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Kaneki smells him before he hears him.
“I’m hoooooooome,” Hide calls from the entrance, toeing off shoes. “I’m dying. It’s so hot and the heater in headquarters broke and I was stuck in a sauna.”
The blond tosses his satchel onto the couch, ignores Kaneki’s pointed look of disappointment, and slumps onto the ghoul, “I’m so hungry, tired, and gross. I think I sweated a whole new Pacific.”
Smiling, Kaneki puts down his novel and scooches over and maneuvers his whining boyfriend into his lap. He buries his nose into sweat damp hair, breathes in Hide’s scent, listens to the thundering beats of his heart. “You smell good,” he says, hand combing through damp hair. “You always smell good.” Kaneki feels the warm puffs of Hide’s laughter on his shoulder, feels the blonde burrow into the thin cotton of his shirt and mumble: “Yeah, but I feel disgusting.”
“I can turn up the AC.”
“Ugh, no, I’ll go take a bath,” the lump in Kaneki’s lap gives a put-upon sigh. “I’m starting to feel sticky.”
“That’s an idea,” Kaneki says, licking a stripe along the steady beat of Hide’s pulse. He savors the taste, salty and familiar. He sucks on an earlobe, allows his hands to drift, skirt along the edge of polyester and cotton. The human smells good; like sandalwood and pine in the summer wind. Hide always smells exquisite, but when his cheeks are flushed that shade of crimson, when sweat pools in the delicate hollow of his collarbones, he smells irresistible.
Tentatively, he travels lower, feels Hide’s fingers clench, blunt nails scraping through the thin material of his shirt. He murmurs nonsensical things into the blonde’s ears, pulls plaintively at faded denim. He wants more of it. He wants to drown in Hide’s sweat, Hide’s cries, in sandalwood and pine –in the feeling of home.
“N-no,” Hide gasps, “C’mmon, I’m hungry, tired, and sticky. We’ll do this later, okay?”
Kaneki murmurs his agreement into the trail of sweat he follows, down and down. “Kaaaaaaaneeeeeeeeekiiiiiiiiiiii, you octopus ghoul, let me up. I’m so hungry I will eat you.”
“Kinky.”
Hide jerks back, scrunches his nose, and Kaneki can imagine the image of Tsukiyama swimming in the blond’s head and laughs. He kisses the flushed cheeks, licks the salt from them. “Honestly, I’m completely on board with the ‘Squeaky Clean Hide Plan.’ It’s just hard to…let go.”
“It’ll help if you told your curious friend to stop what it’s doing.”
Kaneki’s hands still. Hands? Up Hide’s shirt. Legs? Pinning Hide in place. Kagune? A pair wrapped around Hide’s waist. Another…
“Oh god, I’m sorry, Hide. Really.” And now Kaneki feels the heat, feels the burn of mortification crawl up his neck, settle in his cheeks. He leans into the kind hands that frame his face, accepts the playful kisses that are dropped on his nose, his cheeks, his lips. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Now,” Hide pulls back, cheeky grin firmly in place. “You’re going to let me up, let me take a bath, and then we’re going to continue this. And afterwards, you’re going to treat me to dinner in bed. Dinner that you didn’t cook, by the way. As much as I love you, I’m not willing to suffer through such torture ever again.”
“I can join you.” He thinks of water. He thinks of it cascading, trickling, pooling. Thinks of all the secret places they will find, thinks of following them to those secrets. Thinks of rediscovering each of them until the scent of Hide infiltrates every nook and cranny of their tiny bathroom, until the smell of summer wind hangs thick in the air.
“God, no Kaneki, I love you, so much. And there’s a lot I’d sacrifice for your sake, but I’ve gotta draw a line here. A man has to be able to wash his own ass in peace without a hundred and twenty pounds of ghoul hanging off him.”
A small part of him rears back in affront, “I’m more than a hundred and twenty pounds now.”
“I know, Kaneki. And while I appreciate your efforts in all things martial very much –I mean, wow, have you seen your abs?” Hide makes a show of fanning himself, eyes twinkling. “Those things should be registered as weapons of mass destruction, they could knock an unsuspecting girl out at fifty paces. But that’s beside my point –a man needs some space when it comes to bathroom time, okay?”
And it’s not that Kaneki doesn’t get it, he does. But.Life as a ghoul comes with its own baggage. It comes with weird quirks, strange habits, and unusual compulsions.
One of them, Kaneki thinks, is this.
For the life of him, he can’t understand why the thought of allowing Hide to get cleaned up makes his kagune curl just a bit more possessively around Hide, why it makes him drag his fingers through the sweat that pools in the dip of Hide’s back. He doesn’t know why his muscles tense each time Hide squirms, why he responds by clinging more tightly.
Gently, Hide extricates himself from the warm grasp of Kaneki’s kagune, wriggles his way out of the vice of Kaneki’s legs, kisses Kaneki until the ghoul stops thinking. “Really quick bath, okay? Really quick. Super quick. In and out.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And then fun.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And then food. Lots of food.”
“Okay.”
“I’m really not kidding about that. I’m so hungry I think I could eat an entire cow.”
“Just get in the tub, Hide.”
Kaneki stares at the closed bathroom door, focuses on the sound of water filling the tub. Imagines Hide sliding into it, imagines the delicate sheen on Hide’s golden skin. He licks the lingering taste of salt and Hide from his fingers.
He wonders if he can convince Hide not to change the sheets the next morning.