miracle drug

by prozac

Summary:

Riku has a lot of problems. Yushi is the solution to some of them.

Notes:

 

Content warning: alcohol abuse and all that it implies, discussions of unsafe sex and the potential consequences, general mental health issues, internalized homophobia and negative thoughts about being "feminine" in sexual situations.
 
Characters are aged up by around three years as of the posting date. Riku is twenty-five.

This fic wouldn't exist without these two songs. Give 'em a listen if you'd like.

Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Smiths
Junie - Searows

 

 

miracle drug • /ˈmɪr.ə.kəl ˌdrʌɡ/
noun

1. any medicine, especially a new one, that is remarkably effective
2. a drug that cures a disease that was thought impossible to cure

 

 

The thing about Yushi is that he’s too kind for his own good. Riku’s always thought so. He thought it from the moment they moved in together two years ago, when Riku brought the massive coffee table from his old apartment and Yushi looked at his own perfectly fine, smaller coffee table, and offered to get rid of it. So they bundled Yushi’s coffee table into the back of Sion’s car and dropped it off at a donation center, and the whole time Riku felt sickeningly guilty—for taking up space, for receiving unneeded kindness from a near-stranger—but he never said anything. He never said no, it’s fine, I’ll donate mine instead.

That’s the thing about Riku, then. If Yushi is kind then Riku is greedy. If he’s given an inch he’ll take a mile. Yushi said they could both use half of the fridge, but by the end of their first month of cohabitating Riku was using two thirds of it.

The shower curtain is blue because Riku wanted it to be. The welcome mat by the front door is the thin, worn one Riku bought when he first got his own place. The throw pillows on the couch are large and fluffy instead of small and neat, the way Yushi prefers his home decor. When Yushi buys a six pack of beer to drink after work—or in Riku’s case, before his night shifts at the bar—Riku drinks five of them. Yushi’s mother gifts him a set of sweaters. Riku takes a look at them, rubbing the fabric between his fingers, and Yushi insists they’d look better on Riku. And Riku never says no. He never denies Yushi’s kindness, no matter if it feels suffocating. When Yushi orders Riku’s favorite foods, Riku eats them. When Yushi buys a new laptop he gives Riku his old one. It’s covered in stickers—the idol groups Yushi likes, cartoon decals of cats, a single bright yellow dandelion—but Riku takes it anyways.

He’s indebted to Yushi for more than the physical things he gives away without blinking. When Riku was first touring the Adachi apartment, Yushi quietly pointing to the appliances and the in-unit washing machine and the balcony with his clothes hanging on a drying rack, he’d looked at Riku seriously for a moment and clenched his jaw.

“You should know I’m gay,” Yushi said. “If that bothers you, we shouldn’t live together.”

It didn’t bother Riku, of course. He said as much and moved in a week later. It took him a good year to build up the courage to tell Yushi his truth, half-slurred with vodka on his breath after a shitty shift at the bar. Yushi was Riku’s second gay friend, but he was the first person Riku came out to. He responded with kindness, of course. He responded by nodding, by wiping Riku’s tears with the calloused tip of his thumb, by pouring him another shot and listening to Riku babble until the sun came up. He never complained about having work in the morning. He never told Riku to go to sleep. He never said, why didn’t you tell me when you first moved in? Yushi was patient and kind back then like he’s patient and kind now. He came into Riku’s bedroom two days later and gave him a rainbow sticker for his laptop.

Yushi was the first person Riku came out to. He was the second person, after Daeyoung, to know about Riku’s problems with sex. It’s not like Riku planned to tell him. He rarely plans to say anything to Yushi. It’s just that they live together, and Yushi sits with Riku while he drinks even if he has better things to do, and he even listens to Riku’s stupid complaints about work with amused smiles and sympathetic hums. On rare occasions he tells his own work horror stories in return, his soft voice filled with laughter as he talks about his stupid boss who wouldn’t let employees take off their suit jackets even in the middle of summer.

So Riku’s drinking—he’s been drinking for a few hours—when he looks at Yushi, the soft fall of his hair over his forehead, the way he smiles at his phone, and asks, “Do you let guys touch you?”

Yushi puts his phone down and raises his eyebrows. “Of course I do.”

“Right,” Riku says. Stupid. Of course he does. Yushi’s gay and handsome and well-adjusted. It’s Riku who has a mess in his ribcage that flinches from anything warm.

“Right,” Yushi echoes, and then cocks his head. “You don’t?”

Riku takes a fat swig of beer and winces as it goes down. “I mean, I do. Just not—like that.”

What Riku means—what he won’t say—is that he moved to Tokyo when he was twenty, only seven months after he realized he was gay, and the city and its people seemed cold and scary and unfamiliar. The guys on the apps weren’t always kind. He went to clubs and made out with strangers, choked on their tongues, and never let them into his home. He’s not a virgin, because he’s gay and in his twenties and constantly horny, but he’s never—he’s never done anything intimate. He fucks guys from behind, always at their places, guys who aren’t the type to ask for anything, and he cums in them and leaves.

Some of them want him to stay. Some of them text him for days afterwards, convinced they see something in him worth keeping, and Riku blocks them. When he sees them again at clubs he ducks out into the street and goes home. Ashamed. Embarrassed by his own behavior and afraid that they might be mad at him. Or worse, that they might want to fuck again.

Of course Yushi isn’t like that. He’s had a few boyfriends during the two years they’ve lived together. Kind guys, funny guys, guys with light stubble on their chins and office jobs just like Yushi. Yushi doesn’t have a problem with staying. He doesn’t have a problem with softness. He doesn’t have a problem with giving. Riku knew that from the first day they met: you should know I’m gay. He knew from the day they moved in together, with the coffee table and the welcome mat. He’s always known.

“Not like that?” Yushi asks, curious but not imposing, and Riku closes his eyes and leans back on the couch. “What do you mean?”

“I just mean I’m not very nice,” Riku says, staring down at his hands. “And they’re not nice to me.”

When he spilled his guts to Daeyoung about this some months ago, Daeyoung looked at him with worry. Maybe he thought something bad had happened to Riku, something that made him scared and cold and closed off. But nothing bad has happened to Riku, not in the way someone would think—he’s been like this for years. For his whole adult life, at least. He realized he was gay some ten years after he had his first crush on a boy, because he hadn’t allowed himself to look the truth in the eye. Because it scared him. Because he knew his mom would be sad. She still would be, if she knew.

Yushi’s parents know he’s gay. He told them when he was fifteen.

“Riku,” Yushi says, not with worry but with gentleness, “you deserve kindness.”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? Riku’s not sure he does. What does it mean, to deserve softness? Who’s worthy and who isn’t? Yushi’s worthy, obviously. Sion and Daeyoung are, with their patience and laughter. Of course Sakuya and Ryo are. They’re still so vulnerable.

“Yeah,” Riku says. His throat tastes like alcohol. He probably smells toxic. Yushi’s just sitting there, rubbing his thumb over the rim of his beer can, looking at Riku inscrutably.

“Is there a guy you like?” Yushi asks. “Anyone you trust? It can be—hard, I guess. To trust someone enough to let them touch you.”

That’s Yushi, alright. Understanding what Riku means without Riku having to spell it out. To let them close to you.

“No,” Riku says. “I haven’t had a crush since I was, like, seventeen.”

“Hm,” Yushi says. He sets his beer down on Riku’s giant, ugly coffee table and tucks his hands under his thighs. “I could, if you wanted.”

“You could—?”

“Touch you,” Yushi says. “I could touch you the way you want to be touched.”

Riku opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again and says, “I’m not—you don’t have to do that. I’m not asking you to do that.” Panic, then, whirling sharply in his gut. “I wouldn't ask that of you, Yushi, you know that—”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Yushi says, narrowing his eyes. “I’m offering.”

Riku tries to pour himself a shot. His hands are shaking. His skin feels tight on his body, like it’s compressing him into a square centimeter of matter. A black hole. Desperate and heavier than god. “You have a boyfriend.”

“Not anymore,” Yushi says. He reaches out and plucks the bottle from Riku’s hands. He pours the shot smoothly and cleanly, and Riku takes it with a weak smile. “We broke up a couple weeks ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn't a big deal. We weren’t serious.”

Riku met Yushi’s last boyfriend. He walked out of his bedroom one morning to see the guy standing shirtless in front of the refrigerator. It’s funny. Yushi’s so strange and isolated, sometimes—spending days in his room playing video games, or traveling alone to Fukuoka on a whim—but he’s very well liked. He’s attractive enough and kind enough to get any guy he wants.

Riku knocks back the shot. The thought of Yushi’s hands on his body makes him drowsy and sort of dizzy. Yushi is on his phone again, probably texting Sion, and he seems entirely relaxed. Not like Riku would be if he just propositioned his roommate. But the truth is, well—Riku does trust Yushi. He trusts him about as much as it’s possible for him to trust anyone. It’s not like it would be a hardship to fuck him. Yushi’s very good looking. He has a pretty smile and pretty hands and pretty eyes. He touches softly. He slings his arm around Riku’s shoulders when he’s drunk. He pats his lap when Riku’s tired, and Riku will curl up on the couch with his head on Yushi’s thighs.

It wouldn’t hurt to try. Yushi’s probably the only person in the world who Riku could reject—stop, this isn’t working—and would still be fine to live together afterwards. Yushi’s kind. He’d just nod and shrug and tell Riku to take a shower and go to sleep.

Yushi puts down his phone and frowns slightly. “You don’t have to—”

“Sure,” Riku interrupts him. “Yeah, sure.”

Yushi’s eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Riku says. He reaches out and grabs Yushi’s hand. Yushi’s skin is slightly sweaty. “I think—yeah. I mean, I trust you.”

“Oh,” Yushi says, squeezing his hand. “That’s—I’m glad.”

“Should we—”

“Not right now,” Yushi says, shaking his head. “You’re too drunk.”

Riku doesn’t grit his teeth and say I’m not fucking fragile. It’s a close thing. It almost slips out.

“And I need to mentally prepare,” Yushi says, which is so Yushi that Riku laughs out loud.

“Sure, yeah. Okay. But it should be—”

“Soon,” Yushi finishes. “So you don’t have time to get anxious.”

Riku blinks his alcohol-heavy eyelids and rubs his thumb over the back of Yushi’s hand. He thinks, not for the first time, how strange it is that Yushi hasn’t found a long term partner. He’s so solid and steady and clever. His mouth is pink and pretty. His body is slim and strong.

“Sounds good,” Riku says, even though he can barely comprehend what he’s agreed to. “So. That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Yushi says, and smiles. “You should shower and sleep.”

“I will,” Riku says. He looks at Yushi’s lips. “Would you kiss me?”

Yushi huffs a laugh. “Sure. If that’s what you want.”

Riku doesn’t know if he wants it. Want is a strong word. All he knows is that if Yushi kisses him, and if he doesn’t shatter into a million pieces of skin and flesh, he’ll feel less terrified about the whole thing. Besides, he trusts Yushi. He trusts that Yushi won’t try to take something from him. Won’t let Riku slide into hazy, drunken darkness.

Yushi lifts their intertwined hands and looks at Riku while he presses his warm mouth to Riku’s wrist. His eyes are gentle. “There you go.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Riku says. Humiliatingly, he sounds like he’s complaining.

“I know,” Yushi says softly. “Tomorrow. If you don’t change your mind tomorrow, I’ll kiss you.”

“Fine,” Riku says. There’s a smile on his lips that must match the one on Yushi’s face. “Yeah, that’s—fine.”

Yushi shakes his head and lets go of Riku’s hand. “Shower. Bed.”

“Shower, bed,” Riku responds. “Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“I just—thank you.”

Yushi shakes his head and looks down at his phone. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Riku does, in fact, need to thank him. He needs to get on his knees and tell Yushi he’s the only person who’s never denied Riku anything. He needs to throw out his coffee table. He needs to buy his own fridge so he stops taking up Yushi’s shelf space. He needs to—he needs to scrape the skin off his body, pile it in Yushi’s lap, and wait for Yushi to put him back together.

What a strange thought. Yushi’s right; Riku is drunk.

“Then I won’t thank you,” Riku says, draining the last of his beer, and goes to take a shower.

 

 

 

 

He has work the next day, starting from six in the evening and lasting until midnight. The early crowd at the bar is mostly rough-looking alcoholics who spend handsomely and only make conversation when they’re grumbling at someone over the phone. Not that Riku judges them. He also starts drinking the moment he gets in to work—but then again, so do most of the bartenders.

Today he’s working with Takahiro, so it could be worse. He’s no Sion, not as adept at charming the customers and making Riku laugh, but he knows enough about baseball to save Riku from drunk students insistent on discussing Ohtani and Yamamoto and the Dodgers.

The old man at the end of the bar orders his fifth whiskey tonic in two hours. Riku will probably have to call him a taxi. He makes a second drink for good measure and chugs it in the back room during his ten minute break while one of the new hires squints at him worriedly.

Look, it’s not like Riku’s unaware he drinks a lot. It’s just that he works at a bar, and when he first moved to Tokyo everything was large and strange. He needed something to loosen his joints and his mouth. He wanted to fuck guys and he certainly couldn’t do it sober. Besides, when Sion’s here he drinks just as much, and sometimes they stumble through Shinjuku and towards Ni-chome to drink even more.

As the hours drag onwards, Riku brings out a platter of snacks for a group of college students and then watches them joke and flirt with each other from his place behind the bar. It makes his chest ache. He was never going to go to college—his eldest sister did, but she was an exception to the rule—and sometimes he wonders how his life would be different if he did. If he’d be behind a desk, like Yushi, instead of behind a bar. If he’d be happier with the easy structure and regular paycheck, or if he’d be depressed.

He’ll never know. That’s the problem, really. Not that he didn’t go to college, or that he’ll probably be stuck working thankless food service jobs for the rest of his life—the problem is that he’ll never get to change his mind. He’s twenty-five and his future is carved in stone. He could’ve stayed behind in Fukui, worked at familiar cafes serving familiar people, but then he couldn’t be—well. He couldn’t be gay.

That’s how it is. His life is decided for him twofold, once because he only has a high school diploma and twice because he likes men instead of women. And he could, if he was filial and perfect, marry a woman and have a kid and a dog and a small home, but he’s not filial and perfect. He’s greedy. He's always been greedy. He just wishes—

Yushi talked about it once, on a rare occasion when he was just as drunk as Riku. He rubbed his pretty hands over his pretty face and said he wished he could have kids. Said he wanted more than anything to start a family, and how it was the one thing he hated about himself—that he couldn’t raise a child. He didn't hate that he was gay, or that his mother cried when he told her, or that his coworkers would look at him sideways if they knew who he loved. No, Yushi hated that he couldn’t have children. Hated it about himself, like it was a personal failing, like he was letting himself down more than anyone else. Riku couldn’t relate. The things he doesn’t like about himself are much larger. Much more immediate. They loom in the corners of his vision when he tries to sleep. They make him fuck guys without looking at their faces, with the lights dimmed and whiskey in his veins.

Riku drags a towel over the bar and smiles at a lady who says something nice to him about his hair. He pretends to be bashful until she turns her head away, and then the smile slides off his face. Right. Yushi. Yushi, who said I’ll touch you how you want to be touched. Who Riku said yes to. Barely any hesitation. He must’ve seemed desperate or crazy or both. Asking Yushi to kiss him—as though Riku really wanted it, which he doesn’t. He hasn’t looked at a man as more than a fuck since he was a teenager, and back then he didn’t even know he liked men. It’s like when he realized he was gay all the feelings of romance and pure desire crawled into a hole and buried themselves six feet deep. Inaccessible. Too dangerous to touch.

It’s ten at night. Yushi’s probably playing video games in his bedroom or watching some shitty drama on the television. Maybe he’s texting the groupchat—more likely he’s politely reacting to Ryo and Daeyoung’s memes without saying anything of substance. If Riku checked his phone he’d probably see a dozen Yushi reacted to… notifications. That’s Yushi. His face is always turned towards the sun.

“Table two needs water,” Takahiro says, darting behind the bar. Riku nods and grabs a pitcher from the fridge. There’s a girl at table two who smiles at him like he’s beautiful and he smiles back. It’s no skin off his teeth to play the part of someone he’s not. In many ways it’s what he gets paid for. He’s a silent companion to the alcoholics at the bar, a friendly classmate to the college students, an object of affection for the salarywomen who stop by only on the days he’s working—as Sion informs him they do.

“You could be a celebrity,” one of the women says, smiling so broadly that Riku could count her teeth, and Riku smiles back.

“Oh no, I couldn’t. You’re too kind. Would you like more beer?”

They always want more beer if it’s Riku who’s asking. He crouches behind the bar, takes a shot of something clear and strong, and brings an extra beer to their table for good measure. It’s an apology. For what, he’s not sure. Maybe for the fact he’ll never fuck her. Maybe because he acts like she has a chance.

He clocks out at half-past midnight and considers finding a club to squeeze into. He thinks about pushing his tired, sweaty body between men who’d let him do anything to them. He thinks of Yushi watching a drama and picking chips from a bag with his thumb and forefinger, and hails a taxi instead.

 

 

 

 

Riku gets home, closes the door behind him, and says, “I still want you to kiss me.”

“Hello,” Yushi says mildly, looking up from the couch. “Brush your teeth first.”

Riku chokes on a surprised laugh. He’s not sure what he was expecting. Obviously Yushi wasn’t going to change his mind—he means what he says, and he keeps all his promises—but Riku didn’t expect it to be so easy. Physical intimacy is a game of cat and mouse. It’s a game Riku knows well, even if he isn’t very good at it.

“We don’t have to,” Yushi says, pausing the TV and looking up at Riku from under his eyelashes. “You know that.”

“Yeah, I know,” Riku says. He hangs his jacket on the back of the door and shakes his head. “I’ll—yeah. I’ll brush my teeth.”

He’s not a fucking virgin. He’s kissed too many guys to count, drunk in one club or another, or in dark alleys next to overstuffed dumpsters, or in stranger’s apartments. There’s nothing to be nervous about. He brushes his teeth and stares at his face in the mirror. He’s mildly tipsy, still coming down from his shift, but Yushi can’t expect him to be sober for this. Because, like, Riku’s kissed people, but he’s never spent a taxi ride thinking about it beforehand. He’s never thought about how their chapstick will taste, and if Yushi’s hands will be cold from the glass of ice water he nurses while watching TV, or if his hands will be sweaty and warm. Usually Riku just screws his eyes shut and hopes the guy knows how to use his tongue. Hopes the guy isn’t too wasted to get hard.

He splashes water on his face and combs through his hair with his fingers. It’s getting long, curling around his ears and tickling the top of his spine, but whenever he mentions needing a haircut Yushi frowns and shakes his head. He likes it long, he says, and so Riku keeps it long, and hopes Yushi will compliment him more often.

Yushi doesn’t. He tells Riku to keep his hair long and nothing else, like it’s the only thing about Riku he notices, and maybe it is. It would make sense. Riku knows how to get what he wants from guys who are just as fucked up as he is—literally and figuratively—but he took one look at Yushi, the first day they met, and knew it wouldn’t be so easy. Yushi’s employee badge on the table by the door, an ironing board set out by the balcony, the way he walked softly, his steps lighter than air.

Riku rubs his temples, grits his teeth, and exits the bathroom. Yushi’s watching his show again, his glass of ice water held at a dangerous angle against his chest. Any sharp movement and it’ll spill all over his shirt. Good thing Yushi moves thoughtfully. Languidly. He looks over his shoulder at Riku and smiles faintly, just a quirk of his lips, and Riku exhales.

“Come sit down,” Yushi says, so Riku does. Sits down on the couch and pulls his knees to his chest. There’s a good half meter of space between his shoulder and Yushi’s. It’s the same way he spends most nights, when Yushi gets home from work at a reasonable hour and decides to stay up late. His blinking phone tells him it’s one in the morning. His chest tells him to change his mind. To take it all back. What’ll he gain from kissing Yushi? Nothing, really, besides a kiss from Yushi. It’ll be nice but it won’t change anything. Riku will still be rough edges and blacked-out nights and sex that leaves him empty. If anything—and Riku looks over at Yushi, at his eyelashes and the slight space between his parted lips—if anything, Riku will steal a piece of Yushi’s kindness. He’ll make Yushi a bit less gentle.

“I don’t think,” Riku tries, “I don’t think—we shouldn’t do this.”

Yushi looks at him impassively and sets his ice water down on the coffee table. “That’s fine.”

Riku swallows. “Okay.” The jittery feeling in his chest doesn’t fade. He’s still tightly wound and slightly woozy. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s just not a good idea.”

“Whatever you want,” Yushi says, and then hums. “You want to watch this show with me? It’s about—”

Yushi pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and tucks it around his body while he talks. He looks soft and beautiful—like he always does—and Riku, not for the first time, imagines taking Yushi between his hands and crushing him. Like biting down on a blackberry, all that sweet juice bursting on his tongue, dripping slightly bitter down the back of his throat. He thinks about touching the shiny skin at the tip of Yushi’s nose. Sometimes, when Riku meets Yushi’s newest boyfriend, he looks at the guy’s hands for evidence of carnage. To see if they’ve reached inside Yushi and pulled out all the goodness inside of him, thrown it on the floor, destroyed it with lust or greed. Sometimes when Yushi’s cooking and oil splatters onto his skin, Riku watches him wince slightly and worries that Yushi will fade into nothing.

Riku often hurts the guys he fucks. He doesn’t mean to, but he does, and he’s not cruel enough to lie to himself about it. He only kisses them in the dark, in public places, and in private he fucks them hard and fast and never says anything kind. It never crosses his mind to say anything kind. Once he’s charmed his way into a guy’s pants there’s no reason to keep up the sticky sweet act. And if anyone—if anyone could be bruised, could be irreparably scarred, it would be Yushi.

Riku wanted to kiss Yushi last night. How strange. He’d wanted to kiss Yushi when he came home fifteen minutes ago. He wants—Yushi’s still talking about the show paused on the television, his voice pitching louder in excitement as he taps his fingers on his knees, the throw blanket pulled tightly around his chest.

“I changed my mind,” Riku interrupts. “I actually want—can you—?”

Yushi goes quiet. There’s a twinkle in his eyes, left over from talking about his TV show, but it fades away as he blinks. “Riku.”

“I know,” Riku says, digging his fingers into his thighs. “I’m sorry, I’m just—I don’t know. Overthinking.”

“Then stop,” Yushi says, like it’s that easy, and reaches over to pull Riku against his side. His fingers find the unruly hair at the nape of Riku’s neck and Riku—he looks at Yushi’s nose, at his cheeks, at his jaw. Anywhere but his mouth and his eyes. The shaky feeling under his skin fades in the places where Yushi’s body is touching his. Their pressed-together thighs. The blanket scratching against his arms. They do this all the time when they’re drunk—or when Riku’s drunk—but there’s never a plan. An expectation.

Riku opens his mouth to change his mind for the millionth time—to duck away from Yushi’s body, to run into his room and hide until he’s fully sober, to fling himself off the balcony—but Yushi hums and fits a slightly cold hand under Riku’s chin, and Riku’s mind goes oddly quiet.

“Hey,” Yushi says. Riku looks into his eyes—a magnetic force—and almost recoils at what he sees. Warmth and nothing else.

“Hey,” Riku whispers. The hand on his chin moves to his jaw, and he shudders. The trembling in his body surges and focuses on the tips of Yushi’s fingers, where they’re lightly massaging the hinge of his jaw. There’s a heady, inexplicable sensation in his mind. Like he’s floating. Like the golden suggestion of evening light, steaming through the windows of the dive bar, painting yellow slats onto the beer-stained wood. Like a small animal climbing into a hole for the winter, taking one last look at the real world—at the greens and blues of life—before falling asleep under layers of mulch.

Riku sighs, unsteady, and leans forward to press his forehead to Yushi’s shoulder. He screws his eyes shut and feels his heart beating rabbit-quick against his ribcage.

“Hey,” Yushi says again. His hand, when it tilts Riku’s face back up, is very firm. His breath ghosts across Riku’s cheek, sunlight-warm, and Riku inhales shallowly. His lungs are half empty. His eyes, when he opens them, are too close to make out anything solid on Yushi’s face.

“Just do it,” Riku says. He’s trying for stern but it comes off vaguely pathetic, and his vision is dancing with gray spots, and Yushi’s hand on his jaw is—tight. It anchors him halfway in the air. It forbids him from running away.

“Okay,” Yushi says, and does.

Yushi’s mouth is very gentle. His lips press against Riku’s for less than three seconds, like a barely-there wisp of air, and it’s nice. Of course there are no fireworks or breaking objects—Riku’s kissed and been kissed before, and he knows how it goes—but there is a strange settling under his skin. A quietude. It descends over his body, swaddles him, lifts him slightly out of himself. When Yushi pulls back Riku frowns and realizes he wants more, which is also strange so he curls a hand around the back of Yushi’s neck and doesn’t—he wants to drag Yushi in, to make him move, but he doesn’t think Yushi would like that very much.

“You can keep going,” Riku murmurs, feeling Yushi massaging again at the hinge of his jaw, and hums when Yushi closes the gap.

It’s oddly effortless to kiss Yushi; Riku feels like he can see into the future. He knows before it happens that Yushi will thread his fingers through Riku’s hair and deepen the kiss, licking firmly into his mouth and breathing sharply through his nose. He knows that when Yushi’s tongue slides against his he’ll feel a tight knot of heat in his stomach, and that he’ll have to resist the urge to push Yushi into the couch and climb on top of him. He knows that Yushi will grin against his jaw when Riku parts his lips and swallows a moan. It comes out sideways, a breathy sound, but it’s unmistakable for what it is. Riku covers his eyes with his hands as Yushi nibbles gently at his neck, humiliated by the involuntary noise, and he can hear Yushi laughing at him.

“Why are you hiding?” Yushi says.

“I’m not,” Riku lies, and grinds his teeth together as Yushi starts to suck ruthlessly at his neck. “You—I have work—”

“I have concealer,” Yushi says, and it really—it does feel good. It feels really, really good. Riku gasps and tilts his head to the ceiling, tracing lines of water damage and peeling paint so that he doesn’t get completely hard from Yushi, of all people, giving him a hickey. And there’s that coil in his gut, like a spring wound painfully tight, and when Yushi licks over the new bruise Riku’s mouth opens to let out a faint whine that he can’t—he doesn’t recognize it.

The noise is so sudden and embarrassing that he jerks away, extracting himself from Yushi’s teeth and arms, and covers his face with a throw pillow. He lays down on the couch and hopes to suffocate himself. He’s hard, of course, but there’s also a deep pulsing fear in his ribcage. It’s louder than words and it worms under his skin, where the quietude settled when Yushi first kissed him, and makes his brain feel very sharp in his skull. His mind is jagged, with rough edges, and all of them tell Riku to leave—to twist away when Yushi’s hands find his thighs, to say something pointed and crude—this was just okay, now let me fuck you—and the gulps of air he strains through the pillow are stale and shallow.

There’s a tug on the throw pillow. Riku tightens his grip and thinks about making little feminine noises. About what that means. About who he is as a person if he melts so easily, if Yushi can suck at his neck and make Riku forget what it means to be a man.

“Stop that,” Yushi says, his voice distant, and the next tug on the throw pillow is strong enough to yank it out of Riku’s arms. Yushi’s face comes into blinding focus. His eyebrows are raised.

“Give it back,” says Riku, reaching half-heartedly towards the pillow. Yushi throws it on the floor.

“Take a deep breath,” Yushi says. His tone isn’t kind, exactly. It’s very matter-of-fact. Riku recognizes this tone, too—it’s the one Yushi uses when Riku complains about having to wash the dishes or clean the toilet or go grocery shopping. It’s just a part of life, Riku.

Riku crosses his arms over his chest. He feels a manic, desperate smile forming on his face. “No.”

Yushi sighs quietly. “Are you okay?”

“Obviously,” Riku says, still smiling. “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s just kissing.”

“I know,” Yushi says. “I know that.”

The implication, of course, is that Riku doesn’t. That Riku’s making a big deal out of something very small. That he’s laying on the couch with Yushi looming over him and getting worked up over the fact that—that he—that he likes kissing Yushi.

But that’s not it. Riku knows that Yushi’s not trying to be snarky with him. He’s just stating a fact, and Riku is perverting his kindness into something inflammatory. It’s what Riku does best.

“Let’s stop,” Yushi says. He pats Riku’s thigh. “Watch my show with me.”

“No,” Riku says quickly. His shoulders tense in surprise and he feels the false smile flicker off his face. “No, I just mean—it’s fine.”

“Is it?”

Good question. “Yes,” Riku says. “It’s just kissing.”

“Okay,” Yushi shrugs, and then slowly, gently, lays his body over Riku’s. It’s a pleasant weight, actually. It makes the panic fade into white noise. Yushi tucks his forehead against Riku’s jaw and then licks at his throat, a long wet stripe that makes a bubble of laughter burst out of Riku’s chest.

“Ew,” Riku says. He presses his nose into Yushi’s hair and smells shampoo and something earthy, like the air freshener Yushi used to keep on his dresser, next to the lamp with the FC Barcelona themed lampshade. Red and blue stripes. It’s an ugly lamp. It clashes terribly with the rest of Yushi’s mild design-magazine decor.

“It’s just kissing,” Yushi says against his throat, his voice vibrating through his chest and into Riku’s. “And it’s nice to hear you.”

Riku digs his fingers into the space under Yushi’s shoulder blades and stares up at the ceiling. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t.”

Yushi huffs and pokes his toes into Riku’s ankle. “I’m not allowed to?”

“No,” Riku says. “It’s not—I don’t like it.”

“Fine,” Yushi says, and presses his lips to the underside of Riku’s jaw. It feels like—

When Riku was little, he and his sister Kana—his sister who's two years older than him—would give each other butterfly kisses. He would lean his face against her cheek and flutter his eyelashes against her skin until she giggled at the feeling, and then she would do the same to him. They would do it after arguments, or if one of them got a bad grade on a test, or if mom was mad at them. It was thank you and I’m sorry and I’m here for you, easier and more honest than words.

When Riku thinks about his family now it’s like something in his throat winds very tight and steals his breath. He loves them, of course, and they love him—he talks to his sisters regularly and his parents every once in a while—but they don’t know him. They don’t know the real reason he moved to Tokyo. His sisters, always so excited to ask if he’s met someone special, don’t know that they’ll never have a sister-in-law. Being an adult, a full human being, is so much more complicated than being a small child. Sharing love through butterfly kisses.

Yushi’s mouth on his jaw feels like that. Like butterfly kisses.

Riku wordlessly rubs his fingers across Yushi’s cheek and tilts his head up to kiss him on the mouth. Soft, easy. Yushi doesn’t want anything from him. Yushi only ever gives, and Riku only ever takes. Right now that’s okay. He gets to kiss Yushi like this, the soft wet slide of their lips, and sink into the couch cushions under Yushi’s long, slender body. He knows, somehow, that Yushi won’t do anything about Riku’s half-hard cock against his hip. He won’t acknowledge it or reach for it or beg for it to be inside of him. Riku shakes his head slightly, ridding the mental image from his mind, and strokes his thumbs over Yushi’s cheekbones while they kiss.

“I think this is nice,” Yushi whispers against the corner of his mouth.

“You think?”

“Yeah,” Yushi says. He kisses Riku’s cupid’s bow. “It’s nice. For me, at least.”

Riku tugs Yushi’s bottom lip between his teeth and bites at it lightly. Yushi huffs a sigh and sneaks his hands under Riku’s shoulders, pressed between his shirt and the couch. Yushi’s body is very warm. So is Riku's.

“It’s nice for me too,” Riku decides. Nicer than it would be with a stranger, at least. He’s barely even tipsy anymore. It frightens him desperately to be sober and under someone else's body, but at least Yushi is warm and certain and asking for nothing. At least it’s Yushi.

“I’m sorry,” Yushi says, pulling back and hovering a few centimeters above Riku’s face.

Riku frowns, rubs at Yushi’s shoulder blades. “Why?”

“I’m sorry you’re scared.”

“Oh,” Riku says, sort of brokenly, and lifts his head to kiss the curve of Yushi’s nose. When he pulls away Yushi’s still looking at him. His eyes are impassive once again. “It’s—”

It’s what? Not true? Not Yushi’s fault? Riku is very good at lying, and he could lie right now. He could lie, and Yushi would just continue to look at him blankly, his lips spit-slick and shiny. Riku should lie. He should jump off the couch, run and hide, spend the rest of his life in bed, buy a train ticket back to Fukui and become who he used to be. Someone worthy. A perfect piece in the puzzle of the world.

As it is, he doesn’t much feel like lying to Yushi. He’s far too tired.

“It’s okay,” he settles with, and pulls Yushi’s head against his chest. “I’m not scared of you.”

“Weird,” Yushi says, muffled against Riku’s shirt. “People always tell me I’m terrifying.”

“Yeah, of course they do,” Riku says, smiling into the crown of Yushi’s head. “You’re very scary.”

Yushi curls one of his hands into the shape of a claw and raises it to Riku’s face. He lets out a little fake growl. “See? Terrifying.”

It’s not Yushi’s imagined ferocity that scares Riku. Ferocity doesn’t scare him at all. It’s the lack of it that’s terrifying. It’s the soft skin in between ribs. It’s meaningless kindness. It’s slow music and quiet conversation and the watery light of the afternoon sun when he’s fully sober, sitting out on the balcony and looking down at Adachi City, his part of Tokyo, and imagining he can see all the way across the Arakawa River.

Riku pokes his tongue into the pocket of his cheek. His mouth tastes like Yushi—whatever nameless scent his skin carries—and like whiskey and toothpaste. “You have work tomorrow.”

“I know,” Yushi says. “Go to sleep.”

“On the couch?” Riku says, and means with you laying on top of me?

“Yes, on the couch,” Yushi says like Riku’s stupid. “You do it all the time.”

“Not like—not like this.”

“First time for everything,” Yushi says. “I need to wash the dishes. I’ll be back.”

It’s past one in the morning. Yushi doesn’t really need to wash dishes. Yushi could, if he wanted to, go into his own bedroom and fall asleep. Instead he climbs off Riku’s body and turns off the floor lamp, shrouding the living room in long shadow, and walks into the attached kitchen. He could leave Riku alone. He could leave Riku to his thoughts and his fears and the thing in his stomach that wants to swallow him whole. That thinks it’s nice to hear you and wonders if Yushi really meant it. Wonders if Riku can make needless noise—can carve a space into where he isn’t wanted—and still be liked. Cared for.

He curls up under the blanket. The distant sound of the kitchen faucet, and of Yushi scrubbing pans, puts a slight damper on the buzzing under his skin. What he really wants is to follow Yushi into the kitchen and find something to drink. That’s what he really wants. He also wants to ask Yushi to kiss him again, and this time Riku won’t pussy out. He won’t get small and cowardly about it. He’ll keep a handle on himself. He won’t let a hickey make him lose his composure.

Right. The hickey. Riku pushes a finger into the bruise on his neck and presses his thighs together at the slight pain. He hasn’t had a hickey in—he doesn’t know. A long time. He’s never been aware of getting one, at least. He usually wakes up in the morning and gets an unpleasant surprise when he looks in the mirror.

This one isn’t too bad. This one is from Yushi, so it’s okay. He already shares a home with Yushi. He shares quiet nights with him, and furniture and kitchen appliances and shampoo. They wash their laundry together, which in many ways, Riku thinks, is the most intimate thing you can do with someone. Putting all your dirt and sweat and nastiness in the same place. Bleaching it clean.

Riku pulls the blanket up to his throat, closes his eyes, and falls asleep to the sound of dishwater.

 

 

 

 

The thing about Riku’s friend group is that they’re weird. Riku read anecdotes online about weird gay friend groups, back when he was younger, but he didn’t believe the stories until they happened to him. If he drew up a diagram of all the ways his friends have fucked each other he’d have the most complicated graph of all time, and he only has five friends.

Well, in truth, it would mostly depict the incestuous Yushi-Sion-Daeyoung tangle that’s mellowed out over the past six months. It was the bane of Riku’s existence for a while. Looking over Sion’s shoulder and seeing he was sending the exact same sexts to Yushi and Daeyoung was…something. And then there’s whatever’s going on with Ryo and Sakuya, and whatever sometimes goes on with Ryo and Daeyoung, and what Riku unfortunately suspects happened on one drunken occasion between Sakuya and Sion, after which Riku said I think he’s too young for you and Sion responded by vomiting into a storm drain.

Riku is the exception to the rule. He’s made out with Daeyoung exactly once and Sion also once, both on the same night, both of them only wanting to make the other jealous. So. It doesn’t really count. Not that Riku minds. They all figured out early on that Riku wasn’t the type to fool around with friends, and they never called him weird or pressured him. It’s true that sometimes Riku thinks it would be nice, having casual sex someone who actually likes him. Sometimes Riku watches Ryo make big eyes at Sakuya and feels—well, mostly disgusted, but also sort of jealous. It must be easy to be horny all the time if you can just turn to a friend for help.

Yushi said once, when Riku was talking about their friends mindlessly, “Sion and Daeyoung would definitely let you hit.”

As though Sion and Daeyoung are the problem. They’re not. The problem is Riku. He knows that he could walk outside with Sion after a shift at the bar and ask him to fuck and Sion would say yes, as long as he and Daeyoung weren’t in one of their doomed-to-fail dating phases. He knows that Sion would be fine bending over and taking it. Daeyoung not as much, maybe, but he’d find some way to meet Riku in the middle.

Riku can’t have sex with his friends because Riku is kind to his friends. He cares for them fiercely. So fiercely that he sometimes wishes he didn’t know them at all, because then he wouldn’t have to worry about them. Sometimes he hates his friends for making him care about them so much. Sometimes he hates them, but he’s always kind to them. When he has the urge to be sharp or cruel he swallows it all the way down and pastes on a smile, the same way he does at work, except for when they’re all drunk. Sometimes he’s mean when they’re all drunk.

They always forgive him.

Like now, Sion rolling his eyes and patting Riku’s shoulder: “It’s fine, dude. I know you didn’t mean it.”

Riku had said, two nights ago, your life is so fucking easy. Mean and mostly unprompted. Sion had frowned and turned away to talk to Yushi instead. Riku had meant it, at the time, but he’ll pretend he didn’t. He’ll pretend he doesn’t burn with jealousy at Sion’s entire being—how handsome he is, how good he is with his words, how he’s shy without being awkward, humble without being meek, brave enough to move to a new country and learn a new language and go to fucking pride parades.

Sion was Riku’s first gay friend and the second person he came out to. Sion is the reason Riku met Yushi at all, and then met everyone else in the friend group. He’s the reason Riku isn’t living in a shithole rooming house in San’ya anymore, or drifting aimlessly around Tokyo. Well, okay—Riku is drifting aimlessly around Tokyo, but if he’d never met Sion he’d be even more lost.

“Seriously, it’s okay,” Sion says, wiping down a spill on the bar. “We were drunk. People say stupid shit when they’re drunk.”

“Maybe I’m drunk too often,” says Riku. He’s stacking shot glasses precariously at the corner of the bar. It’s five in the evening, too early for customers, and he’s desperately bored.

Sion laughs lightly. “You said it, not me.”

Riku thinks about telling him. About saying, so Yushi and I kissed, like they’re in high school or something. If Riku were someone else then Sion would already know, because Yushi would’ve told him, but Riku’s certain Yushi hasn’t told anyone. Besides, what is there to tell? Kissing is nothing in a friend group full of guys that fuck each other. And Riku couldn’t even handle the kissing. He froze up, got weird, freaked out over the mildest physical intimacy imaginable. Riku—hated it. Liked it. Wants to do it again very, very badly. Wants to do more. Wants Yushi’s hands on his skin for real, and his eyes on Riku’s body.

Riku also wants to throw himself into the ocean.

“Customers,” Sion hisses, whipping Riku with a rag, so Riku pastes on his smile and welcomes in the first alcoholics of the evening. Again, Riku’s two shots deep, so he’s not judging. He wishes he had enough expendable income to spend every night drinking and frowning at his phone.

As he serves the guys—spills whiskey on his hands, curses under his breath—he thinks about the first few months after he met Yushi, when Yushi was still going to university. The way he seemed slightly put off by Riku’s presence in his space, even though he was unerringly kind to him. How he shrunk into himself when he opened the bathroom door on Riku brushing his teeth. The first time Yushi bought a boyfriend over, before Riku had come out—when he was hooking up with guys in bathroom stalls, always greedy for more in ways that made him emptier than ever—Yushi had looked at Riku firmly, almost meanly. You really don’t care that I’m gay? He was holding his boyfriend’s hand like a test.

Riku hadn’t cared. Or—he did care, but only because he’d never seen two men hold hands outside of a gay club. He’d never seen softness or intimacy in such a private place. On the couch. Muttered laughter behind Yushi’s bedroom door. Riku had been angry, actually. Angry, feeling like Yushi was bragging or showing off, even though he had no way of knowing Riku was gay. He had no way of knowing that Riku wanted what Yushi had but couldn’t bring himself to look for it.

He doesn’t think Yushi’s ever been angry with him. Not really, not in any way that counts. One time, not long after Riku came out to Yushi and then to Sion and then to all the other friends he made after moving in with Yushi, he came home from a club smelling like stomach acid and cologne. He’d been sick to his stomach and hollowed out—the usual—and as he ran to the bathroom to throw up he thought Yushi looked at him with hatred.

He only had a second to look at Yushi’s face before he was vomiting in the toilet. He probably imagined it. When he was finished emptying his stomach he’d gone to his bedroom and heard Yushi playing video games through the wall. Yushi was on call—probably with Sakuya—and his voice was faint and tinged with laughter. Nothing that made Riku think the derision in Yushi’s eyes was real. It was a trick of the light, probably.

After that he tried his best to sober up before he went home. He threw up in club bathrooms or on the sidewalk or slept it off at Sion’s. Even if it was a trick of the light, he didn’t want Yushi to look at him like that ever again. Like Riku was small and disgusting.

On his work break, Riku takes a shot with Sion and goes out into the back to have a cigarette. He tries not to smoke—he has plenty of vices already—but he’s been itching for one all day. He needs the harsh feeling against the soft lining of his throat, his lungs.

He fumbles for his phone. There’s nothing new in the groupchat. He has a few texts from Hina, his eldest sister, updating him on her pregnancy. One of them is a vague suggestion that he come back to Fukui to visit soon.

He opens his chat with Yushi and sends him a quick hi. He’s not sure why he does it. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Yushi isn’t glued to his phone at night—more likely to be glued to his laptop or the television—and the last text he sent Riku was a link to an armchair they’ve been thinking about going halfsies on. Beige fabric, like Yushi likes. Overstuffed and comfortable like Riku likes.

What’s up, he gets back as he’s wiping his face in the employee bathroom.

Riku sighs through his teeth and texts back, would u be down to fuck before he can psych himself out.

Yushi doesn’t respond immediately. It’s while Riku’s delivering snacks to a table of salarymen that his phone buzzes in his back pocket. He starts to sweat on cue, like a trained dog, and he feels his smile falter on his face.

“More beer?” he offers, and the guys say yes, because everyone says yes if it’s Riku who’s asking.

He ducks behind the bar and, very unprofessionally, opens his phone.

“Beer to table five,” he mutters to Sion, who rolls his eyes but obliges.

Sure, but let’s talk about it first, the text says. How very Yushi. Sure. Like he’s agreeing to go to the cafe down the street for breakfast, not saying he’ll let Riku bend him over and fuck him. Or—is that how it’ll go? Riku doesn’t know. He doesn’t fucking know anything, actually, which is the main problem of his entire life. That he’s treading water and barely breathing.

“Who is it?” Sion asks when he comes back behind the bar. There’s a sauce stain on his white shirt. “A guy?”

“Just Yushi,” Riku mumbles, and puts his phone back in his pocket.

“Ah, our favorite guy,” Sion smiles. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” Riku says. One of the men at the end of the bar is holding an empty glass and glaring at him. Right. Because Riku is supposed to read customer’s minds.

“Tell him I say hi,” Sion says cheerfully.

“You have his number,” Riku says, his tone snarkier than he’d like, and goes to refill the man’s drink.

 

 

 

 

Yushi is in his bedroom when Riku gets home at half-past midnight. His bedroom door is open—a sign Riku can enter—and he’s laughing raucously over the phone. Riku smells like smoke and piss. He hangs up his jacket and takes a perfunctory shower, the water hot enough to fog up the mirror so he doesn’t have to look at himself, and brushes his teeth. He goes into his own bedroom and chews on his fingernails for about ten minutes before swallowing a mouthful of spit and making his way into Yushi’s bedroom.

Yushi’s playing a video game, like Riku knew he would be. His headset is crooked, one side pushed behind his ear—maybe so he could hear Riku come home—and his mouth quirks up when he sees Riku.

“I gotta go, Saku,” Yushi says. “Riku’s home.”

Sakuya says something loud and muffled and then his voice cuts out. Yushi pokes around on his keyboard and Riku sits behind him, on the edge of his bed, and feels his skin tighten around his body. Like he’s suffocating inside himself. There’s a bougie-looking scented oil diffuser on Yushi’s windowsill. It’s a new purchase. Riku hasn’t seen it before, although it’s not like he’s in Yushi’s room very often. He darts in, sometimes, to ask Yushi what he wants from the grocery store, or to let him know he’ll be home late, but when they hang out it’s in the living room. It’s one of the things Riku liked about Yushi from the moment they moved in together—they both have their own private, sacred spaces. He doesn’t have to worry about Yushi barging into his bedroom and vice versa.

Yushi takes off his headset and spins around in his chair. He quickly looks Riku up and down. “You smell like smoke.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I took a shower, but—yeah. I know.”

“I don’t mind,” Yushi says. “I’m just saying.”

“How was, um,” Riku tries. “How was work?”

“It was fine,” Yushi says. His face is soft and blank. “It always is.”

He doesn’t ask Riku how his work was. Actually, Yushi’s not very good at small talk. He’s a good listener, and he’s excellent at making people feel comfortable enough to share what weighs on their mind, but when it comes to work and the weather he sort of goes quiet. Like he doesn’t remember the proper script for casual conversation.

“You wanted to talk,” Riku prompts. He rubs Yushi’s bedding between his fingers and bounces his knee up and down.

“Yeah,” Yushi says. He reaches behind himself to grab a mug of tea and take a sip. “Let’s talk.”

“What did you want to talk about?”

Yushi frowns. “Sex, I assume.”

“Well yeah,” Riku laughs, sort of hysterical. “I just mean—what is there to talk about?”

“A lot of things,” Yushi says. He cocks his head and looks Riku in the eyes for a brief moment. “Exclusivity. Topping and bottoming. What you’re comfortable with. If you’re sure.”

“A lot of things,” Riku echoes. “Well, I’m—I mean. I get tested.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not completely stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Yushi says easily. “Do you use condoms?”

Riku’s face is very warm. “Usually. Well—okay. Not always.”

“Then you need to get tested again,” Yushi says. His tone is neutral but it feels like judgement. Like he thinks Riku is—something bad. “I’ll get tested too. I haven’t since the last guy.”

Riku wants to say something stupid. He wants to say the type of shit he’d say to a hookup. C’mon, it’s just once. The type of shit guys said to him when he started fucking around. He won’t say it, of course. Yushi is a careful, diligent person, and besides, Riku would have to kill himself if he gave Yushi an STD. Like for real jump off the balcony.

“Cool,” Riku says, not feeling cool at all. “What were the other parts?”

“Well,” Yushi says, “there’s one big thing, I think.” He puts down his mug. “I don’t bottom.”

Riku chokes on his spit. He tries to play it off like a random cough but Yushi’s looking at him with an expression that’s both amused and tense. And it’s not like—okay. Riku talks about sex with his friends. He knows way too fucking much about Sion’s sex life, for example, and therefore also knows way too much about Daeyoung’s. He knows, vaguely, that Yushi is a good lay. He’s never asked for details because he frankly doesn’t want to know. But when it comes to him and Yushi, they don’t talk about these things. They barely even talk about guys. Sometimes, when there’s a hot actor on the TV, they’ll pretend to drunkenly hit on him, but that’s something they do when wasted and never in the light of day.

“And it’s non-negotiable,” Yushi says. “So I don’t know if that changes things for you.”

It does, of course. Change things. Riku should shake his head and call the whole thing off. He fucks guys. That’s it. That’s sort of all he does. Even when he sucks a guy off he’s only doing it in the hopes that Riku will get to top him.

“There’s more to sex than penetration,” Riku says instead, feeling very much like Daeyoung during one of his passionate rants on the problems in the gay community. “I mean—right?”

“Of course,” Yushi says. He picks up his tea again. The oil diffuser on the windowsill is spitting out rosemary-scented vapor. “Blowjobs, handjobs, rimming, fingering—”

“Yeah, I know,” Riku says, and—huh. Yushi is laughing at him. “Why are you laughing at me?”

“I don’t know,” Yushi says. He runs a hand over his face. “This is just crazy.”

It’s nice, actually, to hear Yushi say what Riku’s been thinking in the back of his mind. It’s absolutely fucking crazy. This conversation is crazy. Watching Yushi’s pretty lips form the word rimming is insane. It’s also insane how much Riku wants—how much he wants that mouth on him again. He sort of wants to end this whole conversation and pull Yushi into his lap and kiss him. He wants to say nevermind, we don’t have to fuck, just—just what? Kiss me? Touch me softly? Fucking hell.

“If we fuck, would you be comfortable being exclusive? Just for a while. I like to—” Yushi shakes his head and sips from his mug. “I don’t know. I feel some way about it.”

“What way?” Riku asks. He needs to learn to filter his words, but he’s never been great at it around Yushi.

“I don’t know,” Yushi says. “I would just prefer exclusivity.”

It’s kind of a crazy thing to ask, except—Yushi isn’t asking. He’s just saying. He’s sharing what he prefers and leaving it up to Riku to decide. Because Yushi, sitting in his gaming chair, his sweatpants pooling around his ankles, is endlessly kind.

“No condoms if we’re exclusive?” Riku asks, which is also crazy, because he’s barely even kissed Yushi. He has no reason to be thinking about getting on his knees while Yushi sits in his stupid fucking gaming chair, to be thinking about swallowing down his cock, letting it hit the back of his throat, his eyes watering, cum pooling on his tongue—

“Sure,” Yushi says. “After we get tested, sure.”

Riku shifts and wills his cock to stop swelling. “Cool.”

“Cool,” Yushi echoes. “Tomorrow’s a Saturday, right? I’ll go to the clinic.”

“Someone’s eager,” Riku jokes. Very lame. Yushi raises his eyebrows in response.

“You’re the one who booty called me from work.”

“I didn’t—” Riku says, but Yushi’s grinning at him again. He’s really very pretty. Always has been. “Can we make out?”

Yushi stretches his arms over his shoulders and closes his eyes. His arms are long and faintly muscled. “If you want.”

Riku wants. He—really wants, actually. When Yushi stands up he spreads his legs so Yushi can stand between them, and he tilts his head up, and when Yushi bends down to kiss him Riku grabs Yushi’s shoulders and pulls him in.

Like the first time, it’s really nice. Yushi’s skin is just as warm and his hands are just as solid on Riku’s face. Like twin anchors. And he knows what he’s doing with his mouth, crowding into Riku’s space and breathing him in, and Yushi tastes like himself. Like home. Riku slides his hands up the back of Yushi’s shirt to touch more warm, smooth skin, and he feels the tension from work—the tension of being alive—slip from his body as Yushi kisses him. It’s surprising, though, how fierce Yushi is when he’s kissing. Like he’s used to being in charge. He’s the one who climbs into Riku’s lap, who digs his fingers into Riku’s waist. Not harsh—not to cause pain—but to possess. Yushi’s grip says, I’m the one kissing you.

Riku almost doesn’t care that he groans as Yushi settles firmly into his lap. He muffles it by pulling away and pressing his mouth to the slope of skin between Yushi’s shoulder and his neck, where he tastes like heaven—clean and sweet—and when Yushi sighs, tugging on Riku’s hair and holding him in place, Riku starts trembling again. Unmoored. Floating through the rosemary-scented space of Yushi’s room as he digs his teeth into Yushi’s skin. There’s saliva flooding his mouth, and his hands are—without his consent—scrambling against Yushi’s back, under his shirt, like he’s desperate. Maybe he is. Maybe he is desperate. Maybe Yushi in his lap is the only good thing he’s felt in months. Maybe when Yushi yanks Riku’s head away and rubs his fingers over Riku’s lips, Riku feels like he’s unraveling. There’s a shiny ring of bite marks on Yushi’s shoulder.

“You’re good?” Yushi asks, and Riku nods much too quickly. “You’re good,” Yushi says again, a statement, and smiles. “And you’re a good kisser.”

Good. Like Riku is a well-behaved dog. It shouldn’t make his skin feel like it’s on fire. It shouldn’t make him tremble even more violently. He pulls Yushi towards him again, licks into his mouth, bites off a moan when he feets Yushi’s perfect teeth against his tongue. He can hear Yushi huffing short, pitchy exhales into his mouth, like Riku’s at least doing a good job—good—and the sounds make Riku’s stomach tense and hot. Like he’s swallowed honey. Sweetness all the way down.

Yushi slips a thumb into Riku’s mouth and runs it along the inside of his lower lip, leaning back to look at Riku’s face while he does. There’s a wash of pink high on his cheekbones and the collar of his shirt is stretched out around the place Riku bit him. Riku chokes on another terrible noise as Yushi rubs his thumb over the bumps of Riku’s molars and then presses down on his tongue. It feels very much like the pressure of cock. Riku wants—holy shit. He wants so badly for Yushi to—to—he wants Yushi to push him down onto the bed, bracket his thighs around his shoulders, and stick his cock down Riku’s throat.

A wash of horror and arousal floods his senses. He’s shaking so much that Yushi’s face is blurry, so he closes his eyes and lets Yushi continue to poke around in his mouth. He doesn’t—to be so completely emasculated like that, to let someone—Yushi—to let Yushi use him—it’s inconceivable. It won’t happen.

“Hey,” Yushi says. “You still here?”

Riku opens his eyes, curls his tongue around Yushi’s thumb, and doesn’t respond.

“Hm,” Yushi says. He pulls his thumb from between Riku’s lips and narrows his eyes. Searching, not mean. “You wanna watch TV?”

“Uh,” Riku says, his voice reedy, “what?”

“TV,” Yushi says. He pats Riku on the cheek and climbs off his lap. “Let’s watch something.”

“Okay,” Riku says, mystified and turned on and deeply embarrassed. “Did I—did I do something wrong?” It’s something he could only ever ask Yushi.

“No,” Yushi says, looking over his shoulder and smiling slightly. “You’re very good. I said that.”

“Oh,” Riku swallows. He’s still shaking. “Thanks.”

“I don’t want to get so horny that I do something stupid,” Yushi says, very matter-of-fact, like it’s not ridiculous that he’d get thoughtlessly horny just from kissing Riku. Like Riku would make him—what? Impulsively skip getting tested? It’s insane.

“Oh,” Riku says again. “You’re—really?”

“It’s not like hooking up with you is a chore,” Yushi says. He’s pulling on a sweater and sliding his feet into house slippers. “You’re very attractive.”

Riku smiles, unbidden. “Thanks. So are you.”

Yushi huffs. “I’d hope so,” he says. He pauses in the doorway. “TV?”

“TV is fine,” Riku says. He adjusts his pants to attempt to hide his stiff cock and follows Yushi into the living room.

 

 

 

 

Riku was nineteen and a half when he realized he was gay. He was sitting in the back of his friend’s car, squished in the middle seat—much like he is now, with Daeyoung on one side and Sakuya on the other, Ryo perched dutifully in Sakuya’s lap so that everyone fits—and he had been staring out at the sky, which was yellow with sunset and promise.

“Your ass is so fucking heavy,” Sakuya complains, jabbing Ryo in the waist with a finger. “My legs are going numb.”

“Be kind,” Daeyoung says lightly. Riku watches Sakuya violently roll his eyes. They’ll get stuck like that, Riku’s father would say. Laughing, fond, always letting Riku get away with far more attitude than he should.

“Your ass is bigger than mine,” Ryo grumbles, to which Sakuya puts him in a headlock and Riku sighs and closes his eyes.

The drive to Zushi beach from Tokyo is less than ninety minutes. They could’ve taken the train, probably, hauled all their shit on their backs, but there’s something about pressing close to his friends in Sion’s car that makes Riku feel very young. Lifts the weight off his shoulders. The highway cuts through Kanagawa, dark greenery bursting out of concrete planters, high stone walls, squat-nosed trucks trundling past—and Riku grew up on the coastline, with his eyes to the western setting sun, but it’s joyful in its own way to drive east.

Sion plays music at a polite volume. It’s his R&B playlist, the one Sion and Yushi curated together, but only Riku and Daeyoung are listening. Sion and Yushi are distracted, talking quietly in the front seats, their voices threading through the low bass like a dripping faucet. Riku bites at the knuckle of his thumb and tries to read Sion’s lips. He can’t, of course. He won’t try to read Yushi’s. Yushi speaks without moving, sometimes, like his thoughts are so loud that they become sound.

“Are you being mean to Ryo?” Sion calls, his eyes darting across the rearview mirror, and Sakuya stops poking Ryo’s waist long enough to roll his eyes again.

Riku laughs through his teeth and turns towards Daeyoung. Daeyoung’s face is pressed to the window, watching the grey highway flash by, and Riku wishes he’d taken the window seat. Being in the middle is so—he doesn’t mind the physical contact, not with his friends, but if he was snug against the window he’d turn his face to the overcast sky and disappear.

As they get closer to the beach, Sakuya falls asleep and the fog starts to burn off. The highway becomes narrow and shrouded in green, no concrete walls to interrupt the endless foliage. Vines climb up signs marking exits and towns, and trees reach old limbs over the shoulders of the road, casting friendly shadows on Daeyoung’s slack face. Shocks of bamboo thrust into the sky like needles. There are beige brick hotels and heavy concrete bridges curling overhead, and sunlight shining weakly through the trees. Riku presses his hands against his stomach and follows the path of an airplane floating distantly through the air.

He was nineteen and a half when he realized he was gay. It didn’t dawn on him; it wasn’t a long time coming. It was a completely new and novel realization that scared the shit out of him, pressed between his friends as the sun set through the back window. He was half-tipsy and completely happy, his hair wet and sticky from seawater, and his heart had felt strangely open—too open—and he’d closed his eyes and pushed a palm against his sternum and realized. There was no special boy. He wasn’t attracted to any of his friends. It was just the truth. It was a truth that didn’t exist and then suddenly did, big enough to bowl him over, and he’d spent the ride back home nauseous and desperate to curl up in his bed and take a fine-toothed comb over all of his memories.

And when he did—when he was home, in his bed at his parent’s house, flipping through his past like it was a file stamped with a big red TOP SECRET warning, he’d known it was true. That he was gay. It was incredible, and it was horrifying, because he hadn’t suspected. He hadn’t known. It was a realization that dropped into his lap from the sky. A gift of terrible, sudden clarity.

Seven months later, he’d saved enough money to move to Tokyo. He’d met Sion not long after.

When they get to the beach, finally, it’s relatively empty. There’s a few young men hauling kayaks into the mellow water, and a cluster of tourist families crowded around the sun monument—with its golden sculpture cutting into the horizon—but it’s cold in springtime, and the water even more so. Riku is the only person desperate enough to feel the ocean to go to Zushi beach in March. That’s why his friends are here, after all. They’ll all say they wanted to go, and that they don’t mind bundling up to their noses to sit on the sand and look out at the water, but the truth is that they did it for Riku.

It kind of makes him want to drown himself.

“You can go,” Sion says, nudging Riku’s shoulder as he digs his feet into the sand. The ocean spreads out in front of them. “Go swim.”

So Riku does. He throws himself into the freezing surf and lets the water numb every inch of his skin. He breathes in the salt, feels it itch inside his nose, and dives under a shallow wave. Fully submerged, he opens his eyes. He takes in the stinging pain and the impregnable blue. It throws him off balance in a very familiar way. It’s so cold that his brain stutters to a halt, and he reaches down to grab a handful of sand, grounding himself.

The seawater is an indifferent caress on his skin. He imagines it worming between the molecules of his body, 75 percent water becoming 100 percent, his organs floating in the ocean of his torso. He thinks about unfeeling fingers curling around his fingers and toes, around his neck—fingers down his throat, unwelcome, lifeless and massive like the Pacific itself—

He lifts his head out of the water and splutters a mouthful of salt into the air. He rubs a hand over his eyes and through his hair and breathes in, long and deep, so that he doesn’t throw up. He should’ve had something to drink before he piled in Sion’s car. Beer, at least. When he looks out at the horizon there’s a small wave wandering towards him, a swell of the sea, and he lets it push against his chest, lets it pull his feet backwards. The sky is blue and dotted with faint gray clouds. His hands, when he raises them to his face, are slightly purple.

He curses under his breath to expel some of the heaviness in his chest and turns towards the shore, where his friends are gathered on a blanket and talking soundlessly. The endless whisper of the ocean keeps Riku from hearing them—their laughter, their kindness.

Yushi’s not with them. He’s standing at the edge of the surf, his jeans rolled up to his knees, looking out at the horizon. Or maybe he’s looking at Riku. He’s too far away to tell.

“Hi,” Riku calls. The waves carry his words away. “Hi, Yushi.”

Yushi says nothing. Doesn’t hear him, of course. Just keeps looking out into the distance.

Riku thinks about unfeeling fingers reaching through the dark to touch his face. He thinks of neon lights and train cars and thankless bathroom stalls. Yushi is just a dot on the shore—a pale face, a black jacket and jeans—but he could be a lighthouse.

Riku shakes his head, holds his breath, and dives back into the water.

 

 

 

 

It would be a lie to say Riku isn’t waiting for his test results to come back. Every time he forgets about it, the urine sample and the blood draw, it crashes back into the forefront of his mind like a monsoon.

It’s not really about Yushi. Well, it’s not just about Yushi. It’s more that Riku fucks guys when he’s too drunk to make wise choices, and he doesn’t get tested as often as he should. He tries not to think about it. He tries not to consider the possible consequences of everything he does. He’s a good employee and an okay friend and he pays his rent and wears clean clothes, so of course there has to be some part of his life where he’s unwise. Sometimes he forgoes condoms. Sometimes he’s too drunk to remember that condoms are a thing. Sometimes he wakes up and realizes he fucked someone because he’s in a stranger’s bed, but he has no memory of the act itself.

So. Riku’s too anxious in the week after submitting his test to actually worry about having sex with Yushi. By the seventh day he’s fully convinced himself he has every STD under the sun, that he’s going to die a slow, painful death, and that his parents will find out he’s gay when Sion shows up to his funeral, or something. It’s a whirl of panic that doesn’t go quiet when he drinks. He feels it at work and at home and when he’s trying to fall asleep.

When he does get the results back, an email notification flashing on his phone screen, he swallows down bile and taps it open. He almost cries when the results say he’s clean. He curls under his blankets and rocks back and forth, trying to cure himself of the left-over panic, but all it leaves behind is a crushing horror. He’s been risking his body—and for what? For nothing. He almost always regrets having sex once it’s over. Sometimes he regrets it before it’s begun.

He closes his eyes and listens to Yushi watching TV in the living room. He can’t make out what the actors are saying, but the low hum of noise is enough to pull him out of his spiral. He wipes his face and sends Yushi his results.

Like usual, it takes a while for Yushi to text back. When he does it’s with a confetti emoji and a screenshot of his own clean results. Riku rubs a finger over his screen—over the red and blue of the confetti emoji—and thinks about Yushi’s Barcelona lamp of the same colors.

It’s strange that Riku’s doing all this for Yushi. For Yushi to touch him. Or maybe it’s not strange. Maybe Riku’s hoping that some of Yushi’s kindness and beauty and light will rub off on him. Or maybe he just—wants it. Maybe there’s nothing complex to it at all.

I’m down whenever you are, Yushi’s next text says, and Riku laughs under his breath and puts in his earbuds to listen to something loud and meaningless.

 

 

 

 

It happens on a morning, actually. It’s one of those lazy Sunday mornings in mid-spring where Riku wakes up freezing cold and pads out onto the balcony to soak up the sun. The air isn’t yet full of dazzling summer humidity—it’s crisp and clean, so sometimes Riku just lays down on the balcony and lets the sun warm him. It’s a nice balcony. The railing is made of opaque plaster slabs so there’s no one to judge him for laying on the dirty ground in his sweatpants. Adachi, the part of Tokyo they live in, is relatively sleepy. He can only faintly hear the traffic on the road below. Best of all, he doesn’t work on Sundays. He gets to stay at home and melt in the sun, or on the couch, or sleep the entire day.

He’s pretty sure he falls asleep again, laying in the warmth on the balcony. When he opens his eyes Yushi is hovering somewhere above him, hanging up damp clothes on the drying rack.

“Good morning,” Riku rasps.

“Good morning,” Yushi says quietly. “You look comfortable.”

“I am,” Riku says, pressing his cheek to the warm balcony floor. He’s probably getting dirt on his face, but he’s too peaceful to mind. “You have any plans today?”

Yushi snorts. “You know I never have plans.”

“Sometimes you do,” Riku says. He closes his eyes and feels Yushi move around him—the soft sounds of his rustling pants, the drying rack creaking under the weight of more wet clothes. “Sometimes you go over to Sakuya and Ryo’s.”

“Not on Sundays,” Yushi says. Riku can feel the shift in the air as Yushi sits down next to him, one of his knees brushing the side of Riku’s face. “I like doing nothing on Sunday.”

“Hm,” Riku says mindlessly. He wants Yushi to touch his hair. Yushi likes it long, after all. He presses his forehead harder into Yushi’s knee but Yushi doesn’t seem to get the memo.

“Do you have plans?” Yushi asks. “Or do you want to do something?”

“No,” Riku says. A car horn blares from the road below and he blinks his eyes open in surprise. Yushi isn’t looking at him—he’s looking up, at the bottom of the balcony above theirs. He’s looking at the swath of warm sky all around them.

Riku knocks his head against Yushi’s knee again. “Hey.”

Yushi looks down at him. His bangs are falling into his eyes. “Hey.”

“You look pretty,” Riku says. It’s not weird for him to say. He always compliments Yushi. He has no reason not to. There’s nothing to lose or gain by telling Yushi the truth—that he’s beautiful.

“Okay,” Yushi says, smiling slightly. That’s not weird either. He usually responds with only the vaguest amusement. “Thanks.”

Riku huffs. He wants to say, don’t you want me? I haven’t fucked anyone since you kissed me for the first time. Instead he makes a noise of complaint and grabs one of Yushi’s hands, places it on his head. “I thought you liked my hair.”

“I like your hair,” Yushi confirms, sounding slightly mystified, and scratches at the crown of Riku’s head. It feels nice. Like the sun, twofold. Like Riku is a cat curled up in the light. Needless and wantless.

“Yushi,” Riku grumbles.

“Okay,” Yushi says, to the question that wasn’t asked, and bends down to kiss Riku on the forehead. Like the sun. “Okay, Riku.”

Riku shivers slightly and looks at the underside of the balcony above as Yushi pushes Riku onto his back. He shivers more when Yushi kisses him on the mouth, soft and questioning, and he reaches up to curl his hands around Yushi’s shoulders.

“What do you want?” Yushi asks against his mouth. His voice—also like the sun. It’s all the sun. Riku’s body shakes in the light.

“Don’t know,” Riku mumbles. It’s not really true.

“Okay,” Yushi says again, and leans back slightly to run a hand across Riku’s chest, down his stomach. Riku grinds his teeth together when Yushi’s hand squeezes his soft cock. Underneath, the traffic murmurs onwards, but on the balcony Riku’s cock fills up confusingly fast under the mild pressure of Yushi’s hand.

“That’s—yeah,” Riku breathes, and pulls Yushi down to kiss him again. “I want that.”

Yushi tugs Riku’s lower lip between his teeth and releases it with a slick sound. “I know.”

He knows. Like Riku is transparent when it comes to Yushi, who sees through his skin and bones. Whose hand is slightly damp from the laundry when it sneaks under Riku’s waistband. He knows what Riku wants—somehow, even when Riku doesn’t—and he’s willing to give it to him. Lovely, perfect Yushi. Riku screws his eyes shut and whines, so quietly that it’s swallowed up by the white noise of the city, but he hears it all the same. He thinks Yushi does too.

“You’re fine,” Yushi says, and curls his hand around Riku’s cock, rubbing his thumb across the wet tip. “I like hearing you.”

Riku has said—he’d forbidden Yushi from saying that, hadn’t he? But his stomach clenches up at the words, and he’s pulling Yushi down by the hair and sighing into his mouth. He’s melting in the sun, and under Yushi’s touch—firm and rhythmic on his cock, sliding down to cup his balls and then working over the shaft again. Riku grips Yushi’s hair and breathes through it.

Like the sun. That’s all he can think, really. Yushi’s touch feels like the sun, and Riku is a cloud floating through the sky. He’s shaking on the inside but his body is still. When he makes a stiff noise against Yushi’s tongue, Yushi laughs and kisses him harder, strokes him faster. It feels—fucking incredible, actually. The taste of Yushi’s mouth, the smell of laundry detergent, Yushi's strong hand on his cock. Riku’s not in the dark. He’s in the light, so full of arousal that his balls ache with it—his stomach—and he doesn’t even care when Yushi pulls down the waistband of his pants and exposes his cock to the open air.

“Yeah,” Yushi says, Riku mouthing at his jaw. “I knew you’d have a nice dick.”

So matter-of-fact. Like any other observation in the world. I like your hair long. You smell like smoke. Riku tries to laugh but the sound that comes out is a stuttered hiccup. He’s thrusting up into Yushi’s fist. Because Yushi thinks he has a nice—because Yushi was thinking about it. He imagined what Riku’s dick would look like. It makes no sense that the idea turns Riku on so violently, but it does.

“Gonna,” Riku groans, speaking without thinking, and then Yushi’s shifting to take the tip of Riku’s cock in his mouth—between his pretty lips—and Riku sees stars. He pistons his hips up, unthinking, feeling the impossible wet heat of Yushi’s mouth. He gasps into the air and cums like that, laying on the balcony with Yushi’s mouth on him, with his fingernails scraping the floor underneath him.

“Holy shit,” Riku says, and means it. Yushi slides his lips off Riku’s dick with a lewd pop and wipes cum from the corner of his mouth. His eyes are very dark and his hair is shining in the sun. He’s so—Riku’s cock is softening in the warm air, but he still feels full to bursting. He watches more than feels Yushi pull his pants back up and pat Riku’s stomach with his palm.

“Yeah?” Yushi says, looking faintly smug. “Good?”

“Shut up,” Riku mumbles. He sits up and looks at the front of Yushi’s gym shorts, hoping for—that. Yushi’s cock is tenting his pants, and Riku wants it. Wants him. He feels sort of fucking insane about it. He wants Yushi in his mouth so bad that he’s shaking again, tucking his knees into his chest and feeling swallowed by the sun. He’s never wanted to suck someone off like this before. Never in his entire fucking life. Never. He does it so he’ll get the favor returned, or because he thinks he should—if the guy’s letting Riku fuck him, it’s probably the least Riku can do—but with Yushi, Riku’s drooling with it. His brain feels like it’s leaking out of his ears.

Yushi hums, spreads his legs, and says, “You can.”

Riku is too sun-drunk and sated to overthink it. He crawls across the balcony and then collapses, like a puppet with its strings cut, to bury his face in Yushi’s crotch. He hears himself moaning—even louder than before—but it sounds like it belongs to someone else, and he inhales the thick smell of Yushi’s cock, rubbing his cheek and his nose over the outline of it, latching his mouth to the fabric over Yushi’s balls and sucking. He feels blissfully stupid. He feels empty, but not in that aching, terrible way—like all the darkness inside of him has been carved out and replaced with light. Like as long as he has his mouth between Yushi’s legs, and Yushi’s hands pulling through his hair, he doesn’t need anything else.

“Riku,” Yushi says, his voice slightly wobbly, as Riku sucks a wet patch over the tip of Yushi’s cock. It feels so good. It feels so good against his mouth, the rough fabric of Yushi’s gym shorts, the smell of his skin and his cock, his soft thighs when Riku kneads at them with his fingers, seeking purchase, seeking anything.

“Please,” Riku begs, muffled against fabric. Please let me taste your cock. Please. And Yushi understands him because Yushi always understands him.

There’s something to be said, probably, for teasing and going slow, but Riku doesn’t have the brainpower or the patience. As soon as Yushi shimmies out of his shorts, his eyes bright and wide, Riku rests his cheek on the inside of Yushi’s thigh and then swallows him down. Fills his mouth with spit to the point where it spills down his chin, hollows his cheeks, pulls out all the stops—because if anyone deserves the best blowjob Riku can give, it’s Yushi. Riku swallows, chokes, feels Yushi twitch and pulse against his tongue. His eyes are filled with his tears and his body with a thrumming lightness, and when Yushi grunts and pushes Riku’s head down, forcing his cock down his throat, Riku moans so long and loud that he’s worried, for a moment, the neighbors might hear it.

If this was anyone else he’d shove them away. If it was anyone else he’d bite the guy’s dick off. But it’s not anyone else, and being under Yushi’s control feels like—it makes more sense than anything ever has. Yushi’s cock is perfect in his mouth, full and heavy and burning hot, and his precum dribbles down Riku’s throat and makes him gag. He fucking—he loves it. He can feel his own cock starting to rouse again, impossibly, and when Yushi drags him off Riku looks up at him, his jaw sore and his lips slick with saliva, and says, again, please. He’s never felt anything strong enough during sex to make him say please.

“You’re okay?” Yushi asks, endlessly kind even with his blown pupils and dripping cock, and Riku nods eagerly.

“Yes, yeah, I’m okay.”

Yushi’s mouth quirks into a perfect, pretty smile. He sneaks a thumb into Riku’s mouth to pull it open and feeds his cock back between Riku’s lips. Riku thinks he might black out with how fucking hot it is, to see Yushi like this, self-assured and gorgeous under the sun. Riku lets himself go mostly limp as Yushi thrusts lightly into his mouth. He does as much as he can—curling his tongue around the shaft, hollowing his cheeks, swallowing down each new spurt of precum—but mostly he just melts. Mostly he just lets Yushi have his mouth, and feels his own cock get hard.

“Touch yourself,” Yushi says, almost too quiet to hear over the obscene sounds of Riku’s mouth—Riku laves his tongue over the head of Yushi’s cock as it slides between his lips, trembling at Yushi’s hand tightening in his hair and the punched-out sound Yushi makes. “C’mon, Riku, touch yourself.”

Riku obeys. It takes him no time at all to cum again, with Yushi all around him, and his orgasm hits him with Yushi’s cock choking him out. The headrush is better than anything he’s ever felt. Better than drunk sex. Better than sex. Because it doesn’t feel like sex, really, with Yushi groaning and fucking his mouth, with Riku’s cum spilling over his hand. It feels like more. Like something nameless and much larger than the messy spill of two bodies. It’s not at all comparable to what Riku does in club bathrooms and stranger’s beds. It doesn’t feel like the same act. With Yushi, like this, it feels like—it feels like Riku finally getting what he wants. It feels rough and human and real, and safe. So fucking safe.

“I love your hair,” Yushi breathes from above him, meaningless and random, and then slides his hands to Riku’s shoulders and cums down his throat with a wordless groan. Riku swallows, swallows, keeps swallowing. Wants everything Yushi is willing to give him. Always has. He licks down to Yushi’s balls, rubs his mouth over the soft crease of his inner thigh, and feels hot tears prickle in the corners of his eyes. The sun is warm on his back and there’s drying cum on his hand, on his dick.

He feels slightly like an animal. It’s not the worst feeling in the world.

“Riku,” Yushi says, gentle, and softly tilts Riku’s face up. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Riku says. His voice is fucking wrecked. Yushi’s eyes are so warm. “Yeah, all good.”

Yushi hums and folds himself in half to kiss Riku. It’s an awkward angle, and Riku’s mouth definitely tastes like cum, but Yushi doesn’t seem to mind. He rubs Riku’s shoulders as they kiss, chasing away the tension that threatens to reemerge in Riku’s body.

He just sucked Yushi off. He just—he acted like he loved it, moaning and slobbering, because he did love it. It’s fucking scary. It’s so fucking scary that he should be, probably, pitching himself off the balcony. He shouldn’t be letting Yushi kiss him softly and touch the skin on the back of his neck.

“When you’re with other guys,” Yushi starts, but Riku shakes his head no. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want to explain that he doesn't look in their eyes, that he doesn’t lose himself in their bodies, that he doesn’t get hard with their cocks in his mouth. He can’t tell Yushi that Yushi’s the only one he’d let fuck his mouth. That he wanted Yushi to.

He can’t say any of that. He can barely fucking think it.

“I want breakfast,” Riku says. He’s not very hungry but he needs to change the subject.

“Okay,” Yushi says. He watches Riku sit up with something unnamed in his eyes. Like caution, but not quite. More like care, or thoughtfulness. “We can order. I don’t want to cook.”

Riku wants to make a joke—I sucked your dick and you won’t even cook breakfast—but joking about it feels wrong. Like it would be perverting the sunlight sliding over both their bodies.

“You’re also pretty,” Yushi says, his face turned to the sky. “Just so you know.”

Riku’s jaw aches when he smiles. It feels good, like the soreness that comes from a long swim. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Yushi says, and looks back at his face. “Can I kiss you again?”

“Yeah,” Riku says, relieved. The kiss is chaste but brief, but when it’s over he feels once again grounded to the balcony. His back is overwarm from the sun.

“Whatever we order, I need coffee,” Yushi says, wiping at a spot under Riku’s jaw—spit or cum, probably—and Riku laughs, his throat aching, and agrees.

 

 

 

 

At the bar, Riku drops a bottle of rum while he’s pouring himself a shot in the employee break room. It sprays glass and liquor all over the floor and soaks through his shoes and socks. Fucking disgusting.

“Nice,” Takahiro says, amused more than anything, as Riku scrapes the glass up with his hands.

Riku privately thinks it’s karma for drinking on the clock, but it’s not like he’s gonna stop. Everyone does it. Even Takahiro takes a celebratory shot with him after the break room is clean and smelling like bleach instead of alcohol.

“Cheers to stealing from our boss,” Takahiro says, probably only half-joking, and Riku forces a laugh through his teeth.

The truth is that he’s horribly distracted. Has been since the weekend, Yushi on the balcony, Yushi’s cock in his mouth. Afterwards they’d ordered coffee and porridge and watched a few episodes of a show Ryo recommended. It had been normal. Around midday Yushi had retired to his bedroom like usual and Riku had FaceTimed Daeyoung to quiet the growing dread in his chest. On Monday morning, Riku woke up to an empty apartment—Yushi always leaves early for work—and a small bag of cough drops on the coffee table. For his fucking throat. Riku had been simultaneously unexplainably angry and horny about the whole thing, and spent the morning crunching on cough drops and trying not to jerk off.

Sion noticed that something was up when he came into work on Tuesday. He hadn’t mentioned it in so many words, but he’d asked Riku an unusual number of times how he was feeling, so much so that Riku had to smoke a cigarette during break to get away from him.

He’d taken Sion up on the offer to go to a club after work. He’d stood in the corner while Sion made out with some random dude. He’d refused drinks from about a dozen hot guys that approached him, feeling self-righteously angry at Yushi for the fact that he couldn’t fuck any of them. Mostly, he felt angry that he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to fuck a single one of them. Not even the cute twink with a fat ass and a sweet little voice. Riku looked him up and down, thought about Yushi sitting on the couch back home, and turned him down with a shake of his head.

Fucking ridiculous. As though Yushi could tell him what to do. As though Yushi—changed something in him. It’s Yushi. His roommate, his friend, the guy he buys furniture with. His—fuck buddy? That doesn’t seem right.

Hina, his eldest sister, calls him after work, with his shoes still stinking of rum. She’s up late from pregnancy-induced vomiting and wants to know how he’s doing. Everyone always wants to know how he’s doing, it seems. Reaching their fingers down his throat.

“I’m alright,” he tells her, picking his way across the sidewalk. Shinjuku is bright even in the middle of the night, the LED billboards and neon signage painting the world pink. “How are you?”

“Besides the vomiting?”

“Right,” he says. “Sorry.”

“No worries,” Hina says. “I know it’s late.” There are crickets chirping into the fluorescent night, rivaling the sound streaming from karaoke bars and restaurants with their doors flung open. “Hey, have you thought about visiting soon?”

“I can’t,” Riku says, too quickly. “I mean—I don’t know.”

“Of course you can,” she says, like he’s being silly. “I know you don’t work on Sundays. Get someone to cover your shift on Monday, spend a night in Fukui. We miss you.”

Riku walks past a young woman smoking a mint-scented cigarette and inhales a tendril of smoke. “I really can’t. It’s too—we’re too busy. At work.”

“Okay,” Hina says, but she sounds disappointed. “I’d go over there, you know, if I wasn’t—“

“You don’t need to,” Riku says. “I’m good. I like Tokyo.”

“I know you do,” she says. “I want to meet your friends, you know. I want to know who’s taking care of you.”

Riku laughs and, unbidden, thinks of Yushi. “I’m twenty-five. No one needs to take care of me.”

“Oh please,” Hina says. He can hear the smile in her voice. “Everyone needs to be taken care of. Even when they’re a big bad adult like you are.”

Riku rolls his eyes fondly and shoves his free hand into his pocket. “I’ll visit when the baby is born, okay?”

“You better,” she says. “I’ll be really sad if you don’t.”

She means it. Riku hasn’t really thought that far ahead—he doesn’t think ahead at all, just pulls his body from one day to the next—but he really should. Of course he wants to meet his little niece or nephew. He loves his family. That’s the thing, isn’t it? If he didn’t love them, everything would be easy. If he didn’t love at all his life would be so fucking simple.

“I will,” he says. “I promise. When is it, August?”

“June,” Hina says. “I want you to be there when I give birth, Riku. I want you with the rest of our family.”

He swallows down a sharp noise and hums into the phone. “Okay. Okay, I’ll be there.”

Hina sighs. “Good. That makes me happy.”

“Good,” he echoes. “I need to—I’m gonna order a taxi.”

“Get home safe,” she says. “Love you.”

“You too,” he says, and when she hangs up he laughs wildly into the nighttime air and considers throwing his phone on the ground, hard enough to shatter the screen.

He doesn’t. He orders a taxi and goes home, and when he unlocks the apartment door his eyes catch on Yushi, fast asleep on the couch. The TV is playing quietly and Yushi is snoring faintly.

“Hi,” Riku says, to no one in particular, and his feet carry him over to Yushi. There’s a glass of ice water on the coffee table, swimming in a pool of consendation. He lifts it up and puts it on one of Yushi’s embroidered coasters.

Yushi’s arms are bare under a tank top and covered in goosebumps. Without thinking, Riku crouches down next to him and rubs a hand over the bumpy skin. Yushi’s nose twitches slightly.

There’s a white emptiness under Riku’s skin that feels like the sun. He grabs the throw blanket from the armchair—the plush beige one they bought last week—and pulls it over Yushi’s slight body. He blinks, something lodged sideways in his throat, and brushes his fingers over Yushi’s forehead. Gentle, just like Yushi would be.

“Sleep well,” he whispers, and walks away to wash the alcohol off his skin.

 

 

 

 

“Your shoes smell nasty,” Yushi says, holding Riku’s work shoes in one hand like they’re toxic.

“I know,” Riku says. “Why are you smelling my shoes?”

“Not by choice,” Yushi grumbles. “I was cleaning up.”

Riku takes a swig of beer and blinks out at the balcony. The sun is setting steadily, sending red and orange over every surface. “I’ll get new shoes.”

“Good,” Yushi says, pleased, like he’s accomplished his mission. “Saku wants to go out for dinner, if you want to come.”

“He didn’t say anything in the groupchat.”

“He doesn’t want Sion to go,” Yushi says. He shrugs and tosses Riku’s rum-scented shoes onto the ground. “I don’t know why. I’m staying out of it.”

Riku thinks he knows why, but it’s probably not his place to say. Things would be so simple if his friends stopped fucking and falling in love with each other. “So me, you, Sakuya, and—?”

“Ryo, I think.”

“You want to go?”

“I want to go if you go,” Yushi says. He says it often, and Riku says the same, but it feels—different, for some reason. It makes Riku pleased in a way it didn’t before. He chugs the rest of his beer and feels a smile settle on his face.

“Yeah, sure. I’m down.”

It’s weird, looking at Yushi standing by the front door, to think about him fucking Sion or Daeyoung or, god forbid, someone else in their friend group. Riku knows for a fact that Yushi has fucked the first two. It’s just weird. It was weird before and it’s weird now. He doesn’t like it very much, actually. He doesn’t like to think about Yushi giving Sion what he wants, or being gentle with Daeyoung. Or rough. Or anything.

“Hey,” Yushi says. “We don’t have to go.”

“No, it’s fine,” Riku says. “Got lost in my head.”

They get dinner at an izakaya. Riku drinks twice as much as the other three but only gets half as drunk. The usual, then. There’s hotpot and yakitori and Riku watches Sakuya and Ryo antagonize each other for twenty minutes at a time before acting like best friends for the next twenty. Yushi stays neutral through it all. It’s sort of like theatre, as far as Riku’s concerned.

“Don’t tell Sion about this,” Sakuya says over his second plate of sashimi, which confirms Riku’s belief that this random four-person dinner is simply because Sakuya’s mad at Sion.

“Like you’re not gonna tell him,” Ryo says, which sets off another round of bickering.

As Sakuya’s face goes red—from alcohol but mostly performative rage—Yushi’s hand slides onto Riku’s thigh. He almost jumps at the touch, startled and taken-aback, but Yushi’s eyes are bubbling with mirth and focused on Ryo. His hand is just a hand. A steadying weight. I’m here, and so are you. He’s not asking for anything because he never is. Riku wants to close his eyes and rest his head on Yushi’s shoulder until the world goes quiet.

At some point Sakuya leaves to go to the bathroom and Ryo’s slumped in the corner of the booth, chewing on his lip and scrolling through his phone. Yushi leans close to Riku’s ear.

“He’s in love with Sakuya,” Yushi whispers. “Do you think Sakuya could love him back?”

It says something for how often Yushi murmurs in people’s ears that Ryo doesn’t even look at them across the table. Riku shakes his head and whispers back, “I think Sakuya already does.”

Not that Riku would know. He can only ever see what’s on the surface. It’s Yushi who can see through skin, under veins, between ribs. It’s Yushi who cracks people open his hands and examines the remnants of their bodies for signs of love and life.

Riku doesn’t know what it looks like when someone’s in love. He knows that Sion cries over Daeyoung sometimes, when Daeyoung is mad at him or back in Korea visiting family. He knows that Daeyoung gets tense and quiet for weeks when Sion starts a new doomed-to-fail relationship. He knows that Ryo looks at Sakuya like he’s a star in the sky, or a glittering planet, and that Sakuya tries not to look at anyone. He knows that Yushi is kind to everyone. He knows that Yushi would have gone to dinner with Sion just to make Sakuya mad—not to be a bad friend to Sakuya, but to be a good friend to Sion.

When Sakuya gets back from the bathroom, Ryo frowns at him but slides a fresh beer across the table. Maybe that’s what love looks like. Maybe it looks like nothing in particular.

Riku wouldn’t know. He looks at Yushi, his skin dappled silver in the low lighting, and wonders if Yushi would know what love looks like. He wonders if Yushi was ever in love with any of his numerous boyfriends. The answer is probably yes. If he was never in love, why would he keep dating? Yushi must see something worthy and kind in every man he touches.

There must be something like that in Riku.

Riku shakes his head and waves over a waiter for another beer. Yushi’s hand is still heavy on his thigh, warm and sweaty, and it’s making him think stupid things. There’s nothing in Riku that’s lovely and kind. He’s not at all like the gentle, quiet men Yushi used to bring home. It’s just that he’s Yushi’s friend, and he’s not bad looking, so Yushi decided to be generous with his body as well as with his words and actions.

Sakuya doesn’t spend the entire night complaining. Eventually he starts talking about college classes and video games, and when Ryo makes a bad joke Sakuya laughs loudly because he’s drunk and probably because he loves Ryo just as much as Ryo loves him. Maybe that’s what love looks like, too—like friendship. Like laughter.

It figures that Riku’s never been in love with anyone. He hasn’t had a crush since he was seventeen. He hasn’t wanted anyone for more than their body since—ever.

He doesn’t know how many beers he’s had by the time he and Yushi are swaying on the pavement, waiting for a taxi. He just knows that it’s enough to get him properly drunk, which means it was a lot. Beers don’t do much for him anymore.

“What?” Yushi laughs, his arm slung around Riku’s shoulder, his face shining under the streetlights. “Why’re you—you’re looking at me like—”

Riku grabs Yushi’s waist, pulls their bodies flush together on the sidewalk, and kisses him so hard that their teeth click together. Yushi makes a noise of surprise and then smiles, drunk and distracted, as the world blurs around them. There’s a pulsing heat dancing up Riku’s legs from the pavement below.

“I’m not looking at you,” Riku lies, right into Yushi’s mouth. “I’m not.”

“Okay,” Yushi laughs. He grabs Riku’s ass for a brief moment and pulls away. He’s—Yushi’s glowing. The shape of his body is hazy in Riku’s vision and the world is simultaneously cold and warm and springtime mild. Yushi is the only person Riku trusts. The only one.

The only fucking one.

“I can’t believe you,” Riku says, and it doesn’t make sense—it’s not what he means to say—but Yushi still smiles like he understands.

“Well, believe me,” Yushi says, and then holds Riku’s hand as they wait for the taxi to arrive.

 

 

 

 

April rolls around, and so does Yushi’s birthday. There’s cake and vodka and presents spread out on Riku’s ugly coffee table, and a portable karaoke machine plugged into the TV with which Daeyoung humiliates them all. Late that night, after everyone’s gone home, Riku sinks to his knees in the bathroom with vodka on his breath and asks—begs—Yushi to fuck his throat again. He doesn’t have a good excuse. He’s not blackout wasted or even desperately horny, he’s just—he wants it. Yushi looked so beautiful, unwrapping presents and pretending that he liked all of them—and Yushi is such a bad liar—so Riku was thinking about it the whole night. When Yushi blew out his candles Riku made his own wordless, thoughtless wish.

Yushi gives it to him, of course. Looks down his nose under the bathroom fluorescents and makes Riku choke on his cock until he’s crying with it, and then positions his shin between Riku’s knees so Riku can hump against it and suck at Yushi’s softening cock until he cums, his knees cold and aching on the bathroom floor.

They drink more after that—or Riku does, while Yushi fiddles with the new crochet set that he apparently desperately wanted—and as Riku drifts, the tastes of cum and vodka mingling on his tongue, Yushi puts down the crochet needles and says, flat and sure, “You’ll let me fuck you one day, right?”

“What?” Riku says, heart jumping into his throat. “No, I don’t—no.”

Yushi hums and picks up the needles again. “Okay.”

Riku’s fucking drunk. “Maybe. One day.”

“Alright,” Yushi says again. “Only if you want.”

“I’ll—I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

He’s too drunk to feel anything, including fear, so he’s telling the truth. He thinks about it. He thinks about it in the morning when he wakes up with his millionth hangover of the year—of his life—and he thinks about it while he vomits into the trashcan conveniently positioned by the head of his bed, probably put there by Yushi at some point during the night. Perfect fucking Yushi. Riku can’t even be angry about it. He’s too fucking grateful.

So, Riku thinks about it. He hates that he thinks about it. Sometimes when he’s jerking off his mind slips from remembering Yushi’s cock in his mouth to imagining Yushi’s fingers inside of him, slow and firm while they stretch him out—Yushi’s body over his, his cock filling all the empty space in Riku’s body—and Riku has to stop jerking off. Potent anxiety floods his senses and makes him simultaneously extremely hard and very afraid, like he’s being hunted. Like he’s standing in his parent’s house with the muzzle of a shotgun to his forehead.

“I can’t,” Riku says eventually, on another blissful Sunday morning. “I can’t—I don’t want to get fucked.”

Yushi looks at him impassively. “That’s fine. I’m sorry, I was—I was drunk. I didn’t mean to pressure you.”

“It’s okay,” Riku says, but he’s glad for the weight off his chest. He’s glad that he doesn’t have to think about Yushi inside of him, all around him, owning his body and his soul. He doesn’t have to worry about the noises he’d make. There’s a first time for everything, but—not for that. Riku can’t allow himself to let go so entirely.

“There’s more to sex than penetration,” Yushi says, echoing what Riku said some time ago, and when Riku laughs he feels entirely relieved but oddly sad.

 

 

 

 

Riku was ten years old the first time he had a crush on a boy. The first time he had a crush in general. The boy was the little brother of Hina’s best friend, dragged along to play dates just like Riku was, and he was raucously loud and not very funny. But he was really nice, is the thing. One year older than Riku, which means everything when you’re ten and eleven, but the boy didn’t act like he was smarter or older or like Riku was small and dumb. He let Riku use his Nintendo and didn’t get mad when Riku splashed him in the ocean.

Riku hated to look at him in the ocean. That’s why he splashed the boy so much—he hoped the boy would get mad and swim away. Riku hated to see him shirtless. He hated the big bad feeling in his chest when the boy laughed. And, when he was eleven and the boy was twelve, he told the boy as much—I hate you—and the boy looked at him sadly and never talked to him again. Good, Riku thought. That’s good.

There were other boys that made him feel the big bad feeling. Other boys he hated. The last one was when he was seventeen. It was a guy he played volleyball with in middle school, a vague acquaintance one year younger than him, and they reconnected over the summer while working at the same ice cream stall. The boy was sweet-faced and very smart and, in hindsight, definitely gay. Probably had a crush on Riku. But Riku wasn’t gay back then so he wasn’t thinking about things like that. All he knew was that he liked hanging out on the playground at night while the guy talked about his dreams for college. He knew that he also hated it, because of the feeling. The big one.

The boy tried to kiss him a week before school started up again. Riku shoved him away and ran, and ran, and ran until he couldn’t breathe or think or swallow his spit. He got home far past curfew, his mother simultaneously angry and worried, and he’d stood in the foyer and cried. Big ugly wailing tears. Waking the whole house.

That’s where the cracks started, he thinks. A whole fissure running up and down his spine, fracturing into snowflake lines of breakage as the years passed. So much empty space in his body. So much fear and tension. And with the cracks came the inability to feel the big bad thing, or really anything at all, even when he realized he wanted to fuck men. Even when he combed through his memories and labeled the crushes for what they were.

Sometimes Riku wants to find that boy online—the one from the ice cream stall—and send him a message. Not I’m sorry, because he’s not sorry for what he couldn’t control. He wants to say something weirder. Something like: what did you see in me? Why did you want me? Was it just my body, or was it something else? Something I can’t see in the mirror?

 

 

 

 

One evening Yushi comes home from work, in his cute little suit jacket with his company badge hanging around his neck, and finds Riku sobbing with his head on the coffee table. Drunk, of course, and filled with something awful. His teeth hurt. His eyeballs ache in his skull.

“Woah,” Yushi says, kicking off his shoes, and hovers a hand over Riku’s back. “What’s going on?”

“The coffee table,” Riku cries, wretched. “We need to get rid of the coffee table.”

It makes sense. It makes sense in his head, at least. He takes up so much space in the world. He feels like a grotesque, laborious creature, polluting the air around him. Polluting Yushi most of all. Yushi’s hand on his back is probably absorbing the poison, quick and lethal, so Riku shakes it off and glares over his shoulder.

“There’s nothing wrong with the coffee table,” Yushi says, patient but clearly confused. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s so big,” Riku spits, and pounds his fist on the surface. Yushi winces. It breaks something further in Riku’s chest. “See? It’s so big and—it’s so big. And ugly.”

“It’s a normal table,” Yushi tries. “Do you want some water?”

“No,” Riku says. “I don’t need water. I don’t need anything.”

Yushi sighs shakily through his teeth and sits down on the couch. He cocks his head and looks at Riku, kneeling on the floor with his fingernails scraping against the wood grain of the table. “How can I help you?”

“Get rid of the table!” Riku’s really drunk, but it’s not an excuse for the way he’s acting. He’s usually drunk, is the thing. He’s so often drunk that it’s becoming a serious problem. He can acknowledge that now, with his burning eyes and his aching skin, but he’ll ignore it again in the morning.

“I like the table,” Yushi says firmly. “We’re not getting rid of the table.”

“We should’ve kept yours,” Riku says, fresh hot tears spilling down his cheeks. “Your table was better.”

“My—what? What table?”

“Your table. Your coffee table. You got rid of it. Why would you get rid of it?”

“Oh,” Yushi says. “I forgot about that.”

“I didn’t,” Riku chokes, and buries his face in his arms. “I always think about the table. Always. I’m always thinking about—”

“It was my table,” Yushi says. His voice is slightly raised, but when Riku looks at his face—blury, through the liquor and tears—he doesn’t look angry. Just uneasy. “Your table was bigger. It’s better for two people. I didn’t even—I bought my table at Daiso, Riku. I didn’t care about it.”

“My big fucking table,” Riku says. “Fuck.”

“Yeah, your big fucking table,” Yushi says. He’s probably making fun of Riku. Who knows. Who fucking cares. “It’s a great table.”

“It’s a terrible table.”

“Okay,” Yushi says. “Whatever you say. But we’re not getting rid of it.”

“Fine,” Riku says. His stomach is rolling. “Whatever.”

Silence, then, except for the sound of Riku’s nauseating tears. He curls into a ball on the floor and drifts through his head, through the jagged corners of his mind, between all the razor-sharp cracks. It’s so dark inside. He’s so scared of falling.

“Drink some water,” Yushi says. “Go to sleep.”

“Why?” Riku asks miserably. He wraps a hand around one of the dented table legs and squeezes until his knuckles turn red and then white. He wants Yushi to pry his hand off. He wants Yushi to carry him to bed. He wants Yushi to—what? Save him? How fucking pathetic. How unfair, to expect that from Yushi.

Riku’s old enough to know that people don’t save other people. He’s old enough to know that the only way to escape himself is by becoming a person he actually likes. He’s drunk enough to acknowledge it right now, but he’ll ignore it in the morning.

“Go to sleep,” Yushi says tiredly. Of course he’s tired. He just got home from work and Riku’s throwing a tantrum over furniture.

“We could fuck,” Riku says, the only thing he can think of to cover up the cracks, but he knows it’s stupid as soon as he says it.

“Absolutely not.”

Riku lets go of the table leg. “You don’t want me? Do you hate me?”

“Don’t be mean,” Yushi says, which throws Riku for a loop. He knows he’s being an idiot, but he’s not sure how he’s being mean. He’s usually mean on purpose. He’s pretty good at it. He’s best at it when he’s drunk and envious.

“I’m not being mean,” Riku says. He feels himself deflating. The cracks closing up, if only for the rest of the night.

“I don’t hate you,” Yushi says. “You know—you know I don’t hate you. Do you even know how much I—” Yushi breaks off and looks up at the ceiling. “Just go to sleep.”

“Okay,” Riku says, sick and miserable.

“In bed,” Yushi says. “Go to bed. I’ll bring you water.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I know,” Yushi says. “I know that, Riku.”

In the cold darkness of his bedroom, Riku pretends his arms aren’t working so Yushi will hold the cup of water to his mouth and help him drink. The light spilling in from the hallway makes Yushi’s expression look like—well. Not like he hates Riku, exactly, but like he certainly doesn’t like him very much. Yushi’s good at forcing a blank face, but the expressions that slip through don’t lie. Riku wants to tear off his skin and give it to Yushi and beg. Beg for what, he doesn’t know. For anything. For Yushi’s sunlight to shine on him, always and forever.

He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t scream. He finishes the glass of water, turns over in bed, and passes out before Yushi leaves the room.

 

 

 

 

Riku’s done that before. Thrown a drunken tantrum in front of Yushi, completely humiliated himself. Usually Yushi’s subdued in the day that follows. Riku doesn’t blame him. He frankly can’t believe that Yushi’s been his roommate for so long. If he were Yushi, he wouldn’t put up with it, but he’s not Yushi. He’s not kind or gentle or patient. He’s not college-educated and gainfully employed and beautiful, inside and out.

He’s too embarrassed to get out of bed in the morning when he hears Yushi making breakfast. He only gets up after Yushi leaves for work, and he takes a long shower under painfully hot water and scrubs every inch of his skin. He only throws up once, and while he watches his vomit swirl down the drain he thinks about—well. Something scary. He thinks about not drinking. He thinks about what it would take for him to stop. Maybe he’d have to be jobless and homeless and destitute. Maybe he’d have to be dying. Or maybe he could just—stop.

It’s a terrifying thought. It’s just as scary as the idea of Yushi fucking him. Riku doesn’t have any defense against the world if he doesn’t have alcohol. He doesn’t have anything. He’d be raw and shaking and vulnerable in a world that only wants to hurt him.

He spends the hours before work, before the sun sinks in the sky, poking around the internet for something that speaks to him. There’s a lot, as it turns out. Typing I drink too much in the search bar directs him to something called Alcoholics Anonymous, which sounds extremely serious and quickens Riku’s heartrate. But there’s a heading on one of the pages of the website that cuts through his chest like a hot knife: The first step is acknowledging you have a problem.

Riku closes the tab, closes his computer, walks out of his bedroom and closes the door. He doesn’t—he doesn’t know. He finds himself on the balcony, staring down at the evening traffic and trying to catch his breath. Of course he has a problem. He has a lot of problems. He moved to Tokyo because of the biggest one, the first fracture, but it left a cascade of smaller issues in its wake. He couldn’t fix any of it by having sex with random guys just like he couldn’t fix the shame. The horror of being known, of being held, of looking another man in the eye.

It’s not as fun to drink at work, later that night, when he thinks I have a problem each time he takes a shot. The alcohol is bitter and he mostly craves a cigarette. He watches Sion wait tables and imagines telling him, I have a problem. Imagines telling him Yushi’s the only person I want to touch me for the rest of my life. That last thought is a wild, insane bolt from the sky, and it shakes through Riku’s bones like lightning, but when he smokes his break-time cigarette it fades back into faint static.

What he feels for Yushi isn’t permanent. Of course he feels that way now, living with Yushi, trusting him, sometimes kissing him for no reason at all. But they’ll stop fucking eventually. They’ll stop fucking, and Riku will go back to the clubs, and he’ll get used to the monotony of drunken lights-off sex with nameless men. Yushi will fade away just like all the nameless men fade away. He has to. He will.

Yushi’s not on the couch when Riku gets home from work. He’s in his bedroom, and the door is open but the room is quiet. He’s not playing video games or talking on the phone. Riku hovers by the door for a moment before knocking. Yushi hums a quiet come in, so Riku does.

He’s curled in bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin, his face lit by the stupid Barcelona lamp on his dresser, and Riku—for a moment, Riku really can’t imagine Yushi fading away. He can’t imagine not wanting to touch him or kiss him or suck his cock or be in his rosemary-scented bedroom, under his inscrutable gaze.

“Hey,” Riku says, leaning against the doorframe, his heart pounding. “I know I have a problem.”

Yushi hums and sits up in bed. “Oh?”

“I mean, lots of problems,” Riku says, laughing humorlessly, “but I mean the alcohol.”

“Hm,” Yushi says. “Yeah. You do.”

“I can’t—I’m not saying I’m gonna stop,” Riku says, “but I’m aware of it. And I’m—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for last night.”

“I forgive you,” Yushi says softly. Not it’s okay, like the rest of their friends might. Not don’t worry about it. It’s better, though, to be forgiven. It means Yushi can see under Riku’s skin. It means he always has. “Come here. Sit down.”

Riku does. He’s barely even tipsy, which is strange, and when he sits at the edge of the bed Yushi curls himself around Riku’s waist and plants a kiss on the outside of his thigh, over his jeans. Riku clenches his jaw and allows himself to tangle his fingers in Yushi’s hair.

“I’m gonna suck you off,” Yushi says. “If that’s alright.”

“Yeah,” Riku says, immediately breathless. “Yeah.”

Yushi is gentle. He pushes Riku onto his back, still in his beer-scented clothes from work, and rucks up his shirt to kiss at his stomach, his hips, and then the edges of his ribs. He noses over Riku’s groin and kisses there too, over his jeans and then over his underwear, and when Riku dares to lift his head and look he sees—Yushi’s eyes. Endlessly soft and shockingly certain. Riku lays his head back down and examines the ceiling as Yushi pulls out his cock. When he licks at it, certain and firm, Riku breathes out an oh and strokes softly at Yushi’s hair.

Yushi is gentle with his mouth, too. He sucks at Riku like he’s patient, not greedy, and Riku has to keep his eyes trained on the ceiling for fear of cumming immediately. He closes his eyes and imagines Yushi’s sweet mouth around his cock, and his dark eyes looking at Riku’s face, and then Riku realizes he doesn’t need to imagine it at all. Yushi is right there.

“Oh my god,” Riku mumbles, awestruck, when Yushi swallows him down and cups his hand under Riku’s balls. He lifts his head to look at Yushi—at his wet eyes, so untroubled, and his stretched-out mouth—his hands rubbing lightly at Riku’s thighs—and Riku cums like that. Just like that. It’s a whole-body tremor that wrings a pathetic noise from his chest, like he’s grieving or dying, and he fits his hands over Yushi’s cheeks just to feel him. The shallow scar on his cheekbone. His skin. All of it makes Riku cum harder, like he’s surrounded by sunlight, by stars, and he thinks the cracks in his body are mending and widening at the same time.

“Baby,” Riku says mindlessly. Yushi pulls off and smiles slightly. “Yushi.”

“What?”

“Just,” Riku says, shaking his head and tugging on Yushi’s shirt. “C’mere.”

Yushi does. He lays his body over Riku’s just like he did after they kissed for the first time, and Riku holds him close as he grinds against Riku’s thigh. Yushi cums quietly, his mouth open in a lovely little gasp.

“Baby,” Riku says again. Like a prayer. Yushi says nothing this time, just clambers to his feet to change his pants and toss Riku an old pair of gym shorts.

“Sleep here,” Yushi says. It’s a command, and Riku will obey. Of course he will.

“If I have to,” Riku says, but Yushi knows he doesn’t mean it. He climbs back into bed and loops a thigh around Riku’s waist.

“You do,” Yushi says. “You have to do whatever I say.”

Yushi doesn’t mean that, either, but Riku wishes he did. Really fucking wishes. He breathes in the scent of Yushi’s hair, of his skin, and looks up at the ceiling and prays for shooting stars.

 

 

 

 

The first guy Riku fucked was a twenty-year old twink. So, basically, the same as Riku. He was also the first guy Riku kissed, and it could’ve been worse, all things considered. They were both drunk, but not drunk enough to throw up on each other, and the guy knew what he was doing even if Riku didn’t. He knew how to prep himself. He seemed to figure out implicitly that Riku wanted him to bend over and never, ever turn to look over his shoulder. Riku figured, back then, that’s how it always went between two men. One does the fucking. The other bends over and takes it.

If that’s how it had to be, Riku certainly wasn’t going to offer to bend over and take it. It was bad enough that he only wanted men. It was even worse that the desire chased him away from Fukui, from his parents and his sister and his friends, and brought him to sweaty clubs selling overpriced alcohol. Riku wasn’t going to sacrifice more of himself. He’d given enough. The cracks in his soul were already irreparable.

By the time he met Sion—by the time he learned that, no, it didn’t have to be like that—it was too late. By the time he came out he was on an irreversible course to self-destruction. Sex was fun, but it was also quick and dirty and meaningless. Sex was fucking someone and leaving. Sex was getting blackout drunk. That’s what sex was, and that’s what being gay was, and it was too late for Riku to change his mind. Years too late. And sure, before he moved to Tokyo he had vague half-dreams of boyfriends and domestic partnerships and shared pets, but it was never going to happen. Riku wasn’t built for a life like that. He wasn’t soft or gentle or kind.

That’s how it had to be. It could’ve been worse, all things considered.

 

 

 

 

Sion goes back to Mokpo for his birthday, which means the real celebration is in late May. It’s the weird part of the year where Sion is, on paper, two years older than Riku, while Yushi is the same age as him. It makes Riku feel a strangeness on his skin, like he’s suspended out of time—unreal—and Ryo nods thoughtfully when Riku says as much.

“I get it. It’s like when I’m one year older than Sakuya for a bit and he gets all mad about it.”

It’s not really like that, but whatever. Riku still smiles and pats Ryo on the head.

They go out for dinner and then gather at Sion and Daeyoung’s place around midnight. It’s really wonderful, Riku always thinks, to be surrounded by people who love him. They drink beer and play truth or dare and share embarrassing secrets under the hazy lamplight until the sun rises, and everyone’s piled on top of each other and asleep, except for Riku, who’s looking over their faces one by one. He feels like a child again. He’s searching for treasure on the beach, finding one beautiful shell after another. His friends shine perfectly under the sunrise.

Eventually Daeyoung wakes up—he has a meeting in the afternoon, even though it’s a Saturday, and Riku sleepily listens to him washing up in the bathroom.

“Good morning,” Daeyoung says when he returns. “I’m gonna make coffee. You want some?”

Riku nods and slides Sakuya’s head gently off his lap. He didn’t even notice his legs were numb. He follows Daeyoung into the kitchen and leans against the counter as the coffee machine drips lazily into the pot, blinking exhaustion out of his eyes.

“So Sion’s old now,” Riku jokes, and Daeyoung smiles lazily in response.

“Yep.”

“You love him?” Riku asks, but it’s more of a statement than anything. The truth of it is plain on Daeyoung’s face.

“Yeah,” Daeyoung says. He taps the side of the coffee pot. “I do.”

Riku hums. For some reason he feels slightly fragile. “Maybe you should tell him.”

“He knows,” Daeyoung says shortly. “He loves me too, you know. Even if it doesn’t seem like it.”

“No, it seems like it,” Riku says, because it does. In many ways Sion is a lot like him—aching and empty. Searching for something he already—well. Riku and Sion are a lot alike, is all.

Daeyoung laughs lightly. “That’s good. Hey, Riku, I have a question.”

“Yeah?”

“You and Yushi are hooking up, aren’t you?”

Riku’s mouth is dry. There’s nothing to swallow down. “We’re not.”

“You are,” Daeyoung says, tapping the coffee pot again. “I know you are.”

“Did he—” Riku starts, a cold feeling trickling down his spine. “He told you?”

“No, of course not,” Daeyoung says. He rolls his shoulders back and digs in the cupboard for a mug. “He said no when I asked him. But, I mean, he’s a terrible liar.”

Riku takes a mug from Daeyoung and tries to think of something to say. There’s nothing. No words, no ways to run and hide. He can’t smile and charm his way out of this. Daeyoung is his friend. Daeyoung is someone he cares about.

“Sorry,” Riku mumbles. The mug in his hands is covered in Hangul writing. Yushi would probably know what it says, because Yushi is smart, and because when Yushi cares for people he goes above and beyond in a way Riku can’t comprehend. Learns new languages. Memorizes birthdays and allergies and favorite colors.

“Why are you sorry?” Daeyoung asks, raising his eyebrows. “There’s nothing wrong with it. As long as you’re both happy.”

Riku tries to scoff, but it comes out sideways, like a hiccup. “I don’t think it has anything to do with happiness.”

“Hm,” Daeyoung says. He pours himself a cup of coffee and does the same for Riku, and then leans against the counter and looks Riku square in the face. “It could, you know.”

No, I don’t know, Riku wants to say, except maybe he does know, and maybe it’s the most terrifying fucking thing in the world. He takes a scalding sip of coffee and shoves the knowledge down, all the way down, underneath his singed tastebuds and burnt throat, and he looks at his new shoes and breathes slowly through his teeth.

“I’m just saying,” Daeyoung says. “Drink your coffee.”

Riku drinks his coffee and thinks about broken things.

 

 

 

 

As far as hooking up—it’s not like they do it all the time. Riku thinks hooking up implies some sort of regularity, or a pattern, but there’s no pattern to what he and Yushi do. It’s a once-a-week thing, on average, and it’s mostly Riku sucking Yushi’s cock. Not that he minds. It’s sort of strange when he thinks about it too hard, or for too long—how they spend most nights curled up on the couch as usual, except for the occasions Yushi sticks his hand down Riku’s pants. It’s strange that on Fridays, after shitty shifts with terrible customers, Riku can come home and kneel between Yushi’s legs and disappear. It’s strange that Riku goes to the club and feels so desperately bored he goes home after an hour and half.

It’s strange that everything else is exactly the same. Yushi sends Riku links to home decor they don’t need, and Riku sends twice as many in return; they spend too much money on take-out, and just as much money on beer; there’s still evenings where they’re alone in their respective bedrooms, Yushi probably playing video games and Riku listening to music or scrolling through TikTok or going out with Sion.

Riku used to wonder if it was normal for two people to spend most of their time doing nothing. It’s not a fair thought, really. Yushi works five days a week at a respectable, well paying job, and Riku—well, he works five days a week. But besides that, and besides his now-infrequent nights out, Riku doesn’t really leave the apartment. Yushi certainly doesn’t. They’re basically hermits. So yeah, Riku used to wonder. He used to look at the people around him, with copious day-trip plans and a list of restaurants they wanted to visit, and wonder if there was something wrong with him and also with Yushi.

He’s not sure he cares if there is. Not anymore. There’s nothing he wants more than to stay inside, in their apartment, and do nothing in particular. He wants to sit next to Yushi on the couch, to hang their laundry on the balcony, to fill the fridge full to bursting, to curl in bed and fall asleep knowing he’s only alone because he wants to be. If he doesn’t want quiet, and if he isn’t emotionally exhausted, he can fit himself into Yushi’s space and fall asleep there instead.

So, all things considered, it’s unusual that Yushi wants to go out on a Sunday.

“I don’t want to go out,” Yushi says. He’s exasperated, but not at Riku, which is nice. “We need to go to a cafe, or something, so I can finish this dumb presentation.”

“You want me to come?” Riku asks, raising his eyebrows. “I thought the apartment was distracting.”

Yushi looks at him sideways, with his hands twisted around the straps of his work bag. “Obviously I want you to come.”

“Oh,” Riku says.

“I’m not going out alone,” Yushi says, with grave seriousness. “Don’t make me go out alone.”

“Okay, yeah, I’ll go,” Riku says, even though he really doesn’t want to, because he’s pretty sure he owes Yushi a coffee or five for putting up with him on a daily basis. “Don’t get mad at me if I distract you.”

“I never get mad at you,” Yushi says, easy and true, and Riku ducks his head to stare at the floor.

Riku works in Shinjuku, with its skyscrapers and LED billboards and pressing crowds of people, and he goes to clubs in Ni-chome. He only really walks around in his part of Tokyo, Adachi, when he’s making his way to the bus stop for work or going on a grocery run. He rushes through, insistent on getting where he needs to go as fast as possible. When he takes a taxi home from work he closes his eyes and lets the streetlights blur behind his eyelids.

Yushi doesn’t move through Adachi the same way Riku does. He walks like he’s wandering, like he has no goals, and he recognizes so many little things—a white cat in a barbershop window, a glitched vending machine that spits out bottled milk tea for half the usual price, and a dentist’s office with a large vat of orange flowers under the window.

“They always bloom at the end of May,” Yushi says. “Every year.”

“Pretty,” Riku comments absentmindedly. He’s never been down this street because it doesn’t connect to a bus stop or a liquor store.

“They’re an early birthday present for you,” Yushi says.

“What?”

“The flowers,” Yushi says, like Riku’s stupid.

“Daeyoung’s birthday is sooner,” Riku says. Yushi just looks at him blankly.

There’s so much that Yushi knows, as they walk through Adachi, and it doesn’t make sense. Yushi leaves the apartment at six in the morning, five days a week, and gets home in the late evening. His actual job is on the other side of the Arakawa river. He doesn’t like to go out. It doesn’t make sense that he’s memorized the shops and the roads and the places where the sidewalk crumbles into dirt.

The cafe Yushi leads them to is small and quaint. Riku has never seen in his life.

“How do you know this place?” Riku asks. “How do you know so many places?”

“I’ve lived in Adachi for five years,” Yushi says, raising his eyebrows. “You know that.”

Riku did know that, actually, but he’s never really thought about it. Five years ago—Yushi was already in Adachi, living with other roommates, other college students, and Riku was hopping around Tokyo and praying for a place to land. He was working three jobs and spending all his money buying drinks for boys, buying clothes he hoped would make him look hot, saving pennies for the daily costs of his shithole rooming house in San’ya. He was getting wasted with the old guys who crowded in the smoke-filled hallways until two in the morning, and he’d lie about getting kicked out of his family home so they’d have pity on him, let him have a drag of their cigarettes.

Yushi was already in Adachi. He was living in the same apartment they’re living in now. He was studying business, planning his steady future, dating polite boys and living with polite roommates. He was doing his homework at cafes and petting cats on the sidewalk and paying rent with his parent’s credit card. He was waiting with bated breath to live a life that was entirely his own. He was watching TV shows on the same couch, in front of the old coffee table, with that same gentle light in his eyes.

Five years ago, Riku sort of knew Sion—recognized him from some of the clubs—and he couldn’t understand why Sion kept mentioning restaurants that were hiring, friends he knew with spare bedrooms, organizations that offered cheap food and medical care. He couldn’t understand why Sion talked to him but didn’t want to fuck him. Four years ago, Riku finally applied to the bar that Sion worked at. Shitty hours, but steady, and a stable enough income to move out of that San’ya rooming house and into a cupboard-sized apartment in Itabashi. Closer to work, closer to the Ni-chome bars, no old men talking shit outside his bedroom door until two in the morning. Riku missed the chaos, somehow. One year was enough for it to sink under his skin, into his veins, and become a part of who he was.

A little over two years ago, Sion mentioned that one of his closest friends was looking for a roommate. It was a place in Adachi, inconveniently far from work, but it was quiet, Sion said, and it was friendly. As though Riku needed friends and quiet. Riku was drunk when he said yes. He was drunk and he just wanted Sion to stop talking.

“It’ll be six years in September," Yushi says. They’re still standing in front of the cafe, the rosy afternoon turning mildly humid. “And then we’ll have been roommates for three years.”

“Yeah,” Riku says. His throat feels tight. “Three years.”

Yushi hums and taps Riku’s elbow, just below the bone. Riku looks at his pretty teeth, his pretty mouth, his pretty eyes. “We can go outside more, if you want.”

“I don’t know,” Riku says. “I don’t know what I want.”

Yushi laughs softly. “Who does?”

You do, Riku doesn’t say, and follows him into the cafe.

 

 

 

 

In mid-June, Riku takes the shinkansen to Fukui three days before Hina is supposed to give birth. He’s crushingly anxious. On the train, he curls against the window and fogs the glass with his breath, thinking about the ocean, thinking about his mother, thinking about volleyball courts and wide sunlit streets and low beige houses with cinderblock fences and green gardens climbing endlessly into the sky. He thinks about the humidity of a middle school classroom. He thinks about his father’s face when Riku left—the tears that threatened to spill, the bewilderment and frustration in his eyes.

It’s not like Riku hasn’t gone home in the past five years. He returned for the first couple of New Year’s Days, for his mother’s retirement party, and for his eldest sister’s wedding. He loves his family. If he could go home more he would, but he can’t, and not because he doesn’t have the time or the money—but because he is physically, mentally unable to get on the train to Fukui unless the love of his family depends on it. Unless he can think, honestly and truly, if I don’t go home for this they’ll never talk to me again.

The truth is, too, that Riku loves Fukui. He misses it like he misses being a thoughtless child. Like he misses being unfractured, unbroken. He misses the quiet and the ease and the sunlight and the rain. He misses the endless sky. He misses knowing every street, every good restaurant, every vintage clothing store, every cheap snack shop. He misses being a part of something that made sense. A perfect piece in the puzzle of the world.

Kana, his second eldest sister, picks him up from the train station in her rickety Kei car. She looks older. Her hair is cropped short above her shoulders and when Riku climbs in the car she slaps his arm, hard, and then hugs him across the center console.

“I hate you,” she says into his shoulder. “You suck.”

“I know,” Riku whispers. She smells like childhood. He can barely breathe.

“God,” she says, shaking her head and blinking rapidly. “God. Are you ready to be an uncle?”

“No,” Riku says. “Are you ready to be an aunt?”

“No,” she says, smiling, “but I don’t think Hina is ready to be a mom, so. We’re okay.”

“That’s not very nice,” Riku says. His legs barely fit in the passenger seat. As Kana drives out of the parking lot, the city that spreads out around him is so familiar he has to close his eyes.

“She’s always saying it,” Kana says. “She’s worried she’s gonna be a bad mom.”

There are thoughts, of course, that his sisters share with each other and not with him. It’s partly because he’s a man and partly because he’s so far away. He wishes, strangely, that Hina told him her worries about motherhood. He would’ve told her she’s going to be perfect. He would’ve talked about how she used to break up fights between him and Kana, when they were kicking and screaming at each other, and how she bandaged his ankle that day at the beach when he was seven.

“Who’s at the house?” Riku asks as they wind to the heart of his childhood neighborhood. Some of the homes—some of them belong to his childhood friends, his teenage classmates. He’s looked through those windows. He’s walked through those front doors.

“Just dad,” Kana says. “Mom is at Hina’s place, probably stressing her out. Dad and I got kicked out.”

“And how’s Hina?”

“She’s healthy.” The car turns onto his road. His family’s road. Telephone wires criss-crossing overhead, a rusty bicycle on the neighbor’s stoop, trees and bamboo reaching out from behind the row of brown houses. The perpetually empty lot at the end of the block, overgrown, dotted with pink flowers.

“She’s healthy,” Kana says again, “but how are you?”

Riku clears his throat and reaches into the back seat for his duffle bag. “I’m good.”

Kana pulls into the driveway and puts the car in park. Riku looks at the mailbox, at the porch with the potted plants, at his father’s car tucked deep in the garage. He looks at the empty sky and down at his hands. He feels like a mannequin.

“Are you really, Riku? Are you good?”

He can’t meet her eyes. His sisters—both of them—know him so well. They’ve loved him and hated him and watched him grow from the moment he was born, but with none of the hazy biases that cloud the eyes of a parent. When Riku realized he was gay, his first fear was that his sisters already knew. They didn’t, of course. No one finds what they’re not looking for.

“I’m good,” he says. “I’m—I’m better than I have been.”

She sighs and turns off the car. “Alright. But if you need to—”

“I don’t—”

“If you need to talk—don’t interrupt me—I’m here. You know that.”

Riku shakes his head, tension in every muscle of his body, and gets out of the car without responding. It’s the same shit his sisters have been saying since he announced he was leaving Fukui. Always the same. As though one more time, one more please talk to us, will make him spill his guts and ruin his life. They look at him like he’s fragile. And all he can think, when he looks back at them, is: if you knew who I was, you wouldn’t look at me like that.

He thinks the same thing when his father hugs him briefly in the foyer. He thinks the same thing as they eat take-out—none of them are good at cooking—and talk about the gender of Hina’s baby.

“I hope it’s a girl,” his father says. “Your mother will have much more fun buying clothes for a girl.”

“Babies aren’t dolls, dad,” Kana says, and then grins. “I hope it’s a girl too. No offense, Riku.”

Riku rolls his eyes. “Aren’t we supposed to say we’ll be happy no matter the gender?”

His dad laughs and coughs into his fist. “Shit, now I sound like a bad grandfather. You’re right. As long as the baby is healthy.”

They have ice cream and frozen daifuku, junk food they couldn’t eat if their mom was around, and Kana talks about the shitty customers at her waitressing job and about the guy she just broke up with. Riku is still surprised to hear his sisters talk about their dating lives with their father—even Hina, before she got married—but he supposes it makes sense. Their father is a good man. Non-judgemental, always doing whatever he can to make the family happy. He worked two jobs while Riku was growing up, before his mom went back into the workforce, and he always rinsed the smoke off his breath before pulling his kids in for a hug. He helped Riku get all of his summer jobs. He showed him the best spots on the beach, taught him how to work a record player, and bought him his first legal drink.

“Your ex sounds like a dick,” Riku interjects, just to say something, and Kana laughs.

“Nah, he was just boring. My life is boring enough without a boring man.”

“You have a good life,” his father says, frowning. “You’re doing very well for yourself.”

“Oh,” Kana says, smiling slightly. “Thanks.”

His father clears his throat. “As are you, Riku.”

Riku looks down at his hands. The smell of the house is seeping into his pores. It’s not really home, not like his apartment in Tokyo, but it’s certainly the memory of one. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” his father says. “Ah—I’m going to have a smoke. Riku, why don’t you come with me?”

“Oh, I don’t really—”

“Riku,” his father says. “Just come outside with me, hm?”

Every muscle in Riku’s chest clenches, vice tight. There’s no good reason for it. His sister doesn’t seem alarmed, and his father isn’t glaring—he never glares—but Riku feels deeply, potently afraid. Like if he’s alone with his father for even a moment his father will see all the toxins. The degeneracy. The darkness Riku hides under his skin, and not very well—the darkness all his friends have come to know, and maybe to love, but friends aren’t blood. It’s different.

Still, Riku follows his father onto the front porch and sits on the ground while his father relaxes into the old patio chair with a sigh. The smell of cigarettes is soothing, at least. It swallows the fragile scent of his childhood.

“Can you believe it?” his father says conversationally, taking a drag. “A grandchild. How strange. I don’t feel old, you know.”

“You’re not old,” Riku says faintly, his eyes on the red sky, and his father laughs.

“Yeah, yeah. You don’t have to lie to me.”

The crickets are beginning to sing, loud and atonal. That’s the same, still. There are crickets in Tokyo too. In Adachi, in Shinjuku, in San’ya.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” his father says gruffly. “You still work at that bar?”

“Yeah.”

“Honest work,” his father says. “Teaches you people skills.”

Riku has always had people skills. He charms strangers quickly and easily. It’s the ones who aren’t strangers that prove much more complicated. He wonders if it’s the same with his father—darkness all the way down—but finds himself recoiling from the idea of his father as a young man, the wrinkles on his face smoothed down to nothing.

“Can I—?” Riku asks, motioning to the pack of cigarettes, and his father laughs.

“I won’t tell your mother.”

Riku lights a cigarette and inhales the harsh smoke into his stomach. He thinks of Yushi, alone on the couch, responding to memes in the group chat with a polite thumbs up. He thinks of sweaty clubs and faces pressed against the pebbled plastic walls of a bathroom stall.

“I’ve been thinking,” his father says. Riku doesn’t say uh oh, like he would with his friends. “I’ve been thinking about being a grandfather. And I’ve been thinking about you, Riku, and—”

Whatever his father was going to say is swallowed by a screech from his sister, echoing out onto the front porch, and the announcement that Hina’s contractions are only five minutes apart, and that her husband is driving her to the hospital. Riku looks at his father. For a moment he thinks they’re feeling the exact same thing—love and fear and whatever it means to be human.

The sun is bursting red onto the horizon, and onto everything Riku used to know. He makes a wish—a faint one, half-formed—and stubs out his cigarette.

 

 

 

 

It’s a boy. His nephew, a shrunken, wailing thing, the product of nine hours of labor, taking his first breath as the sun crests over Riku’s hometown. He’s healthy. His sister is healthy. Her husband is losing his mind with stress, sweating down his temples, and the waiting room is crowded with at least ten people from all sides of the baby’s family, but all that matters is Hina and his nephew are healthy.

There’s a long line of people who get to hold the baby before he does. But when he does—when the fragile, impossible boy is placed in his arms—the world narrows. Becomes a faint pinprick of light, a star on the horizon, all of it meaningless and small with his nephew cradled to his chest. He’s bald and tiny and objectively ugly, and Riku knows it, but he can’t help the tears that bubble out from his stomach from somewhere deep and unacknowledged.

“Uncle Riku is crying!” Kana says, but she’s also crying, and so is his father and his mother and the ten million relatives in the waiting room.

Riku looks into his nephew’s hazy eyes, at his fat cheeks, at his incredibly tiny fingers, and thinks, you will never feel what I’ve had to feel. I won’t let that happen. It’s an impossible thought, and useless—Riku is so far away, so distant from his family—but it echoes through his head and becomes a solid truth. No creature this small, this defenseless, deserves the cracks in Riku’s body, or the darkness. His nephew deserves love. He deserves endless love, and anything he’ll ever want, and a smooth, effortless life. He deserves laughter and light and unconditional, overwhelming love. Love. The only pure, good thing in the world. The only—

“Let me hold him,” his brother-in-law’s grandma says, reaching out her gnarled hands, and Riku lets his nephew float into new arms. Arms that love him. So many arms. Some of them are the same arms that held Hina and Kana and—and him. And Riku. His crying mother, his sniffling father, his favorite aunt with her embroidered handkerchief.

Kana comes up next to him, her face red and splotchy, and when she hugs him he hugs her back just as hard. Hina is in the next room over. She’s safe and healthy. Everyone in his family is safe and healthy. They’re safe and healthy back home, too—Tokyo, his new home—because his friends have been blowing up his phone all night, soothing his anxiety and talking about the babies in their own far-away families.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Kana sobs into his chest, and Riku just holds her. It was Hina who asked him to come, of course. It was Hina he couldn’t refuse. He didn’t know the rest of his family wanted him here, but it makes sense in hindsight. How could he not be here? His nephew, his blood, his parent’s first grandchild. And there’s a part of him, buried deep and desperate, that’s glad they have a grandchild. At least one. Maybe Kana will also get married and have children and no one will notice that Riku’s not following the rules.

His nephew is passed around until a well-meaning nurse comes to whisk him away, murmuring about rest for the baby and the mother, and most of the family is politely shooed out of the maternity ward. The sun is hovering low in the sky as Riku stands on the pavement outside of the hospital. His sister isn’t crying anymore. His father is crying. Riku and Kana do him the kindness of pretending not to notice.

“I don’t think I’ll sleep for a week,” Riku says, even though he can feel sleep deprivation pressing at his eyeballs.

“I can’t believe it,” Kana says, laughing. “Holy shit. Our nephew.”

“Our nephew,” Riku says. His father blows his nose so loudly that Riku has to stifle a laugh.

“Breakfast,” his father grunts. “Breakfast and coffee.”

“Alright, grandpa,” Kana says cheerfully, and Riku smiles into the sun.

 

 

 

 

Riku spends two more days in Fukui. It mostly consists of sitting on the porch of Hina’s house and listening to her exhausted husband babble his worries into thin air. Sometimes, on the rare occasions Hina or his mother aren’t on baby-duty, he gets to hold his nephew, or just peer down at his face as he sleeps in Hina’s arms.

“I knew you’d love him,” Hina says, smiling up at Riku, her face bright and beautiful. “I’m so glad he’ll have you as an uncle.”

And Riku agrees, somehow. He’s just as glad to be his nephew’s uncle. He’s convinced he can do it right with Hina’s baby—show him the light and none of the dark. Show him the type of love Riku’s been avoiding for the last five years.

His friends back in Tokyo react accordingly to the five hundred baby pictures he sends, even though they’re probably over it by now. He doesn’t text Yushi much—he’s too tired to think beyond his next meal—but Yushi sends him some links to baby clothes and furniture and even a wildly expensive breast pump that Riku sends along to his mother. Riku’s glad for it. He’s glad that Yushi doesn’t need him to respond, and he’s glad that Yushi’s texting him anyways. Reacting with little hearts to each baby picture. Sending links to unnecessary purchases, just like he does back home.

He’s actually sad while he’s packing his stuff to go back to Tokyo. He’s not desperate to escape. He doesn’t feel like he’s running from something. It’ll return, of course—the fissures and the fear—but for now the birth of his nephew makes it all seem frivolous. New life. How impossible.

Riku is sprawled on his childhood bed and double checking his shinkansen ticket when his father comes into the room. Riku lifts his head and gives a lazy wave. If he’s tired, his father is probably twice as tired as he is.

“You’re heading out?” his father asks, gently shutting the bedroom door behind him.

“In a few, yeah,” Riku says. “Are you—is everything okay?”

“Yes, of course,” his father says. He looks around Riku’s bedroom, at the peeling posters and old textbooks stacked on the sun-bleached desk, and shakes his head. “I never had the chance to tell you what I was thinking.”

“Oh,” Riku says. Right. Smoking on the front porch, contractions, car ride to the hospital.

His father pulls out Riku’s old desk chair and takes a seat. It groans under him, and he barks a laugh. “Dangeous chair.”

“Yeah,” Riku says. He sits up and puts away his phone. His heartrate is picking up in a way it hasn’t in the days since his nephew was born.

“I wanted to say to you earlier, before the baby,” his father says. “I’ve been thinking about being a grandfather.”

“Right,” Riku says cautiously.

“I’m glad to be one, of course,” he says. “But I don’t need that many grandchildren.”

Riku squints at his father’s furrowed brow. “Okay.”

“If it’s just this one kid, that’s okay,” his father says. His eyes are still on Riku’s wall. Old posters—soccer players, anime characters. “I’m happy with what I have. If you don’t—Riku.”

“What?” Riku chokes, his heart cramping in his chest.

“I want you to listen to me,” his father says, and then his eyes are on Riku’s face. “I’m happy with one grandchild. If Kana wants children, that’ll be wonderful, but I’m okay if she doesn’t.”

“Dad—”

“And if kids aren’t in the cards for you, it doesn’t matter.” His father’s eyes are very, very clear. “If you want something else out of life—if you’re taking a different path—I don’t mind. I truly don’t mind. All I want—”

“Dad,” Riku says. His voice is wet.

“I just don’t want you to be lonely,” his father says, his voice cracking on the word lonely, and Riku can’t see anything. “I’d hate if you were lonely, son. Anything else, I don’t mind. Live how you want to live. Just don’t go through life alone. It’s hard enough as it is.”

“No,” Riku says, his face buried in his hands, his heart unfolding. “It’s not hard. It’s okay. I’m—I’m okay.”

“I hope so,” his father says. “I pray that’s true. Every night, Riku, I pray that’s true.”

Riku thinks about being seventeen. He thinks about being twenty. He thinks about being ten years old. He thinks about the countless nights he fell asleep in this bed, in this room, under the watchful eye of his parents—his parents, who held him in their arms when he was born. Fragile and small and ugly. His sisters, too, who were the next ones to hold him.

“I’m okay,” Riku says. He wipes his face and looks at his father, and thinks of Yushi. “I’m not lonely.”

His father clears his throat. “Good. That’s—I’m glad. I'm very glad.”

And when his father leaves, mumbling something about tea and a cigarette, Riku looks out the window and sees nothing but stars.

 

 

 

 

Riku doesn’t drop his bags off at the apartment and go straight to a club or a bar. He doesn’t wander the city in search of something to mend the cracks. He takes the bus home, walks the last couple blocks feeling fragile and new, and when he stumbles into the apartment Yushi is waiting for him. Or not waiting, exactly—he’s washing dishes, music playing softly from his phone—but it’s all the same to Riku. Yushi is so fucking handsome in the harsh kitchen light—shimmering, angelic—and Riku isn’t lonely. The realization hits him like a wrecking ball.

“Hi,” Yushi says, turning off the faucet, but Riku doesn’t have the words to respond. He presses Yushi against the counter and kisses him for a long, long time. Long enough that time fades away, and Yushi’s soap-damp hands become soft and dry. Riku strokes Yushi’s hair and his shoulders and his slim, strong arms. He inhales skin and water and rosemary.

“Hi,” Riku breathes when he finally pulls away, but Yushi is looking at him with that same old gentleness. Riku has to kiss him again. He has to kiss Yushi’s ears and his chin and his lovely neck. He has to feel Yushi’s hands on him in return—on his waist, his ass, hovering lightly around his neck.

“Did you have a good trip?” Yushi asks eventually, leaning back to peer at Riku’s face.

“Yeah,” Riku says. “I’m an uncle now.”

“I know,” Yushi says. There’s a smile on his shiny lips. “Cool.”

“It is cool,” Riku says, giddy with something he can’t explain. “I’m happy.”

Yushi cups Riku’s face in his hands and laughs softly. It’s an earthquake tremor, an aftershock, and Riku can feel it through Yushi’s palms. “I bought beer,” Yushi says, and slides his hands off Riku’s face. “If you want.”

“Sure,” Riku says.

He sips beer with Yushi in the living room, leaving the dishes unwashed in the sink, and rests his head on Yushi’s thighs. One of Yushi’s dramas is paused on the TV—Riku should really start learning the names of these shows—but he’s made no move to turn it back on. There’s still soft music spiraling from Yushi’s phone. Riku closes his eyes and breathes, and listens to Yushi’s breathing. He thinks about Yushi’s boyfriends. He thinks about Yushi’s hands. He thinks about Yushi.

“You missed some big news,” Yushi says. “Daeyoung and Sion are dating.”

Riku huffs. “What is this, the tenth time?”

“No,” Yushi says. His hands are soft in Riku’s hair. “I think it’s for real.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Just a feeling,” Yushi says. “I just have a feeling.”

Riku thinks of Sion, searching for something he already has. He opens his eyes and looks up at Yushi’s face, the fall of his hair and the round tip of his nose. Yushi raises his eyebrows. It’s a silent question that Riku can’t answer. He doesn’t have the words. He doesn’t have—there’s a pressure in his chest, like tears but not quite, and it has him standing up walking to the kitchen to get the vodka. Yushi just watches him. Doesn’t say, don’t you have a problem? Doesn’t say anything. He just watches Riku pour himself a shot on the coffee table.

Riku knocks back one shot, and another, and then kneels on the ground by Yushi’s legs. Not to suck him off. Not to—just to look up at him.

“Riku,” Yushi says, frowning, and Riku shakes his head. Swallows his spit. He’s filled to bursting with the warmth of Yushi’s presence, and he knows what he wants. This time he knows.

“I want you to fuck me,” Riku whispers. “Please.”

Yushi looks at him. Doesn’t say, really? Are you sure? Doesn’t say anything. He just looks at him. Riku presses his forehead against Yushi’s knee and screws his eyes shut. “Please, Yushi.”

“Okay,” Yushi says quietly. Louder, he says, “Yeah, okay. Have you—”

“What?” Riku asks, starting to tremble. He can’t look at Yushi’s face. He can’t look in the mirror of Yushi’s eyes.

“You haven’t been with anyone else?”

“No,” Riku says. The idea makes him sick. “No. Only you. Have you—?”

“No,” Yushi says. His hands find Riku’s hair. I like your hair long. “You would know if I had.”

Because Yushi doesn’t do one night stands. He does boyfriends. He does commitment and relationships and love. Riku would know because he would’ve met the guy. He would know. Instead, he’s taking Yushi’s space and time and gentleness. It’s a bad thing for him to do, probably, but Riku is greedy. He’s been greedy from the moment they met—coffee table, refrigerator, shower curtain—but he won’t stop now. He couldn’t if he tried.

“I’ll fuck you,” Yushi says, and when Riku finally looks up, into Yushi’s eyes, all he sees is light. “I’ll fuck you in my bed. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” Riku pleads. “Yes.”

He floats, he thinks, to Yushi’s bed. When he lays down there’s a kiss on his jaw and another on his forehead, and then Yushi’s on top of him, the long lines of his body, and his hands are everywhere. They peel off Riku’s shirt and then run over his chest, his pebbled nipples, and Riku cries out when Yushi pinches him there—it hurts, it feels like being owned—and he doesn’t care that he’s making noise. He doesn’t care. He watches as Yushi kisses his waist, runs his nose over Riku’s bellybutton, looks up at him with hot dark eyes that are so certain and beautiful Riku’s hips jump off the bed.

“You want me,” Yushi says, his voice coming from far away, and Riku bites his tongue and nods. “Tell me.”

“I want you,” Riku breathes. “Please, Yushi, I want you.”

Yushi kisses him for that, a perfect reward, and then takes his own shirt off. All Riku can do is look at him. He’s already hard. He’s melting in the sun. Yushi’s chest is pale and lovely and his stomach is lean, and his muscles twitch when Riku runs a reverent hand along his waist.

“Pretty,” Riku says thoughtlessly. “You’re so pretty.”

Yushi’s lips quirk up. He grabs Riku’s jaw hard, with a commanding grip, and then manually turns his head from side to side. Like he’s examining Riku’s face. Trying to memorize every bone and patch of skin. Riku pants as Yushi’s fingers press firmer into his jaw, as his eyes go narrow and sharp. It feels like—like being under a microscope, or being in a dream, trapped under Yushi’s body, at his mercy. Safe. Riku lets out a broken whine and Yushi laughs and kisses him lightly.

“Be patient,” Yushi says. “Let me look at you.”

Riku lets him. He has no choice, and even if he did, he wouldn’t choose anything else. Yushi looks at him for so long and with such intensity that Riku starts to shake again, his whole body vibrating, and Yushi takes a strange sort of pity on him by pinching his nipples again.

“Please,” Riku says, twisting against the pressure. “Please.”

“Be patient,” Yushi says again, but slides off of Riku all the same. “Take off your pants.”

Riku scrambles to obey. His jeans get stuck around his knees for a long, embarrassing moment, but Yushi doesn’t offer to help. He just smiles and lays down next to Riku, shimmying out of his own pants, and Riku’s delayed even longer by the distraction of Yushi’s half-hard cock. He wants it in his mouth. He always wants it in his mouth.

“Hey,” Yushi says. “Your pants, Riku.”

Right. Riku kicks out of his pants and lays very still as Yushi fumbles through his bedside drawer. Yushi’s ass is—perfect. His body is fucking perfect. Just looking at him makes Riku’s cock dribble precum on his stomach, like he’s a kid watching porn for the first time. Just the shifting muscles in Yushi’s back and the pinch of his waist, the way he hums when he finds whatever he’s looking for.

Riku can’t handle it. When Yushi flops down next to him again he pulls Yushi into him. Their skin, pressed together, is excruciatingly perfect. It feels impossibly good. Riku moans and kisses him and puts his hands everywhere, all over Yushi’s skin, and it’s still not enough. He wants to kiss Yushi until the sun rises. He wants to die between Yushi’s legs. He wants to feel Yushi’s fingernails scraping against his back when he wakes up. There’s a slow, hot feeling in his gut, dripping honey, and it’s burning at a fever pitch. He could cum like this. He could cum just from feeling Yushi’s skin, from rubbing his cock against Yushi’s stomach.

“Be patient,” Yushi says, with a tone that’s rough and new, and it makes Riku obey. It makes sparks burst under his eyelids, actually. Makes his cock drip. His vision is hazy when Yushi pushes him onto his back and moves to kneel between Riku’s thighs.

“Yushi,” Riku says.

“Yeah?”

Riku bites his tongue. Thank you. I love you. “Please.”

“You keep saying please,” Yushi says, sounding amused, and wraps a loose hand around Riku’s cock. His other hand moves to Riku’s balls, and then to the sensitive skin between his balls and his hole. There’s a jolt of fear at that. It feels good—it feels new—but Riku sort of wants to squeeze his thighs shut and back out.

No—he doesn’t really want to. He doesn’t want to. There’s a voice in his head that tells him he should back out, that he shouldn’t want this, but it’s not a kind voice. It’s not his voice. It’s a voice born from the fractures in his soul that he so desperately wants to heal. It quiets, somewhat, when Yushi squeezes lube into his hands and starts to stroke Riku’s cock, wet slow and steady. It quiets further when Riku looks at Yushi’s beautiful face.

“Put a pillow under your hips,” Yushi says. “Hold up your thighs for me, please.”

Please. It’s a terribly vulnerable position to be in, with his ass in the air and his knees pulled up around his chest, but he fucking—he fucking wants it, and Yushi looks at him like he’s never wanted anything else.

“Thank you,” Yushi says. He bends down to suck the head of Riku’s cock, brief and gentle, and then mouths at his balls. The heat in Riku’s body ratches up a notch, impossibly hotter, and he gasps at Yushi’s tongue on his hole. He’s never—he hasn’t done this. He’s done it to others, to loosen them up and get what he wants, but he’s never—Yushi’s tongue is firm and warm and it feels hopelessly good. So sensitive and dirty, like it’s the last thing anyone should ever want, but Yushi is—Yushi is moaning. He’s moaning against Riku’s hole, sucking at the rim, licking and sliding his lips along the skin like he’s kissing it.

Riku shudders a disbelieving laugh into the air, and then an equally disbelieving moan when Yushi’s tongue prods inside him. His cock is fucking gushing. He smells rosemary and the faint plastic scent of lube. He can’t—he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he buries them in Yushi’s hair and ruts up against Yushi’s mouth. He feels insane. He’s on fire, melting into Yushi’s mattress, and he can’t fucking comprehend why he’s never done this before.

Right. Because if he had, it wouldn't have been with Yushi.

“Baby,” Riku groans. “Baby, that’s so fucking good.”

Yushi moans in response, like a song, and fucks his tongue further into Riku’s hole. As if it wasn’t enough—Yushi’s noises, raw and real, are making Riku dizzy. He could cum like this, too. If he touched his cock once, just one stroke, he’d spill all over his hand.

“Baby,” Riku says again, “Yushi, please, I want—fuck—I want you—”

Yushi lifts his head. His mouth is obscenely wet and his eyes are hazy. He sucks one of Riku’s balls into his mouth, lazy and luxurious, and Riku almost blacks out.

“I’ll fuck you,” Yushi says, instead of be patient, and his voice sounds tight. Turned-on. Riku feels fucking insane. “I’ll fuck you, Riku.”

Riku’s fingered himself before—when he was drunk enough to forget himself—and he’s always liked it. Liked it too much, in a way that filled him with bile and guilt. He’s never done it while mostly sober. He’s never let someone else do it. But when Yushi slides one lube-slick finger inside of him, Riku feels his body clench down hard. He swallows a broken sound and lets Yushi kiss him through it. There’s a slight pressure—not painful, but strange—and then Yushi’s rubbing his finger against something that makes Riku feel like lightning.

“Oh fuck,” Riku moans, his muscles seizing, and Yushi kisses him hard enough to bruise, swallows his breath and his sounds, bites at his lips. Riku’s skin is tingling. His fingernails are digging into Yushi’s back. He can’t think, or see, or—all he feels is Yushi, and the singing pleasure in his body. “Yushi, Yushi, fuck—”

The second finger doesn’t hurt. It stretches, fills him up, and then massages Riku’s prostate hard and insistent. Yushi sits back on his heels and breathes sharply, staring at Riku’s face. Riku gasps and spreads his legs and drifts. He’s so full. He’s so full. Yushi is making him full, making him feel so fucking good, and if Riku knew it would feel like this he would’ve—he would’ve. He would’ve fucking—made Yushi cheat on his boyfriends—he would’ve begged—

“Feels good, huh?” Yushi breathes, vaguely smug, but Riku doesn’t mind. He thinks he says yes. He chants it, maybe, as Yushi starts fucking him with three fingers, so good—and Yushi’s breaking him open. Yushi’s rubbing, over and over, at the place that makes Riku moan and drip all over himself. He only wishes Yushi were closer. He wishes he could live under Yushi’s skin, or that Yushi could live inside of his. He wishes Yushi didn’t have to be all the way down between his legs.

Riku reaches out, a wordless plea, and Yushi understands. He thrusts his fingers in deep, presses hard, and then pulls them out to lean down and kiss Riku softly. Not enough. Riku reaches up, tugs on his hair, and opens his mouth for Yushi’s tongue. When he feels it, finally, sliding against his own, he thinks he could cry. It feels so good. It feels so, so good to be kissed by Yushi and touched by Yushi and to be in Yushi’s presence at all. Too good. Impossible. He could kiss Yushi forever, always, if it wasn’t for his empty, aching hole. Yushi’s cock rubs against his stomach, warm and hard, and Riku stretches his thighs farther apart.

“Fuck me,” says Riku, slurring around Yushi’s tongue. “Fuck me, fuck me, I need it—I need you—”

“Yeah?” Yushi says, his breath hot on Riku’s face, but it’s not a question. It’s an answer. “Yeah. I’ve got you.”

Yushi’s got him. Isn’t that something? Yushi has him. All the desperate threads inside of Riku’s body are unraveling, one by one, but Yushi has him. Yushi’s here.

Yushi enters him slowly, excruciatingly so, and Riku exhales shakily and looks at Yushi’s lovely face. The sweat on his bangs, the curve of his nose—the way he feels perfect, inside Riku and on top of him, and when Yushi bottoms out Riku feels hot tears sliding down his cheeks. He’s perfect. He’s full and perfect. They’re both perfect, Riku and Yushi, Riku-and-Yushi, and the long low noise Yushi makes is perfect, and the feeling of his cock when Riku clenches down is perfect. The cracks in his body are filled with light. It’s all light and love. All the way down.

“I’ve got you,” Yushi says again, his voice faint like breath, and all Riku can do is wrap his legs around Yushi’s waist and breathe. “I’ve got you,” he repeats, pulling out slowly and thrusting in deep, and Riku hiccups on a sob and reaches up to touch Yushi’s face. Just touch. His cheeks, his strong eyebrows, the tight corners of his mouth. All that skin. Riku can’t believe he’s allowed to touch.

“I know,” Riku says, which means thank you, and also I love you.

It’s insane. It’s insane how good it feels when Yushi fucks him slowly, and it’s—the feeling in his chest, louder than the heat and his pulsing cock, is insane. He’s looking into Yushi’s eyes and shaking, and Yushi is looking back. Endless. If Riku could—if he could get married, and if he could have children, he’d do it all with Yushi. He’d do it like this. He’d beg for Yushi to fill him up like this, over and over and over.

Riku thumbs press hard against Yushi’s cheekbones as he gets fucked, as he’s split open, and maybe he should ask for harder and faster but he’s so fucking blissed out like this, Yushi moving slowly inside of him, his body lithe and pale. When Yushi kisses him, his hips working in time with the slide of his mouth, Riku hopes to swallow him whole or be swallowed in return. He hopes to die. He hopes to fucking die.

He was right when he thought, all that time ago on the balcony, that sex with Yushi wasn’t like sex at all. Or maybe this is what sex is like and Riku hasn’t been having sex at all—he’s just been getting off. Maybe this is sex. Maybe it’s being touched and filled and kissed, and crying wordlessly from the untainted feeling of it all, overwhelming and everlasting. It’s his cock weeping onto his stomach and the scent of rosemary and Yushi’s face, his skin, his endless impossible gentleness. His kindness. Even in this, Yushi is kind. Especially in this.

“I’m gonna cum,” Yushi groans, his head dropping against Riku’s shoulder. “Can I cum in you?”

“Yes,” Riku breathes, cinching his legs tighter around Yushi’s waist. “Yes, baby, c’mon.”

Yushi thrusts fast, then, his teeth scraping against Riku’s shoulder, and whines high and reedy when he cums, hips twitching. Riku pulls him in. Clenches down. Wants Yushi inside of him forever. Wants his cum and everything else. He reaches between their sweaty bodies for his own cock, slick to the base with precum, and he barely has to stroke himself before his body is tightening and he’s cumming too, slow and hot like honey, sizzling under every inch of his skin. He’s still crying. He doesn’t think he’s cum so much in his life, spilling over his hand and onto his stomach, Yushi’s stomach, wrung out of him, forced.

“Baby,” Riku croaks, his tongue heavy in his mouth. “Yushi.”

Yushi lifts his head, looks at him for a long couple of seconds, and then smiles. It’s the sun. It’s the space between all the hairline fractures in Riku’s heart.

“I knew you’d let me fuck you,” Yushi says, which is sort of a stupid thing to say, but Riku doesn’t care. He’s drunk with it. With sex. With Yushi’s body and Yushi’s smile and Yushi’s heart.

“Yeah, you win,” Riku grins, lightheaded, and Yushi shakes his head.

“No,” he says. It doesn’t mean anything, really, but Riku thinks he understands.

It’s a little uncomfortable when Yushi slides out. Cold, kind of wet. Riku still doesn’t care. He can’t stop looking at Yushi’s face. He can’t stop smiling. He sees Yushi’s Barcelona lamp out of the corner of his eye, red and blue, and a laugh bubbles out of his throat.

“What?” Yushi asks, but he’s smiling too.

“Just—your lamp.”

“What’s wrong with my lamp?”

“Nothing,” Riku says. “Nothing, baby.”

He should probably stop saying baby. He won’t stop, though, unless Yushi asks him to. He doesn’t think Yushi will ask him to.

“I like that lamp,” Yushi says.

I love you, Riku thinks, and rolls his eyes. “I know you do.”

There’s a wet rag, at some point, pressed between his legs, and there’s Yushi kissing his face. There’s another familiar, soft command, sleep here, but Riku was going to anyways. If Yushi kicked him out—he doesn’t want to think about it. He’d be irreparable. The cracks would never heal. And Riku knows he’s the only one who can fix himself, can save himself, but he thinks Yushi probably helps. Or maybe it’s all Riku, still. Maybe Riku is finally letting Yushi help. Maybe, when he asked Yushi all those months ago, do you let them touch you, he was asking for help.

It doesn’t really matter. Right now, curled in Yushi’s arms, it doesn’t really matter. The sun will rise and set but Riku will always have this.

Thank you, he thinks, and watches Yushi blink until he falls asleep.

 

 

 

 

Riku switches the phone to his other ear and flicks ash off his cigarette. It spirals to the pavement and onto his sort-of-new work shoes.

“Are you busy?” Hina says through the receiver. “I can call another time.”

“No, I’m on break,” Riku says. “My perfect nephew keeping you up?”

“Your perfect nephew,” she laughs. “Yes, he’s keeping me up. I kind of feel insane. Is that normal, do you think?”

“What did mom say?”

“She told me to take a vacation and leave him with her.”

“Ooh, scary,” Riku grins. “She’s gonna steal him."

“I want to be a good mom,” Hina says. “Riku, do you think—”

“You will be,” Riku says, firm and certain. “You are. You’re an amazing sister, and I’m not half as cute as he is.”

Hina sighs. “Thank you. That—it means a lot, you know.”

Riku thinks, I know, and takes another drag. He hopes his nephew never picks up a cigarette. Never drinks beer. Never works at a bar unless it’s with one of his best friends, and the pay is good and the hours are only slightly shitty.

“I’m gonna visit in October,” Riku says.

“Right, yeah. Isn’t Kana also going down to visit you at some point?”

“She wants to,” Riku says. “I’m—I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.”

“Let her,” Hina says. “You know, Riku, you’re the only one of us that’s lived anywhere but Fukui. It’s pretty cool how much you’ve seen.”

Riku’s never thought of it like that. How could he? It was all—it was all heartache. It was imaginary rejection and aching, all-consuming fear. He never considered what his sisters might think of it, besides that they worried about him. Never considered they might want him to show them around Tokyo, that great big city, and let them into his world.

“I guess it’s pretty cool,” Riku says. His cigarette is a nub, burning at his fingers, and he puts it out on the wall beside him. “I have to go. Say hi to my nephew for me. And—I mean, mostly just take care of yourself.”

“I will,” Hina says. “And so will you, right?”

“I’ll try my best,” Riku says, and means it.

Back inside the bar, Sion and Takahiro are talking shit about the customers making a drunken mess at table three. Neither of them will do anything about it, of course, but it’s healing in it’s own way to complain. Riku joins in and only slightly wants to yell at the old lady who interrupts their conversation for a new gin and tonic.

He’s on closing shift tonight, which is an endlessly boring slog until three in the morning, and by the time Takahiro leaves at two Riku’s bouncing on his toes and daydreaming about curling up in his bed, or on the couch next to Yushi. Sion’s wiping the bar, equally bored out of his mind, and Riku almost asks about Daeyoung, and about their new matching rings, but decides to give it a couple more weeks. He has time. They all have time.

He ushers the last drunk customers out at 2:30 and spends the next half hour cleaning crushed tempura from the floor under table three. Honest work, like his father said, but still shitty.

It is what it is. He has time.

And when they finally lock up, stepping out into the bright neon street, Yushi is leaning against the wall and scrolling on his phone.

“Are we going clubbing?” Sion says, and then laughs. “Kidding. I’ll see you both later.”

Riku barely hears him walk away. It’s three in the morning on a Friday—no, on a Saturday, ten hours since Yushi got off work. He’s standing in the bright lights of Shinjuku for no good reason. Just to see Riku.

“Hi,” Riku says, slightly breathless, and Yushi smiles at him.

“Hi. Want me to call a taxi?”

“Wait,” Riku says. He reaches out to grab Yushi’s wrist. The city is alive with sound, with music and life and small drunk groups of students and tourists, but Riku can only see Yushi. “Why are you here?”

“To pick you up from work,” Yushi says, like he’s dumb.

“No, but,” Riku says. “It’s late.”

“I know.”

Riku rubs his thumb over the bone of Yushi’s wrist and tries, really tries, to say what he’s thinking. “You’re acting like—”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re my boyfriend,” Riku finishes, and Yushi just raises his eyebrows. Breathtaking. The center point of all the sunlight in the world, even in the dead of night.

“I could be your boyfriend,” Yushi says. “I sort of already am.”

“Oh,” Riku says. The smile on his face is so wide it hurts. “Oh.”

“I’ll call a taxi,” Yushi says, smiling gently—gentle like he always is. Kind and beautiful, like he always is. “Let’s go home.”

“Home,” Riku echoes, the shape of the word soft in his mouth, and smiles at the empty sky and the flashing billboards and at Yushi’s face.

And he isn’t lonely.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

I am my own editor! Please please let me know if you spot any spelling, formatting, grammar errors etc.

Phew. This fic took over my soul. Once I started writing I literally could not stop lol. It's a little different from what I usually write, particularly in that it's an alternate universe, but I hope I still did yuriku justice in this imagined world.

Some notes:
- Alcoholism, and substance abuse in general, is a very complicated thing and recovery isn't linear. I purposefully left this story line open ended. Not everyone with a problem wants to or needs to stop drinking, and if they do stop, the process can be life-long. Some people are able to return to drinking moderately. All in all it's a very nuanced topic and I didn't want to treat it like it's black-and-white.
- I can't seem to stop writing about love that was there all along. Love all the way down, if you will. And about sunsets and sunrises and the ocean, and places I can only dream of visiting. Yuriku very much lends itself to all of those things, imo :)

 

Thank you for reading! Have a wonderful day/night/sunrise/sunset, wherever you are in the world :)