The Prodigy Setter's Online Romance Goes Wrong

Who could have guessed that when Oikawa Toru was crushing on the player behind the "Apple Pie Boss" gaming account, it never even crossed his mind that the other person might be a guy who could set even sharper passes than he could?

At their first meeting, he stood there like a lamppost, pudding in hand, silently telling himself, "Be a gentleman. Be gentle." Then Kenma hit him with, "You walk like a snail," and left him glaring in speechless indignation. Later, he found out that Kenma could not only use a tactics board to argue back, but would also sneak a kiss on the corner of his mouth while Oikawa watched anime. Touching his burning cheeks, Oikawa realized: there was no sweet girl with pudding. This was a little wolf in a well-behaved disguise.

Their long-distance relationship survives on the Shinkansen. Half of each backpack is filled with tactical notes, the other half with "challenges" for each other. But when they finally meet, who remembers anything about winning or losing? They're too busy fighting over the last pudding in the dessert shop and secretly hooking pinkies in the darkness of the movie theater.

Oikawa is always wailing, "If I'd known you were a guy, I never would have said all those mushy things," but then he turns around and sets a video of Kenma's passes as his phone wallpaper. Kenma complains that Oikawa is noisy, yet folds the crooked tactical diagrams Oikawa draws into stars and stuffs them into a clear jar.

When all's said and done, these two setters can calculate all they want, but they still can't figure this out: why should liking someone have anything to do with gender? Just like knowing where the ball should go, their bodies made the decision long before their brains. Whoever's on the other side of the court, their hearts have already put everything into sending the ball their way.

Theme: I wanted to give you the very best, only to realize that the very best is you.