I finished Banana Fish and EVERYTHING HURTS. I don’t think I’m going to get over this god damn series in a long, long time. So at 2am, delirious from so many emotions, I wrote this clunky as hell little snippet modelled after the infamous volume 19 splash page. Enjoy???
Intimacy was a difficult thing for Ash to understand. Lust, sure, he’d been on the receiving end of lust enough times to know the way it bent and broke those it wanted. Intimacy, though, didn’t seek to subjugate so there was no way to outsmart it or use it.
With Eiji, intimacy was a learning curve.
He’d spent the better part of the year as Eiji’s student. Learning how to smile, be held, and seek shelter in someone else. At first they had an intimacy that rivalled what he’d shared with Shorter, and then, when he wasn’t looking, it had become more.
Now, stretched out in the same bed in the Manhattan apartment, he felt surrounded by it. In the background, the repaired air conditioning started up with a rumble and the blinds clacked softly against each other. The apartment always smelled a bit like take-out and the laundry detergent that Eiji used to wash everybody’s clothes. Eiji’s laughter and Ash’s crooked grin were as worn into the place as Eiji’s favourite spot on the couch. It felt like a home, with the fond memories to match.
Ash had laughed the first time Eiji pushed their beds together.
“Pushing the beds together? What are we, a mormon couple?”
“So many nightmares,” Eiji had chided, trying to make light of the way Ash haunted windowsills and hallways after them. “You think I don’t hear you staring at me, or feel you sit on the bed to be near me. Like a child wanting to crawl in bed with their parents but being too shy to ask. Now you won’t be shy.”
“You can’t hear me staring,” Ash had huffed.
“So you admit, you do it.”
Eiji made jokes about the nightmares because what happened at night was too painful to examine by daylight. He normalized it, and Ash loved him for that.
And that love—the dangerous, warm thing their intimacy had so effortlessly rolled into—was exactly why Ash struggled to acknowledge the ways lust had begun to colour it.
His hand reached out across the bed towards Eiji’s back. Eiji was naked down to his underwear. They both were. It started when the air conditioner broke and then became the norm. Ash’s body had been seen by hundreds of men and yet laying near naked beside Eiji was the most vulnerable he’d ever felt—his defences left with his socks and jeans on the bedroom floor.
It would have been so easy to lay his palm against Eiji’s neck and run up the back of his hair to smooth the unruly bit at the top. Or to press a kiss along the top of his spine, just to feel how warm and sweet his skin really was. He wanted to breathe on his neck until Eiji couldn’t help but chuckle, or pull the older boy flush against him to make sure he didn’t disappear while Ash slept.
Ash’s hand curled into a fist inches from the small little hairs on the back of Eiji’s neck.
But he couldn’t. He had no right.
His past wasn’t the problem because the idea of purity was bullshit. Eiji wasn’t innocent, or weak, or some angel that he’d tarnish and ruin by simply touching him. Eiji had proven time and time again that he wasn’t breakable.
Instead, it seemed selfish.
Eiji loved him with everything and did so without expecting anything in return. He’d spent months helping Ash to understand that. What right did Ash have to turn around and put expectations on it? To colour their easy intimacy with the first little sparks of genuine desire he’d felt in ages? To put that on Eiji and hope and hope and hope he felt it back was self-serving.
Why was it so goddamn hard to finally want something?
Ash moved a little closer, falling into the shallow dip between the two beds. He sighed heavily, content with being closer to Eiji, and let sleep take him for a few hours.
Once his breathing had evened, Eiji rolled around to stare at Ash. The worry lines and tight jaw were gone—there would be no nightmares tonight.
“Maybe tomorrow night, hm, Ash?” Eiji smiled sadly at the hand extended across the bed towards him, caught wanting. He leaned over and pressed a kiss on one of Ash’s bruised knuckles. “I can wait.”
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