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“So you do what, like Twitch?”
Kenma huffs and pushes the strands of hair that have fallen out of his bun back. They swing right back into place, annoyingly so, not even a couple of seconds after he tries to get them out of his face.
He’s been sitting across from Hinata Shouyou for what feels like eternities now, although it’s only been a few hours. He’s enjoyed catching up with him, really, they haven’t seen each other in years and Kenma can’t lie and say that he hasn’t missed Shouyou, because he has. He’s just forgotten what it’s like to be in the presence of someone as jubilant and full of life like Shouyou is.
“I already told you it’s YouTube,” he says.
“They’re the same thing, though?”
He likes Shouyou, he really does, but for someone so smart on the court, it blows Kenma’s mind that he can’t comprehend video platforms.
“Twitch is for streaming. I don’t stream,” Kenma says, “yet, I guess.”
“Why not?”
Kenma had decided to talk to Shouyou for a thousand other reasons outside of his current affairs. Yeah, he wants to sponsor Shouyou, and they somehow managed to get through that conversation (even though it took a good amount of screaming in disbelief), but Kenma still can’t get the conversation onto the right path. The path that he should probably try to steer it towards.
“I just don’t like the weight of interacting with people like that.” He shrugs. “You have to keep up with a lot of comments.”
Apparently, Kenma is horrible at trying to steer conversations. It’s no surprise, really, but god, can his mouth actually say what he needs it to for once?
“You’d be really great at it!” Shouyou says with a reassuring smile that strikes Kenma directly in the chest.
Okay, maybe that’s a segway into what he wants to tell Shouyou.
Since Shouyou think he’d be great at streaming, maybe he’ll think that Kenma is great at other things, and then he might actually want to—
“Yeah, maybe.”
Nope.
The words sit on the tip of his tongue, but he just can’t say them.
In a childish and almost annoying manner, Kenma’s mentally prepared an entire script, just to make sure everything is said correctly and in such a way that there’s no getting around the essence of what he wants. He’d practiced saying this over and over again the night before; Shouyou, listen, I need to tell you something important and however you respond, we’ll still be friends, but it’s been difficult to keep this to myself—
“If you ever end up streaming, can I be in one of them?” Shouyou asks. That familiar glint sparks in his eyes, the one that should be classified as excitement, but is really much much more than the standard definition of excitement, and Kenma breaks his gaze to look at the floor.
“Sure,” he says.
The urge to bash his head on the table between them boils up from the bottom of his stomach.
He’s a coward. He’s an absolute coward and should’ve never thought of asking Shouyou about this—not the sponsorship or his life or whatever, those things are fine, but the real reason he’d even considered talking to Shouyou.
And it’s not like he hasn’t already run through the possible outcomes of the conversation in his head for the past week (maybe years, maybe since high school, really), but that doesn’t outweigh the anxieties spiraling in his chest now.
But he needs to get it out.
He has to.
“Shouyou,” he says, looking back up, “I need to—“
“Do you want to get dinner?”
Kenma freezes, mouth still hanging half-open with the ends of a sentence lingering between his teeth.
“What?”
“Do you want to get dinner?” Shouyou repeats. “With me. Like now.”
“If you were hungry we could’ve ordered—“
Shouyou interrupts him again, this time along with a quick shake of his head, like he can’t get things right and is getting frustrated with himself—Kenma’s become familiar with this expression of Shouyou’s over their years of friendship. It's what he does when a play doesn't go exactly the way he expected it to, when something's getting under his skin and he doesn't know how to just come right out and say what's bothering him.
“Not like that, I’m not hungry, okay, well, I’m kind of hungry, but I want to go to dinner with you. A full-on dinner. With you. And me. Tonight.”
When Kenma sits in absolute silence, staring wide-eyed across the table, Shouyou adds a wide smile and a, “Please?”
Everything he’s said runs through Kenma’s mind on replay—dinner, with Shouyou, right now, but not because he’s hungry, but because he wants dinner, with Kenma, right now, and—
“Are you asking me on a date?” Kenma asks.
Shouyou looks up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then back up again until he settles on just staring right at Kenma. “I think so?”
Ironic doesn’t have just the right connotations for Kenma’s liking. This situation isn’t ironic. He had wanted to ask Shouyou out and, alright, Shouyou got to it before he did, but that doesn’t make it ironic. It makes the situation irritating. A little funny, but more irritating than anything. He should’ve just gotten it out, it’s really not difficult to ask someone to dinner, but Kenma continuously kept backtracking. Hours of conversation have already passed between them and he couldn’t even ask a simple question that Shouyou managed to get out in a second.
Kenma takes a deep breath, realigns his thought process.
That’s not what’s important right now. What’s important is that he likes Shouyou, has since high school. Even more so, Shouyou likes him enough to ask him out. He doesn’t know how long the unsaid feelings have been festering in the unspoken air between them, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re going to go on a date and it’s going to be fun, because they always have fun together, and maybe Kenma’ll end up with a boyfriend sooner or later.
He smiles at Shouyou and that’s enough of a signal for Shouyou to practically bounce up and start looking for his shoes and wallet. It’s a definite yes, silent, but real, just like most things when it comes to their friendship, or relationship, whatever it is. It’s a definite yes and Shouyou’s running around getting his shit together and Kenma doesn’t even try to stop the laugh that breaks from his chest.
“You’re paying!” he says.
“Aren’t you the billionaire?”
He’s not a billionaire, but he’ll let Shouyou keep thinking that he is.
“You’re the one who asked me to dinner.”
Kenma hears Shouyou grumble in the adjacent room, but when he comes back to the front, he gives Kenma this teasing smile, reaches for his hand, and says, “You’re lucky I like you.”