“I can’t do that. She’s hurting and I want to be here now.”

Noriko listened to the silence following those words. Kyoko spoke on the phone, with Yukio most likely.

“No! Look there’s a guard in a car outside, and I don’t care that you don’t trust Kuri-chan.”

What? Trust Kuri?

“Yes. Noriko’s hurt and you just have to wait, OK!” A hard, rapping sound told Noriko Kyoko had slapped the phone to the table a little harder than was good for it. “Damn he can be so stubborn sometimes.”

Kyoko came back from her call and clasped Noriko’s hands in her own. As if that had been a signal, Kuri rose and punched a call of her own.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk it over with Nao-kun?” Kyoko wondered for the umpteenth time.

Noriko shook her head. Talking with Nao was the last she wanted to do right now. First she had to wrap her head around his message. Slept with a girl? That can’t mean… can it? But there really was only one way to interpret the message. But maybe I read it wrong.

She needed her phone to know for sure, but she had lost it somewhere.

“I don’t care. Cancel the shoot.”

Noriko felt Kyoko flinch at those words. Going back on a promise to work was alien to her. Noriko could understand why one might have to, but on a fundamental level she agreed with Kyoko on this.

“No. You stupid little fuck. Mess with me and I’ll trash the next shoot, so just cancel this one and shut the hell up!”

This time both Noriko and Kyoko flinched.

“Yes, I can sit this one out. For two years and start working in Europe instead if I have to. Wrap your tiny brain around that you shit-head!”

Kuri didn’t slam her phone to the table, but it disappeared into a pocket in her baggy clothes. She’d changed into them a little earlier when her bodyguard arrived at Noriko’s home for the second time, this one with two bikes and a bag of clothes.

The first he’d joined them in the car driven by the escort assigned to Kyoko and Yukio. The other half of that escort waited at school for Yukio to finish. Three bodyguards, plus the one Vogue sometimes added when the magazine deemed it too dangerous for Kuri to be out with only one guard.

Who was that?” Noriko asked. Anything was better than talking about Nao.

“My boss.”

Noriko flinched again. Talking with someone superior in that way was alien to her.

“Look, Noriko, he made me go through what you’re feeling now, and I had to do it to myself.”

I suspected as much.

“Besides, he’s powerless if I quit modelling.” Noriko felt Kuri’s hands caressing her head. Long, slender fingers, entirely different than her own small ones. “He already cost me my love. I’ll be damned if I’ll let him have my friends as well.”

Noriko looked up and met Kuri’s eyes. “Your still not supposed to behave like that in Japan.”

“I’m not Japanese. I’ll never be. Given the way they treat women here I don’t want to.” The last came out like a whiplash. “Urufu is tedious with his comparing with Sweden all the time, but don’t believe for one second that I don’t agree with him!”

Kuri’s sudden wrath almost had Noriko want to talk about Nao again. Almost. I forgot she’s hurting as well. I didn’t know it could hurt this way. Noriko fought down her tears. She wasn’t the emotional kind anyway, and she really didn’t want to burden her friends with how empty she felt after Nao’s message, or how her self-image was one of a discarded dishcloth. She didn’t want them to see…

Two pairs of arms wrapped her in a hug, and Noriko broke down again, just like she had done over and over the last hours.

He slept with a girl?

Then what she really wondered, and what really hurt struck her. He slept with a girl who wasn’t me? Thinking that was oddly disturbing. Not once had she tried, or even wanted, to get into bed with Nao, but now, now after that message, Noriko felt betrayed because Nao hadn’t tried to seduce her first.

I’m not rational. But then again, rational didn’t hurt this way. Rational wasn’t raw emotions. Rational wasn’t love.

“What the hell?”

Kuri’s voice broke Noriko’s chain of thought, and she felt Kuri release her embrace and fish up her phone to get yet another incoming call.

“Ulf, why is he calling me?”

Despite the pain in her chest Noriko heard how Kuri’s voice almost broke.

“Christina here, you want something?”

A few moments of silence followed.

“Noriko, it’s for you.”

For me? Noriko took the phone. “Yes?”

“It’s me, Ulf,” Urufu said. “I have your phone. Do you want me to hand it to your brother, or should I hold on to it until we meet next?”

Would be easiest to have Ryu handle it. But Noriko knew her brother would rummage through the contents of her phone if he got his hands on it. “Would you keep it for me?”

“Will do. I’ll have if fixed as well.”

Fixed?

“It’s in pretty bad shape.”

Bad shape? Oh, yes, I dropped it on the floor. Then Noriko recalled how expensive it was to get phones repaired. “Eh, Urufu, don’t mind. I’ll handle that part myself.”

“No problem,” came the voice from the other end. “It’s only money. Until a while ago I had a reason to save them, but it’s no longer there.”

Urufu, you do know that your voice can be heard in our end as well? Noriko looked up and met Kuri’s eyes just as she flinched. Yeah, she heard al-right. You had no reason hurting her.

But that wasn’t true. That wasn’t true at all. Kuri clinging to her idiot bro was enough to make Noriko want to hurt her, or at least had been until Nao’s message.

“Whatever, just as long as I’m not without a phone for too long,” Noriko said. Moments later she finished the call.

Thank you Urufu. Making me worry about something different took my mind off Nao.

Had that been the purpose? With Urufu you never knew.

“Feeling better?” Kuri asked. “He knows how to make you angry in a good way. Up to some tea and sweet pastries?”

“Bribing me?” Noriko said.

“Sure are,” Kyoko said from her place behind Noriko. “Bribing is good.”

Noriko smiled for the first time that afternoon and rose to her feet. “Consider me bribed.”

***

A few days earlier he had given Urufu a questioning look, or at least Ryu hoped he had. Still, in the end Urufu never budged one bit. He held on to Noriko’s phone and left Ryu to fend off the incessant attacks from the foreign girl. She’d be called Jeniferu-chan if she joined club, Coperu-san otherwise, but her joining was pretty much a given, so Ryu decided to go for the former.

“Look, Jeniferu-chan, I already have a girlfriend,” Ryu said, when the girl made herself comfortable by his table at the café.

Jeniferu-chan ate half of her biscuit and met his eyes. “She’s about as much in love with you as I am,” she said.

Dammit, you could at least pretend to be taken in by my princely charms like the rest of the girls. Ryu smirked, but then he felt his smirk twist into a grin. Jeniferu-chan was a little devil, but she was an irresistible one.

“I guess you played merry hell with the boys at your middle school,” Ryu said.

Jeniferu-chan looked up from her coffee, absent-mindedly dipped her biscuit in it and ate the second half. “What if I did?” She dropped her spoon and it fell onto the plate with a clattering. It almost sounded angry. “Boys are either too shy to say what they want, or take what they want without asking first.”

You’re a cynical one. “Look, I’m going out with Kuri, so just give up, will you?” And this was the real reason he was on a date with a girl other than his girlfriend. With said girlfriend just a door away. The date was Kuri’s idea in the first place. “You’re giving me a bad reputation, not to speak about your own.”

“Bad reputation? This is our clubroom, isn’t it?” Jeniferu-chan said and swept dramatically with her arm around the café.

Ryu downed his own coffee, waved to James for another one, and looked at the girl sitting across the table. Cute, but no match for Kuri after all. But damn what a presence.

Around them boys and girls alike either glared at them or threw them admiring glances. Kuri, what were you thinking? “Actually, it’s in there,” Ryu said. He pointed his table spoon in the direction of the door behind the counter. As is Kuri, he thought.

The two of them came here more and more often thee days. Club hours were a convenient excuse, but mostly they did so to get away from all the attention at school. And that made Jeniferu-chan a major pain, because she glued herself to him as far as Kuri tolerated her.

“OK, if we make you an official member, will you play nice then?”

“Sure. Long term I’m more interested in that Swedish guy anyway.”

Cynical indeed. “Which of them?” Ryu asked, but he already guessed the answer.

“So force him to join as well,” Jeniferu-chan said and surprised him.

What, not Urufu? Maybe a sulking Urufu wasn’t all that attractive. Which brought Ryu to his second problem. Kuri and him coming here almost every day Kuri didn’t have a photo shoot meant Urufu was demonstratively absent. He avoided Kuri to a degree that made Ai-chan seem almost clingy in comparison.

On top of it all Noriko seemed more morose than Ryu ever recalled her being, but she flat out refused to tell him what it was all about. Some kind of falling out with Nao-kun, that much was clear, because the tall senior never showed up with Noriko on his arm.

“Some kind of answer would be good,” Jeniferu-chan said.

“Uh, sorry. Sure, you’re both members.”

“That quick?”

“Anything that stops you from making me look like a two timer,” Ryu responded and shot her an angry look.

“Maybe I’ll have the other Swede by the side. Like a snack.”

You bastard! “Wouldn’t it make you look bad if you went after Kuri’s discarded belongings.” I’m sorry for using your name like this, Kuri. “But then maybe that’s the best you can get.”

It was a dirty way to protect his friend.

“Discarded? I’ll make him shine so everyone understands she couldn’t keep up with him.”

Damn brat! But you probably could. Besides, who was he to decide whom Urufu got attached to? “I’d shoot you down. Prince of Himekaizen here.” Still, he just had to try protecting Urufu anyway. Jeniferu-chan was bad news.

The short period of grace time ended, and the café filled up with students from Irishima High who took longer time to walk here, Ai-chan among them, and in that crowd Kuri’s stalkers mixed in. Ryu saw her long term bodyguard move closer to the counter, and the escort Vogue had assigned to her entered through the door.

The joys of being famous.

Right now Ryu felt a sense of gratitude that their school uniforms were kind of drab. Kuri in Irishima High’s traditional sailor uniform, well, there was more than one way to be cruel to boys.

“Falling in love with your girlfriend?”

Ryu flinched and stared at Jeniferu-chan. What was that all about?

“You know, I can help with this. I’m not really an arse, but if you treat me like one I’ll behave accordingly,” she said. She looked at him, and at the moment she was merely cute. “I understand you’re torn between your ex and your girl, but don’t you think it’s better if all three of you talked it over.”

“None of your business,” Ryu barked.

Jeniferu-chan gulped down the remains of her coffee and tilted her head sideways. “I just made it my business.” Then she turned and faced the counter. “Christina, you can come out now,” she shouted in English.

“What do you think...”

“Stuff it! I’ll handle the stalkers.”

The door behind the counter opened and Kuri entered the café proper. Just as the first camera flashes started blinking from a multitude of phones Jeniferu-chan rose from her chair.

Ryu just had time to see her flash a devastating smile before she dialled her presence up to eleven and blasted everyone in the café with a wave of charisma.

Damn, why do every freak have to end up in our school? Ryu hardly had time to finish that thought before he noticed how quite a few girls glared at Jeniferu-chan and then threw him longing glances. Fine, including me. Still, why?