no refunds! || kuroken

phone calls

please beware of intentional spelling mistakes at the end!!

...

Kenma is screwing a component onto the motherboard that came in the mail this morning, when Kuroo calls him, trying to fix up his PC so he could finally play some decent games on them, rather than the free ones that came with his gaming software.

Immediately, his heart shrunk up in his chest, and he nearly dropped his screwdriver on the floor, his ring and middle fingers wrapped in small bandaids from the accidental cuts he'd gotten from assembling the sharper parts of the component.

He swallows, hanging his head and feeling small, trying to isolate his thoughts so that he could hold a decent conversation with Kuroo without feeling nervous. The more he thought, and the more Hinata had instilled some kind of weird awakening in him when it came to his feelings, the more he seemed to get more anxious in front of Kuroo than he ever had in his life.

Kenma takes a giant breath that fills his chest and makes his tummy ache, before pressing the answer button.

"Hello?"

"Kenma! Are you busy?"

Kenma looks back up at his PC parts scattered across the top of his desk, screws and RGB light strands littering his desk. He had put away the entirety of today to build his computer, knowing it would probably bleed into the morning depending on how fast he worked.

He was very busy.

"I am not busy," Kenma says, his voice soft and Kuroo knew that Kenma was obviously lying with the way he sounded like thin string, unreliable and going to break easily if he toyed with the idea enough. "Are you...okay?"

"Yes! I know you are probably doing something important, but I just wanted to quickly ask you if I could hang out with you before the date on Saturday."

Kenma feels like voids made up his chest and his heart had been swallowed at the mention, lost in one of them with no chance of finding it again. He keeps trying to forget about the fact that Kuroo still had that ad up, knowing that it was his own damn fault for thinking too much into this.

He couldn't screw it up now.

"Y-yeah..." Kenma wants to tell him it was okay, that he could come over and they could talk and be friends and be normal while he helped him prepare for some date with some random girl. Hinata did the same thing for him when he went to see Kuroo for the first time, so this was fine.

It was normal.

But he shakes his head at no one once he musters up enough courage to speak up, barely enough but it was enough. The phone is heavy in his hand, as if it held the outcome of every single branch stemming from Kenma's fate, as if the world had taken itself into Kuroo on the other line.

Come on, come on.

"Thank you! I—"

"A-actually, um..." Kenma looks to his feet as a blush is strewn across his cheeks, his heart pelting in his chest at the anticipation of how this would go, if he even let it go that way, feeling way more overwhelmed than he wanted to on a Tuesday night. "I don't...think you should go on the date, Kuro."

"Hm? Why not?"

Kuroo was oblivious, ready to listen and respond to him as if he had an important concern regarding him, and it made everything feel more difficult. Kenma clutches his phone tightly, feeling his hot cheeks against his fingers as he pressed the phone to his ear, feeling himself begin to struggle. "W-well, because...um..."