Chapter Text
Bookstores offer their own unique sense of peace, a hushed companionability between yourself and other patrons perusing the stacks.
They’re calming in a way other shops or bars never manage, so stopping by the local indie store on your way home from work has long been your preferred way to wind down and bridge the gap between office hours and the open expanse of your weekend.
You step through the sliding doors. The effect is instantaneous, soothing and rousing all at once. Your eyelids flutter. You take a deep, grounding breath that loosens every muscle in your body.
Warmth envelopes you like a hug, pushing back the chill evening air. The next breath, and every one after, is heavy with the scent of crisp paper and rich ink. And books, books, books stretch out before you as far as the eye can see. They’re shelved and stacked and propped up on every surface, each one a closed portal, a sealed well of potential, teasing you with their contents.
The cashier, her face friendly after months of your individual routines overlapping, calls out a greeting that you return with a smile.
You take your time, focused only on the easy fall of your steps that lead you to each of your usual haunts, your favorite sections, fingertips trailing along the spines as you go.
The best part of the experience is the quiet. A soft instrumental melody floats down from the speakers overhead, but other than that it’s perfectly, incandescently muted. Any voices are pitched low, their tones weighted with the sort of reverence usually reserved for places of worship.
Your thoughts are dreamy — senses thoroughly muffled — by the time you reach your last stop. The cant of your head is as much a side effect of your blissed-out state as it is a gesture needed to help you actually read the poetry books’ spines. Rumi and Neruda, Bashō and Browning, Oliver and Angelou. Each name hits like a further shot of comfort to the heart; the smile that curves over your features is the same one that comes from spotting a dear friend in a familiar place.
You stretch out a hand, intending to coax your selection free with a crook of your finger against its top edge.
When suddenly another hand reaches for the same volume, knuckles bumping lightly against your own.
“Ah.”
Your hands twitch apart in mirrored unison. You look up, and your apology dies on your lips.
The sum of this stranger comes to you in parts. Black hair curling softly against his temples, around his ears. The sharp, clean line of his jaw. Brows thick and dark like two decisive brushes of ink, currently raised in surprise over the frames of his glasses. The eyes behind them are a verdant, lovely green, the deepest shade of it you’ve ever seen outside of late summer in the shade.
He’s beautiful — all bundled up in a tailored jacket and a cream-colored sweater.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
His cheeks and the tip of his (sinfully adorable) snub nose are flushed, like he’d just stepped in from the brisk air outside.
But his hand where you’d touched just now was almost startlingly hot.
And you’re quite a ways from the doors; the poetry section is tucked in a corner nearly all the way to the back of the store.
“N-no, that’s okay!” God, was that as loud as it sounded? You half-cover your mouth and muffle a quieter: “Sorry, sorry,” in penance for breaking the sacred silence.
Tall, dark, and bookish smiles with the smallest quirk of his lips.
He reaches out again, plucking the book of poems free in a series of careful motions. You’re so caught up ogling his hands — how is someone this pretty even real — that you don’t realize what he’s doing until he has to clear his throat.
“It’s the last copy,” he says, holding the book out to you in offering.
Your eyes dart from the book in his hand to the now-empty space on the shelf. The expression on your face must be even more alarmed than it feels — he chuckles, so rich and rumbling it curls around your heart like a cat and squeezes hard, once.
“No no! Please, you take it.” You’re more careful to keep this a whispered declaration.
“Please, I insist, Miss-” the honorific trails up on a question.
‘He wants to know your name, you dingus,’ calls out a helpful (and kind of harsh, hey now) voice in the back of your mind.
“(Y/n).”
He repeats your name back, thoughtful and slow, like he’s savoring it, committing it to memory.
“Akaashi Keiji,” he offers in return, bowing slightly at the waist.
“Thank you.” Cheeks warm, you accept the book with a grateful little dip of your head and your own murmured repetition of his name. You hold the book close, palms clasped loosely over the cover. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“The pleasure’s mine.”
You realize you’ve both been whispering this whole time, voices getting progressively softer. You’d also both been steadily leaning in, drifting more and more into one another’s orbit, to compensate for it.
You shoot up straight, the book’s corners pressing hard against your chest where you’ve hugged it tight in a fit of nerves.
Akaashi straightens as well, the motion a little more controlled. But his eyes are still downcast, still trained on you.
‘Oh god,’ you panic. ‘What’s wrong, what’s he looking at, is there some stain on my coat, I don’t rememb—’
You follow his gaze down the length of your own body to where you’re still cradling the book close.
When you glance back up, it’s to see that he’s smiling again, and it’s all in his eyes, all dappled sunlight racing through leaves. Your heart thumps hard, once.
“This is possibly a little forward of me,” he starts, faltering for a beat in a way that solidifies something in your own mind. “But I’d like to buy that book for you, if that’s alright.”
Quiet thrill pulses through you, sudden and dizzying.
“You can say no, of course,” he continues, sincere. “I won’t be offended, I know it’s a strange thing for a stranger to offer.”
Akaashi’s expression is calm, other than the determined tilt of his brows. It’s the ever-so-slight tension to his shoulders that gives him away though. He looks like he’s bracing himself.
He’s nervous.
And that’s it. You’re gone, swept up in a sudden wave of daring. His sinking self-certainty only serves to buoy your own.
“Do you,” you tilt your head. “Do you go around offering to buy random people books often, then?"
“This is a first for me, actually,” he admits.
"I mean I wouldn’t be offended if you did. I actually admire that kind of direct action approach to literacy—”
Akaashi laughs. It’s a warm, quiet sort of laugh anyway, but he still covers it with a loose fist.
“—But why me?"
He takes a deep breath. Lets his hand fall away.
“Because.” He’s staring at the book again. “Because when you walked in earlier, you looked like you were coming home. You just.” His eyes dart back up to meet yours. “Your whole body, everything about you just looked the same way I feel every time I come in here myself.”
Your pulse is thundering in your ears, straining against your wrists.
“You’re beautiful anyway,” he continues. “But coming through the doors, you were radiant.”
Is he trying to make you spontaneously combust?
“I—” You sputter like a tea kettle.
“Was that okay?” He pushes his glasses up where they’d started to slip. “I’m sorry, that was probably a lot all at once, but you asked. And I meant every word.”
“It’s fine,” you squeak, fanning your face with your hands. “Um, thank you seems a little inadequate here but. Thank you.”
“Of course.” He rolls his lips together, trying to smother a sudden and distinctly smug grin.
Oh. Okay then.
You inhale once. On the exhale you smile your softest, sweetest smile. His startled blink is immensely gratifying.
“How about this: you can buy me this book if I can treat you to coffee.” You let your expression fall into intense consideration, pretending to run the numbers in your mind before adding: “And possibly a pastry, just so we’re properly even.”
“Deal,” he agrees, without hesitation.
· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·
The cashier winks at you over Akaashi’s bowed head as he’s signing off on the sales receipt.
Even his handwriting is lovely, what the fuck.
Just as he goes to slide everything back, you cut in—
“Can I actually borrow that pen?”
You flip open the book and write out your phone number on the back of his receipt, then tuck it between the pages like a bookmark. “So you don’t lose it.”
Then you hold the book out for Akaashi to take.
“But I—” He looks utterly thrown.
“I’ve actually read a lot of the poems in this collection before,” you confess. “But if you borrow it, maybe you can read some and let me know what you think over coffee, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he breathes, accepting the book back. He double checks to make sure the receipt is wedged as snug and secure as possible. “Yes. I’d like that.”
· • —– · one week later · —– • ·
Serendipity neatly placed a coffee shop almost perfectly equidistant to each of your apartments.
“Strange that we never bumped into each other before now,” you wonder aloud, stepping through the door as Akaashi holds it open for you.
“Very strange, yes,” Akaashi agrees, voice oddly faint.
(Before the date’s over, he confesses in a rush that he’d actually been working up the courage to talk to you for weeks after always spotting you here and at the bookstore.)
Following a repeated offer to keep this your treat, he never once insists on paying. Akaashi accepts the coffee and blueberry muffin you’d promised him with thanks. No ego, no awkwardness.
He helps you out of your coat and pulls your chair out for you in a series of moments so relaxed it somehow never makes you feel helpless or frail. The gestures are sincere, and so sweetly old-fashioned it melts your heart.
You talk, and the back and forth is easy as breathing, like this is your fiftieth date together rather than your first.
“I’m an editor actually,” he says, when conversation inevitably turns to the topic of work.
"That’s amazing,” you say, awed. “Any books I would know about?”
Two bright spots of color bloom high on Akaashi’s cheeks. He clears his throat and absently spins the sleeve on his coffee cup around. Your attention narrows to his hands, the lovely stretch of his fingers and the way the tendons dance across the back. He takes a slow, purposeful sip of his drink.
The sum of these tells would normally add up to embarrassment. And maybe that makes up a little bit of his reaction. But there’s a certain gleam to his green, green eyes and a little crook to his mouth. Akaashi isn’t embarrassed.
He’s about to let you in on a joke.
“I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Zombie Knight Zom’bish?”
A joke clearly made at his own expense.
“The…shounen manga? About zombie jousting?”
“The very same.”
· • —– ٠ ✤ ٠ —– • ·