[BL] What That Mouth Do?

The mountains were the first thing Bae noticed.

Not the house — the cramped driveway already crowded with the U-Haul and his dad's truck, the front door standing open to the warm gray air. Not the rain, though it was everywhere, soft and constant, the kind of rain that didn't fall so much as *exist*, hanging in the atmosphere like it had always been there and always would be. Not even the smell, which was different from Maui in ways he couldn't fully describe — heavier, greener, older somehow, like the island had more to say.

Just the mountains.

They rose behind the neighborhood in a solid green wall, close enough that Bae felt, standing in the driveway with a box wedged under one arm, like he could walk to the base of them in ten minutes. Like they were watching. He had grown up near mountains his whole life and had never once felt watched by them before. He didn't know if that was Hilo or just him, newly arrived and already reading things into the landscape that probably weren't there.

He carried the box inside.

The house smelled like fresh paint over something older — wood, rain, someone else's years lived in these walls. His mother was already in the kitchen, moving efficiently through the space like she was solving a problem, opening cabinets and closing them, cataloguing what was where. His father was somewhere in the back, and Bae tracked him by the soft, steady sound of furniture being set down and adjusted. Norman Makua did not speak much when there was work to be done. He didn't need to. The two of them had always communicated mostly in quiet.

Bae set the box down in what would become the living room and stood in the middle of it for a moment.

The ceiling had a water stain in one corner shaped like nothing in particular. The windows faced the backyard, which was narrow and overgrown and currently being rained on. Outside, somewhere down the street, a dog was barking about something with great personal conviction.

He thought about his bedroom in Maui. The specific slant of afternoon light on his wall. The way he knew every sound the house made — which floorboards groaned, where the AC ticked at night. He'd lived in that house for eleven years. Eleven years was a long time to learn a building's language, and now he was standing in one that didn't know him yet.

He went back out to the truck for another box.

---

By midafternoon the rain had softened to a mist and the Goya family had arrived.

Bae heard them before he saw them. The sound of a truck door slamming and then his aunt Odelia's voice carrying into the house — "Norman! Where do you want these?" — and then Owen behind her, already narrating something to no one in particular, and then footsteps on the front steps and suddenly the house, which had been so quiet all morning, was full.

Uncle Owen had apparently brought his portable grill. Bae learned this by going outside to get a roll of tape from the truck bed and finding Owen in the side yard, already setting it up with the focused satisfaction of a man who believed every occasion was improved by the presence of food cooked outdoors. He was in slippers and a faded t-shirt and he pointed at Bae with a pair of tongs like a greeting.

"Eh, the boy! You wen' get big."

Bae smiled. He was never sure what to do with that particular observation. "Yeah," he said. "Hey, Uncle Owen."

"Good to have you guys back." Owen turned back to the grill, began doing things to it with confident authority. "Go eat something. Your auntie brought stuff."

Inside, Odelia had indeed brought stuff — containers of food covering the kitchen counter in an arrangement that suggested she did not fully trust that Isabae Makua would remember to feed herself during a move. Bae's mother and aunt were standing at the counter in conversation, and there was something warm about the sight of them together — the same Korean-Scottish mix in their features, the same small gestures — that Bae watched from the doorway for a second before anyone noticed him.

"Bae." His aunt smiled at him. She had his mother's eyes and a directness in her expression that made Bae feel both seen and slightly cornered. "You okay? Come, eat something."

"I'm good, I just needed—"

"Come eat something," she said again, in the tone of a woman who had already decided how this conversation ended.

He came and ate something.

He was standing at the counter with a plate when Honoka appeared.

She came from deeper in the house — she'd apparently already claimed territory, had apparently already found Bae's room and poked through everything in it, because she showed up holding a small cactus he'd packed in his desk drawer and said, "This yours? Why is this a cactus, you live in Hawaiʻi."

"I had it for three years," Bae said.

"It's like four inches."

"It grows slow."

Honoka set the cactus on the counter like she was delivering evidence. She was sixteen, the same age as Bae, with her mother's directness and her father's easy grin, and she was wearing a cropped t-shirt in a color that Bae could not have named, and she looked at him the way she had always looked at him at family events over the years — like she was waiting for him to be more interesting than he was currently being.

"You remember me?" she asked.

"Yeah, Honoka, we've met like twenty times."

"We've met at family stuff. That doesn't count." She leaned against the counter beside him. "Last time I saw you was Grandma's seventy-fifth. You ate cake and played on your phone the whole time."

"That was a long gathering."

"Four hours."

"Very long gathering."

Honoka studied him with the expression of someone making a preliminary assessment. Then she seemed to decide something, and she smiled — different from the appraising look, warmer, more real. "You gonna like it here," she said. Not a question. A statement, offered freely, like a gift.

Bae looked out the kitchen window at the backyard in the mist and thought about the mountains watching from behind the trees. "Maybe," he said.

"Definitely," she said, and took food from his plate without asking.

---

The afternoon moved through the house like the rain — everywhere, unhurried. Furniture got carried and positioned and repositioned. Owen grilled outside and periodically offered opinions on matters no one had asked him about. Miyoko arrived sometime after three, gliding in with the calm authority of someone who could walk into any room and make it look like she'd been there first. She was twenty and carried herself like she already knew the ending of most situations. She said hello to Bae with a small smile and a look that lingered just a beat longer than necessary, and Bae had the unnerving sense that she had already formed a complete opinion about him.

He spent most of the afternoon being useful and largely unnoticed, which was how he preferred it. He carried boxes. He shifted furniture when asked. He ate when food was put in front of him and said yes and no and thank you in the right places and stayed close to the walls, where it was easier to see everything without being in the middle of it.

It was a skill he had spent years perfecting.

His mother found him at one point, standing in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen, holding a box of books and waiting for a moment of clear passage through the suddenly very full house. She stopped in front of him and looked at him with the particular expression she wore when she was reading something he hadn't said.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Big day."

"Yeah."

She looked at him another moment, and he knew she was doing the thing where she weighed how much to say against how much he needed to hear. She reached up and smoothed his hair — his thick curls were getting unruly in the humidity, he could feel them — and said, "Come find me if you need a break from the noise."

"I'm fine," he said.

She nodded like she believed some of that. She went back to the kitchen.

Bae carried his box of books to his room and sat on the edge of his bare mattress and looked at the walls, which were the same off-white as every room in every house he had never fully felt at home in, and outside his window the mountains were still there, still green, still watching.

He was fine.

He was usually fine.

---

Honoka found him on the lanai just as the day was exhaling into evening.

The backyard faced west and the clouds had thinned enough that the light was coming through in long gold sheets, catching the tops of the trees and making everything look briefly like a painting of itself. Bae was sitting on the steps with his back against the railing, knees pulled up, watching it happen. He heard Honoka come through the back door and considered whether he could convincingly pretend to be somewhere else. He could not. She sat down beside him.

"You do this a lot," she said.

"Do what."

"Disappear to the edges of things."

He looked at her. She was looking at the yard, not him, eating something — a piece of mango from inside, vivid orange in the fading light. She offered him a piece. He took it.

"I wasn't disappearing," he said. "I was just — sitting."

"Mm." She did not sound convinced. "You always this quiet?"

"Pretty much."

"Okay." She seemed genuinely fine with that, which surprised him. Most people who asked if he was always this quiet were asking him to stop. "I'm the opposite," she added, conversationally. "Ask anyone."

"I could tell."

She grinned. "Is that bad?"

"No," he said, and realized he meant it.

They sat there for a while, the two of them. The sounds from inside — his father's voice, Owen's laugh, the particular percussion of Odelia organizing a kitchen — drifted out through the screen door and settled around them. Somewhere in the neighborhood a lawn mower was going. The rain had fully stopped and the air smelled clean and deep, like the earth had just taken a long drink.

"I'm glad you guys moved here," Honoka said, after a while. "My mom's glad too. She won't stop saying it."

"Yeah?" He didn't know what to do with that — the straightforwardness of it.

"You're gonna be at Waiākea in the fall, right? Same as me?"

"Yeah."

"Good." She picked at the edge of her mango skin. "You know anyone in Hilo?"

"Not really. Just family."

"That's fine. You'll meet people." A pause. "My best friend's probably coming by later, actually. He was gonna help with some boxes."

"He doesn't have to."

Honoka shrugged. "He offered. He's like that." She glanced at Bae sideways, a little amused about something. "Don't be weird when he gets here."

Bae frowned. "I'm not weird."

"You kind of are. In a fine way. Just — don't disappear into the walls."

"I don't—"

"Bae."

"What."

"Just say hi," she said. "That's all."

---

Pili arrived when the light was nearly gone.

Bae was in the living room, nominally helping his father arrange a bookshelf, actually handing his father books while his father did the arranging, when he heard the front door open and Honoka's voice change — louder, brighter, pointed outward — and then footsteps and the particular way the room shifted when someone new walked into it.

He had been bracing, without quite meaning to, for someone like Honoka: loud and present and socially frictionless, someone who would come in and immediately own the space. Someone he would need to smile at correctly and for whom he would need to perform being a reasonably normal human being for the appropriate duration.

What came through the living room doorway was a guy in an oversized t-shirt and worn sneakers, a guitar case strap over one shoulder, dark hair slightly damp from the evening air, looking unhurried in the way that some people carried in their bodies the same way others carried tension.

He noticed Bae's father first, nodded at him. "Mr. Makua. Need help with that?"

Norman Makua turned, assessed the newcomer, and — which was unusual — smiled. "I'm good. Bae, you know Pili?"

Bae's father went back to the shelf. The newcomer looked at Bae.

"Hey," Pili said. Not a performance of friendly. Just — hey. Calibrated to him, somehow, like he'd correctly identified in one second that Bae was not a person who needed a lot of entrance.

"Hey," Bae said.

Honoka appeared in the doorway behind Pili, took in the scene, and immediately vanished toward the kitchen with the energy of someone who had accomplished what she came to do.

Pili looked around the room — the boxes, the half-assembled shelves, the general organized chaos of a family mid-arrival — and said, "You guys been at this all day?"

"Since this morning," Bae said.

"You eat anything good? Owen grill?"

"Yeah."

"Good." Pili set his guitar case down against the wall with the ease of someone who set it down everywhere. He looked at the bookshelf and at Norman and said, "I can hold that side if you want," and Norman said, "Sure," and that was apparently that. Pili stepped in beside his father and held the shelf steady while Norman worked, and Bae stood there for a moment, still holding a stack of books, watching this happen.

He put the books down. He went to find somewhere to sit.

He ended up back on the lanai.

He wasn't disappearing. He just needed a minute. The house had gotten full again when the shelf project attracted additional commentary from Owen, who had opinions about anchoring things to walls, and Odelia, who had opinions about where things should go, and Miyoko, who had appeared silently and was sitting in the armchair in the corner reading something on her phone while everyone else talked around her.

Bae slipped out the back and sat on the steps again. The sky was dark now, properly dark, and the air was cooler, and the mountains had disappeared into the blackness but he knew they were there.

He heard the screen door behind him and expected Honoka.

It was Pili.

He came out without preamble and sat on the steps beside Bae, leaving a reasonable amount of space between them, and looked out at the dark backyard. He had his phone in one hand and he glanced at it and then set it face-down on the step beside him, which Bae noticed without knowing why he noticed it.

"Shelf's done," Pili said.

"Thanks for that."

"No problem." He looked up at the sky. "Clouds are clearing. Rain's pau for tonight."

"Pau?"

"Done. Finished." He glanced at Bae. "You're from Maui?"

"Yeah."

"How long?"

"Basically my whole life. We moved there when I was four."

Pili nodded, looking back at the yard. "Maui's different."

"Yeah," Bae said. "This feels — I don't know. Closer to everything."

"Hilo does that." A small pause. "The mountains, yeah? You notice that? Like they're right there."

Bae turned to look at him.

"I noticed that," Bae said. "First thing when we pulled up."

Pili nodded, something easy in his expression, like an answer had arrived at the right time. "Grew up here," he said. "I still notice it. Some places you stop seeing after a while. I don't think I'll ever stop seeing those."

Bae was quiet for a moment. "Did you always live in Hilo?"

"Panaewa. My family's been there forever." He tilted his head slightly. "You'll know it. Not far from here."

"Is it — like this? The neighborhood?"

"Eh, bit different. Quieter. More trees." A beat. "This area's nice though. Good for runs."

"Do you run?"

"In the mornings. Before it gets hot." He glanced at Bae. "You?"

"No," Bae said honestly.

Pili smiled. Not a laugh, not a performance — just a small, uncomplicated smile. "What do you do? Like, for yourself."

The question landed quietly and Bae sat with it for a second. Nobody asked that. People asked what school he went to, what his parents did, whether he had brothers and sisters. They asked questions that had answers that told them how to categorize him.

*For yourself* was different.

"Music," he said. "I play guitar. Not like, seriously. I just — it's what I do when I'm not doing anything."

Pili looked at him with renewed attention. "Yeah? What do you listen to?"

And then they were talking.

It was not a dramatic thing. There was no moment where Bae thought, *this is different*, or made a decision to let his guard down, or said anything that surprised him. They talked about music — artists they knew, songs that had gotten under their skin for reasons neither of them could fully articulate, the specific feeling of a chord change that hits you somewhere below the chest. Pili knew music the way someone who loved it knew it, not technically, not as performance, just as something that mattered. He talked about it without showing off.

At some point Honoka appeared at the screen door and said, "You guys want anything?" and they both said no without looking up, and she went back inside.

At some point Bae mentioned a song he'd been playing with lately and Pili said he knew it, could play it, had been playing a version of it for months — and there was a moment where they both reached for the same chord name at the same time and then both stopped, and Pili laughed, which was — Bae thought later — the first time he'd made someone laugh in a long time just by being himself in a room.

The dark deepened around them. The air smelled like rain and green things and somewhere Owen was still talking inside. Bae forgot, for a stretch of time he couldn't have measured, to be conscious of his hands, his posture, how much space he was taking up.

He just talked.

When Pili left, it was late enough that the neighborhood had gotten quiet.

He said goodbye to Norman, who came to the door and shook his hand. He said something in the kitchen that made Odelia laugh. He knocked his shoulder against Honoka's in that practiced way of two people who had been friends long enough to have their own physical language, and then he came back through the living room where Bae was standing and he said, "I'll see you around," in that same unhurried tone he'd arrived with.

"Yeah," Bae said. "For sure."

Pili picked up his guitar case. He lifted one hand in a loose wave at the room generally and then he was through the front door, and then he was gone.

Bae stood there for a moment.

He was aware of people still moving through the house — his father returning to some task, Honoka and Miyoko talking in the kitchen, his mother appearing in the hallway with a look that asked a question she didn't ask aloud. The house went on being full and warm and loud in the way it had been all day.

But something had shifted. Some internal calibration he didn't have a name for.

He lay in bed that night on a mattress that felt unfamiliar, looking up at a ceiling that was not his. The room was dark except for the amber seep of a street light through the curtain, and the rain had come back — or maybe it had never fully left — and it moved across the roof in a soft and steady way that was different from the Maui sounds he knew.

He thought about what he would have predicted this day would feel like.

Awkward. Long. Exhausting. The grinding labor of being Baenor Makua in a roomful of people who knew him by blood but not by presence, having to perform a version of himself that was friendly and competent and fine, fine, always fine.

And it had been that. Parts of it.

But it had also been the mountains watching from behind the trees. And Honoka's hand taking mango off his plate like they'd known each other their whole lives instead of from the edges of family occasions. And his father smiling at a stranger, which his father almost never did.

And Pili, sitting on the steps beside him in the dark, asking *what do you do for yourself* like the answer was genuinely going to be

interesting.

Bae stared at the ceiling.

He had spent a long time — more time than he liked to think about — imagining what it would feel like to be different. Braver. Someone who walked into rooms without calculating exactly how much space to take up. Someone whose body didn't feel like a first draft of a person. He'd spent years watching other people move through the world the way Pili moved through the world — easily, without apparent effort, like they had simply decided the world was worth being present in.

He hadn't known what to do with that tonight. The easiness. The fact that Pili had sat down next to him specifically, like it was nothing, like quiet people were not a problem to be solved.

It wasn't that he thought anything would happen.

He was smarter than that. He knew who he was and how people looked at him and what that meant, and he was not someone who made the mistake of building on a single evening.

But he lay in the dark in his new room in Waiākea Uka, listening to the rain learn the shape of a roof that was now, technically, his, and he thought about how badly he wanted — not Pili, or not just Pili — but the feeling. The specific feeling of not being invisible. Of taking up the right amount of space. Of living in a body that belonged in the room it was sitting in.

He wanted to be in the room.

That was all. That was everything.

He closed his eyes.

The rain kept going, quiet and honest, the way it did here.