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On his first night back in Miyagi, Hanamaki makes the poolside his tightrope, careful not to fall.
It has been said that twenty-five is the prime age for balancing acts, but Hanamaki can say he's never really teetered spectacularly. Instead, he thinks of the repeated motions of work and school and whatever monotony Tokyo usually afforded, and wonders if skirting the edge is the most daring thing he's done in years. With the key in hand, he goes back to his text messages—i broke into the school pool tonight, he's written without answer. care for a swim?
“I mean, it’s not breaking in if I gave you the key.”
Hanamaki turns around to greet him. Matsukawa’s arrived (though twenty minutes late), bearing convenience store fare in assorted apologies. He throws Hanamaki a bag of shrimp chips, lightly seasoned, and takes his place over at the other side of the pool. With a sigh, that very Matsukawa sigh, he rolls his slacks right up his calves for the wade. Hanamaki watches on, neither superstitious or particularly pious, and deems this a ritual worth keeping.
Matsukawa looks up to nowhere in particular. Stars, maybe. Some vast and empty universe. Hanamaki sees the way Matsukawa fills it in himself; he wonders if he's still writing his sci-fi epic, or thinking of ways to better his musical about the wonders and terrors of deep space.
Hanamaki laughs when he thinks about it. He sets himself down by the poolside, too, just like old times.
“So. We're here again,” Matsukawa says, because it's been eons since they've broken into the school pool with snacks and nothing but the water between them.
Matsukawa grins at this. Hanamaki notices the thinness of it before settling back on his thoughts. Because it's true—the last seven years of their friendship had been a flurry of train rides, Tokyo excursions, and late night phone calls. With no closeness lost, Hanamaki thinks of the word for it: different. It'd been different since graduation, he supposes, but not bad. He also remembers that times like this were also a relentless sort of good.
“Do you come here a lot, now that you're teaching?” Hanamaki asks, out of spite for his professors back in Tokyo. “Just sit here with your beer and grade tests?”
Matsukawa scoffs, always light enough not to offend. “No,” he answers.
“And why not?”
“This is a sacred place, don't you know?”
From there, Matsukawa opens a box of classic chocolate pocky; Hanamaki, in turn, goes after his shrimp chips. “Who am I, to disturb the great kappa grandfather of the Aoba Johsai Olympic sized pool?” he continues on.
“I mean, it's nowhere close to an Olympic sized pool,” Hanamaki corrects, “but sure.” He was never in the game of stifling anyone’s imagination, anyway. He looks for kappas in the water before stuffing a crisp into his mouth and deeming it a useless endeavor.
“Speaking of the Olympics, did you hear anything about Oikawa?” Matsukawa asks.
Hanamaki sours at the name. “He got himself his first brand endorsement yesterday. Instant coffee, I think. I've never seen so many zeros on a check before.”
“Wow.”
“Even Iwaizumi was horrified.”
They both exaggerate wide eyes before settling into another laugh. Easy is what Hanamaki would like to call this. Just like back then. Leaning back into the rest of the night, Matsukawa undoes all the buttons on his dress shirt, while Hanamaki wets his hair back.
Still on the edge, not daring to cross to the other side, Hanamaki looks across and sees endless possibility. Just like back then. Just like now.
“So, enough about Oikawa,” Hanamaki says. “How are things?”
“The usual,” says Matsukawa. “I killed my Venus flytrap a few days ago, if that's worth making the news.”
“I guess it is,” Hanamaki says. “Rest in peace, houseplant.”
“Rest in peace.”
It goes quiet again after that, a moment of silence for the passing of time.
“And you?” Matsukawa asks right back after a few seconds. “Anything new?”
“The usual work at the lab,” Hanamaki says. “Tests. Papers. You know how it is.” He grimaces, when he realizes how rehearsed this sounds. In that moment, he wonders how many times he's used that line in the city, via first dates and other first meetings and every passing pleasantry along the way. In correction—because he remembers Matsukawa is not the city, or it’s 13,189,000 inhabitants, or someone to be subjected to passing pleasantries—he begins again: “I want to move back to the prefecture.”
Matsukawa lifts his head up. “Really?” he asks. “Why’s that?”
Hanamaki thinks of the things to rattle off. “I miss the mountains. This pool. My mother’s cooking. I miss—”
He stops himself. Matsukawa smirks back anyway, like he just might understand.
“Anyway,” Hanamaki starts up again, clearing his throat. “How's Hana-chan?”
Matsukawa shrugs. “She's a nice girl. Wonderful, really. In another life, I'd think about marrying her.”
“But?”
“It just didn't work out,” he answers. “That's how things usually go, right?”
“Right.” Hanamaki strains in trying not to smile too hard. Matsukawa peeks back into his box for more pocky.
In some comfortable sort of silence, the water at their feet, Hanamaki mulls over every time they've sat like this instead, and decides they need nothing further. Forget the breakups and to-bes.
“So,” Matsukawa starts, a smile too cheeky to quit. “Wanna break out the beer?”
It might be enough, just to find Matsukawa across some close but safe distance, to draw the borderlines and keep in the clear.
Insistent on never falling in, Hanamaki smiles back.
“I thought you'd never ask.”
For Hanamaki Takahiro, twenty-five has been shaping up to an unremarkable year.
This is something he tells himself one day over breakfast with Iwaizumi, still too full from snacks (and maybe just a little sick to his stomach). He thinks of the night before in pieces and movements, too sudden for morning: the laughs, the beers—the fact that he might've had too many of them—and determines, with newfound clarity, the horror, that he might be the slightest bit hungover.
Iwaizumi, of course, offers him no solace. “So, as you were saying,” he continues, setting down his own breakfast. “You spent all night at a pool you broke into.”
Next to them at the table, Oikawa lowers the newspaper from his face, already raring to go for the rest of the day. “Iwa-chan, weren't you listening? It can't be breaking in if Matsukawa’s a teacher at Seijou.”
“Fine,” Iwaizumi continues on. “But what else?”
Hanamaki decides there isn't anything else. “We just—I don't know. Talked. Laughed,” (admittedly all at Oikawa’s expense). “Like last time. Graduation.”
“Graduation,” Oikawa remembers fondly. “Remember that night, Iwa-chan? That was the night you said we could, you know—”
“Don't you even start—”
“—hold hands!”
Iwaizumi swats himself in the face, and Hanamaki can do nothing but sigh at their coupledom. From there, he surveys the last few years of the Iwaizumi-Oikawa union: the obviously mutual crushes, the get-together, the bickering, the incessant way they worked at it anyway, through thick and thin, the horrible and the heaven sent. As if Tokyo were another life, Hanamaki remembers: Oikawa sitting on the edge of the bathtub and arguing over the phone; plane tickets for invitationals; Iwaizumi’s surprise airport visits (and the inevitable bickering all the way back).
In any case, ease was not something they’d lived by. They'd built bridges to cross any distance, and distance was something they regularly conquered: it no longer mattered what countries or cities they found themselves in, or how much time had passed since they'd last seen each other. It was annoying, to say the least, but admirable to see the effort. Hanamaki smiles, when he watches Oikawa try to feed Iwaizumi a piece of umeboshi.
“We're getting off track,” Iwaizumi says with just the slightest bit of a smile. “Get back to your story.”
Hanamaki snaps back into attention, foggy as he might be. “There isn't much to tell. We stayed at the pool and I drank too much,” he says. “That's all.”
Iwaizumi frowns. “Ah.”
Oikawa shakes his head with a tch, and this is when Hanamaki remembers that no one clicks a tongue better than he does.
“You're leaving out a very important part,” Oikawa says.
“Oh?” Iwaizumi and Hanamaki both ask.
“Well, you had gone to sleep early, Iwa-chan, and I was still up watching footage for this invitational.” Oikawa picks at his food, making art with unrolled omelettes. “And you know how staying up to three A.M. just happens to you out of nowhere?”
“Sure,” says Hanamaki, unconvinced, and Iwaizumi huffs out like he's resisting the urge to scold him about staying up until the likes of three in the morning.
“Well,” Oikawa says. “Here's the part you're leaving out. You didn't just get back here on your own. Mattsun walked you all the way home.”
Hanamaki curses under his breath. “Did he?” he asks. “You didn't meet us by the pool? That's what I remember.”
“Memories get hazy with every drop you drink,” Oikawa returns, almost poetic. “But yes. You're lucky he didn't seem too bothered about it, but then again it's Mattsun and—ow!” Oikawa stops right what he's saying. “Iwa-chan! Why'd you kick me?”
“Because it's breakfast and you're talking too much,” Iwaizumi says. “Anyway,” he goes on, “it's the beginning of golden week, isn't it? He should be at his apartment this morning, since he's not teaching.”
Hanamaki cringes. “What? To give him the opportunity to make fun of me? He’d probably write me into a short story called The Amazing Adventures of My Drunk Best Friend.”
Oikawa gasps with a smack of a hand to his cheek. “Makki!” he calls, so pleasant it's irritating. “You actually admit he's your best friend?”
“I mean…” Hanamaki frowns. “Yeah. There's just no way out of that, I guess. It is what it is.”
Oikawa and Iwaizumi exchange glances, always in their secret, unspoken dialects. “Hey, Iwa-chan,” one half of them starts. “You remember that new athletic gear shop I wanted to check out in town? That grand opening?”
“No—ow,” Iwaizumi follows. “I mean. Yeah,” he says. “You wanted to go right after breakfast, right?”
Hanamaki shrugs. “You know, I've been meaning to go, too. I heard about the complimentary sweatbands."
Oikawa wags a chopstick in retaliation. “Sorry, Makki. You're not coming with us.” Iwaizumi nods along in agreement.
“Why not? I thought we all came here to Miyagi to rekindle our love of the prefecture. Now you're running off to go on dates without me?”
“Yep,” says Iwaizumi. He exchanges another glance with Oikawa, who lunges forward on the table.
“I'll let you in on a secret, Makki,” he says gravely, but it's hard to take him seriously with the grain of rice on the corner of his lip. “He didn't want me to tell you this, but he said he was feeling under the weather, and helping you home so late at night didn't help things.”
Hanamaki sighs. “Is that so? Then maybe I should visit. I haven't been to his place in a while, anyway.”
Oikawa nods, right on the verge of something ecstatic; Iwaizumi, less so.
“Wonderful,” Oikawa says, and they go on eating their breakfasts.
Hanamaki declares, with nothing more than a groan, that he's nowhere near hungry enough to finish his meal.
(Instead, he thinks of what to bring Matsukawa later. He drowns in the idea of something broth-based, no cooking skills, be damned.)
“You aren't sick, are you?” Hanamaki drops a bag of instant ramen and konbu soup mix in the doorway later that day, rain-soaked and a thousand yen poorer.
Reaching under his sleep-shirt, always a white tee too thinned beyond saving, Matsukawa scratches at his stomach. “No,” he says. “Just a bit drowsy from drinking. Oh, what have I said about drinking before?”
“That even when you don't get hungover, there's always something about the next day,” Hanamaki recalls (even if he was, well, hungover). “Like moving in slow motion.”
“You remembered,” Matsukawa says with a grin.
“Hard not to, when the first person I ever got shitfaced with was with you.”
And just like that, Hanamaki throws his shoes off to come creaking into Matsukawa’s Sendai apartment. It is in supreme comfort that he flops himself onto the floor, content to pick up one of the many literary magazines off to the coffee table to read. Matsukawa had been a big fan of Gunzo since he was a kid, for reasons he would not pinpoint until his first year of college, over a late night phone call with Hanamaki: “Every submission that's featured is anonymous. For example, you could write all the love stories you want, and no one would ever know.”
“Love stories?” Hanamaki had asked at the time. “Is that what you want to write, then?”
“Well, we’ll see. I'll let you know, whatever it ends up being.”
From the ground, Hanamaki stares up at Matsukawa, swallowing down any urge to reminisce. He shuts his eyes closed instead, magazine still open across his chest; Matsukawa comes to lift it off, when he lies down by his side.
“You know,” he says, and Hanamaki can't help but snap his attention back to him, “we as a society do not lie on the floor enough. You see a lot when you're down here.”
“What are you even talking about?” Hanamaki asks with a laugh.
Matsukawa smiles. “Honestly, I have no idea.” He points a finger up at the ceiling, traces the cracks in it like brand new star systems. “But it's comfortable down here, don't you think?” he asks, and Hanamaki pretends not to be conscious of the way their shoulders bump.
“We used to do this in school, too,” Hanamaki says. “Remember?”
Matsukawa scoffs. “You mean the way we used to push the desks to the wall after cleaning duty?”
“We had it easy, then,” Hanamaki says with a nod. “Silly kids just killing time, you know? Now it's all taxes and paying rent and taking multivitamins in the morning.”
“It's not so bad,” Matsukawa says. “All those multivitamins will just make you even wiser.”
“Wiser for what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Not repeating the mistakes of your past?” He shrugs at this, sights looming over back at Hanamaki.
“What?” Hanamaki swallows down in return. “Are you referring to something in particular?”
For a moment, Matsukawa’s eyes go wide-set, a rare enough occurrence on any given day. With a small shake of the head, Hanamaki knows he's telling the truth. Matsukawa was never much of a liar to begin with.
“No,” he affirms, “but are you?”
Hanamaki makes himself a liar. “No. I regret nothing.” He doesn't think about the time he was eighteen and restless, a poet in his own right, writing up love letters without signing them, sending them. He definitely doesn't remember making mix tapes either, or practicing grand speeches in his head—things like, “I've thought of you since graduation day,” and “It’s ridiculous, just how just much I like you.”
Of course none of these things ever crossed his mind. Because eighteen had been a matter of wading, a time where crushes that were destined to fade like cooling sweat. So he'd be a fool, to think of the time they'd talked all night at a bus stop, or strung up two cups to play telephone across classrooms. No way had he remembered their Cowboy Bebop marathon that one summer, or the way he had swooned after him in secret: all eyes, lips, and that incorrigible face.
So it would be the most useless endeavor, to remember the exact moment he'd fallen in love, not like, and how things like this always came with the mundane.
Hanamaki thinks back to some other lifetime (or what certainly felt like another lifetime, by now). It was nothing grand. They'd been at the poolside the night after graduation, in a spring too cool to swim or splash. It had been all about the little motions—Matsukawa unfastening the first two buttons of his shirt, Hanamaki throwing flower petals from a bouquet too big to carry home. The chatter, in fact, was hardly worth remembering; aside from the usual things like move-in dates and their logistical nightmares, Hanamaki let the rest of it fall by the wayside to make room for some other memory, the possibility. He had pressed the name and the number like a bookmark in a novel hardly begun. ‘Matsukawa Issei at eighteen,’ he'd remembered, just as he was. Hanamaki had been prepared to leave it at that.
But if Hanamaki learned anything that night, it was that he couldn't just leave the pool with ‘Matsukawa Issei at eighteen.’ Across the poolside, he'd begun to think of other ages instead. Would Matsukawa Issei at twenty finally like umeboshi? Be a published writer by thirty? By seventy-five, would he enjoy a game of gō in the park and feed the sparrows? Again and again, he'd think of him this way. Again and again, he'd think about being beside him, too: to twenty and thirty and any undetermined age.
So maybe that was the point he'd figured it was such. Love. Hanamaki had been in love with him since he even figured it had a name. Matsukawa defined it. He made it the vernacular, but spoke it in a slang only they knew; without him, there was one less noun in the dictionary and no other word could dare to come as close. Not something to be trifled with then, and not one to be trifled with now.
In a fury, Hanamaki swallows down and pretends there isn't a word for it. He pretends he hasn't lived with it these past seven years.
“Hey.”
“Yeah?” Hanamaki answers the call.
“How about we just stay like this?” Matsukawa asks out of the silence, almost asleep and too drowsy to take back. “It's raining too hard, anyway. It's not like we can go anywhere.”
On the contrary, Hanamaki thinks about running away regardless of rain, but he doesn't when he sees Matsukawa fall asleep next to him.
“Fine,” Hanamaki tells him, when no one can possibly hear him.
“Fine,” he repeats, when no one will catch the sound of him giving in.
“Flowers and a string quartet,” Oikawa answers later that night, “just like they do in the movies.”
Iwaizumi rolls his eyes. “No.”
“No?” Hanamaki asks back.
“The only thing you need is yourself,” Iwaizumi says like some truth. “That's the perfect confession.”
Oikawa lowers his sunglasses and squints back at Hanamaki in the end-of-day sun. “Say, Makki...why are we answering hypotheticals, anyway?” He blinks all innocent like he knows the reason exactly.
Hanamaki shifts in the grass, tipping his baseball cap over his eyes, this month’s edition of Gunzo mostly unread in his lap. “No reason,” he lies. “I just read this story on the way over here and it made me think,” he makes up, flipping to the table of contents and finding a random title to read off of.
“It's called—uh, Things to Say by the Pool.”
Hanamaki grimaces. Weird, but surely a coincidence. Every story in Gunzo remained anonymous, and it could've been written by anyone.
“Sounds boring,” Oikawa says. “Is it a love story?”
“Um.” Hanamaki shakes his head, before nodding along. “I don't know, actually.”
“But you're the one who read it,” Iwaizumi says. “How don't you know?”
With a shake of his head, Hanamaki can't help but smile, all weary. “I just,” he starts, mashing his mouth closed. “I can never be sure.”
Oikawa gets off the ground, wiping off grass blades and helping Iwaizumi up along the way. “Well,” he says, “maybe we should let you get to that, then. Iwa-chan promised he’d get soba with me tonight, anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Iwaizumi sighs out, following Oikawa up the grass. He stops to look back, all grins. “He probably won't be looking for us once he's done reading.”
Without another word, Hanamaki sets to start. “Things to Say by the Pool,” he announces, “by anonymous.”
Overhead, the sun leaves for some pretty little dusk, dusk gone for a time by the pool and all roads to it.
To everyone else, this will just be a story—
but to all intended parties, a confession hidden in the pages.
“Why didn't you tell me?” Hanamaki’s out of breath when he comes stumbling out of the gate, one sandal lost on the way to the pool, the other kicked off without a fight.
Calmly, Matsukawa just looks up from his side of the ledge, lit in nothing but the haziest streetlight. The fireflies emerge, airborne. A phone screen lights up, calls missed. The horizon spells the demise of day, nearly dark, and for a moment, Hanamaki wonders if he's stumbled into a dream; Matsukawa blinks like it, a walking lull. A call to kill his guards.
“You know you're not the only one who can sneak in, too,” he says.
“I'm not talking about that,” Hanamaki says, forcing down the lump in his throat. Out from his back pocket, he unrolls the latest copy of Gunzo and flips to the story again. “Why didn't you…” He doesn't finish. Hanamaki realizes he's never gotten this far before. “I mean—your story.”
Matsukawa shrugs, ever-unassuming. “It never came up, I suppose. Good on you for finding it. Never thought I'd ever hear back when I submitted it, though.”
“No,” Hanamaki can only say.
“No?”
“No, because I don't mean any of that.” Hanamaki scans the paragraphs, the passages; he recalls the two unnamed boys and their adventures by their pool of sorts, some lake in the middle of nowhere, all miles apart and miles between (and maybe the moon); he remembers their secret language, the smoke signals at dusk; he remembers cheeky letters and a lifetime of exchange; he remembers the I love you, spread out in 16,395 words (which Hanamaki knows because he’s counted).
To all intended parties, he remembers at once.
“You wrote this for me,” Hanamaki says, quiet. Matsukawa’s face falls at once, when he realizes, and he can only smile in defeat.
“So, you found me out.”
Hanamaki shakes his head. “Why didn't you tell me? That you, you know—felt that way?” He swallows again, coming to the edge of his side of the pool, thoughts in a jumble. The word he thinks of is precarious. He goes on regardless, and the two of them hang on in silence.
“I didn't want to force things,” says Matsukawa. “If you had read it, great. If you never did, then so be it.” He avoids looking up, all half-lidded in the partial view, and this is when Hanamaki remembers something else from the story: for all other times, he'd seen the world in carelessness. For the boy on the other side, it'd been a matter of not being able to bear any full sight.
“When…” Hanamaki swallows before going on. “When did you realize?”
“I’m not even sure,” Matsukawa admits. “When does anyone ever realize that sort of stuff? I mean, one day you're just sitting by the pool all fine and the next, you're not.” He shakes his head. Hanamaki nods back.
“So.”
“So,” Matsukawa continues with a smile. “I figured I'd try to write something down to combat, you know, the weird feeling in my stomach.”
“Butterflies,” Hanamaki finishes.
“No.”
“No?”
“Emptiness,” Matsukawa corrects, more bemused than anything else. “It was emptiness, like I could never get full. Ever get that feeling?”
Hanamaki mouths a quick little yes, another nod to follow.
“So I wrote and revised. Sent it in when I felt like I was ready,” Matsukawa follows. “Took me seven years—”
“Too long,” Hanamaki interrupts.
“What?”
“Too long. Because in those seven years, I've—”
Matsukawa waits, eyes wide like he can't believe it, but he quickly settles back into his usual gauntness. Whole body in exhale, he shakes his head before breaking out into laughter, a crack in every other note.
“I can't believe this,” says Matsukawa. “We're such…”
“Assholes?” Hanamaki asks. He can't resist laughing, either. “I know. I know.” They stay like this for a while, caught in sniveling of all things. Hanamaki knows Oikawa would never let it down, if he saw them like this—but it's no matter, because he'd come to learn some important, vital truth regardless: that twenty-five was built for extraordinary things, impossible things, but only if you dared to reach out.
“So,” Matsukawa asks. “What now?”
Hanamaki grins in a salute. Sights at the water, he wastes no more time.
At eighteen, it had been a matter of wading.
At twenty-five, he jumps in to meet him on the other side.