FIC: Quicken to Silver, Ohtori/Shishido, NC17 (13/41)
Title: Quicken to Silver (13/41)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: In which time passes and people change and drift, but there is always tennis. Ohtori/Shishido
Shishido-san seems to think that Ohtori goes to concerts all the time. Ohtori doesn’t say otherwise, that this is really the first time he’s ever been to one. His father didn’t question why he was dressed up because Ohtori was finally doing something valuable for his music. His mother questioned why he was wearing his best suit and who he was going with, because, really “She must be a lucky girl.”
“It’s…just a friend from tennis club,” Ohtori tries to explain.
His sister Chizuko laughs and ruffles his hair. “Of course. And I go to concerts with my girlfriends from art club all the time, Choutarou-chan, riiiight.”
“You did last week,” Ohtori whispers.
“That was what you think, idiot,” she whispers back. “Like I’d tell our father who I actually went with. Duh.”
The concert hall is big and filled with people. Ohtori finds Shishido-san by the coat check. He smiles and says, “Hello,” softly because it’s all he can do not to take his eyes off Shishido, who stands lanky and casual in his own suit. Ohtori’s fingers itch to undo the buttons of his shirt and wiggle down between Shishido’s stomach and the waistband of his pants. They’ve never gone that far, but now Ohtori longs to even more.
“Stop staring,” Shishido hisses. “Someone might see.” But he smiles the whole while as they walk to find their seats, shuffling into the auditorium, down rows of seats half-filled with audience members.
“Do you know this piece?” Shishido asks. He reads the program and tosses it aside. “I have no idea what happens at these things.”
“Ah, I think we wait for the orchestra to play,” Ohtori says. “And then we listen to the music.”
“I knew that,” Shishido says. He sighs and shakes his head and mumbles something about “uncool” under his breath. Ohtori smiles back at him.
“Well, well, well! You were the last person on earth I thought I’d ever see someplace like this, Shishido.”
Shishido’s eyes go wide as he and Ohtori both turn around. There, three rows behind, Atobe sits with a big smirk spread across his face. His hair has mostly grown back, although it is still shorter than when he was buchou.
“Shut up, Atobe,” Shishido says.
Atobe waves his hand. “No need to be rude, Shishido. I hope you don’t become too distracted during the show by Ohtori’s moon eyes.”
“I- I don’t have moon eyes, Atobe-buchou,” Ohtori sputters.
Atobe laughs. Shishido grits his teeth.
“Enjoy the show, Shishido,” Atobe drawls. “Whether it’s the music you choose to pay attention to or not.”
“Asshole,” Shishido mutters.
“Maybe we should just ignore him, Shishido-san,” Ohtori says. Shishido sits and glowers as the musicians start to take their places in the pit. Ohtori sighs and leans over, pressing into Shishido’s shoulder. “At least you’re here with someone,” he whispers into Shishido’s ear. Ohtori smiles to himself when Shishido shivers in his seat, then he adds, “Atobe-senpai is by himself.”
Shishido glances over his shoulder.
“You’re right,” he says.
When the lights dim, Shishido’s hand sneaks across the armrest to touch Ohtori’s palm. Their fingers lace together, palm-to-palm, and stay that way until the last note of the music strains and swells in the hall. Ohtori prods Shishido in the side after the performance and offers him a tissue to wipe the spot of drool from the side of his mouth.
“It was a…really good concert,” Shishido says.
Ohtori nods. “You fell asleep five minutes in.” Shishido flushes and mutters something, but Ohtori doesn’t mind.
***
At night, when everyone else is sleeping, sometimes Ohtori pulls the box out from under his bed and looks at the little bottle. The cat hops up onto the end of his bed and walks up to him, insisting to be pet. Ohtori pushes her aside. It’s bad enough that he has to hide the bottle from his family, he doesn’t want the cat to know about it either.
When she curls up at the foot of his bed, then he opens the bottle. It smells a little strange, something he can’t quite place. It’s smooth and slick between his fingers, and better on his cock when he ventures that far. His hand slides against his erection. Ohtori bits his lip and moves his hand faster, harder under his heels dig into his mattress and he whispers, “Shishido-san” as he comes between the sheets.
Now his sheets smell faintly of the lube, and of his own spunk. “Damn,” he whispers. Hopefully his mother won’t notice and he can sneak his sheets into the wash without anyone discovering the smell.
The cat is still sleeping.
He’s read his sister’s Cosmopolitans. He knows What Sex is Like For Him and Moves That Make Guys Melt. He knows His Secret Pleasure Zone and How To Snag Any Man You Want. Atobe might think he’s naïve, might think he makes moon eyes at Shishido-san, but Atobe has never had sex either.
Maybe Shishido wants to beat Atobe in this, in something at least once. But Shishido-san doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. Ohtori meets him on lazy Sunday afternoons and they go to rent movies or play video games at Shishido’s house, sometimes play a game of tennis at the sports complex when Shishido can book a court for an hour or two.
Schoolwork seems like a joke. With his acceptance into Hyoutei senior high school, Ohtori neglects his homework along with most of the rest of his yearmates. Year finals in February are nothing more than a rubber stamp.
His mother pesters him to keep up his piano. “And your violin, too, because you have more time without the exams.” Ohtori grudgingly drags his violin case from his closet, but it is forgotten once more as soon as his cellphone buzzes and Shishido is on the line.
The cold of January turns to the slight thaw of February. His birthday falls in the first week of year finals.
He wonders if Shishido-san will give him a present. He wonders if maybe…if maybe his parents and grandmother and sister can somehow leave the house for a few hours sometime soon. Ohtori knows what he wants for his birthday. He’ll be fifteen and that’s plenty old enough. He has the little bottle, he know what to do, sorta. The thought makes his stomach flutter and his hands shake.
It doesn’t work out. His grandmother rarely leaves the house and someone is always there. He doesn’t want to press Shishido-san because Shishido-san was the one who wanted to wait in the first place, not him.
The night before his birthday, Ohtori goes out to the shops to buy chocolates and more mint gum for Shishido. It is Valentine’s tomorrow, too, and he wants to show the person he loves that he loves him. It becomes more and more apparent every day. He thinks of Shishido in his dreams, in his classes, even when eating breakfast and walking to the bus. He feels like an uncool idiot half the time, stumbling and fumbling, but at the same time, it doesn’t matter because Shishido-san doesn’t seem to care that Ohtori is uncool or an idiot.
He carries home a small bag with the wrapped chocolates inside, careful to stuff the bag into his backpack before he walks inside and before anyone can ask him questions about who they are for. His sister seems to know everything and corners him after supper.
“Buy something for the girlfriend today, Choutarou?”
Ohtori tries to lie and say no, but his furious blush gives everything away. His sister laughs and calls him an idiot, but she doesn’t say anything more to their parents. His phone buzzes in his pocket, making his heart leap in the hope it’s Shishido calling. He flips his cellphone and grins when he sees the number.
Ohtori answers it and shuts his bedroom door behind himself. He slides down the door to the floor, listening to Shishido’s voice, the sound soothing and wonderful and making his mind trail off again.
Shishido only has to say “Choutarou” and Ohtori is gone, his eyes heavy-lidded with desire that courses through his veins, pumping straight to his groin.
“I love you, Shishido-san,” he whispers.
Shishido’s voice stops. Silence hangs over the call.
Ohtori blinks, realizing what he has said. He sucks in a breath and tries to apologize, “I- Shishido-san-”
The sound of Shishido’s breathing on the other end has ceased, too. The line goes dead, dead air that echoes louder than any noise, than any song, than any voice in Ohtori’s mind.
***
The first thing Ohtori does is stare in horror at his cellphone. It feels heavy and foreign in his hand. The numbers still shine blue, the screen still bright until it fades and Ohtori remembers he needs to breathe.
He doesn’t feel like breathing, not with the growing pain blooming in his chest, pressing down on his heart.
The second thing Ohtori does, once he realizes that yes, he actually did say that to Shishido, is frantically redial Shishido’s phone number. It’s number one on his call list, and yet he forgets what he has to press before he summons what little dignity he has left and presses the speed dial.
Pick-up pick-up pick-up pick-up. He hopes. He whispers. He wants Shishido to answer, to be near by and say “Hello” in that vaguely irritated way he always sounds like on the phone.
One ring.
Ohtori wrings his hands.
Two.
Ohtori can feel a cold sweat dribbling down the sides of his face.
Three.
A voice message.
Ohtori calls again. His hands shake and threaten to drop his cell phone.
Each ring is agony, each ring is a blunt blow to his chest. Three strikes and he’s out.
He sinks to the floor and moans, defeated.
The third thing Ohtori does is punch his wall. It shakes the framed photograph of his family. It thunders through the house and makes his sister yell at him. He doesn’t hear a word she says. He hits his wall again, and again, determined to bleed out his pain into something tangible.
His knuckles are raw by the sixth punch.
His father knocks at his door. “What are you doing in there?” he asks, his voice stern.
Ohtori bites back a whimper. “Nothing!” he insists.
He punches his own arm next.
The skin on his hand finally cracks and bleeds when he bashes his fist against his bed. He doesn’t care if he destroys his hand, or his arm.
He thinks of tennis, without Shishido-san, ever.
Ohtori falls face-face onto his mattress as the tears start to well in his eyes. It doesn’t matter if he’s uncool anymore. Shishido-san hates him.
He cries himself to sleep, then wakes up in a rumpled school uniform. He is too exhausted to care about changing. He drags himself to school, he drags himself to his exams, he drags himself home, then shuts himself in his room again, too exhausted to even cry.
It is Valentine’s Day. It is his birthday. There are little boxes of chocolates and star-shaped candies and sweet-scented notes waiting for him in his locker. Ohtori bags them up and takes them home, pausing at the trash bins outside the school gates. He hovers the bag over the rim before guilt holds him back from throwing out the gifts of girls who have no part in his misery.
At home, he shoves the entire bag under his bed, intent on leaving it there until White Day when he will write thank you notes, then give the gifts to Mukahi-senpai, or maybe Watanabe-kun in biology class, who loves chocolates more than anything.
He doesn’t even bother to put on a smile for his birthday. He can’t bring himself to even pretend.
“You must be busy thinking about your year finals,” his father reasons. “Good boy.”
Ohtori finishes his exams, three more days of catatonia, and then tells his mother he is sick and can’t go to school. He has never outright lied to her like this before, so she believes him, pressing a hand to his forehead and pronouncing his temperature fine, but his bloodshot eyes and headache and nausea the sign of something else.
Under the sheets, he can cocoon himself away from the world, away from reminders of tennis, of posters and photos and a tennis racket, now buried deep deep in his closet. Here, he is a fifteen year old boy with a broken heart and he feels like he wants to die most of the time, and nauseous and sick for the rest.
When he does dream, gone are the images of Shishido moaning and panting and writhing like a fish under him, gone are the mornings when he wakes up hard and aching, his hands already touching himself, gone are the mornings when he wakes up with a dampness between his legs, over his belly, too, and the sheets. Now the only dampness there is sweat, not come.
Three days of faking sick before his mother rolls him out of bed. “Is everything all right, Choutarou?” she asks. She sits on the edge of his bed, awkward and concerned, until Ohtori caves and leans against her shoulder and cries. He says nothing. She rubs his back and murmurs things about growing up, about how things will be better, about how things always work out for the best, even though they don’t seem that way. He lets her think he’s better when he stops.
But he really only stops because his eyes can’t cry anymore and his body can’t shake anymore and he can’t breathe without becoming lightheaded again.
The angst of February fades into March with the coming of spring and the buds on cherry trees. The dull pain does lessen, as his mother said, but Ohtori can’t sleep well at night knowing he has a photograph with Shishido stashed under his mattress and he can’t bring himself to remove it because he won’t look at Shishido and he wants to get over him and he wants to play tennis in senior high- damn Shishido!- and Shishido may have hurt him, may have bruised and shattered him inside, but he’s stronger than that.
Ohtori wants to be stronger than that, if only to prove to Shishido-san in the end that he was worth it. And Shishido lost a second time around.
He hates feeling this way, angry and vengeful, but it’s the only thing that keeps him going through the last days of school, through graduation, through the assemblies and presentations. Ohtori stares at his classmates, all smiles, and envies them.
When Hiyoshi phones him and asks, “Are you busy on Thursday? Kabaji and I are going to the streetcourts by the school to practice before senior high starts”, Ohtori says he’d love to come, he’d love to play, and he’ll even bring the balls.
The racket trembles in his hand the first time he holds it, but the grip is engraved in his muscles, in his bones, and when he hits that neon lob Hiyoshi serves, everything floods back, a myriad of happy and sad and angry and hurt and determination.
I will keep playing this game, Shishido, he thinks, but this time it is for me.
It might be an unofficial game, but when Kabaji calls out, “Ohtori, game, 6-2”, Ohtori feels the first lightness in his heart he has in six weeks. And it feels good.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: In which time passes and people change and drift, but there is always tennis. Ohtori/Shishido
Shishido-san seems to think that Ohtori goes to concerts all the time. Ohtori doesn’t say otherwise, that this is really the first time he’s ever been to one. His father didn’t question why he was dressed up because Ohtori was finally doing something valuable for his music. His mother questioned why he was wearing his best suit and who he was going with, because, really “She must be a lucky girl.”
“It’s…just a friend from tennis club,” Ohtori tries to explain.
His sister Chizuko laughs and ruffles his hair. “Of course. And I go to concerts with my girlfriends from art club all the time, Choutarou-chan, riiiight.”
“You did last week,” Ohtori whispers.
“That was what you think, idiot,” she whispers back. “Like I’d tell our father who I actually went with. Duh.”
The concert hall is big and filled with people. Ohtori finds Shishido-san by the coat check. He smiles and says, “Hello,” softly because it’s all he can do not to take his eyes off Shishido, who stands lanky and casual in his own suit. Ohtori’s fingers itch to undo the buttons of his shirt and wiggle down between Shishido’s stomach and the waistband of his pants. They’ve never gone that far, but now Ohtori longs to even more.
“Stop staring,” Shishido hisses. “Someone might see.” But he smiles the whole while as they walk to find their seats, shuffling into the auditorium, down rows of seats half-filled with audience members.
“Do you know this piece?” Shishido asks. He reads the program and tosses it aside. “I have no idea what happens at these things.”
“Ah, I think we wait for the orchestra to play,” Ohtori says. “And then we listen to the music.”
“I knew that,” Shishido says. He sighs and shakes his head and mumbles something about “uncool” under his breath. Ohtori smiles back at him.
“Well, well, well! You were the last person on earth I thought I’d ever see someplace like this, Shishido.”
Shishido’s eyes go wide as he and Ohtori both turn around. There, three rows behind, Atobe sits with a big smirk spread across his face. His hair has mostly grown back, although it is still shorter than when he was buchou.
“Shut up, Atobe,” Shishido says.
Atobe waves his hand. “No need to be rude, Shishido. I hope you don’t become too distracted during the show by Ohtori’s moon eyes.”
“I- I don’t have moon eyes, Atobe-buchou,” Ohtori sputters.
Atobe laughs. Shishido grits his teeth.
“Enjoy the show, Shishido,” Atobe drawls. “Whether it’s the music you choose to pay attention to or not.”
“Asshole,” Shishido mutters.
“Maybe we should just ignore him, Shishido-san,” Ohtori says. Shishido sits and glowers as the musicians start to take their places in the pit. Ohtori sighs and leans over, pressing into Shishido’s shoulder. “At least you’re here with someone,” he whispers into Shishido’s ear. Ohtori smiles to himself when Shishido shivers in his seat, then he adds, “Atobe-senpai is by himself.”
Shishido glances over his shoulder.
“You’re right,” he says.
When the lights dim, Shishido’s hand sneaks across the armrest to touch Ohtori’s palm. Their fingers lace together, palm-to-palm, and stay that way until the last note of the music strains and swells in the hall. Ohtori prods Shishido in the side after the performance and offers him a tissue to wipe the spot of drool from the side of his mouth.
“It was a…really good concert,” Shishido says.
Ohtori nods. “You fell asleep five minutes in.” Shishido flushes and mutters something, but Ohtori doesn’t mind.
***
At night, when everyone else is sleeping, sometimes Ohtori pulls the box out from under his bed and looks at the little bottle. The cat hops up onto the end of his bed and walks up to him, insisting to be pet. Ohtori pushes her aside. It’s bad enough that he has to hide the bottle from his family, he doesn’t want the cat to know about it either.
When she curls up at the foot of his bed, then he opens the bottle. It smells a little strange, something he can’t quite place. It’s smooth and slick between his fingers, and better on his cock when he ventures that far. His hand slides against his erection. Ohtori bits his lip and moves his hand faster, harder under his heels dig into his mattress and he whispers, “Shishido-san” as he comes between the sheets.
Now his sheets smell faintly of the lube, and of his own spunk. “Damn,” he whispers. Hopefully his mother won’t notice and he can sneak his sheets into the wash without anyone discovering the smell.
The cat is still sleeping.
He’s read his sister’s Cosmopolitans. He knows What Sex is Like For Him and Moves That Make Guys Melt. He knows His Secret Pleasure Zone and How To Snag Any Man You Want. Atobe might think he’s naïve, might think he makes moon eyes at Shishido-san, but Atobe has never had sex either.
Maybe Shishido wants to beat Atobe in this, in something at least once. But Shishido-san doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. Ohtori meets him on lazy Sunday afternoons and they go to rent movies or play video games at Shishido’s house, sometimes play a game of tennis at the sports complex when Shishido can book a court for an hour or two.
Schoolwork seems like a joke. With his acceptance into Hyoutei senior high school, Ohtori neglects his homework along with most of the rest of his yearmates. Year finals in February are nothing more than a rubber stamp.
His mother pesters him to keep up his piano. “And your violin, too, because you have more time without the exams.” Ohtori grudgingly drags his violin case from his closet, but it is forgotten once more as soon as his cellphone buzzes and Shishido is on the line.
The cold of January turns to the slight thaw of February. His birthday falls in the first week of year finals.
He wonders if Shishido-san will give him a present. He wonders if maybe…if maybe his parents and grandmother and sister can somehow leave the house for a few hours sometime soon. Ohtori knows what he wants for his birthday. He’ll be fifteen and that’s plenty old enough. He has the little bottle, he know what to do, sorta. The thought makes his stomach flutter and his hands shake.
It doesn’t work out. His grandmother rarely leaves the house and someone is always there. He doesn’t want to press Shishido-san because Shishido-san was the one who wanted to wait in the first place, not him.
The night before his birthday, Ohtori goes out to the shops to buy chocolates and more mint gum for Shishido. It is Valentine’s tomorrow, too, and he wants to show the person he loves that he loves him. It becomes more and more apparent every day. He thinks of Shishido in his dreams, in his classes, even when eating breakfast and walking to the bus. He feels like an uncool idiot half the time, stumbling and fumbling, but at the same time, it doesn’t matter because Shishido-san doesn’t seem to care that Ohtori is uncool or an idiot.
He carries home a small bag with the wrapped chocolates inside, careful to stuff the bag into his backpack before he walks inside and before anyone can ask him questions about who they are for. His sister seems to know everything and corners him after supper.
“Buy something for the girlfriend today, Choutarou?”
Ohtori tries to lie and say no, but his furious blush gives everything away. His sister laughs and calls him an idiot, but she doesn’t say anything more to their parents. His phone buzzes in his pocket, making his heart leap in the hope it’s Shishido calling. He flips his cellphone and grins when he sees the number.
Ohtori answers it and shuts his bedroom door behind himself. He slides down the door to the floor, listening to Shishido’s voice, the sound soothing and wonderful and making his mind trail off again.
Shishido only has to say “Choutarou” and Ohtori is gone, his eyes heavy-lidded with desire that courses through his veins, pumping straight to his groin.
“I love you, Shishido-san,” he whispers.
Shishido’s voice stops. Silence hangs over the call.
Ohtori blinks, realizing what he has said. He sucks in a breath and tries to apologize, “I- Shishido-san-”
The sound of Shishido’s breathing on the other end has ceased, too. The line goes dead, dead air that echoes louder than any noise, than any song, than any voice in Ohtori’s mind.
***
The first thing Ohtori does is stare in horror at his cellphone. It feels heavy and foreign in his hand. The numbers still shine blue, the screen still bright until it fades and Ohtori remembers he needs to breathe.
He doesn’t feel like breathing, not with the growing pain blooming in his chest, pressing down on his heart.
The second thing Ohtori does, once he realizes that yes, he actually did say that to Shishido, is frantically redial Shishido’s phone number. It’s number one on his call list, and yet he forgets what he has to press before he summons what little dignity he has left and presses the speed dial.
Pick-up pick-up pick-up pick-up. He hopes. He whispers. He wants Shishido to answer, to be near by and say “Hello” in that vaguely irritated way he always sounds like on the phone.
One ring.
Ohtori wrings his hands.
Two.
Ohtori can feel a cold sweat dribbling down the sides of his face.
Three.
A voice message.
Ohtori calls again. His hands shake and threaten to drop his cell phone.
Each ring is agony, each ring is a blunt blow to his chest. Three strikes and he’s out.
He sinks to the floor and moans, defeated.
The third thing Ohtori does is punch his wall. It shakes the framed photograph of his family. It thunders through the house and makes his sister yell at him. He doesn’t hear a word she says. He hits his wall again, and again, determined to bleed out his pain into something tangible.
His knuckles are raw by the sixth punch.
His father knocks at his door. “What are you doing in there?” he asks, his voice stern.
Ohtori bites back a whimper. “Nothing!” he insists.
He punches his own arm next.
The skin on his hand finally cracks and bleeds when he bashes his fist against his bed. He doesn’t care if he destroys his hand, or his arm.
He thinks of tennis, without Shishido-san, ever.
Ohtori falls face-face onto his mattress as the tears start to well in his eyes. It doesn’t matter if he’s uncool anymore. Shishido-san hates him.
He cries himself to sleep, then wakes up in a rumpled school uniform. He is too exhausted to care about changing. He drags himself to school, he drags himself to his exams, he drags himself home, then shuts himself in his room again, too exhausted to even cry.
It is Valentine’s Day. It is his birthday. There are little boxes of chocolates and star-shaped candies and sweet-scented notes waiting for him in his locker. Ohtori bags them up and takes them home, pausing at the trash bins outside the school gates. He hovers the bag over the rim before guilt holds him back from throwing out the gifts of girls who have no part in his misery.
At home, he shoves the entire bag under his bed, intent on leaving it there until White Day when he will write thank you notes, then give the gifts to Mukahi-senpai, or maybe Watanabe-kun in biology class, who loves chocolates more than anything.
He doesn’t even bother to put on a smile for his birthday. He can’t bring himself to even pretend.
“You must be busy thinking about your year finals,” his father reasons. “Good boy.”
Ohtori finishes his exams, three more days of catatonia, and then tells his mother he is sick and can’t go to school. He has never outright lied to her like this before, so she believes him, pressing a hand to his forehead and pronouncing his temperature fine, but his bloodshot eyes and headache and nausea the sign of something else.
Under the sheets, he can cocoon himself away from the world, away from reminders of tennis, of posters and photos and a tennis racket, now buried deep deep in his closet. Here, he is a fifteen year old boy with a broken heart and he feels like he wants to die most of the time, and nauseous and sick for the rest.
When he does dream, gone are the images of Shishido moaning and panting and writhing like a fish under him, gone are the mornings when he wakes up hard and aching, his hands already touching himself, gone are the mornings when he wakes up with a dampness between his legs, over his belly, too, and the sheets. Now the only dampness there is sweat, not come.
Three days of faking sick before his mother rolls him out of bed. “Is everything all right, Choutarou?” she asks. She sits on the edge of his bed, awkward and concerned, until Ohtori caves and leans against her shoulder and cries. He says nothing. She rubs his back and murmurs things about growing up, about how things will be better, about how things always work out for the best, even though they don’t seem that way. He lets her think he’s better when he stops.
But he really only stops because his eyes can’t cry anymore and his body can’t shake anymore and he can’t breathe without becoming lightheaded again.
The angst of February fades into March with the coming of spring and the buds on cherry trees. The dull pain does lessen, as his mother said, but Ohtori can’t sleep well at night knowing he has a photograph with Shishido stashed under his mattress and he can’t bring himself to remove it because he won’t look at Shishido and he wants to get over him and he wants to play tennis in senior high- damn Shishido!- and Shishido may have hurt him, may have bruised and shattered him inside, but he’s stronger than that.
Ohtori wants to be stronger than that, if only to prove to Shishido-san in the end that he was worth it. And Shishido lost a second time around.
He hates feeling this way, angry and vengeful, but it’s the only thing that keeps him going through the last days of school, through graduation, through the assemblies and presentations. Ohtori stares at his classmates, all smiles, and envies them.
When Hiyoshi phones him and asks, “Are you busy on Thursday? Kabaji and I are going to the streetcourts by the school to practice before senior high starts”, Ohtori says he’d love to come, he’d love to play, and he’ll even bring the balls.
The racket trembles in his hand the first time he holds it, but the grip is engraved in his muscles, in his bones, and when he hits that neon lob Hiyoshi serves, everything floods back, a myriad of happy and sad and angry and hurt and determination.
I will keep playing this game, Shishido, he thinks, but this time it is for me.
It might be an unofficial game, but when Kabaji calls out, “Ohtori, game, 6-2”, Ohtori feels the first lightness in his heart he has in six weeks. And it feels good.