My Rival Is My Anonymous Hookup novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Board

On the sales floor they fight as always while Tomoya texts the app that it ends and Yoru answers "Okay"; alone at the copier Ren says he agreed on the app because he couldn't have agreed in person.

Tomoya sent the message on Sunday night at 11:40, because that was when he ran out of excuses.

Hotaru: This ends. We know who we are now. We're coworkers.

He watched the screen for four minutes.

Yoru: Okay.

That was all.

One word of reply from a man who had spent three nights whispering how much Tomoya was worth.

Tomoya threw the phone onto the sofa and told his plant it was a bastard.

He had named the plant Gojo last spring, and it was not a good plant.

On Monday morning he walked into the sixth floor at 7:05 and found Ren already at his desk.

Ren sat across from Tomoya's desk with reading glasses on his nose.

He went through a stack of store sheets.

He wore a charcoal suit.

The white lanyard hung on its hook where it belonged.

He didn't look up.

"Morning," Tomoya said, because he was a professional.

"Arisaka."

That was all he got.

Tomoya sat down, opened his laptop, and stared at Ren over the screen, trying to find the man from room 507.

The jaw was the same. The hands were the same.

Ren turned a page with the same thumb that had pinned Tomoya's hip to the bed on Friday.

Tomoya looked away so fast he knocked over his coffee.

"Wow," Chihiro said, appearing from nowhere with a snack bag. "You're both in before seven-fifteen on a Monday. Gojo's contest is already working."

"It's not a contest," Tomoya said, mopping up. "It's a formality."

"It's a chair," Ren said, still not looking up. "Don't make it smaller than it is."

"Ooh," Chihiro said, delighted, and sat on the edge of Tomoya's desk. "Fighting talk."

Keiji Gojo came out of his glass office at eight with a paper cup in each hand, which meant he was about to give a speech.

All fourteen people in Section 2 stood up from their desks.

Gojo planted himself beside the sales board on the wall.

The board listed every salesman's monthly number in black marker.

The two names at the top had been trading places for six years.

ARISAKA 118.4%.

KISARAGI 118.8%.

Somebody had drawn a tiny crown under the first name, and then a second tiny crown under the second.

"On Friday I told you two," Gojo said, beaming at them both, "that the old chief retires on the thirty-first of March and Section 2 needs a new head."

"We heard," Tomoya said.

"The seat goes to whoever wins the Daikoku Mart renewal. The pitch to their buyer is on the twenty-eighth of March, in Osaka."

"Understood."

"I'll be fair, and I'll be brutal." He drank some coffee. "I also have to remind you of the rule. Whichever of you gets the chair becomes the other's direct boss."

A ripple of laughter ran across the floor.

Ren stood perfectly still beside Tomoya.

"Under company policy," Gojo went on, "nobody may have a relationship with a person in his own reporting line without telling HR. And then one of the two gets moved to another section. So if either of you is secretly married to the other, speak now."

The floor roared.

Tomoya laughed along, a beat too late, and his face was hot all the way up into his hair.

Chihiro looked at him with her head tilted, thinking.

"Arisaka-senpai's gone red," she said.

"It's the coffee."

"It's cold coffee."

"Out," Gojo said happily, and clapped his hands. "Go and make me money."

The whole morning went on like that.

Tomoya and Ren fought over the shared printer queue, the Daikoku store list, and a window that one of them wanted open.

At eleven they had a full argument across the desks about whether the thirty-first of March fell on a Monday.

Neither of them was wrong, and it was glorious.

It was the first time in two days Tomoya had felt like himself.

It was also the first time in two days he had felt like a liar.

Every word between them was the same as it had always been, and under every word he heard Ren saying good.

At seven that evening the floor was empty.

Tomoya had stayed to finish the Daikoku comparison sheet, and he told himself it was only work.

The copier in the corridor was warming up with a groan.

He put his pages on the glass and pressed the button.

A hand reached past his shoulder and pressed it again, harder.

He didn't have to turn around.

"That's a double-feed," Ren said. "It'll jam."

"I know how to use a copier."

"You've jammed it twice this month."

"That was you, jamming it to annoy me."

"It was you."

Ren was standing very close.

The corridor lights were off on that side, and the copier's green glow made a long strip across his white shirt.

Tomoya could feel the heat of him on his back.

"I got your message," Ren said.

"Good. Then you understand."

"I said okay."

"You said okay very fast."

"The app isn't where I wanted to argue about it." Ren's voice went lower.

Tomoya turned around.

They were closer than he had thought, and the copier lit Ren's face from below.

"You wrote that it ends," Ren said. "You wrote it to Yoru. You didn't write it to me."

Nobody else was on the floor.

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