The studio smells of hairspray and instant coffee—typical for a Saturday morning at art school. Sae powders Taiga’s already flawless face while Sawa wrestles with a stubborn strand of Hokuto’s hair that seems eager to escape.
Juri stands a few meters back with his clipboard, aware of how it looks and at peace with it.
The checklist has three columns: eye contact, duration, mirroring, laughter count. A fourth, drawn at 2 a.m., remains blank—either for future findings or because he fell asleep. Either way, room has been left.
The hypothesis, since nobody asked: closeness and romantic staging create the illusion of chemistry. Put two strangers in tuxedos, pose them like newlyweds, and let the brain fill the rest. Misattribution of arousal, the 36 questions, all that. He expects to prove it’s manufactured, with a checklist as evidence, item by item, like a receipt.
An n of 2 isn’t a real sample. He knows and is fine with it.
The subjects changed thirty minutes ago. White tux, black tux, both blinking at their reflections like the mirror was the stranger. Introductions went as Juri expected: one talked, the other didn’t.
Hokuto is still talking. As Sawa pins his hair, he asks, “Ah—sorry, would it be all right if I asked how long you’ve been doing this? You have very steady hands, is all. Sorry.”
He laughs softly, straightening an already straight cuff. Again.
Juri notes fidgeting in the margin, despite it not being one of his three columns. Science is flexible.
Taiga hasn’t spoken in eleven minutes. His white tux fits like it grew on him. He sits motionless beneath Sae’s brush, accustomed to being looked at since childhood. His hands are folded on his lap, slowly turning a prop ring around his finger.
He looks like an anime prince who stepped out of a poster and got bored.
“You’re staring,” Sae says to him without turning.
“I’m establishing a baseline.”
“Uh-huh. On the clipboard of love.”
“It’s a clipboard of variables.”
“Of love,” Sawa agrees.
They high-five over Hokuto’s head. He apologizes, then laughs at himself for it.
11:07 a.m. Baseline. Eye contact: 0 seconds. Mirroring: none. Laughter: 2, both from Hokuto.
Juri studies the numbers, then the two of them. One murmurs through his haircut, fingertips brushing the mole above his lip. The other sits silent, turning his ring, gaze distant and still.
Two strangers. One hour of staging. A checklist with a blank column.
“Okay,” Juri says, camera at his hip. “Whenever you’re ready, we’ll take this outside. The light’s better out there.”
“Okay,” Taiga says. His first words in a while.
“Ah—yes, sorry, ready whenever—sorry.”
Juri grins and flips to a fresh page. Manufactured chemistry, coming right up. He’s got a hypothesis and a clipboard. What could go wrong?
Forty minutes before the hairspray, the studio hosts only Juri, two garment bags, and a table with two envelopes.
He’d set it up like a proper lab: chairs, backdrop, cash in plain sight. The cash was mostly for effect—experiments should look like experiments—but the envelopes made him feel like a spy, and he was fine with that.
Hokuto arrives at 10:26, four minutes early and apologizing.
“Tanaka-kun? Thank you for having me. Ah—sorry, am I early? I can wait outside.”
“You’re perfect. Sit.”
His eyes flick to the envelopes, then away. Juri pretends not to notice. A subject eager for the fee deserves some privacy.
Taiga arrives at 10:31, unapologetic, wearing a Nirvana shirt at odds with his face. “Hi.”
“Thanks for coming. Okay—introductions. Kyomoto Taiga-senpai, fourth year, painting. Matsumura Hokuto, third year, creative writing.”
Hokuto straightens. “Kyomoto-senpai. I’m Matsumura. Thank you for—well, for agreeing to this. Sorry, that’s a weird thing to thank someone for.” A small laugh at himself.
“Hm.” A beat. “Okay.”
The stiffness settles like dust. Hokuto’s spine straightens, his hands clasp, and his posture turns deferential toward a senpai he’s known for eleven seconds.
Juri writes “register: formal, distance: proportional” in the margin. Not a column, but science is flexible.
Then, his pen stops.
Kyomoto. He’d skimmed past it in the emails, too pleased with himself to notice. Like the buses. The trains. The name on half the country’s commuter lines. And its heir stands in his studio wearing a band shirt, waiting for payment from a third-year with a clipboard.
“Not to be weird,” Juri says, carefully casual, “but—Kyomoto. Like the company Kyomoto?”
“Yeah.” A pause long enough that Juri expects nothing more. “I was bored.”
No elaboration. Juri waits, but that’s apparently explanation enough. A man who’s never needed anything has decided this might be interesting.
Fine. Rich people are a confound he can’t control for, and the budget’s fine.
“Okay, the deal,” Juri says. “Staged wedding shoot, about an hour, a set of poses. You two don’t know each other. That’s the point.”
“So, we’re—strangers, then,” Hokuto says slowly, reaching for the word. “That’s the, ah. The variable.”
“Exactly.”
He hands them the envelopes. Hokuto accepts his with both hands and a bow, thanking him twice. Taiga pockets his unopened, like a gum receipt.
“Any questions?”
“Which pose first?” Taiga asks.
“We’ll get there.” Juri flips to a fresh page, pleased. One subject stiff as a new shirt, one bored senseless, no eye contact, and a promising hypothesis. “Sae and Sawa—they’re hair and makeup—will get here at eleven. Until then—get uncomfortable.”
“Uh,” Hokuto says. “We already—sorry. We’re already a little uncomfortable.”
“Hm,” Taiga agrees.
Perfect. Right on schedule.
The courtyard is at its October best—soft light through ginkgo leaves, first-years carrying a plaster torso across the grass, nobody blinking at two tuxedos. Good. An unbothered audience.
Juri positions them beneath the biggest tree and raises his camera. “Okay. First pose. Foreheads together. Hold for ten seconds.”
Silence.
“Uh—” Hokuto says. “Together, as in—sorry, I know what together means.” A small laugh at himself. “Sorry.”
He leans in like a man approaching a skittish horse. Taiga merely tilts forward half a degree, as though adjusting a setting.
Their foreheads touch. Hokuto makes a small noise, apologizes, and holds.
Juri counts aloud, partly for amusement, partly for the pleasure of saying “for the purposes of the study.” Through the viewfinder, their faces seem decades apart: Taiga pale and princeling-smooth, Hokuto unexpectedly photogenic. Something Showa about him, like a man waiting on a train platform in 1972, a letter in his pocket. The mole above his lip catches the light.
Forehead contact: sustained, 10 sec. Eye contact during approach: 0 sec. Laughter: 0.
“Great. Now, hands. Matsumura-kun, take his hand. Like it’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“It isn’t, though,” Hokuto says, already taking it.
“Pretend.”
Taiga’s hand stays still. Hokuto’s doesn’t. He adjusts his grip twice, reflexively reaches to straighten his cuff, then realizes there’s nothing to straighten beneath Taiga’s fingers. His grip settles. Taiga turns slightly, studying their joined hands as he studied the ring earlier.
Hokuto stares into the distance, lips moving faintly. Psyching himself up, Juri bets.
“Hold that for ten seconds. Smile if you can.”
“Which one of us is the—uh. Which one is the—” Hokuto stops. “Sorry. Which one of us is the groom?”
“Both. It’s 2016.”
“Right. Yeah. Sorry.”
“You apologize a lot,” Taiga remarks.
“I do—sorry.”
A beat. Then a strangled sound disguised as a cough. Technically laughter.
Juri considers the tally column, rejects it, and briefly feels fraudulent. Science is flexible, but not that flexible.
Hand-hold: sustained. Laughter: 0. Eye contact: brief, averted.
Hokuto glanced once, roughly a second, before finding the canopy fascinating. Taiga never glanced. Probably data of some kind. Juri will decide later.
“Okay, last of the set. Ring exchange. Senpai, you’ve got the prop. Matsumura-kun, hand out.”
He frames wide, then tight. Taiga holds the ring between long, pale fingers. Juri zooms in on their hands rather than their faces, a choice he’d defend under oath but can’t explain.
The ring slides on. Hokuto studies it like a sentence worth keeping, then catches himself and bows slightly to no one.
“Perfect. Hold for ten seconds.”
They hold. Light filters through the leaves, doing something inconvenient to the shot.
Behind the camera, Juri writes nothing. He’ll log it later. He’s busy.
The stairs behind the library are perfect. Concrete, two flights, sunlit at the top. Juri has been saving them.
“Okay, new series,” he says, walking backward up the first few steps. “Candid. Movement. You two are running late to your own wedding. Climb fast, I’ll shoot from above.”
“Running,” Hokuto repeats. “Upstairs. In tuxedos.”
“For the purposes of the study,” Juri says, grinning to himself.
The theory is sound. Raise the heart rate, introduce a handsome stranger, and the brain misattributes the pounding pulse. Misattribution of arousal. The literature involves bridges and women with clipboards, but stairs should work. They’re vertical bridges.
He climbs to the landing, sets up, and waves them down. “On three. One, two—go!”
They go. Hokuto moves like someone who’s never been late and won't start now. Taiga is like someone who has never run up the stairs before.
By the second flight, their tuxedos have become liabilities. Juri fires off a dozen frames—pumping arms, contrasting lapels, a ginkgo leaf drifting through like a paid extra.
They reach the top, bent over, hands on knees, panting.
“Great,” Juri says. “Hold that.”
“Hold—okay—sorry—” Hokuto wheezes. “Sorry, just—one moment—”
Taiga braces against the railing, discovering that his lungs aren’t decorative. His pale face has turned pink, more color than Juri has seen all day.
Juri raises the camera. Elevated heart rates, shared exertion, faces close together. The confusion should start any second.
Through the viewfinder, he watches.
Hokuto straightens, catching his breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t—exercise. Much. Clearly.” He laughs weakly behind his hand, still gasping.
Taiga glances over.
That’s it. Two exhausted strangers.
Taiga exhales slowly. “Stairs.”
“Yeah,” Hokuto says. “Stairs.”
No meaningful eye contact. No mirroring, unless matching exhaustion counts. No laughter, unless Hokuto’s wheeze qualifies, and Juri refuses to count that. He has standards.
He lowers the camera. Two winded men in tuxedos on a concrete landing. One still wear the prop ring . Possibly his least romantic photograph ever, including an actual wedding commission where the groom’s mother appeared in every portrait.
He records it anyway. He’s not a coward.
11:42 a.m. Stairs (arousal induction). Heart rate elevated: both. Attributed to: stairs. Chemistry: none observed. Result: inconclusive.
After a pause, he adds in the margin: ???
Then, beneath it: variable failed?? or subjects immune?? pick one.
Taiga recovers enough to smooth his cuff, a habit Juri has noticed. Hokuto murmurs to himself.
“Again?” Juri offers, half hoping.
“No,” Taiga says.
“Fair.” Juri shrugs and caps the lens. Maybe the bridge studies had better bridges. Or worse subjects.
He studies his neat table, irritated that his experiment worked exactly as designed and produced nothing.
He sighs. “Let’s get you two retouched.”
Back at the studio, Sae has Taiga reclined, blotting his forehead with surgical precision. Sawa combs Hokuto’s sweat-damp hair, making sympathetic noises.
“Nandemonaiya” plays from the girls’ speaker, loud enough to make it clear who runs the studio. Everything has been RADWIMPS since August. Juri has heard the album through four different walls this week.
At least it isn’t the SMAP playlist. Sawa played that for two days straight and cried twice.
“You made them run,” Sae says, focused on Taiga’s forehead. “In tuxedos. Close to noon.”
“For the purpose of the study.”
“The study.” She powders his nose. “The clipboard of love has a cardio component now.”
“It’s a clipboard of variables.”
“Of love,” Sawa chimes in.
They high-five over Hokuto, who mumbles into the comb.
Juri retreats to his pose list. Foreheads, hands, ring, stairs: done. Dip, back-hug, walking shot: remaining. He glances between his list and the two men being groomed.
The experiment isn’t going as planned. The poses should produce chemistry through proximity. Instead, he’s collected apologies and cardio.
He taps his pen. Maybe they need conversation alongside physical contact. The 36 questions involved talking, after all. He hasn’t allowed that. A design flaw, filed under later.
The song ends. Piano begins, followed by a vaguely familiar voice.
“Hanabi,” Taiga says.
“Hanabi,” Hokuto says.
Juri’s pen stops.
They stare at each other. Hokuto sits half-turned, a comb in his hair. Taiga freezes beneath Sae’s brush, which pauses too.
“Which song is your favorite?” Taiga asks. He tilts his head, suddenly attentive rather than merely still.
“Ah—it’s a single, originally, but it’s on the 1992 to 2002 compilation, the—sorry, that came out very loud.” Hokuto laughs behind his hand, ears pink. “My favorite. Probably. Today. It changes.”
“My favorite,” Taiga repeats. A beat. “Sign.”
“Sign is—yes. Sign is perfect. That whole—” Hokuto touches the mole above his lip, eyes briefly unfocused. “Sorry. I was just—never mind. Senpai, have you seen them live?”
“Once.” Taiga taps the armrest in time with the song. “Saitama. SENSE.”
Hokuto bolts upright, forcing Sawa to rescue her comb. “No. No—the SENSE tour? Saitama Super Arena? I was there, I—that was my first live, my father drove us, I was sixteen and I made him—”
Juri watches Hokuto’s formal register disappear mid-sentence.
“—I made him play the album the whole drive there. Both ways. He still hums it.”
“Same,” Taiga says.
“Same—wait. Same day?”
“The Saturday.”
“I was there on the Saturday!” Hokuto stares at him. “We were in the same arena! Five years ago. I was—there were fifty thousand people, and I was in the—”
“Me too.” A beat. “Different seats.”
“Obviously different seats, yeah, sorry, that’s—” Hokuto laughs brightly behind his hand, apologizes, then laughs at his own apology.
Juri checks his clipboard. Eye contact, mirroring, laughter count, one blank column. Their current eye contact has already exceeded the morning’s total. Neither seems aware of it.
He draws a fifth column, leaves it unnamed, and writes 2011. Saitama. He doesn’t know what he’s measuring anymore, only that his existing columns seem inadequate.
12:09 p.m. Shared variable: Mr. Children, Saitama, 2011. Both minors. Both present. Odds: no idea. Column: —
“Okay, hold on,” Sae says, interrupting with her powder brush. “Done. Both of you. Out of my chairs, you’re ruining the powder.”
“You have a concert to discuss somewhere else,” Sawa says, unplugging the curling iron.
Juri caps his pen and grabs his camera. He’d planned a dip, a back hug, and a walking shot. Now he wants to put them on a rooftop and see what happens without interference. Nothing in his 2 a.m. research covered that.
“Music building,” he says. “Rooftop. The light up there is the best on campus around noon, and—” he raises a hand before Hokuto can ask, “—we’re taking the elevator this time.”
“Thank you,” Hokuto says, with feeling.
“Thank fucking god,” Taiga says, standing, smoothing his cuff.
Taiga heads for the door, Hokuto following, already asking about the setlist. Juri watches them leave, clipboard tucked beneath his arm, fifth column still waiting.
“So what do you paint? Sorry—is that a big question? That feels like a big question.”
“Not big.” Taiga studies the skyline. “Whatever’s in front of me. Mostly.”
“Whatever’s in front of you?”
“If it holds still long enough.”
Hokuto laughs behind his hand. “That’s—no, that’s a real criterion. My professor says the same thing about sentences. Except backwards. He says a sentence has to keep moving or it dies, which is, uh—” His gaze drifts past the water tank. “Sorry. I was writing that down. In my head. I do that.”
“Hm,” Taiga says. But it doesn’t sound dismissive.
Juri raises his camera. Neither notices. All morning, Hokuto had bowed to the lens and Taiga had endured it. Now they’ve forgotten it exists.
Noon light warmly washes the rooftop concrete. Juri frames their contrasting tuxedos against the railing and shoots.
“And you write,” Taiga says. “What?”
“Ah—everything, a little. Freelance for a small magazine, mostly. Profiles, event coverage. Last month I did four hundred words on a cat café anniversary and I made it work, which I’m weirdly proud of.” A self-conscious laugh. “And fiction, for school and on my own time. Which nobody pays for, so it must be the real thing.”
Taiga turns, studying him like a potential painting. “The cat café.”
“The cat café.”
“Four hundred words.”
“There were nine cats, senpai. Each one deserved—” Hokuto breaks into surprised laughter. “Okay, none of them deserved anything. They slept on the customers.”
Taiga makes a low, almost melodic sound. Surprised, he touches his chest as though checking its source.
Juri hovers over his laughter tally. He’d counted eleven by the elevator. Since then, he’s lost track twice. He writes lots.
“What about you, senpai—do you have a favorite thing to paint? Subjects, I mean. Light, or—”
“Hands.”
“Hands?” Hokuto repeats, examining his own.
“Yours are interesting,” Taiga says, as casually as commenting on the weather. “You have ink on the middle one.”
“Oh—that’s from this morning, I was—” Hokuto studies the smudge, ears pink. “It’s always the middle one. I don’t know how. I write like a normal—okay, apparently not like a normal person.”
“Hm.” Taiga drums his fingers against the railing.
Half a second later, Hokuto repeats the rhythm. Neither notices.
Juri’s mirroring column had one morning entry: none. Now Hokuto leans and pauses with Taiga, while Taiga has adopted Hokuto’s chin-down listening posture. Juri adds two ticks, then abandons the column.
He keeps shooting. The photographs are better than anything on his pose list. No dip, back-hug, or walking shot. Just two men discussing their majors, every third frame worthy of a gallery wall.
“—no, the worst part of writing is the middle,” Hokuto is saying. “The beginning is hope and the end is relief and the middle is just—being lost. For weeks.”
“You finish anyway.”
“I finish anyway, yeah.” A pause. “How do you know when a painting’s done?”
Taiga considers the question, comfortable in the silence. “When taking anything off would make it worse.”
Hokuto falls quiet. His gaze unfocuses, a small smile forming as his lips silently repeat something. His fingers settle against the mole above his lip.
“Sorry,” he says, returning. “That’s going in something.”
“Okay,” Taiga says.
A breeze carries a ginkgo leaf up from the trees below. It brushes Hokuto’s cheek and catches on his collar. He’s too busy discussing deadlines to notice.
Without hesitation, Taiga reaches over and removes it. His fingertips graze Hokuto’s cheekbone for half a second. He examines the leaf, then releases it into the wind.
Hokuto stops mid-sentence. His ears turn a shade Juri has no column for.
“You had a leaf,” Taiga says.
“Right. Yes. Thank you. I didn’t—it was just sitting there, on my—” Hokuto touches his cheek, laughs too loudly, apologizes, then laughs again. “Sorry. Wind. October. Leaves. That’s—anyway.”
“Anyway,” Taiga agrees. He keeps looking at Hokuto, though not with his usual measuring gaze. Juri can’t classify this one either.
Juri lowers his camera to his chest and looks over it. Warm light on concrete. Two strangers at a railing. One still touching his cheek.
His clipboard hangs at his hip, pen uncapped against a page full of columns that can’t account for any of this.
He writes nothing.
The studio has been transformed by the time they return. Juri isn’t sure how the club put it together so quickly, but they’ve pushed the equipment to the walls, draped a gauze backdrop across the far corner, and scattered LED tea lights across the floor in a rough semicircle. Someone found a disco ball that throws slow diamonds across the ceiling when the overhead dims.
“We improvised,” Sae says, arms crossed proudly. “You’re welcome.”
Sawa adjusts the Bluetooth speaker, and the opening piano of John Legend’s “All of Me” fills the room.
Hokuto stands at the edge of the floor, hands clasped in front of him, studying the tea lights like a man who’s been asked to cross a minefield in dress shoes. Taiga is already on the floor, standing in the center of the light diamonds, white tuxedo catching every one.
“Okay,” Juri says. “Last set. First dance.” He raises his camera, then pauses. Lowers it to his hip. “Matsumura-kun. Hands on his waist.”
“His—” Hokuto swallows. “Right. Yeah. Okay.”
He steps forward. His hands hover at Taiga’s sides like he’s trying to hold something without touching it.
“You can actually make contact,” Juri says.
“Right. Sorry.” Hokuto’s palms settle, barely, against the white fabric. His fingers are rigid.
“Senpai, arms around his neck.”
Taiga lifts his hands without hesitation. They rest on Hokuto’s shoulders, then slide to the back of his neck, easy as settling into a familiar pose. His fingers brush Hokuto’s collar.
Hokuto’s spine goes very straight.
“Now sway. Slowly. Like you’ve done this before.”
Hokuto moves like a man counting in his head while Taiga simply stands and lets the music move around him.
The disco ball turns. The song switches to Christina Perri’s “a thousand years.”
Hokuto’s breathing is audible, the way someone breathes when they’re trying very hard to be normal and the effort itself is the giveaway. His gaze fixes somewhere past Taiga’s ear, at the gauze backdrop, at nothing.
“Sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m not—I don’t really dance. I should’ve mentioned that. I’m not—”
“You’re counting the beat. Stop.”
Juri almost misses it. He’s adjusting the aperture, and the words land softly beneath the music.
Hokuto blinks.
“Just listen to it,” Taiga says. “The song does the work.”
Hokuto exhales. Something in his shoulders releases. His rigid fingers soften against Taiga’s waist. His gaze drops from the backdrop to Taiga’s face, and stays.
Taiga doesn’t look away.
Juri raises his camera. Through the viewfinder, the disco ball scatters light across the two. Hokuto’s hands rest where Juri told him to put them, but the grip has changed. Taiga’s thumb moves once, absently, against the back of Hokuto’s neck.
Neither of them is swaying to the beat anymore. They’ve found a slower one, private, slightly off the tempo of the music (now “Can’t Help Falling in Love”), and they don’t seem to notice the difference.
Juri takes the shot. Then another. Then he lowers the camera and watches over it, the way he’s been doing more and more, as if the lens has become the thing between him and what’s actually happening.
The playlist shuffles and Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” starts, which is—fine. It's the most wedding song to have ever wedding songed.
Juri circles wide, keeping to the edge of the tea lights, and shoots from a low angle. The disco ball is throwing slow constellations across the gauze and across the two of them, and the light catches the white tuxedo in a way that makes Taiga look slightly unreal. Hokuto’s black jacket absorbs everything around it, so in the frame he’s mostly shape and shadow, except for his face, which is turned toward Taiga and—
They’re talking. Juri can see their lips moving but can’t hear a word over the guitar. Taiga says something short. Hokuto’s mouth opens, closes, opens again, and then he laughs—not the surprised, hand-over-mouth laugh from earlier, but something that tips his head back and shows his teeth. Taiga watches him, and the corner of his mouth slowly pulls up.
Juri takes the shot. Checks the display. Takes another.
They’re still talking. Hokuto gestures with one hand, the other still resting on Taiga’s waist, and whatever he’s saying makes Taiga exhale through his nose. Then Hokuto says something else, and Taiga’s shoulders shake; a low, short, real sound comes out, and Hokuto grins like he’s won something.
Juri doesn’t log it. He doesn’t even look at the clipboard sitting on the folding chair behind him, pen resting across a page he hasn’t touched in—he doesn’t check how long.
Then Hokuto shifts his weight. His left hand presses firmly against Taiga’s lower back, his right catches Taiga’s hand, and he dips him.
Juri’s finger hits the shutter on reflex.
It’s not a good dip, technically. Hokuto’s arm is shaking slightly and his stance is too narrow and if Taiga weighed five more kilograms they’d both be on the floor. But Taiga’s head tips back and his eyes go wide and he laughs—a real one, open-mouthed, startled. Hokuto is grinning down at him, and the framing is so stupid and perfect that Juri takes three shots in a row without breathing.
Hokuto pulls Taiga back up. They’re close. Very close. Taiga’s hand is still in Hokuto’s, and their faces are maybe ten centimeters apart, and Hokuto’s gaze drops—just for a second, just barely—and Taiga’s chin tilts up, and the room gets very quiet in Juri’s head, like the autofocus has locked on something and everything else has gone soft—
The music stops.
“Sorry!” Sawa calls from the speaker. “That’s the end of the playlist. I can restart it?”
The silence is enormous. Hokuto blinks. Steps back. He releases Taiga’s hand and straightens his cuffs, twice, three times.
Taiga stands still in the center of the tea lights, expression unreadable.
Juri lowers the camera. It takes him a moment to remember he’s the one running this. “That’s a wrap,” he says. “We got everything. You guys were great.”
Hokuto turns toward him. “Oh. Already?”
“Already,” Juri confirms.
Taiga glances at Hokuto, then away. He says nothing.
They drift toward the makeup table where their clothes sit folded in two neat piles. Hokuto picks his up and holds them against his chest. Taiga tucks his under one arm.
They leave for the fitting room together, walking close enough that their shoulders nearly touch, and neither of them looks back.
Juri sits on the folding chair and scrolls through the camera’s display. The courtyard shots are clean. The rooftop shots are better. The dance shots are something else entirely.
He stops on the dip.
Hokuto’s arm is a blur at the edge of the frame because the shutter speed was set for slower movement, which is a technical mistake Juri would normally delete on sight. But the rest of the image is sharp: Taiga’s head tipped back, mouth open, caught mid-laugh, and Hokuto above him, grinning. The white tuxedo catches every scattered point of light in the room. The black tuxedo absorbs them. They look like two halves of something.
Juri stares at it for a while.
The fitting room door opens and Taiga steps out first, Nirvana tee back in place, black jeans, sneakers. He walks straight to Juri. “Tanaka.”
“Yeah?”
“Send me the photos.”
Juri blinks. He hadn’t expected either of them to want the photos. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll email them.”
Taiga nods and steps aside.
Hokuto emerges a moment later, button-down tucked in, sleeves rolled to the elbow. “Tanaka-kun, thank you for today,” he says with a small bow. “It was—I had a really good time. If that’s useful. For the study.”
“No problem,” Juri says. Then, softer: “I’ll send you guys the photos this week.”
They gather their things near the door. Juri busies himself with the lens cap, but the studio is small and quiet now that Sae and Sawa have slipped out, and sound carries.
“Here.”
Juri glances over. Taiga is holding out his envelope—the one from this morning, still unopened—toward Hokuto. He’s not looking at it. He’s looking at Hokuto.
“I don’t want it,” Taiga says. “Take it.”
Hokuto’s hands come up, palms out, like he’s stopping traffic. “I can’t accept that. Thank you, but I really—no. Senpai, I can’t.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not—I can’t accept that, but thank you.” Hokuto’s voice is firm and polite and slightly panicked.
Taiga looks at the envelope. Looks at Hokuto. Puts it back in his pocket. “Okay,” he says. “I have an idea.”
Hokuto waits.
“We spend it on dinner.”
The studio is very quiet. Juri’s hand rests on the lens cap. He doesn’t move.
“Are you—” Hokuto starts, stops, starts again. “Sorry, is that—are you asking me on a date?”
“Yes.”
Hokuto’s mouth opens. Closes. A flush climbs his neck and reaches his ears, visible even from across the room.
“Okay,” he finally says. “Yeah. Yes.”
Taiga nods. He shoulders his bag and walks to the door, and Hokuto follows half a step behind, and just before they reach the hallway Hokuto says something Juri can’t quite catch and Taiga exhales through his nose, and Hokuto laughs, hand over his mouth.
The door closes behind them.
Juri sits in the empty studio. The tea lights are still flickering on the floor. The disco ball turns slowly, throwing diamonds across nobody.
He picks up the clipboard. The page is blank from the rooftop onward. The pen rests across it, untouched.
He leaves it there.