Archive of Our Own

When Langa sees Reki in the suit, he holds back a laugh. Reki looks ridiculous, the suit is too small and it makes his shoulders look like they’re struggling against the seams, which, judging by the way Reki disdainfully squeezes them, maybe they are. 

“Dude you can laugh, no point holding back,” Reki sighs, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, “hand it to mom to make me look fourteen on the day of our last class photo.” His mouth turns downward into a sincerely put-out pout and all of Langa’s amusement turns into fondness, the laughter dying somewhere in his stomach, inconsequential. 

“You look cute,” Langa assures him, because he does, though he’s almost as tall as Langa is now on account of last year’s growth spurt. He’s even cuter with the small frown he’s wearing now, and the demure blush that follows Langa’s words. 

Reki blushes. It’s not new information, but every time it happens Langa’s heart does a thing, and he reminds he has a crush, and by now, three years into their friendship, he knows it’s probably love. Langa’s had crushes before, but no one’s ever been summer in the way that Reki is summer, all year round. Langa is never cold. He wishes he could live inside the warm expression Reki has on his face, thinks if it were possible to do something stupid like that, he would do it, he’d do all the stupid things that people don’t think are real, cough the affection out of his lungs and turn into purple glow-in-the-dark balloons. He’d make it possible. He and Reki would make it possible. 

Reki is real. Reki is blinking at him as he spaces out, and Langa coughs.

Recently, Reki has been leaning into his touches, so Langa reaches forward to squish his cheeks together. “How are you eighteen,” he says, “you look five.”

“Better than fourteen,” Reki scoffs. He paces around his bedroom and gathers his phone. They have to leave now if they’re going to make it in time for the class photo, but Reki is hesitant, stalling all morning. Langa doesn’t need him to say it, he knows today will be tough. For Reki, leaving high school is like sleeping without your feet tucked in. 

So instead of pitying him, which Reki will hurt about when he’s alone and the world feels too heavy, Langa asks, “how is fourteen worse than five?” and grabs Reki’s headband off the side table.

“Fourteen year olds are scary,” Reki argues, reaching a hand out to claim his headband, “have you seen Miya? Wait. Should I wear this? Mom said I shouldn’t.”

“You’ve got a point there,” Langa laughs, pausing to take stock of Reki’s hair. It’s as wild and thick and red as ever. “Whatever makes you comfortable,” Langa decides, and he already knows what his friend will do.

Reki tugs the headband with a silly smile and they’re on their way. They skate there, against Masae’s wishes, taking the longer route under the overpass to practice. In the photo you can see remnants of their skate, in the way Reki’s tie has gone crooked and Langa’s hair falls into his eyes.

After the pictures, a group of their classmates meet up to get ice cream. Reki and Langa usually wouldn’t bother with that kind of thing, but Nayaka Haruko is going, and Reki made plans to shoot his shot today. 

Over the past two years, Reki’s confidence has grown. He’s never dated anyone, but he’s come close. Haruko comes by the skate shop sometimes and watches Reki work, her long black hair touching the countertops. If Reki was going to date her, Langa’s just glad that she’s someone who genuinely likes him back and is interested in what he does.

Langa’s never been the jealous type. But maybe it’s even more dangerous that he believes, with an occasional sliver of self-conscious doubt, that Reki likes him and doesn’t know how to process that yet. 

So it doesn’t bother him when Reki and Haruko date over the December break. In February, he even spends his nineteenth birthday with the two of them at the bowling rink. Haruko is kind, a better bowler than Reki and Langa combined, and she makes sure to include Langa in every inside joke she and Reki share. Naturally, Langa feels inclined to do the same with her. After they’ve cut the fluffy cheesecake and they’re sitting out in Reki’s front yard, he offers to teach Haruko their signature dap. Reki squeaks at that though, hopping over the porch and grabbing Langa’s hands over the railing. Haruko laughs it off, but her eyes linger on Langa long enough for his breaths to come out stilted and uncertain.

And it doesn’t bother him when Reki starts coming over with hickeys and painted nails and other new attitudes he picked up from his girlfriend. People at S notice and they start patting Reki’s back in the way that men and boys do over women, acting like Reki has accomplished a necessary milestone in his life as a teenager. Reki frowns at them, not quite understanding the scope of it, until Joe explains it to him and he frowns even harder. 

“Haruko-chan is just someone I’m seeing. I don't understand why there are rules about it,” he says, chewing the straw of his milkshake, “besides, they wouldn’t cheer like that if I was dating a guy.”

Next to him, Langa takes a bite of his burger and looks away, face burning. He’s glad he doesn’t noticeably blush.

Cherry sort of sadly smiles at Reki’s words, and makes a noise of agreement, snuggling further into Joe’s open arm against the booth. Langa can’t pinpoint when that became normal, but in a way it would be weirder if he could. Joe and Cherry have always just been Joe and Cherry.

“People will be assholes no matter what,” Miya pipes up, and Reki gives him a bump that says he wholeheartedly agrees with the kid.

Langa studies the multicoloured bandages on Reki’s fingers as he watches his friend stir and then finish his milkshake, his Adam’s Apple bobbing up and down as he swallows. Mostly Langa finds that he’s content just to look at him, be near him, skate alongside him. Reki’s friendship and the loyalty in his amber gaze, even when he’s sporting the thickest strawberry shake moustache imaginable, keeps Langa going, keeps him hopeful. He doesn’t need anything else, unless Reki wants it. 

He wants Reki to want it, but Reki has always needed to do things on his time. He doesn’t know himself until he does something, and Langa is okay with that. He won’t ever get in the way of what Reki needs to do. 

The break ends like that, Langa contently sitting on the sand watching Reki and Haruko splash each other with Naha’s bright water. A loud American pop song blasts from Miya’s portable speaker as he builds a sand castle around Joe and Cherry near the shoreline. 

Langa can’t help but notice that Reki’s body has matured. He’s still lean, soft around the middle so that his sides sometimes spill over his tighter pants, and he’s sturdy in the shoulders. Reki’s knees and calves are probably the strongest part of him. The song crescendos to the steady summer beat of Langa’s heart.

It’s probably the last beach outing of the year before exams start and college begins in April.

As the afternoon turns into evening, the sun gets in Reki’s face and he raises a hand to block it, turning for a moment to look in Langa’s direction. Langa swears that, even from a twenty metre distance, he can see a transient sparkle in his eyes, quick and heavy with implication. An implication of what, he doesn’t know. It’s just that every time Reki looks at him, it feels like a promise.

“I love you,” Langa says out loud, and the waves crash over his voice, and the music spins it into oblivion, turning a loaded confession into a mere distant noise. He’s all in his head about it until he realizes Reki saw his lips moving.

“What?” Reki calls back, yelling over the noise. 

Langa shakes his head. He takes off his sunglasses and runs down the sand. “Here,” he smiles, sliding the shades onto Reki’s perfect and round nose. They’re too big on his face and he pushes them up with a wrapped finger. He got that cut from a wallride two nights ago, landing too roughly on one hand and slicing it, along with his left knee, on the pavement. Langa gauzed it, the two of them crouched by Reki’s bed at 1 am.

Haruko’s never done that for him, Langa thinks selfishly. No, he’s not supposed to think like that. Haruko has done a lot for Reki. She’s not a skater, but she can do a kickflip without bailing and that’s pretty cool.

“Oh,” Reki says, “thank you, Langa.”

“You look like a dork,” laughs Haruko, and Reki doubles over with a chuckle saying “I know right,” and falling into Langa. It’s only then that Langa realizes he’s knee-deep in water and wearing jeans that will take forever to dry off. It doesn’t matter. He may as well be submerged, head-first, all the air in his lungs replaced with cold water.
___

Langa and Reki will both attend university in Naha in two weeks. Reki’s enrolled in Okinawa Prefectural University of the Arts to study crafting, and Langa’s enrolled in the College of Nursing, his eyes set on studying psychiatric nursing.

Which is a relief, Reki decides, as he lies on his mom’s lap, her gentle hands giving him the same braids she gave Koyomi. Reki wants it to look just like his sister’s but his hair isn’t long enough, so to make up for it, his mother is putting butterfly clips in between the braids.

It’s been a while since Reki has just done this, been a baby with his mom, but right now his mind is calm and his heartbeat is slow and he loves her so much he feels ageless, and maybe a little childish too, in a way that’s good and safe. 

He’s glad he doesn’t have to leave Naha or Langa or his family, but his mother is still emotional because, as she quietly says, her baby is a graduate, and when did her baby grow into a man? It all seems impossible. 

Reki’s mind skips a bit at the word man, though he can’t really pinpoint why. Adult, he wants to correct, just say adult. But he doesn’t say that, choosing only to relish in his mother’s attention. 

Reki knows he’s his mother’s favourite. A firstborn child usually is, but with his father’s continued absence, Reki has been more than just a son. He’s worked hard at the Dope Sketch to buy his sisters’ birthday presents and he helps with chores. He hopes his mother is proud of him. With four children and her mother to take care of, there’s barely any time for her to say it.

“Mama?” 

“Mm. Why are you using your baby voice?”

Reki chooses to ignore that, and shifts so he can look up at her. “I’m your favourite right?”

His mother smells like agu pork and herself, that mom-smell that Reki could never pinpoint. He’s certain no one else smells like her.

The house is quiet, the younger girls gone to soccer practice with Sobo and Koyomi at her tutor’s house. The window in the living room is open to let the warm mid-March breeze in and Reki thinks about their last beach outing before college, the one where Langa was looking at him strangely and running into the water with his pants on. 

His mother says something but he misses it, his thoughts still swimming in Langa, and he’s trying to remember how his friend smells but for some reason it’s evading him. His stomach drops at the notion of attending a different school than Langa. Though the commute from Reki’s college to Langa’s is a mere half hour, it’ll sting not to see Langa every single day. He hopes they’ll still have as much time to skate.

“Huh?” Reki says, when his mother pokes him in the tummy.

“I said I don’t have favourites,” Reki’s mother says with a small chuckle, “what were you daydreaming about?”

Langa. “What college will be like, what kind of crafts major I’ll be,” he lies, and then he registers his mothers’ response. “Mama,” he scowls, “how can you say I’m not your favourite. The girls aren’t home, just admit it. I’m your favourite.”

“Reki-kun,” scolds his mother, but she softens when she meets Reki’s eyes. “My Reki,” she says, “you are my gift. I appreciate everything you have done for our family. I might have had a difficult time accepting your choice of major, but I want you to know I support you, alright? Even with your…difficulties… I’m proud of you for passing high school.”

“Alright,” Reki swallows, “thank you. That means a lot to me, mom.” There’s a lump in his throat, and it gets more painful as he stands up and looks at himself in the mirror. He looks pretty, with the clips littered in the two braids his mother managed to give him. He wants to go out and walk around like this and show Langa and Haruko, but he knows people will laugh. 

Reki shakes the thought away and does the dishes and cleans the oven until bedtime, but when he’s alone in his room he stands in the bathroom for nearly half an hour. He stares into the mirror and doesn’t quite understand what he sees there.

Sometimes Reki lives in an imaginary world, one full of colour and the steady sound of wheels on pavement and Langa’s voice when he calls his name. And sometimes he wakes, with a jolt, and sees the real world spread out in front of him, all of the roads he took for granted forking into indescribable shapes. It’s the scariest thing when he’s reminded that real people don’t skate for their entire life. Real adults, people who're supposed to turn into men, don’t wear ribboned braids and clips in their hair and paint their nails in floral pinks, at least not seriously. 

But Reki wants to do those things. He even wants to get his ears pierced and wear those dangling charms that his girlfriend sports with ease. Sports bras look cool too, why can’t he wear those? He doesn’t want to be a real boy like people think he is. He wants to be a little like his girlfriend even, and have people think he’s pretty and delicate instead of handsome sometimes.

He presses a palm against the mirror and remembers something. With a sigh, he shuts the door to his assailing bathroom and shuffles through the drawer of his dresser. He pulls out a manila folder filled with his old artwork. The very first piece in the folder is a blue handprint from when he was five, in kindergarten. He presses his eighteen year old hand to his five year old hand and nearly chokes out a sob at the difference in size. 

Reki doesn’t know why he’s doing this. It feels like he’s trying to let go of something, but he doesn’t know what it is, or if it wants him to let go.

His chest gets tight and he doesn’t want to cry, because Langa said he’d come over in--Reki checks the time on his phone--five minutes.

And god, it is dumb that when Langa does show up in the doorway of Reki’s room, he feels so safe that the tears do come, fat and cold down his cheeks?

“Reki.” Langa rushes toward him like he does when Reki falls really badly off his board, hands outstretched and forehead wrinkled.

“I’m sorry,” Reki cries, crossing his arms over his face to impede the oncoming hug that Langa is too willing to give. 

“Sorry for what?” Langa asks softly, “for crying? You don’t ever need to be sorry for that.”

Langa lays two warm hands on Reki’s arms, moving them away from his face. Reki keeps his eyes squeezed shut, because even thinking of the worried look Langa’s giving him makes him feel guilty.

“Hey,” Langa says, his thumbs pressing gently into Reki’s wrists, “your hair looks pretty. Did you do it yourself?”

Something shakes in Reki’s chest, a tremor in his jaw. He sniffs and slowly opens his eyes. His vision is blurred from the tears that stick to his eyelashes, but when he realizes Langa is serious, he manages to blink them away.

Reki shakes his head. 

“Oba-san did it then?” Langa infers. 

Reki nods.

“D-do you like it?” he asks, a cautious smile on his face. 

“Yeah,” Langa says, playing with one of the braids, “it’s pretty.” He looks away for a moment, that strange look in his eyes appearing when he turns back, the one that makes Reki blush for no reason, that makes him a near beet red when Langa adds, “you’re pretty.”

Reki squeaks and covers his face up again, hiding in his baggy sweatshirt. 

“Um,” Langa says after an awkward beat, “let’s go skate? That always helps you.”

Reappearing from under his shirt, Reki gives a nod. The entire way to the skatepark and for the rest of the afternoon, his heart behaves stupidly, beating faster than he’d expect it to for a simple day like this. He’s anxious, he thinks, and his mind is usually in ten different places, but never when he’s skating. Everything is just a little too much today. 

Naturally, he falls, which Langa thinks is hilarious. Soon Langa is sweeping Reki off his feet and into a bridal style lift. In that quick moment when he’s wrapping his arms around Langa’s neck and telling him to spin him, all the noise in Reki’s brain goes mute.

___

Back in December, when Reki first kissed Haruko, he’d expected to feel what everyone says you’re supposed to feel -- sparklers bursting in his chest, a warm connected feeling maybe, like when he skates on those really late nights and mosquitos fly past Langa’s eyes when he stops moving. And he did feel something with Haruko, heat across his cheeks and in his belly under the sun of the school’s rooftop. 

Haruko had touched his chest and he touched her thigh under her skirt and it was okay, it felt good. But when he pulled away it was with a wave of sadness, embarrassing tears choking up his throat, and his only thought was why, and that he hadn’t packed Koyomi’s lunch or cleaned his room that day and he’d have to apologize for it later. A part of his churning brain drilled through his random thoughts and reminded him that he needed to log in to his school portal, and make sure Langa did it too and understood everything. Texting Langa and getting everything in order suddenly seemed more important than anything. As that thought stung him, he’d buried his face in Haruko’s caramel hair, trying to hide himself from himself, but most importantly, from her, because she had been nothing but good to him. He knew when he was ready to tell her, she’d understand. It made it worse.

Now, as they stand in his room, a day before Haruko leaves Okinawa, he faces it, all of the things he has to say to break up with her. 

“Oh, I have these for you,” Haruko says before Reki can speak. She hands him a clear bag filled with five different nail colours, “you seemed to like them and I don’t want these colours anymore. I need to get nude colours like beige and rose gold, since those are more professional.” 

Reki clasps the bag in tight hands. “Thank you,” he manages.

Haruko is merciful until the end. “I’m going to Tokyo, you know,” she says knowingly, “I’m going to be a doctor. So nothing you can say right now will hurt me.”

Wind knocks against Reki’s window and he vaguely remembers that it’s supposed to rain later today. He has a shift at Dope Sketch in the afternoon, and he has to take the laundry out of the dryer and fold it. And then he has to text Langa about the portal.

“Would you have broken up with me anyway?” Reki asks, his eyes searching the colours. Purple, red, blue, yellow, and pink. 

Haruko nods. Her hair is tied in a bun and some of it falls to the sides of her face. “You see Reki-chan, I knew we wouldn’t fall in love. I know you like me but…” She laces her fingers with Reki’s, a half-smile on her face, “kissing you wasn’t as fun as I thought, and it’s not because of you. I won’t be anybody’s second choice, that’s all.”

“Ha-chan, you’re not,” Reki begins, because he doesn’t want her to think that, but Haruko only shakes her head. 

“You’re a good person Re-chan,” Haruko says steadily, “there’s a lot you need to think about. I know it when I look at your eyes, they’re always cloudy, somewhere else. I get it. There’s a lot I need to think about too. But I’m proud of myself and I’m ready for the next adventure. I can’t wait to study medicine. Besides, aren’t long distance relationships way too hard?”

Reki nods. “I think so,” he says, and it doesn’t feel like enough. He wants his ex-girlfriend to know how great she is, skating with him and bringing him nail polish. He successfully made rafute with a sweet side of beni imo for her once, but cooking seems like nothing in comparison to her capacity for empathy. 

“Haruko-chan.”

“Mm?”

“I’ve always admired you,” Reki admits, the words spilling out and tripping over each other, “you’re good at everything and you, you really put your mind to things, so easily. You're stubborn because you’re confident, and I-I want to be like that too.”

Haruko makes a sound of indignation, bumping her shoulder with Reki’s. “Now you tell me,” she says, rolling her eyes, “why didn’t you tell me that when I confessed to you, dummy? Huh?”

Reki stammers for a moment before Haruko squeezes his hand. “I’m kidding,” she laughs, “ah Reki-chan, you always take everything to heart.”

The last time Reki kisses Haruko, he’s saying goodbye. She pulls him close and kisses his cheek and he kisses somewhere in her hair, and then she gets on her scooter and yells “ganbatte, Kyan Reki of Naha! Send me pictures when you paint your nails!” as her laughter cascades into the end of the afternoon. 

Reki rubs the back of his neck, red with embarrassment, standing on the porch until Koyomi comes out to tease him. 

___

The first month of university feels stretched into a year. By the weekends, Reki’s brain is all frayed like the sides of his converse. It’s nice being able to make things, but there’s a lot of theory before the actual crafting, and he finds it hard to pay attention without Langa or somebody interesting sitting next to him. He squirms in his seat, sometimes speaks out of turn, and mostly doodles away the humourless voice of his professor. The guy in front of him has a tattoo on the back of his neck, and Reki copies it into his notebook with his black Muji pen.

For his first project, on the theme of “Rest,” Reki makes a small cedarwood stool with rounded feet. He’s quite proud of it, but he gets a C on it, and when he works up the courage to ask why the professor comments, “mediocre design, too colourful.” 

Reki stays after class in the studio and squats on the tarp, admiring his work. He used a combination of pink and purple on the stool, creating a gradient effect he thought was uplifting. There’s nothing uplifting about getting a C though. He signs into his palm, wishing he could complain to Langa. But Langa has class until nighttime today, and Reki’s left to mull everything over on his own. Besides, he’s sort of been avoiding Langa. He just isn’t sure what to say to him about all this. He isn't even sure what 'all this' means.

When he gets home, Koyomi’s waiting for him on the steps. “Reki-nii-chan,” she drawls, “can we skate?” 

Reki blinks at her for a moment of consideration and then breaks out into a smile. 

Koyomi’s turned into a great skater over the years. She lands almost all her kickflips and her ollies are near perfection. Skating with her has become less of Teacher Reki time and more natural and fun. Reki even made her her very own board a few months ago, and she treasures it. The underside is yellow, with simple trucks and small wheels so she doesn’t go too fast. When she gets better and grows taller, he’ll make the necessary adjustments. 

He chuckles when Koyomi lands on her butt at the end of her wallride. 

“Almost,” he encourages, ruffling her hair. She shoves his hand away, muttering “don’t ruin it,” but she’s smiling, and that’s what matters most. 

They sit there on the pavement until the sun sets, Reki telling his sister about college but leaving out the recent grading situation.

“Reki-nii-chan.”

“What?”

“Are you wearing lipgloss?”

Reki swivels to her, pushing backward on his skateboard to get further away. Maybe he had purchased strawberry lip gloss at a pharmacy on a whim a few days ago. When he tried it on in the bathroom, it had made him feel softer, and he liked himself. 

He didn’t think it would be noticeable, but perhaps it glitters in the light of the sunset.

“So what if I am,” he snaps. 

“So nothing,” Koyomi shrugs, “should I do your nails tonight?”

Reki watches a lazy cloud pass by, far behind the cluster of others in the distance. He looks at his sister and her genuine face, the brown clarity in her young eyes. Her heart-shaped earrings seem to glow in the pink of the night.

“Koyomi,” he says, not sure of his next words, “do you think mom will let me get my ears pierced?”

Koyomi blinks at him. “Why would you want that?”

“I don’t know,” Reki sighs. He stands up, tucking his skateboard under his arm. A wave of frustration passes through him and he wants to crawl out of skin, or claw at it, rip all the bandages off and let the wounds sting. “I’m just… I don’t know. Whatever. Forget it.”

“Reki,” Koyomi says, “it’s okay if you’re not my brother,” Reki’s heart first skips a beat at the lack of honorific and then at the implication of his sister’s words. It’s like Koyomi always calls him Reki-nii-chan, but she does when others are around, and the few people at the skatepark are still petering out. 

Reki never really liked it, being reminded that he was a brother. 

He turns. “Yeah?”

“Is that okay?” Koyomi asks, “are you okay?”

Reki scratches his arm with his wristband, moving it up and down to create friction. “How do you know about this stuff? Like what to say.”

“I read a lot about it online,” Koyomi says, “one of my friends at school, Juri-chan, is going through something similar to you, I think. Juri-chan says that being a girl feels wrong, but being a boy feels wrong too. Some people call it x-gender, but Juri doesn’t really know yet, what we should call it. So I’m just trying to be supportive. I’m not sure if that’s why you’re being like this.”

Reki doesn’t know what to say, so he only nods. 

“You don’t have to be my brother,” Koyomi repeats, and that’s when Reki decides. He doesn’t mind being Koyomi’s brother. He likes introducing himself as his sisters’ brother and it would be way too hard to do anything else. He likes being his mother’s son. But it’s nice too, knowing that Koyomi doesn’t think of him as just a boy.

He tries to explain it to Koyomi the best he can, but he’s never been all that coherent with talking about himself. At the end though, when they’ve reached their home, Koyomi stops him before they enter the house. 

“Reki-nii-chan,” she says, “you can talk to me about your personal issues now. I’m old enough.” She sort of puffs her chest out and puts her hands on her hips as she says it, and Reki is reminded of how young she still is at thirteen.

He smiles, some of the weight on his chest lifting itself up with both hands. “Okay,” he says, poking the dimple in her cheek, “thank you Koyomi-chan.”

___

Two months into the first semester, and Langa’s face is already breaking out. He paces around his room, thinking he should blame Reki.

It’s been a week since Langa and Reki have seen each other and Langa’s sure the stress of that is what got, quite literally, under his skin. It’s neither of their faults really, but Reki has been distant. Langa’s called and texted with him, but every time he asks Reki to visit, he claims he’s working on some paper or doing research at the library. Langa’s busy too, his classes all have heavy workloads and he has to do labs once a week, but it doesn’t stop him from missing Reki during every tiny break he manages to take.

It weighs so heavily on Langa that he complains to Cherry and Joe on the weekend. They’re at Sia La Luce, Langa slumped against the counter as he eats his ravioli. 

“Why don’t you just go over to his house like you usually do?” Cherry asks, biting into his garlic bread. 

Langa shrugs. “I feel like Reki doesn’t want me to. I feel like he’s creating distance on purpose.”

“Sometimes people do that when they’re struggling with something,” Joe says, “to tell the truth, I can be like that too. I can get quiet and distant.”

Cherry scoffs. “I’ve never seen you quiet and distant,” he mumbles, but he rubs Joe’s back, like he’s letting him know he’s just kidding.

And then Langa is worried. He wants to go over and wrap Reki up in his arms and ask him what’s hurting and where so he can be the one to fix things for once. 

He’s broken his skateboard five times over the past two years, and Reki has fixed it just as many. When Langa watches Reki work, it feels like Reki isn’t just repairing a board. It feels like he’s fixing something unseeable in Langa, a broken mechanism in the hollow of his chest that he forgets to check himself for until Reki says, “you looked wobbly today.”

After dinner, he lets his pride settle and he skates to Reki’s house. 

Langa laughs, almost out loud in frustration, when he peers through Reki’s bedroom window. Reki is asleep. It’s best not to disturb a sleeping Reki, lest he grow claws and scratch anyone in his vicinity.

He sends Reki a text instead: Call me when you wake up.

Does that sound too demanding? He stands there for a moment and sends another text: Only if you want to!

___

Reki doesn’t call. He sees the text on Sunday morning, guilt burning in his stomach, and he can’t move. He didn’t sleep at all. He lay awake, his mind racing faster than he could ever go on his board. Even with the joyous sunlight filtering through the curtains, his head feels heavy and his thoughts still spin. Thinking about Langa used to make him feel so good, but now he just feels worse about himself.

During his lecture on Friday, he’d taken his miniature skateboard to class and used to fidget, doing finger tricks on his desk. Girls who sat next to him eyed him strangely, but he didn’t think anything of it until his professor walked up to him in front of everyone and said, “do you think you’re in grade school, Kyan-kun? Why are you playing with toys when I’m lecturing?” 

His fingers froze, the plastic board falling off the desk, and Reki saw himself on it, falling off a cliff at the mines.

After class, he’d skated to chase that feeling, speeding downhill and through traffic, reckless with frustration. An eighteen wheeler blows air into his face, momentarily blinding him, but something about that had felt blissful, his mind blank with the terror of it all. It had reminded him of getting beat up in that alleyway at sunset. It had felt right, like he deserved it. When it was over, and he was still alive, he dropped himself onto the concrete and let the gravel dig into his cheek until he bled.

As Reki lies in bed now, his hands making fists, he pictures S’s giant mine. In the background, people chuckle, their voices like static noise as he reaches for somebody’s hand. They fall, and he falls too. The air leaves his lungs, and he gasps, sitting up in the middle of a waking nightmare.

Reki figures he doesn’t understand how to be a person anymore. He’d always used his model skateboard to keep himself focused in high school, but it seemed like it was a weird thing to do in university. Every time he moves or opens his mouth at school now, he feels like he’s judged for it.

All of his classmates seem to have portfolios and connections to galleries. Some of their families are artists or they already make and sell their work online and at festivals. Reki stays away from talking to them, because the one time he told someone he skates, they gave him a questioning look and moved on to chew their Pocky.

Reki has always believed that things turn around. Bad days don’t last forever. It’s like when you’re getting over a skating slump. Sometimes tricks fail and you find yourself bailing at every corner, but once you know how to do them, they always come back to you. But after two months in a school that seems to reject him, he doesn’t know if it works the same anymore.

Having doubts about himself feels so pathetic and cringeworthy, and Langa would hate  seeing him this way, so he pushes the sheets off his body and tries to put his mind to an assignment that’s due on Wednesday. 

Getting into the journal article he’s supposed to read is difficult. It’s so dense, and he ends up picking the yellow polish off his thumbs instead of digesting any of it. 

He wants more, but this is all he can do for now, only the thumbs. The yellow is pale and not noticeable, and it’s not a good tone for his tanned skin. It looks oversaturated. He scratches it until his nails start flaking, and then he forces himself through the paper’s unnecessarily complicated introduction.
___

Another week passes like that. Langa gets caught up in his assignments and labs and crashes at the end of each day. Learning about mental illnesses and how to treat them is interesting, and it’s what he signed up for, but what he didn’t realize was how much emotional work went into reading about certain things. Some of it reminds him too much of himself, or of his mother after his dad passed away. He feels exhausted by the end of each day, unable to skate with how heavily his body shoulders the information.

On Saturday, he decides to go to the skatepark. It’s dawn, way before anyone else would even think of being here. Anybody except Reki. 

But Reki isn’t skateboarding. He’s sitting against the coping, doing finger tricks with his miniature board. Some of his hair is tied back into a semi-ponytail with a scrunchie that is probably Koyomi’s and it makes him look soft, even cuter than he usually does. Langa watches him for a while; he seems immersed, his usual radiance dimmed by frustrated concentration. 

He approaches cautiously, walking instead of skating, which feels like a different sort of gravity, and then he squats.

Reki looks up, his eyes wide and beautiful and sort of scared. It’s a blessing that Reki’s eyes betray his thoughts, but Langa is sure he doesn’t think so.

“Langa.”

Langa’s name is weak in Reki’s mouth.

Langa thinks he’s upset with Reki. He doesn’t want to be, but he’s been ignored for two weeks and it feels like a sucker-punch looking to look at his friend right now.

“What’s going on with you?” Langa asks sadly, “where have you been?”

“What do you mean?” Reki shrugs, “I’ve been busy with classes.”

“Where’s your board?”

“Home.”

“Why?”

Reki stops moving his plastic board back and forth and takes it in his hand. “You’re mad at me,” he says.

“Reki,” Langa sighs, “I’m not… why couldn’t you text me back? Just once. You could have texted me back once. Do you think I like knowing my best friend is struggling and I can’t do anything?

“I’m not struggling,” Reki argues, his voice a pitch higher, “people need alone time you know.”

“Not you,” Langa sighs, “you need people.”

Reki looks down at that. He makes a noise at the back of his throat, a frustrated sound, and rises to his feet. “Yeah.” He laughs but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I need people. I struggle. I need to be helped through everything. It’s true and you should say it. And make smarter friends while you’re at it too.”

“Hey,” Langa says urgently. He gets to his feet as Reki tries to leave, and grabs him by the arm. “I thought we’d been through this ages ago. I told you, you’re--”

“Just shut up, will you?” Reki says, shoving Langa’s touch away, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re being unfair.” Langa tries to keep his voice level but he wants to yell. He won’t yell at Reki. He can’t.

“Reki, I gave you space because I thought that’s what you needed,” Langa says, “but now… I miss you.”

Reki puts his face in his hands, but it’s not the usual endearing way. His fingers shake, the knuckles explosive and raw. He looks frustrated, about to explode, and Langa is scared for the first time that something has gone horribly wrong.  

“You can tell me what’s wrong. I won’t tell anyone, you know that.” He knows he shouldn’t, but he grabs at Reki again, this time pulling him close and taking his face between his hands. Reki resists, but only with a fraction of his strength. 

It physically hurts when Reki cries, harder than he cried that time in March. Langa tries to catch all the tears, but there are too many, and then Reki is pushing him away again. 

“L-Langa,” Reki sobs brokenly, “I don’t fucking know what to d-do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

He tries to walk away, but Langa grabs him around the waist, his hands making fists in Reki’s orange hoodie. “No,” Langa says, feeling Reki’s body rigid and afraid, probably more scared of himself than of Langa, a thought that makes Langa want to cry along with him. 

“You don’t have to be sorry. Nothing you can do will push me away. I’ll… I’ll give up skateboarding before I let you go.” 

Reki’s frame deflates, sagging into Langa’s chest. Langa hugs him from behind like this, speaking softly into Reki’s hair. 

“Don’t you know that?” he asks, “or have you stopped believing in me?”

“I feel so confused,” Reki admits, his voice close to a whisper. The dawn wraps them both in pinks and blues, like it knows how much Langa hurts for Reki. 

“That’s the only emotion I feel these days. I feel like I fall off a cliff every night and nobody is around to catch me because I don’t even want to tell them to watch me skate. I don’t want them to see. I love my sister but she’s so young and I don’t want her to have to… fix me. No, I don’t fall. I’m pushed.”

“Who pushes you?”

“Another version of me that knows how to be a person.”

“But Reki,” Langa says, squeezing his friend tight, “you are a person. You’re the best person I know. My favourite person.” 

Reki sniffles, his nose red under the few freckles that dot the bridge, and Langa can’t help but smile at that. “You’re such a cutie,” he says, and Reki spins in his arms to face him. 

“Hey,” he yells, his tears clearing, “you’re gonna say that stuff at a time like this?”

“Okay okay,” Langa laughs, “you’re not cute at all. And you smell kind of bad. Have you showered lately?”

“Hey!”

They end up at McDonald’s close to nine at night. Langa orders a Big Mac, and Reki picks at fries and a chicken junior as he slowly tells Langa everything. After flipping a coin for topic choice, he goes with the gender stuff first (heads).

He keeps his voice low, so Langa has to pull his chair over to sit beside Reki instead of across from him, shielding his words from other customers.

“Not quite a boy and not quite a girl,” Langa repeats, processing the information until it matches one of his memories. “I went to school with a few nonbinary people in Canada,” he recalls, “it’s not a big deal, Reki. In English we use pronouns right?”

Reki nods. “Like he and she and stuff,” he answers, rubbing a finger under his nose. Langa notices the scratched up nail polish on his thumb, but he figures he shouldn’t say anything. 

“Yeah,” Langa says, “pronouns are pretty central to the English language and people assume a lot about your gender based on them, which they shouldn’t. So one of my friends went by ‘they’ pronouns.”

“That’s not really translatable in Japanese I guess,” Reki notices with a thoughtful pout, “but it makes sense. It’s more neutral?”

“Exactly,” Langa confirms. He sips his soda and thinks. “You said you’re okay being called oniichan though, right?”

“Yeah,” Reki shrugs, “for me, language doesn’t matter as much as how I feel inside. I just want people to understand me.”

“I understand you,” Langa says gently. And he’s sure he does. Whatever Reki says, he takes it at face value and adores it. Adores Reki. Adores the way he’s looking at him, vulnerable and open, his lips faintly tinted with some kind of gloss. They look soft and pretty, and Langa’s stomach flips. When he first met Reki it was daytime, and he thought he was cute, maybe handsome, the way you would look at a painting and judge it’s quality. But the night he landed his first ollie, he found Reki looked prettiest at sunset. And every time after that, the word would come to mind. Reki is naturally pretty, in the way he speaks, the way he thinks about things, just him.

Reki will always be Reki.

“I’m afraid you won’t get it sometimes,” Reki admits. 

“I will always want to get it,” Langa assures him, “I’ll work hard, Reki. I’ll ask questions.”

Reki gives a shaky inhale and smiles shyly into the last of his chicken junior. 

“You know you’re really dramatic?” Reki says later, when they’re walking home. He nudges Langa in the side. “Saying you’ll give up skateboarding and all that. No way you’d do that.”

Langa huffs. “I might. I think I could sometimes, if I had to. You don’t know everything about me.”

“What a hard ass,” Reki mumbles, earning him a playful shove from Langa. 

“Reki,” Langa calls, when he sees Reki’s shoulders drooping, “come up here.” He lays his board on the concrete and steps on holding a hand out to Reki. He pulls Reki close on the board. 

“I don’t think this is possible,” Reki chuckles, “I mean, ergonomically.”

“I did it at the hot springs that time,” Langa reminds him.

“Yeah well that was two whole years ago. I weigh a lot more now and we were already at high velocity back then,” Reki retorts. 

Langa shakes his head. “Stand in the middle, nerd,” he says, “my passion defies physics.” It sounds like something Reki would say, and maybe that’s why Reki sputters.  

Reki has to clutch around Langa’s waist to actually be able to do that. Langa does his best to skate them to Reki’s house. It’s a bit staccato and turning is impossible, but it’s fun falling all over each other. Reki hides his face in Langa’s shoulder as they zoom downhill past street lights, not because he’s embarrassed, Langa realizes, but because he’s a step closer to accepting that he’s allowed to be protected.

___

“I feel like everyone’s so much more… set? Than I am,” Reki says, “I guess I still feel like a kid.” He can feel Langa’s eyes studying him, always so intense with the desire to comprehend.

They’re sitting on the rug by Reki’s bed, Langa’s hands pressed over a newspaper so they don’t stain the room with neon pink. 

It’s easier for Reki to talk about his feelings when he’s doing something else. He never thought that painting Langa’s nails would be one of those things.

“Like everyone has a path and they know what they want,” he continues, “are you supposed to know all that by university?”

“I don’t know,” admits Langa. “When I came to Naha, I felt lost. No, that’s not true. I felt lost before that.”

“It must have been hard,” Reki says. He’s moved on to Langa’s pinky nail, which is the trickiest because it’s the smallest, but he manages not to paint over Langa’s skin. “Scratch that,” he adds with a regretful chuckle, “I know it was hard.”

Langa’s quiet and when Reki looks up again, he finds the older boy staring at him with a warm, embarrassing gaze. 

He knows what Langa is thinking. That Reki found him. That Reki made Okinawa home and gave him a passion again. He’s said these things before, and even if he never did, his eyes have become so readable that Reki just knows.

“I haven’t felt like a kid since I was sixteen, when my dad passed,” Langa says, and Reki feels it in his gut, his palms under Langa’s to inspect his work. 

“I came to Naha feeling like I was supposed to be an adult and take care of Mom. And now I finally like a kid, and I’m nineteen in college.” Langa laughs, dropping his head to stare at his fresh pink nails. “It’s because I have so much fun with you, Reki.”

Reki feels a smile spread across his face. He holds Langa’s cold hands in his warm ones and settles into the way Langa looks at him. He feels cozy under the warm lights of his postered bedroom and the gaze of the person he trusts most in the world.

Somewhere in the house, Reki hears a thud and then the twins’ giggles. 

“Give me back my console you little brats!” shouts Koyomi, a shadowed figure running past the half-open shoji doors outside Reki’s room. 

Reki bounds to the entranceway. “Are they trying to play Kartrider again?” Reki laughs. He glances down the hall at the twins who are peeking their heads out from behind the wall.

“Off to bed with you,” Reki shouts, “Nanako, don’t you dare give me your tongue!” Nanako thinks she’s all that at five years old. Chihiro just hides behind her.

Koyomi rolls her eyes. “Brats,” she repeats, glancing briefly into Reki’s room and nodding at Langa, “Ahh. I was getting to another level. Anyway sorry Reki, I’ll keep it down. Hey Hasegawa-kun.”

“Hey Kyan-chan,” Langa waves with both hands, in a cutesy tone he reserves only for Reki’s sisters.

Reki grunts and slides the shoji doors shut as the twins’ heads disappear again. He turns back to Langa with a sheepish look, which is returned with a chuckle.

“My turn,” Langa announces, and gets to work painting Reki’s nails a vibrant blue. 

Having his nails painted by someone else gives Reki a soft feeling, and he can’t help but close his eyes and hum a Motohira Hata song he usually does at birthday karaoke with his family. Sobo knows all the words, but Reki only remembers the melody.

“You know what would be cute?” Langa says, “those stick-on jewels as an accent nail.”

Reki flushes and doesn’t bother to hide it. “Oh,” he says, “yeah. That would be. Maybe I’ll buy some at the craft store.”

“I’ll come with you,” Langa offers, to Reki’s surprise. “I think the konbini down the street sells them too.”

“You won’t be embarrassed if I wear them out?”

Langa stares at him. “Are you embarrassed that I’m gay?” 

“W-what?” Reki’s confused. Of course he’s not. When Langa came out to him in their third year of high school, he hadn’t even been surprised. He said something like, “okay cool,” and finished his last harumaki, leaving Langa in a mess of relieved laughter. Joe, Cherry, Shadow, and Manager Oka had been cool about it too, and even Miya hadn’t said anything insulting for once.

“So why would I be embarrassed about anything you do, or anything you are?”

“I…” Reki trails off, blowing on the nails of his right hand. “Good point.”

When Langa gets to his left hand, Reki clears his throat, saying the thing he’d wanted to say when Langa first saw in the skatepark. 

“I missed you too, okay?”

“I know,” Langa whispers. 

“What kind of answer is that? The ego of this guy.” But even as Reki complains, he yawns and feels himself relaxing. He hadn’t realized how much stress his brain was under until now. He feels himself going slack, his brain creating that safe, gooey-headed barrier between his room and Langa, and the rest of the world. 

Nothing else matters. 

“Langa do you want to stay over?” Reki asks, but unlike the other times he’s asked this casually, what he really means tonight is, please don’t leave me.

Langa nods. Usually they would chatter as they got ready for bed, Reki laughing at something Langa said with a mouth full of toothpaste and accidentally spitting on the mirror. But this time, Reki is quiet, staring at himself and Langa in the mirror as they brush their teeth together.

There’s a light line of stubble chin and he wants it gone, but he’s too tired to shave it himself. He’ll leave it for the morning. His eyes linger though, and his stomach twists. For some reason, he’s fine with his leg hair, but facial hair doesn’t feel right. He looks away, forcing his eyes into the drain instead of his troublesome reflection.

He spits the last of his toothpaste and leans against the tiles to wait for Langa, forcing his eyes to stay open. After Langa’s dried his face, he picks the shaver off the cabinet and turns to Reki. 

“You want to shave right?”

Langa’s voice echoes off the bathroom walls, a warm sound in a bright place. The only sound Reki latches onto.

“I’ll do it in the morning,” Reki says, waving his hand.

“I’ll do it now so you can sleep properly,” Langa offers. 

Relief washes through him, and Reki is too tired to refuse or be embarrassed about it. He sits up on the sink and lets Langa take his face in his long hands. It doesn’t feel much different than when Langa sometimes treats his skating injuries, except that instead of feeling cool and accomplished, Reki feels sort of exposed.

They’re silent save for Langa’s short directions like, “turn this way more,” “keep your face like that,” and “did that hurt?”

“You can tell me if it hurts, you know,” Langa says when Reki suppresses a wince.

“No I’m okay,” Reki whispers. He closes his eyes through the end of it, his mind falling half-asleep. He only faintly registers Langa cleaning-up. 

“Reki,” comes a whisper. 

Reki’s too sleepy to answer, leaning forward into the dependable chest in front of him. He hears someone else in the bathroom as the door opens, and he figures it’s his mother, because she asks something like, “heard you…is Reki-kun sick?” in that familiar worried tone.

Langa says something about a hard day and before Reki knows it, he’s lying in bed with the sheets up to his chin and his feet tucked in, his mother’s hand on his forehead. 

“...Fever?” he hears, and then Langa’s voice next to him replying, “no, I don’t think so. We were out late.”

“...Let me know if you....”

“...worry. I’ll stay… I will. Thank you, Oba-san.”

Reki feels the bed sink as Langa joins him on the mattress. He feels a kiss pressed to his temple and it almost gets his eyes open again, but then Langa mutters, “go to sleep Reki, it’s okay. You worked hard today.”

Worked hard? Reki thinks, Langa’s the one who worked hard, listening to all that.

But then Langa is stroking his forehead and when Reki faintly gets the idea to skip classes tomorrow, sleep pulls him under.

___
 
The first thing Reki says when he wakes up is, “do you think my mom would let me get my ears pierced?”

He stares at Langa, who’s apparently still sleeping, and pokes at his side. Nothing. Langa snores lightly. Reki must employ another strategy. 

“Langaaa, it’s eleven in the morning, don’t you have class?” 

Langa shoots up, blinking his eyes a few times. He scrambles for his phone and checks the time. It’s eight in the morning. 

He turns his gaze onto Reki, his disgruntled expression making Reki chuckle. 

“Sorry,” Reki smiles, “but I was saying. Do you think my mom would let me get my ears pierced?”

“No,” Langa answers shortly, burying himself under the covers again. 

“Langa,” Reki says again, but his friend is once again sleeping.

Reki stays in bed, alternating between browsing through accessory stores online and reading an article about Ryukyu Shikki. He actually finds both of those to be equally riveting, so he goes back and forth between the printed material and his phone whenever one starts to drag on for too long.

A pack of uneaten umaibo sits on his night table, so he crunches on that while he studies, making sure not to get too many crumbs on the bed since he’ll have to clean that up himself. 

The fact that Reki has an appetite this morning must mean he’s feeling better. The dual anxiety of going back to class tomorrow and asking his mother about earrings (date to be determined)  still sits in his stomach, but he manages to stimulate his brain into ignoring it.

The decoration techniques are interesting, and he’s sure that Sobo has talked about using the hananuri technique on the black lacquer trees that line one of his mother’s jewellery boxes that sit in their living room cabinet. 

He’s deep in thought about how he must have inherited his crafting skills from Sobo when he feels the bed shift beside him. Two blue eyes pierce into him and he suddenly feels a little light in the head. Warm too. 

“How long were you staring at me,” frowns Reki. 

“As long as it took you to finish that pack of umaibo,” Langa replies with a lopsided grin. He sits up, his blue hair messy around his face. He tousles it back into place and reaches to check the time. A look of horror passes over his features when he realizes it’s past eleven. 

Reki muffles a chuckle behind his hand and slaps Langa on the back with his printed article. “Don’t worry,” he says, “you can still make the last hour.”

Langa sighs, and then he flops back onto the bed, staring up the ceiling. “Are you feeling okay?” 

“Me?” Reki asks genuinely. 

Langa looks over at him. “Yes you,” he says, with a smile Reki doesn’t quite understand. 

“Oh. Yeah. I’m okay.”

Reki lays down too, resting his cheek against the pillow and studying Langa’s side profile. He even looks intelligent, has that somber face that gives him the appearance of a scholar. “How have your grades been so far?” Reki questions. 

“Are you asking so you can compare yourself to me?” He says it matter-of-factly, his eyes on Reki’s Yuto Horigome magazine clipping pinned to a bulletin board on the far wall. Around the clipping, there are multi-colored sticky notes with tasks that Reki has yet to complete. He uses blue ones for household chores and purple ones for school-related things. Red ones are for things related to skating, like materials he needs to pick up or sketched out steps for tricks he wants to practice.

“They’re that good?” Reki asks.

Langa sighs. “Reki.”

“Just tell me then!” 

“My marks have been better than in high school,” Langa admits with an air of finality. This is all Reki is going to get.

Langa’s grades were already better than Reki’s in high school, except in mathematics, so Reki takes that as confirmation of his previous assumption.

“What’s that article about?” Langa asks, rolling over to rest his head in Reki’s lap and peer up at the highlights that Reki has made.

“It’s pretty interesting,” Reki says, buzzing with the excitement of talking about his interests. “I like reading about Ryukyu art because it makes me feel… I don’t know, like, close to my Sobo, and my other ancestors.” His cheeks warm with the admission, and for the countless time he wishes his body would stop being so melodramatic. He thinks it sounds pathetic but when Langa nods affirmatively, he continues. “I never thought about it too much, but Sobo is pretty talented when it comes to designing things. She can do bingata too.” 

“What’s bingata?”

“Oh it’s like, Okinawan patterned dying,” Reki explains, “used in textiles, like rugs and stuff.” He pulls up pictures on his phone and shows them to Langa. 

“You have a rug like that in the living room,” Langa observes. 

“Yeah, true.”

Langa says nothing after that, just lies there, missing class, and lets Reki talk as much as he wants to about the different techniques he’s learned and how difficult many of them seem. With the way he’s zooming through his explanations, Reki feels like he’s talking about skateboarding tricks.

“My Sobo doesn’t talk about herself,” Reki realizes, “but I get it.”

“Why?” Langa asks. 

Reki looks down at Langa, who’s blinking up at him. He touches Langa’s forehead curiously and takes his hand away just as quickly. 

Despite the criticisms his mother would sometimes share about U.S. military occupation, he’s not an expert on Okinawan history or even his own family history. Nevertheless, “I think she’s hurt,” Reki says, because if nothing else he can tell when people are hurt. “And when you’re hurt you just want to forget it. You don’t want to pass that on to other people.” 

Langa turns his cheek into the loose fabric of Reki’s harem pants. “But don’t you think it hurts people even more, not to tell them what’s wrong with you?” 

“Some things are too hard to talk about. It takes up all your energy.” Reki picks at the skin around his nails before returning his hands to his lap. “I think people understand that.”

“That’s true,” Langa agrees quietly, in the even tone he always takes. Reki used to think Langa took that tone because he was secretive, or shy, but he’s learned that this is just how Langa is. Soft around the edges and wholly agreeable. He hears everything Reki says and he considers it finely, responding in a way that tickles pleasantly in Reki’s ears.

Reki feels Langa take a breath into his leg and he reaches out to touch his hair. The dye has faded and been bleached and re-dyed over the years, and Reki wonders what it would look like if it was just his natural colour. Would it be brown like Reki’s? Blonde? Maybe even black? It doesn’t bother him not knowing. He runs his fingers through it and smiles at how Langa’s eyes fall shut. 

The baby blue of Reki’s nails create a monochrome effect with Langa’s icy blue as he repeats the motion, lost in the sensation of silky strands falling over his skin. Despite the cool-tone colours, he feels his stomach warming like there’s thick liquid running through his organs. 

It’s quiet enough that all Reki can hear is Langa’s breathing. Everyone in the house has gone to school and work, besides Sobo who is either in the kitchen or in her room. 

“Pass me my earbuds?” Langa requests. 

Langa hands Reki the left one and sticks the right in his ear. The rest of the afternoon is spent like this, listening to music and talking about whatever comes to mind. Reki has the evening shift at Dope Sketch, so Langa stays until then, and then buses to his evening class.

Reki feels a tug in his stomach when Langa leaves, but then Koyomi’s home and needs a snack, and so he doesn’t have the brain capacity to dwell on it too much.

___

Dope Sketch is one of the only places where Reki feels really useful. He likes interacting with the customers and suggesting specs for their boards. He knows he’s lucky to have a manager like Oka, someone who actually cares about him and respects his work.

At work, Reki wears his headband instead of the scrunchie. The place is air-conditioned, so it’s too chilly for just the uniform t-shirts and he layers them over his hoodies instead. Everything has an order here, and it’s easy for his brain to compartmentalize each task as it comes. He balances the register, sorts through the new orders, and serializes each board they received from shipment this morning.

The shop closes at eleven, and Reki’s in charge of wiping down the counters and doing final inventory. It’s Oka’s former shift, but now that Reki’s ‘old enough to deal with the night customers,’ (as if the late nights at S weren’t practice enough) he’s confident leaving Reki in charge. When he’s finally rolled down his sleeves and turned off the lights for the night, he looks up to find Langa standing by the door, his face illuminated only by the streetlight outside. 

“Hey,” Langa says, taking a step forward.

“I thought you’d be home by now,” Reki says, pulling his sleeves down over his hands and coming around the counter.

“Um,” Langa holds his board in his hands, adjusting it under his arm. “I have something for you.” 

He reaches around for his backpack and pulls out a small purple bag while Reki fidgets with the recycling. 

Reki gasps, so loud it’s almost comical, when he opens the bag to find multicolour stick-on nail jewels and pineapple shaped clip-on earrings. 

“Langa.”

Langa only smiles, reaching his hands out and pulling Reki into a hug. Reki tucks his head into the crook of Langa’s neck and squeezes around his shoulders. “Thank you,” he says. Truthfully, the pineapples are a bit much, but there’s no use in saying that now. He appreciates the gesture even more.

The hug feels secure, and Langa sways them side to side a little with stronger arms. Reki pokes his fingers out of his sleeves to touch the hair at the back of Langa’s neck and relishes in this safe feeling, only them in the dim lights, surrounded by skateboards, the thing they both love the most. Reki feels a lump rising in his throat, but it’s not from wanting to cry. It’s overwhelming, sentimental in a good way. 

Langa still works here on the weekends, but doesn’t have nearly the same amount of responsibility Reki does anymore. Standing here like this, Reki remembers the days when he and Reki would work until closing after school, their hands brushing over the folder of inventory. 

Reki gets the sense, his stomach lurching, that they’ve grown up, or he’s at least a little bit of the way there. 

It’s not so bad, not when Langa is embracing him like he’s something worth holding onto. He doesn’t like to think about it, but a part of Reki has always thought Langa would leave him. Even after that night under the sunset when they promised to skate together infinitely, a voice in the back of Reki’s mind told him it would be a few months before Langa moved on to someone cooler, made new friends, moved somewhere where he could taste snowflakes on his tongue instead of rain. 

And though Reki has changed, in so many ways it makes his head spin, there are always things that will stay the same. There is always this. 

So when Reki pulls away from the hug to wrap his arms around his best friend’s neck, the feather-light kiss he places on Langa’s lips doesn’t feel like a confession. It feels like confirmation of something they already knew. 

___

Langa’s heart jumps out of his body, thumping so hard he’s sure Reki can hear it. There’s a fuzzy noise in his ears, like the background noise of the rock song they listened to before Langa got out of Reki’s bed and skated to class. There’s so little air in his lungs that he isn’t sure how he kisses Reki back, but he does, just as light, just as gratefully. Reki tastes like the remains of the day, a stale carbonated tinge that is somehow the most beautiful flavor in the world. 

Reki leans his forehead against Langa’s and laughs breathily. “Pineapples huh?” he asks. 

Right. The earrings. The reason he’s here. “Do you like them?” Langa asks, his heart still thudding in his ears. He touches a small scar on Reki’s cheek before his brain catches up to his actions.

Reki wipes under his nose. “They’re everything to me,” he says, looking down at the space between them. His eyelashes flutter up to Langa’s burning face. His eyes are wet, but he blinks back the tears. Seeing him emotional helps Langa to clear his mushier thoughts.

“Put them on for me?” Reki requests. 

Reki rarely asks for anything, and the fact that he’s asking Langa to do this means so much. Langa’s heart feels like it’ll burst. He loves Reki, and has never been so sure of it as he is now.

As he clips on the earrings -- Reki’s earlobes are blushing too, cutie -- he decides that it wouldn’t be so bad if Reki knew he was thinking for once. 

“I love you, Reki,” he says in English, even though he burns with embarrassment.

“Oi, don’t say that,” Reki replies shyly, avoidantly looking at his reflection in his phone camera, “and I look ridiculous. These are huge.”

Langa laughs, wrapping his arms around Reki’s waist again and looking at that cheek scar, which he thinks of as a relic of Reki’s undying passion, so undying that it can hurt. Langa doesn’t want it to hurt. He presses a kiss to the scar, and Reki giggles.

For some inexplicable reason, Reki takes a picture of them like that, though he’s embarrassed about it later, rolling around on his mattress with his face in Langa’s chest and threatening to delete it. As Langa expected, he never follows through with his bluff. 

___

When they both have time the next weekend, Langa exchanges the pineapples for red triangles that compliment Reki’s brown hair and make his face look even warmer than it already seems. 

Reki wears the earrings home, and as soon as Koyomi sees them her face breaks out into something like pride, an expression Reki never thought he would see from his younger sister.

“Hi pretty,” Koyomi greets cheekily. 

Reki smacks her lightly in the arm. “Don’t tease.”

“Sorry,” Koyomi says, “you do look pretty though. Seriously. You might look prettier than me.”

“I am prettier than you,” Reki agrees. He crosses his legs under the chabudai and pulls a cushion into his lap. It’s not just the earrings. He’s wearing cherry lip gloss, and he bought new clothes with Langa too. The lavender hoodie he’s wearing fits narrower and shorter than his usual ones, paired with regular black slacks that define his figure more than his usual bulky attire. His half-ponytail is tied with a scrunchie that matches the hoodie, and his nails are blue with diamond-shaped stick-ons on the thumbs. He feels like himself.

He went to S like this the previous night, plus eyeliner courtesy of Cherry, and Miya said, “you look nicer than usual, slime. Not that you ever look nice," and then, flustered by himself, "let's just say that tonight is an exception.”

Reki barely got out his thank you, before some guy, a real guy’s guy with a girlfriend hanging off his arm, called out, “hey redhead, are you a chick tonight?” The girls around him had laughed.

“That depends,” Miya yelled feistily, “are you a dick?”

“Get out of here man,” Joe added, a hand on Reki’s shoulder, “I don’t want to cause a scene, so leave the kids alone and don’t show your face near us again, got that?”

Reki swallowed, the heavy weight of Joe’s protective hand grounding him. He was glad Joe was there. Langa had class last night and his absence made Reki's skin feel thinner, easily scarred.

He shakes the thoughts away now at the sound of his sister's voice. People who love him are the people that really matter.

“Let’s not get a big head now, o-nii-chan,” Koyomi is saying in a sing-song voice.

They both laugh, Koyomi resting her head on Reki’s shoulder. Reki’s noticed that she’s gotten more affectionate with him, the way that she is with some of her girl friends from school. It’s incredibly affirming. 

Koyomi’s chewing something that sounds like licorice and Reki’s about to ask where his share is when Sobo walks into the room. She leans her cane against the doorframe and sinks down onto the floor next to her grandchildren. 

“What’s up?” she says casually, making Reki and Koyomi giggle. 

It’s always funny when Sobo tries to fit in with teenagers. Reki’s heart does that expansive thing that reminds him how much he loves his family.

“Not much,” he grins, “what’s up with my Sobo?”

Sobo goes on to complain about her knee pain, and the various issues she’s had with her back. All of her complaints are ailments that Koyomi and Reki have heard before, but it doesn’t mean they don’t listen. 

Reki massages his grandmother’s knees as they wait for dinner. If his grandmother thinks the earrings are strange, she doesn’t say it. Reki figures it’s because she still thinks of him as a kid who does random shit like wear his sister’s jewellery. 

The twins come next, each taking one of Sobo’s knees, so Reki focuses on her hands instead. Workers hands, hands that are dried and hardened with labour and craft. Reki hopes his hands look like this when he’s in his nineties too.

“Ah my grandchildren are so good to me,” Sobo sighs happily. 

Masae serves goya champuru for dinner. It tastes good, as his mother’s cooking always does, but Reki can barely finish with the weight of his mother’s gaze on him, raking over his body with what seems like confusion. When their plates are nearly clean, she lays a hand on Reki’s knee. 

“Is this some sort of phase?” she asks gently. 

Reki glances at Koyomi, who leans forward as if she’s about to say something. Reki doesn’t want her to explain anything about his gender (or sexuality for that matter, though he’s known since he learned the word bisexual that he was exactly that). He’s not ready to tell his mom and she probably will never understand. He’ll tell her when he eventually moves out. It would be too tense to do it now. Life already feels so precarious, and Reki needs his family to be stable.

Sometimes family is about compromise, not saying too much but asking for what you need in a roundabout way. And sometimes it's about being cute until your mom gives in.

“Actually mama,” Reki says, laying a hand over his mothers, not missing the way her eyes train on his nails. “I wanted to ask you if I could get my ears pierced.”

The twins have stopped making mustaches out of their moyashi and are sitting up, staring at Reki as if they know what’s going on.

Masae is quiet for a while, her hands pulled back into her lap. She looks at Koyomi. 

“I think he’d look nice,” Reki’s sister offers.

Reki shifts to sit on his hands, because he's overcome with the urge to pick at his nails. 

“Those earrings are pretty,” Sobo suddenly says “why don’t you let him get real ones?”

Reki’s head whips to her in surprise. 

Masae stares at her mother. “Really?”

Sobo nods, gesturing a wrinkled hand in Reki’s direction. “Your Papa used to have earrings,” she says to Masae, “little gold hoops. Of course, they were pierced by me, with a needle and he cried for hours like a baby. But what’s the big deal? Nowadays there are lots of places that will do it safely. Let the child do what he wants. It won’t hurt him.”

Like a glass running over, Reki’s chest fills with gratitude. 

“A lot of men wore jewellery back in the day,” Sobo continues, “it’s not a big deal.”

And though Reki deflates a little at being compared to men, an automatic reaction lately, he’s more encouraged than disappointed. He stares at his mom expectantly, pleading with what he knows are quintessential puppy eyes.

“I suppose I don’t see why not,” his mother says cautiously, “but taking care of piercings is a big responsibility, Reki. You need to be on top of it to prevent infection.”

“I’ll help him,” Koyomi pipes up. “I’m good at that kind of stuff.”

Masae chuckles, wiping her face with a cloth napkin. “You certainly are.”

Reki tucks his feet up under his chin even though it hurts because he just ate. 

The look his mother gives him isn’t cold. It’s not like anything he’s seen before, either. It’s not bad though, and he’ll take that for now. 

He’ll take just this, his family seated around the table and the fact that they are his, which is more that many people could ask for. He’ll take the way Koyomi produces the licorice out of the pocket of her dress and hands him a piece as unnecessary consolation. He’ll take the Naha sunset, painting their modest living room in an impossible-to-capture colour, the red Shikki plates in the cabinet painted fierier with the evening. 

Sobo stands and her knees crack, the twins collapsing in giggles because random sounds are what they find funny this week. 

And Reki knows, more than he’s never known himself, that nothing is ever perfect, no board, no relationship, no person. 

He eats his dessert feeling okay with that.

___

No grade is perfect either, Reki realizes when he gets another B. The term project is “Self Portrait” and students were asked to create a craft, either textile or clay, that represents them. 

Reki mulled over it for agonizing hours, hiding himself in his bed sheets until Langa climbed through his window and took his face in his hands to ask why he hadn’t skated for two days in a row. 

“I’m working,” Reki had said through squished lips as Langa squeezed his cheeks together. 

When he divulged the issue to Langa, his friend shook his head, confused. “Reki,” he said, “you’ve been designing more than skateboards all this time.”

“Huh?”

Langa shuffled around Reki’s room and found his sketchbook under art textbooks. He flipped through the pages, pointing out graphics, doodles, and other types of drawings that Reki had used for boards, and the way his eyes skated over each one made Reki even more flushed than when Langa looked directly at him.

“This is all art, you know,” Langa said, running his thumbs over the old pen doodles like it was the simplest thing in the world. (He sometimes touches Reki’s face like that, like he's tracing him out, finding the stubble and the scars and removing them with gentle touches).

Some of the doodles dated back to the year they first met, others were more recent and refined, though the occasional Kuromi still appeared between the pages. “You’re an artist, Reki, a craftsperson,” Langa said, “you always have been.”

Oh. Good to know. Reki felt like pinching himself, or something, for being so obtuse about his own work. Instead, he held out his arms and let Langa climb into them.

In the end, poured over clay in the studio after class each day, Reki settled on a simplified tsuboya ware bowl. It was quite small since there were a lot of steps that would take time, but Reki worked hard to create the line-engravings on the pottery that he thought best represented himself. That is, all of the engravings were doodles from his journals, sketches of board designs and pieces of people’s hands he’d committed to memory. 

Some of the engravings look admittedly childish, but he had worked hard on them. 

When the B is handed to him, he isn’t unhappy. It might be less than an A, but it’s better than a C. 

He brings the project home to the prying hands of his sisters, but the person he really wants to show it to is lying on his bed, one of Reki’s old baseball caps over his face as he naps. 

The room is warm with afternoon, but cool with the rain. Reki closes the window with hopes that thunder doesn’t disturb Langa.

Then, Reki pads slowly to bed and places his bowl on the nightstand. He watches Langa’s chest move up and down. Lately, the heavily sensitive content of his classes have, for lack of better words, kicked Langa’s ass. Reki is glad he can find solace here, that this room, Reki’s room, is his comedown space.

Sometimes when Reki watches Langa sleep, he sees him tremble, contends with the sad noises at the back of his throat even though they wring his heart painfully. Those times, he knows that Langa dreams about his father, the way Reki sometimes dreams about the friend he lost. When Langa has nightmares, Reki presses his forehead against his and waits for Langa to wake up. Looking into each other’s eyes seems to calm him down. He first learned this strategy in their second year of high school, one night after a stressful race at S when Langa had beat Joe in a low-stakes beef. It was Langa’s shifting that had woken him. When Reki pressed his hands against Langa’s face in the dark, he’d found tears.

Langa says that when he’s tired, he’s more susceptible to flashbacks. So Reki stands there, watching Langa sleep. He takes the cap off Langa's face and admires the slight blush over his cheeks and wonders what he’s dreaming about, wondering if it’s him but not so confident to believe that it really is. 

He knows that when Langa eventually wakes up, the first thing he’ll see will be Reki, Reki and the earrings he finally has, real ones, only studs because the piercings are a few days old. And when Reki shows him the bowl, he’ll tuck his hair behind his ears so he can see it properly and ask questions. He’ll lean against Reki’s shoulder and look up into his eyes as Reki rambles on and on about bringing together his culture and his interests, and how he’s realizing that they’re related and that he should talk to his grandmother more while they wash the dishes together. 

And Langa will say something like, “Reki, you did so well.”

Or “Reki, I’m proud of you.”

Or “Reki, I love you.”

Anything he says, it will be enough because it will be the truth. Reki will feel like enough. Eventually, as the pad of Langa’s hand stays centred in his, he’ll feel like he’s something special. 

At the end of the night, when he discretely kisses Langa’s shoulder in the light of the twins' favourite Ghibli film, his family an oblivious insulation around them, he’ll hope, down to his fingertips, that Langa feels it too.