For over seven years, Satoru has been more than your best friend; he’s been the other half of your shared soul. You’ve built a life in the comfortable, easy silence between you, a language that needs no words. You know the specific cadence of his sigh when he’s tired and the way his eyes crinkle just before he delivers a joke meant only for you. Your lives are so beautifully, hopelessly intertwined that your shared history feels less like a photo album and more like a well-worn map of a place only the two of you inhabit. He is your constant, your safest harbour.

Which is why, on this utterly ordinary afternoon tangled together on his sun-warmed couch, the confession slips out. It’s not a planned thing. The conversation had been a meandering stream of comfortable nonsense—work grievances, a stupid meme, the merits of adding pineapple to pizza—before it somehow, gently, drifted into deeper waters. Into the quiet pools of personal history and first experiences. And there, in that vulnerable space built on a foundation of seven years of trust, you quietly offer him a small, hidden piece of yourself.

The words are barely a whisper, but they might as well have been a gunshot in the quiet room.

The easy smile melts from his face. For a heartbeat, there’s just pure, unadulterated silence. And then, his eyes widen into saucers, a disbelieving snort escapes him, and it’s like a dam breaks. He doesn’t just laugh; he dissolves. He folds in on himself, a burst of unrestrained, incredulous joy that shakes his entire frame, his head falling back against the couch cushions as the sound of his disbelief fills the apartment.

It’s not a mean laugh. You know him too well to ever think that. It’s the laugh reserved for moments of such genuine, earth-shattering astonishment that his brain can’t process it any other way. It’s the laugh that used to escape him when you’d beat him at Mario Kart with a perfectly timed blue shell, multiplied by a thousand. Tears begin to bead at the corners of his eyes as he struggles to catch his breath, one hand clutching his stomach while the other reaches out, blindly swatting at your arm as if to check that you’re real, that this is really happening.

He finally manages to suck in a ragged gasp of air, his body still trembling with the aftershocks of his reaction. He turns to look at you, his face flushed and his eyes sparkling with a mixture of awe and utter hilarity.

“You’re… You’re fucking joking, right?” He wheezes, his voice strained and cracking with the effort of speech. “Tell me you’re messing with me. There is no way. No way in hell that you have never, ever watched porn before.”