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you start your text to kuroo with the most beautiful array of words a 22-year-old can muster.

you busy rn?

no, he sends, quicker than you’d expected. what’s up?

sometimes, you expect him to finally block your number, or ignore your texts, or throw his phone in a river, but he never does. you’ve been broken up for months now and, somehow, every time your dryer breaks, or your windshield cracks, or you have a day so horribly terribly bad that you just can’t breathe, you still have tetsurou on speed dial.

you’re not complaining, of course, but the evil of it isn't lost on you. he should move on, and so should you—it’s your fault that doesn’t happen.

can't i just be curious? you ask.

no, he replies. not your thing.

you chuckle a little at that, mostly because you can imagine him saying it. he's got a smile on his face, pulled up towards his eyes from his cheeks. the image makes you miss him in the stark, white kind of way—empty, but whole.

you start typing out a response (i'm bored..........) until the ellipsis gets so long you have to delete it. you start again (i think you left a coat at my apartment? do you wanna come-), but you're lying, so you delete it again. before you can think about it too hard, you swipe your fingers over the call button.

"you okay?" he asks after three rings. you don't usually do this sort of thing—texting has always suited you well enough—but the sound of his voice makes your legs feel weak and you feel a little bit like the world was going to collapse if you didn’t hear his voice, so you're calling it a worthy endeavor.

"i miss you," you say. It's quick—a little to loud and a little too forward—but it rolls off your tongue so naturally that you let it hang in the air, giving the words a little grace.

a beat, and then, "yeah?"

“yeah,” you say, a soft pause, almost finalized but not quite there yet. you can hear his breath—a mechanical rattle, just a little.

a laugh bleeds through the phone and then, “how much?”

if you were better—as over him as you tell everyone you are—you would have better resolve. you’d say a little, not too much, just sometimes when i’m bored or lonely or especially horny or scared. instead, you chew on the side of your lip for a second and say, “enough.”

“enough to call me?”

your laughter breathes out of you sort of thoughtlessly. you imagine saying, enough that sometimes it aches. like there’s a piece of me that always feels cut off at the stem—my phantom limb, my missing piece.

instead, you say, “i guess so,” a little too quickly and quietly.

a beat of silence and you can hear his breath through the receiver. he’s not panting, but he’s moving enough that the sound leaves your phone in steady heaves.

“are you—running?” you ask.

“a little.” you can hear him grin. “just around the neighborhood.”

“mine or yours?”

a pause, and then he breathes, “does it matter?”

you sink your teeth into your bottom lip. if you know kuroo like you think you do—and oh do you, all nearly-six-and-a-half-feet of him—he’s wearing some tiny little athletic shorts he bought in college that, admittedly, should probably be illegal to wear outside. if weather’s permitting, there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s in a t-shirt he doesn’t usually wear anymore or no shirt at all. it’s dusk, but it was ninety-two today—dead of august summer heat—so you would bet the latter.

“it does,” you say, suddenly struck by the ex-boyfriend shaped mental image swirling around your head. “just for curiosity’s sake.”

“curiosity? you want me to run by your window?” he huffs, presumably jumping off of a sidewalk, or over a patch of grass, or down the staircase leading into the park next door. “let you decide whether or not i still entice you?”

instinctively, you draw your way towards your living room window. four stories up, south-facing for the light. you can see the street below you and the sort-of-evil part of you hopes to he’s there. the sidewalk is glaringly empty, baked by the heat.

“very funny,” you say.

“i’m serious!” he replies. “sort of.”

you chuckle, resting your forehead against the glass. you can feel the weather fighting it’s way into your apartment and, if the utility bill wasn’t already sort of a nightmare, you would open the window just a crack—let the air bridge the gap between your world and his.

you wonder if you’d be able to sense him out there somehow. if the air would smell different or the breeze would stall or if his presence would be so heavy you’d feel his gravitational pull down the block.

“can i ask you something kind of fucked up?” you say, and there’s a pause on the other line. quick hesitation, and a slow reply.

“sure?” he drags the ‘u’ a little.

“when i broke up with you,” you start, pressing the phone to your ear a little too hard. “who did you call first?”

you don’t really know why you’re asking him this right now, if you’re being completely honest. maybe to think about the look on his face, or the way his breath sounds when he’s nervous. maybe it’s the reassurance that he didn’t call some other girl he used to see, or a friend who said you guys were bad match, or—

“my dad,” he says suddenly, clicking his tongue against his teeth. the crackling of the wind stops for a second and you imagine him standing at the edge of the sidewalk, dragging his free hand through his hair.

you breathe, “what’d you tell him?”

he’s walking again. you can just barely hear his feet against the ground. they’re slow, steady steps. something crunches under his feet like gravel.

your eyes dart out to the naked pavement again. you can nearly see yourself, standing there like a ghost. it’s almost midnight; he’s telling you he loves you; you’re telling him it’s hard; he’s quiet, squeezing his eyes shut and pinching at the bridge of his nose; you’re telling him you’ve never felt this way before and that it scares you; you’re telling him that the world feels too big.

“you really wanna get into this?” he asks.

your tongue almost feels too big for your mouth. in your head, you say, i want you to tell me i fucked up so bad that you never want to speak to me again so i can get over this. i want you to say that you’re tired of answering my texts—that i’m exhausting, that this is exhausting.

“not—over the phone, i guess,” rolls across your pallet in one big blob of words and spit instead.

“okay,” he says, sort of absently. “fuck, okay. give me a sec.”

he’s moving again—your phone is making that staticky noise that sounds like he stuck his speaker into a fishbowl. you can hear him breathe (in and then out).

i miss sleeping next to you. sometimes, i can feel the weight of you stirring on the other side of the bed and i wonder if i’m psychic or just insane. remember that time we hooked up in college? before you told me you loved me and before you got that new tattoo and i took that shitty job that made us both miserable? remember how hot it was that night? the ac was broken and we were both so fucking sweaty but i think i know the feeling of your tongue in your mouth more than i know my own name.

“tetsurou?”

it’s quiet on the other end. you watch him cross into view from your window and you stand there, kind of stupid and hopeless. every once in a while, you see him somewhere out in the wild (your favorite coffee shop downtown on a sunday, when it’s almost too packed in there to breathe; at the park, drawn across the grass, looking up at the sun; in a bar, cheeks flushed, eyes wide, grin big and toothy) and you’re reminded of the fact that he is, in fact, real, and looks up at your window from the sidewalk, panting and out of breath.

you hold his gaze from three stories up, not thinking about it too much when you hang up the phone—instinct more than anything else. the silence in your apartment is nearly deafening. you swear you can hear him as his chest rises and falls.

by the time you slide your shoes on, drifting your way towards the elevator without locking your front door, your eyes have glazed over. your out-of-body feeling doesn’t fade until you’re leaving the building, a disgusting rush of humid air hitting you head on. you’re not usually prone to freezing up like this, but you stand there, just outside the exit, staring again.

he is shirtless (points for you), but he’s standing with an uncomfortable hunch to his shoulders, like the whole thing feels off. it does, you’ll note. for as long as you’ve known kuroo you’ve been playing this horrible game of cat and mouse. you’ve wanted him so badly so many times, but you’ve wanted him to chase you even more. you tease him, you tell him you like your alone time, you never let him stay for longer than the night. you make for a horrible girlfriend, and an even worse ex.

“hi,” you say, finally. you’re standing a little too far for it to come out normal.

“hi,” he replies. a smile peeks out from behind his lips—a flash of shining teeth.

do you ever think about that time you bit my inner thigh so hard that it left a long, spiraling bruise across my leg? you were so apologetic about the whole thing, but i remember being fascinated—more that my body could produce such dark shades of purple than anything else. i remember running my hands along it, thinking i should have felt it in some way or another, but, by touch, it was like it wasn’t even there. were we even a couple yet? you always did have such sharp teeth.

“you didn’t have to come all the way over here, y’know.” you’re smiling, but half of you means it and half of you is sort of begging for him to invite himself inside.

“it’s fine. i was at the park.” he bobs his head to the side, gesturing towards the big patch of grass across the road. the construction finished last spring, just as it got too hot to really enjoy it.

“oh.” you feel kind of foreign in yourself—stiff. “did you like it?”

he eyes you, “seriously?”

kuroo steps forward, over the sidewalk and onto the concrete slab in front of the exit. you consider closing the gap—only a foot or two between you—but you hesitate. he smells like sweat, and skin, and whatever cologne he picked out this morning. you know he’s never been able to settle on just one, switching back and forth between some cheap shit he picked up on vacation and a birthday present from his grandfather, based entirely on a whim.

he’s just so—familiar. for as strange as making eye contract with your ex-boyfriend can be, he knows how you have to hide you phone charger from your cat so he doesn’t chew it, how you take your coffee, how you love to cook, even when you don’t want to. you know he still sends birthday cards to his friends from highschool; you know he hasn’t talked to his mom in months; you know his favorite songs, the spots where he’s the most ticklish, how his worst fear is falling so far behind that he can’t get back up.

you’re awestruck, almost, every time you see him. for how much you can pretend you don’t want him anymore (that you never did in the first place), he’s magnetic. you’re drawn to him in a way that you have never, and probably will never understand.

sometimes your sister still calls me when you’re especially upset. i don’t know if you’ve told her that we broke up, but i don’t fill in any missing pieces for both of our sakes. is it wrong to ask you if you’ve talked to her lately when i already know the answer? did your shitty roommate ever move out? did you ever donate that stuffed animal from your mom that you don’t like looking at? i like to wonder if you know about the nooks and crannies of my life the way i still know about yours. i think already know the answer anyway.

“did you wanna come up?” you ask. i love you. “i can get you something to drink” i love you.

“i shouldn’t,” he replies.

“i know.”

i’ve only ever woken up before you once. you drool in your sleep, y’know. just a little. for a while that morning, i watched you snore with your head stuffed in between my pillows. there was something sort of exciting about it—like i knew i was never gonna see it again. when you woke up, i rolled over, pretending i was still asleep so i could hear the way you yawn, and stretch, and crack your back before you get out of bed. i think about someone else getting to wake up next to you one day and i feel sick with myself. i hope so badly that they deserve you.

“i miss you,” you say. you run your tongue along the back of your teeth.

“so i’ve heard,” he grins.

“i know.”

it was such a pleasure to love you. i’m sorry i took it for granted. can you come inside? can we talk it through? you can tell me how bad i fucked up (you won’t) and i can nod along, looking down at the floor so i don’t have to meet your eyes, and then we can go back to doing whatever we did before this, even if that’s nothing at all.

he wraps his hands around the railing next to the door, shifting all of of his weight back and forth between his heels and his toes. it’s so brutally humid that he looks hazy while he does it, like the air is lagging a second behind his movements.

“when i called my dad,” he starts, his gaze shifting in your direction. “i told him that i asked you to move in with me, and i told him that you looked fucking petrified. you hadn’t broken up with me just yet, but i could tell it was coming.”

(you can see it again—that night on the sidewalk in front of your apartment. he’s scrolling through apartment listings, showing you different ones in the area. do you want a one bedroom or two? the one bed is cheaper, obviously, but i think we can make the other one work if you really want it. he flicks through one picture and then another. you feel dizzy. you’re both a little drunk—not enough to be completely out of your mind, but enough that he walked you home to make sure you made it all the way. his tolerance for that type of shit has always been so much higher than yours.

my lease isn’t ending until july, so we can think about it for a while if you want. he grins, and you start counting his teeth. he asks you something about uhauls and moving out, but all you can think about is how fucking cold it is. january’s almost over but you have your coat buttoned all the way up, and you’re ducking your nose into the collar to avoid the wind. he asks you something else, you don’t hear him. he asks if you’re alright; his eyes get wide and the smile drops off of his face. you wave him off and tell him it’s time for you to go inside. you love him, you tell him, you’re sure you do. you’ll see him tomorrow, you smile, but you can feel the way it doesn’t quite reach your eyes.)

“what’d he tell you?” you ask. it comes out sort of flat and dead.

kuroo laughs, in a dry, humorless sort of way.

“that he taught me better than to try and predict the future. worst fucking advice ever.”

you snort, “seriously.”

silence swells between you again, tipping between warm and awkward. a bike flies by about a street over with a speaker in the basket, playing a song you liked a lot when you were fourteen or fifteen but don’t much care for now. for a half second, you think about how funny it is that the people around you are conscious and living too. they, for all you know, don’t yearn for people right in front of them. kuroo links his hands together, cracking each of his knuckles.

have you been on any dates lately? i went on one, about a month ago. i sat across from a guy at a bar and i knew my makeup was fucked up because my hands had been trembling the whole time i was getting ready and he just wouldn’t stop staring at me. we ate shitty bar food and made shitty conversation and then split the check afterwards. i went home and thought about the inside of your mouth. when i looked in the mirror, there were three big blobs of mascara on different parts of my face.

“did you call him after i did it—tell him you were right?” you smile a little sloppily, and he sinks his teeth into his bottom lip, shaking his head.

“didn’t have the stomach for it.”

can we start over? all the way—like, i tell you my name and where i’m from and that my mom and i don’t get along like we should, because that always seems to come up first. you can tell me how tall you are, how you know a fantastic fucking thai place that i need to try and we can sit across from each other, picking up food and telling the other one to try it because it’s just too good to pass up. i’ll pretend i don’t know which t-shirt of yours is the most comfortable and you can pretend you don’t know what the inside of my body feels like. we’ll be decent about it because we’re decent people who have never fucked on the first date and have never broken up because one of us had never known commitment like this before and was scared to know what it feels like.

you move your toes around in your shoes uncomfortably. kuroo leans forward on the railing again, hanging nearly half his body into the patch of garden below the exit’s stoop. you think for a second about how pretty he is, and then about what an asshole you are for thinking about him like that in the first place.

“you didn’t deserve what i did to you,” you say, stark and sudden. you barely recognize your voice out of your own mouth. “i don’t know if i’ve said that before, but you didn’t.”

“i moved too fast,” he hums, not moving from his half-up-half-down position. “i knew you were scared, but i kept pushing and pushing and pushing because i thought if i could just get you over the hump it would be okay.”

“it might’ve been.”

he shakes his head, “you know better than that.”

your fingers twitch, and you reach a hand towards his back, sliding it up the curve of his spine. his skin is warm—you can feel goosebumps work their way up towards his shoulders. the familiarity of it makes you feel like throwing up.

“do you remember that one campus bar where you lost your id?” he asks. he’s leaning back toward your hand as he speaks—you can feel the ripple of his skin across your fingers. “we spent all night looking under tables and asking people if they’d seen it—“

“just to find out it was in your wallet,” you grin.

“because you left it at the bar,” he says.

“and you were too drunk to remember you grabbed it,” you reply.

he pushes himself up from the railing and you pull you hand away, rubbing your fingers together to strip the magnetic feeling out of them.

“you thought it was so funny after we found it.” he’s looking at you, but you can see the way his eyes are starting to glaze over, stuck in another moment in time.

“because it was,” you laugh. “i’d never seen you so apologetic.”

you held my hands and said “baby if i knew i would’ve given it you, you know that right? like, i didn’t know it was in there—i didn’t even know i brought my wallet inside.” you could barely get the words out you were so bombed. i held your face between my fingers and told you that i loved you, and i loved you, and i loved you, and that that you were one of the funniest people i had ever met.

“when i went home that night and laid in bed, all i could think about is how bad i wanted you there—how bad i always wanted you there.” he chews on the inside of his cheek. you can see the indent of his teeth moving back and forth. “you ever think we were meant to be together?’

“constantly,” you say, a little smile working its way up your face.

he rubs his hands up and down his thigh, the weird synthetic material of his shorts making that horrid crinkling sound each time he moves.

can you be here all the time? can you come fix my sink and lie in my bed and tell me how pretty i am every time i need to hear it most? can you talk to my mom when i don’t want to? can you tell me about your favorite movies? can you fall asleep next to me and let me complain about your snoring all night long? can i promise you that i’ll try my best for you? that i won’t dive head first but i’ll get as close to the water as i can? can that be enough for us? just for a little while?

“can i come up, actually?” he says. “i’m thinking maybe i really need that water.”

you grin, a little wider than you intend to. “yeah, yeah you can.”

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