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When he was a kid, urban legends were all stuff that wouldn't bother anyone. Human-faced dogs. Haunted stairs. Ghosts in the bathroom. McDonalds' burgers made out of worms. You got scared or freaked out and then you grew up and forget about it.
Now?
"Oi! Clear off!" he barked, startling the gaggle of elementary schoolers congregating around his truck.
Half scattered, shooting off like a bunch of two-legged marbles. The rest lingered, eyeballing the courier mascot on the side panel. They were little little, couldn't've touched it on even their tippiest toes, and yet here they were.
"Aniki, go fast!"
"Go home before you get yourself killed."
Rin loaded the hand truck and looked into the blissful, cavernous void created by his sweat and sacrifice. Only a few more to go.
They were still waiting there when he closed up the back, goggle-eyed, anticipating the moment he'd get in the driver's seat.
He chased them off, roaring like a monster, then had to go scrounging in the gutter for his stamp. His holster hadn't been fastening right for a while and dumped it anytime he went over a brisk walk, but the office couldn't be any more bothered to replace it than they could to wash their fleet or keep up on safety inspections. Everything would get fixed once some bigwig from the central office stopped by for a visit, so until then he'd make do.
He scooped it up and saw a final kid he hadn't noticed, petrified, snotting all over himself.
He crouched before him and said, "Aniki doesn't want to be mean, but sometimes that's what it takes. Touching the truck while it's moving is very dangerous, okay? Now go home."
The kid nodded, but didn't move one bit.
Rin sighed. He would really rather get on with his route, go home, get something to eat.
"Where do you live?"
With a trembling finger, the kid pointed to the apartment block he'd just delivered to, mumbled out a number, and Rin scooped him up and headed upstairs. The kid's pants were full of piss, but his shirt was already so drenched with sweat he didn't think any of it could get through.
A weary woman answered the buzzer. Rin explained the situation and apologized for having to scold him, bowing so deep his face about touched his knees. The mother thanked him, marvelling weakly at his professionalism before ushering her son in, gently closing the door, and falling into a tearful fit.
Mr Professional, that was him, one in a sea of a million in this company. Gleaming trucks, gleaming smiles. No package dropped, no matter how heavy. Never reeking of sweat, no matter how long the shift or how hot the weather. Nothing that would ever make a customer realize they were being served by a real human being and not a customer service automaton.
Rin climbed into his cab, grabbed some sanitizer and tissues to scrub the piss off his arm, and headed to his next destination.
"So as you can see, there's a need to do something about it."
The office was hot and stank of ink and paper. A fan squatting on a pile of horse-betting stubs blew futilely at nothing in particular. Rin sat on the edge of the chair—it was supposedly ergonomic, but if you sat back in it for more than five minutes, you'd get up feeling like you'd been punched in the spine—and swiped his palms on his slacks. His butt was already numb from driving, but the boss hated for drivers to stand on account of it being 'unsociable'.
"Whattaya want me to do? Write corporate and tell them to change the logo? Do you think they'd do that for me? Do you think I'm that special?" Kirishima swiveled in his chair, chewing his pen. "You worry too much."
"I think it's reasonable to worry about being liable if some kid loses an arm trying to touch our truck at speed because of a shitty urban legend."
"The company will pay for it. Probably."
"Probably."
"Yeah, probably."
"I'll probably lose my licence too. What'm I supposed to do then?"
"Aren't you always talking about your school crap? Why do you need a commercial licence?"
"I like having options."
"How many options do you need? Be more decisive! Pick something and let your company take care of you. Look at me, I ain't even thirty and I'm already up here. You could be too."
Sometimes Rin wondered what Kirishima got out of these lectures. Acting as if his life had gone precisely to plan, like they both didn't know otherwise. That had always been the frustrating thing about him. Kirishima lived in a one-way eternal now, where he could see and remember whatever he wanted about anyone and nobody was allowed to do the same for him. He was born from a buttercup just yesterday and dropped into management at a bumfuck branch of a major shipping company through happenstance, and if you thought you knew anything else, no you didn't. Those dreams of a glorious future he enraptured Rin with? Never happened. Those flowers Rin brought whenever he put himself in hospital? Must've been for someone else. Not me. I'm fine. Never been anything else. I don't even know you like that.
It didn't use to be this bad. When he first started working here, Kirishima at least acknowledged him as his little brother's best friend, though feigning a greater distance between them than had been true, but once Kirishima declared Ikuya dead to him, all his friendships died alongside him and the years they'd spent on each other's peripheries were null and void. Only work remained.
Rin shifted in the chair, trying, as he had many times before, to reconcile the Kirishimas of now and long ago, despite knowing they weren't any different. One had simply followed this tendency to its natural conclusion. How he had ever been infatuated with such a ridiculous man? When he thought back to how, whenever he mentioned anything Kirishima had said before, Kirishima would ruffle his hair and call him his little stalker, annoyance shining through the joviality just enough for him to get the message, Rin wanted to scold his pea-brained seven year-old self for being so hungry for his attention that he played along instead of seeing him for what he was. Get some self-respect! He's not cool or mature, he's just thirteen and has nice hair!
These kinds of crushes were uniquely embarrassing. If a person was the sum of the people around them, didn't loving a fuckup mean he was a fuckup too? Even if he hadn't felt like that about Kirishima in a long time, the possibility scared him. Besides, Kirishima wasn't the only one. With age Rin had come to realize that he had a tragic form of brain damage that drew him to the most absurd, frustrating man in every room. This parade of dark-haired, anti-social weirdos—what did that say about him?
Kirishima leaned forward, voice low, like he was about to tell a secret. "Why don't you come and get some drinks with us?"
"I have to work on my thesis."
"You always have to. There's plenty of time to stop in for a beer or two."
A beer or two invariably ended up as five, took at least three hours, and necessitated trying ignore off-colour jokes while providing emotional support for Nakagawa after he started crying about getting dumped by his girlfriend. (It'd been four months, the guy needed to let it go.)
"It's a big paper. Important."
"Everything's important to you. Lighten up, enjoy yourself for once. Nobody ever winds up on their deathbed wishing they spent more time writing papers on...?"
"Human geography."
"Whatever that is."
He'd told him before, but it never stuck. He gave his usual half-assed promise to think about it and went to change.
He soaked up the ocean that had formed on his low back, scrubbed the stink from his pits, and peeled out his underwear, taking extra time to mop up his crotch. Someday science would prove that these ball-baking slacks were the reason for the population decline. He'd raised the issue of having uniforms better suited to delivering in high-heat, high-humidity weather during his first year here, and got the official response: Shut up greenhorn, do you think the company has money for that?
Well, it wasn't as if he'd be having kids anyway.
He wadded the wet underwear in alongside his uniform and rinsed his face in the sink as the edges of a dehydration headache fluttered around his eyes.
Shiina was sitting in the lobby by the vending machine, kicked back with a flimsy paper fan in one hand and a pop in the other. He'd sweated out the product from his red cowlicky hair and his street shirt was already splotched at the pits. (For budgetary reasons, the building's aircon was only allowed to be turned on in arcane circumstances determined by upper management.) Rin could smell him from a metre away. Shiina stretched himself out like a cat, intensifying that hot, animal funk, and settled his thick, freckled forearms on his thighs.
Had anyone else been around, Rin would've nodded and went on his way, but the guys had all either gone on to the bar already or were on their way back from their routes, so he decided to stick around a bit.
Shiina pointed the fan at him. "Lemme hit you with this."
Rin leaned down and let him waft a little wind at his face and Shiina busted into a big grin, like yeah, he knew how good that felt. Once in a while Rin thought it'd be nice to sit on his cock, partly cause he was cute, but mostly cause he wanted someone who got how it was to be like this, work like this. Not some desk jockey who bitched and moaned about how the weather wasn't that bad while leaving his air-conditioned home in an air-conditioned car to his air-conditioned office and why didn't he want to fuck right after he got off the clock, he couldn't be that tired where's your manly vigor blah blah. No, he needed a guy who'd suffered that daily melt, one he could take a frigid, teeth-chattering shower with, and lay beside in a heap of cool, crisp sheets.
He thumbed a few coins into the vending machine as Shiina alternated fanning between them.
"Only thing I had clean today were my boxers. My balls have been fused to my leg for like, an hour."
"You gotta powder em," Rin said, taking a long swig of juice. "Or bring baby wipes or something."
"You coming for drinks, or...?"
"Nah, gonna work on my thesis."
Disappointment put a dent in Shiina's face. "Are they that complicated, that you have to work on them all the time?"
"It's the culmination of a lot of work, so..." Rin never knew how to explain these things to people outside of academia. They seemed to think it was no more complicated than half-assedly assembling four or five sources and regurgitating them into a summary, like a high school essay.
"Do you at least have fun with your study group?"
"Don't have one," Rin admitted.
Attempts at sociability had been made in the first couple years of undergrad, but the deeper he got into his degree, the more reclusive he had become. He supposed you could chalk it up as a sign of his increasing maturity—didn't they say that wisdom wasn't in talking, but listening?—but he couldn't subscribe to the notion that the zenith of humanity was silence. Even monks did their daily chants. More than that, he felt that there was nothing between him and his cohort, that anything they could talk about was so trivial and rote that they might as well not talk at all. Hot Cold Hungry Tired, adults relaying their physical states to one another like a kid's book. That was what conversations had become. Not that things had been any more complicated before, only that it became more strange, intensifying his yearning, seeking, for what?
Something will come and crack my heart clean open.
It was a freak, errant thought that arose now and then, but unable to articulate what it meant or what that something might be, he let it fade like every time before.
Shiina looked like he was about to assume something irritating about his personal life, so to ward that off, Rin asked, "Have you been having problems with kids?"
"Yeah. It started off as just little kids, but lately high schoolers have been getting into it too. They only ever get me when I'm parked though."
"It was like that for me at first too and that was fine, but now they want to touch it while I'm moving. They say it's better if it's going fast."
"Ehh, not good. Have you tried talking to them?"
"Who has time to talk to every single kid? I tell em to scram. You'd think at least the older ones would have some kind of sense."
"It's not a matter of sense, it's about being fun. Doing dumb shit."
"They can do dumb shit that doesn't involve moving vehicles."
"Hard for me to be mad at them. Wasn't that long ago that we were still kids ourselves."
"I'll be mad for the both of us. I don't want to be responsible for some kid getting mangled."
"I get it. Not much we can do though."
Shiina gave another million-watt grin and Rin wished he didn't have such a thing for straight guys. Life was hard enough already. He finished his juice and left before his deep-fried brain could say something stupid.
The heat clapped him the instant the door opened, fogging his shades, squeezing his brain dry and dumb. He lingered there, waiting for his glasses to unfog, trying to think where'd be best to get groceries. The X Mart by his apartment would be easiest, but if he went on down the way, the Korean grocery was having a big sale.
Across the street, there was a highschooler sitting on a bench, waiting. Rin couldn't tell if he was spacing out or staring at the office. Maybe he knew someone who worked there. Whatever, it wasn't his problem.
He decided on the Korean place. Had to run a tight budget with prices nowadays, even if meant getting another letter from his nosy-ass neighbour about not having national pride.
He trudged down the street, thinking of the big bowl of muk-sabal he was gonna make. Lots of cucumbers. Healthy heap of kimchi. Actually, now that he was back outside, he'd love a nice cold beer. Why was it that weather like this made you crave liquor so bad when it only dehydrated you?
One of their trucks came round the corner. Romio, one of the newbies, tooted his horn and Rin waved back, watching him pass. The courier's loincloth was grungy, more brown than red. He couldn't imagine why anyone would think anything good would come of touching it. Didn't kids read Maeterlinck anymore? If all he had to do was find happiness was touch a truck, then he'd never have another bad day in his life.
Red loincloths, blue birds...
Would that kid be alright? Could he bounce back after a good night's sleep or was he going to have a complex about deliverymen the rest of his life? Crying when the doorbell rang. Nightmaring over demons in blue stripes. If he saw him again, should he say something? He didn't want to come across as a creep. Honestly, the best thing was to not get involved with kids at all.
What was he getting pressed for? Stupid. Stupid.
He stopped at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. In the low gloss of a shop window, he saw the reflection of the highschooler behind him. He stood a measured distance off, staring at him with a sort of blank expectance, school bag hanging on one shoulder, duffel on the other. An athlete? What uniform was that?
"What do you want?"
"You're a deliveryman, aren't you?"
"What's it to you?"
The kid kept on staring with that inscrutable expression, then turned and left.
A couple days later, he delivered to that same apartment block in Iwatobi. It was during the post-work rush, to the extent that existed here, and amidst the adults bustling home he spied that little boy, hunched on the ground with an ice pop, studying his chalk portrait of an angel girl.
"Nice picture you got there," Rin called out. The boy froze on the spot.
Rin hopped out the cab, rummaging through his pockets. What did he have that a kid would want? No candy. A pack of tissues, a half-used chapstick. His keys. Some loose change. Yeah, that'd work. He gave him 100¥ and told him sorry and that he could spend it on whatever. The kid stammered out a thank you and shuffled off, leaving his angel to be trampled.
Not the most satisfying ending, but it was good enough.
He opened up the back, took a deep breath, and started unloading a mountain of Amway trash. In the Hierarchy of Despicable Delivery Customers, there were those who were despised because of the products they ordered (liquids, bulk litter, pet food, large electronics) and those who were despised on a personal level. Amway sellers were the latter. They never ordered small amounts and had a nasty habit of trying to hard sell at the door. Rin had once been dragged into a house by a lady who insisted she had a face mist that would make him irresistible to women. He'd thought about asking if she had anything for attracting men, but it wasn't funny enough to be worth getting written up for.
He got his first load stabilized and glanced out a route to the destination and was about to head up when he realized his stamp had jumped its holster again. Cursing under his breath, he bent to grab it and as his fingers made contact, a hand stroked up the rear seam of his slacks like a passing breeze.
The stamp slipped his grip. When he turned to see who'd done it, there was nothing but the slow churn of foot traffic. Some old folk. Housewives hurrying home to fix dinner. An office lady wobbling in her heels. Clusters of students. Must've been a mistake. He was no stranger to getting bumped into, though there weren't that many people on the street. Well, some folks were just clumsy. Nothing to do for it.
He grabbed the stamp and wheeled the packages up, thinking nothing more of it.
And then, a couple days later, at a different address in that same little town, that hand came for him again. He'd been at a local stationer's, waiting for the old man to finish packing the last box he wanted to ship out, when he felt that smooth swipe across his backside. He tried to spot the culprit, but the old man announced that he was finished and Rin was forced to pay it no mind.
But it happened the next day and the next day and the day after that, every time that same spine-crawling stroke.
It happened to and from delivery spots. While loading and unloading the truck. While talking to customers. He never got a clear view of the perp.
The day it happened thrice in the same shift, he sat in his cab, slammed his hands against the steering wheel and cried a few hot, angry tears before continuing his route. Why him? What had he ever done? He wasn't some girl in a miniskirt practically asking for it. He was a guy. He was working. Didn't they have anything better to do?
Eventually, he became preoccupied with the idea that somehow they knew he liked men. They had scoped inside his brain and figured that fag probably fucking liked it. What was a fag gonna do anyway? Nothing. And he hadn't.
Maybe he did deserve it.
Miserable June melted into monstrous July, the humidity ticked up to the mid-80s, and the number of kids trying to touch the trucks for a chance at happiness likewise swelled. The hand consumed more and more of his thoughts. It was hard to imagine that it could be attached to anything, that it was not some abstract entity that existed solely to devil him. He started tensing up off the clock, though it had yet to happen while he was out of uniform, and dreaded the daily dispatch to Iwatobi. Still, it wasn't as if he could crawl into the office and snivel about wanting to change routes. So there was a sex creep—who cared? You didn't see Murase begging to not have to deliver to houses that had dogs even after he broke his chin getting knocked down the stairs by one. They went where the packages went, end of story.
Nausea welled in his throat as he headed into Iwatobi once again. He wound the tail of the truck down a narrow road and brought it to a rumbling halt before That Fucking Place. He pressed his face into the steering wheel, sighing. He'd managed to avoid it this long, but it seemed his luck had run out.
That Fucking Place was a three-story post-war construction that might as well been from the Meiji period given how aged and decrepit it looked. It was notorious for having exactly one toilet in the entire building—up on the third floor, reserved for the highest-paying tenants—and a building manager who enforced the sovereignty of the toilet with an iron fist. A proper delivery to That Fucking Place required lightning speed and a stone bladder, because the building manager would call the police on drivers who lingered too long or used the toilet on the third floor, even if they had received permission from a third-floor tenant to use it.
A tatty laminated notice by the door informed deliverymen that they should take packages directly to the recipient's flat, not leave them at the front door or with the office, though he was obliged to go to the office to ask where it was anyway.
He shouldered past some tenant's kid playing Game Boy in the hall and wound through a strangely labyrinthine corridor. The stairs were narrow and steep and the stench of mildew thickened to a paste that clung in his mouth. Old cracks, painted over and recracked, streaked through the wall like lightning, and the building, denied the relief of a peaceable collapse, creaked and moaned in its long, slow slouch back into the earth.
The hallway at the bottom was indistinguishable from one you might see in a bomb shelter. Exposed wires and pipes, a bare bulb burning dully, casting all in jaundiced light. The closeness of the doors spoke of living spaces where no human should live, divided and subdivided into the smallest habitable area. No-kitchen flats with a view of nothing but a cracked concrete wall, enough room to lay down and sleep, no more.
A message chimed on his BlackBerry. Must be his advisor. He'd want an answer right away. Rin stuffed the parcel under his arm and waited for his device to wake up. As its face glowed to life, the stairs let out a woeful creak, and the hand came down and gave him a good hard squeeze.
The BlackBerry clattered to the floor. He could hear the stranger panting through his nose, trying to make himself quiet, but still Rin knew he had run hard for a long time. He turned.
In his dreams, he had presumed a certain look from the man who harassed him. One of those goblinish men ubiquitous in porn: fat, middle-aged, stinking of booze and smokes and balding despite best efforts.
This? Less a person than a presence, a hawk he could he never reach, a mountain too treacherous to climb. Ink-black hair, flat blue eyes.
When they spoke of castle-toppling beauties in school, he, with his juvenile idea of beauty as a thing that fluttered and shone, had been unable to fathom what that could really mean. Wasn't it a thing that uplifted, made you feel good? To be immersed in beauty was to float in a sea of bubbles, weightless, soft, glimmering. But experience proved otherwise—not elevation, but a power, commanding and absolute.
Beauty would bend you on your knees and break you.
As Rin stumbled away, the boy advanced, hand outstretched, Game Boy singing in his pocket. The overhead light stuttered and revealed that blue was not flat and dead, that at its core was a hot, reverent glow.
Rin's eyes flicked down his body. Oh. Was this kid gonna...?
He took a half-step back, but could manage no more. The warmth of that body encroached, holding him in its thrall. It seemed inevitable, that this hand that had casually taken so much should catch him and take some more.
The edge of the hand connected with his shirt and Rin abruptly remembered who he was, where he was, who he was dealing with.
"You motherfucker."
If it was going to happen, it wouldn't be in a place like this.
The kid sprang back, sprinting up the stairs, and Rin nearly abandoned the package to go right after him, but he forced himself to drop it at the door, grab his phone, and then give chase.
By the time he made it back upstairs, the building manager was pitching a fit, storming down the hall with a dingy, bent golf club.
"Who was that kid!? Are you even a real deliveryman? You in a fuckin gang? Little fucking hooligans. Scoping the place out, huh!?" He thumped the golf club against the floor. "Turn out your pockets, you rat!"
Despite his uniform, the package, and the truck parked out in front, the manager refused to believe he was who he said he was. He called the office and then, unsatisfied with whatever Kirishima told him, the police.
Rin trembled with a rage unknown to him, struggling to suppress the furious words that would lunge out if his control slipped for even a second. When the police arrived, the tension near tore him in two, but he clutched hold of his anger and crushed it into a diamond, speaking as little as possible, knowing that if he did not tread carefully he'd flush all the work he had done these past few years straight down the toilet.
He spoke with slow precision, answering each question to the best of his ability.
"I don't know. It was some random kid. He probably wanted to pull some kind of prank. I've never seen him before in my life. He has nothing to do with me. I would like to go back to work now, if that's alright with you."
The residents were also questioned, but only one had seen the kid through her window, biking away like hell was on his heels.
Eventually, Rin was released and for the next half hour he debated storming back and giving the building manager the bitching out of a lifetime, but he held on until end of shift and went for drinks after, commiserating with fellow survivors of That Fucking Place until his evening concluded with him throwing up torrents of cheap beer in the streets.
Shiina showed up with a bottle of water for him and rubbed his back as he got the rest out.
"You want me to take you home?" Shiina asked, big, broad hand stroking him so tenderly.
"Yeah," Rin croaked, eyes watering. "Yeah."
Thinking back on it in bed, so furious he could barely sleep, he realized he'd said one thing that wasn't true. He had seen that kid before. It was the one who'd been at the office, the one who asked if he was a deliveryman.
A few hours before he had to get up for school, he drifted off with Shiina's parting words echoing in his mind.
You had a bad day, but you'll make the most of tomorrow.
Of course he would. How could he not?
Now he knew his enemy.
For the next couple days, Rin didn't see the kid, which was fine by him. His nerves needed the breather. He'd never been followed into a building before, it had all stayed on the streets—fair game, comparatively speaking—but if he was willing to chase him inside, what came next? Would he be satisfied staying on the clock? Rin found himself taking long, obtuse paths home, idling here and there, plotting his next step.
The uniform he had seen that day belonged to Iwatobi High School, meaning the kid either lived in Iwatobi proper or in one of the smaller surrounding villages. He debated staking out the campus on his day off, but nothing good would come of it. Once the kid cooled down, he would show himself again. After all, summer vacation was coming up—what better time for a teenage lech? Still, he wasn't ruling out the possibility that he might pop up before then, so he kept his head on a swivel and waited.
Sure enough, one obnoxiously humid evening, Rin caught sight of the kid in his side-view. He trailed behind on a silver bike, hunched over his handlebars, sweat dripping down his face. He looked glad to let himself coast when he could, seeking out moments of relief in the breeze, but that leisurely determination persisted, refusing to sway from its path.
Tempted as Rin was to brake check him, it didn't seem appropriate. He hadn't figured out what he was going to do with the kid once he caught him, but letting him plow into the back of a box truck wasn't what he had in mind, regardless of how funny it might be.
He rolled to a stop.
"Hey, you, on the bike," he called out the window. "It's dangerous to follow that closely."
Startled, the kid swerved off elsewhere, silver frame flicking shimmer at the truck like a curse.
Had he been following him like that this whole time? Maybe he wasn't paying as close attention to the road as he thought he did. Maybe he'd been more discreet about it before and had simply grown more emboldened.
When next Rin saw him, he had abandoned the bike to follow afoot. Spying him lurking behind a barber shop banner, something swelled in Rin's chest—panic, excitement, he didn't know what. He jaunted up the stairs to the apartment, each step sending a jolt of lightning through his body. The recipient averted her eyes as she signed and Rin knew he must be making some kind of deranged face, but he couldn't stop. He bounced back down, stamp and pen clenched in his fist, singing under his breath. He glanced at the banner, but it flapped sluggishly, concealing nothing. He didn't know where he'd went, but he knew he was there.
C'mon. Try me.
Rin slowed his way back to the cab, but some part of him said he wouldn't approach here. Too open.
The next stop was for a restaurant, to be brought to the back down an alley. Perfect. Once he'd gotten the signature, Rin dropped his pen, letting it bounce between stacks of old crates. Muttering fake admonishments about his clumsiness, he bent to search, leaving his flank wide open, blindly scraping at the concrete as a shadow crept up behind him.
There was a pause and then—
The kid went for it, both-handed, and Rin reared up and slammed an elbow into his chest full force. The kid staggered back, wheezing, bewildered, helpless to resist. Rin caught him in a headlock and wrenched him down and all the kid could do was claw at his arms and stamp and kick the air like a mule. His silent struggle devolved into guttural, panicked grunts and once his knees started to buckle, Rin eased up.
He forced the kid to sit on a crate and stood over him as he caught his breath. Drool shone on his lips and his eyes were wet, though he would hardly let Rin see it, staring at the ground the way he was. He massaged his throat, gasping, then blotted his brick-red face dry with his arm.
"What've you got to say for yourself?" Rin demanded. "Nothing? You've been stalking me for what, a month, and you can't say anything? You fuckin pervert. Get up. We're going to the police."
Rin jerked him up by the arm. Here, in the cramped, fading light, he looked exactly what he was: a kid. Petulant, pouting at having been caught. But the longer Rin stared, the more the kid cooled off, clinging back shreds of hateful glamour. It was that particular coolness that riled Rin up—the cool of a guy who floated through life unconnected to his true self, protecting his fragile little heart from the danger of feeling too much. An angel of aloofness. He wanted to drag him to earth.
Rin squeezed his arm and the pout came back. Alright already, you caught me, don't rub it in.
"I'll do what I fuckin want," he muttered, yanking him out the alleyway.
It would be at least a ten minute walk to the nearest police box, but the kid trudged along obediently, man enough to face justice head on. To know there was at least one singular strand of moral fiber buried in that callous perversion made relief and unnervedness swirl in Rin's chest.
The kid was trim and fit with a deep, boyish tan, but unlike his highschool teammates, whose tanlines cut neatly at the wrists and neck, the darkness poured down his throat, slunk under his collar. (A runner, perhaps, a swimmer.) It was hard to not resent it. Rin had always gone straight from white to crispy. He could be sunscreened up and covered to the nines and there was still a chance he'd be fried by sixth inning. Your name's like a girl and you've got skin like one too, they said. Even now, the guys at work gave him a hard time about it. Pretty boy. Idol-in-training. He wanted to shove his hard, calloused hand in all their faces and say: Ain't this man enough?
Rin squeezed again, making the thick veins in his hand and arm pop. Let him see who he was messing with.
"What's with you?" he asked. "Why are you doing this?"
The kid swiped the sweat off his lip with that same insolent look.
"Was it a dare? Just felt like it?"
Nothing.
"Does it get your dick hard?"
Now there was a face. The kid tried to break away, but Rin yanked him close.
"I'm right, aren't I? You're one of those guys that gets it up by molesting strangers. Don't even care if it's a man or woman as long as you get your rocks off. Disgusting."
"I'm not," the kid bit out. "Not like that."
"Then what are you like? Tell me."
But the kid refused to say another word. That hard blue was fractured and bitter. For the rest of the way, Rin asked him every question that came to mind. What grade was he in. What sport he played. What his family was like. Did he have a girlfriend. How many friends did he have. He asked these and more, squeezed that arm until he knew it would bruise, speculated what'd become of him once he was in jail, offering again and again the chance to prove he was something other than what Rin assumed and in return got stone, stone silence.
They arrived at the police box. The disgusting weather had driven the cops inside, so Rin couldn't simply hand the brat off and have him taken care of. He stood at the finish line, waiting on himself to take the last few steps of this marathon, but the kid's surly compliance had sucked the fervor from his vengeance and he was more tired than satisfied.
He wasn't going to let him go—he was under no delusion that the kid was anything but a menace to society—but he hadn't gotten any closer to an answer to the question that haunted him this whole time.
"Why me?"
"Because," the kid said, and refused to elaborate.
"So?"
Rin leaned back in the chair, swirling the cup of watery coffee the staff kept topped up while the kid underwent interrogation. He'd phoned in a brief overview of the situation to Kirishima, who scolded him for wasting time and told him to not bring the truck back until his route was through. It had been almost an hour and the only thing he knew was the kid's name: Nanase Haruka.
Yamamoto, chief officer on duty, had finally returned from the interrogation room, where Rin presumed Nanase was sitting with a big bowl of katsudon talking about his relationship with his mother.
"Apparently there's some schoolyard rumor about—"
"The delivery trucks, I know, I've been dealing with kids for months."
"Not just the trucks. According to him, the rumor now says that touching the butts of deliverymen will also work."
"What." It was so insultingly stupid that he couldn't think of a proper followup.
"I know, I know, it's absurd." Yamamoto cleared his throat a few times, looking as though he were about to say something tiresome. "Given the absurdity of the situation, if you could possibly overlook this..."
"Why should I? If that's the reason, then it's a problem for my whole company, not just me." Rin hated to throw around the weight of a corporation he felt lukewarm about at the best of times, but any weapon was good in a fight.
"I mean..." Yamamoto dragged the tip of his pencil across a coffee-stained napkin. "It is a kid after all."
"He's—" Rin squinted at notepad the officer had brought with him.
"Sixteen. There's no need to get all worked up over this." Yamamoto leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Look, I don't want to get into the details, but we're pretty sure this kid is kinda 'special', you know? He doesn't really know what he's doing. We get calls about him a few times a year. Climbing into fishtanks at the department store. Trespassing. Petty stuff like that. He never means any harm by it."
"Shouldn't he have someone looking after him?"
"He should, but he lives alone. Dad works up north and Mom went with. The school checks in on him now and again. The parents keep the lights on and he feeds himself and goes to school most of the time so there's not anything we can do about it. Used to be you could just sterilize guys like that and stick em in a facility so they don't bother anyone, but we're not allowed to do that anymore." He shrugged. "They talk about wanting dignity, but is anything about this dignified?"
Rin hated that they were trotting out the sob story, hated more that he felt a twinge at it. But he wasn't backing down. "How do we know he's not molesting women on the train or something? I mean, if he'll go after a guy..."
"If he's doing that, then of course we'd have to take that seriously, but you're a tough guy, you can handle him. And I'm sure you have better things to do than drag a retarded kid through the courts over nothing." Having decided that the matter was settled, Yamamoto went on, "We'll have him write a formal apology and tell him he needs to stay away from your guys' offices, trucks, and employees. Easy as that."
There wasn't anything else he could say about it.
In private, Kirishima ragged on him for reporting the kid, but as far as Rin could tell, nobody else in the office knew that it was him that'd been groped. There was a stupid meeting where Kirishima issued a direct warning to the one lady driver they had and told everybody else to not worry about it. They didn't have a photo and the police refused to release his name, so Kirishima said to keep an eye out for a black-haired teenage boy—narrowing it down to only 90% of the teen boys in the prefecture—and shoo him away from the office if he showed up.
Things went more or less back to normal. Rin went out and delivered in weather that felt like rolling around in somebody's armpit, chatted with Shiina for a few minutes after work, fiddled with his thesis, all that. The cops got off their asses long enough to fax a memo to all the schools in the area about the dangers of making contact with moving vehicles, so the number of incidents with kids dwindled.
But there was something that churned in the pit of Rin's stomach nonetheless: that hard, singleminded stare. For a couple weeks he stayed busy enough to ignore it, but at last, a day off arrived and he was too caught up on life to think about anything else.
It wasn't the kind of look he would expect on a kid who just wanted to grab ass for good luck. That'd be more mischievous, maybe scared, depending on the kid. Not so serious. Not that intense.
Then there was the fact that nobody else had been targeted. There were plenty of drivers in their fleet, all of whose asses were exactly as grabbable as his. He didn't think it was a matter of anyone holding back from embarrassment—if there was anything drivers loved, it was telling stories about backbreaking deliveries to unreasonable people who lived in nightmare houses full of bitey pets. An ass-snatching boy wonder would be the talk of the shop for weeks, a story to pass on through the generations, like The House of 200 Cats.
Wasn't it him he was after?
Could he tell? That was what it always came back to. He had been horrifically self-conscious about it as a teen, hearing people talk about obvious tells that didn't seem so obvious. It was easy to avoid being overly obsessed with fitness or talking like an okama, but what were you supposed to do when you overheard an old woman, ruminating on a favourite actor, serenely say, "Oh, he's a faggot, you can tell by the lips."
Sometimes you could look at a guy and know he was safe. Sometimes it took him way too long to figure it out (how he and Ikuya had spent so much time together without realizing was almost embarrassing, but they had been young and dumb), though time and experience had made him more confident in his judgment. Even when he wasn't sure about a guy, there was that certain inscrutable thing that drew him in.
It was funny sometimes, how even when you thought you were alone, once you started looking, they were all around you. How many times had he chatted up a guy and heard that he thought he'd been the only one in his village before he ran into an old classmate while cruising?
The old man you always liked but could never explain why. The boy you had been best friends with before he transferred to another elementary school. The coworker who was the only thing that made your shitty job bearable. They found each other, like magnets.
Was that what Nanase saw in him? A thing he didn't understand, but wanted anyway?
He couldn't stand to think about it anymore. What he needed was someone grown and sexually available to occupy his time.
He considered calling someone over, but lately his neighbour had been posting sticky notes to his door calling him an honorary Korean and though he thought the guy would somehow be less disgusted with him having sex with men than with him enjoying foreign food (so long as the guy was Japanese), he did not relish the idea of spending any more time in his flat than necessary. It'd been a while since he'd been to the bar anyway.
Had he wanted to get sloppy, he'd've gone to G-23. It was the Bar of Bad Decisions, the place where you went when there was no cure for your ails but to seek oblivion without death, where the DJ's custom breakcore mix would give you a heart attack just listening to it, where the drinks were awful and overpriced but would get you halfway to the morgue if that's what you wanted, the place whose dance floor was the perpetual stage of the worst breakups known to man, whose hallowed frame served as a chapel in which you could raise your voice in chorus with thirty other men to mangle Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" beyond human recognition. People said dancing was fun there, but it wasn't so much dancing as it was skating on vomit.
But he wanted a more loving sort of attention and to not wake up in a toilet cubicle with the taste of unknown dick in his mouth, so it was, as usual, Black Dog.
The bell on the door jingled as Tsubasa let him in. "And where've you been?"
"Things have been awful at work these past couple months," Rin said.
"That's all the more reason for you to've been here. You come alone?"
"Always do."
Tsubasa leaned out into the night, peering down the hill, again checking the handful of cars parked at a plausible distance. The trees and tall grasses were still, but the insects raged, filling the air with a dull, droning screech. Beyond the bar's meagre light, it was as black as the inside of a hole. It had never been a particularly active part of town, but in the past couple decades, it had fallen into increasingly greater disrepair as folks got old and kids moved away, so only a few elderly residents and the tiny corner store that served them remained.
"Delinquents been coming back?" They mostly squatted in abandoned houses with their friends, chainsmoking and talking about how life was shit, but occasionally snooped up to try and cause problems.
Tsubasa closed the door snug and tight. "There was an incident at G-23."
"Oh. Somebody get jumped again?"
"Blackmail."
Hard to say whether that was better or worse. "You drinking tonight?"
"Haven't decided."
"You can have a few on me."
"Maybe I will. Just don't come crying to me when you come in here next time and your bottle's all drunk up."
"How's things with that guy from Miyazaki?"
"Tried to schedule a meetup with him but he chickened out. Won't return my calls. I reckon we're done for."
"Ahh, that blows."
"It is what it is. You still looking?"
"I don't even know anymore. Everything's been so..."
"You got a computer at home? I know some sites that can get you started."
"Is that really any better than taking out a personal ad? Get a hundred guys calling you up, none of them wanting the same thing you want?" It'd been almost a year and he was still working through the pile of letters his last foray had inflicted on him.
"Think of it like catching fish. With a fishing pole, you gotta sit around waiting to catch one thing you might not want, but with a net you can catch a lot quick and then spend the time you would've spent waiting on sorting through them."
"That's depressing."
"You and your precious little heart." Tsubasa tousled Rin's immaculately pre-tousled hair. "Well, there's some guys from G-23 in here tonight. Maybe you'll get lucky."
"If you wanted me to get lucky, you wouldn't mess my hair up." Rin laughed, unclamping the hand from his head.
Tsubasa straightened up a few of his flyaways and gave him a pat on the shoulder. "If it doesn't work out, come home with me and I'll show you those sites."
"Thanks for always looking after me."
Tsubasa waved him off. "What else would I do?"
The mass of bodies filled the bar with warmth. The scent of cigarettes threaded amongst alcohol and cologne. Glassware glittered under the romantic lighting, casting starpoints on the posters that cluttered the walls. Akizuki and Hishikawa were joshing around with Akira, insisting he sing something other than Utada Hikaru for once. Shirae, Mei-Z, and Karin fluttered their hands and screeched with laughter while Yuki and Mori argued about the best way to treat hemorrhoids at home and Kibune flexed for Ibaraki. There wasn't much sitting room and there wasn't much standing room, but somehow everyone always managed to fit.
He scanned the crowd for the G-23 refugees. Part of him expected to see that kid drifting through the shadows, even though he would get bounced on sight so as to not draw undue attention from the cops. Used to be the bar didn't mind letting in high schoolers so long as they acted right and didn't drink, but they had been harassed by the police too many times for that anymore.
Rin was one of the last of Mama's kids, had been there the night the police finally barged their way in. He sprained his ankle jumping out the bathroom window, hid in a bush getting eaten by mosquitos for an hour, caught a ride home on Tsubasa's motorcycle, then got punched in the head and cussed out by his coach the next day for not taking care of himself before a big game. He came back the week after, but got stopped at the door. Come back in two years, Mama said, so he did. He'd had Tsubasa and some slightly dubious flings to keep him company in the meantime, but none of it felt as good as opening that door again and everybody acting like he'd only been gone a few minutes.
Maybe this was what guys like them needed to turn out halfway right. Not a bar necessarily, but to know that someone else was out there and that there was a place to meet them. What else was there? Staying cooped up with these strange feelings with nothing to do but let them go rancid. Teammates shoving gravure magazines in your face every day, asking which girl's titties you liked best. Having to tell adults over and over you were too focused on sports to enjoy the spring of youth. Drowning in love and family life wherever you go.
No wonder the kid was out chasing deliverymen.
Irritation twinged through Rin. He didn't know why he was thinking this. The kid wasn't a tragic villain. He didn't deserve sympathy. And he wasn't responsible for every fag west of Tokyo anyway.
"Oi, Rin-chan, about time you showed up!"
Greetings rang out all around and on the far end of the bar, a man leaned out to get a look—Shiina.
"Matsuoka!?"
Rin felt like Bigfoot walking into a photography convention. As a small consolation, Shiina reacted about the same, blushing like crazy, fidgeting on his stool.
"You boys know each other?" Mama asked.
Rin tried to play it cool, blithely muttering, "Ah, from work..."
"How are you always in here complaining you can't find a man when you're working with a hunk like this? You're hopeless!" Mama pulled his bottle from the shelf and fixed him his whisky and soda. "Honestly. Go show him the magazine room. And take that with you."
With drinks and the usual admonishment to not make a mess in hand, they took the narrow staircase to the second floor. It was quieter, if only a little, though the music and chatter strained up through the floorboards. Light filtered through a custom checkerboard fixture, each panel a different colour, painting soft, prismatic landscapes across their faces. Three out of four walls were taken up by bookcases whose shelves were stuffed with issues of gay magazines dating back to the 70s, erokomi, porno novels, advice books, memoirs, and the occasional academic text. Most of it was Japanese, but there was some English stuff too, though none of it was meaningfully organized. Death in Venice was buddied up to Yes Yes Yes, a book on gay liberation was right beside a half-dozen issues of Barazoku. Rin couldn't imagine it any other way.
"This is Mama's collection. She'll let you borrow them, if you want. Most folks just read em here though."
Shiina looked over them politely at first, then squinted at something, pulled it out, and started skimming, pleasantly baffled that these things existed, the way Rin had been back then. "Huh. You ever read any of them?"
It was hard to not laugh. Back in the day, he'd rush straight over and hole up here whenever he got the chance, reading any and everything until Mama told him he was too pretty for glasses and that he should go home before his eyeballs fell out. He bounced helter-skelter from shelf to shelf, Crystal Boys one day, a sex guide the next, laughing and crying and discreetly jacking off (sometimes alone, sometimes with Tsubasa), and every time left with his heart full to bursting.
"Yeah, I've read a few."
"So," Shiina said, and failed to follow up.
"So."
The dehumidifier whirred in the corner. It was gonna be like that, huh. Rin took a gulp of his drink, threw down a couple cushions, and sat at the table.
"Have you been to a place like this before?"
"I've been to G-23 a few times, but I wasn't feeling it tonight. It's such a far ride and things over there are kinda... Akizuki, I guess you'd know him, he said he'd introduce a few of us over here if we wanted, so I took him up on it. It's... different."
"The women?"
"And the okama. You see those guys on TV, but you wave it off cause it's just a performance, right? You never think you'll meet one for real. And with the girls, it's kinda stressful, cause you gotta act right, but on the other hand, I never really thought about there being girls like us. Guess it makes sense they'd want somewhere to go too."
G-23 was men only, no exceptions, and Rin heard up in Tokyo the bars got real granular as far as tastes went, that you could get kicked out for not being fat or skinny or hairy enough for any given spot and that guys wouldn't even talk to you if you weren't their exact type, which sounded unbelievably stressful for no real reason. People always said the city was better for them and he supposed it made it easier for hook-ups, but it was such a mercenary way of going about human interaction that it sat poorly with him. There was something nice about everyone mixing together like this, rubbing elbows with folks he'd otherwise never spend time with. Maybe he was more of a hick at heart than he thought.
"Glad to see you getting out," Asahi said. "You've seemed real stressed lately."
"Yeah, I guess." For a moment, Rin thought of talking about it. He couldn't. It was too pathetic.
After that, the awkwardness dissipated, and they were back to their usual chatting about this and that. They agreed that knowing this much about each other put them on an automatic first name basis and Rin had to refrain from tasting his name too much—Asahi, Asahi, Asahi. The topic drifted to sports and it turned out that while he had pursued pole vaulting in his youth, Asahi was a baseball fan at heart and Rin, having played from elementary all the way up to graduation, found himself giving him the inside scoop.
"Did you shave your head and all that?"
Rin groaned, burying his head in his fists. "...Yeah. I looked so bad. I almost wanted to quit over it. But Coach kept telling us, how can you be serious about baseball if you can't even throw away something as worthless as hair? Everyone else having to do it too made it a little easier, but still..."
Asahi laughed. "I bet you were cute."
"I really wasn't."
"Show me a picture and I'll be the judge."
"I might have some at home somewhere. I don't know." Rin stretched his arms out, wondering if he should go back down for a refill. It'd be a chance to let Asahi go and mingle without the implication that he was bored of his company. He didn't want to thieve up all his time if this turned out to be his only visit to the Dog. "Think I might head for another drink. If you wanna come down and chat with some of the other guys, maybe find someone to go home with...?"
Asahi's face puckered with consternation. "Trying to get rid of me already?"
"I didn't mean it like that."
"Besides." Asahi rattled the ice in his glass. "I already found the guy I wanna go with."
Rin awaited the name, wondering what he went for. Bears? Twinks? Onee-sans? Asahi slid his hand across the table, washing over Rin's like a wave, and leaned in til their temples touched. With each breath, Rin's hair fluttered against their cheeks like static.
"Can I come see those pictures of you?"
"See, you were cute."
Asahi pointed to a second year photo of Rin dressed as Curry King, mascot of the team's annual sports festival booth, whose job it was to saunter around telling 'peasants' their palates were too unrefined to comprehend the flavours of his royal curry, but they could try if they dared. The premise was unbelievably embarrassing, but once he got the turban on, he jumped straight into character and performed so well that he got called back for a third year encore.
But the warm curry feelings were blunted considerably by the Polaroid opposite it of him in the classroom, glancing over his shoulder, hard jawline and fuzzy head combining to look like a fucked up, bloody q-tip.
"No, I wasn't. You don't have to flatter me."
"If we had gone to the same school, I totally would've had a crush on you."
Would he, though? He knew guys. Puppy love would not have survived the time he forgot his ballcap during the hottest game of the season and turned his scalp into a crusty, peeling tomato for a week.
Rin didn't know how this had happened. You pass out after frotting like a couple of animals and wake up to a guy asking to see your high school album—who did that? He'd tried to distract him with a blowjob, but that dick was scarcely out his mouth before Asahi was asking again.
Each page flip cut a sliver in his soul. The album shouldn't even be here. He'd tried to leave it at home, but his sister had, in her usual meddling way, stuck it in one of his boxes while he packed up and he'd felt too guilty to throw it away since. It was a joint effort between her and Ma, scraping together family photos with those acquired secretly from teammates and the photography club. When they presented it to him at his post-graduation dinner party, he'd gotten choked up, not because he was moved, but because he knew what it meant—that this, the supposedly best phase of life, was over and he would be obliged to pine for an age he had never loved.
"Is it really that interesting?" he asked.
Asahi looked at him like he was ridiculous. "I love this kind of thing. Seeing the past all put together, the memories that people cherish... It's amazing. Honestly, I'm relieved you have something like this. You're so quiet at work. We've been working together, what, three years, and you're still a stranger to everyone."
"I talk to you, don't I?"
"Not about yourself. You always change the subject. I was worried. I thought maybe you had a tragic childhood or something."
Rin almost laughed. "There wasn't anything like that, it's... High school just wasn't really a good time for me."
"Oh." Asahi looked down at a photo of him playing with a dog at the beach. "You get bullied?"
"No, I..." How did you explain this kind of thing to someone so well-adjusted? "Things never felt right. Nothing fit. There was something missing."
Baseball was a mistake. It had been from day one, but what else was there? Kendo? Tennis? Everything felt wrong, so he might as well stick with the thing he'd invested the most in. He remembered Ma hustling from work to home to fix dinner and then to her neighbourhood association meeting, leaving behind a slush of papers in the living room that he, then twelve, sifted through and for the first time saw exactly how much it cost to keep them all alive. Utility bills, mortgage payments, an endless confetti of receipts for clothes and groceries, and among that, blunt printed statements of how much baseball really cost. He had been thinking of quitting and trying something else, but how could he start over when a single glove cost close to forty thousand yen?
Before baseball had been swimming, but after his father went down with his ship, that became an uneasy fit. He loved it because his father loved it, loved the things about it that his father loved, and without that spark, there was nothing to sustain his passion. Nobody cared about the relay besides him. There weren't any really great swimmers to measure himself up against. Other kids got angry at him because he was too competitive, took things too serious. And one day, his well-meaning coach saw him looking at the wall of relays past, transfixed by the odd, ethereal glow of old colour photos, and knelt down and said, You'll be up there soon. You're a good swimmer, just like your dad, and he cried so hard that he threw up.
If Dad was such a good swimmer, then why didn't he survive? If swimming was about building your perfect team, why was he always so lonely in the water?
He never went back to the swim club. He got invited to play baseball one day because they were short on players and decided that was good enough. And that was all he had been ever since. Good enough.
Asahi placed a hand on his thigh. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you upset."
Rin snapped back to the present. "It's fine. I'm fine."
He tried to get himself together. He couldn't be this pathetic in front of a coworker. Asahi closed the album, snaked his arms around Rin, and rolled them back into the futon.
"You were happy sometimes, right? You can hold on to those memories and forget the rest."
Was that it? Simply clean the sludge out of your brain every 8000 kilometres to guarantee a good, emotionally balanced life? It must work for somebody. Not him. Hard to forget the way you felt if you never stopped feeling it.
"Yeah, I guess," Rin muttered into his shoulder. Nobody died. He didn't get molested. It was nothing to be upset about, no matter how much of a sadsack he was, and even if it was, it was his fault anyway. Nobody held a gun to his head and told him to play ball. "Being an adult is better anyway."
Asahi hummed. "I live with my family, so it hasn't been really any different. My mom still fusses about me eating properly and not staying out too late. It's convenient and I like spending time with them, but it'd be nice to have my own place. Especially for things like this."
"You could get one of those nasty no-kitchen, no-toilet apartments for cheap. Bring guys in and tell em, 'Welcome to my love nest.'"
"I don't hook up enough for that to be worth it. Are there any love hotels around here that let in two guys? I tried going to one once and they wouldn't let us in."
"Not that I know of."
"Guess I'm stuck jacking off in the park." Asahi sighed and, to distract himself from his disappointment, decided to pay back the morning service.
Given the mood, Rin hadn't thought he could get into it, but the hard weight of another man, the way Asahi kissed him thoroughly, insistently, like he could fill up everything hollow in him given enough time, got him molten and panting. His hard-on jumped as Asahi's hands shaped to his ribcage and those lips moved down to his sternum, slid through hard, abdominal curves. He felt a hot, traitorous pulse in his ass and wished it would shut up. He hated bottoming when he was in a bad mood, he didn't know why, just the feeling of being already miserable and then having some idiot's dick up you and him expecting to be treated like god for giving you his blessing. No. Times like that, he needed to top.
But he couldn't bother getting mad over nothing, cause Asahi was stroking his cock and kissing the backs of his thighs and next thing Rin knew he was cumming on his stomach.
He had scarcely caught his breath before Asahi was atop him again, kissing him drunk, and once Rin knew every single cell of his tongue, Asahi looked at him dead on and said, "I want you to rely on me more."
At work? In life? In bed? Who knew. His stupid ass couldn't do anything but agree. Asahi laid on him a few seconds longer, like he had to, like he was expecting him to take it back, run out the apartment butt naked and never turn up to work again, but Rin stayed and he was satisfied.
Being the nice guy he was, Asahi went and cleaned things up, bustling around the apartment like he belonged there, and came back to the futon and waited. Any other guy would've been out the door by now (with a vague platitude about seeing him again 'soon' if they were nice), but Asahi had yet to even hint at leaving and though it was a little awkward, Rin didn't particularly want him to either.
"Do you have plans for today?" Asahi rubbed his neck, chuckling. "Is that too forward of me to ask?"
He wanted more? Why? In any case, if he wanted to give him the boot, now was the time. He had other, more important things to be doing—namely, staring at his thesis and rearranging trivial details until it turned into a meaningless blur.
But didn't he do that enough?
"There's a little revision I need to do, but other than that, nothing important. Want a shower?"
"After breakfast."
"Do you like French-style omelettes?"
"Never had one."
"Well, it's high time you did."
"Anything I can do?"
"Keep me company," Rin said and stuffed the album into his shelf so hard it'd take a crowbar to get it back out.
Omelettes, toast, a light fruit salad, some miso soup. Was this overkill? He didn't know. Asahi chattered at him as he worked, designating himself the dishwasher as need arose. Soon there was nothing left to prep but the omelettes. Rin scrounged together odds and ends from his fridge. Ham. Onions. Plenty of greens. Asahi found the radio and scrolled through news and tacky talk shows to a station blaring butt rock that Rin diced along to.
Imagine if every day could be like this.
The thought ambushed him so abruptly he didn't know what to do with it. Imagine if he could live a life full of small, ordinary happinesses with a guy who wouldn't evaporate with the dawn. One who would rub his back when he was sick and tell him he was cute even when he wasn't.
Asahi leaned across the table, drumming to the beat.
"That's why I like green onions better. They don't make you cry."
After a brief detour back to Asahi's apartment so he could change, they took a trip to the planetarium, got lunch at a nearby ramen shop, played with a stray dog at the park, then stopped by the arcade to match mettles. It was a simple day of hanging out, the kind he'd scarcely had since high school. His face ached from smiling; his stomach from laughter. It shouldn't feel any different.
And yet he was so overwhelmed that he couldn't even tell what he was feeling anymore. Over and over he asked himself: Am I in love with this guy? He thought he'd know what it was like by now. The slow, poisonous pain of adolescent longing. The flutter of excitement so quickly snuffed when a promising new guy made it clear he was only after a fuckbuddy. A cherry that flowered for an ephemeral moment before being stripped to its bare, ugly bark. Wasn't that it? Or was this how it was supposed to be all along?
The claws of the crane machine clinked shut empty. Asahi groaned, smacking his palm against the control panel. "Ugh. I can't spend any more on this. Let's go."
Asahi needed to pick up groceries before he headed home and though Rin ought to've given him directions to the nearest shop and leave it at that, he ended up coming along with. They wound through the store debating the merits of different instant noodle brands, reminiscing on junk they ate as kids that tasted awful as adults, trading commercial jingles and marketing slogans that had been baked into their brains.
Rin almost wanted him to buy a 10 kilo sack of rice to have an excuse to give him a hand toting it home, where he'd get invited to stay for dinner, after which he had to have a bath, of course, then they'd fool around a bit, and then it'd be too late for him to catch the train home (a taxi was out of the question, on account of him trying to be economical), so they'd spend another night wrapped up in each other, and in the morning he'd borrow some clothes to go to school, which he'd have to bring back after work, and then it'd be time for dinner again, and things would go on like that forever, their lives knotting into one another without either of them really thinking about it.
"Did you hear about Belgium?" Asahi asked, keeping his voice low. "That they legalized same-sex marriage a few weeks ago?"
"Yeah, I heard. Holland legalized it not too long ago too." Rin fought down a smile at Asahi's blatant disappointment that he wasn't the first to tell him. "Wanna get married?"
"What, right now!?"
"No!" Rin playfully cuffed him. "I mean in the future."
"Jeez, I thought you were about to propose to me!"
"If I did, would you say no?"
"I'd really need to know a guy before I could agree to anything like that."
"So at least three dates, got it."
"More than that!"
"Nah, three dates for us is the same as three years' worth of regular dates. It's like dog years."
"There's guys I've been hooking up with for more than three years and I wouldn't marry any of them."
"That's why I said dates. How many guys have you been on at least three dates with?"
"...None."
"Exactly."
"What about you?"
"Two, but both times we realized it wasn't going to work."
To be more specific, Tsubasa was a total top (and loved motorcycles more than he could ever love a man) and Ikuya was a total bottom (and had personality problems). Rin could never make himself commit to either role. He flitted from one man to another to get what he needed, but what he wanted was someone who could go with his moods so he didn't have to bust out the Rolodex every time he wanted something different.
"Who?" Asahi asked, as if he'd have any idea who they were—well, maybe he would. This wasn't Tokyo.
"Tsubasa, the bouncer at Black Dog, and Ikuya, who's been my best friend since we were kids."
"The bouncer..." Asahi screwed up his face, trying to remember. "You like tall guys, huh."
"I like passionate, fit guys. And for the record, Ikuya's shorter than me."
"If you did find a guy things worked out with, would you do it?"
"I don't think it'd get legalized here."
"Those guys up in Tokyo talk about that kind of thing though, right?"
"People talk about a lot of things, doesn't mean they'll happen," Rin said. "To be honest, sometimes I can't help but wonder, 'is it okay to focus on things like that when we have so many other problems?' Does getting married matter if my landlord kicks me out for it?"
"Maybe it makes us look more normal? I mean, I'm a normal guy. You are too. They just have a hard time seeing it because their ideas are getting in the way."
"If they can't already see everything about us that's normal, then how's marriage supposed to fix it?"
"Some people can't understand things unless it's shown to them in a way they expect. They can't imagine two guys being in a serious relationship unless it's official. It's not fair, but what is?" Asahi shrugged. "Besides, there's benefits only married couples are allowed to get, right? Hospital visitation rights. Government stipends and tax deductions. My sister gets stuff from the government for her kid. So it's not like it's for nothing."
"Stuff for households and kids don't mean anything if they won't let us have households or kids."
"Yeah, but it's something, right?" Asahi spoke with a sharpness Rin had never heard out of him. "And maybe some guys just want it."
"Yeah, I guess." No point in pressing it further. Silence lurked between them before Rin hesitantly said, "I've thought about going overseas after I graduate to see how things are elsewhere. It's not that I want to leave. It's just..."
"What kind of life are you going to have if you stay?"
"Yeah."
It was a desire he'd never voiced before. He couldn't help feeling guilty, like he was calling in a lifeboat and leaving everyone else to drown. He was strong, right? Hadn't he spent his teen years talking about how he'd forge his own path? So why didn't he speak up? Why didn't he make the change he wanted to see? If these things really mattered, why did he expect everyone else to put their necks on the line and not his own?
Why should a coward get a happy ending when no one else would?
How many times had he told himself he was going to do something, only to back out at the last second? I need to get somewhere safer. Somewhere friendlier. I'll do it once I graduate high school became I'll do it once I graduate university would become I'll do it once my career is stable and on it would go, perpetually awaiting a moment he knew would never come.
Even if he moved to the city, it wasn't really like things were that much different there. Other Black Dog patrons had told him as much. You could still lose your job. You could still get kicked out of your home. People still pestered you about relationships. Even the most enlightened city-slickers couldn't, wouldn't understand. Why couldn't they simply hide it? Why not play along with how things were expected to be and dally around in your free time? Why make a nuisance of yourself to everyone else? Think of the middle-aged men who were idol otaku, the cashiers who cultivated rare strains of wheat at home, the university students who doubled as jazz musicians at night, each happy in their own partitioned little worlds. Why let one insignificant aspect of your inner life dictate the whole?
And he wished that it could be insignificant. No more special than discovering your coworker does writing as a hobby. But no one else would let it be. He could strain as much as he liked against the mire of obligation, but it would drown him long before it ever let go.
If he left, it would have to be for good.
"Ugh," Asahi sighed. "I can't compete with guys who have that much determination. It's too cool."
"It's not determination so much as it is desperation."
"It's more thought than I've put into my future. My parents have been getting on my case about it lately. 'Your job is good enough to support a family, so if you're not going to go to school, then you might as well get married.' They're not wrong, but it still feels too soon. But graduation felt too soon too. Ready or not, you're always growing up before you know it." He chuckled wistfully. "I never wanted much in life anyway. Steady job. Good health. A family. That's really all you can hope for, isn't it?"
"You never felt like there might be something else?"
"Like what?" Spoken as if he had never once considered anything but minor variations of the preordained route.
"I don't know. You have to find it."
"There's that determination of yours again." Asahi smiled sheepishly. "I mean, if I could have all that with a guy... But you're probably right. It won't happen here."
As they rounded the corner to the refrigerated section, in the corner of his eye, Rin saw him. The kid. Skulking behind a shelf, fixed on him with that hard stare. Rin's blood ran cold. Had he followed him here? Had he been following him this whole time? Or was it coincidence? Yutouhama and Iwatobi weren't that far apart, he could be visiting a friend, or—no. This fuckin kid didn't have friends. You'd have to be some kind of masochist to try and hang out with him. The only other time he'd seen him crawl out of Iwatobi was to stake out the office.
Did he know where he lived?
Ignoring him wasn't going to cut it here, but he didn't want to start a whole incident and be forced to explain everything to Asahi. Wasn't him being with another guy enough to make him buzz off? Maybe he thought they were only friends. That'd be the normal assumption, anyway. Well, he'd have to make it clear.
While Asahi pondered what tofu to buy, Rin leaned close, laying his head on his shoulder. Asahi about jumped outta his skin.
"What, you tired?" His voice was high, shaky.
"Hmm?"
"It's just, we're in public, y'know?"
"Yeah, I know. I was thinking it was a shame you have to go."
"Well," Asahi squeaked, then cleared his throat and straightened up, forcing himself into a chesty, roosterish bluster. "Wouldn't if I didn't have to. I'll see you at work, won't I? Even if it's only a little bit. You won't have to wait long."
While Rin had never been impressed with anyone trying to butch it up (himself included), the fact that Asahi's whole face had turned firetruck red made it sweet instead of exasperating. He laughed into his shoulder, watching him go redder still.
"What's so funny, huh?" Asahi grumbled. "Can't take a guy seriously? I see how it is."
He glanced around and, seeing no one, slung an arm around Rin in a warm, tight hug. Among the sweat and fading hue of soap, was a muted citrusy cologne. Rin nuzzled into him and sighed, wishing this could be untainted by that kid's presence, that he could look back someday and feel nothing but this warmth, this glow.
Reluctantly they separated and Asahi went back to tofu-pondering and Rin glanced over his shoulder quick enough to see despair well up in the kid's face before he abruptly turned, stumbled into a product display, and disappeared.
Part of him felt bad for some reason, but he shoved it in a box and shut it up. This was necessary. Some guys just wouldn't get it unless somebody else was there to make it make sense for them.
Asahi picked up his last few groceries and each time he looked at Rin, he started laughing nervously and kept it up to and through the checkout.
While the cashier rang up a pile of discount tofu pockets, Rin heard a bubbly voice burst out, "Haru-chan, do you know that guy? You're staring at him really hard. Should we say hi?"
If there was a response, he didn't hear it.
The doors swooshed open. They stepped out into the sunset. Asahi's nerves had still yet to work out of his system and he kept on giggling like a kid who'd put a whoopee cushion on the teacher's chair until, frustrated, he jammed a hand to his blushing face, took a deep breath, and finally stopped.
"Sorry, I'm being really uncool. I've never done anything like that somewhere so public."
"It's fine." Rin wanted to drag him into an alley and kiss the little stripes of sunburn on his nose and ears, but he'd already pushed his luck more than enough today. "If anyone was uncool today, it was me. But I'm glad we got to spend some time together."
"He's leaving, Haru-chan! Don't you want to talk to him?"
Asahi flipped over his receipt, scribbled his number on it, and handed it to Rin. "Can we do this again next week?"
Rin could feel those cold blue eyes burning a hole through his back. "Yeah. I'd like that."
The doors slid neatly shut.
At work, they kept it professional. They joked around like they hadn't seen each others cocks and carried on their usual bellyaches about the weather, the manager, and deliveryman-seeking dogs, dreaming of a future in which TVs did not weigh as much as a bag of bowling balls. They both had other things going on and neither wanted to come across as clingy, so they decided it best to only meet up on their days off.
Rin kept on tweaking his thesis. Kirishima kept on harassing him about going to the office drinking parties and now interpreted his absence as sign of having an active love life, which he took interest in. Rin's reluctance to talk about it prompted jovial, barbed queries of, "C'mon, you're not like my brother, right?" and there was nothing to do but brush him off and go to the batting cage to crank out hits until he burned and ached.
How're you gonna try and implicate me when you were the one begging me to jack you off in the hospital, huh?
That pitiful puppy face, made more devastating by the various casts and wrappings holding together the bones carefully reassembled from the Lego fiesta the jump had made them into.
It's so boring in here. Everything hurts. I just wanna feel good for a few minutes. Not like I can ask the nurse. Nobody else comes and sees me.
And Rin, as stupid at seventeen as he had been at seven, entered into the obligatory dance of mutual affirmation that they were not Like That and that it wouldn't mean anything and agreed.
He remembered it sometimes, the room's clean, hollow smell, the crinkling of the hospital gown as his hand slid under, Natsuya mashing a cheek into his chest and gasping so hard as he came that Rin got scared he'd mess his ribs up again. He remembered him clinging to his shirt so he had to hunch there, hand full of cum, as Natsuya kept crying, asking, Why am I a fuckup? as if by simply holding his cock, Rin understood his life better than him.
By the time Rin came back with drinks, Kirishima was back in the Eternal Now and he knew this would never happen again, that it would never be acknowledged, and left feeling like he had done what needed to be done.
The last ball streaked out and Rin about knocked the cover off it.
Go find another bridge and don't fuck it up this time, idiot.
This gig was looking terminal. He'd been hoping to hold onto it until graduation, but if it was time to go, it was time to go. Getting hired on at a new place would be a huge pain, though. And his thesis advisor had repeatedly stressed avoiding any major life changes if he could help it. And there were the finances...
Maybe it wouldn't be bad to get restationed in the warehouse, where he didn't have to do anything but shunt boxes and listen to the other packers gab about sports and girlfriends and the motorcycle they were definitely going to buy for real this time. The pay would be worse and it would suck to have his commercial licence go to waste, but it was better than restarting at the bottom of the payscale of a different company and the warehouse crew had their own manager, so he could get some heat off his back a while.
He tried talking to Ikuya about it, but all he said was that he should tell his brother to get fucked, which wasn't a solution and wasn't worth the price of an international call, but made him feel better anyway. Tsubasa offered to hook him up with a job at the motorcycle repair shop. But the best course of action came after a couple beers convinced him that this was important enough that he could call Asahi without looking like a needy baby.
They hashed out a plan for Rin to hire a fake girlfriend to come meet him at the office a few times, then for him to attend a drinking party, cry about getting dumped, and resume business as usual. Rin didn't like the idea of employing a tactic he'd expect from a cheap drama, but he didn't see what other option he had.
"Honestly, the best thing would be to come a few times per week to make things easier on yourself. He only gives you a hard time because you look arrogant. Like you're too good for us."
"I don't like getting drunk around straight guys. Especially not Kirishima. I get scared I'll do something by accident."
"Everybody's acting embarrassingly, Kirishima included. That's the point. We're drunk, who cares?"
"I don't want the suspicion to even be a possibility. He doesn't like guys like us."
"A lot of guys are like that, but that doesn't mean they're going to act on it."
What utopian high school did he go to to think like that? "You don't get it."
"Tell me how I don't. Don't you think we're all scared? That shit used to have me paralyzed in middle school. But you gotta deal with that fear. You can't be jumping at shadows your whole life. You gotta hype yourself up. You gotta tell yourself, 'Nothing's gonna happen,' even if you don't believe it. These guys, they're not scary guys. They just want to get to know you. And I'll be there, right beside you. I won't let anything happen to you. Okay?"
He could've said yeah, okay, and left it there. He almost did. "If you really wanna know how Kirishima feels about us, ask him about his brother."
"What brother? He told me he was an only child."
In the grand scale of delivery days, today was one of the better ones. Nothing overly heavy. No arduous traversals. He'd been bitten by a cavapoo that was 'just curious', but it hadn't broken skin so the damage was purely to morale. The loincloth rumour was uttering its death rattle, so the fleet remained unmolested aside from somebody breaking the mirrors on Asahi's truck the other day. None of the buildings nearby had cameras and nobody had seen anything, so the company shrugged and replaced them. More importantly, Rin still had yet to see the kid outside of the chance encounter at the grocery, so it seemed all he'd needed was the cops and a man to put the fear of god in him.
Just a few more deliveries and he would have two whole days with Asahi.
After a night of marinating in frustration following the fake-dating call, Rin decided to forgive Asahi's incessant optimism. It was like being angry at a puppy for tripping you because it adored you so much that it wouldn't get out from under your feet. Maybe this was what he needed. Someone to prove that he didn't have to be beholden to his brain damage, that he was capable of being close to a guy who was approximately normal. So Rin invited him to dinner and more or less went I'm sorry, I'm sad, get me a prescription for some rose-tinted glasses so I can see the world the way you do and they scheduled a trip to go camping on the beach. There'd be beer and barbeque and swimming. His bag had been packed since yesterday. He'd bought film for his camera. Condoms. Tonight, they'd prep food so they could load up the cooler first thing tomorrow.
For the first time in a long time, Rin was excited. Each day checked off his calendar amped him up more and more until he could scarcely think about it without grinning from ear to ear.
Just a few more to go.
Next package! Looked like an aircon. The label said: Nanase Seiji.
He tried to not put too much stock in it. Could be a cousin. A grandfather. Someone completely unrelated. He didn't know many Nanases, but that didn't mean it was some super rare surname. (He didn't know any Nanases aside from that one, but still.)
If it was him?
If it was him...
He would figure out what to do when he got there.
The residence was up on top a hill and there was no way to easily get up close on account of there being no road, so he went by foot, hiking up a street so narrow two grown folk couldn't've gone through it side by side. The stairs that came next were the newest thing here, decked on either side by houses that would get tore down or abandoned within the next decade or two and capped with a small shrine that saw few worshippers. On his right, a house where a mother was hanging up laundry, then another with a blank nameplate, and on his left was his destination.
The yard was so overgrown that you could hardly tell it was fenced in. Beneath a dogwood that looked like it'd never been trimmed, holly ran riot and what once might've been grass was overtaken with mushrooms, ferns, and sansai so that it looked as though someone had scraped up a chunk of forest and replanted it here. The path to the door, sandwiched between velvety green waves of moss, was the only thing kept respectably clear.
Did someone really live here? Was Nanase Seiji some old man who couldn't keep house properly anymore?
He hit the buzzer. The door slid open.
Of course it was him.
Of course he had a dog.
"This is not how you set up a booty call."
Nanase Haruka slammed the door shut.
"Hey! You need to sign for this! I didn't walk up these stairs for nothing!"
Indistinct shuffling. Rin jammed his thumb on the buzzer and let it ride. Until this package was delivered, he wasn't moving from this spot. He'd camp out here for a week if that's what it took. He'd make fools of them both. See if he gave a fuck.
After a few more minutes, he tried the door and found it unlocked. Nanase was hunched on the genkan floor, head buried between his knees. He peered up over his arm. "You're supposed to leave a failed delivery slip. Stop bothering the neighbours."
"If you're gonna have the balls to have me deliver to you, then at least follow through." Though he'd really rather chuck the thing in and forge the signature, Rin mustered up all his professional restraint and deposited it inside the genkan with the care he would give any regular package. "Isn't this what you wanted? Here I am, live and in person, just like your little porno addict fantasy." He gripped himself through his slacks and jostled it. "'Express delivery for Nanase. Handle carefully.' Is that what you thought I'd say?"
"I didn't—!" Nanase started, before clenching his fists and exhaling sharply. He stood, tides of embarrassment and frustration shifting on his face. "My dad said something about a new air conditioner. The old one died a couple of days ago. It doesn't have anything to do with you." He added in a lower, sullen tone, "The world doesn't revolve around you."
"Just this once, I'm not going to consider this a violation of your agreement with the police." The kid bristled at the reminder. "Did you tell him you got detained for being a molester?"
"Can I sign for this? Do you need anything else?" As if he had the right to be indignant.
Rin shoved the clipboard into his hand and watched him sign. "Is it that fun, grabbing guys' asses?"
Nanase gave him a surly look, thrusting the board back at him.
Rin forced his way inside, slamming the door behind him. The board clattered to the ground as he grabbed the kid, hands marauding everywhere Nanase had touched him and beyond.
"How do you like it? Huh? You like having some guy you don't know grabbing on you?"
The kid blindly thumped his fists against Rin, but it was easy to tell he'd never been in a real fight. The dog was going berserk, fur pricked up, barking like crazy, but he'd never fought anything either.
Rin crushed Nanase to his chest and growled in his ear: "You like it?"
The kid reared back and headbutted him. Cursing, clutching his forehead, Rin let him go. The dog finally got the memo and launched forward, snagging his shirt. Its head whipped back and forth and the fabric stretched, tore.
"Makkou," Nanase said, voice shaking. "Makkou, stop."
The dog growled, then reluctantly let go. He and his master retreated to a safer distance, eyeing Rin warily.
"See," Rin said, swiping at his mouth, trembling from the adrenaline. "Don't like it, do you."
They stood there a moment, catching their breaths, deliberating what came next.
"Did you start that rumour at your school?"
"No."
"Who did?"
Nanase kept his eyes low, stroking the dog's bristling back. "I dunno. The truck story had been going around for a while and then it suddenly changed one day."
"Is anyone else going around molesting drivers?"
"I haven't heard of it."
Small blessings. "Then why?"
"I tried touching the truck and nothing changed. Then I touched you and it did."
He actually believed that crap? Rin didn't know if that made it better or worse.
Nanase was quiet for a while. "The other day... Who was that guy you were with?"
"Why do you need to know? Weren't you with someone too?"
"It was just Nagisa."
"You say that like I know who that is."
"Was that your boyfriend?"
"I'm not answering that."
Rin folded his arms and caught a glimpse of the time. No point in sticking around. The package was delivered, he'd got his vengeance and his answers, it was time to go on and git.
"Are you gay?" he asked. Did kids even know what that was, aside from something you're not supposed to be? "Do you like guys, I mean."
"I dunno."
"Do you like me?"
Nanase looked wounded by the accusation. He knelt, petting the dog like it demanded every ounce of his focus. "Not really..."
"But you're happy when you touch me."
"Yes."
"So you like me."
"No."
"Look, I know you don't get any education about this stuff, but if touching somebody makes you happy, you like em in some kinda way, even if it's another guy. If you got feelings for someone, be a man and be upfront about it. You could've written a love letter and not been in any of this mess."
Nanase buried his face in the dog's fur. "It's not that simple."
"It can be."
"You're an adult. You can do whatever you want."
"I am an adult, one you don't know, one you'll never see again unless you order a microwave. I don't give a shit about tattling on you to your parents or your school. The worst thing that'll happen is maybe I'll throw it in the trash."
"If I say anything, then things'll end up like they did for Isuzu!" Nanase slammed his fist on the mat. "She always used to touch people and everybody was fine with it and then she told a girl she liked her and... She can't go to school anymore. We can't swim together anymore. I only ever see her at meets now."
Nanase stared at him, eyes hot and shimmering, then curled around the dog, who licked his hands, his arms.
The air in the house was so thick and stagnant and swampy, you could ladle it up and serve it. Rin didn't know how the kid could stand it. Anyone sane would've gone somewhere else.
"Well, I won't be like that. To be clear, that doesn't mean I'll reciprocate your feelings. But I'll hear you out at least. I know what it's like too." Rin scuffed his toe against the floor. "I'm sorry about your friend."
Nanase stayed quiet.
"I'm sure she'd be glad to hear from you. If you can't see her, call her. If you can't call her, write. We have to look after each other. Nobody else is gonna do it."
Nanase hunched there a while longer, then slowly stood. "I'll get you something to drink."
Ceasefire accepted. "Something bottled that I could bring with me, if you have it. Ain't got time to be standing here drinking lemonade all the livelong day. And I hate to ask, but...?"
"The toilet's that way."
"Thanks."
Despite the state of the yard, the house's interior was remarkably clean and the fragrance of incense wound through the halls. Rin wondered how long he'd been living alone and what kind of parents could up and leave their kid behind. He wondered if Nanase had any say in it. If they came back for holidays. If they wrote. If they called. If he had anyone in his life who gave even half a fuck.
In the years since Dad's death, his absence had taken on a strangely comforting sense of finality. Rin accepted the knowledge that it wasn't his decision to be stripped from his life, that he would've stayed if there'd been a choice. What comfort could be found in this? At least they cared enough to send money? At least he wasn't homeless?
Not that it was any of his business.
He stepped into the bathroom and Nanase appeared behind him, drinkless, mute.
"When I said I'd accept your feelings, I didn't mean like this."
Nanase stared at his feet.
"What? You have my sympathy, even though you don't deserve it. What else could you want?" Rin gave him all the time in the world to work up his nerve and got zilch for it. He scoffed. "Get me a drink and leave it at that. I don't have time for guys who can't be honest about their feelings."
"Not good," Nanase muttered. "Not good with words."
"So what, you wanna give me a hug? That's very sweet of you, so hurry up and fuck off." Again he waited, but nothing came. "Can't even manage that, huh? Pathetic."
He'd been with too many curious guys who started off gung-ho, then got cold feet the instant another man laid hands on them. Call it throwing him into the deep end, but every man needed to take this step on his own.
Something gently touched his neck and then, irritated at himself, Nanase spun him around and gave him a clumsy kiss. It was hard and dry and drifted way off course, but there was something endearing about it.
"Annoying," Nanase grunted. "You'd be cuter if you didn't talk so much."
On second thought. "You sound like the mean old men who try and pick me up."
"I don't wanna hear about them."
"Then don't act like them." Regardless, Rin decided to humour him a little and gave him a proper kiss. He had to tell him to open his mouth because he was such a virgin he didn't have any sense of what he was supposed to do. The taste was a little sweet, a little tart, like pineapple. "There. Anyway, I really have to piss, so if you don't want me making a mess of your floor..."
He turned back around, expecting that to be that, but Nanase leaned over his shoulder, looking down expectantly.
"What, you wanna watch? That's your fetish?"
"Dunno."
"What do you know?" Rin sighed and fished himself out. Nanase's breath quickened as he pushed himself closer, trying to get a better view. Rin cradled his cock in his palm, a little smug as he showed it off. "You like it?"
Nanase let out a throaty grunt.
"Then you can do the honours." Rin guided Nanase's hand to his cock and closed his fingers around it, shivering at the hot, sticky grip. "You fuck up, that's on you. I'm not sticking around to mop up your floor."
The kid took aim and Rin let loose a torrential, roaring piss straight to the center of the bowl. It stuttered across the water as Nanase jammed his hips forward, humping Rin while seeming utterly unaware he was doing so. It was kinda cute, in a pathetic way. Had he been like this at his age? By his recall, he'd been shoving markers up his ass and sticking his dick in household objects under his teammates' dubious promises they felt like real pussy, but he quit that nonsense once he met Tsubasa and debuted in the scene, at which point his elders joined together and worked on building him from the ground up like a faggy little condominium. He was more or less confident in his performance by now, though still finding new embellishments, renovating aspects of his sex he had figured would be settled by now.
The piss tapered to a halt, but the kid refused to let go.
"Not enough for you?"
Nanase buried his face in Rin's shoulder, prick hard and insistent. Rin's watch read way past the time he should've been gone, but once you were already late, the specifics of exactly how late you were stopped mattering.
With a sigh of weary magnanimity, Rin pushed down his slacks. "Don't stick it in. I'll snap it off if you try."
Nanase scooped up a tiny bottle of lube laying on the floor. He really never had anyone over, huh.
The crack of the cap, the wet sound of Nanase slicking his cock up, the chill of the lube slithering down his crack... Despite going in with the intention of letting the kid fool around while he saved his best for Asahi, some primordial part of Rin's brain couldn't help but get a little in the mood.
Fumbling in his enthusiasm, cock flipping and flopping over the wide expanse of Rin's ass, Nanase eventually managed to slot it between the cheeks and began to move. He pawed at Rin, smearing lube all over his already ruined shirt. "Ah, aniki... Aniki..."
Rin craned his head back, cradling Nanase's face to his to give him a leisurely kiss, murmuring, "Good boy, good boy."
Aniki can be nice too, you little shit.
Nanase let out a gargled whine into his mouth, thrusts growing jerkier, more erratic. Was that it already? How disappointing, to have a guy hunt you so hard for so long and then turn out to be a quick shot when you decide to humor him—but Rin supposed you couldn't expect much from a teenager.
Then Nanase planted a hand in his back and bent him at the waist.
"Oi!"
But Nanase simply slid back into his crack and went on as he had before. Rin braced himself on the toilet tank, wishing he had more to do other than stare at the wall. He started running over his planned route for the remaining packages, but some incredibly irritating noise kept derailing him. Rin craned his head around and saw the dog hovering just outside, stip-stepping from foot to foot.
"Can you do something about that?"
Nanase looked more annoyed that he'd said something about it than at the fact there was a dog right behind him, crying and tapdancing, watching him fuck. "Makkou, go."
Things went on without any meaningful progress for a good solid five-ten minutes more before Rin got fed up. The room was miserably hot, his hips were starting to hurt, the tank was making his forearms sore, and he had perfected what remained of his delivery route and Nanase still showed no signs of slowing.
"Come on, I don't have all day!"
He shoved a hand into Nanase's underwear and yanked him forward, rocking back into him hard. The seams puckered and popped threads with each jerk, but that wasn't his problem. If they tore, they tore, and if he didn't want them to tear, then he should hurry the fuck up so he could go home already.
"C'mon, kiddo." Rin pulled his best whore face, made his voice liquid gold. "You know what to do. Just let it out. You've been waiting for this for so long. Don't let it stay pent up. Shoot that hot fuckin cum all over me."
"Don't call me kiddo."
"I'll call you what I want!" But if he was going to be like that about it, it might turn into an unnecessary delay. What was his name again? Ah, that was right. "Don't make me wait, Ha-ru-ka."
Nanase let out a strangled grunt and a hot streak of cum striped his crack, chased by another and another, pulsing down his hole, dripping into his underwear.
"That's it," Rin crooned as he arched back, letting his self-satsifaction show. "Good boy, Haruka."
Nanase shivered. "Don't call me Haruka either."
He offered no preferred alternative.
Rin felt relieved, thinking maybe he could finally go, but already Nanase was down on his knees, burrowing facefirst into his asscrack to lick it clean.
"I have to get back to work at some point, y'know."
The kid didn't care. He might as well've not said anything.
Getting away would be easier now that Nanase wasn't clinging on his back, but he was already in this hole, so why stop digging? At least now he was getting something out of it. When he'd mentioned being interested in rimming in the past, guys would either scrunch their noses up and pretend he hadn't said anything, tell him he was disgusting flat out, or give him a couple cursory licks before deciding that was enough and ramming their dicks in. Honestly, if the kid just wanted someone to eat out once in a while, he wouldn't hate that. Might be worth correcting his worst tendencies before he sprang from his chrysalis as a fully-fledged asshole and started terrorizing the scene.
Rin grabbed him by the back of the head and shoved his face deeper, relishing the way his nose knifed into his crack. "Eat it, bitch. Pay me back for all the suffering you caused."
Nanase was swimming in it, sucking up the grunge and grime, the gruelling mundanity, fervently tasting his every inch until Rin, even in this tiny, piss-stinking room, felt like a king. He hooked a leg back round him, adding pressure from his heel, and it was hard to tell if Nanase could even breathe at this point, but the kid took it in stride. His hole got rosy warm and twitching and Rin was starting to lose his head, feverishly muttering, eat me eat me oh fuck me, stick your filthy bastard tongue in me, fuck my hole with your tongue and, without a single question, Nanase carved an opening in his body.
There was no hope of saving anything for later now, Rin was so hard it hurt, blood threatening to tear him asunder as his prick jolted and strained for relief. Groaning low in his gut, he savoured Nanase's squirming and scraping a few moments longer, then let go and turned, cock cutting a majestic arc through the humidity to sway to a trembling halt in the boy's face. Asahi was going to have to settle for some cuddles.
"Go on, make yourself useful."
The kid, face smeared with sweat and lube and spit and cum, stared at the cock dumbstruck, like he didn't have one of his own.
"What, you'll eat ass, but my dick's not good enough for you?" Rin cockslapped him a few times, trying to get the point across, but it didn't help. "Open up."
"Why?"
"What do you mean 'why'? What kinda porn are you watching that you know all that other stuff, but don't get blowjobs?"
"I don't watch them. They're unpleasant."
"How would you know unless you did?"
"Some older kids made me in middle school. The girls looked unhappy. I didn't like it."
"There's ones with only guys. Maybe I'll show you sometime." There were a few old tapes laying around his flat that he could bear to part with.
"I don't want strangers. I want you."
Jeez, he'd had would-be boyfriends say that with less conviction. "Okay, fine, and I'll give you more of me if you open up."
Nanase squinted at him, distrusting, but let his mouth eke open. Rin pushed on his jaw until his lips parted enough to permit clearance and was about to stick it in when the kid suddenly asked, "Does that guy do this for you?"
Forget it, he was sticking it in his waistband and going home. But alas, his legs refused to move. "That is not your business. If you won't do it, then I'll go on ahead and ask him. I'm sure he'll be more than happy to oblige."
"I'll do it better."
He looked like he believed it too. "Then put your money where your mouth is, you punkass virgin."
Nanase opened up, tongue defiantly sticking out.
Much as Rin craved to go in for a throatfuck, it wasn't happening unless he wanted puke all over his feet. Had to go easy on the baby.
Nanase's mouth was small and weirdly tepid, his jaw was as flexible as an iron pole, and his tongue sat high and kept shunting him into his teeth (on accident or to be petty, he didn't know which). He kept coaxing him to not overthink it, let his mouth sit open naturally, but it'd be a tight fit regardless. He'd need a lot of work to be even halfway decent at cocksucking.
"Breathe through your nose and keep your jaw nice and loose. Open up a little more. Little more. Be good for me. There we go. That's more like it." He stroked Nanase's cheek. "Tastes good, don't it?"
"It shtinksh," said the guy who'd just staged an excavation of his asshole.
Rin grabbed him by the hair and snapped his hips forward, wincing past Nanase's scraping teeth to win a startled grunt.
"I keep trying to be nice to you. I keep trying."
Nanase glowered up at him, squeezing him in teeth and tongue as warning before turning his head a little to give a more amenable angle. Throwing care to the devil, Rin barreled on, irritation putting extra sting in each thrust. Spit frothed on Nanase's lips, bubbles popped and poured down his chin in a stream, jaw quivering as he struggled to keep up with the assault.
Nanase slapped Rin's thighs, calling for mercy, so Rin pulled his glistening, spit-stringed cock out. Nanase retched, pitifully gasping for breath, but nothing came up. "Haahn, haaah, huueh—"
Nothing smart left in that mouth. Good.
"You think you're so fuckin good at whatever you do just cause you want to be, don't you?"
Coughing, eyes watering, Nanase grabbed his slippery asscheeks and buried his face in Rin's groin, ignoring the cock to take tiny, mincing bites of his pubic mound. Rin started scolding him, but the kid stared up, grabbed a mouthful of pubes, and pulled.
Ignoring the lingering sting in his groin, Rin grabbed Nanase by the chin and this time, the mouth came open easier, admitting him into its narrow confines. It was still a tough fit, but Nanase was at least working with him now, giving space to his body, fitting into his motion, breaking now and again to pull off with a ravenous gasp before diving back in. His stubby nails dug long red streaks into the backs of Rin's thighs and through the gasping and slob, he still looked like he was feeling good in the reckless, unabashed way that gave Rin a thrill. Forget a guy who posed and postured his way through an encounter, this was what he wanted.
"Aw hell," Rin groaned, that telltale tightening winding through his body. "That's it."
Just outside, the dog circled back with a garbled scream of concern.
"Would you go already!?"
Even Nanase was annoyed enough to give a dismissive wave in his direction and the dog slunk off.
Too horny to be dissuaded by the interruption, Rin huffed and puffed, hips working in quick, sloppy swings, slowing only a half second to yank his tattered shirt away from his sweat-drenched body. He was blistering, boiling, each breath syrup in his throat, each heartbeat aching thunder, hand trembling against wet hair, hot scalp, cock on the verge of shattering. Words bubbled, congested in his chest, then melted away.
Nanase gasped out a breath—
Rin came, filling Nanase with a violent gush. Six more shots followed that Rin mindlessly fucked through, cum churning and swirling through Nanase's mouth. His cockhole gaped, nuts strained, urging out every last drop, and he did not pull away until his body had fully dispensed the load he'd been saving for another man.
Nanase gagged, startled by the taste, and tried to lean to the toilet to spit, but Rin wrenched his chin up.
"No. Swallow it. I want you to remember this taste."
Resenting the order, Nanase tried shoving his head down, but Rin only forced his chin higher, higher, until gravity gave him no choice and his mouth broke open, tongue lolling out fat and pink and clean.
"That's what a man tastes like." Rin let him go. "Next time it'll be your punk ass. Got it?"
Nanase grunted, scowl back in force.
Rin realized his bladder had worked up a little more piss in the meanwhile, figured, Might as well, and let it out in one short squirt that splashed Nanase's bangs. It rolled down his forehead, curved around his nose, and the kid swiped the drip up with his tongue. Rin chuckled, ruffling his hair as a ways of commending him for putting up with it. Nanase flinched away, as if the gesture was utterly foreign to him, then, hesistantly, resumed his place. Rin gave him a few pats more, the boy receiving them with the feigned indifference of a cat who had thrown itself into its master's lap, not with a request, but an expectation of attention, and when he withdrew, the boy glanced up—
And in his heart, a precipitous lurch.
I need to get the fuck outta here.
But he slouched onto the toilet, knees weak, every part of him compromised, and thirsty, crazy thirsty.
Nanase took his own cock in hand uncertainly, as if practising foreign etiquette, and aimed for Rin's face.
"Don't you fucking dare."
So he redirected, pissing into the valley between Rin's legs and the water roared as their piss mixed in the bowl, turning a soft mimosa yellow. Nanase tapered off without making a mess of either of them and looked strangely proud. The dog came in and started chewing on Rin's kneecap.
Whatever. Whatever. I'll just throw myself down those stairs on the way out. Then I won't have to think about it anymore.
Having already wasted this much time on this stop, Rin took a few minutes more to clean himself up, making liberal use of Nanase's towels. He was sure the little cretin would have a ball sniffing them once he was gone.
When he came out the bathroom, the dog was nowhere to be seen and Nanase was in the kitchen, aproned up, organizing ingredients on his tiny counter.
"Pressed mackerel sushi. Smashed cucumber salad. Corn potage." Nanase gestured towards each thing as it took up its place. "I bought enough so I could have leftovers, but it's fine for two people too."
Did this kid seriously not understand the concept of work? "I have to go. G. O. I have a job I still need to do."
"Then after," he said, like it was irritating to have to point out something so obvious.
"I already have plans."
"With that guy?"
"Hey. Don't fuck with him. You hear me? I'm serious. Not one word. Not one look. He's not your business. Got that?" Rin smacked his arm. "Got it?"
Nanase grunted, pulling away.
"Don't make that face. I don't have to be nice to you. If I feel like seeing you again, I'll see you. Don't bother me at work. Or any of the other drivers, for that matter."
"I'm free at night," Nanase said. "I have swim practice after school. So night is the best time to reach me."
"And your parents are alright with a grown man showing up at night looking for you?"
"They don't live here anymore. They haven't for a long time." Right. For a moment, he'd forgot. "If you can't come, then you could send a letter."
"Are you trying to be cute?"
"You told me to write you a letter."
Rin groaned, beyond exasperated at this kid, this conversation, this whole day. "I'm leaving. Have fun with the new aircon."
Having never been given the drink he was promised, he helped himself to a tin of coconut water from the fridge and headed for the door. That should've been that, but Nanase, compelled by some incomprehensible force, ran up and grabbed his butt.
Rin thought they were past this, but apparently not, so he brushed the kid off with one final piece of advice: "If you want guys to like you, don't be a creep."
The heat smacked him like a wave. From here, unable to see where he'd parked, the journey back to his truck seemed like a trek across the Sahara. Be awful nice if he could just curl up on a tatami floor with a brand new aircon, waiting for supper. Forget those last couple packages. Leave the truck behind. Get himself clean and sit in a cold tub til his nuts were all shrivelled up and he didn't even care.
He tugged his top, unsticking his undershirt. The dog eyeballed him from where it stood in the garden, barked once, and went back to eating.
Bones tired and mind weary, Rin began the long way back.
Everything he'd done inside that house was an unremittent mistake. Silly boy, don't you dare grope me—yes, please suck my asshole. I don't want anything to do with you or your feelings, but tell me anyway. Write me a love letter, maybe I'll respond. Maybe I'll drop by. Maybe I'll teach you everything a couple of men can do.
It was overindulgent, there was no other way of looking at it. The best thing would be to ignore him from hereon out. Give him a taste of the bitterness of the adult world. Getting into dubious, nebulously defined affairs with men you never see again was just part of the package. Besides, a guy who looked like that would be a hit in the scene, despite his everything else, he'd be fine without him.
Four years was a long time to wait, though.
Was there anything for guys that age? Maybe he'd ask Mama next time he went in. Send an anonymous—No. The kid could figure it out on his own. That was what he had done.
His Blackberry rang. It was Asahi.
"Hey, you running late? Wait, you're not driving right now, are you? I can hang up."
"No, no. I'm on my way back to my truck now. I had to go up the world's biggest fucking staircase with an air conditioner and then the guy receiving it was super annoying and I got attacked by a dog... I have a couple more things to go, but it shouldn't take that long."
"A dog? Did you get hurt!?"
"My uniform's fucked, but I'm fine. Are you done already?"
"I have a little more paperwork to go, but I snuck out to the payphone to see where you were at."
"Missed me that much?"
"Maybe. Is there anything you wanted to eat?"
"Cold curry udon."
"Got it."
"We can still do the camping prep after dinner—"
"Don't even worry about it, I'll take care of all that. You just get back here and get yourself some rest. You earned it."
For a moment, Rin floated. "Thanks. See you when I get there."
"Seeya. Drive safe."
He pocketed the device and paused to give his knees a break, taking a sip of his drink. Even this late, the air was thick and scummy and the heat wavered around him. A horse-sized mosquito buzzed past, too tired to bother biting. He patted down his pockets to be sure he hadn't left anything behind and in the rear felt something that hadn't been there before. Paper. An envelope. He pulled it out just enough to read the subject—Delivery Aniki—then put it back. It would get soggy if it stayed in there, but he let it be. There would be plenty of time to read it in the bathroom at work and frankly, it was what it deserved.
Hasty, scribbled out feelings from an idiot. Who would want that?
Far below, past the houses, past the winding ribbon road, was the port. Compared to his hometown port, it was a shabby thing, populated sparsely with small fishing vessels. There were dolosse piled high against the seawall and a handful of buildings studded the perimeter, brutal, flat grey heaped against brutal, flat grey, but around it, the mountains were dark and lovely and the sea spread out in a glittering orange wash and in this light, even the grey became gold.
Rin lingered a while longer, wondering how this all would look at night.