Pass Da Mic, Pass Da Pen, 2/2
Two weeks later on his lunch break, Jun wandered his way inside the Komagome Library. After spending the last several days taking Sakurai Sho’s business card out and worrying it between his fingers, paralyzed and unable to dial the number, he felt it was a wiser course of action to go in person.
It was quiet, mostly older people sitting at the tables with newspapers. It had been years since Jun had been in a public library, but they never changed much, did they? He saw a young woman was scanning books for patrons at the desk, so he hung back, feeling a little creepy as he waited for her.
When he finally approached, she seemed a bit confused when he didn’t have any books in his hands to check out. “I was actually wondering if you could help me. I’m looking for one of the librarians here, Sakurai-san.”
She nodded. “This is the circulation desk. Sakurai-san is in our reference department.” She gestured to a staircase. “Please go down those steps. He works at the desk down there.”
He thanked the woman, gathering his courage and heading to the lower level. It was even quieter downstairs. There were lots of shelves down here, packed with encyclopedias and other reference materials, older magazines and newspapers. There were a handful of study carrels and other work tables. The reference desk was opposite the staircase, two computer stations both occupied. One by a woman who was probably in her mid-50’s, the other by Sakurai Sho.
Today’s Sakurai was peak geek, sitting at his workstation in a red sweater vest over a plain white dress shirt, a red and purple polka dot tie around his neck. He seemed deep in his work, the sound of his fingers on his keyboard the only real noise in the room. Jun felt guilty for interrupting him at work, but not as guilty as he’d felt running away from Cafe Gosuke without a word or a call since.
He approached the desk, and the woman looked up first. Jun had to stifle a laugh of astonishment when he recognized her. The woman before him was the same one from the writers’ club, the woman who wrote the really horrifying romance novels. There was no sign of the pervert within when she smiled at Jun, not recognizing him. “Can I help you today?”
“Actually,” he said, seeing Sho perk up instantly. “I was wondering if Sho-san could help me?”
“Matsumoto-san!” Sho said with a smile. “It’s good to see you. Isn’t this out of the way for you?”
“I’m on my lunch break.”
“What a coincidence. So am I…in five minutes. If that’s alright with you, Hara-san?”
The woman nodded. “I’ve been hearing your stomach growl for a while, Sho-kun. You’d better just go already.”
Sho nodded. “I’m finishing up an email, let me join you in just a moment.”
Jun perused one of the shelves for a while, running his fingers along the book spines. He’d found himself in a natural science section, most of the titles and topics a bit out of his comfort zone.
He soon heard a “psst”, and he looked through the shelf to the next aisle, seeing Sho’s friendly eyes. He smiled, meeting him at the end of the row.
“Sorry to bother you at work.”
“It’s not a bother at all, I’m glad to see you.” Sho gestured to the staircase. “Let me just clock out and we can go grab something to eat…” Sho paused, looking a bit nervous. “…you do want to do that, right?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Good,” Sho said. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Once they were outside, Jun was able to ask. “Sakurai-san, your co-worker…”
Sho raised an eyebrow, grinning. “What about her?”
“She’s a writer, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes, a very committed one.” Sho leaned forward, even though nobody was liable to listen in and know what they were talking about. “I can’t count how many times she’s asked me for some synonyms for ‘erection’ that sound…sexy.”
Jun laughed at him, trying to ignore the way his skin prickled at how easily Sho had just said the word ‘erection’ in front of him. He shook it off, asking Sho to lead the way for lunch.
They headed a few blocks from the library. Though several neighborhood restaurants had lines of workers on lunch breaks going out the door, Sho directed him down an alleyway to a hole in the wall place that specialized in tonkatsu and where there was no wait at all.
Sho waved to the old couple running the restaurant, calling out that they’d both have “the special.”
“Trust me on this one,” Sho said cheerfully as they took seats at a table near the window.
Jun took off his ID lanyard from work, setting it on the chair beside him while Sho rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. The old woman brought some glasses of water to them, but otherwise left them alone.
He looked up, meeting Sho’s eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
“Aiba-san said it wasn’t because you didn’t want to.”
Jun swallowed down a lump in his throat. Was there no end to Aiba’s meddling? “He’s very nosy.”
Sho smiled. “I know.”
“I’m still working on…everything right now,” he admitted. “Figuring some things out.”
“I understand.”
He appreciated that Sho understood. Perhaps he’d had just as much trouble trying to find someone too, someone to trust, someone to be with, not that either of them felt the need to spell it out.
“I don’t like surprises. I don’t like being surprised. I don’t like people coming up behind me and touching me. I don’t like things like that.”
“Oh?” Sho looked rightfully confused.
“But I surprised you, showing up unannounced like this. You were in the middle of work and I just showed up. I’m sorry, Sho-san.”
“I guess I don’t hate surprises as much as you,” Sho said. “And besides, I’ve spent most of my morning working on a request for information. This is a nice break.”
“What kind of request?”
“A woman in Niigata emailed us looking for some news story. She lived in Toshima as a kid, and thinks that there was a write-up in one of the big daily papers about some math competition she won when she was in junior high school. She was looking to get a copy of the article, but all she had was a range of a few years and her name to give me as clues to start looking.”
“That’s what you do all day?”
Sho smiled. “Sometimes people ask me where the bathroom is.”
He smiled in return. “Did you find it? The article?”
“I did.” He pointed to his temple. “Just call me Sherlock Sakurai.”
They chatted a little more about work, Jun giving the world’s quickest overview of his role in the finance department. Instead of the kind of clues that Sherlock Sakurai dealt with, his job required mostly numbers. Tracking invoices and orders and similar boring things. Sho told him more about the library, his usual patrons who came to ask him strange questions.
When their food arrived and he had his first bite, he looked up to see a smirk on Sho’s face. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
Jun nodded, chewing and hiding a laugh. “Yep.”
They ate, got to know each other a little better, at least as much as they could in half an hour. The fear and nerves that had defined the last two weeks…or more like the fear and nerves that had defined the last several months of Jun’s life, they fell away under the strength of Sho’s ready smile and the cheerful, adoring way he spoke about some of the people who came in to the library. It was the same way he spoke about the members of the Gosuke Writers’ Club.
After wishing so long to find someone, striking out at every turn date after date after date, it felt good sitting and talking to Sho, amused by how much he loved to eat, how much he loved to talk. He had a smudge of tonkatsu sauce on the corner of his mouth, and Jun wanted to tell him. Better yet, he wanted to grab a napkin and wipe it, but it was too soon for that. Sho eventually found it himself anyway.
He had to catch the train back to the office, and it was quicker to walk in the opposite direction. They stood outside the small shop, and he felt much more comfortable this time around. He hadn’t had to suffer through astonishingly freakish smutty writing or bloody haunted houses or one of Ninomiya’s interesting but confusing chapters of bunny girl breasts bouncing. Sho had been right - of course there’d been another way.
“Our writers’ club meets this Saturday,” Sho said before they parted. “Everyone usually clears out of the cafe by 11:00. Just in case you wanted to come and actually enjoy yourself.”
He laughed, adjusting his lanyard around his neck. “The cafe’s just a cafe then, huh?”
He lost the ability to speak when Sho’s hand reached out, fingers brushing against the buttons of his dress shirt. He looked down, seeing that Sho was just turning his ID badge around so it was facing forward.
“Let me know if you’ll come,” Sho said, snatching his hand back quickly, turning almost as red as his nerdy sweater vest. “I’ll have a curry pan waiting for you.”
“It’s a deal.”
-
Curry pan after the writers’ club became a ritual every other Saturday and then soon it just became every Saturday. After falling too hard and too fast for people that ended up disappointing Jun or breaking his heart or both, Sho seemed content to take things at what Jun feared might be a glacial pace. He wasn’t sure if Sho just sensed that about him or if Aiba in his need to meddle had said something, had told Sho that Jun needed time.
But their curry pan Saturdays in the cozy Cafe Gosuke, the two of them curled up comfortably on separate sofa cushions, became something Jun looked forward to every week. And the things he’d feared turned out to not be scary after all. Sho had Twitter but only to follow celebrities he liked. He didn’t have Facebook. He mostly used LINE to talk about TV shows and send cute stickers with his co-workers at the library. He was just a normal guy.
And for all Jun had worried about Sho being “too smart” for him, Sho never spoke down to him. One week Sho had even asked him if he knew anything about baseball history, as they’d gotten a few questions at work, people emailing them for information about baseball statistics that hadn’t been available on Wikipedia. Sho hadn’t really known much about where to look, and though Jun didn’t know for certain, he’d had a few ideas that Sho had been happy to learn. Jun’s fears about not being able to keep up, of Sho thinking he wasn’t an equal, had been unfounded. Sho wasn’t a genius, but he was someone who always liked to learn. Jun realized that those were separate things entirely.
The only negative so far that Jun could see was that Sho had picked up Aiba’s habit, calling him “Matsujun” and pretty much nothing else after a while. It was only a negative because it just meant that he’d have to wait longer to see if Sho would ever be able to just call him Jun. Not that he’d been calling Sho anything other than “Sho-san” or “Sho-kun” the last few weeks either.
It was yet another open mic night, and Aiba had headed out already with his pink notebook and an application form for the short story contest Sho had been pestering him to enter for so long now. He was planning to have Sho check it over and proofread his story for errors before he sent it in.
Jun, on the other hand, would not be setting foot inside Cafe Gosuke that night because Sho had texted him that morning to tease him that the women with the lizard people novel were bringing a chapter of something new entirely - a novel about killer robots invading Osaka. “It’s up to a plucky takoyaki stand worker to save the day,” Sho had told him. “Come on, Matsujun, that’s amazing, you have to admit it.”
Amazing or no, he’d said thanks but no thanks.
He was staying late at the office, scanning some old records so they’d have digital backups. He was just packing up to leave around 9:00 when his phone vibrated with an incoming message from Aiba.
Sho-chan is going to read something tonight. You should at least come by for that.
He stared at his phone screen in disbelief. Sho had never said anything about writing something original. In fact, Sho had told him a few times now that he really didn’t have the “writing bug” even after all this time mentoring the writers’ club. Why hadn’t he said something?
Curiosity piqued, Jun couldn’t help catching the train over, walking to Cafe Gosuke. He watched from outside for a moment, standing across the way and peeking through the glass. He could see that Ninomiya was doing another of his performances, the audience hooked on his every word. Jun smiled despite himself, hoping that one day Nino’s work might find even more fans.
He waited until Nino was finished before opening the door to stand in the rear of the cafe. Though he was fairly certain he’d entered with little fanfare, Aiba spotted him and hurried over while a young man read a story about the funny things his grandma often said.
“Matsujun,” Aiba whispered excitedly, wrapping an arm around him. “You’re just in time. He’s up next and he’s the last one, and it’s going to be nuts in here, I’m sure of it.”
Jun scanned the crowd nervously, finding an oblivious Sho sitting on one of the sofas, watching the current reader. But Jun definitely noticed that Sho wasn’t as relaxed as he usually was, his sneaker tapping the floor nervously.
“He didn’t tell me he wrote anything,” Jun murmured.
Aiba covered his mouth to keep from laughing, tugging Jun by his sleeve and pulling him into the men’s room, shutting the door so they could talk.
“Hara-san lost her voice,” Aiba explained. “She asked Sho-chan to read her stuff on her behalf. I can’t believe he agreed to it.”
“The one with the hotel?”
“No, that’s Haru-san. Hara-san is the woman he works with.”
Jun’s jaw dropped. He was speechless.
“Exactly what I said, that’s why I texted you as soon as I found out.” Aiba elbowed him, grinning wickedly. “He’s gonna read something dirty, I just know it. Ahhh, poor Sho-chan.”
He was in disbelief, registering just what Aiba was saying. Sho still hadn’t been bitten by the writing bug. Instead Sakurai Sho, the beloved leader of the Gosuke Writers’ Club, was going to finish the evening off by reading filthy pornography.
Out loud.
In public.
Well, as public as Cafe Gosuke could be considered.
Jun fumbled for the door, barely able to keep it together as he and Aiba stumbled out into the hall, trying to keep their footsteps quiet as they returned to the cafe. Jun couldn’t help looking at Sho, understanding his tapping foot even more now. Jun didn’t know where Sho had found the courage to agree to something so preposterous, but it warmed Jun from head to toe, seeing how much Sho cared about his friends, his colleagues…his writers. The Sho who clapped for them all, the Sho who wanted Aiba to enter contests. The Sho who would now abandon his dignity just to help Hara-san’s words be heard.
Although couldn’t the woman have just waited another month to get better?
Mercifully the young man stopped blabbing about his grandma and as the audience clapped, Sho moved to the microphone with less than his usual pep. In his shaking hands were a few typewritten pages. He was a bit underdressed for such a…sensual performance, in a blue plaid button-down and jeans, but Jun could see Hara-san at one of the front tables, clapping eagerly for Sho since she couldn’t speak.
“And now for our last reading for tonight,” Sho said, voice quivering a little. “Hara-san has laryngitis and per doctor’s orders, she’s been put on vocal rest. But she wanted to get your feedback on a scene from her new novel Bubble Economy, Bubbling Romance so your reader tonight is yours truly.”
Jun had to turn around in secondhand embarrassment, hearing Aiba snickering beside him as he looked away. He made eye contact with Ohno-san, who was standing behind his counter. Ohno pointed to the platform, lightly chiding him for turning away. With a title like Bubble Economy, Bubbling Romance, Sho was going to need all the crowd support he could get.
He turned back, seeing Sho was rustling through the papers. “Ah,” he muttered into the microphone, “this is a bit…it’s a bit…unsafe for children’s ears, please keep that in mind, won’t you?” He looked over at Hara-san, turning red. “I’ll do my best, but I’ll never do it as well as Hara-san.”
“You can do it, Sho-san!” cheered one of the writers and soon the cafe was in a mild uproar, clapping for their longtime leader to finally give a reading himself.
Sho took a deep breath and got started. Jun crossed his arms, moving to lean against the bakery counter to keep from falling over from laughing. His whole body was shaking as Sho started reading, Aiba beside him in equal near-hysterics, hand over his mouth.
The first few minutes went smoothly, Sho’s voice low but calm as he described the story’s heroine, Kunie-san, who’d recently lost her virginity to the mysterious Yamamoto-san, a stock market trader. The text was littered with 1980’s references, even the names of specific songs playing in the hotel lobby as Kunie-san waited for her next tryst.
Sho turned to the next page, shifting his weight from foot to foot as the audience listened to him so eagerly. Hara-san’s writing was just as amateur as Jun remembered, although coming from Sho’s mouth, it seemed almost…decent. It didn’t help that Sho read a bit slowly, licking his lips as his mouth presumably went a bit dry from reading without stopping. Jun had a hard time looking away once Sho read that Yamamoto-san had arrived, a hotel key clutched in his “strong, manly fist.”
Already Jun could see the women at some of the tables leaning forward, eager to hear the filthy words pour from the handsome Sakurai Sho’s mouth. Jun couldn’t help admitting that he felt similarly, even if those filthy words were bound to be as far from sexy as could be. It was different, though. It was Sho, his voice rasping, deep, sending a rush of heat down Jun’s spine.
“She’d waited in the lobby for him for what might have been a minute or an hour,” Sho read, scratching a bit nervously at an itch on his leg. “And now…now that they were here in the room he’d paid for, the room devoted entirely to their sin, she was soaking wet, her panties clinging to…her…clinging to her throbbing sex, desperate to feel the hard, thick pulse of him inside after so many days apart.”
Sho cleared his throat, and Ninomiya on one of the sofas buried his face in the crook of his arm, his entire body shaking in laughter.
“Yamamoto-san grabbed hold of her, fierce and wanton. ‘I’m going to make you come,’ he said as his hand descended lower and lower, squeezing her rump like it was a fresh melon. ‘You’re going to come again and again, baby, you’re gonna gush like a waterfall.’”
There was a slight squeak as Aiba’s body slid down the bakery case, landing on his ass as he collapsed in silent giggles.
Jun, however, wasn’t too concerned with the words Sho was saying. He was more interested in the way Sho was saying them. And how he was saying them had the female contingent of the room at his complete and utter mercy.
Sho blinked before continuing onward. “And…Kunie moaned with reckless abandon when Yamamoto-san pulled out his wallet. ‘Real estate, baby, that’s where the money is.’ He shoved her roughly onto the bed, ripping her panties off and flinging them aside. Yamamoto-san…” Sho blinked again, scratching his leg again. “Yamamoto-san then slipped a 10,000 yen bill from his wallet and teased it against her skin. Soon Kunie was gasping, shuddering, breathless, aching when she felt the crisp bill rub against her…her hot, gaping hole…”
Aiba made a quiet little noise of astonishment beside him, but Jun couldn’t look away. Sho was on a roll.
“Again and again, Yamamoto rubbed the money he’d earned from the stock market against her empty, needy vaginal entrance. ‘This money is mine, baby. This pussy is mine, too.’ She watched as he took the drenched currency away from her dripping wet center, licking the bill with his tongue.”
“Oh wow!” exclaimed one of the older housewives in the crowd, getting Sho to finally crack an awkward smile. Jun was breathing more heavily, listening without shame to the rather strange sex scene pouring from Sho’s lips.
“She screamed, not caring what the other hotel guests might think once Yamamoto-san thrust his velvet steel into her. His immense love rod slammed inside her repeatedly, her nails scratching down his muscled back, claiming him as he claimed her body. It wasn’t so much a waterfall as an ocean wave in a storm slapping against a sandy beach when she climaxed.”
“Matsujun, help,” Aiba wheezed beside him, trying to tug on the leg of Jun’s slacks.
“Kunie screamed as she…as she gushed for him.” Sho took a deep breath, his voice a little lighter, a little breathier. “‘Yes, Yamamoto-san! Yes, Yamamoto-san! I want you to fill me, I want you to fill me up! Give me all of it, all of it, all of it!’ He came inside her like a shotgun blast, and Kunie screamed again, never ever ever wanting it to end.”
Sho stopped speaking, and the room was utterly silent save for Aiba’s barely muffled laughing beside him.
Blushing red as a tomato, Sho lowered the papers in his hands. “Um, and that’s the scene.” The writers’ club erupted, applauding like crazy for Sho’s performance.
He cleared his throat, his voice higher, shakier than it had been while he was reading. “And that’s also a wrap for this month’s reading. Many thanks to Hara-san for…for that scene. We all hope you’ll feel better next time around, I’m sorry if I wasn’t quite up to snuff…”
From the murmurs among some of the women, Sho had been way more than “up to snuff.” As the applause died down and the writers all gathered around each other, Jun watched as a mob of older women, mostly Hara-san’s friends, crowded around him.
Aiba had finally staggered to his feet, his face nearly purple from the effort he’d expended to keep from laughing himself to death. He grabbed a napkin from one of the holders on the bakery counter, patting his face with it. “Oh my god, I can’t believe he read all that…oh Matsujun, I can’t believe he said that shit out loud!”
“He’s a good guy,” Jun said, not caring how obviously proud he sounded.
“If I can get through the rest of my life without referring to my own dick as a ‘love rod’ though…” Aiba mumbled, chuckling to himself.
Ohno turned the lights in the cafe up just a bit, taking the focus away from the reading platform. Sho, stuck hearing the praises of the likely sex-deprived women, was desperately looking for someone who might save him. What Sho definitely didn’t expect, if the shock in his eyes was any indication, was to look across the cafe and see Jun standing there.
When one older and obviously turned on woman started patting his face, the others with her got just as bold, praising him, patting his arms and telling him he “ought to read audiobooks if he was going to sound that sexy!”
Jun recognized the cry for help in Sho’s eyes and moved across the cafe floor with purpose. The women stepped aside when Jun walked up, some of them overtly checking him out without shame.
“Sho-san,” he said loudly, “I’m submitting that story I told you about to the contest, and the deadline is midnight tonight. Can you help me?”
Seeing his way out, Sho eased back from his crowd of adoring, perverted fans. The sounds of disappointment they made were clearly and pointedly directed at Jun. “Ah, ladies, it’s been fun tonight huh? I hope to see most of you on Saturday, okay! Thanks for coming out!”
And then Sho was tugging him by his sleeve, eager to escape. “Of course I’ll help you, Matsumoto-san,” he said noisily, hoping to keep the others away. “Should we get a table?”
“Ah, unfortunately I left my flash drive in my car, let’s go get it…”
Sho looked unbearably grateful, grabbing his bag from one of the sofas and following Jun to the cafe exit, the both of them waving quick goodbyes to Aiba and Ohno.
Once they were outside and at least two blocks away, Sho stopped walking. He let out a quiet but irritated “aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!”, causing a few couples nearby to steer clear. Having stopped in front of a recycling bin, Sho tore up the pages from Hara-san and shoved them inside like they might have given him a sexually-transmitted infection through the paper.
He turned to Jun, on the brink of one of his good-natured chuckles, until he realized that Jun was far from laughing.
“Matsujun?” Sho asked, sounding downright innocent after the ten minutes of filth he’d just read to the patrons of Cafe Gosuke.
Jun took a step forward, and Sho bumped into the recycling bin, making the tiniest squeak of surprise. Jun was holding onto every last ounce of self-control remaining to him. “Sho-san.”
“Yeah?”
“I kind of need to kiss you right now, really badly.”
Sho’s eyes widened, and he looked desperately from side to side, examining their surroundings. “Um…okay. Okay. Okay that’s…that’s not what I…okay.”
He kept looking and Jun looked too, unable to hide his desperate need. Well, at least he wasn’t screaming or bursting or gushing like Kunie. Across the way, a 7-11. Behind them, a family restaurant. He didn’t like the idea of kissing Sho for the first time in the men’s restroom of either establishment, and most other stores in the neighborhood were closed. But where could they find a little privacy?
Sho tapped his fingers against his mouth, panicking, until realization dawned on him. “Can you um…you said you need to kiss me now, but could you wait 15 minutes?”
Jun, regaining a bit of the sense he thought he had, managed to nod. Sho tugged on the sleeve of his jacket, unable to take his hand in a public street.
“This way…it’s, just come this way.”
-
Jun was barely keeping it together. From the moment Sho had started to read that nasty scene, Jun had wanted him. Okay, maybe he’d wanted to kiss Sho for a while now…maybe he’d wanted to do even more than that. But hearing Sho read like that, hearing Sho sound like that…well, it had moved up Jun’s timetable.
He found himself grinning as he figured out where Sho was taking him. Sho pulled out a swipe card from the pocket of his bag and approached the employee entrance door. The place had been closed for a few hours, but Sho explained that there was no security guard. It was just locked, although he could swipe in if he needed to after hours.
“Aren’t there cameras?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t work here.”
“If they check the tape, you’re a patron who left your wallet in one of the study carrels. You knew Hara-san and I were going to Cafe Gosuke, so you approached me.”
“This is kind of absurd.”
He inhaled sharply when Sho gave him a rather wicked smile.
“It’s the only plan that I could come up with that didn’t involve us getting on the subway and going to my place. My place that’s like, half an hour away. You’re the one who wants to kiss me so badly, so I didn’t want you to suffer much longer.”
Sho swiped in, and they entered the darkened library. To give their story the legitimacy it needed, Sho turned on lights in each room they passed through, heading down to the reference section on the lower level. Since the camera didn’t pick up sound and nobody else was in the building, Sho explained what to do.
“Just poke around in each carrel, and then pretend you’ve found it. Hold it up and I’ll celebrate with you. Then we’ll shut the lights off and leave…later. It only tracks me swiping in, and once the lights are off, they’ll assume we left.”
“Sho-san, I didn’t realize librarians were such…rule breakers.”
Sho laughed quietly as Jun started making a big show of checking each study carrel. “Well, I’ve wanted you to kiss me since the first time we met. I think it’s worth it.”
He looked up from one of the carrels, seeing a slight mix of embarrassment and eagerness in Sho’s face. Since they’d met? Sho had wanted this since they’d met? Well, he couldn’t let him down, could he?
With the high wall of the carrel, there was no way the security camera would see his hand pull his wallet out of his pocket. He raised his hand up, waving the wallet almost theatrically.
“Found it! I guess you’d better escort me out then, Sakurai-san.”
Sho led him back upstairs, shutting all the lights off. Once they were off, the security cameras weren’t likely to register their shadows in the dark, provided they followed the convoluted path Sho was leading them on. “Come on, this way,” Sho said. “I can’t do this where I work.”
“What do you mean?”
Slowly they made their way through the darkened library, Sho’s hand holding his, the pair of them laughing like a couple of kids. Which made it all too fitting when Sho produced a ring of keys from his bag and opened a door, pulling Jun inside. “This is the children’s reading room.”
“There’s something immoral about this,” Jun complained as Sho closed the door. He heard Sho drop his bag and the key ring somewhere on the floor.
“Yeah, probably,” Sho admitted, finding Jun’s hand in the dark and tugging on him again. “But this is the only room with the big beanbag chairs.”
Sho roughly yanked him down, and Jun laughed, landing on a squishy beanbag chair that had enough room for Sho and him together. His suit was going to wrinkle, but he didn’t really care once he managed to find Sho’s face, stroking his cheek with his thumb and smiling in the dark.
“Usually this chair can fit about five elementary school kids,” Sho explained.
“Please don’t tell me that.”
“I’m in the information business, I can’t help myself,” Sho teased, fingers finding Jun’s tie, tugging until Jun was nearly lying on top of him. He felt the softest press of Sho’s lips against the corner of his mouth, a lingering promise of better things to come. “You’ll just have to shut me up.”
So he did.
-
A few months later…
-
He woke not to the usual sound of Sho making coffee but instead to the sound of Sho’s voice next to him in bed. He blinked a few times, realizing that Sho wasn’t so much speaking to him as he was reading aloud.
“Kunie gasped as Yamamoto-san pulled her back roughly, sheathing his love sword completely inside her soaking, dripping…”
“Enough!” Jun howled, turning over and narrowing his eyes at the sight of Sho lying on his side, leaning on his elbow and reading from his iPad screen.
Sho offered him a wink before looking down again. “…sheathing his love sword completely inside her soaking…”
Jun moved quickly, yanking the iPad away and turning with it, gently tossing it onto the pile of clothes they’d left scattered across Jun’s bedroom floor. When he turned back, Sho was waiting for him, leaning forward and having no qualms about kissing Jun and his morning breath.
Jun pulled away first, being more particular about that sort of thing. He got out of bed, knowing that Sho was greedily appreciating the view as he bent down and picked up the iPad.
“I’m keeping this with me,” he threatened, taking it into the bathroom with him so he could wash up, brush his teeth. He made a point of holding it up over his head as he emerged, letting Sho use the bathroom next.
Jun opened his sock drawer, shutting off the iPad and burying it underneath his socks. When Sho emerged, naked and brushing his teeth like he didn’t have a care in the world, Jun was lying comfortably on the mattress, watching.
Sho pointed his toothbrush at him. “Hara-san wants my feedback. You’re very rude to the kind and talented members of my club.”
Jun rolled his eyes, flinging a pillow and hitting Sho in the hip with it. “You told me once before, Sho-san. That I shouldn’t sit through something I hate.”
Sho snorted, turning back to finish his brushing. When he came back, Jun decided they could postpone the coffee. He was wide awake seeing Sho strut around his room without a stitch of clothing on.
“I’ve got a new chapter from Nino, too. He wants to know what I think about his Usagi-kin love scene. The bunny girl and Yamashiro are finally going to make sweet sweet bunny-human love.”
“Is that all they’re sending you now? Has your innocent and pure writers’ club turned into a gathering of smut peddlers?”
Sho joined him on the bed, moving to sit on top of him, skimming his fingers down Jun’s chest with his usual skill. “I’d still say ninety percent of the content being produced is friendly for a teen and younger audience.”
Jun grinned, shutting his eyes when Sho leaned down to kiss him, tasting like mouthwash as he slipped his tongue past his lips. He wrapped an arm around him, finding comfort and pleasure both as he tickled his fingertips down Sho’s back, hearing Sho’s appreciative moan against his mouth. The kisses grew more heated, the touches more aggressive, until Sho was almost panting, desperate.
“Oh Matsujun,” he murmured, brushing his lips against Jun’s temple. “I need to feel your diamond-hard love sword inside me.”
Jun gave Sho a rather rude push, hearing him laugh and then cry out in panic as Jun knocked him over and off of him, nearly pushing him off of the bed.
“Call it that again, and you definitely won’t,” Jun complained, getting Sho onto his back. He kissed him quiet once more, one of Sho’s legs wrapping possessively around him. He smiled, laughing each time Sho tried to spit out another disgusting line of Hara-san’s, Jun punishing him in return with tickles, with gentle bites to his shoulder, his bicep.
Soon enough Sho was love-dumb, giddy, reaching a hand up to stroke Jun’s face. “Can I ask you something? It’s not about Hara-san, I swear.”
Jun leaned in to Sho’s touch, knowing that it was a trick and loving it just the same. “Go ahead and ask.”
“What kind of sex noises do you think a bunny girl would make?”
Jun had enough, laughing as he moved over, grabbing a condom and lube from the nightstand. “Let’s leave that sort of detail to the people who can actually write.” He pushed the packet toward Sho’s mouth, let Sho tear it open with his teeth. “The noises you make are better anyway.”
“Maybe I really should do audiobooks,” Sho mused.
Jun swallowed Sho’s desperate, needy moan when he pushed inside him. Jun didn’t like to share. Sho clung to him, breathing heavily in his ear, rocking up against him. “Sho-san, don’t quit your day job.”
Soon after that, words failed them both.