Chapter Text
We didn’t even kiss.
It was the fastest Kiyoomi had ever hit backspace on his phone keyboard, the blinking cursor at the bottom of his text thread with Atsumu staring back at him like it was mocking his momentary lapse in judgement.
The statement was laced with emotion—and Kiyoomi and Atsumu didn’t do emotions. They had explicitly agreed not to when they started this whole arrangement in the first place.
And had he been unable to stop himself from sending that stupid text, it would’ve unraveled the carefully crafted air of nonchalance that Kiyoomi had been tiptoeing around since he started suspecting that maybe he cared more than he would like to admit.
He pocketed his phone and walked out of the elevator and back to his place, a few floors above Atsumu’s where they usually met up to relieve some tension.
They never went back to Kiyoomi’s place, at his own insistence—part of the whole nonchalant thing he liked to think he had going on. He didn’t allow just anyone into his space like that, and his teammate turned casual fuck buddy should not be the exception to that rule.
But the text he almost sent as his stomach churned on the elevator ride back seemed to indicate that he was doing a shit job at maintaining the distance he so carefully put between him and his setter.
They were in the middle of the season and practice had been particularly grueling that day.
“Captain’s wife is probably pissed at him and he’s takin’ it out on us huh,” Atsumu joked as they walked back to their apartment complex together—the unspoken agreement that they were both going back to the blonde’s place to blow off some steam already evident in the brisk pace they were going at.
It wasn’t until Kiyoomi was in the elevator afterwards that he felt uneasy—like something was missing, like he’d forgotten something important.
It was then that he realized that in their eagerness to get the strain of practice out of their systems by exerting themselves in an entirely different way, they didn’t even kiss once.
It got Kiyoomi thinking about the countless times they’d done this before. Usually, the moment the door closed and not a second later, Atsumu’s lips were on his. He always kissed Kiyoomi like a man possessed, like he would die if he didn’t get a taste of his mouth as soon as they were alone.
Kiyoomi didn’t like to admit it because of his aforementioned forced nonchalance, but the kissing was always his favorite part. Atsumu always ravished him before they did anything else, but afterwards his kisses always came with a certain kind of tenderness that almost seemed out of place considering the casual nature of their whole thing.
Or maybe Atsumu was just so fucked out by the time they were done that his kissing came across as tender when in reality he was just tired. Kiyoomi didn’t know what the hell to think anymore.
Why did it even matter so much to him that Atsumu didn’t kiss him? He didn’t know that it did until he was typing that text out. But he was a smart man; he could put two and two together and admit to himself that this wasn’t just about sex for him anymore. Maybe it hadn’t been for a while now.
He mentally kicked himself as he went on to do his nighttime routine. He couldn’t believe that for such a careful man he managed to go ahead and do the one thing he wasn’t supposed to—catch feelings for the blonde asshole that was just supposed to warm his bed for a few hours at a time, not carve out a permanent place in it.
It didn’t seem to matter how many walls he built around himself to keep this exact thing from happening. No sex at my place. No staying over. No feelings. Nothing of the sort whatsoever.
His desire for more slowly seeped through the cracks in his walls and corroded every bit of it. And now they were crumbling. If he didn’t nip this in the bud, soon enough he would be standing out there defenseless, holding his heart out for someone who could just stomp all over it.
He got in bed and checked his phone one last time to see if maybe Atsumu had noticed it too. Maybe he was as torn up about this as Kiyoomi was.
But there were no new messages. So he stared at his ceiling until he felt like he had gathered up every drop of resolve he had left in his body to simply say no the next time Atsumu asked him to come over.
It sounded easy enough, right? Him dreaming of steady, beautifully calloused setter hands holding him close as he slept that night was just another thing he would have to ignore.
***
Sure enough, nary a day later, Atsumu was sidling up next to him in the locker room after a blessedly much easier day of practice.
“Ya comin’ over tonight, Omi?” He whispered, winking at the spiker once his blonde head popped out of the shirt he was changing into.
Kiyoomi took a deep breath and steeled himself to push through with his plan. He already overthought himself nearly to the grave the night before. That was the hard part.
Now his mind was made up, and all he had to do was say no.
But he glanced back at the setter and the easy smile on his face almost made Kiyoomi’s resolve crumble. Almost.
Atsumu was looking at him so openly—maybe even fondly, if he was being generous with his interpretation—that he almost said screw the plan. Almost, but not quite.
He reminded himself that he was doing the right thing, the safe thing, by ending things before they got too messy.
“No,” he replied quickly and impassively, as if even just dragging it out too long with Atsumu smiling at him like that would be enough to change his mind.
“Oh, okay. Tomorrow, then?” Atsumu responded casually, understandably thinking that it was meant more as a rain check than an outright and indefinite no.
Kiyoomi sighed. This wasn’t really a conversation he wanted to have in the locker room with their teammates just loitering around.
“No, Miya. I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
“What?” The blonde exclaimed, coughing into his fist after his sudden outburst turned a few heads toward them. He dismissed them with a hand wave and a sheepish laugh, and Kiyoomi didn’t respond until their teammates were back to minding their own business.
“We can’t talk about this here. But I think we should end our… arrangement.” He looked back at the blonde one last time as he slung his bag over his shoulder, a little taken aback by the unreadable expression on his face.
He had never seen Atsumu look so… distraught. Whether it meant that maybe he was as torn up about all of this as Kiyoomi was, or just upset that he was losing a good, consistent, easy fuck, the spiker had no mental bandwith to think about at the moment.
So he said his goodbyes and turned around to walk home alone for the first time in months. He knew he probably owed Atsumu some sort of explanation, that is if the blonde even wanted or needed one.
Probably not—his pragmatic mind supplied once more. Atsumu had droves of people who would take any opportunity to get close to him. Kiyoomi was sure he could walk up to any bar and find someone else that same night if he wanted to.
The thought alone of Atsumu with someone else made his stomach flip, further reinforcing that he did the right thing by preemptively ending things before his feelings destroyed him completely.
But who was he kidding? It already hurt anyway. If he was any good at being preemptive he would’ve caught himself before he even had any feelings to begin with.
He spent the walk home and the rest of that night coming up with a way to articulate his reasons for ending things without giving too much of his feelings away, just in case the setter asked.
Too embroiled in his own shit, he was blissfully unaware of the turmoil he sent Atsumu’s way—the blonde tossing and turning in bed trying to come up with what the hell he could’ve possibly done wrong to make Kiyoomi end things.