#sorry for the heart vomit
Kyoutani Kentarou loves like a lake on a summer day.
Love was never something he wanted or sought after. Crushes were just something he didn’t get. His teammates seemed to always be talking about sex and relationships, and while he’d make the occasional mental note on someone’s attractiveness, he wasn’t at all interested in dividing up his time for someone else. Whether he would find love or not, whatever. Even after high school and he’d let himself be flirted with at parties and bars, partaking in one night stands and a short-lived first attempt at monogamy, he never worried about it.
Perhaps, he should have.
That’s what he thinks when he first meets you, a friend of Hanamaki and Matsukawa’s who is entirely too good for him. Too pretty. Too interesting. Too charming - something about you screaming that you are not in short of love or any stranger to it. Even if he were good with words, he wouldn’t know what to say to you, so he doesn’t say much at all. Though it doesn’t stop you from becoming his 219th Instagram follower in the proceeding days.
He doesn’t know if he should be thankful or frightened that you can tell he’s intrigued by you from the lack of feedback he gives you. It’s more than confidence, and less than greed - something that beckons him that seems solid and tangible, yet if he were to try and hold it in his hands, he can’t. And it unnerves him.
So you meet him 99 percent of the way, not pushing or pulling, not threatening to walk the other way, just waiting for him to take the final step. He’s not sure what he ever did to deserve such favored treatment, and surely you will be disappointed when you find out that you laid out all your cards just for him, but he says’fuck it,’ and though he tells himself it’s no big deal if it doesn’t work out, he hopes by some miracle that it will.
Turns out he never needed a miracle, he just needed you. From the day Kentarou decided to let you in, not a day goes by without him needing you - needing to feel you in his bed, needing you to eat a meal with him, needing to show you a picture of a dog he saw on his daily run. He wonders why he was so hesitant to know you like this. You fit so perfectly - against his side when you sleep, and in his life.
If Kentarou had known love was like this, he would have wanted it all along. All he had ever known was his parents fighting, Yahaba constantly getting nagged at by some girl in high school, and Koganegawa complaining about getting ghosted, again. What makes you so different? What makes what he has with you so different?
The more he tries to pin down the answer, the more of you he sees, and the deeper he falls. He notices that your love seems to overflow, with him, with your friends, with the animals you encounter to the bugs on the ground, from your eyes, from your lips and fingertips, onto pages and into songs. Even when you’re mad at him, you curl right up against his chest and cling to him as you pout, forcing him to wrap his strong arms around you and apologize, because really, what else can he do?
“Never thought you’d be the one to give a dating pep talk. You’re nicer than I thought,” Tsukishima says all too honestly with his usual provoking tone one day at practice, right after Kentarou had convinced Koganegawa that his most recent Tinder failure was the best thing to ever happen to him. Though his advice was rough and blunt, the giant setter found meaning in comfort in his words and thanked him.
Despite his bespectacled teammate’s prodding, he finds himself not irritated, but in agreement. When did he become so sympathetic? He wonders for the last few hours of practice. He wonders on the train ride home. He wonders all the way up until moment he opens the front door to your shared apartment, and sees you turn your head from your spot on the couch, your face illuminating at the sight of him as you scramble to get up to greet him by flinging your arms around him before he can even get out the first syllable of ’tadaima.’
Ah, yes.
Your love is like the ceaseless, unabating energy of the sun, generating and radiating from every aspect of your being whether or not there’s anything to consume your spirit. It spawns beauty like blooms on the flora and provides comfort to even those considered cold of blood. It’s something he could never even dare to emulate, but oddly, Kyoutani Kentarou loves like a lake on a summer day, absorbing the most of your light before reflecting the rest onto those who find refreshment in and around his surface - all around a little warmer and more inviting under your phosphorescence.
