Overt opposition and rivalry might be easier to manage, after all Izaya had prearranged ways of dealing with upstarts but there was nothing in his vocabulary regarding strange vows of affection. For that Izaya was utterly unprepared.
Izaya received innumerable solicitations for easy sex with no strings attached. The offers came from beautiful women and quite a few men as well, from the many hostesses and hosts that populated the glossy underworld of seduction. Tokyo's night people. It amused him considerably that only they applied, the plain and average either did not covet him or believed themselves excluded by default. Odds were it was a mixture of both.
The sleek creatures that made such advances knew the rules of the game: they never offer, expected or even dreamed of demanding actual love. And the more indifferent Izaya proved the greater his allure grew. He knew very well that the hosting industry, whether its lower echelons that bordered on prostitution or highly rarefied clubs, was jaded to notions of love. In that they were like Izaya himself in being unable to fully experience the scope of human emotion as others did.
Izaya turned them down ever so expertly and added fuel to the fire by simply letting a few hints that rapidly blazed into full blown rumors merrily sustaining itself and even growing in volume as people added bits and pieces. And so Izaya built the myth of being a bisexual playboy when in fact he remained a virgin.
It amused Izaya to no end. No one would ever believe that his sexual experience was none whatsoever. The best way to create fiction was to weave truth in its midst. That he was the object of desire of Tokyo's most attractive people was true: that he reciprocated in kind was not.
In fact, Izaya spent precious little time considering sex and never saw it as an actual viable option. Even the simple physical aspect bothered him somewhat. It displaced him from being in control. His sex drive being almost nonexistent suited him just fine. What he lacked in libido Izaya more than compensated by the endorphin rush he got whenever things went according to his complex and minute machinations.
Izaya started at the cube again, the colors falling into a pattern with preternatural speed as his fingers worked. It was perhaps not entirely true that no one knew just how little interest Izaya had in sex. He suspected without being able to tell for sure that Shinra at least knew.
It did not matter because in this too Izaya expected Shinra to hold his peace. If it was true that Izaya's entire existence had been a convoluted avoidance of intimacy honed to an entire life philosophy his memory had a flawless quality to it: Izaya could never forget some semi-ambiguous words exchanged once upon a time. He had simply chosen to interpret them in the most neutral of ways and thus maintained his status quo in relation to Shinra.
But Kadota made it impossible to seek refuge in subterfuge. It left no room for Izaya to squirm his way back to the way things used to be and this was enough to terrify him. One of Izaya's tenets was that of keeping the same tone in his relationships with others. People often mistook him for one thing – some were even reckless enough to think him harmless – or they might even not know that he existed at all until Izaya corrected them on that point, usually with dramatic consequences to all involved minus Izaya himself.
Changing his mind about people was hardly ever necessary because he saw through them almost immediately. Mikado could fool even his best friend but Izaya had gathered enough information to form a strong suspicion to which actual evidence was a mere confirmation. Once enough data was compiled predictions ceased to be instinctual reactions to become necessary.
His gift was in the coincidence between the two modes of knowing, the intuitive and the rational, the convergence of vectors into a single points and all these points then aligned in a perfect pattern of regularity that only he, Orihara Izaya, could ever see.