Work Text:
and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
— Frank O’Hara, For Grace After A Party
On the bullet train to Sendai, the tall cup containing Keiji’s milk tea started to split open. It was a cardboard cup, a part of Gong Cha’s eco-friendly policy, that had a seam down the side.
He didn’t notice at first, only finding it strange that tea pooled at the bottom of his cup so that when he leaned over to take a sip with his glass straw, a round puddle pooled around its bottom on the pull-down tray in front of his seat. Then the puddle got bigger and bigger. He lifted the cup, turned it in his hand, and saw that the seam was splitting.
Earlier, he wasn’t planning on buying any food for the train, committed as he was to onigiri from Onigiri Miya (he even checked their Instagram the night before to confirm they’d have a stall). But Tokyo Station—its passageways labyrinthine and gray, distinguishable only by the advertisements and shops littered about—was as crowded as it ever was. They arrived at the station 20 minutes early, and Udai insisted that was plenty of time to buy a bento.
“C’mon, Akaashi, isn’t it tradition?” said Udai, already surveying an impressive display in front of one shop with photo realistic plastic food. The painted marbled fat on the fake beef looked sumptuous.
Keiji planned on just waiting for Udai, but felt awkward in the kinetic throng of people moving through the station, each person with somewhere to be, while he stood in place. So he decided to line up for a tall cup of milk tea with boba.
Now here he was, watching milk tea dribble all over his pull-down tray.
But it was too good a day for a faulty cup to ruin his mood. From his window seat, he watched the autumn scenery pass by. The leaves on the distant trees had deepened to oranges and reds, and even meters away, they fell down in a hale when the wind picked up as the bullet train ploughed through.
It was a Sunday. He was seeing a volleyball match in person after two months of intermittent overtime. Bokuto would be there. He was going to see Bokuto play.
Faced with such contentment, all he could manage for the split cup was a half-hearted “Oh no.”
He fumbled for tissues in his backpack, which he’d set down in the empty seat between him and Udai on top of his folded coat. He wiped the worst of the mess away, laid a few sheets between his cup and the tray, and raced to sip his tea and all the boba.
*
The summer before the second semester of Keiji’s second year of college, Bokuto took the bullet train to Tokyo and stayed back home with his family. It was like Bokuto’s last few months of high school again, when they could lean against each other on the couch and watch Bokuto’s little sisters bicker over who got to play as Princess Peach on Mario Party. (“That’s not fair! I was Rosalina last time!”)
They put on suits and watched Keiji’s younger brother give a rousing effort at Mozart at his violin recital. (Bokuto was a one-man standing ovation.)
Both their families filled up a tiny, three-star Michelin sushi restaurant hidden in an underground mall in a subway station, a pricey meal on Keiji’s bucket list that Bokuto insisted was his treat for everyone. (Their fathers, separately, still tried to pay.)
They spent time alone together too.
Akaashi’s college roommate Miyoshi went back to Kyushu for the whole break, so they had the apartment alone to themselves. (“Akaashi,” Miyoshi said before he left, “I love you dearly and support your relationship, but please remember that my handwritten drafts for my poems are on my desk.” Keiji, incredulous, replied, “What would we do with your poems?”)
Bokuto in the flesh—the way he scrunched his eyes closed, his hard chest when he pulled Keiji in, his solid thighs under around Keiji’s waist, his kiss, his laugh, his smell, his every touch—was incomparable to the pixelated Bokuto on FaceTime.
On the second to the last day before he had to return to Hiroshima, Bokuto surprised him with tickets to DisneySea. Bokuto’s cheeks were flushed and his tone apprehensive when he said, “I don’t know if you’re the amusement park type and we’ve been before with the team. But I wanted to go just the two of us.”
Keiji was physically incapable of preventing himself from smiling. “Koutarou,” he replied, “I’m definitely the amusement park type.”
They spent 17 minutes picking matching Mickey ears that they both wore the whole day.
The sun was bright and scorching, and the sky clear. The summer crowd was at its peak with schools being out. Lining up for barbecue popcorn took longer than it should.
Slathered in sunscreen, Keiji could ignore the baking sun and being jostled once in a while beside unabashed joy that seemed to seep out of Bokuto, who wanted pictures of the two of them everywhere. (Later, Konoha commented ironic vomit emojis on all their photos on Bokuto’s finsta.)
In the queue for Tower of Terror, while Keiji (true to his character) was paying attention to the backstory of Hightower and his cursed idol, Bokuto tapped him on the shoulder. Keiji turned around to Bokuto pulling a tube of Biore UV sunscreen from his chest sling bag.
“Keiji,” he said, “the backs of your ears are red. Did you put sunscreen on earlier?”
“No. I think I missed them.”
Bokuto handed him the tube. “Here. We need to reapply every two hours anyway.”
Keiji opened the screw top, handed Bokuto the cap, and squeezed the cool solution on his fingertips. Bokuto presented his hand, so Keiji squeezed it over his fingertips too.
As they stood facing each other while the prop gramophone droned on about the ride, both of them rubbing sunscreen on the backs of their ears (“and the back of your neck too”), Keiji felt perceived .
There was at least one person in the universe who cherished his existence, the entirety of him.
The philosophical cliche, which Miyoshi loved so much he made a 62 stanza-long poem about it the semester prior, went: If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Keiji thought, Koutarou would notice. If I were a tree and I fell in the middle of the forest, I wouldn’t even have to make a sound. He’d just know.
*
The arena was as huge as the other ones he’d been to to watch Bokuto, but this one was packed.
Once the game picked up, the entire stadium was one organ. They seemed to move together—two sides of the stadium alternately cheered or groaned for every point, like halves of a human heart pumping blood.
What bound them, no matter which team they cheered for, was the belief that their presence, their ardent desire from the bleachers could somehow influence the outcome of the game.
This was what Keiji missed out on in high school.
When he was still a national-level athlete, he watched a game by breaking it down to its essential plays so he could pick them over for techniques that would work for him. Or he’d watch already strategizing how their team could beat the ones playing. Or he’d wait for a play he knew the athletes on the court could do.
Now, as only a spectator, every play connected. He was still as invested in where the ball landed, but his viewing was no longer dispassionate. He saw Sakusa lunging for a dig on center court, thought at him, C’mon, c’mon receive it!, and felt a rush of satisfaction when Sakusa actually did, the ball flying up from his extended arms.
Keiji knew he wasn’t the only one who felt that rush. Everyone on his side of the stadium thrummed with it, their hope for a win a singular pulse of Receive it! Save it! Spike it!
Earlier, their train was delayed pulling up to the station by four minutes. Then Keiji’s planned purchase from Onigiri Miya of three onigiris for 750 yen meant the game had well started by the time he found Udai squeezed in the middle of packed bleachers, the seat beside him saved. Keiji had to maneuver between the knees and backs of people in two rows of seats to get there.
He thought, Is it normal to sometimes forget that you’re six feet tall?
When he was near his seat, he accidentally dug his heel onto the foot of a middle-aged man beside him, who seemed to have come alone and was wearing a vintage MSBY cap from before their logo redesign more than half a decade ago.
“Watch it,” the man muttered.
Keiji, finally on his seat, bowed in apology, mumbling “I’m sorry, please excuse me.”
But by the time the game was in full swing, his bad first impression didn’t matter. After Bokuto’s spike pounded the ball on the opposite court and he did his beam pose for the audience, Keiji did the finger guns back. The man beside him did them too.
Their eyes met and they both laughed. In the crowd, they were only parts of the whole.
“Bokuto’s just fantastic,” the man said, grinning.
Keiji’s own heartbeat picked up. He answered, “He’s the absolute best.”
The last time they saw each other in person was a day ago, early Saturday morning. Keiji was still in bed, cherishing every second of sleep he could before his alarm, when he felt Bokuto pet his hair away from his face and press a kiss on his temple.
Keiji, half-asleep, hmmed in acknowledgment.
Bokuto, still leaning down, whispered, “Baby, I started the coffee machine. And I left an omelette in the microwave. Just heat it up, okay? I’m going now.”
Keiji found enough lucidity in him to mumble, “Don’t forget your headphones so you can sleep on the bus,” to Bokuto’s retreating back.
Looking down at the court, Keiji remembered that saying again. First, the figure of the ace is one that inspires his allies. He doubted anyone playing on court needed Bokuto to inspire them, but the thousands of people watching did. Under the arena lights, Bokuto looked resplendent, his body tense as a notched bowstring, his eyes focused only on the ball.
To Keiji, he was bright as a star, right here on the court.
Deep in the final set, when Miya Atsumu set a free ball for Bokuto to spike and kill, Keiji’s legs pushed him out of his seat on their own. In the whole crowd, he was the only one who stood.
His heart was pounding in his chest, louder than the crowd’s pulse.
He wanted to yell, Look at him! Look at our ace. He’s ours.
Then a quieter thought, just for him.
He’s mine.
*
Throughout college, the second semester was always a trudge. Partly because it continued right through the dead of winter and Keiji stagnated in the cold like the leafless trees on campus.
Mostly because the beginning of the semester coincided with the beginning of the V. League season, and in the interim weeks before either began, his long distance contact with Bokuto gradually dwindled as the other man’s training schedule and media commitments picked up; it stayed that way until a few weeks into both when they’d acclimated to one another’s new schedules.
When autumn came, the drop in quality time after they’d spent Keiji’s summer break together was an early chill. The few hours they could devote to spending time together across 676 kilometers smouldered in Keiji’s memory.
In his first year, Keiji got an unscheduled call from Bokuto nearing noon, in between his classes. He was on his way to lunch with friends from the literary journal when his phone rang, so he gestured for them to go ahead.
As soon as he picked up, Bokuto said, “Keiji, this is the worst day ever .”
Keiji’s pulse quickened. “Are you okay? Do you need me to call anyone? Your mom?”
“Oh no, sorry,” Bokuto replied, his tone sheepish. “That was melodramatic. I just want to rant.”
Keiji huffed. “Okay, of course you can rant. I was just worried there for a second.”
“Sorry! But you remember my reserve teammate Kamiya?”
“Your reserve teammate huh,” Keiji laughed. “You really are mad.”
“Yes, I am!” On the line, his voice got louder and staticky. “He stole my Air Salonpas and replaced it with his. His has a broken nozzle. How could I not notice that?”
“He’s terrible,” Keiji soothed. “But you have a giant ad in Tokyo Station for Air Salonpas. I’m sure they can send you more than you can use in a year.”
“That’s true. It’s the replacing that gets me, you know? Like just ask for mine if you want it so bad.”
“Yeah, he really needs to learn to talk to you. Why did you need it anyway?”
“Oh, my ankle got a bit swollen in practice.”
Keiji felt a migraine looming. “Koutarou, how is that the second thing you tell me on a call?”
In his second year, Keiji hid away in an empty study room in the library, propped his phone up on a book stand over his reading assignment, and pressed the mic on his earphones close to his lips so he could talk to Bokuto on FaceTime quietly.
“Who are you reading again?” Bokuto asked. He was in his apartment in Hiroshima, his hair still wet from the shower.
“Longinus,” mumbled Keiji. “And Koutarou, please dry your hair properly, it’ll be cold out soon.”
“That sounds like a… you know, that thing you take when your throat hurts,” Bokuto replied. “And I will, I was just excited to see you.”
Keiji tried hard to keep a smile off his face. “Lozenges. It does kind of sound like that, but Longinus is a dead Greek. And flattery will get you nowhere, you know.”
Bokuto grinned. “Nah, flattery gets me everywhere with you. And aren’t they all dead Greeks? So what’d this one say?”
In his third year, Bokuto FaceTimed in the early morning, when Keiji had yet to sleep. He was on the last stretch of an all-nighter, while Miyoshi snored in the same room. Keiji went to the bathroom and closed the door behind him before picking up.
Bokuto was in his long sleeve compression shirt and still sweaty, evidently back from his morning run. He must have called while he was opening his front door, because he was entering his apartment when he said, “Keiji, I saw a missing pet poster on my run today.”
Keiji was fond. “Was it for a cat?”
“No, it was for a tortoise. A tortoise!”
“What was its name? Did the poster say?”
“That’s the thing, it didn’t.” Bokuto propped the phone on his kitchen counter and he kept talking while he rummaged his fridge, taking care to project his voice. “Isn’t that weird? Why would you get a pet tortoise and not name them?”
“Maybe it had a name of its own that the humans couldn’t pronounce.”
Bokuto abandoned his fridge, the door still open. He drew close to his front camera, his eyes soft, and said, “That is such an Akaashi thing to say.”
In his fourth year, the warmest memory of all, Bokuto moved back to Tokyo.
*
After the referee blew the final whistle, after the appreciative crowd had applauded both teams for what felt like 20 minutes, after the throngs of people began heading for the exits, Udai turned to Keiji and asked, “Aren’t you gonna go get your man?”
Oh, he wanted to. He glanced down at his watch. It was only 4:30 PM.
“No,” he replied, “It’s gonna take at least another hour for him to do press and all that. Why don’t we head to a cafe so we can talk about your ideas for the next arc?”
Udai sighed, his shoulders slumping forward. “Damn Akaashi, you’re really good.”
After he looked on in distress as Udai ordered a complicated drink with seven espresso shots, after he received a text from Bokuto that he’d by free before 6:30, promise in the middle of the meeting and Udai teased him for checking his phone so often, after he and Udai parted in front of the cafe with a notebook full of plot ideas between them, Keiji dragged his feet as he made his way back to the arena.
He had 15 minutes before 6:30 PM, so his mind wandered.
He was right, on the train. It was a beautiful autumn day. The leaves had deepened to oranges in Sendai too. The air was crisp and just the perfect amount of cold on his cheeks.
In haiku, the poets divided even the immutable changing seasons in two levels: First, by the four seasons, then further into three distinct parts for each season—early, middle, late. They categorized seasonal motifs and symbols this way, and collected the lists in books called saijiki, a dictionary of images, so that haiku could uniformly convey seasons at least across a region.
Some of the images were worn and familiar, like the remaining cold for early spring, or cicadas for middle summer.
Keiji’s favorite image in saijiki was a strange one—the galaxy for autumn. He’d always wondered about that, about what possessed the poets to see the constellations above their heads as seasonal, when the changing leaves were right there on the ground.
He thought, Did everything disappear at the turn of the season?
Kawasaki Tenko wrote of the stars reflected on a water wheel as it spun: holding up the milky way, then spilling it all out.
He pondered all this, lost in thought, until his feet had led him to the big concrete open space in front of the arena. The event was long over, so there were only a handful of people wandering about, each person absorbed in their own life, with somewhere to be.
“Keiji!” he heard from somewhere to his right. When he turned to look, it was Bokuto, waving an arm over his head. He was standing right in front of the arena’s discreet side entrance, the one reserved for professional athletes.
Bokuto had a big smile on his face and his cheeks were flushed. His hair was down too, probably fresh out of the shower.
Keiji entertained the idea of running into his arms. He settled on walking as fast as he could. Bokuto stretched an arm out, waiting for him to take it.
When their hands finally touched, Bokuto pulled him into the entrance, away from everyone else outside. Then he was drawn into a tight embrace, Bokuto’s hard chest flush to him.
Somewhere between his temple and ear, Bokuto murmured, “Hey baby.”
“Hi,” Keiji murmured back into Bokuto’s shoulder. He ran a hand through Bokuto’s hair and said, “I’m so glad you used a hairdryer today.”
Bokuto laughed. Then he turned his head towards Keiji, who smiled and leaned in for a kiss.
When they pulled away, Bokuto, was still smiling. But he narrowed his eyes at Keiji and said, “You’re late. Were you thinking of haikus again?”
Keiji laughed, helpless. “Actually, I was,” he said. “How did you know?”
“You didn’t reply to my text. And of course I know.”
The glow of Bokuto’s love was thrilling. He could bask in it, reflect it back, and spill it all out.
Distantly, Keiji concluded that the poets were wrong. The turn of the seasons didn’t matter. His metaphysical galaxy, at least, was here to stay.
“So,” Bokuto said, drawing Keiji’s attention back. “What happened with you today?”
Keiji huffed. “With me? Nothing happened with me. I watched you win a game against the three time V. League champions.”
They walked together towards the Black Jackals locker room, unspoken understanding between them to get Bokuto’s things.
Bokuto said, “You saw the whole thing! What do I have to tell you about that? So you took a 90-minute bullet train ride from Tokyo and nothing happened?”
Keiji grew quiet and considered everything he did that Sunday.
Then he said, “My milk tea cup split open on the train.”