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It felt like swallowing the sea—
being forced to, ships and all.
Then a silence as vast as it was particular.
Then like holding a mirror up to Apollo
and expecting his face there, when Apollo's
always been
faceless, obviously, being a god.
And the hand still holding the mirror up anyway.
And the face not showing.
— Carl Phillips, Reasonable Doubt.
"'This silly thing you have for me', she said, 'isn’t it about time you ended it?' So I said, Aya-chan, it never actually began—"
"Bullshit. You're too nice to actually say that," Mitsui quips, cheeks bruised soft pink, perched on the floor beside Ryota, kneading at the bump of his knee. "At least, when you try. If you try— which you always do, when it comes to Ayako."
Outside is a symphony of tin rain; a cacophony of falling angels. The walls of the locker room keep their melody muted, dulled; they hold in the heavy scent of sweat, thick like muck, it adheres to the two of them like a second skin. The boiling warmth of exhaustion. Familiar aches. Under the bright lights Mitsui’s skin looks so translucent the blood cells might die just by the sun, so paper thin the rays see right through him down to his intricate machine core— it fascinates Ryota. He wonders what people see when they look at Mitsui; a purposeless gunslinger, a nameless vagabond. Perhaps a delinquent with a child's pistol —thumb and forefinger, baddaboom!— in a parody of himself. Blood still warm on his hands but no one sees, and his raucous laughter all but covers the jagged crystals. But tonight the fatigue colors him in something kinder. Painless. Something a little like swimming in static, like when butterfly wings tumble down your arm.
“Whatever, man,” Ryota punches him on the shoulder, half-defensive, half-embarrassed. “It’s like she’s immune to everybody’s charm, even Rukawa. Maybe she’s not into guys.”
“Maybe she’s not into you,” Mitsui challenges, goading him into a fight. The only language he knows how to speak.
“Maybe.” Ryota relents, a subtle decay. This always happens. His feelings clang around and bounce off his insides like a badly-aimed shot and he walks around with a weight dragging his gut in circles. Be it love that crawls away from his skeleton, dangerously dancing its way to the open. Or grief that puts him to sleep, digging its fingernails into the ripe flesh between his ribs. Leaving him to chant a name under his breath and shear his heart valves so that even angels listen to his tearful voice. Nobody wants to see Ryota bleed through his fingertips, though. My heart is nearly exploding, he tells himself, but I have to pretend I’m fine.
Mitsui starts flicking his zippo open and closed, the world curving and tilting round the sound. Everyone left except for them. Exhausted, slumped against the lockers, Ryota feels trapped in a different dimension altogether, a wrinkle in space, some artificial sanctuary. He’s half-sure Mitsui’s never smoked a day in his life, that it probably belongs to Hotta or one of those thugs he used to roll with. But perhaps there's something awful and familiar and grounding about metal jutting out against his flesh like baby teeth, something fascinating about the prospect of tasting gravel on his tongue, lungs picking up rust and ashes instead of air. Perhaps it’s self-flagellation. Or the pretence of it. Homesickness for somewhere that isn't home.
“I’m glad coach knocked some sense into you,” Ryota starts, nodding at the lighter, a little timid, a little awkward, so very silly; his voice comes out two pitches higher than it's supposed to be. “We would’ve never made it this far without you.”
Suddenly Ryota is thirteen and in his first year of middle school, cloudy-eyed and pliant and with a softness to his cheeks that he couldn't quite floss in the bathroom sink. In him are a lot of static empty spaces stretching wide and clinical, and his feelings crash into his hardwood chest and leave dents. And in front of him is this boy who wears his brother’s smile like jewelry, who inspects those around him like he knows something they don't, like a cop shining his flashlight on their bloodshot eyes, waving an invisible search warrant for the objects hidden beneath their faces. Much like Sota, Mitsui is the kind of boy who gets the second glance. His legs are deft, stance predatory, far too confident; he shines his brain against his elbow until even in the grease, a perfect shot can swing on its own two arms and not fall victim to slip up. Three points. One skipped heartbeat. Endless waves of mourning.
Ryota has always been afraid of the torrent that would escape if he opens up too much.
“Oh, I know,” comes Mitsui’s voice, bodyless in the ether but so, so alive. And arrogant. Bright in a way Ryota’s still not used to. It breathes warmth into the cracks of his spine in the most peculiar way. “I’m the real ace of this goddamned team.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, ex-delinquent,” he says to dim the voltage under his own skin, but he doesn’t mean it, not really. So pragmatic is the unit making Ryota’s dull world spin. Around and around like machine hearts do, so easy for people like Mitsui to mock because it's a simple lock and key, so easy for Ryota to ignore because it beats every second week; an okinawan fisherman coming home with his crabpots full of rot and the ocean full of despair— It’s a story as old as time. He’s lost something in the water.
“You punk,” laughs Mitsui, cocky and shameless and second brightest to a bullet in the back, and he’s got Ryota in a headlock, halfway into his lap.
Like this, he’s sixteen and in his freshman year. Faced with this boy who wages war for sport. He would know Mitsui anywhere, with his Fight Club smile; as morbid and queer as the ghoulish senses of addiction to violence, to freedom and rock bottom, trousers low-slung like the power lines at the edge of the city. Feet sauntering like he can outdance the showgirls. Since the very beginning, the second no less staggering than the first, Ryota has been stuck somewhere in the spaces between Mitsui’s lashes, caught in the humidity between his lips, the scarred tissue on his chin, that uproarious and diaphragm-deep laugh. And oh how glorious and terrifying it was to break and be broken by him. This flaming meteor of a boy sending Ryota up in smoke— reducing him to dead stars and debris, something red kindling behind his eyes, splitting mountains.
Looking back at it, Ryota should’ve seen it. In the slouch of Mitsui's shoulders, in that grief disguised as rage; the kind that can only be gleaned from having lived too little yet lost too much— the way he cowered like a hurt dog beneath his own splintered glass reflection in Ryota’s eyes. Ryota too was nothing but a system of hollow cavities and failing organs, perhaps he was just better at hiding it, and perhaps Mitsui hated him all the more for it. Time always seems so gentle when you live wrong, oblivious to your own thinning, when you keep curdling your brother’s bones just to get out of bed every morning. When you follow the light back home even if it tears you apart, flesh from bone.
When they finally calm down from trying to wrestle each other into submission, Ryota ends up with his head on Mitsui’s lap, curling into him like a cat. His wrists are on fire and his ribs keep cutting into his lungs. And his hair keeps falling over his eyes, out of place, unruly as if moths were burrowing in it, threatening to eat his mind alive. The silk inside him.
“You know, you have your own bed at the hotel," Mitsui nags. Ryota is only half listening, nuzzling into Mitsui’s stomach to shield his eyes from the light. He thinks he might fall asleep like this. "And it’s, what, seven minutes away from here?”
His voice drifts into the fog of Ryota’s mind, morphs into something having to do with feet treading on silky sand beaches and hair as soft as dandelions swaying within long blades of uncut grass.
"Miyagi, seriously," he says again and a summer symphony lurches into sound— pruny fingertips and instruments out of tune, and Ryota is squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again
“It’s raining cats and dogs out there. Besides, you’re warm,” he provides, expecting Mitsui to follow. His heart is suddenly a big absorptive moss in his chest, and it grows fat and happy with the way Mitsui brushes the hair off his forehead, gentle, cautious, like Ryota is made of rose-colored glass, tender and young, so breakable.
"And my next point,” he chides with no aggression, “Why on earth do you take such cold showers? I nearly froze my balls off getting in after you this morning. Do you not know how to work out a water heater?"
At this, Ryota turns to face him, neck at an awkward position against Mitsui’s thigh. There is a strange, distanced sort of tone to his own voice, and it's numb. Cold. Rot proliferates. “It’s just… hard, to get out of my own head sometimes. A cold shower helps.”
Though Mitsui doesn’t know what it’s about, who it’s about, how the mere thought of him nearly twists Ryota’s limbs— his eyes ghost over with softness nonetheless, glimmering, full to the brim, overflowing. With things easily believed, things like morning dew that burns away before the sun rises. False hopes. Consolation. Ryota’s heart keeps stopping. Like their first car back home, stop and go, stop and go. He’s waiting for the rain to come claim him. He’s constantly drowning. Constantly coming up for air. He’s taken to accepting constriction as affection. Wouldn’t choke him if it didn't love him. Wouldn’t fill him up if it would leave him emptied out.
“You know, you look so young with your hair down,” Mitsui says and he sounds winded, caught off-guard. A window has been left open in Ryota’s heart. There’s a breeze inside.
Ryo-chan, we gotta get you a new haircut or something. No one's gonna take you seriously if you look like you’re still in third grade.
Hey! You’ll see that hair has nothing to do with it when I beat your ass!
Oh, big talk. Ready to back it up?
Ryota refuses to meet his eyes. He knows he doesn’t look much different from when they were in middle school. He may be adding new layers, styling his hair into a perfect quiff, his ear piercing slicing the light just so, but nothing really changes, the foundation remains the same. Or maybe it's less like construction and more like a house that begins to crowd as Ryota phases through bodies. That morning, his own reflection made him sick. The fact that he’s now older than his brother ever was. Carnivorous, a hundred unfound sorrows, depthless eyes. He spills on his chest a relic all-knowing, knowing nothing, owing everything. He grows less and less the more Mitsui watches him. The more knots Mitsui untangles from his hair.
“I feel like there’s an insult in there, somewhere,” he jokes to shatter the lilac tinted moment.
Stop, I’ll break if you don’t.
So easy and full is the serpent that invades the hollow, the stranger fitting itself inside and licking the walls clean. Around and around and around, the same cyclical death until the cogs grind their teeth dull and spit blue blood and hate Ryota’s flesh and tear it asunder for all the rays to fester inside, to breach the walls and undo his screws, his precious metal. His simple little organs, gritty and rotted through with patina green, shitty cheap little parts, worth nothing on the farmers market.
“No, Miyagi. Actually, I—“ Mitsui trails off, jaw clenched in a challenge against himself. “You were really brave today. I, um, I know about your accident, how bad you’ve been hurt. And I’m… proud. Of you. How hard you worked to make it this far. Fuck, man, you’re really strong. Somedays you get this really sad look in your eyes, and I don’t know what it is that you’re mourning but I know that you don’t let it weigh you down.”
Tears well up in Ryota’s eyes, almost of their accord. He feels stupid, broken. Maybe he hadn’t healed properly. Maybe something in his brain has come loose. Maybe he needs oiling between the joints, the rusted will, the ignorant arteries that should be in his fists. When his eyes finally meet Mitsui’s, the air turns into shunting electricity, the light into angel smudges. At their age, dandelions are on fire, the cold sleeps in the spaces between your vertebrae and your skin feels like sand. With a kick of testosterone, raging loneliness, and a heart so ripened with loss and full of so many fleas— it's easy to fall in love with just about anyone. The tongue slowly turns blue, and the origin of your midnight paralysis twists deeper into ambiguity; there's no pesticide for such feelings.
But he has to pretend he’s fine.
“Oh, God. Please don’t cry,” Mitsui placates, eyes widening at the sight of Ryota’s quivering bottom lip.
To love Mitsui is to eat with your mouth closed because he thinks it's disgusting. And he also would rather pull his own stomach out than the promise ring sitting on his center finger, the one you’d given him on your anniversary. Between them nothing will be said that cannot be said in the language of the softened hand, the touch of a fingertip to the knee, a tapping on the wrist, a knuckle-pop, a fist, a broken tooth, a clearing of the throat; excuse me, but I have been aching for a very long time.
Ryota thinks he might want to kiss Mitsui; just get up on his elbows, press right into him. He can kiss that kind smile off of Mitsui like a punch to the lips, can taste his elusive tongue, sour like sugar crystals in a burnt glass jar— he can, goddamn it. And he’s nearly there, quarter way up when Mitsui’s fingers lock around his jaw. Mitsui closes the other half of the distance in a blink, his lips a trigger that Ryota breathes against, forgets the charcoal bumping through and through. Their lips touch, tentatively, experimentally, exploringly, just a brush of skin against skin, before Ryota’s fingers slip under Mitsui’s knee brace, palming the prominent bone, the roughened skin— Mitsui gasps, leans in farther and farther and Ryota inhales, opening up, veins bulging, heart contracting, tears spilling, tongue wet and warm and—
Ryota pulls away with a laugh so loud and boisterous it grows wings and flies up, up, up. Mitsui is a terrible kisser, flimsy, all nerves and tight lips, and Ryota tells him as much, watching him flush from the neck up.
“You should cough out bird feathers,” Mitsui squirms, uncharacteristically shy, “The way you’re smiling at me right now.”
“Mitsui-san,” Ryota coos, playful, euphoric. A tear falls, his smile widens. “Was this your first kiss?”
"Was it not yours?" Mitsui asks instead, evasive and boyish, his gaze suffocating. It's all the answer Ryota needs.
This is the most alive Mitsui’s ever looked. Gentle lover, wiping Ryota’s tears away with his velvet touch, leaving a small kiss on each of his scintillating cheeks. He must’ve read something in Ryota’s eyes because he straightens up after, head dipping between his shoulders, hands looping around Ryota’s wrists with conviction, and asks, “Who?”
Ryota adjusts himself so that he’s straddling Mitsui’s thighs, shrugs, “Hanamichi.”
“Huh?” Suddenly Mitsui has this thing going on where he looks like a seven year old wearing a face a decade too old, except he is exactly the type to draw characters from his favourite manga under the bed covers, hard-boil eggs in microwaves, and apparently, cringe in disgust at the thought of his teammates kissing.
Ryota can’t help laughing, “I mean I kissed a girl or two before that, but Hanamichi was the first dude. Why are you so shocked?”
“I don’t know, man. Hanamichi just seems oppressively heterosexual. Like, he’s all manly and shit.”
“And I’m not?” Ryota huffs, offended. Then, pinching Mitsui’s inner arm and earning himself a surprised laugh, “You know what, don’t answer that. Just shut up. Asshole.”
“So like,” Mitsui fidgets with Ryota’s wristband, fingers long and knobby and incessantly grazing at the tender skin underneath. Ryota feels like he’s near where the world splits, falls on the edge of its own sword. It’s a cute look on him, being nervous. A bit insecure. Doesn’t often show so blatantly on people like Mitsui. “You’re into Hanamichi or something?”
“Hell no,” Ryota chuckles, “It was just a dumb thing done in the name of comraderie. You know, we both got rejected like a million times and he figured we might as well be each other’s first kiss and get it over with. I just kinda went along with it.”
Maybe that’s not really all it was. Ryota thinks of a pair of swings, a pair of hands that could rearrange you like the aftermath of a supernova, melting stars, the reddening of Hanamichi’s cheeks afterwards, “Ryo-chin, bro, does this make us gay?!” It would've been easy, to say let there be love and watch it manifest on Hanamichi’s cinnamon skin, glowing like the full moon. To watch over him as he sleeps, face smeared against the futon, breaths soft like the galloping of a baby lamb. In a way they never are when Hanamichi is awake. This hurricane of a boy. He's a glitch, a splash of colors, too stark a contrast to blend in smoothly
Mitsui still doesn’t meet his eyes. His skin has a pearly sheen to it, he's melting all over the floor. And his eyes, twin flowers of moonlight. Ryota grabs him by the chin, says in a voice that melts glass and bends metal, “I just wanted to make him feel better. And myself, too. I don’t have any feelings for Hanamichi. Not anymore, at least.”
“Honestly, the whole thing sounds dumb, but what else do I expect from you two.”
“Hey—“ Ryota starts but the protest dies in his throat when Mitsui finally looks at him, leans in closer as if searching for something. Asking what is this? This creature? In my hands? Is it lethal? Do I kiss you, regardless? His hands are fidgety, but Ryota’s mind is worse, unfurling and twisting like waves, and he wonders if they are both afraid. He wonders if they’re really so wrong to be. Because whenever he looks at Mitsui, he’s illed with a fire too bright to last, and Ryota worries it'll raze them all the way through. Not sure he’d have the power to put it out.
“And Ayako?” He asks. Stubborn. Begging for a kiss in the middle of an avalanche, foolish boy with carnage on his teeth.
Ryota smiles, sad yet hopeful, shining sea glass, the end of a new beginning. “That one will take time.”
Against his palms, Mitsui is hard and smooth, all sinew and muscle and bone, morning musings and afternoon hoops. When Mitsui kisses him again, softly, slowly, lazily, like winter turning itself out into spring, his touch feels like something Ryota has always known, in the back of his head, but has never grasped. Like driving back the unlit road home. His hand is tangled in Ryota’s hair. His tongue finds its way between Ryota’s lips, clever and insistent, mottling love letters on the roof of his mouth. Ryota has always depended on him, quite like this. Arms looped around his neck in a prayer, in a plea. How much longer can I have this?
"Mitsui-san," Ryota gasps, and he realizes it's so easy. So painless. To forget all the times you’ve been set alight, boiled down, squeezed into shapes that made your spine click, mangling you into someone else entirely. Just to be loved. To be good enough. To borrow a little passion.
Mitsui’s hand finds its way between Ryota’s thighs, where he can feel Ryota’s heat through his shorts, the swell of him. Ryota whines high in his throat, louder than the melody the storm plays outside. He pushes Mitsui away with a hand to his chest, and Mitsui’s eyes are glossy and wide with surprise, or maybe infatuation, or maybe just raw hunger. Ryota’s cheeks are burning with embarrassment and desire, and he’s stammering out, “Can you even get hard right now?”
“Probably not, my body is wrecked,” Mitsui says, lips wet with spit, red and alluring. Soft like a cake when you slice into it.
“You and your nonexistent stamina,” huffs Ryota, burying his face in Mitsui’s neck to calm himself down, suddenly overwhelmed and enamoured and wilting in the most beautiful way.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t take care of you,” Mitsui placates, and the words are muffled against Ryota’s hair, his voice like swallowing up all the stars in the sky and throwing them back up again only for Ryota to drink them, one syllable at a time. “You’re the Interhigh’s number one point guard after all, you deserve a little reward.”
One of Mitsui’s hands slides up to his hip, gripping, clawing its way under his uniform, fragile skin sewn taut, while he uses the other one to get Ryota off. Ryota moves against him slow, letting the urgency of lust gradually fester under Mitsui’s touch. It's a little like dancing on the surface of the sun, eating the horizon, the sunset melting on his tongue. Maybe if he were an astrophysicist, he would've understood this better. He would’ve tried to last longer. To be quieter. But Mitsui keeps laying wet kisses on his shoulder, mouthing at his skin like he’s casting a spell until Ryota’s body is giving in, opening up, muscles turning to mush and cotton candy, basketball shorts all damp and sticky.
When he finally calms down, Ryota rests his forehead against Mitsui’s, plays with the little curls that rest daintly against the back of his neck. “Hello,” he whispers into the few inches between their lips. Hello my name is kid you pulled out from the bottom of the ocean at thirteen. Hello my name is boy you chewed between your molars and spat out to dry on the pavement at sixteen. Hello my name is lover so deep dwelling in the stringy parts of your heart. Can this be where I stay when things are too much outside? Shut the shades over the waxy windows? Paint the world black, even blacker than I am on the inside, keep the lights out if I want?
“Was it okay?” Mitsui mouths against Ryota’s jaw teasingly. Ryota’s pulse is singing an erratic lullaby under skin.
The worst thing about falling in love with Mitsui is that it’s the loneliest love in the world. Of course it is. It has to be, when you wake up each day realizing that no one will ever love you again like this. No one will ever love you again, not so honestly, so wholly, so unhesitatingly. Not even Mitsui himself.
And isn’t that how you drown? How hypothermia sets in? Heartbeat frantic like a rabbit and then just kind of numb. He wonders if that’s what Sota’s last moments felt like.
So instead of answering, Ryota asks, “Mitsui-san, what are we?”
Mitsui doesn’t even stop to think. “Friends.”
Ryota sits back on Mitsui’s legs, he looks at him, blank. Here is the kind of boy who would wait hours in the dead cold of January to pick you up from the subway station. This is someone who despite braving frostbite, would always cup your hands to his mouth to puff on first, who’d pocket your hand in his own jacket, who’d walk you home after practice just to kiss you on the forehead.
“Friends who let off steam in the locker room? Didn’t realize fuck buddies is what you wanted.”
“I want to be the love of your life,” Mitsui says, the cogs in his muscles relax, liquidize. He means it.
Ryota feels like he's near where the world splits, and there's only yearning for the stars on Mitsui’s skin, for a love twisting them until their beginning and ends melt into a lifeline. He’s always had this disease. He feels too much. Loves too hard until his heart is so full that he can’t keep it in his chest, nearly leaps out of his mouth. Sometimes he contemplates going around asking people if they can open their mouths and show him that their hearts are in their mouths too, that they're just as full as he is. So full that it makes him nauseous and he wonders if he'll ever be able to eat again.
“Why,” Ryota says.
“What do you mean why?”
Ryota’s mother taught him that, in life, the same pain hurts you twice. Once in the present. Once in the past. Infinitely, continuously, like a scar that will never go away. A gaping hole. And Ryota, he doesn’t think he could ever survive a scar like Mitsui. Not a second time.
“You’re really hard to read,” Mitsui says when the silence pools between them like thick black tar. “Somedays, I wonder which side of you is the real thing.”
“Perhaps none of them,” Ryota says. It’s the frankest thing he’s said all day, maybe this entire time, since the moment they met.
Mitsui’s got half of his mouth stretched up into an awkward, lopsided chuckle, and it freezes there. “That’s a problem. I Kinda like all of them.”
“Even the ones you haven’t met?”
Around them the world is silent and burning, and there's a pearlescent, shiny halo from the overhead lights on Mitsui’s head. Ryota wants to lean in to kiss it.
“Even the ones you haven’t met,” says Mitsui, and he’s got that precarious twinkle in his eye again. Ryota loves that, loves Mitsui, he thinks, loves how he’s got his heart spelt out, loves this young, insolent thing before him. Loves it so much he feels his heart squeezing shut in his chest, pain a rusted nail driving right through him.
Mitsui gathers him in his arms, and they stay wrapped around each other on the floor for a moment. It feels like a fever dream. Maybe it's all a mirage, Ryota contemplates. Maybe there's too little sugar in his bloodstream, maybe his heart is too in love with the way Mitsui splits the horizon apart in his hands with the sheer force of his will, maybe it's just Ryota’s rotten ribs. Maybe it's that, the graveyard around Ryota’s heart, the decay. The fear of loneliness, the strength to be alone.
"You're not going to fall asleep on me, are you?" asks Mitsui. Ryota just hums and snuggles closer, the scent of Mitsui against his ribs is like pertichor after a draught. The universe becomes depicted in the same hues of red that color the edges of Mitsui, in the cadence of Mitsui’s heartbeat, the warmth of Mitsui’s skin, and the feel of his hand tangled in Ryota’s hair. Ryota gives in, ignores the uncomfortable stickiness between his legs, the wetness on the back of his neck. The weight at the bottom of his ribcage.
Ryota learns to choose himself: to choose the things rotting in a cave in Okinawa. To scrub the dead skin off his lips. A demonstration of liveliness; if he were dead or still dying he would only envy the parts to go, those which were braver than the rest of him.
After all, even the dark seems so gentle draped around Mitsui. So maybe it will be okay. Maybe he will stay.