Far too late, Yosuke realized that he had signed off on his own misery one incredibly mundane evening, when Yu was double-checking the contract while he was packing their things. "Yosuke," Yu had said out of the blue; Yosuke made a sound that said he was listening. "Since we'll own the house ourselves, we could keep a pet. Would you mind if we got a cat?"

Yosuke briefly thought about the idea of keeping a cat, some fluffy cute creature that ate and slept and wanted to be pet or something, and—mostly trying to figure out how to pack a lamp—answered, "Sure. Why not."

"Just checking," Yu said.

Yosuke wrapped the light bulb in a sock and eyed the ceramic base. "Do we have any bubble wrap left?"

"Don't think so."

"Dammit."

A month later, early morning on a Sunday after a night of very good sex, Yu said, "Let's go pick out a cat today," and Yosuke said, "Okay," before he was completely awake.

He had been under the impression that this would involve a quick trip to the nearby pet store. The trip was not quick. The two of them—Yosuke with a giant bag of cat food in one arm and a shopping bag of bowls and litter boxes and miscellanea with the other; Yu with a giant bag of cat litter that Yosuke could barely pick up—hauled entirely too many supplies by foot back to their house.

Yu let the litter down gently on the floor, breathing hard and cracking his neck, but giving no sign that he regretted everything. Completely spent and sprawled out on the couch, Yosuke said, "Ugh. Man. We should've taken a taxi."

"Are you tired?" Yu asked, as if his own hair weren't stuck to his forehead with sweat.

"I'm dying over here," Yosuke said, like he hadn't been perfectly capable of carrying tons of boxes during their move. Yu came over and offered him a hand, which Yosuke accepted on instinct, even thought he felt like laying there a little longer. "Coming to think of it. What about the actual... cat?"

"We'll stop by the shelter after we set up here." He gestured to the supplies that Yosuke had dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

Yosuke fell back into the couch with a dramatic groan. "All right. Just give me a moment, partner, and we can..." Yosuke's voice trailed off as Yu's words sank in. "Shelter? You mean pet store?"

"Shelter," Yu repeated with a hint of a frown.

"Dude, the pet store's right there! Isn't the shelter on the other side of town...?"

"We can take a taxi back," Yu offered. Yosuke would later understand that this was to avoid stressing out the cat, never mind stressing out Yosuke, and the very first of the many small ways Yu was more considerate of a small annoying animal than his partner.

The subway ride to the animal shelter was fairly quiet. Yosuke occupied a seat and refused to yield it for the bratty children that came on board, because he had just been made to carry 15 kilograms of stuff in his arms for six city blocks for no pay and was now being marched across the city to pick up a furry animal he had no interest in but would be obligated to share his space with for who-knows-how-long. The children, on the other hand, were still full of the energy and optimism of youth. They could stand.

Halfway there, it seemed to him that Yu was inspecting him, and he said, "What?"

"You look pretty beat," Yu observed unhelpfully.

Yosuke shrugged, uncrossed his arms and recrossed them the other way. He didn't actually say something to Yu, like This is too sudden, I don't even like cats, and I wanted to do other things on our only day of the week off from work, of course I feel like shit, because although that was how he felt, he wouldn't say that on a public subway even if he could put it into words. Instead, he said, "How is it still morning?"

In hindsight, if Yu had been as perfect as half the world believed him to be, he probably should have asked Yosuke—while he had his full attention and before they arrived at the shelter—if he was truly all right with getting a cat. It would have been the fairest thing to do, to both Yosuke and the cat.

Instead, Yu cracked a small smile, one of his accommodating I'm-glad-we're-still-all-right smiles, and the topic slipped by. Because one of Yu's imperfections had always been that he left it up to everyone else to start important conversations, and Yosuke didn't have it in him to bring it up like he was actively forbidding Yu from getting his cat.

So they went to the shelter. And Yu got his cat. It went something like this: a volunteer worker who seemed to hate him and love Yu for no reason (like everyone else), a fucking ton of cats lined up along the walls all of which Yu seemed to want to take home, and finally one incredibly ugly calico cat with a face like Vladmir Putin that did not so much "nyaa" as it did make a strained braying sound like it was being strangled to death. Yu somehow decided that catwas The One, on account of its ability to open its own cage from the inside which, to Yosuke, sounded like the worst possible trait for a cat to have.

"His name is Tomo," Yu announced in the taxi over the cat's psuedo-dying cries.

"Like 'friend'?" Yosuke said, not really interested, but preferring the sound of Yu's voice to the cat's.

"No, just Tomo."

Tomo made a dying sound again, and Yosuke took some comfort in the fact that the taxi driver seemed just as annoyed as he was.

At home, Yu wrote Tomo on the bowls in permanent marker, as if there was any doubt who would be eating cat food out of the bowls on the floor. Meanwhile, Tomo stayed behind the sofa, where it had been since they let it out of the carrier.

"Is it going to take a piss back there?" Yosuke said, arms crossed, leaning against the counter. The house had only been theirs for a few weeks but Yosuke liked how it smelled.

"He's just anxious about being in a new place," said Yu, first time pet owner and master cat psychologist. "He'll come out when he's ready." Upon second thought, Yosuke was fine with the cat staying under the couch and out of the way.

Out of the blue, Yu proposed, "Let's watch a movie tonight."

"Making progress on that list of classics?"

"Actually, I was thinking of Dumminator 4."

—The latest entry in a series of movies they'd watched together six years ago, when they were teenagers craving special effects and explosions and didn't cringe at the crappy script. As young professionals, they did cringe at the script, and the fights were kind of awkward and the sfx unconvincing, but it was nice sharing a throw, touching shoulders, and laughing about how nothing in the movie seemed dangerous at all after everything they'd been through.

Halfway through, Yu slung an arm across his back and rubbed absentmindedly at the muscles at the base of his neck. He knew Yu didn't personally get anything out of this stuff, and that Yu knew Yosuke did, and it was his wordless way of saying Sorry about today. Let me make it up to you, when Yu didn't think that he'd done something wrong so much as he'd been imperfect in the execution.

Yosuke let him massage him. He was still stiff from his workout this morning, so it felt nice. It put him in the mood to forgive him, which was probably playing exactly into Yu's schemes. But that was all right, too. Some ripped American actor finished saving the world, Yu was trying to make things up to him, and whether or not there was a cat, their lives were still fundamentally the same.