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The key turned, the lock disengaged, and Saionji walked through the door from the brightly illuminated hallway into the dim apartment. He scowled to see the lights not on, unsurprised but still annoyed. After flipping on the switch and locking the door, he beelined for the balcony, where he knew he’d find Touga.
Sure enough, there he was, nursing a bottle of wine glass by glass. He sat cross-legged at a small but stylish table, just big enough for two seats, perched at the edge of the balcony. The view from it, and from this high-rise flat in general, was second to none. For the price they’d paid for the damn place, even accounting for their wealth as successful art dealers, it had better be. Touga himself stared unsmiling out at the night lights of the city below without acknowledging Saionji’s arrival. He was still wearing his scarf and longcoat—somewhat reasonably, given the chill December night—but anytime he simply left the lights off like that, it was because he wanted to brood. In the thirty-some years they’d known each other, Saionji had come to realize at least that much about his asshole best friend-slash-lover.
“If you were going to leave the class reunion early, you could have at least told me,” Saionji grumbled, seating himself opposite him.
“And deprive you of the opportunity to rub shoulders with our old schoolmates? What kind of friend would that make me?”
“One who hadn’t taken the car and ditched me!”
“I told you you should have taken your own.”
“We live together!!”
Touga chuckled in that way he did when he didn’t have a good retort but refused to admit it. Then he sipped his wine. “Have a drink. Your therapist always says you’re too angry.”
“This time, they’d agree I’m just angry enough,” Saionji snapped. But he did note the second glass and poured himself a schlock anyway. “If you’re going to sit in the dark and drink, could you at least drink saké instead of this Italian bilge?”
“And deny you the opportunity to complain? I could never.”
Saionji snorted and sipped. It was decent, he supposed. He knew without looking at the label that it was probably very classy and very, very expensive, but red wine had never been to his taste. Red tea, on the other hand… But that was another matter.
“So what’s wrong?” he asked Touga.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“Don’t bullshit me. You’re boozing in the dark, staring out at nothing. All you need is a stereo playing your own voice on repeat to complete the mood. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong—”
“The hell it is. I just said, don’t bullshit me.”
Touga took a long sip of his wine. At first, Saionji allowed him that much dithering. Honesty and directness didn’t come naturally to the other man. When the seconds dragged into minutes, though, his patience wore thin.
“Did it have to do with Nanami?” he guessed.
Touga’s hand, which had been slowly swishing his glass, stilled. So that was a score.
“Did you finally admit to her you actually are siblings?” he pressed.
He chuckled. Unlike before, it was terse, abrupt. “Heavens, no. She’s taken so well to independence. It would be terrible of me to upend that.”
“Again,” Saionji added for him.
“Again,” Touga agreed.
“So then what?” he insisted. “It’s hard to believe it was anything she said. Even Nanami couldn’t dress you down hard enough to make you repent your shamelessness.”
“Oh, no, it was nothing like that.”
Saionji waited through another interminably long sip. “My therapist also says I should be honest when something’s angering me, and your constant deliberate vagueness is pissing me right off,” he snapped. “Just talk to me. Please.”
“Oh, my. I should ring your therapist up and tell them what wonderful strides you’re making.”
He nearly upended the table, wine and glasses and all. Instead, with forced calm, he set his glass down and focused on a few kendo-related breathing exercises. The urge to strangle his life partner faded, somehow.
“Fine. Don’t tell me, then,” he said. He even managed to make it not sound petulant. “I’m still angry at you for leaving me behind without saying a word, but I’ll treat that as a separate matter. If you change your mind, let me know. I’ll listen.” He stood. “For now, I’m taking a shower and going to bed. Good night.”
Then he left and did as he said. The hot water steamed away some of his temper, or at least made it easier to scrub off. Logically, if Touga had taken off so abruptly, something must have really upset him. That sure as hell didn’t justify leaving Saionji at the reunion with no wallet and no way home, but it at least was a reason. Hearing or not hearing it wouldn’t change why he was angry, so there was no point in badgering him about it further.
He breathed the steam in and out. There. Still upset, but at least on an even keel about it. Touga was right about one thing: he was making some progress. That made him feel a little better.
Saionji dried off, shrugged on a bathrobe, and turned in for the night. He and Touga had their own rooms, for when they couldn’t stand each other, and California king-sized beds, for when they couldn’t stand to be apart. Just in case, he left the door open. Sure enough, some time after he’d settled in and was starting to drift off, a presence slipped into his room and creased the mattress at his back. A broad hand, still icy from outdoors, slipped over his waist, into his bathrobe, and up his chest.
“You’re warm,” Touga murmured into his ear.
“I won’t be if you keep pawing me with those freezing hands of yours,” he muttered back.
Still, he made no move to stop him. Touga didn’t stop, either, opting instead to trace circles in Saionji’s skin with his fingertips.
“I am sorry about earlier,” Touga added, voice low and possibly even regretful. “It was thoughtless of me to leave like that. How did you get home?”
“Arisugawa lent me cab fare, and was absolutely insufferable about it,” he replied. “She also told me I should dump you.”
Touga chuckled. It had a different cadence than usual. “I hope you won’t be taking her up on her advice.”
“I’m still considering it.”
“Dear oh dear.” He leaned in closer to nip the upper curve of his ear, to send his long fingers questing south. “Then I’d better convince you otherwise…”
Maybe his anger hadn’t faded as much as he’d thought. Maybe it just flared again from his irritation at Touga’s apparent belief that he could just sweep this all under the rug. Either way, Saionji snarked, “Is sex all you have to offer?”
He stilled. “Excuse me?”
“Your first move to convince me not to leave you is to try to seduce me. Is sex all you have to offer, or do you just think I’m that easy?”
For a moment, Touga neither spoke nor moved. Then, at last, he withdrew and rolled over to rest back-to-back with him. “I suppose I deserved that,” he murmured.
Saionji let that hang there for a moment out of spite. When Touga shifted and sat up, though, he found he didn’t want him to go. So he said, “I’m not going to leave you.”
He could practically feel him looking back. “Oh?”
“You just have a talent for pissing me off. Sometimes I think you do it for fun, and that pisses me off more.”
“If it would help vent your frustration, we could always go a few rounds with a pair of shinai. For old time’s sake.”
While Saionji still practiced kendo—had won several championships over the years, even competed a time or two in the Olympics—Touga had quit the sport after high school. He rolled over to squint at his lover. Touga, naked, was staring out the window at the moon. The sight of him, moonlight silvering his long red hair and caressing his skin, softened Saionji’s heart.
It reminded him of an old school lesson about Japanese literature and the subtlety of Japanese sensitivities, namely how famous novelist Natsume Souseki had once translated I love you as The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?. Anyone Japanese would understand, he had later explained. And Saionji did understand. Or perhaps he wanted that to be their understanding.
Maybe he was easy after all. But he just wanted to know Touga cared.
“Old time’s sake, huh,” he murmured, scooting over and slipping his arms around him. “Did the reunion get you sentimental for the past?”
Touga chuckled and looked back at him. Their bangs and noses brushed together. Even at this distance, though, he could only barely see his eyes in the dark. “Even I indulge in nostalgia from time to time, best friend.”
“Nostalgia for what, exactly?” Saionji asked, dry and wry.
“A simpler time… is what I’d like to say, but life has never been simple, has it?”
“I suppose not. Even a small child with no cares or worries also has no autonomy.”
Touga fell silent.
Saionji eased back and tugged at him. “Get under the covers. You’re freezing.”
To his mild surprise, he obeyed without sarcasm. Saionji drew the sheets up and over them. To his further surprise, Touga slipped his hands around him, head bowed. With his back to the moonlight, his face was now in shadow, further veiled by his cascading hair.
“Did you enjoy the reunion?” Touga murmured.
“Ending aside, it was fine enough. It was good to see our underclassmen in the kendo club again. They’ve done well for themselves. There were some faces I didn’t see, but I’m likely better off not having seen them.”
“It’s cute of you to say ‘some faces’ when you really mean ‘one face.’”
He scowled. “What about you? It must have been awkward to see all the girls you fucked and tossed aside married to respectable husbands now.”
“Not really.” Touga twined a finger around one of Saionji’s curls. “Sex might be all I have to offer, but it’s not as though there’s any inherent shame in sharing my bed, hmm?”
“Hmph.”
“Kyouichi.”
Saionji blinked. Even after all these years, most people, even Touga, still referred to him by his family name. He himself thought of himself as his family name, most of the time. “What?”
Touga studied that curl as he twisted, untwisted, and re-twisted it. “How long have we known each other?”
What brings this change in the winds? But Saionji knew better than to say that aloud. “Most of our lives, at this point. We met through our kendo lessons, as I recall. You had short hair back then.”
Twist. Untwist. Twist. “Did I?”
“It is strange to think of. It was only for a short time in the time I’ve known you. Then you grew it out, and now you’ve always had long hair.”
Untwist. Twist. Twist. Tug. “True.”
“Why?”
Tug. Twist. Curl. “Do you remember that birthday Nanami gave me a kitten?”
“Vaguely. I remember the kitten itself better. You were infatuated with it.”
“Well then, do you remember how she disappeared one day?”
“Nanami?”
Flatly: “No, my cat.”
“Ah, that.” Pause. “You were devastated. You went out all day looking for it, calling over and over. When night fell, our parents made us go home, but you snuck out, and I followed you, to keep looking. We both got in trouble for it. And we never did find the damn cat.”
“As it turns out, we wouldn’t have. Tonight, Nanami told me she’d killed her. Packed her in a box and drowned her in a river.”
Touga delivered this line so evenly, so casually, that Saionji’s brain skipped while trying to process it. When it finally sank in, all he could manage was, “What?”
“She said she’d felt guilty about it for years. The only reason she’d come to the reunion was to get it off her chest. She said she felt she couldn’t truly cut ties with me without confessing her sin.”
“What the fuck??” he uttered.
“Isn’t it funny, the things that remain invisible even as they lay right at our feet?” Touga remarked, distant, dreamy. “Truly, the deepest shadows lie at the base of a lighthouse.”
No fucking kidding. Saionji knew Nanami had been capable of some vile things as a child—all of them had been—but he was astonished at such a low. Even he wouldn’t stoop to enacting such violence on a tiny, defenseless…
…hnnh. Maybe he ought to belay that train of thought.
“So then you’re upset because the kitten you’d thought run away had actually been killed,” he concluded. “Is that it?”
Touga’s hand stilled. “Is that it…?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
His head tilted, sinking deep into his pillow. “I received another kitten years later for a different birthday. That one vanished after a while, too. I’d been so delighted at the time I received it, but after that, I got so caught up in myself I paid it no mind. Then, before I knew it, it was gone… I never even got around to giving it a name. I simply assumed it would stay without my needing to do anything, even though I acted as though it was never there at all.”
Saionji said nothing. His gut told him Touga meant more than just a missing kitten, like an allegorical play cast in shadows on a wall, but damned if he understood what he was driving at.
Aloud, he asked, “When was this? I don’t remember that happening.”
Touga twisted his finger back around a lock of Saionji’s hair. “Ah, you’d just been expelled, so you weren’t there for it.”
“Oh. That birthday,” he said flatly.
“I got you expelled on purpose, you know.”
Saionji shot up. “WHAT?!”
Touga smiled up at him, but the rest of his expression was lost in a moonlight shadow. “The letter you received, saying the castle would come down? That was a fake I sent you.”
He gawked down at him, shock replaced in a gush by incandescent fury. His fists trembled from the titanic effort to not grab Touga by the neck and throttle him. “Why would you do that?” he growled.
Instead of answering, Touga slipped his hand back. Saionji’s hair glided off and fell. “Will you be taking Juri’s advice after all, then?”
He opened his mouth; shut it. I simply assumed it would stay without my needing to do anything… “You’re a fucking asshole,” he snapped. “You always do this. You’ve always done this. You always treat me like you can put a bookmark in me and pick up where we left off whenever you please.”
He turned over, half-burying his face. His hair hid the rest. “I know. I’ve been terrible to you.”
Fury sublimated into frustration. As powerful as his desire to hit something was—the wall, a pillow, Touga—he mastered it. You’re more than your anger, his therapist had told him. You’re a strong kendoka, yes? But when you can be angry and not use it as an excuse to lash out, that’s when you’ll be truly strong. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. In. Palm his face. Sigh, deep and drawn out.
“That’s not what this is really about,” he observed aloud. “If it was, you wouldn’t have ditched me at the reunion in the first place.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
Of all the insufferable— “And if I said yes, then?” he asked coldly.
Touga turned even further away. Even so, he spoke clearly: “Everything ends eventually. There’s no such thing as something eternal.”
Saionji flinched as if pricked. “Do you say things like that to hurt me on purpose?”
“Yes. It’s a bad habit.” He peeked up. “Are you angry?”
“Yes!”
“What can I do to make it up to you?”
“Stop being so you!!”
Silence, a heartbeat or three long. Then: “…How about I offer you my hair?”
That jarred him into confusion. “Your what now?”
“My hair. Shave it off and repent, like a Buddhist monk.”
He stared. Inane though it was, he could only manage to say, “You’ve always had long hair.”
Touga tilted his head back down. “I know, and I’m tired of it. I should have sheared it off ages ago. But some things are difficult to let go of.”
His shoulders sank. Something finally clicked. “...Did you enjoy the reunion?”
“Heavens, no. It was terrible,” he said conversationally. “Juri has a fiancée who loves her back, Miki and his sister can stand in the same room and be comfortable about it, Nanami took concrete action to move on with her life, and you took all the jabs about your school days in remarkable if cranky stride. It seems I’m the only one still caught in the past.”
He rubbed his forehead. Then he settled back into bed. “How are you caught in the past? We all left that ageless rose garden together.”
“Akio-san didn’t give us our scars; he merely took advantage of them.”
Saionji considered that. Then: “Are you serious about cutting your hair?”
“I’ve been meaning to for a long while, anyway. It’s much too heavy a burden to insist on carrying all these years.”
“…You aren’t actually talking about your hair, are you?”
Touga smiled, leaned in, and kissed him. The suddenness of it flustered Saionji at first, but he let himself melt into it after a moment. For all his flaws, Touga was an excellent kisser.
Too soon, he pulled away, only to lean in to his ear. “This is why I keep you around,” Touga whispered. “You’re the only one who truly understands me.”
“You—you flatter me,” Saionji stammered back, caught off-guard but not really displeased by it. With a gruff snort, more hot air than anything else, he added, “I often feel like I don’t understand you at all.”
“That’s a good thing.” He drew away, expressive pensive. Maybe even sad. “But maybe one day I’ll give you the missing pieces.”
What missing pieces? Saionji opened his mouth to say. He decided not to. Instead, he pointed out, “If you’ve been meaning to cut your hair anyway, it doesn’t carry much weight as a symbol of penitence.”
“True.” Touga slipped out of the bed and stood. “That’s why I want you to do it.”
Saionji sat up. “Me? Why?”
“Because I love you.”
Of all the insufferable, disarming, heart-pounding— “Wh-where do you think you’re going?!” he sputtered, hurling the covers back and following Touga out the room.
“They’re around here somewhere,” he non-answered, heading for one of the cupboards. As Saionji watched over him, he rummaged through the drawers for a moment. Then: “Here.” Touga offered him a pair of scissors. The blades were long and gleamed palely in the moonlight. “Do with me as you will.”
He accepted them, then opened and shut them with a loud, clean snip. They seemed sharp; they’d cut well. As he opened them again, he reflected how much trust it must take to allow someone to take a sharp blade close to one’s head.
“I don’t know how to style hair,” he said aloud. “Don’t blame me if it ends up looking terrible.”
He shrugged. “I won’t.”
So Saionji had him put on his own bathrobe and drape a towel around his shoulders, then sat him down on a chair with another towel on the floor. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. In four clean strokes, thirty-year-old growth was felled. The rest took more careful, measured cuts. Eventually, Touga sported a haircut cut close to the nape of his neck, with that annoying forelock cut to just over his ear. It didn’t look completely terrible, and when Saionji gave him a handmirror with which to inspect himself, Touga agreed. Hearing that was surprisingly relieving.
“So what do you want to do with this?” he asked, holding up what remained of Touga’s tresses.
He looked at him with eyes that seemed indifferent at first but, up close, smoldered with a strange intensity. “Burn it,” he replied.
He didn’t question it. He simply found a wide-brimmed bowl to coil the locks in, sprinkled it with saké, and brought it to the balcony table. Though it was freezing outside, they stood together there as Saionji threw in a lit match. Each of them drank to and watched the devouring flames.
Firelight dancing in his intense gaze, Touga murmured under his breath, “Everything ends eventually. There’s no such thing as something eternal.”
It probably hadn’t been meant for Saionji’s ears. He caught it anyway, though, so maybe it had. He cast him a long look. However, Touga’s eyes remained fixed on the burning strands until they were nothing but ash and blackened smoking coils.
“God, this reeks,” he observed.
Touga snorted, then broke out laughing. It was long and loud and terribly inelegant—and somehow free, not unlike his new short haircut. When he settled down, he nodded. “Yeah.”
“Let’s get inside. It’s freezing out here. We’ll clean this mess in the morning, after the wind’s blown the smell away.”
“Yeah.”
They each head back inside, and, without needing to discuss it aloud, returned to Saionji’s room. There, they tossed off their robes and slipped under the covers.
As he drew his lover into his arms, Saionji murmured, “Touga.”
“Hm?”
“If you need a good therapist… I can recommend one to you.”
Touga paused for a long moment. Instead of laughing it off like Saionji expected, though, he murmured back, “I’ll think about it.”
He blinked at him wide-eyed. Touga met those eyes without smiling. Saionji gripped his waist; then he leaned in and let his lips say the rest.