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“Shura-san, over here!”
Yes, there where the camera’s flashing, where the magazine crew is clustered, chattering, laughing, bustling around the lighting equipment closing off the penthouse’s city view. They want Haruomi to look up and be reminded what talent in music, ultimately marketable, got you: money, sure—and fame. He glares at the pool water. Little good it does him, reflecting the photo shoot’s lights right back at him.
And it quivers, upset by the motion of the only other body in the pool with him. Chisei’s foot comes into view first, and then his leg, his slender side—he’s spinning idly on the float brought as a prop, having too much fun, not taking the shoot seriously. And the crew is delighted by it. Typical. Haruomi couldn’t blame the crew, though, could he.
“The sooner you flash ’em your best smile,” Chisei says, by now half a rotation away from Haruomi, “the sooner you can go inside to write.”
“Shura-san! Yasha-san!”
Haruomi grabs the float and spins Chisei—a drink in his hand—toward him. “We were already interviewed inside,” Haruomi says. “They took our pictures. This is unnecessary.”
“Don’t be lame, Haruomi. That one was the cozy interview. Stuffy, really. This is the fun part!” He stretches up, the float squeaking from the brunt of his wet skin, and he’s coming in close—just to prod Haruomi’s bare collarbone. “This is what sells.”
Shutters, clicks. Stills of their conversation memorialized, publicized, intruders profiting off their lives.
“Don’t make that face! You were good earlier,” Chisei says, smiling to Haruomi’s frown. “We keep it balanced in interviews, you and me. I do the talking and the joking and the schmoozing and the getting off-topic; you rattle off the boring bits about our album’s drop date. And,” he says, voice warmer than the sun dipping for the day, “you get to go into the deets about the track-making and your inspiration. You love doing that.”
“And I’ve done it already.”
“Right! Now,” he says, handing Haruomi the drink, “there’s this part. Drink; it’ll help.”
“You want me drunk for the photo shoot…?”
“Oh, I’d love to see that, but that’s never happening. You’re adorably straitlaced,” Chisei says, grinning something wicked. “Have a drink or two to go from one-word-per-hour, standing-in-the-corner Haruomi to ten-words-per-hour, sitting-on-the-sofa Haruomi. That’s all they need.”
“I don’t know how to pose in a pool.”
“If ya drink, it’ll loosen you up enough where you’re not thinking about it. Candid shots always turn out best, anyhow.”
Haruomi tilts the glass to catch a scant ray of sunlight. The rim of the glass and the smear of Chisei’s lips from where he had drunk blaze, alive. Carefully Haruomi drinks and even more carefully removes the glass from his own lips, marring the other side of the glass, now wholly unclean. He runs his tongue over his teeth. “This has gin,” he says.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You hate it.” It is Haruomi who stocks it for himself, on those songwriting nights that run long, but never alone.
“But you don’t,” Chisei says, simple as that.
Haruomi takes a very hasty sip, getting him a light scold from the photographer: “The shot would have been great if you’d done that slower, Shura-san! Could you try that again? Yes, thank you!”
“Chisei,” Haruomi says out of the corner of his mouth.
Chisei flicks water at him. A single drop makes it inside the glass; Chisei fist-pumps, and Haruomi can’t help the quirk to his mouth. “What’s up?”
“Never offer to give an interview in your apartment again.”
Chisei laughs.
“Don’t dismiss it; I mean it. I need to hear you say ‘yes.’”
“I’m saving that for another occasion,” Chisei says.
Haruomi’s mind stutters.
Chisei throws himself back on his float. “Instead, I’ll say fi—ine.”
“Ooh, good pose, Yasha-san! Shura-san, can you get closer? You’re almost out of frame.” The photographer peeks her face out from behind her camera. “We’re almost done. We appreciate the opportunity to have come into Yasha-san’s home! We’re just waiting for that one perfect shot…”
“It’s almost golden hour,” an assistant says. “We have to get it!”
“And we will,” the photographer quickly says, “because we have two beautiful models!”
Chisei turns to Haruomi, one perfect eyebrow raised in tandem with one corner of his mouth. “Hear that? You may be—how’d they put it in that other interview—oh, yeah, ‘reserved to the point it’s frightening,’ but you’re also beautiful. Damn, what can’t you do, Shura?”
“Get you to stop being annoying, apparently,” he mumbles into his glass as he drinks, glancing away, not seeing his mouth is where Chisei’s had been.
The tide Chisei one-handedly sweeps over him he certainly feels.
He exhales, measured, through his nose. “Chisei,” Haruomi says.
He’s kicking water at him now. “Hmm?”
“You.” Haruomi drags the float closer.
“Me?” Chisei says when Haruomi’s purposeful silence has him shifting nervously on his float.
“You,” he says again, resting his elbow on the float, fingers parting his drenched hair from his face, “are incredibly annoying.”
Chisei grins. “And you,” he says, jabbing a forefinger at Haruomi’s chest, “not only already said that, now you’re smiling about it. Hey, look over there.”
He does—and hears a click.
“That’s it!” the photographer says. “We got the shot! That’s a wrap, everyone! Thank you, Buraikan-san!”
Clapping and echoes of thank you, bows here and there not made too deep, not in this young, modern crowd. The crew, still chattering, begins to pack up. Chisei slides off the float, splashing next to Haruomi, his drink as good as useless.
“Nice, Shura! As your reward,” Chisei says over his shoulder as he wades away, “you can cook me dinner!”
“How is that a reward for me…”
“C’mon, you know!”
Chisei’s kitchen—cobbled together one item at a time as Haruomi, using at least two spots on the stove each time he was over to feed him, complained over the poor wares Chisei had—matches Haruomi’s down to the cutlery. He doesn’t know where anything is; he asks Haruomi about it: typo-riddled texts out of snack desperation at one in the morning, just-wondering-if-you’re-free calls around lunchtime, buy-drinks-on-your-way-over demands for dinner. And Haruomi always answers.
Assistants are waiting for them at the edge of the pool, plucking Haruomi’s drink away, taking Chisei’s sodden shirt, and handing them fresh towels along with more compliments. Chisei knows what to say to have them laughing, to make every one of them feel not like this is their job but like he is their friend who had invited them to his home, had made them feel loved, and now the gathering sadly comes to an end.
“I think,” one of the assistants says, ears pink, her fingers fussing with her hair, “that I can see why you were named the number one most eligible bachelor in music, Yasha-san.”
She couldn’t have fanned his ego more.
“In music?” he asks, holding onto Haruomi’s elbow, a laugh at the edge of his voice, utter silence in Haruomi’s. “Not just hip-hop?”
“Yes!”
“Yasha-san is very popular,” another assistant says—this one a man, also pink at the ears. “Ah, of course, Shura-san is as well! But…”
“It’s fine,” he says. “I don’t care about that. Only making music.”
Chisei laughs and lets him go. “He means it, you know. Well, thanks for telling me!” He rubs his towel on his scalp. “I don’t read the kinds of magazines that’d rank musicians like that, but I do love being told I’m great. Sucks I’m not actually eligible, though.”
Up go the cries of dismay and surprise, their eyes wide with parasocial betrayal, their wheedling need to know more. Haruomi isn’t saying anything, but in his head, snapped toward Chisei, he’s screaming What?
Chisei doesn’t notice. He pops his head up from under the towel, hair still water-dark, and tosses the towel onto the closest chair. “You’re not getting anything else from me!” he says, putting his finger to his lips. “Keep this talk secret, ’kay?”
“Shura-san,” one of the assistants starts, swiveling to him, “did you know?”
“Excuse me.” He walks past them, past the whole damn crew, their lights and cameras, the high-rise city sunset he didn’t get to enjoy, and heads inside for the comfort of the kitchen, wet imprints of his bare feet fading up to where he stands dripping, gripping the otherwise spotless sink.
He isn’t even granted silence: Chisei escorts the magazine crew in. Haruomi’s jaw tightens, expecting him to extend the crew’s invite for drinks and so for Haruomi to mingle. Instead, he overhears goodbyes, more thank yous, meaningless polite exchanges, the trail end of laughter shut out when Chisei closes the door after the last of the crew leaves.
“Phew!” Chisei says from somewhere in the foyer. But he approaches: even in slippers, Haruomi can tell the beat of his footfalls. And here he is, striding into the kitchen, leaning on the kitchen island. “Long day, huh, partner?”
A single, final drop of water plinks from Haruomi’s hair and down, into the drain, out of sight and out of existence.
“Maybe we should get take-out?” Chisei strolls over to Haruomi. “You don’t look good.” He reaches out a hand.
Haruomi swats it away.
“Okay,” Chisei says, slowly, an eyebrow raised, his hand unmoving where Haruomi had flung it to, “that’s not you sick from socializing, this is you being bitchy. What’d I do this time?”
Nothing. He’d done the betrayal of nothing: he’d found someone to love; someone else to call his treasure. And he had said nothing.
Haruomi rubs the star tattooed on his hand. Thinks of its partner on Chisei’s shoulder. Thinks of how no delicious sting from any other tattoo had been as high as that star, knowing another was marked the same and had felt the same—in the bite of the needle; in wanting to match his skin with him at all.
He turns to Chisei. “Who?” he finally asks. It feels no better to speak it than to have it ring in his head.
“Huh? ‘Who’ what?”
“Who,” he says, looking over Chisei’s star-speckled shoulder, “are you dating.”
There’s a beat, one that Haruomi would never include in his music. Then the twinkle of Chisei’s laughter.
Chisei will tease him, will tease anyone, but it is never out of cruelty. He wouldn’t be laughing at him, but is there anything else it could be, when his question is so precarious, the answer even more? Haruomi grits out, “What?”
“Maybe I,” Chisei says, fore- and middle fingers making a flat V in front of his eyes, “love Shura.” He twists his hand, fingers aimed for Haruomi’s eyes now.
“Be serious.” He snaps it; he casts his face aside, the heat of shame and a fool’s false, fleeting hope on his cheeks. “You’re dating. Why did you never tell me? It could impact our work.”
Another beat, of silence and of Haruomi’s heart on double time, his thoughts whirling, his mouth drying, his throat constricted, incapable of saying another word, for once demanding something of Chisei. Though he doesn’t need to.
“Hmm.” Chisei’s back is to him, its line lax, an embrace away. “Hey, I’m gonna go change real quick. And I want yakisoba for dinner!”
It is at the click of Chisei’s door closing that Haruomi finds he can move, think, speak: “I can’t fry food wearing a swimsuit.”
Stupid. Of all things to say, it’s the least important to follow that conversation, lacking an end. Stupid and obligated; he can’t say anything else. Not yet. His thoughts haven’t settled; his heart is just behind his tongue, pressed to the roof of his mouth.
Theirs is a partnership. It’s artistic, it is mingled with business, but it is and has been possible by their… Friendship is too shallow a term. By their mutual understanding of the other’s strengths, in music and as a person; by wanting to connect with those strengths and better them and know them, know this person, as finely as their own selves. That’s their partnership, found against the odds of time and place, and Haruomi will be damned before he lets it go. Including from another intruding on what he’s made with Chisei. Someone who would take him away and see this side of him—and more. Someone who would know Chisei better than Haruomi ever could.
Haruomi has never more succinctly named what they have; never even put ‘love’ to its face, in whatever form it might take between two people like them. It’s terribly like Chisei to throw out such a weighty word like it’s nothing to tease Haruomi. It isn’t like him to end the conversation like it had been dead weight.
What Haruomi needs is to cook. Cooking is meditation, the free-float of the mind in the sure movements of stirring, chopping, mincing, spicing; and it is communion. It is making something from nothing to nourish you and any who might partake in the fruits of your labor. It is giving, and it needs to be taken. Haruomi gives like he needs it to live, like anything excess on him will rot him. And Chisei takes; he could have taken from anyone, chosen anyone, but the one he completes is Haruomi.
Haruomi absolutely needs to cook.
There is no conscious effort on Haruomi’s part to move: he is by the sink one moment, nausea spinning like a record; and then he is outside Chisei’s door, hand poised to knock. Hesitantly, he does.
“I need my clothes,” he says. And adds, self-conscious, “To cook.”
The door swings open, Chisei pattering away backwards, one leg not in his pants. “They’re right where you left ’em in the bathroom. You can also take a towel if you need to. Well, you should.” He throws himself backward on his bed, tugging the pants leg on. “You’re getting my floors wet.”
“You don’t care about that.” Haruomi shuffles into Chisei’s adjacent bathroom.
“No,” Chisei says from his room, “but you do!”
“This isn’t my penthouse…”
Haruomi is tugging off the towel from his head, and like a magician’s trick, there Chisei is at the door frame. He’s smiling.
“Maybe not in name,” he says, “but you do spend an awful lot of time here. I don’t think anything in the kitchen is mine; you have a spare laptop here that I’ve definitely never snooped through; the shirt you came in wearing that you very neatly folded over there was one you borrowed from me once, but it looked better on you so I never bugged you about returning it; and a few days ago I found a pair of socks buried between the sofa cushions that weren’t my style, but totally were yours.”
Haruomi sits on the edge of the extravagant Western tub and pats dry his legs, pointedly not looking at Chisei. “And?”
“A—and wouldn’t it be easier to live together?”
“My laptop,” Haruomi says, slowly turning his head up, sitting but feeling like he’s falling, “is password-protected.”
“Sure, by my birthday. Real slick, Haruomi.” Chisei tips his head back. “So. You up for being roomies? Since you’re basically my personal cook—I might die if you ever quit doing it, by the way—you don’t have to contribute to the mortgage payments.”
Haruomi says, when his breath hurts too much to hold any longer: “Turn around; I need to change.”
“That’s not answering me,” Chisei says. But he turns around, leaning on the opposite side of the door.
Haruomi takes off the swimsuit as quietly as he can, as if by not making a sound, he is not actually disrobing, nor is he a backwards glance away from his partner, the most important person in his life, half the reason why he wants to greet each day as they dawn. As if he hadn’t said Turn around instead of the more absolute, private Leave.
“Ha-ru-o-mi,” Chisei says, “say something, ’cause otherwise I’ll get sad you’re ignoring me…”
“I’m not ignoring you.” Quick to say that. The swimsuit is at his ankles. “I need time to think about what you said.”
“Why? I told you, you pretty much already live here. Nothing much would change.”
Haruomi stands, steps out of the swimsuit, grabs his boxers; panics, briefly, prodded by what Chisei had said, that they are not his—but they are, yes, they are. He slides them on even quicker than his reply to Chisei had been, the elastic snapping at his waist.
Chisei cranes his head over his shoulder.
It’s more than being looked at, and it’s more than being seen: it’s Chisei taking him in, from his still-stringy hair, down to his uninked chest, lingering even lower, then up to his face. It takes a fraction of a second; but it had been long enough for Haruomi to have yelled at him to turn back around. From the moment Chisei had turned around, that had been an option.
For anyone else, it would have been.
Haruomi swallows. The bathroom is sleek, chrome and sparse decor, and when he clears his throat, the sound bounces off each corner to surround them. “No,” he says. “I don’t want to be here when you have people over.”
“That barely happens! I hate having strangers visit. If I’m hanging out with someone who’s not you, I’m pestering them about going to their place or somewhere else entirely.”
“You don’t have a spare bedroom.”
“I can buy a bigger penthouse.”
“We don’t…” Haruomi takes a shaking breath and grabs his tee. “We don’t know what will happen to us if we see each other more than we already do.”
Now it’s Chisei’s laugh bouncing off every place Haruomi’s throat-clear hadn’t reached. “You think I’m going to hate you if I spend too much time with you or something?” He takes a languid step to Haruomi. When Haruomi, fool that he is, doesn’t get that Stop out, it’s two steps. “You really think that?”
“No.” He whispers it and isn’t sure Chisei has heard.
But he has—he’s walking slowly; now, somehow, he’s only one step in front of Haruomi. His hands are stuffed in his pockets, he’s slouching in a way that won’t be good for him a few years from now, his bangs are half over his eyes from the angle of his head, and he’s putting on a smile that doesn’t crinkle the corners of his eyes. “You know what I think? I think you got jealous when I said I’m in love with someone.”
“And I think,” Haruomi says, tugging the tee on, the fabric soft on the tautness of his face, “that you didn’t tell me who it was because—”
“I did tell you.”
His head comes free, hair mussed, brow furrowed. Then eyes widening. Pulse thrashing.
Chisei’s non-smile hasn’t changed. “I said maybe I love Shura. Maybe I love Haruomi, too.”
“You keep saying ‘maybe.’”
“Because if I don’t hear you say it back,” he says, leaning down, hands thumping on the edge of the tub, on either side of Haruomi, trapped, “then maybe I don’t.”
“You don’t take yourself very seriously.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“So how do I know you mean this?” He tells himself to not be swayed by the late sunlight burnishing Chisei’s hair and eyes and lips, parting for a soft laugh.
“How do you know, huh.” Chisei takes one of Haruomi’s rings gleaming on top of what remains of his folded clothes. “When I told you you’re a treasure I found, I meant it.” He tenderly loosens Haruomi’s grip on the tub’s edge. “That was years ago. But I still think that. I needed to find someone like you, and you needed to find someone like me. And we did. We really did.” He slides the ring on.
Haruomi lets him.
And he lets himself yank Chisei down by his medallion, cold and heavy, hurting where it digs into Haruomi’s chest, not mattering when his lips are on Chisei’s again and again and again, unsatiated, tasting the utmost a man could offer another: himself. The sensation is more than a kiss; Chisei’s hand bunches on Haruomi’s shirt, sliding him off the bathtub’s edge and onto the floor, all to ease himself on Haruomi’s lap with a grin he can feel every tooth of.
He’s breathless, he still needs more, he would be happy to die here—but he can’t, and he won’t. To die here is to forgo the rest of his days with Chisei: creating music with him, eating homemade meals with him, laughing after one too many drinks together, performing together. So he pulls away, just minutely, Chisei understanding and shifting to skim his teeth along Haruomi’s neck, unwilling to sever their contact.
Haruomi shivers, fingers digging into Chisei’s nape. He should finish changing. He should start dinner. He should put his hands on Chisei’s waist, slip off his clothes, slip him down, and feel, bask, triumph in the impossibility of loving someone who will let you in as close as you can get.
Chisei loosely drapes his arms around Haruomi’s neck and looks sideways-up at him. “You’re really making me hungry.”
Haruomi’s breath is recovered; it’s his entire body buzzing with mania. He nudges Chisei’s head toward him—
—and Chisei grabs onto his hand, not fulfilling the kiss Haruomi needs.
“No, I actually meant it,” Chisei says, grin lopsided. “Like, I’m hungry-hungry. I still want yakisoba!”
Haruomi blinks. And can’t help a smile. “You’re terrible,” he says, taking his hand as they help each other stand.
“You like me anyway,” Chisei says, throwing himself over Haruomi’s back. “Take me to the living room. I like watching you cook.”
“And you’re demanding.”
“And you’ll give in, anyway. You’re moving in with me, too. You know that.”
Haruomi huffs out a laugh, reaching over to gently tug Chisei down, his chin bony on Haruomi’s shoulder. He curls his arms back to support Chisei’s legs. “Hold on to me,” he says.
Chisei does.