3-2, I had barely won against Yamada who despite playing for the first time kept me on my toes and forced me to pull some pretty cheap tricks against her, this lead to some questionable enraged squeals from Yamada, she tried everything in her power to stop her defeat, even taking off her glasses which she said was "blurring her vision", of course it was a close game and it was extremely fun, somehow throughout that whole 5 minute game Yamada had drank her whole bottle of soda but she had barely even touched any of the snacks on the table.
I was taking her bottle to the trash when she called out to me.
"Hey Sato?"
I turned around to see her facing me, her knees on the sofa, resting her head in between the cousins, her arms resting flat on the back of the sofa, she took her hoodie off as she was getting too hot due to how hard she was trying to beat me.
"I know you heard that I told my cousin that we were friends, but are we?"
Considering we have known each other for about 3 days and she was visiting my house I would say we are friends, however I wouldn't consider us too close.
"Well…"
I thought about it, we are similar in a lot of ways but also extremely different, I was much more relaxed while she seemed to be a high energy person, friends outside of the online space was something I never really had during middle school because I learned from home, going high school and just school in general was nerve wracking, and so was this, for some reason I was so nervous to answer her and my face was showing it.
I pursed my lips, before hesitantly responding to her question.
"I don't know."
"You don't know? You're kind of giving off "not at all" vibes with that answer."
She just couldn't take that for an answer, of course why not.
"Ok if it comes down to a yes or no answer, yes, we are."
"O-oh."
Yamada's face quickly turned scarlet as she covered her face with one of the pillows on the side of the couch after which Yamada quickly bolted out of my view behind the couch cousins.
"You good?"
Silence from her, I waited for her to answer me before I shrugged and threw her bottle in the trash, honestly I didn't understand why she was feeling so embarrassed about me saying we were friends, especially considering she said we were friends in the first place, but that's just girl logic for you I suppose.
*****
Me and Yamada were sitting at my dining table reading an old manga I found boxed up under my bed, we were both utterly bored out of our minds, we had done everything we could have thought of, we gamed, I cooked us dinner, and then we gamed even more, we had utterly exhausted ourselves for the whole afternoon, and it was now 7:30 pm.
"I think you should head home, Yamada."
"Agreed, my moms probably expecting me to come back home soon, thanks for letting me hang out with you and play on your console, it was super fun."
"No problem."
We both stood up and I walked to the hallway and opened the door for her to exit, she quickly grabbed her satchel and hoodie, before standing in front of me, and unzipping her satchel.
"Eh, what is it?"
"The gift."
"Oh right, yeah."
"Don't open it until I leave ok?"
"Ok?"
*****
It had been 30 minutes since Yamada gave me the bag, It was on my bed and still unopened it had a layer of tape keeping it closed.
"Might as well."
I proceeded to slowly peel off the tape keeping the giftbag closed, before tearing it off the purple paper wrapping of the bag, I quickly opened the bag and found what looked to be a note taped to a family sized piece of chocolate, I quickly took the note off and read it.
'Hey Sato, thanks for taking the time to spend time with me and such, I really appreciate that you had that talk with me after my work day was almost done, you really took away a lot of my stress with that, and also thank you for making me breakfast yesterday, I hope we see each other more often in the future!' - Yamada Hana
Huh, it was really neat of her to give me a note of all things, instead of telling me this in person, but also…
"Isnt this my favorite brand of chocolate?"