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Abe was too old to need babysitting. He had told his parents as much a thousand times, just like he’d told them he didn’t care that they were taking a family vacation to Universal Studios right when the team was starting to prepare seriously for the spring tournament season, but no one ever listened to him.
“Mihashi-san said it’s no problem for you to stay with them for a few days,” his mother had said, as if that had ever been the issue. “Don’t worry, we’ll bring you back a cute hat!”
So now here he was, following Ren home from school with an extra bag in anticipation of a forced three-night sleepover party, trying to ignore all the pictures of themed rides and food in Super Nintendo World that his family kept sending him.
“Mom will be late tonight, so we’ll have to cook,” Ren said, kicking off his shoes and scrambling out of the genkan to make room for Abe to do the same. “We can—”
It took Abe a few seconds to realize Ren had trailed off because Abe was standing still in the entryway, glaring down at his phone and making no move at all to take his shoes off or set down his bags. His mom had just sent a photo of the three of them posing with Donkey Kong.
“Um. Is it. Okay?”
Abe stuffed his phone into his pocket, irritated that he felt so… irritated . “It’s fine.” He bent over to fully untie his laces just to have an excuse to hide the irritated flush on his cheeks.
“Or Abe-kun can take a bath, and I can cook!” Ren must have been worried about something he’d seen in Abe’s face.
“It’s Takaya. Remember? And it’s no trouble, I’ll help.” Abe plastered on an easy smile as he straightened up, but Ren still flinched.
“We—have a lot of vegetables!” Ren led the way to the kitchen, shuffling just a little too fast. “Mom thought curry would be easy.”
“Sure.” Abe’s phone buzzed again, but he ignored it, stopping at the sink to wash his hands. It buzzed two more times while he was drying them off.
“Carrots…and…peppers….” Ren narrated ingredients as he pulled them from the fridge, setting everything carefully on the counter beside him. Abe couldn’t really help until everything was ready to go and Ren had given him a task, so he took a quick look at his phone again.
I got the Super Mushroom Pizza Bowl~~~ 🍲-(-‿- )
Shun had taken photos of his dinner from three different angles, following them up with a selfie of the whole family. They all had themed mushroom hats on.
“Little shit,” Abe muttered.
There was a loud banging sound from the fridge, and when Abe looked up, Ren was staring at him wide-eyed, rubbing the back of his head.
“Not you, I was talking about Shun!” Abe dragged Ren in to inspect the bump, tsk ing at the goose egg that was already forming. He opened the freezer to dig for some ice.
“Sit down while you ice that and tell me what to do.” Abe rolled up his sleeves. It would be good to have a little distraction, anyway.
With obvious reluctance, Ren did as he was told, lowering himself gingerly to a stool.
“Potatoes are in the bowl,” he said, pointing. “And—cutting boards—there’s a knife in the drying rack—”
It took a minute for what Ren and Shinooka had taught Abe about knife work to start coming back, but once it did, he began cutting more or less easily, and the quiet that had fallen in the kitchen became a little less awkward.
“Your peppers look good!” Ren chirped. “I can cut—”
“Keep icing for another five minutes,” Abe said. “You shouldn’t be using knives this close to a tournament game, anyway.”
Ren shrank back onto the stool like a chastised puppy.
Now Abe felt a little bad. “Do these carrots look okay?” he asked, as a peace offering.
“They’re good too!” Ren beamed, the scolding already forgotten. “You remembered how I like them!”
“I—everybody likes them that way.” Abe shoved the carrots off to one side of the cutting board and started on the potatoes.
“Why is Shun a… little shit?” The way Ren lowered his voice at the end, like he was afraid to repeat the bad words out loud, made Abe snort out a short laugh.
“He’s always a little shit.”
Silence followed, lingering and expectant enough that Abe felt his ears getting warm. Ren wasn’t as easy to fool as he used to be.
“It’s really not a big deal.” And it wasn’t; Abe was extra annoyed at himself precisely because it wasn’t a big deal. Hadn’t he told his family not to reschedule their trip? Hadn’t he said he didn’t care? “He just keeps sending me pictures from Universal Studios.”
“Do the pictures make Abe-kun sad?”
Abe chopped a potato with so much force the impact of the knife rang out loud and jarring in the kitchen.
“What? No, I— what? ” He was so flustered he couldn’t even correct Ren about his name. “Why would you think that?”
Ren got shifty-eyed, one hand still pressed to the back of his head. “Because—Abe-kun wishes he could be on a trip with his family, instead of—”
Abe dropped the knife and turned fully toward Ren now. “You think I’d rather be at some stupid theme park than preparing for Koushien?”
“Not—Koushien, just—I—” Ren shrank under Abe’s gaze, his mouth opening and closing uselessly.
“Sit up, I’m not mad at you.” Abe was fully aware he was the one being difficult in this exchange, but he wasn’t quite sure how to turn Irritated Abe Mode off. He turned back to the counter and started on the last of the vegetables.
For a while, the only sound in the kitchen was the regular shink of the knife against the cutting board and an occasional sniffle from Ren. Abe was trying to work out if he should apologize when Ren piped up from behind him, “I didn’t mean baseball. I know baseball is the most important thing to Abe-kun.”
“Takaya,” Abe said automatically, before the rest had registered. He frowned, turning once again to face Ren. “Wait. What are you talking about?”
“I know—Ta…kaya,” —Ren paused to swallow, visibly pained from the effort— “didn’t want to stay over. I only meant—you wish you were with your family now, instead of here, with—”
Ren stopped there, cringing. His hands were both in his lap now, fiddling with the bag that had once contained ice and now contained mostly water, fingers gone pink with cold.
“What? When did I ever say—”
But Abe cut himself off, understanding and no small amount of mortification dawning on him slowly. He’d been sullen and short-tempered all week, ever since it had been decided that he would stay with the Mihashis. Even at practice, he’d been short and distant, and now that the first day of the visit had finally arrived, he’d spent most of it ignoring Ren to glare at his phone.
“I’m not upset about staying with you, Ren.”
Abe wiped his palms on his pants and stepped forward, taking the dripping bag from Ren’s hands to chuck into the sink. Ren peered up at him, ashen-faced.
“I was never upset about staying with you. I just wanted my parents to stop treating me like a little kid.”
This didn’t seem to do much to convince Ren, who remained hunched and pitiful on his stool, blinking back tears. Abe closed his eyes for a brief moment and took a deep breath. Why was talking to Ren always so hard? Why couldn’t he ever just say exactly what he meant?
“I like spending time with you, okay?” Abe grasped Ren’s hands, every bit as clammy-cold as they had looked, and held them tight, willing the warmth back into them. “I like cooking with you and hanging out at your house.”
There was a tiny, faintly hopeful glimmer in Ren’s eyes now, and his fingers were starting to warm, although he still regarded Abe with just a hint of suspicion.
“Then—why is Abe-kun so—”
Surly? Petulant? Ren would have been justified in using far less charitable words. Abe gritted his teeth against a groan and tried not to lose his nerve.
“It’s embarrassing,” he admitted.
Ren just blinked up at him, and Abe felt the precise moment he caved. What the hell. He had no ego left to preserve, anyway.
“Nintendo just used to be—kind of—our thing.” Abe dropped Ren’s hands—they had mostly warmed up by now—and leaned back against the counter, scrubbing at his reddening face. “Mine and Shun’s, I mean. We would play all the time, before he got into baseball. It’s stupid. I haven’t played video games in years. I just know he’s sending me all this stuff because he’s trying to make me jealous.”
There. He’d said it, and now he could crawl off somewhere to quietly die of mortification. To think he’d spent all week trying to convince his parents he wasn’t a little kid anymore. At least he was pretty sure Ren wasn’t the type to go around spreading rumors to the rest of the team.
“Or maybe—Shun wishes Abe-kun was at the park with him?”
Abe snorted. He wanted to respond with something sardonic, but he had just about exhausted his capacity for any kind of speech at all.
“Yuu-chan comes over to play MarioKart on Fridays,” Ren said, after a beat. Abe dropped his hands.
“Or sometimes Smash Brothers, or Donkey Kong.” Ren cocked his head, looking genuinely perplexed. “Is it weird? To like video games and baseball? I thought everybody liked that stuff.”
Abe hesitated. “It’s not weird,” he said, slowly, “is it?”
Ren hesitated, too, but eventually hazarded a faint smile. “Does Abe-kun want to play after dinner?”
Abe let out a long-held breath and smiled back. “It’s Takaya,” he said. “That sounds fun.”
They ate two double portions each of curry, then settled in on the floor in front of the little TV in Ren’s room, which had apparently always had a Nintendo hooked up to it that Abe had somehow never noticed. Ren kicked Abe’s ass in five straight games of MarioKart, even though he insisted on always playing as the weird little squid.
“I used to be good at this,” Abe said after yet another loss, dropping his controller in disbelief. “Are you practicing MarioKart as much as you practice pitching?”
Ren averted his eyes and jumped up from the floor. “We should probably get ready for bed!”
Abe’s phone started buzzing again while they were brushing their teeth, and Abe figured he ought to respond, if only so nobody thought he was dead. It was his mom this time, making a video call. Abe swiped to accept and managed a muffled greeting through a mouthful toothpaste.
“There he is! We were beginning to wonder if you’d cut us all off—say hi to Takaya, honey!”
His dad grunted and waved as the phone swung past him to land on Shun’s shit-eating grin. He was still wearing a mushroom hat, but now also sported a giant plastic popcorn bucket shaped like Yoshi’s egg.
“Hi! I rode Bowser’s Challenge four times! Dad rode once but then he puked, so I got to eat his dessert! Also I got pictures with Donkey Kong and Yoshi. I bet you reeeaally wish you had come on vacation now!”
Abe was already rolling his eyes, but their mom interrupted before he could retort.
“Don’t listen to him, Takaya, he’s been picking out omiyage for you all day. He’s just trying to make you jealous because he misses you.”
“Hey!” Shun’s voice sounded even more high-pitched than usual. “Nuh-uh —and Takaya already said he doesn’t care about kid stuff anymore, he’s too excited like always about his sleepover with Ren—”
Abe spit into the sink before he could choke on his toothpaste. “Okay we’re going to bed now good night!”
He slammed his phone face-down on the counter and quietly seethed, trying to avoid meeting Ren’s gaze in the mirror. Why had his mother chosen right now to call? Why was Shun such a little brat? Why wouldn’t Ren stop looking at him like that?
“Shun’s an idiot.” Abe rinsed out his mouth twice, more than was necessary, still trying but failing miserably to ignore the way Ren had gone all doe-eyed and pink-cheeked. Abe flicked off the bathroom light, even though Ren hadn’t finished brushing. “Are you coming? It’s late.”
When he got to the extra futon on the floor of Ren’s room, Abe lay down and immediately pulled the covers over his head. He could just stay like this until Ren stopped looking at him or he died of embarrassment, whatever came first.
After another minute or two, Abe heard Ren pad quietly into the room, the soft click of the lights being turned off.
“Good night,” Ren said, cautiously. Abe had no intention of responding, except then, without any warning at all, Ren added, “Takaya-kun.”
A shiver shot straight up the curve of Abe’s spine. Mortified as he was, try as he might, he couldn’t stop the stupid, gratified smile that crept its way onto his face. He tugged the covers down just enough to be audible.
“ Just Takaya,” he scolded, once more for good measure. “Good night, Ren.”