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The thing about Nakamura Okuto is that he has never once, in the entire history of knowing Hirose Aiki, allowed himself to believe that he is anything other than a placeholder.
He thinks it now, watching Hirose lick melted ice cream off his wrist with the single-minded focus of a much younger kid, sitting on the low wall outside the convenience store with his knees splayed and his collar undone and the late afternoon sun turning his hair the color of weak tea. Hirose is laughing about something — Nakamura has already lost the thread of it, the way he always does when Hirose laughs, because the sound does something to his chest that makes it briefly impossible to process language — and Nakamura is sitting beside him with his own popsicle forgotten and dripping over his knuckles, thinking: this won't last.
It is, he has come to understand, simply the shape of things. Hirose is the kind of person rooms reorganize themselves around. He says something only slightly funny and three people repeat it for the rest of the week. He forgets your name for a month and then remembers, out of nowhere, the exact flavor of chips you like, and it undoes you completely, the way he does that — collects you without trying, holds onto you without meaning to, like you're a stone he picked up on a beach and put in his pocket and now can't quite explain why he kept.
Nakamura is not that. Nakamura is the boy who trips over mop buckets. Nakamura is the boy who once spent four days in agony because he thought Hirose had seen the cover of a book he should not have been carrying around school. Nakamura is, by his own private and frequently revisited accounting, a deeply average person who has had the wild, undeserved luck of becoming friends with someone extraordinary, and who understands, with the calm certainty of a boy reading a weather report, that extraordinary people eventually move on to other extraordinary things.
"You're doing the face again," Hirose says.
Nakamura blinks. "What face."
"The thinking-too-hard face. Your eyebrows go like this." Hirose attempts a demonstration that involves scrunching his whole face like a dried plum, which is not remotely what Nakamura's face does, probably, except that Hirose has apparently catalogued it closely enough to imitate, which is its own small, devastating data point that Nakamura immediately files away to suffer over later, alone, at home.
"I wasn't thinking anything," Nakamura says, which is a lie so large it should leave a mark.
"Liar," Hirose says, without heat, and bumps his knee against Nakamura's, and goes back to his ice cream like it cost him nothing at all to do that — like touching Nakamura is as unremarkable as breathing — and Nakamura sits very still and tries to memorize the exact weight and warmth of it, because he has learned, the hard way, every single time, that you should memorize good things while you have them. You don't get a second look. The wanting kind of love doesn't ask permission to leave.
⸻
Here is what Nakamura believes, with the unexamined firmness of a fact he has never once tested: Hirose is straight. Hirose dated Hana Sakamoto for two months in the spring, and although it ended — Nakamura had heard, secondhand, that Hirose had been called boring, which had made something in Nakamura's chest go hot and furious in a way he didn't examine too closely at the time — the fact that it happened at all is the only piece of evidence Nakamura needs. Hirose likes girls. Hirose is going to, eventually, find a girl who does not call him boring, who makes him feel cool and interesting and worth keeping, because that is what girlfriends are for, that is the entire economy of being a normal boy in a normal school, and Nakamura — who has known what he is since he was small and quiet and counting tentacles on the octopus in his grandfather's fish tank instead of looking at the girls his cousins pointed out to him — Nakamura is simply not eligible to compete in that economy at all.
So he doesn't try to. That's the secret architecture of it, the load-bearing wall Nakamura has built his whole heart around: he doesn't try, because trying would mean hoping, and hoping would mean eventually grieving, and Nakamura would rather just skip straight to a smaller, manageable kind of grief — the daily kind, the kind you can carry in your pocket like a stone — than gamble on the kind that flattens you all at once.
This is, Nakamura tells himself, going for it. He walks beside Hirose to the train station. He learns which vending machine on the third floor doesn't eat your coins. He remembers Hirose's order at the ramen place without being told twice. He laughs at jokes that aren't funny because Hirose's face when he lands one is funnier than the joke could ever be. He does all of this and calls it enough, calls it brave, even, in his bravest moments — look at me, talking to him, walking next to him, existing in the same five feet of air as him — and never once lets himself imagine going further than that, because further than that is a door he has nailed shut with both hands.
He'll get tired of me eventually, Nakamura thinks, not for the first time, watching Hirose toss his ice cream wrapper at a trash can from eight feet away and miss by a wide, cheerful margin. He'll find someone easier. Someone who isn't always overthinking, who doesn't flinch when people are too kind to him, who knows how to just — be normal, around people. And that's fine. That's allowed. I'll just use the time I have now.
He picks up Hirose's wrapper for him and puts it in the bin himself.
"You're so on top of it," Hirose says, delighted, like Nakamura has performed a magic trick instead of cleaning up trash, and something in his voice catches funny on the word on top of it, a little too warm for the size of the compliment, and Nakamura — who has spent years building elaborate scaffolding around the idea that Hirose's kindness means nothing more than kindness — doesn't catch it at all.
⸻
What Nakamura does not know — what Nakamura has never once let himself suspect, because the alternative would require dismantling an entire belief system he built brick by brick specifically so it could never be dismantled — is that Hirose has been quietly losing his mind for a while now.
Not in the way Nakamura loses his mind, which is loud and internal and full of self-flagellating commentary. Hirose's unraveling is slower, stranger, and it crept up on him the way weather does — you don't notice the sky changing color until you're already standing in the rain.
It started, if he's honest, around the time of Hana. Hana had been nice. Hana had been pretty, and funny in her own clipped way, and dating her had felt, for about three weeks, like exactly the thing Hirose was supposed to want — the thing every TV show and manga and older-kid conversation had promised him would feel like winning. People had looked at him differently. Guys in his class had started talking to him like he'd leveled up. It should have felt good.
It had felt like holding his breath the entire time.
"You're kind of boring, you know that?" Hana had said, not even cruelly, just tired, two months in, picking at her nails on a park bench while Hirose tried to figure out what he'd done wrong. "Like — I don't know. You're sweet. But it's like talking to a wall sometimes. You don't really — open up."
Hirose had nodded and apologized and walked her home and then gone to the convenience store alone afterward and stood in front of the drinks fridge for much longer than necessary, trying to identify the feeling in his chest, and only later — much later, embarrassingly later — understood what it actually was. It wasn't heartbreak. He hadn't been able to open up to Hana because there had been nothing in him, with her, that was asking to come out. He had performed the shape of a boyfriend perfectly competently and felt, the entire time, like he was reading lines off a card someone else had written.
And then there's Nakamura.
With Nakamura, Hirose doesn't perform anything. With Nakamura, he says the dumbest things that come into his head — does machine-gun noises with his mouth in the middle of class, gets genuinely furious about cafeteria menu changes, cries a little at sad commercials — and instead of being told he's too much or not enough or boring, Nakamura just — looks at him. Really looks, with this expression like he's witnessing something rare. Like Hirose telling a bad joke is somehow remarkable. Like the way Hirose eats curry, fast and a little messy, is something worth being fond of instead of something to be embarrassed about.
Nakamura compliments him on things nobody else even notices. The way he remembers a teacher's birthday. The fact that he held the door. The specific, stupid, tiny way he laughs at his own jokes half a second before anyone else does. Every time, it lands in Hirose's chest like something dropped from a height, and every time, Hirose has to actively stop himself from doing something humiliating, like grabbing Nakamura's sleeve and asking him to say it again.
He has started to suspect — quietly, in the part of his brain he keeps the door shut on, the same way Nakamura keeps a door shut on his own — that this is what people mean when they talk about feeling like a tsundere. Not the anime kind, all crossed arms and "i-it's not like I like you or anything." Just the actual, structural experience of being complimented by someone and not knowing where to put your face. Hirose has never once felt shy receiving praise in his life. Praise has always been easy currency for him, something he could catch with both hands and toss back with a grin.
Nakamura's praise is the only kind that makes him want to look at his shoes.
That's weird, Hirose thinks, sitting on the wall with his melting ice cream, sneaking a look sideways at Nakamura, who has gone somewhere far away behind his eyes again, who does this constantly, disappears into his own head mid-conversation like he's checking something against a private and unkind ledger. That's a weird thing to feel about your best friend.
He doesn't finish the thought. He's gotten good, this past year, at not finishing that particular thought, mostly because every time he gets close to the end of it, his stomach does something complicated and he has to go think about something else — homework, dinner, the new game coming out, anything — until the feeling passes.
It hasn't passed yet. It's been months. He's starting to suspect it isn't going to.
⸻
What Hirose has noticed, more than anything else — more than the wanting-to-look-at-his-shoes feeling, more than the stomach thing — is the look on Nakamura's face right before it goes carefully, deliberately blank.
It happens often enough that Hirose has started keeping count, the way you'd track weather: a storm front of something moving in behind Nakamura's eyes, visible for maybe a second and a half before he smooths it over into his usual mild, agreeable expression. It happens when someone is too nice to him too suddenly. It happens when Hirose touches his arm without thinking about it. It happened, once, memorably, when a girl in their class said something offhand about Nakamura being a good catch for somebody someday, and Nakamura had laughed it off with a joke so fast and so smooth that Hirose — who knows him now, who has spent a year learning the grammar of Nakamura's silences — understood immediately that something underneath the joke had just quietly broken.
Nakamura thinks he's good at hiding it. He is not good at hiding it. He is, in fact, one of the most transparent people Hirose has ever met, in the specific and maddening way that people who think they're unreadable always are — so busy managing the apparent surface of themselves that they don't notice the surface is made of glass.
Hirose has tried, a few times, gently, to ask. "You okay?" "What's up?" "You went somewhere just now." And every time, Nakamura does the same thing: a small laugh, a shrug, a "yeah, sorry, just thinking about homework" or "just tired" or, once, memorably, "thinking about whether octopuses dream," which had been such an obvious and almost insultingly bad deflection that Hirose had nearly called him on it right there, except that Nakamura's voice had cracked slightly on the word dream, and something about that had made Hirose go quiet and let it go instead.
He's started to suspect — and this is the thought that keeps him up some nights, staring at his ceiling, replaying every flinch and every careful joke — that whatever Nakamura is hiding behind that smooth, pleasant, agreeable face is something much bigger than homework. He doesn't know what it is yet. He just knows that it costs Nakamura something to keep wearing it, every single day, around him specifically, and Hirose — who has never in his life had to work to be liked, who has always just been able to walk into a room and let the room like him back — finds himself wanting, with an intensity that startles him, to see underneath it.
Not the composed Nakamura. Not the smiling, agreeable, easy-to-be-around Nakamura who laughs at the right moments and says the right things and never, ever asks for anything.
The other one. Whoever that is. Hirose wants to meet him.
⸻
He gets his chance, in a roundabout, accidental way, on a Tuesday in early June.
It happens because Hirose, in a fit of impulse that he will later describe to himself as either the bravest or the stupidest thing he's ever done, decides to walk Nakamura all the way home instead of splitting off at the usual corner. Nakamura protests — weakly, the way he protests everything, like he doesn't quite believe he's allowed to take up the space of being protested at — and Hirose just laughs and keeps walking, hands in his pockets, whistling something tuneless, until they're standing outside a modest house with a faded blue door and Nakamura is fumbling with his keys looking like a man being escorted to his own execution.
"You don't have to come in," Nakamura says, too fast.
"I want a glass of water," Hirose says, which is a lie, and they both seem to know it's a lie, and neither of them says anything about that, and then the door is open and Hirose is standing in Nakamura's front hall for the first time in his life, looking around at the shoe rack and the little photo of a much younger Nakamura missing his front teeth, and feeling, absurdly, like he's just been let into something sacred.
The octopus tank is the first thing Hirose really registers once they're in Nakamura's room — a respectable-sized aquarium glowing pale blue in the corner, one curious orange-red octopus pressed up against the glass like it's been waiting for visitors.
"Whoa," Hirose says, delighted, crossing the room immediately. "This is — wait, this is Icchan? The one you're always talking about?"
"Yeah." Nakamura hovers near the door like he's not sure he's allowed all the way into his own room. "He, uh. He likes when people tap the glass. Gently. Not — don't tap it hard, he doesn't love that."
Hirose taps it gently. Icchan drifts closer, one curling arm unfurling against the glass, and Hirose makes a sound of pure, uncomplicated joy that has nothing performative in it at all, and Nakamura — watching from the doorway, watching Hirose be delighted by the one part of his life that has never once judged him — feels something in his chest crack open just slightly, helplessly, the way it always does when Hirose is kind to the things Nakamura loves.
This is the part I'll remember, Nakamura thinks, with the strange clarity of someone already grieving something that hasn't ended yet. When he's gone. This exact moment. Hirose, in my room, being happy about my octopus.
And then his phone buzzes.
It's nothing important — a notification from an app, gone as soon as it appears — but in the half-second of fumbling to silence it, the screen flashes its lock-screen wallpaper, which is, embarrassingly, a photo Nakamura took without quite admitting to himself why: Hirose mid-laugh at the ramen shop three weeks ago, head thrown back, utterly unguarded, the single best photograph Nakamura has ever taken of anything in his life.
Hirose sees it. Just a flash, just a second, but Hirose sees it, and Nakamura sees Hirose see it, and the room goes very quiet in a way that has an entirely different texture than the quiet from thirty seconds ago.
"That's—" Hirose starts.
"It's nothing," Nakamura says, too fast, shoving the phone into his pocket like it's on fire. "I just — I take a lot of photos, it's not — it doesn't mean anything, I'll change it, I didn't even realize that was still—"
"Nakamura."
"I'm sorry, I should've—"
"Nakamura." Hirose's voice isn't sharp. It's something gentler than sharp, something that makes Nakamura's mouth shut on its own. "Why are you apologizing?"
And this — this is the question Nakamura has spent a year and a half building defenses against, and every single one of them fails him at once, because the honest answer is so much bigger than the question deserves, and the dishonest answers all taste like ash in his mouth right now, with Hirose looking at him like that, patient and a little wide-eyed and not laughing, not making a joke of it, not doing any of the things Nakamura had pre-grieved for in advance.
"Because," Nakamura says, and his voice comes out smaller than he means it to, "I know what it looks like."
"What does it look like?"
"It looks like—" Nakamura laughs, except it isn't really a laugh, it's just air leaving him in the shape of one. "It looks like exactly what it is. And I don't — I'm not trying to make this weird, okay? I know you're not — I know this isn't — you don't have to say anything. I'm not asking you to say anything. I just need you to forget you saw that, and we can go back to normal, and I promise I won't—"
"Why would I want to forget it?"
The question lands like a dropped glass. Nakamura actually stops breathing for a second.
"What?" he manages.
Hirose's ears have gone faintly red, which is new, which is a thing Nakamura has genuinely never seen before in the entire history of knowing him, Hirose who laughs at his own embarrassment, Hirose who has never once looked uncertain about anything in his life as far as Nakamura has observed.
"I said," Hirose says, slower now, like he's working it out as he says it, "why would I want to forget it. You— you really think I'd be upset about that?"
"I think," Nakamura says carefully, like each word might detonate, "that you're being nice. Which you always are. And I think if I let myself believe it means something else, I'm going to ruin the only good thing I actually have, so I'd really, really appreciate it if we could just—"
"Okuto."
It's the first time Hirose has ever used his given name. It stops Nakamura completely, mid-sentence, mouth still open around a word he's already forgotten.
"You do that thing," Hirose says, quieter now, taking one step closer, "where you decide what I'm feeling before I get to tell you. You've been doing it the whole time I've known you. You decide I'm going to get bored of you, or that I'm just being nice, or that there's some — some expiration date on this, and I never get a say in any of it. You just quietly grieve me while I'm still standing right here." His voice catches slightly. "Do you know how that feels? Watching you brace for me to leave every single day, like I'm already halfway out the door? I'm not going anywhere, Nakamura. I haven't been going anywhere. You're the one who keeps acting like I will."
Nakamura's eyes are stinging. He hates this, hates how fast it happens, hates that the one thing he's never been able to control around Hirose is exactly this — the speed with which his careful composure gives out.
"You don't understand," he says, and his voice cracks properly this time. "You can't — you're you. People like you. People always like you, easily, the normal way, the way that makes sense, and I'm — I'm awkward, and I overthink everything, and I trip over mop buckets, and I'm not — I'm not the kind of person someone like you ends up with. I'm the kind of person someone like you is nice to on the way to someone better. And that's fine. I made my peace with that a long time ago. I just didn't want you to see the lock screen, because then you'd know, and you'd have to be kind about letting me down, and I really, really didn't want to make you do that."
Hirose is quiet for a second. Then, very deliberately, he reaches out and takes Nakamura's hand — not dramatically, just simply, the way you'd take something you were worried might get dropped.
"You cry to your octopus," Hirose says.
Nakamura blinks. "What?"
"I bet you do. I bet you come home and you smile through whatever happened all day, and you keep it together right up until you're in this room, alone, with Icchan, and then it all comes out. Am I wrong?"
Nakamura doesn't answer, which is its own answer, and Hirose's face does something complicated and tender that Nakamura has genuinely never seen on him before.
"I want that," Hirose says. "Not — I don't want you to be sad. I hate that you're sad, actually, I hate it a lot, I've hated watching it happen for months and not knowing what it was. But I want — I want to be there for the part where you stop performing okay. I don't want the version of you that's smoothed over for my benefit. I've had enough of people who only want the easy version of someone. I had that with Hana. I was boring with Hana because there was nothing in me that wanted to be anything else for her." His thumb moves slightly against the back of Nakamura's hand. "I'm not boring with you. I've never once been bored around you. You make me want to say the stupidest things just to see your face do the thing it does. And I have spent months trying to figure out why that is, and I think — I think I finally figured it out, like, four minutes ago, looking at your phone."
"Hirose—"
"I like you," Hirose says, plainly, like it's the easiest sentence he's ever said, even though his ears are nearly purple now and his hand is shaking very slightly where it's holding Nakamura's. "I don't know when it started. I think it might have been a while ago and I just didn't have a word for it because I never thought I was supposed to want this. But I do. I want this. I want you to stop pre-grieving me. I want you to let me actually be here."
Nakamura is crying. Not performing it, not managing it into something presentable — just crying, openly, the way he apparently only ever lets himself do in front of an octopus, except now it's happening in front of Hirose instead, and the world has not ended, the floor has not opened up, Hirose is just standing there, still holding his hand, looking at him like he's something worth looking at instead of something to apologize for.
⸻
It does not, of course, stay that private.
This is the part of the story that Nakamura will later describe, to anyone who asks, as "the part where Hirose ruined my entire life in the best possible way," because two weeks after the conversation in his bedroom — two weeks of careful, disbelieving, electric happiness, two weeks of holding hands under desks and walking just slightly too close together and Nakamura forgetting, every single morning for one blissful half-second upon waking, that any of it was real — Hirose decides, apparently with no warning whatsoever, that the entire school needs to know.
It happens at the summer festival. It happens in front of what feels, to Nakamura's rapidly short-circuiting brain, like the entire population of their school, gathered around the food stalls in the warm dusk light, paper lanterns strung overhead, the smell of grilled squid and sugar everywhere. Nakamura is mid-sentence — something about whether they should get takoyaki, an objectively normal, low-stakes sentence — when Hirose simply turns, takes Nakamura's face in both hands with the same easy confidence he does everything else, and kisses him.
It is not a brief kiss. It is not a polite, deniable, could-have-been-an-accident kind of kiss. Several people nearby actually stop talking. Someone — Nakamura will never be entirely sure who — drops a drink.
When Hirose finally pulls back, just slightly, just far enough to speak, his face is bright red and he is grinning like he's just won something, and his voice carries — it carries on purpose, Nakamura understands immediately, this was never an accident, Hirose has never done an accidental thing in his life when it comes to making sure people know exactly how he feels.
"I like you," Hirose announces, to Nakamura and, functionally, to the entire festival. "I've liked you for a while, actually. I just didn't say it because you're an idiot who decided I was going to get bored of you, which—" he turns, briefly, to address the gathered onlookers, most of whom are now openly staring, "—is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, by the way, you should all know that, he's been thinking I was going to leave him this whole time, which is insane, because he's the best person I know, and I'm not going anywhere, and I needed everyone to hear me say that so he'd finally believe it."
The crowd around them has gone somewhere between stunned and delighted; somebody near the back actually starts clapping, slow and uncertain at first and then less so, and Nakamura — who has spent the better part of two years believing, with the bone-deep certainty of a fact never to be questioned, that he was a footnote in somebody else's much more interesting story — stands there in the lantern light with his face on fire and his heart doing something it has genuinely never done before, something closer to flying than breaking.
"You're insane," Nakamura manages, when he can speak again. "You're actually insane. You couldn't have told me first? In private? Like a normal person?"
"You wouldn't have believed me in private," Hirose says, entirely unrepentant, still holding his face, still grinning. "You'd have found some way to talk yourself out of it. I know you. I had to make it loud enough that you couldn't shrink it down into something small and temporary." His thumb brushes Nakamura's cheekbone, gentle now, the performance dropping away into something quieter and just for the two of them, even with half the school still watching. "I wanted everyone to know, because I'm not embarrassed. I've never been less embarrassed about anything in my life. I just wish you'd let yourself believe it without needing the proof."
Nakamura looks at him — really looks, the way Hirose has apparently been looking at him this entire time, the year and a half Nakamura spent assuming he was invisible, assuming he was temporary, assuming the kindest, brightest person he'd ever met was only ever passing through — and something settles in his chest that has not been settled in a very long time. Not certainty, exactly. He doesn't know if he'll ever be fully capable of certainty; the bracing-for-impact is probably going to take a while to unlearn. But something steadier than the bracing. Something that might, eventually, with practice, learn to call itself trust.
"Okay," Nakamura says, and his voice wobbles, and he doesn't try to smooth it over this time. "Okay. I believe you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." A small, real, undefended laugh escapes him, the kind he usually only lets Icchan see. "I still think you're insane for doing this in front of literally everyone."
"I'm aware," Hirose says happily, and kisses him again, shorter this time, easier, like the first one had been a door kicked open and this one is just walking through it. "Takoyaki now?"
"Takoyaki now," Nakamura agrees, and Hirose laces their fingers together right there in front of everyone, unbothered, unhidden, like it's the easiest thing in the world — and for the first time in longer than he can remember, Nakamura lets himself believe that maybe, for him too, it finally is.