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Kuramochi’s mouth is like cotton when he realizes. Sawamura Eijun—his roommate, his teammate, his friend—is giving him fucking heart palpitations. Kuramochi is getting ready for morning practice when it hits him, and it’s all thanks to the sidelong glance he casts at the sleeping figure beside him while changing into his compression shirt and pants. Sawamura’s face is so serene when he sleeps, like he’s an angel or something, despite the fervor with which he seems to live every single second of his life, whether it be in agony or euphoria.
The cottonmouth is just a prelude to the dust that’ll be collecting in his grave when he’s dead, any and all feelings unrequited, because Kuramochi knows he’s taking this to his grave. Sawamura’s buried in his phone a lot of evenings emailing Wakana, probably pining away or planning a date the next time he visits home or something. Of course the guy’d be confused if his upperclassman, who’s always scouring through his picture folder for a shot of his lady friend, suddenly professed a romantic fondness for him. Kuramochi himself is still reeling from the epiphany about being bi-something-or-other-or-both-or-whatever, even if it’s been at the back of his mind for who-knows-how-long.
But Kuramochi’s actually quite equipped, he thinks, to carry the emotional load. He’s no stranger to suppressing his feelings, bottling things up until they explode—though he’s determined to keep this one contained in perpetuity.
He half-jokingly imagines closing the lid of a coffin while closing the door to their room.
The feeling in Eijun’s head reminds him of the air during morning practice in the spring, with sunlight clashing against the thinning clouds and turning them into crystals in the sky or into nothing at all. Crisp. Unending. Free.
But it’s nighttime. The only time he gets to think about this thing without anyone seeing the red crawling over his face or asking why he has to curl up into a ball and hold onto the hem of the bedsheets like that.
He’s been mulling it over for a while, but it’s pretty clear, isn’t it? He likes Kuramochi. A lot, actually. A-lot a lot. Sure, Kuramochi teases him all the time, but that’s kind of nice, right? All the wrestling helps keep him limber. And he cares a lot, too. Eijun has learned to read between the lines when his upperclassman is shouting threats at him: “You’d better be out of this funk by the time I walk back into this room, or, so help me.” Eijun can hear the growl, the laugh underneath, and the concern underneath that. He’s heard it a so many times, maybe hundreds, and it’s kept him going when he thought he might as well quit. Being around him has become something precious and second nature.
He likes Kuramochi a-lot a lot, he thinks, and that’s something worth sharing, right?
Right.
Sun’s still shining through their window when they get back from evening practice. Summer does that, makes it stay light out longer, makes the curtains look nostalgic while they glow and float in the breeze that blows into the room.
(Summer also makes people act like Eijun acts every day of his life.)
Kuramochi flops onto the floor in front of the television, covered in partially absorbed sweat that’s definitely gonna have him smelling something horrible if he doesn’t shower soon. But he wants to give himself a moment to wind down. He closes his eyes and feels the air move like a veil over him, wafting and playing at the flyaway pieces of his hair that were lying on his forehead.
Eijun destroys the oncoming calm by flopping on the floor next to him with a thump. “Kuramochi-senpai, I have something to say!” he shouts.
Balls will go flying, so thank you in advance.
Kuramochi forces his eyes open and looks at the figure propped up on an elbow beside him. “You’re yelling.” But he can’t even get the full sentence out of his mouth before:
“I like you!”
Kuramochi’s mouth turns to cotton. He has to reorient himself, figure out if he’s the one who said it, because there’s no way in this universe that anyone else in the room would have, right?
But no, it wasn’t him. No, he’s too busy trying to get the saliva to return to his mouth so that he can yell back—“Holy shit, Sawamura, what?”
“I like you!”
“I don’t mean ‘what did you say,’ you—oh my god.”
He’s still lying on the ground, and Sawamura’s still lying their next to him, staring at him like he’s staring through him, but not through him, just way deeper than normal and—so, what did he just say? What does he say back? A statement like this isn’t exactly aimed at Kuramochi every day.
“Is that bad?” Sawamura keeps going. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I think it’s fun to be around you even if you put me in the scorpion hold and won’t let me win at Street Fighter, and I like walking back with you after practice and talking about how we’re getting better as a team, and I think you’re a person that I’d want to—”
“Sawamura, god,” Kuramochi yells. Eijun startles back, starts trying to remember Phase C of the plan, which is the conditional phase where he recites the apology that he half-prepared a few minutes in advance of all this, but Kuramochi reaches over the pitcher’s shoulder with one strong arm and pulls him in close enough that Eijun’s head is resting in the crook of Kuramochi’s neck, and he can feel the pulse pounding there and the heat of all the blood rushing by. In a voice barely above a murmur, Kuramochi says, “I just need a second.”
More than a second goes by. Kuramochi starts whispering again, “I just didn’t know this was going to happen. I was planning on just never saying anything.”
“Why?” Eijun asks. Kuramochi stays quite for a long time, long enough that Eijun starts wondering if he fell asleep.
Kuramochi burrows his nose in Eijun’s hair and half sighs, half groans the nerves away. “Because I didn’t want you to leave.”
Eijun holds on closer, in their little mess of limbs on the floor during the evening of the first evening of something beautiful, or maybe he’d lost count of the days since it began.
“What would you say now?” he asks.
Kuramochi laughs his laugh that Eijun loves. “Why do you say the most embarrassing things?”
Eijun looks up, playfully offended expression and a hint of pink tinting his face. Kuramochi doesn’t give him a chance to make a retort. He props his own head up just enough, even if it kills the already screaming muscles in his neck, and it feels like cotton candy when he kisses Eijun for that very first time, sweet like the taste of victory and soft like the pink on their cheeks and the clouds in their heads.
Stay with me.