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“He's clearly a great athlete, but I mean, it must be so difficult to play with him.”
Kuroo gritted his teeth and turned the urge to scowl into a carefully crafted smirk accompanied by the eyebrow tilt that subtly suggests that you might be a complete moron and casually replied “Not really” like a champ instead of punching the jerk in the face like he really wants to.
Every time someone, a classmate, a player from another volleyball team or a different sport, the girl who works the morning shift at the coffee shop on Wednesdays, not so delicately implies that Bokuto must be a pain in the ass teammate/classmate/friend/whatever, Kuroo desperately wishes he had less self control. But the punching would definitely upset Bokuto and probably wouldn't reflect very well on Kuroo either.
The truth is that for him, everything about Bokuto is startlingly easy.
Kenma is his childhood friend and they've known each other forever and Kuroo knows he can tell Kenma anything and visa versa. Even then they still have to make those minor adjustments for each other, they are both pretty cerebral people and neither of them mind being thoughtful about their friendship but the first time Kuroo met Bokuto he couldn't believe making new friends could be that easy.
When they first started hanging out after their first summer training camp a million years ago in junior high Kuroo had actually been worried by how well they got along. There was the volleyball of course but they genuinely enjoyed each other's most stupid jokes, Kuroo never felt pressure to find cool things for them to do, Kuroo never had to be the cool one. Bokuto just liked him. Boundlessly and enthusiastically.
Intellectually Kuroo could see how Bokuto might seem like a lot for someone to handle. His energy, careless affection, and complete lack of any sort of indoor voice were overwhelming for some people. Combined with his low moods – when he was needy, or melancholy, or frustrated – Kuroo could potentially understand how people might write Bokuto off as too much work. But everyone who wasn't useless (in Kuroo's expert opinion) would stick around long enough to learn that Bokuto was the most supportive teammate – always excited for his teammates successes and constantly helping them improve, that he could be very engaged in learning if he was really interested in the subject material, and that if you were lucky enough to be someone he loved – that you would never doubt it for a second.
For them crossing the line from friendship to dating was as easy as breathing, just as easy as their friendship had been and a million times better. Kuroo had known since the first time he met Bokuto that all the other man really wanted was to be loved – it was that simple. Kuroo had always thought of himself as kind of a complicated person but it seems that when it comes to Bokuto that's all Kuroo wants too.