oh, reckless abandon like no one's watching you
and while our blood's still young
Sakurai Sho/Ninomiya Kazunari
AU. In which Nino is a hooker and Sho falls in love.
R
Absolute fiction
Cross-posted to arashirabu
1.
Sho falls in love on a Thursday night.
“Kabuchikō,” Aiba had said, pushing him out the car. “Where men get their dicks sucked without getting their hearts broken.”
It all seems rather seamy to Sho. There are hosts and hookers everywhere, and he gets hit on by two transvestites.
“Fuck,” Sho says.
“Alright. But cash upfront, if you please.”
Sho whips his head around, and there’s a boy standing behind him. He has black hair and he’s wearing a t-shirt with a pink Pac-Man ghost printed on it, and Sho thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
The boy sucks him off in a dingy alley beside a faded V6 Be Yourself! poster, lets Sho card his fingers through his hair and swallows till Sho’s cock goes limp in his mouth. Sho blinks at him through his post-orgasmic haze and he grins impishly, flicking dirt off his jeans.
Another boy appears, and he’s wearing what Sho thinks are velvet pants.
“Nino,” he says prissily. “We are late.”
“Oh,” the boy - Nino (what a cute name, Sho thinks, just like his thighs) - says, before hurrying after him.
“Bye,” he throws over his shoulder with a little wave.
Sho falls in love on a Thursday night.
2.
Sho is an economics undergraduate. He has two best friends, Ohno Satoshi and Aiba Masaki. One is an art major who likes to doze off on Sho during their shared anthropology elective seminar while the other has yet to declare his major, and whose current aim in life is to Help Sakurai Sho Get Laid. Whether or not this involves random hookers in seedy bars on school nights is irrelevant.
Sho is pretty satisfied with his life, most of the time.
He looks down at Nino, curled into his side like a kitten, and runs his knuckles gently down his cheek.
3.
One night, Sho finds Nino and Jun (the prissy one - he knows his name now) at a flashy karaoke house in various states of undress entertaining three drunken businessmen. Nino lights up when he sees him, and for the next ten minutes he ignores his clients in favour of making out with Sho. In their enthusiasm they jostle the coffee table and upset a bowl of beer nuts. Sho looks away from Nino’s neck long enough to see Jun’s eye twitch at the sight.
When it’s Jun turn to sing and he selects I Touch Myself (Electropop Version) Sho tugs Nino out of the room, because while Nino’s the one who’s mysterious and feline, Jun is the one who sings like a dying cat.
Sho finds an unoccupied room and fucks Nino slowly on the cleanest couch. Afterwards they lie side by side, and when Sho takes off his jacket to cover Nino’s bare legs, Nino blushes. Sho grins, triumphant.
4.
On Friday nights the Curiosity Team likes to head down to the oden place near Ohno’s house. The service is shit but the broth is of supreme excellence.
“I’m going to ask him out,” Sho says.
Aiba claps his hands, unable to contain his glee. His knee accidentally jostles the table and upsets Sho’s bowl of soup.
“Ah, so delicious,” Ohno says around a mouthful of konnyaku.
5.
The night before, Sho prepares a list of what he’s going to say, encapsulated in nineteen bullets and several sub-points. It turns out this is all unnecessary.
“What would you like me to do?” Nino asks, smiling, thin arms wrapped around Sho’s neck, and Sho is happy, so happy.
“Stay,” he says.
Nino’s smile freezes in place. He slides neatly off his perch on Sho’s lap, presses a sweet kiss to the corner of his mouth, and leaves.
6.
Over the following week Sho writes all his papers for the semester and drinks cappuccinos like it’s the only thing he needs. Aiba finds him huddled in the corner of the library and brings him a jam-filled granola bar.
Aiba is quiet for once, humming under his breath and helpfully brushing granola crumbs off page 137 of A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation. Then he takes a nap and leaves Sho to continue on his ambitious academic pursuit.
When it’s almost dark out, Aiba rests his chin on top of his folded arms and tilts his head curiously.
“Have I ever lied to you, Sho-chan?” he asks.
Sho is so startled he almost forgets for a second that he’s miserable.
“No,” he says. “No, you haven’t. Why?”
“Well then,” Aiba beams, snuggling further into the warm crook of his arms. “You should know that I have no intention of starting.”
Sho blinks.
“You’re not about to get your heart broken, Sho.”
“Oh.”
“Promise,” Aiba yawns, eyes slipping shut.
7.
Sho’s leaving for the student car park after his econometrics lecture when he bumps into someone.
“Oof,” says that someone.
Sho starts to apologise but when he straightens up all that comes out his a weak croak.
“Hello,” Nino says.
He’s wearing a hoodie with a green Super Mario mushroom and the term 1-UP printed below it. Sho clutches his books a little desperately.
“So here’s the thing,” he goes on to say before Sho can make an idiot of himself. “One day, you’re gonna come find me and I’ll probably be lying in a dumpster with spunk in my hair or bleeding to death from bloodplay gone wrong.”
“That is truly a mortifying thought.”
“Occupational hazard. I make no promises.” Nino shuffles his feet and stuffs his hands into his pockets. The tips of his ears are pink.
“One date,” he says. “You can take me out on one date.”
7.5
This is what Sho wants to say:
I can take care of you this problem. All jobs have occupational hazards, some more fatal than others and it just so happens that you’ve chosen one of those jobs. Wouldn’t you rather work in a safer environment, say, a comic book shop or perhaps even a decent bar? I can even deal with a bar, because I know how a little bit of sleaziness appeals to your less rational cognitive faculties and yes, your hands may be a bit too small to mix cocktails but it’s okay, you can just pour beer and collect tips. Or there’s this quaint little café near my campus, they’re always looking for new help -
This is what Sho really wants to say:
FUCK ALL THIS TO HELL LET’S RUN AWAY YOU DON’T NEED THIS FUCKING JOB AND WHO REALLY NEEDS A DEGREE I CAN BUILD YOU A FARM AND WE CAN GROW TANGERINES FOR THE KIND OLD LOCAL FOLK
This is what Sho believes in:
i would like to keep you, for an interminable amount of time
This is what Sho does say:
“Thank you.”
8.
Sho makes reservations at a nice restaurant that’s well known for their signature tomato hotpot (which offers seven different varieties of tomatoes to choose from, guaranteed to leave you Spoiled for Choice and Craving for More!).
“Do you think they have hamburgers?” Nino asks, once the waitress leaves them to study their thirty-page menus.
Sho is debating between heirloom tomatoes and campari tomatoes when he looks up. “Hamburgers?”
“Yes,” Nino says from behind his menu, now pursuing the exotic pickles section. “They are my favourite food.”
“Oh.” Sho tries not to pout.
“But tomato hotpots are good, too,” Nino smiles gently at him across the table. “Healthy. Expensive.”
Sho does not like to do things half-assed, and if he only gets one date with Nino he’s going to get the boy a hamburger, damn it.
“Come on,” he says, taking Nino’s hand.
An hour later they’re seated at the back of an old cinema screening The Sound of Music, eating Quarter Pounders and over-salted fries. When they get towards the end of the film where the characters perform in the Salzburg Festival, Nino hums along with the song and Sho pretends that he’s not charmed.
So long, farewell, Auf Weidersehen, goodbye, Nino mouths. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
9.
Sho tries not to think after dropping Nino off, just about how before Nino left the car he had let Sho kiss him one last time with tongue, how Sho could taste grains of salt in his mouth and the way Nino had clutched his shirt.
He drives around blindly for a while and ends up at Ohno’s flat. Ohno answers the door in his pyjamas, smiling in that sleepy, contented way of his, and beckons Sho in without a word.
They slump next to each other on Ohno’s old, old couch, and Sho unearths a 500-yen coin from beneath the cushions. They continue poking around and manage to find paintbrushes, a Dragonball comic and Aiba’s old porno that Ohno never got around to returning. Ohno makes a surprised noise and slots it into the DVD player. Ten minutes in, and Sho knows all that pussy on screen is not going to do him any good. He puts his head on Ohno’s shoulder.
“Satoshi,” he says.
“Hmmm?”
Sho gives a tired sigh. “He thinks the two of us will never work out.”
Ohno gives his head what feels like an affectionate nuzzle. “That’s his mistake, then.”
“And I’ve never let myself hope for something like this before.”
“That’s yours,” Ohno says, and pushes Sho’s car keys into his palm.
10.
Sho gets to Kabuchikō in record time. He begins to despair when he sees the throng of people but he spots Nino almost immediately, sitting on the sidewalk where Sho had left him, contemplating his shoes.
Sho nearly trips in his haste to get to him, and that’s why he sounds breathless when he says, “Let’s go somewhere. Like Okinawa.”
Nino looks up at him, eyes wide and lips parted slightly.
“Have you gone bat fuck crazy,” he finally says.
“I hope not,” Sho says, and if his smile is a tad manic, well. He bends down till they’re looking eye to eye and holds Nino’s hands in his.
10.5
This is what Sho wants to say:
Maybe we’ll go to Okinawa for a day or maybe ten days, maybe we won’t even reach Okinawa at all, maybe we’ll get lost on the way and we won’t be able to get back here even if we wanted to, we can grow tangerines or watermelon or fucking tomatoes, all seven varieties of them, perhaps we won’t earn a lot, even less than what you’re earning and less than what I’d earn after I figure out what to do with a degree in economics, maybe we’ll starve or maybe we’ll have enough, maybe we’ll be happy or maybe we won’t -
This is what Sho really wants to say:
- but I still don’t know what other Rodgers and Hammerstein songs you know by heart, I still don’t know how many of the t-shirts you own have video game characters printed on them, and -
This is what Sho believes in:
- you still have so much to show me and I have so many things to tell you, so -
This is what Sho does say:
“Please don’t make me end something before it’s even begun.”
11.
“I loathe any place near the ocean,” is what Nino has to say. Then, “Alright. I - alright,” breathed into the divot between Sho’s collarbones like a promise.
12.
They drive for ages and make their way out of the city without a map. At one in the morning they stop at a petrol kiosk. Sho buys Skittles and a latte for Nino while Nino tries his luck with one of the Gacha machines outside. He wins a Totoro cellphone strap and attaches it to Sho’s phone when he thinks he’s not looking.
Sho doesn’t know how much time passes, but in an hour or two someone’s probably going to call him, demanding to know where he is. They’ve been driving around in circles for a while now, Sho knows it and so does Nino, but it’s nice to pretend that they know where they’re going.
Nino’s dozing off in the passenger seat, wrapped in an old afghan. Sho leans over to breathe him in just because he can, and drives them somewhere where they can watch the sunrise.
Sakurai Sho/Ninomiya Kazunari
AU. In which Nino is a hooker and Sho falls in love.
R
Absolute fiction
Cross-posted to arashirabu
1.
Sho falls in love on a Thursday night.
“Kabuchikō,” Aiba had said, pushing him out the car. “Where men get their dicks sucked without getting their hearts broken.”
It all seems rather seamy to Sho. There are hosts and hookers everywhere, and he gets hit on by two transvestites.
“Fuck,” Sho says.
“Alright. But cash upfront, if you please.”
Sho whips his head around, and there’s a boy standing behind him. He has black hair and he’s wearing a t-shirt with a pink Pac-Man ghost printed on it, and Sho thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
The boy sucks him off in a dingy alley beside a faded V6 Be Yourself! poster, lets Sho card his fingers through his hair and swallows till Sho’s cock goes limp in his mouth. Sho blinks at him through his post-orgasmic haze and he grins impishly, flicking dirt off his jeans.
Another boy appears, and he’s wearing what Sho thinks are velvet pants.
“Nino,” he says prissily. “We are late.”
“Oh,” the boy - Nino (what a cute name, Sho thinks, just like his thighs) - says, before hurrying after him.
“Bye,” he throws over his shoulder with a little wave.
Sho falls in love on a Thursday night.
2.
Sho is an economics undergraduate. He has two best friends, Ohno Satoshi and Aiba Masaki. One is an art major who likes to doze off on Sho during their shared anthropology elective seminar while the other has yet to declare his major, and whose current aim in life is to Help Sakurai Sho Get Laid. Whether or not this involves random hookers in seedy bars on school nights is irrelevant.
Sho is pretty satisfied with his life, most of the time.
He looks down at Nino, curled into his side like a kitten, and runs his knuckles gently down his cheek.
3.
One night, Sho finds Nino and Jun (the prissy one - he knows his name now) at a flashy karaoke house in various states of undress entertaining three drunken businessmen. Nino lights up when he sees him, and for the next ten minutes he ignores his clients in favour of making out with Sho. In their enthusiasm they jostle the coffee table and upset a bowl of beer nuts. Sho looks away from Nino’s neck long enough to see Jun’s eye twitch at the sight.
When it’s Jun turn to sing and he selects I Touch Myself (Electropop Version) Sho tugs Nino out of the room, because while Nino’s the one who’s mysterious and feline, Jun is the one who sings like a dying cat.
Sho finds an unoccupied room and fucks Nino slowly on the cleanest couch. Afterwards they lie side by side, and when Sho takes off his jacket to cover Nino’s bare legs, Nino blushes. Sho grins, triumphant.
4.
On Friday nights the Curiosity Team likes to head down to the oden place near Ohno’s house. The service is shit but the broth is of supreme excellence.
“I’m going to ask him out,” Sho says.
Aiba claps his hands, unable to contain his glee. His knee accidentally jostles the table and upsets Sho’s bowl of soup.
“Ah, so delicious,” Ohno says around a mouthful of konnyaku.
5.
The night before, Sho prepares a list of what he’s going to say, encapsulated in nineteen bullets and several sub-points. It turns out this is all unnecessary.
“What would you like me to do?” Nino asks, smiling, thin arms wrapped around Sho’s neck, and Sho is happy, so happy.
“Stay,” he says.
Nino’s smile freezes in place. He slides neatly off his perch on Sho’s lap, presses a sweet kiss to the corner of his mouth, and leaves.
6.
Over the following week Sho writes all his papers for the semester and drinks cappuccinos like it’s the only thing he needs. Aiba finds him huddled in the corner of the library and brings him a jam-filled granola bar.
Aiba is quiet for once, humming under his breath and helpfully brushing granola crumbs off page 137 of A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation. Then he takes a nap and leaves Sho to continue on his ambitious academic pursuit.
When it’s almost dark out, Aiba rests his chin on top of his folded arms and tilts his head curiously.
“Have I ever lied to you, Sho-chan?” he asks.
Sho is so startled he almost forgets for a second that he’s miserable.
“No,” he says. “No, you haven’t. Why?”
“Well then,” Aiba beams, snuggling further into the warm crook of his arms. “You should know that I have no intention of starting.”
Sho blinks.
“You’re not about to get your heart broken, Sho.”
“Oh.”
“Promise,” Aiba yawns, eyes slipping shut.
7.
Sho’s leaving for the student car park after his econometrics lecture when he bumps into someone.
“Oof,” says that someone.
Sho starts to apologise but when he straightens up all that comes out his a weak croak.
“Hello,” Nino says.
He’s wearing a hoodie with a green Super Mario mushroom and the term 1-UP printed below it. Sho clutches his books a little desperately.
“So here’s the thing,” he goes on to say before Sho can make an idiot of himself. “One day, you’re gonna come find me and I’ll probably be lying in a dumpster with spunk in my hair or bleeding to death from bloodplay gone wrong.”
“That is truly a mortifying thought.”
“Occupational hazard. I make no promises.” Nino shuffles his feet and stuffs his hands into his pockets. The tips of his ears are pink.
“One date,” he says. “You can take me out on one date.”
7.5
This is what Sho wants to say:
I can take care of you this problem. All jobs have occupational hazards, some more fatal than others and it just so happens that you’ve chosen one of those jobs. Wouldn’t you rather work in a safer environment, say, a comic book shop or perhaps even a decent bar? I can even deal with a bar, because I know how a little bit of sleaziness appeals to your less rational cognitive faculties and yes, your hands may be a bit too small to mix cocktails but it’s okay, you can just pour beer and collect tips. Or there’s this quaint little café near my campus, they’re always looking for new help -
This is what Sho really wants to say:
FUCK ALL THIS TO HELL LET’S RUN AWAY YOU DON’T NEED THIS FUCKING JOB AND WHO REALLY NEEDS A DEGREE I CAN BUILD YOU A FARM AND WE CAN GROW TANGERINES FOR THE KIND OLD LOCAL FOLK
This is what Sho believes in:
i would like to keep you, for an interminable amount of time
This is what Sho does say:
“Thank you.”
8.
Sho makes reservations at a nice restaurant that’s well known for their signature tomato hotpot (which offers seven different varieties of tomatoes to choose from, guaranteed to leave you Spoiled for Choice and Craving for More!).
“Do you think they have hamburgers?” Nino asks, once the waitress leaves them to study their thirty-page menus.
Sho is debating between heirloom tomatoes and campari tomatoes when he looks up. “Hamburgers?”
“Yes,” Nino says from behind his menu, now pursuing the exotic pickles section. “They are my favourite food.”
“Oh.” Sho tries not to pout.
“But tomato hotpots are good, too,” Nino smiles gently at him across the table. “Healthy. Expensive.”
Sho does not like to do things half-assed, and if he only gets one date with Nino he’s going to get the boy a hamburger, damn it.
“Come on,” he says, taking Nino’s hand.
An hour later they’re seated at the back of an old cinema screening The Sound of Music, eating Quarter Pounders and over-salted fries. When they get towards the end of the film where the characters perform in the Salzburg Festival, Nino hums along with the song and Sho pretends that he’s not charmed.
So long, farewell, Auf Weidersehen, goodbye, Nino mouths. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
9.
Sho tries not to think after dropping Nino off, just about how before Nino left the car he had let Sho kiss him one last time with tongue, how Sho could taste grains of salt in his mouth and the way Nino had clutched his shirt.
He drives around blindly for a while and ends up at Ohno’s flat. Ohno answers the door in his pyjamas, smiling in that sleepy, contented way of his, and beckons Sho in without a word.
They slump next to each other on Ohno’s old, old couch, and Sho unearths a 500-yen coin from beneath the cushions. They continue poking around and manage to find paintbrushes, a Dragonball comic and Aiba’s old porno that Ohno never got around to returning. Ohno makes a surprised noise and slots it into the DVD player. Ten minutes in, and Sho knows all that pussy on screen is not going to do him any good. He puts his head on Ohno’s shoulder.
“Satoshi,” he says.
“Hmmm?”
Sho gives a tired sigh. “He thinks the two of us will never work out.”
Ohno gives his head what feels like an affectionate nuzzle. “That’s his mistake, then.”
“And I’ve never let myself hope for something like this before.”
“That’s yours,” Ohno says, and pushes Sho’s car keys into his palm.
10.
Sho gets to Kabuchikō in record time. He begins to despair when he sees the throng of people but he spots Nino almost immediately, sitting on the sidewalk where Sho had left him, contemplating his shoes.
Sho nearly trips in his haste to get to him, and that’s why he sounds breathless when he says, “Let’s go somewhere. Like Okinawa.”
Nino looks up at him, eyes wide and lips parted slightly.
“Have you gone bat fuck crazy,” he finally says.
“I hope not,” Sho says, and if his smile is a tad manic, well. He bends down till they’re looking eye to eye and holds Nino’s hands in his.
10.5
This is what Sho wants to say:
Maybe we’ll go to Okinawa for a day or maybe ten days, maybe we won’t even reach Okinawa at all, maybe we’ll get lost on the way and we won’t be able to get back here even if we wanted to, we can grow tangerines or watermelon or fucking tomatoes, all seven varieties of them, perhaps we won’t earn a lot, even less than what you’re earning and less than what I’d earn after I figure out what to do with a degree in economics, maybe we’ll starve or maybe we’ll have enough, maybe we’ll be happy or maybe we won’t -
This is what Sho really wants to say:
- but I still don’t know what other Rodgers and Hammerstein songs you know by heart, I still don’t know how many of the t-shirts you own have video game characters printed on them, and -
This is what Sho believes in:
- you still have so much to show me and I have so many things to tell you, so -
This is what Sho does say:
“Please don’t make me end something before it’s even begun.”
11.
“I loathe any place near the ocean,” is what Nino has to say. Then, “Alright. I - alright,” breathed into the divot between Sho’s collarbones like a promise.
12.
They drive for ages and make their way out of the city without a map. At one in the morning they stop at a petrol kiosk. Sho buys Skittles and a latte for Nino while Nino tries his luck with one of the Gacha machines outside. He wins a Totoro cellphone strap and attaches it to Sho’s phone when he thinks he’s not looking.
Sho doesn’t know how much time passes, but in an hour or two someone’s probably going to call him, demanding to know where he is. They’ve been driving around in circles for a while now, Sho knows it and so does Nino, but it’s nice to pretend that they know where they’re going.
Nino’s dozing off in the passenger seat, wrapped in an old afghan. Sho leans over to breathe him in just because he can, and drives them somewhere where they can watch the sunrise.