#lacett

Shougo doesn’t come the day he’s supposed to, but Taiga only half-expects him to. He’s never been particularly punctual and he always likes to make people wait; even if he was there he’d probably be an hour or two behind Taiga, popping his head out of the waves when the angle of the sun against the water would be too low for Taiga to tell if it’s him or just an illusion, just another oddly-shaped glare.

But he doesn’t come even then, and Taiga paddles back to shore alone. His stomach clenches; he checks the date on his phone and it’s right. It’s been exactly a year; there’s no way he remembered that date wrong, not when he’d been waiting for it almost since the day they’d decided on it. It’s been a year since he’d seen Shougo, now coming up on a year and a day, three hundred and sixty six days since they’d last spoken, touched, kissed.

And maybe it is bad luck for humans and merfolk to get tangled up; maybe it always ends badly. But Taiga’s not giving up hope that it’s ending between the two of them just yet.

*

The next day’s sun sinks in the sky like bathwater running down the drain. Shougo still hasn’t shown up, and Taiga’s beginning to wonder if he will at all. What if he doesn’t? What if something horrible has happened? What if he’d gotten caught in the middle of some mertribe political spat or tangled in a fishing net or trapped under an iceberg? What if he just doesn’t want to see Taiga, decided it’s not worth it to say a proper goodbye? (And he would, too; Shougo leaves things messy behind him, currents chopping and slicing against each other until the energy collapses on itself.)

Maybe he just should have surfed today; he’d missed some nice waves and they would have been a distraction, better than lying on his board all day and wondering, trying to peer into the murky green water for a telltale flash of a silver fin.

He closes his eyes, resting his chin against the surfboard. The last time he’d seen Shougo might have been the last ever—he’d let his eyes cling to Shougo’s bare back as he’d waded into the waves, walking awkwardly as he always did in human form (he’d never gotten fully used to having legs, almost always reflexively kept them clamped together) and then swimming the rest of the way; his black hair had slowly turned to silver and he’d arched his back as he’d transformed the rest of the way. And then he was gone; he resurfaced briefly, the length of his body and the shine of his silver fin alight in the air like a kite for just a second. And Taiga had tried to ignore the tightening in his chest, the uncertainty of whether they truly would meet again, the way his hands had felt entwined in Shougo’s, the rough salty taste of Shougo’s mouth.

The sun is almost touching the horizon when Taiga leaves. The waves are subsiding; there’s one he can catch and he does but it doesn’t feel all that good. It feels lonely, the same way his truck does when he drives home on the highway, headlights blazing on the empty road ahead.

*

He resolves to go out the next day just to surf, just to get a feel for the waves and the tides, just to let them crush him or push him ahead, to stop thinking about Shougo and let him be. He gets to the beach early enough for it to be basically empty, paddles out, and tries to get his body used to the water. When he’s stopped shivering he pulls himself back up onto his board, sweeps his hair from his eyes. And then the board dips beside him; he squints into the morning sun and then almost falls off. Shougo’s perched like a smug board on the other edge, smirking.

“Took you long enough,” he says, and he has no right.

And Taiga should be mad but he’s not; he’s just relieved that Shougo’s alive and okay and here, sitting on his board and talking to him, and they’ve wasted too much goddamn time already. He reaches for Shougo, pulls him forward, puts his hands on that Shougo’s smooth, slippery skin and his lips on Shougo’s. He still tastes th same, salty and fishy and a little bit bitter and burnt and so very familiar.

“You absolute ass,” he says, in the bare space he can manage between kisses.

Shougo bites his lip, tangles his fingers in Taiga’s wet hair until it’s up against the webbing in his fingers, as if he wants to keep this up until their mouths are swollen like waves far off against the horizon, reaching up to touch the sky.

“You love it, though,” Shougo says when he finally does take his lips away, grey eyes sparkling just like the scales on his fins.

“Not really,” says Taiga.

Shougo swats his thigh with his tailfin; Taiga raises an eyebrow. He traces over Shougo’s hip with his thumb; his other hand is still on the back of Shougo’s neck. They’re both still breathing hard, faces only inches away from each other, and slowly the color of Shougo’s cheeks begins to darken. Oh. He’d most definitely missed this, the way he could just look at Shougo and get him all flustered, the way Shougo’s fingers are curling around his hair, the way he’s trying to look down or away or somewhere. This part Taiga does love. (But he won’t tell Shougo right now; he doesn’t want him to get a swelled head.)

“I missed you.”

That does it; Shougo full-on blushes, a coral reef blossoming across his face. He pulls Taiga’s face closer, kisses him again to avoid it, desperate and sloppy this time. Taiga can feel Shougo’s heart beating erratically against his skin, the rough force of his body spinning in all directions like a wave that broke too soon. His breath fails him; he drops his forehead to Taiga’s shoulder and hides his face.