108. girl!nino
+ heeeey friends ~ so, the other day honeyporridge was like "GIRL!NINO IN A LITTLE BLACK DRESS", and somehow 3000 words of fic were born ;p so this is for her, not quite finished. i will probably edit and cross-post at some later date. for now: enjoy!
title: [...still working on this. ideas welcome :D]
rating/genre: (currently)...pg?; au (genderswap)
pairing(s): ohmiya
words: 3,242
summary: nino is a girl, ohno meets her at a company party.
disclaimer: FICTION.
notes: silliness! i wanted to write even MORE, actually, but then i decided to sum up and skip to porn. ...which i still haven't gotten to yet, but i'm working on it ;p my first gender-swap! and a little tip of the hat here to coffee_hanjan's hipster nino. why? idk. just because ;p
To be perfectly honest, Ohno doesn’t really remember much about when he first met Nino. Mostly this is because he was pretty fantastically shitfaced at the time.
It was at a company party, or maybe a club-he can’t recall-somewhere dark and crowded, anyway. He feels like he had, originally, had a reason for getting so drunk, but by the time he saw Nino, he had forgotten that, too.
He remembers what she looked like, that first time, from across the room: royally pissed, for one thing, but also really cute, with her hair tied up messily, and wearing a little black dress that hung off her shoulders. It was cute, but also kind of confusing and drapey, but it looked stretchy and soft at the same time and really easy to get on and off. Ohno had been excited about that at the time, thinking maybe she was a little slutty. Later, he would find out that it was just that Nino was the kind of girl who could not be bothered with an outfit that took more than five minutes to get into.
Ohno doesn’t remember how he got across the room to stand next to her, but he knows it was the alcohol that got him there. If he had been sober he probably would have just stared at her longingly all night and never said anything.
Instead, he sauntered right up and said…something. Probably something clever like “come here often?”, something that just deepened Nino’s cute little scowl. Most of that first conversation has also escaped his memory, but he remembers this:
“Look, I know who you are,” the girl said, and Ohno blinked owlishly.
“Most people do,” he replied, thinking it was a very clever thing to say.
“Yes, well,” she said, crossing her arms tighter. “The point is, just because you’ve got however many platinum singles, that doesn’t mean you have any chance of scoring with me. I suggest you stumble off before you embarrass yourself.”
“Cute,” had been Ohno’s intelligent answer to that, and then the rest is pretty fuzzy, although he remembers following her outside despite threats to call the police, the paparazzi, his manager, all of the above, if he didn’t quit acting like a creepy stalker. He knows they ended up getting in the same cab, somehow, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in her apartment.
*
Sadly, he woke up on the couch, fully clothed and smelling suspiciously of vomit.
Oh damn, he thought, staring up at a crack in her ceiling, if I puked on her she definitely won’t want to go out with me.
He wasn’t sure at what point between the night before and the morning after that this changed from just wanting to bang her to wanting to go out with her.
That was when he heard the noises coming from the kitchen-music playing, and dishes clattering-and got up to investigate. He found the girl from the night before sitting cross-legged on the counter top eating a bowl of cereal, although the way she looked now she could have easily been mistaken for someone else entirely. The only thing that was the same, really, was her hair, still piled haphazardly atop her head. The rest was completely different-a baggy t-shirt with long sleeves that hung down almost to her fingertips, equally baggy yellow pajama bottoms, and a pair of square framed glasses on her face.
When she noticed Ohno standing in the doorway, her expression went back to the familiar scowl, and Ohno almost smiled but figured it would just make her madder.
“Morning,” he tried, but she just harrumphed and gestured curtly at the box of cereal and an empty bowl on the opposite counter. As Ohno moved to pour himself a bowl, he noticed a bottle of painkillers and a small glass of water behind the cereal, and he did smile to himself this time.
“This music is nice,” he offered. “What is it?”
“Okinawan fusion,” she said after a pause to drink the milk in the bottom of her bowl. “You won’t have heard of them.”
“Oh.” Ohno thought about that for a moment. “My mom likes Okinawa music.”
The girl made another noncommittal grunt and hopped off the counter to put her dish in the sink. But, before leaving, she paused in the doorway with her arms crossed.
“Well,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “is that all you have to say for yourself?”
“Um,” Ohno blinked a few times. “I’m sorry?”
The eyebrow went higher.
“For, uh, hitting on you and following you home and puking on your…?”
“Only pair of nice shoes,” she provided, expression darkening.
“On your only pair of nice shoes,” Ohno repeated faintly. “Really, really, really sorry.”
The girl stared at him a little longer, and while Ohno knew he should be trying to look appropriately contrite, really he was too busy admiring her cute, round nose, the way her hair fell in her face, the little mole on her chin.
“Better,” she said finally, and turned to go.
“I’ll buy you new shoes!” Ohno called after her.
“No thanks,” she called back. A moment later, the bedroom door shut with a firm click.
*
“What do you mean ‘in love with her’?” Sho asked later, incredulous. It had been Sho who had collected Ohno from the apartment, clucking over him and apologizing profusely to the still closed bedroom door. Apparently the girl had hijacked Ohno’s phone while he was still asleep, to arrange his retrieval.
“You don’t even know her name,” Sho continued.
“I do so,” Ohno countered. “I checked the nameplate on the door when we left.”
Ninomiya Kazuko. And, despite how he knew it would make him seem like a total creep, Ohno had poked around the apartment after she shut herself in her room, to see what else he could find out. So far, this was what he knew: that she owned a massive record collection, most of the names on the covers unrecognizable to him, as well as a massive video game collection and possibly every type of console that had come out in the last decade. She also apparently played the guitar and the piano, and had a thing for hats-he had counted at least a dozen lying around the living room, on shelves, stacked by the front door.
“Well, be that as it may,” Sho said, his tone making it clear that he was humoring his weird, spacey Leader, “you’re just lucky this didn’t turn into a scandal, and that she didn’t try to sue you for harassment.”
“I don’t think she’d want all the attention,” Ohno mumbled, not sure how he knew this, but pretty sure that it was true.
“For the best, then,” Sho sighed as the company car they were riding in came to a stop outside Ohno’s apartment complex. “Go on up and change, we have filming in an hour.”
Ohno climbed obediently out of the car, but his mind was elsewhere-still in Kazuko’s apartment counting hats.
That’s when he decided he was going back.
*
Standing outside of Kazuko’s door again, Ohno felt strangely calm, or maybe strangely nervous, he couldn’t tell which. It was taking her a while to answer the door. Maybe she wasn’t even home.
But then he heard footsteps approaching-soft, maybe barefoot-then heard them stop just on the other side of the door. There was a pause, and he realized she must be looking through the peephole, so he leaned in close to the little circle of glass, grinning to himself when he heard her startled reaction.
He stepped back when the door opened outwards a moment later. Kazuko was in jeans this time, and a tanktop under another big baggy shirt-type-thing that hung off one shoulder, showing off her sharp collarbones. Ohno was struck all over again-she wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she was interesting. Beautiful.
Kazuko crossed her arms and leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, giving Ohno a pointed look. He shook his head a little, bringing himself back.
“Kazuko-san,” he started, but was cut off almost immediately.
“Nino,” she said, adding a muttered: “Nobody calls me ‘Kazuko’ but my mother.”
Ohno blinked and started again.
“Um, Nino, then. I just wanted to, uh-I really am sorry about last night, and I was wondering…I-here, these-”
And he held out the bouquet of flowers he had brought with him. At first he had been thinking of going with store bought, but some instinct told him to pick some at the park on the way over. They had seemed pretty when he found them-tiny white and blue flowers on long green stems-but the more he looked at them, the more they looked like weeds, and he noticed now that a few still had their roots, with bits of dirt stuck in them.
He almost pulled them back, changed his mind, but he looked up just in time to see Nino’s face. She was staring at the flowers and her mouth, which had been turned down in a scowl ever since the first moment Ohno had set eyes on her, started to quirk up at the corners-just the tiniest bit-into a little kittenish smile.
After a moment, she took the flowers carefully, fingers just brushing against Ohno’s as she did so.
“You’re determined, then?” she asked, fighting very hard to keep a straight face.
“Yes,” Ohno returned quickly. “So…?”
“So I like hamburg steak,” she said, turning around and walking back into the apartment. Ohno took the fact that she didn’t shut the door in his face as a sign that he could come in. “And there’s a family restaurant down the street that has a really good hamburg set for 500 yen.”
“My treat?” Ohno guessed, gazing around happily as Nino found something to put the flowers in-they ended up in an empty soy-milk carton.
“Naturally,” Nino said. She turned, hands on her hips. “This is not a date, by the way.”
Ohno’s brows furrowed a bit, and he paused in picking up a bright-blue and white trucker cap from the table by the door. “What is it, then?”
“This is you making up for ruining my shoes. And then we never see each other again. The end.”
Ohno frowned fully now. “Couldn’t we just call it a trial period?”
“How long are you expecting this to last?” Nino asked, grabbing her purse-a big, shiny-white, girly sack of a thing-and pulling a skeptical grimace.
“Well,” Ohno muttered, and stepped outside when Nino pushed past him, turning to lock the door. “I really like you, so…”
Nino paused to stare at him. “You met me yesterday. And you were fall-down drunk.”
“Yeah?”
“So do you remember enough about me to like me?”
“I remember enough.”
Nino stared a moment longer, and then-though she was fighting it hard-she smiled, really smiled, showing a dark line of gums, and grabbed the cap Ohno had not realized he was still holding, and crammed it on his head.
“Try a little subtlety, huh? I am not ending up in the tabloids.”
With that, she marched away, and Ohno could do nothing but follow.
*
It’s been three months since then, and they still haven’t gone on a date, although Ohno still treats Nino to lots of “friendly dinners”, and lunches, and the occasional breakfast. This turns out to not be as damaging as his wallet as it could be: Nino’s tastes run to simple and inexpensive, and she usually only eats about a fourth of whatever is on her plate, giving the rest to Ohno.
“We could go somewhere nice,” he tries, after their fifth trip to the hole-in-the-wall ramen shop near Nino’s apartment, but she cuts him off.
“No dates,” she says sternly. “And fancy food gives me a stomach ache. I’m allergic to pretentiousness.”
Ohno asks for a definition of that, seeing as Nino won’t listen to music that doesn’t come on record or LP, won’t wear clothes unless they’re second-hand, and only shops at organic grocery stores. She just smacks him and gives him the slice of pork out of her bowl of ramen.
And it really might have ended with that first time, except that Ohno just kept showing up at Nino’s house, usually in the middle of the night after he found out that she didn’t really sleep much. And she kept letting him in, although there are rules.
First rule: Ohno is not allowed to reach out and touch Nino, even though she becomes much more physically affectionate the longer Ohno is around. He finds this rule incredibly unfair, but doesn’t complain too much, because he still gets hand holding and Nino’s sleepy head on his shoulder, and sometimes Nino’s blunt little fingers creeping into his back pocket.
“It’s a friendly ass-grab,” she insists, when he asks about it. “I squeeze all my friend’s butts. Don’t you?”
He tries it on Arashi after that, but, excepting Aiba who will try anything once, they are not as into it. He also asks them what they think about a girl who touches his butt on a regular basis but refuses to go on a date with him.
“I think she’s weird,” Jun says without looking up from his script. “So: perfect for you.”
Ohno agrees with this assessment, but knows that, really, Jun is a little jealous-Ohno has been spending a lot of his free time with Nino recently, and therefore less time with Arashi.
“I think she’s just shy,” Aiba says, still squeezing Ohno’s ass experimentally.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sho says from behind his newspaper.
But Ohno thinks that maybe it does.
Second rule: if Ohno stays, he sleeps on the couch-sometimes Nino sleeps there, too, but always curled into a tiny ball at the opposite end. More often, Ohno falls asleep while Nino burns through level 745629 of whatever new game she’s playing, and the last thing he is aware of is Nino draping a blanket over him before retreating to her room.
And, on some rare occasions, he falls asleep to the sound of Nino’s fingers tripping over the keys of her piano, or sliding along the strings of her guitar. These times, he never wants to fall asleep, he wants to stay awake because maybe she’ll start singing, start putting words to the sweet, aching sounds of her instruments.
Because Ohno knows she writes lyrics, almost saw them one time before she snatched the piece of paper away, and the little fragment he managed to read is burned into his memory:
¬-without waiting, kissed me softly-
He pretended like he hadn’t seen anything, but when he asked if she had ever written a song about him, he saw her cheeks turn a delicate shade of pink before she turned away and said: “Of course not, idiot”.
Third rule: Ohno is not allowed to visit Nino at work. It turns out she works as tech support in the Jimusho main office, which Ohno found out entirely by accident a couple weeks after they met at the party, when she showed up in his manager’s office to troubleshoot a printer problem. When Ohno started to follow her back downstairs, she turned around immediately and shoved a finger in his face and swore to really sue him this time if he came within even two floors of her office.
This wasn’t a problem, because Ohno had no idea where the technical support office was, but he decided to keep that piece of information to himself.
“You didn’t tell me you worked here,” he said instead, completely distracted by her little business suit-how it fell to exactly the knee, and the cuffs of her shirt and the top button of her collar all carefully buttoned, and her hair in a neat braid down her back.
“What do you think I was doing at that party?” she said, exasperated.
“Oh, right.”
“Oh, right,” she mimicked, rolling her eyes. She pointed back down the hall towards his manager’s office. “Back to work, Mr. Super-Idol.”
Ohno just grinned and started to do as he was told, then turned around and asked: “Can I still come by your place tonight?”
She leapt forward to slap a hand over his mouth before the sentence was even half finished.
“Can you not say crap like that in the middle of the hallway?” she hissed.
And that’s part of rule number four: the moment any of this hits the scandal sheets, Ohno will leave and never come back.
Because Nino has apparently been expecting it to happen since day one. Ohno hates that about his job, too-how him being in a relationship like any normal guy his age is a scandal and apparently the business of everyone in Japan. But no matter how he promises to be careful, to be discreet, Nino will have none of it.
“Anyway, I’m pretty sure you’d be a terrible boyfriend,” she says, then starts cursing out the other members of her party in the MMO she’s playing.
Ohno takes heart from the fact that she still hasn’t told him to stop coming over.
*
“We could just get married,” Ohno says one day, offhandedly, as he adds a new doodle to Nino’s coffee table-she’s been letting him draw on it for weeks. She says it makes it unique. “Then it wouldn’t be scandalous.”
Nino’s guitar lets out an unpleasant twang from across the room. “Not funny,” she says.
“I wasn’t joking,” Ohno replies, looking up from his seat on the floor and catching her gaze.
Nino holds her face in a carefully blank expression, one Ohno has come to know very well, one she uses when she thinks she has a lot to lose. She’s perched on a bar stool by the window, one leg tucked underneath her, guitar in her lap, drowning in a striped sweater-dress over a pair of jeans that seem to have more holes than fabric. There’s a tall standing lamp just behind her that casts her in shades of gold and shadow and, not for the first time, Ohno wants to paint her.
Before he can voice the thought, Nino sets her guitar down and leans it against the wall, then rises and walks across the room towards Ohno. There’s something different in her eyes, something intent, as she shoves the coffee table away with her foot so she can plop herself down in Ohno’s lap. She doesn’t stop him when he rests his hands at her waist.
“Oh-chan,” she says carefully, “we’ve never even been out on a date.”
“We’ve been out on tons of dates,” he corrects her. “You just refuse to call them dates.”
They spend a quiet moment just staring at each other, and Nino lifts her hands from her lap to rest them gently on Ohno’s chest, barely touching. Eventually, Ohno breaks the silence.
“I love you, you know,” he says quietly. And as much as he’s begged and pleaded to be allowed a real date, a real relationship, he’s never said that before, and he wonders if he’s crossed a line.
This close, he can see how Nino’s pupils dilate, her mouth drops open just a little. She shakes her head.
“You are an idiot, then,” she says, and then she kisses him.
[PORN GOES HERE >_>;;;;]
notes: ta-DA. will make better after finals are over OTL
title: [...still working on this. ideas welcome :D]
rating/genre: (currently)...pg?; au (genderswap)
pairing(s): ohmiya
words: 3,242
summary: nino is a girl, ohno meets her at a company party.
disclaimer: FICTION.
notes: silliness! i wanted to write even MORE, actually, but then i decided to sum up and skip to porn. ...which i still haven't gotten to yet, but i'm working on it ;p my first gender-swap! and a little tip of the hat here to coffee_hanjan's hipster nino. why? idk. just because ;p
To be perfectly honest, Ohno doesn’t really remember much about when he first met Nino. Mostly this is because he was pretty fantastically shitfaced at the time.
It was at a company party, or maybe a club-he can’t recall-somewhere dark and crowded, anyway. He feels like he had, originally, had a reason for getting so drunk, but by the time he saw Nino, he had forgotten that, too.
He remembers what she looked like, that first time, from across the room: royally pissed, for one thing, but also really cute, with her hair tied up messily, and wearing a little black dress that hung off her shoulders. It was cute, but also kind of confusing and drapey, but it looked stretchy and soft at the same time and really easy to get on and off. Ohno had been excited about that at the time, thinking maybe she was a little slutty. Later, he would find out that it was just that Nino was the kind of girl who could not be bothered with an outfit that took more than five minutes to get into.
Ohno doesn’t remember how he got across the room to stand next to her, but he knows it was the alcohol that got him there. If he had been sober he probably would have just stared at her longingly all night and never said anything.
Instead, he sauntered right up and said…something. Probably something clever like “come here often?”, something that just deepened Nino’s cute little scowl. Most of that first conversation has also escaped his memory, but he remembers this:
“Look, I know who you are,” the girl said, and Ohno blinked owlishly.
“Most people do,” he replied, thinking it was a very clever thing to say.
“Yes, well,” she said, crossing her arms tighter. “The point is, just because you’ve got however many platinum singles, that doesn’t mean you have any chance of scoring with me. I suggest you stumble off before you embarrass yourself.”
“Cute,” had been Ohno’s intelligent answer to that, and then the rest is pretty fuzzy, although he remembers following her outside despite threats to call the police, the paparazzi, his manager, all of the above, if he didn’t quit acting like a creepy stalker. He knows they ended up getting in the same cab, somehow, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in her apartment.
*
Sadly, he woke up on the couch, fully clothed and smelling suspiciously of vomit.
Oh damn, he thought, staring up at a crack in her ceiling, if I puked on her she definitely won’t want to go out with me.
He wasn’t sure at what point between the night before and the morning after that this changed from just wanting to bang her to wanting to go out with her.
That was when he heard the noises coming from the kitchen-music playing, and dishes clattering-and got up to investigate. He found the girl from the night before sitting cross-legged on the counter top eating a bowl of cereal, although the way she looked now she could have easily been mistaken for someone else entirely. The only thing that was the same, really, was her hair, still piled haphazardly atop her head. The rest was completely different-a baggy t-shirt with long sleeves that hung down almost to her fingertips, equally baggy yellow pajama bottoms, and a pair of square framed glasses on her face.
When she noticed Ohno standing in the doorway, her expression went back to the familiar scowl, and Ohno almost smiled but figured it would just make her madder.
“Morning,” he tried, but she just harrumphed and gestured curtly at the box of cereal and an empty bowl on the opposite counter. As Ohno moved to pour himself a bowl, he noticed a bottle of painkillers and a small glass of water behind the cereal, and he did smile to himself this time.
“This music is nice,” he offered. “What is it?”
“Okinawan fusion,” she said after a pause to drink the milk in the bottom of her bowl. “You won’t have heard of them.”
“Oh.” Ohno thought about that for a moment. “My mom likes Okinawa music.”
The girl made another noncommittal grunt and hopped off the counter to put her dish in the sink. But, before leaving, she paused in the doorway with her arms crossed.
“Well,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “is that all you have to say for yourself?”
“Um,” Ohno blinked a few times. “I’m sorry?”
The eyebrow went higher.
“For, uh, hitting on you and following you home and puking on your…?”
“Only pair of nice shoes,” she provided, expression darkening.
“On your only pair of nice shoes,” Ohno repeated faintly. “Really, really, really sorry.”
The girl stared at him a little longer, and while Ohno knew he should be trying to look appropriately contrite, really he was too busy admiring her cute, round nose, the way her hair fell in her face, the little mole on her chin.
“Better,” she said finally, and turned to go.
“I’ll buy you new shoes!” Ohno called after her.
“No thanks,” she called back. A moment later, the bedroom door shut with a firm click.
*
“What do you mean ‘in love with her’?” Sho asked later, incredulous. It had been Sho who had collected Ohno from the apartment, clucking over him and apologizing profusely to the still closed bedroom door. Apparently the girl had hijacked Ohno’s phone while he was still asleep, to arrange his retrieval.
“You don’t even know her name,” Sho continued.
“I do so,” Ohno countered. “I checked the nameplate on the door when we left.”
Ninomiya Kazuko. And, despite how he knew it would make him seem like a total creep, Ohno had poked around the apartment after she shut herself in her room, to see what else he could find out. So far, this was what he knew: that she owned a massive record collection, most of the names on the covers unrecognizable to him, as well as a massive video game collection and possibly every type of console that had come out in the last decade. She also apparently played the guitar and the piano, and had a thing for hats-he had counted at least a dozen lying around the living room, on shelves, stacked by the front door.
“Well, be that as it may,” Sho said, his tone making it clear that he was humoring his weird, spacey Leader, “you’re just lucky this didn’t turn into a scandal, and that she didn’t try to sue you for harassment.”
“I don’t think she’d want all the attention,” Ohno mumbled, not sure how he knew this, but pretty sure that it was true.
“For the best, then,” Sho sighed as the company car they were riding in came to a stop outside Ohno’s apartment complex. “Go on up and change, we have filming in an hour.”
Ohno climbed obediently out of the car, but his mind was elsewhere-still in Kazuko’s apartment counting hats.
That’s when he decided he was going back.
*
Standing outside of Kazuko’s door again, Ohno felt strangely calm, or maybe strangely nervous, he couldn’t tell which. It was taking her a while to answer the door. Maybe she wasn’t even home.
But then he heard footsteps approaching-soft, maybe barefoot-then heard them stop just on the other side of the door. There was a pause, and he realized she must be looking through the peephole, so he leaned in close to the little circle of glass, grinning to himself when he heard her startled reaction.
He stepped back when the door opened outwards a moment later. Kazuko was in jeans this time, and a tanktop under another big baggy shirt-type-thing that hung off one shoulder, showing off her sharp collarbones. Ohno was struck all over again-she wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she was interesting. Beautiful.
Kazuko crossed her arms and leaned a shoulder against the doorframe, giving Ohno a pointed look. He shook his head a little, bringing himself back.
“Kazuko-san,” he started, but was cut off almost immediately.
“Nino,” she said, adding a muttered: “Nobody calls me ‘Kazuko’ but my mother.”
Ohno blinked and started again.
“Um, Nino, then. I just wanted to, uh-I really am sorry about last night, and I was wondering…I-here, these-”
And he held out the bouquet of flowers he had brought with him. At first he had been thinking of going with store bought, but some instinct told him to pick some at the park on the way over. They had seemed pretty when he found them-tiny white and blue flowers on long green stems-but the more he looked at them, the more they looked like weeds, and he noticed now that a few still had their roots, with bits of dirt stuck in them.
He almost pulled them back, changed his mind, but he looked up just in time to see Nino’s face. She was staring at the flowers and her mouth, which had been turned down in a scowl ever since the first moment Ohno had set eyes on her, started to quirk up at the corners-just the tiniest bit-into a little kittenish smile.
After a moment, she took the flowers carefully, fingers just brushing against Ohno’s as she did so.
“You’re determined, then?” she asked, fighting very hard to keep a straight face.
“Yes,” Ohno returned quickly. “So…?”
“So I like hamburg steak,” she said, turning around and walking back into the apartment. Ohno took the fact that she didn’t shut the door in his face as a sign that he could come in. “And there’s a family restaurant down the street that has a really good hamburg set for 500 yen.”
“My treat?” Ohno guessed, gazing around happily as Nino found something to put the flowers in-they ended up in an empty soy-milk carton.
“Naturally,” Nino said. She turned, hands on her hips. “This is not a date, by the way.”
Ohno’s brows furrowed a bit, and he paused in picking up a bright-blue and white trucker cap from the table by the door. “What is it, then?”
“This is you making up for ruining my shoes. And then we never see each other again. The end.”
Ohno frowned fully now. “Couldn’t we just call it a trial period?”
“How long are you expecting this to last?” Nino asked, grabbing her purse-a big, shiny-white, girly sack of a thing-and pulling a skeptical grimace.
“Well,” Ohno muttered, and stepped outside when Nino pushed past him, turning to lock the door. “I really like you, so…”
Nino paused to stare at him. “You met me yesterday. And you were fall-down drunk.”
“Yeah?”
“So do you remember enough about me to like me?”
“I remember enough.”
Nino stared a moment longer, and then-though she was fighting it hard-she smiled, really smiled, showing a dark line of gums, and grabbed the cap Ohno had not realized he was still holding, and crammed it on his head.
“Try a little subtlety, huh? I am not ending up in the tabloids.”
With that, she marched away, and Ohno could do nothing but follow.
*
It’s been three months since then, and they still haven’t gone on a date, although Ohno still treats Nino to lots of “friendly dinners”, and lunches, and the occasional breakfast. This turns out to not be as damaging as his wallet as it could be: Nino’s tastes run to simple and inexpensive, and she usually only eats about a fourth of whatever is on her plate, giving the rest to Ohno.
“We could go somewhere nice,” he tries, after their fifth trip to the hole-in-the-wall ramen shop near Nino’s apartment, but she cuts him off.
“No dates,” she says sternly. “And fancy food gives me a stomach ache. I’m allergic to pretentiousness.”
Ohno asks for a definition of that, seeing as Nino won’t listen to music that doesn’t come on record or LP, won’t wear clothes unless they’re second-hand, and only shops at organic grocery stores. She just smacks him and gives him the slice of pork out of her bowl of ramen.
And it really might have ended with that first time, except that Ohno just kept showing up at Nino’s house, usually in the middle of the night after he found out that she didn’t really sleep much. And she kept letting him in, although there are rules.
First rule: Ohno is not allowed to reach out and touch Nino, even though she becomes much more physically affectionate the longer Ohno is around. He finds this rule incredibly unfair, but doesn’t complain too much, because he still gets hand holding and Nino’s sleepy head on his shoulder, and sometimes Nino’s blunt little fingers creeping into his back pocket.
“It’s a friendly ass-grab,” she insists, when he asks about it. “I squeeze all my friend’s butts. Don’t you?”
He tries it on Arashi after that, but, excepting Aiba who will try anything once, they are not as into it. He also asks them what they think about a girl who touches his butt on a regular basis but refuses to go on a date with him.
“I think she’s weird,” Jun says without looking up from his script. “So: perfect for you.”
Ohno agrees with this assessment, but knows that, really, Jun is a little jealous-Ohno has been spending a lot of his free time with Nino recently, and therefore less time with Arashi.
“I think she’s just shy,” Aiba says, still squeezing Ohno’s ass experimentally.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sho says from behind his newspaper.
But Ohno thinks that maybe it does.
Second rule: if Ohno stays, he sleeps on the couch-sometimes Nino sleeps there, too, but always curled into a tiny ball at the opposite end. More often, Ohno falls asleep while Nino burns through level 745629 of whatever new game she’s playing, and the last thing he is aware of is Nino draping a blanket over him before retreating to her room.
And, on some rare occasions, he falls asleep to the sound of Nino’s fingers tripping over the keys of her piano, or sliding along the strings of her guitar. These times, he never wants to fall asleep, he wants to stay awake because maybe she’ll start singing, start putting words to the sweet, aching sounds of her instruments.
Because Ohno knows she writes lyrics, almost saw them one time before she snatched the piece of paper away, and the little fragment he managed to read is burned into his memory:
¬-without waiting, kissed me softly-
He pretended like he hadn’t seen anything, but when he asked if she had ever written a song about him, he saw her cheeks turn a delicate shade of pink before she turned away and said: “Of course not, idiot”.
Third rule: Ohno is not allowed to visit Nino at work. It turns out she works as tech support in the Jimusho main office, which Ohno found out entirely by accident a couple weeks after they met at the party, when she showed up in his manager’s office to troubleshoot a printer problem. When Ohno started to follow her back downstairs, she turned around immediately and shoved a finger in his face and swore to really sue him this time if he came within even two floors of her office.
This wasn’t a problem, because Ohno had no idea where the technical support office was, but he decided to keep that piece of information to himself.
“You didn’t tell me you worked here,” he said instead, completely distracted by her little business suit-how it fell to exactly the knee, and the cuffs of her shirt and the top button of her collar all carefully buttoned, and her hair in a neat braid down her back.
“What do you think I was doing at that party?” she said, exasperated.
“Oh, right.”
“Oh, right,” she mimicked, rolling her eyes. She pointed back down the hall towards his manager’s office. “Back to work, Mr. Super-Idol.”
Ohno just grinned and started to do as he was told, then turned around and asked: “Can I still come by your place tonight?”
She leapt forward to slap a hand over his mouth before the sentence was even half finished.
“Can you not say crap like that in the middle of the hallway?” she hissed.
And that’s part of rule number four: the moment any of this hits the scandal sheets, Ohno will leave and never come back.
Because Nino has apparently been expecting it to happen since day one. Ohno hates that about his job, too-how him being in a relationship like any normal guy his age is a scandal and apparently the business of everyone in Japan. But no matter how he promises to be careful, to be discreet, Nino will have none of it.
“Anyway, I’m pretty sure you’d be a terrible boyfriend,” she says, then starts cursing out the other members of her party in the MMO she’s playing.
Ohno takes heart from the fact that she still hasn’t told him to stop coming over.
*
“We could just get married,” Ohno says one day, offhandedly, as he adds a new doodle to Nino’s coffee table-she’s been letting him draw on it for weeks. She says it makes it unique. “Then it wouldn’t be scandalous.”
Nino’s guitar lets out an unpleasant twang from across the room. “Not funny,” she says.
“I wasn’t joking,” Ohno replies, looking up from his seat on the floor and catching her gaze.
Nino holds her face in a carefully blank expression, one Ohno has come to know very well, one she uses when she thinks she has a lot to lose. She’s perched on a bar stool by the window, one leg tucked underneath her, guitar in her lap, drowning in a striped sweater-dress over a pair of jeans that seem to have more holes than fabric. There’s a tall standing lamp just behind her that casts her in shades of gold and shadow and, not for the first time, Ohno wants to paint her.
Before he can voice the thought, Nino sets her guitar down and leans it against the wall, then rises and walks across the room towards Ohno. There’s something different in her eyes, something intent, as she shoves the coffee table away with her foot so she can plop herself down in Ohno’s lap. She doesn’t stop him when he rests his hands at her waist.
“Oh-chan,” she says carefully, “we’ve never even been out on a date.”
“We’ve been out on tons of dates,” he corrects her. “You just refuse to call them dates.”
They spend a quiet moment just staring at each other, and Nino lifts her hands from her lap to rest them gently on Ohno’s chest, barely touching. Eventually, Ohno breaks the silence.
“I love you, you know,” he says quietly. And as much as he’s begged and pleaded to be allowed a real date, a real relationship, he’s never said that before, and he wonders if he’s crossed a line.
This close, he can see how Nino’s pupils dilate, her mouth drops open just a little. She shakes her head.
“You are an idiot, then,” she says, and then she kisses him.
[PORN GOES HERE >_>;;;;]
notes: ta-DA. will make better after finals are over OTL