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Once again, as he’d been so many times over the last two weeks, Reo was in the locked first-floor bathroom, but tonight, for the first time, he was alone. His head hurt. The blue-and-white tile was sticky and dirty—Reo already knew this particular room got a lot less attention from cleaning staff, tucked away as it was down the hall from the far more frequently used multi-stall toilet, despite this one being the recent setting for arguably much more unsavory activities—but he was sitting on the floor in his shorts and socks anyway, back against the wall, hugging his legs to his chest and pressing his forehead against his knees. He wasn’t crying anymore, but his temples still ached with that stuffy, dull feeling anyway, and his lips were salty with tears and snot he hadn’t bothered to reach over and grab some tissue to wipe off. If someone had asked how long he planned to stay in that spot, he wouldn’t have known how to answer. A few hours? All night? The whole next day? He couldn’t picture any of it; every moment he spent with Nagi no longer by his side felt impossible, incomprehensible, like a bad dream he was still waiting to wake up from. He still couldn’t make himself believe he really never would.
Melodramatic? Sure. But melodrama was Reo’s prerogative at the moment, he figured. After all, he had a broken heart.
He was pressing his thumbs to his pressure points, trying to relieve some of the stinging tension, when the door handle was rattled from the outside. Seriously? It hadn’t happened once any of the times he and Nagi were in here together; what were the chances another player had sleep-stumbled down to this inconvenient spot the one day he wanted least to face anyone?
“Occupied,” he called out in irritation, his voice coming out embarrassingly thick and hoarse from tears.
“I know,” he heard then. “It’s me. Nagi.”
He looked, as usual, unbothered when Reo finally opened the door, even by the sight of his (supposed, spurned, betrayed) best friend with his eyes scrubbed red and his skin shiny and blotchy and his hair down and straggly around his face. “Hi,” he said, and Reo could only cough up a bitter, phlegmy laugh.
“What are you doing here?” he asked after he’d cleared his throat and wiped his nose again on the inside of his shirt. Nagi blinked as if he didn’t understand the question.
“I dunno,” he finally said, shrugging one shoulder. “Wanted to see if you were down here, I guess. Same as you...”
“You were looking for me?” Reo said inanely, pathetically. As absurd as it was to the rational side of his brain, a part of him wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Nagi had planned to bring Isagi to their spot that night, fool around with him instead, replace Reo even in that role. His jealousy was that overpowering, that illogical, just like everything with Nagi had always been for him.
“Pretty much,” said Nagi. “Can I come in?”
They sat down where Reo had been a moment before, Nagi slouching cross-legged, Reo resting his elbows on his knees, head turned toward the wall. His traitorous body was already responding instinctively to Nagi’s familiar presence next to him, the smell of his freshly washed hair, the sound of his fingers fidgeting unconsciously with the drawstrings of his pajama shorts. He pulled his legs closer in to hide it. Nagi sighed, the sound a frustrated hmm that Reo also recognized. He didn’t say anything.
“Reo’s mad at me,” Nagi finally said. Reo laughed again.
“What gave it away?”
“It wasn’t about you,” said Nagi. “I wasn’t thinking of leaving you behind. It’s just me.”
“I know,” Reo said quietly. He couldn’t believe Nagi still didn’t understand. That’s the whole problem, he wanted to scream in his beautiful stupid face. You’re never thinking about me. That’s what hurts so bad. But what would be the point?
“Don’t be mad,” Nagi said. “It’s annoying, you know? We’re friends.”
“You really hurt me, Nagi,” said Reo, his eyes still boring into the corner of the room. “You—” Betrayed me. Dumped me. Broke my heart. “You embarrassed me,” he finished lamely.
Nagi didn’t say anything. Reo didn’t know what he expected. He’d never heard Nagi give anybody an apology before, least of all him. Instead he let them both sit in uncomfortable silence, so close yet so far, and then, after a moment—
“What the hell?” Reo pushed himself backwards on the floor, finally turning to fix Nagi with an incredulous glare. Nagi blinked, looked down with his big eyes at the hand that he’d just tried to lay on Reo’s bare thigh as if it were any other night. As if nothing had changed.
“What?” Nagi asked. “I thought—”
“I’m not doing that right now,” Reo said. “Not after what you did.” His face burned in humiliation that he even needed to say it, that Nagi actually thought he’d be that easy. But then again, why shouldn’t he? When had Reo ever been anything else?
“Come on,” said Nagi, a flicker of irritation shadowing his eyes for the first time. “You’re really being dramatic, Reo, seriously, it’s not—”
“Shut up,” Reo said, and bent over, pressed both his palms to his face. “Can you just leave?” he asked, his voice muffled. “I really don’t want to talk to you right now.”
“Reo,” Nagi complained in that familiar spoiled tone of his, the one Reo normally loved to indulge more than anything. Not tonight. He wasn’t going to do that to himself this time, wasn’t going to subjugate himself once again to this last, most painful of Nagi’s whims. No.
“No,” Reo said aloud. “Just go away. Please.”
But once Nagi was gone, of course, Reo already wanted him back.
It was on their second night at Blue Lock that they’d picked out the bathroom, slipping away after lights-out, one and then the other, to locate the perfect spot, anything inaudible from the dorms and lockable from inside. There were only a few options, in the end; any would have done just as well, but this was the one they chose, tiptoeing giddily around the empty first floor in their sock feet, Nagi plucking one hand nervously at the back of Reo’s t-shirt, then wrapping the same arm tightly around his neck once they were finally safely alone, pressing his forehead to Reo’s and nipping at his nose while he shoved a thigh hard between Reo’s legs. Reo had to force himself not to hump Nagi’s leg like a dog while he held his slim jaw in place to kiss him hot and deep because it had been more than forty-eight hours since the last time and Nagi was so incredible, so talented, so far above everybody else there, and he was Reo’s, his, and Reo had never been prouder. His treasure. He almost let the words slip out as he licked into Nagi’s mouth, making him squirm, thick saliva all over both of their chins, delirious with the excitement of it and with the constant panting lust he’d had to keep pent up for days. So yeah, he almost said it. Almost. But he didn’t.
Instead he licked his lips and tucked his stray hairs behind his ears and lowered himself down until his face was level with Nagi’s hard-on, outlined in his baggy shorts so visibly it made Reo’s chest hurt. But when he finally pulled down Nagi’s waistband and put him in his mouth, took him in all the way, like he liked, like he knew Nagi liked—
“Hey.” Nagi was tugging slightly at Reo’s hair, his voice sleepy and half-moaned as Reo pressed his tongue against him. “Hey, Reo. I wanna fuck you.”
“Ah.” Reo swallowed, wiped his wet mouth with the back of his hand. “No, I don’t have…not tonight. I don’t think we can.”
“But Reo, please?” Nagi’s precious pouty voice again, the one Reo so hated to refuse. “I miss your ass…”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Tomorrow,” Reo forced out, staring pleadingly up at him from the floor. As much as he wanted to give Nagi everything he asked for, the lube was still packed at the bottom of his toiletry bag in his suitcase upstairs, and it just wasn’t worth the risk of going without and tearing or chafing something that would slow him down and tank his stats in the very first week. “Tomorrow night, okay?” And he pushed his own shorts to his knees, spat into his hand, rubbed the inside of his thigh with saliva, trying for some kind of tilted last-ditch seduction. “You can do me this way tonight,” he said, and turned to bend over, elbows on the floor, his back to Nagi, pressing his legs together tightly. “Like we used to.”
So they christened the little bathroom the same way they’d christened the Hakuho locker room, most surfaces in Reo’s floor of the Mikage building, even the backseat of the limo once after Ba-ya left it running when she stopped on the drive home for a quick grocery run. Some of Nagi’s come got on the wall, which Reo cleaned with a wet paper towel. There was a time he would have licked it off and been grateful, like the day early on when Nagi came over after practice and let Reo jack him off during their massage and, once he’d left, Reo collected the sweaty, jizz-stained bedsheet he’d been lying on and buried his face in it while he touched himself until he almost passed out from lack of oxygen. Now, months later, he’d finally become secure enough in his possession of Nagi that he hadn’t felt the need to do stuff like that in a long time—or so he’d thought that first night, at least. And in the end that was probably why the Second Selection happened, wasn’t it? Reo had gotten greedy. He wanted Nagi all to himself, every part of him, and had gotten complacent in his assumption that just because he’d done everything he could to make Nagi dependent on him, to take care of his every need and give him a purpose for his life and treat him like the most important person alive, that Nagi would never get sick of him.
Nagi, who’d never asked for any of it. Nagi, who wasn’t even gay, who was honest and pure and talented in ways Reo would never be, who Reo had really only ever been using for his own ends, after all. He’d brought it all on himself, all his own heartbreak and loss, and the worst part was that when he looked back on everything, he could only wish he’d been even more selfish.
Of course some part of him knew why he’d gone down to the bathroom again, only one day after their last horrible conversation, but that didn’t make him hate himself any less when he opened his knees for Nagi to fit himself between his thighs as he tugged at Reo’s waistband, gentle and unembarrassed like he always was, broad and strong and skin smelling just slightly like sweet, pheromonal sweat, a callused hand on Reo’s cheek, thumb pressing at his sore lips. Reo could never resist him. He was so easy. It was pathetic.
“Missed you today, boss,” he mumbled into Reo’s ear as he rubbed him clumsily to full hardness, Reo’s body reacting as it always did with Pavlovian eagerness to Nagi’s mere proximity. “’S weird playing without you.”
“Stop it,” Reo whispered, squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t cry. “Don’t talk.” Nagi moved his hand across Reo’s face, pressed three fingers into his mouth, which Reo suckled at instinctively. He felt blindly for Nagi’s soft hair, rubbing his thumb against Nagi’s forehead as Nagi licked inside his ear, making him shudder. Even with his eyes closed Reo knew every part of him as if it were his own, as if over the past six months their shared devotion and obsession had turned Nagi into an extension of himself, their bodies changing and growing around each other like intertwined branches until there was no distinguishing them anymore. Nagi was the only person who’d ever been inside him; Reo was Nagi’s first and only for everything, as he knew well, a fact he held fast in his heart with a combination of tender gratitude and bitter regret that he couldn’t say the same about himself. Reo had done all of this to him, he reminded himself as Nagi pulled his shorts all the way down, moving in close so he could stroke both of their wet hard-ons with one hand. He’d taken the priceless, beautiful piece of unformed clay that was Nagi Seishiro and molded it into genius, and he’d believed that selfish act of creation gave him the right to tweak and fiddle the same way with Nagi’s undeveloped sexuality: teach him how to like what Reo liked, spoil him with decadent pleasures, addict him to having whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it, and make him believe he couldn’t get it anywhere else. He’d done this to him, so now he had to take responsibility.
Still, there were some things he knew he just couldn’t handle, so he pushed Nagi’s face away as it moved in to meet his lips and shook his head, pressed his chin to his shoulder so Nagi couldn’t look at him. “Don’t kiss me,” he said. “I can’t.”
Nagi frowned. Reo loved his frown. “Okay,” he said, sounding a little hurt. “I’m gonna do this, then.” And he leaned over and put the tip of Reo’s cock in his mouth.
“Nagi.” Reo’s voice came out pinched and broken after only a moment of Nagi sucking at him, something he’d done less than five times the whole time Reo had known him, lazy and adorably selfish as he was. “You don’t have to do that,” Reo told him, which he’d told him each of those other times, too, but which today even he could tell didn’t exactly sound sincere. Normally he was always happy to only please Nagi when they were together, and Nagi always happy to only be pleased. Somehow it didn’t quite feel the same anymore.
Nagi took his mouth off and looked up at Reo with those horrible, beautiful doe eyes. “Reo’s sad, though,” he said, like it was a neutral statement, like it wasn’t all his fault, Reo’s sadness, his loneliness, his hurt. Like Nagi hadn’t done all of this to him.
Well, maybe Reo wasn’t the only one who could stand to take a little responsibility.
Nagi spluttered a little when Reo pulled him by the hair, guiding him down, pushing himself in until his tip bumped Nagi’s throat, until Nagi was giving him a real blowjob, rather than the noncommittal halfway-there suckling he normally satisfied himself with. But he didn’t fight. He let Reo gently fuck his mouth until he could almost do it himself, until it was Nagi tickling his own larynx with Reo’s cock, Nagi holding him in until he couldn’t breathe and had to pull off and suck in air before going back for more. And, shit—it was really hot. Reo felt sickeningly gratified to see Nagi like this, coughing and drooling but still gamely following Reo’s lead, doing his best. His rhythm was off and his technique nonexistent, but still it took under two minutes until Reo was twitching and jerking into his mouth, holding his hair tight in his fist so he couldn’t move while he came into Nagi’s throat. It felt unbelievably good. He almost couldn’t believe how much he liked it. Then Nagi stood up and spat his come out in the sink, and he remembered about everything else.
“You okay?” Nagi asked him when he let out a groan.
“I’m disgusting,” Reo said, pressing a hand to his hot face, shorts still around his ankles.
“Huh?” He heard Nagi slurp some water from the faucet, swish it around his mouth, and spit again. “No you’re not.” The tap turned off. “You’re really cool,” Nagi told him earnestly, his voice a little raw-sounding. “You’re my best friend.”
Whatever that meant.
Seven months. It sounded pathetically miniscule when he really thought about it, even in the context of his relatively short life: only seven months out of seventeen years to spend with the one treasure he’d ever had all to himself. Only seven months to learn everything there was to know about him, to see all his expressions and moods, to memorize every inch of his body, to bond himself irrevocably to the only person he was sure he’d ever love. For some people it probably would have taken years. It didn’t matter. Reo knew from day one.
The first time he made Nagi come was three weeks after they met, but even back then it felt like they’d known each other forever. At least for Reo. He’d already gotten firmly into the habit of babying Nagi, feeding him and dressing him and carrying him around campus on piggyback, so when it happened that they were in the showers and Reo looked down to see Nagi was getting half hard as Reo massaged purple shampoo into his hair, it only felt natural to move a hand down and whisper to his friend to relax, I’ll take care of it. Reo’s got you. Nagi barely moved, barely made a sound while Reo touched him, just grunted a little and jerked his head to the side when he finished, spilling sweet warmth over Reo’s fingers that he wished the water wouldn’t wash away so fast.
They didn’t talk about it. Nagi didn’t seem to think anything they were doing was unusual, at least no less so than anything else Reo did for him. It took three more similar favors—quick, clinical handjobs in the lockers or on the massage table, Reo trying his very best to appear calm while his heart thudded and his face burned with adoration and desire—before Nagi finally acknowledged it aloud, one afternoon after practice when Reo was stretching him out on the gymnasium mats long after the rest of the team had gone home. He had one hand on Nagi’s soft, downy-haired calf, the other by his thigh, bending his leg up against his chest, when he heard Nagi clear his throat.
“Hey, boss,” he said softly, looking up at Reo from under his overgrown bangs. “You think you could, uh...help me out again? Like you do sometimes?” And he bent his free leg to the side to reveal the growing tent in his shorts that Reo had been doing his best to ignore for the past five minutes.
Reo let his calf go and nodded. From this new vantage he could see a sliver of Nagi’s actual dick through the opening of his shorts, the thick and responsive organ he’d been doing his best to sear every inch of into his brain any time he got the chance to see or touch it, for fear those chances would one day disappear. He knew he couldn’t hesitate, couldn’t give himself the opportunity to lose his nerve. “Of course,” he said, keeping his voice steady with effort as he stared at Nagi’s slightly flushed face. “I’ll do something special for you today, okay? You worked really hard at practice.” He tucked his fingers carefully under the waistband of Nagi’s shorts, pulled them down to his knees, and bent over, propping himself up on his ankles, to hover above Nagi’s crotch.
“Put your hand right here,” he said, and moved it into his hair, where he felt Nagi’s fingers flex instinctively. “Just pull on it if you want me to stop.” But Nagi never did.
“Reo’s good at that,” he said in a slightly dazed voice when it was over, Reo still wiping his watery eyes and savoring the last traces of Nagi’s come lingering on his tongue. Reo bit back a smile at the compliment and, tingling with happiness and love down to his toes, pressed himself close to Nagi again and clutched at the sweaty polyester of his jersey in one fist.
“Nagi,” he whispered. “You know how much you mean to me, right? You know I’d do anything for you?”
“Yeah, sure, boss.” Nagi didn’t seem too perturbed by Reo’s sudden invasion of his personal space. “I got that.”
“What I just did,” Reo said, with a glance toward Nagi’s crotch. “I’ll do that whenever you want me to, okay? I don’t care when—call me at home, pull me out of class, whatever. You can have it whenever you want. Just—don’t do it with anyone else, okay? That’s all I want.”
Nagi scratched his damp hair. “Don’t really see how that’d happen anyway,” he said, as if considering the possibility for the first time. “I barely even know any girls, they never talk to me.”
He knew it was basically true, but Reo still struggled to understand how such a thing was possible, the way Nagi looked. In any case, he let it pass. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, good. Because I mean it. Anytime. Seriously.”
Nagi paused, absorbing this, then quirked his lips into a slight smile and reached out to ruffle Reo’s hair. “Reo’s kinda ecchi, huh?”
Easy, easy, easy.
In fact, Nagi rarely if ever mentioned girls to his face after that, not that Reo was stupid enough to let that fool him into believing Nagi might be the same as him. He knew he was Nagi’s first kiss, because Nagi told him so, one day in Reo’s room while housing a slice of two-layer chocolate cake the chef had prepared for him downstairs. Normally Reo would have never let anybody spill crumbs all over his bed like that, but hey. Anything for Nagi.
“Want me to suck you off while you finish your dessert?” Reo teased him, tracing a finger over Nagi’s scabby knee from where he sat at his feet on the floor, patiently waiting. “Two for one?”
Nagi shrugged and licked some icing off his fork. “Hey, Reo.”
“Yeah?”
“How come we never kiss when you get me off?”
Reo blinked. “What?”
“I dunno,” said Nagi. “Never mind.”
“Do you...want to do that?” Reo spoke each word carefully, not wanting to push anything on Nagi but desperate to understand what his cryptic question was trying to convey.
“Yeah, maybe.” Nagi was scraping the metal of his fork around on his empty plate as he talked. “I never did it before, so I don’t really know. But it probably feels good, right?”
“Nagi.” Reo stood up, took the plate from Nagi’s hands and put it on the nightstand.
“Yeah.”
“Come here,” said Reo, and placed a hand on Nagi’s soft cheek as he touched their lips together.
He tried not to get too carried away, not scare Nagi off, but it was difficult. Nagi was hesitant at first, letting Reo take the lead in setting the rhythm, opening his mouth, using his tongue, but it didn’t take long before he was sucking just as eagerly as Reo’s lips and pulling Reo closer to grind against his hard-on. Reo rubbed his palm against Nagi’s fly as he licked into his mouth wantonly, feeling Nagi’s sweet grunts against his teeth. Then Nagi was moving on top of him, pressing Reo’s back into the mattress, pulling down both their shorts as they kissed open-mouthed and sloppy, and, with the instinctive silent language their bodies had begun to share, Reo drew his legs up toward his stomach and guided Nagi in to start thrusting his wet cock between his thighs. It was perfect. It was like Nagi was really fucking him, almost, seeing him pant and jerk on top of him, feeling his hard-on rubbing harshly against the sensitive place between his legs, hearing the squeak of the bedspring again and again as Nagi humped against him roughly. He held Reo’s legs in place long after they’d already started cramping up from the unnatural angle and, when he came, let it run carelessly over Reo’s torso and soil his rucked-up t-shirt. He didn’t even ask whether Reo wanted to finish too. By rights it should have offended him how little Nagi seemed to care about reciprocating any pleasure or comfort Reo gave him, but instead it made Reo even indescribably hotter to think about Nagi using his body so selfishly, imagining Nagi fucking him for real and disappearing once he’d gotten his, treating him like nothing but a hole, like the easy lay they both already knew he was. He turned over onto his stomach on the bed while Nagi lay back on the pillows, already absorbed again in his phone game, and came after three strokes of his hand, picturing it.
“Hey,” Nagi said again once Reo had returned from cleaning himself off in the ensuite. “You do that kind of stuff with girls a lot?”
Reo glanced over from where he was retying his hair in front of the mirror. “No,” he said sharply. “Never.”
“Oh. ’Kay.”
“Why do you ask?”
In the reflection, he saw Nagi smile a little at his horizontal screen. “No reason,” he said. “Just seems like you know a lot about it. And girls really like you.”
“Yeah, I know. But I can’t. There’s something wrong with me.” He spoke the words without thinking and instantly regretted them. He could see Nagi scrunching his face up in confusion. “I don’t mean it like that,” he said quickly. “I just—”
“Reo’s really cool,” said Nagi. “Not weird.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” Reo rubbed at his face, feeling the warm flush of shame on his skin. “It makes me really happy, doing this stuff for you. I didn’t—there was...” He coughed, avoiding Nagi’s eyes in the glass. “I had this friend when I was a first-year,” he said. “He was the first person I...did that kind of thing with. I used to think it meant I wasn’t normal, you know. But I didn’t know anything back then, and it wasn’t the same. It didn’t make me feel good. But this makes me feel good. I mean it.” What was he talking about? Why was he saying any of this? What the hell was wrong with him? Nagi didn’t need to know about his long-ago sexuality crisis or his disastrous first quasi-romance with the two-years-older son of one of his father’s C-suite guys; he didn’t need to know how really easy Reo had once been, how all it took was a cool senpai calling him pretty to get him on his knees and (even more embarrassingly) falling in love. Or so he’d thought, at least. Once he met Nagi he realized he hadn’t known the meaning of the word.
“Okay,” said Nagi, apparently unaffected by Reo’s stumbling confession. “Feels good for me too.”
“Good.” Reo, seeing Nagi’s eyes glued to his screen, let himself smile as wide as he felt. “I’m glad.”
Strangely, seeing Nagi with Isagi was what hurt the most. Or maybe it wasn’t strange: back at Hakuho, he’d already been aware of his rabid possessive streak when it came to the object of his obsession; it just happened that, fortunately, almost nobody else in that school ever took enough notice of Nagi to really make him worry. There were a few girls who—no matter what Nagi tried to tell him—definitely took a few too many looks in his direction for Reo’s comfort, but he was able to defray those threats with little effort, simply continuing to monopolize all of Nagi’s time and attention and silently encouraging his belief that he was totally invisible to the opposite sex. Other guys could grate on him a bit, especially toward the end of their high-school season when some of their teammates finally realized how singular their star player was and began praising him excessively during practice or asking him for pointers on trapping techniques, but that too barely rose to the level of concern; Reo was perfectly well aware that the only way he’d won ownership of Nagi’s libido was through persistence and convenience, and none of those boys stood a chance to compete with Reo’s efforts in that category or with his total lack of dignity when it came to sexual reciprocity. But the black box of Isagi Yoichi, the completely incomprehensible mystery of what was so fucking special about him that made Nagi break apart the central relationship of both of their lives without so much as a second thought, was fraying Reo’s already thoroughly deranged mental state and filling his head with feverish, absurd (please God let them be absurd, please, please) scenarios of Nagi betraying him in every way possible, giving to Isagi like it was nothing everything Reo had coaxed and wheedled out of him over months, enjoying it, choosing it with Isagi like he’d never enjoyed or truly chosen it with Reo. The images crowded his head at every spare moment—at practice, during lunch breaks, in the shower, and the less said about his sleep habits the better—and the one time he’d crossed paths with the two of them together, chatting in the cafeteria with the same slouched posture, both of their hands firmly shoved in the pockets of their shorts, he’d had to sincerely feel at his septum with his fingertips to make sure his nose hadn’t spontaneously started bleeding.
It was probably for this reason that he kept showing up in the first-floor bathroom night after night, even after promising himself he’d stop, even after telling Nagi in no uncertain terms that he never wanted to speak to him again. He was in possession of one last claim to the genius Nagi Seishiro, and it was going to take more than a little thing like self-respect for him to give it up. But tonight, the first time after their confrontation in the bath, even that connection now felt completely different, suddenly hard and distant in a way it had never been before, totally absent of the sweet intimacy that he’d gotten so complacently accustomed to in their sex of the past few months. Though Reo knew he was equally (if not primarily) to blame for that particular lack. He couldn’t help it; he had too much anger, too much pain in his heart and body now to pretend things were the same way they’d always been. It was only another reminder of their humiliating inequality that Nagi didn’t seem to hate him at all.
“Reo,” Nagi began for the second time that night as he fingered Reo in his lap, and Reo just squeezed his eyes shut and panted against Nagi’s shoulder and pulled at his hair.
“Shut up,” he mumbled. “I said I don’t want to talk to you.”
They were sitting on the closed toilet, Reo straddling Nagi with his pants off, clutching at his shoulders and trying not to cry. Nagi had two fingers inside him, and Reo could tell he was trying to find his prostate. He wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Back on the outside, after the first few times Nagi fucked him, once he was accustomed to all the gory details Reo had at first tried to conceal from him, Reo used to let Nagi watch as he fingered himself open before sex: Reo on his bed, usually, legs open, feet planted on either side of Nagi while Nagi stared at him unselfconsciously and with a thrilling and terrifying curiosity. Sometimes Reo even felt confident enough to dirty-talk him a little, tell him how he couldn’t wait to feel Nagi inside him, he’d been waiting for it all week, he loved Nagi’s cock so much, it was so big and hard and felt so good inside. Good boy, he’d say as Nagi finally put it in, especially if he’d remembered to go a little slow, ease his way through rather than just ramming it in hard the way Reo had to object to but secretly almost kind of liked, because it proved that Nagi, at least for that moment, really wanted him. Good boy, Nagi. My genius. My treasure.
“I like when Reo says that stuff,” Nagi had told him once while Reo was toweling his hair after the shower, in that blunt non-sequitor way he had that never failed to make Reo swoon.
“What stuff?” Reo asked.
“Nice stuff...” was Nagi’s unhelpful answer.
“During sex, you mean?” Reo squeezed some wet hair in the cloth.
“Yeah, like...calling me nice stuff. It kinda reminds me of, like...my mom or something.” Nagi was looking at his feet as he said it.
Reo stroked his hairline with a finger. He must have been dick-drunk, out of his mind, because the next words that came out of his mouth were “I can be your mommy if you want.” And he guessed Nagi was, too, because he looked up at Reo and smiled.
Fuck. There were still so many things they had to learn about each other, about themselves, deep feelings and buried turn-ons they could have spent hour upon blissful hour discovering together in Reo’s cozy king-sized bed had it not been for Blue Lock and its stupid promise. And now they’d never get the chance. Four months since the first time Nagi fucked him and he still didn’t even know how to hit Reo’s sweet spot. What an idiot. He kept coming tantalizingly close, too, just deep enough to tease, and then flailing, pulling back to jam his fingers inelegantly inside again, leaving Reo sweaty and open and unsatisfied. Something he used to think he could never be with Nagi.
“Nagi,” he finally hissed into his ear, and grabbed the wrist underneath him to steady it. “Not so fucking hard, okay? Use a little technique for once.”
He saw Nagi’s features arrange themselves into petulant protest, then watched him stop himself, furrow his brow, and pull Reo closer to attempt what he’d asked. Reo knew his face, his body so well that he could read the slightest twitch of intention, and he’d used that ability to great effect in their former life, anticipating Nagi’s every move and need on the field, in the classroom, in bed. Now it seemed to serve mostly to taunt him, just one more reminder of the empty gash where Reo’s heart had once been: he’d seen everything Nagi was capable of, except leaving him.
“Like that?” he tried, bending his fingers together like he was trying to scrape a sticker off his phone. Reo squirmed a little on top of him.
“Deeper,” he said through clenched teeth. He felt impossibly exposed, naked from the waist down and spread open for Nagi, half embarrassed and half frustrated, like a fussy unsatisfiable child. There was a certain shameful hotness to it, his pathetic masochistic side engaging almost unwillingly, but he no longer felt safe enough with Nagi to really lean into that impulse.
“Reo always used to like it when I did it,” Nagi said, his pout audible in Reo’s ear. “You said it felt so good every time.” Reo rolled his eyes.
“When did you ever finger me before?” he grumbled. “I always had to do all the work for you.” He didn’t acknowledge the last part of Nagi’s reminiscence; of course he’d said that, about six billion times, and meant every one from the bottom of his easy little heart. There was a time—less than two weeks ago, in fact—when the same unskilled motions Nagi was doing now would probably have sent him into spasms of adoring ecstasy. Now it was too little and far too late.
“Because Reo never let me...” Nagi tightened his unoccupied hand around Reo’s bare waist, fingers digging into the divot of his hip. “You said there wasn’t anything I could do better at. Remember? And now I don’t know how...”
“Okay,” said Reo, “whatever.” This was veering dangerously close to a real conversation, one he most certainly was not ready to have. “Can I just suck you off or something? I don’t think this is working.”
“I wanna make Reo come.” Nagi stuck out his lower lip stubbornly.
“Fine.” Reo put his hand on Nagi’s wrist and eased him out so he could turn himself around on Nagi’s lap. He could feel the hard-on under his thigh as he pressed his back to Nagi’s chest, and it sent a shiver of arousal through him, along with a more unpleasant frisson of sadness as he realized he couldn’t think of the last time he and Nagi had had sex that hadn’t revolved around the needs of Nagi’s dick. Not that Reo had ever tried to change that. Hell, he’d encouraged it, practically enforced it as the status quo he believed was most conducive to keeping Nagi docile and loyal at his side. And now, like Nagi had said, he didn’t even know how to do anything different.
“For real?” he heard Nagi ask behind him when Reo moved his hand into position. He nodded and kept Nagi’s palm where he’d placed it against his Adam’s apple, encircling his slim throat.
“Slow,” he instructed as Nagi eased two fingers back inside him. “Deeper. A little deeper, but gentle, okay?” Nagi’s hands were big, and though Reo often used to nag him to use lotion before bed and after the bath, today they were as red and chapped as they’d been the day they met. “A little more,” he breathed, rubbing a heel against Nagi’s shin, “okay, now bend them a li—oh fuck, Nagi.”
“’S that it?” Nagi’s voice sounded a little slurred. Reo grunted a yes, then bit his lip hard, cursing himself for letting the name slip out. Nagi was stroking both fingertips in just the right squishy, tingly place inside him now, sweet but firm, the way he’d only ever done accidentally when he fucked Reo before. He still would have traded just about anything to go back then, of course, but this new Nagi had his charms, too, it seemed. Reo reached an arm behind him to steady himself against Nagi’s shoulder, thighs trembling, fingers tangling in Nagi’s soft hair.
“Keep doing that,” he gulped between breaths. “And—” He nudged at the hand around his neck. “Squeeze it.”
“Okay, boss,” Nagi mumbled, and did as he was told. Reo heard his own high-pitched moan as if from outside as Nagi massaged his prostate with one hand and compressed his windpipe with the other. His back arched almost reflexively against Nagi, his leg pressing harder into Nagi’s warm erection. Nagi grunted. Reo drooled from his open mouth. He felt hopeless, stepped-on, dirty, and really fucking good. If only my dad could see what I look like right now, he thought inanely, and as he did Nagi squeezed a little harder and he saw stars and then he was whimpering and pulling Nagi’s hair hard enough to uproot and shuddering as he came uncontrollably all over his stomach and thighs.
“Wow,” Nagi said after a moment, as Reo pushed himself gingerly off his lap to clean up, his legs still a little shaky and unsure. “Reo’s really hot...”
Reo rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.” He couldn’t look at Nagi. He felt crushingly ashamed at having let himself get so vulnerable, more than he’d ever even been back when he and Nagi actually liked each other. Except—what did actually matter, anyway? He was nothing to Nagi, he’d made that clear enough. His opinion of Reo couldn’t get any lower, because it wasn’t low to begin with; it didn’t exist in the first place. He’d spent countless hours thinking himself into circles to preserve some noble, dependable image of himself in Nagi’s eyes, when really he could have been doing whatever the fuck he wanted the whole time and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. He almost laughed, realizing it.
“I didn’t know you were into that,” said Nagi from across the room. “The choking thing.”
Reo, wiping himself off with a damp paper towel, just shrugged. He didn’t feel like explaining himself.
“Did you do that with some other guy or something?”
Reo looked over at him, incredulous. “What?” he asked. “No. You don’t think I’ve asphyxiated myself on that thing enough times to know how it feels?” He gestured with the soiled paper to Nagi’s dick, which was still visibly hard and which Nagi had been rubbing apparently absentmindedly over his shorts while Reo talked.
“Wanna do it again?” Nagi gave him a shy smile.
“Honestly?” Reo straightened and tossed the paper towel in the trash. “No, I don’t really feel like it right now. You can take care of that yourself.”
“Reo’s still mad...”
“Yeah, I am.” He pulled his boxers and shorts back on and smoothed his hair with both hands. “Really mad. But hey, Nagi?”
“Yeah?” Nagi looked at him with big wet eyes.
“Don’t let it bother you,” said Reo. “It’s not your problem anymore.”
Another heaping spoonful of salt for Reo to smear into his already weeping wound: the last night they spent together before the Second Selection was when he’d felt the closest to Nagi that they’d been in weeks. He’d been so tender, so adorably bratty, so Nagi. So Reo’s. They went straight from dinner to their special meeting place, Reo carrying Nagi the whole way, pausing only for a quick pit stop at their dorm to grab the bottle of Okamoto from Reo’s suitcase. By the time they were almost there, Nagi was sucking on Reo’s ear, probing the crevices with his tongue and making Reo giggle indiscreetly in the hall.
“You can’t do stuff like that outside,” he reprimanded Nagi breathlessly once they were safe inside, Nagi already pulling him down to the floor and tugging at his shorts. “You don’t want us to get caught, right?”
“Eh, who cares?” Nagi stared up with his familiar squinty, asymmetrical grin as Reo straddled his hips, the one that always put Reo in mind of a baby learning to smile for the first time. “I bet tons of other guys are doing stuff like this here.”
“You think?” Reo laughed as he pulled off his shirt, grinding his ass down against Nagi’s crotch to get him hard. “Dirty mind, Nagi.”
“I mean, buncha teenage boys, hormones and all, no chicks around...” Nagi licked his lips as Reo slipped a hand into his shorts. “And that redhead’s pretty like a girl, huh...”
“Oh, really?” Reo leaned over on top of him and nipped at Nagi’s neck scoldingly. “Well, too bad for him,” he mumbled in Nagi’s ear as he rubbed him. “He can’t have you. You’re mine.” And he bit down hard on Nagi’s neck, making him twitch, leaving a wet, red imprint of his teeth on the pale skin when he pulled away. “You’re mine,” he repeated, feeling delirious with love and obsession and victory. “Right, Nagi? You belong to me.”
“Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.” Nagi pushed Reo’s face away gently, turned him over, felt for the bottle on the floor and thrust it into Reo’s hand. “Reo’s crazy...” he said, pulling his own shorts off as Reo dripped cold lube over his fingers. “Try and get ready quick, okay? Really wanna put it in...”
It was just so good that night, so fucking good, so hot and wild and sweet and rough at once, and Reo had never wanted it to end. He loved it every time Nagi was inside him, of course—he loved Nagi so much, how could he not?—but that time it just worked particularly well, the physical part, and Reo felt excitingly grown-up and sophisticated for liking it as much as he did. Nagi’s cock was just like every other part of him, pretty and powerful all at once, waiting unassumingly with a coiled strength inside that only had to be coaxed out to stun Reo into speechlessness. He had to cover his mouth after a while, embarrassed by the girly sound of his own involuntary gasps, but Nagi reached over and pulled the hand away, twisting his arm back to pin it against his spine for good measure, and then Reo just let himself fall into it, crying and whimpering gratefully and repeating Nagi’s name over and over until his throat felt hoarse. Nagi, Nagi, Nagi, fuck. Nagi, baby. My baby. Nagi. By the time Nagi finished, coming inside him with a groan, Reo’s legs felt numb and his face was hot and streaked with tears and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so happy.
I wish I could have known this would happen four months ago, he remembered thinking to himself, and, yeah, it was true—their first tries hadn’t always been the easiest. Reo hadn’t expected them to ever actually get that far, even when they started seriously hooking up, consistently and intentionally; it didn’t matter, Nagi wasn’t gay, and Reo figured that even if, in the mind of a straight guy, making out with and getting blown by your same-sex high-school best friend was one thing, surely fucking him in the ass was quite another. But maybe not. It wasn’t like Reo was any kind of expert on the heterosexual male thought process, and Yoshihara the summer before had always professed that he wasn’t gay either, and that certainly hadn’t precluded him from thinking up pervy shit like dressing Reo in his sister’s school uniform skirt and jerking him off in front of his full-length mirror. So maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised when Nagi, in the middle of fucking Reo’s thighs on his bed (they were in Nagi’s dorm room for once, a rare occasion—Reo’s parents were visiting Tokyo for a week, and he was trying to spend as little time as possible at home while they were there), paused in his lazy thrusting, one hand on Reo’s waist, and said, “Hey, Reo. You think I could put it in for real sometime?”
Reo turned to look back at him. He was on hands and knees on Nagi’s tiny cot, naked except for his kneesocks, Nagi still in his sweaty jersey with his practice shorts around his ankles. He was chewing gum while he humped on top of Reo, which Reo definitely shouldn’t have found as hot as he did. “Uh,” he said, his head still a little sex-addled and muddy, “I...well, yeah, of course, if you wanted to. Of course. But do you really? Want to?”
“Kinda, yeah.” Nagi popped a bubble in his teeth. “What, is it a lot of work or something?”
“No,” said Reo. Not for you, at least. “It’ll just be more...intense, I guess. Or, like...” He didn’t know how to tactfully phrase what he really meant, which was basically, You’re going to see a lot more of me than you usually do, and it’s going to be really gay, and we won’t be able to pretend this is casual anymore, and I don’t want to scare you off or make you stop liking me because I agreed to something neither of us were ready for. “It’s just kind of a big deal to some people,” he said instead. “I mean, I’ve never done it before. But I’d do it with you. Any time. As long as you’re sure you want to.”
Nagi creased his brow for a moment, then looked down at Reo for a long, nervewracking moment. “I think so,” he said finally. “Yeah. I wanna be Reo’s first time.”
Woof. “Okay,” Reo said, and couldn’t help smiling up at him as he squeezed his thighs tighter, rubbing them together with Nagi’s cock trapped in the middle. “How about this?” he asked. “Two hours of drills after every practice next week, and then on Saturday you can fuck me. Sound good?”
Nagi groaned.
If Nagi thought his schedule that week was grueling, it was nothing compared to Reo’s, who drilled with Nagi after school for the full two hours every day on top of his already much more rigorous workout routine, ran to the library to finish his homework as fast as he possibly could, then came home sore and mentally drained only to spend the rest of his evening diligently watching educational AVs and fingering himself. He’d tried it once or twice before, so it wasn’t like the concept was totally unfamiliar, but doing it with a specific, concrete end goal in mind made his rehearsals both more achievable (Reo was nothing if not goal-motivated) and more intimidating. He felt a real sense of accomplishment, for instance, when he was able to get in three fingers three days in a row, but then he thought about the actual size of what he’d be trying to fit that weekend—Nagi wasn’t, like, huge or anything, but hell, the guy was 190 cm tall, there were some physical realities you just couldn’t avoid—and felt like a hiker trying to climb Fuji with nothing but a pair of old Converse. But it was for Nagi, for his dream, so he could do it. He could.
“I can,” he found himself reiterating to Nagi that afternoon, after he’d sent Ba-ya on an impossible errand across the city and set out two different types of lube (because as if there was a world where he was going to make Nagi wear a condom) and dimmed the track lighting and changed his sheets and spent ninety minutes in the bathroom prepping himself both physically and mentally before Nagi came over. “I really can, okay? Just let me get used to it for a minute.” Nagi had two inches inside him. He was bent over, palms sweating, shaking a little from the stretch and the pain and the somehow totally alien feeling in his body. Probably he should have gotten a toy or something to practice with, but he’d had some dumb stubborn idea that he needed Nagi’s to be the first dick-shaped thing he ever put inside himself, and anyway the credit card statements all went to his parents, who definitely would have noticed an adult store charge and lectured him aggressively about responsibility and safe sex. His dad had always had an outsized fear of Reo knocking up some girl and her trying to claim some of the Mikage fortune for a bastard kid. Pretty funny, really. If they only knew.
Thinking about his dad motivated him anew, and he took a deep breath in—through his nose like the websites said—and pushed himself back a little more as he breathed out. It was okay. He was going to do it, he really was. “Nagi,” he said, his voice pinched. “Wet it some more, okay?”
“Yes, boss.” Snap. Squirt. Smack. “Feels really good, Reo,” he said, a little distantly. “Is it okay for you? Does it hurt a lot?”
“It’s not that bad,” Reo lied. “Just weird.”
“Mm.”
“Could you—talk to me a little?” Reo forced out as Nagi edged in another centimeter. “Tell me how it feels for you? I like that.”
“Yeah, shit, Reo, it’s awesome.” Nagi was sliding his hand up and down Reo’s back as he talked. “It’s so tight around me…feels so good…you’re so cool, Reo…” Another stretch, he felt so bizarrely full, like someone was inflating him from the inside. It’s Nagi, he kept trying to tell his body. He’s yours. He belongs here. “Ah,” Nagi said above him, “it’s so hot…I feel like you’re gonna swallow me…”
When he finally pushed himself all the way in, Reo buried his burning face in his pillow and said, out loud, his voice muffled beyond comprehension, “I love you. I love you.” It was reminder and thanks at once. He’d do anything for Nagi. It was just what he wanted, in a way, once he acclimated to the weirdbadmaybegood sensation; the pain was only proof of his devotion, to Nagi and to his dream, and the strange pangs of awful pleasure that he felt when Nagi started to thrust deep inside him were all the better for how hard-won they were, just like he was certain all their triumphant soccer victories together would one day be. And when he felt Nagi come hot and thick inside him it really did all feel worth it. So much for not getting pregnant, he thought deliriously. Then: God, I wish.
“You wouldn’t do this stuff with any of the other guys here, would you?” Nagi asked him in the bathroom the next night, the day Reo had lost and been shunted down to the two-man floor. He didn’t ask where Nagi and Isagi were. He didn’t even know whether they were still on the same team, not that it made a difference to his hatred of the shrimp. Or of Nagi. He’d let Nagi fuck him that night, because he might be getting eliminated after the next match, might never see Nagi again before he got named Japan’s greatest teenage striker or whatever the fuck. Because he wanted to feel Nagi inside him one last time before that happened. Because nothing mattered anymore. Because he still loved Nagi as much as he hated him—far more, really—and it made him hate himself most of all.
“When would I even get the time?” Reo rolled his eyes at Nagi where he sat on the floor. He’d had to scrub out his sleep shirt under the faucet—he came practically the moment Nagi put it in after five minutes of careful fingering, and by the time they were finished it had congealed and gotten the fabric all gross. For some reason, Nagi had chosen to wait down here with him while it dried. “You know,” he added bitchily, “I am still playing a little soccer in here without you.”
“I know.” Nagi ruffled up his own messy hair and looked at his feet. “Just asking...”
“Whatever,” mumbled Reo, and tipped his head back until it thumped against the wall behind him. He stared at the spiky metal claws of the fire sprinkler on the ceiling and didn’t talk.
“Hey, Reo,” said Nagi after a minute. “You know you were my first kiss, right?”
Reo closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“I remember you talking about some other guy before,” Nagi said. “That you did stuff with. What was he like?”
Reo opened his eyes again and turned to look at Nagi, who was sitting cross-legged, hunched over, fiddling with a loose thread on the hem of his t-shirt. “There was nothing interesting about him,” he said, his voice edged with anger. “He was a selfish asshole who used me for sex.” He bit his lip before he could add, “just like you,” but the implication was clear, he figured. “Why are you asking about that?”
Nagi didn’t answer. Reo chewed on his lip some more. He really wished Nagi hadn’t made him think about Yoshihara, though in truth he’d been on Reo’s mind more than he liked to admit ever since Nagi’s betrayal. Their trysts of the past week had given him a taste of the same lonely, sick feeling that used to overwhelm him every time he sat in the car on the way back from seeing Yoshihara, and yet, just like back then, he forged on anyway, ignoring all his body’s protests and objections. Like he hadn’t learned a thing.
“I don’t like it,” Nagi said then. “I don’t like thinking about you and some guy. It pisses me off.”
Fucking hell. Reo bent over where he sat, pressing his fingers into his eyes hard until they danced with white spots. For Nagi to say something like that now, possessive and sentimental in ways Reo would have given an arm to hear a month ago, now after it was so far past too late—and about a part of Reo’s life he didn’t have the first clue about—they were crowding his head now, words and images and sense memories he hadn’t thought of in years. Yoshihara staring at him from across the room at a Mikage company party as Reo flirted desultorily with some giggly middle-schooler. You’re really pretty for a boy, you know. Reo sending him a selfie with his hair down and shirt off, as requested, then waiting three unbearably tense hours for a two-word response. You only just finished year ten, right? So you should probably call me senpai. Reo gagging on the fingers Yoshihara was pushing in and out of his throat, trying to train him to give his first blowjob. What do you think your dad would say if he knew you liked this kind of stuff? Yoshihara teaching him the thigh-fucking thing, Reo’s skin red and painfully chafed between his legs the next day when he put on his underwear. You’re so easy, Mikage-kun, if only you were really a girl, you’d be perfect. So easy. So, so easy. It hadn’t occurred to him before Yoshihara said it that there was another way he could even be. Yoshihara asked, and Reo, empty little Reo, who’d never been able to imagine anything else someone might love him for, just gave him what he wanted. And now look where that had gotten him.
“Okay,” Reo finally told him. “Well, too bad. How do you think it makes me feel, thinking about you and Isagi together all fucking day? Why should I give a fuck about how you feel? I don’t remember getting that kind of courtesy from you.”
“What?” Nagi looked at him with his blank doe eyes. “What does Isagi have to do with it? We’re not even on the same team anymore.”
“So what?” Reo stood up, covered his bare chest protectively with both arms. “You still gave me up for him. You threw me away. So you don’t get to be jealous.”
“But that’s different,” said Nagi. He sounded genuinely confused. “I’m trying to get better at soccer, that’s why I went with Isagi, I didn’t want us to stop being friends. I keep trying to tell you that.”
“Whatever.” Reo went to grab his still-wet shirt from where it hung on the sink. “Figure it out yourself, Nagi. I’m done.”
“Screw you.” Reo turned in surprise when he heard it to see Nagi standing up, glaring at him. “I get it now, okay? I just really thought you were cooler than that.”
“Cooler than what?”
“I thought you actually wanted me to be the best,” Nagi said. “Like you told me. But you don’t care. You just want me to be the best with you, right? If it’s just for me, it doesn’t matter. Everything’s all about Reo.”
“About me?” Reo heard himself laugh, a grating, hysterical sound. “After I spent the last six months coaching you, feeding you, carrying you around, fucking blowing you—”
“Yeah, for what?” Nagi interrupted him. “I thought you actually wanted to do that stuff, but you just wanted me to owe you something, right? So I couldn’t leave you?”
“If that’s what I was doing, I guess it didn’t work very well.” Reo’s throat felt hot. “Because you left.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I thought there was something else between us besides fucking soccer,” said Nagi. “Like maybe you actually liked me or something. But I guess not.” He turned toward the door, but Reo grabbed him before he could move, pulling his t-shirt in a crazed fist.
“I loved you,” he said, feeling his face burn and his voice crack as he spat the words at Nagi. “I love you. You were the one who used me, you were the one who never cared. I gave you everything, everything I possibly could and it still wasn’t enough.” He was crying now, though he registered the fact only dimly, the sensation of warm tears on his skin once they’d already been shed. Nagi was staring at him, those sweet slow bug eyes now hard and shut off like Reo had never seen them. “Something between us.” He couldn’t accept it, couldn’t handle the idea that his love might not have been as unrequited as he’d always believed—not now, after he’d already squandered it. He knew he was losing Nagi again, and somehow impossibly even more finally than the last time, and knew the only way he could stop it was to let him go—prove his love, tell Nagi he could play with whoever he wanted, show him that Reo would accept him no matter what. But he couldn’t. Even if it really was true, even if there was a tiny abject voice in his heart that told him that he could give it all up for Nagi, Nagi was the only thing he really needed—he couldn’t. It was too humiliating, and he had too much pride, and his love for Nagi wasn’t pure like that, never had been. Nagi was right: Reo was selfish. He didn’t deserve his love. But he wanted it anyway.
“I don’t get you, Reo,” Nagi said quietly. “I don’t get why it has to be like this.”
“Because of you.” Reo wiped his wet nose, then had to squeeze his eyes shut painfully tight to stifle the frantic sob he could feel rising in his chest. “You don’t love me,” he whispered, more to himself than to Nagi, trying desperately to convince himself of something he now knew he’d never truly believe again. “You never loved me. You left me. You...”
“Okay, Reo,” said Nagi. “Whatever.”
When he heard the door shut, Reo knew he was alone in there once again, as he’d been so many times over the past five days. Somehow this time was the worst.