Chapter Text
The sun wasn’t setting yet, but it was low enough to stain colors across the clouds in the early evening sky. Pale yellow and grey near the horizon, while directly overhead they remained pure white against the pale blue of the sky. Kai simply took in the sight of them, stretched out in wispy lines like the lightest rippling of waves.
The shouts and laughter from the concrete area above carried down to where he lay on the grassy slope, not quite loud enough to irritate him. There was just one voice he was listening to, picking it out of the crowd with the ease of long habit. He filled his ears with only that laugh, the words that coaxed others on, prompting them to shout back and join it in laughter. A moment without the voice made Kai strain his ears for it, more and more of his attention being pulled in that direction.
Then the voice was far closer at hand, calling his name, and Kai looked over to see Max had come down to stand directly over him.
“I brought you something!” Max announced, his cheerful voice directed at Kai at last.
Something was ice cream from the vendor in the park, and Kai accepted it because Max’s fingers brushed over his when he handed it over. He accepted it when Max sat beside him in the grass to eat his own ice cream.
“Are you just looking at the clouds?” Max wanted to know.
Kai nodded silently, licking at the places where his ice cream was melting and threatening to drip down his fingers. Max had chosen vanilla for him. Plain and simple sweetness, and Kai wouldn’t let himself read into that.
Max leaned back on one elbow to cloud-watch too, but Kai wasn’t looking at clouds anymore. He was looking at the smudge of chocolate on Max’s lip. He was looking at the curve of his throat and the way Max’s hair stirred with a light breeze.
“They almost look like waves, don’t they? You know, like the little lines of foam on low waves.” Max glanced over at him as if to ask, ‘is that weird?’ Kai gave him a stiff nod of agreement, and got a smooth smile in return.
For a moment Max was quiet, licking at his ice cream. Kai let his gaze run over Max’s body, though he’d told himself he wouldn’t do that anymore. He’d also told himself he wouldn’t move to where Max was teaching kids beyblading in the park and fill his ears with that voice while it wasn’t directed at him. That hadn’t exactly worked either.
“Don’t you want your ice cream?” Max asked after a moment.
No. He wanted wipe the chocolate stain from Max’s lip. He wanted to lick it away. He wanted to roll over and pin Max against the grass, to blot out the view of the sky so that Max’s eyes would stay on him.
A body at rest would stay at rest and Kai knew it was the same for him. If he set himself in motion, he didn’t know when or where he would stop.
“Did I get the wrong flavor?”
Kai returned to licking at his ice cream. There was a part of him that wanted to imagine each lick swiping across untouchable skin, but it was too cold and too yielding to ever fit what he imagined.
The uncertain look in Max’s eyes still wanted approval, so Kai gave it.
“I like sweet things.”
“Really?” Max beamed. What he would do with that information, Kai had a vague idea. It seemed promising enough that he would allow it.
His treat finished, Max flopped back to lie in the grass. That innocent grin of his said he was too happy at such a small thing to notice that the hunger twisting in Kai’s stomach had to do with another kind of sweet thing entirely. He never noticed, and Kai could live with that. He had been living with it the whole time.
Max lay beside him in companionable silence. He was close enough to touch, always close enough to touch, and yet as untouchable as a cloud.