“Fuck off,” Hiroto says, and there is a rage rivalling the day in the rain. Hiroto slaps his hand away with the same force he had tried to raise a fist at Takeru. “Who the fuck do you think you are.”
Masaki stammers. He is hurt, but he makes sure not to show it. “I’m your brother,” he says, but even that came out weak.
Hiroto takes a breath to control himself. This is a rare sight.
“I am not going to fuck you, Masaki.”
That is not what he wanted to hear. Masaki doesn’t know what he wants. Do you still like him? The words relent in his head. His head buzzes with a familiar pain. The same dull ache at the back of his neck when Hiroto walks away, and Masaki must crane his neck to look. To see.
“That’s not what I mean.” Masaki paces in the living room. He is not sure what he means either. The living room is too small to be running in circles. “I mean—you don’t need to. I will help you. I can help you.”
“It was years ago, Masaki. I was not whoring myself out because I wanted to.”
That stops Masaki cold. “Don’t say it like that.”
Hiroto sizes him up, his eyes flaring. He is taking it the wrong way. “I fucked men for money. How did you think I gave you that belt at Christmas?”
Masaki remembers. He still has it in his closet, a vibrant midnight black. “You told us you found a job at the bar.”
“Aniki told me not to lie about my age.”
“—and that’s what you did instead!”
“It paid well,” Hiroto says.
“Hiroto!”
Hiroto’s face is blotted red. He holds himself upright, the movement of his black shirt overseeing the heaving of his chest. Masaki paces back to the sofa, not knowing where to put his arms. He stops moving. He feels like he’s taking up more space than he should.
“What,” Hiroto says as an accusation.
“He said—” Masaki pauses. He isn’t sure how to say this without hurting Hiroto’s pride somehow, of Masaki’s own. They are family. It takes a moment before Masaki identifies the shame in his chest. He didn’t know. Hiroto didn’t tell him. The shame is not towards Hiroto. “That guy said something about—”
A deep gruntle startles him. Masaki jolts awake when his head hits the wall in a loud, merciless hit.
“Why the fuck does it matter what he says!” Hiroto says, his voice ramping up. “I like men. Fine. I fucked men before because I needed the money. I fuck men now when I want to. What the fuck does it have to do with you?”
Hiroto catches up to him. His hand a trembling thing on Masaki’s shirt. Masaki’s back hits the end of the sofa, and Hiroto hovers over him like a wounded predator. Masaki shot a wild wolf he had no intention of hunting in the first place.
“What’s that,” Hiroto hisses. He leans in. The last time they were this close was when they fought in high school. Hiroto told him to stop worrying about his fights with more action than words. His sharp cheeks and eyes are curving and full in a way Masaki notices for the first time. He has grown up— and Masaki is given a concrete and almost aggressive reminder of his role in shaping his little brother. Fierce, bold, and ready to strike whenever slighted; Masaki is reminded of the awe he felt when he first saw Hiroto fight. He and Masaki’s eyes had met, and Hiroto’s mouth parted open for a curse.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Hiroto spits out, with his mouth turning cruel. He blinks slowly, a mellow kind of torture. He breaks into an excruciating smile. “Or what— is that what you want?”
Hiroto’s mouth breathes against his throat. Not once had Masaki imagined being capable of such things. Of saying such words. Masaki’s body senses the heat of Hiroto’s skin and tips his head back, not understanding. Hiroto narrows his eyes and laughs.
“Do you want to get fucked?” he says, a soft breeze on the thin skin, his teeth grazing back a vein, “I charge decently, Masaki. I can give you a discount for being a good brother. What’d you say?”
And Hiroto lowers his eyes. A deep crackle comes out of him. Masaki doesn’t like that sound. It is as if it belonged to another world.
The Amamiya brothers have been doing business with the worst people in society for a while before Masaki reluctantly thinks about its moral implications. Takeru is the best at negotiation and bullshit PR speeches, but since Takeru is dead, the duty naturally befalls Masaki’s shoulder. Masaki muzzles over the legality of it all for a long second before deciding that they still need this job for food.
The mission that day consists of a small package. Masaki could guess what it was by its weight and just out of the sheer experience of handling dangerous items in his hands. They don’t ask, however. They don’t tell. The Amamiya brothers are guileless in their intentions—they are out there to deliver goods for the patron. No more, no less. They are just trying to survive.
“Good job,” the man says, weighing the package in his hands. Masaki has done weight training lighter than that. “I don’t expect less of the legend.”
“The Amamiya brothers pride themselves on quality delivery,” Masaki says, all smiles, wondering if he can convince Hiroto to go for fried chicken tonight. He always wants sushi after work. It’s time for fried chicken.
The man is a template for the kind of the underground boss of a medium to large mafia group. Masaki has dealt with them enough to know that most people in this business are just a cheap copy of what they seem to be. Takeru liked action movies with people like these. It makes you focus on the plot, Takeru had said in faux solemnity, since the characters are exactly what you imagine them to be. There is no need to pay attention to what you already expect.
"Although, I have to say.” The man hands the package to his man waiting with open palms. “It's a surprise to see you here, Hiroto."
In the dark, windowless basement, the man says so. The man displaces the wall of guards with one hand, then shoves his hands in his pockets; he seems to wait for something. Masaki quickly snaps back to see Hiroto sitting behind in the shadows. He likes to make Masaki do all the hard work of negotiation and still asks Masaki to pay for his food.
Hiroto's face is hard in the dark. He walks up to where Masaki is, his heels clicking loud in the silence.
"I'm surprised you told me your actual name,” the man continues. “People usually pick a name that can't trace back to them."
"Hiroto," Masaki says, gazing at the shadow before him, a question in midair. The man gives him an amused glance.
"Does your brother know that you were a whore?"
Chaos. The guards yell out, but it's too late. Hiroto surged and grabbed the man by the throat. A laugh and a hand rise in the futility. Perhaps it was to calm his subordinates, but it had looked like an insult. A raised hand, a silent order, a question: Do you remember what you used to be?
"You get less tonight than what you get on your first night with me, Hiroto," the man says. "If you share today’s bounty with your brother, that is. I bet you gave him money for that night, too, such a good boy, caring for his family. I was fond of you. Any chance that you'd be back in business soon?"
Hiroto's back is curved as he slams the man down. The guards could have moved. They didn't. It’s the laughter.
The man has a terrible, wet laugh.
"Say.” A liquid cough. There is red on the floor. The man heaves through his chuckle. “Do you still like him?"
A dry sound. The man's head swirls with the force of that hit. He starts to wheeze. Hiroto's arm is raised again. And down. And again. The man continues to laugh.
A growl startles Masaki out of his place. Hiroto is growling. It sounds so inhuman that Masaki almost forgets to move. It reminds Masaki of a caged animal that they had to deliver once. Takeru had refused the business under the pretense of their policy on delivering living things, but Masaki knew it was for Hiroto. Hiroto cares about weak things in need of protection, but God knows Masaki does not have time to care about an obviously illegally acquired wounded pet in a cage.
Masaki does, in the end, move. He can’t stand there forever. Grabbing Hiroto by the right arm, the one he has been using to swing into the man's face like a sandbag, he says, "That's enough, Hiroto."
Hiroto doesn't look at him. That, more than anything else, frightens him.
“Hiroto,” Masaki whispers. When Masaki was close to killing a man on a high road, Hiroto shook his head. Panic rises in Masaki, pain prickling at the back of his eyes. “Hiroto, that’s enough.”
Hiroto’s head snaps back. Wide eyes stare back; for a moment, Masaki thinks he’s afraid. There is a soundless name on his breath. Masaki pulls him up.
“Look at me,” Masaki says, feeling more like Takeru than he ever did. “We are going home, Hiroto.”
Hiroto doesn’t answer, but that is not out of character. What is worrying is his hand on his arm, squeezing his forearm like he wants to twist it. Hiroto has his eyes closed, a deep frown clouding his sweating face.
“Thank you for your service,” the man wheezes out, his body still lying on the ground, his limbs stretched wide. If Masaki wanted, he could step right on him. If Hiroto wanted, Masaki could kill him. If Hiroto wanted, Masaki could do much of everything. “Tell me more about your love life when you can, okay, Hiroto? I want to know if I still have a chance, hah—”
Hiroto’s arm tenses in his grip when the laughter skips through the air like pebbles on water. Masaki grabs on tighter, annoyed by the reaction the man seems to raise in Hiroto. He spits on the floor where the man still lies and picks up the forgotten stack of cash off the ground. He shivers when he passes a hand over his hair and realizes he is gritting his teeth. He is cold. He tries to lessen his hold on Hiroto out of the fear that he is shaking him too much. Hiroto’s hand stills when Masaki lets his hand slip away from his shoulder.
Hiroto’s hand moves away in turn as they walk out. The fresh air hits him like a bullet. The moon is large behind the shuffles of leaves, bright enough for Masaki to notice the blood on his brother’s fist and a bright streak of red across his cheeks.
“Hiroto,” Masaki says. Hiroto opens his eyes slowly as though blinking awake to a dream.
Masaki remembers the legend of the moon and how beauty is often foreign, alien, and difficult. Hiroto’s face, the surreal way light shapes him, reminds him of their mom. He thinks about what mom would think if she knew what happened today.
“Fuck off,” Hiroto says. He quickens his footsteps, leaving Masaki to stare.
Masaki watches anger burn in Hiroto with a sense of strange comfort. Hiroto isn’t mom. He doesn’t belong to anyone. Not even to the moon.
Masaki never fully understood him. In the same vein that Hiroto doesn’t seek to understand him fully, there is an unspoken promise between them not to divulge further. It becomes an issue upon the first week of Takeru’s death. After they have cremated the body and visited the grave, Masaki begins to wonder about Hiroto and their future. It is now that he realizes he never thought of them as individuals. Masaki is an extension of the Amamiya brothers, but Hiroto—what is Hiroto?
Masaki attempts to piece together an answer when he realizes that the person who can answer is gone. Hiroto and Masaki always turned to Takeru for advice. Losing him is not so much losing a person as losing a life they once took for granted. Masaki struggles to see the future, so Masaki looks back.
Hiroto trails on his cock, his fingers are lowering down to parted legs, down to his hole, his gesture as fluid as expected from someone who has done it before.
“Relax,” Hiroto says, and Masaki can’t help but think that someone must have said something similar to him at some point. “I won’t hurt you.”
“It does, though,” Masaki says, the lie coming out smoothly and without guilt, a desperate attempt at keeping his head afloat. His heart jumps in a deadly, succinct way, the loud hammering in his ears making him squirm. A question occupies his mind unattended. “Did he do the same to you? The guy from earlier.”
“Why do you care?”
“Uhm. He wasn’t really good-looking.”
Hiroto grunts. Masaki should stop joking.
The lotion feels weird. Hiroto’s fingers seem determined to probe deep inside him, the glide of the skin inside his own. It’s intimate beyond Masaki’s understanding. Masaki’s stomach makes a strange backflip when he hears Hiroto’s voice. “Yeah,” he hears him say, whispering on the pores of his neck, “but not exactly like this.”
Hiroto doesn’t elaborate. He is concentrated. Masaki buries his head in his pillow and tucks his arms beneath it. A tingling feeling arises on his forearm, the heavy pressure of his weight on the bed. He counts his breathing.
It’s the final wide stretch that startles him. Masaki yelps and blinks his eyes open. He has forgotten he has closed them in the first place.
Masaki’s head burns. The world is burning; he is a dried-out leaf in a wild forest fire. Everything is hot except for Hiroto’s hands. His fingers grip his thighs like he wants to leave a mark. Masaki feels like he is in the clouds, with a single string holding him from the back of his hair, wuthering in the wind, waiting for the fall.
The thin strength of his nails inside him is odd. It’s enticing. “Why were you doing that? The—”
“Whoring?”
“I said— ah, to not say it like that.”
“I wanted money, Masaki.”
Masaki knows. That’s why he breaks into a cold sweat. “Is it—it is because we didn’t allow you to work with us?”
“No,” Hiroto says, his voice edging on the verge of annoyance. Ever so proud. “It’s not.”
“Then why are you doing this now?” Masaki thinks he asks. He hears the question before he registers his voice out in the air. His head thuds, skin rising at the slightest creak of the bed. Masaki remembers vaguely being in his room. With croaked voice, he manages out, “Were you hurt before?”
“We are not sensitive to pain,” Hiroto says. It’s something Takeru used to say. He said they are working in a field that demands pain. Physical, moral—it is all pain that demands to be felt. Masaki shakes his head, a gasp stepping in between his thoughts.
“But that that kind—that dirty—"
Hiroto stops ever so slightly. Masaki’s eyes snap open. This is his room.
“Hiroto,” Masaki says, sitting up with some difficulty, knowing he should apologize, but then decides he has enough. The sheets grind on his skin even though he knows he had washed them this week. “What are you trying to do?”
Hiroto levels him a glance. “Fuck you.”
Masaki laughs. “I like your pun,” he says, with no answer in return.
He is right, however, that it doesn’t hurt. The feeling is odd and then sharp. Masaki emits an embarrassing sound out of his mouth.
“There,” Hiroto says, adding another finger. The stretch makes him gasp. “You are doing good, Masaki. There will be better things later.”
Masaki doesn’t like how Hiroto is fluent in dirty talk. He grumbles, “Take—”
“What?”
“Take your clothes off! It’s unfair to be the only one naked. Also, let me change place. I want to see you.”
“Why?”
“Why? Why not?”
Hiroto’s hands continue to do his work. “It’s better in this position.”
“What, speaking from experience?”
“Yeah.”
Masaki’s head twists to look at him. Hiroto moves his free hand up to his stomach, one finger probing the ribs. The question he really wants to ask is on the tip of his tongue.
“Who do you like, Hiroto? The man that he’s talking about. One of your clients?”
Out of the slanted view of Hiroto he gets in this position, Hiroto’s face seems to remain impassive. “It was a long time ago.”
“So you don’t like him anymore?”
“I’m fucking you.”
“That doesn’t mean that you got over the guy.”
Hiroto’s pink mouth gets sucked back, his teeth white. “Speaking from experience?”
Masaki laughs. “Well, I guess, kinda. I have been with people in love with others.”
And Hiroto’s wet hands clutch on his damp skin. His face rises in colour. A laugh seems to escape him, the kind of indignant laughter one gives when anger is hard to summon. “Isn’t that what you want? Fucking people you don’t care about? Whores?” Hiroto says. “Don’t you like when people give themselves to you?”
Masaki thinks about it. “I suppose I do, sometimes, yeah.”
A pause. There is something in the tone of this question that Masaki finds brave.
Hiroto asks, “Then why can’t you want this?”
Never in his life has Masaki heard the question clearer: why can’t you want me? For a brief, glistening moment, Masaki sees the boy who arrives at his house with a bland T-shirt and a short frown, hand tight against his mom’s, before letting go when he noticed that he was staring.
Hiroto’s eyes meet his and then move back to the point of his chin, down and down. Masaki feels naked from the inside out.
“You should like this.”
Hiroto is not wrong. Masaki enjoys the idea of meaningless sex. Of giving oneself completely, surrendering without a clear understanding of what that means the next day. It is different for Hiroto. Hiroto is different from other people. Masaki twists back to a position that can be called normal in this situation and reaches to cup Hiroto’s face in his hands. The heat startles him, and Masaki blurts out:
“Not from you, Hiroto.”
Hiroto blanches. All tenderness washes from Hiroto like a downpour. A frown. A scowl. He slaps Masaki’s hand away and stands up. The bed yields, curving down before it bounces back like nothing has happened.
Hiroto is dishevelled, fully clothed, and the worst Masaki has seen him in a while.
“Fuck,” Hiroto says, running a hand over his face. The tip of his fingers curve and dig into his skin like he wants to rip it off. “That’s enough. Fuck. Fuck this, Masaki. If you don’t want this, don’t fucking look at me. Don’t let me look at you.”
“Hiroto—”
“Don’t look at me!”
The problem for Masaki is that Hiroto does look. Hiroto had always noticed when he was staring. Hiroto is turning his head away, his entire body diverging from his. Masaki moves, wincing like one does when in the same position for too long.
Hiroto has stood up, his hair ruffled and his shirt stretched thin, one of the sleeves up against the shoulder. Masaki had never seen him so red except for the day Takeru got him a bike.
Hiroto throws him a blanket without looking. It ends up covering part of his leg. Masaki is cold all over.
He stands there hovering by the door like he wants to say something. Masaki waits. There’s something he wants to say as well.
In the end, it’s Hiroto that closes the door.
Seven hours after Hiroto hasn’t returned home, Masaki gets the bike's key. His GPS signal is still on. Masaki knows precisely where he is. He knows that place. He knows every place—these are places they have been to before—the convenience store they stopped by last week, the sushi place Hiroto dragged him to late at night. This whole day he has spent time looking at the dot moving from place to place like it’s an eye-tracking game. Masaki prepares for supper whenever Hiroto is ready to return when he notices the dot stagnant in its move. It has stopped at a place that Masaki remembers, but then again, Masaki remembers almost everything.
Masaki doesn’t know why he is angry. He also doesn’t know what to expect. So he and his little brother almost had sex, and so the little brother ran from home because of something he said during. Masaki grips his hold on the handgrip, the friction of his leather gloves against the skin. The image of a man’s wide pupils remains vibrant, the light whitening the side of his face and the tip of his lips whispering.
Do you still like him?
Masaki didn’t even know Hiroto liked men. Maybe Takeru knew, but Masaki could forgive that. What bothers him is that a man outside of the family knew it. Many people knew before him. Before him and before Masaki knows what to do with it.
Masaki parks his bike and almost trips when he gets down. Taking off his helmet in haste and running towards the singular person in his mind, Masaki lets November’s wind hit him without complaint. He needs some cold air.
Hiroto sits on the bench Masaki once sat on. His back is straight, and his legs are stretched out; Hiroto sits like a person waiting. His head doesn’t turn in Masaki’s direction, but his finger twitches as though jolted awake. Masaki watches his ashen face glow with colour and forgets what he is here for.
Instead, he says, “I’m surprised you still remember.”
“You ran away from the house,” Hiroto says, in a way that suggests this isn’t something Masaki does. He is right. “It was the second week I came to the house.”
Hiroto’s face remains ash-like, but a soft hue covers his cheeks. It is cold, but nothing in his posture indicates he feels it. “I made you leave the house that night,” he continues. There is a certainty there that Masaki finds hard to question. He doesn’t remember how he felt back then. He remembers the event like any other, and he remembers many things.
“Well,” Masaki says, sitting beside him. Hiroto doesn’t budge, but he doesn’t look at him either. “I don’t think I was that dramatic.”
Hiroto’s breath clouds white when he speaks. “You left because I said I hated you.”
Masaki’s heels scratch the thin layer of snow on the poorly trimmed asphalt. He smiles at himself for liking the remorse in Hiroto’s voice. “It was a long time ago,” he says.
“But you still remember.”
“I do.”
Masaki pockets his hands in his jacket. He meets Hiroto’s eyes. This park is empty because it’s midnight and for kids. Masaki used to play here. Masaki used to think that Hiroto hated him before Hiroto came to him in tears, begging him not to leave. It’s funny how much kids exaggerate things, where everything felt like an event worth dying for. Hiroto had gripped him by the arm and told him that he would leave in his place if he so wished. He came at him crying. It is then that Masaki realized that there is no place for hate for these kinds of people. People like Hiroto.
“Your emotions are always so full,” Masaki says. “Your rage, your love, your sadness. You always go the whole way.” He laughs, somewhat conscious of how he sounds. “It must be hard that day, running to me for mom and dad when you didn’t even care.”
A spark returns to Hiroto’s eyes. The beginning of a fire. It’s all or nothing. Hiroto is all or nothing. “I don’t hate you. I never hated you.”
Masaki takes pity. “You don’t have to lie.”
Hiroto makes a face. That spark kindles, catching fire. “If you don’t believe me—”
“I believe what you said. You said you hated me.”
“Then believe me now.”
Masaki loves him. He loves the way he frowns. He thinks about putting his hand there, smoothing the wedge. He thinks about how Hiroto has never lied to him with that frown.
“Are you coming home?” he asks. Hiroto stands up, his legs stiff and his face stiffer; the cold finally seems to be slipping through the cracks. His lips snap open like an old music box just twisted by the tail.
“I never hated you.”
Masaki doesn’t know what to do with sincerity. Hiroto’s pink cheeks in the snow. “Thank you,” he ends up saying, a little lame, a little shy. “Thank you, I guess.”
“Have you ever hated me?”
Masaki finds that slight bout of insecurity in the tilt of the sentence lovely, but he doesn’t fool himself. Hiroto never begs. Hiroto never asks. Hiroto demands what needs to be answered. Masaki hears what Hiroto is demanding of him.
Don’t hate me.
“I love you,” Masaki says.
The midnight is black and cloudless, and the moon curves its arc like it’s trying to join itself by two extremes.
“Come on,” Masaki says, walking back to his bike. He doesn’t look back. He knows Hiroto will follow.
So this is try two, Masaki thinks, this time more curious than anxious.
“Think of me as one of your women,” Hiroto says. When Masaki looks back with an appropriate reaction, Hiroto laughs. “One of those people that don’t care about you and that you don’t care about. Think of me like that. Isn’t that how you do sex?”
It is. Masaki doesn’t like the way he spells it out. Hiroto’s hand is soft against the fabric of his pants. His finger slides against the slit of his clothed cock, and Masaki gasps in a distinctly pathetic way.
“It won’t be like last time; I won’t do what I did,” Hiroto says, perhaps meaning it as a reassurance. It doesn’t reassure Masaki in the slightest.
Masaki just convinced Hiroto to get back home. He doesn’t want to say anything to make that happen again. Hiroto eventually catches on to his silence, his nose an inch before his, his hands unfastening his belt and pants. Hiroto hums appreciatively at the sight of his naked cock. That reaction makes it twitch.
Masaki wants to bury himself and somehow leave the cock alive with Hiroto. Having a conscience is sometimes distracting.
Hiroto’s hand is rough and warm and so, so good. He is looking at the cock, and Masaki is looking at him, the pupils down and lashes up. A dash of pink; Hiroto’s tongue darts out to lick his lips.
“Hiroto,” Masaki says. Even that doesn’t make Hiroto look up.
Hiroto says, “Close your eyes.”
The movement of his hand is speeding up. Masaki bucks his hips and seeks more. “It’s always so unfair—ah, what, are you insecure about your abs? At least take off your shirt—ah, it’s not like I haven’t seen you naked—”
Hiroto doesn’t return his polite inquiry. Masaki doesn’t know anything other than the friction of Hiroto’s hand on his cock, the jab of his thumb on his foreskin. The pressure on one of the veins drives him crazy—Hiroto, whose hands are ways to violence. Hiroto, whose hands gripped his arm, returned home when he told him to.
Hiroto.
Waves of pleasure roll through him in credence, his eyes frail, and he trembles. Hiroto’s palm lingers with spurts of white. Hiroto’s head is visible when Masaki regains his breath, the top of his black hair in a neat swirl. It was embarrassingly quick. Masaki never got off so quickly. Hiroto looks back with widened eyes, staring at him as though shaken.
Masaki pins him down before he can escape, seizing that moment of weakness in a greedy little grip on Hiroto’s wrists. Hiroto makes a sound, his mouth agape.
“I want to see you,” Masaki says.
The words come out slanted, breathless. “Fuck off, Masaki.”
“Why won’t you take off your clothes?”
Something dark flashes in Hiroto’s eyes. “What’s exciting about a man’s body for you.”
“Well—”
Hiroto hears the hesitation. His face is a twisted thing. “Nothing,” he says, “it means nothing to you.”
Masaki tries to amend the situation, but he admits he is annoyed. There is an animosity that gathers in the air. He slides a hand under Hiroto’s shirt. “You mean a lot to me, Hiroto.”
Hiroto doesn’t reply to that, though he doesn’t remove the hand away. His eyes drop down to his cock, and his hand returns to his spent cock with a vengeance.
“Can you get up again, big brother?”
And there is such a teasing, apparent challenge in that voice that Masaki bares his teeth and smiles. His hand feels the muscles on Hiroto’s stomach, and he goes down to hold his cock. He has never held a man’s cock like that before. He has never held anyone’s cock with the intention that he has right now.
Hiroto’s face opens to him as his body reciprocates. Maybe the only truth they can get from each other is this: the bright collision, teeth against the tilted chin, and lips parted to say nothing but to breathe. Maybe this is the sacrifice Masaki is waiting for.
Hiroto is asking for destruction. There is fire, the beginning of something resembling warmth, and Masaki walks into it.
“Masaki,” Hiroto says.
I am here, Masaki thinks, he says. He walks into it. Fire, hell, and Hiroto, Hiroto, Hiroto.