Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Kass fiddles with the hem of his jumper. The table in the restaurant he’s chosen has a seat for two. It’s graced with by far the prettiest view towards the beachfront, something he meticulously checked on the restaurant’s gallery on his way here. He gives a dissatisfied glance at the wilted flowers—something he couldn’t have planned for, and debates how likely he is to get noticed exchanging them with ones from another table.

He’s about half a second from doing it when the sound of the front door being opened startles him into a straight posture. It’s not you that walks through the door, however, but a set of random strangers, a young-looking couple that loiter awkwardly around the entrance before they’re led by a waiter to an empty space.

He inconspicuously wipes his palms on a napkin. You’re late. Not by much, but it’s enough to make him think you decided to blow him off, which annoys him more than he cares to admit. Sure, you’ve got your hands full being the Champion of Feroxia, but he’s the Champion of almost every other region on earth, and he made time for this, (cancelled several of his appointments, actually) and if you don’t come here within the next five minutes he’s never going to—

The door swings open again. This time, it is you.

You’re dressed simply, like you’ve been dragged from a field expedition. He’s loathe to admit you look good regardless, but he knows you’ll catch him staring at your legs sooner or later and give him one of your insufferable smiles, like you’re in the middle of a fight and he’s losing, which could well be true. Maybe you deliberately picked out clothes that slotted in the slim overlap of ‘attractive’ and ‘lazy,’ so you could make him feel like a desperate weirdo; like you could wear a trash bag and he’d still have to wipe bits of drool away from his face. Or maybe you snatched the first thing in your wardrobe and he needs to start carrying tissues. Best not to think about it.

He wants to get up from his chair and tell you how much he’s missed you (wants this reunion to be touching) but his tongue tangles into ugly little knots the second your eyes meet. He knows nothing of the sort is going to make it out of his mouth.

“You’re late,” is what he says instead.

He regrets it almost immediately. You’re hardly ten minutes behind schedule and it’s absolutely not the most important thing he could have said about seeing you for the first time in three months.

“Sorry,” you say, unapologetically. Your knowing smile suggests you didn’t expect him to say anything else. You plop down on the chair facing him and drop your rucksack against the table leg. It’s covered in grass; Kass can’t help but turn his nose up,

“And you look like you’ve crawled through a bush,” he continues, though he wishes he didn’t. Still, you don't look offended, and your smile only gets wider. 

“I did; got some berries for the trouble.” You grab a menu and flick through it in a flippantly transparent attempt to bury your amusement into nonchalance. “If you warned me this was a date I might have prettied myself up a little.”

“It’s not.”

“Then you should have no problem with the way I look.”

“Who says I do?” Kass also pretends to peruse the menu, even though he decided what to get in the limousine on the way here. “If anything, I’m surprised you didn’t come through that door with mud caked on your face.”

“Noted. I won’t disappoint you in the future.” Your grin reaches from ear-to-ear. Are you even reading the menu? He doubts it. 

“Aw, already looking forward to our next reunion?” Even as Kass says this, he’s wondering why he feels the need to be such a spectacular ass. The established dynamic must be stronger than his willpower.

The waiter that attends to your table looks profoundly uncomfortable to hear you bickering between each other, so Kass quickly rattles off his order. This must catch you off guard, because you clearly pick the first thing your eyes land on (soup of the day? In this heat?) and stutter with your delivery. Little victories. 

“Tight budget?” he asks, and you rap him over the head with the menu.

You get through the pleasantries by the time your orders arrive. Kass asks whether you’ve been taking care of his pokemon, to which you tell him that his trajetagon (which flew you over here) has become indispensable to maintaining your spot as Champion of Feroxia. Kass quickly learns that this is the same as being Champion of anywhere else, because you follow with a long rant damning all the endless paperwork and Kass is over-eager to remind you he’s champion of five whole regions, meaning he’s got it a lot worse. 

“For every plane ticket you sponsor, I’ll gladly take the title off your hands,” is what you spit back. He elects to forget it’s well within your ability to hand his ass to him and says he’d like to watch you try. 

When the waiter comes back, he sets your table with two plates: seared trakmaw with black rice and coriander sauce for Kass, an impeccably prepared meal that looks fit for a king, and pumpkin soup for you. It takes barely five minutes of laughing at your attempts to convince him your broth is an untopped classic before you start trying to steal bites.

He feels like a child when he bats your attempts away with his fork, but he’s having more fun than he’s had in months. It always comes down to this when he’s with you. Being petty and small, like kids in a playground. He can’t remember the last time he let himself act like the public world wasn’t a camera on live. 

“If you get down on your knees and ask nicely, I’ll let you have some,” he says, only because he’s sure you’re not going to entertain the thought. Which is why his heart jumps when you sit forward in your chair and eye him suspiciously, like you’re considering it.

“Alright then,” you say, standing up. Your chair scrapes on the floorboards and the whole restaurant looks at you. He hates the way his body reacts when you come to the open space beside him: the chaotic percussion of his pulse beating a barrage against his throat. A cloud gathers at the corners of his vision. He feels like he can barely make out shapes, which is a disaster, because if you’re going to do this he wants to see every little detail.

And then you impale a sizable piece of trakmaw onto your fork.

“Keep trying. You might get me on my knees someday,” is your victory speech.

You don’t spend much time in the restaurant. Once your meals are finished, you use the first lull in your back and forth to drag him on a walk along the coast. “The view is too nice to look at it from behind a window,” is your explanation. So that extra bit of forethought to reserve the right table was worth it, after all.

Several wooden piers split the beach in parallel lines. You’ve passed the chokehold with the thickest crowd of people and have arrived at a more remote location, where the only shop still open is a small stall with a windblown roof of thatched grass.

You come to rest at the end of a short, wooden pier that overlooks the glimmers of sunset flickering on the choppy waves of the ocean. You’re not looking at the view, choosing to stare into the shallow water, and he’s not sure if it’s a good thing. Does he want to up his romance here, or not? He can never seem to decide when he’s with you.

“Truth or dare,” you say, before he has the time to think about it.

“Dare,” he answers and changes his mind instantaneously. “Actually—”

“I dare you to get me a hot dog.” 

That, Kass decides, is something he can do, and will probably be a lot less hassle than whatever salacious thing you’d have made him admit. “Ketchup or mustard?”

“You ask like the answer is going to be anything but both.”

With a snort that escapes him just before he can think to stop it, Kass digs out his wallet from the pocket of his jacket and goes to make the order at the shop nearby. It takes him barely five minutes to return with a hot dog for you and a fizzy drink for himself, in a can he taps at self-consciously when he realises you are, in fact, looking at the sunset.

“Man, this view almost makes me wish we were on a date,” you say.

It is a date. You have to realise this. It’s been a date since he booked a table for the most romantic restaurant he could find on the internet. Since he opened the shrink wrap on his cologne to spritz his neck. Since he messaged you to schedule a ‘catch up’ long before buying a plane ticket to Feroxia.

“It’s not a date,” he says.

“That's not what I said.”

“I know. I just thought I’d remind you.”

You roll your eyes and swipe the hot dog from his hand when he swings his feet over the edge of the pier. He’s taller than you, but not by much, so his toes barely skim the surface of the water.

“Your turn for truth or dare,” he says.

“Dare,” you respond equally resolutely, and he has to pretend not to be disappointed. He has a couple of questions that he wants to get out of the way before you break apart for the night and don’t see each other for another couple of months. 

“I dare you to jump in the ocean.”

You scoff, but barely a couple of seconds pass before you put your hot dog on the pier in its box and strip your clothes off. This shakes him up far more than he finds acceptable. Your pants are next to go, falling into a crumpled heap on the sandy pier, and now he really needs to look away, because any second you’re going to turn around and realise he’s blatantly staring—

“Take a picture; it’ll last longer.”

“Don’t tempt me.” 

And with that half-admission, he kicks you off the pier, laughing as you yelp and topple backwards into the ocean.

When you don’t come up, he knows you’re just trying to drag a reaction out of him. Which is why he’s absolutely not going to let you win and check on you. He’s taken the L plenty of times over the course of your acquaintance, and he doesn’t care to give the list another extension. Except, thirty seconds in, the urge to peer over the edge to double check you didn’t snap your neck on a rock overtakes him, and he leans forward on his knees to assuage his imagination.

Of course, you choose that second to resurface with a dramatic gasp and grab the collar of his crewneck, dragging him off the pier with you. He wishes he didn’t scream like a little girl, but the cold seeps into his bones and every single one of his limbs immediately feel like they’re going to fall off, which pisses him off inordinately, because it’s August, and the ocean should be balmy enough to sleep in. He always forgets the seasons in Feroxia are backwards.

“At least I gave you a warning!” he shouts.

“Why would I do that when I can drag you in and hear you scream?”

Kass tries to feel with his toes for the sand, but his feet only kick at the water. It’s so tortuously cold he feels like he’s going to cramp up and drown. “Because I’m holding a drink and don’t have a change of clothes? And my wallet is in my pocket?”

“Oh, can it. I don’t have a change of underwear, either, and we both know the only thing in your wallet is that black credit card you keep showing off. Plus, your drink isn’t even open.”

He can’t refute any of that, so he memorialises his lost pride with a grimace and shuffles closer instead. Just enough that he can excuse it by feeling cold if you question it. Which you don’t.

“It’s your turn, anyway.” you remind him.

“Dare.”

“Ugh, again?” you make a face and dive underwater to sit on the sand for a moment. When you resurface, tendrils of hair stick to your face. “I dare you to tell me why you keep coming back to Feroxia.”

Kass opens his can and takes a small, demure sip out of it. When he realises it hasn’t given him enough time to think of anything to say, he takes another. "Why shouldn't I? It's a nice region,” he says eventually.

"Nice? You hate Feroxia."

"I never said that."

"You said, and I quote, 'I hate Feroxia. It's the worst region to be a trainer. I have to plan my hiking around flash floods, dust storms, and golf-ball sized hail, all within a week of each other, and I can’t even go outside without slathering myself in sunscreen.’"

Kass takes another, lengthy sip of his drink. “Still, you can’t dare me to tell you something.”

“Why not?”

“Cause that’s just a truth, you clueless twit.”

You’re clearly unhappy with that, but he couldn’t care less. Hell will freeze over before he answers that question honestly.

“In that case, I dare you to get me another hot dog.”

“Seriously? You’re such a fatass; you haven’t even finished eating your first,” he says, but he’s already clambering up the balustrade of the pier.

“Hey, I’m kidding!” You drag him back into the ocean and the cold breadth of the sea hits him in all the wrong places. He jitters and playfully slaps your hand away. Despite wearing less clothes, you’ve adapted to the freezing water a lot better than he has, and he wonders if it has anything to do with the fact you seem dead set on staying submerged and toughing it out. Tentatively, he sinks into the water and tries to do the same.

“I dare you to point at the most attractive person on this beach,” you say instead.

Kass lifts a curious eyebrow. When he looks around the sparsely populated coast, no immediate applicants come to mind. He wonders whether you did this on purpose: sat on the question until the only other people around were families and elderly men.

“Hoping it’ll be you?”

You don’t blush at this like he wants you to, but you do avoid eye contact, and that’s enough for him to see through your next feeble words of, “you wish.”

“In that case it’s that guy over there.” He subtly points with his thumb at a bald man nursing a six-pack of beer to his pot belly. The fourty-something peers over his sunglasses at an older woman in a bikini that walks past, eyes clearly trained on her—

“I can see the appeal,” you mumble sarcastically. You jump up in the water and grab the edge of the pier, hauling your body just high enough that you can reach your hot dog from your pile of clothes. Ungracefully, you stuff it into your mouth and lower yourself back into the water. “As a heads up, for your next dare, you’re gonna need to get his number.”

“Easy. I’m sure he’ll be powerless against the unstoppable allure of my black credit card.”

You laugh. He wishes it didn’t make a spark of pride flit through his chest, like he’s a dumb teenager trying to impress his crush with even dumber jokes.

A cloud looms over the sky and another chill passes through both of you. Kass has been in the water for long enough that being submerged is starting to feel better than coming out of it and facing the nefarious grip of the wind, so he sinks a little deeper, up to his mouth.

“Truth,” you say once you finish your hot dog, and he hopes the choppy surface of the ocean distorts his smile past recognition. Clearly, you don’t know what you’re getting into. He’s had a question ready for the better half of two years.

“Why did you keep my autograph?” he asks.

You grip the pier a little harder and turn away from him slightly. “What autograph?”

You’re playing dumb? As if. He’s going to get his answer even if he has to wrangle it out of your dead body.

“The one I gave you when we first met in Clefside City.” 

It’s not a memory he enjoys recalling. During your first encounter, he mistook you for an over-eager fan and spent the first few minutes lauding about how fantastic he was, basically shoving a pre-signed autograph into your pocket before subtly (not subtly) shooing you off. To say he was devastatingly humiliated when you both walked into the research facility and Professor Wollemi informed him you were, in fact, not some random who felt like following him around, but the only trainer without a single gym badge who had beat him since he came out of pre-school, is a grave understatement. What’s worse, at the time, you’d spent the last few formative years of your life bashing video games in your mother’s attic and you didn’t even know his name.

("Starstruck? Don’t be. If you want to take a picture together, make sure to get it from my left side; it’s my best.")

He’s still bitter. What kind of weirdo keeps their mouth shut through all of that? You probably loved seeing him make a fool out of himself.

“I don’t know which one you’re talking about,” you say.

“Don’t even try. When we last met up in May, after my driver dropped you off, your mum invited me in for pavlova, remember? The autograph was hanging on the fridge, tacked by two pokeball magnets.”

You look angry. He wonders if it's at him or at yourself. “Well, can you blame me for not throwing it out? Your face is plastered on every billboard in Kanto. I thought I’d get good money for it.”

“But you never sold it.” You’re trying hard to pull the wool over his eyes, which means you’ve got something to hide. He’s bursting out of his skin in excitement.

“Alright, but wipe that smirk off your face,” you concede, and splash him with seawater. “I really did intend on pawning it off, you know. If you were half as famous as you said you were, I figured the paparazzi in Valloway would be all over it.”

He swims a little closer. “But?”

“But later, I don’t know. We became friends, and I guess it felt like a memento.”

‘Friends.’ It’s so basic. There’s nothing sentimental about the way you say it, either. You sound like you’re trying to spit a bug out of your mouth. And yet its mere mention has reached a height of sincerity previously untouched in your relationship.

Kass feels strange, unbearably so. He wants to pull you underwater and kiss you. He wants it so bad he can’t think straight.

“What are you staring at?” you ask. 

He moves away. “Just wondering what I said to make you think we were friends.”

You snort and kick his leg underwater.

Kass is at an impasse. Either he goes for another dare, which means he has to jeopardise his reputation by asking that bald man for his number, or he opts for truth, and you force him to admit why he keeps coming back to Feroxia, which is a skeleton in a closet he locked and tossed the key to.

Luck is on his side, at least, because you also seem keen to drop the game. You probably realise he’d insist on ending with your turn to keep it fair. (And you’re totally right. He wouldn’t let that slide.)

Instead, you talk about some nuances of pokemon training and loiter around rockpools, where you encounter a beached polydubia and briefly team-up to toss it back into the ocean. It’s shortly after that, while looking at the last scrapes of dusk on the horizon, that Kass decides to drop his bombshell.

“Do you want to stay here overnight?”

You whip around to face him with a glance that seems, at best, suspicious. “Why?” 

“I don't really feel like going home in wet clothes. Either I wreck the upholstery in my car or force trajetagon to fly us all the way home, which, even on a good day, doesn’t seem possible, but especially not when we’re still dripping with water. We’ll rent out two separate beds for the night. No big deal.”

Kass knows he’s rambling, but the look on your face makes him feel like he’s diffusing a bomb. Worst of all, he’s not even being honest; God knows if he’s making sense. 

“I’ll pay for it, obviously," he adds, maybe in desperation.

Even as you agree, you look unsure, but you don’t put up a fight while you trail along the coastline to the first hotel you see: a modern building with glass walls and an expansive garden of palm trees and low-lit swimming pools. They’re all empty for the moment. Now that the sun has hidden behind the ocean, the infamous chill of the Feroxian night gathers in the air, and every sensible person has gone into hiding.

Kass’ wet shoes squeak against the black marble floor in the entrance. Glazed vases bursting with palm fronds twice his height sit in alcoves lit by lamps that look a little like glowing balls of loosely tangled yarn, and a gigantic clock with the frame of a golden sun ticks his time away in roman numerals. There is only one receptionist. Kass drags himself to the desk in his heavy clothes, leaving a path of wet shoe prints. You look a little more presentable than he does, but your hair still drips seawater onto the floor and your soaked underwear is stuffed into your grass-covered bag, like a dark secret unbeknownst to the rest of the world.

“Can we book a room with two, single beds please?” he asks.

The only room left is going to have a double bed, he’s sure of it. There were none that fit the bill when he checked the website this morning. He’s so sure that he’s holding his breath as the receptionist taps away at her computer, and when she comes up with a smile, tells him that he's 'very lucky' because they’ve had, not one, but two cancellations, and asks him whether he’d like the standard or the deluxe, his disappointment feels like a physical gut-punch. He digs around in his wallet while she rattles off some differences between them, probably mentioning a price he’s grown unaccustomed to listening out for.

“Deluxe, please,” he mutters out of habit, and hands her his credit card. The receptionist, villainess of the night, taps away on the computer without a second thought for his crushed ambitions. 

“Show off,” you mutter, just loud enough that he can hear, and he has to curb his smile. 

“We’ll see if you’re still complaining after taking your bath in a jacuzzi.”

The receptionist politely pretends not to see you sticking your tongue out as she swipes Kass' card. Which… doesn't seem to work, apparently. He watches her try once, twice, thrice, before she apologises and tells him, "the system must be having some technical issues," after which she resets the card machine (and her computer) to no avail. Regardless of how she sticks the card in or waves it about, she gets the same transaction error.

Kass waves it off with a, "no problem," but he’s probably more confused than she is, because he used it barely an hour ago to buy your hot dog and it was totally fine. The receptionist calls her supervisor over, a woman dressed head-to-toe in white, who does exactly the same thing, and then politely explains his card was declined.

“Are you sure? There should be no limit on that account,” he asks. The supervisor says she’ll try again, but even before she unplugs the machine, it’s clear she’s just going through the motions to placate him.

Kass looks at you in confusion. You look back at him with a guilty expression he’s never seen on your face before.

“What is it?” he asks.

You bite your lip and look away.

“Seriously, what have you done?”

“Nothing!” you say, too loud and too fast. “I'm just thinking. I mean, the last time you used it was at that food stall, right?”

“Yes. If you're implying that buying a hot dog maxed out my credit card—”

“No, it's just, that was before… our little swim, you know?”

Oh, he thinks, of course.

“You mean, before you dragged me in the ocean.”

“Look, my debit was totally fine after a run in the washing machine. It's not my fault you have some bougie card that can’t take being splashed with a bit of water.”

“No,” he enunciates, with sarcasm that drips poison, “of course not. Clearly, Bank of Kanto set out to ruin this whole evening by giving us no choice but to sleep in a bush naked and catch hypothermia.”

This is a prospect you look genuinely horrified for, which surprises him, because it's not possible you got all eight badges without roughing it out at one point or another. 

“Can't your chauffeur drive us back to my house?” you ask helplessly, and he remembers your cushy origins prior to becoming champion, as a teenager who played video games all day and rarely saw the sun if you could help it. Clearly, old habits die hard.

“Not unless you feel like trekking across the region. I sent my driver away an hour ago.”

The fear in your eyes redoubles as rage. Maybe this wasn’t the best time for another bombshell. 

“Are you for real? When I hadn't even agreed to stay the night?”

Kass figures that he can either stand his ground here or grovel for your forgiveness. Borderline instinctively, he decides that if there ever was a point of no return, it was long before now. Maybe long before today. If you put a knife to his neck and told him to stick a pin somewhere, it would probably land around the time he participated in that stupid online competition, the prelude to this unravelled mess, and was inevitably eviscerated by you, the loser who could identify pokemon by their shrill, bit-crunched, video-game cries and had never touched a pokeball in real life. (And no, that is not a sore spot.)

Needless to say, Kass does not grovel.

“Yes! Back when you dragged me in the ocean like a brain-dead dipshit and I decided I didn't want to wreck the upholstery in a car worth more than your livelihood!”

He knows he’s overstepped the line when you gasp. Great job, Kass. What an unforgettable date this has been.

“That does it, you slimy little grubbit,” you say, rolling your sleeves up. “I don’t give a shit about your half-assed excuses, stupid credit card, and I certainly don’t give a shit about your upholstery. Why don’t you take the next private plane to your mansion in Kanto and get yourself a whole new car with your mountain of savings, since you’re clearly so much better—”

The supervisor clears her throat. Both of you snap from your argument and look at her with a mortified expression, like you forgot she was there.

“Maybe you would like to stay in one of our economy rooms instead?” she asks. “If you happen to have any cash on hand, our rates are listed on the leaflets.”

Kass feels the tension thin to a cold breeze when you sigh and pluck one off a metal stand on top of the reception desk, but your mouth is still set in a tight grimace. Your eyes dash and back and forth over the listings, and you’re clearly not impressed, but he suspects it’s got nothing to do with the rooms and everything to do with the fact he just called you a brain-dead dipshit.

“Would you like me to leave you to discuss?” the supervisor asks.

“No, that’s alright,” you say, and put the leaflet back. “Sorry for the trouble. Just put us in your cheapest room, please. I’ll cover the cost for tonight.”

The receptionist types something on her keyboard and double checks her computer. “That would be the standard suite facing the city. It has, erm, only one single bed though.”

“Fine by me,” you say. “He can sleep on the floor.”

Kass tries not to grimace. Something something, monkey's paw; something something, be careful what you wish for. Sure, universe, lesson learnt. 

Chapter Text

You’re surprised when Kass doesn’t raise hell about sleeping on the floor. Quite the opposite, after you both take a shower, wrap yourself in towels, and string your wet clothes out on the radiators, he’s quick to organise a makeshift bed on the carpet, and he doesn’t complain about it once, even though it’s strung out of towels and looks pathetic to the point of comedy. It’s only after you lend him your jacket out of pity that he starts whining, (about how much it stinks of sweat, which you can’t refute) but he doesn’t seem keen on giving it back, so you suspect he appreciates the gesture more than he lets on.

Kass is very uppity about certain things (such as not ruining the upholstery of his car) but it's in these moments you see him as someone else, like a double-sided coin flipping in your finger. It’s strange to you, always has been, how he’s equally comfortable sleeping in a bush and signing photographs for the paparazzi. You don’t know many aristocrats with six-figure-salaries who willingly spend weeks on end with nothing but a tent and bags of canned food.

“What are you looking at?” Kass asks. “Changed your mind about the jacket?”

You shake your head. The curtains are drawn shut behind you and the room is dark. You’re bundled beneath the white duvet, towel over your head and chest, and Kass is trying to get comfortable in his tomb of rags.

“I’m just thinking about you,” you say.

Kass, who was busy trying to find a fold for your jacket that would reveal some hidden, pillow-like softness, stops abruptly. “Why?” he asks, and his face, barely illuminated by the dull light on your bedside table, looks wary and guarded.

“I guess I feel bad for making you sleep on the floor.”

He starts folding the jacket again. “Is this because I told you I’d pay for the room? Don’t worry about that. I’m not forcing you onto pumpkin soup rations just so you can cover the cost of a hotel. As tragic as this looks, it still beats sleeping in a bush.”

You wrinkle your nose and sit up on your mattress. “What’s with all the poverty jokes today? Maybe I don't need a manager to sift through all my sponsorship deals, but I'm still Champion of Feroxia. I'm not struggling to make ends meet.” 

“Ah, so you don’t mind covering the cost of the hotel?” Kass has no towel over his chest, so as he sits up and faces the lamp, shadows gather in the dips of his lean muscles. (Don’t look, you tell yourself. Don’t look don’t look don’t look) “Then maybe we should get some room service too? Was there a number for that anywhere in the leaflet?”

You throw your pillow at his face. 

He makes a funny noise when he gets hit, which you find incredibly satisfying, but he rights himself quickly to move the pillow out of your reach. 

“I don’t see why you thought that was a good idea. I’m not giving it back.”

“By all means, keep it. I just thought you’d rather sleep on the bed with me.”

Whatever Kass was about to say chokes in his mouth. He’s got a wild look in his eyes, and when he intakes a breath, it’s so loud that you can hear it. Which is… embarrassing, really. For both of you.

“Why are you surprised?” you ask, rubbing your arm self-consciously. “We’re both to blame for this situation, so I don’t see how it’s fair you’re the one sleeping on the floor.”

“Oh,” he says, and you don’t like the way it sounds. Kass must not like it either, because he repeats it, like he’s trying to wipe the previous one from existence. “Oh, right. Then, uh, yeah, sure. If that’s alright with you.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t.”

“Right.” Kass grips the towel around his waist as he gets up, re-wrapping and tightening the knot. He can’t meet your eyes, and for all intents and purposes, he looks like he's seen a ghost. You don’t like this quiet, cryptic version of Kass. Worst of all, his weird behaviour is making you feel weird, and you like that even less.

He tosses the pillow towards you and starts setting himself up on the other end of the bed, folding the jacket at your feet. For mysterious reasons you’d rather die than think about, this disappoints you.

“Seriously, you want to go topsy-turvy? Are you five?”

Your first thought when he whips around with a venomous glare is: ‘that’s more like it,’ which is kind of grisly, really. You wouldn’t know how to open that can of worms if you tried.

“And you want to sleep together on a single bed?” he grills. “Even married couples don’t like each other enough for that, and last time I checked, we were barely friends. Unless I hit my head on a rock falling from that pier and blanked on two years of patty-cake.”

You grab the pillow and press it into the mattress with far more force than is necessary. If you stopped to think about it, you’d probably agree with him, but as it is, you wonder if you could get away with smothering him to death and dropping his body in the ocean. ‘Barely friends?’ So that’s what he thinks of you.

“Stop making it into a big deal,” you say. Your voice rips with tension. “We’re both adults, there’s only one pillow, and I don’t want your dirty feet in my face while I sleep.”

“But my dick pressed against your ass is no problem?”

Your cheeks set ablaze. In the future, you commend yourself for being able to respond with anything but a blue screen of death. “Then turn around and face the wall! God! What is wrong with you today?”

“Fine!” Kass concedes, though it sounds like anything but, and strides onto the mattress with a viciousness that shakes the bed. He steps over your legs and shuffles to sit against the wall, where you told him to go. This, as it turns out, is far closer than you thought it would be, though you’re less concerned with his proximity than you are with the next thing he says.

“You really want to pretend there’s nothing between us? Okay, I can play this game too.”

He looks at you from behind his long eyelashes with furious, narrowed eyes. Your heart hammers in your throat. It reminds you of the first few days of your rivalry, long before making your lives miserable became an inside joke; when one-upping each other was a matter of life and death. It feels life and death now. When he crawls under the covers and moves closer, it feels like he’s going to push you off a precipice.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask, but you might as well be throwing questions at a brick wall. He’s a livewire cauldron, bubbling with anger, or… (and this is the moment you realise all the other alternatives seem worse, so you just stick with anger).

“I don’t know. Clearly, I’m not thinking straight, because there’s nothing weird about this, right?”

Beneath the sheets, one of his fingers trails over your shoulder with a barely-there ghost of a touch that leaves scorched skin in its path. You think it’s an accident until you notice the blatant way he studies your reaction as you flinch against him. You feel dizzy. He smells good, which isn’t right. Kass should smell like sunscreen and sweat, but the subtle smell of cologne lingers about his washed body. And why is he even wearing it in the first place? You want to lean into it so bad you’re deathly scared you’re actually going to do it.

“I never said it wasn’t weird,” you say, out of desperation to say anything at all. You grab his wrist and push his hand away. “Just that it wasn’t a big deal.”

Once again, his expression morphs, and you’re reminded of the flipping coin. Except instead of heads or tails, it twists inexplicably: an impossible shape with more sides than you can ascribe a number to. You’ve seen him look defeated, sure, but you’ve never seen him like this; like he’s lost far more than the title of Champion in the ceaseless battleground of your acquaintance. 

“You can’t tell me you’re not nervous.” Against all odds, between the border of low rumble and whisper, he sounds not like he’s teasing, but like he’s begging. Tell me you’re nervous. Tell me you’re feeling this.

There’s a flurry of unknowns in your head. What is he thinking? What do you want him to think? And why the hell are your hands trembling? When you speak, your voice nearly breaks apart in your throat.

“Why not? You said it yourself. We’re barely friends.”

Kass actually scoffs at that. “And you believed me?”

Whatever words were about to slip from your lips unravel in your mouth. Because what kind of idiot spills conviction into hateful words he doesn’t believe and lets himself get angry when people take it to heart? It makes you crazy with frustration.

Then again, that’s Kass all over. From the highest stray hair on his unruly brown mop to the embroidered sponsors on his walking boots. A backward tongue and hands that act in spite of it. All lies and half-truths and double-sided-coins and never, ever honesty. 

“Not anymore,” you say, before grabbing a fistful of his hair and pushing your mouth to his.

Kass doesn't seem to know what's happening at first. His eyes are blown-open; his shoulders stiff. Still, he evidently has more sense than you do, because when he orients himself, his hands push at your chest, like he wants to get you off, and you pull away with a start.

Why the hell did you think that would be a good—

And then he pushes you into the pillow and devours you with desperate, open-mouthed kisses. 

Ah. That’s why.

For a few, wonderful seconds, you forget to breathe. Not out of relief or soul-crushing affection, but because you want to rip every single lying word from his mouth and never let him speak again, and you want it so bad you’d sew your lips to his and never let them part.

When he comes undone; he does it for air: his breath is a ragged mess; the amber of his eyes is a thin trace against the black hole of his pupils, and his lips are bright pink. Ruined and swollen.

As it turns out, he has a lot of faces you haven’t seen. Good faces you want to see again. You glide a breath’s distance forward, and in that moment, with a curse-breaking blink, his rapture fades, and he looks horrified, absolutely horrified—

“No, this isn’t a good idea. We shouldn't—” he starts, but you’ve got zero interest in whatever shitty excuses follow, so you roll your eyes and tug him back. He offers no resistance, only melts in your touch when his chest falls upon yours. You feel his muscles relax beneath your outstretched fingers, hear his breathing slow—and pick up again as the kiss builds on itself.

You want to scorch him to ashes. Want his little useless lies to be snowflakes devoured by the wildfire. Freshwater drops in the ocean. Anything that makes them disappear. And then his cool hands snake up the hem of your towel and you realise he wants to ruin you too. Which is fine. It’s how you’ve always been. Winner and loser. 

“Off,” he mutters, in-between kisses, which take a steep turn down your jawline and into the crook of your neck. The damp ends of his hair trace cold, intermittent paths across your skin.

The friction has rendered your towel so loose you merely have to shake it off. The low-light of the bedside lamp reveals your nakedness beneath the blanket, and Kass separates from you for a moment to take it all in.

“Is the offer to take pictures still standing?” he asks. A joke on the transcript; not so much in person. Your breath runs thin when his thumb rubs circles into your breasts, and the part of you that still sees Kass as an enemy feels his influence with an acute sense of alarm.

“If you want a souvenir from Feroxia, I’ll get you a fridge magnet.”

Blink-and-you-miss-it, his eyes crinkle with warmth. It’s a strange look for him; you’ve grown unaccustomed to seeing his face without the brittle edge of disapproval. You wonder if it’s because you’ve never been physically close enough to catch these brief flashes of affection, or if the foreplay has torn apart his fortitude. And then it’s over, because his eyes darken with something that can’t be misconstrued as anything but lust, and his soft, traitorous lips trickle over your neck.

“In that case, let me give you a souvenir too.” His breath is hot and heavy against your ear. Your pulse spikes. You can’t shake the feeling you’re going to lose yourself, especially when he takes the soft skin of your neck between his teeth and kisses it over, and over, and over.

You try to reprimand him, but one of his hands sinks between your legs and the commanding nature of your tone is shaken into a scatter of pitches. His name turns to a helpless cry that merely urges him to tug your chin and expose more of your vulnerable neck.

You don’t know what this is to him. Whether leaving a trail of hickeys is his way of claiming a little bit of your body. A small victory, perhaps: an echo of your constant grappling for dominion. Oddly, you don’t mind. If this is a fight, both of you are on even ground. Your hand (still tangled in his mussed hair) directs him to where you want his lips, and his glazed eyes give him the costume of a spellbound fool. Watching each other come undone may be the most rewarding aspect of your entire rivalry. Friendship. Bed buddy arrangement. Whatever the hell this is going to be in the morning, when you can’t avoid the ‘what are we,’ conversation by mumbling his name over and over.

When he surfaces, his lips are slicked with his spit. He looks at the marks on your neck with satisfaction you can recognise even amid the borderline reverent ruination of his signature disapproval. Ever the coin, you suppose.

“Worried I’m going to forget about you if I don’t have a reminder?” you ask and give him a coy look. Something stirs on his tongue, you can tell, but his lips keep it locked behind bars. Which means whatever it is would hurt his pride. (Probably an affirmation.) 

You let your hands roam over a protrusion on his towel. When he hisses, satisfaction recurs into you from all angles.

“W-wait,” he says, grabbing your wrist and pushing it into the bedsheets.

You lift an eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not saying we need to stop.”

“Then what are you saying?”

He shrinks into the blanket somewhat, like he hopes it will shield him from the busybody of the desk lamp and shroud the pink tips of his ears in shadow. When he speaks, he sounds like he’s admitting a secret. “That we should take it slow.”

You’re not sure what to make of it. Going slow is exactly the opposite of what you thought Kass would want, which either means sex happens to be the one thing he is uncharacteristically lazy about, or tonight isn’t about burning each other alive in a furious struggle for power. And that’s far removed from your expectation, considering this is the same man who blasted through every scenic route in Feroxia to claim the title of Champion before you showed up to take it away from him.

“Since when do you even do slow?”

He looks away. Another question he doesn’t want to answer. But you don’t press, not when he slides downward, asserts himself between your legs, and puts his mouth to better use, leaving a trail of sloppy kisses up the inside of your thigh. If this is how he’s going to avoid answering your questions, you’re not eager to put up a fight. Maybe you should ask him again why he keeps coming back to—

You gasp. Your thighs tighten around his head. He forces them back apart, pressing them into the mattress.

His languor is torturous. It ruffles every feather inside of your mind, because the Kass you know would rush through this before his common sense could catch up and tell him it was a bad idea. Then again, the Kass you know wouldn’t do this in the first place. Wouldn’t trust you to look after his team of pokemon, invite you to a restaurant on the beach, or look heart-crushingly over-the-moon when you admit you consider him a friend. (Which is ridiculous, really. And you hate the way your stomach flutters when you recall the stars in his eyes.)

You press the back of your hand against your mouth. Bit by bit, you’re losing yourself in his soft touches, and if he doesn’t pick up his pace, you might start cussing him out to keep yourself from begging. Which you refuse to do, regardless of his intentions. If you give him an inch, he’s going to want the mile. Not that you would let him off the hook if the positions were reversed.

Which gives you an idea.

“Hold on,” you command. 

He stops immediately and looks at you with poorly concealed concern, like someone might look at a wild animal. “What is it?”

“Sit up.” 
 
He follows your instruction. Watches you do the same. The restless way he tangles his fingers sparks something inside of your chest that hovers too far from lust and too close to affection. Against your better judgement, you lean into it, twining your hands together and placing them on your hips, which he greedily grabs a hold of. Still, the edges of his mouth turn downwards. 

“Was I—” he begins, and hesitates, nipping his bottom lip between his teeth. “Was I doing it wrong?”

You stop short. You were expecting some snarky comment about ‘deciding to go slow all of a sudden.’ Not that. 

“Don’t tell me you’ve never done this before.”

His ministrations are too deliberate to tell, but the more you think about it, the more it adds up. Sure, Kass can barely take four steps in Valloway without being stopped for autographs, but for all his endless popularity, he spent his eighteenth birthday in a tent, with only his pokemon for company. Clearly, interpersonal relations are low on his list of priorities.

His jaw sets into a tight, hard line. “Was I doing it wrong or not?” 

Ah. Getting defensive. How cute.

You stifle laughter as you shake your head, but Kass doesn’t look pleased with the resulting smile, either. “You weren’t,” you tell him. 
 
“Then why did you tell me to stop?”

“Because,” you start, and push against his chest until he tips backward against the crumpled blanket. “I want my fun too.”

It’s a strange relief to see his nervousness dissolve to expectation. A little bundle of anxiety that untangles in the palm of your hand, along the fingers your trace across his chest, which rises and falls in stuttered rhythm.

Down, they slide, beneath the towel. His breath catches.

“I’ll go slow, don’t worry.”

His eyes close and his hips jut forward, ever so slightly. True to your promise, you keep your touches feather-light, and he rewards your restraint with small, exquisite gasps. You lean into his collar to hear their full span, and he cranes his face away from you. Embarrassed, you think at first, before he defiantly meets your eyes and you realise the muscles in his neck are taut with expectation. So you place kisses along the column of his throat, suck and nip. His fists curl into the bedsheets. Legs quiver. Every little detail of his descent boldly outlined in the unbroken stretch of your attention.

“Now I understand why you wanted to take pictures,” you say.

His eyes flit away from yours. This time, you’re sure it’s out of embarrassment. His dry wit has shrivelled up. Against your curled fingers, he has become entirely yours to mould. You wonder if a similar thought crossed his mind with his mouth between your legs. 

“Kass Akai: world-renowned celebrity, bucking into my hand. Should I expect jealous hate mail tomorrow?” You’re joking, of course, but a blue shadow dips on Kass’ forehead. 

“We can keep this between us, if you want.”

“Can?” It strikes you as a strange word for one reason only: it implies there’s an alternative.

Accidentally or on purpose, Kass misunderstands the question. “I’m not legally obligated to tell the truth about our relationship in interviews, believe it or not.”

“I didn't realise you talked about our relationship in interviews full-stop.”

Kass looks at you like you’re crazy. “You’ve never seen a single one? Six months—” he starts and winces, because you run your fingers over his tip and his whole body stiffens in an effort not to lean into you. “After you became Champion, the first six months of interviews were nothing but questions of you. Of who you were; in general and to me in particular. And they still ask me about you. Every time I take a plane here.”

“Why?” you scoff. It seems outlandish. You’d always considered yourself a mere comma in Kass’ run-on list of ambitions. A stopgap in a schedule packed tight of everything but your influence. 

“Probably because you were the only person I could never defeat, despite multiple attempts. Or maybe they could see something I couldn't. Beats me. I’ve often been told I’ve got no talent for fooling anyone but myself.”

“And me, apparently.” This is an admission you barter a hefty bit of pride for, but it’s worth the vulnerable look that crosses his face. If you weren’t so drunk on lust, you’d probably try to decipher it. Instead, you sweep the thought under a carpet and unfasten his towel in gentle, deliberate steps.

“Can I be honest?” he asks, when you take the erection that springs from beneath the towel wordlessly, running circles over the tip with your thumb. The towel lands in a heap on the floor, among all the others.

“Shoot.”

“I’m not going to last. At all.”

You can’t help it. Despite knowing he’s going to hate you for it, you burst out laughing. Stoic, dishonest Kass, coming out with something like that. You wouldn’t have believed it. Almost back-to-back, you follow with a tandem of apologies, but it proves unnecessary, because Kass doesn’t look offended in the least. It feels like a miracle in motion when you catch the cusp of his relieved smile before he slides his hand up your neck and (gently pressing his fingers into the dip at the base of your head) pushes your lips to his. Over, and over, and over.

“I hate you,” he says, when he’s finished. And then, he laughs too. Like it’s all a big joke open to no-one but yourselves. A red tape that wraps around the room and shutters the windows. 

Oh, the things you’d do to that lying little mouth—

Wordlessly, you press your knee between his legs, and his pleased growl rumbles into your lips. He splays one hand on your crotch and slides two of his fingers in slow, nervous circles over your clit, watching you react with a characteristically studious attitude. You widen your legs slightly, and he reacts to it without a moment’s thought, pushing his fingers inside, bit by bit, until you’re buried to his knuckles. The sound this makes is utterly obscene. It’d be embarrassing if he weren’t so clearly into it, and you let him play around, less interested in the motion of his ministrations (he’s sliding them in and out, which doesn’t do all that much for you, per say) than you are with his slightly parted lips and blatant fascination.

Still, that must not be enough for him, because when he looks up at you, he doesn’t look satisfied. “Is this right?” he asks. 

“Instead of sliding them in and out, try curling them.” 

His face scrunches in concentration. “Like this?”

Yes, like that. You gasp against his cheek. “Now, where you were touching me before, use your thumb.”

“Okay,” he murmurs, so timidly you can barely hear him. “You can… grip me a little tighter, if you want.” High-and-mighty Kass, reduced to a mousey pre-pleading. Normally, you’d jump on the chance to tease him, but whatever part of you found pride in throwing him off kilter seems to be buried somewhere far out of reach, amid the slow-building pleasure heating your body. You follow his suggestion without comment, and the next groan that rumbles from inside of him rattles you to the core. 

“I know I was the one to suggest going slow,” he says, “but I’m really not going to last much longer. Do you think we could skip ahead?”

"To… what, exactly?" 

Kass can't meet your eyes. "To... me being inside of you. If that’s alright."

Your eyes widen. You feel bad refusing him, but this whole thing was so unforseen that you didn’t even think to bring protection. “Sorry, but I haven’t got anything we can use. We’ll have to do it like this for tonight.”

He looks away. “Theoretically, if I happened to have some…”

You lift an eyebrow. “Then yes, you could theoretically stick your dick inside me.”

Kass needs no further encouragement. He weasels from under the covers and stumbles over to the radiators, where your wet clothes are strung out. When he returns, it’s after digging about in the pocket of his jeans, with a small, thin square between his thumb and index finger.

“Do you just carry condoms around?”

Kass wrinkles his nose as he tears it open with his teeth. The wrapper falls upon the duvet.

(Cola flavoured. How considerate)

“Don’t even test me,” he says, rolling the condom on. “You already know I don’t.” 

Only sheer force of will stops your heart mid-summersault. He planned this. Which means he wanted tonight to happen. You can’t decide whether you want to kick or kiss him. Thankfully, he tumbles into the bed and settles on the latter before you make your mind up. 

“Look at me. I want to see your face as I do this,” he says, and nothing, absolutely nothing, can help your poor heart now. Especially not when he pushes you into the mattress with his lean body and brushes a strand of hair from your face, like even that is an obstacle. The rims of his amber irises catch the scant light of the lamp, and red bruises have bloomed where you assaulted his neck with kisses.

Kass was never unattractive, but even among the metropolis backgrounds of south-eastern Feroxia, he had this wild, unpolished look about him. During the first few days of your acquaintance, you understood how he garnered fans, but not fangirls, least of all why they fawned over him in camping gear as though he looked better in tracksuits than the average person. The only time you saw his appearance as anything of note was the day you fought each other as Challenger and Champion at the peak of The Crescendo: him, the latter, adorned in the traditional garb of the Dominion, with a velvet cape sweeping the floor behind his steps, a pitch-black crown embedded with red jewels adorning his messy hair, and that god-forsaken, smug look on his face. (Not that he wore any of it better than the hanger in your wardrobe after you swiped the victory from under his nose.)

Now, however, as he kneels at your hips, with the lamp at his back and every unruly hair lit like a glowing wire, you see the appeal of messy. If ruining him was the initial allure, the no-holds barred wreck he has become is the overture. You spread your legs apart; he shuffles closer. In his excitement to get close he nearly topples over, and you both try (and fail) not to laugh. Lit from the back, he has become totally transparent, and you’re a bigger fool for his honest feelings than you care to admit.

And then, finally, he places himself flush with your entrance. 

“Tell me if it hurts,” he says. You don’t have the chance to tell him he’s dragged the foreplay far too long for that to be a possibility before he enters you and finds out for himself. As has become the new custom, he does this slowly, and you have all the time in the world to see him come undone, all the way from his trembling thighs to the upturned lilt that plays with his voice.

“When did you even get this wet?” he asks. You can tell he’s trying not to sound out of breath.

“When I saw the cola flavoured condoms.”

He snorts despite himself. “Shut up.” 

“Make me,” you challenge, and he does just that, placing an uncharacteristically chaste kiss upon your lips before following it with a decreasingly measured series, progressing down your body like the hem of a flame along a piece of paper. When he gets to your nipples, he rolls his tongue around them in turn, and your body burns from inside out. 

As he begins thrusting inside of you, the grasp of your pride slackens its restraint. You moan freely, and Kass’ face fractures with little worry lines. When you rock your hips, the muscles in his abdomen tense. Everything you do reflects upon him. Even from beneath, the influence feels like power, heady and intoxicating. You could do this for the rest of your life and never get bored.

But just as you think that, he stops.

“Kass, come on,” you plead, because you’re too far gone to stop yourself.

He shakes his head with a strange, crooked expression. For a second, you’re almost worried for him.

“Kass?”
 
“Maybe if you beg some more,” he has the gall to say. High and mighty bastard. His smile is cocky, but there’s a tense edge to it you can’t decipher (like in his hurry to plaster it together, he ran out of time to patch the holes), until you chase your pleasure by rolling your hips against him. Immediately, his resolve crumbles. He pins your hips to the mattress with unprecedented desperation, and his drawn-out, high-pitched, “no, please, just wait,” is far more honest than his teasing.

“You’re gonna cum, aren’t you?”

“Yes!” he bursts, with no remnant of that superiority. “If you keep flailing against me. Chill out for a second.”

You take pity on him and do as he says. Now that the curtain has fallen on his precarious pantomime, he looks totally at his wits end. For a while, his laboured breathing is the only thing to cut through the silence. 

“Try to think about something boring, like paperwork,” you advise.

“I’ve been doing that since you came out of the shower. It hasn’t helped.”

You could tease him, sure, and you would have killed for the chance in any other circumstance, but he looks so pitiful you honestly don’t have the heart for it. Either you’re going soft, or this man is an unwitting maestro in swinging your sympathy like a pendulum.

“In that case, just bring me up to speed, okay? And we’ll do it together.”

Kass stares you down like he’s trying to decide if that’s his only option. You clench around him to prove your point, and he must realise he’s about three thrusts from busting a nut (don’t laugh, he really will hate you this time), because he intakes a sharp breath and nods.

“Okay, that’s clearly the only way this is going to work.” 

He looks pained as he pulls out of you. Not that you’re happy about it either (he filled you out quite nicely), but the stiff way his jaw is locked in place makes it look like he’s gritting his teeth in sheer effort. He must be very close if the slightest friction is having such an effect. 

The duvet shifts as he gathers the wetness from where you’re joined. It spreads along his fingers, joining them with a thin, transparent line. For a moment, his eyes widen, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Then, all of a sudden, they snap back to you. Like a leaf scorching under the sun, you burn in the lens of his ceaseless attention, especially when he licks his fingers clean, picks up your hand, and turns it over, pressing the pulse in your wrist to his lips. You feel his teeth, first, then his tongue, before he hooks your hand around his neck and leaves his own free for undisclosed purposes.

“Tell me when,” he says.

When he touches you this time, you can’t help but jolt beneath his wet fingers. You close your eyes, but even against the darkness of your lids, you know he’s staring. 

Look at me. Let me take pictures. Let me see.

Another kiss. His eyelashes flutter against your cheek. Your chin tilts upwards, following his mouth. His chest becomes flush with yours, and you’re obscenely aware of his body heat. An erratic heartbeat thrums. For a moment that lasts entirely too long, you can’t tell who it belongs to.  

And then he curls his fingers—

You try not to say his name, but it slips from your parted lips as a whisper regardless. You know he hears it. He’s too close not to. With bated breath, you wait for a snarky comment, but nothing comes. Quite the opposite, when you finally gather the courage to open your eyes, you find him utterly spellbound. Your word has twined around his neck in a lasso—so you pull, pull, pull him to your lips again. He has you wrapped around his finger but it’s all okay because you’ve got his leash on your wrist. Somehow, both of you have come out of this on top. 

“Okay,” you whisper, a little out of breath, “enough.”

Kass nods, understanding. He looks like he wants to say something dangerous, but it’s swept under the carpet when he enters you again. His fingers slow but never stop—lavishing you with attention even as he begins thrusting. Kass is good at that. Good at directing his one-track mind. Long after you’ve stopped being able to think straight, when you’re so, painfully close you can’t even rein in your desperate cries for him to go faster, he maintains a shocking coherency (Or his hands do, at least).

“Say my name again,” he instructs.

You don’t even think about what he’s asking you to do, you just do it. All at once, you feel him push all the way inside of you, hitting you in a spot that sends a burst of pleasure rippling through your body, and the last, harsh circle he makes with his hips proves to be the tipping point. Somehow, this is the best you’ve ever felt, on the cliff’s edge of the unending build-up, pressing your knees against his ribcage and tugging on the bedsheets for sanity. You feel like you’re floating, and you only come back down to earth when Kass intertwines his fingers in yours. 

“You just got so tight,” he chokes out. “Please don’t tell me to stop, I’m gonna, I’m gonna—”

A flush of affection that works in tandem with the tingling in your toes blooms in the space between your throat and your chest. You fight through the blur of your narrowed eyes to see his own glaze over.

He collapses against you, radiating heat. And then, while you’re both basking the post-orgasm glow, relishing the plush of his heavy breath across your collar, comes a harsh knock against the wall from the room next-door. 

“Keep it down, please!” your neighbour yells.

You both look at each other, simultaneously wide-eyed and utterly spent, like you’ve been woken from a dream so outlandish that you may never find the words to describe it, and bury your embarrassed laughter into each other’s skin.

You lay together for a while, Kass still buried between your legs, before he abruptly remembers he’s wearing a condom and gets up to toss it in the bin. You mourn the loss of his body heat during the unbearable, ten-second span of his absence until he wriggles back beneath the covers and takes you in his arms, pressing you to his naked chest.

And then he looks at you. Suspiciously tenderly. 

“What?” you ask, trying not to smile.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” he asks, though he grins like he’s lying, which makes you think he knows exactly what you mean. 

“Like…I don’t know. I’ve never had anyone look at me like that. All weird.”

He bursts out laughing, and you feel his chest shake against your body. When he meets your eyes, they’re so full of feeling you almost can’t recognise him as the same person who bought an entire shop’s stock of potions so you wouldn’t have any for yourself. Which, to this day, is probably the pettiest thing he’s done.

“It’s nothing big,” Kass says. “I’m just thinking about how this evening turned out better than I could have hoped for, even though I tripped on every single step it took to get here. Which I’m sorry about, by the way.”

Your jaw swings open. For as long as you’ve known him, that word has never left his mouth.

“Now you’re looking at me all weird.”

“Sorry, I just…I don’t get it. What are you even apologising for? I was the one who broke your credit card and made a mess of the hotel situation.”

“Well, you know—” he begins. His chest rises against yours in a steadying breath and you prepare yourself for whatever bomb he’s about to drop. “Because I did this all wrong from the beginning. If I’d been upfront with you, we could have had a rose-sprinkled, penthouse suite reserved as early as yesterday. But because I couldn’t even admit I sent my driver away so I wouldn’t get cold feet about asking you to spend the night together, we were packed into a single bed after an argument about my stupid upholstery. That’s not the impression I want to leave you with, going forward. You mean more to me than that.”

It feels like being hit with a waterfall. Some dam has ruptured, torn in halves and quarters, and every single tonne of cold water has washed over your body. He’s waiting for an answer, but the only thing you can think about is the way he’s looking at you, like you’re holding a match over his heart and all you have to do to break him irreparably is let go of it.

“Kass, I had no idea...”

His face falls. “If you’re going to tell me this was just a one-night stand, save me the spiel and—”

“No, no, that’s not it, I would—I mean…” Your tongue is in tangles. “I want to do this again. For sure. But unless I’m wrong, you want more than this, which… It’s not that I don’t want it either, but for starters, I see you once every three months. At best. And even then, we're still easy pickings for tabloids. Can you imagine the inevitable publicity that would come out of the woodworks to pry our lives open if we did it more? Especially if we keep making scenes in public like we do now. We’re just… not the most conventional people, you know?”

“Then we just have to call each other more often. And I’ve already told you, we don’t have to make it public.” He looks at you like he doesn’t see what the problem is. He’s borderline angry, which makes you angry too, because for all Kass prides himself on being pragmatic, his solution is shockingly short-sighted. 

“Don’t give me that. Even if I don’t so much as tell my mother, we’ve both got our fair share of paparazzi who will find out sooner or later. And you know me, Kass, I’m barely used to the kind of attention that comes with being Champion. Do you really think I’d be good with—”

“You’re telling me you can’t handle some gossip articles? Since when do you even look at the news?” His hand forcibly entwines with yours, like he’s trying to convince you that you’re bound together whether you like it or not.

“It’s not that simple, you know that.” Even as you argue with him, your hand squeezes his beneath the blanket. “Are you really okay being in a long-distance relationship until one of us retires? Because until then, I’ve got every reason to be in Feroxia, and you’ve got every reason to be everywhere else. Unless you were under the impression I’d drop my job to be a trophy wife, in which case, I hate to disappoint, but I love being Champion.”

Kass gets very quiet. Part of you is relieved, because it makes you think you’ve finally got through to him (and that part is subsequently disappointed, because as embarrassing as it is to admit, you wouldn’t hate to be proved wrong).

“Is one of us retiring the only way we could get this to work?” he asks eventually.

You’re about to tell him that you don’t know—that it might be—before he shuts you down completely.

“Because if you’re willing to wait a couple more months, I could probably…”

Of all the things… Kass is willing to drop his career? For you? You shake your head vehemently. “Don’t be stupid. You shouldn’t even be considering that.”

He bites his lip. “But if you’re going to make me choose between—”

“If I make you choose between a life-long, seven-figure salary career and a one-day relationship, it should be a no-brainer.”

“It is,” he says resolutely, looking at you in a way that makes it utterly clear which one he’d choose. You don’t really know what to say to that, which makes you think maybe he’s right, and you’re the one being unreasonable. But there’s still a niggle in the back of your mind that tells you it can’t be that easy. There are mountains of problems still unresolved—snags in your friendship that have gone unspoken and unadmitted. Is it really okay to put them all behind you?

“I can tell you’re still not convinced,” he says. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Let me change your mind.”

“I don’t know,” you admit. “We’ve known each other for two years and yet, it's only now, after literally having sex, that we've reached some sort of understanding. I don’t want to rush into this headfirst and set us up to fail, you know? Maybe it’s better to keep our expectations low and take baby steps.”

Kass takes your hand and splays it against his in a gesture so intimate you might have pinched yourself if it hadn’t been preceded by his waterfall confession. With the other, he draws a line with the tip of his finger upwards from the centre of your back.

“See, that, I get,” he starts in a small voice. The line stops at the crook of your neck, where he begins sweeping little shapes in straight and curved lines. “I’ve thought about this a lot, and every single time, I think of another hurdle. Before tonight, my head was running a hundred miles an hour. What if I’ve made too many mistakes and you’re never going to think of me as anything but a nuisance? Or I took too long and you’ve found someone else? What if this goes right, but two years down the line, we’ll argue about something stupid, block each other, and be too proud to ever text again, even though it would be the single, worst decision of our lives?” 

You realise somewhat abruptly that the lines he’s repeatedly tracing on your back spell his name—like he’s trying to brand himself onto your skin.

“Well, my life for sure,” he continues. “Maybe you can’t say the same.” 

“Kass…”

“Hold on. My point is, I’m scared too. I’d be worried if you weren’t, because that would mean you couldn’t care less whether this pans out or ends in disaster. So, if you want to take it slow, that’s fine. We can try texting more often and seeing if it bridges the distance gap. Or spending more time in public and letting you adjust to being on the front cover of tabloids. I’ll wait for you. And after all that, if you still don’t think it’s a good idea, then… I don’t know. Maybe you’re right and I’m deluding myself. But you’re probably just being stubborn.”

“Okay,” you say. It feels like a weight has fallen off your chest. You feel so, unbelievably light, like if the blanket was not wound so tightly around your body, you would float away. He’ll wait for you. He’ll wait for you.

“Are you sure?” he asks, like he too, can’t believe it.

“Yeah. Baby steps, right?”

Kass sighs in relief. He lets go of your hand and wraps his arms around you, burying his face into your chest. “I was honestly ready to argue with you until morning.”

“We’ll probably do that anyway.”

His eyes flicker upwards mischievously. You know what he’s going to say before he says it.

“I can think of better things to do in the meantime.”

“Oh? Fill me in.”

He hmms, a pleased sound that seems to come from the bough of his chest. And then he rolls on top of you, skims his fingers against your ribcage. 

“By the way, it's a eight-figure salary. Not that it matters.”

You laugh and press the open palm of your hand to his mouth. “Shut up,” you tell him.

“Make me,” he says, putting on (a completely butchered) impression of you. And before he can ruin the atmosphere any further, you do.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed and would like to let me know (or if you have any questions or constructive crit), please feel free to leave a comment :)