All Good Things cont
Title: All Good Things (continued)
Part one
Jin spoke to Junno in whispers on his cell phone, his right hand gripping the steering wheel, Hajime asleep beside him, soft puffs of air escaping from his mouth.
“How are you?” Junno asked cheerfully. He seemed incapable of anything else.
Jin missed Tokyo and sheets that weren’t stiff with starch and even the girls who played music outside his window at two in the morning like he was some fairytale character who could be wooed by the sound of his own voice.
“Fine,” he said. “Still, you know, looking for Kamenashi.”
“Ah, so is Kame,” Junno said. It seemed like another of his jokes that nobody understood, except it was cryptic and profound and Junno was never either.
Jin gripped the steering wheel tighter. “What do you mean?”
“He said he needed to find himself.” Junno sounded like Kame had just gone outside for a quick smoke, like it didn’t bother him that two of his bandmates had run away halfway across the world. “Something about how he couldn’t go on like that anymore and needed to find himself.”
Jin grunted.
"But,” Junno continued. “Don’t worry yourself about that. Just have fun and bring Kame back and maybe some American games while you’re at it.”
He left Jin with an ache like he was missing something, which would have been fine except Jin was past the point of exhaustion, at the stage where there was nothing except a faint buzzing between his ears.
Jin tossed his cell phone away and pulled over, puffs of sand rising up beneath the tires. He reached for Hajime. Got him out of the car and halfway sprawled against the hood before awareness tightened the muscles on Hajime’s back.
“What are you -”
Jin hushed him. Leaned on top of Hajime, chest to back, sliding an arm down Hajime’s to keep his hand pressed against the car and Hajime turned away. He didn’t want to see Hajime’s face. It would have undone everything.
Thankfully, Hajime seemed to understand, letting his head fall forward with a moan as Jin lapped at the dried, salty sweat on his neck. His other hand fumbled to pull down Hajime’s jeans and undo his fly all at the same time.
Hajime bucked at the first infuriatingly slow slide of Jin’s cock against his thigh. “Lube,” he gasped, hand flailing toward his bag. Jin got it. Slicked some around and inside Hajime then rocked back on his heels to coat himself, wondering what it would be like to make Hajime use his mouth instead, get Jin good and ready with saliva. Kame never, Kame had never -
They both groaned when Jin pushed in. Hajime collapsed onto his elbows, pushing back to meet Jin thrust for thrust. Jin feathered kisses down on Hajime’s back, on the muscles straining to meet the demand, then slid his hands down the same path, scratching just enough to leave marks on Hajime’s skin. They faded after a second. Jin did it again. Then again until Hajime shuddered and froze taut beneath him and Jin’s own world came to a stuttering stop, leaving him shaking and tired and sobbing, “Kame” into Hajime’s shoulder.
~
Jin woke up alone. His bag was on the table, the car keys on the nightstand level with his eyes when he lifted his head groggily. A neon two thirteen flashed red on the clock.
Hajime came back when Jin was brushing his teeth. He had two paper plates loaded with doughnuts that he juggled haphazardly with a thermos.
“I don’t like coffee,” Jin said through the foam of his toothpaste.
“It’s orange juice,” Hajime replied. “It’s good for you. It’s actually derived from a fruit, which is something I’ve yet to see you eat.”
“What are you - my mother?” Jin muttered.
“Someone has to be the adult. It’s obviously not going to be you.”
Jin turned around and grabbed Hajime. “Nobody has to.” It felt somehow important.
Hajime just smiled and shook his head, nudging Jin away from the sink. “We’ll just end up going in circles. Then we really won’t be able to find anyone.”
Jin watched Hajime brush his teeth, meeting his eyes through the small vanity mirror. The complementary toothbrush was just a little too small for a grown man. There was foam gathered around Hajime’s mouth, white and fluffy, and Jin suddenly felt like spearmint.
“You have the oddest kinks,” Hajime said, but he tilted his head to the side, allowing Jin access.
“I think the orange juice was spiked,” Jin muttered. Hajime’s startled laugh jostled his head from Hajime’s shoulder.
“People have libidos completely separate from alcohol, you know.”
“I don’t.”
Hajime made a sound in the back of his throat, halfway between a laugh and a snort. “That would explain last night.”
Jin froze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have - I don’t know why I -”
Hajime shook his head. “No. Don’t. It’s fine.”
“It’s not like I’m in love with him,” Jin continued. “I don’t even know him anymore.”
Hajime laughed. “You’re just chasing after him in a foreign country.”
Jin eyed him. “Are you jealous?”
“No.”
For some reason, Jin believed him. For some reason, Jin wanted him to be, if only to be something approaching normal. “Why not?”
Hajime hesitated. “Did you watch any of his dramas?” he asked at last.
“I don’t see how that -”
“Forget it. It’s not important.” Hajime looked up at him and smiled. The wall behind Jin felt suddenly solid and extremely close. “Does this mean I get to guilt trip you into helping with my other case?”
“It’s not…” Jin began, trailing off when Hajime reached over and put a hand on his chest.
He pushed Jin against the bathroom door. “Come on, you know you want to.”
~
Hajime climbed back into bed with an unlabeled manila folder. Jin rolled over, ran a hand along the curve of his spine, fingers bumping against the ridges as Hajime arched into his touch. Hajime’s boxers rode low enough to expose two narrow hips and Jin bent down to mouth one.
“Pay attention,” Hajime laughed, whacking him once. “Now, this is all I have on the case. Apparently, somebody has some photographs that Johnny wants. Our main priority is to get back the originals and any copies. On the way, it would be great if we happen to catch the culprit.”
“He probably stole something from Johnny’s private collection,” Jin murmured. “Scandal material for sure.”
“This,” Hajime said, ignoring him, “is the only picture we have of our thief.”
Jin looked at the picture that Hajime held out, studied it in growing disbelief. “It’s somebody’s back. The only thing we know is that he has black hair. And good taste in jeans.”
“We also know he rented a house in this very town.”
“This town?”
“About a ten minute drive from here.”
Jin stared at Hajime, then at the file in his hands. “You had this planned all along.”
Hajime grinned. Starched motel sheets slid off his legs as he leaned over to grab his pants. “What do you say to a little stake out?”
~
Hajime parked their car a block from their target, huge evergreen shrubbery shading them from the sun. They took turns staring at the house through a thin patch in the plants.
Jin grabbed the binoculars from Hajime’s hands and stared at a close-up of blue shingles and faded beige paint. White plastic shutters at the windows remained firmly closed. In the past two hours, the only movement had been a mailman stuffing a pizza ad in the mail slot.
“This is it?”
“Were you expecting high speed car chases?” Hajime asked, opening a bag of barbeque chips. “This is the oh-so-glamorous life of a private eye. Envious yet?”
Jin eyed the crumbs dotting Hajime’s shirt and shook his head. “What happens if I have to go to the bathroom?”
Hajime raised an eyebrow. “You’re a man, aren’t you? Make use of the great outdoors.” He gestured at the bushes.
On a closer look, they were made up of thousands of tiny prickly barbs that made Jin’s stomach shrivel up inside of itself when he imagined getting close to them. They were cacti disguised as greenery, a foot from white, cracked pavement and a lawn composed of stone. Jin would sooner pee on the neighbor’s front porch.
“Wouldn’t that draw attention to us?” he asked.
“Not if you’re careful about it,” Hajime said primly, and Jin could suddenly see Hajime in his mind’s eye, unzipping his pants while sneaking peeks over his shoulder.
He grinned and nudged Hajime. “Why don’t you show me?”
“Pervert,” Hajime said. He set the back of his car seat down and stretched out in the newly opened space. Jin guessed it wasn’t an invitation for sex, not with the way Hajime pulled his jacket over himself.
Hajime looked up from the paperback he’d brought out. “Keep watch.”
“Why me?”
“You have the binoculars,” Hajime said like it made perfect sense. “I’ll take over in an hour.”
Jin fiddled with the thing in his hands, turning the knobs so that the house went fuzzy before his eyes. It was horribly boring. He went outside to feed a stray cat while Hajime took over.
“Don’t go too far,” Hajime murmured, binoculars pressed to his eyes.
Jin looked down at the cat, white spots on its calico fur still snow white, and fed it more of Hajime’s chicken. “Yeah,” he said to it. “You might get hit by a car.”
It looked up at him with narrow cat eyes.
“I was talking to you,” Hajime said and Jin pouted, wrapped a hand around the cat’s middle and lifted up. It went with him willingly, feet dangling in midair like a limp rag.
Hajime frowned as he climbed back into the car. “What are you doing? You’re going to get cat hair all over everything.”
“This way nobody’s going to run off.” Jin stroked the cat beneath its chin and it worked its paws into the folds of his shirt. “I think it’s a girl.”
“Are you going to name her?”
“Don’t have to. She already has one.” Jin lifted the blue heart-shaped tag around her neck.
Hajime choked on his drink. “It - it’s somebody else’s cat. Don’t take somebody else’s cat.”
“I’m just borrowing. Besides, she wants to be here or she wouldn’t have found us.”
“The classic logic of a thief.”
Despite that, Hajime still cradled the cat in his arms when she daintily stepped over to him, leaving a cold spot on Jin’s chest the exact size of a housecat. Jin watched as she butted her head against Hajime’s hand, stretching to get his fingers to scratch that exact spot. There was a smile on Hajime’s face, and Jin didn’t think it had anything to do with what Hajime saw in his binoculars.
“I’m hungry,” Jin said after a while. Dusk had arrived sometime between his shifts and the cat had long fallen asleep on Hajime’s lap. Dozens of white lights illuminated a bleached rock walkway in front of the house beside them. Its neighbors were the same, nightlights drawing to prominence calm blue signs with a gigantic eye painted on them. It made Jin think of Hajime and his job. There was one lit window in their house. Hajime turned to him, shadows on his face drawn long by the streetlight overhead. He was handsome at that angle: dark and mysterious.
“I’m hungry,” Jin said again.
Hajime smiled. “Me too. I feel like something…gourmet.”
They ended up at a convenience store, the only customers save for a little old lady who looked at them out of the corner of her eyes as she shuffled down the aisles in a floral print dress.
“She thinks we’re up to no good.” Hajime threw a package in Jin’s basket. Jin read the white letters on red wrapping.
“Ramen?”
Hajime tapped the bowl, finger landing on the drawing of chopsticks and noodle. “Gourmet ramen.”
“Instant ramen.”
“Instant, gourmet Japanese ramen.” Hajime smiled, put another in their basket. “I used to eat these all the time. Don’t knock it until you’ve tasted it. They’re great, especially after a long day.”
The entire aisle was stacked with packaged food. Giving in, Jin scanned it for other flavors. Hajime nodded when Jin grabbed a shrimp flavored bowl. “Very good. You’re learning.”
“Are you sure this is ok?” Jin asked.
Hajime cocked his head to one side.
“Leaving the stake out,” Jin clarified.
“Well, that’s something I never thought you’d say. It’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen tonight anyways. He’s probably asleep by now.” Hajime grabbed the basket before Jin could ask him how he knew that and drew him closer. Jin could see the old woman glaring at them out of the corner of his eyes.
“Your charms aren’t working on her,” Hajime murmured.
Jin wasn’t sure why they were discussing some woman old enough to be their grandmother when Hajime was looking up at him like that. If he had it his way, they wouldn’t be discussing anything at all. “I’m not using my charms right now.”
“Oh, so you have to turn it on first.”
A strand of hair had fallen across Hajime’s eyes, caught between his lashes. It moved as he blinked and Jin wanted badly to tuck it behind Hajime’s ear. He wet his lips. “I bet I can make her faint.”
Hajime took the basket from Jin’s hands, turning away to survey the shelves once again. “She might if you kiss me. But then the store clerk will probably throw us out and I want my ramen.”
~
The next day was just as cloudless as the first, the sky a clear, unbroken plain of baby blue. Jin shielded his eyes from the sun and squatted on the sidewalk, leaning down to peer beneath the bushes. Hajime was parked at the same spot again and he craned his neck to see Jin over the passenger door.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s not here.”
“The cat? She’ll come back,” Hajime assured, gesturing for Jin to come back. The inside of the car smelled like a noodle stand and Jin fished out an instant ramen lid from beneath his seat. He studied the cartoon shrimp on the cover, its bulbous eyes staring back at him in delirious delight.
“I should have saved some shrimp for her.”
Hajime rolled his eyes. His hands dangled outside the window, tapping a disjointed rhythm against the door. “She’s somebody’s cat. I’m sure they feed her better fare than month old dried shrimp.”
“I don’t know why I care. She liked you better anyways.”
“Because I wasn’t trying to smother her with affection,” Hajime said, looking through his binoculars. Jin glanced at the house and saw the mailman ambling up the street, wearing khaki shorts and a large hat pulled low over his eyes. He was pushing a cart with the letters USPS emblazoned on the sides. Jin thought they had cars for mail delivery in America, mail cars that drove up to each house and deposited letters with a lazy sweep of the mailman’s arm.
The shutters in the house were pulled open.
The sun had risen to blaze directly overhead when Jin saw the mailman again, making his way down the block, cart squeaking with every rotation of its wheels. He was heading the same direction that he came from.
“I didn’t know mail took so long,” Jin murmured.
“What?” Hajime asked beside him, lying down with his paperback novel held up toward the car ceiling.
Jin pointed at the man just as he disappeared around a corner. “The mailman. He really takes a long time to deliver mail.”
“Oh,” Hajime said, flipped a page.
Then he bolted upright, hair at the back of his head sticking out in all directions.
“Shit,” Hajime said, scrambling with the car door. “Shit.”
“What? What is it?”
Jin ran after him, scrambling with his jacket, which hung in a state of indecision on him. He banged his foot on the curb and went down hard.
Hajime had reached the corner by the time Jin got back on his feet. It turned onto a straight street: all uniform houses and year old trees. There was nobody in sight, no cars that weren’t parked either.
“Shit,” Hajime said again, doubling over in exhaustion.
Jin grimaced, dusted off gravel from his hands. His knee throbbed where it hit hard pavement. “What is it?”
“You’re sure he came this way?” Hajime asked instead of answering.
“Who? The mailman?”
“Supposed mailman.” Hajime squinted at the intersecting street ahead. Cars raced passed. He shook his head, panted some more. “No hope of tracking him in that crowd. He’ll be long gone before we get our directions straight. Come on.”
Hajime straightened up painfully, favoring his right side as if there it had cramped up, and began walking the other way.
Jin followed him back to the house they’d been watching, hung back as Hajime walked right up to the front door. Jin looked over his shoulder up and down the street. No signs of life at all, which had been the case more often than not the last few days.
The pastel blue door opened with a creak.
Jin turned back to Hajime in awe. “How did you --”
Hajime shook his head. “I didn’t. It was unlocked.” He reached into his pocket, and, for a wild second, Jin thought he was reaching for a gun. What came out was a flashlight.
The door opened into a small foyer, one square meter of beige linoleum. A shoe rack stood to one side, its insides bare. Hajime spared a glance at the Home, Sweet Home sign on the wall and ventured inside.
The rest of the house was carpeted in some nondescript matting that might have been white once upon a time. They walked through it carefully, shoes making ominous thuds that echoed in the bare space. Jin tried hard to squash the inherent urge to take them off.
The one bedroom was swept clean, bedroll tucked neatly to one side. The drawers, the closet were empty as was the bathroom. Light maple cabinets in the tiny kitchen yielded nothing besides a can of cat food, ultra moist.
Hajime carried it back to the living room, set it down next to piles of paper and folders that had been strewn in the center of the floor as if just waiting for them to be found. “Well,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “At least we know where the cat went. With his master. Probably in that mail cart along with the rest of his personal effects.”
Jin flicked open a manilla envelope. “What’s all this?”
Hajime took it from him. “The stuff Johnny sent us after. All nicely bundled and laid out for our convenience.”
“Well, that’s great,” Jin said. “We did it.”
“Yeah, great,” Hajime said with little enthusiasm. “I guess I should call Johnny and see what he wants us to do with all this.”
“Hey.” Jin put a hand on Hajime’s wrist, stopping him from putting his phone to his ear. He waited until Hajime met his eyes. “We did it. We won.”
“No, he won. We only have the documents because he let us have them as some kind of consolation prize, or because he’s done with them. With us. All we did was sit in a car and baby-sit his cat two days. We lost. I failed.” A thin voice came through his phone. Hajime pulled away and brought it to his ears, turning his back to Jin. “Yes. This is Hajime.”
Hajime had set up a fire in the backyard by the time Jin returned with their dinner. Orange sparks danced in the air like fireflies. Hajime’s face shone bright in the light of the fire, above a body shrouded in shadow, folded in itself. Jin approached slowly, feeling like an intruder.
“Hey,” he said. Hajime blinked, turned his face, tired and worn, to him.
Jin held up the bag, bottom transparent with grease. “Dinner,” he said. “It’s not much, but we should still eat something.”
Hajime nestled his head back into his hands folded above knees drawn tight into his chest. “You can have my share.”
“Hajime…”
“I’m not hungry.”
The light drew shadows that made the bones on his wrist larger, sharper, the hollows of his cheeks too. Jin could see circles there from too much work and not enough rest, a mind that wouldn’t stop gnawing away at the larger picture.
“You didn’t fail,” he said, leaning in close enough to smell lighter fluid on Hajime. “You did your job. Johnny is happy.”
“Johnny,” Hajime said. “Is only concerned about burying his less savory deals.”
Hajime fed the fire. Manila envelope curled in the flames, receded into ash, the black edge of a photograph peeking out before it too was consumed. They watched in silence as the documents burned.
~
Early morning was bitterly cold, desert sand just as inhospitable in town. A spider, thin and gawky, scuttled along the floor, awkwardness in its movements like its joints were locked by cold. Jin shivered, wrapped the thin blanket he’d salvaged from the backseat of the car closer around his body.
He wondered what had woken him. The light peeking through shuttered blinds was too pale for it to be proper morning and the room had an air of heavy expectation only borne from rising before the world.
He padded through the house barefoot, toes sinking in carpet, picking up lint and the occasional cat hair. Emptiness made the rooms larger. The hallway practically reverberated with it and Jin shivered again.
Hajime was in the backyard, kneeling in the exact position Jin had left him only now the documents were a pile of nondescript ash that was slowly being eaten away by the wind. A large section of burnt paper caught on the branches of a bush and crumbled as Jin sat down next to Hajime.
“Were you here all night?”
Hajime shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep.” He sounded as empty as the house behind them.
“It’s easier with two people. You just have to give it a try.”
“I tried.” Hajime left a trial of black behind as he shoved his bangs away from his face. His palm was covered in ash like he’d shoved it into the remains of the fire. “It didn’t take.”
Closer, Jin could see Hajime’s bag peeking out from behind a knee, pamphlets spilled out of its depth like confetti -- orchards and oceans and villas of pure silk. Tempting, jarring against yellowing grass. Hajime had fanned them out around him, in front of him where he stared down at them as if looking for a long awaited answer.
Jin picked one up, ran his thumb along the smooth gloss of laminated paper.
“They’re from Kamenashi’s dorm room. From his trash, more specifically.”
“Oh.” The edges were worn. A vague smell of over ripe banana teased Jin’s senses. “So we’re back on his trail.”
Hajime snorted. “Hardly. One man’s castaways hardly mean anything. We’re still chasing his tail. And our own.”
He leaned forward until he was nearly bent double over the ground, hair hanging down in vertical strands parallel to the blades of grass. Jin couldn’t see his eyes at that angle except for glimpses of dark orbs as they darted from paper to paper. Hajime spread his hand out, left dark smudges and wrinkles.
“Still, there’s something here. I know it. I feel it. I just can’t - It’s just trash, and I don’t even know what to look for, but I know it’s there. Here. Somewhere.”
Jin frowned, and frowned harder when Hajime slapped away his proffered hand. “You need sleep.”
Hajime shook his head. “No. I don’t. That’s how our fake mailman got away and I can’t let that happen with Kamenashi too. I can’t have two in a row. I can’t.”
He still refused to look at Jin as if tearing his eyes away from the bright ads for one second would also result in failure, which was maddening because they hadn’t failed. Not yet. Not with anything.
“There are,” Hajime said when Jin told him that. “Certain things I’m expected to do. People I’m supposed to exceed.”
He looked at Jin as if asking him to understand, and Jin did. “You care too much about what others think.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It is!” Jin rose to his feet, pointed toward the horizon where, if he looked hard enough, Japan would surely be. Hajime watched him warily, crouched over Kame’s brochures like they were in danger of being trampled. The one in Jin’s hand made a noise of protest in his fist. “Things you’re expected to do? People you’re supposed to exceed? That’s utter bullshit. What about what you want to do instead?”
“We can’t all run around like children our entire lives.”
“You’re not fifty! I’m not fifty. Stop acting like we are.”
Hajime refused to answer. Jin sighed, anger leaving as quickly as it had come. “Come on, let’s both try to get some sleep.”
He held out a hand to Hajime, who stared at the ground. “I want to be alone.”
Jin put his hands on his hips. “You sound just like him.” He wasn’t sure if it was just a statement or an accusation, but it was pure fact, and he didn’t like it.
“Akanishi.” Hajime looked up, gaze level and strong. Jin couldn’t read anything within those depths. It had been so much easier when Hajime had just been a person with a rare proclivity for carnivals that had been forced onto Jin’s company.
Jin squatted down again, picked at the stray grass that hadn’t been trampled into the ground. “We can turn back,” he said, suddenly desperate. “We don’t need to find him.”
Hajime shook his head. “We do. I do. I have to.”
“Just because Johnny…”
“You don’t understand.” Hajime left, leaving Jin with an empty room. Kame’s bags sat in the corner, watching Jin as he stood there, torn between going after Hajime and staying. He chose, in the end, to stay.
“Stop it,” he told the bags. “It’s not like I’ll be able to find him. He’ll come back soon. You should worry about your owner. And what he’s thinking, skipping out on work like that.”
Kame’s luggage stayed reproachfully silent.
Jin occupied himself with watching a show about a guy and a girl and misunderstandings that kept them apart and threw crumbled paper at the screen when the guy missed out on another hint. And, when he couldn’t stop guilt from creeping in, he called Japan.
“Stop worrying me,” Koki complained. “I have a drama now and I can’t afford distractions. A true artist is supposed to give a piece of himself to his craft, you know.”
~
Hajime climbed into bed with him that night, all hard lines and sharp angles, smelling like businessmen after their ten-minute break. Jin had been waiting for him at first, thinking, or hoping, that they could finish what they’d started in the shade of the rest stop, Hajime’s thigh wedged between Jin’s legs. But then Hajime hadn’t come inside and Jin’s cigarettes were missing and Jin didn’t feel like digging through layers of paranoia to find the person beneath.
He pretended to be asleep.
Kame led Jin to a black house, decorated with ghosts and darkened windows.
Jin followed his gaze up. “House of mirrors?”
“Yes. Come on.”
Kame slipped inside. Jin couldn’t follow him fast enough, losing sight of him around the corner. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned, crashed into a mirror. Neon lights threw everything into confusion.
“Lets go,” Jin called, nearly pleaded. “Kame, lets go.”
The mirrors hurt his head, played with his mind, and he bumped into another dead end, tasted copper in his mouth. Kames split before him, around him, all with different hairstyles with different clothes. Jin thought for a second that he saw Hajime.
Jin reached out blindly and grabbed onto a wrist. “Lets go,” he said again.
For a second - horrible, horrible - it wasn’t the right Kame he’d grabbed, some doppelganger starving and desperate, before he realized it wasn’t Kame at all.
“Finally decided to pull your head out of your ass?” Koki asked him, and Jin jolted awake.
Hajime slept fitfully, tossing and turning and moaning and, when Jin couldn’t stand watching him like that anymore, looked up at him with black glittering eyes. You shouldn’t be here, Jin thought, tracing Hajime’s once broken nose with a finger. Not here, not now.
Hajime caught his finger in his grasp. “Do you understand now?” he asked.
“We don’t,” Jin said instead. “You don’t have to.”
He wasn’t sure what he meant. It was like watching history repeat itself, a sped up, distorted version that Jin had hated with a ferocious intensity the first time around.
“It’s alright,” Hajime said, sliding a warm, dry hand up his arm.
Jin felt like a fool.
~
Jin made up his mind halfway between the gas station and the house, a half eaten turkey sandwich in his hands and another in the bag, purely for formality’s sake because Hajime had refused to eat the last two Jin had bought him, preferring to stare at his pamphlets instead. Jin was sure that Hajime could recite the fine print by that point.
He was sick of watching Hajime. Sick of the house and its empty halls, sick of the silence that pervaded everything.
Hajime made a sound of disapproval when Jin placed the bag in front of him, moved it away as Jin sat down.
“We’re leaving,” Jin said, trying to instill some air of authority into his voice. “We can’t find Kame by staying here.”
Hajime didn’t do anything beyond look at him skeptically as if to say ‘you can’t be serious’. Jin was though - extremely serious.
“We’re leaving,” he repeated.
Hajime shifted. His hair caught the light and flashed a silver-black, darker with brown dye almost entirely faded away. “So where will we go?”
“North.” Jin had thought it through already, ignoring the nagging churning of his stomach. He was certain it was the right thing to do. “We’ve been going north. We’ll just keep going north.”
“Until we fall into the ocean?”
“Or we find him,” Jin said. “We could find him, you know.”
“We have a direction and brochures that” - Hajime held them up in the air - “have nothing to do with anything. We can’t leave without something more specific. We’ll really end up falling into the ocean.”
“But we have to find him,” Jin repeated.
Hajime smiled. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”
~
“Nakamaru,” Jin said. “What did he tell you?”
There was a pause. “He was rambling. Talking about Sapuri and that kiss in the vineyard and stuff. I thought he’d had too much to drink. Or not enough.”
“What is it supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention. He needed a break. He was stretching himself too thin. I was just glad he was taking a break.”
Jin closed his eyes, imagining Kame alone somewhere slowly gathering up all the pieces of himself. It was an oddly sobering thought. Jin clenched his fists, eyes flying open when his right closed around paper. He had forgotten he was still holding a pamphlet. Jin looked at it then blinked and straightened, reading the words again slowly. “A vineyard? What about an orchard?”
Nakamaru hesitated. “He might have mentioned cherries.”
~
The old man sitting on the steps, an old wooden pipe clasped between his lips, pointed to his right with a dry, trembling finger. Jin followed it to a tiny cottage like the kind he’d seen on his manager’s calendar. Ivy was growing on its cream brick walls, twisting above one large arched window and a baby blue door. The mat in front of it had ‘Welcome’ written in large loopy letters. Jin’s feet covered the ‘e’ and the ‘m’. He hesitated and turned back to look at Hajime.
“Go on,” Hajime said. “We’ve come all this way.”
“Maybe you should do this. You’re the one who --”
The door opened and Jin turned back around in surprise. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” Kame said back. Surprise made his eyes wide and clearer than Jin remembered ever seeing them except for maybe that very first day they’d met -- Kame still a gawky, ugly little thing with a penchant for talking too fast and moving too much.
His hair was shorter, signs of a professional stylist in the fall of the tresses. Jin touched his own, tried to remember the last time he’d seen the inside of a salon.
Kame’s eyes shifted over to Hajime behind Jin, and Jin turned, glad for something to say. “This is Kindaichi Hajime. He helped me find you.”
Kame blinked, gaze still locked with Hajime’s. “Akanishi…”
“Yes?”
Hajime smiled and waved with a slight tilt of two fingers. Kame shook his head. “Never mind.”
He shifted, banging his foot against a large metal bucket that he’d set down when he’d seen Jin. It was an angular, old thing that looked like it was made out of the thinnest aluminum.
“I was going to the orchard,” Kame explained. “I was going to get some cherries for dinner.”
He looked at Jin as if waiting for some kind of response. Jin couldn’t think of any. He was too busy staring at Kame’s hair and his lips and his clothes. Hideous clothes, really, of red plaid and ragged jeans fit for a farmer. He wondered what Kame thought of him.
Hajime elbowed him. “We’ll help. It’ll go by faster that way.”
They got a ladder at Kame’s direction and carried it, a person on either side, to the orchard. Jin was sweating by the time they ducked beneath the trees, lush leaves providing shade that was all too welcome. The ladder was at least three times as tall as him, weighed what felt to be infinitely more.
“That’s great,” Kame said. “Just set it there.”
He trailed after them bucket in hand. There was no sweat on his face, nothing save an odd tranquility that fit foreign on his features like clothes one size too large. A large wool sweater, comfortable and worn and oh so welcome. Jin was hit with the sudden irrational fear that Kame was happy there.
“You’re not, are you?”
Kame blinked. “I’m not what?”
“Happy.”
Kame studied him as if trying to unravel Jin with his eyes. Wary eyes. Intelligent, thoughtful eyes that sometimes made Jin want to run screaming into the next city out of slight fright, part unease, definite frustration.
“Now or then?” Kame asked finally, hooking his thumbs on the waistband of his jeans, tugging it down so Jin could see Dolce printed on the top of black underpants. It calmed him in a way that Kame’s hipbones, sharp and narrow, could not.
He felt suddenly the need to measure their span with his hands, compare them to the faint memory of a narrow waist pressed against his.
Behind them, Hajime made an aborted motion. His arm fell down to his side before it touched either of them.
“It’s hot,” Jin said instead, wiped a trail of sweat from his brow and mourned the disappearance of pale skin as Kame bent down to pick up the bucket once more. He nodded.
“Yes. I forgot to bring water.”
“I could…”
“No,” Hajime said. “No. You two stay here. I’ll go get it.”
They watched him until the leaves swallowed him up. It didn’t occur to Jin to ask how he knew where to go.
Kame sat down on the ladder, his feet level with Jin’s eyes. He wiped his face with a towel he’d hung on the belt loop above his left rear pocket then handed it wordlessly to Jin, who followed his example.
When he reached up to hand it back, Kame grabbed onto the other end and held on. Jin found himself unable to release his grip.
“There were a lot of people who reminded me of you at the school,” Kame said.
Which is why you left, Jin thought. He said, “Really? They must have been talented.”
Kame lips curled up slightly. “They were mainly lazy.”
Jin had nothing to say to that.
The heat enveloped him, suffocatingly hot. Kame’s ladder was scorching to the touch despite the shade. Jin pressed his hand, palm down, on a step, fingers fanning out. His pinky brushed against the leather thong of Kame’s sandal.
He wondered if he was right, leading Hajime back to Kame.
“After you left,” Kame said. His voice was so soft that Jin didn’t hear it at first above the dry rustle of leaves. “After you left, we were put on hold.” Jin shifted uneasily. “Not that it was entirely because of that. NewS - did Yamapi ever tell you they regrouped? - The company had NewS to promote and Kanjani8 and. We were put on hold.”
“I had a lot of time off,” Kame confided to his hands. “I found myself wondering what I was doing. Without work, without - anything - I didn’t know what I was doing. Did you feel that way?”
“Yeah,” Jin said.
“Did I. Make it worse?”
There was no good way to answer that. Jin couldn’t - even though silence was just as damning - make himself say anything.
Kame nodded. “Sorry,” he explained when Jin looked at him in surprise.
“Yeah,” Jin said again.
Kame passed him the towel. It smelled like perfume and sweat, a musky mix of exertion that brought to mind the chaos of dressing rooms, the exhilaration of the stage, bowing linked as six.
Jin rested his head on the ladder, turning so he could watch Kame as he tilted his face up to the sun, in that narrow beam of sunlight that broke through the canopy of trees. Jin closed his eyes and listened to the stillness.
They stayed that way until Hajime came back with a bucket of water and accidentally spilled half of it down Jin’s shirt.
~
The sky was turning a swirl of red and orange overhead when Jin got out of the shower. Kame and Hajime had put the rest of the cherries away and were watering the flowers in the garden. It was a half hour job with one watering can and the faucet nestled between two hydrangeas a curved path of bleached white steppingstones away.
Jin followed the sound of their voices to the back of the house, sidestepping around a snail that had been lured out by promises of food and the setting sun.
“He wants you. You’re rational and happy and slightly childish and - you’re what they want.”
“Oh, Kame,” Hajime - it had to be Hajime - said. “I’m not. And if I am, what does that make you?”
“Tired.”
Jin frowned and caught his sleeve on the branch of a nearby tree. He missed Hajime’s response among the snapping of twigs. By the time Jin managed to free himself and peek around the corner, Hajime had reached over and ducked his hand beneath the flow of water, bringing it up to draw an outline around Kame’s lips. “You need to learn to relax. I’ll help you.”
Kame licked away the moisture from his mouth. Across the garden, Jin did the same.
“Don’t argue with me,” Hajime warned. “I’m the rational and happy and slightly childish one.”
It would have been odd - like looking into a two-way mirror - if not for the slightly outdated cut of Hajime’s hair, the worry lines at the tips of Kame’s mouth, the little things here and there like shoulders without the weight of the world.
Jin shifted so he could watch something resembling acceptance flicker across Kame’s face.
“And you can come out now,” Kame said in Jin’s direction.
Jin flinched then stepped out awkwardly, fidgeting with the towel around his waist. “Hey. I didn’t know we were - you were.”
Hajime held out his hand. “Come here.”
Jin took his hand.
~
Afterwards, Hajime leaned over and kissed Kame, tilting his head back to give him access. Jin could see their tongues, red and wet, entwined between their lips as if they were trying to merge into one. It was hot, Jin had time to think, feeling a distant, languid stir of interest before sleep pulled him under.
Hajime wasn’t there when Jin woke up. Kame had his back to him, the small mole on his shoulder blade shifting as Kame bent over to pick up his book that had fallen sometime in the middle of their activities. Jin watched him for a while - the strangely vulnerable arch of Kame’s body, open and humble clad in pale, smooth skin, Kame’s expression calm when he thought no one was looking. Jin cleared his throat. Kame looked up and smiled, closing his book to move closer to him.
“Hey,” Kame said.
“Hey.” Jin’s voice felt raspy from overuse. “Where’s Hajime?”
“Gone.” Kame studied him cautiously. “Is that ok?”
“Yes.” Jin rolled closer to him. “You’re whole.”
It wasn’t a question, but Kame answered it anyways, chasing the yes with his tongue against Jin’s mouth.
“He’s not completely gone,” Jin said. “Not if you don’t want him to be.”
Kame smiled - a little sadly, Jin thought. “When did you become smart?”
“Not smart,” Jin said. “I still want you.” He kissed Kame to prove it.
“Fuck,” Kame said, arching into his hold.
There were crescents left on Jin’s arm from Kame’s fingers curling into skin as Jin chased Kame’s tongue with his own, fanning out his hands along sharp, narrow hips. Kame’s pants had fallen sometime between that first kiss and the bite behind Jin’s ear and his cock stood uncovered at the center, centimeters from Jin’s hand that seemed to move with a life of its own to grasp and stroke along its length.
“Fuck,” Kame gasped again, and Jin swallowed his next moan, unoccupied hand clutching Kame’s so tightly that it must have hurt.
It was better now with experience on their side - dozens of people between then and now that Jin wanted to say had only existed so he knew how to press Kame to him and kiss him just right, so he didn’t come at the first touch of his cock with Kame’s, hot and smooth and wet, as they settled into an urgent rhythm.
“Jin,” Kame gasped.
“Yeah,” Jin said, twisting to get more of Kame. “Yeah.”
~
Kame was curled up in a chair when Jin woke again. He’d put on a shirt and pants and was worrying a hairbrush between his hands. His hair was still wet from the shower. There would be no more sex that night, Jin realized with a pang of regret. His disappointment only lasted as long as it took for Kame to realize he was awake, and then Jin clambered over to the chair at Kame's invitation, curling his body around Kame's still warm from the shower. Kame let Jin invade his space with an air of faint amusement. Even then, Jin’s legs ended up dangling halfway outside the chair.
His cell phone began to ring, muffled beneath layers of clothes. Jin made no move to get it.
“So,” he said after it stopped.
“So,” Kame agreed.
“There’s this photoshoot I’m supposed to make sure you get to. It seems that the group can’t survive without at least one of us.”
Kame laughed, twisted his legs so that one ended up between Jin’s. “Koki would kill you if he heard that.”
“Koki’s a bulldog,” Jin said. “He’s all bark.”
“Koki’s a sweetheart.”
Jin scowled and missed his chance to stop Kame from getting to his feet. His hands grabbed at air. Jin's scowl deepened, cold permeating the place Kame had occupied. He wondered how Kame would react if Jin threw a tantrum, if he declared that Kame was his. For a second, he could almost imagine Kame squaring his jaw and saying, "I've always been yours," like there had never been a moment of doubt.
Kame looked back at him. “You coming?”
And Jin scrambled to follow.
The End
Part one
Jin spoke to Junno in whispers on his cell phone, his right hand gripping the steering wheel, Hajime asleep beside him, soft puffs of air escaping from his mouth.
“How are you?” Junno asked cheerfully. He seemed incapable of anything else.
Jin missed Tokyo and sheets that weren’t stiff with starch and even the girls who played music outside his window at two in the morning like he was some fairytale character who could be wooed by the sound of his own voice.
“Fine,” he said. “Still, you know, looking for Kamenashi.”
“Ah, so is Kame,” Junno said. It seemed like another of his jokes that nobody understood, except it was cryptic and profound and Junno was never either.
Jin gripped the steering wheel tighter. “What do you mean?”
“He said he needed to find himself.” Junno sounded like Kame had just gone outside for a quick smoke, like it didn’t bother him that two of his bandmates had run away halfway across the world. “Something about how he couldn’t go on like that anymore and needed to find himself.”
Jin grunted.
"But,” Junno continued. “Don’t worry yourself about that. Just have fun and bring Kame back and maybe some American games while you’re at it.”
He left Jin with an ache like he was missing something, which would have been fine except Jin was past the point of exhaustion, at the stage where there was nothing except a faint buzzing between his ears.
Jin tossed his cell phone away and pulled over, puffs of sand rising up beneath the tires. He reached for Hajime. Got him out of the car and halfway sprawled against the hood before awareness tightened the muscles on Hajime’s back.
“What are you -”
Jin hushed him. Leaned on top of Hajime, chest to back, sliding an arm down Hajime’s to keep his hand pressed against the car and Hajime turned away. He didn’t want to see Hajime’s face. It would have undone everything.
Thankfully, Hajime seemed to understand, letting his head fall forward with a moan as Jin lapped at the dried, salty sweat on his neck. His other hand fumbled to pull down Hajime’s jeans and undo his fly all at the same time.
Hajime bucked at the first infuriatingly slow slide of Jin’s cock against his thigh. “Lube,” he gasped, hand flailing toward his bag. Jin got it. Slicked some around and inside Hajime then rocked back on his heels to coat himself, wondering what it would be like to make Hajime use his mouth instead, get Jin good and ready with saliva. Kame never, Kame had never -
They both groaned when Jin pushed in. Hajime collapsed onto his elbows, pushing back to meet Jin thrust for thrust. Jin feathered kisses down on Hajime’s back, on the muscles straining to meet the demand, then slid his hands down the same path, scratching just enough to leave marks on Hajime’s skin. They faded after a second. Jin did it again. Then again until Hajime shuddered and froze taut beneath him and Jin’s own world came to a stuttering stop, leaving him shaking and tired and sobbing, “Kame” into Hajime’s shoulder.
~
Jin woke up alone. His bag was on the table, the car keys on the nightstand level with his eyes when he lifted his head groggily. A neon two thirteen flashed red on the clock.
Hajime came back when Jin was brushing his teeth. He had two paper plates loaded with doughnuts that he juggled haphazardly with a thermos.
“I don’t like coffee,” Jin said through the foam of his toothpaste.
“It’s orange juice,” Hajime replied. “It’s good for you. It’s actually derived from a fruit, which is something I’ve yet to see you eat.”
“What are you - my mother?” Jin muttered.
“Someone has to be the adult. It’s obviously not going to be you.”
Jin turned around and grabbed Hajime. “Nobody has to.” It felt somehow important.
Hajime just smiled and shook his head, nudging Jin away from the sink. “We’ll just end up going in circles. Then we really won’t be able to find anyone.”
Jin watched Hajime brush his teeth, meeting his eyes through the small vanity mirror. The complementary toothbrush was just a little too small for a grown man. There was foam gathered around Hajime’s mouth, white and fluffy, and Jin suddenly felt like spearmint.
“You have the oddest kinks,” Hajime said, but he tilted his head to the side, allowing Jin access.
“I think the orange juice was spiked,” Jin muttered. Hajime’s startled laugh jostled his head from Hajime’s shoulder.
“People have libidos completely separate from alcohol, you know.”
“I don’t.”
Hajime made a sound in the back of his throat, halfway between a laugh and a snort. “That would explain last night.”
Jin froze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have - I don’t know why I -”
Hajime shook his head. “No. Don’t. It’s fine.”
“It’s not like I’m in love with him,” Jin continued. “I don’t even know him anymore.”
Hajime laughed. “You’re just chasing after him in a foreign country.”
Jin eyed him. “Are you jealous?”
“No.”
For some reason, Jin believed him. For some reason, Jin wanted him to be, if only to be something approaching normal. “Why not?”
Hajime hesitated. “Did you watch any of his dramas?” he asked at last.
“I don’t see how that -”
“Forget it. It’s not important.” Hajime looked up at him and smiled. The wall behind Jin felt suddenly solid and extremely close. “Does this mean I get to guilt trip you into helping with my other case?”
“It’s not…” Jin began, trailing off when Hajime reached over and put a hand on his chest.
He pushed Jin against the bathroom door. “Come on, you know you want to.”
~
Hajime climbed back into bed with an unlabeled manila folder. Jin rolled over, ran a hand along the curve of his spine, fingers bumping against the ridges as Hajime arched into his touch. Hajime’s boxers rode low enough to expose two narrow hips and Jin bent down to mouth one.
“Pay attention,” Hajime laughed, whacking him once. “Now, this is all I have on the case. Apparently, somebody has some photographs that Johnny wants. Our main priority is to get back the originals and any copies. On the way, it would be great if we happen to catch the culprit.”
“He probably stole something from Johnny’s private collection,” Jin murmured. “Scandal material for sure.”
“This,” Hajime said, ignoring him, “is the only picture we have of our thief.”
Jin looked at the picture that Hajime held out, studied it in growing disbelief. “It’s somebody’s back. The only thing we know is that he has black hair. And good taste in jeans.”
“We also know he rented a house in this very town.”
“This town?”
“About a ten minute drive from here.”
Jin stared at Hajime, then at the file in his hands. “You had this planned all along.”
Hajime grinned. Starched motel sheets slid off his legs as he leaned over to grab his pants. “What do you say to a little stake out?”
~
Hajime parked their car a block from their target, huge evergreen shrubbery shading them from the sun. They took turns staring at the house through a thin patch in the plants.
Jin grabbed the binoculars from Hajime’s hands and stared at a close-up of blue shingles and faded beige paint. White plastic shutters at the windows remained firmly closed. In the past two hours, the only movement had been a mailman stuffing a pizza ad in the mail slot.
“This is it?”
“Were you expecting high speed car chases?” Hajime asked, opening a bag of barbeque chips. “This is the oh-so-glamorous life of a private eye. Envious yet?”
Jin eyed the crumbs dotting Hajime’s shirt and shook his head. “What happens if I have to go to the bathroom?”
Hajime raised an eyebrow. “You’re a man, aren’t you? Make use of the great outdoors.” He gestured at the bushes.
On a closer look, they were made up of thousands of tiny prickly barbs that made Jin’s stomach shrivel up inside of itself when he imagined getting close to them. They were cacti disguised as greenery, a foot from white, cracked pavement and a lawn composed of stone. Jin would sooner pee on the neighbor’s front porch.
“Wouldn’t that draw attention to us?” he asked.
“Not if you’re careful about it,” Hajime said primly, and Jin could suddenly see Hajime in his mind’s eye, unzipping his pants while sneaking peeks over his shoulder.
He grinned and nudged Hajime. “Why don’t you show me?”
“Pervert,” Hajime said. He set the back of his car seat down and stretched out in the newly opened space. Jin guessed it wasn’t an invitation for sex, not with the way Hajime pulled his jacket over himself.
Hajime looked up from the paperback he’d brought out. “Keep watch.”
“Why me?”
“You have the binoculars,” Hajime said like it made perfect sense. “I’ll take over in an hour.”
Jin fiddled with the thing in his hands, turning the knobs so that the house went fuzzy before his eyes. It was horribly boring. He went outside to feed a stray cat while Hajime took over.
“Don’t go too far,” Hajime murmured, binoculars pressed to his eyes.
Jin looked down at the cat, white spots on its calico fur still snow white, and fed it more of Hajime’s chicken. “Yeah,” he said to it. “You might get hit by a car.”
It looked up at him with narrow cat eyes.
“I was talking to you,” Hajime said and Jin pouted, wrapped a hand around the cat’s middle and lifted up. It went with him willingly, feet dangling in midair like a limp rag.
Hajime frowned as he climbed back into the car. “What are you doing? You’re going to get cat hair all over everything.”
“This way nobody’s going to run off.” Jin stroked the cat beneath its chin and it worked its paws into the folds of his shirt. “I think it’s a girl.”
“Are you going to name her?”
“Don’t have to. She already has one.” Jin lifted the blue heart-shaped tag around her neck.
Hajime choked on his drink. “It - it’s somebody else’s cat. Don’t take somebody else’s cat.”
“I’m just borrowing. Besides, she wants to be here or she wouldn’t have found us.”
“The classic logic of a thief.”
Despite that, Hajime still cradled the cat in his arms when she daintily stepped over to him, leaving a cold spot on Jin’s chest the exact size of a housecat. Jin watched as she butted her head against Hajime’s hand, stretching to get his fingers to scratch that exact spot. There was a smile on Hajime’s face, and Jin didn’t think it had anything to do with what Hajime saw in his binoculars.
“I’m hungry,” Jin said after a while. Dusk had arrived sometime between his shifts and the cat had long fallen asleep on Hajime’s lap. Dozens of white lights illuminated a bleached rock walkway in front of the house beside them. Its neighbors were the same, nightlights drawing to prominence calm blue signs with a gigantic eye painted on them. It made Jin think of Hajime and his job. There was one lit window in their house. Hajime turned to him, shadows on his face drawn long by the streetlight overhead. He was handsome at that angle: dark and mysterious.
“I’m hungry,” Jin said again.
Hajime smiled. “Me too. I feel like something…gourmet.”
They ended up at a convenience store, the only customers save for a little old lady who looked at them out of the corner of her eyes as she shuffled down the aisles in a floral print dress.
“She thinks we’re up to no good.” Hajime threw a package in Jin’s basket. Jin read the white letters on red wrapping.
“Ramen?”
Hajime tapped the bowl, finger landing on the drawing of chopsticks and noodle. “Gourmet ramen.”
“Instant ramen.”
“Instant, gourmet Japanese ramen.” Hajime smiled, put another in their basket. “I used to eat these all the time. Don’t knock it until you’ve tasted it. They’re great, especially after a long day.”
The entire aisle was stacked with packaged food. Giving in, Jin scanned it for other flavors. Hajime nodded when Jin grabbed a shrimp flavored bowl. “Very good. You’re learning.”
“Are you sure this is ok?” Jin asked.
Hajime cocked his head to one side.
“Leaving the stake out,” Jin clarified.
“Well, that’s something I never thought you’d say. It’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen tonight anyways. He’s probably asleep by now.” Hajime grabbed the basket before Jin could ask him how he knew that and drew him closer. Jin could see the old woman glaring at them out of the corner of his eyes.
“Your charms aren’t working on her,” Hajime murmured.
Jin wasn’t sure why they were discussing some woman old enough to be their grandmother when Hajime was looking up at him like that. If he had it his way, they wouldn’t be discussing anything at all. “I’m not using my charms right now.”
“Oh, so you have to turn it on first.”
A strand of hair had fallen across Hajime’s eyes, caught between his lashes. It moved as he blinked and Jin wanted badly to tuck it behind Hajime’s ear. He wet his lips. “I bet I can make her faint.”
Hajime took the basket from Jin’s hands, turning away to survey the shelves once again. “She might if you kiss me. But then the store clerk will probably throw us out and I want my ramen.”
~
The next day was just as cloudless as the first, the sky a clear, unbroken plain of baby blue. Jin shielded his eyes from the sun and squatted on the sidewalk, leaning down to peer beneath the bushes. Hajime was parked at the same spot again and he craned his neck to see Jin over the passenger door.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s not here.”
“The cat? She’ll come back,” Hajime assured, gesturing for Jin to come back. The inside of the car smelled like a noodle stand and Jin fished out an instant ramen lid from beneath his seat. He studied the cartoon shrimp on the cover, its bulbous eyes staring back at him in delirious delight.
“I should have saved some shrimp for her.”
Hajime rolled his eyes. His hands dangled outside the window, tapping a disjointed rhythm against the door. “She’s somebody’s cat. I’m sure they feed her better fare than month old dried shrimp.”
“I don’t know why I care. She liked you better anyways.”
“Because I wasn’t trying to smother her with affection,” Hajime said, looking through his binoculars. Jin glanced at the house and saw the mailman ambling up the street, wearing khaki shorts and a large hat pulled low over his eyes. He was pushing a cart with the letters USPS emblazoned on the sides. Jin thought they had cars for mail delivery in America, mail cars that drove up to each house and deposited letters with a lazy sweep of the mailman’s arm.
The shutters in the house were pulled open.
The sun had risen to blaze directly overhead when Jin saw the mailman again, making his way down the block, cart squeaking with every rotation of its wheels. He was heading the same direction that he came from.
“I didn’t know mail took so long,” Jin murmured.
“What?” Hajime asked beside him, lying down with his paperback novel held up toward the car ceiling.
Jin pointed at the man just as he disappeared around a corner. “The mailman. He really takes a long time to deliver mail.”
“Oh,” Hajime said, flipped a page.
Then he bolted upright, hair at the back of his head sticking out in all directions.
“Shit,” Hajime said, scrambling with the car door. “Shit.”
“What? What is it?”
Jin ran after him, scrambling with his jacket, which hung in a state of indecision on him. He banged his foot on the curb and went down hard.
Hajime had reached the corner by the time Jin got back on his feet. It turned onto a straight street: all uniform houses and year old trees. There was nobody in sight, no cars that weren’t parked either.
“Shit,” Hajime said again, doubling over in exhaustion.
Jin grimaced, dusted off gravel from his hands. His knee throbbed where it hit hard pavement. “What is it?”
“You’re sure he came this way?” Hajime asked instead of answering.
“Who? The mailman?”
“Supposed mailman.” Hajime squinted at the intersecting street ahead. Cars raced passed. He shook his head, panted some more. “No hope of tracking him in that crowd. He’ll be long gone before we get our directions straight. Come on.”
Hajime straightened up painfully, favoring his right side as if there it had cramped up, and began walking the other way.
Jin followed him back to the house they’d been watching, hung back as Hajime walked right up to the front door. Jin looked over his shoulder up and down the street. No signs of life at all, which had been the case more often than not the last few days.
The pastel blue door opened with a creak.
Jin turned back to Hajime in awe. “How did you --”
Hajime shook his head. “I didn’t. It was unlocked.” He reached into his pocket, and, for a wild second, Jin thought he was reaching for a gun. What came out was a flashlight.
The door opened into a small foyer, one square meter of beige linoleum. A shoe rack stood to one side, its insides bare. Hajime spared a glance at the Home, Sweet Home sign on the wall and ventured inside.
The rest of the house was carpeted in some nondescript matting that might have been white once upon a time. They walked through it carefully, shoes making ominous thuds that echoed in the bare space. Jin tried hard to squash the inherent urge to take them off.
The one bedroom was swept clean, bedroll tucked neatly to one side. The drawers, the closet were empty as was the bathroom. Light maple cabinets in the tiny kitchen yielded nothing besides a can of cat food, ultra moist.
Hajime carried it back to the living room, set it down next to piles of paper and folders that had been strewn in the center of the floor as if just waiting for them to be found. “Well,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “At least we know where the cat went. With his master. Probably in that mail cart along with the rest of his personal effects.”
Jin flicked open a manilla envelope. “What’s all this?”
Hajime took it from him. “The stuff Johnny sent us after. All nicely bundled and laid out for our convenience.”
“Well, that’s great,” Jin said. “We did it.”
“Yeah, great,” Hajime said with little enthusiasm. “I guess I should call Johnny and see what he wants us to do with all this.”
“Hey.” Jin put a hand on Hajime’s wrist, stopping him from putting his phone to his ear. He waited until Hajime met his eyes. “We did it. We won.”
“No, he won. We only have the documents because he let us have them as some kind of consolation prize, or because he’s done with them. With us. All we did was sit in a car and baby-sit his cat two days. We lost. I failed.” A thin voice came through his phone. Hajime pulled away and brought it to his ears, turning his back to Jin. “Yes. This is Hajime.”
Hajime had set up a fire in the backyard by the time Jin returned with their dinner. Orange sparks danced in the air like fireflies. Hajime’s face shone bright in the light of the fire, above a body shrouded in shadow, folded in itself. Jin approached slowly, feeling like an intruder.
“Hey,” he said. Hajime blinked, turned his face, tired and worn, to him.
Jin held up the bag, bottom transparent with grease. “Dinner,” he said. “It’s not much, but we should still eat something.”
Hajime nestled his head back into his hands folded above knees drawn tight into his chest. “You can have my share.”
“Hajime…”
“I’m not hungry.”
The light drew shadows that made the bones on his wrist larger, sharper, the hollows of his cheeks too. Jin could see circles there from too much work and not enough rest, a mind that wouldn’t stop gnawing away at the larger picture.
“You didn’t fail,” he said, leaning in close enough to smell lighter fluid on Hajime. “You did your job. Johnny is happy.”
“Johnny,” Hajime said. “Is only concerned about burying his less savory deals.”
Hajime fed the fire. Manila envelope curled in the flames, receded into ash, the black edge of a photograph peeking out before it too was consumed. They watched in silence as the documents burned.
~
Early morning was bitterly cold, desert sand just as inhospitable in town. A spider, thin and gawky, scuttled along the floor, awkwardness in its movements like its joints were locked by cold. Jin shivered, wrapped the thin blanket he’d salvaged from the backseat of the car closer around his body.
He wondered what had woken him. The light peeking through shuttered blinds was too pale for it to be proper morning and the room had an air of heavy expectation only borne from rising before the world.
He padded through the house barefoot, toes sinking in carpet, picking up lint and the occasional cat hair. Emptiness made the rooms larger. The hallway practically reverberated with it and Jin shivered again.
Hajime was in the backyard, kneeling in the exact position Jin had left him only now the documents were a pile of nondescript ash that was slowly being eaten away by the wind. A large section of burnt paper caught on the branches of a bush and crumbled as Jin sat down next to Hajime.
“Were you here all night?”
Hajime shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep.” He sounded as empty as the house behind them.
“It’s easier with two people. You just have to give it a try.”
“I tried.” Hajime left a trial of black behind as he shoved his bangs away from his face. His palm was covered in ash like he’d shoved it into the remains of the fire. “It didn’t take.”
Closer, Jin could see Hajime’s bag peeking out from behind a knee, pamphlets spilled out of its depth like confetti -- orchards and oceans and villas of pure silk. Tempting, jarring against yellowing grass. Hajime had fanned them out around him, in front of him where he stared down at them as if looking for a long awaited answer.
Jin picked one up, ran his thumb along the smooth gloss of laminated paper.
“They’re from Kamenashi’s dorm room. From his trash, more specifically.”
“Oh.” The edges were worn. A vague smell of over ripe banana teased Jin’s senses. “So we’re back on his trail.”
Hajime snorted. “Hardly. One man’s castaways hardly mean anything. We’re still chasing his tail. And our own.”
He leaned forward until he was nearly bent double over the ground, hair hanging down in vertical strands parallel to the blades of grass. Jin couldn’t see his eyes at that angle except for glimpses of dark orbs as they darted from paper to paper. Hajime spread his hand out, left dark smudges and wrinkles.
“Still, there’s something here. I know it. I feel it. I just can’t - It’s just trash, and I don’t even know what to look for, but I know it’s there. Here. Somewhere.”
Jin frowned, and frowned harder when Hajime slapped away his proffered hand. “You need sleep.”
Hajime shook his head. “No. I don’t. That’s how our fake mailman got away and I can’t let that happen with Kamenashi too. I can’t have two in a row. I can’t.”
He still refused to look at Jin as if tearing his eyes away from the bright ads for one second would also result in failure, which was maddening because they hadn’t failed. Not yet. Not with anything.
“There are,” Hajime said when Jin told him that. “Certain things I’m expected to do. People I’m supposed to exceed.”
He looked at Jin as if asking him to understand, and Jin did. “You care too much about what others think.”
“That’s not the point.”
“It is!” Jin rose to his feet, pointed toward the horizon where, if he looked hard enough, Japan would surely be. Hajime watched him warily, crouched over Kame’s brochures like they were in danger of being trampled. The one in Jin’s hand made a noise of protest in his fist. “Things you’re expected to do? People you’re supposed to exceed? That’s utter bullshit. What about what you want to do instead?”
“We can’t all run around like children our entire lives.”
“You’re not fifty! I’m not fifty. Stop acting like we are.”
Hajime refused to answer. Jin sighed, anger leaving as quickly as it had come. “Come on, let’s both try to get some sleep.”
He held out a hand to Hajime, who stared at the ground. “I want to be alone.”
Jin put his hands on his hips. “You sound just like him.” He wasn’t sure if it was just a statement or an accusation, but it was pure fact, and he didn’t like it.
“Akanishi.” Hajime looked up, gaze level and strong. Jin couldn’t read anything within those depths. It had been so much easier when Hajime had just been a person with a rare proclivity for carnivals that had been forced onto Jin’s company.
Jin squatted down again, picked at the stray grass that hadn’t been trampled into the ground. “We can turn back,” he said, suddenly desperate. “We don’t need to find him.”
Hajime shook his head. “We do. I do. I have to.”
“Just because Johnny…”
“You don’t understand.” Hajime left, leaving Jin with an empty room. Kame’s bags sat in the corner, watching Jin as he stood there, torn between going after Hajime and staying. He chose, in the end, to stay.
“Stop it,” he told the bags. “It’s not like I’ll be able to find him. He’ll come back soon. You should worry about your owner. And what he’s thinking, skipping out on work like that.”
Kame’s luggage stayed reproachfully silent.
Jin occupied himself with watching a show about a guy and a girl and misunderstandings that kept them apart and threw crumbled paper at the screen when the guy missed out on another hint. And, when he couldn’t stop guilt from creeping in, he called Japan.
“Stop worrying me,” Koki complained. “I have a drama now and I can’t afford distractions. A true artist is supposed to give a piece of himself to his craft, you know.”
~
Hajime climbed into bed with him that night, all hard lines and sharp angles, smelling like businessmen after their ten-minute break. Jin had been waiting for him at first, thinking, or hoping, that they could finish what they’d started in the shade of the rest stop, Hajime’s thigh wedged between Jin’s legs. But then Hajime hadn’t come inside and Jin’s cigarettes were missing and Jin didn’t feel like digging through layers of paranoia to find the person beneath.
He pretended to be asleep.
Kame led Jin to a black house, decorated with ghosts and darkened windows.
Jin followed his gaze up. “House of mirrors?”
“Yes. Come on.”
Kame slipped inside. Jin couldn’t follow him fast enough, losing sight of him around the corner. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned, crashed into a mirror. Neon lights threw everything into confusion.
“Lets go,” Jin called, nearly pleaded. “Kame, lets go.”
The mirrors hurt his head, played with his mind, and he bumped into another dead end, tasted copper in his mouth. Kames split before him, around him, all with different hairstyles with different clothes. Jin thought for a second that he saw Hajime.
Jin reached out blindly and grabbed onto a wrist. “Lets go,” he said again.
For a second - horrible, horrible - it wasn’t the right Kame he’d grabbed, some doppelganger starving and desperate, before he realized it wasn’t Kame at all.
“Finally decided to pull your head out of your ass?” Koki asked him, and Jin jolted awake.
Hajime slept fitfully, tossing and turning and moaning and, when Jin couldn’t stand watching him like that anymore, looked up at him with black glittering eyes. You shouldn’t be here, Jin thought, tracing Hajime’s once broken nose with a finger. Not here, not now.
Hajime caught his finger in his grasp. “Do you understand now?” he asked.
“We don’t,” Jin said instead. “You don’t have to.”
He wasn’t sure what he meant. It was like watching history repeat itself, a sped up, distorted version that Jin had hated with a ferocious intensity the first time around.
“It’s alright,” Hajime said, sliding a warm, dry hand up his arm.
Jin felt like a fool.
~
Jin made up his mind halfway between the gas station and the house, a half eaten turkey sandwich in his hands and another in the bag, purely for formality’s sake because Hajime had refused to eat the last two Jin had bought him, preferring to stare at his pamphlets instead. Jin was sure that Hajime could recite the fine print by that point.
He was sick of watching Hajime. Sick of the house and its empty halls, sick of the silence that pervaded everything.
Hajime made a sound of disapproval when Jin placed the bag in front of him, moved it away as Jin sat down.
“We’re leaving,” Jin said, trying to instill some air of authority into his voice. “We can’t find Kame by staying here.”
Hajime didn’t do anything beyond look at him skeptically as if to say ‘you can’t be serious’. Jin was though - extremely serious.
“We’re leaving,” he repeated.
Hajime shifted. His hair caught the light and flashed a silver-black, darker with brown dye almost entirely faded away. “So where will we go?”
“North.” Jin had thought it through already, ignoring the nagging churning of his stomach. He was certain it was the right thing to do. “We’ve been going north. We’ll just keep going north.”
“Until we fall into the ocean?”
“Or we find him,” Jin said. “We could find him, you know.”
“We have a direction and brochures that” - Hajime held them up in the air - “have nothing to do with anything. We can’t leave without something more specific. We’ll really end up falling into the ocean.”
“But we have to find him,” Jin repeated.
Hajime smiled. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”
~
“Nakamaru,” Jin said. “What did he tell you?”
There was a pause. “He was rambling. Talking about Sapuri and that kiss in the vineyard and stuff. I thought he’d had too much to drink. Or not enough.”
“What is it supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention. He needed a break. He was stretching himself too thin. I was just glad he was taking a break.”
Jin closed his eyes, imagining Kame alone somewhere slowly gathering up all the pieces of himself. It was an oddly sobering thought. Jin clenched his fists, eyes flying open when his right closed around paper. He had forgotten he was still holding a pamphlet. Jin looked at it then blinked and straightened, reading the words again slowly. “A vineyard? What about an orchard?”
Nakamaru hesitated. “He might have mentioned cherries.”
~
The old man sitting on the steps, an old wooden pipe clasped between his lips, pointed to his right with a dry, trembling finger. Jin followed it to a tiny cottage like the kind he’d seen on his manager’s calendar. Ivy was growing on its cream brick walls, twisting above one large arched window and a baby blue door. The mat in front of it had ‘Welcome’ written in large loopy letters. Jin’s feet covered the ‘e’ and the ‘m’. He hesitated and turned back to look at Hajime.
“Go on,” Hajime said. “We’ve come all this way.”
“Maybe you should do this. You’re the one who --”
The door opened and Jin turned back around in surprise. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” Kame said back. Surprise made his eyes wide and clearer than Jin remembered ever seeing them except for maybe that very first day they’d met -- Kame still a gawky, ugly little thing with a penchant for talking too fast and moving too much.
His hair was shorter, signs of a professional stylist in the fall of the tresses. Jin touched his own, tried to remember the last time he’d seen the inside of a salon.
Kame’s eyes shifted over to Hajime behind Jin, and Jin turned, glad for something to say. “This is Kindaichi Hajime. He helped me find you.”
Kame blinked, gaze still locked with Hajime’s. “Akanishi…”
“Yes?”
Hajime smiled and waved with a slight tilt of two fingers. Kame shook his head. “Never mind.”
He shifted, banging his foot against a large metal bucket that he’d set down when he’d seen Jin. It was an angular, old thing that looked like it was made out of the thinnest aluminum.
“I was going to the orchard,” Kame explained. “I was going to get some cherries for dinner.”
He looked at Jin as if waiting for some kind of response. Jin couldn’t think of any. He was too busy staring at Kame’s hair and his lips and his clothes. Hideous clothes, really, of red plaid and ragged jeans fit for a farmer. He wondered what Kame thought of him.
Hajime elbowed him. “We’ll help. It’ll go by faster that way.”
They got a ladder at Kame’s direction and carried it, a person on either side, to the orchard. Jin was sweating by the time they ducked beneath the trees, lush leaves providing shade that was all too welcome. The ladder was at least three times as tall as him, weighed what felt to be infinitely more.
“That’s great,” Kame said. “Just set it there.”
He trailed after them bucket in hand. There was no sweat on his face, nothing save an odd tranquility that fit foreign on his features like clothes one size too large. A large wool sweater, comfortable and worn and oh so welcome. Jin was hit with the sudden irrational fear that Kame was happy there.
“You’re not, are you?”
Kame blinked. “I’m not what?”
“Happy.”
Kame studied him as if trying to unravel Jin with his eyes. Wary eyes. Intelligent, thoughtful eyes that sometimes made Jin want to run screaming into the next city out of slight fright, part unease, definite frustration.
“Now or then?” Kame asked finally, hooking his thumbs on the waistband of his jeans, tugging it down so Jin could see Dolce printed on the top of black underpants. It calmed him in a way that Kame’s hipbones, sharp and narrow, could not.
He felt suddenly the need to measure their span with his hands, compare them to the faint memory of a narrow waist pressed against his.
Behind them, Hajime made an aborted motion. His arm fell down to his side before it touched either of them.
“It’s hot,” Jin said instead, wiped a trail of sweat from his brow and mourned the disappearance of pale skin as Kame bent down to pick up the bucket once more. He nodded.
“Yes. I forgot to bring water.”
“I could…”
“No,” Hajime said. “No. You two stay here. I’ll go get it.”
They watched him until the leaves swallowed him up. It didn’t occur to Jin to ask how he knew where to go.
Kame sat down on the ladder, his feet level with Jin’s eyes. He wiped his face with a towel he’d hung on the belt loop above his left rear pocket then handed it wordlessly to Jin, who followed his example.
When he reached up to hand it back, Kame grabbed onto the other end and held on. Jin found himself unable to release his grip.
“There were a lot of people who reminded me of you at the school,” Kame said.
Which is why you left, Jin thought. He said, “Really? They must have been talented.”
Kame lips curled up slightly. “They were mainly lazy.”
Jin had nothing to say to that.
The heat enveloped him, suffocatingly hot. Kame’s ladder was scorching to the touch despite the shade. Jin pressed his hand, palm down, on a step, fingers fanning out. His pinky brushed against the leather thong of Kame’s sandal.
He wondered if he was right, leading Hajime back to Kame.
“After you left,” Kame said. His voice was so soft that Jin didn’t hear it at first above the dry rustle of leaves. “After you left, we were put on hold.” Jin shifted uneasily. “Not that it was entirely because of that. NewS - did Yamapi ever tell you they regrouped? - The company had NewS to promote and Kanjani8 and. We were put on hold.”
“I had a lot of time off,” Kame confided to his hands. “I found myself wondering what I was doing. Without work, without - anything - I didn’t know what I was doing. Did you feel that way?”
“Yeah,” Jin said.
“Did I. Make it worse?”
There was no good way to answer that. Jin couldn’t - even though silence was just as damning - make himself say anything.
Kame nodded. “Sorry,” he explained when Jin looked at him in surprise.
“Yeah,” Jin said again.
Kame passed him the towel. It smelled like perfume and sweat, a musky mix of exertion that brought to mind the chaos of dressing rooms, the exhilaration of the stage, bowing linked as six.
Jin rested his head on the ladder, turning so he could watch Kame as he tilted his face up to the sun, in that narrow beam of sunlight that broke through the canopy of trees. Jin closed his eyes and listened to the stillness.
They stayed that way until Hajime came back with a bucket of water and accidentally spilled half of it down Jin’s shirt.
~
The sky was turning a swirl of red and orange overhead when Jin got out of the shower. Kame and Hajime had put the rest of the cherries away and were watering the flowers in the garden. It was a half hour job with one watering can and the faucet nestled between two hydrangeas a curved path of bleached white steppingstones away.
Jin followed the sound of their voices to the back of the house, sidestepping around a snail that had been lured out by promises of food and the setting sun.
“He wants you. You’re rational and happy and slightly childish and - you’re what they want.”
“Oh, Kame,” Hajime - it had to be Hajime - said. “I’m not. And if I am, what does that make you?”
“Tired.”
Jin frowned and caught his sleeve on the branch of a nearby tree. He missed Hajime’s response among the snapping of twigs. By the time Jin managed to free himself and peek around the corner, Hajime had reached over and ducked his hand beneath the flow of water, bringing it up to draw an outline around Kame’s lips. “You need to learn to relax. I’ll help you.”
Kame licked away the moisture from his mouth. Across the garden, Jin did the same.
“Don’t argue with me,” Hajime warned. “I’m the rational and happy and slightly childish one.”
It would have been odd - like looking into a two-way mirror - if not for the slightly outdated cut of Hajime’s hair, the worry lines at the tips of Kame’s mouth, the little things here and there like shoulders without the weight of the world.
Jin shifted so he could watch something resembling acceptance flicker across Kame’s face.
“And you can come out now,” Kame said in Jin’s direction.
Jin flinched then stepped out awkwardly, fidgeting with the towel around his waist. “Hey. I didn’t know we were - you were.”
Hajime held out his hand. “Come here.”
Jin took his hand.
~
Afterwards, Hajime leaned over and kissed Kame, tilting his head back to give him access. Jin could see their tongues, red and wet, entwined between their lips as if they were trying to merge into one. It was hot, Jin had time to think, feeling a distant, languid stir of interest before sleep pulled him under.
Hajime wasn’t there when Jin woke up. Kame had his back to him, the small mole on his shoulder blade shifting as Kame bent over to pick up his book that had fallen sometime in the middle of their activities. Jin watched him for a while - the strangely vulnerable arch of Kame’s body, open and humble clad in pale, smooth skin, Kame’s expression calm when he thought no one was looking. Jin cleared his throat. Kame looked up and smiled, closing his book to move closer to him.
“Hey,” Kame said.
“Hey.” Jin’s voice felt raspy from overuse. “Where’s Hajime?”
“Gone.” Kame studied him cautiously. “Is that ok?”
“Yes.” Jin rolled closer to him. “You’re whole.”
It wasn’t a question, but Kame answered it anyways, chasing the yes with his tongue against Jin’s mouth.
“He’s not completely gone,” Jin said. “Not if you don’t want him to be.”
Kame smiled - a little sadly, Jin thought. “When did you become smart?”
“Not smart,” Jin said. “I still want you.” He kissed Kame to prove it.
“Fuck,” Kame said, arching into his hold.
There were crescents left on Jin’s arm from Kame’s fingers curling into skin as Jin chased Kame’s tongue with his own, fanning out his hands along sharp, narrow hips. Kame’s pants had fallen sometime between that first kiss and the bite behind Jin’s ear and his cock stood uncovered at the center, centimeters from Jin’s hand that seemed to move with a life of its own to grasp and stroke along its length.
“Fuck,” Kame gasped again, and Jin swallowed his next moan, unoccupied hand clutching Kame’s so tightly that it must have hurt.
It was better now with experience on their side - dozens of people between then and now that Jin wanted to say had only existed so he knew how to press Kame to him and kiss him just right, so he didn’t come at the first touch of his cock with Kame’s, hot and smooth and wet, as they settled into an urgent rhythm.
“Jin,” Kame gasped.
“Yeah,” Jin said, twisting to get more of Kame. “Yeah.”
~
Kame was curled up in a chair when Jin woke again. He’d put on a shirt and pants and was worrying a hairbrush between his hands. His hair was still wet from the shower. There would be no more sex that night, Jin realized with a pang of regret. His disappointment only lasted as long as it took for Kame to realize he was awake, and then Jin clambered over to the chair at Kame's invitation, curling his body around Kame's still warm from the shower. Kame let Jin invade his space with an air of faint amusement. Even then, Jin’s legs ended up dangling halfway outside the chair.
His cell phone began to ring, muffled beneath layers of clothes. Jin made no move to get it.
“So,” he said after it stopped.
“So,” Kame agreed.
“There’s this photoshoot I’m supposed to make sure you get to. It seems that the group can’t survive without at least one of us.”
Kame laughed, twisted his legs so that one ended up between Jin’s. “Koki would kill you if he heard that.”
“Koki’s a bulldog,” Jin said. “He’s all bark.”
“Koki’s a sweetheart.”
Jin scowled and missed his chance to stop Kame from getting to his feet. His hands grabbed at air. Jin's scowl deepened, cold permeating the place Kame had occupied. He wondered how Kame would react if Jin threw a tantrum, if he declared that Kame was his. For a second, he could almost imagine Kame squaring his jaw and saying, "I've always been yours," like there had never been a moment of doubt.
Kame looked back at him. “You coming?”
And Jin scrambled to follow.
The End