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“Did you get the invitation?” Ohno’s voice came distorted through the phone’s receiver.
Sho nodded, even though he knew his friend couldn’t see him. But somehow, Ohno always understood.
“What are you going to do about it?”
Sho glanced at the trash can in the distance. There, crumpled and then ripped apart, was the wedding invitation he got from Aiba just an hour before.
“Are you going?” Ohno asked him after a beat.
“After the way things ended?” Sho laughed bitterly. “No.”
“This is all so fucked up, man.” On the other side, Ohno sighed. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Aiba with that… you know. And the two of you like this.”
“Are you going to go?” Sho asked, ignoring his friend’s last comment.
“Yeah,” he admitted with a soft voice. “I’m sorry, I… I don’t want him to think we all hate him…”
Sho felt the pain in Ohno’s words as he said that. Sometimes he would forget that he and Aiba cutting all ties with each other also meant that the balance of their group had been disrupted. They put their friends in the worst situation when they had to pick sides, and now it had been six months that they hadn’t all met together like they used to. He knew Nino, Ohno and Jun all still hung out with Aiba, and of course, they hung out with Sho too. But things never felt right when they gathered as four.
“Yeah,” Sho found himself saying. “It is fucked up,” he echoed Ohno’s words from before.
Silence again. After twenty-one years of being Ohno’s friend, Sho had started interpreting his silences. There were times where his friend was just not sure what to say, or times where he was just too tired to speak. There were also times when Ohno would just stop listening, and it would take him a while to get back to the conversation. But this silence? It felt loaded with something Sho couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“Nii-san?” he called, tentatively.
“You know,” Ohno started, hesitantly. “I always thought it was gonna end up with the two of you.”
“What was?”
“The whole thing,” he said. “You and Aiba, together. I thought you were gonna make it. Like, it was always supposed to be the two of you, you know?”
Sho listened to Ohno’s words in silence, processing them. There might have been a time when Sho thought the same too, but he had no hope anymore.
“You should see him, he’s miserable,” Ohno continued. “I think he regrets his decision, but he knows you two are done.”
“We didn’t have to be,” Sho whispered. “He was the one who slept with me after he already knew he was going to marry his abusive girlfriend.”
“I know, I know,” Ohno conceded. “But I don’t like to see him like that. It’s worse than it was before. Even when we’re together, he’s always checking his phone, and he flinches every time her name comes up.”
Sho’s heart hurt at those words, but he told himself that he shouldn’t care. If he let himself care again, he didn’t know what he would do.
“I’m not good with words like you are, but yeah,” Ohno was continuing. “I really believed you were gonna get through to him one day, and that we’d be going to your wedding now. That’s what I thought. I think we all did.”
“Yeah, well,” Sho dragged a hand on his face, suddenly tired of this conversation.
“I’m sorry, Sho-kun.”
“Me too,” Sho whispered, as he hung up.
***
‘I’m sorry if it upsets you, but I am going to marry her.’
Those words were stuck in a loop inside Sho’s head. Over the past six months, they would come back to him periodically, at the strangest time. Sometimes they would come to him while he was doing some research for work, or while he was on air. More often than not, like that night, they wouldn’t let him sleep. Sho would stare at the ceiling of his room while laid out on the bed, touching the sheets next to him distractedly, trying not to think about the feeling of Aiba’s hands on his body.
He had tried so hard to forget everything like Aiba had asked him to. He had tried so hard to move on. But, as expected, he couldn’t.
Sometimes he wondered if things would have been different if he hadn’t kissed Aiba that first night. If he had never said anything, maybe he could have convinced Aiba to get out of his relationship eventually. He would still be with Ueda, and while that wouldn’t have made him completely happy, it wouldn’t have made him pathetically miserable, which is what he was feeling now.
And sometimes, when he let his guard down and let himself be weak for a second, he even wondered if things had been different if he had kissed Aiba when they were in college instead. Where would they be if he hadn’t been too chicken to tell Aiba what he felt for him when they were still young and had all the time in the world?
But then maybe Aiba would have stopped being his friend. And at least this way… At least this way he got to be with Aiba at least once in his life, Sho would end up thinking.
‘I’m sorry if it upsets you, but I am going to marry her.’
He grabbed the pillow from under his head and pressed it to his face. He hadn’t talked to Aiba for months, but he still didn’t know how to live without him. Even now, he couldn’t stop thinking about his invitation; even now, he was just counting down the days to his wedding. It was twisted.
He sighed and sat up. During his insomniac nights, there was one thought, one solution that would cross his mind every time. He wasn’t sure it would even work—and it probably wouldn’t—but he needed to do something. He couldn’t take this anymore.
Gathering all the resolution he could muster, he took his phone out and typed a short message in the chat he had with his three friends.
I think I need to leave.