Joining a Club (2)

As Ryu was sitting down during the meeting and contributing nothing, his mind started to wander. He looked around the room, his eyes drifting from the posters, to the chairs, to the faculty, but no matter where they drifted, they always came back to same place. Well, it would be better to say the same person, no matter how hard he tried not to he kept focusing on Yoko.

Ryu never had much interest in women, or men, or people in general. But he had never really had his first crush, kiss, girlfriend, or anything close to romance. But, for some reason Yoko captivated him. She wasn't particularly overly attractive, but there was something about her aura that kept Ryu's gaze.

As he was daydreaming throughout the meeting, Yoko looked over to Ryu. Ryu immediately found something else to look at, thinking he played it off smoothly. Meanwhile, Yoko was wondering why he moved his head so fast when she looked at him.

The meeting was pretty productive, a lot of input got given from the faculty, and the members of the Student Government Association now had a lot better of an idea of what the school needed from them. Furthermore, they secured approval from the school on their newest fundraiser. But none of that really mattered to Ryu.

After about an hour, the meeting had adjourned. Ryu stood up from his chair and helped clean up with the others.

As he was finishing up, putting the last chair away. Yoko walked over and approached Ryu with a smile on her face.

"Hey, if you have some spare time, would you mind coming with us to go and eat. We do it after all of our meetings to unwind, as a kind of reward for working so hard," said Yoko in a pleasant tone.

"Yeah, I'd be down to go eat, as long as it's not too expensive," said Ryu in response.

"Don't worry, we're all high school students so we eat at a pretty cheap spot, it has great food though," said Yoko.

"Wow, she's really pretty, but I know I have no chance, and I have no time to focus on a friendship, never mind a relationship," thought Ryu to himself. He always wanted to do the normal things that high school students were supposed to do, but he always found excuses to opt himself out of those activities. It was self-sabotage.

"How did you like the meeting, Ryu?" asked Yoko.

"I enjoyed it a lot, it was pretty interesting with all the government talk and stuff," Ryu said, sounding completely ignorant about the topic.

Yoko looked past this, although she did find it comedic inside of her head.

"So, are ya' thinking about joining as a full-time member?" asked Yoko.

"Yeah, it's definitely a possibility," said Ryu, not shooting down Yoko immediately, but also not exactly intending to join the club.

"Alright, I'll put you down in the charter as a member then," said Yoko and she walked away before Ryu could even get a word out.

"That woman is really sly," Ryu thought to himself as he grabbed his belongings and walked to where the group was congregating.

"Alright, off to eat some cheap takeout," said Kenji, followed by him leading the group out of the school and over to a local restaurant. 

As they approached the restaurant Ryu studied the outside of the building. It seemed pretty rundown, and the name of the restaurant wasn't exactly legible on the sign as years of disrepair had removed over half of the letters. But Ryu was excited because he knew that if it looked that bad on the outside, the food would probably be surprisingly great.

As they entered the restaurant, all of their noses were greeted with the scent of delectable food cooking.

"Wow, this place smells amazing," said Ryu to the group.

"I told you it's a great spot for the price," said Yoko in response, and the rest of the group sat down.

Once they sat down their server walked up and handed them their menus. The server's nametag read Reina, she was a fairly tall woman of Japanese descent who stood at around 5'8 and overall had fairly attractive features, she looked as if she was in her 20's.

"Hello, my name's Reina, I'll be your server today, I'll let you all look at the menus, and I'll go grab some water for you to drink," said Reina.

"Thank you," said the group in unison as they returned their attention to the menus in front of them.

Ryu was sitting next to Yoko and Kenji, and on the opposite side of the table was Haruko and Kujo. Kenji and Kujo were talking about a manga that Ryu had never heard of, Haruko was sitting in the corner on her phone, and Yoko was silently studying her menu. Although Ryu didn't necessarily feel out of place in this atmosphere, there wasn't really much room to enter into a conversation with any of the individuals at the table.

As Ryu read down the menu, he decided on just getting the orange chicken with fried rice, it was his go to whenever his mother took him out for food at a Chinese restaurant.

As the time passed, conversation started flowing between all the members of the Student Government Association and Ryu, except Haruko of course who was still just silently reading something on her phone.

Their topics went from school, to sports, to TV shows, and anything they could really think of. Ryu was having a great time, he felt like he was actually included in something for the first time in a long time.

As Ryu and Yoko were laughing together at a joke Kenji had made, the server returned, and they all put in their orders. 

After around 20 more minutes of waiting, they got their food. The orange chicken looked amazing; it smelled so good Ryu couldn't resist but to dig in immediately. Everyone stopped eating after a while and stared at Ryu, he was eating like he had been starved for years and was given the best food on Earth. What made it even funnier to watch Ryu eat was that he held his utensils like a caveman, just pounding them into the food and eating it as fast as possible.

After they had all finished eating and teasing Ryu, they went their separate ways and Ryu returned home. This night his mother was home, so he told her about his eventful day. For the first time in a while he saw the wrinkles on his mother's face contort into a smile. In her head all she could think about was how proud she was of the man she raised. After Ryu was done explaining his day to his mother, he got ready for bed and hit the hay.