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Tsukishima Kei fidgeted when he was nervous. It was a subtle thing, mostly; he was almost certain that there were only a few people who could read him well enough to tell. It was unfortunate that he was standing in front of one of them.
“Do you want to come over today?” Tsukishima asked, one of his hands circled around his other wrist in an effort to keep his fingers still. He was aiming for a casual tone, which like most things, seemed harder to do when he was actually trying. He thought he had mostly captured it, but maybe he missed the mark a little, since Yamaguchi looked at him strangely for a fraction of a second.
But his face cleared into a smile when he said, “Sure, Tsukki.”
Tsukishima had been planning this, is the thing. It was possible that he should have been planning it since junior high, but he’s slow to these things, he’s found. His mother called him a late bloomer once, despite his early growth spurt, and it was embarrassing but maybe she was right. He’d only been planning this since two weeks ago, when woke up in the middle of the night from a very stressful dream; they were walking home from practice and Yamaguchi tried to kiss him in front of Ukai’s store after handing him a pork bun, with Hinata Shouyou laughing from somewhere behind him. He startled awake from the image, breathing heavily and wondering when exactly Yamaguchi had…bloomed, so to speak.
The question Am I gay? didn’t seem to have much relevance to him; he didn’t care much about the answer. What he did care about was the way he was suddenly hyper-aware of all the places he and Yamaguchi touched when they sat next to each other, the way that Yamaguchi had gotten more muscular in their first two years of high school. The question Would he kiss me? had a lot more weight in Tsukishima’s mind than some abstract sweeping statement about who else he wanted to kiss. This mattered. So he planned.
Today, his mother was working late and his father was visiting family on the coast. Akiteru was not stopping by, and Tsukishima wouldn’t tell him why he kept asking. Today was...well it wasn’t the day, but it was a day, anyway. Just a day when he planned on kissing his best friend, because suddenly the idea seemed glaringly obvious, to the point where he couldn’t make himself stop picturing it, play-by-play.
But he was trying to be casual.
It was snowing when they left school, the small powdery kind of snowflakes that weren’t any good for making snowballs. Kei hadn’t made a snowball in years, but this was the kind of knowledge he held onto, apparently, he thought as he looked around at it. Yamaguchi was wrapping his scarf around his neck while he talked, the wool muffling the story he was trying to tell. He was in his big parka and his too-long scarf, both of them making him look smaller than he really was, and it was...cute, maybe. The word, even in his own head, made him bite his tongue and curse his luck. Tsukishima’s one real friend, and one day he had to start finding him cute. It all seemed unfair, if he was being honest.
“So I went to class one, trying to give Hinata this note that Mayumi-san — you know her, she’s in our class, and she’s in the photography club, she always comes to take pictures of us playing — she gave me this note, and —” Yamaguchi went on with his soft voice lilting from behind his scarf. He was used to Yamaguchi’s stories about people that Tsukishima supposedly knew but couldn’t ever remember; this was familiar.
He listened, tucked his hands into the pockets of his jacket, lighter than Yamaguchi’s because he didn’t like how he looked in big bulky coats like that. Akiteru always told him not to prioritize fashion over function or he would get frostbite, but so far he had managed okay.
“Aren’t you cold in that?” Yamaguchi interrupted his own story to ask. “Do you want my scarf?”
“No thanks,” Tsukishima muttered, glad that the cold was masking the pink of his cheeks. Yamaguchi shrugged and went back to talking about Mayumi, a girl who apparently might or might not have had a crush on Hinata.
“What does a smart girl want with Hinata, anyway?” Tsukishima asked with a derisive laugh.
“A lot of girls like him,” Yamaguchi said with another shrug. “A lot of girls like you too, you know.”
Tsukishima furrowed his eyebrows in confusion, looking at Yamaguchi incredulously. “What?”
“Every time a girl talks to me it’s to ask about you.” Yamaguchi told him with a laugh. “I figured some of them had to have confessed by now.”
“Don’t you think I would have told you if girls were…confessing to me?” The word felt strange on his lips, stranger to be saying to Yamaguchi.
“I don’t know.” Yamaguchi said, his hands buried in his coat pockets. “I guess they haven’t though.”
“No,” Tsukishima replied emphatically.
“You’re kind of intimidating, you know.” Yamaguchi joked, a smirk on his lips, and Tsukishima smirked back. “I think you’re scaring them away.”
He wanted to say good, because the idea of a some girl he didn’t know stuttering that she liked him made him feel intensely uncomfortable. He’d rather scare girls away then make them cry when he didn’t know what to say back. Yamaguchi was better at that kind of thing, at...talking. He was comforting where Tsukishima only knew how to be stiff and awkward. Yamaguchi was better at a lot of things, if Kei was being honest, but that was an embarrassing thought. Too many of his thoughts were becoming embarrassing, lately. He spent the rest of the walk home trying not to dwell on the way the pink of Yamaguchi’s cheeks looked nice underneath his freckles (embarrassing) and barely succeeding.
++
After two hours spent sitting quietly in front of the television, Tsukishima was starting to realize that he didn’t plan well enough. It was the right day, they were in the right place, but he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, now that Yamaguchi was here next to him. He never thought this far ahead, he realized suddenly, dumbly. Shit.
“Do you have homework, Tsukki?” Yamaguchi turned to ask him, and Tsukishima almost jumped. He had been busy staring at the back of Yamaguchi’s head and obsessing over how, exactly, people did these things. Confession-type things. How was Mayumi-san from class going to confess to dumb Hinata? How were his own apparent harem of schoolmates going to confess to him?
“Uh.” Tsukishima responded finally, after an unnatural pause, and Yamaguchi stayed looking at him.
“Are you okay?” He asked, tilting his head to the side, and that stupid hair on the top of his head tilted with it.
“I’m fine. I finished my homework in class.” Tsukishima muttered, pushing his glasses up just to have something to do.
Yamaguchi didn’t look convinced, but he shrugged. “Okay. Can you help me with science?”
It was over pages of physics formulas spread on his bedroom floor that Tsukishima noticed the way Yamaguchi’s nose scrunched up when he concentrated. His furrowed eyebrows made him look serious, and it was...annoying. His stomach felt uncomfortably light.
“What’s the symbol for wavelength again?” Yamaguchi asked, looking up from his notebook.
“Can I kiss you?” Tsukishima blurted in response, without thinking. Idiot, his mind screamed back at him.
Yamaguchi blinked. Tsukishima felt his face burn, and he willed himself to follow up with something, anything. Every alarm in his brain was going off at top volume.
“What?” Yamaguchi asked, dumbstruck.
Tsukishima stuttered over the words awkwardly, the earnestness sticking in his throat. “I. Want to kiss you.”
Yamaguchi blinked again. “Why?”
“What? What do you mean, why?” Tsukishima asked, annoyed. He knew his face was turning more red by the minute. “I like you, that’s why.”
“I like you too, Tsukki.” Yamaguchi said, looking confused. “But I — oh. Is this...is this a confession?” He raised his eyebrows at the word.
Tsukishima felt a growing urge to bury himself in a large hole. “I don’t know. I guess.”
Yamaguchi laughed loudly and Tsukishima decided that burying himself alive was definitely a viable option.
“Don’t — I — what are you laughing at?” Tsukishima asked with some difficulty.
“Sorry, Tsukki. You just look so flustered.” Yamaguchi said through another laugh as Tsukishima buried his face in his hands.
“I am flustered.” Tsukishima admitted grudgingly, his words muffled by his own hands.
There was another agonizing moment of silence, during which Tsukishima took the time to regret ever feeling any emotion toward anything, before he felt fingers touching his wrist, pulling his hands down from where they covered his eyes.
“I’ve never kissed anyone before.” Yamaguchi said quietly, his fingers still wrapped around Tsukishima’s wrist, now laying in his lap.
Tsukishima swallowed on nothing. “Me either.”
Yamaguchi’s nose scrunched again. Concentrating. “Sorry if this is bad.”
The apology was still ringing in Tsukishima’s ears when Yamaguchi leaned forward across their notebooks toward Tsukishima’s face. When Yamaguchi’s chapped lips brushed his own, the feeling unfamiliar and strange, he was overly aware of his own heart beating too loudly and the fact that his eyes were still open. They both mostly stayed still, their lips closed but pressed together, and Tsukishima counted Yamaguchi’s freckles to avoid feeling like he might overheat and combust like an overworked computer.
Yamaguchi pulled away again after their tame peck of a kiss, like the kind you see in older movies. “It wasn’t bad,” Tsukishima breathed out, and he didn’t like the way he sounded. You could hear the sentiment in his voice, and it made him feel vulnerable.
“No, it wasn’t.” Yamaguchi agreed quietly. His cheeks were pink again, not from the cold anymore. “Can I try again?”
Tsukishima nodded, forcing himself to stay mute out of unwillingness to say yes, please, but Yamaguchi paused when Tsukishima started leaning back in.
“Here,” he muttered, shuffling their notebooks over to the other side of Tsukishima’s bedroom floor and scooting closer to Tsukishima. “Maybe take your glasses off?”
“Is that — do people do that?” Tsukishima asked awkwardly.
“Well, I don’t know. It seems like they might get in the way.” Yamaguchi said.
Kei slid his glasses off with an embarrassed shrug, reached to set them on his nightstand. Yamaguchi smiled minutely at him before leaning in again, bringing his hands to rest experimentally against Tsukishima’s jawline. They felt nice there, Tsukishima made a mental note of that before their lips were touching again.
They stayed frozen in an unsure kiss for a moment before Tsukishima moved his lips, started a momentum that Yamaguchi went along with eagerly. It was clumsy, their noses bumping awkwardly, and when Yamaguchi lost balance on the arm that he was propping himself up on, he nearly fell into Tsukishima’s lap. They both gasped lightly at the new closeness and when Yamaguchi took advantage of Tsukishima’s open mouth, his tongue darting into Kei’s mouth, they both gasped again.
“Tsukki,” Yamaguchi said breathily, pulling back for a moment with a smile, “this is fun.”
“Shut up.” Tsukishima muttered, rushing to lean back in and taste Yamaguchi’s mouth.
It got messy, then, with both of them unskilled and over-eager, but that didn’t stop Tsukshima’s heart from pounding, or make his breath any less ragged. Everything around them seemed fuzzy, like they might have just faded out of Tsukishima’s bedroom altogether. It was easy to melt into, this kissing thing, and Tsukishima decided he didn’t want to stop. His hands moved unsteadily to find Yamaguchi’s hips, and pulled him into his lap fully.
Yamaguchi let out another small gasp and his teeth caught on Tsukishima’s bottom lip in the process. Kei, unexpectedly and certainly without his own permission, let out an audible groan at the feeling of it, and he felt himself blush furiously in response. “Uh,” he muttered heavily, opening his eyes to the sight of Yamaguchi staring at him, fascinated.
“I was gonna say sorry, but you...did you like that?” Yamaguchi asked in a quiet voice, like his usual volume would shatter the atmosphere hanging around them.
Tsukishima gulped loudly and Yamaguchi laughed, soft and careful; it was irritating, how much he liked the sound of it. “That’s interesting,” Yamaguchi said softly, lips almost upturned. Tsukishima swallowed again, embarrassed by the way Yamaguchi was staring at him, like he was something to be studied.
Yamaguchi’s phone buzzed noisily in his pocket, startling the both of them and bringing them back to reality. “Oh,” Yamaguchi muttered, staring at it. “My mom wants me home soon.”
“I’ll walk you.” Tsukishima said immediately, like his mouth couldn’t move fast enough to offer to walk half an hour in the snow.
Yamaguchi looked a little embarrassed at that. “Are you sure? It’s kind of far in this weather.”
“I don’t care.” Tsukishima said back, ignoring his own mental complaints about cold fingers and wet shoes.
“Okay, Tsukki.” Yamaguchi agreed quietly with a small grin, like he was flattered. Which was stupid, Tsukishima thought. Stupid to be flattered by the idea of someone wanting to walk you home, when you were so...walk home-able. That’s not a thing, he reminded himself, annoyed. Is this what having a crush did to people? Make them stupid? Or was it still a crush, if you had kissed them? What was Yamaguchi now — his...friend? Boyfriend? The thought made him shake his head to bring himself back into reality. One thing at a time.
He pulled on his coat and boots by the front door while Yamaguchi did the same. Yamaguchi looked him over with a displeased look in his eye. “At least take my scarf.”
Tsukishima rolled his eyes, feeling his cheeks go pink at the concern. But the idea wasn’t unappealing. “Fine.”
Yamaguchi went on his tip toes to wrap it twice around Tsukishima’s neck, and his hands rested on Kei’s broad shoulders when he finished. “There. You’ll be warmer, at least.”
“Thanks,” Tsukishima muttered weakly, overwhelmed suddenly by how stupidly endearing Yamaguchi’s giant scarf was, how stupidly endearing it was that he offered it.
“You should get those earmuffs that have headphones in them, Tsukki.” Yamaguchi said when they started walking. “Then your ears wouldn’t get cold."
“Maybe.” Their boots crunched the snow underneath them and the kind of silence that only happens in winter fell around them as they walked.
“Hey,” Yamaguchi began after a moment, looking at him shyly. “Um. Can I hold your hand?”
“Yes.” Tsukishima nodded, feeling very sure that this was a good idea.
“Okay, um.” Yamaguchi looked down at his mittens, at a loss.
“Here.” Tsukishima muttered, reaching down and sticking his left hand into Yamaguchi’s right mitten. Their fingers, Yamaguchi’s warm and Tsukishima’s cold, intertwined and both of them stood in the snow staring at each other with matching blushes.
Yamaguchi laughed, a light and airy sound, and it made Tsukishima grin back. This was more earnestness than he was used to in a day, but it felt…nice. Holding Yamaguchi’s hand in his dumb mitten felt nice.
“We should get going.” Yamaguchi reminded him, and Tsukishima nodded.
“Yeah.”
They kept their hands clasped, hanging between them naturally like this had always been a part of walking home together, instead of something that made Tsukishima's ears burn from embarrassment. But there was something sort of pleasant about it, anyway.