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They hadn’t planned on going to university together. But come time for entrance exams it had turned out that Tashiro and Shirahama’s grades were around the same level, and because they’d gone to the same middle school, they’d ended up picking the same university for all the convenient reasons of living close enough to home, and because of that they’d ended up living together, too.
Easy enough. The strangest part of the whole arrangement was that others had started calling them childhood friends. That’s a term you use for a girl who cutely punches your shoulder and nags at you about your eating habits with the familiarity of someone who’s grown up with you. And though he was well past middle school, and knew Tashiro better than any other student here, they weren’t even close to being attached at the hip. In middle school Tashiro had flitted around the social order with a novel kind of friendliness and Shirahama had skated through with friends he’d liked, but not enough to keep in touch with past graduation. Both of them never talked to girls much, which is weirder the longer Shirahama thinks about it, so he doesn’t. It’d make him jealous, anyways.
Still, Tashiro was a little different, compared to everyone else. Shirahama isn’t egotistical enough to believe he’s special or anything, but hanging out with Tashiro had always felt extra… comfortable. Years beyond their initial meeting, Shirahama can admit that he’d liked Tashiro more than he’d liked most people. Tashiro was the kind of person that prompted disarming honesty and responded to it with nonchalant kindness. When he’d learned about Shirahama’s love of gal games, he’d just nodded along like it was a hobby akin to running, and they’d continued their friendship like that over the years, easily and without question.
So they’ve crammed their belongings together in a shoebox apartment and accept that they’ll see each other more frequently. They hash out things like groceries and noise and showers and settle together for dinner while Shirahama complains about classes or a rude stranger or the route he’s gunning for in the game he’s just bought (“Hinako rejected me! Again!”).
The first time, Tashiro asks, “Let me try?” like it’s equivalent to grinding levels in an RPG.
Steam curls up to his face. Shirahama pauses to eat, inspects Tashiro’s guileless eyes, and begrudgingly agrees.
Later that night, controller held lazily in his hand, Tashiro asks, “Don’t you get eye strain?” He clicks through some dialogue and clarifies, “From gaming in the dark.”
“Nope,” Shirahama replies. “I have perfect vision. 20/20 and everything.”
Tashiro doesn’t need glasses, which is probably why he doesn’t react to this statement with the appropriate level of awe. Instead he flicks through the dialogue choices, and picks the blatantly terrible option (“Who are you, again?”).
Shirahama wrestles with him for the controller. (“It’s glaringly obvious!” he squawks, trying to bat Tashiro’s hands to the side. “It’s so in your face, you should get blinded by it!”)
It’s not like they’re the only people who’d stayed together after high school. Nothing could pull Kuresawa away from his girlfriend, and two of the upperclassmen Tashiro knew had also ended up attending the same university. Of course, Miyano had chosen to attend his boyfriend’s university; they were absurdly lovey-dovey as always. He half-expects to receive wedding invitations in the mail at any moment, but Miyano seems like the responsible type, so Shirahama’s probably got a few years before it happens. It makes receiving mail feel a lot more harrowing, though.
Couples like that cause single people to hate themselves. Shirahama’s attended his fair share of group dates, always dragging Tashiro with him—in fiction you get dragged to them and dragged out of them, but real life is mundane, the gloss stripped from everything except for some of the girls’ lips. It’s a staid, fumbling length of time that ends in Shirahama over-conscious of his sweat and Tashiro under-conscious of everything, cheerfully making new connections like it’s middle school and girls aren’t interested in him.
Tashiro is just like that, still fresh-faced and charming, but in double now that he’s just a few centimeters shy of Shirahama’s height. It made it easy to see the thick, brown roots of his hair as they’d grown out, but his bleached ends stayed as they were—a shock of brown and gold like he was the sunflower and sun all at once.
About a month into living together, Shirahama had cracked and said, “You have to bleach your hair, I’m going crazy.”
Tashiro fingered the ends with belated surprise, and said, “...I’d forgotten I could just… do that.”
“Let me,” he had said, so a few days later they were crowded into the bathroom with a bleach kit, and Tashiro’s hair was left undone.
“Wow,” Shirahama says, running his hands through the fine strands of hair to check for tangles. The bathroom has the brightest light in the whole place, and it illuminates the full length of Tashiro’s hair, grown past shoulder-length. “You could pass for a girl like this.”
Tashiro’s head snaps up. “Really?”
“What? No, you’re way too tall now,” he reflexively denies.
“Surely there’s girls as tall as me in your gal games,” Tashiro argues.
“There’s girls as tall as you in real life.”
“So what about in games?”
Shirahama pauses. “...The sporty ones are usually tall,” he concludes. “And the rich ones, sometimes. Now keep still.”
The one time he’d tried to style Karasubara’s hair, it had been a nightmare to get him to settle down. Tashiro, infinite in vivacity, should be a similarly restless customer. But when Shirahama’s hands are in his hair Tashiro is deathly still, neck tipped in whatever direction is asked, like he’s a corpse waiting to be transformed. Maybe an angel—maybe a hallucination; he blames bleach fumes.
“Kuresawa won that crossdressing contest, didn’t he?” he says, painting bleach onto a section of Tashiro’s hair. “Your heights aren’t that different. His girlfriend taught him a bunch of makeup techniques, though…”
“Hanzawa-senpai knows how to do makeup,” Tashiro pipes up. “I bet he’d do it if I asked.”
“...Will you?”
Shirahama’s impression of Hanzawa is vague, but he seems like the type of person to have a lot of cards up his sleeve. Somehow, despite the fact that they live together, he still feels like the third wheel when he accompanies Hanzawa and Tashiro. It’s one of those unexplainable things about Tashiro—like the way he goes out of his way to make regular trips to the bathhouse by his home, or his sudden devotion towards ping pong, or his current far-off and impenetrable expression.
“...He’s probably busy,” Tashiro says.
“Probably,” Shirahama echoes. Sometimes he wishes he could see a little less.
In the end they’d bleached Tashiro’s hair without any other trouble. Maybe Shirahama had gloated too much about how easy it was, because Tashiro had refused to let him cut his hair, but even after a week had passed, he accepted nothing more than trimming his split ends and leaving his hair long, blonde, and unbroken.
At some point in the year, Tashiro comes back to their apartment with a game disc in hand. “Kuresawa said it’s good,” he says.
Shirahama, freshly emerged from the assignment he’d holed himself inside to complete, yawns, says, “Okay,” and asks, “How were they?”
Tashiro updates him with cheer and platitudes (“They missed you!”) and Shirahama doesn’t think about it until the morning when he looks at the cover, sees a bunch of flashy guys smiling back at him, and finds out that it’s a BL dating sim.
“Why’d you get this for me,” he asks as flatly as he can muster, total disbelief the only thing between him and a full-body blush.
“Well, you’re into that kind of stuff, right?” Tashiro asks.
Shirahama gets heated. “It’s totally different!” he exclaims. “This is—Miyano likes this kind of stuff. It’s—I don’t even play otome games.”
Tashiro, amazingly, just shrugs. “Dating is dating,” he says. “Isn’t it going to be mostly the same?”
Shirahama shakes his head. Vehemently. “It’s really, really not,” he says. “Girls are… different.”
“I mean, sure,” Tashiro says. “But… how, exactly?”
“It’s like…” The words, in the light of morning, suddenly die on his tongue. “Girls are… cuter, and they’re not as rough as guys and… they’re just different,” he lamely explains. A few days ago he’d borrowed notes from a girl in his class, and she’d given him a strange look when he’d thanked her. Girls are unknowable. “Guys are… you know, easier to get…”
Tashiro, too, looks at him strangely. “If they’re so easy,” he says, “won’t this game be a breeze?”
“Ugh, that’s totally not…” Shirahama sighs and switches angles. “Listen, the game’s probably designed for girls, anyways. It’s probably not that realistic.”
“You care about the realism?” Tashiro asks, furrowing his brows in judgement. “Wasn’t Hinako a secret princess?”
“Oh my god, fine,” Shirahama says, and only hours later, while trying to raise the affection levels of the stoic student council president, does he realize that he’d forgotten to say he has no interest in playing at dating guys. But Tashiro’s already tucked onto his shoulder, running a stream of commentary into one ear, and he feels locked down. He might as well see the route through.
He can’t see that clearly, but Tashiro’s lips are pink. Success, Shirahama thinks dimly, the alcohol blurring his vision and mind to a gossamer lightness. He caps the drugstore lipstick.
“Really, like a girl,” he murmurs thoughtlessly, and Tashiro doesn’t open his eyes but he does hum in half-agreement, half-question. Inhibitions lowered, Shirahama clarifies: “Unfairly pretty.”
They don’t have blush, but there’s no need for it. Shirahama’s not a pretty blusher—he gets red and splotchy like he’s developed a new kind of rash—but Tashiro is, skin going all soft and pink in just the right places, like he’s modeling for some kind of skincare line. Sun-kissed beauty, they’ll call it.
They’d gone on another group date, and it had been… like going through the motions. The only thing of note had been how early it had started, and almost immediately he’d wanted nothing more than to get dragged away. Instead he’d drank a little more than advised and Tashiro had looked at him in the dim lights and said, “Hey, we should be getting home.”
A few minutes later, they were facing the night air, Tashiro bearing his dead weight with effortless and tipsy cheer. “I feel like I’ve been spirited away,” he mumbles.
At some point in the years after middle school, Shirahama had conceitedly believed that turned into a person with some backbone. Now, pulled around by the strength of Tashiro’s muscles and whims, he’s realizing that he’s just switched who he bends for.
“What’s up with you?” Tashiro asks. “You didn’t seem that into it.”
He’s too sharp. Shirahama shrugs and gives his best noncommittal, “I don’t know.”
“Shame. I liked her skirt.”
He straightens up so fast he gets whiplash. “Who?”
“Oh, um, her name was Aya? We talked with her a bit… her hair was dyed.” He shrugs. “The skirt looked fun.”
Shirahama exhales, long and slow, and then makes a dismissive noise. “That style of skirt is in like, every store. If you like it so much, I could just buy you one—”
“Really?” Tashiro’s question jumps out before Shirahama can even finish saying to look at. He looks—giddy. Unreasonably and unfairly so.
He takes another sobering breath. “Really.”
So he fussed with his hair until it felt presentable, came to terms with his forever-spinelessness, and they’d headed to a nearby department store to find whatever skirt Tashiro had liked so much. This was until Tashiro proved himself incapable of describing any piece of clothing, after which they settled on just picking out whatever skirt was nice enough. There weren’t a lot of guys milling around in the ladies section, but there were some, which is why Shirahama wasn’t self-conscious until a salesperson came up to him and asked:
“Shopping for your girlfriend?”
In a panic he blurted the first thing on his mind: “They like green.”
She giggled, somehow charmed by the answer, and he bought the skirt in front of him, because Tashiro’s face had gone all helpless and soft when touching the fabric. It was only once they’d left that Tashiro said, with wonderment, “I do like green.”
“You wear it all the time,” Shirahama scoffed. “It’s obvious. Like the sun.”
“Moon’s out, now,” Tashiro replied, the hazy confusion a reminder that he, too, was drunk. Maybe that was the reason he’d paused by a drugstore on the walk home, darted inside, and emerged a few minutes later, lipstick tube in hand.
Now, with Tashiro dressed in his new skirt—knee-length and spring green—and a loose tank top, Shirahama realizes it was a ruinous choice. Each item fits better than it should, the peach-pink lipstick and off-white top accenting the shimmering fabric below. It’s like there’s a garden growing on the bed, and when Tashiro shifts the skirt rustles along with him. There are probably less devastating ways to apply lipstick, but Shirahama doesn’t know them.
As he looms above him, he can feel Tashiro’s leg hair absently scratching against his own shin. His vision hasn’t faded in the slightest—the low lights and alcohol and even his own shadow can’t obscure the curves of muscle on Tashiro’s arm, the way his Adam’s apple moves as he breathes, in and out, splayed before him like it’s so easy.
Tashiro’s eyes blink open. His gaze, unencumbered by the need for glasses, pierces right through. “How do I look?”
Shirahama’s mouth falls open, but he can’t speak. The options are paralyzing. What he really wants to do, more than anything, is mess up Tashiro’s face—drag a finger across his lips until the color smudges. The tank top isn’t new, but Shirahama is suddenly hyperaware of the exact amount of skin it exposes, and he wants to pull up the blanket and cover everything. Instead he just stares like he's been shocked dead.
Finally he reaches out, tugs Tashiro’s hair loose, and slips the hair tie onto his wrist. There’s the barest hint of brown at his roots, but otherwise Tashiro’s hair is blond and blurs soft shadows onto his face. Before Shirahama’s can adjust to the sight he sinks his head into the crook of Tashiro’s neck, catches the fresh scent of his—their—shampoo, and says, kind of incoherently, “You can’t ask me that.”
Laughter vibrates through his skin. “Are you still drunk?” Tashiro murmurs, and then, louder: “I was right. There isn’t much difference between the two.”
“Maybe,” Shirahama lies, and Tashiro’s laughter continues to reverberate. He doesn’t say the sun-obvious answer: You.