Aria: A few notes before I go on with the story:
First, thank you to my beta, Mai. You did a wonderful job of reading this over, and brought to my attention the second point:
If you have read my stories before, you are probably familiar with my writing style. It is somewhat stylistic and takes a great deal of liberty with grammar and sentence structure. That being said, if it makes the story hard to read, please, by all means, let me know, and I'll try to tone it down a bit. Also, I now have no idea as to how long this story will be, since I want this relationship to develop realistically. I can't imagine it would go on for too much longer...check my profile for updates. Now, as for the reviewers:
Kagemihari: Thanks so much! I appreciate your comments.
Yami Hoshiko: Case in point. Another stylistic choice...but I'm sorry it didn't work for you. Anyway, here's the fourth chapter!
Misura: I'm glad you enjoyed! I'm an avid reader of your fics as well, so I'm quite pleased with your response.
TeeDee: More fluff (sort of) in this one!
Kuraiko: Thank you! Ah, to be a Joukai gateway drug...*grins* Glad you enjoyed.
Hakuryu08: Thanks!
Pleasance: I've tried to be more specific about their inner thoughts in this. Hope you enjoy.
Fire Dragon of Darkness: True, I can't write too fluffy without wanting to hit myself. Glad you like.
Callisto: This one's short too, but I edited the other so....you won't hurt me, right?
Sarasusamiga: The summer will last about as long as they normally do...and if it takes me into the fall or winter to get them together, then I guess I'll have to go for it! Thanks again for the reminder and comments! ^_^
Lethe Seraph: Hey! Save some ice cream for Seto and Jou, huh?
Darkmus: *glows* Thanks! I really appreciate the comments and encouragement, and I'm so glad you enjoy my story.
Nyako-chan: Oh, I agree. Seto sundae is definitely in the making. *sing- song* I can't wait till I can write them together...
Hush Puppie: Hey, cool! Thanks! I always appreciate being on favorites lists. It makes me feel so special. ^_^
Shousetsuka1: Hello again! And the comment that made me think about other people reading my writing...like I said, it's mostly intentional. There are places where, like everyone, I slip up and misspell or forget the grammar structure, but for the most part...yeah. Meant to be there. Thanks for the in-depth comment!
Darkness Rising: And more you shall have!
Icy Flame: *glows* You're so kind! I'm so glad you like my style and story. I write so much Joukai that it's important to me to make each story different.
Katsuki: Thanks!
Bh: I hope you remember, too.
Nekocin: I'm sorry you didn't like "Rescue", but I'm glad you enjoy "Vanilla". They are very different stories, and I've enjoyed writing them both, so I appreciate your kind comments.
Animebay-b: Thanks!
Alright! On with the story.
VANILLA Chapter 4
* * * * *
The next few weeks were quiet, and uneventful, and full of gorgeous summer weather. Joey read his book slowly, savoring, not the words, but the presence of his companion, always remembering the pressure of that pale hand on his head, and wondering if it meant anything. Kaiba, for his part, was grateful that his little refuge hadn't been destroyed after all, and so stopped questioning Joey's sometimes odd behavior, maintaining instead a sort of unspoken agreement that in the park, regardless of what happened outside it, things could always be quiet and sunny and filled with work, reading, talk, and the ever-present vanilla ice cream.
But all of this didn't explain the way he sat and looked out his window when he went back to the office in the afternoon, or his sudden restlessness when he went home in the evening. He still typed late into the night and woke up heavy-lidded from deep warm sleep, thinking about the park.
And it really didn't explain the growing fascination that dragged his eyes from his laptop's screen to the lines that appeared between Joey's eyebrows while he read, squinting against the light reflecting from the white pages, or to the shimmering sun that slid through shaggy dark blonde hair. Not to mention the way he started if Joey happened to look up and meet his eyes, with the stupid grin of his.
He took to wearing sunglasses, since the bright light made it too hard to see his screen, watching the lines of text expand and fill pages with their staggered black outlines, lines upon lines of text, each following the other until his head spun and he wanted to lift his eyes back into the clean air, convinced by his smoky glasses that the world had shaded. Darker afternoons crept in, where there was no superfluous light to shine in Joey's slowly bleaching hair, lighter and—Seto grinned to himself—somehow even shaggier now. It desperately wanted cutting, but Joey just shook it out of his eyes a bit oftener than before and kept reading, oblivious to everything except sun and warm grass and shade on the pages of his book, and the coolness of oncoming evening that prompted him to stretch out in the last brassy slants of sunlight, basking in the lazy summer days. Every day was a little different, but always more similar to yesterday than it would be different from tomorrow, and Joey stopped worrying about his crush and just let his heart pound once, hard, into his chest when Seto arrived, let his eyes drift from the dancing red-black type laid in rows upon rows on the pages he was reading to the shade caught in the folds of Seto's shirt, to the contrast between his dark glasses and—still—fair skin. Somehow Seto still remained white and translucent, polished, while Joey looked at himself in the mirror at home before taking a shower and watched his arms and face grow darker every day as his hair grew lighter, his teeth flashing white against tanned skin. In the mornings he would go to the beach and lie in the rough sand or in the water, feeling silky waves wash under him, before going home and washing the sticky salt away with hot water, even as he'd let the sand and salt bleach his nightly dreams into immaterial craving for the park and sweet smooth ice cream.
Things might have gone on in this way indefinitely, every day glowing to a new beginning and glowing to the same ending as the day before, distinguishable only by what page or chapter Joey was on or by what program Seto was trying to perfect, if only Joey hadn't been a little late one day, and been forced to buy the last cone from the cardboard box, handed to him by the same bored girl from the spring, except now she grinned and winked at him, bending to scoop the vanilla into the cone as soon as she saw him running her way, and as he collapsed, panting, against the worn counter, she handed it to him with a small apologetic smile. "I'm afraid this one's a little fragile," she told him, gingerly passing him the cone, "It's the last one from a big box. It might break up a little."
He grinned hugely at her, shaking damp—streaked with light gold, she noticed, melting a little herself—hair out of his eyes and took it carefully. "Thanks," he said, and passed her a crumpled dollar bill and a few coins. She swept them off the counter and watched him walk off, before turning the radio back up and smiling to herself.
Walking quickly over the now-familiar paths, he licked at the ice cream and grinned, stretching a little. He'd swum out into the waves until the breath ran ragged in his chest, tasting like salt and copper, trying to burn last night's restless tossing out of his tired muscles, and he felt pleasantly sore in the movements of his arms and twisting back muscles, and then he turned off the path and saw Seto looking out over bright green soft grass and bright blue warm sky loosely holding his briefcase, shining silver in the sun.
Joey didn't pause, didn't start, didn't jump, just went and stood nearby, concentrating perhaps a little intensely on his ice cream but otherwise perfectly at ease. "Whatcha looking at?" he asked, vanilla slurring his words a little.
Seto shifted a little so that he could see Joey out of the corner of one long eye. "Isn't it obvious?"
Joey shrugged and looked out in the same general direction, eyes squinting slightly from sea-salt and the bright sun. He saw sheets of sunlight laid down on grass with huge sweeps of shadow melting under trees; saw the worn- down path, all its cracks filling with moss; saw tree roots rising into the open air and arcing down to twist again into the soil; saw people walking, laughing, talking, arguing.
"I see a fat guy jogging," he said frankly, and licked at his ice cream. All that exercise earlier had left him craving sugar and he didn't really feel up to playing games, so he saw with annoyance that Seto was wearing that small smirk that Joey used to want to hit.
Actually, he still sort of wanted to hit it.
"Honestly, it's just the park," he went on, looking out across the grass, the trees, the clumps of people. "There's not really anything special about it."
Seto might have said something, or he might not have. Joey would never know, because as he looked down, squinting away from a sudden slant of sunlight, his hand jerked, his ice cream unbalanced and—
"Oh, fuck!"
The frail cone broke into three neat pieces—Joey wondered as he tried to catch it if perhaps that girl behind the counter was more conniving than he gave her credit for—and vanilla fell slowly onto his hands, creamy against darkly tanned fingers, cold after scratching sand and sun, and "Oh, hell..." before Seto's reaction caught up and he turned to help, getting only a slap of vanilla across the back of his hand for his trouble. He snatched it back as if it had been burned.
Joey stared at the ruined cone, at his handful of vanilla, and shook his head, walking to a bush and dumping the mess into thick green leaves. He shook his hands out, watching droplets of ice cream fly off his fingertips, and wanted to laugh, or yell, or maybe just sink into the warm black pavement and avoid ice cream, fragile cones, and Kaiba for the rest of known existence.
So he almost missed seeing Seto look at the vanilla on his hand, and, had he missed it, he would have missed too the sudden wary pause in the blue eyes, usually hidden behind dark glasses or washed with sun these days. He recognized it.
Seto was thinking about something he didn't want to think about. Joey recognized those slightly drawn-in silky brown eyebrows, the flash of white teeth, the cautious blankness in slanted blue eyes. How could he not? He'd been watching that face for months.
He decided.
"Sorry about that," he said, wiping his own hands off on his already dirty jeans after licking them mostly clean.
The smell of vanilla was everywhere.
Kaiba shrugged and moved for a tissue, stopped, and just brought his hand to his mouth to lick the ice cream off, remembering suddenly the first time he'd seen Joey in the park. He'd had vanilla on his hand then, too.
He remembered watching Joey walk away.
"Whatever," he said brusquely, turning back, looking out and ignoring the taste.
"Yeah, well..." Joey was floundering. Now that he'd made his decision, he didn't want to go through with it.
But talking to Kaiba's back was always easier than trying to talk to those inscrutable blue eyes. He took a deep breath, trying to think of something to say, and...and...
And he couldn't do it. He couldn't stand there and tell the guy he had a crush on him...life just didn't work that way, and even if it did, it still wouldn't help him out here. This was Kaiba he was thinking about, for chrissakes.
Joey shook his head, thinking. There had to be some way to bring this up...but the problem was, he still wasn't sure how to talk to Kaiba without there being the clear end result of offending him...and this was about as far from that as it could be. So he tried to convince himself that what he was really doing was starting a fight, and that, instead of confessing to crushing on Kaiba, he was insulting him.
It didn't really work.
"I lied," he said. "It isn't just the park. I wait all day to come here, and then I wait for you to show up. I guess it's not the park so much as the fact that I just want to see you, Kaiba. I guess I like you."
This is that moment, Joey thought. The one I knew was gonna happen. The one where I make a huge fool out of myself.
And then he realized that the moment had already happened, and when Kaiba stiffened and turned around, his eyebrows knitted together and blue eyes totally unreadable, he already had the uncomfortable expression of someone who would clearly like nothing better than to pretend what he just said or did never happened, and was mentally yelling at himself, as if that would suddenly yield some answer to the situation. In fact, he could barely hear what Seto said over the tumult.
"What?"
Thin shoulders shrugged, thin lips tightened in annoyance. "I said, what do you mean?"
Joey stared. "What do I mean?" he echoed in disbelief, suddenly feeling extremely annoyed. Dammit, he was going to get this through Kaiba's thick skull if it killed him. "What do you mean, what do I mean? What part of 'I like you' don't you get?" He stopped short, feeling slightly run-down, but the look on Kaiba's face set him off again.
He was never going to forgive the bastard for this.
"Do I gotta spell it out for you?" he asked, stepping forward. He hadn't felt so furious in—he had no idea, but he knew he had sometime. This wasn't how it was supposed to go—this wasn't any of the ways that it was supposed to go. The thought that perhaps Kaiba was toying with him sent a flush of blood to his face and he launched back into it. "Do people just never say that to you? What do I mean—what do you think I mean?" He started ticking points off on his fingers. "I mean I come here everyday so I can see you, even though you—regularly—piss me off. I didn't dare come get my book because I thought you knew about it...I've got a fucking crush on you, okay? And everything that comes with a crush, meaning there's nothing I'd rather do than stop trying to play all these fucking mind games that I'll never win at anyway and actually get you to like me too."
He paused to gauge the reaction so far, but saw nothing—absolute nothing. The blankness in the blue eyes scared him, and he leaped back into the fray with sudden panic and a comfort in his own reckless noise.
"You're egotistic, and a know-it-all, and a rich arrogant bastard and smart and actually nice when you want to be and so fucking beautiful that I can't take my eyes off you, as I'm sure you've noticed. And now I guess we're just going to go back to hating each other, since the other option clearly isn't going to happen, and I'm sure as hell not gonna stick around now that you know all this, you rich bastard. So stop toying with me."
He took a breath, and steadied from the rush. He could feel his nails digging into his palms, his hands forced into fists, his whole body was trembling with anger and nerves and maybe just a little bit of anticipation.
So he waited.
And waited.
And watched as Seto turned and walked off, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped around the silver handle of his briefcase.
The scent of vanilla swirled in his wake.
* * * * *
Aria: Next chapter: Seto's reaction, and what Joey did after he walked away. Till next time!
First, thank you to my beta, Mai. You did a wonderful job of reading this over, and brought to my attention the second point:
If you have read my stories before, you are probably familiar with my writing style. It is somewhat stylistic and takes a great deal of liberty with grammar and sentence structure. That being said, if it makes the story hard to read, please, by all means, let me know, and I'll try to tone it down a bit. Also, I now have no idea as to how long this story will be, since I want this relationship to develop realistically. I can't imagine it would go on for too much longer...check my profile for updates. Now, as for the reviewers:
Kagemihari: Thanks so much! I appreciate your comments.
Yami Hoshiko: Case in point. Another stylistic choice...but I'm sorry it didn't work for you. Anyway, here's the fourth chapter!
Misura: I'm glad you enjoyed! I'm an avid reader of your fics as well, so I'm quite pleased with your response.
TeeDee: More fluff (sort of) in this one!
Kuraiko: Thank you! Ah, to be a Joukai gateway drug...*grins* Glad you enjoyed.
Hakuryu08: Thanks!
Pleasance: I've tried to be more specific about their inner thoughts in this. Hope you enjoy.
Fire Dragon of Darkness: True, I can't write too fluffy without wanting to hit myself. Glad you like.
Callisto: This one's short too, but I edited the other so....you won't hurt me, right?
Sarasusamiga: The summer will last about as long as they normally do...and if it takes me into the fall or winter to get them together, then I guess I'll have to go for it! Thanks again for the reminder and comments! ^_^
Lethe Seraph: Hey! Save some ice cream for Seto and Jou, huh?
Darkmus: *glows* Thanks! I really appreciate the comments and encouragement, and I'm so glad you enjoy my story.
Nyako-chan: Oh, I agree. Seto sundae is definitely in the making. *sing- song* I can't wait till I can write them together...
Hush Puppie: Hey, cool! Thanks! I always appreciate being on favorites lists. It makes me feel so special. ^_^
Shousetsuka1: Hello again! And the comment that made me think about other people reading my writing...like I said, it's mostly intentional. There are places where, like everyone, I slip up and misspell or forget the grammar structure, but for the most part...yeah. Meant to be there. Thanks for the in-depth comment!
Darkness Rising: And more you shall have!
Icy Flame: *glows* You're so kind! I'm so glad you like my style and story. I write so much Joukai that it's important to me to make each story different.
Katsuki: Thanks!
Bh: I hope you remember, too.
Nekocin: I'm sorry you didn't like "Rescue", but I'm glad you enjoy "Vanilla". They are very different stories, and I've enjoyed writing them both, so I appreciate your kind comments.
Animebay-b: Thanks!
Alright! On with the story.
VANILLA Chapter 4
* * * * *
The next few weeks were quiet, and uneventful, and full of gorgeous summer weather. Joey read his book slowly, savoring, not the words, but the presence of his companion, always remembering the pressure of that pale hand on his head, and wondering if it meant anything. Kaiba, for his part, was grateful that his little refuge hadn't been destroyed after all, and so stopped questioning Joey's sometimes odd behavior, maintaining instead a sort of unspoken agreement that in the park, regardless of what happened outside it, things could always be quiet and sunny and filled with work, reading, talk, and the ever-present vanilla ice cream.
But all of this didn't explain the way he sat and looked out his window when he went back to the office in the afternoon, or his sudden restlessness when he went home in the evening. He still typed late into the night and woke up heavy-lidded from deep warm sleep, thinking about the park.
And it really didn't explain the growing fascination that dragged his eyes from his laptop's screen to the lines that appeared between Joey's eyebrows while he read, squinting against the light reflecting from the white pages, or to the shimmering sun that slid through shaggy dark blonde hair. Not to mention the way he started if Joey happened to look up and meet his eyes, with the stupid grin of his.
He took to wearing sunglasses, since the bright light made it too hard to see his screen, watching the lines of text expand and fill pages with their staggered black outlines, lines upon lines of text, each following the other until his head spun and he wanted to lift his eyes back into the clean air, convinced by his smoky glasses that the world had shaded. Darker afternoons crept in, where there was no superfluous light to shine in Joey's slowly bleaching hair, lighter and—Seto grinned to himself—somehow even shaggier now. It desperately wanted cutting, but Joey just shook it out of his eyes a bit oftener than before and kept reading, oblivious to everything except sun and warm grass and shade on the pages of his book, and the coolness of oncoming evening that prompted him to stretch out in the last brassy slants of sunlight, basking in the lazy summer days. Every day was a little different, but always more similar to yesterday than it would be different from tomorrow, and Joey stopped worrying about his crush and just let his heart pound once, hard, into his chest when Seto arrived, let his eyes drift from the dancing red-black type laid in rows upon rows on the pages he was reading to the shade caught in the folds of Seto's shirt, to the contrast between his dark glasses and—still—fair skin. Somehow Seto still remained white and translucent, polished, while Joey looked at himself in the mirror at home before taking a shower and watched his arms and face grow darker every day as his hair grew lighter, his teeth flashing white against tanned skin. In the mornings he would go to the beach and lie in the rough sand or in the water, feeling silky waves wash under him, before going home and washing the sticky salt away with hot water, even as he'd let the sand and salt bleach his nightly dreams into immaterial craving for the park and sweet smooth ice cream.
Things might have gone on in this way indefinitely, every day glowing to a new beginning and glowing to the same ending as the day before, distinguishable only by what page or chapter Joey was on or by what program Seto was trying to perfect, if only Joey hadn't been a little late one day, and been forced to buy the last cone from the cardboard box, handed to him by the same bored girl from the spring, except now she grinned and winked at him, bending to scoop the vanilla into the cone as soon as she saw him running her way, and as he collapsed, panting, against the worn counter, she handed it to him with a small apologetic smile. "I'm afraid this one's a little fragile," she told him, gingerly passing him the cone, "It's the last one from a big box. It might break up a little."
He grinned hugely at her, shaking damp—streaked with light gold, she noticed, melting a little herself—hair out of his eyes and took it carefully. "Thanks," he said, and passed her a crumpled dollar bill and a few coins. She swept them off the counter and watched him walk off, before turning the radio back up and smiling to herself.
Walking quickly over the now-familiar paths, he licked at the ice cream and grinned, stretching a little. He'd swum out into the waves until the breath ran ragged in his chest, tasting like salt and copper, trying to burn last night's restless tossing out of his tired muscles, and he felt pleasantly sore in the movements of his arms and twisting back muscles, and then he turned off the path and saw Seto looking out over bright green soft grass and bright blue warm sky loosely holding his briefcase, shining silver in the sun.
Joey didn't pause, didn't start, didn't jump, just went and stood nearby, concentrating perhaps a little intensely on his ice cream but otherwise perfectly at ease. "Whatcha looking at?" he asked, vanilla slurring his words a little.
Seto shifted a little so that he could see Joey out of the corner of one long eye. "Isn't it obvious?"
Joey shrugged and looked out in the same general direction, eyes squinting slightly from sea-salt and the bright sun. He saw sheets of sunlight laid down on grass with huge sweeps of shadow melting under trees; saw the worn- down path, all its cracks filling with moss; saw tree roots rising into the open air and arcing down to twist again into the soil; saw people walking, laughing, talking, arguing.
"I see a fat guy jogging," he said frankly, and licked at his ice cream. All that exercise earlier had left him craving sugar and he didn't really feel up to playing games, so he saw with annoyance that Seto was wearing that small smirk that Joey used to want to hit.
Actually, he still sort of wanted to hit it.
"Honestly, it's just the park," he went on, looking out across the grass, the trees, the clumps of people. "There's not really anything special about it."
Seto might have said something, or he might not have. Joey would never know, because as he looked down, squinting away from a sudden slant of sunlight, his hand jerked, his ice cream unbalanced and—
"Oh, fuck!"
The frail cone broke into three neat pieces—Joey wondered as he tried to catch it if perhaps that girl behind the counter was more conniving than he gave her credit for—and vanilla fell slowly onto his hands, creamy against darkly tanned fingers, cold after scratching sand and sun, and "Oh, hell..." before Seto's reaction caught up and he turned to help, getting only a slap of vanilla across the back of his hand for his trouble. He snatched it back as if it had been burned.
Joey stared at the ruined cone, at his handful of vanilla, and shook his head, walking to a bush and dumping the mess into thick green leaves. He shook his hands out, watching droplets of ice cream fly off his fingertips, and wanted to laugh, or yell, or maybe just sink into the warm black pavement and avoid ice cream, fragile cones, and Kaiba for the rest of known existence.
So he almost missed seeing Seto look at the vanilla on his hand, and, had he missed it, he would have missed too the sudden wary pause in the blue eyes, usually hidden behind dark glasses or washed with sun these days. He recognized it.
Seto was thinking about something he didn't want to think about. Joey recognized those slightly drawn-in silky brown eyebrows, the flash of white teeth, the cautious blankness in slanted blue eyes. How could he not? He'd been watching that face for months.
He decided.
"Sorry about that," he said, wiping his own hands off on his already dirty jeans after licking them mostly clean.
The smell of vanilla was everywhere.
Kaiba shrugged and moved for a tissue, stopped, and just brought his hand to his mouth to lick the ice cream off, remembering suddenly the first time he'd seen Joey in the park. He'd had vanilla on his hand then, too.
He remembered watching Joey walk away.
"Whatever," he said brusquely, turning back, looking out and ignoring the taste.
"Yeah, well..." Joey was floundering. Now that he'd made his decision, he didn't want to go through with it.
But talking to Kaiba's back was always easier than trying to talk to those inscrutable blue eyes. He took a deep breath, trying to think of something to say, and...and...
And he couldn't do it. He couldn't stand there and tell the guy he had a crush on him...life just didn't work that way, and even if it did, it still wouldn't help him out here. This was Kaiba he was thinking about, for chrissakes.
Joey shook his head, thinking. There had to be some way to bring this up...but the problem was, he still wasn't sure how to talk to Kaiba without there being the clear end result of offending him...and this was about as far from that as it could be. So he tried to convince himself that what he was really doing was starting a fight, and that, instead of confessing to crushing on Kaiba, he was insulting him.
It didn't really work.
"I lied," he said. "It isn't just the park. I wait all day to come here, and then I wait for you to show up. I guess it's not the park so much as the fact that I just want to see you, Kaiba. I guess I like you."
This is that moment, Joey thought. The one I knew was gonna happen. The one where I make a huge fool out of myself.
And then he realized that the moment had already happened, and when Kaiba stiffened and turned around, his eyebrows knitted together and blue eyes totally unreadable, he already had the uncomfortable expression of someone who would clearly like nothing better than to pretend what he just said or did never happened, and was mentally yelling at himself, as if that would suddenly yield some answer to the situation. In fact, he could barely hear what Seto said over the tumult.
"What?"
Thin shoulders shrugged, thin lips tightened in annoyance. "I said, what do you mean?"
Joey stared. "What do I mean?" he echoed in disbelief, suddenly feeling extremely annoyed. Dammit, he was going to get this through Kaiba's thick skull if it killed him. "What do you mean, what do I mean? What part of 'I like you' don't you get?" He stopped short, feeling slightly run-down, but the look on Kaiba's face set him off again.
He was never going to forgive the bastard for this.
"Do I gotta spell it out for you?" he asked, stepping forward. He hadn't felt so furious in—he had no idea, but he knew he had sometime. This wasn't how it was supposed to go—this wasn't any of the ways that it was supposed to go. The thought that perhaps Kaiba was toying with him sent a flush of blood to his face and he launched back into it. "Do people just never say that to you? What do I mean—what do you think I mean?" He started ticking points off on his fingers. "I mean I come here everyday so I can see you, even though you—regularly—piss me off. I didn't dare come get my book because I thought you knew about it...I've got a fucking crush on you, okay? And everything that comes with a crush, meaning there's nothing I'd rather do than stop trying to play all these fucking mind games that I'll never win at anyway and actually get you to like me too."
He paused to gauge the reaction so far, but saw nothing—absolute nothing. The blankness in the blue eyes scared him, and he leaped back into the fray with sudden panic and a comfort in his own reckless noise.
"You're egotistic, and a know-it-all, and a rich arrogant bastard and smart and actually nice when you want to be and so fucking beautiful that I can't take my eyes off you, as I'm sure you've noticed. And now I guess we're just going to go back to hating each other, since the other option clearly isn't going to happen, and I'm sure as hell not gonna stick around now that you know all this, you rich bastard. So stop toying with me."
He took a breath, and steadied from the rush. He could feel his nails digging into his palms, his hands forced into fists, his whole body was trembling with anger and nerves and maybe just a little bit of anticipation.
So he waited.
And waited.
And watched as Seto turned and walked off, one hand in his pocket, the other wrapped around the silver handle of his briefcase.
The scent of vanilla swirled in his wake.
* * * * *
Aria: Next chapter: Seto's reaction, and what Joey did after he walked away. Till next time!