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Sora sucks his thumb all throughout elementary school. His mom says it's his ADHD, that he's just so bored all the time. Riku's mother tells him privately that she thinks it's got more to do with the fact that his dad isn't around. Riku doesn't really care why it happens, only wishes that it would stop happening because it's creepy.
It also jacks up his teeth. They put him in braces with a finger cage attached; you can see it when he opens his mouth, a thick squiggly wire peeking out from behind his front teeth. He lets Riku touch it once, feel where it's anchored and how it sits against the roof of his mouth. And he demonstrates precisely how effective it is by closing his mouth around Riku's finger and trying to suck on it -- which, in retrospect, is absolutely mental -- and yeah, it doesn't work.
So he switches to nail-biting. He bites them to the quick, bites them until they bleed. The surrounding skin is ragged because he bites off hangnails, too. Sora's fingers are always in his mouth, and if they aren't then they're pruny from having recently been in his mouth.
The sound drives Riku up the wall, that irksome wet clicking noise, so he starts holding Sora by the wrists at sleepovers. Sora whines about it at first, tries to yank his hands free so he can go back to gnawing on them, but Riku's grip is too strong for him. They're in junior high and already Riku's deep and robust, with about fifteen pounds and several inches on Sora and all the other boys in their class. ("An early bloomer," his mother says.) Eventually Sora gives up, resigns himself to captivity and lets his arms go limp. He falls asleep and Riku still doesn't let go, just watches his eyelids twitch through the dark.
He's back to chewing his fingers come next Saturday night, but this time Riku grabs his wrists and he doesn't put up a fight, just sighs woefully and goes back to babbling about nothing in particular. It happens the next time, and the next, and eventually it becomes automatic: they turn off the lights and lie down to go the sleep, and Sora offers up his wrists. Sometimes when Riku wraps his hands around them he'll ghost his thumb along his pulse points, over his carpal tendons like it's an accident. They share the same pillow.
Freshman year Sora gets this gray hooded sweatshirt with white cotton pull strings. Riku sneaks a glance in History and finds them, naturally, in his mouth. They don't play human handcuffs anymore, because Sora stopped biting his nails out of the blue and so there's really no excuse. Sleepovers are rare, anyway; Kairi has been Sora's girlfriend since June. By the time Christmas break rolls around Sora's chewed the strings off entirely, leaving two limp, frayed stumps in their place.
He switches to pencils.
Riku spends sophomore year watching Sora suck on popsicles after he goes to get his braces tightened.
He ought to feel worse about it.
Sora and Kairi break up the last week of junior year. It doesn't come as much of a surprise to anybody, mostly because they've spent the entirety of the relationship calling each other "dude" and have kissed maybe twice (no tongue, Kairi swears.) Nothing changes much between them. They get on as well as they always have, only without all the my girlfriend my boyfriend and holding hands in front of their parents. Sora misses the final day of class to get his braces taken off.
He rides his bike over to Riku's house and they trek through the woods in his backyard to sit on the ancient arch bridge that overlooks the creek. Riku hates this bridge. It creaks when the wind blows, rotten wood falls from its underside when you walk across it, the ugly blue paint is mostly chipped off. It gives his ass splinters.
Sora dangles his legs over the edge, which makes Riku nervous. He's chewing on a toothpick. "I'm single now," he says, mostly to the creek. He turns his head, and there's a look on his face. Riku knows this look. He sees it on girls when he walks them home from dates; it's typically accompanied by hair-twirling. It's the "linger-on-the-front-porch" face.
He's imagined how this face might look on Sora on more than one occasion; usually at night, usually in bed, staring up at the ceiling and mapping it out in his mind's eye. The angle of his chin, are his lips wet?, is he wearing one of those goofy headbands or not? How blue are his eyes, because sometimes it changes? What's left of his summer tan? How many freckles? And some other things: Getting a hold on those narrow hips, how'd they feel in his hands -- Sora's kind of small but his body is tight, he's firm but he's soft and he's warm, god, he's like a heater. How soft his lips are, how they would taste. If he'd shiver (yes) because he wants, it's five, six years of wanting in his hands, in his mouth and Riku wants just as badly. What it feels like to hang on to him, pinion him there in his arms and feel him quake.
Sora watches him like he wonders, too. "Weird, huh?" he asks.
"Not really," says Riku, who is not ready for this.
Sora chews gum all summer long, just because he can, and well into senior year. It gets him detention on more than one occasion; their Spanish teacher has a strict "no chicle" policy. Sora has adjusted his chewing pattern and velocity to achieve maximum quietude and she can still hear him over thirty teenagers doing groupwork. She'll call his name and hold out her trashcan, and Sora will whisper to Riku, "See you in five minutes," before he trudges up to the front of the class and spits his gum into the bucket.
"You know where to go," the Señora tells him, and before he slides out the door he'll pull a dumb face at Riku and say something stupid like Adiós querido. Riku rolls his eyes and starts trying to think up some way to get his dumb ass sent to detention.
They're up in Riku's bedroom one day in January, sitting on his bed. Riku's leaning up against the headboard with his Calculus textbook on his knee, and Sora's stretched out beside him, upside-down with his head dangling off the foot of the bed. He's got his phone in his hands, texting Kairi or playing Tetris or something.
"Hey," Riku says.
"Hmm?" Sora lifts his head and pushes himself up onto his elbows.
"Do you have any gum?" He doesn't really need to ask; most of the time Sora's got two packs on him, at least, and twelve in his car. So he's a little flummoxed when Sora reaches into his mouth and pulls out the piece he's been chewing.
"This is my last piece," he says, and holds it out to Riku.
There's a long moment where they both just stare at each other, sitting in silence like they're waiting to see what happens next, like they don't already know. Riku takes Sora's gum and puts it in his mouth. It's cold and slimy, and only faintly flavored now.
"This is gross." He starts chewing it anyway.
"Then why did you take it," Sora says throatily. His expression has changed. Their eyes are still locked.
"I don't know."
"Can I ask you something weird?" Sora's eyes flick briefly down to his mouth.
"Yeah." Riku wets his lips, and Sora looks again.
"Can I spit in your mouth?" he asks.
"Yes," Riku says, faster than a bat out of hell.
Sora scrambles over like he's on the clock and bats the textbook to the floor. He puts himself over Riku's lap with his knees on either side, just hovering. Riku thinks about tugging on his hips, making him sit there. He grips him by the back of his thighs, snugs his thumbs right up underneath his butt. He's warm through his clothes, and taut like a bowstring. Sora puts his hands on Riku's throat, and Riku tilts his head back, and it's different from the bridge, so different because this time it doesn't matter if he's ready or not. (He is. Ready in his bedroom, with Sora about to spit into his mouth, waiting for it like some kind of psychopath.)
Sora's lining their faces up. Riku opens his mouth for it.
It lands on his tongue and slides down warm toward the back of his throat, dirty. Sora feels it when he swallows, the bob of his Adam's apple beneath his thumb. There's a spit thread between their mouths that breaks, lands on Riku's chin. Suddenly his bedroom is stifling.
Sora touches his face, thumbs his upper lip. "You're my best friend," he says, and then pulls that lip back so he can lick Riku's teeth. Riku lets his mouth hang open, tries very hard not to pant against Sora's face like a rabid animal.
"Just kiss me, you fucking alien," he rasps, with some difficulty because Sora's tonguing his canines. Riku's never had anybody laugh into his mouth before, but Sora does and suddenly it's his new favorite thing.