eeveee | Catching On (Gravitation: Shuichi/Reiji) (Reply)

“But why?” he asked again, because ‘you said you weren’t going to bitch about it’ was not what he considered an answer to the question. Rage stepped back, and the hands on his shoulders relaxed. Her eyes were firmly set to the buttons of his jacket, and her fingers clenched when she started speaking in slow, deliberate words.

“Because I’m twenty years old, you fucking moron, that’s why. Considering that you almost had your way with me because of a spat with that jerk, I can’t see why you should have such a problem with it now.”

She met his eyes, then, before resolutely closing hers and using his shoulders as leverage as she stood on her toes and Shuichi realized that she hadn’t just been making it up, she honestly had never kissed before. He knew that she wasn’t an actor up to faking that sort of inexperience, and the admirably pig-headed manner in which she was ignoring his lack of cooperation had little in common with the usual way she seemed to pursue romance. Five seconds into the ridiculous parody of a kiss, he set his hands to her shoulders and pushed her away with an irrational burst of anger that she mirrored as she pushed his hands away from her arms.

“Would it really bother you that much to give me a warning before you try to eat my face?!” he snapped, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Rage stepped back with her arms crossed, and a thunderous scowl etched into her face.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be changing your mind so often, then, since you already agreed to let me do it, and do you have a problem with the way I kiss?!”

“That wasn’t a kiss, that was – “

“Yeah? Well, I’d sure like to see you do it –“

“Seems like you’re forgetting which one of us it is that’s so pathetic that she has to ask for her first kiss!” he shot back, before he had the time to realize how her eyes had widened and her face suddenly wasn’t angry at all. She swallowed audibly, and her arms fell to her sides, fingers clenched so hard that they were whitening.

“Well, maybe I wouldn’t have had to if you weren’t…” she broke off there, voice weakening as she once again was staring at his shoes, “If you weren’t… what I mean is…”

Shuichi thought that if this had been any other thing they were talking about, he would have said something mean to her because she was fucking insane. But he also knew that he really wasn’t the right person to accuse others of lacking in sensible thinking, and he knew that when it got to love, he was a lot more prone to do stupid things than even Rage was.

“You know, it’s not… it really isn’t that I… you were doing it wrong, that’s all,” he said, and touched her shoulders. She was small and soft against him, smelled like something girly and tasted of chocolate mint ice cream. He thought about Yuki, and wondered if this was how Yuki thought about him, and then he wondered how it could be that somebody as scary as her could be so harmless once he put his arms around her.

She made a noise into his mouth that might have been a sob, and for a moment that seemed to stretch on for longer than it should, he almost wished he could love her the way they both knew he couldn’t.

For