“Yo, Kris! Over here!” Rick shouted from across the small, homely restaurant that Kris just walked into. When Kris looked over, he saw the expected Rick sitting there, but he also saw another of his friends over there, Amir. In contrast to Rick’s rather loud shout for the morning, Amir simply offered a small and quiet wave.

Kris didn’t say anything before he got close enough to the table to speak in a normal, indoors voice. “Yo, and you shouldn’t shout like that. It’s the morning and it’s nice and quiet inside. Gotta use your indoor voice, bro.”

Rick looked straight at Kris for a few moments, blinking several times, before replying, “Huh. Yeah, guess you’re right. My bad.”

“It’s all good. Also, yo, Amir. Didn’t know you were going to tag along.”

Amir shrugged and said, “Rick said he was meeting you for pancakes, so figured I’d tag along. Anyways, seeing you act like this… is the weirdest shit, man.”

Kris blinked a couple of times himself before sitting down next to Amir. “What do you mean? Act like what?”

“Like this. You know, all goody-two-shoes and shit.”

“I’m just trying to be respectful.”

“Exactly, man! You never cared about that before!”

“I did, I just didn’t realize I wasn’t being respectful.”

“You telling me that if we would have called you out on everything sooner, you would have changed?”

“Yeah. Look at Rick. I called him out on being an alcoholic and now he’s getting help. Sometimes people miss the obvious and need called out.”

“He’s got a point,” Rick chimed in.

Amir hung his head and sighed. “Shit, you mean all I had to do to get you two fools to stop screwing around was to call you out on your bull sooner?”

Kris and Rick nodded in unison to their friend, prompting said friend to sigh again.

“Sometimes people aren’t aware that they’re doing anything wrong,” Kris said. “It’s hard to always think about everybody else around you, and everybody makes mistakes, and that’s okay. That’s why you have to get some friends who will call you out and help you when you mess up.”

“I feel like a pretty shit friend all of a sudden,” Amir said. “I’m used to everybody hating getting called out and never wanting to change, so I never bothered.”

“It’s alright. A lot of people do get offended when you try to help them because realizing they’re doing something wrong is uncomfortable, or something like that.”

“Man, when did you get like this? Seriously, you never talked like this before. It’s good and all, I’m just confused.”

Rick nodded along with Amir this time. “He’s got a point.”

Kris thought about it for a moment before saying, “If you mean like, aware of this stuff, then… I guess when I met Ryou?”

“Ryou?” Amir asked. “Who’s that?”

“Oh, a friend of mine. I met him in that game I told you about.”

“The one with the freaky headsets?”

“They’re not that bad.”

“Man, those headsets literally mess with your brain with signals and shit. That ain’t natural. Altering time perception and shit. Fucking around with memories. Ain’t no way I’m trying that shit. The government already knows enough about us without us literally letting them into our heads.”

“The governments aren’t getting anything from your brain by playing.”

“Alright, fine, maybe the gov ain’t, but what about the company that owns it? That rich dude with his private little space station? He’s probably collecting all our secrets and shit.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

“Why do rich smart dudes with more money than they know what to do with want to do anything that they do? Us normal folk’ll never understand their reasons.”

Rick raised his hand a little and asked, “Did you just call Kris normal?”

“Right. Probably shouldn’t do that.”

“Hey,” Kris spoke up, “I’m normal. I think.”

Both Rick and Amir laughed a bit when they heard that. “Yeah, sure,” Rick said. “The prodigy who has every engineer in the world wanting to work with him and could be living in a mansion with a hundred servants if he accepted even some of his offers, and who is so dense that he doesn’t even realize when girls are literally stripping and pressing their tits all up against him. Fuck, I’m still annoyed when I think about the last time we dragged you to a club. Stole the attention from every other man there and didn’t even realize it.”

“Right?” Amir said. “This dude straight up had girls thirsting all over him and trying to get in his pants, and he didn’t even notice it, then he had the fuckin’ balls to whine after we left about how he was lonely and wanted a girlfriend.”

“You looked like you were gonna kill him when he said that.”

“Yeah, and I wanted to. Was tempted to throw him into an alley so that some crackhead could deal with him for me. ‘Oooh, look at me, I’m Kris and I’ve got literally a whole fuckin’ club of the city’s finest ladies grinding all up on me, I’m so lonely, I wish I could get a girlfriend.’ Maaaaaaannnnn.”

Kris might have warned Rick about keeping it quiet, but all three men ended up laughing pretty loud after the recalling of that night’s events. Fortunately, the waitress coming over to their table to get their order helped them remember where they were and lowered their voices before placing their orders.

Once the waitress walked away, Kriss said, “I guess I was kind of dense. Ryou told me I used to be as dense as a harem protagonist, which I guess is pretty dense.”

“Like from an anime?” Amir asked. “Shit, that really does describe you perfectly.”

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Rick nodded in agreement.

“I guess?” Kris replied. “But I’ve got my girlfriends now, so you don’t have to worry about me whining like that anymore.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Amir said, shrugging Kris’s reply off for the most part. “I bet the next time we drag you out there, you’ll end the night whining about being lonely again. Then we’ll—hold up.”

Rick and Amir looked at each other before leaning real close to Kris, their eyes narrowed onto him. “Did you say girlfriend?” Rick asked.

“No, bro, I’m pretty sure he said girlfriends. Plural,” Amir said. “Now, I know you ain’t never lie, so that means you’re either misunderstanding something and think you’ve got girlfriends… or you’ve actually got girlfriends.”

Kris blinked and said, “Yeah. Oh, that’s probably surprising. Honestly, I’m surprised myself.”

“Naw, naw naw naw. You ain’t—you gotta be fucking with us, right? You? Look, I know you’ve got the looks and fame and all that. Hell, if I rolled that way, I’d have called dibs on you years ago. But I know you. You. You the kind of man who sees a girl you like and fucks it up in some stupid way, and when girls like you, you completely miss it and she moves on. Ain’t no way you got yourself a girl, especially girlfriends, unless some girl has fuckin’ tied a leash around your neck and forced you to be her man.”

“Nah, that’s something Ryou would be into, not me.”

Rick interjected with, “We don’t even know this Ryou guy. You can’t expose his fetishes like that.”

“Shit, right. Sorry. I’ll have to apologize to him later. See, this is what I mean. We need called out on our behavior so we can learn from our mistakes.”

“That ain’t the point right now,” Amir said. “The point is that you think you’ve got yourself girlfriends.”

“Because I do.”

“Prove it.”

Kris reached into his pocket, took out his phone, and pulled up a picture that he took with his girlfriends back when he visited them at Alice’s dad’s. He wasn’t sure what the picture was for at the time since he had no idea they liked him yet, but they made sure to send it to him later on. “We weren’t dating yet, but this is them. The one with the orange hair is Rachel. Black is Iris. Emily, brown. Abigail, white. Anastasia, blonde. They’re seriously amazing and I don’t deserve them at all. I’m pretty sure I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have them.” Then he switched to a picture of him and Ryouta where he had his arm wrapped rather obnoxiously around Ryouta’s neck. “This is Ryou, by the way.”

“Go back to the girls.”

Upon request, Kris returned to the previous picture, letting his two friends repeatedly look down at it, then up at him, and then back down at it, over and over.

“You’ve gotta be misunderstanding something,” Amir said. “I ain’t crazy, right, Rick?”

Rick nodded in agreement. “No way. I mean, I want it to be true, because you deserve to be happy and all that, Kris, but… there’s no way.”

Without saying anything else, Kris pulled his phone back to him, tapped on the screen a few times, and then put it on speaker phone before placing it down on the table. Rick and Amir both leaned over it and watched as the phone dialed Rachel’s number, or at least who they assumed must have been her going by the picture set to her number.

“Kris!” Rachel shouted as soon as she answered the phone. “What’s up? You don’t usually call this early! Hehe, miss me already?”

“I always miss you,” Kris replied without a single ounce of hesitation or embarrassment.

“Hrhehidhfoudhfdhdrthte, you’re too sweet! Gosh… now I’m smiling and my cheeks are burning.”

“By the way, you’re on speaker.”

“O-oh… I—I am? Are you… doing something, or—”

“I’m at the restaurant with some friends. They didn’t believe me when I told them that I’ve got girlfriends now, so I thought I’d call you to prove it.”

“You… you mean… they—they can hear me? Right… right now?”

“Yeah. Sorry, maybe I should have warned you first when I called you that you’re on speaker.”

“That’s… that’s alright. But… I would prefer warning in the future… so I know to… you know, c-control myself a bit better.”

“But I don’t want you to control yourself even if others are around. I love when you make excited noises, and I want to show you and your noises off.”

“Ahhh! You—you can’t just tell me that sort of thing! You’re going to make me all giddy and hyper again!”

“You already sound like you are.”

“Hhtersdhtsehsdhtdshd, Kris! Please! It’s embarrassing! I—I mean, I love it, but at the same time, it’s embarrassing!”

“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed, but alright. I’ll let you calm down.”

A sigh of relief could be heard on the other side of the call. “Thank you. A-anyways… umm… h-hello, Kris’s friends! I’m Rachel! And yes, I can confirm that I’m real and dating him! As are my sisters! We-well, we’re not actually sisters, but… Kr-Kris can explain it. Umm, I hope that we get along if we ever meet each other! And please take care of Kris when we’re not able to! I—”

An enraged shout could be heard from the background, and Kris recognized the shouting voice as coming from Emily, though it was a tone of voice he never heard from her before. “What the fuck?! How?! I’ve been losing weight and watching what I’m eating! How did another bra break on me?! Why won’t these stupid fucking things stop growing?! Seriously! What the fuck is going to happen if I get pregnant?! I’m going to turn into a bloody damn cow! I already fucking feel like one with disgusting oversized udders like these! Damn it! I’m not even going to be able to fucking cuddle with Kris like this because my god damn tits are going to get in the way and keep us apart! He’s going to have to be the little spoon, but I want to be that! I’m going to tear these fucking lumps of lard off myself if they grow any more!”

The shouting was loud enough, despite being in the background of the call, for everybody in the restaurant’s dining area to hear.

“I think I should hang up now,” Kris said.

“Wa-wait!” Rachel shouted. “She’s not a bad girl! She’s just… a bit less refined in private! Oh gosh, oh no… she has no idea you could hear all that. I should have—”

“Don’t worry about it, I just don’t want everybody else to hear about her private business. I love you, and I love her, and I don’t care if she talks like that even if she does it around me. But you should let her know we all heard her probably.”

“I’m… I’m not sure that would be good for her ego…”

“I think she deserves to know.”

“I—alright. I’ll let her know. Umm… I—I love you. I’m going to… go check on her and let her know what happened.”

“Alright. Love you, Rachel. I’ll talk to you later.”

As worried as Rachel might have been, she still giggled when she heard that and replied with another, “I love you!”

And then the call was over.

“See?” Kris asked his friends. “Girlfriends.”

Rick and Amir each placed a hand on one of Kris’s shoulders, tears in their eyes.

“I’m proud of you,” Amir said, “but I also hate you.”

“Kris,” Rick said, “I’ve never wanted anything more in my whole life than a girlfriend with huge tits. You get to live my dream. You… you make sure to comfort her and let her know that she’s perfect the way she is, alright? You let her be the little spoon no matter what it takes.”

Kris nodded and said, “I’ll do my best.”

The two friends leaned back into their seats before staring up at the ceiling in disbelief together.

“I can barely believe it,” Amir said. “Kris. Kris. Got girlfriends. Not only that, but they’re hot cosplaying girls.”

“Cosplaying girls?” Kris asked.

“Yeah. They were cosplaying as maids in that pic you showed us.”

“Oh. They are maids. Those weren’t fake costumes.”

“Your… your girlfriends… are actual, genuine maids?”

“Yeah.”

“Maaaaaannnnn. This was a good day. Woke up. Had some coffee. Was thriving, you know? Now here I am, with the least likely man I know to ever get laid unless by accident, with his own maid harem. What do I have? Nothing.”

“Well… no offense, but you did let Jada’s pet fish die. I can’t really blame her for breaking up with you.”

Amir slumped over and looked down at the table. “I know. Man… I just wanted to give the little dudes some fresh water since the water they were in stank. I didn’t know a couple hours in tap water would kill them.”

“Didn’t one of them jump out of the cup and land in the garbage disposal?”

“But not all of them! That was only one! And I have no idea how a dude so fat even fit down there!”

Rick spoke up and said, “Don’t worry, bro. You’ll get another girl, and I’ll get another girl once I actually try to again. We just have to believe. You’ll get another girl with big hair and I’ll get a girl with big tits. Then we’ll both be happy.”

“Hold up.”

“What?”

Amir looked at Kris. “You’re the one with the girlfriends. You’re the one who got yourself a harem of hot maid girls while our backs were turned on you for five seconds. I never thought I’d say this, but… Kris, you need to teach us your ways.”

Rick had the expression of a man who just heard one of the greatest ideas in his life, and he was quick to nod along with Amir’s idea.

Kris wasn’t sure if he would be the best man to teach his friends about how to get girlfriends… but how could he say no when they both looked at him with such desperate eyes?

“Don’t worry,” Kris said. “I’ll help you.”