Date 3: ShoutaxYayoi
"Wow! This place is amazing!"
If Shouta didn't know any better he would have asked if Yayoi had never been to an amusement park. The way she was looking at all the rides and food stalls one would think so. But she was an idol, of course she'd been to an amusement park, for promotional purposes if not anything else.
So instead he said, "Isn't it? Where do you want to go first, Yayoi-chan?"
"Uu~ They all look so fun. I don't know which one to pick..."
Glancing over, Shouta couldn't help but laugh at the look on Yayoi's face. She looked genuinely torn between where she wanted to go, her head whipping left to right as she struggled to decide.
"It's your day off," he reminded her. "We can spend as long as you'd like here. We have time to go to every ride."
"But is Shouta-kun okay with that?" she looked at him worriedly.
"Are you kidding? I love amusement parks! I've always wanted to try every ride in one go."
"Really?" when Shouta nodded, Yayoi smiled as though a huge weight had been taken off her shoulders. "Then let's go to that roller coaster first!"
"Alrighty then~"
/~/~/
Shouta loved roller coasters, really he did. After a promotional event at amusement parks he always tried to get Touma and Hokuto to ride with him on one out of the goodness of his heart and the want to spend some quality time with his teammates (read as: he knew both of them got ridiculously sick to the point of throwing up) so yeah, he would say he was pretty experienced with roller coasters.
But holy crap Yayoi was freaking insane.
"Come to think of it, didn't you say you're afraid of heights?" he commented in a roundabout way as they boarded their fifth roller coaster.
"My eyes are closed the whole time so it's not that scary," Yayoi explained cheerfully.
Well then.
"You're not tired from all that screaming?" he asked as they exited their eleventh one.
"U-uu~! Not at all!"
Must come from being an idol.
In any case, it was a relief when she finally decided she'd had enough of roller coasters. Now it was time for that god-awful spinny wheel of death that looked like it was about to fall apart any second and kill all of its riders.
"This looks great!" Yayoi said enthusiastically.
Shouta refrained from commenting. He also did his best to refrain from throwing up as the ride began simultaneously spinning and swinging.
"Bumper cars!"
Yayoi was surprisingly aggressive in the ring. And she always seemed to be singling him out.
"Spinning cups!"
He wanted to close his eyes. But then he would have missed seeing that adorable expression on Yayoi's face.
"Haunted house!"
After all the horrors of the previous rides, Shouta figured nothing could scare him. So it was pretty awesome strolling through the dark mansion with a cute girl hanging off his arm. Awww yeah.
"Let's go to the merry-go-round next!"
"I know I said we could go on all the rides but shouldn't we at least take a break?" he said, but he offered a smile to show he was being friendly. "I mean, it's already four o'clock and we haven't even had lunch yet."
She stopped in her tracks, blue eyes blinking questioningly before an alarmed expression came over her face. "Shouta-kun, are you tired? I'm so sorry! I got so carried away I didn't even think about you!"
Shouta wondered briefly if he should feel offended by that. "Haha, no, it's just that I was feeling a little dizzy for a sec there. Sorry, Yayoi-chan. But I'm good now! We can go to merry-go-round."
Yayoi frowned, looking unconvinced. She seemed to still be troubled about the fact that she'd completely ignored her date. "Are you sure? If you're not feeling well we should probably just leave."
"What? No way, I'm perfectly fine! Haha, I'm the amazing and cute Shouta - nothing gets me down! The merry-go-round's that way, right? We should go." Shouta grinned, trying to reassure Yayoi. Sure, he'd been getting tired of all the consecutive rides, but he hadn't meant to make her feel bad. "Come on, it's a good thing that you were having so much fun. You don't need to be sorry for it."
"But ignoring and forgetting about other people is a terrible thing to do, especially if their your friends," Yayoi pointed out.
Shouta shrugged. "But if you can afford to forget about them than that must mean they're really your friends, right? Because you know they wouldn't mind as much." As he spoke, he turned and began to walk, gesturing for Yayoi to follow. When she did, he continued,
"For example, let's say you ignored Iori-chan for a day. Didn't talk to her at all. Didn't even look at her. Then you ignored, say, Yukiho. Who would be more insulted?"
"But Iori-chan's always away with Ryuugu Komachi," Yayoi protested. "I don't even see her every day. We're... used to not talking to each other."
Shouta nodded. "But you see Yukiho every day, right? You two work together a lot since neither of you are part of your own unit yet. So I bet she'd be a little more hurt."
"I... guess." It was clear that Yayoi still wasn't grasping the point of this.
"And yet in the end, despite working with Yukiho more and barely even speaking with Iori-chan, you and Iori-chan are still better friends than you and Yukiho are."
There was a pause as Yayoi thought this over.
"That's hardly the same thing at all!"
"You don't think so?" Shouta blinked, a little surprised that that was her reaction to what he considered to be a personal stroke of brilliance.
"I'm not ignoring Iori-chan or anything! I think about her every day."
"Well, okay, but in the end not talking to her is pretty much the same thing."
Yayoi frowned. "No, it's not. She knows I'm thinking about her, and I know she thinks about me. Just because we don't get a chance to talk to each other doesn't mean we're ignoring each other."
Shouta held up his hands, not wanting to get into an argument with her. "Alright, then let's think of this another way. Would you say that somehow, the fact that you and Iori-chan are suddenly away from each other a lot helps your friendship?"
"It doesn't... strain it..." Yayoi trailed off, now pouring all her concentration into this question. "Whenever we do get to hang out now we always have a lot of fun together. It makes me really happy."
"So not being near her as much is fine because it makes you happier when you're finally together, right?" Shouta concluded.
In the back of his head, Shouta wondered if he'd maybe gotten off topic from his original point. Not that he could remember what his original point had been, anyways.
"Going by that logic, Shouta-kun, I should be happy being with you right now."
"Are you saying you aren't?"
"I'm not saying that at all," Yayoi smiled. "You're a very nice person. I'm grateful that you brought me here today."
"Come now, I'm not being friend-zoned before the day is even over, am I?"
"Friend-zoned?"
"This is a date, Yayoi-chan, a date! After this is over I get to ask you for the privilege of becoming your boyfriend~"
Yayoi looked surprised. "I can't go out with a rival," she said in a completely serious tone. "Especially not one from Jupiter."
Ouch. "Why not?"
"It'd be very complicated. Wouldn't we always be competing with each other?" she pointed out. "That would be terrible. Only one of us would be allowed to win and the other has to suffer."
Shouta paused, and then nodded slowly. "Mm, that's a good point. But wouldn't the loser be happy that his girlfriend won? A relationship is about the other person over yourself. Even if I lost I wouldn't be sad if you were the one who won."
"You're amazing, Shouta-kun."
"I try," Shouta replied.
"And I really have to thank you for the date today."
"I'm glad you're finally considering it as a date."
"So here goes."
Yayoi kissed his cheek, pulled back with a grin, and promptly ran off to the merry-go-round line.
Score.
Wow, I cannot believe how short this was. A lot of people gave me some super awesome ideas for a ShoutaxYayoi date, but in the end I thought bringing family matters into the chapter was complicated so I turned it into an amusement park, but then it turned into a therapy session, and then a kiss (on the cheek) to wrap it all up. Funny how things work out.
Next date: ToumaxHibiki