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Loud rock music blared in the locker room as the Tokyo Invitational wound to a close, sent off by its participants in festive fashion.
Well, most of them were festive.
From the corner of the room, Kazuya and Shunshin sat side by side, arms crossed in similar fashion while they observed Narumiya and Yamaoka compete in a train wreck disguised as a dance-off. When it concluded with crotch grabbing pelvic thrust from Mei, Kazuya didn’t bother masking a snort.
“Well, that image is never going away,” Kazuya remarked, coaxing a chuckle from Shunshin. “It’s a shame phones were banned from this thing. Line needs to know the real Mei.”
Shunshin shook his head. “You can’t blackmail him. That would require having shame.”
“Damn, you’re right.” Kazuya sighed and bumped his shoulder into Shunshin’s. “I’m going to miss the people watching aspect of being here a lot.”
Brow quirked, Shunshin asked, “Is that all you’re going to miss?”
Kazuya held up his hands in surrender, biting back a smile. “You got me. I’ll miss the excellent company.” His eyes navigated the room, and he confirmed that nobody was looking their way. After all, who would notice a couple of wallflowers when Mei was making a perfectly good spectacle of himself?
“Hey, uh —” Kazuya leaned in to whisper. “— you wanna get out of here?”
Shunshin met Kazuya’s gaze, and he swallowed hard at the question. “Sure.” Kazuya wasn’t sure what that look had meant, but he wouldn’t be finding out unless Shunshin deigned to tell him.
The two of them ducked out of the locker room unnoticed and settled on the landing halfway up a flight of stairs, which gave them a perfect vantage point to peek into the yawning locker room door yet remain largely unnoticed by the revelers. “Much better,” Kazuya marked as they caught a glimpse of Mei dancing off with yet another participant — Umemiya this time.
Next to him, Shunshin hummed. “I assume there is something you want to say without company.”
Did he? Kazuya didn’t think he had a motive to escape the revelry other than wanting to escape the revelry, but Shunshin was smarter than him at pretty much everything people-related. Perhaps there was something there, even if he didn’t know what it was yet.
Kazuya’s lack of a response was more of an answer than he cared to admit, and if the way Shunshin was looking at him was indication, he wasn’t the only one who came to that conclusion.
“Kazuya, why me?” At Kazuya’s gawk of surprise, Shunshin elaborated, “There are so many incredible athletes at this camp, and most of them aren’t self-admitted giant nerds, but you spent most of your free time with me. Why?”
With a shrug, Kazuya replied, “Why wouldn’t I? I can talk baseball with anybody here and learn something, but stuff outside of baseball? You’re the only one I find interesting.”
A barrage of emotions flitted across Shunshin’s expression, but Kazuya’s stomach clenched when a frown was the end result. “Did I say something wrong? I’m told I do that a lot.”
“No.” Shunshin propped his chin on his knees and closed his eyes. “It’s . . . complicated.”
“Doesn’t have to be.” Lolling his head back to gaze up the stairwell, which went up two more floors above that one, Kazuya tried to piece together something that wouldn’t make things worse. He was sure Shunshin understood his instinctual lack of tact, but this aura from Shunshin, Kazuya didn’t understand it at all. He admitted, “I don’t get it, but I want to.”
Shunshin’s vision wandered over his way, and he eyed Kazuya long enough to make Kazuya’s skin itch. Finally, he said, “We’re leaving here tomorrow morning, so if you want to leave it at that, I understand. I won’t like it, but I understand.”
Kazuya’s brain screamed inside his skull. He was far out of his comfort range, or his scope of knowledge of Other People. Shunshin needed him to figure something out, and Kazuya didn’t even know where to start. “I —”
His response, the result of which even he didn’t know, was cut off when Shunshin’s lips pressed against his.
Turning his attention back to the party in the locker room once again, Shunshin said, “Take that for what you will.”
Blinking because he didn’t know what else to do, Kazuya gaped at Shunshin, who looked ready for hell to descend on his shoulders. His head spun. He had never kissed anyone before, had never really craved it, yet somehow, that youthful right of passage went to You Shunshin.
The weird part was that he was more than okay with it.
“I’ll just —” Shunshin stood, his lanky frame towering over Kazuya’s seated form, but as he descended the stairs, Kazuya couldn't remember him ever looking so small.
Kazuya didn’t like that at all. He sprang to his feet and jogged down the stairs after Shunshin, steering both of them down a darkened hallway until he found the first open door: a bathroom.
The lights flickered on once they entered, and Kazuya couldn’t miss the strained line of Shunshin’s lips. At his sides, his hands balled into tense fists, knuckles white from the squeeze.
Shunshin was angry, upset, scared, or something — maybe all at once — that much, Kazuya knew. What he did know, however, was that neither of them were going to leave this bathroom until they walked out at least as friends.
It wasn’t until he opened his mouth that he figured out what he wanted to say. “Why me?”
“What?”
Kazuya shrugged. “It’s a fair question. The term mostly used by my own teammates to describe me is ‘shitty personality’, and you’re way smarter than I’ll ever be. Why would someone like you want someone like me?”
Shunshin’s back snapped ramrod straight, and he glared at Kazuya. “That’s not true! From the first time I saw you play, I knew you could see what’s in a person’s heart and do everything possible to make the most of it. I’ve never seen anybody who could do that like you do.”
“I, uh —” Kazuya slumped against the bathroom door, mulling over Shunshin’s words as his fingers idly fiddled with the hair on the back of his neck.
He couldn’t recall the last time someone had something like that to him, if it had ever happened at all. It didn’t bother him what other people thought, but what Shunshin had said summoned a feeling he usually associated with the purity of spirit he only gained through playing his best baseball. That was when he was at his happiest.
“Oh.” The word slipped out quietly, but it was the only sound in the room and it seemed to echo between them.
Even Kazuya wasn’t too dense to figure out what was going on. Shunshin liked him ‘like that’, and Kazuya wondered if the same might have been true for him, as well.
Kazuya strode over to the sink where Shunshin had retreated and cut off any escape with his hands planted firmly on either side of the counter. “Guess there’s only one thing to do.” Shunshin bit his bottom lip while waiting for Kazuya to finish, “You’ll just have to kiss me again and see what happens next, now won’t you?”
“Kazuya, are you —”
“Aren’t I always?”
Shunshin inhaled sharply, and hands that were unsteady for the first time since they had known each other cradled Kazuya’s face, and Kazuya’s eyes fluttered shut as he prepared for something new.
This time, Kazuya had time to process the interaction. Shunshin’s lips were warm and firm, and Kazuya’s own mouth was wetter than he knew what to do with.
He could hear his heart beating in his ears when Shunshin pulled back, both of them winded like they had run a kilometer at a dead sprint.
Brow raised, Shunshin asked, “So what happens now?”
Heat burned in Kazuya’s cheeks. He had just kissed someone, and it hadn’t been just anybody. You Shunshin was a faraway dream for him, a pipe dream of what a perfect pitcher would be like. He certainly hadn’t envisioned wanting those deft hands on him again, yet there he stood, jaw flapping open and shut because there weren’t words for this merry churning in his stomach.
A smile crept onto Kazuya’s lips. “What we normally do when something catches our interest.”
“What’s that?” Even as he asked, Shunshin was biting back a smile of his own.
“Practice.”