Coming Out (2/11)
Title: Coming Out
Author: thanku4urlove
Pairing: Inoo/Takaki, with a brief rendezvous of Inoo/OMC (Original Male Character)
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Slight cursing, discussions about sexuality, bullying, kissing
Genre: Slice of life? Slow burn, romance
Summary: It's the end of 2007. Inoo Kei is seventeen, and just debuted with nine other boys in Johnny's Entertainment's new group "Hey! Say! JUMP". He's a bit nervous, and a bit overwhelmed, and thinks he might be developing a bit of a crush on his bandmate, Takaki Yuya. It's embarrassing when Takaki finds out, but Inoo is sure that the crush isn't going to go anywhere. They aren't really that close, and Takaki says he's straight, and it's just a little bit of affection. It'll go away. Right?
About phone calls, first experiences, and falling in love.
A/N: Oh do I love writing dialogue. Enjoy!
Previous Part: 1
This chapter can also be read on AO3 here! (x)
When Inoo finally went to sleep that night, he expected to wake up the next morning feeling like his entire world had changed. He’d shared another deep, dark secret with Takaki; he’d rekindled feelings that had never really gone away, but only grown stronger; he’d changed his outlook on how he perceived his bullies, minimalizing it to their problem, not his problem.
He woke up feeling overdramatic.
Nothing was different. Nothing was actually different. He probably didn’t actually like Takaki; Takaki had simply been kind to him when he needed a friend, which was somewhat nice but mostly horrifyingly embarrassing. Bullies were still awful, and would still make him feel like shit no matter how he himself felt about it. All he’d done was make himself a crying, blubbering mess in front of someone whose opinion he cared about over something that didn’t even matter. His eyes were all red and his eyelids all puffy for no reason.
Maybe when he saw Takaki he would feel different, he thought. He walked into practice feeling slightly apprehensive, glancing around. Takaki was playing a hand game with Chinen, and Inoo watched them for a moment before he was distracted by Daiki stepping in front of him.
“Oi.” Daiki was frowning, looking over his face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“...good morning to you too.” Inoo said, dragging his eyes to meet his friend’s own. “What?”
“You look terrible. Are you okay?”
“Oh.” Inoo rubbed a hand over his face. His eyes did burn a bit, though if it was from staying up late or from crying he couldn’t tell. “Is it that noticeable?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else will say anything, probably. Were you up late last night?”
Daiki’s concern was so genuine and real that for a moment, Inoo was fully prepared to tell the whole story, letting his mouth open. Then a loud laugh sounded from across the room, Inoo looking over to see Takaki, evidently having lost whatever game it was he was playing, leaning back with his mouth open in happiness and his eyes closed. Both of his hands were held by Chinen’s own, being swung back and forth in a childlike excitement.
“What’re you smiling at?” Daiki followed his line of sight, then gave Inoo a sympathetic look. “I thought you were over him?”
“I was. Am, I mean. I am!” Inoo glanced quickly back at Daiki. “I never was into him, alright? Not really. Not enough for it to matter or whatever.”
“You can tell me if you like him.” Daiki said. “It’s okay. You know that, right?”
“Of course. But really, Daiki. I don’t.”
Daiki’s expression suggested that he didn’t quite believe what Inoo was saying, so Inoo looked away from him and back at Takaki and Chinen. Then Takaki happened to glance over, meeting Inoo’s eyes and offering up a small smile, and Inoo wasn’t sure he quite believed what he was saying either.
They didn’t talk about the phone call. They didn’t talk at all, not really, though Takaki would randomly smile at him now, something that always caught Inoo-and Inoo’s heart-by surprise. If he didn’t know that Takaki was a self-proclaimed straight boy, he might have misconstrued the glances as a crush… Though he told himself that was mostly wishful thinking. Maybe this was just what it felt like to be Takaki’s friend. Takaki was generally a very friendly person, from what Inoo could tell; random smiles in his direction didn’t seem too off brand.
Inoo found himself trying to make up some reason to call Takaki again. He’d already used the “sorry, wrong number” excuse, and couldn’t very well think of another one. He got to the point where he tried to sneak something out of Takaki’s bag while he was in the bathroom, just so he could pretend he’d found it, but Yuto saw him and gave him a strange look, so he cooked up some excuse that made the kid laugh and slinked away.
Just call him. He told himself. He called Daiki without reason or preamble all the time; he didn’t need a reason to talk to his friends. Because he and Takaki were friends, right? Probably. Maybe? Takaki was some strange, crush-acquaintance that knew way too much about him. There wasn’t really a category for that. But it made him nervous. Talking to Takaki had been so easy the first time, despite his high-strung emotions and the delicate subject matter-he was worried that maybe, it had been a one time thing. That he would call Takaki again, and it would be awkward. That he’d had his one moment, and now it was over.
Inoo was sitting at his desk and staring down at his phone, fully prepared to ring up Daiki and bemoan his situation when the device buzzed in his hand. The screen read Takaki Yuya, and Inoo nearly choked on his tongue. He scrambled to answer it.
“Hello?”
“The twenty-fourth.” Takaki said, with absolutely no preface or prelusion. “Did you do that on purpose?”
Inoo didn’t know what to say, feeling completely off-kilter.
“I have no idea what we’re talking about right now.” He confessed, and for some reason, Takaki laughed.
“The day you called me was the twenty-fourth.” He explained.
“So…?”
“So! That’s the day between our birthdays.” Takaki said. He said it like it was some incredible clue, some significant piece to solving a mystery. “I realized it just now. I mean, I know my birthday is in March and yours is June, but…”
He trailed off at Inoo’s total, entirely dumbfounded silence.
“This is stupid, huh?” He asked, and Inoo couldn’t help himself, bursting into laughter.
“You just… You just figured my secret number plan. Congrats.” Inoo told him once he could speak again.
“Wait, really?” The immediate perk in Takaki’s voice was nearly palpable.
“No! That’s absolutely nothing!” He exclaimed, choking on another round of laughter, and this time Takaki laughed too. He didn’t laugh loud, like Inoo knew he was doing, the sound soft but highly amused instead. It sent a warm feeling into Inoo’s chest, and Inoo slid from his desk chair and plopped himself onto the floor, stretching out onto his back. He was happy to be on the phone with Takaki again. That they were laughing. That again, it felt easy.
“Wait.” A realization had him sitting up fast. “How do you know when my birthday is?”
“Don’t you know when mine is?” Takaki asked back, and sure, Inoo could reverse-engineer that information with the clues Takaki had given him, coming up with March twenty-sixth.
“I had to do math for that.” He explained, dismissing it as evidence.
“You’re smart, huh.”
“But you just… You just know mine?”
“I’m smart.”
“You just said I was smart.”
“We can both be smart.”
Inoo didn’t believe that statement in the slightest, the silence pulling a frown onto his face. Takaki let out a breath.
“There was a birthday party last year, when we were all juniors. It was for you and a couple of other kids that had birthdays around the same time, but they mentioned what day everyone’s birthday was actually on, and I just remembered, I guess.”
“You just… Remembered?” That was a little more plausible, though it felt like such a strange thing to think about. What train of thought had Takaki been on to come to this “twenty-fourth” realization?
“I have a good memory.”
“You do?” That didn’t seem right, Inoo thinking back to a couple of days ago and understanding why. “No you don’t, you couldn’t remember Okamoto’s dog’s name, which will probably come up more often than my birthday will.”
“Do you remember Okamoto’s dog’s name?” Takaki challenged, and at Inoo’s silence, burst again into laughter. “I can’t explain it.” He confessed. “I don’t know. You’re more interesting, so it’s easier to remember stuff about you.”
Inoo laughed. It was the only thing he could think to do, the only thing to distract from that tugging ache in his chest, that persistent affection that he both loved and wanted to just go away.
“I wasn’t… I wasn’t joking.” Takaki said, but before that sentence had Inoo completely frozen, he continued. “How is school going? Any better?”
School was… School was normal, mostly. Maybe a little better, but stranger too, in a way that could be worse. There was a new kid in Inoo’s class.
He’d said where he’d transferred from, but Inoo no longer remembered it. He was quiet. He was odd, though Inoo wasn’t sure that he had too much room to call other people odd. He still thought it anyway.
Inoo found himself looking at the boy a lot, with no idea why. He just did it, glancing behind himself before he realized he was doing it. And it was always short, always for less than a second, because whenever he did, the boy was looking back at him.
Inoo couldn’t remember the new kid’s name. He didn’t really want to, either; it was his final semester of his final year. He didn’t want to get involved with anyone at this school for any reason anymore. He just wanted to be done. Nobody had wanted to be his friend, and he was used to it that way. Just because this guy was new, just because he might not know who Inoo was, and that Inoo was an idol, that didn’t change anything…. Right? He was telling himself not to hold out hope. So, externally, he wasn’t.
One day in class, he hadn’t been paying attention, the last lesson of the day going by faster than he realized, and before he could pack up his belongings his desk was surrounded. The taunts were light, all words and simple insults that Inoo had heard before. Then one of them grabbed at Inoo’s notebook and yanked, ripping a few pages of notes out. Thankfully, it was notes from a few weeks ago, stuff that the class had already been tested on, so Inoo didn’t bother getting it back, finishing his packing up while they taunted his--perfectly average looking, if he was being honest--handwriting. They let him get to his feet without touching him, so Inoo thought that if he kept his head down and muscled his way through, maybe they would lose interest.
Miraculously, it worked. Inoo lifted his head as he stepped through the classroom door, and met a familiar pair of eyes. The new kid was standing against the opposite wall, situated at a perfect angle to see Inoo’s desk through the open doorway. Not saying anything. Not offering to help. Just watching. The hope Inoo had refused to acknowledge that he had was dashed, and he pushed past the boy without a word.
Inoo had decided, before even graduating high school, that he was going to Meiji University. High school was hell, but he’d followed through for the entire three years even without strictly needing to. It felt foolish, and pointless, to just end it at that. He needed those years of high school to mean something. Bullying felt too juvenile a thing to follow him into university, but if it tried, Inoo was determined not to let it. So, while it was only a halfway point in terms of his higher education, graduation from high school was still a relief.
That year was proving to be a very busy one for their group, however. It was 2008, and they had three releases lined up as well as an end of year concert to get ready for, and they were so inexperienced at their jobs that they needed months in advance to prepare. Inoo didn’t think that he could enroll in college that year and still succeed, so he decided to set his sights on Meiji in 2009 and put all his focus into simply surviving as the group got ready to release Dreams Come True, their second single.
The songs themselves weren’t too difficult, the lyrics repetitive and easy to remember. But they still spent hours in the recording studio, hours in photoshoots for the CD cover, and had an entire music video to put together. It made Inoo glad that he didn’t have homework to worry about, not able to do much more than go home and collapse in bed.
He’d also been too busy to call Takaki back. He wanted to call Takaki, feeling easier about the whole idea now that it had happened more than once, but he couldn’t find the time. Takaki didn’t call him either, but Takaki was busy too; too busy to even have music video filming on the same day as the rest of them. Takaki was the lead in a television show.
Aside from it being “about time”, they were releasing their single so that Takaki could have a solo on the CD for the show. He filmed his part in the music video with Yabu, and the rest of them filmed later. The music video filming was actually extremely fun, Inoo forcing himself to just calm down and relax and have fun with his groupmates--groupmates that he was coming to call close friends. Despite the joking and the laughing and trying to ignore the rest of his responsibilities, he continued to look around for something, not realizing what it was until halfway through the day.
He was trying to lay eyes on Takaki, despite knowing he wasn’t there. It was something automatic, something he didn’t realize he was doing until after he’d glanced around, found nothing, and felt a little disappointed about it. It was weird how often he found himself performing the scan of the room, that action of wanting to see Takaki despite knowing fully well that even if Takaki was there, even if they did see each other, they wouldn’t talk. Did Inoo just want to look at him?
“I can’t tell if I like him… Or if I just like looking at him.” He told Daiki as they were leaving, prompting his friend to burst out laughing.
On the day the single was released, Inoo felt a sense of rolling dread in his stomach for reasons he couldn’t pin down. He wasn’t embarrassed, not really; he couldn’t be, not when all of his band mates were next to him, doing the exact same thing. The song wasn’t a masterpiece, but it wasn’t like he’d written it, it wasn’t like he would be made fun of for the way it was composed-
Made fun of: those words struck a chord. He was expecting to be teased. He was waiting for someone in his personal life to realize who he was, and care, and gang around him or beat him up. It was a bit nerve wracking every time he walked around his neighborhood on days off and saw someone from school, keeping his eyes on his feet and trying not to run away. He was so twitchy after the release that his parents asked him about it, and he found himself hours after dinner had ended, still sitting at the table with them and talking to them about all that he’d gone through with his high school classmates. He tried not to cry, but didn’t really succeed, his mother smoothing his hair down with her soft hands and asking him if there was anything that they could do now to help. Inoo didn’t know what to say.
Three days after Dreams Come True came out, Inoo took dinner into his bedroom and decided he wanted to call Takaki. It was the twenty-fourth, and he declared that excuse to be reason enough.
“Hey Inoo.”
The instant use of his name was surprising, though Inoo wasn’t sure why; he knew about caller ID and all. Maybe it was just hearing Takaki say it. Either way, it threw him off for a moment.
“Happy phone call day.” Inoo answered, and Takaki laughed. “Are you busy?”
“Not right now. It’s late. I’m being driven home.” Takaki said. Inoo frowned, looking out his bedroom window. Night had fallen a while ago.
“Where were you?”
“Set! Filming. We’re almost completely done. I had a big fight scene today; I got all beat up.” There was a smile in Takaki’s voice. “Do you wanna see?”
“What?” Inoo asked. “You got beat up? Why do you sound so happy about it?”
Instead of answering, the call disconnected. Inoo pulled his phone from his ear and stared at it, wondering maybe if Takaki went under a bridge or something, when the screen lit up from a text from Takaki instead.
Upon opening it, Inoo saw that Takaki had sent him a picture. It was a picture Takaki had taken of himself, looking into the camera with a bit of a smug expression. He had a big purpled blotch of a bruise on his cheekbone and chin, with blood coming from the side of his mouth. Maybe he should be concerned, or unhappy with seeing Takaki hurt, but Inoo’s first thought was a slew of expletives. Takaki… Takaki looked hot.
His staring was interrupted by his phone ringing in his hand.
“Well?” Takaki asked.
“Well?” Inoo asked back. “Are, like… Are you okay?”
“It’s just makeup.” Takaki said easily. “Have you been watching the show?”
The show. Takaki was one of the main characters in the third season of Gokusen, which had started airing roughly two weeks ago. And no, Inoo hadn’t seen a second of it.
“No, I’ve been busy.” In truth, it felt weird and embarrassing to watch it, and it aired at the same time his little sister Aki liked to watch her romance dramas, and he couldn’t think of a reason to put it on that Aki wouldn’t tease him for.
“Oh.”
Inoo tried not to read too much into the fact that Takaki sounded a little put out.
“I want to.” Inoo continued, because it was true. An excuse to stare at Takaki? He would take it. “After seeing that picture, I might have to.”
“What does that mean?”
“You look sexy with your face all bashed in.”
“Bashed in? My face isn’t bashed in.” Takaki protested. Then, a little less indignantly, but thankfully not uncomfortably, “I look sexy?”
“Of course. Being beat up is so sexy.”
“It is?” Another pause. “Do… Is that something that you… You like, or just… People like?”
“You can say guys.” Inoo said, enjoying Takaki’s spluttering across the line. Takaki sounded so awkward that Inoo knew he had to not be just talking about all people thinking it was sexy. “And I don’t know if most guys think it’s sexy. I mean, they should. You look all manly and roughed up.”
Takaki laughed a little, the sound quiet, close to his ear, and still slightly uncoordinated.
“So you like manly guys then?” He asked after a moment. Inoo found himself falling into thought, wanting to give the question an honest answer.
“Well, I’m not sure about that.” He glanced at the food on his plate, picking through it with his chopsticks. “Nothing wrong with a manly guy. But when they get too muscley things just get weird. I’m not really into like… A sixty-four pack, or whatever.”
Takaki burst out laughing. “That’s all it takes? No extra chest muscles and you like someone?”
“I mean, I don’t know. Male pattern baldness really gets me going.”
At that, Takaki’s laughter was even louder, but further away from Inoo’s ear, as though he’d thrown his head back. It was the loudest Inoo had heard Takaki laugh on a phone call before, and desperately wished he could see it in person, though the sound alone made his chest almost hurt with pride and affection.
“Bald and lazy. You sure are picky.”
“I don’t know if I have a type.” Inoo confessed. “I don’t think I’ve had enough serious crushes on people to actually tell. If I don’t think that there’s even the possibility of a guy liking me back, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly, and it’s not like guys go around advertising that sort of thing.”
A small, contemplative sound came across the line.
“I guess I get that.” Takaki said after another quiet moment. “So, what I’ve got to go on is not much working out and the less hair the better. Got it. Anything else?”
“The baldness thing was a joke!” Inoo protested. “Why, are you making a checklist?”
“No, shut up. I’m making conversation.”
“And a conversation goes both ways.” Inoo said. “So tell me, what kind of guys are you into?”
I’m--!” Takaki was flustered for a moment before Inoo began to laugh at him, and then Takaki laughed too. “Hey, stop. I… I don’t know.”
“You don’t have a type?”
“I mean, pretty girls. They’re nice to look at. Girls that are friendly.”
“Everyone likes pretty, friendly girls.” Inoo countered. “Even me. You don’t have anything specific?”
Takaki fell into thought, Inoo taking a couple of moments to put food into his mouth.
“Just anything cute, really.” Takaki said. “This is a secret or whatever, but I love cute stuff.”
“Aw, want me to buy you a Hello Kitty pencil case?”
“I’m not a nerd like you, I don’t need a pencil case.” Takaki shot back, and Inoo laughed. “But seriously, I’m weak against anything with big eyes and a cute face, and not just girls.”
Not just girls. Inoo’s breath completely stilled in his chest, but then Takaki continued.
“Like dogs and cartoon characters and stuff.”
Oh. False alarm--did false hope count as a false alarm?--and the laugh that Inoo managed out sounded much too stressed and strained to his own ears, so he tried another joke to play it off.
“Watch out, I’m going to tell Friday magazine that your ideal type is dogs and cartoon characters.”
That had Takaki laughing again, but it sounded muffled, like he was covering his face with his hand or something.
“You’re awful.” He said, but he still had the laughter in his voice. “If you do that, I’ll tell everyone that your type is pretty and friendly girls.”
It was Inoo’s turn to burst out laughing, a piece of meat from his dinner plate rolling across his desk when his hand went weak with amusement and he lost his grip on his chopsticks.
“That isn’t even a threat! That would be good for me, actually.”
“It wouldn’t be good for your chances with all the manly guys.”
“Ah, yes. The manly guys. I’ll just look at you with my big eyes and my cute face and you won’t tell them anything. You would be completely powerless against me.”
Takaki was quiet for a moment, and though Inoo knew it was just a little unreasonable to be so worried, he still felt a flash of fear run through his chest, wondering if maybe he’d taken the whole joke too far.
“You do have big eyes.” Takaki said, his voice quiet again. “Hey, I just got home. I’ve gotta go.”
Then he hung up, and Inoo simply sat at his desk, begging himself just finish his dinner and go to bed and not read too desperately into what Takaki had just said.