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When Tobio was seven, Kazuyo took him to the public swimming pool.
Tobio trailed after Miwa to the deep end. The floor bottomed out under his feet the moment he slipped in. Water rushed painfully into his nose. His lungs burned. He kicked but he couldn’t reach the surface, couldn’t touch the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He was sinking.
He gasped. Water gushed into his mouth.
Tobio stares at Hinata. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise; later, Tobio will wonder why it did. Across from the table, Hinata stuffs more tofu into his mouth. He always hogs all the tofu when they have miso soup for breakfast.
“Again?” Tobio asks.
“It’s a good offer,” Hinata says.
He leans easily against the table, elbows on the edge, white t-shirt loose. The pale morning light washes over the kitchen. Hinata stands and reaches for more miso soup, the bruise at his waist peeking from under the fabric.
“Plus,” he says, “it will be like going home. I’ve lived in Brazil twice. I’m basically a local now.”
“When are you leaving?”
“After the season ends. June, maybe?” He eats another spoonful. “Did you buy a different brand of seaweed?”
June; early in the off-season. They will need time for the paperwork, after all. Tobio knows. He has been to Italy and back. Hinata is talking about something else already, reaching for the tamagoyaki: the Black Jackals have one more game, doesn’t Tobio know, the seaweed from the combini tasted better. Tobio stares at him. He always holds himself so easily in Tobio’s kitchen after they spend the night, as though Tobio’s place is his own.
“And there’s still time.”
Tobio realizes Hinata is looking at him.
“For what?”
Hinata smiles, an imperceptible curve. Half careless, half amused.
“For us.”
“Distracted?”
Tobio lifts his head from the locker room bench. Hoshiumi looks down at him. Tobio hit 202 serves today and tried the quick with their new middle blocker. Everything felt fine.
“No.”
Hoshiumi stares at him.
“Fine,” he says. Then, “Come with me tomorrow. Sachiro asked me to walk his dog.”
They never go to Hinata’s place.
Under him, Hinata’s thighs tremble. Do their matches always happen to be closer to Tokyo? Does Hinata happen to be in Tokyo more often? Tobio realizes he has never seen Hinata’s apartment. He presses his mouth to Hinata’s neck, grips his thighs. There, the line where his skin begins to tan. Faded, now, after years in Japan.
Hinata never talks about Brazil, either.
Hinata gasps, a small, unsuspecting thing, and spills. Falls back onto the bed, all bones liquid. Tobio falls onto the bed beside him. Rolls over, chest heaving.
“What is your apartment like,” he says, later, when their breaths quiet a little. Hinata has closed his eyes. Their calves are still hooked, sweaty.
“Messy,” Hinata says, and huffs a little laugh. “Packing is hell.”
The words come like a punch. Tobio remembers.
“You’re packing already?”
Hinata hums. “Better early than late.”
Tobio tries to imagine it, a little place stacked with huge cupboard boxes. It slips away from him. Instead he sees Hinata in his kitchen the next morning, stretching in an old t-shirt, grabbing a pair of chopsticks from the drawer without thinking.
“I bought seaweed from the combini,” Tobio says.
Eyes still closed, Hinata smiles.
Tobio thought Kotarou might hate him, like the cats in Miyagi used to, but Kotarou simply trots beside Hoshiumi and lets Tobio scratch his chin. It’s a gloomy day. Hoshiumi buys a can of coffee that looks very sweet from the vending machine. He tells Tobio a story about wanting to drink coffee because it looks grown-up but refraining since coffee stunted height-growth. Now he drinks more to make up for all the coffee he didn’t get to drink at fifteen.
They find a bench. Hoshiumi sips on artificially sweetened coffee. Kotarou rests his head on his front paws.
“So Hinata’s leaving, huh.”
Tobio blinks.
“Hoshiumi-san, you know?”
“He told me, yeah.”
“Does everyone know already?”
“I don’t think so. Ushijima probably doesn’t know. Though, who knows, you Miyagi people have a scary gossip circle.”
Under the bench, Kotarou yawns and lays his head down again.
Tobio wants Hinata to go. Hinata may have made him a promise but Tobio was the one who first spoke the words aloud, who pulled it from air into shape. Follow me to the top of the world. The truth is you never do reach the top. You always climb higher. You always go further. You play in the best league in Japan and then you play in the best league in the world and then you do it again, because how else to get better? How else to see further?
Except Tobio doesn’t want him to go.
You’ve been already, he wants to say.
Haven’t you come back home?
He wants Hinata to go. He wants Hinata to stay. Tobio wants both, two timelines that cannot exist at once, that must contradict each other. Tobio wants the impossible. For the first time, Tobio is greedy. He has never been greedy, only steadfast: eyes fixed towards the destination, not a desire but a reality he is going to make true.
Tobio doesn’t look back. He didn’t look back when he was fourteen; he didn’t look back when he was nineteen and Hinata left for Brazil, leaving him behind in order to chase him. He didn’t need to. He was ahead.
The first night they slept together, Hinata paused on the platform. He was going to take the train back to his apartment in Osaka. The wind breathed through the tunnels; the train was coming. Hinata had slung a small bag across his back, standing half in shadow and half in murky light. Overhead the announcement sounded, blurry and deafening across the tracks.
His back towards him, Hinata turned—and smiled.
An imperceptible, careless thing, almost as though he didn’t mean it.
At the edge of the bed, Hinata pulls his shirt on, the muscles of his shoulders shifting—he’d fished the t-shirt out from the wrinkled mess of bed sheets, letting out a small whoop when he did—his head tilted against the night falling in faintly through the windows, and Tobio realizes he is trying to pinpoint the moment he first lifted his gaze and met Hinata’s back.
There, against the bed, Hinata’s tan lines. Faded but visible, still, even in the dark.
Tobio says, “I missed gyozas when I was in Italy.”
Hinata stills.
“Are you hungry?”
“No, dumbass.”
“You’re the one talking about gyozas at one in the morning!”
“There were dumplings everywhere but they all tasted wrong. I ordered dumplings at every restaurant. I didn’t realize I was looking for gyozas, until one day the landlord’s wife knocked on my door—she’d cooked lunch for everyone, and she knocked on door after door carrying this huge, heavy pot—I didn’t know she was Japanese until that day. She’d made the gyozas herself. I thought I was going to cry at the door eating them.”
Hinata doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t turn around, just sits where he is, back delineated against the faint night.
“Did you? Cry?”
“No. It was just very warm.” Tobio turns to the ceiling. “I just felt very warm.”
Hinata finally turns. The tan lines on his thighs where they sink into the mattress, his lovely mess of a hair. His shoulder where Tobio pressed his mouth to when he was close, smothering a gasp, shaking as Hinata laughed, breathless.
“Do you think I’ll miss gyozas when I go to Brazil?”
“I don’t know,” Tobio says. “Did you, last time?”
“No,” Hinata says. “Not gyozas, for some reason.”
He doesn’t say anything else.
“The first time,” he says, a long silence later, “I had a bag of crispy fried salmon skin with me.”
The line of his shoulder, soft in the dark—broad, a broadness imprinted under Tobio’s hands, now, like muscle memory. Like volleyball. It occurs to Tobio that he has never seen Hinata scared. Frustrated, yes; defeated, yes. Never scared. As though he was incapable of it.
“Sorry,” Tobio says.
Hinata turns his head a little. “For what?”
“I didn’t think you could be scared of anything.”
Hinata huffs a laugh in disbelief. Wants to say something, swallows it back.
“And you?” he asks. “What are you scared of?”
Lots, Tobio thinks. A ball falling on an empty court. Drowning, ever since Kazuyo pulled him out of the pool with one strong arm, rough hand warm on Tobio’s back as he wheezed on the tiles.
“Water,” he says.
Hinata blinks.
“You don’t know how to swim?”
“No.”
Hinata smiles.
“I’ll teach you some day.”
It was the last time they slept together. Tobio doesn’t realize, the way last times come. He doesn’t realize until the week before Hinata’s flight and it becomes clear their schedules do not allow them time to meet again. He turns it over and over, then, that last night. Feels it swell like a bruise. The things he said, the things he didn’t say. The mundanity of it all.
Beside him, Hoshiumi sips his sweetened coffee in silence.
“Do you want to hold Kotarou’s leash?” he asks.
Tobio holds Kotarou’s leash. Kotarou doesn’t mind. He flips his tail once, languidly, as he naps under the bench.
Why had it come as a surprise?
He keeps thinking about the way the light fell into the kitchen, the pale morning slanting across the corner of the table. The air, smelling of breakfast. Warm. Miso and tamagoyaki, white t-shirt loose around his waist as he reaches for soup.
The way he leaned easily against the table. The way he said it, as though he was giving an offhand comment on the way Tobio cooked the tofu. He said it the same way he’d said the words that first night, turning slightly on the platform with a smile so faint Tobio would have missed it between the shadow and the light, in the dingy station. As though it didn’t matter. As though he would have shrugged if Tobio said no and asked Tobio about the combini nearby the next minute.
The way he told him. Tobio was neither the first to know, or the last. Just someone among the sea of people Hinata was going to tell. Just someone.
He doesn’t see Hinata off at the airport on the day he leaves. The Alders has a game; Tobio is the starting setter. He takes his place to serve, bounces the ball against the floor and feels it hit his palm. Turns and squints against the bright lights. He can see it: Hinata, a backpack larger than him on his back, dragging the luggage through the airport. Finding his way to the gate, a familiar route, now, threading through the crowd.
But Tobio doesn’t think about it.
The whistle blows. Tobio throws the ball into the air.
Hinata finds the line. He checks his passport again, drinks the last of his water, tosses the bottle towards the trash can. He grins when it falls in. Overhead, the announcement sounds for his flight.
Tobio begins to run.
The line towards the gate progresses. The guard waves him over. Hinata goes. Not fast enough; he runs.
He disappears behind the dividers.
Tobio hits the ball.
Hoshiumi lets him walk Kotarou. Tobio holds the leash, lets Kotarou sniff at a fallen leaf. Beside him, Hoshiumi drinks sweetened coffee and stuffs his hand into his pocket. The days are growing cold. Tobio buries his face into the collar of his blazer.
He hit 403 serves today. The quick with the new middle blocker is coming together.
Kotarou finishes sniffing at the leaf and looks at Tobio. Tobio rubs his head.
He cooks miso soup for lunch. The steps are simple; Miwa taught him how to cook it. It was the first dish she taught him. He finds tofu in the fridge, checks the expiration date of the dried seaweed. In the kitchen, a pot of broth boils on the stove. Seaweed first, tofu last. Be careful so it doesn’t break.
The smell of miso fills the air, warm.
The kitchen seems emptier, somehow.
It feels like stuffing the winter sky into his body. Like running and running until your thudding pulse presses close against your ears, too big to contain. Tobio cannot find the words for it, so he doesn’t say anything. Beside him, Hoshiumi tilts his head towards the sky. It’s going to snow, the weather forecast said earlier. It will be the first snow of the year.
“If you miss him so much,” Hoshiumi says, “why don’t you just go to him?”
Why don’t you just go to him?
Tobio steps out of the airport into summer.
He had expected it, had changed into a short-sleeved shirt in the tiny cubicle in the restroom at the airport, yet it disorients him still. The air, all warm around him. The sun bright on the streets. The language he doesn’t understand, swimming around him. An address he doesn’t know how to get to.
He takes the bus to the hotel and sets down his luggage. When he arrives at the gym following the address, it is dusk, and the gym is closed. Tobio stares at the locked door. Pulls at it, helpless, to no avail. There is nowhere else to go.
He turns and sees the beach.
He walks over. Trails of sand scatter across the sidewalk until it swallows the pavement, the beach a long stretch along the bay. Tobio takes off his shoes and holds them in one hand. The streetlights have lit up, bright and pale against the purple-blue sky. Volleyball nets are set up here and there. Music plays from the boombox, faint as the wind carries it over.
Hinata turns, grinning, and sees Tobio.
He stills. His lips part, slightly. His hair is flying in the wind, his bare arms tanned under his sleeveless shirt, the whole of him dyed against the purple of dusk. Tobio clutches his shoes at his fingertips, self-conscious.
Hinata opens his mouth. Tobio thinks, he’s going to speak my name.
“Oh,” Hinata says.
But Hinata is in the middle of a match; they are behind by a few points. He waves to his teammate to pause the match and buys Tobio a drink from the bar nearby, chatting with the bartender as he waits. The bartender calls Hinata by his name in a thick accent and tells him something in rapid Portuguese. They burst into howling laughter. Hinata pushes the drink into Tobio’s hands. Tobio takes a sip. It’s sweet. It burns his throat.
Hinata is smiling. “Good?”
Tobio blinks. But Hinata is already running back to the court, shouting. The match resumes. Hinata dives for a dig, leaps, butchers a set. Tobio wants to shout dumbass, wants to tell him to lift his arms higher. He sips his drink instead. He’s not drunk, not even tipsy; just warm. Warm to his toes. Hinata spikes. They score a point and he high-fives his teammate, grinning.
They lose. But there are still drinks to buy, dinners to treat. Music to dance to, as the night falls and the beach comes alive. Hinata shakes his hips offbeat and laughs as he wipes at his cheek. Someone’s lip gloss has gotten on his chin, the smear of glitter glimmering in the dim light. Tobio has another drink thrusted into his arms, something sweet and tangy and spicy. He holds it in his hands. Watches Hinata move, watches him mouth the lyrics to a song Tobio doesn’t understand, shouting the words out loud when he knows them.
He doesn’t notice when Hinata appears on his side.
“Not finishing that?” Hinata asks, cheeks flushed, nodding to the glass in Tobio’s hands.
“Probably not.”
“You don’t like it? I thought you’d like it.” Hinata is smiling. His hair is sweat-damp. “You always got yuzu-flavored wine when we went to the combini in the morning.”
How strange, to hear of Japan here. In the middle of this bar, in the middle of all the music. The two of them in Tokyo feels like another world.
Tobio swallows. His voice softens. Hinata will hear it, still. He always does.
“I like it.”
The sea of people swimming around them. Hinata looks at him and then smiles, a strange, soft thing. He takes the drink from Tobio’s hands. Their hot hands brush.
“Let’s go,” Hinata says.
On the twenty-four-hour flight from Tokyo to Sao Paolo, Tobio imagined what Hinata’s apartment looked like. There was nothing else to do. What he managed to picture was vague and nonsensical: pale walls, a small kitchen, messy counters, two 7-11 onigiri in the fridge when the apartment was in Brazil. Grey, maybe. Not so bright, maybe. Tobio realizes later that he had been picturing his old apartment when he first moved to Tokyo.
They take the bus. Hinata doesn’t ask about Tobio’s hotel; Tobio doesn’t bring it up. They arrive at Hinata’s apartment, and Hinata pushes the door open. Tobio steps in, tentative. Solid lines replace the blurry colors in his imagination. The low shelves, the wide walls; it’s more spacious than he expected. A wooden table sits near the kitchen. The warm tones of the couch are dim in the night. A yoga mat is rolled up in the corner, leaning against the floor-to-ceiling window.
“Water?” Hinata asks, walking into the kitchen. “Milk?”
He doesn’t flick on the lights. The night washes over the walls. Tobio hears it before he follows him into the kitchen: the clink of glass, the gurgle of water. Hinata, moving easily in the kitchen in the dark.
“The power went out two days ago. It was only for thirty minutes, so the milk should be fine. Just drink the water for now, though. Oh, you can’t see. The switch is over there. I’ll just—”
Tobio touches Hinata’s cheek.
Hinata falls silent. He catches Tobio’s gaze in the dark; his breath slows. Tobio leans in. Hinata glances down, eyes falling shut.
Tobio kisses him.
Hinata holds his breath—then exhales, a slow sigh into Tobio’s mouth. Hands coming around Tobio’s waist, tightening—loosening, thumb rubbing against the skin under Tobio’s shirt. Tilts his head as Tobio licks into his mouth, and then once more.
“How are you?” Hinata whispers. Tobio presses his nose into his neck and breathes against skin.
“Awful.”
Hinata laughs, an incredulous huff. “Excuse me?”
“Awful,” Tobio says again, and presses his mouth to Hinata’s chin. To the smear of glitter, glimmering in the night. “I need to leave in a week, you know.”
Hinata laughs. He wraps his arms around Tobio’s head, and Tobio finds his mouth again.
He finds the words, later, when Hinata is close. Thighs trembling, can’t say a word even though he’d been laughing earlier—Tobio taking his time pushing in, slow and sweet, foreheads pressed together as Tobio moved. Pushing Tobio’s sweaty hair back. Only gasps, now, at the end of it all. Tobio presses his face against Hinata’s neck. Hinata’s hand finds his hair, holds him close by the back of his head.
“I think I love you,” Tobio says.
“God,” Hinata groans. Half grief, half laugh. “God, not now. Move—”
Tobio wakes up early the next day from jetlag.
Hinata’s side of the bed is empty. The rest of the house, too, is empty. Tobio walks around the living room, the kitchen, touching the counter and taking a cushion before putting it back down. Wondrous. The house unfolds itself in the light of the morning, brighter. Warmer, with more colors.
The door opens. Hinata steps in, wiping the sand off his feet on the outdoor mat. He lifts his head and sees Tobio.
“You’re up,” he says. He smiles. “Breakfast?”
Hinata busies himself in the kitchen. Yogurt, cheese bread, bowls of passion fruit and acai, coffee. Tobio watches, sitting by the wooden table with a leg folded on the chair. Wondrous. They eat. Hinata had gone meditating on the beach. He almost never uses his yoga mat, now.
“It’s lovely in the morning,” Hinata says. “Want to see it?”
He does.
Ahead of him, Hinata wades into the water, the hem of his t-shirt billowing in the sea. His silhouette soft against the pale blue sky. Tobio follows; the water rushes cold past his shin. The sand is soft under his feet.
“Just relax.”
Tobio’s heart pounds in his chest. He can feel the surface of the sea, the line of water along the side of his face. He’s always been too stiff to float. He’s always been scared of drowning. Hinata’s hands are there under his shoulders, a faint touch.
“It’s not so bad, yeah?”
Why had he let himself get roped into this? Laughter, shouting, splashing, dumbass, if you let go, I swear—DUMBASS—don’t laugh—
It frightens him. But there’s something more, he sees now. Letting go of his limbs, letting the water carry the weight of his body. Hinata has let go, is floating beside him. Tobio closes his eyes and all disappears: the sky, the sea, the line at which one ends and the other begins. Only blue. Only the two of them, floating in the endless blue.
Hinata’s voice comes from beside him, further away than it seems. Closer than it seems.
“See?”
Tobio does.