no white flags

“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.”

“Just on the phone?” you ask.

“For now,” Tenko says. You’re weirdly disappointed. “What?”

“Huh?”

“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 met up,” you say. You save the photo and set your phone aside. “Sounds good.”

<- Chapter 4

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