Chapter 11
A couple days passed with no word from Suga. Daichi was able to shrug it off, hunker down, and put any nervous energy he had into his work. He roped Tanaka into reorganizing the store room to maximize their storage space. When he asked Ennoshita to help him with preparations for year-end inventory, his assistant manager raised his eyebrows. Daichi said he just wanted to be prepared, and Ennoshita reminded him that they never did inventory prep in advance.
“I know, but maybe just this year,” Daichi asked.
Ennoshita just nodded. “I’ll get the clipboard,” he sighed.
Then a week passed, and Daichi tried to process the extra nervous energy that he couldn’t hone at work into his volleyball league. He ran extra laps, did extra reps during weight room rotations, and stayed late to come up with strategies for their next match with the other community center.
Every night he came home exhausted and sore, but his brain held sleep hostage. He would lay in bed, stare at the ceiling, grab his phone, look at the blank screen, put it back on the table. A car would pass by the building and the light would reflect off his phone, tricking him into thinking there was a message. A notification. Something. Anything. Daichi pleaded into the void. He got his wish some nights, when he exchanged a couple messages with Suga, but the words were empty.
Two weeks went by and Daichi’s nervous energy turned into something uglier, something with which he was all too familiar. He had felt like an ass, still felt awful, but maybe, just maybe, even though it hurt, it was for the best. Suga was the most interesting person he had ever met. “Would he really have been happy with me?” Daichi asked himself.
Michimiya caught him sulking in the food court and sat down next to him. He tried his best wipe the frown from his face, but she was too quick.
“Why the long face?”
“Hey, oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”
Michimiya took her arm away to cross them over her chest. She looked around the food court before focusing back on Daichi. “Does your sulking have anything to do with a certain blonde not visiting you lately?”
“No,” Daichi responded a little too quickly.
“Really?” Michimiya asked as she leaned on her elbows. “Y’know,” she mused aloud, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you happier than you were with him. The way you two looked at each other made me sick,” she laughed, “but not in a bad way.”
“Mich-” Daichi tried to interrupt her train of thought before it took corporeal form and sliced through his gut.
She continued. I’ve seen you with a lot of guys and your face never lit up the way it does when you’re talking about Suga. I’ve even seen you two lovebirds making out in the service hallways,” she giggled. “So what’s the deal?”
Daichi didn’t see any way to escape saying it aloud. “We had a fight, or something, and he needs his time to deal with it.” The words themselves didn’t seem so bad, but they weighed him down like extra gravity.
“Sorry Daichi, but sulking isn’t going to help anything.”
“I’m not sulking.”
Michimiya raised an eyebrow and mimicked Daichi’s expression with wide eyes and an exaggerated pout. “Whatever you say.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Daichi mumbled quietly.
“So you’re just going to let him go, like the rest of them?” Michimiya said carefully.
The idea of putting Suga with the ‘rest of them’ made him want to punch a hole in the table, so he said nothing.
Michimiya rolled her eyes. “I saw the way he looked at you, too. Has it ever occurred to you that he might actually like you just as much as you like him?” Her phone buzzed and she jumped off the bench. “There’s an asshole at the store, so I have to go kick some ass. See ya!”
Daichi stared at the rest of his half-eaten sandwich. Had it ever occurred to him that Suga might like him as much as he liked Suga? He cleaned up his table and made his way back to Sports World, where he was greeted by a suspiciously quiet Hinata and an icy Kageyama, which wasn’t completely out of the norm. What was abnormal, however, was the presence of a whispering firecracker with bleached hair talking to Tanaka in hushed tones.
“Hey Hinata, Tanaka, people who don’t work here,” Daichi greeted coolly. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Nope!” Hinata beamed. “We were just talking about you!”
“Really? Were you talking about how I told you replace the laces in the demo shoes? Which I see hasn’t been done yet?”
Both Hinata and Tanaka cringed, but Noya popped out from in between them. “That was my bad! But we’re here to fix everything.”
Daichi tapped his foot, feeling his patience dwindle to dangerously low levels. “Fix what exactly?”
“C’mon Daichi,” Tanaka said, “you’ve been walking around like a cartoon character with a cloud over its head and it’s depressing the hell out of everyone.”
Daichi was oddly touched. Still annoyed, but touched. “Sorry I’ve been making things difficult on you guys. It was irresponsible of me to to let my personal life affect work. Now, can you please get back to work?”
Tanaka threw his hands in the air. “That’s not the point! We just care about the happiness of our fearless leader,” he said, ignoring the work part.
“Suga has been doing the weird thing where he smiles all the time and thinks that we can’t tell something’s wrong,” Kageyama added. “It’s the worst.”
“And it’s a little creepy,” Hinata shivered.
Daichi looked at the people in front of him, staring at him with eager eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can do.”
“Well, just so happens that I have,” Noya started and popped up in front of Daichi holding a plastic card that looked suspiciously like… “A pass! To the horror convention next week. Suga just announced that he’d be making a surprise appearance there. It’s pretty far away, but you should surprise him!”
Daichi’s stomach did an unpleasant flip. Instead of grabbing the pass, he gripped the sides of his pants. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Noya forced the pass into Daichi’s hands. “Pretty sure it’s the best idea ever. Plus,” he pointed his thumb at his chest, “you’ll have us to back you up!”
“Moral support!” Tanaka chirped.
Everyone pulled passes out of their pockets and held them up. It was a sweet gesture, Daichi admitted, but impractical. “Then who’s going to watch the store?”
“I already asked Ennoshita to cover. He’s gonna grab Kinoshita and Narita, too. They’ve got some time between classes and studying and whatever else respectable kids like them do,” Tanaka winked.
“Okay,” Daichi said slowly. He was running out of excuses. “But Suga said he needed his space and I need to respect that.”
“Bullshit,” Kageyama said angrily.
“Yeah, bullshit!” Hinata echoed from behind him.
Kageyama reached back to swat at Hinata, but kept his eyes trained on Daichi. “I know he said that, but Suga still has a picture of you guys as his phone background. He looks at it when he thinks no one is paying attention, but it’s really obvious.” Kageyama looked around like Suga might pop out from behind a display.
Tanaka slung one arm around Noya and one around Hinata. “I think what we’re trying to say, boss man, is that you need to suck it up and go sweep your guy off his feet.”
He swallowed hard, his last full conversation with Suga swirling around in his head. The look on Suga’s face when Daichi told him he didn’t want any more surprises, how he felt when he didn’t go after Suga that night. The four pairs of eyes on him. The plastic passes reflecting the harsh lights of the store. “Okay,” he agreed.
Hinata, Tanaka, Noya, and even Kageyama descended on him. They erupted into shouts that started as victorious but ended as accusatory when Hinata flailed and accidentally whacked Kageyama across the face. Daichi had to split them up and, when he did, Hinata asked, “you’re driving us all, right?”
Daichi groaned in response. “I guess so.”
Exactly a week later, everyone, including Asahi, gathered in the mall parking lot and crammed themselves into Daichi’s car like clowns in a circus act. Daichi drove the whole way with one eye in the rearview mirror scanning for cops, because Noya insisted on being strapped into Asahi’s lap, and Hinata, dressed as a zombie with fake blood streaming out of his mouth and makeup to fade his tattoos, kept touching Kageyama inappropriately thinking that no one noticed, so Kageyama responded by loudly threatening to make him bleed for real, and, to top it off, Tanaka screamed out the window every time another driver did something even remotely questionable. Daichi didn’t even have time to be nervous about seeing Suga.
He only had to pull the car over once, and Daichi took more than a couple deep breaths of relief when everyone tumbled out of the car in front of the hotel that was hosting the convention. He took Asahi aside, because he knew no one else would listen, and told him as clearly and explicitly as he could, “never fucking again.”
Crowds of people streamed in through the main doors as their own group approached. It was a veritable sea of black shirts, bright lips, fake blood, and fishnet stockings. When they were inside, Tanaka motioned for Daichi to turn around. “Looks like Kageyama’s fan club caught up with him,” he snickered.
Sure enough, Kageyama was surrounded by a large group of people holding out whatever they had for him to sign. He signed and greeted diligently, but kept looking to Hinata, who stood right outside the group, giving him thumbs up in between giggles and snorts.
Tanaka snapped a blurry picture with his phone. “What? Ya know that’s going to be Hinata pretty soon.”
“No, I know,” Daichi smiled. If someone would’ve told him all those months ago, at his first con, that this is where he would end up, he would’ve thought they were out of their minds. He chastised his past self, because this was better than anything he could have imagined. They all watched Kageyama for a couple of minutes before Noya shoved the event program into Daichi’s hands.
“Suga’s panel is on in an hour,” Noya said quickly. “Asahi’s already run off to see him at Kiyoko’s booth.”
Tanaka’s head whipped back from Kageyama and his gaggle of fans. “Kiyoko is here?”
“Hell yeah she is,” Noya smirked.
“Then what are we waiting for? Daichi, you got this, right?” Tanaka clapped him on the back.
“Yeah, yeah,” Daichi answered, a little jealous that everyone might see Suga before he did. If he did at all. If his barely-formed plan succeeded. The ‘if’ made Daichi uneasy all over again. “Are you going to tell him, Suga, that I’m here?”
Tanaka looked at him aghast. “And ruin your grand love gesture? What do you take me for?”
“Cool. Good,” Daichi said nervously.
Noya and Tanaka ran off into the crowd, leaving Daichi alone in the sea of con-goers. He checked the map and wandered past tables on the way to the panel room. There didn’t seem to be any particular order, so he marveled at the towers of books, piles of swords, walls of gruesome masks, and groups of people comparing fake wounds. He couldn’t hide the slight curve of his lips and the awkward smile that followed. Suga was probably in heaven and Daichi was grateful to be a part of it. Even if their meeting backfired, this was what Suga loved, and he loved Suga.
They had never said it, always tiptoeing around the phrase, but there it was, plain as day. He loved Suga and suddenly felt like the world’s biggest asshole for never admitting it out loud.
Daichi waited outside the room with a piece of paper tacked to the wall. “A New Generation of LGBT+ Horror” written in thick, black sharpie confirmed that he was the right place. Hinata and Kageyama joined the line behind him, as well as Asahi, Noya and Tanaka, with Kiyoko and Yachi right behind them. Even Tsukishima and Yamaguchi joined the crowd, Yamaguchi waving happily to Hinata and Yachi. Daichi wasn’t sure whether he was glad for the support or mortified by the increasing number of witnesses to his potential failure.
Once the doors opened, Daichi walked quickly into the room and snagged a seat right by the microphone set up in the center of the aisle. He laughed into his hand and shook his head and dreaded the coming days, not knowing whether Hinata would ever let him live any of this down after all the grief he had given him all those months ago.
Then again, he never thought he’d be in this situation, which, Daichi admitted, was wild and perfect. He looked up to the panelists taking their seats. Wild and perfect, just like the guy who climbed on the stage and looked right at him.
Suga cocked his head at Daichi with a surprised smile. Daichi felt a familiar arm over his shoulder and heard a quiet click.
“Did you just take a picture?” Daichi whispered.
“Of-fucking-course,” Tanaka whispered back.
Hinata appeared on his other side. “Now don’t say anything dumb or embarrassing!” He teased in a low, sarcastic voice.
Daichi rolled his eyes. “Was that supposed to be me?”
“Duh,” Hinata laughed. “But seriously. Just do what I did.”
“Oh god,” Daichi mumbled.
The moderator calmed the crowd and Daichi felt like he was on the first hill of a rollercoaster, slowly inching his way to the crest before freefallin. Suga didn’t do much talking, always preferring to let the other panelists speak, but, when he did, Daichi swore the room lit up. He prayed that someone would remember what they talked about, because he had trouble focusing on anything but the sound of Suga’s voice.
When it was time for questions, Daichi broke out into a cold sweat. He was first in line. Hinata had been right about the seats, Daichi gave him that. He stepped up to the microphone, but couldn’t bear to look up at the stage. “This question is for Sugawara Koushi,” he croaked and, all of a sudden, he blanked. Who’s idea was this? Why didn’t he just call Suga like a normal person? What would he even say? His mind raced back to the only other time he had been in this situation and the words were out before he realized what he was saying.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Hinata was the first to laugh, then the audience, then a stunned Suga on stage, who let his head drop back and he laughed toward the ceiling. That laugh. The same laugh that first drew Daichi in, the laugh that first belonged to a confusing stranger, then to a charming acquaintance, then, finally, to a most treasured person, his most treasured person. He relaxed into the laugh and looked at Suga, who composed himself and leaned into the microphone of the person next to him.
“What an original question,” he said with a wily grin. “I do, but he hasn’t been around much lately. You think you’re a better man for the job?”
Daichi shrugged. “That other guy was an idiot.”
“Really now,” Suga’s eyes shone. “And who are you?”
“A guy that wants to keep surprising you, or who wants to try, at least. I’m a guy that loves you.”
The crowd hushed.
Suga scrunched up his face to hold back tears. “Well, complete stranger that loves me,” Suga laughed, “I’m flattered and all, but this isn’t really an appropriate topic of conversation for a panel. So if you don’t have a question about my book…”
Daichi scratched the back of his head. “No, I do. Or, not a question, just that I’m really excited. And ready to help, if I can, at all.”
“I think I could find a way for you to help, handsome stranger,” Suga said through the tears that ran down his face. He wiped them with the back of his hand. “And thank you. I’m really excited, too.”
Daichi thanked the panelists for their time, nodded at Suga, and climbed back into his seat. He looked back at his moral support and muffled his laughter.
Tanaka was wiping tears off his own face, Nishinoya held Asahi’s hand in his lap and ran his fingers through Asahi’s hair with the other, the taller man barely holding it together, and Kageyama had his arm slung around Hinata’s shoulders as he bounced in place. He was about to open his mouth when Kageyama pulled his hair.
Hinata planted a big kiss on Kageyama’s cheek. “What was that for? I was just gonna ask if he understood the method of my madness now?”
“Just shut your trap for a second,” Kageyama scolded. He fixed the tuft of hair that he had messed up and let his hand rest on Hinata’s shoulder so that he could lean into Kageyama’s chest.
Daichi mouthed “thank you” to Kageyama and he nodded back with a blush.
They listened to the rest of the questions and, at the end of the panel, members of the audience gravitated to the front of the room and surrounded the panelists, shielding them from view. Daichi’s phone buzzed.
From: Suga
What’re you doing after this?
Daichi knew exactly what he wanted to do.
To: Suga
Telling you how incredible you are.
From: Suga
You’re going to have to beat off all my adoring fans.
He smiled into his phone.
To: Suga
I’ll get my bat from the car.
From: Suga
Make sure someone gets pics of the blood.
Daichi still didn’t know if everything would work out in the end, but he was sure of one thing, that he loved this man, gory details and all.