[hina/erika] sharply
Apr. 2nd, 2012 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
songbirdspeaksTitle: Sharply
Pairing: Murakami Shingo/Toda Erika, featuring Nishikido Ryo, Ninomiya Kazunari, Takizawa Hideaki, Shinoda Mariko (AKB48)
Rating: PG-13 for a scene in a strip club
Word count: ~3000
Warnings: Idiocy, AU
Summary: Nino and Ryo have Erika's best interests at heart. Really.
Author's Notes: Based very, very loosely off of Ned and Norah's Infinite Playlist. But only very loosely. For dalampasigan during White Day 2012.
"Mariko, I am going to kill them both," Erika says into her phone, as she stares at the sign on her front door. It's plain white paper, written in Nino's chickenscratch handwriting, and taped to the center below the bronze 232 near the top--'Erika, we've blocked the door, don't come home before midnight! Nino and Ryo-chan'. Erika juggles her handbag and her briefcase around to rip it down from the door.
"Why?" Mariko asks, almost infuriatingly calm. Not for the first time, Erika wishes Mariko hadn't moved away after they graduated from college. By all reports Mariko is ecstatic at the Kyoto kindergarten where she's begun work, but Erika's never missed her former roomate more.
"They blocked the door," Erika says, "they say I can't come home before midnight. I have to work on this case!"
"When was the last time you didn't work on a case at night?" Mariko asks.
Erika thinks. "Three days ago?" she guesses, "no, wait, never mind, I started working on that abuse case. Um... a week ago--no, that's not true. I don't. I can't seem to remember."
"Maybe take their advice," Mariko says, and she's very gentle about it. Coming from her it sounds infinitely more reasonable, and Erika sighs.
"All right, fine," she says. She tucks the phone under her chin. "Hey, Nino," she calls, knowing she's not going to get him to answer her any time soon.
"What?" Ryo says from the other side of the door, and Erika kicks it petulantly.
"At least take my briefcase," she says, "or else I'm just going to go to Starbucks and work some more."
The door swings open, and Ryo's hand shoots out. Erika hands the briefcase off, and turns to walk down the hallway. After a moment of staring at the elevator, she walks past, and turns the corner at the top of the banister. "Mariko," she says, "I'll call you tomorrow, provided I'm not hungover."
"Have a good night," Mariko says, voice warm.
"You too," Erika says, as she passes through the half-dark lobby of the apartment building, and folds the phone closed to push it into her bag. There are cars zooming past as she stands, stock-still, at the corner in front of her building, and she chews on her lip as she thinks.
Finally, she turns abruptly left and begins down the sidewalk. There isn't much in the area, but she's intent mostly on finding a bar and getting drunk, and going from there. The first bar she passes seems promising until a pair of leather-clad bikers stumble out with bloody noses and black eyes. Erika ducks around the two big guys, holding her bag close to her chest, and continues down the block. There's a traditional-style place she considers because of how quiet it seems, but even she thinks there might be something sad about a twenty-something woman sitting in a bar drinking sake all alone next to a bunch of salarymen, and she walks by.
The third bar is loud, of course, and there's a crowd, but the band playing inside--the chalkboard outside calls them 'Five Flat Flowers', and Erika thinks she's heard the name before--is good, even from out on the street. Erika's immensely glad work doesn't require a suit; her blouse might be a bit fancy for this crowd, but over jeans and in the dark she doesn't think it's noticeable. She finds the bar quickly enough, and ducks between two groups of guys to slide onto a stool. "Gin and tonic on the rocks, please," she says, and the bartender nods briskly at her before he turns to mix it. It's between her hands shortly, and she takes a long sip before she turns on her seat, crossing her right leg over her left at the knee to watch the band perform. They're punk, or close enough, which Erika is remarkably fond of after long nights spent listening to Nino and Ryo's acoustic-piano sound; the frontman is a wiry, long-haired guy with a soaring voice, and Erika likes the sound of it. She finds the toe of her right sneaker bopping along quickly enough, and doesn't regret it at all.
"Hey, can I buy you another?"
Erika turns in her chair. The guy leaning on the bar next to her is wearing a green plaid button-down open over a gray t-shirt and jeans; Erika doesn't think the combination quite goes, but he doesn't seem too drunk as he looks at her expectantly.
"I don't let strange men buy me alcohol," she tells him.
The man laughs, loud, and Erika finds herself charmed by it, inexplicably. "Murakami Shingo," he says, and sticks his hand out to her.
Erika puts her mostly empty glass (when did that happen, she wonders) down on the counter, wipes her slick palms on the thighs of her jeans, and reaches forward to shake his hand. "Toda Erika," she says, "you a fan of the band?"
"No, I'm their agent," Murakami says, and the longer he talks the more obvious his accent is. "Are you a fan?"
Erika slips into Kansaiben easily. "No, but my roommates are, I think," she says, "they kicked me out tonight, said I need to have some fun. I work too much, apparently!"
Murakami blinks, looking taken aback, and then presses on. "What do you do?" he asks.
"I'm a social worker," she says, "I work with kids. Is this all some attempt to not be a strange man and buy me a drink?"
"You caught me," Murakami answers, "sometimes a guy needs to get to know a strange, beautiful woman sitting alone at a rock show and liquor her up."
Erika breaks into giggles at that. "All right, when you put it that way you're not so strange, Murakami Shingo. You're welcome to buy me a drink, if you want."
"Aiba," Murakami roars, making her jump, "get the lady another! And can I get another beer here?"
"Hina-chan," the bartender chides as he pours a beer, "don't yell in her ear."
Erika rolls her eyes. "I grew up in Osaka," she says, loudly enough to be heard as the band rockets into a clatter of instruments, "one loud guy is nothing!"
"And don't be nosy," Murakami snaps, reaching over to smack the other man over the head in what is unmistakeably a tsukkomi.
The band begins to wrap up as Erika guzzles down her second drink between laughing at Murakami--Hina, he says, after a minute or two of conversation. She finds out in short order that he's an agent for a record company, he's single, and he's been living in Tokyo for three years, not that anyone can tell because of his accent. He likes soccer--he likes soccer a lot--and hanging out with his friends, including the members of Five Flat Flowers, who he's known since high school. He wanted to be a comedian after high school, but he couldn't seem to keep a partner and wound up getting a communications degree. He's energetic and optimistic, and he seems to know everyone in the entire bar, or at least be on his way to it. When the set winds down and the frontman--he introduces himself as Subaru, after a poke to the ribs from Hina--suggests they try crashing a party thrown by a guy named 'Tackey', Erika doesn't hesitate at all before accepting Hina's invitation.
It's not often she meets someone who's able to catch the rhythm of her conversations so quickly, and she's not willing to let him go just yet. She pushes down butterflies as she ducks into his passenger seat, and they take the twenty-minute ride to an ostentatious high-rise near Nichome with conversation bouncing back and forth between them. Hina laughs at her jokes, even the ones she's pretty sure aren't actually funny, and she's giggling most of the time, too. Hina parks the car in the lot under the apartment, and the sixteen-floor elevator trip is effortless.
Tackey turns out to be Takizawa Hideaki, the director, and the first thing Erika says when Hina introduces them is that 'Nino is going to be so jealous'. Tackey laughs, and she shakes his hand. Tackey is a strange guy, Erika discovers immediately, when he points out a weird tree-decorated clock and begins to tell her the story of how Hina bought a matching pair of them while he was in Rome. Erika listens, caught up by his energy and the charisma that's made him so famous among filmmakers, and doesn't notice Hina's disappeared until Tackey says something that's a perfect boke and there's no follow-up smack.
"Where did he go?" she asks, making a face.
"Who, Shingo?" Tackey asks, "if we see him again for an hour or two, I'll be surprised. For such a violent guy, he's some kind of social butterfly."
The feeling that rises up in Erika at that surprises her; she doesn't usually feel cheapened by being befriended by someone popular (Nino's her roommate, after all), but knowing that somewhere else Hina could be introducing himself to some other strange, beautiful woman makes the ugly burn of jealousy spark in her chest. She shoves it down just in time to see Hina pass by, and reaches out to catch her fingers in his sleeve before she overthinks herself. Hina jerks when her grip pulls on him, and he rounds on them, confusion written over his brow.
"I see you're the kind of guy who invites a girl to a party and then leaves her with his friend," Erika says, arching an eyebrow at him.
"No," Hina says, "I just--I had to say hello to a guy, and I got caught up in having a drink with a guy I work with! And I left you with Tackey, didn't I?"
"I didn't come here with Tackey, did I?"
Hina looks surprised, as if her meaning is only now becoming clear to him. His hand is hot against her elbow when he curls his fingers around her arm. "We should try somewhere else, then," he says, leaning down into her ear to say it.
She quirks her lips at him. "Let's go," she says, and shakes his hand off to wind her fingers through his and drag him toward the front door.
The night air is brisk against her skin when they get out onto the sidewalk; the air in Takizawa's apartment had been crowded and muggy, though she hadn't noticed at the time. Now, with Hina's hand the only thing warming her body, she leans closer. His body radiates heat, she finds, like a noisy radiator, and Hina extricates his hand from hers long enough to wrap an arm around her shoulders in short order.
"So where should we go?" he asks.
"Where's somewhere you've never been that you wanted to try?" she asks.
"The pachinko parlor a block over," Hina admits, immediately. "Stop laughing!"
"What?" Erika gasps, between peals of laughter, "it's funny!"
"All right, all right, maybe it's a little funny," Hina admits, and they're both in high spirits when they step through the double doors. The smoke immediately catches in Erika's nostrils, and she wiggles the itchy feeling out of them distractedly. The place is filled with old guys, mostly, and the pachinko machines. Hina's looking across the store at the mah jong table set up there, but Erika looks down just in time to see a roach crawling across the foyer.
"We're leaving," she says, voice tight, and Hina follows her line of sight, looking down. His reaction is instantaneous, a half-audible screech of disgust, and then they're both gone, stumbling through the doors and making similar noises.
"Gross," she groans, "so gross!"
"I hate bugs," Hina grouses, "your turn."
"I've never even been here before!" Erika complains, and steps out on the sidewalk anyway. She turns around and around to catch the storefront signs, and her eye catches on 'La Fleur', a hostess club with half the neon in the name faded to black. "Let's do it," she says.
"They're gonna try and recruit you," Hina points out, and Erika shrugs.
"Wouldn't be the first time," she says, "I just turn on the accent. Come on, come on!"
To their surprise, La Fleur is nearly empty, and the two hostesses on the floor look up with matching expressions of surprise. (And, if Erika's not wrong, a little annoyance, since they're clearly in the midst of some kind of glass-stacking competition.)
"Well," Hina says.
"Looks like we got the wrong address," Erika decides, "sorry to bother you!"
The hostesses are back to their game by the time Erika shoves Hina out the door.
"We should have stayed," Hina says, "they looked like fun!"
"They looked like thirty-five," Erika says, darkly, "and there was no one else there, you would've been stormed by girls looking for your money and I'd have been left out in the cold. We left your friend's party to get away from that."
"I know where we can go next," Hina says, and points out a club tucked back between two bars. 'Tomoya's' is dark when they first step inside, and Erika's about to count this as another bust when the stage lights go up and a trio of scantily-clad men walk down the catwalk.
"Oh my god," Erika squeaks, and then drags Hina past the other customers to sit down in the center of the floor, as near the stage as they can get it. The guy in the middle has a poodle perm that makes his head roughly twice as big, and his backup dancers are a little tentative as they strip out of their sleeveless button-down shirts. Then poodle perm guy gets on the bar, and Erika breaks into enthused giggles, smacking Hina's bicep. "Oh my god we are in a gay strip club," she says, after the show ends and the next set is announced. There are tears of mirth in her eyes; she wipes at them.
Hina's eyeing the poles. "I took poledancing classes for a while," he says, out of nowhere.
"And," Erika says, "you can't just leave that there."
"Tackey and I went! The guy he wanted to hire as stunt choreographer for one of his movies, Tsubasa, he became a dance teacher after he retired, and the only amateur class he taught was poledancing. So we went and did some poledancing until Tackey could convince him to work for him."
"Get to it," Erika says, "I'm sure they'll let you go on between sets!"
Hina makes a noise like a dying donkey; Erika's learned to recognize it as surprised laughter. "Seriously?" he asks.
"Go," she says, "hey! My friend wants to try!"
Which is how Hina winds up doing a striptease to a Perfume number. Erika claps, obnoxiously at first and then more honestly appreciative as his clothing starts to come off. "Oh," she says, when his shirt goes flying, "no one told me those were there!"
Hina is still laughing when he gets to the pole. He doesn't seem quite sure what to do with it, but he sets his shoulders gamely and does some kind of complicated spinning move Erika's not sure she'd be able to replicate right off the bat. Either way, it makes his abs ripple, and she could watch him do it all night. "Come here," Erika says, digging through her purse for spare bills. "It's too bad you're wearing pants," she tells him, and stuffs five thousand-yen notes into the waistband of his jeans.
"I'm not taking off my pants," Hina says, but turns and shakes his ass for a moment before the song ends and he hits a pose. Erika's not sure when she stopped being sloshed and started being legitimately entertained by the whole thing, but the standing ovation she offers is one-hundred-percent real. Hina gathers up his shirts and slides off the stage, ignoring calls from the thong-wearing and glitter-covered proprieter to come back any time.
"Come on," he says, and Erika follows him.
They end up in a conbini somewhere around 3AM. "What's the ettiquette for using money you got from me for dancing on a pole to buy me ice cream?" Erika asks, as she sorts between mini ice cream cartons.
"Buy your own ice cream," Hina says, as he grabs an energy drink and a cookies-and-cream carton.
"Your booty-shaking cleared me out," Erika says, "you can think of it as--as going Dutch!"
"Using money I made fair and square to buy you food is like going Dutch," Hina repeats, sounding like he doesn't believe her.
"You don't sound like you believe me," she says.
Hina rolls his eyes, and buys her the ice cream. They wind up sitting thigh-to-thigh on a park bench in a children's park, eating ice cream straight out of the cartons with plastic spoons and laughing about everything.
"The sun is gonna come up soon," Erika notices, and rifles through her bag, where she was twenty-nine missed calls and three voicemails.
"Erika," Mariko says in the first, "you should call your roommates and tell them you can take care of yourself. I hope you're having a good time!"
"Erika-chaaaan," Nino whines in the next, "bring me ramen on the way home?" (Erika answers that with a text filled only with 'no' over and over again for ten pages.)
"Erika," Ryo says in the last, and he sounds a little nervous, "text me or something so I know you're not in any trouble?" Erika answers his concerns by taking a picture of herself and Hina, spoons sticking sideways out of their wide grins, and sending it to all three of them.
"That should keep them off my back for now," she says.
"You have good friends," Hina says, and she looks up at him.
"I do," she agrees. Then she shifts a little closer. "You know what I don't have?"
"What?" Hina asks, after clearing his throat.
"A boyfriend," she says.
"Oh," Hina says, "are you looking for one?"
"If I meet the right person," she admits, and turns toward him.
He tastes like cookies-and-cream ice cream, and the sharp tang of Red Bull, and Erika's not sure she's ever tasted anything better.
Pairing: Murakami Shingo/Toda Erika, featuring Nishikido Ryo, Ninomiya Kazunari, Takizawa Hideaki, Shinoda Mariko (AKB48)
Rating: PG-13 for a scene in a strip club
Word count: ~3000
Warnings: Idiocy, AU
Summary: Nino and Ryo have Erika's best interests at heart. Really.
Author's Notes: Based very, very loosely off of Ned and Norah's Infinite Playlist. But only very loosely. For dalampasigan during White Day 2012.
"Mariko, I am going to kill them both," Erika says into her phone, as she stares at the sign on her front door. It's plain white paper, written in Nino's chickenscratch handwriting, and taped to the center below the bronze 232 near the top--'Erika, we've blocked the door, don't come home before midnight! Nino and Ryo-chan'. Erika juggles her handbag and her briefcase around to rip it down from the door.
"Why?" Mariko asks, almost infuriatingly calm. Not for the first time, Erika wishes Mariko hadn't moved away after they graduated from college. By all reports Mariko is ecstatic at the Kyoto kindergarten where she's begun work, but Erika's never missed her former roomate more.
"They blocked the door," Erika says, "they say I can't come home before midnight. I have to work on this case!"
"When was the last time you didn't work on a case at night?" Mariko asks.
Erika thinks. "Three days ago?" she guesses, "no, wait, never mind, I started working on that abuse case. Um... a week ago--no, that's not true. I don't. I can't seem to remember."
"Maybe take their advice," Mariko says, and she's very gentle about it. Coming from her it sounds infinitely more reasonable, and Erika sighs.
"All right, fine," she says. She tucks the phone under her chin. "Hey, Nino," she calls, knowing she's not going to get him to answer her any time soon.
"What?" Ryo says from the other side of the door, and Erika kicks it petulantly.
"At least take my briefcase," she says, "or else I'm just going to go to Starbucks and work some more."
The door swings open, and Ryo's hand shoots out. Erika hands the briefcase off, and turns to walk down the hallway. After a moment of staring at the elevator, she walks past, and turns the corner at the top of the banister. "Mariko," she says, "I'll call you tomorrow, provided I'm not hungover."
"Have a good night," Mariko says, voice warm.
"You too," Erika says, as she passes through the half-dark lobby of the apartment building, and folds the phone closed to push it into her bag. There are cars zooming past as she stands, stock-still, at the corner in front of her building, and she chews on her lip as she thinks.
Finally, she turns abruptly left and begins down the sidewalk. There isn't much in the area, but she's intent mostly on finding a bar and getting drunk, and going from there. The first bar she passes seems promising until a pair of leather-clad bikers stumble out with bloody noses and black eyes. Erika ducks around the two big guys, holding her bag close to her chest, and continues down the block. There's a traditional-style place she considers because of how quiet it seems, but even she thinks there might be something sad about a twenty-something woman sitting in a bar drinking sake all alone next to a bunch of salarymen, and she walks by.
The third bar is loud, of course, and there's a crowd, but the band playing inside--the chalkboard outside calls them 'Five Flat Flowers', and Erika thinks she's heard the name before--is good, even from out on the street. Erika's immensely glad work doesn't require a suit; her blouse might be a bit fancy for this crowd, but over jeans and in the dark she doesn't think it's noticeable. She finds the bar quickly enough, and ducks between two groups of guys to slide onto a stool. "Gin and tonic on the rocks, please," she says, and the bartender nods briskly at her before he turns to mix it. It's between her hands shortly, and she takes a long sip before she turns on her seat, crossing her right leg over her left at the knee to watch the band perform. They're punk, or close enough, which Erika is remarkably fond of after long nights spent listening to Nino and Ryo's acoustic-piano sound; the frontman is a wiry, long-haired guy with a soaring voice, and Erika likes the sound of it. She finds the toe of her right sneaker bopping along quickly enough, and doesn't regret it at all.
"Hey, can I buy you another?"
Erika turns in her chair. The guy leaning on the bar next to her is wearing a green plaid button-down open over a gray t-shirt and jeans; Erika doesn't think the combination quite goes, but he doesn't seem too drunk as he looks at her expectantly.
"I don't let strange men buy me alcohol," she tells him.
The man laughs, loud, and Erika finds herself charmed by it, inexplicably. "Murakami Shingo," he says, and sticks his hand out to her.
Erika puts her mostly empty glass (when did that happen, she wonders) down on the counter, wipes her slick palms on the thighs of her jeans, and reaches forward to shake his hand. "Toda Erika," she says, "you a fan of the band?"
"No, I'm their agent," Murakami says, and the longer he talks the more obvious his accent is. "Are you a fan?"
Erika slips into Kansaiben easily. "No, but my roommates are, I think," she says, "they kicked me out tonight, said I need to have some fun. I work too much, apparently!"
Murakami blinks, looking taken aback, and then presses on. "What do you do?" he asks.
"I'm a social worker," she says, "I work with kids. Is this all some attempt to not be a strange man and buy me a drink?"
"You caught me," Murakami answers, "sometimes a guy needs to get to know a strange, beautiful woman sitting alone at a rock show and liquor her up."
Erika breaks into giggles at that. "All right, when you put it that way you're not so strange, Murakami Shingo. You're welcome to buy me a drink, if you want."
"Aiba," Murakami roars, making her jump, "get the lady another! And can I get another beer here?"
"Hina-chan," the bartender chides as he pours a beer, "don't yell in her ear."
Erika rolls her eyes. "I grew up in Osaka," she says, loudly enough to be heard as the band rockets into a clatter of instruments, "one loud guy is nothing!"
"And don't be nosy," Murakami snaps, reaching over to smack the other man over the head in what is unmistakeably a tsukkomi.
The band begins to wrap up as Erika guzzles down her second drink between laughing at Murakami--Hina, he says, after a minute or two of conversation. She finds out in short order that he's an agent for a record company, he's single, and he's been living in Tokyo for three years, not that anyone can tell because of his accent. He likes soccer--he likes soccer a lot--and hanging out with his friends, including the members of Five Flat Flowers, who he's known since high school. He wanted to be a comedian after high school, but he couldn't seem to keep a partner and wound up getting a communications degree. He's energetic and optimistic, and he seems to know everyone in the entire bar, or at least be on his way to it. When the set winds down and the frontman--he introduces himself as Subaru, after a poke to the ribs from Hina--suggests they try crashing a party thrown by a guy named 'Tackey', Erika doesn't hesitate at all before accepting Hina's invitation.
It's not often she meets someone who's able to catch the rhythm of her conversations so quickly, and she's not willing to let him go just yet. She pushes down butterflies as she ducks into his passenger seat, and they take the twenty-minute ride to an ostentatious high-rise near Nichome with conversation bouncing back and forth between them. Hina laughs at her jokes, even the ones she's pretty sure aren't actually funny, and she's giggling most of the time, too. Hina parks the car in the lot under the apartment, and the sixteen-floor elevator trip is effortless.
Tackey turns out to be Takizawa Hideaki, the director, and the first thing Erika says when Hina introduces them is that 'Nino is going to be so jealous'. Tackey laughs, and she shakes his hand. Tackey is a strange guy, Erika discovers immediately, when he points out a weird tree-decorated clock and begins to tell her the story of how Hina bought a matching pair of them while he was in Rome. Erika listens, caught up by his energy and the charisma that's made him so famous among filmmakers, and doesn't notice Hina's disappeared until Tackey says something that's a perfect boke and there's no follow-up smack.
"Where did he go?" she asks, making a face.
"Who, Shingo?" Tackey asks, "if we see him again for an hour or two, I'll be surprised. For such a violent guy, he's some kind of social butterfly."
The feeling that rises up in Erika at that surprises her; she doesn't usually feel cheapened by being befriended by someone popular (Nino's her roommate, after all), but knowing that somewhere else Hina could be introducing himself to some other strange, beautiful woman makes the ugly burn of jealousy spark in her chest. She shoves it down just in time to see Hina pass by, and reaches out to catch her fingers in his sleeve before she overthinks herself. Hina jerks when her grip pulls on him, and he rounds on them, confusion written over his brow.
"I see you're the kind of guy who invites a girl to a party and then leaves her with his friend," Erika says, arching an eyebrow at him.
"No," Hina says, "I just--I had to say hello to a guy, and I got caught up in having a drink with a guy I work with! And I left you with Tackey, didn't I?"
"I didn't come here with Tackey, did I?"
Hina looks surprised, as if her meaning is only now becoming clear to him. His hand is hot against her elbow when he curls his fingers around her arm. "We should try somewhere else, then," he says, leaning down into her ear to say it.
She quirks her lips at him. "Let's go," she says, and shakes his hand off to wind her fingers through his and drag him toward the front door.
The night air is brisk against her skin when they get out onto the sidewalk; the air in Takizawa's apartment had been crowded and muggy, though she hadn't noticed at the time. Now, with Hina's hand the only thing warming her body, she leans closer. His body radiates heat, she finds, like a noisy radiator, and Hina extricates his hand from hers long enough to wrap an arm around her shoulders in short order.
"So where should we go?" he asks.
"Where's somewhere you've never been that you wanted to try?" she asks.
"The pachinko parlor a block over," Hina admits, immediately. "Stop laughing!"
"What?" Erika gasps, between peals of laughter, "it's funny!"
"All right, all right, maybe it's a little funny," Hina admits, and they're both in high spirits when they step through the double doors. The smoke immediately catches in Erika's nostrils, and she wiggles the itchy feeling out of them distractedly. The place is filled with old guys, mostly, and the pachinko machines. Hina's looking across the store at the mah jong table set up there, but Erika looks down just in time to see a roach crawling across the foyer.
"We're leaving," she says, voice tight, and Hina follows her line of sight, looking down. His reaction is instantaneous, a half-audible screech of disgust, and then they're both gone, stumbling through the doors and making similar noises.
"Gross," she groans, "so gross!"
"I hate bugs," Hina grouses, "your turn."
"I've never even been here before!" Erika complains, and steps out on the sidewalk anyway. She turns around and around to catch the storefront signs, and her eye catches on 'La Fleur', a hostess club with half the neon in the name faded to black. "Let's do it," she says.
"They're gonna try and recruit you," Hina points out, and Erika shrugs.
"Wouldn't be the first time," she says, "I just turn on the accent. Come on, come on!"
To their surprise, La Fleur is nearly empty, and the two hostesses on the floor look up with matching expressions of surprise. (And, if Erika's not wrong, a little annoyance, since they're clearly in the midst of some kind of glass-stacking competition.)
"Well," Hina says.
"Looks like we got the wrong address," Erika decides, "sorry to bother you!"
The hostesses are back to their game by the time Erika shoves Hina out the door.
"We should have stayed," Hina says, "they looked like fun!"
"They looked like thirty-five," Erika says, darkly, "and there was no one else there, you would've been stormed by girls looking for your money and I'd have been left out in the cold. We left your friend's party to get away from that."
"I know where we can go next," Hina says, and points out a club tucked back between two bars. 'Tomoya's' is dark when they first step inside, and Erika's about to count this as another bust when the stage lights go up and a trio of scantily-clad men walk down the catwalk.
"Oh my god," Erika squeaks, and then drags Hina past the other customers to sit down in the center of the floor, as near the stage as they can get it. The guy in the middle has a poodle perm that makes his head roughly twice as big, and his backup dancers are a little tentative as they strip out of their sleeveless button-down shirts. Then poodle perm guy gets on the bar, and Erika breaks into enthused giggles, smacking Hina's bicep. "Oh my god we are in a gay strip club," she says, after the show ends and the next set is announced. There are tears of mirth in her eyes; she wipes at them.
Hina's eyeing the poles. "I took poledancing classes for a while," he says, out of nowhere.
"And," Erika says, "you can't just leave that there."
"Tackey and I went! The guy he wanted to hire as stunt choreographer for one of his movies, Tsubasa, he became a dance teacher after he retired, and the only amateur class he taught was poledancing. So we went and did some poledancing until Tackey could convince him to work for him."
"Get to it," Erika says, "I'm sure they'll let you go on between sets!"
Hina makes a noise like a dying donkey; Erika's learned to recognize it as surprised laughter. "Seriously?" he asks.
"Go," she says, "hey! My friend wants to try!"
Which is how Hina winds up doing a striptease to a Perfume number. Erika claps, obnoxiously at first and then more honestly appreciative as his clothing starts to come off. "Oh," she says, when his shirt goes flying, "no one told me those were there!"
Hina is still laughing when he gets to the pole. He doesn't seem quite sure what to do with it, but he sets his shoulders gamely and does some kind of complicated spinning move Erika's not sure she'd be able to replicate right off the bat. Either way, it makes his abs ripple, and she could watch him do it all night. "Come here," Erika says, digging through her purse for spare bills. "It's too bad you're wearing pants," she tells him, and stuffs five thousand-yen notes into the waistband of his jeans.
"I'm not taking off my pants," Hina says, but turns and shakes his ass for a moment before the song ends and he hits a pose. Erika's not sure when she stopped being sloshed and started being legitimately entertained by the whole thing, but the standing ovation she offers is one-hundred-percent real. Hina gathers up his shirts and slides off the stage, ignoring calls from the thong-wearing and glitter-covered proprieter to come back any time.
"Come on," he says, and Erika follows him.
They end up in a conbini somewhere around 3AM. "What's the ettiquette for using money you got from me for dancing on a pole to buy me ice cream?" Erika asks, as she sorts between mini ice cream cartons.
"Buy your own ice cream," Hina says, as he grabs an energy drink and a cookies-and-cream carton.
"Your booty-shaking cleared me out," Erika says, "you can think of it as--as going Dutch!"
"Using money I made fair and square to buy you food is like going Dutch," Hina repeats, sounding like he doesn't believe her.
"You don't sound like you believe me," she says.
Hina rolls his eyes, and buys her the ice cream. They wind up sitting thigh-to-thigh on a park bench in a children's park, eating ice cream straight out of the cartons with plastic spoons and laughing about everything.
"The sun is gonna come up soon," Erika notices, and rifles through her bag, where she was twenty-nine missed calls and three voicemails.
"Erika," Mariko says in the first, "you should call your roommates and tell them you can take care of yourself. I hope you're having a good time!"
"Erika-chaaaan," Nino whines in the next, "bring me ramen on the way home?" (Erika answers that with a text filled only with 'no' over and over again for ten pages.)
"Erika," Ryo says in the last, and he sounds a little nervous, "text me or something so I know you're not in any trouble?" Erika answers his concerns by taking a picture of herself and Hina, spoons sticking sideways out of their wide grins, and sending it to all three of them.
"That should keep them off my back for now," she says.
"You have good friends," Hina says, and she looks up at him.
"I do," she agrees. Then she shifts a little closer. "You know what I don't have?"
"What?" Hina asks, after clearing his throat.
"A boyfriend," she says.
"Oh," Hina says, "are you looking for one?"
"If I meet the right person," she admits, and turns toward him.
He tastes like cookies-and-cream ice cream, and the sharp tang of Red Bull, and Erika's not sure she's ever tasted anything better.
