NANA’S FAVOURITE

Before the sun kissed the horizon, Sukuna’s attendants got him ready for the day like routine. Bringing in a fresh set of clothes to your shared chambers, strips of human flesh awaiting him in the dining area for breakfast. The same before you got here, and after the matrimony. And in these very chambers do they leave a sloppy mess for you to deal with, along with a sideways glance to a brazier they’ll abandon. Clothes strewn across the floor, chests popped open and spilling with silks, partition still propped open.

All for you to deal with. The wife of the King of Curses.

“Impudent, bare-faced aides,” you mutter, expression caving inwards. And oh, do you realize how much you’re starting to sound like your husband.

It was only your first season here, and you’d been made a pushover. Initially, you hadn’t thought too much on it. They’d been contemptuous when you were simply the lowly courtesan that Ryomen Sukuna brought to his shrine to fuck on occasion.

Not a soul in these walls had reckoned that Ryomen Sukuna would ever take on a wife, much less you, so you welcomed the transition with grace.

You’d dressed yourself, bathed yourself, on occasion offering a hand in the kitchen to the faint servants even when your husband sneered at your docility. You had taken their adverseness as unfamiliarity, hoping that with time the tensions would ease up as they’d gotten to know you and slowly come around. But it hadn’t, they hadn’t welcomed you. If anything, the mistreatment only mounted.

And their abuse can only go so far, a woman pushed to her wits end.

Propping your chest open, you dress yourself in your kimono and paint your lips red. A fierce look contrasting the serenity coloring your face than you are used to.

Your husband is out hunting. His mount galloping through the mountains as he crosses either dwellers or game, bringing back whatever he can by mid-afternoon. This winter has been rather harsh, so it isn’t uncommon for him to unleash his blaze across an unsuspecting village and bring home treasures.

That gives you enough time to set things right, and if all else fails, you’ll at least avoid your husbands taunts while he basks in your humiliation. It seems you’ve married a cruel bastard. He’d lounge on his chair and guffaw at the thought of you standing up for yourself and failing.

Additionally, he’s resided with these people long before he’d come to know you, so who knows if he’ll take their side in such an accusation.

No, this is something you want to fix yourself.

—

“I have come to fetch you, My Lady. Is there assistance you require?”

With your posture ramrod straight, you pace the length of the serving room in the east wing of the shrine. Ages ago, it was built for guests, though Sukuna hosts nothing of the sort. It is simply ornamentation now, left to collect dust and wither.

“These zabutons. They have been eaten away by moths,” you express, tone level. “Replace them at once.”

Tsumigi, one of Sukuna’s attendants, dips her head, arms slipped into the sleeves of her kimono. “I see, My Lady. But it seems that Master Sukuna asked to keep this room untouched.”

Your gaze meets hers over your shoulder, lips thinned. You can hear the smirk playing in her tone. “And I am ordering you to find replacements. Do you dare to defy me?”

By now, you would have expected her to give in. Toss aside the harsh theatrics, and obey her lady. But instead, she meets your gaze with a grin.

“If it is to satisfy Master Sukuna, then yes.”

She excuses herself as you seethe, your eye twitching in disdain.

This is going to be harder than you thought. But you musn’t give up. This is as much your home as it is there’s, and you tend to see this through.

—

You arrive in the dining room for breakfast—the scent of steamed rice and dashi stock broth wafting into your nose and blossoming a hunger deep in your gut. For the most part, your breakfasts are uneventful, though they can be rather lonely.

You drum your fingers across the low table you’re seated at on a cushion, taking a sip of your steeped tea and allowing it to diffuse through your frayed nerves.

A new plan. One that will assert your authority over the attendants…

Or, you can gain their favor.

Both routes are rather humiliating. Attempting to mirror your husbands attitudes, or grovel as what he despises. You can picture his mocking of you crystal clear.

The soft taps of your fingers increase, sounding into the mahogany finish, cogs and wheels churning in your mind.

The vapor from your untouched and lively miso soup curls upwards, soft tendrils billowing up before dissipating.

Your gaze thins on a partition across the room, mindlessly studying the decorative flora.

Appeasement or authority.

You turn it over a countless number of times, chalking up half-witted plans, mentally cursing yourself out. It shouldn’t be this hard, seeing as you’d scavenged around half of your life for scraps before joining a brothel once you’d come of age.

Though you find yourself at a standstill with the people who call this place home.

And it is unbelievably infuriating.

Snap!

Suddenly, your chopsticks break in half in your hand, small fractures of splintered wood flinging across the table and littering the clean surface.

You mutter curses as a small girl finds her way to your side, deeply bowing her head and attempting to atone.

“I apologize, My Lady. Is the food not up to your standards?”

You find yourself stilling at her soft tone. Huh. Her sincerity is refreshing.

“Uh, no. It seems I am lacking an appetite this morning, but I can assure you that the food is plenty flavorful every other morning.”

You give her a half hearted smile as she wipes the table with a rag that was tucked into her apron. It seems she is part of the kitchen staff.

A groove hooks between your eyebrows. “I’m sorry, it seems that I do not recognize you. What is your name?” you offer her a tilt of your head, the corners of your lips twitching upwards when she nearly topples over her feet and straightens beside you.

“Furi, My Lady.”

You chuckle, soft, your eyes forming crows feet from how fitting her name is.

振り. A shake. A tremble.

A fall.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Furi. Now, tell me. Why is it that I have yet to come across you? After all, we share these walls,” you express, a genuine yet perplexed smile creasing your cheeks.

She lifts her gaze from the hem of her kimono, reddened ears and hazel eyes locking with yours. “It is a long story, but I am the chef, My Lady.”

Your eyebrows lift in intrigue. “So you say? A girl this young with such a knack for cuisine,” you smirk, lifting a spoon to dip it into the miso soup. You bring it back to your mouth and feel yourself slacken, your tensed up muscles unkinking. A sigh of relief puffs from your lips, lashes nearly dusting shut.

“You are too kind, My Lady.”

There is a beat of silence where she retreats to her previous spot, off in the corner. She makes herself undetectable, like how you didn’t notice her while your breakfast was served. The new sets of chopsticks find their way to your hands, before you begin working away at your steamed rice.

“If I may,” Furi starts again, and you find yourself glancing over your shoulder see her. “Is everything alright, My Lady?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” you lie through a bite, globs of chewed rice sliding down your throat.

She hesitates, swaying where she stands. “The last thing I would want to do is overstep and upset you… but you seem quite… untuned as of late. Are you sure nothing is out of the sort?”

This young girl is quite attentive, though the intention of her actions escape you. Does she really seek to console you? Are you questioning her sincerity as it’s been so long since you felt something of that likeness?

You place your chopsticks down, turning to face her. You’ve met young girls like her during your time at the brothel—innocent yet capturing a word of compassion. Naturally, you would beckon her to come sit beside you, however you do not want to offend not scare her. So you speak to her from where you sit.

“How long have you been living her, Furi?”

“Just over two years now, My Lady.”

You nod, inwardly noting this information. She’s been here quite some time, and you’re wondering if she’s pissed someone off for being secluded to the kitchen but out of your sight.

“And what can you tell me of this shrine?”

She sways again, her feet doing a sort of dance beneath the flounce of her skirt. She’s nervous.

“There is no one here to punish you. You may speak freely,” you offer, eyeing as she smooths out the creases of outfit.

She is still reluctant, so you hope the silence will prompt her to speak. Swiftly, it does.

“Though I am confined to the kitchen, I am not without notice,” she begins, swallowing thickly and avoiding eye contact while she twists her hands between each other. “I see the way the attendants treat you.”

Her directness makes you falter, your mouth parting to say something but words fail you. What exactly are you supposed to say? Defend your tormentors? Complain about their aggression?

“I see,” you resort to acknowledgment, biting the inside of your cheek. “For a moment, I believed it was all in my head.” The chuckle that leaves you is dry, coating the inside of your throat like raw honey. Thick, uncomfortable.

“I apologize for it. On their behalf, you have done nothing to deserve such treatment,” she hastens her words, eyes widening as she watches you carefully. “However, a bit of context might prove beneficial.”

Context?

You cock your head to the side at her cryptic words, watching as she takes a tentative step forward.

“Well, then. Do tell,” you say, clearing your throat ad adjusting your posture. “It seems I am always outside of some long running, cruel joke.”

Furi glances past her shoulder, eyes squinting when she sees a shadow pass the parchment of the sliding doors. “Not here. Not now. I will tell you everything I know in due time,” she affirms, biting the inside of her cheek.

There are far too many attendants lurking nearby, and not enough time as the allotted duration for breakfast is already coming to an end.

“Very well. I hope to speak to you soon,” you reckon, returning to your cold rice and stale tea.

Furi bows and dismisses herself, and another attendant steps into the room to replace her.

It is Tsumigi yet again, a frequent contender to your misery. Her cheeks are flushed as if she’d been outside in the relentless cold tending to something, the hem of her skirt riding up and tucked into her sock awkwardly.

Bowing, she greets you and offers to clean the table, a snarl playing at her face. Most likely, the attendants are aware of your humiliation that unfolded in the serving room just an hour ago.

Gathering your bearings, you get to your feet, smothering a huff, and step past Tsumigi.

Wordlessly, you dismiss yourself before you offer her any more gossip for tea time.

—

The next few days, you find yourself in a bleak routine. Each morning grows colder, Sukuna’s place beside you empty every morning as he tends to foreign affairs. Scorching villages or plaguing the capital. Doing whatever he does to satisfy his insatiable hungers as the lands grow fallow.

It doesn’t help that you have to tend to the brazier on your own through the night as winter harshens, but you’ve endured worse.

Furi doesn’t serves you breakfast personally, that day she spoke to you serving as a fluke. The attendants seemed to be understaffed and placed the catering on the chef. But it comes to your attention that Tsumigi was busy with her stableboy that clarifying morning, the whispers of gossip curling through the shrine walls easier to pick up on as you attempt to make yourself as imperceptible as Furi.

Tsumigi is making a ridicule of you, and for why? You cannot come to fathom. The two of you barely exchange words aside from repulsing pleasantries.

It is late one night when Sukuna is bathing after coming home soaked in sweat and caked in dirt when you linger towards the kitchen.

You discover Furi hunched over a large pot, dipping her finger in to taste a broth that makes your stomach growl despite having dinner a mere few hours before.

“It smells wonderful,” you offer, tugging your obi loosely over your yukata after quickly throwing it on.

She nearly jumps out of her skin, setting her ladle down and bowing her head. “M-My Lady… I wasn’t expecting you at this hour,” she mutters, folding her hands into her kimono.

You close the proximity, leaning over to get a whiff of tomorrow’s lunch. “It seems you weren’t expecting me at all,” you press, lifting an eyebrow giving her a slow appraisal. “Is something of the matter? I have been waiting to speak with you.”

It wouldn’t be far-fetched for this young girl to avoid you after telling you such secrets, regretting every letting you in or offering clarification.

Furi cringes, her brunette bangs falling over her forehead. “I believe that one of the attendants might have been privy to our conversation.”

Your careless grin drops. “Is that so?”

She nods, again with her swaying.

You sigh, tongue darting out to wet your lips. “Are you safe? Have the attendants been mistreating you in anyway?”

Weakly, she shrugs. “Not any more than they already have.”

You deflate at her words. Her situation doesn’t seem much better than yours, except she doesn’t have a title to protect her. You endure passivity, while she very well may endure aggression. “I sincerely apologize, Furi. It was not my intention to get you tangled up in my troubles, but it seems that we have a lot to discuss.”

The attendants, besides the ones tending to Sukuna in the bath, have retired to their quarters, leaving the kitchen open for the two of you. Nabbing a stool, you rest beside her while she makes you a cup of tea and tends to her broth.

“There was a woman before you,” she starts, a look painting her face as if she wants to bite her tone off, “just three change of the seasons ago. With bushy eyebrows and hair as long as a yōkai and believed her nudity to be a pastime.”

An ache blooms behind your ribs, but you bite it down. It’d be foolish to think that you were Sukuna’s first anything, seeing as your occupation before this marriage had been as a courtesan.

Still, it hurts.

You smother a sigh but it escapes you.

A pang to dwell upon for another time.

You nod for her to continue.

“She was incredibly beautiful, a sorcerer just the same. A daughter of the Fugiwara clan with a technique to their standard. But…” she cocks her head to the side, as if reliving her memories in real time. “Master Sukuna spared no interest in her. He simply tolerated her. Her slaughter meant a headache in the capital that he had no patience to deal with.”

The broth simmers on a low kindled heat, the sound of ash sparking and wood shifting.

“She was wildly obsessed with Master Sukuna, clinging to his side and attempting to seduce him at every corner. He pried off her pawing hands when they grew too grabby, and, unsuccessfully, I tried to warn her. Her attitudes were dangerous, and she believed she formed a friendship with me when I wanted to avoid the spilling of blood across these tatami mats.”

Ah. Benevolence had been her fall from grace.

“The attendants here had quickly grown tired of her, irritated that her mood swings affected the Master’s, which in turn made their livelihoods all the more difficult.”

You drop your head, a sigh wound of stress tricking from your lips. “And they took their grievances out on you…”

Furi nods carefully, tending to the flickering flames beneath the pot.

“… and what they’re doing now is all the same. I am just another disposable woman they’ve come to reject.”

She doesn’t confirm your words, but her silence says enough. “There is more, My Lady.”

You find yourself tapping your bare foot against the cold flooring.

“One morning, she had challenged him to a fight, expressing her undying love and desire to be the individual to take his last breath.”

Her words, thick with distress, slam into you.

It is very clear how the result of the fight came out, seeing as Sukuna still breathes and she is nowhere to be found.

Your blood roars in your ears, your foot now at a bouncing cadence on the floor. You drown out her next words, but catch bits and pieces of it. It seems that following the slaughter of his past admirer, the capital had unleashed an outcry. Sukuna had no interest in hazing the capital as it brought him a plethora of benefits, but it was inevitable. The result of the achingly long war had been catastrophic—hundreds and thousands of men slaughtered by his hand before he stalked into the capital with the head of their general. The shrine itself reaped the consequences, attendants beheaded for a single misstep and food running scarce as hunting had been replaced with frequent battles.

It is a possibility that a battle near the capital had been when he’d first spotted you in your pleasure house.

“Furi, I must thank you,” you confess, running your fingers through your hair and getting to your feet. Move, you need to move. “There is plenty that I must do now, so I will dismiss myself. But make it known, I will not let this insubordination and blustery ravage on.”

You lean forward, placing a hand on her shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze. Your heart clenches at the thought of this young girl enduring such harassment without a single shoulder to lean on.

“Leave it to me. I shall mend the divide that splinters the shrine.”

Furi’s tense expression melts away into something of relief, and you want to commit this image to memory to ensure you see this through.

“However, before I go, I have one last thing to ask of you.”

“Anything, My Lady.”

You release a strained breath.

“The name of this woman. What was it?”

—

You leave Furi in the kitchen, your bare feet slapping against the narrow corridors. The sconces adorning the walls flicker, flames licking at each other and casting your shadow long and obtuse across the ground.

Once you realize you’ve reached your husbands chambers, you realize how much time has passed between dinner and the present.

He will be curious as to where you’d gone off to. Often times, he grows restless in your absence.

You sigh. In all of the time you’d known Sukuna, he’d been vexingly talented at reading you and picking up on your mannerisms. You only pray that he is exhausted from his eventful day to spend his time analyzing you.

Though it seems you are woefully ignorant of just how energetic your husband tends to be, the sight you open his chambers to jarring.

He’s in nothing but his pale sirwal, his lower pair of arms crossed behind his back while he presses himself to the floor, and back up. His upper pair of arms flex, palms splayed on the ground, hands massive enough to curl around your throat and then some.

Push-ups.

Realistically, there has to be a way to maintain such a massive physique, so it isn’t outlandish that he works out. But still, you find yourself caught off guard. Innocent as ever, but heat still manages to fist low in your loins. Your gaze trails the length of his corded forearms, veins bulging across his biceps, deltoids rippling through effort.

Not the first instance to cross your mind, but you’d find immense pleasure in biting his arms.

You are well aware that he has sensed your presence ever since you found yourself in the kitchen up until you were standing outside his chamber doors, so he doesn’t flinch when you gawk at him from just a few feet away.

“Where did you run off to?” he presses through a grunt, lowering himself where his chin nearly brushes the straw mat.

Straight to the point.

“I was hungry, there were some fruits left in the kitchen,” you lie, steeling your nerves and praying you don’t betray yourself.

He continues his repetition, though he finally slides his attention upwards towards you. Deep pools of blood red assess you, his brow line furrowing in thought. “We had dinner merely an hour ago. Do not tell me you are with child and stuffing yourself for two.”

You splutter, shaking your hands, a nervous chuckle leaving you. “N-no, My Lord. Nothing of the sort.”

He finishes his workout, before standing to his feet and rolling his shoulders back, looking everything but convinced. “That title from your lips disgusts me and you know it. Do not address me as such again,” he mutters in mild irritation, padding over to the door and peeling his socks off.

You deflate, wanting to slap yourself for how easily you squirm under his scrutinizing attention. But, you cannot tell Sukuna of your current situation. There are a number of ways it could go once it is in his orbit, and you want to avoid majority of them.

Untying your obi, you toss it on the top of your chest before making your way towards the bed when a pair of heavy arms snake around your waist, pulling your back flush against his chest.

“It seems that my efforts have gone to waste,” Sukuna mutters, the lower pair of his hands settling on your waist while the others work their way towards your breasts. Melting, you toss your head back against his torso, lashes dusting shut. He leans forward, sniffing the plush of your cheeks, of your lips. He has a thing for your scent, an admission you were privy to when he had you squirming beneath him. “This womb isn’t swollen with my heir.”

Weakly, you giggle through the butterflies, scrunching your nose. “We have yet to discuss such matters,” you deflect, reaching a hand up to grab a fistful of his silky, salmon-colored hair. “Take this up with me another time.”

Sukuna cocks his head thoughtfully, then spins you around and tosses you over his shoulder with terrifying ease. “Foolish woman. You think I do not see how you gawk at the stable hands son, how you beam with such idiocy at the thought of carrying your own?” He lands a harsh slap against your ass, punching a squeal out of your throat, before tossing you onto the bed.

“Speaking in circles. Tch. We might as well practice tonight,” he prompts, fingers curling around the waistband of his sirwal before dropping it, leaving only his loincloth.

Two heavy cocks straining against the too-small fabric. Two cocks you’ve felt slipping down your tongue, dragging inside your cunt, stretching your ass—.

You shake away the dizzy feeling mounting you, all splayed out with your parted yukata, your bare form his to feast his gaze upon. And he does so unabashedly, canines clicking as four crimson slits rest heavy on your lips, your breasts, dancing down your navel, to your spread legs pooling with arousal.

You wonder if he’s looked at her this way.

Inwardly, you cringe. You shouldn’t be thinking of her when you’re about to be taken by him.

The mouth rending his stomach grins with earnest, drool coating its lips in a sheer shine. The tongue hangs out limply, desperate for a taste of your sex.

“Come,” he mutters, two arms folded across his chest with the other two propped at his hips. His voice, impossibly deep and raspy, sends heat prickling over your skin, coupled with a flush that suits you.

You crawl to him, slowly and allowing your hips to sway freely beneath your yukata, not once tearing your gaze from his hardened stare. His pectoral muscles shift, a muscle in his jaw pulsing like he’s holding back from pouncing at you.

You come to a slow before him, lifting off of your haunches and kneeling. Your eyeline barely meets his chest, allowing you to bask in the immense size difference between the both of you.

Sukuna chuckles low, running his tattooed tongue over his teeth. “You have always been a bad liar.”

You feel your heart dip behind your ribs.

“Excuse me?”

His lower pair of hands come down to grab your wrists, holding them up beside your head. He leans forward, face mere inches from yours, his warm and iron-laced breath fanning over your lips. “Your breath smells the same as it did during dinner. I didn’t take my wife for a cheat,” he grunts, upper lip peeling back in disgust to bare his teeth. It’s true, there are no remnants of citrus or sweetness hanging from your lips. “Now tell me. What affairs were you tending to between dinner and now?”

Unbearably, your pulse quickens.

You twist in his grip, but his fingers only tighten, nearly bruising your skin. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you grit out.

The seams of his mouth curl upwards, before he’s closing the distance between his cheek and yours, rubbing them against each other. His facial crest, the texture like roughened and cracked tree bark, digs into your flesh and you bite back a curse. “My wife, stubborn and obstinate as always,” he grumbles into your ear before catching your lobe with his teeth. You hiss, casting a cheek away from his cruelty, before one of his hands fly towards your chin and connects your lips.

Betraying yourself, you hum into the kiss, your spine arching backwards as he folds you impossibly. His tongue, heavy and slick, presses down on your own and strokes it reverently. Hands—everywhere—begin to tug your yukata off and discard it, before something wet laps at your pebbled nipples.

You pull away, sliding your gaze down to your wet areola, Sukuna’s stomach mouth desperate for a taste of you. You peer back up to your husband, something perverse and frantic coiling between your silky folds. “W-we’ve never…”

Never used the stomach mouth in bed, is what you were going to say. Though you won’t lie and say you haven’t thought of it.

Sukuna’s nostrils flare, lower pair of eyes focused on your saliva-slick lips while the upper pair glower at you, releasing the unrelenting grip from your wrists. “Afraid? The brat wants to take it slow and easy, huh?” he taunts, head cocked to an angle.

You scoff, arms falling by your side. “Nothing of the sort.” Your coital acts through the last couple of seasons have been raw, and debauched—Sukuna lapping the blood of his freshest kill from your navel before devouring your sex, to taking you with both cocks, your obscene noises loud enough for the entire shrine to bear witness to.

So, no. Slow and easy wouldn’t make much sense seeing how he handles you with those four hands of his.

“Then quiet that fucking mouth of yours,” he scowls, before he’s on you again.

Teeth crashing, saliva swapping, noses bumping.

Hungry. So fucking hungry.

And angry. What Sukuna does not tolerate, especially from his betrothed, is deceit.

The tongue mouth laps at your tits, occasionally tweaking an erect bud between it’s teeth and tugging just to earn a whimper from you, your maw parting open for Sukuna to gag you on his tongue. Writhing and squirming in his grasp, you attempt to tamp down the pleasure darting down your spine, nearly leaking your essence onto the sheets, but it is inevitable. You surrender to his touch like a sinner seeking repentance.

Two hands cradle your face while the other two knead the flesh of your ass like dough, squeezing and groping. His stomach tongue slathers spit across your chest, and you mewl through the sensitivity, hips rocking and thighs rubbing together for friction.

“That desperate, huh?” your husband mutters against your lips, and in your urgency, you nod quickly. The two hands cradling your head shift—one to grip the back of your neck and face your gaze upwards to meet his, and the other drags down between the valley of your breasts, down your navel, until he’s sliding the meaty digit across your swollen clit.

You jolt at the contact, but much movement isn’t possible as he keeps you place at the nape and the waist.

“Is this amusing?” he quizzes, unfurling to his full height and staring at your nude form down the bridge of his crooked nose. “Running circles around your husband like some charlatan.”

Cruel bastard.

“I-I am not—.”

“I can feel your pulse jumping under my thumb,” he snaps, leaning into your face with a snarl. “Have these walls kept you bored in my absence?”

You frown, a muscle in your jaw ticking. “Something like that.”

He clicks his tongue at your vague reply, clearly unimpressed. “Tch. Still as cryptic as ever.”

Quickly, his open palm slaps sharply against your clit, before two fingers push past the ring of resistance in your cunt and stretch you open. A mouth forms on his palm, a drooling mess, lapping at your hood and prying apart your silky folds.

“Looks like I’ll just have to coax it out of you.”

As if the brazier has been finally warmed, coals tended to and sifted, the heat in the room mounts as he splits you on his hand. Calloused digits from decades of labor and torment drag down your gummy walls, all while the open maw on his palm collects your juices and nibbles at your clit.

He doesn’t stop open-mouth kissing you. He barely allows you to come up for air, tamping down your noises with his mouth. Your breasts are aching and wet, the nubs perky and sensitive from the continuous stimulation.

His towering form pushes you down onto the sheets, slotting his massive body between your legs. The stretch is painful, but you curl your legs around his waist and dig your ankles into the divots on the small of his back.

“You’re a pretty little thing, bird,” he mutters against your lips, his wrist picking up a brutal cadence as his fingers reach places that make you whine and tense. “It’s a shame you’re a fool.”

His words carry a heat behind them, adamant on undoing you to figure out what you're keeping from him. He knows you may be anserine, but you're not an utter idiot, so the sin you’d committed and are keeping from him cannot be too great.

Still, he will have his fun breaking you.

It’d been a bit of time since he’d had his hands on you—sorely exhausted from the long days and even longer nights, reserved to his chambers once he returns from the bathing house over the last couple of weeks—so the stimulation has you huffing and puffing. Clit woefully sensitive, mounds on your chest sore, and a heat fisted low in your gut that only Sukuna has managed to unspool compared to the men you’ve been with back at the brothel. Pathetically, you claw at his chest, pushing to slow his brutal pace, scissoring motions inside your cunt and stretching your walls wide. After all, you’ll need to accommodate his girth in time.

“Oi. Paws off,” he complains disgruntled, lower pair of eyes widening. One hand finds both of yours, pinning them down above your head while he laughs sardonically.

And oh, how he enjoys such a debauched sight. Your bare form, flushed and wet and squirming beneath him while he taunts you. Whittles you down to some hapless mutt.

He works you through your first orgasm, finger pads repeatedly swiping over that tender spot and feeling the plush muscle jump. A strangled moan is punched out of you, legs trembling over his thighs and stomach caving inwards. Your cunt squeezes his two digits like a snare, sucking him in as you buck your hips into his palm.

But the King of Curses does not stop there, no. Giving your cunt a few slaps, he works his two fingers back in while his other hand finds your puckering hole. You freeze up, muscles spasming as you lock eyes with him, slick finger coated in your arousal rubbing over the entrance.

“B-both?”

“The idiocy of you,” he scoffs, one of his upper hands gripping your cheeks to squish them together. You pout, lower lip jutting out, before you feel the burning stretch. A finger, pushing into your ass. “I’ve no patience for stupid questions.”

He peers down, a glob of spit trickling from his lips pelting your cunt. It sloshes with your juices, before you feel the slick wetness cascade down to your asshole.

“M-my god!” you squeal, back arching up off of the mattress, now being speared from both holes. The curl and flex of his fingers as he finds all those sensitive spots is hypnotizing, drool leaking from the seam of your lips, eyes rolling back into your skull until all you see is black.

“Not my name,” he sneers, pressing another inch deeper while you wriggle.

Another orgasm. And another. And another.

You’ve made a wet, sloppy mess across his sheets, completely unaware of how many blissful peaks he’s worked you over and through, each more mind-numbing than the last. Your ears ring dully, eyes glossing over with a thing gossamer of wet luster. When you meet his pumps, he praises you, kissing the bevel of your jaw. When you sob and squirm against him, he clicks his tongue and gazes at you with blown pupils and a look of pity.

Your form is perspired, covered in a thick coat of sweat and cum, nearly breathless as you huff and puff. Nothing coherent leaves your lips, arousal stuffing the ridges of your brain like cotton.

Fucked dumb by his fingers.

“N-no more, ‘Kuna,” you mumble out, your holes aching and still stretched open. How he has not cramped in his fingers is beyond you.

The raspy chuckle from your husband is enough evidence that he’s nearly at his wits end—hefty cocks hard against the fabric of his loincloth, brushing against the inside of your quivering thigh. But one thing about Ryomen Sukuna is that he will never yield first, even if it’s dragging him up a wall. “The dove is spent, hm?” he cooes, the side of his lip curling upwards. “I can stop anytime. Just tell me the truth and I can release you from this exertion.”

You muffle a whine into his pillow, wrists aching from where he keeps them pinned above your head. “It is n-nothing, Sukuna.”

His eye twitches, before his wrists starts to pick up a speed and you squeal. “Okay, okay! …I visited the c-chef in the kitchen.”

His eyebrows dart inwards. “The scrawny girl? What for?”

“Release me first.” you mumble, Sukuna’s fingers nearly brushing against your womb.

Your scowl has mirth swirling in those thinned crimson irises. “Do not think that you are in the position to make demands.”

A beat passes before you puff air from your nose. The sooner you tell him, the sooner he’ll release you and you can figure out a plan for Tsumigi and the other attendants. “Fine. Why didn’t you tell me about Yorozu?”

His smile falters for a moment, nearly imperceptible, before he releases your hold and peels away from you. Fingers slip from your holes and you collapse in exhaustion, keeping your eyes trained on your husbands rolling shoulders. He’s silent for a few moments, while he finds his discarded kimono and slides his arms through them. “It is insignificant. Besides you.” He waves a dismissive hand, bare feet padding over to a chest propped open.

That does nothing to soothe the ache unfurling around your heart and squeezing the organ. “If it is so “besides me,” then I do not understand why I had to be kept in the dark.”

He chuckles, searching for his pipe. Two of his fingers rub together, kindling a flame he uses to smoke the pipe. “Former lovers are trivial. You are my wife while she was just some,” he inhales, smoke billowing in his lungs. “Whore I kept around for my affairs.”

“She was in love with you and you murdered her. This wasn’t some fucking concubine.”

He stirs, folding his lower pair of arms over his chest. The silence has you feeling filthy, the cum between your lungs a sticky mess.

Sukuna pads over to the low table, a bowl of nuts awaiting him. He sits down, legs folded beneath him, mildly entertained while he stares bleakly at you. He pops a nut into his mouth, then smokes his pipe. Casual, insouciant.

You attempt to smother a groan but it escapes you, lifting from the bed to get dressed. You slip your yukata on, then tie your obi across your waist. “If nothing but silence is what you offer me, then I shall retire to my chambers.”

The silence is deafening while you adorn yourself.

“Name.” Sukuna suddenly grumbles from the dark corner, moonlight filtering through the drapes distorting him in the shadows. He looks menacing, like the beast he is.

“What?” you blurt out, fixing your hair and attempting to look semi-normal before you enter the halls. Who knows what’s waiting out there, if your disheveled image will be even more fuel to gossip?

“I want a fucking name. Who told you of Yorozu? Was it that chef girl?”

You roll your eyes, before you parrot his words right back to him with a pinched smirk over your shoulder. “It is insignificant. Besides you.”

You don’t know how, but in the blink of an eye, Sukuna closes the proximity between the two of you. One hand curls around your throat before he’s pushing you against a wall, his face contorting in utter disdain and disgust. He regards you like a slab of meat to be devoured come morning.

“What I tell you, and what I keep from you is up to my discretion. Mine,” he snarls, fingers tightening around your throat. Not choking, just firm. Keeping you in place. “What I won’t tolerate are attendants that poke and prod into my history then blab to my wife. Now…” the corner of his lip twitches upwards, as if he is enjoying this. “Name.”

Your husband is a sadist.

You hold his gaze, inexorable, unwilling to yield to his cruelty. “She told me you didn’t love her.”

“She’s got something right,” Sukuna jeers, another hand coming to tilt your chin up. Yet, something in his gaze almost… softens. The sharp edges of his russet eyes melting away, curled and mocking smirk sliding into something else. “The only time I’d felt anything for her was when I’d slashed her in the chest, and then ate her for dinner.”

You freeze, feeling your heart cinch.

“And what reason do I have to lie?” he adds on, head tilting when his lower pair of eyes slide down to your lips, then to the door. “There is a shrine I have to look after. Her presence threatened it.”

Your fingers twitch at your side, not quite sure what to do with his seemingly genuine confession.

He clears his throat, returning his gaze to you. Now, he regards you like something delicate. “If she had meant anything to me, wouldn’t you think she’d still be with us, bird?”

Ryomen Sukuna truly has no reason to lie to you.

He can bed anyone he wants. Yet, instead of keeping you as some concubine, he chose to seal this relationship with matrimony. With titles. With an unspoken promise.

He chose to be with you.

You don’t address the suffocating tension between the two of you. You heart slamming against your ribcage and a lump nestling into your throat, dropping your gaze. “Furi, the chef. She is not at fault, Ryomen.”

Your husband eyes you, waiting for you to continue.

Coughing the lump in your throat away, you fidget with your kimono, chin still held up. “The attendants have been… undutiful,” you settle on that word, not quite sure how to tread upon the unfamiliar territory.

You wait for his reaction, but he just continues to watch you. Like a predator studying its prey.

“Clothing left a mess, glares across the halls, insubordination,” you emphasize the last word in disdain. “I have been left to deal with their ostracization in your absence, Sukuna. Furi only told me why they may feel this disdain towards me.”

You bite the inside of your cheek.

“She’s been the only friend I have.”

Sukuna’s grip loosens on your chin and throat, his expression settling into something you’ve seen when his advisors approach him. Before he mounts his horse and heads into battle.

Something hungry for war, for a need to unleash his fiery wrath.

“I need names. Or shall I just turn this fucking shrine upside down and start anew?” he chuckles maniacally in sheer rage, padding towards the door.

Fuck.

Leaping forward, you grab his wrist and halt him, eyes staring up at him and practically pleading. “Sukuna! Wait, before you do something rash—.”

“When they insult you, they insult me,” he growls, shoulders rippling with effort and you know that all he sees is red.

It seems you misjudged him. Ryomen Sukuna would go to the ends of the earths for you. To hell and back.

“Sukuna, just— give me a moment,” you emphasize, nearly begging him back inside the chambers. Fire radiates off of him in shudders, like he’s prepared to set this shrine ablaze for you.

Scorned, he stares at you for a few moments before stepping back inside, arms folded over his chest. “So this is what you were so fucking adamant on keeping from me? What, was your pride threatened?” It almost seems laughable to him, you of all people worried about humiliation.

You married a beast at the end of the day.

Dejectedly, you sigh, orbs darting between Sukuna’s left and right ones. “I… I didn’t think,” you nibble on your lip. “I was worried you would take their side.”

Ryomen Sukuna practically gawks at you now, before a huff of humored air jumps from his chest. “What?”

You toss your head back, running your hands through your hair. “Tsumigi, she’s one of your oldest servants. How am I supposed to complain to you about her when I’ve barely been here half the year?”

Another laugh tumbles from him. “You must be the asinine person I’ve come across.”

“Enough of the jokes, Sukuna, I—.”

You freeze.

Sukuna’s lips are on yours, his hands cupping your cheeks. His tongue swiping against your lower lip and tugging on the plump skin.

Not soft, but rough. Possessive.

You don’t know how long it takes for him to pull back. Slightly breathless, pupils that were pinpricks a moment ago now saucer wide.

“You. I chose you, brat,” he huffs, large palms splayed on the side of your head and digging into your scalp. “That Tsuragi servant means absolutely nothing to me.”

“Tsumigi,” you correct, but he ignores you.

“When I had decided that marriage was the best option for this… relationship, I was also ready to call this place your home. And being the wife of the King of Curses…” he snarls, hooking a thumb into your mouth and pressing down on your tongue. You can’t bite down the whimper that resonates from you. “… means your word matters just as much as mine here.”

Despite yourself, your lip trembles, warmth unfurling over your skin.

Hearing the rare affection in his words makes you wonder why you ever doubted him in the first place.

He tugs his thumb out from between your lips, swiping your cheek, head cocked to the side while his four eyes appraise you in the moonlight.

“This… I must mend myself, Sukuna,” you whisper, form leaning in towards him, into his heat.

He chuckles, all raspy and taunting. “It is not yours to fix, you foolish bird. A disobedient, mouthy whore is not someone I will allow to reside within the shrine walls.” A beat. “Unless it’s you.”

You giggle, a hand coming down to smack his chest, but he catches it with a sly grin. “No, really. I have to make an impression on them. Make them remember who they respond to.”

His four eyes search for dubiety, before he retires. “My, my. It seems that my influence here is rubbing off on you,” he points out, a hand finding the small of your back and pulling you flush against him.

You feel his two hardened cocks, needy and begging for your attention, press into your abdomen.

He leans down, his coppery and nutty breath fanning over the crown of your ear.

“And I must say… jealousy does not suit you, sweetheart.”

—

The days that follow, you keep your head held up high.

Sukuna returns to his daily retreats, but ensures that he will cleave whoever missteps dare you speak up. If he hears of it, whether or not you like it, he’ll be feasting on an attendant for dinner.

But you, you find your cadence.

You accompany Furi in the mornings, legs dangling off of a large stool while she chats your ear off, broth and meat lilting in the air, all tantalizing. She’s been promoted to head of the kitchen, meaning all servants must answer to her.

Most do not reject it, heads bowed in genuine reverence and tones amicable.

Tsumigi has been demoted from kitchen staff to the stables—where her stable hand lover can see her scooping up horse excrement's. It isn’t long that you here that he has moved returned to his wife at home, and she has grown cold and bitter.

It isn’t perfect, but your actions against Tsumigi have other attendants treating you kinder. In turn, they learn what kind of person you are.

Cordial, organized, timely.

A friend to most.

You simply have to wait for everyone to fall into step.

Sukuna grows irritated easier than before, more and more missteps he’d scowl at resulting in a severed limb he could gnaw on.

You do what you can to placate him, but he’s kept an ear open for who has mistreated you. The so-called gossip he rejects keeps him well-informed as to who he needs to split open.

And not long after, you come back from the forest to find Tsumigi’s decapitated head held up by your husband like some trophy.

A ghastly sight.

Your husband— the cruel, detestable bastard.

One that would kill and haze the entire world for you.

One that ensures your safety, and your comfort in the place you can now safely call home.

He may not be a picture perfect companion seeing as he refers to himself as a king and finds pleasure in your soreness, but one thing he won’t allow is some measly human being to cross you.

Free food, a fresh kill, and a happy wife he gets to come home to at night.

"That doesn't exactly answer my question," Satoru dryly replied, his voice closer now, and you could practically feel him there. Was he looking down at you? Squatting next to you to scowl at the state he'd gotten you in?

"You don't need to worry about it," Sukuna grunted. His foot disappeared from your side - only for it to abruptly step down on your bound wrists, pressing down on your restraints, his heavy weight nearly making you wince as you struggled to keep your eyes shut. "No one's gonna find her here."

Great.

Where the fuck was here?

You'd like to say you would prefer him to just shoot you. To make it end quick and fast rather than leaving you to stew in the anticipation of what he was going to do to you at his vague implication that he wasn't just going to immediately murder you. But fuck, you wanted to live. To walk out of here without letting either of those assholes win.

Suguru would probably realize your missing soon - even if Satoru threw excuses at him. Unless, of course, he told him that you had left.

Plus, Nanami would come looking, wouldn't he? When you stopped responding or calling him?

Your brain unhelpfully reminded you that Satoru did still have your phone, could pretend to be you but you wanted to have faith that your boss wouldn't buy into it. That he'd know something was wrong and do something about it.

"It'll fuck everything up if anyone knows she's alive," Satoru snapped at him, and you started to consider the possibility that maybe they weren't as close as you initially suspected. That they might have made an arrangement rather than Satoru simply just being one of his glorified servants.

"Whatever," Sukuna retorted, using that voice he only ever did when someone was treading on thin ice, ready to shatter the surface and let whatever rage was brimming under it out. "Get the fuck out of here and tell the cops that you think your friend murdered her."

Oh.

If anyone was looking for you, it would be for a body.

They'd search all the wrong places and suspect the wrong man - all while Sukuna and Satoru got away with it.

You didn't mean to react.

But you guessed you did, flinching or freezing stiff, signaling to the man stepping on you that you had stirred.

"Stop faking it," Sukuna reprimanded, pressing his foot down harder as you tried to squirm, to worm away from the pressure.

There was no real point.

You were half-tempted to ask them why, to dig deeper for a truth that seemed not to matter that much in the end. But you knew the answers would only be unsatisfying. That the picture it painted would only be a bleak one, spelling out a depressing death - or an even worse life.

If Satoru went to the police, pleaded with them that he'd run from a fucking cult because he thought its leader might have killed a poor journalist for snooping too close, Suguru's life would be over soon. Suguru would go to jail, or worse, get strapped down to some cold clinical table and dissected in the name of science.

And you would just be a missing person.

Presumed murdered.

"You're both fucking dicks," you spat at them instead, figuring the outcome would be the same even if you pretended to be sweet. Neither of them would believe it anyway.

"Aw," Satoru snickered right as your eyes started to adjust to the dimly-lit room. It looked like some kind of unfinished basement, brick walls and concrete flooring, no furniture or decorations that stood out, the corners of your vision hazy as he bent over, blue filling your vision as his face stopped inches from you. "This really isn't personal."

It was though, wasn't it?

If you had picked him back in Suguru's bedroom, you weren't sure this was where you'd be. Would he have let you in on what he was planning? Were you his last straw?

"I don't believe you," you breathed.

He lied to you too many times. Hid himself behind cheeky smiles and casual laughter. Bright eyes burning too hot to match whatever easy expression he plastered on.

"Everything he had was supposed to be mine," Satoru shrugged like it was just that simple. Condensing years of their friendship into a sentence - ready to make sure Suguru received one like Sukuna was supposed to. "I'm just fixing that."

"You selfish-" You started to scoff at him, but the heel of Sukuna's boot dug in deeper, the sound becoming strangled as the pressure shifted to sharp pain.

"He's the selfish one," Satoru harshly snapped, grabbing your chin in his thick fingers to force your focus on him. "I'm the reason he even has any of this. I stuck by him and-"

"So what? You wanna be worshipped?" You snarkily cut him off, seeing through his whole disgruntled, woe-is-me bullshit.

"I should be."

Your stomach dropped.

Everything inside it getting jumbled and tangled, intestines squeezing as your heart thrummed against your rib cage.

You used to think you were a good judge of character. That you had some special talent for seeing people for what they really were, noticing the little stray tears in the costumes they put on, where to tug to see what was lying underneath.

But you'd clearly underestimated and misread Satoru from the start. And now you were paying for it.

"I told you to get the hell out of here," Sukuna grumbled, finally lifting his foot off your back, although you could still feel the phantom shape of it pinning you there.

And despite how fucking sick it made you to see him, you still didn't want Satoru to go. Didn't want to be left alone with Sukuna - not when you had no idea what sort of retribution he planned on inflicting on you.

What kind of revenge would suffice? What would it take for him to be satisfied?

"I'm leaving," Satoru retorted, low and sarcastic-sounding. He disappeared from your field of vision, and you tried to move, to lift your head, but it was only then you realized the thing on your neck was a collar chaining you close to the floor.

It choked you, constricting your breathing until you dropped your head back down, but the brief moment of panic made the rest of you spasm, sharp pain radiating up your right leg as you gasped. You couldn't even look to see what happened to it, your mouth clamping shut to not give Sukuna the pleasure of getting what he wanted.

"Stay still," he growled. "Gonna bleed through your fuckin' bandages."

"What did you do to it?" You hissed, huffing at how badly it hurt.

"Just carved it up a little," he casually answered, like he was amused by your panic, your pain. "Had to stage the scene."

You'd been in bad situations before.

But none of them had been as bad as this.

Or well, none of those times had been with someone as fucking crazy as Sukuna. And this was the first time you couldn't see a way out of it.

You had no escape plans. Couldn't exactly see a way to run away when you were chained and bound and injured.

Unless Sukuna had some sudden, complete change of heart, you were stuck here. Wherever here was.

The door slammed shut - and you couldn't breathe, your throat constricting as your captor walked around to crouch next to you.

You couldn't look at him, deliberately closing your eyes as he drew near.

"It's soundproofed down here," he spoke deliberately slow, like his voice was the edge of a knife he was sharpening, an unspoken threat hanging heavy in the air while you shivered and tried to pull away from him as much as you could. "Just gonna be you and me alone for miles."

You guessed that meant none of his lackeys had managed to get out of jail with him.

At least something you did had stuck.

Even if you were now trapped in your own makeshift prison with the man you once got arrested as your warden.

"Open your eyes," he grunted, one of those hard, calloused hands of his holding your cheek. He used to do that when you were warming his bed, back when he was convinced you were just a pretty thing wrapped around his finger. Now, his fingers were freezing.

You still listened to him though, as if he'd even consider mercy of any kind. But maybe obeying would stave off a worse punishment.

His face had a few more scars than you remembered, a mean-looking one raised across his eyebrow that slit through the hairs. His pink hair was dyed dark, like he'd been trying to disguise himself despite all his distinctive tattoos.

"What are you going to do now?" You half-whispered, hating how soft it came out. How scared.

He opened his mouth to answer, one corner of his lips curling up into a crooked smirk when you both heard it.

Someone was screaming.

reblogs + comments are always greatly appreciated <3

Choso Kamo’s voice cracks on the mere words, at the mere notion—and Yuji can only ogle him in utter bewilderment. Oh…my god…?

Alright so not calm or cool or collected.

Fuck, he was so far gone that it almost looked painful.

He’s never seen his big brother’s eyes shine like that before - whether in excitement (at the delusion) or in panic (at the reality) he couldn’t quite tell. He’s never seen his big brother’s face burst into a blush so strong that it makes him wince. He’s never seen his big brother turn his toned frame away and start muttering - more to himself than anything.

“Why would you even suggest that? Why would you want me to- heheh…ask her out? Why did you know that’s been my biggest dream since freshman year? Why did you think that I could ever possibly manage to-” And then he’s gasping in realization.

And in a split-second - so fast that the poor pink-haired boy could never have seen it coming - Choso’s whirling around to grab him from either side of his shoulders. “Unless- unless you saw something between us that I didn’t!” He exclaims, shaking Yuji with every word. “Unless you believe that I actually have a chance and you want me to go for it before it’s too late?!”

Yuji’s jaw drops, “I uh…huh?”

“But of course!” Choso was on a roll now, jostling the boy back and forth even harder. “In dad’s nighttime k-dramas the two romantic leads never really know when they like each other—but of course!” People in the cafeteria were starting to stare now. “I’m the male lead and you saw something in her eyes that made you want me to confess! Before either I get hit by a truck and get amnesia or she gets married off to some faraway 6’7 CEO-”

“CEO? What the f-”

“So what was it you saw?” Abruptly stopping his shaking now, Choso leans in with widened eyes. He probes at his younger brother with eager questions, “What was it you saw in her eyes? Hidden longing? Desire? Betrayal? Lu-”

“M-maybe?” God, he was feeling dizzy now and those peas weren’t helping…“Webster’s Dictionary did say that betrayal could be a synonym for disgust. I think.”

To which Choso pauses - still with that same insanely hopeful expression stiff on his face. And Yuji thinks that he might just’ve have broken him when-

“Oh, it’s no use—” He almost thinks he prefers the ramblings of a madman, rather than the dramatic way that Choso’s throwing himself over his space on the cafeteria table. Head in his hands. Shoulders shaking with a sigh.

The metal trays they’d been provided with rattle ever-so-slightly at his ministrations, and Yuji has to be the one to nudge them to the side. Mouthing out apologies to the students around them that throw them dirty looks—honestly, this was supposed to be his tour of his older brother’s college campus before he attended. He was supposed to be the one being taken care of during this pivotal time of his life.

Which (to Choso’s credit) had been what ended up happening for most of the day: through all those labs and lecture halls and facilities he’d been led to by him, through all those professors that Choso made him speak about his future major with, through most of lunch where his brother kept on insisting that he take more until…you came along.

Almost as if thinking of the very same thing (you), Choso’s sniffling even louder. And Yuji’s gingerly patting at the AC/DC t-shirt on his back, “There there…it’ll be alright, bubba. Wait- if you’re the male lead then who am I?”

Choso sputters out, “I don’t know? Homosexual supporting cast? I don’t know anything-” Pathetically bemoaning, “I can’t even do anything-”

Yuji insists gingerly, “I’m sure if you just asked her-”

“No you don’t get it, Yuji.” He finally raises his head from his hands, silver lip ring twinklin’ in the light. His older brother brings a ringed hand up to twist at it - in just the way he did whenever he got nervous about something. “She’s part of The Plastics- the leader, actually. And those other two? Utahime and Shoko.”

It seems that you and your duo of friends had been stopped by a few more of your acquaintances just outside the cafeteria. And as you laughed and talked amongst yourselves, Yuji and Choso leaned over in their seats to catch more glimpses of you.

He points subtly at the brown-haired girl with eyebags and a…scalpel close by you. “Ieri Shoko’s one of the smartest girls you will ever meet. Eso sat next to her in Anatomy 101 last semester, and he said she cheated so well that the professor changed their marking scheme.” Then as Choso moves the tip of his digit, so do Yuji’s eyes onto another girl with a scar across her face and an arm thrown over your shoulder. “That one with the traditional dress? That’s Iori Utahime, she’s totally rich because her dad invented the Toaster Strudel. Utahime knows everybody’s business, everything about everyone- that’s why her hair is so big…it’s full of secrets.”

Yuji stifles a giggle, “And ah- the one you’re obsessed with?”

“Shhhh- not so loud!” As if he hadn’t just been causing a scene earlier. Choso just has to take one look at you before he’s repeating your name in the most dreamy manner, “-perfection takes human form in her.”

“Perfection?”

“Don’t be fooled. Because she may seem like your typical selfless, smart, gorgeous sweetheart but in reality…she’s so much more than that.” Choso sighs, “How do I even begin to describe her?”

“I don’t get it, we have popular kids in our high school too?” Yuji asks. Hell, if they were counting like that then he wasn’t doing too bad socially himself.

But Choso’s fervently shaking his head. In an instant, he’s getting up and dragging Yuji away from his mushy peas. Ignoring his whines- “Come with me.”

They all said your name.

“She’s flawless.”

“She has two Fendi purses and a silver Lexus.”

“I hear her hair’s insured for ten thousand dollars.”

“I hear she does car commercials in Shibuya.”

“One time, she met Jacob Elordi on a plane. And he told her she was pretty.”

“One time she punched me in the face. I liked it.”

And by the end of his (second) tour around campus (and his first tour around the gossip mill), Itadori Yuji could…somewhat understand where his older brother was coming from. In addition to being liked so much, you were somewhat…scary.

He feels himself shiver involuntarily as you pass him by, not seeing the two tall boys hidden beneath a large oak tree on campus. Watching you. Though, Shoko does- and glints her scalpel threateningly at them until they duck back behind the scraggly trunk.

“But still-” Yuji hisses at Choso, crouched against the flares of green grass. “-I don’t see why you can’t at least give it one try to ask her out? I thought you weren’t scared of anything, bubba.”

“And then there’s that problem-” Handsome face suddenly hardening, Choso checks whether the coast is clear for Shoko and her scalpel before gesturing at his younger brother to follow. Popping their heads from the side of the oak trunk once more, he’s pointing an index at the other man you’d walked up to. 

The tip of his finger - all chipped with black nail polish - honed in like an arrow at the silver haired man. Yuji watched as he grabbed you to his side with a guffaw, where you wrinkled your nose at the way he crinkled your blouse- but let him do as he pleased anyway. “That two-toned, two-inch bastard- Naoya Zenin.”

“From the Zenin Corporations?” Yuji gawked.

“The Zenin Corporations, and he goes ‘round acting like it too.” Choso grumbles, lightly thumping his fist against the tree. “His family’s old old money, but word is they’re gonna be charged with embezzlement soon, heh. He started dating her at the start of freshman year- no idea how that happened, some say he bribed her with a GMC Hummer and they’ve been on and off ever since.”

“Wild.” The pink-haired boy whistles- inadvertently catching the attention of you. Turning away boredly from a lecture on Naoya’s latest business ventures to catch the two tufts of hair peaking through the oak trunk. You have to stifle a laugh as they duck out of sight with matching yelps.

“Something amusing about wining and dining the CEO of the World Bank, honey?” Naoya leers out, and you know he doesn’t mean that pet name he uses.

“Nothing amusing at all, actually.” You’re plastering a painful plastic smile, and he doesn’t catch the snipe. You’re angling your head to try and catch a glimpse ‘round the trunk, at those doey brown eyes that caught yours. “Tell me all about your ah- glorious old money again.”

“Why most certainly.”

You’re rolling your eyes, and you don’t catch the way that Shoko threatens her scalpel in the direction of the oak once more.

Yuji - who’d been craning upwards to take another look - hastily sits back down on the ground with a thump. “Bubba, we’ve got to do something about her though. The Itadori men don’t just sit around doing nothing in a time of crises-”

“Do what though?” Choso puts his face in his hands, long chestnut hair falling around his face. Obscuring his pout from view, though one could hear it. “It’s hopeless-”

“No.”

Choso looks up in surprise.

At Yuji’s determined face, that smile. Brighter than the sun. 

He pulls a handheld camera from Choso’s backpack and takes a picture of them both, you in the background. Blissfully unaware. “I’ve got a plan.”

.

.

.

PHASE ONE OF WIMP: Everybody needs to know.

“There are four phases, the first is-” Yuji whispers, face pressed against the cold library shelf. Textbooks the size of his head. Names of authors that blurred into one. A wall of words that he’d shuffled aside to spy on the other side of it, “-we first have to get the word out about our WIMP.”

“WIMP?” Choso hisses back in confusion. He was standing right beside his younger brother, stooped down to look through their little crack.

A nearly-empty table.

A column of books.

A certain purple-haired girl rarely seen without leaving your side.

“Yeah?” Itadori answers, “Wingmanning Itadori’s Mythical Party- or WIMP for short.”

Choso can only look at him in pure aghast.

“Anyways, going back to our WIMP-”

“Yuji, stop trying to make WIMP happen. It’s not going to happen.”

“About our party then.” To which the pink-haired boy waves off easily, “Don’t sweat it- dad is out on some bonding trip with Uncle Kuna and grandpa, so they won’t be back until tomorrow so we have the house alllll to ourselves.”

It was true that their home actually sat on the outskirts of campus, right alongside the other dorms and residential buildings for the students. It was actually one of the reasons that Choso had chosen this particular university in the first place, because of its proximity (and it led him to you so, good thinking on his part, hm?) And so he still resided there with his family, but as for throwing a party…“Yuji, parties really aren’t a big deal in college. I don’t know if it’s even a good-”

“Do you wanna do this or not?” He pulls away to give Choso a deadpan look, the sharp edges of the books embedding vertical lines on his face. 

The other man stammers, “W-well…”

“Let me rephrase-” Yuji says, “-do you want her in your house-”

“Yes.”

“And there you go.”

Choso sputters, face flushing at the fact that he’d been caught out so easily. He scratches behind his neck and looks anywhere but into his brother’s mischievous eyes, “W-well! You’ve clearly been spending too much time with Sukuna…and what about the fact that we have a house and apparently the word- but still no actual- party-”

“Semantics, semantics.” And to Choso Kamo’s complete and utter horror- he’s pulling out his camera to take a picture of their stakeout. He’s starting to push off the bookshelf and walk away.

Reaching out a hand, “Wait- wait, Yuji!”

Right up to the corner of the shelf, he grins. “First we’ve got to get the word out.” 

And before Choso can do anything about it, Yuji’s pranced right up to the long student desk. Making a few of them look up at his sudden, yellow-hoodied intrusion- he’s clapping a hand over his forehead and bemoaning. “Oh, woe is me! Woe is me!” Choso’s clapping a hand over his forehead, too, though for a much different reason. He thinks he’s having an aneurysm. “Oh, I seem to have gotten myself a little lost…”

Trailing off, he peeks at Utahime out of the corner of his eye - and finds her completely unphased. 

It was as if she didn’t even hear his display, and flicked casually through a glossy athletics magazine that’d been stuffed between the pages of her textbook.

Choso watches as he starts up again, slightly louder this time- “My poor, innocent high school self- all alone in this big, bad campus. All abandoned. If only I had a good samaritan to guide me back…” He peeks at Utahime again and she doesn’t even flinch—and what the- was that a textbook on children’s education she was reading?!

“Oh, how I wish a future teacher—” Yuji lets the words ring in the air, shooing away another student that’d come over to help him. “-could maybe get some practical work in and help me…a poor, poor high school student who doesn’t know of the big world…” 

Utahime looks up at him—this was his chance!

And Yuji’s brightening up- before he registers she was looking right past him and at the clock that’d been ticking away on the wall behind him. The two brothers come to the realization at the same time and they bite back groans.

Goddammit! “How I wish I had someone to help me lest they wanted me to miss my brother’s party- tonight. Yes, a party tonight. A partyyyyy—” Emphasizing his words; his initial idea had been to strike up a conversation with Utahime as she (with her heart of gold) helped his poor lost self, and to naturally weave in the idea of the party and perhaps invite her and her friends as a thank you. 

But now, Utahime (with her heart of thorns) was pleasantly ignoring him to pack her bag and leave. 

Though, he was catching the attention of almost everyone else in this part of the library. Wondering just who the kid was and why the hell he couldn’t shut up—“He doesn’t even go here!”

Yuji sighs, “Free beer.”

“Oh, are you lost?” Utahime asks with a warm smile.

“What the-” Choso squawks, but ultimately gnaws down on the inside of his cheek to shut himself up before she hears. He watches Utahime get up from her seat and sling her back over her shoulder, leading an allegedly lost Itadori Yuji out of the library (the exit was two shelves away but she didn’t seem to question it).

From here, he can hear snatches of their fading conversation - Utahime inquiring about this party, Yuji responding in kind. He rattles off their address that she makes him text her, along with an invite extended to her friends. She says she has two best friends who would just love to come. “You’re Choso’s brother, aren’t you? I saw you two in the cafeteria today, yeah, my friend would tooootally love to come- just don’t tell her boyfriend.”

Yuji tilts his head in slight confusion.

Choso notices that his brother also greatly exaggerates about the beer (which, obviously, the high-schooler wouldn’t be able to drink) and some DJ they’re flying in, but he doesn’t quite have it in himself to feel anything but cautious excitement right now.

You.

You, you, you.

Yuji throws a thumbs up behind his back.

Pulling out his camera and starting to coax Utahime into a selfie picture or two.

Choso’s lifting off of the shelf with a chuckle - he can’t believe it worked. He can’t believe it actually worked! In both shock and slight relief, he’s taking a few steps back—now that he thinks about it, how did it even work-

Before he’s crashing into someone.

“Oh, fuck- I’m so sor-”

“You’re alright, baby.”

That voice.

Choso whirls around so fast that he feels the world tilt. Choso whirls around so fast that he feels his tall figure sway. That he’s chasing the sound of your voice- and he doesn’t even care if he looks a fool doing it.

Though he’s sure it shows, if the way you’re giggling at his action is anything to go by.

Slightly fluttering your lashes, “Something the matter?” You ask, with a smile.

“N-no…”

“Mhm.” And then you lean in—so close that he could kiss you. 

One of your hands reaches past him, almost caging him against the book shelf. And Choso’s plastering his back against their hair columns- face burning, hands pressing to his toned sides, pink lips quivering with greed. His eyes dip down to those lips of yours that just kept on getting closer…“Wh-what you are-”

“I got what I need.” In the corner of his peripheral vision, he sees you lift off a hefty textbook from the shelf. Past his figure. 

Where your hand had actually been reaching - and Choso feels his heart drop down to his stomach when you neatly distance yourself with the book. That very same slightly-dangerous smile still on your face, “As for you, have fun with your…” Your eyes drift to the gap between two books he’d created, a peephole. Narrowing, though your smile only widens. “-spying. Bye now!”

“W-wait-” Choso’s voice only comes out once you’d left, “Wait I wasn’t-”

.

.

.

PHASE TWO OF WIMP: Break her up with her boyfriend—yeah yeah, Choso’s bored!

Nobody in the lecture hall seemed to question why a high-schooler was sitting and swinging his feet happily amongst them. Nobody in the lecture hall seemed to question why there was a sudden flurry of texts and whispers more prominent than usual, either.

A palpable excitement in the air.

And Choso doesn’t think that Professor Yaga was paid enough to notice nor care.

It seems that telling Utahime first about the party was the smart move. Because before Choso had even stepped foot outside the library (moving on autopilot after that lil’ encounter from you), the news had trickled down from her and to almost the entire department. He was immediately being thrown looks left and right- hell, even a clap on his shoulder by some frat dude he didn’t know congratulating him on ‘finally throwing a rager’. 

He didn’t say he was throwing a rager…nor that he was inviting them…but alright…

Even now, a few of the students around him would nudge each other and not-so-subtly point. Giving him a few glances. Dropping each other the pin of his address. Whispering about how ‘that quiet punk’ kid was throwing a party. Which honestly would’ve been completely tolerable had it not been for the fact that he was drawing attention from the row before him. Think that’s not too bad? Think again-

Choso takes just one glance at the row below—and feels his heart jump to his throat as he recognizes the beautiful back of your head.

He’s spent so many long hours studying it, you couldn’t fault him for immediately knowing…

But it didn’t matter if he knew or not.

It didn’t matter how close he was.

It was you, along with a few of your friends that’d managed to register to the class in time (though, it’s not like you were lacking for willing volunteers). Along with your boyfriend beside you. 

Choso’s only able to look from behind.

Always an invisible wall between you two, invisible galaxies in every inch. Even that conversation he had with you in the library had ended in misunderstandings and distance. Oh…his heart ached, he hung his head low.

Your worlds would simply never cross—

“Haibara Yu, an invite for you.”

“Ah! Why thank you, Itadori-kun.”

“Anytime, my dude.” Yuji replies, eyes glimmering with stars. 

Choso snaps his head to Yuji in utter astonishment as he leans down and prods the man with the bowl cut in front of him - one of your closest friends, Haibara. And here Itadori Yuji was - speaking to him as if it was absolutely nothing—doesn’t he know that you! Were! Right! There! The pink-haired boy seated next to him hands Haibara an impromptu invitation (really, a scrap of paper ripped off of…Choso’s lyrics book with their address written down). 

Chuckling at the cutely childish action, Haibara fist bumps Yuji. “I’ll be there, and say thank you to your brother for me.”

“Oh- he’s right here.” Yuji stabs a thumb to the seat beside him, which Choso looked as if he was trying to sink into. And when Haibara gives him a friendly smile and wave, Choso can only reciprocate with a jerky nod of his own.

And then Choso’s attention gets caught by the way that Yuji reaches deep into his hoodie pocket. Pulling out several more crumpled scraps of paper- how the hell did he have so many? And what the hell was Choso supposed to write songs on now?!

He places his head in his hands and grumbles, “Yuji…”

But Yuji simply continues, “Nanami Kento two for you-” His brother was now throwing the invitations at their unsuspecting recipients, the blond man catches it with a disgruntled scoff. “Ijichi Kiyotaka—four for you Ijichi Kiyotaka, you go Ijichi Kiyotaka!” A bespectacled man catches it with a yelp that catches Yaga’s attention (and his disregard). And then Choso’s heart catches in his throat as Yuji sing-songs out your name, gently handing you your own scrap of paper.

His scrap of written-over…lyrical…paper.

The scrap of paper that Choso had written songs about you on-

“Aw, you wrote my name on it and everything?” You’re cooing at the boy, beginning to unfold the invitation. It was a palimpsest of words, and your eyes go down the slightly-blurred lines of faint writing beneath Yuji’s blocky letters. It was cursive, slanted, with a sweetly messy impression so that you couldn’t make out half the words on it. Just your name. Over and over. “That’s so sweet! Um, you wrote my name…like…a lot-”

“No!”

Before you can read any further, the pierced man behind you reaches over and snatches the paper out of your hands. In a split-second, he has it crumpled up and stuffed deeeep into his bag where no mortal soul would see it ever again.

What follows next might be the most awkward few seconds of silence in his entire life.

Yuji looks at him. Yaga looks at him. Your friends look at him. You look at him-

“Um, why are you so obsessed with me?”

And he can’t even say anything in response because it’s fucking true—!

Yuji takes a picture of the scene.

It’s only Naoya who - seeming to not have noticed a single thing amiss - raises his index in the air and punctuates it with his annoying, grating voice. “Um-”

“And none for Naoya Zenin, bye!” Yuji stuffs the rest of the scraps inside his hoodie.

“Excuuuuuuse me-”

Choso blocks out the tirade of threats that Naoya then proceeds to spit their way, his black-tipped hair flying askew in all angles as he starts arguing with the younger boy. The previous tension between you and Choso left unsettled (not good tension, certainly, no matter what Yuji may think), you’re resigning yourself to lean back in your seat and let Naoya throw his arm over your. Jostled by him. Sighing at the fact that you were jostled by him. “Naoya, let it go-”

And oh—it makes Choso fucking angry to see you still with this asswipe. 

But fuck—does it almost make him smile seeing that look on your face. 

Only getting more bored with every word falling from Naoya’s lips. Only barely putting up with him. A fleck of angry spittle falls from your (hopefully soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend’s mouth, and you’re meeting Choso’s eyes in the middle as you follow it. 

Both of you grimace in disgust.

Next to him, Yuji nudges at his ribs- a victory for Phase Two! He almost wants to laugh.

Yaga drones, “Mister Kamo, would you mind letting the class hear your thoughts on the subject of Caesar and Brutus at hand?” It seems he’d gotten enough of the ruckus in the back rows.

Choso stands, clearing his throat. “What’s so great about Caesar? Hm? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. And when did it become okay for one person to try and claim everything, huh? Because that’s not what Rome is about.” He looks straight at Naoya, “We should totally just stab Caesar!”

.

.

.

PHASE THREE OF WIMP: Ask her (to the party, if not out)!

“Bubba-”

“No-”

“C’mon bubba-”

“No-”

Yuji’s throwing his hands up in defeat, letting Choso’s own fall from his grasp. His wrists were all red n’ raw from all the pulling- even after the younger of the two brothers had seemingly given up on bodily draaagging Choso halfway down the campus gardens.

Right to you.

And honestly, Choso should be thankful that his brother’s such a fervent advocate for him getting his shit together and actually talking to the girl of his dreams.

But you’re just meters away, so beautifully oblivious.

And he can’t help but feel his knees weaken—“B-but what am I even going to say to her-”

“For starters, you can apologize for the way you snatched her invitation out of her hand.” Yuji’s saying - so very practically that it almost hurt. Was this really the same kid who’d run after him crying when he first left for college? “And then you can invite her to the WIMP-”

“I said stop trying to-”

“I got it, I got it!” Yuji puffs out his cheeks in a pout, “Man, you really know how to squirm your way out of important conversations- but you won’t be squirming your way out of this!”

Before he knows it, Choso’s being rounded by his younger brother- who then slams both palms against the others shoulders and starts shoving him in your direction. You were talking to someone, with your back turned to him and your air one of complete ease.

And here two Itadori brothers came to shatter it.

“You- won’t- be- getting out of this one, bubba-” Yuji forces out between pushes, and with every time Choso struggled against it, his throws only got even harder. “Talk- to- her-”

“And- and say what-”

“I don’t know- I’ve never asked anyone out before?”

“Fuck!”

With a final profane exclamation, Choso’s shoved right at your footsteps- and you’re turning around at the commotion. Raising your brows at the man that was bent so low before you, that he could practically look up your skirt if he wanted to.

You take a step back, “Um…”

“F-fuck-” He seemed to be saying that a lot today, and he stands upright instantly. Rubbing at the back of his flushed neck, Choso tries looking anywhere but in your eyes—where the fuck did Yuji disappear to?! “Anyways um…nice weather we’re having, huh?”

“Right…” You look up, there was a rain cloud formulating above you. There was a 30% chance that it’s already raining.

Your company - some business major by the name of Mei Mei, he believes, throws her single long braid over her shoulder - “Ooo la la~ Guess I should leave you two alone then, hm?” Waving just the tips of her fingers at you, “Toodles~!”

“Buh-byeee, again- I love your hair!” You’re calling out with the sweetest smile.

“Thank you~!”

And only once Mei Mei was well and fully not in earshot do you turn back to Choso and deadpan, “That is the ugliest fucking hairstyle I’ve ever seen.” 

He hides a laugh behind his fist, “I-it certainly is eccentric…” Well, he’d be lying if he said he never secretly thought the same.

You tilt your head, his contagious smile making your own lips slightly quirk. In this dimming light, you could see the dimples by the corners of his lips- “And so? I don’t suppose you’re here to hear my tastes in hairstyles, are you?”

“I-I wouldn’t mind.” He coughs underneath his breath, self-consciously thinking to his own cutesy space-buns. He’s seen you staring at them a few times before…at least his imagination liked to think you did. He’s almost glad he wore them down today, “But ah- but no, you’re right. First of all, I came to apologize.” 

Before you can say anything else, he’s bowing before you.

Sharp and sincere.

He couldn’t see the expression on your face like this- and so Choso scrunches his eyes and spits out the words. “I apologize for how rude I was during the lecture earlier, it- it’s completely my fault and I shouldn’t have snatched the invitation out of your hands. It was just…”

“Personal?” You ask, and he’s whipping his head up to catch your warm smile. “I get it. Your secret’s safe with me.” Before thinking about it a little more, “And Utahime…and Shoko. Maybe Ijichi-”

His pinkish mouth gapes, “A-and the…”

“My name?” Teasingly, you pretend to think. “I didn’t see a thing. My name? What name?”

Beside himself, he begins to laugh- “And I uh- there’s also…” He’s only slightly leaning up from his bow now, fists clenching upon either side as if tries not to lose his nerve. And Choso might just have- had it not been for the flailing body of his brother.

Just a little distance away, Yuji dances about and gestures at Choso to keep talking. Shaping out hearts with his arms. Mouthing a little ‘go on’. Puckering his lips and making kissy faces—

You notice the way his gaze strays past you and start to turn-

But Choso’s grabbing your hand in a panic- stopping you from moving- making you turn around in slight surprise. “I uh!” And he feels…he feels so much. The heat of your hand thrumming in his own. The zaps of electricity as your eyes meet his. The adoration at just how beautiful you were in this light. Somehow, some way, the shy man manages out. “I wanted to…to invite you personally to the WI- I mean, the party.” 

He winces, waiting for your rejection.

Only-

“I’d love to!”

In the distance Yuji’s camera runs out of battery with how many times he’s flashing away pictures.

Choso’s on cloud nine all the way back home, he doesn’t think his feet even touch the pavement. Yuji gives him a good, hard smack on the back in congratulations as they get on Choso’s bike—“Wow, maybe you’re not a hopeless case after all, bubba!” 

Choso rides a little faster that day.

.

.

.

PHASE FOUR OF WIMP: DON’T BE A WIMP!

It honestly hadn’t taken them too long to turn Itadori Jin’s home into the habitat of a college party. It was already big enough, and it had a pool out in the back and a rooftop to climb. All they needed to add were a few key components: booze, beats, onion rings.

Most of it was ordered with their uncle’s credit card…

He’d asked his Löded Diper members to join him for a gig later in the night. And Yuji had begged his friends to help them with the decorating and set-up on account that they could join the (alcohol-free, to them) party afterwards.

Meanwhile Choso had paced their living room so many times that he thinks his footsteps were seared into the carpet - some excuse of a cool big brother he was. He’d damn near twisted off his lip piercing with the way he’d been nervously toying with it- it’d taken Yuji and Nobara dragging him off to get a bit more dolled-up for him to stop.

And so here he was.

Dressed in his best ripped jeans, chains glinting, biceps flexing through his short sleeves, nails painted and re-painted. 

He throws his silky bangs out of his eyes and watches as the students trickle in- he didn’t even know half the people that dapped him up before treading inside the Itadori family home. And through each smile and greeting, Choso’s eyes flickered over the blur of faces for only one.

Yours.

The slosh of beer. The splash of ping-pong balls inside cups.

It was nearing midnight and Choso still couldn’t find you. Fuck, he almost considers letting the party rage on and leaving to find you himself-

“Bubba!” Yuji calls out over the thumping bass, and the dark-haired man is whipping around to find his brother surfing over the sea of people. “Bubba- bubba!” Hand cupped over his mouth to let his voice project, the other gripping his camera. “I saw Utahime and Shoko by the food table, no sign of her though.”

“Yuji-” Choso’s yanking on his brother’s arm, tugging his brother to him. His eyes probe down in concern, “What do you mean no sign of her? You’re sure?”

“Positive.” Yuji nods, “I asked them, too- they said she’d be coming separately but still no sign of her.” 

“I hope she’s okay…” Choso worries on his lip ring, he looks over the perspired heads of party-goers. The party was in full swing by midnight, and it showed no sign of stopping. He’s sure he saw at least one antique vase smashed, and one drunk couple making out in Sukuna’s room…“Maybe I should go check on her?”

Yuji tilts his head in confusion, “How?”

“I’ll just wait by the door maybe…”

“All night?”

“All morning if I have to.” 

Waving off his concerns, he tells his brother to order some more food and leaves for the front door.

Ignoring the calls of his name and the compliments. Trying to squeeze past the slightest gaps between bodies, “Excuse me-” He’s whispering, wincing as he forces his way through them. “Excuse me- coming through. Excuse me.” Seeing the widely gaped door as a few more people shove themselves inside the party, the door starts to close. “Wait wait don’t close, I just want to get to-”

You.

A hand stops the front door from closing, and he’s instantly putting a name to face. A name to body. A name to each fingertip by fingertip.

The party hushes just a little when you enter. The music slows. The chatter dies down. The eyes of everyone present snaps to you- holy shit, it was you. It was really, really you. 

Dressed in your prettiest slip dress. Hugging every inch of you so perfectly in the way he wanted to. Your eyes shimmering with a bit of glitter on the edges. Your lips resembling a candy he couldn’t wait to suck on right now. Immediately, it’s as if his world was bending to your will, your intrusion - as it always did.

Holding the door open, “Oh!” You’re clearly startled to come face-to-face with Choso Kamo so soon - and especially so close. Your eyes widen as they flit up his sculptured body, that t-shirt that clung to him attractively. “Ditching your own party so soon?”

“I was about to until you came along.”

Fuck—why did he say that?

In the distance, he can hear three irritating (strangely familiar) squeals. And he’s bringing a hand up to fiddle with his lip piercing, apology on his tongue when-

“Well, then I sure am glad I came along.” You’re smiling in that way that feels like you’re analyzing every inch of him, “This party wouldn’t have been much fun without you, Cho.” You push his shoulder with yours, and he thinks he might just melt.

He thinks he does.

There’s a flash of a camera that jolts him into action once more.

“Can I uh- get you uh—a beer? Or something?” Grimacing at his own choked-up hosting, he ushers you in and closes the door. Your shoulder brushes against his, and he thinks he might just cream his pants. “Or a shot? Ah- onion rings?”

“I think I’m good on the alcohol…for now.” You hum, and there’s something in your tone that he can’t quite pinpoint. The party parts ways for you, and he’s leading you inside. 

Choso raises a brow, curious. “How come for now?”

“Ah- because I know if I want to drink I’ll drink until I drop out of anger.” You huff, looking up at him meaningfully. You’d reached the dance floor by now- or at least, the living room that had found itself being turned into a dance floor. The music was much louder here, and you beckon Choso in close to whisper in his ear—your breath brushing his sensitive earlobes. “Break-ups tend to do that to you.”

Choso shivers at the proximity, before registering what you’d just said. “Wait- break-up-”

“It was a long time coming anyway.” You’re sighing, a slight smile on your face. “And this time it’s done for good- don’t worry, it’s not like I’m upset or anything…” Huffing out contemplatively, “Well, maybe a little- but not over him, rather the time I wasted.”

“I-I see…” Choso swallows, his throat was parched as if he’d just run a marathon. He clenches his fists, and then he wipes those sweaty palms down his sides—before bringing them up to hold yours. In just a little, his band would be playing (he’d been holding them off for you), but until then…

You look up at him in slight surprise, slight warmth.

“Then…” He tugs you down to the dance floor, “-shall we dance?”

.

.

.

“Fuh-fuck…” Choso can’t help but let his slick tongue flop out- as if he wanted to surge his head between those pretty legs of yours, as if he wanted to chase that sweetly honeyed cunt you’d plopped right on top of him.

It didn’t take long after dancing together - so close, you’re sure the rumor mill was working overtime by now - and listening to Choso’s rock set before you’d all but dragged him upstairs. Blindly, he’s the one that’d led your impatient self to his bedroom and locked the door.

And you’d barely had the time to admire those rock posters along his walls, his practice drum kit, before he’d laid you out on his jet-black sheets.

Before you’d flipped him over and set your thighs upon either side of his pretty, pretty face.

With your hips hoverin’ over Choso’s face, you’re letting your mouth upturn into a smirk as his gluttonous tongue lavishes out. The ridges of his tastebuds already watery with how badly he wanted you, he’s groaning from underneath. “S-sit on my face.” 

“What was that?” You’re leaning in with your ear cupped, pretending not to hear. Not close enough for him to actually get what he wants, but enough to have him lunging forwards with a whine. “The music’s really loud, Cho.”

“Sit on my- face.” Such a pretty hot blush spreads all over his cheeks, as if Choso couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of his own mouth. With both hands gripped upon both your thighs, he’s pulling you in. “Please sit on my face, ngh- what do I hafta do to have you fuck my mouth properly?”

“How about you beg-”

“Please—”

“Call me ma’am?”

Tears start twinkling at the edge of Choso’s eyes at how badly he wanted you, how ravenous he was. “Please…” Mumbling out in such a pouty way, his lip ring glimmers. “Please, ma’am.”

You shiver, zaps of arousal running down your spine and straight to your core- you couldn’t believe that it was so damn easy to get him to bend to your will like this. And Choso’s noticing your slight shakes with a whine of concern, batting up his lashes-

“Something the matter, baby?”

“Oh, nothing—” You hum, and the bed creaks as you inch just a lil’ forward. “It’s just, you’re already so tempting as is- just one question, have you ever done this before?”

You didn’t know it was even possible for his furious flush to grow even stronger, “N-no…”

“Mmm, thought so.”

To which his brown brows furrow in a plea- “But I promise I’ll be so good for you- mmpf!”

Immediately shutting him up with the front of your pussy- your bloated lips end up glued against his mouth. His greedy maw. His agape cavern. His lip piercing was cold against your outer cunt. His tongue sticks directly out to swipe at your sultry pussy, and you watch in real time as Choso’s doe-like eyes widen, entire body jolting as if he’d just been struck by a million volts of electricity.

And he takes one lick, he takes one slurp.

That’s all it takes for Choso Kamo to get fucking addicted.

“O-oh my god…” Slurring out right between your pussylips, you’re being dragged forwards as if you were nothing but a ragdoll atop him. Nudged right until the tip of his straight nosebridge ends up shoved between your folds, “Mmm, oh my god-” He breathes out—that’s until he realizes that he has to remove himself from your pussy to actually breathe.

And it’s with great pain that and multiple seconds that Choso actually unlatches himself from your cunt to intake a few gasps. Before plunging straight back in with a wet sluuuuurp—“Oh my god- are all pussies this sweet- or is it just yours, ngh! I think it’s just yours, baby…”

Oh, it’s going to be really fun to control him to your lecherous whims.

“I didn’t realize you’d be a fuckin’...oh, fuck.” You’re throwing your head back with a slight yelp. Because without any warning, Choso’s smearing aside your folds with his nose to find your sensitive nub.

Instantly letting his mouth fall open, he’s latching at your clit and drag-drag-draaaagging. And especially with his frigid lip ring, it’s making you feel sensations you didn’t even know were possible. “Mmm, and then there’s this clit of yours—fuck!” As if that wasn’t enough, he’s reaching up a hand to hold your pussylips wiiiide open. Sucklin’ away even deeper, “Just the gift that keeps on givin’, baby, mmm- this pussy is just such a treat. I think I could have her for breakfast, lunch, and dinner-” 

He just starts babbling - so drunk on your pussy already that the only thing you can do is grab onto a lock of Choso’s dark hair and pull him off. “Ch-Choso, oh my god.” Wait- did you think you could control him?

He’s blinking his long lashes at you blearily, lips all glossed with your sweetened slick. “What were you saying again?”

“Munch.” You’re spitting out, almost accusing- and a drivel of your spit dangles out of your mouth, ready for Choso to open his mouth and let it splatter onto his mouth. You’re looking down at the display and letting out a shiver, “I didn’t think you’d be such a munch, Choso- you sure you’ve never done this before?”

“P-pussy…” He’s prattling out, hypnotized. Before shaking his head out of that daze, slightly giggling. “I mean- positive.”

Your peripherals widen in disbelief—did he seriously just mix that word up with your pussy? “You can’t be serious…” Deciding to take things into your own hands, you’re tightening your fist ‘round his sweat-drenched bangs a bit more. “Unless you want to- hah, suffocate then you might wanna take it slow, baby.”

“B-but…”

“But what, Cho—?” And oh, he could see that mean glint in your eyes as you tugged his head to the side and made him groan. The sudden movement made Choso’s lips break off with a dampened mwah! and the poor boy is reaching upwards with a few pleas.

“Please-” This eyeliner smearing ‘round the edges as he all but cries at the very thought of your pussy being taken away from him. “Please- no! Don’t take her away from me m’begging- you can take it slow, you can take it slow.” Choso shakes his head fervently, “You can take it slow just…”

And you catch his dilated pupils darting somewhere towards the edge of his bedside cabinet, curiosity growing. “Just what, hm?”

“I just want to have one condition of my own.”

You let him trail off of your pussy- and it takes him a few more open-mouthed kisses before he can even bear to remove himself from your cunt. Without delay, he reaches to open up the drawer beside him. “What are you…”

And you can only watch - slack-jawed and speechless - as Choso fits a silver orb of a tongue piercing right in the middle of his tastebuds.

Right smack-dab in the middle.

You take back what you thought about control.

And you’re barely allowed the time to register just how attractive he looks this way, before Choso’s back plastering his flattened muscle over your pussy. “S-slow, I said, Cho. Slow.”

“Sorry, baby, sorry.” Brows knitting together, he tries to concentrate. “Slow…m’gonna take it…slow.”

You’re gyrating your hips backwards in such a sensual pace - it was almost agonizing the round-a-bout way you’d move your hips back against his face. Keeping him wrapped around your lil’ pinkie, “Mmm, yeah- just like that, Choso.” 

Holding onto his scalp, your channel constricts at the way he just kept on cracking out tiny whimpers every time you tugged a bit too harshly at him.

Humming, “Just like thaaaaat-” Feeling his overeager mouth surge faster upwards at the compliment, “Ah ah- slow down, baby. Mmm, just like that.”

Because at least this tempo let you keep your wits about you. 

Somewhat…

But then something happens.

But then he’s sensing your deviating hips angle themselves- he’s sensing you crave the cold drag of his piercing. And Choso Kamo just can’t stop his body being sent into a state of frenzy—where it doesn’t matter how much you’re holding yourself back, he’s pulling you in, he’s squelching his tongue upwards, he’s kissing away. “This—” Lapping and lapping up the crevice of your cunt with his lengthy tongue. “Does it feel good on your pussy, baby? Please- please tell me you can feel it.”

“I can feel it.” Breathily, you have to fight to keep your tone under control as he slips n’ slides his textured tastebuds all over your outer pussy. Alternating between those ravenous kisses and lil’ tugs on your clit. “F-feels so cold on my clit- hah.” Fuck slow, he was going wild.

“Good.” And you swear you can feel Choso’s smile spreading across your folds, oh-so-sensitive with his sheer friction. The longer he was kissin’ away at your cunt, the more honest he got. “I got it just for you, y’know?”

And no matter how tightly you’re trying to grab onto his sweaty scalp, Choso was just so feral with his movements. Uncontrollable. You try to haul him backwards to slow him down, but he was only manhandling you further onto his face. “Wh-what do you mean you got it just for me?”

“Exactly what I said, baby—” He’s batting his teary lashes, “That I was thinkin’ of you when I- ngh, got it. That all I could fucking think of when I got my tongue pierced was havin’ your sweet pussy on me like this, and my piercing rubbin’ up against you like- that-”

Lurching on top of him when he stretches your tight hole out with just the crown edge of his tongue. Choso’s circular piercing knocks up against the sides of your walls and leaves you feeling mad, “Oh my god—” Saliva splattering down your front.

Then Choso’s feeling the way you clench, feeling the way your entrance quivers around nothing.

And it was just such a shame to leave your pretty cunt waiting, wasn’t it? So like the good boy he was, he’s slipping an inch of his wet muscle inside and making you gasp at the stretch. His orbed piercing marking his pathway perfectly, “Shit! At least give a girl a warning-”

“M’sorry, baby.” Choso whines, “Y-you won’t take my pretty pussy away from me for that, will you?”

“Well…” At least dragging out your answer let you see him all hopeless and needy like this. But honestly, looking at him - all starry-eyed, blushing-cheeked, half his face slicked in your sap - how could you ever say no to him?

Shit, he might just have you drunk on his tongue.

And your body starts to quake with tiny shivers, with both your hands woven into his hair for stability. You feel the desperate slashes of his tongue increase, and realize that he wasn’t edging any closer to your hole without your permission. How cute…“Nope- but s’gonna be on my terms, baby- oh.”

No sooner are the words panted out of your mouth that Choso’s mazing his prolonged tastebuds straight through your entrance.

A direct pap! to the gooey roof of your cunt- and you gasp at the contact, slightly pulling back. Before Choso holds one side of your hips and makes you sit properly down on his face to slash and slash and slash at your innards. Fucking you with his mouth like such an animal- “Y-yes, anything you say…”

“Fuck- fuck- then-” You’re tugging back with his hair, almost simply to watch the way that Choso’s chasing your cunt afterwards.

“T-tell me m’doing a good job, baby- tell me-”

Hiccuping out, “You’d be a much better boy f’me if you were a little more in control.” His lip piercing was practically glued to your outer cunt, and Choso simply couldn’t decide between sucking on your slit and spreadin’ open your hole with his very lips.

Maddened.

You’re struggling to even think beyond the primal stretch at your hole, and as you tug on Choso’s hair yet another time- he’s moving back in with a growl. “C-can you even think, baby?” Asking, whining through the great dollops of saliva clogging up your throat. He shakes his head and you continue, “Do you even know what you’re doing? Can you even breathe?”

“How can I?”

Drippin’ straight down his pointed chin, droplets of your slick wobble across his skin as he mumbles. “Like I said- m’taking it sloooow—” Stroking your glistening walls multiple times a second, his tongue piercing zig-zagging rapid lines. “M’taking it- hah, just the pace you want it.” His brown eyes glinting with something that looked almost predatory. “M’giving you m-mercy.”

“F-fuck…” A breathless gasp leaves you, eyes widening at the sinful epiphany you’d just come across. “I really…can’t control you.”

Shoving himself a few inches deeper inside your wet pussy, “But she certainly can.”

And then it’s not just Choso’s tongue that’s muddlin’ up your mind (and your cunt), but his fingers decide to join in on the fun, too.

Not only were they unfairly long, but they were so flexible. 

Curving juuust the right way to make those chunky metal rings on his fingers dig against your softened walls, “J-just can’t control myself when it comes to this pussy, baby.” He’s whining out between your slick-sheened thighs, splatter after splatter of syrup letting out of you. Choso thrusts his digits in until they’re knuckle-deep, and his skin ‘round that area stings bright red. “Just drives me…wild. Just makes me wanna make her mine and- fuck, fuck everyone that th-thinks otherwise.”

“Oh, please—” Throwing your head back, your thighs start to shiver - and you’re not quite sure whether that’s because of the exertion or the sheer amount of pleasure he was pumping into you. “Please, you’re just so close-”

“No, you’re just so close.” He’s giggling out, taking a lavish lick inside your hole. “I can taste it on her.”

“You- you can…” You breathe out in disbelief. 

He locks his lips ‘round your clit now, permanently back to sucking on that cute nub. Drawing out the most adorable whines from your mouth, Choso’s swervin’ his ringed fingers inside of you. Looooog zig-zags, “I can.” Poking his textured tips into any crevice he can find, any orifice. “You’re startin’ to taste so much sweeter, baby- fuh-feels like you’re gonna cum on my tongue.”

Bucking, “I am I am- ngh, I’m so fucking close.”

“Mmmm—just need to hit that p-pretty lil’ g-spot, don’t I?” At that surprised look you’re throwing down at him, “What? Just because m’a virgin doesn’t mean that I’m- ngh, unknowledgeable. I read up on it y’know…”

“And what exactly did you read up on it, Choso?” You can’t help but ask.

“That I need to find that spot and you’ll feel—” The circle of his tongue piercing draaaags so lecherously, right on time with one of his silver rings inside of you. The cold material makes your pupils swirl inside the whites of your eyes, and you almost don’t hear his next words. “-like c-cumming on my face-”

Jostled up by him-

“Please tell me where it is, baby.” He begs, words nearly drowned out by the squelches! of him hammerin’ two fingers away inside of you. “Please- please I want you to cum on my face. I promise I’ll be good…after, just let me know where-”

“Fuh-fuuuuck, Choso.” You’re bawling out, that fire starting out at the pit of your stomach. “You’re just too much- think m’gonna cum soon n’- hck! my g-spot should be…”

He moves, fingers twitching excitedly inside of you.

“-right- up.”

And he’s probin’ into your sweetest spot perfectly—just perfectly. 

The roughened knobs of his fingers stick against your bundle of nerves, and you’re feeling a sudden surge of pleasure that makes you see pure white- before you’re throwing your head back and announcing your high. “C-cumming-” You gurgle out, “Oh my god- m’cumming, Choso.”

“H-heh…all on my tongue.” The dark-haired man declares smugly - just as he’d expected, you’d toppled over the edge. He told you he could taste it. “More, baby- more. Ride your orgasm out on my tongue, will you?”

“Doing so…”

Fucking you with his hands.

Not only were you gripping Choso’s long locks in two places and using him to bounce your hips backwards, but he was elongating your high with not two- not three- but four ringed fingers bullied between your tender pussylips.

Just plain mean. The sheer stretch of it was just incredible, and he was openin’ you up like never before. 

Eating you out like never before.

You’re feeling wet tears roll down your cheeks at the feeling of his tastebuds rolling over your throbbing clit—slurp-slurp-slurp! Precisely whenever it felt like a peak of your bliss was coming onwards, and that only left you more gone on his tongue. “Feels good like this, doesn’t it, baby?” With a sloppy noise, he then continues to suck on your clit. “Mmmm- not bad for a first timer.”

“P-perhaps.” You didn’t even know what else to say. You’re shivering throughout your entire body when he slobbers his tongue over from your clit to start pricking n’ prodding at your hole. “Shit- y’know my high’s almost over, right, Choso?”

“I know.”

And yet he still doesn’t stop.

Not until you’re left fucked utterly dumb on his mouth, not until he’s letting you ride through your entire orgasm and then some, not until he has you in actual tears of overstimulation-

“P-please-” You couldn’t believe how you sounded at this point - you. Queen Bee. Things always went your way- but now you were at Choso’s complete and utter mercy. “Give your mouth a little rest, Cho-”

He seethes, as if offended. “I don’t even need to breathe when I have your pussy on me, you think I’d stop because m’jaws fuckin’ tired, baby?”

Blubbering, “Maybe not- but hck! if you slow down now then I’ll have more stamina for ah- something else…” For him? You’d have stamina regardless, but the lil’ warning worked in getting Choso to unglue his pierced lips from your pussy with a final mwah!

And it was the loudest, most sinful noise you’ve heard in your entire life.

Enough to get you to shake with arousal, and for Choso to use his strong arms n’ seat you down on his lap. With your legs straddling his slender waist now, he’s sitting up. 

Staring down at you through heavy half-lidded eyes, “You were saying…?”

“I was saying.”

He just looked too sexy like this.

Long hair all rumpled with you running your fingers through them. His eyes faintly misty and sex-crazed. More than half his face was gleaming with your syrupy slick. Lips puffy. Eyeliner smeared. Rings all stained with a few layers of your sap that he licks right off- all while looking straight into your dilated pupils.

Your cunt throbs.

Eager to get him back for this, you’re tearing off Choso’s t-shirt of some punk-rock band. And beneath—oh, were you pleasantly surprised.

You’d somewhat expected Choso to be one of those types that were silently muscular, silently toned, silently so strong. 

Your eyes greedily followed the curves and dips of his sculpted front, and realize that he was blushed all the way down to his prominent pecs. You reach out and touch the spattering of star-like freckles across them, and then so on forth to his…nipple piercings.

Your thumb snags on the glinting bar that pierced his left pec- and he hisses.

“Oh my-” You’re cooing, “S’this for me, too?”

“Y-yes.”

You push him down flatly onto the bed, making his pillows puff up with the pressure. Your hands then sensually caress the ladder-like ridges of his abs - all smoooooth and rippling at your touch. 

Down, down, dooooown to ultimately end up buried in his slightly unruly happy trail. “It’s always the quiet ones, huh?” His breath hitches once you start fiddling with his jeans, tugging—pulling. “Who would’ve thought that cute lil’ Choso Kamo, always so quiet and shy, would be like this.” Your mouth waters as his pants start loosening, “That he’d be so, so…”

Big.

There was no other adjective for it.

Choso Kamo was simply so big - just the prettiest rose-red at his tip, all engorged that it was as if every ounce of blood in his body had ended up at his cock instead. A few puffy veins. Just the barest curls of brown at his base. His erection stood looooong and upright, dribblin’ out a few lines of precum at the intensity of your stare. 

And there- right in the middle of his shaft was a circular piercing that sat snugly underneath a particularly prominent vein. Winking up at you like it couldn’t wait to feel you.

And even from here, you could tell that Choso was already the type to be so sensitive-

“D-don’t-” To your surprise, his right hand snakes down and ends up at your throat. Gently holding you back from getting any nearer to his raging hot cock.

You’re mentally counting about ten of his inches- maybe eleven?! And you look up at him in slight confusion.

He clears his throat, “I mean- it’s just that I know what you’re thinking. But the thing is, if you put your lips on me now then m’just gonna…cum…instantly.”

Your brows raise damn near to your hairline, “What if I want that then?”

“I’ll beg you not to.”

“Beg.”

“Please, ma’am- fuck-” You’ve just made that punk-rock boy beg—and not only that, whilst he was midway through his pleading, you’d made him throw his head back with the cutest whine.

How?

Simply swervin’ your hips over his aching hot length, and whilst Choso had been talking- you’d just runnnnn your glossy pussylips down the thickness of his length. Simply sandwiched between your folds, he’d felt so thick and solid against your entrance.

Throb-throb-throbbing away.

It’d only left you…ravenous for more-

“Need you to fuck me now, Cho.” You lean in to tell him, your breath scorching against his face. And Choso had the urge to lean up and lick those dried tears off your cheeks. “Want you inside me so fucking bad-”

“Fuh-fuck- don’t talk like that.” He’s urgently saying, head snapping downwards.

And you’re following his gaze just to find that Choso’s bawling divot had started pouring out bead after bead of gooey white sap at your words. Simply your words. He was almost on the verge of cumming at your words.

And oh- how he both loves and hates that mischievous smile that spreads across your pretty face. “But it’s just the truth, Cho.” Batting your lashes up at him, “I just really want you inside-”

“Please-”

“Always wanted you inside-”

“I w-won’t go easy-”

“Always dreamt of you inside- oh, fuck.”

It’s the last thing your nasty mouth can get out before Choso’s grabbing onto either side of your shoulders and shoving his thick, aching cock inside of you.

Just a single inch, perhaps not even that.

Just the slightest intrusion.

And it’s so sexy that you almost wished you recorded the way he’s letting his toned chest heave with a gasp, the way he’s flushing all the way down to his roots, the way that Choso’s entire body seems to zap with sultry lightning—a mere pause.

You could almost feel the question that hangs in the air - so this is what you feel like?

Before then he’s shoving and shoving.

Like he’s gone absolutely wild- “Fuck-” Choso spits between his honed teeth, “Fuck- hold still.” Grabbing onto you anywhere, everywhere—just anything that would keep you there while he tried to fuck his cock inside you until your sweetened sap is overspilling. “Hold still, hold still, hold—” You weren’t even prepared to accommodate him, and yet you can feel an inch or so more of his thickness funnel inside. “—still.”

“Oh my- oh my god!” You’re thrashing at the sudden pressure being put on your lower half, but Choso’s keeping his hold firm. He’s pinning you down. He’s not letting you move a single inch. He’s not even giving you a mere warning before reeling his puffy inches back-

Your eyes snap open, and you’re just about to ask whether he was pulling back.

-before Choso’s snapping his hips to yours and only tunneling that globular tip of his even deeper. “Hold still.” He spits down a splat! accurately onto your cunt, “You- you just need to hold still.”

It was like a mantra. You’re shivering at the tone of his voice. 

There was a certain roughness to his words, a certain primal want in them that you’ve never heard from Choso before. Or anyone, ever, really. 

It made your heard damn near beat out of your chest, and your fingers tremor as you reach up to him. Gliding away the sweaty bangs that obscure Choso’s gaze, “What did you say now, baby?”

“I said-” And you can only gasp as he lunges his hips back a few more inches, barely even letting your cunt constrict around nothing before he’s pushing in with a deep thwack! It’s enough to make your body lurch at the sudden intrusion- to which Choso’s tightening his grip on you until he was white-knuckled. “-hold. Still.”

But how could you possibly hold still when you were stuffed in so tight that you barely felt like you could even breathe. Could barely even keep it together. Could barely do anything but arch your back and-

“Didn’t I fuckin’ tell you to hold still?”

Your jaw drops, turning your head down to look at him—weren’t you supposed to be the mean one out of you two? “You did, but-”

“Then hold—” Clearly feeling that he needed to up the ante, both his hands detach from your sides. You could already feel the steam wafting out from where his touch had once been, and those very same rude palms waste no time ending up…laced on top of your crowned scalp. “-fucking-” Using the leverage to push you down onto his drilling hips, “-still.”

He finally looks up at you then - finally.

And what you see shakes you to your very core.

Because Choso Kamo’s pupils were dilated until it looked almost animalistic, in a way you didn’t even know was possible for a human. He looked crazed. He looked hungry. He looked as if he was on the verge of devouring you whole right then and there.

And then he’s fucking you like it, too.

Rough, rapid half-thrusts just to fit inside.

Fuck—Choso’s throbbing circumference was just too fucking big to bottom out immediately. But he’s sloppily dragging down your channel until he was just about halfway inside, with the knob of his silver piercing tickling your entrance.

With a gruff groan, he swipes that frigid metal ‘round your hole as if claiming you. The shy man hisses at the resistance of your cunt before holding you down and pushing- “Hold still before I fucking c-cum.”

“Oh-” You’re gasping, “So that’s why-”

“Fuck- actually, don’t even speak.” And you’re quickly understanding why when even the mere sound of your whiny voice leaves Choso’s bludgeoning tip twitching.

Hard and fast.

Desperate and needy.

Like he was trying to claim even the slightest ounce of space inside you, Choso bucks his hips and lets his dewy eyes flutter shut. Mouth falling agape, “Shut up and take it. D-don’t test me, baby.” With the hand plastered on top of your scalp, he’s ramming you right back down to meet his hips. “Not unless you want me to cum i-inside right this very second.”

“But what if I do?”

“Fuck…fucking- shut—” Shutting you up by a ringed thumb pushed into your mouth, it was just so easy for him to reach down from your crown. Preventing you from talking back, preventing you from running, preventing you from doing any fucking thing but taking his thickly massive cock.

Ignoring those words of yours that were definitely riling him up, Choso instead focuses on letting his blushin’ tip scrape at your g-spot.

It leaves you absolutely incoherent, squealing ‘round the intrusion of his thumb. “Please-” You’re somehow managing out, “Please I- hck! love it like that- would love it even more if you would cum in-”

“Fucking- I can’t even—” And he just sounds so agonized as he drills up into you like a madman - Choso’s oversensitive cock wasn’t even ready to, didn’t even think he could handle it. And yet he’s doing so to prevent you from yammering on with those filthy words of yours. Choso’s crying out. “Is that you or her talking- you or her—stop talkin’ outta your pussy, baby, s’gonna drive me w-wild.”

Blinking away your tears, the edge of his thumb had slipped out of your mouth by now. Drawing a splattering smear of saliva, “And here I thought you said you were g-going to let me have my way-”

“Did I say that?” As he pauses to think, you could see the brief glimmer of human recognition spark in Choso’s deep irises. “Can’t remember, heh.”

“You little-”

You’re cut off by your own surprised yelp, because in absolutely no time- Choso has your positions flipped over. It was you that had your back against the mattress now, being pushed further and further in the direction of the headboard any time he moved.

And Choso was just lurking above you, was just pinning you down with his mere muscular weight.

He didn’t even have to try to halt your restless hips in their pursuit, and throws your legs over his shoulders easily to fuck you in the meanest mating press possible.

Your ass against his thighs, his forehead bending down to press against yours.

This angle was just perfect. 

In absolutely no time, his rounded cockhead was bludgeoning against every sweet orifice on your walls. Before he’s ultimately slide-slide-sliiiiding down to dig his circular girth against your cervix- with a great thud! that sets your teeth on edge.

His pale hips slam into yours again and again and again- “H-hold still.” Just about the only thing that he could get out now, right between those clenched canines of his. It was more on autopilot than anything, because you weren’t moving a single inch- and yet Choso was already so gone on your cunt that he couldn’t stop babbling. “Didn’t I tell you to stop moving- oh, this sweet pussy…she’s just being so filthy f’me.”

“And you’re just being so pussydrunk, Cho.” You’re somehow giggling out, though he’s slowly fucking that laughter out with a rough few slams at your deepest depths.

Not slowing down until you couldn’t help but feel his bruisin’ tip even after he’s pulled out, just to sink all the way back in again. “Hold- fucking- still—”

“I am.”

“Wh-what do you even mean?” Sounding genuinely confused, genuinely so dazed. You’re sure that if you squeezed your soft, velvety walls this very second then Choso would completely forget the last few seconds of your conversation.

Almost to test it - you do.

And you watch as the dark-haired man immediately drops his head to the crook of your neck, clammy skin-against-skin. You watch as he shivers, you watch as he only raises his face to stare at you with bleary eyes. “Wh-what were we talking about again, baby…?” And even more so- you’re raising both your hands up to toy with the glinting silver of Choso’s nipple piercings, rolling your fingers over his rosy buds. And you watch as an even more dopey expression overcomes his features, “We were nght—talking?”

Even his syllables were slurring together. You had to bite back a giggle, “Just talking about how much I wanted you to fill me- ngh- up.” You’re tugging and teasing his cute nipples, he lets off the prettiest short gasps any time you’re pressing down on the pierced nubs of his nipples like a button. “You can cum inside right now if you wanted, Cho.”

“R-right…” And his eyes grow just a bit clearer, he’s nodding as if he remembered exactly what you meant. Scouring one hand off your head and down the middle of your core, “Right- was talking about how I wanted to fill this ngh- cute womb up like craaaaazy- weren’t we?”

“Yes- fuck yes.” You’re moaning as his speed suddenly grows even faster.

“And we were talking about how m’gonna cum any second now?” He presses down on the top of your stomach as he pounds past your geysering orifice, creating the perfect pressure that makes the both of you whimper. “And how m’gonna be the one to cuh-cum first?”

“Yes- yes-”

“Because m’so patheeeeetic on this pussy, aren’t I?” An almost crazed tone in his voice, something that sends zaps of electricity thrumming through your every vein. “I’d die for her- I’d ngh- do anything for her.”

You throw your head back, body arching against his glissading abs. “You…are…oh.” And you didn’t know who was more shattered at this point - you or—

“But you’re not pathetic for wanting this touch-starved loser virgin to fill your cunt up with my cum?”

You.

It was absolutely you.

At least, it was you in this very moment. 

Because somewhere in the middle of his vulgar strokes, Choso had somewhat regained his senses. At least enough to make you end up with heart-eyes on his cock, your cunt slobberin’ out any time he’s pulling his hips back.

A great splosh! of sap pathetically spilling out from between your legs leaves him crinkling his nose with a shy chuckle. “Cute.” Before you know it, his hands lift off of your scalp to wrap one at your throat. The other drifts down somewhere between your legs…“You- ngh, reeeeally want me to fill this pretty pussy up, baby?”

And you can’t help but become so-very-honest on his rovering cock, knockin’ against your every sweet spot and aching to knock you up! “Yes-” You blurt through tears, “Yes, I really- ngh, really want you to.”

“Sh-shit, you don’t know how many times I’ve dreamt of you saying that.” 

You might have been opening your drooling mouth to respond with something, but Choso’s cutting you off by slithering his slender index and thumb between your pussylips and pinching your cute clit. You’re moaning loud enough that you’re sure the party downstairs must have heard- “J-just like that-” Letting your limp limbs twitch with the crackles of pleasure. “Just inside, baby.”

“Mhmmm- inside inside- inside.” Choso’s grunting out after each ravenous roll of his thumb atop your nub. He’s hitting your pelvis a few more times with his, making the slamming of skin echo out into the room. “But you better cum f’me first, baby.”

Your eyes snap wide open, “Why me first-” Speeding up, your g-spot was practically getting bruised by this point.

“Can’t you indulge this loser a little and let me make you cummmm again-” He coos, fingers so fast on your clit that they look like nothing but a blur. “S’all I’ve ever wanted ever since I first- ngh, saw you, y’know? To give this pussy a gooood proper fuckin’ that I knew she wasn’t getting- I might’ve been a virgin but I could learn.”

“And you’d be the- hah, one to do that?”

He’s slamming his globular length into your so hard that your tastebuds sizzle, and you swear you can taste his salty pre at your throat. Choso’s starin’ you deeply into your eyes whilst he fucks you maddeningly, deeply into your eyes whilst he says. “Baby, I already am.”

 As he finishes his filthy sentence, Choso purposefully shortens some of his furious thrusts. Because he didn’t even want to wait for the recoil of your spongy womb before he’s pumping in one more, because he wanted to assault your poor throbbing g-spot with his orb piercing. Rubbing and rubbing—

Until you’re finally crashing into your second high of the night.

Such an incredible sensation that you can’t decide which one was better - both of them were the two best in your entire life, however. 

“Hold still-” Choso unplasters his hand from your neck, which then moves down to grip at your waist. To keep your waist pinned down to the creaky mattress, “Hold still while I fuh-fuck you like you deserve.” And above all - to let the fat, drivellin’ tip of his cock glide down your g-spot and alllll the way to your womb with absolutely no problem. Again and again. Every peak upon peak being draaaaagged out—“Hold still while- ngh, oh…fuck, I can barely even speak because of her.”

It takes over your body in waves - first your toes that curl, then your thighs that just won’t stop twitching, your heaving chest your muddled mind.

And then finally that mouth of yours that keeps on begging- “Now- now your turn.” Stubbornly, you lock your ankles around the back of Choso’s neck. Not even halfway through your own orgasm before you’re begging for his, “Gonna hold still- so you h-have to do it inside, m’kay, Cho?”

He’s staring at you with such dazed eyes, “Y-yes, ma’am.”

Because you always did get what you wanted.

And the tingles of your high have just barely begun to peter out, before they’re being replaced by the sheer sultry warmth of Choso’s ivory syrup.

The volume.

The way he was flooding you up with only a few vicious strokes.

It oozes out like a never-ending fountain by his strawberry divot, ending up emptied allllll the way near the back of your womb. “Y-yes—” You whine. You pinch Choso’s nipple and he spurts out just a few more pearly beads of cum, “Right there, Cho, want it all deep inside.”

“F-fuck—ngh—” Red-hot. Splashing. Entire body bowing into yours, sweat breaking out across his skin. He scrunches his eyes shut and lets the powerful bliss overtake him, “Oh my god it just feels so- hck! S’even better than I imagined cumming inside you- oh.”

You follow the line of his bleary sight- only to find that Choso was staring where you both were connected.

Your swollen folds. The ring of white ‘round his base.

The fatness of his thumb hovers right down to smear away that cute gloss of white, slurp! “Except in my, mmm, dreams, it was more like—” Though it was for no use, because Choso’s free hand only presses down on your stomach anyway. Until his creamy white cum oozes out of you in slick layers, “-this.”

You’re gaping at the mess he’s made, “And you were telling me to h-hold on-”

“I still am.”

Body moved around by him like a ragdoll, he’s using the hand on your stomach to pin you down. Shoving every solid inch of his cock back and forth—Choso thud-thud-thuds at the goopy wetness of your womb with each of his wads. 

Fucking each one inside you.

Webbing up your insides until your toes curl-

His second hand tilts open your jaw and spits- before kissing you, tongue piercing and all. “Wanna take my virginity a second time?”

.

.

.

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK—!

“Rise and shine—! The sun is shining! The grass is green! Your father is back from his trip-”

Now, Choso Kamo will say that he isn’t exactly sure what it is that woke him up that morning. Perhaps it was his father’s usual morning call, as one of those people that were much too happy in the early hours. Perhaps it was the warmth at this side, the way he doesn’t even have to open his eyes to know who it is. Perhaps it’s the way he presses a soft morning kiss on the side of your neck, how it all felt like a dream.

Perhaps it’s the girlish scream.

Two of them. One from his father and one from him.

Sitting up in alarm, Choso’s dragging his blanket further up your partially-covered bodies. Trying (quite futilely) to perhaps cover the nail marks down his back and shoulders, the hickies all over your body, the way both your mouths were still swollen. 

Face heating up at Itadori Jin’s wide, gawking eyes from the doorway, “D-dad!” And you start to stir at Choso’s yelp, “Dad, get out-”

“R-right away!”

BANG!

As the thunderous sound of the door closing, you’re lurching up in his bed. Now fully awake, you pull the sheets to your chest. Words nothing but a whisper- sore with all the overuse from last night, “Tell me what I think just happened didn’t just happen…”

Choso opens his mouth to answer (maybe lie and forget this ever happened)-

Before there’s a rapid knock and the door swings wide open once more.

Jin’s pinkish hair makes an appearance, and he keeps his eyes trained shamefully on the floor. Choso starts to protest. You yelp- “Breakfast is downstairs and I’ve made enough for everyone so please stay, okay bye!” He announces over your two voices, and promptly slams the door shut once again.

And you’re left in the silent wake of it—floor rumbling with the vibrations of the door, loud enough that you think you could hear your two thumping heartbeats. Oh my god….

Choso’s the one to break the silence - he kisses you chastely on the lips. “I uh- first day as a couple is going smoothly?”

Sitting up in alarm, Choso’s dragging his blanket further up your partially-clothed bodies. At some point in the night you’d gotten up to make yourselves somewhat presentable and help Yuji clean up after the party. And at some point in the night you’d also kept getting handsy in his room…

It doesn’t take you too long to throw on whatever t-shirt and pyjama pants that Choso hands your way, before admiring just how cute you looked in his clothes…alright maybe it did take long before the two of you were finally ready to make an appearance downstairs. But only because he kept insisting on kisses!

The kitchen quietens down at your entrance, and you’re setting sights on a man that must be no other than Choso’s grandpa- right along with another, younger, one who was the spitting image of Jin. Just slightly rougher around the edges. Tattoos. Piercings- ah, you understood where Choso must’ve gotten his style influenced from.

You’re at their round breakfast table, with his uncle (Sukuna, you hear) on your right, and Choso on your left. The dark-haired man reaches over and runs a hand down your thigh soothingly once conversation starts back up-

“How do you like your eggs, my dear?” Jin asks you, and when you answer he instantly gets to work - waving off your urgent requests to help. “No no- sit, sit! You’re the guest! I always have told Cho here to treat his guests- not that he ever brought anyone over, you’re the first!”

“Certainly- treated her well-” Sukuna coughs out the words only to get elbowed by Wasuke and flicked with egg by Jin. Batting away the concoction, he looks at you by way of explanation. “I’m not a regular uncle, I’m a cool uncle.”

Jin starts up another batch for you, “But anyways- I know we’re just getting to know each other now, my dear, but I do want to thank you for taking care of him.”

“The pleasure’s all mine.” You meet Choso’s eyes, and he blushes.

“Awwwww—” Jin, who’d been there to witness the entire thing, starts to flutter about in excitement. He didn’t even care that the eggs were starting to burn- “You two are just dears! Oh, is it too late to show you the baby photographs- tell me it’s not too late!”

Not sure what to say, “I uh…”

“Oh, it’s alright- I’ll just show you the middle school pictures for today and we can save the baby pictures for…also today.” Without waiting for your response, Jin’s disappearing somewhere into the living. Spatula and all. “Yuji, where’s your camera again, my dear?”

Yuji, who’d been shooting smug looks at you two ever since you’d entered calls out- “Should be uh- on the couch?”

And for a second, there’s a moment of peace.

Only for a second, however, you have to remember that this is the Itadori household that you’re in. 

And Itadori Jin’s voice thunders from outside the kitchen—“Choso Kamo. Itadori Yuji. Get to the TV room this- instant!” A shiver goes down your own spine despite not being called out, and you wondered just what made the sweet man sound this way.

As a group, everyone in the kitchen rushes along with the boys.

Only to find Jin standing with the camera, plugged into the television, and its screen displaying—

Choso pouring a mountain of shots on their very kitchen table.

Jin deadpans, “Choso…can you explain to me what you are doing in this photo?”

Choso squints at the screen, “That’s not me.”

“That’s not you?”

“…Nope.”

“Okay.” Jin replies easily, “How about these?”

Shuffling through the pictures on the camera - and you have to hold in a nervous laugh at the shots upon shots of shots, of Choso’s band playing at the party last night, of all the rambunctious students dancing, of a few smashed vases that was likely no one but Jin’s - and then, finally, he’s stopping on one.

One of you and Choso—dancing.

So close.

Your foreheads pressed together

Smiles only for one another.

In the peripherals of the shot, you could see people starting to whisper and hoot at the two of you, you could see your own friends squealing excitedly at the fact that it’d finally happened. But there seemed to be a strange world of your own there that no one else could quite penetrate. Choso’s eyes were just sparkling.

He giggles, “Heheh, that’s me…”

A/N. Oh this was so funnnn- thought of Yuji as Greg and was like WAIT-

Soobin’s good at keeping it cute, but the state of his room speaks otherwise. Busty figurines line his shelves and their big, sparkly eyes follow you. Most people’s heads would spin if they saw it. They’d try and fail at connecting the Soobin that appears in public and the bare truth of... Well. Him.

You sure did, the first time you had. A week ago. Poking your head in, it’s all that you were met with. Heads of pinks, blues, tiny tiny skirts, all an array against the backdrop of his decidedly dudeish decor otherwise. It felt like you had caught him jerking off, the way his ears went red and he sputtered and pleaded with you to just please go. You’re sure that the way you gaped, wide-eyed and stupefied, didn’t make him feel any better about it. But damn it, that’s just too good. He, your best friend, is an under wraps degenerate.

“Do you touch yourself to these?” you had asked him, covering your laugh with a hand because at least you had the conscience to not laugh right in his face. He had gone straight from red mortification to white and he snatched back the one you’d been turning over in your hands. It’s not like you were laughing at him, you guess. It’s more that you thought those ‘otaku’ shirts he wore lounging around the place were for ironic value, not… a precursor in plain sight to the state of his bedroom. To think that all that was stowed away behind that door that you’ve passed a hundred times like a rotten little secret.

What does it change? God, you wish you knew. The extent of your knowledge ends at the fact that you can’t quite look at him right in the eyes anymore without the thought flickering in the outskirts of your mind. Even as you sit curled up in his couch, littered with blankets that he kept because he knew that you liked them and would just steal from him anyway, and watch his back work in the kitchen.

How couldn’t you know? Literally how could it have sprung up on you like that? Are you a shitty best friend? But seriously. Soobin wasn’t a loser. He’s always been slow, easy nonchalance. You watch his forearms flicker as he tugs the freezer drawer open, full with muscle that’s never felt more at dizzying odds with what you imagined a dude that was into shit like that would have than it does now. The image it brings to mind of lanky, awkward limbs and a beard that crawls down the neck is not him. It’s frustrating. It’s been spinning in your mind, the thoughts bouncing off one wall just to hit another and then, like it has every day since you saw it, circling back.

It all boils down to one thought. The worst one, because it’s sticky and deeply unsettling. Because, since when did you start imagining what sort of stuff your best friend got off to? You wonder what the search bar of his go-to porn website looked like. You imagine what videos he gravitated toward, what about them had him clicking on them and then wrapping his fist around himself. It probably looks features something a lot like those figurines he has on display. You grimace.

Plopping down in an air of clean black pepper and musk, he offers you a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ‘Chunky Monkey’. A cheeky smile tugs at the corner of your lips. Still your Soobin, though.

“You got me ice cream?” you say, letting the sugar and cream melt on your tongue with a hum.

Soobin shoots you a glare. You have to snort. The question’s more irritating than genuine, and that’s why you asked it. When doesn’t he buy you ice cream? You never asked him to. If it’s, for whatever reason, what he wants to do though, that’s his money to spend. You’re blessed. “What are we watching?” he asks instead, taking up the remote in his hand from across the couch. The sleeves of his black cashmere sweater are bunched to his elbows.

“Dunno.” You lick off the spoon, tucking your legs to one side. “Probably some anime girls for you, though.” The words come out with a terrible, knowing lilt and a mean smile. You have to get the thoughts out from under your skin, purge them from your blood and put them out into the air so they can be more real and less like spiraling delusions. If you let the air settle on that too long, though, it’ll become heavy. And that’s also scary. Scarier, even. So you deflect. It’s freezing, anyway. Probably either the fact that it’s a crisp twenty degrees outside, or it’s the cold tub in your hands starting a slow creep into your bones. “What’s the heater set to?” you whine.

The way his gaze changes… Falters, even, on you. It turns into static electricity, standing the hairs on your arms and neck up with the weight of its presence. It flickers down to where you now realize your pale fluffy sweater has drooped off a plump shoulder so quickly that you might’ve blinked and missed it. But you didn’t, and you hate it. Because it makes all of this weirder. Your stomach goes up in a colorful explosion of butterflies and something that you should have stopped trying to poke three days ago while you were ahead.

Throat bobbing, Soobin laughs to himself with a bow of his head that brings his dark hair into his eyes. He shakes it all away and that plasticky smile almost looks barbed in the soft milky light of his living room. He’s prickled and gone red over countless jabs since that day, but something low in your tummy feels that it’s reaching a breaking point. You can see the strain beginning to tear at something he’s been keeping neat and tidy for a long, long time. And you just don’t know how to stop. It’s like sugar-high right on your tongue, sweeter than the sugar and the cream in your mouth as you blink at him and try to pin down just what exactly it is, sweeter than the flush in your cheeks that wholly at odds with your complaining about it being cold.

Speaking more to himself, he echoes a breathy, “Some anime girls…” The way he laughs over it makes you squirm, because it doesn’t sound like he really finds it funny at all.  “Pick whatever you want. I don’t care.” Tossing you a blanket, the fat knitted one that cradles you right back, he crosses his arms and settles in. His head hits the back of the couch with a dull thump. It illustrates the line of his jaw and the muscle there, working like he’s chewing over something. You always did like his jawline. It was a sharp, male thing in the soft set of his dimples and the sweet dark-chocolate of his eyes.

The air crackles. You both want to tuck into his side and recede back into what is safe and to see more about whatever… This is. This man you don’t know or understand how to interact with. You have some self-preservation in you, though, and there was warning in that slash of his mouth. An understated don’t touch it. Give it up. So you do the safe thing and you curl into the warmth of his side, just like you do every other night in your flimsy pajama shorts and your chunky socks to ward off the rest of the cold that you can’t cure with the crook of his body. Except now you know a secret.

The T.V. drones. You laugh when you’re supposed to, and so does he. You’re both good at pretending, you guess. That’s probably how things have ended up coming to this.

Taking a final spoonful of ice cream to your lips, it drools over the side and onto you. “Shit!” you say, assessing the damage where it fell on your clothes. It’s stained, that’s for sure. Your poor sweater. “This one’s my favorite… I just got it. Ugh.” Wincing, you peel yourself from his side.

Soobin sighs and stands up. “Is it ruined?”

“Probably.” You tug your lips to one side, looking up at him with big, disappointed eyes. Is the pout on your lips put on for him? Since when did you start doing that, too?

Those eyes flash again. Below the surface, you almost see yourself reflected in them. Sitting on his couch with the chub of your thighs pressed into him, sweat drooping so low it shows where the fat of your arm meets the swell of your breast, looking at him all new. You swallow thickly. If you can tell the difference in yourself, then he must be feeling it. A pit forms in your stomach. Are you being unfair?

Something fundamental was changed the moment Soobin went from your untouchable best friend to the sort of man that decorated his space with anime tits. For so long, you stubbed out every single stray thought about him. Because guys like that didn’t look at you, did they? It’s pathetic, and to some degree you can recognize that. But something did change, and it’s got your heart doing something new and different. You’re letting it run loose with the plethora of things you haven’t up until now.

“Look,” he says, before he has to clear his throat to speak more clearly. His cheek flutters with a clench of his teeth, a flash of dimple like sprinkles atop the sight. “I’ll go turn up the heater. Go grab a shirt, okay?”

You blink. He’d become a blubbering mess when you saw his room the first time. Now he’s sending you in there yourself? You guess that since the cat’s already out of the bag, he’s given up trying to pretend about what he is and isn’t into. Laughing at him was cruel, and driving it in harder was even more so. Picking yourself up, you pad to his room.

Trying your best to not make eye contact with anything that might make you more insane, you tug open his dresser. His whole place smells like him, mellow and handsome, but his room even more. You rifle through his stash of graphic tees and sweats and find nothing. Soobin keeps a stash of shirts just for you. His shirts won’t fit you—not in the way you want them to. Usually, he brings them out for you to change into when you’re spending the night and itching for that feeling of stolen clothes hanging off the softness of your frame. For something to hit you at the thigh and drown you in excess, to look like you’d swiped it right from his dresser and covered yourself in it. He’d bought them just for you; purposefully oversized. It’s just a matter of finding where he actually keeps them.

His closet, then? There’s only so many places they could be. You roll open the door and narrow your eyes. Hanging jackets, sweaters, stuff forgotten up high on a rack, and the bare wood scent of a closet mingling with Soobin’s that comes off his clothes.

There’s a box on the carpeted floor, one flap open. From it, dangles a bit of pale cream fabric. Intrigued, you dip down to your knees. Probably in here. You’ve exhausted the closet and the drawer and found nothing, anyway.

What you pull out of that box is far from your collection of well-loved, oversized graphic tees. They come out frilly, delicate and strappy, all sweet in an array of pale pinks and buttercream yellows and they’re so scant it makes your face heat up just knowing he has them in his possession. There’s polka dots and stripes and they fall all over your lap as you, despite yourself, cannot stop pulling them out. It’s like a shameful game of how much worse can the next thing I pull out be? And it seems to get more impossible with each. It’s so heart-stopping it’s almost macabre.

They look just like the ones in plastic all around you right now, like the shit plastered on his walls. It’s fucking cosplay costumes. 

You are definitely, absolutely overstepping boundaries. No, you’re way out past that. This is so far out in the deep end, the water’s ear-high, and you don’t really know how to get back to where you can touch.

But who are these even for? Soobin may be a self-proclaimed otaku loser, but you know with a certainty that... Well. They’re not for him, right? Is there a girl? Fingers itching and throat dry, you fumble for a tag. Something. Anything that’ll relieve the new, strange fascination roaring in your ears. Everything you’ve already been plagued by is doubled down on, but your heart is also a spike in your chest. There is so, so much you didn’t know about him. And it's all been right here. Under your nose, and none of it did you notice. It makes your face numb, sends your brain in a thousand different, fuzzy directions. The Soobin you know is either a fake, or it’s just the very tip of the iceberg that makes up the whole of your best friend.

Your stomach, already in tight knots, drops down into your toes. Your heart stops in your throat. The fabric of the tag in your fingers reads in your size. Every single one of them does. Tugging out a tiny, ruffled white skirt, it’s the same. This thing would barely cover your ass, especially with how skirts fit on your body. But maybe that’s the point.

The room bleeds around you, the faces of those figurines and posters melting. Are these for you?

Soobin’s approach is too sudden for you to stuff them all back and hide what you were doing, even though your blood jumps to the surface you try as you might. The door flies open, and it’s like he knew, somehow, what you’d find.

“Fuck,” he growls, face wan. “Fuck, what are you doing?”

You want to drop the fabric from your hands like it’s hot. But you don’t, and it’s all the more incriminating, all the more mortifying. All those polka dotted cups and rosettes and lace send your cheeks up in flames as you blink dumbly at him, caught in the act. You wish for three seconds ago, when you could have stuffed this all back into the box and went back out there and pretended you didn’t see shit.

And you finally just don’t know what to say. You have no more pointed, mean jokes. Fragments of real sentences come fumbling out instead. “I.. It was… I was looking…” You don’t finish, choking on the thump of your pulse in your throat. But it’s not a lie. You were just looking for a shirt. This is just a symptom of a much bigger problem: that Choi Soobin has a stash of stupidly delicate costumes, and the evidence toward the possibility that he bought them thinking about you, or at least another girl with a body like yours, is damning.

“You were looking?” he says, eyes wild. He begins to shove them back where they came from like it’ll change the fact that you saw them. His hands tremble and shake. “I trust you to go into my room and you just start snooping through my stuff?”

Your mouth opens and you suddenly have a lot of things, but now they just won’t come out. Shaking your head, you watch as he cleans up the mess all except for the pretty set still in your hands.

His voice strains. “What the hell?” he says, exasperated and his eyes wildly searching yours. Gauging. Gauging how far too far is, and he may be a mess and he may be snapping, but the root and truth of that reaction is that you weren’t supposed to find it. His breaths come and go erratically. It looks like he might pass out, pupils blown wide and sharp.

The first words you can string along coherently come out flatly. “Are those for me?”

“What?” Soobin says, shoulders going rigid. “What the hell are you talking about?” He tries to laugh that off, a barked, unconvincing sound. “No. Fuck, no. They’re just… It’s a collector thing, alright? I collect them. I can’t believe you just…”

Dragging a thumb over the piece you still have, you eye the tag. When you walked in here for the first time and saw what you did, you imagined what Soobin might be into. Something like those petite girls that studded the shelves was what you landed on. It’s just the probability of the matter. It’s something you had to accept before you let hope hurt you. But this thing says something different, something that makes your tummy feel all tight.

“Give that to me.” He snatches it from you, still trying to pretend none of it exists. “Shit. Would you look at mec please? I’m not a fucking weirdo. I promise.” The word cracks.

That sounds like a plea to shove down the fact that he feels exactly like one. Like keeping little bits of lace fantasies like this is anything but perversion.

“Look at me,” he says, his desperation making it sharp.

When you do finally scramble up the last vestiges of your conscious thoughts, you hit him with a bare, “Do you want me to put it on?”

Soobin blanches further, as if he could. He looks like you just stabbed him in the chest. “What?” he stutters. “I… It’s not… I said it wasn’t for you.”

The pounding of your heart is the only thing you can hear. It pangs and pushes you over the cliff that you two have been clumsily teetering on for too long. “It’s pretty. What’s it from?” you say. What are you even saying? You should be asking him what all this is, but you can’t get the image of him deliberately surfing the web for costumes meant for your body. Of him opening that incognito tab and searching for plump thighs and soft cheeks and handfuls of body, just like yours. It brings to life something that you didn’t know you could feel.

“It’s… just a show. Just forget you saw it, okay? I know it’s weird. Let’s just go back and watch the movie. Please.” He’s still trying to scrub his hands clean, but god. It’s so wonderfully degenerate that he couldn’t. He couldn’t scrub the discovery from your brain no matter how hard he tried. This is the deep end.

“You don’t want me to put it on?” you ask, taking another gander at the cotton crushed under his fists. It’s erotic, really. The sight of something so distinctly feminine and delicate against him. In the hand of your best friend. “Is it for another girl, then?” The thought constricts around your chest. You would just have to shrivel up and die.

“No.” The word tears from him. Soobin runs a trembling hand through his hair, making a mess of the silky brown-black. “Damn it. It’s not for another girl.”

“Then can I?” you say, a final thread. It’s breathless.

The air stagnates around the two of you. And then it hardens and it breaks right in two as he opens his mouth, eyes tortured and blown black, and says shakily, “Yes.” Like it’s a stolen fantasy come true.

And here you are. His soft best friend that he’s been harboring feelings so wrapped up and close to his heart for that not even you had the slightest clue, so pent up that he bought shit for you and never even expected you to wear it. Forced to watch you run around in cruel, risky shorts with the plush of your thighs and the dimples all free because he didn’t see you that way, right? And you’re looking at him with glowing cheeks, eyes hazy and round, shirt sleeve slipping, and it probably is just that.

It doesn’t take much more convincing than that. Your legs are jittery and you feel all floaty as you steal the piece back and skip into the bathroom, disappearing.

The bathroom is not a hiding spot. It’s not a relief. Your breathing quickens as you shed your clothes and pull on these new ones, knowing what they mean. It quickens and drives you into such a frenzy that you have to give yourself a quick pep talk before stepping back out. Because, what if it’s not what he hoped? It’s a given by this point that he’s… into bigger girls, you guess. But what if you step out and his shoulders sag and he gives a tight smile, because on you it’s not what he had dreamed up when he went ordering these?

When you step out, the air is sucked straight out of the room. The flowy, cotton hem flirts high up on your thighs. The sleeves are puffy and round on your shoulders, coquettish, and they don’t try to hide their congruence with your shape. They don’t pretend that you’re made of straight lines. They work with your chubbiness, making a show of it. It’s all soft, white cotton and gossamer that represents a sleep shift. It’s comfy. You don’t want to tug it off, you find. You want to bend this way and press your arms together just so and to play with it. The headband with floppy ears on your head should be mortifying, too. A week ago you thought the figures on his shelves were nothing short of ridiculous, and now you’re dressed like one.

Soobin’s face is dead. He doesn’t make a choked sound. It doesn’t even look like he knows what to do. It’s a mirror of that look you had seen just the littlest bit of earlier, when you were testing the limits of him.

“What?” you say, fluffing the flowy, babydoll body of it and doing a spin. It moves with you. Without a doubt, he got a flash of your bottom in the swish of the pieces, “No?” 

“Please,” he chokes. “Come here. Please.”

Gathering up the willpower, you eat up the space between you and finally you’re in his space, on the floor beside him, dressed like this. It’s explosive. It’s like throwing a match into a puddle of fuel; fuel, being the pent-up, sordid need that Soobin has been made up of for so, so long. And fire catches.

Soobin’s mouth catches yours like he’s trying to eat you up. Bite into you like sweet pound cake. And oh, he eats. He tastes like sweetness, like the bite of ice cream he had stolen earlier. His tongue moves over yours, his teeth nipping like he can’t keep it at bay. Once the wall crumbles, all that’s left is the depravity. And Choi Soobin has a lot of that to spare, you’ve learned. You whimper and mewl into his mouth, brain racing to try and catch up with reality. It never really does.

He pulls back with tilted glasses and lips smeared with you. The shiver that starts from the base of your spine is more than bone-deep. “You taste so fucking sweet,” he says, out of breath and playing with the edge of a whine. A strangled growl. You don’t know, actually. All you know is that you want to hear more of it, want to hear him tell you that you’re the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted. “I knew you’d be sweet. I knew it. Can I please fuck you?”

It’s jarring. One second he can’t speak, the next he’s just… asking things like that. It makes you crazy. It flips your stomach over. “Soobin,” you say, lips wobbly.

That’s all he needs to hear. He’s like a dog that’s been waiting for a treat for too long for any sort of patience or tact.

The carpet abrades your ass as he tugs you by the hips down toward him. It steals the last bits of oxygen that you had been fighting to keep right away from you. It’s everything you never thought could happen and it’s coming to you in the form of your big, dumb best friend’s hands on you. Stars dapple the image of him reaching blindly up at his drawer like he can’t look away from you for even a moment. He fumbles, a clumsy mess that misses the drawer a few times, but eventually he finds what he went looking for.

Out of his dresser drawer comes a wand vibrator with a fat, rubber head. That’s it; you’re definitely not breathing.

You wonder if he bought that thinking of you, too. If he saw that shade of baby blue and all he could think, with such desperation, is that it would look good pressed between your shaking thighs. His cheeks are a dusty pink as he thumbs it on and it starts with a buzz. It’s been charged, then, and waiting. You also wonder if he’s pressed it to the slit of himself, thinking of the pretty spill of your thighs as he did it, thigh highs cutting into the chub there or any other thing he wanted to see you in.

The buzz starts on your inner thigh, first. He presses it there and watches how your body moves under it with a distinct, perverted delight. “Oh my God,” he says, straight from his chest.

Overcome with a lifetime of needing to hear that, you squirm. “Do you like it?” you ask. A stupid, air-headed question. But stupid and air-headed is just what you are right now. “Is it pretty?”

“Do I like it,” he laughs, the pads of his fingers rough where he dares higher on your thigh. The throb in your body takes the small crumb and doubles it. Triples it. Your entire center lights up. “Do I like it? Do you know how many times I came on my own stomach thinking about your fucking thighs? About fucking them? Saw you… Saw your shorts go up too high when you crawled and…” He can’t even finish, voice tightening. “Yeah. Yeah I like it.”

His hands are still trembling as he pushes the playful hem of the costume up. Up. He goes until he can see the full extent of your soft thighs, the seams of them pressing into one another all fluffy and soft and the true state of, the way Soobin looks at it, femininity and sex. He doesn’t stop until it’s ruched above your belly then above your breasts. And he stops to dig his fingers into your belly, to feel that it’s real and beneath him right now. That you are.

A moment of shyness creeps in as the air brushes all that exposed skin. The press of your breasts into the hunch of your arms that comes almost second to breathing as you feel his awareness on you, the tightening of your nipples that sends a buzzing thrill down your spine, all of it. And he’s seeing the full extent of what you look like beneath the soft, obscuring clothes. For the first time in a long time with him, you want to curl into yourself and hide it.

But it wasn’t Soobin that ever cared about the dimples in your thighs when you’d sport pajamas and stay over at his place. Not at all. That was all you. His adam's apple works, and then beseeching you with a sharp, heady, “No, please, let me fucking see you. I…” He wets his lips, eyes so dark that the chocolate there is just black. Shining. “Do you know what you’ve done to me, every day, for years? It’s not fair.”

Taking a stray hand, you drag it down. You feel the curve of your belly, follow it all the way down until you cup the roaring heat between your thighs. The place where all that softness meets, and it’s alive. It’s sending jitters through you. “You really… You seriously wanted me, Soobin?”

Soobin blinks. There’s a disconnect. Because where you keep asking him if he’s sure about this, if he thinks you’re pretty, that’s not what you find in his eyes. All that’s left in him is the need to eat something sweet, to feel all that softness arch into the hard lines of himself just so he knows what it feels like beyond the screen. Beyond the lowest of his perverted, melted thoughts. “Stop asking me that,” he says, voice hoarse. He slides his fingers beneath yours, still over the cotton of your panties but touching you right where it’s the loudest. Your breath catches sharply in your throat, heels digging into the carpet. “You’re starting to piss me off.”

You can feel your pulse. It’s all you can feel, really as he hooks his thumbs beneath the simple band of your panties and he drags them down the curves of your thighs. Slowly. Watching every inch. They’re a simple pale cotton, polka dotted. It’d send your ears glowing hotter if it were any other man, but this is Soobin. Look at what he’s got on you. Look at what he has hidden in that box, and whatever else he keeps stashed away in his brain that he wants to try out and do to you. He’s buzzing at the sight of them wrapped around your knees.

Nudging a thigh open further, he tests the buzz on his palm and kicks it up higher a few notches. Your stomach does a wild, deep flip. “Tell me if it’s too high, okay?” he says, breathing shallow. “Tell me anything. Tell me what you want me to do to you. Fuck, I’ll do anything you want.”

And then he presses it just above where you need it. You wiggle. It’s cruel. You were so ready. He remedies that by spreading you with two fingers, the sound of your wetness sending your hand over your mouth to fight the fluster, and pressing the head of the buzz right into your clit.

Lightning flashes behind your eyes. The sound you make is not your problem—not when you can’t even register it. You snap halfway up, nails digging into his wrist and the white in your vision swimming. “Soobin,” you warble.

“Fuck,” he says, caught on the sight of you. He tries circles, waxing and weaning the intensity. “Holy fuck.”

It doesn’t take long for it to all become too much. The shudder of that thing is violent, twisting up that knot in your belly so far that it stands the hair on your arms up. Your hips dig back into the floor, heels too. You need to be as far away from the sensation as possible. You need it right up inside you.

He takes a fistful of the fat at your hip, right where your tummy meets thigh, but that only works for a fleeting moment. You’re shaking and writhing on the ground, and he needs to be a part of it. Trembling with restraint, he hikes a leg of yours up, letting your plump calf float by his head, digging divots with his fingertips into your thigh to hold it up. Your body gives in to him, and it’s your favorite thing you’ve ever seen. The fact that you are built to take the shape of him like dough, and he is built to make that dent. It looks like his favorite thing, too.

“This is better,” he says, working the angle so that it hits the throbbing, sensitive underside of your swollen clit. You can only jolt and sob, spine aching to arch. “This is so much better. I want to die in them. Look at them. Look at your tummy. Please give me one. Please, I need it so bad. C’mon, baby. Don’t hold it back.” His voice is scraped raw. He presses a kiss into the inside of your knee and, like he can’t even stop himself from doing it, begins rolling his hips into the mess between your stricken thighs. A whimper falls from his bitten lips, but he won’t screw his eyes shut. The only thing he wants to see is this. You. All of it, every last bit, down to the way your tummy folds at the new sensation, tightening up. 

The friction of his jeans is it. Sparks fly. It’s like you’ve been struck by a live wire. You sob, digging your skull back into the floor. The release of it is white-hot, and it slows to honey as you listen to him curse and continue rutting his clothed bulge against you.

Oh, God. He pulls you in to taste your mouth again, fumbling with the zipper of his jeans so clumsily that you would laugh if you were anywhere else, doing anything else. But here, watching him so fucking crazy over you that he can’t control his hands, it’s got your head drunk on syrup and sugar. He springs out onto his stomach, and you can’t help making a noise into his mouth and tearing yourself from the heat of his mouth to catch a nosy look.

“Holy shit…” you say, still finding your breath, head still floating elsewhere in tandem with the ebb and flow between your thighs. And yet, it comes to life something new and starving at the sight. You knew your best friend was big and dumb and clumsy, and also now a pervert. But the sight still gives you pause.

You don’t have to be small with Soobin. He’s big enough to provide you that. Because your thighs might be fully and your tummy might spill over them when you sit, but as he takes them into his hands and positions you for himself just how he wants you and has got himself off imagining for how long, you don’t know, his palms eat up your frame. You don’t have to be small when you stare dumbly at the thickness and length and drooling tip has to be kissed away by him trying to distract you from it, all searing licks of his tongue as he presses the tip to your entrance. Your thighs are split around his tiny waist, tummy pressed into the muscle of his own, and there is no other way that Soobin would have it.

Bracing himself on the carpet beside your head, he guides the head of hick cock to your entrance. He just can’t stop kissing you, and you don’t even know if it's a distraction anymore, or if it’s just the need to be eating you whole. It doesn’t catch, slipping up through your slick and nudging your clit with a jolt.

Soobin’s teeth grit. You just laugh, bracing your forehead against his broad shoulder. He presses in true this time and you make a small, stunted sound into the fabric of his sweater. He’s big this way, too. You had seen it, but now you feel it. Scrabbling at his shoulders, you pull back to try and look in his eyes. Warmth radiates from your plush cheeks. 

“I know,” he says, voice close to a break. He shudders, sliding into you as slowly and quickly as he can manage. You feel every inch. The hold he has on your waist, your tummy, is ironclad. “One sec. One sec, please… I just…” His hips meet your bottom, and he’s all the way in. The idea of that, of your best friend inside of you, sends another pang of haze through you. “Okay,” he chokes and takes a hold of your hips. “Oh my God, you are… Okay, just… Like this.”

He swivels your hips in circles. You wince. It makes you aware of every inch all up inside of you, deep in your tummy. But then it starts to fade, and you start to take the shape of him like you seem to be good at. And he can see the moment it changes. “Okay?” he bites out. He’s doing so good.

“Okay,” you squeak. Okay as you’ll get. You just need him to make love to your body and show you exactly how he wanted to do it all those years you spent thinking he didn’t notice you. You need it right now, whining on top of you.

The wall breaks. The man that had kept this secret for years, so neat and strict that only now you’re seeing it? He’s gone. He is so far gone. All that’s left is the one that starts frantically fucking you like the degenerate he is. 

His hands and mouth are all over you. He tastes. He moulds the dough of your thighs to the shape of his hand, the point of your breast a too soft, too real weight in his palm, your tummy brushing up against his with every buck. He shudders at it all. “Baby,” he whines. His face crumbles, brows knitting and cheeks the same pink as yours. Curling his fingers into your hair, he feels you flutter. It sends his hips stuttering. “Another one. Another one, please. I can’t believe I’m fucking you.” The words come from his belly like they take everything in him to make. 

The sounds of his hips canting into your ass, the friction on your shoulders and back from the carpet, the way your belly body jiggles with each thrust he gives you. None of it matters. All of it exists just beyond your field of reality, which consists of his choking whines and growls and the second, more terrifying knot in your belly. “I’m trying.” You grasp at his shoulders, breathing in the musk of him above you. “More, Soobin. Please, I need more.”

That ignites a challenge in him. You feel it in the way his spine straightens and he falls into your neck. The concept that what he’s giving you isn’t taking you over the edge? He can’t handle that. Not after all that wanting and needing. Taking a bite right over your collarbone, which is made soft with a padding of fat on you, he tilts his hips, fumbles with his support behind your head, and he fucks you with a very simpleminded intention. You were going to cum again, and he’d lick the taste like sweet sugar right from your mouth. Each new, pitchier moan, he drinks it. His bangs stick to his forehead. It’s a miracle that his glasses are still on his face, but they fog around the rim where they meet his face. He’s flushed and all you can see is black in his eyes.

You dig your heels into the base of his spine. Deeper, you need him deeper. But how could he get any deeper into your belly?

“Where?” he cracks, shaking apart over you. His eyes are wild. It’s sudden, like he had been trying for so long to keep it down for you, but it’s consumed him finally. “Oh fuck.” His voice trembles with a noise that makes your brain go white. “I’m gonna… Baby, tell me where or I’ll…” The effort of his jumping hips, the tightening of his belly, it all works against him.

You don’t get to answer him. The world goes away again, and you shake apart under his chest. Your breasts press into him when you arch, and your tummy tightens so hard you almost wish it would stop so you could breathe. 

“God, your face!” he says, and it’s his final words. Soobin stills, a shudder starting at his spine and finishing with a sob into your neck, and he sacrifices what you know he really wants just in time to spill onto your belly. He shakes so much you think he might come down on you, but those sturdy arms keep him up just enough for him to kiss at your neck and pant warmth into your skin. He ruts a few more times, a final rope of white seeping warm and sticky into your psyche. And now, not only do you know what Choi Soobin feels like inside of you, what he sounds like and which exact angle he leans, but you also know exactly what it feels like to be painted in him. In your best friend. 

He pulls away when it’s all run through your systems and left nothing more than laziness and a molasses flood where your blood should be roaring instead and that afterglow chemical that makes you want to press your cheek into his chest and never leave. His face is a mess, glasses askew before he fixes them over his dusty pink cheeks, and he rakes his fingers through the damp hair at the base of your neck.

“Sorry,” he says, as if he’s finally coming back to himself. Not enough for the sight of his cum on your chubby tummy to not capture and keep his gaze, though. “I’ll… I’ll clean you up.”

It’s a question, the return of his nervousness. Are we still good? Is this weird? You just give him the slow, glowing smile of a girl that just had her brain turned to mush. “You’re a perv,” you say, giggling.

He left you a mess. You reach back behind your head and feel how the ground had teased it up. Your thighs are pink in the shape of his fingerprints. Pound cake, for sure. It looks fascinatingly a lot like he decided to top all that cakey softness off with strawberries and cream.

His eyes light up again and jaw ticks. Heart jumping in your chest, you laugh right in his face this time. It looks like, finally, you know the way to get under what Soobin pretends he is, right down to the core of him. Sugar-rotted. And he’s gonna wish you didn’t.

ash: okay yes this is super indulgent but i just see soobin and kai as the tubatus that could hold their own with a chubby girl. IM NEXT LETS GO!

You met him on your third and a half day at the Daily Planet.

He spilled coffee on you. A full cup. Right down the front of your blazer. Frothy iced caramel latte catastrophe. He panicked immediately—rushed through an apology so fast you barely caught the words—then offered, in complete earnestness, to dry-clean your coat. Not send it to the dry cleaner. Do it himself. Like it was the gentlemanly thing to do. You just stared at him, dripping, blinking. “Are you okay?” you asked, because someone had to.

He nodded—too fast—then proceeded to trip over the recycling bin just trying to get you napkins.

You’ve been friends ever since.

It’s not the cleanest origin story.

But over time, somehow, Clark became your person.

Not in the “call-at-3-a.m.-while-sobbing” kind of way (that’s Jimmy), or the “bring-wine-and-insult-your-evil-ex” kind of way (also Jimmy). 

But in a steadier, quieter way. You write your little articles; he helps edit them. You fight with your sources on the sidewalk; he bakes them apology muffins the day after to make sure they don't contact Perry. You cover Metropolis politics like it’s trench warfare, and he smiles across the bullpen at you like you’re doing God’s work even when you're calling the mayor a “power-drunk thumb in a trench coat and a receding hairline you can see from space.”

He’s your constant. Steady and reliable and always five degrees too soft for this world.

Which is exactly why it doesn’t make sense.

Why, one night, it all… shifts.

.

You’re soaked.

Not in the steamy, sexy way. Not even in the Charli-XCX-Spring-Breakers kind of soaked.

Just: wet. Unpleasantly. In that half-drenched, trench-foot, what-is-my-life kind of way.

The weather app lied again (seriously, Metropolis Weather has one job), and your jacket is now suctioned to your body like a bad ex. Your boots have crossed the line from “water-resistant” to a really bad “Swamp Thing cosplay,” and your tote—home to your press pass and a sad little Tupperware of soggy couscous—is dripping like it’s auditioning for a plumbing ad.

So when Clark offers his place—soft-voiced, ever-accommodating, all that big dumb golden retriever energy—you say yes.

Not because you’re weak. Please.

Because he lives closer.

Logistically. Geographically.

(Okay, maybe emotionally, too, but you’ll unpack that when your socks aren’t squelching like a really bad porno.)

So now you’re in his apartment. Standing in the entryway. Leaving a trail of water on his hardwood floors while he gently, gently hands you a towel and fiddles with the thermostat and says things like, “You’re going to catch a cold if you don’t change out of those clothes.”

And you, being the self-possessed adult that you are, snort and say, “Thank you, Mom.”

Clark blushes.

Actually blushes. Like a cartoon character. Like a man who has never, in his life, imagined someone undressing in his home, which is hilarious, given that you’ve seen the size of his arms. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, rubbing the back of his neck. “I just meant… yeah. You’re soaked.”

His place smells like cinnamon and laundry detergent. There’s a candle burning on the kitchen counter—one of those $9.99 specials from Bath & Body Works. You imagine him in the store, earnestly reading the label on something called "Warm Vanilla Sugar" while the cashier tries to upsell him on a five-for-fifteen deal.

The image makes your lips curl. Your mascara's halfway down your cheekbones, your calves are cramping from the walk, and you should really, really, really just go take a hot shower and crash on his couch.

Instead, you look at him.

And he’s looking back.

Not like most men do—not the bar-stool inventory of what you are and aren’t. Not a scan. Not a question. More like a memory. Like he’s already filed you away in some quietly treasured part of his brain and he’s just taking the time to make sure the details are right. Like you are known.

You don’t think. You don’t make a plan. You just move.

Step forward. Grab the lapels of his flannel like it owes you money. Pull him down. Kiss him.

It’s not graceful. Not choreographed. You catch his chin at a weird angle, and your nose bumps into his, and the kiss lands too sharp, too fast. Like you’re trying to stun him. Like you’re trying to win a fight.

But then, he exhales.

And he melts. Not urgently. Not hungrily. Just… fully.

Like this is the thing he’s been waiting on for months, and now that it’s finally happening, he’s scared to spook it. His hands hover for a beat, like he’s making sure it’s real, and then one comes to rest lightly on your waist—tentative, patient. The other curls around your jaw with all the softness of a man who has no business being this gentle.

You break the kiss first, of course.

Because you always break things first.

When you look at him, he's staring at you like you invented language. Like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so they hover awkwardly at your sides, respectful, warm, and shaking just a little.

Which is when the panic crashes in.

He’s not supposed to look at you like that. Like you hung the stars. Like he knows you. Like he loves you.

Because if he does. If he really, truly does. Then eventually, he’ll stop.

They always stop.

People love you in the beginning. They love your bite, your snark, the way you know which part of a politician's background are most incriminating. They love the thrill of earning your attention. They love that you make them work for it. But eventually, the charm fades. The sharp edges cut a little too deep. 

You forget to text back. You overshare. You undershare. You get tired. You get real.

And they get bored.

You’ve never wanted to risk that with Clark. He’s been yours—just yours, in the safe way—for too long.

You step back like the floor might collapse under you. 

Put space. Just… anything between your body and the soft burn of his flannel. Try not to think about how fucking warm he was. “Shit—uh. You don’t have to say anything,” you blurt, voice too fast, too thin. “We can pretend it didn’t happen. Go back to normal. That’s fine.”

Clark’s brows knit, not in offense, just concern. He doesn’t look hurt. He looks… steady. Like he expected this part. “Are you sure?”

The way he asks it is soft. Unhurried. Like it’s not some ultimatum. Like it’s okay if you're not sure.

You open your mouth. Close it. Swallow.

“I just—” You press your fingers to your temple, like maybe that might just reorganize your entire internal filing system. “You know I don’t do relationships.”

“I know,” he says, without hesitation.

You study him—really study him—like you’re trying to find the catch. Some hint of disappointment or wounded ego. But it isn’t there.

He reaches up slowly and tucks a damp strand of hair behind your ear, his touch feather-light. “You don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”

You blink. “Even if I’m the one who kissed you?”

Clark smiles, just barely. “Especially then.”

His hand lingers near your cheek, but he doesn’t push. He’s patient in that maddening, disarming way. Waiting, always, for you to meet him halfway.

“Whatever you want,” he says again, quiet. “I’m good with that.”

You stare at him. “You’re really not gonna argue?”

“Nope.”

“Not gonna psychoanalyze me? Tell me I’m avoidant or emotionally stunted or terrified of my own vulnerability?”

He huffs a small laugh. “Already did. Long time ago.”

Your lips twitch despite yourself. “And?”

He shrugs, like it’s the easiest truth in the world. “You’re complicated. But you care. A lot. More than you let people see.”

And damn it, you hate how much that lands. How much he lands. You hate that he’s always been able to see through you, gently, without ever demanding more than you could give. And you hate—more than anything, more than all of that—how badly you want to kiss him again.

So you do.

Maybe to prove a point. Maybe to blow it all up before it can settle. Maybe because you’re already in too deep and part of you is tired of pretending you’re not.

You didn’t plan for it to go further. You didn’t plan anything, really. 

But your hands slide up into the open collar of his flannel, and he stumbles a little as you back him into the bookshelf. His glasses tilt when your fingers brush his temple, and you pull them off carefully, gently, like they’re the only thing tethering you both to whatever was before.

His eyes are wide. His mouth already parted. And when he looks up at you like this—flushed, breathless, undone—you think, mine.

And it’s terrifying.

Because it means it’s real.

It happened.

God.

It happened.

.

You strip him out of that worn flannel with a kind of sick, obsessive care. Button by button, like you were unwrapping a gift, like you were unearthing something you’d been searching for in every bad date, every failed talking stage, every mediocre bar makeout that had ever left you cold.

His flannel hit the floor. He doesn't say a word.

Not until you settle into his lap, thighs on either side of his. Then—quietly, like he wasn’t sure if it was okay to want anything—he says, “You… you don’t have to be gentle. Just, just in case. So you know.”

But you are. Because he is. 

Because even now, even with your mouth to his, your hands fisted in his curls, his hands stay light on your hips. Like he doesn't want to take more than you’d give. Like he's still giving you the option to leave.

He makes a sound when your hips tilted forward. Not a groan, not exactly. Something deeper. A noise from his chest, halfway between a gasp and a plea. You kiss more of it out of him, mouths clumsy and desperate, fingers scrabbling at the hem of his undershirt, and it feels like breathing.

His breath's caught between his teeth when you rip a condom wrapper in between yours, slotting it onto him with shaking, shaking hands and trying not think about how he's probably the biggest you've ever had.

Lord have mercy.

You ride him like your life depends on it.

You get a thigh cramp halfway through—let out an annoyed groan and tried to keep going—and he, sweet, precious idiot that he is, sits up and says your name like it hurt. Voice quivering like he wants to stop, wants to help, wants to make sure you're okay.

Absolutely no way in hell you wanted that to happen.

“Clark,” you hissed. “Chill. I'm okay, dude. I’m fine.”

“Okay,” he said, dazed, grinning. “Just—didn’t want you to get hurt. I mean. You’re, uh. You were very intense. Just now.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the one with the dick that's slowly rearranging my guts,” you mutter, and he laughs so hard his shoulders shook.

And worse—goddamn it, worse—he looks at you the whole time.

No games. No posing. Just Clark. Holding your hips with those hands—god, those hands, unfairly big and warm and steady—and looking up at you like he meant it.

You’d told him once, over shitty fries past midnight on the curb at McDonald's, that you didn’t trust men who made eye contact during sex. Called it performative. Manipulative. 

“Like they’re trying to Jedi mind-trick you into thinking it’s love,” you’d scoffed, and he'd gone quiet in that way he does, not sulking, just thinking. But that he was filing it away.

So of course—of course—when you're bare above him, hair a mess, mascara still clinging to your cheekbones, all vulnerable and exposed and teetering over the edge because his dick was doing wonderful, amazing things to your insides and making you melt—

He looks up at you with that open, earnest face and asks, softly:

“Do you want me to close my eyes?”

You freeze. Like an absolute idiot. Like prey.

And you say no.

"No."

Never.

He nods. “Okay.”

Then he kissed the inside of your wrist—just because it was there—and you lost ten entire emotional minutes and your grip on reality, grinding down on him like your life depended on it.

You come so hard you forgot your name. 

Forget what you were supposed to be protecting yourself from. Forget every lie you’ve ever told yourself about  the depth of your feelings for him.

It was insane. Deranged.

(Perfect.)

Later, three orgasms later, you collapse over him in a ridiculous heap of limbs and half-dressed post-coital delirium, forehead pressed to his shoulder, chest still heaving.

And he whispered something into your hair—something low and steady and not quite the word love, but so close it that it scraped through your head.

Then he hums.

You don’t recognize it at first—just the vibration under your cheek, the low murmur of a tune, warm and unassuming. You’re half-asleep, boneless, and not fully aware he's still inside of you, pulsing, your fingers curled around his neck.

But you listen.

“You humming Dolly right now?” you murmur, voice hoarse.

Clark hums a little louder. “‘Here You Come Again.’” Then, almost shy, “She’s good. What?”

You groan into his chest. “You absolute dork.”

“I like her,” he says, defensive. “She’s smart. You know she gave away, like, a million books to—wait, are you laughing?”

You are. Full-on giggling into his shoulder now. Giddy and too full and sore in all the best ways.

.

And you really don't mean to keep it going in the morning, let alone  in the shower.

Truly. 

You're just trying to get clean. 

Wash off the evidence of the night before—sweat and come and a whole life’s worth of repressed emotional distress—but then, Clark steps in right behind you, warm and quiet and too gentle. 

And suddenly it was over for you. Just absolutely fucking over.

He offers to join, sheepish and bashful, eyes flicking away like he hadn’t just had his face between your thighs just a few hours ago. “Just to save water,” he says. “'Cause of the environment… and all that.”

And sure, Clark. You absolute liar. The environment.

Except the second he steps in behind you—naked, dripping wet, glasses still off so he looked all boyish and wreckable—your resolve crumples like wet newspaper.

He reaches around you for the body wash and that was your downfall. Arm flexing around your waist, that goddamn baritone rumble in your ear as he asks, “This one okay?”

Like you're supposed to just—what? function when his voice was doing that thing? That was supposed to be okay?

But then his hands are on your hips—steady, huge—and you tilt your head back just enough to graze his jaw. He flinches. Or maybe you do. And before either of you could process it, your palm's flat against the tile and Clark was slowly pressing himself against your back.

“Okay?” he asks, voice a little too hoarse, a little too human.

You nod. “Yeah. Just—don’t be sweet about it.”

“But I'm always sweet about it,” he mumbles, and then he was, dragging a hand up your stomach, brushing your wet hair off your neck, mouthing at the base of your spine like he was making a wish.

He moves inside you slow. 

Like he means it. Like he thinks he’d scare you off if he went too fast. And it was disgusting, really, how good it felt. How intimate all of this was.

Your knees nearly buckle. You have to brace yourself with both palms on the glass, forehead pressed against fogged-up safety plastic, biting down on your own goddamn fist to keep from crying out his name like something from a romance novel.

(You still did, eventually. He made sure of that when he pressed one large hand up against your stomach so you can feel him, really feel him, and another down your front, rubbing at your clit like it was a lifeline until you saw stars.)

"Clark. Clar—fuck, baby, I'm almost—Jesus Christ—oH!"

When it was over—when your legs were jelly and your throat was raw and your spine was doing that post-orgasm melt thing—you turn to rinse the shampoo out of your hair, and he just… helped. Without you even having to say anything.

He lathers it for you, clement and thorough, massaging your scalp. His cheeks are pink. His mouth is pink. You think about biting him. Maybe.

But instead, you let yourself lean into his chest while the water poured down over both of you, and you didn’t speak, because if you spoke, it would become too real.

So, you just let him wash your back.

He didn’t ask you to stay.

You didn’t ask if he wanted you to.

But when you wander out of the bedroom ten minutes later—half-wet, flushed, wearing his old Central Kansas A&M hoodie like it hadn’t just been folded neatly in a drawer—you find him in the kitchen, humming again. 

Making pancakes.

“You want blueberries in yours?” he asks, like he didn’t have his dick in you in the shower ten minutes ago.

And you—traumatized, horny, emotionally compromised—you say, “Sure."

Then, because your brain has finally rebooted just enough to return to its default defense mechanism:

“Also, we need to talk.”

Clark pauses mid-pour, then turns around, spatula still in hand. “Okay,” he says, unbothered. His voice is calm, casual. Like you didn’t almost combust from having maybe, four—no, five or six orgasms in his arms over the past twelve hours.

You cross your arms over your chest, over his sweatshirt. “Last night—and this morning was great. I mean, objectively. A solid eight out of ten. No complaints.”

He looks amused. “Only eight?”

“I’m leaving room for improvement,” you say, defensive. “But I just want to be clear again that this isn’t… this isn’t a thing.”

Clark nods. “Okay.”

You squint at him. “You’re not going to ask what I mean by that?”

“Well,” he says, lips twitching, “I—uh, I figured I’d let you finish your prepared statement first.”

You gape at him. “I knew I was giving Perry's press conference energy.”

“You’re even holding your coffee like a mic.”

You glance down. You are. Damn it.

He walks over, sets your pancake on the table next to you, and then settles into the armchair across from the couch. His legs are way too long. He has to fold them a little awkwardly, which should be goofy, but somehow only makes him look more like someone who could carry you up a mountain and apologize for the inconvenience while doing it.

You sip your coffee. Clear your throat. “So. Ground rules.”

He raises his brows. “Rules?”

“Yes. Rules. Guidelines. Frameworks for how this… goes.”

Clark tilts his head. “You mean for… us?”

“No, for NATO,” you deadpan. “Yes, us.”

He tries to cover a laugh with a sip of his own mug, but you see the dimple twitch. Smug bastard.

You forge ahead. “Okay. Rule one: this is casual. Very casual. Like… like ‘you can sleep with other people’ casual.”

Clark nods, slow. Thoughtful. “Do you want to sleep with other people?”

“No,” you admit. Then scowl. “But I want to have the option.”

“Right,” he says, nodding. “The illusion of freedom.”

“Exactly. Wait—"

He’s smiling at you now. Soft and fond and dangerously amused.

You plow on. “Whatever. Rule two: no romantic stuff. No dates. No—like—Valentine’s Day cards or surprise cupcakes or, God forbid, foot rubs.”

“You’re really against foot rubs?”

“I just think they set a tone.”

Clark looks at his plate. “What if I just make you pancakes sometimes?”

You narrow your eyes. “Pancakes are a gray area. I'm only allowing it this time."

“Noted.”

You tuck your feet under you. “Rule three: no falling in love.”

He looks up.

There’s a pause. A beat of silence so thick it fills the whole room.

You add, quickly, “I know that sounds dramatic, but I’ve seen what love does to people, and it’s terrifying. They lose brain cells. They post Instagram captions like ‘my forever’ with sparkly emojis. They start making weird couple TikToks where they throw cheese slices at each other’s heads. I can’t be part of that kind of ecosystem. I'm lactose intolerant."

Clark’s smiling again. Not in the ha ha you’re sooooo funny way. In the I think you’re the best thing to ever happen to me way, which is very much against the rules.

“Are you even taking this seriously?” you demand.

“I am,” he says, clearly lying. “You’re very intimidating.”

You roll your eyes and gesture wildly. “I’m just saying! I don’t want this to become something that implodes because I—God, because I can’t remember your favorite pizza topping one day and suddenly we’re—we're not friends anymore and splitting custody of houseplants and  fucking Cat is stuck writing a gossip column about it.”

Clark chuckles. A pause. “well, for the record? My favorite pizza topping is mushrooms.”

You wrinkle your nose. “That’s a red flag.”

“You’re the one writing up a treaty before brunch.”

“Exactly,” you say, triumphant. “See? We’re incompatible.”

Clark leans forward slightly. 

The sunlight from the window cuts across his glasses, but you can still see his eyes, warm and impossibly blue, locked on yours like you’re the only person in Metropolis who matters. “I think you’re scared,” he says gently. “Which is okay. I just want you to know… I’m not going anywhere. Rules or not.”

And that—

God. That should not make your eyes burn the way it does.

You shake your head, fast. “Don’t say stuff like that. It’s dangerous. You’ll trick me into liking you more.”

“I’m just being honest.”

“Well, stop.”

He raises a brow. “What do I do if I want to kiss you?”

You freeze.

Your heart does a complicated backflip-kick into your ribs.

“...well, that's allowed,” you mutter.

He smiles again, dimple sinking deep.

And then, because he’s a menace with zero self-preservation, he leans in.

You meet him halfway.

And it’s soft this time. Sweeter. Slower. No rain, no adrenaline, just his hand cradling your jaw and your fingers twisted in the hem of his t-shirt like you’re trying to anchor yourself to something real.

.

It's been months now of your little arrangement. And you're already destroyed by the time he even speaks.

Not because he’s touched you yet. Not really. He’s just there, mouth warm against the inside of your thigh, hands stroking the back of your knees like you’re something delicate. Something precious.

Which is so fucked. You are not precious.

You told him that that, breathless and still shirtless and sitting on his kitchen counter at midnight while he gently fed you the leftover peach cobbler Martha left for the two of you straight from the fridge.

He just nodded. Wiped away the crumb left on the edge of your lip. Said, “Okay.”

And then he kissed the inside of your wrist again and said, “You’re still allowed to want things, you know.”

Which is—god, so not fair. 

Now he’s between your legs, kissing a line up your thigh like he’s praying. He’s been taking his time. Like the goal isn’t to get you off, but to study you. Like he’s memorizing the exact way your breath catches and the little twitch of your fingers every time he licks just close enough to your center, but not quite.

You’re panting. Whimpering. Biting your lip so hard you’re pretty sure you taste blood.

And he’s grinning. Not cocky—just happy. Which is so much, so much worse.

“You’re staring at me again,” you breathe.

Clark hums, kissing just below your hip. “I just like looking at you.”

“That’s crazy,” you whisper. “You’re crazy.”

“Probably.” He kisses your navel. “Do you want me to stop?”

You whine. You actually whine. You feel like you've just set feminism back by centuries. “No.”

“Didn’t think so,” he murmurs, nuzzling into your skin. And then, because he’s the devil in a button-up: “You know, the way you objectify me is honestly very inappropriate. I’m not just a—just a piece of meat, you know.”

You bark out a laugh, head tipping back against the pillow. “So bad news, you're actually a mountain of meat, man.”

“See? Objectified.” He presses a kiss just below your ribs. “Reduced to my—”kiss“—ridiculous shoulders—”kiss“—and tragic dimples—”kiss“—and stupidly proportionate thighs—”

“I didn’t say anything about your thighs—”

“Oh, but I think you were thinking it.”

You giggle, delirious. Drunk on this man. “God, shut up and fuck me.”

Clark goes still.

Not awkwardly—this isn’t early-days Clark, the one who used to stammer when you wore red lipstick when you came over and knocked over his own coffee trying to offer you a napkin. 

This Clark—the one under you now, hands broad and firm against your thighs, spine pressed into the worn couch like it’s the only thing keeping him from rising into the sky—this Clark is different.  

He’s grown into himself. Into this. Into you.

Not cocky, not exactly. But assured in a way that makes your stomach clench and your mouth go dry. You’ve seen it happen slowly. Like the sunrise—you didn’t notice until the whole room was full of it.

This Clark doesn't flinch when you flirt, doesn’t panic when your mouth goes sharp or your eyes go guarded. He just… waits. He sees it all. Lets you burn yourself out. And then lays a hand on your cheek like you’re made of something precious.

Still, he doesn’t move.

And that’s what sets you off.

You squirm, shifting your weight in his lap, irritated now. “What?”

He looks up at you, his jaw tight, hands still splayed over your thighs like he doesn’t know whether to hold on or let go. There’s something in his eyes, sharp, patient, impossibly tender, and it makes your chest ache in a way you refuse to name.

“You really want that?” he asks, voice low.

You roll your eyes. “You think I climbed onto your face to do taxes?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Your stomach flips. You hate when he does this. Gets all serious and calm and measured while you’re flailing, clearly two seconds away from combusting. You cross your arms over your chest—petulant, defensive. “Clark.”

“You say stuff like that,” he murmurs, one hand dragging up the back of your thigh, “but then you pull back like I’ve asked for your soul.”

You glare at him. “I’m not pulling back.”

He lifts a brow. “You haven’t even kissed me yet.”

You scowl. “I was about to, but you’re being annoying.”

His smile is crooked, lazy, maddening. “Yeah? Gonna punish me for it?”

Your heart skips. You hate that you love it when he talks like that. You hate that he’s right—that you’re the one drawing lines in the sand and then pretending you don’t care when he steps over them.

You lean down, hover over his mouth. “I swear to god, if you don’t do something soon, I’m walking out that door.”

He catches your jaw in one hand, gentle but firm. “You won’t.”

“Watch me.”

His thumb drags over your bottom lip. Lets it pop out just a bit, so you can feel the way the wetness drips over your chin. “You always say that. You never do.”

Your breath stutters. Your spine goes stiff. You hate how much he knows you. You hate that he’s always so calm about it, so damn tender, even when he’s calling you out.

“I’m not just a warm body, you know,” he says after a beat, the faintest furrow between his brows. “If that’s what you wanted, you should’ve picked someone who doesn’t look at you like I do.”

You blink. “And how is that?”

Clark tilts his head, eyes never leaving yours. “Like I actually see you.”

You hate him for that. A little.

But you kiss him anyway.

Hard. Sharp. Like a warning.

And then he flips you—effortless, smooth, like it doesn’t take more than a breath. One of his hands pins your wrists above your head. The other trails slow up the curve of your thigh. His mouth finds your neck, and you gasp—not in surprise, but because it’s too much. He’s too much.

“You keep asking me to take you apart,” he murmurs against your skin, “but you never let me show you what it actually means.”

“Oh my god,” you groan, shivering under him. “You are so fucking—”

“What?” he interrupts, dragging his mouth back up to yours. “Soft? Serious? A buzzkill?”

You don’t respond. You’re too busy squirming, too busy arching into him, because he’s right. Again.

“Too bad,” he murmurs, smiling like a secret. “You don’t get to run the show tonight.”

And you're already clawing at his back by the time he finally pushes in. And god, fuck, it’s—

He’s so much. Too much. Even now, even after months of attempting to get used to him, after a minimum of one hour of foreplay every time, hours spent fingering you open and devouring you whole and it still makes your spine tingle in the best way possible. The push and pull of it every time, the struggle, the way he looks at you so, so proudly when he's bottomed out and your smiling from under him like you've just won the lottery.

You make a sound—something small, strangled, "Clark."—and he doesn’t shush you this time.

He smiles.

“There it is,” he murmurs. “Now we’re being honest.”

.

Then one day, Clark cancels a lunch.

That’s it. That’s all. Not the end of the world.

He texts you a sweet apology. Too many words, as always, classic Clark, something about a lead on some money laundering story and “I’ll bring dinner to make up for it, promise, anything you want, even that overpriced pasta from the place with the weird chairs.” He adds three emojis. Two are completely nonsensical (a chicken and a rain cloud?). One is a little heart. You stare at it longer than you should.

You text back something breezy. Casual. “You’re the one missing out on my lunchtime TedTalk about corrupt city councilmen and their tragic toupees.”

He doesn’t respond until hours later. Just a thumbs-up emoji.

You tell yourself it’s fine. You tell yourself you don’t care.

.

Then it happens again.

This time, you're already standing outside the Planet, coffee lukewarm, watching a construction crew down the block try to maneuver scaffolding around a new billboard. It’s another Superman PSA—third this month. Something about disaster preparedness and blood drives. His cape’s caught mid-whip, expression noble and inhumanly calm. You roll your eyes, but your stomach tugs a little. Something about the stillness in his posture—it looks almost familiar.

Your phone rings.

Clark.

You answer with a smirk, trying to make it light. “Should I be worried you’ve joined a pyramid scheme? Please tell me you’re not selling supplements.”

There’s a pause, then his voice, warm but ragged around the edges: “I’m so sorry. Something came up. Can I explain later?”

You make some offhand joke about mafia debt collectors and say, “No worries,” even as your stomach twists.

He sounds tired. Tired in a way Clark never really gets. You’re the one who burns out, who rants and paces and flirts with deadline-induced breakdowns. He’s the one who shows up with coffee and an extra pen. Always.

But now his voice has this roughness to it. Frayed edges. Like he’s trying not to breathe too hard into the receiver. Like he just ran here. Or ran away from somewhere.

“Are you okay?” you ask, before you can stop yourself.

Another pause. “Yeah,” he says, and he softens, like he always does when he hears your voice. “I will be.”

.

By week three, he’s dodging plans like it’s his new hobby. You’re not hurt, obviously. You’re busy too. You have other friends. You go to bars. You flirt with bartenders you’ll never text back. You have a whole life outside of this whole thing with Clark.

It’s not a relationship. It’s just a thing. A nice, dependable, sometimes pantsless thing.

That’s all.

But still, there’s this night.

You’re at your apartment. There’s an old movie playing, something black and white and miserable, and Clark was supposed to be here an hour ago.

You’d ordered his favorite takeout. You’d even found that dumb craft soda he likes, the one that tastes vaguely like melted gummy worms. You told yourself you just wanted someone to share the noodles with.

He doesn’t show.

No call. No text.

You sit through the entire movie. Alone.

And when your phone finally buzzes—close to midnight, just his name and a short, “I’m so sorry. Can we talk soon?”— you stare at it for a long moment.

Then you flip your phone over, face-down.

And in the dark, you think, Shit. This is how it starts. The distance. The shift. The slow pulling away.

You’ve done it to people before.

You just never thought you’d be on the receiving end.

Not from him.

Not from Clark.

.

Around 11:30, you open Twitter out of boredom. You don’t cry. That would imply something was wrong. That you were hurt. You’re not. Obviously.

You’re just a little annoyed.

And maybe, just mayb, you’re thinking about how Clark used to be your safest person. Your sure thing. Your just-text-me, just-call-me, just-walk-right-in-without-knocking guy.

And now he’s something else. Something slippery. Something you have to squint at sideways to understand.

Your thumb scrolls through the usual mess. Politicians being embarrassing, memes you’re already tired of, some half-hearted discourse about whether the Metropolis skyline is over-designed or “delightfully optimistic.”

Then: a video clip.

No sound. Just shaky phone footage.

A blur of red and blue moving fast—streaking through the air over Hobbs Bay, pulling someone from a collapsed scaffolding, leaving behind a wake of stunned bystanders and bent steel.

You pause. Watch it again. Retweets piling up.

BREAKING: Superman saves construction worker after scaffolding collapse.

You stare at it for a second longer than you mean to, then snort under your breath.

Must be nice, you think. Some people get rescued. Some other unlucky fuckers just get ghosted.

.

The message comes on a Thursday. One of those weirdly warm spring evenings when Metropolis smells like asphalt and deli grease and the last ten years of your bad decisions.

Hey. You free tonight?

You stare at it for a moment too long. Thumb hovering.

Then:

yeah. yours?

A pause.

If you want.

God, he’s infuriating. Polite even now. Careful with you, like you’re made of something breakable. Like you haven’t already cracked half a dozen times this month alone.

Still, you go.

.

It’s not tense at first. It’s easy. Familiar.

Clark opens the door wearing one of those threadbare t-shirts that should be illegal, sleeves barely containing his biceps, neckline just a little too stretched from use. His hair’s damp. There’s flour on his cheek.

“You baked?” you ask, stepping past him before he can do that thing where he tries to gauge your mood like a barometer.

He shrugs. “Felt like it.”

There’s banana bread cooling on the counter. Two plates. One knife. He’s already sliced yours and left the end piece—your favorite—on the left, like always.

You want to be mad. Or suspicious. Or anything that would make this easier to navigate. But it’s hard to keep your footing when he’s being like this. Soft. Normal. Like he didn’t flake three times last month. Like you hadn’t spent the last few nights half-dressed and overthinking on your bathroom floor

But them again, you could never really resist him for that long.

So maybe it’s no surprise that your dress ends up pooled around your ankles. The lamp’s still on. Your mouths are moving like they’ve done this a hundred times—because you have, but it's not enough, will never be enough—and you’re both pretending it’s still casual. Still nothing.

Except it doesn’t feel like nothing.

And then Clark pulls back.

Not sharply. Not like he’s been burned. More like he just remembered something, which, again, not unusual. You’ve seen that look before. That oh shit look.

But tonight, he doesn’t immediately jump up. 

He doesn’t mutter something about needing to check in with Perry or help Lois edit her headline.

He just… stares at you.

And not in the usual way, not with those soft, soft eyes like you’re something he stumbled across in a field and decided to treasure. He looks—serious. Scared, even. His hand is still on your hip, but his other is twitching slightly at his side like it doesn’t know what to do with itself.

“We need to talk,” he says.

You still have one shoe on. You don’t even remember kicking the other off.

You blink at him. “I—what?”

He licks his lips. His glasses are smudged. He doesn’t take them off.

“Something’s been—there’s something that I need to tell you,” he says, slower now, like he’s rehearsing this in real time and trying not to panic.

And that—that is when your stomach drops.

Because you know this script. You’ve seen this scene. The music swells, the camera pans in, the guy who smells like safety and Sunday mornings says he “needs to talk,” and then boom. Heartbreak, cut to black, roll credits.

You hold up a hand before he can say anything else. “Wait. Just… don’t. Yet.”

Clark pauses. He blinks at you.

“Look,” you say, backing up a step, scanning the room like you’re looking for your dignity. “If this is about how I’ve been kind of, I don’t know, evasive or inconsistent or, like, deeply emotionally unavailable, I just want to say — I know. Okay? You don’t have to do this so gently.”

His face twists. “What?”

“You’re trying to break things off,” you continue, steamrolling him, your voice way too steady for the freefall happening inside your chest. “And I get it. I do. You’ve been pulling away for weeks, you disappear all the time, you don’t sleep anymore, you look like you’ve been hit by a truck most days, which I assumed was just bad reporting hours, but who knows, maybe it’s metaphorical.”

Clark tries again. “I’m not—”

“It’s fine,” you say, voice louder now. “It’s fine if you met someone. You don’t have to pretend it’s not happening.”

“I didn’t—”

“You’re allowed to outgrow this. Me. Whatever this is.”

Your dress is still on the floor, and you suddenly want it back on like it’s armor. You crouch to grab it, clumsy with urgency, your hands all wrong.

“I should’ve seen it coming. You were too good to last. Guys like you don’t stick around for girls like me.”

“Hey,” he says sharply, stepping forward, but you back away before he can reach you.

“Don’t,” you say, holding your dress to your chest like a shield. “Don’t be nice to me about it.”

Clark runs both hands through his hair. He looks like he’s short-circuiting. “You’re not even letting me—I’m not trying to end this with you.”

You stare at him, lips parted.

He’s breathing hard now. His glasses are askew. His shirt’s wrinkled, and his jaw is clenched like he’s holding something back with both hands.

“I was going to tell you something,” he says, voice raw. “Something real. Something I’ve never told anyone who didn’t already know.”

You freeze.

Because that doesn’t sound like cheating.

That sounds like confession.

“What,” you whisper, suddenly breathless. “Like a dark secret? You have a kid? You’re actually married? Are you part of a mafia? Are you—Oh my God. Are you a stripper?”

“What?” he blurts, completely thrown.

“I don’t know, Clark!” your voice spikes, hands flying up. “What the hell could you possibly say right now that starts with ‘we need to talk’ and isn’t a relationship guillotine?”

His eyes flick to the window. Just for a second. A glance, like instinct. And then right back to you.

And for the first time, you see it.

The quiet panic. The way his entire body is buzzing like a live wire under skin.

Like he’s not scared of you.  He’s scared for you.

But it’s too late. You’ve already built the wall and bricked yourself in.

You grab your dress, yanking it on with the dignity of a raccoon being evicted from a trash can. Somewhere behind you, Clark says your name again, gentle, like a bruise he’s afraid to touch. You ignore it.

Instead, you just start collecting your things like a squirrel in crisis.

Because—and this is humiliating—you’ve essentially moved into his place over the last year in the slowest, most passive-aggressive way possible. Not officially. Not “hey, should we get you some keys?” But enough that the signs are there. 

Enough that you now have to do this, which is to say the break-up equivalent of packing a go-bag in the middle of a fire drill.

You grab the mug with the faded “Central City Gazette Student Press 2013” logo you refuse to drink out of at home because it’s chipped, but which you do drink out of here, because Clark always makes tea the right way — hot, strong, too much honey. You grab the copy of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow you stole from his shelf three months ago and meant to pretend was yours all along. The sweatshirt he “forgot” you left here, that you “forgot” he noticed you wore to bed six times in a row.

You jam it all into your work tote like it’s a goddamn body bag.

Then there are the smaller things. The stupid things.

The half-used notepad from a city council meeting where someone tried to blame vigilante-induced infrastructure damage on solar panels. The disposable camera from that one weekend in Smallville — the one you never developed because the idea of seeing his parents smile at you felt too dangerous, too much like you might belong there.

And then you eye the drawer next to his bed. Your drawer, to get that clear, which was never explicitly claimed but which somehow holds one (1) pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs, two (2) half-empty bottles of lube, and three (3) protein bars, one of which is probably from last fiscal year. You shove it all into your bag, zipper groaning like a sad, sad accordion.

Clark’s still standing near the window, looking bewildered. Like he walked into the scene five minutes late and can’t tell who started the fire.

“Wait—are you leaving? You don’t have to—just—can we talk? Please?”

You don’t look at him.

Instead, you gesture vaguely at your bag. “This is just me doing a quick inventory of my terrible judgment. Don’t mind me.”

“Can you stop for two seconds and just let me—”

“Clark,” you say, and your voice comes out quieter than you meant it to. “It’s okay.”

It isn’t. But you’re trying to win the emotional Olympics in the “cool and detached” category, and you’re not about to blow it with something as devastating as eye contact.

You sling the bag over your shoulder and pause by the door. 

You consider saying something devastating and poetic. Something from Hamlet, maybe. You’ve always liked the line about cutting love out with a knife and it still bleeding. But instead, you give him a big, fake smile and an inexplicable hand up, like a contestant leaving Rupaul's Drag Race in disgrace.

“No harm, no foul,” you say. “Tell whoever you're seeing that I say hi.”

And then you leave.

.

You are, in every measurable way, unwell.

You don’t call it a breakup.

That would imply there was something official to break. That you were ever really together. That there was something solid under your feet to begin with, instead of months of teasing the edge, hovering over the line like two people too chicken to admit they’d already crossed it.

So, no. Not a breakup.

Just—a recalibration. A pause. A hot minute.

You say this to Jimmy, who narrows his eyes and says, “You’re holding a spoon like a murder weapon right now, so I’m gonna circle back on the ‘hot’ part of that minute.”

You even say it to the woman at the corner bodega—the one who always gave Clark an extra packet of honey for his tea and once slipped you a protein bar when you looked particularly anemic on a deadline.

She glances up from restocking the gum and says, “He’s okay? The tall guy? With the glasses and the very... polite shoulders?”

You blink. “Sorry, what?”

“He always said thank you. For the bag. Like, sincerely.” She squints at you. “You were good together.”

You make a sound of vague agreement and exit before she asks if you want your usual. (You do. But the idea of holding a wrap in your hands right now makes your stomach lurch.)

You take your PTO. Two weeks. You don’t tell anyone where you’re going, mostly because you’re not going anywhere. You lie in bed. You eat cereal out of a mug. You watch a three-hour documentary about the collapse of a bridge in Gotham and cry when a random city engineer says, “We tried our best, but it wasn’t enough.”

You don't let yourself think about that… that stupid drawer by Clark’s bed.

Or the banana bread.

Because there is banana bread.

It shows up on your doorstep the morning of Day Three, wrapped in wax paper and still warm. No note. Just a faint imprint where a palm must’ve rested on the foil, like he wasn’t sure if he should knock. You don’t bring it inside right away.

You stare at it. Then the door. Then back at the bread like it might explode.

Eventually, you take it in. Set it on the counter. Eat half of it standing over the sink with your fingers, because you don’t trust yourself to not drop it.

He texts you the next day. Just your name. Then a minute later: Just wanted to check in. Hope you’re doing okay.

You stare at the dots blinking at the bottom of the screen until they disappear.

You don’t answer.

He calls a few times, a few days later. Your phone lights up with his name, and you let it ring out. Not because you’re angry—okay, maybe you are, a little—but because you know the sound of his voice will wreck you. Because if he says your name in that soft, patient, Clark way, you’ll crack like a fucking fault line.

He doesn't leave a voicemai any of the times l. Just hangs up.

(You spend the rest of the night clutching a throw pillow to your stomach like it’s a life raft.)

You tell yourself this is temporary. You’ll get it together tomorrow.

And then tomorrow happens.

And then the next day.

And then—on the seventh day, like Jesus, you rise.

Kind of.

You pull on the ugliest hoodie you own, some too-large sweatpants with a questionable stain, and a pair of knockoff Crocs. Your hair is doing something that technically defies gravity, and you haven’t worn deodorant since Tuesday. Your soul is gone. Your standards are lower. All that remains is one singular thought:

Hotdog.

.

Which is how you find yourself under the flickering fluorescent lights of a 7/11 at 1:42 a.m., perched on the curb out front like a feral raccoon, holding a lukewarm hotdog in one hand and a Red Bull in the other, actively disassociating while Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You plays through a tinny outdoor speaker with all the emotional resonance of a dying Roomba.

You stare off into the distance.

Which is, of course, exactly when Clark walks up.

You see him in your periphery first. Hear the crunch of gravel, the telltale weight of his sneakers.

“No,” you say, out loud. “No. No. Absolutely not.”

Clark stops short. “Hi,” he says, voice soft. A little nervous.

You hold up the hotdog like a loaded gun. “Turn around.”

“I—”

“I swear to god, Clark.” You don’t even look at him. “I am mentally and spiritually clinging to life by the barest thread, and if you say something kind to me right now, I will vomit on the pavement.”

He nods. Raises both hands. “Okay. Not saying anything.”

You stare at him. His flannel is wrinkled. His hair’s sticking up at the back. There’s a scuff on his glasses like he’s been rubbing at them all day.

Goddammit. He looks like home.

You turn your burning eyes back to the pavement and try to focus on your dinner. Try to remember how this whole dignity thing works.

“Why are you here,” you say finally, flat.

He swallows. “Because I needed to see you. Because I’ve been calling, and—”

“Right,” you cut in. “The calls. That I didn’t answer. On purpose.”

“I know.”

“And you took that as a challenge?”

Clark exhales slowly. He takes a tentative step closer.

“I’ve tried everything else,” he says.

You roll your eyes. “Maybe that’s because you’re not supposed to fix this. Maybe this is just what it is now.”

“That’s not what I want.”

You shrug. “And? Sometimes we don’t get what we want. That’s life. Welcome.”

He’s quiet. Long enough that you glance sideways and catch him staring at you with a look you can’t name. Doesn’t defend himself. Just stands there, quiet, while a beat-up minivan idles past the edge of the lot and the Whitney Houston outro fades into static. And you’re just about to tell him to cut it out—whatever this whole tortured-eyes, kicked-puppy thing is—when he steps forward.

One arm wraps around your waist.

And then—

You are no longer on the ground.

You shriek like a B-movie scream queen, clutching your 7/11 hotdog in its sad foil wrapper like it might save your life. “WHAT THE FUCK,” you yell. “WHAT—ARE YOU KIDDING ME—WHAT IS HAPPENING.”

“I’m sorry!” Clark yells over the wind.

“ARE YOU—IS THIS YOU?! ARE YOU—”

“Yeah!” he shouts. “Hi! Surprise!”

“SUPERMAN?!”

“…Yes!” he calls back, cringing midair.

“YOU’RE SUPERMAN?!”

Clark doesn’t answer that. Just… grimaces. Flying sideways. His arm tightening around your waist like he’s half-expecting you to elbow him in the ribs and wriggle free.

You might, honestly. As soon as your brain catches up. You’re only just vaguely aware of your Croc flying off somewhere over a used car dealership.

“My toothbrush is still at your apartment!” you shriek.

“I know!”

“I HAVE A TOOTHBRUSH AT SUPERMAN’S APARTMENT!”

“I know! That’s why I—listen, I panicked! You weren’t picking up! You blocked me on like, four platforms—”

“I BLOCKED YOU BECAUSE I THOUGHT YOU WERE GHOSTING ME FOR ANOTHER GIRL, NOT MOONLIGHTING AS A NATIONAL TREASURE.”

The wind roars past your ears. Your teeth are chattering. You’re barely holding onto the last few shreds of coherence. And Clark—no, Superman, apparently—he’s not even breaking a sweat.

“You couldn’t have called?” you snap.

“I did!”

“WITH WHAT, MORSE CODE?”

“I showed up at your apartment!”

“With a cape, Kent?!”

“No! No, the cape’s new—look, I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t talk to me. Jimmy said you took PTO and haven’t left your apartment in four days and I just—I needed you to see me. To listen.”

You make an inhuman noise, somewhere between a wail and a curse. “So your solution was to airlift me like a stolen asset out of a CIA bunker?!”

“I checked to make sure no one was looking!”

“YOU TOOK ME HOSTAGE.”

“I swept the parking lot, I swear! The cameras at 7/11 are fake, and there was one guy but he was busy dropping a Big Gulp.”

You blink at him. Wind in your eyes. A foot still bare. There’s an onion from your hotdog stuck to your shirt. Your heart does a slow, brutal somersault.

“…Okay,” you breathe. “Okay, so this is real.”

“It’s real,” he says.

“Like, capital-R Real.”

“Yeah.”

You shake your head once, sharp. “Jesus Christ.”

And then something in you quiets. Something that’s been vibrating with panic for days—for weeks—sputters out like the end of a bad engine. You’re too tired to scream again. You’re too wrung-out to cry.

So you just say, quietly: “I'm sorry. For not listening. Or giving you the time to explain. But, what the fuck, dude.”

Clark swallows. His eyes flick to your mouth, then away. He nods—once.

“I didn’t want to lie to you,” he says again, quieter now. “I hated it. Every second of it.”

His breath fogs slightly in the night air. He still won’t quite meet your eyes.

“I thought I could keep it separate. You and… that part of me. I thought if I just kept my head down and made you pancakes and let you call me out when I forgot to text back, it’d be enough.”

He runs a hand through his hair, still wind-tossed from flight. “But then it wasn’t. Because I started… I don’t know, noticing stuff. Like the way you always get a little mean when you’re scared. Or how you never remember to lock your front door but you’ll glare at me for refusing to jaywalk. And every time I had to run off and I saw the look on your face—I wanted to tell you. I almost told you, like, like, forty darn times.”

His voice cracks a little. He’s still not looking at you.

“I kept thinking, if I say it out loud, you’ll leave. Or worse—you’ll stay, but only because you think you owe me something. Because I have the suit. Because I can lift a building. But I don’t want you to be impressed by me. I just want you to look at me the way you used to. Like I’m just… Clark.”

He laughs, sudden and shaky. “God, I sound insane.”

You say nothing. You’re not breathing very well.

And then, softly, finally, like he’s pushing it out before he loses the nerve: “I love you. Not in a heroic, save-the-day kind of way. Just—I love you. I think I’ve been in love with you since you made me help you tail that councilman with the suspicious hair plugs. And you made fun of me the whole time, but you still brought snacks.”

He swallows. “I don’t need anything from you. I just wanted you to know.”

The wind whips gently around you both now, slower, softer. Like the world has dialed down to listen in. 

Clark hovers easily in place, arms strong around you, careful and warm, like he’s afraid you’ll wriggle free again and drop straight through the clouds.

He’s flushed. Nervous. He looks like he’s trying to prepare for every possible version of the moment after this. Every soft or horrible thing you might say. Every joke you might make to dodge the weight of it. Every silence.

You lean back a little to look at him.

And then, honestly, you just kiss him.

Because it’s easier than saying the whole thing. Easier than listing every moment that’s led to this, every reason you tried not to fall for him and did anyway. 

The time he walked (not flew) across the city in the rain because you forgot your keys. 

The fact that he never interrupts when you’re spiraling, just waits it out, steady and warm and right there. 

The way he let you drag him into that adult store and joked around and made him blush with the pink handcuffs, and then he bought them for you anyway.

 The banana bread. 

“I love you too, you idiot.”

His whole face crumples. And then he laughs, messy and relieved and a little helpless, like he wasn’t expecting you to say it back. Like he wasn’t hoping.

“You do?”

You nod, eyes stinging. “Yeah. In every kind of way.”

And Clark—not Superman, Clark Kent, the world’s most ridiculous man, the guy you’ve known and kissed and run from and found again—leans in and kisses you silly again.

.

You’re still smiling when he stumbles through your front door with you in his arms.

Not gracefully. Not like some poised, soap-opera seduction —more like the two of you crash through the threshold like a couple of drunk fucking idiots who forgot how to use their limbs. You reach back and slap the door shut, barely catching the knob, breathless from altitude and adrenaline and everything that’s been boiling under your skin for months.

Clark kicks over your shoe rack by accident. It topples over with a loud bang and suddenly, all your shoes are on the floor.

“Sorry,” he says, half-choking on a grin, already pressing you to the wall. “I’ll—clean that up—later—”

You cut him off with your mouth. Sloppy, desperate. Fingers tangling in his curls, tugging just to feel him gasp against you. You can feel the way he hardens close to you, and you're really, really liking where this is going.

It’s not like you didn’t know he was strong. 

You’ve seen his biceps. You’ve felt the hand at your back steady you when a cab came too close. You’ve watched him shoulder his way through panicked crowds, through chaos, through life, always quietly making space for you.

But this is different.

This is him holding your entire body like you weigh nothing. Like physics doesn't apply to you anymore. Like his hands were made to carry you and his mouth was made to ruin you.

“Clark,” you gasp, because you don’t know what else to say. Your hoodie’s already halfway up your torso. His hands are under it, up your ribs, one squeezing your thigh like he’s staking a claim and the other splayed wide across your spine. “You’re—fuck—”

“I know,” he pants, nosing down your throat, licking into the hollow like he’s starving for it. “I know, baby. You’re—God, you’re actually killing me.”

He lifts you—actually lifts you—like you’re nothing, just sweeps you up with one arm under your ass and carries you toward the bedroom, leaving a trail of your jacket, your hotdog wrapper, and one of your slippers behind. 

You claw at his shirt, frantic, trying to get it off. Buttons ping off somewhere near the kitchen island and you both flinch, then laugh again, dizzy with it.

He drops you on the bed and follows fast, crawling over you, shedding the remains of his flannel and undershirt like he’s being hunted for it. 

"Fuck, fuck—take this off," and yank off your hoodie and he groans at the sight, like the skin of your chest is some sort of a revelation, like he hasn’t had it memorized since the first time he saw you in a tank top at work and forgot what day it was.

His mouth is everywhere. On your collarbone, your shoulder, between your breasts. 

Hot and open and eager, tongue twisting ruthlessly around your nipples. He’s making sounds now, those broken, happy little gasps like he’s surprised every time you let him touch you again.

You’re squirming under him, soaked and breathless, tugging at the waistband of his pants like it might save your life.

“I am gonna ruin you,” you manage to say. "Baby, let me fucking ruin you."

Clark laughs again, the kind of laugh that goes straight to your core, deep and bright and boyish, and then he flips you effortlessly onto your stomach, pushing your thighs apart with his knee, dragging his mouth down your spine like he’s tracing poetry there.

“Oh yeah?” he murmurs, low and smug. “Get in line, pretty girl.”

He pushes into you with one smooth, slow thrust, so much of him, too much, your jaw goes slack, and he just stays there for a moment, his hand curled over yours, forehead pressed to the back of your shoulder.

“I love you.”

Your breath stutters.

He doesn’t give you time to recover, emotionally or physically. Doesn’t let you laugh it off or throw up your usual wall of flippant sarcasm. He kisses your shoulder again, hips moving deeper, more purposeful.

You twist beneath him, trying to turn over because as much as you love doggy, you can't bear to not look at him right now. 

But his hand presses gently between your shoulder blades, grounding you. “Wait,” he murmurs, and you freeze. You’re still so full of him you can barely think. “Just let me—can I just—”

He grinds forward, pushing all eight inches of him inside, and you choke on a moan. You’ve never heard him like this. Not just desperate, not just lost in it — but open.

“I love you when you’re mean,” he pants, voice fraying around the edges. “I love you when you roll your eyes at me in meetings and mutter under your breath during interviews. I love you, God, you're so tight," another thrust. "—when you wear those socks with the tiny dogs on them and try to pretend you’re not soft.”

You turn your head, mouth parted, eyes wide. “Clark—”

He leans down, kisses your cheek, your temple, the place behind your ear that makes your thighs shake.

“I love you when you’re being impossible. When you steal my flannels. When you pretend you don’t care. When you kissed me for the first time and then gave me a whole spiel about it.”

“Stop—”

“I love you,” he says again, brokenly this time, like it’s being torn out of him. “I love you even when I’m scared you’ll leave. Even if this is all I get.”

You turn fully this time, eyes glassy, fingers curling around the back of his neck to drag him in.

And you kiss him.

Hard.

Hungry.

Grateful.

“I love you,” you whisper against his mouth. “I love you, you wonderful, wonderful man.”

Clark lets out a sound that’s not quite a laugh and not quite a sob.

Then he flips you under him and fucks you like it’s a promise.

You say it again when you come the second time, breathless, high-pitched, hands clutching at his shoulders, and again when he follows with a low, shuddering groan, spilling into you like he’s got nowhere else he’d rather be.

.

The car smells like spearmint gum and way, way too much coffee. Clark’s got one hand on the wheel and the other laced through yours like it’s always been there. Which, lately, it has.

You’re about halfway to Smallville.

“So,” you say, tapping his knuckles with your thumb. “How many embarrassing baby photos am I being subjected to this time? Just give me a ballpark.”

Clark chuckles. His dimples show. “Oh, uh… probably all of them. Again."

You groan. “Even the corn maze one?”

“There are multiple corn maze ones,” he corrects gently. “There’s one where I’m dressed as a scarecrow.”

You stare at him.

He nods solemnly. “With face paint.”

“Oh my God,” you wheeze, turning toward the window. “I don’t know if I’m emotionally prepared for that.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, squeezing your hand. “Ma loves you. You could commit tax fraud in front of her and she’d ask if you wanted seconds.”

You snort. “That’s very comforting.”

He shrugs, smiling again. “It’s true. She already set up the guest room.”

You blink at him.

“…The guest room?”

A pause. Clark glances over. “Well, I didn’t want to assume we’d—uh—share a bed. With my parents in the house.”

You raise a brow. “Clark. We had sex in a supply closet at the Planet.”

“That was—okay, yes—but that was under different circumstances.”

“We are dating.”

“I know.”

You lean your head back against the seat, grinning. “You’re so weird.”

“You love it,” he mutters, cheeks pink.

You do.

God, you do. You love him.

It still sneaks up on you sometimes. The clarity of it. The quiet, persistent fact of Clark Kent: the man who once made you blueberry pancakes the morning after you nearly ran out on him, who kissed your wrist like it meant something, who never—not once—looked away. Who told you he was Superman in the middle of a 7/11 parking lot, like some fucking lunatic.

And now here you are. In his car. On the way to meet his parents.

Officially.

Not just as the girl who sleeps over sometimes. Not as the coworker who won’t stop pretending she doesn’t care. Not as the idiot who thought she could get away with loving him and not doing anything about it.

No. Now, you’re his girlfriend.

Which means this is real. Which means you’re going to their farmhouse in Smallville. And Martha is probably going to offer you pie. And Jonathan is probably going to show you Clark’s fifth grade spelling bee trophy like it’s the most precious thing in the world.

Which should terrify you.

(And maybe it does, a little.)

But mostly—mostly it feels like the best thing you’ve ever said yes to.

Clark clears his throat. “Hey.”

You turn.

He’s watching you with that expression again. That soft, unguarded, ruined look like he still can’t believe you’re real. It’s so sincere it nearly undoes you.

“I’m really glad you’re coming,” he says. Quietly.

You look at him. You squeeze his hand back.

“Me too, Michigan.”

His ears go a little red. “Don’t call me that.”

“Oh? I thought you liked when I objectify you by state.”

“I like it slightly less when it happens in front of a rest stop attendant while you’re holding beef jerky and winking at me. And when it's the wrong state."

You smirk. “Not my fault you were born with that jawline and a humiliation kink.”

Clark coughs through a laugh. “God help me.”

He reaches across the console, dragging his thumb lightly over the inside of your wrist. The same spot he kissed that night. The one you think might still hum a little under your skin.

You let your head fall against his shoulder, smile tucked into your cheek.

“Wake me when we’re ten minutes out?”

“You sure?” he murmurs, already lowering the volume on the radio.

“Mhm.” You close your eyes. “I gotta mentally prepare myself for the scarecrow photos.”

You feel the press of his lips against your knuckles. Gentle. Familiar.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he says. “They love you, you know that. I do too."

You smile.