Mayuko could learn to like this.

She doesn’t get the instant fairy-tale happy ending; there isn’t much that she can think of that she’d want less. They go to dinner and he updates her on the kid’s progress; she usually wears jeans or slacks and a shirt, irreverent of their sophisticated fellow clientele. He likes it, she thinks, or at least smiles when she walks in the door in faded denim, eyes flicking to trace the line of her hips.

She sips wine in an American style restaurant and nearly snorts it out her nose when he describes Kyo reacting to Hanajima at his father’s house far too early in the morning; as their teacher she was close to friends with some of them, and as their relative he loves them. It’s less of a filler topic than she first feared.

They talk about other things-politics sometimes, gardening, her parents, the bookshop, the new class full of students, not nearly as interesting as the chaotic mass threaded with Sohmas, psychics and punks, she tells him. The peace is unfamiliar.

He laughs and she smiles, breaking off to eat. Just two friendly adults in a restaurant; his eyes occasionally catching on her mouth as she talks, she critically and shamelessly examining his suit.

Just a casual conversation in a crowd.