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Kakeru had been waiting for an opportunity like this for ages.
Ever since Haiji gave everything he had to finish running his first and only Ekiden, he’d been thinking of the best way to thank him for everything he’d done. No gift seemed appropriate and words were never enough, so for the better part of the month post-Ekiden, he’d been observing him, trying to see if there was anything he wanted or needed, something that would be within his abilities to give him. That one insane dream which completely ruined his knee aside, Haiji didn’t seem to want or need anything. He was a man easily contented with what he already had, who found joy in the simple pleasures in life.
Kakeru concluded that Haiji may well be the real-life inspiration for a mysterious novelist or poet protagonist character, whose charm lay in his self-sufficiency, all-knowing smile and the light in his eyes.
Or maybe he’d just been spending too much time with the romance manga series Prince had lent him, and seeing Haiji live out the other part of his life as a literature student was feeding his imagination.
Either way, when Yuki mentions that “I think Haiji may be interested in someone”, Kakeru has one of those light bulb eureka moments.
He remembers a particular manga character being a tortured romantic, who wrote secret love letters – monologues so tender and full of ardour and delight – which he never sent out, and Kakeru couldn’t help but wonder if that may soon be Haiji’s life story.
For the most part of their friendship, Haiji had either been so fixated on the Ekiden or so busy with his final year thesis that Kakeru had been convinced he simply didn’t have room in his heart for anything else. But he supposes now that he’d accomplished the dream that once consumed him, Haiji finally has the bandwidth to indulge in his feelings for other things – or another person, for that matter.
“How can you tell?” he remembers asking Yuki.
“You’d be able to tell, too, if you watched him closely enough,” is Yuki’s cryptic reply. “It’s not like he’s being subtle.”
Haiji has never been lukewarm with his feelings, and if the Aotake residents had watched him carefully enough, Kakeru supposes they might’ve been able to see his Ekiden plans coming from a mile away. And as far as affection is concerned, one only needs to look at his dedication to Nira to know that Haiji’s affection runs deep.
With Valentine’s Day around the corner, Kakeru believes the stars have aligned. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for – a chance to help Haiji the same way he helped bring him back to the one thing he loved most.
He just needs to find out who Haiji has feelings for, and then… Well, he’ll figure out what to do next along the way.
Yuki is right in that Haiji isn’t being subtle. Because now that Kakeru is looking out for the signs, he catches Haiji staring off into space more often than he used to, a smile creeping to his lips at odd times of the day when his thoughts drift.
Haiji. Daydreaming. About something that isn’t the Ekiden.
Kakeru didn’t think he’d live to see this day.
Haiji’s gaze then shifts to him, and when their eyes meet, Haiji raises a hand over mouth, barely hiding the smile as he blinks innocently at Kakeru.
*
There’s one night when Kakeru notices the lights on in the kitchen and peers in to find Haiji on his feet experimenting with recipes, pots bubbling and ingredients strewn across the dining table in the middle of the room.
It’s 4am.
“Kakeru,” Haiji smiles, beckoning him over in a hushed whisper. “Great timing.”
“What’s…” Kakeru gestures at the table, then the counter, then the stove. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
Instead of answering, Haiji sticks a spoon in his mouth.
“How does this taste?”
Kakeru dutifully takes the contents of the spoon into his mouth, and a burst of rich, creamy flavour hits his tastebuds.
“Tuna mayo?”
Haiji nods, looking expectantly at him.
“It’s really good…” Kakeru says hesitantly. Anything covered in mayo is delicious, really. “But, Haiji-san, why are you – ”
He stops short when Haiji reaches over to brush the corner of his lips with a thumb, wiping away a smudge of mayo that had found its way there.
“I’m trying out new recipes,” he says simply, turning his attention to the pots on the stove.
Kakeru blinks, mind still stuck in the moment that just passed, thinking about the way Haiji’s thumb had felt on his lip.
“Why?” he asks, after a pause.
Haiji hums. “A new hobby?”
“At this hour?”
Haiji shrugs, the corner of his lips curling into the secretive, private smile that Kakeru has been seeing on his face a lot lately, and Kakeru just knows that it has something to do with Haiji’s little crush. Or not-so-little crush, judging from the mess in the kitchen, Kakeru thinks.
“How long have you been standing?” he asks, glancing at Haiji’s knee.
“Not long. I spent a lot of time sitting at the dining table,” Haiji says, pointing to the mess of chopped vegetables and discarded batter. “But the doctor did say that a bit of movement is good, so really, I’m just following the doctor’s orders.”
He looks at Kakeru from the corner of his eye with a smug smile, like he knows that he’s won this conversation.
“Do you need help cleaning up?” Kakeru offers instead.
“If you want to,” Haiji says cheerfully, packing away little concoctions into tupperware boxes to place into the fridge.
Over the next few days, Kakeru realises he’s become the appointed taste tester of Haiji’s recipes because he serves him dishes he doesn’t serve the rest at Aotake – from chicken nanban, fried shrimp and tamagoyaki, to pancakes, sugar cookies and chocolate pudding.
He can’t figure out why Haiji wants his opinion. He doesn’t have anything else to offer other than “It’s really good”, because that’s exactly what it is. It’s an understatement if he’s being honest, but Kakeru doesn’t think he has the vocabulary to adequately express how delicious they taste. For one, there’s a lovely creaminess to all the dishes that he can’t quite place a finger on.
Another thing he can’t quite decipher is the way that Haiji is watching him from across the dining table as he samples the dishes. With his chin resting on an upturned palm, Kakeru can feel the heat of Haiji’s gaze even when he isn’t looking at him. When he raises his eyes to acknowledge it, he’s always met with Haiji’s curious, smiling eyes and there’s a tension in the air that makes him feel a little breathless. Has Haiji ever looked at him this way before?
“I put mayo in all of them,” Haiji finally tells him, like it’s supposed to answer all his burning questions.
“All of them?” Kakeru asks. “Even the cookies and pancakes?”
Haiji nods, his eyes twinkling with amusement. Kakeru supposes the person Haiji is wooing seems to have a soft spot for mayo, too. It would explain why it had to be him, and why his opinion mattered this much.
“I’m really glad you like it,” Haiji says softly, his smile playful, and Kakeru has to remind himself that Haiji isn’t actually making this for him.
All these dishes he’s whipping up ought to be for someone – perhaps someone from Haiji’s literature class? – so Kakeru keeps trying to catch him in the act of placing them in a bento or wrapping them up in pretty packaging, but he never does.
Either Haiji is really good at hiding things, or he never follows through with sending his dishes to the intended recipient.
*
Kakeru also notices that Haiji spends a lot of time writing in a little journal. Unlike the training journal, however, he never shows it to Kakeru.
He writes in it in plain sight, in the kitchen of all places, with a look that can only be described as “smitten”. Haiji runs the back of his finger absentmindedly over his bottom lip – ghosting over a whisper of a helpless smile – as he pens down sentences that turn into paragraphs.
Haiji in love is really quite something, Kakeru thinks. He wonders if it’s even possible for someone to look even more attractive. Ever since Haiji had completed running the Ekiden, there had been something different about him – like the way he stood, or the way he smiled, or even the way he spoke. He’s physically more broken than he has ever been before, but there’s a wonderful self-assuredness that now radiates from within him, shining brighter through the cracks. If that had been the result of Haiji being in love with running, Haiji being in love with a person renders a very human quality to the heroic and almost untouchable running legend that was Kansei University’s Kiyose Haiji.
The truth is that love looks beautiful on Haiji, and Haiji is powerless in the face of it.
Kakeru clears his throat, and Haiji immediately looks up, fingers splaying across the journal in a vain attempt to hide whatever he had spent the last 30 minutes scribbling.
“Kakeru,” Haiji smiles, a finger playing with the edge of the paper, before he casually flips to a blank page. “You’re back early.”
“What are you doing?” Kakeru asks, matching the level of casualness of Haiji’s page flip as he goes to get a glass of water.
“Just writing,” Haiji says mysteriously, propping his chin up with a hand as he regards him with a lazy smile. Kakeru knows that he ought to ask a follow-up question, to get to the bottom of this, maybe have Haiji admit that he actually has feelings for someone and wrestle the name out of him so that he can finally help him do something about it. But instead, he finds himself feeling self-conscious, the tips of his ears going red as Haiji watches him, eyes tracking his every movement around the kitchen, down to the very act of drinking the glass of water in his hand.
It’s like he’s waiting for something to happen, for the penny to drop, for Kakeru to piece together what he’s trying to say in between every meaningful gaze and expectant pause.
Kakeru’s eyes trail from the journal in Haiji’s hands up to his face, and when their eyes meet, he immediately feels the urge to avert them, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
Haiji raises a questioning eyebrow, his smile unfaltering, and Kakeru feels his heart stuttering with an unfamiliar emotion. Haiji holds his gaze just long enough for Kakeru to start feeling a little warm, before he lets his eyes fall to the blank page of his journal, hiding the familiar secretive, private smile as he runs the back of his finger over his lips again like he’s contemplating something incredibly amusing.
Before Kakeru can ask what’s so funny, Haiji suddenly bolts upright, eyes wide.
“Ah!”
“What?” Kakeru asks, startled.
“I forgot to feed Nira,” Haiji says, looking terribly troubled as he gets to his feet, though there’s something odd about the way the corners of his lips are twitching upwards.
“I can help you with that…” Kakeru offers, wondering if Haiji, who once climbed out of his window to bring Nira for a walk after being locked in his own room (for his own sake!) by the others, would ever forget to feed Aotake’s 11th resident.
Haiji waves him off, moving to the door with unsteady steps.
“I need some fresh air, anyway,” he says, and disappears round the corner before Kakeru can stop him, calling out Nira’s name.
Kakeru sighs, leaning against the kitchen counter, feeling the tension rush out of the room together with the culprit of said tension.
And then his gaze falls on the journal that Haiji has left on the table.
Kakeru really wishes he wouldn’t just leave the thing lying around, especially when he spends all this time being secretive about it. At this point, Kakeru is convinced that Haiji is teasing him. It’s as if he’s aware of what Kakeru is doing, and he’s dangling a carrot in front of him, only to jerk it away at the last minute. What ever happened to all those dishes and mayo recipes he had been working on, anyway?
He regrets it as soon as he does it, but Kakeru reaches for the journal, curiosity getting the better of him as he flips to the page that Haiji had been writing on. He’s not proud of it, but he tells himself that he’s only taking a peek so that he can help Haiji with this crush he so obviously has on someone.
Kakeru reads the first few lines and immediately slams the book shut, face hot. He glances around, hoping to god that no one had seen him or heard the audible gasp that came out of his mouth.
That was the start of an entire paragraph about someone’s lips.
“Haiji-san,” Kakeru calls out, stumbling out of the kitchen, fanning himself with the journal in his hand. “You forgot your notebook!”
*
There’s something special about nights like these, where it’s just the two of them under a sky of... well, stars. Kakeru is sure that stars would probably be visible somewhere in the country. Like on a balcony, in a cabin in the middle of the woods, for example.
But tonight, he finds himself sitting in the yard outside Aotake, watching Haiji as he plays with Nira. He can’t remember why they are alone, except that maybe the rest said something about going to the public baths and Haiji had said he'd stay back. Kakeru found that he'd much rather be here, too.
Valentine’s Day is one day away, and Kakeru still hasn’t gotten any closer to figuring out the answer to the biggest question on his mind at the moment, which consequently also means his plans are headed on a one-way trip to failure.
Kakeru reasons that it’s the only possible explanation as to why Haiji has been occupying his thoughts more often than he already does.
“Haiji-san, tell me about the person you have feelings for,” is what he really wants to say. Instead, he settles for:
“Valentine’s Day is coming up.”
“It certainly is,” Haiji hums, booping Nira on the nose, chuckling when he gets a confused blink in return. And then Haiji exhales dramatically, pulling his good knee to his chest and resting his chin atop it.
“Ah,” he sighs, turning his face to Kakeru. "If only walls could talk, right?”
Kakeru stares back at him. He’s not quite sure what he means.
“If walls could talk, they’d be able to let someone know when another person has feelings for them, wouldn’t they?” Haiji says forlornly. “They’d see all the little moments in between other moments, and all the little things in between the other little things they do for them when no one is looking.”
Something is odd about the way that Haiji is looking at him, and Kakeru starts to feel warm all over again, thinking that the jig is up.
Haiji knows. Haiji knows that he’s been snooping around, getting all into his (very personal) business, and he has nothing to show for it. Not even a name.
As Kakeru struggles to piece together an explanation, Haiji turns to Nira, and asks: “What do you think, Nira? Do you think he knows?”
Well, Kakeru thinks. It’s now or never.
“Are you in love, Haiji-san? With something other than running?”
“Am I – ” Haiji blinks at him, before he starts to laugh. “I thought it was pretty obvious.”
There’s a sinking feeling in Kakeru’s stomach in the moment he’s proven right, and it’s only then does he realise that he hadn’t wanted it to be true. He suddenly can’t bring himself to look at Haiji and he can’t figure out why.
“I just want you to know that I’ll help you,” he says, trying to control the slight tremble in his voice. “Whatever it takes.”
It’s strange, because Kakeru is sure he means it, but it sounds like a lie, even to him.
“Whatever it takes?”
There’s a twinkle in Haiji’s eye and a teasing lilt in his voice. It’s a loaded question, but between figuring out why he suddenly feels like he’s about to throw up and the way that Haiji is looking at him, Kakeru doesn’t quite have the mental capacity to consider the implications of whatever he’s saying so –
“Yes. I just… I just need to know who the person is.”
Haiji pauses, and lifts an eyebrow.
“Even if it isn’t you?”
“Even if it isn’t me,” Kakeru nods and immediately does a double take.
“What?”
Haiji looks at him from the corner of his eye, the side of his lips curling into a smile.
“He doesn’t know,” he whispers to Nira.
It takes Kakeru a second – maybe two – before his brain finally catches up. But when it does, Kakeru feels the air rush out of his lungs, the realisation a wave of relief that washes over him and sends newfound butterflies fluttering in his stomach.
“What...” Kakeru swallows, his throat going dry. He does know. Or at least, he’s hoping he does. Because he really wants to be right. “What do I not know?”
Haiji shrugs. “If only walls could talk, right?”
“Haiji-san…”
Haiji laughs, a lovely, light, delighted sound that makes Kakeru’s heart skip and his breath catch. Has it always done that?
Haiji’s gaze turns to him, slow and intentional, and time seems to stop. Just for a little bit.
“Well, okay,” he says quietly, after raising his eyes to meet Kakeru’s. Haiji leans in, smiling as he reaches to brush Kakeru’s hair out of his eyes, before dropping his hand to his cheek, fingers gently tilting his face towards him. “But only because the night sky is just so pretty.”
Kakeru wants to tell him that he doesn’t make sense, that there’s nothing pretty about the night sky today. But then Kakeru sees the stars anyway, shimmering bright like the moment that Haiji kisses him.
Haiji's lips are soft, his kiss sweet and careful. And when Kakeru inhales in surprise, he breathes in the scent of warm, fresh linen and the body wash that Haiji always uses.
All first kisses should be like this, he thinks.
He’s slow to respond again, but Haiji patiently waits for him, just like he always does.
“Are you okay?” Haiji asks gently, looking at him with curious eyes and a small tilt of his head, and Kakeru immediately lifts his chin, catching Haiji’s lips between his own.
He likes the kiss. In fact, he likes the mayo recipes, and that ridiculous paragraph about his lips, and the way Haiji smiles when he’s thinking about him, too.
But more importantly, he likes Haiji in exactly the same way that he does, and it’s baffling how it took him this long to realise just how fond he is of him.
So Kakeru presses close, and hears the way that Haiji inhales sharply, smiling just before he parts his lips, hands resting on Kakeru’s arms as he kisses him back.
“I like you, too,” Kakeru tries to tell him, but Haiji keeps kissing him, each and every touch one that takes his breath away, and he realises that Haiji has always known.
It feels a little like the world is melting down to the space between their lips and the breath against his cheek, when someone clears his throat, and Kakeru immediately darts back, turning to see Yuki standing with his arms crossed.
“Maybe not do this outside?”
He’s addressing Haiji, clearly unimpressed. And then he turns his Kakeru, adding, deadpan: “Told you Haiji was interested in someone.”
“Ah, what terrible timing, Yuki,” Haiji sighs, eyeing him with mock displeasure. “Shouldn’t you be with everyone else?”
Yuki narrows his eyes, his lips curling in disbelief.
“I forgot my towel,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have come back for it if you had told me that this was happening tonight.”
Kakeru glances from Yuki to Haiji, and then back to Yuki. “What’s going on?”
“Way to ruin a romantic moment,” Haiji grumbles.
Yuki rolls his eyes, raising a hand as he begins to head back towards the public baths.
“Spare a thought for Nira who doesn’t need to see this,” he calls out, before he pauses, turning back around.
“I don’t need to see this,” he adds, which draws a laugh from Haiji who waves him away.
“He’s a sneaky bastard, this one,” Yuki tells Kakeru as he heads off, leaving a perplexed Kakeru and a tickled Haiji in his wake.
“What was that about?” Kakeru asks as Haiji tries to look apologetically at him, though the crinkle by the corners of his eyes betray him.
“I got a little help from Yuki, is all,” Haiji confesses, and the puzzle pieces start to click into place, from the moment that Yuki had brought Haiji’s feelings to his attention.
“You…” Kakeru’s mouth opens and closes, unsure of how to react to this, oscillating between feeling entirely mortified and somewhat thankful. “But I…”
“I like you, Kakeru,” Haiji whispers as he leans in, eyes smiling and shimmering with affection. “It’s always been you.”
And just like that, Kakeru knows exactly how to react.
He pulls Haiji into another kiss, savouring the way that he laughs against his lips – delighted and wonderful, every bit as lovely as the first time he hears it – and decides, as Haiji melts into his touch, that maybe it’s not so bad that walls can’t talk after all.