Chapter Text
Kei Tsukishima is laying in bed with Testuro Kuroo, facing out towards the room and contemplating the decisions that led her here. She feels restless, despite the physical exhaustion settling beneath her skin. Kuroo is unconcerned, as she’s dozing off with her chest pressed to Tsukishima’s back and her face buried in her hair. One arm is looped loosely around Tsukishima’s waist. This is the way it seems to always go, and Tsukishima doesn’t know how to feel about it.
It’s early fall, and the room is beginning to feel too warm to remain in bed with another person, so Tsukishima shifts to put distance between them. When the cool air of the room hits her back, she sighs. Where they were connected, she felt hot and sticky and stifled.
Now almost completely asleep, Kurro grumbles and digs herself a little deeper into Tsukishima’s space. At this point, Tsukishima knows that it’s just about impossible to wake her, and the opportunity becomes the channel for her restlessness. She shifts again, inching across the narrow bed until she is sliding out of Kuroo’s grasp and off of the bed to crouch on the floor.
She holds her breath, mostly out of habit, and listens closely to see if Kuroo stirs. She doesn’t, of course, so Tsukishima paws at the floor in the dark until she finds her discarded clothing. It’s well past midnight, they both have class in the morning, and Tsukishima would rather be in her own bed. Somehow, Kuroo managed to convince her to come over, again, despite Tsukishima wanting to limit their time together to the weekends. She feels like the chore of finding her clothing in the dark is part of her punishment for agreeing to come over.
Her fingertips glance across the familiar, satin-like material of her bra and she grabs it. She slips it on before locating her shirt, panties, and pants. The entire time, the sound of her rustling around on the floor and the heavy, contented sound of Kuroo’s breathing are the only noises in the room.
Tsukishima only finds one sock, and finds herself growing increasingly irritated at the girl asleep on the bed behind her, as if she were the one to blame. Tsukishima could get up and turn on the light to find her things, but that would mean disturbing Kuroo. She wants to slip out without her noticing, so that she doesn’t have to deal with her. She doesn’t want that stupid, bed-headed, overly-confident Casanova sitting up, eyes half lidded with sleep, to beckon her back to the bed.
Because Tsukishima, for whatever godforsaken, ridiculous, unknowable reason, can never walk away from an opportunity involving Kuroo and her bed. Or Kuroo and the back of her car. Or Kuroo and a private library study room. Or Kuroo and any place she proposes in her raspy, seductive voice.
She sits back against the bed and lets her head fall back to the mattress, where she closes her eyes despite the lack of light in the room. She waits, thinking that maybe the sock will just appear and she’ll be able to leave with her dignity intact.
Whenever she can, she leaves discreetly. It’s best when Kuroo is asleep, but Tsukishima has bolted when she’s gone to the bathroom before. And if she can avoid saying goodbye to Kuroo and her insufferable roommate, Bokuto, it’s as good as it gets.
After a moment, Kuroo’s breathing starts to irritate her again and she’s patting the ground around the bed and she finds it. Relieved, she finishes dressing and grabs her phone from the bedside table. She checks the time and inwardly scolds herself for staying out so late with Kuroo again .
Tsukishima slides her phone into her back pocket and slips out of the room, being careful to step lightly over the perpetual mess covering the floor. She opens the bedroom door, letting in a sliver of light from the hallway. She glances back at Kuroo, and sees that she’s rolled over to face the wall, and is curled up more than usual.
It catches Tsukishima’s attention, because she didn’t hear her move. Her curiosity, however, is fleeting, and she leaves, closing the door as quietly as she can behind her.
When she makes it to the front door to put on her shoes, she doesn’t notice the mismatching patterns of her socks. She simply rams her feet into her boots while pulling her fall coat over her shoulders. A moment after that, she’s making her way out of the apartment and down the long hallway to the building exit.
Back in the apartment, Kuroo rolls over onto her back and sighs. She felt it when Tsukishima got up to leave, and heard her moving around to get dressed in the dark. She reaches for her phone and presses the home button to glance at the time, wishing that Tsukishima would stay the entire night just once. If not to stay next to her, then to at least refrain from crossing the campus in the middle of the night. She knows better than to ask, though.
For now, she stretches and gets up to use the bathroom, not bothering with clothing or a light. She’s naked, a casual consequence of all of Tsukishima’s visits, and doesn’t care if Bokuto sees her, if her roommate is even awake. They shared a room freshman year, and saw plenty of each other then, another glimpse wouldn’t kill either of them now.
Kuroo thinks of all of this on her way to and from the bathroom. Upon her return to her room, the light from the hallway illuminates an unfamiliar sock in the center of the room. It stands out amongst her own clutter almost immediately. Curious, Kuroo closes the door behind her but goes to turn on her bedside lamp. She sits on the edge of the bed and stares down at it. It’s a typical ankle-height sock, patterned with mint green dinosaurs on a dark blue background. Kuroo stares at it, as if it could tell her about all the reasons Tsukishima always comes over but never stays.
She should know, because they had decided ages ago what their rules were, but finds herself wondering about it from time to time anyway.
She lets herself fall back into bed, then rolls over to try to sleep.
The next morning, Tsukishima wakes up to a text message from Kuroo. It’s a photo of her sock, captioned with Something sexy to remember you by?
She drops her phone on the pillow beside her and sits up to crawl to the other end of the bed, where her laundry basket sits. She’d gotten back so late that she undressed and got ready for sleep on autopilot. She didn’t pay attention to her clothes, but after rifling in the basket, she sees what must be Kuroo’s sock, which she’d mistakenly grabbed in the dark.
She clenches her jaw and stubbornly crawls back into bed, refusing to take Kuroo’s playful, teasing bait. She grabs her phone and lays back into her pillows, staring at the picture message.
Tsukishima tells herself that she’ll answer it later, after she’s had some coffee and maybe a shower to wash off the shadows of last night’s romp. She tells herself this, but is already typing a snarky message in reply.
Burn it
Kuroo’s reply is almost instantaneous, Your other one will be lonely
She snorts, and quickly taps out: Your room is a disaster, it’s contaminated
Doesn’t stop you from coming back, though ;)
When she reads that, she drops her phone on her comforter as if it burned her. She really, truly hates being reminded of their arrangement, despite the fact that she does keep going back, willingly and almost eagerly.
The whole thing started last school year, towards the end. Tsukishima was a freshman, and had been figuring out how to navigate the social scene without throwing herself completely into sports or extracurriculars. She had gotten enough volleyball talk drilled into her head during her three years at Karasuno, and despite the fact that she enjoyed the sport, she wanted a little break from it. Somehow, her attempts at distancing herself from volleyball had propelled Kuroo right into her life.
They’d run into each other at a party, hosted by some distant, but mutual friend of theirs. By the time Kuroo had arrived, Tsukishima had been uncharacteristically shitfaced, for reasons she didn’t like to dwell on. She wasn’t too drunk to throw herself completely at Kuroo, unfortunately, and they had hooked up. The first night, it had just been an intense makeout, to drunk Tsukishima’s dismay and Kuroo’s pleasant surprise. Tsukishima vaguely remembers pushing for more, but has the impression that Kuroo put a gentle stop to their progress. The details are still fuzzy, and she hasn’t brought it up at all.
Then, one hook up became two, which became three, which turned into an almost routine, biweekly boning. They probably meet up once a week on average, now, and while Tsukishima didn’t want it to spill over from the weekends into the weekdays, they’d passed that point months ago.
The turning point was the summer, when they had both coincidentally stayed on campus to work. Their proximity and the empty campus facilitated their arrangement, and sleeping together, but not really hanging out, had become their biggest pastime.
Now that it was the school year, things had slowed, but not by much, and Tsukishima was actively trying to change that. She didn’t want to be wrapped up in Kuroo anymore. It was too much work, despite the lack of expectations and the easy, carefree way Kuroo treated their arrangement. They were non-exclusive friends with benefits, which had been working out perfectly fine, until now.
Now Tsukishima is constantly irritated, for almost no reason, and she is tired of all of Kuroo’s relentless, cheesy flirtation.
She gets up out of bed to shake off the feelings threatening to send her into a thoroughly bad mood, and goes to take a shower.