Tokyo: Who would still fall in love after being spoiled?

Chapter 109 The last step of the date is to go home together

They all left the watch shop empty-handed.

The clerk did not treat them coldly just because they didn't buy anything. Instead, he smiled and saw them off.

Takeda then took him to a family restaurant that offered a variety of set meals.

The store is spacious and bright. This type of building usually occupies a corner of an intersection, and the walls facing the street are all transparent and clean windows.

"It is said that this is a restaurant where middle school students often gather together." Takeda chose a seat next to the street window, a booth that could seat four people opposite each other.

"It is said?"

"I rely on personal experience and hearsay," Takeda said with a smile, sitting across from him. "After all, I've never liked sorting through useless data—searching newspapers, online news, and the like—it's just too boring."

"Maybe." He only remembered that youth romantic comedy light novels often used family restaurants as study session scenes.

"But actually, I've been to a place like this before," Takeda added. "In junior high, I was with my classmates. It was a sorority party, and there were four girls in total, including me."

"What did we talk about?" He was looking through the restaurant's menu on his phone, which was displayed by scanning the QR code.

"What else can middle school girls talk about? You can't talk about studying at a sorority, right?" Takeda said with a laugh. "It was all just baffling stuff, that's how I felt at the time."

She paused, then continued, "Two of the girls are from different classes, and the remaining girl is from the same class as me, and we have a pretty good relationship."

"Then?"

"There were two girls from different classes. One of them was a classmate of mine in elementary school, so we were considered good friends. The other girl was a good friend of my classmate's elementary school classmate."

"It's starting to get complicated," he said, but in fact the relationships are still very clear, and the relationship between the four girls will not be too chaotic no matter what.

"That girl likes a boy in my class."

He stopped interrupting and continued listening.

"And that boy liked me - although I didn't know this until these people came to me." Takeda said excitedly. He didn't seem hungry, but just wanted to find a place to rest first.

The sky outside the window gradually darkened, and the horizon reflected the dusk, which transitioned from gray-blue to light red, orange-yellow and orange-red. Against the backdrop of dusk, there were a few white spots of light emitted by man-made objects.

"I was in my third year of junior high, studying hard for the entrance exam. The boy who liked me heard about my aspirations and also applied to Kitakura High School."

"So, a friend of a friend of a classmate of mine asked this connection to come to my house and told me to lie and say that I had applied to the same school that boy originally wanted to apply to—Beiying High School was too difficult for her, but she could get in with some effort."

"Do you agree?" He casually ordered a set meal with fried pork cutlet and pushed the mobile ordering page in front of Takeda.

"How could I agree to such a thing!" Takeda said dissatisfiedly, "What does all this have to do with me? Do you really want me to cooperate?"

"agree."

"I want her to find a way to work it out on her own—if you secretly like someone and don't say it out loud, nothing will ever come of it."

"That makes sense. Has she changed her mind?"

"How could that be possible...it turns out she decided I wasn't willing to help, but she didn't insist too much, so she decided to work hard and get into Kitakura High School."

“…” He was silent for a moment.

"Isn't that stupid?" Takeda asked him.

"Some." He didn't like to comment on others behind their backs, so he only made the comment in response to Takeda's question.

"But that boy is even dumber!" Takeda thought about this and laughed to himself, "Guess what?"

"How do I know..."

"In the end, the girl got into Kitakura High School, but the boy didn't," Takeda said. "Originally, the girl's grades were much worse than the boy's."

"It means that the boy's love for you is not as important as the girl's love for him," he concluded.

Takeda was dissatisfied with his summary and stepped on him under the table.

"Hey, you have to treat me to dinner!" she said angrily.

"It's worth it..."

He watched Takeda swipe the menu on his phone screen to the most expensive set meal and threatened him—

"Apologize to me! Or I'll order this."

"I'm sorry." He said obediently. In fact, it didn't matter if he really ordered it, and it didn't matter if it was ten times more expensive, but an apology would not be enough to calm Takeda down.

"Tell me, 'That boy is so stupid!'" Takeda continued to give him orders.

"That boy is just too stupid." he repeated.

"That's right!" Takeda was finally satisfied. He browsed the menu for a while and ordered an eel rice.

The price of eel rice is also a little bit higher, she said this was to teach him a lesson.

Two set meals were served one after another, but she took away half of his pork chop and gave him half of the fried eel.

"These chopsticks have been separated before I use them, so don't be disgusted." At the end, Takeda did not forget to say this.

"When you fed me watermelon, didn't you use the same spoon you used?" he kindly reminded.

I was stepped on again.

“Is it sweeter?”

"It's all watermelon--" He stopped talking, and the foot on the shoe began to gradually exert force.

"It is sweeter." Finally, under the pressure of Miss Takeda's coercion, he changed his words.

"That's right!" Takeda was finally satisfied.

After dinner, when it was completely dark, they walked out of the family restaurant and onto the streetlights of Shinjuku. "Going to the movies?" he asked Takeda, his eyes wandering aimlessly over the various signs on the street.

"It's not late enough..."

"Have you decided what you want to see?"

"When we get to the cinema, we'll see what they're planning to show and watch it."

"What if you don't like it?"

"If you don't like it, let's just chat and pass the time - then we can sit in the last row together and buy some extra popcorn snacks."

They asked and answered questions, walking aimlessly on the street.

I passed by a small coffee shop. The interior decoration was in a warm dark-toned Western European home style, with gray-yellow and dark brown walls. There were many photos of the store manager hanging on the walls, and each of the round tables provided for customers to drink coffee and rest had a few handicrafts on them.

The record player with a big speaker was playing the Beatles' "Hey Jude", which was why he stopped in front of the store for a moment.

"Want to go in and take a look?" Takeda also stopped and looked into the store following his gaze.

"No." He looked away. "This store plays Beatles music."

"Beetle?"

"The ones I sang to you before, coke and zombies."

"No wonder..." Takeda stopped talking and stood with him on the street to listen for a while, then commented, "It's nice, but not as good as your singing."

"where……"

"You're responsible for this—it's called preconceived notion," Takeda said playfully. "Even though I knew it was a Beatles song and you just sang it to me casually, I had never heard of the Beatles before you sang it to me. So when the melody sounded, the first thing that came to mind was your voice."

"It's like when you read a light novel first, and then see someone with the same name in a literary novel?" He understood what Takeda said and asked back.

"It feels similar, so just for this matter, you should compensate me with something." Takeda said as if asking for a gift.

"Next time I sing, I'll record it and save it as an audio." He thought for a moment, "Whenever you want to listen, you can listen to it anytime, anywhere."

"Well... not bad." Takeda thought as he put his hands behind his back, pulled up the index finger of his left hand with his right hand, took a few brisk steps forward, ran in front of him, and his response became quieter.

They passed by a coffee shop playing Beatles records, a bookstore with a cat lying on the front desk, and a board game store selling all kinds of cards, with many players playing different games inside...

The chit-chat also extended endlessly along the shops they passed by.

Takeda pulled him into a doll shop and asked the clerk to help him pick out a plush rabbit doll that he liked.

"Why don't you catch it yourself?" he asked as he walked out of the store.

"It's easy to catch them yourself, but you'll lose all your money," Takeda shared his experience. "But if you have a store clerk do it for you, you only need to pay a fixed amount, and he can keep catching them until he succeeds."

"Then why don't you just buy the dolls separately?"

"They're not sold anywhere else! Or they're only available at flea markets, and those are just discarded old stuffed dolls."

He had never played a claw machine before, so naturally he was not very clear about Takeda's thoughts.

It was already past nine in the evening when they walked out of the doll shop.

"If we still lived in the boarding house, it would be closed by now." Takeda sighed as he glanced at the time displayed on his mobile phone.

"Then climb over the wall." He continued the context.

"There is a rope ladder in the storage room in the corner of the boarding house." Takeda glanced at him and smiled.

My eyes sparkled with the bustling neon lights of Shinjuku, which seemed to be always on.

"So..." He gradually caught up with Takeda's thoughts and understood what she was going to say.

"It's finally 'late enough'!" Takeda said to him with some excitement, "It's time to go to the movies."

"Yeah." He also felt a unique atmosphere spreading around them as Takeda divided the evening time into "before the boarding house is closed" and "after the boarding house is closed".

Together, they followed Google Maps to the nearest movie theater and found the movie with the shortest showtime on the schedule, regardless of whether it was a rerun or whether any of them had seen it.

After buying some popcorn snacks and tickets, I went into the dimly lit movie room.

There were only a few people watching this movie, scattered in various corners of the cinema.

They sat in the middle of the last row, just avoiding all the couples who came to watch the movie.

The name of the movie was "Bouquet of Love". Judging from the attendance rate, it was most likely a re-screening, but fortunately none of them had seen it - in fact, it didn't matter as long as Takeda hadn't seen it.

The popcorn didn't work after all. He watched the entire movie quietly with Takeda. When the movie ended, he carefully observed the couples around who were watching the movie - and was genuinely worried about them for a few seconds.

The hero and heroine finally parted ways.

This movie is not about love, it is about breakup.

Perhaps... he didn't sit down and watch the whole thing, and what he remembered most clearly was the passage at the very beginning of the movie -

Don't you think it's strange for couples to share headphones? If you listen to stereo music with headphones, the left and right ears will hear different sounds. If two people listen in one ear each, they will hear different songs.

"When we share headphones while shopping, are the songs in both ears the same?" He saw that most couples were not affected by the content of the movie, and he felt relieved for them, so he asked Takeda.

"How would I know..." Takeda was eating popcorn. When she heard his question, she frowned and thought for a moment, "Let's try it?"

"This time you listen to the left ear."

"it is good."

(End of this chapter)