one thing at a time
The first thing was a few days after: after the fight, after Tokito had found the files, after they had come to whatever odd understanding it was that he still felt like he only half-understood, and that half more in scribbled pencil sketches than any coherent picture. He'd been sleeping on the couch, of course. It was perfectly comfortable, that was why he'd gotten it, and sharing the bed with Tokito would have been an absurd impossibility even if he'd wanted to press through all the barriers he'd let his houseguest erect. He propped his arms behind his head every night and listened to the traffic out on the street and airplanes flying low, and Tokito would go to sleep knowing that he was there. At first he'd waited for the night when Tokito would creep past him to the door, creaking on the board at the edge of the hallway to the bathroom and the one that bordered the kitchen linoleum because he wouldn't know to avoid them, and he would lie with his eyes open and tracking patterns in the stippled ceiling while Tokito escaped out the door and the hallway and the elevator and the building and disappeared out of everything he knew forever. But the night hadn't come, and after a while he'd stopped waiting for it. Instead he'd started waiting to start waiting for it again.
Then things were different, and he woke up in the middle of one night that followed no particular day with warm weight on his chest, lining his body, slowing his breathing. The weight was breathing too, slightly faster, making two rhythms that intersected briefly and then parted again. He stared up, but the ceiling was a white smudge with his glasses off. He'd actually been asleep this time, deeply asleep. The weight was Tokito.
City light made laddered bars across the ceiling where it seeped in between the blinds, which he closed upward so the light didn't hit his face in the morning. They were soggy, indistinct oblongs to him now, of course, but he knew from other nights. The blinds also reflected in a small square of dim light in the television. Tokito's face was pressed into his chest, his breath making a small hot place where he exhaled, then a small cool place when he breathed in again. It must be around two in the morning, but he couldn't read the clock, either. His leg was asleep; Tokito's legs had pinned it, his knee uncomfortable in Kubota's thigh.
His hand twitched. He thought, distantly, of a butterfly, landing on the back of his palm as he just stood minding his own business in the park. It was tiny, and fragile, and its wings iridesced blue and black. You wanted to cup your other hand and put it down like a hill over its shuddering wings, before it could fly away. It was beautiful and you wanted to keep it. But it wasn't yours, and it was fragile; your clumsy human hand was too big for such procedures, and the poison in your good intentions inescapable. You just had to make yourself keep still, and let it decide whether it wanted to fly off, or stay, or whatever it wanted to do. You couldn't even breathe. But since when had you ever minded about that?
Look at me, Tokito shouted in his mind, and he closed his useless eyes.
Tokito was soundly asleep, and he didn't even stir when Kubota put his hand on his shoulder, slowly and deliberately, feeling bones under the skin under the shirt that had come out of his own closet and never found its way back in. There was a thickness to the way he breathed when he slept that made him sound almost sick, but maybe it was just the way his mouth was mushed into Kubota's chest, so that his lips pushed slightly to the side. He'd probably wake up with a circle of saliva on his own shirt. Well, the shirt that he was wearing. Tokito's shoulder rose and fell with every strangely labored-sounding breath. Butterfly wings, stirring, tickling his palm.
He wrapped his arms around Tokito's shoulders, and pressed his face into his hair, in one huge, clumsy, human motion. Tokito smelled like soap and Kubota's cigarettes and the fabric softener the laundromat used on the sheets and pillowcases. He was heavy, and uncomfortable, and too hot, and not fragile in the least.
Kubota went back to sleep with a slight smile he wasn't even aware of on his lips.
He woke up to muted thuds and groans, faint and distant sounds of fists punishing flesh almost drowned out by the quiet rattle of buttons. Light was spilling into the apartment no matter which way the blinds were turned, and a dim fuzzy shape that could only be Tokito was sitting at the foot of the couch. He could tell by the way it was leaning its whole body tensely to one side or the other, jerking another dim fuzzy shape that was probably the controller right and left as if that made the button presses more effective.
Kubota pushed himself up on his elbows, took his glasses off the table, and put them on. Tokito made a disgusted sound in his teeth, although he'd missed the cause. "The computer winning again?" he asked. His voice sounded gritty to himself.
Tokito snorted, crouched forward over the controller still, hammering a button with his index finger. "Tch. I can never get the stupid roll to work." Another gout of pixellated blood made him reel back in disgust, flopping against the couch enough to scoot it half an inch. "Thought you were never going to wake up," he added, off-handedly, as the animation scrolled by for the start of the second round.
Kubota squinted at the clock, and made a mild sound to himself. 10:17. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept so late.
"Hold the X button down," he advised, pulling himself to a sitting position. His leg was so stiff he could barely move it, but he was careful not to press it against Tokito as he leaned closer, fumbling for his cigarettes. "The problem's with your follow-through."
That night he followed Tokito into the bedroom, without comment, and Tokito didn't make any either. He lay down in the corner of the wall, on his back with his hands behind his head like always, and Tokito lay at the extreme outer edge of the bed so he was as far away as possible, his back turned, nothing touching between them. At some point in the night he woke up with both of them on their sides in the middle, facing, his arms tight around Tokito, Tokito's hand clinging in the back of his shirt. But he didn't know when, since he went back to sleep so quickly it didn't occur to him to wonder.
---
The second thing came a few weeks later, so suddenly that he had trouble keeping track of just how long it had been. He woke up in darkness again, the room silent except for the distant sounds of traffic, weight and perspective shifting like vertigo around him, his body being shaken and disturbed. He was hard and his cock was in a warm, slightly damp, sticking grip -- a hand, he thought, sweaty. His hair was in his eyes and he was already breathing fast, and so was someone else, very close to his face so that he could feel the humid speed of it. The bed was creaking under them, a sly mutter of a sound. There was light under the door from the living room, and the air switched on with a soft hum while he blinked into the glow, searching it out.
He pushed his hips into the hand, and the breathing against his cheek shuddered into a faint groan that didn't exactly sound pleasant. He reached, struck his hand against flesh and ribs clumsily, and there were fumbling scrambles and hissing and another hand, shockingly strong, grabbed his wrist and pinned it down on the mattress. Teeth skimmed his neck and he let out a rough slapped breath. Tokito? he thought, and found the idea impossible to credit, somehow, although it was without alternatives. Tokito?
The hand was pumping him, roughly, and he turned his head so the pillow rucked his hair up into his face and swallowed his uneven breath. Weight, hot and bony and yielding, drove down into his hip and thigh, and only after a moment could he recognize the stiff extra pressure of an erection inside its curves and corners. The body on top of his was shaking, and there were the faintest sounds of a voice -- cursing or pleading, down under its breath. Everything was too strange. He tried to reach but his wrist was still pinned, the other hand gripping the stroking, squeezing arm at its bicep, pulling away a corner of its shirt. He dug back his head, exposed his throat, gulped air. He'd been dreaming, something about elongating his body, moving very fast along tunnels and pipelines under the ground --
At some point he came and at some other point he shoved his thigh up enough and Tokito ground down enough to come too, biting his shoulder, breathing too fast, sounding less aroused than accused and on the point of flight. He wasn't sure when or what happened after that. He half-dreamed in between the shudders of breath and come, and fell asleep again almost at once, feeling sick and feverish and at sea; and he didn't wake up again until the morning, when he lay blinking into the light and hearing Tokito banging around in the kitchen, singing horribly some song that had been on the radio all the time since fall, and never really knew if it had actually happened at all.
---
After that he stopped counting, but the next thing was probably when he decided Tokito needed help.
He wanted to be seduced, was the conclusion Kubota had come to. He sensed both the tension and the slight careen of their orbit around each other, the way Tokito started to say things and then bit them off, ending up staring at the television in troubled silence. He seemed to be both waiting for something and embarrassed to have to. Kubota had never seduced anyone before, but he couldn't imagine it was that difficult. There were steps, and rules, and tasks, as with any game you played against a human opponent. He found that way of looking at it curiously reassuring.
Still, it didn't take long to realize that it was more difficult than he'd thought. Tokito riled up when he teased, snorted when he flirted, went still and watchful if he moved the wrong way. The first two were sort of amusing, if not very conducive to seduction, but that last soured his mouth for the whole exercise for the rest of the day, and he could swear left Tokito looking even more frustrated than before. He would catch Tokito's gloved hand knotting on his thigh, like he could punch and pummel himself into some fluid, easy normal person's shape: like fear was something like a door, to be kicked down.
Kubota didn't know anyone normal, and he wasn't frustrated. But he felt something like settling into a sinkhole when he started to climb across Tokito in the bed that had become theirs, even just to get up and go to the bathroom and brush his teeth, and then had to haul himself back fast when Tokito's blind scramble yanked the sheets into a tangled mess of panic and sweat.
He apologized, but Tokito didn't hear it amid saying "Sorry... sorry," in a loud, furiously casual voice. He'd ended up pulling himself forward to sit on the edge of the bed, getting himself out of Kubota's trajectory, and was staring down at the carpet and not looking around. Kubota brushed against him getting out of bed, half on purpose, but tried to be more careful after he realized Tokito was forcing himself not to pull away.
"Sorry," Tokito said, again, as Kubota was leaving the room, but he thought maybe pretending not to hear would keep Tokito from feeling like he had to.
There were piles of console controller cords and remote controls tangled around the legs of the coffee table by the couch, a soaking pot sitting in the sink awaiting washing. Evidence everywhere, none of it particularly damning. He wiped off the flecks of toothpaste that had backsplashed up onto the bathroom mirror, and tried to remember the last time he had tried, for someone else's sake, to do something different from what he might have done anyway.
"I want to," Tokito said later, in the dark, when he thought Kubota wasn't listening. His voice sounded like somebody else's totally, but maybe that was just because it was so quiet. "Look, I want to, I really do. I just."
"Don't worry about it," Kubota said, with his eyes closed, knowing that he would.
---
He gave up fast, on trying to make it easier for Tokito or for himself, so the next thing was even later, the time they were out shopping at the convenience store on the corner and it started to bucket rain on the way back. He had the plastic handles of the shopping bag twisted in his hand so they sealed its mouth, Tokito with the collar of his jacket yanked up over his head and laughing, running wheezing and crashing into each other and falling up the stairs inside the building like most people would fall down them. They left trails of puddles in the front hall and stairwell, catching the flat grey light of the day outside in them like they were somehow tracking mirrors in from outdoors.
They banged into the apartment, out of breath, soaked, tumbling heaps of limbs. Tokito wrenched off the jacket and shook out his hair and Kubota defended himself the best he could with his palm, smiling. He dumped the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter, and pulled Tokito to him, and Tokito flailed at his hands, laughing, griping that he was fine and not staying forcedly, watchfully still at all.
"You're soaked," Kubota said, grinning with the obviousness of it, and slicked droplets of water out of Tokito's hair, onto the linoleum floor. There was thunder muttering outside, although it was already mostly over. Tokito was holding his shoulders, and laughing, and then not laughing, then just near, and his breath warm. After that they were kissing, veering around just slightly, their shared axis on a tilt in his dark kitchen. He could taste rainwater. There were hands in his shirt and hands in Tokito's hair, so escape wasn't an option, which was always good to know. They were both cold to the touch, but warm under their skin.
After a while all that mattered was a tangle of interlaced legs, with Tokito's lower back against the counter, his own hands braced and wet on the countertop's lip. Wet jeans felt terrible on his hard-on and his glasses were so smudged with water he couldn't see a damn thing, and there was rain in his mouth and two spots of warm hands on the small of his back, up under his shirt. Tokito rolled his hips, broke away gasping to let Kubota's mouth sink down the line of his throat like an airplane droning out of the sky, and his skin tasted like metal, and Kubota yanked his glasses off and set them down next to the groceries. What did he think he was going to see anyway?
"Not in the kitchen," he muttered in Tokito's ear, when he could break away enough to talk, "we eat here," and Tokito was laughing, shaking with it. Like they were both easy, and fluid, and free.
"Bed," Kubota said, also, but they made it as far as the couch. He fell back in its corner and Tokito stretched out along one of its legs, the wet clinging jeans a struggle, his hair cool on Kubota's stomach as he pressed his face into the gap and gave up all the heat under his skin, hidden behind his lips, searing in his tongue, his hand gripped on Kubota's thigh, his tongue, Kubota's cock, the wet slipping sounds of mouth and skin and the apartment was nearly dark as night and their breathing mingled just slightly off-kilter, never quite fully together for long, joining and separating and wrapping around again.
He came in Tokito's mouth with his teeth clasped and brow clenched, but his hand as loose and kind on Tokito's hair as if it held something tiny and fragile instead.
"Do you want to fuck me?" Tokito said, later, his breath fast and light on Kubota's neck. It was somewhere between the mostly-rhetorical inquiries of dirty talk, where do you, what should I, and weary resignation to facing some lifelong phobia: spiders or tight spaces, say, something as foolish as it was deathless. Kubota pressed his mouth into Tokito's hair, both his hands busy bracing them both from behind on the couch.
"Yes," he said, dry and husking from breathing too fast. It was true; he did.
Then he jerked Tokito off until he came gasping and growling with his face pressed in the couch cushions, and stretched them both out on the couch to sleep until the rain had passed.
---
The next thing -- although really by now all things were to some degree running together, like paint in rain -- was lying on the bed as the shower cut off in the other room, one hand folded behind his head, the other holding his novel up in front of his eyes. It was a tiring position for his arm, and he was thinking of rolling over to prop himself on his elbows and put the book on his pillow when Tokito padded in from the bathroom, throwing his bunched-up towel over the chair, straddled Kubota's hips with a bottle of lotion clenched in his fist, undid his pants and pulled out his cock and slicked it hard and lowered himself onto it. At some point in the process Kubota managed to set his novel aside, although he'd lost his page, and later had to find it again from memory. It occurred to him to think that Tokito did all of this too easily, with too much practice, for everything else he had observed about Tokito, but not with any real conviction. It was always easy for him not to think what he didn't want to.
"Tokito," he said, but leather-gloved fingers were pressed up against his mouth, holding lips against teeth and against each other. It was a surprisingly naked act, for Tokito, using that hand; he could feel the strength behind it, only as restrained as Tokito had clumsily learned in the past few months, and he felt the slight widening of his eyes before he really registered the emotion itself behind it.
"Shut up," Tokito said, low. He lifted his hips and rocked them back down, and the curious gloved angles of his hand shook with the effort of gentleness. "Shut up."
Kubota did.
---
So it was really pointless to keep track, now, in spite of the fact that he did anyway, because everything mattered and every time was its own bead on an infinite string, that, if it was not counted, would be lost.
They never took touching for granted, and he appreciated that. It was not a luxury to be flaunted, touching one another; they did when they needed to, but only then. If they needed to more than anyone else in their positions might have, it didn't matter, there was still no waste. He made himself remain grateful for Tokito's skin, the feeling of his blood moving under it, the aliveness of him that he'd protested himself, and Tokito always clung in his sleep. You did what you had to, that was all. If you gripped too tightly your hand would tire, someday. He believed that too.
Still, much later, one more thing:
He had a crick in his neck when he straightened back up, and Tokito's expression was almost unreadable, as much as that was possible. They walked home through the snow. When they got back, they ordered a pizza before anyone could close down for the weather, and he beat Tokito idly at a couple of games, and they ate some and put the rest in the refrigerator. Tokito didn't say, I was scared, and Kubota didn't say, you make everything harder. He didn't say thank you, either.
In the bedroom, Tokito said, "Fuck me," in the same tone he'd said, You're heavy. When Kubota reached for him he reached back, pulling Kubota in onto him, over him. He spread his knees and pushed them up, making the middle of himself a knobby sort of valley.
There are things you don't say. Are you sure? What were you dreaming? I can stay with you, right? You've got this piece, this big piece. You reached down inside so deep and took it out so easily that I didn't even notice, and now there's this part of me that's off balance and I don't move around or think right anymore. You kick in your sleep like you want to get away. Yes, it was just like that, like I'd already seen you stretched out on the table with your eyes open, I don't know how you knew. Do you think there's any other way? Are you sure? Really, are you sure? Are you sure, are you sure about this?
He sank inside silently with his weight pinning Tokito to the bed, his body close and tight. No chance for escape. Outside, the snowfall buried them.
You couldn't even breathe. But since when had you ever minded about that?
He fell asleep in the dark, with Tokito clutched into his chest and his steady fast heartbeat fluttering into his ears; and he didn't even think for a second about what the next thing might be.