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It’s not unlike a fit, Kaoru knows, like one a child would throw, the way he sends himself going to the nearest boutique he can find near the dinghy club he tries to manage. Rei should be on stage right now, wailing into a microphone, and Kaoru wishes he was still chatting up a girl from behind the bar so he would have an excuse to be there. He should be there, but he’s discovered he likes the feeling of velvet through his fingertips too much for it to be normal, or at least what he thinks should be normal.
He spends more time in there trying to charm the lady behind the counter instead of shopping until his stomach begins to lurch, then grabs and purchases the first thing he sees. It’s a dark burgundy, almost purple, probably intended to stop right at the knee. Kaoru knows it will be a bit shorter when, if ever, he fits it on himself.
_____
It’s a lipstick stain, like the ones that girls leave on his own, the ones that have Kaoru touching in the mirror to make the wax on his skin feel tangible; Like the ones that Rei leaves on the butt of a cigarette, the afterburn of that minty lip balm he uses, the one he swears dries out his lips more than it does him any good.
It’s as frustrating as that last speck of nail polish that dares to not chip off, like the near run-out bottle of black that Rei keeps in that little pouch in his schoolbag–- The one Kaoru paid for at the drugstore for him while Rei batted his heavy eyelashes at the man behind the counter for a pack of cigarettes–- the pouch that Rei swears is decorated with carnations, where Kaoru can only see sweet pea, maybe dahlia.
And it festers, a sore he forgot to saline rinse out, every time his hands rub up against the faint blush on his lips after a kiss– It never hits the mark, the rouge never sits as nicely against his mouth as he needs it too, and all he can bear to do is take the sleeve of the blazer he’s borrowed from his father to his face to scrub it off until his skin turns red, until he doesn’t know if he’s just flustered at his own thoughts or if it’s shame burning a hole in his stomach.
_____
Kaoru does not get the chance to wear it before he throws it to the bottom of his closet. He should have asked for a gift receipt.
_____
“A skirt,” Kaoru says, facing down the hallway to his bedroom, his back to his father at the table.
“A skirt,” his father repeats. Something smells like bile and maybe it's the syrup sweet sting of the drink that got splashed on his face earlier by his date on his shirt, still, or whatever might be bubbling in his throat. His father does not ask whom the skirt is for. “A skirt.” And all he hears is the passing of a page, not even the clicking of a tongue.
_____
Rei, he does not think about much; He tries not, no, not now, Rei, who has the rhythm, who has these sanded rhubarb drops, “Oi, Hakaze-kun,” Rei, who has a velveteen pouch in his hands, “Do you like rhubarb?” Rei has the breath of being human within him as much as the blue in his fingertips tries to deny it, Rei, who thinks–- just thinks, he does a lot of thinking, lots of chewing on his lip and scratching the space behind his ear, the knot of his jaw, Kaoru’s learned–- Rei thinks he has Kaoru, too.
Kaoru, silent, save for the chewing of his lip. “No.”
“Have you ever tried it?”
Kaoru hasn’t tried it. “No.” Towards Rei, who knows more than he should.
“What does someone like you know about it if you’ve never tried it?”
It’s pointless, arguing like this: Rei does not take No for an answer, Kaoru does not know anything about rhubarb but he knows this, knows the chill of Rei’s digits because he’s had to pry bottlenecks out of them–- “Expensive ones, too!”-- the ones that Rei needs to pay for if he’s going to have a drink, the ones Rei spits out into the bar sink and says it all tastes like piss, anyway.
Pointless, still, with that same gooseflesh prying apart Kaoru’s lips. “Open wide, Hakaze-kun,” Rei opens his mouth too in a facsimile of what he wants: “Ahhh,” He hums, lips parted like he’s waiting for a light to shine down into it. Rei’s nails tap into Kaoru’s front teeth and the candy drop is bitter on his tongue, spits it out like saltwater into his open hand, the way he’d watch water fall through his fingers, pick seaweed out of his hair. Rei’s fingers are warm when he plucks that petal pink and pollen yellow drop out of Kaoru’s palm and throws it into his own open mouth, as warm as the laugh he lets out when Kaoru stifles the guffaw in his throat, “At least,” Simpered, rolling the candy between his teeth; Rei licks stray sugar off the pad of his thumb, his index finger, tainted pink by blistered-bruise colored dye, “You know you don’t like it, now.” The candy is sweeter, now, without the weight of it on his tongue.
_____
It’s against his better judgement, Kaoru knows.
“You were supposed to be on stage–-” Kaoru cuts himself off and checks his wristwatch, as if he doesn’t have a phone in his back pocket, and squints and taps at the thing trying to see the hands in the pale yellow light of the alleyway behind the club, “--Maybe a half hour ago.”
“Really?” Rei says, dryly, voice hoarse and knuckles red, tossing the cigarette butt to the pavement and sliding it under the bottom of his good shoes, the ones he wears to school.
“I don’t pay you to sit out here and ruin your lungs like that.” He says, this time reaching for the carton sitting beside Rei on the concrete steps of the emergency exit. He turns it over in his palm and crushes it when he realizes it’s empty. Maybe if Rei cared enough he’d turn around and comment on the cute pout he knows Kaoru’s making, and then he’d even get to see him blush, too, when he tries to act like he doesn’t know what Rei is talking about-- but he doesn’t. Kaoru doesn’t think that Rei cares about much these days.
“You don’t fuckin’ pay me at all,” He laughs, and Kaoru does too. It’s nice to hear him laugh for the first time in a while and it makes him sick. No, he doesn’t pay Rei, he can’t pay Rei because Rei won’t let his pride allow Kaoru to; This, he swallows down like bile, down the same way he would if he was arched over the toilet bowl.
Rei runs the back of his hands across his eyelids and it’s unfair how nicely the smeared eyeliner looks against his skin if not for the faint hics coming from his throat. And it’s not until when Rei blows his nose against the sleeve of his probably-too-expensive-to-sling-snot-on leather jacket that Kaoru realizes he’s been staring. “What,” he says, cracking a smile as abruptly as one slams a door, “You want me to do your makeup too?”
_____
Kaoru likes girls. He likes when girls paint their nails, he likes when those girls let them look at their painted nails. Pink, like the rouge dusted on their cheeks, like the lines on Rei’s palm when he asks for the keys to the lockers in the dressing room, or purple, green, sometimes, turning grey; lilac, lavender, like the perfume dotted on their wrists and neck. Kaoru likes when girls let him kiss their wrists, their neck, likes when girls don’t have blisters on their wrists, or bruises on their necks, and Rei has plenty more when he dresses down in front of Kaoru because “It’s a fuckin’ dressing room, Hakaze-kun, where else am I supposed to get naked?” Kaoru likes that too, when he sees the reflection Rei isn’t supposed to have in the mirror. Kaoru likes girls because they have what he does not find in his own self reflected in the mirror of his bedroom.
Rei leaves his bag on the couch after he stomps out to the stage, and Kaoru likes this, too; Girls let him go through their purses and handbags so he can use their lip balm, taste the gloss on their lips after they kiss it off of them, he likes when he wears their scrunchies and barrettes on his wrist so he can tie and pin his back. Kaoru likes when Rei asks him to hold his hairtie for him because he can only fit so many pins and elastic bands between his teeth and Kaoru can smell the leaf-litter-light of his perfume on his wrists, his neck when he tosses it back, as musty as rose petals pressed between pages of a novel and it hits him just as hard as the funeral-home-formaldehyde fragrance of the nail polish he finds at the bottom of the backpack.
It’s not black, Kaoru learns, holding it up to the lights that dot the mirror of the dressing room. It’s the deep end of a lagoon, as dark a blue as his bedroom when he strips in front of his mirror; Plum-skin purple like the circles under Rei’s eyes, the bruises he leaves on himself when he pokes and prods at his skin like he pinch and pull the clay of his being into the shape he wants, blackcurrant, bergamot, blood orange like how a girl should smell, like what Kaoru puts on his own pulse points because that’s what girls like. Kaoru likes when girls let him model their purse, their cardigans, Kaoru likes when they tease him and call him such a good boy for indulging them, such a pretty girl he is when he pins his hair back with those barrettes and when he blushes they like that too, kiss him better for it–-
“Hakaze-kun,” Rei’s dredging the bottom of his backpack. “Who else did you let back here?”
“No one besides your bandmates.”
Rei shrugs, “You’re not lying to me, are you?” He sighs, slings his bag over his shoulder.
“No.”
“I must have left my nail polish at home, then.” Snaps the scrunchie he’s wrenched out of his hair against his wrist, “That blows. I was gonna ask if you wanted me to paint your nails.” He’s almost pouting, bottom lip caught between his top teeth when Kaoru espies the very little curves Rei holds in the mirror. At least Rei is wearing clothes when he looks over his reflection in it, this time.
_____
“Kaoru,” she coughs, and if it weren’t for the steady hand holding hers down, the lacquer on her nails, maybe she’d cover her mouth. Kaoru’s mother doesn’t do a lot of much these days, so he helps her with what he can: he can pick things up for her if she drops them off the side of her bed, he can pull out the chair to her desk, the one she shouldn’t be sitting at, “My little gentleman,” she calls him, still, with her fingers coursing the seaglass flats of his hair, “Kaoru,” she calls him now, “Precious,” like coral–- “Precious coral,” Kaoru learned earlier, grows in dark crevices in the ocean, on the rocky bottom of the sea in crevices, and cracks, with a red, pink, almost orange skeleton–- “Bones, just like you, and me.”
His mother has bones; Kaoru can see them under her skin when she flexes her fingers, lifts them to blow on the red, pink, almost orange lacquer of what he’s painted on her nails. “You’re a precious boy, Kaoru,” she sings to him, “Thank you.” Her skeleton doesn’t work as much as it used to, he’s also learned, like when coral colonies begin to rot, and bleach, like the grey strands in her hair.
“Are you a coral?” Kaoru is just as many handfuls of years old as the fingers he has on each hand. Sometimes precious corals grow in fingers. Sometimes they are harvested to make plates–- No, they grow in plates, like how some whales have plates for teeth–- His mother taught him this, too. “You’d be a pretty coral.” Red, pink, almost orange, far enough in the depths of the ocean just where the sun shines just right, seabreeze-soft, sandy shores and shoals.
“I’m sure you’d make a pretty coral, too.” If her bones worked as well as they used to, she’d paint his nails, too; holding the bottle is enough work for his little hands, held fast on hospital napkins and plastic trays.
“I don’t wanna be a coral.”
“What would you like to be?”
“I wanna be a mermaid.”
“I’m sure you’d make a beautiful mermaid.”
“And you’d have to be a mermaid too, because if I’m a mermaid, then you’d be a mermaid, because corals come from corals and mermaids come from mermaids, and because you’re my mama, and I’m your baby.”
“And you’ll always be my baby, Kaoru.”
_____
It’s darker, now, with his curtains drawn, with what little he has in his reflection in his bedroom mirror. He’s as naked as a painting, as bare-boned as one too; Kaoru’s shirt is too tight around what he doesn’t have on his chest, tucked into his shoulders, and he selfishly wonders if Rei’s ever felt the same about himself, too.
_____
The half-light of the dressing room makes Rei look more unwell than Kaoru knows he is, the stuttering furrow of his brows, his lips, tightly tucked together because he knows if he opens then he’ll start bitching again and for once, just this once, Kaoru is grateful, “Hakaze-kun,” Until he isn’t.
Still, he’s spellbound, “I’m not taking you home with me.” For the second, third, fourth and fifth time and still Rei kicks his legs over the edge of the couch, throws his arms into the air over his head.
“But you wanna.” Kaoru wants to.
“I don’t.” His father won’t be home tonight, for once.
“But I wanna go home with you.” Rei folds over like silk and satin over the side of the couch, “I wanna, Hakaze-kun,” He sings each and every syllable like he does on stage, soaked in sweat, “I wanna go home.”
“Then–- Go home, Rei! Shoo! Scram!”
“But I can’t…” Muffled, through the layers of leather and duct-tape holding the cushions of the couch together that Rei’s suffocating himself in, supine on the sofa, “...I lost my nail polish,” He sniffles, and if Kaoru knew any better he’d think he boy is actually crying, “I can’t go home until I find it. I want it back. It’s my favorite.”
“I’ll pay you for it if it’ll shut you up.”
“And you’ll take me home, too?”
“I don’t take boys home.” He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. Rei doesn’t need to know that.
“Then take a fuckin’ girl home, for Christ’s sake,” he’s kicking his legs in the air now, lays them flat over the back and thump, thump, thumps his feet against the frame like he’d kick the pedal on a drumset. Thump, thump, thumps, hare-heady, Kaoru’s heartbeat, “Well, you’ve got one right here, boy.” Thump, thump, Rei’s fist against his own chest, thump! Rei’s head when it hits the floor as he falls off the side of the couch when he hacks up a hairball.
There’s stones in Kaoru’s pockets, or maybe it’s his house keys, or the nail polish bottle he still hasn’t figured out where to hide in his bedroom, or maybe it’s the bag he’s carrying on his back–- bags, because Rei has his schoolbag, and his backpack with his what-all-else in it, where the nail polish should be-- Kaoru is a gentleman, so he carries Rei’s purse because tonight, Rei is the almost-maybe-not-a-girl-but-who’s-asking he’s bringing home tonight, so he carries Rei’s purse, or whatever Rei carries in lieu of one.
“Do you do this for every girl you bring home, Hakaze-kun?” Rei muses, watching the faucet spitand sputter when Rei asks for a glass of water, “Oh–-” Rei’s hand wobbles when he wrestles the glass out of Kaoru’s palms from across the counter, “--Oops!” No, Kaoru doesn’t slide out of his slacks in the middle of the damned kitchen for every girl he’s taken home because they’ve spilled water all over his school clothes, “Are you sayin’ I’m special?” Rei asks, once more, when Kaoru tells him this as much, “You already have me in your home. You don’t need to flatter me to get what you want.”
Kaoru should splash water back on Rei for all he’s done, maybe, if he’s lucky, Rei will spit and sputter and turn into ash like the vampire he thinks he is. But he’s no priest, and far from it, so soaked slacks are the only holy water he has to offer back into Rei’s face like a poorly mixed cocktail, “You–-”
“--You pervert,” Rei speaks through the crack in Kaoru’s bedroom door, “Did you go through my stuff?”
“Why would I–-Get out!” When Rei peeks his head through the door, “--do that?” softer, soured, when Rei throws Kaoru’s pants on his own bed, his house keys and lagoon-blue nail polish on the top of them.
“You,” Rei spits, still water, livehouse swill, when he points a single finger into the bullseye of Kaoru’s chest, “You fuckin’ owe me.”
“I told you I’d pay you back for it.” It’s Kaoru’s turn to point at the pile of pants on his own bed; This, he does, with Rei’s own hand in his own, forced towards their quarry, “There it is. Fair deal.”
Rei’s hands really do shake, Kaoru’s learned, now that he has one of his hands in own; To be fair, maybe he did drop the glass on the counter on accident, like how he slammed the locker door in the livehouse dressing room shut on accident, too, or how he snapped at Koga, for possibly taking his nail polish, Keito, too, when he too promised to purchase him another-– “You won’t promise me shit,” he said, and that's when Kuro padded out to the fire-exit before Rei could snap at him, too–- No, because Rei doesn’t like playing fair, “Hakaze-kun,” Rei feels like doing whatever the hell he wants, “Let’s play dress-up.”
_____
“A skirt,” Rei says, with the kind of lift at the end as if he wants to ask a question, “You bought a skirt?” He says again, this time for sure, blinks once, twice, as if when he opens his eyes he’ll be anywhere else but where he stands behind Kaoru.
“A skirt,” Kaoru sing-songs, sighs. “Yeah.”
“What color is it?”
“Burgundy,” he says, and this time he doesn’t feel as sick saying it. “Almost purple.”
He can’t see Rei in the mirror while he splashes water on his face, trying to wipe off the ruby red stain left on the side of his mouth from the girl who he’d bought a drink for, but he swears he can almost hear him staring. “Who’s it for?”
“Well,” Kaoru’s face feels almost too hot when he reaches up to wipe what’s left of the lipstick kiss off with his sleeve, either from the blood rushing to his ears or from scrubbing his skin until raw, “It’d make a good gift for my date, don’t you think?” and he looks into the mirror, smiling with all of his teeth, straight and white like a perfectly painted picket fence.
“That’s a shame,” Rei murmurs, “‘Almost purple’ would’ve been a cute color on you.”
_____
“...What?”
Rei shakes his head towards what Kaoru has in his other hand. “Is that the skirt?”
“Oh.” It’s the skirt, dredged from the deep of his closet, where he’d been searching for something else to wear in the eve of forgetting to do his usual laundry before he’s left for the night, “Yeah.”
Rei nods, soft, like the gaze he’s got on his face, now. “I’ll do your makeup.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll paint your nails.” Softer, like the velvet, or maybe corduroy that Kaoru pulls through his fingers in his palms.
“Uh-huh.”
Rei’s fingers flex around Kaoru’s own, now, weaved together like a wicker basket, willow branch, well-worn and weary. “That what you wanna do tonight? Play dress-up with me?”
“Yeah.” Kaoru forgot to get condoms at the drugstore they passed, anyway, where he walked circles in the aisles while Rei picked through each and every bottle of nail polish they had on the shelf before he decided on a handful, then three, two, one, none at all when he couldn’t make up his mind. “Okay.” God forgive him for being a gentleman.
_____
“I’ll paint them yellow next time, mama.” Kaoru speaks into the crook of his mother’s arm. She smiles, the shift of her lips felt upon the crown of his little head. “Like the fishy we saw.”
“Which one was that?”
“The… the yellow one,” It was yellow, “Flat. And it went like,” He lifts himself up, on the hospital bed, sticks his hands flattened together in front of his mouth, “Like this.”
She’d laugh if she could, how she used to, if she had the strength to. “The tang?”
“Yeah.” She’d pick him up and hold him to the aquarium glass if she could, too, let him trace his finger against the glass and watch all the other fishies follow him, up, down, to the right and to the left, “Like a mermaid,” he said, “Because mermaids can talk to fishies.”
“Where did you learn that mermaids can talk to fishies?”
“Uhm,” Kaoru hums, tucks his thumbnail between his teeth and his mother has the strength still to take that from his mouth, set his fidgeting fingers down at his sides, “I don’t remember…”
“Well,” She says, “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Yeah.”
She has the strength, still, to lean over to where Kaoru sits on her lap, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear even if she has to try once, twice, when she shakes for it to stay, “Only mermaids know about that, Kaoru.” She wavers, like seaweed in the shallow shore, the kind he’d carry handfuls of to and from the shoals to where his mother sat in the sand, tossing on her head, her sunhat, like she was a mermaid, too.
“But I’m not a mermaid, mama. Are you a mermaid?”
“Well,” she shrugs, tosses her hands into the air like she would when she could throw handfuls of kelp back at her son, “How else would I know so much about fish?” Only air, she passes between them, now, kisses too, when she blows one through the air, one that Kaoru catches with his hands and sticks back on his mother’s nose.
_____
Rei shakes, too, when he pats down piles of napkins and toilet tissue on the floor of Kaoru’s bedroom, still, when he flattens the brush on the side of the bottle, swipes once, twice, on Kaoru’s index finger and paints more of the paper towel than he does of his nail. “Fuck,” he spits, sniffles, scrapes his skin with the tip of his own lacquered nails, “Sorry,” again, when he misses the mark, hisses through his teeth, “I-- I promise I’m better at this than you think.”
“Rei.” Kaoru sighs. “Rei.” When he doesn’t listen, shakes his head, drops the brush onto the bed of napkins, “Let me, okay?”
“What do you know about painting nails?” He spits, sharp, cuts through the air like silver, fish scales settled in the sink.
Kaoru shrugs. Rei doesn’t protest when he takes the brush into his own hands, lays his fingers flat on the folded towels. “More than you, I think.” He swipes once, twice, on each side of his nail, flexes the brush down the curve of his index, middle, ring and pinky, “I’ll do yours when I’m done, alright?”
_____
“Where will you go when you die, mama?”
“Where do you think mama will go?”
“The ocean. Maybe. I think.”
“Why do you think mama will go to the ocean?”
“That's where mermaids go when they die. And corals. And yellow tangs.”
“Only mermaids know where mermaids go when they die, Kaoru.”
“Is it a secret?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“No. Because then the other mermaids and fishies and corals wouldn’t be able to find you when you die. And then I wouldn’t know where to find you when you die. And I wanna see my mama.”
“I hope you don’t have to see your mama for a very long, long, time after I die, Kaoru.”
“I’m gonna miss you, mama.”
“I’ll miss you, too.”
_____
“I-– I don’t know,” It’s pleated, purple, picked at the seams when Rei helps place it around Kaoru’s waist. “Is this right?”
“Is what right?” Rei hums, in tune with the singing of the zipper when he pulls it through on his backside. “Does it feel right?”
“I guess.” It feels like something’s missing, a purse to hang at his side; No, Kaoru turns once, twice in the mirror, shifts his weight from one leg to the other, adjusts the edge of his shirt back in under the waistband and untucks it once more when that doesn’t feel right, either. His hands barely reach past the edge of it when he sets them straight at his sides, slides them–- “Oh,” he smooths the edges of it against his thighs, “Pockets. I’m–- Rei, listen, don’t laugh–- I’m trying to put my hands in my pockets.”
Rei, for what it’s worth, isn’t laughing; He’s trying not to, at least, his chest rising and fluttering with whatever giggles he’s stifled in his throat, “But you don’t have any, Hakaze-kun.”
“But I feel like I should! I need to put my hands-–” He gestures, throws his hands and whatever facsimiles he could have held into the air and gathers them in a groan, “--Somewhere!”
Rei shrugs, wipes whatever smile he was wearing off of his face with the back of his hand. “I’ll bring you something that my mother used to make me wear when I was little. It has pockets.”
“...Really?”
“Yeah.” He coughs, tucks his thumb back between his teeth and Kaoru crosses his legs when he sits next to Rei on the bed. “They, uh-– I used to wear a lot of dresses. And skirts. Some of them had pockets sewn into the petticoats.” Rei puts his hands into his own pockets, then, of the jeans he’s been wearing for the evening when Kaoru lets his still-soft nails wrestle Rei’s wrist away from his mouth. “And when they didn’t there were these… belts, kinda, belts that you’re supposed to tie around underneath your skirts, and they just had these pockets on ‘em. And I’d-–” He turns, braces himself on the bed, gets as close to Kaoru’s face as he can without kissing him, “--Don’t laugh.” Still, their noses brush together.
“I won’t.”
“I used to put kittens in them, the fuckin’ uh, the pockets, I mean. I’d put kittens in them and take them inside to show my brother. And rocks. Burnt incense cones, too.”
“...Did he want to see the incense cones?”
“No. I just thought they smelled good.” Rei inhales, gulps down a breath like he’s risen from shallow waters. “You smell good.”
“Thank you.”
“I used to uh, use my mother’s perfume a lot, too. She’d bitch and moan at me for it. And the kittens. And the rocks.”
“I used to do that, too.” When Kaoru was little, just two handfuls of years old enough to not know yet that things can run out, disappear, dissipate into sand and saltfoam and seabreeze-sweet sprays of his late mother’s perfumes, stashed in the second drawer of her jewelry box. “The, uh, perfume. I used to use my mother’s perfume. Her nail polish, too.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I do your makeup, now?”
Kaoru sucks in a breath. “Yeah. I think you should.” His chest is tighter now underneath his blouse than it ever has been before.
_____
His mother would let his hair down, once, when she had enough hair to. When they’d walk the shoreline together, step alongside seashells, scallops, starfish; Sun-bleached hair and her son’s to match. She cut it, once, when she couldn’t walk as well as she used to be able to, and Kaoru cut his own to match. He didn’t have to, she didn’t want him to, still, she held the scissors, and still, sent tumbles of straw sailing to the kitchen’s floor, bathed in summer sunlight that seeped through the curtains of the open window.
He still walks that shore. There aren’t as many seashells, or scallops, or starfish as there used to; Maybe when he was smaller, younger, with much less of a brain and body than he has now, there were more critters crawling amongst the sands than he remembers. Or now, there’s little boys and their mothers that walk where they walked now, with pockets full enough to carry those critters back to her where she stoof under the sun in her sandals, her sunhat; Maybe those boys still have their mother, and she hasn’t gone to wherever mermaids and corals and yellow tangs go when they die yet, and maybe if they’re lucky they never will have to know, like he does now, as he tugs the hairtie out from the pitiful ponytail he wears when he has to tie it up for school, sits in the shallows with his feet in the water and wishes the waves will carry him to wherever; maybe, if Kaoru is lucky, it’ll be where his mother sleeps in the sand beds, now.
_____
“Hakaze-kun,” Rei mumbles, while he wrings his hands together, tugs on the split ends of his sandy-straw hair, “You wanna see?”
He nods, and Rei’s touch on his shoulders is featherlight and birdboned as he twists Kaoru around to the mirror on his desk, no longer bathed in bedroom-lights-out black. He opens his eyes before Rei tells him to, and almost regrets it when something in him lurches like a prodded animal, poised at the feet like snakes coming up to strike sparrows and Kaoru forgets what he was more afraid of: Liking the look of fumbled eyeliner, on his lids, or hating it. But his own reflection shocks him, and he lifts a hand to poke at the dusting of something on his cheeks, albeit borrowed and perhaps a few shades too light.
It’s the touch of Rei’s hand readjusting a stray lock of hair just out of his line of vision in the mirror that lets Kaoru know this is real, and he leans to the right to catch the tail-end glimpse of Rei tucking the flyaway into a little silver hairpin to hold it back.
“Do you like it?” Rei asks, voice hoarse like just after he jumps off stage, before he starts bitching and moaning at whoever dares to be in the dressing room at the same time as he is, and he sounds near-laughably shy, the kind of shy that perhaps Kaoru should be right now.
Kaoru nods, again, because he genuinely does not know what to say. “I wish I had hair like yours,” and it stumbles out in the same cadence of an apology.
And Rei laughs then, enough that he’s sure whoever’s on the other side of the condo wall can hear his cackle as sure as the shattering of a dinner plate: loud, booming, almost like the thumping of Kaoru’s heart. “You don’t,” he says, and raises a hand to pick at the dried peppermint-balm skin of his lips, “You really don’t. It’s a absolute fuckin’ pain to take care of,” and his hands come to tug on the shell of Kaoru’s ear like a mother would, poke at his ear lobes where he wishes he wasn’t turning red.