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It is the looks. It is always the looks that tell Hajime he has mail.
“How bad is it?” he asks with a sigh as soon as the door falls shut behind him and he spots his flatmates lingering around the tiny dining table shunted into the corner of their open kitchen. J.D. is vibrating as if he accidentally sat down on an anthill instead of the cheap IKEA folding chair creaking dangerously underneath him, and Raúl is suspiciously fixated on the screen of his tablet. The aspiring designer never does serious work outside of his own room.
Hajime was somewhat sceptical when Utsui-Sensei suggested he should join a flatshare, especially after Matsukawa had asked who would inherit his X-Box when he was inevitably murdered, but a year later he is still very much alive and finds himself rather happy with his living situation.
“Actually, the most amazing thing happened!” J.D. grabs a tiny stack of carton sheets and starts sorting through the postcards.
Hajime furrows his brows and dumps his gym bag in front of his room before joining his flatmates at the table.
“He sent one twice,” J.D. declares before he shows the stack to Hajime and wildly taps the topmost card depicting a bright beach with three large umbrellas throwing shade over a pink towel.
It started soon after he moved in. At first slowly—one per week, sometimes two. By now, they arrive almost every day.
Postcards from Tooru.
The first time J.D. had confronted him about his regular mail, Hajime had blanked completely and told him “From my parents”. In his defence, he had known the giddy motorcar mechanic in training for less than two months and wasn’t quite sure how the born and bred Coloradan would react to him coming out. The moment he had said those words, Hajime realized, that it made absolutely and utterly no sense for his parents to send him postcards from Argentina and that they had a few too many hearts scribbled into the corners. J.D. had started to grin from one ear to the other, rubbed his hands in glee and started to coo: “Someone has a sweetheart! Wait.. don’t say anything… you… like red hair and big busts!”
And Hajime, the utter idiot he was, didn’t have the courage to disagree.
The sham, however, didn’t last long because unlike his High School friends Raúl has more than three working brain cells that aren’t constantly occupied with sports and/or memes. And so, one fateful day, Hajime had carried his computer into the living room and introduced them to his boyfriend.
“God fucking damn it, why didn’t you say anything! Brunets would have so been my second guess!” J.D. had been angrier with himself for identifying the wrong hair colour as Hajime’s type than the wrong gender and Raúl, while sceptical at first, warmed up to the idea of his flatmate dating another man the very moment Tooru started demonstrating his rapidly increasing Spanish skills.
And ever since that day that marked the start of their friendship, the postcards arriving in increasing intervals have become a daily highlight.
Hajime takes today’s stack. Tooru started sending a card a day around a month ago, but due to postal processing, they tend to arrive in bundles of three or four.
He squints at the picture. “You sure?”
“Hajime, my dude, I’d recognise that pink towel anywhere! The same one already fluttered in around November.” J.D nods, and the strands of his offensively blue mohawk swing back and forth. They’ve grown out over the spring and now, without gel, it looks much like a misshapen palm tree has been planted and subsequently forgotten on the other’s head.
Hajime sighs, flopping down onto the third chair and turns the card with the umbrellas and the pink towel around to find Tooru’s minuscule handwriting on the other side. The card is from twelve days ago and it informs him that his boyfriend went on a hike with his team. Hajime already knows this story because they have video-called twice since then and Tooru has spent a substantial amount of time showing and narrating the millions of pictures he took during the trip.
Hajime switches to the next card. This one has some weird, scaly animal on it that is somewhere right in the middle between grotesque and cute. It is from ten days ago and contains Tooru’s nuanced take on ‘why mangos are weird fruits’. Hajime rolls his eyes. If you write a postcard every single day, you are bound to run out of events to tell people about, he supposes.
He glimpses at the third card, showing a montage of various tourist destination beauty shots from the San Juan area and it documents Tooru’s search for a new belt that fits onto his favourite shorts. Another story he has already heard in much greater detail than any human being ever should.
He takes a moment to shake his head before he returns to the first card, takes out his phone and snaps a picture.
|| [You]: Already had that one.
“He’s gonna be so mad,” Hajime grins at the opportunity to taunt his boyfriend. Maybe if he starts to run out of postcards, then he’ll finally stop sending them, since rational arguments have all gone ignored so far.
It takes a total of twenty-one seconds for his phone to start vibrating.
“Wow, not wasting any time, is he?” J.D. grins.
“You’ve read his postcards, what do you think?” Hajime gets back up, grabs the small stack and excuses himself to his room.
>How dare you!< Is the first thing hissed at him; a very brown, very familiar eye, very close to the camera.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at practice?” Hajime returns, propping his phone against a water bottle and flops down into his desk chair.
>It is called multitasking, and I refuse to leave such blatantly nonsensical accusations unchallenged.< Tooru huffs, leaning back far enough for Hajime to make out his surroundings: blue and white deck chairs under a large canopy. Hajime recognises the terrasse outside Tooru’s gym instantly.
“Shut up, you sent one twice.”
>I didn’t!<
Hajime pulls a grimace. He had a long day working with Utsui-Sensei at the gym and his tired body is torn between just giving up and trusting J.D.. The race is narrow, but the latter wins and he bends down to pull a big shoebox from under his desk, filled to the brim with all the cards his boyfriend has sent over the last year. His flatmate said that the first postcard with the towel and the umbrellas arrived around November.
It takes longer than he anticipated, but the satisfaction is undeniable when he triumphantly holds the two identical postcards next to each other, proving Tooru very wrong.
“You were saying?”
The turmoil on his boyfriend’s face is a true delight and Hajime’s lips pull into a wider and wider grin as he watches thought by thought, argument by argument, retort by retort cycle through the other’s brain until they eventually settle in a stare through narrowed eyes and a jutted chin.
>You just poked the dragon!< Tooru grumbles.
“Does that mean ‘the dragon’ will stop sending postcards about mangos, now that he has cycled through all existing motives in his reach and the ones from fucking Miyagi you sent when you went home for Christmas?” Hajime raises an eyebrow.
>I am on to something with the mangos, I swear!<
“You are most certainly not.”
He leans back in his chair, the shoebox still in his lap, and adjusts the angle of his phone a bit.
>So sue me for being a little old-fashioned, but I want to tell the boyfriend who I love and miss a lot about my days.< Tooru starts whining.
“Since you keep forwarding me YouTube clips of yourself on TV, I know that you are very aware the concept of e-mails exists.”
>I’m old-fashioned and a romantic, Iwa-Chan, not a lunatic! Unless you want me to record my games and mail them to you on a VHS.<
Hajime crosses his arms over his chest and exhales through his nose so loud that the other must hear it through the speakers.
>Thought so.< Tooru smirks, as if that was a win for him.
Hajime may never understand what is going on inside that head but, nevertheless, the other’s familiar shenanigans soften something inside his chest and his shoulders relax.
“I miss you too. Now get back to training, smartass.”
A soft breeze ruffles Tooru’s hair, accentuating his coy smile. Then, the image stutters and freezes for a heartbeat before the only thing Hajime can see is his own picture in the camera and he finds his fingers absentmindedly tracing around the edges of the postcards—his only source of comfort in the chokingly dreadful moments after every call, when the distance between him and his boyfriend feels so much more real than he can stomach.
It is the looks. It is always the looks that tell Hajime he has mail.
Today, however, it is the absolute lack thereof that tells him something is different. That, and J.D. biting his lower lip, barely containing the quaking amusement bubbling under his skin, as he hands Hajime the newest stack.
There haven’t been any postcards for almost two weeks and he’d had half a hope that Tooru finally saw sense. He should have known better—that the only way to go for the brunet was downwards, further into madness.
‘Until I find a new store <3’ is all that is written in green glitter pen on the first card (if one doesn’t count the alien face drawn below). The front shows Tooru himself, flashing his signature peace sign into the camera.
The second features his boyfriend sitting in a street corner cafe, generously sipping a cappuccino and the text ‘Postcard with a picture of me writing the postcard. Take that Inception! PS: Realised I confused mangos with papaya—stay tuned for new developments ~’.
And, as if that wasn’t enough, the third one is a picture of perfectly suntanned abs above those all-too-familiar gym shorts with the Seijoh-blue waistband sitting right below a crisp, pale tan-line that is bordering on scandalous. The back only contains one word: ‘Better?’
In the lower right corner, they all bear a watermark reading ‘mypostcardprinter.com’.
“That little shit!” Hajime breathes out and J.D. bursts into laughter.