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It's been overcast all day, but it only recently started raining. You've spent all day inside, straightening your apartment, because you've had too much energy all day and haven't been able to take your daily run like you'd like. You considered running, earlier, but you didn't want to get your ears and tail wet, and you especially didn't want to deep-clean the house to get rid of the wet dog smell you tend to carry with you after being in the rain for too long. But, after a while of cleaning and doing other menial tasks, you find that there's nothing left to do in your small apartment, nothing that will satisfy your need to burn the energy you have.
Well, there is one thing you can do.
You glance over to the hallway. Down that hall is the bedroom you share with Choromatsu, who is surely laying on the bed, reading a book. Your tail starts wagging as you imagine the stern, concentrated look on his face, his pointed, fuzzy ears in a relaxed position and his tail flicking from side to side. Before you can think about it any further, you're bouncing down the hall towards your bedroom, and then slowly pushing open the door with one hand, your tail swishing behind you.
Choromatsu doesn't seem to notice that you're there. If he does, he's ignoring you. Both options don't seem very desirable, so you allow your tail to hit the door frame in loud, repeated thwacks. Choromatsu doesn't look up from his book, which means he's ignoring you, and you won't be having that.
“Choro-chan,” you say. He raises an eyebrow, but he doesn't say anything, so you clear your throat. “Choromatsu,” you say again, crossing your arms. He doesn't budge, so you try one more time, stomping your foot as you shout, “Choromatsu!”
“What?” Choromatsu huffs, tail flicking, “I'm reading.”
“And I'm bored,” you whine, crossing your arms.
“Okay,” Choromatsu rolls his eyes, his ears flicking in defiance. He's laying on his stomach, with his feet pointed towards the headboard and his chest on a pillow to hold himself up while he turns a page in whatever book he's reading. From where you're standing, it doesn't look like the fine literature he blabs about from time to time, but you're not exactly one to judge. “I don't see how that's my problem.”
You glare at him for a moment, before you decide to make it his problem. As he settles back into his book, you step towards the bed, until you're even with the middle of his back. Then, you turn your back to the bed, and fall backwards.
Choromatsu yelps as you fall on top of him, dropping the book on the floor, open and facing upwards. He tries to scramble out from under you, but you just stay on top of him, his thin frame being no match for your dead weight and fierce dedication to being silly. After a moment of scrambling, he gives up with a sigh. “Why'd you do that?” he whines, “I was trying to read.”
“Because you weren't paying attention to me,” you reply, “And now you are. Problem solved.”
Choromatsu sighs. You've been with him long enough to know that he finds your clinginess endearing, even if he likes to act like he doesn't. You've never really understood why. Maybe he likes when you're insistent, because it means that you haven't gotten bored of him. Maybe he just likes to complain. You'd believe him either way, if he ever decided to tell you.
“You're so needy,” he laments, trying to wriggle out from under you. You, of course, double down, adjusting yourself so that your chest is pressing into his back. He gives up after that. “At least let me get my book,” he sighs.
You briefly consider the possibility of this being a trick, but the thought of Choromatsu finally paying attention to you is very enticing, so you roll off of him and allow him to reach down to the foot of the bed. You were unable to see his face before, but as you watch him stand up to grab his book from the floor, you notice a deep pink blush across his cheeks, which fills you with a deep sense of satisfaction. He straightens out his green hoodie after bending over to pick his book up from the floor, and then he lays back down, right where he was before.
Once he's back on the bed, you roll over on top of him again. Then, for a while, neither of you say anything. The patter of the rain against the window and the occasional page turn fills the space a conversation might otherwise occupy, and you're content with this, for a while, laying on top of Choromatsu while he reads a book. The storm has started to pick up outside, the tapping on the window changing from the sound of distinct raindrops to a rush of water pelting the glass, too many all at once to pick out their individual sounds.
“Can you get off me for five seconds so I can get some water?” Choromatsu huffs out, closing his book. You roll off of him, and sit up in your shared bed. He sighs as he stands up, setting the closed book down on the foot of the bed. “I'll be right back,” he promises, before he walks out of the room. You know he’ll keep that promise, because he knows he’ll have hell to pay if he doesn’t.
You listen as Choromatsu shuffles around in the kitchen, rummaging through cabinets for whatever particular cup he has his heart set on. As you’re trying to pick out the sound of his footsteps from the sound of the clinking cups in the cabinet, a clap of thunder sends your heart into a frenzy, the subsequent lightning bolt making the sky outside glow a stark white for just a moment. You scurry under the blankets that Choromatsu was just laying on, wrapping them tightly around your shoulders and tucking your tail between your legs. The power flickers for a moment, before humming back to life.
You’re too on edge to notice Choromatsu’s footsteps as he returns to the room. When you become aware of him again, he’s already standing in the doorway with two cups of water, looking at you like this is the first time he’s ever seen you afraid of anything. He hurries to set the cups down on the end table, and then climbs into bed with you. “Hey, hey, puppy, are you– are you okay?” he asks, setting his hands on top of where he assumes your knees are, beneath the thick comforter.
You don’t answer him, although you figure your trembling should be an answer in and of itself. He brushes the hair away from your face and cups your cheek, and you lean into his touch, your heartbeat still thrumming in your ears. “Sorry for leaving you,” he sighs.
“I hate thunderstorms,” you mumble into the blanket.
“I know. I’m sorry.” He settles in next to you with his book, with his back to the headboard, and you lean against him. You’ve never had much of a regard for personal space, and he’s never seemed to mind. “You’re so cute when you’re all scared like this, though.”
You glare at him from your blanket cocoon. He doesn’t say another word on the subject. Instead, he reaches over for his book, which had been discarded by his feet. When he returns to his regular sitting position, you sigh as he sets a hand on your head, his chewed-up nails scratching by the base of your floppy ears. The sensation of his nails against your scalp makes you melt into him further, and he does his best to support your weight with his own scrawny frame.
“Um, do you want to…” he starts, before he clears his throat and opens the book.
“Do I wanna what?” you press.
“I was thinking maybe you could. Um. Put your head in my lap…?” he asks, without once making eye contact with you. You oblige without another word, shoving his book out of the way to make room for your head, your hair spread across his thighs. His face flushes almost immediately, still unable to make eye contact with you.
“Better?”
“Yeah,” he squeaks.
The two of you stay like this for a while. Choromatsu holds the book up so you can rest your head on his thighs, and you watch as he turns through the pages. It doesn’t look particularly interesting to you, but you’ve never seen your boyfriend as having good taste in media anyway. Eventually, though, he sets the book down on the nightstand, by the two cups of water, and takes to carding his fingers through your hair, scratching your ears, calming you down through the storm.
Choromatsu has always been your calm in a storm, in some way. Between the chaos of his family and your own life, having someone to return to like Choromatsu has been reassuring in a way nothing else has. Despite his self-serious, standoffish facade, he always knows what to say, what to do, to calm you down. You wonder if he sees you like that, if your presence is relaxing to him, despite how energetic you know you can be.
As you stare up at him, you remember the first time you truly cried in front of him. It was on the train home, after one of the longest, most stressful days you’ve had in years. He was waiting for you at the station, to walk you home, and he bought you flowers and some takeout at his brothers’ urging, because “that’s what you do for pretty girls”. When Choromatsu told you this, you had to sit down on one of the benches, because you couldn’t stop the tears from spilling, coating your cheeks. He thought he’d done something wrong at first, until you hugged him like it was the end of the world. You remember how stiff he was, back then, how he had no idea how to handle the idea that another human wanted to touch him.
“I was just thinking,” Choromatsu says, interrupting your train of thought.
“About what?” you ask, reaching a hand up out of the blanket to brush his hair out of his face, like he’d done for you.
“I think I’m braver when I’m with you,” he whispers, like you’re two kids telling secrets at a sleepover, “Like, I think… in moments like these, when I see you all scared, I can’t also be scared. So I try to… to let you feel what you need to feel, and be brave during that.”
For a guy who pretty much exclusively reads ecchi, Choromatsu’s words are surprisingly sentimental, and you believe every bit of it. Choromatsu has never really been a liar, anyway; he knows he couldn’t get away with it with you. You can’t help the smile that creeps up on your cheeks as you lay beneath him, and he scoffs. “Don’t make a thing out of it, I just–”
“That’s so sweet,” you grin, “My Choro-chan…”
He groans, head falling back against the headboard. “I try to be a little sentimental and this is what I get,” he scoffs.
“You could get a lot more than that,” you snort, which makes him stammer.
Another clap of thunder rings through the apartment. You keep staring at Choromatsu through it, like if you stare for long enough, you’d be able to catalog each of his facial features: the little bit of stubble he’s grown, the indent of his philtrum, the softness of his brown eyes with their sharp, cat-like irises. And then the thunder is gone, and you notice that he’s staring back at you, too, smiling. You can feel your heartbeat spike up again, but you get the feeling it has nothing to do with the storm this time.
“Tell me about the book you were reading,” you say. You don’t care about the book, and Choromatsu knows this, but you’re in the mood to hear Choromatsu explain something to you at length.
Choromatsu indulges you. “It’s about these aliens,” he begins, “but they’re also girls. And the protagonist, she’s the captain of a spaceship that’s on this really long mission out in space, and she’s lost half of her crew, so they land on this alien planet to restock their supplies.”
“And the aliens have boobs?”
“Yes, the aliens have boobs. That’s not the point. It’s actually a very profound story about war and what it means to be human and the horrors of colonization–”
“The horrors of colonization?”
“--Yes, the horrors of colonization. If you’re going to interrupt me I don’t have to tell you about it.”
“Fine, fine,” you sigh, feigning defeat, “Continue.”
Choromatsu provides you with a very in-depth explanation of the themes of the book, as well as the relationship between two of his favorite characters: the ship’s mechanic, and an alien robot with sentience. You listen so intently, hoping to absorb any of this information to later bring it up to him and see the little sparkle in his eyes when he realizes you’ve been listening all along, that you don’t even notice another boom of thunder until the lights around you have turned off.
“It’ll come back on,” you say, “Keep talking.”
And so he does. He talks for so long that you wonder if you could fall asleep like this, head in his lap, listening to the rain outside. You don’t, because you’d feel bad about his legs falling asleep, but the thought is so enticing.
It’s the first time you’ve felt truly at peace with the world in a very long time.