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Himuro’s favorite cigarettes were Mild Sevens. He smoked them by himself in a dusty alleyway behind the swimming pool every other day, kept an ashtray stashed behind one of the plastic bins at the end of the fence, sucked on each cigarette slowly and serenely until he could feel every part of himself shrivel up a few inches deeper. This particular routine was not so much a coping mechanism as it was a method to drive the loneliness away, and if it was his loneliness asking to be driven away, Himuro was all too ready to comply.
There were lights from the pool and they flickered in and out over the water. The swimmers inside were all athletes, drawing out their laps under the lights whilst keeping pace to the rhythm and tick of a digital watch. The water was a rather melancholy shade of blue. Himuro finished his cigarette, and lit another one.
“Ah, were you here the whole time?”
He let out a shaky breath and watched the ends of the smoke slither up into the sky, spoke without turning his head. “How did you find me, Atsushi?”
“Oh, it wasn’t hard,” said Murasakibara. “I made a deduction.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Let’s go home, Muro-chin.”
“But you only just got here,” said Himuro. “Won’t you stay a while?”
Reticence at its most basic level merely required Himuro to keep quiet about his personal life and leave his effective secrets hidden underneath a pile of cold stones, but in practice it was difficult and much more costly of a journey than he had really prepared for. He could barely afford the fuel expenses from Akita to Shizuoka, for one thing, and Atsushi was more than ready to add to his tab by ordering a large supply of chicken-flavored potato chips at the combini on the other side of the bus station.
“You’ll get hungry,” he explained to Himuro. “I’m just being considerate here.”
“It’s nice that we’re graduating in a month,” Himuro told him. “I wouldn’t know how to deal with you if it was for the rest of my life.”
“That’s mean, Muro-chin.”
“I don’t think I was trying to be nice.”
The bus came fifteen minutes after the hour, and Atsushi sat beside him in the third row from the back, cramped and cranky for the first three hours and then largely scornful for the rest of the trip, having shifted his body horizontally so that his long legs could stretch out and invade the area of Himuro’s footrest. In general, he was very pathetic to look at, munching on his chicken-flavored potato chips and pretending that there was meaning behind the shoddy movie about upskirt photography that they were showing on the miniature tv. Himuro felt sorry for him. It kept him from feeling sorry for himself.
“Is he really worth that much to you?”
“You didn’t have to come with me, Atsushi.”
“Nah. It’s nice to take a break like this, especially with Muro-chin. I like spending time with you. I really do.”
“And it’s definitely not because you’re a lazy ass who doesn’t want to do off-season training.”
“Definitely not.”
“You’re very agreeable today, aren’t you?”
“It’s only because I like Muro-chin, OK. I think he’s rubbing off on you too much.”
They arrived in Shizuoka late in the evening. Atsushi took twenty minutes to stretch out on a wooden bench next to the station and Himuro used this time to light another cigarette. Together they watched the bus pull out of the station and into the maintenance garage, a gray cloud emerging from its exhaust pipe to match the smoke that escaped from Himuro’s mouth.
“When did you start on those cigarettes, anyway,” said Murasakibara. “They’re not very good for you, you know. Muro-chin is getting too skinny.”
“When did you start on the junk food, anyway,” Himuro parroted him, cracking a small smile. “I dunno, Atsushi, maybe you’re just too chubby.”
Haizaki showed up just then. His pace was slow and Himuro noticed that, even without looking down, he did not step on a single crack in the sidewalk.
“Oi, what’s this guy doing here?” he said to Himuro, and jerked his thumb at Murasakibara. “We never agreed on you bringing someone else too.”
Himuro said nothing. He tapped the end of his carton of Mild Sevens and drew another cigarette from the box. There were three left before he’d have to open a new pack.
Murasakibara narrowed his eyes. “I wanted to come. You got a problem with that?”
Himuro spared neither of them much of his attention and put the cigarette in his mouth. He stuck his hand in his pocket to look for his lighter but before he could fish it out, Haizaki leaned forward lazily and caught Himuro’s arm with one hand. He flicked open his own cigarette lighter with his other hand, released his grip on Himuro’s arm to cup a palm over the flame, and then lit Himuro’s cigarette for him.
“Thank you,” Himuro murmured. He sucked at his smoke quietly for a moment before removing it from between his lips, blew out a small string of carelessness and then his fingers were on the back of Haizaki’s neck. They kissed in front of the bus station.
When they pulled apart, Haizaki licked his lips. “Get lost, Atsushi.”