no refunds! || kuroken

yellow flowers

It's been another week.

Kuroo was able to convince Kenma to see him every day since he'd helped him study, and despite Kenma feeling guilty for taking Kuroo away from his roommate and his tutoring at his university, he couldn't help but feel a strange sense of pride at the fact that Kuroo prioritized him.

He would never admit it to anyone, though.

And even when he was gone, Kenma still thought about him. He couldn't get him out of his head, couldn't get his smile like diamonds and his windchime laugh out of his head, or the phantoms of his fingers off of his hands or out of his hair. He still thought about him, wanted to hear his voice more often than not, and looked forward to the next time they could hang out together.

And their dates often felt real, despite it being all for show.

But Kenma didn't like thinking about that last bit so much.

Here he was now, on the way to his parent's house while the sun was setting, opting to leave a little later in the day to avoid as many questions as he could. He's made up about fifty scenarios in his head revolving around his family and Kuroo, about half of them making him want to die on the spot.

He hoped that they didn't ask any personal questions or made any invasive comments because his parents were the type to not know boundaries and he was not the type of person to laugh it off and switch the conversation.

He was thankful that Kuroo was, but even then, his family could be brutal.

And then he thinks that maybe, he was being too dramatic.

"What are you thinking about, Kenma?"

Kenma blinks, brings himself back to his sense, and finds himself passing a highway marker with Kuroo in the passenger's seat, soft indie floating around the car while a muffled topaz melts through the window, fuschias and yellows weeping over the sky like phoenix wings set on fire. His heart skips as Kuroo tilts his head while looking at him, always so ready to listen and talk with him, even if he didn't have much to say, to begin with.

"The dinner. I'm kind of scared."

"Oh, yeah. Me, too." Kuroo looks out the window, and Kenma notices he was playing with the stray threads in the hole of his jeans, gold covering his knee as his fingers danced nervously on the black denim. "But we should be okay. We've been okay so far."

Kenma nods, passing a car in the left lane, before he slows down, checking the speed limit.

He was fine, but he still felt like he was going too fast, the ruse of adrenaline mixing with his blood and setting him up for more stress that he didn't need.

"Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, again. You really didn't have to do this." Kenma says, finding the statement weird but not as awkward as he'd imagined.

"Neither did you." Kuroo says, and Kenma misses the grin his gives him as he lolls his head towards him. "So thank you."

Kenma's lips house a small smile at how Kuroo somehow managed to make it cheesy, and he appreciates him either way and thinks of how different he was from Hinata, Kageyama, even Bokuto. He's met the latter once, and in that short window, understood just how they were friends.

Kuroo often felt too strong for someone like him, making things that scared Kenma look easy, opening up doors that he'd rather kept locked so effortlessly, it was frightening. But he still liked him regardless.

"We're about twenty minutes away from the house," Kenma says, spotting an exit marker and seeing the only chicken joint in the vicinity.

He used to go there with his siblings after school sometimes, ordering the same thing every time because he was too afraid of getting something he didn't really like.