It wasn’t like Haruka was begging his parents for money. He was about to argue, but he shut his mouth. He wanted to tell her that he was using the dividends from the little investments he’d made in elementary school whenever he came to get coffee, but she probably would believe that even less than his reasons for hanging out at a café every day.
When he’d told his high school friends about it, most of them had thought that he was bluffing. They’d just laughed at him, saying he was flaunting his parent’s money. Keiichi was pretty much the only one who took him at his word.
“I guess I’ll stay at the café until eight today.”
“Why? Ah, this is the one, Haruka-kun!” Kotono said with a smile as she pointed at a building. Once they were all alone in the elevator, the subject changed to a delivery from the day before, and he lost the chance to say that it was because he wanted to talk with her more.
When they were finished with their delivery and were about to head back to the café, Kotono stopped, asking him to wait a second.
“Haruka-kun, there’s somewhere I want to go. Will you come with me?”
“Huh? When?”
“Right now.”
Haruka agreed, despite being a bit confused, and Kotono called Yurinoki and let the master know that she was taking her break.
The place they were headed was a promenade beside Shinjuku Gyoen Park. There was a crowd of people there, all looking up at the ginkgo tree. Despite the fact that there was no wind, the leaves were falling without any pause, making golden mountains on the ground.
“We made it. They started falling before I came into work today, so I was worried they’d all have fallen by now. It’s ginkgo day. Just like magic, isn’t it? Today, autumn ends, and winter begins. I wanted to show you this moment I love, Haruka-kun.”
Apparently, Kotono had learned how the ginkgo leaves fall from a poem two years earlier and had started walking the promenade before going to work around this season to catch sight of it.
As they watched the ginkgo leaves silently fall, they chatted about nothing in particular. He had time to tell her about himself, and how he felt about her. But all he could do was look at her profile from the side, staying silent.
“That café was why you became a cat lover, wasn’t it?” Keiichi asked, picking up a ginkgo leaf and spinning it by the stem with his fingertips.
“Now that you mention it, you might be right.”
Alstroemeria had originally been the cat of one of Yurinoki’s regulars. After they passed away, none of their relatives had been able to take her, so the master adopted her. He’d said that customers stopped coming once he made the café nonsmoking for the cat’s sake, so they started doing delivery.
“At first, I’d been interested in it because I wondered how it stayed open,” Haruka said.
Ever since he was little, whenever he’d go out to eat with his family, they’d start observing. The moment they liked a place, they would research what company ran it, or what the parent organization was, or if they were listed on the stock market. His family was one where they’d check out how a place was being run and chat about each of their observations as they ate.
“Your folks like thinking about that stuff, huh?”
“They really do. Whenever we stayed at a hotel, whenever we ate, even when we were on a trip overseas, it’d all be like an observation. Of course, I couldn’t think of anything else but getting out on my own.”
Becoming a restaurant consultant was a familiar job for Haruka to take, and he had decided early on that he’d make that his main focus and branch out from there.
“They’d been so good to me, but I just stopped going there all of a sudden,” Haruka murmured, only for Keiichi to give him a look like he wanted to say something. “I’m only saying it because it’s in the past now, but really, I liked Kotono-san, not the cat.”
“I know.”
He hadn’t said anything, but he’d thought that Keiichi would have noticed.
“But Kotono-san loved books and would always just talk to you,” Haruka added. “Just who was it who told me to join a band if I wanted to get popular?”
“Oh yeah, you had a guitar, didn’t you?”
At the time Haruka had an electric guitar set. While he’d enthusiastically recruited classmates to join his band, they’d broken up immediately after. He had barely touched the guitar since buying it. That much was obvious, seeing as he couldn’t even play one song.
“Well, whatever I tried didn’t matter,” Haruka said. “She had a boyfriend, after all. And when we were out doing deliveries, she’d get hit on, since she was so charming.”
One day, when Haruka had planned on matching the time he went home to when she got off so he could invite her out, her boyfriend had come to pick her up. He was in his mid-thirties and worked at an office nearby. The guy had showed him his adult composure, asking if Haruka and Keiichi were the rumored cool high schoolers he’d heard about. He remembered it had pissed him off to no end.
Wanting to get her attention, he stopped going to the café for a while. But once he’d stopped, it just got harder to go, and he started making excuses for not going, like how there was better coffee at home, and how he could laze around there without worrying about the time. Keiichi never really said anything about it, and he began hanging around Haruka’s house again.
Looking back, it would have gone better if he’d quit the mature act and started acting friendlier. He knew that well after interacting with cats.
“Thinking back, it was a pretty amazing place. When we’d go there for coffee and loiter around, the master fed us like we were just bonuses with the cat. Though both of us ate it as if it was nothing.”
Keiichi put a hand to his chin, looking a little bit upward. “I do the same sort of thing at Undecimber Garden.”
“Huh, really?”
“There’s one person who’s started coming when I’m getting stuff prepped in the evening, saying they can help by sampling the food. I didn’t ask them, but…I understand the feeling of wanting to feed someone when they’re there.”
“Oh yeah, you’re serving some food lately, huh?”