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You miss the last train back to Tokyo. Too much of a good thing. Now you stand in the mostly empty station, Satomi thrumming beside you with his mouth pressed into that near-perpetual downturn you'd kiss into something softer if you let yourself give him what he wants, rather than what he needs.
Your phone is dead, and so is his. Too much of a good thing— hot pot, dessert, then a walk around the city because neither of you will admit it, buy you both hate saying goodbye. Or, maybe he'll admit it. Actually, he'll definitely admit it. He is always admitting things you wish he wouldn't.
If your phone still had juice you would have already booked an airbnb, or called one of your contacts here to see if they'd let you stay the night. There's an English Duchess you used to fuck for money near the station who had a Japanese fetish. She wanted you to eat sushi off her creamy, scallopy white body. You wonder if you still have her number, or if you've gotten too old for her tastes. You are thinking so much about what it means, to be too old. Spoiling like milk.
"Come on," Satomi says, turning and walking. The lights from flashing advertisements bounce off the black of his hair, cast him in neon yellow, blue, pink. Hands in his pockets, shame slanting his neck. You are so in love with him that you notice all of this, take a snapshot in your head, lock it up behind your ribs to study later. "You can charge your phone back at my place."
It's unwise to go to Satomi's apartment so late. He'll try to get you to stay over, and you won't have a good excuse not to, or another plan in place. You imagine sleeping on a park bench, pigeons shitting on you like a street person. Then you think of his rumpled, dirty-sheet floor bed. How many times you've jacked yourself off thinking about what it would be like to keep him in it for a whole day, making him feel good, putting your mouth all over him. Long, sticky afternoons that belong to some universe where making Satomi feel good is the same as being good to him. Too bad you're stuck in this universe—the one where it would be nicest to walk out on him. Never see him again.
You're selfish, though, so you don't disappear. You remain, but only at a distance, even though it's his least favorite place to keep you.
—
Following him is easy. You know how to wether the terrible mechanism, how to endure the tug of the fishhook he has in your guts without ever tripping over the line and swallowing him whole. The two of you weave through the city, passing mostly lone, exhausted looking men and couples wrapped up in each other. No one else is out this late. You and Satomi exist somewhere between these two categories: side by side, but not together. Not quite.
His apartment is so quintessentially the living space of a teenager on the verge of adulthood it should make you feel dirty. No real style, like he has yet to try anything on that stuck, piles of dirty clothing and dishes and nothing but cheap instant soups and mismatched mugs in the cupboards. He doesn't clean for you, and he won't let you buy him any nice furniture or clothes. You suppose he keeps you at a distance, too. In his own way.
But not in every way. As soon as the door's locked behind him he turns on his heel, shrugs off his jacket and looks at you. "Stay tonight," he says, in the way Satomi always says things when he has been planning them, worrying over them, rehearsing them in his head. "It's stupid to get a hotel. To pay when all you'll be doing is sleeping there. And it will take your phone a long time to charge, anyway," he says, laying each point out so carefully, like lines of cocaine for you to snort.
"You don't have a couch for me to sleep on," you remind him, because a couch is absolutely one of the things you've offered to furnish his apartment with that he's staunchly refused. "And we can't share your bed."
"Why not?" he asks, frowning. "I won't do anything. I'll just sleep."
"It wouldn't be right," you eventually offer as you sit next to the tangle of cords he has plugged into a surge protector, the whole thing a fire hazard. Instead of searching through the bolus for the charger that will fit your phone, you sigh and cross your legs, ankle to knee. It's almost like giving up.
Satomi says that a lot— I won't do anything. He means kiss you, or touch you, or make some stupid childish mistake like wandering into Yakuza territory to give you a good luck charm. He also means embarrass himself, or cry. He means cross a line. It's cute because he doesn't get it— that you're not worried about him doing something to you. Not like you're worried you might do something to him.
He sits in front of you, on his knees with upturned eyes like miserable puddles of topaz, rainwater warmed with a street lamp. The trick is to melt inside without letting him know he melts you. "Give me the opportunity to prove to you I won't act out of line. I won't ask for anything, I won't—"
"Satomi-Kun," you say, reaching out and putting your hand on his head, stomach lurching at the slip of softness against your palm. His eyes widen and flash—you touch him so little these days because it's so monumentally hard to pull away, so it surprises him. But you manage, your hand falls back to your lap, you force a smile because you're really damn good at forcing smiles. "It's not you I don't trust."
A spill of pink across his cheeks. He blushes so easily it's kept you up at night, it's woken you up, panting, hands shaking like they already did that thing they can't do. "You know I'd let you," he murmurs. "That I want you to."
Your forced smile gets more forced, less smile-like. It makes your cheeks ache. He's an open wound on the floor, you could crawl inside it, you could become adhered to him as he coagulates. Instead, you push him gently away with the toe of your Italian leather loafer. "Satomi," is all you can think to say. No honorific, no jokes. You can't even muster the thickness of warning. It's like you're just saying his name, because you like the way it feels on your tongue. "I'll sleep on the floor," you add, a concession like death.
His face doesn't light up or anything, its not what he wants. Not really. You know this. Instead of considering it a success you're staying at all, cutting his losses and backing off, he says, "my bed is also on the floor."
"I'm not going to steal your bed," you say. "What sort of monster do you think I am?"
"Not steal," he says, voice muffled from behind his hands. You love his hands. Love the shape of them, love the way he holds chopsticks and cleans his glasses and rubs his eyes whenever he's mad at you. "Share," he explains.
You swallow, throat clicking. You're keeping him up. He probably has class the next day, and you are exactly the sort of monster you know yourself to be—the sort who knows he should walk away, but can't. The sort who negotiates sleeping arrangements with a nineteen year old who thinks he loves monsters. A nineteen year old who's won the love of a particular monster, anyway. God—you are so fucking tired. "Ok," you finally say. "As long as we put a bunch of pillows between us. The Berlin wall, nothing crosses."
He snorts. "What makes you think I own a bunch of pillows? We're gonna have to share."
"You should let me buy you pillows," you say. "No reason to live like a Spartan, Satomi-Kun."
But he ignores you, he's getting up, he's opening his drawers and peering in. "I don't think I have anything that will fit you."
You shake your head. "Keep your clothes," you tell him, because you don't think you can stand wearing anything of his, smelling him in the fibers, knowing he's sweat into the soft cotton. "I sleep naked. I won't be tonight, of course, but—"
"You could." A whip-crack, precise and flaying. You feel your insides clutch.
"You're relentless, you know that?" you say, shrugging off your jacket and throwing it at him, overwhelm buzzing deep in your gut, a want so long-suffering and acute it's morphed, curdled. A dull pain, a chronic unshakable sickness. "Jesus. A lesser man would have cracked, you know."
"Is that all that's stopping you?" Satomi asks, scooping what you can only assume are his sleep clothes from the floor and taking them to the bathroom. "Your delusional commitment to being a 'good man'? Seems a little late for that."
"Yeah, well. We all have our lines in the sand," you say, calling after him. The door clicks closed, and presumably he takes his jeans off in there, stripping just one room away. You've never even seen him shirtless, you've never fucked another man, and it's insane what he does to you in spite of all these things. You've gotten so used to being changed by Satomi you sometimes lose sight of how bizarre it is that he's the one who changed you. Against all odds, you feel alive and good and worthy because of him, at the same time you feel terrible and filthy and irredeemable. Over this kid. This absolute fucking kid.
Here you are, in his apartment. Unbuckling your slacks and stepping out of them, peeling layers of clothes off until you're in nothing but your underwear, a pair of silk boxer briefs that seem absurdly seductive now that you're about to crawl into Satomi's bed in them. What the fuck are you doing? you ask yourself. It's the same thing you ask yourself every time you see a cat, take a picture of it, and send it to him. Being in love is nothing like you thought it would be—the obsession is mundane, irritating. It chokes you the way weeds choke a garden. It requires constant work and dutiful, agonizing maintenance to prevent you from being taken over completely, ensnared in thorns and pollen.
You shut off the lights before he emerges from the bathroom, so he doesn't see you burning up under the florescents and think you're offering all that skin up for the taking. You can't let him think you're coming on to him—he'll take the bit and run like a racehorse. And god those things are your weakness. You love losing money at the tracks, on the off chance you might win.
When he comes out, he's traded one oversized shirt for another, and his face is wet like he washed it. No wonder his skin is so nice and clear. "Can I use your toothbrush?" you ask.
He flicks the lights back on and they crash into your retinas, make you wince and blink. "Don't be disgusting," he says. "If you use my toothbrush I'm kicking you out."
"Promise?" you ask, crawling out of his bed in your underwear, realizing he's undone every one of your plans. Forced you into the light like a fucking cockroach to be crushed, robbed you of every pitiful attempt to set and enforce boundaries. You feel his eyes boring into your back as you flick on the tap and put toothpaste on your finger—it's not a very effective way to brush, but it's better than nothing. You try and use your nails, scrape at the divots between your teeth, but all you do is stab your gums. "What's the big deal about sharing a toothbrush?" you shout from the bathroom through a mouthful of foam. "Is it the germs? Do you even know how kissing works, Satomi-kun?"
"If we were kissing," he says, "I might feel differently about it."
You spit—there's blood in the mouthful, streaking it pink. You wash your DNA down his drain, and return to the darkness of his apartment without another word about kisses.
—
The bed is insanely narrow. Just a full sized futon mattress on the floor, his body close enough you soak up the heat of it. You feel enormous. You feel like there's no way you'll last the whole night without touching him, accidentally at the very least. Plus, everything smells like him. His cheap deodorant and soap and shampoo smell, plus the mint of his toothpaste in both of your mouths. It's driving you fucking crazy. You're half-hard, under his sheets. "This isn't going to work," you announce, staring up at the ceiling. "There's no way I'm gonna sleep."
"I probably won't either," he admits. The muted sound of a swallow, and now you are thinking about the inside of his throat. The wet, dark, tunnel of it. Satomi is a series of wet-dark tunnels he'd provide you access to, in a heartbeat, if you only asked. Instead you break his heart. Withhold everything. Deny him and deny him until you're nothing but reflex, a clock gear tick-ticking away, beyond wondering why it is you're supposed to be denying him in the first place. What the fuck are you doing? you ask yourself again. "So, if neither of us are sleeping…what should we do?" he broaches eventually.
"Hm. Watch TV. Play cards," you offer.
"Neither of those sound very fun."
"What does Satomi-kun have in mind?" you ask, before you consider he might just—
"You know," he snaps, dart to your bullseye because fuck, you walked right into that one. "You're not stupid. Stop acting stupid." Then he shifts an inch or so closer, so his arm brushes against yours in an electric fever. It goes straight to your already traitorous, chubbed up dick. God. You are sick, though this is far from the worst place you have ever gotten hard over him. You used to thicken in your trousers just watching him watch you sing. Something about his accessing gaze, so unimpressed, elbows on the table, chalk on his school clothes.
"I should go to the couch."
"I don't have a couch."
"I know."
He has no idea how close you are to saying fuck it. How how thin your resolve has worn after years and years of tense meals and self denial and his incessant, dutiful habit of chipping away at you every time you meet. You're the hole in the bottom of a prison cell he's been digging out with a spoon, and he's got no clue how close he is to freedom. Or to a cave-in. Maybe he thinks it hasn't worked, that he hasn't driven you crazy or eroded your excuses one by one, but God, it has. He's done you in. You haven't even pulled your bare arm away from his, he could make one move and—
"I'll let you use my toothbrush," he says. "If you kiss me first."
"Let me use your toothbrush? You propose this like it's a goal of mine. Like I started stalking you back in Osaka because one day, I just really wanted to use your toothbrush. Which is shitty by the way, you're supposed to replace those things when the bristles get all flattened out."
"So you admit you're a stalker," he says. Then he rolls over, looks down at you. You can barely make out his face in the darkness, only that his eyes look bigger than you're used to because he's not wearing his glasses.
"Sure? I'm under no illusions about being a good man," you murmur. He wavers there, he's about to lean down and do the deed and god, you can't let him. He'll regret it in a few years, you'll regret it for a lifetime. What has all this resistance been for, if you can't stick to it? Why were you wasting time if you were always going to fuck up, go off the rails, stick your finger in his perfect jam center and ruin him with dirt? "Ok," you say resolutely. Then, you sit up, you reach out, and you grab him. He's skinny and surprised so it's easy to roll him onto his side, away from you. You trap him there under your arm, your chin atop his skull, in his hair. "That's enough."
You can feel his heart speeding under the pressure of your forearm, shaking his frame. He's in your arms, spine to your breastbone, you're holding him and that's bad but it's not as bad as letting him kiss you which you were absolutely going to do. "How about that card game?" You suggest.
He kicks you. Heel to shin, and the angle is all wrong for it to hurt but you make an oof sound anyway. It doesn't make you let go, but it does make you cant your hips away as you suddenly remember you're hard, too close to his ass. He feels you move away, and chases you. Tries to fit his body towards yours, so hungry, a sneak-peak of what it would be like if you made out with him. "What a cheap shot, Satomi-Kun!" You breathe, the words broken up around a breathlessness you disguise as laughter.
"Do you even—do you even want to?" he grits out, going limp against you, panting.
"Want to play cards?"
"No. You know what I mean—do you—," a frustrated sound deep inside him, and you shouldn't feel bad for protecting him, but you do. He gets you all scrambled, turned upside down, convinces you in terrible, dangerous moments that it would be kinder or more honorable, somehow, to just give in and let him devour you. Devour him back. Nothing in this dirty-sheet floor bed but bones and blood, in the end. "Sometimes I think it's just me," Satomi whispers, breath warm against your arm, moving the fine hairs there. "But it's not. I know it's not. I'm not crazy. If there was no chance, ever, you'd tell me there was no chance. You'd send me away."
You have never sent him away, it's true. You've never told him there was no chance, because you, of course, know how close you are all the time. A wobbling pier on splintered stilts, moments away from collapse. But you could lie: I just don't want to break your heart, kid. I don't want to hurt you.
Instead, you release your hold on him, arms suddenly weak by impending honesty. You move your lips to his hair. "It's not just you," you admit.
He sighs shakily, softens in your arms. "What are you waiting for?" he asks then. "Is there some magic number? When I turn twenty and can drink and gamble?"
"It's not a matter of waiting," you explain, relenting your grip without entirely letting him go. You're pretty sure he won't push any further, he wants you here, exactly where he has you, behind him and confessing to the darkness. Your arm slackens and your hand flexes, damp, unsure of where to land. On his stomach? Too much, you'll blow your load. His side? Maybe? You decide on his hip, which feels like a mistake. He's angular, hot, and your thumb goes rogue and finds the bone through the elastic of his sweats. "It's that I shouldn't in the first place, not ever, because… of who I am, and who you are. You don't need this."
"But I want it."
"You think you want it."
"You don't know what I want," he grumbles, reaching up and grabbing your hand before you think to snap it away. He traps it against himself, then stubbornly moves your palm under the hem of his shirt to touch bare, searing skin. Jesus Christ. He is so soft and smooth, even better than your dreams of him, and your mouth is so suddenly flooded in spit you have to swallow. "What do you want?" he asks.
Another cheap shot. There's no good answer. You want something that isn't real. You want him, of course you want him, to fuck him and spoil him and buy him things—but you want it to not fuck him up. And that just can't happen. There's no version of your love that doesn't also ruin. That's just how things are. "It doesn't matter because what I want, or what you want…they don't just get to exist in a vacuum. And Satomi…the circumstances are all wrong. They have been since the beginning. We got off on the wrong foot, we didn't have a chance."
"The wrong foot?" He says. "The foot where you needed me to teach you to sing? The foot where you approached me first? And acted like my friend? And picked me up and dropped me off in your car and I lied to my parents about it? The foot where you flirted with me? When I was fourteen? That foot?"
It's like swallowing an ice cube whole. Vocal cord paralyzing, a shock from throat to gut because damn, you didn't know he saw it like that too. You thought maybe you'd spared hm the gory details. Were certain of it because why else would he think he's in love with you? You were sure that was a condition born from his ignorance. "Yeah," you say, adjusting your hand, which is still very much under his shirt. "That one."
"Ok, well, that's not really my fault," he snaps. "At all."
"No, it's not." You squirm. Talking is challenging because you're still so hard, it's depriving your brain of blood. He's so warm against you and he smells so fucking good and there's just never been a moment in all the time you've known him when you didn't want him in your mouth. Under your skin. You have his name on your body forever and even that didn't cure you. What are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to survive this? Satomi-kun in your arms, accusing you or being a dirty pervert and still begging for you to do something about it? What the hell are you doing? "But it doesn't make it right."
He pets your fingers through his shirt. They're spread over his ribcage, slotted into bones, holding the unsteady huff of his breath. This silence spreads out for a long time, you pray he's fallen asleep at the same time you know he hasn't. The sort of prayer you can say because you already know it won't be answered. "Do you love me?" he finally asks.
"Jesus Christ," you say, his hair in your mouth and your hips twitching. "I know I should have slept in a park."
"I love you," he says plainly, and then he's rolling over in your arms, forehead pressed to yours, minty boy breath all over your mouth, which is open even though it really should not be open. "I don't care if I should or shouldn't or if it makes me pathetic or if you think I'd be better off dating people my age, or whatever you think. I just do. That's the truth. And I want to be with you."
He's dug clear through the floor and out the other side, just like that. Prison break. An alarm is going off somewhere but you can't hear it, because you don't want to, because you are in love, and it's not how you ever thought it would be. It's so tiring, mostly. You are worn out.
So you put him on his back, cup his face, thumb over the line of his jaw which has gotten sharper every year you have known him. You look into his eyes until they become one eye. One puddle of sad golden rainwater, stained black in the dark. "I'm not good to be with," you tell him, wading through the eye puddle to his mouth. Open, pretty. He licks his lips and his tongue touches you, because you are already that close.
"I know," he says.
You nod. Then you kiss him.
He tastes how you knew he would taste because you used to taste his exhalations, all the time, in the Karaoke booth. In the Century. In restaurants. Every opportunity you got. You've been drunk on it for so long that finally having it rips through your body like a hurricane. You shudder, press him down underneath the long line of your body, put your fingers in his hair as he opens up for you, gives you his tongue.
You've never kissed like this. So soft, so wet. You lick at each other the way animals do. Maybe because he's also a man and there's no pretense of decorum or seduction—or maybe because he's inexperienced and he doesn't know how to control the output of spit. You have no idea but it's a fucking miracle, this mad, aimless, desperate kissing. You drink his drool, you map his teeth. You bear down over his heartbeat, astounded by the hummingbird speed.
When you pull back to breathe there's stars at the edges of your vision, and his hands are all over you. Your chest, your back, your arms, your neck. He feels you out, and you think back to that time he hugged you at the station—how electric and terrifying it was, how certain you were that you'd die, right there, in front of all those people. "See?" he says, kissing the corner of your mouth, tongue flicking out. "Was it so hard?"
You laugh an all-breath laugh. He has no idea, he never does, he can't know that this thing has almost killed you. That he's pushed you past a breaking point, that there will be hell to pay, eventually, because there always is. That's your curse: you were his age when your signed away your life. You don't get to have nice things, you don't get to put your tongue in them without something blowing up in your face. This is fucking dangerous. You are fucking dangerous. A hundred cliches about crime, all of them true. And meanwhile, Satomi underneath you, mewling and humping your leg and getting his teeth in your tattoos and biting too hard because he's never bitten during sex before because he's never had sex before. Another miracle.
What the hell are you doing? You ask yourself, but it's too late.
You kiss him again, and you can't stop kissing. You had your line in the sand, but it's gone, now. You are not a good man. You have always known that.
"So fucking much," you say as you kiss down his neck to the feverish thud of his pulse, hiding your face there, using his body to drown out the roar of blood in your ears. Blood down his sink, blood in his bed, a portent, the future, this thing that's rushing in both of your bodies.
"What?" he asks. His spine rolls as he presses into you. Oversized shirt pushed up to his throat so you can finally see his chest, glowing white rectangle like a postage stamp in the black of his room. You rub your face into it, scour his skin with your stubble.
"You asked me if I loved you," you tell him. "There's your answer. I love you So. Fucking. Much, it drives me crazy. Makes me break all my own rules. That's the truth, Satomi-kun—do you still want it?"
A shimmer in the darkness, your spit on his skin. He reaches down, you kiss his fingers. He breaks the kiss to push them right into your mouth. They taste like salt, and you swallow them. Gag around them, let him get as deep as he wants, into your every wet, dark tunnel. Choke you—the weeds, to your garden. You are giving up. You're letting them overtake. "Yes, I want it," he promises.
And for the first time, you give him what he wants, instead of what he needs.