Hideya had forgotten all about the beautiful man with the bad attitude that he’d met at the last investor’s gala.
His life has been too full of bullshit to even think on it.
He’d had to run a job with Snake again, and the banker’s daughter from that night had apparently taken a shine to him.
Unfortunately, her father’s a big deal, running at least half of the banks in Kyoto and the surrounding area, which means that she’s a big deal.
Which is why Sakamoto-san had called Hideya personally to ask him to take her out.
“Are you ordering me to date her?” Hideya had asked flatly, after listening to the wind-up to all of this. The ways Sakamoto always dances around the glaring and implicit power imbalance when it comes to the two of them.
He had laughed his jolly, booming laugh at that.
“Hideya-kun, where do you get these ideas? Of course, of course I’m not asking you to date her. I’m merely asking you to, hm… take the young lady out and treat her like a gentleman. She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Hideya says, because it’s expected of him. He hadn’t honestly noticed or cared.
That jocular laugh again. “Then what’s the problem? She’s a pretty young woman who’s taken a shine to you. And besides, you’re too young to only be working all the time. Enjoy yourself a little. Would it be so bad if you had someone like that waiting for you at home?”
The girl’s name is Sayu, and Hideya picks her up outside the gates of her university in a Porsche.
She’s standing there in a buttercup yellow dress that bares her clean collarbones, with her hair tied up in an effortless messy bun, clutching a matching purse. She leans down to peer into his open window to make sure it’s the right car.
“No, that’s okay,” she says when he goes to open her door for her. “I can get in myself. You’re Hayate-san, right?”
“That’s right.”
He drives them to an upscale restaurant for a late lunch, and she’s quiet in the car. She sits politely, with her hands folded in her lap.
The lunch is as awkward as Hideya expected it to be. They make small talk, and Hideya’s attention wanders.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Because there he is again, facing Hideya in another section of the dining room, sitting across from a man whose face Hideya can’t see. That same man.
When Sayu goes to the bathroom, Hideya makes a decision. He crosses the room decisively, and the man from the other night doesn’t look up from his meal, even when Hideya is standing right above him.
It makes Hideya feel a little spark of something, being ignored.
The white-haired man in front of him delicately stabs a bite of food and chews it thoughtfully. And something in Hideya just… frays. In the way that he suddenly wants to make this man pay attention to him.
The man he’d been eating with had also gone somewhere, so Hideya takes it upon himself to be a little shameless.
“We keep meeting,” Hideya says, brushing the ice prince’s wrist with his fingertips where it lies inert on the table. “If I keep bumping into you like this, I’m going to start to think you’re following me.”
The man’s slender fingers spasm minutely, and then he pointedly extracts his hand from the table and puts it in his lap.
Hideya has no idea what’s wrong with him—why he’s flirting with this man like this.
“Don’t you have a date to get back to?” Ruby asks him with a withering stare.
Hideya gives a bark of laughter, not too loud, but bitter. “It’s not a date, it’s a business arrangement.”
“What about you? Where’s your date?”
Honestly, he expects the man to immediately deny it. It’s clear enough that whatever meal he’s having here, it’s about business, too.
Instead, the man says, “Why? Jealous?”
Hideya leans in, flirtatious. His eyes are heavily lidded, giving him the rakish air of a well-fed predator. “What if I am?” he asks.
“Then can I ask you to cover my tab?” the man sitting at the table says just as shamelessly.
Hideya doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. Why he’s saying these things or pushing his luck. He doesn’t know what he’ll say next, still leaning compromisingly into another man’s space. He would never normally act like this.
He does have to get back, though. He can’t leave Sayu alone for long.
Ah. Damn, speak of the devil, there’s Sayu now, clutching her purse and glancing around looking for him.
Ruby smirks and props his pointed chin on his hand. “Run along now. I think your business arrangement is calling.”
* * *
“Sorry,” Hideya says as he slides back into his seat, wearing a disarming smile, looking very different from the wild predator he’d been a few moments prior—the face he’d shown the other man. “I had to take a call, and I got caught up.”
He’d half expected Sayu to pitch a fit about it, but contrary to the impression he’d got of her the other night as a spoiled brat, she’s surprisingly good-natured. She shakes her head and brushes it off easily.
“I know how it is. My dad is always working, too.”
Hideya doesn’t know how he feels about being compared to her dad. She can’t be older than 19, but he’s not that old. He steers the conversation back around to her studies, and she’s talkative enough for both of them, filling the space with chatter about her major and some of the friends she’s made at school—names that go in one ear and out the other, female names for people that Hideya has never met.
Eventually, Sayu asks, “That’s your friend, right?”
“Sorry, what?”
Hideya’s been caught off-guard again. It’s unlike him. For a second, he isn’t sure what Sayu is talking about.
“That person you were meeting. It’s the same as at the gala the other night.”
“You have a good memory.”
Sayu hums. “Not really. I just noticed. Mostly because, well. I was surprised.”
Now that gets Hideya’s attention, mostly because it’s a kind of strange thing to say.
“Huh? Why would you be surprised?”
“Oh. Just—I didn’t think that Ruby had that many friends.” She laughs a little. “Actually, I didn’t know that he had any friends at all.”
“Ruby?”
Now it’s Sayu’s turn to give him kind of a strange look.
“Sure. Ruby Sasajima.”
The shockwave that goes through Hideya at that goes unnoticed as Sayu keeps on innocently talking.
“Our fathers are friends, so I see him around a lot. He always seems so lonely. Just… kind of cold, you know? We have someone in common, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Hideya murmurs absently. “I guess so.”
Hideya is even more absent than usual for the rest of their date. He goes through the motions, but it’s all a blur until he’s dropping Sayu off back at her dorm.
“You can let me out here,” she says when they’re a block away.
One of Hideya’s brows arcs up. “And why would I make you walk?”
“Oh, just. It’s more convenient for you, isn’t it? I really don’t mind.”
Hideya huffs. “You’re a bad liar,” he says. But he does stop the car, parking it in a no-parking zone in front of a restaurant for long enough for Sayu to get out of the car.
She beams at him when she realizes that he is letting her off where she’d asked.
“Thanks, Hayate-san,” she says, giving a little wave as she gets out of the car.
Ruby Sasajima, the heir to the Sasajima-kai.
How was Hideya supposed to know what he looked like? It’s not like he’d ever met him before.
He thinks back to the night they had met, when Hideya had treated him like a sack of potatoes and stuffed him in a glorified supply closet. The corner of his mouth twitches up as he slaps himself on the head.
No wonder the guy stared at him like he wanted to scoop Hideya’s intestines out.
Still. A corner of his mouth twitches up.
He’s disappointed that he couldn’t see the look on Ruby’s face when he realizes that Hideya really did foot the bill for his tab. His and his business associate’s both.