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"I want to dye my hair."
Shouyou looked up from the DS he was holding in his hands, flinching as he heard Link getting attacked and promptly killed. He frowned with a pout of his lips, but nonetheless redirected his attention to Kenma who was sitting across from him, legs crossed and hands neatly pooled in his lap.
Kenma's gaze was nowhere near Shouyou, but instead, cast off to the side eyeing a sock on the floor that Shouyou had haphazardly kicked off upon arriving at Kenma's apartment with a meat bun dangling from his mouth. Shouyou took a moment to pause his game and gently placed Kenma's DS on the bed.
"I thought you said you were gonna' let your black hair grow out?" Shouyou asked, tilting his head in confusion. Kenma thought he looked akin to a lost puppy.
"I changed my mind," Kenma lightly replied, eyes still anchored on his boyfriend's sock. He felt the bed shift and he instinctively looked up, eyes now fixated on Shouyou who was now leaning forward on his knees, hands flat down on the bed in front of him. Shouyou's honey colored eyes were panoramic and nearly sparkling, his excited smile taking up the entire width of his face. Kenma already knew what he was going to ask.
"Can I help you dye it?!" Shouyou crooned, wiggling his hips. His small fingers curled into the blankets, bare toes doing the same behind him.
"Hm, I don't know," Kenma mumbled, subconsciously running his fingers through his hair and tucking a few loose strands behind his ear. Admittedly, he couldn't find himself putting his trust in Shouyou with handling chemicals. The shorty couldn't pour a bowl of cereal without making a mess.
"Please, please, pleeease," Shouyou whined, clasping his hands. He even went so far as to pucker his lips. "Kenmaaaa."
Kenma startled when Shouyou suddenly let himself fall forward, face plunging into Kenma's lap. The blonde's face flushed a brilliant shade of red, too stunned to speak, too stiff to move. He felt his boyfriend nuzzle his thigh and heard him let out a muffled whine, which Kenma would admit was rather cute. Shouyou was always cute.
Kenma looked down into his lap, a little bit in awe. Shouyou nuzzled his thigh one more time before turning his face to the side, one brown eye peeking out from behind a tuft of orange hair.
"Please let me help, I wont do anything you don’t want me to," he mumbled softly, as if whispering a secret to himself.
Kenma found himself threading his fingers through Shouyou's hair, felt him tense briefly at the sudden touch before he let slip a complacent sigh. The boy's warm breath seeped through his clothes, and Shouyou's slender fingers curled into the fabric of Kenma's shorts.
They spent a few minutes like that, with Kenma softly combing his fingers through his boyfriend's hair, occasionally caressing the sides of Shouyou's face. It was easy to get lost in these kinds of repetitive, intimate motions, and Kenma couldn't help but smile.
He never had the heart to deny Shouyou of anything, not when the boy was always so genuine, so excited, so passionate about even the most trivial things. Like how he was now, begging to help dye his hair of all things. Shouyou was too cute for his own good.
"Okay," Kenma finally answered with a shrug, as if disinterested. Shouyou immediately leaped into action. He pulled himself from Kenma's lap and sat up, throwing his hands in the air.
"Wahhh, thank you let's go now!!" he hollered, about to spring from the bed, but a quick hand at his wrist prevented him from doing so.
"Tomorrow," Kenma chided, voice a tad lower than usual, and gently tugged at the other's wrist. Though Shouyou's endless supply of energy thrummed strong through his veins, he allowed Kenma to slowly lead him back to the middle of the bed. Kenma pondered why his boyfriend was not trying to break out of his grip, with how excited he had been just a few seconds ago, but perhaps Shouyou knew that he had unintentionally sparked a bit of hidden interest in Kenma, a kind of interest that was more intimate in nature.
Kenma lowered Shouyou to the bed until he was lying down on his back, his small frame surrounded by blankets and pillows.
"Alright, tomorrow," Shouyou belatedly agreed, and then Kenma felt the other's hands coming up to tenderly cup his face, thumbs tracing invisible patterns along the apples of his cheeks. Shouyou pulled Kenma down until they were eye level, their faces a mere couple of inches apart, and then he smiled and placed a light kiss upon his nose.
Kenma wasted no time in covering that gentle smile with his lips, his arms snaking underneath Shouyou's back and curling around the boy's waist. He pressed Shouyou as close to him as he could get, until he could feel the other boy's fluttering heartbeat in tandem with his own.
Shouyou laughed through the kiss, even when Kenma licked his mouth open and mapped the inside with his tongue. They spent the rest of the early evening lost among the sheets.
Shouyou held the two boxes of Palty Golden Brown Hard Bleach in each hand, somewhat at a loss.
"Why Palty?" Shouyou queried, taking a moment to inspect the picture of the woman featured on the bright pink box. Her hair was nice and straight and smooth, and she had the exact same shade of hair as Kenma. She was very sparkly, he concluded.
"If I'm going to bleach my hair, I'd rather do it gently, " Kenma explained patiently, taking a seat upon the closed toilet. Shouyou set the boxes down upon the bathroom sink and took as step closer to Kenma, reaching over to twine a strand of the blonde's hair around his index finger.
"So you need two boxes because your hair is so thick?" Shouyou teased with a smile. Kenma batted his hand away playfully.
"Three boxes actually, but since it's just the roots, only two," Kenma corrected.
Shouyou suddenly leaned forward and planted a particularly loud kiss on the top of the older boy's head, and Kenma could only raise an eyebrow, cheeks coloring.
"I'm going to miss your pudding head," Shouyou lamented, wiping a fake tear from his eye. Kenma huffed at his faux dramatics.
Nearly an hour and a half later, and a resulting messy bathroom, Kenma sat in front of Shouyou, both perched at the edge of the bed. Kenma shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with being ogled at so fiercely. Shouyou's stare was like a honing beacon. No matter where Kenma looked or where he pointed his body, he could feel Shouyou's eyes dissecting him.
"Will you quit it," Kenma muttered tersely. From the corner of his eye he saw Shouyou visibly flinch, followed by a sequence of rather hilarious, but painful looking facial expressions.
"Gwah! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-- ," Shouyou wailed frantically, already throwing his hands out in front of him as a way to placate the situation , but Kenma interrupted by merely reaching over and plucking one of Shouyou's airborne hands. He cradled the small hand within his own, fingers lightly massaging Shouyou's knuckles. After a couple of seconds, Shouyou squeezed back, and in the next instant, the younger boy covered Kenma's hand with his free one, bringing their clasped hands to his chest.
"You look SO cool Kenma!!!!!!" Shouyou gushed, stars in his eyes. "I mean it wasn't as if you weren't cool before, but you look even cooler now!"
"Is that so. .." Kenma trailed off, looking away. He couldn't hide the redness of his face, but the least he could do was try not to maintain eye contact.
During the dyeing process, Shouyou had made an utter mess with the dye, staining a couple of towels and even his own shirt, but thankfully they had both managed to get the job done. In the end, Kenma's roots were completely and evenly coated. His hair still irritatingly smelled like bleach and probably would stay like that for the next couple of days, but all he really cared about was having his roots even with the rest of his hair.
"So cool!" Shouyou piped up once more, releasing Kenma's hands.
"I see," Kenma whispered. Whenever Shouyou praised him like this, Kenma's vocabulary seemed to fly out the window. It was hard to form sentences, let alone a single word, when Shouyou was like this. It wasn't as if Kenma didn't appreciate his boyfriend's encouraging words, because he did, very much, it was just that hearing those kinds of things coming from Shouyou left him very flustered.
Kenma found himself seeking out the other's hands, finally looking up, red face and all, to Shouyou who was also looking just as flustered. Kenma looked down to their entwined hands, their laced fingers, and admired the contrast in skin tones. Shouyou, whose skin was tanned and sun-kissed with freckles, compared to Kenma's pale, creamy skin. Kenma secretly loved the difference.
Kenma guided Shouyou's hand to the top of his head, directing the boy's fingers through his hair and letting out a small sigh when Shouyou's fingers finally entangled in his hair.
“You're hired,” Kenma blurted, already tensing at the slip of words.
“Haha, what?” Shouyou chuckled with a tilt of his head and a scrunch of his eyes, weaving his fingers through Kenma's just-dyed hair and gently scratching at his scalp.
“I meant...” Kenma continued, licking his lips. “...that you're on hair dye duty.”
Kenma felt lips on his own, and then on his forehead, and he didn't have to even look at Shouyou to tell that the stars were once again his eyes.