Chapter Text
Coupons exchanged hands, and Kiyoshi offered his face forward for yet another kiss with a glint in his magenta-shadowed eye and a grin on his painted lips.
“Mou, Kiyoshi-kun, don’t stare,” said the soccer club’s manager. Kiyoshi obediently closed his eyes, but there remained a sense of glint about his proffered expression nevertheless. She pressed her shining lips to his to the ooohs of the basketball club, curling one small hand around his elbow to keep steady.
Someone had really had a great idea when they’d suggested that the captain of their basketball team should play host to a kissing booth while wearing a dress and makeup- particularly since it was open-invite, and the girl’s school down the road were not just allowed but encouraged to come in the spirit of general charity and good clean wholesome fun. Kiyoshi only wished he had thought of the idea himself. Really quite lovely girls who’d never have come here otherwise were darting over to first giggle and then, daringly, hand over their coupons for a bit of side-action with the nationally-ranked basketball team. The girl’s basketball team was a doing a respectable sideline in their own booth, but crucially, had declined to be stationed anywhere near the boys.
Kiyoshi had abandoned the- really quite terrible- wig to the heat of the day, and his makeup had melted and been reapplied three times, usually by giggling customers, who paid extra to hold his face and sit in his lap while they brushed shimmer over his cheekbones or admired how the long sleeve of the dress tightened around his bicep when he flexed it.
He wiped his mouth and then leaned forward to greet another customer, who stepped up to the booth holding a coupon book and a sheet of paper, his jaw clenched tight.
Wait, his? Kiyoshi looked at the vision in a blue sun-dress and white cardigan and long dark hair, and then recognized the sharp line of the nose, the tilt of the chin, the cold and expressionless stare, the Teikou Basketball player staring determinedly off into the middle distance without looking at his vice-captain Akashi Seijuuro, standing in front of Shouei Basketball Club’s cross-dressing kissing booth dressed in girl’s clothes and asking, in quite flat and dead tones, for one of them to give him a kiss.
Kiyoshi stood. Akashi Seijuuro’s eyes narrowed as he tracked Kiyoshi’s head rising. He was wearing boy’s dress shoes, quite flat, and Kiyoshi was struck again by how young Teikou’s famous first-year vice-captain was, how young they all were, how different off the court and on it. Akashi passed quite easily for a girl; Kiyoshi, in his bright yellow frock, did not even try.
Akashi flapped the paper once again. “Please,” he recited, in the same icy tones, “Give me a kiss.”
Kiyoshi took the paper. It was a handwritten sheet, full of actions which has been signed ‘WITNESSED’ by someone not Akashi Seijuuro, and on the list, explaining possibly everything, was ‘get a kiss from Shouei’s captain at their booth’. Other tidbits were ‘dress as a girl to get in’, ‘eat ten takoyaki in three minutes’ and ‘four first-place prizes from booths of your choice’. Kiyoshi immediately understood. Akashi-kun was clearly being hazed. Sempai were assholes everywhere; it was the right of seniority. Why, he remembered being made a regular- the paint had been everywhere for weeks.
He looked down at Akashi’s face, at the sweating Teikou third-year, down at the paper, then right into Akashi’s eyes. Kiyoshi returned the paper, which Akashi took wordlessly. He took the offered coupons and passed them to his shooting guard, acting as treasurer. He reapplied his lipstick.
Then he lifted Akashi’s hand and smooched the paper right over the relevant item on the list. “Thanks for the business,” Kiyoshi said cheerfully. “Here you go!”
One of Akashi’s rather perfect eyebrows lifted and then settled. “Thank you,” he said, and looked Kiyoshi up and down. “That is a very nice dress, Iron Heart,” he added, and then was gone.