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Monday mornings are the worst.
Well...Monday mornings after spending all night correcting undergrad essays you forgot about, are worse. Monday mornings where you sleep in after pulling an all nighter to correct said essays in time so you are now late as a result of this, are even more so. Scratch that. Monday mornings when Suna Rintarou is forced to spend money he doesn’t have on food he desperately needs, because he is incapable of time management, are the absolute worst.
And now he’s making a fool of himself in front of the cute new barista.
“Coffee?” The barista asks, a bored expression on his face, as he takes the breakfast sandwich from Rintarou’s hand. Osamu, he reads from his name tag.
“Cute,” Rintarou mumbles.
Osamu blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“Coffee. Yes, yes. Yes coffee,” he replies instinctively, and momentarily shuts down before rhyming off, “cappuccino, extra hot, two shots of espresso.”
Which is a fine order, he assumes. The only problem is that, well...
Rintarou doesn’t even like coffee.
He only knows this order because Motoya orders it at least twice a day, which is probably only part of the reason why he’s constantly buzzed and a constant pain in Rintarou’s ass.
The barista, Osamu, nods, “to go?”
“Yes.”
“Size?”
“Small,” at least he’ll be subjecting himself to as little of it as possible.
“Name?”
“Name?”
The barista looks up from the cup in his hand, pausing with a black marker hovering over it, and despite the sleepiness in his grey eyes, manages a quick smirk.
“For your cup.” He explains and wiggles the offending object. Rintarou nods, feeling the heat in his face as he swallows.
“Sunarintarou,” he blurts, all one word. He’s going to blame all of this on sleep deprivation and financial stress and definitely not tell Motoya at all, ever.
There’s a spark in those sleepy, hooded eyes and the smirk gets slightly wider as Osamu finally puts pen to cup, “alright Sunarintarou, that’ll be 800 yen.”
“You don’t drink coffee.”
“No,” Rintarou agrees, not looking up from his laptop, “I don’t.”
Motoya hums as he stands in front of him.
“It’s awful,” Rintarou says, looking up from where he’s typing an email, “do you want it?”
Motoya doesn’t even answer, plucking the coffee straight from his hand and taking a mouthful instead.
“This is good,” Motoya says truthfully, pulling an appreciative face, and raises an eyebrow at Rintarou. Rintarou who sighs and folds right then and there—he’s going to blame this on sleep deprivation and financial stress.
“I panicked.”
“Oh?”
“The barista was cute,” he lets his head fall into one of his hands and feels a yawn begin to build in his chest.
Motaya laughs out loud, and gets a few funny looks from others in the staff room, “do you know what’s funny?” Motoya says, closing Rintarou’s laptop and sitting on the table in front of him. “You always have this big scary sullen face, but really, you’re just an emotionally stunted, disaster gay and it just looks like intimidation.”
“Fuck you,” Rintarou says without any malice and leans back on the couch just as his phone begins to ring. The caller ID reads Prof. Kurosu. “Fuck,” he says scrambling to his feet and shoving the last of his breakfast sandwich into his mouth, “I’m late, supposed to be helping in Kurosu’s lab.”
Considering Suna Rintarou has not only an undergraduate and a Master’s degree completed, but is now in his first year of achieving a PhD, many people tend to mistakenly assume he has his life together. He does, in fact, not.
Luckily, he has his sometimes best friend and fellow sufferer, Motoya, to remind him of that daily.
“You’re a mess,” Motoya says as they wait by the counter to collect their coffees, and Rintarou heaves a sigh.
“I know.”
“No, like, you’re a mess, mess,” Motoya says earnestly, staring straight at Rintarou with his small, round, evil eyebrows, raised slightly like judgmental caterpillars, trying to drive the point home.
“I know,” Rintarou whines, fiddling with the edge of his pastry bag. They’d come back to the cafe where Osamu, or ‘barista boy’ as Motoya has named him, works because apparently, he makes a damn good coffee. Not that Rintarou would know that. And Rintarou had agreed, intending to maybe get a matcha latte and a cookie, and ended up with yet another double shot cappuccino and a brownie.
He thinks sadly that he should never have been allowed to leave the womb, never mind home or the closet. All things began to go to shit when he left the womb.
Sighing, he lets his head drop and clutches at the pile of books in his arms he couldn’t quite fit in his backpack.
“Komori.”
Rintarou doesn’t look up as he hears Motoya thank the barista and collect his coffee.
“Sunarintarou.”
Rinatarou does look up this time, right into the once again sleepy, but smiling, eyes of Barista Boy Osamu, and doesn’t move like he should—because he’d only given his family name this time. He’d only given the name Suna, but barista—Osamu—must have remembered.
“Sunarintarou?” Osamu says again and his lip twitches.
Rintarou can hear Motoya stifling a laugh as he shifts the books in his hands to accept the drink.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, not able to meet Osamu’s eyes and turns away, right into the firing line of one Komori Motoya.
“You’re a mess,” he says simply and Rintarou pushes past him a little harder than needed, books barely balanced in one arm, a coffee he is neither going to drink nor give to Motoya, and a brownie he’s going to eat all the while dreaming about the white chocolate and raspberry cookie that had been sitting beside it in the display case.
“I know.”
It becomes habitual. Unfortunately and fortunately all wrapped into one. It becomes habitual.
He goes, sometimes alone, usually with Motoya, to the coffee shop where Barista Boy Osamu works. Before he goes, he tells himself he might talk to him today, comment on the weather maybe, compliment his hair if he’s feeling confident, a simple ‘how’s your day?’ at the very least. He also tells himself he is not going to order a coffee, but upon his third visit, Osamu seemed to have memorised his godawful fake coffee order and asked, with a smile,
“Same again?”
And Rintarou, like a fool, and a mess, and a disaster gay who is emotionally stunted but apparently just looks pissed off all the time, blanched and said, “yep. Please.” As if he was being done a favour.
Sometimes Osamu isn’t there when he goes, those days he manages to order everything correctly and not get teased by Motoya which is nice… in a way.
But it becomes habitual. He goes to the cafe, he tells himself he will talk to Osamu and he will not order a coffee. Then he does not talk to Osamu and does order a coffee. At least he’s managed to order the correct bakery item every time after that first mess up. That’s a win.
Today is probably going to be no different, he thinks as he pushes the door open, but he doesn’t have neurons left in his skull to think over any of it—he’s tired. There’s an existential tiredness seeping from his bones making his feet feel heavy and his shoulders droop even more than usual.
He shuffles his way to the counter, and he knows he looks like shit, but he doesn’t expect to be called out on it by the cute barista, with whom he’s exchanged only approximately 0.0000000001% of his vocabulary. It also doesn’t bode well for his poor, disaster gay heart.
“You look tired,” Osamu says as he picks up a paper cup and begins to write on it before Rintarou can say anything. You’d think he’d have developed a taste for coffee by now, but no, he has not.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, once again flexing that 0.0000000001% of his vocabulary.
Osamu laughs, “I didn’t mean it like that… well I did but not in a bad way.”
Rintarou sighs and looks into those grey, smiling eyes. Osamu looks as if he wants to say more but is biting his tongue, maybe stopping himself from insulting Rintarou more. “Thanks, I’ll take ‘you look tired’ as a compliment. What every struggling student wants to hear ever.”
It comes out a little more bitter than he’d intended it to, and internally winces. He’s barely been able to say more than ten words to the man, and now he’s being a sarcastic asshole.
Yet, it somehow seems that the world has decided to take a break from endlessly dragging Rintarou through coffee bushes, and give him an actual break when Osamu laughs at him, then turns to start on the coffee.
Rintarou watches him go through the motions that have become almost familiar at this stage, and sets himself the task of actually having a conversation, Osamu had started an almost one, he just had to build upon it. And it helps that Motoya isn’t here, watching him shrewdly, a smile already forming on his lips and an insult on his tongue. And it also helps that it’s quiet, only one other person sitting in the far corner of the cafe, head buried behind a laptop. And it helps that Osamu had almost started a conversation with him already.
Osamu turns around, paper cup in hand, “can I get you anything else?”
“Yeah, can I get a…” he trails off and looks at what’s left in the display case.
“I recommend the shio daifuku.”
Rintarou looks up at him, and sees a softer smile than usual on his face.
“Promise, you wont regret it.”
“Okay,” Rintarou says, “I’ll have a shio daifuku.” Now, now is his chance to say more, “but if it’s awful I’m going to boycott this place.”
Osamu laughs and nods, picking up a tongs to take out the pastry. “Oh as you should,” he says, “I’d be offended if you didn’t hold my suggestions in such high regard that you wouldn’t revolt over a terrible suggestion.” He carefully places it into a brown paper bag, and extends it and the coffee over the counter to Rintarou.
“Thanks,” he says and bites the edge of the bag to free up a hand and reaches into his jacket pocket for his wallet.
“No,” Osamu says holding up a hand, “this is on me. Apologies for accidentally insulting you.”
Rintarou pauses for a moment while his brain reboots and runs his new findings through his already malfunctioning mind, then smiles.
“Well, it is the least you could do.”
Rintarou would like if this was the beginning of a new routine, where he’d go to the cafe and maybe flirt a little with Osamu and possibly build up to not ordering coffee. But the world seems to give him half a break and then throw him an endless line of deadlines and lazy professors that need help with corrections, and as much as he’d love to say no, as much as the words have teetered on the edge of his tongue, he also knows that academic politics are a thing and he can’t.
So he doesn’t get to see him at all really. He seems to keep missing Osamu’s shifts—he knows this because Motoya makes sure to inform him anytime he sees him—or just doesn’t have the time or money to justify spending on a coffee he isn’t going to drink.
Surprisingly, the next time he sees him is at 10p.m. on a Friday night after being dragged by Motoya to the department’s post finals drinking night out.
Rintarou had insisted he wasn’t going, had insisted adamantly he wasn’t going because all he had wanted was to sit at home with a bag of popcorn and catch up on all the TV shows that had been flung to the wayside for the last three weeks, but Motoya had insisted and Motoya has a way of getting what he wants always. Rintarou decided to blame his folding on sleep deprivation and financial stress which wasn’t going to be helped by a night of drinking, but sure would help him forget for a moment about said sleep deprivation and financial stress.
Two drinks pre going out to numb the pain of social interaction though, is not supposed to be enough to make a person do a double take and question their eyesight that is still surprisingly good despite the amount of screens one stares at on a daily basis, but he still does a double take.
Standing at the bar, the cracked leather wallet he got from his sister four birthdays ago, under the amber light of a suave cocktail bar—he definitely should have brought a hip flask full of the closest thing to paint stripper on sale in the alcohol section of the small konbini on the corner to—Rintarou does a double take and finds himself turning red.
Underneath the same amber light on the other side of the bar, Barista Boy Osamu catches sight of Rintarou and begins to grin. In his own hand is a bottle of some alcohol or other that could never be mistaken for paint stripper, while his forearms are visible under the neatly rolled up sleeves of a dress shirt. If Rintarou thought it was a suave and swanky bar before, the neatly tied black bow tie and waistcoat poke him in his empty pockets and tell him, you can’t afford to be here. Yet Osamu’s grin tells him there is nowhere else he would rather be than under those pretentious amber lights.
“Hey,” Rintarou says casually while his heart is forced through a coffee grinder.
Osamu’s smile grows a little bigger. “Hey,” he replies a little loudly to be heard over the soft jazz surrounding them, but overshooting the optimal volume and winces a little before grinning again, “I’m gonna need to see some ID.”
Rintarou laughs on instinct, but when Osamu doesn’t make to reply, he asks a little dumbfounded, “wait, are you serious?”
“Course, I don’t wanna lose my job.”
“I can’t believe this,” Rintarou says, pulling the underused driving license from a pocket in his wallet and handing it to Osamu who inspects it, nods, and hands it back.
“Take it as a compliment,” he says with a shrug and a knowing look that this is one of the most annoying things someone can be told after being ID’d when they are four years over the legal drinking age of twenty one. “Good to see you again professor.”
“I thought you were a barista.”
“And I thought you were a sleep deprived college student,” Osamu replies, beginning to pour something into an alcohol measure.
“Well I’m not a professor either.” Rintarou replies, letting his arms rest on the bar in front of him and watches Osamu pour a range of alcohols into a shaker, then turn round and add something else.
“Oh?” He asks over his shoulder.
“No, somewhere in between. Subjecting myself to a PhD because I enjoy pain apparently and the Geneva Conventions says nothing against academically inflicted torture.”
Osamu snorts and begins shaking the silver cocktail shaker. “I can’t say anything,” he replies and stops shaking, pulling off the lid and beginning to pour the dark brown liquid into the awaiting cocktail glass, “I’m working two jobs to try and start a business for the exact same reason.”
He finishes pouring and lets the drink settle with a small white foam on the top, and Rintarou has his worries. These worries prove perfectly valid when Osamu finishes and tops the cocktail off with a coffee bean, a smile, and a “because I know you like coffee.”
“I don’t,” Rintarou answers looking down sadly at what he assumes is an espresso martini, “I actually hate coffee.”
Hangovers are the worst.
Well… hangovers after mixing alcohol and drinking cocktails are worse. Hangovers when the realisation hits you that the cute barista is also a very cute bartender and he thought you were too young to drink, are even more so. Scratch that. Hangovers when Suna Rintarou has a feeling something else happened the night before but has forgotten because he gets the worst hangovers and short term memory loss from drinking and so can’t be sure that didn’t embarrass himself, are the absolute worst.
Rintarou groans and throws an arm over his eyes to block the light cracking through from between the curtains. At least it’s a Saturday.
He inhales deeply, trying to trudge through the pain behind his head. After another moment, he throws his arm down and makes to move so he can grab some aspirin and water and maybe text Motota, when he freezes.
Oh his bedside table, there are three items:
The first is a full glass of water.
The second is a small plate with two aspirin sitting on it.
The third is a folded piece of paper.
Despite the headache and his achingly dry mouth, Rintarou snatches the note up first and takes a moment to blink through the pain and read the simple note.
Sunarintarou,
Make sure to drink lots of water and take care of yourself. Text me when you wake up so I know you’ve survived.
~Miya Osamu
Rintarou reads it. Then he reads it again. Then he takes his medicine, drinks some water, and decides to nap and figure it out later.
Rintarou wakes up twenty minutes later with a marginally less painful headache and some sudden questions. How was that note left on his bedside dresser and were the water and pain killers laid out by the same person and most importantly, he thinks, looking down at the large sweater he has on over his shirt from the night before, is this Osamu’s sweater?
He already knows the answer.
Fumbling, he rushes to get out of bed and tangles his legs in blankets and almost falls face first to the floor. He sighs and lets himself slide off the bed and contemplates his life for just a few moments, before rising again to look for his phone. It’s plugged in on the floor and buzzes when he reaches to pick it up. It wasn’t him that plugged it in, he knows that, he may love his phone but he’s not the type to remember to plug it in when he’s drunk.
There’s a string of messages from Motoya over a variety of different apps, most of which are some combination of emojis and question marks. Honestly, Rintarou has very little recollection himself. Opening his notifications he starts swiping them away, he’s just going to call Motoya anyway, no point reading them all, when his finger freezes over a message from an unknown number.
It simply reads:
this is Osamu, let me know you’re still alive, you drank a lot of tequila!
No. No. No.
The last time Rintarou drank tequila… the thought doesn’t bear remembering. Not that he remembers it, but was simply told about it over and over and over again and he has yet to live it down.
He calls Motoya.
Good news is, he didn’t actually do anything overly embarrassing except for telling the cute bartender/barista, Osamu, that he’s been ordering coffee he doesn’t drink because,
“And I quote,” Motoya had said, “‘because I am a sleep deprived disaster gay that looks scary and intimidating but actually just don’t know how to flirt. I mean, you’ve only heard 0.0000000001% of my vocabulary. And you’re really cute.’”
“You’re exaggerating,” Rintarou had replied, not able to accept this even though, as Motoya had said the words, the memory had trickled back.
Motoya paused on the other side of the line for a moment. “Do you want me to lie to you?”
“No,” Rintarou said, sinking into his sweater which he then remembered was not his. “The sweater…”
“He walked you home. He insisted on walking you home. Which thinking about it now could have been murder-y, but I know where he works.”
Rintarou had ended the call and lay looking at the ceiling, putting together the jigsaw that was the night before. He remembered the espresso martini and Osamu laughing at him. He remembered being bought drinks by Kuruso, and taking selfies with Motoya. A phantom burning hit the back of his throat as he remembered doing tequila shots.
The rest of the night was a blur made up of a few images: him sitting by the bar to talk to Osamu, Osamu laughing a lot, being handed a glass of water which he hadn’t wanted, Osamu’s shift ending and his insisting on walking him home, Motoya saying something Rintarou is glad he doesn’t remember, the cold air, Osamu also insisting Rintarou wear his sweater because, apparently, he wasn’t cold, Osamu walking him up to his door and Rintarou inviting him in, Osamu refusing to give him a kiss because Rintarou’d been drinking and he had not (this sends the blood rushing to Rintarou’s face), Osamu writing the note and setting up the water and aspirin, Rintarou walking Osamu to the door and saying goodbye, then Rintarou throwing a small hissy fit he didn’t get a kiss.
Finally, the last memory; Osamu promising him a kiss after their first date.
Maybe the world dragged him through all those coffee bushes for good reason then. So he picks up his phone, sends a text, and passes out again.
“So I got you a cappuccino, extra hot, two shots of espresso. That’s right isn’t it?”
Rintarou turns around and scowls at Osamu holding two paper cups in his gloved hands, his sleepy eyes barely visible between the beanie he has pulled low and the scarf he has pulled up over his face.
“Shut up,” Rintarou says pouting, and reaches a hand out for one of the cups, “it is extra hot right?”
“Yes,” Osamu says and rolls his eyes, bumping his hip against Rintarou’s as they begin walking, “there’s also cookies in my backpack.”
“White chocolate and raspberry?”
“White chocolate and raspberry,” Osamu confirms, tugging down the scarf on his face and raising his cup to his lips.
“Oh my god, I love you,” Rintarou says, heaving a contented sigh into his own drink, tasting the thick, sweet hot chocolate. He knew Osamu was lying when he said it was coffee. “Hey—” he begins, then notices Osamu isn’t there.
He turns and furrows his brow when he sees Osamu has stopped a few steps behind him.
“What?” Rintarou asks.
“What?”
“What?”
"No," Osamu says carefully, "I'm asking you, 'what?'"
“But I asked you 'what' first.” Rintarou argues.
Osamu shakes his head and takes a few steps, closing the gap between them and places one hand on Rintarou’s arm and looks up the small height difference between them, eyes burning.
“My ‘what’ is more important,” Osamu breathes urgently.
“But what were you what-ing?”
Osamu groans and throws his head back, eyes to the sky.
“What did you just say to me?”
“Ehh…. ‘what’?” Rintarou offers and Osamu groans even louder, letting his head drop now, the bobble on his hat bouncing on his head.
“Before that,” he whines, “you said…”
Rintarou pauses and tries to think. What had he said? He told Osamu to shut up and asked if his hot chocolate was extra hot, Osamu had said he had cookies, Rintarou had said he loved him, then he realised Osamu had stopped walking—
“I said I love you,” Rintarou breathes a little disbelieving, while Osamu begins to laugh and looks him in the eye with one of the largest grins Rintarou has ever seen on any person ever, and it’s the most wonderful thing he could ever imagine.
“Yeah,” Osamu says, “you did.”
“I did.”
“I love you too.”
“Obviously,” Rintarou snorts, which earns him a small smack on the arm, “I mean I am so cool, and smooth, and funny and—”
“—I take it back,” Osamu says, beginning to walk away, but Rintarou catches his arm.
“Shut up, just because you’re soooo whipped for me—”
“Excuse me, who pretended they liked coffee for three months because they were crushing so bad?” Osamu laughs.
“Okay fine, we’re both so whipped,” Rintarou sighs, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah,” Osamu agrees kissing him, and Rintarou can taste the coffee there, “we are.”
“Don’t do that again. You taste like coffee and I hate coffee.”