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Kojiro had always taken his cooking seriously, but leaving his best friend stranded for nearly an hour on his own while he made out with onions and pasta in another room was another level.
“It’s like he went abroad and forgot all his manners,” Kaoru muttered to himself. He had strewn himself across Kojiro’s bed as a form of protest, but the already existing piles of souvenirs and clothes made it harder for Kaoru to further mess anything up. The whole room was what Kojiro would call “organized chaos.”
As if chaos could be organized. Kojiro was definite proof that it could not.
Despite the mess, Kaoru had always liked the childhood room. The space was practically a closet compared to his own; aside from the duffel bags and suitcases bought back from Kojiro’s time abroad, the gallery of knick knacks from when he was a kid scattered across the shelves and bookcase ledges added to the “storage room” feel. Kaoru tried to understand it—Kojiro was the only boy in his family, and the oldest. His mother had gone the extra mile to appreciate his accomplishments and validate his hobbies, even if it did result in guests not being able to take two steps without tripping over–
“Is that our old school uniform?”
Kaoru squinted at the familiar fabric sandwiched in a pile of other folded clothes. The familiar blue…, the slight sliver of white… Before Kaoru could think better of it, he was on his feet and pulling the set out from the stack.
It had to have been one of their third-year uniforms. The blue of the jacket was still strong, and its threads still soft under his fingers. Albeit slightly worn, the elbows were still intact—something that very few of Kojiro’s uniforms could brag about. The brute was always falling and ripping holes in his clothes.
Kaoru wanted to try it on. While he’d been just a bit taller in school, Kojiro’s broad shoulders had always made him look bigger. They were similar enough in size that they could at least loan each other jackets when the other forgot pieces of their uniforms; Kaoru was confident that the small piece of nostalgia would still fit on him.
Just as he was starting to slip an arm through one of the sleeves, the sound of heavy footsteps filled the hall. In a flash, the jacket was folded into a heap and stuffed into a stack of clothes. He had just sat down on the bedroom floor, back leaning against the side of the bed, as the footsteps entered the room.
Kojiro, toting a plate in each hand, grinned at his friend through the doorway. “I’m back!”
Kaoru looked up and pretended that he had been bored instead of just rummaging through someone else’s clothes. “I can see that,” he said dryly.
“Yeah, sorry for the wait.” Kojiro apologized as he handed one of the dishes off to Kaoru before carefully sitting down next to him, confidently balancing his place atop his hand with the ease of someone who’d done it a thousand times before. He probably had, Kaoru realized.
“Got a bit distracted.” He winked. “You know how it is.”
“Your mom wouldn’t have made her guests wait.” Kaoru looked down at his food. It smelled great, with red sauce artfully covering rolled pieces of thinly sliced beef. He scooped up a bit of the meat and chewed on it. “Did you stop halfway through to do a workout?” he said through the perfect blend of tomato, herbs and masterfully cooked meat.
Kojiro bit off his own forkful and smiled at his plate. “I’m never going to hear the end of the bodybuilding jokes, am I.”
“You can’t just triple in size and expect me to not make a comment about it.”
“Everyone else managed,” he said.
“I’m not ‘everyone else’ though, am I?” Kaoru mumbled.
“True. No one else is immune to my good looks and many charms like you are.”
“I see Italy humbled you.”
“They loved me over there,” Kojiro said. A smile broke across his face before he tilted his head in a moment of sincerity. “I did miss you though.”
“Even though you did kick us out of your dorm when we came to visit?”
“I kicked Aino out of my dorm,” Kojiro clarified. “ You just followed him out.”
Kaoru knew he wasn’t exaggerating the pointedness of his tone. Something about the way Kojiro said it made him raise his shackles, even if he did have a point. “We were dating at the time, it wouldn't be right to leave him on his own like that.”
“Oh? Like he left you?”
“I guess it’s true what they say about foreigners not having manners,” Kaoru spat back. “Careful what you say next, we’re surrounded by the sentimental clothing of your youth and I still have a plate full of liquid tomato. I’m not afraid to use it.”
Surprisingly, Kojiro didn’t make a move at Kaoru’s threat. “Aside from the suitcase pile,” he explained, nodding to the section of his room dedicated to unpacking new clothes and souvenirs from Italy, “this is all my mom’s doing. I honestly don’t even care about most of this stuff, I’m fine leaving it here.”
That’s right, Kojiro was moving into his own place in a few months. He’d spent so much time abroad and on his own, it made sense that he wouldn’t want to sleep in his childhood room. But still…
“You should take at least a few things as mementos,” Kaoru suggested.
“Really? You’re starting to sound like my mom. What am I going to do with…”—he picked up the same piece of clothing Kaoru had discarded minutes before—“my high school uniform?” The thing looked comically small in his hands.
Kaoru didn’t grace the comment with a response, choosing to let the silence settle around them instead while he ate his food.
Naturally, Kojiro had to ruin it. “So. Have you heard from Ainosuke at all?”
“Why does his name keep coming up?” Kaoru groaned.
“You guys might be exes, but that doesn’t mean I have to write the guy out of my life.”
“Actually,” Kaoru pointed out, “I think you do have to. It’s code. And you don’t even like him that much.”
“ Girl code. And honestly, you’re right.” Kojiro shrugged. “I just thought he would’ve said something since I came back. Since he was the one who bought the tickets for you guys to visit me.”
“He’s probably too busy being a rich kid to welcome one of his oldest friends back.” Kaoru scoffed. “You know how it is with these rich people.”
“Kaoru, your family is also rich, you know,” Kojiro pointed out around a mouthful of food.
“We’re not like that , though.”
“ You aren’t. The rest of your fam scares me, though.”
Kaoru leveled his gaze at him. “Seriously? Is that why you always have me come over?”
“Your house is big and empty. It feels haunted.”
“Yeah, well, you should try living there. Not much better.”
“Yeah…” Kojiro’s voice took a gentler turn. “Sorry I left you there.”
Kaoru huffed. “It’s not like I haven’t been roaming those halls for the first twenty years of my life. Although your mom was kind enough to invite me over pretty often.”
A smile broke across Kojiro’s face. “I asked her to, y’know. I knew you’d both get lonely.”
Kaoru stared at the whorls of tomato sauce on his plate as he chewed on another piece of meat. It was such a “Kojiro” thing to do, asking his own family to take care of his friends, knowing that his absence would weigh heavily on them both. He was always so worried about others—even Ainosuke , of all people. Kaoru wondered how he could bring himself to be so open, so full of the empathy he lacked.
“Why are you so quiet all of a sudden?” Kojiro asked. “I hope you aren’t mad I called you ‘lonely,’” he teased.
“How do you manage to be so reliable?” Kaoru blurted out.
“ Me ?” The boy actually had the nerve to look shocked. “I wouldn’t say that I’m ‘reliable.’ Sometimes I just…” he shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of people want something, but are scared to speak up and ask for it. I just ask for them.”
“Uh-huh…” Kaoru said, maybe just more than a little dubiously.
“I told you I didn’t know!” Kojiro exclaimed. Quieter, he muttered, “Why did you even ask me if you weren’t going to take the answer seriously.”
Kojiro’s fake pout, which usually did absolutely nothing to help his case when pitched against Kaoru, actually tugged against his conscience. He sighed. “Yeah, good point. Sorry.” Then, to entertain the thought, he turned to Kojiro and asked, “What do you think I want?”
Kojiro, who was finishing off his own plate, started to choke, loud, body-wracking coughs jumping out of his throat. A fleck of red sauce landed on Kaoru’s cheek.
“Ew,” he mumbled.
“What kind of… question… is that?” Kojiro got out between hacks.
“You said that everyone has a thing they want that they can’t ask for,” Kaoru repeated as Kojiro began to settle. “So what’s my ‘thing?’”
Kojiro sputtered out another cough. “Ask another question.”
“What’s the big deal? Unless you’re lying about your powers of empathy.”
“Fine, fine.” Suddenly, like a flip being switched, he was serious again. He stared right at Kaoru, with a look so solemn that he was starting to get worried.
“You know, if it’s that serious you don’t–”
Kojiro took a breath. “You’re lonely,” he stated. “Although you’re always busy and always around someone, you never have anyone who’s on your level. And the one guy who was… well, we all know how Aino turned out.”
“So you’re saying that I need friends,” Kaoru deadpanned. “I could’ve told you that myself, idiot.”
Kojiro shook his head. “You don’t need just a friend, and you know that. That’s why you threw yourself into Aino so quickly. But aside from him, you don’t really have anyone else.”
Kaoru held up a hand. “First off,” he said, “I did not come here just for you to call me a hopeless loner, or to just sit quietly while you rub the charcoaled remains of my latest breakup all over my face.”
“So you admit that the relationship was a dumpster fire?” Kojiro asked.
As usual, Kaoru ignored him. “And second, what do you mean by ‘I don’t really have anyone else?’”
“What do you mean ‘what do you mean?’”
“You’re still here,” Kaoru stated simply.
Kojiro blinked blankly at him, more than a little stunned. “That’s different,” he mumbled. “It’s not like how you had Ainosuke.”
Kaoru rolled his eyes. “What, like romantically ? As if you’d want to date me.” He scoffed and looked at Kojiro the same way he would after telling a joke, waiting to see a humored expression or hear a burst of laughter.
But Kojiro wasn’t smiling.
In fact, he was sweating. He looked about as comfortable now as he’d been the day he had come out to his family. Actually, now that he thought of it, this look was awfully similar…
An uneasy feeling began to crawl its way into the pit of Kaoru’s stomach. “Kojiro–”
Something in his tone must have given him away, because Kojiro, ever-observant Kojiro, abruptly got to his feet.
“I’m going to go wash off my plate.” He thrusted out a hand. “I’ll take yours too. Quickly,” he added.
Kaoru gripped his dish a little tighter as he eyed his friend. “We both know that you suck at being subtle, but that was bad. Even for you, Kojiro. Just spit out what you want to say.”
“I’d really rather not,” he mumbled. “Forget I said anything.”
“You can’t just do that after starting the conversation!”
“Yeah, well, I’m doing it now.”
“Kojiro, please,” Kaoru groaned. “You’ve already gotten this far, you might as well finish what you wanted to say.”
“What’s it to you?” Kojiro challenged. “Why are you suddenly so invested?”
Kaoru resisted the urge to throw his plate at the idiot in front of him. “Why are you suddenly so cagey? You sound like someone’s died–”
“I might, after this,” Kojiro said under his breath, quiet but not quite soft enough to escape Kaoru’s ears.
“–or confess, or something,” he finished.
Silence.
Kaoru raised his brows in a question he already knew the answer to. Am I right ?
Kojiro was as red as the dish he’d just finished. “I’m, uh… I’ll wash my plate now.”
Kojiro couldn’t stumble out of the room fast enough. Kaoru gave him a minute, then slipped out after him. He gingerly sidestepped the creaky spots in the hall as Kojiro disappeared around the kitchen doorway. A second later, Kaoru heard the sound of water running. He edged closer, near enough to be able to peak around the corner.
Looking at the kitchen, it was clear to Kaoru that the main chef of the Nanjo household had been gone. It wasn’t dirty—as if Kojiro’s mother would allow any mess—but the counter sported a few new stains, along with a handful of sauce bottles that Kojiro swore belonged in the fridge, and more than a few dishes were piled off to the side of the sink—something that Kaoru knew drove Kojiro nuts.
He was working on scrubbing the dishes now, hunching over the sink, sleeves rolled past his elbows. “So close .” Kaoru could barely hear his voice over the running water.
He leaned in closer. This side of Kojiro, elbows deep in soap, muttering to himself over the running of the faucet, was Kojiro Nanjo in his natural habitat. Over the years spent together, the meals cooked and shared between the two—so many of them in this home—Kaoru had gotten to see a side of his friend that surpassed all the other facades he wore. This was no overconfident, flirty Joe, no big brother role model, no dutiful son. The only other time he ever saw Kojiro be more himself was while he was dropping in from some absurd location, getting absolutely wasted after failing to bomb an especially teep hill, mastering whatever flatground trick he was practicing, skating away as fast as he could from security guards.
Something tugged at the back of Kaoru’s mind, a concern. Kojiro was ambitious, always so passionate about his craft. His was a passion that Kaoru knew would never settle, one that could never be shelved or put aside. One thing about Kojiro was that once he had a goal—a real, serious, life goal—he was bound to it.
Kaoru sighed. From experience, he knew that reaching your goal meant nothing you had no one to celebrate them with. And for years, that “someone” had been himself, sometimes intimately in the way that only the closest of friends could, but more often than not from a cool distance.
Kaoru had had enough distance from his friend. He took a breath and stepped inside the kitchen.
“Give it up already, Nanjo.”
Shit. His voice sounded wrong. What was meant to be nonchalant came out… somewhat exhausted? “It’s close enough.”
Kojiro looked at Kaoru as if he had died and came back to haunt him. He whipped his body around with more speed than Kaoru thought his overgrown muscles were capable of, mouth open and gaping at him like a fresh fish at the market.
“Looks like the cat’s out of the bag. It was a pretty shitty one to begin with.”
He could see the wheels turning in Kojiro’s brain. “You.. knew? Since when?”
“Since when?” was a good question. Kaoru himself couldn’t think of an answer—one day he’d just caught Kojiro’s eye, saw him glance at him a certain way, and he just knew. The incident in Italy wasn’t the only confirmation of the shift in their relationship, it was just one more piece of the puzzle.
But he wasn’t going to explain that now.
“Since you kicked me to the streets in a foreign country, you idiot. I know what jealousy looks like.”
“You’re never going to let me down for that, are you?”
“Why should I?” he asked with a little more igdignance than the situation probably called for.
Kojiro huffed. “Fair enough. But we’re getting off topic. You know how I feel, but”—Kaoru could see him trying to steel himself—“How… What do you think?”
There he went again, being considerate. Damn him for making him try to decipher the mess of emotion churning around in his heart. They both knew that his dating track record was less-than-ideal. He was too blunt, too straightforward, too caught up in his own life to date a complete stranger. Kojiro was one of his closest friends, sure, but so had Ainosuke at one point, and that turned out worse than he could’ve imagined.
But there was something, some voice deep inside him, that whispered, “ But this is Kojiro.”
He sighed. “Dating your best friend seems like a recipe for disaster. Too chaotic.” He gestured at the space between them. “I mean, look at us now. We can barely get through a confession.”
He meant it as a joke, a last ditch attempt at forced nonchalance . But his tone gave him away; Kojiro’s face lit up despite the complaint. That familiar, overconfident smile spread across his lips.
“If you call this an argument, I’d hate to see what happens when we’re both actually mad. And besides, none of my recipes are disasters,” he added. “A little chaos never hurts anyone.”
Kaoru snorted. “Easy for you to say. Some of us actually have brains and can’t muscle our way through our problems.” Even as he said it, he gave himself a small smile. As ambitious, loud, overprotective, and overall chaotic Nanjo Kojiro was, there was still some order to the frenzied whirl of
him
that never failed to sweep Kaoru away.
Maybe there was such a thing as organized chaos.