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The facts--according to Chris who heard them from Kanemaru who heard them from Haruichi who was actually at the scene of the crime--are these: On a balmy day in early spring with the temperature hovering at a comfortable 25 degrees Celsius and an electric current buzzing through the air as third years zoomed towards graduation and many a junior high school student geared up for high school, Sawamura Eijun drops his baseball cleats in a parking lot after an exhausting (but exciting) friendly scrimmage at another high school.
That last fact would be unremarkable if only Sawamura had not dropped the cleats, forgotten about them, and then hurried off the bus that was about to take him back to Seidou to find his cleats crushed and laying in the middle of the road, having been run over by a tide of personal vehicles exiting the parking lot in an exodus very similar to the one all the animals made upon leaving Noah’s Ark.
Sawamura needed to buy new cleats, so he had brought Haruichi along, and with Haruichi came Furuya, but also Kanemaru, and therefore Toujou. In the end, half the baseball team tagged along.
When Kanemaru had woken up complaining bitterly about needing a certified expert to help Sawamura pick out a pair of damn good cleats, Chris had suffered a lapse in judgement--having woken up from a wonderful dream involving a pair of glasses on the floor, a pair of legs wrapped around his waist, and a low voice whispering into his ear he’d better be able to shift it into high gear because this was going to be one wild ride--so he’d agreed to lend his baseball know-how.
Chris is now sitting at the back of a sporting good store watching two sales associates hover warily as upwards of ten burley high school baseball players occupied the aisles of the shoe department ooh-ing and aah-ing over their potential purchases.
Miyuki is sitting next to Chris, having archly proclaimed he was responsible enough to take care of his equipment extremely well. His cleats were going to last at least through the spring and straight into spring sales, hello, yes.
His glasses flash as he laughs at the others struggling to decide on which cleats to buy, the onus of choosing the one apparently becoming too great to bear without complaint. Chris shifts uncomfortably, trying as hard as he can to forget his dream from this morning.
And that’s what you missed on Seidou: The Baseball Years.
There’s a pair of cleats in Chris’ line of sight that are in Miyuki’s size. They are just the model and brand that Miyuki tends to favor and Chris knows that it wouldn’t be difficult to walk up to the cashier in all the hubbub with the nondescript cardboard shoe box and make the purchase.
Except.
“My cleats haven’t been used all this winter,” Miyuki would claim. “They deserve at least one last victory lap, don’t you think?” It would be his way of rebuking Chris for wanting to spend the effort, the money, on him of all people.
Chris has learned.
Last week, when he’d oiled his catcher's mitt, he had oiled Miyuki’s too. He isn't someone who does things by halves; it’s not in his nature.
Miyuki keeps his mitt out of sight, out of mind. They're kept in an almost secret place that he’d shown Chris only once when Chris had come over to his dorm room right after afternoon practice and Miyuki had been putting things away with a brilliant weariness--bright around the eyes but dull around the arms, muscles fatigued by a great day on the field.
Chris blinks and he’s back there, last week becoming today as he’s sitting on Miyuki’s bed watching Miyuki turn his mitt over and over in his hands.
“What the fuck is going on?” Miyuki asks in a quiet whisper.
Chris replies as mildly as he can, “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No. No it’s perfect,” Miyuki says, voice faint, eyes shaded by his bangs falling into his face as he looked down at his glove. “Exactly how I would have done it.”
“Then I don’t see what the problem is.”
Chris can see exactly what the problem is. This is the gust of wind that turned into a tornado; the one small breath on the other side of the world that created a category F-5 disaster.
“Baseball is my life.” Miyuki’s tone carries the hint of something plaintive.
It wretches something loose in Chris’ chest--microtears diagnoses the physician--so that even though he’s done nothing wrong he still feels like the worst person the world, like he’s made a huge mistake and won’t ever be able to make up for it. It’s a ridiculous thought. An awful feeling. But he can’t seem to get rid of it, the idea that he’s done something unforgivable when all he meant to do was something kind.
“I can take care of myself,” Miyuki says, louder, head raised and eyes meeting Chris’ over their catcher’s mitts clutched in their hands, shields against the onslaught of each other.
“I never said you couldn’t.”
“Please, don’t touch my things again.”
Ask me, Chris thought desperately while he nodded in agreement last week, ask me to take care of you. Ask me, Chris thinks now as Miyuki’s eyes focus on the box across from them sitting on the low shelf barely an arm's length away. Let me do this.
“This is great!” Miyuki says. He turns to Chris with a big grin on his face, waiting for the moment that Chris grins back and agrees. Chris digs up a faint smile a beat too late. By the time he’s calibrated his grin to the correct levels of indulgent and amused, the grin has already slid off of Miyuki’s face, only to be replaced by a more solemn expression. “So. About us. What are we to each other?”
The anatomy of a wet dream is like so: unnatural transitions between strange scenes that make no sense when placed in a linear time scale, scenes that aren’t always sensual or lewd; the sexy parts tend to be sensory, gasps and moans, a feeling of fullness and the slick strain of muscles in motion, sometimes it’s just a sensation of hands on skin and the promise of orgasm.
The most embarrassing part of Chris’ dream from last night--or was it this morning--wasn’t even the part where he tries to hit a home run with an figment of his dreamscape, but mostly what happened after they make it to home plate.
They start whatever-this-is in the winter. Snowfall had been limited that year, but the fallout from their awkward teenage hands pawing clumsily at zippers--nerves making their thick fingers even more graceless--was spectacular.
"So that was--"
"That wasn't anyone's first time was it?" Miyuki interrupts. He laughs nervously and Chris turns to him, startled, chest still heaving from exertion, eyes wide and hair a mess from Miyuki's curious hands. "Because it wasn't mine," Miyuki adds quickly to answer his own question. His grin is self-satisfied and lazy in a way that exudes honesty, and Chris will believe him because for all the ways that Miyuki Kazuya is a genius, minor sex deities aren't made in a day.
"Me neither," Chris says.
"Fear not, Sir Chris, this was great fun. Way better than awkward fumbling behind the tennis courts on a pollen-filled spring day."
Miyuki grins and Chris ducks his head, pressing a quick kiss to Miyuki shoulder. Miyuki looks startled, but laughs it off, reaching out to trail a hand lazily along the line of Chris' back, tracing the length of his spin from shoulder to hip, touch growing fainter as Chris gets up from the floor and walks to his desk.
He has to suppress a shiver, the casual intimacy coming across like a game of chicken he doesn't know the stakes to. In a roundabout way, it feels like rejection, any attempts to get closer to Miyuki in an intimate way casually rejected or sidestepped. Chris' feelings on this are like the nondescript ache of an old injury, don't walk on that, don't turn this way, and you'll be fine.
Chris grabs two mugs and two packets of drink mix from his bottom drawer and then fills up both mugs from the contraband hot water dispenser Kanemaru squirreled away in the closet.
"I sincerely hope so," he jokes. "Because this time you have hot chocolate to follow up on the deed."
Miyuki laughs as he makes grabby hands for a mug. "Excellent deeds are being done every day."
The air around Chris and Miyuki grows heavy, insulating them from the excited noises Eijun is making across the store. They are now a separate world made up of the two of them. Chris tries to come up with an answer to Miyuki’s question, but whenever he reaches for the words to describe what they are, all he can see is Miyuki’s eyes looking at him over the rim of a coffee mug, Miyuki sitting crosslegged on their bed (that’s an important detail in Chris’ dreamscape, the concept that they share a bed), both hands wrapped around a chipped blue mug, fingers overlapping delicately under the handle, wearing one of Chris’ old baseball jerseys and looking...
As if there was nothing more he needed to do other than let the sunlight from their half open blinds pour into the room like so much honey and milk, warm and sweet and filling. Like he was content to stay the morning through, remain in the circle of Chris’ arms through the wee hours before the sun fully broke through gray cloud cover, willing to be held down in this new way, unafraid to stay the night and stay ever after.
“We’re friends with benefits,” Chris says smoothly.
It’s what he’s sure Miyuki needs to hear.
The things Miyuki wants from Chris are twofold, a means to forget the everyday and a method to remember the extraordinary. The means to forget is by having mind-blowing sex, light on the mind, heavy on the blowing. The yellow and blue bruises the shape of fingers that dot Miyuki's hips, wrists, elbows and other tender-soft places and joints--whenever he leaves Chris the morning after--is evidence unto itself of the means they use to forget the everyday.
Miyuki wants what Chris can give him. He doesn’t want Chris (former catcher, never-prodigy, capable of leaping tall buildings in a single bound only to drive himself into the ground the very next minute because he had been set to self-destruct all along).
Miyuki nods once, and then flashes a quick grin, light thrown onto the tiled ceiling of an indoor pool, lapis blue and gold leaf, mortar crumbling behind a beautiful facade.
“Of course. Silly of me to forget.”
Chris grins back. He turns up the charm and holds back, with a Herculean effort, the words he's been swallowing for some time now: I’m the fool for wanting more.