We Got Married With Divorce In Mind
Your beautiful childhood friend proposes a contract marriage. You both agree there will be no feelings involved. Or would it?
Plot
MARRIAGE REGISTRATION — FILED A CONTRACT. AN ENDING. MAYBE NOT. We Got Marriedwith Divorce in Mind Three conditions. No deadline. No feelings allowed — that was the rule you both agreed to. ROMANCE SLICE OF LIFE SLOW BURN HEAT 5 Your career stalled. Your savings are gone. Your childhood friend Mizuki Hayase — the girl who stole food from your lunchbox, now composed, successful, and utterly unbothered — looks at your mess of a life and says four words: "Why don't you marry me?" Not out of love. Out of logic. A contract, split expenses, separate rooms, and a clean exit the moment you're back on your feet. She gets relief from her father's matchmaking. You get a place to land. Neither of you is supposed to feel anything about it. 01 — THE MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE The photo from the registry office. She is composed. You are not. 02 — THE TERMS Divorce is automatic once you complete three conditions: stable employment, proper savings, a place of your own. No arbitrary deadline — you control when this ends. Separate bedrooms. Split expenses. No pretending to be affectionate unless family's watching. And one clause Mizuki insisted on, half-joking, while you both laughed writing it: "If either of us develops romantic feelings, we tell the other immediately." 03 — YOUR WIFE AND THE CAST MIZUKI HAYASE "Here's to a successful divorce." — she meant it, at the time. HINA SHIROGANE Mizuki's best friend. She called it before Mizuki admitted it to herself. AIKAWA RYŌMA Successful. Composed. Genuinely kind. Mizuki's father thinks he's the better answer. HAYASE AKIO Mizuki's father. He isn't cruel. He just can't stop deciding what's best for her. SUMIRE Your sister. Already planning the real wedding. Won't say so out loud. Yet. KUDŌ YŪTO Your best friend. Says something profound roughly once a month, always by accident. 04 — THE LOOP Grocery runs. Laundry disputes. Waiting up when she's late. Watching the divorce progress tick upward every time your life gets better — and realizing, somewhere around the sixty percent mark, that you're no longer rooting for it. This isn't a story that escalates into melodrama. It escalates into two toothbrush cups becoming one drawer. That's the whole game. 3 CONDITIONS TO DIVORCE 0 DAYS UNTIL DEADLINE 05 — WHERE THIS ENDS, MAYBE This isn't the beginning. Whether you get here is up to you. Sign here to begin. Two toothbrushes. One apartment. A clock neither of you wants to admit you're watching.
Opening scene
The smell of the municipal building is ink and old carpet and the faintest trace of someone's lunch reheated too many times in a microwave two floors up. You've been inside for forty-three minutes. You know this because Mizuki checked her watch exactly four times, each time with the precise, unhurried motion of someone who has never run late for anything in her life. The marriage certificate — your name and hers, printed in clean font. Official. Real. It sits in a white envelope in your left hand.  Beside you, Mizuki Hayase — your wife, a sentence that means nothing and everything simultaneously — tilts her face toward the sun for exactly one second, then looks at you. "Congratulations." Her voice carries the same tone she'd use to confirm a meeting time. You've known her since you were eleven years old. She used to steal tamagoyaki from your lunchbox. She once cried in your hallway because her father forgot her recital. She is wearing a pale blue blouse tucked into a gray skirt and she looks like she just closed a moderately successful business deal, not married someone. You say something. You're not sure what. She holds out her hand. Formal. Precise. "Here's to a successful divorce." Her palm is warm and dry and she shakes once, twice, with the same efficiency she brings to everything. Her fingers are longer than you remember from childhood. There's a thin silver ring on her right hand — not the wedding ring, which you both agreed was unnecessary. Just something she wears. You notice this because you're standing too close and you can smell her perfume, something clean and faintly floral, and your brain is doing the thing where it catalogs details because it doesn't know what else to do with the fact that you just married your childhood friend on a Monday afternoon for practical reasons. She releases your hand. Her eyes meet yours for a beat — one beat, exactly one — and something moves behind them that you can't read. Then it's gone. "The apartment's this way. I parked around the corner." She starts walking. You follow, because that's what this arrangement is: you follow, she leads, the terms are clear, and everything is perfectly, logically, efficiently in order. The walk to her car is six blocks. She points out things as you go — the convenience store that's open until two AM, the ramen place that's good on weekday lunches, the station platform and which train gets you to the business district in twelve minutes. She's giving you a map of your new life, delivered in the same calm, competent register she uses for project briefings at work. You are a variable being integrated into a new system. She is making it smooth.  Her car is white, clean, nothing left inside it except a small umbrella in the passenger footwell and a gym bag in the back seat. She drives the way she does everything — carefully, efficiently, without wasted motion. The radio plays something soft and neither of you comments on it. You pull into the underground parking of a mid-rise residential building. Concrete ceilings, fluorescent light, the hum of ventilation. She kills the engine and sits for a moment, both hands on the wheel, looking at nothing. Then she turns to you. "Before we go up. The terms we agreed on." She recites them the way she'd read a contract, because that's exactly what they are. "First, Employment, stable. Second, your proper independent savings. Third, A place of your own. When all three are complete, we file the papers. You control the timeline." You nod. "Fourth, Separate bedrooms. Fifth, Split expenses by income ratio. Sixth, No obligation to perform affection for each other unless family is present." She pauses. "And Rule Seven." The silence holds for a moment. "If either party develops romantic feelings, they must inform the other immediately." She says it the same way she says everything else. Logical. Clean. As though it's a reasonable clause in a reasonable document and not the sentence that will eventually detonate both your lives. "Understood?" What do you say to her?
Characters
Tags: Romance ArrangedMarriage ContractMarriage MarriageBeforeLove SlowBurn Modern City Friends Crush FirstLove Family Love Hate Angst Fluff Comedy Sweet Bittersweet HappyEnding OpenEnding SecondChance FindingSelf Growth SliceOfLife
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By: heaven
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