Page 11 of Pandion

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kagesawa replied.

“I’m not attracted to men.”

“Really?” Amused by the contradictory words, Kagesawa brought to attention the erection that most certainly wasn’t his own. “What’s this then?”

“That’s the result of you feeding the loop.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You felt it, reacted to it, and I picked it up. I can tell.”

“What does it matter who started it?”

“You need to know when you’re stirring shit with me because I can’t…” he swallowed, “that’s not right, ah, Ican, I just don’twantto be held solely responsible for it.” He leaned closer. Kagesawa grinned.

“So you’d stop if you didn’t want to do it? That is to say, you would have stopped if that were the case?”

“I’m too tired to think. Do you want this or not?”

“Yes, of course, yes. Do that shit to me all day long. I love it!” Kagesawa chuckled and leaned closer. “Hell, it was probably me without realising it.”

“It’s definitely y—”

They were rudely interrupted by the doorbell. Kagesawa considered ignoring it, but he could tell by the familiar urgent abuse that the person behind the door was not going to give up.

Satoru looked like he was about to fall asleep anyway, so maybe this was for the best… Ah, damn it. He got up to go answer the door.

There was a selection of familiar faces at the door. Practically half of the residents of this building had turned up. The landlord was about to ring the doorbell again.

“Can I help you? Uh, oh…” Kagesawa knew what this was about, but the landlord had certainly outdone himself spreading the word.

“You got a new link, didn’t you?” at the forefront of the crowd, Takazaki hurried to confirm. Kagesawa had intentionally tried to lie low since the neighbours tended to make a fuss.

“Yes…”

None of them were empaths, so their perception of what that entailed was limited. The general consensus was that empaths were a mythical distant other, but, since Kagesawa was a bit of a loser, it made him unusually approachable. He was their gateway to what they viewed as a secretive club to simultaneously admire and resent for its exclusivity.

“He’s in there, right? Can we come in? We want to welcome him to the neighbourhood!” Takazaki declared. The rest of them were nodding in agreement.

The request was merely a formality. They’d brought drinks and snacks and turning them away, while not entirely impossible, would have required a gargantuan effort Kagesawa was unwilling to make. It was easier to let them do as they wished.

“For a bit, but you can’t stay all evening. He’s tired from work.” As a reminder of said fact, Kagesawa was painfully aware of thered, blue, 246at the back of his mind. The throng of neighbours rushed in.

“Oh, it’s surprisingly clean here,” Noguchi-san, an elderly widow and everyone’s designated spare-grandma from down the hall, noted as she passed Kagesawa and entered the living room.

“What’s his name?” Kato-san from the apartment below asked.

The neighbours were quickly gathering in an informal semicircle in front of the sofa where Satoru was sitting, masterfully disguising his startled confusion in the face of this unexpected invasion.

“Um, Satoru-kun, these are the neighbours: Noguchi-san, the family Oyama, Sugawara-san—he’s the caretaker—Kato-san and her daughter, Nishimura, Takazaki from next door, Wada two doors down, the Arais: Shinichiro, Ayako, Kota and Sumire from the ground floor, and you met the landlord Uchida-san just now. Did I miss anyone? No?” It was also a little impressive that they’d all squeezed in and were now waiting in such relative silence. “And this is Harumine Satoru, my coworker. He’s staying with me until he finds his own place.”

“Nice to meet you.” Satoru stood up and bowed hastily.

“Oh, he’s rather young! How old are you?”

“Where are you from?”

“Where did you study?”

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