Unnecessarily Romantic
Hiroki clamped his mouth shut, lowering the coffee cup slowly so as not to let anything on to Nowaki. He should have known better than to think he could even breathe without letting on to Nowaki.
“Hiro-san? Is something wrong?”
He shook his head furiously, not meeting his gaze, making a vague sound in the negative before turning his attention to breakfast. Stop asking, he willed him, or you’ll come up with some kinda unnecessarily romantic suggestion that I’ll have no choice but to agree to.
“Hiro-san,” Nowaki was saying again, and Hiroki would have told him off then and there for interrupting his thoughts if only- “Why aren’t you saying anything, Hiro-san?”
Hiroki clutched his chopsticks harder, spearing his omelette, unable to stop the telltale blush on his cheeks. “Nothing,” he mumbled, although it came out sounding too muffled to be recognised. When his lover said nothing he looked up to see Nowaki with his ‘you’re so cute’ expression on again.
“Did you scald your tongue?”
Brown eyes widened. How the hell did he know? Was it a doctor thing? That bastard of a Nowaki, he must’ve been laughing at him the whole time! Damn him! Hiroki despised drinking freshly brewed coffee because he unerringly burnt his tongue every time he did, but this morning was special because the two of them were sitting together at this table for the first time in a long time (this was not an unnecessarily romantic moment. It wasn’t), and he’d been so damn caught up in that that he’d forgotten all about letting the beverage cool.
“I know the perfect cure for a scalded tongue,” Nowaki said, getting up from his chair. Maybe it was the suggestive way he’d said it, maybe it was the look on his face, maybe it was because last night they’d both been too tired to even think of…
Hiroki felt his cheeks heat up instantaneously and glared down at the coffee cup. Had his tongue been un-raw and in a state in which he could rant, he would have yelled at Nowaki for making unnecessarily romantic suggestions again. Whoever heard of a kiss being a cure for-
“Here you go, Hiro-san.”
Hiroki snapped his gaze up to see his lover holding out a glass of cool water. “It’ll help soothe your tongue.”
Oh. Stiffening, he took the glass and gulped the water down, handing it back (still not meeting Nowaki’s gaze) with a muttered, “Thank you.”
A soft hand on his chin exerted just enough pressure to tilt his head upwards, and Nowaki’s lips were pressed against his, the younger man’s tongue, strangely not as heated as it usually was, entangling with Hiroki’s own; somehow, the rawness made him more… sensitive.
It had still been, Hiroki thought, much, much later, sprawled beside Nowaki on the sheets and glad for the first time in his life for a scalded tongue, an unnecessarily romantic gesture.