no white flags

Akiko hits you with the news a month before your twentieth birthday and sends you reeling. She does it at the end of a shift, thankfully, so you don’t have to stick around and try to control your expression, but you barely make it to the train station before you break down. You’re up all night running the numbers, checking job listings, anything and everything, and you practically sleep through your morning classes. The longer you think about it, the more inescapable it feels, until you can’t even think about going into work without wanting to throw up.

You go in anyway. It’s not like you’ve got a choice. You put on your headset and transfer calls, confirm dates and check code phrases, ensure that the cars will be there to take the high-tiers to their engagements and bring them back, staring at your screen through blurry eyes while your stomach churns itself to a pulp.  Mizuho sends you a message. It’s just the video game controller emoji – her code for a call from Tenko. Then she comes out of her office, shoos you out of your chair, and transfers the call over to your headset.

You try to brighten up. You really do. “Hi, Tenko! I was wondering if you’d call tonight.”

Tenko’s quiet. You try for funny, try for banter. “This is the part where you say hi to me, too.”

“Something’s wrong with you.”

“What?”

“I talk to you all the time. I know what your voice sounds like and it doesn’t sound like that,” Tenko says. “Something’s wrong with you. What is it?”

Akiko would kill you if she heard you complaining to a client. Especially about this. “Nothing. Everything’s fine. Want to know what I’m wearing?”

“Stop,” Tenko says sharply, and you startle. “I’m not stupid. I know something’s wrong. Tell me what it is or I’m hanging up now.”

You don’t want him to hang up. This is maybe the first time ever that you’ve felt that way, and it shocks you so badly along with everything else that you couldn’t keep it quiet if you wanted to. “I turn twenty next month.”

“Do you want me to send you a present or something?”

You want to scream until your throat ruptures. “I’ll be twenty. That means I’ll be legal. My boss just told me she’s promoting me to escort.”

It’s silent for an endless, agonizing moment. “Why?”

Tenko sounds just as confused as you were when Akiko said it. “One of the high-tiers – her top customer just locked it down. There’s no room in her schedule for anyone but him, and my boss needs someone new. So she picked me.” You think about your brand-new blank wishlist, the page that’s already been set up on Shiroiwa’s password-protected website, the date Akiko’s already set up for you on your goddamn birthday, and feel your eyes well up. “She’s acting like she’s doing me a favor.”

“Tell her no,” Tenko says. “You don’t want to do it. Say no.”

“She won’t let me keep my old job. She says once I’m legal, Sakura’s job is the only one I can have.” You swallow hard. “I was up all of last night trying to figure it out, and I can’t. There’s no other job I could get that would pay enough to cover rent and food and school.”

“So what, you’re just going to do it?” Tenko sounds pissed. You’re pretty sure you know why, and a second later, he proves you right. “What about me?”

“She said I could still see you.” You can’t tell if Akiko was trying to throw you a bone or just trying to twist the knife. “My dates would come first. They pay better than phone calls.”

“Fuck that,” Tenko says shortly. Then he hangs up.

He’s never hung up on you before. You take your headset off, letting it dangle loosely in your hand as you lean back against the wall, your eyes burning. This is all your fault. You got complacent. You got hopeful. You were so stupid to think this could work, any of it, and when you tried to talk to Tenko, like you’d talk to a friend, he acted exactly like any other client would. You should have known better. You should have known better when Akiko hired you, and even knowing that none of this is happening specifically because you’re quirkless, you should never have forgotten that you don’t matter in this world. You never have, and you never will.

Someone comes to get you eventually. It’s Noriko, who gets stuck on the desk when you’re busy, and you get two words into an apology before she cuts you off. “He’s on the phone with Akiko,” she says. “Player One.”

You look blankly at her. She takes your arm and tugs you away from the wall. “We’re listening in Mizuho’s office. Come on.”

You let Noriko lead you down the hallway to Mizuho’s office, then wedge in alongside everybody else who could conceivably take their break right now. Haruka snakes one absurdly long arm out to grab you and tug you close to the desk, and the phone. “I see Nine hasn’t done much to put you in your place, little boy,” Akiko is saying, in that slow, sly tone of voice that always spells trouble. “Watch your tone with me. I’ve got something you want, not the other way around.”

“You don’t care about Nine. You just want money. She’d be a shitty hooker and you know it.”

“Do I know it?” Akiko’s probably arching one perfectly sculpted eyebrow, sprawled out on the couch in her office. “I’ve seen her, darling. You haven’t. Looks like hers, it doesn’t matter if she’s good at it or not.”

Akiko’s lying through her teeth. There’s nothing special about the way you look, and you can’t figure out what Tenko’s trying to do. “You can make more money off her now that she’s legal, right? If you can make more money off her, it shouldn’t matter how you do it.”

“Do I smell a business proposition? Or is that simply the postadolescent lust? Careful there – you’re coming off as something of a creep.”

She’s trying to make Tenko uncomfortable. You know it’s working even before you hear it in his voice. But he doesn’t back down. “I’m the creep who was here first. I want to lock it down.”

Akiko coughs. You’re coughing, too, but only because Akane’s driven her elbow into your stomach at the same time as Yuka’s punched you in the arm. Tenko is still talking. “You can charge a lot for her first date, but after that, her inexperience starts to fuck things up for you, pricing-wise. She’ll be pretty cheap until she builds up a list of regulars. Assuming she can build up a list of regulars. And that would take what – six months? A year?”

You thought Tenko was just popping off on Akiko because he was pissed that you wouldn’t be around as much. You didn’t realize Tenko had done market research, and apparently neither did Akiko. “A year is a long time,” Tenko continues. “She’ll be out of here way before you can make the big money.”

“Then I should fire her now, don’t you think? Cut the dead weight.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t making any money.” Tenko waits for Akiko to argue, just like he sometimes waits for you to argue. When she doesn’t, he keeps talking. “And you still need somebody to route calls and sort mail. She can still do all that shit. But when you make her an escort, her dates will be with me. All of them.”

A message from Akiko pops up on Mizuho’s screen: CAN HE SWING THAT?

Akiko types like an old person. Mizuho responds in the affirmative, then adds a detail you haven’t seen her add before, to any fact sheet, about any client. He has backup.

What does that mean? You can barely think straight, and before you can work it out, Akiko hits Tenko with a counteroffer. “All her dates? Are you sure you don’t want her to pick up a little more experience?”

“She has what she needs.” Tenko responds fast. “Take it or leave it.”

Akiko’s quiet for a moment. “I’ll take it,” she says. “But you initially said that you wanted to lock it down, not that you wanted to reserve her dates.”

“What’s the difference?”

“If you simply want her dates, that’s one thing.” Akiko lets that dangle for a second. “If you want Nine all to yourself, that demands a contract.”

There’s something you don’t like about this, and you realize what it is a moment later: Akiko might not be selling you to some creepy client known for breaking in the new girls, but she’s selling you all the same. The fact that she’s selling you to Tenko doesn’t improve matters. Much. You’d rather lie down with the devil you know than the devil you don’t, but you’d rather not lie down with the devil at all.

Tenko’s voice has that weird note in it again. “What kind of contract?”

“We’ll discuss that in a moment. Once my entire staff stops listening in on the other line.” Akiko raises her voice, and your coworkers scatter. “Nine, sweetheart, are you there?”

Busted. You press the conference button on Mizuho’s desk phone. “Yes.”

“You were listening?” Tenko sounds uncomfortable as all hell. “The whole time?”

“Not the whole time,” you mumble. This is awful.

“How about I let the two of you talk, hmm?” Akiko hums into the phone. You recognize the distinctive vibration of her quirk and feel an unpleasant surge of – something. It had better not be jealousy. “I’ll call back once you’re done. Pay attention, Player One. It would be unwise of you to miss my call.”

“I won’t miss it.” Tenko sounds like he’s speaking through clenched teeth. “I’m hanging up now.”

“No need. Mizuho will transfer you back to Nine.” Akiko blows a kiss into the phone. “I look forward to our partnership. It’ll be a pleasure doing business with you.”

Your headset begins to beep. You jam it back over your ear and exit Mizuho’s office at speed, heading for the mailroom. Tenko’s already talking before you shut the door. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

“I would have found out anyway.” It’s quiet for a while. He doesn’t say anything, and you’re still not the best at silence. “Why did you do that?”

“I was here first. I don’t want to share.” He’s speaking through clenched teeth again. You want to tell him to relax his jaw before he gives himself a headache, but he’s still talking, and he doesn’t like to be interrupted. To be fair, neither do you. “What goes into this contract, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only seen parts of one.” You could ask Sakura about hers. Maybe you should. “Tenko –”

He cuts you off. “Your boss is creepy.”

“Yeah. That thing with her voice – that’s her quirk,” you say. “I’m sorry she did that to you.”

“I don’t care.”

He wouldn’t let you lie to him earlier. “Yes, you do.”

It’s quiet again. You feel weirdly hollow, and weirdly unsteady. The things you’ve come to count on – your job, your calls with Tenko – have shifted around on you, and now you don’t have a clue where you stand. In some ways it reminds you of what happened when your dad’s gambling debts caught up to your family. You didn’t know what to do then. You don’t know what to do now.

You figured it out eventually, though, and after a few minutes of silence, you figure it out now, too. “I don’t like that I have to say this,” you start, “because I don’t like being someone who needs saving. But you’re saving me right now. Thank you.”

“I did it for me, not for you,” Tenko says, but you hear that weird note in his voice again, the one that comes in only when it matters. “If it’s for the wrong reason, it doesn’t count.”

“I’m the one getting rescued,” you say. “It counts to me.”

It occurs to you that you’re treading too close to the line. Talking about saving people is hero talk, and if you call Tenko a hero, he’ll probably never talk to you again. You hear a weird sound on his end of the line, something you haven’t heard before, and a jolt runs down your spine. You play it off in a hurry. “Sorry about how expensive I’m about to get, though.”

Tenko’s voice is muffled. “Worth it.”

<- Chapter 3