Work Text:
“What are you worried about?” You ask in the awful lighting of a 7-eleven after midnight.
“Hm?” Koushi asks, slurping up noodles, spraying himself and the table with Chili oil.
He looks nice, from this angle. Your face pressed against the table - disinfected beforehand - squinting up. You’re too tired for this, yet forever unable to say no.
“You don’t take me all the way to a 7-Eleven because you’re sleeping like a baby,” you defend your question.
“A lot of the underclassmen are taller than me,” he offers, offering you a bite of his Mapo Tofu.
You open your mouth despite knowing it’s going to be too spicy for you. It’s too spicy for him, you know, he’ll complain about his numb mouth for days.
“Too spicy?” He asks just seconds later, wiping a tear from your cheek.
“You’re the worst,” you sniffle, pushing yourself up to take a sip from his drink.
Sometimes you wonder how often you’ve indirectly kissed him. How many of those indirect kisses do you have to trade for a direct one anyway?
“You love it.”
“I love you,” you joke, but his face falls, visible even in this terrible light.
“What?”
“My mouth’s numb.”
And it feels like a dejavu. Like something you’ve lived through before. Because you have, every month since you’ve turned fifteen.
Graduation is just around the corner though. Who knows what’s going to happen after that. Maybe he’ll finally confess to someone he likes.
Maybe that won’t be you.
Your hand curls into the fabric of his shirt, pulling him forward even as your brain screams in panic, a frantic, capital-lettered “NO!” right behind your eyes.
Koushi tastes like Mapo Tofu and sugar-free ice tea, like exhaustion and the thrumming fear of growing up.
“Still numb?” You ask when you pull back, his eyes wide open, brimming with emotion.
“Think so,” he mutters, his lips red from the Chili Oil. “Can we try again?”
-
Summer break means loose limbs, napping in the sun as the boys train behind you.
Sometimes it feels as if you’ve always spent your breaks to the sound of Daichi cursing, Asahi panting and Koushi egging both of them on.
“Hey,” today his face appears above you, blocking the sun.
“Hey,” you blink back lazily. “Done already.”
“No, I got bored.”
“Hey, get back here!” Daichi calls from somewhere but Koushi just leans down to kiss you, the angle so weird that your nose hits your Adam's apple and he coughs, falling into you.
“Dork,” you complain, his head on your chest.
“Hmm,” he snuggles into you, pretending not to notice Daichi stomping over to get him. “You love it.”
-
“When did you fall in love with me?” Koushi asks, legs dangling out his window. You’ve chosen the relative safety of his bed, huddled into one of his sweaters despite the warm weather.
“Don’t know,” you admit. “One day I found you annoying, the next you were irresistible.”
“Irresistible?” You can hear the grin in his voice and the worry he tries to hide with it.
“Wanna go for a ride?” You ask before he can make a joke. “I’ll pay. I’m kinda craving Super Spicy Mapo-Tofu from 7-Eleven.”
He’s quiet for a while, swinging his legs in only after a full five minutes. “Sure.”
His hand finds your thigh while driving, curled around it as if it’s the lifebelt keeping him afloat. You draw a heart onto the back of his hand, feel the tension bleed out. It returns and you draw again, repeat the cycle until you park the car.
“We kinda have to get out if we want to eat,” you remind him, drawing a heart and an arrow going through and his name and yours, not once letting go of the hand curled around your thigh.
Koushi’s staring through the windshield, motionless.
You hold your breath, checking to see if you can hear his, the slow intake and the slower exhale, the almost not-there rise and fall of his chest.
He blinks and the tension shatters around him, though his smile does little cover his unease.
-
You don’t know when you met Koushi for the first time. To you, it feels as if he’s always been part of your life, like a tree that has dug its roots into your body, has grown so close you no longer know where one part ends and the other begins.
Still, there are shadows to him you have yet to see, secrets he has not yet uncovered.
But you’re not scared. Never of him.
“Hey,” you breathe against the soft skin of his cheek, “did you know I can read your mind?”
“Yeah? What am I thinking about?”
And if you’d have to guess, you’d come up empty, because yesterday he told you about mermaids and the day before he was dreaming about curry buns the size of Volleyballs.
But you keep talking, a fear spilling out you didn’t know you had, hid it so well you forget it existed.
“Do you think we’ll be together forever?”
And in the way he blinks, the lights of the 7-Eleven no longer mirrored in his eyes, you can tell he’d been thinking the same.
“I hope so,” he admits. “But I don’t know.”
“Wishes do count, right?” You tell yourself more than him. Because there’s College for you and training for him, an unknown nothingness stretching out in what others call future. “Because I wish to be with you.”
“I wish to be with you too.”
“Good,” you swallow thickly, picking his hand from your thigh and kissing the back of it. “What more do we need?”
- - -
And isn’t this Dejavu?
Finding yourself under the unflattering lights of a 7-Eleven, sharing Super Spicy Mapo Tofu and Sugar-free Ice Tea?
“Don’t spill on my dress,” you tell him as haughtily as you can manage at three in the morning, half drunk on champagne and cake, the ring on your hand glittering.
“Wouldn’t dare,” he bites back, grinning from one ear to the other like he’s drunk. Maybe he is, he had more Champagne than you.
But you doubt it, because you feel it too, the happiness bubbling in your throat despite the late hour, despite the spice you still can’t tolerate, and the bright lights blinding you.
“Miss Sugawara,” Koushi says at that moment, pushing himself up and toward you even as you eye the food in between and its dangerous red pigment. “Care to give me a kiss?”
“Your mouth is numb?”
“Never too numb for a kiss from you.”