. You tilt your head to study him. “This was just some movie of Dabi’s I was working on. And now it’s — this. And maybe if it was just that, I’d buy it, except now there’s this.”
He wants to gesture between the two of you, but he’d have to let go of your hand. “I don’t get that kind of luck. Other people get it all the time, but not me.”
“So you’re overdue,” you say. “I think this might be your fault.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, you spent all this time pretending you didn’t want to be an actor. You didn’t spend any time thinking about what it would be like or what you would do if you got your shot,” you say. “I didn’t spend a lot of time daydreaming about being in the movies, but I didn’t not think about it, either. So when I got the call, I was really shocked — but I was excited, too. You’re having to cold-read the excited part.”
Tomura sits there for a second. “Do you like calling me out or something?”
“I like getting to know you,” you say. “Besides, you can call me out on something, too.”
“Over what? Like you said, you’re handling this way better than me.” Tomura thinks about it for a second. If he wasn’t so damn sleep-deprived, he’d have been on it as soon as you finished talking. “You didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about people liking you back? Seriously?”
“It’s a cliche,” you say awkwardly. You were staring at Tomura a second ago. Now you won’t look at him. “I’ve been in a ton of shows with front-row tickets to a billion showmances. If that was going to happen to me it would have happened already.”
“It’s happening now,” Tomura says. He pulls on your hand a few times, hoping you’ll look at him, but you don’t. “Sorry about the unavailable thing. That was weird. We haven’t even done anything.”
“I said it too,” you say, instead of telling Tomura it wasn’t weird. “But you’re right that we haven’t done anything. You owe me cuddling and a good night’s sleep. Are you going to back out?”
Tomura’s mood improves so fast it’s stupid. “No.”
The two of you grab room service first. It’s not cheap, but you point out that the two of you have stuff to celebrate. Tomura’s sort of hoping he’ll get a second wind, at least enough to get through a real makeout session with you, but it totally backfires. After he’s eaten something, his exhaustion pulls the fire alarm, and it’s an effort to take off his shirt and plug in his phone before flopping over onto the bed.
You climb in next to him and make yourself comfortable, knees folded into the bend of his, arm draped over his waist, cheek pressed to his shoulder. Tomura makes a surprised sound. “Sorry,” you say. “You said you make cuddling weird, so I thought I’d make it weirder.”
“This isn’t weird,” Tomura says, even though he’s never been the little spoon in his life. He doesn’t like that he can’t see you, but he likes knowing that you’re there, that you’re holding onto him instead of the other way around. On the whole, he’s into it. Otherwise his eyelids wouldn’t be getting heavy. “Are you going to be okay like that?”
“Yeah.” You blink, and your eyelashes brush against Tomura’s skin. “Go to sleep, okay? Dabi said he kept you and Spinner up all night, and he said he’d mess me up if I let you go to your first day of filming sleep-deprived.”
Tomura will tell Dabi where he can stick his advice tomorrow. He risks leaning back against you a bit and you adjust your arm around him, holding him closer. Fuck. “Are you even tired?”
“Yes,” you say. “It was kind of dumb, to be honest. I was up all night wondering if this guy I danced with actually liked me.”
Tomura shouldn’t be smiling at that. It’s a good thing you’re not looking at him. “Stop wondering,” he says. “I like you. Go to bed.”
Your eyelashes brush against his shoulder again. So do your lips, a second or so later, which would drive Tomura crazy if he wasn’t mostly asleep. He’s almost all the way asleep when he hears you answer him. “I like you, too.”
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Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Call Me Sometime (Chapter 5) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic
You work the dispatch desk at a phone sex line to make ends meet, and you're used to handling some strange calls. But the caller you're babysitting tonight is the strangest by far -- and that's before you find out why he called.
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4
Chapter 5
“It’s really not so scary,” Sakura says to you, smiling. The two of you are meeting in the room where she holds her video sessions, which makes you feel weird on way too many levels — but this is where she wanted to meet, and you want as much information as she can give you about working under a contract. “What have you heard? About escort work in general?”
“After working here so long? A lot.” Most of it isn’t good. “Um, you all provide kind of a big range of services. You have different specialties. Hirono and Mitsuko see the guys who get off on power plays, and Mayumi handles the ones with really specific fetishes. Yoshimi only works with clients who like to roleplay. And you —“
You’ve never been clear on what Sakura’s specialty is. You give her an apologetic look, and she laughs. “My specialty is discretion,” she says. “I work with clients who want a companion who can pass as something more — something more than a mistress, even. You could say I provide the girlfriend experience.”
“The girlfriend experience,” you repeat. “What’s that?”
“Oh, Nine-chan. Haven’t you ever had a boyfriend?”
You’ve had two. One in middle-school, which doesn’t count, and one in high school, which does. He saw you naked, so you have to count him, even if the two of you weren’t in love. “Yeah, but it was kind of weird. I didn’t really know what he wanted from me.”
“That won’t be a problem here. It’ll likely be spelled out in the contract,” Sakura says. “Amount of contacts per day, type of contact — text, phone, video, face to face. Date activities. Sexual expectations. All of that will be covered under the contract. I — are you okay?”
Somewhere around “sexual expectations” you started getting nauseous. “I’m good.”
“The expectations will be spelled out,” Sakura says, giving you a worried look. “But the girlfriend experience isn’t just about quantity of contact. It’s about quality. It’s about making the client in question feel like the most important man in the world, without putting pressure on him to do anything in response. Time spent with you should feel good for the client. It should feel easy and stress-free, and to his observation, it should look effortless from you.”
You’ve heard the high-tiers say things like that before. “Professional.”
“Not quite,” Sakura says. “Escorts who work outside of contracts need to be professional, to make it clear with their clients where the boundaries lie. You’re working with one client who’s paying a lot for all your attention. Your job is to make him forget the payment part. The client should feel like you’re with him because you want to be.”
“So the girlfriend experience is the girlfriend fantasy.” That makes a little more sense to you, but you see Sakura shrug. “No?”
“It depends,” Sakura says instead. “How do you feel about Player One?”
You don’t know how to answer that. Sakura can tell. “Prior to my contract, I had twelve regular clients,” she says. “None of them were terrible, but I looked forward to meeting one of them much more than the others. Partially because of how he treated me, of course, but partially because there was a lot to like about him. Men hire escorts for a lot of different reasons. My favorite client hired me because he wanted companionship, and his career didn’t allow time for him to date.”
You’ve heard rumors about who Sakura’s contract is with. You’re pretty sure he’s a hero — a minor one from a rich family who works a really busy beat. Yokohama’s a big city. There’s always something going wrong. “I liked him,” Sakura continues, “and he liked me. We developed a tighter bond than I did with my other clients, to the point where we decided it would be best to become exclusive.”
“It was a mutual thing?”
“Of course! Kaz wouldn’t have done it unless he knew it was what I wanted.” Sakura smiles. You wonder how much of this is true and how much of it is a story she’s telling herself to make the fact that some guy owns her more acceptable. “I know your client didn’t have a chance to ask you first, but he knew a promotion to escort wasn’t what you wanted, didn’t he? Had you talked about it before?”
“I couldn’t have. I didn’t know what Mitsuko was planning,” you say. You think back on the conversation and, like you do every time you think about it, feel unsteady on your feet. “I wasn’t going to say anything. He knew something was wrong from my voice.”
You’ve wondered since then if you wanted Tenko to guess that something was wrong. If you were hoping he’d save you. You’re still not sure what the answer is. Right now, though, it doesn’t matter. Mitsuko’s not going to turn you into an escort — instead, she’s selling you to Tenko so you can provide the girlfriend experience. Sakura nods knowingly. “So he does know you,” she says. You don’t like that idea very much. “And you must have some idea of what he’ll expect from you in a more formal arrangement.”
You don’t have any idea at all. As far as you can tell, Tenko locked you down to avoid losing the access he already has. If he’s after more, he hasn’t spoken about it on the phone with you — but even as you’re speaking with Sakura about the contract, Tenko’s on a video call with Mitsuko, signing the stupid thing. Who knows what kind of ideas he could come away with? “It’s not so scary,” Sakura says again. You believe her even less than you did the first time. “You already know how to make your client feel good, or he wouldn’t have done this.”
You make Tenko feel less alone. Beyond that, you’re not sure how you make him feel, other than weird. Without seeing his face or reading his body language, you’ve had to rely entirely on changes in his tone and syntax to tell you what’s going on in his head, and you can tell that he’s thrown for a loop multiple times during every call. He gets quiet when he’s confused, snappish when he’s unsure, and you’re never sure what you said or did to cause it. Talking to you matters to him, though. Enough that he’s willing to drop a ridiculous amount of money to make sure he’s the only one who gets to.
You wonder, like you do every so often, where Tenko’s getting the money. It doesn’t really matter as long as he can pay — and Mizuho said he could. That’s not all Mizuho said about him, though. You ask Sakura. “Mizuho said he’s got backup. What does that mean? Just that he’s rich?”
Sakura shakes her head. “All the clients are wealthy,” she says. “She means he’s got someone powerful in his corner. Someone Mitsuko would think twice about crossing. I’m guessing that’s part of why she said yes.”
Someone powerful. What does that mean? Money is power — but like Sakura said, every Shiroiwa client is rich. Tenko’s supporter could be powerful in the sense of a quirk, maybe, and your mind jumps to any one of a number of heroes. But Tenko hates heroes. He hates heroes, he has someone powerful enough to spook Mitsuko backing him up, and his boss wants him to fundamentally alter society. A picture comes together in your head, one you don’t like. You thought Tenko was a lonely, socially awkward anarchist with money to burn, and maybe he is. There’s also a nonzero chance that he’s a villain.
Villain or not, Mitsuko’s just had him sign a contract that says he basically owns you. You read over it sitting in the basically-empty room where you’ll hold video sessions if Tenko wants them. It’s detailed, like Sakura said it would be. You’re obligated to contact Tenko at least once per day. Sakura’s contract obligates her to be available twenty-four seven, but Sakura’s a full-time escort and you’re still hoping to get an aboveboard job one day. The daily contact is mandated to be at least by text, but the expectation is that you’ll call him outside of your regular work hours at least once per week — on a phone that, per contract, Tenko will pay for. Video calls and in-person dates are optional. Anything sexual is one hundred percent off-limits until Tenko’s twentieth birthday so you don’t get arrested. The contract mandates that you put together a wish list in case Tenko wants to send you gifts. It also mandates that Tenko give at least two weeks’ notice before terminating the contract, lest a truly ridiculous severance payment be yanked out of his account.
A few of the high-tiers stop by for a look at it, and all of them are impressed. “The boss was looking out for you,” Mayumi remarks. “This is a lot of good stuff for somebody who doesn’t have to put out.”
“Is that how you feel about it?” Hirono asks. “Having to put out? I think it’s fun.”
“Of course you do. Clients get off from kissing your toes. I’m the one who has to threaten to suck a guy’s balls off with a vacuum cleaner if he doesn’t eat me out right.”
“Okay, but you’re getting eaten out. I’m just getting my toes kissed.” Hirono glances at you. “I know Player One’s not legal yet, but you two spend a lot of time on the phone. What kind of stuff is he into?”
“That’s not really what we talk about,” you say. “I don’t know.”
You don’t know for sure, but you have some ideas, courtesy of Tenko’s responses to all the weird stuff you find in the mailroom. Lingerie is a yes, costumes are a no. Role-play, or at least the serious kind of role-play, is also a no. He doesn’t seem interested in heavy-duty kink, or you’d have heard about it the time somebody sent a full complement of high-end BDSM gear to one of the club girls. The idea of toys seems to interest him, but you can’t tell if that’s a sexual interest or just a basic curiosity. The workers call sex toys for men lube tubes. Sex toys for women are a lot more interesting.
In fact, now that you think about it, the only thing you found that really caught Tenko’s attention was a book of erotic short stories a client sent to one of the phone sex operators, hoping she’d read it over the phone the next time he called in. He asked way too many questions about it — where it came from, why someone would send that, what the stories were about, whether they were any good — until you finally snapped and told him to stop trying to trick you into reading them yourself. You couldn’t figure out why a guy like Tenko, who has an internet connection and a whole online database of free porn, would be interested in erotica read aloud. You still can’t, except —
Except he can’t see you. All he has to go on is your voice. The two of you talk about sex not infrequently — you work for an escort service, it always comes up — but it’s always joking or clinical, never actually hot. You wouldn’t know where to start and neither would he. Maybe he wanted to you to read the stories so you’d have a script to go off of. Or maybe he just wanted to hear you talk about sex like you meant it.
“I knew there was something,” Hirono crows. “Look, she’s blushing —”
“You’re going to be fine,” Mayumi tells you. She pats your shoulder. “This guy likes you so much that he locked it down sight unseen — and between you and me, I think he’s going to be pretty happy with the sight once he sees it.”
You don’t think so. You don’t look like anything special, and it doesn’t take much to tip you from ordinary to gross. Third-day hair and forgetting to wash your face will usually do it. You can cross that bridge when you come to it, though. Unless Tenko wants to video call, you’re perfectly fine to keep answering the phone in sweatpants.
Your brand-new work cellphone arrives towards the end of your shift, already set up. The contact list contains one phone number, which must be Tenko’s, and he’s also downloaded a ton of mobile games. You set your passcode, power off the phone and turn it on again, and then send your first text to the single number in your contact list. Hi. It’s me.
The phone starts ringing, painfully loud, and you answer it and hold it up to your ear, already missing your headset. “It got there,” Tenko says. You nod until you remember that he can’t see you. “What do you think?”
“It’s really nice,” you say. Nicer than your personal phone, for sure. “Thanks for not making it pink.”
Tenko snorts. “I’ll send you a case for it as soon as you tell me what color’s your favorite.”
Your instinct is to recoil, to duck the personal question — but as of a few hours ago, your time belongs to Tenko, and you’re supposed to provide the girlfriend experience. Guys probably want to know their girlfriend’s favorite color. You swallow hard and tell him, wondering why you feel like you’re selling your soul, then follow up: “You don’t have to get me a case.”
“Yeah, I do. I hear you drop stuff all the time in the mailroom,” Tenko says. “Your audio sounds weird. Do you have headphones?”
“I’ll go find a headset,” you say.
“I’ll be right back.”
You hang up, go to the reception desk, and beg, steal, and borrow your way into the headset you usually use. “You have a contract now,” Mizuho grouches at you. “Make Player One buy it for you.”
You’ll ask Tenko to buy you stuff when hell freezes over. You take a few seconds, connect your headphones via Bluetooth, and call Tenko back. He picks up on the first ring. “Don’t hang up on me again.”
“Sorry,” you say. “I just had to go look for one.”
“You could have taken the phone with you,” Tenko says. He’s getting clingy. Or maybe not: “I don’t hang up on you. Except that one time.”
“Maybe we should talk about that,” you say. “I read the contract. It’s really specific. But it doesn’t tell me what you want from me.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
That’s not the answer you were hoping for. “If it was obvious, I wouldn’t ask,” you say. “This is all really weird. I’m grateful. Really. I would rather talk to you than any of the others.”
“Because we’re friends.”
Every so often, Tenko will ask you a question that feels like it has a wrong answer. This is one of them. “Yes.”
“I don’t have a lot of friends,” Tenko says. “More than I had before, but you were first. I’m not losing you to some string of assholes who are too pathetic to get a real date.”
It’s quiet for a second. “And you sounded like you were going to cry or something when you told me. I’d be the asshole if I let my friend cry.”
Your throat closes up. “I’m glad you have more friends now,” you say, swallowing hard. What is wrong with you? “You deserve that. You deserve people who care about you.”
“What about you?” Tenko asks. “Who do you have that you care about?”
“We’re going straight for personal questions, huh?” You should have guessed that’s what would happen. It’s not like you can have phone sex or something. Or that either of you would even know where to start with that. “Uh, so — there’s my D&D group, right? I’ve told you some about them. I met one of them through work and the other ones I know from high school. I haven’t had time to make friends in my EMT course yet. I’d like to, but they like to go out after class, I always have to work.”
“Not anymore,” Tenko says. “Go out if you want to.”
Sakura said to provide the girlfriend experience, but no boyfriend you’ve ever had or heard of has suggested that you go out with people, particularly not when you haven’t specified the gender composition of the group. “Don’t you want to know if there are going to be guys there?”
“No,” Tenko says. You picture him shrugging. You’ve been trying harder to picture him lately, and it’s not going well. His voice tells you nothing. “I’m not your dad or something. Do you have parents? Where are they?”
“Um — I’m an only child. My mom and I talk. Sometimes.” You can’t remember the last time you actually called her. Usually it’s just a text or two, here and there. “And then my dad, he — um, he’s the reason I’m here. He had — has — a gambling problem. He spent all our family’s money trying to pay back debts, so I had to get a job. So I guess you can thank him for the fact that we met.”
It’s quiet for a little bit. “Do you believe in fate?”
“Huh?” You try to switch gears with minimal success. “Why?”
“Or destiny, I guess. Sensei does. That’s why he chose me,” Tenko says. Who’s Sensei? You’ve heard him refer to a boss before, but never a teacher. “I want to say I wish your shitty dad hadn’t made it so you had to get this job, but if you didn’t get this job, I wouldn’t have met you.”
Oh. It strikes you as weirdly sweet. Maybe there’s something wrong with you. “Let’s say destiny’s a thing,” you say. “Even if I didn’t have this shitty job, we’d have met sometime anyway.”
“Then I wish your shitty dad hadn’t made it so you had to work for an escort service,” Tenko says, and you laugh. “I mean it. If we’d have met some other way.”
“We would have,” you say. “So, um — are you busy right now? What are you doing?”
“Not busy. I’m just in my room,” Tenko says. “Playing a few games.”
“Did I interrupt?”
“No,” Tenko says at once. “I was just — uh — hanging out. Don’t worry about that stuff.”
“About interrupting your games?”
“About interrupting anything,” Tenko says. “I want to talk to you.”
Right. He wants to talk to you. He’s paying a lot of money to make sure he can talk to you. “I thought we could play games together sometimes,” he says. “Even if you have to study, we can be on the phone. I won’t bother you. I want to hang out.”
“You went quiet. Do you want to hang out — not on the phone?”
“I mean, I thought you did,” you say awkwardly. “I sort of thought –”
You don’t know what you thought. The girlfriend experience, like Sakura said, except that doesn’t seem like it’s on Tenko’s mind. He has other friends now, but he still wants to talk to you. Does he even know what you look like? Are you just supposed to treat him the way you’d treat your other friends? Your relationship with Tenko, whatever it is, used to be simple. Now it’s complicated, just like everything else in your life, and not for the first time, you find yourself wishing you could go back to the way things were before.
“We’ll meet up,” Tenko says into the silence. “Not yet. Right now I want to know what you want for your birthday.”
“You don’t have to get me anything,” you say at once. “Just sing me the birthday song and we’ll be good to go.”
“Me singing you the birthday song would ruin your birthday,” Tenko says. “If you had a wish list, I’d get you something from that, but since you don’t, you can just tell me. Pick something.”
“Um –” You cast about for something inexpensive, something you still couldn’t justify buying for yourself. “New dice.”
“Dice?”
“For my D&D game. Everybody has their own set, and the people in my group get ones that match their character somehow. I can only afford the plain ones.” Your face is heating up with embarrassment. “If you wanted to get me something I’d definitely use, new dice would be great.”
“I can do that,” Tenko says. He sounds pleased. “What does your character look like?”
Somebody in your group likes to draw, so you have a picture – but not on this phone. You spend an awkward few minutes texting yourself from the new phone so your personal phone has the number, then texting the photo from your personal phone to the new one. Trying to juggle multiple phones is going to be a pain. If you’re not careful, you’re going to wind up calling and texting Tenko from your personal phone.
You finally get the photo sent. Tenko must have his sound on, because you can hear the arrival noise from the message through your headphones. “This is cool,” Tenko says. He sounds surprised. “I thought it was going to be like – a nun, or something.”
“That’s what I had been thinking, but the person who drew it went the other way with it,” you say. “I like it better this way.”
“Me too. I needed something for your contact photo, anyway.”
So that answers one of your questions. Tenko doesn’t know what you look like. If he’s going to imagine you as somebody, you don’t mind if it’s your D&D character. “Then I need a contact photo for you,” you say. “That’s something else you can get me for my birthday.”
Tenko makes a skeptical noise into the phone. “You don’t want a photo of me.”
“Either you can send me a picture or sing me the birthday song,” you say. “Up to you.”
He must really not like singing. A second later, you get the photo.
You can’t see his face. Or anything in his background. He’s taken the photo from about a forearm’s length away when he’s mostly facedown in his pillow, and all you can see is messy blue-grey hair and the corner of one eye. You can’t tell what color his eye is. Just that he’s looking at the camera.
thanks, you text back, even though the two of you are still on the phone. i like your hair
“Don’t lie,” Tenko says out loud. But a heart-react shows up next to your message, and your stomach does an odd twist. “Use that one for now. You can take a better one when we meet up.”
It’s weird. The thought that he didn’t want to meet in person made you uneasy, but the thought that he does expect to meet up makes you nervous, too. But he said not yet, so you tell yourself not to worry about it for now. You’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. You try not to think about how many bridges you’ve crossed with this job that you never expected to get to in the first place.
“When we meet up,” you say. You save the photo and set your phone aside. “Sounds good.”
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