booty shorts
There’s something obscene in it. Spandex is lighter from his usual running shorts, but tighter. The locker room is empty, yet Wakatoshi still feels goosebumps trailing up his legs. Or maybe that’s the cold; the window is open and even this far inland, the ocean wind is pervasive. But Wakatoshi has never liked wasting time. He takes one last look at the faded color of the walls before pushing the doors open and stepping into the gym. He’s drawing curious looks, he knows, even if his stride is uniform – his hands folded across each other as he makes a beeline for Satori.
Anticipation races in his lungs. It’s comeuppance at last, after years of hearing the same joke.
Or, in part, it’s gratitude for the hurried lunches, the whispered conversations in the backs of classrooms, the times the walked home together as the sun wound down. It’s Shiratorizawa’s last practice, and Wakatoshi has never been good with words. The sea of nostalgia remains in his stomach. He looks around. They have spent the better part of three years here. The future awaits. He thinks he will make the first step to it now.
“Satori-kun, I bought you a pair of booty shorts,” he says dryly. “We can match.”
It isn’t his decision if Satori should continue volleyball in college, but he does know that this is the ending of a golden age. Soon, he will drive to Tokyo with his life packed away in cardboard boxes. There will be new people, new teammates, and there is only so much space in one’s life for high school friends. Yet he wants his phone to burn beneath his pillow every night with a string of nonsensical memes. He wants permanence stretching into an infinity of hayrides and hushed bus trips at dusk.
No, Wakatoshi decides. There will never be words good enough for this.
