Chapter 6

This time, Shishido was actively avoiding Ohtori. He knew he was probably destroying his chances of fixing the mess they'd made of their friendship, and something inside him wanted to curl up and die at the very thought, but he just couldn't face his partner until he'd gotten a handle on how he felt about the whole thing.

The idea that Ohtori had a crush on him, once it really sank in, bothered Shishido a lot more than he wanted to admit, even to himself. Apparently he wasn't nearly as open-minded about that sort of thing as he'd thought he was. Any time he started thinking about what sort of thoughts might have been going through the younger boy's head when they were together, or remembered that burning light of hope and a dream rekindled in his partner's eyes when they'd finally decided the last month had just been one royal screw-up...

Granted, Ohtori had been talking about it in the past tense when he'd confessed, and Atobe and Jirou had both said they thought the younger boy was getting over it. It didn't seem to matter. Any time Shishido thought about talking to the other boy - or worse, facing him - his mind just shut down in shock and refused to process anything.

So he'd stopped answering his phone, letting his message service screen his calls for him. He made sure he didn't go anywhere near Ohtori's class, and stayed far away from the music wing. He knew it was the coward's way out, but he just couldn't bring himself to face his partner and best friend while he was in this state of mind.

The first message from Ohtori came the day after the party. It was long and rambling, first asking if he wanted to play on the weekend and then going on to chatter about inconsequentials until it abruptly cut off, past the time limit. The second, immediately after, was a sheepish apology for babbling followed by a reminder to call to arrange a time to meet.

It was so exactly like almost every other message his partner had ever left him that it made Shishido smile through the pain in his chest as he deleted them. Ohtori really had forgiven him; now it was up to Shishido to make the next move, so their friendship could return to the way it had been. Unfortunately, Shishido was nowhere near ready to make that move.

Two days later the third message came, a puzzled inquiry as to why Shishido hadn't called and a joke about how the answering service must have deleted the previous message for being too long. Only someone who knew Ohtori as well as Shishido did would have been able to detect the worry and fear in the younger boy's voice as he laughed. Shishido deleted that one, too, his hand shaking as he hit the button.

The fourth was a text message, first thing Monday morning, asking if Shishido was all right. He hid the phone under the edge of his desk and stared at it all morning, unable to keep his eyes off the blinking cursor at the end and the menu option that asked if he wanted to reply. He got in trouble twice with his teachers for inattention, and received more than a few odd looks from Atobe, but finally the phone's battery died and the screen went blank. When he got home, he plugged it in and promptly deleted the text message.

When the fifth and final message arrived at the end of the week, at first he thought it was a wrong number since it started with several seconds of dead air. He was about to delete it when Ohtori finally spoke, a whispered "Shishido-san... I'm sorry." His language was extremely formal and his voice broke on the last syllable, before he hastily ended the call.

That message, Shishido kept.

He wasn't sure why he held on to that one when he'd deleted all the others. To torture himself with, maybe, since he listened to it over and over all weekend. Every time he listened his thumb hovered over the button to delete it, but he couldn't bring himself to press it. The choked misery in his partner's voice made Shishido feel like he couldn't draw enough air, and forcing himself to listen seemed like the least he could do considering he was the one who'd made Ohtori feel so bad in the first place.

The first time he caught himself thinking about his partner while jerking off, after the third message, he lost it entirely. It hadn't even been an actively sexual thought, just a vague sort of 'I wonder if Choutarou really did think about me while he was doing this', but it was enough to send him bolting for a very cold shower. He leaned against the tiled walls and let the frigid water numb him, ignoring his mother knocking on the door and asking why he'd felt the sudden need for a shower at midnight on a Sunday.

The water calmed him enough that he was able to look her in the eyes afterwards and explain that he'd woken from a nightmare and needed to wash off the sweat. She fussed over him a bit, but he brushed her off with the annoyance common to all teenaged males with overly nurturing mothers, and escaped back to his room. He saw his brother wink at him from the door to his room, and his face flamed as he realized the older boy probably thought it had been a wet dream he'd woken from, not a nightmare.

Even once he was safely back in his bed, he couldn't stop worrying at it in his mind like Pochi with a bone. Thinking about Ohtori thinking about him was just a little too close to thinking about Ohtori, period. He shoved the very idea firmly out of his head, and swore to himself that he wasn't going to jerk off again until he could be sure no weird thoughts like that would creep up on him again. It didn't matter how many cold showers he had to take, or how frustrated he got.

The worst part of it all was the dreams. Maybe because of the reason he was denying himself, or maybe it was because he'd been spending so much time obsessing over what Ohtori might or might not have fantasized about doing with him, but Shishido's dreams took on a somewhat disturbing trend. Not that he wasn't used to having erotic dreams of one kind or another; he was fifteen. But now they had a tendency to feature Ohtori in some way, and that was freaking him out more than all the rest of it combined.

By the time Monday came around again he was a nervous wreck, and his mother took one look at him as he emerged from his room and ordered him straight back to bed.

Shishido wasn't in the least loathe to stay home for the day. He'd been blowing off his study sessions with Atobe and Jirou ever since the party, and he hadn't gotten a single sentence done in his homework for the weekend. He knew he should have been concerned about his grades, but at the moment he frankly couldn't bring himself to care. The disaster his friendship with Ohtori had become seemed far more important than preparing for ascension exams that were still months away.

He managed to fall into a fitful sleep in the afternoon, and as a result when his phone rang he was too groggy to remember why he shouldn't answer it right away. Memory caught up to him even as he croaked out his name, and for a moment his heart jumped into his throat, choking him. If it was Ohtori, what would he do? Hang up on him? Make some excuse about being too sick to talk, and then just turn the phone off and leave it off so he wouldn't forget again?

To his relief, it was Atobe's deep baritone on the other end of the line, not Ohtori's soft tenor. "Shishido, what the hell is going on? Where were you this weekend?"

"I'm sick, obviously, or I'd have been in school today," Shishido muttered, rolling over onto his back. "And I was home all weekend, why?"

There was silence on the other end of the line, then Atobe sighed. "You forgot, didn't you? How sick are you? Couldn't you at least have called to let me know you weren't coming?"

"What, you guys couldn't study without me?" Shishido asked, bewildered. Atobe sounded almost hurt, and that wasn't like his friend at all.

"You're an ass, Ryou," Atobe replied, and Shishido could almost hear him rolling his eyes. "The party was this weekend. I can't believe you forgot."

Party. Atobe's party. Atobe's birthday. Which was only five days after his, damn it. Cursing, Shishido sat up, holding his aching head in his hands. Atobe had planned his party for the weekend after his birthday, and the invitations had gone out a month ago. Shishido had completely and utterly forgotten. "Fucking hell, Keigo, I'm sorry," he said miserably. "I just... it's been a really bad week, and I'm not thinking straight. You probably wouldn't have wanted me there anyway."

Come to think of it, maybe it was just as well he'd forgotten. Ohtori almost certainly would have been invited, and there was no way Shishido could have handled seeing him in the state of mind he was in. Though he would have at least told Atobe ahead of time that he was sick, if he'd remembered.

"Did something happen between you and Ohtori?" Atobe demanded, and Shishido's stomach lurched.

"Wh-why would you think that?" he asked, cursing the stammer for giving him away. Atobe's 'Insight' didn't work as well if he couldn't read the person's body language, but he'd known Shishido long enough to be able to pick up on subtle nuances in his voice.

"Possibly because you've hardly said three words to me since your party, and Ohtori begged off sick on Saturday as well," Atobe replied dryly. Something in Shishido ached at the reminder that Ohtori was suffering because of his inability to accept the fact that his partner was gay, but he shoved it down again. Atobe was continuing, "Are you coming over tonight to study? You've got a lot of catching up to do."

"What part of 'I'm sick' did you not understand?" Shishido snapped back, irritated more at himself than his friend. "I'm not even sure I'll be up for school tomorrow, either." The longer he could convince his mother to let him stay home, the longer he could put off his inevitable encounter with Ohtori.

"If you're actually ill, I'll eat my racquet," Atobe snorted. "It's not like you to run away from your problems, but it's your life to throw away. However, I will not allow you to do poorly on your ascension exams. Not only would it reflect badly on me as both your friend and former captain, but you know perfectly well that if your incoming grades aren't high enough you won't be permitted to join the high school tennis club."

Damn, Shishido had forgotten about that. "Fine, fine, I'll come over," he capitulated with bad grace. "Don't blame me if I start throwing up on your expensive carpets," he added just for a bit of revenge.

Unperturbed, Atobe simply said "I'll send one of my drivers to pick you up, if you take the bus it will be far too late by the time you get here." Then he hung up, leaving Shishido listening to the beep of the dial tone. Sighing, he hauled himself out of bed and started searching for clean clothes and his textbooks.

By the time he reached Atobe's mansion, he was grudgingly starting to admit that getting up had probably been good for him. With his mind focused on all the studying he was going to have to catch up on, instead of the problem with Ohtori, he was starting to feel human again for the first time in days. He nodded at the butler that let him into the huge house, and headed straight for Atobe's study room with the familiarity of habit.

Raised voices made him pause as he reached the top of the winding staircase. He couldn't hear what was being said through the thick door, but he approached cautiously. He didn't think he'd ever heard Atobe actually shout at someone outside of tennis practice, and while Jirou could certainly get loud when he was excited, this definitely sounded angry.

He was tempted to just wait out in the hall until whatever was happening had finished, but curiosity got the better of him. Turning to the next door down the hall, which led to Atobe's entertainment room, he entered it and approached the study from that direction. There was no door between these two rooms, and he could see Jirou sitting at the table, looking supremely unhappy. He still couldn't make out Atobe's words as the other boy murmured something vaguely soothing, but the angry reply was loud and clear this time. And it wasn't Jirou yelling, either.

"How could you do this to me?" Ohtori was almost hysterical, but Shishido had no trouble recognizing that voice. He froze just outside the door, eyes wide and heart pounding in his chest. Ohtori was here? Had Atobe set this up? It wouldn't be unlike his friend to try to meddle, but if he had, Shishido was going to chew him a new one. Just as soon as Ohtori finished yelling and left. If he had his way, the younger boy would never know he was there.

"I thought you were my friends," the junior was continuing bitterly. "How could you tell him? Don't you think if I'd wanted him to know I'd have told him myself?"

"We didn't think it would hurt any more," Jirou replied, hunching down a bit in his chair, his voice small and apologetic. "We thought you were getting over him."

"I was!" Ohtori shouted back. Shishido pressed himself against the wall, a little shocked. He'd never heard his partner lose his temper like this; had in fact been starting to wonder if Ohtori really had any kind of temper to lose. "I am! But what the hell difference does that make? I still didn't want him to know about it!"

"Ohtori, you're over-reacting," Atobe said, and this time Shishido could hear him. "If you'll just calm down for a moment and tell us what happened..."

"Over-reacting?" Ohtori's voice cracked on the last word, and he finally stopped yelling. When he continued after a moment, however, Shishido almost wished he would start again. The low, intensely furious voice the junior was using now was somehow worse than hearing him yell. "I'll tell you what happened. I stayed behind like you said I should, and we actually had managed to fix things when he mentioned the 'insane theory' the two of you had told him about."

Jirou flinched visibly and wilted a little further, and Shishido saw Atobe reach out to brace the smaller boy's shoulder with one hand. Ohtori kept going, oblivious or uncaring to how much he was hurting Jirou. "It caught me completely by surprise, and by the time I recovered my wits it was too late to try to deny it. So I admitted it, and he froze. Then he essentially told me to get out, and he hasn't said one. Word. Since."

"I'm sorry," Jirou whispered, tears in his big brown eyes. "Ohtori-kun, I really thought things would be okay! He was so miserable when you were avoiding him, I thought maybe..."

Shishido cursed as his friend's eyes flickered over to him and paused, widening as Jirou caught sight of him. He'd been leaning forward without realizing it, trying to hear the soft apology, and Jirou had spotted him. Apparently following his gaze and realizing who had to be there, Atobe called out wearily, "Shishido, stop lurking in shadows and get in here. Maybe if we can get both of you in one place long enough with a mediator, we'll be able to sort this out so you two can stop slinking around like whipped puppies."

Heart beating far too fast in the answering silence, Shishido swallowed hard and walked into the room. His hands were shaking, so he tucked one into his pocket and wrapped the other a little tighter around the strap of his bag. He'd told himself he wasn't going to look, but despite his best intentions, his gaze went straight to Ohtori. "Choutarou," he said, trying for a casual greeting. His voice broke on the word, though, and he winced.

For just a moment, Ohtori looked like utter hell. There were dark circles under the tall boy's eyes, his hair was a bit mussed, and his eyes were red like he'd been crying recently. The sight of it squeezed Shishido's heart so hard he thought it might stop, and he caught his breath. Given one more second of seeing his partner and best friend looking so devastated, Shishido would have blurted out an apology, and gotten down on hands and knees if that was what it took to get Ohtori to forgive him.

Before he could even open his mouth, however, Ohtori drew himself abruptly to his full height and stared down at Shishido. All the passion and anger and hurt fled the younger boy's eyes, and his features could have been carved from purest glacier ice. Shishido had heard other students and even tennis club members refer to his partner as the 'Ice Prince' on occasion. He'd often wondered how the warm, friendly, affectionate junior could possibly have earned such a nickname.

Now, seeing in person the way the air around Ohtori almost visibly dropped in temperature in response to the tall boy's expression, Shishido didn't have to wonder any more.

"Shishido-san." Though the words were perfectly polite and even cordial, the tone was practically dripping frost. Shishido actually shivered, and saw Jirou do the same. "I'm sorry, I was just leaving. I won't interrupt your study time."

"Ohtori-kun," Jirou started hesitantly, but he was silenced instantly when that glacial gaze turned briefly to him. The senior sank even farther down in his chair, turning to huddle into Atobe's supporting hand. Even Atobe looked like he wanted to say something, but didn't quite dare in the face of that chill.

Without another word Ohtori turned and left, his movements measured and graceful, not the angry stalk Shishido had been half expecting. He even closed the door gently, being careful not to slam it. For long moments after the sound of the latch echoed in the room, there was utter silence.

Finally Atobe breathed out a long sigh, and leaned back in his chair. His hand was absently rubbing Jirou's shoulder, as the smaller boy remained huddled in on himself, but the storm-grey eyes were fixed on Shishido.

"Well. You certainly made a mess of that," Atobe said. "Have you really been avoiding him since then? Is that why your phone always went to voicemail this past week?"

All the confusion and anger and fear Shishido had been holding inside for days exploded, with Atobe providing a convenient target. "What the fuck, Atobe? You dropped a fucking bombshell in my lap, and you expected me to just take it and smile? I needed to think about it, damn it! I've been avoiding him because I didn't know if I could face him without freaking out on him!"

"Shishido, how could you?" Jirou turned big, wounded eyes on him, and Shishido snarled back at him. "After that whole time when you were so upset that he wasn't talking to you, how could you turn around and do the same thing to him?"

"Because I fucking well figured it was better than getting hysterical at him for thinking about me that way, damn it," Shishido growled back. "And excuse me, but what the fuck possessed you to try to set us up? I'm not fucking gay!"

"Nobody said you were," Atobe cut in tartly. "Stop yelling, Ryou. Jirou wasn't trying to set you up, he just thought you were mature enough to handle the truth, and that it would help the two of you sort things out if you weren't hiding things from each other. Clearly, he was mistaken."

"It's not a matter of maturity, damn it!" Shishido protested, though he had a sinking feeling that it probably was. "How would you feel if I just suddenly confessed to you that I'd been thinking about you that way, huh?"

"I would be flattered, find out if you still felt that way and what I could do to keep you from getting hurt, and assure you that our friendship was in no danger because of it," Atobe shot back, eyes flashing. "And also reassure you that I didn't think less of you for it. Do you think I haven't had boys confess to me, Shishido? Frankly, I'm surprised Ohtori was the first one to ever tell you, but I suppose you're considered somewhat less approachable than I am."

"It's not the same if it's some random guy who likes you, damn it," Shishido snarled. "Ohtori is my partner. Who knows how much time he spent thinking about me like that when we were together? It creeped me out, all right?"

"You could have just told him you needed time to think about it," Jirou commented from his huddle, his voice small. "He'd have backed off and given you the space you needed, but then when you were ready you'd have had your friendship back again. But you hurt him, Shishido! I don't think he's going to forgive you very easily."

Biting his lip, Shishido had to admit to himself that Jirou's suggestion was exactly what he should have done. His friend was right; Ohtori would have left him alone long enough to come to terms if he'd just asked for the time. But damn it, it wasn't like they didn't all know that he tended to react to things with his emotions instead of his brain.

"I don't think we're going to get any studying done tonight," Atobe said as the silence stretched out after Jirou's words. Before tonight Shishido would have described his friend's tone as 'cool', but after seeing the ice Ohtori was capable of, Atobe didn't even come close. "Shishido, go home. My driver will take you. When you've stopped having a temper tantrum like a five-year-old, we can talk about this reasonably and see if we can salvage the situation."

"I've had more than enough 'help' from the two of you," Shishido snapped, stung by Atobe's dismissal and lashing out without thinking about it. He regretted his words when he saw the tears start tracking down over Jirou's cheeks, but he couldn't take them back now. "Until you two get over this fucking meddling streak, I'll do my own damn studying, thanks."

"Fine. You know the way out." This time Atobe's voice was 'cool', and Shishido hid a flinch. Atobe was furious. Well, fuck it. So was Shishido, and of the two of them, he thought he had a whole hell of a lot more reason to be upset. He stalked out of the room, and unlike Ohtori he did slam the door on his way out. Somehow, it didn't make him feel any better.

Return to Tennis no Ouji-sama Page

Return to the Main Index

Email Miko no da