Chapter Text
Suguru’s halfway through deciding whether or not he should order some takeout or try to convince one of his sisters to cook something when his phone rings. He’s outstretched on his bed, hair still damp from his shower, and turns his head to see who’s calling. From here, he can read the start of Sato—
He picks up.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” Satoru’s voice says, awkwardly. Immediately, Suguru cautions.
“Everything alright?” he asks, sitting up.
“Yeah no, everything’s fine,” Satoru replies, and Suguru thinks he can hear a TV from his end of the line. “I just wanted to ask you something, if that’s cool with you?”
Suguru snorts, “Yes, Satoru. It’s ‘cool’ with me if you ask me a question.”
“Ha, yeah, yeah. Uh, well. You know my cousin, Megumi? Him and his friends are renting a beach house thing a few hours away like, two weeks from now. He invited me and Shoko to split the cost, would you be down to come?”
“Oh. Uh—”
“Shoko’s bringing Utahime,” Satoru quickly adds. “If you don’t want to, it’s fine—”
“It’s fine. I can go,” Suguru interrupts. “I just have to clear it at work, but I should be good.”
“Really?” he says, elated, and Suguru tries not to laugh at him.
“Yeah, it sounds fun.”
“Okay, cool, sweet. Let me tell Megumi. ”
“Sa—”
He hangs up before Suguru even has a chance to ask him about the actual price of it all, but he supposes it can’t be too insane given that they’re all still college students. He sends Satoru a quick tell me who to pay before dropping the phone onto his mattress and standing.
Suguru has never been to a beach house.
What was he supposed to bring? Did the beach house include beach things already? He doesn’t even know where his swimming trunks are, it’s been over a year since he’s even been to a beach.
He slips off his mattress and steps over to his open closet. Besides swimming trunks, he’ll need regular clothes, too. What should he even wear? What if the group decides to go out somewhere nice?
He purses his lips as he stares at the hung clothes and the mess of folded and half-folded clothes shoved into the cloth cubbies he has at the bottom of his closet. He starts to pluck out shirts and pants he likes, but wait, shit, he should be looking for shorts, right? He ends up throwing everything onto his mattress, amassing a mostly grayscale collection he can scavenge through and pick options from.
Maybe he should call Satoru, ask him if they had any definite plans or what he was going to pack for himself—
“Whatcha looking for?”
He whips his head around towards his doorway to see Nanako watching him, brow raised with an amused look. He looks back to his mattress and frowns. He’s making an absolute mess, he can barely even see his sheets anymore.
“Satoru invited me to a thing with his friends and cousin.”
Nanako steps in and sits on the edge of his bed, shoving aside some clothes.
“Are you moving in with them?”
Suguru picks up a tank, “Funny. We’re renting a beach house—”
Nanako’s eyes immediately widen with excitement, “What? Can we go?”
“No.”
Nanako groans and leans back on his bed, lying down on two pants Suguru decides he’ll be leaving behind. She has her arms stretched above her head and kicks her feet slightly as she loiters. Suguru ignores her and goes about figuring out what the hell to take with him. Even with his mess, he has yet to find his swimming trunks, which is infuriating. He thought they’d be at the bottom of the cubby with his socks, but when they weren’t, he assumed the article of clothing would surely be in the cubby with his winter gloves, but they weren’t there, either. At least now he knows he’s missing one glove out of the pair of his warmest—
“So like,” Nanako says, and Suguru knows from her impish tone this can’t be anything good. “Are you two dating?”
Suguru whacks himself with a hanger when it bounces back from him tugging off a shirt from it.
“We aren’t,” he insists.
Nanako eyes him, disbelieving.
“You don’t even like him,” he adds.
“He’s just kinda dumb,” Nanako says, and Suguru laughs.
Looking at the shirt now, it’s kind of ugly. Small too, he doesn’t know if it’ll still fit him. He shoves it into a cubby and moves on.
“It’s okay if you are—”
“If you’re going to bother me about this, then get out of my room.”
“Fine,” she protests, dragging out the ‘e’ as she rolls onto her side before sliding off. One of the pants she was on slipped to the floor in the process. Suguru walks over to pick it up and sighs when he dumps it back onto the bed.
He feels so stupid. What was he even doing? He wasn’t even packing, it’s not like the trip is tomorrow.
From downstairs, he can hear the sharp screech of their washer nearing the end of a cycle. Had he put his trunks in the laundry? He could have, maybe.
When he goes downstairs to check, he sees his sisters sitting in the living room with the television on, legs thrown over one another on the couch as they both scroll through their phones. They ignore him as he walks past them and the kitchen to the sliver of a closet with their washer and dryer. As he starts to transfer the damp clothes into the dryer, there’s no sight of his swimming trunks, just some of his shirts and his sister’s clothes.
After he turns the dial to the dryer to start it, he rubs at the back of his neck.
“Do you know where my swimming trunks are?” he calls out.
“No,” both Nanako and Mimiko answer in unison.
Fuck this. He’ll just buy a new pair.
He walks back out to the main area and scoops up his keys from the handmade bowl set by the door. He notices it’s starting to crack down the center.
“Where are you going?” Mimiko pipes up, and Suguru turns to see her watching him, Nanako still scrolling through her phone.
“I’m heading to the mall.”
Now, Nanako looks at him too, Mimiko halfway off the couch.
“Can we go?”
He sucks at his teeth. What were the pros and cons of this?
Pros: Nanako and Mimiko could possibly speed up the process by searching for a pair with him. Also, they could probably stop by the food court to grab dinner or pass by a drive-thru together.
Cons: Nanako could continue to taunt him about Satoru, which, in turn, would lead to Mimiko joining, which, in turn, would drive him up a wall. The girls could also theoretically, and most probably, lengthen the process by asking to go to one of their preferred stores.
“It has to be fast—”
Before he can even finish, Nanako and Mimiko are rushing at him by the door.
Suguru doesn’t hate shopping, but he severely lacks the stamina his sisters have for it. He’s been aimlessly walking around the men’s swimming and athletic section of the department store they’re in for, at most, twenty minutes, and he’s already itching to leave.
At least Nanako and Mimiko left him alone. They had split when they arrived, Nanako saying something about how she needed some new nail polish while Mimiko wandered off to the shoes.
He has different options for swimming trunks, but it’s honestly borderline overwhelming. Why did they make so many different types? Would a 5” trunk fit him well, or a 7”? Maybe one of the longer athletic options? How was he even supposed to know? The whole ordeal tips over into toomuchtoomuch when he walks by the swim briefs display, and for just a moment, the images of Satoru in one flicker in his mind. It’s demeaning and embarrassingly far too flustering for his own comfort, and Suguru’s face warms as he turns away quickly, scorned by the polyester thing.
On cue, he feels his phone vibrate in his pocket and pulls it out to see a message from none other than Satoru himself.
Satoru: remember sunscreen
After a second, another message buzzes through.
Satoru: i’ll get ur back if u can’t reach ;)
Suguru snorts, and he’s about to type a reply when he feels a chin dig into his shoulder. He yelps, and nearly drops his phone to the floor to hide the message.
“How did you not hear me?” Mimiko says as she steps back, and Suguru shakes his head.
“Distracted,” he admits, and Mimiko tilts her head.
“By?” she prompts.
Suguru looks at her and chews at his lower lip. She’s holding onto a bundle of fluffy socks and what looks like three packs of some aloe foot mask.
He could be honest, if he lies and Nanako figures it out, it would be more annoying to deal with.
“Satoru texted me,” he decides and doesn’t miss the delighted glint in Mimiko’s eyes.
“Nanako told me about the beach house.”
His head sways back with a groan.
“It’s not a big deal—”
“When was the last time you had a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend? Or, whatever .”
Suguru’s not sure he wants to discuss his admittedly, abysmal, dating habits with his little sister in the middle of a store, but Mimiko is staring at him, and something is gnawing at his gut. He starts to think of an actual answer, and tries to remember the last actual relationship he had. He’s never seen someone long-term. There was that week he thought Mahito and he might have had something when they had met, but that felt like a lifetime ago and now he knows how fucking annoying that man could be. And before that? He didn’t date around in high school, always too busy with work or school or making sure his sisters were okay to ever actually act on a crush.
“Just something to think about,” Mimiko says.
“What does that mean?”
She reaches for a pair of swimming trunks he has folded over in his shopping basket. She makes a face, mouth squeezed into a slant as she comes to a decision. Quietly, she puts away the shorter black pair Suguru had selected back into the basket and leaves the other over a rack. Suguru’s about to reprimand her and tell her to take it to the dressing room when she talks.
“We’re gonna leave the house when we go to college,” she says. “We’re gonna date.”
He opens his mouth, and Mimiko shushes him.
“You can’t keep not doing things for yourself and saying it’s for us. You can have an actual boyfriend, it’s fine.”
He hadn’t expected that. He’s startled, blanking out on what to say, on what to even think.
“I don’t like Satoru,” he lies, painfully obvious.
Mimiko’s expression deadens as she stares at him, eyes devastatingly declaring I’m done with your shit.
He rubs his face, dragging his fingertips across his eyes.
“I really don’t want to talk about this to my sister.”
Mimiko whacks him with the foot masks across the shoulder.
“You never wanna talk about anything with us.”
“That’s not true.”
She goes to whack him again, but Suguru deflects the masks this time with a hand.
“It is.”
Nanako emerges a few feet from Mimiko’s side then, turning into their section with a shopping basket of her own hanging off the crook of her elbow containing some nail polish and some hair products.
“Nanako,” Mimiko calls, and Suguru rolls his eyes.
“Really? You’re bringing her into this?”
“Into what?” Nanako says, and instantly Mimiko is babbling away about everything. Suguru doesn’t stand a chance to defend himself and tries to flee to the dressing room. It almost doesn’t work when Nanako reaches for his basket to keep him hostage, but she moves too late, and Suguru slips away to try on his swimming shorts.
Back home, with a stomach full of cheap mall court veggie noodles and a bag of brand new clothes dumped onto his bed, Suguru can’t stop thinking.
He’s thinking about his dating history, trying to recollect a relationship that felt significant to him, trying to remember how he even felt when each short-lived affair started. Did he ever get as nervous as this?
He’s thinking about his sisters, thinking despite how aggravating and honestly, insulting they got about their conversation on the drive back home, they were somehow still right. Mostly, at least. He’s still not sure if he agreed with them calling him a dork and Satoru a dweeb.
Most of all, he’s thinking about Satoru.
He’s thinking about the small space ranger figure on top of his dresser that fell over when he knocked the bag of clothes into the piece of furniture when he got back to his room. He’s thinking about how Satoru won the tiny piece of colorful plastic on one of their most recent impulsive hangouts, a visit to an arcade when Shoko last minute canceled plans with Satoru. He’s thinking about how Satoru looked playing a chaotic dance game, his lanky limbs speedily trying to link up each depicted move on the screen with the illuminated symbols underneath him. He’s thinking about how he looked when he tangled his legs and fell over, how hard Suguru laughed that he choked on the soda he was drinking as it surged up his nose.
He pushes clothes aside and lies down on his bed, the mattress straining under his weight.
“Fuck me,” he exhales, closing his eyes. “I’m really doing this.”