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The betrayal that cut the deepest was Hirotsu’s. Of all his colleagues in the Port Mafia, Hirotsu was one of the few Dazai might say he actually trusted. Hirotsu was serious and dedicated, perfectly happy with his position in the Black Lizards not out of a lack of ambition but because he truly believed in the Mafia’s goals and knew it was where he could best carry out its work. So when Hirotsu had told him that they had an important suppression mission to carry out on the western coast of Japan, Dazai had believed him. Outside their usual purview, of course, but the Mafia had its hands in all sorts of matters, so it wasn’t a shock until their sleek black sedan had pulled up in front of the luxury guest house and Dazai, squinting against the setting sun just visible beyond the pale walls of the building, had with a sense of creeping horror realized what this trip actually was.
“By special request of the boss,” Hirotsu explained, bowing deeply to Dazai. “I apologize.”
“Motherfucker,” Dazai spat, not at anyone in particular, though the chauffeur cringed away from him. “Fine. Let’s go.” Haughtily he swept into the sprawling building.
It was, if one were in the mood to admit it, which Dazai decidedly wasn’t, a lovely resort in a truly picturesque seaside town. The sliding glass door of his room in the luxurious guest house opened onto a stunning vista of fine sand beach and flat ocean, painted in hues of orange and pink and soft pale gray by the setting sun. A light sea breeze ruffled Dazai’s hair as he peered out over the landscape, carrying with it the clean sharp scent of the ocean. He could hear in the distance the constant hush of the waves lapping at the flat sand of the beach.
Slamming the door shut, Dazai turned on his heel and went to find alcohol.
His house slippers made soft shuffling sounds on the tatami floor as he wandered somewhat aimlessly through the guest house, hearing through some half-open doors the familiar chatter of his colleagues. His only consolation was that, as the only executive on this forced vacation, he got his own room. He opened a door at random and discovered a linen closet. Without closing it he continued on his way.
One of the hallways opened, at long last, onto a kind of communal living space, couches and a low table, a curtain-draped doorway onto a small but lavishly appointed kitchen. Refrigerator: chill air and bright yellow light, soft electric hum, several bottles of sake. Dazai grabbed one and let the refrigerator close behind him as he ducked under the curtain. It caught on his hair, ruffling it over his forehead, but he was too busy cracking the seal on the bottle to care. Condensation quickly formed on the cool glass. He put the neck of the bottle to his mouth, tipped his head back, drank. The sake was cold. He swallowed slightly too much in his enthusiasm and ended up with its sharp alcoholic burn in his sinuses and throat. A drop caught on his lower lip as he lowered the bottle.
It wasn’t just that he hated vacations—which he did—or the beach—which he also did, though he couldn’t quite remember ever having spent an extended amount of time dealing with the unpleasant experiences of bright sunlight, gritty sand, the boring expanse of the flat ocean. It was that a full week of nothing left him no respite from himself.
As he shuffled back into his room and closed the door, the beige floor and bare walls of the room stretched blankly before him, as featureless as the whole miserable week, day after day after day of nothing but white walls and pale sand and all the vibrant and hideous ways his resting mind tried to destroy itself.
He sat on the floor, hunched over, placing the cool bottle of sake in the vee where his ankles crossed. His fingers slid over the beads of liquid on the green glass, creating fat drops that raced quickly down its sides to darken the tatami. He noticed, perhaps for the first time since arriving, how warm he felt in his suit jacket and shirt. Another problem surfaced: not that Dazai had ever had a problem commanding respect from his subordinates, but he was aware that being the youngest executive in Mafia history sometimes put him in something of a precarious position within the hierarchy of the organization. Appearing in front of Hirotsu and Ango and whoever else was assigned to this “get Dazai away from Yokohama” mission in some kind of—his thoughts stuttered to a stop—beach getup would completely destroy his credibility as executive. If Akutagawa was here he might as well just pass his position on to Chuuya.
(Dazai did spend a moment thoroughly enjoying the mental image of Chuuya at the beach looking like an angry, wet cat with his stupid hair plastered to his face and his skinny arms crossed tightly over his chest. He would probably get horribly sunburned; the overall effect with his red hair and burned-pink skin would be something like the world’s angriest tomato. Well, a cherry tomato.)
A soft knock sounded at the door; Dazai twisted his body around to look at the doorway but didn’t bother getting up.
“What,” he said. He had meant to sound sharper than it came out: even to his own ears he just sounded tired.
The door cracked open and Oda’s face and one shoulder peered into Dazai’s room.
“Hi,” Oda said.
Dazai’s mood improved tremendously. “I didn’t know you were trapped in this miserable hellscape too,” Dazai chirped as Oda came into the room, closing the door softly behind himself.
Oda was wearing, inexplicably, a white short-sleeved button down shirt with an off-white allover flower print. Loose around his arms it exposed the slim but solid lines of his biceps, the knobs of his elbows, the tracery of veins on his muscular forearms. He was also wearing shorts, which did not bear thinking about. After a moment of indecision he sat facing Dazai, legs folded underneath his body, resting his broad hands on his knees. The shorts rode up to expose the soft flesh of his thighs. Dazai tried not to look. “Actually,” Oda said, “I asked to come along.”
Dazai felt his eyebrows attempt to take flight from his face entirely; the soft, worn bandages wrapped around his head wrinkled against his forehead and cheek with the movement. “You wanted to be here?”
“I like the beach. It’s relaxing.”
“Oh, my god,” Dazai said as a new sense of terror swooped over him. “You’re all insane.”
Oda shrugged and held his hand out for the bottle. “Maybe.”
Still reeling, Dazai handed the sake over numbly. “Everyone I work with is insane.”
“Most people like the beach,” Oda said, nonplussed. He drank from the bottle, head tipped back, throat working as he swallowed, and Dazai thought about Oda’s mouth on the bottle and his own.
“Impossible,” Dazai argued, mostly on principle. It was difficult to articulate, even to Oda, the myriad ways the beach was untenable for people in general and Dazai in particular. The beach was a place of sun, about which Dazai could charitably be described as neutral, and of water, for which Dazai had no particular love except as a suicide method (and even then, a second-tier method at best), and of bare skin, which Dazai could not reveal for so, so many reasons.
So much of Dazai’s dubious and hard-won comfort regarding existing as a corporeal being in the world came from being as clothed as possible at all times; even his compulsion to roll up his sleeves he dealt with via judicious application of bandages to his forearms. He could barely remember seeing the world barefaced. Exposed limbs were unthinkable. So, too, was the idea of appearing without the suit jacket that broadened his shoulders and the tailoring that slimmed his body to this angular, boyish lie.
Oda narrowed his eyes at Dazai, his contemplative gaze sweeping over Dazai’s body from his still-ruffled hair to his crooked, half-loosened tie to his worn bandages and his hands curled in his lap, pale against his dark trousers, to his crossed legs. Dazai’s whole body felt warm in a way unrelated to the closed-in summer warmth of this room of the guest house.
“Well,” Oda finally said, “you’re not exactly dressed for it.”
“I am dressed,” Dazai said, reaching for the sake bottle, “for a suppression mission, which is what I was told this was.” He wiggled his fingers in impatience when Oda didn’t hand it over immediately.
With visible reluctance, Oda passed the bottle. The cool glass was slick with condensation. Dazai tried not to think about Oda’s mouth as he brought it to his lips and swallowed, swallowed.
“I’ll lend you a shirt,” Oda said, and Dazai choked on the sake.
Wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist, the worn edges of the bandage catching drops of wetness, Dazai glared at Oda. It was—he was—
“The goddamn beach has made everyone go fucking nuts,” Dazai grumbled.
“I don’t mind,” Oda continued, as though that was at all part of Dazai’s problem here.
“Fine!” Dazai threw his arms wide in defeat, feeling the sake slosh around in the bottle he still clutched in one hand. “Fine, the beach won. Let’s go.”
If Oda was surprised at Dazai’s quick about-face, he didn’t show it. He stood and Dazai followed him mutely to his room, which had a few bags strewn about and several half-assembled futons on the floor. Oda knelt beside a worn-looking leather satchel and shuffled around its contents for a moment. Dazai watched the way the thin fabric of his shirt clung to his broad shoulders and the narrow slope of his waist. To distract himself he drank. Oda emerged holding a gray shirt in the same style as the one he wore, patterned with paler and darker fern leaves and tropical-looking flowers.
“This shirt is gigantic,” Dazai said, but he traded the bottle for it anyway. It was made of a lightweight material, washed enough times to be soft in his hands. He rubbed his thumb over one of the flowers.
If asked he could easily blame it on the alcohol, the way he yanked his tie over his head and quickly began unbuttoning his shirt right in front of Oda as though he had ever done this in front of anyone before. His fingers flew over the buttons, revealing the inch of skin below his collarbones between where the bandages stopped and the curve of the binder began, the swell of his chest where the binder could only do so much, the curve of his waist and hips as he yanked the shirt from his trousers and tossed it to the floor. Studiously not looking at Oda Dazai slipped on the borrowed shirt. The sleeves hung to his elbows, the hem reached his thighs, the vee of the collar dipped low enough that the top of his binder was visible. It smelled of Oda.
“Ta-da,” Dazai deadpanned.
Oda looked at him with an inscrutable expression. Dazai could not help but imagine the possible outcomes: confusion at best, disgust or dismissal at worst, their years of friendship crumbling under the impossible weight of this revelation, the relentless knife of “oh, so you’re actually” that somehow never stopped twisting.
“Let’s go,” Oda said instead of any of that, standing, straightening his clothes with unconscious touches of his broad hands to his chest, his hips.
Outside: the cool salt-sharp breeze, the pale crescent of the beach, the wide dark expanse of the sea and the sky. As the sun slipped beyond the horizon its reflected warm light disappeared from the surface of the ocean, leaving just a few ripples that were quickly swallowed by the night. In the other direction the moon rose, perfectly round, its bright surface mottled with the shadows of craters and mountains. More stars were visible even this close to sunset than Dazai had ever seen in Yokohama. The bright pinpoints of the stars and the intermittent rolling whitecaps in the ocean created a kind of shimmering tapestry that stretched from just beyond Dazai’s feet to far above his head.
The sand was warm under Dazai’s bare feet, soft and fine, with just enough give that when he took a step he felt a little impression sink under the weight of his body. They walked down to the shoreline and the sand became firmer and cooler with the memory of seawater it held; Dazai stood at the very edge of the water and watched small shimmering waves lap at the dark sand. Almost without a conscious thought to do so he stepped into the water. It was pleasantly cool, cradling, in that strange intimate way water does, the arch of his foot, the knob of his ankle. He’d forgotten to roll his trousers up and the water slowly crept up the fabric, damp against his skin. As he waded further in the tiny waves broke around his ankles with soft sloshing noises. He craned his neck to look up at the sky. If he laid in the water facing up it would be like lying in the sky itself, its cool dark cloak wrapped around him, cradling him as he closed his eyes and sank, holding his breath until the last possible moment—
“It’s not so bad,” Oda said softly from somewhere behind him.
“I was just thinking about how nice it would be to drown here,” Dazai responded, conciliatory.
Oda sighed and stepped into the water beside him. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, well.”
It took Dazai a moment to realize that Oda was holding something out to him: slim reeds, or straws, unrecognizable until Oda also held out a small plastic lighter. Dazai plucked a sparkler from Oda’s hand and Oda lit it, spark, flame, bright sizzling light. It illuminated Dazai’s pale hand and bandaged arm, the mirror of the ocean, Oda’s soft auburn hair and the sharp angles of his face. Dazai smiled, in spite of himself, and drew a line through the air whose bright imprint he saw against the insides of his eyelids when he blinked. He examined the sputtering light at the end of the sparkler, merrily burning itself down to nothing. After a moment’s thought, he traced a few characters in the air.
“It’s okay,” Oda replied.
The sparkler faded out. Dazai looked at the burned-down wire he held, blinking to adjust his eyes to the moonlit darkness again.
“Where did you even get those?” Dazai finally asked.
“My pocket,” Oda said.
Dazai looked over at him: the pale glow of his shirt in the darkness, the highlights and shadows of his sharp-angled face, the blur of his hair, his throat and the exposed triangle of skin below where his collarbones met.
“You are always like this, Odasaku,” Dazai said almost wonderingly.
Oda shrugged. “I don’t know how else to be.”
Dazai felt an extraordinary fondness toward Oda, tall and constant, who had almost certainly gone on this trip solely because Dazai was here, whose shirt slipped comfortably over Dazai’s body, who had seen Dazai’s bound chest and slim waist and scarred upper arms, who had secreted sparklers onto the beach just to amuse Dazai.
“You really don’t,” Dazai murmured. When he placed a hand on Oda’s shoulder he felt the loose sleeve of Oda’s shirt slip up his arm, exposing the last few layers of the bandage and the skin beneath it. The water lapped lazily around Dazai’s ankles; his trousers felt damp up to his calves. The ocean stretched away from them, gentle waves susurrating softly, becoming, at some indeterminate point in the distance, the star-flecked sky.
Oda put a warm hand on Dazai’s hip, rucking up the loose folds of his shirt. Dazai sighed and swayed toward him, caught between their hands on each other. The moon illuminated the rippling ocean and the wet sand with its faint pale glow. Very slowly Oda eased his hand up to where he could touch bare skin, the dip of Dazai’s waist, sliding his broad splayed hand to the small of Dazai’s back. His fingertips fit into the furrow of Dazai’s spine. As the tide pulled out the liquid sand washed around Dazai’s feet, sinking him further into this spot where he stood, facing Oda, all his attention on the places where their bodies touched.
Oda leaned down to meet him, callused palm shifting against Dazai’s skin, and Dazai tipped his chin up and let his lips part. Oda’s eyes fluttered shut. It was, at first, just a brief soft brush of Dazai’s mouth to Oda’s, a sharp intake of breath barely heard over the hush of the waves. The air was still. Dazai’s hand still clutched Oda’s shoulder. Someone was trembling.
Dazai pressed up toward Oda, unsteady on his toes in the wet sand until Oda steadied him by gently bringing them together, Dazai’s back arching to press his chest against the steady warmth of Oda’s, his arm sliding around the back of Oda’s neck to lock their bodies against one another. In the wake of this closeness kissing Oda almost seemed secondary, a gift that Dazai unwrapped distracted still by the familiar scent of Oda and the warm press of his arms around Dazai’s frantically trembling body. Oda was stable, solid, his mouth so gentle against Dazai’s when Dazai pressed too close too quickly and bumped his nose against Oda’s cheek. Their lips finally met properly, lush fullness, the promise of the body’s inner warmth, and when Dazai tentatively touched his tongue to the seam of Oda’s lips the kiss deepened, slick and sweet.
When Dazai couldn’t hold his breath any longer he sighed against Oda’s mouth but it was nothing like drowning, Oda’s strong arms the obverse of the cool encompassing cloak of the sea and the night; instead of becoming nothing he was simply himself, soft bandages and tight binder, the slip of Oda’s shirt over his shoulders, his sand-mired feet, Oda kissing him and kissing him.
They drew apart and Oda tentatively touched his fingertips to Dazai’s jaw, skirting around the bandage on his cheek to tuck a lock of hair behind his ear. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over Dazai’s skin so fondly Dazai thought he might die right then, immolated by the tender affection Oda freely gave him.
“Beautiful,” Oda murmured.
“Hm?” Dazai tipped his head toward Oda’s hand and Oda threaded his fingers through Dazai’s hair. He cradled Dazai’s jaw in his hand and Dazai wanted to peel off the bandage on his cheek so Oda could touch him there, he wanted to unwind all his bandages to let Oda touch him, everywhere.
“Isn’t the moon beautiful tonight?” Oda asked, not taking his eyes off Dazai.
Dazai thought about the moon and the tapestry of the sea and the sky, the gentle lapping of the waves over his ankles, and he thought about the shirt Oda had unhesitatingly given him and the little handful of sparklers Oda had brought onto the beach without even lighting one for himself. He thought, too, about the way Oda had looked at him after seeing his body and his scars: inscrutable because it was just the same way he had ever looked at Dazai.
“Yes,” Dazai said. “It is.”