Kuroo is shoved into the corner next to you, with the crushed-velvet pillows you were so afraid to spill coffee on. There had been three of you earlier, you and your art history TA and him, and since the café was a literal sardine box you had found yourself trying to balance minimizing body contact and acting like he had the plague. Your TA had had to leave in a rush, and you’d been secretly a little glad, especially when Kuroo didn’t request that you take her former seat across from him.

You remembered him the first time you met, folding himself into your tiny apartment and looking sheepish when you had looked away from the dingy window above the sink you’d been sketching and asked who he was and why he was in your house. It had turned out that he was your roommate’s boyfriend, had been for about two months, and were they ready yet?

They weren’t, so you invited him to sit on the other chair at the table and wait. You hadn’t expected him to talk to you. You hadn’t expected him to be nice.

When you blurted you have a really striking face, I’d love to draw it during a lull in the conversation where you’d had no other option than to focus on the arrangement of features some people (bad roommates) would call handsome, you hadn’t expected him to ask would you really?

You were a bad roommate, though they didn’t know it, because you hadn’t kept in touch with them after moving out but you called Kuroo at least an hour every day before bed.

And you were a bad friend—to Kuroo, not your ex-roommate, because you’re pretty sure you had loved him from the first moment he’d asked after the perspective of your little window sketch.

“Your hair,” he says, and has to twist his whole torso around to get a good look. He catches a piece of it in between his thumb and forefinger, twiddles it back and forth and peers at it like it’s a specimen in a lab. “You changed it.”

“Hardly,” you say. “I just got a trim.”

“It’s different this time,” he says. “Isn’t it?” You purse your lips and blow across the top of your super-fancy tiny coffee cup, a futile exercise since you already drank half of it.

“I went to someplace new, I guess,” you say, and he lets out a whoop that makes you laugh and forget the rest of your words.

“I knew it,” he’s so smug. “I always know.”

“Yeah,” you bat at him so he drops your hair and it springs back, you can feel it in your scalp. “Who even notices things like that?”

“Me? When it’s you.”

“Oh, stop it.” You think. “What am I allergic to?”

“Peach skins and nickel,” he says immediately. “And when you were little you broke out in hives when you ate a pomegranate but you liked it so much you kept eating it anyway and eventually the reaction went away.”

“Your memory is insane,” you sip your coffee, staring at the rapidly diminishing amount. You can’t afford another one, not on your budget as an art student. Ugh.

“No,” he reiterates. “Only when it’s you.”

It started (really started) after your roommate had broken up with him, when you’d come home in the early morning and found him sitting outside your door, brown eyes red-rimmed and holding a box of his things like it weighed a thousand pounds. Let me get you some water, you’d said, and I’d ask you to come in, but. Ah. Sorry. Do you want my breakfast bowl for tomorrow? You had tried to be kind, even though it was hard. You were tired and you didn’t know what had happened and you still had to live with his ex without them hating you.

A few months had passed—you were no vulture, and had no way to reach out anyway. He had bumped into you on vacation in Paris, grabbed you by the shoulders, and looked at you in a way he never had before. It made everyone else on the busy street disappear.

I wanted to talk to you again. Would that be okay? I still have the picture you made me, somewhere.

Your friendship ripened with the seasons.

“I believe you,” you laugh.

“You don’t!” He runs a hand through his hair, jokingly frustrated, you think. And devastatingly attractive. “You always—like—downplay your importance in my life. Like you think I forget about you when I can’t see you. But I think about you all the time.”

“Kuroo, don’t,” you say, but it’s a mistake, because you always address him formally. Your last defense against him finding out all the boundaries you want to cross. It’s a mile between you, and your hip is still touching his.

“Why not?” He spreads his arms, and knocks over your tiny coffee cup. The rest of it spills out over the table, not even enough to drip off, and neither of you notice. “Why can’t you see that I like you?”

“Because you don’t,” you choke, and you hate getting emotional like this, hate that you hate confrontation. “We’re good friends. I’m not gonna be a rebound.”

“You’re not,” he says. “You won’t be.”

“I believe you,” you say again.

“Stop that,” he groans, looks at you again like he did in the street in Paris. “If you don’t want me, that’s fine, I’m just so bad at not wanting you.”

Kuroo is awful, eyes gleaming in the lamplight and hair oil-black and dressed like he’s old money, like he’s trying to impress you.

“Of course I want you,” you say, hot and still not leaning away from him so you can breathe.

“Good,” he looks a little starstruck, and maybe that’s when you start to believe that he can look at you and tell the truth. “Good. I can draw you up a list, later, when you’re not so fucking close to me and so—”

He tilts your chin with his fingers and kisses you and it’s a word between the both of you, a whole language of touch. The overripe peach falls off its branch and bursts on the ground. The coffee soaks into the discarded cloth napkins.

“You make it hard for me to think,” he says when he pulls back, breathless. “But I can write you an essay, ten pages, twelve point font, with citations, of all the ways I love you to prove it. I swear it.”