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He misses the mountains, the serene white shroud of snow and clouds. The terrain here is too flat, too open, bordered by million-dollar resorts on one side and the broad, endless blue of the ocean on the other.
Genji sits on the back steps of the seaside cottage, unsure what to do with himself in a place like this. However deeply he dislikes the beach, Genji doesn’t exactly hate watching
McCree
on the beach.
Several feet away, McCree has discarded his poncho and shirt, and busied himself with stringing up a hammock between two palm trees. The hat, boots, and belt remain, though, making McCree seem out of place among the bathing suits and beach towels.
Genji is still staring when McCree glances over his shoulder.
“Hey, partner, wanna dance?”
Genji tenses. “What?”
His eyes are directionless to everyone, he knows, but still Genji hopes McCree can’t tell exactly how they travel the sleek path from beard to chest to waist to. . .
McCree’s hands go to his hips, palming the pistols there.
“Spar. Practice. Get it?” McCree stalks toward him, mischievous, easing the pistols free. “I’m partial to that thing you do with your sword.” The weapons spin like gleaming acrobats in his large hands. McCree cocks his head and pushes his hat back with the barrel of a gun. “Wondered if you’d mind me shooting at you, just a little bit.”
Genji swallows. Instead of the many alternate responses firing away in his brain, appropriate or otherwise, he only shakes his head.
Confusion slowly pulls the sly look out of McCree’s eyes. He shrugs and saunters back to his hammock.
Mortified, Genji is alone with his feelings for only a moment. Fareeha comes back from her late afternoon run, jogging past McCree in a flurry of kicked sand, bottle of water in her hand. Damp and breathless, she collapses on the step beside Genji and gulps half the bottle before noticing the object of Genji’s attention.
“What’s wrong?” she says, dark eyes traveling past Genji’s shoulder, “is Jesse bothering you?”
“No,” Genji replies quickly. “Yes.”
When he turns to look at Fareeha, she’s studying him like a falcon.
“Mm.” She takes another sip of water.
“His role in the group is strange to me,” Genji says. Across the sand, McCree pulls the hammock tether tight, dark patches of sweat blooming on his tank between his shoulders. “Still, he has an undefinable quality.”
Fareeha pauses with the water bottle at her lips and cuts her eyes at Genji. “No, he really doesn’t.”
Genji supposes she is right. Many of McCree’s qualities are obvious, well-defined by his tank top and jeans.
Without meaning to vocalize it, Genji murmurs, “I like his poncho.”
Fareeha sputters and spits a stream of water across the sand at their feet, her choking subsides, replaced by laughter so intense that she can barely speak.
“Why is that funny?”
“It’s. . .a . . .rug!” she gasps between laughs. “M-Mom bought it in Dorado. From a. . .a man whiter than this beach. It-it. . .it was in the hallway outsidethe
bathroom
.”
Behind his visor, Genji feels heat rise into his cheeks, a flush that runs like hard liquor through the parts of him still capable of the burn. Fareeha shakes her head at him, grinning, still wheezing through the aftershocks of laughter.
She doesn’t understand.
He’s not ashamed of his interest, the urge and responsiveness of his body. He is overjoyed that such a simple thing, a flesh-and-blood thing, is still possible.
Gazing at the sweaty, disheveled, sun-kissed figure of a man who doesn’t quite fit, at the beach or perhaps anywhere, Genji decides that Jesse McCree is ‘possibility’ in tight jeans.
Fareeha looks up at him as he rises from the step.
“Where’re you going?”
“To get my sword.”