a clusterfuck of poor life choices

This is not something that he can say he’s accustomed too, although the weight of a hand on his thigh is more familiar than it used to be.

But never in class.

He glances over at Tony, and is a mildly surprised to find that he’s still steadily taking notes, eyes tracking the progress of his hand across a college-ruled notebook with intricately-detailed doodles in the margins. Jeff spends a prolonged moment marveling at Tony’s focus, his will prestressed and less brittle than Jeff’s ever was. Jeff thinks, not for the first time, that maybe he really is unable to function normally and have relationships at the same time if a hand on his body disrupts him this much.

He knows that Tony knows his issues with his own self-esteem, probably better than he even does sometimes: has language to describe them that leaves Jeff’s heart full and his head spinning. Language that Jeff can never properly manipulate for himself. And Jeff knows Tony well enough too, to know that Tony would tell him that he can do anything he sets his mind to. Partially because he’s a genius, but mostly just because he’s Jeff- and Tony certainly hasn’t held onto that unshakable faith in him all these years because of his high IQ.

He fiddles with his pen, stealing glances at Tony who’s always been an steady, and often grounding presence at his side. His hand is warm, and doesn’t ask for more than Jeff can give, steady and still, resting just above his knee.

And to his surprise it takes very little effort. Jeff fixes the scribbled tail off of the page with a messy heart in the margin, and he thinks it looks okay. It’s not realistic or detailed by any means, because realistic representations of hearts are not aesthetically pleasing. It beautifies the margin of his page and catalogues a time when Tony reached for him and pushed him to be just a little bit more than he thought he could.

It’s the first time in years that both you and Shindou are single at the same time. So apparently, for Shindou, this translates to dragging you out to every gay club in Tokyo in a fit of obnoxiously well-intentioned, heterosexual solidarity (‘no don’t worry Touya, I’ve got your back’) and engaging in the traditional but tactless trash-talk of your ex-boyfriend (‘I’m doing it for you, because I know you can’t. What else are friends for?’).

And you appreciate the effort. You really do. But as you slump on the stool, sullenly nursing your apple-tini like a worn out factory worker who’s secure enough in his masculinity to order drinks that are served with bright red cherries, while pointedly ignoring Shindou’s nervous and meandering rant about how flattered he is to be hit on by other guys, you find that all you really want to do is go home and collapse in your own bed. And not with one of the random men that Shindou keeps trying to foist on you.

He frowns at you when you shoo away another would-be suitor offering to buy you a drink, because you still have at least one sip left of yours, thank you very much though.

“He looked nice, didn’t he Touya?” he asks, leaning heavily against the bar, trying to catch your eyes. It’s not really a question though and that irritates you because you know that he’s baiting you. But you’re too apathetic to search for any sort of verbal escape route.

“Yes, Shindou,” you agree. “He looked very nice.”

“Then what the hell crawled up your ass?” he snaps, clearly taking this much more personally than he should. “That’s like, the third guy you’ve shot down in the last couple of hours.” He raps his finger tips on the soggy cardboard coaster under his pint glass, and you think idly that they look so much better when they’re manipulating go stones.

“Well?” he demands, and you heave a sigh and meet his eyes.

He’s not really mad. If you can say that you know him at all, then you can say that at least you know him well enough to know that his abrasiveness only indicates thinly-veiled concern. He stares at you intently, brow furrowed, fingers doing River Dance across the counter top. Something knots in your throat but it's an old and familiar feeling and you have a lot of practice swallowing it down.

“I honestly don’t know why we couldn’t have just gone back to my apartment and played a few games if you wanted to spend some time together. We could’ve even bought some sake if you wanted to drink.” Shindou looks affronted at the suggestion. You offer him a weak, conciliatory smile and place your hand on his gently, trying to cut him off before his fingers get to the tap solo. His hand stills.

“What? No, Touya! That’s not how you get over a break up. Take it from me.” He frowns and it’s hard to see in the dim of the club and the flashing colorful lights, but you think his face is flushed from the humid press of too many bodies in one place. He slides his hand out from under yours and flags down the bartender to order a couple of something that you don’t recognize, but look like shots and smell of lime and vodka when they’re placed in front of you. Shindou downs the rest of his beer and picks up his shot glass. You side-eye yours suspiciously.

“Okay, on the count of three we’re doing this.”

“What is this, Shindou?” You stare yours down but answers are not forthcoming. You’re not sure this is a good idea.

“This is the solution to every break up, okay? Drink ‘em out of your system. Works every time.” He nods sagely and you neglect to mention that his flighty disposition towards his month-long affairs hardly count as ‘break-ups,’ and that you’re not so certain he’s qualified to be doling out advice. But there he is passing it out like pamphlets xeroxed on the cheapest paper that money can buy, carelessly thrown at passersby on the streets, and here you are, seriously considering taking one. Typical.

You look at him warily, already knowing that when it comes to bad decisions the odds are stacked against him, and only risk-takers and adrenaline-junkies would probably ever consider placing any money on him. Maybe. And you have always been a frugal man (‘stingy’ you hear Shindou’s voice insist). But, as always, his grin is impossible to quantify yet infectious. He smiles in that way that would be over the top and cheesy and that would piss you off if it wasn’t so sincere. Something warm and nervous blooms in your chest.

Ah, what the hell.

“Fine.”

“That’s the spirit, Touya!” He claps a hand on your shoulder, laughing, and you frown at the unwarranted contact. “Okay, we’re taking these together.”

“Stop manhandling me,” you say picking up your shot. He grins but stops squeezing your shoulder anyway. You'll count that as a victory. He pauses, still standing close enough that you can feel the heat of him on your upper arm, and appears to think hard on something for a moment.

“Here’s to friendship.” He says (not to rivalry. he doesn’t say ‘to rivalry’ or to any number of other things that would make so much more sense), before throwing his back. Your gut clenches and you follow suit. It burns like latent regret. He hoots and laughs and slams his glass back onto the counter and you follow suit a little more carefully, a little less joyously, wincing as you feel the burn spreading in your stomach, reflecting that it's been a year or two since you've had anything particularly heavy to drink.

"See? Not bad, right?" He asks, hand finding its way to your shoulder again. You force yourself to relax, and relent when Shindou insists you do another.

You feel at once wrapped up in him, intertwined and inseparable for better or for worse; and like you’re a satellite in his orbit, observing from a distance and drawn into the circle of his gravitational pull but never getting close enough to touch. Even though he's blantantly ignoring you and back to roughing up your cleanly-pressed shirt, so maybe that's not the best analogy. Actually, you're relatively sure he's the only reason you have to take your clothes to the cleaners as often as you do, so if you're going with astronomy metaphores he might be more appropriately described as a super nova.

You drink another shot with him, and it burns a little less. It occurs to you that he’s always been the only one to ever make you feel so lost for words.

    You are seventeen and everything is calm and steady, almost mundane. Go is the eye of your own personal hurricane, and Shindou is the high winds and the floods for all the havoc that he manages to wreak on everything else in you life.

Things are neat and orderly for the most part. You’ve always prided yourself on self awareness, and you can see the path laid out before you, neatly trimmed and well defined against the manicured lawn of your life. There are your obligations: to your parents and to your school work. There is Go, and Go is a safe space; the one space that you are the master of your own destiny and everything that happens only does so because you willed it; and it stands out most important of all.

And then there is Shindou who continues to elude your understanding. He’s too busy kicking up your flower beds and tracking muddy shoe prints across your sidewalk like a drunkard to explain himself.

He sits back abruptly in his seat, arms crossed, and stares at the Goban with a furrow in his brow as though it’s going to magically volunteer the answer, and you take the opportunity to study him. You’ve always thought he looks absurd, with his mismatched hair and his bright orange shirts and trendy sneakers. Certainly, he looks out of place among the normal patrons of your father’s salon, and nearly as much among the other pros. It’s only his hands that betray him, steady and deft and somehow graceful in the face of everything else that’s loud and garish and clumsy about him. They’re the hands of an accomplished Go pro, and they look that part. You know, because they look a lot like yours.

Sometimes you think that it’s the only thing the two of you have in common, really.

It’s been years, and you think that you're only just now starting to get a sense of what makes him tick. Maybe. On a good day. When you get right down to it, he might be the only thing in the universe that you will never be able to completely understand through sheer force of will. And for every bizarre, off-the-wall stunt he pulls, he leaves you baffled and reeling and falling deeper under the allure of his mystery. At least that’s how he would probably phrase it to feel cool, like one of those heros from those comics he reads. The way you see it: he’s obnoxious and obfuscates and overcomplicates everything, even really simple things. But then that’s how all of this started anyway, you guess.

Sometimes it feels like you’re drowning, and what scares you the most isn’t the knowledge that you’re going to suffocate, but that you would do it, happily and repeatedly, if only to be a step closer to understanding what it is about him that makes you want to dive headlong into a dangerous situation.

“I resign,” comes his decidedly not-dangerous grumble from across the Goban, knocking you back into reality. You’ve seen the resignation coming since you destroyed one of his key formations earlier on, but you can’t help the self-satisfaction that settles over you. Of all the things in the world, there is still nothing quite as gratifying as beating Shindou.

“Thank you for the game,” you say on autopilot, as you begin to clear the stones from the board. Your head is airy and your chest stretched full with something light and bubbly, like helium, and you can’t help the tiny smile you feel cracking your lips. He says something but you’re too lost in your strangely tumultuous happiness to pay all that much attention because he’s probably just harping on you anyway. Then he’s snapping his fingers in front of your face rudely and you’re jolting backwards.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” you ask, blinking at him owlishly, too taken aback to reprimand him or smack his hand out of your face. He looks shocked at his own actions too, and blinks right back at you.

“I was just asking if, maybe, you wanted to take a break and go get some food?”

You take a minute to process that, and he seems to squirm in his seat. You glance at the clock behind the counter, look back down at the Goban, look at Shindou who’s expression is unreadable but tinged with discomfort. There are things that the two of you do that, through tiral and error and the only real fights you've ever had, you've established as okay; and then there are the things that you have never done, and those are a gamble. This fits snugly into the latter category and you try to fit the new and oddly-shaped pieces together.

“Alright,” you say, cautiously, feeling the start of a frown tilting the corners of your mouth. His face transitions into a grin so easily you find yourself questioning, again, those times you’ve seen him looking broken.

“Yeah, okay,” he says as he pushes up out of his chair. You follow him to counter where he collects his bag and Ichikawa gives you a small smile that knows something that you don’t, and that makes you fidget.

Once you’re out on the pavement he stretches his arms over his head, back popping, at ease in the sparse throngs of people mulling about the two of you.

“So. Ramen?” he asks, and you make a face.

“I guess that’s fine. Don’t you have ramen a lot though?” You think you remember hearing that somewhere, some off-hand comment by an acquaintance made in passing. He wrinkles his nose at you, then turns on his heel and strides off, clearly expecting you to follow.

“Of course I do. It’s delicious,” he scoffs as you catch up to walk beside him. He’s loose-limbed and his gait reflects it, arms swinging just a hair too much to be unintentional, and his gaze is steady before him. “You don’t?” A surprised laugh manages to rip it’s way out of your throat. Mostly because you are reminded that Go isn’t the only thing he’s intense about, but also because that intensity is directed at ramen of all things. He startles beside you and gives you a baffled look while you shake your head as though that could undo it, and try to fight the blush that you can feel beginning to bloom on your cheeks.

“You can’t actually be serious.”

“What? I am dead serious. No! Check this out, this is me being serious.” He gives you a deadpan for your troubles. “Rude!”

“Okay, alright. Are you paying?” He looks at you sternly before turning back to the path, barely managing to avoid running into a woman trying to snap a photo of something across the street.

“God, you’re a cheap jerk, aren’t you? Why should I pay? You make more money than me!”

“But this was your idea,” you protest. “I’m not even particularly fond of ramen!”

Shindou grumbles about what a stuck up asshole you are as he digs for his wallet, but he knocks his shoulder against yours anyway. You nearly trip over your own feet in shock, and you’re almost offended and ready to tell him off until it dawns on you that this is how people your age act. He notices your surprise because he shoots you a challenging little smile.

“What?” he says, “you got a problem, Touya? Did I violate your extra large bubble or something?” You can’t help the quirk this drags to your lips. You don’t think you’re quite to the point of shoving him back, though.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Shindou. I’d hate for this to be a repeat of today’s game. That didn’t work out so well for you.”

“Excuse me?” He stops short on the sidewalk and a teenaged boy walking behind him curses as he careens into Shindou’s back. Shindou doesn’t seem to notice. You keep on walking, and after a moment of gaping he quickens his stride to catch up with you. “Oh my god, Touya. No! Say that again, I dare you.”

You fail to smother the smile that splits your face as he follows you with a string complaints mostly about your sweatshirt, but there’s also something in there about today’s game. And it’s true, that he had made a particularly brilliant move earlier that left you considering the board through one cup of tea. Sometimes the leaps and bounds of his talent is nerve-racking, even for you. It just makes the dig at his minor insecurity of the nonprofessional tally that the two of you keep all the more gratifying.

This isn’t a serious game the two of you are playing, not like your Go, and contentment settles over you like a pleasant fog as his grumbled insults about your dumb haircut and your dumb shoes slide off your back. You feel like something significant just shifted and locked into place, but you’re not entirely sure what.

But then he makes a snide comment about the dullness of your midgame, which is something that no one has ever acused you of before, and you snap back at him about how stupid and inconsistent he is on instinct. Then you’re one hundred percent positive that nothing about you, or him, or this will ever change.

He makes you crazy and better. And despite the barbs you launch at him you’re strangely twisted up and happy inside in a way that’s unfamiliar to you. Because he’s pulling out a stool at the counter and slouching into it, and shooting an expectant look in your direction when you stand there dazed, blocking the entrance to the ramen shop, and he’s here because he wants to be.

He wants to spend time with you and it’s

the first time in your life that someone your age ever invited you to lunch.

Your mood isn’t even soured when he insists that you pay for your own bowl. In fact, you feel generous enough to pay for his as well.

He gives you an odd look.

    You are twenty-four, and somehow, despite all the recent drama and the inherent discomfort in being here and Shindou trying way too hard as usual, you’re laughing. You don’t remember at what point you became enthusiastic about all of this. It could have been after the fourth shot that Shindou insisted you drink with him.

Your arm is slung around him. It feels alien and amazing, and the two of you stumble down the street. Shindou is talking rhythmically, and you realize after catching your breath, that this is his version of singing. This sends you into stitches again because he’s really into it and it sounds awful.

Your body is too heavy and your ankles are jelly and wobble when you try to walk on them, but his hand clutches at your waist as you double over in laughter. It keeps you steady and wrenches you back up straight when you almost face plant on the sidewalk. You drop your head against his shoulder, instead, and gasp for breath.

“Oh my god, Touya,” he says, and you think he’s trying to sound annoyed but it just comes out with the same breathless quality that you’re experiencing. “Oh my god. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this. I mean I knew you were a lightweight but damn.”

“Mmhm,” you hum, into the humid, giggle-filled space at the nape of his neck. He shivers and his hand clenches your shirt below your ribs, undoubtedly mussing it even more than he already has tonight.

You’re pretty sure that sober-you would have an issue with that, and you really probably should call him on his manners, but your mind is thick and sluggish like a particularly heavy summer day. And, really, why bother? You’re lost in a pleasant, giddy haze and it’s nice. You wrap your other arm around his shoulder and melt into his side, not stopping to acknowledge the way that he stiffens marginally.

“Are you okay? Do you need to go home?” he asks in a small, shaky voice as he secures his arm tighter around your waist and tries to cinch you up so you’re not hanging quite so much of your weight on him. Your mouth is inches away from his neck and you can feel the heat radiating from him and see the way his adams apple bobs as he gulps and the pulse that’s thrumming too-close, quivering under his skin, making you want to seal your mouth over that spot and bite down.

Somewhere you know your thoughts should disturb you. Because it's Shindou. But you’re not exactly being self-critical right now.

“No, this is good. This is great. You were right about everything, Shindou.” He gapes at you and affection erupts under your breast bone with so much intensity that it blindsides you and you push in just a little closer so that you don’t totter over, arms tighter around his shoulders.

“Holy shit. I’m never going to let you forget that you said that.” You snicker into his neck and grasp at your senses, centering yourself before giving him one last squeeze and stumbling away from him. “No, really Touya. Can I get that in writing? I think I still have a napkin from the bar.” He shuffles behind you, presumably digging for the napkin as he follows you down the street. “Actually, forget that. I want that engraved on my tombstone, oh my god.”

“Whatever you say, Shindou.”

“You think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding!” He catches up to you, and grabs your sleeve, stopping you from crossing the street in an aimless, drunken wander. “Hey, we’re not that way.”

"We’re not?"

He laughs at you and its loose and bright and guttural and reverberates through your belly and your bones. Your toes curl in your slightly sweaty loafers.

"No," he says, tugging on your shirt cuff. "And just 'cuz you're drunk don't think I'm letting you forget what you said."

You roll your eyes.

He steers you down the block to another establishment. Loud club music pours into the street whenever the door is opened.

Shindou shoots you a grin.

    You are eighteen and you jolt awake.

With a soft groan you push yourself up onto your elbows, and blink as you look around the unfamiliar room. It’s dusky and cool, and a little light seeps from the other room under the crack in the door, casting dramatic shadows across the hardwood as it hits the goban, painting your waist in a broad, dark stripe.

You blink at your surrounding blearily, and only after a moment does it occur to you to ask yourself what you’re even doing on the floor. You glance down yourself, awareness seeping back into your body slowly, cells at a time, and freeze when you realize that the weight on your thigh is actually a head of tousled blond and black hair.

It comes back to you, then: how Shindou all but dragged you to Waya’s birthday, game after game of Go, and cheap beer. Lots of cheap beer. More cheap beer than Go, actually, which you only started drinking after Shindou started whining about how unfun you were, and because Waya's chilly looks were starting to make you squirm. Everything after that is a fuzzy haze of laughter and Go played sloppily and Shindou’s eyes twinkling as he guffawed and face planted in the middle of your game; and you laughing, the fact that your game was destroyed and Shindou had been the one to destroy it hadn’t bothered you and this strikes you as embarrassingly out of character. Waya even talked to you at some point, you think, swaying on his feet in much the same way that you had needed the counter to hold yourself up straight. Something about ‘you’re not as bad as I thought, Touya’ which should have been insulting except that for some reason it seemed like the sweetest, most meaningful thing anyone had ever said to you at the time.

Your jaw and your gut aches.

As does your back, probably from passing out. On the floor of Waya’s living room. With Shindou on you.

Something twists and flutters in your chest and you can’t decide whether it’s uncomfortable or pleasant and that indecisiveness somehow lends itself to being both. You could move: push Shindou’s head off of your thigh and find somewhere else to sleep, or better yet, collect your keys and make your way home, but that feeling that’s still pressure cooking in all of your empty spaces, and the curiosity it ignites in you, causes you, instead, to lay a hand lightly on his head.

His hair is coarse, much more so than yours, and stiff from whatever over-priced product he puts in it. You like it, you decide, so you card your fingers through his ridiculous yellow bangs and feel your stomach boil with guilt.

But this is okay, you think. You’re friends, you think, even if that’s still a foreign feeling. And you sit there, savoring the coarseness of his hair and the warm weight of his head on you; admiring the way that his back and shoulders are taught and lean despite his profession, how his legs are lanky with the onset of adulthood, and his arms are flung haphazardly about him as he sprawls on his side. The way his-

He’s-

Your stomach bottoms out leaving you breathless, and you tear your eyes away when you realize they’ve been raking up and down his body. So you lower yourself back to the floor to stare at the ceiling instead, hand still tangled with clumps of his sticky, gelled hair, and try to get back to sleep.

You can feel him drooling on your leg, and you feel like that should bother you, and it bothers you that it doesn’t. Instead, you like it almost as much as you like the feel of his hair between your fingers. Something about it seems too endearing to be mad about, and it’s the first time you can remember thinking of Shindou in such a way. There is something heavy and writhing inside you and try as you might to stop it’s progression, understanding is beginning to dawn on you.

Something comes awake and you don’t sleep.

    You are twenty-four. Shindou’s fingers are digging into your hipbones and you’re not sure when it stopped being a joke and became

this.

Whatever this is.

He swore up and down that more booze was the solution.

Loosen up Touya, he said. You need to have some fun, he said. Go dance, he said.

“Absolutely not!” you had snapped, blush darkening your cheeks. Even drunk and uninhibited as you are, this was so embarrassing.

"How are you going to get a date if you don't?" he had snapped back, defenses automatically hackled. "Look, I'll go with you and everything okay? It'll be fun."

You didn’t go right away, but Shindou kept buying you fruity shooters and pushing, and eventually you couldn’t remember why you thought it was such a bad idea to begin with. It was so much easier to let him guide you with a hand on your shoulder and you remind yourself that he’s never taken ‘no’ for an answer even when that means he’s making a fool out of himself, so why would he start now?

You’ve never danced in your life and you don’t know how, awkwardly shuffling from foot to foot, but it doesn’t occur to you to be self-conscious anymore because your head is fuzzy and the world is spinning in a way that makes you giddy and Shindou’s there with you. There’s something thick and electric about the music thrumming through you, heavy and thumping in your limbs, overwhelming like sound waves through containers shallow ballast water, which kind of makes you gracelessly but methodically stumble about the the crowd of people moving around you, and you’re thankful that Shindou doesn’t seem to be much better off. He’s laughing into the air above the sea of people like he doesn’t have a care, head thrown back exposing the dark column of his neck. Your eyes light on it and don’t let it go until he lets his head drop down, chin bumping his collarbone in an intoxicated lull. He seems to come back into focus as he makes eye contact with yours.

He says something but you can’t hear him over the racket.

“What?” you yell back, but it still comes as a surprise when his hand shoots out and cups the back of your head, pulling you into his breathing space and, by proxy, the distance at which you can hear him.

“You’re almost worse at dancing than me!” he shouts above the noise, eyes shining with flashing lights and mirth, “I didn’t think that was possible!” He has this strange shuffle-flail thing that he does and you can’t imagine you look much better and there’s not a thing you would change about that right now.

“I’ve never done this before!” you tell him.

“Me neither!”

“You haven’t? I thought you and Waya went out sometimes?” you say, and he grins impossibly wider, breath ghosting over you face.

“I’ve danced plenty of times. I mean I’ve never danced with another guy before.” You can’t help the laugh that rattles out of you, destabilizing you with its ferocity. You clutch at his biceps to keep yourself steady, stumbling into him. His hands light on your waist to help you right yourself again even as he clings onto you just as much for balance. His shuffle may not be much, but he’s almost as drunk as you are and he’s unsteady on his feet, so you clutch at one another, precariously stable like an excessively ambitious house of cards.

“Well then, I’m honored to be your first.”

He laughs. You laugh; and you try to remember a time when you felt this light but come up short. His hands flex against your waist and he’s still grinning, swaying with you, closer than the politeness would dictate but manners be damned, because this isn’t nearly as terrible or awkward as you thought it might be. You’d never admit it to Shindou, you probably don't have to because you're sure it's written all over your face, but you’re actually enjoying yourself. He keeps chattering at you over the music and the mood stays airy even in the heavy den of sex and sweat around you.

You’re thankful that this is a gay bar because no one takes a second look at the two slightly shorter-than-average men laughing and swaying just a little too much, just a step off-beat, in a sea of elbows and swinging hands and exposed arms.

But being a little shorter than average also means that you’re not as visible. So you get knocked into by a young man who’s especially enthusiastic about the song that just came on (or possibly on drugs), and stumble headlong into Shindou and he laughs like it’s the best joke he’s ever heard and tightens his grip on you so that you don’t fall over and get trampled. Your hands scrabble at his back for purchase but you end up with a facefull of his collarbone anyway. You’re able, after a moment, to grasp a handful of his shirt and lever yourself back from him and he smiles at you, endearingly.

But he neglects to loosen his hold after you’ve regained your balance thumbs running idly over the ridges of your denim-clad hips, fingers splayed across the small of your back dipping just a little lower than appropriate, with a strange little smile lingering at the edges of his mouth. And you don’t push him away either.

And that’s when things start getting weird.

    You are nineteen and everything is electricity and aching cavernous spaces inside of you that echo with want, and yet you feel too full, nearly bursting with all of the things in your head that you cannot express and can barely even parse out for yourself. But either way you spend most of your days flying and elated, chest topped off with so much giddiness that you feel like everyone can see it spilling out of you.

Everything’s a whirlwind of games and Shindou and Go and Shindou and long study sessions and ramen with Shindou, but you’re beginning to think that maybe windswept is a good look on you. You can rise up and meet things head-on, and while you’ve always been in control on the board with a keen ability to anticipate and adapt to anything your opponents do, it’s the first time you’ve ever felt this way other things in life.

Life is busy, but Shindou’s at the center of almost every errand, so it's effortless.

He sits across from you on a Sunday afternoon, playing with you on your father’s Goban in your house and

your eyes track the movement of his fingers as he places his hand: nails ruddy and bitten and stone-worn, callused. There’s a band-aid from the paper cut he gave himself yesterday when the two of you were sorting through kifu. They’re tanned and dark and stand out in contrast to the stone between his fingertips and the odd, lightly-colored scar across the back of his hand that you’ve never asked about but desperately want to touch, while the skin around his nail bed is chapped and a little red where he’s clearly picked at it.

In short, they’re the most beautiful hands you’ve ever seen and now you’re certain that you were mistaken, and that they look almost nothing like yours, which are too pale and bony, that fumble and sweat whenever he’s near.

“Touya?” You’re jolted out of you daze and a gleeful thrill runs up your spine when you realize that you’ve been caught staring, so you wrench your eyes away, fighting the urge to pretend like you hadn’t, to meet his. His brow is furrowed in confusion, fiercely green eyes tinged with one part concern and two parts irritation.

“Yes?” You gulp, and the nape of your neck prickles.

“It’s your move.”

“Ah. Yes.” You bow your head back to the board, bangs shielding your face from his expression, and wonder how long you had been staring, and at what point he caught you. You can feel his eyes on you as you study the game, and it burns tracks of fire down to your back, awareness making you tingle all over.

The patterns of stones on the surface of the Goban are unfamiliar and you realize that you’ve been playing on autopilot. Oh.

You’re busy trying to catch yourself up when his hand brushes the bangs off of your face. You’re brain, previously whirling, stutters to a full stop and you stare at him with wide eyes. He presses his palm firmly to your forehead but his fingertips are light and idle at your temple, almost caressing you.

“Are you feeling okay?” he asks, and your mind races. You want to tell him ‘no,’ that nothing about this is ‘okay,’ that there’s a serpent, scalding and massive, writhing in your gut and you’re about two stitches away from coming completely undone, and about a moment away from combusting and somehow it’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever experienced. “You feel like you have a fever."

“Um...” You falter, at a loss for what to say because you can’t exactly tell him the truth. That you were too captivated by his hands, and not captivated enough by the patterns that they were laying. It sounds insulting, even to you, and you know he’d take it wrong (or maybe he would take it exactly right).

You imagine the two of you paint a funny picture. You: rumpled, red-faced and dazed and sitting with your hands twisted up in your lap, with Shindou: dressed in a brightly patterned hoodie at odds with the traditional decor of your family’s home, leaning over the Goban, hand laid on you like a concerned mother.

“Look if you weren’t feeling well you should have said something!” he says. His hand is still firmly against your face and you resist the urge press into it more, craving the contact with a fierceness you’ve only ever felt during particularly challenging games of Go. “God, you’re stubborn to the point of stupidity.”

“What?” you snap, because no matter how foolish you’ve been acting you’re not about to let him get away with insulting you. “You’re hardly one to talk!”

“What is that supposed to mean? You’re the one playing crappy just because you’re too dumb to admit that you don’t feel well! This game is awful and it’s your fault, you know!”

“Do you want to compare official records, Shindou?” You grit your teeth and this is good. This is just what you need, your face is warm with irritation and it’s a safe change. Besides, this is almost as good as playing Go with him, and almost as good as eating lunch with him and almost as good as studying with him. And almost, but not quite as good as the fleeting touches that the two of you accidentally share on occasion, that you mentally replay on repeat in the dead of night when no one is around to disturb you, which you will no doubt do with the hand that he's still failed to remove from your forehead for some reason. You press harder against it in challenge.

His eyes flash and harden into something dense and molten, narrowed under the fringe of his absurd yellow hair, and now you’re not the only one who’s flushed in the face. He scowls at you and, yes, that’s a nice look on him - there’s something very masculine and animalistic about that expression (and when did you start thinking like that?). Warmth pools low in your belly and, okay, maybe that’s not so good.

“Oh my god, Touya! You are like, the king of pigheaded! Don’t even try to turn this around! If you aren’t feeling well you should go lie down instead of playing crappy Go! It’s insulting!”

You hardly notice the movement of his hand until it’s migrated upwards, and his fingers curl in your hair and give it an unintentional tug. Fire shoots through you and every neuron in your body jumps into hyperdrive and, oh god. Your dick twitches in your pants and you jolt, hands flying up to grip his wrist and push it away from you as you wrench back from him out of his grasping range. He looks mildly surprised by your erratic movement, perhaps completely unaware of the actions of his own body until you reacted to them.

You almost flop back onto the tatami, manage to catch yourself on your hands behind you. You don’t even want to know what you look like, flushed and mussed and semi-hard.

“My Go is not crappy,” you protest weakly, panic belying your irritation. “Besides, I’m not even sick.”

“Well, you’re sure playing like it! What’s even with you?” His eyes are searching your face, and he mostly looks confused now. You wonder if your face is as flushed as it feels.

“Nothing! Nothing!” you say, and your voice cracks a little bit on the second ‘nothing.' “Can we just finish the game, already?” He looks puzzled at your submission and leans away from the board, regarding you with baffled concern as you take a deep breath trying to calm yourself down. Your pants are a little tighter than they were and you’re forced to hunch forward a little bit, thankful for the board between you.

“Okay... but pay attention this time!” He shoots you another suspicious look, and you promptly avert your gaze back to the board, afraid that he’ll see something in your eyes that you don’t want him too. Or maybe it’s the fact that maybe you kind do want him to see whatever -it- is, because maybe he can identify it and qualify it and give you the words you keep desperately searching for in the quiet moments before sleep. But in any case it’s a good diversion as you get your breathing back under your control.

He ends up winning the game, anyway, and doesn’t hesitate to gloat about it. Maybe he would have in either case, but you console yourself with the thought that it was too far gone by the time you actually started to focus.

It’s late when you walk him to the door. Part of you wants to walk him all the way to the light rail, but you beat that urge into submission and celebrate small victories since, not only was today’s game a humiliating loss (five whole moku!), but you are also unable to combat the urge to brush your fingers against his shoulder when the two of you pause at the front door to say goodbye.

It’s weird, because he catches your finger with his and he squeezes them with a soft grin, but his jaw stands sharp and defined in contrast, shaded with stubble, and so much more adult than you ever remember it being. Your heart hiccups almost painfully in your chest and you have to fight the urge to tug on his hand and pull his body against yours.

“I’m glad I have you,” he says, eyes deep green and boring into yours and there’s a sincerity, and also a sadness there that seems unwarranted. You feel warmth spread across your cheeks and hope that it doesn’t show. It’s bizarre, like most other things that he does, but it feels like the most meaningful thing he’s ever said to you. But like most of the things that he does, he also needs to shatter the hushed sincerity of the moment by opening his mouth and saying, “Even though that game today was terrible! Man, I hope you’re not planning on making a habit out of this because if you stagnate what’s gonna happen to me? That’s just selfish, Touya!”

“Get out.”

He laughs almost the entire time it takes him to travel down your front walk to the gate, and turns to mockingly salute you after he opens it. You huff with crossed arms and pretend that you’re not touched by the fact that he even thought to do it.

You shut the door with a click and lean back against it, letting out a sigh, tense and loose-jointed all at once. You startle when your mother pops from around the corner, precisely-timed, it seems, as though she’d been lingering there for minutes. Guilt tickles you a little, and it feels as though she just caught you in a deeply private moment.

But that’s ridiculous.

She smiles at you, drying a cup from the evening’s dishes.

“Did Shindou-kun leave, then?” she asks. You compose yourself enough to smile back at her.

“Ah, yes. He has an early game tomorrow so he needed to go home and get some rest.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I was going to offer for him to stay the night.”

You’ve never been more thankful or disappointed at your mother’s unusual display of tardiness. She looks at you as though she’s measuring your reaction and you're never totally sure what's on her mind, so you try to shutter your expression as best you can.

“Oh, well, I’m sure he had other things to do at home.” That same meticulously neutral look sweeps her face, and you realize that you must look silly and uncomposed, ruffled and leaning against your front door, hugging your waist like a flustered school-child. You straighten yourself abruptly feeling far too exposed.

“He’s such a nice boy. I’m happy you two are so close.” There’s a little sparkle in her eyes and she nods sagely. “Anyway, there’s a bath ready if you want one.”

“Um, yes, thank you.” She kind of... shakes her head at you, then turns to leave, probably back to the kitchen since the cup in her hands isn’t getting any drier. Strange. You try not to wonder what all of that was about.

But you can’t fight the grin that stretches your face, for no good reason as far as you’re concerned and, oh god, maybe you are ill.

    You are twenty-four and this world is not of your making.

Everything is hot and hazy and smells of sweat and men and Shindou. Always Shindou. And somehow, through the fog that’s settled over your mind you still know that this is all wrong, but the much larger part of you, the part that is drunk and wants to do what feels good, doesn’t care.

His hands burn like coals as they rake down your back, and his thighs quiver on either side of yours as you push your hips against his and try to ignore the very obvious problem growing between the two of you.

Sweat trickles between your shoulder blades and he’s looking about as flustered as you feel, face flushed, panting into the minuscule space between your mouths, dampening it with his breaths.

You wish you didn’t feel completely responsible for escalating this situation. You even wish that you could blame the alcohol coursing through your system. But the hands that you have pressed against the small of his back, fingers dipping below the waist of his pants, slipping on the sweaty-slickness of the skin under his tee-shirt

that’s all you.

And even while drunk, you’re not quite delusional enough to try to convince yourself otherwise. You don’t really want to, because you feel the smothering pressure of history and self-awareness weighing heavily on your shoulders.

Half of your life.

His fingers seem to flutter at the jut of your shoulders for a prolonged moment before they settle against you and he drags his nails up the skin at the back of your neck to tangle in the dampness of your hair, pulling it none too gently, and settling his body against yours impossibly more tight that before and you

moan

and let your head tilt against his, temple to temple, reveling in the rapid pulse you can feel thrumming there (or maybe that’s yours) and the humid breeze as he exhales, too fast, against your neck.

You don’t know how it got this way. You’re not even sure that you regret it. Something is waking up inside of you that’s been buried for years. Something that you remember from when you were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Something that makes the antidistance between your bodies still too far and makes your blood pulsate with want and need and-

You only broke up with your boyfriend nine days ago.

Shindou grinds against your thigh and muffles a groan against you, pressing his mouth against your ear in a hard and decisive unkiss and-

You think you’re going to be sick.

    You are twenty and Shindou has a girlfriend.

He met her through her brother, who interns for Go Weekly and interviewed him after an important victory last month. And now he’s brought her to an office gathering this fine evening in September.

She’s pretty, with dark hair braided loosely and hanging just below her shoulders framing sharp, narrow eyes, and a slight figure; but her laugh sparkles like bells and she wears purple cardigans and

(you do too but)

they look so soft and feminine and right on her.

You stand across the room and off to the side, sipping a glass of chilled sake, pretending to watch the casual, low-stakes game unfolding before you between two lower dans who are too drunk to play well and so are just playing for fun, but really you're watching the way Shindou’s arm looks dark against the skin at the back of her neck as he snakes it around her shoulders and holds her tightly against his side. Waya is with them, laughing at something she said and eyeing her with the same stupidly twitterpated look on his face because she’s pretty. She really, really is and you can recognize it intellectually but you don’t really understand it because you’re stuck in a loop of fantasies that involve stubble scraping against your neck, or large, strong hands pinning your wrists above you. You’re not sure where you got tripped up on the whole sexual attraction thing, but you’re relatively sure that you slipped and broke yourself somewhere along the way. Maybe it was that moment when you were twelve that Shindou trounced you so thoroughly, and after that, you’re sure that you could only ever have eyes for him.

Or maybe it was sometime long before that.

You really don’t understand.

You never took Shindou for the sort to be starstruck by a pleasant face, even if you understood that he would date, or even get married someday! You always knew that the intense, single-minded fixation you had on each other was partially due to the absence of other -normal- things in your lives. And you knew he would probably find someone else to focus some of that intensity on one day. But that was a far-off notion made hazy by time and distance, and you really didn’t think it would be so soon. And the real shock (or perhaps the real betrayal, you can't quite decide which you feel more), is that you never thought it would be someone who only had a passing connection to Go.

You snort into your cup and feel hollow despite the hors d’oeuvres that you helped yourself to before you lost your appetite, a couple of hours ago, when you were mulling around the refreshments table, checking the door every time someone walked in, just in case it was Shindou, unaware that when he finally did show up your night would actually get significantly worse instead of better. You don’t know how long you stand there like that, cup half empty, head too full, eyes trained on that shock of blond hair and that effortless, slightly crooked smile as it turns with easy grace to her, leans down to press against her temple.

You can’t stop watching.

Eventually you realize that there’s a presence beside you and you tear your eyes away from him to see Isumi leaning against the wall, presumably watching the game that you’re not, drink in hand, smiling serenely down at the board and the two players who guffaw and play half-heartedly through the haze of booze.

A cursory glance indicates to you that you aren’t missing much.

“Enjoying the game, then?” comes the soft voice at your shoulder. You turn to Isumi to smile at him, but he’s not really looking at you, so you kind of pause halfway through the motion and fix your eyes back on Shindou instead. God, his hair looks so stupid.

“Yes. The beginning was interesting,” you lie.

“I’m sure it was. They certainly seem to be enjoying themselves, in any case.” You look back to where the two of them are, red-faced and laughing and remember a time when you and Shindou had been much the same, playing Go drunk at Waya’s birthday party where, you can say with confidence, all of this began to spiral out of your control. “Did you have the chance to meet Yoshida-san yet?” Isumi asks lightly. You can’t help wincing, and pray that he didn’t notice. It’s not his fault, he doesn’t know what’s going on in your head.

Conflict bubbles inside of you even though your brain tells you that there is hardly reason for it.

“I did,” you say once you’re absolutely certain your voice won’t betray you. “She was very nice. I think she will be good for Shindou.”

You’re scraped raw, like you swallowed a bolus of sandpaper.

“Mm perhaps, but maybe she’s almost... too nice for Shindou.”

“What do you mean?” You risk a glance at Isumi, and he’s smiling wistfully, gazing off into the distance at nothing in particular as far as you can tell, and you have a weird and sudden vision of him as an older man waxing poetic about humanity and the changing of the seasons. It’s then that you decide you like Isumi, despite the difficult subject he's forcing you to talk about.

“I’m not sure. Call it a gut feeling, but I always thought Shindou would do well with someone who really challenged him. I mean, he always seems to do his best under adversity, after all.” He shrugs, and you laugh despite yourself, but it feels rotten in your mouth and leaves your throat aching in its wake.

“'Under adversity' is the only time he does anything, have you seen his apartment?”

“Exactly.” Isumi laughs along with you and shakes his head. He lapses into silence once his chuckles have abated and you’re smiling slightly, but not feeling a whole lot better, and not really able to put words to why everything is just a millimeter off, just enough to make the world seem fuzzy and make you second guess yourself. You never had any illusions about the courses that your lives would take, afterall. But for whatever reason, you couldn’t help that initial numbing shock when he first introduced her to you, or the after tremors that course through you, chilling you limbs and making you feel sick and achey. Flu symptoms.

“You know,” Isumi says, startling you out of your thoughts again. “She kind of looks like you.”

The observation is unspeakably cruel.

You don’t say anything at all to that, but you feel your mouth tighten around the edges as you look back over at her. She’s small and pale, her hair and eyes are in dramatic contrast to her complexion, and her sharp jaw stands out against the softness of the rest of her. She’s wispy and lovely looking, with a graceful sundress that hangs delicately just below her knees, a whimsical, beaded necklace draped around her neck, and her hands are soft and moisturized, nail beds well maintained, and you don’t think you look anything like her at all.

“Touya-san, it’s not any of my business but,” When you turn to look at him this time he’s actually looking back at you. His eyes are thoughtful, you think, but you'll be the first to admit that you were never that good at reading people without a Goban between you. “I just wanted to say that if you ever need to talk, I’m your friend too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not.” Isumi smiles slightly and pushes himself off of the wall. “Hope you feel better soon,” he says anyway, and slips away before you can ‘correct’ him, sidling towards where Shindou and Waya and Yoshida-san are congregated. Your head aches. Maybe you really are getting sick.

You should get out of here. Your mind is running in circles. Staying isn’t doing you any good.

But as you’re on your way towards to door, something makes you pause and look back. Shindou isn’t looking at you, focused on something Waya is saying, laughing, the flash of white teeth against tan skin, the loose grip of his hand around his glass of beer, comfortable and confident and just the way you’ve always remembered them, long fingered, blunt-tipped and large and how good they felt the times he’s accidentally touched you with them, how good they would feel if-

You really need to leave.

It’s not until you’re in the elevator that you allow yourself to remember the longing you thought he always looked at you with. You let your head drop back against the cold, metal wall of the elevator with a dull ‘thunk.’

Seam by seam, you silently unravel.

    You are twenty-four and things are have gone horrendously wrong.

Because you think that Shindou might have came in his pants. In public. Against your thigh. And nothing about this is right.

You’re walking unevenly down the street, the cold air a blessing against your damp and heated skin, when he manages to catch up with you. Under different circumstances you might have felt bad about leaving him, blissed out and drunk and disoriented in the middle of a club, but your head is muzzy and your thoughts are too tumultuous to really take the high ground on this.

“Touya, wait!”

You keep on walking, reasoning that you can always just say you were too drunk to make sense of him later, while also being drunk enough that you really just want to punch him across his stupid, pretty mouth.

It’s late. You don’t know how late, but you’re pretty sure some of the clubs are starting to close their doors as evidenced by the groups of intoxicated people stumbling about, or loitering in the lamp light, too-loud laughter echoing in the otherwise empty streets.

“Goddammit I said wait!” There’s a hand on your wrist, spinning you around in a flourish and for a dumb second you really just appreciate the breeze in your hair.

“What?” you snap, wrenching your wrist from his grip. He looks befuddled, hand hovering out in front of him like he hasn’t quite figured out how to drop it back to his side. The nervousness and confusion is clear on his face.

“What are you doing?” he asks, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans instead, shoulders bunched up around his ears giving him the very distinct look of a child who’s just been scolded. You huff and turn to keep walking. He stutter steps behind you, then follows you, presumably, based on the sound of his too-stylish sneakers scuffing on the pavement.

“Going home.”

“Oh. Well, you’re going the wrong way in that case.” You seethe and wonder how often he’s even been in this area and how he could possibly know that. But you’re drunk and terribly unhappy and you don’t want to add ‘lost and cold and with nowhere to sleep’ to the list of things for you to be pissed off about, so begrudgingly you turn around.

“Where’s the light rail?”

“What the hell is your problem?” You want to get away from him is your problem, but you don’t know where else to go, and he holds you captive with his reticence.

“Nothing,” you lie. “I just want to go home.” He crosses his arms and glares at you.

“I’m pretty sick of you not talking to me.”

“That’s because there’s nothing to talk about!” you all but explode, throwing your hands in the air. He takes a step back with a startled look on his face and you grit your teeth and try to reign in your temper. The alcohol coursing through your system makes it difficult, but after a moment of breathing and clenching and unclenching your fists you manage a much more even, “look, I’m just tired and I want to go home.”

He doesn’t look terribly comforted, keeps looking at you like he’s waiting for you to strike out at him (which he’s not unwarranted in thinking given the violence of your outbursts and the irrational stream of your thoughts) and everything about this situation is just so wrong. That in a fit of drunken ambiguity he can do what he did and get out of jail free, when you’ve been struggling with it, and with him, for fundamentally all of your adult life. Still struggle with him, even though you shouldn’t and you don’t want to because what kind of heartless asshole does that make you.

You still miss Hiroshi. Your chest throbs painfully.

He sighs and scuffs his shoe on the pavement and your gaze is drawn to the movement, maybe just so that you won’t have to look him in the eye anymore.

“C’mon,” he says at last, sounding defeated and almost lost, in a way you haven’t heard from him in years, “I’ll take you home.”

You want to protest but at this point you think the fewer words that you exchange, the better.

    You are twenty-one when, one Sunday afternoon, your mother drags you away from your moping and out to run errands instead. Usually, you would reserve Sundays for Shindou and Go, but the last couple of months, he’s been inconsistent, rain-checking most of the time. Today is no exception.

But you still certainly reserve your Sundays for Go, even if Shindou is no longer a part of the equation.

It seems like it's been weeks since you’ve talked to him outside of pleasantries at work, he’s too busy with whoever his latest girlfriend is when he’s not in matches or conventions.

But here’s the thing. You don’t really care! An introvert by nature, you’d much rather relax at home with leisurely study on the rare days that you have off rather than go out and, most probably, get into some sort of inane and ridiculously immature screaming match in public. It’s not like you’d turn him down if he was to call you right now and reschedule, but that can be attributed more to your passion for the game than any kind of on-reserve hope that he might want to spend time with you.

To be perfectly honest you’re much happier serenely studying kifu at your desk.

(you really are)

So, it’s a little weird when your mother approaches you and insists that you come out on her Sunday errands with her, because, like you, she has made it perfectly clear in the past that she enjoys her Sunday rituals in solitude. That she loves getting out of the house, and stopping to chat with the owners of local businesses, or stop in at the bookstore to browse or just take her time without feeling rushed.

You think that she’s worried about you. By now, she’s stopped asking why Shindou doesn’t come over as much, and you know that she’s noticed the fact that you go out a lot less. Sometimes you catch her staring at you with a look in her eye that insinuates she knows you a lot better than you’re comfortable with, before she covers it up with a gentle smile and an offer to make you something to eat.

You hate to worry her and think it might be about time that you move out so that you’re not under her constant scrutiny anymore, but somehow you think that would concern her more. She’s never really been an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ kind of person. Not like Shindou.

And that’s how you find yourself, standing in the middle of an art supply store, on a brilliant spring afternoon, with a list written in your mother’s fine print and no idea what any of it means. You always knew that she did crafts and things and sometimes displayed them around the house on certain holidays, or gave them as gifts, but this is an entirely new world to you and you are completely lost.

The store is on the smaller side, obviously locally owned, but bustling as artists and enthusiasts use their free day to browse. You’re starting to panic, wondering if it would be too much to interrupt your mother’s doctor appointment to seek guidance. You are not prepared to undertake this alone.

You traipse up and down the isles, trying to look as though you belong, but you must stick out because after a couple of minutes of aimless, wide-eyed wandering a man approaches you with a smile that you might describe as sympathetic.

“Do you need some help?” Embarrassed relief washes through you, but your self-consciousness does not outweigh your good sense, and you’re not stupid enough to turn down the offer.

“Yes, please.” He smiles at you, and it’s a nice smile that reaches his eyes you notice. The kind of smile you can’t help smiling back at, a little bit.

“Okay,” he says offering his hand much to your confusion. And he must notice your bewilderment because he clarifies, “the list you’re clutching like a lifeline? Let me see.”

“Oh,” you say, feeling stupidly conscious of the position of your hands as you deposit the list in his palm. He takes it from you and gives it a once over.

“You don’t come here often,” he observes as you follow him down another aisle that looks exactly like the aisle you were in before as far as you can tell, but he is clearly aware of the subtle differences and begins rifling through one of the shelves.

“Am I that obvious?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not really it. My dad owns the store so I tend be pretty familiar with our clientele,” he says.

Oh. Right. Because that would make sense. He laughs lightly at whatever expression is on your face (you can’t imagine you’re looking your sharpest) and turns to hand you a small stack of colorful parchment which you instantly hug to your chest, as though that could somehow shield you from your own idiotic behavior.

“So, what?” he asks, “thought an art course would be easy credit or something?”

“No, I’m just running some errands for my mother.”

“Oh, gotcha.” He leads you down another isle and digs for something else from the list. He’s a lot taller than you, you notice with a pinch of shame. You always hoped you’d get your father’s broadness, or at least mother’s height, but even at twenty-one you’re stuck, slightly taller than her, but still a scant inch shorter than average for men, the same height you were when you were seventeen. The young man stands a good head above you and makes you resent your scrawniness even more than usual since it typically doesn’t bother you as much when you’re surrounded by the pastiness or pudginess or skinniness that tends to reflect the stature of many other professional Go players.

He employs his superior height and reaches onto the top shelf, stretching so that his shirt rides up a little bit despite the strings of his apron pinching it at his waist, and your eyes are drawn to that minuscule strip of skin and to the way his shirt fits him really well, clinging to his shoulders and shifting just so as he moves, and he’s

attractive.

This epiphany is accompanied by a kind of electric shock because, while it’s true you’ve found other men attractive before- idly, aimless, and in passing- the only one who’s ever had any kind of presence in your life, that was tangible to you was Shindou. You don’t have time to dwell on this revelation in aisle three, though, because, suddenly, instead of the pleasant view of his lower back and the jeans that hug his rear just right, you’re faced with apron pockets embroidered with the colorful store logo.

Your eyes fly to his face, wide, and now you know you’re blushing because he just caught you checking out his behind. He doesn’t look particularly like he’s about to punch you though, mostly just a little surprised and a little of something else expressed in the quirk at the corners of his lips.

You feel like surely your about to combust. You open your mouth to say something but nothing comes out for a too-long instant, and then,

“So your father owns this store?” you blurt, kicking yourself and praying he doesn’t bring it up. He doesn’t, just smiles kindly, perhaps a little too kindly.

“That’s right.” He shuffles down the aisle a little ways, and drops some spools of bright string into the accumulation of colorful knick-knacks in your arms. “I attend university during the week and help out on the weekends when it’s busiest.”

“Ah, I play... Go,” you say before realizing he didn’t actually ask you. He raises an eyebrow at you.

“You’re Touya-san’s son?” he asks, startling you because you didn’t think he would know anything about it.

“You know my father?” you ask, maybe a little more eager and excited at the prospect than you were really going for.

“No, sorry. But your mother stops in every few weeks. She talks about you often. Lovely lady. I can’t believe I didn’t see the resemblance before now.” He tilts his head as he looks at you and you fight against the instinctual need to hunch in on yourself because an attractive man is sizing you up.

The blush that was only starting to disperse from earlier intensifies again, almost painfully, and you swear that if you keep this up you’re going to faint because your blood is being shunted sporadically all over and you're having trouble keeping up with you own physiological reactions to small talk.

“She talks about me?”

“Yeah!” he says, but otherwise doesn’t elaborate, which really doesn’t seem fair to you.

He ticks his way down the list, grabs a glass bottle from one of the shelves, then makes his way up to the front counter. You’re grateful to unload the barely contained mess in the cradle of your arms. He itemizes the list and begins ringing you up.

“Well, what about you? What are you studying?” you ask just to prove to yourself that you're not totally disfunctional, and maybe (just a little) to even the playing field without asking anything too prying.

“Classical literature.”

“Oh. That’s fascinating."

You mean it. You always quite enjoyed reading the classics when you were in high school. He hums and writes up your receipt, shoves it in the bag. You reach for it, ready to high-tail it out of the boutique, feeling that you have made enough of a fool of yourself for one day, but he doesn’t hand it to you right away, so you linger awkwardly, hand still out stretched, feeling flayed open by his gaze. He gives you a once over and smiles that same, kind-looking smile.

“I’m Ikeda Hiroshi, by the way,” he says, proffering a hand for you to shake. His hand is not much larger that yours despite his advantage in height, but it’s cool and dry and makes you uncomfortably aware of the clamminess of your palms.

“Touya Akira.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” which you, again, expect to be the end of it, but he doesn’t seem to have the same attitude. “Touya-san mentioned that you won some kind of important match a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, nothing so important as she might have made it seem,” you say by default, because you’ve learned that people who don’t play Go don’t really want to hear about Go even when they think that they do.

“She most certainly didn’t make it sound that way. And she made it sound so exciting, like some kind of fierce battle.” His eyes are a kind of clear gray color, and twinkle at you under the fringe of his brown hair.

People don’t often ask you much about your passion for your livlihood, because (and you'll never understand this) most people tend to think it's boring, and don't hesitate to describe Go in drab and dreary terms. So it's only natural for you to be taken aback by the novelty of this exchange. You wonder, briefly, if he even knows what Go really is, but then you think it would be silly for a student of the classics not to.

That's when you decide that he’s nice. It probably helps that he also described Go as a ‘fierce battle’ so maybe it’s not such a lost cause afterall.

“Oh well, you see, it’s like this-”

And you tell him. All about Go, all about the institution in Japan, the scheduling nightmares, the great players, the search for the Hand of God, how humbled you are by the game. You intentionally skip over rivalries.

And he talks to you too, about his favorite myths and stories, some of his classes that are particularly challenging and the professors who teach them, his little sister, work and regular customers. You hang off to the side of the counter fully engaged with him, as he rings up any other customers that wander up to make a purchase. It’s probably rude that the entire time more than half of his attention is fixated on you, but you can’t bring yourself to be too apologetic because all the previous awkwardness has been swept away by the effortless torrents of your words. It’s an easy conversation, and you don't have easy conversations, at least not with people your own age about things other than Go (Shindou doesn’t count). And there’s something remarkable about it.

You completely lose track of time, forget to meet your mother, end up chatting with Ikeda for (as it turns out) hours, until your mother finally wanders into the store looking for you.

He grins as he waves goodbye. And your mother has this pleased little smile on her face, which you’re beginning to suspect means that, maybe, how much you enjoyed your afternoon hadn’t been by random chance. But you can’t really bring yourself to care, because a breathless kind of exhilaration has taken up residence in your chest and you’re feeling good about yourself for the first time in months.

When your mother hands you the receipt with a phone number scrawled across the back of it later, you can’t keep the dumb grin off of your face. It still takes you a week to muster the courage to call him.

    You are twenty-four and, despite almost braining yourself a handful of times already, you’ve managed to haul yourself up the stairs. Shindou is chattering away behind you. And by chattering you mean that he’s complaining about what an ass you’re being. You haven’t really said much back, just a handful of sneered quips when he’s started being completely unbearable, but mostly you’re just waiting for him to wear himself out or leave. Your experience with him indicates that he has a chronic inability to let anything go ever, so neither is particularly likely.

You lean heavily against the door and dig for you keys as he launches into another tirade, one which you’re sure he’s ranted about twice already on the walk home.

“I seriously don’t understand what is up with you,” he’s saying, “we were having fun and then all of a sudden you’re acting all bitchy! God, I forgot your damn mood-swings. Anyway I’m here, so wanna play a game?”

Scoffing, you press your forehead against the cool wood of the door and try to make yourself feel less feverish. Everything is too warm and closing in and you’re struck with a disconcerting feeling of mild claustrophobia despite being outside.

It’s been awhile since you and Shindou have played a game. Through the thick haze of your sluggish mind you try to recall, and the best you can come up in is a few months ago. But surely it hasn’t been that long, and you must just be too drunk to remember. You press your forehead harder against the door, hard enough that you can feel the manufacturer’s fake wood patterns imprinting on your face. You don’t really care, trying to jam your key into the lock, missing.

“You want to play a game?” you ask, and everything about your voice sounds so wrong to you. Like auditory double-vision. Like you’re listening to a static recording of yourself from when you were young. Like you’re hearing yourself talk through water. You’re not sure if that’s because you’re speaking wrong or hearing it wrong, but it warbles a little bit at the end, unsteady and weak. Your intonation is off and you sound frustrated and unsure in your own ears, but you were really going for irritated.

The key’s upside down. Oh. You hope Shindou didn’t notice that little faux pas. You try again and it’s off by a millimeter, doesn’t quite make it into the keyhole, and instead slides along the brass lock and to the artificial wood of the door.

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s been awhile since we played hasn’t it? And it’s still early for a night like this.” Your world spins, and it’s too hot. Sweat buds on your face and hands and the back of your neck, and your breathing is shallow. When did that happen? Everything feels choked off like you're breathing through a straw, and you can't seem to get a good breath no matter how hard you try.

You’re barely able to manage a “weren’t you just angry at me?,” and your voice is small and tinny, barely managing to squeeze out the back of your throat.

“Ehh, yeah, still am, but that’s what makes a game fu- hey are you okay?”

You’re too busy gulping all the excess saliva in your mouth to say anything back. The roiling in your stomach and the heacache building behind your eyes keep you occupied enough that when Shindou reaches out and takes your hand, aims it for the lock, it comes as a surprise to you. You jolt and your stomach complains, overstimulated and terrible, and you look over at him as he manages to get the door open with a soft hand on your wrist.

When he looks back at you, he smiles hesitantly, and asks you if you’re okay, if you need some water.

+ this has barely been proofed mostly because i lost patience and got sick of it. i’m sorry in advance i'm sure there are a million typos

  —-

  It’s half past eleven when the lights flicker and everything goes black, followed by the weak and distant flash of lightning through the Touya-family parlor window. It dawns on Hikaru as he scrambles for purchase in the alarmingly dark room, that they should have gone to bed hours ago. He curses as his knee crashes into the Goban and hears Touya gasp as the stones rain down on the tatami preternaturally loud over the storm raging outside.

“What happened?” he asks, forcing himself not to flail anymore before he destroys something expensive. The Touya household seems to be chalked full of antiques and nice, pretty things, and even though recently he’s been here more than he hasn’t, he’s honestly never paid much attention to the placement of anything but the stones on the board. Touya is breathing deeply and slowly, calming breaths, and somehow Hikaru is able to hear him above the sound of rain.

“It seems that the power's out,” Touya says evenly, sending a little wave of embarrassment through Hikaru at his own overreaction. He blinks, eyes wide and unseeing in the dark.

“That happens in Tokyo?”

“Apparently!”

It’s not something that Hikaru’s ever experienced even though he thinks he remembers hearing his mother mention it happening when she was a girl. Maybe. He doesn’t really know, actually. He might have seen it in a movie or something. In any event it’s new and strange to sit in perfect darkness because he can’t recall a time when his room wasn’t illuminated by the soft glow of street lamps. Hikaru wonders what happened, if anyone got hurt, how much of the city has lost power, if his own house still has power. Mostly, though, he wonders if he could have pulled ahead and won the game that’s laying strewn across the floor.

He hears Touya shuffle around the Goban and his throat tightens.

“Where are you going?” he hisses before he even knows for sure that Touya is leaving. He vaguely remembers that Touya had just refilled the pot of tea and it’s somewhere in reaching distance just waiting for him to knock it over and scald himself. That knowledge holds him captive, like that group he had in the upper right corner before he scattered it. Either way, it’s all Touya’s fault.

“I was going to see if I could find some flash lights,” Touya says.

“Not without me you’re not,” Hikaru mumbles, and blindly reaches for him.

His hand hits skin and the shock that sends along Hikaru’s arm is enough to make him pause. At first he thinks it’s because he’s just really thankful to feel Touya. His disembodied voice floating through the absolute darkness is unsettling at best, and now there’s tangible evidence under his palm that the world didn’t just disappear. Even if that’s a little dumb to think. In any event, the contact is reassuring.

But Touya stiffens and Hikaru feels too warm even in the coolness of the parlor. He’s almost certain that they’ve touched eachother before, but now that he thinks about it he can’t recall any one instance, and maybe that’s because there’s never been much thought or intent behind the little touches they might share navigating day-to-day situations. Right now, with his fingers pressed firmly against the warm yield of Touya’s cheek, it occurs to Hikaru that touching him is kind of strange. Also, that a strained hush has befallen the space between them, somehow more deafening and thicker than the dull roar of rain. 

Touya is unnaturally still and hot under his fingers. Hikaru twitches feeling strangely guilty and exhilarated and prods a little, trying to map out the expanse of skin. He feels hair barely brushing his knuckles, the tiny flutter of eyelashes against his palm.

Maybe, at first, it’s curiosity that pushes him to brush his thumb over Touya’s eyelid, or the darkness that gives him the courage to explore the narrow ridge of Touya’s nose with the pad of his index finger, but it’s probably mostly the fact that Touya hasn’t pulled away.

Touya’s skin is soft and his hair is soft and he’s soft against Hikaru’s palm in a way that he’s never been in real life, which leaves Hikaru’s chest tight and his blood rushing to his head, riveted on something other than Go for the first time in a long time. The previous game mostly forgotten, he’s much more fixated on the high arch of Touya’s cheekbones, the soft hollow between the shell of his ear and his hairline and slightly rough texture of the skin of his jaw.

Touya could probably use a closer shave, Hikaru observes vaguely, brushing his fingers against the day-old stubble and stifling the giddy laugh that threatens to bubble up at the realization that his own shaving regiment is more severe. Than Touya Akira’s. And somehow that’s the funniest and most interesting thing Hikaru could have realized.

It hits him like a flash flood that he’s never been so fascinated by another person, living or dead. Even worse, he’s pretty sure that he’s known this for longer than he’s wanted to admit.

Hikaru still can’t see anything, there are no street lamps glowing outside. He blinks owlishly is a misguided attempt to clear his vision, like he might be able to see the outline of Touya’s parlor again. As it stands, he barely remembers its shape in the face of everything else that seems to be going right. And even more surprising: he doesn’t care anymore that he can’t see, and that he might trip and break something expensive if he tries to move, or ‘scald’ himself with tea that’s probably pushing tepid by now. Sight or recollection of his surroundings are only valuable in that he might have to move, and he finds that he’s very content with where he right now as he drags his fingertips down Touya’s cheek and skirts around the edge of his mouth.

His senses are overwhelmed by the sound of rain, the heat radiating from Touya’s face and the statuesque stillness in his body; the mounting need to be closer. He leans forward just a little as his fingers glide across Touya’s slightly chapped bottom lip and Touya tenses impossibly further.

Then it’s like a flip is switched. 

Suddenly Touya is trembling and his breath is washing against Hikaru’s knuckles in soundless, shuddering gasps, and only then does Hikaru realize that he’s been holding it this whole time, and that revelation sends a pleasant, tingling jolt through him.

Touya’s hand clamps around his wrist and squeezes and Hikaru wants to pretend that he doesn’t know what’s going on and even more he wants to pretend that he isn’t okay with it, but he’s too surprised by just how okay with it he is that he can’t muster the focus to feign otherwise. Touya’s palm burns and he feels himself quake in turn. He barely notices his own breath hitching painfully beneath his breast bone.

He runs his thumb back and forth over Touya’s lip and tries not to think too hard about what he’s doing and the impact all of this will have on their relationship, or what will happen if he leans forward just a little bit more.

The thing is it’s been a good year, and in particular, it’s been a really good week. Something clicked awhile ago, and even though Waya never passes up the opportunity to remind Hikaru that they’re both stupid and that they’re driving him nuts, he and Touya have been attached shoulder to hip whenever they’re not otherwise caught up in official engagements; and their Go is living and breathing and thriving. This week alone, Hikaru’s spent most of his nights with Touya because, for reasons that are becoming painfully clear with the passing of every breathless second, the idea of Touya being alone in this huge house sets his teeth on edge. An entire week of sharing meals and commuting together and playing Go, and somehow they’ve only gotten into two fights that ended in either of them seriously angry. And Touya barely complained when he insisted on ramen for dinner. Hikaru’s even relatively sure that he caught him smiling as he paid for their meals.

What it boils down to is that Hikaru is insanely happy, he thinks, and that’s a little scary. The last time he was comfortable and complacent left him devastated in the aftermath of everything, and he finally has something to lose again.

Right now, his thumb is brushing Touya’s bottom lip and Touya’s breath is hot and humid and unsteady against the back of his hand. His grip on Hikaru’s wrist is the only thing that’s grounding him even as it leaves his throat tight and his head spinning. Touya scoots just slightly closer and Hikaru resists the urge to lean into him.

“Shindou,” Touya says. It’s barely a whisper and his voice cracks embarrassingly like they’re fourteen again, but for whatever reason it’s the hottest thing Hikaru’s ever heard because suddenly he isn’t in control anymore. Before he can totally process what’s going on his mouth is on Touya’s and even the overwhelming sound of the rain seems melt into the background.

Touya jolts and shudders against him, and for a brief, heart-stopping moment Hikaru is positive that he’s made a huge mistake. He’s about to pull away and do damage control, which he thinks will probably consist of weakly insisting he lost his balance and face planted right into Touya, when the hand encircling his wrist tightens almost painfully and pulls.

He’s not even really sure how it happens, but when he comes back to his senses Hikaru is on his back with hands full of Touya’s hair and the bitter taste of tea in his mouth as Touya attacks kissing the same way he attacked Hikaru’s formation earlier: direct and vicious.

Something shifts into place.

Hikaru has never considered himself an eloquent person. He doesn’t think that he’s ever really contemplated the nature of his demeanor before this moment (and maybe it’s a little silly to be thinking this right now). He’s sure that Touya’s mental monologue is profound and possibly drawing all kinds of Go parallels that he wouldn’t have the wherewithal to even understand right now, because his body is fevered and all his blood is pooled in his gut and his groin. But what he does manage to think is that, obviously, he had nothing to worry about. Of course, it’s just Touya and one thing that he's learned and come to appreciate over the years is that Touya isn’t worth his worry unless they’re sitting on opposite sides of the Goban. He feels phenomenally stupid.

He also feels phenomenally light headed when Touya mouths his way down his jawline with wet, sloppy kisses and bites his neck. But hey, his mouth is free now, and he uses his newfound liberation to catch his breath which has grown surprisingly heavy. Touya groans against his skin, warm and with the hint of tongue, and it sends shivers scuttling through him.

He realizes, with a spike of some emotional cocktail of embarrassment and excitement, that Touya is cradled between his thighs and that he’s more turned on than he can ever remember being in his life. Touya must to notice right around the same time as him, because he stills for a moment, breathing hot and hard against the nape of Hikaru’s neck, then he’s snaking a hand down between them and palming Hikaru through the denim of his jeans.

Hikaru is more than familiar with the touch of his own hand, but even the glancing touch of another person is enough to leave him gasping, arching his back and pressing closer. Touya hesitates before grinding his palm down more firmly against Hikaru.

“Fuck,” Touya mumbles against his skin, and Hikaru was mistaken before because he thought that Touya’s voice, shy and cracking over Hikaru’s name was the hottest thing he’d ever heard. But that was before he’d heard Touya cursing, husky against his neck, which almost has him coming in his pants.

There isn’t a lot of thought behind it when Touya goes for his fly and Hikaru eagerly wriggles out of his jeans, but self consciousness strikes an anxious chord when Touya’s fingers curl into the elastic waist band of his boxer briefs.

They’ve never done things in half measures, but things seem suddenly incredibly real.

Touya must either notice the shift in Hikaru’s demeanor or be suffering from nervousness himself, because his fingers hesitate and Hikaru’s underwear stay blessedly at hip level. He slides back up Hikaru’s body and kisses him again. It’s infinitely different from the fierce and frenzied kisses that got them into this mess. It’s soft and lingering and almost chaste except that Hikaru can’t quite help slipping out a little bit of tongue to flick against Touya’s lips. Touya hums against his mouth and pulls back to rest his forehead against Hikaru’s. His grip on Touya’s hair turns as soft as the situation seems to warrant, and he gathers it loosely at the nape of his neck.

“You okay?” he breathes into the heady, damp air that separates their mouths. It remains too dark to see anything, even Touya’s outline above him, but little things seep back into awareness: the sound of rain hitting the roof, the hard feel of tatami and go stones under his back, one of Touya’s hands tracing idle, formless patterns onto the skin of his hips, Touya’s clothed erection pressed against his thigh. His dick twitches at that little revelation, and he feels decidedly less jittery. Now that he’s not in a rush to maul Touya’s mouth, he notices something wet under his shoulder and guesses that somewhere along the way they must have spilled that pot of tea after all.

“Yeah,” Touya says, and the little crack in his voice is back. “Are you?”

Hikaru contemplates this question for a moment, but he’s too charmed by the shakiness in Touya’s words to remember why he wouldn’t be. In fact, it seems silly, really, that Hikaru would ever second guess this since he never even looks both ways before crossing the street. He’s not a particularly careful or reflective person by nature, or at least that’s what Akari tells him (and maybe she’s right because he usually just shrugs it off), so he’s not entirely sure why he’s been afflicted by this sudden bout of caution (although he suspects). But the thing is, if there’s anything he’s ever been confident of it’s the fact that Touya has become a permanent installment in his life, and while he’s not really explicitly thought about this, it actually does seem like the logical conclusion to the progression of their personal relationship.

If Hikaru’s free hand wasn’t busy tucking Touya’s hair behind his ear, he would have face palmed for not seeing it before, but right now it’s busy with a much more important chore.

“We spilled the tea,” Hikaru informs him instead, shifting to try and wiggle out of the puddle that’s seeping into his tee shirt. He feels Touya shake above him and Hikaru mentally debates on if he’s laughing or not when Touya fists his shirt to pull him up.

It doesn’t go quite as smoothly as Touya was probably hoping. Hikaru ends up bashing his nose against Touya’s chin, and he spends the next couple of seconds pawing at Touya’s face trying to locate his lips.

“Shindou!” he squawks indignantly, scandalized, and Hikaru rolls his eyes but the effect is lost in the dark. Leave it to Touya to be touching his dick one minute and abashed at Hikaru’s audacity the next. Touya draws a breath and Hikaru sees the scolding coming just as Touya’s opening his mouth, and if there is one thing that Hikaru takes pride in, it’s his ability to throw a wrench in all of Touya’s carefully laid plans.

He cuts him off with an eager press of lips and Touya kind of instantly melts and forgets whatever he was going to say, opting instead to cup the back of Hikaru’s head and kiss him back enthusiastically.

Things go a little better. Kissing is easier now that Hikaru’s brain can keep up with what’s going on and Touya’s using more tongue and less teeth. It’s still intense and bruising but Hikaru doesn’t know why he assumed it would ever be any different because, clearly, Touya’s the only person it would ever make sense for him to kiss. When he feels Touya’s hands slide down the sides of his neck, and back down the sides of his body to dance around the skin at his hips he simply braces his palms against the floor and levers his ass off the ground in response.

All of Touya’s heat and eagerness come roaring back and Touya outright moans into his mouth as he hooks his fingers in Hikaru’s underwear and drags them down his thighs. He shivers and wonders exactly how much longer than him that Touya’s been thinking about this.

Touya fists him loosely and Hikaru can’t help the jolt and the surprised moan that works its way out of his mouth. It feels strange for there to be a hand on his dick when he’s not the one controlling its cadence. Squeezing his eyes shut uselessly in the dark, he notices the little things: like the way the angle is all wrong and so amazing, or the way that the fingertips with Touya’s Go callouses seem to rub just a little softer than the rest of his hand, or the way Touya flicks his wrist when he gets to the top of a stroke.

Touya’s mouth is at his neck and he feels Touya’s unoccupied hand groping his leg, traveling back towards his knee. Then Touya is nosing his way down Hikaru’s clothed torso, planting idle kisses on the way and, well. Hikaru’s pretty sure that he knows where this is going.

Touya eases back, steadying himself on Hikaru’s leg, breath ghosting over his belly and hips and Hikaru holds his breath in anticipation. There’s a moment of stillness when the hand on his cock grips him at the base and ceases its ascent, then there’s something moist and softer than fingers pressed to the head and Hikaru knows exactly what that is.

He sucks a breath harshly through his teeth and his toes curl unwittingly in his socks.

Touya starts slow, delicately mouthing the head of Hikaru’s cock, lips catching at the taper of his head sending electricity sparkling through his internal circuits; but as Touya seems to get his bearings Hikaru feels his tongue slip out and rub against the underside.

He tries to stifle the whimpers that rip themselves out of his throat, but once he starts he can’t seem to stop the torrent of light, breathy noises. Touya hums against him in response which is almost as amazing as Touya’s tongue, so really maybe it’s a win-win kind of thing, even though if Touya didn’t seem to be getting off on it Hikaru would probably be humiliated. 

He jumps when Touya’s lips encircle him completely and heat shoots down through his toes and fingertips which, he suddenly notices, are buried in Touya’s hair. He slides down Hikaru’s cock smooth as satin and Hikaru chokes on his own saliva. He’s somehow good at this, even though he can’t fit all of Hikaru’s cock in his mouth and clearly has the wisdom not to try.

Hikaru is nearly doubled over himself, breathing in the scent of Touya’s shampoo in desperate pants. His fingers are buried in Touya’s hair, yanking at it in a way that he would personally find painful but Touya doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, the way he groans with each tug sends another soft vibration through Hikaru and leaves him squirming helplessly and bucking up slightly into the tight circle of Touya’s mouth. He can’t help but wonder if Touya’s looked up how to do this when he pulls back, swipes the head of Hikaru’s cock with his tongue and begins stroking the base with calloused fingers. He moans around him when Hikaru yanks his hair particularly hard, then Hikaru can’t think of anything at all. Touya’s tongue writhing against him and the vibrations of his wordless vocalizations around him is overwhelming and unlike anything he’s ever experienced.

Touya manages to settle into a rhythm with his mouth working in tandem with his tongue and his hands gently jerking the base of his dick. It’s a bit clumsy, enough that it’s obvious that Touya’s never done this before, but Hikaru’s certainly not in a position to judge since he’s relatively sure he’s never felt anything quite as amazing. 

And Touya, stupid, amazing Touya, his rival and his best fucking friend, is moaning like he’s never wanted anything more than Hikaru’s cock in his mouth. That thought alone is enough for Hikaru’s balls to tighten and-

“Shit, Touya, move!” he gasps. For one panicked minute he tries to push Touya’s head away and wriggle out from under him, but Touya only seems to tighten his grip and redouble his efforts.

The thing about not being able to see, Hikaru thinks, is that it makes everything else that much more intense by contrast. Or at least that’s what he’ll tell himself later as he licks his wounds over coming way too fast and way too hard in his eternal rival’s mouth.

It’s not what he thinks about as he lays flattened and panting in the aftermath of his orgasm. Mostly what he wonders is how he ended up back in the puddle of tea, and how on earth he can get Touya to make as many of those breathy noises as possible.

Touya crawls back up his body and lays at his side, hand trailing shapes on his heaving chest, heavy breath stirring Hikaru’s bangs.

“Are you alright?” he asks softly and Hikaru nearly laughs at how dumb that is since he can’t remember a time that he’s ever felt better. He opts, instead, to grab a fistful of Touya’s hair, because he seemed to like that, and to sling a thigh over Touya’s hips as he rolls him onto his back. Touya hisses possibly in surprise or in pain but that only intensifies Hikaru’s need to get his mouth on him.

Hikaru just came but there’s a fire burning under his skin more urgent than he can ever remember his own arousal being, and he can trace it back to the fierce desire to get Touya’s pants off as fast as humanly possible. Because, really, after that, the only option left available to him is to slobber all over Touya Akira’s dick.

It’s clumsy and he spends precious seconds fighting with the double button fastening Touya’s slacks, but Touya’s too busy moaning at the little brushes of Hikaru’s knuckles against his cock to complain.

He feels the muscles of Touya’s legs twitch when he nearly rips his pants and underwear down in one go. Eagerly, perhaps foolishly, he wastes absolutely no time in feeling out Touya’s dick and putting his mouth all over in.

He suspects that Touya may have done some research on blow jobs (which leaves Hikaru armed with an entire slew of embarrassing personal questions that he’ll delight in asking Touya later), so as per usual there’s a knowledge gap. But, Hikaru assures himself, he’s always been best at learning on the job anyway.

There’s something powerful about having Touya’s cock in his mouth and feeling him writhe beneath him at even the smallest flicker of tongue at the crown of his head. He breathes deeply through his nose, barely adding the symphony of Touya’s desperate moans above him.

And sucking dick is surprisingly good too. He can’t remember if he’s ever thought about it much before, but regardless, it’s effortless because of the way that Touya’s hips are twitching under him, and Touya’s thighs are locked around his shoulders and quivering against him, and Touya’s heels are pressed into the space between his shoulder blades, and Touya’s hands are just barely ghosting over his hair again and and again, like he’s afraid of what he’ll do if he allows himself the luxury of proper touch.

Hikaru squeezes Touya’s hips as tight as he wants and it’s the most intoxicated that he’s ever been.

When Touya comes, it’s with a small intake of breath then complete silence as his body tenses so hard that Hikaru’s shoulders ache between the vice of his thighs. He doesn’t pay that much attention to it though, because he’s suddenly faced with the dilemma of a mouthful of come and no idea what to do with it.

With some effort, he swallows, doing his best not to think about sperm. He probably wouldn’t have done things differently either way other than to mentally prepare himself, but he really didn’t think that one through.

Touya’s legs go slack around him, and his knees slip off of Hikaru’s shoulders bonelessly. He rests his face against Touya’s thigh and breathes deeply. He hazily realizes that he’s horribly aroused again, but settles for nuzzling the juncture of Touya’s hip and composing himself as best he can in the fading mental echos of Touya’s moans. A hand drops to the top of his head and pushes his bangs back. He grins against Touya’s skin.

“Are you alright?” Hikaru parrots back cheekily, feeling smug and deeply satisfied. Touya gently cuffs him, but he can feel the small, telltale shake in his body that means he’s probably laughing. Or cold. Hikaru’s gonna go with laughing though.

“We spilled the tea,” he says, speech slurred and muzzy. Hikaru can hear the smile in his voice.

“Are you in it?”

“Yeah.” 

Hikaru laughs and gropes around for Touya’s hand.

“C’mere then,” he says, pulling on Touya who rudely groans at his efforts. “It’s dry over here.”

Touya allows himself to be pulleyed, then actually helps wrench himself up halfway through deadweighting it, but in any case Hikaru’s pretty sure he deserves a ‘thank you’ for his troubles. He lets it drop when Touya tumbles into him and they crumple to the floor in a weirdly comfortable tangle of sweaty limbs and sticky shirts (which, Hikaru realizes belatedly, they never removed). He relaxes under Touya’s weight, wishing for the first time since all of this started that he could look Touya in the eyes. Because neither of them has the option of retreating now that they just did… whatever they’ll end up calling the thing that they just did, and he is literally pinned under Touya who’s flopped limply across his torso.

There’s time, he thinks. Tomorrow. Next week. For years. They’ve got all the time they’ll need to see eye-to-eye and exchange blowjobs and yell and play Go.

Touya noses into the nape of his neck and Hikaru lays there in absolute darkness, thinking of how maybe they should talk about this. He plants a kiss on Touya’s forehead instead, and when Touya hums sleepily, affection blooms hot and bright in the aching space under his sternum.

---

You are twenty-four and your stomach is in weary knots that would have had you on edge if they hadn’t gotten apathetic and given up part way through trying to make you anxious. The result is a slightly disgruntled feeling curling in the pit of your stomach, but it’s so halfhearted that it’s easy to ignore, like a mild cold or the dull ache in your joints when it’s chilly out, but it’s always there all the same. Your nerves fire blanks and you’re left feeling worn-out, strangely over-stimulated, and grumpy.

It’s the first time in years that both you and Shindou are single at the same time. So apparently, for Shindou, this translates to dragging you out to every gay club in Tokyo in a fit of obnoxiously well-intentioned, heterosexual solidarity (‘no don’t worry Touya, I’ve got your back’) and engaging in the traditional but tactless trash-talk of your ex-boyfriend (‘I’m doing it for you, because I know you can’t. What else are friends for?’).

And you appreciate the effort. You really do. But as you slump on the stool, sullenly nursing your apple-tini like a worn out factory worker who’s secure enough in his masculinity to order drinks that are served with bright red cherries, while pointedly ignoring Shindou’s nervous and meandering rant about how flattered he is to be hit on by other guys, you find that all you really want to do is go home and collapse in your own bed. And not with one of the random men that Shindou keeps trying to foist on you.

He frowns at you when you shoo away another would-be suitor offering to buy you a drink, because you still have at least one sip left of yours, thank you very much though.

“He looked nice, didn’t he Touya?” he asks, leaning heavily against the bar, trying to catch your eyes. It’s not really a question though and that irritates you.

“Yes, Shindou,” you agree. “He looked very nice.”

“Then what the hell crawled up your ass?” he snaps, clearly taking this much more personally than he should. “That’s like, the third guy you’ve shot down in the last couple of hours.” He raps his finger tips on the soggy cardboard coaster under his pint glass, and you think idly that they look so much better when they’re manipulating go stones. 

“Well?” he demands, and you heave a sigh and meet his eyes. 

He’s not really mad. If you can say that you know him at all, you can say that you at least know him well enough to know that the abrasiveness of his voice only indicates concern that he’s trying, very poorly, to cover. He stares at you intently, brow furrowed, fingers doing River Dance across the counter top. Something knots in your throat but that’s an old and familiar feeling and you have a lot of practice swallowing it down.

“I honestly don’t know why we couldn’t have just gone back to my apartment and played a few games if you wanted to spend some time together. We could’ve even bought some sake if you wanted to drink.” Shindou looks affronted at the suggestion. You offer him a weak, conciliatory smile and place your hand on his gently, trying to cut him off before his fingers get to the tap solo. His hand stills.

“What? No, Touya! That’s not how you get over a break up. Take it from me.” He frowns and it’s hard to see in the dim of the club and the flashing colorful lights, but you think his face is flushed from the humid press of too many bodies in one place. He slides his hand out from under yours and flags down the bartender to order a couple of something’s that you don’t recognize, but look like shots and smell of lime and vodka when they’re placed in front of you. Shindou downs the rest of his beer and picks up his shot glass. You side-eye yours suspiciously.

“Okay, on the count of three we’re doing this.”

“What is this, Shindou?” You stare yours down but answers are not forthcoming. You’re not sure this is a good idea.

“This is the solution to every break up, okay? Drink ‘em out of your system. Works every time.” He nods sagely and you neglect to mention that his flighty disposition towards his month-long affairs hardly count as ‘break-ups,’ and that you’re not so certain he’s qualified to be doling out advice. But there he is passing it out like pamphlets xeroxed on the cheapest paper that money can buy, carelessly thrown at passersby on the streets, and here you are, seriously considering taking one.

You look at him warily, already knowing that when it comes to bad decisions the odds are stacked against him and only the prophetic or truly insane would place any money on him. And you have always been a frugal man ('stingy' you hear Shindou's voice insist). But, as always, his grin is impossible to quantify yet infectious. He smiles in that way that would be over the top and cheesy and that would piss you off if it wasn’t so sincere. Something warm and nervous blooms in your chest.

Ah, what the hell.

“Fine.” 

“That’s the spirit, Touya!” He claps a hand on your shoulder, laughing, and you frown at the unwarranted contact. “Okay, we’re taking these together.” 

“Okay,” you say, picking up your shot and lifting it towards where he has his outstretched. He appears to think hard on something for a moment.

“Here’s to friendship.” He says (not to rivalry he doesn’t say ‘to rivalry’ or to any number of other things that would make so much more sense), before throwing his back. Your gut clenches and you follow suit. It burns like latent regret. He hoots and laughs and slams his glass back onto the counter and you follow suit a little more carefully, a little less joyously. You feel at once wrapped up in him, intertwined and inseparable for better or for worse; and like you’re a satellite in his orbit, observing from a distance and drawn into the circle of his gravitational pull but never getting close enough to touch. It gives you a second’s pause as it occurs to you that he’s always been the only one to ever make you feel so off-kilter.

----

You are sixteen and everything is calm and steady, almost mundane. Go is the eye of your own personal hurricane, and Shindou is the high winds and the floods for all the havoc that he manages to wreak on everything else in you life.

Things are neat and orderly for the most part. You’ve always prided yourself on self awareness, and you can see the path laid out before you, neatly trimmed and well defined against the manicured lawn of your life. There are your obligations: to your parents and to your school work. There is Go, and Go is a safe space; the one space that you are the master of your own destiny and everything that happens only does so because you willed it; and it stands out most important of all.

And then there is Shindou who continues to elude your understanding. He’s too busy kicking up your flower beds and tracking muddy prints across your sidewalk like a drunkard to explain himself.

He sits back abruptly in his seat, arms crossed and stares at the Goban with a furrow in his brow, as though it’s going to magically volunteer the answer, and you take the opportunity to study him. You’ve always thought he looks absurd, with his mismatched hair and his bright orange shirts and trendy sneakers. Certainly, he looks out of place among the normal patrons of your father’s salon, and nearly as much among the other pros. It’s only his hands that betray him, steady and deft and somehow graceful in the face of everything else that’s loud and garish and clumsy about him. They’re the hands of an accomplished Go pro, and they look that part. You know, because they look a lot like yours.

Sometimes you think that it’s the only thing the two of you have in common, really.

It’s taken you years to get a sense of what makes him tick, and you’re still not entirely sure you do. You think that he might be the only thing in the universe that you will never be able to understand through sheer force of will and the burning desire to. And for every bizarre, off-the-wall stunt he pulls, he leaves you baffled and reeling and falling deeper under the allure of his mystery. Or at least that's how he would probably phrase it to feel cool, like one of those heros from those comics he reads. But the way you see it, he’s obnoxious and obfuscates and overcomplicates everything. But it’s always been that way, hasn’t it? Because that’s how all of this started.

Sometimes it feels that you’re drowning, and what scares you the most isn’t the knowledge that you’re going to suffocate, but that you would do it, happily and repeatedly, if only to be a step closer to understanding what it is about him that makes you want to dive headlong into a dangerous situation.

“I resign,” comes his decidedly not-dangerous grumble across the Goban from you, knocking you back into reality. You've seen the resignation coming since you destroyed one of his key formations but you can't help the self-satisfaction that settles over you.

“Thank you for the game,” you say on autopilot, as you begin to clear the stones from the board. Your head is airy and your chest stretched full with helium and you can’t help the tiny smile you feel cracking your lips. He says something but you’re too lost in your strangely tumultuous happiness to pay all that much attention because he’s probably just harping on you anyway, but then he’s snapping his fingers in front of your face rudely and you’re jolting backwards.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” you ask, blinking at him owlishly, too taken aback to reprimand him or smack his hand out of your face. He looks shocked at his own actions too, and blinks right back at you.

“I was just asking if, maybe, you wanted to take a break and go get some food?”

You take a minute to process that, and he seems to squirm in his seat. You glance at the clock behind the counter, look back down at the Goban, look at Shindou who’s expression is unreadable but tinged with discomfort. This isn’t something that the two of you do and you try to fit the new and oddly-shaped pieces together.

“Alright.” His face transitions into a grin so easily you find yourself questioning, again, those times you’ve seen his crestfallen expressions.

“Yeah, okay,” he says as he pushes up out of his chair. You follow him to counter where he collects his bag and Ichikawa gives you a small smile that knows something that you don’t, and that makes you fidget.

Once you’re out on the pavement he stretches his arms over his head, back popping, at ease in the sparse throngs of people.

“So. Ramen?” he asks, and you make a face.

“I guess that’s fine. Don’t you have ramen a lot though?” You think you remember hearing that somewhere, some off-hand comment by an acquaintance made in passing. He wrinkles his nose at you, then turns on his heel and strides off, clearly expecting you to follow. So you do.

“Of course I do. It's delicious,” he scoffs as you catch up to walk beside him. He’s comfortable and his gaze is steady before him. “You don’t?” A surprised laugh manages to rip it’s way out of your throat. Mostly because you are reminded that Go isn’t the only thing he’s intense about. He startles beside you and gives you a baffled look while you shake your head as though that could undo it, and try to fight the blush that you can feel beginning to bloom on your cheeks.

“You can’t actually be serious.”

“What? I am dead serious. No! Check this out, this is me being serious.” He gives you a deadpan for your troubles. “Rude!”

“Okay, alright. Are you paying?” He looks at you sternly before turning back to the path, barely managing to avoid running into a person trying to snap a photo of something across the street. 

“God, you’re a cheap jerk, aren’t you? Why should I pay? You make more money than me!” 

“But this was your idea,” you protest. “I’m not even particularly fond of ramen!”

Shindou grumbles about what a stuck up asshole you are as he digs for his wallet, but he knocks his shoulder against yours anyway. You nearly trip over your own feet in shock, and you’re almost offended and ready to tell him off until it dawns on you that this is how people who are your age act. He notices your surprise because he shoots you a challenging little smile.

“What?” he says, “you got a problem, Touya? Did I violate your extra large bubble or something?” You can’t help the quirk this drags to your lips. You don’t think you’re quite to the point of shoving him back, though.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Shindou. I’d hate for this to be a repeat of today's game, because that didn't work out so well for you.”

“Excuse me?” He stops short on the sidewalk and a teenaged boy walking behind him curses as he careens into Shindou’s back. Shindou doesn’t seem to notice. You keep on walking, and after a moment of gaping he quickens his stride to catch up with you. “Oh my god, Touya. No! Say that again, I dare you.”

Triumph blossoms in your chest as he follows you with a string complaints mostly about your sweatshirt, but there's also something in there about today's game. And it's true, that he had made a particularly brilliant move earlier that left you considering the board through one cup of tea. Sometimes the leaps and bounds he makes in ability is nerve-racking, even for you. It just makes the dig at the minor insecurity of your nonprofessional record all the more gratifying.

But this isn’t a serious game the two of you are playing, not like your Go, and contentment settles over you like a pleasant fog as his grumbled insults about your dumb haircut and your dumb shoes slide off your back. You feel like something significant just shifted and locked into place, but you’re not entirely sure what.

But then he makes a snide comment on your end game tactics and you snap back at him about how stupid and inconsistent he is on instinct. Then you’re one hundred percent positive that nothing about you, or him, or this will ever change.

He makes you crazy and better. And despite the barbs you launch at him you’re strangely twisted up and happy inside in a way that’s unfamiliar to you. Because he’s pulling out a stool at the counter and slouching into it, and shooting an expectant look in your direction when you stand there dazed, blocking the entrance to the ramen shop, and he’s here because he wants to be.

He wants to spend time with you and it’s 

the first time in your life that someone your age ever invited you to lunch.

Your mood isn’t even soured when he insists that you pay for your own bowl. In fact, you feel generous enough to pay for his as well.

He gives you an odd look.

---

You are twenty-four, and somehow, despite all the recent drama and the inherent discomfort in being here and Shindou trying way too hard as usual, you’re laughing. You don’t remember at what point you became enthusiastic about all of this. It could have been after the third shot that Shindou insisted you drink with him.

Your arm is slung around him. It feels alien and amazing, and the two of you stumble down the street. Shindou is talking rhythmically, and you realize after catching your breath, that this is his version of singing. This sends you into stitches again because he’s really into it and it sounds awful.

Your body is too heavy and your ankles are jelly and wobble when you try to walk on them, but his hand clutches at your waist as you double over in laughter. It keeps you steady and wrenches you back up straight when you almost face plant on the sidewalk. You drop your head against his shoulder, instead, and gasp for breath.

“Oh my god, Touya,” he says, and you think he’s trying to sound annoyed but it just comes out with the same breathless quality that you’re experiencing. “Oh my god. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this. I mean I knew you were a lightweight but damn.” 

“Mmhm,” you hum, into the humid, giggle-filled space at the nape of his neck. He shivers and his hand clenches your shirt below your ribs, undoubtedly mussing it.

You’re pretty sure that sober-you would have an issue with that, and you really probably should call him on his manners, but your mind is thick and sluggish like a particularly heavy summer day. And, really, why bother? You’re lost in a pleasant, giddy haze and it’s nice. You wrap your other arm around his shoulder and melt into his side, not stopping to acknowledge the way that he stiffens marginally.

“Are you okay? Do you need to go home?” he asks in a small, shaky voice as he secures his arm tighter around your waist and tries to cinch you up so you’re not hanging quite so much of your weight on him. Your mouth is inches away from his neck and you can feel the heat radiating from him and see the way his adams apple bobs and he gulps and the pulse that’s thrumming too-close, quivering under his skin, making you want to seal your mouth over that spot and bite down.

Somewhere you know your thoughts should disturb you, but you’re not exactly being self-critical right now.

“No, this is good. This is great. You were right about everything, Shindou.” He gapes at you and affection erupts under your breast bone with so much intensity that it blindsides you and you push in just a little closer so that you don't totter over, arms tighter around his shoulders.

“Holy shit. I’m never going to let you forget that you said that.” You snicker into his neck and grasp at your senses, before giving him one last squeeze and stumbling away from him. “No, really Touya. Can I get that in writing? I think I still have a napkin from the bar.” He shuffles behind you, presumably digging for the napkin as he follows you down the street. “Actually, forget that. I want that engraved on my tombstone, oh my god.” 

“Whatever you say, Shindou.”

“You think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding!” He catches up to you, and grabs your sleeve, stopping you from crossing the street in an aimless, drunken wander. “Hey, we're not that way.” 

  "We're not?"

  He laughs at you and its loose and bright and guttural and reverberates through your bones. Your toes curl in your slightly sweaty loafers.

He steers you down the block to another establishment. Loud club music pours into the street whenever the door is opened. 

Shindou shoots you a grin.

----

You are seventeen and you jolt awake.

With a soft groan you push yourself up onto your elbows, and blink as you look around the unfamiliar room. It’s dusky and cool, and a little light seeps from the other room under the crack in the door, casting dramatic shadows across the hardwood as it hits the goban, painting your waist in a broad, dark stripe.

You blink at your surrounding blearily, and only after a moment does it occur to you to ask yourself what you’re even doing on the floor. You glance down yourself, awareness seeping back into your body slowly, cell by cell, and freeze when you realize that the weight on your thigh is actually a head of tousled blond and black hair.

It comes back to you, then. Shindou all but dragging you to Waya’s birthday, game after game of Go, cheap beer in which Shindou happily partook, even managing to pressure you into one or two. And then laughter and Go played sloppily and Shindou’s eyes twinkling as he guffawed and face planted in the middle of your game; and you laughing, the fact that your game was destroyed and Shindou had been the one to destroy it hadn’t bothered you and this strikes you as embarrassingly out of character. Waya even talked to you at some point, you think, swaying on his feet in much the same way that you had needed the counter to hold yourself up straight. Something about ‘you’re not as bad as I thought, Touya’ which should have been insulting except that for some reason it seemed like the sweetest, most meaningful thing anyone had ever said to you at the time.

Your jaw and your gut aches.

You guess you must have fallen asleep. On the floor of Waya’s living room. With Shindou on you.

Something twists and flutters in your chest and you can’t decide whether it’s uncomfortable or pleasant and that indecisiveness somehow lends itself to being both. You could move: push Shindou’s head off of your thigh and find somewhere else to sleep, or better yet, collect your keys and make your way home, but that feeling that’s still pressure cooking in all of your empty spaces, and the curiosity it ignites in you, causes you, instead, to lay a hand lightly on his head.

His hair is coarse, much more so than yours, and stiff from whatever over-priced product he puts in it. You like it, you decide, so you card your fingers through his ridiculous yellow bangs and feel your stomach boil with guilt.

But this is okay, you think. You're friends, you think, and that's still a foreign feeling. And you sit there, savoring the coarseness of his hair and the warm weight of his head on you; admiring the way that his back and shoulders are taught and lean despite his profession, how his legs are lanky with the onset of adulthood, and his arms are flung haphazardly about him as he sprawls on his side. The way his-

He’s-

Your stomach bottoms out leaving you breathless, and you tear your eyes away when you realize they’ve been raking up and down his form. So you lower yourself back to the floor to stare at the ceiling instead, hand still tangled with clumps of his sticky, gelled hair, and try to get back to sleep.

You can feel him drooling on your leg, and you feel like that should bother you, and it bothers you that it doesn’t. Instead, you like it almost as much as you like the feel of his hair between your fingers. Something about it seems too endearing to be mad about, and it’s the first time you can remember thinking of Shindou in such a way. There is something heavy and writhing inside you and try as you might to stop it’s progression, understanding is beginning to dawn on you.