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Koushuu had taken the loss hardest out of all the third-years.
They returned from Nishinomiya in the second week of August, earlier than anyone wanted or anticipated. It was, ostensibly, not his fault. They’d been down one run in the ninth inning, two outs on the board. The opposing pitcher had a cutter that no one could quite touch. Everyone assured him of this.
Then Koushuu went up to bat, and he was caught looking. That was how Koshien ended.
It could have been fine if the final batter were anyone else. They would have lost all the same, probably, but Koushuu was the one who beat Yui to the starting catcher position in their first year, whom everyone expected to fill Miyuki’s shoes. During those two years, Koushuu frequented the weight room and swung his bat in private; his shoulders grew broader to accommodate the team upon them. He’d done everything right, replicating Miyuki’s habits, studying his strategies, but in the end, he had still fallen short.
Days later, Sawamura messaged him on LINE: I saw the Kamijo game—keep your head up, Wolf-boy!!! You had a great run. He delayed replying, mostly because he didn’t find Sawamura’s statement to be true. His profile picture was no longer the ace number keychain Yoshikawa made, which he’d kept for two years, but rather a selfie with two guys Koushuu didn’t recognize, wearing gray baseball uniforms. After a week, when the wound had begun the slow process of closing, he finally answered, Thank you.
In the fall, he watched Sawamura’s college games on TV each weekend. Through the tinny speakers, his voice was singularly familiar: Balls will come flying, so fielders, thank you in advance!
By then, Koushuu had already made peace with the possibility that he might never catch for Sawamura again. At their championship-winning game in his second year, Koushuu was first to the mound after the final out, receiving Sawamura’s full weight in his arms as the bench cleared and the team swarmed them. Remember the chafe of his uniform shirt on your face and the smell of sunscreen, he told himself. This is what you have left of him. Keep it.
He should have known the impulse would return; Sawamura was exceptional, even when his catchers made calls Koushuu deemed suboptimal, even when backed into a corner. He always had been. It made Koushuu shiver, watching him paint the corners on-screen with the same pitches he’d caught a year ago and longed to catch again. His palm tingled with every strike. The wanting had snuck back in like a cold draft.
But the college offers came steadily, and the option opened itself to him in December, right before he returned to Kanagawa for the holidays.
“You know,” Taku had said on the train home, “I couldn’t really see you going anywhere else.” Through the windows, Tokyo’s suburbs were roaring past. The car was quiet and slightly chilly.
Koushuu asked him what he meant, and he shrugged.
“Well, like—every other school just was a backup for this one, right?”
Sawamura was back to being a reliever in college, one member of a deep bullpen with experienced upperclassmen pitchers. Not that it seemed to affect him; he had the same loud mouth, that earnest tendency of his to energize others without trying. His pitches were better than Koushuu remembered—faster, sharper, more inscrutable.
When he caught one for the first time since coming to college, the ball had whistled along its arrow-straight trajectory and settled neatly in Koushuu’s mitt. His palm grew hot with the force of its contact. This part was as he remembered.
Sawamura had beamed at the sound, a hard thump ringing out in the bullpen. “How was that, Wolf-boy?”
“Nice pitch,” he called back. “Good control.”
Miyuki had asked him a similar question over email when he heard the news—how is it, catching for him again? Koushuu had thought about the answer for days. There was a lot he could tell Miyuki in his reply, about Sawamura’s relaxed demeanor on the mound, the firmness of his pivot foot, or the ease with which he swung his arm through on each pitch. Then there were thoughts Koushuu kept private: Sawamura’s hair fluttering gently over his forehead, the slight curves of new muscle and height developed while Koushuu was not looking.
To Sawamura himself, Koushuu withheld his praise. There was so much to describe at once, all the uncountable strengths of his pitching breaking through Koushuu’s memory, but Sawamura had probably heard all of them from the new team. His weaknesses, too, were new and more particular—details so small Koushuu would not have bothered to point out in high school. He did not want to risk revealing the extent of his attention, far beyond what was demanded of him, even when he was Sawamura’s main catcher.
After throwing his last pitches, Sawamura crossed the bullpen toward Koushuu. “What did you think today? Still like catching my pitches?”
You have no idea, he thought to himself, you really have no idea. “They’re good,” he said instead. “They look faster, especially at the plate.”
“I’m glad you think so!” Sawamura said, smiling. A drop of sweat reached the outside edge of his compression shirt, leaving a faint damp patch at the collar. The taste of salt emerged on Koushuu’s tongue. “I missed pitching to you this past year, Okumura. I’m excited to form a battery again.”
Koushuu did not yet have the right to be his catcher in an official capacity, but he stayed silent on that fact. Not that it was new to him. Once again a first-year, he would have to play the catch-up game as he did at Seido, training his sights on the backs of older catchers, older pitchers. So much to do, so little time; he had come to recognize that three years was not long enough.
Someone had called Sawamura’s name across the practice field. Before jogging away, he tapped Koushuu’s chest guard twice and said with a grin, “See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” said Koushuu to Sawamura’s retreating form, his shadow stretching so impossibly long in the afternoon sun that Koushuu could almost step into it from his distance.
Koushuu joined the first-string after the spring tournament, during which the team was one win away from the Emperor’s Cup. Despite not making the All-Japan Series, Sawamura had a standout season. Watching from the stands, Koushuu reached the same conclusion as the media: He was among the Tokyo Big6’s best pitchers, certain to be the next ace.
In his first official game, Koushuu manned the bullpen for two innings and sat on the bench for the other seven. They won in no part due to him, although Sawamura pitched the last five innings without conceding a run. Koushuu hadn’t watched his pitches from the dugout for years. From this angle, he could see the high arc of his back leg as it left the ground at the end of each pitch, the flex of his right calf as it stabilized his body’s rocketing movement. He looked like a dancer.
Sawamura found him in the locker room afterwards, wearing an ice wrap on his left shoulder. Several of their teammates remained chatting near the entrance door, though most had already finished changing and left the player facilities. “Hey, Okumura,” he said.
He did not have a shirt on, and the right side of his chest was visible, bare and tempting, covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Koushuu wondered what it would look like in motion, if Sawamura were stretching his arms above his head or throwing a pitch. When Koushuu glanced back up to meet his eyes, Sawamura was already looking at him, amused. If he noticed where Koushuu had been staring, he chose to make no comment on it. A small kindness.
“Wolf-boy’s first first-string game,” he said.
“Yes,” Koushuu agreed, though he hadn’t touched the field once. During the second inning, Sawamura was warming up beside him in the bullpen with another catcher, alternating between yelling and focused throwing with each at-bat. Koushuu’s pitching partner didn’t end up playing.
“I wanted to get your feedback on my pitching today,” Sawamura said, and as if to explain himself, he added, “I saw you watching on the side.”
It was true—he was watching. In high school, Sawamura had also asked for feedback after every game, regardless of whether Koushuu played, and, anticipating it again, Koushuu spent his time on the bench considering his answer. But truthfully, he had no critiques for Sawamura. It was a beautiful five innings. How like him to seek improvement from a near-flawless performance, to be so hungry for perfection with no rest.
“You placed your fastballs well, and I don’t think they were able to get a read on your splitter. Their contact was quite weak,” Koushuu said. “You pitched a good game.”
“The splitter felt a little bit unstable, still.”
If it had been, Koushuu couldn’t tell from the dugout. After thinking for a moment, he conceded, “The double their first-baseman hit off of you in the eighth—that one was probably a bit high. Were you tense from the fumble on the previous batter?”
Sawamura nodded. “It was definitely rising, I could feel it.”
“You recovered quickly, though. I was impressed. You’ve improved a lot.”
Something latent and warm flashed across Sawamura’s face. Koushuu barely caught it before it disappeared. He appeared giddy at Koushuu’s praise.
All of a sudden, Sawamura asked, “You still keep in touch with Miyuki, don’t you? You should tell him how impressed you were. He never listens when I brag to him.”
If anything, Koushuu thought, the opposite was more true—Miyuki followed Sawamura’s pitching the most attentively out of the Seido alum and had the most praise for him, though likely not to his face. He was Miyuki’s first and greatest project after all, the foundations of which he laid brick by brick with his seventeen-year-old hands. How often did those two speak now, years after the last time they’d formed a battery? Did they talk about Koushuu the way he and Miyuki did about Sawamura? Koushuu wanted to know everything they’d told one another, to have everything they’d shared.
“Tell him yourself,” Koushuu replied, pricklier than intended or strictly necessary.
“So you’re a wolf today!” Sawamura exclaimed, unfazed. He dropped a hand in Koushuu’s hair, ruffling as if to pet him between imaginary wolf ears. “Alright, have it your way.”
His scalp tingled under Sawamura’s touch, body growing unstable in its heat. Despite his personality, Sawamura was not all that touchy in high school: On the mound, he tapped Koushuu’s chest through the thick barrier of the leather glove; off the field, he limited himself to an arm around Koushuu’s shoulders, and that was the extent of it. Maybe it was a habit Sawamura developed later—probably nothing to him, who lived to be close to others. Koushuu was not that kind of person, though he had watched on with curiosity as Sawamura wormed his way into each of his Seido teammates’ hearts—that is, until it happened to him. The normal amount, and then some.
“I still don’t understand what that’s supposed to mean,” he said.
Sawamura laughed. “You’ll see one day, Wolf-boy!”
Koushuu scowled but didn’t argue. After retrieving his duffel bag from a nearby locker, Sawamura unstrapped the ice wrap and rolled his shoulders back twice. Koushuu’s eyes drifted to Sawamura’s abdomen, taking in its subtle lines. He’d seen Sawamura entirely shirtless many times before, but he had become tanner in college, or perhaps his tan had become more consistent. Something about it sent Koushuu’s mind stumbling, and a compulsion emerged within him to reach across the short distance between them and touch.
“By the way, my roommates and I are hosting a thing tonight to celebrate the first win. You should come by,” Sawamura said, folding the ice wrap and placing it into his bag. Koushuu’s expression remained carefully blank. “It’s just with the team, don’t worry. It could be nice for you to get to know them outside of practice.”
“A thing,” Koushuu said skeptically.
“Yeah, like a small get-together!”
He weighed his options for the night: go back to his dorm and study, or go to the thing. It would be good, certainly, to be friendly with his teammates outside of baseball. Most people were not like Sawamura, acting the exact same on and off the field; even then, it took a while for Koushuu to really know him.
In the end, his reasoning was intuitive. Sawamura invited him, and Koushuu wanted to see him, or, at least, didn’t have the resolve to stop himself from wanting to see him.
“Text me the details,” he said. Then, to protect himself, he added, “And put on a shirt.”
Sawamura shared an apartment-style dorm with two of their teammates, located a short walk from the athletic facilities. When Koushuu arrived, he could already hear the team’s muffled conversations from outside. He knocked, and Sawamura’s voice grew louder through the door as he approached.
“Wolf-boy, you made it!”
Koushuu toed off his shoes and hovered at the entrance as Sawamura smacked his shoulder. “Stop that,” he grumbled.
In the living room, several of his teammates were playing Super Smash Bros. One of them seemed to be doing much better than the others, KO’ing three characters in rapid succession. Koushuu followed Sawamura into the kitchen.
Opening the refrigerator, Sawamura asked, “Do you want a drink? I have Asahi, Kirin, Strong Zero, soju…”
“Are you guys all alcoholics or something?”
He laughed. “No, only Shoji,” he said, jutting a thumb toward the living room couch. Just then, Shoji, their second-year shortstop, mashed his controller and jumped out of his seat when, on-screen, Jigglypuff was sent flying out of frame with a booming sound effect.
“I’ll have Asahi,” said Koushuu. He had not drunk much at all in high school—a few sips here and there from his parents’ glasses at home during breaks, if they offered. Though he could handle the taste, he was not yet accustomed to the kind of drunkenness exhibited by college students en masse.
Sawamura pulled two cans of Asahi out of the mini-fridge, handing one to Koushuu and keeping the other for himself. As Sawamura popped the pull-tab on his can, some beer spilled out onto his thumb. He frowned at his nail, wet and shiny with residue, and took it between his lips, darting his tongue briefly over the tip. Koushuu looked away to open his own beer, but also to keep his eyes away from Sawamura’s innocent, frustrated face. He had done nothing provocative, nothing out of the ordinary, yet Koushuu found himself noticing everything with a heightened sensitivity to the desire he kept dormant over the years, when he’d been adamant on maintaining stability within the team, within himself. But either way, he’d already gone and done the big thing, the most self-indulgent of all, by giving himself three more years of baseball alongside Sawamura.
Koushuu wanted to touch his pink mouth, to step into his space, to feel the warmth around his body. He wanted to unzip the front of Sawamura’s hoodie and find an old t-shirt’s stretched-out collar, to imagine the skin that might greet him under it. It was too much. Sawamura was too much, too oblivious to the effect he had on Koushuu, who was once very good at being unaffected. Whatever resistance he’d built up was lost to disuse like the atrophy of a muscle. This muscle was one he trained every day at Seido until Sawamura retired, not anticipating that he would come back a year later and be the same person Koushuu had been looking at all along.
Under the apartment’s yellow light, Sawamura’s eyelashes cast shadows high on his cheeks when he blinked. He was studying Koushuu now, head tilted. “What’s wrong?”
“Huh?”
“You were just staring into space.”
“I’m fine,” Koushuu said. He took a large sip of beer, wincing at the onslaught of alcohol flavor.
“Want to hop in with me?” Sawamura gestured toward the living room. A round had just ended, and two people were offering up their controllers.
Playing Super Smash Bros was the last thing Koushuu wanted to be doing. “You go ahead,” he said.
“Come on, not even one round?”
Koushuu shook his head, mouth dry. “I’m okay.”
One of his teammates was holding out a controller in Sawamura's direction. “Someone else can take it,” he called.
Koushuu raised an eyebrow, though Sawamura’s response secretly pleased him. “Don’t trust me alone in your kitchen?”
Sawamura laughed. “Not that.” A lock of brown hair fell loosely into his face, and he smoothed it back behind his ear. Taking a drink from the beer can, he continued, “I really did miss you last year, you know? I meant what I'd said.”
“I know,” replied Koushuu. “I believed you the first time.”
A red blush was beginning to creep onto Sawamura’s face after making steady progress with his beer; however, he did not seem drunk. His golden eyes were locked onto Koushuu as if trying to communicate without words. “For emphasis, then.”
The team was still around the corner, audible from where they were alone in the kitchen. Sawamura was holding back, speaking around something greater, which he did not normally do. “What are you trying to say, senpai?” Koushuu asked.
Sawamura opened his mouth to speak then closed it right away, dragging Koushuu by the wrist down a short hallway of doors. Bedrooms, he realized, as Sawamura opened one and led him through. Inside, a shiba inu-themed calendar hung above his desk, while photos and posters littered the rest of the wall space. His navy sheets were strewn haphazardly across the bed. This was the first time he’d seen Sawamura’s college bedroom, Koushuu noted faintly, or any room belonging to him alone.
Shutting the door behind him, Sawamura leaned back against it and ran both hands through the hair at the side of his head, letting it flop back onto his ears. He scrubbed at his face. Koushuu’s heart pounded in his chest; there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide from Sawamura, but that wasn’t what he wanted anyway. The feathered animal of his body could not stop beating its wings.
“When you told me you were coming here,” Sawamura started, “I was really, really glad.”
“You know I was going to,” Koushuu said, because for him there was no question of it. Once the offer came in, he’d set everything else to the side and signed the contract immediately. Maybe that was irresponsible, but he was here regardless, and none of that mattered.
“The entire Big6 was scouting you. You could’ve gone anywhere.” Peeling himself off the door, Sawamura moved to sit on the bed, pulling his knees up to his chest. He pointed to the desk chair, and Koushuu obeyed dutifully. “Why did you come to this school, Okumura?
“Sawamura-senpai…”
“Please,” Sawamura said, expression stricken with something that could have been uncertainty. “I need to hear you say it.”
There were several reasons Koushuu had given to those who asked: a nationally acclaimed baseball program with the ability to send him to the majors, strong academics, and a nice campus to boot, but he knew that wasn’t what Sawamura was looking for. A lump settled in Koushuu’s throat, one he couldn’t swallow away. Leave it to Sawamura to probe straight at the heart, to unearth what Koushuu had planned to take to the grave.
Yet he was sitting before him now, waiting for an answer Koushuu knew he could give.
“I didn’t want to stop playing baseball with you,” he said quietly. Any louder, and he would have to face the strength of the conviction leading him in its truest, most penetrating form. But he was facing it anyway, allowing the words to come out in the first place. Throwing all his cards on the table, he added, “I was following you.”
“Okay,” Sawamura breathed out, letting his feet fall back to the floor. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”
“Okay,” Koushuu replied. Was that all Sawamura wanted? The alcohol was rushing to his head, and he could barely breathe.
Abruptly, Sawamura stood up. He crossed the few steps of distance between them and stopped just short of Koushuu’s face, eyes wide and searching, as though he’d worked up the courage and lost it at the last moment. But he had understood correctly, so Koushuu closed the distance, planting a firm hand on the back of his neck, and Sawamura smiled, and he could feel it, warm and adamant against his mouth.
How bizarre that the world around them could collapse into a single point of feeling—the press of Sawamura’s shy lips, the abstract neon picture dancing behind Koushuu’s closed eyes, the fire trailing in its wake. The fresh scent of Sawamura’s shampoo surrounded him, and his bangs tickled Koushuu’s face. Dimly, he recognized that he’d never had Sawamura so close, at the great culmination of his imagination, the boundary he forbade himself from crossing but did anyway.
“Kiss me again,” Sawamura demanded as Koushuu pulled away, and he did, winding his fingers through the hair at Sawamura’s neck and darting his tongue quickly into Sawamura’s mouth, feeling suddenly empowered. He made a satisfied noise.
Sawamura laughed in relief when he straightened back up. His lips were parted and shiny. “I was worried this whole time I’d read everything wrong.”
Koushuu shook his head, still dazed. “I kind of thought you could already tell. That I…” he trailed off. Like you, want to kiss you, fantasize about you—all true statements that he did not say.
“Maybe, but I couldn’t be sure. You’re pretty mysterious, you know that?”
“I’m an open book,” said Koushuu, and Sawamura huffed.
He returned to where he’d been sitting on the bed and folded his hands together. “I’m serious about this though, about you. And I hope you are too, because you’ve stuck yourself with me for three years.”
“I am, I know. I did that on purpose,” Koushuu said, closing his eyes. He had trouble looking at Sawamura in all his sincerity; he could not yet shake the feeling that the view didn’t belong to him, that there was more to do—make starting catcher, bat harder, be braver—before he’d deserve it.
“Okay, good. That’s good,” Sawamura said, and smoothed both hands from Koushuu’s neck down to his shoulders, as if debating whether to kiss him a third time. Then, brushing Koushuu’s hair to the side, he did—a quick peck to the spot between his eyebrows. Koushuu’s eyes opened again.
He could hear their teammates cheering at something from the living room, possibly an impressive in-game maneuver. They sounded underwater. “Maybe we should go back out there,” said Koushuu, when Sawamura whipped his head toward the noise. He drank from an abandoned beer can, its contents lukewarm and bitter. Whether it was his or Sawamura’s, he didn’t know—not that it mattered anymore.
“Sure,” said Sawamura. He was quiet for a moment, then suggested, “We could get dinner tomorrow.”
“Yes,” Koushuu agreed. “I’m free.”
“7 p.m.?”
“Okay.”
Sawamura smiled, bright and blinding, and nodded toward the door. “You go first. To not be suspicious.”
So Koushuu went, finding the team doing largely the same thing they had been before. Someone asked him where he’d been. The bathroom, he said. My stomach hurt.
A slow, comfortable weight settled within him as he watched the game, the same moves replaying in such quick succession that the characters’ voice lines cut off. PK Fi—PK Fi—PK Fire! said the TV. Sawamura’s mouth pressed onto him over and over in his mind’s theater. Still, there was more to discover, more to uncover. Further beyond his lips: the heat of his tongue, his playful teeth; under his clothes: the solid muscle, its vast, varied planes, all that Koushuu knew and did not know.
Sawamura emerged minutes later. When posed the same question of where he’d been, he answered, “The bathroom!”
The team glanced between them.
“Right,” someone said.
And Sawamura, confusedly, looked back at Koushuu, who could not help but laugh under his breath.