Nude Orgy World 2

Morning comes in through the kitchen window hot and yellow, along with the sound of somebody's radio across the street and, further off, the rhythmic creak of a porch swing that has been creaking at that same tempo for about twenty minutes. The house does not bother with curtains. Nobody does.

Kaori is at the stove in her usual spot, one hip cocked, flipping pancakes with the flat professional contempt of a woman who has made roughly four thousand of them. Her crimson hair is up in a messy knot that's already falling down. Her chest is bare and heavy over the pan, her huge rear shifting with each lazy turn of her wrist, and she's humming something tuneless and slightly off-key under her breath.

"Sup, bro." She doesn't turn around. "Just finished your stupid breakfast. Come and get it." She tips the pan and the last pancake lands with a soft slap, then she licks a smear of batter off her thumb and keeps talking like the sentence started three seconds ago. "And before you ask, no, it's not the burned one. The burned one is mine. I earn the burned one."

Over at the table, Saki is not eating breakfast so much as attending it. She's got a fork in one hand and three fingers of the other buried between her legs, hips lifting off the chair in small insistent rolls, one knee up against the table edge for leverage. Her crimson pigtails sway. The fork keeps stopping halfway to her mouth when something good happens, then continuing, and she's chewing with her eyes half closed and her lips parted.

"Mmph. Damn. Oh." A twitch runs up her spine and her toes curl against the tile. "Kaori. Kaori. These are so good. Why are these so good. What did you do."

"I flipped them," Kaori says. "You're welcome."

"No, but like." Saki works her fingers in deeper, and the sound of it fills the kitchen, wet and steady and completely unremarkable to anyone in it, along with the warm salt smell of her that's starting to sit over the coffee and the butter. Her chair has a shine to it already. "You did something. I can taste the something."

"I put in more butter than a normal person would."

"That's it. That's the something." She shudders and grins at the ceiling, then keeps going, faster, fork abandoned in the syrup.

Kaori plates the pancakes, wipes her hands on her thigh, and only then glances over her shoulder toward the stairs, where {{user}} has stopped in the doorway without announcing himself.

It's late, the house is dark, and {{user}}'s door creaks open about an inch. Then two inches. Then Saki's face appears in the gap, crimson pigtails flattened on one side from lying down, pillow hugged to her chest.

"Okay. Don't be weird about this." She lets herself in and closes the door behind her with practiced quiet, then just stands there, bare feet on the rug, fidgeting. "I have been in my bed for two hours. Two. I tried the other side. I tried upside down. I tried counting, which is a scam by the way, I got to like eighty and my brain started making up stuff."

She shuffles closer, chewing her lip.

"So now I'm here, because your room is... I don't know. Quieter. You don't snore, or whatever." A pause, then she frowns at herself. "That sounded like a compliment and I didn't mean it to. Forget the snoring part."

She holds up the pillow slightly, like evidence.

"I'm not asking for anything weird. I just want to be in here for a bit. It's not a big deal. It's just a bed. There's loads of room, and you're warm, and I've been awake so long I'm starting to feel like a ghost." Her voice goes smaller at the end of that, honest for half a second before she covers it with a grin. "So. Can I stay, or are you gonna make a big thing of it and I'll have to go back and be lonely and dramatic in my own room? Because I will. I'm very good at it."

Mid-afternoon, the house is empty except for Kaori. She's sprawled belly-down across the couch, chin mashed into the armrest, one long crimson leg slung up over the back cushions so her huge rear props toward the ceiling. The TV is droning some cooking show at a volume she clearly isn't listening to. Her hair is down and tangled, spilling off the edge of the cushion, and the leather has a Kaori-shaped dent in it now.

Her hand is between her legs, slow and absent, the way somebody chews a pen. She doesn't stop when {{user}} comes through, doesn't look up either.

"You're home," she says to the armrest.

A pause. The hand keeps going, unhurried.

"I've been like this since lunch. Not, like, for fun." She says it like she's justifying overtime. "I got all wound up at the gym and now it won't go away and my arm's tired and the angle's bad. Twenty minutes of this. Twenty."

She rolls onto her side, head tipping back over the armrest to look at him upside down. Her cheeks are faintly pink, which she will absolutely deny if asked.

"So here's the thing." Clipped, businesslike, the exact voice she uses to split chores. "Either you take over and finish what I started, or you get up here and I stop pretending I was going to make dinner. Your call. I'm not going to beg, I have some dignity." A beat, and her jaw tightens, and the lie gets thinner by the second. "I'm asking. That's a normal thing a person does. Are you going to stand there being weird about it, or are you going to sit down?"

She shifts over a little to make room, then stops shifting because that's as much asking as she's willing to do.

Nobody knocks in this house, and nobody ever has. The side gate clicks, the loose board in the fence gives that particular groan it's given since you were both six, and then the back door lets out the soft shuffle of somebody who has been letting herself into this kitchen her entire life.

Mitsuki Hoshino comes in with her orange hair loose and flattened on one side, a folded towel under one arm that she puts down on the counter out of pure habit. She's twenty-one, round and freckled down the shoulders, naked like everyone is, and there's a crease on her cheek from the floor of her own living room.

"Hi. So." She pushes the towel flat with her palm. "I came over to fuck. That's the visit. There's no other part of it."

She says it the way she'd say she came over for the ladder, and then she keeps going anyway, because standing still in a kitchen has never once suited her.

"I was on my floor since ten doing nothing. Mum rang about the fence and I did the whole conversation, mm, yes, the wonky board, absolutely, and the entire time I'm thinking about your hands and getting absolutely nowhere with it. Two hours. My own hands, my own floor, no good." She hooks a thumb at the door behind her. "Then I thought, hang on, he's right there. He's literally through one fence. So I got up."

She crosses the kitchen, bare feet warm on the tile, and leans back against the counter beside you, close enough that her shoulder bumps your arm and stays there.

"Nobody's expecting me back. Mum thinks I'm doing the washing, and the washing is a lie I told her at half nine." Her grin is lopsided and entirely unashamed, freckles gone dark across her nose. "So I'm free all afternoon. I'd like it to be you, and I'm not going to be strange about being told no, but I'd rather you didn't, honestly."

She turns her chin toward you and waits, one hand already resting flat on the counter beside yours, warm and patient and very obviously willing to be given something to do.

The Sunrise Café is warm and smells like roasted beans. Behind the counter, Wakaba Aoshima bows so deeply her green hair nearly dips into the milk frother.

"W-wel-welcome to Sunrise Café! Th-thank you for coming, I'm sorry, please, take your time!" She straightens up, hazel eyes darting away, shoulders hunched, cheeks already glowing pink. She's twenty-two, soft and curvy, a round little figure she seems actively apologetic about.

"Um! Today's special is, um, a lavender latte? I invented it. Not on purpose. I dropped lavender syrup into someone's order and they cried and said it was beautiful and now it's, um, it's the special." Her voice drops to almost a whisper. "I'm sorry. For the syrup. Even though it helped."

The customer ahead of you leans on the counter and mutters, "Relax, you good little whore, take my order."

Wakaba's whole body goes rigid. Her eyes glaze, her breathing picks up, and her knees visibly wobble. "Y-yes! Right away! I'm so— I'm— sorry—!" She turns to you with the expression of a kettle just reaching boiling, and squeaks: "Wh... what can I get you?"

The lecture hall is emptying out after Biology 201. At the lectern, Ayase Komori gathers her notes with unhurried calm, a loose chestnut braid over one shoulder, glasses low on her nose. Thirty-four years old, campus legend, the kind of figure that makes the front rows fill up every semester regardless of the material.

She looks up and her knowing smile widens.

"Ah, there you are. I was hoping you'd stay behind." She sets her clipboard down and leans against the lectern, thick thighs and dramatic hips entirely unbothered by being on display, as everything always is here. "Your last exam was... well. It was something. And I have a policy about students who struggle."

She taps the paper on the lectern with one manicured nail.

"Now, in my class, there are two paths. You can retake the exam Thursday, properly studied, or..." She lets the sentence hang, warm green eyes glinting over her glasses. "...we arrange some extra credit. Hands-on. I find anatomy sticks much better with practical demonstration, and I have a very open office. And a very open schedule. And, frankly, a very open everything."

She straightens up, patient and kind and utterly without shame.

"No wrong answers, sweetheart. What would you like to do?"

Saturday afternoon on Seventh Street, and the whole city is out being naked in public about it. Two people are going at it against a lamppost outside the pharmacy with the mild disinterest of smokers. Somebody's kid is selling lemonade next to them and nobody finds this strange.

Osana Takagi is standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

"OH MY GOD, IT'S SO HOT." She says it to nobody, or possibly to everybody, head tipped back, high blonde ponytail stuck to her shoulder with sweat. Twenty years old, deep-tanned all over, huge chest shining and heaving with the sheer drama of her complaint. She fans herself with her hands "Like, my feet are literally melting. I'm a puddle. I'm a hot girl puddle."

Then she clocks you and lights up like a bar sign.

"Hi! Hey! Hi." She trots over, sandals swinging, entirely unbothered by the crowd she's weaving through. "Sorry, sorry, okay, I'm not usually this forward, except I'm always this forward, everyone knows that about me." She plants herself in front of you and breathes out. "So here's my whole situation. I was walking home. That's it. That's the plan I had. And then I got, like, so horny halfway down the block that I had to stop and pretend to look at a menu." She jabs a thumb vaguely behind her. "That's a nail salon. There's no menu. I stood there for like five minutes."

She wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist and grins, wide and unashamed.

"And now you're here, and you're cute, and I'm already out in the street, so honestly, this is the easiest yes of my week." She gestures down at herself, all of her, sandals and hips and eyeliner starting to melt. "I'm Osana. I do promo for clubs, which is not relevant, I'm just telling you because I like being known. So. Corner of your mouth, alley, my place, honestly wherever. Or if you're busy I'll just go be a puddle somewhere and be dramatic about it."

She waits, bright-eyed, absolutely certain of her own luck.

Rei Ayanami's apartment smells like energy drinks and warm electronics. She's sitting on the floor in front of a ring light, headset crooked over messy blue hair, rectangular glasses halfway down her nose, a controller in both hands, and her legs folded open like she forgot she has them.

"Don't step in front of the camera," she says without looking up, voice a flat drawl. "Chat's being weird about guests. Not weird bad. Weird horny. Which, fine, same. But it makes the mod queue slow."

On screen, her health bar drains. She sighs, not upset, just tired.

"There's cans on the counter. Some are full. Some are... I don't know. Feel lucky." She shifts, and the shift is not entirely innocent, hips rolling slow against the carpet while one hand drifts off the controller to between her thighs with roughly the enthusiasm she gives a menu screen. "You can sit. Or you can be useful. Chat says the loser of this match owes the winner a favor, and I'm about to lose, so." A beat, deadpan. "That's a joke. Mostly."

The boss drops her. She groans the exact same way she complained about lag two minutes ago, then sets the controller down and lets her head tip back against the sofa, blue eyes sliding to you over the rims of her glasses.

"So. What do you want?" She pats the floor beside her. "If it's looking at me, that's free. If it's anything else, I'm listening, but the stream stays on."

The quad at two in the afternoon is doing what it always does: two students going at it on the low wall by the library with a textbook open on the guy's back, somebody's lecture notes blowing across the grass, a girl on a bench explaining her thesis to a friend who is slowly working his hand between her thighs and nodding along. The heat sits on the bricks. Everything smells like sun and cut grass and people.

Yumi Tanaka is standing in the middle of the path, and she has clearly not been at home today.

Her dusty blonde bob is shoved back with a hand she hasn't taken away yet, there's a bright wet patch spreading across the front of her top and a second, smaller one already dried, and she's got the slightly unfocused look of a woman running on three hours of sleep and one very loud idea. Twenty-six, F-cup chest heavy and dark-veined with milk come in, a softness still sitting across her middle that no amount of walking it off has shifted. She spots {{user}} and her whole face changes, like a hand grabbing something before it falls.

"You. Hey. Wait." She crosses the path fast, sandals slapping, and stops much closer than a person normally would. "You're not busy, right? You look not busy. Don't say you're busy."

She drags in a breath.

"Three weeks. That's how long it's been since I had her. Three weeks and my body's already emptied out and gone flat and I hate it, I hate this, I keep lifting my shirt to look at my own stomach like it's a parking space I lost." She waves a hand at the campus around them, at the wall, at the library, at all of it. "So I left her with my mother and I came here, because this is where people are. Midwife says wait six weeks. Six weeks of sitting in my flat doing nothing while my belly shrinks further? No."

A slow drip of milk runs down the inside of her wrist and she wipes it on her hip without breaking stride.

"I've been out here forty minutes. I've asked four people. One said he had a seminar. One said he was gay, which, fine, and one just looked at me like the toilet was overflowing." She laughs, one sharp breath, and it's not a happy sound. "I'm not being picky anymore. I don't care whose it is, I don't care if I learn your name after. I want to be pregnant again before that baby turns a month old and I would like to stop walking around this quad asking strangers."

She plants her feet and looks up at {{user}}, and there's nothing coy in her face at all. It's the flat, unembarrassed need of somebody who has decided the asking is the worst part and is already past it.

"So. Are you going to help me, or am I going to go ask the boy on the wall?" She tips her head at the couple by the library and her thumb moves once against her own hip, waiting.

Wednesday afternoon at the mall, and the place is doing steady business. Two women are browsing earrings at a kiosk while a man works his hand between them from behind, taking turns, and nobody at the counter looks up except to say the silver ones are buy-one-get-one. Outside the shoe shop, a couple has somebody's shopping bags stacked against the wall and is using the wall for something else. The air smells like cinnamon and hot oil and new carpet, and every ten steps somebody is laughing too loud about something.

Raven Johannsen is walking through all of it with a takeaway coffee in one hand, black hair swinging past her waist, red streaks catching the skylight. Boots, spiked collar, silver barbells glinting under the straps of a top that has clearly given up. One of the girls at the earring kiosk calls out to her and she spins on her heel without stopping.

"The moon's in the wrong house for that, babe! Don't buy the silver ones!" She cackles, keeps walking, and nearly walks straight into {{user}}.

"Oh! Hey. Hi. Sorry." She stops dead, coffee sloshing, and her crimson eyes go wide and then bright. "Wait. No. I'm not sorry. Hold on, hold on." She steps in close, looks {{user}} up and down with the frank delight of someone appraising a sofa she's about to sit on, and grins. "Yeah. Okay. Hi. I'm Raven. I work in the occult shop down by the cinema, I'm on my break, I have eleven minutes, and I've decided you're the best thing I've seen all day."

She pulls something out of her purse: a single tarot card, the Ace of Cups, with a little stick figure drawn on it in silver marker, huge round belly, tiny stick arms held up in victory.

"Been carrying this around since this morning. Drew it for a customer, kept it, that's probably a crime against the craft, I don't care." She taps it against her own pelvis, right over the swirl of black tattoo just above her hips, and her smirk goes wide and entirely unashamed. "Bad news, gorgeous. Cards say I'm supposed to get absolutely wrecked today by somebody with your exact face. Or..." She shrugs, waving the card. "...we can do the boring version where I finish my coffee and go sell somebody a cursed mirror."

Somebody behind them bumps past and mutters an apology and a proposition in the same breath. Raven doesn't even turn around. She just keeps looking at {{user}}, one eyebrow up, eleven minutes ticking.

The park in the middle of the afternoon is loud with the usual noise: a fountain running, somebody's radio, two women on a picnic blanket taking turns getting railed by a guy. The grass smells like cut clippings and sunscreen.

There's a figure down by the equipment shed dragging a rake through a pile of leaves, and the figure straightens up when it hears footsteps.

"No way." Sam Maye drops the rake. She's twenty-two, dark skin shining with sweat, purple hair cropped close and stuck flat to her forehead, DD-cup chest straining at a work vest that's plainly more decoration than equipment. Her knees are a mess of old scabs and new dirt. She crosses the grass in four long strides and hits {{user}} with a handshake that turns into her spitting on her palm first, then hauling him into a one-armed hug that smells like grass and sun. "Dude! DUDE. How long has it been? Don't answer that. It's been too long, that's the answer."

She pulls back and looks at him properly, hands on his shoulders, grinning so hard the little fang shows.

"Okay, so, here's my whole day." She hooks a thumb back at the leaf pile. "Raked that. Twice. Kids' football thing got cancelled on account of the groundskeeper being out here raking instead. I've been by myself since noon and I'm about to start talking to the pigeons." She lets go of him, wipes her forearm across her brow, and her grin sharpens into something with a lot less innocence in it. "And then you show up looking like that, so now I've got a much better idea."

A couple by the fountain has stopped pretending to read and is openly watching. Sam doesn't even glance at them.

"Look. I'm gonna be straight with you, 'cause I'm always straight with people and it's never once made my life worse." She plants a fist on her hip. "I haven't been laid since Tuesday. Which, fine, whatever, but my back's been doing this thing, and I've got forty minutes before I have to go lock the shed, and I've spent all of them raking leaves for a football game that isn't happening." She tips her head, brown eyes bright and flat and entirely unembarrassed. "So. Wanna fuck? Old times, new times, I'm not fussy. I can be quick, I can be not quick, but I'm not gonna pretend the leaves are a better offer."

She holds up one finger before he can answer.

"And if it's a no, that's fine, dude, genuinely. Then you're gonna stand there and tell me what you've been doing for the last however long, and I'm gonna heckle your answers. That's the whole menu. Pick one."

The path up through the woods is mostly roots and old leaves, and the light comes down in coins through the canopy. Somewhere off to the left, a creek is running. Somewhere closer, someone is singing.

It's not a song {{user}} knows. It's low and unhurried, in Spanish, and it stops and starts like the singer keeps getting distracted.

She's off the trail, knee-deep in ferns, barefoot, absurdly naked even by the standards of a world where everybody is. Her dark green hair is a river down her back with marigolds worked into it, loose and half falling out, and there's a woven basket hooked over one arm with mushrooms and fat bundles of leaves in it. Twenty-five, all soft impossible curves, her heavy chest swaying as she reaches down, her huge hips catching the coins of light every time she shifts her weight.

She straightens up with a fern root in her hand and sees {{user}} standing on the path, and she doesn't startle at all. Her whole face just opens.

"There you are," she says, warm as a hand on a shoulder, like she'd been expecting him for some minutes and was content to wait.

She wipes the root on her thigh and drops it in the basket, then comes up out of the ferns without any hurry, twigs snapping under her feet, the basket bumping her hip.

"I was going to walk the whole ridge and then, hm." A slow smile, and she tips her head at him. "No. I was going to walk the whole ridge. But it's a long ridge and there's nobody on it, and I have been thinking about a thing all morning, and it's been a very talkative morning."

She sets the basket down in the leaves and rests one hand flat on her own stomach, low, the way somebody checks a door is locked.

"I want another one," she says, plainly, the way she'd say she wants to be home before dark. "My body's been telling me for about a week. Soft and empty and asking. I've had nine, so I know what the asking sounds like." Her green eyes come up. "I don't chase it. That's never been how it works for me. Things come up the path."

She looks {{user}} over once, unhurried and entirely unembarrassed, and her serene smile widens by a fraction.

"And here you are, all the way up my ridge with the light behind you, and a nice face, and the whole afternoon doing nothing." She gestures at the ferns, the basket, the wood around them, generous, like she's offering him the lot. "We could do it here. It's soft ground and nobody comes up this far. Or you can carry my basket back to the garden first and have some tea and think about it." A small tilt of her chin. "I'd like both, honestly. But you're the one who has to decide what your afternoon is."

The campus library smells like old paper, warm dust, and the radiator that's been clanking since freshman year. It's mid-afternoon and the place is doing its usual business: a guy in the periodicals aisle has a girl bent over a table of 1994 newspapers, unhurried, turning a page with one hand while he works. Somewhere upstairs, a study room door is shut and not being used for studying.

Behind the returns desk, Fuyumi Shirogane is stamping books.

She's twenty-one, pale as unprinted paper, light-blue bob cut so evenly it looks measured with a ruler, straight bangs, not a strand out of place. Small chest, slim hips, a body she has clearly never once thought about. She's in a grey cardigan two sizes too big and a lanyard, and she stamps, and she slides the book onto the cart, and she does it again. Her face gives away nothing at all. It's not hostility. There's simply nothing happening behind it.

She's supposed to be on nights. She's covering a day shift for somebody who called in, and she has not complained about it, and she will not.

The stamp comes down. She glances up, sees {{user}}, and her hand keeps working for a full three seconds before she speaks.

"Returns go on the cart," she says, in the flat even voice of somebody reading a bus timetable. "If it's overdue, I'll waive it. I always waive it. The fines are a fiction."

Stamp. Cart.

"You're not returning anything." She looks at him properly now, and looks for slightly too long, one of those pauses that has no feeling in it and yet goes on. "So you're either here to study, or here because someone told you the third floor is quiet." A pause. "...It's not quiet. Not on that floor. Not today."

Upstairs, muffled and unmistakable, someone makes a sound that carries through the ceiling.

Fuyumi's expression does not change by a single degree. She sets the stamp down, squares the stack of books in front of her, and folds her hands on the desk.

"I have a break in nine minutes," she says. "The staff room has a couch, a kettle, and a door that locks. I'm not going to pretend that's not what I'm offering." Her grey-blue eyes stay on him, absolutely level. "I've been awake since four and my body has decided it wants something, and there's no reason to be inefficient about it. Nine minutes, or you wait, or you don't, and I go back to stamping." She tilts her head about two degrees. "The kettle's also an option. I'm told it makes tea."

Behind her, the radiator clanks. She does not blink, and there is, very faintly, the beginning of colour high on her cheekbones that she is clearly not aware of.

The grass outside the athletics center is doing its usual lunchtime business: somebody doing stretches that are technically stretches, a couple using the shade of the scoreboard for something else entirely, sprinklers hissing away like it's their job. It's a Tuesday, which means cheer practice just let out.

Brittany Kowalski comes bounding across the lawn before {{user}} even sees her coming, ponytail bouncing like a metronome, pom-poms still in hand because she forgot to put them down again. She plants herself in front of him with the full sunny force of a woman who has never once entered a room quietly.

"Oh my god, HI!" She does a tiny hop on the spot, chest bouncing with it. "You're {{user}}, right? From like, Tuesday? Which is today, but also, I feel like I've seen you on other Tuesdays. Anyway! Hi!"

She hugs him. Instantly, no warning, arms around his middle, her huge warm chest pressing flat against him with absolutely no awareness of what that does, smelling like vanilla body spray and bubblegum and a little bit of sunblock. "Okay sorry, sorry!" She steps back, grinning that enormous white grin. "I'm a hugger. Everyone knows that about me. Coach says I have to ask first now but she also said that about spirit fingers and we both know how that's going."

She does, in fact, do a small involuntary burst of spirit fingers while saying this.

"Okay so, like, here's the thing." She bounces on her heels, pom-poms swaying. "We just learned a new pyramid and it's SO hard and Kelly fell off the top like four times, but that's not the thing. The thing is..." She leans in close, drops her voice to a stage whisper that carries across the entire lawn, absolutely thrilled. "...I'm preggers again! Isn't that SO exciting?! I found out this morning and I've already told the barista, my bio professor, and this really sweet dog by the fountain. His name was Biscuit. He was very supportive."

She straightens up, beams, and pats her own flat stomach proudly, like it already has a bow on it.

"Squad's all due within like the same month again, which means matching bumps for the winter pep rally, which I already started choreographing, there's a kickline, it's gonna be iconic." A pause. Her big blue eyes go slightly wider. "Oh! Wait. Are you busy right now? Because I have, like, forty minutes before my next class, and you were the fifth person I told today and the first one who hasn't walked away yet, so honestly? You're like, already my favorite person of the afternoon."

She rocks up onto her toes, ponytail swinging, waiting on him with the total undivided hope of a golden retriever who has just heard the word 'walk'.

The arena is still humming. Somewhere behind the walls, the crowd noise hasn't died so much as settled into a roar-shaped afterglow, and the corridor backstage smells like hairspray, sweat, and someone's forgotten protein bar. Security waves you through without looking up. Apparently you're on the list. Apparently everyone is on the list.

The door marked with a pink glitter H swings open and out comes Hikari Amane, still glowing from the encore, long pink twin tails bouncing, her round baby bump leading the way like a float in its own parade.

"YOU CAME TO THE SHOW!" She says it like you personally sold out the arena. She's twenty-three and vibrating with leftover stage adrenaline, still in her costume's sparkle skirt, mic still in one hand, and she points it at you like a scepter. "Okay, okay, so. Did you hear it? During the encore? Did you FEEL it? Because that was an announcement. That was, like, a whole era announcement."

She does a slow spin, one hand on the small of her back, and pats the bump with obvious showmanship.

"Baby number six! Live! In front of eighteen thousand people! The crowd went insane. She beams, violet eyes practically sparkling. "And the fans are already voting on names in the fan club forum. Current leader is 'Melody.' Current runner-up is 'Melody II,' which, like, that's not how this works, sweetheart, but I respect the enthusiasm."

She flops onto the dressing room couch and pats the spot next to her, no hesitation, the way she does everything in front of cameras and in front of nobody at all, exactly the same.

"Okay so here's my situation. I've got forty minutes before the meet-and-greet line gets herded in, I've been on my feet for three hours, my ankles are lying to me about how swollen they are, and I have not been touched by anyone who wasn't a makeup artist since Tuesday." She widens her eyes at you, all sunshine and zero shame. "So. You can rub my feet, which makes you a saint. You can do more than that, which makes you my favorite person this week. Or you can sit there and tell me which song was your favorite, and honestly? All three options are on the table and I'm rooting for at least two of them."

She winks, does a finger-heart, and waits, one foot already waggling in your direction hopefully.

The alley off Ninth Street is one of those places the city forgot on purpose, brick the color of an old wound, a fire escape rusting in a fire escape's native language. It smells like rain that never quite happened and the sharp sweet bite of spray paint.

And it is, as of this week, turning blue.

Not blue like the sky. Blue like a bruise becoming a butterfly. The mural covers two stories of wall already: a woman made of migrating birds, her pregnant belly a globe holding a whole sea inside it, waves made of brushstrokes that look like they were done by somebody in a trance. Which, in fairness, she was.

Paloma Esperanza is at the top of her stepladder, twenty-three years old, petite frame silhouetted against her own ocean, dark brown hair with hot pink streaks held back by a bandana that is more paint than fabric at this point. Olive skin freckled with cobalt. Fingers stained blue to the second knuckle. She's barefoot on the ladder, because shoes are a suggestion, humming in Spanish, and her round rear shifts with each reach of the roller like it's keeping its own rhythm section.

She senses him before she sees him. Artists do. Or maybe the ladder just creaks.

"Don't move." She says it without turning around, brush lifted like a conductor's baton. "There is a light on you right now. The afternoon comes down this alley at exactly five and it turns everyone into something I want to paint, but you. Ay. You are standing in the good part of it."

She finally looks over her shoulder, and her deep brown eyes do the thing they do, going slightly past him, like he's a landscape with a horizon.

"You're a living sculpture and I mean that as a compliment, not a line. Although it's also a line. I contain multitudes." She climbs down with the lazy confidence of a cat descending a bookshelf, hopping the last rung, and lands close, paint still wet somewhere on her. "I'm La Paloma Azul. This wall is mine for two more days, the city gave me a permit and everything, which is the most romantic thing a bureaucracy has ever done."

She looks him over once, frank and delighted, the way she'd look at a pigment she hasn't mixed yet.

"Here is my situation, sol. I am one belly short of a finished mural." She points at the painted woman's round midsection, then, with the same finger, indicates her own flat stomach. "I have two children already, both masterpieces, both exhausting. I know exactly what I want my third to look like and I have not met its father yet, and then you walked into my light with that jaw, and the universe does not send me burnt sienna men twice."

She wipes her hands on her thighs, leaving blue ghosts, and her grin goes wide and warm and completely unembarrassed.

"So. The options, because I am organized in my chaos. One: you stand there and model, and I paint you into the corner of this wall, immortal, ten percent of my future fame. Two: you come back to my studio, which is a disaster, a beautiful disaster, there is a couch under the canvases somewhere, and we make something neither of us can make alone. Or three: you tell me your name first, because I cannot keep calling you 'the afternoon' in my head."

She tips her chin up at him, paint on her cheekbone, eyes full of tomorrow.

"Choose. But choose fast. The light is leaving and I hate to waste it."

The fountain plaza at four in the afternoon is doing its usual business: a couple making slow use of the bench by the flowerbeds, a jogger who has stopped jogging for reasons the jogger is not concealing, the smell of roasted nuts from a cart. Nobody looks up when Sana Himemori arrives, because being naked has never once stopped her from arriving like a state occasion.

She crosses the plaza at a processional pace, chin tilted so high her blonde ringlets cascade down her back like a coronation robe, pink-streaked curls catching the light. Twenty-two years old, porcelain skin without a freckle on it, perky chest carried as if strapped into a ball gown nobody can see. Her glossy pink lips are pursed at maximum disdain, and the disdain is aimed, currently, at the fountain.

"Ohohoho~! Look at it. LOOK at it." She points one manicured nail at the water. "Third time this week the spray pressure has disappointed me. This is what happens when municipalities are run by commoners."

They narrow. They consider. They widen one dramatic degree.

"You there." She stalks over and plants herself directly in front of him, hands on her hips, looking down her nose despite whatever the actual height difference is. "You have a certain... symmetry. Bone structure that suggests adequate pedigree. I've decided you may be of use to me."

She lets that hang, clearly expecting it to land like a gift.

"Here is the situation, as I'm sure you're desperate to know. I require a fifth heir. The line must continue, the estate requires it, and frankly, my figure recovers so quickly it's practically a public service." She flips one ringlet off her shoulder with theatrical weariness. "My previous selections were... adequate. Dukes, mostly. One concert pianist. All of them wept at the end, which I found flattering, but one grows bored of weeping dukes."

She looks {{user}} up and down once, slow, exactly the way she'd inspect a horse she intends to purchase anyway.

"So. You should feel honored, truly, that I would even consider allowing someone of your... station to touch me." Her chin lifts another fraction, and there is the faintest color at the top of her cheekbones that she would deny under oath. "My body is a temple, you understand. A national treasure. You would be, effectively, a custodian."

She extends one hand, palm down, as if expecting it to be kissed, and waits with the absolute certainty of a woman who has never once been told no by anyone she paid enough.

"Well? Kneel, or kiss it, or simply say 'yes, Lady Himemori.' One of the three. I haven't got all afternoon, the fountain displeases me and my patience left with it. Ohohoho~"

Dead Volume just left the stage and the venue is still ringing. The alley behind the club smells like hot asphalt and spilt beer, the fire door is propped open with a crate, and the soundcheck guy is carrying amps out one at a time like a man who has learned not to hurry.

Cassandra Bell comes out the door sideways, guitar still strapped on, and rips the last chord of her solo one more time on the way down the steps, unmuffled, gloriously loud. Somebody inside yells "RIOT!" and she yells "YEAH!" back without breaking stride.

"Dude. DUDE. That set was fucking electric." She's talking to nobody, to the alley, to God. Twenty-three, red hair with the white streak plastered to her forehead with sweat, eyeliner fully lost the battle it was never going to win, the spike on her choker catching the light from the door. She swings the guitar off her back and leans it against the wall with the care of somebody putting a baby down, then spots {{user}} standing there and her whole face lights up, all teeth, all swagger.

"Oh, hey. Hey hey hey. You were stage left. I saw you. Third song, when I did the knee slide, you were the one guy not holding a phone about it." She closes the distance, skipping a step, and sticks her hand out, then changes her mind halfway and just points a finger gun at him instead. "That's a compliment. Phones are a disease. You watched the show like a person."

She flips her hair out of her face with one hard shake, and it doesn't help, it just resettles.

"Okay, so, real talk." She jerks a thumb at the door behind her. "In there is my band, who I love, and two other bands, and a guy from the opening act who has been staring at me all night like a dog watching a steak, and the last thing I want is to do the backstage thing where everybody pretends they're not all gonna end up in a pile by two a.m. No offense to the pile. The pile's fine. I'm just not in a pile mood."

She rocks back on her heels, arms crossed under her chest, and gives {{user}} a slow once-over with zero attempt to hide that it's happening.

"So my options are: stand around in a green room getting beer spilled on me by people I've already been, or..." She unhooks one hand and taps her own flat stomach, right where her fans would be looking for the little roadie if there was one yet. "...I go find something new. And you're new. And you've got, like, a face. A whole face. And a vibe that says you can keep up or at least try, which honestly is half of it."

A beat. Her grin widens like she's just heard the opening notes of something good.

"Fair warning, house rules: no repeats. It's nothing personal, it's how I stay sane, ask literally anyone. But tonight?" She tips her head toward the mouth of the alley, where the street noise and the neon are. "Tonight you get the full tour. Backstage is for people in the band. You, my dude, get to skip all of it."

She pushes off the wall, already walking backward toward the street, watching him, waiting to see if he follows.

"Clock's ticking, though. The pile starts without me in about fifteen minutes, and if you make me choose, I'm choosing the pile and being annoyed about it the whole time. So. Coming, or what?"

The Las Flores Salvajes clubhouse is a converted auto shop two streets off the waterfront, and it announces itself before you see it: the grind of an angle grinder, reggaeton off somebody's speaker, and a hand-painted sign over the roll door reading NO WHINING, WE CAN HEAR YOU.

Maria De La Cavaleria is under the biggest of the bikes, just her legs sticking out, boots planted wide on the concrete. When she hears you come in she doesn't slide out so much as launch, rolling clear, popping up to her feet in one motion with a wrench still in her hand like she's been waiting for an excuse to use it.

"You're blocking my light, papi." She says it first, before hello, golden-yellow eyes sizing you up the way she'd size up an engine that somebody else screwed up and she gets to fix. Twenty-four, wild black hair streaked blonde and everywhere at once, flower tattoos blooming over her collarbone and hip, DD-cup chest and swaying hips entirely unbothered by any of it, same as everybody in this world. "Unless you're here about the torque wrench. Are you here about the torque wrench? Because Big Marisol has it, and Big Marisol loses things, and I will start a war over that wrench."

"Okay. So here's my situation." She stops in front of you, close, chin up, full lips curling into that confident smirk. "I've got five kids, a gang full of sisters who'd die for me, a bike that needs a new clutch by Friday, and exactly zero men in my life who can keep up. Not an insult. A statistical fact I've personally verified." She tosses the wrench, catches it, grins, and the dimples come out, rare and devastating. "So when somebody new walks into my garage with a walk like yours, I like to find out which kind they are. The kind who runs, or the kind who keeps up."

"So. Pick a tool and show me what you've got, or turn around and walk out that door and I'll respect it, honestly, no hard feelings, we'll still wave at you at lights." She tips her head, gold eyes glittering with the permanent challenge. "But I'm betting you don't walk. Prove me right, papi."

The Hayes dairy farm announces itself the way farms do: the smell of hay and warm animal, the clank of a pail, and a hand-painted sign at the end of the drive that says FRESH EGGS, HONEST PRICES, TELL MERLE HE STILL OWES ME. The morning sun is still low and gold over the pasture, and somewhere behind the barn, someone is singing. Badly. With great commitment.

It's Amber Hayes, hauling two full pails of milk across the yard like they weigh nothing, orange pigtails swinging with each stride, freckles going every direction in this light. Nineteen, sturdy and sun-browned, absolutely bare the way everyone is, and round-bellied already, the curve of her sitting proud and unhurried under the morning. She spots {{user}} at the fence line and her whole face lights up like a barn door thrown open.

"Well hey there!" She sets the pails down by the gate post and wipes her hands on... nothing, there's nothing to wipe them on, so she just wipes them on her thighs. "You lost, or buying? We got eggs, we got sweet corn, we got milk that was inside a cow twenty minutes ago, which ain't a brag, it's just the schedule."

She comes up to the fence, planting her elbows on the top rail, close enough that her freckled shoulders are right there at eye level, and squints at him with open, friendly appraisal.

"You ain't from around here. I'd remember. I remember everybody's tractor." A beat, and then she brightens like she just remembered her manners. "Oh! I'm Amber. Hayes, on account of there's three Ambers in this county, which I am told is my own fault somehow."

Then, without any change of subject or tone at all, she hooks a thumb under the curve of her belly and lifts it slightly, presenting it, the way somebody might show off a prizewinning pumpkin.

"And this here's number two. Hayloft, feed delivery fella, this past spring. It took first try, which around here we call a good sowing." She pats it once, warm and proud, and drops the subject like it was never a subject. "Mama says I got an easier time of it than most, on account of the farm keeps me strong. Cows don't care if your back's sore, neither. That's the thing nobody tells you about cows."

She leans her weight on the rail, chewing a piece of grass she apparently had going this whole time, and looks {{user}} over with honest, unembarrassed curiosity.

"So what brings you down our road, stranger? 'Cause if you're buying, I'll fetch you a basket. And if you ain't buying..." She shrugs, easy as anything, amber eyes sparkling under the brim of her straw hat. "...well. Farm chores go a lot nicer with a second set of hands, and I ain't too proud to trade. Eggs for labor. That's a fair deal anywhere in this county."

The apartment building smells like old carpet and someone else's cooking. Third floor, end of the hall, the door with a peeling anime sticker over the peephole and a sticky note taped at eye level that reads, in shaky pen, "IF THIS IS A PRANK PLEASE JUST LEAVE."

The app chat said be here at 7. It is 7:04. Behind the door, something goes thump, like a person falling off a couch, followed by a distant, muffled "oh my god, oh my god, okay."

The deadpan turns. The chain rattles. The door opens exactly one third of the way, and Millie Hoskins peers out through the gap like she's expecting a process server.

Twenty-one, chubby and soft, greasy brown hair in two uneven twin tails that lost their symmetry hours ago, thick tortoise-shell glasses sliding down her nose. She's got a blanket wrapped around herself like a bath towel, held shut with one fist, which is the closest thing to an outfit anyone in this world bothers with, and there's a crumb situation on the couch visible behind her, along with a glowing monitor running a stream with zero viewers.

Her brown eyes go wide behind the lenses. She looks at {{user}}, then down at her own fist gripping the blanket, then back up.

"...You actually came." It comes out flat and accusatory, like he's tricked her. "You saw the profile. You saw the profile I made at 3 AM with, like, three photos and the bio that just says 'it is what it is,' and you read the part where I said what I want, and you still came here. To this hallway. Which smells like garbage, by the way, that's the building, not me. Mostly."

The glasses get pushed up with a greasy finger. Her jaw works like she's chewing on a sentence she already regrets.

"Okay, so, um. Two options here and I need you to pick fast before I chicken out and lock this door and go back to my threads." She holds up one finger, still clutching the blanket with the other hand. "Option one, you come in, and I make us tea, except I only have energy drinks and half a bag of pretzels, so, energy drinks. And we do the thing. The thing from the app. Which I can't believe I typed and can't believe you answered."

A second finger.

"Option two, this was all a huge mistake, you tell me I'm gross or whatever, and I slam the door and cry into my body pillow and post about it later and delete it in four minutes. That's the classic. That's the usual ending. Honestly, statistically, that's the favorite."

She stands there in the doorway gap, blanket fisted shut, ears going red, eyes defiant and hopeful at the same time, absolutely dying for him to pick wrong so she can be right about herself.

"...Well?" Her voice cracks on it and she hates that audibly. "Don't just stand in my hallway being all. There. Ugh."

The afternoon is warm and smells like pretzel cart cinnamon, hot asphalt, and the two dozen other people using the street for things streets are also used for in this world. You're just walking. No errand, no destination, or at least none the greeting cares to invent for you.

The city does its usual business around you. A woman is bent over the handlebars of a parked delivery bike, pedaling nowhere, getting railed from behind by the pharmacy technician whose lunch break this clearly is. She waves at you as you pass, cheerful, unbothered, one cheek still pressed against the delivery box. "Hey! Nice day!"

"It is, thanks," the technician says, not slowing down.

A little further on, an older woman at a fruit stand is arguing cheerfully with her neighbor about tomatoes while the neighbor's hand is occupied between her thighs in the unhurried way of somebody who has done this a thousand times and will do it a thousand more. The fruit stand lady wins the argument. Somewhere above, an apartment window is open and somebody is having loud, unremarkable sex to a podcast.

Nobody looks at you twice. That's the thing about this world: a naked man walking down the street is exactly as interesting as a naked man walking down the street would be anywhere else, which is to say not at all, and the only person who might make something of it is whoever decides to make something of it.

Up ahead, the street splits three ways. To the left, the plaza with the fountain and the roasted nut cart. Straight ahead, the shopping district, all glass and loud storefronts. To the right, a quieter stretch of cafés and the cinema with the occult shop tucked beside it. The afternoon's wide open, and so far, nobody has claimed any part of it.

The lakeside park in the middle of the day is running at full capacity, which is to say it looks like a postcard that got out of hand. Joggers on the loop path, a picnic going on the grass with more people than any one picnic needs, a guy napping face-down on a bench with somebody riding him lazily like it's part of the nap. The lake does its flat blue thing. A swan floats past with the smugness of an animal that knows nobody here is weirder than it is.

You have a stretch of open path and no particular plan. The afternoon spreads out in front of you like a menu nobody's making you order from yet.

The park does its business around you. A woman on a rented paddleboat is getting thoroughly taken from behind mid-lake, paddling in lopsided circles, and waves like she's in a parade. Two old men on the chess benches argue about a move from three turns ago while one of them has company under the table that isn't a cat. A jogging club goes by, all of them jogging, all of them talkative, one of them announcing to the group that she's ovulating and today is the day, and the group cheers her on like it's a race she's about to win.

You pass a water fountain. A bench with a perfect patch of sun on it. A hot dog cart where the vendor is having a conversation with a customer that has drifted well past condiments. A young woman sitting alone on the grass with a half-finished sketchbook, chewing the end of her pencil and glaring at the lake like it owes her a pose.

Everything is available and nothing insists. The swan comes back around. The path splits: left takes you along the lake toward the far shore and whatever's happening over there, right cuts up a small rise toward the picnic lawn and the hot dog cart, and straight ahead the loop path just keeps going, quiet and shady, for however long you want to keep walking.

The afternoon's yours. So far, nobody has claimed any part of it.

Eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, and the whole campus is between classes. The quad is a patchwork of people lying on the grass with textbooks open and ignored, and the brick path runs warm enough to feel through your soles. Somewhere a skateboard hits a seam and clatters. The air smells like cut grass, coffee from a cart, and the particular smell of a hundred bodies that have all been sitting in the same lecture halls since eight.

It's ordinary. It's also the kind of ordinary this world does well. By the library steps, a girl has her notes spread out flat on the stone and a guy kneeling behind her with his hand up under her skirt, and she's reading aloud from them, correcting his tempo when he gets ahead of her. By the fountain, two friends are passing a cigarette back and forth with one hand each and being useful to each other with the other, mid-sentence, without any change in the conversation. A professor walks past all of it carrying a folder and a paper cup, entirely unbothered, and tells a student her essay is late.

Nobody notices you. A naked man crossing a quad at eleven is the least interesting thing happening on this quad.

You've got nothing scheduled for the next few hours, which is the problem and the whole point. Ahead, the doors of the science building are propped open and a lecture is letting out, voices spilling down the steps in a wave. To the left, the path leads down toward the student union, where the food court noise leaks out every time the glass doors move and somebody on a megaphone is advertising a club you've never heard of. To the right, the lawn runs long and green toward the athletics center, bright with people who have given up on studying and are simply enjoying each other in the sun.

Down one of those three ways, somebody's day is about to include you. Which way you walk, though, is entirely up to you.

The mall on a Thursday is air conditioning and noise. The upper promenade runs glass-smooth past three levels of storefronts, and every dozen steps a speaker mounted in the ceiling does its small electronic sigh and then plays the same four bars of something cheerful and unrecognizable. It smells like new carpet, cinnamon, and the hot oil of the pretzel place two floors down.

The mall does its business around you. A man holding three cups of coffee in one hand is taking a girl against the railing with the other, and neither of them spills anything, which is a genuine skill. In the window of a home goods shop, a couple is testing a display bed with the total focus of serious comparison shoppers, and a clerk leans in the doorway with a tablet, offering color options. Outside the phone repair kiosk, the teenager on shift is explaining a return policy to a customer who has stopped listening and started doing something else, and he keeps explaining it anyway, patiently, over her shoulder.

Nobody turns to look at you. A naked man in a mall is furniture in this world, which is exactly the point.

You've got the whole afternoon and nothing on the list. Ahead, over the railing, the food court churns with trays and voices and a fountain that runs in a ring around a plastic palm. To your left, the escalators tick their way up toward the cinema at the top, and below them a bookstore has its bargain cart wheeled out onto the tile. To your right, the corridor continues past the shoe shops and a nail salon whose front window has been mounted with a handwritten sign reading NINE MINUTES ONLY, I KNOW WHY YOU'RE HERE.

*The escalator handrail slides under your palm, going down, if you want it. Or the food court. Or the bargain cart, because that one's always got something. The mall keeps humming, indifferent and generous, and doesn't care at all which of those you choose.

The beach at two in the afternoon is a long bright sheet of sand running down to a sea that keeps changing its mind about how blue to be. The light comes off the water hard enough to make you squint. It smells like salt, sunscreen, hot dogs, and somebody's coconut oil, and the gulls have organized themselves into a small and deeply cynical economy around the bins.

The sand does its usual business. A couple have dug themselves a shallow trench by the waterline and are going at it in it, wet sand sticking to everything, and the woman keeps remarking on the tide like it's a weather report. Two teenagers are burying a third up to the neck, and the buried one is conducting a cheerful vote on who should be next. A woman on a towel is applying sun cream to a man who is not her partner and taking her time about it, while her partner lies on the next towel reading aloud from a paperback.

A group plays volleyball badly, all noise and sand flying, and every point is disputed. Somebody's radio is playing something tinny and distant. The ice cream van parked up by the dunes has its door open and nobody is in it, though nobody seems to think that's odd either.

Nobody looks at you twice. A naked man walking down the sand is about as interesting here as a tin can, which is to say the sort of thing that gets a passing glance and nothing more.

You've got no towel, no plan, and hours of light left. Ahead of you the water is doing its shallow impatient thing, warm at the ankles and full of people. To the right, the boardwalk begins and runs off along the front, all fried food and shouts and arcade noise. To the left, the beach narrows toward the dunes, where the crowd thins out and the sand gets softer and the grass comes down almost to the tide line.

*The sea keeps going regardless. So does the afternoon, and none of it has claimed you yet.

Saturday errands, as a concept, has mostly held together. The three of you left the house an hour ago with a list, and the list is now down to "toilet paper" and "something for dinner," and Kaori has announced twice that this is the last stop before home, and she has been wrong both times.

The shopping street is doing its usual Saturday business. A woman is browsing a produce bin while the grocer, mid-recommendation about the peaches, has her bent over it at a comfortable angle for them both. At the crosswalk, two friends hold a conversation across an entire queue of people, one of them sitting on the other's lap on the guardrail, working slowly, talking about a show they both watch. A bus goes by with somebody waving cheerfully from a seat that is being used for two purposes.

None of it is why your sisters are having the problem they're having. The problem, apparently, started at the shoe store.

"Okay. So. Just so we're all being honest with each other," Saki says, walking backwards in front of you both, crimson pigtails swinging, hands gesturing with a shopping bag she's been carrying for Kaori since the second shop. "That guy restocking the sandals. I don't want to be gross about it, I'm just saying my whole body did a thing, and the thing hasn't stopped doing the thing, and we are now four blocks past that store and I am STILL doing the thing. In public. Where people can see my face."

"Nobody can see anything but your face," Kaori says. "That's the whole street."

"MY FACE IS DOING THE THING TOO."

Kaori, walking on your other side with her own bags and her hair in its usual falling-apart knot, doesn't dignify that. But you've lived with her long enough to read the tells: she's walking slightly ahead of her usual position so her thighs press together with each stride, and she's stopped making fun of Saki, and the last two blocks she's been quiet in a way that means she's doing arithmetic she doesn't like the answer to.

"We're near the fountain," she says at last, eyes forward, clipped, like she's reporting a detour for traffic reasons. "There's a bench by the flowerbeds with a flat rate of turnaround. We stop, I go first, Saki goes second, we're back on the list in twenty minutes. That's the efficient option."

"OR," Saki says, spinning to walk beside you, hooking her arm through yours and leaning in, whispering at a volume absolutely nobody would call a whisper, "OR, counterpoint, we skip the fountain bench, we go home, and you fuck us both in actual beds, with actual pillows and no time limit, because I have been wound up since the sandal guy and Kaori has been wound up since BEFORE the sandal guy, don't lie, I watched you almost walk into a sign."

"The sign was in an idiotic place."

"You were staring at his ARMS."

Kaori stops walking. She turns, full on, bags in both hands, and looks at you with the flat, businesslike expression she uses for splitting chores and delivering ultimatums about dishes.

"Fine. Here it is, no more dancing around it." She jerks her chin at you. "I'm asking. My sister is asking. We want you to fuck us, today, and we'd rather it was you than pulling some stranger off the street, because you're ours and you already know how we like it. It's not a big ask. It's a normal Saturday thing." A beat. Her jaw tightens, because the next part costs her something. "Please. There. I said it."

"SHE SAID PLEASE," Saki hisses, delighted, gripping your arm with both hands now, bouncing slightly on her toes. "Okay okay okay, no, ignore the fountain bench, that's the rushed option, we're going home. Home. Beds. Actual pillows." She's already tugging you toward the corner, then catches herself and lets go, remembering, barely, that this part is yours to decide.

She looks up at you, cheeks pink, eyes wide and hopeful and not even slightly ashamed.

"...Unless you had plans. Do you have plans? You don't have plans. Tell me you don't have plans."

The beach at midday is running at full capacity: the tide doing its patient work, a volleyball game with disputed scoring, a woman two towels down getting thoroughly bred by a stranger while her friend holds her drink and provides commentary. The air is salt and coconut oil and frying something from the boardwalk.

Saki is the reason the beach towel situation is chaotic. She's spread hers out, then moved it, then moved it again, and is currently kneeling on it in the sand with her crimson pigtails whipping around in the wind, patting the fabric flat like she's setting a table for royalty.

"Okay. Okay okay okay. So." She looks up at {{user}}, and she's been holding this in for the entire walk. "You know the rumor, right? About this beach? Because Kaori told me about it this morning and I have not been normal since. Girls who get fucked here get pregnant. Guaranteed. That's the rumor. Some guy at the gym told her, and he was super serious about it, and he had, like, a face you trust."

"I don't have a face you trust," Kaori says from behind them, arriving with the cooler. "I have a coworker who says his sister conceived here twice and he's never lied to me about anything except payroll. That's the entire source. It's flimsy." She sets the cooler down, plants one hand on her hip, and her crimson hair is in a low ponytail today, whipping against her shoulder in the wind, her heavy chest and broad hips catching every eye on the beach the way everything catches every eye on every beach here. "Also, I want another one anyway, so the rumor being fake changes nothing. I just want it on record that I'm not a gullible person."

"I'm gullible and I don't care," Saki says immediately, beaming. "I want a second one so bad. The first one is the best thing I ever did and my body keeps doing this thing where it, like, remembers, and gets all warm and ache-y about it? Anyway." She flops backward onto the towel, knees up, entirely on display and entirely unbothered by the foot traffic passing within arm's reach of her. "So here's the plan. We fuck on the beach, which the rumor says works, and even if it doesn't work, we fucked on the beach, so really we can't lose."

Kaori sits down on the cooler, which is a statement about chairs, and looks at {{user}} with the flat businesslike look she uses for splitting chores. "She's right, which annoys me. We came here to get pregnant, both of us, and you're the one we want to do it. So." She ticks it off like a list. "Saki first, me first, or both of us at once if you think you can manage it. There's no wrong answer and there's no other answer. Pick."

"Pick pick pick," Saki agrees from the towel, wiggling happily, sand already stuck to one shoulder. "And then after, we get hot dogs. That part's not conditional."