FIC: Glory Days, Yukimura/Sanada, NC17 (6/7)
Title: Glory Days (6/7)
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Sanada aims for the Nationals. And more...Yukimura/Sanada.
The room still smells of strawberry cake, ground into the carpet, by the time Jackal and Marui dissipate and Renji carts Kirihara back to their room on his back. Yukimura brushes his hands through Kirihara’s curls and murmurs something about “sleeping like an angel” as he shuts the door behind them.
Sanada snorts. “Akaya is no such thing,” he mutters.
“You said the same thing about me last night,” Yukimura says. Sanada blinks and flushes and stammers out that he doesn’t remember or know what Yukimura is talking about. A finger presses against his lips to silence him. “You were talking in your sleep,” Yukimura tells him. “Did you know you do that, Genichirou?”
The kisses start slow, with Sanada backed against the door. His head hits the peephole uncomfortably, pressing against the back of his skull, but it doesn’t matter, not with Yukimura’s hands making quick work of his t-shirt hem, pulling it over his head and barely missing a beat between wet, hungry kisses, growing with intensity as his cock strains in his pants.
Sanada sighs into the touches, into the kisses. Yukimura’s tongue glides over his skin, liquid silk and the feeling just as smooth. He closes his eyes, willing himself to memorize this moment with his mind, with his body.
They end up sprawled over the bed on their sides. Yukimura throws a leg over Sanada’s hip and rubs his erection. “I’m so hard, Genichirou,” he moans, then kisses Sanada’s collar. His teeth are sharp as he nips. Sanada hisses and clutches Yukimura’s hair, trying hard not to tug, and ultimately failing.
Yukimura squeezes his cock hard around the base, the tips of his fingers pressing into his sac. Sanada shivers. His legs tremble. He thrusts blindly and the sheets bunch up under his hips, under his feet. “I want you to…” he moans when Yukimura pulls harder, rubs harder.
“…I want to be in you again,” Yukimura pants. He pushes himself onto his elbows. One hand trails up Sanada’s stomach, the other remains steadfast on his cock, pumping and shifting and making Sanada’s eyes roll back with the building arousal, enough to make him pant, too, and gasp and groan Yukimura’s name.
“Do it!” Sanada grunts. His body shivers. His balls tighten and he can barely hold back. “Do it again and again!”
The grip around him clamps down. He chokes, orgasm on the brink and held back by a single motion. His thighs shake and his body flushes hot with fever, then cold with chill.
Yukimura holds tight. He presses his lips to Sanada’s forehead, a chaste kiss, when he reaches in the drawer of the table where they left the lubricant and condoms the night before. “Don’t come yet,” he whispers. “Wait for me.”
Fingers stretch him. It burns, slow and steady, and Sanada can barely hold back. When Yukimura slides into him, filling him, stretching him too tight, too much, to the point of almost-but-not-quite pain, Sanada digs his nails into Yukimura’s back. He groans. Their hips slide, slick and sticky, and his cock is hard, heavy, straining under Yukimura’s grip. He slips, and for a moment Sanada feels as though he is in free fall, floating on the edge of nowhere.
And then he is back in his body, gasping and arching and clinging to Yukimura as the spasms of pleasure rock through him, over and over and he clenches around Yukimura, who chokes and shudders and thrusts inside him, his own orgasm hot as fever in the cool air of night.
His skin is patterned with trails of saliva and come, sweat dribbling into the recesses of his limbs. The sheets are stuck to his back and his hips. His leg has fallen asleep and he doesn’t have the heart, or the mental capacity, to ask Yukimura to shift a little so he can be more comfortable. Sanada can feel Yukimura’s heart racing through his chest as their breathing stills. The air around them is quiet and calm. The air conditioning rattles, cooling their bodies.
It is the last night here in this place, in this interlude. They have sex twice more, maybe three times. On their sides, with Yukimura’s leg thrust between his thighs. Standing up, against the wall, with Yukimura breathless in his ear and Sanada fearing he would be too heavy for Yukimura to support, until Yukimura’s cock pressed against the top of his inner thigh and he couldn’t care about anything besides having it inside him again.
They might have done it one last time, an exhilarated, overtired and frantic fuck, with Sanada on his knees on the bed, buckling and bent over. His hand shakes as he pulls his own cock, Yukimura thrusting blindly into him, the only noises being their moans and the slap of slick skin, fast waves of orgasm rising inside and rippling through his cock, come smeared across the sheets when they collapsed down onto them.
The hotel telephone rings when no sun has risen. Sanada reaches for it, flailing a hand across the table. He grunts into the receiver. A cheerful message tells him it’s the hotel wake-up call for room 512. The phone dangles off the hook when the concierge finishes his speech. Sanada rolls onto his side and pulls the sheet tighter over his shoulders, curling foetus-like to conserve his warm cocoon.
Yukimura lies next to him, breathing soft and steady, until he suddenly flings himself from the bed. The sheet hits Sanada in the face. He pushes it off himself to see Yukimura walk, completely naked, across the room and rip the curtains open, sighing deeply in the grey light of pre-dawn.
He squints at Yukimura. “Come back to bed,” he says, but the words sound like a moan, a plea to his ears. Yukimura doesn’t answer, but opens the glass balcony door and lets the cold morning air flutter through the room. Sanada shivers. Too early, he thinks.
“It’s not too early,” Yukimura says.
“You heard me,” Sanada slurs. Yukimura hums in agreement and leans over the bed.
“Wake up,” he tells Sanada. “We’ve got to catch the bus at seven and you’re still in bed. Get up!” He rips the sheet away from Sanada’s huddle with a flourish and throws it across the room. Yukimura laughs at himself. “Is that how Atobe does it?” he asks.
Sanada refuses to laugh at this hour. The joke wasn’t even funny.
Yukimura can be very cruel sometimes. He uses the shower first, but not before he flicks on every lamp, every fluorescent light and even the light in the closet, just for Sanada. He lies there, squeezing his eyes shut and refusing to get up just yet. He’s not a morning person. Kirihara would say he’s always grumpy, morning or not. With consciousness comes the realization that his legs have aches and his hips hurt and his arm is asleep from where he thinks Yukimura had been lying on it and he’s sticky and gross and he doesn’t want to get up.
“Are you still in bed, lazy ass?” Yukimura sings when he waltzes out of the bathroom, dripping wet and naked. Sanada stares at him through slitted eyes, and takes in the reddish bruises dotting his chest and neck and even the bottom of one buttcheek.
His face burns.
Yukimura tugs the sheets away from him and grabs his arm, pulling him to his feet before he shoves Sanada into the bathroom.
He stumbles into the shower. Steam frosts the mirror and the shower doors. The bathroom is fogged up in a warm haze of clean soap and toothpaste and mouthwash and deodorant.
Yukimura can be very cruel sometimes. Sanada yelps when the first spray of water hits him, icy cold. In an instant he is woken up, fumbling with the showerhead, slipping on the tiles, trying frantically to get hot water.
Yukimura has used it all up.
He shivers and shampoos his hair. He washes himself as fast as he can, getting soap in his eyes in the process, causing him to yelp again at the burning pain. Sanada hops from foot to foot, sudsing one calf, then the other. His legs ache. There is no other way to describe it. His butt hurts. Last night catches up quickly. His limbs feel used and abused, as though he’s just played a 12-hour match against Atobe, and nothing moves the way it should.
It hurts him to kneel down and fish out clothes to wear. It aches to search under the beds to find his cap, flung off sometime last night, what seems like forever and only a moment ago at once. Dull pain pangs through his lower half, muscles and limbs stretched in strange ways, as he shoves his bags together, packing haphazard and knowing his mother will sort through his dirty laundry.
Sanada can’t find the little bottle and the condoms anywhere in his tennis bag. He pulls the drawer open, but they are missing, except those thrown into the garbage or mushed up in tissues.
“What are you looking for?” Yukimura asks from the doorway where he has dragged his own bags.
“The…” Sanada clears his throat, trying to remain calm. His insides twist with the horrible thought that someone in his family might open a suitcase, a tennisbag, and find them when he gets home. He’d die of embarrassment. Sanada stands up and stretches out his arms when a yawn rises. Breathe. Relax. “I can’t find the condoms,” he mutters.
“Oh, I have them,” Yukimura says. “Is that all right?”
Inwardly, he sighs with relief and nods.
Bags are carried out into the hallway. Yukimura gives the room one last check, then locks the door. Jackal stands by the elevator, yawning and muttering good morning. They shovel down breakfast in the dining room, rice and cereal and toast and tea. Marui steals a half-dozen pastries for the bus ride. Keys are dropped off at the front desk and at long last the chaperone reappears.
His neck is covered in more red bruises that Yukimura’s. And his hair is much shorter, making them all the more visible. Renji smiles at this and catches Sanada’s eye, and unspoken joke passing between them.
The bus arrives on time, to the second. Renji checks his watch and tells Yukimura. Kirihara is barely awake. He trips over Sanada’s tennisbag and skins his knee.
“If you’d worn pants, that wouldn’t have happened,” Sanada grumbles.
“I’ll get the bandaids,” Jackal sighs and opens his tennisbag. The pockets are stocked with gauze and candies and bandaids and change to buy Akaya’s good behavior.
“It’s too early,” Kirihara moans, rubbing his eyes, rubbing the bandaid. “Even Sanada-fukubuchou is tired!”
Sanada stops mid-shuffle to the bus. He stands stiffly and bites back the ache in his body. Kirihara has noticed the wince in his walk it seems. He pulls his cap lower over his face.
“Tired?” Yanagi asks. “Nfufufu…” He pats Kirihara on the head and continues to smile. “Maybe Genichirou should have gone to bed earlier, then.”
Sanada flushes. Yukimura’s eye twitches. No one else seems to notice, because the chaperone’s girlfriend has run down into the hotel lobby in nothing but a lacy negligee. She wraps her arms around his neck and they are both lost in a disgusting display of tongues and mouths and saliva everywhere.
Sanada notes that Jackal’s eyes don’t leave the girlfriend’s breasts, which jiggle as she and Ito-sensei kiss. Gagging noises are heard from Kirihara, who bolts onto the bus and turns away to stare out an opposite window. “Yuck!” he grumbles.
The sun has barely risen. Sanada ends up in the seat behind Kirihara, by himself. Light streams across the ocean, down below the highway, which winds towards Tokyo and Kanagawa, towards home. Everything is illuminated with goldleaf, blindingly bright and warm, although the bus driver has cranked on the air conditioning to a freezer-like temperature.
Everything is completely normal. Niou inserts himself beside Marui, accosting him for a pastry, the kind with jam and red bean paste. Marui shrieks and flaps his arms. Renji tries to ignore them. Jackal sighs and rolls over, covering himself with his regular’s jacket for a nap.
Yukimura stands and walks to the back of the bus. His eyes sweep over Niou, then Marui. He says something quietly to them, dangerously so, because they both shut up. Niou returns to sit beside Yagyuu, promptly falling asleep on Yagyuu’s shoulder as Yagyuu reads a novel. Sanada listens to the sounds of Yagyuu’s page-turning, to Kirihara’s handheld game console clicking, to Yanagi textmessaging someone back home, and falls asleep too, before even the smell of Chiba peanuts and the fishy, salty smell of the beach has left the air.
***
Compared with Chiba, Kanagawa is cramped and crowded with high rises and university students. The stale smell wafts off the canals. Sanada can smell it even at the school, as he unloads his bags from the bus. He thanks the sensei for chaperoning them, as much as he doesn’t want to, when Yukimura pokes him in the back.
Yawns are frequent, even in the early afternoon when they’ve arrived back home. Marui’s stomach grumbles as loud as the bus as it drives away and leaves them standing at the school gates, baggage surrounding their feet.
Kirihara picks up his backpack and tennisbag and starts to roll his suitcase down the street towards the bus shelters. Sanada sticks his foot out to stop him. “Where are you going?” he asks. “The school is back there.”
Akaya blinks, owl-like. “I know that. I was going home.”
“You have school,” Sanada snaps.
Kirihara shrugs. He holds up his index finger and says, “My mother said that I didn’t have to do to school this afternoon if I was too tired from the busride. And I am.” He grins from under his curly bangs up at Sanada, teasing him on purpose.
“My mother said the same thing, Sanada,” Niou says slowly as he hoists his lumpy duffelbag over his shoulder.
Sanada shoots Yagyuu a pointed glare. Yagyuu sighs and adjusts his glasses, but says nothing to stop Niou. “I won’t get your literature homework,” he calls out to Niou. Niou grins and shakes his head.
“Yes, you will!” he shouts back, just as a bus pulls up along the curb and he is gone.
Sanada, for one, had a nice nap on the busride and while his body still has residual aches, he drags his bags into the school and dumps them in his locker. He manages to make it to his very last class of the day after changing quickly into his school uniform. He isn’t the only one in literature- Yagyuu is already sitting across the room in his own seat by the time Sanada makes it.
He hasn’t missed much, these past three days in Chiba. The poems they are analyzing sound familiar, but it’s not until he’s walking out to the tennis clubhouse afterwards that he remembers Yukimura studied the same poem last semester, because he brought Yukimura’s homework to the hospital for him.
The nurses are fawning over him on the tennis courts. Sanada grinds his teeth at the sight of Yukimura surrounded by these women who put their hands all over him, as though they have the right to be touching him. Yukimura grins and bears it, as they ask him routine questions about his health, and what he did in Chiba, how he felt and does he think he’s feeling okay? Did he get too much sun because his face looks a bit peaked and pink?
Sanada grabs the handle of his racket hard enough that his knuckles feel numb. He glowers at the nurses. They don’t even notice him, or anything else, except a fourteen year old boy who keeps staring out in vain at the tennis club members starting to congregate on the nets for practice.
“Fifty laps!” Sanada shouts at them. A couple seniors titter and mutter something about the captain not having said anything yet.
“You’re losing your touch, Genichirou,” Yanagi says.
Sanada shivers, feeling a frisson of Yanagi looming behind him. He turns to see Yanagi standing placidly, holding a clipboard and pen.
“Do you want it to be sixty?” he shouts at the seniors. They grumble at him and he can hear the hissed “asshole”s under their breath as they start their laps. Yukimura stands beside him after a moment, and the nurses flutter off, pleased with their patient.
“Are you feeling cruel today, Sanada?” Yukimura asks him. “Sixty laps? Didn’t Chiba relax you any bit?”
Sanada snorts and tries to ignore the flush burning his face. He frowns at the tennis club members, all running concentric rings around the courts, a blur of dark yellow. But there are faces missing among the crowd. He has yet to see Kirihara lurking about, picking on first years. He has yet to see a head of bleached hair or hear the grumble of Marui’s stomach, or the dark sheen off Jackal’s shaved head.
“Where are the regulars?” he asks. Yukimura says he doesn’t know, but it’s obvious the entire regulars’ team, including Yagyuu, decided to take the day off. Sanada folds his arms and grumbles, “I’m not impressed with this.”
He, Yukimura and Yanagi are the only regulars present. The heat of late summer hovers over the courts, heavy and hazy and palpably thick. The school building shimmers, mirage-like, over the edge of the fences and tree-lined walkways to the courts. The cicadas have come out, full-blast, humming a rhythm that Sanada finds soothing, but one that drives Yanagi to stealing a basket from the first years’, dumping all the balls out, and rushing out to catch the offending insects.
Sweat slides down the back of his neck as he practices swings, demonstrating for a first year whose grip and angle are off, too haphazard and too much of a follow-through that turns his body. He guzzles water from his bottle sitting on a bench between rallies with Yukimura. A group of juniors cluster around the side of the court, eyes wide with awe to see their buchou playing, to see him healthy and here. Yukimura’s tennis is a sight to see, even during practice.
His socks fall down at the back of his ankles. His t-shirt clings too his body with the cloying heat of late August. The air stifles, no breeze for comfort. The sun shines blindly off the windows of the school, a hundred white-hot glass panes that burn onto the tennis courts. Sanada is panting, drained and exhausted by the time Yukimura finally calls for cool-down stretches. The ache from earlier has been replaced by a pleasant sort of pull in his legs and arms, the satisfaction of a good practice making Sanada smile.
Yanagi returns, a basketful of cicadas under his arms, and he stretches with Sanada. Sanada leans down low and reaches for the toe of his sneaker. “How many more do you think you’ll catch?” he asks. A fat drop of sweat oozes down the bridge of his nose. He pauses mid-stretch to wipe it off.
“In this part of town, I’d say there could be as many as ten per square metre,” Yanagi says.
“What are you going to do with them?”
Yanagi’s lips curl slightly and his teeth flash dangerously for a moment. “Give them to Akaya to throw into the canals.”
“You’re as cruel as any of the rest of us, Yanagi,” Yukimura says. Sanada feels the pressure of hands pressing on his shoulders, and he turns to see Yukimura’s eyes watching him from above.
The clubhouse showers and changeroom feels empty with only the three of them, but once Sanada steps under the spray of cold water, he doesn’t think too much about it, only that he ought to assign fifty laps each, in addition to the regular amount tomorrow for those skiving off practice. With Yukimura here, however, it might be difficult because sometimes he can have a soft spot for his teammates.
Not always, though.
A second shower starts beside him. From the distinct sounds of the slap of wet feet on tile, Sanada recognizes it as Yanagi. That, and the smell of his soap wafts through the damp air, of clean and fresh like a mountain spring. Perhaps that’s even the brand he uses, Sanada has never asked.
He closes his eyes and stands still, relishing the feel of the cool water moving over his warmed muscles. He listens for a third shower to start. A curtain is drawn back, but something is not right, not when he feels hands slide across his back and down over his chest, and a chin press into his upper arm.
Sanada stiffens in shock. “You…” he starts, but Yukimura stops him with a wet kiss, wet from the tongue sliding across his lips, wet from the water sliding over his cheeks and face and skin. Every sound, every touch is heightened here. Sanada wills himself not to moan as their lips make soft noises, as their tongues make sloppier ones when Yukimura presses himself against Sanada’s side and rubs his hips.
“I can hear you two,” Yanagi’s voice calls over the spray of water.
“Seiichi!” Sanada hisses when he pushes Yukimura off him. Yukimura licks his lips, but it only makes Sanada’s cock swell harder from the way the water catches on his top lip, from the way his hair hangs over his eyes in clotted locks. Yukimura’s eyes flick down, and he smiles. Hands cup his cock, fingers run over his balls. Sanada chokes on the reprimand now lodged in his throat.
But Yukimura relents, stepping back to shower beside Sanada, in the cramped and small stall, as though nothing has passed between them. He steals Sanada’s soap, he reaches for his shampoo a half-second before Sanada was about to, he takes Sanada’s towel off the little hook and steals it for himself, wrapping it around his hips. It brushes his hips the way Sanada wants to, arms around Yukimura’s thin body.
Yukimura’s towel is smaller and thinner. Sanada grabs it and furiously rubs himself dry with it, before walking out to the changerooms completely naked. If Yukimura can play with him, then so can he.
Yanagi raises an eyebrow when Sanada stands before his locker, in all his naked glory. “You might want to watch that mark on your neck,” he says, nodding to Sanada’s left side, “unless you want your parents to ask about what you did in Chiba.”
The downside of standing there naked is that every blushing bit of skin on Sanada’s body flames red at Yanagi’s comment. Yukimura has the grace to smile at him, proud of the hickey he gave. He is so embarrassed that he yanks his shirt on backwards.
Yukimura says, “Is everything all right, Sanada?”
Sanada twists his arms the right way out and glares. He buttons up to the collar in an attempt to hide the mark beneath his shirt. Yanagi walks with them to the front of the school, then leaves to catch his bus. Sanada and Yukimura walk the other way, towards the train station. He’s boiling under his school shirt, but he doesn’t want anyone else to notice the mark on the base of his neck. Sanada keeps reaching out to touch it, to feel the bruise blossom with a soft ache when he runs his fingers over the spot. The heat makes his bags feel heavier and his steps more sluggish, but that might be Yukimura as well.
“It was nice in Chiba,” Yukimura says.
Sanada grunts. The train platform rattles with an approaching train. His train, the easiest way to get home for him.
“Come over on Friday night,” Yukimura says. His hand brushes the back of Sanada’s as the train rolls to a stop and students and salary men pour on and off the platform, rushing around them, rustling the air and the damp hair that presses wet at the back Sanada’s neck. A shivers runs down his spine, involuntarily making him shake.
He nods and says, “Good night, Seiichi,” but his voice is lost in the din of people, and Yukimura’s head disappears as a second train rolls onto the tracks for the opposing direction, his train home.
***
Sanada eats supper and then watches reruns of gameshows in the evening with his grandfather and his brother. Home is cool and quiet and comfortably familiar, familial. He is careful when he sits, mindful not to wince when he shifts on the couch. Thinking of the dull ache deep down brings a flush to his face with the memory of Yukimura above him, their foreheads pressed together, damp with sweat and saliva. Even this morning feels like it was a lifetime ago.
His mother picks through his bags when he climbs the stairs to go to bed early. Sanada freezes in the doorframe. Clothes are spread across the mats on the floor and she stands over them, hands on her hips. “Genichirou, are you missing a pair of pajamas?” she asks.
He swallows thickly, praying that she doesn’t smell anything strange on his clothes. The new smell of sex. Will she know he’s done things- things with Yukimura- by picking through his suitcase? What if there was a rogue condom? What if-
“Don’t touch my things!” he snaps. “I can do it myself, okaasan!” She rolls her eyes at him and completely ignores him, piling up his clothes and lugging them out in her arms. Sanada refuses to help her with the laundry. Instead, he flops down on the futon she’s unrolled for him and stares at the beams in the ceiling.
The night is warm and a soft wind that flaps through his open window swings the rice paper lanterns hanging from his ceiling, the electrical cords flap against the walls. Sanada peels off his clothes down to his boxers and lies on top of the sheets, sweating and slightly uncomfortable. It feels lonely to not have a sleeping body beside him, as warm as Yukimura was. It feels lonely not to hear the lulling breathing of Yukimura in his ear. He misses the air conditioning of the hotel, too. He was spoiled there.
But he’s too tired to comfort himself with his hand. Sanada lies in the darkness, half-hard and listens to the faint honking of cars on the roads outside, until sleep manages to cast a net over him too.
***
Classes on Thursday feel like an eternity. The ticking clocks pass minutes like hours. English, especially, drains on forever until lunch comes. He meets Renji and Yagyuu and they eat their lunches under the archway of a cloistered hallway overlooking the seniors’ courtyard of the building. Yukimura and Niou have late lunch period on Thursdays. Marui and Jackal eat fried chicken and rice in the cafeteria, preferring to waste half their break waiting in the lunchline.
A sparrow chirps from a forgotten crevice. Yagyuu talks of an upcoming golf tournament outside Kanagawa, towards Osaka, that his father bought tickets to. Renji works on his physics homework that piled up over their mini-holiday. Sanada shovels down his leftover BBQ beef and noodles and sucks his juicebox straw. He chews on the plastic relentlessly, anxious for the day to be over and tennis practice to begin.
If the morning crawled, the afternoon oozes. The school is hottest then and Sanada’s classrooms are positioned on the unfortunate side of the school, where the sun beats viciously. Chemistry boils, the air as stifling as the smell of gas from Bunsen burners, glowing azure and amber, then brilliant emerald from copper. Sanada stops taking notes midway through the lecture. He scrawls characters on the margins of his notebook, like a schoolgirl would. His ballpoint pen is no calligraphy brush, but his strokes are just as fine, spelling out Friday and love and tennis and honour and when will this bloody class end?
The last bell rings and Sanada nearly jumps from his seat and runs towards the clubhouse. It reeks of sweat and Niou’s mouldering old sneakers in the bottom of his locker, rubber burns from tennis balls and griptape, deodorant and the faint metallic tang of steel lockers and gold-plated trophies.
Sanada loves it.
His chest tightens as Yukimura walks in with Marui, who throws an arm over his shoulder and pops bubbles loudly. Sometimes, he almost wishes he could be as open with Yukimura as Marui or some of the other regulars. His hands itch to reach out and run down Yukimura’s back. His eyes focus on the line of his spine that shows when Yukimura pulls off his school shirt. He stands with his back to Sanada. The fluorescent light overhead heightens the fading marks and bruises and streaking claws of his skin, evidence of their nights together.
Sanada squashes the urge and crosses his arms. He narrows his eyes at Marui, who pops bubbles happily between tying his shoelaces, right, then left foot. “You missed practice yesterday,” he tells Marui.
Yukimura lifts his head and an eyebrow too.
“How many laps extra are you giving them for truancy?” Sanada asks.
“I’ll excuse them for now,” Yukimura says.
Kirihara sticks his tongue out at Sanada, then grins. “Buchou is nice and understanding,” he says, sing-song as he slings his racket over his shoulder.
Sanada makes sure to go out of his way to ask Kirihara for a rally after swing practice. Kirihara stares at him, bug-eyed with disbelief, then chuckles darkly. Sanada also makes sure to use his ka, burning Kirihara’s knuckle serves with fast, fierce spins just to make him angry, just to sate his desire to silence Kirihara’s bratty retorts.
“That was supposed to be a rally!” Kirihara shouts. He throws his racket to the ground and stomps around in a circle. “You aren’t supposed to do that, Sanada-fukubuchou!”
Sanada smiles from under the shady brim of his cap.
***
Friday dawns with the promise of something more. Two days since he’s done anything more than pass Yukimura a waterbottle after practice, or a towel on the bench. He’s fifteen, as much as he forgets it sometimes, and he’s as desperate for sex as any other teenage boy. He dreams of Yukimura on cotton sheets, flushed with desire and moaning his name, “Genichirou, Genichirou, I want you so much, Genichirou.” He dreams of touches that make his legs shake and his cock twitch, he dreams of that gloriously full feeling of being stretched and invaded himself, of their two bodies, pulsing and panting, of Yukimura thrusting up into him and hitting that place that made him gasp and buckle and come harder than he’d ever come before.
His mother wakes him up to tell him breakfast is ready. Sanada buries his head under a pillow and grumbles, bitter that the dream has been broken, irritated that he probably doesn’t have time to curl his hand around his erection and get rid of his morning erection before eating.
He sits uncomfortable and sullen at the table. His brother smiles widely, scooping a large bowl of rice and humming to himself. “Don’t look so miserable, Genichirou,” he chirps. “Your face will stick in that scowl.”
Sanada glowers.
“Or maybe it already has?” his brother offers.
Under the table, Sanada kicks him in the shin.
On their way out the door to respective bus stops, his brother elbows him in the gut. It still smarts when Sanada walks through the doors of Rikkai Dai junior high, but he’s not going to admit that to anyone.
It rains all day, the world a humid, sticky place of late August. Yukimura runs practice late and they stay inside one of the school gymnasiums, taking turns with the ball machines in groups of two. They run laps around the basketball circuits. They practice swings, carefully staggered in this cramped indoor place. The rain falls, a soft staccato beat on the metal roof over their heads. The regulars retreat to the clubhouse for a few reps on the bench press and leg press. Sanada does two hundred sit-ups on the rubber floor mats, then one hundred push-ups.
They stretch. They shower. They dress. Jackal locks the clubhouse up for the night, and then they go home. Sanada takes Yukimura’s bus with him, but the salary men have come out, so they stand squashed by the backdoor of the bus, sweating and damp from the shower, damp from the drizzling rain that sticks to everything along with Sanada’s schoolshirt. It’s hot, it’s miserable, and he is glad to step off the bus with Yukimura.
Neither have an umbrella with them. Yukimura covers his head with the school newspaper Sanada offers him, last week’s issue, forgotten in the bottom of his backpack. “There’s room for you,” Yukimura says, but Sanada just shakes his head. His cap will do. The rain has slackened and there is no point to huddle under anything, not when it comes from all directions, a hazy mist that sits heavy through the streets.
Yukimura’s mother hands them both towels when they reach the house. She ushers them inside and asks Sanada to stay for supper. They sit on Yukimura’s bedroom floor with towels over their heads in front of a portable fan. The fan hums and rattles and moves semicircular between the two of them. Sanada shivers when the blast of air hits his arms, all the little hairs standing on end.
With a click, Yukimura’s door is closed. He walks back to Sanada and kneels down, straddling his lap with one thigh to either side and his hands in Sanada’s hair. They kiss slowly as the fan blows air through their hair, whipping it up together as lips slide over lips and tongues. Sanada leans back against the bed and pushes his hips up into Yukimura’s erection. Yukimura’s back is clammy when he pushes a hand under the hem of his shirt. Sanada’s fingers climb higher and his one hand moves to the front buttons, then Yukimura pulls back.
“It’s supper, Genichirou,” he says.
Shirts and pants are smoothed out. Hair is patted down. Mouths are wiped clean of saliva. Sanada makes for the doorway when a sharp grip pulls him back for one last kiss, as hot as the air around them, and just as cloying.
He thinks of it during dinner, when cold soba and chilled green tea are passed around. He tries not to blush when Yukimura’s sister asks him questions about Chiba, of seashells on the beach and the hotel that Sanada didn’t pay much attention to because he was too busy having sex with her brother. The grilled unagi is delicious. Sanada thanks Yukimura’s mother for inviting him, but she waves them both off before he can offer to help with dishes.
“Do you mind if I weed a bit?” Yukimura asks. “The ground will be damp and easy to pull the roots now.”
He shakes his head. Once they step into the garden Yukimura grumbles that his parents didn’t help weed while he was away and look, Sanada, how overgrown the geraniums are! Sanada doesn’t know what Yukimura is talking about. All he can see are beautiful orange and purple blossoms between swags of green. He stands by the magnolia tree. The fat leaves brush his rolled up sleeve as he holds a spare trowel for Yukimura. If he were to attack the weeds, he’d as like dig up one of Yukimura’s flowers as an unwanted invader.
There is a fuschia plant with dripping scarlet buds, and bushy ferns that hide tiny ground-creeping vines. Yukimura frowns and rips sprigs of green between the leaves, throwing them onto the stony path that winds through the small yard. He breaks up the dirt at the base of a lemon tree with the same look of determination as he would in tennis, only now the sharp scent of citrus fills the air, rather than rubbery griptape.
His hands are black with earth by the time he sits back on his heels, satisfied with the pile of weeds behind him. They sit on the tiny porch and dangle their feet into the leaves of a dwarf maple tree, which Sanada only recognizes because of the leaves: smoky crimson fingers that tickle their skin. The bells of a wind chime sway and tingle above their heads, catching the late evening breeze. Everything is glittering with the purple glow of dusk, and a hundred thousand diamond-shining droplets of rain, suffused in the air.
Yukimura’s sister flops down between them with a tray of sliced watermelon. It is sweet and juicy and Sanada runs the taste over his tongue, savouring it, savouring the peaceful feeling, despite the jabbering of a ten year old girl in his ear.
When she leaves and the screendoor slams shut behind her, Yukimura scoots closer and taps Sanada’s ankle with his bare toes. “Saa, Sanada,” he whispers, “do you have any fantasies?”
The piece of watermelon he had been chewing on goes down the wrong way when Sanada coughs. “What?” he chokes out, pounding his chest to make the melon move.
“Fantasies,” Yukimura clarifies. “What are yours?” He places a hand on Sanada’s knee. Inky earth rims his fingernails as he drums them lightly. He remembers the dreams of calligraphy, of Yukimura waist-deep in black, black ink.
“Your family is-”
“You can tell me. Do you want to hear mine?” Yukimura turns around quickly, then licks a wet path up the side of Sanada’s cheek. He shivers. His pants feel too tight. It is getting harder to think with Yukimura’s hand inches up the inside of his thigh and strokes the outline his hardening cock forms.
Whatever protest Sanada is too transfixed to make, Yukimura would ignore anyway. “Sometimes,” he says in a low voice, “I wonder what it would be like to see you down on your knees in front of me in the changerooms. You would still be sweaty and red from tennis and we’d be the only ones there, still in our uniforms.” Yukimura laughs, a sound to rival the chiming bells on the breeze. He smacks Sanada on the thigh, bringing Sanada from a momentary reverie. “Now, what’s yours?”
Sanada’s jaw has gone slack and his mouth has stopped working. He’s as eloquent as Kirihara when he sits there blinking at Yukimura and making nonsensical guttural noises. “Y-Yukimura,” he says. A hand presses against his lower back and reaches under the hem of his shirt. Cool fingers bite his hot, sticky skin at the base of his spine. He closes his eyes and sighs.
“Yukimura…”
“You can tell me, ne?” Yukimura whispers. “Do you want me on my knees? Do you want me to dress up? Do you want me tied up and struggling? Do you-”
“Seiichi, stop!” Sanada pleads, his voice barely above a whisper in case Yukimura’s family might hear them. “If someone-”
“If you tell me, I’d do it,” Yukimura says. “Tell me. Anything.” Yukimura frowns for a moment and a thin line forms on his forehead. “Except Atobe,” he adds.
Sanada shudders. “There is no Atobe,” he mumbles, trying to wipe an image of Atobe strutting around in nothing but a purple feather boa from his mind. “No, Yukimura, I…” he sighs heavily, more like a groan than anything else. “I had a dream once where…with ink and…” It is hard for Sanada to say the words because he doesn’t really know what Yukimura wants from him. The dream was arousing, even now thinking about it, his skin feels flushed with desire.
Yukimura’s hands have danced up to the back of his neck. They toy with his hair, moving slowly through it, soft against his scalp. Sanada closes his eyes once more, sighing into the feeling of peace, of comfort, as those fingers comb through his hair, removing his cap and guiding his head to Yukimura’s shoulders. He relents and lets himself fall. For a moment.
“You can paint all over my body,” Yukimura says. The wind carries his words into the sepia-tinged glow of dusk. Sanada can barely make it home that evening, because his legs don’t work right, not with Yukimura’s words echoing in his mind.
You can paint all over my body.
Author: Ociwen
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: Konomi owns all.
Summary: Sanada aims for the Nationals. And more...Yukimura/Sanada.
The room still smells of strawberry cake, ground into the carpet, by the time Jackal and Marui dissipate and Renji carts Kirihara back to their room on his back. Yukimura brushes his hands through Kirihara’s curls and murmurs something about “sleeping like an angel” as he shuts the door behind them.
Sanada snorts. “Akaya is no such thing,” he mutters.
“You said the same thing about me last night,” Yukimura says. Sanada blinks and flushes and stammers out that he doesn’t remember or know what Yukimura is talking about. A finger presses against his lips to silence him. “You were talking in your sleep,” Yukimura tells him. “Did you know you do that, Genichirou?”
The kisses start slow, with Sanada backed against the door. His head hits the peephole uncomfortably, pressing against the back of his skull, but it doesn’t matter, not with Yukimura’s hands making quick work of his t-shirt hem, pulling it over his head and barely missing a beat between wet, hungry kisses, growing with intensity as his cock strains in his pants.
Sanada sighs into the touches, into the kisses. Yukimura’s tongue glides over his skin, liquid silk and the feeling just as smooth. He closes his eyes, willing himself to memorize this moment with his mind, with his body.
They end up sprawled over the bed on their sides. Yukimura throws a leg over Sanada’s hip and rubs his erection. “I’m so hard, Genichirou,” he moans, then kisses Sanada’s collar. His teeth are sharp as he nips. Sanada hisses and clutches Yukimura’s hair, trying hard not to tug, and ultimately failing.
Yukimura squeezes his cock hard around the base, the tips of his fingers pressing into his sac. Sanada shivers. His legs tremble. He thrusts blindly and the sheets bunch up under his hips, under his feet. “I want you to…” he moans when Yukimura pulls harder, rubs harder.
“…I want to be in you again,” Yukimura pants. He pushes himself onto his elbows. One hand trails up Sanada’s stomach, the other remains steadfast on his cock, pumping and shifting and making Sanada’s eyes roll back with the building arousal, enough to make him pant, too, and gasp and groan Yukimura’s name.
“Do it!” Sanada grunts. His body shivers. His balls tighten and he can barely hold back. “Do it again and again!”
The grip around him clamps down. He chokes, orgasm on the brink and held back by a single motion. His thighs shake and his body flushes hot with fever, then cold with chill.
Yukimura holds tight. He presses his lips to Sanada’s forehead, a chaste kiss, when he reaches in the drawer of the table where they left the lubricant and condoms the night before. “Don’t come yet,” he whispers. “Wait for me.”
Fingers stretch him. It burns, slow and steady, and Sanada can barely hold back. When Yukimura slides into him, filling him, stretching him too tight, too much, to the point of almost-but-not-quite pain, Sanada digs his nails into Yukimura’s back. He groans. Their hips slide, slick and sticky, and his cock is hard, heavy, straining under Yukimura’s grip. He slips, and for a moment Sanada feels as though he is in free fall, floating on the edge of nowhere.
And then he is back in his body, gasping and arching and clinging to Yukimura as the spasms of pleasure rock through him, over and over and he clenches around Yukimura, who chokes and shudders and thrusts inside him, his own orgasm hot as fever in the cool air of night.
His skin is patterned with trails of saliva and come, sweat dribbling into the recesses of his limbs. The sheets are stuck to his back and his hips. His leg has fallen asleep and he doesn’t have the heart, or the mental capacity, to ask Yukimura to shift a little so he can be more comfortable. Sanada can feel Yukimura’s heart racing through his chest as their breathing stills. The air around them is quiet and calm. The air conditioning rattles, cooling their bodies.
It is the last night here in this place, in this interlude. They have sex twice more, maybe three times. On their sides, with Yukimura’s leg thrust between his thighs. Standing up, against the wall, with Yukimura breathless in his ear and Sanada fearing he would be too heavy for Yukimura to support, until Yukimura’s cock pressed against the top of his inner thigh and he couldn’t care about anything besides having it inside him again.
They might have done it one last time, an exhilarated, overtired and frantic fuck, with Sanada on his knees on the bed, buckling and bent over. His hand shakes as he pulls his own cock, Yukimura thrusting blindly into him, the only noises being their moans and the slap of slick skin, fast waves of orgasm rising inside and rippling through his cock, come smeared across the sheets when they collapsed down onto them.
The hotel telephone rings when no sun has risen. Sanada reaches for it, flailing a hand across the table. He grunts into the receiver. A cheerful message tells him it’s the hotel wake-up call for room 512. The phone dangles off the hook when the concierge finishes his speech. Sanada rolls onto his side and pulls the sheet tighter over his shoulders, curling foetus-like to conserve his warm cocoon.
Yukimura lies next to him, breathing soft and steady, until he suddenly flings himself from the bed. The sheet hits Sanada in the face. He pushes it off himself to see Yukimura walk, completely naked, across the room and rip the curtains open, sighing deeply in the grey light of pre-dawn.
He squints at Yukimura. “Come back to bed,” he says, but the words sound like a moan, a plea to his ears. Yukimura doesn’t answer, but opens the glass balcony door and lets the cold morning air flutter through the room. Sanada shivers. Too early, he thinks.
“It’s not too early,” Yukimura says.
“You heard me,” Sanada slurs. Yukimura hums in agreement and leans over the bed.
“Wake up,” he tells Sanada. “We’ve got to catch the bus at seven and you’re still in bed. Get up!” He rips the sheet away from Sanada’s huddle with a flourish and throws it across the room. Yukimura laughs at himself. “Is that how Atobe does it?” he asks.
Sanada refuses to laugh at this hour. The joke wasn’t even funny.
Yukimura can be very cruel sometimes. He uses the shower first, but not before he flicks on every lamp, every fluorescent light and even the light in the closet, just for Sanada. He lies there, squeezing his eyes shut and refusing to get up just yet. He’s not a morning person. Kirihara would say he’s always grumpy, morning or not. With consciousness comes the realization that his legs have aches and his hips hurt and his arm is asleep from where he thinks Yukimura had been lying on it and he’s sticky and gross and he doesn’t want to get up.
“Are you still in bed, lazy ass?” Yukimura sings when he waltzes out of the bathroom, dripping wet and naked. Sanada stares at him through slitted eyes, and takes in the reddish bruises dotting his chest and neck and even the bottom of one buttcheek.
His face burns.
Yukimura tugs the sheets away from him and grabs his arm, pulling him to his feet before he shoves Sanada into the bathroom.
He stumbles into the shower. Steam frosts the mirror and the shower doors. The bathroom is fogged up in a warm haze of clean soap and toothpaste and mouthwash and deodorant.
Yukimura can be very cruel sometimes. Sanada yelps when the first spray of water hits him, icy cold. In an instant he is woken up, fumbling with the showerhead, slipping on the tiles, trying frantically to get hot water.
Yukimura has used it all up.
He shivers and shampoos his hair. He washes himself as fast as he can, getting soap in his eyes in the process, causing him to yelp again at the burning pain. Sanada hops from foot to foot, sudsing one calf, then the other. His legs ache. There is no other way to describe it. His butt hurts. Last night catches up quickly. His limbs feel used and abused, as though he’s just played a 12-hour match against Atobe, and nothing moves the way it should.
It hurts him to kneel down and fish out clothes to wear. It aches to search under the beds to find his cap, flung off sometime last night, what seems like forever and only a moment ago at once. Dull pain pangs through his lower half, muscles and limbs stretched in strange ways, as he shoves his bags together, packing haphazard and knowing his mother will sort through his dirty laundry.
Sanada can’t find the little bottle and the condoms anywhere in his tennis bag. He pulls the drawer open, but they are missing, except those thrown into the garbage or mushed up in tissues.
“What are you looking for?” Yukimura asks from the doorway where he has dragged his own bags.
“The…” Sanada clears his throat, trying to remain calm. His insides twist with the horrible thought that someone in his family might open a suitcase, a tennisbag, and find them when he gets home. He’d die of embarrassment. Sanada stands up and stretches out his arms when a yawn rises. Breathe. Relax. “I can’t find the condoms,” he mutters.
“Oh, I have them,” Yukimura says. “Is that all right?”
Inwardly, he sighs with relief and nods.
Bags are carried out into the hallway. Yukimura gives the room one last check, then locks the door. Jackal stands by the elevator, yawning and muttering good morning. They shovel down breakfast in the dining room, rice and cereal and toast and tea. Marui steals a half-dozen pastries for the bus ride. Keys are dropped off at the front desk and at long last the chaperone reappears.
His neck is covered in more red bruises that Yukimura’s. And his hair is much shorter, making them all the more visible. Renji smiles at this and catches Sanada’s eye, and unspoken joke passing between them.
The bus arrives on time, to the second. Renji checks his watch and tells Yukimura. Kirihara is barely awake. He trips over Sanada’s tennisbag and skins his knee.
“If you’d worn pants, that wouldn’t have happened,” Sanada grumbles.
“I’ll get the bandaids,” Jackal sighs and opens his tennisbag. The pockets are stocked with gauze and candies and bandaids and change to buy Akaya’s good behavior.
“It’s too early,” Kirihara moans, rubbing his eyes, rubbing the bandaid. “Even Sanada-fukubuchou is tired!”
Sanada stops mid-shuffle to the bus. He stands stiffly and bites back the ache in his body. Kirihara has noticed the wince in his walk it seems. He pulls his cap lower over his face.
“Tired?” Yanagi asks. “Nfufufu…” He pats Kirihara on the head and continues to smile. “Maybe Genichirou should have gone to bed earlier, then.”
Sanada flushes. Yukimura’s eye twitches. No one else seems to notice, because the chaperone’s girlfriend has run down into the hotel lobby in nothing but a lacy negligee. She wraps her arms around his neck and they are both lost in a disgusting display of tongues and mouths and saliva everywhere.
Sanada notes that Jackal’s eyes don’t leave the girlfriend’s breasts, which jiggle as she and Ito-sensei kiss. Gagging noises are heard from Kirihara, who bolts onto the bus and turns away to stare out an opposite window. “Yuck!” he grumbles.
The sun has barely risen. Sanada ends up in the seat behind Kirihara, by himself. Light streams across the ocean, down below the highway, which winds towards Tokyo and Kanagawa, towards home. Everything is illuminated with goldleaf, blindingly bright and warm, although the bus driver has cranked on the air conditioning to a freezer-like temperature.
Everything is completely normal. Niou inserts himself beside Marui, accosting him for a pastry, the kind with jam and red bean paste. Marui shrieks and flaps his arms. Renji tries to ignore them. Jackal sighs and rolls over, covering himself with his regular’s jacket for a nap.
Yukimura stands and walks to the back of the bus. His eyes sweep over Niou, then Marui. He says something quietly to them, dangerously so, because they both shut up. Niou returns to sit beside Yagyuu, promptly falling asleep on Yagyuu’s shoulder as Yagyuu reads a novel. Sanada listens to the sounds of Yagyuu’s page-turning, to Kirihara’s handheld game console clicking, to Yanagi textmessaging someone back home, and falls asleep too, before even the smell of Chiba peanuts and the fishy, salty smell of the beach has left the air.
***
Compared with Chiba, Kanagawa is cramped and crowded with high rises and university students. The stale smell wafts off the canals. Sanada can smell it even at the school, as he unloads his bags from the bus. He thanks the sensei for chaperoning them, as much as he doesn’t want to, when Yukimura pokes him in the back.
Yawns are frequent, even in the early afternoon when they’ve arrived back home. Marui’s stomach grumbles as loud as the bus as it drives away and leaves them standing at the school gates, baggage surrounding their feet.
Kirihara picks up his backpack and tennisbag and starts to roll his suitcase down the street towards the bus shelters. Sanada sticks his foot out to stop him. “Where are you going?” he asks. “The school is back there.”
Akaya blinks, owl-like. “I know that. I was going home.”
“You have school,” Sanada snaps.
Kirihara shrugs. He holds up his index finger and says, “My mother said that I didn’t have to do to school this afternoon if I was too tired from the busride. And I am.” He grins from under his curly bangs up at Sanada, teasing him on purpose.
“My mother said the same thing, Sanada,” Niou says slowly as he hoists his lumpy duffelbag over his shoulder.
Sanada shoots Yagyuu a pointed glare. Yagyuu sighs and adjusts his glasses, but says nothing to stop Niou. “I won’t get your literature homework,” he calls out to Niou. Niou grins and shakes his head.
“Yes, you will!” he shouts back, just as a bus pulls up along the curb and he is gone.
Sanada, for one, had a nice nap on the busride and while his body still has residual aches, he drags his bags into the school and dumps them in his locker. He manages to make it to his very last class of the day after changing quickly into his school uniform. He isn’t the only one in literature- Yagyuu is already sitting across the room in his own seat by the time Sanada makes it.
He hasn’t missed much, these past three days in Chiba. The poems they are analyzing sound familiar, but it’s not until he’s walking out to the tennis clubhouse afterwards that he remembers Yukimura studied the same poem last semester, because he brought Yukimura’s homework to the hospital for him.
The nurses are fawning over him on the tennis courts. Sanada grinds his teeth at the sight of Yukimura surrounded by these women who put their hands all over him, as though they have the right to be touching him. Yukimura grins and bears it, as they ask him routine questions about his health, and what he did in Chiba, how he felt and does he think he’s feeling okay? Did he get too much sun because his face looks a bit peaked and pink?
Sanada grabs the handle of his racket hard enough that his knuckles feel numb. He glowers at the nurses. They don’t even notice him, or anything else, except a fourteen year old boy who keeps staring out in vain at the tennis club members starting to congregate on the nets for practice.
“Fifty laps!” Sanada shouts at them. A couple seniors titter and mutter something about the captain not having said anything yet.
“You’re losing your touch, Genichirou,” Yanagi says.
Sanada shivers, feeling a frisson of Yanagi looming behind him. He turns to see Yanagi standing placidly, holding a clipboard and pen.
“Do you want it to be sixty?” he shouts at the seniors. They grumble at him and he can hear the hissed “asshole”s under their breath as they start their laps. Yukimura stands beside him after a moment, and the nurses flutter off, pleased with their patient.
“Are you feeling cruel today, Sanada?” Yukimura asks him. “Sixty laps? Didn’t Chiba relax you any bit?”
Sanada snorts and tries to ignore the flush burning his face. He frowns at the tennis club members, all running concentric rings around the courts, a blur of dark yellow. But there are faces missing among the crowd. He has yet to see Kirihara lurking about, picking on first years. He has yet to see a head of bleached hair or hear the grumble of Marui’s stomach, or the dark sheen off Jackal’s shaved head.
“Where are the regulars?” he asks. Yukimura says he doesn’t know, but it’s obvious the entire regulars’ team, including Yagyuu, decided to take the day off. Sanada folds his arms and grumbles, “I’m not impressed with this.”
He, Yukimura and Yanagi are the only regulars present. The heat of late summer hovers over the courts, heavy and hazy and palpably thick. The school building shimmers, mirage-like, over the edge of the fences and tree-lined walkways to the courts. The cicadas have come out, full-blast, humming a rhythm that Sanada finds soothing, but one that drives Yanagi to stealing a basket from the first years’, dumping all the balls out, and rushing out to catch the offending insects.
Sweat slides down the back of his neck as he practices swings, demonstrating for a first year whose grip and angle are off, too haphazard and too much of a follow-through that turns his body. He guzzles water from his bottle sitting on a bench between rallies with Yukimura. A group of juniors cluster around the side of the court, eyes wide with awe to see their buchou playing, to see him healthy and here. Yukimura’s tennis is a sight to see, even during practice.
His socks fall down at the back of his ankles. His t-shirt clings too his body with the cloying heat of late August. The air stifles, no breeze for comfort. The sun shines blindly off the windows of the school, a hundred white-hot glass panes that burn onto the tennis courts. Sanada is panting, drained and exhausted by the time Yukimura finally calls for cool-down stretches. The ache from earlier has been replaced by a pleasant sort of pull in his legs and arms, the satisfaction of a good practice making Sanada smile.
Yanagi returns, a basketful of cicadas under his arms, and he stretches with Sanada. Sanada leans down low and reaches for the toe of his sneaker. “How many more do you think you’ll catch?” he asks. A fat drop of sweat oozes down the bridge of his nose. He pauses mid-stretch to wipe it off.
“In this part of town, I’d say there could be as many as ten per square metre,” Yanagi says.
“What are you going to do with them?”
Yanagi’s lips curl slightly and his teeth flash dangerously for a moment. “Give them to Akaya to throw into the canals.”
“You’re as cruel as any of the rest of us, Yanagi,” Yukimura says. Sanada feels the pressure of hands pressing on his shoulders, and he turns to see Yukimura’s eyes watching him from above.
The clubhouse showers and changeroom feels empty with only the three of them, but once Sanada steps under the spray of cold water, he doesn’t think too much about it, only that he ought to assign fifty laps each, in addition to the regular amount tomorrow for those skiving off practice. With Yukimura here, however, it might be difficult because sometimes he can have a soft spot for his teammates.
Not always, though.
A second shower starts beside him. From the distinct sounds of the slap of wet feet on tile, Sanada recognizes it as Yanagi. That, and the smell of his soap wafts through the damp air, of clean and fresh like a mountain spring. Perhaps that’s even the brand he uses, Sanada has never asked.
He closes his eyes and stands still, relishing the feel of the cool water moving over his warmed muscles. He listens for a third shower to start. A curtain is drawn back, but something is not right, not when he feels hands slide across his back and down over his chest, and a chin press into his upper arm.
Sanada stiffens in shock. “You…” he starts, but Yukimura stops him with a wet kiss, wet from the tongue sliding across his lips, wet from the water sliding over his cheeks and face and skin. Every sound, every touch is heightened here. Sanada wills himself not to moan as their lips make soft noises, as their tongues make sloppier ones when Yukimura presses himself against Sanada’s side and rubs his hips.
“I can hear you two,” Yanagi’s voice calls over the spray of water.
“Seiichi!” Sanada hisses when he pushes Yukimura off him. Yukimura licks his lips, but it only makes Sanada’s cock swell harder from the way the water catches on his top lip, from the way his hair hangs over his eyes in clotted locks. Yukimura’s eyes flick down, and he smiles. Hands cup his cock, fingers run over his balls. Sanada chokes on the reprimand now lodged in his throat.
But Yukimura relents, stepping back to shower beside Sanada, in the cramped and small stall, as though nothing has passed between them. He steals Sanada’s soap, he reaches for his shampoo a half-second before Sanada was about to, he takes Sanada’s towel off the little hook and steals it for himself, wrapping it around his hips. It brushes his hips the way Sanada wants to, arms around Yukimura’s thin body.
Yukimura’s towel is smaller and thinner. Sanada grabs it and furiously rubs himself dry with it, before walking out to the changerooms completely naked. If Yukimura can play with him, then so can he.
Yanagi raises an eyebrow when Sanada stands before his locker, in all his naked glory. “You might want to watch that mark on your neck,” he says, nodding to Sanada’s left side, “unless you want your parents to ask about what you did in Chiba.”
The downside of standing there naked is that every blushing bit of skin on Sanada’s body flames red at Yanagi’s comment. Yukimura has the grace to smile at him, proud of the hickey he gave. He is so embarrassed that he yanks his shirt on backwards.
Yukimura says, “Is everything all right, Sanada?”
Sanada twists his arms the right way out and glares. He buttons up to the collar in an attempt to hide the mark beneath his shirt. Yanagi walks with them to the front of the school, then leaves to catch his bus. Sanada and Yukimura walk the other way, towards the train station. He’s boiling under his school shirt, but he doesn’t want anyone else to notice the mark on the base of his neck. Sanada keeps reaching out to touch it, to feel the bruise blossom with a soft ache when he runs his fingers over the spot. The heat makes his bags feel heavier and his steps more sluggish, but that might be Yukimura as well.
“It was nice in Chiba,” Yukimura says.
Sanada grunts. The train platform rattles with an approaching train. His train, the easiest way to get home for him.
“Come over on Friday night,” Yukimura says. His hand brushes the back of Sanada’s as the train rolls to a stop and students and salary men pour on and off the platform, rushing around them, rustling the air and the damp hair that presses wet at the back Sanada’s neck. A shivers runs down his spine, involuntarily making him shake.
He nods and says, “Good night, Seiichi,” but his voice is lost in the din of people, and Yukimura’s head disappears as a second train rolls onto the tracks for the opposing direction, his train home.
***
Sanada eats supper and then watches reruns of gameshows in the evening with his grandfather and his brother. Home is cool and quiet and comfortably familiar, familial. He is careful when he sits, mindful not to wince when he shifts on the couch. Thinking of the dull ache deep down brings a flush to his face with the memory of Yukimura above him, their foreheads pressed together, damp with sweat and saliva. Even this morning feels like it was a lifetime ago.
His mother picks through his bags when he climbs the stairs to go to bed early. Sanada freezes in the doorframe. Clothes are spread across the mats on the floor and she stands over them, hands on her hips. “Genichirou, are you missing a pair of pajamas?” she asks.
He swallows thickly, praying that she doesn’t smell anything strange on his clothes. The new smell of sex. Will she know he’s done things- things with Yukimura- by picking through his suitcase? What if there was a rogue condom? What if-
“Don’t touch my things!” he snaps. “I can do it myself, okaasan!” She rolls her eyes at him and completely ignores him, piling up his clothes and lugging them out in her arms. Sanada refuses to help her with the laundry. Instead, he flops down on the futon she’s unrolled for him and stares at the beams in the ceiling.
The night is warm and a soft wind that flaps through his open window swings the rice paper lanterns hanging from his ceiling, the electrical cords flap against the walls. Sanada peels off his clothes down to his boxers and lies on top of the sheets, sweating and slightly uncomfortable. It feels lonely to not have a sleeping body beside him, as warm as Yukimura was. It feels lonely not to hear the lulling breathing of Yukimura in his ear. He misses the air conditioning of the hotel, too. He was spoiled there.
But he’s too tired to comfort himself with his hand. Sanada lies in the darkness, half-hard and listens to the faint honking of cars on the roads outside, until sleep manages to cast a net over him too.
***
Classes on Thursday feel like an eternity. The ticking clocks pass minutes like hours. English, especially, drains on forever until lunch comes. He meets Renji and Yagyuu and they eat their lunches under the archway of a cloistered hallway overlooking the seniors’ courtyard of the building. Yukimura and Niou have late lunch period on Thursdays. Marui and Jackal eat fried chicken and rice in the cafeteria, preferring to waste half their break waiting in the lunchline.
A sparrow chirps from a forgotten crevice. Yagyuu talks of an upcoming golf tournament outside Kanagawa, towards Osaka, that his father bought tickets to. Renji works on his physics homework that piled up over their mini-holiday. Sanada shovels down his leftover BBQ beef and noodles and sucks his juicebox straw. He chews on the plastic relentlessly, anxious for the day to be over and tennis practice to begin.
If the morning crawled, the afternoon oozes. The school is hottest then and Sanada’s classrooms are positioned on the unfortunate side of the school, where the sun beats viciously. Chemistry boils, the air as stifling as the smell of gas from Bunsen burners, glowing azure and amber, then brilliant emerald from copper. Sanada stops taking notes midway through the lecture. He scrawls characters on the margins of his notebook, like a schoolgirl would. His ballpoint pen is no calligraphy brush, but his strokes are just as fine, spelling out Friday and love and tennis and honour and when will this bloody class end?
The last bell rings and Sanada nearly jumps from his seat and runs towards the clubhouse. It reeks of sweat and Niou’s mouldering old sneakers in the bottom of his locker, rubber burns from tennis balls and griptape, deodorant and the faint metallic tang of steel lockers and gold-plated trophies.
Sanada loves it.
His chest tightens as Yukimura walks in with Marui, who throws an arm over his shoulder and pops bubbles loudly. Sometimes, he almost wishes he could be as open with Yukimura as Marui or some of the other regulars. His hands itch to reach out and run down Yukimura’s back. His eyes focus on the line of his spine that shows when Yukimura pulls off his school shirt. He stands with his back to Sanada. The fluorescent light overhead heightens the fading marks and bruises and streaking claws of his skin, evidence of their nights together.
Sanada squashes the urge and crosses his arms. He narrows his eyes at Marui, who pops bubbles happily between tying his shoelaces, right, then left foot. “You missed practice yesterday,” he tells Marui.
Yukimura lifts his head and an eyebrow too.
“How many laps extra are you giving them for truancy?” Sanada asks.
“I’ll excuse them for now,” Yukimura says.
Kirihara sticks his tongue out at Sanada, then grins. “Buchou is nice and understanding,” he says, sing-song as he slings his racket over his shoulder.
Sanada makes sure to go out of his way to ask Kirihara for a rally after swing practice. Kirihara stares at him, bug-eyed with disbelief, then chuckles darkly. Sanada also makes sure to use his ka, burning Kirihara’s knuckle serves with fast, fierce spins just to make him angry, just to sate his desire to silence Kirihara’s bratty retorts.
“That was supposed to be a rally!” Kirihara shouts. He throws his racket to the ground and stomps around in a circle. “You aren’t supposed to do that, Sanada-fukubuchou!”
Sanada smiles from under the shady brim of his cap.
***
Friday dawns with the promise of something more. Two days since he’s done anything more than pass Yukimura a waterbottle after practice, or a towel on the bench. He’s fifteen, as much as he forgets it sometimes, and he’s as desperate for sex as any other teenage boy. He dreams of Yukimura on cotton sheets, flushed with desire and moaning his name, “Genichirou, Genichirou, I want you so much, Genichirou.” He dreams of touches that make his legs shake and his cock twitch, he dreams of that gloriously full feeling of being stretched and invaded himself, of their two bodies, pulsing and panting, of Yukimura thrusting up into him and hitting that place that made him gasp and buckle and come harder than he’d ever come before.
His mother wakes him up to tell him breakfast is ready. Sanada buries his head under a pillow and grumbles, bitter that the dream has been broken, irritated that he probably doesn’t have time to curl his hand around his erection and get rid of his morning erection before eating.
He sits uncomfortable and sullen at the table. His brother smiles widely, scooping a large bowl of rice and humming to himself. “Don’t look so miserable, Genichirou,” he chirps. “Your face will stick in that scowl.”
Sanada glowers.
“Or maybe it already has?” his brother offers.
Under the table, Sanada kicks him in the shin.
On their way out the door to respective bus stops, his brother elbows him in the gut. It still smarts when Sanada walks through the doors of Rikkai Dai junior high, but he’s not going to admit that to anyone.
It rains all day, the world a humid, sticky place of late August. Yukimura runs practice late and they stay inside one of the school gymnasiums, taking turns with the ball machines in groups of two. They run laps around the basketball circuits. They practice swings, carefully staggered in this cramped indoor place. The rain falls, a soft staccato beat on the metal roof over their heads. The regulars retreat to the clubhouse for a few reps on the bench press and leg press. Sanada does two hundred sit-ups on the rubber floor mats, then one hundred push-ups.
They stretch. They shower. They dress. Jackal locks the clubhouse up for the night, and then they go home. Sanada takes Yukimura’s bus with him, but the salary men have come out, so they stand squashed by the backdoor of the bus, sweating and damp from the shower, damp from the drizzling rain that sticks to everything along with Sanada’s schoolshirt. It’s hot, it’s miserable, and he is glad to step off the bus with Yukimura.
Neither have an umbrella with them. Yukimura covers his head with the school newspaper Sanada offers him, last week’s issue, forgotten in the bottom of his backpack. “There’s room for you,” Yukimura says, but Sanada just shakes his head. His cap will do. The rain has slackened and there is no point to huddle under anything, not when it comes from all directions, a hazy mist that sits heavy through the streets.
Yukimura’s mother hands them both towels when they reach the house. She ushers them inside and asks Sanada to stay for supper. They sit on Yukimura’s bedroom floor with towels over their heads in front of a portable fan. The fan hums and rattles and moves semicircular between the two of them. Sanada shivers when the blast of air hits his arms, all the little hairs standing on end.
With a click, Yukimura’s door is closed. He walks back to Sanada and kneels down, straddling his lap with one thigh to either side and his hands in Sanada’s hair. They kiss slowly as the fan blows air through their hair, whipping it up together as lips slide over lips and tongues. Sanada leans back against the bed and pushes his hips up into Yukimura’s erection. Yukimura’s back is clammy when he pushes a hand under the hem of his shirt. Sanada’s fingers climb higher and his one hand moves to the front buttons, then Yukimura pulls back.
“It’s supper, Genichirou,” he says.
Shirts and pants are smoothed out. Hair is patted down. Mouths are wiped clean of saliva. Sanada makes for the doorway when a sharp grip pulls him back for one last kiss, as hot as the air around them, and just as cloying.
He thinks of it during dinner, when cold soba and chilled green tea are passed around. He tries not to blush when Yukimura’s sister asks him questions about Chiba, of seashells on the beach and the hotel that Sanada didn’t pay much attention to because he was too busy having sex with her brother. The grilled unagi is delicious. Sanada thanks Yukimura’s mother for inviting him, but she waves them both off before he can offer to help with dishes.
“Do you mind if I weed a bit?” Yukimura asks. “The ground will be damp and easy to pull the roots now.”
He shakes his head. Once they step into the garden Yukimura grumbles that his parents didn’t help weed while he was away and look, Sanada, how overgrown the geraniums are! Sanada doesn’t know what Yukimura is talking about. All he can see are beautiful orange and purple blossoms between swags of green. He stands by the magnolia tree. The fat leaves brush his rolled up sleeve as he holds a spare trowel for Yukimura. If he were to attack the weeds, he’d as like dig up one of Yukimura’s flowers as an unwanted invader.
There is a fuschia plant with dripping scarlet buds, and bushy ferns that hide tiny ground-creeping vines. Yukimura frowns and rips sprigs of green between the leaves, throwing them onto the stony path that winds through the small yard. He breaks up the dirt at the base of a lemon tree with the same look of determination as he would in tennis, only now the sharp scent of citrus fills the air, rather than rubbery griptape.
His hands are black with earth by the time he sits back on his heels, satisfied with the pile of weeds behind him. They sit on the tiny porch and dangle their feet into the leaves of a dwarf maple tree, which Sanada only recognizes because of the leaves: smoky crimson fingers that tickle their skin. The bells of a wind chime sway and tingle above their heads, catching the late evening breeze. Everything is glittering with the purple glow of dusk, and a hundred thousand diamond-shining droplets of rain, suffused in the air.
Yukimura’s sister flops down between them with a tray of sliced watermelon. It is sweet and juicy and Sanada runs the taste over his tongue, savouring it, savouring the peaceful feeling, despite the jabbering of a ten year old girl in his ear.
When she leaves and the screendoor slams shut behind her, Yukimura scoots closer and taps Sanada’s ankle with his bare toes. “Saa, Sanada,” he whispers, “do you have any fantasies?”
The piece of watermelon he had been chewing on goes down the wrong way when Sanada coughs. “What?” he chokes out, pounding his chest to make the melon move.
“Fantasies,” Yukimura clarifies. “What are yours?” He places a hand on Sanada’s knee. Inky earth rims his fingernails as he drums them lightly. He remembers the dreams of calligraphy, of Yukimura waist-deep in black, black ink.
“Your family is-”
“You can tell me. Do you want to hear mine?” Yukimura turns around quickly, then licks a wet path up the side of Sanada’s cheek. He shivers. His pants feel too tight. It is getting harder to think with Yukimura’s hand inches up the inside of his thigh and strokes the outline his hardening cock forms.
Whatever protest Sanada is too transfixed to make, Yukimura would ignore anyway. “Sometimes,” he says in a low voice, “I wonder what it would be like to see you down on your knees in front of me in the changerooms. You would still be sweaty and red from tennis and we’d be the only ones there, still in our uniforms.” Yukimura laughs, a sound to rival the chiming bells on the breeze. He smacks Sanada on the thigh, bringing Sanada from a momentary reverie. “Now, what’s yours?”
Sanada’s jaw has gone slack and his mouth has stopped working. He’s as eloquent as Kirihara when he sits there blinking at Yukimura and making nonsensical guttural noises. “Y-Yukimura,” he says. A hand presses against his lower back and reaches under the hem of his shirt. Cool fingers bite his hot, sticky skin at the base of his spine. He closes his eyes and sighs.
“Yukimura…”
“You can tell me, ne?” Yukimura whispers. “Do you want me on my knees? Do you want me to dress up? Do you want me tied up and struggling? Do you-”
“Seiichi, stop!” Sanada pleads, his voice barely above a whisper in case Yukimura’s family might hear them. “If someone-”
“If you tell me, I’d do it,” Yukimura says. “Tell me. Anything.” Yukimura frowns for a moment and a thin line forms on his forehead. “Except Atobe,” he adds.
Sanada shudders. “There is no Atobe,” he mumbles, trying to wipe an image of Atobe strutting around in nothing but a purple feather boa from his mind. “No, Yukimura, I…” he sighs heavily, more like a groan than anything else. “I had a dream once where…with ink and…” It is hard for Sanada to say the words because he doesn’t really know what Yukimura wants from him. The dream was arousing, even now thinking about it, his skin feels flushed with desire.
Yukimura’s hands have danced up to the back of his neck. They toy with his hair, moving slowly through it, soft against his scalp. Sanada closes his eyes once more, sighing into the feeling of peace, of comfort, as those fingers comb through his hair, removing his cap and guiding his head to Yukimura’s shoulders. He relents and lets himself fall. For a moment.
“You can paint all over my body,” Yukimura says. The wind carries his words into the sepia-tinged glow of dusk. Sanada can barely make it home that evening, because his legs don’t work right, not with Yukimura’s words echoing in his mind.
You can paint all over my body.