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A mere five minutes after Shin, with no explanation, texts (begs) Hiyori to come over to his house, he appears at the front door, knocking on the door with the same flinch-inducing intensity as always. Shin has been sitting with his knees to his chest and his back pressed to the wall, sitting on his phone with 0 thoughts in his head and scrolling through every social media app he’s ever installed, some he doesn’t even remember creating an account for, ever since he sent the text while also obsessively checking that Hiyori didn’t give any new response after his “Yup ! On my way ^^ <3”, because he’s normal like that, so he answers the door in barely a second-long motion of jumping to his feet and swinging the door wide open, hitting it on the door stopper in the process. It’s… fine. His parents aren’t home, anyway. Nobody will know. Except, well…
“Wow, Shin! That was surprisingly violent for you! The poor door… You know, you must’ve hurt its feelings…”
Hiyori’s expression makes it seem like he witnessed Shin murdering and eating, like, seven puppies.
“It’s… a door?”
“Doors have feelings, too!” Hiyori takes a step forward, completely inside of Shin’s personal bubble which he doesn’t have anymore with Hiyori around, but he’s still going to say he does for the sake of this description. Then he turns around, softly caresses the door ( ‘God I wish that were me,’ briefly pops up in Shin’s thoughts), gives it a kiss ( ‘God I wish that were me,’ again, against his will, appears in his thoughts), and closes it. Shin hopes from the bottom of his heart that nobody witnessed that. That would be one hell of a conversation.
“Hiyori-kun, I’m already regretting inviting you over.”
He turns around and pouts at Shin, wrapping his arms around himself. “That’s so meaaaan… Hmph, maybe I shouldn’t have come!” He sighs with a theatrical amount of force behind it. “That’s it!”
Shin raises his eyebrows involuntarily. Jeez, why is he so overly expressive all the time…? He doesn’t mean to, but he’s aware of it and every time can never stop himself. “What’s it?”
“ That’s it!” Hiyori doesn’t explain and turns back to the door, grabbing the handle and very, very slowly turning it. “I’m leaving! Byeeee, Shinnie-winnie-chicken—” he lets out a laugh that he obviously failed to repress— “dinnie!”
“Wh-What the hell is dinnie? ”
He doesn’t respond (which maybe is for the best, because does Shin truly want to know the deep lore of Sou Hiyori?) and opens the door more carefully than Shin did, goes outside, and begins to close it behind him. He closes the door… very slowly… so painstakingly slow… barely one inch closer to being shut… barely each passing second… nowhere near being closed…
Shin watches.
“Oh, come on, Shin!” Hiyori reenters the house and shuts the door (but carefully, because he’d never dare to hurt the door’s feelings), visibly annoyed—but he’s not being serious. Probably not being serious. Maybe he’s being serious? Scratch that, Shin has no idea what’s going on in Hiyori’s head, and he gets surprisingly upset by the littlest of things, so maybe he is, in fact, upset by this joke that he thought they were both in on.
“Reaaaally, Shin?”
Nevermind, he’s not upset.
“Oh, I thought you were leaving? I was just waiting.”
Hiyori grins at him; it has that uncanny quality to it, even though that shouldn’t be conveyed in this situation. Ugh, that’s probably just how he is, but Shin wishes that he would stop being so creepy all the time. But Hiyori doesn’t care what Shin thinks about that, sadly. It’s fine. Shin can deal with it. At least he has a friend.
“No, no, I would never, ever leave you!” For whatever reason, Hiyori sounds excessively serious. “Especially not when you send me an ominous text like that! You shouldn’t just tell me to ‘come over, please’; that’s so worrying! I was expecting you to find you collapsed on the floor or something.”
Shin rolls his eyes—but he’s not actually annoyed or mad at Hiyori. He can’t find it in him to be when he’s acting silly and nice like this. “My bad. Could’ve just asked me, though.”
“Nope, no time for that! Had to be there right away, or else, who knows what could’ve happened?”
“Usually, phones have a function for calling people.”
Hiyori pouts, because he doesn’t have an argument for this one. Haha. Shin has won for once! Finally, the upper ground! To be the king—
“Your mom.”
…
“I cannot stand you,” Shin lies, but they both know the truth written in the subtext.
Hiyori rests his legs over Shin’s thighs as he spreads his entire body across the other 75% of the couch that Shin has been squeezed out of, trapping him… Yes, literally trapping him. Shin is incapable of moving.
“Soooo, what’s going on? You don’t tell me to come over here very often, instead of coming to my house, so, y’know, I’m guessing that something must be wrong.”
“I mean, I kinda have parents, so that’s why I don’t ask you to come over when I know I could go to your house instead and know that nobody’s gonna bother us…”
Hiyori hums. “Are you avoiding my question?”
“Maybe.” Shin keeps his gaze fixed on the blank TV in front of them. This conversation feels extra awkward without any background noise. You can usually hear some air conditioner or heater or whatever that thing is humming in the background at Hiyori’s house, but it’s quiet here. “Do I have to tell you?”
Shin wanted to say something else after that first sentence, but Hiyori had to stop him, of course. “Yup! Pleaaaase, I’m worrieeeed.”
He sighs. Is he really worried? Well… Yeah, Hiyori most likely is. Shin is probably overthinking it and trying to convince himself that “nobody cares about me”, as per usual. “Fine.”
Hiyori doesn’t let there be any silence. “So?”
“Hey, let me think. Um…”
By think, Shin means: figure out what he can and can’t tell Hiyori. There’s a lot of things bothering him. But he needs to pick and choose what to tell him, because… Because something. Because… erm… Some reason. He has to be careful, because, um, because…
Shin purses his lips together like some secrets will spill out from them if he leaves them too close to being opened.
There are many unnamed things bothering him. He can say that, right?
“It’s not only one thing, I guess. It’s… There are…” Why does it feel like he’s battling against his own mouth trying to get any of this out? “…multiple things bothering me.”
“Mmm, that makes sense!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Hiyori looks unnaturally pleased with what Shin’s saying.
“What do you mean it makes sense?”
“Hmm…” Hiyori shifts—not that Shin’s looking or anything, no, he feels him moving. “Your parents are away, first of all. I know you aren’t extremely attached to them, but that can be upsetting. Finals are coming up, too. High school, in general, is always stressful. Plus… ahaha. Well.”
He stops speaking. Shin’s pretty sure that, normally, people keep explaining after saying “plus”. Trying to read his expression for any hint of an explanation, he looks over at him; of course, he doesn’t gather much of anything from it.
‘What’s going on inside his head…?’
“Umm, H-Hiyori-kun?” Shin’s voice comes out more fragile than he wanted it to. Hiyori blinks as if flinching and looks over at Shin. He smiles in the Sou Hiyori classic cat-hunting-mouse way.
“Hiya! Sorry, I got lost in thought for a moment. What were we… Oh, yeah!”
Shin waits for Hiyori to keep talking, but he doesn’t. This conversation is not going very well. “Erm. What were you going to say earlier?”
Hiyori’s gaze is burning holes through his skin and into his organs or something like that again. Shin has the urge to curl up in a ball but as mentioned earlier, he can’t move his legs.
“Am I a stressor in your life?”
The pressure of Hiyori on him weighs heavier. “What?”
“Shin, it’s not that hard of a question. Am I a stressor in your life?”
His voice shifted to being deathly serious. Shin hates it when he does this. He stares at the floor, because looking at the TV is too close to looking at Hiyori. But he’s in the corner of his eye.
He’ll know if Shin lies. He always does. “In what way?”
“Well, do I make you stressed? In a bad way, to be specific?”
Shin keeps dancing around the question, beating around the bush until he’s growing dizzy from it. “Doesn’t anyone? Doesn’t—doesn’t anything, really? It’d be kinda weird if you never did.”
“Hm.”
Welp, Hiyori does not sound particularly happy with that answer! Not that Shin was expecting him to be very happy with it in the first place… He’s just trying to get out of this topic of conversation. This is the exact thing he’s been anxious about, how great.
“Can we change the subject?”
“Hmmm,” Hiyori says but in a way that makes it clear he’s not thinking about it, “no.”
If only Shin could run and hide from Hiyori. Deep down, he knows he never would do that because he’s a coward, but he can wish, can’t he? “Why?”
“Because I’ve been wondering. Mmm, maybe not wondering if I know the answer.”
His heart jumps to his throat and chokes him momentarily before dropping back down and deciding to start pounding in approximately five different places at once. “If you know the answer?”
“Of course I know. Ahaha, have you seen your face around me?”
Shin can’t find any words to respond with. He keeps looking at the floor, but regardless Hiyori’s there. The single thing left in his mind is him desperately trying to keep himself from freaking out too badly. That’d be unbelievably embarrassing.
“Truly intriguing. You look at me so fearfully and yet with so much admiration and, dare I say it, love .”
The word from Hiyori’s tongue, brutally, makes Shin’s face burn red. Fuck.
“So interesting. And, so, why would you ask me to come over if I’m making you more stressed?”
Some highly strained words respond to Hiyori from Shin’s mouth: “Because I like you.”
He means it.
“Oh? Fun choice of words there. You like me? Which way?”
“Crushes are—stressful—”
SHIT.
The world doesn’t stop and go into a movie-esque slow motion where Shin goes into a detailed internal monologue about his earth-shaking life-altering mind-bending crush on Hiyori and then Hiyori kisses him in the middle of it like he was expecting it to when that stupid confession spilled out. Instead, Hiyori laughs.
“ Oh? ”
“I—uh, no, no, um, I—umm, I never. I never said anything. Um. Nevermind. Um. Fuck. Um.”
This is how Shin is going to die. He’s going to go into cardiac arrest on this couch at 7:32PM with Hiyori half on top of him, and his cause of death is going to be because he accidentally (maybe not so accidentally) admitted to him that he has a crush on him. This is going to be on his gravestone. Shin Tsukimi, died of—
“Amazing!”
AMAZING? NO, no, no , nothing about this is even slightly amazing! Shin is going to DIE, he is going to DIE right now he is not going to live and Hiyori is going to desecrate his grave or something out of sheer disgust—
“You have a crush on me?”
“Um.”
Holy shit , say no, Shin!! NO! That’s all you have to do! Say no!!
“N-No???”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. THAT IS NOT GOING TO WORK!! That is not going to work.
“Oh, well, okay, then!”
‘Sorry, what?’
“Aww, that’s disappointing… And I thought my feelings were reciprocated… Such a shame…” He sniffles. He is absolutely messing with Shin, but…
Shin is so weak. “W-Wait, n-no… A-Are you serious?”
Hiyori smiles at him. He then adjusts his position to be sitting more like a normal person on the couch, aka not on top of Shin, and grabs his face so Shin is looking him directly in the eye. And he kisses him, because of course he does, right, guys? Clearly? So normal?
‘What… the… fuck…?’
Neither of them are any good at it. It doesn’t last very long, and Shin doesn’t get to process how he’s feeling, because all the nerves in his brain stop functioning at once or something, and now he’s staring at Hiyori, eyes wide, the most confused expression he’s ever had in his entire life on his face.
Hiyori doesn’t even move any further away from him. Their noses are almost touching. It’s a bit uncomfortable, especially when Hiyori’s looking at him like that. Cat-hunting-mouse.
A giggle.
“I love you too, Shin!”