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Karamatsu is really, really good with his hands.
Sure, it sounds like a weird thing to say, but it’s not untrue. It might just be because he does plenty of things with them. He pushes up the sleeves of his sweater a lot, up to his elbows—and he hardly notices how your teeth worry your bottom lip or how your gaze lingers on his forearms whenever he does. He spends a lot of time tuning and playing his guitar for you—the same three songs, in fact. Occasionally he’ll dip out of his repertoire and fool around with notes and chords, or play that one song he composed about the woes of being a sextuplet, but for someone with no plans, he’s pretty strict about what he likes to play.
He even drums out patterns against your knuckles whenever his fingers, callused at the tips but otherwise surprisingly soft, slip between yours, or whenever his palms flatten across your back in a makeshift massage. You can never quite figure out what the rhythm is, but you guess it’s another song he’s been working on. He likes it best when the two of you have the chance to sit on his roof, apart from the rest of his family, where you can bask in the ambience of the town below. It feels peaceful that way—when it feels like the whole world belongs to you, and he doesn't try to monologue about it.
Or maybe he just monologues through his music. You wouldn't put it past him. It’s a hell of a lot more calming to listen to, at least. And it’s nice to see him make something of himself. Something creative.
It’s like that this afternoon, when you’re sitting cross-legged on your living room floor and Karamatsu’s already at work tuning guitar strings against each other. He frowns at the way the cuff of his sleeve keeps brushing—not conspicuously, but enough to annoy him—against the strings, and eventually he shrugs out of his jacket and lays it beside him in an unceremonious heap. Muscle tenses under his skin as he works, and you have to hope you're not being too obvious about the fact that you can’t. Stop. Staring.
But Karamatsu seems to work in opposites—flamboyant when others roll their eyes, and painfully, painfully oblivious to the moments you're especially attracted to him. Even still, he graces you with a smile, curls his fingers against the strings, and starts to pluck out one of the usual three songs, probably confident that you're entranced by his handiwork. And honestly, with the serene look on his face and the ripple of his knuckles as he works, it’d probably be a lot more pleasant to listen to, and watch, if you hadn't heard it at least fifty times before.
But you don't have the heart to interrupt him, so you wait to speak until each note has faded into an echo and his loose fist rests against the body of the guitar. “Karamatsu,” you begin, wary of shattering what he likes to call the fragile heart and ego of a starving artist. “What about playing something else? Something new, maybe?”
Karamatsu’s face falters a bit, and you hope you haven't insulted him. (Maybe this pales in comparison to being abandoned for pears, but you don't dare bring it up.) “Something else…?” he echoes. “But I thought you liked those ones.” He breaks out into a grin, and you can tell it’s a cover-up, but you humor him anyway. “I have to play up to the desires of my Karamatsu fans, don’t I?”
“I do like them!” you insist, maybe a little more defensive than you’d meant to be. “I do, honest. They’re my favorites, that's why you play them. It’s just, some variety would be nice, too...”
In the silence that follows, Karamatsu’s face becomes a little harder to read. Thoughtfully, his hand slides over the curves of his guitar—while you bite your lip and try not to stare for too long—and he finally speaks. “Then let's go somewhere else.” He lets out a single laugh, tipping his sunglasses from atop his head to the bridge of his nose. “The outside world inspires me, you know.”
Or the attention does. But you hold your tongue and concede.
That’s his cue (or his excuse) to take you to the park with his guitar slung over his shoulder, and maybe the change of scenery is worth it, even if you do sort of regret the fact that he put his jacket back on. He spends lot of time leaning—against a tree, against a railing, against the bridge above the river—and once he sits himself down at the riverbank and crosses his legs, he breathes. Like he has to soak everything in before he can channel anything else. Or maybe like he needs to mentally prepare himself. He’s as good with façades as he is with his hands.
This time, when he plays for you, he sings. Softly, like for once in his life he doesn't want to attract any attention. Or like he only wants to attract yours. It's actually kind of flattering, especially because you didn't really know that he could sing. But he does, and when it mingles with the pluck and strum of his guitars, you feel like you could sink into the music, if a bit uncomfortably. His voice wavers with an untrained vibrato, and he sounds a little off-tune sometimes, but you think that maybe with some training he could actually go somewhere with it. His English pronunciation isn't too bad, and his Adam’s apple bobs when he dips into the lower notes, and his eyes are shut tight behind his sunglasses. And you could be imagining it, but it looks like his hands are shaking.
It makes you wish you knew how to play. Particularly because once he finishes, you don't have to doubt whether his hands are shaking or not.
You scoot a little closer to him, coaxing your hands around his until his fingers lock into the spaces between yours, and keep your eyes trained on the grass. You can still feel the fresh indents from the guitar strings on his fingertips. “That was really nice,” you murmur.
He lets out another single laugh, practically a signature of his by now. “I suppose I’ll just have to learn more songs for you, won't I, angel?”
The pet name makes you shudder a little, and you hope it's not too visible. Or that he takes it as some sort of compliment. “Yeah,” you tell him with a smile, giving his hands a gentle squeeze. “I guess you’ll have to.”