Once Akashi's heart stopped pounding, he realized the little black box, his security blanket, was still in Furihata's room. His step hitched, but he knocked away the sudden panic that threatened his last shred of sanity.
Forget it, he snapped at himself and kept moving. I've lived for 18 years without it; all I have to do is assume the whole world is listening.
Akashi quickened his step and slid in beside his father with two minutes to spare.
"Have you met my son, Seijūrō?" Akashi-sama introduced him to the University's President.
"I haven't had the pleasure," the man said.
"No, Sir, it is my pleasure." His golden eye flashed, as he smiled that vacant, pleasant Akashi family smile.
Akashi escorted his father to the Mitsuoka Galue that waited to whisk him off to the airport. He stood, ignoring the cold, saying nothing, as he waited for his father to finish speaking to the President, the Dean, and the members of the board of directors who he held perfect Akashi sway over.
There was a special place in his head that the Seijūrō facet of his personality retreated to in situations like this, allowing the Akashi persona to take over. Akashi's razor-sharp attention and inability to feel anything other than hate made him the perfect weapon against his father. Seijūrō recited basketball statistics for every game he ever played in that empty void, and thought only of the warmth Kōki showed him.
He felt his father's stern disapproving gaze, as he held the door open for a bevy of beautiful senpai girls. He bowed from the neck, and spoke vacuous compliments that sent them twittering into the night.
Does he know about the kiss? Akashi thought. He can't know. Calm down, baka, your palms are sweating. Pull it together!
"Students?" his father asked, as the dignitaries faded away and left the two Akashi's standing in the parking lot.
"Yes, Sir.
"Are their parents positioned?"
"I don't know any of them personally," Akashi answered truthfully. "But it never hurts to leave a good impression, as you've taught me."
"Hmph, during the summer break will work on your vocabulary. Shamelessly flirting with inferior women isn't my idea of a 'good impression.'"
"Yes, Sir, I look forward to your correction."
"As you should, Seijūrō, as you should," his father said, and then stepped into the Mitsuoka Galue. The driver closed the door, and Akashi stood at attention until the car turned the corner at the end of the street and disappeared.
Furihata looked at the bright blue computer screen and made sure all the BIOS settings were correct before he put in the Windows 7 disc and started the installation. While he did that, he went through every piece of paper on his desk.
He didn't want to think about the way his lips still tingled, so he got down to work.
He made a pile of the sketches he'd made of Akashi's document. He added the Clipper's logos and all the test runs he'd printed out. It was a large pile, and it would take a considerable amount of time to burn. They'd been lucky that the smoke detector hadn't gone off the first time. Of all people, he knew that shredded documents could be put back together and his shredder was a simple strip-cut kind. He filled the sink with hot water, and he ripped the colored parts of the document and soaked them. The colors began to bleed almost immediately as he hadn't changed to his high quality ink cartridges for the tests. When the paper had turned a lovely shade of purple, and destroyed the document past saving, he shoved the soppy paper into an empty ramen noddle cups from his garbage.
He put the small text section of the test prints into the shredder, gathered up the scraps, and then put it through again with an old Algebra worksheet. Those pieces he consigned to the flame in the sink. The scraps left over where plain white pieces of paper. He wrote random notes on them: a grocery shopping list written in a blue Primsacolor pen, Mitzutani's phone number in pencil, a recipe, and other things unrelated to Akashi, basketball, or…
Stop thinking about his lips. Yes, they were incredibly soft, but he was just excited. It may mean nothing. I probably means nothing. Just stop it and get to work!
He crumpled some of the notes, and threw them in the garbage can under the sink. Others he scattered about the desk.
The computer needed his response and he typed in the serial number and accepted the license agreement before considering what else he would need to destroy.
There was a file on his phone he had to delete. It was a picture from the first game he'd watched Akashi play in Hokkaido. It wasn't an incriminating photograph, it was just a snap shot of the redhead on the court, dribbling the ball with one hand and the other raised calling the play. He'd sent it to his friends and former teammates as a sort of, "look who's at my school," joke. He'd meant to erase it, but it had so far escaped the many times he'd purged his phones of unneeded memory hogs.
He deleted it, and forty or fifty other photos that meant nothing to him, just so that if anyone searched his phone they'd see nothing that would endanger Akashi's escape. The call log showed a few calls from Akashi's cell phone, but erasing those would be meaningless. They were known running partners, and having an occasional call between them was innocuous.
He went through his sketch books and ripped out the page that had doodles made with the Scarlet Lake colored pencil he'd begun carrying with him to class lately. He folded the paper into the bottom of the bag he brought with him when he showered. The paper would disintegrate, given enough hot water, but he didn't want to clog his own pipes.
After Windows finished loading, he installed Chrome and went through all of his bookmarks and added a new ones from every NBA team. The rest of Furihata's bookmarks were completely benign: graphic art links, his school portal, email, a few music-related sites, and not much else.
He reset his browser to automatically open incognito mode whenever it launched. He'd started that years ago when his brother had found a link to porn on his computer and he'd tattled to their parents. It was easier not to have a history living with that rat of a brother, and he'd never changed the default, even after he begun living along; it just wasn't necessary.
He wanted to leave the room; he had to pee, but Akashi's warning about people coming in the moment he left, made him suffer through the painful pressure in his bladder. While MS Office loaded, Furihata went through the emails since the beginning of the semester. There was not a single one from Akashi. In fact, now that he thought about it, he didn't even know Akashi's email address. He could guess at his school account, since they'd all been assigned one, but he didn't bother.
Once Word had loaded he opened and closed documents leaving a trail of homework assignments in the recent document history. Photoshop and Illustrator would take hours to load, and he really had to pee, so he did a quick search of his room and found one last thing related to Akashi by the fish bowl – the black box.
"Shit," Furihata said, looking at the fish as if maybe they'd have a brilliant idea of what to do next. He didn't even know which dorm Akashi lived in and there was no way he was going back to that party.
No way! This is bad!
He pocketed it, and grabbed up his shower bag and cell phone. Before he left, he took three pieces of his literature assignment and placed them randomly about the room. One went under the wheel of his desk chair, another was laid at a specific angle over his keyboard, and the last he put between two layers of clothing in his drawer. He had no idea if he'd be able to tell if they were moved, but it made him feel better to know he was doing… something.
As he locked the door to his room and tried to walk nonchalantly to the bathroom despite the pressure in his bladder, he was acutely aware of the vibration in his pocket.
Every time he closed he eyes that night, Akashi saw one of two faces, both of which brought him back to fully awake. It went in a pattern. He'd see his father, angry and disappointed by some imagined slight; he would dream of burning flesh, and his eyes would snap open. When he finally got his pulse under control and closed his eyes again, he'd see Furihata in that moment just before he'd leaned in those centimeters and kissed him, then he'd wake with an uncomfortable pressure in his groin. Then he'd see his father's condemnation: repeat, ad nauseum. Finally Akashi chanced it, and got up and went to the bathroom. It would be an anomaly in his routine, but he would visit the school nurse tomorrow and complain of stomach upset, blaming the party's crappy food and cheap alcohol. He closed the bathroom door and retrieved the iPod from its hiding place.
He composed a very simple single line email to Shintarō in New York: [How did you know you were in love with Takao?]
It was way passed his normal time to be online, but he sent it anyway, figuring that he would have a few moments to check it in the morning. As he was about to put it back in its hiding place, he saw the screen flash with a response.
[It was more of a coming to realize that I loved him. We were together so often that when we were apart, I recognized his absence acutely. I tested it and realized it was more of craving to be around him, then an understanding that he was elsewhere. Have you finally found someone?]
[Maybe, I don't know. But I can't afford to have a romance, not even a dalliance, at a time like this. Things are in motion.]
[The spare futon is ready for you, anytime. It will fit two as well as it will fit one.]
[That would be a bit forward, but it is appreciated.]
Akashi's mind settled a little bit as he thought about the fact that there were other faces, other people, and other choices for him.
They didn't run that morning, Akashi's early morning text said that he had a stomach ache. Furihata ran anyway, since he was awake, and he took the little black box with him. After the first few minutes, he wished he hadn't. The vibration was enough to make him want to cry, but when he returned to his room, and he felt the thing go silent, some of that paranoid terror ebbed away.
He showered again, and then slid open his drawers to put out something to wear. His literature homework was on top of clothing instead of in between the shirts as they had been last night. He looked around the room and the black box continued to be still as he walked the full length.
Shit, Seijūrō was right, they searched my damn room.