“that’s a line, kō,” you murmur, your voice drifting off as your gaze wanders to the corner of the desk where a stray paperclip is catching the afternoon light. it looks shiny. like a tiny silver trombone.

“it’s a majestic line,” bokuto corrects instantly, entirely deadpan, his massive arms tightening around your waist like a pair of high-grade ratchet straps. “the best line i’ve ever seen in my life. write another one. do the pink one next. please?”

he’s so deep in the trenches of affection that it’s honestly becoming a public safety concern. if you told him to flip the desk over because the wood grain looked at you funny, he would have it airborne before you could blink. he loves you so much; he attends the church of your existence every single second of the day, acting as the self-appointed high priest of making sure you never experience a single moment without a hundred and ninety pounds of muscular volleyball captain attached to your torso.

your fingers start up a rhythm against his forearm—tap, tap, taptap, tap. your index and middle fingers bounce against his skin, mapping out the precise cadence of a song you can’t remember the name of, but your brain demands it be played on the instrument of his biceps.

bokuto freezes. his entire body goes rigid, eyes widening until they look like two poached eggs as he tracks the movement of your fingers. to anyone else, a partner absentmindedly drumming on their arm is a normal, everyday occurrence. to bokuto, this is a direct transmission from the heavens. it’s an honor. it’s a holy ritual.

“you’re doing the drum solo,” he breathes, his chest expanding against your back like a rapidly inflating bouncy castle. “the skin-drum. i’m the drum. this is the greatest day of my week.”

“it’s tuesday,” you point out, your eyes tracking a dust mote that is currently executing a flawless pirouette in the sunbeam near the bookshelf.

“exactly! a historic tuesday!” he buries his face directly into the fabric of your oversized sweater, making a muffled, needy noise that sounds suspiciously like a vacuum cleaner trying to swallow a sock. “do it harder. play the whole album. do the one with the fast beat.”

you don’t even realize you’ve shifted your focus from the dust mote to the texture of his sweatpants until your hand is sliding down to pat his knee in a rhythmic, three-beat loop. your brain is a pinball machine, the silver ball bouncing wildly off bumpers of thoughts you can’t quite catch, but the physical sensation of tapping against him keeps you anchored to the floor so you don’t float away entirely.

he’s the perfect canvas for it. he’s warm—permanently radiating heat like a freshly toasted bagel—and he doesn’t move away. he never tells you to sit still. instead, he treats your lack of focus like a rare, beautiful weather event that he is incredibly lucky to witness.

“hey,” he says, his voice dropping into that weirdly soft, desperate tone he only uses when he’s looking at you like you invented the concept of oxygen. “look at me for a second. just a tiny bit.”

you turn your head, your chin immediately bumping into his nose because he is still hovering approximately zero millimeters from your face. his golden eyes are completely blown out, practically sparkling with a level of adoration that should require a permit.

“you’re so pretty it’s making my teeth hurt,” he complains, his bottom lip turning out into a pout so dramatic it belongs in a museum. “how are you doing that? you’re just sitting there. you’re not even trying. you’re just breathing and my brain is short-circuiting. look at my hands, they’re shaking. you did that.”

they aren’t actually shaking, but he holds them up anyway, his massive, taped fingers twitching slightly for effect. you let out a soft huff of a laugh, your fingers instantly migrating from his knee to his wrist, resuming the rhythmic tap-tap-tap against his pulse point.

“i’m supposed to be studying,” you say, though the textbook has long since lost all meaning. the words are just black shapes on white paper now, looking less like economics and more like a colony of very organized ants.

“studying is fake,” bokuto declares with absolute, unearned authority. “who needs graphs when we have this? look at this symmetry. we fit together like two lego bricks. the expensive ones. the ones that lock in so hard you need to use your teeth to get them apart.”

the comparison is so violently specific that you can’t help the giggle that bubbles up from your chest. it’s a small, sudden sound, but the reaction it provokes from bokuto is instantaneous. he lets out a high-pitched, strangled noise—the kind of sound a golden retriever makes when it sees a tennis ball drop into a lake—and violently nuzzles the side of your face until your hair is a static-charged nest.

“do that again,” he begs, his nose dragging across your cheekbone. “the laugh. do the little squeak. please. i’ll give you my shoes. i’ll give you my favorite knee pads. the ones with the good padding.”

“i don’t want your sweaty knee pads, kō.”

“i’ll wash them! i’ll wash them with the flowery soap that smells like the pink trees! just laugh again!”

he’s so utterly helpless against you, so entirely unreveled by the mere fact that you exist in his general vicinity, that it’s almost comical. he watches your face like he’s trying to memorize the exact placement of every single eyelash, his chest heaving with a sigh that is so full of devotion it threatens to blow the papers off the desk.

your attention drifts again, caught by the way his silver-and-black hair sticks up in those ridiculous spikes. without thinking, your hand leaves his wrist and wanders upward, your fingers tangling into the soft, surprisingly malleable strands at the back of his neck. you start twirling a piece around your finger, pulling it slightly, then letting it snap back into place.

snap. snap. snap.

bokuto melts. there is no other word for it. the muscular, terrifying ace of fukurodani academy simply ceases to have a spine, slumping forward until his forehead is resting against your shoulder, his breath hot against your neck as he lets out a long, shuddering whine of pure contentment.

“if you stop doing that, i will actually pass away,” he informs the fabric of your sweater, his hands coming up to gently, reverently cover your thighs, his palms huge and incredibly warm. “they’ll have to bury me right here. under the desk. they’ll write ‘he died because his partner stopped touching his hair’ on the stone.”

“that’s a very long sentence for a tombstone,” you murmur, your eyes tracking the slow, hypnotic movement of your own fingers through his hair.

“i’ll pay extra for the big stone,” he mumbles, his fingers twitching against your legs as he tries to match the rhythm of your hair-twirling with small, rhythmic squeezes of his own. “anything for you. everything for you. you want the moon? i’ll jump really high. i can almost reach it on a good day. if i get a good approach, i’ll grab it for you.”

the mental image of bokuto kōtarō soaring into the stratosphere to punch the moon out of orbit just to bring it to your desk is so vividly ridiculous that you let out another genuine, loud laugh.

he reacts like he’s just won the national championship, instantly lifting his head, his eyes blazing with a triumphant, blinding light. before your brain can register the sudden shift in gravity, he’s shifting his weight, his massive arms scooping under your thighs and lifting you entirely out of the chair as if you weigh nothing more than a volleyball.

you let out a startled gasp as he sits back onto the floor, pulling you securely into his lap so you’re facing him, your legs draped over his hips. the textbook is completely forgotten now, left open on the desk to face the wall by itself.

“much better,” bokuto beams, his face inches from yours, his grin so wide it looks like it hurts. “now you don’t have to look at the boring book. you can just look at me. i’m much more interesting than inflation. look at my face. see? premium content.”

you can’t even argue. you just lean forward, resting your forehead against his, your fingers instantly finding his collarbone to resume their comforting, distracted tapping. one, two, three. one, two, three.

bokuto closes his eyes, a soft, incredibly tender smile replacing his wild grin as he wraps his arms around your back, pulling you so close that you can hear the steady, heavy thudding of his heart beneath your fingertips. it’s fast, matching the exact speed of your restless hands, perfectly in sync with every single twitch and turn of your beautiful, chaotic mind.

n: i actively struggled, but i hope it’s good :3

© showhay — don’t copy, repost, or translate without my permission. do not use/feed my works to AI.