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Rintarou is not a morning person by any means, never has been and never will be, and yet his internal alarm wakes him up on a Friday morning at a solid 7:52am, eight minutes before Osamu’s alarm.
It’s ridiculous. Osamu doesn’t have curtains in his room because he broke his old curtain rod halfway through their first year of college and just never got it replaced, and so every morning now he wakes up with the sunrise and fibs some shit about health benefits. They hadn’t started hooking up at that point, but Rintarou is convinced that even then, the forces of the universe had been colluding against him specifically. To get him laid regularly, and then pull the rug out from beneath his perfectly healthy sleep schedule. To give him Miya Osamu, and then fuck up the rest of his life.
Eight minutes later he hears the opening sequence of a Kelly Clarkson song; he fumbles for the snooze button and sighs, burrowing further under the blankets to escape the shine of the sun. The empty spot on the bed next to him is still warm; Rintarou rolls on top of it and takes the blanket with him, like a burrito.
His clothes have been taken from the bedroom floor and tossed over the back of the desk chair. There’s already a novelty mug from a Hokkaido resort on the bedside table filled with water.
They’ve done this enough times for him to know how the next part goes. Outside in the kitchen, something scrapes against the bottom of a pan. Osamu is humming the jingle of a car commercial. In six minutes, the alarm will go off again, Rintarou will snooze it again, and Osamu will hear him snooze it from the other room.
Rintarou does it twice before the humming in the kitchen stops. Rintarou drowsily counts seventeen seconds of padded footsteps to the door before it opens, and someone shuffles in.
“Wake up, bitch,” Osamu grins down at him. He wields chopsticks in one hand and a bowl of something heavenly-smelling in the other, and Rintarou has never made a noise like the snorting one that escapes his nostrils right then ever in his life. “Order up.”
“I can’t come over next weekend,” Rintarou tells him as they walk. His own apartment is on the way to Osamu’s ten o’clock lecture, a straight shot across the main quad and on the street behind the humanities building. They walk it together because why not.
One of the nicest parts about his thing with Osamu is that there’s none of that decoding bullshit. They were friends first, the guy that helped him cheat through an entire semester of statistics their first year, and didn’t start hooking up until maybe a year and a half later. They know each other’s languages, there’s no point in sugarcoating. Rintarou can say I’m not coming over tonight and offer no other explanation, Osamu will say okay and won’t expect one, and the next day he gets a blowjob that melts his brain out through his ears to make up for it. And it goes both ways.
“Okay,” Osamu says easily. Their shoulders knock together as Osamu leans a little into his space. “Are you replacing me then? I knew it was only a matter of time.”
“Don’t joke, one day it might actually happen,” Rintarou says, grins when Osamu’s mouth slants into a pout. “I’m going into the city to see my family. Aunt’s birthday.”
Osamu catches the pinched look on his face and pats him sympathetically between the shoulder blades. “You poor thing. Try not to miss me too much, yeah?”
Rintarou elbows him in the side. “Dickhead.”
They’re maybe halfway across the quad now, taking the less crowded path along the edges of the courtyard. Osamu’s going to be late to his class, he can already tell, he lingered too long leaving vaguely threatening messages on his brother’s Animal Crossing island bulletin board while Rintarou was brushing his teeth and trying to nudge him out of the door for his own good. Maybe it’d be faster if they took the central path. Maybe. Probably. They never do.
“You cold?” Osamu asks. It’s nearing the end of winter but there’s still a stark chill in the air that sticks its fingers down the neck of his sweater, and not in a sexy way. He hadn’t needed a jacket yesterday evening when he made the trek to Osamu’s, but he needs one now.
Rintarou curls his fingers into his palms and massages them against one another. “I’m fine.”
“Uh huh. C’mere.” Osamu reaches over and untangles his left fist with his own fingers, slotting them in between Rintarou’s. Osamu runs like a goddamn furnace; sometimes he’ll refuse to sleep over in the summer months because he ends up getting baked under a blanket, but it’s convenient right now.
Rintarou looks down at their conjoined hands. “Huh.”
“Better?”
It really is, now his entire body feels warm too. “Yeah.”
“Cool.” Osamu pulls his phone out of his pocket with his other hand and scrolls through his email. They walk like that, all the way to the end of the quad and towards the line of brick and mortar buildings lining its edges.
“This is really gay,” Rintarou says after a bit.
“Definitely not the gayest thing we’ve ever done, but sure.” The corners of his eyes wrinkle as Osamu grins at him, but then they smooth out after a moment. The warmth of his palm pulls away a little. “We don’t have to, if you’d rather not.”
He doesn’t really have to think about it for too long. “Nah,” Rintarou says lightly. Osamu’s lecture hall is in the building just up ahead of them and he’ll have to let go in literal moments, but to prove his point, he tangles their fingers together a little more securely and wraps his thumb around the back of his hand. The cold air is crisp and dry; nobody’s hands are damp. “It’s nice.”
“Welcome back,” is the first thing that Osamu says to him when Rintarou walks into his bedroom the next Tuesday evening. And then, “I know the agreement was that we were gonna have sex, but before we do that I need to complain about something first.”
Rintarou freezes. His jacket is already off and shirt halfway unbuttoned. “Okay,” he says slowly. He crosses the room and sits beside Osamu on the bed, who has his laptop open on his legs and reading glasses pushed up the bridge of his nose and scowling adorably down at his open window of Microsoft Outlook. He’s wearing his blue sweatpants with a hole in both pockets, which means that he’s been sitting here for a while. The sight of him sends a pang of affection through Rintarou’s chest, fleeting in motion, warm in its aftershocks.
“Okay,” Osamu begins, taking a breath like he’s winding up to start screaming. Rintarou gently closes the open laptop now that he’s distracted and sets it on the bedside table. “So my philosophy professor.”
“The demon woman,” Rintarou nods. He crawls into Osamu’s lap and straddles his thighs, pushing his face into the juncture between his shoulder and jaw.
His hands reflexively find Rintarou’s waist and drag him closer against his chest. “Yeah, you remembered.” Hard not to, when it’s half of what Osamu will ever talk about when they hang out. And they hang out a lot . “So today, she…”
The common conception with the twins is that Atsumu is the talker. Which, granted, is mostly true—Atsumu is virtually incapable of shutting up ever—but what’ll surprise most people is just how much Osamu can and will say once you get him rolling. It must be a means of decompression, with how little he’s probably able to get out during a day in the life as Atsumu’s twin, and they live together too, for Christ’s sake. Rintarou let him decompress to him one time, and Osamu took that as a green light for whenever he wanted for the rest of their lives. It’s fine—he’s more than willing to listen, really.
“And then she fucking emails us,” he says in the same kind of voice he would say and then she keyed my car or fucked my mom . “Like, what the fuck.”
Well, mostly willing. Osamu is still talking. He smells good, his hair damp from the shower and sort of citrus-y. Rintarou licks a stripe up the length of his neck and puts his hands up Osamu’s ratty band t-shirt, making the words in his throat sputter momentarily.
“Demon woman,” Rintarou affirms, late on the beat.
“Stop that, you’re being rude,” Osamu chastises him. “I’m telling a story and you’re feeling me up.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re listening as a means of seduction,” Osamu corrects. “That’s not the same thing. You’re being very unfair right now.”
Rintarou rolls his eyes against his neck so Osamu can feel him do it. “It’s working, though.”
“No it’s not.”
He grinds his hips down, just a point of pressure, but it makes Osamu exhale sharply into his hair. “Tsumu’s still here,” he reminds him, voice gone low and deliciously raspy. The rest of his body betrays him; Osamu is literally cupping Rintarou’s ass with both hands.
“He’s leaving soon,” Rintarou replies without missing a beat. “He and Sakusa are going to watch Pretty in Pink again tonight.”
“I actually really liked that movie.”
“No kidding. Are you gonna fuck me now or what?”
Osamu presses an open mouthed kiss in the space behind his ear and grins against his skin. “Toldja you’d miss me,” he says in a voice that makes Rintarou hate him and simultaneously want to jump his bones.
Rintarou takes Osamu’s face between his hands, squishes his cheeks, says “you’re the worst” with absolutely no heat, and kisses him for real. He’s been hounded by his family for an entire weekend, stayed mildly exhausted and very-not-mildly horny all day, but kissing Osamu is like ripping all that tension out of his spine with the power of a pressure washer. Osamu nips at his bottom lip like he’s trying to prove his own point; Rintarou retaliates by pushing him down against the bed so hard he bounces on his back a little. They both giggle as the bed frame creaks.
There’s a thud in the other room, the sound of scrambling feet across the floor, and then a collision of something and Osamu’s bedroom door.
“STOP. I’M STILL FUCKING HERE.”
“Leave faster, then,” Osamu bellows. His hands work lazily at Rintarou’s belt buckle. Rintarou tips his head backwards and moans loud, high and reedy, from the back of his throat.
“GEAHGH,” is the approximate sound Atsumu makes.
Seconds later, their front door opens and closes with enough force to create a gust of wind that blows through the apartment. Rintarou laughs and sticks his tongue down Osamu’s throat so he shuts up for real.
“So,” Sakusa begins in The Voice. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between The Voice and Sakusa’s regular voice, given that they both fall somewhere in the ballpark of tonal fatality. But after two and a half years of living together, Rintarou is acutely aware of all of its pitches. The Voice could mean a lot of things, none of them particularly good. He unconsciously straightens in his seat.
“So,” Sakusa says again. The Voice drips with displeasure and they haven’t even looked up from their phone yet. “When am I meeting your boyfriend.” They say it just like that, without the inflection of a question.
Rintarou chews on his mouthful of cup noodles very slowly. Swallows. “I wasn’t aware that I had one for you to meet.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Sakusa deadpans. “Osamu. I’m talking about Osamu.”
“Osamu’s not my boyfriend,” Rintarou says. “Also, you’ve met Osamu before. Like. Many times.”
“I haven’t met him as your boyfriend ,” they retort. “There’s significance.”
“Is there?” Sakusa is languidly draped over the armrests of the chair they’re in, legs hanging off one end and head and neck hanging off the other like a cat in the sun, and Rintarou can’t stop thinking about how that position can’t be good for their spine, but then again, his posture is also shit and bringing it up will probably result in an easily avoidable shit-throwing contest. “You didn’t re-introduce Atsumu to me when you guys started dating.”
Sakusa taps something on their phone and immediately scowls. “Yeah, because we weren’t being fucking stupid about it,” they reply, glowering, which, okay. Rintarou can’t tell if the sour face is more for him or for the Sudoku game he’s pretty sure they just lost.
Sakusa is one of those people that doesn’t believe in casual sex. Not in a sacred, your-body-is-a-temple-for-Jesus kind of way, they just don’t think that it ever really works for romantically inclined individuals. It’s one of the weirdly nice things that Sakusa will do for him, preach to a choir about how he really deserves to have someone, even if the sentiment sort of feels misplaced.
Rintarou begs to disagree; he’s not opposed to falling in love, but no dick is monumental enough to make a permanent space for in his life at this moment in time. He isn't the type to need anyone, and neither is Osamu, which is why this thing that they have works so well. They eat, they laugh, they hang out, they fuck, and that’s all there is to it.
“You’re annoying. I’m not letting you of all people give shovel talks on my behalf. You’re too scary and I promised my little sister I’d let her do it first.” He nudges the trashcan closer to him with his toe and tosses the empty styrofoam cup into it. “Also, Osamu’s not my boyfriend.”
Sakusa, who has been looking at their phone upside down during this entire exchange, looks up at Rintarou now, long and slow and scowling.
“What?”
Sakusa is a biochemistry major, which is sick and twisted and explains a lot about a lot of things, but that’s besides the point. This detail is only relevant to the simile he’s about to make because he knows that Sakusa is studying him the same way he studies single-celled organisms under a microscope: like he’d rather be running them over with his car than identifying DNA sequences. Sakusa looks through the microscope of his soul and Rintarou feels like a single celled organism. Sick and twisted.
“Nothing,” they say after a beat, turning back to their phone. “Never mind.”
Rintarou makes a strangled, accusatory noise and Sakusa very pointedly does not look up at him again. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“The judgey thing.” He wrinkles his nose. “The thing where you judge me all bitch-like and it pisses me off. You used to tell me you were judging me when you did it and then I told you to stop, but now you just do it and pretend like you’re not doing it even though you very obviously most definitely are.”
Sakusa blinks once, twice, like they’re a computer that’s just been booted up and Rintarou’s put in too many inputs for this early in the morning at four-thirty-pm. “I’m not doing anything,” they say finally.
“You suck,” Rintarou responds. “I’m sorry not all of us want to be married at twenty one.”
“I don’t want you to be married at twenty one,” Sakusa retorts. “You’re not emotionally mature enough for that. You’d be divorced within the year and then you’d probably force me into letting you be my roommate again.”
“Wow, fuck you.” Rintarou throws his chopsticks in the sink and doesn’t wash them. Sakusa’s upper lip curls. “You know what? I am gonna get married. I’m gonna get married at twenty one and not get divorced ever and then you’ll be wrong and sorry and you’ll miss me as your roommate. Fuck you.”
“Fine,” Sakusa rolls their eyes. “Do you think Osamu will say yes?”
Rintarou tries to smother them with the couch cushion.
It’s sort of funny because Rintarou’s ninety-nine percent sure that Osamu would say yes. They’d probably do it for a tax benefits thing, or one of those if-we’re-both-still-sad-and-single-and-pathetic-by-thirty-five pacts. Which is perfectly normal. Tax benefits and loneliness are real and solid reasons to get married to someone. Rintarou knows plenty of other people who would do that with him.
You’ve had your dick in his ass, comes a voice that sounds annoyingly like Sakusa’s. That’s not like plenty of other people. To which Rintarou says, shut the fuck up, go slut shame someone else through their own subconscious.
Out of all of his friends, he would probably mind being lonely-tax-benefits married to Osamu the least. Living together would come a lot easier than it does to him and Sakusa, who’s one condensation ring away from kicking Rintarou to the curb, since they have a lot more similar values and humor and temperaments. They’ve always just gotten along like that—the playing off of each other and that mental sync—a seamless kind of feel.
But mostly because of the, you know, tits. The breakfast in bed thing is pretty nice too.
“You look constipated,” Osamu says, sliding into the chair across from him and scaring the shit out of Rintarou. “What’re you thinking so hard about you look like you need to shit?”
“Nothing,” Rintarou lies. “You know I don’t think, babe.”
“That I do.” Osamu picks up the takeout mug set in front of him. Rintarou only got there a few minutes before him; his matcha latte with soy milk and extra foam is still scalding. Osamu hisses and curls his tongue over his top lip. He watches the pink of it swipe frantically, back and forth, back and forth.
“It’s still hot.”
“Yeah thanks, no fucking shit,” Osamu growls back. He eyes the cold brew between Rintarou’s hands with genuine distaste. “God, no wonder you’re freezing all the time, you’re drinking iced coffee in the middle of fucking February . Psychopath.”
“That’s not how being a psychopath works,” Rintarou retorts. He finds Osamu’s leg underneath the table with his foot and hooks it around his ankle, so he brings their shins flush together. “You’ll warm me up later, right?”
Osamu scrunches his nose and doesn’t say anything else. Rintarou’s grin widens.
The cafe they’re at is quite close to his and Sakusa’s apartment, just outside the campus and on the way to both of their morning lectures. It’s kind of kitschy, its logo a line art drawing of a cupcake against a pink background and little potted plants on all the windowsills, but the tiny blonde girl that works the register was in Rintarou’s intro psych class last year and gives them free brownie bites, so they keep coming back. This all goes to say that Sakusa would probably blow a gasket if they knew Rintarou was bringing Osamu to their breakfast place, and as a pre-hook up ritual, no doubt.
It’s the late afternoon on a weekend, cloudy after a morning rain, and the shop is fairly full. There’s less students on computers than there are during the week, mostly friend groups and couples. At the table next to them, a boy returns with two cups of coffee and a kiss on the cheek for his girlfriend. He sits down and they immediately tangle their legs together.
Dude. There’s Sakusa again. You motherfucker.
“Hey,” Rintarou says. “Do you think we act like boyfriends?”
Osamu has taken the lid off of his latte and is blowing incessantly across the surface liquid. He pauses momentarily to raise an eyebrow in his direction. “Is that what you were thinking about earlier?”
“No. Answer the question.”
Osamu puts the lid back on and burns his tongue again, smacking his tongue thoughtfully before responding. “Shit, I dunno. Maybe. Probably.” He goes for another sip with similar results, because for some reason he can only act as impulse control for his twin and not for himself. He glances up at Rintarou, gunmetal eyes inquiring. “Does that bother you?”
It probably should. It should also probably bother him that it doesn’t seem to bother Osamu at all, but in that moment, Rintarou can’t bring himself to give a shit about it either. It should also probably bother him that this is the second time they’ve done something like this in the last week and a half—Osamu saying or doing something that crosses a proverbial line of their arrangement, and Rintarou just going with it, for reasons he doesn't quite care to unpack.
“No,” he replies. “It is what it is, I guess.”
Osamu grins broadly. “Eet eez what eet—”
“No,” Rintarou repeats, balling up a napkin in one hand and throwing it at his forehead. “Stop that.”
“Are you going to Bokuto’s tomorrow?” Osamu asks as he’s pulling on his jacket and opening the bedroom door, Rintarou a step behind him.
He hums in thought. Thinking about taking drinks from Bokuto (“see, this one’s called the Cannon,” he explained to Rintarou once, “because there’s two shots, and you drop the Jägermeister one in first, then the vodka one— wait! I’m gonna go find the blowtorch”) makes him feel hungover already, but he really does need to get out. Plus, the only people he can remember making plans to see in the last couple months being Osamu and maybe sort of Atsumu is…bad. Living with Sakusa has seriously turned him into a recluse. Speaking of which,
“Sakusa, are we going to Bokuto’s tomorrow?”
“No,” comes the reply from the bathroom.
“We’ll be there,” Rintarou says.
Osamu looks up from deleting a text from his brother to nod and grin. “Want to walk over together? You’re on our way.”
Sakusa shuffles out of the bathroom as Rintarou says, “Sure. Text me.” He must’ve just returned from the library because there’s a layer of green goop spread across his entire face and caked across his T-zone, the first thing he always does after returning from the library’s ‘infested communal breathing air,’ or so Sakusa likes to call it. He’s glowering very pointedly at him, but the face mask and the additional yellow towel hair band holding back his curls makes the entire thing significantly less threatening than it would be without.
Rintarou sticks his tongue out at him. He walks Osamu out and waits for him to put his shoes on, pulling open the door and meeting him in the middle when he turns around to kiss him goodbye. “See you."
“See you,” Rintarou grins.
“Bye Sakusa,” Osamu calls, who only grunts back in reply.
He closes the door behind him and skips back into their living room space. “Okay, you don’t have to go to Bokuto’s if you really don’t want to,” Rintarou acquiesces, “but it probably doesn’t matter what I say, because Atsumu’s gonna make you go—why are you looking at me like that?”
Because Sakusa is now staring at him with an expression that can only be described as...actually, Rintarou doesn’t know how to describe it. He’s never seen Sakusa make a face like that ever, because he’s never quite been able to catch Sakusa by surprise and Sakusa is a person so disenchanted by Life in general that practically nothing can catch him by surprise at all. But there he is, eyes blown wide and eyebrows fantastically twisted, in an expression that’s very plainly surprised and heavily mingled with another emotion that makes Rintarou hesitate in cataloging it as such.
“What was that,” Sakusa asks flatly. Rintarou crosses his arms.
“What was what?”
“You—” Sakusa sucks in a long, steady breath, closing his eyes as if to reset his senses. When he opens them again, they’re blown up with—yeah, now that look is definitely rage, face mask or not. “You guys kiss goodbye.”
“Uh, I guess.” This is by far the weirdest instance of slut shaming from Sakusa that he’s had the displeasure of experiencing. “We also engage in penetrative sex, in case that wasn’t already clear.”
Sakusa throws up his hands and physically gets up to pace in a circle around their coffee table.
“What is wrong with you?” Rintarou asks exasperatedly. “Like, is this one of your things? Do you make Atsumu pop a breath mint every time you kiss him?”
Sakusa ignores both of his questions. “You’re not allowed ,” he hisses, “to do goodbye kisses. That’s not a thing.”
He wrinkles his nose. “Why not?”
“Because of the—” Sakusa makes several frustrated hand gestures that Rintarou cannot decipher for the life of him, “—implications! Intimate implications.”
“Intimate,” Rintarou repeats.
“Intimate,” Sakusa says again, looking mildly horrified.
It’s very unlike Sakusa to be this vague. About one hundred percent of what’s happened in the last thirty seconds or so have been very unlike Sakusa. “You heard the penetrative sex thing, right? Like you know that that happens.”
“I can’t do this.” Sakusa takes another lap around the coffee table. And then another. Rintarou isn’t sure if he’s been dismissed yet, so he just watches him go round and round until he peters himself out. “Watching you two is making me lose brain cells. Next, you’ll be inviting him to your family’s for Christmas and buying a turtle together and packing each other homemade bentos.”
“I mean, I like turtles. Is it also against your intimacy rules if he makes me breakfast in the mornings?”
Sakusa stops. Stares. “He what ?”
He was half kidding, but the growing horror on Sakusa's face has Rintarou thinking that he probably should’ve just kept his mouth shut altogether. “He makes breakfast? Just like, eggs and shit. It’s called being courteous.”
Sakusa says dully, “He knows how you like your eggs in the morning.”
Rintarou hears how it sounds and grimaces. “Well. Not like that .”
Sakusa’s eyes go unfocused for a brief moment as he mutters something under his breath—a series of increasingly indecent expletives and something about vodka—before shaking himself out of it and smoothing his expression over.
“I’m going to go lie down,” Sakusa says slowly, “and when I get up, you need to be gone or else I’m probably going to strangle you to death.”
“Noted. Also, completely unrelated, but I think I’m going to be moving out next semester.”
“I think Sakusa is mad at me,” Osamu tells him a few days later.
“Really.” Rintarou threads his fingers through the hair falling in Osamu’s eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“Uh, they told me? I got home after class yesterday, and them and Tsumu are making out on the couch—”
“Gross,” Rintarou wrinkles his nose. “In the shared space?”
Osamu nods gravely, as gravely as he can with his head totally in Rintarou’s lap and fistfuls of his hair in his hands. “In the shared space,” he confirms.
“Gross,” he repeats. A shared space is sacred. He does not want to think about Sakusa and Atsumu anywhere near Sakusa and Rintarou’s living room. On top of the communal throw blanket —this is a dangerous train of thought. “Anyways.”
“Anyways, I just walked in the front door, and Sakusa looked at me right in the eye and said that they quote, fucking loathed me. And then they just up and left altogether and Tsumu got mad at me because he thought I did something but I didn’t. So I thought it must’ve had something to do with you.”
Rintarou pretends to hum in confusion, his fingers picking idly at the baby hairs lining Osamu’s forehead. The dim light bulb of his bedside table lamp casts a slanting yellow glow across the tip of his nose, the corners of his eyes, in the divots of his mouth, turns slate grey into the color of sand. He should really stop dyeing it; Rintarou should also stop being the one to help him dye it.
“Well, that just sounds like normal Sakusa. Did he say it in The Voice?”
Osamu cracks one eye open. “What voice?”
“You know.” Rintarou extracts one hand to wave vaguely in the air. “The Voice.”
“I don’t know what that means. You two are so weird.”
Rintarou opens his mouth to retort that there is absolutely nothing weird about him and Sakusa, and anything that may be weird about them is all Sakusa’s fault and none of his. Sakusa’s the one with the slut shaming and the nonsensical hatred for his major that he’s already too deep into and the boyfriend who perpetually looks like someone cracked an egg on his hair that he’s practically married to at the ripe marrying age of twenty one, and then he remembers what Sakusa thinks about him and the guy currently in his lap and frowns.
“It’s late,” he says instead. The clock reads two seventeen in the morning, Osamu was supposed to go home approximately six hours ago. “You gonna go home?”
Osamu grunts noncommittally, turns over onto his stomach and presses his face into Rintarou’s stomach. “You want me to?”
Not really, he thinks, and he would feel like an asshole for sending Osamu home at this hour even though he’d leave if Rintarou asked, but he doesn’t give an automatic green light just to spite the Sakusa Voice in his head that’s now screeching at top volume, SEE? SEE? SEE? “I dunno, I’m tired.”
“Yeah?” Osamu cracks a single eye open and peers up at him a little confusedly. “So am I?” He looks like a mildly disgruntled puppy and Rintarou wants him right here forever. He lightly scratches the space behind his ear and Osamu’s eyes flutter sleepily. Oh my God.
“I’m not having sex with you,” Rintarou says, just to put it out there. “You horndog. You insatiable little man.”
“Oh my God,” Osamu wheezes. He extracts his arm from where it’s been folded awkwardly beneath his torso and starts patting blindly around Rintarou’s face, looking for his mouth to cover. “Just shut the fuck up and cuddle me back.”
“Horndog,” he repeats, but gets under the covers and turns off the lamp. The room falls into darkness—proper darkness, because Rintarou owns curtains that actually work. He hooks his chin on top of Osamu’s shoulder, lodges his shin in between his thighs, and closes his eyes, listening to both of their breathing even out.
“Hey, Rin.”
“Hmm?”
“The thing you said the other day at the cafe. The boyfriends thing.”
“Mmm.”
“Was that what Sakusa was talking about?”
A pause. “Nah.”
“Rin.”
“Okay, probably. Definitely. Um.”
“It’s fine,” Osamu laughs a little through his yawn, his breath warm in Rintarou’s hair. His thumb strokes mindless circles on top of his wrist. “I was just wondering.”
Rintarou is suddenly very aware of every point of contact between his and Osamu’s bodies—and there’s a lot of them. He’s never felt nervous around Osamu, never felt the need to even after all of this started, but he feels a little nervous right now. “Okay,” he says in a voice that doesn’t really sound like his own.
“I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t. He’s just being really annoying about it.”
“So you do mind.”
“I don’t ,” Rintarou grunts. “Sakusa can think whatever he wants. It’s our thing.”
“Hmm. Yeah.” He can feel Osamu starting to drift off, going comfortably lax beside him. “Honestly,” he yawns again, wide, “I wouldn’t mind if you were my boyfriend.”
Rintarou’s eyes snap all the way open. What.
“Wow, way to make a guy feel wanted,” he manages a few beats too late, the words sounding strangled in his own ears.
Osamu chuckles sheepishly. “I dunno, I thought it was obvious.”
“Obvious,” Rintarou repeats, still mulling over his first words. And then: “What.”
“What?” He feels Osamu shift on the pillow, craning his neck downwards to try and peer at him through the dark, like he’d be able to decipher the odd look Rintarou knows he’s got on his face right now. “It’s not like you’ve been any less obvious either.”
“ What .”
“That you wouldn’t mind being—are you okay? Your heart’s going really fast.”
Rintarou clears his throat. “I’m fine. I...I wouldn’t mind being your boyfriend. I guess.”
“You guess,” Osamu echoes.
“I know,” Rintarou amends.
Because he does, Rintarou is realizing with dawning clarity and mild horror, he does know. He wants to be Miya Osamu’s boyfriend. He has been Miya Osamu’s boyfriend. He wants to be Miya Osamu’s boyfriend officially , because apparently they’ve been in this thing so long that they’ve been acting like boyfriends this entire time and just couldn’t tell the difference.
“Okay,” Osamu yawns again, wrapping his arms around Rintarou’s shoulders and unceremoniously pressing his face into his tits. “Cool.”
He’s glad that Osamu is treating this entire thing like it’s no big deal, because Rintarou sort of feels like he’s going to start vibrating right out of his own skin.
“So just to clarify,” he says eventually through a mouthful of cotton once he’s gotten his heart rate down, “you have a crush on me.”
He can practically hear the roll of Osamu’s eyes when he replies, “You have a crush on me too, in case you forgot.”
“You want to date me,” he grins, smushing his face deeper into Osamu’s chest so he can feel his glee. “That’s so embarrassing.” And then the grin drops, and his chest seizes up in a flash of blinding, terrible realization. “Uh actually, on second thought. I don’t think I can be your boyfriend.”
Osamu hums. “Why not?”
“Because then that means that we have to tell Sakusa. And that’ll mean that he was right.”
A long silence follows as this sinks in for Osamu. He wonders briefly why the thought of a smug Sakusa is just as heinous for him as it is for Rintarou, and then the reminder of the existence of Miya Atsumu slaps him full in the face. Maybe they won’t be boyfriends after all. Maybe their only option now is to skip countries and take on new identities as rice farmers.
“We can talk about it later,” Osamu finally agrees, “but I think you already know what you wanna do.”
“Do I? I don’t think I do.”
“Yeah, you do.” Osamu drops a kiss onto the top of head, which would be a lot cuter of a gesture if he didn’t yawn right into it.
And he’s right, he thinks as Osamu spits out a mouthful of his own hair back onto his scalp, and Rintarou makes a snorting noise through his nostrils unlike any other noise he has ever made in his life, he does know what he wants to do. Unfortunately. The rice farmer idea is tempting, but Rintarou is too pale and doesn’t eat well enough to handle hours of physical labor. Sakusa Kiyoomi will simply have to eat shit.
“Do you want to switch? I’ll tell Atsumu and you can tell Sakusa. Mix it up.”
“Oh yeah, absolutely not. Night, boyfriend.”