15. 水

Water

Yoh, ever the lazy slacker at heart, was never one to greet sunrise with much enthusiasm. But this morning, the sunlight entering the bedroom seemed particularly harsh and menacing, even filtered through his closed eyelids. Yoh groaned, shut his eyes tighter, and rolled over, which turned out to be a huge mistake.

"Aaargh!" he groaned loudly as blood surged to his head and throbbed within his veins.

Yes, Yoh was experiencing, for the first time in his young life, the stark and deeply unpleasant reality of a hangover. He gave the headache a few moments to subside and, upon realizing it was here to stay, sighed with resignation and sat up slowly, his eyes still shut.

"Ah, Yoh, you're awake," came a voice to his left.

Yoh opened his eyes. Another mistake. "Aaargh!" He squinted to shield his pupils, but looking at anything at all sent waves of nausea through his body. He closed his eyes again in search of relief, but felt the headache still pulsing in his every nerve, reminding him of its presence with every heartbeat.

"I take it that this is a 'come-sweet-release-of-death' morning for you, too," Ren said. With great effort, Yoh cocked his head and opened his eyes to give his friend a once-over. Ren looked as bad as Yoh imagined he himself looked at that moment, with bloodshot eyes behind swollen eyelids and a general, body-wide pallor. He staggered closer to Yoh and presented him with a cold glass of water.

The thought of ingesting anything at the moment, even something as benign as water, made Yoh's stomach turn. Just thinking about putting the glass to his lips made his bile churn within his gut.

"Trust me, you'll feel better. And take these." Ren pressed a couple of small objects into Yoh's languid palm. Upon looking down, he saw they were pills of some sort. "Aspirin."

Against his better judgment, Yoh took a timid sip of water and attempted to direct it down his throat. He gagged and saw Ren scramble to get out of projectile-vomit range. But the nausea dissipated, and Yoh took another, more substantial gulp, without ill effect. The aspirin followed suit shortly.

"Finish that water and I'll get you some more," Ren said, with some urgency bleeding into his voice. "I need you to get better quickly."

Yoh groaned. He assumed he had left the house in utter disarray after a night of hard drinking. The thought of having to pick up after himself, while feeling like complete crap, was unpalatable, to say the least. He tossed back another gulp of water, almost wishing it were more beer. Yoh felt Ren yank the now-empty glass out of his hand.

He returned, fairly quickly for someone who was also hungover, with a fresh glass of water. Somehow, the one he had just downed made him thirstier. He greedily chugged the water.

"Feeling better?" Ren asked expectantly.

Yoh had to admit that his headache did seem less severe. He still felt queasy, as though any sort of sensory stimulation might make him throw up, but at least he didn't feel like the embodiment of death anymore. "A little," he said.

"Good." Ren seated himself on the edge of the bed beside his friend. "Because we need to talk."

"Yeah, I know," Yoh said, biting down his dread. "I probably made a huge mess out there last night. I can't even remember what happened. Of course I'll help you clean it up."

Ren looked surprised at this. "Oh. No, no, Yoh, not about that."

Yoh frowned. "Not that? Okay, did I break something, maybe?"

"Yoh," Ren said sharply, "I need you to be honest with me. About … your feelings for your fiancee."

The mention of Anna, even not by her name, made Yoh's headache feel twice as intense. He shut his eyes as his head throbbed in time with his heartbeat. "Do we have to talk about this now?" Yoh managed to get out.

"Yes," Ren insisted, in a tone that took rescheduling off the table. "Especially after, ah … after what happened last night."

By the stress Ren had put on the words, Yoh knew he wasn't talking about making a mess or even breaking something. But what did he mean? Yoh struggled to recall the events of the previous night. Everything was reasonably clear, until they had started knocking back the beers. He dimly recalled getting flustered at something and yelling at Ren to remove his shirt, and then …

"Ohhh," Yoh said, as he recalled stepping outside to light up a cigarette. "I'm sorry for smoking, Ren. I know it was a stupid thing to do -"

"Ah, so that's how far along you are in recalling the events of last night. Keep going, Yoh, you can do it," Ren said, his tone betraying an even mix of impatience and condescension.

Yoh struggled mightily to remember what had happened after that. Seeing that Yoh seemed stuck, Ren got up off the bed and, after picking up his glass of water from the nightstand and taking a sip, started rifling through his dresser. He pulled out a black leather belt and raised its buckle until it drew about even with his waist before releasing his grip on it.

The clatter it made upon hitting the floor jogged Yoh's memory - that exact same sound had punctuated their return to the living room last night, only the belt had been attached to Ren's waist, and it was Yoh's hands that had caused it to slip to the floor …

"Yes," Ren said upon seeing the look of recollection washing over Yoh's face. "Now you see why we need to talk."

Yoh remained silent as his mind flooded with details of the previous night that had been summoned by the sound of Ren's belt buckle.

"Very well, since no input from you seems to be forthcoming, I'll start. Yoh, I have to be frank with you. Of course it's your life and everyone reacts differently to trauma. And I don't presume to know Anna nearly as well as I'm certain you do. But I'd bet anything that she isn't champing at the bit to throw herself at anyone who seems mildly interested, as you've been doing."

They were strong words, but perhaps ones too flowery for Yoh to comprehend fully, especially in the midst of a brutal hangover. "Huh?" he said at last.

Ren sighed exasperatedly. "Okay. Look. You just met Natsuki, and even I can tell you're smitten with her." Yoh looked like he was about to interrupt with a rebuttal, but Ren pressed on. "Don't insult my intelligence by trying to tell me I'm mistaken. And that's to say nothing of, well, me."

Being confronted with Ren's assessment of his behavior immediately put Yoh on the defensive. "What's your point?" he asked testily.

"Not a point, but a question." Ren bent over to retrieve his belt and started coiling it up. "Do you intend, at some point in the future, to reunite with Anna? Because if you do, I must say your conduct tells a different story."

"Yes," said Yoh with some force. "I want to be with Anna. But do you have any idea how hard it is to be with her?"

Ren, who was stowing his belt back into the top drawer of his dresser, looked over his shoulder at Yoh. "No," he admitted, "but that's hardly an excuse. If you're holding out hope for your relationship with Anna to work out in the end, nothing in the world would justify a dalliance."

Yoh gave Ren a blank look.

"An affair, Yoh."

Yoh looked thunderstruck. "An affair?" he shot back. "I haven't cheated on Anna!"

Ren looked simultaneously incredulous and wounded. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said, his tone anything but apologetic. "Do I not count because I'm just a friend? Or maybe because I'm a guy and you're just 'experimenting'? You're lucky I'm so disciplined. Otherwise you might have really crossed the line."

Yoh's expression of anger softened into one of confusion at Ren's last declaration. "Wait, what do you mean by that? 'Might have really crossed the line'?"

"I don't want to get bogged down in the details," Ren said firmly, waving his hand dismissively before himself. "The point is -"

"No, wait! I want to know," Yoh interrupted, straining through his hangover to talk over Ren. His impatience was clear to see, but he decided to humor Yoh.

"Well, as I'm sure you'll recall, the first time, we were interrupted by our friend Horohoro. But things were cut short even before that. I think it's safe to say that you were … overflowing … with anticipation. And that led to our little tryst ending somewhat … prematurely," he said meaningfully.

Yoh's brain valiantly fought the two-front war against his hangover and Ren's somewhat cryptic comment. For once, his brain seemed to have won the battle. "Wait," he blurted out, "that's right! We didn't go on because I came too -"

"- To the conclusion that you didn't want to live with the guilt of cheating on Anna!" Ren interrupted hastily. "Yes, that's what happened. And as for last night, well, it doesn't matter what happened specifically. Just take my word for it. I kept the situation from getting out of control."

"Oh?" Yoh felt a blush coming on as more fragmented memories of last night started to emerge. "How did you manage that?"

"I dusted my hand with potato chip crumbs and smeared them on your face while we were … while you were kissing me," Ren admitted, feeling himself flush a little at recalling their makeout session. "So then I convinced you to go to the bathroom to wash your face. I locked you in there until you had cooled off."

"But the bathroom doesn't lock from the outside," Yoh pointed out.

"No, it doesn't," Ren acknowledged with a coy smirk, "but telling you it was locked was enough. You were quite drunk, Yoh. Although, judging from the mess I had to clean up in there this morning, you were still more than capable of, ahem, taking matters into your own hands."

Yoh looked lost for a second before his expression brightened. "Oh! So I just jacked -"

"- Jacked up your hopes of getting back together with Anna? Maybe," Ren interrupted smoothly. "And that brings us to the crux of the matter. Allow me to recapitulate."

"Is that the medical term for what I did last night in your bathroom?"

Ren rolled his eyes. "Look, Yoh. Let's not pussyfoot around. If you really love Anna - if you want to salvage your relationship - all of this has got to stop."

Yoh's expression darkened as the truth of Ren's words sank in. He lowered his gaze to the floor. Guilt seemed to manifest itself around him, seizing him by the shoulders and slumping them down. "Yes, you're right, Ren." Yoh's voice sounded contrite yet hopeful, as though admitting his indiscretions had shown him there was light at the end of the tunnel.

"Good," Ren said, in a tone that was soothing by his standards. "We're on the same page. But I do feel a few questions are in order." Ren pushed the fingertips of his hands together, forming a tent with his hands. He gestured with the point of it towards Yoh. "You and me. It's time to decide, Yoh. What am I to you?"

Yoh sank into deep thought. He realized that he still didn't quite know at what point he would place Ren on his acquaintance-lover continuum. So he gave a cop-out answer. "A fri-"

"And don't say 'a friend,' Yoh. You know what I mean."

"I haven't decided yet!" Yoh looked genuinely pained from thinking about it, and most of that wasn't because of the hangover. "Look, Ren. I've literally had no choice in my love life for years. As long as I can remember, it's been out of my hands. Now I finally feel like I'm allowed to think about what it's like to be with other people, you know?" Yoh hesitated, then went on. "Maybe I'm drawn to Natsuki because she gives me a kind of attention Anna never did. And maybe I'm drawn to you because …" Yoh trailed off upon discovering he couldn't give a reason.

"It's complicated," he said at last. He wasn't wrong; their relationship certainly was a complicated one, even without taking its romantic aspects into consideration. The first time they had met, Ren made no secret of the fact that he coveted Amidamaru, so much so that he considered Yoh expendable. But Yoh's serene personality never failed to influence those who spent any length of time around him, and Ren was no exception. It wasn't long before Ren's tense standoffishness thawed into begrudging tolerance, and eventually friendship.

As young male friends are wont to do, Yoh and Ren frequently exchanged joking insults, backhanded compliments, and mocking banter - at least when their peers were around. When there were no witnesses, their exchanges often took on a more heartfelt tone. It was during those moments, Yoh realized, that the groundwork had been laid for their mutual attraction. When Ren allowed himself to be vulnerable, to admit that he was far from perfect, to admit he wanted advice or even help, it touched Yoh in an unfamiliar yet enthralling way.

And hence, his attraction to him …

Yoh realized that Ren was still staring at him, expecting an answer. "Ren," he said, "you're conceited, you're cold and calculating, and sometimes I wonder if you even have a conscience. But that's only when other people are around. When it's just you and me, I see a different side of you. It's not afraid to show weakness. It cares about what I have to say. It's human like me. It confides in me. It makes me feel wanted and needed. I don't know if that's love. But it's more intimate than anything I ever felt with Anna."

Ren looked down and awkwardly thrusted his hands into his pockets. "Th - Thank you for your honest answer, Yoh." His hands fidgeted with a couple of bits of lint in his pockets. "Still, as … touching as I find your answer, the fact remains that in the end, only one of us can truly be yours."

Ren sighed, pulling his hands out of his pockets and lacing them behind his head. "As difficult as it is for me to say this, Yoh, I think the best course of action for us is for me to bow out. At the end of the day, it has to be Anna."

Yoh didn't immediately reply to this. Silence permeated the room. The boys both found it difficult to look at each other at that moment. They both fixed their gaze on Ren's glass of water atop the nightstand. Beads of condensation slowly wended their way down its surface, pooling in a ring around its base.

"Say you've been forced to drink water all your life," Yoh said suddenly, breaking the silence. "Your doctor tells you that even a drop of anything else will kill you. Then one day, you're cured, and someone offers you all kinds of drinks. Matsuda Cider. Bocari Sweat. G. G. Lemon. Bepsi Cola. Wouldn't you be tempted to try them all?"

"Yes," Ren answered. Yoh looked stunned at how easy it had been to get Ren to agree with him.

"Of course," he went on, "I'm not sabotaging a relationship and breaking someone's heart by taking a sip of sugar water."

"You are such a stick in the mud," Yoh sighed.

"Sorry, Yoh, but I don't make the rules. You get to be in a relationship with either one person at a time or nobody at all. And if that one person happens to have been preordained, tough luck. That's still all you get."

Yoh stared hard at the glass of water. It almost seemed to be mocking him. "It's just not fair."

"Life's not fair, Yoh. If it were, you'd be allowed to have your own personal soda fountain at your beck and call. Have whichever one you want with every meal. Mix them together, even. But that's not the way it works. If you even reach for a sip from another drink, you're hurting someone. And you're not the hurting kind, are you, Yoh?"

Yoh felt oddly vindictive at that moment. The injustices of his circumstances cried out within him to be rectified. His lips curled with malignance. "Someone deserves to be hurt from the shitty hand I've been dealt," he said.

Ren was completely unprepared for that. He recoiled and landed hard enough to make the water in his glass slosh around. "You - you don't mean that, Yoh," Ren replied disbelievingly.

"Well, why should I be the only one to suffer?" Yoh demanded. "Anna should know there are consequences to treating people badly."

Ren looked like he wanted to say something, but there was a foreign, resigned, almost defeated aura about him at that moment. He looked at Yoh with reproach and worked up the nerve to speak. "You've already punished her enough."

The words drew an immediate, furious flurry of words from Yoh. "Me?! All she did was test my limits, day in and day out! I couldn't take it anymore, and that's my fault? I was tortured, dominated, coerced, mocked, but never loved, Ren. I need love like I need water. And Anna was a desert with no oasis in sight."

Ren raised his eyebrows as he watched Yoh speak. He seemed to be chewing on his words, or perhaps considering what to say next. At last he said, "There was love, Yoh. It was beneath the surface, but it was there."

"What would you know?" Yoh rebutted. "You weren't there to see all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the training -"

"No, I wasn't," Ren agreed, "but I know somebody else who was."

Yoh watched as Ren approached the corner of the room where Yoh had left his duffel bag. He unzipped it and the torn end of the rolled-up Soul Bob poster poked out of the opening.

"What are you - Don't touch my stuff!" Yoh barked as Ren dug deeper into his bag.

"Too late," he said, pulling out a box of candy and another object, long, thin, and black, and inscribed with calligraphic kanji …

To be continued in chapter 16