Chapter 7
Hinata was smiling. Not his normal, bubbly smile, but a conniving, mischievous one.
Daichi narrowed his eyes at him from across the store. Hinata took a shirt, slipped the folding board between the layers of fabric, and folded the sleeves behind it. He repeated the action over and over without changing his expression.
So, not only was he smiling, but he was completing his daily tasks without objection. Daichi looked at the list for the day, clipped haphazardly to the top of their register clipboard. Usually, it was decorated in the the doodles Hinata drew to procrastinate, but, that day, the sheet was bare except for large red sharpie checkmarks and Hinata’s initials.
And it was quiet. Too quiet.
It had been a couple weeks since the back room incident, and, since then, Hinata had not been quiet for two minutes together. He and Kageyama had apparently spent as much waking time together as humanly possible, and Hinata had no qualms about spilling every single detail of every single minute. Some of the things he blabbed about were just random tidbits from their days. For example, Daichi learned that Kageyama really liked milk, but he didn’t like milk in things, only liked it by itself. Daichi waved goodbye to whatever bit of important information or past memory that was pushed out of his brain to make way for the knowledge of Kageyama’s dairy preference.
When Daichi wasn’t getting barrel rolled by insignificant details, he was waterboarded with stories that were entirely inappropriate for the store and Daichi had, on more than one occasion, physically put his hand over Hinata’s mouth to shield customers from his graphic descriptions of the way Kageyama blushed when Hinata felt him up in public, or how he stopped functioning for a full two minutes after Hinata had shown him some particularly lewd drawings from his sketchbooks.
But sometimes, on very special occasions, when Hinata wasn’t talking about his sexual escapades or Kageyama’s daily routines, he gushed about the creative projects that seemed to surge from them like waterfalls after the snow melts, and Daichi lapped them up. He leaned on his elbows, rapt, while Hinata told him about a group of people with extraordinary abilities that were standoffish and rude, but noble and powerful. Or a story about the first woman to ever survive the bite of a werewolf and turn into one herself, and then leading her own pack despite thousands of years of werewolf patriarchy.
Daichi looked at Hinata again. He was still folding clothes, silent as the grave. At the very beginning of their shift that day, when Daichi had asked him how he was doing, he got a one-word answer. To his other questions, Hinata proffered only vague gestures. His first full sentence came when he asked Daichi if he had any plans for the evening, and when Daichi said that he didn’t, Hinata went googly-eyed, almost like he did when he was talking about Kageyama. Daichi asked why it mattered, and Hinata had just shrugged. After that, it was radio silence. For hours. Everything about it made his skin crawl and Daichi couldn’t take it any more.
“So, Hinata.” Daichi approached him casually and pretended to look over the knee pads hanging on the wall. “Why’d you want to know if I was doing anything tonight?”
Hinata averted his eyes and kept dusting the packages.
“You’re going to ignore your manager? Your friend?” It was a low blow, but Daichi was desperate.
Hinata stiffened and puffed out his cheeks. He squeezed his mouth shut like he was trying to hold his breath. Or keep himself from talking. Daichi raised an eyebrow. “You know,” Daichi picked a package of kneepads off the wall and put it on the correct hook, “if you were hiding something, especially something that had to do with me, I’d be pretty upset.”
Hinata tried to walk away, but Daichi grabbed the back of his shirt.
“Luckily for me, I have a secret weapon,” Daichi inched closer, “and I’m not afraid to use it!” He wiggled his fingers and lunged.
“I. Can’t. Tell. You! Really!” Hinata managed between gasps of breath and choked laughter. “It’s. A. Surprise!”
Daichi stopped tickling him. “A surprise?”
Hinata clutched his stomach and took rapid breaths. A real smile returned to his flushed face. “Yeah! A surprise! For you!”
“Oh god.” Daichi let Hinata go and he scrambled out of reach. The last time Hinata had tried to surprise him, they ended up having to pick individual confetti pieces out of the store rug on their hands and knees because Hinata had forgotten that the store vacuum wasn’t working and threw confetti everywhere. Daichi’s spent his birthday weekend in bed, sleeping on an ice pack. He wasn't the biggest fan of surprises. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Hinata scratched his head and ran fingers through his hair. “Both?”
A phantom pain shot up Daichi’s spine and he shuddered. “Just tell me.”
“It’s a good surprise, I promise. No confetti in rugs.” Hinata promised. He crossed his finger over his heart, right where the Sports World logo was embroidered.
“Can you tell me anything?”
Hinata frowned. “I don’t know…I guess I can say that it’s happening tonight! Definitely maybe by the end of our shift.”
“Definitely maybe,” Daichi repeated. He braced himself for another long couple of hours.
As the end of the day neared and customers made their way to the register with their final purchases, Hinata’s phone buzzed in his pocket. They weren’t allowed to have their phones on them, but Daichi figured it was close enough to the end of the day that it didn’t really matter. It definitely wasn’t because he was curious about the surprise.
Hinata picked up the phone. “Bakageyama! What’d I tell you about calling me while I was at work?” He laughed loudly and Daichi swore he heard Kageyama arguing a point on the other end. Hinata cast a furtive look toward Daichi. “Fine, fine, yeah, I know I told you to call. Hey! I’m not an idiot!” Tinny shouting erupted from the phone. “I can’t say anything now, but is everything happening soon? It’s almost time to close the store... Shut up! I didn’t say anything to him!”
As much as Daichi loved listening to Hinata scream at Kageyama who was, apparently, in on whatever scheme Hinata had concocted, they had actual jobs to do, and Daichi was anxious to end a stressful shift. “Hey, Hinata, shut your trap and get back to work!”
“Gotta go, see ya - aw, he hung up on me,” Hinata moaned.
“Surprise, surprise,” Daichi mumbled.
Not five minutes after Hinata hung up the phone, and ten minutes before they were supposed to close the store, Hinata suddenly leapt up and covered Daichi’s eyes with both hands. Daichi’s heart pounded in his chest and he tried to mentally prepare himself for what must undoubtedly be Hinata’s surprise. He heard the chime that meant someone had just entered the store. “There better be a very good reason for blinding me when someone has literally just stepped into the store,” Daichi warned.
Hinata shushed him and Daichi heard the shuffling footsteps approach them. He was just about to rip Hinata’s hands from his face when Hinata lifted them himself and shouted “surprise!”
Daichi blinked a couple of times to readjust to the light. Hinata was there with a hand through Kageyama’s arm, the latter staring daggers at nothing, which wasn’t entirely unexpected, but the third person almost caused him to step back in shock.
“Heard I had a new fan! ‘Sup?”
Sugawara Koushi, the actual person, stood in front of him, and smiled with a wattage that Daichi was sure he had never seen contained in any one single face. He wasn’t wearing a beanie this time, so Daichi could tell how long his hair was, and admire the way it shimmered across his forehead, curled at the ends and behind his ears, and dripped down the nape of his neck like mercury. There was one tuft of hair, on the top of his head, that was immune to gravity, and it bounced when Suga lifted his hand to wave.
They locked eyes and, even though Daichi had thought about those eyes constantly since the day he followed Hinata as he bounced from table to table at the con, his shoddy memory was nothing compared to the real thing. It was funny, Daichi thought. He spent his days cursing the awful fluorescent lights of the store, but Suga’s eyes caught the light and each shade of brown, the coffee, the caramel, all of them, flickered and danced like they there alive.
“Daichi? Hey?”
He hated himself for how much he loved the way his name sounded from Suga’s lips. “You remember me?”
“Aw, I’m a little disheartened that you think I could forget such a handsome face,” Suga said with a pout.
Daichi was suddenly very self-conscious. He looked down at his stupid uniform pants and his standard-issue white polo with Sports World emblazoned across his chest. He swallowed hard. Hinata laughed into his hand, the one that wasn’t in Kageyama’s.
“Really, though, are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” Suga stepped close to him and peered into his eyes.
Daichi laughed. That was one way of putting it. “Yeah, hi, sorry. I’m just surprised.”
Suga clasped his hands together. “Well, good! That was the point!”
“It worked,” Daichi admitted. Suga’s sleeves slipped down his wrist to reveal yet another beguiling mole on his skin, and he looked at Daichi like he also sort of couldn’t believe it was happening.
Hinata elbowed Kageyama sharply. He retaliated quickly and cleared his throat. “We told Suga that you were interested in his writing and he really wanted to see you again.”
“And,” Hinata butted in, “you said you didn’t have plans, so there’s no excuse for you to not come out with us tonight!”
“I was getting there!” Kageyama shot at Hinata.
“You were too slow,” Hinata challenged in a serious voice.
Suga put his arm around Kageyama’s neck. “Aw, your bickering is so cute.” He started to sing, “Kageyama and Hinata sitting in a tree…”
Kageyama whipped his head around and stared at Suga. They looked at each other for a couple minutes before Suga let out a long, dramatic sigh.
“Geez, Tobio, when’d you get to be such a buzzkill?” he asked and rubbed the back of Kageyama’s head.
“Yeah, Tobio,” Hinata taunted.
Daichi laughed at the three of them, but the clock on the wall caught his eye. One minute past close.
“Something wrong?” Suga asked, his hand in Kageyama’s mussed hair.
Daichi scratched the nape of his neck. “I hate to interrupt, but Hinata and I have to close up the store.”
Suga knitted his eyebrows and a crease formed above the bridge of his nose. Daichi barely resisted the urge to reach out and smooth it with his finger.
“So, you’re coming out with us, right?” Hinata asked.
Daichi looked at Suga again. The crease was gone and, instead, his eyes were wide and his lips parted in a small smile. There was no way he could refuse him anything, even if everything in him screamed that it would be too good to be true. “Of course.”
They quickly agreed on a time and place, and Suga dragged Kageyama out of the store. Hinata vibrated with excited energy, so he cleaned, folded, and vacuumed at warp speed, but Daichi had never been more nervous in his life and he didn’t know how to handle it. He had to re-enter the closing sales numbers in the spreadsheet at least three times. Then, he dropped the cash drawer on the floor and accidentally ripped the sales report receipt in half. As he changed into the spare clothes he kept in his gym bag, he whacked his elbow on the wall and hissed in pain. On the way out, he hit his shoulder on the door frame. How many times had he gone through that door before? And since when did going out make him nervous?
Hinata was tapping his foot anxiously when Daichi emerged from the office. They locked up the store and walked across the parking lot.
“So you’re not mad?” Hinata asked sheepishly.
Daichi looked into the night sky. He should’ve been mad. He never asked for any of it. In fact, he had explicitly asked Hinata to not do anything. Daichi had contented himself with admiring Suga from afar, simply imagining what it would’ve been like to see him again, to tell him he was amazing. He was happy to curl up with his books, both of which he had already read by that point, and skim them for sentences that he might’ve missed the first couple of times. It was easier that way. There was no one to be disappointed and no one to disappoint. No surprises. But seeing Suga again, in the flesh, tore his walls down embarrassingly fast. “I should be,” he finally admitted.
“I’m really sorry, it’s just, when I mentioned to Kageyama that you were asking about Suga, his eyes got all wide.” Hinata scowled in a surprisingly accurate imitation of Kageyama’s face and plastered his hair to his face to mock the way Kageyama’s hung haphazardly over his forehead. He gruffed an octave lower than his own voice, “what the hell, dumbass Hinata? Suga’s been asking about him, too.”
Daichi snorted. “You’re getting to be a pretty good liar.”
“Why’s it so hard to believe that Suga remembered you?” Hinata asked with genuine curiosity. It broke Daichi’s heart. The world wasn't as pretty as Hinata sometimes made it out to be in that creative brain of his.
“I’m just a random dude who happened to be friends with his protege’s,” Daichi gestured ineloquently toward Hinata, “stalker.”
Hinata laughed. “Hey, remember when you said you’d go on a double date with us after Kageyama and I met?”
Daichi groaned. “So I made my bed and have to lie in it, huh?”
“Yup,” Hinata chirped and tilted his head. “But I still don’t understand why you don’t think Suga would’ve remembered you? I mean,” Hinata fidgeted with his hands, “even if he didn’t, because I’m sure he meets a lot of people, why did you assume he wouldn’t, or that I was lying?”
Why would Suga remember someone like Daichi? Suga was the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life. Daichi was nothing out of the ordinary. Suga was a published writer, supremely talented, with his name out there in the world. Daichi was a store manager, interchangeable at best, content to stay anonymous. Suga’s head was probably filled with blood and gore and bits of humans and zombies and stories and ideas and founts of words overflowing. Daichi’s head was full of corporate directives and what he would eat for dinner and hideous fluorescent lights.
But there was no need to say any of that aloud. The last thing he wanted to do was burden Hinata with his self-doubt, so he shrugged and apologized. Hinata, strapped into the passenger seat, told him it was okay, but didn’t push the issue any further and hummed along to the radio. Daichi kept his eyes on the road and wondered how long into their get-together it would take for Suga to realize that they were worlds apart.