Archive of Our Own

January, 1995.

Satoru felt unclean.

The feeling did not belong to his body, and yet it lived there. It did not sit on his skin like grime, did not gather in the crescent beds beneath his fingernails, did not cling to him in any visible, indictable way. It existed somewhere less merciful. Somewhere deeper. It existed in the same place guilt did, in the same place shame did, in the same place God did.

He had been washed that morning.

He remembered it with the vivid, punishing clarity of ritual. The bathwater steaming and opaque, his mother’s hands guiding him into it with a firmness that did not permit refusal. She had used his favorite soap—the vanilla one, thick and syrup-sweet, the scent of it cloying and devotional, filling the small bathroom until it was all he could breathe, all he could taste. She had worked it into his skin until it frothed, until white foam gathered in the shallow valleys of his collarbones and the narrow hinges of his elbows.

She had scrubbed him the way one scrubs a stain. Behind his ears. Along his throat. Between each finger, prying them apart to reach the places dirt was fondest of hiding. She had rinsed him until the water ran clean, until there was nothing left of him but what God had made.

He remembered watching the suds spiral down the drain. He remembered wondering what, exactly, they had taken with them.

Afterward, she had dressed him carefully for morning sermon. One of his white shirts, freshly laundered and pressed, the cotton stiff and starchy against his shoulders. His hair was brushed and parted neatly down the center like the rest of the clean, young boys in the church. His shoes were tied tight enough to remind him they were there.

He had looked like something preserved. He had looked like something pure.

And still, Satoru felt unclean.

It stopped snowing around thirty minutes ago, one hour after sermon, and that’s when he was allowed to go outside to play. Playing in the snow was always fun, and he liked how it matched his hair and eyelashes. The Bible taught him that snow was about purity and cleansing but failed to supply anything about what it meant to feel dirty in the snow. If he were a true child of God, would he not feel eternally cleansed right now?

He cupped a heap of snow in his hands and let it sift through his dirty fingers.

“Suguru, is there something on my hands?”

He looked at his best friend who was busy making shapes in the snow with a rogue stick he found on the ground. They were in Suguru’s backyard while their parents sat inside for tea. 

The boy looked up from his spot with a worried look on his face. He threw the stick to the side and made his way toward Satoru, who stood there in the stark white with his palms up, just staring.

“Give ‘em here.”

Satoru gave him his hands without a second thought and found they burned hot in Suguru’s touch. Worried, he snapped them back toward his body, fearful he was doing something wrong for them to burn so hot.

Am I dirtying him? Am I burning his skin?

Suguru furrowed his eyebrows, confused. “What’d you do that for? I said give ‘em here, ‘Toru.”

All Satoru could feel was the pain from his fingernails digging into his palms as he closed his fists and held them to his chest. He never knew fear like this before. Not when he accidentally broke the lamp in the living room, not when he coughed in church, not even when he proper sinned like the time he tripped a boy over for calling Suguru a girl. Now however, he felt the fear of being the one to burn his best friend to ash with his filthy hands.

“There’s something wrong,” he tried to explain, but the lump in his throat was making it hard. “Sugu, there’s something wrong with me. I’m cursed or something.”

At that, Suguru blanched a little, too young to know what to do, too solid to let that make a difference. “I can get Mother. She always knows what to do.”

The thought of Suguru’s mother seeing him like this made Satoru freeze. He didn’t want anyone else to see him like this. He quickly loosened one of his fists before Suguru could step toward the house and pressed himself closer to Suguru, seeking comfort in the only person who made him feel safe. 

“Am I dirty?” he asked before he could think better of it.

Suguru looked him up and down with a curious expression, squinting, searching for something that could explain whatever the hell was going on. “Huh? No… you look fine to me.”

That’s not what I meant. Am I filthy, or am I pure?

He swallowed hard, bile rising at the thought of making the world more rotten than it already was.

“Are—are you sure?” It came out weak, brittle. He lightly unclasped the hand from Suguru’s jacket which he was still holding, leaving it just hovering over the fabric. He was scared he’d burn Suguru again, but he was more scared about being unclean. “What about my hands?”

Without reservation, Suguru gently took Satoru’s hand from the jacket and then lifted the other, still pressed to Satoru’s chest, into his own small palms. He turned his hands till his palms faced God, and Lord, did they burn, but before he could pull back, Suguru held them firmly, thumbs brushing over the lines and grooves of his palms, steady, careful, unflinching.

“All clean, ‘Toru. I promise. See?”

Satoru did not believe him. 

Even as Suguru stood there with a promising expression while Satoru’s hands trembled and scalded in his hold, he did not believe him. And still, he stood there, unmoving, feet planted in the white snow, a little less scared now.

—

September, 2001.

Suguru was Satoru’s best friend. He had been since they were six years old and would be till they were eighty, Satoru hoped, which is why when the other boys at church tried to speak to Suguru, he could become a little vicious. It wasn’t entirely malicious, but it only felt natural. He wanted Suguru all for himself, so everytime any of the church boys tried to speak with them, a gnawing fear slithered around Satoru’s throat which rapidly turned to anger.

It didn’t help that Suguru was the most polite boy in the church. All of Satoru’s insolent childish ways would be met with a stern eye and a few words that were probably stop that, Satoru, or so he imagined. He usually tuned out Suguru’s complaints. For a child only twelve years old, Suguru was very mature for his age, so whether Satoru heard what he said or not, he still obeyed.

Which brings him to sitting criss-crossed on a merry-go-round in the park behind the church. 

Sunday's sermon finished not long ago and Suguru roped Satoru into spending some time with the other kids. The three other boys were a little bit older, fourteen, fifteen maybe, so they thought it childish to actually play in the park, much to Satoru’s dismay. Suguru didn’t seem keen on joining him in going down the slide like they used to, so he just joined him in sitting down with the others.

“Did you hear about the Ieiri girl?” a boy with black hair asked. Satoru didn’t care much about his name.

“What, did she get her period?” another snickered. This one was blond.

Satoru could only watch as they went back and forth. They didn’t seem to want to steal Suguru away from him, which was good. Great, even. But the way they were talking about this Ieiri girl was leaving a sick residue in his stomach. He looked over at Suguru who was also mostly silent, not missing the unease in his eyes as they paced back and forth between the boys. See, if you weren’t so nice and polite, we wouldn’t be in this mess, idiot. He closed his eyes and begged God for forgiveness for cursing.

“One of the boys from basketball told me she got in trouble for kissing a girl, no joke. I assumed pussy was good but not good enough to stray from God,” the black-haired boy sneered. 

Something sick twisted in Satoru’s gut. He wanted to leave, wanted to punch all three of the boys until their noses were broken, felt the need to pick at his skin until it was red raw and burning. Maybe it was because he wasn’t old enough to have this much hate in his heart. Maybe it was because he didn’t like these boys from the get go. Maybe it was because from where he sat, his knee was pushing slightly into Suguru’s thigh. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Either way, he did not understand why the cross around his neck was blazing.

“Holy shit,” the blond cursed.

The third boy, short and stocky, started laughing. “Figures. She always seemed like she had something wrong with her. All quiet and artsy and shit.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees like he was about to tell scripture. “My dad says girls like that either end up in hell or in rehab. Or both.”

The blond barked another laugh. “Seriously? Rehab? What, for licking cunt?”

Satoru’s heart hammered, fast-fast-fast, like a boy running from wolves. He couldn’t breathe quite right. His throat felt tight, like hands were closing around it, and his skin crawled under his dress shirt like ants were burrowing through him. 

“Nah,” the black-haired boy jumped back in, eyes too bright, voice too hungry for approval. “My uncle says that stuff spreads. Like—” He snapped his fingers. “Like infection. One girl starts eating carpet, and suddenly the whole grade is. Then she’ll cut her hair, get all ugly, start dressing like a goddamn guy.”

“And then what?” the blond grinned. “We all have to watch her prance around like she’s got a dick? Pfft. Hard pass. I like my girls actually, y’know… normal.”

“Yeah,” the stocky one said through another laugh. “If an actual dude ever tried kissing me, I’d beat his dick in so hard he’d forget which bathroom to use.”

They all laughed at that like it was the funniest thing in the world, like fear was comedy, like bodies and hearts were just props. And Satoru hated it—hated the sound, hated the faces, hated the way the words poisoned the air and settled in his lungs like black mold.

The blond wiped his eyes. “Whatever. If she likes girls so much, she should just go to some rainbow school or whatever. They got those, right? Where freaks go?”

“I heard they shock ‘em,” stocky-boy added, grinning like a gargoyle. “Fix their brains.” He tapped his own skull. “Zap that lesbian right out. Same for faggots.”

“Stop!” Satoru blurted, and when all four heads turned to look his way, dread rose to the forefront of his throat. 

“Stop what?” the blond asked.

“I-I don’t know. Doesn’t this seem a bit wrong—to be talking about her like this?” 

The blond’s mouth curled, more teeth than smile. “Sounds like something a gay dude would say.”

Satoru froze. He wasn’t gay, he knew that. This wasn’t about gay or straight anyway, this was about the Ieiri girl being talked about behind her back like she wasn’t a person, like she wasn’t one of God’s servants. It wasn’t fair to do that to one of God’s children.

When Satoru didn’t respond, the stocky one leaned back, arms crossed. “Actually, you know what? Let’s ask your little boyfriend.” He jerked his chin toward Suguru, who stiffened beside him like someone had hooked a wire through his spine and tugged.

“Yeah,” the black-haired boy echoed. “Suguru’s smart. He reads all those boring books. Bet he knows what God thinks.”

Four sets of eyes turned toward him. He stared at the dirt beneath his sneakers, one scuffed heel tracing a line back and forth like he was drawing a boundary he wished he could vanish behind.

“I mean…” Suguru rubbed the back of his neck, shrinking into himself. “I guess it’s weird.”

Satoru deflated.

“Weird,” stocky echoed triumphantly. “Told you.”

“See?” blond said, smacking Suguru between the shoulders like he’d said something brilliant. “Normal guy answer.”

Suguru laughed—thin, forced—like he was letting gravel scrape his throat. Satoru looked away. He thought about how dirty Suguru suddenly looked, as if he was chalked under dust and debris and the everloving stain of his own faith.

“Whatever,” Satoru muttered, standing too fast. “I’m leaving.”

“Aww, come on,” the blond called behind him. “We’re just joking!”

But Satoru kept walking, hands balled into fists so tight his nails bit half-moons into his palms. The natural path of his walk was automatic, legs moving one-by-one, first right, then left, across pavement he’d memorized without meaning to—past his house, his school, the old library where he sneak-read manga in his free time. He was a string pulled along a track, a bead on a wire, a ghost dragged forward by some unseen current.

His thoughts—those traitorous things—ricocheted wildly around his skull, skipping like stones across water too shallow to catch them, a chorus of noisy angels screaming at him to look back, look back, look back.

He did not.

He knew the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—or at least the kindergarten-safe retelling—the one where a boy walks and his love follows, and all he has to do is be patient, be strong, keep his eyes forward. Simple. Easy. Don’t turn around. Don’t give in. Don’t ruin everything with one weak-willed glance.

Satoru had always believed Orpheus was stupid. Now he wondered if Orpheus was merely human.

Because now the urge to turn, to verify, to search, to see, was a living thing, a heartbeat that wasn’t his own. It climbed his spine like ivy, tugged at his shoulder blades like hands. He imagined turning around, painfully slow, eyelids fluttering open like they were glued shut, and finding Suguru following him, climbing out of some shadowed pit with him, leaving those vile boys behind, letting their voices dissolve into ash in the wind.

He imagined it so hard he almost tricked himself into believing it.

But what if Suguru wasn’t there? What if the only thing behind him were those boys—the new Cerberus and its three snapping heads—holding Suguru tight by the back of his collar, dragging him back down into their underworld of hate and jabs and spit-shined certainty?

What if Suguru chose them?

The thought cracked something small and important in the center of his chest. A wishbone, maybe, or some godforsaken hinge holding boyhood together.

His feet carried him onward, dirt hitting rubber, rubber hitting bone, the friction of each step a reminder that he was still here, still moving, still resisting the gravity pulling him backward. He wanted to scream, wanted to run, wanted to stand still and wait forever in case Suguru appeared beside him like a miracle, like a reprieve, like the burn of a hand on skin.

He didn’t turn. And so he walked.

Walked like someone in a trance, or maybe someone freshly sleepwalking, body moving ahead of mind, mind somewhere miles above him like a helium balloon rising and thinning and disappearing into an atmosphere not meant for human lungs. Past the crooked mailbox, past Mrs. Nakamura’s yard where her hydrangeas curled inward like they knew the world was cruel, past the old skatepark whose chain-link fence rattled like a ribcage.

He walked and walked until he saw the lake—if you could dignify it with a word as grand as lake. It was really just a wide, indented scoop in the earth that had collected rainwater and runoff over more years than either boy had been alive. A retention pond, his father called it, as though naming it something duller could rob it of its mystery. But to Satoru and Suguru it was a portal, a half-feral secret, a clearing at the edge of the world where the grown-ups never looked and where the rules twisted into softer shapes. He sat down by the water.

In summer, older kids jumped from the half-rotten dock and screamed when the water swallowed them cold. In winter, a thin crust of ice hovered over its surface like the skin that forms atop old milk. Right now, with the sun still high but softening, early afternoon melting toward whatever lazy hours followed, it was glassy and bright, reflecting the sky and the trees and the doubts Satoru was treading water in.

Snap. Thump.

“Shit!”

Satoru smiled to himself. Forgive him for cursing, Father. He still did not look back.

“Are you gonna help me?” Suguru croaked miserably. Satoru knew he didn’t need help.

“Sorry, can’t turn around. I don’t want you to be taken to the Underworld.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?” Suguru huffed, taking a seat next to him. “Actually, you know what? Don’t wanna know.”

Satoru turned toward him. “You followed me.”

“Yeah, and I’m gonna get in a heap of sh—trouble when Mother and Father realize we’re missing.”

Satoru tutted. “Those boys are really growing on you. You’re cursing the roof off this house.”

“We’re not in a house right now.”

Something sour passed over him. “That’s not the point.”

Suguru let out a sigh that seemed to move the water in ripples. “Why’d you run off?”

“Because what they were saying wasn’t nice.”

“They were only jokin’.”

“Cool. It wasn’t funny.”

“That’s how boys are though! You’d know a whole lot more ‘bout it if you hung out with them a bit more.”

Even the vague notion of that thought was enough to put Satoru in a mood.

“They called me gay.”

“Yeah, but you’re not so it’s fine.”

“So you agree with them. You think gay people should get their brains zapped. That the Ieiri girl is some sort of infectious demon cast out of Heaven or something.”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“You said it’s weird. You agreed with them.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Well neither’s being called something like that!” Satoru’s voice cracked, too loud in the hush of the water, too loud for a Sunday that still felt half-owned by hymns and incense.

“‘Toru, why are you so worked up about this?”

Satoru felt his face go hot—ridiculously, stupidly hot. He wished the lake would swallow him whole and spit him out somewhere else, somewhere easy.

“Because it’s mean,” he snapped, but the word felt flimsy, like a cardboard shield in a swordfight. “It’s cruel. And they said it like—like she wasn’t even human.”

Suguru made a noise in his throat, unsure. “But she is weird.”

“So are we!” Satoru shot back. “We slap each other with tea bags when our parents aren’t looking. You think too much for your own good. I don’t shut up even when I should. We’re weird all the time and nobody wants us to get zapped!”

“That’s not the same.” Suguru’s voice had a stiffness to it. “You know what the Bible says.”

Satoru jerked his chin toward him. “Do you?”

“I—I know enough,” he stammered. “That it’s wrong. That’s what everyone says. So it must be.”

“So if the Ieiri girl asked you to be friends, you’d say no?”

Suguru frowned. “I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Suguru opened his mouth, closed it again. He wasn’t used to being cornered—not by Satoru, at least.

“It just… it don’t matter,” he muttered finally.  “She’ll grow out of it. Or get help. Or—something.”

The burning in Satoru’s chest flared so hot he swore he could feel it blister. “Grow out of what? Liking someone? Wanting someone? Liking—” He cut himself off, startled by the edge in his own voice.

Suguru’s eyes widened, not because he understood, but because he didn’t. Satoru knew that the idea he was dancing near didn’t exist in Suguru’s world.

“What are you even talking about?” Suguru demanded. He sounded frustrated the way someone gets when they’ve reached the end of their map and the world keeps stretching past it anyway.

Satoru swallowed hard. “I just…” He failed again, words kicking dust inside his throat. “Just because someone likes someone doesn’t mean they’re bad. Doesn’t mean God hates them.”

Suguru stiffened. “Who said anything about liking?”

“You know what I mean!”

“No I don’t! I don’t!” Suguru’s voice pitched higher, fear lacing the edges. “I don’t understand why you’re gettin’ so twisted up over this! It’s not like it’s about you!”

“But what if it was?” Satoru saw Suguru’s whole face twist up, alarm blooming there like mold on bread, and he rushed—tripped—over the backpedal. “Not me!” he blurted. Too fast. Too loud. “Obviously not me. I’m not—God, I’m not—I’m not like that.”

Suguru’s shoulders eased a millimeter, the air leaving him in a quiet sigh he probably didn’t even register. Relief smelled metallic in the space between them.

“I’m just askin’,” he went on, voice wobbling toward casual and landing somewhere crooked and wrong. “Like… if it was someone. Someone we knew or someone you thought of as a really good friend…”

Suguru frowned at the lake like it might cough up the right answer for him. “Well,” he said slowly, choosing every word like he might get smacked for the wrong one, “I guess I’d… I dunno… stay away from ’em.”

“Stay away?”

“Yeah. At least until they got help,” Suguru nodded, quick and certain now that the track had been laid for him. “’Cause if they’re like that… then they’d probably want…” He trailed off, ears turning red.

Satoru’s pulse crawled up his neck. “What? Want what?”

Suguru swallowed. “You know.” A helpless gesture of the hand. “Them things. Kissin’ and… bein’ all weird.”

Satoru stared, cold prickling up his arms like winter frost. “And you’d just leave them,” he said, voice thin.

Suguru shrugged. “It’d be better. For both of us.”

Satoru barked a laugh that was not a laugh at all. “Well, lucky you,” he croaked, forcing his grin so wide his cheeks hurt. “’Cause I’m not. Like that. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Suguru echoed, and his relief showed again—unclenched shoulders, looser breath, a tiny smile like a shutter cracking open.

“Just wanted to know,” Satoru muttered. “In case.”

Suguru’s response was immediate, simple, and wrong in all the ways neither of them knew yet.

“Well, now I do.”

—

October, 2003.

It was two years later that Satoru started to question the Bible.

Satoru’s parents took great pride in their religion, as did the Getos. It was not abnormal for the two families to sit around the dining room table after supper and recite verses. It was mainly an opportunity to have the boys dissect the intricacies of the Bible, especially now that they were fourteen and had a better understanding of life.

Their parents took turns reading under the yellow lighting, stopping every now and then to iterate the importance of a specific verse or let Suguru ask one of his many questions. He was sitting across from Satoru, chin raised and eyes downturned to catch a glimpse of the book in his mother’s hand as she read. Satoru wasn’t very interested, however. His mind kept trying to capture bits and pieces of Mother Geto’s voice but he was too preoccupied with the small scratch under Suguru’s jaw. When did he get that? Was he hanging around with one of the church girls and she snagged him accidentally with her nail? Was it a cat? Satoru really hoped it was a cat.

In the midst of his staring, Suguru turned and looked at him. Satoru’s heart raced in his chest and he quickly snapped away, embarrassed and a little pink-cheeked. He didn’t know why it was embarrassing, it just was. Despite the hot tremor in his fingers, he looked back at his best friend only to find him still looking at him. There was a serenity in Suguru’s face that he only saw when he was at church or when he’d hug his mother, but now, it was directed at Satoru. Only at Satoru. The thought made him flush a little redder, but before his thoughts could get the better of him, Suguru nodded toward the Bible in his mother’s hands. 

Pay attention, idiot, it read. 

Satoru rolled his eyes but couldn’t help the timid, secret smile that bloomed on his face.

“We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.” Mother Geto’s voice was solid yet soft, as if the word of God was coming straight through her. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.”

Satoru let the words roll through his mouth and onto his tongue, down his esophagus and into the part of his stomach that held his curiosity and whim. 

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

Before he could think twice, Satoru opened his mouth. “So… if God is love,” he said slowly, frowning at the open Bible, “does that mean… He loves everyone the same?”

Mother Geto’s hands paused over the page. “Yes, dear,” she said gently. “God’s love is the same for all His children.”

Satoru chewed his lip. “Even… people who do bad things? Or people who… feel things about each other that others don’t like?”

Satoru’s father cleared his throat. “Satoru,” he uttered, tight, “God’s love is perfect, yes, but that doesn’t mean every choice people make is good. There are rules. We have to follow them.”

Satoru blinked. “I know,” he said quickly, but then, almost without thinking: “But if the rule is to love, then… isn’t loving someone wrong still from God?”

The room went quiet. Satoru didn’t understand why. Suguru always asked lots of questions and was never served with silence like this, never had his father’s jaw tense at him, never had his mother look at him warily, like he was dirty, unclean. 

Suguru nudged Satoru’s knee with the tip of his toe from across the table. Satoru looked up at him and saw his best friend staring with a burrowed type of look—a little accusatory, a lot confused. It reminded him of that day all those years ago in the snow when he promised Satoru that he was clean. Maybe he was right not to believe him.

Despite the silence, Satoru turned back to Mother Geto, undeterred. “If someone loves someone and everyone says it’s wrong, can it still be God’s love?”

“That’s enough for tonight,” his father interjected, and that was the end. 

It didn’t take long for the pleasantries to be over, and before he knew it, the Geto’s were driving off. Satoru stayed by the window the whole time, one hand plastered on the glass, watching Suguru in the back seat. He seemed upset, and like most things, Satoru didn’t understand why.

“Satoru, can you come here for a moment,” his father beckoned. Satoru looked back from the window to find his mother gone and his father sitting in the seat previously occupied by Mother Geto. 

He approached cautiously. “Yes, Father?”

“Do you have any idea what kind of questions you asked tonight?” his father asked, leaning back, hands gripping the arms of the chair. “About love. About God. About things that are not right. In front of guests, might I add.”

Satoru tilted his head and sat down in the seat Suguru was sitting in before. It was still warm. “I was just trying to understand.”

“Understand?” His father’s eyes narrowed. “You call that understanding? You are testing limits, poking at things that should never even cross your mind. Do you think God allows you to question what is proper?”

Satoru’s throat went dry. “I… I don’t know… I just—”

“You don’t know?” His father’s tone sharpened. “You think that makes it okay to twist God’s word? To justify feelings that are wrong?”

Satoru’s stomach clenched. “I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”

His father stood suddenly, looming over him. “No,” he barked, voice hard as iron, “you will learn. You will learn that not everything you feel is good, not everything you want is allowed, and not everything your heart whispers is from God.”

Satoru’s eyes widened, and he shook his head. “But… I just don’t understand. If love comes from God…” His voice faltered. “…then why would some kinds of love be bad?”

“Because God created boundaries,” his father said firmly, stepping closer. “There is right, and there is wrong. There is the life He designed, and there is the chaos your foolish curiosity can lead to. You are fourteen and you need to know where you stand. Now.”

“I’m not trying to be wrong!” Satoru protested, panic creeping into his voice. “I just—”

“You think your confusion excuses you?” his father cut him off, tone rising. “Do you think God cares about excuses? About feelings that lead only to sin? You will follow the rules He gave, or you will face the consequences. Do you understand me?”

Satoru froze like ice water, like a river in January, like the snow Suguru once wiped off the palms of his hands when he was younger and unbeknownst to life’s cruelty. He closed his eyes and pretended he was in the Geto’s backyard again, feeling the ice melt into his socks, down his ankle, and into his shoes while Suguru touched him. If loving a man was such a bad thing, then why did God put his most beautiful servant in Satoru’s life? Why had he let him be so gentle with his dirtiness? Why couldn’t something as pure as snow and as clarifying as a reassuring touch be love the same way it was for man and woman?

His father’s hand shot out, gripping Satoru’s collar and lifting him to his feet. “I said, do you understand?”

Satoru spluttered in lieu of words. They usually came so easily, but now they were bitten down and swallowed with the sins he was on trial for.

The hand in his collar cinched tighter, fabric twisting at his throat, and the space between one breath and the next thinned to nothing. There was a flicker of motion that was barely perceptible, already inevitable, and then his father’s fist met his eye. 

By the time he understood he was falling, the chair had already caught him. Wood struck bone; the impact jarred up through his spine and settled deep in his skull, where the pain began to pulse. He felt a trail of blood line the innermost part of his cheek, and it felt impossibly slow, like a river he could trace with a fingertip, a river carrying not water but guilt. He touched it lightly, careful not to smear it further, and the taste of iron was sharp and holy, as if his own body were offering up a confession God had not asked for, a private liturgy written in copper and heat.

The room around him hummed low, the walls bending inward, the chair’s backrest pressing against his spine like a pulpit, and he imagined the blood as a tear God might shed, if God were capable of bleeding for the missteps of children who could not yet name the sin they carried in their hearts. A sacramental wound, small and personal, an altar of one. The blood was small, almost laughably small in the face of the weight of his father’s words, but it felt monumental, an altar erected in the flesh, and for a fleeting moment, Satoru imagined God leaning down to inspect it, nodding, satisfied, a silent absolution he would not be allowed to voice. He traced the line of blood again, fingertips sticky and warm, and in his mind it became a river beneath a river, unseen but stubbornly flowing. He wondered if all suffering bled like this, quietly, into impossible shapes of understanding, into a knowledge that was too much for a fourteen-year-old to hold all at once. He wondered if loving could ever be wrong, or if the world simply refused to see what God had mercilessly placed in his hands.

“Answer me, child.”

“Yes, Father,” Satoru whispered, blinking back the sting in his eyes.

“Good,” he said, voice steadier but no less stern. “You will think before you speak. You will think before you feel. And you will remember that not everything your heart tells you is from God.”

He said yes aloud and no for the first time in the silent cathedral of his chest, and somewhere between the blood on his fingertips and the word Father on his tongue, something holy in him learned how to divide itself cleanly in two. He bowed his head—not in obedience, but in the murky genesis of a war between heaven and his own pulse. If this was salvation, it tasted indistinguishable from exile. It was the day God was set above the steady percussion of his own heartbeat, the day his own name began to toll like heresy beneath a river no one else could see, and as he stood there, small and trembling beneath doctrine and yellow light, Satoru understood that the question itself—the audacity of asking whether love could be wrong—was his first sin, and also his first true confession.

—

Morning crept in reluctantly, as though the sun itself were embarrassed to witness whatever remained of the night before, and the thin slice of light that cut beneath Satoru’s bedroom door burned hotter than any sermon he’d ever heard. He lay still for a long time, suspended between waking and not, too aware of the throbbing above his cheekbone, the way pain pulsed like a second heartbeat in a place no extra heart belonged. His right eye refused to cooperate at first, swollen shut like a door that had been nailed from the inside, and when he pried it open with two fingers and a hiss of breath, the vision that spilled in was fragmented—shapes splitting, doubling, drifting apart like ice floes on the Okhotsk Coast when winter couldn’t decide whether it meant to take or spare them.

He sat up slow, as though any sudden movement might jar loose the precarious scaffolding of denial he’d erected overnight, and the sheet slipped from his shoulder with all the enthusiasm of someone being exiled from heaven. The bruise, though hidden from his own sight, announced itself in every direction—behind the eye, in the hinge of his jaw, in the knotting of his throat—and Satoru imagined, with a kind of childish cruelty, that if he pressed his thumb hard enough into the skin he might find the imprint of his father’s knuckles fossilized there.

His bedroom was the same, which felt like a personal insult. The posters on the wall remained indifferent, the laundry on the floor continued to sulk, and the crucifix above the desk hung stern and silent, as though daring him to pretend last night had been a dream. Satoru rubbed his face and something warm stirred behind the bruise, not pain exactly but a molten embarrassment, the way tar must feel when it first begins to melt and remembers it used to be something fluid and free.

He swung his legs off the side of the bed and paused there, poised, his bare feet hovering an inch above the carpet like he could stall gravity if he tried hard enough. He breathed in, and the breath tasted like iron and old fear; he breathed out, and it didn’t leave him.

In the bathroom, his stomach dropped. The swelling was worse in the morning light—crueler, like daylight had peered in through his skull and decided to announce to the world exactly how last evening had gone. Someone had smudged thumbprints beneath his eye, someone had left fingerprints on his face, and the reflection in the mirror looked less like Gojo Satoru and more like some paper puppet version of him, wrinkled at the edges and buckling at the crease.

He touched it. Wrong move. Pain flared sharp and immediate, like hot iron pressed to meat, and he snatched his hand away, breath catching somewhere in his throat.

Okay. Calm down. Fix it.

He pried open the bathroom drawer with fingers trembling far more than they should have been—stupid fingers, weak fingers—and started hauling out every useless thing in reaching distance: toothpaste, dental floss, the travel-sized sunscreen his mother insisted he carry in his pocket as if sunburn were a moral failing. He was looking for something to erase him, something that could rewind time or dull reality, something miraculous.

Cold spoon. That’s a thing, right? Or maybe it was just something moms joked about on TV, the kind of half-serious remedy women laughed over at brunch to hide hangovers and heartbreak. Still, he grabbed one from the kitchen drawer and shoved it into the freezer. Five seconds later he was back in the bathroom, wondering if that was long enough. Probably not. Who cares.

Time was turning slippery in his hands, pooling and spilling everywhere like dishwater. He blinked and five minutes were gone. Blinked again and the spoon was nowhere near cold enough but the clock on the wall was suddenly screaming 8:03, and classes started at 8:15, and he hadn’t brushed his teeth and his face looked like something you reported to a teacher, to a counselor, to a parent.

His stomach lurched.

He pressed the spoon to his eye anyway and the metal was shockingly cold, a relief so sudden it felt like being dunked under water. His breath stuttered out of him and the world seemed to narrow into that one sensation: the aching throb shrinking just slightly beneath the pressure, the faint numb taking over the color.

Better. Not good. But better.

He blinked hard, blinked again, and suddenly he was clenching the counter tight enough that veins corded blue beneath the skin on the backs of his hands. His reflection blurred. Not because of distorted glass, but because his eyes were stinging.

“No,” he whispered to himself, the word coming out strangled, too raw in his throat. No crying. Not over this. 

His chest tightened anyway, something like a fist wringing his insides, twisting harder each time he tried to forget how small he had felt in the guise of his own faith. He forced air out through his nose, ragged. He tried to swallow, but everything in him rebelled.

He hated how much he wanted Suguru to ask if he was okay. Hated how stupid that thought even was.

Knockknockknock.

“Satoru?” His mother’s voice, muffled but intent. “Sweetheart, everything all right in there?”

The spoon clattered to the sink. Panic jolted up his spine.

His voice came out pitched strangely, like it was wearing someone else’s shape. “Yeah—yeah, I’m fine! Just—um—my stomach feels weird. I might be late.”

There. A lie so thin it practically evaporated. Forgive me, Father.

Usually his mother had a sixth sense for excuses, slicing straight through them. But today—maybe she hadn’t had her coffee yet, maybe God smiled down on idiots, maybe the universe allowed one acorn of mercy tossed to a desperate squirrel—she paused, then said, “All right. I’ll call in for you. Breakfast is still on the table if you want it.”

Footsteps down the hall.

Satoru’s shoulders slumped so suddenly he almost folded in half. Something hot pricked behind his eyes again, but he blinked it away, hard, swallowing the tremor in his throat and feeling it land like bile in the pit of his stomach.

He walked to school late. The sidewalk was empty the whole way since the tide of adults rushing to work and the flood of kids running to school was well over. He took the time to become less of himself in order to face everyone in class. He didn’t want to be a questioner anymore, didn’t want to be the kid with the bruised eye socket or the boy with the pitiful empathy or scorched skin. He wanted to be Satoru. Unmarked and unremarkable Satoru. 

And so he walked through the gates with a pure mind and a clear soul, with his ironed uniform and his hair parted in the middle, though drifting to shaggy now. The only thing sticking to him like sweat in heat was the mark his father gave him, and even then, it was okay. Bruises heal, marks disappear, sinful parts of your soul are battered down to dust and blown away.

As he stepped through the gates of the school, he stopped. Chk-chk. He clammed his head to the side and listened. 

Chk-chk. Chk-chk.

He frowned then backpedaled slightly. When he heard the noise again, he walked out of the school grounds entirely and rounded the corner into the alleyway, and there crouched was a girl in her school uniform, hand cupping what he could only assume was a cigarette and lighter. Satoru had seen many adults smoke before, he wasn’t oblivious to the sin, but he’d never seen a schoolgirl do it. She could not be much older than him.

“You’re harming the body God gave you by doing that, y’know,” he blurted before he could stop himself.

Her head whipped around, a glare sharp enough to make Judas reconsider betrayal. He, however, remained unmoved.

“Smoke makes you sick,” he went on, “and addiction is enslavement.” 

That made the girl laugh even though Satoru wasn’t joking. She looked at the cigarette, then at Satoru, and extended her hand. “Want one?”

“Wha—no! I don’t want to get ill and die.” 

How could this girl even ask him that? It’s not like she can even get the thing to light. Idiot.

All she did was shrug. “Suit yourself.”

Chk-chk.

“Why are you smoking during school time?”

The girl groaned. “Dude, are you serious?” Satoru nodded. “It was rhetorical, you dickhead.” Forgive her, Father. 

“You shouldn’t speak like that to an underclassman, especially as a woman.”

Chk-chk. It finally lit.

The girl grinned but that quickly faded when she looked back up at Satoru. “I don’t like your type so just leave me alone.”

Satoru furrowed his eyebrows, the words striking a slow, hollow rhythm in his chest. He wondered if she meant the way he carried himself—hands folded too neatly, uniform pressed, smile measured—or the thoughts he let leak too quickly, the questions he asked when the answers weren’t his to know.

“My type?”

“Yeah, your type. Church boys.”

He took a step forward, hesitant but unwilling to back down. There’s nothing wrong with me, he told himself, but the words felt fragile, echoing off walls of doubt he hadn’t even noticed before. Am I too earnest? Too careful? Too much of a boy who wants to be right, who wants to be good? His heart thudded awkwardly in his chest, a small, insistent drumbeat against the tension of her glare.

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” he cried out, louder than he’d intended. It sounded stupid, childish, a gasping plea that had nothing to do with what she said and everything to do with how he felt. He felt the rage of his old self he left behind fifteen minutes ago bubble up to the back of his throat, and he had to take a breath to swallow him back down. I’m just Satoru.

“Sit down. What’s your name?” 

That took Satoru by surprise. He had come closer without realizing, now just two feet away from her.

“I’m just Satoru,” he said, and it felt good. He sat down next to her. 

“Hey just Satoru, I’m Shoko Ieiri.”

Satoru bristled. “The lesbian?”

Shoko Ieiri’s eyes narrowed. Sharp, calculating, a glint of steel running through the brown. She leaned back slightly, cigarette clutched between fingers, lighter dangling in the other hand like a torch someone had handed her to defend herself. “Excuse me?”

Satoru’s stomach twisted. He had meant nothing by it. Not that. He didn’t want her to think he was like the others despite spending the morning trying to scrub himself clean of sin, trying to polish his thoughts until they shone like the Sunday candles he and Suguru lit. Everything was smeared and slipping.

“I—I didn’t mean it like that,” he stammered, face heating, ears buzzing. “I—uh—it’s just—” He waved a hand vaguely. What was just? He couldn’t even think of a safe word that wouldn’t sound like condemnation. 

He wanted to run his fingers through the air and erase what he had said, wanted to tell her that he spent the better half of the morning at war with himself, against the part of him that wanted to say yes, that wanted to admit that maybe love wasn’t supposed to be locked in a box, wasn’t supposed to be exclusively for boys and girls who followed every rule and hymn and rigid commandment. Against the part that had seen Suguru’s hands and felt the warmth and the tether of wanting someone in this world, and thought, maybe that could exist, maybe that could be right, maybe that could be me.

And now here she was. The real-life, smoking, stubborn, completely untamed proof that the world didn’t care about the careful, measured love he’d been studying like holy text. And she was sitting there, lips pressed together, eyes sharp, ready to pounce if she felt cornered, and his morning-long ritual of becoming a “good church boy,” a safe, dutiful, correct Satoru, seemed suddenly hollow, friable, like it would shatter if he so much as blinked in the wrong direction.

“I just… I—I’ve heard people—” He stopped himself. Couldn’t say it. Couldn’t say the things that had floated through the air that morning he sat criss-crossed on the merry-go-round two years ago and all the time since then. Couldn’t say the words without feeling them lodge in his throat, a sharp stone he wasn’t ready to swallow.

Shoko exhaled, smoke trailing from her lips in a lazy, curling ribbon. She extended her hand to him again. “Here. Take a puff and I won’t punch you.”

Satoru snapped his head to the side. “W-what?”

She nodded toward his eye and he felt his veins go cold. He almost forgot. “What happened there?” she asked, practically forcing the cigarette between his fingers. He held it awkwardly, as if it would set him alight at any given moment. It was warm and wet at the filter, and he was scared to be holding it. He’d never seen sin so tangible before.

“I, uh…” he trailed off.

She grabbed his hand softly from where it floated stagnant mid-air. “You bring it to your lips and then you inhale.”

Satoru wanted to say yeah, I know how smoking works. I’m fourteen, not a moron, but he couldn’t get the words out. Shoko continued inching his fingers closer to his mouth and he felt like crying or running or burying his face six feet deep in the snow.

When it was an inch from his lips, Shoko leaned in toward his ear. “You don’t have to do it, Satoru. You have a choice here. Some people don’t, and that’s okay too.”

Satoru was too young to understand what she meant. Or maybe he knew exactly what she meant and chose not to read into it too much. Either way, the cigarette was brought to his lips and he inhaled, and the smoke filled his lungs with the weight of a thousand sermons, thick as incense in a crowded chapel, curling into his chest like whispered confessions no priest could hear. It tasted bitter, acrid, like the charcoal of burnt offerings, like the smoke that rises from candles too quickly snuffed, like prayers that sputter and choke before they leave your lips. It wrapped itself around his ribs and stuck to the back of his throat, clinging like guilt, like shame, like knowing he was stepping across lines he had been taught were holy. He coughed, hacking, folding in on himself, his chest heaving and stomach twisting. His eyes watered, and the bitter taste scraped against his tongue and roof of his mouth, a flavor so wrong it might as well have been labeled forbidden.

“Holy shit, dude. I didn’t expect you to actually do it,” Shoko laughed, pulling away, taking her sin with her.

Satoru heaved. “What? You made me!”

“I explicitly said you had a choice. Don’t put it on me.”

“Wha—” Satoru deflated, let his body slump a little, head tipped back against the brick wall. He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t really know what to say. He just sat there, gravel digging into his ironed pants, silent. He wanted to laugh, overcome by the ridiculousness of the situation, of the fact that he was offered sin on a silver platter from the resident lesbian and he ate it up without a second thought. 

He didn’t even beg God for forgiveness. He was too far gone in the moment, the morning, the struggling debate in his mind.

“I got into a fight,” he said absentmindedly. He didn’t know why he was talking about his problems with some girl who was probably two-three years his senior and feeding him tar and arsenic and formaldehyde. 

She motioned to his cheek and he nodded. “Looks pretty badass for a thirteen year old.”

“I’m fifteen in December,” he snapped.

She snorted then took a puff of her cigarette. “What was the fight about?”

Satoru gulped. “There’s this guy in my class,” he began, casual like he wasn’t choosing every word with tweezers. “Bigger than me. Like, freakishly big for fourteen. Eats four lunches, probably.”

Shoko raised her eyebrows. “Naturally.”

“Anyway,” Satoru said, shoving his hands into his uniform pockets, “he’s always trying to act like he’s in charge. He’s someone who thinks he’s got the final word on everything, like anyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter or whatever.”

Shoko snorted. “Must be nice.”

“Yeah. Well, he’s always telling everyone what to do. Sit here, shut up, don’t talk, don’t think. You know the type. So yesterday, he—I dunno—he just starts picking on me. Says I should stop being so weird. Stop acting like I know things. Says I should just fall in line with everyone else. So I said something back. Nothing big. Just told him to screw off and mind his business.” If love comes from God, then why would some kinds of love be bad? “Then he grabs my collar and says if I don’t listen, he’ll make me, and—“

Shoko blew smoke sideways. “And you hit him back?”

Satoru shook his head fast. “Couldn’t.”

Shoko frowned at that, looking over his face studiously. He shied away from the look, biting the inside of his cheek as he focused on the tip of his shoes. “It doesn’t even hurt that much anymore.” Lie.

“You’re gonna get him back though, right?” she asked, dabbing her now-smoked cigarette into the ground. “If someone tried that with me, I’d bite their ear off.”

Although he’d known the girl for ten minutes, he knew she was telling the truth. She was much braver than he was.

“I’ll get him back one day,” Satoru nodded.

“Good. Be who you wanna be and don’t take shit from no one.” She ruffled his hair—quick, careless, almost reverent in that way only the godless can be. Then she stood, every limb loose and certain, like she’d already lived through worse nights and worse boys and worse alleys. “I gotta go. Hope your face heals. Call me when you’re old enough to have a cigarette.”

A sound bubbled out of him. Not laughter really, but something warped and buckled and determined to still pass as joy. It hurt in his eye and cheekbone and skull, and yet it felt like a relief valve opening after a night spent clenched. “Okay. Cool.”

She drifted toward the mouth of the alley, each step dissolving her back into the larger world, into school corridors and bus stops and whispered rumors that stuck to her like burrs. Then the panic seized him, the same cold panic he felt whenever scripture was read aloud and he didn’t feel the holiness he was supposed to feel.

“Hey! Shoko!”

She turned quickly, smiling, expecting kindness. The cross around Satoru’s neck burned, and so did his dirty hands, and so did his filthy soul. What he was about to say would leave him unclean for the rest of his life.

“Can you like, not tell anyone we talked?” The words spilled out, tripping over each other like altar boys scrambling to hide spilled wine. “Because… you know…”

And there it was. The rot in the rafters.

Because you’re a lesbian.

Shoko’s smile faltered. Not dramatically, not ruinously, just the smallest drop, like a candle flame bowing in a draft no one else felt. But Satoru felt it. He would feel it again in dreams years later, a single flicker extinguishing and relighting, the afterimage burned into his eyelids.

Her expression gathered itself back together, quick hands righting what had been dented but not broken. “Yeah,” she said at last, voice low enough to sound a little like resignation, a little like divine word said backwards. “No problem.”

But Satoru knew—even at fourteen, even with doctrine stuffed in his pockets and bruises blooming under his eye—that it was a problem.

That he had become one.

He sat there long after she vanished around the corner, tasting ash he couldn’t cough up, trying to swallow down the truth he wasn’t ready for: that fear could make you betray someone faster than hate ever could. And that the first person he betrayed to stay safe was not her.

It was himself.

—

He didn’t go to school.

His mother probably already got the phone call but he just didn’t care. He would figure it out later, apologize, cry, get hit, whatever. He already survived a beating so he rationalized that another couldn’t be much worse.

Just before lunch, he put a note in Suguru’s locker asking him to meet at the library down the road after school. Since then, he’d been in the corner reading a manga series his parents would surely kill him for.

At three, he couldn’t stop checking the clock, as though the hands themselves could answer questions he didn’t know how to ask. Is he going to show up? Is he going to ignore me? Did he even see the note? Satoru curled further into their usual corner, hidden, small, teeth pressing the inside of his cheeks until the taste of blood prevailed, a reminder that the body always remembered even when the mind tried to forget. After last night, certainty was scarce. He was sure that he had asked the wrong questions in front of the wrong people, that Suguru’s expression in the car when the Getos left had been edged with disappointment or anger, that the hit had landed just where it hurt most, but beyond that, everything else was unknown. What did Suguru think of him now? Did Suguru think him foolish, annoying, unworthy of the small fragments of attention he had once taken for granted? The uncertainty burned hotter than any bruise, more insistent than any physical pain, gnawing at him with a quiet, insidious precision. He had survived worse, but this, this not knowing, was something that the body and mind both recognized as infinite, a slow, patient ache that could not be bandaged or explained away.

At 3:12, Satoru couldn’t even pretend to read the manga. He crumpled the paper quietly in his hands, careful, obsessive, because the librarians might peek around the corner and see him destroying something someone else had made, a crime against order and propriety. One stupid, insecure tear escaped, trailing down his cheek, wet and painful and utterly unremarkable, but it carried the weight of a thousand questions he couldn’t ask and a thousand answers he might never hear. His body folded in on itself, head braced against his knees, spine curving the way it always did when he tried to disappear into himself, hands squeezing the useless paper in his lap as if pressure alone could force the chaos inside him into submission. Each crumple, each shallow breath, each small waver of disgrace and frustration folded into the other, indistinguishable, unrelenting, and somewhere inside, a quiet, desperate part of him wanted nothing more than to vanish, to become small enough that the world might overlook him entirely, and yet another part, stubborn and reckless, refused, refusing even as it trembled.

At 3:25, he heard him.

“‘Toru, you okay?”

He didn’t answer at first.

Suguru’s voice always sounded different when it was aimed at him—a softer pitch, like he was trying not to wake something sleeping inside Satoru. Today it felt almost unbearable, too gentle for someone who knew exactly what could happen to a boy like him if he said the wrong thing again.

He lifted his head slowly, as though the motion alone could be measured in millimeters, as though the world might tilt if he dared look too quickly. His eye met Suguru’s. Not his good eye, not the one he used to blink and pretend nothing had happened, but the other one, darkened and swollen, bruised densely and insistently, a small dark planet of its own. 

Satoru hated himself a little for this. Hated the way the skin around his cheek hurt, hated the sharp spike of embarrassment and fear curling in his belly, hated that the sight of it made Suguru’s throat tighten the way he’d imagined holy water burning paper or sin being dragged into a confession booth. Satoru wanted to hide it, fold himself inward like paper, disappear into the crumpled remains of his manga and pretend that the bruise was someone else’s. But the eye, the proof, was hefty, heavy, demanding to be seen, and so he let Suguru see it.

Suguru’s hand twitched, as though he wanted to reach across the space between them but couldn’t, as though there were a map of rules and fear and guilt scribbled between his fingers. His face went still, impossibly still, the sort of still that made Satoru think the world had momentarily paused to consider the damage done, to consider the fine line between accidents and violence, between protection and punishment, between childhood and the edge of what comes next.

“It—” Suguru began, and stopped.

Satoru swallowed. The taste in his mouth was bitter, coppery, like the inside of a tin can left out in the rain, throat tight, eyes pinched at the edges until he could barely see, until even blinking felt like a betrayal of the world around him. He couldn’t explain. He didn’t want to. Words were dangerous things, brittle as old bone, sharp as the edges of a broken window, and he could feel the bulk of Suguru’s restraint pressing down on him, pressing him smaller, pressing him into himself until he wondered if he had a body at all or if he was just air and regret and the faint smell of dust.

“No,” Suguru whispered finally, low and caught between anger and fear, “‘Toru—”

“I’m fine,” Satoru cut him off, voice barely a squeak, “really.”

Suguru bit his lower lip. Maybe to keep himself from saying something worse, maybe to hold back the tremor of his own heart, the pulse that betrayed every hidden, complicated corner of him. He could be furious. He could hate him. He could want to drive the pain deeper, to blacken the bruise Satoru had every right to carry. And yet Satoru, curled inward and trembling in the small space between them, dared to hope—dared to imagine—that Suguru’s restraint came not from anger but from some quiet mercy, that maybe he was keeping himself from crying instead, that maybe the muscle memory of care, of love, of years stacked like bricks between them, was strong enough to hold him even when everything else threatened to collapse.

And then Suguru sank. Slowly. The movement quiet but absolute, deliberate, like water settling into a deep basin, knees folding beneath him until he was at eye-level with Satoru, the perfect church boy made a creature of vulnerability by the simple, terrifying act of surrendering himself to another’s hurt. Satoru’s chest tightened, ribs folding in on themselves, and for a moment he felt as though he were a zoo animal, enclosed and unable to move, barred behind glass or metal columns, told when to eat, when to shit, when to sleep. But then Suguru reached out. Both hands. Palms hot, burning faintly, cupping Satoru’s face with a tenderness that felt impossibly large, impossibly fragile, like glass over a candle flame, like the petals of a flower pressed into memory, like a prayer caught in someone else’s mouth and offered back to you. 

Am I dirtying him? Am I burning his skin? God, please don’t let me hurt him any further.

His thoughts were sickening, suffocating, but when Suguru’s hands touched him, when the heat and pressure of them seeped through his skin and into the hollow of his bones, Satoru felt something unfamiliar: human. 

“I’m sorry.”

Satoru was too out of it to know if it was Suguru or himself who said it, but it didn’t matter either way. It still held the same meaning.

Suguru let himself fall forward just enough, a tilt so gentle it felt like a tide creeping over sand, forehead brushing Satoru’s, the faint press of bone through skin a shock to every nerve. The tip of his nose trailed along Satoru’s cheek, tracing the path of tears that were stinging, salt-heavy, etched like rivers into soft flesh, and Satoru felt the small, impossible weight of it, the small impossibility of being held so tenderly without breaking entirely. He closed his eyes while he let Suguru explore him so innocently. The world contracted until there was only heat and wetness and the quiet certainty of Suguru’s presence, the impossibility of distance between them. He wanted to stay here forever, to exist in this fraction of space and time where the world couldn’t reach him, couldn’t punish him, couldn’t call him anything other than himself.

And so he whispered a prayer—not for forgiveness, not for absolution, not even for courage—but a prayer of permission, desperate and trembling, to God or to whatever might be listening: let me be this close, let me stay here, let me be allowed to breathe in the same air, to feel the same warmth, to fold into him without collapse, forever.

—

December, 2004.

Satoru had always known that seven was a good number. Seven was the number of completion, of perfection, of God’s own design. Seven was supposed to mean blessings, full circles, wholeness, miracles. Seven days to creation, seven gifts of the spirit, seven virtues, seven colors of the rainbow, seven notes to make a scale complete. His birthday fell on the seventh. Every year it fell on the seventh, and every year it reminded him that he was not what the number promised. He was not perfect. He was not blessed. He was fifteen today, and he felt no miraculous fullness.

He did not like birthdays. He did not like the attention they demanded, the small expected happiness, the perfunctory congratulations, the smiles he could not return. Birthdays were mirrors, and he had never liked mirrors. They reflected what he was and was not, what he feared he could never be, what everyone else assumed he was, if only for a few polite hours. Family could not see it, would not see it. And he could not see it himself. He did not like that he existed at all sometimes, that his body and mind continued forward, that he survived when he had tried not to, that he felt, still, the pressure of being observed, evaluated, measured, and found wanting.

The day had been long, hollow in the way birthdays can be when everyone is watching but no one is really seeing. His mother had baked a cake in the morning, a small vanilla one with white frosting and careful, uneven piping. His father had given him a present, wrapped neatly, with a card tucked inside. He had received a handful of texts from people who sometimes called themselves his friends, messages polite enough to pass as attention, empty enough to feel like nothing. Suguru had sent a text at nine a.m. as he usually did—Happy birthday!—which he had read and reread and then stared at for a long time before setting the phone down.

The family friends arrived in the evening, small and smiling, handshakes and polite hugs, the air heavy with the sweet smell of vanilla and candles. Satoru felt nothing. He felt nothing, and that nothing stretched across his chest like a cold, empty waterbank. He kept his hands in his lap, folded neatly, careful that no one could see the trembling beneath.

He slipped away after sunset. Just outside at the back where it wasn’t so loud. The backyard was black, save for the faint halo of moonlight and the light from inside, and the wooden bench waited silently. He sat, shoulders slumped, eyes tracing the outlines of the trees, the grass, the fence, all swallowed by shadow. He breathed, shallowly at first, and then deeper, letting the darkness press around him.

It was around eight when he heard the backdoor open and close.

“Your parents told me you’d be out here.”

Satoru smiled up at Suguru. “You made it.”

“Sorry I’m late. Had to wait for father to come home to drive us here.”

Satoru took notice of the little giftbag in Suguru’s hands and pointed at it. “Is that for me?”

Suguru nodded. He was still standing by the door, no more than ten feet away, and Satoru had the urge to get up and pull him close for warmth. It was only the start of December but the nights were already getting too cold to withstand. 

“Can you sit down?”

“Yeah.”

The bench was easily big enough for two growing boys, but when Suguru sat down, their knees touched. Maybe he noticed the way Satoru’s lips were shading toward a faint, fragile purple, a color caught between cold and embarrassment, or maybe it was nothing more than miscalculation, the result of sitting too close without thinking, the instinct to respect space clashing with the impossibility of staying apart on Satoru’s birthday. Satoru hoped it was because he wanted to be close to him.

The gift bag was a plain silver color, nothing special, but Satoru loved it all the same. It was placed in his lap as Suguru cleared his throat.

“My family got you a book of devotionals with ornate illustrations—”

“Wha—dude, you’re not meant to spoil it before I even take a look.”

“If you would let me finish…” Suguru nudged his knee and placed a hand over the top of the gift bag as if he was guarding it. “I know we usually don’t do presents but fifteen is a big deal I guess. So, uh, yeah. This one’s just from me. Happy birthday, Satoru.”

When Suguru took his hand away, Satoru lifted the edge of the bag, and inside rested a pair of white knitted gloves. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. His chest felt impossibly full, stretched with something fragile, something beautiful he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying until now, pressing against him so lightly it might shatter if he breathed too hard. His hands had always itched to reach, to touch, but they were always cold, always a little wrong, a little unclean in his own eyes. Yet here was the gift of touch, of warmth: something soft, something clean, something that belonged to him from the person most special to him in a way he’d never dared to imagine. He traced the edge of the bag with trembling fingers, taking in the way someone else noticed the small, silent parts of him, the parts that went unseen, unremarked, the hands that always betrayed him with chill and grit. 

Suguru cleared his throat. “I got mother to knit those. She didn’t have any blue wool but I think white is also nice. Instead of them matching your eyes, they match your hair…” He nervously snapped his eyes between Satoru and the gloves while waiting for a response that never came. “Do you like them?”

“They’re… nice,” he finally said, the word almost slipping past him, small, inadequate, yet entirely true.

Suguru’s eyes flicked toward him, then back down at the gloves. “I know your hands get cold,” he said carefully. “In the winter, you’re always—” He hesitated, searching for words that wouldn’t sound silly or sentimental. “—always cold. So I thought… snow’s coming soon. Maybe these would help.”

Satoru’s chest lifted slightly, heat spreading through him, stronger than the wool in his hands. “They’re beautiful,” he murmured, and meant it. Beautiful in the way someone had thought about him, had noticed him, had folded care into something tangible and soft and meant only for him.

Suguru hesitated, then asked, “Do you… want to try them on?”

Satoru blinked, then nodded. “Yeah.”

Suguru eased the gloves out of the bag for him, careful, and slid them onto Satoru’s hands. The wool stretched just enough, fitting snugly over his knuckles, over the tips of his fingers, over the coldness of his skin. He flexed once, twice, and noticed the engraving in black thread along the wrist: S.G. His initials. But also Suguru’s. 

He thought of the snow in 2008, the way he had shown Suguru his hands, trembling, certain they were filthy, and he thought of the cold winter mornings he spent trying to warm them alone.

“They fit perfectly,” Satoru murmured quietly, flexing again. He raised his eyes to Suguru’s. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Suguru said softly, almost as if answering to the air itself. His voice didn’t carry any pride, just calm, measured care. “I thought you might like them.”

Satoru turned his hands slightly, pressing the palms together, feeling the embrace of wool and of thought, of someone knowing him in a way no one else did or ever could. He opened his mouth to say more, to say thank you again, but Suguru beat him to it.

“There’s… one more thing in the bag.”

Satoru blinked, heart tightening a little in anticipation, and nodded, hands still encased in white wool, feeling the careful fuzziness of Suguru’s attention resting on him. The world outside the porch was quiet, dark, forgiving in its emptiness, and for the first time that day he felt something settle inside him. 

Suguru took out a deep, midnight-blue leather-bound book from the bag, its cover mottled with subtle streaks of silver that caught the light like distant stars, and placed it in Satoru’s gloved hands. The spine was stitched with a soft gray thread, almost imperceptible, and the edges of the pages glimmered faintly, as if each sheet had been kissed by moonlight.

“A notebook?” Satoru asked, inspecting it. 

“Uh, more like a journal. I have one and I write in it sometimes.”

Satoru traced the cover page with his thumbs. “What do you write in yours?”

Suguru shrugged. “Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yeah. Things I think, things I feel. It’s just for you. For you to… get it out. I think it’s good to write stuff down and get them off your chest if you don’t think you can talk to other people about them.”

Satoru frowned. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

“I know.”

Satoru watched his face in the low light, the way his eyes dropped for half a second before lifting again, the way his hands folded together and then unfolded, as if he were sorting something invisible and delicate. The journal rested warm against Satoru’s palms, the gloves softer still, and for a fleeting moment he felt the strange dissonance of being held and holding at the same time.

“But,” Suguru continued, quieter now, “sometimes it’s easier to say things to paper. It doesn’t get worried or tired or disappointed. It doesn’t…” He hesitated, then added, almost apologetically, “look at you differently afterward.” 

Satoru’s frown softened. “I wouldn’t look at you differently. Not ever.”

“I know,” Suguru repeated. “Just try it out, yeah?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Later that night, after everyone had gone home, after the lights had been switched off and the house was lonely again, Satoru sat upright in his bed with the journal in front of him. He thought about what he’d write in it as he undid the cord that kept it together. 

Things I think, things I feel, he thought, the words echoing softly in his mind, like a mantra or a warning, neither quite right nor wrong. 

He could write about his family, about the chasm that had grown between them with each passing year. How his father’s fists were more painful than his mother’s pity. He could write about the way prayers sometimes felt heavy on his tongue, or light, or wrong, or not enough, or like they would never be enough.

He could write about the things that lived inside his body, in his arms and legs and heart, through his veins. He could write about his hands, always too cold, always too clumsy, always carrying something filthy or fragile, something that could betray him if he let it, something he could not entirely love and could not entirely reject, and yet had to carry anyway, because they were his, and his alone. He could write about things he had never written down before—things that frightened him, things that felt like secrets too much to carry alone. Things that pressed against him in church pews, in empty rooms, in quiet hallways, that he shoved deep and locked away, hoping no one would notice, hoping he could lock them up and lose the key.

He could write about almost anything and nothing at all, about the contradictions of living in a world that demanded perfection yet punished any trace of humanity, a world that told him what to fear, what to want, what to feel, what to think, what to hide, what to expose, and sometimes pressed so hard he forgot the rhythm of his own breathing, the simple, necessary proof of being alive. He could write about the weight of eyes and words and expectations, pressing from every direction, a tide that threatened to drag him under, and yet, here, with the journal spread before him, he could cradle it like a vessel, a small, private universe that waited only for him to speak, only for him to let the unsayable escape, and maybe, just maybe, feel a little lighter for having tried.

He could write about Suguru too. Maybe.

When the cord unravelled, he opened up to the first page, only to find handwriting that was not his.

You’re allowed to feel all the things you’re scared to feel. You’re allowed to think the things you’re scared to think. You don’t have to be afraid to put them here.

Happy Birthday. 

- S

By the third reading, the tears found him, sliding down his cheeks without ceremony, and he did not brush them away. He did not try to impose sense or order on them, did not attempt to fold them neatly into reason or explanation. He let them fall, let the journal hold him, let Suguru hold him in some quiet, almost impossible way, a presence threaded through ink and paper. He felt himself come apart and gather at the same time, like melting ice falling into a pool that is somehow warmer than the winter air around it, like a body too long frozen, discovering the heat of blood, discovering motion, discovering space to exist. 

He pressed his face to the open page, letting the woodsy scent of paper fill his nose, the faint scrape beneath his fingers anchor him, the hush of the darkened room settle around him like a blanket too heavy to lift. In that fragile convergence of senses, he discovered something he had never known he could: relief. The tears blurred the words, and he did not care. 

He let them fall. He let himself be felt.

—

June, 2005.

Satoru and Suguru sat dead-center on the bus, that strange no-man’s-land where the world felt both too close and too far. The ride was an hour—sixty interminable minutes from their tiny town to another tiny town indistinguishable from the first—and the whole thing might’ve felt pointless if not for the simple, aching truth that tonight they’d be sleeping under the same roof.

Every year, the church dressed this pilgrimage up in language so sweet it rotted the teeth: retreat, encounter, renewal, as if twenty half-grown children could be kneaded back into shape like bread dough gone stale. The pastors insisted it was spiritual nourishment. The parents murmured about fellowship and safe company. But Satoru knew—down in the marrow where truth calcifies—that the trip was really about control. One night away to scrub the residue of independence off the children’s bones; one sanctioned reminder that the world outside doctrine was large and terrible and hungry. Faith, Satoru suspected, was more about keeping fences mended than pastures green.

He should not have cared. Not in that way that made his ribs press inward like baling wire tightening around a bale of hay. But the sleepover mattered. It was the only way he and Suguru could slip beneath the same roof without divine permission being questioned. One night. One chance a year to breathe the same dark and wake in the same light. A loophole disguised as sanctity.

The bus rattled beneath them, a steel ribcage around twenty other bodies, all chattering and yelling and making themselves known. Satoru wasn’t listening. He watched the landscape smear past the windows—rows of pine trees blurring into telephone poles, telephone poles blurring into rust-colored fields—and tried to pretend the hour wasn’t pulsing behind his temples like a countdown.

Suguru was reading the itinerary like it mattered, and Satoru envied him, envied how easy it seemed for Suguru to fit inside the borders people drew for him, how naturally he accepted the things they were asked to believe. 

Satoru tipped his head back against the seat until it hurt. He stared at the ceiling of the bus and tried to imagine a version of himself who didn’t wonder about everything. A version who didn’t carry questions like parasites under the skin. A version who could say a prayer without feeling the weight of a lie behind his teeth.

“It’s dumb that we only get to do this once a year,” Satoru muttered, not sure if he meant it to be heard, not sure if he meant anything at all.

Suguru hummed, a sound that lived somewhere between agreement and mourning. “Could be worse,” he rebutted. “Could be never.”

Could be never, Satoru echoed internally with a sudden flash of panic bright as lightning in the brain. One night sanctioned now. Maybe fewer later. Maybe none someday. He had no vocabulary for that kind of dread. He only knew it settled in his chest like river silt, layering slowly, impossible to dig out. He pressed his knee lightly into Suguru’s, a careful act of bravery, a Morse-code for don’t ever leave me. Suguru pressed back, instinctively, reflexively, with no awareness that he had just steadied a boy drowning in questions he didn’t yet know he was asking.

Their knees kissed for the rest of the bus ride and their shoulders ghosted near one another as they followed the chaperones out of the bus and down the rocky path. They filed into the retreat house like an ocean of muted colors, socks whispering on the laminate floors, backpacks trailing behind them. The rooms were small, two twin beds pressed against walls that smelled faintly of bleach and furniture polish, the windows overlooking a parking lot and a hedge trimmed too low. Two kids per room, one pastor down the hall, another keeping watch in the lounge where the carpet had been scrubbed until it hurt the eyes.

Prayer came first. A circle in the common room, voices rising and falling in carefully measured harmony, faces lit by the sickly yellow glow of fluorescent bulbs. Hymns so loud they vibrated in Satoru’s chest, so precise they left no room for error, no room for thought, no room for the kind of silence that made him wonder. Bible study followed, the pages of the Good Book pressed into hands like they might somehow be a shield. Questions were asked, answers expected, and the right response was always known before the words were spoken. Suguru sat across from him, his posture exact, hands folded, eyes fixed on the page, and Satoru felt a jolt of something strange in the way Suguru’s fingers brushed the paper, the gentle motion impossible to ignore.

Meals were orderly, a line of trays in the dining hall, plates arranged neatly, conversations measured. The staff moved among them like quiet overseers, nudging, correcting, ensuring compliance, ensuring gratitude, ensuring stillness. Satoru tried to focus on the words, on the faces of the kids around him, on the rosaries behind the big glass cabinet, but every glance at Suguru pulled at him, magnetic and confusing and wrong. Every time Suguru laughed quietly at a joke or reached for a glass of water, Satoru felt the day accumulate like static under his skin, buzzing, waiting.

By the time the last hymn had been sung and the lights in the hallway flicked off, the rules had been recited, the day’s lessons absorbed in varying degrees, Satoru found himself in a small room with Suguru, two beds not touching, the thin walls making the voices of the other boys distant and muted. And suddenly, in that small rectangle of space, under the faint hum of the air conditioner and the light of the bedside lamp, the rigid order of the day collapsed. The trip, the rules, the lessons, the prayer, the hymns—they were all background now, a frame for the one thing that mattered: being near Suguru in the quiet and the dark, where no one was watching, where there was no expectation to behave.

Satoru got to work.

“Help me with this,” he grunted, unplugging the lamp and coiling the cord onto the top of it. The only light now came from the window. There was a beautiful Waning Gibbous high in the sky.

Suguru frowned. “Aren’t we too old to be doing this?” 

Satoru’s head snapped up, startled, offended, a small prick of hurt twisting inside him. “Since when?” His voice hit the low register of accusation, though he tried to mask it with a shrug. “We do this every year. It’s tradition.”

And it was. Ever since the summer of 1996, the trip they barely remembered in pieces and half-light, when they had ended up on opposite ends of the room in their separate beds, and Satoru had woken in the dead of night to the ragged sounds of Suguru sobbing beside him—frightened, small, afraid—fear had carved itself into ritual. Satoru had suggested it that night, urged it with the simple authority of someone who understood that proximity could stave off nightmares, that two beds pushed together could keep at bay the unseen shapes that haunted the dark. Suguru had complied immediately, nodding with snot running unchecked, chest heaving with silent terror, eyes wide and unwilling to meet Satoru’s because he feared that the strange, relentless things that crept into his mind during REM sleep would come back to claim him if he faced them alone. And so the beds had been joined every year since, an unspoken tradition of sorts, a pact written in sweat, fear, and the small, stubborn persistence of care.

For eight years they’ve pushed their beds together, and for eight years Satoru has guarded his best friend through the night and into the morning, and he didn’t plan on stopping now.

“But what if you have a nightmare?” Satoru asked, small.

“I don’t get those anymore.”

The lie was so evident that Satoru could smell it. It wafted through his nose and down his throat and left a bad taste on his tongue. He stared at the empty space between the beds, the half-inch of carpet that would remain if he obeyed Suguru’s refusal. His stomach tightened in knots, twisting around his chest. The empty space felt cavernous. It stretched across the floor and swallowed the air, filled the small rectangle of the room, and mocked the very heartbeat of their ritual. 

“Why do you always do that?” he murmured, his hands still gripping the edge of the table like it was a lifeline. “Why do you lie? You do get them. You always get them. I’ve been there. I’ve heard you. You—”

Suguru’s jaw tightened, and he turned his gaze to the wall, to the shadows of the room, to anything that would keep him from seeing Satoru’s eyes, which were bright and trembling and waiting in the moonlight. “I said I don’t, Toru,” he sighed, stubborn. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

Satoru let out a sharp, brittle laugh, more anguish than humor, and let go of the bedside table. “Fine,” he repeated, but there was no conviction in it. He wanted to argue. He wanted to fight. He wanted to reach across that empty space and pull Suguru into the center of his world, into the one place he had always known was safe. Instead, he sank onto the edge of the bed, arms crossed, staring at the floor, at the carpet fibers, at the distance that felt like an entire canyon between them.

For a long time, neither spoke. Satoru just stared, not knowing what he did wrong. His mind drifted over the rituals that awaited him—the shower, the brushing of teeth, the prayers muttered stiffly over cold tiles, the bed that would be as frigid as snow, empty of warmth he could call his own. When Suguru finally moved, rising from where he had been sitting so effortlessly, Satoru cursed himself for letting his thoughts twist and linger so long that Suguru would take the first shower, the first claim on the heat on his stupid hair and his stupid skin. By the time I get in, all the warm water will be gone, wasted on someone who doesn’t even want to touch me anymo—

“You helping or what?” 

Satoru dragged his vision up to see Suguru gripping the bedside table while looking at him expectantly. 

Satoru blinked. “Oh,” he said, too fast, too relieved. “Yeah.”

He scrambled off his bed, feet slapping the cheap carpet. The tension that had clung to his spine like static loosened. They lifted in silence, ensuring they didn’t tip over the lamp, careful not to make a ruckus that would lead to a concerned knock on their door. 

“Watch your side,” Suguru muttered.

“I am watching,” Satoru muttered back, mock-annoyed and fully smiling. 

They successfully moved the table to the other side of the room, then hauled the first bed into the centre. Then the second. The beds thudded together, mismatched coverings and all, forming the single oversized island they’d built every summer for nearly a decade.

“Are you happy?” Suguru asked when he took a step back.

“I’m happy.”

“Good. I’m showering first though.”

Satoru tutted but let him go. He flopped backward, starfishing for a second across the uneven seam where the two mattresses met, then pulled his legs in, rolling onto his side. He listened to Suguru moving behind the bathroom door, heard the click of the lock, the hiss of pipes, the abrupt cough and rattle of ancient plumbing coming alive. A moment later, water pattered against tile. Satoru let his eyes slip closed.

He told himself he wasn’t waiting.

Five minutes passed. Ten. The water cut off with a metallic jerk, leaving the room heavier with silence than it had any right to be. Satoru pushed his face into the pillow and inhaled the faint powdery scent of detergent, convincing himself it didn’t matter, that he wasn’t counting the seconds until Suguru came back out.

When the door finally opened, light spilled into the room in a thin, holy blade—gold as communion wine, soft as the silk lining on a coffin. Suguru stepped out barefoot, hair still dripping, the hem of his pajama shirt clinging damply to the ridge of his collarbone like it didn’t want to let him go. Water beaded at the ends of his dark strands—heavy drops that clung and clung until gravity won and sent them sliding in a straight, divine line down his throat, vanishing somewhere beneath the neckline of cotton and adolescent breath.

Satoru stared. He told himself he wasn’t staring, that he was simply looking, cataloging like any normal person might—two eyes, one nose, hair attached to head, nothing extraordinary—but every nanosecond of observation betrayed him. His gaze snagged on Suguru the same way a loose thread catches on a door hinge: inevitable, helpless, embarrassing.

Suguru raked a hand through his hair, and the strands clung to his fingers like they were begging him not to pull away. He looked sixteen and seventeen and infinite all at once, soft around the edges, newly carved in others, like someone had sculpted him out of sleep and steam and handed him back to the waking world unfinished.

“Bathroom’s free,” Suguru announced, tossing a damp towel over the chair.

Satoru nodded too many times. “Yeah. Cool.” He moved before thoughts could catch up, muscles firing in a blind scramble for escape, like a deer bolting at the snap of a twig. In any other context it would have been funny, but nothing was funny, not when his cheeks burned and his pulse thrashed against his jugular like it wanted to be anywhere but inside him. He snatched his pajamas and toothbrush without looking, without breathing, without risking one more second in the orbit of Suguru’s damp quietness. Then he all but ran.

The bathroom door thudded shut with a decisive click that felt like sealing a vault.

It silenced the world.

It amplified everything else.

His breathing came first, then his heartbeat, then the feeling.

God. The feeling.

It came like a fever rolling through marrow—heat radiating from the inside out, molten metal poured into veins too narrow to hold it. His stomach clenched, something ugly and wonderful unfurling low and deep, a spark catching kindling.

“Fuck,” Satoru whispered, then asked God for forgiveness, then felt dirty for speaking to God in a moment like this.

He pressed his back to the door like he needed something solid to keep him upright. The tile floor was cold enough to sting through his socks, but he barely noticed. Every inch of his awareness hung suspended somewhere outside his skin, hovering in the air Suguru had just vacated naked, still humid with his warmth.

I can’t feel this. I can’t feel this. 

But his body did not care about rules or sermons or any of the ancient words carved into the wooden pulpit back home. His body cared about Suguru—Suguru with water sliding down his throat, Suguru with skin flushed from heat, Suguru who didn’t even know what he did to him.

Satoru squeezed his eyes shut and immediately regretted it—because Suguru was clearer behind darkness. Memory was cruel like that, offering highlights in high definition: the tiny curl at the end of his damp hair, the bump of his Adam's apple, the inexplicable gentleness Suguru carried in his limbs even when he pretended he didn’t.

His cock hardened in his pants.

“Oh my god,” Satoru breathed, voice cracking as he folded forward, elbows on knees, head hanging heavy. “Not now.”

Not at a church retreat with a cross thumbtacked on the wall.

He scrambled, stripping himself of his clothes and turning the shower knob with shaking hands. The water sputtered at first, reluctant, then came in full, biting and unyielding. He stepped beneath it, letting it hammer at him, sluice through him, drench him in sheets of liquid winter that stung like needles, that tried to claw the heat from his bones. Each drop was a miniature exorcism: it traced the pulse of shame along his groin, it lashed at the thrum of his lust, it sought to wash away the fire Suguru had smuggled inside him with nothing but the sway of a shoulder, the brush of damp fabric.

I will not touch myself. I will abstain from sin.

He pressed his forehead against the cold tile, letting the chill gnaw at his skull, letting it carve channels through the fever he carried. He tried to imagine the heat being expelled, flushed into the drain with the water: the scandal of wanting, the brazen, carnal spark that had ignited the instant Suguru’s presence grazed his eyes. And yet, even as frost clawed at his chest, the memory of warmth persisted—the impossible, incendiary heat of Suguru just existing in the same room, mundane and yet cataclysmic, sun in the middle of a blizzard, wildfire under snow. Suguru had always been sunlight in a frost-bitten landscape, a fire snuck into ice, and now that fire had branded him, left its signature, illegible yet indelible.

The water cut across him, tried to purge, tried to render him pure as fresh snowfall, a blank slate, a frigid canvas. For a fleeting moment, it worked: he felt whitened, exorcised, chastened. A landscape undisturbed by heat, desire, by the illicit tremor of lust he had no right to harbor. But the moment dissolved instantly. Snow could not erase fire, ice could not unmake the combustion Suguru had ignited in him with nothing more than a look, a posture, the ordinary catastrophe of his body recognizing the extraordinary man standing there.

He stepped out of the stream, quivering, soaked through, hair clinging, breath shivering like rigid glass, shorn of warmth yet still branded by it. The heat was a serpent beneath the surface, waiting for permission to strike again. He wrapped his arms around himself, trembling, aware that the cold had purified only the skin, the surface, while the molten pulse of desire remained, undeniable, insidious, impossible to disown.

Snow on skin. Fire in heart. One could never truly bury the other.

He yanked the towel from the hook, dried himself, and let himself be clothed with his freshly ironed. Toothbrush in hand, he smeared the minty paste over the bristles and scrubbed, fast and fierce, as if he could brush the fear from between his teeth, from under his gums. Mint and cold water bit at his tongue, at the roof of his mouth, and he let it sting. Let it remind him: the fire didn’t belong here, didn’t belong in him. 

He spat, swallowed water by accident, gagged, rinsed again. 

I’m ready. 

He killed the bathroom light on his way out and stepped into the dark. 

Suguru was already in bed.

Of course he was. Flat on his side, back turned, spine a long quiet sentence Satoru could read without ever learning the alphabet. The sheets rose and fell with his breathing—unbothered, unburdened—as though nothing in the world was wrong, as though nothing smoldered under Satoru’s skin but ordinary circulation.

Satoru climbed in after his quick prayer, careful enough to make no sound, and laid down on his side with his back to him.

“Night,” Suguru murmured.

“Night.”

Silence. It was like that for a while. Satoru didn’t know if Suguru was asleep or not so he just kept staring at the wall.

Then Suguru flinched like he’d been struck. “Get your ice-block foot off me.”

“It wasn’t even touching you,” Satoru hissed.

“It was,” Suguru countered. “I felt the cold on my tibia.”

“Oh my God,” Satoru moaned, rolling halfway over to shove at Suguru’s shoulder. “Drama queen.”

“Don’t touch me.”

“You started it.”

“You touched me first—”

They were half-whispering, half-snarling into their pillows, two grown boys devolving instantly, beautifully, stupidly into ego bruises and adolescent logic. Another jab. Another shove back. Pillows shifting. Elbows in sheets. A leg thrown where it shouldn’t be. Small, stupid collisions escalating like avalanches do—quietly at first, then all at once.

“Enough,” Suguru snapped, voice low, carrying a weight that made Satoru pause mid-laugh. Before Satoru could protest, Suguru moved. His knees landed on either side of Satoru’s hips, straddling him, weight even, solid, unyielding. Then his hands shot out, grabbing Satoru’s wrists and pinning them above his head against the mattress, pressing him gently but insistently into the bed. “Stop touching me.”  

Satoru froze, startled, breath catching. The warmth of Suguru’s body pressed against his, chest to chest, the bed groaning faintly under the sudden closeness. Every inch of him was acutely aware of the way Suguru smelled, of the strength in his arms, the subtle tremor in his hands.

For a long, stupid second, neither of them moved.

Suguru’s breath landed on Satoru’s cheek, warm where Satoru felt he ought to be frostbitten, and his pulse went sprinting through him, too fast for one body, too wild, like it was trying to escape through bone. He was painfully, microscopically aware of every point of contact with humiliating clarity: the dip of Suguru’s weight on his upper thighs, the cage of Suguru’s knees bracketing his hips, the press of knuckles against the pillow.

It should have been funny. It had been funny a moment ago. But this was a sudden stop, a seatbelt-lock moment, their bodies realizing something before their brains would admit it.

Suguru blinked. Once. Twice. Slow, startled, like he was only now realizing he was straddling Satoru.

“Oh,” he said. Too soft. Too late.

And then Satoru felt it. The feeling. The traitorous rise, the heat gathering where it shouldn’t, insistently, helplessly, like his body had betrayed him to the gallows. Heat flooded downward. Blood obeyed instinct, not reason. His hips pressed up a millimeter too far and there was no hiding the hardness that brushed against Suguru’s inner thigh.

Suguru froze. Everything about him froze. Breath, spine, even the fingers clutching at Satoru’s wrists, stiff as splintered wood, and Satoru couldn’t tell if it was fear or desire or the rigid paralysis of a boy taught that any trace of hunger or want was sin, and the awareness that Suguru knew, that they both knew, that it was impossible to ignore now, made Satoru’s face burn hotter than the heat pooling in his pelvis, made his pulse hammer in his ears and his temples, made him feel small and stupid and disgusting. 

Suguru exhaled. “We… we need to—” he stopped. There wasn’t a way to finish it. He loosened Satoru’s wrists, meaning to let go, meaning to release him back into air that wasn’t trying to choke them both, but Satoru’s fingers curled in the moment of contact, catching, holding, stupid as instinct. What am I doing?

Suguru froze again. “What are you—” he began, then stopped again, because maybe there was no harmless ending to that sentence.

Satoru’s voice scraped out, raw and pitiful and honest in the worst way. “I don’t know.”

Suguru’s throat bobbed. He wasn’t breathing right either. He opened his mouth, maybe to joke, maybe to defuse, maybe to retreat, but what emerged was quiet, bewildered, unwillingly honest: “Satoru.”

And Satoru could feel it land on him like a hand, like a verdict, like a window opened into a room he had been told never to enter, and he swallowed, throat clicking, muscles tightening and trembling, the small, insistent pulse of the forbidden rising and mixing with his heart and his ribs and the long-braided tension that stretched from his scalp down into the mattress, a tension that both held and released him at once.

“Suguru,” he breathed back, the word feeling enormous and impossibly heavy, three syllables carrying years of guilt, hunger, fear, and a confusing, shaming delight he could not untangle. Three syllables that seemed to make the room itself lean closer, listen, and hold its breath with them.

Then, in a motion so quick and impulsive it surprised even him, Satoru tilted his neck up a fraction, brushing his lips against Suguru’s in a tiny, almost tentative kiss. Just a press, a poke of curiosity and daring, cute in its hesitation. His heart lurched at the closeness, at the taste and warmth, at the audacity of the act, and then he settled his head back down onto the mattress, flat, wrists still lightly trapped beneath Suguru’s hands, fingers curled in them, eyes wide and bright, staring at him. Watching. Waiting.

Never before had Satoru imagined doing something like this—taking the leap, testing the boundary, offering a kiss as both question and confession. Never before had he been this exposed, and yet he couldn’t take anything back. He couldn’t stop himself from seeing what Suguru would do next.

Suguru’s chest rose and fell, and for a moment, every inch of him was braced like a cathedral in a tempest, built to withstand a storm it secretly longed for. Then, with no words, no warning, no permission granted beyond the silent plea in Satoru’s gaze, Suguru leaned down, lips brushing Satoru’s, soft at first, testing. Satoru’s breath hitched. Suguru pressed a little closer, tilting his head, and their mouths met fully, lips colliding with a delicious clumsiness—pressing, slipping, brushing, pulling back just slightly before pressing in again. 

Satoru had never kissed anyone, and he imagined Suguru hadn’t either, but he was certain it was the best kiss two people have ever shared. Neither used tongue; they didn’t know how, and neither needed it. The urgency came from everything else: the tilt of heads, the pressing of foreheads, the way their chests were flush against one another.

Suguru’s hands slid from Satoru’s wrists to cradle his face, fingers threading into the soft, rebellious strands at the nape of his neck. Satoru’s arms twitched, then wrapped instinctively around Suguru’s back, desperate for balance, for connection, for proof that he was not entirely untethered in this storm. With rivers of mercury twisting and folding through his veins, he felt the impossible intimacy of it spiral into every nerve, every heartbeat, every thought he had ever been told was wrong.

Suguru shifted an inch forward, a weight settling where it had no business, pressing down against Satoru’s thigh, and the world went crooked and loud, a sudden vertigo, a tilt in the frame of reality that screamed wrong in every fiber of both their bodies. But neither could move, or maybe neither wanted to. Satoru could feel the sink of Suguru’s hips against his own, a solid, undeniable proof that what they were doing had names they had never spoken, sins they had memorized only to avoid, and yet, somehow, instinct and heat were louder than doctrine, louder than every careful restraint he had spent a lifetime building, louder than every prayer and every lesson about purity and shame, and his chest hitched and his stomach buckled with the effort of trying to fight a truth he couldn’t even put into words.

He moaned, a sharp, startled sound that ripped through the quiet, and Suguru grunted in response, a sound that carried equal parts panic and acknowledgment, equal parts confusion and desire, and it pressed the air around them into something thick and trembling, like the calm before a storm had been sucked into the room itself. 

There was no turning back. Their bodies were already speaking in a language neither had learned, a dialect of flesh and gravity, of heat and weight and pressure, and Satoru’s back arched involuntarily, hips lifting a fraction that should have been innocent but wasn’t, and Suguru’s hands tightened for balance, for control, for whatever he thought might keep the world from exploding. It was so dirty, but Satoru had never felt cleaner. Hands slid lower still, brushing against thighs, brushing over the swell of Satoru’s arousal, teasing him through the thin fabric of his pants. Satoru bucked, chest pressing to Suguru’s, lips locked again, sucking, grinding, tasting—dirty, filthy, and entirely necessary. Suguru’s fingers dug into his hips, shifting him, leaning his weight into every movement, pressing him flat against the mattress, holding him there, claiming him.

The sound of skin sliding, of low, rough breaths, of moans barely caught in the throat filled the room, and Satoru’s world narrowed: hips, hands, mouths, teeth, tongues, weight, friction. Suguru moved over him like a storm, hands and mouth and hips all at once, and Satoru was caught in it, trapped in it, wanting it to never end, every filthy, heated second. Their breathing collided, ragged and shallow, the bed creaking beneath them like it, too, was caught somewhere between morality and impulse, between terror and something achingly sweet, something that smelled of sweat and panic and skin and forbidden space.

Satoru’s mind spun, half screaming about the guilt, the wrongness, the lectured-from-birth shame of touching a man this way. The other half dissolved entirely into the sensation of Suguru somehow pressing even closer, the weight of him a declaration that neither one could name, a gravitational pull he wanted to surrender to even as his logic sputtered and screamed. He imagined it like wandering into a shrine no one else could see, stepping through doors of molten light and shadow, drinking from fountains of memory that could never be emptied, and leaving with a mark etched so deep into his flesh that not even death could wash it clean. Suguru’s mouth, Suguru’s hands, the unspoken confession of their bodies—they were both the sacrament and the sin.

When they parted for air, the beauty of their act crumbled like a stained-glass window shattered by a careless stone.

Suguru sat up and his chest rose and fell unevenly, hands dropping to his lap, fingers curled as though holding onto some fragment of self-control. He looked anywhere but at Satoru, eyes tight, jaw set. 

“I—this was wrong” he began, voice tight, caught in the friction between apology and disbelief. He pressed his thumb to the centre of his forehead, as if to push the moment away, to erase the imprint of their closeness before it could leave a scar in memory. “I didn’t mean for—”

Satoru’s hands twitched against the sheets, longing for the warmth he’d just known, but finding only cold hesitation. His eyes didn’t leave Suguru, wide and searching, but he stayed silent, waiting for Suguru to continue, as if the room itself was holding its breath.

“You’re my best friend. That’s all you can ever be.”

Satoru’s lips parted, but nothing came out. Shock, frustration, a thousand questions roiling in his chest. 

Suguru ran a hand through his hair, swallowed, then pushed himself slightly upright. “I… I need a moment.” He moved carefully, the precision of his motions masking the internal storm, and excused himself. “Bathroom,” he muttered, almost to himself, then slipped off Satoru and out of their bed.

Satoru was asleep before Suguru emerged from the bathroom, and when morning came, Suguru’s side of the bed was cold and smooth, untouched.

—

March, 2006.

There were many things Satoru and Suguru never talked about.

When they were younger, it was easier to shy away behind the curtains of uncertainty and youth, to masquerade beneath the blinding headlights of their inability to communicate, their adherence to look each other in the eye and say what they really felt, what they really meant. But they were older now, grown up in more ways than one, with minds full of memories and experiences, and bodies enriched by the wonders of adolescence and puberty, Satoru was waning explosive. 

Satoru had spent years looking to Suguru for sight, for guidance, feeling too lost and incomplete to navigate the world on his own. He wanted the steadiness of his best friend by him all the time—next to him in church pews, beside him on the road when they rode their bikes, hands cradled in his, words spoken only to him. 

He found in Suguru what he did not find in God.

It helped him in more ways than one. When he continued to question the beliefs of God after that one fateful night back in 2003, he found himself crawling out of some blacked out darkness and into a light which held no direction. If one is to question the compass of their entire existence, then how will they navigate their life without the orienteering arrow? If Satoru had no light and no arrow, how would he know where to go?

He wrote all of this down, pen to paper, his thoughts far more juvenile than he’d like to admit—a lot more ugh and can you believe this? than actual sentences, more exclamation than structure, more frustration than art. The journal, his pride and joy since December 2003, had softened with age and use. The spine had gone pliant and the pages no longer fought him when he opened to them. He didn’t write everyday, only when the pressure built behind his eyes, when thoughts pressed so hard against his skull that he worried they might fracture him. He wrote when prayer failed him.

Knockknockknock.

Fear wound through his body like a sled carving through fresh snow, like a boa constrictor coiling tight and slow, leaving no space to breathe. He had lived in it for so long that the hope it might ever leave him had crumbled to dust years ago. With a snap of frustration and shame, he slammed the journal shut and shoved it beneath him as he sat cross-legged on his bed.

“Yes?”

The door peered open.

“Satoru, honey, Suguru’s here to see you.”

Fear was extinguished by relief, relief coagulated with anxiety, and Satoru honest to God felt a little sick, but that all vanished when his mother opened the door further to reveal Suguru standing tall behind her.

“Oh, hi,” Satoru let out meekly with a small wave.

“Hey.”

Satoru’s mother smiled sweetly at Suguru, patting his cheek. “I’ll leave you boys to it. I have banana bread baking in the oven and would love for you both to try it and let me know how it tastes!”

Suguru bowed as he always did when adults were taking their leave. “Sounds delicious, ma’am.”

Satoru’s mother glowed, giving him another few pats on the cheek before heading back to the kitchen.

When the door closed behind Suguru, Satoru unclenched with a sigh. “You’re such a suck up, you know that right?” He wanted to say ass kisser but knew Suguru would scold him for that.

Suguru hummed and took a few strides toward Satoru’s bed. When he plopped down on his back, he let out a sigh similar to Satoru’s. “It’s common courtesy and respect, especially when showing up unannounced.”

“Real good segway, dude,” Satoru snorted. “What’re you doing here? Thought you were going to the Haibara’s house with Mother Geto.”

Mother Geto was really close with Mother Haibara, almost as close as she was with his mother. They had a son, a year younger than him and Suguru, and Satoru didn’t much care for him. He’d met him only once or twice at Suguru’s house, a whirlwind of movement and laughter that made the air hum and taste too bright, too loud, too much. Always clinging to Suguru, always wanting, always happy in ways that made Satoru feel the hollowness of his own caution, his own stillness. It was exhausting, and the boy was exhausting, annoying, actually, and Satoru could not fathom how Suguru tolerated the constant effervescence, the way it demanded attention without asking permission. He thanked God, quietly, that he lived over an hour away. The distance was a blessing, a buffer, a shield that let him admire Suguru without having to navigate the guy’s relentless glee over what was his.

Suguru shrugged. “I was. Mother left after breakfast but I didn’t feel like it today and it was a bit stuffy at home, so…”

Satoru tried to hide the smile that was threatening to bust out on his face. It wasn’t a nice smile, it was a mean one, a petty thing. He was happy Suguru chose him over the other guy, glad that he wasn’t absolutely preening to go over and have that thing fawn over Suguru’s knowledge of doctrine and scripture. 

“Good, I was getting bored.” Satoru blew air upward so his growing bangs uncovered his eyes a bit more. “You aren’t wearing your gauges.”

For his birthday this year, Satoru bought him magnetic gauges. Suguru had been talking here and there about how cool they looked but knew his parents would never let him actually pierce his ears, so Satoru got him the next best thing.

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t want Mother Gojo seeing them and saying something to my parents.” He fisted his pants pocket and pulled them out. “I’ll put them on until we go out there for banana bread.”

Satoru smiled solemnly as he watched his best friend put on the gift he got him. He hated how Suguru had to hide parts of himself. He wondered briefly who Suguru would be without strict parents and the confinements of religion, if he’d get more piercings—facial or otherwise—or even a few tattoos here and there to signify the significant moments in his life in ink like Satoru did with his journal.

Suguru shifted, raising a little so he had his elbow on the bed. “How do they look?”

Beautiful was the first thing that came to Satoru’s mind. I think I’m in love with you was the second.

That was something he explored in his writing the most. He didn’t think that was the intended reason Suguru gifted him the journal in the first place but it somehow ended up being the main topic of every page. He didn’t feel so bad about it now, the whole love thing. It was easy, it felt natural, it felt like he had always thought this way about him, which is why it was so easy to let it go in moments where he didn’t feel it thrashing hard enough to come out.

“Really good. Wish you could wear them all the time.”

Suguru flushed and Satoru’s heart drummed and he was suddenly very, very happy that he and Suguru met.

“You look a little emo,” Satoru added.

Suguru clicked his tongue and landed back on his back. “Don’t say that. You know what they say about those folks.”

With a groan, Satoru moved onto his belly to lie next to Suguru. “Stop harping on about that. There were no emos with gauges thousands of years ago so God couldn’t have had a negative opinion on them and so we shouldn’t either. It’s anti-emo propaganda and you’re falling for it.”

“Fine, I relent. God loves emos.” 

Satoru snorted and Suguru cackled and the room filled with a delicate symphony that Satoru hadn’t heard in a while. They hadn’t talked about what happened last year, and Suguru was too mature to make anything weird, but sometimes it felt off, like there was an elephant in the room whose only goal was to smash everything valuable into pieces with its trunk. But it was fine now. Good, even. And that was great, so Satoru let himself settle into it. A warm bubble, brief but unmistakable, expanding where fear and caution usually dwelled.

Suguru strained his neck to look at Satoru, whose face was parallel to his, cheek braced on his arms, eyes tracking nothing and everything all at once, when Suguru’s glance drifted to the spot where Satoru had been sitting earlier. “You actually use it?”

Satoru’s body went rigid, heat spiking behind his eyes. It was probably the first time Suguru had seen the journal since the day it had been gifted, tucked away and never spoken of, a secret threaded through years of quiet. He never let anyone know of its existence. 

“Sometimes.”

They don’t talk about the message Suguru wrote in it, just like they don’t talk about the kiss.

“Hm. Looks like I might need to buy you another one soon.”

If it were up to Satoru, he would keep writing in that journal forever, stitching pages into its spine with his own hands if he had to, making it impossibly heavy and impossibly permanent. He didn’t want another, not a replacement, not a second, not some facsimile; he wanted the one he had now, the one that had quietly shown him who he was underneath everything else, who he was when no one else was watching, who he was in the small spaces between prayers and chores and fear. And yet—because his mind always circled back, because it had to, because he couldn’t help but fold himself in on the thought—the idea of Suguru buying him another, of having him be the provider of Satoru’s catharsis, of it being their thing, made a part of him ache pleasantly. 

“I still have a few pages left. Ten, fifteen maybe.”

Suguru nodded, then dragged his face up toward the ceiling. “What do you write in it?”

Satoru blanked. What a funny thing to ask when you’re the muse. He felt something bubble in his stomach—maybe that same relief-anxiety concoction from earlier, or maybe something waning explosive.

“Stuff.” Good one.

“Stuff?” Suguru smiled. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No!” Satoru sat up so he was resting his forearms on the bed. He could smell the banana bread wafting in from the kitchen. “I don’t not want to talk about it, I just don’t know how.”

With a piqued interest, Suguru assumed his earlier position on his side, elbow in the mattress and hand supporting his head. “Like where to start?”

“I guess. Where to start, how to start, all of it.”

“Well, why don’t you start somewhere small? What were you writing about before?”

Satoru’s palms started to dampen. He realised a little belatedly that this was probably going to happen now. He still had options, but they all pertained between telling the truth and lying, and he was so, so sick of lying all the time. But there was still fear, there was always fear—in the hallways of his home, in his bones, in the way Suguru was innocently looking at him to get the things he needed off his chest. He was scared and he was sweating and God was watching and—

“You.” Shit. “I was writing about you.”

Suguru didn’t move a muscle, but Satoru knew something was happening internally. Maybe a confused firing of neurons that was both heightening the sympathetic nervous system and calming the parasympathetic. Maybe some issue with the facial nerves not inputting the audio correctly through the ear. Maybe something else.

He cleared his throat after a moment and Suguru broke from his trance, glancing down to where the noise came from, then back up to Satoru’s eyes.

“You don’t have to talk to me about it if it’s something private about me. I understand.”

“But what if I do?”

Suguru audibly swallowed. “Then I’ll listen.”

Satoru shifted. He braced his head in his palms, let his eyes close, let himself disconnect from the moment long enough to collect his thoughts or what was left of them. Am I doing this? Am I really just doing this right now? A jagged breath left his lips.

“‘Toru, I can come back another time if—”

“I write about you a lot actually.” His palms left his face. He decided to be brave and face this head on. A detonation. A waning explosion. “I have this one old entry I wrote that I always go back to. Well, it isn’t so much one entry as it is a culmination of dozens of pages I’ve written over the years about one particular instance.” 

Suguru nodded along a little gingerly, a little too wary for Satoru’s liking. “And… it has to do with me?”

“It has to do with you.”

“Okay.”

One breath. Two. Am I really doing this? I’m really doing this. Things I think, things I feel. Three.

“Why have we never talked about that night?”

His eyes bore into Suguru’s, and unlike before, there was a visible fracture in his composure. The nervous system can only withstand so much numbing before it gives up. 

Suguru drew a breath and didn’t quite use it. “What night?”

And there it unfolded, like a blade sliding along raw nerves. This—the hesitation, the careful deflection, the quiet minimization—this was what Satoru had harbored bitterness toward for years, the thing that had gnawed at the soft insides of him. This is who he thought would take him seriously enough to have this conversation with him.

He bit the inside of his cheek just enough to reach some sort of stasis before replying. “Don’t do this to me, Suguru.”

Suguru’s mouth pressed into a thin line. He looked away first. That, more than anything else, told Satoru everything he needed to know.

“I’m not doing anything,” Suguru said. His voice was calm. It was the voice he used when he was sure he was right. “You’re the one bringing it up.”

Satoru laughed, a sharp, humorless sound that surprised even him. “That’s all you have to say? That’s your defense?”

“It’s not a defense,” Suguru said. “It’s the truth.”

“The truth,” Satoru echoed. He scrubbed his hands down his face again, fingers digging into his cheeks like he could physically rearrange himself into someone less affected. “You kissed me. You let me kiss you. And then you told me it didn’t mean anything beyond friendship. That’s not nothing.”

“Okay, fine. Sure. It meant something,” Suguru offered, and Satoru’s stomach thumped. There was a sickness in the hope he felt in the moment, and it all but cancered in his body when Suguru continued. “That doesn’t mean it meant what you’re implying.”

Right. Yeah. Hope was a miserable thing.

Satoru leaned a little closer, like proximity might force honesty through osmosis. “Then tell me what it meant.”

Suguru finally looked at him. His eyes were steady, but there was fear there—not the hot, frantic kind Satoru knew well, but something colder. Something taught.

“It meant we crossed a line,” Suguru said. “One we shouldn’t have.”

Something curdled in Satoru’s guts. Something like old milk left out on a hot day.

“That’s not an answer,” he snapped.

“Why does it have to be more than that?” he asked. “Why does everything have to be something?”

Satoru shot up so he was sitting cross-legged on the bed again. “Because it just does! Because that’s how the world works!” The frustration was bubbling and it was making him sick trying to keep it down. 

Suguru dragged a hand over his face. “What do you want from me?” he asked, and this time there was something raw in it. “Do you want me to apologize? Do you want me to say I regret it?”

Satoru’s chest tightened. “Do you?”

Suguru hesitated. Just for a second. A betrayal in slow motion.

“I regret that it hurt you.”

Satoru flinched. “That’s not the same thing.”

Suguru exhaled slowly, like he’d been holding his breath for longer than Satoru realized. “I’m not gay, Satoru.”

Satoru blinked. “That’s—” He stopped himself, recalibrated. “Okay.”

Suguru nodded, relieved at the lack of immediate resistance. “I need you to understand that.”

“I hear you,” Satoru said. Then, because honesty had already cost him everything, he added, “I just don’t think it’s that simple.”

Suguru’s jaw tightened. “It is to me.”

Satoru shifted his weight. His heart was doing that unpleasant, arrhythmic thing again, like it couldn’t decide what part of this to process first. “So what was that night?”

They say repeating the same act and expecting a different outcome is madness, and Satoru felt every inch of that verdict settle into his bones. He wanted nothing more than the proof that he wasn’t imagining it all, that the quiet torment wasn’t conjured by his own mind. He wanted clemency, mercy, a reprieve as absolute and impossible as an innocent person staring down the barrel of a gun, the seconds stretching and contracting like the pulse in his temples. Please, God, he prayed, pressing the words into himself so they would stick to the bones, I beg you.

Suguru’s mouth flattened. “A mistake.”

Hope was a cruel thing.

“There it is again.”

“That’s what it was.”

Satoru nodded slowly. “Okay. Then help me understand something.”

Suguru hesitated, but he didn’t stop him.

“If you’re not gay,” Satoru started, choosing each word carefully, “and that night didn’t mean anything beyond… impulse or urge or whatever you want to call it—why did we never talk about it?”

Suguru sat up, ran a hand through his hair. All Satoru could do was stare at this side profile. “You’re confused.”

The word landed wrong. Satoru laughed quietly. “About what?”

“About yourself,” Suguru said. “About what you’re feeling. You’re young, and you’ve always been a curious person, and I think you’re attaching meaning where there doesn’t need to be any.”

Satoru stared at him. “So this is about me now.”

“I think it is,” Suguru said, firm. “I think you’re projecting.”

Projecting. The audacity of it almost took his breath away.

“I’ve spent my whole life confused,” Satoru said quietly. “I wrote it all down just to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself and now I know for sure. This isn’t confusion.”

Suguru crossed his arms, defensive. “Then what is it?”

“It’s clarity,” Satoru replied. “For me.”

Suguru shook his head immediately. “No. I don’t accept that.”

Satoru felt something in his chest twist. “You don’t get to accept or reject it. It’s mine.”

“And you’re trying to make it about me.”

“I’m trying to be honest with you,” Satoru insisted. “There’s a difference.”

Suguru’s voice dropped. “You’re asking me to question things I’m not willing to question.”

“Why?”

“Because I know who I am,” Suguru snapped. Then, catching himself, he softened it—too late. “I’m not attracted to men. I’m not interested in… that life. I don’t want it.”

Satoru nodded. Slowly. “Okay.”

The lack of pushback seemed to throw Suguru off more than anything else. Silence crept in again, awkward and thick. Suguru looked unsettled now, like he’d expected absolution and gotten something far less comfortable.

“So what,” Suguru said. “You’re gay now?”

Satoru winced. “I don’t know.”

Suguru seized on that. “Exactly.” He laid back down on his back and fisted at his eyes. 

The word fell like a stone into a pond, except the water was Satoru’s chest and it had no bottom. It was cold and precise, sharper than anything Suguru had ever said, and Satoru felt it hollow out the center of himself. All the careful sentences he had strung together, all the honesty he had folded into the space between them, the clarity he had clung to like a lifeboat—they were gone. Flattened. Gone. As if he had been shouting into a canyon and the echo had returned as ridicule, as indifference, as the kind of dismissive truth no one asks for but everyone receives. He had spent years learning to articulate his thoughts, to pin them down like insects under glass, and now Suguru had crushed them with a single word.

It wasn’t just rejection. It wasn’t just coldness. It was a declaration of power Satoru had not noticed until now: Suguru could choose his proximity, his attention, his feeling, and Satoru could not. He could not bend Suguru to see him. He could not bend Suguru to care. He could not bend him at all. For the first time, Satoru realized how little he mattered, how completely his truth—his clarity, his certainty, the thing he had protected and polished for himself—was inconsequential to the one person whose acknowledgement he had hungered for.

He’s going to leave me.

It was not a rational thought, not a conscious one, not a thought shaped by present words, but it had weight. Suguru’s single word, Suguru’s unyielding shoulders, Suguru’s posture that resembled that of someone who had always known who he was and what he would allow—it all confirmed the old rule.

Satoru didn’t realize he had begun to cry until his vision warped and the room took on that watery, distant quality, like he was looking at Suguru through tarp left out in the rain. The crying was quiet at first, almost polite, his body attempting restraint even as everything inside him spilled loose, but then a sob tore through him so violently it shook the bed.

Suguru startled at the sound, his clenched fists loosening instinctively as he looked up. The attention burned and Satoru felt exposed, grotesque, like a wound pressed open under a merciless sun.

“Hey—” Suguru shifted, propping himself up on one forearm, concern breaking through his rigidity. “Satoru, come on, it’s okay. Don’t cry.”

That only made it worse.

“I’ve ruined everything,” Satoru cried, the sentence collapsing in on itself as soon as it left his mouth. “I—I don’t want you to stay away from me now.” He folded forward, burying his face in his hands, trying desperately to disappear into the small, dark space between his palms. If he could hide long enough, maybe this wouldn’t be real.

“’Toru, what are you talking about?”

Satoru inhaled heavily and smelled the regret in the grooves of his palms. “You said—you said it. You’d stay away until I got help and I don’t want to get help, Suguru. I don’t want to change. I don't—" The rest dissolved into sound. His body finished the thought for him. Tears spilled freely now, hot and relentless, tracking down his wrists and soaking into his sleeves like seawater, like something corrosive.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t—listen,” Suguru said quickly, confusion bleeding into his voice. “Can you look at me for a second? I can’t understand.”

Satoru shook his head. The motion sent a dizzying wave through him. His breathing had gone shallow and erratic, each inhale scraping, each exhale incomplete. There wasn’t enough air. There was never enough air.

“Please.”

It took everything he had to pry his hands away from his face. When he finally looked up, the shame was immediate and overwhelming, a visceral sense of contamination crawling over his skin. He felt unclean when he made eye contact with Suguru, unclean as if something poisonous had been poured over his head and allowed to seep inward, past flesh and bone, into places that could never be scrubbed clean.

“The day those boys were talking,” he said hoarsely. “After church. About the Ieiri girl—Shoko.” He inhaled. Exhaled. “You told me you’d stay away from gays until they got help. Those people get zapped, Suguru, they—” His voice fractured. “It would hurt, I know it would, I know it would hurt so bad—”

He never finished.

Flesh burning where fingers closed around his wrist. 

“Come here.” Suguru tugged, gentle but insistent. Satoru didn’t move. Couldn’t. “Please, for me?”

His body betrayed him before his mind could object. It went pliant, obedient, following the pull as though it had always been waiting for permission. His forehead struck Suguru’s chest, and the rest of him followed, collapsing inward, going slack. He could hear the beating of Suguru’s heart, could feel the beatings his father would give him, could understand all the ways Suguru had always beaten him to the answers—faith first, certainty first, adulthood first.

Arms snaked around his shoulders. He was being held. Even now. Even like this. Even filthy and sacrilegious—Satoru’s skin, unwanted and unmistakably gay, pressed against Suguru’s clean, ordered body, a violation of both intimacy and holiness, an undeniable vileness made flesh against purity.

“I’m sorry,” Suguru breathed into his hair, and it took Satoru by surprise how sanctified it sounded. His grip on Satoru only tightened as the apologies left his mouth. “I’m so sorry, Satoru. I was a kid when I said those things, and even so, I was sorry then too.”

Satoru couldn’t take it in. The apology slid off him, unable to find purchase. He cried through it the same way he allowed himself to be held: passively, miserably, without belief. His stomach churned. He thought he might vomit.

“M‑my hands.” He curled them into fists between them, knuckles white, and pressed his mouth uselessly against Suguru’s chest as he spoke. “My hands, my everything, they’re so dirty. I’m so dirty. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Suguru’s breath stuttered. He didn’t pull away. If anything, his arms tightened again, firmer now, like he was afraid Satoru might slip through him if he didn’t hold on hard enough.

“Hey,” he whispered, the word barely more than air. Satoru wondered if he was crying too. “No. No, listen to me.”

Satoru shook his head against his chest, a small, frantic movement. His fists stayed clenched, knuckles aching, nails biting into his palms like penance. The apologies kept spilling out of him, broken and compulsive, each one worse than the last.

“I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t touch you,” Satoru choked. “I shouldn’t be like this. I’m dirty, I shouldn’t—” His voice cracked so violently it barely resembled itself. “You shouldn’t have to—”

“Satoru, please,” Suguru begged but it was no use. Satoru was stuck and all that could be computed was abandonment and disgust. 

A few sobs later, his body was seized—Suguru’s thick, warm hands moved him, pulled him upright so fast there was no time to track the motion, no time to brace or think. Satoru barely registered the shift before he was being pressed down, pulled flush against Suguru’s chest, legs straddling him, thighs pressing into his sides. 

And then, Suguru’s lips crashed into his.

Satoru melted into the shock, mind scattered in a thousand directions at once. Half here, half there, wholly everywhere. 

Suguru was kissing him. 

Suguru was kissing him.

Again.

Their mouths didn’t move much at first. The kiss was closed, breath-heavy, held longer than necessary for panic and longer than mercy alone would require. Suguru’s hand came up to the back of Satoru’s neck, thumb resting just beneath the hairline, keeping his head steady. The other stayed firm at his waist, fingers spread, holding him upright with quiet insistence. Satoru’s breath broke between them, wet and uneven. Tears smeared against Suguru’s cheek, salt and heat pressed into his skin, and still—still—Suguru didn’t flinch. He leaned into it instead, deepening the kiss by a fraction. 

And Satoru should have pulled away. He knew he should. He should have reminded himself that Suguru had just told him he was straight. That their kiss last year meant nothing, that it was a mistake. But even as panic and disbelief churned through him, he knew that this was not the careless, experimental kiss of the past; Suguru’s hands weren’t just holding him—they were undoing years of filth, stripping him bare, making him clean.

He wanted to think. He wanted to reason. He should be terrified. But his chest burned, his skin tingled, and his lips, against Suguru’s, betrayed every argument he tried to make in his head. He was entirely surrendered. Part of him whispered, What are you doing? This is wrong, and another part screamed, Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.

So he kissed him harder. Lips moving with intent now, claiming, urgent, fire-fed. His arms twined around Suguru, fingers digging into shoulders and neck as though he could fuse himself to him. His sobs hitched, mingled with ragged breaths, and the panic clawed at him, unrelenting. Yet there was a strange clarity amid the chaos: he could feel Suguru everywhere, could feel that Suguru wasn’t letting go, could feel the truth of that, even if every rational part of him refused to acknowledge it. The kiss deepened further, tongues brushing for the first time for a heartbeat too long.

He was hyper-aware of everything: the scent of Suguru’s skin, the warmth of his breath, the rapid, uneven beat of his heart against Suguru’s chest. The memory of being told he was “wrong” collided with the inexplicable rightness of the moment. Why is this right? Why does this feel like home? Why am I melting into this, knowing it’s impossible? His mind scrambled for safety, for sense, for logic. But there was none. There was only heat, only the tremor in his knees, only the newfound rhythm of being held, kissed, and wanted by the person he’d spent years orbiting in longing, fear, and shame.

When they pulled away, it was all spit-string and gasping breaths.

Satoru didn’t go far. His forehead pressed to Suguru’s, noses brushing, breaths tangling and breaking apart again. Suguru’s hands were still on him, but that didn’t stop the frost of confusion that naturally came with the after of the thing they just shared.

Suguru’s thumb moved once, a small grounding motion at the base of Satoru’s skull. “See? You’re not dirty, Satoru.”

Satoru swallowed. Their foreheads stayed together, but his body had gone strangely still, like if he moved even an inch the moment would collapse in on itself. “But—” His lips brushed Suguru’s with the word, accidental, electric. He pulled back a fraction, just enough to look at him. “You said—”

“I know what I said,” he answered. It came out rougher than before. “I know.” His eyes flicked away, then back, restless. His hand slipped from Satoru’s neck to his shoulder, then lower, then finally dropped altogether, like he’d caught himself holding something forbidden.

“That doesn’t change this,” Suguru continued, voice lower, steadier. “It just doesn’t make you—” He exhaled, breath ghosting over Satoru’s mouth. “It doesn’t make you wrong.”

Satoru’s hands were fisted in Suguru’s shirt now, knuckles white, fabric wrinkled and stretched beneath his grip. He hadn’t realized he’d grabbed on until the ache registered. His body remembered the kiss more clearly than anything else—the certainty of it, the way Suguru had kissed him like there was no hesitation, no revulsion, no distance at all.

“You can’t do this to me,” Satoru whispered.

“You’re my best friend,” Suguru said, and it hurt. Hurt more than when he said it last time. 

“Yeah, I know. I—” The words scraped on the way out. “I know what that means.”

“I’m sorry.”

Satoru let out a breath that almost laughed, the sound brittle and incomplete. “Don’t be sorry.”

The words sat there, inadequate. Suguru nodded anyway, like he didn’t know what else to do with them.

“If you were—” he started, then stopped. The pause stretched. Satoru felt it coming before it arrived, felt his body brace in a way his mind hadn’t yet caught up to. “If you were a woman,” he continued, eyes fixed somewhere just past Satoru’s shoulder, “I think I could love you without hating myself.”

Ice water poured down Satoru’s spine. His mouth opened, and nothing came out. Nothing. His throat worked, shifting air, but it made no sound. His lips parted and closed again, and still—silence.

Suguru’s hands returned, cupping Satoru’s cheeks. His thumbs brushed along the edges of Satoru’s cheekbone, gentle but insistent, as if trying to hold him together. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

Knockknockknock. 

Suguru’s head jerked up like he’d been electrocuted, knocking into Satoru’s face. In a heartbeat, he shoved Satoru off him, fumbling to sit upright, straighten his shirt, and look composed—anything but the reality of the moment. Satoru hit the mattress lightly, blinking, stunned and disoriented, chest still hammering.

The door swung open.

“Banana bread’s ready!” his mother announced cheerfully, stepping inside.

Suguru’s head bowed slightly in thanks. “Smells delicious, ma’am.” His voice was steady, warm, perfect. Hands clasped in front of him, posture impeccable, the very picture of the church boy everyone expected him to be.

Satoru swallowed. His chest felt hollow, his stomach twisting, as he watched the ease with which Suguru slipped back into the world, back into composure, back into a version of himself that didn’t belong underneath Satoru, that didn’t taste of lips and fire and desire.

He smiled faintly at Satoru, the smallest flicker of affection that somehow made the wound widen.

Satoru lowered his gaze, feeling smaller, lighter, broken in ways no apology could reach. The memory of Suguru’s hands, the ghost of his lips, pressed into him like a prayer he could never answer, a devotion he could never return. He clenched his fists at his sides, trying not to shake, trying not to show the way the world had shifted under his feet, trying not to pray for something that could never be.

He hoped God loved Suguru half as much as he did.

—

July, 2007.

Satoru had learned early that July was not kind to church clothes.

The sun was hot and sweat dripped down temples, gathering at hairlines and along the backs of necks, darkening collars no matter how carefully you stood. People lingered anyway, shaking hands, adjusting collars, pretending the heat wasn’t getting to them. Satoru stood among them and felt fourteen and all elbows and knees and too much skin, his shirt sticking unpleasantly between his shoulder blades, the sun bleaching the concrete steps until it hurt to look at them. July always did this—exposed everything. Salt on skin. Pulse in the throat. The simple fact of being a body.

Suguru came up behind him and hooked two fingers into Satoru’s sleeve, steering him out of the small crowd and toward the side of the church. “Fix my tie.”

Satoru let out a short, breathy scoff. “Can’t do it yourself?”

Suguru, with his hair neatly tied back in a bun and his white dress shirt sticking idly to the sweat on his chest, just shook his head. “I’m fatigued from the heat.”

And Satoru being Satoru—a good friend, an excellent stylist, a boy put on the right path after more than one clean-cut rejection and an apology to God—slid his fingers up Suguru’s tie and adjusted the knot so it was no less than perfect. It was so perfect in fact that Satoru didn’t take his hands off him straight away. He smoothed a stray hair back from Suguru’s brow, tugged gently at his collar so the seams lay flat, checked each button like he didn’t trust the day not to undo them. Evidently, he just didn’t know when to let go.

“You okay, ‘Toru?” Suguru asked after a moment.

That was a good question. A great one, actually. 

He didn’t really wish to speak so he just flashed his canines and prayed to God he would just drop it. But behind his black-tinted sunglasses which his mother would scold him later for wearing inside, he was lost and looking for guidance. He expected Suguru to grin back at him, to punch him in the shoulder and say something like let's get in there then or stop smiling like that or else your face is gonna get stuck like that. What he didn’t expect was for Suguru to push his sunglasses up to the top of his head. No—if Satoru expected Suguru to do something so tender in front of ten maybe fifteen people, he would’ve made sure that he wiped the tears that were threatening to drop from his eyes. 

“Why do you lie to me?” Suguru sighed, and Satoru felt selfish for making this about him again. For always having Suguru come up and pick up the pieces.

“I’m happy! Can’t a man be happy anymore? Jeez. You look good. So good that I might admit to being jealous just this once.”

“Are you suffering from heat stroke? Do you want a glass of water or some shade?”

“I had shade,” Satoru vaguely gestured to the sunglasses at the top of his head, “but you took it away from me.”

Suguru tutted, shook his head, looked down at his feet which sported fancy dress shoes similar to Satoru’s. Satoru looked down at his watch.

“Suguru dear!” Mother Geto called despite being three, two, one steps away. “Oh, you boys look so handsome, God bless! Suguru, have you seen your suit jacket?” 

Suguru shook his head. “I gave it to Satoru back at the house.”

Two sets of eyes turned to him. Satoru blanched.

“I left it on the backrest of the chair in the living room. I’m so sorry, I’ll—I’ll quickly run and get it!”

Before he could take another step, Suguru grabbed him by the arm. There was too much contact today. “In this heat? Are you crazy?” He looked back to his mother. “I’ll go with him in case something happens.”

“Darling—”

“It’s fine, Mother. We’ll be quick.” Without another opportunity for follow-up, Suguru pulled Satoru with him out of the front area of the church and down the street. The sun was blazing on them and it didn’t help that their pants were black, attracting the sun like moths to a flame, Icarus to the sun.

They walked in silence for a few minutes and Satoru catalogued their steps. Their footing was the same, and if they ever strayed a footing, Satoru would ensure he corrected it so they stayed in sync.

“So, are you gonna tell me what’s up?” Suguru asked after a while, hands in his trouser pockets.

“Nothing’s up, and would you quit asking?” Satoru kicked a loose pebble then clicked his fingers. “My balls are sweating. There. There’s your answer.”

Suguru tucked his chin into his chest to hide his laugh but it didn’t work. Satoru laughed with him.

“Hey, if I take you on a quick detour, will you follow me?” Suguru asked.

I’d follow you anywhere. Still.

“Okay.”

And so Suguru walked and Satoru followed. Past the crooked mailbox, past Mrs. Nakamura’s yard where her hydrangeas were cut down long ago and replaced with sunflowers, past the old skatepark which was upgraded last year to include not one but two pump tracks. They walked till their toes were sweaty and their hands were muggy, and far enough that there was probably a search party out looking for them now, but they finally made it to the lake. Satoru smiled as he followed Suguru down the path and smiled even harder when Suguru didn’t look back at him once. They sat side-by-side on the dock, letting their calves dangle off the edge just shy of the water.

Satoru focused his attention on the rippling water. “Why are we here?”

He was met with a shrug, then a sigh. “Just needed a breather I guess.” The words were simple, but Satoru wondered if the heaviness behind them reached him at all, or if Suguru’s mind was somewhere else entirely, drifting like the small debris the current carried away from their feet.

Satoru inclined his head, a movement so slight he wasn’t sure Suguru even noticed. Their feet swung gently in tandem, silent but not uncomfortable, each swing pulling him a little further from thought and a little closer to the steady rhythm of their proximity.

“I’m surprised this rickety old thing hasn’t collapsed yet,” Suguru mentioned after a while, absentmindedly.

Satoru scoffed. “Yeah, don’t hold your breath on it lasting much longer. Knowing our luck, it’ll go down in the next ten.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m the luckiest man in the world.”

Something inside Satoru faltered. He looked down at Suguru’s hands, the ones that burned him up and calmed him down in equal measure, and eyed the engagement band on his ring finger. The same finger that cradled his own at age six and cupped his face at age fourteen and left marks in his skin at age sixteen. There’d be a wedding band on there in the next couple of hours, and maybe a third one, an eternity ring, in ten or twenty years signifying an extra layer of devotion if he was lucky enough.

“You’ll live a happy life, Suguru.” He hated how he meant none of it. Hated how he’d perfected how to mask the tone and inflection of his voice the day Suguru had casually introduced him to his new girlfriend, hated the memory of his own stomach twisting the night of their engagement, of dinner rising unbidden in protest as Suguru Facetimed him to flaunt the ring on her finger, its gold cold and bright and impossible. “You found a good one. Let’s hope you don’t chase her away with your tendency to hog the blanket.”

Satoru winced at his own words, reminded of the night of their first kiss, but nonetheless, he expected a laugh from Suguru, or even a scoff and a shove. Tough crowd. But when he turned to Suguru with a smile, he found it falling off his face as quickly as it got there. 

Suguru was crouched over, elbows on his knees, hands fully over his face, blunt nails digging into the sides of his head, and he was shaking. Shaking like a man guilty of a heinous crime.

“Suguru?”

The air smelled faintly of algae and something sour, something human, something sticky that might have been sweat, might have been shame.

“I can’t,” Suguru croaked finally, so quiet it seemed like the word might not reach the water. Or Satoru. Or himself. “I can’t…”

Satoru’s stomach knotted. He wanted to reach out, wanted to stop this, wanted to fix it somehow, wanted—he didn’t know. He didn’t know what he wanted, only that he needed the world to be different, only that he needed Suguru to look at him.

“What’s going on?” he whispered, hoping to pry some truth with a soft voice of encouragement.

Suguru lifted his head a little, let his fingers skim over his mouth until his lips started to curdle and his eyebrows started to bunch up and he started to cry into the water. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to be good. You know that. I’ve sat through every sermon, done every youth group thing, I said the prayers, I—” His voice splintered. “I believed it. All of it.”

Satoru felt his pulse falter, a staccato thud in his throat.

“But I’m fucking tired,” he sobbed, and Satoru had to bite back the gasp because it was the first time he’d ever heard Suguru curse. “I’m so tired that I begged God to take it away. To take me away.”

Satoru blanched, the blood retreating from his face like a tide. My Suguru wanted to die? Cracked was too gentle a word for what happened to his heart. It felt pried apart, forced open along fault lines he hadn’t known were there, an internal split that radiated outward into bone. He had imagined Suguru tired before. Overworked. Overburdened. He had never imagined this—this exhaustion that sounded like surrender, that sounded like someone standing at the edge of themselves and asking not to be there anymore. 

“And he didn’t,” Suguru continued, shoulders folding inward. “So what does that make me? I feel like a fucking lie.”

A cold flush crawled up Satoru’s spine that would’ve been mistaken for sweat in any other instance. His throat tried to close. “You’re not a lie.” The words left him too fast, too sharp; he flinched at his own voice, at the way it trembled at the edges. “You’re—you’re Suguru. You’re—”

“I don’t know who that is,” Suguru snapped, not loud but desperate, the kind of desperation that bled out even when someone tried to dam it with syllables. “Everyone else seems to know, but I don’t. God knows. My parents know. My fiancée knows—or she thinks she does. You…” His breath hitched again, and he shook his head. “You shouldn’t.”

Satoru froze. Suguru wiped hard at his face with his sleeve, like he could erase the last five minutes if he just rubbed hard enough. He laughed—sharp, humorless, a brittle little splinter of a sound.

“You’d think He’d take the hint, right?” Suguru gritted out, voice raw. “Thousands of prayers. Hundreds of nights. Years of—of bargaining. Offering everything but my blood. ‘Please take it. Please make me different. Please just—just let me be right.’” His hands curled into fists on his knees. “And every morning I woke up still me.”

“You’re getting married today,” Satoru managed, forcing the reminder into the space between them like a plank over a widening gap. The words tasted metallic. He was afraid—afraid of what Suguru was implying, afraid of what he himself might allow—and he despised that fear, but if there was still a path for Suguru to retreat to, something steady and respectable and unregrettable, then Satoru would hold it open with both hands. “You love her.”

“I like her,” Suguru whispered, voice small. “I want to love her.” He wiped angrily at a tear. “She’s good. She’s safe. She’ll give me a normal life.”

Satoru gave the saddest smile in the world. “Then how about we go back for that suit jacket, yeah? The ceremony’s—”

“But I’m in love with you.”

Satoru’s entire world stopped. The words fell like molten crystal, sharp and fragile all at once, slicing the thin veil between thought and feeling, embedding themselves in his chest with the subtle, inexorable weight of gravity bending around a single axis. Air became viscous, the kind of thick, trembling mist that made each inhale a deliberate act of rebellion. His tongue stiffened in its own mouth, a traitor refusing to form vowels, consonants, sentences. His throat clenched around a hollow, unnameable sound, a gasp suspended before it could ever take shape.

I’m in love with you.

He could see Suguru—past the hands, the hair that had come undone from his bun stuck damp against his brow, the quivering jaw, the wet lashes catching sunlight like tiny prisms—he could see every boy Suguru had been, every man Suguru had tried to bury beneath hymns, prayers, sermons, ritual perfection. The church boy who folded himself neatly into the corners of pews, who learned obedience like breathing, who swallowed questions whole, who stacked his own desires in a dusty, hidden closet and swept the floorboards clean. And he could see him now, trembling and human, glorious and fragile, exhumed from years of self-denial, hands pressed to skin as if the air itself might burn him away.

I’m in love with you. 

The syllables folded into one another like origami made of fire, like glass being blown slowly, painfully, shaped into some intricate, unbreakable lattice inside his chest. It was infinite and infinitesimal all at once. A tremor that ran from the base of his skull to the tips of his toes. A halo of heat around the nerve endings of his hands and the tiny hairs on his arms. An ache that was pleasure, a terror that was awe, a hunger that was reverence, a reverence that was despair. He wanted to collapse. To vanish. To dissolve into Suguru’s shadow and be carried off into the lake, into the unseen, beneath the visible, beneath the real. He wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream, to whisper every unsaid word, to hold the infinite infinitesimal in the hollow of his hands and watch it burn. He wanted to run. He wanted to stay. He wanted everything and nothing all at once.

I’m in love with him.

Suguru swiped at his eyes again, more frantically this time, like he was drowning on land. “I’m supposed to be marrying her right now,” he croaked, and something in him cracked clean open with the force of it. “And you’re sitting here asking me if I’m okay.”

He let out a broken noise that might have been a laugh. Might have been a sob.

“And the only thing I can think is—” He pressed his fist against his mouth, almost swallowing the end of the sentence whole. “I wish it were you.”

And that was the line that did it. Not I’m in love with you. Not the crackling, incandescent blasphemy of those first five words—it was this. This tiny, exhausted, ridiculous wish spoken like a death sentence and a prayer all in the same breath.

It was bridal-white longing uttered on the morning of his wedding. It was a man saying I want the life I’m not allowed to have. It was a child in a pew begging the sky to change him and being answered only with silence. It was a friend telling Satoru, without saying the words, you are my one and only.

Satoru’s body reacted before his mind could catch up. His hand hovered upward, fingers trembling with the urge to cup Suguru’s cheek, wipe the streaks away like he had once done for Satoru, cradle the admission like it was some smoldering ember that could still be carried home and coaxed into fire, but he stopped himself. Inches away. Close enough to feel the radiating heat of Suguru’s skin.

“You—you can’t say things like that,” Satoru murmured, and his voice sounded like it was coming from the riverbed beneath the riverbed. Pulled under. Grit-scraped, waterlogged, heavy with silt. “You can’t.”

Suguru let out a noise—half wounded animal, half disbelieving human trying to understand the rules of the universe. “Why not?” A whisper, but a demand. A whimper, but a war cry. “Is it still too soon to start being honest with each other?”

It occurred to Satoru at this moment that he’d misunderstood Suguru all along. He’d spent years believing Suguru was his compass only because Satoru himself was directionless, because he needed someone steadier to point north. But Suguru had never been a gentle thing in the first place. He wasn’t delicate stained glass lit from behind by someone else’s faith. No—he was the thing stained glass was trying to imitate. Crystal under pressure. Stone struck into spark. A mineral shard pulled from the earth with sharp edges still intact. His certainty hadn’t come from any church pew or scripture; it had been quarried from within him, carved out of refusal and ache and a want he had not allowed himself. Suguru had always been the one Satoru followed, yes—but only because Suguru had spent years walking blind into the dark ahead of them both. Only because he had been the road itself, paved under his own feet, leading Satoru forward only because he’d been breaking and marrying the path ahead barehanded the whole time.

“I’m scared,” Satoru whispered, and it was too true, too raw, too much like spilling molten metal onto cold tile.

Suguru let the sound brush past him, half-smile, half-grimace, letting the trepidation and the pain fizzle together in a single, breathless exhale. He closed the space between them like two planets in slow collision, like two twin beds pushed together at the seams, and his hand found the back of Satoru’s neck, settling there as if it had always been meant to. Foreheads collided, soft and urgent, and skin pressed to skin, permeating each other like air folding into air, like light seeping through the cracks of a shuttered window.

“I’m fucking terrified.”

He leaned in, and so did Satoru, and when their lips met, it was the softest, most gentle feeling in the world. 

It did not feel like falling. It felt like crossing a threshold he’d been circling his entire life, barefoot, afraid of what might be demanded of him on the other side. Suguru kissed him without haste, without hunger chivelled into guilt, and Satoru thought of all the other kisses that had asked him to forget himself. 

This one didn’t want erasure.

It wanted remembering.

Suguru took the lead, lips tracing Satoru’s, brushing the top lip, the bottom lip, kissing the corners, mapping the territory of his mouth like one might trace constellations in a sky no one else could see. Satoru kept his eyes open for the most part. He wanted this kiss to sink beneath the skin, past muscle and habit and fear, to mark something deeper—bone-deep, marrow-true. He wanted it to lodge there stubbornly, so that even if time did its worst, even if years stripped names and faces down to static, there would be proof left behind. 

When they parted for air, Suguru’s brows knit. “You taste like smoke.”

Satoru’s face flamed, hot with embarrassment and with Suguru’s salt-slick tears. “I cried to Shoko this morning before coming over.”

Suguru sighed and nosed the tender pink of his cheek. “‘M sorry, sweetheart.” And Satoru’s body boiled over by the name. “Can I make it up to you?”

Satoru didn’t know what that meant so he just nuzzled into the crook of Suguru’s neck and hummed, still in disbelief, in utter shock. Suguru moved while Satoru was breathing in his scent, untucking his dress shirt from his pants and placing his hands to the pale planes of his torso, along the sides, the ribs catching where fingers fell. He let out a sound that splintered the air and Satoru’s chest alike, like quicksilver running through the fissures of a glacier untouched for millennia.

“I’ve never touched you here before,” Suguru mumbled against his hair.

Satoru gulped, becoming very hot, becoming accustomed to the feeling once more. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it, so instead, with shaky fingers began undoing the buttons of Suguru’s shirt, one by one, five falling at last, exposing the ridges and hollows beneath. His hands splayed over Suguru’s chest, tentative, worshipful.

“I’ve always wanted to touch you here.”

Suguru’s grip on his waist tightened. “Yeah?”

Satoru pushed one side of Suguru’s dress shirt over his shoulder, exposing skin and tan lines. “Yeah.”

Suguru groaned and pulled Satoru on top of him. His hands moved down to Satoru’s thighs, slow as snowfall, mapping the sharp press of muscle beneath tailored fabric, learning him like scripture he had once sworn not to read. 

Then, he felt Suguru’s phone buzz in his pocket. Once. Twice. On and on. They both stilled.

The sound did not belong here. It did not belong to the lake or the wind or the low animal rhythm of breath passing between parted mouths. It was fluorescent. Artificial. It was a church bell translated into vibration and lithium battery. Suguru shut his eyes and Satoru knew. He did not need to see the screen to know. He did not need to be told that somewhere, in a building filled with white flowers and polite smiles and perfectly ironed suits only worn for celebration, people were beginning to glance at their watches.

The phone kept buzzing.

“Answer it, Suguru.”

Suguru hesitated half a second too long, then reached into his pocket and pulled it free, answering. “Hi, Mother.” Even that was different. The timbre shifted, the edges softened, the man who had just dragged Satoru into his lap and kissed him like a confession was suddenly somebody’s son, somebody’s fiancee. 

“They’re there?” Suguru asked quietly. A pause. “Yes. I know.” Another pause, longer this time.

Satoru could imagine the scene without seeing it. The officiant checking his watch, the bride in a separate room, perhaps. Lace adjusted. Bouquet re-gripped. Someone saying it’s fine, it’s fine, he’s probably on his way.

Suguru’s throat moved again. “I’m not coming.”

Satoru felt it hit somewhere low in his body, somewhere near the place Suguru’s hands had been moments before. He looked away, suddenly aware of how bare his chest was, how Suguru’s unbuttoned shirt hung from his shoulders like evidence.

The voice on the other end grew sharper. Even from a distance, Satoru could hear the rise.

“What do you mean you’re not coming?”

“I can’t do it,” Suguru said.

On the other end of the line, something was breaking. He could hear it even without the speaker on. The rhythm of interruption. The brittle cadence of disbelief.

“You will ruin her.”

“I know.”

“You will humiliate her.”

“I know.”

“You should have said something before today.”

Suguru closed his eyes. “I should have.”

Satoru watched the guilt move across his face like weather—real, unmanufactured, heavy. This was not a man fleeing consequences. This was a man walking straight into them.

“I’m sorry,” Suguru whispered, though it was unclear who he meant it for.

The call ended after a moment, and the phone remained in Suguru’s hand long after the screen went black.

The wind skimmed low over the lake, dragging silver across its surface. Somewhere behind them, the trees shifted and resettled, bark creaking like old floorboards in a house that had decided to keep its secrets. The world continued in that obscene, indifferent way it always did. A wedding had just been quietly dismantled, and the water did not so much as ripple in protest. 

Satoru threaded his fingers through Suguru’s head, nails digging slightly into his scalp for comfort. Suguru melted into it. 

“Suguru?” he asked timidly, fingers not stopping but looking down at where their bodies were connected. 

“Yeah?”

Satoru rubbed his lips together, nerves, insecurity, doubt mixing with Suguru’s saliva that was drying on his lips. He took a deep breath.

“I have loved you for years. I have been the place you come to when things get loud. I have been your best friend. I have been the person you almost choose.” He finally looked at him. “I will not be almost ever again.”

“You’re not almost, what—” Suguru inhaled slowly, as though preparing to step into cold water, “what do you need?”

“I need to know you’re not going to resent me for this. For the mess. For what you just walked away from. I need to know you’re not going to wake up in six months and decide you chose wrong.”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” Suguru replied, certain. “I’ve tried living without my love for you. It doesn’t work. And I don’t want to die anymore.”

Satoru’s hand came up to Suguru’s collar, fingers curling into fabric. “If you hurt me again, I won’t forgive you.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“And I won’t.”

Suguru’s hands found Satoru’s bare waist again and Satoru could do nothing but melt, could do nothing but meet him in the middle with a kiss that transcended all the others. Soft, loving, full of the comfort and reassurance that Suguru wasn’t married to his mind or religion or a woman. He was solely his.

“We’re—” Suguru broke away, exhaled, a quiet, disbelieving huff. “We’re in public.”

Satoru swallowed. “There’s nobody here.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

Suguru’s hands, traitorous and warm, were still splayed against Satoru’s waist, thumbs resting in the shallow dip above his hips like they’d discovered something sacred and were afraid to lose it.

Satoru tilted his head, studying him. “Oh,” he said lightly, though his pulse had begun to stutter. “So what, you suddenly care about propriety?”

Suguru shot him a look. “I’ve always cared.”

“Right,” Satoru hummed. “That’s why you just skipped the most aggressively proper event of your entire life.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

Suguru’s jaw flexed. “Yes.”

Satoru’s mouth curved, teasing but not unkind. “So what are you saying? Kissing me is fine. Touching me is fine.” His fingers pressed lightly into Suguru’s chest, tracing down an exposed line of skin that faded below his shirt. “But anything more and lightning strikes?”

Suguru caught his wandering hand gently, holding it in place. “You know what I’m saying.”

“Humor me.”

A faint flush crept up Suguru’s neck. It was almost unfair, how quickly he colored, like his body had never learned how to lie despite that being a lie in itself.

“I was raised to believe,” Suguru began carefully, “that sex is… sacred. That it belongs in marriage. That it’s not something you treat lightly.”

Satoru’s teasing expression softened a fraction. “And you still believe that?” 

“I don’t know what I believe,” Suguru admitted. “I know what I was taught. I know what I promised myself I’d follow.” His eyes lifted to Satoru’s. “And I know that wanting you doesn’t feel impure. It just feels terrifying. There’s no going back.”

Satoru exhaled slowly. He slipped his hand free from Suguru’s grasp, but only so he could rest it flat over Suguru’s heart. “You think sleeping with me is the point of no return.”

Suguru’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Yes.”

“And you don’t think leaving everything behind for me already was?”

“That was a decision,” Suguru replied. “This would be… a covenant.”

Satoru’s usual flippancy faltered. He shifted closer, until their chests brushed. “So what,” he murmured, softer now. “You’re afraid that if you touch me like that, God will be disappointed?”

Suguru gave a breathless, humorless huff. “Something like that.”

“Or that you will?”

Suguru didn’t look away. “Maybe both.”

Satoru tilted his head, thumb brushing slowly along Suguru’s collarbone. “I don’t want you to do anything just to prove something. Not to me. Not to whatever version of yourself you’re rebelling against. If you’re going to have sex with me, it’s because you want to, and not because you already burned down the house and think you might as well set fire to the rest of the village.”

Suguru’s hands tightened slightly at his waist. “I don’t see it as ruining anything. I see it as giving something.”

“To me?”

“To us.”

Satoru’s throat went dry. “You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

A beat.

“You realize,” Satoru added, a faint edge of his old grin returning, “that this is the least casual proposition I’ve ever received.”

Suguru’s brow furrowed. “I’m not propositioning you.”

“You kind of are.” A reluctant smile tugged at Suguru’s mouth. Satoru’s tone softened again. “I need to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“If we don’t do it today,” Satoru started, watching him carefully, “if we wait—if we decide we want to be… whatever we’re becoming—will you resent that?”

“No.”

“And if we do,” Satoru continued, voice quieter now, “will you wake up tomorrow and feel like you sinned?”

Suguru dipped his head forward until there was no space left between them at all. “I don’t feel like I’m sinning when I love you so dearly.”

The simplicity of it disarmed Satoru. He searched for doubt. Found none.

“So what are you afraid of?” Satoru asked.

Suguru’s fingers slid up Satoru’s sides. “That I won’t survive how much I want you.”

Heat bloomed low in Satoru’s stomach, but it wasn’t frantic. He leaned down, brushing his mouth along Suguru’s jaw, then pausing just shy of his ear. “Tell me clearly,” he whispered. “Do you want to have sex with me right now?”

Suguru’s hands flexed at his waist. “Yes.”

Satoru pulled back enough to look at him again, eyes searching one final time. “No guilt.”

“No guilt.”

“No repentance tomorrow.”

“No repentance.”

“And you’re not doing this because you think you owe me.”

“I’m doing this because I love you. And because I want to share my body with the person I plan to spend the rest of my life with.”

The rest of my life.

Satoru’s teasing smile faded into something softer, something almost awed. He’d been waiting his whole life to hear those words, and now that they were here, they sounded better than he could have hoped for.

“Fuck,” he whined. A kiss. “Yes. Fuck yes.” Another kiss. “Suguru, take me back to my place.”

—

They did not run down the dock. They did not touch in the open air, did not give the lake or the trees or the distant houses anything to remember. They walked with a careful distance between them, two men composed in the aftermath of something seismic.

The restraint lasted exactly as long as it took Satoru to unlock his front door.

The second it shut behind them, the composure shattered.

Suguru had him against the door before the lock had even fully clicked into place—hands everywhere at once, mouth crashing into his with a hunger that felt less like impatience and more like survival. The sound that tore from Satoru’s throat was swallowed immediately, devoured.

All that talk of permanence, of covenant, of truth—it combusted on contact.

Satoru’s keys clattered to the floor, and the sunglasses from the top of his head followed, forgotten. 

Suguru kissed him like he had been holding his breath for years. Not careful now. Not timid. His fingers dragged beneath Satoru’s shirt, palms hot against bare skin, mapping him in greedy strokes that bordered on frantic.

“Suguru—” Satoru gasped, half-laughing, half-wrecked already. 

They stumbled forward together, knocking into the hallway wall. Satoru’s shoulder hit first; Suguru’s hand followed instantly, shielding his head as if he could undo the impact by force of will.

“Sorry,” Suguru breathed against his mouth, even as he kissed him again.

“Don’t—” Satoru caught his collar, dragging him closer. “Don’t start apologizing.”

They moved in a messy, breathless tangle down the hallway, Satoru walking backwards, barely aware of where his feet were landing. A picture frame rattled on the wall as Suguru’s arm brushed it; the narrow console table groaned in protest when Satoru’s hip clipped the corner.

Suguru did not slow down.

“How long d’you think we have?” he murmured against Satoru’s lips, words breaking apart as he chased them with another kiss.

Satoru tried to think—really tried—but Suguru’s mouth was relentless, trailing to his jaw, his throat, teeth grazing lightly before soothing the mark away.

“I—I dunno,” Satoru managed, mind scrambling through logistics that felt laughably irrelevant now. “My parents’ll be helping yours, I think—ah—”

Suguru’s fingers made quick work of the remaining buttons on Satoru’s shirt, as though he’d memorized their placement. The fabric parted again, sliding off his shoulders, baring him to the warm air of the hallway.

“They’ll be busy,” Satoru continued, breath catching when Suguru’s palm flattened over his stomach. “Explaining. Managing everything. Could be a while. Might—”

Suguru nipped at his lower lip, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to steal the rest of the sentence.

“Perfect,” he groaned, though it sounded less triumphant than desperate.

A thrill shot through Satoru’s ribs at the implication. It felt wicked and private and deliciously unfair—the world occupied elsewhere while they undressed each other in its blind spot.

“Shit,” Satoru cursed when Suguru misjudged the turn and guided him straight into the bedroom doorframe.

Suguru froze immediately, horror flashing across his face. “I’m sorry, I—”

“I said stop apologizing,” Satoru cut him off, tugging him forward again by the front of his shirt. “I’m fine. Keep going.”

The door slammed shut behind them with a sharp thud, kicked closed by Suguru’s heel.

For half a breath, they stood there, chests heaving. Satoru’s shirt hung open, sleeves slipping down his arms. Suguru’s hair was already disheveled, eyes blown wide and dark, like he’d crossed some invisible threshold and couldn’t quite believe it.

Suguru’s hands slid down to Satoru’s hips and guided him backward until the backs of his knees hit the mattress. The sensation startled a breath out of him, and he let himself fall, the bed dipping beneath his weight. Suguru followed immediately, bracing himself above him, one hand planted by Satoru’s head, the other still gripping his hip like he was afraid he might disappear.

Satoru reached up, fingers tangling into Suguru’s hair, pulling him down into another kiss that swallowed whatever was left of hesitation. When they broke apart, Satoru trailed a hand to Suguru’s nape to stop him from leaning back in. He could feel Suguru’s pulse under his thumb. Fast. Matching his.

Suguru swallowed. “Something wrong?”

“Suguru,” Satoru whispered, because if he didn’t say something he was going to combust, “do you… know what you’re doing?”

They’d never been taught how two men were supposed to do this, only that they weren’t supposed to. Everything else had been scavenged from rumor and inference. What if that wasn’t enough? Had Suguru thought about this? Or was he trusting heat to substitute for knowledge? Wanting wasn’t the same thing as knowing.

A faint, embarrassed huff of laughter escaped Suguru before he could stop it. “I don’t.”

“Yeah,” Satoru admitted. “Me neither.”

They stared at each other for a second—equal parts flushed and mortified.

Suguru shifted his weight slightly, careful not to press too much, like even that required permission now. “I’ve—” He stopped, jaw tightening.

Satoru raised a brow. “You’ve what?”

Suguru’s ears pinked first, then the color crept downward. “I’ve seen… things.”

Satoru blinked. “Define things.”

Suguru exhaled through his nose. “Porn.”

Satoru laughed, a bark of disbelief and delight that nearly vibrated the sheets. “You?”

“Yes, me.”

“I thought you’d combust if you typed it into a search bar.”

“I almost did,” Suguru muttered.

Satoru grinned up at him, unable to help it. “When?”

“A few years ago,” Suguru said, resigned. “Once. Maybe twice.”

“Twice,” Satoru repeated, delighted.

Suguru shot him a look that could have melted steel. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.”

And then there was a pause, a tilt of weight, a quiet alignment of heat and breath. “Well what about you?”

“Obviously.”

“How often?”

Eyes flicked away, lips twitched, and Satoru swallowed the urge to laugh. “We are not doing inventory.”

Suguru’s lips curved faintly. “Satoru.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “I’ve watched it. More than twice. Happy?”

Suguru’s gaze flickered over his face, then down briefly, then back up. “Did it help?”

“With what?”

“Understanding what to do.”

Satoru considered that. “I guess. I don’t think you really understand it till you do it though.” 

Suguru nodded slowly. His hand, still resting at Satoru’s waist, flexed slightly. “Have you—” He stopped again.

“You are remarkably bad at finishing sentences for someone who just dismantled his entire life,” Satoru teased, voice catching, a laugh hidden in the chest.

Suguru ignored that. “Have you done anything. Yourself.”

Ah. There it was.

Satoru felt heat climb his throat again, but this time it wasn’t from kissing. “Yes.”

Suguru’s brows drew together. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

“How—”

“Oh my God,” Satoru laughed, covering his face briefly with one hand. “You cannot be asking for specifics.”

“I’m trying to gauge—”

“You’re trying to gauge?” Satoru echoed, incredulous.

Suguru’s composure cracked. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He doesn’t want to hurt me. Not anymore.

Satoru gulped. “I’ve… taken care of myself,” he said, more gently now. “Enough to know what feels good. Enough to know what doesn’t.” Suguru’s shoulders loosened a fraction. “And you?” Satoru asked.

Suguru hesitated, then murmured a quiet, “Yes.”

Satoru blinked. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Suguru repeated, looking faintly betrayed by his own honesty.

Satoru couldn’t help it—he smiled, softer this time. “Look at you.”

“Don’t.”

Satoru gripped Suguru’s shirt and pulled him down to him, giggling. “Were you thinking of me?”

Suguru went very still. The stillness said more than any answer could have.

Satoru’s grin widened, delighted and disbelieving all at once. “No way.”

“Satoru—”

“Oh my God,” he laughed, half breathless already, tugging him closer by the collar. “You were.”

Suguru’s face had gone a shade deeper, color climbing from his neck to the tips of his ears. “It’s not—”

“I thought about you every single time I jacked off,” Satoru whispered in his ear. He was getting turned on, the feeling on full blast now. He curled a leg around Suguru’s lower back and pulled him into him so all of Suguru’s weight was on him. He rolled his hips upwards experimentally, just once, for effect. “I thought about you while doing other stuff too.”

Suguru’s gulp was evident. “Like what?”

Satoru’s breath trembled a little. The confidence up until now was all an act, and it was slowly crumbling, slowly getting embarrassing with Suguru’s beautiful eyes looking down at him with interest. 

“Like, you know…”

Suguru whined, letting his head dip down to leave an open mouthed kiss against Satoru’s chest. At the same time, he brought Satoru’s legs that were wrapped around his back a little higher, essentially folding him further, and then slowly grinded his hips against Satoru’s. 

Suguru was hard. Satoru was extremely hard.

“You thought about me while you were fucking yourself?” 

Satoru’s breath hitched, shallow and fast, like he was trying to inhale the world at once. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t form the words that would match the heat crawling through him. Never in a million years did he ever think he would hear words like that come out of Suguru’s mouth.

Suguru manhandled him so he laid further down the bed, head against the pillows. His fingers toyed with the waistband of Satoru’s pants before stopping. 

“Answer me, sweetheart.” 

Holy fuck.

“Yeah, yes. Always you. Was always wishing it was you instead.”

A genuine smile graced Suguru’s features. “Can I take these off?”

“Please.”

With shaky fingers, Suguru peeled the dress pants off him, Satoru helping a little by jutting his hips up a little. When they were thrown to the floor, Suguru couldn’t help but stare at the milky expanse of Satoru’s long legs. His gaze moved up to his boxers which sported a very obvious bulge, then up to his bare torso and chest which his shirt barely tried to conceal. He was taking him in, through and through.

Satoru, shy, sat up on his elbows. “Can you um, take off your clothes too?”

“Of course.”

Suguru sat back and pulled the shirt over his head, revealing the tanned planes of his torso, the faint ridges of muscle that caught Satoru’s gaze, almost painfully. Every movement was careful, like unwrapping a fragile gift, and Satoru’s hands itched to follow, to explore, but froze instead, fingers curling into the fabric of the mattress. All he could do was watch as Suguru discarded his shirt on the floor and moved to the buttons on his pants, and when Suguru’s pants were off as well, Satoru sat up, letting his shirt that was previously half-off his body fall completely. 

There they were then, two boys sat on Satoru’s bed in nothing but their underwear. It was a little funny how well they pretended to know what to say and do when, in truth, they were nothing more than two cathedral candles set too close together—newly lit, trembling at the wick, unsure whether they were meant to burn steady or melt into one another.

All that bravado from moments ago felt almost theatrical now. Stripped down to cotton and skin, they looked less like sinners and more like something unbearably young, vulnerable in a way that had nothing to do with nakedness.

They had grown up being told that this—this wanting, this closeness—was dangerous, corrupting, a fall from grace. But sitting like this, shy and flushed and uncertain, they looked anything but fallen. They looked like boys at the edge of a lake at dawn, water still and glassy, knowing if they stepped in it would change them, cool them, wake them, make them aware of their own skin in a way they had never been before.

Satoru placed a hand on Suguru’s cheek, leaned in enough to kiss him with all the love in his heart. 

“Can I try something?” he murmured against Suguru’s lips. When Suguru nodded, Satoru tried to swallow his nerves. “Lie down on your back.”

Suguru obeyed without question, because Satoru asked him to, because Satoru—who had spent his entire life asking for nothing and pretending he needed even less—had looked at him with something delicate and unguarded in his eyes, something that trembled at the threshold between request and confession, and Suguru, who had built himself into something immovable and devout and unreachable, found that he had never learned how to deny him anything at all.

He lowered himself slowly, shoulders meeting the mattress, hair spread beneath his head in slow, dark tributaries, a river system branching outward without pattern or restraint, and Satoru watched it happen with an intensity that frightened him a little, because he had known Suguru his entire life and yet had never seen him like this. His eyes never left Satoru’s face, not even as his chest rose and fell in shallow, careful breaths, like he was afraid the wrong inhale might shatter the moment entirely.

Satoru followed him down. He moved carefully, crawling into the space between Suguru’s legs like a pilgrim approaching something holy and forbidden in equal measure. He had the sudden, disorienting thought that this was what faith must actually feel like—not the sermons or the scripture or the hollow repetition of borrowed conviction, but this. This trembling certainty. This unbearable awareness of something vast and intimate and alive beneath touch.

A soft inhale from Suguru, sharp and ragged, drew Satoru down, leaning his forehead to the warm plane of inner thigh, lips brushing with cautious curiosity. He left light, teasing kisses, peck after peck, nuzzling closer, almost tasting the space between restraint and surrender, the tender terrain that vibrated beneath his fingers. He drove his hands up and down Suguru’s thighs, cupping behind his knees and drawing his hands up over his hamstrings, feeling the muscles contract beneath his palms. He didn’t stop lapping at the most sensitive, thin-skinned parts of his thighs until he grew a little more confident, moving up, up, up until his tongue was trailing Suguru’s cock over his briefs. 

Suguru’s hand shot out, tangling in his hair. “Holy—hah—you’re killing me.”

Satoru gulped. I think I’m doing well. His fingers fanned over Suguru’s thighs, tracing up to his hipbones. “Can I…”

Suguru didn’t relish the hand in Satoru’s hair as he sat up on one elbow and looked down at him. “Yeah.”

Here goes nothing.

His hands moved quickly, almost fumbling in their eagerness, and before he knew it, Suguru’s briefs were hanging off one of his ankles and his throbbing cock was staring Satoru in the face.

He was big. Really big. It took all of Satoru’s self control not to sit there ogling at the sheer size of it. 

Suguru’s grip softened in his hair, sliding down to cup Satoru’s cheek, gentle and grounding. “Go slow. It’s okay.”

Satoru swallowed, heart thudding against his ribs. He was nervous. He had no real experience. No blueprint beyond imagination and half-remembered videos and his own hands in the dark. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be good. Didn’t mean he couldn’t learn Suguru specifically.

He gripped the base of Suguru’s cock and softly gave it a few exploratory pumps. It was dry, so he licked up the underside before lubricating it with his own spit. Suguru seemed to enjoy watching him so he decided to put on a show. He batted his eyelashes and took the head in his mouth, running his tongue over the slit and sucking. Suguru didn’t take his eyes off him.

“Doing so good—yeah, just like that. Feels good, baby.”

Satoru preened at the attention, his confidence skyrocketing as he took him further. Pink lips stretched wide to accommodate Suguru’s girth. His mouth was so full and he was only halfway down so he stroked what wasn’t in his mouth. He moved experimentally, watching Suguru’s face the entire time, searching it for signs of approval or discomfort or revelation, desperate for confirmation that he was not ruining something irreplaceable.

And shit, if Suguru’s face wasn’t a dead giveaway.

His eyebrows had drawn together so tightly it looked almost painful, like he was bracing himself against something immense and inevitable. His eyes were shut, but not peacefully—there was strain in it, restraint, the visible effort of someone trying and failing to maintain control. His lips parted on uneven breaths, chest rising and falling too fast, too shallow, like the air itself had turned thin.

His hand had found its way to the back of Satoru’s neck without either of them noticing when, fingers threading into the hair there, scratching lightly, then pressing, then simply holding. It wasn’t forceful, it was helpless.

It made Satoru crazy, dizzy with lust. His thoughts went scattered and bright and useless, like birds flushed suddenly from a tree. The feeling of Suguru’s hand there made his vision blur at the edges, made small, involuntary sounds spill from him that he didn’t recognize as his own, whimpers of ecstasy at the man before him. They vibrated through him, through the fragile bridge between them, through Suguru too, judging by the way Suguru’s breath hitched harder every time Satoru failed to remain quiet as he bobbed amateurly on his cock.

Suguru’s composure had always been one of his defining features—his restraint, his control, his quiet, immovable dignity—but now it was slipping through his fingers like water. His breathing had grown uneven, his voice reduced to fragments that barely resembled language. Half-formed syllables, broken murmurs, Satoru’s name dissolving into breath more often than sound which only made Satoru want to work harder as he tried to take more of his cock, working faster, slobbering. 

Satoru wanted to be good. Not just adequate. Not just tolerated. Good in a way that meant something. Good in a way that would rewrite every careful, repressed year Suguru had spent denying himself this. He wanted Suguru to remember this moment and know, with certainty, that it had been worth it. 

He tried to nose the hairs on Suguru’s navel, tried to bury himself to the hilt like he saw on this one specific video online, but his body betrayed him. His throat tightened unexpectedly, reflexive, untrained, and he gagged before he could stop it, the sound ugly and humiliating in the quiet room. He pulled back abruptly, coughing, his lungs seizing in protest as tears sprang, hot and unwelcome, to his eyes.

“Satoru.” Suguru’s voice had changed instantly, all urgency vanishing, all pleasure set aside without hesitation. His hands were on Satoru’s face immediately, gentle and careful, thumbs brushing beneath his eyes, wiping away the involuntary tears as if they were something precious rather than embarrassing. “You okay?”

Satoru nodded too quickly, mortified. “‘M fine.”

He leaned forward again automatically, stubborn, determined to fix it, urging himself to swallow Suguru back down because he honestly loved the feeling, craved the salty taste and the heaviness in his mouth that proved Suguru was defiling him. But Suguru stopped him with a light hand to his throat. 

Satoru frowned. “I wanna keep going.”

Suguru’s fingers moved slowly against his neck, tracing the delicate column of his throat, the fluttering pulse beneath the skin. “It’s enough, baby.”

Satoru glowed from being called baby, at the feeling of Suguru’s fingers around his throat, but that didn’t stop his stomach from dropping, insecurity flooding where heat should be. “You didn’t like it?”

“No. God, no, I loved it. Maybe a little too much.” Satoru gazed down to where Suguru’s cock was twitching, red, angry. He swallowed, letting the feeling be marked and owned by Suguru’s hand over his pulse. 

“Then…?”

“You were so perfect. More than perfect,” Suguru complimented, sitting up fully and taking both of Satoru’s cheeks into his palms, giving him a kiss, “but I want the first time I, you know, to be… inside of you.”

And if that wasn’t a statement to hear coming from a rosy-cheeked Suguru. If Satoru’s dick wasn’t fully hard before, it sure was now.

“Is that… okay? Something you’d want?”

Suguru’s hands were still cradling his cheeks, thumbs resting just beneath Satoru’s bottom lip like he didn’t trust gravity not to pull him away. His eyes searched him with an intensity that felt geological, ancient and pressurized, like something forming miles beneath the earth’s surface where heat and time conspired to turn carbon into diamond.

“Yes,” Satoru breathed, and the word left him like something torn free rather than spoken, dragged up from a place deep and molten inside his chest where restraint had gone to die. “Yes. Fuck, yes.”

He surged forward with a desperation that was equal parts hunger and relief, his mouth finding Suguru’s with reckless, unpracticed urgency, teeth clashing, breath tangling, every movement clumsy with want and yet devastating in its sincerity. He kissed him like he had been starving for years and only now realized what hunger was supposed to feel like, like every previous touch had been a shadow cast by this one, a rehearsal for something that had always been inevitable.

His hands could not remain still. They wanted Suguru, wanted Suguru in their body, wanted Suguru’s come in their body. They wandered everywhere at once, restless and reverent and greedy, mapping the terrain of Suguru’s body as though committing it to memory would somehow preserve it against loss. His fingers curled around Suguru’s arms, feeling the strength coiled there, the quiet steadiness that had always stabilized him without either of them acknowledging it. They slid down over his ribs, tracing the delicate architecture beneath skin that rose and fell too quickly, too unevenly, betraying him. His palms flattened against his chest, and he could feel Suguru’s heart pounding beneath his touch, frantic and undeniable and alive.

It thrilled him.

It undid him.

He pulled back only enough to speak, his lips still grazing Suguru’s, their breath shared and indistinguishable.

“Say it properly,” Satoru whispered, and his voice had lost its arrogance, its careless invincibility, stripped bare until only something flimsy and aching remained. “Tell me what you wanna do with me.”

He did not know where the words came from.

Without missing a second of his lips, Suguru gripped onto Satoru and pushed him back onto the mattress so he was pinning him, keeping him trapped, unable to move. “I want to come inside of you.”

Satoru made a whiny sound—high and helpless and completely beyond his control—his back arching off the mattress as though the syllables themselves had taken physical form and struck him, splitting him open from the inside. His hips lifted instinctively, searching without thought, offering himself up in a gesture so vulnerable it made his vision blur. 

“Dirtier,” he pleaded.

Suguru nipped at the exposed skin just under his jaw, fingers slipping beneath the fabric of his briefs, brushing against warm skin, and Satoru’s breath left him instantly, punched from his lungs like he’d been struck. 

“Wanna fuck you,” Suguru murmured against his throat, his voice darker now, roughened by desire and restraint and something possessive he had never allowed himself to feel before. “Wanna feel you tighten around me.”

Satoru’s fingers dug into him desperately, his body reacting before his mind could catch up, every nerve ending suddenly incandescent, alive in ways he had never imagined possible.

“Wanna pump you full of my come,” Suguru continued. "Wanna watch it spill out of you and know it’s mine.”

Satoru made another broken sound, something dangerously close to a sob. Suguru lifted his head then, their eyes meeting, and there was nothing casual left in his expression, nothing detached or careful. 

“Wanna make you mine, Satoru.”

Mine.

The word echoed through Satoru like a struck bell. Satoru reached for him blindly, pulling him down, closing the distance between them with frantic urgency, his lips finding Suguru’s again and again, as though he could fuse them together through sheer force of will, as though proximity alone could guarantee permanence.

“Fuck, Suguru. Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

Suguru’s lips curved faintly, his eyes searching Satoru’s like he was still discovering him. “You make it easy to say things I didn’t know I was capable of saying.”

Suguru pushed the briefs down past his hips, past his thighs, until they were nothing more than a forgotten thing at the edge of the bed, and then he stopped. His eyes moved slowly over him, not with hunger alone, but with awe, with something so soft it almost hurt to witness. Satoru shifted under his gaze, suddenly self-conscious in a way he had never been before, his instinct to hide warring with his desperate need to remain open.

Suguru noticed immediately. His hand moved to Satoru’s waist, thumb brushing gentle, grounding circles into his skin. “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. Let me show you.”

Suguru moved over him like he was learning him by touch alone, like sight was insufficient for the task. His mouth traced the jut of Satoru’s hip first, a slow graze of lips that lingered just long enough to make the contact feel intentional, before drifting inward to the softer plane of his stomach, where he pressed open-mouthed kisses that left behind a damp, cooling trail. His hands followed the path of his mouth in quiet counterpoint, sliding along Satoru’s sides, spanning his waist, then climbing again as though compelled by something instinctive, something devotional. Satoru could only lie there and feel it happen to him—the glide of palms, the warmth of breath, the unbearable gentleness of it—and his body reacted in small, involuntary betrayals, muscles tightening and loosening beneath Suguru’s touch like something waking slowly from sleep.

When Suguru’s mouth closed around one of his nipples, the sensation struck him sharp and sudden, a concentrated pull that unraveled into heat, into something liquid and destabilizing that spilled down through his chest and settled low in his belly. Satoru heard himself make a sound he did not recognize, something naked, and the humiliation of it burned hot in his face even as one of his hands drifted weakly into Suguru’s hair, not to stop him, but to hold himself against the rising tide of it. Suguru did not mock him for it. He only continued, kissing upward along the column of his throat, over his jaw, pausing at his cheek with a softness that made Satoru’s heart beat a little faster, before retreating back down and pressing a slow kiss into the center of his palm as though it, too, deserved attention, as though no part of him was unworthy of being known.

He did not neglect anything. He returned downward with the same unhurried patience, kissing along his thighs, the firm slope of muscle giving way beneath his mouth, then lower, to his knees, his calves, his shins. When Suguru peeled his socks away and pressed his thumbs into the tender arches of his feet, Satoru felt the tension leave him in increments, felt himself soften and open under hands that treated him less like something to be taken and more like something to be carefully unwrapped.

By the time Suguru reached the place that had been aching for him from the very beginning, Satoru was already trembling.

Suguru bent over him, pressing a kiss to the base of his cock, then another just above it, working upward in slow succession, his lips mapping the length of him with agonizing meticulousness. Satoru’s breath caught hard in his throat, a sharp hiss escaping him before he could stop it, his hips twitching despite himself. It felt wrong, almost, to be touched there with such gentleness, in a place that had only ever known his own hurried, private hands. Wrong and holy all at once.

Suguru moved downwards, kissing and licking until he was nosing at his balls, and then Satoru felt the purposeful stroke of Suguru’s tongue against him, lower than he expected, lower than he was prepared for, sending a violent shudder through his entire body as sensation bloomed outward, shocking and electric and impossibly intimate. Satoru’s back arched off the mattress.

He did not know he could feel like that.

He did not know he could feel anything like that at all.

He wanted to scream that it was filthy, wanted to tell Suguru to stop, but the words got stuck in his throat. It’s wrong. So wrong. And it’s… amazing. He couldn’t even admit it out loud, not with Suguru so close, so impossibly attentive. The shame and the pleasure tangled together like sparks in his chest, and he let himself melt into it, silently, desperately, praying Suguru wouldn’t notice how much he was losing control. 

The sensation did not remain localized to where Suguru’s mouth had touched him, did not confine itself to nerve endings and skin and the obvious geography of flesh, but instead spread outward in widening, uncontrollable circles, like a stone cast into still water, like an aftershock reverberating through structures too fragile to withstand the tremor, and Satoru felt it everywhere at once—in the tightening of his stomach, in the involuntary curl of his toes, in the helpless way his fingers clenched in the sheets beneath him as though bracing for some unnamed impact he knew, instinctively, was coming.

He felt Suguru’s hands on his thighs, steady and grounding, thumbs pressing absentminded circles into the sensitive flesh there as though soothing him through the very thing he was causing, and the contradiction of it nearly unraveled him, because Suguru was both the architect of his undoing and the only thing preventing him from collapsing entirely under its weight.

Suguru lapped a little more desperately at his hole now, and Satoru outright moaned and thrashed around, the lewd sounds of Suguru slurping and the tender feeling of him all over his bottom half sending him into a frenzy. 

“Suguru, ha—shit.”

“Is it okay? Are you feeling good?”

Satoru’s chest rose and fell rapidly, mind spinning in a dizzy haze of sensation and disbelief. Good? Yes. Better than anything he could have imagined. 

“Y-yeah,” he gasped, voice barely more than a trembling croak. His hands fisted in the sheets, fingers clawing at the fabric as his legs quivered beneath Suguru’s ministrations. “Just… like that.” He jerked, thrashing just enough to make Suguru work harder, the whines from his mouth only being amplified by the wet slurps from below him. 

Eventually, Suguru pulled away again, though this time he did not move far, his lips brushing absentmindedly against Satoru’s hip as though reluctant to leave him entirely, his hands continuing their slow, grounding movements along his thighs.

Satoru lifted his head weakly, disoriented by the absence, by the sudden, unbearable coolness where warmth had been. “Suguru,” he murmured, almost accusing, almost pleading.

“You’re delicious, Satoru. Taste so fucking good.” He leaned forward, pressing a soft kiss just beside his navel, then another lower, his voice quieter now, steadier, though no less affected. “Do you have lube?”

Satoru nodded quickly, breath catching. “Yeah,” he said, his voice barely more than air. “Yeah, I do. Bottom drawer.”

Suguru leaned over and rummaged for a moment. Satoru had it at the very back because God forbid his mother, or worse, his father ever found it. When Suguru emerged back, it was not without a smirk and a raised eyebrow. “It’s half empty.”

There was no use trying to hide the blush on his cheeks, but he did close his eyes if only to save some of his pride. “Shut up and get on with it.”

The boyish laugh that came from Suguru made him peek one of his eyes open, and boy was it a sight to see—Suguru, bare, arms flexing as he squeezed the lube onto his hand and massaged it onto his fingers. It made Satoru’s stomach tense, whether in anticipation or nerves he could not decipher. All he knew was that Suguru’s fingers were bigger than his, fatter. All he knew was that he’d never done this before with another person, and probably never would have if it weren't Suguru. All he knew was that his best friend was looking down at him.

“Come ‘ere,” Suguru murmured as he bent down, taking Satoru’s nape into the back of his hand to jut his head up a little, and kissed him. It was so sweet, Satoru nearly didn’t register the feeling of fingers massaging the outside of his hole. 

He made a small noise of shock against Suguru’s lips, and Suguru pulled back. “Okay?”

“‘S okay.”

Suguru continued the movement. “I’ve never done this before so just… tell me if it’s bad or if I hurt you.”

“You’re not gonna hurt me,” Satoru promised. “Wanna feel you inside so bad.”

And Satoru got what he wanted. Suguru slid one finger in, insidiously slow, and with each knuckle, Satoru’s back arched off the mattress more and more. He was right, Suguru’s fingers were bigger than his. His own fingers, his fumbling efforts, paled in comparison to Suguru’s, the crooked, awkward ways he usually fucked himself replaying like a poor imitation. Just one of Suguru’s was enough to leave him breathless and panting a little pathetically. 

Satoru focused on taking it, on being good. It hurt a little but the notion that it was Suguru doing this to him let the pain flake off like old paint, scattering harmlessly to the floor as desire took its place. 

Suguru’s hands moved with mindful intent, checking in constantly, coaxing Satoru into trust with every glide and press. He explored the contours of Satoru’s body with a patience that made Satoru’s chest tighten, each movement precise yet fluid, as if memorizing the landscape of him. Another finger followed, slipping in with a slick, urgent glide that left Satoru gasping. Two became three, pressing and stretching in a rhythm that felt impossibly intimate, until every shadow of discomfort that had clung to him moments ago was gone, reduced to nothing but a memory of tension dissipating into air.

“Mmph, Suguru, please, ‘m ready,” Satoru whined out. There was sweat dripping down his temples, along the planes of his stomach. He was impatient, cautious of how long they had left, but also cautious of how agonisingly hard and leaking his cock was against his stomach. 

Suguru curled his fingers just a fraction, enough to have Satoru jump a little with a filthy moan leaving his lips. He was sure Suguru was luxuriating in the way he was coming apart—maybe just the sight of his body betraying him, maybe the teasing of his fingers alone—but there had to be a hint of frustration building in him too.

“Don’t wanna hurt you ‘Toru,” he mumbled, curling his fingers again. “Wanna open you properly so you can take all of me.”

Satoru was panting, chest heaving, every nerve frayed and electric. Stretched or not, he needed Suguru—needed him inside, needed it now, or he swore he might shatter entirely.

“I’m ready,” he gasped, voice trembling and rough. “I’m so ready. If you don’t fuck me right now, I—God, Suguru, I need it. I need it so fucking badly.”

There was no answer, no nod, no words or confirmation besides the feeling of Suguru’s fingers leaving his body, making him cold and empty. Besides the sound of the lube bottle uncapping and the view of Suguru squirting some on his hand and lathering it on his cock. It made Satoru tremble with anticipation, with God-forbidden, sin-soaked lust, with the acceptance that he will burn in heaven with Suguru when all of this is over. 

Suguru bent down so he was face-to-face with Satoru. “Tell me you want this.”

Every ounce of Satoru’s being quivered in answer. “I want this.” His hands rose instinctively, cradling Suguru’s head, fingers threading through the dark strands of his hair as though holding onto him could make the world stop. “Tell me you need this.” Do you take me as I am?

Suguru smiled, tracing his thumb along the bridge of Satoru’s nose, then his cheekbone. “I need this. I’ve always needed you.” He gazed at Satoru with a devotion he could never recover from, with an adoration that would break Satoru’s bones if he dared to carry it. “Tell me you love me.”

For a moment, Satoru felt as if the universe had contracted to the span between their eyes, to the brush of Suguru’s thumb against his cheek, and he was suspended there, floating, believing entirely in this impossible, feral, sacred connection. He wanted to memorize every angle of Suguru’s devotion, to carry it inside him forever, to never let it go.

“I love you, Suguru.”

Nose-to-nose, Suguru pushed his cock past the ring of muscle, slowly, and Satoru felt broken into, unpurified in the most holy of ways. He could feel everything all at once, but his main focus was on Suguru looking down at him, eyes searching, always searching for him. It wasn’t much, but it was the entire universe to Satoru, because at that moment he knew with certainty that Suguru loved him back. 

When Suguru pushed in a little more, Satoru’s head tipped back hard into the mattress, his throat stretched open to the ceiling as he bit down on his lip to keep the sound in. Suguru followed the motion, his face suspended just above Satoru’s. His mouth hung open with each unsteady breath, close enough that the heat of it spilled over Satoru’s skin. His lower lip caught on the point of Satoru’s lifted chin and dragged there as he hovered, eyes fixed on his face, watching—helplessly, hungrily—as every flicker of sensation moved through him.

“You’re so tight, ‘Toru,” he mumbled against his chin. “Shit, you’re so warm.”

Satoru could’ve been brought to tears with that statement. It was a revelation, like sunlight he hadn’t known existed. He had spent so long expecting cold, expecting judgment, expecting nothing at all, and here was Suguru, saying it so plainly. Never once in his life did he think he could be warm, never once did he believe that there’d be something he loved in life that could be permanent, wholly his. 

He gripped onto Suguru’s shoulders and never wanted to let go. “Keep going. More… need more of you.” Suguru nodded, wordlessly, speechless. He pushed in and Satoru felt the stretch, the burn. 

“So pretty,” Suguru said against him, the words spoken softly, almost absently, but they struck Satoru with the force of something physical, something capable of altering his internal structure. “You have no idea what you look like right now.”

Satoru let out a weak, disbelieving sound, something between a laugh and a whine. “Yeah?” he managed, his voice thin and trembling, his fingers tightening reflexively on his shoulders. “What do I look like?”

“An angel,” Suguru whispered. He was almost fully in now, Satoru knew, could feel it, and his core was building up. “My angel.”

“Ah, fuck, Suguru,” Satoru meweled, and in an instant, Suguru buried himself up to the hilt with a thrust, and Satoru came so hard he saw stars. 

It tore through him without warning. Too fast. Too much. His body seized around Suguru, helpless, his breath collapsing into itself as heat rushed through him and left him hollowed out in its wake. He was spent, the space, or lack thereof, between his and Suguru’s body now sticky, and he turned his face away, squeezing his eyes shut as if he could disappear into the mattress. His hands slackened where they clutched Suguru’s shoulders, shame creeping in quick and quiet, hot beneath his skin.

“—sorry,” he whispered hoarsely, the word barely there. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“Satoru.” Suguru’s voice was soft, firm in a way that allowed no retreat. One hand came up, gentle but unyielding, cupping his jaw, guiding his face back. “‘S okay. Didn’t want you to come only once anyway. You can give me more, can’t you?” His hand dipped to the space between their bodies, fingers dipping through Satoru’s come, smearing it further across their torsos till he brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked on them. “Love the way you taste. I know it’s greedy of me but I can’t deny myself anymore.”

Just from those words, from watching Suguru lap up his come, Satoru’s cock jumped, twitching, coming back alive. He could come again. He could be good. He could be Suguru’s. 

“Uh huh, yeah. Yeah, I can give y’more. Anything. Everything.” Then he tensed, squeezing Suguru’s cock. “Please be greedy. Please fuck me.”

That was all Suguru needed to hear apparently. 

The first thrust barely buried him, exploratory, shallow, but Satoru’s moan was immediate, ragged and loud, breaking through his own hesitation. Suguru followed quickly with a second, pushing just a little deeper, and Satoru could feel the pressure, the stretch, the fullness, every nerve in his body screaming in delicious protest. The third drove him over the edge of control. Suguru buried his face into Satoru’s neck, teeth grazing lightly as he groaned, and Satoru’s hands tangled in Suguru’s shoulders, pulling him closer, needing him. Each subsequent thrust grew more insistent, more demanding, hips rocking with increasing urgency, until Satoru couldn’t keep track of where his body ended and Suguru’s began. The bed creaked beneath them, skin slapped against skin, Suguru’s cross necklace bounced against his chin, wet friction slicked over every surface, and Satoru’s chest rose and fell in ragged pants.

Suguru bent down took one of his nipples into his mouth, sucking, biting gently, while simultaneously scratching down the sides of his torso all the way to his legs, never once stopping the brutish thrusts. All Satoru could do was take it—mind and body completely surrendered to Suguru and the way he was worshipping his body. His hands moved from Suguru’s back to the mattress, from the mattress to Suguru’s neck, biceps, chest. He was a restless being, unable to contain the pure bliss.

“You’re so sensitive,” Suguru grunted, his voice roughened at the edges, reverent in a way that made Satoru’s stomach twist. His thumb brushed absent circles into Satoru’s thigh, soothing and absentminded, as though calming a frightened animal. “Always wondered. Knew you would be.”

With that, Suguru punctured a particularly hard thrust, hitting the entirely correct place, almost making Satoru come again. He could almost see God. It was relentless, yanking the stupidest noises out of his throat, rendering him useless. 

“What—what else, ha—” Lord help me. Lord help me. Lord help me. “What else did you think about?” 

Suguru brought one of Satoru’s legs up to rest over his shoulder, bending him, going deeper than before. There was no way this man had only ever watched porn twice, the thought was laughable in itself. 

“A lot of things,” he said with an almost sinister smile. Then he bent the leg further so Satoru’s knee nearly touched his nose. “Thought about how flexible you’d be,” he admitted, voice low, almost thoughtful if it weren’t for the gut-tearing thrust he punctured, making Satoru’s head spin. “About how my name would sound being moaned from your lips. If you’d be quiet or loud .”

The new angle stole the air from Satoru’s lungs. It wasn’t just deeper—it was complete. There was nowhere left untouched, nowhere left to retreat. He felt arranged, rearranged, revealed, every hidden part of him drawn into the light without mercy.

“Suguru—” His voice fractured on the name.

Suguru watched him, attentive in a way that made it worse. He withdrew only enough to return again, a measured retreat followed by an unhurried push inward, the motion smooth, inexorable. 

“I thought about this,” he continued, quieter now. He rocked into him again, deeper this time, coaxing Satoru’s body open around him with a patience that bordered on cruelty. “About the way you’d look when you stopped holding yourself together so carefully.”

He shifted his angle, just slightly, rolling his hips as he pressed forward. The change was subtle but devastating. Satoru gasped sharply, fingers flying to Suguru’s shoulders, clutching at him as though he might drift apart otherwise.

“Like this,” Suguru murmured.

Satoru’s face burned. He couldn’t tell if it was from the stretch or from the staggering awareness of himself, of how exposed he was, how easily undone. It felt like being seen for the first time in his life, and he didn’t know how to survive it. Suguru exhaled through his nose, watching him unravel beneath him, and did it again—drew back, then sank forward, faster now, ensuring Satoru felt the entirety of him, the stretch and fullness of it, the intoxicating intimacy of being fucked so completely.

“I didn’t know,” Suguru said softly, almost to himself. “That it would be better than anything I could ever imagine.”

The rhythm began to falter, not from hesitation but from the strain of restraint. Suguru’s composure was thinning, his movements losing some of their precision, his hips stuttering forward with increasing urgency.

“I’m—fuck, close. ‘M c-close,” Satoru sobbed, because he imagined all those things too. Had lusted carnally his entire life for Suguru to feel the same.

Suguru inhaled sharply at the sound, his fingers tightening where they held him. His next thrusts were even more uneven, almost clumsy in their desperation, and he let out a broken breath against Satoru’s throat. “Y-yeah, me too. Shit, wait for me,” Suguru groaned, thrusts faltering dumbly, hands squeezing, face contorting. “Fuck, Satoru, I—”

Satoru’s hearing muffled, as if the world itself had folded in on him. His vision flared white, then darkened at the edges, then pulsed bright again, every throb of pleasure hammering through him. Hot ropes spurted from his cock, drenching his stomach and chest, tracing the hollow of his collarbones. Somewhere along the way, Suguru had collapsed on top of him, teeth sinking into the junction of his neck and shoulder, and only when a ragged, intimate sound left Suguru’s lips by his ear did Satoru manage to open his eyes again.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Suguru stayed folded over him, a reassuring burden, firm across Satoru’s chest. His mouth remained at the slope of Satoru’s shoulder, not biting now, just resting there, breath hot and damp against flushed skin. Each inhale dragged slowly through his chest, each exhale uneven, as though he were relearning how to breathe.

Satoru’s hands, which had been clutched tight at Suguru’s back, loosened by degrees. His fingers slid through dark strands of hair at the nape of Suguru’s neck, trembling faintly with the aftershock of it all. His body still felt distant, oversensitized and humming, like a bell that had only just stopped ringing.

Suguru moved first, his hips easing forward a fraction, then stilling again as if reminded of where they were joined. The movement coaxed a small, overstimulated sound from Satoru’s throat, half protest, half something softer.

“Too much?” Suguru asked quietly.

Satoru swallowed, throat dry. “No,” he breathed stubbornly, though his body betrayed him with a tremor when Suguru adjusted again as if to tease, carefully withdrawing an inch before pressing back in shallowly, testing, reacquainting himself with the warmth that still held him. “Okay, yes. Fuck. Too much.”

Suguru’s hand came up to cradle his face, thumb brushing the damp heat beneath his eye, smoothing away the crease that had formed between his brows, then pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Gonna pull out now, okay?”

“‘Kay.”

Suguru slowly pulled out and it made Satoru whine, if not for the pain, then for the absence. Suguru didn’t give him time to feel it though as he shifted them smoothly, rolling onto his back and guiding Satoru with him, hands firm at his waist until Satoru was lying on top of him, chest to chest, their bodies aligned again in a different way. Satoru let out a quiet sound of surprise, but didn’t resist. His head came to rest instinctively beneath Suguru’s chin, cheek flush with the firm, reassuring hold of his chest. Their legs tangled without thought. Their breathing, slowly, began to match.

“It’s not fair,” Satoru murmured into his chest as Suguru petted his head. It continued its slow pilgrimage, combing through the damp strands at his nape, smoothing them down, only to begin again. He was growing drowsy. 

Suguru frowned. “What isn’t?”

“You,” Satoru said. “You didn’t even know what you were doing. You’re not meant to be good.”

Suguru’s mouth curved faintly. “No,” he admitted, then he trailed a hand down to Satoru’s hole, nudging and pressing against it where it still oozed his come. “But I knew I wanted to make you feel good.”

Satoru’s stomach clenched, a shiver crawling over him that he couldn’t hide. His own hands twitched, trying to think of anything else, but he couldn’t take his mind off the vile, sticky sensation Suguru was drawing from him. Every press, every teasing dip made him whimper, and the filthy thought that Suguru’s fingers were digging through his spent mess was making him hard again.

Satoru huffed, trying not to react as Suguru played with him. Instead, he trailed his finger up Suguru’s bicep, following the shape of muscle beneath skin. “Was—was I good?”

Suguru halted his movement, to which Satoru tried very hard not to sulk about. “Satoru, of course. You were beautiful.” His hand moved back up, thumb tracing slowly along his spine, definitely getting come on his back, yet uncaring, following the delicate architecture of him, each vertebra acknowledged in quiet succession. It sent small, involuntary shivers through Satoru. “You were perfect.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.” Suguru’s hand flattened between his shoulder blades, keeping him from shrinking away from it. “Let me see you, sweetheart.”

Satoru lifted his head, chin resting lightly against Suguru’s chest, and waited, eyes tracing the steady rise and fall beneath him. He saw everything he had feared and everything he had longed for—each trace of doubt, each scar of shame, each pulse of unspoken desire. Suguru’s hands had scrubbed away more than skin; they had traced the cartography of his anxieties, mapped the valleys of his insecurities, pressed into the ridges of his tension until the tremors of guilt dissolved like frost under a winter sun.

Here, pressed to Suguru, Satoru sensed a cleansing that went deeper than ritual, deeper than scripture, deeper than the whitewashing of hands in holy water or the insistence of soap and suds. He was stripped of pretension and pretense, washed not by water but by devotion, by reverence, by the insistence of being witnessed and cherished. Even the faint scent of vanilla seemed to linger in memory, a ghostly echo of innocence not lost but reclaimed.

And in that moment, Satoru realized something that had always eluded him in the scattered snow of childhood, in the rigid ceremonies of morality, in the cold judgments of self: he was not unclean. He was luminous, a conduit for warmth and certainty, his faults and scars folded into the intricate lattice of something unbreakable. The world, with all its rules and judgments, could only exist outside this circle of fire and flesh. Here, he was seen. Here, he was known. Here, he was whole.

Suguru smiled down at him, leaned in to peck a kiss on his forehead. “Hm, I was right.”

“Huh? About what?”

“I’m the luckiest man in the world.”