A broken arm leaves Riku relying on you for more than he’d like, including something as simple as drying his hair. It should be a simple favor, but being alone together in the cramped bathroom, your hands in his hair and every inch of space between you disappearing, is enough to bring weeks of unspoken tension to a breaking point. With nowhere left to hide, the truth finally slips out.
╰┈➤ tags: friends (idiots) to lovers, fluff, caretaking, mutual pining, confessions, yearning!! W.C: 9.4k
to the lovely anon who sent this request, i hope i gave your prompt the story it deserved
Your forefinger is still hovering the doorbell when Riku answers the door. One look at him is all you need to confute your theories about his injury and conclude he hadn’t been putting up a show at all. If he had, he wouldn’t be meeting your eyes and greeting you with pain etched all over their black—and surely, you think, he wouldn’t be looking like someone losing a battle against basic hygiene with the wrong hand.
There’s a smear of toothpaste in the middle of his shirt, the kind of blotchy white that blends in well enough with the illustrations, and that you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been the one who gifted it to him. You want to scold him for staining it, and also thank him for wearing it at all, but neither thought makes it past your lips. Your attention is already sliding up to his face, to the disparate strands of hair flattened on one side and sticking up wildly on the other. It’s a wordless confirmation that he’d been rotting in bed right up until you rang the doorbell—which would have debunked your argument further, had it not already disintegrated on the spot.
Reading people is not a field you’d consider yourself competent in, even less in a week that has done nothing but whittle away your energies. But still, the shift is there, clear as a day and a little too dour to look at—and if you have noticed it with so much ease, chances are Riku has a mashed brain and a broken arm.
“Oh dear,” you hear yourself mutter, even though you hadn’t been planning on greeting him this way.
Riku, whose last name could very well be cleanliness for the amount of times he’s scolded you for eating like a toddler, doesn’t seem mortified about the mess that has come and gone over him. There’s no whisper at the back of his head urging him to domesticate the tempest on one side of him, or to bury that smear under sufficient boldness and one casual movement of his arm. You doubt he’s even conscious of either, at this point. At least he looks glad to see you, unless the twitch of his mouth means something else entirely, that is.
He drags the words out, lips slipping into the usual pout he reserves you when your attention only just scratches his needs.
Your eyes wander from his face to the white cast wrapped around his right arm. It has Sakuya’s name plastered all over it in indelible ink and wobbly letters, as if he had authored Riku’s injury the second the cast had hardened around it—which, frankly, becomes harder and harder to dismiss as a joke the more you think about it. Knowing Sakuya, he’d probably pestered the doctor into lending him the most permanent marker available, partly out of spite, and partly because the entire accident had been far too stupid not to leave his signature on.
It takes you a great amount of restraint not to point out this entire situation is, in fact, self-inflicted, and even more patience not to greet every one of Riku’s complaints with the same heartfelt response—and what have we learned? Probably nothing, if Riku’s history with Sakuya’s dares is anything to go by, but you’ll let him recover first.
His immunity from consequences is, much like the cast, only temporary.
You tiptoe around the scolding, and lift your hands to smooth down his hair. Riku folds under its weight without much effort.
“You can still brush your hair with your left hand, you know?”
Riku can function like a normal adult. You’ve seen it happen often enough to trust it isn’t a myth. He cooks, remembers things like sleep and appointments and the general maintenance required to keep a human being operational. Left to his own devices, he can be responsible.
It’s only when you get busy that the smallest things seem to start getting to him. A forgotten grocery run, a missing charger, a meal he can’t quite be bothered to make for himself. None of it would normally matter, and yet somehow each one finds its way back to you.
“I tried, but it was hard.”
You narrow your eyes at him, though the rest of you seems reluctant to participate in the annoyance. Once you’ve decided his hair is tame enough to leave alone, your hand drifts lower until your fingertip brushes the toothpaste stain on his shirt. Riku follows the path you’ve traced, almost instinctively, but with the kind of weariness that makes his eyes heavy and his movements too slow. His lips pucker just as sluggishly, as if his brain has taken one second longer to catch up to what you’re pointing at.
You bite back a smile. “You didn’t notice.”
He shakes his head, but the gesture comes out gentler than he had in mind. A strand of hair slips loose with it, cascading right above his eye with a precision that feels almost too neat to be a simple matter of luck. It isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and yet the combination of that and the look on his face is enough to draw a chuckle out of you. By the time the sound leaves your lips, Riku seems to have discarded the sluggishness somewhere it can’t follow, settling back into himself as though he’d been waiting for your voice to find him again. He manages about two seconds of trying not to laugh before it becomes very clear that it was never going to work—and then he’s laughing too.
As the laughter begins to taper off, his eyes flutter open and come to rest on you with a nitid spark that wasn’t there a moment ago. For a moment, neither of you says anything. The silence crams the space between you, but it doesn’t prod at your tongue or ask for words in return. The years have taught you not to dread silences like these, where Riku’s features nestle into the stillness of calm waters at night, and where you’re comfortable enough to let them stay that way. You can already guess what he’s about to say by the whiff of mischief that passes through his lips and tugs them on one side.
It should be easier to prepare yourself, to have some sort of defense against it already in place, but Riku still manages to make your head spin with three familiar words.
You pause for a second, finding your balance and a response that won’t fall apart into awkwardness halfway through. You could say it back and mean it completely—you always miss him, always wish you’d look up and find him in every room you’re in—but there are boundaries you can’t cross without ripping yourself apart. There are limits in the way you’re allowed to miss him, and you’re already brushing against them more than you should.
So you shrug. “It’s only been three days.”
“Doesn’t matter. Three days in this cast are three centuries in the real world.” He insists, pouting like you’ve committed a crime against him. “Plus, you left me here all by myself with one arm and no help at all. That’s kind of cruel.”
“And whose fault was it?”
He throws his head back in a sigh. “Oh, come on.”
His hair is at least behaving again, or trying its hardest to. Now that he’s conscious about the stain, he keeps shifting on his feet and maniacally adjusting his stance as if that might somehow erase its shape. Even then, you can’t deny it. Riku still looks a bit too rough, too unlike the person you know every route to, and every secret of.
You can’t shake off the guilt that engulfs you all at once, even though the cast is limpid of your signature, and didn’t cure around your faults. There must be a lot of pain simmering underneath its chalky shell, amassing with his breaths, and flaring to life at every wayward movement in the wrong direction. Riku complains, he sulks, he stages his discontent—but he also stifles all the real suffering inside, in a place where you can’t test its depths with your hands. You find yourself wishing he would let some of the pain spill over to you too, even if it meant it would hurt to carry it. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him.
“Go take a shower,” you say softly. “I’ll make us dinner in the meantime.”
Riku hesitates under your gaze for a moment, then gives a small nod and disappears from your sight.
You shouldn’t be relieved by his absence, nor should the air feel lighter now that the room has expanded without him in it, but it matters little what you feel or forbid yourself from thinking, because it all ends the same way. You fill your lungs with all the oxygen this apartment has to offer, before Riku comes back and everything in you goes haywire again.
Your feet guide you into the kitchen on their own, finding the turnings on their own, tracing paths so deeply worn that the space has long since ceased to belong only to him. Here, even the silence knows your name and asks about you. Right now, it presses against your ears, too present to ignore and too full to hold for long. Maybe it’s because of Riku. He has this way of leaving a residue of his existence in every corner, of reshaping the space so entirely that no room can ever truly revert to how it was before him. He makes the space around him feel like somewhere to be.
The house is small, but it never feels confined while he’s around. When he moves through the rooms, rattling cabinets and scattering his belongings, the walls always seem further apart than they are. They only constrict back to their true form the moment he is gone, without anything left of the way they felt before. Now that your breathing has slowed, the rooms have reverted back to the size they’ve always been, and somehow that feels impossible to ignore.
You start cooking without thinking too much about it, moving around his kitchen with an ease born of a thousand past repetitions. You busy your hands with the knife and the pan, but your attention has already wandered elsewhere. It waits, quietly and stubbornly, for Riku to walk back into the kitchen. You tell yourself you’re only focused on the meal. It’s easier than admitting you’ve started measuring evenings like these by the sound of him moving through the apartment.
The smell of his shampoo reaches you before he does, but you remain still. Somewhere down the hall a door is opening, and you find yourself counting the seconds between the click of the latch and his appearance, the way one might track a storm by the space between lightning and thunder.
It’s late, and you are tired. You have spent a lifetime being careful, building something sturdy out of ordinary things—habits, proximity, the reasonable language of friendship. Then the footsteps come to a stop behind you, and in that sudden arrest of motion, the truth catches up to you.
You’ve been so careful, given it so many tries, but now you’re tired of tracing the edges of that word, pretending it still fits, that it isn't tearing at the seams. For a moment, you can only stand paralyzed, staring at the grain of the counter as if it might offer an escape from the weight of it, so new and ancient all at once in the way starlight is.
You turn around and find Riku there. His hair remains damp from the shower, and heavy with water that gathers at the ends and bleeds onto his shoulders. He doesn’t even get a chance to say anything before you grab the towel clutched in his good hand. He lets you take it without protest, blinking once in mild surprise as you steal it from his grasp.
If you keep your hands busy, keep the familiar machinery of taking care of him running, maybe the thing that just shifted in you won’t have anywhere steady to root. So you bridge the gap between you, draping the cloth over his head and working the damp strands of his hair to chase away the water. He just stands there, close enough that you’re more aware of him and his warmth than you are of anything else. You finish drying his hair and let the towel fall around his neck.
By all rules of the distance you have kept for years, he should take a step back now. He should make a joke, pull a face, complain about how you’re treating him like he can’t dry his own hair—anything, really, that would allow the moment to fold back into itself the same way it always does. Instead, he remains tethered to your space, close enough that you could count the rise and fall of his breaths if you wanted to, his gaze crawling across your features with a slowness that might have belonged thirty minutes ago, but feels alien now.
Riku has looked at you a hundred times—across crowded rooms, over dinner tables, from the passenger seat of your car—but that only makes this harder to understand. You know his face. You know the shape and weight of his attention. Yet standing here now, with his gaze resting on you for a moment too long, you find yourself at a loss for what to do with it.
There’s a question forming somewhere inside your brain, one that has no safe way of becoming words. It circles the way he’s looking at you, and everything you would never risk asking even if you found the courage for it. In the end, all that makes it to the surface is the only thing small enough to survive being spoken.
“Stop staring at me, you weirdo”
Riku takes his time before speaking. “I just missed you.”
Your words leave him wavering between speaking again and letting the silence take over instead. In the end, he chooses neither. He takes a step towards you, one that loses its footing somewhere in the middle and finds it again, and comes to a stop with barely anything left between you. You could laugh it off, and push him out of the way with a playful shove that resets time back to before he ever answered the door, but your body doesn’t follow the thought. You stay rooted exactly to where you are and let him make something useless out of every direction that isn’t him.
It takes him a moment too long before he leans down and presses a kiss to your forehead.
“Doesn’t make it less true.”
By now, you are certain that the flush of your cheeks is the only vibrant thing left in the apartment. You want to be annoyed with him for the effortless way he moved toward you, and for the fact that he did it at all and is still breathing into your space like this is something you always do on Wednesdays. You try to find some grievance to hold against him, but your brain is too crowded to assemble it, and your pride has apparently decided this is not its moment.
You wouldn’t find much material to work with even if the air were easier to take in, anyway. Riku is tender in a way that leaves no room for annoyance, and for all the ways your heart tends to arrive at the wrong moment, you can’t call this one a mistake.
“Go dry your hair.” You murmur, forcing the suggestion through the quiet, even if the words are just an hidden plea for distance.
Riku shakes his head. “Help me? I can’t do it properly with one hand.”
“Come onn,” he whines, tipping his head back. “You’re already here anyway… Don't make me do it alone.”
“Riku.” You warn him, though your voice doesn’t come out nearly as firm as you mean it to.
“I’d do it for you.” He means it, and you can tell because he doesn’t look away. “You know I would.”
You hate the grin that surfaces when he knows you have no way to refuse him. It’s a little unfair, you think. The eyes alone would have been enough to dismantle you, but the conviction is perhaps too excessive to use against someone who stopped being a fair opponent a long time ago. You would have conceded on your own, in your own time, at your own expense.
Where Riku is concerned, it’s always a matter of when.
Resisting him has never really been in your repertoire—but then again, neither has reading people or making choices that are actually good for you, so at least you’re consistent. You follow him to the bathroom, and realize a little too late that you would’ve done this even without the cast, even without any excuse at all. You would do whatever Riku asks of you with very little resistance, and you’re certain the same is true in reverse, that he keeps no record of what it costs him, because it never occurs to him to. It should feel reckless to admit you would come running the moment Riku calls, but instead the realization loosens into something close to relief, like there might be a small silver lining tucked inside all of this.
You sit on the edge of the bathroom sink, taking the hairdryer from his hands as he steps between your legs to reach the outlet behind you. It’s new, this kind of proximity, this ease of letting him exist right there without thinking too much about it. You are aware of every small adjustment your body makes to accommodate it—the way you shift your weight, where you put your hands, how much space you’re taking up and whether it’s the right amount. You’ve never dried anyone’s hair before, much less imagined doing it so casually with Riku, when it wanders so far beyond the borders of what your friendship was permitted to be.
Until thirty minutes ago, those boundaries between you and him were clear, built around laws you could count and name without hesitation. Now they feel less defined, blurred in ways you cannot entirely blame on him when your own body offers no resistance to the shift. He’s here, and you’re here—and it occurs to you, without notice, that this might be a threshold from which you cannot return. Perhaps this is how your world reshapes itself from now on, you think, as your heart makes its presence known beneath a shirt that just so happens to be his.
The static of the hairdryer hums through the bathroom, and it smooths out the restless thoughts in your mind just enough to make them manageable. You try not to pay too much attention to this Riku keeps drifting back into your space whenever he moves, as though neither of you can quite remember where the old boundaries used to be. More than that, you try not to think about the way he seems to have set aside every unnecessary layer without even noticing he’s done it. You know this isn’t vulnerability, because he isn’t exerting himself to let you see what he usually hides.
This is just Riku, unguarded enough to be entirely himself. This is him when he isn’t trying to be anything other than himself.
At least you are grateful his eyes are closed. It spares you from wondering whether he notices the care you are pouring into this, and the precision of your fingers working patiently through his hair, granting each tangled strand more devotion than you ever think to give yourself. Every now and then, a loose lock falls across his face and earns a twitch at the corner of his mouth that makes the room constrict and grow warm all at once.
For a few minutes, it’s easy to just be here, and to focus on this rhythm instead of the truths you know are still there. It’s easy not to think about the pain he keeps brushing aside, or the tiredness that lives just beneath his eyes even when he’s smiling. He looks almost peaceful right now, caught in a quiet you wish you could step into whenever the world becomes too loud.
But like all things that feel too good to stay, this doesn’t last.
Riku opens his eyes and the static in your thoughts goes quiet all at once. His eyes are the same shade of brown they have always been, familiar enough that you’ve stopped noticing them, and yet, something in their depths feels altered. Maybe it’s just the bathroom light settling across them unevenly, deepening the shadows, making them harder to decipher than usual.
Or maybe it’s neither of those things. Maybe it’s simply that he’s looking directly at you, and not away.
You continue running your hand through his hair, occasionally nudging strands forward in an attempt to get him to blink or look away. Riku blinks them away when he has to, but his attention never truly leaves you, even when the strands brush against his lashes. You find a section of hair that doesn’t need the attention you give it, and keep your gaze averted—but the longer the silence stretches, the more impossible it becomes to pretend you are blind to it.
Then he shifts, almost casually, and brings his good arm down onto the sink beside your thigh, close enough that you feel the warmth of it before you register the movement. His thumb finds the fabric of your pants and moves across it slowly, once, then twice, in a motion that would feel casual if he weren’t looking at you like that.
The realization strikes with a suddenness that leaves you almost breathless. You need to leave, not after dinner, not after he has fallen asleep—but now, immediately, while the narrow window of your own composure remains open. The bathroom has always been small, but right now it’s inundated with his shampoo, his breathing, the pressure of his attention against every surface of your body. You need air that doesn’t carry him in every breath, and enough distance to sit with your own mind without him standing in the center of it.
Because whatever this is, whatever line you’re crossing, is going to haunt you longer than it should, taking up permanent residence in your thoughts and refusing to grant you peace even when the night goes quiet.
So you switch off the hairdryer, setting it blindly onto the edge of the sink. You move to slide off the porcelain, desperate to put distance between yourself and all of this, but Riku moves first. He leans in, and for an interminable second, you’re certain he is about to cross a line you won’t know how to recover from. Then he shifts slightly to the right, calm as ever, and simply catches his own reflection in the mirror.
His words disrupt the quiet so unexpectedly that they don't quite register at first. Then a breath slips past your lips, grateful for the interruption, and for the chance to think about something other than the storm that has been brewing between you since you crossed his threshold. You drop your head, trying to collect yourself, to pretend you’re in control of anything at all. Instead, your forehead collides lightly with his shoulder.
Just fucking great, you think. That’s exactly what this situation needed.
You clear your throat, hoping your voice manages to hold itself together better than your face has all night. “I need to go home.”
Riku pulls back, reclaiming his own space as though he had never stepped out of it. An immediate confusion takes hold of his features, and for a moment you are tempted to pull your words back just to see his face falter all over again in waves—his eyes first, the fracturing line of his brows then.
“You just got here.” There is something unyielding about the way the words leave him, as if that fact by itself should be enough to resolve the argument before it can expand any further.
You shake your head and try not to look at him for too long. “I just need to go home, Riku.”
You use the moment to finally slide off the sink, which immediately proves to be a mistake. The bathroom offers no room for a graceful exit, and your feet have barely met the floor before you walk straight into his chest. Riku reacts on instinct. The arm he had braced beside you drops to catch you, and his palm settles at your waist as though stopping you before you can even lose your balance.
You don’t fall, but a part of you wishes you had. His hand only lingers for a second, doing nothing more than ensuring you are steady, but it’s enough to leave your thoughts in disarray and make you aware of the warmth of his palm through the fabric of your shirt long after he has withdrawn it. Enough to remind you that Riku is always touching you in some small way, because it’s something built into his nature rather than a choice he makes.
You turn toward the door and nearly make it there before Riku reaches for your arm.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” His grip isn’t tight, but it’s enough to stop you.
You freeze. The confusion on his face has grown into something closer to concern, and is assembling piece by piece into the outlines of a frown.
You shake your head. “Nothing.”
You try to pull your arm free, but he only shadows the movement, invading the space before it can widen into a new boundary between you.
“Talk to me, y/n. What happened?” He pleads. His grip loosens, but he doesn’t let go.
You swallow hard. Riku is looking at you as though trying to solve a puzzle that wasn’t there a minute ago, his eyes fixed on your face and certain the answer is written there somewhere. He looks so endearing standing in the center of his bathroom, his cast stark white under the harsh glare, his mouth slightly parted like he’s waiting for your permission to start worrying. He looks ridiculous, too, and the realization does absolutely nothing to ease the pressure.
If anything, it makes things worse. Because all you can think about, standing here with your heels practically against the door and still nowhere left to retreat, is how desperately you want to close the remaining space, take his face in your hands, kiss him, and then tell him he’s an absolute idiot for a dozen different reasons that finally make sense now—for reaching for you every chance he gets, for looking at you like this, for touching you like it’s nothing when it’s taking everything in you to pretend it means nothing back.
“I’m not letting you go home until you tell me what’s wrong.”
You purse your lips into a thin line. “I said nothing’s wrong.”
Riku stares at you for exactly half a second, then he snorts.
“Right, of course.” He lifts his cast slightly. “And this is just for decoration.”
The silence stretches on, and you let it, because your mouth has stopped being useful and the words are buried too deep down your throat to retrieve them if you tried. He takes a step forward, and his grip shifts, sliding from your wrist to graze your fingers. The contact barely lasts a second, but you yank your hand back so quickly it startles you both into stillness. His hand stays suspended in the air a beat too long before it falls slowly back to his side. You almost think you have saved yourself, until you make the mistake of looking back at him.
You laugh, though you can’t place what part of this is meant to be funny. Nothing about the situation feels clear enough to explain, least of all the way the brief brush of his fingers remains branded into your skin. Whatever it is, the sound comes out wrong, thinner than you expected and hollow in a way you don’t know how to mend. It sounds more like surrender than amusement—just exhaustion finding its way out through the only opening you forgot to guard.
Your chest swells with air. “You want to know what's wrong?”
Riku nods at once without a shred of hesitation, his eyes still fixed on yours. The concern remains, rewriting his features into an expression you never wished to become familiar with. You look at the cast on his arm that he has been using as an excuse to pull you closer all night, and the way he’s standing so close that he hems you right against the bathroom door, because he will keep you here until morning if it means you will finally stay and talk.
Suddenly, it’s all too much to hold. You are too exhausted for any more careful phrasing, and too tired to keep the truth from leaking through the spaces you have spent weeks holding shut. This isn’t something that arrived tonight, or all at once. It has been accumulating in the silence for a long time, in every small and ordinary moment you insisted meant nothing, growing in the dark of your late night conversations until it stopped being something you could look away from.
You are in love with your best friend, and the secret has outgrown every place you’ve tried to keep it.
The frown between his brows deepens.
“You keep touching me.” You hesitate just long enough to regret it, then push through anyway, forcing your voice to sound steadier than you feel. “You hold my waist. You kiss my forehead. You look at me like—”
The rest of the sentence refuses to leave your throat, and breaks off before it can ever become sound. Silence floods the vacancy it leaves behind, growing with every second neither of you breaks it and invading every corner of the room. It smothers the hum of the bathroom light, the rumble of the building outside, and has that texture to it that abrades all the words you could’ve said.
Riku swallows, and in the absence of everything else, it reaches you so clearly. You hear it, and your attention catches on it in a way you don’t know how to explain. Riku is never the one who gives himself away first. You hadn’t expected him to be the one standing here with something to swallow down, with a truth at the back of his throat that he can’t quite get rid of either.
You close your eyes for a second. Of course he asks. Of course he needs it mapped out for him in plain words, even if the honesty might burn the both of you.
“Like you’re in love with me, Riku.”
The words slip out before you can catch them, and everything in the bathroom seems to stop with them. For one awful second, all you can hear is your own heartbeat, so loud to fill the room and impossible to think around. Your gaze drops to the floor almost immediately, and you find yourself wondering how long you’re supposed to keep staring at it before the embarrassment starts to fade enough for you to look at Riku again. The tiles are unremarkable in every way, uneven at the grout lines, but they are the only safe surface left to look at. You study them as though they might offer a reprieve, as if staring long enough could thin out the embarrassment until it becomes manageable and allow you to lift your eyes again.
You still cannot quite believe the words left your mouth, and beneath the humiliation, there’s already a desperate impulse to undo the damage. You think of how you should clarify, how you probably should soften the blow and reach back into the last thirty seconds to reshape them into an exit you can still take before it’s too late.
“I'm not saying you are in love with me,” you continue. “I'm just saying that's what it feels like. And maybe that's not fair because this is just how you are, or maybe you've always been like this and I'm the idiot for reading into it, but I can't do this anymore.”
You hear your voice falter, but there is nothing to do about it, no way to recall the sound and make it sound like someone in control of themselves.
“I can’t keep standing here pretending I don’t have feelings for you, Riku.”
Even as the admission leaves your mouth, a part of you tries to claw it back. Riku stares at you, and whatever reaction had been moving through his features a moment ago locks behind an unreadable mask that yields no answers except the certainty that you have made a terrible mistake. You should have kept it buried, carried it quietly to the end, letting it fossilize along with your bones. Instead you folded under the smallest pressure, under his gaze, and the way he looks at you as though you are something he cannot afford to let go of.
There goes the most beautiful friendship you have ever had, you think, and at least the realization is so quick it almost doesn’t hurt. You make a silent promise anyway—if he has not spoken, if he has not reacted by the time you count to three, you will turn around, walk out that door, and never look at him again. You will leave before he has the chance to be kind about it, before he has to find the gentlest possible way to tell you he has never meant any of it the way you needed him to.
One, and Riku hasn’t moved. He’s still standing there, looking at you like he’s trying to determine whether what you said is real or just a trick his mind has assembled out of painkillers and too-bright bathroom light. You tell yourself this is manageable. You can still walk away from this with your dignity intact if you just keep counting.
Two, and something shifts across his face, too brief to hold onto, but enough to make your chest tighten anyway. You start to turn, because retreat feels easier than standing here and watching his expression work through a conclusion you’re not sure you can survive. You have been moving toward this ending for a long time, you think. Ever since the moment you looked at him and found that the word friend felt like a betrayal every time it crossed your lips. You knew this day would arrive, but you hadn’t accounted for how much of you it would take along with it.
Before you can reach three, Riku speaks.
“You have feelings for me?”
He repeats the words back to you, slowly, a little dazedly, like he understands each of them on their own but not what they become when slotted together. His voice gives you no verdict and shape to what he’s feeling yet. The meaning of it remains out of reach, hung in the blurred lines between understanding and uncertainty. You wait for something to break in his expression, in his tone, in the silence after the echo fades, but his words arrive and just stop there.
When you nod, it has nothing to do with courage, or certainty, or any of the things you might have wanted it to be. Everything that matters is already out in the open and breathing in the small space between you.
“Yeah. I have for a while.”
You liked him the first time he made a joke and sought out your eyes first, as if your reaction was the only one that mattered to him. You liked him every time he remembered something small you’d mentioned in passing and brought it up weeks later as if it had never occurred to him to forget it. You liked him two weeks ago when he stopped by the library for no reason other than to see you, and Yushi raised an eyebrow the second his shadow disappeared behind the shelves. You still remember opening your mouth to argue, to insist it wasn’t like that, only for the words to die in your mouth before you could find the breath to say them. Even then, some part of you had already stopped believing the lie.
“It doesn’t matter.” You add too quickly, shaking your head as if that could erase consequences. “You don’t have to say anything. I shouldn’t have—”
Finally, the rigid line of his shoulders uncoils, and his chest expands with a breath that looks long overdue. Color rushes to his cheeks, creeping up from beneath the skin in a flush that has nothing to do with the heat of the hairdryer, which has been sitting cold on the sink for long enough now that you can’t blame it for anything.
He shifts his weight, pushing a few strands of hair away from his face with his good hand, though they fall right back into place a second later, as stubborn as ever. Under different circumstances you might have laughed. Right now, all you can think about is how alive he suddenly looks.
“You’re serious.” He says, though his voice is too low it could’ve been just a thought directed to himself.
“I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”
His teeth press briefly into his bottom lip before he lets it go, breathing out a smile that never quite makes it to his face. You can see the truth registering in his face bit by bit. There’s a flicker of disbelief in his expression, one that has nothing to do with doubt and everything to do with the surprise of hearing those exact words come out of your mouth. He keeps his eyes on you, studying your features once, then again, torn between laughing, shaking his head, and begging you to say it one more time.
“You think I’ve been doing all this,” he starts, then stops, like even he doesn't even know how to finish the sentence properly. “You think I’ve been holding your waist, and pulling you in here, and I don’t—”
Riku opens his mouth, then parts with the thought. His brows knit together in a tight line, and you can see him struggling against the inadequacy of a language that cannot match this moment. He studies you for one final second, until he abandons the pretense of speech and bridges the distance between you. For the first time all night, you don’t try to escape him. There doesn’t seem to be much point anymore. A few hours ago, you would have put a wall between you on pure reflex, but now, the efforts of escape feel too futile to bother with. You have already handed him your heart, anyway. Compared to the magnitude of what you just confessed, the final few inches separating you don’t matter at all.
Riku breaks into the brightest smile you’ve seen him wear. “I like you, y/n. God, I like you so much.”
He lets out a breath that sounds almost fragile at the borders and drags a hand across his face, still smiling despite his own hesitation.
“I thought I was the one making things awkward for myself. Every time I touched you, every time I wanted to be near you, every time I caught myself thinking about you way more than a friend should.” His smile falters into something softer. “I kept telling myself to be happy with what I had… But now you’re standing here telling me you’ve had feelings for me too, and I don’t know what to do with that besides tell you I’ve been in love with you for a very long time.”
You blink, once, then again, hoping that will help the words arrange themselves into something your mind can hold onto. You hear the words, you understand them, and yet you keep colliding with them as if for the first time, unable to move past the reality that they were actually spoken. Riku loves you. The certainty of it should make everything clear, turn your old fears into nothing more than empty shadows. Instead, your thoughts scatter in every direction at once.
You stare at his cast, still feeling disconnected from your body but at least able to speak. “Sakuya thinks every problem in life can be solved by doing a handstand.”
“Yeah, and even he figured it out.”
Riku’s cheeks are bright now, and the heat in your own face tells you yours aren’t any different.
“I knew I liked you. That part wasn’t complicated.” He smiles faintly. “The complicated part was convincing myself you could ever like me back.”
You shake your head. This is Riku—the person who walks into any space and alters it without meaning to, who has never seemed to struggle with being liked, or noticed, or wanted. Riku, whom people drift toward instinctively, as if it is the most natural thing in the world to be drawn into his orbit. It almost doesn’t make sense to imagine otherwise. How could anyone not fall for him, when everything about him is so effortless to love, so impossible to stay away from?
You try to keep your expression steady, but the composure slips away regardless. The corners of your mouth betray you first, then the rest follows as though it were never given a choice to begin with. The phantom line between his brows finally smooths out as he searches your face, and then he breaks into a laugh too. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know what caused yours—he just follows it anyway, because it feels impossible not to. The sound reaches you before you even fully register it, slipping right into your chest and liberating everything you didn't realize you were holding so tightly.
“So…” You bite your lower lip, trying to regain control of your face. “That’s a relief?”
“Yeah,” Riku lets out a breath that might be a laugh or might just be him trying to find the right words for what he’s feeling. His eyes flick away for a second, then come back to you. “I mean—yeah, it is. I just—”
His voice falters into nothing, abandoning the sentence before it can ever find its footing. You stand within the space those words should have filled, unable to tell whether it makes things clearer or only leaves you more exposed. In the stillness, your heartbeat sounds deafening, and turns the air so thick that breathing feels like a conscious choice you have to think your way through. He’s so near that the heat of his gaze burrows a physical path on your skin, the kind that grows sharper each time his attention returns to you without hesitation, refusing to look anywhere else.
Riku looks just as unsettled. His shoulders draw up slightly before he seems to notice and tries, with only partial success, to smooth them back down. Then his eyes flicker down, barely long enough to register, to your lips, before pulling back up to meet your face with a swiftness that suggests the impulse surprised even his own body.
“I—” He tries, but nothing comes after it.
He exhales slowly, letting the tension roll out of his shoulders as he takes a long breath to gather the scattered pieces of himself right where you can see them. Then he takes another step into your space, so slowly, as if anything faster might startle you into retreating. It wouldn’t, of course. You don’t believe there’s a version of you that could ever run from Riku, or carve out a place to hide from him, no matter how suffocating the air becomes, or how completely the gravity shifts between you.
He stops just before there’s no distance left to cross, so close that his breath ghosts against your lips. Every bit of hesitation he has left feels tangible. It’s the same touch he’s given you before—back when words weren’t enough to mend your wounds, when your sorrow was spilling over and he simply stayed close enough to shelter you from the collapse without asking anything of you. Now there are no tears, no reason to comfort a pain simmering underneath, and still his fingers linger there, brushing lightly over your skin as if you might need the reminder that he’s still here. He’s gentle in a way that leaves the rest of the world feeling rough by comparison. It sinks in quietly, amassing beneath your breaths until it’s too vast to resist, that there isn’t anyone else who would look at you or touch you like this and mean it so completely.
He rests his forehead against yours with a gentleness that muffles the rest of the world around you. Your breathing surrenders to the same rhythm without effort, unintentional yet somehow perfectly timed. Your noses brush in the narrow space between each inhale and exhale, and nothing about this feels out of place.
There’s no room for words, no tolerance for distance, no demand for anything at all beyond this seamless breathing. You just stand there, breathing into each other’s space, your faces close enough to blur and grow familiar with this proximity until you no longer fear it. It feels like you could stay like this forever, without ever needing to come back up for air.
His breath shifts, just slightly, and when he speaks it’s quieter than everything that came before it.
You don’t trust your voice to maintain its shape, so you nod once, terrified that any greater movement might completely rupture you. It isn’t hesitation, but rather the reality that you have waited so long for this moment that even a syllable as effortless as yes refuses to materialize when you reach into the dark for it. There’s nothing you have ever craved more than this, not even close. And in that silence, you make a promise to tell him exactly that, once your voice stops feeling like it belongs to someone else and starts feeling like yours again.
An exhale slips past his lips, and the tension in his posture thaws out just enough to register if you are already searching for it. His palm grows firmer against your jawline, so warm impossibly soft as it keeps you there without pulling.
His lips meet yours slowly, devoid of hesitation and yet refusing to rush, as if he’s giving you every chance to stop him even though neither of you does. The room, the silence, even the outlines of your own thoughts dissolve into nothingness the moment his mouth warms against yours, tender and firm in its demand. He’s so warm, so adoringly real as he kisses you until there’s nothing left to focus on except the way time seems to forget itself around the two of you.
His top lip brushes against yours slowly, and so lightly it almost feels like he’s testing whether you’re still there, whether you’ll stay for it. He doesn't press for anything more, though he refuses to surrender a single inch of the distance he just crossed. His hand remains a comforting weight against your jaw that tethers you close in a way that doesn’t feel like pressure at all. The gentle friction of his thumb against your cheek leaves no room for any wandering thoughts. It forces you to just feel him, and your fingers to curl blindly into the fabric of his shirt, trying to absorb some of his warmth directly into your own skin.
You don’t notice how much the kiss has deepened until your spine meets the wall, and the impact forces a startled breath straight into his mouth. Riku breaks away instantly, though he retreats just enough for cool air to rush into the gap between your faces. His eyes stay on your face, tracking across your features unrelentingly, searching for any trace of discomfort, and any change he might have caused without meaning to. He breathes out words meant to ensure you're still with him the same way he’s with you, but that you don't register inside your head at all.
Your fingers tighten into the fabric of his shirt before he can retreat any further. You drag him back into your space with an urgency that leaves no room for his hesitation to breathe, and then pull his mouth back down to yours, trying to erase the memory of the space he just tried to put between you, answering every unvoiced question he just tried to ask. Riku hesitates for the briefest moment, and then the last drop of his restraint gives way. He slips in his tongue, rewriting the slower rhythm that came before into something heavier and more consuming that makes your eyes roll to the back of your head.
So this is what it’s like to be kissed by Riku.
You had weeks to dream up this moment, to piece it together with borrowed wishes and stolen thoughts—and still, the reality takes your breath away. None of those fantasies came close, none of them knew what his warmth tasted like on your tongue. You could have never predicted the carefulness in his lips despite everything waiting has worn into both of you, or how he refuses to retreat the second your lips part, never rushing away from you, never leaving you to doubt the truth of his touch. Every phantom version of Riku you ever created disappears beside the one standing in front of you now. This one is tangible, and he kisses you, holds you, he stays, until your lungs burn and the room fizzles out entirely. He’s real, and impossible to get enough of.
His forehead comes to rest against yours again, but it feels different this time. There’s no nervousness left in the breath that brushes across your lips and lingers there, no trace of him holding back or questioning his right to be this close. Now there’s none of that, and the certainty in his eyes leaves you feeling all warm inside, for reasons you would never dare explain out loud, especially not to Yushi. The thought almost threatens to pull a laugh out of you. It’s only a matter of time before Yushi finds out, and you will have to face whatever trial he deems necessary once he calculates just how long his two best friends harbored these feelings in silence. God, Riku is in love with you. Even with his skin pressing against yours and his breath still tangled with your own, the words feel almost too grand to be true.
“You’re still here,” he murmurs, so softly it barely makes it past the space between you.
You lift your chin to catch his mouth in a petite kiss, then follow it with another, and another. Each one arrives softer than the one before it, and Riku takes all of them, completely smitten with the rhythm of your answer until you feel his lips give way and shape themselves into a smile against yours.
His breath still catches on its way out, but the look on his face has completely grown into something smug that obliterates any last attempt at looking serious. “I really, really think we should date.”
You answer with a quiet hum, though the sound drifts upward at the end without quite becoming a real response. Your fingers graze the short hair at the base of his nape, charting the bristling texture while you look at him, still a little fascinated by the fact that he keeps looking back. “Mh? Should we, now?”
“I mean… I confessed, you confessed. We kissed.” he adds, a bit lighter now. “That’s… pretty much the basis for a relationship, no?”
Riku’s gaze flickers briefly to your mouth before he leans down and presses a small kiss to the tip of your nose. With everything else that's already happened tonight, you didn’t think there was a single gesture left that could catch you off guard. But then again, maybe you should leave the deciphering of intentions to anyone else but yourself, since your heart gives an embarrassingly eager reaction to that simple kiss. It’s unfortunate, and somewhat mortifying underneath the surface, because Riku notices absolutely every detail when it comes to you—except the fact that you’ve been in love with him this entire time, apparently. (Then you think, let’s not blame him. You haven’t been particularly clever either)
You tilt your head, struggling to keep the smirk off your face. “I don’t remember you dating every person you’ve ever kissed.”
Riku watches your face for a second that stretches out far past what time should allow.
“None of them mattered. None of them were you.”
Then his thumb traces a path across your cheek, slow enough that you feel every millimetre of it, and it makes it harder to hold still than it should. There’s nothing you can do but lean into his touch and let him claim you, and mark you, and love you, until his name is the only thought left in your head. When your eyes meet his, the truth doesn't feel like something you have to excavate from your chest anymore. It doesn't feel like a structure you have to engineer or forage through the dark corners of your mind—because it occupies the space between you and him so unmistakably that you can’t understand how it ever went missing in the first place, and how he could have stood this close without catching on.
You want him. Maybe you always have.
You smile. “I really, really think we should date, too.”
There’s some kind of pride in witnessing a smile spread over his features because of something you said. The glow from the bathroom door shears across his face, and you could swear his eyes are throwing off sparks as his gaze spills over your skin. You could spend a lifetime like this—watching the old boundaries between you dissolve into something completely obsolete, kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him again until his mouth becomes the only thing you know how to breathe in.
“Okay,” he smiles against your lips. “Good.”
He doesn’t rush the next kiss. His hand stays where it is, warm against you, the space between you measured in breaths instead of inches. For the first time all evening, neither of you is wondering what happens next. His thumb traces a slow line down your neck, and the smile he gives you is soft, almost shy. Before you can think to say anything, he leans in and kisses you again. The cast is still there, his arm is still broken. Tomorrow he’ll still need your help with things he can’t do alone.
Strange, you think, how lives can change in moments that ask so little of them.
𝒻low ‹𝟹: wheeeew… this one was a long time coming. i’m so sorry for making you guys wait months for this (especially you, anon), but life decided to throw everything at me. Things are finally starting to settle down and get a liiiittle better, so i’m really happy i could get this part out.
Thank you so much for your patience, and stay tuned for part 2… aka the steamy stuff 😚
