Chapter Text
Satsuki has known him forever, so of course she has noticed that he’s been acting weird lately.
She has noticed it, so when he tells her he needs to talk to her, she knows that it’s about whatever has made him act up nowadays.
She’s grateful that he’s finally coming to her with whatever is worrying him, because having an awkward Dai-chan is the worst—it’s unnatural, and creepy, and just plain wrong, you know.
When he starts talking, what he actually says is something she never would have thought in a million years that she would be hearing from him.
Suddenly, she can’t breathe.
She can’t think.
She can’t do anything because how is she supposed to respond to “I think I’m in love with you, so what do you say about dating me?” Coming from her best friend of seventeen years.
She can see that it took a lot of courage and strength of character for him to say that. She can see it and she appreciates it, but what the hell, Dai-chan?!
How is she supposed to respond to such a claim? What kind of question is that coming from your best friend, whom you can see as nothing other than a best friend, an almost-brother throughout her entire life?!
She’s in love with Tetsu. She always has been, and she still is when Dai-chan asks her out. Better yet, she doesn’t have this kind of feelings for Dai-chan, and she doubts she ever will.
“No” is the obvious answer.
And yet, she can’t do it. She can’t say that. She can’t turn him down.
Because, what will become of their friendship if she turns him down now, when he professed his feelings for her?
She can’t see any chance of their bond coming out unscathed from this, whatever she decides to do.
And it matters to her, because no matter how much of an asshole he can be, how selfish and demanding and outright annoying at times, she does love him. She loves him and she needs him in her life but not like that, and how is she supposed to reconcile how she feels about him with this sudden change of attitude from his end?
She must have made some kind of expression while she deliberates her answer because he snorts a laugh, rubbing the back of his neck—a nervous tic of his; something he does to relieve the tension he feels.
“You don’t have to look so torn, Satsuki. It’s not that big a deal…” he mutters, laughing mirthlessly.
His gaze wanders away from her, unable to look at her conflicted expression as she mulls his proposal over in her mind.
Oh, but it is a big deal, and she knows it is. It is a big deal because she can see how much the wait for her answer is excruciating him. How every minute longer she takes to think it through is making him more and more uncomfortable.
So, she decides she might as well speak up.
She tells him then, that she believes them starting to date will be a mistake. She still has feelings for Tetsu and she doesn’t feel that way to him, Dai-chan. She can’t see herself as his girlfriend, and she thinks it would be cruel to start dating him without having that sort of feelings for him.
She tells him she doesn’t want to hurt him, even though she’s well aware that simply telling him these things is already hurting him.
He hears her out. He listens until she has finished talking. He merely looks at her, with those keen, sapphire eyes of his. He looks at her for the longest of times; he looks at her until she starts feeling uncomfortable.
And then—then, he smiles.
It’s an expression that makes her breath hitch in her throat for some reason.
It’s funny, because she’s seen so many of Dai-chan’s smiles, and there is only so many variations of a single expression one’s face can have, and yet she can swear that she’s never seen him smile like this before.
He smiles, and says this.
“I know that you still have feelings for Tetsu. I’m not asking you to look at me and only me.” His voice is strained and she knows it takes a lot out of him to say something like this. “What I’m asking you is to take a leap of faith and give this—give me—a chance.”
She is staring at him with wide, unblinking eyes, as her heart hammers in her chest. It does because she’s nervous and she’s scared and she doesn’t know what to do or say, so that she doesn’t end up breaking something precious to her.
“If you dislike the arrangement, we can always just call it off.” He shifts his weight on his other foot and that smile is on his face again. The one that makes her breath catch in her throat. “You can’t know something is a mistake before trying it out, right?”
She swallows thickly as she looks at him and the only thing she can hear is her intermittent pulse in her own ears.
“Go out with me, Satsuki,” he urges her on, putting his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunching slightly. “Please,” he adds as an afterthought, his voice uncharacteristically small.
It’s only then that she realizes why his smile has this effect on her. It makes her also realize what her only answer in this situation can be.
She smiles shakily and nods shyly. Suddenly, he’s beaming, and her heart is still ramming against her ribcage in anxiety and worry.
But she knows she did the right thing.
She knows because he looked so vulnerable, so unnaturally unguarded and acted like he would be able to take whatever she decided for her answer.
She knows he was lying to himself, so she knows she made the right decision.
Living with the right decision, though—that, she knows, is going to be a lot harder than making it.
Becoming Dai-chan’s girlfriend, Satsuki believes when she agrees, is going to change everything.
After all, it’s such a huge step—going from being just the childhood friend who always nags him to being his love interest—that it’s impossible to think everything will continue how it has always been.
It’s that exact thought that keeps Satsuki up that same night after she says “yes” to Daiki’s proposal.
It’s that same thought that makes her restless the next day when she’s up after having had too little sleep thanks to having fretted too long over the issue.
When she sees him the next day, a piece of toast dangling from his lips while he scurries to put his shoes on quickly, Satsuki is met with an air of familiarity that she finds disconcerting.
The feeling is reinforced when he continues acting as though nothing has changed since the previous evening. He still makes the same pointless small talk he always does on the way to school, provoking her every now and then so that she can join in on the playful banter.
When they sit down at their desks at school and he slumps over his headfirst, Satsuki wonders if she perhaps imagined the whole scenario with the “I like you, please go out with me”.
That thought makes her feel conflicted again.
She doesn’t want to have worried over nothing.
“Satsuki, let me copy your math homework,” Dai-chan calls lazily while poking her in the back from his desk behind her.
She throws him a look over her shoulder, loading it with all her contempt for his laziness when it comes to dealing with important school tasks.
“No way. You deserve to have the maths teacher call your parents so they can know how much of a lazy bum you are.” She huffs, shuffling her schoolbooks on her desk. “Maybe when they take away your allowance for a couple of weeks, you’ll get your act together at last,” she adds complacently.
“Come on, please?” he almost whines, and she curses him in her mind, because she’s sure he knows how weak she is against this tone. “If you do this for me, I promise to treat you to those crepes you’ve been eyeing since last week.”
The pink-haired girl bites on her lip thoughtfully. He drives a hard bargain – that much is for sure.
She really has been salivating over the thought of the delicious crepes at the new store next to Maji Burger downtown. They looked really nice and very tasty, but they were also pretty expensive for her tastes. This was the reason why she hadn’t tried them yet.
Damn Dai-chan.
She sighs in defeat before digging into her school bag for her maths notebook. She passes it over to him, and his grin when he snatches it out of her hands is positively blinding.
“Fine,” she says in resignation. “But I am definitely getting the most expensive one! So you better be prepared!”
“Yes, yes, that’s totally fine by me,” Daiki says in a sing-song voice, already busying himself with the task of copying Satsuki’s homework.
His dismissiveness of her claim makes her wonder whether he even heard her warning.
The pink-haired girl sighs, chastising herself for once again enabling that loafer’s laziness.
“The things I’m willing to do for good food…” she mutters irritably to herself while she picks up her lunchbox from under her desk.
“Thanks, Satsuki, you’re a lifesaver!” Daiki tells her, passing her the notebook back a couple of minutes later.
She grunts around the onigiri she is chewing on, not feeling the least bit pleased with herself. Still, she decides to let it slide for now. Oh well—at least the crepe better be well worth it!
She doesn’t realize that she has completely forgotten all thoughts of how awkward today is going to be.
On their way out of the pastry shop, keeping her lip from pouting proves a somewhat difficult task for the pink-haired girl.
“You said yourself that I could take a bite,” Daiki points out, a smug smirk on his face as he walks next to her.
“Yes, a bite,” she emphasizes in a very miffed tone while glaring daggers at him. “Not a chunk.”
His laughter makes her want to smack him in the face.
“It’s not my fault that my bite is bigger than yours.”
“You took my strawberry,” she complains, getting to the root of the problem. “You could’ve taken a bite anywhere, but instead, you took my strawberry!”
He laughs again and she hears condescension in it. Before she can say anything else, though, he’s giving her a can of strawberry juice from a vending machine.
She takes it roughly out of his hand and gulps it down in one go. While doing so, she purposefully ignores the Cheshire cat-like grin on Daiki’s face.
“How was the peace offering?” he prompts once she’s already throwing the can in the trash.
“Insufficient,” Satsuki grumbles, much to the basketball ace’s amusement.
They end up taking the longer route home so they can pass by a convenience store. From there, Daiki buys her a popsicle—her favourite kind—and has one himself.
On their way towards their houses, Satsuki’s finally wearing a content smile on her face. She’s so full and delighted that she doesn’t notice that her face is being studied by her companion.
“Well, that was fun!” she says with a mischievous smile. “I should make a habit of exchanging homework for sweets and favours. Might end up being a lucrative business.”
He laughs at that, and takes a stride towards the front door of his house while she does the same. Her hand is already on the knob when he calls her name again to stop her.
“Not too bad for a first date, right?” he asks her then, with a smile so kind it makes her heart jump in her throat at the sudden change of the air around them.
The question first causes a chill run down her spine. That was a date? Really? She had just been on a date with Dai-chan, without even knowing it?
Was it still a date if she hadn’t known it was a date?
But before she can dig herself into an overthinking hole, she actually gives their afternoon some thought and a smile stretches on her lips.
“Yeah,” she agrees with a slight smile of her own. “Not bad at all.”
Becoming Dai-chan’s girlfriend, Satsuki finds after they start dating, doesn’t really change all that much about their relationship.
He still pisses her off when he’s being lazy and irresponsible, and he still teases her about various things, proving himself quite a handful and almost always being very high maintenance kind of guy.
And yet, it’s somehow more pleasant than it used to be before.
She can’t quite put her finger on why that is, but it will be a lie if she said she wasn’t enjoying it.
It’s two more weeks and several more dates until Satsuki finds out what it is exactly that has changed to subtly, so imperceptibly between them, but has such a huge impact in the whole way she perceives their exchanges.
She notices it when they decide to go together to the amusement park, and he goes off to get something to eat.
When he comes back, instead of having some snacks just for himself—like he usually would before—he brings her share of them as well. He hands them to her nonchalantly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world—for him to remember to get food for her, too.
When they go around, wondering what to ride, he lets her choose.
When they get hungry for real food, he agrees with whatever type she wants to have instead of choosing on his own, like he would have when they were still just friends.
Wherever they go, he’s always the one paying.
And, even though that has happened before, this time he doesn’t even make a peep in complaint—whereas before he seemed to get some kind of kick out of grumbling about what a “demon” she was for making him splurge so much while she had him at her mercy.
And there’s something about his nonchalance about the whole thing that makes him seem a lot more mature in her eyes than when he was just her friend.
It makes her realize that even Dai-chan—daft, selfish, a bit too short-sighted in the social aspects of life Dai-chan—is capable of changing, and of growing up.
She also knows that it’s because of his feelings for her that he has.
Maybe she’s something of a sap, but she has always believed that love has the omnipotent power of changing people. That’s why she knows that being in love with her is making him take steps into becoming someone she respects even more.
And, although it had been a fantastic couple of weeks to her—he’s Dai-chan, and he’s known her forever – knows best how to entertain her—the moment she realizes that he’s slowly changing and why, she starts feeling guilty.
She does, because even though she is enjoying herself, her feelings for him haven’t changed the least bit.
Plus, she can see that kind expression on his face and in his eyes that he throws her every now and then—as though she’s the best thing that ever happened to the world—and it makes her heart ache.
It does, because she feels none of that for him.
She’s still in love with Tetsu-kun, even though she rarely even gets to see him. Her heart is so full of the shadow, she doesn’t feel like she has room for the light.
And, leading him on like this… It’s just too cruel.
She can’t do it anymore.
So, with trembling limbs, she makes up her mind to have a talk with him the next day.
“Say what?” is his eloquent response, accompanied by the most comic rendition of his baffled expression.
“I don’t want to be leading you on, Dai-chan,” she all but whines out, putting her hands on the railing on the edge of the roof of Touou.
He laughs, amused.
“What part of this is leading me on? I was the one who suggested it, wasn’t I?” he reminds her, just in case she has forgotten.
She hasn’t.
Not a day goes by without her hearing that scene in her head at least once a day.
“Well, yes, but…” she relents, struggling for her words.
He quirks his brows at her, expectant of what she is to say next. His expression is the epitome of innocent curiosity and it makes her feel even worse, because it’s Dai-chan, and she feels like the most horrible person for doing this to him.
“I don’t want to be lying to you. It’s cruel and unfair and you don’t deserve it, and it makes me—”
He interjects on her tirade with a noisy slurp of his boxed banana milk when the tiny straw starts sucking on empty air instead of liquid.
He’s still smiling, very much amused when he opens his mouth to speak again.
“When exactly did you lie to me about anything?” he prompts.
His query catches her off-guard. She doesn’t know how to respond, her mind reeling. He chuckles and moves his gaze to lock with hers.
“Were you lying to me after our dates, when you told me you had a good time?” His question makes an almost-offended, panicked look seize her features.
“No!” she answers a bit too forcefully, as a result. “I wasn’t! I really did have a great time going to places with Dai-chan…” Her voice grew progressively smaller, the more she said.
“Then what exactly is it that you lied to me about? I do remember that you were rather explicit in your terms when I first asked you out. Was there something else you left out telling me then?”
She shakes her head. Her teeth sink into her lower lip as she considers what to say.
“No,” she acquiesces at last. “But that’s exactly why I feel really bad about this, Dai-chan,” she says in a pleading tone. “I can see the way you look at me sometimes, and I feel bad because I can’t reciprocate, and that’s just… It’s cruel. I feel like I am using you, and I’m starting to hate myself for it.”
To her surprise, her confession makes him laugh and shake his head again.
He takes a step closer to her, putting a large hand on the crook of her neck, steadying her, while his other tilts her chin up so she’s looking at him in the eye.
“Satsuki, thank you for worrying so much about me,” he tells her, with that same kind expression that made her feel nervous and self-loathing. “But you don’t have to. I knew exactly what I was setting myself up for when I came to you, and all I asked is that you give it a chance. I didn’t ask you to start working toward changing how you feel about me. I didn’t ask you to try to return my feelings.”
His hand at the base of her neck is warm and solid. It instils her with a sense of security she can’t explain. It reassures her and soothes her racing mind, garbled with worries and scruples.
“I get that it’s your thing—wanting to be in control all the time; having all the data; minimizing the risks and damage – all that kind of stuff,” he says with a snicker and she pouts up at him for the tiny bit of condescension she hears in his tone. “But you’re overthinking this. Way too much.”
He says it with a ringing laugh.
“You need to let go of that need to be constantly in control, and just try living a little. Try winging it, for a change.” His hand lets go of her chin. He takes a step back from her, giving her his best, smuggest smirk. “Let’s improvise this as long as it’s still fun, hmm? Stop worrying about how I feel, or how you feel, and instead, just enjoy yourself. What do you say?”
She blinks up at him with her large, magenta eyes, considering his words.
She knows that beneath all the bravado, he’s not as invincible as he likes to make himself seem. She knows best that he cares—and he cares a lot, about more things than anyone would ever believe he does.
But still, there’s something so compelling in his grin when he looks expectantly at her for her answer.
It makes her realize that although in this kind of situation, where feelings of romantic involvement are concerned, he’s out of his element and a lot more vulnerable than he realizes, he’s also not as fragile as she’s led herself to believe.
He’s Dai-chan, and even though it nearly destroyed him, he did manage to pick himself up even after what happened in middle school with Tetsu-kun. It had been ugly and excruciating to watch before he had properly worked through it, but he had managed it. She knew that even if she did wind up hurting him, he’d manage to fix himself up—eventually.
She gives him a shaky smile.
“So… just be honest to myself and you, and live in the moment, huh?” she asks in a small voice, and the tinkling laugh that it elicits from him makes her feel righter about her decision once again.
“That’s the plan,” he tells her, taking another sip from his boxed milk he’d left briefly at the ledge of the railing. The straw sucks on air again, and he’s once again reminded that it’s already empty.
She laughs as well when he grimaces at the box and crumples it in his grip. She nods slowly to herself.
“Yeah… okay. Let’s try winging it,” she agrees with a small smile and he gives her the most beaming grin she’s seen on his face in a while.
“Don’t worry,” he tells her, and it makes her feel a lot more reassured than she will ever be able to admit to him aloud. “I’m the master of improvisation. You’re in good hands.”
He’s laughing again, and he’s joking with her. She gets it, but still it sets her mind at ease to hear him say it, even if he’s just kidding around.
She knows it’s true, too. She knows, because his expression always morphs into that kind smile whenever he looks at her.
She’s in good hands.
And even though she doesn’t think she’ll be able to reciprocate his feelings, she can safely say that his heart was in good hands as well.
She has to admit that once she stops fretting over every little thing, Dai-chan is actually—dare she say it—a pretty nice guy to be dating.
The fact he cares helps a lot, too. Because he’s still Dai-chan, and he still says stupid stuff from time to time that makes her want to slug him one in the face when he does. He still teases her every chance he gets, and even though it makes her bristle sometimes, his ringing laughter (even if it is at her expense) makes it worthwhile tolerating his idiocy.
The fact he cares helps in that, although he’s still himself, whenever she’s cold when they’re out, he actually lends her his jacket without needing to be asked. He buys her things she never voices out loud she wants—even though she does want them; desperately, sometimes. He always has a plan for where they could go next, and it’s always fun, because if there’s one thing Dai-chan knows best how to do, it’s how to have fun and be completely carefree.
Being around him is easy.
He really is amazing in the fact he never shoves his feelings in her face, and when they’re laughing together like the idiots they are, it’s easy to forget that Dai-chan is actually in love with her, and this is a date, and people who date are supposed to be mutually interested in one another in a reciprocal way.
Dai-chan is a good boyfriend, because he understands better than anyone would give him credit for. He understands and he moderates his pace perfectly to match with hers. She is forever grateful to him for that.
Dai-chan is an easy guy to be dating, because she doesn’t feel weird around him—not unless she starts dwelling on their issues.
Their dates are not like that one time she went out with Tetsu-kun: she doesn’t feel ridiculously nervous around Dai-chan; she doesn’t stammer, doesn’t blush the shade of a ripe tomato when he’s close; doesn’t do stupid things when he’s around because she simply can’t properly control her limbs.
Dai-chan makes her feel at ease. Around him, it’s so easy to be herself. It’s easy to have fun, because in many senses, they’re a lot alike.
It’s nice dating Dai-chan, because it gives her reason to dress up nice.
Satsuki, being a girl just like any other in that sense, loves having reasons to prim up every once in a while. Being with him by her side is awesome in the way that, when he’s around, the creeps that sometimes try to pick her up or hit on her are never brave enough to step up to her with a guy like Daiki next to her.
For the first time Satsuki comes to appreciate that, most of the time, around others and in large congregations of people, Dai-chan has a rather mean-looking face.
Not to mention a very intimidating body build.
Being an all-year-around basketball ace for over a decade has been kind to him.
The days pass, turn into weeks, and Satsuki discovers something that she wouldn’t have thought she would when she first agreed to this whole thing.
Being Dai-chan’s girlfriend is very easy, and comes very naturally to her.
Two months after they start dating, Daiki and Satsuki are on their way home from their trip to the arcade, laughing and arguing about who was the ultimate winner of the evening in sum-up of all the games they played.
It’s like that they run into two of their classmates from school.
“Oh, are you guys on a date?” one of the girls asks, gaze shifting conspiratorially from the ace’s face to his manager’s and back again.
Daiki isn’t really the overly sociable kind of guy—he doesn’t spend much time with his schoolmates (especially the girls) and he rarely exchanges more than a couple of words with them before finding something more interesting to do.
However, when asked such a question out of the blue, he can’t help the small pause the query brought with it.
He shifts his cerulean gaze away from the three girls eyeing him curiously. He pauses, because they had never run into others while they were out before. He doesn’t know whether Satsuki wants others to know that they were together, or not.
And even if she doesn’t want them knowing, that’s fine with him—he doesn’t really care what others think to begin with.
So he doesn’t want to say anything that can ruin the idyll of their days.
In the short time it takes for him to make up his mind and open his mouth, Satsuki turns to the two girls and smiles coyly.
“Yeah, we are,” she says, making the girls’ eyes twinkle. “Just back from the arcade, where I kicked Dai-chan’s ass in every other game.”
She grins impishly up at him and he proceeds to interject that no, she hadn’t because she had lost in too many games against him for that to be true, and they proceed to exchange some playful banter among themselves and with the two girls from their class.
Their classmates giggle while listening to them, soon making up an excuse to leave them to their own devices, so ‘they can continue their date’.
Once they are alone together again, Daiki suggests that they go take a look around a CD store because there’s a band he’s recently been interested in, whose disk he wanted to buy.
It’s hard not to notice the huge smile on his face when they make their way down the street, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why it is there.
Satsuki tittered to herself, waving Daiki’s curiosity in what’s funny when he throws her a look.
Sometimes, he was so easy to make happy (ridiculously happy, too; just from her telling people that she acknowledges herself as his girlfriend) with such tiny things, that it made her grin like an idiot as well.
One thing she likes a lot in Dai-chan as her boyfriend, is that he does absolutely nothing to pressure her into anything.
That, in itself, is surprising enough. She would’ve pegged him for the aggressively forward and demanding kind of guy, considering how touchy-feely and completely disregarding he is in regards to other people’s personal space even with his friends and teammates.
One would naturally expect such a person to be all over his significant other; which was why his inclination of keeping their encounters entirely platonic takes her by surprise.
She often notices how easy it is for her to forget that he’s actually in love with her. She would probably forget entirely if not for those doting expressions he sometimes allows to steal over his face while he looks at her when she’s laughing like a maniac or doing something silly.
She sometimes sees couples, holding hands or kissing, and she takes a guilty look up at his profile—because she feels bad; she’s sure that he probably wants to do things like that, too, but she isn’t comfortable even thinking of those, not to mention actually trying to do them together.
He’s the master of distracting her whenever she starts brooding too much over such matters—he always drags her off on yet another downtown adventure just when she’s about to apologize, or say something unnecessary.
He goes along at her pace so perfectly, without missing a single step, that she finds herself giving him half-baked excuses for the hugs she gives him every time she realizes it.
And, even though she’s not in love with him, and he’s still an eyesore of a leech of her schoolwork and an incorrigible tease, she has to give it to him—Dai-chan is an amazing boyfriend.
Somehow, over the days after running into those girls, Satsuki ends up befriending the two of them.
It’s really rather funny how, before they saw her in that kind of situation with someone, they thought she was unapproachable and somewhat hard to talk to.
She blames being surrounded by loud-mouthed idiots like Wakamatsu-san and ill-tempered morons like Dai-chan for girls thinking that she is nothing like the rest of them, just because she is constantly around guys.
Having girl friends in class is something new to Satsuki – she has rarely ever made many, owing to her long-standing friendship with Dai-chan, who has a unique quality of scaring people away (again, she blames his mean-looking face in social situations), and her devotedness to helping her basketball teams out.
And, although it is new, she finds herself liking it already.
“Mo-mo-i-san!” a familiar voice called out to her.
When she looked up, surely enough, it was her two friends waving her over to come have lunch with them.
They were sitting on the blanket Satsuki brought to school ever since all three of them agreed they ought to have lunch outdoors for a change as soon as the weather allowed it.
As the weather forecast predicted the first sunny day in a long while, the pink-haired girl knew that it was time to take action.
This was why Satsuki was now sitting with her legs folded to her side as she took large bites of the tasty boxed lunch her mother made for her today.
“So,” one of her companions started in a demure tone, “how far have you and Aomine-kun gone?”
The question made Satsuki spit out the water she had been drinking.
“W-w-what?” she asked, sputtering, once she made quick damage control over the mess she’d made.
“Well, you know, Aomine-kun is always so forward and daring, so we were just curious…” the other one tried to amend, nudging the second girl in the ribs.
Satsuki swallowed thickly, averting her gaze from the girls.
“I don’t know what you guys were thinking, but Dai-chan and I don’t do that kind of stuff,” she mumbled, carefully digging into her lunch again.
“Not at all?”
“No,” she repeated testily, popping an octopus-shaped weenie into her mouth. “We haven’t even kissed yet.”
“What?” they both said in chorus, sharing a baffled look amongst themselves before turning back to her. “How come?”
Satsuki’s hand halted on the way to her mouth with the bite of rice in her chopsticks.
“It still feels kind of weird to me. So we haven’t,” she admitted quietly.
“But haven’t you guys dated for, like, two months, was it?” Satsuki nodded at that. “And he never even tried to take one kiss so far?”
“Nope,” the pink-haired girl confirmed, her lunch already half-gone.
“Maybe he’s gay?” one of her friends suggested then, making her laugh out loud and choke on her bite of food.
“Dai-chan is not gay,” she assured them, still giggling at the thought.
“How can you be so sure?” the other one shot back with a conspiratorial look.
So Satsuki proceeded to tell the girls about Dai-chan theory about women and, more specifically, women’s boobs.
“He could be gay but still like boobs,” was the response her tirade earned her, and it took her a while to recover from the laughing fit and the notion of her boyfriend being secretly gay.
“Seriously, though, you’ve been dating for more than two months and he hasn’t made a move to kiss you once? Never would’ve pegged Aomine for such a patient guy,” one of her friends said sagely at length.
And, unwittingly, her words got Satsuki thinking.
“Dai-chan?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m your girlfriend, right?”
He laughs.
“Last time I checked, right.”
“And you like me, right?”
“Are you trying to pick a fight with me?” he asks through bubbling laughter.
“I’m just trying to understand something,” she clarifies. “So I am your girlfriend, and we’ve been dating for over two months now,” she lists slowly. Then, she adds, “And you like me.”
“Right,” he chimes in, deciding to play along. He can admit to being vaguely intrigued about where she is going with this.
“Then how come you’ve never tried to kiss me?”
She can tell from the way he completely stops walking and his face is completely rid of any emotion that this is something he has given a lot of thought even before her asking him.
He turns to look at her, expression unreadable—his earlier mirth gone without a trace—but eyes intense as they bore into her.
“Would you want me to?” he parries neutrally, deflecting her question.
The silence that follows his query is deafening in their ears while Satsuki mulls it over.
For some reason, she knows that she’s suddenly treading on thin ice there, and she almost regrets bringing up the matter.
Her initial reaction is a reflexive “no” to his question—he’s Dai-chan, and even if he does feel that way to her, that doesn’t mean that she can just go ahead and nod her head to something like this. A kiss is a kiss.
But before she can say the word, she stops—because her ‘no’ is not the ‘no’ it would have been if he had asked her the same thing two months ago. She’s not even sure she wants to say ‘no’ to begin with.
That doesn’t make it a ‘yes’, either.
She is still in love with Tetsu-kun (or at least she doesn’t think that has changed; it has no reason to have changed). The one she’d rather kiss is Tetsu.
And yet, it’s not like she isn’t curious…
“I don’t know…” she admits aloud at length, gaze shifting to her feet. She’s confused and torn, and not just a little vexed with how complicated her life is all of a sudden.
To her surprise, he smiles and shrugs, stuffing his hands into his pockets nonchalantly.
“That’s exactly why I haven’t.”
“Huh?”
“I want you to want to kiss me,” he tells her with a somewhat sly smile. “I don’t want you to just be going along with the flow, accepting a kiss I want to give you just because you feel you shouldn’t say no to me. Because we’re dating, or some bullshit reason like that.”
She blinks in confusion. He’s making very little sense to her.
“I want you to want it, too. Not because I do, not because you think you should, but because you choose to.”
He proceeds to give her that same quirk of his lips that he gave her when he first told her of his feelings to her—the same one that once made her heart race with worry and anxiety.
And even though her heart accelerates dutifully at the sight of it, for some reason she doesn’t feel the cold chill that used to come with it before, nor the uncomfortable tightening in her belly.
The sincerity and tenderness of the smile no longer horrifies her.
“I want you to want me. So our first kiss, if you ever feel like having it, will be on your terms—or it won’t be at all, if you tire of me before it happens.”
His kind smile morphs into a smirk.
He turns on his heel and continues his trek towards school again, in a better mood than before.
After all, just now was his first time seeing Satsuki blush such a vibrant red colour at something he had said or done, ever since they started going out.
It’s just a small victory in his favour, but he’ll take what he can get.
Ten weeks after they start dating, Satsuki notices a peculiar trend.
It’s not really much of a trend, though—it’s probably the most natural thing in the world, but still, it’s very noticeable.
It’s noticeable because he has spent a good amount of his high school life with a perpetual frown etched onto his face, his brows seeming eternally fixated into a displeased crease. It has been so long since he last laughed like he meant it, since he has smiled genuinely instead of smirking like he is up to no good.
So, of course, she notices.
She notices that after they start this dating charade—because, really, what else can she dub it when he’s the only one with the large emotional investment in the romantic involvement—he smiles and laughs much more often.
She also notices how his change of attitude affects how people perceive him, too.
No longer is he the guy people always try to avoid, because his mean-looking expressions make them believe he’s a delinquent.
No longer do they traipse around him as though they are stepping on thin ice, trying to remain physically as far away from him as possible, because they fear for their well-being in his vicinity.
Instead, they marvel at his openness, share in his joy whenever he’s laughing raucously at something or someone. They realize that he is someone worthwhile getting to know better, someone worth getting closer to.
He smiles, grins and laughs more often, allowing people to realize what she has known all along.
Frankly, it makes her heart warm—to know that he’s finally healing after what happened in middle school. To know that he is finally moving on.
And whenever he smiles in the way that makes his eyes twinkle in mirth, she can’t help the curl of her own lips in reciprocation as well.
Whenever he smiles like that, it becomes harder for her to say that the only man she has eyes for is Tetsu.
But she tries not to dwell on this fact too much. Because right in the next moment, Daiki does or says something that ruins the moment, and makes her want to slap him and herself both.
She drops by his house unannounced one Saturday afternoon.
She’s trying to contain her grin of self-contentment but it’s hard when she feels so proud of herself for what she’s managed to do on his behalf.
It’s even harder to have a presence of mind enough to keep her feat a secret from him until she can actually come and tell him in person.
It’s hardest to admit—even just to herself—that the reason she keeps it a secret until she can tell him in person, is because she wants to see his face when he hears – admit that she wants to see him light up in joy and beam at her like she’s sure he will when he finds out.
Satsuki invites herself to his house when she finds that it’s unlocked and he doesn’t answer the doorbell after the fourth time she rings. She only has time to curiously peer around the living room after taking her shoes off at the entrance, before she spots him.
And when she takes in his appearance, she finally understands why he never answered the door.
He has just a pair of boxers on. His skin is still moist and his hair is dripping wet, matted in an illicitly becoming way to his forehead. The towel around his neck speaks volumes in itself about the fact that he’s fresh out of the bathroom, even if the rest of the details weren’t clue enough.
It’s ridiculous how hard a time she finds herself having about not staring.
It’s not her first time seeing him half-naked. It’s also not like she’s not used to walking around men in various states of undress—considering she’s greatly invested in a sport that usually makes the guys playing sweat profusely, and sometimes gets them to relieve themselves of some article of their clothing or another.
Still, for some reason, exactly because he’s Daiki, the guy she’s known her entire life, whom she (supposedly) can’t look at with the eyes of a girl, she can’t tear her gaze away, regardless how hard she tries.
The way the water droplets slide down his perfectly toned abs and limbs borders on the criminal in how distracting it is. She finds her eyes drawn to every movement he makes and how it causes the muscle groups contract in response, rippling with the effort of carrying out his will to move this way or that.
It’s like she’s mesmerized, and it’s really rather ridiculous, because this isn’t like her.
He greets her nonchalantly, oblivious to her current internal struggle his state of undress has caused, and he’s—naturally—curious what’s brought her over. He asks her that all the while rubbing the terry cloth of the towel to his dripping navy locks, drying them as best as he could.
His question sinks in with a half a minute delay or so, during which she is staring transfixed at the motions of his strong hands while he messily dries his hair—and is it really fair that something so mundane and normal as that has her staring so unblinkingly at him for no apparent reason? What’s wrong with her today anyway?
She snaps out of her trance when she wraps her mind around the fact he’s expecting a response from her—a coherent one, preferably. She’s grateful she zones back in before he notices how long it’s taking her to form a normal answer.
That’s when she remembers why she dropped by in the first place.
She clears her throat—hoping to clear her mind as well—and tells him that she got him something he’s going to like a lot. Her words are cryptic while she rummages in her back pocket for something, and he peers curiously at her from under the towel over his head, obscuring his view slightly.
What she takes out of her pocket is two pieces of paper, and he blinks in nonplus at her until he realizes what they are.
She got tickets for his new favourite band’s live show today.
Once it sinks in, he grabs her by the hands, looking reverently at the tickets in her fingers’ grasp. He stares at them for a while, probably wondering if they’ll disappear if he gives them some time to. She can’t help a chuckle at his child-like glee when he pinches himself to make sure that he isn’t dreaming this up.
Then he proceeds to grab her by the sides of her face, planting a sloppy kiss on her cheek while wearing the biggest of grins she has ever seen.
He tells her—almost shouts over his shoulder—to give him a minute while he runs up the stairs to his room to go get some clothes on, so they can go out early and get good seats for the concert.
She nods absentmindedly and tells him to take his time while a giggle tears from her at his antics. She stares after him even after he’s gone, and she tries not to dwell on why she does.
In wake of his departure to his room, she manages to ignore the small stab of disappointment at being deprived so soon—too soon—of his frame clad only in a pair of boxers while his skin still glistened with droplets of water from his shower.
She even manages to quell the surge of happiness at being able to make him so childishly happy and ecstatic just by pulling a few strings and calling in a few favours to get those tickets.
But however hard she tries to, she can’t manage to fight down the blush that dusts her cheeks, warmth spreading from the point where his lips had touched her skin.
Nor can she ignore the intermittent beat of her heart, skipping slightly, in response to his sudden, rather bold, advance in the heat of the moment.
Her unexpected reaction to the whole thing makes her wonder: if it takes so little to rile her up so much – just a simple peck on the cheek – how would she react if he were to kiss her for real?
She reminds herself, then, that he won’t give her any kisses unless she takes it on herself to take them from him. So there’s no need to ponder such things at the moment. She doesn’t want to kiss him, so there would be no kissing involved between them anytime soon.
Why was she so fixated on the topic of kissing all of a sudden? It was so weird of her, really. It’s almost as though she wants it to happen, despite knowing better.
And since when had being around him become something she looked forward to with so much trepidation?
Better yet, since when had making him happy over something she did for him become such a delight to her?
And why did her pulse refuse to slow down even after he descended the stairs again, fully clothed and grinning from ear to ear?
What an odd day this was rapidly turning into.
There are many things Satsuki starts noticing around the end of their eleventh week as a couple.
One of the more important things she notices is how many things she’s noticed about him ever since they’ve started dating—and she tries not to pay too much mind to that fact, or to look too deeply into it, lest she should start making odd conclusions and startling revelations that she’s not ready to face up to yet.
But one of the more peculiar things she’s noticed is that Daiki has a serious case of wandering eyes.
It’s not really news to her—she has always noticed the way his gaze tends to linger on some of the girls he passes by on the street, or meets in school, or wherever. She never paid much heed to it before, because it didn’t matter to her—she didn’t approve of the way he eyed those girls in an almost predatory way, but it’s not like she had a reason to reproach him just because he was looking.
Besides, with the clothes some of them were wearing, it was clear that what they wanted was for men to stare.
When she becomes his girlfriend, it becomes a lot more evident to her – his penchant for letting his eyes (and mind) linger on other girls they meet.
And, if she has to be fair, despite the fact that she is his girlfriend in title, she does barely anything that would warrant her the right to call herself such. Sometimes, it’s even a bit hard for her to believe how patient he’s being with her, how perfect his pacing is with hers, how well he coincides with hers.
So, really, in light of all that, a little case of a wandering eye after some prettier girls he passes by isn’t really something she has any right being displeased about—especially considering how heartless she is to him in some senses.
The fact she has no right feeling that way doesn’t stop her from doing it, though.
Whenever they’re walking around town together, and she’s right there, right next to him, and they pass by some girl with an impressive bust or very evidently well-curved body and his eyes linger upon her for a few seconds longer than normal, Satsuki feels this inexplicable stab of fury, along with a twinge of slight homicidal urges.
These feelings start becoming more and more pronounced the more time they spend together. She can’t help feeling irked at having him looking after some skank showing too much tail, especially when she, Satsuki, of all people, was walking right next to him, all prettied up and well-clothed just for their date.
She’s his girlfriend and even though, indisputably, she’s not the best girlfriend there can be, she doesn’t like him looking after other girls when she’s around.
The sentiment keeps growing over time, until the feelings the occurrence arouses in her become almost stifling in their force.
It’s most curious how she can be drowning in envy and seething mutely in rage, and never realize that the reason she feels that way is because she has begun wanting him to look at her and only her. She needs him to continue being in love with her, having eyes only for her and no one else.
Unbeknownst to her, it comes to the point the notion of him entertaining the thoughts of having other girls at his side upsets her to the point she wants to hurt something.
They’re in her room, watching a sitcom on her laptop while stuffing their faces with junk food. He’s sitting on the floor, his back propped up against the edge of her bed, while she sits on the end of the mattress next to him. They’re laughing more at their little mocking commentaries to the show rather than what they’re watching, and the afternoon they’re sharing is quickly becoming the best time she’s had in years.
She finishes her serving and takes a long, calculating look at his profile. He laughs at something the characters in their show do, and she realizes when he does how addictive the sound of his laughter has become to her. She can’t get enough of it, can’t get enough of his goofy grin and the stupid nonsense he says.
She stands there, next to him, as they lounge languidly as though it’s second nature to them, in her room, and she realizes—perhaps for the first time; at least in such clarity—that he’s not just Dai-chan, who somehow ended up falling for her; Dai-chan, who loved her as more than just a friend; Dai-chan, whom she was dating for the past three months.
He is Dai-chan, her boyfriend, whom she is growing more and more curious about, becoming more and more aware of, every day.
He’s Daiki—the person all her thoughts and musings focus on nowadays. Daiki – the one who haunted her every waking hour without knowing it, without having meant to. The one who patiently stood next to her, trying to never force his feelings upon her and quietly loved her from the side while she pined after other people who would never pay that kind of attention to her.
It makes her realize how much he has matured over so little time. It also makes her wonder – just how much did he actually change before she has realized it? How much did he end up changing so subtly underneath all the familiarity?
He says something to her, and angles his head so he can fix his gaze upon her. When he does, he pauses briefly, and reaches over to brush something from the corner of her mouth.
His touch to her face is brief and chaste—it’s lighter than a butterfly’s flutter against her skin, and yet it sets her flesh aflame.
Her cheeks flush with colour as he brings the piece of rice that has been stuck to her face to his lips. He sucks on his thumb and swallows the tiny piece of food while grinning impishly at her. He tells her something as he does, but she can’t hear over the roar of her pulse in her ears.
All she can focus on is how alluring he looks as he licks his finger clean, how sorely she is tempted to reach over and brush her tongue against his when she sees it darting out to lick his finger clean. She wets her lips unconsciously as she wonders how the texture of his lips and tongue will feel when meshing with hers.
She stares so long and so unwaveringly at his mouth that he notices before long.
“What?” he asks her clueless, mirth seeping in his tone. “What’s with the staring? Do I have something on my face, too?”
She wishes she can answer him, but she can’t. The only thing that’s on her mind is how tempting his lips are when they move as he speaks. Her thought process is completely smothered by the overwhelming urge to lean over and kiss him.
She gets so wound up in the notion that her pulse starts racing, her breathing rags. She ends up leaning in toward him before he can demand again what she was so adamant in staring at.
She gives in to the temptation because she sees no reason not to.
The kiss is short and somewhat unfulfilling—just a press of her lips against his. It’s somewhat infantile and nothing much at all, yet it still manages to make her heart accelerate even further.
As she pulls away from him, she notices the shocked expression on his face. She giggles briefly at it before gingerly putting a hand to his shoulder to steady herself.
“You don’t need to hold back so much on my account, Daiki,” she whispers against his lips breathlessly.
When she leans in to kiss him again, she wants to know if there’s any better than that first silly attempt.
She quickly finds out that yes, there is, when he actually gets his wits about him enough to respond to her kiss. She savours the fact of how much softer his lips feel compared to how she had imagined they would. She realizes all too quickly that the flutter of her heart in her chest is making this even more addictive that it already is.
The second time she kisses him, after he gets a grip on himself enough to be able to reciprocate, it’s like a dam breaks inside of him, or something snaps. It’s like it takes him a moment to realize what’s happening, to extrapolate what it means, to fully fathom what her impromptu action should mean to him.
And once it sinks in, his hand settles firmly on the back of her head, keeping her close when he deepens the kiss. His tongue brushes against her lip and she’s opening her mouth so readily to him before she can reconsider.
Then things start happening in a blur to her garbled mind, because she loses track of what is what very quickly. One moment his tongue is swiping against hers, greedily exploring and invading her mouth, the next his weight is pressing down onto her on her bed, pinning her between him and the mattress.
She realizes their kissing has gone out of control when the moan she makes at the mind-blowing emotions his actions stir in her body make him even more eager. He’s raining open-mouthed kisses along the column of her neck. Her back arches off the bed and closer up into him. Her skin tingles at all the points where it’s been in contact with his, and she feels like she can’t take a single gulp of air.
She knows that things have escalated quickly—too quickly—when he pushes her legs apart and nestles himself between them, all the while continuing to assault her mouth with those mind-numbing kisses of his.
She starts resisting and calling his name to stop him when she realizes that this is going way out of control way too fast. It takes her considerable effort to make him come to enough, to come down from his arduous daze.
He doesn’t hear her when she calls to him, his mouth planted against her skin, eliciting traitorous moan after moan from her. So when she begins getting scared she might not be able to stop him, she puts her hand over his mouth before he can continue whatever he has planned to do to her.
He’s heavy on her the way he has her pinned, but she’s grateful her action makes him pause. He halts and stares up at her with eyes wide and glazed over with lust. He’s just as winded as she is, breathing intermittent, face flushed and skin burning. She smiles shakily up at him, caressing the side of his face with the hand she’d used to block his lips from coming in contact with her.
“Not so fast, okay?” she utters gently, her fingers cupping his cheek tenderly. “Some degree of self-restraint would still be nice,” she tells him, laughter seeping her tone when she finally sees him get a firmer grip on what is going on.
He looks down at her and notices he’s had her sprawled over her bed. One of his hands is under her shirt, and the other is supporting most of his weight on top of her. He’s panting and breathless and literally left hanging, yet he’s repentant for having lost control so completely over himself for a moment there.
He sighs deeply, lets his head fall to the crook of her neck as he tries to calm himself down. Her breathing is laboured as well, but she hugs an arm around his shoulders and gently pets his hair while he leans against her.
“Sorry,” he says hoarsely against the oversensitive skin of her neck. It prickles with attentiveness to the way his exhales fan against her heated flesh. “I kind of lost it for a moment there.”
He lifts himself off of her and lies on his back next to her. His gaze pins to her ceiling as he finally slows his breathing.
“I guess I just got so happy you finally showed some interest, I lost myself in the moment.”
She smiles fondly at him, and leans in to press herself up against his side. He puts an arm around her immediately, as though on reflex. A feeling swells in her chest at getting to be like this next to him, and she knows that he’s converted her completely without her notice, somewhere along the line.
“All things in due time,” she promises enigmatically. She savours the way her words make his eyes shine. “Let’s keep it simple for now, okay?” she asks while she leans in to catch his lips in another kiss.
“Okay,” he agrees breathlessly before she swoops in on him.
It takes Satsuki three months of dating him to finally start reciprocating his feelings some, even if she’s just starting to.
But it takes her only two of his fervent kisses to get hooked on him and his ardour for her.