“B-Builder-woman?” Ryota asked at his door, surprised. Behind him, a short girl—shorter than Ayame—with an A-line haircut in a spaghetti-strapped tank-top and gray booty-shorts tugged on his shirt.

A drunk Ayame shoved the door open with her heavy hands and invited herself in, falling to the floor after three steps. Then, she stared into space.

“Who’s she?” asked the girl behind Ryota and placing a lock of hair behind her ear and looking at him with an unsatisfied expression. “I thought you’re eating me tonight!” She didn’t give him a chance to explain and hit him on the chest a couple of times, grabbed her laid out stuff—only her bag—and walked out the door. Before slamming it, she shouted, “I’ll leave the for you and her! Don’t contact me ever again if you’re going to treat me like this!” She walked off after her grand exit.

Ryota could only run to his window and shout, “It-it’s not what you think!” He wanted to run after her and clear things up, but he couldn’t possibly leave the drunk Ayame in his house alone. She was someone he always got into a fight with, but she was still a friend. “C-come back!” He sadly stopped shouting when he saw his girl’s car drive off his driveway.

“Echatly!” Ayame’s slurred speech made Ryota glare at her. She cackled uncontrollably with her hand pounding the glossed floor. “Echatly! Come back!”

“You!” He pointed at her with anger. “What’s a drunkard like you doing here in the first place? A-and how did you even know where I live?” He received nothing but further giggles. “Why am I trying to get answers from a drunk?” He heaved a depressing sigh and made up his mind to suppress his temptation of wanting to throw her out on his lawn for the night. Instead, he picked her up and took her to his bedroom. “You better be glad I’m a good friend,” he said as he struggled to carry her for more than three steps. “How do guys carry girls like sticks?!”

Soon, his mind was interested in something else. Her flesh in his hands was different. It was nowhere near soft and especially nowhere feeling like a girl’s either. It was very structured, constricted, and ashy. He stood at his spot and examined her body. There had been a few times where they had touched each other—since they fight when they had the chance—but not once had he ever felt or touched her skin for more than a mere thirty seconds. He had never really caressed and sensed how physically different she was in comparison to all those fluffy, soft and sensitive, and feminine ladies he had laid beside with, who had taken an immense amount of care for their skin.

“You’re not pretty,” he quietly said, “or beautiful. But you’re a diamond in the rough.” He lifted her with more power and smiled to himself. “You’re a one in a million.”

When he had finally gotten her to rest on his bed—after much panting and trouble—he fell to the floor to rest his body. Seriously, why did she come to my place? He was so tired that he wanted to go straight to sleep, but he knew he had to wash up. “It’s so far!” As he looked in the direction of his bathroom, his droopy eyes led him to slumberland.

*

What’s that? Ryota batted his eyes open to weird sounds he had never heard before. Odder than that, he was sleeping on his bedroom floor and his bedroom light was on. How did this—when he turned around to the sound, he saw the scene that cleared his memory. “Oh, builder-woman. You.”

Ayame, sitting on his bed, whimpered to herself. Still drunk, perhaps. She didn’t seem to have noticed him though. Nor hear him.

He gave her space in hopes that she’d see him. When there was no sign of her ever looking up, he slowly and cautiously went to sit beside her. “Y-you okay?” He had never seen her drunk before, although they had taken a few shots here and there together, but it had never been to this point. “Want water? Food? Bathroom?”

No response.

“You hurt anywhere?”

A pause. Then, she made a screeching, horrific sound like a growling cat at a windowsill.

He took this as an answer and alarmingly got on his knees in front of her. “Wh-where are you hurt? Do you want me to—” He stopped talking and almost had a heart attack when he saw her placed a hand at her heart. “I’ll call an ambulance!” When he stood up to search for his phone, her cold, wet, and slim hands stopped him, and they gradually loosened their grip. “I-Is there something else too?” Just don’t die in my house!

“My heart…hurts.” She slammed a hand at her chest.

“I’m calling—”

She didn’t let him go. “And my head hurts.” Her other hand rested on her head. “What should I do?”

“I’m calling for an ambulance,” he informed her. He spotted his phone from near his feet on the floor, possibly having slipped out of his pockets during his sleep, and he picked it up. He dialed a number, and she continued to speak.

“Is there medicine for this?” she cutely asked like a child. “Will I be able to erase my feelings for him?”

“911, what’s your emergency?” asked the dispatcher over the phone.

Ryota instantly ended the call. He had already let her ruin his fun night, and now, she had made him worried for a dumb reason. He frowned at her. “Oi, don’t tell me, you’re not really in pain, right?” He pointed to his phone. “I almost called an ambulance for you, but you’re not really hurt, aren’t you?”

With her eyes slightly closed, she raised a hand. “I am hurt!” She gradually lowered her hand as she defended her claims. “It didn’t hurt when I hammered my finger. It didn’t hurt when I seesawed my toe. It didn’t hurt when I slipped from the roof. It didn’t hurt when my employees undermined my abilities because of my gender.”

He didn’t know how to respond. Or react.

They had never been this personal before. He had witnessed several of her injuries and had overheard some behind-the-scenes insults and curses about her, but he had never heard or witnessed her side of the story. He had never needed to because he knew—well, now he had clarified that he had simply assumed—that she was a capable person not bothered by those kinds of things.

“But...why does loving someone…” Her hand resting on her head slid to cover one side of her face, and the other hand on her chest slid up to cover the other side of her face. “…hurt this much?”

“Does this have something to do with Ryosuke?” He had already known that she had visited him at the photo-shoot site, and since she was talking about love, he had deduced that the culprit behind this was his friend. “What did he do?”

She shook her head, hands still covering her face. “What should I do? What if it is true?”

“What if what is true?”

She wiped her tears and removed her hands. “He adores children. I don’t. He was in a committed relationship. I never was. He wants his family. I am not related to him.”

He sighed. “Is this about that whole clingy question you’ve asked a while back?” He sat beside her again. “I told you that it’s all a fair game.”

“But in the end, he gets to choose, doesn’t he?”

“T-true…”

She scowled at him. “Then it’s not a fair game! She’s won his heart, and she’s still in his heart!”

His eyes widened. “Y-you know…!” …Mi-chan’s his ex?

“He sees her in Mi-chan!” She may be drunk, but the cause of this was because she had incidentally witnessed the inaudible but somewhat secretive conversation between Mirai and Ryosuke at the photo-shoot when they were outside the women’s bathroom. She couldn’t hear their conversation well, but she did hear Mirai’s firm commentary about how she chose Natsu. Ayame, having said the basis of her worries, which stupefied Ryota to no end, fell on her side on the bed and resumed crying.

He mentally made some assessments. Miraculously, builder-woman’s dumb when it comes to her love life, so she hadn’t made the correlation between the relationships Mi-chan has with the brothers. At the same time, he raised his eyebrows in fatigue, I’ve been involuntarily included with information I don’t know what to do with. He warily asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

No answer.

There has got to be a reason why she’s here, right? He knew that she’d never whimsically want to come to his place. They weren’t that close with each other, and he believed she was disgusted with him for the ways he handled his affairs with plentiful women.

“…friend,” she uttered on his pillow.

“Huh?”

It took her a while to answer again. This time, she pulled herself to sit up, and with moist, red eyes, she said, “Because you’re my only friend.”

He wanted to laugh because it made her look like some lone wolf, but when he made out that this comment may be true because of her previous comments about how she was possibly hated at her workplace—and the fact that she was hardly around women of her age due to her taste in career—he began to sympathize her.

“And…”

He intently listened. Would she say something along the lines that he was the only person she trusted even though she acted as if she hated him? If so, he was pumped to hear any and all the compliments she’d say.

“…I thought…maybe you could…do me a favor.”

His so-called dream faded within two seconds of its birth. He glowered at her and monotonously questioned, “What?”

“Make Mi-chan fall for you.”

*

“Morning,” Ryota nonchalantly said to Ayame without looking at her. He was lying on his side on the couch, facing the TV in his casual attire: shirtless and in boxers. He had no work today since he had requested a day off because he thought he’d have a wild night had it not been for a drunkard’s interruption.

She gave him the same reaction. “Morning.” She calmly entered the living room and sat on a single chair adjacent to him. “What you watching?”

“There’s nothing good to watch.” He glanced at her. “There’s food in the back if you’re hungry.”

With a serious face and a dry tone, she asked, “Can I trust you?”

“After the horrific night you gave me, what do you think?” He too joked back with the same serious and dry expression.

She smiled to herself and got up to head to the kitchen to fix herself some lunch. It was the first time her hangover had caused her to sleep past morning since she hardly drank to the point where she woke up past ten and with a migraine. But yesterday was an exception. As she loudly found her way around his kitchen—which she didn’t care—she casually started a new conversation. “Thanks for letting me sleep for the night.”

“No problem,” he said as if it was the most usual thing in the world between them.

And it bothered her.

They only met whenever Ryosuke was present—because it was mostly at his workplace that they saw each other—and had never really spent any unplanned time with each other before. This, although uncomfortable and unforeseen, was their first.

“Sorry, but…” She found his forks and spoons in the most unfitted place of all—inside a plastic, bright, yellow cup in the refrigerator. Right in the middle of everything. She lost her train of thought and focused her attention on them. “Where are your spoons?” She saw them but wanted confirmation.

“Ah, check the fridge. It should be in a container or something.”

She tried to stay calm and not question too much about his oddities. Interestingly, as she made this mental note, she realized that today, she had found very atypical “facts” about him, thanks to her sudden sleepover, of course.

He kept his shoes aligned and organized by light to dark colors—he had over twenty pairs of shoes when she had counted it earlier before coming down the stairs. His clothes were usually of the color white, and he even used facial products. The only facial product she had ever used was sunscreen, and so when she had seen them, she read each bottle to understand its uses and was baffled when she concluded that he used four different moisturizers, two different sunscreens, and six different bottles of cologne.

Even though she was a girl herself, she didn’t have this many beauty products on her table. In fact, she didn’t have a table in her bedroom at all.

As those realizations run in her head, she didn’t sense Ryota entering the kitchen.

“It’s there.” He pointed to the cup.

“H-huh?” She looked at where he pointed to and came back to the reality of getting a spoon. She randomly took one out of the cup and rested it on her plate.

“Did you not see the chicken curry on the stove?” He looked around. Nothing was being cooked or heated. “Or do you not like it?” He walked around her to the other side of the fridge. “Should I cook you something else instead?”

“This is fine. Actually,” she added a smile, “I’m surprised you can cook.”

“I have to.” He closed the fridge when she backed away and heated the crockpot with the chicken curry. “When you live alone, you gotta look out for yourself.”

“I know that well.” She found herself blurting out something unnecessary, so she bashfully looked away.

“What do you mean?” He leaned on the fridge, opposite her. “You have your parents and your siblings with you.”

“Yeah…but, sometimes, being with them…” her hands tightened around her plate, “…feels a bit…unbearable.”

“And you can’t move out or get rid of them because of the family job,” he finished for her, understanding her situation. “If you ever need a fresh of breath air,” he sent her a flirtatious smile, “I’m always available for—”

“Don’t send me any of your useless flattering.” She walked away from him to the stove to check up on the curry. “You made quite a lot.”

“Well, I do have a guest—an uninvited guest,” he joked, not knowing that coming back to that subject brought waves of discomfort to her more than to him. He saw and heard no kind of response from her. Only her backside faced him. He asked, “You okay?”

“D-did I…do anything weird yesterday?” She didn’t turn around.

He couldn’t tell if it was because she was embarrassed. Or worried. But he shouldn’t be curious about her reasons. He should be worried about his own responses. He wasn’t that close with her to understand how she’d take certain honest replies, but at the same time, they did have an indescribable relationship that was different from any kind of relationship he had had before.

But what was their relationship anyway?

And even if they didn’t have any relationship, the big problem that really held him back was her weird and misconception about the ex-Yamada couple. What was he to say about that if she asked him?

“Oh,” he uttered. He went around her and reached to turn off the stove. “This is heated well enough by now.” He avoided eye contact. “I think I’m going to get a bite too.”

She received the hint that he didn’t want to answer her questions, and she took this as a sign that it was best for her to not ask. Or know. She played along with his silent decision, and an idea popped into her mind. “Hey, got time for the fresh air you had volunteered for?”

His interest was perked. He didn’t expect her to ever ask. Not even if she was on the brink of death and he was somehow her only savior. He half-jokingly said, “Depends if you’re going to give me your body.”

She grinned. “My body’s what you’re going to construct.”

And she was serious.

*

“Morning, lovebirds,” commented one of Mirai’s co-workers when she saw Mirai getting dropped off and escorted by Ryosuke. They had parked and gotten out of their cars at the same time. “Stop showing off your love,” she teased.

Mirai greeted her colleague, “Morning, Taka-san.”

They entered the building and continued their light morning conversation.

Ryosuke put a gentle hand around his friend’s back and said to Taka-san, “My sweetie’s still shy when we’re in pub—”

She nabbed his stomach. “You can leave now, or you’ll be late for work.”

“Ah!” Taka-san exclaimed, scaring the people in the lobby. She pointed to Ryosuke. “Now I know who you look like!” She widely grinned at him and inched in closer. “Yamada-san of Sunny Village! The young bachelor with a passion for toys!”

The receptionist nearby overheard and covered her gasp. “He doesn’t look like him—he is him! Oh, my gosh!” She squealed with delight and said to Ryosuke, “You won last year’s international award for donating more than half of your savings to the needy and giving new free toys too!”

Almost everyone in the lobby surrounded him and said various comments to the