FIC: Appropriation, YanaKiri (Part 1/2)
Title: Appropriation (Part 1/2)
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 17000 (oops)
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: After drifting apart over the years, Kirihara moves back into Renji's life.
Author's Notes: Written for Kirihara's 2007 birthday. Happy Birthday, Kirihara! Your senpais love you, you stupid seaweed head, you. &hearts
Thanks to pixxers for all the handholding.
[Part 1] [Part 2]
Kirihara shows up one day, entirely unexpected. Renji hasn’t seen him in almost a year, not since last autumn when Kirihara finally gave up on high school and got onto the professional circuit. They saw each other occasionally during Renji’s first year of university- meet ups with the high school tennis teammates were inevitable, really, because they’d been together for six years.
But after the shabu shabu parties at Marui’s parents’ house and the karaoke nights scattered here and there, arranged by quick phone calls on Jackal’s part, Kirihara wandered off, tennis taking its toll on get-togethers and Renji allowed his own coursework to swallow him whole.
He stands at Renji’s door, shifting his weight awkwardly from foot to foot. He’s grown - not as tall as Renji, but at least Yagyuu’s height now. The coltishness in his arms and legs is gone, too, with the way Renji sees Kirihara hold himself, head held high and cocky, his stance casual and confident at once.
“Um…senpai,” he starts. “Well…uh…this might sound weird…”
Kirihara runs a hand through his hair, ruffling up the back and shaking off sweat droplets into the air. One hits Renji on the upper lip. It’s hard to resist the urge to wipe it off. Kirihara drips sweat down his face and smells too strongly of a too recent workout. Renji thinks that Kirihara is affiliated with the university’s training program now, but he’s never bothered to ask.
“See, the gym showers are kinda going through renovations right now so I can’t use them and Sanada-senpai said that you lived not too far away and I-”
“You wanted to use my shower?”
Kirihara nods. He flashes Renji a sheepish grin. “If you don’t mind.”
Renji says nothing, he just opens his door wider. It hits his runners, lined up by the doorway and he has to back up into his wardrobe to allow Kirihara inside. His apartment is tiny- one small room, with furniture crammed into every section of wall and a folding tray for a desk. A shelf held up by bricks holds his university textbooks and translated Chinese novels for literature class. It’s enough for one person, for him, and there’s a reason he doesn’t invite people over.
Kirihara breezes right into his apartment, dumping his tennis bag in the middle of the tatami floor. “Um….that’s your bathroom?” he asks, peering into the only other door in the apartment.
Renji walks two steps to his rickety wicker shelf and pulls off the lone clean towel. A bit sad-looking and threadbare, but it’d do. “Here,” he says, handing it to Kirihara.
The bathroom door shuts. Water starts to run, the sound rushing through the wall as Renji goes back to microwaving his leftovers: curry from Genichirou’s mother. Not his favourite, but it was free. And it tastes better than the bento boxes at the convenience store.
The water stops as the microwave dings. Renji turns his back and grabs a tea towel to pull his supper out when the bathroom door swings open in a haze of warm steam. The hazy steam slithers out the open windows, lost in the pleasant late summer breeze that flutters the net curtains.
Renji doesn’t know why, but he turns to look. Curiousity about Kirihara gets the better of himself, how Kirihara has changed since they last saw each other. Kirihara stands for a long moment, glorious and golden, taller than the last time Renji would have seen him after a shower, what, two years ago in high school? His stomach and chest glisten with water droplets. Wet hair curls around his forehead, over the shells of his ears. He breathes out through his mouth, lips parting in a half-sigh as he blinks. The towel shouldn’t be that low on his hips, low enough that Renji can easily make out the thin, dark line of hair leading down from his bellybutton…
His mouth feels awfully dry. The tea towel drops from his own hands.
Kirihara breaks the mood as soon as he steps out of the bathroom, somehow managing to trip over his feet and land in a heap of naked teenage boy, the towel having flown across the room as he shrieks.
“Ow,” Kirihara moans, rubbing his head and blinking again. He forces a laugh and Renji remembers that it’s his apartment and he really shouldn’t be looking at Kirihara quite so long and intently, as if he’s searching for something he can’t put a finger on.
Feeling his face heat up, Renji gives Kirihara the towel again. He looks at his hands, which brush Kirihara’s damp skin. A shiver of hot and cold courses through his body without logical explanation.
When did Kirihara develop this man’s body? He stands and stretches, the hair under his arms new to Renji, the hair on his legs, too, and the cock between his legs- Renji can’t look and he shouldn’t look and only when Kirihara forces another laugh does Renji stop and think properly and remember his curry in the microwave.
Kirihara isn’t modest and he’s never been, but even Renji has to stop for a moment when Kirihara prances over to his tennis bag, stark naked in front of the open window and starts to dress himself. His muscles flex as he sticks his legs one, then the other into his boxers. Renji’s chest feels funny and tight, unexplainably so, when Kirihara wriggles into his pants and t-shirt, stretching his arms above his head and sniffing in the air.
He closes his eyes and then says, “Do you like curry, Akaya?”
***
It is three days later when Kirihara comes again. He knocks three times, slamming his fist into the door before Renji answers. Mid-knock, Kirihara pauses and bites his lip. He looks younger when he does that, but never innocent- the gleam in his eyes is too dark.
“I think…I left my wrist weight here?” he asks.
Renji shakes his head. “I haven’t seen anything,” he says. His flat isn’t impeccably clean, but he keeps it tidy enough, save for the couple stacks of school notes that tend to flutter and float around his few surfaces on their own, depending on the time in the term and how many essays he might have due.
It’s a Monday afternoon, almost supper. Or, it is supper, but Renji’s been engrossed in the middle of reading an article- boring metaphysics about literature, or some such shit. Sometimes he questions why he studies the subject. It all blurs together after a long day on campus and trying to wrap his mind around anything that difficult is taxing. His stomach growls. He should eat something, but his cupboards are empty and-
Kirihara holds up a plastic bag. “Uh, since I ate your food last time, I brought some. You don’t mind, do you senpai? I kinda owed you.”
“No…” Renji murmurs. “That’s…” perfect, actually…
Kirihara unpacks his bags. A set of salmon sashimi, jewel-toned on white rice. A box with pickles and pink ginger. Another bento, filled to the brim with sliced beef and a plastic package of brown BBQ sauce. Kirihara keeps rooting around his bags, never-ending and deep: juice boxes and barley tea, a bag of potato chips and some sort of can of green jelly.
Renji picks it up, reading the label. Kirihara shrugs. “I have cake, too. I get really hungry after tennis practice. Sometimes I hit this café near the sports centre.”
“I see,” Renji says. His table is spread with food- it’s never seen this much before, but then he usually eats by himself in the evenings since Genichirou started to stay later with Yukimura at the university gym. Renji never felt like a third wheel in junior high and high school, but then again, Genichirou wasn’t screwing around with Yukimura back then the way he does now.
It’s nice to have someone to eat with, even if Kirihara does slather everything in the bottle of mayonnaise and the BBQ sauce he bought. Renji doesn’t mind Kirihara dripping his udon noodles all over the tabletop. He doesn’t mind Kirihara chatting on and on about the tennis coach- “a former pro, you know, Yanagi-senpai. He played with Federer and Andy Roddick and people like that.”
Renji isn’t bitter about not playing tennis anymore himself. He never planned to go further than high school. It was never a question of if but when he would stop and he’d always assumed it would be when he started university. Still, listening to Kirihara talk about his smashes and drop shots makes something sting, almost wistful, inside himself. He turns his palm over underneath the table, imagining the ghost-weight of a racket.
“Senpai?” Kirihara asks.
Renji shakes his head. He picks his chopsticks up again. “Thank you for the supper,” he says, slurping up his noodles. “It was very nice of you, Akaya.”
Kirihara shrugs. “I usually eat at the ramen stand by the station or at home but you’re better than my parents. They don’t get tennis at all.”
Renji forces himself to smile and nod, agreeing with Kirihara. Inside, though, he knows he doesn’t get tennis anymore now than Kirihara’s family would. He gets Chinese literature and English motifs. Shakespeare and Shen Fu and Akutagawa.
The cicadas are out in full force by the time Kirihara leans back in the chair and belches. “Oops,” he says, laughing at himself and apologizing just as quickly.
“It’s fine,” Renji says. He piles up the empty plastic trays and stacks them in the sink. Recycling goes out in two days. Kirihara picks at the last of the cold noodles with his fingers, then passes the tray to Renji.
The insects chirp outside the open windows, curtains fluttering from the dull grey sky. It will rain tonight, Renji can tell that much just from looking through the filtered light, half-hidden by bushy green maples and willows in the park by the train tracks. The first drops of rain come, trickling through the trees. Kirihara pushes his head through the window and mutters, “Shit.”
“What?” Renji wipes his table down. He’s not a neat-freak, by any means, but he needs to do his homework tonight and he’d rather not get mayonnaise on the back of his assignments. Hopefully Kirihara will leave soon. It’s already close to dusk, that hazy, lazy time when Renji would rather flop back on his bed and pop on his tiny tv instead of doing work.
The rain showers harder, splattering fat drops across the window panes. Kirihara closes them, ducking his head and mumbling something about not wanting to get Renji’s books wet from the open windows. The chirping bugs go quiet, lost in the rush of rain when the first peel of thunder racks the clouds and flickers the lights.
Dammit, Renji thinks. He can’t remember where he left his matches, in case the lights go. He has candles stashed in his underwear drawer, beside his socks, but…
Kirihara sits, curled up on the small couch, shadows dancing across his face. It’s longer, drawn, with his lips pulled tight and thin, almost an adult now. He’s thinking about something, the way his forehead scrunches up. His shoes are lined up by the door beside Renji’s, the tongues of his sneakers hanging out grey and grungy and well-used.
“Akaya…?” Renji asks.
“I should…probably go home…” Kirihara murmurs. He frowns, lop-sided, and stares out the window for a long moment. The lightning flashes, electric shocks pulsing through the sky and rumbling the earth beneath them, loud and violent as an earthquake.
Renji glances over his shoulder. He knows Kirihara hasn’t brought a raincoat- or any sort of coat besides the university tennis club jersey, but the thin nylon would be soaked through in an instant at the rate the rain pours from the sky, puddles forming in every crevice outside, torrents of water flushing down the street drains.
And, from the looks of things, from Kirihara’s slow movements and heavy sighs, he hasn’t got an umbrella either.
From his wardrobe, Renji fishes out his own. It’s non-descript and black, one of the arms has seen better days and will probably break soon, but it’s something. “Here,” he says, handing it to Kirihara, “use this.”
“T-thanks,” Kirihara says. He bobs his head, then a smile starts to play at his lips. “Thanks, Yanagi-senpai.”
He shouldn’t keep his door open as long as he does, but Renji feels the need to watch Kirihara leave, the rain obscuring his form before he gets to even the end of the block. The lights of the city streetlamps grow fuzzy and blurred as the rain drowns everything in a filmy glaze. Kirihara’s tall form stands out, his blue tennis bag probably getting wet, not covered by the umbrella. Renji inhales deeply, then closes his door behind himself.
His homework waits, wedged into a plastic folder in his bag. Instead, Renji flops back on his bed and stares at the ceiling until the lights go out completely and he can’t be bothered to burn any candles in the muggy, sticky heat.
***
On certain days Renji has a spare couple hours between classes when he can go and take a leisurely lunch on the grass patches of the campus grounds that overlook some of the outdoor tennis courts. He brings his laptop, his textbooks and sets up on an empty bench. He knows that Yukimura is practicing and that Genichirou will be around somewhere nearby. The injury after high school might have stopped Genichirou from a professional career of his own, but managing Yukimura eats up much of his time.
Renji has just started his sandwich and a new chapter of the novel for next week’s assignment when the sound of someone else’s breathing and a dark shadow falls over the page. Renji looks up. Genichirou looks down.
“Is…there a reason Akaya wanted your phone number?” Genichirou asks as he takes a seat on the bench.
Renji raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t know he did. He borrowed my umbrella last week.”
Genichirou grunts. The staccato sound of tennis balls being hit fills the air around them, punctuated only by the constant drone of insects and the occasional chirp of birds. “He and Yukimura will be competing for the university spot in the circuit this year.”
Renji sets his book down and uncrosses his legs. “Really? I thought Seiichi would have nailed the placement.”
Genichirou says nothing for a pregnant moment before a tiny smile crosses his face. His hand, the injured hand, clenches on his knee, fingernails digging into his skin. “He will,” Genichirou says.
***
Kirihara doesn’t call and Renji doesn’t question it.
Two days later, Kirihara’s tell-tale fist slams against Renji’s door. Kirihara gives the umbrella back to Renji and apologizes for the hour. “Practice ran late tonight,” he says. “I wanna make sure that circuit spot is mine, senpai.”
He doesn’t have a lot of extra money, but when Kirihara offers to call for delivery pizza, Renji doesn’t say no. Kirihara’s company is much more interesting than reading an article on symbolism in the novel. He chats about practice, about how determined he is to win the spot and wipes his greasy fingers everywhere: on his shorts, on the edge of Renji’s table, and then on the paper towel Renji hands him.
“It’s like a full-time job!” Kirihara says. “9-5 working on tennis. I mean, it’s cool, but…” He sighs. And then yawns loudly.
Renji notices the stack of articles to read, piled up on top of his tv, which Kirihara has started to eye. Renji should be reading them, yes, but…
Kirihara stares back at him, his eyes wide and dark and so intent that Renji can’t help but be surprised, even if he doesn’t show it outwardly. Leaning on his elbows, Kirihara says in a small, unsure voice, “You don’t…you don’t mind me being here, do you senpai?”
His question takes Renji aback, almost as much as the look in his eyes. He’s not in red-eye mode, no, Renji hasn’t seen Kirihara like that in years, possibly since junior high school. But then, he hasn’t seen Kirihara play in a long while either. The excuse of school and university homework seems so feeble all of a sudden.
Renji looks away. “No,” he says, his voice quieter than he would prefer, “no, of course not.”
Kirihara doesn’t break his gaze, though, and his hesitant smile starts to waver at the edges of his mouth. He sits back on Renji’s couch, his fingers curling over the arm rest where Renji would sometimes set bowls of rice and eat in front of his tv while doing homework. Multitasking to the extreme to try to save time.
Now, though…
Silence hangs between them, although a tv host drones on, her shrill voice piercing the air, but unable to cut the tension. Renji feels guilty for not being more eager. He feels guilty for wanting to do his homework, and not wanting to, all at once. Kirihara has breezed back into his life, and Renji doesn’t know what to make of it.
“Would you like some tea?” Renji asks.
At the same time, Kirihara says, “Can I use your shower?”
Kirihara looks at his knees. Renji looks at the assignment sheet he’s holding. It must seem like he’s pressing Kirihara to leave, the way he’s tense and sitting up at the edge of his rickety chair, ready to stand up and usher his kouhai out the door. That isn’t what he feels; he just…doesn’t know why Kirihara wants to be part of his life all of a sudden.
Kirihara is the high school, the junior high part of Renji’s life. It ended, he went off to school, tennis more or less forgotten, although the friendships forged remain. Or did remain, until Genichirou started to mess around with Yukimura and ruined the three-way dynamic of the friendship. Deep down, Renji resents that. He knows he does, as much as he tries to be accepting. He’s their third wheel now. School is the only one who wants him around.
He’s thinking too much, over analyzing, and he knows it. Kirihara forces a laugh and starts to mumble and say that he should be leaving, but before Renji can think, his hands reach out to grab a towel and he throws it at Kirihara’s head.
It hits him, square in the face and catches Kirihara off guard this time. For a moment, Kirihara stares at it in his hands, then he smiles, nodding and unsure and thanking Renji, yet again, for putting up with him.
“I don’t mind the company,” he tells Kirihara through the bathroom door.
Truth be told, he’s never had this much company to determine this. Renji pads to his tiny kitchen and flicks on the kettle. As Kirihara showers and the water runs, he rummages around for tea cups. Ceramic wear, with oozing glaze over terracotta-like roughness. The cups look as though someone spilled liquid chemicals all over them, but Renji likes the look, likes the feel of the warm ceramic in his palms when he drinks. None of Jackal’s paper takeaway coffee cups for him, Renji prefers the genuine thing.
He watches the kettle come to a boil, tiny bubbles clinging the sides inside. It takes longer than usual, but now, with Kirihara here, Renji can’t find the concentration he needs to start his readings. He can hear Kirihara moving around in the shower, dropping bottles under the spray of water. He can hear Kirihara banging the sides of the tiny stall- sometimes, Renji hits his head if he isn’t careful. Perhaps he should have said something to Kirihara…
Mostly, though, he listens to the sound of water. He can almost see it, sluicing down Kirihara’s naked body, warm and wet over his smooth skin, over his muscled arms and the jut of his hips. His chest feels funny again at the memory of Kirihara being here the first time, at the recollection of his broad new shoulders, his naked body touching Renji’s towel, his wet hair clinging to his forehead and curling at the ends…
The kettle clicks, having finished, just as the shower turns off. Renji pours the water into a waiting pot and measures out the tea leaves with a bent spoon.
He should ask if the university sports complex’ showers have been repaired yet, but he says nothing when the door slides open and Kirihara steps out, not wearing a towel this time, but fully dressed back in his shorts and t-shirt. He leaves damp footprints across the wood laminate flooring as he walks over to Renji.
“Senpai?” he asks.
Renji hands him a cup of tea.
Kirihara sits on the couch and Renji at his table, with Kirihara oddly silent again. Steam rises from the bathroom, out into his apartment. A fresh breeze rustles through the open window, bringing yawns to Kirihara. The air lifts the leaves in the tall zelkova and maple trees, the swish soothing as Renji starts to read. In the distance, a train rattles by, the lights brighter than the tv that Kirihara watches.
Or does he…?
Renji looks out of the corner of his eye. Kirihara turns towards the tv, but his eyes are glazed over and unfocused, reflecting the flashing images. From time to time, he’ll blow across the surface of his cup. And then, he takes a sip. Renji keeps watching, setting his pencil down without looking at it because he’s too busy staring at the way Kirihara’s throat bobs, the Adam’s Apple moving down, then back up. Kirihara licks the rim of the teacup, pink tongue sliding over the ceramic glaze.
Something burns inside Renji. He closes his eyes and shivers, unable to stop the swell between his legs. It’s illogical and nonsensical. Indirect kisses are the thing of romance and novels and the literature he studies, not his former tennis club kouhai. Still, his own mouth tingles, having touched that same cup a hundred, thousand times himself. A weight presses against his chest, causing Renji to pause for a breath.
He’s been reading too much modern fiction for that one university course. Resolute, Renji flips through his notes to start another article, for another class, this time on violence and imagery. He reads, forcing himself to concentrate on the words in front of him and not on the small slurping sounds Kirihara makes. He sips his tea. He turns his pages. He makes notes and underlines key phrases with an orange highlighter.
By the time he finishes, the tv has changed programs.
And Kirihara is slumped across the end of his couch, the teacup set on the window sill and his head thrown back in sleep. His mouth is parted, just barely, and his lips shiny with saliva where he must have licked them. His hair ruffles with every slight gust of wind that flows in through the window, smelling of the city and the fishy ocean, all mixed up into one.
Renji can also smell his own shampoo and woodsy soap on Kirihara, which he must have used in the shower. Kirihara’s legs stick out in front of him as his body slumps further down into the couch and deeper into sleep.
His watch reads half-past ten. Renji assumes that Kirihara probably still lives at home with his family, which means that he shouldn’t be here too much later if he wants to catch a train. The train station, too, is a good twenty minute walk if Kirihara’s parents still live on the same line as when they were in school together.
He should wake Kirihara….
Renji tiptoes over. It’s his apartment, but he feels a lingering duty as Kirihara’s senpai not to make too much noise as he turns the tv off. Renji slides the remote from underneath Kirihara’s limp hand and sets it on the window sill beside the empty cup.
Kirihara breathes heavily, his head lolling even more to the side. He makes a little noise, almost like a whimper, and Renji shivers again; the sound vibrates through his body and settles in his cock. It’s wrong, to think about touching Kirihara’s half-dry curls like this. It’s wrong, to think about how those shiny lips might feel, might taste…
Renji shakes his head. The hand that hovered over Kirihara’s shoulder to tap him, to wake him up and say he’ll miss his train if he stays too much later, it falters and Renji takes a step back to clear his thoughts. He feels dizzy, as though he’s had a beer and a half and he isn’t thinking straight.
Straight in more than one sense of the word.
It’s not a cool night at all, but Renji pulls his extra blanket off the top of his wardrobe and unfolds it. Gently, he drapes it over Kirihara, who sniffs and wiggles. Renji pauses before he fixes the ends of it- he doesn’t want to wake Kirihara up at this point. He’d rather just stand and watch the boy sleep, listen to his sleepy noises and the way his nose wrinkles. The way his toes wriggle and his mouth moves, lips curving around a single word:
“Senpai.”
***
It was high school, early autumn, at the time of year when the flush of summer heat swelled and now started to fade and the trees began to shed their first few leaves, all scarlets and golds and rich, rich russets.
Rikkai had won the Nationals, again, due to a fluke in the scoring system when Seigaku brought out their star rookie. Never one to back down from a challenge, Yukimura and Sanada played doubles one against Tezuka-Inui pair. Renji had sat on the bench, digging his nails into the seat. The desire to win had overridden anything else, as much as his childhood screamed at him that his former best friend was, once more, playing against his new team…if ‘new’ meant seven years new.
Now, with autumn bringing crisp breezes down from the mountains and roasted sweet potatoes, heavier school jackets and fresh sweet apples, the tennis season was over. Renji was finished with tennis for good.
He didn’t hesitate to clean out his locker, as much as sadness lingered in the memories of the clubhouse, of kicking asses and playing so hard he sweated blood. Yukimura was outside, speaking with a scout who had come by for the second time this week. Jackal and Marui had the task of cleaning out the showers, down on their knees and scrubbing at months’ of mould buildup because they were too busy practicing tennis instead. Niou had left already, the first to go to start studying for university entrance exams.
Yagyuu sat on the bench, sorting through his tennis bag. Kirihara was beside him, staring up at Renji. Renji could feel it with the eyes in the back of his head, the prickles on the back of his neck.
“Akaya?” he asked. Renji scrubbed the locker shelf harder. The paper towel did nothing to remove the permeating stench of sweat from where his uniforms sat dirty after games.
Kirihara said nothing, but Renji’s hairs continued to stuck up. He turned around, just as Yagyuu stood up, nodded politely, and said he would see Renji in the library tomorrow to go over their biology notes together.
He and Kirihara were left alone. Kirihara’s gaze was invasive, deliberate and it made Renji look away. Kirihara would verbally guilt-trip Sanada over being left alone, again, next year in high school, but him?
Renji assumed he was worthy enough only for a silent glare. He brushed it off and went back to cleaning the old socks from the bottom of his locker.
His neck hairs continued to prickle and Kirihara kept staring. Only when Marui emerged from the showers with a slop bucket did the feeling finally dissipate.
Kirihara stomped out of the clubhouse, slamming the door behind himself as loud as he could.
“What’s with him?” Marui asked.
Renji shrugged.
***
Kirihara leaves before Renji wakes up, but Renji notices a jacket left behind on the couch, underneath the bunched blanket. He sighs, suspecting that Kirihara will be back at some point to retrieve it.
For now, he mostly notices his erection. And the bowl of instant miso soup left out, having gone cold, at his spot at the table. There isn’t a note, but the piece of dried out toast beside the soup says enough. Silently, Renji thanks Kirihara. It’s thoughtful, if cold and tasteless by now. He smiles to himself, imagining Kirihara rifling through his cupboards, fingers touching all his dishes and boxes of Chinese sauce for vegetables, like a little kid would.
More pressing is his erection. Yes, he’s twenty and yes, he still gets them, the same way he did as a teenager: a pretty girl on the street, a magazine spread of women in bikinis with bouncing breasts, even the failed attempt he and Genichirou had once at watching a porn movie (stolen from Genichirou’s brother). Those were fleeting desires, mostly the thought of what sex and what another warm body, lying under his, moaning his name would feel like.
He’s never had the chance. Well, maybe Renji has, but he didn’t act on the girl in high school who followed him around for a week. He didn’t say anything to the megane woman who asked for his number in the supermarket last year, and even last month, drinking with Jackal and Yagyuu, there had been that girl in the bar, making eyes at him and trailing her fingertip over the swell of her breasts…
It never occurred to him before, not until now, his lips brushing the used teacup on the counter, left there by him last night after he picked it up off the window sill. Renji closes his eyes, his chest pounding and his dick throbbing as he remembers seeing Kirihara’s lips, Kirihara’s mouth, Kirihara’s tongue on the same cup. Renji presses his mouth to it, kissing the rim and half-wishing it wasn’t cold ceramic against his lips.
In the shower, too, Kirihara’s palpable presence remains. Curly black hairs gather in the water drain. Renji picks up the soap and slides it across his arms, his belly, sighing into the feeling and thinking that it had touched Kirihara’s skin just last night. He soaps up his legs, purposely avoiding his erection because it’s just wrong to think about his kouhai and his cock at the same time, and yet, he does regardless. Renji wraps his sudsy hands around his dick, tugging and jerking himself off, wondering if the breathy noises he makes could be heard on the other side of the door had Kirihara still been here.
“Akaya,” he whispers as his forehead presses to the plastic wall, water running down his back along with the last pearly strands from his orgasm. Renji closes his eyes. His face feels unnaturally hot.
Kirihara lingers on his towel, his sweat and distinct smell permeating the terrycloth. Renji sniffs it, and the twisting perversion in his stomach rears its head. So does his dick, tingling and sensitized from climax. He wipes himself dry with the towel and hangs it over a hook to dry.
The jacket lies on the couch. He could drop it off at the sports club with a simple note, and then there would be no need for Kirihara to come back.
Instead, Renji dresses, grabs his bag and locks his door behind himself, jacket untouched.
***
Kirihara doesn’t show up that evening. Or the following. Renji feels, in some ways, that he’s home free. In the evenings, he works on assignments and emails instructions for a group project in his one class. He reads articles and edits his notes. He calls his mother once and assures her that yes, he’s eating well, but that if she’s willing, he wouldn’t mind an extra 10 000 yen deposited into his bank account.
His apartment is silent. The kettle boils, the tv drones on, the wind swishes through the open window but there is no other voice to speak with. Renji looks at the empty couch and sometimes, he can almost see an imprint from Kirihara’s bum, from his head where he slept and his curls spilled out across the armrest.
Renji finds himself pouring two cups of tea, only to realize, it’s just him. He sighs and feels rather stupid. He’s lived alone all year before this, and now that Kirihara stayed a few times, his life has been completely thrown around.
His bed is colder than ever, and not just because the first trees have tentatively begun to change their colours. The bed is too wide, too lonely and his hand down his pants, cupping his balls and pulling at his cock seems pointless. He’s hard when he wakes up, dreams lost upon waking, although Renji suspects they involve certain kouhais with dark, length gazes…
His classes finish early one afternoon, so Renji meets Marui and Genichirou in the main cafeteria for late lunch. Genichirou walks over, waving with his bad hand for Renji to come over to the table Marui reserved. A spread of sushi and sausage-filled taiyakis are stacked on Marui’s cafeteria tray. Renji hands him a 500 yen coin and sits down in the free seat.
“The sociology assignment is killing me,” Marui moans. “If I flunk this course, I’m doomed. Need it for a credit, though.” He stuffs a taiyaki into his mouth in two bites.
Genichirou frowns and looks over at the line of students filing by, trays filled with noodle bowls or plastic bento boxes. “I don’t know if Yukimura’s injury has recovered enough for the tournament coming up.”
Renji sets down his chopsticks. “Oh?”
“The invitational one in California?” Marui asks. He wipes crumbs from his mouth, looks over his shoulder at a vending machine and mutters, “Man, I really need a beer right now. I can’t sit through my econ class- Yanagi, how the hell did you take it last year? It’s boring as fuck.”
Genichirou ignores Marui’s complaining to take another sushi roll. “We thought he would be ready, but Akaya may go in his place after all.”
Renji stiffens.
“Oh yeah!” Marui nods emphatically and balls his fists, pounding the table in excitement. “I saw Akaya last week, he’s looking good. Pretty pleased with himself to have taken Yukimura’s spot last season, eh?” He waggles his eyebrows at Genichirou, which only makes Genichirou frown and roll his eyes.
Genichirou snorts. “Akaya still has years to catch up to Yukimura’s level.”
“But he won the tournament in Osaka against those Korean losers,” Marui says. He pokes Renji in the arm with a chopstick. “Gonna eat that salmon one? You look a bit green, Yanagi.”
“Koreans have never been at our level,” Genichirou mutters. “But he wouldn’t stand a chance against the Ukrainians this year.”
Renji stares at his plastic plate. A weight presses against his ribs, making it hard to breathe, let alone eat. This morning, and all his foolish thoughts about Kirihara, about Kirihara naked in his shower and kissing the rim of his teacup and sleeping in his apartment, about the unremembered dreams that leave him shaking and panting and sticky between the legs- Renji can’t say a word lest something slip and his friends find out.
It’s private.
It’s embarrassing.
And it’s nothing, all at the same time. Kirihara is his kouhai and has simply required his help recently. Nothing more. His own mind has been over-analyzing things. He must be overworked from all of his recent literature readings and the surprise of having Kirihara walk back into his life after nearly a year without an email, without a text message, without anything.
They were never friends in school, though, which makes everything make even less sense. Renji shifts in his seat, trying to maintain a calm demeanour even though his face is on fire, flaring up every time Genichirou and Marui so much as even mention Kirihara’s name.
Renji keeps quiet, then finally excuses himself when his erection becomes painful, aching so much that he can’t think properly. “I’m sorry, I have a lot of work to do tonight,” he says, his excuse pathetic, but good enough that Genichirou nods and Marui waves goodbye.
It would be dirty and inappropriate to masturbate in the cafeteria bathrooms, although Renji is well aware that both Niou and Yagyuu did it in high school, possibly with each other. The toilet doorway is enticing, but he bypasses it, walking quickly and pulling at the hem of his shirt so it covers a little more of his front.
Walking is uncomfortable. Renji passes too many other students in the large green parks in front of campus buildings. He walks by the sports complex, too, because it sits on the shortcut. He can almost hear the ping-pong of tennis balls inside and he wonders if Kirihara is there, practicing with a coach in preparation for another possible overseas tournament.
He looks at the glass doors of the building, wondering what it would be like to go inside and watch Kirihara practice. Genichirou has invited him more than once to come and play a game with Yukimura and himself, but it wouldn’t be the same as their school years, not with the little looks and long stares Yukimura and Genichirou share now.
The Arts library is across another green park, lined with tall elms that swish in the faint wind. Students scatter the grounds, bento boxes and picnic food on laps, sometimes a textbook or even a laptop. Renji hesitates at the library, then decides to go inside. As much as his dick aches, even more as it rubs against his pants, he needs to do some research for that essay before long.
Kirihara has been too much of a distraction recently.
***
Three hours in front of a cubicle computer screen staring at article results and Renji is exhausted. His ass hurts from sitting for so long. His dick still hurts, Kirihara never too far from his mind as he reads passages on the computer screen about plump lips eager for kisses and soft skin like spring peaches. He can almost feel his fingertips stroking the air, wishing that there was someone physical for him instead of an ill-fated fantasy.
The sky burns with a sort of dusky amber light by the time he packs his bag and leaves the library to go home for real. Even though it’s been days since Kirihara was last around, Renji finds himself in the Familymart near his apartment picking out two packages of melon pan and two katsudon bentos. He shakes his head at himself, thankful that the cashier wouldn’t understand his inward dilemma.
If nothing else, Renji can shove the second bento in his fridge for tomorrow. He nods, yes, that’s what I’ll do. It’s not Kirihara’s bento. There is no significance whatsoever.
His neighbourhood is residential, but filled with enough students to make it lively: windows open and bright inside, blaring music out into the darkening evening sky, lines of laundry flutter in the warm night air and the smells of curry and frying pork cutlets make it seem slightly homier than any university residence ever could.
Renji walks up his step- he’s on the ground floor, but it’s a safe enough building. The security light is on, shining yellow light onto the cement walk. It seems slightly odd, unless one of the other tenants walked by recently to go out, or drop off laundry, or perhaps a delivery man….
“Senpai?”
For an instant, Renji almost thinks that his imagination is running wild, not just his hormones. But then his eyes adjust to the fluorescent lighting and the keys in his hands slip, jingling when they hit the pavement.
Kirihara bounces from foot to foot, then he dives for the keys. He hands them to Renji, their fingers brushing as Renji accepts them. A shiver runs down his spine and the wind, too, blows cool over his bare arms.
“Sorry,” Kirihara says, ducking his head and half-smiling. His gaze is firm, though, and his eyes dark on Renji. Just like the last time.
Those dark, wide eyes, rounded unlike his own, send little thrills throughout Renji’s body, pools of pleasure in his belly that make breathing difficult the way his heart feels so heavy and pounds so fast.
“You…you eating alone?” Kirihara asks as Renji opens his door. His hands shake on the door handle, but Kirihara doesn’t seem to notice because he keeps looking at Renji’s face in that way that makes it even more uncomfortable.
Not that Renji feels uncomfortable inside, though. If anything, it’s the opposite. In some ways, listening to Kirihara talk about his practices soothes him because its mindless and relaxed, sitting at the table, eating lukewarm bentos and drinking the barely tea that Kirihara had in his bag, served in Renji’s ceramic teacups. Renji leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, enjoying the sound of Kirihara’s voice, enjoying Kirihara’s blatant enthusiasm for tennis, undiminished over the years.
“I remembered when I got to the gym that I forgot my jacket here,” he says. “But then I got so busy the past couple days because the coach has been pushing me hard, you know? He thinks I could do it, even if I have to play Yukimura-senpai to get the spot.” Kirihara laughs. “That’s what you get if you get injured, ne senpai?”
Renji hums. He doesn’t entirely agree, but he’s not inclined to argue with Kirihara, either. Back in school, only an idiot would think it wise to try to hold Kirihara back from whatever he wanted to do, violent or otherwise. Although Kirihara has obviously mellowed and grown up, Renji isn’t about to push things.
Besides, that part of him deep down, that envious, petty little person finds it ironic and funny that Yukimura is out of commission. That’s what he deserves- he may have love, but he doesn’t have the game. Renji’s mouth starts to quirk at the thought, until he stops himself, guilty of schadenfreude.
“Senpai?” Kirihara asks.
“You were saying?” he asks.
Kirihara gives him a long look, eyes reflecting the kitchen lights and seemingly sucking the brightness into their dark depths. If he wanted, Renji could allow himself to fall into them, to have his body and mind sink into those questioning black pupils that focus on him more and more. Kirihara must be noticing how Renji is only half-listening. Or possibly the cutlet sauce on the side of his mouth.
With a paper towel, he wipes it off. Kirihara belches and pats his stomach, then realizes his error and mutters an apology.
“No need,” Renji says. “We’re both boys here.”
Kirihara laughs. He sounds awkward and forced and the data doesn’t fit together. Renji can’t figure out why, unless Kirihara wants something…
His eyes shift to the couch. He folded the blanket the evening Kirihara didn’t show up, but Renji can still almost make out the shadows of dents where Kirihara slept and sat there.
“Um…” Kirihara bites his lip, his lovely, pink lip with his short, sharp teeth. Frisson runs cold and electric through Renji’s limbs when an image of Kirihara, on top of him, moaning his name and biting his chest with those same sharp teeth flashes across his mind.
Renji shakes his head.
“It’s okay, I can watch it at my parents’ house. Sorry.”
He blinks. Kirihara inches away from the couch that he must have inched toward in the first place. Renji is the fool, again, and shame unfurls in his stomach because he’s been caught spacing out yet again. He bows his head a bit and asks Kirihara to repeat himself. Renji can’t even be bothered to make up a lie about homework consuming his mind functions.
This time, Kirihara blinks. He scratches his temple, fingers buried in the thick curls in a way that makes Renji’s own fingers itch even more to touch, to feel, to pet that hair.
“The marathon of Naruto episodes on Animax and I was wondering if…maybe…” Kirihara chews his lip again, enticing Renji to agree to whatever he might ask. Kirihara scuffs his sock foot on the edge of the couch before he mumbles, “…if maybe you wanted to watch it with me tonight if you weren’t doing anything else?”
The couch is small, there is no way around it. A small, black vinyl couch pushed up against his wall, across from his bed. Kirihara settles in first, looking up at Renji, who stands, feeling awkward and unsure if he should sit down next to Kirihara because their thighs will brush if he does.
Renji sits down. His erection rears again, but when Kirihara reaches for the blanket and throws it over their laps, he breathes an internal sigh of relief. The nights grow cooler with each passing day and gusts of air blow in through the window, giving Renji goose pimples on his arms.
Ah. Now the blanket makes sense.
They eat the melon pans and sip hot green tea. Renji clutches his teacup with two hands, just in case Kirihara bounces on the couch or flails his arms like he would in school. But he doesn’t. He yells at the characters, he swears, he grins and he nods or shakes his head furiously, but he’s relatively calm compared to his younger years. Crumbs dot the blanket and their melon pan wrappers crinkle during the silences of the anime. Renji doesn’t understand what is going on- something about ninjas and nine-tailed demon foxes…but to watch the flickering emotions on Kirihara’s face?
His cock swells more, as does the ache in his chest. In the dancing light of the tv, Kirihara’s face becomes a kaleidoscope, his cheekbones highlighted in blue, his eyes in green, his nose pink and orange and his lips even darker, even fuller as he bites them and angsts with his favourite characters.
Not until Kirihara starts to yawn does Renji realize the time. He’ll miss his train home, again. Another episode starts, the music blaring loud until Kirihara turns down the volume a few notches with the remote.
“It’s cool if you gotta study,” he says. “You don’t have to watch it all with me.”
Renji shakes his head. “I don’t mind,” he says. I don’t mind watching you. Kirihara is warm, his bare arm occasionally brushing Renji’s hand when he fixes the edge of the blanket. His thigh presses against Renji’s under the blanket, slightly sweaty but mostly warm, comfortable. Renji could sit like this all night, if it wasn’t for the dull throb between his legs, which grows stiffer and harder to ignore every time Kirihara yawns or makes a soft little noise in the back of his throat.
When Kirihara falls completely quiet, his motions and expressions ceasing, Renji looks at him. Kirihara’s chest rises and falls softly and he leans over, closer to Renji, then finally settles against his shoulder.
Asleep.
It’s too much, this, to have Kirihara’s hair tickling the side of his neck, smelling of standard shampoo and faint sweat, to have Kirihara’s warm breath ghosting his skin, to have Kirihara’s pleasant weight pushing on him. Renji squirms, closing his eyes in a silent prayer that Kirihara’s arm won’t fling over his lap and feel his hardness, tighter and harder than ever before and stealing his sanity because Kirihara’s lips, shining in the tv glow, are so close and he could…just…
Renji’s strangled breath is a moan. Despairing, he pushes Kirihara’s shoulder with his own. “Akaya,” he says. His voice cracks and he has to clear his throat before his mouth works again.
Kirihara stirs. Blinking, drowsy, he pulls back and looks at Renji, his eyes darker than ever and glazed with slumber. The look burns through Renji, so hot, so understated that he could come right then and there if Kirihara so much as waved a hand over his cock.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, voice thick and slurred, “I can leave, or something…senpai…sorry…”
“No,” Renji says. He bites down on his tongue, surprised at his own eagerness. Without thinking, he nods to his bed and Kirihara, sleepy enough, accepts the invitation by shuffling over to the bed and stretching out along it.
“Senpai?” he asks. Hands in the air make grabbyfists, then Kirihara flops over, shoving himself against the wall in what could be an invitation of his own for Renji to sleep beside him.
The data is confirmed when Kirihara murmurs, “I made room for you…since you’re so nice to me, and all…senpai, you’re the best…”
Author: Ociwen
Wordcount: 17000 (oops)
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: After drifting apart over the years, Kirihara moves back into Renji's life.
Author's Notes: Written for Kirihara's 2007 birthday. Happy Birthday, Kirihara! Your senpais love you, you stupid seaweed head, you. &hearts
Thanks to pixxers for all the handholding.
[Part 1] [Part 2]
Kirihara shows up one day, entirely unexpected. Renji hasn’t seen him in almost a year, not since last autumn when Kirihara finally gave up on high school and got onto the professional circuit. They saw each other occasionally during Renji’s first year of university- meet ups with the high school tennis teammates were inevitable, really, because they’d been together for six years.
But after the shabu shabu parties at Marui’s parents’ house and the karaoke nights scattered here and there, arranged by quick phone calls on Jackal’s part, Kirihara wandered off, tennis taking its toll on get-togethers and Renji allowed his own coursework to swallow him whole.
He stands at Renji’s door, shifting his weight awkwardly from foot to foot. He’s grown - not as tall as Renji, but at least Yagyuu’s height now. The coltishness in his arms and legs is gone, too, with the way Renji sees Kirihara hold himself, head held high and cocky, his stance casual and confident at once.
“Um…senpai,” he starts. “Well…uh…this might sound weird…”
Kirihara runs a hand through his hair, ruffling up the back and shaking off sweat droplets into the air. One hits Renji on the upper lip. It’s hard to resist the urge to wipe it off. Kirihara drips sweat down his face and smells too strongly of a too recent workout. Renji thinks that Kirihara is affiliated with the university’s training program now, but he’s never bothered to ask.
“See, the gym showers are kinda going through renovations right now so I can’t use them and Sanada-senpai said that you lived not too far away and I-”
“You wanted to use my shower?”
Kirihara nods. He flashes Renji a sheepish grin. “If you don’t mind.”
Renji says nothing, he just opens his door wider. It hits his runners, lined up by the doorway and he has to back up into his wardrobe to allow Kirihara inside. His apartment is tiny- one small room, with furniture crammed into every section of wall and a folding tray for a desk. A shelf held up by bricks holds his university textbooks and translated Chinese novels for literature class. It’s enough for one person, for him, and there’s a reason he doesn’t invite people over.
Kirihara breezes right into his apartment, dumping his tennis bag in the middle of the tatami floor. “Um….that’s your bathroom?” he asks, peering into the only other door in the apartment.
Renji walks two steps to his rickety wicker shelf and pulls off the lone clean towel. A bit sad-looking and threadbare, but it’d do. “Here,” he says, handing it to Kirihara.
The bathroom door shuts. Water starts to run, the sound rushing through the wall as Renji goes back to microwaving his leftovers: curry from Genichirou’s mother. Not his favourite, but it was free. And it tastes better than the bento boxes at the convenience store.
The water stops as the microwave dings. Renji turns his back and grabs a tea towel to pull his supper out when the bathroom door swings open in a haze of warm steam. The hazy steam slithers out the open windows, lost in the pleasant late summer breeze that flutters the net curtains.
Renji doesn’t know why, but he turns to look. Curiousity about Kirihara gets the better of himself, how Kirihara has changed since they last saw each other. Kirihara stands for a long moment, glorious and golden, taller than the last time Renji would have seen him after a shower, what, two years ago in high school? His stomach and chest glisten with water droplets. Wet hair curls around his forehead, over the shells of his ears. He breathes out through his mouth, lips parting in a half-sigh as he blinks. The towel shouldn’t be that low on his hips, low enough that Renji can easily make out the thin, dark line of hair leading down from his bellybutton…
His mouth feels awfully dry. The tea towel drops from his own hands.
Kirihara breaks the mood as soon as he steps out of the bathroom, somehow managing to trip over his feet and land in a heap of naked teenage boy, the towel having flown across the room as he shrieks.
“Ow,” Kirihara moans, rubbing his head and blinking again. He forces a laugh and Renji remembers that it’s his apartment and he really shouldn’t be looking at Kirihara quite so long and intently, as if he’s searching for something he can’t put a finger on.
Feeling his face heat up, Renji gives Kirihara the towel again. He looks at his hands, which brush Kirihara’s damp skin. A shiver of hot and cold courses through his body without logical explanation.
When did Kirihara develop this man’s body? He stands and stretches, the hair under his arms new to Renji, the hair on his legs, too, and the cock between his legs- Renji can’t look and he shouldn’t look and only when Kirihara forces another laugh does Renji stop and think properly and remember his curry in the microwave.
Kirihara isn’t modest and he’s never been, but even Renji has to stop for a moment when Kirihara prances over to his tennis bag, stark naked in front of the open window and starts to dress himself. His muscles flex as he sticks his legs one, then the other into his boxers. Renji’s chest feels funny and tight, unexplainably so, when Kirihara wriggles into his pants and t-shirt, stretching his arms above his head and sniffing in the air.
He closes his eyes and then says, “Do you like curry, Akaya?”
***
It is three days later when Kirihara comes again. He knocks three times, slamming his fist into the door before Renji answers. Mid-knock, Kirihara pauses and bites his lip. He looks younger when he does that, but never innocent- the gleam in his eyes is too dark.
“I think…I left my wrist weight here?” he asks.
Renji shakes his head. “I haven’t seen anything,” he says. His flat isn’t impeccably clean, but he keeps it tidy enough, save for the couple stacks of school notes that tend to flutter and float around his few surfaces on their own, depending on the time in the term and how many essays he might have due.
It’s a Monday afternoon, almost supper. Or, it is supper, but Renji’s been engrossed in the middle of reading an article- boring metaphysics about literature, or some such shit. Sometimes he questions why he studies the subject. It all blurs together after a long day on campus and trying to wrap his mind around anything that difficult is taxing. His stomach growls. He should eat something, but his cupboards are empty and-
Kirihara holds up a plastic bag. “Uh, since I ate your food last time, I brought some. You don’t mind, do you senpai? I kinda owed you.”
“No…” Renji murmurs. “That’s…” perfect, actually…
Kirihara unpacks his bags. A set of salmon sashimi, jewel-toned on white rice. A box with pickles and pink ginger. Another bento, filled to the brim with sliced beef and a plastic package of brown BBQ sauce. Kirihara keeps rooting around his bags, never-ending and deep: juice boxes and barley tea, a bag of potato chips and some sort of can of green jelly.
Renji picks it up, reading the label. Kirihara shrugs. “I have cake, too. I get really hungry after tennis practice. Sometimes I hit this café near the sports centre.”
“I see,” Renji says. His table is spread with food- it’s never seen this much before, but then he usually eats by himself in the evenings since Genichirou started to stay later with Yukimura at the university gym. Renji never felt like a third wheel in junior high and high school, but then again, Genichirou wasn’t screwing around with Yukimura back then the way he does now.
It’s nice to have someone to eat with, even if Kirihara does slather everything in the bottle of mayonnaise and the BBQ sauce he bought. Renji doesn’t mind Kirihara dripping his udon noodles all over the tabletop. He doesn’t mind Kirihara chatting on and on about the tennis coach- “a former pro, you know, Yanagi-senpai. He played with Federer and Andy Roddick and people like that.”
Renji isn’t bitter about not playing tennis anymore himself. He never planned to go further than high school. It was never a question of if but when he would stop and he’d always assumed it would be when he started university. Still, listening to Kirihara talk about his smashes and drop shots makes something sting, almost wistful, inside himself. He turns his palm over underneath the table, imagining the ghost-weight of a racket.
“Senpai?” Kirihara asks.
Renji shakes his head. He picks his chopsticks up again. “Thank you for the supper,” he says, slurping up his noodles. “It was very nice of you, Akaya.”
Kirihara shrugs. “I usually eat at the ramen stand by the station or at home but you’re better than my parents. They don’t get tennis at all.”
Renji forces himself to smile and nod, agreeing with Kirihara. Inside, though, he knows he doesn’t get tennis anymore now than Kirihara’s family would. He gets Chinese literature and English motifs. Shakespeare and Shen Fu and Akutagawa.
The cicadas are out in full force by the time Kirihara leans back in the chair and belches. “Oops,” he says, laughing at himself and apologizing just as quickly.
“It’s fine,” Renji says. He piles up the empty plastic trays and stacks them in the sink. Recycling goes out in two days. Kirihara picks at the last of the cold noodles with his fingers, then passes the tray to Renji.
The insects chirp outside the open windows, curtains fluttering from the dull grey sky. It will rain tonight, Renji can tell that much just from looking through the filtered light, half-hidden by bushy green maples and willows in the park by the train tracks. The first drops of rain come, trickling through the trees. Kirihara pushes his head through the window and mutters, “Shit.”
“What?” Renji wipes his table down. He’s not a neat-freak, by any means, but he needs to do his homework tonight and he’d rather not get mayonnaise on the back of his assignments. Hopefully Kirihara will leave soon. It’s already close to dusk, that hazy, lazy time when Renji would rather flop back on his bed and pop on his tiny tv instead of doing work.
The rain showers harder, splattering fat drops across the window panes. Kirihara closes them, ducking his head and mumbling something about not wanting to get Renji’s books wet from the open windows. The chirping bugs go quiet, lost in the rush of rain when the first peel of thunder racks the clouds and flickers the lights.
Dammit, Renji thinks. He can’t remember where he left his matches, in case the lights go. He has candles stashed in his underwear drawer, beside his socks, but…
Kirihara sits, curled up on the small couch, shadows dancing across his face. It’s longer, drawn, with his lips pulled tight and thin, almost an adult now. He’s thinking about something, the way his forehead scrunches up. His shoes are lined up by the door beside Renji’s, the tongues of his sneakers hanging out grey and grungy and well-used.
“Akaya…?” Renji asks.
“I should…probably go home…” Kirihara murmurs. He frowns, lop-sided, and stares out the window for a long moment. The lightning flashes, electric shocks pulsing through the sky and rumbling the earth beneath them, loud and violent as an earthquake.
Renji glances over his shoulder. He knows Kirihara hasn’t brought a raincoat- or any sort of coat besides the university tennis club jersey, but the thin nylon would be soaked through in an instant at the rate the rain pours from the sky, puddles forming in every crevice outside, torrents of water flushing down the street drains.
And, from the looks of things, from Kirihara’s slow movements and heavy sighs, he hasn’t got an umbrella either.
From his wardrobe, Renji fishes out his own. It’s non-descript and black, one of the arms has seen better days and will probably break soon, but it’s something. “Here,” he says, handing it to Kirihara, “use this.”
“T-thanks,” Kirihara says. He bobs his head, then a smile starts to play at his lips. “Thanks, Yanagi-senpai.”
He shouldn’t keep his door open as long as he does, but Renji feels the need to watch Kirihara leave, the rain obscuring his form before he gets to even the end of the block. The lights of the city streetlamps grow fuzzy and blurred as the rain drowns everything in a filmy glaze. Kirihara’s tall form stands out, his blue tennis bag probably getting wet, not covered by the umbrella. Renji inhales deeply, then closes his door behind himself.
His homework waits, wedged into a plastic folder in his bag. Instead, Renji flops back on his bed and stares at the ceiling until the lights go out completely and he can’t be bothered to burn any candles in the muggy, sticky heat.
***
On certain days Renji has a spare couple hours between classes when he can go and take a leisurely lunch on the grass patches of the campus grounds that overlook some of the outdoor tennis courts. He brings his laptop, his textbooks and sets up on an empty bench. He knows that Yukimura is practicing and that Genichirou will be around somewhere nearby. The injury after high school might have stopped Genichirou from a professional career of his own, but managing Yukimura eats up much of his time.
Renji has just started his sandwich and a new chapter of the novel for next week’s assignment when the sound of someone else’s breathing and a dark shadow falls over the page. Renji looks up. Genichirou looks down.
“Is…there a reason Akaya wanted your phone number?” Genichirou asks as he takes a seat on the bench.
Renji raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t know he did. He borrowed my umbrella last week.”
Genichirou grunts. The staccato sound of tennis balls being hit fills the air around them, punctuated only by the constant drone of insects and the occasional chirp of birds. “He and Yukimura will be competing for the university spot in the circuit this year.”
Renji sets his book down and uncrosses his legs. “Really? I thought Seiichi would have nailed the placement.”
Genichirou says nothing for a pregnant moment before a tiny smile crosses his face. His hand, the injured hand, clenches on his knee, fingernails digging into his skin. “He will,” Genichirou says.
***
Kirihara doesn’t call and Renji doesn’t question it.
Two days later, Kirihara’s tell-tale fist slams against Renji’s door. Kirihara gives the umbrella back to Renji and apologizes for the hour. “Practice ran late tonight,” he says. “I wanna make sure that circuit spot is mine, senpai.”
He doesn’t have a lot of extra money, but when Kirihara offers to call for delivery pizza, Renji doesn’t say no. Kirihara’s company is much more interesting than reading an article on symbolism in the novel. He chats about practice, about how determined he is to win the spot and wipes his greasy fingers everywhere: on his shorts, on the edge of Renji’s table, and then on the paper towel Renji hands him.
“It’s like a full-time job!” Kirihara says. “9-5 working on tennis. I mean, it’s cool, but…” He sighs. And then yawns loudly.
Renji notices the stack of articles to read, piled up on top of his tv, which Kirihara has started to eye. Renji should be reading them, yes, but…
Kirihara stares back at him, his eyes wide and dark and so intent that Renji can’t help but be surprised, even if he doesn’t show it outwardly. Leaning on his elbows, Kirihara says in a small, unsure voice, “You don’t…you don’t mind me being here, do you senpai?”
His question takes Renji aback, almost as much as the look in his eyes. He’s not in red-eye mode, no, Renji hasn’t seen Kirihara like that in years, possibly since junior high school. But then, he hasn’t seen Kirihara play in a long while either. The excuse of school and university homework seems so feeble all of a sudden.
Renji looks away. “No,” he says, his voice quieter than he would prefer, “no, of course not.”
Kirihara doesn’t break his gaze, though, and his hesitant smile starts to waver at the edges of his mouth. He sits back on Renji’s couch, his fingers curling over the arm rest where Renji would sometimes set bowls of rice and eat in front of his tv while doing homework. Multitasking to the extreme to try to save time.
Now, though…
Silence hangs between them, although a tv host drones on, her shrill voice piercing the air, but unable to cut the tension. Renji feels guilty for not being more eager. He feels guilty for wanting to do his homework, and not wanting to, all at once. Kirihara has breezed back into his life, and Renji doesn’t know what to make of it.
“Would you like some tea?” Renji asks.
At the same time, Kirihara says, “Can I use your shower?”
Kirihara looks at his knees. Renji looks at the assignment sheet he’s holding. It must seem like he’s pressing Kirihara to leave, the way he’s tense and sitting up at the edge of his rickety chair, ready to stand up and usher his kouhai out the door. That isn’t what he feels; he just…doesn’t know why Kirihara wants to be part of his life all of a sudden.
Kirihara is the high school, the junior high part of Renji’s life. It ended, he went off to school, tennis more or less forgotten, although the friendships forged remain. Or did remain, until Genichirou started to mess around with Yukimura and ruined the three-way dynamic of the friendship. Deep down, Renji resents that. He knows he does, as much as he tries to be accepting. He’s their third wheel now. School is the only one who wants him around.
He’s thinking too much, over analyzing, and he knows it. Kirihara forces a laugh and starts to mumble and say that he should be leaving, but before Renji can think, his hands reach out to grab a towel and he throws it at Kirihara’s head.
It hits him, square in the face and catches Kirihara off guard this time. For a moment, Kirihara stares at it in his hands, then he smiles, nodding and unsure and thanking Renji, yet again, for putting up with him.
“I don’t mind the company,” he tells Kirihara through the bathroom door.
Truth be told, he’s never had this much company to determine this. Renji pads to his tiny kitchen and flicks on the kettle. As Kirihara showers and the water runs, he rummages around for tea cups. Ceramic wear, with oozing glaze over terracotta-like roughness. The cups look as though someone spilled liquid chemicals all over them, but Renji likes the look, likes the feel of the warm ceramic in his palms when he drinks. None of Jackal’s paper takeaway coffee cups for him, Renji prefers the genuine thing.
He watches the kettle come to a boil, tiny bubbles clinging the sides inside. It takes longer than usual, but now, with Kirihara here, Renji can’t find the concentration he needs to start his readings. He can hear Kirihara moving around in the shower, dropping bottles under the spray of water. He can hear Kirihara banging the sides of the tiny stall- sometimes, Renji hits his head if he isn’t careful. Perhaps he should have said something to Kirihara…
Mostly, though, he listens to the sound of water. He can almost see it, sluicing down Kirihara’s naked body, warm and wet over his smooth skin, over his muscled arms and the jut of his hips. His chest feels funny again at the memory of Kirihara being here the first time, at the recollection of his broad new shoulders, his naked body touching Renji’s towel, his wet hair clinging to his forehead and curling at the ends…
The kettle clicks, having finished, just as the shower turns off. Renji pours the water into a waiting pot and measures out the tea leaves with a bent spoon.
He should ask if the university sports complex’ showers have been repaired yet, but he says nothing when the door slides open and Kirihara steps out, not wearing a towel this time, but fully dressed back in his shorts and t-shirt. He leaves damp footprints across the wood laminate flooring as he walks over to Renji.
“Senpai?” he asks.
Renji hands him a cup of tea.
Kirihara sits on the couch and Renji at his table, with Kirihara oddly silent again. Steam rises from the bathroom, out into his apartment. A fresh breeze rustles through the open window, bringing yawns to Kirihara. The air lifts the leaves in the tall zelkova and maple trees, the swish soothing as Renji starts to read. In the distance, a train rattles by, the lights brighter than the tv that Kirihara watches.
Or does he…?
Renji looks out of the corner of his eye. Kirihara turns towards the tv, but his eyes are glazed over and unfocused, reflecting the flashing images. From time to time, he’ll blow across the surface of his cup. And then, he takes a sip. Renji keeps watching, setting his pencil down without looking at it because he’s too busy staring at the way Kirihara’s throat bobs, the Adam’s Apple moving down, then back up. Kirihara licks the rim of the teacup, pink tongue sliding over the ceramic glaze.
Something burns inside Renji. He closes his eyes and shivers, unable to stop the swell between his legs. It’s illogical and nonsensical. Indirect kisses are the thing of romance and novels and the literature he studies, not his former tennis club kouhai. Still, his own mouth tingles, having touched that same cup a hundred, thousand times himself. A weight presses against his chest, causing Renji to pause for a breath.
He’s been reading too much modern fiction for that one university course. Resolute, Renji flips through his notes to start another article, for another class, this time on violence and imagery. He reads, forcing himself to concentrate on the words in front of him and not on the small slurping sounds Kirihara makes. He sips his tea. He turns his pages. He makes notes and underlines key phrases with an orange highlighter.
By the time he finishes, the tv has changed programs.
And Kirihara is slumped across the end of his couch, the teacup set on the window sill and his head thrown back in sleep. His mouth is parted, just barely, and his lips shiny with saliva where he must have licked them. His hair ruffles with every slight gust of wind that flows in through the window, smelling of the city and the fishy ocean, all mixed up into one.
Renji can also smell his own shampoo and woodsy soap on Kirihara, which he must have used in the shower. Kirihara’s legs stick out in front of him as his body slumps further down into the couch and deeper into sleep.
His watch reads half-past ten. Renji assumes that Kirihara probably still lives at home with his family, which means that he shouldn’t be here too much later if he wants to catch a train. The train station, too, is a good twenty minute walk if Kirihara’s parents still live on the same line as when they were in school together.
He should wake Kirihara….
Renji tiptoes over. It’s his apartment, but he feels a lingering duty as Kirihara’s senpai not to make too much noise as he turns the tv off. Renji slides the remote from underneath Kirihara’s limp hand and sets it on the window sill beside the empty cup.
Kirihara breathes heavily, his head lolling even more to the side. He makes a little noise, almost like a whimper, and Renji shivers again; the sound vibrates through his body and settles in his cock. It’s wrong, to think about touching Kirihara’s half-dry curls like this. It’s wrong, to think about how those shiny lips might feel, might taste…
Renji shakes his head. The hand that hovered over Kirihara’s shoulder to tap him, to wake him up and say he’ll miss his train if he stays too much later, it falters and Renji takes a step back to clear his thoughts. He feels dizzy, as though he’s had a beer and a half and he isn’t thinking straight.
Straight in more than one sense of the word.
It’s not a cool night at all, but Renji pulls his extra blanket off the top of his wardrobe and unfolds it. Gently, he drapes it over Kirihara, who sniffs and wiggles. Renji pauses before he fixes the ends of it- he doesn’t want to wake Kirihara up at this point. He’d rather just stand and watch the boy sleep, listen to his sleepy noises and the way his nose wrinkles. The way his toes wriggle and his mouth moves, lips curving around a single word:
“Senpai.”
***
It was high school, early autumn, at the time of year when the flush of summer heat swelled and now started to fade and the trees began to shed their first few leaves, all scarlets and golds and rich, rich russets.
Rikkai had won the Nationals, again, due to a fluke in the scoring system when Seigaku brought out their star rookie. Never one to back down from a challenge, Yukimura and Sanada played doubles one against Tezuka-Inui pair. Renji had sat on the bench, digging his nails into the seat. The desire to win had overridden anything else, as much as his childhood screamed at him that his former best friend was, once more, playing against his new team…if ‘new’ meant seven years new.
Now, with autumn bringing crisp breezes down from the mountains and roasted sweet potatoes, heavier school jackets and fresh sweet apples, the tennis season was over. Renji was finished with tennis for good.
He didn’t hesitate to clean out his locker, as much as sadness lingered in the memories of the clubhouse, of kicking asses and playing so hard he sweated blood. Yukimura was outside, speaking with a scout who had come by for the second time this week. Jackal and Marui had the task of cleaning out the showers, down on their knees and scrubbing at months’ of mould buildup because they were too busy practicing tennis instead. Niou had left already, the first to go to start studying for university entrance exams.
Yagyuu sat on the bench, sorting through his tennis bag. Kirihara was beside him, staring up at Renji. Renji could feel it with the eyes in the back of his head, the prickles on the back of his neck.
“Akaya?” he asked. Renji scrubbed the locker shelf harder. The paper towel did nothing to remove the permeating stench of sweat from where his uniforms sat dirty after games.
Kirihara said nothing, but Renji’s hairs continued to stuck up. He turned around, just as Yagyuu stood up, nodded politely, and said he would see Renji in the library tomorrow to go over their biology notes together.
He and Kirihara were left alone. Kirihara’s gaze was invasive, deliberate and it made Renji look away. Kirihara would verbally guilt-trip Sanada over being left alone, again, next year in high school, but him?
Renji assumed he was worthy enough only for a silent glare. He brushed it off and went back to cleaning the old socks from the bottom of his locker.
His neck hairs continued to prickle and Kirihara kept staring. Only when Marui emerged from the showers with a slop bucket did the feeling finally dissipate.
Kirihara stomped out of the clubhouse, slamming the door behind himself as loud as he could.
“What’s with him?” Marui asked.
Renji shrugged.
***
Kirihara leaves before Renji wakes up, but Renji notices a jacket left behind on the couch, underneath the bunched blanket. He sighs, suspecting that Kirihara will be back at some point to retrieve it.
For now, he mostly notices his erection. And the bowl of instant miso soup left out, having gone cold, at his spot at the table. There isn’t a note, but the piece of dried out toast beside the soup says enough. Silently, Renji thanks Kirihara. It’s thoughtful, if cold and tasteless by now. He smiles to himself, imagining Kirihara rifling through his cupboards, fingers touching all his dishes and boxes of Chinese sauce for vegetables, like a little kid would.
More pressing is his erection. Yes, he’s twenty and yes, he still gets them, the same way he did as a teenager: a pretty girl on the street, a magazine spread of women in bikinis with bouncing breasts, even the failed attempt he and Genichirou had once at watching a porn movie (stolen from Genichirou’s brother). Those were fleeting desires, mostly the thought of what sex and what another warm body, lying under his, moaning his name would feel like.
He’s never had the chance. Well, maybe Renji has, but he didn’t act on the girl in high school who followed him around for a week. He didn’t say anything to the megane woman who asked for his number in the supermarket last year, and even last month, drinking with Jackal and Yagyuu, there had been that girl in the bar, making eyes at him and trailing her fingertip over the swell of her breasts…
It never occurred to him before, not until now, his lips brushing the used teacup on the counter, left there by him last night after he picked it up off the window sill. Renji closes his eyes, his chest pounding and his dick throbbing as he remembers seeing Kirihara’s lips, Kirihara’s mouth, Kirihara’s tongue on the same cup. Renji presses his mouth to it, kissing the rim and half-wishing it wasn’t cold ceramic against his lips.
In the shower, too, Kirihara’s palpable presence remains. Curly black hairs gather in the water drain. Renji picks up the soap and slides it across his arms, his belly, sighing into the feeling and thinking that it had touched Kirihara’s skin just last night. He soaps up his legs, purposely avoiding his erection because it’s just wrong to think about his kouhai and his cock at the same time, and yet, he does regardless. Renji wraps his sudsy hands around his dick, tugging and jerking himself off, wondering if the breathy noises he makes could be heard on the other side of the door had Kirihara still been here.
“Akaya,” he whispers as his forehead presses to the plastic wall, water running down his back along with the last pearly strands from his orgasm. Renji closes his eyes. His face feels unnaturally hot.
Kirihara lingers on his towel, his sweat and distinct smell permeating the terrycloth. Renji sniffs it, and the twisting perversion in his stomach rears its head. So does his dick, tingling and sensitized from climax. He wipes himself dry with the towel and hangs it over a hook to dry.
The jacket lies on the couch. He could drop it off at the sports club with a simple note, and then there would be no need for Kirihara to come back.
Instead, Renji dresses, grabs his bag and locks his door behind himself, jacket untouched.
***
Kirihara doesn’t show up that evening. Or the following. Renji feels, in some ways, that he’s home free. In the evenings, he works on assignments and emails instructions for a group project in his one class. He reads articles and edits his notes. He calls his mother once and assures her that yes, he’s eating well, but that if she’s willing, he wouldn’t mind an extra 10 000 yen deposited into his bank account.
His apartment is silent. The kettle boils, the tv drones on, the wind swishes through the open window but there is no other voice to speak with. Renji looks at the empty couch and sometimes, he can almost see an imprint from Kirihara’s bum, from his head where he slept and his curls spilled out across the armrest.
Renji finds himself pouring two cups of tea, only to realize, it’s just him. He sighs and feels rather stupid. He’s lived alone all year before this, and now that Kirihara stayed a few times, his life has been completely thrown around.
His bed is colder than ever, and not just because the first trees have tentatively begun to change their colours. The bed is too wide, too lonely and his hand down his pants, cupping his balls and pulling at his cock seems pointless. He’s hard when he wakes up, dreams lost upon waking, although Renji suspects they involve certain kouhais with dark, length gazes…
His classes finish early one afternoon, so Renji meets Marui and Genichirou in the main cafeteria for late lunch. Genichirou walks over, waving with his bad hand for Renji to come over to the table Marui reserved. A spread of sushi and sausage-filled taiyakis are stacked on Marui’s cafeteria tray. Renji hands him a 500 yen coin and sits down in the free seat.
“The sociology assignment is killing me,” Marui moans. “If I flunk this course, I’m doomed. Need it for a credit, though.” He stuffs a taiyaki into his mouth in two bites.
Genichirou frowns and looks over at the line of students filing by, trays filled with noodle bowls or plastic bento boxes. “I don’t know if Yukimura’s injury has recovered enough for the tournament coming up.”
Renji sets down his chopsticks. “Oh?”
“The invitational one in California?” Marui asks. He wipes crumbs from his mouth, looks over his shoulder at a vending machine and mutters, “Man, I really need a beer right now. I can’t sit through my econ class- Yanagi, how the hell did you take it last year? It’s boring as fuck.”
Genichirou ignores Marui’s complaining to take another sushi roll. “We thought he would be ready, but Akaya may go in his place after all.”
Renji stiffens.
“Oh yeah!” Marui nods emphatically and balls his fists, pounding the table in excitement. “I saw Akaya last week, he’s looking good. Pretty pleased with himself to have taken Yukimura’s spot last season, eh?” He waggles his eyebrows at Genichirou, which only makes Genichirou frown and roll his eyes.
Genichirou snorts. “Akaya still has years to catch up to Yukimura’s level.”
“But he won the tournament in Osaka against those Korean losers,” Marui says. He pokes Renji in the arm with a chopstick. “Gonna eat that salmon one? You look a bit green, Yanagi.”
“Koreans have never been at our level,” Genichirou mutters. “But he wouldn’t stand a chance against the Ukrainians this year.”
Renji stares at his plastic plate. A weight presses against his ribs, making it hard to breathe, let alone eat. This morning, and all his foolish thoughts about Kirihara, about Kirihara naked in his shower and kissing the rim of his teacup and sleeping in his apartment, about the unremembered dreams that leave him shaking and panting and sticky between the legs- Renji can’t say a word lest something slip and his friends find out.
It’s private.
It’s embarrassing.
And it’s nothing, all at the same time. Kirihara is his kouhai and has simply required his help recently. Nothing more. His own mind has been over-analyzing things. He must be overworked from all of his recent literature readings and the surprise of having Kirihara walk back into his life after nearly a year without an email, without a text message, without anything.
They were never friends in school, though, which makes everything make even less sense. Renji shifts in his seat, trying to maintain a calm demeanour even though his face is on fire, flaring up every time Genichirou and Marui so much as even mention Kirihara’s name.
Renji keeps quiet, then finally excuses himself when his erection becomes painful, aching so much that he can’t think properly. “I’m sorry, I have a lot of work to do tonight,” he says, his excuse pathetic, but good enough that Genichirou nods and Marui waves goodbye.
It would be dirty and inappropriate to masturbate in the cafeteria bathrooms, although Renji is well aware that both Niou and Yagyuu did it in high school, possibly with each other. The toilet doorway is enticing, but he bypasses it, walking quickly and pulling at the hem of his shirt so it covers a little more of his front.
Walking is uncomfortable. Renji passes too many other students in the large green parks in front of campus buildings. He walks by the sports complex, too, because it sits on the shortcut. He can almost hear the ping-pong of tennis balls inside and he wonders if Kirihara is there, practicing with a coach in preparation for another possible overseas tournament.
He looks at the glass doors of the building, wondering what it would be like to go inside and watch Kirihara practice. Genichirou has invited him more than once to come and play a game with Yukimura and himself, but it wouldn’t be the same as their school years, not with the little looks and long stares Yukimura and Genichirou share now.
The Arts library is across another green park, lined with tall elms that swish in the faint wind. Students scatter the grounds, bento boxes and picnic food on laps, sometimes a textbook or even a laptop. Renji hesitates at the library, then decides to go inside. As much as his dick aches, even more as it rubs against his pants, he needs to do some research for that essay before long.
Kirihara has been too much of a distraction recently.
***
Three hours in front of a cubicle computer screen staring at article results and Renji is exhausted. His ass hurts from sitting for so long. His dick still hurts, Kirihara never too far from his mind as he reads passages on the computer screen about plump lips eager for kisses and soft skin like spring peaches. He can almost feel his fingertips stroking the air, wishing that there was someone physical for him instead of an ill-fated fantasy.
The sky burns with a sort of dusky amber light by the time he packs his bag and leaves the library to go home for real. Even though it’s been days since Kirihara was last around, Renji finds himself in the Familymart near his apartment picking out two packages of melon pan and two katsudon bentos. He shakes his head at himself, thankful that the cashier wouldn’t understand his inward dilemma.
If nothing else, Renji can shove the second bento in his fridge for tomorrow. He nods, yes, that’s what I’ll do. It’s not Kirihara’s bento. There is no significance whatsoever.
His neighbourhood is residential, but filled with enough students to make it lively: windows open and bright inside, blaring music out into the darkening evening sky, lines of laundry flutter in the warm night air and the smells of curry and frying pork cutlets make it seem slightly homier than any university residence ever could.
Renji walks up his step- he’s on the ground floor, but it’s a safe enough building. The security light is on, shining yellow light onto the cement walk. It seems slightly odd, unless one of the other tenants walked by recently to go out, or drop off laundry, or perhaps a delivery man….
“Senpai?”
For an instant, Renji almost thinks that his imagination is running wild, not just his hormones. But then his eyes adjust to the fluorescent lighting and the keys in his hands slip, jingling when they hit the pavement.
Kirihara bounces from foot to foot, then he dives for the keys. He hands them to Renji, their fingers brushing as Renji accepts them. A shiver runs down his spine and the wind, too, blows cool over his bare arms.
“Sorry,” Kirihara says, ducking his head and half-smiling. His gaze is firm, though, and his eyes dark on Renji. Just like the last time.
Those dark, wide eyes, rounded unlike his own, send little thrills throughout Renji’s body, pools of pleasure in his belly that make breathing difficult the way his heart feels so heavy and pounds so fast.
“You…you eating alone?” Kirihara asks as Renji opens his door. His hands shake on the door handle, but Kirihara doesn’t seem to notice because he keeps looking at Renji’s face in that way that makes it even more uncomfortable.
Not that Renji feels uncomfortable inside, though. If anything, it’s the opposite. In some ways, listening to Kirihara talk about his practices soothes him because its mindless and relaxed, sitting at the table, eating lukewarm bentos and drinking the barely tea that Kirihara had in his bag, served in Renji’s ceramic teacups. Renji leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, enjoying the sound of Kirihara’s voice, enjoying Kirihara’s blatant enthusiasm for tennis, undiminished over the years.
“I remembered when I got to the gym that I forgot my jacket here,” he says. “But then I got so busy the past couple days because the coach has been pushing me hard, you know? He thinks I could do it, even if I have to play Yukimura-senpai to get the spot.” Kirihara laughs. “That’s what you get if you get injured, ne senpai?”
Renji hums. He doesn’t entirely agree, but he’s not inclined to argue with Kirihara, either. Back in school, only an idiot would think it wise to try to hold Kirihara back from whatever he wanted to do, violent or otherwise. Although Kirihara has obviously mellowed and grown up, Renji isn’t about to push things.
Besides, that part of him deep down, that envious, petty little person finds it ironic and funny that Yukimura is out of commission. That’s what he deserves- he may have love, but he doesn’t have the game. Renji’s mouth starts to quirk at the thought, until he stops himself, guilty of schadenfreude.
“Senpai?” Kirihara asks.
“You were saying?” he asks.
Kirihara gives him a long look, eyes reflecting the kitchen lights and seemingly sucking the brightness into their dark depths. If he wanted, Renji could allow himself to fall into them, to have his body and mind sink into those questioning black pupils that focus on him more and more. Kirihara must be noticing how Renji is only half-listening. Or possibly the cutlet sauce on the side of his mouth.
With a paper towel, he wipes it off. Kirihara belches and pats his stomach, then realizes his error and mutters an apology.
“No need,” Renji says. “We’re both boys here.”
Kirihara laughs. He sounds awkward and forced and the data doesn’t fit together. Renji can’t figure out why, unless Kirihara wants something…
His eyes shift to the couch. He folded the blanket the evening Kirihara didn’t show up, but Renji can still almost make out the shadows of dents where Kirihara slept and sat there.
“Um…” Kirihara bites his lip, his lovely, pink lip with his short, sharp teeth. Frisson runs cold and electric through Renji’s limbs when an image of Kirihara, on top of him, moaning his name and biting his chest with those same sharp teeth flashes across his mind.
Renji shakes his head.
“It’s okay, I can watch it at my parents’ house. Sorry.”
He blinks. Kirihara inches away from the couch that he must have inched toward in the first place. Renji is the fool, again, and shame unfurls in his stomach because he’s been caught spacing out yet again. He bows his head a bit and asks Kirihara to repeat himself. Renji can’t even be bothered to make up a lie about homework consuming his mind functions.
This time, Kirihara blinks. He scratches his temple, fingers buried in the thick curls in a way that makes Renji’s own fingers itch even more to touch, to feel, to pet that hair.
“The marathon of Naruto episodes on Animax and I was wondering if…maybe…” Kirihara chews his lip again, enticing Renji to agree to whatever he might ask. Kirihara scuffs his sock foot on the edge of the couch before he mumbles, “…if maybe you wanted to watch it with me tonight if you weren’t doing anything else?”
The couch is small, there is no way around it. A small, black vinyl couch pushed up against his wall, across from his bed. Kirihara settles in first, looking up at Renji, who stands, feeling awkward and unsure if he should sit down next to Kirihara because their thighs will brush if he does.
Renji sits down. His erection rears again, but when Kirihara reaches for the blanket and throws it over their laps, he breathes an internal sigh of relief. The nights grow cooler with each passing day and gusts of air blow in through the window, giving Renji goose pimples on his arms.
Ah. Now the blanket makes sense.
They eat the melon pans and sip hot green tea. Renji clutches his teacup with two hands, just in case Kirihara bounces on the couch or flails his arms like he would in school. But he doesn’t. He yells at the characters, he swears, he grins and he nods or shakes his head furiously, but he’s relatively calm compared to his younger years. Crumbs dot the blanket and their melon pan wrappers crinkle during the silences of the anime. Renji doesn’t understand what is going on- something about ninjas and nine-tailed demon foxes…but to watch the flickering emotions on Kirihara’s face?
His cock swells more, as does the ache in his chest. In the dancing light of the tv, Kirihara’s face becomes a kaleidoscope, his cheekbones highlighted in blue, his eyes in green, his nose pink and orange and his lips even darker, even fuller as he bites them and angsts with his favourite characters.
Not until Kirihara starts to yawn does Renji realize the time. He’ll miss his train home, again. Another episode starts, the music blaring loud until Kirihara turns down the volume a few notches with the remote.
“It’s cool if you gotta study,” he says. “You don’t have to watch it all with me.”
Renji shakes his head. “I don’t mind,” he says. I don’t mind watching you. Kirihara is warm, his bare arm occasionally brushing Renji’s hand when he fixes the edge of the blanket. His thigh presses against Renji’s under the blanket, slightly sweaty but mostly warm, comfortable. Renji could sit like this all night, if it wasn’t for the dull throb between his legs, which grows stiffer and harder to ignore every time Kirihara yawns or makes a soft little noise in the back of his throat.
When Kirihara falls completely quiet, his motions and expressions ceasing, Renji looks at him. Kirihara’s chest rises and falls softly and he leans over, closer to Renji, then finally settles against his shoulder.
Asleep.
It’s too much, this, to have Kirihara’s hair tickling the side of his neck, smelling of standard shampoo and faint sweat, to have Kirihara’s warm breath ghosting his skin, to have Kirihara’s pleasant weight pushing on him. Renji squirms, closing his eyes in a silent prayer that Kirihara’s arm won’t fling over his lap and feel his hardness, tighter and harder than ever before and stealing his sanity because Kirihara’s lips, shining in the tv glow, are so close and he could…just…
Renji’s strangled breath is a moan. Despairing, he pushes Kirihara’s shoulder with his own. “Akaya,” he says. His voice cracks and he has to clear his throat before his mouth works again.
Kirihara stirs. Blinking, drowsy, he pulls back and looks at Renji, his eyes darker than ever and glazed with slumber. The look burns through Renji, so hot, so understated that he could come right then and there if Kirihara so much as waved a hand over his cock.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, voice thick and slurred, “I can leave, or something…senpai…sorry…”
“No,” Renji says. He bites down on his tongue, surprised at his own eagerness. Without thinking, he nods to his bed and Kirihara, sleepy enough, accepts the invitation by shuffling over to the bed and stretching out along it.
“Senpai?” he asks. Hands in the air make grabbyfists, then Kirihara flops over, shoving himself against the wall in what could be an invitation of his own for Renji to sleep beside him.
The data is confirmed when Kirihara murmurs, “I made room for you…since you’re so nice to me, and all…senpai, you’re the best…”