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"Aomine Daiki, age Too Old for This Shit, at your service," mumbled Aomine as he came down from a pull-up. He'd lost count around fifteen, distracted by a crack in the gym's load-bearing wall, but he figured he was close enough to twenty reps to quit.
The street beyond the weight room's enormous window brightened; somewhere behind the cloud cover, the sun was rising. With it would come another sticky summer day in northern Tokyo; the last day of summer, some said, but those who worked outdoors knew better. It would be summer for weeks yet, and Aomine intended to enjoy his rare days off near a goddamn air conditioner.
It's your birthday, eat something nice, drink some beers, go get laid, his boss had instructed him. Take the next day too, sleep it off.
Eating something nice would be easy enough, as would the beers. The getting laid part, maybe not. Aomine hopped off the pull-up bar, cast a wary glance at the crack he'd seen earlier, and headed for the showers. Alternating cubicles were taped off with yellow, crime scene-looking tape, except the words on the tape were SOCIAL DISTANCE, interspersed with stylised cartoon animals bowing deferentially. The world was a weird place these days, and it was a weird time to have a birthday.
When you were a kid, birthdays were a big deal. For kids, nearly every year brought something new, be it a school year with new classmates and teachers or a whole new level of school, always climbing towards an age when you can finally say enough. For those on high school sports teams, the added years came with heightened awareness of the inevitability of fleeing into the open world. In Aomine's case, anyway. Maybe if he'd had the drive to go to university, he could have squeezed out another couple of years of waiting for his life to begin.
He'd worked in his uncle's construction company for just about twenty years, now. The work was satisfying -- making stuff you could touch and look at, not moving stacks of files around a beige cubicle -- the pay was decent, and his days off were his own. Sometimes he wondered what could have been if he'd just tried to get into a university, if only to play basketball. Would he be an office drone, now? A dental hygienist like Satsuki?
Growing up, all he'd ever seen ahead was professional basketball, but that was America. He'd have had to try out, and back then he'd had too much pride to go begging for a spot on a team when his whole life he'd always been invited to play on skill alone. Anyway, it wasn't so bad. About the only one of his classmates who'd amounted to anything notable was Imayoshi, who now served on a city council in some prefecture far, far away. As for Aomine, in a few more years, he'd be building his own house.
What for? piped up jaded teenager Aomine, who still haunted the recesses of Aomine's brain, if only at stupid o'clock in the morning.
Aomine turned the water on and hummed the local supermarket jingle. Loudly.
The SOCIAL DISTANCE tape with the bowing animals was all over the lockers and benches in the changing room, too; Aomine suspected that the gym's owner probably bought way more of the stuff than she needed, so was now using it like wallpaper.
As he finished getting dressed, he saw his phone's notification light glowing blue and wondered if it was spam, his first Happy Birthday (unlikely; the older you got, the more people forgot you existed), or--
Aomine snatched the phone up from the slatted bench and unlocked it. LINE had a little red dot, and when he navigated to his chat list, his stomach did a triple flip. Finally, finally, after having left him on "read" for two weeks, Kagami had replied.
Kagami had recently moved back to Tokyo from Kagoshima -- the fitness company he worked for was expanding -- and invited Aomine out. Pandemic or not, a couple of guys could still go for a drink at an izakaya, as long as they cleared out by ten. They'd cleared out at nine, bought a six-pack of beer at a supermarket and continued the night by the riverside. After the beer had gone, they'd taken the cans to a convenience store recycling bin and followed the river to walk it off.
They'd stayed in touch, sporadically, since high school, not even to say happy birthday or anything, just the occasional hey, did you see that Raptors vs Lakers game and the like. Occasional bursts of conversation followed by months of silence. And then Kagami was here and Aomine seemed to have lost the off-switch to his mouth. That night by the river, he hadn't wanted to go home, hadn't wanted it to end -- he couldn't remember feeling that way since they'd both been teenagers, only back then it was about Tetsu, for both of them. The rage-streaks they'd both harboured -- against themselves, against the world, against each other -- had folded into new shapes that made them fit.
Before the beer could wear off, Aomine had pulled Kagami into the shadow of a tree inhabited by a trillion cicadas and kissed him -- no tongue or anything, just a soft, dry, tentative invitation -- but Kagami had eased away, mumbled an apology, and walked off into the murk. Aomine had spent the rest of the night trying not to beat his head against his bedroom wall and then nearly fell off some scaffolding the following morning. He'd composed a dozen messages to Kagami but sent just this one: I get it, you hated it. I won't do it again, so don't be mad.
Kagami had read it at some point, and then there was nothing, day after day. It was so weird. Just days before, Aomine wouldn't have given a shit if Kagami didn't respond to him for months at a time, and now there was no space in his head for anything but Kagami and Kagami's reasons for not replying. When you know, you know, his mom used to say back when she'd still been actively trying to marry him off to some acquaintance's niece, and, well, Aomine sure as shit knew.
And now there was a response. The first few characters just said about last time so he'd have to open the message to see what it actually said.
I didn't hate it.
"What, that's it?" Aomine exclaimed, then noticed the time stamp. Four forty-six in the morning, just minutes after Aomine had left his phone in the locker and headed out to the weight room.
Does that mean you want me to do it again? he typed, then backspaced. If Kagami was going to bolt like a frightened gazelle after one little kiss, maybe he should play it a bit cooler.
It's sure early. Were you up all night thinking about me on my birthday? Aomine stared at that one for a while, then his inner skulking teenager offered, Oh yeah, real smooth, just the type of thing I would say. Aomine immediately erased it.
Drinks later? It's my day off. He added a winky emoji, but it looked creepy. He tried typing in "clover" for a lucky four-leaf clover, but the first syllables brought up a giant black dildo from a sticker set he'd drunkenly downloaded and never got around to removing. He opted for a mug of beer instead and sent the message.
The reply was almost instantaneous.
Come over around four. Following it, an address pin in Akasaka.
Aomine put on his Celtics face mask and swiped his mag-key to let himself out of the gym and into the morning. He most definitely was not bouncing, either.
*
He was trying to figure out what to wear when Satsuki called. "Dai-chan, happy birthday! Tetsu-kun says happy birthday, too, by the way."
"Thanks. Put him on?"
"He's at the animal shelter with the kids. Risei wanted to choose the puppy."
Aomine raised an eyebrow. "Tetsu's finally caved? I thought he'd never replace Nigou."
"You know how it is. We all move on."
That's one way of putting it. "We sure do."
"Anyway, enough about sad things! What are your plans? Do you want to come over? I'll go and buy a cake right now!"
Satsuki, Tetsu, and their three kids lived in Yokohama, and there was no way in hell Aomine would have gone all the way out there even without a prior engagement. Which he most certainly was not going to tell Satsuki about. He'd be late to Kagami's if he had to answer all her inevitable pointed questions.
"I'm good, gonna enjoy the aircon, maybe order some pizza. Play some ball on the TV. Go to bed early. You know, life in the fast lane. By the way, grey or white?"
Satsuki laughed. "Pink! Talk to you later, Dai-chan."
Aomine scratched his head and pulled the white button-down polo shirt free of its hanger. Pink. Seriously.
He splurged on a cab to Kagami's, not wanting to marinate on a train and arrive smelling like an overripe avocado. He rang the downstairs bell and the door buzzed; he took the elevator to the fifth floor and found Kagami waiting with his apartment door open.
"Hey," Aomine said, suddenly tongue-tied, which didn't happen often, but Kagami was wearing a Celtics jersey over a white tee. Kagami wasn't a Celtics fan, but he knew that Aomine had been into them in recent years.
"I like your mask," Kagami said with a conspiratory nod. "You can take it off if you want, I got tested before coming to Tokyo. I mean, I might have picked it up in the meantime, but I'm pretty sure I didn't. We're not open to the public yet."
"I wasn't planning on keeping my mask on, don't worry," Aomine said with a grin.
Kagami gave him a look. "You're about as subtle as ever. Come on in."
"Subtlety is for wimps," Aomine offered, making his way inside, where it smelled like every amazing food ever.
His phone buzzed with a notification, and he went to turn it off as he got his shoes off in the entryway. The message was from the owner of his gym: she was having a raffle to raise some funds to help get the business back up and running post-pandemic. The prize was five rolls of SOCIAL DISTANCE animal tape. Aomine muted the phone and left it atop the shoe cabinet, weighing down his face mask.
He walked into the living room to find a countertop full of family-style dishes so varied he didn't know where to look. Sirloin medallions, fried chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, lamb skewers, at least eight different kinds of salads, a sauce tray, vegetables the names of which Aomine didn't even know, a cheese plate, a bread basket, a giant glass bowl full of cut fruit, and a rotating tiered tray of tiny cakes, puddings, and jellies in every colour. Every amazing food ever.
"I didn't know what Western food you liked besides hamburgers," Kagami said, peering intently at the floor. "So I made everything. Happy birthday."
I'm seriously in love with this dude, Aomine thought, so unexpectedly even to his own self that his insides turned themselves around a few times. "C'mere," he half-croaked, pulling Kagami in by the Celtics jersey, then taking Kagami's face in his hands. They kissed for a long time, sizing each other up at first, figuring out where to put their noses, then their hands, how their bodies fit together in a tighter embrace.
Easy, it was so easy, so perfect, like fishing out the very last puzzle piece from beneath the sofa, finding that the cat had destroyed the rest of the puzzle in the meantime, and feeling that unexpected frisson of excitement at getting to put it all back together again, this time with all the pieces at hand. When you know, you know.
"I like you," Aomine murmured, finally pulling away. "Are you on the menu?"
"Ask me later," Kagami whispered back. "First you're gonna eat my food."
"The stuff I like, you mean. It's my birthday, you know."
"You'll like all of it."
"Yessir."
[end]