for the love of the brotherhood, 1/2
I'M BAAAACK ♥
It isn’t the penises drawn on his mirror in shaving cream that concern Jun. It isn’t even the fact that there are a pair of boxers on the floor he knows aren’t his own. And the gaping, wide-open bedroom window doesn’t even make him blink.
“Where,” Jun mumbles, “the hell are my slippers?”
These slippers are the most wonderful things to have ever graced Jun’s delicate feet. (True, he runs track with the junior varsity team, but that’s nothing a personal footbath and European salves won’t help. Also, runners: hot.) He’s had them for years and the fluff lining hasn’t matted down, even after long nights of pacing back and forth trying to figure out whether or not drama was still the right major for him. The majestic violet color hadn’t faded, either, and his embroidered initials still stood out in all their glory.
Jun considers them his best and most fabulous friends. And someone had taken them right under his nose.
Pants be damned, Jun swings open the door to his single room and scans the hallway—nothing but a few red cups rolling lazily on their sides, beer still trickling from the rims. A peek over the staircase into the main lobby doesn’t give him any clues, either.
Shun walks by then, wearing a bathrobe that was once white but is now an odd color of green-gray.
“Hey,” he says, voice hoarse. “You might want to check the roof.”
Fuck.
Jun is halfway up the stairs in a second before he stops and turns around. Shun is still standing on the second floor balcony, half-asleep and probably still drunk.
“Also,” Jun yells, loud enough so that Shun wakes up and also so that the entire frat hears, “the penises on my mirror and the underwear on my floor better be gone by the time I come back downstairs.”
He pauses just to hear doors bang open frantically and more pantsless guys scamper into the hallway toward Jun’s room. Sometimes, he thinks, this brotherhood thing isn’t so bad.
--
When people ask Jun why he decided to join the frat in the first place, his answer is always the same: Shun.
They had met freshman year at a mixer organized by Pi Alpha Phi. Shun was rushing and wanted to look good, but he ended up standing too close to the keg and instead ended up looking good and drunk. From here, the story gets a little fuzzy, and Shun has his own version: he seduced Matsumoto Jun with a crooked fingertip and a red cup of warm beer.
But Jun knows better, even if he doesn’t really remember that night. One, he would never drink warm beer. And two, Jun would never fall for the crooked-finger trick. Not even if he was wasted out of his mind would he ever give in to something as stupid as a finger tilting ninety degrees.
So he doesn’t know how it happened, but he does remember making out with Shun in a corner of that mixer, everything dark and sweaty and questionable, the room a blurry pulsing mess, the music too loud and pounding in his ears. His contacts were sticking to his eyes and his hair probably looked like a dead, wet sheep but at least he was making out with someone who looked halfway decent.
Nothing happened after that, because Jun still didn’t know how to take people back to his room without being awkward or having them turn around and leave right away anyway because his roommate Nino always left his gaming stuff out in a messy pile that nobody could get through without tripping. And Jun really didn’t mind that so much in the daytime because he liked playing Mario Kart in between classes with his roommate, but it sucked otherwise.
But then during the summer Jun and Shun took beginning economics together and learned that the opportunity cost of skipping class was getting to make out on the quad when there was no one around. Shun was a member of the frat by then, full-fledged, all his dues paid and all his ridiculous PA Phi-themed merchandise bought.
By the time sophomore year started, Shun kept ending up in Jun’s bed and Jun kept finding himself at frat events because he finally had a friend with tons of benefits and he didn’t want to let that go.
And then in January, a week before spring rush started, Shun was taking off his jeans in Jun’s bed and Jun was about ready to go down when Shun suddenly sat up.
Jun was not happy. He did not appreciate being stopped in the middle of such an important activity, and he was already pissed that Shun was wearing boat shoes with no socks. “What?”
“Do me a favor,” Shun said.
Jun took a moment to think about what kind of kinky things Shun might ask him to do, and then decided he wouldn’t mind a lot of them, so he shrugged. “Okay.”
“Rush next week,” he’d said, and Jun was about to put all his clothes on and go, but Shun was still talking. “I’m going to be on the frat committee so you’ll be seeing a lot less of me if you don’t join.”
“Well,” Jun said, and thought about it. “Do I get anything else?”
He hadn’t needed any more prodding—he really, really liked Shun—but he might as well try for more incentives.
“Attractive guys,” Shun said quickly. It was like he’d already made the list. “Looks good on your resume. Your own room in a proper house for senior year. Fancy formals where you can wear a suit and you get as much punch as you want—.”
“—Done,” Jun said. Shun knew him too well. “Done.”
Before this, he’d never really thought about Greek life—joining it or otherwise. He’d gone to a few Greek-sponsored mixers and found himself in the beer-stained basement of Sigma Nu one morning with a killer crick in his neck, but that was as far as his experiences went and he just wasn’t interested in wearing pastel everything and buying bowties and that whole hazing business. It wasn’t his scene.
But Jun takes his friends seriously, and Shun asked him to do this just so they could keep seeing each other. How was Jun supposed to say no? Blame it on the haze of the moment and the liquid fire pulsing under his skin, blame it on all that inevitable freshman naiveté—but Jun knows that he did the right thing. Back then, at eighteen, he would have done anything for Shun. He still would.
--
Three years later, Jun is president-elect of his university’s PA Phi chapter. He has to wait another semester to be properly sworn in as president, but he’s in no hurry. For now he just wants his slippers, and maybe a stable boyfriend.
Things have changed a bit since freshman year. It’s not that he’s fallen in love with Greek life or anything—everyone is still a douche, the party juice no longer has any taste, and the sorority girls aren’t even that cute—but he’s made a lot of friends this way, and he was able to move into the house a year early. He kept his drama major but added an ethnomusicology minor, and if he finds any class difficult, there is always someone in the frat to help him out.
Like when he had to take a required computer science class. His freshman roommate and computer science major Ninomiya had joined sophomore year after Jun convinced him the frat needed a digital archivist and that he could have the entire basement to himself.
“J,” Nino says, poking his head out of the trapdoor that leads to the roof. He has the worst bedhead Jun has ever seen and he’s as pale as a sheet of paper. “Toma told me I would be able to find you on the roof.”
“You look like shit,” Jun says, balancing on the tiles. He can see his slippers perched on the other end of the roof, as if seated there to watch the sunrise. “Where have you been?”
“CompSci exam.” Nino yawns and squints hard against the bright lights of the outdoors. “I’ve been awake for like thirty hours.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“I’ve been studying for thirty hours,” Nino says, and it comes out in a half-hiss, half-growl. “I took a ten-minute nap and dreamt about Fibonacci numbers and initialization files.”
Jun loses his footing for a second and watches a pile of leaves flutter to the ground. “Speak a language I understand.”
“I don’t want to hook up with you, sorry.” Nino snorts loudly as Jun turns around to glare at him, but not before losing his grip again. More leaves scatter. “Also, can you tell me about that guy you took into your room last night?”
There isn’t a thing Jun can tell Nino about the guy from last night because he doesn’t remember a minute of it. He pretends to think as he crawls slowly across the rooftop, trying not to upset anymore debris or even knock his slippers off the edge. “Tell me who put my slippers out here first.”
Nino’s head bobs out of the sunlight for a second. “Christ, it’s hot.”
That isn’t an answer, but Jun has slunk halfway across the roof now. He’s almost there. Just an outstretched hand and a little lunge, and—
“Matsumoto.”
Fuck. Again. Startled, Jun’s foot bangs against a loose tile, and the shock sends one of his slippers plummeting to the world below. He scrambles forward and snatches the other one, but not before bruising his ribcage in the process.
Had the voice been Nino’s, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. Jun wouldn’t have even turned around. But it belongs to the current president of the frat, and Jun has to keep up appearances, even if he isn’t wearing pants.
“Sakurai-kun,” Jun says as calmly as possible. “Good morning.”
“It is a good morning.” Sho smiles widely. “Listen—I have to practice my thesis defense later. Care to join me? I need an audience, and Nino says he would much rather enjoy gouging his ear tunnels out and listening to Hello Project girlbands all day.”
“The old Morning Musume stuff isn’t so bad,” Jun says, very serious, and then clears his throat. “What’s your thesis on?”
Except Jun doesn’t need to ask: he knows. Everyone in the frat knows. Hell, Jun wouldn’t be surprised if the entire campus knew, including the faculty and staff. Sakurai Sho is the type of guy who doesn’t necessarily broadcast what he’s doing to the rest of the world, and yet the rest of the world still manages to find out. He is just that loved—or wanted.
“It’s an exploration of the sociocultural changes that American rappers have created throughout East Asia,” Sho says, and Jun pretends that makes sense to him. “Do you know anything about it?”
“Tupac,” Jun says right before blushing a furious shade of pink. Sho just smiles, and behind him Nino pretends to vomit all over himself and the roof.
“By the way, nice slipper,” Sho says then, nodding to Jun’s lap. Jun hopes he actually means nice lack of pants. “I’ll get the other one for you.”
And he does. Sho is a gentleman at heart, and Jun has always liked nice boys.
--
Luckily the underwear on Jun’s floor is gone when he gets back to his room, but whoever rinsed the shaving cream dicks off the mirror didn’t do a very good job. For a split second Jun thinks about recruiting the next pledger he sees to wipe the rest of it off, but decides against it. He’s already exhausted and he hasn’t even been awake for an hour. Finding a whiny freshman would just be more work that he doesn’t want to deal with.
As he runs the water over a washcloth, someone knocks on the door. “Need help?”
Jun turns around. “Not from you,” he says, but without much conviction. “What’s up?”
Shun shrugs. He’s still wearing the bathrobe, and Jun really wants to tell him to wash it, but the poor kid looks like he can barely hold himself up. “I came to ask if you knew what the hell I did last night, because I sure don’t know.”
“And I would?” Jun swipes the mirror down the middle in one long stroke. “I don’t even think we were together last night.”
He doesn’t mention how the two of them haven’t gone out together in months. Jun’s not sure when things changed, but he remembers a time when he wasn’t even able to leave his dorm on a Friday night without texting Shun first and asking where he was going. But lately Shun has been going out with the other guys in the frat to parties that Jun just isn’t interested in.
“Yeah,” Shun says, voice distant for a second, but then he reaches forward and grabs the washcloth out of Jun’s hand. “You’re too slow. Move over.”
Jun doesn’t fight. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and watches Shun clear the mirror in two easy movements. “Why are you asking, though? What’d you do?”
“Um.” Shun pretends to focus wiping away a difficult spot that isn’t really there. “I told you, I don’t know, but.”
Jun has known Shun for far too long to put up with this. Also, he can guarantee that whatever the story is, he’s heard worse. This is inevitable in Greek life, especially if the president of the Inter-Fraternity Council is a certain Akanishi Jin. “But what? Don’t tell me you knocked someone up.”
It’s supposed to be a joke. But Shun isn’t laughing.
“Shun,” Jun says.
“That girl with the really nice hair,” Shun says, still focusing on the spot that doesn’t exist. “In ADPi.”
“Kuroki Meisa?” Jun tries not to laugh. “She actually hooked up with you?”
“No,” Shun says, voice low. He looks behind him, but there isn’t anyone else in this house besides Nino who would dare show up in Jun’s room without permission. “I mean—she does have really nice hair. But no, someone else.”
Jun has to think about it. He’s extremely picky about hair, whereas Shun will grow his out to a weird mullet and think it looks good.
But he does have someone in mind.
“Yuu?” Jun guesses. “Yamada Yuu?”
Shun ducks his head. When he looks up, his smile is a little desperate, and mostly pleading.
“Jun,” he says, “do you know how to count periods?”
--
Jun does not know how to count periods, nor does he ever want to know, and he can make sure of this by never sleeping with a girl. So far, he’s doing a good job of it (though he has to admit that if Kuroki Meisa ever got off her damn high horse and yanked her head out of the clouds, he would probably do her in a heartbeat).
He leaves Shun in the bathroom, promising that he’ll be back in a second with someone they trust who might actually know a thing or two about what happens when condoms break during sex with girls. Just the thought of that—in fact, the thought of a vagina—makes Jun a little sick, but he tries not to show it as he tugs on a pair of jeans and steps into the hallway.
“Ah,” Sho says, stepping a little clumsily out of the way so as not to collide with Jun. “You shouldn’t open your door into the hall, you know.”
Jun’s throat immediately constricts. Sho has put on his glasses and is carrying a thick binder stuffed with papers. He looks exactly like he just stepped out of one of Jun’s biggest fantasies, except he’s wearing clothes. “Sorry,” he says, attempting to sound as normal as possible. “You’re not hurt, right?”
Sho shakes his head. “I’m fine, but next time, watch out.”
“For what?”
“For me.”
Jun feels like he has been hit by lightning and confusion all at the same time: watch out for Sho? Well, he always has. But wait. What did that mean? Why did he say it? Was he being literal? Of course Jun should watch out for Sho in the hallway when he blindly opens his door; he should watch out for everyone, especially Toma who tends to sleepwalk. But Jun has a feeling Sho isn’t talking about safety.
At least, not hallway safety.
“I will,” Jun says carefully, like he’s practicing for a presentation. “Were you on your way to practice for your thesis defense?”
“I was,” Sho says, and shifts his binder to the front of his pants. “I was on my way here, actually.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Jun now has to remember how to successfully get someone from the very tricky outside-his-bedroom-zone into the extremely easy onto-his-bed-area in broad daylight. This is difficult for two reasons: one, he hasn’t done this in a long time because usually his partners just walk into the room on their own, and two, he is so turned on he can’t even think properly. He feels like a big ball of thunder and heat, heat all the way from the tips of his toes to his hairline, and he swears that if it weren’t eleven o’clock in the morning and his brothers weren’t up and about doing non-sexy things at this non-sexy hour he would just tear Sho’s clothes off in the hallway and take him on the slatted wood floor.
But it’s eleven and Jun is sweating and hard and confused, and Shun—shit! Shun is still in the bathroom. God, Jun thinks, I am an awful friend. “Sakurai-kun, um…”
Sho raises his eyebrows. “Do you have plans?”
“No,” Jun says quickly, even though the answer is yes, I have plans and a friend in my bathroom who needs to know how to count periods. Thinking about that calms him down a little. “It’s just—.”
The door bangs behind him suddenly, like someone has run into it.
“Sho-kun! Christ. Jun, you’re the best, of course Sho-kun would know.”
Jun has never felt more horrified in his life. “Shun,” he starts, but the rest of the sentence gets stuck in his throat.
But Shun isn’t listening. Of course not, Jun thinks, he has bigger things on his mind. But here is Jun, also with big things on his mind (Sho’s binder is one of them, followed by what’s behind it), and he can’t get over the sheer shock that he was just cockblocked by his best friend.
On the other hand, Sho has switched gears without even batting an eyelash. “Oguri,” he says, voice back to its normal volume. “You needed help with something?”
“It could possibly be something,” Shun says, and joins Sho in the hallway, leaving Jun with a crushed spirit and an extremely disappointed boner. “Or not. I hope not, anyway.”
“Seems serious,” Sho says, glancing once at Jun before putting an arm around Shun. “Come to my room and we’ll talk about it.”
Shun looks back at Jun, wide-eyed and almost apologetic. Did I interrupt something?
The urge to smack Shun to the floor and beat him with a slipper (a normal one, not one of his nice ones) is fierce, but Jun reminds himself: broken condom. Broken condom. Broken condom, pregnancy scare, Shun needs him.
Jun shrugs. Nope, he mouths back, and watches Sho’s ass disappear behind a corner.
--
But really though: Shun interrupted everything, and Jun could kill him. He could also kill him for being in the midst of a pregnancy scare and making Jun worry about things like possible babies and what Shun will do if he has to take out another student loan to pay for child support, but mostly he just wants revenge for the most obvious and brutal cockblock known to man. It was as if Shun had appeared behind Jun with a grin and a blinking neon sign that said I AM HERE TO STOP YOU FROM GETTING IT ON in huge letters.
He has always had bad luck, but this is just a kick in the gut. No—the balls. That would be more appropriate.
The way he sees it now, Jun has two choices: he could jerk off in the bathroom like a horny fifteen-year-old (and from the way he’s been acting, maybe he is and maybe he doesn’t care) or he could find someone to take care of his problem. If he were a rational thinker, Jun would possibly consider starting work on his geology paper or reading the screenplays he has due for next class to distract himself.
But the thought of Sho is persistent, and there is no way he could even sit down for five minutes with his schoolwork without snapping completely. So Jun stalks into his bathroom—
—And hears the door to his room squeak open.
“Shun,” Jun begins, ready to give his best friend the lashing of his life, “I can’t believe—.”
“I can’t believe you think I’m Shun,” Sho says, and Jun hasn’t even made it out of the bathroom before he finds himself against the wall, elbows bruising against cheap plaster as Sho presses up against him. “He’s pretty upset, you know.”
OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL OH MY GOD, Jun thinks, but quickly suppresses the urge to tear off all his clothes at once. “I’m pretty upset with him,” he says instead, fighting to keep his voice at a reasonable level. “I buy all his condoms. You’d think he’d want to use one, they’re free.”
“I did see that box,” Sho says, words dropping low to a growl. “I took the liberty of helping myself to a few.”
“Oh?” Jun’s mouth feels like a desert.
“I thought I’d need some in the near future,” Sho says, and kisses Jun, fire and ice all at once, so hard Jun has to grab a fistful of Sho’s shirt to keep from sliding down the wall. He wonders for a split second if the door to his bedroom is open, and then reconsiders it: of course it isn’t open. It’s Sho. It’s Sakurai-sempai, and he is always one step ahead of the game.
Before this, Jun imagined Sho to kiss the way he acts in class—deliberate and intelligent (but not a show-off), someone who would make a mistake just to remind the world that he’s human. But the real Sho kisses like he just can’t get enough, and Jun feels himself bruising in the lips and the elbows. The real Sho kisses like he’s two steps behind the game and needs to catch up before the timer runs out. It hurts, but Jun likes it. He wouldn’t stop this for the world.
“You’re good with this, right?” Sho says, and Jun feels the words rather than hears them. “This is okay?”
Trust Sho to ask. Jun works a knee in between Sho’s legs and pulls him closer. They don’t align properly, and Jun has angles where Sho’s body decided to stretch, but he loves a challenge. “Perfect,” he says, and drags Sho by the shirt to the bathroom counter.
Tomorrow morning, Jun thinks, Sho will wake up and count all his minor injuries from this moment. He will have a horizon-line bruise on his hip where the edge of the counter dug into his skin, and a butterfly-shaped tattoo of purple on his other hip where Jun hung on to him, rocking, so desperate he felt almost silly. Maybe he’ll have welts on his shoulders, still, track marks created by Jun’s nails.
“I’ve never gotten off in a bathroom,” Sho says, and there is laughter in his voice. He’s watching Jun fumble with their belt buckles—suddenly the most complex contraptions in the universe. “Do you do this a lot, Jun?”
“Yes—no,” Jun growls, and looks up to glare at Sho. “Are you going to help me or what?”
“I’d rather watch you struggle,” Sho says, but reaches down anyway and tugs Jun’s belt off easily, then his own. The buttons on jeans go next, two quick finger movements, and the boxers are simple pulls of cotton down cold knees. Within a minute they’re both naked from the waist down, clothes kicked to all sides of the bathroom, and Jun wastes no time in sliding his cock against Sho’s.
Sho’s surprised groan is one of the happiest sounds Jun has ever heard in his life, and he can’t stop to think about anything except the hysterical, hazy pleasure shooting through his skin. He takes a hold of Sho’s hip, thumb digging into bone, and rocks forward carefully. Sho groans again, and this time lets his head fall back against the bathroom mirror. “Fuck,” he says, teeth gritted, and scrambles for Jun, finally finding the hem of his shirt and sliding a hand up to his side, then to his back. “Matsumoto, what the hell are you waiting for, keep—.”
The rest of the sentence dissolves in a shocked inhale as Jun rocks forward again, and again, and this time doesn’t pause, not even when he feels Sho’s nails dig into his shoulders or when he can feel Sho’s own hips moving along to his own, missing the rhythm at first and then finding it, then falling out of it again as he scratches harder at Jun’s back (a reversal of scars, Jun thinks; he’ll have to get up tomorrow and examine at his own back in the mirror).
“Can’t keep up?” Jun breathes in Sho’s mouth as their lips slide over each other—not quite a kiss, but they’re a little otherwise preoccupied.
“You’re better at this than I thought you’d be,” Sho says, and the effort it takes for him to get all those words out in a coherent sentence drives Jun absolutely crazy. It also shows him that he’s not doing quite enough, so he reaches down and takes both their cocks in one hand as best he can, sliding up and down a few times, trying to keep himself in check long enough to see Sho’s mouth fall open into a wonderfully misshapen O.
But Jun can’t hold it in for long, and the next thing he knows he’s panting into Sho’s t-shirt, hand still jerking the both of them, except instead of the perfect rhythm from earlier he’s simply tugging now for the sake of moving one step closer to coming all over the bathroom counter and their shirts and his hand. He imagines what that might look like—Sho’s loud groan filling every nook of Jun’s small bathroom as he bucks into Jun’s hand and comes all over his fingers, warm and sticky and wet, his other hand using Jun as a support to keep from falling to the linoleum in a heap of breaths and sweat. So much for a thesis defense, Jun thinks, grinning slightly as Sho whimpers to the still air around them.
When Sho finally does come there’s hardly any sound, just a hasty grunt of a warning to Jun’s ear and then Jun feels it in Sho’s quivering hips and the hot, wet stickiness suddenly filling his palm and covering his fingers. It’s a heavy silence that seems to wrap around Jun, covering him and bringing him closer to Sho—as if they could even be closer at this point; Jun is practically climbing him—and then Jun feels it, Sho’s hand quickly pushing between them to wrap around Jun’s cock and he can’t even register how Sho’s fingers got there before he’s buckling forward, muffling his cries into Sho’s t-shirt and the quiet stillness around them. He only manages not to hit the floor thanks to Sho’s hands, which are also sticky and shaky, but still very much there.
“We didn’t use the condoms,” is the first thing Sho says after a long time. He sounds like he’s just run a marathon. “And my hip hurts.”
“Name your bruises after me,” Jun says, and kisses Sho before he can say anything about that.
--
After Sho and Jun have had sex five times in a month (and during the last couple of times finally doing it properly by making it to the bed and using a condom), Jun decides that he and Sho are now officially a thing. This means, of course, that they aren’t really dating, and they’re certainly not a couple. But they are a thing.
So he tells two people: Nino and Aiba.
Aiba and Jun met just last year, not at a party or a fraternity function but on the top floor of the library. Jun had been trying to cram a semester’s worth of notes about gender roles in Shakespearean plays—something he would never do again, as he can now recite select lines of Twelfth Night after about five shots of whiskey—and he’d needed a break.
All Jun remembers from that night is getting up from his study table to get a cup of coffee, and then colliding with a long boy with limbs that seemed to go everywhere at once. Jun was too tired to look where he was going and Aiba, well, Aiba was just there. Jun quickly learned that Aiba normally ran into things simply by being.
“That’s my reproductive system!” Aiba had yelped, too loud for the library. “Sorry—sorry—I meant that’s the book that landed on your foot, not my actual reproductive system—hey, are you okay?”
The librarian found Aiba and scolded him like she was his grandmother, as if it was her sole duty in life to tell Aiba off for being too loud. Jun was about to tiptoe away and pretend like he wasn’t a part of the guilty party, but then he heard Aiba laugh and turned around just in time to see him smile and bow at the librarian.
It was the laugh, and then the smile, that made Jun stay. He couldn’t lie about it then, and he can’t lie about it now: Aiba is beautiful. Not just pretty, but beautiful in the way where you just couldn’t help but stop and stare at him, or make him laugh just to hear the sound ringing in your ears forever. So Jun stuck around after the collision and helped Aiba with his books, and then Aiba went and bought the biggest cup of coffee he could find on campus with as many shots as espresso as he was allowed to ask for.
“I bet strangers buy you coffee all the time,” Aiba had said when he gave the cup to Jun. “You’re in that frat, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Jun had said, and offered a sip to Aiba. “Are you in one?”
“I was.” And Aiba had laughed. “That didn’t work out.”
Jun failed his test the next day because he stayed up for too long listening to Aiba tell his story about how he’d accidentally rushed the Christian frat freshman year and only realized it when the brothers kept telling him to “have a blessed day.” (“I just thought they were being nice! Oh, and they had these fish magnets on their car bumpers,” he’d said, and drew one on a piece of paper. “God fish or something.”) He’d decided that hearing Aiba talk about his biology classes and being pre-med was more interesting than reading about Desdemona in Othello. And even if Aiba did ask Jun if he thought it was possible to ride an ice floe all the way from Hokkaido to Tokyo Bay, Jun still doesn’t regret anything that happened that night.
In fact, if Jun had the choice, he would marry Aiba and have babies with Sho.
“You can’t have babies with Sho-chan, Matsujun,” Aiba says now, chin perched atop a stack of medical textbooks he just got from the health sciences library. “That’s physiologically impossible.”
Jun rolls his eyes. “You can be the godfather,” he says, and watches Aiba go from skeptical to positively beaming in no time. “Now what were you saying about physiologically impossible?”
“Men can’t have babies now,” Aiba says, and then purses his lips. “But science does great things, you know! One day that might be different.”
Jun is about to comment on how excruciatingly painful that sounds and maybe he should just adopt babies with Sho instead, but Aiba isn’t finished.
“Have you told Oguri-kun about this?”
“Not yet,” Jun lies. He wasn’t planning on telling Shun at all, mainly because he doesn’t feel that Shun should be rewarded with juicy secrets until the whole pregnancy scare thing is figured out (also, it hurts Jun to say it, but he’s been dreading the day he has to help Shun shop for baby booties and diapers).
But Jun just feels like he can’t tell Shun. It’s not so much that he doesn’t want to—something inside Jun just finds his fling with Sho something that should be kept a secret from Shun for as long as possible. Shun is busy with his classes, and has acting gigs on the side, and now he has to worry about potential Yamada Yuu babies running around. Plus, they haven’t spoken to each other about things like this in ages—Jun didn’t even know Shun liked Yuu—and just coming out of the blue with “Hey Shun, so Sho and I are a thing, isn’t that awesome” seems strange nowadays. And now that they’re seniors, Jun feels like he shouldn’t have to trouble Shun with things that don’t concern him.
“Matsujun?” When Jun looks up, Aiba is frowning. “Are you okay?”
“I miss Shun,” Jun says. It’s not an answer, but he knows Aiba will go with it. “Is that weird?”
“Not really,” Aiba says, and moves his stack of books to the side so he can see Jun better. “You guys haven’t been hanging out that much lately. It makes sense.”
Jun stares hard at the title of the first book in Aiba’s stack, A Comprehensive History of Blood Diseases and their Origins, before answering. “He thinks he got somebody pregnant.”
“Oooooooh,” Aiba says, eyes as wide as the blown-up blood cells on his book cover. “Is he going to have to take out another loan to help with child support?”
“I hope not,” Jun says, and sighs heavily, dropping his chin to his chest. “He’s really nervous, though.”
“You know how to cheer him up? Throw him a maybe-baby shower!” Aiba suggests. “Or not,” he adds after seeing Jun’s face.
He would never throw Shun a maybe-baby shower, mainly because Jun never wants to plan anyone’s baby shower in his life, and he would rather eat his own slippers than participate in those godawful games. But he does love planning parties, especially if they get to be held at PA Phi. That’s his territory, and Jun knows it well.
And Shun does love parties. If Jun threw a party for Shun at the frat and invited all their friends, it would make him forget about this pregnancy scare business and cheer him up like nothing else could.
“If I threw a party at the frat, would you come?”
Aiba tilts his head, wondering. “Hm,” he hums. “Only if you promise me that you’ll tell Oguri-kun about Sho.”
He holds out his pinky.
Jun stares at it. “Seriously?”
“Matsujun,” Aiba warns. “The pinky promise is binding. And there’s no chance of bacterial transfusions that you might get with a blood pact! It’s strong and safe.”
Jun can’t argue with that. He touches his pinky finger to the tip of Aiba’s. “Fine. Done.”
“No,” Aiba says firmly, and grabs Jun’s pinky with his own, tangling them together in a tight grip. “Now it’s done.”
Jun likes to live up to his promises, especially if he makes them with Aiba. But this one may be a little harder to keep.
--
Barely a block away from the house, Jun gets mugged.
Well—not mugged, per se. But Jun is pretty sure having someone tiny and quick jump on him from behind isn’t a friendly gesture, even if they back off right away and don’t go anywhere near his wallet.
“Sorry,” the small person says. “I couldn’t help it.”
Jun glares. “Really? Did you really have to jump on me?”
“You’re cute and jumpable,” Becky says, and plows right on before Jun can say anything about that. “Are you on the way back to the house? Can I come? I have some business.”
“Can’t you do that at your own house?”
Becky points to the pink Greek letters—Zeta Tau Delta Pi—on her lime green tank top and then makes two thumbs down. “You know the rules,” she says. “No booze, no boys.”
ZTDPi is PA Phi’s sister sorority, and probably not half as fun a place to be if you can’t drink or fool around inside the house. At least, that’s how Jun thinks of it. He’s known Becky for a couple of years now ever since she joined ZTDPi during the spring rush of her freshman year, and now that she’s the president and Jun is soon to be president of his frat, they’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other pretty soon.
Not that Jun particularly minds. He doesn’t think he’s ever met anyone who could keep his brothers as much in check as Becky does, except maybe Sho.
“Who do you need to talk to? It’s not official business, or I would know about it.”
“You don’t know everything, Matsujun,” Becky says, and pokes Jun in the chest with her index finger. “I just wanted to check our calendar with yours and see if we could do a mixer.”
“We could,” Jun says, and rubs the spot on his chest where Becky poked him. “I was just thinking of having a party or something.”
“Perfect!” Becky claps her hands, and Jun watches her long, brown ponytail swing behind her like a tail. “We can tell the rush girls it’s mandatory. They can take some boys off your hands.”
Rush. Jun knew he was forgetting something. So far, he hasn’t done anything to help out the fall recruitment chair, but he hasn’t asked for any help so far—Toma is independent enough, despite the sleepwalking. But he has no idea of the size of the group, or if there’s anyone shady that he might need to weed out. On the other hand, there could be some spunky underclassmen who could take on leadership for next year.
Jun takes rush seriously. After all, that’s how he met Shun.
“Come on,” Jun says, and turns on his heel. “Let’s talk about this at the house.”
Where Jun walks, Becky skips. She knows exactly where the house is, and bounds ahead of Jun humming a song that she probably just made up on the spot. By the time he catches up to her she’s sitting on the wooden bleachers in front of the house, swinging her legs back and forth to the tune in her head.
“Hey,” Becky says when Jun passes her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What are you talking about?” Jun is starting to wonder if he’s just got a giant zit in the middle of his face that tells everyone about all the problems in his life.
“You seem weird,” she says, suddenly standing and leaning in close to his face. Jun can feel her breath tickling his neck, and he feels like she’s going to swoon into him at any second.
“I am no such thing,” Jun says, and pulls back from Becky’s stare. “Also, you’re in my bubble.”
“Becky-san, you can come into my bubble,” says a tiny voice from the porch, and when Jun turns he sees wide eyes and a mess of wiry bedhead—at three in the afternoon. “It’s open.”
The noise Becky makes is somewhere between a snort and an offended huff. Jun doesn’t have the mental capacity to deal with an extremely sexually repressed Maru right now, but just then the door opens and Nino appears with a can of Red Bull in one hand and a donut in the other.
“I heard that,” he says to Maru. “Man, we can’t take you anywhere.”
“That’s what Ryo-chan said too,” Maru says, and Jun can feel his voice slipping into a whine.
“Then don’t invite people into your bubble.” Jun pushes past Nino and Maru and leads Becky into the hallway entrance of the house with an outstretched hand, even though she knows exactly where to go. He’s just concerned that she might get eaten by Maru.
The business office of the frat is right off the main entranceway, sandwiched between a wall of obnoxious PA Phi tapestries and a large frame of the current brothers of the frat. Sho’s face is at the very top, next to Jun’s as the president-elect and Shun’s as vice president. (But Jun is wearing the best tie. There has never been any competition for that.)
“That’s a nice tie,” Becky says, pointing to Jun’s picture on the frame. “Can I borrow it?”
“No,” Jun says, and pushes open the door to the office without even knocking.
Sho is sitting on the desk—not on the chair, but on the desk—with his glasses on and his shirt undone to the second button. He has his legs crossed, and when he sees Jun he smiles.
Jun grins back. Then Becky walks into the room, and Sho drops a manila envelope on his lap.
“Wow,” she says, and looks from Jun to Sho and back again. “You guys are really obvious, you know that?”
“Good afternoon,” Sho says, clearing his throat. “Welcome to the business office.”
“You mean welcome to the brothel,” Becky says, and sits down in Sho’s plush swivel chair behind the desk. “So can we have this mixer I was talking about? Matsujun says he loves the idea.”
Sho raises his eyebrows at Jun. “Will this be a rush event?”
“Yes,” Jun lies, and then shrugs. “Or a Shun event.”
Surprisingly this makes sense to Sho, but Jun wouldn’t expect anything less from someone who’s been the president of a fraternity for the past two years. “Okay,” he says.
Becky has since crossed her legs in the chair and is swiveling around. “That’s it?” she says, voice fading in and out as she circles around.
“It’s for rush, so it’s fine.” Sho hands the manila envelope to Jun and stands up. “If you break my chair, Becky, you’re going to have to pay for it.”
“Put it on ZTDPi’s tab,” she says, and swivels around one more time before sliding off, albeit a little unsteadily. “Next weekend, then?”
“Done,” Jun says, without even thinking about it. Not that he needs to—he’s thrown together events in hours. They weren’t spectacular, but they got done. And a week is more than enough time for him to create a party that will make Shun so excited he’ll forget all about pregnancies and periods.
“Lovely,” Becky chirps. She salutes both Jun and Sho before stepping out of the doorway.
“Let me walk you to the door,” Sho calls, but Becky waves him off.
“I think you have more important things to take care off,” she says.
Jun loves Becky. He also loves Sho, but that’s a little easier for him to show right now.
--
“And then he had a manila envelope on his crotch,” Nino repeats. “And then you guys did it on the desk.”
“Yes.” Jun is positively beaming. He’s showing more teeth right now than he ever has. “My back hurts. I think I was on a stapler.”
“Wow,” Nino says, “you’re stupid.”
Maybe he is, but all Jun definitely knows right now is that Sho is wonderful and the sun is shining every day, even though they’re in the basement and the only lights down here are the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and the faint blue auras coming from the computers. But he’s still sure it’s shining.
“Your face right now is too much for me,” Nino continues. “Please leave.”
“No, wait,” Jun says, and he’s still grinning like an idiot but he really does have a serious question for Nino. “Can you start handling social media for the party?”
“I thought it was a rush event.” Nino opens his laptop and Jun watches the light flood his face. “Do you really want the rest of the world to show up at this party?”
“No. That’s why we’re going to have bouncers. Matsuken for the front door and Hina for the back—you know, the usual.”
“Fine,” Nino says. “I hope you’re happy when there are hordes of anonymous, unconscious freshmen on our porch, because I’m not cleaning them up.”
“No one will be unconscious,” Jun says, and he means it. He’s seen Sho deal with the police too many times, and he definitely doesn’t have enough patience to deal with them anymore. But most importantly he’s not about to let a bunch of eighteen-year-olds pass out within fifty yards of his frat house. If that happens, they will pay.
Nino sends a message to the closed PA Phi Facebook group:
there will be a mixer the last weekend in oct. if you are rushing either paphi or ztdpi this is MANDATORY. usual house rules apply: if you don’t find yourself in a bed by the time the party winds down, get the hell out. we have a lot of bushes in the yard and people have told us they’re pretty comfy. NO PUKING ON THE LAWN. if you don’t like our PJ, we don’t like you. if you are underage we are not taking care of your ass so come with someone who will. also prez-elect jun is now claimed so if you planned on showing up just to get in his panties it’s not gonna work. see you there. – x
“Who is ‘x’?” Jun says, squinting at the screen. “And I think you typed ‘pants’ wrong.”
“I know exactly what I typed,” Nino says. He hits the send button before Jun can say anything else. “And there’s no way in hell I would put my name out there for the entire world to know I’m the one writing the messages.” Jun knows that this is Nino’s way of saying that he likes to see girls wildly running past him at parties, wondering where the mysterious X could be hiding.
“Now go away,” he continues, and turns away from Jun. “I have to write a program that will illegally transfer tons of data from the tower in the CompSci lab to my new hard drive. And you should go make up with Shun or something.”
Jun pretends to be affronted, but he knows there was no way he could hide from Nino in the first place. He’s just like that—he knows everything, even though he hardly talks to anyone and doesn’t get out of the house all that much.. “We don’t need to make up,” Jun says. “We just haven’t talked in two weeks.”
“Yeah, well,” Nino says, and Jun watches him boot up a computer that is bigger than his entire dresser. “That’s pretty much the same thing with you two.”
He’s right, and Jun knows this well, but he’s not about to give in so easily. “I’ll wait until the party,” he says.
“So then wait until the party.” In the blue glow of the computer screen, Nino looks positively evil. “Wait until then, and then watch Shun freak out about how you’re ignoring him on top of his freaking out that Yamada might be pregnant. So he’s going to get totally wasted, and he’s going to find someone else to comfort him, and depending on how that turns out he might have to start counting two sets of periods. All because you waited a week.”
Jun stares. He can’t think of anything to say.
“Yeah, you’re welcome,” Nino says, and hands Jun a can of Red Bull. “Now close your mouth and get out of here.”
Part Two
Title: For the Love of the Brotherhood
Pairing(s): Jun/Shun, Jun/Sho, Jun/Ohno/Ryo, slight onesided Jun/Aiba, Nino/Riisa, Shun/Yamada Yuu, slight Aiba/Yamada Yuu
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~17,000
Summary: College AU. When people ask Jun why he decided to join a fraternity in the first place, his answer is always the same: Shun. Now he's the president-elect of Pi Alpha Phi, and senior year is about to get way out of hand.
Notes: Written for 
lysanderpuck during the inaugural 
kitto_slutparty fic exchange! YAY! Apparently this won the exchange. (No, it wasn't a competition. Original post here.)
A note: all my knowledge of fraternities and sororities comes from my continuing education at a wonderful American public university. God bless state schools. To quickly explain a few terms: "rush" is the recruitment period for students, usually freshmen and sophomores, to join frats/sororities. Many of the frats have special events just for rush so that people can get to know them better, meet the brother/sisterhood, get a feel for the atmosphere, etc. Pi Alpha Phi is a real fraternity and Alpha Delta Pi (ADPi) is a real sorority, but ZTDPi is fictional. PJ stands for party juice and is usually a bunch of different juices mixed with vodka; if you're at a fancy ('fancy") party they soak fruit in it. Also, "no booze no boys" is a real sorority house rule. At least round these parts. And finally: loads of love, love, LOVE to my beta 
aeslis because 1) she is just magical and 2) she beta'd 17k in like an hour. WOAH.
It isn’t the penises drawn on his mirror in shaving cream that concern Jun. It isn’t even the fact that there are a pair of boxers on the floor he knows aren’t his own. And the gaping, wide-open bedroom window doesn’t even make him blink.
“Where,” Jun mumbles, “the hell are my slippers?”
These slippers are the most wonderful things to have ever graced Jun’s delicate feet. (True, he runs track with the junior varsity team, but that’s nothing a personal footbath and European salves won’t help. Also, runners: hot.) He’s had them for years and the fluff lining hasn’t matted down, even after long nights of pacing back and forth trying to figure out whether or not drama was still the right major for him. The majestic violet color hadn’t faded, either, and his embroidered initials still stood out in all their glory.
Jun considers them his best and most fabulous friends. And someone had taken them right under his nose.
Pants be damned, Jun swings open the door to his single room and scans the hallway—nothing but a few red cups rolling lazily on their sides, beer still trickling from the rims. A peek over the staircase into the main lobby doesn’t give him any clues, either.
Shun walks by then, wearing a bathrobe that was once white but is now an odd color of green-gray.
“Hey,” he says, voice hoarse. “You might want to check the roof.”
Fuck.
Jun is halfway up the stairs in a second before he stops and turns around. Shun is still standing on the second floor balcony, half-asleep and probably still drunk.
“Also,” Jun yells, loud enough so that Shun wakes up and also so that the entire frat hears, “the penises on my mirror and the underwear on my floor better be gone by the time I come back downstairs.”
He pauses just to hear doors bang open frantically and more pantsless guys scamper into the hallway toward Jun’s room. Sometimes, he thinks, this brotherhood thing isn’t so bad.
--
When people ask Jun why he decided to join the frat in the first place, his answer is always the same: Shun.
They had met freshman year at a mixer organized by Pi Alpha Phi. Shun was rushing and wanted to look good, but he ended up standing too close to the keg and instead ended up looking good and drunk. From here, the story gets a little fuzzy, and Shun has his own version: he seduced Matsumoto Jun with a crooked fingertip and a red cup of warm beer.
But Jun knows better, even if he doesn’t really remember that night. One, he would never drink warm beer. And two, Jun would never fall for the crooked-finger trick. Not even if he was wasted out of his mind would he ever give in to something as stupid as a finger tilting ninety degrees.
So he doesn’t know how it happened, but he does remember making out with Shun in a corner of that mixer, everything dark and sweaty and questionable, the room a blurry pulsing mess, the music too loud and pounding in his ears. His contacts were sticking to his eyes and his hair probably looked like a dead, wet sheep but at least he was making out with someone who looked halfway decent.
Nothing happened after that, because Jun still didn’t know how to take people back to his room without being awkward or having them turn around and leave right away anyway because his roommate Nino always left his gaming stuff out in a messy pile that nobody could get through without tripping. And Jun really didn’t mind that so much in the daytime because he liked playing Mario Kart in between classes with his roommate, but it sucked otherwise.
But then during the summer Jun and Shun took beginning economics together and learned that the opportunity cost of skipping class was getting to make out on the quad when there was no one around. Shun was a member of the frat by then, full-fledged, all his dues paid and all his ridiculous PA Phi-themed merchandise bought.
By the time sophomore year started, Shun kept ending up in Jun’s bed and Jun kept finding himself at frat events because he finally had a friend with tons of benefits and he didn’t want to let that go.
And then in January, a week before spring rush started, Shun was taking off his jeans in Jun’s bed and Jun was about ready to go down when Shun suddenly sat up.
Jun was not happy. He did not appreciate being stopped in the middle of such an important activity, and he was already pissed that Shun was wearing boat shoes with no socks. “What?”
“Do me a favor,” Shun said.
Jun took a moment to think about what kind of kinky things Shun might ask him to do, and then decided he wouldn’t mind a lot of them, so he shrugged. “Okay.”
“Rush next week,” he’d said, and Jun was about to put all his clothes on and go, but Shun was still talking. “I’m going to be on the frat committee so you’ll be seeing a lot less of me if you don’t join.”
“Well,” Jun said, and thought about it. “Do I get anything else?”
He hadn’t needed any more prodding—he really, really liked Shun—but he might as well try for more incentives.
“Attractive guys,” Shun said quickly. It was like he’d already made the list. “Looks good on your resume. Your own room in a proper house for senior year. Fancy formals where you can wear a suit and you get as much punch as you want—.”
“—Done,” Jun said. Shun knew him too well. “Done.”
Before this, he’d never really thought about Greek life—joining it or otherwise. He’d gone to a few Greek-sponsored mixers and found himself in the beer-stained basement of Sigma Nu one morning with a killer crick in his neck, but that was as far as his experiences went and he just wasn’t interested in wearing pastel everything and buying bowties and that whole hazing business. It wasn’t his scene.
But Jun takes his friends seriously, and Shun asked him to do this just so they could keep seeing each other. How was Jun supposed to say no? Blame it on the haze of the moment and the liquid fire pulsing under his skin, blame it on all that inevitable freshman naiveté—but Jun knows that he did the right thing. Back then, at eighteen, he would have done anything for Shun. He still would.
--
Three years later, Jun is president-elect of his university’s PA Phi chapter. He has to wait another semester to be properly sworn in as president, but he’s in no hurry. For now he just wants his slippers, and maybe a stable boyfriend.
Things have changed a bit since freshman year. It’s not that he’s fallen in love with Greek life or anything—everyone is still a douche, the party juice no longer has any taste, and the sorority girls aren’t even that cute—but he’s made a lot of friends this way, and he was able to move into the house a year early. He kept his drama major but added an ethnomusicology minor, and if he finds any class difficult, there is always someone in the frat to help him out.
Like when he had to take a required computer science class. His freshman roommate and computer science major Ninomiya had joined sophomore year after Jun convinced him the frat needed a digital archivist and that he could have the entire basement to himself.
“J,” Nino says, poking his head out of the trapdoor that leads to the roof. He has the worst bedhead Jun has ever seen and he’s as pale as a sheet of paper. “Toma told me I would be able to find you on the roof.”
“You look like shit,” Jun says, balancing on the tiles. He can see his slippers perched on the other end of the roof, as if seated there to watch the sunrise. “Where have you been?”
“CompSci exam.” Nino yawns and squints hard against the bright lights of the outdoors. “I’ve been awake for like thirty hours.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“I’ve been studying for thirty hours,” Nino says, and it comes out in a half-hiss, half-growl. “I took a ten-minute nap and dreamt about Fibonacci numbers and initialization files.”
Jun loses his footing for a second and watches a pile of leaves flutter to the ground. “Speak a language I understand.”
“I don’t want to hook up with you, sorry.” Nino snorts loudly as Jun turns around to glare at him, but not before losing his grip again. More leaves scatter. “Also, can you tell me about that guy you took into your room last night?”
There isn’t a thing Jun can tell Nino about the guy from last night because he doesn’t remember a minute of it. He pretends to think as he crawls slowly across the rooftop, trying not to upset anymore debris or even knock his slippers off the edge. “Tell me who put my slippers out here first.”
Nino’s head bobs out of the sunlight for a second. “Christ, it’s hot.”
That isn’t an answer, but Jun has slunk halfway across the roof now. He’s almost there. Just an outstretched hand and a little lunge, and—
“Matsumoto.”
Fuck. Again. Startled, Jun’s foot bangs against a loose tile, and the shock sends one of his slippers plummeting to the world below. He scrambles forward and snatches the other one, but not before bruising his ribcage in the process.
Had the voice been Nino’s, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. Jun wouldn’t have even turned around. But it belongs to the current president of the frat, and Jun has to keep up appearances, even if he isn’t wearing pants.
“Sakurai-kun,” Jun says as calmly as possible. “Good morning.”
“It is a good morning.” Sho smiles widely. “Listen—I have to practice my thesis defense later. Care to join me? I need an audience, and Nino says he would much rather enjoy gouging his ear tunnels out and listening to Hello Project girlbands all day.”
“The old Morning Musume stuff isn’t so bad,” Jun says, very serious, and then clears his throat. “What’s your thesis on?”
Except Jun doesn’t need to ask: he knows. Everyone in the frat knows. Hell, Jun wouldn’t be surprised if the entire campus knew, including the faculty and staff. Sakurai Sho is the type of guy who doesn’t necessarily broadcast what he’s doing to the rest of the world, and yet the rest of the world still manages to find out. He is just that loved—or wanted.
“It’s an exploration of the sociocultural changes that American rappers have created throughout East Asia,” Sho says, and Jun pretends that makes sense to him. “Do you know anything about it?”
“Tupac,” Jun says right before blushing a furious shade of pink. Sho just smiles, and behind him Nino pretends to vomit all over himself and the roof.
“By the way, nice slipper,” Sho says then, nodding to Jun’s lap. Jun hopes he actually means nice lack of pants. “I’ll get the other one for you.”
And he does. Sho is a gentleman at heart, and Jun has always liked nice boys.
--
Luckily the underwear on Jun’s floor is gone when he gets back to his room, but whoever rinsed the shaving cream dicks off the mirror didn’t do a very good job. For a split second Jun thinks about recruiting the next pledger he sees to wipe the rest of it off, but decides against it. He’s already exhausted and he hasn’t even been awake for an hour. Finding a whiny freshman would just be more work that he doesn’t want to deal with.
As he runs the water over a washcloth, someone knocks on the door. “Need help?”
Jun turns around. “Not from you,” he says, but without much conviction. “What’s up?”
Shun shrugs. He’s still wearing the bathrobe, and Jun really wants to tell him to wash it, but the poor kid looks like he can barely hold himself up. “I came to ask if you knew what the hell I did last night, because I sure don’t know.”
“And I would?” Jun swipes the mirror down the middle in one long stroke. “I don’t even think we were together last night.”
He doesn’t mention how the two of them haven’t gone out together in months. Jun’s not sure when things changed, but he remembers a time when he wasn’t even able to leave his dorm on a Friday night without texting Shun first and asking where he was going. But lately Shun has been going out with the other guys in the frat to parties that Jun just isn’t interested in.
“Yeah,” Shun says, voice distant for a second, but then he reaches forward and grabs the washcloth out of Jun’s hand. “You’re too slow. Move over.”
Jun doesn’t fight. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and watches Shun clear the mirror in two easy movements. “Why are you asking, though? What’d you do?”
“Um.” Shun pretends to focus wiping away a difficult spot that isn’t really there. “I told you, I don’t know, but.”
Jun has known Shun for far too long to put up with this. Also, he can guarantee that whatever the story is, he’s heard worse. This is inevitable in Greek life, especially if the president of the Inter-Fraternity Council is a certain Akanishi Jin. “But what? Don’t tell me you knocked someone up.”
It’s supposed to be a joke. But Shun isn’t laughing.
“Shun,” Jun says.
“That girl with the really nice hair,” Shun says, still focusing on the spot that doesn’t exist. “In ADPi.”
“Kuroki Meisa?” Jun tries not to laugh. “She actually hooked up with you?”
“No,” Shun says, voice low. He looks behind him, but there isn’t anyone else in this house besides Nino who would dare show up in Jun’s room without permission. “I mean—she does have really nice hair. But no, someone else.”
Jun has to think about it. He’s extremely picky about hair, whereas Shun will grow his out to a weird mullet and think it looks good.
But he does have someone in mind.
“Yuu?” Jun guesses. “Yamada Yuu?”
Shun ducks his head. When he looks up, his smile is a little desperate, and mostly pleading.
“Jun,” he says, “do you know how to count periods?”
--
Jun does not know how to count periods, nor does he ever want to know, and he can make sure of this by never sleeping with a girl. So far, he’s doing a good job of it (though he has to admit that if Kuroki Meisa ever got off her damn high horse and yanked her head out of the clouds, he would probably do her in a heartbeat).
He leaves Shun in the bathroom, promising that he’ll be back in a second with someone they trust who might actually know a thing or two about what happens when condoms break during sex with girls. Just the thought of that—in fact, the thought of a vagina—makes Jun a little sick, but he tries not to show it as he tugs on a pair of jeans and steps into the hallway.
“Ah,” Sho says, stepping a little clumsily out of the way so as not to collide with Jun. “You shouldn’t open your door into the hall, you know.”
Jun’s throat immediately constricts. Sho has put on his glasses and is carrying a thick binder stuffed with papers. He looks exactly like he just stepped out of one of Jun’s biggest fantasies, except he’s wearing clothes. “Sorry,” he says, attempting to sound as normal as possible. “You’re not hurt, right?”
Sho shakes his head. “I’m fine, but next time, watch out.”
“For what?”
“For me.”
Jun feels like he has been hit by lightning and confusion all at the same time: watch out for Sho? Well, he always has. But wait. What did that mean? Why did he say it? Was he being literal? Of course Jun should watch out for Sho in the hallway when he blindly opens his door; he should watch out for everyone, especially Toma who tends to sleepwalk. But Jun has a feeling Sho isn’t talking about safety.
At least, not hallway safety.
“I will,” Jun says carefully, like he’s practicing for a presentation. “Were you on your way to practice for your thesis defense?”
“I was,” Sho says, and shifts his binder to the front of his pants. “I was on my way here, actually.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Jun now has to remember how to successfully get someone from the very tricky outside-his-bedroom-zone into the extremely easy onto-his-bed-area in broad daylight. This is difficult for two reasons: one, he hasn’t done this in a long time because usually his partners just walk into the room on their own, and two, he is so turned on he can’t even think properly. He feels like a big ball of thunder and heat, heat all the way from the tips of his toes to his hairline, and he swears that if it weren’t eleven o’clock in the morning and his brothers weren’t up and about doing non-sexy things at this non-sexy hour he would just tear Sho’s clothes off in the hallway and take him on the slatted wood floor.
But it’s eleven and Jun is sweating and hard and confused, and Shun—shit! Shun is still in the bathroom. God, Jun thinks, I am an awful friend. “Sakurai-kun, um…”
Sho raises his eyebrows. “Do you have plans?”
“No,” Jun says quickly, even though the answer is yes, I have plans and a friend in my bathroom who needs to know how to count periods. Thinking about that calms him down a little. “It’s just—.”
The door bangs behind him suddenly, like someone has run into it.
“Sho-kun! Christ. Jun, you’re the best, of course Sho-kun would know.”
Jun has never felt more horrified in his life. “Shun,” he starts, but the rest of the sentence gets stuck in his throat.
But Shun isn’t listening. Of course not, Jun thinks, he has bigger things on his mind. But here is Jun, also with big things on his mind (Sho’s binder is one of them, followed by what’s behind it), and he can’t get over the sheer shock that he was just cockblocked by his best friend.
On the other hand, Sho has switched gears without even batting an eyelash. “Oguri,” he says, voice back to its normal volume. “You needed help with something?”
“It could possibly be something,” Shun says, and joins Sho in the hallway, leaving Jun with a crushed spirit and an extremely disappointed boner. “Or not. I hope not, anyway.”
“Seems serious,” Sho says, glancing once at Jun before putting an arm around Shun. “Come to my room and we’ll talk about it.”
Shun looks back at Jun, wide-eyed and almost apologetic. Did I interrupt something?
The urge to smack Shun to the floor and beat him with a slipper (a normal one, not one of his nice ones) is fierce, but Jun reminds himself: broken condom. Broken condom. Broken condom, pregnancy scare, Shun needs him.
Jun shrugs. Nope, he mouths back, and watches Sho’s ass disappear behind a corner.
--
But really though: Shun interrupted everything, and Jun could kill him. He could also kill him for being in the midst of a pregnancy scare and making Jun worry about things like possible babies and what Shun will do if he has to take out another student loan to pay for child support, but mostly he just wants revenge for the most obvious and brutal cockblock known to man. It was as if Shun had appeared behind Jun with a grin and a blinking neon sign that said I AM HERE TO STOP YOU FROM GETTING IT ON in huge letters.
He has always had bad luck, but this is just a kick in the gut. No—the balls. That would be more appropriate.
The way he sees it now, Jun has two choices: he could jerk off in the bathroom like a horny fifteen-year-old (and from the way he’s been acting, maybe he is and maybe he doesn’t care) or he could find someone to take care of his problem. If he were a rational thinker, Jun would possibly consider starting work on his geology paper or reading the screenplays he has due for next class to distract himself.
But the thought of Sho is persistent, and there is no way he could even sit down for five minutes with his schoolwork without snapping completely. So Jun stalks into his bathroom—
—And hears the door to his room squeak open.
“Shun,” Jun begins, ready to give his best friend the lashing of his life, “I can’t believe—.”
“I can’t believe you think I’m Shun,” Sho says, and Jun hasn’t even made it out of the bathroom before he finds himself against the wall, elbows bruising against cheap plaster as Sho presses up against him. “He’s pretty upset, you know.”
OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL OH MY GOD, Jun thinks, but quickly suppresses the urge to tear off all his clothes at once. “I’m pretty upset with him,” he says instead, fighting to keep his voice at a reasonable level. “I buy all his condoms. You’d think he’d want to use one, they’re free.”
“I did see that box,” Sho says, words dropping low to a growl. “I took the liberty of helping myself to a few.”
“Oh?” Jun’s mouth feels like a desert.
“I thought I’d need some in the near future,” Sho says, and kisses Jun, fire and ice all at once, so hard Jun has to grab a fistful of Sho’s shirt to keep from sliding down the wall. He wonders for a split second if the door to his bedroom is open, and then reconsiders it: of course it isn’t open. It’s Sho. It’s Sakurai-sempai, and he is always one step ahead of the game.
Before this, Jun imagined Sho to kiss the way he acts in class—deliberate and intelligent (but not a show-off), someone who would make a mistake just to remind the world that he’s human. But the real Sho kisses like he just can’t get enough, and Jun feels himself bruising in the lips and the elbows. The real Sho kisses like he’s two steps behind the game and needs to catch up before the timer runs out. It hurts, but Jun likes it. He wouldn’t stop this for the world.
“You’re good with this, right?” Sho says, and Jun feels the words rather than hears them. “This is okay?”
Trust Sho to ask. Jun works a knee in between Sho’s legs and pulls him closer. They don’t align properly, and Jun has angles where Sho’s body decided to stretch, but he loves a challenge. “Perfect,” he says, and drags Sho by the shirt to the bathroom counter.
Tomorrow morning, Jun thinks, Sho will wake up and count all his minor injuries from this moment. He will have a horizon-line bruise on his hip where the edge of the counter dug into his skin, and a butterfly-shaped tattoo of purple on his other hip where Jun hung on to him, rocking, so desperate he felt almost silly. Maybe he’ll have welts on his shoulders, still, track marks created by Jun’s nails.
“I’ve never gotten off in a bathroom,” Sho says, and there is laughter in his voice. He’s watching Jun fumble with their belt buckles—suddenly the most complex contraptions in the universe. “Do you do this a lot, Jun?”
“Yes—no,” Jun growls, and looks up to glare at Sho. “Are you going to help me or what?”
“I’d rather watch you struggle,” Sho says, but reaches down anyway and tugs Jun’s belt off easily, then his own. The buttons on jeans go next, two quick finger movements, and the boxers are simple pulls of cotton down cold knees. Within a minute they’re both naked from the waist down, clothes kicked to all sides of the bathroom, and Jun wastes no time in sliding his cock against Sho’s.
Sho’s surprised groan is one of the happiest sounds Jun has ever heard in his life, and he can’t stop to think about anything except the hysterical, hazy pleasure shooting through his skin. He takes a hold of Sho’s hip, thumb digging into bone, and rocks forward carefully. Sho groans again, and this time lets his head fall back against the bathroom mirror. “Fuck,” he says, teeth gritted, and scrambles for Jun, finally finding the hem of his shirt and sliding a hand up to his side, then to his back. “Matsumoto, what the hell are you waiting for, keep—.”
The rest of the sentence dissolves in a shocked inhale as Jun rocks forward again, and again, and this time doesn’t pause, not even when he feels Sho’s nails dig into his shoulders or when he can feel Sho’s own hips moving along to his own, missing the rhythm at first and then finding it, then falling out of it again as he scratches harder at Jun’s back (a reversal of scars, Jun thinks; he’ll have to get up tomorrow and examine at his own back in the mirror).
“Can’t keep up?” Jun breathes in Sho’s mouth as their lips slide over each other—not quite a kiss, but they’re a little otherwise preoccupied.
“You’re better at this than I thought you’d be,” Sho says, and the effort it takes for him to get all those words out in a coherent sentence drives Jun absolutely crazy. It also shows him that he’s not doing quite enough, so he reaches down and takes both their cocks in one hand as best he can, sliding up and down a few times, trying to keep himself in check long enough to see Sho’s mouth fall open into a wonderfully misshapen O.
But Jun can’t hold it in for long, and the next thing he knows he’s panting into Sho’s t-shirt, hand still jerking the both of them, except instead of the perfect rhythm from earlier he’s simply tugging now for the sake of moving one step closer to coming all over the bathroom counter and their shirts and his hand. He imagines what that might look like—Sho’s loud groan filling every nook of Jun’s small bathroom as he bucks into Jun’s hand and comes all over his fingers, warm and sticky and wet, his other hand using Jun as a support to keep from falling to the linoleum in a heap of breaths and sweat. So much for a thesis defense, Jun thinks, grinning slightly as Sho whimpers to the still air around them.
When Sho finally does come there’s hardly any sound, just a hasty grunt of a warning to Jun’s ear and then Jun feels it in Sho’s quivering hips and the hot, wet stickiness suddenly filling his palm and covering his fingers. It’s a heavy silence that seems to wrap around Jun, covering him and bringing him closer to Sho—as if they could even be closer at this point; Jun is practically climbing him—and then Jun feels it, Sho’s hand quickly pushing between them to wrap around Jun’s cock and he can’t even register how Sho’s fingers got there before he’s buckling forward, muffling his cries into Sho’s t-shirt and the quiet stillness around them. He only manages not to hit the floor thanks to Sho’s hands, which are also sticky and shaky, but still very much there.
“We didn’t use the condoms,” is the first thing Sho says after a long time. He sounds like he’s just run a marathon. “And my hip hurts.”
“Name your bruises after me,” Jun says, and kisses Sho before he can say anything about that.
--
After Sho and Jun have had sex five times in a month (and during the last couple of times finally doing it properly by making it to the bed and using a condom), Jun decides that he and Sho are now officially a thing. This means, of course, that they aren’t really dating, and they’re certainly not a couple. But they are a thing.
So he tells two people: Nino and Aiba.
Aiba and Jun met just last year, not at a party or a fraternity function but on the top floor of the library. Jun had been trying to cram a semester’s worth of notes about gender roles in Shakespearean plays—something he would never do again, as he can now recite select lines of Twelfth Night after about five shots of whiskey—and he’d needed a break.
All Jun remembers from that night is getting up from his study table to get a cup of coffee, and then colliding with a long boy with limbs that seemed to go everywhere at once. Jun was too tired to look where he was going and Aiba, well, Aiba was just there. Jun quickly learned that Aiba normally ran into things simply by being.
“That’s my reproductive system!” Aiba had yelped, too loud for the library. “Sorry—sorry—I meant that’s the book that landed on your foot, not my actual reproductive system—hey, are you okay?”
The librarian found Aiba and scolded him like she was his grandmother, as if it was her sole duty in life to tell Aiba off for being too loud. Jun was about to tiptoe away and pretend like he wasn’t a part of the guilty party, but then he heard Aiba laugh and turned around just in time to see him smile and bow at the librarian.
It was the laugh, and then the smile, that made Jun stay. He couldn’t lie about it then, and he can’t lie about it now: Aiba is beautiful. Not just pretty, but beautiful in the way where you just couldn’t help but stop and stare at him, or make him laugh just to hear the sound ringing in your ears forever. So Jun stuck around after the collision and helped Aiba with his books, and then Aiba went and bought the biggest cup of coffee he could find on campus with as many shots as espresso as he was allowed to ask for.
“I bet strangers buy you coffee all the time,” Aiba had said when he gave the cup to Jun. “You’re in that frat, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Jun had said, and offered a sip to Aiba. “Are you in one?”
“I was.” And Aiba had laughed. “That didn’t work out.”
Jun failed his test the next day because he stayed up for too long listening to Aiba tell his story about how he’d accidentally rushed the Christian frat freshman year and only realized it when the brothers kept telling him to “have a blessed day.” (“I just thought they were being nice! Oh, and they had these fish magnets on their car bumpers,” he’d said, and drew one on a piece of paper. “God fish or something.”) He’d decided that hearing Aiba talk about his biology classes and being pre-med was more interesting than reading about Desdemona in Othello. And even if Aiba did ask Jun if he thought it was possible to ride an ice floe all the way from Hokkaido to Tokyo Bay, Jun still doesn’t regret anything that happened that night.
In fact, if Jun had the choice, he would marry Aiba and have babies with Sho.
“You can’t have babies with Sho-chan, Matsujun,” Aiba says now, chin perched atop a stack of medical textbooks he just got from the health sciences library. “That’s physiologically impossible.”
Jun rolls his eyes. “You can be the godfather,” he says, and watches Aiba go from skeptical to positively beaming in no time. “Now what were you saying about physiologically impossible?”
“Men can’t have babies now,” Aiba says, and then purses his lips. “But science does great things, you know! One day that might be different.”
Jun is about to comment on how excruciatingly painful that sounds and maybe he should just adopt babies with Sho instead, but Aiba isn’t finished.
“Have you told Oguri-kun about this?”
“Not yet,” Jun lies. He wasn’t planning on telling Shun at all, mainly because he doesn’t feel that Shun should be rewarded with juicy secrets until the whole pregnancy scare thing is figured out (also, it hurts Jun to say it, but he’s been dreading the day he has to help Shun shop for baby booties and diapers).
But Jun just feels like he can’t tell Shun. It’s not so much that he doesn’t want to—something inside Jun just finds his fling with Sho something that should be kept a secret from Shun for as long as possible. Shun is busy with his classes, and has acting gigs on the side, and now he has to worry about potential Yamada Yuu babies running around. Plus, they haven’t spoken to each other about things like this in ages—Jun didn’t even know Shun liked Yuu—and just coming out of the blue with “Hey Shun, so Sho and I are a thing, isn’t that awesome” seems strange nowadays. And now that they’re seniors, Jun feels like he shouldn’t have to trouble Shun with things that don’t concern him.
“Matsujun?” When Jun looks up, Aiba is frowning. “Are you okay?”
“I miss Shun,” Jun says. It’s not an answer, but he knows Aiba will go with it. “Is that weird?”
“Not really,” Aiba says, and moves his stack of books to the side so he can see Jun better. “You guys haven’t been hanging out that much lately. It makes sense.”
Jun stares hard at the title of the first book in Aiba’s stack, A Comprehensive History of Blood Diseases and their Origins, before answering. “He thinks he got somebody pregnant.”
“Oooooooh,” Aiba says, eyes as wide as the blown-up blood cells on his book cover. “Is he going to have to take out another loan to help with child support?”
“I hope not,” Jun says, and sighs heavily, dropping his chin to his chest. “He’s really nervous, though.”
“You know how to cheer him up? Throw him a maybe-baby shower!” Aiba suggests. “Or not,” he adds after seeing Jun’s face.
He would never throw Shun a maybe-baby shower, mainly because Jun never wants to plan anyone’s baby shower in his life, and he would rather eat his own slippers than participate in those godawful games. But he does love planning parties, especially if they get to be held at PA Phi. That’s his territory, and Jun knows it well.
And Shun does love parties. If Jun threw a party for Shun at the frat and invited all their friends, it would make him forget about this pregnancy scare business and cheer him up like nothing else could.
“If I threw a party at the frat, would you come?”
Aiba tilts his head, wondering. “Hm,” he hums. “Only if you promise me that you’ll tell Oguri-kun about Sho.”
He holds out his pinky.
Jun stares at it. “Seriously?”
“Matsujun,” Aiba warns. “The pinky promise is binding. And there’s no chance of bacterial transfusions that you might get with a blood pact! It’s strong and safe.”
Jun can’t argue with that. He touches his pinky finger to the tip of Aiba’s. “Fine. Done.”
“No,” Aiba says firmly, and grabs Jun’s pinky with his own, tangling them together in a tight grip. “Now it’s done.”
Jun likes to live up to his promises, especially if he makes them with Aiba. But this one may be a little harder to keep.
--
Barely a block away from the house, Jun gets mugged.
Well—not mugged, per se. But Jun is pretty sure having someone tiny and quick jump on him from behind isn’t a friendly gesture, even if they back off right away and don’t go anywhere near his wallet.
“Sorry,” the small person says. “I couldn’t help it.”
Jun glares. “Really? Did you really have to jump on me?”
“You’re cute and jumpable,” Becky says, and plows right on before Jun can say anything about that. “Are you on the way back to the house? Can I come? I have some business.”
“Can’t you do that at your own house?”
Becky points to the pink Greek letters—Zeta Tau Delta Pi—on her lime green tank top and then makes two thumbs down. “You know the rules,” she says. “No booze, no boys.”
ZTDPi is PA Phi’s sister sorority, and probably not half as fun a place to be if you can’t drink or fool around inside the house. At least, that’s how Jun thinks of it. He’s known Becky for a couple of years now ever since she joined ZTDPi during the spring rush of her freshman year, and now that she’s the president and Jun is soon to be president of his frat, they’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other pretty soon.
Not that Jun particularly minds. He doesn’t think he’s ever met anyone who could keep his brothers as much in check as Becky does, except maybe Sho.
“Who do you need to talk to? It’s not official business, or I would know about it.”
“You don’t know everything, Matsujun,” Becky says, and pokes Jun in the chest with her index finger. “I just wanted to check our calendar with yours and see if we could do a mixer.”
“We could,” Jun says, and rubs the spot on his chest where Becky poked him. “I was just thinking of having a party or something.”
“Perfect!” Becky claps her hands, and Jun watches her long, brown ponytail swing behind her like a tail. “We can tell the rush girls it’s mandatory. They can take some boys off your hands.”
Rush. Jun knew he was forgetting something. So far, he hasn’t done anything to help out the fall recruitment chair, but he hasn’t asked for any help so far—Toma is independent enough, despite the sleepwalking. But he has no idea of the size of the group, or if there’s anyone shady that he might need to weed out. On the other hand, there could be some spunky underclassmen who could take on leadership for next year.
Jun takes rush seriously. After all, that’s how he met Shun.
“Come on,” Jun says, and turns on his heel. “Let’s talk about this at the house.”
Where Jun walks, Becky skips. She knows exactly where the house is, and bounds ahead of Jun humming a song that she probably just made up on the spot. By the time he catches up to her she’s sitting on the wooden bleachers in front of the house, swinging her legs back and forth to the tune in her head.
“Hey,” Becky says when Jun passes her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What are you talking about?” Jun is starting to wonder if he’s just got a giant zit in the middle of his face that tells everyone about all the problems in his life.
“You seem weird,” she says, suddenly standing and leaning in close to his face. Jun can feel her breath tickling his neck, and he feels like she’s going to swoon into him at any second.
“I am no such thing,” Jun says, and pulls back from Becky’s stare. “Also, you’re in my bubble.”
“Becky-san, you can come into my bubble,” says a tiny voice from the porch, and when Jun turns he sees wide eyes and a mess of wiry bedhead—at three in the afternoon. “It’s open.”
The noise Becky makes is somewhere between a snort and an offended huff. Jun doesn’t have the mental capacity to deal with an extremely sexually repressed Maru right now, but just then the door opens and Nino appears with a can of Red Bull in one hand and a donut in the other.
“I heard that,” he says to Maru. “Man, we can’t take you anywhere.”
“That’s what Ryo-chan said too,” Maru says, and Jun can feel his voice slipping into a whine.
“Then don’t invite people into your bubble.” Jun pushes past Nino and Maru and leads Becky into the hallway entrance of the house with an outstretched hand, even though she knows exactly where to go. He’s just concerned that she might get eaten by Maru.
The business office of the frat is right off the main entranceway, sandwiched between a wall of obnoxious PA Phi tapestries and a large frame of the current brothers of the frat. Sho’s face is at the very top, next to Jun’s as the president-elect and Shun’s as vice president. (But Jun is wearing the best tie. There has never been any competition for that.)
“That’s a nice tie,” Becky says, pointing to Jun’s picture on the frame. “Can I borrow it?”
“No,” Jun says, and pushes open the door to the office without even knocking.
Sho is sitting on the desk—not on the chair, but on the desk—with his glasses on and his shirt undone to the second button. He has his legs crossed, and when he sees Jun he smiles.
Jun grins back. Then Becky walks into the room, and Sho drops a manila envelope on his lap.
“Wow,” she says, and looks from Jun to Sho and back again. “You guys are really obvious, you know that?”
“Good afternoon,” Sho says, clearing his throat. “Welcome to the business office.”
“You mean welcome to the brothel,” Becky says, and sits down in Sho’s plush swivel chair behind the desk. “So can we have this mixer I was talking about? Matsujun says he loves the idea.”
Sho raises his eyebrows at Jun. “Will this be a rush event?”
“Yes,” Jun lies, and then shrugs. “Or a Shun event.”
Surprisingly this makes sense to Sho, but Jun wouldn’t expect anything less from someone who’s been the president of a fraternity for the past two years. “Okay,” he says.
Becky has since crossed her legs in the chair and is swiveling around. “That’s it?” she says, voice fading in and out as she circles around.
“It’s for rush, so it’s fine.” Sho hands the manila envelope to Jun and stands up. “If you break my chair, Becky, you’re going to have to pay for it.”
“Put it on ZTDPi’s tab,” she says, and swivels around one more time before sliding off, albeit a little unsteadily. “Next weekend, then?”
“Done,” Jun says, without even thinking about it. Not that he needs to—he’s thrown together events in hours. They weren’t spectacular, but they got done. And a week is more than enough time for him to create a party that will make Shun so excited he’ll forget all about pregnancies and periods.
“Lovely,” Becky chirps. She salutes both Jun and Sho before stepping out of the doorway.
“Let me walk you to the door,” Sho calls, but Becky waves him off.
“I think you have more important things to take care off,” she says.
Jun loves Becky. He also loves Sho, but that’s a little easier for him to show right now.
--
“And then he had a manila envelope on his crotch,” Nino repeats. “And then you guys did it on the desk.”
“Yes.” Jun is positively beaming. He’s showing more teeth right now than he ever has. “My back hurts. I think I was on a stapler.”
“Wow,” Nino says, “you’re stupid.”
Maybe he is, but all Jun definitely knows right now is that Sho is wonderful and the sun is shining every day, even though they’re in the basement and the only lights down here are the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and the faint blue auras coming from the computers. But he’s still sure it’s shining.
“Your face right now is too much for me,” Nino continues. “Please leave.”
“No, wait,” Jun says, and he’s still grinning like an idiot but he really does have a serious question for Nino. “Can you start handling social media for the party?”
“I thought it was a rush event.” Nino opens his laptop and Jun watches the light flood his face. “Do you really want the rest of the world to show up at this party?”
“No. That’s why we’re going to have bouncers. Matsuken for the front door and Hina for the back—you know, the usual.”
“Fine,” Nino says. “I hope you’re happy when there are hordes of anonymous, unconscious freshmen on our porch, because I’m not cleaning them up.”
“No one will be unconscious,” Jun says, and he means it. He’s seen Sho deal with the police too many times, and he definitely doesn’t have enough patience to deal with them anymore. But most importantly he’s not about to let a bunch of eighteen-year-olds pass out within fifty yards of his frat house. If that happens, they will pay.
Nino sends a message to the closed PA Phi Facebook group:
there will be a mixer the last weekend in oct. if you are rushing either paphi or ztdpi this is MANDATORY. usual house rules apply: if you don’t find yourself in a bed by the time the party winds down, get the hell out. we have a lot of bushes in the yard and people have told us they’re pretty comfy. NO PUKING ON THE LAWN. if you don’t like our PJ, we don’t like you. if you are underage we are not taking care of your ass so come with someone who will. also prez-elect jun is now claimed so if you planned on showing up just to get in his panties it’s not gonna work. see you there. – x
“Who is ‘x’?” Jun says, squinting at the screen. “And I think you typed ‘pants’ wrong.”
“I know exactly what I typed,” Nino says. He hits the send button before Jun can say anything else. “And there’s no way in hell I would put my name out there for the entire world to know I’m the one writing the messages.” Jun knows that this is Nino’s way of saying that he likes to see girls wildly running past him at parties, wondering where the mysterious X could be hiding.
“Now go away,” he continues, and turns away from Jun. “I have to write a program that will illegally transfer tons of data from the tower in the CompSci lab to my new hard drive. And you should go make up with Shun or something.”
Jun pretends to be affronted, but he knows there was no way he could hide from Nino in the first place. He’s just like that—he knows everything, even though he hardly talks to anyone and doesn’t get out of the house all that much.. “We don’t need to make up,” Jun says. “We just haven’t talked in two weeks.”
“Yeah, well,” Nino says, and Jun watches him boot up a computer that is bigger than his entire dresser. “That’s pretty much the same thing with you two.”
He’s right, and Jun knows this well, but he’s not about to give in so easily. “I’ll wait until the party,” he says.
“So then wait until the party.” In the blue glow of the computer screen, Nino looks positively evil. “Wait until then, and then watch Shun freak out about how you’re ignoring him on top of his freaking out that Yamada might be pregnant. So he’s going to get totally wasted, and he’s going to find someone else to comfort him, and depending on how that turns out he might have to start counting two sets of periods. All because you waited a week.”
Jun stares. He can’t think of anything to say.
“Yeah, you’re welcome,” Nino says, and hands Jun a can of Red Bull. “Now close your mouth and get out of here.”
Part Two