Chapter 2

Getting up early was something that you’d been forced into by your job. If you had your way you would be a night owl and sleep in until 11 AM every morning, but the founder of the startup you worked for was one of those ‘early bird gets the worm’ kind of guys who did CrossFit in his spare time, so you were expected at your desk at the office at a miserable 8:30 AM, which meant you usually needed to be up by 7 AM to get ready for the day and make the commute.

Unfortunately, you had quickly learned, sleeping in on the weekend would fuck with your ability to get up on Monday, so you had to be up anyways. This did have the silver lining of being able to get up to make breakfast for your guest.

“Ollie!” Hikaru said loudly when she came out of your guest room. “I was going to make you breakfast this morning.”

That room had once been your home office, but you’d happily shifted things around in the apartment when Hikaru Crockman had called you to ask if you could put her up for a little while. She was your cousin by marriage, which was fairly obvious considering how utterly white you were and how completely Japanese she was. Well, mostly Japanese. Apparently she was a quarter Korean and a quarter White. Her father had married your Aunt Liz and brought Hikaru into the family with him. She was a few years younger than you, but the first time you met her she’d been such a sweet little kid who spoke in Japanese half the time and stumbled through English in such a cute way that you couldn’t help but make sure she felt welcome and started learning the language better.

That had been more than a decade and a half ago now, and your step-cousin had graduated college and was moving to the city to look for work.

“Well, I got here first so you’re just going to have to eat what I make you,” you said with a little grin. It had become a thing in the last couple of weeks since she’d arrived - even though she didn’t have a job to go to yet, she woke up early with you and tried to make sure you had something to eat on your way out the door. That first weekend you’d woken up to waffles. Now you wanted to treat her back.

“No, no, no,” Hikaru shook her head, stomping over to the kitchen and starting to push you. She was a tall girl but almost willowy thin so the pushing didn’t have much effect against your weight, but she was insistent so you let her move you. “I need to pay you back somehow, Ollie. You can’t just do everything for me.”

“I can if I want,” you teased her.

“I’m better in the kitchen than you anyways,” she said, frowning and pushing you out of the kitchen entirely.

“That’s big talk coming from the girl who used to only eat rice,” you teased her.

“Yeah, when I was six,” Hikaru said. “Now go sit at the table.”

“Alright, alright,” you sighed. You weren’t used to other people doing things around your apartment for you, so it felt weird letting Hikaru do stuff in the kitchen. You went and, instead of sitting, grabbed some plates, cups and cutlery and set the table before sitting down. From there you could see Hikaru working in the kitchen, but not what she was working on. Her hair was lighter nowadays, though only half of that was from her mixed genes and the other half was from her adding some auburn highlights to accent the natural waves in her hair. She was dressed in a cute little t-shirt that you hadn’t seen before that had characters from Studio Ghibli films chasing each other around the front and back in a continuous circle, and as she worked she had a soft smile on her face. When she glanced up and saw you looking at her she blushed a little and then scowled at you playfully.

You blushed in return, feeling silly for getting caught looking at her, and you took out your phone.

Hannah had texted you again before her early morning run, reminding you that you needed to swipe twenty times on that dating app again today. It was supposed to be the last day, thankfully, and maybe she’d leave off of her campaign.

You opened the app and started swiping. There were a few scantily-clad women who immediately screamed either Scam or Prostitute to you, and a few more who were obviously just there to advertise their Instagram accounts. Then there were the women that you were a little hypocritical about saying no to - you certainly weren’t a physical catch or specimen by any means, but you should at least feel some spark of attraction to someone you swiped positive on, right? You swiped right on two women in total. One was a girl who looked kind of average-pretty, but your years of spending hours in the character select screen of various games told you with a different haircut she’d probably be way prettier. The other was a woman who was clearly way out of your league, who worked in recruitment and headhunting. You weren’t sure whether she was really there for the dating app, or just trolling for potential clients since this was supposed to be an app for nerds to meet and date.