Chapter 2: Twenty-One Years Is a Long Time to Forget a Pinky Promise

Twenty-one years later, and the world is a completely different place.

Inoe is staring at her computer screen at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, and her eyes are so dry they might actually crumble into dust. The 3D character model on her screen is staring back at her with soulless eyes, and honestly? She relates.

"If I adjust the polygon count one more time, I swear I am going to lose my mind," she mutters, pushing her long black hair behind her ear.

Her desk at Kitao Company is covered in energy drink cans, sticky notes with incomprehensible scribbles, and a small cactus named Gerald that she talks to when no one is around.

"Gerald, why is the rigging on this character so broken? Look at this. Her arm bends backwards. That is not how arms work."

Gerald, being a cactus, says nothing.

"Helpful as always."

Inoe is thirty-one years old now, and she is a Model Artist and Senior Game Developer at one of the biggest gaming companies in Japan. She is incredibly good at her job. Like, scary good. The kind of good where people whisper "she is a genius" in the hallways and she has absolutely no idea because she is too busy talking to her cactus.

She is also still very, very shy.

"Kobayashi-san," her coworker Tanaka pops his head over the cubicle wall. "The CEO apparently reviewed our project proposal and loved it. There is a company-wide email about it."

Inoe blinks. "The CEO? I have never even seen the CEO. Does anyone know what he looks like?"

Tanaka shrugs. "Apparently he is young. Like, our age. That is all I know."

"Huh," Inoe says, and goes back to fixing the backwards arm because honestly, who cares about CEOs when there are polygons to wrangle.

Meanwhile, approximately forty-seven kilometers away, Ikuza is organizing his bookshelf by the Dewey Decimal System because apparently that is what he does for fun now.

His apartment is small but immaculate. Everything has a place. His shoes are lined up by the door in order of frequency of use. His refrigerator has labels on the shelves. His spice rack is alphabetized.

He works at a local company in the accounting department. It is not glamorous. It is not exciting. But Ikuza shows up every single day at exactly 8:45 AM, fifteen minutes before his shift, because that is who he is.

"Punctuality is the politeness of kings," he says to nobody, straightening his tie in the mirror.

His red hair is still short, his glasses are still slightly too serious for his face, and he still has the expression of someone who is perpetually unimpressed with the universe.

He is also thirty-one and has never had a girlfriend.

Not because he is unattractive - quite the opposite, actually. Several women at his workplace have tried. One even left a love letter in his locker, which he found, read, corrected the grammar errors with a red pen, and returned.

She did not try again.

The truth is, there is only one person who has ever made Ikuza's perfectly organized heart skip a beat, and he met her during his first semester at Tokyo University.

Her name is Yumi.

But he does not think about that. He files it away in the mental folder labeled "Unnecessary Emotional Data" and gets on with his life.

Speaking of Yumi, she is currently in her corner office at the top floor of Hanabi Beauty Corporation, spinning in her executive chair like a child while her assistant stands there holding a stack of papers and questioning all of his life choices.

"Wheeeee!"

"Takahashi-sama, the board meeting is in five minutes."

Yumi stops spinning. Her long purple hair is a magnificent disaster around her face. She grins. "Tell them I will be fashionably late."

"You said that last time and showed up forty minutes late eating a crepe."

"And it is a delicious crepe! Your point?"

Yumi is twenty-nine, the CEO of a beauty empire, and has the energy of a golden retriever that just discovers caffeine. Her father built the company from the ground up, and Yumi took it to the stratosphere with her terrifying combination of business savvy and absolute zero shame.

She is also hopelessly, desperately, embarrassingly in love with one person.

Kitao.

The same Kitao who is, at this exact moment, sitting in HIS corner office at Kitao Gaming Corporation, stacking empty coffee cups into a pyramid and ignoring three urgent emails.

His orange hair is still ridiculous. His smile is still too wide. And he is still, after all these years, thinking about a girl with black hair and a laugh like tiny bells.

"Inoe..." he murmurs, staring at his computer screen where her employee profile photo sits.

He clicks it closed when his assistant walks in.

"Sir, the quarterly review-"

"Later! I am doing something important!"

He is not doing anything important. He is drawing a tiny face on a sticky note and giving it pigtails.

Four people. Four wildly different lives. And none of them have any idea that the universe is about to grab them all by the collar and throw them back together in the most chaotic, hilarious, heart-wrenching reunion of all time.

Twenty-one years is a long time to forget a pinky promise.

But some promises have a funny way of keeping themselves.