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They met at a small family restaurant across her office. It was pushing nine, when he entered; he saw the back of her hair before he saw her face.
For a moment, he wondered if he could leave, without her noticing. He'd paced outside for ten minutes with a cigarette before he'd reached the end of it and crushed it under his leather shoes. When she'd called him, on the phone, she'd sounded different, more restrained. The younger him would have plowed on without hesitating, without thinking of her convenience; older, now, and he'd regressed in some ways.
He cursed under his breath, when she saw him. She raised her hand to wave. He nodded at her, and tipped his hat lower to hide his eyes. He moved forward, his movements slow and measured.
She waited.
The street was still dark, when he woke her.
He threw a pebble at her bedroom window; he shone a light at the glass, until she looked out.
"Satsuki," he shouted, thinly, into the darkness, "let's go!"
The flashlight in his hand, he aimed at her eyes. She covered her face with her hands with a whimper. He heard it in the eerie quiet of her yard, loud and thundering in his ears like the slightest creak of his bicycle.
"What is it," she hissed back. "What are you doing?" She batted at the light uselessly, and he let it circle her head. Her hair shone brightly even in the pale artificial light.
"Just come with me," he said. She pursed her lips, and shut her window.
He waited.
She was a little taller, now, but he was, too, so he couldn't be sure if it were the heels or her height. She took his hand in a firm, professional handshake, and he wondered if she felt the limpness of his own.
He took a seat across her, and they settled into an unsettling silence while waiting for someone to take their orders. She asked for pumpkin soup and a salad, and he a sizeable steak, and garlic bread.
"You're early," she said. "I thought you would be a little later than this."
He bit his cheek. "Not really," he said. "You were always the slow one."
"Says the person that gave the senpai a heart attack every time there was a game," she retorted. She looked surprised, for a moment, at her quick temper, and he at the sudden reminder of their youth, but they laughed, shortly, and he felt a flare of kinship well in his stomach.
"You always gave me a hard time, when we were younger," she said. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and took a sip from her near-empty cup of coffee. "I don't know why I went along with all your crazy shenanigans."
"I don't know why, either," he said, mildly.
"I must have been crazy," she said.
"Yeah," he answered, their brief moment of solidarity broken as the waiter approached with her soup. "You probably were."
She emerged from the front door, still in her pajamas. Over the cotton floral print, she clasped a bathrobe to her chest.
"Do you know what time it is?" She muttered. He touched the top of her head and smoothed down her hair, mussed from sleep.
"You're so slow," he said. He shifted the flashlight back in his bag and adjusted his hold on his bike. "Climb on."
He sat on the saddle and dumped his baginto the metal basket by the front. She followed him and stared at her slippered feet, then at the crossbar.
"That hurts my back," she said.
"Do you want your feet to hurt when you walk," he answered.
"Where are we going?" She asked.
He pushed the kickstand back, and gave her a smile that showed his teeth, feral. "Come on," he said. "Don't you trust me?"
He held out his hand. She held on tightly, to her robe, before taking his fingers, stained with grease and dirt. In a moment, she would complain about the mess. She would cry over her ruined clothes.
For now, she climbed on.
They ate with careful motions, their elbows caged neatly in their personal space. A napkin, he thought, hysterically, I'm actually using a fucking napkin, and she looked at him strangely but did not comment.
"I wasn't sure if you'd come see me," she said, as she broke her bread over her soup. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of free time for serious athletes, after all."
He picked at his side dish with a fork. He scattered his buttered carrots and corn across the plate.
"I always meant to call," she said. "And then came university exams, and work, and, well. You know the rest."
He did. He knew about the wedding, when he'd received his invitation a week later, lost in the mail. He knew she had a boy that looked like her, when he pouted, with hair a dark shade of red and cheeks that colored, darker. "Why didn't you, then?" He asked, surprised that his voice was calm.
She set down her spoon and spread her hands on the table. "I just never found the right words to say," she said. "It's easier when it's only a few weeks, but when time drags on and on, there are a lot of things that get in the way. And, you know, you never called either."
He bit into a small slice of his steak. It was tasteless, in his mouth. His stomach, it was heavy with food. Something in him clenched.
He wanted to go home and sleep.
Behind the old house along the slope, they crouched together, their backs against the cemented wall. It was nearly a quarter to six in the morning. She shivered in the cold, despite her robe.
They ate bread filled with red bean and glutinous rice balls. His water bottle, they passed to each other in turns. Their fingers were littered with crumbs and sticky with sugar.
"That's gross," she said, laughing, as he licked at his fingers, wet with syrup. He let out a small, graceless snort.
"Put your feet down," he said, patting at her knees. "I wanna nap for a bit."
"You were the one who took me here," she said. "I can't believe you just want to sleep."
He grunted, but said no more as he propped his head on her lap. She touched the side of his neck, felt the hair above his nape, cropped coarse and stiff against her palm. When they were younger, his hair was finer, softer than hers, even. While she fretted over knots and tangles from an unruly braid, the brambles and the leaves from afternoons spent hiding in the bushes came away easily as he passed a hand over his hair. She envied him for small mercies.
By six, he was fast asleep. The sun rose, behind the apartment complexes and the skycrapers, the concrete mass that was Tokyo. The clouds scattered across the sky were sparse and thin, the smoke thick and grey even in the distance. She watched as the sky bled brightly, as it melted into a clear white.
Beneath her hand, he slept on.
She seemed to sense his disquiet, like it was second nature to her. She called for a refill of her cup, and they melted back into awkwardness as the server made small chatter with them.
"Lovely night for a date out, isn't it," the waitress said.
"Oh, we're not," she started, but when he moved to tear his bread into tiny pieces and handed some to her, she closed her mouth and took a piece.
"Everyone in Touou thought you were my girlfriend," he said.
"Everyone in Teikou thought I was Tetsu's," she said. She left some bits of oregano on her thumb. She sucked at it without thinking of it, and smiled.
"Everyone was an idiot," he said.
"More than you?"
He popped a piece into his mouth, and shook his head. "Not really," he said. "I had my moments."
"Whatever it was you said," she told him, resting her hand on the back of his, clenched on the table, "I always forgave you for it, you know."
They pushed the bicycle down the steep incline a little before seven. Sometimes she paused to pet a dog, and sometimes they greeted a neighbor with stilted smiles. She took over with the pedaling, this time, and he jogged beside her, his strides long and unhurried.
"Are you going to practice today?" She asked. She veered a little, to the right, and he reached out to steady the handlebar.
"Maybe not," he said. "It's getting kinda boring."
"But I thought you were a basketball freak?" She teased. He exhaled, loudly, and ignored her.
"Tetsu won't be happy," she continued, quietly, this time. "Neither will Akashi-kun."
"Tetsu," he said, "can mind his own business."
She looked at him like he had pushed her; her hands were limp at the handle bars, but she didn't stop pedaling.
"Sorry," he said, suddenly ashamed. "I didn't mean it like that."
He did, though. She knew it, too. She must have found something in his frown, the tight set of his jaw, because she didn't call him out.
Instead, they moved forward. It was the only way they knew how.
For the rest of the hour, they talked like old men looking back at their youth; she had more candor, now, and more steel. They talked about their old homes, their parents. The things they remembered most, that stood out sharply in their minds.
She asked him, if he remembered calling her out at five in the morning in middle school, and how he ditched practice in the afternoon, the first of many.
"No," he lied, choosing cowardice over honesty. "Can't say I do."
He moved on, to brighter topics, like how she'd wept over his fascination with models and she laughed and called him horrible. It was a safe memory, to be infatuated with someone printed on glossy paper and far from reach. Better that, than the truth.
Between their houses, there was a low fence. The white paint was chipped, the wood worn and gnarled at the edges. When they were five, he had kicked over one of the posts; he slipped in and out of the fence through the gap he'd made by accident and asked her to come out and play.
They were seven when he'd broken more things than he could count. The first was the latch from her back porch, and the next was her doll. He'd given her his ball, in turn, and wondered why she was furious at him for weeks afterward.
She understood him, but he didn't understand a lot of things about her. When she followed him, he was happy, but he didn't know how to take care of her, and he left her alone, when he felt like it.
He was never one for fixing things, that much he knew. She must have known it. She must have. He thought of this, as he propped his bike against the fence. She went through her pockets; she felt for her keys.
When she came up with nothing, she turned to him, shame-faced. "Do you know how to break the lock," she said, desperately.
He was good at breaking things. Really, he was.
They exited the restaurant together, she in her coat and he in his jacket. Her husband would pick her up at the intersection in a few minutes, she explained, as she turned down his offer for a ride. There was a pause, as she gathered her things. She kept her bag close to her, like it was the only thing that stopped her from embracing him.
"Thank you," she said, finally, "It was so good to see you, even if we haven't talked for a while. I'm sorry I couldn't be there for you, all the way. I know you aren't--"
In the streetlight, she looked solemn. He took her by the wrist; he almost hushed her with his mouth. But he didn't. He didn't.
"It was good to see you to," he said. He kissed her, on the cheek. He felt her cheeks swell, from her smile. This close to her, he could see nothing of the girl she once was. But perhaps -- perhaps.
"Go on," he said, smiling. "Kagami will be waiting for you."
He helped her sneak back inside, through the back porch. He held the window open for her and helped her up with his shoulders.
"Go on," he said. Her pajama pants were soft, under his palm. "Go back to sleep."
She kept her movements slow, and measured. She propped her feet against the sink, and clambered off with tiny stretches to the floor. She made to move inside the kitchen, but he caught her elbow, suddenly.
"I'll see you later," he told her. He kissed her, on the cheek.
"Go to practice, then!" She said. She was smiling, though, even as she shooed him away. She disappeared, into her house. He waited until she reached her room and stuck out her tongue at him as she closed the window.
In the morning light, he blew her a kiss. Her window remained shut, unmoving. He turned back to his bicycle. His steps were quiet, save for the crunch of dirt, the rustling of weeds.
He went home, alone.