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HIIRAGI KASHIMA WAS A LIAR.
If you were to call him one, it would probably go in one ear and out the other, even if you were actively having a conversation. It was an ego thing, the way his hearing was so selective that it filtered out anything even slightly derogatory. He wouldn’t necessarily hear you, but the point is that he wouldn’t correct you either, because you wouldn’t be wrong.
Hiiragi lied, but it wasn’t on a pathological scale or anything concerning like that. Rather, he just got a kick out of seeing how far his theatrics could go. In fact, he had gotten so damn good at lying that if the whole music thing he had going for him didn’t work out, he could more than likely worm his way into the acting industry and give a believable performance. Better than what was in the movies, anyway.
So when Shizusumi told him that he was almost completely sure he overheard Mafuyu and Yuki discussing plans to reveal their already very obvious relationship to them, one thought pushed its way to the forefront of his mind: to lie his ass off.
For as long as he could remember, Mafuyu and Yuki had been trying to make it seem like they weren’t dating, and trying hard. They were affectionate with each other, but they had been acquainted for most of their lives, so they were bound to be more touchy than others. That wasn’t what gave them away.
It was the stolen glances, the fleeting touches passed off as accidents. It was the kisses on side streets when they thought they were out of sight and tension filled moments where they weren’t kissing, but you could tell they were thinking about it. Then they would say they had to go to the bathroom or something—both of them, because apparently one couldn’t take a piss without the other—but if you went to check on them five minutes later, there they fucking weren’t.
But they were Hiiragi’s friends, so if they wanted to believe their relationship was a secret between the two of them, he wasn’t going to stop them. And now that they were coming clean, he had to act like he never saw a thing. For their sake.
They stood hand in hand in front of him and Shizusumi during one of their breaks in the studio, and Hiiragi made sure to contort his face to convey a sort of confusion. He drew his brows together a bit and looked between the two of them, then at their interlocked hands. It wasn’t meant to be perplexing, per se, because they had held hands before (they’d done a lot of questionable things before, but you learn to look the other way at some point), but the way they were standing had an air of deviance. Their backs were too straight, chins too high, and their fingers were interlaced rather than their hands being clasped in what could easily pass as a bro thing.
Mafuyu and Yuki looked at Hiiragi. At Shizusumi. At each other. And like their minds were conjoined—Hiiragi swore they were some days, even though they were polar opposites—they blurted, “We’re dating.”
Hiiragi was baffled. At least, he looked the part.
He parted his lips, sitting in silence for a moment. When he opened his mouth to speak (he wasn’t going to, because he hadn’t thought that far in his process), he promptly shut it and looked at Shizusumi like he would speak the words for both of them. But even as the most thoughtful of the two, all he managed was a gobsmacked, “Huh.”
Shizusumi wasn’t too bad himself. Sure, the interjection was underwhelming—it lacked quite a bit of emotion and it was too concise—but that was how Shizu was. Calm. Simple. He worked so well with Hiiragi because the latter packed a punch, and he was the ice pack that made it hurt less. Or something.
It was good that Shizu’s response was pretty dull, anyway, because Hiiragi was just getting started.
“No fucking way,” he uttered. Mafuyu and Yuki turned to each other again, but this time, Hiiragi saw it: a flash of love in their eyes that, for once, wasn’t subdued. Mafuyu looked up at Yuki with a fond smile and Yuki looked down with one even fonder, as if they were at last proclaiming that they exclusively and unapologetically belonged to each other. “No. Fucking. Way.”
He didn’t even mean to say it that time. Truly. It wasn’t his lying getting so fine that he could do it subconsciously. He just never expected his best friends to be so outward with their love, and, though he would never say it, seeing it then was somewhat . . . endearing. “How long?”
“I dunno,” Mafuyu answered. “Some months?”
“Damn.” Hiiragi leaned back and let out a sigh, and a rather dramatic one at that. It was more than ‘some months.’ Hell, maybe it was some years, or the entire time frame of more than a decade that they had known each other. In a way, they were always dating, and they just didn’t know it.
But ‘some months’ was fine too.
Instead of correcting or questioning it, Hiiragi turned to Shizusumi, raised a brow and, knowing the pair could hear, whispered, “Isn’t this against the rules?”
Shizu shrugged. “What rules?”
“There are no rules.” Hiiragi could hear Yuki roll his eyes as he spoke. He averted his glance to catch a glimpse of it, but was instead met with Yuki looking freakishly serious. As serious as he could with him naturally having the face of a sarcastic asshole, at least. “We’re dating, and we don’t want to hide it around you two anymore.”
At the words—they were rather stern, like he had put all the manhood he had at sixteen into it—Hiiragi took a good look at them. A faint blush had spread of Mafuyu’s face and he held Yuki’s hand tighter, as if he really was anticipating a response. With his piercing stare, Yuki looked rather composed, but Hiiragi could see his jaw clenched.
If you asked Hiiragi, he didn’t think his opinion mattered, because they would be in love no matter what. They would take their dumb bathroom breaks and kiss and smile at each other in a totally not platonic way regardless of what anyone thought about them doing so, but they truly, deeply cared about what he had to say, so he shrugged his shoulders. “Alright. Do your best.”
Mafuyu and Yuki both released a relieved breath, then laughed at their synchronization. Hiiragi grimaced. They had always been an annoying couple, but now they were an annoying actual couple.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” Yuki said, turning around and walking towards the door with Mafuyu hot on his heels. “we’re going to the bathroom.”
Their hands were still intertwined, because it was a perfectly normal thing to walk to the bathroom holding hands.
For the first time, Hiiragi got the chance to say, “Like hell you are.”
“Yeah,” Yuki agreed. He turned over his shoulder, flashing the grin on his lips that revealed his intentions. “we’re definitely not.”
And as if they didn’t have a rehearsal to get back to, they shut the door behind them and ran off to God knows where to do what lovers did.
Hiiragi waited a moment. Two. When he was sure they were out of earshot, he perked up, turning to Shizu with a smile. “How was I, Shizusumi? Was I good?”
He leaned forward, stopping when he was mere centimeters away from Shizu’s lips. “It was like I didn’t know a thing, wasn’t it?”
Shizu closed the distance between them to take Hiiragi’s lips between his own, humming into the kiss in response. The vibration sent shockwaves throughout Hiiragi’s body, from the tips of his bleached hair to his toes.
Maybe it was just his ego talking, but in the moment, he believed he deserved an academy prize for his performance, both in making the lovebirds think he was an idiot and successfully being part of the couple that wasn’t embarrassingly obvious. He could share it with Shizu too, because he couldn’t have done it alone.
Pulling back, Shizu uttered, “You could have just told them.”
“What’s the fun in that?” Hiiragi mumbled. Then he kissed Shizu again and again, on his lips, his cheek, his forehead.
Until his phone vibrated.
He sat upright, allowing Shizu to do the same now that he wasn’t being leaned on, though he only adjusted where he sat before lying back down. Hiiragi pulled the device from the pocket of his jeans, and on the screen was a text from Yuki. You knew, didn’t you?
Shit.
Hiiragi looked up, as if Yuki would be standing before him with that condescending smirk he put on whenever he knew he was right about something. The one that made anyone, Hiiragi included, want to punch him.
Yeah, he typed, though it pained him to do so, I did.
The response he got was swift, short, and sweet. Asshole.
“Ah,” Hiiragi sighed, turning to Shizu as he ran his free hand through his hair. Shizusumi curiously lifted his head from the sofa’s armrest. “Yuki knew that I knew.”
His phone vibrated again. You and Shizu are together, aren’t you?
Oh, was he on a roll.
Hiiragi and Shizusumi never hid it the way Mafuyu and Yuki did, partially because they didn’t have to since Mafuyu and Yuki did all of the work anyway (e.g. those damned bathroom breaks) and partially because they weren’t half as blatant as Mafuyu and Yuki were in terms of their . . . togetherness. Whatever it was. They hadn’t exactly put a label on it.
But still, it wasn’t like Hiiragi was dying to be found out, and not by Yuki of all people. The singular person who would never shut up about such a discovery.
More or less.
“He knows about us, too.” At that, Shizu shot up. Without sparing him a glance, Hiiragi placed a hand on his chest and pushed him back down into his lying position. “Relax.”
His phone lit up. ”Alright. Do your best.”
Though he was somewhat bitter about the fact that Yuki got to use his own words against him, Hiiragi smiled, clicking off his phone. He was kind of relieved, actually. The skeletons were out of the closet, and so were they.
What an interesting shift in events.
“It’s fine,” Hiiragi said. That time, he wasn’t lying. He truly believed that things were quite alright.