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She feels warm. Warm with the humid heat of mid-summer, warm with the weight of her clothes, warm with one two many Asahi settling in her stomach. Warm with happiness, fondness, sentimentality lingering on her tongue, sweet like the Strong Zero she’d tasted on Yuta’s lips. Warm like his arm against hers, a gentle pressure, more grounding than the tatami beneath them, more grounding than the earth itself. Just like she’d asked.
They’ve been doing this a lot these last few months. Not exactly like this, of course. The alcohol is a new addition, a novelty, only introduced at her request, and she’d watched Yuta sprint down the road like a criminal trying to smuggle the cans up in broad daylight. But the rest of it is familiar, now, almost routine: shoulder-to-shoulder on the tatami, on her futon, in the kitchen, laughing at everything and nothing. The room’s smaller than what she’d had in Sotenbori, and infinitely shabbier. The tatami is scuffed. The standing fan clicks when she lets it cycle. The only light that gets in is through an ancient, rotting window, one that creaks when she shuts it too quickly, and if the neighbours’ kids walk too quickly, she can hear them through the walls.
She wouldn’t change it a bit.
Yuta had made a bento for her before he came, panda onigiri and pan-fried gyoza, and they’d tucked into their food together in silence. He’d remembered to ask Tagashira about his laptop, for once, and Haruka was feeling nostalgic, so they’d put on Shin-chan to bring in their first drinks. They’re several in now, episodes and drinks alike, and the booze has made Yuta’s face that telltale cherry-red and his grin a little too wide.
He’s sprawled out beside her, one arm along hers, the other behind his head. His left leg’s stuck in the air for the novelty of it while the right stays straight, flat, pressed along hers, and there’s something forming in his head, something being calculated. Haruka knows it because he’s not usually too daring. Without a drink in him, Yuta’s a quiet boy, easy pickings for his friends, a convenient scapegoat and punching bag for any sort of joke. He’s less reserved with her, speaks more freely, with more contempt-turned-admiration for his aniki and his friends alike. But it’s only alcohol that can get him talking, asking real questions, the real deep-cutters. Questions like:
“Was I your first kiss?” Yuta asks, turning his head to face her.
“No,” Haruka answers, a little too quickly. She knows how he’ll react, and she’s giggling before he can even start it: his usual squeaking, the tilt of his head. Yuta has rocked himself up to sit by the time she leans on her side, and she grins when he chooses his usual position, one leg bracketing the other. He squishes his cheek against his knee, leaning forward just so, and Haruka grins at the impossibly red flush of his cheeks as he smiles.
“Oh,” Yuta says, pressing his lips to his jeans. “Cool.” He doesn’t smile like this when he’s angry—he’s too bad at reigning his feelings in for that, Haruka thinks. But there’s something else to the way he presses his lips together, to the way his eyes dart away.
“Was I yours?” She asks.
“No.”
“Oh.” Haruka smiles at him, too, and the question lingers in the back of her throat—who was it? But Yuta reaches over, resting one hand over hers, and squeezes, and the question dies in her throat.
She’s still not used to it—the contact, the intimacy, the informality of it all. There’s something more lax about the people here in Onomichi, a looseness with these things that she craves in small doses, in the tiniest, bite-sized chunks. And Yuta gives it to her freely, without restraint, without a second thought, like he can read her mind, like he knows exactly when she needs them: a bump of the shoulder, a touch of the hand.
Haruka has very little, but she’s never felt luckier.
“Well, I got you your first drink,” Yuta says, his thumb trailing over her knuckles. “That has to count for something, right?”
“Well,” Haruka replies, “actually, you didn’t either.”
“What?!” He’s louder when he’s drunk, timid reservation swapped for words straight from the soul, and Haruka can’t help but laugh. “Those geezers didn’t get you something before me, did they?”
“Don’t call them that!” Haruka’s still laughing as she says it, the picture already in her head: Nagumo clocking Yuta upside the head and the way Yuta would sputter in the aftermath. She draws her legs up and leans forward, hugging her calves, pressing her cheek against her knee to match him. “It wasn’t them,” she answers, drumming her fingers against the tatami. “It was a friend of mine. From Sotenbori.”
Yuta scoots closer. The leg that rests on the ground bumps into her calf. She doesn’t move it.
“Was it one of the T-Set girls?”
“They weren’t my friends,” Haruka says. It must come out sharper than she intends, a little more brutal, because Yuta winces. She’s seen him enough at the bar to know he’s not very good at hiding things—he wears his heart on his sleeve when he’s drunk. It’s what she likes about him. “Don’t apologise,” she says, shifting her foot to nudge his leg, and he sounds his relief out with an audible huff. “It was someone else.” She’s feeling a little bolder tonight, the alcohol loosening her tongue, because she adds, “The same person.”
“The same person…”
“My first kiss.”
Yuta hums, leaning to the side to pick up his can and take a sip. “But if it was in Sotenbori…” he trails off, frowning, and Haruka can almost see the gears turning in his head, calculations being made in real time as he waves the can around. “Haruka-chaaan,” he says, suddenly, his tone heavy with the weight of a scandal, “you were drinking underaged.” He chuckles to himself, like it’s funny, and Haruka giggles with him.
“We’re doing that right now, Mister twenty-next-year.”
“This is different.” Yuta tosses the rest of the can’s contents back in one gulp before gingerly resting it at his side. “You’re with me. It’s cooler.” He plants his palm against the tatami, leaning against it as he furrows his brow. “But… if it was back then… did they let you hang out with boys? I thought managers were crazy strict.”
And for a brief moment Haruka regrets opening her mouth, because she knows Yuta’s the type of nerd to have watched her performances, and he’s the type to remember her teammates, but he’s also the type to think for more than five seconds, and to be even surface-level familiar with how things go. Because it would have been a scandal if she’d been caught with a boy—Park had made sure she’d known that like the back of her hand. And it would’ve been worse if she’d been caught drinking, too. And Park-san was strict, overbearing, incredibly conscious of the world around them, but she’d let Haruka have friends. Encouraged her, even.
She wonders how everyone in Sotenbori is doing.
“Haruka-chan,” Yuta says.
He flops back after he speaks, limbs akimbo, his legs spreading to frame her body. He winces at the thump of his head on the tatami, rubbing at the back of his head, but he’s smiling. A toothy one, this time, snaggletooth and all. Haruka watches him curl his hands into fists as he lifts his chests and stretches, loud and cat-like, basking in the pitiable relief of the fan’s provided air, and she knows something big is coming.
“Yeah?”
“Keep a secret for me,” he asks. He brings his left leg in to hook her ankles, and he stretches an arm out towards her. Haruyka takes his hand in hers and lowers it down to his waist, and she watches the upward twitch of his lips when she presses her palm against his.
“I will,” she answers.
“Tatsukawa.”
Haruka tilts her head. She’s about to prompt for more, but then:
“My first kiss,” Yuta elaborates. “Tatsukawa.”
In retrospect, she thinks she could have been a bit more tactful. Paused on purpose, maybe. Delay the sting of it. But she’s got none of that insight in the moment, and the Asahi’s taken all her restraint: she’s left to follow her base instinct, to whip her head around and yell the words sitting in her soul:
“Him?”
Yuta winces. “He’s pretty .”
Haruka thinks back to him—aloof, a bit abrasive, mildly suspicious. Pretty, too. Not to her, no way, but objectively pretty, the type they put in shoujo manga for girls to gawk at, the type Riona and Izumi would point at in magazines and claim as theirs when she was at Sunflower. She remembers the men she’d seen in the signs outside Stardust. He’d make a good host.
“Well...”
“He is.”
“I guess…”
“You don’t get to judge me.” Yuta pouts as he says it, his face somehow even redder, flushed with his downed drinks and what Haruka can only assume is embarrassment. She shifts to lie down next to him, then, lying down on her side, her head propped up on her arm as Yuta lifts his arms to make space. It’s easy to touch him like this, even with the heat: to let herself rest her head on his shoulder, to feel the pressure of his chin on the top of her head. She stretches her arm along his chest, squeezing his side, and she feels the rapid thrum of his heartbeat, the rapid pace of his breath: in and out, in and out.
“I haven’t told anyone else,” Yuta says. He curls inward, towards her, resting his hand on her forearm.
“It’s a lot to trust someone with,” Haruka notes. “But you told me.”
“Well, I trust you,” Yuta says. When Haruka tilts her head up, she finds him looking at her, as though the reason should be obvious. Maybe it ought to be.
She shies away from him again, tucking her head beneath his chin, ignoring the sheen of sweat to his skin. He laughs. His hand squeezes her arm, the barest hint of pressure, and she curls into him, satisfied even with the heat. She hasn’t felt this comfortable in ages. If she dwells on it for too long, she’s not sure she’s ever been this comfortable at all.
“Mine was a girl,” Haruka says, mumbling the words into Yuta’s chest.
His fingers press along her arm. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Her words hang in the air. She can see them, almost. Blown about the room by the fan, scattered in artificial wind, hovering before her, a horrible, horrible confession. She wants to let the fan cycle, to hear the tick-tick-tick of its stuck motor, to let something punctuate the silence. She wants Shin-chan back on, because the auto-player has stopped at the absolute worst time, and she wants a distraction, something else to think about, something other than the thoughts that must be bouncing around in Yuta’s head.
“Was she cute?”
Haruka pinches him just to hear him yelp for his audacity, for his gall, for the fact that it’s completely expected and not expected at all. Because only he can try to make her laugh in such an awkward, stilted way in the face of a confession so humiliating, so private. She slides down with that, folding her arms on his chest and leaning to watch him. He’s smiling.
“She was,” she answers.
“Cuter than me?”
“Definitely,” Haruka replies, because she can’t just let him have everything, and the belly-laugh it gets out of him is as satisfying as the confession itself, as satisfying as the loss of the weight that’d fixed itself in her stomach for the last three years. She watches him—the crease of his brows, his crooked tooth, the drunken flush of his face—and she knows that he’ll make her a little bit stupid. She’s seen enough stupid people make stupid decisions in her life, ones for much worse people, but watching him, Haruka can almost understand it. She sees him and she knows she’ll watch him laugh and chuckle and drunkenly stumble through a rant, she’ll watch him play darts and lose three times in a row and still get up for a fourth, and she’ll do something stupid, something really, really stupid, because of him, for him, with him.
She’s gone long enough being responsible, she thinks. She’s sure she’s earned it by now.
“Tell me what she was like,” Yuta says.
His hand is at the nape of her neck, his fingers combing through the short hair at its base. His eyes are dark with admiration, or fatigue, or some combination of the two, and he adds, “if you want,” and it’s too sincere, too honest. He knows how she can be, how good she is at avoiding it in normal conversation, amongst friends, one-on-one. That she won’t think about it herself, much less with other people. And with all of it he’s giving her an invitation, something she can share without the shadow of guilt lingering over her, something positive, something comparatively light.
She’s been quiet too long, she thinks, because Yuta moves his hand to cup the back of her head, pressing his fingers near her ear. “Don’t worry about it,” Yuta says. “Whenever you—”
“I want to,” Haruka interrupts. She watches Yuta’s expression shift from shock to subdued surprise, and she grins, turning her head and resting it on her folded arms. “If you’ll listen.”
“Yes!” There’s excitement in his voice as he cups her neck one more, his fingers stroking along her hair, toying with the band of her ponytail. “Yeah. I will.”
Haruka hasn’t told anyone about her. She’s felt guilty, too guilty, for how things turned out—for her resignation, for her absence, for her abrupt disappearance. When she thinks back to Sotenbori, she wonders. How she’s doing, what she’s up to. If she’s still dancing. If she’s on the streets, or if she’s a professional. If she talks to the other girls they’d met. She thinks of that night, just the two of them, her crappy laptop and its awful speakers. How she’d had her first kiss listening to denpa, and how the two of them had laughed about it right after.
For all that she’s been through, Haruka’s never been so sure. She knows Yuta will listen. She knows he’ll get it. And she knows he’ll keep his word. And it’s with that on her heart and Yuta’s hands in her hair that she speaks, her voice low, her hands on Yuta’s chest:
“Her name is Akari,” Haruka says, trying her best not to smile. “She was the first real friend I'd ever had.”