(fic) Birds and Bees
Apr. 17th, 2007 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cicerSummary: When Goku wants to know the facts of life, who's more suited to educate him that Gojyo? Well, probably a lot of people. Unfortunately, Gojyo's the only one around.
Hints of 58 and 39. This could probably use a little more polish, and possible a beta, but my writing has been giving me fits lately and I’ve been constantly rewriting and scraping stuff. So I’m pretty much just sick of looking at this as desperate to get something off the to-do pile. I apologize for any roughness or misspellings. Bear with me as I try to get back into the writing groove!
Deep in his third beer, Gojyo didn’t notice when Goku slunk into the seat across from him. He savored the taste of fresh alcohol, a pleasant change from the warm, stale stuff that was usually lurking around in backseat of the Jeep. Leaning back in his chair, he sighed contentedly and closed his eyes.
...Only to jerk upright when Goku began kicking the underside of the table rhythmically. He glared meaningfully at the monkey, too relaxed to reach across the table and thump him properly. Goku didn’t respond. He just kept staring at the worn tabletop, fingering a scratch in the wood morosely.
Gojyo waited for him to look up, and when he didn’t he kicked him lightly under the table. At last Goku managed to tilt his face in Gojyo’s direction, but his eyes still darted across the room anxiously. Gojyo frowned and kicked him again, harder. Goku squawked quietly, and finally looked at him.
“What?” he asked. Gojyo guessed that he was trying to sound angry, but his obvious anxiety interfered with his irritated tone.
“Stop kicking,” Gojyo told him, before taking a long pull off his beer.
“You’re the one who’s kicking!” Goku snapped, but he stopped rapping at the table and drew his legs up a little, hunching in on himself.
“You started it,” Gojyo said. The argument was so familiar, so deeply ingrained into his being, Gojyo was fairly sure that he could argue with Goku in his sleep. According to Hakkai, he sometimes did. Gojyo wasn’t sure whether he believed that.
Goku hunched a little further down, and Gojyo attempted to glare at him until pity finally won out over annoyance and he put his beer down. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothin’,” Goku muttered. Gojyo took another sip of his drink and waited patiently until Goku was ready to spit it out. He seemed to be taking his time. Goku wore an almost hunted expression as his eyes darted around the restaurant once more.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said at last. Gojyo mulled that over for a moment. Answering Goku’s questions could be risky business. He never seemed to ask Gojyo anything good, reserving the important, or rather, socially acceptable, questions for Hakkai or Sanzo. The most important thing he was liable to ask Gojyo was how many plums he thought he could stuff into his mouth before choking. And he didn’t usually beat around the bush like he was doing now.
Still, after a moment’s consideration, Gojyo shrugged. “Shoot,” he said. How bad, he reasoned, could it be?
Goku didn’t answer right away. He hesitated, busily knotting the hem of his shirt between his fingers and darted his eyes around one last time, apparently to check and make sure no one was listening in on them, before muttering, “It’s about…you know. Sex.”
He whispered the word, but Gojyo heard him anyway, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He didn’t have a mouthful of beer, but he sputtered anyway before snatching up his drink and taking a long gulp.
Keeping the drink in his hands, he had a means of distraction while he tried to formulate a response. His immediate impulse was to tell Goku that he was not allowed to know anything about that sort of thing. Maybe, Gojyo reasoned, by the time he was old and gray and Goku had grown out of his current state of gangly-childish-monkey-ness, he’d think about permitting Goku to learn about sex. Maybe.
But that day was a long way off. And while Goku was fun to tease about sex, he wasn’t supposed to take it seriously. He certainly wasn’t supposed to come to Gojyo looking pathetically desperate and like he actually wanted to know. Gojyo resisted the urge to squirm in discomfort. It seemed Goku had the market covered on that, anyway. Attempting to play for time, Gojyo finally stuttered out, “Why are you asking me?”
It wasn’t really a question that needed to be asked. Who the hell else was he supposed to ask? Still, Gojyo was slightly comforted by Goku’s look of utter mortification. It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t the only one who was embarrassed.
Shifting in his seat, Goku finally muttered, “I don’t know. You know a lot about this stuff, right?” Gojyo picked at the label on his beer bottle and vaguely considered dumping the remaining liquid over his head before taking his lighter to himself. Maybe being on fire would allow him to escape this conversation.
“Yeah,” he answered, unable to keep the suspicion out of his voice. It was gratifying, in some ways, to know that Goku thought of him as some kind of sex guru, wise in the ways of physical pleasure. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret for all the sexual comments he’d made in Goku’s presence. He hadn’t known it would lead to him being forced to tell Goku the facts of life.
But when it came right down to it, Goku really didn’t have anyone else to ask. Gojyo suspected that Sanzo would stage a murder-suicide if Goku ever asked him. Gojyo didn’t blame him. The idea of a bullet to the brain sounded like an appealing alternative to this uncomfortable conversation. And as for Hakkai…Gojyo suppressed a shudder. Hakkai surely knew enough about the biological aspects of sex. The practical ones too, if Gojyo was any judge. Still, turning Goku over to Hakkai’s tender mercies for a talk about sex was just asking for emotional scarring on Goku’s behalf. While he certainly didn’t want Goku to have sex now, Gojyo didn’t want to condemn Goku to a life of celibacy, either. He’d already pegged it as the root of many of Sanzo’s issues, anyway.
Goku didn’t know anyone else well enough to ask them, and they couldn’t send him into the streets to ask strangers to divulge their sexual knowledge, so that just left Gojyo. He didn’t really think of himself as the best man for the job, but he was forced to concede that he was certainly the lesser of various evils. He sighed, and put his beer down. “Okay, okay. What do you want to know?”
Goku, still red, paused to consider it. Mentally, Gojyo tried to figure out where to start if it turned out that Goku’s knowledge of sex began and ended at ‘put it in’, as he suspected. He supposed he couldn’t really blame the poor kid. He’d gone straight from a cave to a temple before joining the rest of them on what amounted to a twisted version of a road trip. It wasn’t like any of those places were great for learning about sex. Aside, perhaps, from the brothels that popped up in some of the towns they passed through.
There was an idea. Gojyo turned it over in his mind for a moment, considering how violently Sanzo would murder him if he actually took Goku to one of those places. He dropped the idea like a hot potato, though, when his thoughts turned to how violently Hakkai would kill him if he did it. Brothels were clearly out. As Gojyo sorted through the remainder of his sexual knowledge, he couldn’t help feeling faintly paternal. It was sort of nice to be able to teach someone these things, passing the torch, and all that. Not that he wouldn’t pass off the job if he could, he thought, but it was still nice. He shook of the sense of sentimentality and cleared his through.
“Okay. Well. You know the basics of it, right?” he asked, toying with his beer bottle. Goku shifted slightly, still faintly flushed with embarrassment. He nodded reluctantly.
“I know some things,” he said, sounding faintly defensive. “I’m not stupid, pervert.”
Gojyo decided to let the pervert comment slide, and nodded. “Okay, right, penis goes into vagina.” He ignored Goku’s furious hiss at the words and plunged on. “Do you know how two guys do it together, though? Or two girls?” Of course, he didn’t know which way Goku leaned, but he figured it would be best to cover all the bases, so to speak. No sense in leaving him uneducated. He’d need this information one day, gods willing.
“Um. I think so,” Goku said, scrunching his face up in thought. “It’s the stuff you and Hakkai do together, right?”
Gojyo manfully resisted the urge to bang his head against the table and yell once again that Goku wasn’t supposed to know about that. He was proud of his self control, at least until he snapped, “And what exactly do you know about that?”
Goku looked less embarrassed now, and more defiant. “You know!” he insisted. “When Hakkai makes Sanzo let you room together sometimes you make noise. That’s what you’re doing, right?” Gojyo clapped a hand to his face and made a mental note to make sure that in the future, whenever he and Hakkai were ‘sharing’ a room, that they got one that was several doors down from Sanzo and Goku. Apparently they were somewhat less discreet than they’d thought.
“Okay,” he said, before pausing to clear his throat. “Okay,” he continued. “So you know that stuff. And you know that you can do it with a boy or a girl. But it’s different depending on which, you know.”
Goku blinked. “It is?” he asked. He seemed genuinely surprised. Gojyo sighed, and took a minute to pity whoever was unfortunate enough to have Goku as a future sex partner. Now there was some bad karma, he thought. He sighed again and took a sip of his beer before setting it down and pushing it away.
“I think we better start from the beginning,” he told Goku.
***
Two hours and three beers later, Gojyo had managed to cover male anatomy, female anatomy, the use of prophylactics, and the top ten things you should never do in bed no matter how good an idea it seemed at the time. He saved threesomes, bondage, and other kinky stuff for the next talk, one he hoped would never come. It was enough, he privately insisted to the gods, that he had made sure the monkey had a decent idea of what he should and shouldn’t do during sex. Asking him to introduce the kid to the kinky stuff was just too much. As it was, Gojyo was absolutely convinced that he’d just earned his entry into Nirvana once he’d died. Screw the quest to stop the Minus Wave and save the world, any idiot could do that. But it took a strong man to explain sex to Goku.
Leaning on his elbows, Gojyo swirled the last of his beer around in the bottle and said, “And that’s how you do it.” He almost expected a round of applause to burst forth from the nearly empty dining room, for a divine light to shine down on him, the blessings of the gods falling on him for so nobly enduring such a trial. Goku just blinked.
“Huh,” he said. Gojyo sighed, and tipped back the rest of his drink. He’d wanted to ask Goku something since he first brought the topic up, and now seemed to be the best time.
“Why do you want to know all this anyway?” he asked, eyeing Goku carefully. Goku shifted a little in his seat and shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just…did,” he said. When Gojyo continued to look at him questioningly, he added, “It just seemed like…time.” Gojyo resisted the urge to get all teary about Goku becoming a man. He settled for clearing his throat and reaching over to give Goku a solid, manly smack on his shoulder.
“Well, now you know,” he agreed, before looking at Goku slyly. “And now that you know, who are you going to go practice with?” Goku turned a pleasing shade of red, reassuring Gojyo that he wasn’t actually going to go out and acquire more hand-on knowledge.
“Perverted kappa!” Goku squawked, and Gojyo laughed at his mortified indignation.
“Come on,” he pressed. After being forced to endure such a torturous conversation, he thought he should be allowed to embarrass Goku a little. “What about her?” he asked, pointing to the attractive waitress two tables over. “Do you think she’s cute?” Goku wrinkled his nose slightly.
“She’s old,” he said dubiously. Gojyo glared at him, and glanced back at the waitress. She didn’t look more than twenty-five.
“Oi,” he said, leaning across the table to knock Goku on the head. “That’s not old. She’s only a couple years older than I am.” Goku appeared unconvinced. Gojyo scanned the room for younger girls, becoming curious in spite of himself. He’d never really seen Goku interested in anyone; not in that way, at least. He couldn’t help but be curious about what sort of person he might like.
“Okay, what do you think of her?” He pointed out a girl near the bar. She was younger, maybe seventeen, and pretty in an innocent, disarming way. Goku studied her more carefully than he had the waitress, but only shrugged.
“She’s okay,” he said, but without much enthusiasm. Gojyo drummed his fingers on the table and studied the occupants of the room again. He considered that maybe he was looking in the wrong direction. Maybe he’d been right to include the whole guy-on-guy part in the talk. He hummed thoughtfully and selected a good-looking guy near the door and nudged Goku.
“Well, what about him?” he asked. Goku looked. Gojyo observed him carefully to see if he showed any more interest in the guy than he had in the female candidates Gojyo had selected for his impromptu contest. Goku’s expression suggested that he was still unimpressed. He shrugged again. Gojyo kept himself from rolling his eyes. It was good to know that even if Goku had to enter puberty, at least he wasn’t slobbering over everything with two legs. Still, Gojyo thought he might at least show a little interest. After all, he had been to one to ask Gojyo about sex, and that suggested that there must be somebody he wouldn’t mind doing the horizontal mambo with.
Oh. Well, there was that. Gojyo paused. He hadn’t really considered the possibility that Goku’s interest might lie a little closer. Maybe he wasn’t interested in strangers because he’d already fixated on someone else. That wouldn’t be such a problem, except that the only people that were around him that much were himself, Hakkai, and Sanzo. Gojyo was relatively sure that it wasn’t him, and fairly certain it couldn’t be Hakkai. Which left…well. Gojyo eyed Goku speculatively and decided to test his hypothesis.
“Well, what about me?” he asked, lounging back in his seat in his best attractive-bar-ornament position. Goku looked at him blankly. “Do you think I’m hot?” Gojyo pressed. Far from looking embarrassed or anxious, Goku looked faintly disgusted and kicked Gojyo solidly in the shin.
“Pervert!” he said. Gojyo rubbed his bruised leg, but felt relived. A kick in the leg was a small price to pay to be reassured that Goku wasn’t nursing a crush on him. Still, there was obviously somebody. He pursued his suspicions relentlessly.
“What about Hakkai?” he persisted. Goku looked grossed out.
“Ew, no!” he exclaimed. He seemed affronted at being forced to think of Hakkai sexually. Well, Gojyo thought, there was no accounting for taste. After all, the kid couldn’t even appreciate his charms. Plus, if it wasn’t him and it wasn’t Hakkai…
He leaned back casually and took a sip of his drink before questioning in a deliberately offhand tone, “What about Sanzo, then?”
Ding ding ding! Bells went off in Gojyo’s head as Goku flushed a deep pink. He felt a wave of pity for the poor kid but couldn’t help but be extremely amused. The kid was lucky, though. He was probably the only one Sanzo wouldn’t shoot for having a crush on him. Goku colored more deeply before stuttering, “No!” His voice wavered, though, and his eyes darted anxiously around the room, as if expecting Sanzo to appear out of nowhere and smack him. Gojyo smirked, and drained the rest of his beer, satisfied at the results of his interrogation.
“Ah,” he hummed, letting his tone suggest that he understood perfectly well. Goku’s coloring was soemwhere between pale and pink as he stammered out denials. Gojyo chuckled and left his empty beer bottle on the table, giving Goku’s hair an affectionate ruffle as he headed toward the stairs. Goku remained at the table, flustered and stuttering. Gojyo couldn’t smother his grin.
It had gone much better than he’d expected, he considered. He was thrilled that Goku had finally realized that Sanzo, though possessed of the worst temper Gojyo had ever encountered, was a nice piece of ass. Granted, Sanzo would make all their lives hell if he ever found out about Goku’s little crush, but still. At least they could all rest assured that Goku wouldn’t be fooling around with anyone else while he was pining after Sanzo. And if, against all odds, the monkey actually managed to break through Sanzo’s metaphorical chastity belt…well. Gojyo hid a smirk and made a mental note to force Hakkai to room with him for the foreseeable future and leave the other two by themselves.
Everyone knew that Sanzo just needed to get laid, after all. If Goku was up to the job, the Gojyo thought the trip west might be about to get a whole lot more pleasant.
Hints of 58 and 39. This could probably use a little more polish, and possible a beta, but my writing has been giving me fits lately and I’ve been constantly rewriting and scraping stuff. So I’m pretty much just sick of looking at this as desperate to get something off the to-do pile. I apologize for any roughness or misspellings. Bear with me as I try to get back into the writing groove!
Deep in his third beer, Gojyo didn’t notice when Goku slunk into the seat across from him. He savored the taste of fresh alcohol, a pleasant change from the warm, stale stuff that was usually lurking around in backseat of the Jeep. Leaning back in his chair, he sighed contentedly and closed his eyes.
...Only to jerk upright when Goku began kicking the underside of the table rhythmically. He glared meaningfully at the monkey, too relaxed to reach across the table and thump him properly. Goku didn’t respond. He just kept staring at the worn tabletop, fingering a scratch in the wood morosely.
Gojyo waited for him to look up, and when he didn’t he kicked him lightly under the table. At last Goku managed to tilt his face in Gojyo’s direction, but his eyes still darted across the room anxiously. Gojyo frowned and kicked him again, harder. Goku squawked quietly, and finally looked at him.
“What?” he asked. Gojyo guessed that he was trying to sound angry, but his obvious anxiety interfered with his irritated tone.
“Stop kicking,” Gojyo told him, before taking a long pull off his beer.
“You’re the one who’s kicking!” Goku snapped, but he stopped rapping at the table and drew his legs up a little, hunching in on himself.
“You started it,” Gojyo said. The argument was so familiar, so deeply ingrained into his being, Gojyo was fairly sure that he could argue with Goku in his sleep. According to Hakkai, he sometimes did. Gojyo wasn’t sure whether he believed that.
Goku hunched a little further down, and Gojyo attempted to glare at him until pity finally won out over annoyance and he put his beer down. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothin’,” Goku muttered. Gojyo took another sip of his drink and waited patiently until Goku was ready to spit it out. He seemed to be taking his time. Goku wore an almost hunted expression as his eyes darted around the restaurant once more.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said at last. Gojyo mulled that over for a moment. Answering Goku’s questions could be risky business. He never seemed to ask Gojyo anything good, reserving the important, or rather, socially acceptable, questions for Hakkai or Sanzo. The most important thing he was liable to ask Gojyo was how many plums he thought he could stuff into his mouth before choking. And he didn’t usually beat around the bush like he was doing now.
Still, after a moment’s consideration, Gojyo shrugged. “Shoot,” he said. How bad, he reasoned, could it be?
Goku didn’t answer right away. He hesitated, busily knotting the hem of his shirt between his fingers and darted his eyes around one last time, apparently to check and make sure no one was listening in on them, before muttering, “It’s about…you know. Sex.”
He whispered the word, but Gojyo heard him anyway, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He didn’t have a mouthful of beer, but he sputtered anyway before snatching up his drink and taking a long gulp.
Keeping the drink in his hands, he had a means of distraction while he tried to formulate a response. His immediate impulse was to tell Goku that he was not allowed to know anything about that sort of thing. Maybe, Gojyo reasoned, by the time he was old and gray and Goku had grown out of his current state of gangly-childish-monkey-ness, he’d think about permitting Goku to learn about sex. Maybe.
But that day was a long way off. And while Goku was fun to tease about sex, he wasn’t supposed to take it seriously. He certainly wasn’t supposed to come to Gojyo looking pathetically desperate and like he actually wanted to know. Gojyo resisted the urge to squirm in discomfort. It seemed Goku had the market covered on that, anyway. Attempting to play for time, Gojyo finally stuttered out, “Why are you asking me?”
It wasn’t really a question that needed to be asked. Who the hell else was he supposed to ask? Still, Gojyo was slightly comforted by Goku’s look of utter mortification. It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t the only one who was embarrassed.
Shifting in his seat, Goku finally muttered, “I don’t know. You know a lot about this stuff, right?” Gojyo picked at the label on his beer bottle and vaguely considered dumping the remaining liquid over his head before taking his lighter to himself. Maybe being on fire would allow him to escape this conversation.
“Yeah,” he answered, unable to keep the suspicion out of his voice. It was gratifying, in some ways, to know that Goku thought of him as some kind of sex guru, wise in the ways of physical pleasure. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret for all the sexual comments he’d made in Goku’s presence. He hadn’t known it would lead to him being forced to tell Goku the facts of life.
But when it came right down to it, Goku really didn’t have anyone else to ask. Gojyo suspected that Sanzo would stage a murder-suicide if Goku ever asked him. Gojyo didn’t blame him. The idea of a bullet to the brain sounded like an appealing alternative to this uncomfortable conversation. And as for Hakkai…Gojyo suppressed a shudder. Hakkai surely knew enough about the biological aspects of sex. The practical ones too, if Gojyo was any judge. Still, turning Goku over to Hakkai’s tender mercies for a talk about sex was just asking for emotional scarring on Goku’s behalf. While he certainly didn’t want Goku to have sex now, Gojyo didn’t want to condemn Goku to a life of celibacy, either. He’d already pegged it as the root of many of Sanzo’s issues, anyway.
Goku didn’t know anyone else well enough to ask them, and they couldn’t send him into the streets to ask strangers to divulge their sexual knowledge, so that just left Gojyo. He didn’t really think of himself as the best man for the job, but he was forced to concede that he was certainly the lesser of various evils. He sighed, and put his beer down. “Okay, okay. What do you want to know?”
Goku, still red, paused to consider it. Mentally, Gojyo tried to figure out where to start if it turned out that Goku’s knowledge of sex began and ended at ‘put it in’, as he suspected. He supposed he couldn’t really blame the poor kid. He’d gone straight from a cave to a temple before joining the rest of them on what amounted to a twisted version of a road trip. It wasn’t like any of those places were great for learning about sex. Aside, perhaps, from the brothels that popped up in some of the towns they passed through.
There was an idea. Gojyo turned it over in his mind for a moment, considering how violently Sanzo would murder him if he actually took Goku to one of those places. He dropped the idea like a hot potato, though, when his thoughts turned to how violently Hakkai would kill him if he did it. Brothels were clearly out. As Gojyo sorted through the remainder of his sexual knowledge, he couldn’t help feeling faintly paternal. It was sort of nice to be able to teach someone these things, passing the torch, and all that. Not that he wouldn’t pass off the job if he could, he thought, but it was still nice. He shook of the sense of sentimentality and cleared his through.
“Okay. Well. You know the basics of it, right?” he asked, toying with his beer bottle. Goku shifted slightly, still faintly flushed with embarrassment. He nodded reluctantly.
“I know some things,” he said, sounding faintly defensive. “I’m not stupid, pervert.”
Gojyo decided to let the pervert comment slide, and nodded. “Okay, right, penis goes into vagina.” He ignored Goku’s furious hiss at the words and plunged on. “Do you know how two guys do it together, though? Or two girls?” Of course, he didn’t know which way Goku leaned, but he figured it would be best to cover all the bases, so to speak. No sense in leaving him uneducated. He’d need this information one day, gods willing.
“Um. I think so,” Goku said, scrunching his face up in thought. “It’s the stuff you and Hakkai do together, right?”
Gojyo manfully resisted the urge to bang his head against the table and yell once again that Goku wasn’t supposed to know about that. He was proud of his self control, at least until he snapped, “And what exactly do you know about that?”
Goku looked less embarrassed now, and more defiant. “You know!” he insisted. “When Hakkai makes Sanzo let you room together sometimes you make noise. That’s what you’re doing, right?” Gojyo clapped a hand to his face and made a mental note to make sure that in the future, whenever he and Hakkai were ‘sharing’ a room, that they got one that was several doors down from Sanzo and Goku. Apparently they were somewhat less discreet than they’d thought.
“Okay,” he said, before pausing to clear his throat. “Okay,” he continued. “So you know that stuff. And you know that you can do it with a boy or a girl. But it’s different depending on which, you know.”
Goku blinked. “It is?” he asked. He seemed genuinely surprised. Gojyo sighed, and took a minute to pity whoever was unfortunate enough to have Goku as a future sex partner. Now there was some bad karma, he thought. He sighed again and took a sip of his beer before setting it down and pushing it away.
“I think we better start from the beginning,” he told Goku.
***
Two hours and three beers later, Gojyo had managed to cover male anatomy, female anatomy, the use of prophylactics, and the top ten things you should never do in bed no matter how good an idea it seemed at the time. He saved threesomes, bondage, and other kinky stuff for the next talk, one he hoped would never come. It was enough, he privately insisted to the gods, that he had made sure the monkey had a decent idea of what he should and shouldn’t do during sex. Asking him to introduce the kid to the kinky stuff was just too much. As it was, Gojyo was absolutely convinced that he’d just earned his entry into Nirvana once he’d died. Screw the quest to stop the Minus Wave and save the world, any idiot could do that. But it took a strong man to explain sex to Goku.
Leaning on his elbows, Gojyo swirled the last of his beer around in the bottle and said, “And that’s how you do it.” He almost expected a round of applause to burst forth from the nearly empty dining room, for a divine light to shine down on him, the blessings of the gods falling on him for so nobly enduring such a trial. Goku just blinked.
“Huh,” he said. Gojyo sighed, and tipped back the rest of his drink. He’d wanted to ask Goku something since he first brought the topic up, and now seemed to be the best time.
“Why do you want to know all this anyway?” he asked, eyeing Goku carefully. Goku shifted a little in his seat and shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just…did,” he said. When Gojyo continued to look at him questioningly, he added, “It just seemed like…time.” Gojyo resisted the urge to get all teary about Goku becoming a man. He settled for clearing his throat and reaching over to give Goku a solid, manly smack on his shoulder.
“Well, now you know,” he agreed, before looking at Goku slyly. “And now that you know, who are you going to go practice with?” Goku turned a pleasing shade of red, reassuring Gojyo that he wasn’t actually going to go out and acquire more hand-on knowledge.
“Perverted kappa!” Goku squawked, and Gojyo laughed at his mortified indignation.
“Come on,” he pressed. After being forced to endure such a torturous conversation, he thought he should be allowed to embarrass Goku a little. “What about her?” he asked, pointing to the attractive waitress two tables over. “Do you think she’s cute?” Goku wrinkled his nose slightly.
“She’s old,” he said dubiously. Gojyo glared at him, and glanced back at the waitress. She didn’t look more than twenty-five.
“Oi,” he said, leaning across the table to knock Goku on the head. “That’s not old. She’s only a couple years older than I am.” Goku appeared unconvinced. Gojyo scanned the room for younger girls, becoming curious in spite of himself. He’d never really seen Goku interested in anyone; not in that way, at least. He couldn’t help but be curious about what sort of person he might like.
“Okay, what do you think of her?” He pointed out a girl near the bar. She was younger, maybe seventeen, and pretty in an innocent, disarming way. Goku studied her more carefully than he had the waitress, but only shrugged.
“She’s okay,” he said, but without much enthusiasm. Gojyo drummed his fingers on the table and studied the occupants of the room again. He considered that maybe he was looking in the wrong direction. Maybe he’d been right to include the whole guy-on-guy part in the talk. He hummed thoughtfully and selected a good-looking guy near the door and nudged Goku.
“Well, what about him?” he asked. Goku looked. Gojyo observed him carefully to see if he showed any more interest in the guy than he had in the female candidates Gojyo had selected for his impromptu contest. Goku’s expression suggested that he was still unimpressed. He shrugged again. Gojyo kept himself from rolling his eyes. It was good to know that even if Goku had to enter puberty, at least he wasn’t slobbering over everything with two legs. Still, Gojyo thought he might at least show a little interest. After all, he had been to one to ask Gojyo about sex, and that suggested that there must be somebody he wouldn’t mind doing the horizontal mambo with.
Oh. Well, there was that. Gojyo paused. He hadn’t really considered the possibility that Goku’s interest might lie a little closer. Maybe he wasn’t interested in strangers because he’d already fixated on someone else. That wouldn’t be such a problem, except that the only people that were around him that much were himself, Hakkai, and Sanzo. Gojyo was relatively sure that it wasn’t him, and fairly certain it couldn’t be Hakkai. Which left…well. Gojyo eyed Goku speculatively and decided to test his hypothesis.
“Well, what about me?” he asked, lounging back in his seat in his best attractive-bar-ornament position. Goku looked at him blankly. “Do you think I’m hot?” Gojyo pressed. Far from looking embarrassed or anxious, Goku looked faintly disgusted and kicked Gojyo solidly in the shin.
“Pervert!” he said. Gojyo rubbed his bruised leg, but felt relived. A kick in the leg was a small price to pay to be reassured that Goku wasn’t nursing a crush on him. Still, there was obviously somebody. He pursued his suspicions relentlessly.
“What about Hakkai?” he persisted. Goku looked grossed out.
“Ew, no!” he exclaimed. He seemed affronted at being forced to think of Hakkai sexually. Well, Gojyo thought, there was no accounting for taste. After all, the kid couldn’t even appreciate his charms. Plus, if it wasn’t him and it wasn’t Hakkai…
He leaned back casually and took a sip of his drink before questioning in a deliberately offhand tone, “What about Sanzo, then?”
Ding ding ding! Bells went off in Gojyo’s head as Goku flushed a deep pink. He felt a wave of pity for the poor kid but couldn’t help but be extremely amused. The kid was lucky, though. He was probably the only one Sanzo wouldn’t shoot for having a crush on him. Goku colored more deeply before stuttering, “No!” His voice wavered, though, and his eyes darted anxiously around the room, as if expecting Sanzo to appear out of nowhere and smack him. Gojyo smirked, and drained the rest of his beer, satisfied at the results of his interrogation.
“Ah,” he hummed, letting his tone suggest that he understood perfectly well. Goku’s coloring was soemwhere between pale and pink as he stammered out denials. Gojyo chuckled and left his empty beer bottle on the table, giving Goku’s hair an affectionate ruffle as he headed toward the stairs. Goku remained at the table, flustered and stuttering. Gojyo couldn’t smother his grin.
It had gone much better than he’d expected, he considered. He was thrilled that Goku had finally realized that Sanzo, though possessed of the worst temper Gojyo had ever encountered, was a nice piece of ass. Granted, Sanzo would make all their lives hell if he ever found out about Goku’s little crush, but still. At least they could all rest assured that Goku wouldn’t be fooling around with anyone else while he was pining after Sanzo. And if, against all odds, the monkey actually managed to break through Sanzo’s metaphorical chastity belt…well. Gojyo hid a smirk and made a mental note to force Hakkai to room with him for the foreseeable future and leave the other two by themselves.
Everyone knew that Sanzo just needed to get laid, after all. If Goku was up to the job, the Gojyo thought the trip west might be about to get a whole lot more pleasant.
