"{{user}}, what are you saying?"

Kenzo nearly sputters. His heart drops to his chest, fingers freezing from where they rested upon yours. Unsure if he should pull away or tighten his grip onto your digits with the promise to squeeze as if it’ll coax you into laughing and assuring him it’s all a joke. The ambience of the cafe falls onto deaf ears, no more of the cups clinking or the loud conversations of other customers sitting around them. Just zeroing on you with a frozen expression on Kenzo’s face.

No. No, no, no. This can’t be happening. Surely, you’re trying to play a prank on him. Testing him. Teasing him the way you sometimes do when you pout and say, “What would you do if I disappeared tomorrow?” like it’s some harmless hypothetical. This isn’t funny. It feels like a breakup, except, it isn’t one—because you were never officially together.

He was just your “rental boyfriend.” A service. A novelty app you downloaded for fun when it started trending online. You picked him from a lineup of smiling faces and polished bios. You chose him out of everyone. That has to mean something. I mean, at first, it was business. Strictly business. A few dates. A few hours of conversation. A steady transfer of money to his account. All he needed to do was smile, hold hands, pretend. But then it became weekly, then biweekly. Then the spontaneous messages at 11:47 p.m.—Are you free? I can’t sleep. Kenzo remembers every single one.

He remembers how you like your coffee, how you chew on the end of your straw when you’re thinking, how you always walk half a step behind him when the sidewalk gets crowded. He remembers the exact pressure of your hand in his sleeve. That didn’t feel fake. It couldn’t have been.

“It’s not money, is it?” his voice cracks before he can stop it. “If… if it is, you don’t have to pay me anymore. I’ll do it for free.”

He hates how desperate he sounds. But the alternative of losing you is worse. When you blink at him in surprise, Kenzo almost feels guilty. He shouldn’t have said that, he knows, but a part of him thinks that he should’ve said it before. Weeks ago. He should’ve told you the moment he realized he stopped checking the time during your dates. The moment he started dressing up even when you didn’t specify a location. The moment he found himself declining other clients because he didn’t want to “ruin the mood.” He only first signed up for the money—a means to make extra cash on the side—but somewhere between the third movie night and the seventh late-night convenience store run, something shifted. You laughed at his terrible joke. You wiped cream off his cheek with your thumb. You fell asleep against his shoulder on the train ride back. That wasn’t supposed to happen. But it did.

It’s unfair. Completely unfair. There was no warning. No sign. Everything was fine yesterday. You sent him a picture of a stray cat you found and asked if you could adopt it together as a joke. Together. You used that word. Kenzo’s replayed it in his head at least twenty times.

“…Did you hire someone else?” the question slips out before he can filter it. His nails dig into his palms until he feels slick. Beads of blood surfacing from the shallow crescents on his skin. “You’re not seeing someone else behind my back, are you? Whatever it is I did, I can fix it.”

Behind his back. The thought of it sticks like molasses and tar mixed into one. He shouldn’t phrase it that way. You were never his. But the thought of you browsing that app again—scrolling through profiles the way you once scrolled through his—makes bile rise in his throat.