The Distance Between Us
Chapter Three: Traversing
Shinobu heard Miyagi leave the bedroom and go into the bathroom. He listened to the water run.
Miyagi entered the front room a few minutes later encountering a frowning Shinobu.
The professor was still in his work clothes, but his tie was off, collar unbuttoned, sleeves likewise, and rolled back. He was running damp hands through his shiny black hair and managing to look only slightly sheepish.
"Sorry I didn't tell you I was home, Shinobu. I checked in on you, but it looked like you were busy and I didn't want to bother you."
The scowl on Shinobu's face softened only slightly at this confession.
"That's okay. You looked like you'd had a hard day, so I thought I'd give you a few minutes too." Shinobu tried to sound nonchalant as he inadvertently admitted to his own checking in. Then he sniffed.
"Miyagi!" A storm rose in his gray eyes. He held out his hand. "Give them to me."
The older man's face now sported a scowl of his own.
"It was only a few puffs. I didn't even smoke the whole thing." Miyagi's voice was almost plaintive as he said this.
"Bathroom or bedroom?" Shinobu demanded.
"Okay," Miyagi confessed. "I lit up in the bedroom… Force of habit."
"Look, Old Man, you might like sleeping in a chimney, but I don't!"
"Well, you could always sleep in your own room then," Miyagi replied darkly, though both knew as soon as the words left his mouth this was an idle threat.
Defeated, Miyagi reluctantly took the pack out of his breast pocket and handed it to Shinobu. He winced as he watched the teen stuff his beloved cigarettes into the front pocket of his jeans. He knew his babies were going to be crushed beyond recognition the first time that his brat sat down.
"One after dinner…if you're good…and only outside," Shinobu huffed as he went back into the kitchen to grab the food.
Miyagi would have been seriously pissed off if it weren't for the fact that the scrunched up expression of indignant authority on his young lover's face was just so damn cute.
"Fine," he conceded. Then he added casually, "smells good." He was testing to see if he could ascertain how the temperature of their table was going to be this evening.
"You're a terrible liar, Old Man!" Shinobu tried to sound stern but failed. His attempt tonight had been one of his better and he was secretly pleased to have this recognized.
"Shu-chin, you wound me," Miyagi cried in the teasing voice he usually reserved for his junior, Kamijou. "Why must you always be so cruel?"
Ignoring him, Shinobu placed the bowls on the table and sat down across from his melodramatic lover. After a quick blessing, Shinobu jumped right back into to where the conversation had left off.
"Can it with the 'Shu-chin' crap!" This was a new nickname Miyagi had been provoking him with lately. "I am not a child."
Miyagi was not in the least bit disturbed by Shinobu's irate tone.
"That, My Dear, is a matter of contention." Then, quickly surveying the table, before Shinobu could go into a tirade about his last comment Miyagi observed carefully, "No cabbage?"
Seeing the dark expression on the sweet face across form him, Miyagi suddenly wondered if he shouldn't have been a bit wiser in choosing his diversionary tactics.
"I have been expanding a bit, you know. I am quite capable of learning how to cook something more than cabbage," Shinobu shot back haughtily.
"Of your capabilities, my lovely Shinobu-chin, I have never had any doubt." Miyagi said this mildly, but there was truth in his voice.
The sincerity of the older man's statement surprised Shinobu and rendered him silent for a moment. He found to his great dismay that he was blushing at this understated praise.
Sensing he had maneuvered Shinobu away from the unstable realm of emotion and onto the slightly less treacherous terrain of reason, Miyagi asked with a gentle smile, "So, Shu, how was your day?"
With this tender prompt, Shinobu launched into the details of the trials and tribulations of his new school and the perpetual trauma of being a teenager.
He had recently been kicked out of yet another school. Not for anything overtly malicious, but he was just too damn smart for his own good and bored easily, which almost inevitably lead him to mischief. His new school was an international academy comprised of teens from all over the world, who were for one reason or another, residing in Japan.
After his time in Australia Shinobu found this diversity engaging and he was really trying to make a go of it this time. It didn't hurt that Miyagi threatened to kick his ass if he fucked up again, as he was running out of options.
Miyagi sat quietly in an attitude of rapt attention as Shinobu spoke. He made the appropriate sounds at the right places, asked thoughtful questions, and what's more, he really listened to everything Shinobu was saying (a courtesy he'd rarely offered his ex-wife).
This ability to listen closely, when he wanted to, was a big part of what made him, actually a very effective and much loved instructor. As a professor he not only lectured, but also guided his students through his courses, using this skill and leading them with well-placed questions.
It had taken Shinobu more than a few months of living with him to understand that this interest was genuine and that he was not simply be patronized.
This experience was very different from anything he had previously known. Whenever his parents had asked him about his day, those brief moments between meetings and engagements, it only took about two minutes after he started talking for their eyes to begin glazing over. Before living with Miyagi, it had been years since he'd answered the question of how his day went with more than a simple, "fine."
Once he'd reached an appropriate stopping point, Shinobu looked over inquisitively. "What about you, Old Man?"
There were many things Miyagi could have chosen to tell Shinobu about his day, however, he did not want to weigh his young lover down with the mundane minutia of his life.
Also, he did not really feel it appropriate to talk about his colleagues or his students with someone who was so much younger and who, no matter how many times he tried to forget this fact, was still the Dean's son. So, he did what he usually did most often in these supposed situations of give and take: he deflected.
"Shu-chin, you devastate me with your unkind labels. I am not so old."
"That," Shinobu echoed smartly, "is a matter of contention." His gray eyes were smiling, even if his mouth was not.
Hearing Shinobu's words Miyagi was gripped by a strange sense of déjà vu.
"I'll have you know, Shinobu," Miyagi's his face was serious, "that while for a head of cabbage, I may be very old indeed… for a mountain, I have not yet begun in years."
"Ha!" cried Shinobu. "It's lettuce not cabbage, and you just completely ripped that line off from that Remo Williams movie we watched the other night."
"In my version cabbage seems more appropriate… given our circumstances," Miyagi replied nonplussed and then he added, "Besides, I cannot be held responsible for the after effects of what happens when you force me to watch those ridiculous American action movies you're so fond of."
"Well," Shinobu challenged, "You said you wanted to see an old movie."
"I meant something classic."
"That's classic. It was made, like, in the eighties."
"Oi, Brat, you have no sense of history!" Miyagi, shook his head. "Anyway, you know I don't like the stereotyping of Asian males films like that portray."
"What do you mean?" Shinobu was suddenly curious.
"You know…" Miyagi rolled his eyes. "That we're all yakuza or some wizened oriental Yoda."
"You're just saying that because you're still mad the last time you went to America everyone thought you'd been named after that Karate Kid movie."
Miyagi suddenly wished he hadn't confided to his young lover (after a night of drinking with Kamijou) about his semester abroad as an undergrad and the annoying frat boys who called him "Wax on/Wax off" for the four and a half months he was there.
Shinobu was really getting into this now."Aren't you omitting a possibly significant subtext in both of these films?"
"First," Miyagi corrected, "those are movies, not films, but make your point."
"Well, that westerners must eventually bow and submit themselves to the more effective and enlightened ways of the East if they are to achieve true consciousness and victory." Shinobu was quite convinced of his reading.
"No," Miyagi disagreed. "It's nothing more than Hollywood's perpetuation of blatant romanticized Orientalism."
With this their debate began.
This was one of the things that Miyagi truly loved about Shinobu: the kid was so fucking smart and willing, once he had an idea, to take any discussion to the mat. Miyagi dealt with enough youths each day to know that this kind of passion was rare.
Shinobu, likewise, loved it when he and his lover would get engaged in conversations like this, in part because this was one of the places where he learned the most about Miyagi. The man was very stingy about the details of his everyday life. Additionally, no matter where or when else Miyagi might call him a "brat," during these debates, he never referred to him that way, but treated him as an equal.
By the end of their verbal sparring, Miyagi and Shinobu were both bright-eyed and breathless. Such intellectual wrestling had become for them, in the time they had been together, another form of foreplay.
So, it did not surprise Shinobu too much, when after he'd cleared the table and was standing at the sink washing the dishes that Miyagi slid up behind and wrapped his arms around him. Shinobu pushed back into the touch. He loved the comforting mass of his lover. Miyagi was tall and slender, but there was a solidity to the man that anchored him.
Sometimes when he pictured the two of them together, he envisioned a small patch of pasture. Miyagi would appear as a dark, smooth, half-buried stone, he a tawny clump of wild grass made wild by the force of the wind, writhing on the surface of the rock,.
Miyagi slid his hands down the waistband of Shinobu's loose jeans, one large palm traveling the length of each of the teen's narrow hips. He paused, resting his hands in their hollows and leaned over the Shinobu's shoulder.
"Are you growing again?" he growled. "Because you feel skinnier."
These kinds of observations embarrassed Shinobu. He used his elbows to awkwardly push Miyagi back.
"Shut up!" He felt his ears grow hot. "Help me dry."
"Mmmmm… not yet," Miyagi mumbled, burying his face in the back of his lover's honeyed head. He breathed in, relishing the way Shinobu smelled. He kept one hand in Shinobu's jeans and slid it over to the front, brushing it across the youth, stirring him. The other hand, he brought up and placed under his boy's jaw, pulling Shinobu's chin way up, turning his head, and exposing his long slender throat.
Miyagi kissed Shinobu's small Adam's apple and then extended his tongue and teased it upwards. He rubbed his nose along his gray-eyed heart's fine jawline. Then he pulled back, slightly surprised.
"When was the last time you shaved?"
He could instantly feel the boy beneath him burst into a full-body blush.
Shinobu began to try and wriggle furiously out of his grip. Miyagi's arms, however, were like a vise. The teen hated it when he was asked questions like this; ones that pointed out what he felt were physical shortcomings. He was terribly embarrassed that he was eighteen and still didn't need to shave more than once or twice a week.
When Shinobu realized that any attempt at escape was futile, he grew even more frustrated.
"Why?" he spit sarcastically, "Are you turned off by my manly stubble?"
Miyagi just snuffled into his angry lover's ear.
"Ah, Shu-chin, when you finally acquire some manly stubble, I am sure I will find it just as delightful as the rest of you." Then he added in a voice much more serious. "Perhaps it is wrong of me, but I think I might find it just a bit sad when you really need to shave every day."
In his arms Shinobu stilled and said nothing.
"I like you a bit soft," Miyagi confided.
"Someday too soon, My Dear Brat, the world will make you hard, and I fear I will end up shredded by all your sharp edges." Miyagi punctuated his statement by leaning over and brushing his lips softly against Shinobu's tender mouth.
Then his kiss deepened.
Initially, at this contact, Shinobu closed his eyes, but about halfway through, he opened them and found Miyagi's open as well. Their gazes met and in their meeting unspoken confessions were made.
When the kiss finally broke, Shinobu turned away quickly, his cheeks flushed.
"You've been teaching poetry this week, haven't you?" Though he could not see the face of the man behind him, Shinobu could feel Miyagi draw back slightly.
"Yes. Why?"
"You always get melancholic when you teach poetry… Such sadness doesn't become you." Shinobu said the last part without thinking and then began to panic as he felt Miyagi begin to withdraw his hands in response to his words.
"I suppose you're right," Miyagi stepped further back, completely disengaging.
He ran his fingers nervously through his inky hair with one hand, while the other unconsciously went to his empty breast pocket.
"Damn," he muttered realizing the absence of his smokes. "Maybe I should start grading some papers."
Shinobu knew he had wounded the older man. Desperate to restore the harmony they had so recently been sharing, he found himself forced to resort to drastic measures.
"Or," he pulled a disheveled looking cigarette out of the pack in his jean pocket, "You could go draw us a bath."
Miyagi looked suspiciously into the earnest gray eyes and then offered Shinobu a slight smile.
"Well, anything to get out of helping with the dishes." He slid the cigarette from between Shinobu's slender fingers.
"Oi! Old man, be sure to turn on the fan when you light that damn thing up in there!" Shinobu shouted over his shoulder as Miyagi left the room.
As soon as he heard Miyagi chuckle and the bathroom door close, he leaned against the sink glad the disaster had been averted. It took him a few moments waiting for the relief to truly sink in to finally stop his trembling.
Once he'd finished the dishes, Shinobu moved into the bathroom.
While Miyagi's apartment was by no means palatial, the tub in the unit was actually on the extravagant side. Shinobu was surprised to find Miyagi had already scrubbed and climbed into the bath. He was reclining decadently, obviously savoring his cigarette.
Shinobu was disconcerted to find the situation thus. Tearing off each other's clothes simultaneously in the heat of passion or scrambling out of them in the dark, these he was used to with… but this?
It meant he had to disrobe in front of a still and watchful Miyagi.
Shinobu debated about whether or not to turn his back, but then decided against it. He started taking off his clothes, when he heard Miyagi's rich voice coming from the tub.
"Hey there, Shu, slow down a bit. The water's not going anywhere."
Shinobu looked up and saw the lusty gleam it the man's eyes. Heeding the request, he forced himself to draw his actions out.
Unused to trying to act in a way that passed at all for sensual, he tried to focus on keeping his long fingers from shaking as he gradually revealed himself in the bright light of the bathroom. Noting his tremor, Shinobu berated himself, finding it ridiculous that after all these months that Miyagi could still make him come undone like this.
He was grateful to find, however, his embarrassment dropped more away, with each article of clothing. He was encouraged also by the silent approval glowing in Miyagi's dark-blue eyes.
After what seemed like an eternity, Shinobu was bare. He scrubbed down quickly in the shower and then slipped into the bath, coming to rest, at last, between Miyagi's muscular thighs. Here he leaned back against a hard, broad chest and allowed himself to be soothed.
Miyagi tenderly rubbed Shinobu's tight chest. He slid his large palms over the water-slicked flesh. As they sat together in the bath, Miyagi, with skilled hands, began to stroke Shinobu's slender frame.
He played Shinobu's body as though it were a stringed instrument. Composing an arrangement of eroticism, he authored a musical movement formed from sighs, moans, sharp gasps, and soft breaths that built and then broke at its shuddering crescendo.
Following this, Miyagi drained the tub and rinsed both it and its occupants.
Once he'd climbed out of the tub, standing on still slightly wobbly legs after his powerful climax, Shinobu draped a towel around his narrow waist and then found himself, surprisingly, quickly draped over his lover's broad shoulder as Miyagi, without a word, picked him up and carried him into their bedroom.
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