Work Text:
“So, ah, you come here often?”
It’s all out-of-place, that line against the white tablecloth, hanging awkwardly as the perfectly-tailored suit that Yuuta wears like a man who has never been able to get used to luxury. But Maki smirks.
“Don’t have many occasions to,” she tells him. “You?”
“I, ah, well, it’s not often I can come by a date I’d bother bringing to a place like this.” He leans forwards on both elbows now, chin resting in the cup of his palm. Ever so slightly, he cocks his head, but it’s a flick of a motion without even a hint of his usual puppyish confusion. “And really, where have you been hiding all these years?”
And that’s what does it.
Maki sets down her delicate champagne flute with no delicacy at all, smacks the white tablecloth with her open palm, and bursts out laughing. She keeps it up until her stomach hurts from the effort and thumps the table twice more, cackles, wonders when she is ever going to be able to breathe again, rests her forehead on the table, and-
“I know I sounded ridiculous, but really, Maki?”
She finally (finally) manages to raise her head, wipes at her eyes with a napkin that comes away tan from her foundation, and wheezes, “you’re somethin’, Okkotsu, you really are.”
“That, uh, that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Where do you even get these lines? Honestly.”
There are a hundred possible answers. Someone (there are several someones who would’ve) made him watch a lot of romantic comedies back in school. A secret weakness for shoujo manga. Watching his friends try to flirt on outings when he was the one who had to stay sober to get everyone else home in one piece. It doesn’t really matter. The answer has never been the point.
“I seem to recall you telling me that confidence was hot,” he says mildly, fishing a bread roll from the basket in the center of the table.
Maki watches. He tosses it, catches it, tosses it one more time, as if he’s checking to see if it’s hollow, and then grabs the butter knife with the same hand to smear a serving of butter onto the side of his plate, as if he knows Maki is watching, and admiring how fluidly he moves through even the most mundane of tasks, and she isn’t even really aware of the impulse before she wets her lips, swallows, and reaches for a roll of her own.
“Yes,” she says. “I did say that.”
“And look at you now,” he teases. “Clearly you meant that.”
“Can you go back to bein’ corny? Liked that better.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” he chuckles, nudging her shoe with his under the table.
“Tch.”
“I can do confident.”
Maki should not blush. There is absolutely no reasonable explanation at this late stage of things for why she might. But she feels herself warming from the neck up, and the best she can do to counter this is to flatly reply, “clearly.”
“Sorry, am I embarrassing you?”
“Tch. ‘Course not.”
He pokes her calf with his shoe this time, and she is too aware that he’s watching her reaction even to know what it is herself.
“Feels good,” he says, smiling so fondly that Maki hardly knows what to do to herself. “Knowin’ I can still make you make that face.”
She doesn’t ask him what face. Much as she wishes she needed clarification, she does not. “Hmph.”
He sets down the roll and reaches across the table for her hand. “Makes me real happy.”
“I’m…I’m glad.”
He chuckles, brings her hand to his lips and kisses it. She knows—his head is bowed but he’s looking up at her through his lashes when he does it—that he foresees precisely what effect this will have, that he’s playing her, that he knows.
“Of course it does,” he says fondly, setting her hand back down without letting it go.
That’s the only reason she lets him get away with these things, that tenderness. His are not and will never be rough hands or rough words. He can play her like any instrument he likes if it means seeing him like this, breezy, self-assured, flirtatious, able to laugh about the ways he wants her instead of cry. He can flirt all he’d like, because he’s Yuuta, and none of it will ever mean anything but love.
“After all, what’s it been, twelve years?” Yuuta asks, smiles sadly. “I’m not so young anymore.”
“Oh, shut up,” she scoffs. “We’re not even forty.”
“Mm, forty going on seventy,” he says, ripping a piece of bread off the roll and carefully buttering it. “I’m not exactly in my prime.”
What an idiot she married, Maki thinks. It is hard to comprehend a person being stupid enough to look in a mirror every day as Okkotsu Yuuta at thirty-eight and not to notice that he has never looked so much himself, no baby fat in his cheeks or bags under his eyes. He’s as slender and lithe as ever, if a little quicker to tire. There is a certain soulfulness in those eyes that’s gotten Maki to do any number of stupid things. That wasn’t there before. He really is an idiot.
“Speak for yourself,” is what she says to express this.
Now it’s Yuuta who blushes, Maki who smirks. She’s always been the one who had the easier time getting a rise out of the other, but it still makes her feel smug.
“Now, Maki,” he says, once he’s gotten his bearings and his breath back, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to get around admitting that you’re attracted to-“
“And?” she asks, raising a single eyebrow. “I’m the one who booked the hotel room, hah?”
Yuuta flushes again, looks down at his plate. “You did, ah, you did do that.”
“’Case ya haven’t heard,” she says, kicking him under the table, “I got a type.”
“Yes, someone stronger than you, I-“
“Beanpoles.”
Yuuta shakes his head fondly. “Surely you could find a nicer way to put that.”
“You still a beanpole?” she asks. “You still stronger than me?”
“Well, that’s never an easy question, but-“
“Answer’s yes, so I dunno what you’re on about.” She chews for a moment, looks thoughtful. “Plus you get a little extra from not bein’ a deadbeat, so…I would say you’re pretty much fine.” She gives him a leveling look. “And not old.”
“Not being a deadbeat,” he chuckles. “High bar.”
Maki is exceedingly smug about this, having snared the good one.
There are not many in their world and yet somehow she has the one who picks the twins up and kisses them when he comes home and has a picture on his desk of Shinsuke from his kindergarten play, hiding in the back with all of the other shy children cast as trees, and a picture in his wallet of Maki holding them the day they were born, and who’s never held it against her or anyone that they can’t have another, and who tells Tsugumi in the most diplomatic way imaginable that he had better not ever hear her saying that again about every other week. Somehow Maki got that one.
“For most people,” she scoffs.
They’re quiet for a moment after that, buttering pieces of their rolls, red-faced. Neither of them knows exactly why the other is so flushed, or how that even happens anymore, but the obvious solution appears to be picking at the bread, pretending to enjoy it, waiting for the moment the wait becomes unbearable.
“Maki,” Yuuta finally says.
“Mmhm?”
“I don’t think I remembered to tell you earlier that you look beautiful.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“I mean, you always do, but…”
“Thanks.”
“I like that blouse on you.”
She is well aware of this. There is a reason she’d chosen it.
“Thanks,” she says again, instead of the truer you like it better off, and then, “you’re not half-bad yourself.”
“Hardly.”
“Fits ya well.”
“Doesn’t feel like it does.”
“It does.” Maki narrows her eyes. “Trust me.”
“If you insist.”
“I do insist.”
She’s running out of things to say about his suit that don’t have accompanying actions which are entirely inappropriate for a restaurant, so the arrival of the waiter with their entrees is welcome. So is Yuuta’s soft smile, his insistence on taking her photo with her steak before she starts to eat.
“Twelve years, huh?” he asks, then, at Maki’s small answering smile, he takes the photo, glances at it, smiles. “Pretty crazy.”
“Yeah.”
“Twelve years, two kids…”
“Four dogs”—not all overlapping—“and a bearded dragon-“
“What’s it been, five near-fatal injuries?”
“All yours.”
“All mine, of course. Two apartments and a house-“
“And twelve of these dinners where you make eyes at me and try to pretend you’re smooth.”
He does, to his credit, make eyes at her for that, and they are very smooth indeed.
“I don’t need to pretend, my love,” he says innocently. “You’re blushing.”
She curses under her breath and he laughs, airy and free, the kind of laugh she’d never have thought he was capable of a couple of years ago. The thought makes her blush furiously at her own sentimentality and start sawing furiously at her steak.
“Case in point,” he says.
“I hate you.”
“Oh, darling,” he laughs. “I love you too.”