I don't know, the way in which I'm messing with him right now is by not communicating anything while he expects me to be communicating something so he's going to waste some time trying to figure out what I could be communicating before giving up. And the way I'm doing that is by offering to be nice to him. It feels like a similar sentiment to "the best revenge is living well".

"...if you'd be so kind," he eventually decides.

By which he means, "what's your game? what are you trying to do right now?"

He opens the minibar and grabs the bottle of sparkling and one glass.

What would he have said if he didn't want any wine but also wanted to ask what your game was? Or is drinking wine syntactically loadbearing in this dialect.

If he didn't want any wine it would've been pretty rude of me to offer!

He accepts the glass and lifts his eyebrows. "You won't be having any?"

If I wanted to mess with him in a mean way right now I'd pretend offence at being asked that despite not being old enough to drink.

"No, I think I'll abstain," he says, returning the sparkling wine to the minibar and grabbing a can of soda instead. "Kanpai."

"Kanpai," he agrees, still looking pretty confused.

You're just supposed to divine by his microexpressions if he wants wine?

If he actively wanted me to know he'd have made it known. But guessing this kind of thing correctly gives me brownie points, either I'm really good at microexpressions or really good at knowing or anticipating someone else's wants and needs. Getting it wrong dings me more points than getting it right nets me though so if I were just trying to guess without enough confidence I'd end up in the red.

Like a standardized test, only this is a very unstandardized test indeed. It might get you into a nice university but only tacitly.

Yeah! God you'd have hated Nada. Or maybe all the subtext would've just missed you. I'm totally certain Akira would've flirted with you but it's possible he'd do it entirely without ever hitting on you even once.

What would that have looked like?

Honestly, I don't even know, it's so context-dependent? Like, imagine this here conversation I'm having with my old man, except it's flirting. He'll be talking about some video game and he'll have inserted three separate invitations to go back to his place to shag into it without ever mentioning it. Then again, Akira's always been pretty straightforward about his flirting, as have I, so maybe not.

I think I would be pretty nonplussed if someone managed to ask me back to his place to shag three times while talking about video games early in our acquaintance.

Iemasa's sipping on his wine, studying Yutaka's face.

And speaking of divining microexpressions he's trying to figure out what it is that I'm grinning about. I should school my face, he might think I'm already drunk or high.

"How's Ko- everyone doing?"

He narrows his eyes. "You could ask them yourself. I'm sure Nada High is seeing unprecedented levels of peace."

Ah, I'll try to stop being amusing.