Chapter Text
When Aida Riko was eight years old she successfully constructed a house of cards.
Her father had given her the deck to keep her occupied as he studied, glancing over at her every so often and shaking his head in amusement as the cards slipped and slid and collapsed, defying her stub-fingered efforts. About half an hour later he received a telephone call, and when he looked back she had three stories built and was placing the final pair, her tongue trapped between her teeth.
He stared at her, mouth slightly agape, as she sat back from her work. Riko remembered the look on his face. It was the look she cherished most, sought after in all things: pure, unadulterated pride.
She also remembered the look on his face when she very deliberately reached out and tipped the whole thing over.
He watched her for another minute, and then got up and knelt next to her. “Why’d you do that?” he asked in a tone adults never used with her, like he was honestly interested in her answer.
She shrugged. “Crooked,” she said. “Was gonna fall.”
He laughed at her, running a hand through his hair in rueful amazement. “Precious girl,” he said, “you’re going to be your own worst enemy, one day.”
+
The first time Kiyoshi kissed her, she thought, No. No, it’s too soon. No, it’s too soon, and too good.
No one met their soulmate in high school. Barely anyone even met their soulmate in college. Soulmates were adults, people who were people independently from one another but were better people together, not. Not her, half-formed, still working out how to dress, how to live, how to move in the world.
She was supposed to have a few trial runs, practice games, training camps—boys who were too rough with her, or not rough enough, boys who didn’t understand the way she worked, boys who took her for granted, boys who wasted her time. Boys who didn’t kiss her like this, certain and uncertain at once, perfect and wide-mouthed and warm.
No, she wanted to tell him when he pulled back, his hands still curled gentle and questioning at her throat. No.
“Riko?” he asked softly. “What’s wrong?”
You’re too early, she thought, but leaned in to kiss him back anyway, and his mouth curled into a smile against hers. You’re too early, and now it’s going to have to end.
+
She was right, of course, but even she had to admit that the way it ended surprised her.
She looked at Kiyoshi over the rims of her glasses. They were hanging out at his place—there was no way her father would allow Kiyoshi anywhere near her own bedroom as a friend, doubly so if he’d known they were dating—and she was sitting at his desk, but turned to face him, her notebook at her elbow, trying to draw up some kind of strategy for their second real week of practice.
“He’s really got you worked up,” she said, watching Kiyoshi pace.
He made a face at her—eyes squinted, his mouth rueful and wry. “Is it so obvious?”
She pressed her lips together, amused. “You haven’t stopped talking about him for the last hour and a half.”
“Ahhh,” said Kiyoshi, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry, he just—“
He made a wordless gesture that Riko was beginning to associate very strongly with their new team member. They were all new team members, really, considering they’d just started the club itself, but. There was something a different kind of new about Hyuuga Junpei.
“It’s okay,” she reassured him, reaching out to him with her legs. He stepped obediently between them and she used her toes to nudge him close, looking up at him but also past him, thinking of Hyuuga. “I’m intrigued, too.”
Kiyoshi looked down at her, eyebrows raised. “Oh?”
She nodded. “I’ve never seen you play that well with anyone, for one thing.”
He looked confused, opened his mouth to protest, but she fixed him with a look. “The Kings were different,” she said firmly. “I know it and so do you. You had strategy worked out, you knew each other, but strategy and knowledge aren’t the only elements to good basketball.” She softened her voice. “If they were, you would have gone to Rakuzan with the rest of them.”
Kiyoshi’s eyes slid past her face. “Except Hanamiya.”
She gave him a little nod. They didn’t really talk about Hanamiya, and she was content to keep it that way—there was some pain that healed best left alone; bruises and broken bones, rather than wounds to be sewn shut by needle-point words. “Except Hanamiya.”
He rolled his neck, looking contemplative. “You might be right.”
She grinned at him. “You know better.”
He laughed and bent to kiss her. “You are right,” he corrected himself. “In this, as in all things.”
She hummed into his kiss, and when she pulled back again—a little breathless, because he was really really good at that—she said, “So I think you should start playing with him one-on-one.”
KIyoshi blinked at her. “I don’t think he’d want to, he basically hates me.”
Riko—doubted that, had seen enough of Hyuuga’s glares to comfortably categorize them as overcompensation, she just wasn’t sure yet what he was compensating for. “Rivalry is a powerful motivator,” she pointed out, instead of giving voice to anything else, yet. “Besides, no one could hate you for long.”
He went red and dropped his head against her shoulder, mumbling something soft and incoherent, and she buried her hands in his hair and nearly forgot to wait for the other shoe to drop.
+
It was the wrong metaphor, really. Cliches rarely hold perfectly true, and if this was a shoe dropping it was dropping in very low gravity, because she watched it all the way down.
She watched Kiyoshi come off the court after his sunset games with Hyuuga sweating and exhausted and radiating a kind of contentment she’d never seen on him. She watched the way his eyes followed Hyuuga as he went through his drills, watched the way his gaze settled on him in class, watched the way he reacted to Hyuuga’s snapped insults and weightless barbs like a ship gathering speed from tempestuous winds—taking a calm, quiet kind of strength from them, a calm, quiet kind of resolve. Taking them as they were meant, not as they were said. She watched them play each other, and then watched them play together. Watched Hyuuga’s bright-eyed admiration and smug satisfaction and the genuine respect in the hand he held out to Kiyoshi the first time they won a game, watched Kiyoshi’s cheeks heat when he clasped it, with weariness and his own satisfaction and—something else.
She knew that blush, knew how it felt against her fingertips, against her lips.
So when Kiyoshi stepped up to her one day after practice, uncertain in his own skin in a way that he hadn’t been with her in months, when he said, “Riko, I—I think I—“, well. It was barely an impact at all.
“I know,” she said, and smiled the smile she’d been practicing for days. Slid a hand up his jaw, tried to figure out how to move her fingers right. “I—I know.”
He stared at her. “What do I do? I love you so much.”
That hit her hard. That she hadn’t planned for. He’d never said it before—neither of them had, and it wasn’t like she doubted it was true but to hear it now, in this context, like the breath before the but, it. She swallowed, and then had to swallow again, and his face crumpled. He went to his knees in front of her, arms wrapped tight around her waist, pressed his face against her stomach.
Riko tilted her head back to stare at the sky, her hands settling on top of his head. “I love you, too,” she said, so softly she didn’t know if he even heard.
+
She expected—somewhere in the back of her head—to start resenting Hyuuga. He was, after all, very slowly stealing her boyfriend out from under her nose. But she couldn’t; she got mad at him, mostly because he seemed absolutely determined to get under her skin; she even got bitter, at times. But resentment required that he was somehow getting something he didn’t deserve, and she couldn’t quite convince herself that was true.
Part of it was that he tried so hard; there were few things in the world Riko respected more than pure, simple effort, and Hyuuga worked harder than anyone she’d ever seen. At basketball—but at life, too, at school and at being someone his team could admire. He had a lot of almost old-fashioned ideals of honor and competition and self-sacrifice, cobbled together from the pages of every kind of literature on historical heroes and warriors that he could lay his hands on, but instead of making him stiff and traditional it just made him—better. A better man, a better human, sarcastic and caustic and defensive and good.
Part of it was how happy he made Kiyoshi. Not always—most of the time he made him some mix of bewildered, self-conscious, and extraordinarily competitive—but sometimes she saw in him an easy, striving sort of joy, the joy of working hard at something you loved and having someone meet you there, egg you on, demand more from you.
It woke an answering happiness in her, a kind of displaced happiness, fierce and proud and wholly unselfish, the same kind of happiness that seeing her team play well made her feel, only a little more intimate, closer to her heart. Like she was a conductor, watching her soloists wind in and out of one another’s melodies, creating something together that she could only imagine in the abstract but was still somehow–her song, played through their instruments.
And a part of it was that Hyuuga was—increasingly and in a very real way—her best friend.
She wasn’t really sure how it happened, and she wasn’t even sure he would classify her that way—Izuki had her beat in terms of length of friendship, after all, and friendships between dudes were something she had no interest in competing with. But he fell in at her side very naturally, and it always gave her a little thrill of satisfaction, the certainty that he had her back. Kiyoshi did too, of course, but where Kiyoshi’s support was a constant silent rock she could lean against when she needed it, Hyuuga’s support was an arrow in her quiver when she thought she had none. He filled her silences, silenced her fears. He was in all ways the captain to her coach, and she found—suddenly and with no shift in emotion—that she loved him for it.
That was fine; she’d loved a lot of people for a lot of things. It wasn’t an active or a demanding love, it didn’t itch her under her skin like her initial crush on Teppei. It just sometimes nudged her when she wasn’t looking, pushed a sadness into her mouth that shouldn’t be there. And the jealousy she felt when she watched him and Kiyoshi on the court—stuck up under her ribs at first as jealousy that Hyuuga was fulfilling something she couldn’t for her boyfriend—carved its aching path to her heart itself, transformed now into jealousy that they were fulfilling something she couldn’t for each other.
“I have something to say,” she said to Kiyoshi, sitting on a bench in the park under distant stars, “but—I feel stupid about it, like. Like I’m hopping on some sort of bandwagon.”
Kiyoshi reached out, pulled her against his side. “You’ve never been on a bandwagon in your life,” he said steadily, but there was a fierce note of curiosity to his voice. “I don’t think you’ll start now.”
Riko licked her lips. “I—get it. How you feel about Hyuuga.”
He shifted, a little. “Oh,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t understand. “That’s good, right—“
“No,” she said quickly, turned to look at him. “I mean I get it, I—I feel it.”
“Oh,” he said again, entirely differently, and she saw a lot of things in his eyes—understanding, a stab of envy, and finally pure, almost despairing amusement. He grinned wide at her. “Aren’t we a pair,” he said softly. “I should’ve known you’d wise up someday.”
She made a face at him, but it slipped into a smile. Tension that she hadn’t even been aware of drained out of her, and she started laughing too fast, her chest fluttering with relief and nervousness. He tilted their foreheads together, ran blunt fingertips across the skin under her ear. “So,” he said, his breath across her lips, “what do we do?”
She kissed him, once, because it always helped her think. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll run some recon. We can go from there.”
+
She let her feet carry her to the edge of the court next to Izuki, her clipboard at her chest. “Izuki-kun,” she said, “can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” said Izuki, and then he grinned at her. “Wait, sorry, that’s my job.” He waited, and then made a little shooting-a-basketball movement with his hands, in case she didn’t get it.
She rolled her eyes, using the familiar fond exasperation to build up her armor a little, and then she said, quickly and quietly, “Hyuuga, does he—like boys? At all?”
Izuki stared at her, his satisfaction with his pun fading into total surprise. “That’s a pretty personal question,” he said, and for once she could tell nothing at all from his face or his voice. “Why?”
“I want to order him strippers for his birthday, and I know I would have more fun if there was a little variety,” she said dryly, watching his eyes. Hyuuga’s birthday wasn’t for another six months—to name one of a dozen problems with that statement—but she hoped the joke would set him at ease, remind him who he was talking to. She tried to beam her good intentions directly into his brain.
Izuki shifted on his feet a little. “I don’t really think that’s a question you should be asking me,” he said. “You want to know, you should ask him.”
Riko bit her lip and turned back to watch the players on the court, her shoulders dropping. It had been worth a shot, at least.
“If you were to ask me, I definitely wouldn’t be able to give you a straight answer,” Izuki said, after a minute.
It took her a second to process, and then she laughed, startled, and he looked slyly sideways at her. “God,” she breathed. “That one was actually pretty good.”
“They’re all good!” Izuki protested, and Riko blew her whistle to signal practice’s end.
+
“So,” she said to Teppei, later, her legs across his on his couch. “You know I love a good competition, but it’s important that this not turn into that. We make no moves. We make no grand romantic gestures. We say nothing. It has to be a free choice, freely made. Okay?”
Teppei nodded, his eyes distant. It seemed like it took effort for him to look at her again, and when he did there was a heartbreak in his eyes that stopped her cold. “Do we actually have to break up?” he asked, his voice rough.
She clambered forward to straddle his hips instead, perching on his lap, and his huge hands settled at her waist. She tucked her thumbs under his jaw to tilt his head upward. “Don’t think about it as breaking up,” she said, her own voice a little thick. “It’s just—a pause, like. We don’t know if he’ll choose either of us, maybe in six months we’ll both be heartbroken and finding solace in each others’ arms.” She smiled, crooked. “Maybe this is just half-time.”
He shook his head. “Nowhere near,” he said, and drew lines up her spine. “End of the first quarter at most, and even that sounds scary.” His hands were everywhere, skimming across her biceps, her waist, up under her shirt, and she bit her lip, hard. “Riko,” he breathed, his eyes dropping to her mouth and then returning to her eyes, his expression blisteringly sincere, “you have to know, this is the only reason that I would ever—“
No it isn’t, Riko thought, but his fingers were skimming up her ribs and she leaned forward to lick into his mouth instead, her hands going back to undo the hooks on her bra, shaking the loose straps down her arms a little so he could push his hands up beneath it. He groaned, brushing his knuckles over her nipples and his nose against her throat, and Riko laughed a shaky, crazy laugh against his ear. “Enjoy,” she said, “this is one thing I’ve got that Hyuuga doesn’t.”
Teppei grinned and kissed her collarbone. “I’ll miss them,” he said, and then, more seriously, “I’ll miss you.”
Riko tangled her fingers tight in his hair. “You’ll still have me,” she said, because that much was true. “Always.”
+
They didn’t really act differently around each other at school, but Riko could tell Hyuuga at least knew something was off. They arrived separately, for one thing, and Kiyoshi didn’t lean in to brush a kiss across her cheek before homeroom like he had every day for months. They didn’t linger for each other after all their classes, at least not as much, and Hyuuga—started to hover, looked like some kind of confused blond sheepdog, his gaze flickering between them like he expected one or both of them to burst into tears.
“Stop that,” she said, smacking him lightly in the arm as he checked up on her for the fourth time, a few days after they put their plan into action. “We’re okay.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” he muttered, rubbing his arm like she’d punched him much harder than she had.
She just gave him a look, unimpressed, and he looked away. “Okay—together?” he asked, voice abrupt.
She took a breath, watching his profile. “Right now,” she said carefully, “okay apart.”
He turned back toward her, staring. For a long moment she thought he would ask her why, and she tried to calmly choose one of the five or six answers running through her head—we just need some space, we feel like we’ve run our course, I want to focus more on school, Teppei’s in love with you and so am I—tried to school her expression into something not-panicked; but he just furrowed his brow and said, “I’m sorry.”
She almost laughed. “Don’t be,” she said, and ignored the fact that she has to refer to it, even in the silence of her own head, as putting their plan into action and not breaking up.
+
The day Hyuuga cut and dyed his hair back to black was was one of the most disorienting of Riko’s life.
It—did things to his face, or undid the things that his long, blond hair had done to it; suddenly his jaw was sharp and his cheekbones were high and his eyes—which she’d labeled previously as a kind of muddled brown or grey—were revealed as green, not bright green but a gorgeous kind of grey-green like seaglass, like the sea itself. She ran into him on the way to school and barely recognized him—didn’t, from behind; didn’t until he called out to her as she passed and then raised a hand in slightly annoyed confusion when she looked back at him.
She blinked, stared. “Hyuuga…kun?”
He tugged at a bit of his hair, grimacing. “God, does it really look that weird?”
She shook her head and waited for him, glad for the opportunity to just stare. “Just unexpected,” she said. “When did you get it done?”
“Did most of it myself last night,” he admitted. “Except the back, which my dad did—he’s a barber.”
“Really? It looks really good. You should do mine, sometime.” She didn’t think too hard about that, about how it would feel, having his attention on her in such a targeted way for so long.
Hyuuga blinked at her. “Yeah,” he said, “okay.”
SOS, she texted Teppei, and a blurry but still representative pic she’d snapped while pretending to take a selfie. SOS!!!!
oh god, he texted back. thanks for the warning
Even with it, though, she saw it hit him when they walked into class. His eyes widened, flickered to her in pain for a second, and then slid inexorably back to Hyuuga.
Who—noticing nothing—scowled at him, the expression a familiar one even if it had leveled up several times in attractiveness. “What?”
Kiyoshi closed his mouth. “Your hair looks good,” he said, with remarkable self-restraint.
Riko had some pretty good restraint herself, or she would have burst out laughing.
+
She approached the basketball court slowly. They’d never been so formal as to–draw lines, or anything, but they still each had, like, zones of non-interference. She didn’t linger to watch their sunset games anymore; Kiyoshi didn’t meet her on her walk to school, or her walk home. Little bubbles of privacy with Hyuuga in case—well. In case.
Play seemed to be paused. Kiyoshi had the basketball tucked under one arm, his other hand at his face, and Hyuuga was stepped up into his space, staring up at him. She blinked. There was something off—and then Kiyoshi lowered his hand and she realized what it was. Hyuuga wasn’t wearing his glasses; instead, they were perched on Kiyoshi’s nose, slipping down a little in his sweat.
She bit her lip, her heart aching. He used to steal hers, too, when she was paying too little attention to him and too much to her work, used to hold them way up above her head so she had to wrap her arms around his neck and hoist her legs up around his waist to be able to reach them, and by then, well. The distraction had been successful.
She swallowed against the lump in her throat. It was worth it, she told herself, looking at Kiyoshi’s warm, warm eyes behind Hyuuga’s frames. It was worth it, if it meant he looked like that.
And—Hyuuga was looking back, and maybe it was because he was bare-faced but his eyes looked wide, his expression a little stunned. His hands were loose at his sides and—they’d never drawn lines but she should still step off because what if this was—but—it was worth it, it was, but in this moment Riko still wasn’t quite ready to have to let go.
“Cute,” she called, and Kiyoshi looked at her, his smile shifting, and she was glad—glad she could tell the difference between his Hyuuga-smile and his Riko-smile, glad she didn’t have to watch him give hers to anyone else, and glad that he didn’t seem disappointed that she’d interrupted. She smiled back at him, crossing the court toward them.
Hyuuga—maybe counting on Kiyoshi being distracted by her, as if he could be with Hyuuga so close—made a grab at Kiyoshi’s face.
Kiyoshi dodged him easily, a tiny stutter to his movements, and Riko wondered if he was thinking about what she’d been thinking about, wondered if he was wondering what would happen if he lifted the glasses up and away, held them up high for Hyuuga to try for.
“Well,” Kiyoshi said, and judging by the little tinge of pink to his cheeks, he had been. “I’ll be going now.” He laid a hand on Riko’s shoulder as he passed, a little touch like the passing of a baton. “See you tomorrow, you two.”
Hyuuga stiffened. “Oi—“
“Teppei,” Riko said calmly.
Kiyoshi half-turned to her, his profile picked out in the fading light. “Hm?” he asked, as if he had no idea that Hyuuga’s glasses were still on his face.
Riko half expected him to dodge her, as well, when she reached up, but he didn’t, just held her eyes and let her slide Hyuuga’s glasses off his nose. Despite herself, she—lingered; he always looked so good like this, coming down from the game, all his muscles picked out sharp with the effort of setting himself against Hyuuga, his breath still a little quickened, his heart beating hard in his chest.
She wanted to tell him so. She wanted to kiss him. She did neither.
“Oh,” said Kiyoshi, and then let out a little self-deprecating chuckle. “I forgot!”
Hyuuga made a little strangled noise. “You—no, you did not,” he muttered, but Riko didn’t look at him—not yet.
Kiyoshi turned away from her—releasing her—and left, waving a deceptively lazy hand over his head. “See you!”
Riko shook her head, watching him go. “What an idiot.”
She looked down at the glasses in her hands, still not quite able to look at Hyuuga, not quite shifted from one kind of longing to another. Without really thinking about it, she cleaned Hyuuga’s glasses off on her skirt and then slid them onto her own face. She blinked. They made her vision a little weird and warped, but for the most part she could see perfectly fine.
“Oh?” she said. “You’re not very blind, Hyuuga-kun.” She turned to look at him. “Have you ever thought about contacts? Lots of athletes wear them.”
Hyuuga stared at her, and maybe it was just because his face was more open without the glasses because he still looked kind of stunned. It wasn’t a bad look on him. She resolved to try and take him by surprise more often.
“Lots of athletes have money,” he muttered.
She shook her head at him, couldn’t help but tease: “So would you, if you didn’t waste it all on stupid historical figurines. Honestly, that’s why I thought you’d be blind as a bat, you’re such an otaku—“
“I am not,” he snapped, glaring at her, and his eyes were sharp and bright and she—she never would have said there was anything missing from her relationship with Teppei but he didn’t react to her like this, didn’t rise to her bait, and having someone who did was thrilling in a completely different way than anything she’d felt before.
She grinned at him and relented, slipping the glasses from her face. “It’s a shame,” she said, holding them out to him. “You look good like this.”
As soon as she said it she felt guilty—she wasn’t supposed to compliment him, no matter how tempting it was, wasn’t supposed to do anything at all that might make him suspect. He took back his glasses and she stepped past him, swinging her school bag up and over her shoulder, playing it off as quickly as she could. “Shall we?”
Sunset was over; Teppei’s hour had ended, and this was hers and Hyuuga, theirs, their walk from the court to her door. The world was growing darker, a little cooler, slipping gold to blue like the lights on the stage of the world were fading, and Riko felt herself relax.
She loved routine, loved setting herself out on a path she understood, because it left her free to think, to plan even further ahead, like someone laying out the tracks in front of a toy train—there would, of course, always be things she didn’t expect, but this way she could see at least some of them coming, prevent herself from derailing as best she could.
She loved that she could set out toward her house and know that he would follow, settling quiet and content a few paces behind, there if she needed him the same way she was there if he needed her.
Sometimes she thought she didn’t even want to date him. Sometimes this kind of casual coexistence, this shared, breathing presence in the cooling night air, was all she could ever ask for from anyone.
“Hey,” Hyuuga said, and she slowed her pace a little so they were truly side by side, glancing over at him. He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, his face a little curious, a little concerned. “Why’d you tell Kiyoshi not to jump?”
Riko raised her eyebrows. “He told you?”
Hyuuga ran a hand through his hair. He was a kind of effortlessly attractive that set Riko’s teeth on edge, especially because it was still so new; being attracted to someone first and then getting to know them was one thing, that was fine because you got to admire from afar for a while, get used to the idea before you were confronted with it all the time. But suddenly finding someone you already care about, someone you already love, as attractive as she found Hyuuga was—maddening.
“I was able to keep up with him today,” he said, his voice self-deprecating, and it was so—antithetical to all the compliments she wanted to give him that she almost laughed. “I shouldn’t have been.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Riko chided. “There’s a reason you two make a good team.”
Hyuuga shrugged. “Still.”
Riko sighed and let it go, turning her mind to actually answering his question. She didn’t want him to worry, but—this was a weight she’d been bearing for weeks now, and whatever he felt for her Hyuuga had at least made it very clear that his metaphorical shoulders were just as strong and willing as his physical ones.
“He’s been favoring one of his legs,” she said. “He hasn’t said anything, but.” She bit her lip. “I know him, and if I asked he’d just deny it, so. Easier just to tell him to stop jumping until I know more about what’s wrong.”
She saw Hyuuga’s throat bob as he swallowed. “I didn’t notice,” he admitted, like it was a fault in himself.
Riko smiled sideways at him. “Of course you didn’t,” she said. “He’s been hiding it from you in particular.” She stretched upward, Hyuuga’s gaze a little warm on her skin. “Plus, noticing’s my job.”
“He’s okay, though, right?” Hyuuga asked.
She nodded. “It might be that we have to switch up his training regimen—maybe he’s just putting too much pressure on one side of his body. I don’t know yet. But for now, I told him to take it easy.” She bumped Hyuuga with a shoulder, knowing he must hate playing with Kiyoshi at anything but full capacity. “Sorry.”
Hyuuga shook his head with a scowl, like she’d said something stupid. “We can stop playing one-on-one—“
“No,” said Riko immediately. Not just because Kiyoshi would hate it, and it would cut into his zone of personal time with Hyuuga, but because tactically, it didn’t make any sense.
Hyuuga raised his eyebrows at her, and she looked steadily back. She wasn’t supposed to say anything about herself, but if the look Hyuuga had given Kiyoshi on the court was anything to go by, she might get somewhere dropping little hints for the opposition. “You haven’t noticed?” she asked. “I guess you wouldn’t.”
“Notice what?” Hyuuga asked, annoyed.
“You never saw him play in middle school,” she said. “He was good—obviously, he was amazing. But now he’s better.”
Hyuuga blinked. “But surely that’s you.”
Riko grinned at him, warmed by the compliment, by the unhesitating, unquestioning way that it was delivered. “I’m not saying I won’t take any credit,” she admitted. “But he’s not just coached better, he plays better. Because he plays with you.” She felt her smile soften, knew that she was smiling her Teppei-smile, wondered if Hyuuga did, too, if he knew her smiles the way she knew Kiyoshi’s.
Of course not. Why would he?
“Our Iron Heart’s not so Iron after all,” she continued. “When he’s playing with good players, he’s great. But when he’s playing with people he likes?” She shook her head, watching his face. “He’s unbelievable.”
Hyuuga licked his lips. It was hard to tell in the dusk, but she thought—with a little jolt that was half victory and half despair—that he was blushing. “He’d still be playing with people he liked,” he protested, “Izuki and everyone…”
She wanted to—shake him by the shoulders. She’d said he wasn’t blind but he really, definitely was, if he thought the way Kiyoshi looked at him was anything like the way he looked at Izuki or the others. She resisted the urge to kick him in the ankles and shout he loves you he loves you he loves you, barely, restrained herself to a short, “You’re very stupid, you know.”
He bristled. Before he could protest—before she could do anything stupider, anything else outside of her rail-road plan—she reached up and carded her fingers through his hair, just once, nervous and self-indulgent. “Goodnight,” she said, and fled into her house.
She closed her door behind her and leaned against it, letting her strength drain out through her feet.
Are you okay? she texted Kiyoshi, because her own heart wouldn’t settle down. Looked pretty tense out there today.
She’d just pulled off her shoes and flopped down on her bed when he texted her back, I wanted to kiss him so badly.
Riko bit her lip, thought about the glimpse of Hyuuga’s face she’d caught in the wake of her ruffling his hair. Thought of his maybe-blush in the dusk. Yeah, she texted back.
A few minutes later: wanted to kiss you, too.
She squeezed her eyes closed.
Yeah.
+
Sometimes the things that derailed her were total surprises. Things entirely outside of her control; acts of weather or of God, the actions of people she didn’t know. That was frustrating, but made it easer to adjust, after. Made it easier to clear the area and start again.
But sometimes—sometimes the things that pulled her up short were things she should have seen, or things she did see, with a part of her that she refused to listen to or interpret into action.
She’d seen, months ago, the way Teppei was favoring his knee. She’d seen him ignore it, push on anyway, had trusted him—stupid, stupid—to know his own limits. Trusted him—stupid, stupid!—not to injure himself. Because normally he would. Normally, he was smart enough with his body not to put it at risk.
Normally, he wasn’t playing against Hanamiya.
She had nothing in the world to blame but herself.
Hyuuga walked her home from the hospital, for which she was—eternally, impossibly grateful, felt like she was operating on no reserves at all, like maybe she was hooked directly into the beat of his heart like life support because her own had stopped dead when Kiyoshi fell.
“This is my fault,” she said blankly, almost more to the silent world than to Hyuuga himself. Her throat ached with guilt and horror, her hands loose, useless at her sides. “I saw him favoring his leg—I should have known, I should have seen it, I should have benched him—“
Hyuuga stopped, grabbing her shoulder to spin her to him. “Hey,” he said, the urgency in his voice forcing her eyes to his. “Hey.”
She blinked at him, and he glared at her. It was—steadying, calming, and his voice was impossibly sure. “This is not your fault.”
She—appreciated it, but she couldn’t believe him. “It’s my job to notice,” she said bitterly, “remember?”
“Mine, too,” he snapped immediately, “both of us, as his coach and his captain, as people who love him.” He swallowed, just a little flicker of throat, like he’d said something he didn’t mean to, and then continued, just as strident, “so unless you’re gonna blame me, too, shut the fuck up.”
People who love him. She stared up at him, at the anxious certainty in his eyes. People who love him. She wanted to cry—not even with sorrow so much as with relief. Somehow, that resettled the earth under her feet the way nothing else could. Of course that’s what they were—united in that, a team, a category of their very own. People who love him the way that they love him. The loves of Kiyoshi Teppei.
“That goes for you, too,” she said, when she could trust her voice again. “So no going home and crying your eyes out, either.”
He blinked at her, slow and sad. “No promises,” he said softly.
She swallowed. “God,” she said. “What if he doesn’t get better—“
“It would’ve killed him to be benched,” he interrupted her. “You know that.” He shook his head, a tiny, horrible smile playing around his mouth. “He still might have done it, because I’ve never seen him refuse you, but it would’ve killed him.”
She dropped her eyes, but he was right.
Hyuuga ducked down a little, lifted her chin with two warm fingers. “He’s going to be fine,” he said, holding her eyes, his own achingly beautiful, filled with pain and worry and reassurance, “and we’re going to win.”
She stared at him, heart pained, because kissing him would be—everything she wanted, and the worst thing she could do. Kissing him would confuse the easy category he’d just put himself in, would obstruct the truth that would make Kiyoshi so, so happy in the wake of this catastrophic blow. Kissing him would show him exactly how much he always helped, exactly how much he always mattered, and would be absolute betrayal of the first boy she ever loved, lying broken and unknowing in a hospital bed.
She felt her lips tremble, but she forced herself to nod and reach up, wrapping her arms tight around him instead of bringing their mouths together, and his arms settled around her, his heart beating fast in his chest. He was warm, warm and solid against her, and she lifted her face to speak in his ear. “You better hope you’re right, because I really don’t think you want to strip naked and confess to the person you like.”
Quickly—a little goodbye, a consolation prize for herself—she pressed a kiss to his cheek, and then she let him go.
It wasn’t until she was all the way inside—breezing through her living room all the way to her bedroom and closing the door behind her—that she let herself cry.
She thought she’d kept it silent, shoving her face into her pillow, but her father heard anyway, tapped on her door before he entered, settled on the end of her bed. “Riko,” he said quietly, and she could tell he was drunk by the little looping, grasping motions his fingers made against her sheets. “What’s wrong?”
She sat up, shifted her shoulders back into something strong. “My friend was hurt,” she said, “in today’s game, and. We lost.” She scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “I lost.” She was talking about basketball, and she wasn’t.
Her father reached out to wipe her tears away, his fingers lingering on her cheeks. “Loss is the worst thing you can feel,” he said, and he was talking about basketball and he wasn’t. “Sometimes I think it could drive a man mad.”
She took his hand from her face, squeezing it briefly, and then giving it back to him. “I’d like to sleep, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” he said, but he stayed, watching her while she put away school bag, tidied her desk, did a thousand small things to keep her mind off the moment Kiyoshi’s face twisted with horrible pain, the moment she knew what she’d done. Finally she cleared her throat, giving him a pointed look, and her father levered himself to his feet, leaning against her doorway a minute like he wanted to say something else.
“Goodnight,” she said firmly.
He sighed. “Goodnight, Riko.”
A few minutes after he left she got up to close the door behind him, leaning her little set of children’s bells against it like a tripwire.
+
When she visited Kiyoshi in the hospital the next afternoon she honestly expected Hyuuga to have already been there, to have already—confessed, but she had heard nothing and surely he would have at least texted her something, or called, or. Anything, surely they weren’t still—
She wrenched the door to Kiyoshi’s room open maybe a little too hard.
He was alone, and sleeping—his brows knit, a little, his wrists slack and turned upward, his hands open. He looked troubled and vulnerable at once in a way that pulled Riko apart, all of her jealousies and preoccupations fading into nothing. She approached him slow, quiet, careful to have her shoes make no noise on the floor.
He was breathing shallow—was he in pain? she should speak to his nurse—and his eyes were flickering behind his eyelids, so she had no qualms at all about leaning down over him and kissing him, slow and soft.
He blinked his eyes open as she pulled away, and then blinked them wider. “Riko—“
She smiled at him, her chest tight. “Hey.”
He raised a hand, cupping her cheek, his eyes confused. “Is this—are you giving up—“
She laughed, pressing her mouth to his palm, because she didn’t have to, she was defeated anyway. “No,” she said, petting his hair away from his face. “No. But—I—“ she swallowed hard. “Can we—just today.” Before I have to give you up forever.
Kiyoshi nodded, his eyes slipping to her lips, and she leaned in again, and, so much more than sitting alone but not alone enough in her bedroom, it felt like coming home.
+
Hyuuga didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything for days. He didn’t say anything for weeks, and Riko sometimes stole a kiss or two from Kiyoshi because any single one of them could be their last but Hyuuga still didn’t say anything and she couldn’t tell why.
Without Kiyoshi’s daily zones of influence—shifted to the days he texted her letting her know that Hyuuga was coming over and how much time she should give them—she and Hyuuga drew closer together, like they were somehow trying to bridge the gap of his absence. They welcomed new first years to the team, incredible, impossible new first years, and for a while her personal longings got subsumed by her work.
Only—sort of, though, because they still visited Kiyoshi at the hospital together and she still saw the way they looked at each other and. And Hyuuga was a part of her work, made himself slowly indispensable to her, and they carved out a new space of their own, a working-space, a strategic space, talked tactics on the way to school in the morning. His hands on hers as she laid out her tracks.
It was dangerous, she knew, but even her self-control wasn’t perfect.
It was both easier and much harder when Kiyoshi came back. Easier to pull away, because she could remind herself why she was doing it, but harder, because seeing them back on the court awoke that distant, conductor happiness in her again even as it made her so, so certain it was only a matter of time.
Once again—always, always—she was right.
She came back from dropping a load of laundry off in the locker rooms to find the first years still playing each other as she’d left them, but Hyuuga was nowhere to be seen, and Kiyoshi was frozen on the sidelines, one hand to his mouth.
She started approaching him, but Izuki slipped up beside her. “Don’t leap to any conclusions,” he warned.
She glanced at him, puzzled. “That’s a bit serious, for you.”
Izuki shrugged, his shoulders loose. “Hyuuga matters,” he said shortly. “But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”
Riko swallowed. “No,” she said. “No.”
Izuki smiled at her. “Good.”
She started toward Kiyoshi again, and he said, “Riko-san.”
She turned, raising her eyebrows, and he watched her with his sharp, knowing eyes. “You matter, too,” he said. “Don’t try to convince yourself otherwise.”
She blinked at him, startled. “I—I won’t,” she said, and then, “thank you.”
Izuki inclined his head. “Just playing my part.”
“With grace,” she said, and smiled at him. “As always.”
She turned to Kiyoshi, who looked down at her, unseeing. “Teppei.”
He swallowed. “Hyuuga kissed me,” he said, blankly, like a child repeating news he’d heard but didn’t understand.
Riko took a long breath, and saw him stutter, swallow, stutter again, and then his breathing matched hers, like she was maybe teaching him how. “Took him long enough,” she managed finally, a little laughing, little miserable, and he reached for her, tangled his fingers in her shirt and tugged.
She stepped forward and he laid his cheek against her forehead, his arms loose around her shoulders. The first-years had stopped playing, now; Kagami was toweling himself off, watching them curiously, but he didn’t seem inclined to approach. His boyfriend was nowhere to be seen.
“He said your name,” Kiyoshi said, still in that same dreamy tone, and Riko’s heartbeat picked up. “He kissed me, and then he said your name, what—what does that mean?”
Riko licked her lips, refusing to let herself hope. “It’s probably just his stupid chivalry complex,” she said, because. It was, Hyuuga was such an idiot about it that he thought him dating Kiyoshi would hurt her. Which. It would, but that was okay, and it wasn’t for the reasons he thought anyway, and—
“Can we go somewhere? Else?” Kiyoshi said, a little pleading. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he comes back.”
Riko nodded, displacing his head a little, and took his hand, leading him away. Izuki watched them go.
Kiyoshi kept their hands linked between them as they walked to his apartment, staring at the ground, and Riko felt—transported back in time, to previous routine, felt like she was retracing the steps of the Kiyoshi and herself that they’d been before Hyuuga arrived on the scene. Felt herself—here at the end of things—walking like a shadow at the heels of a Riko convinced that things would end.
“W, um. Was it a good kiss?” she asked, her voice getting a little lost on the way out of her mouth.
Kiyoshi’s mouth curled, and he shook his head.
Riko was surprised into laughter. “No?!”
Kiyoshi licked his lips, glancing at her sideways, pained and amused and desperate. “I think he tried to think better of it halfway through but had already committed,” he said. “He kind of missed. I—I wanted to grab him and kiss him back but I was too surprised—“
Riko clicked her tongue. “There was a time when you made every shot he ever missed,” she reminded him. “I’m disappointed in you.”
The look he gave her was so full of disbelief and love that she had to look away, her heart squeezing hard in her chest. His hand tightened on hers. “Sorry, coach.”
She bit her lip, hard, tasted iron. “Y-you’ll have to p-practice—“ Her throat closed on her.
He stopped, pulling her into his arms. “Riko,” he said into her hair as she cried. “Riko.”
She gripped the back of his jersey, hard. “Sorry,” she said, and it came out a sob. “I’m sorry—“
“Shut up,” he said, and she laughed, hiccuping against his chest.
She didn’t cry for long—she never did, experienced grief like a series of small squalls rather than a big storm, and she wasn’t even sure it was grief she was experiencing now, because along with all the desperate emotion she was light, unburdened, relaxed. She’d much rather have an answer that didn’t suit her than be living under a constant question.
“It’s not decided,” Kiyoshi said quietly, as if intentionally shaking her foundations, when they’d made it to his apartment. They were both slow to turn on the light, thinking, maybe, that the waiting state they were in was better suited to the afternoon light—the light they shared, neither Kiyoshi’s sunset or Riko’s dawn.
She shrugged. “I think it is,” she said. “I think you won.”
Kiyoshi looked at her sideways. “I thought you said it was important we not make it a competition.”
“We didn’t,” she said steadily. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a prize.”
Kiyoshi looked like he wanted to argue, but they were interrupted by the buzz of the doorbell. Riko looked at Kiyoshi—suddenly ramrod-straight with nervousness—and crossed to the panel herself, pressing the button. “Who is it?”
“Ah, it’s Hyuuga,” said Hyuuga, sounding nervous even over the crackling intercom.
Riko swallowed. “Junpei,” she said, to make it clear how serious this was, and. Because. Because she wanted to. “I’m here too, just so you know.”
“Good,” said Hyuuga, steadier. “I would like to talk to you both, please.”
Riko glanced at Kiyoshi. “I told you,” he said quietly, and she rolled her eyes and pressed the button to let Hyuuga in.
He jogged up the stairs and past her through the door, coming to a halt inside. It suddenly struck her that he probably hadn’t been here much before, and that–felt appropriate somehow, if a little sorrowful, felt right that she be the one to open Kiyoshi’s door to him.
Hyuuga was staring at Kiyoshi, and Kisyohi wouldn’t meet his eyes.
Riko closed the door and come to stand by the end of the couch, watching. Always, always watching.
“I’m sorry,” Hyuuga said.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kiyoshi flinch. She closed her eyes.
“No,” Hyuuga said quickly “I didn’t mean—I’m not sorry for kissing you,” he said firmly, and Riko opened her eyes again. “I have wanted to for a long time and I—I’m glad I did, whatever comes of it.” His eyes flickered to Riko’s and away, like the touch of a match to her hopes, quick and bright. “But it’s more complicated than that and I think you know that.”
Kiyoshi had dropped his head, his cheeks coloring, and Hyuuga stared at him for a moment before facing Riko squarely. “Will you tell me why you broke up?” he asked. “I—asked Kiyoshi, before, but he just said it was mutual and that he didn’t want to tell me without you.”
Riko raised her eyebrows at Kiyoshi, surprised. When had that happened? “You didn’t tell me he asked.”
Kiyoshi looked guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was when I was in the hospital, and you guys were spending so much time together and I thought—“ he stared hard at his knees. “I thought he would just go to you once he knew.”
Riko shook her head. “Stupid,” she accused.
“Hey,” said Hyuuga, annoyed. “C’mon, stop speaking in code, you assholes.”
Riko grinned at him. “Okay,” she said, and then bit her lip, throwing caution to the winds. “Technically, we broke up because of you.”
“Riko!” Kiyoshi said in horror. “That’s so mean, that sounds so awful!”
Hyuuga was staring at her, his face blank. “E-excuse me?”
Riko sighed, gathered herself, adopted her best Coach Aida voice because it was the only way she would get through this without trembling. “We’re in love with you,” she said, bald and straightforward, “both of us. Teppei realized first and he was all horribly guilty about it, but then I started thinking about it too and like.” She let herself look at him, really look, like she never did unless she knew he wasn’t watching. When her eyes got back to his face he licked his lips, and she flushed.
“Yeah,” she continued, almost a cough of embarrassment rather than a word, and she was talking too fast, she knew she was talking too fast but she couldn’t quite figure out how to stop. “So. We really weren’t sure about how you felt about either of us—I mean, Teppei still probably thinks you hate him because he’s a total idiot but I don’t know, like, we fight all the time, and we hang out a lot but maybe it’s just because it’s good for the club to have a united coach and captain or you like me but just as a friend and—“
Hyuuga stepped into her space, curling a long-fingered hand around the back of her neck and leaning down to press his mouth to hers, and it was such a graceful, decisive movement that Riko kept talking against his mouth for a second before it hit her, and then. She, he, he was kissing her, insistent, and she couldn’t breathe right, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back. His lips were soft and clever and there was a tiny scrape of his stubble over her jaw and she shivered, gave up, licked into his mouth.
She probably could have kissed him forever but she made herself pull away, leaning back from him but not too far. “Mm,” she said, breathless. “Okay. That answers that, then.”
Hyuuga was staring at her, his slips parted and his eyes huge, and she smirked.
“Unfair,” Kiyoshi complained, teasing and sad, “that was a much better kiss than I got.”
Hyuuga stepped back from Riko slowly. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he demanded. He finally looked away from her, his gaze finding Kiyoshi like a drowning man looking for the shore. “Either of you? I—fuck, it would have made my life so much easier.”
He stepped sideways until he was standing between Kiyoshi’s knees, and Riko’s breath caught in her throat at the way his face softened, the way he slowly raised his hands. He ran his fingertips lightly up Kiyoshi’s throat and across his face, impossibly gentle. Kiyoshi took a breath, and with the same confident purity of motion he’d used to kiss her Hyuuga leaned down and captured his mouth.
Riko had a wild, swinging kind of thought that Kiyoshi had taken her disappointment to heart and vowed to shape up, because he kissed Hyuuga the way that she had only felt, never seen. His hand came up to play with Hyuuga’s hair like he was appreciating the cut of it all over again, and when Hyuuga relaxed a little Kiyoshi’s jaw shifted and she—god, she knew that kiss so well, and the way Hyuuga’s whole body went a little limp pulled the strength from her muscles. Kiyoshi had a hand on Hyuuga’s hip like he knew he might need a bit of stability, and Riko clutched at the end of the couch to try to get her own.
Hyuuga pulled back to breathe, tipping their foreheads together.
Mouth barely inches from his, Kiyoshi said, “we broke up so you could choose.” He sounded breathless and Riko simultaneously wanted to pull them apart and never wanted to look at anything but the way they fit together ever again.
“Choose,” Hyuuga said weakly, “I—I don’t have to, do I—I don’t think I could—“
Riko found her strength and strode over to them, smacking them both on the back of the head because it was that or kiss them and she couldn’t—navigate that, had no idea who to kiss first or, and, the idea of kissing either of them with their mouths warm from the other, she. This was going to be really hard to deal with.
“Don’t say shit like that, Teppei,” she said, “not when you call me mean.” She smiled at Hyuuga, reassuring. “Of course you don’t have to,” she said. “But we thought you did—we thought you were going to, because.” Because nothing worked like this, no one found this, not now, not ever. She shrugged, letting the larger-scale thoughts slide off her shoulders and down her back. “Society, I guess?”
Hyuuga’s mouth dropped open. “Society.”
Riko lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It’s not like you had anyone around showing you you could be in love with two people. Hell, we didn’t know if you were even interested in either of us.”
Hyuuga shook his head. “You’re kidding.” He said, dubious. “You have to be kidding.”
“Hyuuga-kun,” Kiyoshi said quietly, “last time we talked about your feelings towards me you told me you hated me.”
Riko rolled her eyes at him, and he noticed, reached out to her with his free hand, and. It pulled her heart up into her throat, made her swallow hard, to have him invite her into the close warm tangle of him and Hyuuga. She took his hand, trying to beam all her gratitude into his eyes.
“I didn’t mean it,” Hyuuga protested.“I never meant it, obviously I never—“ He caught Riko’s eyes and glared at her. “You knew,” he accused. “I basically told you I was in love with him, the day he collapsed!”
Kiyoshi made a high, choking sort of noise and pulled Hyuuga closer, tipping his head against his side. Hyuuga draped an arm around his head, still glaring, like he was protecting Kiyoshi from Riko’s lies of omission.
Riko bit her lip. “You did,” she admitted, and Kiyoshi made a smaller version of the same noise. “Honestly,” she said, “I thought you’d tell him immediately after that. I thought—I don’t know, I thought it was over, you’d chosen, but then you didn’t say anything and I thought I was wrong and I didn’t feel right telling him myself, not when you hadn’t said anything—“
She was talking too much again but also this was important, and when Hyuuga leaned in and kissed her again she sighed, a little, against his mouth. They might have to draw some lines, she thought—distractedly, because Hyuuga’s teeth grazed her lower lip and. She really very much did not want to draw any lines—but they were going to have to draw some lines, because it wouldn’t do to have him undercut her authority like this anywhere but here—not specifically Kiyoshi’s apartment, although she meant that as well, but here as in the shared space of their shared revelations. This new bubble they were carving out, not hers or Kiyoshi’s but Hyuuga’s, the space he’d pulled them both into with his hands and his lips and his love.
They’d asked him to make a choice, and he’d chosen, in true Hyuuga fashion, unexpectedly and with more perfect, understanding precision than she could ever have imagined.
“I didn’t say anything because a blind fucking monkey could see you two were still head-over-heels for each other, broken up or not,” Hyuuga said as he pulled back from her, his voice fierce. “I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt either of you,” he said, “not ever, not if I could help it, and I thought if I acted on my feelings for either of you, that.” He swallowed. “I thought I hurt you today,” he said to Riko, “and it was the worst feeling I’ve ever felt.”
She stepped further into that bubble, curling in to embrace him, her face buried in his neck, and resolved never to tell him how she’d cried. “I’m sorry we never said anything.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Hyuuga said quietly, wrapping the arm that wasn’t across Kiyoshi’s shoulders around hers. She felt—god, she felt solid, even as everything was so unreal, pulled out of a waiting state she’d been in for so, so long.
Kiyoshi’s fingers were still tangled in hers, his thumb swiping slow across her knuckles: I know, I know, I know.
She pulled away from Hyuuga to look at Kiyoshi, suddenly wanting desperately to see his happiness without the shadow of her loss. He stared back, his face incredulous, like nothing had quite sunk in yet, and she couldn’t help but grin wide at him.
Kiyoshi shook his head. “I was so sure I was going to lose,” he said. “I was this close—“ he held his fingers about an inch apart—“to just gracefully stepping aside to wallow in my misery, and then I saw Kuroko-kun and Kagami-kun and I—“ he shook his head. “I couldn’t anymore.“ He looked up at Hyuuga. “When you asked me if I was jealous today I couldn’t believe it.”
“I asked because I was,” Hyuuga said. “Have been, I—every time I see them I want it to be us.” He scowled. “It was starting to really piss me off.”
“No wonder you’ve been so irritable with Kagami-kun lately,” Riko commented, sinking down on the couch next to Kiyoshi. “I thought it might be something like that.” She smirked, feeling light. “Or both of us had struck out and you were secretly in love with Kuroko-kun.”
Hyuuga laughed at her, open-mouthed and beautiful. “As a matter of fact, I did think about kissing him today,” he said.
Riuko stiffened; at her side she felt Kiyoshi do the same.
Hyuuga grinned. “Only because he gave me good advice about you guys.”
Riko raised an eyebrow. Kuroko was surprisingly wise, when he bothered to be, but she hadn’t realized he had picked up on anything going on between them.
“Really?” Kiyoshi asked, echoing her thoughts.
Hyuuga nodded, and then said with studied casualness, “did you know he’s also dating Aomine?”
They both stared at him for a minute. ”What?” Riko asked.
Kiyoshi said in a small voice, “Aomine Daiki?”, as if there was another one that he might be forgetting about.
Hyuuga smirked, inordinately pleased with himself. “You guys are so cute,” he said, in a theatrical, sugary tone.
Riko punched him in the arm, hard, and Kiyoshi went red and mumbled something indistinct, and it was like riding upward in an elevator, this feeling—Hyuuga’s kiss the moment of weightlessness and now, now, the feeling of arrival, of being where she should be.
“Teppei,” Hyuuga said, and. That felt right, too. That, too, was as it should be.
Kiyoshi raised his eyebrows at Hyuuga.
Hyuuga smiled at him, a different, new kind of smile, and Riko wanted to lean in and memorize it with her fingers but contented herself with running her eyes across it, again and again, categorizing it as his Teppei smile. She wondered how it compared to hers.
“You and me,” Hyuuga said, “one-on-one.”
Riko shook her head. “Of course you want to play basketball,” she said, rolling her eyes, “of course.”
Hyuuga widened his eyes at her, attempting to look innocent, and Riko doubted there was a single expression he was capable of that wouldn’t make her want to kiss him. “We missed half of practice, coach,” he said, “I’m just trying to keep to the training regimen!”
“Just because you’re our boyfriend now doesn’t mean I won’t kill you,” she snapped, and then flushed hot and then cold, because what if—what if he didn’t want that, “I mean—“
Hyuuga was definitely blushing, now, his cheeks bright.. “Yeah,” he said, quickly, cutting her off, and looked at Kiyoshi. Riko did too, watching him closely. He looked—calm and pleased and certain, the way he’d looked after she’d kissed him back that very first time, trying to shut up the fears in her head. The look that had convinced her she could. The look of a man who could be sure of the future.
“Yeah,” Hyuuga said again, once again giving her voice where she had none, and she kind of. Knew how Kiyoshi felt.
+
She should have known better.
She should known—the real shoe dropped out of nowhere: a manila envelope on her dresser, left there by the long, calloused fingers of a man who taught her everything she knew.
She should have known better.
The real shoe left her curled in the corner of her bed, staring up at the ceiling, being certain of nothing at all.