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It was Hiruma that got the Definitely-Not-Gambling-No-Sir-Not-At-All fundraiser for the High School American Football Association off the ground, of course. Sure, the Deimon basketball gym had been totally redecorated to be all but indistinguishable from a real casino, complete with games, refreshments (fully minor-appropriate!), and little tucked-away seating areas in the bleachers, but as Hiruma explained to the Association, the participants were spending their money on tickets that could be directly exchanged for prizes, and so even if those participants decided to try their luck at the roulette wheel or blackjack table or specially-modified slots machines to try and boost the bang they were getting for their buck, it wasn’t really gambling.
Somehow it worked, and somehow Hiruma negotiated for Deimon’s football club to get a percentage of the fundraising money due to the donation of their school facilities and time in setting it up, and Hiruma had so much money that Sena wasn’t sure why he resorted to things like this but maybe refusing to spend your own money even when you had it was how people like Hiruma stayed rich.
But regardless, while the context came back to Hiruma, the chaos, surprisingly, didn’t.
That all came back to Marco.
Things had started off as calmly as they could be when a bunch of high school boys from different schools were encouraged to come together in one space and play games against each other for… tickets—not money!—which is to say, things were loud and boisterous but no one was doing anything that could get them detention (or, well, arrested) and everyone was largely enjoying the chance to dress up and have fun without things devolving into anything drastic.
And then, at a particularly crowded craps table, Marco had held the dice loosely in his hand and leaned toward Maria with a lazy grin, crooning, “Would you spare a kiss for good luck?”
She’d rolled her eyes but leaned to peck him on the cheek indulgently, and he’d rolled the dice, and it was when the table erupted into cheers at the result that everything started to go sideways.
“Kiss for good luck!” Mizumachi cheered, and pressed an enthusiastic kiss to Kakei’s cheek as he prepared to roll. Kakei protested, but won his bet, and after that a call of “Kiss!!” spread through the casino—er, gym—like wildfire.
There were plenty of failed bets too, especially when nearly everyone got in on it—they couldn’t all win, kissing for luck or not—but there were enough winners to keep the kissing fest going strong. At the roulette wheel, Suzuna shook her brother by the collar in irritation when he dropped a kiss on top of her head and then shook him in excitement when she won. At the slots machines, Kuroki and Toganou mashed twin kisses to Juumonji’s cheeks as he hit big. Over by the blackjack table, Tetsuma pressed a flat mouth to Kid’s startled and stubbled face and then nodded in satisfaction when the next card was flipped.
Mamori kissed Riku’s forehead and he correctly called the number of the next roulette spin, Harao stretched up onto his toes and the luck pressed to his cheek carried Banba through a round of Texas Hold’em, Julie allowed Koutarou to kiss her hand before she cleaned up at the craps table, and nearly all of Oujou piled around Shin to pepper him with kisses at a slots machine and then cheered when it didn’t immediately break. (He didn’t win, but that was clearly considered victory enough.)
It was more fun than Sena would have expected. He’d been flustered at first, but then by the time he found himself slipping away with a water to one of the more secluded seating areas for a break, he’d been kissed by pretty much all of his teammates and some of his off-team friends besides, and had even piled on good luck kisses himself for Monta, Riku, Mamori and Mizumachi (whose lack of shame was apparently contagious).
He settled down to people-watch and sip at his water, the half-drawn curtains that were working as dividers between the “casino” and the gym bleachers allowing him to peek out without necessarily being exposed to the overstimulation of jumbled teenage enthusiasm and public displays of affection. He was trying not to choke laughing at the sight of Hiruma vehemently refusing a good-luck kiss from Kurita from one direction only to have Musashi stoically press one to the top of his head from the other, when the curtains swayed as he was joined by Marco, cradling his ever-present bottle of Coke.
He looked much more natural in his pinstripe suit than Sena did in his plain one, Sena noticed, but then, Marco kind of dressed like that all the time, didn’t he? But still, something about the quasi-casino environment seemed to bring out how well the look suited him, everything seeming to fit even better than normal.
“Ahh, Sena-kun,” Marco hummed in greeting, taking a seat next to Sena on the dimly-lit bleachers, and Sena startled a little out of his thoughts. “Enjoying the activities?”
Sena nodded enthusiastically but with a sheepish grin.
“Taking a break,” he admitted, glancing back to the opening in the curtains. “Things sort of got a little…”
“A little out-of-hand, I’d say,” Marco agreed with Sena’s unvoiced sentiment with a nod of his own, taking a swig of his drink. “I didn’t think everyone would be so quick to pick up my superstition.”
“You made it look too good,” Sena said, and then scrambled to clarify when he saw Marco’s slightly raised eyebrows and gently quirked smile, “I-I mean, you won for the whole table, right?”
“Mmh, that’s true,” Marco allowed, and Sena blinked in surprise and held still as he moved to smudge his thumb against Sena’s cheek. “Looks like you haven’t sat things out entirely, hmm?”
He showed Sena the faintly pink smudge on his thumb, and Sena laughed nervously, reaching to rub at the lip gloss mark on his cheek as his stomach started to settle down. Being around Marco could be—overwhelming sometimes, he’d noticed. Marco just gave off such a presence that it was hard not to get drawn into whatever he said or did.
“Um, Mamori-neechan, probably,” he said in explanation as he gave up on wiping the lip gloss from his cheek, rubbing his fingers together to rub the smudges away rather than wipe them on his suit pants. His mom would lecture him for sure, and besides, he somehow didn’t want to do something so graceless in front of Marco.
“I see,” Marco said, leaning forward with his elbows braced on his knees to people-watch through the gap in the curtain, Coke bottle dangling loosely in one hand. “You two are close, aren’t you?”
“Mmh, we’ve known each other since we were little kids,” Sena confirmed, leaning back on the bleachers. “Me and Riku on Seibu, too!”
“Ohh?” Marco gave him a sideways glance and lifted his soda for a sip, hiding a distorted smile behind the lip of the bottle. “A childhood romance on either side, hmm? I wouldn’t have thought it of you, Sena-kun.”
Sena’s cheeks flared red and he sat up ramrod straight, waving his hands in front of him in denial, nonono—
“N-no! Not at all!” He protested, but Marco continued as if he hadn’t even heard him, “Though you are very charming.”
And he smiled at Sena again, and Sena didn’t know what to say to that at all, his protests petering out in a brief jumble of confused words. After a beat, he managed to shake his head, slower and less frantic now in his confusion.
“M-Mamori-neechan really is just like my sister…” He mumbled, twisting his hands together in a fidget and looking out to where Hiruma had apparently managed to talk her into a game of poker, him cackling and her looking through her cards with her brow furrowed in concentration. “We don’t think of each other like that at all. Riku either.”
“Hmm, is that how it is? What a relief, then,” Marco said, back to people-watching himself and apparently totally oblivious to how Sena was staring at him in abject confusion. But he couldn’t even begin to ask what Marco meant when his mouth was so dry, he noticed abruptly, so he uncapped his water and took a sip and cleared his throat after he swallowed, trying to figure out how to form the question other than just blurting out bwuh???, when Marco spared him by changing the subject.
“Say, Sena-kun,” he began, leaning back casually now with his long legs stretched out onto the next bleacher row in front of him, crossed at the ankles. “What prize were you looking to earn with your tickets?”
“Huh? Oh,” Sena accepted the subject change gratefully, thinking back over the prize wall that he and Monta had pored over before buying their starter tickets. “Well, if I got really lucky, one of the big prizes was a 3DS game I’ve been saving up for, but that would take a pretty big win…”
“Hmm,” Marco hummed in acknowledgement, and took one last sip from his drink before standing. He smiled down at Sena, adding, “Sounds like the both of us will need a lot of luck. I’m going to rejoin the festivities—do you mind?”
He pointed to his own face with a lazy smile, and it took a beat for Sena to realize he was asking for a good luck kiss.
“Oh—sure!” He agreed, his voice somehow steady despite his flushed cheeks and dry mouth (again—he just took a sip!), and tipped his face up so he could reach once Marco leaned down to offer his cheek.
And Marco did lean down, but instead of turning his face, he gently curled his fingers under Sena’s chin to tip it even further up, and kissed him.
His lips were soft, and he smelled—good. Warm and a little sharp. That scent lingered even after Marco pulled away, just like the warmth of his fingers and his lips, spreading through Sena’s entire face and landing honey-thick somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach as Sena blinked owlishly up at him, thoughts slowed from their normal frantic pace to a dazed blur.
He licked his lips, unconsciously chasing that sensation, and noticed that they were faintly sweet with the taste of Coke.
“Thank you, Sena-kun,” Marco said, voice smooth as always, “Now I’m sure to win big, I’d say.”
And he sauntered away, gracefully reintegrating himself into the bustling crowd of wins and losses and kisses, leaving Sena to feel like so much jelly on the bleachers.
Well. That was—that was—well.
Sena drained the rest of his water bottle, and when he felt like his knees could support him again, he quietly slipped out and found where Monta was betting all his tickets at the roulette wheel. On the next round, with Monta shrieking about Sena avenging him against the wheel, Sena caught Marco giving him that slow smile across the various game tables between them, and without even watching the ball spin in its wheel he thought—somehow, somehow, maybe he’d hit jackpot.