SHAY★

you let satoru do as he pleases, threading your hands through his hair as his hand dips between your inner thighs. he hums into your neck when you scratch his scalp. “suguru,” you breathe, “how’d you two even get here? coach toji’s gonna kill you guys.”

“kiss,” satoru interrupts. you tilt your head towards him, eyes still on suguru as gojo presses his lips to yours.

suguru’s face twists in disgust, but he doesn’t comment. “satoru bribed him. paid him a couple hundreds to see you for five minutes.”

“right—” your voice strains when gojo gropes your ass once again. “and you followed him because?”

geto is already looking away. “he bribed me too.”

you snort, but it turns into a shiver as satoru sucks on your earlobe. he hums, pleased, when your fingers tighten in his hair.

“mmh… got an away match,” he kisses your jaw. “wanted to see my girl first.”

you’re not his girl, you know you’ll never be, but you still laugh when he squeezes your waist & presses hurried kisses to your cheek. you shove him away & his grin is cocky.

“gonna score for you,” he tugs you back, dipping his head to your ear. “and then you’ll treat me, yeah?”

you hum when his arms snake around your hips once again.

“only if you score the winning goal.”

2. POST MATCH SEXCAPADES !

satoru comes back too late.

you’re not sure exactly why—maybe overtime, maybe the team stopped somewhere to celebrate their win—but you don’t let the thought plague you. you’re more concerned about the fact that it’s nearly evening & you can hear a ball kicking against the gym walls. you’re still in your cheer uniform, tiny skirt & sheer top, standing at the metal doors as you watch gojo dribble on his own.

he stops dribbling to catch his breath, wiping sweat off his chin. and then he’s off to sit at the bleachers, letting water slide down his neck as he chugs from a bottle.

you take it as your cue.

you have your hands behind your back, padding all slow, steps soft as you make your way to him. gojo keeps his bottle pressed to his lips but he sees it. how your skirt clings to your thighs. how your breasts ripple under the thin material. he lets out a low hum as you sit yourself on his lap.

you loop your hands around his neck. “hi.”

his lip tugs. “hi,”

he squeezes your waist as you press yourself into him. your tits smush against his chest, nipples hardening, and his fingers are already tracing the hem of your skirt & gliding up your thigh.

“how was the match?” you mumble.

“was good,” he mutters, but his thumb has already found your panties underneath your skirt. he rubs a slow circle over the bud. “you miss me?”

“no,” you sass, but he presses his thumb into your clit & your hips stutter. satoru laughs.

“i know what you like now,” he hums, left hand gliding up your side as the other rubs slow circles over your panties. “know it only takes a little.”

his thumb finds your nipple through your thin shirt. he rubs a circle over the pebbled peak, slow, but then he raises a brow. “no bra?”

you can’t respond. your breath hitches as your head falls into his shoulder.

“so cute,” he murmurs softly. he lets you press against him, leaving your panties to grope your heavy tits in his palm. he squeezes and fondles, pressing light kisses to your cheek as you make pretty noises in his ear. your hips buck into him.

“needy,” he scoffs, but his hands come up to guide your hips as you rut against him. he’s already hard and your panties are soaked thin and you let the material cling between your folds as your clit rubs against him. he flips up your skirt to find you drenched & slobbering. he bites his cheek.

“fuck, baby,” he rasps, sliding your panties over your aching cunt. you’re still humping him. “why’s your pussy so fucking wet?”

you only whimper as he presses his thumb to your sticky clit, rubbing hard circles over the bud. his other hand gropes your hip, guiding you faster over him. your breathing shudders as his thumb circles your clit faster and harder, until your hips are stuttering & he’s cupping your pussy so you cum in his palm.

you whimper, tears pricking at your lashes as you come down from your high. satoru kisses your cheek slow. “mmh, good job, baby.”

he’s still rubbing his palm over your pussy, massaging your warmth all slow & lazy. your eyes drop to his bulge, his cock practically twitching in his shorts. you reach a hand to glide over it, palming him so his hips twitch. he inhales sharply, “fuck—”

“not in my uniform,” he steals your hand, kissing your jaw. “gonna be a nightmare to clean.”

you glare at him through your lashes. “it’s already dirty, idiot.”

he laughs at your pretty face glaring up at him. your cheeks are still flushed, lashes wet, and your lips are in a frown but satoru swears you’re the prettiest thing he’s ever seen. he folds his hand over yours and dips his head to kiss you warm & slow. you gasp as his tongue pushes in, a soft moan leaving your lips as his tongue grazes yours.

“another time,” he murmurs against your lips. “no pouting, yeah?”

you pout anyways, and satoru kisses it off.

3. NOT YOUR GIRLFRIEND !

satoru is driving too fast.

his jaw is tight, knuckles white against the steering as you clutch your seatbelt beside him. your heart hammers against your ribs but the engine soon slows, his foot easing down on the breaks as the car comes to a stop at a traffic light.

today’s match went bad, really bad, so bad to the point that afterwards you’d tried to console him and he’d simply walked past. you try not to let it get to you. you know how men are when it comes to losing in sports.

but satoru’s breathing settles beside you, so you try once more.

“you played good today.”

silence.

"i know you're upset," you continue, voice soft. "but it's just one game, and you'll get them next time.”

silence again. his jaw only ticks, face illuminated by the traffic light’s red glow. the seconds seem to stretch into minutes, and you fumble with your skirt.

“you did your best,” you turn to him. “that’s all that matters—“

“can you stop?”

you freeze.

satoru doesn’t look at you. his fingers tap against the steering as he lowers his foot to the gas pedal. he’s not speeding anymore, but the silence stretches & you can feel a lump clawing at your throat.

you bite your lip. and satoru’s mad, yes, but he’s got no right to talk to you like that or take his anger out on you. so you suck in a breath, try to correct him. “i was only trying to help. you don’t have to take it out on me—“

“do you ever get tired of talking?”

“what?”

but satoru continues. “you always have something to say, don’t you? you’re not my fucking girlfriend. and i don’t need your fucking comfort.”

you blink. the words don’t register at first, but soon your throat is closing up, and you’re nodding obediently before you can think any better of it. your skirt bunches in your hands as you try to keep your breathing steady. god forbid you give him a reason to snap at you once again.

“you’re right,” you try for sass but it fails. “and i won’t act like it again.”

but satoru sees you through the rearview mirror. your eyes are on your lap, like you’re still trying to process what just happened, your thumbs fiddling with the hem of your skirt. satoru only swallows, glances away. if he ignores you long enough, you’ll be just fine, right?

your breath hitches beside him and he crumbles immediately.

he’s already pulling over, unbuckling his belt to reach over the console. “no baby, i’m sorry,” he pleads, and maybe he shouldn’t because it only makes tears fall from your eyes. “shh baby don’t cry, i’m sorry, i’m so fucking sorry.”

he smushes your face into his chest, carding his fingers through your hair. you try to push him away but he takes your hand and presses it to his chest.

“didn’t mean to snap at you,” his breathing is ragged as he cups your face. “don’t cry baby, you know i hate it when you cry.”

you sniffle as he swipes a thumb over your wet lashes. “then what are we?”

satoru doesn’t answer. instead he presses his lips to yours, slow and warm, head tilting to deepen the kiss. “you’re my girl,” kiss. “my baby,” kiss. “my everything,” kiss.

he doesn’t say my girlfriend. but he doesn’t need to, right?

footballer!gojo doesn’t do relationships. and cheerleaders like you don’t make good girlfriends anyway. so you swallow the lump growing in your throat & let him part open your thighs.

SCORE, end

The worst part is that while you question whether or not Satoru is telling the truth, you know that man. He’s a lot of things, but a liar isn’t one of them, especially not out of any sense of self-preservation. No, he’s more likely to take accountability for something that’s not really his fault than to shirk the blame onto someone else for his own failings. It was one of the things you fell in love with about him. A goofball idiot who thinks more about fun than responsibility, emotionally constipated, impulsive, rude at times—these are flaws you could ascribe to him. But a liar? No. He’s never been a liar, as much as you wish he was right now. 

Either way, you’re not just going to take his word for it. You can’t. Your broken heart and your distrustful mind won’t let you. So, you’re going to have to find some way to confirm what he’s told you, and you have to do it without him finding out that you’re looking for the information. 

Did she go after him on purpose? Or did she just fancy herself in love? If she went after him on purpose, then it’s a reasonable guess that it was done maliciously. That thought makes you shudder. But why? That’s the real question. Why do any of that? Selfishness, greed, ignorance, carelessness, lack of empathy? So many questions, and each one seems to spawn a dozen more, like when plucking a dandelion from the yard. 

Then, there was that kiss. The kiss that made your heart race and made your head spin, just like they used to, just like you remember. When was the last time he kissed you? The morning you found those texts, maybe. He’d leaned down and pressed his lips to yours, tender and loving, before getting into the shower. Not even thirty minutes later, your marriage imploded. 

This kiss was different. The last one you shared was domestic and sweet, but you could feel the cavernous hunger in his kiss the other night. It made your knees weak. It nearly tricked your body into succumbing. Afterward, you’d brushed your teeth three times to try and erase the taste of him from your tongue, but he lingered like a sip of sweet spiced hot apple cider in the winter.

In an effort to keep yourself from thinking about it too much, you jam-packed the week with activities, not giving you or Ender a moment to rest. The two of you do so many fun things around the city, from normal touristy stuff to doing things only locals would do. It’s not sustainable, though, but it’s better than dwelling on how your ex-husband might have been … you can hardly even think the word. Not because it changes the way you think about him, but because there’s a part of you, deep down, that feels guilty. Even though you know you probably shouldn’t, looking back, it's glaringly obvious that something wasn’t right about the situation. 

You should have known. His reaction when you confronted him was resigned, broken, small; that’s not Satoru. He admitted to everything and told you that he loved you, but something about it was so incredibly sad. You should have asked more questions. You should have done this. You should have done that. But you were too hurt to do any of it. Still, you can’t help wondering if anything would have been different if he had told you then what you had refused to listen to. 

Satoru finally reaches out again exactly a week and one day after the last time you guys saw each other. You’re at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, where your pieces are currently being featured, packing up Ender to leave for the evening when your phone pings with a message. When you check the notification and see that it’s from Telegram, a knot forms in your throat. Nervousness and anxiety sluice through your gut, but you open up your phone, then the app anyway. 

SG: I’m really sorry about the other night.

SG: I know I shouldn’t have done that. I just got caught up in the moment, and you’re still so beautiful, and I just … I’ve missed you for so long, and I’ve never stopped loving you. So, yeah. I’m sorry. I fucked up because I got overwhelmed by my own feelings. 

SG: I understand if you’re not ready to be around me yet, but I would really appreciate it if you’d let me see Ender, if he’s better, that is. 

You read the messages as the rest come in one at a time, your eyes flicking across the screen. To be fair, you also started to get caught up in the moment, but it still irritates you that he kissed you to begin with. You’ve already got enough on your plate trying to sort out how to handle his explanation; it just added another string of confusion to the twisted knot of emotions weighing heavily in your chest. 

For probably ten minutes, you stand there typing and deleting, typing and deleting. As long as Ender is there to act as a buffer, you’re not really worried about something like that being repeated, so finally you settle on your words and try to type out the message one last time. I’m really tired tonight. I was at the gallery all day. We’re going to the mall tomorrow afternoon; you can meet us there. The mall, nice and public. Suddenly, you’re very grateful for how conservative Japan is regarding PDA. Another layer of protection, though this one is supplied by societal norms. 

SG: What mall and what time? I have therapy at 1:00 PM tomorrow, so if it can be after that, I’d prefer that if possible. 

Normally, you’d tell him to get fucked and either be there when you and Ender are going or not bother at all. But therapy? Who the fuck is this guy and what has he done with your ex-husband? Satoru Gojo’s fatal flaw is that he refuses to lean on anyone when he needs help or feels a type of way. This has to be a joke.

You type out another message, Tokyo Solamachi, 1:30 then. After you hit send, you stare at the screen of your phone for a minute. Then, you start typing again. You’re going to therapy?

Just then, Ender tugs at the bottom of your formal black dress. “Mommy, can we go, please? I’m bored.”

“You’re bored, huh? Alright, we can go. Here, take my hand,” you say, looking down at your son. His blue eyes are the exact same shade as Satoru’s, down to the flecks of teal and navy. That pout is all Satoru, too. God, they look so alike that it hurts. 

He slides his hand into yours, and the two of you start making your way through the museum toward the entrance. Ender sticks close by you, squeezing your hand every so often with his little fingers. As you’re walking, you get another ping on your phone. 

SG: Got it. Thank you. 

SG: Yeah, every week for the foreseeable future. Had my first session last week.

Okay, now you’re seriously starting to question whether you died and woke up in some alternate universe where your ex-husband is actually being proactive about his mental health and well-being. Seriously, what the fuck? But then you remember, he was basically programmed not to ask for help with anything. It’s probably part of the reason he’s so messed up. Scratch that, it’s definitely a part of the reason he’s screwed up. 

You don’t reply to those messages, just tuck your phone away in your bag and focus on Ender as you shoulder open the heavy doors to the museum. The air is stagnant and heavy, the moisture from the humidity almost tangible. Overhead, the sweltering sun turns the atmosphere into a warm soup. 

“Mommy, it tastes wet,” Ender says, a frown tugging at his lips. “I don’t like it.”

“Me neither, kid,” you reply with a laugh. Before he can ask why it ‘tastes wet’ (and you’re certain he was going to), you add, “It’s called humidity. In places that are very warm and have lots of water, the heat makes the water evaporate into the air.”

“What does eva-evap-evap—“

“Evaporate,” you repeat the word slowly, over-enunciating so he can hear the way you say it very clearly and see how your mouth moves to make the sound. Pulling out your phone again, you order an Uber for the two of you back to the apartment. 

“Yeah!” He lets out happily, pleased you understood what he was trying to say. “What does evaporate mean?”

Now that you’ve ordered the Uber, you slip your phone back and try to think of a way to explain it that he’ll understand. “Well, you know when Mommy accidentally boils water too long and then I have to add more water because some of it turned into steam and disappeared?”

Ender nods, his silky white locks bouncing every time. “Yeah, I know.”

“That’s evaporation. That’s how clouds are made too. Water evaporates into the air, then when enough of it is in the air, they form into a cloud, which later comes back as rain. It’s a cycle.” You raise your hand into the air and draw an invisible circle to demonstrate. His thirst for knowledge, for learning, is precious to you, something you try to nurture as much as possible. Any classes or educational activities he’s interested in, you do with him, anything he has questions about, you answer as best you can, any books he likes, you buy him. 

“What’s a cycle, Mommy?” He asks, tilting his head to look back at you. 

Just then, your Uber pulls up to the curb. Approaching the car, you open the door, and Ender crawls in first, then you slide in behind him. Pulling the door closed, you settle him into the seat and belt him in. Once he’s ready, you buckle yourself in while you try to think of a way to explain it. “It’s like a circle. Think of the seasons. We have spring first, then summer, then autumn, then winter. Every year, they repeat in that same order. That’s a cycle.”

“Are cycles a good thing?”

You hum. Jeeze, he’s hitting you with some questions that have very complicated answers today. “Sometimes,” you reply at length, looking down at your son as he snuggles against your side, “But sometimes they can be bad too.”

He looks up at you again, those clear blue eyes full of sweet innocence. “Kind of like people.”

His words hit you right in the heart. They almost bring tears to your eyes because all you can think about is Satoru and the cycle he’s stuck in with his parents, who are bad people, as Ender would bluntly say. You turn your head to surreptitiously wipe away the wet droplets clinging to your lashes. “That’s exactly right, baby,” you say softly, “Kind of like people.” 

The Uber pulls away from the curb, diving into Tokyo traffic. A brilliant sunset stains the sky in shades of crimson, pink, orange, and violet overhead. The colors bounce off the glass windows of the skyscrapers all around. 

“Bad guys can change sides though,” Ender says thoughtfully. “Can cycles change sides?”

You hum and don’t say anything for a while. The Uber goes over a bump that has you bouncing in your seat just a little. “It doesn’t exactly work like that,” you say eventually, “A bad cycle is a bad cycle. It doesn’t get better. But, sometimes, you can break a bad cycle and replace it with a good one.”

♡

(Satoru’s POV)

He never knew so many shades of beige existed until he walked into the therapist’s waiting room. The air smells of lavender and something chemical, like some sort of sanitizer. The receptionist, a young girl who glances at him curiously every so often, like she too is wondering what the hell Satoru Gojo is doing in a therapy office. She checks him in and directs him to sit anywhere, so he plops down on a comfortable couch against the wall. Tilting his head back, his long, sweeping lashes flutter closed.

It’s a good thing Satoru was able to get this appointment so quickly because he definitely has some things to talk about. He’s avoiding his parents, and Kaori for that matter. Shamelessly. He has about a hundred missed calls from his father, his mother, Kaori, and even a few from the household staff as well, probably hoping he would answer because he’s not familiar with those numbers. He’s counting up the texts too; he’s at 151 missed texts. He hasn’t read any of them in full, only caught glimpses of sentences. He’s avoiding that too, like a coward. 

From what he’s seen, it’s not been good anyway. Long strings of insults, guilt trips, and threats from his parents; on Kaori’s end, it’s much the same, but with far fewer insults. Every time he thinks about just saying he’s done, it’s like he’s paralyzed. His body locks up, his heart starts to race, and his breathing turns fast and shallow, then the dizziness and the nausea hit him.

For the last week, he’s been staying at Suguru’s place instead of going back to the penthouse he shares with Kaori. He also hasn’t been going into work and has been generally steering clear of his usual haunts. It’s been such a relief to be away from them, to not have to see them every day, to not have his heart broken into smaller and smaller pieces every time they have to be in the same room. 

Part of the reason he’s waiting and avoiding is that he wanted to have this appointment before making any moves. He’s nervous and not sure of the best way to handle cutting things off between him and Kaori, even less so with him and his parents. He knows he wants to. But how he actually gets from point A to point B, he has no fucking clue. He lets out a gusty sigh just as the office door creaks open, and his head immediately jerks upright. A tall man with tan skin enters the waiting room, his dark eyes landing on Satoru, a pensive expression on his face. A pair of rectangular spectacles sits high on the bridge of his nose. His chin boasts a dark goatee, complementing his haircut, shaved sides, a little longer on top.

“Satoru Gojo,” Dr. Yaga’s voice is deep and raspy.

Slowly, Satoru unfolds his long limbs and rises to his feet. He follows the man into his office. It’s spacious—a low coffee table in the middle of the room, backed by a large couch nestled against the wall, flanked by two sitting chairs. The couch is a soft, calming shade of blue, the only departure from beige he’s seen thus far. Scattered across the table, there are several psychology magazines, glossy covers shiny under the warm lighting. In the back corner of the office, there’s a large wooden desk, scattered with notebooks. Behind the desk sits a big filing cabinet, and against the wall to the side of the desk, a massive bookshelf filled with psychology books. 

“Sit wherever you’d like,” he says, gesturing toward the chairs and the couch, “Make yourself comfortable.”

Satoru drops onto the couch while the doctor grabs a clipboard and a pen from his desk and takes a seat in one of the chairs. The doctor takes his time, settling in, reviewing what looks to be the forms Satoru had filled out online with Shoko a few days ago. His dark eyes flick back and forth behind the lenses of his glasses. Shifting uncomfortably, Satoru waits for the doctor to take the lead because he’s not even sure where to begin, though he knows he has to begin with his parents. 

Dr. Yaga lets out a breath and lowers his clipboard to look Satoru in the eyes. “So, Satoru, tell me a little bit about what brings you in today.”

“Well, Doc, my friends told me that I’m really messed up in the head and that I needed to get help … so I’m getting help.” his answer is reflexively flippant, uncaring, the way he treats things when he wants to hide how fucking vulnerable he feels. 

There’s silence for a couple of seconds, the scratch of a pen against paper. The doctor tilts his head, a dark brow arching up, “Do you feel like you need help?” He taps his pen on the edge of his clipboard. 

Satoru doesn’t answer right away. His jaw flexes as his molars grind together, eyes finding the wooden floor. “Yeah, I guess so,” he mutters reluctantly. “I—I just found out I have a son,” Satoru murmurs. He swallows, “And I don’t want to mess him up.”

“Good. Tell me some more about that,” Dr. Yaga says, nodding as he takes down some more notes. Satoru watches the bob and dip of his pen with each stroke. He writes quickly, eyes darting up to look at Satoru every so often. 

Just thinking of Ender, of you, in this quiet room makes him want to cry, but he refuses to let himself. Instead, he takes a deep breath and begins to tell his therapist your story, his story, his son’s story. He has to start at the beginning, back in college, how he fell in love with you from the moment he laid eyes on you, how much you loved each other, how his parents treated you from the very beginning, how it got progressively worse after you married, how he slowly stopped defending you because nothing seemed to to get them to stop, how his parents hired Kaori as his assistant, how he started spending time with her because he was fucking stupid and thought they’d lay off you if he did, and finally about the night that lead to the demise of your marriage. 

It takes Satoru twenty-five minutes to get through it all, and he barely manages to do so without bursting into tears, but at the end he sits beneath the weight of a silence that feels suffocating. So many emotions are swirling through his chest: rage, shame, guilt, pain, grief, sorrow. 

Dr. Yaga sets his clipboard aside for a moment and sits back in his seat, lifting his leg to rest his ankle across his knee. “Satoru, how much thought have you given to this affair you had with Kaori?” It feels like a pointed question, but Satoru’s not picking up on where he’s going.

“Um, a lot, I kind of ruined my fucking life with it,” Satoru responds bitterly, that ball of emotions crawling up his throat threatening to burst out, but he swallows them down. His Adam’s apple jumps, his teeth sinking into the soft flesh of his inner cheek. 

This is the last thing he wants to talk about. He’s never given anyone the details of what happened that night to anybody but you, and even that was just a week ago. Just thinking about that night makes him feel small, broken, and ashamed. If he does talk about it with anyone, though, it should probably be this guy. At least he’s paid not to judge Satoru. 

“Let’s talk this through a bit more,” Dr. Yaga says. “There’s a lot to unpack here and a lot of it is tangled up in your relationship with your parents, which we’ll broach later, if that’s okay. But I’m not certain you’re viewing this affair, as you so-called it, clearly.” His voice is calm and steady, which eases Satoru’s nerves. He continues after a brief pause, “I want to clear that up before we touch anything else.”

Satoru reluctantly nods. The buttery afternoon sun drenches his silky white hair through the window, gilding the strands in gold. 

“You said you had no romantic feelings for Kaori, correct? And you weren’t even attracted to her,” the doctor says. “If you had been sober, do you think you would have slept with her?”

Satoru shakes his head vigorously, his mouth twisted into a grimace. It’s the truth. He never would have done that, not in a million years. “No, I wouldn’t have,”  he replies. “The only reason I was spending any time with her at all was to appease my parents.”

Dr. Yaga nods, “Right. And you don’t drink much, you said, right? Or didn’t back then?”

Again, Satoru shakes his head, “I was a lightweight, or I used to be anyway.”

“And she knew this and kept giving you alcohol anyway?”

This time, Satoru nods. That night, she would order a drink, then claimed she was unable to finish it for one reason or another. One was too sweet, the next too sour, one she didn’t realize had a flavor she didn’t like in it, and so forth. She told him there was barely any alcohol in them and told him that she always asked the bartender to go easy on the alcohol. But with every half-drink he finished, the more shitfaced he got. He can’t remember how many he finished. There’s a hazy part where he vaguely remembers her trying to sit on his lap, but he pushed her away. He remembers her hand in his hair, yanking it so hard that it hurt to tilt his head back, and outright pouring a drink down his throat. After that, nothing. That’s his last memory of the night. “Yeah,” Satoru rasps, his chest starting to rise and fall rapidly. He feels sick, sick and ashamed, and like he wants to cry until he can’t cry anymore. 

The doctor nods, giving him a look of empathy, but not pity. “Mr. Gojo, it doesn’t sound like you willingly had an affair,” he says gently. “What you’re describing sounds like you were taken advantage of.” 

Satoru blinks at the older man sitting across from him. This awful feeling curdles in his belly, and his teeth sink into the meat of the inside of his cheek, so hard he tastes blood. The sweet-salty coppery tang fills his mouth, and he can’t move; he can hardly believe. He shakes his head rapidly, a tremor running through him. Shame like a lead ball forces his head down lower and lower. “No, that’s not—it’s just—it can’t—“ 

The thought of calling it that makes him feel useless and angry and small. He’s muscular, broad, and absurdly tall; there’s no reason anyone should be able to take advantage of him. He’s supposed to be stronger than that, supposed to be able to defend himself, and yet … He swallows, teeth sinking even deeper into his cheek, the pain helping to ground him. 

Dr. Yaga hums and picks up his clipboard again. Satoru watches as he scribbles in a few notes, though he can’t make out what they say. After a moment, the man sets the board aside again and says, “So you don’t believe you were assaulted?” One dark brow arches up, and Satoru squirms beneath the intensely serious gaze. “Why is that?”

Jaw aching from how hard he’s clenching it, Satoru looks away from Dr. Yaga then. His blue eyes go towards the window, the bright blue sky beyond. He’s silent for a long time, the only sounds in the room the ticking of the elegant wooden clock hung from the wall, the sounds of their breathing, and the chirp of birds beyond the window. “I mean, it would be kind of a joke, wouldn’t it?” He mutters, slouching into the couch, eyes dropping down to his lap. “I’m over 190 cm. I’m not exactly out of shape. How could—“ he swallows, shoving the nausea back down. “How could it be anything but a joke?” The disgust he feels at himself leaks into his voice. “I did this to satisfy myself. I slept with her,” he adds, his eyes blazing because it’s the only thing that’s keeping him from curling in on himself and being sick to his stomach, “Spending time with her felt good, so this is my fault.” But his protests sound paper-thin even to himself. 

“I see,” Dr. Yaga murmurs, picking his clipboard back up. There’s nothing but the sound of his pen scratching against paper for a few moments. Satoru is starting to feel uncomfortable in the silence, as if the layers of him are slowly being pulled back like a curtain before the theater. His knee bounces up and down, the restless energy translating into a need to move something or do something. After a moment, the doctor leans back, “Let’s try looking at this from another perspective, huh?” Dr. Yaga leans forward and braces his elbows against his knees. He leans forward until his chin is resting on his hands. “I want you to picture this exact same scenario, except I want to imagine what happened to you as having happened to your ex-wife  instead.”

“What do you mean?”

The doctor sighs. “If your wife came home one morning and described this exact same scenario. A man plies her with a bunch of drinks until she’s black-out drunk, then she sleeps with him, with no memory of doing it, what would your reaction have been?”

“I would have taken her to the hospital and made sure she was okay,” Satoru says slowly, “Then, I would have found him, and I would have killed him.” His voice is cold and serious, like he means every word. And he does. The idea of anyone taking advantage of you—oh. He sees what the doc is doing. Clever man. “I see your point,” he grits out. 

Dark eyes fix onto Satoru’s blue ones. His brows are drawn together, lips pursed. “Why are you so reluctant to believe that you’re a victim?”

“Because …” he trails, the shame stealing the words right from his mouth. He sits in silence trying to get them to come out, and he does, though it takes him quite a while, “Because sometimes it felt good to be with Kaori, not the sleeping with her thing, but when it was the dinners and lunches. It felt … I don’t know … relaxing?”

The doctor hums thoughtfully and sits back in his seat again. His head tilts to the side, eyes flicking up and down Satoru in a way that makes him want to shift around uncomfortably. “Your parents hired Kaori, right? They suggested you start taking her out to dinners and lunches?”

Satoru snorts and drags a hand through his hair, long fingers tangling in the messy, snowy silken locks. “Bombarded me is more like. Every conversation. Every time we saw each other. If they weren’t talking shit about my wife, they were singing Kaori’s praises and insisting I take her out as thanks for the work she was putting in at the company.” He was so fucking tired of it. At every waking moment, he felt like he was being yanked in half.

“Ah, I see where you’re going wrong,” Yaga says calmly, his voice low and even, something like sympathy in his eyes. “When a dog is starved, scraps may seem fulfilling, even if they’re barely keeping the animal alive. Satoru, are you sure it felt good to be with Kaori? Or, did it feel good to have a break from your parents' verbal abuse because you were doing what they wanted?” 

The question hits its mark, knocking Satoru upside the head. He blinks at the man across from him, not moving, not even breathing really. His head bows and he looks down at his lap, eyes tracing the creases and folds like they hold the answer to the question he’s held in his heart since he was a small child. He swallows, Adam’s apple jumping up then back down. “I don’t know.” his voice comes out very small, wounded.

“Yes, you do,” Dr. Yaga murmurs. 

That’s when he can’t hold back the tears any longer. They line his lower lashes, and he reaches up to harshly scrub them away. When he was small, his parents would mock him and spank or pinch him if they caught him crying; he hates crying in front of other people to this day. “I just wanted them to be happy for me or with me, something, anything,” he bursts out, the words raw and filled with a lifetime of grief. “I just wanted … I just wanted my wife to be happy again. I wanted to make everyone happy and I couldn’t because I’m fucking useless.” At the end, he’s breathing hard and heavy, tears he can’t stop rolling down his cheeks. There’s so much anger, so much fucking rage that he’s nearly blinded by the heat of it, buried in him. It’s a space inside himself that he has never touched, that he’s not sure he can touch because he’s a little scared of the things he would do if he did.

Silence stretches, and Dr. Yaga just watches and waits patiently for Satoru’s breath to even out. “You don’t have to make everyone happy. Your parents have conditioned you to put them above anybody else by forcing you to live off scraps, so to speak. You’ve become dependent on the little bit they do give you and have absorbed the message over time that your happiness, your dreams, your wishes don’t matter. That’s not the case, Satoru. You decide what matters to you.” He pauses, “Do you want a relationship with your parents? As things stand now, with the people they are now, is that a core goal for your future?”

It takes Satoru a long time to answer, and when he does, it’s only the tiniest shake of his head. He feels like he’s betraying, well, he doesn’t even know what or who, but he feels like he’s betraying someone or something. An overwhelming sensation of guilt crashes over him, and he freezes up. “I’m so tired. I just … I just want my son and my wife.” He doesn’t even realize he’s stopped referring to you as his ex-wife. His hands clench into fists, “But every time I think about trying to cut them off, to end things with Kaori, I feel … frozen. Like I can’t do anything, or think anything, or say anything at all.”

“Many children who have strained relationships with their parents will find it easier to write their thoughts, boundaries, and feelings down in a letter rather than saying them to their loved ones directly. What I would suggest is writing two letters. One to your parents and another to Kaori. I want you to include the harm that they’ve caused, the damage it has done to you, and how you envision the future of your relationships with them.” Dr. Yaga pauses and picks up his pen and clipboard again to take a few more notes. “But I want you to pretend that you’re only writing them to read to me. Then we can discuss them next session. Do you think you can do that, Satoru?”

He mulls the idea over in his mind for a moment. In theory, it sounds simple enough, but he worries that it’ll all come out to be a jumbled mess or that he won’t be able to organize his thoughts well enough. Or, worse, he’ll be unable to come up with anything at all. But anything is better than actually speaking to his parents or Kaori right now, so he’ll give it a shot. “Yeah, I can try that,” he says, reaching up to tug on his hair again. “Not that it’s gonna make much of a difference. My parents and Kaori don’t really have a great track record of listening to me.

“Elaborate on that,” Dr. Yaga replies, picking up his clipboard and pen again. He scribbles several lines of notes and 

Satoru shrugs, “I don’t know.” He shifts uncomfortably again, unsure how to explain this complex feeling he has. “I can tell them my thoughts and opinions until I’m blue in the face, and they’ll brush it off and do whatever they want. If I say I’m uncomfortable with something or don’t want to do it, it gets brushed off, or I get told off because I shouldn’t feel that way.”

“And is this something your parents alone do? Or, your parents and Kaori both?”

“Both,” Satoru replies. “Kaori listens to my parents, and they listen to her, but no one actually listens to me.”

“Your parents listen to Kaori?” Dr. Yaga immediately asks, a crease forming between his brows. He jots down another line on the paper, then his flick back up to meet Satoru’s. “That’s interesting.” He pauses, his head tilting. “Let’s put a pin in this for now, but bookmark that. We’ll discuss it next session.” Letting out a breath, Dr. Yaga says, “So, this is how this usually works. Not all therapists are a great fit for every client. Typically, I use the initial three appointments or so to gauge if I’ll be able to help you and allow you to gauge whether you think I’ll be able to help you. Most therapy includes homework, a few activities I’ll assign to you each week.” He pauses, making sure Satoru is following along. “This week, I’d like you to work on those letters, and I’d also like you to research Narcissistic Personality Disorders. We’ll discuss that next session, but I want you to take note of any symptoms you feel you would describe your parents.”

Satoru nods. “Thank you, Dr. Yaga.”

The man just smiles. “You’re a resilient young man, Satoru. Our parents shape a lot of who we are, but we don’t have to be them. You’ve already taken an important first step in recognizing that here is a problem and taking the initiative to try and heal it.”

Satoru just hums and pushes himself to his feet. “I don’t know, doc. Honestly, I have no clue what the hell I’m doing.”

“And that’s okay,” Dr. Yaga replies as he rises from his chair and walks toward his desk. “That’s what I’m here for: to nudge you in the right direction, and, eventually, you’ll know exactly where you’re going. We just need to put the tools in your hands to get you there.” For some reason, Satoru actually finds that really uplifting. Setting his clipboard down, the doctor turns back to face Satoru and asks, “So, how do you feel about the session that we’re wrapping up now?”

He came into this expecting to leave it with the same view he had on therapy as before he went into it, that it was just a bunch of jumbo jumbo cooked up by a bunch of not-doctors that didn’t actually help anyone. But he has to say that he’s been pleasantly surprised with the experience. “Um, good. You’ve definitely given me some things to think about,” he replies, “And it wasn’t really what I expected, which is a good thing.” He reaches up and scratches the back of his head awkwardly. 

Dr. Yaga chuckles, “Good. I’m glad. I’ll see you next week then.”

“See you next week.”

♡

When you and Ender arrive at the mall, he’s itching to be running around. Since recovering from his illness, his energy seems to be boundless, which can be a lot to keep up with on your own. Honestly, you’re a tiny bit grateful to have another person who can help you keep a metaphorical leash on the kid. He points out any stores that interest him, trying to sound out the Japanese characters he recognizes from his lessons. Everyone you pass as you head toward the entrance of the mall coos, waves, or chatters at Ender, always attracting attention everywhere you go, just like Satoru does. 

“Do you want to wait for Satoru, or do you just want to go in?” You ask, leaving the choice to your son.

“Wanna wait,” he says, bouncing on his toes, “I’m really sad I didn’t get to build the Lego with him.”

His mouth on yours, lips moving in perfect rhythm like a dance only the two of you have ever known. The taste of him like a drug you’d been addicted to once, but kicked like a bad habit. That familiar, deep groan, similar to the one he used to make when he would slide inside you. Your heart picks up speed in your chest, fluttering dangerously. “I don’t even remember sleeping with her.” You shake your head to clear it. Fuck, you need to get it together. Taking a deep breath to slow your heart, you look down at your son and say softly, “Ender, do you like Satoru?”

He nods vigorously, his blue eyes sparkling with happiness. “He’s so silly. And he’s big, so I can ride on his shoulders. And he likes Legos like me. And he looks like me.” He pauses and immediately gets distracted as he’s prone to do, “Mommy, can we play Simon Says while we wait?”

“Of course, baby,” you say, but as you play, you’re only paying enough attention for your son not to notice you’re not really all in it. 

No, you’re too busy thinking about the things he was saying earlier, about how he likes Satoru, about what Satoru told you about his ‘relationship’ with Kaori, if you can even call it that, about his parents, about everything. Kaori has always disgusted you a little bit. What kind of woman goes after another woman’s husband? That’s just not very feminist. Of course, Satoru had always disgusted you more. But the longer you’ve sat with what he told you, the less disgusted you’ve grown with Satoru and the more disgusted you’ve grown with Kaori. It makes the complicated knot of emotions inside you even denser and more twisted.

Forgiveness isn’t quite the right word, but perhaps, softened. The fact that he’s going to therapy is what solidified it for you; he must have been telling the truth. Plus, every time you’ve interacted, he’s looked like he’s trapped in some kind of third plane between agony and euphoria. 

Your heart aches horribly for your sweet boy who so badly wants a father, but has never once complained or done a single thing to make you feel less than as his only parent. And you know he would benefit from it is the worst thing. It would be good for him to have Satoru around, not only from just having a father, but also from the contrast of your personalities. Where you’re cautious, prone to worrying, perfectionist, he’s optimistically carefree, confident, and quick to look for fun. 

“Hi.” The sound of his voice makes you jump, and you let out a little shriek, whirling around to face him. Your mouth falls open in outrage, your tongue ready to chew him out, but he’s laughing, eyes all crinkled, and your son is laughing, and you just can’t help but join in too. It’s infectious. 

“Satoru,” Ender shouts, dragging his name out excitedly. He nearly trips over himself in his excitement to run over, and it makes your heart thump hard in your chest. Satoru crouches down to scoop him up, throw him over his shoulder, and spin him around. Your son giggles like a banshee the whole time, shrieking and laughing in a way that almost brings tears to your eyes. And he’s only met the fucking man once, really. 

When Satoru sets him down, your little boy runs over to you and says, “Can we go in now, Mommy?”

“Yep,” you say, reaching down to ruffle his hair, “Let’s go in now. You can take either my hand or Satoru’s hand.” He takes Satoru’s hand. 

Throughout your trip to the mall, you lose track of the number of times that Satoru slaps his card against the card reader. Anything at all that Ender shows any amount of interest in, and he’s already pulling his wallet out of his pocket—Legos, figurines, toys, clothes. Watching them interact is less painful than it was at the aquarium. If he really cuts ties with his parents and Kaori, that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he intends to put Ender first. 

Every so often, you’ll catch Satoru glancing at you, staring at you when he thinks you can’t see him, and it makes your heart race, makes you feel like you can’t quite breathe right. Every time you look at his mouth, your mind (unhelpfully) decides to give you a slow-mo, play-by-play re-hash of that kiss. 

About halfway through the trip, you reach a little kiddie play area where you let Ender go buck wild. It’s got a mini ball pit, a little slide, some little rocking things, a small tower, and a short set of monkey bars. He needs to get the energy out anyway. You and Satoru take a seat together on one of the benches off to the side. Other kids are already running around playing, but he makes friends quickly. 

For a long time, neither of you say anything. Satoru watches Ender zip around the little mini playground, lost in whatever story his vivid imagination is telling him, with intense focus. Finally, he says, “I really love him. He’s perfect, all the best parts of us.”

You nod, “Yeah, he is.”

“I meant what I said the other day,” he says, his tone serious, “I’m glad you don’t want my parents to know about him because I don’t want them to know either. The thought of them being around him makes me feel sick.”

“Yeah,” you reply softly. Silence lapses between you again, but this time you’re the one to break it. “Are you really going to therapy?”

He chuckles, eyes sliding over to you. The smile tugging on the corner of his mouth is a little wry. “Yeah, who would have thought? Me going to therapy?” He says, but then his eyes flick back to Ender, “I don’t want to mess him up the way I got messed up.” He pauses and lets out a long breath. “If you don’t believe me, I can show you the appointment confirmation.”

You shake your head, “No. No, I believe you.” It’s the truth. The fact that he’s offering to show it to you is enough for you. “How was your appointment?”

He nods. “Good. We talked a lot about Kaori and my parents and the night I …” He trails off and looks back at you, “The night I ruined everything.”

“Satoru …” you start, a note of uneasiness in your voice, not because you’re angry like you have been for the last six years, but because if you talk about this with him, you might end up forgiving him and you’re not ready to do that yet. It’s not as if you’re not angry anymore, but the anger is different now, changed. And you’re clinging to what’s left of it with everything you have because you’re terrified of what it would mean to no longer have that crutch as both a weapon and a shield. But you can’t just ignore what he told you. Whether you like it or not, it does change things. So, you just sigh and murmur, “Why didn’t you tell me when I confronted you about how it all happened?”

He watches as Ender jumps into the little ball pit, shrieks and giggles tumbling from his mouth as he plays with the other children. Even with the language barrier, he still manages to make friends. “I don’t know. I was sort of shell-shocked, still, I guess, and a part of me thought that you’d be better off if we weren’t married anymore. I just wanted you to be happy, and I was starting to feel like, if you stayed with me, you’d never be happy again.”

You swallow, tears welling in your eyes for some reason. “I wish you had talked to me,” you whisper.

“Yeah, me too,” he murmurs.

Ender runs back over, and the three of you continue on your mall excursion. You all stop for takoyaki, which Ender is not a fan of. “I don’t like the way the chewy parts rub my teeth, Mommy.” So, you and Satoru end up finishing off the two skewers. It feels horribly, wonderfully natural to spend time together like this. Whenever Ender asks for a piggyback or to ride on Satoru’s shoulders, he acquiesces indulgently, like he’s willing to do anything to put a smile on the kid’s face. It feels dangerously like you guys are a real family. 

As the evening deepens, Satoru turns to you and says, “Want to go up in the sky tree? I’ll pay.”

“The sky tree?” Ender cuts in, child-like wonder lacing his voice. He wraps his arms around your leg. You can see that he’s starting to get sleepy in the way his blue eyes are watery and glazed at the same time. Then his little mouth stretches into a yawn, and he nuzzles his cheek against your thigh.

“The tower behind the mall,” you explain, reaching down to run your fingers through his soft hair. 

“I wanna go up,” he says, all sleepily, and you know that by the time you actually make it to the top, he’ll be out if you carry him. 

But you can’t bring yourself to deny him, so you nod and scoop him up, “Alright, we’ll go up.”

Ender wraps his arms around your neck and nestles his head into the crook of your shoulder. You and Satoru walk side by side as you make your way toward the mall’s exit. What neither of you notice, though, is Kaori, across the open area of the mall, staring at the three of you as you walk outside, pulling her phone out of her bag with a white-knuckled grip.

As predicted, Ender is completely done for by the time you make it to the top of the sky tree. Tokyo is spread out around you in a glittering blanket beneath a gorgeous orange, red, lilac, and periwinkle. You go to stand near the edge, so you can get a better look at the view. If you weren’t holding Ender, you’d pull out your phone to take some pictures.

“He’s out cold,” Satoru says softly as he comes to stand beside you. 

“Yeah, I could tell he was getting to that point when we while we were down in the mall,” you reply, running your hand affectionately up and down his back. There’s a heavy silence between you and other visitors milling around, but it feels like it’s just the two of you. Swallowing down all your fears, all your nervousness, you clear your throat and say softly, “If you cut off your parents and ditch Kaori, then I’ll tell him the truth. I’ll tell him you’re his father.”

A/N: Hugs and kisses. Sorry this is late. I hope everyone enjoys. Like, comments, reblogs are all appreciated

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You laugh while grabbing your purse, "Guys usually don't get flowers for their dates imaginary twin sisters." "What can I say? I'm all inclusive," He slings his arm over your shoulder and beams down at you. You both approach his sports car, you notice the suitcase in the back seat as you get inside. Satoru closes the door before jogging to the drivers side and getting in. "Planning to murder me or something?" you glance at the suitcase. "Duh. I just brought snacks for afterward," He says sarcastically before starting the engine and driving off.

"Well my curfew is at 11 so murder me before then." "Gocha," he winks.

At first you thought he was cracking a joke to maybe release some of the awkwardness of the entire ordeal, or maybe just a way to make you laugh.

That was, until, you saw him approaching the airport, which is precisely when you realized that this was not a normal date.

Then again, Gojo isn't a normal human being, so maybe it is normal. For him.

He glanced at you from the corner of his eye, telling you that he emailed you your itinerary and to make sure to have it ready because apparently your flight was leaving in 10 minutes.

Now you weren't the most educated person on first dates and what not, but you knew that going to the airport was not... ideal.

But, despite your hesitance and dull feeling in your gut that Satoru truly was going to kill you, you found yourself on Satoru's private jet for two and a half hours while he assured you that he was not, in fact, going to kill you.

You both arrived in Okinawa, where Satoru then took you to a park.

You got out of the car he rented, looking up at the endless expanse of stars in awe. Your eyes were glued to the marvelousness in front of you, the small white dots appearing as grains of sand.

You tried to make out constellations you recalled learning about briefly on YouTube before ultimately giving up and taking in the view. "...Satoru, where are we?" "A park! To stargaze. And stuff." He gestures behind him to the expanse of stars and sky in front of you both. "I remember you saying a few weeks ago that you liked looking at the stars and stuff so I thought you might like this since Okinawa is a dark sky community and stuff, but if its too much we can totally go back home I know you're probably-" "It's perfect." You cut off his rambling, giving him a reassuring smile. "You didnt have to book a plane ticket though," you laugh. "I only wanted you to have the best."

You both ended up finding a spot with no trees or mountains blocking your view, on top of a large boulder.

Satoru dragged his mysterious suitcase along with him, opening it up to reveal snacks and blankets.

"In case we got cold. Or hungry," He passes you a rice ball.

You both lay back, side by side and Satoru spends the whole night identifying constellations that don't exist, while also giving them origin stories.

"That one right there," He points in a completely random direction, "That one's us." "...Sartoru, that's a satellite."

"..." he pauses for a beat. "Still counts."

He scooches closer to you, inch by inch until his shoulder and legs are pressed to yours, turning his head to the side to look at the side of your face. Your gaze remains on the sky but you can feel his breathing against your face. "Do you like space?" he suddenly asks. "Yeah, it's cool. I think is fascinating to wonder what's out th-" "I like your space."

He's already violating it. And suspiciously closer.

You slowly turn your head.

You look at him.

Then at the two feet of empty rock beside him.

Then back at him.

"I can tell."

"Guess what else?" He whispers, shoving a gummy worm in his mouth. "What."

"You haven't told me to move." he smirks.

"Move."

"That wasn't genuine."

"I absolutely meant that."

"No because you're still talking to me instead of physically relocating."

"...I shouldn't have to evacuate every time you show up."

"Seems like you've accepted me into your personal space and you're just scared to admit it."

You sigh. "That's not what that means."

"Lets agree to disagree."

Somewhere between stargazing and sunrise, you both fall asleep. You wake up at four a.m to the ocean light peeking over the horizon, before deciding to fly back home.

Although, thinking back on it, you both could have teleported home, but you arrived back in Tokyo around seven a.m.

He drops you off back at your front door, his heart feeling like it's going to implode by looking at the sleepy look in your eyes.

"Thank you for tonight."

"My pleasure, princess," He bows dramatically.

You laugh, "I thought I told you my curfew was at 11 pm?"

"Well, you're home, alive, and safe so I don't see the problem?"

"You broke the rules," you gently push at his shoulder.

"Rules were made to be broken," he shrugs before stepping closer and tilting his head down to your ear, lips stopping by your cheek.

"See you on our second date," he whispers, pressing his lips softly to the side of your face before giggling like an idiot and running away.

You nearly choked on your own spit, “Satoru — ?” He interjected, “Come on, we’ve been practically seeing each other for months now, and you kissed me that one time!”

“That was because you’re unfairly pretty,” you muttered — mostly to yourself.

He moved closer, intertwining his hand with yours, “I’d be a good husband, I promise.” You shook your head, trying to pry your hand away from his, “Satoru, you’re insane. You can’t even blame this on being drunk, you don’t even drink!”

In one swift motion he fell to his knees, “Please?” He whined, clasping both hands together. Groaning, you tried to hoist him up, “Don’t do this here, idiot.”

But he just doubled down, bowing his head and pleading.

“Please! Just one chance? Marry me?”

“Satoru, you don’t even have a ring!”

The white haired man smirked at this, “That wasn’t a no?” You smacked him upside the head, “Of course it was a no!”

The two of you went back and forth for what felt like hours when you finally snapped. “Okay! I’ll make you a deal. Take me on at least three dates then we can talk about dating — happy?”

Satoru pouted, reluctantly getting up from his place on the floor, “I guess it’s something. Three dates and then marriage?”

“No!”

He put his fingers to his chin, stroking an invisible beard before snapping his fingers, “Oh! I got it, the third date is the marriage.”

You sighed, pinching the bridge of your nose, “Keep this up and you won’t even get a first date.”

You turned to leave but he quickly spoke, “Fiancé says what?”

“What?”

“What?”

After about fifteen minutes pass, he pulls his phone out of his pocket and types out a message to you on Telegram: Hey, I know telling my parents is a no-go, which I’m all the way on board with, but am I allowed to tell Suguru at least about little man? He hits send and immediately types out another, And please let me know when you guys get home safe. 

His heart is beating so hard in his chest, the way it did back when he first met you, although he hid it beneath arrogance and his brazen attitude. But you saw through it, you always saw through it, cutting to the heart of him without even realizing you were doing it. The only other person who’s ever seen through his masks so easily is Suguru. 

To keep himself from obsessively checking his phone for your reply, he starts heading back to his car, parked down the block in a garage. He didn’t want it on the street, just in case his parents or Kaori happened to drive by, unlikely but not entirely impossible. 

Like the chances of running into you at that restaurant. Slim to none, but he won that 0.00001% chance lottery. That’s when he realizes there really must be some sort of higher power that’s looking out for him. Maybe Benzaiten or Hotei. Seriously, what are the odds? That the two of you happened to be in the same restaurant, in the same city, on the same day, at the same time? And yet you were there, and he was there, and you have Ender, his flesh and blood that you carried in your womb despite everything. 

When he reaches his car, he unlocks it, the beep echoing through the clean, quiet garage, and slides inside. A long sigh leaves his mouth as he sinks into the driver’s seat, stilling for a moment. His eyes drag over the ceiling as he tries to piece together his new reality. He’s a father.

It’s a state of being completely foreign to him. The only example of fatherhood he has is his own, and he doesn’t want to be that kind of father. In his bones, he knows that. He doesn’t want his son to ever feel the way that he’s felt. Honestly, he’s glad you don’t want his parents to know about Ender; he doesn’t want them knowing either. 

His phone finally pings, and he scrambles to unlock it. After pulling up the app, his eyes scan the message you sent back. 

LOML: Yeah, you can tell him, same rules apply though. He’s not going to say anything to your parents. You can tell any of your friends if you’re sure they won’t say anything to them or Kaori.

LOML: We just got back to the apartment.

LOML: Goodnight.

Yes, he set your contact as LOML. No, he’s not going to change it. It’s in English characters anyway, so it’s not like Kaori will figure it out because she speaks virtually no English. 

Well, at least you answered his questions, even though he was hoping to keep talking to you. After getting your permission, he immediately texts Suguru, Meet me at Musshu Mizuki. Drag Shoko along too. I have something important to tell you guys. He’s supposed to go to that stupid Gala tonight (it’s actually not stupid; he’s pretty sure the money goes to kids with cancer), but he just doesn’t feel like it. Besides, his presence makes no difference whatsoever. His parents will donate the appropriate amount of money, enough to make the company and family look good. He’s too keyed up to put on the fancy clothes and that smarmy, lying smile, too anxious and angry to play at being a happy family with his parents and Kaori.

That’s all it is, isn’t it? An act? When he was younger, he used to cry himself to sleep, hoping for something, anything, from his parents to indicate that there was even a drop of love in their hearts for him. They’ve always been good at the carrot-on-a-stick routine, giving him just enough crumbs to keep him from starving and aching for more. He’s been realizing more and more lately that even when he’s living his life to their exact specifications, they still don’t really love him. 

If they loved him, they would want him to be happy, right? But they don’t care, even a little bit. The question is: if even his parents can’t love him, the two people who are supposed to love him more than anyone, how could anybody else love him? Maybe he was born unlovable, something rotten in him. He’s always gotten by on his brazen charm and boundless optimism, but he’s starting to feel like a sports car that’s been left in the rain for too long—rusting, engine barely turning over.

His jaw clenches and unclenches as he pulls up the group chat between himself, his parents, and Kaori. He named it hell. Looking at their little pictures makes his hand clench white-knuckled around his phone. They dote on her in a way that they’ve never him. It burns him up inside. Why? He can’t understand how they can treat Kaori so well and yet treat him so differently. They load her up with compliments, spoil her stupid, brag about her to others, but Satoru may as well be chopped liver in comparison.

Slowly, he types out a message, Something came up with a client. Going with Suguru to handle it. Can’t make it tonight. After he hits send, he mutes the chat and stuffs his phone in his pocket. They’re going to be pissed, but he’s beyond caring at this point. 

For so long, he’s jumped through whatever hoops they’ve put in front of him, done the song and dance, and he is fucking exhausted. No matter how long he tries to star in the role of perfect son, the directors are never satisfied. He’s never been closer to quitting. You’re not a part of his life anymore, so it’s already ruined. May as well scatter the ashes. 

He takes his time getting to the high-end bar, feeling way more relaxed now that he’s backed out of that gala. Maybe Suguru will let him crash at his place tonight so he can avoid going back to that fucking apartment even longer.

After he parks in a nearby parking garage, he sits in his car for a few minutes, trying to organize his thoughts so he doesn’t just start bubbling. He can’t stop thinking about you, about Ender, about everything. It feels overwhelming, like he’s been dropped in the ocean, but he never learned how to swim. Then, there are his parents and Kaori. It’s all crushing him slowly. 

Letting out a long, weary sigh, Satoru lets himself out of the car and locks it behind him. The high-end izakaya is less than a block away, but the oppressive humid summer heat has him sweating in seconds. At least the breeze cuts through it, running through his silky, snowy hair as his long legs eat up distance. 

Right as he’s arriving, Suguru is as well. His best friend’s dark eyes flick up and down him. Before Satoru can even get a word out, Suguru tilts his head and says, “You look …” Suguru starts, but trails off, the words dissolving into a contemplative hum. His mouth twitches into a frown, and he finishes, “You look like you’ve been through hell.”

Shaking his head, Satoru says, “Kind of. I’ll explain everything after I get a drink in me. You’re never gonna fucking believe this, Suguru.” The two of them duck into the bar together and get a table. When everything was happening six years ago, Suguru was just as blindsided as you were—Suguru, Shoko, Nanami—they all were. Shoko slapped him right across the face when she found out, and Suguru just gave him this look of such profound disappointment that he could barely stand to look at the man. He felt like a kicked dog with his tail between his legs. Things are different now; they’ve forgiven him, mostly because they know by now that he’ll never forgive himself. At least they hate Kaori and his parents as much as he does. 

The host takes them to a small table for four tucked in the back corner. They don’t say much as they get settled and order a bottle of sake for the table. “Where were you today?” Suguru eventually asks while they wait for the waitress to bring the bottle. He slides his jacket off and folds it neatly over the back of his chair. Meticulous in everything. 

“At the aquarium,” Satoru says as casually as if he were saying he was in the office. 

Suguru’s golden-brown eyes narrow on him; his dark brows draw together for a second. “Okay, I’ll bite. What were you doing at the aquarium instead of being at the company like you’re supposed to be?” He pauses, his broad fingers tapping against the wooden table, before saying irritably, “Covered for you last night. Covered for you all day today. I might have to start charging you for my services.”

Satoru shoots him a dirty look and grumbles, “I have a legit excuse.”

“Like day drinking? Or, are you screwing around on Kaori now too?” Suguru counters, leaning back in his chair. His arms cross across his chest, and the look he gives Satoru could curdle milk.

It’s a low blow to an already tender wound. “No, I—“ the waitress arrives with a bottle of sake, showing it to the table before cracking it open and leaving them with two chilled sake cups. Satoru bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood. He supposes he deserves this too. 

Suguru silently pours them each out a cup, and when he’s done, the heavy thud of the bottle being set back on the table diffuses none of the tension. Sake is meant to be sipped, the delicate flavors savored, but that’s not what’s about to happen. Taking the cup, Satoru throws the alcohol back, downing the whole thing in one go. The cup clinks dully as he puts it back down. Before Suguru can say anything, he leans over and grabs the bottle to fill his glass again. The next follows in much the same way as the last. That is, right down the hatch. 

Satoru lets out a gusty sigh and slouches in his seat, head tilting back a little bit, white locks falling back with the motion. Reaching up, he scratches the back of his head at the line of his undercut. He’s about to open his mouth and start explaining when Shoko’s low, slightly raspy voice cuts in, “There are my two favorite idiots.”

She’s got on an A-line skirt and a silk blouse, but the comfortable shoes give her away as a healthcare worker rather than an office worker. He’s honestly surprised she was able to make it. This year she’s been working her ass off, trying to make it to dean of medicine at the University of Tokyo hospital. Their get-togethers have become few and far between as a result. 

“Hey Shoko,” Suguru says casually as she sweeps past, the scent of cigarettes and her sweet floral perfume wafting into the air as she shrugs her jacket off and tosses it haphazardly over the back of the chair. 

The two of them start making small talk, but Satoru just can’t keep it in anymore. The secret is knocking on his teeth in its effort to escape. “I have a son,” he blurts out, the words clanging through the air. 

The effect it has is instantaneous. Shoko trips over her own feet as she’s sinking into the chair, falling on her ass, which would normally make him laugh like a hyena. Suguru drops his glass on the table, slips right through his fingers, though luckily it just bounces, spilling the little bit of sake that was left in it. Then, together, the two of them bust out laughing, really laughing. Suguru’s hand is clapping on his thigh, hunched over, practically howling, and Shoko is laughing so hard she’s wiping tears from her doe-ish, downturned brown eyes.

“This isn’t fucking funny, guys,” Satoru snaps, glaring at them both. “I’m being serious.” 

They all fall silent as the waitress comes by to drop off the first round of appetizers.  The plate clinks against the table as she sets down the wide plate, oblivious to the thick tension between them all.

He really needs his friends to help him figure out what the fuck he’s doing because he has no idea. And that scares the shit out of him. Ender is such a beautiful, whole, happy child who clearly knows how much you love him, and he doesn’t want to be a wrecking ball. Neither of them is a parent, but then the only parents he knows are his own, and he’s only just now beginning to understand how shitty they are at that job.

Suguru and Shoko sober up immediately. Golden-brown eyes narrow at him from across the table. They exchange glances and Suguru murmurs, “Really? You, you of all people have a kid?” He pauses before saying quietly, “You mean to tell us Kaori is pregnant? Congratulations, man, that’s—“ 

There’s no real celebration in his voice, but Satoru cuts him off anyway. “No, just fuck no, Kaori’s not pregnant.” He shudders at the thought, “Don’t even put that into the universe. God, I think I would just end it all.” The alcohol is starting to hit him, a pink flush spreading down his neck and to the tips of his ears. Good. Sobriety sounds like a pretty shitty state to have this conversation in.

“Okay, then what are you talking about?” Shoko says slowly, leaning back in her chair, picking up a fork to twirl it between her steady surgeon’s fingers. Her eyes flick from Satoru to Suguru, then back to Satoru again, one thin brow arching up. 

He doesn’t try to explain because he’s starting to realize how crazy this sounds, especially to both of them, who know just how badly he’s missed you. They’ll probably think he fucking hallucinated the whole thing. Instead, he grabs his phone and pulls up the photo album you sent him. The header image is of you holding Ender from behind, your chin resting on his shoulder, huge smiles on both your faces. Sliding the phone across the table, he watches Suguru’s expression change from one of confusion and skepticism to one of disbelief. He tilts the phone for Shoko to see, and her jaw drops, practically hitting the table.

“Holy shit,” Shoko is the first to speak, blinking up at him, the words slow and drawn out, “Is that your ex-wife? With a whole child?” She looks down at the screen again, doesn’t wait for an answer because she already knows, “He looks exactly like you.” She glances back up at Satoru and gives him that little half smile that tells him she’s about to say something mean. “Bet that pissed her off. Would have pissed me off.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Satoru glares at her. He knows exactly what she means, but he doesn’t want to dwell on why it would have pissed you off, why you might hate your son’s face, his face but smaller and still bright with innocence. “He’s adorable.”

Shoko rolls her eyes, “Yeah, of course you think that. He looks like a little clone of you.”

Suguru, on the other hand, is staring at the album, his jaw clenching as he taps on it to go through some of the photos. “Where did you even get these? How?” His thumb flicks across the screen, eyes going back and forth as he peruses the thousands of pictures and videos you compiled of your son. 

“At the engagement party last night, I saw her from across the room. Thought I was hallucinating at first, but I couldn’t stop myself from chasing anyway,” Satoru explains, pouring himself another cup of sake. The first two have given him a solid buzz, and this last one will push him closer into drunk territory. Right where he needs to be. “But I wasn’t hallucinating, and it really was her.”

He pauses to take a sip of the sake. “She’s working in Japan over the summer and she …” He trails off, tears well in his eyes, the alcohol loosening his inhibitions. Reaching up, he wipes them away as surreptitiously as possible. Voice cracking with grief, Satoru continues a moment later, “His name is Ender. I’ve never met a cuter, sweeter, smarter kid.” His jaw clenches as he tries to figure out how to talk about this without losing it. “He’ll talk your ear off if you let him.”

“So, you’re telling us that your ex-wife, whom you cheated on and whose heart you broke, the woman you pathetically pine for years after screwing it all to hell, had your kid after she left you?” Suguru says slowly, and Satoru winces. He may as well be twisting a knife in Satoru’s gut. Shoko just listens, nibbling on the appetizers. 

“Fuck, do you have to constantly remind me that I ruined my own life?” Satoru snaps, his blue eyes glazed over with the alcohol flowing through his veins. “I get it, okay? I hate myself enough. I hate myself. Every fucking day, day in and day out, I fucking hate myself. I can’t look in the mirror most days.” He spins the kikichoko slowly between his fingers, looking at the blue and white concentric circles. They look like a bullseye at the bottom of the cup. “Sometimes, I think it would have been better for everyone if I had just never been born,” he admits, taking another sip of the sake in his cup. He gives a bitter, humorless laugh, “Maybe my parents would have gotten a kid they can actually love. And she never would have gotten her heart broken.

Suguru looks up from the album, something softening in his features. Yeah, he’s hard on Satoru about what happened, but that’s only because he knows what Satoru is only just now realizing. “Satoru,” Suguru says seriously, his eyes flicking over to his best friend, “You’re still not getting it …” He lets out a long sigh, “You could have been born someone completely different. You could have been born their ideal child. And they still wouldn’t have fucking loved you.” The words are harsh, brutal even, so much so that Satoru physically winces like he’s been struck. “They aren’t capable of it,” Suguru continues, “For years, I’ve watched you make stupid ass mistakes and twist yourself into someone you’re not in your efforts to please them, but you never please them, do you?”

Satoru’s eyes flutter closed, and he takes a deep breath; otherwise, he’s going to have a breakdown right here in the middle of the izakaya. “You already know the answer to that,” he mutters, bracing his elbows against the table to rest his chin on his hands. 

“So do you,” Suguru returns pointedly. “Look, I try to stay out of your relationship with your parents. But it’s killing you, Satoru. Your worst sin isn’t that you cheated, and it’s not that you were a shitty excuse for a husband.” Satoru’s shoulders curve farther and farther inward with every word, tears glistening against his lash line. He’s fighting so hard to keep from bawling like a baby, but his chest feels all tight, and a sob is sitting in the base of his throat like a stuck piece of food. “It’s that you betrayed and destroyed your own happiness for nothing,” Suguru finishes. 

All around them, the bar bustles with patrons and servers, but those words seem to deafen out all of the background noise. For nothing. The very worst part, the part that makes him want to fucking throw up, not because of the booze, but because of how much it hurts, is that Suguru is right. “I know.” The words ring hollow from his lips, “Okay? I know that now. And if I could take it all back and do it all again, I’d do everything differently. Fuck, I’d have moved to America to be with her.” But he can’t take it back. “And I’m fucking freaking out. She’s raised that boy with so much love and care, and I’m fucking terrified I’ll ruin him the same way my parents ruined me.”

“Not possible,” Shoko cuts in. “You might be an idiot, but you actually have a heart. Your parents are soulless vultures.” She pauses, drumming her nails against the table. “Knock it off with the pity party. You’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself that you’ve stopped actually looking for solutions.” Letting out a sigh, she goes on, “Satoru, you need to let your parents go. Go to therapy.”

Let his parents go. He blinks up at Shoko, silvery brows drawing together as he tries to wrap his head around what that means. Let his parents go. He didn’t even know that was an option. And he has even less of an idea where to begin with that. 

Suguru hums in agreement and adds, “She’s right.” He takes a sip from his sake and continues, “Your parents screwed you up like nothing else. Screwed up people screw up people, dude. You need to get yourself right.” Silence lapses between them all. The weight of everything said and unsaid is suffocating. 

“Does your ex-wife know that you and Kaori are engaged?” Shoko asks suddenly, pouring herself a cup of sake.

He really doesn’t want to answer that question. Somehow, he has a feeling he’s about to get chewed out. His throat bobs as he swallows and turns his baleful blues onto Shoko. “No,” the word is mumbled, a childish way of answering because he’s hoping she won’t hear.

“Satoru,” she chides, dragging his name out like a warning. “You need to tell her. If she doesn’t hear it from you, the fallout is going to be so much worse.”

Satoru’s frown deepens, and he whispers, very quietly, “I don’t want to marry Kaori.” 

“Then break off the engagement. It’s not the 1800s, you dumbass. No matter how much they push and threaten and berate you, they can’t force you to marry Kaori,” Suguru says, glaring at him. “I honestly don’t know why you stayed with her this long. Your disdain for her is thinly veiled at best.”

“I don’t know,” Satoru says quietly, but that’s a lie. He pushes himself back and slouches back in the chair, legs spreading open wide. “I guess …” he trails off, the words stuck behind his teeth like taffy, but he pries them out with his tongue anyway. Very small, he says, “I guess I just sort of thought she was my penance.” He swallows, “Because I broke the love of my life’s heart for her, I had to stay with her, y’know?”

Shoko shakes her head, the expression on her face like she’s about two seconds from backhanding him again. And he’d just stand there and take it if she did. “I’ve never met someone so fucking stupid and so fucking smart at the same time,” Shoko starts in. Ah, there it is. He’s been waiting for her to chew him out. He figured it’d happen at least once in this conversation. “End the fucking engagement.  End it before your ex-wife finds out; otherwise, I promise you, she’s going to hate you even more than she probably already does.”

“And stop fucking keeping all your garbage to yourself,” Suguru adds. He leans forward, long, silky black hair falling over his shoulder, to grab the sake bottle. When he’s done pouring himself out another glass, he sets the bottle back and continues, “We’re not your parents, Satoru. We’re not going to treat you like shit for expressing your struggles or how you feel.” 

Nodding along, Shoko says, “Yeah. We might give you shit, but we’re always going to be here for you. Even when you’re being a stupid little punk.”

Okay, now he can’t help the tears sliding down his cheeks. He really doesn’t deserve friends like this. Quickly, his hand snaps up to wipe the tears away, but Shoko and Suguru just look at him softly like they hadn’t realized just how much pain he was in and how much he was holding back. “My kid thinks I’m dead,” Satoru admits quietly, abruptly changing the subject.

Again, both Suguru and Shoko stare at him, dumbfounded. They exchange glances before simultaneously bursting into laughter. Satoru glares up at them, the flush on his neck and ears seeping to a shade of crimson. “It’s not fucking funny,” he grouses, his lower lip jutting out into a pout. His son thinks he died in a fucking boating accident, and he’s just supposed to, what? He doesn’t even fucking know what to do with that. 

“I mean, it kind of is,” Shoko says after her laughter has abated somewhat. “But you’ve met him, obviously. So, who does he think you are?”

“An old friend,” Satoru mutters. It feels like poison in his veins. An old friend—like you aren’t still his fucking everything, like you don’t own him. 

“Wow, you deserve it, but wow,” Suguru says, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “Just give it time. I’m honestly surprised she let you be with him at all.” Suguru starts in on the appetizers, using chopsticks to pick up one of the marinated, sliced, and grilled tofu pieces, served with some sort of whipped umami sauce. 

“Yeah, I know,” Satoru says, letting out a gusty, melancholic sigh. Glancing up, he looks at his friend and says, “Can I sleep at your place tonight? I really don’t want to go back to that apartment.” 

Suguru nods, chewing and swallowing the intricate tofu dish they brought over. “Of course you can.” 

Satoru’s shoulders slump in relief. The idea of having to be around Kaori right now makes him want to crash the fuck out. Looking between Suguru and Shoko, he adds sheepishly, “And, um, how exactly does someone find a therapist?” 

And both of them fucking laugh at him, but at least he knows that, despite everything, they love him. 

♡

(Your POV)

Ender wakes up in the middle of the night sick as a dog. After having a kid, your squeamishness dropped to near zero, which happens with pretty much all parents. Kids can be such gross little creatures, after all, no matter how much you love them. 

You’re up half the night and all day, running pots of sick back and forth to the bathroom, keeping him clean, constantly checking his temperature, feeding him soup, making sure to get him the medicine he needs at the right times, and generally just fussing over him. For his part, Ender is clingy and whiny when he’s sick, like most young kids. All he wants is to be held, sweaty little body curled up in your arms, but you bear with it for him, no matter how sticky and uncomfortable it makes you. Luckily, the kid has a pretty healthy immune system, so this doesn’t happen very often, but it’s always miserable and stressful when he does.

It’s only in the evening that he’s sleeping well enough for you to extricate yourself from his hold and leave him in his room to rest. You haven’t even gotten the chance to eat, and you are in desperate need of a shower. Just as you open the fridge to scrounge up some sustenance, a knock on the door echoes through the apartment. 

Slowly, exhaustion weighing down your bones like lead, you shuffle over to the door and peer through the peephole. Satoru stands outside, his body stretched thin and even taller by the fish-eye illusion of the lens. Fuck, you forgot to text him to let him know that Ender is sick. You shift nervously, hesitating to open the door, but knowing that you probably should. At least to tell him to leave. 

Taking a deep breath, you unlock and yank open the door. Satoru is standing outside, black button-down with the first couple of buttons open at his throat, black pants, shiny black dress shoes. His snowy hair is all combed back, undercut, and freshly trimmed. In one hand, he’s holding a bottle of wine and in the other another Lego bag. Before you even get the chance to say anything, his silvery brows draw together, and he says, “You look …” he trails off, swallowing like he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. “You look like you’ve had a shitty day,” he finishes carefully.

“Ender is sick,” you say, your voice raspy from lack of use and how tired you are, “I’ve been up since three AM.” It’s taking everything in you just to remain upright. Your body aches, you feel filthy, and you’re fucking starving. “I’m sorry, I meant to text you, but I’ve been busy taking care of him,” you finish. 

Satoru stares at you, not saying anything for a second. Those blue eyes flick up and down at you before he asks, “Have you eaten today?”

“No, I haven’t had the time. He gets really clingy when he’s sick. I just got him settled down like fifteen minutes ago.”

He leans against the doorframe. “You want to take a bath?” The question is casual. “I can make you some food while you relax for a little bit.” When your mouth starts to tug into a frown, he adds, “You need some help. I know you’re probably used to doing everything yourself, and it’s my fault that you are, but I’m already here and I want to help.” 

Jaw flexing, you just look at him for a moment, contemplating the offer. You are extremely tired, and it would be nice to have an hour to yourself for a bath or not to have to cook for yourself. It’s been a while since you’ve gotten to completely relax in a bath just due to always having to have one ear open for Ender. He’s not pushing you one way or the other, just watching you with quiet intensity. 

Stepping back, you allow him to come into the apartment. “Thanks,” you mutter, stiff and awkward. He waltzes in and goes straight for the kitchen. Trailing behind him, you feel strange, like your skin doesn’t quite sit right over your body, or maybe like you’re having an out-of-body experience. You’re still getting used to seeing him in your life, immediate, present. 

He sets the bottle of wine on the counter and turns to look at you. “Want anything in particular?” He asks, watching as you lean up against the doorway. 

You shake your head, “Anything is fine.” You’ve never really been picky, willing to try just about anything, with not many foods you dislike. “Bathroom is down the hall, first door on the left. I’ll leave the door unlocked in case he wakes up and you need me.”

Satoru nods and starts looking through the cupboards to familiarize himself with the kitchen. “Take your time, do whatever you need to do. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

Nodding in return, you reluctantly leave the kitchen and head down the hall to take a bath. It’s strange having a second person around to help out with things, something you’ll have to adjust to if this goes on, but who knows if it will go on.

You shut yourself in the bathroom and start drawing a hot bath. Fuck it, may as well throw some of the sweet lavender-scented bath salts in and some bubble bath while you can enjoy it. The rush of the water running drowns out the soft clanks and rattles of Satoru working in the kitchen. Slowly, you strip off your clothing, piece by piece, until you’re naked. Your body is decidedly different from what it was six years ago: stretch marks, extra weight in places you didn’t have it before, tits that aren’t as perky as they used to be. That’s just what happens when you carry a human being inside you for nine months. 

Once the bath is full, a thick foamy layer of bubbles floating on top, you shut off the water and slide into the tub. The warmth soothes your aching, tired body as you ease down. Fully submerged, you tip your head to rest it against the wall, eyes fluttering closed. A long sigh of relief slips past your lips as you let yourself fully relax like you haven’t been able to in months. The only thing that could make this better is some candles and some music, but the music might wake Ender, so that’s a no-go. 

As you lie there with your eyes closed, you can’t help but think of the day you found out about the affair. He was in the shower, and you were sprawled across the bed, going through some pictures you’d taken in the last week on your camera. The soft ping of his phone was innocuous, then another, so you rolled over and grabbed it. Two texts: “Last night was really fun. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did,” with a winky kissy face, and “Is everything okay? You haven’t been replying to my messages all day. I thought we had a good time.” You were sick. Had to run out into the hall bathroom to be sick properly. Afterward, when you confronted Satoru, he didn’t even try to deny it. In fact, he was almost resigned, admitted everything right off the bat, the words coming out of his throat like a sickness he couldn’t keep down. 

The soft knock on the door pulls you from your thoughts. “I brought you a glass of wine,” Satoru says from the other side, “Just thought you might like to have it with your bath.” 

You haul your head up. Well, a glass of wine would certainly be nice, and the bubbles cover most of your body anyway. “Uh, thanks, you can come in,” you say after a second’s hesitation. 

The latch clicks, and he shoulders his way in, eyes going right to you. His Adam’s apple bobs as he stares at you, a glass of pink wine in his large hand. Slowly, with all the sanctity of a priest approaching the altar, he steps into the bathroom and crosses it to pass you the wine. Your hand and arm drip as you raise your limb to take the glass from him, fingers brushing during the exchange. You hate the way it feels like a lightning zap running up your arm, and you have to resist the urge to snap your hand back lest you spill your wine. 

Once you have the wine glass firmly in your grasp, Satoru’s hands slide into his pockets while he looks down at you. “I’m making you a rice bowl with some scrambled eggs and vegetables,” he says quietly. “That okay?”

You nod, “That’s fine. Thanks.”

He just nods. His mouth opens like he wants to say something else, but it snaps closed again, and he just awkwardly leaves the room, shutting the door behind him, and you're alone again. There’s a sense of uncanny valley about his presence, something that should be familiar, but there’s something wrong about it. You sip the wine slowly, savoring this moment of quiet, of not having to be completely, solely responsible for another human being. Tension slowly leaches from your body, allowing you to unclench your teeth and loosen your shoulders for the time being. 

The drip and slosh of the water are soothing. You try to think of anything but the man out in your kitchen, the father of your child. There’s such rage in you still; you can feel it writhing in your chest from time to time. But you’re too tired to be angry. Instead of thinking of Satoru, you force yourself to think of work. 

You’re in the process of putting together a mock-up for a photobook, focusing on candids of sentimental and mundane moments of your life with Ender. This would be your second published photobook. The first focused on street photography transitioning to nature photography, called The Americana. This new one is meant to be sweeter, more personal, named An American Mother. For the last few weeks, you’ve been editing things and preparing them for publication. Then there’s the photography shows you’re doing. Work-wise, there’s a lot on your plate right now.

The wine glass drains bit by bit, emptying down to dregs, which you polish off by tipping your head all the way back. It’s been ages since you’ve been able to have a drink or two. Since you’re responsible for driving you and Ender everywhere back in America, you practically never drink there. If the two of you are traveling, sometimes you’ll have a drink, but only one because you still have to be responsible for him, even if you’re not driving. Your lack of drinking, plus the empty stomach, means that one glass kind of hits you like a truck. You’re not drunk, but you’re definitely buzzed. 

Once the glass is empty, you finish off the bath by draining it and flipping the shower on to quickly wash your hair and your face. You take your time, enjoying the privacy, which practically evaporates once you have a kid. After you’re done, you turn the water off and step out onto the bathmat to dry yourself off with a fluffy towel hanging from a hook on the wall. Then, you drop the towel in the hamper against the wall, along with your dirty clothes, and slide on an equally fluffy robe. You tie the belt around your waist to secure it, and you finally exit the bathroom. 

The wooden flooring is cool under your feet. You walk back out to the kitchen, where Satoru is finishing up some very fluffy-looking American-style scrambled eggs. You taught him how to make them that way back in college. The memory sits heavy in the center of your chest, as all Satoru-related matters do. When he looks up at the sound of your footsteps, he falters, nearly dropping the spatula into the eggs. 

“Fuck,” he breathes, eyes going wide and softening all at once, his face, neck, and ears turning bright red, his Adam’s apple jumping. The reactions make you feel something, though you couldn’t name what if you tried, nor could you say if it was a positive feeling or a negative one. Hastily, he picks up the spatula and shuts the stove off, but continues stirring the eggs through the residual heat. 

You don’t say anything as you slide onto the stool at the counter, watching him cook. The muscles in his arms flex with every push and scrape of the wooden spatula against the pan. Once the eggs are done, he puts a bowl together with the rice, eggs, and vegetables, and a quick sauce poured over the top. He brings the finished dish over, setting it right in front of you, and then he offers you a pair of chopsticks. 

“Thank you,” you say softly, taking the pair and starting to dig in immediately. God, you’re fucking ravenous. You scarf down the food, and it’s actually pretty good. When you met him, he was a trash cook, but you’d slowly taught him here and there. You wonder if he cooks for Kaori, and that thought stings. 

Instead of leaving, Satoru pours himself a glass of wine as well and takes a seat on the stool next to you. You keep eating like the question you never asked him six years ago isn’t burning its way up your throat now: why? You couldn’t bring yourself to ask him that then, but now you want to. Maybe it’ll give you some sense of closure. He grabs the bottle of wine and holds it toward your empty glass in offering, and you just shake your head, so he sets it back down. It’s hard to keep eating with that question sitting on your tongue, but you do. You finish it off and then set the bowl aside. 

Complete and utter silence fills the room, suffocating and intense. Letting out a breath, you try to work yourself up to it. Just ask it. Ask the question. You feel like you might be sick, not from the food or the alcohol, but from your nerves. But you have to know. “Why?” You blurt out, looking down at the counter. Your teeth grind together so hard your jaw aches. Very quietly, you ask, “Why did you cheat on me?” Now that you’ve started, you can’t stop. “Was it something I did? Did you just stop loving me? Did you stop being attracted to me?” For years, you’ve sat with these questions, eating a hole through your head. 

Satoru freezes, a big huff of air leaving his nose. Slowly, he turns to face you, but you look away from him. The stool creaks, then his hands are on your shoulders, gripping them tight, “Look at me.” When you don’t, his fingers dig in just a little deeper. Not enough to hurt, but enough to be impossible to ignore. “I’m fucking serious. Look at me.” 

Your jaw flexes and you finally snap your eyes up to meet his. There’s an intense expression in those blue eyes, some burning emotion. He stares at you for a second, his voice low, solemn, and firm, “I want you to listen to me very carefully here, sweetheart. None of it, not one singular thing, had anything to do with you. You are, and always have been, perfect. It’s my fault. Do you understand me? Mine.”

You sink your teeth into your lower lip, tears welling in your eyes like what you’re discussing only happened weeks ago, instead of years. Carefully, Satoru reaches up and wipes them away from your lash line. “Then why?” You bite out, glaring up at him. 

He lets out a long sigh and says quietly, “Sweetheart …”

“I want to know.” You have to know, you think. To move on, let go, heal, or whatever.

His mouth presses into a thin line, and he doesn’t say anything for a moment. He doesn’t take his hands off you either. “I could feel you pulling away, day by day—“

“So you’re saying it’s my fault?” You demand, starting to pull away.

But those hands of his clamp around your shoulders. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. No.” He shakes his head vigorously, eyes fever-bright like he’s desperate to get you to understand something. “No, I started spending time with Kaori because my parents wouldn’t shut up about thanking her for all the hard work she was putting in for the company.” He pauses, jaw flexing like he’s trying to find the right words, “So, I started doing things with her, like lunches, dinners, things like that. I just wanted them to be happy, and I thought that if I did what they wanted, they might lay off us for a bit. And you might come back to me.” He pauses again, tears filling his eyes. But when he speaks, there’s a cold rage to his voice that you’ve never heard from him before, “We only slept together once before you found the texts. I don’t … I don’t even remember sleeping with her, if I’m being honest. We just went out to dinner, and she kept ordering drinks, and when she couldn’t finish them, she gave them to me to finish. I woke up in her bed in the middle of the night and left.”

You feel sick to your stomach and almost wish you hadn’t asked. Hot salty tears are streaking down your cheeks, and he’s trying his best to wipe them away. “Why didn’t you fight for me afterward?” Not that you would have stayed, but if he fought for you, then at least you’d have known that he cared, that he felt bad. 

“Because …” he trails off. Then, small and anguished, “Because I thought you’d be better off.” Tears are rolling down his cheeks in earnest now. “I was never in love with her; I never even liked her all that much, and no one will ever be more beautiful to me than you.” He chuckles wryly and continues, “Fuck, I can’t get off without thinking of you, you know that? Every time I kiss her, I picture it’s you. I hate going into our apartment and seeing her. It feels wrong. I hate her and my parents both.”

“Then why the fuck are you still with her?” The question slips out before you can stop it, blunt and angry. 

He shakes his head before locking eyes with you again. “Because she’s my punishment. For what I did to you, and my son too, apparently. And my parents like her and I thought, stupidly, that maybe I was with her, they’d like me too eventually.” His voice trembles with agony and barely restrained anger. He swallows, his voice coming out softer now, “I can’t do it anymore, though. I can’t. I’m breaking everything off with her. I don’t care how angry my parents will be. I’ve been thinking about Ender, and the idea of him being in the same room as her or my parents makes me sick. I can’t be with her anymore. Not if I’m going to be his father.”

He’s putting Ender first. You wish he were being selfish, you wish he was giving you something to hate him even more for, because this is worse. He’s doing everything you would want him to, but the pain is somehow worse. You have to look away from him again, unable to bear the intensity of his eyes boring into yours. 

“Look at me,” he demands, and you force yourself to meet his eyes again. “I love you. I have never stopped loving you, and I will never stop loving you. You are the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever laid eyes on, and my failings have nothing to do with you. My fucked up head has nothing to do with you.” He finishes by pulling you into his arms and holding you so tightly that you can hardly breathe. His arms are shaking. “You’re perfect. And I’m so, so sorry that I ever made you think otherwise.” 

You can feel his heartbeat thudding against his ribs fast and hard. There’s so much buried in you that you don’t even know how to feel. Anger, sadness, you want to scream at him, want to slap him across the face, want to hurt him the way he hurt you, but your heart aches, and his arms are warm and familiar. And you want so badly for a future that could have been had things been different. 

It starts with him kissing the tears from your face, a whispered, “I’m sorry,” against your skin after every one. You’re both crying, and he’s holding you like you’re the last buoy keeping him from drowning; then his mouth is on yours. 

For a second, you fall into it. That chemistry that always kept the two of you circling each other like planets around the sun flares up. Some things never die, no matter how much you want them to, no matter how much they should. Your mouths move together like the first months of your relationship, like his lips never forgot the exact shape and taste of yours and vice versa. He groans softly, pulling you closer.

Then it hits you what’s happening. You push away from him, breaking it off, and push him away, your breath quick and heavy in your lungs. “No, no, I can’t,” you start, but he’s already backing away. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t—I just—fuck, I’ll go. I’m going.” The words tumble out of him in a rush. He’s in the apartment for less than two minutes after that. You know because you’re counting the seconds. The door clicks shut behind him as he leaves, and suddenly you’re alone again. 

Your hand drifts up to your chest to rest over your racing heart. He tasted like pink wine, and that sweet flavor you remember like the last kiss you shared was yesterday. You take a deep breath, then another, and another. Why does he make you feel this way? 

A/N: Hahaha, I did it! Just so you guys know, this was at like 2k words this morning. Anyways, hope you all enjoyed the angst fest and thank you all for reading. Likes, reblogs, and comments are always appreciated

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You know it’s hard for Ender sometimes. When other kids talk about the fun things they do with their fathers, when he sees a friend hitching a ride on their dad’s shoulders on the walk to the car when school lets out for the day, when he sees movies or shows that portray a sweet father-son relationship. He’s asked questions about his dad before, and you’ve answered honestly. Well, as honestly as you could anyway, without revealing that he’s actually not, in fact, dead at all.

“Did my daddy like the stars and space explorers like me?”

“Yes, baby. He did. We used to lie out on the grass on picnic blankets, and he’d put his arm around my shoulders, and he’d point out all the constellations.” 

Of course, you did not tell him about the decidedly child-unfriendly activities that followed. But you thought about it. Christ, you thought about it so much that some days it felt like you were going to drive yourself insane. 

“If my daddy was alive, would he play Legos with me?”

“Of course he would, baby. He was fond of a Lego or two himself when he was little.”

You had seen pictures of him as an eight-year-old boy, hunched over some sort of tower he was building. Ender sticks his tongue out a little when he concentrates, just like Satoru did in that picture. But the way his brows furrow together—that’s all you.

“Mommy, did daddy love you?”

“He—yes, he loved me, very much.”

It tasted like a lie on your tongue even though, deep down, you knew it wasn’t. Satoru did love you, but in the end, love wasn’t enough. It was also what made the pain that much more unbearable. 

“Did you love him?”

“Yes … I did. I loved your dad very, very much.”

You felt sick, sick to your stomach. That was a raw truth unwittingly ripped straight from your lungs by your sweet, clueless boy. God, the way you loved Satoru, the way he loved you, it was a force that rivaled the Big Bang. 

The love was there, it was always there, and at first, without it, it felt like a black hole beneath your ribs, absolute nothingness. But now, it feels more like an incurable disease that you’ve learned to live with. There are no pills you can take, no inoculation you can get, for Satoru Gojo after all. 

The old conversations loop through your mind. You want to sob. Not regular sobbing either, rather the kind of sobbing that comes from deep in your lungs, ripped from your body raw, banging on your chest, might be a scream sort of sobbing. But you don’t; you hold your son in your shaking arms and wonder how the hell you’re going to survive tomorrow. 

This is what happens, you suppose, when you don’t actually deal with things and scrape them under the proverbial rug instead. Feelings become this twisted, monstrous thing that eats you alive from the inside out.

The moon arcs through the sky, and you lie in a strange sort of twilight between sleep and consciousness. Your mind runs away from you, lost in the bittersweet nostalgia of your memories and the ache of how everything ended up. The whole night, you stroke your son’s hair and hold him close, grateful for the way he clings to you so that you don’t feel so awful about yourself. 

By now, you should be completely over him; you should be able to breeze through this without so much as batting an eye, because you shouldn’t care. You shouldn’t care about seeing Satoru again, about having to interact with him, but somehow you feel the same as you did that night six years ago, when you happened to pick up his phone and saw the messages from Kaori that tipped you off to the affair. 

You still feel like your heart has been ripped out of your chest. And even now, six years later, you haven’t figured out how to put it back in.

When 7:00 AM rolls around, your eyes burn, and you’re exhausted, but you know you’re not falling asleep at this point. Slowly, you extricate yourself from Ender and pad out of the room, partially closing the door behind you. After eating a quick, quiet breakfast of fruit and some granola, you jump in the shower. You take your time, cranking the water up near scalding, and scrubbing your skin until it’s pink and tingling. It gives you time to get your shit together before you have to wake Ender up and start getting him ready for the day.

Once you’re done, you dry off with a thick, fluffy towel and get dressed in a pair of leggings and a light blouse. For an hour, you fuss with your hair and makeup before you’re finally satisfied with how it looks. Dressed and ready, you fix a light breakfast for Ender of scrambled eggs and toast. Just as you’re pulling the eggs off the stove, a little sleepy voice pipes up, “Put cheese on my eggs, please, Mommy.”

You nearly jump out of your skin, simply because you aren’t expecting it. Turning your head, you see Ender shuffling out in his one-piece footied PJs, which are, of course, covered in stars and astronauts. A huff of laughter slips out, and you instantly relax, saying, “Oh, I thought we were anti-cheese this month.” He definitely refused to touch the lasagna (or, as he calls it, the ‘wasagna’) last week because he didn’t like cheese at the time.

Ender giggles as he comes into the kitchen. “Noooo, I like cheese now.” He 

You set the eggs to the side and bend down to scoop your son up and set him on the edge of the counter. He swings his little legs happily, watching you get cheese out of the fridge and sprinkle it over his eggs. After covering the pan with a lid to let the cheese melt, you walk over to him and run your fingers through his silky, soft hair. Ender’s big blue eyes blink up at you, and you say, “Okay, but if you don’t eat them now because of the cheese I’m gonna—” you attack his sides with little tickles, sending him into an absolute fit of giggles, “—hang you from the ceiling by your little toes.” With one hand, you keep tickling him, and with the other, you reach down and give said toes a soft squeeze.

His laughter is like music to your ears, a balm to your soul after the night spent agonizing over Satoru, your past, and the uncertain future. “No, mommy, stop,” he gets out, although barely, through the giggles. “Don’t hang me from my toes. I’ll eat the cheese.” 

Looking down at him, you raise your brows and say, “You swear?” Your hand comes away from his side, little finger sticking out in offering. 

His small hand rises to meet yours, his pinky curling around your pinky. “I swear,” he echoes as solemnly as if he were in court. Both of you lean in to kiss where your pinkies are curled together, your noses brushing together, earning you another little peal of laughter. “Love you, Mommy,” he says softly. His blue eyes match Satoru’s exactly, looking into yours, the long white lashes framing them fluttering for a moment. 

Your heart swells, two, three times, and you pull him into your arms for a hug and kiss his head. Just for a second, you hold him. One last kiss and you murmur, “You’re such a sweet boy. How did I end up with the best kid in the whole world?”

“You are just a lucky duck,” he says, eyes sparkling as you pull away. His response makes you let out a huff of laughter. When he says things like that, it reminds you so much of Satoru that it hurts. Apparently, arrogance is an inheritable trait. 

You plate up the eggs for him and toast a piece of sweet, fluffy bread. After it’s done, it just needs a little butter, and then onto the plate it goes. Hefting your son up into your arms, you balance him on your hip, one arm wrapped around him, and with your free hand, you juggle the plate. While you get Ender settled in the dining room, you can’t help but worry about how today is going to go. This trip to the aquarium is going to be the first test of many to see if it’s at all possible for Satoru to be a father. Mostly, you’re worried that he’ll slip up (either on purpose or genuinely by accident) and let Ender know that he’s his father. That’s something you’re not at all ready for. Maybe you’ll never be ready for it. 

You watch your son eat, the careful way he holds the fork, his concentration as he carefully balances a bite of eggs on the tines. “Do the chicken eggs goes in the chicken’s belly like I was in your belly?” He asks, snowy brows furrowed as he studies the eggs.

“Kind of, but not exactly,” you explain. “You came out of me as a baby. When a chicken lays an egg, there’s not always a baby in it. Sometimes, an egg is just an egg, but yes, the chicken makes the egg inside them like I made you.”

He hums before shoving the forkful of food into his mouth. Your eyes flick up and down, watching him eat. He’s such a curious kid, always asking questions, listening intently, observing and cataloguing. Since starting school, his grades have always been amazing, and he comes home with nothing but compliments from his teachers. 

Once he’s done eating, you give him a quick bath and then dress him up in blue jeans, a plain navy T-shirt, and a windbreaker jacket for later in the evening, when it gets cooler. “We’re going to be meeting an old friend of Mommy’s at the aquarium,” you say as you slide his sneakers on over his socked feet, “Remember that man we saw at the restaurant yesterday?”

He nods vigorously, his white hair more of a silvery color and stuck to his head from the bath. “The man who looks like me?” he asks cheerfully, oblivious to the turmoil that wreaks havoc on your heart when he does so. The little white and blue sneakers he favors are sitting off to the side, so you lean over to grab them and then kneel to help him put them on.

“Yeah,” you reply quietly, your voice tight and a little uneven, “That man.” Clearing your throat, you continue, “He’s going to the aquarium with us. You okay with that?” As you talk, you do up the Velcro straps on his sneakers, fighting to keep your hands steady. 

“Yeah!” He exclaims. He sounds so excited, despite not knowing Satoru at all, and you chalk it up to how social he is, a trait that he definitely got from his father. The kid can make friends anywhere he goes as easily as breathing. All you can do is hope that it’s the reason rather than him putting two and two together and coming up with four. “He is so big,” Ender continues with a little titter of laughter, “Do you think he’ll scare the fishies?”

That makes you laugh. Well, the kid’s not wrong. Satoru is a big fucking man. “No, baby, I don’t think he’ll scare the fishies,” you reply, straightening up. Back on your feet, you point down the hall and say, “Alright, go potty before we go.”

He scampers away, his little sneakers pattering against the wood floor. Quickly, you throw together his little backpack, stuffing it with an extra set of clothes (just in case), a coloring book and some big crayons, a water bottle, and a juice box. While he goes to the bathroom, you grab a light jacket for yourself and drape it over your arm, as well as your bag, your wallet, your Nikon, and your keys. Just as you’re sliding your phone into your bag, it pings with a telegram message. Speak of the devil. Tapping in your passcode, you open up the app. 

SG: We still on for the aquarium? 

You type back a perfunctory yes and hit send. The typing dots pop up, and a second later, you get another message.

SG: What time?

Noon, you type back, keeping your responses short and to the point. Another message pops up seconds later. 

SG: What kind of stuff does he like? I want to bring him something, if you’ll let me. It’s literally the least I can do. 

True. Money is really no object to his family, a stark contrast to your own life experience. You grew up very poor, parents on SNAP benefits, could barely keep a roof over your head, kind of poor. It’s yet another of the many reasons Satoru’s parents despised you. The first time you met them, your Japanese was okay enough to pick up certain words and phrases—nothing but insults and degradation about the way you dressed, your accent, assumptions about your intelligence, acting like you were some sort of gold-digging whore. 

The truth is that when you and Satoru met, you had no idea he came from money. He seemed like any other college student. It was only after you were head over heels for him that you learned about his background: his family's money, and status. Satoru did try to explain that to them, but they refused to hear a word of it. Anything he said was dismissed like the muttered ramblings of an old, delusional man.

You type back slowly, Astronauts, Legos. He really likes Lilo and Stitch, Blue’s Clues, and Phineas and Ferb. Anything involving science, aliens, or space. After hitting send, you tap your finger against the side of the phone and type out another. You don’t have to bring anything, though. He’s got plenty of stuff. 

SG: I want to. Please, just let me do this. I want to make him smile. 

Letting out a huff, you slide your phone back into your bag without replying. If he wants to blow his family’s money on your son, then so be it. Far be it from you to get between a joyful moment and your son. A few seconds after you slide your phone into your bag, Ender comes running out of the bathroom. He leaps up onto your leg, wrapping himself around it like a little monkey. It’s something he’s done since he learned to walk. 

“Ready, Freddy?” You ask, looking down at him and tapping the tip of his delicate nose, Satoru’s nose, really, in child form. “We’ll go to the park first so Mommy can take some pictures, okay? Then we’ll stop and get some cold drinks before we go to the aquarium.”

He nods, his cheek rubbing against your thigh. “Silly Mommy, my name’s not Freddy,” he giggles. The Uber you scheduled last night should be here any moment, so you heft your son up and balance him on your hip, arm wrapped around his waist. “I’m Ender,” he says softly, “Don’t forget my name.” The way he says it sounds like he thinks this is an actual concern.

“Silly boy, I could never forget your name,” you say gently, giving him a little squeeze, “You’re my sweet Ender Yuki.” Planting a kiss on his forehead, you and your son head out to face the day, despite your reservations about meeting Satoru later. 

♡

(Satoru’s POV)

After Satoru leaves your apartment complex, he’s not sure how he gets home, he’s in such a daze. From the moment he walks through the door though, Kaori bombards him with questions about the clients, where they met, if they got drinks, and what was discussed. Since the clients are fictional creations he made up to escape coming home earlier, he bullshits every single answer. It’s obvious that she’s not buying any of his excuses. 

“Can you please lay off me? Why are you being so weird about me meeting Suguru and some clients? You’ve never given a shit before,” Satoru mutters and marches away from her straight to their shared bedroom. He’s in an awful mood. Leaving you behind in that state left a horrid taste in his mouth, even though it’s his own fault he couldn’t go back to comfort you. It’s the truth, though. She doesn’t usually give two fucks what he’s doing, especially if it has to do with him making more money. The only time she cares is if she thinks he’s going to embarrass her or his family.

She’s dressed in a little white slip, the kind of thing that would have at least tempted him in a physical way a year or two ago, but all he can do is look away. It does nothing to him now. He can barely even think of her as attractive anymore, not when he’s seen you again, and you look so fucking gorgeous, like an angel.

The penthouse feels like a mockery of a home. In theory, the decor is cozy: soft neutral colors, elegant, pristine. But to Satoru, it feels more like a showroom than a place lived in by a person, let alone a family. It wouldn’t look like this if he were still married to you. He’d have a home, a real one, filled with love and mess and happiness.

It’s hitting him just how hard it’s going to be, being around you, pretending he doesn’t want you, acting like every corner of his worthless heart doesn’t belong to you. You’re twice as beautiful as he remembers, but you’ve always been beautiful. Maybe it’s just the dissonance between time and recollection, the way his imperfect memory of your face had started to go fuzzy at the edges. 

Kaori follows hot on his heels. “You’re being defensive,” she accuses, her voice grating in his ears. “What aren’t you telling me?” She demands, trying to make a grab for his arm. 

Why is she so fucking suspicious?

Satoru cleanly dodges her hand. He doesn’t even stop; he just goes straight for the bathroom. Slipping inside, he shuts the door behind him, right in her face. Too much, dealing with her is way too much for him right now. He can hear her incredulous scoff on the other side. As he slumps against the door, he lets out a long, weary sigh and drags his hand down his face. 

“You can’t avoid me forever, Satoru,” she calls, the door doing nothing to muffle her voice. “Just tell me what’s going on. You’ve been acting strange ever since you talked to that woman in the restaurant.”

That makes him panic a little. If Kaori or his parents find out, you’ll fucking kill him, and he can kiss any chance of knowing his son goodbye. “Please, Kaori, just stop. This shit is exhausting,” he bites out honestly, the back of his head bumping against the door as it tips back even farther. “There’s nothing to tell. I’m just tired. It was a long day. She has nothing to do with anything. It was just some random woman.” In the next breath, he lies through his teeth.

There’s silence on the side. “You’re really telling me the truth?” She asks. 

No. “Yes,” he replies irritably, “Fucking call Suguru and ask him.” He’s already pulling out his phone to text his best friend. He types up the message quickly. If Kaori calls you and asks if we met up with some clients after the engagement party, tell her yes. Tell her we went out to Gen Yamamoto. It only takes a few seconds for him to get a text back.

Suguru: Dude, what’s going on?

Satoru’s mouth pulls into a frown. You didn’t tell him if he could let Suguru know about Ender, and he doesn’t want to risk pissing you off, so he’ll ask tomorrow to be safe. With that in mind, he types back, I’ll try and explain tomorrow if I can. This is really important, Suguru. Please, just trust me.

Suguru: Alright, whatever you need. You good though?

Suguru: Oh, shit, she’s calling now.

His thumb slides across the screen as he types back, Better than good. I really can’t tell you right now, but as soon as I can, I’ll explain everything. I swear. After he hits send, he tosses his phone onto the counter and starts stripping off his clothes. Pieces of clothing hit the marble-tiled floor one at a time until he’s completely naked. He flips the hot water on and gives it a minute to warm up, taking the time to stretch out his muscles. 

Through the door, he can hear the murmur of Kaori speaking with Suguru, but he ignores it. All it does is piss him off. The whole day has worn him down—the morning prep with Kaori and his parents, the hellish engagement party, then the emotional rush of running into you and finding out he has a whole child. Every bone in his body protests with exhaustion as he steps into the hot, steaming spray of water.

He lets the water pelt him in the face, the scalding droplets almost soothing. Another kind of penance. It soaks through his snowy hair, turning it a dull gray and plastering it to his head. The water hangs in fat droplets from his thick lashes, which clump together as they flutter closed. Rivulets run down the length of his body, sliding down the hard valleys and divots of his muscles. His hand trails up and down his body, finger pressing in as he tries to loosen them.

It makes him think of how you used to grab his hand and tug him into the bedroom after a long, stressful day back when you were married. Your hand was so soft, smaller than his, and it fit into his perfectly. In the bedroom, you’d push him down onto the bed, strip off his shirt, then straddle his ass and massage down his back. You used to find any excuse to put your hands all over him, and he loved that. It was one of those things that inexplicably made him feel so loved and cared for, in a way he’d never experienced, not even as a small child. 

His earliest memories of love aren’t sweet memories of a mother’s arms stretching out to make room for him or a father’s fierce protectiveness. No, his mother has always been cold and vain, more focused on how the Gojos stack up to other prominent Japanese families. He doesn’t remember getting a single hug, kiss, or tender stroke of the hair by her hands. Not even as a small child. And his father? Well, all that man has ever cared about is having the perfect heir. There is no room for mistakes or failure in Satoru’s life. Those are just synonyms for a stinging cheek courtesy of his father’s palms, days of forced isolation, or hours getting berated and belittled. 

You and Suguru taught him the taste of love. 

It took him far longer than it should have to truly understand that nothing he did would ever be good enough for his parents. Or rather, it took him a long time and losing the best thing that had ever happened to him to understand that his parents’ satisfaction directly correlates to his misery; the worse he feels, the happier they are with him. 

He winces as his fingers knead a particularly tight knot, drawing him from his thoughts. A hiss slips from between his teeth into the steam as he works it out of the muscle. Once it’s broken up, his hands drop to his sides, flexing like they want to reach for something that can’t be touched. 

After you were done massaging him, he never could help himself from quickly rolling you onto the bed, then under him. The way he used to kiss you, like he was swallowing you whole, and the way you melted into him, replay in his mind. Seeing you again has remastered every single memory in crisp 4k HD from the vaults of his mind. It aches and pleases him in equal measure. 

He can vividly recall the little gasps and moans you’d make with his cock buried deep in your pussy. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that you got pregnant. He honestly couldn’t count the number of times he filled you up with his cum, stuffing you full of him over and over. Hundreds? A thousand? At any given opportunity, that’s for sure. 

You were just as bad. The cute way you begged him, “Please, Toru, want your cum inside me.” Or, “Need you to come in me, Toru. I need it so bad.” Or how sometimes, you’d wrap your legs around him and pull him even deeper, locking him inside so that pulling out would have been impossible anyway. 

He’s getting hard just thinking about it. He’d sell his soul to be able to fill your perfect, tight little hole again. 

His cock twitches, demanding attention as it thickens and stiffens, the head turning a pretty flushed pink, veins standing out. His hand wraps around his shaft, fingers giving a slow stroke as he slumps against the wall of the shower. He’d put another baby in you in a heartbeat. He’s so fucking angry he didn’t get to see you all pretty and round with his child. Your tits were probably so perfect, full of milk. Not that they’re any less than perfect now, but it’s yet another thing he missed out on.

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, every atom in his body feeling hot and tight. 

Letting out a quiet breath, his hand works his cock over in firm strokes. He gives it a hard jerk, squeezing tight around the leaking head. His imagination runs wild with scenes of bending you over a counter—no, his desk—and spreading your thighs apart with his knee, and burying his cock in you the way he hasn’t been able to in six years. The thought makes him whimper, his eyes rolling back. He has to bite down on his free hand to temper the sound.

Maybe he’d make you come on his fingers first, just so that he could lick your slick clean off them before fucking you stupid. He hasn’t tasted you for so long. Eating you was always one of his favorite pastimes. The taste of you was better than the ambrosia of the gods, and he’d give anything to have it on his tongue again, your thighs shaking on either side of his head, legs thrown over his shoulders so he can really dig in the way he needs. The next groan that tries to come out is muffled by his hand.

The slick, wet sounds of his hand working himself over blend with the rush of the shower. Every second that passes, thick steam fills the bathroom and the pleasure fogs up his mind. He’d give anything to have you again. He’d sacrifice his name, his wealth, his blood to have you in his arms. 

The hand wrapped around his cock moves feverishly. His pre is leaking into his palm, down his knuckles, only to be rinsed away by the hot water. Eyes closed, he drags his hand up and down the impressive length, twisting his grip a little when he reaches the flushed tip. Fuck, that feels good. He bites down hard on his hand to quiet the little groans and grunts falling from his lips on every stroke.

Minutes later, his cock is twitching, veins pulsing as he spills thick, hot threads of sticky white cum over his knuckles. Letting out a long breath, Satoru watches as the water wipes away the evidence of his sins, carrying it away down the drain. 

“Pathetic. I’m pathetic,” he whispers, lashes fluttering open again, his hands dropping to his sides again as his cock goes soft. The words he wanted to say earlier burn in his throat, so he whispers them to the shower since he can’t say them to you, and the inanimate cannot be his judge: “I love you. I love you so fucking much that it’s killing me. It’s killing me.” 

He lets out another long breath and goes through the motions of finishing his shower. The hollow ache in his chest doubles and triples in size, consuming him from the inside out. When he leaves the bathroom, pale skin glistening with water still, Kaori is lying on the bed. He finishes toweling himself off before dropping the cloth in the hamper and pulling on a pair of boxer briefs. Kaori’s eyes burn twin holes into his back. As he makes his way over to the bed, his jaw feathers and he hesitates for a moment before sliding under the covers.

She scoots close to him, and he goes stiff automatically. One of her arms slides over his chest, and he wants to throw up. “I called Suguru,” she admits softly. 

“Yeah?”

“He confirmed everything you said. Sorry.” She murmurs as she rests her head against his chest. Your place. Yours and no one else’s because you own the heart behind his ribs. “I just—you were looking at that woman with this expression I’ve never seen on your face before. You’ve never looked at me that way.”

Just to be mean, give her an explanation that she’ll believe, he looks at her and bites out, “She looked like my ex-wife.” The best lies contain a kernel of the truth, after all. It gives her a valid reason for why he’s acting so strangely 

Now, Kaori goes stiff. It’s like an unspoken rule of whatever fucked up thing is between them, a thing he can’t quite honestly call a relationship. He doesn’t talk about you ever, and she never asks any questions. Well, she doesn’t anymore.

The only time she ever did, it was in the middle of a fight they were having, where she threw you in his face, “Satoru, you need to get over it! I don’t even understand what’s so great about that woman. What did you even see in her?” At first, he couldn’t even answer; he was so angry that if he opened his mouth, he was liable to scream in her face. “Your parents said she was just some random, poor American gold-digger,” she continued when he didn’t answer. 

He’d never hit a woman, but in that exact moment, he’d never wanted to more. All he ended up doing, though, was looking her dead in the eyes and saying icily, “If you ever talk about her again, I will leave you. I will leave you, and I will make sure that your life is a living hell here in Tokyo. I’ll have you blacklisted throughout the city. Do you understand me? Say one bad thing about her, and we’re over. I don’t give a fuck how ingratiated you are with my parents or how pissed off they’ll be at me. Don’t you ever comment on her again.” All the blood drained from her face, and she just stared back at him. Didn’t even apologize. So, he walked away. He stayed the night at Suguru’s that night.

“But it wasn’t her?” Kaori asks quietly, almost sounding nervous. She leans away from him, as if she’s thought better about cozying up to him in this state. 

His molars grind together for a moment before he mutters, “No.” He hates her, almost as much as he hates himself. “Do you really think if it were her that I’d be here with you?” It’s a cruel thing to say, but it’ll get her to leave well enough alone, and he really doesn’t want her prying anymore. The further she stays away from this, the better.

“Right,” she mutters tightly, rolling away from him. Maybe he should feel bad, but he doesn’t. Not even a little bit. “You know, you don’t have to be such a fucking asshole.”

His mouth twitches, but he doesn’t reply. Satoru rolls onto his side as well, putting his back to her. They might share a bed, but that’s the only thing shared between them these days. He has no feelings at all for her; he never did, and her feelings for him are anything but genuine. She’s not scared of losing him so much as she’s scared of losing access to his parents’ money and influence; she’s scared of losing the perks of being a Gojo.

He doesn’t sleep at all that night. And in the morning? He showers, dresses, and leaves for the office before she wakes up. It’s easier that way. 

♡

(Your POV)

As you and Ender arrive at the aquarium, your phone pings with a notification in your bag. Ender squirms beside you, craning his neck to get a look out the window at the domed glass building that marks the entrance to the Tokyo Sea Life Park. Once the car pulls up to the curb and you help your son out, you dig it out of your bag. It takes you a few seconds to unlock it and pull up the message. 

SG: I’m at the entrance. Are you close?

You type back, We just got here. I’ll meet you there. After you hit send, you look down at your son and adjust the straps of his backpack over his shoulders. “You want up, or do you wanna walk?” You ask, running your fingers through his silky hair. Nervousness plagues you in the form of nausea, your stomach rolling both in anticipation and dread. 

“Up, please,” he replies, stretching his arms towards you and wiggling his little hands. 

Scooping him up with a smile, you balance him on your hip. “You excited to see the fishes?” You ask, stroking his cheek with your free hand. Your Nikon bounces heavily against your chest with every step, where it rests looped around your neck by the strap.

“Yes!” He squeals, wriggling in your arms like a little bobblehead.

“What fishes are you most excited to see?” You ask, as you draw closer and closer to the entrance. Ender bubbles out an answer but you're not paying attention.

You can see Satoru now, leaning up against the outside. His snowy hair gleams in the sun, instantly recognizable and impossible to miss, just like his towering height, broad shoulders, and trim waistline. Dark slacks, baby blue button down, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Fuck him for wearing that. Actually, fuck him. You loved when he wore blue, because of how it brought out his already vivid blue eyes. And the rolled-up sleeves? Jesus Christ, six years ago, you would have been foaming at the mouth to get him inside you, seeing him dressed like that. Even now, there’s a stirring in your lower gut you haven’t felt in so long that the ache is almost overwhelming. 

He straightens up when he spots you. Over his forearm, he’s got a bag from the Lego store around it. The bright yellow catches Ender’s attention. Bouncing excitedly in your arms, Ender points to Satoru, but mostly to the bag on his arm. With his free hand, Satoru waves to you and Ender, his big hand going back and forth in the air.

“Mommy, Mommy, he’s got a bag for the Lego store,” your son chirps excitedly, “If I ask nicely, will he let me see?” The big, toothy grin on Ender’s mouth melts your heart and settles your nervousness. You just have to keep him in mind, remind yourself that you’re doing this for him, for that sweet smile on his face, for the fact that he deserves to be loved by two parents. 

“I think so, but the only way to know is to ask,” you reply, coming to a stop in front of your ex-husband. You feel raw and exposed meeting him in the middle of this big open space. People mill around in small groups, some tourists, some Japanese citizens. Even though they’re probably paying no attention, you feel like everyone’s eyes are on you, waiting to see how this disaster is going to crash and burn.

Satoru’s eyes linger on your face for a moment before drifting to Ender. His mouth opens, then closes, and opens again, a pink tint coloring the tips of his ears. Instead of saying anything to you like you think he’s going to, he just says quietly, in a voice that’s painfully tender, “Hey buddy, nice to see you again. You remember me?”

Ender smiles at him and nods vigorously. “The big man!” He’s already talking about Satoru like he’s some kind of legendary superhuman because of his size. It makes you wonder, if Satoru and you had managed to make it work, would Ender idolize him? Would he be his hero?

No. No, you can’t think like that. What ifs are nothing more than painful reminders of what could’ve been. What’s done is done, and there’s no going back. 

Satoru just smiles at the boy in your arms, that lopsided, soft smile. It pisses you off that it still twists your stomach into knots the same way it did the day you met him. “You can call me Satoru, Toru if that’s easier for you,” he says, his hand lifting to touch Ender, but it drops back down again like he’s thought better of it. “Brought you something, kid,” he says as he slides the Lego bag off his arm. From it, he withdraws a Lego space shuttle and places the toy in your son’s eagerly outstretched hands like it’s something sacred.

Ender’s blue eyes go round, sparkling with excitement. He kicks his feet and babbles excitedly, “For me? Really? Thank you, thank you, thank you! I love space ships. I wanna go in one. To the moon or to Mars. Infinity and beyond! Like Buzz Lightyear. Mommy said I could go to Mars.”

A smile tugs at the corner of Satoru’s mouth, and he says, his voice a shade tight, “Yeah? Well, you’ll have to work really hard in school. But I’m sure your Mom is right; you can do anything you want.” Those pretty blue eyes of his are suspiciously damp-looking in the afternoon sunlight. His throat bobs, Adam’s apple jumping up and down. 

“I know,” he says with a childish little scoff, affronted that Satoru dares suggest he doesn’t understand what it takes to become an astronaut (he doesn’t). “We go in now, Mommy?”

“Yeah, why don’t you let Satoru hold onto the Lego until we’re done, baby?” you say, not wanting him to have that bulky box in his arms while you’re carrying him. “Mommy just has to go buy tickets.” Ender pouts but offers the Lego box back, his lower lip jutting out so cutely you almost let him keep it. Almost.

“Oh, I already bought tickets,” Satoru replies casually as he steps forward to take the box back and stow it in the bag. He fishes his phone out of his pocket to show you the digital tickets for two adults and a child. 

For a second, you just blink at him, processing. Oh. Heat spreads across your cheeks and neck. It’s weird having someone around to do things like that for you. For so long, you’ve been doing this entirely on your own, and you’ve gotten used to it. “Okay. Thanks,” you mumble, hefting your son up to adjust him more comfortably on your hip. 

“Ready to go see the fish, little guy?” Satoru asks, finally having the courage to reach out to ruffle his hair, which makes Ender giggle. 

Your son nods vigorously and raises both hands in the air, whooping and shouting, “Fishies!” 

Satoru’s smile widens, and at the same time his eyes glisten even more. His throat bobs over and over, white lashes fluttering like he’s doing everything he can to keep from crying. “Do you have a favorite fishy, Ender?” He asks, clearly sounding choked up. He falls into step beside you and Ender, his arm brushing your shoulder every few steps. 

“I like sharks!” He exclaims, looking up at the man he doesn’t know is his father. “And the spiky balls. And I like the Dorys and the Nemos.” He carries on excitedly about the different things he likes about the fish—the white stripes on the Nemos, the spikes on the spiky balls, and the teeth on the sharks. 

“That’s quite the list, little man,” Satoru says, staring at your son with such affection that it aches in your chest. He shows the tickets to the counter lady, who lets you past into the actual aquarium. Much of it is below ground, the walls entrenching you in darkness as you descend. Faint, almost glowing blue light comes in from the watery exhibits. The lighting throws Satoru’s handsome features into sharp relief. 

“Okay, Ender, inside voice time,” you murmur against his ear, his silky soft hair brushing your lips. 

He nods and lifts a little hand to hold a single finger to his lips in the hush sign. It makes you let out a breath of laughter and kiss his forehead. He swings his legs a little, giving a soft hehe at the press of your lips. 

The other patrons are being equally quiet, lending a sense of intimacy to the atmosphere. It gives you an uneasy feeling because you can’t help but be painfully aware of how close Satoru is and the heat radiating from his body. You can smell his cologne, something spicy and earthy, with an undertone of sweetness. 

“Mommy, look, sharks!” Ender lets out in his best effort of a whisper. 

So, of course, you head right over. He has you walk across the length of the glass and read him each little informational sign. He absorbs everything like a sponge, asking about a million questions. The whole time, Satoru follows close by like a silent shadow. Every so often, he’ll chime in with something silly that makes Ender giggle. 

There’s still a level of awkwardness, but you don’t feel as anxious as you did earlier. Ender is an excellent buffer, as it turns out. Neither of you has to speak to each other, really, when you can focus on the kid, although you can tell Satoru wants to talk to you, from the way he keeps sending glances your way every so often and the way he opens his mouth when he looks at you, only to immediately close it. It’s a losing battle not to notice every little thing he does. 

About halfway through, your arms start to ache, and you’d really like to take some pictures, so you look down at your son and say, “Think you can walk for a bit, baby?” So many smiles today, so much shared joy, but he immediately starts pouting at the mention of being put down. You give his sides a little squeeze. 

Ender just shakes his head and buries his face against you. “No, I don’t wanna walk.” The wavy blue light dances across his little features. 

“Please, baby? Mommy’s arms are exhausted, and I want to take some pictures,” you plead with him. “You’re getting so big, baby. I can’t carry you the whole time like I used to.” 

Just as you’re about to start bargaining, Satoru cuts in, “I can carry you, uh, if you want, kid.”

Ender’s head rises, and his big blue eyes dart up to Satoru. “Can I ride on your shoulders?” He perks up at his own idea, glancing between you and Satoru, waiting for permission. His silky white hair sticks up at odd angles from how he had his head shoved up against you. 

“If it’s okay with Satoru, then that’s fine,” you say, looking over at the man in question, “Just be careful.” Your son bounces excitedly in your arms. 

Satoru looks like he’s had his lungs stolen from him as he nods and chokes out, “Yeah, yeah, fine with me.” He crouches down so you can settle Ender on the broad expanse of his shoulders, one little leg on either side of his neck. Broad hands clamp around those legs, and Satoru rises to his feet, little hands tugging on the white locks of his hair. You smirk at the grimace on his face. 

Well, at least that part is fun.

“Mommy, I’m so tall.” he giggles down at you, wiggling in his seat.

“I see, sweetheart,” you say, unable to keep the smile off your face. 

“Okay, kid, don’t move too much. Don’t wanna drop you,” Satoru adds, glancing behind him up at Ender. 

With Ender now securely on Satoru’s shoulders, you can stretch yours out without the weight of Ender on your hip. It frees you up to take shots throughout the rest of the aquarium. You have to adjust the settings frequently due to the changing lighting, but it’s worth it. You get a few really good pictures of the penguins and schools of various fish. Ender has the time of his life riding around with Satoru. There’s a natural, easy air between them that makes you want to cry.

You thought you could handle it, but this is almost cruel. It’s a peek into a life that could have been yours if he had made different choices. The longer you walk and watch the two of them together, the more your heart breaks for both you and your sweet son, who has no idea of the pain and the history between you. It hits you that Satoru might not have been a good husband to you, but there’s a possibility he really might be a decent father. Maybe it was you. Maybe you just weren’t enough for him. 

You trail behind them, only half listening to their conversation, the other half of you consumed in this agony of what if and why did it have to be this way? There’s nothing you can add to their conversation anyway, not without starting to sob right here. All these things that Ender missed out on, the family that could have been, the sweet way he handles Ender, which makes him smile and laugh, are like needles in your heart. What god is crueler than Cupid? And what mistress more wretched than history?

He must really love Kaori to still be with her, a fact that curdles in your stomach, yet another layer of complexity in this already fucked up situation. Everything is so complex that it makes your head and your heart hurt to think about it. Would this ever get any easier?

When you all stop at the penguin exhibit, Ender finally wants to get down. But the only reason he wants down is that he’s starting to get sleepy. It’s just about his nap time. He’s fighting it with all he has, though. The kid waddles around, imitating the way penguins walk. Satoru starts to do the same, which sends him into a fit of giggles, and he nearly trips over himself to follow him around. Even as it makes you want to cry until you don’t have any tears left, you take so many pictures of them being silly together. 

“We’ll go to the Arctic and ride around on sleds pulled by doggies and see Santa,” Satoru eggs on his imagination, and Ender is eating it up. He’s cracking up and carrying on with him. 

“We can see the reindeer and the pretty sky lights and the polar bears,” he continues excitedly. More pictures captured. More memories saved. More pain to carry. 

Satoru reaches down and ruffles Ender’s silky hair. “Yep, we’ll do all those things and more.” Crouching down, he adds affectionately, “But let’s start small. How about we build that Lego rocket ship I got you together sometime?”

“Yes! Please, please. Mommy, can Satoru build play Legos with me sometime?” He’s bouncing around excitedly. The last surge of energy before he crashes. 

You have to fight to keep your voice steady as you say, “Of course, sweetheart, whatever you want.” You can’t bring yourself to deny him, especially when the idea brings him such joy. You’d do anything to keep that big, toothy grin on your son’s face. 

Ender walks for a little bit, running ahead of you, though he keeps a careful eye on him, and he doesn’t go too far. Satoru walks beside you, neither of you saying anything for a while, just watching your son dart around from exhibit to exhibit. It feels heavy without Ender acting as safe ground between you. 

“He’s so smart,” Satoru murmurs at last, watching as Ender stands on his toes to get a better look at some kind of eel. “And cute. He’s the cutest kid I’ve ever met.” His voice is a strange mix of love, pride, and grief. “You have to know, I’d do anything. I’d die for him. He’s … he’s perfect.” Tears line his lower lashes, and he subtly reaches up to wipe them away. 

Your teeth sink into your lower lip. It takes you a long time to reply, mostly because you wait until you’re sure your voice will come out steady. “I know. He’s a good kid, Satoru. He’s kind, smart, sweet, curious.” You pause and say slowly, “If there was anything good that came out of us being together, it’s him.”

“I—“ Satoru starts, then stops. His blue eyes track Ender as he darts over to an exhibit filled with turtles, which he points out excitedly. When Ender turns back to face the glass again, Satoru continues, his voice low and rough, “I still think about you all the time. Every waking moment, you’re somewhere in the back of my mind, and you never leave in my dreams. You haunt me. You’re alive and well, but you haunt me anyway. Fuck, I can’t get off without thinking of you.”

“Satoru—“ you start, but he interrupts you before you can get any further than his name. Your heart is racing in your chest, hammering against your rib cage. Is it just you, or are the lights too bright?

“I know that I’ll never deserve a chance to make things right, but I just thought you should know,” he finishes softly. For several minutes, there’s nothing but the sounds of your shared breaths and the gentle hum of the conversation of the other patrons. 

Ender saves you from having to answer. He runs back up to you and throws his arms around your legs. “Mommy, can you carry me again?” There’s a sleepy dullness to his voice as he reaches his crashing point. Luckily, you’re nearly to the end of the aquarium anyway. Scooping your son up, you hold him against your chest. He wraps his arms around your neck and rests his head in the crook between your neck and shoulder. 

With Ender close at hand, Satoru can’t talk that nonsense, thankfully. You scurry towards the exit, eager to get the hell out of here before you have a complete fucking breakdown or a panic attack. Satoru keeps pace with you, though, not giving you more than a few inches of breathing room.

Once you’re outside, you pull out your phone to order an Uber, squinting against the broad, buttery late afternoon sunlight. Your fingers slide against the screen, tapping when necessary.

“I could drive you if you want,” Satoru offers quietly. “I don’t have anything important going on.” There’s so much hope in his voice that it makes you feel sick all over again. 

But you shake your head. “No, uh, I have to get him down for his nap. That’s enough excitement for the day.” Your fingers run through his hair as your son adjusts his head to hide his eyes from the light against your skin.

“Ah, okay,” he says, crestfallen. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he adds, “Well, when can I see you guys again?”

You consider his question. He did promise to build that Lego with Ender, something your son would enjoy so very much. “Um, tomorrow, I guess. In the evening. We can do dinner at our apartment so you guys can do the Legos together,” you say after a moment. 

He waits with you in silence until the Uber arrives. You want to tell him that he can go, but you don’t. You let him wait at your side until the silver sedan pulls up to the curb. As you walk up, he follows close behind and opens the door for you, but before you get inside, he grabs your arms and spins you into his chest. He holds you in his arms and presses a kiss to your forehead. 

Your heart jumps up into your throat. A shuddering breath leaves your lip, silvery tears limning your lower lashes. It’s so beautifully, horribly familiar. Your body aches and craves it at the same time, this taunting bit of contact. 

“Thank you again,” he says quietly before releasing you. 

You pull away from him as fast as possible. No, no, no. He loves Kaori, you remind yourself. He wants Kaori. Why does he do this to you? How can he still make you feel this way? You’re supposed to be over him. 

“Goodnight,” you reply tightly as you slide inside. Satoru closes you in, a baleful expression in those beautiful blue eyes as the door shuts, separating you from him. His eyes stay locked on you. A long, slow breath leaves your lungs, and you tear your eyes away no matter how much you want to look back at him. Your eyes stay dead ahead as the driver pulls away from the curb. 

Ender lets out a sleepy sigh, snuggling up against you. His little hand creeps into yours, and your heart stops pounding because of how it swells at the gesture. You can do this. For this sweet, amazing boy in your arms, you can do this. 

You don’t know what the future is going to hold, but one thing you know for certain? This summer is going to be grueling. 

Taglist is OPEN. I kindly request that all tag requests be made through THIS link as it will help my ADHD brain keep track of them better. Thank you.

A/N: Well, that was fun. TY for reading. Likes, reblogs, comments, are always so v appreciated 💖

( you’re not sure if you’re anticipating the breakfast satoru’s making or just the excuse to be near him again. it’s probably the latter. it’s always the latter )

the kitchen is quiet — too quiet — for a sunday morning. satoru’s usually humming to himself while he cooks. but no chords or melodic notes carry to your ears as you pad towards him.

he’s standing at the stove, his back to you. he doesn’t turn, doesn’t even seem to register your presence despite the floorboards creaking as you approach him. the easy smile that was forming on your lips freezes, then slowly melts away.

“morning ‘toru,” you murmur, it sounds more like a hesitant question than a greeting.

he flips a pancake with a sharp flick of his wrist. it lands perfectly in the pan, a flawless golden circle. “hey,” he replies, his voice flat, devoid of its usual warmth. a single, clipped word. no ‘mornin’ sleeping beauty’, no teasing about your hangover. nothing. . .

a cold knot forms in your stomach, completely unrelated to your nausea. you lean against the kitchen island, suddenly feeling unsteady on your feet. “smells good,” you offer.

“pancakes,” he says, still not turning. he gestures with his spatula towards the bowl of fruit on the counter. you don’t want them. not really. you want him to turn around. to look at you with those ridiculously blue eyes, to crack a joke, to do anything normal. he’s too quiet

“‘toru,” you start, his name feeling foreign on your tongue. “are you okay ?”

he finally turns, and the sight of his face makes your breath hitch. his expression is unreadable. his eyes, usually so bright and full of light, are a dull blue. they don’t crinkle at the corners. they don’t hold any of their usual mischief. it feels like they’re looking right through you.

“i’m fine,” he says, a lie so blatant it’s insulting. “just tired. . . how did you sleep ?”

“okay,” you murmur, rubbing your arms, feeling suddenly exposed in just your t-shirt and shorts. “thanks for. . . picking me up again and taking care of me.”

“what are friends for ?” he hums, and the words shock you. it’s a phrase he’s never used before. he’d usually say : he’d do it all over again. and that someone has to save you from the assholes you seem to attract. he’d ruffle your hair and you’d squirm and play fight until his cheeks are flushed and your chest is heaving.

but today he just slides the ceramic bowl across the counter towards you without a word.

it’s a work of art. tangerine segments with all the bitter white pith carefully peeled away, crisp apple slices, glistening with a sheen of freshly squeezed lemon juice to prevent them from turning brown. ripe mango chunks, impossibly orange and sweet, and plump strawberries, all the green leaves meticulously plucked off. you can’t help but grin.

( he really does know you like the back of his hand )

your smile soon wavers because for once satoru’s not talking to you as he fries the pancakes. no prodding about the date, no gentle teasing about your terrible taste in men. you’re genuinely confused because he’s usually so loquacious in the mornings, a running commentary of bad jokes and complaints about the economical and political state of the world. but he seems to be so far away, lost in a world you can’t see

“these are perfect,” you murmur, popping a strawberry into your mouth. the saccharine juices explode on your tongue. “you’re the best ‘toru”

“i try,” he responds, his voice clipped. not ‘of course i am’. not ‘you’re lucky i love you so much, prepping your fruit is a pain in the ass.’ none of your usual banter.

( it’s like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world instead of being here in your kitchen. anywhere else in the world instead of here with you )

you’re thrown off kilter by it, the typical rhythm of your friendship is suddenly syncopated and strange. it’s like hearing a song you know by heart being played in a minor key.

he serves you a stack of perfect pancakes, golden brown and fluffy, their edges crisp. and immediately starts cleaning up. he’s scraping leftover batter into the sink, loading your dishwasher. washing his hands, drying them on a dishtowel. all the while his back is still to you.

he doesn’t set down a plate for himself. there’s nothing for himself today. he usually sits right beside you — his thigh brushing against yours, thumb smoothing a crumb from the corner of your mouth as he hangs on to your every word and you tell him about your date in detail — but today he seems hellbent on keeping his distance from you. on keeping his voice to himself.

( he never cleans up this quickly. never talks this little. never avoids your gaze as if you’re the last person on earth he wants to look at. why is he being so weird ??? )

“gotta head out,” he says, finally looking at you. “sorry. suguru and i are going to the gym.”

your fork freezes halfway to your mouth. you look so disappointed it almost kills him. he swears he can feel the chambers of his heart caving in because your lip is quivering and you look so confused. he has half a mind to sit down and kiss you until the crease in your brow disappears. to sit down and tell you how he feels. but he’s positive he doesn’t stand a chance. and it’s fucking killing him.

“it’s sunday,” you frown. he never goes to the gym on sundays. sundays are for pancakes and bad movies on the couch. sundays are for you. plus, he’d said he was tired. none of this is adding up.

“the grind never stops,” he shrugs. you’re in disbelief as he leans over and gives you a side hug, a brief, awkward press of bodies before he’s inching towards your front door. you’re still frozen, fork suspended in mid-air, a perfect pancake suddenly looking like cardboard in front of you.

“satoru,” you say again, and this time your voice cracks, the sound pathetic and thin in the suffocating silence of your apartment.

his hand freezes on the doorknob. you can see the tension in his shoulders, the way his entire body goes rigid. but he doesn’t turn around. he just stands there, a silhouette against the light filtering in from the hallway, a stranger in your home.

“i have to go,” he says, his voice strained. and then he’s gone. the door clicks shut behind him, the sound echoing in the sudden silence. you’re left alone in your kitchen, with a stack of perfect pancakes growing cold on your plate. the scent of melted butter and sweet batter, once so comforting, is now, suffocating. what. the. actual. fuck ???

the question echoes in your mind, in the silent kitchen, but there’s no one here to answer it. you slowly lower your fork, the clink of it against the ceramic plate unnaturally loud. your appetite is gone. the plate of pancakes sits untouched, golden-brown circles slowly turning cold, their edges losing their crispness. beside them, the bowl of fruit look like a still life painting. you push the dishes away. you can’t eat. the thought of putting any of that meticulously prepared food into your churning stomach is unbearable. because he’s not here to eat with you.

you stare at the door, half-expecting it to swing back open, for him to reappear with a sheepish grin and tell you he’s pranking you. for him to pull up a chair beside you and steal some of your pancakes. but the front door remains closed.

you wrap your arms around yourself, a futile attempt to hold yourself together. your mind is a chaotic mess, replaying the last twenty-four hours on a relentless loop. satoru’s arms around you at the restaurant, the low murmur of his voice in your ear as he helped you into bed, wiped off your makeup. the warmth of his body beside yours as you drifted off to sleep. you’d slept so deeply, so peacefully, nestled against his chest, the rhythm of his heartbeat steady and reassuring against your ear. in your drunken haze, you’d dared to hope, just for a little while, that maybe this was it. maybe this was the turning point. maybe he’d feel the same way and you could finally be something more.

but now your hope has curdled into confusion, into a deep, gnawing ache. what had you done ? what had you said ? was it the dress ? the stupid, overpriced dress you’d worn for a date that ended in tears and a five-word text message to satoru ? was it the way you’d clung to him ? the way you’d cried ?

your brain spirals, searching for the mistake, the single misstep that triggered this sudden change in him. and the person you’d usually call to unravel this mess with you , the one person who could always make sense of the chaos in your head, is the very person creating it.

you don’t hear from him for the rest of sunday. the day passes in a blur of hollow silence. you don’t leave your apartment. you don’t even drift to shoko’s room. you try to read, but the words swim before your eyes. you tried to watch a movie on the couch, but the familiar dialogue sounds like a foreign language. you pick up your phone a dozen times, thumb hovering over his name, heart pounding with a mixture of desperation and dread.

what would you say ? ‘are you okay ?’ he’d already answered that, with a lie.

‘why did you leave ?’ you’re not sure you want to know the answer.

‘i miss you ‘toru’ ? that feels too vulnerable, too raw.

so you just stare at his name, and wait as the silence grows, filling every corner of your apartment until you can barely breathe. seeping into your bones until you feel like you’re made of nothing but emptiness.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

monday is humiliating. you wake up alone, again. your bed is cold unsurprisingly. the weak light filtering through your curtains does little to chase away the chill that’s beginning to settle deep into your bones. you lay there for a moment too long, your mind replaying the memories of saturday night and sunday morning.

sleepovers with satoru are nothing new. you’ve shared a little over a decade of tangled limbs, stolen tubs of häagen-dazs from the fridge at midnight and whispers in the dark until the moon gave way to the sun.

( you remember the tantrums you’d both throw when your parents dared to try and separate you, to take you back to your respective homes. your shared fits of rage always ended the same way: hastily packed overnight bags, staying up talking until your voices were hoarse and the sun was kissing your cheeks.

you’d spent countless nights falling asleep beside satoru, and you’ve spent countless mornings waking up beside him, his face soft and peaceful in the morning light.

the sleepovers evolved during those awkward teenage years, when your mom decided to waltz around the topic of puberty and drill it into both of you that you weren’t kids anymore and sharing beds was no longer an option. even then, he’d just migrate to your couch, long limbs comically cramped in the small space, his presence comforting despite him being in a completely different room. sleepovers with satoru are the norm, even though you hadn’t actually slept beside each other intentionally in years. )

saturday was reminiscent of simpler times. saturday, he’d actually slept in your bed. not out of necessity, not out of convenience, but because you’d asked him to.

you’d fallen asleep tangled up in the soft sheets, your head tucked beneath his chin, his arms wrapped around you so tightly it felt like he was trying to fuse you to him.

and although your heartbeat was erratic and your breathing was heavy and shaky — because satoru is without a doubt the most attractive man on the planet, and the gentlest, and the weirdest and most annoying and an asshole too, everything all at once, and you’re still that girl with a crush on him despite him treating you like one of the guys — you’d slept like a baby.

in his arms, you’d dreamt of him being the one to take you out on a date, of him loving you the way you love him. and now, you’re laying in bed alone.

for the first time since he’d pushed you off the swings on the playground and you’d demanded a hello kitty bandaid for the scrape on your knee, satoru isn’t talking to you. and you don’t know why.

there’s a void where his voice used to be. and your brain is still searching for the mistake you’re certain you must’ve made.

did you say something in your sleep ? did you do something wrong ? you can’t think of anything.

you go about your day in a fog of confusion and hurt. you expect to see satoru on campus, expect him to fall into step beside you on the quad, to sling an arm around your shoulders, carry your ridiculously heavy tote bag on his own shoulder and complain about his eight a.m. physics lecture. but he doesn’t.

nor does he text you to ask how your international political relations class went.

( hell, he doesn’t seem to have any interest in relations with you at all. )

you finally see him at a little past noon. he’s sitting under a giant oak tree with your friends. laughing at something shoko’s saying, head thrown back, the sound carrying on the crisp air. and then his eyes sweep across your approaching figure on the lawn, and for a split second, they meet yours. then his smile vanishes, wiped clean away, as if it never existed.

despite the sinking feeling in your guy, you walk over, forcing cheerfulness into your voice as you greet your friends and plop down near him. he gives you a curt, almost imperceptible nod, then turns back to shoko, and continues his conversation without properly acknowledging you.

shoko raises a brow but doesn’t comment in fear of making things even more awkward. suguru avoids your gaze as he gives you an apologetic, tight-lipped smile. yeah, satoru is definitely avoiding you. like the plague.

usually, he’d flop over your lap, demanding you play with his hair, his eyes fixed on yours as you’d swipe his sunglasses off his nose and wear them. usually, he’d tell corny jokes until you were breathless with laughter. but now ? nothing. he doesn’t even lean towards you. doesn’t even look at you. you’re practically staring at him, brows furrowed as you try to figure him out. he’s not happy. he’s not sad. he just looks numb, hollow.

satoru doesn’t go off with you when the group splits off for your next classes. he trails after suguru. shoko comes with you, and the first thing she asks is if something happened with you and satoru. you can only say you don’t know as hot, tears threaten to slip down your cheeks and your throat closes up.

despite feeling like an absolute idiot for sitting by him. despite being humiliated by the way he’d blatantly ignored you, you try to get through the rest of the day. your heart feels like it’s splitting in two. satoru is such a core part of your day — your life — that having him flat out ignore you makes you feel physically ill.

you cross paths again after your last class. you’re heading to the cafe to grab a passion fruit refresher, and he’s coming from the opposite direction. your paths are set to intersect. your heart hammers against your ribs, a burst of hope.

maybe he’ll talk to you now. maybe he was just in a weird mood earlier. something with his parents ? his basketball coach ? but he doesn’t even look at you. he just smoothly veers away, leaving a wide, empty berth of space between you, and you’re left standing there, feeling like the world is ending.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

tuesday feels suffocating. you feel like you can barely breathe as you go about your day. this is the longest you’ve gone without speaking to satoru. even when you had petty fights over who got to be player one and whose turn it was to choose a game on the play station, you’d never ignored each other.

( okay, maybe once or twice you’d given him the silent treatment for a couple hours. but you’d never gone this long without making up. )

you want to fix this more than you’ve ever wanted anything. you’re willing to go out of your way to bridge the gap between you. you buy him a sticky sweet cinnamon roll and a perfect red velvet cupcake from the cafe that’s twenty minutes away from campus. the one that’s overpriced but has the best pastries. the one he loves and frequents often.

satoru’s a sucker for sweet treats. he always has been. he’s got the biggest sweet tooth ever. you know he won’t be able to ignore you when you’ve got so much as a jolly rancher in your palm. talk-less of two fresh pastries. you’re certain you’ll be best friends again as soon as he sees the crisp boxes.

thankfully, you still share locations with each other so it’s pretty easy to track him down. you find him in the engineering building’s computer lab, hunched over his laptop. you approach him cautiously, your hand trembling slightly as you hold out the pastries.

“peace offering?” you try, aiming for a light, airy tone.

he glances up, his eyes meeting yours for a fraction of a second before darting back to his screen. “oh,” he says, his cadence a neutral tone that’s somehow worse than anger. “you didn’t have to do that.”

“i wanted to,” you say, your voice sounding smaller than you’d like. “i know you like these.”

“yeah, they’re my favorite,” he says, but he doesn’t make a move to take them. he just keeps typing, fingers flying across the keyboard. “i’m just in the middle of something right now. a project. it’s due soon.”

“oh,” you sound like a deflated balloon. “okay. well, i’ll just. . .leave them here.”

“thanks,” he says, his eyes still glued to the screen. “appreciate it.”

you stand there for a moment longer, before you turn and leave, your shoulders slumping in defeat.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

by wednesday, the sad plasma coursing in your veins starts to bubble into searing rage. who does he think he is ? to just. . . erase you ? ignore you ? to discard years of friendship without a single explanation ? it’s condescending and inconsiderate and you’re so over it. you’re not a toy he can put back on the shelf when he gets bored of playing with it. you resolve to corner him and confront him after your history lecture, your patience worn thin to the point of nonexistence.

“satoru,” you say, your voice low and shaking with fury. “we need to talk.”

he looks at you, really looks at you, and his eyes are ice cold. “i can’t talk now,” he says, his voice quiet. “i have to meet with suguru. we’re working on a presentation.”

“be so fucking for real suguru can wait, you two live together. . ” you shoot back, your fists clenched at your sides. “you’ve been ignoring me for three days, satoru. three whole days. you barely look at me, you won’t talk to me, you’re acting like i don’t even exist and i want to know why so don’t you dare stand there and give me another excuse.”

he sighs, a long, weary sound that seems to drain the last of the energy from his body. “it’s not an excuse,” he says, his voice rough. “i really do have to go. i’m sorry.”

( he doesn’t deny any of your former accusations. and that infuriates you even more )

then he walks away, leaving you standing there, fury and melancholy warring for dominance in your chest. you want to scream. you want to cry. you want to throw something. you want to grab him by the collar of his stupid hoodie and shake him until he tells you what you did wrong. but he’s walking away too quickly for you to do anything but stand there and look stupid.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

thursday comes and goes, and you feel so pathetic that you decide to stop trying completely. you stop looking for satoru in crowds. you stop hoping he’ll sit down next to you and fix everything. you stop typing and deleting messages. you stop. and it hurts. it hurts so much more than anything you’ve ever experienced. it hurts more than being stood up. it hurts more than being led on. it hurts more than being cheated on. it hurts.

there’s a constant ache in your chest. your throat feels tight every time you you try to speak. you chase the comfort of sleep every night and it runs faster. you’re zoning out in your lectures. zoning out in conversations every time shoko asks if you’re okay, you force a smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes.

you haven’t lived a day without satoru since that fateful day on the playground. and now you’ve gone four days without him. you have no idea if you’ll survive another.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

friday nearly kills you. you have a two hour literature lecture with satoru, a huge class in a cavernous auditorium where you usually sit together, in the back row. where he usually slips you notes with ridiculous drawings and nudges you under the table. where you usually draw on his toned arm, little flowers and stars that he complains about but never washes off until they fade on their own.

today, he’s already there when you arrive, to your surprise he’s saved a seat for you like he always does. and a small flicker of hope sparks in you. it’s quenched and dies just as quickly. you realize he didn’t actually save a seat for you. it’s just empty coincidentally. you’re too embarrassed to find somewhere else to sit so you plop down beside him.

he doesn’t even seem to notice because there’s someone on his other side, a pretty girl with long, dark hair who’s laughing at something he’s saying. he’s smiling, and he’s leaning in, his body angled towards her, his attention completely captured by her. you can feel tears prickling the back of your eyes.

you blink them away furiously as you pull out your laptop. heart pounding with anticipation. but he doesn’t even acknowledge you. he doesn’t slip you a note. he doesn’t nudge you under the table. he just keeps talking to the girl on his right, his voice a low murmur that you can’t quite make out over the drone of the professor.

you want to hurl. you want to stand up and scream, to grab his arm and demand that he look at you, that he acknowledge your existence. but you just sit there, your hands clenched in your lap, your eyes fixed on the front of the lecture hall, blinking back tears.

he’s never spoken to this girl in his life. you’ve never even seen her before. and sure, he’s by far one of the most popular people on campus but he doesn’t make a habit of starting conversations with random girls.

( he’s always said he didn’t need any more girl friends because he had you. and you were more than enough for him. )

you resolve, right then and there, that you’ll speak to him on saturday. you can’t do this anymore. you can’t live like this anymore. you refuse to. partly, because you miss your best friend. partly, because this week has been the most miserable week of your life. but mostly because you love satoru too much to let him go.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

on saturday, you muster up the courage to go to his dorm, heart pounding against your ribs. you can’t do it anymore. the silence, the avoidance, the gaping hole in your heart where your best friend is supposed to be. 

( you don’t bother knocking because he’ll know it’s you. and you’re not sure he’ll let you in. you decide to make good use of the spare key he gave you last year for emergencies. because to you this feels like an emergency. )

you can hear the sound effects of a video game as soon as you step over the threshold. you pad towards the living room and find satoru and suguru on the couch, controllers in hand, eyes glued to the screen where sub-zero is brutally launching at kitana.

“you’re cooked” suguru grins as he mashes buttons with a ferocity that makes you smile for a second.

“in your dreams, emo” satoru drawls, a lazy smirk on his face as he leans back against the cushions. he looks so relaxed, so normal. because he hasn’t noticed your presence yet. the sight of him grinning sends a fresh wave of pain through you.

“satoru” you frown, he glances up as you stumble back, and his smirk vanishes, replaced by that same cold, expression you’ve been getting all week.

“what are you doing here?” he asks, his voice flat, trying and failing to mask the shock racking his body.

“i’m here to talk to you . . . obviously.” you say, your voice trembling despite your best efforts to sound strong. “i want you to tell me what i did to upset you.”

suguru’s hazel eyes dart between the two of you, taking in the tension, the way satoru’s whole body has gone rigid. the way your eyes are sparkling with unshed tears. he slowly sets his controller down on the coffee table. “okayyy,” he murmurs, standing up. “i don’t think i should be here for this conversation so i’m gonna go to my room and you two do your thing. . .”

“yeah, you should leave,” satoru snaps, at the exact same time you say, “you should probably leave sugu.”

suguru raises his hands in mock surrender, “relax i’m going,” he mutters, and practically bolts into his bedroom, shutting the door with a soft click that echoes in the silence.

“i gave you that key for emergencies” satoru murmurs, picking up the remote beside him and turning the tv off.

( you can’t believe him. is that all he has to say? after nearly a week of radio silence . . . he’s seething over a stupid tiny silver key ? )

“you’ve been ignoring me for five days, satoru,” you start. “five whole days. you won’t look at me, you won’t talk to me, you’ve been acting like i don’t even exist. so don’t you dare sit there and make me feel crazy for coming here and trying to fix things. instead of telling me what i did and how i can fix this.”

he finally looks at you, really looks at you, and the ice in his eyes cracks, just a little. thawed by something raw and vulnerable and so full of pain it makes your own chest ache.

“you didn’t do anything. it’s not you,” he sighs “it’s me.” you want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he’s red, blue, and purple in the face.

“don’t give me that cliche bullshit,” you shoot back, taking a step closer to him “don’t do that. talk to me properly. we’ve always talked about things properly.”

( the statement sounds less true as each word drips off your tongue. because you’ve talked about everything under the sun with the sole of exception of the thing that matters most: your feelings for each other )

“maybe i don’t want to talk anymore,” he says, but there’s no conviction in his voice.

“yes, you do,” you mumble through gritted teeth, taking another step closer until you’re standing right in front of him. “you’re the most talkative person i know. you can’t go five minutes without telling me some ridiculous joke. so please, satoru. just talk to me.”

he looks up at you, blue eyes searching yours, and for a moment, you think he’s going to break. you think he’s finally going to end this stalemate. he opens his mouth, then closes it again. he shakes his head subsequently.

“i can’t,” he whispers, and the words are so full of pain they break your heart all over again. “i just. . . can’t.”

“why?” you query, your voice barely a whisper.

he looks away, his gaze fixed on a point just over your shoulder. “because if i start talking,” he shudders, “we can’t be friends anymore”

“you’re my best friend, okay?” you choke out, the words torn from your throat. “i don’t know what i did, but i know that you’re the most important person in my life and the last few days have been killing me— ”

“i don’t want to be your fucking friend,” he cuts you off, his voice is ragged, sapphire eyes glinting like coal in a fireplace, burning with a scorching intensity unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

the words hang in the air between you. unraveling everything you’ve ever known. it feels like the world is tilting on its axis. it feels like your friendship is shattering into a million irreparable pieces. you can only stare, your mind a blank, static, the tears on your cheeks are frozen in time.

“what. . ?” you breathe, “you don’t . . what?”

“i don’t want to be your friend because i want to be more than that” he repeats, his voice cracking. “i’ve wanted to be with you since the day i pushed you off the swings. since the day we met on the first day of elementary school and you wouldn’t stop talking about your brother’s obsession with digimon and pokemon. i’ve been in love with you for over a decade, and i’m so fucking tired of pretending i’m not.”

‘since the day i pushed you off the swings.’

‘since the first day of elementary school.’

‘over a decade.’

the phrases echo in your mind and you finally, finally understand what he meant when he’d said he was tired on sunday. he was never angry at you. he was never trying to hurt you. he was just trying to preserve your friendship. all your memories suddenly take on new meanings. all those times he’d linger after holding your hand, all those inside jokes, all those moments when you’d catch him looking at you with an expression you couldn’t quite decipher. it wasn’t just friendship. it was never just friendship.

how did you not see it ? how could you have been so blind, so oblivious to something so obvious ?

you’d been so focused on your own feelings, so caught up in your own fears about what might happen if he knew how you felt, that you never even considered. . . never even allowed yourself to fully hope. . .

“i . . ” you don’t even know what to say “i didn’t know.”

you shake your head, trying to process the weight of his words. the years. the pain he must have felt watching you date other people, listening to you talk about your feelings while repressing his own.

“i didn’t know you felt the same way.” you whisper

his brow furrows as the words carry straight to his heart. he’d never believed in a world where he’d be this lucky. never believed in a universe where you’d love him the way he loves you.

but you do. you have. for years. you’ve buried it under layers of friendship and fear, convinced it was one-sided. convinced he was too good for you, too popular, and here he is, telling you he’s been in love with you since you were children.

“all this time, we could’ve been . . .”

you can’t finish the sentence. the possibilities flood your mind, overwhelming you. the wasted time, the missed opportunities, the years you could have had together. but then you look at him, really look at him, you see the hope dawning in his eyes. and you realize it doesn’t matter how long you’ve waited. what matters is what happens now. what you say today.

“i want to be with you too,” you say, the smile that breaks across his face is like the sun coming out from behind clouds after a grueling thunderstorm. a torrent of everything you’ve been feeling — everything you’ve been holding back for years — pours out of you.

“i’ve been looking for you in other guys,” your breath hitches. “that’s why my dates never work out. because there’s no one like you. i could go on a million dates and i’d think about you on every single one. i didn’t think you would ever see me that way. i was too scared to ask, i didn’t want to ruin our friendship. i didn’t want you to hate me. i didn’t want to lose you forever, and i felt like did. i’ve been dying all week, satoru. literally dying. because i thought i’d lost you, and i couldn’t . . . i can’t. . .”

you’re rambling, pouring your heart out to him, your words a jumbled, messy stream of consciousness, and then you start crying, really crying, your breath hitching in your chest, your vision blurring.

“shit, please don’t cry,” he frowns. “i hate seeing you sad. fuck, don’t . . you could never lose me” he’s cursing under his breath, running a hand through his ivory hair, blue eyes wide with a mixture of horror and regret. “i can’t believe you’re crying because of me. i’m such an idiot”

he wraps his arms around you, pulling you into a tight hug, and you bury your face in his chest, crystal tears soaking through his shirt.

“did you expect me to be all giddy and happy when you were avoiding me all week ?” you mumble into his shirt.

“no, i’m sorry, i’m sorry,” he says, his voice muffled against your hair. “i should’ve never left you. i should’ve told you how i felt but i didn’t think you’d ever see me that way, okay ? i thought i’d be stuck in the friendzone forever and i couldn’t deal with it. i didn’t actually want to ignore you. it wasn’t fair to you in the slightest and it was honestly a dick move on my part. . . i got in my head and i was trying to force myself to move on, but i’ll never do something that stupid ever again.”

“you promise ?” you ask, your voice small.

“i pinky promise,” he murmurs, looping his pinky around yours.

you’re glaring at him through blurred vision and half-lidded eyes. you’re so beautiful. even when you’re sad and mad at him.

( he’s a goner. has been since you walked into class, clinging to your mom’s leg, wailing because you didn’t want her to leave. he’s been a goner since you were sitting three desks away from him, learning how to count up to a hundred. he’s been a goner since the first time you looked at him like this. right after you’d clambered to your feet and demanded he made amends before you snitched on him. he’ll fix everything. he’ll fix everything even if it kills him. )

“please stop crying,” he groans, pressing a soft kiss to your temple. “i’m really fucking sorry and i’m really fucking stupid too . . . and i know that’s surprising ‘cause i’m the smartest person you know—”

“you’re actually the worst. you genuinely suck satoru. . .” you interject, shoving at his chest to release yourself from his cloying grip. you’re laughing in spite of the tears in your eyes.

“i know” he chuckles, somehow managing to hold you even tighter

“i hate you” you say, knowing you meant the opposite.

“i love you. romantically.” he murmurs. and you know he’s clarifying because you were the type of friends who said it casually. frequently. the type of friends who said it everyday without fail. “i don’t love you the way friends are supposed to. which checks out ‘cause i’ve been an awful friend recently,”

“recently, yeah,” you say, giving him a watery smile, and he swears he’s going to have a heart attack if you keep looking at him. “but you’re still the best friend i’ve ever had.”

“i’ll be the best boyfriend you’ll ever have if you’ll let me,” he says, eyes sparkling hopefully. “can i be your boyfriend ? will you give me a chance to make you the happiest alive ?”

“you’re such a cornball,” you say, laughing through your tears. he’s asking like you’re about to get married.

“is that a yes ?” he asks, cheeks tinged cherry blossom pink, heart thumping erratically in his chest. he’d understand if you said no. right now he doesn’t feel like he’s any better than the losers you used to go on dates with. but unlike them he’s willing to pay his dues tenfold. a hundredfold. a thousandfold. . .

“yes, i’ll go out with you,” you grin, and before you can process it he’s hugging you so tight you can barely breathe and spinning you around as your laughter echoes in the living room.

when he puts you down, he cups your face in his hands, thumbs gently wiping away the tear stains on your cheeks. “you’ve gotta tell me what to do to fix everything now” he murmurs. “i don’t have any hello kitty bandaids on me.”

“you still don’t have any ?” you gape, choosing to indulge in his cheesy bit. he’s never going to shut up about him pushing you off the swings or your demand for a cute bandaid. he’ll probably tell the story even when your skin is all wrinkled and your hair’s turning silver. and you’re very okay with that. you’re ecstatic actually. “think of something quick or i’ll tell on you.”

“y’know i’m a genius, i already know what to do” you arch a brow and grins, “i’ll kiss it better.”

( he’s been waiting his whole life to say that )

“you should’ve said that after you pushed me off the swings,” you sigh. “or when you broke my favorite monster high doll. or maybe every time you picked me up from a date . . . we would’ve gotten here sooner.”

“i should’ve just told you i wanted you from the start,” he murmurs, his voice soft. “i could’ve saved us a lot of time and heartbreak.”

satoru finally kisses you, and it tastes like strawberries, the salt from your tears, and the spearmint from the gum he’d been chewing while playing mortal kombat. his hands are everywhere—your waist, cupping your neck, caressing your cheek. your hands are in his hair, pulling him closer. it’s such a slow, sweet kiss, one that you’ve both craved forever. his lips are plush and soft, and he’s pulling you impossibly closer until you have to pull away, cursing the need for oxygen.

he’s looking at you, his cheeks rosy and flushed, blue eyes shining brighter than all the stars in the universe. “pinch me,” he says.

“what ?” you splutter, brows furrowed, head tilted as you blink at him

“pinch me,” he says again. “i’ve gotta make sure i’m not dreaming this time.”

you don’t know whether to laugh or melt. you do a mixture of both as you pinch him and he pretends to wince, “do you dream about me a lot then ?”

“all day, every day,” he quips. “you’re all i’ve ever dreamed of.”

“that’s so corny,” you say, but you’re smiling.

“oh that’s rich coming from you, little miss obsessed with rom coms,” he scoff. “if noah calhoun said that, you wouldn’t think so. you’d be geeking and saying you wish men like that existed. but last i checked i’m a man and i exist—”

“it wouldn’t be cringe because that’s the notebook,” you tut. “but y’know i think you’re quite like noah, actually. personality wise. i can see you hanging off a ferris wheel. and i’d definitely pants you.”

“of course you would” he shakes his head, “looks wise, i’m hotter than noah. wouldn’t you agree?”

“mmm, that’s pushing it,” you say, and he’s about to protest and pout and whine, but you cut him off with a kiss. it starts sweet and gentle before blossoming until you’re beneath him on the couch, his body pressed against yours, his kisses tickling you until you’re laughing so loud you can barely breathe.

“say i’m hotter than noah,” he murmurs against your skin.

“you’re hotter than noah,” you giggle. he loves you. he loves this. this is what he lives to do. make you laugh. he’s made you cry for the first and last time — okay maybe the third and last time if you count petty childhood escapades but he digresses— and he vows, right then and there, that he’ll die before he lets you cry because of him again.

he’s still hovering over you, forearms braced on either side of your head. but he’s not kissing you anymore, he’s just looking at you, and the look in his eyes is so soft, so tender, it makes your heart feel like it might just burst.

after over a decade of pining, of waiting for you to see him with bated breath, satoru can finally breathe easily. his longs are full of the air he’s denied himself of for so long. satoru could never live, never breathe, just be your friend. not really. as awful as it sounds it was a role he played, a costume he wore to stay close to you. but underneath it all, he was always yours. he’ll always be yours

people say the best things come to those who wait, and satoru has always been waiting. always been hoping. and now, looking at you, your eyes shining, your lips swollen from his kisses, he knows every moment of longing, every year of unspoken feelings, every day of carefully guarding his heart, was worth it.

You ended up in the second row, right next to a girl with dark, shoulder-length hair, and tired eyes. You knew her name was Shoko. You’d seen her outside the building a few times, always looking like she was contemplating dropping out.

For the first two days, it was painfully awkward. You’d sit down, offer a tight-lipped smile, and she’d give a half-nod before burying her face in her arms. But on Wednesday, your laptop decided to completely freeze right as the professor was speeding through a crucial shortcut tutorial.

“Fuck,” you muttered under your breath, aggressively tapping your trackpad. “Come on, you piece of shit.”

Shoko shifted next to you, resting her chin on her hand as she looked over at your frozen screen. “Premiere Pro?”

“Illustrator,” you sighed, running a hand over your face. “It’s been buffering for five minutes. I didn’t even save.”

Shoko let out a low, sympathetic hum. “Yeah, that’s a wrap. Just force quit. You can look at my screen for the rest of the lecture.” She slid her MacBook a few inches toward you. “I’m Shoko, by the way.”

“I know,” you said, before wincing. “I mean, I heard the professor call your name. I’m not a stalker.”

A small, genuine smirk broke through her tired expression. “Good to know. I was getting worried.”

That was the opening you needed. Over the next few days, the awkwardness dissolved into easy, casual banter. You started bringing her an extra coffee; she started saving your seat. You realized pretty quickly that Shoko was incredibly chill—level-headed, sarcastic, and completely unfazed by the stress of the major. She didn’t try too hard, and that made it ridiculously easy to just be around her.

By the start of your third week, you weren’t just the quiet transfer student anymore. You were Shoko’s friend. And being Shoko’s friend meant you were suddenly on the radar of the loudest, most chaotic group of guys in the entire block.

The following tuesday, the professor clapped his hands together, announcing a surprise group activity. “Groups of four. You have forty-five minutes to conceptualize a rebranding pitch for the prompt on the board, and then we’re presenting. Move.”

You turned to Shoko, but she was already being dragged away by some girl from the front row. “Sorry!” she called out over her shoulder. “I promised Nara I’d group with her today! You’ll be fine!”

You blinked, suddenly stranded.

“Hey. Transfer student.”

You turned around. Sliding into the empty chair Shoko had just vacated was Gojo Satoru.

You knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. He was the guy who somehow managed to look like he just walked off a runway even when he was wearing a vintage graphic tee and oversized sweatpants. He was loud, extroverted, and effortlessly handsome. But surprisingly, he wasn’t annoying about it. He just had this gravitational pull that made people want to talk to him.

“You’re grouping with us,” Gojo said, flashing a bright, easy grin. He kicked a chair out from the desk in front of him. “Sit.”

Before you could even process the command, another guy dropped his bag on the desk next to Gojo. Nanami Kento. He was the complete opposite of Gojo—quiet, impeccably dressed in a crisp button-down, and radiating an aura of someone who just wanted to get the work done.

“Don’t order her around, Satoru,” Nanami sighed, opening his laptop. “Hello. I’m Nanami. I apologize for him.”

“I wasn’t ordering!” Gojo defended, leaning back in his chair and stretching his long legs out. “I was inviting! There’s a difference. Right?” He looked at you, his bright blue eyes locking onto yours.

“It sounded like an order,” you joked, taking the seat anyway.

Gojo laughed, a rich, genuine sound. “Damn, okay. Fair enough. Oh, this is Leo, by the way.” He gestured to the fourth member of your group, a quiet guy who just offered a polite wave.

“So,” a new voice chimed in.

You glanced over your shoulder. Sitting at the desk directly behind Gojo was Geto Suguru. He wasn’t even in your group—he was supposed to be working with the people behind him—but he was completely ignoring them, leaning his arms on the back of Gojo’s chair. He had his dark hair tied half-up, a silver stud in his ear, and a lazy, teasing smirk on his face.

“You’re the one who’s been keeping Shoko awake in class,” Geto said, his tone smooth and conversational. “I’m Suguru. Satoru and I have been trying to figure out how you managed to get her to actually pay attention.”

“I bribe her with caffeine,” you admitted easily.

Geto chuckled, his eyes crinkling. “Smart. We usually just annoy her until she threatens us.”

“Speak for yourself,” Gojo interrupted, leaning closer to you. He rested his elbow on the desk, propping his chin in his hand. He was close. A little too close for someone you had officially met three minutes ago, but he seemed completely oblivious to personal space. “I’m a delight. Anyway, what’s your name? Shoko just calls you ‘the transfer’ and it makes you sound like a sci-fi protagonist.”

You told him your name, and he tested it out, repeating it slowly. The way it sounded in his voice made a weird, warm feeling bloom in your chest.

“Alright,” Nanami cut in, his voice cutting through the banter. “We have thirty-eight minutes. The prompt is a rebrand for a failing energy drink company. Satoru, you’re doing the logo mock-up. Leo, target demographics. You,” he looked at you, “can you handle the color palette and typography?”

“Yeah, I got it,” you nodded, pulling up your software.

“And what am I doing?” Geto asked from behind you.

“You aren’t even in this group, Suguru,” Nanami said without looking up from his screen. “Go bother your own team.”

“Boo, boring!” Geto complained, but he didn’t move.

For the next half hour, the team was surprisingly functional. Nanami kept everyone on track, Leo worked quietly, and Gojo and Geto kept up a constant stream of conversation with you. They asked about your old school, your style, what music you listened to while you worked. Gojo was incredibly easy to talk to. He had this way of asking questions that made you feel like you were the most interesting person in the room. He didn’t dominate the conversation; he just steered it, effortlessly pulling you out of your shell.

“No way,” Gojo gasped, leaning over to look at your screen. His shoulder brushed against yours. “You’re going with neon green and charcoal? That’s actually sick. I was gonna do a generic red and black logo.”

“Red and black is overdone,” you said, trying to ignore the heat radiating from his arm against yours. “Neon green pops more for an energy drink. Makes it look toxic. People love drinking things that look like they might kill them.”

Geto laughed loudly from behind you. “She’s telling tou that your red and black idea was trash.”

“Shut up, you’re literally doing a rebrand for a soap company right now,” Gojo shot back, though he was smiling. He looked back at you. “Send me the hex codes. I’ll match the logo.”

When the forty-five minutes were up, the professor dimmed the lights. “Alright, laptops down. We’re doing rapid-fire presentations. Group one, up front.”

Everyone shifted their chairs to face the projector at the front of the room. In the shuffle, you somehow ended up sandwiched right between Gojo and Geto. Nanami and Leo were on Gojo’s other side.

You sank into your chair, letting out a quiet breath. The studio chairs were terrible—rigid plastic that offered zero lumbar support. You’d been hunched over your laptop for the better part of an hour, and your lower back was screaming. You shifted, trying to find a comfortable angle, slouching down and arching your spine to relieve the dull ache.

You thought you were being subtle.

“Your back hurts?”

The whisper was right by your ear. You jumped slightly, turning your head to see Gojo looking down at you. The room was dark, illuminated only by the glow of the projector, casting sharp shadows across his jawline.

“Uh, yeah,” you whispered back. “These chairs are awful.”

“Tell me about it,” he murmured.

And then, without any warning, his hand slipped behind you.

You froze. Gojo’s large, warm hand slid right to the base of your spine, slipping easily into the space between your lower back and the plastic chair. You didn’t even have time to process the casual intimacy of the gesture before his thumb pressed firmly into the tight muscle just above your hip.

Your breath hitched.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He was looking straight ahead at the presentation, his expression completely relaxed, but his hand was moving in slow, deliberate circles against your lower back. He applied just the right amount of pressure, his thumb digging into the knot that had been bothering you all morning.

Holy shit, you thought, your heart suddenly hammering against your ribs. What is happening?

You glanced to your left. Geto was sitting there, his arms crossed over his chest. He caught you looking, his eyes flicking down to where Gojo’s arm was disappeared behind your back, and then back up to your face. A slow, knowing smirk spread across his lips, but he didn’t say a word. He just raised an eyebrow and turned his attention back to the front.

You swallowed hard, trying to focus on the student talking about soap packaging, but it was impossible. Gojo’s touch was burning through the fabric of your shirt. It wasn’t sexual—it was just incredibly, overwhelmingly casual. Like this was something he did all the time. Like touching you was second nature.

He shifted slightly, leaning closer so his shoulder pressed against yours again. “Better?” he whispered, his breath ghosting over your neck.

“Y-yeah,” you managed to stutter out, praying the darkness hid the furious blush spreading across your cheeks. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he hummed, giving the muscle one last, firm squeeze before slowly pulling his hand away.

You spent the rest of the class in a complete daze. When it was your group’s turn to present, Gojo did most of the talking, effortlessly charming the professor while you stood next to him, trying to remember how to function like a normal human being.

When the class finally ended, you started packing up your bag, your mind racing. You needed to get out of there before you did something stupid, like ask him to do it again.

“Hey.”

You looked up. Shoko was standing by your desk, her bag slung over her shoulder. “You eating?”

“Uh, yeah. I was just gonna grab a sandwich from the cafe.”

“Cool. You’re eating with us,” she said, leaving absolutely no room for argument. She turned and started walking toward the door.

You blinked, quickly throwing your laptop into your bag and hurrying after her. “Us?”

“Yeah. The idiots,” she clarified, gesturing vaguely behind her.

Sure enough, Gojo, Geto, and Nanami were trailing behind you two.

The campus cafeteria was packed, but Shoko led the way to a large corner booth that was clearly their designated spot. Sitting at the table already, aggressively stabbing a piece of chicken with his fork, was a guy with pink hair and a scowl.

“Took you long enough,” he snapped as the group approached. “I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes.”

“Shut up, Sukuna, nobody asked you to wait,” Gojo shot back instantly, sliding into the booth.

“You literally texted me and said ‘wait for us or I’ll key your car’,” Sukuna snarled, glaring at him.

“It was a joke! Mostly.” Gojo laughed, completely unbothered by the sheer hostility radiating from the other man.

“Who’s this?” Sukuna demanded, his sharp eyes snapping to you.

“Shoko’s friend,” Geto answered smoothly, taking a seat next to Sukuna. “And our new favorite group project member.”

“She saved Satoru from making a god-awful red and black logo,” Nanami added, sitting on the outside edge of the booth.

“Nice to meet you,” you said, offering a small wave. Sukuna just grunted, which you took as a win.

There was only one spot left. The booth was U-shaped. Sukuna and Geto were on the left, Nanami was on the right, and Shoko had taken the chair at the head of the table. That left the space right next to Gojo, deep in the middle of the booth.

You didn’t even hesitate. You were a weak, weak person when it came to pretty faces, and the feeling of his hand on your back was still making your pulse race. You slid into the booth, settling into the space beside him.

Gojo immediately shifted to make room for you, his long legs bumping against yours under the table. He didn’t pull away. Instead, he casually threw his arm over the back of the booth, resting it right behind your shoulders.

“So,” Gojo said, turning his head to look at you. He was so close you could see the faint dusting of freckles across his nose. “Since we’re officially project partners, I’m gonna need your number. You know. For academic purposes.”

Geto snorted loudly into his drink. Sukuna rolled his eyes so hard you thought he might pass out.

“Academic purposes?” you repeated, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Strictly professional,” Gojo nodded solemnly, though the corner of his mouth was twitching. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and handed it to you, the screen open to a new contact page. “Put it in.”

You took the phone, your fingers brushing against his. You typed in your number, handed it back, and watched as he immediately sent you a text.

Your phone buzzed in your pocket. You pulled it out.

Unknown Number: does your back still hurt?

You looked up at him. Gojo was already looking at you, a slow, knowing smile spreading across his lips. He winked, completely unapologetic, before turning his attention back to the table to argue with Sukuna about who was paying for fries.

You stared at your phone screen, your heart doing a complicated flip in your chest.

-----

The next morning, you had Graphic Design Technology and Production 1.

It was a computer studio class, which meant rows of iMacs lined up in a cold, dimly lit room that smelled perpetually of stale coffee and printer ink. You'd settled into your usual seat—second row from the back, on the left side—because sitting at the very back made you feel like you were hiding, and sitting at the front made you feel like you were performing. The second-to-last row was a perfect, unremarkable middle ground.

You had your headphones on, one earbud in, the other dangling. The lecture hadn't started yet; people were still filtering in, dragging chairs, complaining about parking. You were in the middle of reopening a file you'd been working on last night, squinting at your color grading, when the room went dark.

Not the room. Your vision.

Two hands clamped over your eyes from behind—warm, large hands, fingers overlapping just slightly above your brow. Your whole body startled, chair scraping back an inch.

"What the fuck—" you grabbed at the hands instinctively, wrapping your fingers around them. "Who is this?"

Silence.

You could hear the ambient noise of the room around you—keyboards clicking, someone laughing near the door—but from whoever was directly behind you, nothing. Not even the courtesy of a dramatic exhale.

"Hello?" You tugged at the hands. They didn't budge. "I will actually bite you."

Still nothing.

You sat there for a moment, fingers still curled around the wrists, trying to figure out your strategy. The hands were warm. Relaxed. There was no tension in them, which was almost more unnerving—whoever this was, they were completely unbothered. Like covering your eyes was a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing right now.

You tilted your head slightly. "Geto?"

Nothing.

"Shoko, if this is you, I swear—"

The hands dropped.

You blinked against the sudden light, spinning in your chair. Your eyes adjusted, and then you found a face about ten centimeters from yours—Gojo Satoru, crouched down behind your chair, forearms resting on the back of it, a slow, delighted smile spreading across his face.

"Hey, stranger," he said.

You stared at him.

He looked completely at ease, like crouching behind someone's chair for three full minutes without making a single sound was not a deeply weird thing to do. The morning light from the window caught the silver of his earring—new detail, you noted distantly—and his hair was slightly messier than usual, like he'd woken up twenty minutes ago and walked directly here.

"You didn't say anything," you said.

"You were supposed to guess."

"I tried to guess! I said two different names!"

"But not mine," he pointed out, like this was a victory.

"Because you're always talking," you said. "I didn't think you were capable of being quiet for that long."

Gojo grinned, wide and unrepentant. He stood up to his full height, stretching his arms above his head, and then dropped into the empty chair right beside you. The class was filling up. He wasn't supposed to be in this seat. You were pretty sure he wasn't even supposed to be in this row.

"Where do you actually sit?" you asked.

He waved a hand vaguely toward the front.

"Gojo—"

"The professor doesn't care," he said, already pulling out his laptop. "She never takes attendance properly. Besides." He glanced over at you, a small, easy smile still on his face. "It's better here."

You turned back to your screen before your expression could do anything embarrassing.

-----

By the end of your first full month at this school, you had gathered substantial evidence that he was, objectively, a lot. He talked constantly. He sprawled across booths and chairs like furniture was a personal inconvenience designed by people who didn't understand his proportions. He laughed at everything, loudly, at a volume that other people in the cafeteria would turn around to locate. He had strong opinions about font kerning and would share them unprompted.

He was also, without any apparent awareness of the effect, the most attentive person you had ever sat next to at a lunch table.

You'd been with the group for maybe two weeks when Shoko and Geto got into a deeply stupid argument about whether a particular design trend was ironic or sincere—the kind of argument that lived in other people's conversations, not yours, and you'd been in the middle of pulling out your phone to seem occupied when Gojo nudged you with his elbow.

"Okay, you settle it," he said, cutting across whatever Shoko was mid-sentence saying. "Ironic or sincere?"

"Don't drag her into your nonsense," Nanami said, without looking up from his notebook.

"I'm not dragging her into nonsense, I'm inviting her into a legitimate discourse," Gojo said, with great dignity. He looked at you expectantly.

You'd offered your opinion, and somehow—without quite understanding how—you'd been in the middle of the argument instead of outside it, everyone talking at once, Shoko occasionally intervening with a single deadpan sentence that derailed everyone. You hadn't pulled your phone out once.

It kept happening. Gojo had this way of pulling you into the gravitational field of the conversation every time you drifted to the edges of it. Not obviously. Not in a way that felt like charity. Just—a glance in your direction at the right moment, a question with your name attached to it, a "no, wait, what did you think about that?" when someone had already moved on.

You started to wonder if he even knew he was doing it.

-----

Three weeks in the friend group, and the cafeteria was loud and warm, and everyone was tired from a morning of critiques. The table was scattered with trays and bags and the general debris of six people existing in one place, Sukuna often hangs out with you whenever he has free time because he said, and you quote ''my blockmates are a bunch of fucking nerds, I need a break from them". Geto was telling some story about a nightmare client from his commission works last semester. Nanami was listening but nose deep into a syllabus. You were listening, elbows on the table, and you reached absently for the bottle of water you'd grabbed from the line.

The cap wouldn't turn.

You tried again. Nothing. You adjusted your grip. The plastic bit into your palm. You were not about to make a production out of this, so you just kept your expression neutral and kept fighting it quietly while Geto talked.

From across the table, a hand reached over, plucked the bottle out of your grip, twisted the cap open with one easy turn, and set it back in front of you.

You looked up.

Gojo hadn't even paused in his argument with Sukuna about whether Geto's client story had any legal implications. He wasn't looking at you. He'd just—reached over, opened it, kept going.

Shoko, sitting next to you, looked at the bottle. Then at Gojo. Then at you, with the specific expression of someone completing a sudoku puzzle.

You picked up the bottle and took a sip and did not say anything about it at all.

-----

The HVAC in the Arts building was broken. Not broken in a newsworthy way—just broken in the way that meant the temperature in any given classroom was entirely at the mercy of whatever the thermostat had decided to commit to that morning. Some days it was a sauna. Most days it was a refrigerator.

Today was a refirgerator day.

You'd made the mistake of coming in a thin long-sleeve, and by fifteen minutes into the lecture, you'd tugged your sleeves down to your knuckles and crossed your arms over your chest, which was doing approximately nothing to help. Shoko, to your left, had produced a blanket from her bag—an actual blanket, folded small, because she had clearly survived enough of these rooms to come prepared—and wrapped it around her shoulders with the energy of someone who had learned this lesson the hard way.

"You always bring that?" you whispered.

"Since October of freshman year," she whispered back, completely without shame — she looked at her blanket, then you, and signaled to share. You said no because it was clearly meant for one person, and maybe, a bit afraid that the teacher will call you out both for treating the classroom as a refrigerator.

Behind you, Gojo and Geto were in their usual seats. Nanami was somewhere near the front. You shifted in your chair, tucking your hands under your arms.

Something tapped your shoulder.

You glanced back. Gojo was holding out a hoodie—a large, dark green one, pulled from the bag he'd dumped under his chair. He raised his eyebrows at you, which you understood to mean: take it.

"You're going to be cold," you whispered.

He already had a crewneck on. He shrugged like this was a non-issue.

"Gojo—"

He gave the hoodie a small shake. Just take it.

You took it. Geto, next to him, was facing forward with the practiced expression of someone not watching something. You turned back around and pulled the hoodie over your head. It was huge on you. It smelled like laundry detergent and something vaguely warm.

From the front of the room, Nanami—who had apparently turned to check his notes—did a single, brief look at you. Then he turned back around and wrote something down in the margin of his page. You had no idea what it said. You suspected it was not about typography.

The professor kept talking. Shoko glanced at the hoodie. Then she looked forward again, and the corner of her mouth moved, and she said nothing at all, which somehow communicated everything.

He was like that with a lot of people. You'd seen it. He threw his arm around Geto's shoulders constantly. He would steal food off Sukuna's plate with zero self-preservation instinct. He ruffled Shoko's hair exactly once—she had looked at him with such profound disappointment that he'd never done it again, but he still tried to get a reaction out of her at least twice per lunch. He was physical and loud and effortlessly warm with everyone in his orbit.

So.

You kept reminding yourself of that.

He was just like this. It was just his personality. He was a golden retriever in the shape of a graphic design student, and the back touch had been casual, and the bottle had been convenient, and the hoodie was just because he had one and you were cold.

The problem was that he also remembered, without being told, that you didn't like ice in your drinks. And that he had started showing up to your shared classes with two iced coffees instead of one—no explanation, just set one in front of you, kept walking. And that when you'd made an offhand comment two weeks ago about hating the red squiggles in Word documents, he had, the next day, sent you a two-paragraph voice message tutorial on how to turn them off.

At 11 PM. On a Friday. For academic purposes, presumably. You had listened to it twice. You were, you thought, in a budding storm over the next few months.

authors note: | art by: @/9enesiass & divider by: @/bbyg4rlhelps

you shift, turning in his arms until you can see his face. moonlight filters through your blinds, casting stripes of shadow and pale light across his features. his sapphire eyes are fixed on the ceiling, seeing something you can’t

“what’s the first thing you wanna do after defeating sukuna?” your voice is a soft murmur, barely disturbing the comfortable silence.

he blinks, slowly, like he’s waking up from a really bad dream. a ghost of a smile touches his lips, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “hmm? i’m surprised you’re still awake.”

“answer my question, toru.” you pout, glaring at him in the darkness

“assuming i don’t die,” he starts, and the words land like a stone in the pit of your stomach, “i’ll probably be really hungry after all that fighting. so i think you should take me out for dinner and spoil me.”

you laugh “in your dreams, we’ll get dinner and you’ll pay like a gentleman. . plus you’re richer than me”

“ah, so you are just using me for my money.”

“among other things,” you tease, but your heart isn’t in it. “i’m just not paying for you to eat enough to feed a family of six.”

“i’m a growing boy.”

“you’re twenty-eight. you’re not growing, you’re just greedy” your teasing subsides, and the weight of his earlier words settles back in the room, pressing down on your chest. “. . . what do you mean, ‘assuming you don’t die’?”

“well, an assumption is when you make a statement with no concrete proof,” he begins, “and seeing as i’m yet to go toe to toe with the king of curses, there’s a statistical probability that i—”

“don’t be an asshole,” you cut him off, your voice sharper than you intended. “i know what an assumption is.” you prop yourself up on your elbows, “the only way you’re dying is if you don’t take the fight seriously. and then i’ll kill you myself. you promised me we’d elope one day, satoru. and you know how i feel about broken promises.”

his smile fades completely, replaced by profound sadness that makes all four chambers of your heart ache. “you would hate being married to me,” he murmurs, his gaze finally sliding away from the ceiling to meet yours, and the look in his eyes is so desolate it takes your breath away.

“that’s an assumption you don’t get to make,” you shoot back, your voice trembling slightly. “seeing as i’ve put up with you this long.”

“you might get lucky,” he says, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. “you might not have to put up with me much longer.”

“why are you being like this?” you demand, your brows knitting together. his eyes drift away from yours again, to the window where snow is beginning to fall, dusting the glass in swirling patterns. he looks anywhere but at you. “no seriously . . what’s your problem?”

he lets out a long, weary sigh, the sound deflating the last of the warmth between you. “c’mon, sweets. i don’t want our last night together to be like this. . . forget i said anything.”

“last night?” the question is a choked whisper. “what do you mean, last night together? you’re clearly just trying to upset me now”

“i’m not trying to upset you . . but there’s a plan, y’know?” he says, matter-of-factly. “if i die. shoko, yuuta. . . they have contingencies. yuuta’s supposed to use kenjaku’s technique with my body. there’s a plan b alllll the way to z. me winning isn’t the only outcome.” he pauses, before saying. “and i’m okay with that. i. . . i kinda hope i don’t win. it’ll be really great for my character development.”

the joke is so absurd, so horribly out of place, that it makes you want to scream. to hit him. you shake your head in disbelief. “you’re so selfish for saying that.”

“selfish,” he repeats the word, testing it on his tongue. “maybe. but it’s the first time i’ve ever been selfish. it’s not like my life has ever truly been my own. i’d like to die on my own terms at least . .”

this wasn’t how tonight was supposed to go. you were supposed to be fantasizing about life after sukuna. about lazy mornings and going to that cafe he loves, ordering everything on the menu just because you can. you were supposed to be planning a future together, not talking about his death at three in the morning.

satoru getting sealed had been a nightmare. and it was only then, in his absence, that you truly understood how much you needed him in your life. he wasn’t just your annoying classmate with too much power and a smart mouth. he wasn’t just your coworker who flirted with you during meetings. you love him. sure, he was too haunted by the ghost of suguru to ever give you all of him, but he gave you enough.

“i was destined for a miserable life since the moment i opened these damn eyes. but when i’m like this with you,” his voice softens, “i almost think a happy ending is possible for me but it’s not. deep down, i know it’s not . . and you deserve more than this.”

( on the tip of his tongue are broken phrases about how you deserve someone who can take you out on a real date. someone who can do the boring things like cooking and cleaning with you. someone who can come home to you in one piece. someone who can tell you they love you. someone who isn’t him. because he was programmed to be the strongest, to protect a world that would never truly know him. because he isn’t capable of being a boyfriend. a husband. a father. yours. he isn’t sure there’s a future with you in his cards at all )

“i want to lose tomorrow,” he admits, his voice cracking. “sure, i can beat sukuna. but i don’t want to. . i’m just . . so tired.”

you pull away from him, heart hammering against your ribs. “you don’t mean that,”

“nah. . i do,” he says, his eyes finally finding yours again. and the defeat and decisiveness in them is terrifying. “i kinda hope i don’t win for once. might just let it happen.”

“let it happen. . ” you can’t believe him. “sometimes i really hate you.”

he flinches. it’s almost imperceptible, a slight tightening of the muscles around his pretty eyes, but you notice it. he’s the strongest sorcerer in the world, and your words are what finally break him. “i know,” he whispers, his voice quavering. “sometimes i really hate me too.”

tears you didn’t realize were forming spill over. you hate him for wanting to leave. you hate him for making you love him this much. but most of all, you hate the world that made him feel like this was his only escape. his only chance at freedom

“don’t say that,” you choke out, reaching for him, fingers tangling in the soft ivory tendrils at the nape of his neck. he lets you pull him closer, his forehead resting against your sternum. you can feel the dampness of his tears against your skin, and it breaks you all over again. this is the third time. the third time he’s let himself fall apart in your arms. suguru’s defection. suguru’s death. and now, this. the eve of his own demise.

“just want it to be over,” he murmurs against your skin, voice muffled, thick with exhaustion so profound it feels ancient. “i’m so tired of being the one who has to fix everything. . . i just want to be. . done.”

you hold him tighter, your own tears falling freely now, soaking into his hair. you want to scream at him, to shake him, to tell him to fight, to live, for you, for everyone. but the words won’t come. because you understand him more than anyone. and you love him.

“if you win you won’t have to be the strongest anymore” you whisper, “because all our problems will be gone. . and you can just be the man i love.”

he looks up at you then, his eyes red-rimmed and glistening, pupils swimming in endless pools of pain “i don’t know how to be that,” he admits, voice barely a whisper.

“then i’ll teach you” you breathe through your trembling lips, “when you come back. i’ll teach you”

you say the words but deep down, you make the promise but you know he won’t make it back to you. you know that his life’s script was never written with a happily ever after in mind.

satoru doesn’t answer, just looks at you with those devastatingly beautiful eyes — his greatest feature, his twisted curse — and for a moment, you let yourself believe that you can fix him, that you can give him the peace he’s never known. you let yourself believe in a world where the only thing he has to do is love you. but the future you so desperately wanted to believe in, everything you’d dreamed of teaching him, dies with him in the rubble-strewn streets of shinjuku.

The concrete presses into your knees. That is the first thing you properly register—the ache, dull and distant, as though the pain belongs to someone standing several feet to your left rather than to you. You are still bracketing Ijichi with your thighs. Still holding on to what is no longer struggling beneath you.

You look down at your hands.

The movement feels disconnected, belonging to a body that isn't entirely yours at the moment.

Your fingertips are dark with blood—mostly your own, from where your nails broke the skin at the nape of Ijichi's neck during those final moments when you tried to keep the curse back through nothing but physical force.

Your jacket sleeve is pushed up to your elbow where he grabbed it. One knee of your trousers is torn completely through. Your clothes are grey with dust.

Somewhere underneath the static filling your skull, a small rational part of you is still trying to make itself heard.

Get up. You know what comes after the docile period. You've watched it happen twice. Move.

Your body refuses.

Every muscle is shaking—not the contained trembling of cold or exertion, but the full-body vibration of a system pushed beyond the limits of what it was designed to sustain. The tears arrive before you realise they're there, slipping down your cheeks in the way they do when you're too tired to cry properly, when crying would require more energy than what you have left.

You don't wipe them away.

You don't move.

You remain exactly where you are—kneeling in the middle of nowhere, blood on your hands and guilt wrapped around your ribs like barbed wire.

Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

Time does something strange. You lose track of it completely, cannot gauge whether a minute has passed or ten or more, but eventually some fragment of clarity claws its way back to the surface.

Text someone. The thought arrives with a sudden, blade-sharp urgency. Text Yaga. The teams. Anyone. You need to tell them the intelligence was wrong—that the curse does attack sorcerers, that it always could. You need to tell them before anyone else walks into one of these nests believing the reports. Before someone else trusts information that came from you and walks into danger without knowing.

They don't attack sorcerers.

You wrote those words yourself. Filed them. Had them distributed as reliable intelligence to every team currently operating in this city.

Your stomach twists hard enough to make you nauseous.

You reach for your phone.

Ijichi moves.

The change is instantaneous. One moment he is motionless, the next he isn't. There's no gradual transition. No warning, and definitely no hesitation in his movements.

Your breath catches as his body convulses beneath you. His spine arches violently. One arm jerks sideways, while the other slams against the concrete. Then his entire torso surges upward.

He moves wrong.

That's the thought that cuts through everything else as you try to keep him down.

Limbs bending at angles they should not. Muscles moving with abrupt, puppet-like efficiency. Every motion carrying the unsettling impression of something operating machinery it does not understand.

You barely have time to process it.

One moment you're above him. The next you're airborne and the world inverts. Your shoulders hit the hard ground first and your skull follows a half-second behind, the impact erasing the world entirely—a blank, white absence—and then it comes back in fragments: the cursed energy pressing against your skin like something physical, and Ijichi's face descending toward yours.

You don't recognise him.

It isn't the missing glasses, though those are gone—lost in the initial fall, probably ground into the concrete somewhere behind you. It's the expression. Ijichi's face has always been easy to read. Anxiety sits close to the surface, a constant awareness of everything that could go wrong. He's someone who thinks three steps ahead and dislikes most of what he finds there. There is none of that now.

The eyes staring down at you are empty, and underneath that gaze, something else. A directed, feral focus. You have seen it enough times now to recognise it.

A sound tears from his throat that his mouth was not built to make.

His hands slam onto your shoulders and his full weight drops onto you, pinning you against the concrete with the indifferent efficiency of physics rather than intent.

You try to move and can't.

He dips his head even lower and you react—your free arm comes up, jams between his teeth just as his jaw clamps shut.

A scream tears out of you—dragged from your throat by the horror of feeling teeth sink through your jacket sleeve, by the sensation of his jaw pulling and working with mechanical persistence. You're terrified that if you try to pull away he'll take the skin with him. So instead you do the opposite — you push your arm toward him, deeper into his jaw, forcing it open more, and hold it there, keeping the bite where it is.

You kick. You thrash. Your feet find the ground and lose it again.

A small part of your brain—shrinking by the second—is still calculating. Leverage, angles. You think about the combat training you haven't used in two years because the planning room doesn't require it, because your technique is worth more than your fighting.

Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

And then there's the other part. Larger. Louder. The part that knows Ijichi is in there somewhere underneath whatever is currently running him. That every blow you land is a bruise on his body, that Shoko can heal the physical damage, but she cannot erase the fact that you were the one who caused it. That you brought him here. That when he said we don't go inside and you said I just want to look—that was the moment. The exact decision that led to this.

So you only hold on. You don't fight as hard as you could. You let him bite and bite and bite. You stay down and absorb it, trying to ignore the pain, because you cannot make yourself hurt him more than you already have, even while he is hurting you.

Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

He goes docile without warning. The feralness leaves him like a tide pulling away. His weight becomes passive. His face goes slack.

Your shoulder drops an inch.

Then the rest of your brain catches up.

You look at his face. At the vacancy settled over it. At the barely perceptible working of his jaw, the skin of his throat shifting with something that is trying to move upward through it.

Your survival instinct arrives late but it arrives, and you're already scrambling—trying to extract yourself, your arms finally free, the concrete taking another layer of skin from your palms—when his fingers wrap around your neck.

You freeze when he squeezes.

His jaw falls open and you see it.

Something small.

Something many-legged.

Crawling forward.

Your hands come up between you, uselessly, and—

Ijichi is gone.

Not gone—removed. Wrenched backward with a violent force that sweeps his hands away with it, that opens the distance between you instantaneously. Cold air rushes into the space where his body had been. You gasp—a full, involuntary inflation of your lungs, oxygen arriving like something you'd forgotten was an option, the kind of breath that hurts slightly with the sheer relief of having it.

You hear a thud. A heavy one.

"Satoru!"

Your legs have gone numb and they don't cooperate when you try to stand, folding under you on the first attempt. You catch yourself on your palms and get up anyway.

He has Ijichi pinned fifteen feet away, one knee driving into his ribs, both hands braced against his shoulders while he bucks and strains beneath him with the persistence of something that doesn't feel fatigue.

Satoru's expression is focused—the specific look he wears when he is managing several things at once and making all of them look effortless.

You don't understand why Satoru isn't moving away. The curse is still inside Ijichi. It's still making its way out—

"The curse attacks sorcerers!" The words tear out of you. "The intelligence was wrong—I was wrong—you need to get away from —"

Satoru moves; one clean, unhurried motion. He releases Ijichi and steps back, and as he does you see it: the centipede, already free of Ijichi's mouth, already on Satoru's hand, its legs working diligently against his skin.

He flicks his wrist.

Not a combat movement. Something so minor it could have been shaking off a drop of water.

The centipede hits the ground and scurries away.

Satoru lifts his head and looks at you. Whatever he sees when his eyes meet yours makes something in his expression soften.

"It can't hurt me," he says. "Not through Infinity."

You collapse back to the ground, unable to hold yourself upright anymore.

The next fifteen minutes exist in fragments that your brain will arrange into sequence much later.

Teams arriving—voices, movement, the organised efficiency of people who know what they're doing because they've been doing it for weeks. Satoru updating them in clipped, precise terms while you remain further away.

Through the open warehouse door, you see the curses covering the walls and ceiling begin to reduce. The weight in the air lifts by degrees. The smell changes, slowly shifting from something deeply wrong back into something closer to just concrete and dust.

There are two casualties by the time the warehouse is cleared—Ijichi and a younger sorcerer. They're restrained and loaded into separate vehicles with the practised care of people who have been managing this particular aftermath for a month.

Satoru makes his way back to you.

He crouches in front of you and—before doing anything else—reaches up to remove the blindfold. The cloth comes away slowly and he folds it. He looks at you directly, close and without filter, and you watch his face as he processes what he finds.

The colour drains from his features. Not dramatically, not enough that anyone else would notice. But you do. A faint pallor settles over his features.

His knuckles find the side of your face. The touch is careful—a gentle graze against your cheekbone with barely any pressure. You wince anyway. His eyes move: from the bruise forming there to the bite wound on your arm, to your torn clothes, to your hands covered in dried blood, back to your face.

"You're cold," he says, quietly enough that you suspect it's more to himself than to you.

He shrugs his jacket off in one motion and settles it around your shoulders. The warmth is overwhelming in a way you hadn't braced for. It smells like him—something warm and familiar that your tired brain catalogues before you can decide not to.

"Can you hold onto me?" he asks, voice soft and low.

You nod.

He guides your arm around his shoulders with hands that account for the bites, for the dislocated shoulder you didn't realise you had, for all of it. When he brings you upright and you make a sound you didn't intend to make, he says "I'm sorry."

You want to tell him that the only one who should be apologising is you, but when your lips part, nothing comes out.

The world goes dark and then it's Shoko's office—the smell of it arriving before the room does, cigarettes and antiseptic, familiar enough that your body unclenches by a fraction before you've consciously registered where you are.

Your palm finds your mouth. You push away from Satoru and stumble sideways, one hand against the wall. You retch until there's nothing and then past that, until the spinning in your head stops.

"What happened?" Shoko's voice reaches your ears as she moves toward you.

"I don't know yet," Satoru replies from behind you.

You let Shoko sit you down. You let her work.

The healing comes in stages—the bites first, then the ribs you hadn't consciously registered as broken until the pressure releases and your next breath arrives differently than the last dozen, then the shoulder clicking back into its socket, then the rest of the bruises in their accumulation, mapped and addressed one by one.

You sit on the examination table and listen to the sound of her walking away. You are too tired to lift your head, but you hear the murmur of voices somewhere on the other side of the room.

"Solitary," Shoko says, her voice lowered but not enough. "We need to put her there."

"She needs rest." Satoru's response is immediate. "Not a cell."

"She'll get rest. But she can't be left unsupervised." You hear Shoko's footsteps as she paces. "Ijichi's saliva broke the skin on her arm—I saw the other bite marks as well, I saw the scraping on the side of her neck. We don't have confirmed data on transmission vectors yet. We don't know if the curse requires direct host entry through the neck specifically, or whether transfer through contaminated saliva or open wounds is possible." A pause. "If it is possible, she's already been exposed."

"Shoko—"

"Forty-eight hours." Her tone leaves no room for argument. "Yaga will require it regardless. The higher-ups will insist on it. This isn't a debate I'm going to win against institutional protocol, and neither are you."

You can feel her looking at you. Satoru follows her gaze.

"Forty-eight hours of observation. No symptoms—she comes out. That's the arrangement."

He doesn't argue.

When you wake up properly—not the half-conscious drifting of the previous hours but actual wakefulness, the kind that arrives with full spatial awareness—you don't know where you are for the first five seconds before you do.

You sit upright fast. The room resolves: small, the walls close, a cot beneath you with a blanket and a pillow. One of the holding rooms beneath the school. You know this place. You know what it's for. You just don't know why you're here.

The door opens before the rising panic can fully take over. Shoko steps through it, and the sight of her face immediately loosens the tightness in your chest.

"You're awake," she says. Then, after a moment: "Finally."

The relief in her voice is obvious despite the exhaustion.

"Why am I here?"

She doesn't lie. She simply retells the conversation she had with Satoru —the one your brain refuses to remember.

"How long have I been here?"

"Forty hours." She moves to the chair against the wall and sits. "You were in and out for most of it. This is the first time you've been coherent."

Your mouth is dry, your lips cracked. You swallow and run your tongue across your bottom lip, but it doesn't help much.

"Have I—" The question forms and stalls. You know what you want to ask and you know what hearing the answer will feel like, both possible versions of it, and for a moment the not-knowing feels preferable to either. "Is there any—"

"No symptoms," Shoko interrupts gently before you've reached the end of the sentence. "Nothing suggesting cursed infection. Your readings are clean." She pauses. "You're going to be fine."

You run your fingers through your hair and feel immediately how long it's been since you washed it. The texture of it makes you grimace.

Shoko asks what happened, how you got injured.

You try to answer. You start twice and stop twice, the words getting stuck somewhere between your throat and your mouth. The third time you try, what comes out isn't what she expected to hear.

"It's my fault," you say. "All of it. Ijichi, the other sorcerer, everything... it's my fault."

Shoko doesn't ask any more questions when it becomes clear you're not ready to answer any of them.

You're not sure how many hours have passed when you wake up again and cannot sleep anymore. The room has settled around you with the specific staleness of air that hasn't moved, the walls pulling inward in the way that enclosed spaces do when you've been in them too long.

You get up. Pace. Four steps in one direction, four in the other.

You're calculating whether the door is worth trying—not because you think you could break through it, but because doing something futile at least constitutes doing something—when it opens.

Satoru fills the doorway, a tray in his hands.

Your gaze drops immediately. The tray is easier to look at than his face.

He doesn't say anything. He simply crosses the room, sets the food down carefully on the cot, and pulls the small chair from the corner for himself.

You sit. You eat—not because you're hungry, but because eating is something to do with your hands, something to look at other than him.

"What happened?" he asks eventually.

Same question Shoko had already asked. You give the same answer.

"It's my fault."

The silence he holds is longer than hers was.

When you look up without intending to, you find him leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers loosely linked, wearing an expression you don't have precise language for. It isn't anger. It isn't pity.

"That's not an answer," he says.

"It's the only one I have right now."

"Then try a different one." His gaze stays steady. "Walk me through what happened. What were you doing outside the school when you were supposed to remain here?"

The tears arrive before you're ready for them, which has been a theme recently. You press the heels of your palms against your eyes. He reaches over and takes your wrists, gently, pulling them away from your face.

"I saw it in the vision," you say. "The warehouse. What was inside it. And I—I couldn't believe it. I didn't believe it, or I didn't want to. I needed to see it myself before I could tell Yaga, because if I was wrong again—" You stop. Start again. "I convinced Ijichi to drive me there. He told me not to go inside and I told him it was safe, because I believed my own notes, because I'd written they don't attack sorcerers and I treated it as fact when it was an observation from a single controlled environment, and—"

You press both hands over your face, trying to hide the stream of tears. Satoru peels them away again.

"I was wrong," you say. "About the intelligence. About the risk. About everything. And Ijichi trusted me, and I—I... because of me —"

You can barely see Satoru's face through the blur, even though his nose is almost bumping yours as he leans closer.

He cups your face in both hands, thumbs framing your jaw.

"Look at me," he says, and waits until you actually do. "A wrong assessment is not the same as negligence. You submitted the best reading of the available evidence. The evidence was incomplete—that's not a failure of judgment, that's the condition you were working in. Ijichi walked into that building on his own understanding of the risk, not blindly following an order." His thumbs brush softly over your cheekbones, wiping away the tears that still refuse to stop. "You didn't conceal anything. You didn't act recklessly. Being wrong is not the same as being at fault."

You shake your head, or try to. He doesn't release you when you wrap your fingers around his wrists and try to push him off.

"None of this is your fault," he repeats. Quietly. Clearly. And again, with the slight weight of someone punctuating each word deliberately: "None. Of. This."

You don't believe him. But you stop fighting him, which is the most you can manage right now. When you tip forward, he catches you, his hand finding the back of your head, and you cry into his shirt until the fabric is wet and the voice in your head that kept repeating your fault, your fault, your fault is gradually replaced with Satoru's, and his words: none of it is.

Over the next month, everything gets worse in the specific, grinding way that things get worse when there's no clean break point—no single day that marks the shift, just an accumulation of small deteriorations that you notice only in retrospect.

The public panic becomes audible. The news runs on every available screen, the language escalating from unusual incidents to public health crisis to the word outbreak being tested by presenters who aren't yet certain it will hold. Cities implement restrictions. Supply chains begin to show the first signs of strain. Hospitals divert. The coverage has the rhythm of a story that has outgrown the framework built for it and is now dismantling that framework from the inside.

You track the language the way you have been since the beginning. The media still calls it a virus. You recognise everything they describe, and know it isn't just some sickness that will pass on its own.

Kyoto's sorcerers return to their city. The deterioration there has reached the point where their continued absence costs more than their presence here.

The teams that remain operate on compressed rotations, the ratio of available sorcerers to curse activity no longer resolving the way it did a month ago. Locating the curses has become easier—the multiplication and its predictable density-seeking patterns make them findable in ways they weren't when there was only one. Addressing them at scale, however, is the problem that remains. Every cleared nest is replaced by new concentrations elsewhere.

You don't see Satoru.

He's deployed to the largest hotspots, to the places where the number of curses exceeds what any assembled team can manage and requires someone who can clear a space alone. You know he's out there because Yaga mentions him in briefings, and because Shoko receives updates that she sometimes shares and sometimes doesn't.

The thing that keeps the low persistent dread at a manageable frequency is the knowledge that he will be alright.

You spend most of your time with Shoko. Neither of you returns to the apartment much—the school has become the centre of everything, and home has become a word that means wherever you currently are.

She keeps you busy with tasks because she understands that idle is bad for you right now.

Yaga calls you in occasionally. You go, and you use Senken. You give the information as precisely as you can. But the annotations in the margins have stopped. The assumptions stay behind your teeth, filed in the small notebook you've started carrying, the one that goes everywhere with you.

Shoko notices it immediately, because Shoko notices everything. She doesn't ask about it. She waits, with the patience of someone who knows the right moment will present itself.

The moment she takes is a late night when you've fallen asleep at the desk with the notebook half-open beneath your cheek. You wake to find her sitting across from you, skimming through it with the focused efficiency of someone who has found what they were looking for and is making the most of limited time before the window closes.

You snatch it back across the table before she's reached the end of the second page.

"Shoko."

She leans back in her chair, opens a cigarette pack , and holds her other hand out for the lighter sitting on your side of the desk. "I just wanted to see what you're writing in that diary of yours."

You pass the lighter across, glaring. "It's not a diary."

She looks entirely unrepentant.

"You arrived at the same place I did," she says, lighting up and tilting her head to exhale at the ceiling.

"I don't know what you're referring to."

"You wrote—" she doesn't ask to look at the notebook again, which means she retained what she needed from the thirty seconds she had. "approximately that the initial attack pattern targeted only civilians. No individuals with active cursed energy among the casualties, at least not directly infected. And then the pattern changed." A long, slow drag. The smoke rises and disperses. "You questioned whether the continuous division eventually produces something that operates by different parameters. Whether multiplication changes the nature of the thing doing the multiplying." She brings her gaze back down to yours. "I've been sitting with that question for three weeks. I haven't voiced it because I can't confirm it."

"I can't confirm it either," you say.

"No," she agrees. "But you wrote it down anyway."

You don't say anything.

"If it mutated once," Shoko says, her voice shifting into the register she uses when she's thinking at full capacity rather than managing the conversation, "the framework we've been using to predict its behaviour is unreliable. And if it mutated once, there's no reason to assume it's finished."

You see Satoru the next morning.

You and Shoko are crossing the east courtyard coming from the dorms, the campus still half-asleep in the early light, when he appears from the direction of the gate. And stumbles. Not a graceful catch, not a brief falter—a proper, unmistakable stumble, his weight going sideways before he pulls it back.

"Reporting to the medical wing," he says, when he's close enough, his voice carrying a particular lightness, like he's using humour as camouflage. "Routine check-up."

Shoko drops her cigarette and grinds it beneath the toe of her shoe without breaking eye contact with him.

You cross to him and he lets you pull him up—leaning into your side immediately, one arm finding your shoulders, his weight redistributing against you in a way that tells you more than the stumble already did.

He's cold. Not the pleasant coolness of someone who has been outside in the morning air, but the cold of a body that has been operating at the wrong temperature for too long, burning through reserves it should have been replenishing and hasn't.

Shoko knows Satoru can use Reverse Cursed Technique. The fact that he came here instead of using it is not a minor detail.

She doesn't say anything yet. She waits until all three of you are inside, until Satoru is sitting on the examination table with the posture of someone who has been using momentum as a substitute for stability and has just been given a surface to stop against. Then she crosses her arms.

"Tell me," she demands an explanation.

He looks at the wall. At you. Then, with the expression of someone conceding something that costs them—a quiet, almost ashamed quality underneath the usual surface, the look of someone who has always been able to fix things themselves and is having to say out loud that they currently cannot—at Shoko.

"I can't activate it properly," he says. "Normally my cursed energy regenerates—" he snaps his fingers, the gesture landing flat without the energy behind it. "—like that. These days my reserve runs dry because there's no time for recovery. It's not replenishing at the rate it should."

"When did you first notice it?" Shoko asks, after she's done what she can with the examination.

"A week ago."

The silence that follows has weight. You and Shoko doing the same quiet arithmetic—a week of operating below threshold at the scale he's been managing—and arriving at the same answer, which isn't a comfortable one.

"Have you told Yaga?" you ask.

"No."

"He'd give you time to rest—"

"He would," Satoru says, and the certainty of it makes clear he's already considered this and moved past it. "And it wouldn't stay between us. The word spreads: the strongest sorcerer alive requires mandatory rest. That information finds the wrong people. Forty-eight hours, and every curse user currently exploiting the chaos while everyone's attention is elsewhere knows there's a window to do something even worse —"

He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to—you've seen the intelligence reports, you know what's been accumulating in the margins while the cursed centipedes occupied every available resource.

"Even Geto's cult is gaining ground." The words arrive with a scoff, differently from the rest—not planned, not prefaced. They come out the way things come out when they've been held too long and find a gap. "It's not in the news yet, but it's in the intelligence summaries. More civilians turning to him, not just the usual fringe, actual numbers, actual increases in compound attendance. Framing the outbreak as proof of something he's been saying, casting him as someone with answers while the Jujutsu establishment can't manage what's happening." He stops. Something crosses his expression. "I don't—that was —"

He cuts himself off.

Suguru.

The name doesn't land in the room so much as it changes the room—a shift in pressure, a change in the quality of the air between the three of you, something becoming suddenly, irreversibly different from what it was a moment ago. None of you have dared to mention him to each other since the day it was officially announced that he had defected.

Shoko moves to her desk and sits. She takes out her cigarettes . Doesn't open the pack immediately. Just holds it in both hands, looking at the floor.

Satoru's jaw has locked. His gaze has gone to a fixed point somewhere past the walls, past the campus, somewhere only the Six Eyes can reach.

The silence that settles has been accumulating for months. It has finally taken up all the available space and there is nowhere left to put it.

You give it thirty seconds. Then a minute. Then you follow Satoru when he stands and walks outside.

"Where are you going?"

You already know the answer. You just need to hear whether he'll say it.

"Back out." He doesn't slow down.

You step directly into his path.

Your palms press against his chest—not with any realistic expectation of stopping him, because physics doesn't work in your favour and you both know it, but you dig your heels in anyway, your fingers curling slightly into the fabric of his shirt like your body has decided that if force isn't available, stubbornness will have to do.

"You can't."

His chest rises with a slow breath. "I have to."

"Shoko and you refused to let me run myself into nothing." You hold his gaze, or where his gaze is behind the blindfold. You don't bother making him recall the details—it's clear he knows what you're referring to. "Why should this be different?"

For a moment he doesn't answer, and you see the change in him. The small, instinctive retreat, the reaching for the easiest available explanation, the one that ends the conversation quickly.

"Because I'm—" He stops. Recalibrates. "Because the situation requires —"

"Because you're not weak the way I am?" The words come out flat and slightly amused, the tone of someone naming the obvious rather than edging around it. "Go ahead. Finish the sentence."

"That's not what I mean." He looks at you directly, the full weight of his attention on you. "You know that."

"I know," you agree. "Which is exactly why I'm saying it back to you, so you can hear how stupid it sounds."

Your hands drop from his chest. But instead of stepping back, you step forward, closing the distance, tilting your chin up.

"You can be stronger than me. You are stronger than me—I don't have any argument with that, Satoru, it has never been the point. What I care about—" you pause, trying to find the words — "is you. I've been watching Shoko barely hold herself together when someone mentions your name, and you've apparently been running a significant deficit for a week, and it turns out you've been doing exactly what you wouldn't let me do."

He looks away. His jaw is set, hands closed at his sides—not in anger, something closer to discomfort, the specific look of someone who can face almost anything except being cared for, because they don't think they deserve it.

"You've been disappearing for days at a stretch," you say, and your voice cracks slightly in a way you don't try to hide. "One-word messages that could mean anything. And every time you don't show up, I—" you stop. Decide that particular sentence is for another conversation. "I'm asking you to let us be your friends. Not bystanders, not support staff. Friends."

He still doesn't speak.

"If you want to go, go," you say. "I can't stop you. But I think you should come back inside with me. The three of us can find something to eat, pretend for at least an hour that the world isn't falling apart, and then you can find another hour to close your eyes."

You turn around. Start walking. The pavement is quiet, your footsteps against it sound very alone for exactly three seconds. Then another set joins them, and Satoru follows you back inside.

The Oracle's Burden TAGLIST

the party was loud. louder than any party you’d been to before. you could barely hear your friends over the music.

there were bottles all over the kitchen counters. titos. fireball. buzzballs. beatboxes. you name it and it was there.

satoru gojo’s eyes were on you the entire night. you didn’t know his name yet. just that he was tall enough to see over the crowd. his white hair glowed under the led lights and his eyes were far too bright for someone who was four drinks in.

he nudged his long-haired friend before nodding in your direction to point you out to him. it wasn’t subtle in the slightest.

you were drunk. very drunk. your big had told you that the sigchi house was the only frat house you could safely get blackout drunk. and you took that to heart.

you spent most of the night with shoko, yuki, and utahime but you’d occasionally break to talk to some of the sigchi pledges. your big had practically forced you to.

you learned quickly that ryomen sukuna wasn’t the most friendly guy. he barely even spared you a glance when you came up to him to introduce yourself. he seemed bored with you in a way that felt intentional but the girls at the party loved him. so, there had to be something going for him. even if you couldn’t see it. he wasn’t ugly, you supposed.

choso kamo was sweet. nervous but still relatively confident. you could tell he was high. he had mustered all of his confidence as he asked you about your major, constantly looking over your shoulder at yuki.

suguru geto was calm despite having drank more alcohol than the rest of the pledges. but you couldn’t help but notice how nicely kept his long hair was. it seemed healthier than yours.

kento nanami looked done with everyone.

“i joined for brotherhood and connections,” he told you flatly, gesturing vaguely at one of his brothers attempting to shotgun a beer upside down. “not… whatever this is.”

despite that, he had nursed several beers throughout the night.

satoru gojo was tall. you spent your entire conversation with him with your head craned upwards.

you didn’t approach him first like you did with the rest of the pledges. he approached you.

“y/n, right?” he asked as if he hadn’t been watching you for the past hour.

“you’ve been watching me,” you teased.

“observing,” he corrected you, a grin appearing on his face.

“right. cause that makes it less creepy.”

“exactly right.”

you let out a laugh despite yourself. he smelled good. somehow, you could make out the scent of his cologne underneath all the alcohol. it was kind of like a mix of jo malone and fireball.

he was funny in a way that wasn’t just to get into your pants. though, he wouldn’t have minded that either.  

your body swayed side to side as you talked to him, the alcohol settling in your stomach in a way that you knew was going to hurt in the morning. his hands hovered at your waist, slowly steadying you in a way that he wasn’t sure was okay.

shoko passed you another shot. you took it without thinking.

“so, tell me about yourself,” you stumbled over your words, now 5 shots and 2 cups of jungle juice in. “why sigchi?”

“my dad was the president when he went here. so was his dad. it was kind of a no brainer,” he hummed, pulling you in close as another brother pushed past you.

“you’re tall,” you pointed out, poking his cheek.

“that your type?”

“could be.”

he laughed, pushing hair out of your face.

“it’s loud,” you pressed your fingers against your temple.

you could practically feel the bass thumping in your head.  

“bathroom’s pretty quiet.”

“you trying to kill me, satoru gojo?”

“not tonight. i’ll save that for another time.”

you looked at him for a second before shrugging, “then, sure.”

the bathroom was darker. quieter. the music was muffled behind the walls. you leaned against the counter, laughing as the two of you snuck away. he shut the door behind you two. locked it. the space felt a lot smaller than you had imagined.

“this better?” he raised an eyebrow, stepping a hell of a lot closer to you than he had been earlier.

up close, he didn’t seem as confident and polished. there was something reckless in his eyes. something that wanted to see what would happen next.

you grabbed his collar and tugged him down slightly so you didn’t have to crane your neck up anymore.

“much better,” you smiled.

he let out a small laugh, “you’re really pretty, you know.”

“i bet you told every girl here that tonight,” you let go of his collar.

“nope. just you,” he placed his hands on your hips to make up for the loss of contact. “was staring at you all night. i thought you noticed.”

“…a little.”

the corner of his lip turned up when he saw your cheeks get that much more flushed.

“good. i wasn’t really trying to be subtle.”

you hung your arms around his neck, pulling him down once again before crashing your lips against his. it was sloppy. you were both drunk enough that your teeth clashed and you let out a laugh before trying again.

this time slower.

his hands tightened on your hips, thumbs pressing in like he needed something to hold onto.

he kissed you like he meant it. not rushed. not careless. but like he’d been waiting for this for a lifetime. or rather, since he spotted you in the kitchen two hours ago.

you pulled back just enough to breathe.

“you’re not as cocky as i thought,” you murmured.

“disappointed?”

“a little.”

he smirked faintly, “i can fix that.”

before you could respond, he kissed you again. deeper this time. his hands trailed down to the back of your thighs, lifting you and placing you on top of the cold counter so the two of you were on the same level.

one of his hands slid slightly higher at your waist while the other stayed steady at your hip. you shifted on the counter to get closer to him, your legs parting instinctively to make space for him.

you grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer. and that was all the confirmation he needed.

his mouth moved slower now. the kiss was more deliberate. the kind of kiss that made the room feel a hell of a lot warmer than it already was. the kind of kiss that made you feel dizzy in a way that you liked. and the kind of kiss that had you asking for more.

his lips slowly trailed down to your neck, leaving light kisses that had you in a daze.

someone knocked on the door. you both ignored it.

another knock. louder.

“occupied!” he yelled out, barely breaking from you.

the knocking stopped, footsteps retreating down the hallway.

his head was between your legs before you could even process the fact that it was happening. your skirt bunched around your hips as your legs spread, the cool counter stinging your thighs as your wet panties laid bunched up in his pocket.

“absolutely soaked,” he teased, his fingers pumping inside of your cuntas his tongue licked lazy stripes up and down your clit. “pretty girl.”

your lips stayed parted as your back rest against the mirror. no matter how much you bucked your hips, he kept his rhythm with his fingers as his tongue started swirling around your bud.

“s-shit,” you tangled your fingers in his locks, pulling him up to press your lips to his.

“tastes so good,” he hummed, sliding his tongue into your mouth.

you could taste yourself on his tongue. it was sweet. like honey.

he rocked his hips against the counter as he kissed you, his fingers still pumping inside of you, curling to hit that special spot that made you cry out in pleasure.

your hips lifted off the counter as you felt your orgasm build inside you. his hand came down to your thigh, pushing you back down onto the counter.

“this pussy’s practically gushing for me,” he pulled away from your lips to lower himself back down and swirl circles on your clit with his tongue. “just like honey.”

“satoru…” you couldn’t help but whimper at his teasing, gripping onto his forearm as he pleasured you. “i’m-i’m close…”

satoru rocked his hips against the counter with an even faster rhythm as he heard you say that. he just couldn’t help himself. you just looked too good with your eyes all droopy and your entire face relaxed as you were about to cum. it was just so damn lewd.

“so fuckin’ beautiful.”

he lifted up from your clit again, pressing his lips to yours as his other thumb came to circle your clit, his index and middle finger working inside of you.

his cock pulsed in his pants, throbbing harder by the second as his fingers curled inside of your dripping cunt.

your moans fell out of your mouth with ease. and despite being distracted, you were grateful that the music outside the door was too loud to hear anything going on inside the first-floor bathroom.

but satoru wanted to hear them even louder. the sounds of your moans were like honey in his ears.

his fingers curled harder inside of you as he added a third finger.

“cum for me whenever you’re ready, gorgeous.”

he felt your pussy flutter when he said that. and he knew you weren’t going to be much longer. and neither was he.

“h-holy shit, satoru,” you clenched around his fingers.

your whole body seized up, and your vision turned white as your orgasm ripped through you. satoru’s fingers never stopped their assault on your hole as you convulsed.

the sound was so messy- your wet cunt gushing around his fingers as he pumped them inside of you while his tongue lapped at your clit.

satoru wasn’t far behind. once he saw your beautiful face and heard your beautiful sounds, his own orgasm hit him embarrassingly quick, making him cum in his pants.

a rush of embarrassment bordering humiliation flooded through satoru.

fuck.

he pulled back slightly, his breathing uneven as he prayed you hadn’t noticed.

but then your eyes flickered downward to the dark patch on his sweats for half a second. just enough.

when he looked back up at you, your expression had changed slightly. you were catching your breath, slumped back against the mirror with a dazed look in your eyes. but there was something else their too. something small and amused hiding behind your hazy eyes.

“you okay?” you asked softly, your voice still a little breathless.

the corner of your mouth twitched upward after. you already knew the answer.

satoru felt his face burn as it flushed a shade of red.

“mhm,” he answered way too quickly.

you hummed quietly at that, not questioning him further.

but he noticed the way your eyes quickly dropped toward him again before you looked away entirely, fixing your skirt with shaky and slow drunken hands.

with a nervous chuckle, satoru carefully helped you down from the counter.

you seemed exhausted now, swaying slightly once your feet hit the floor. looking into your eyes, satoru knew you were out of it. more than just post orgasm bliss.

he figured that the last place you should go is back to the party.

luckily, your dorm wasn’t too far from the sigchi house- about an 8-minute walk.

the entire walk there, you kept drowsily rambling about random things. about how the loud music from the party gave you a headache.

how your feet hurt.

how you hadn’t memorized the kkg chants yet for initiation.

satoru barely processed any of it because all he could think about was you.

the way your thighs shook around his shoulders as you came.

the way your fingers tugged at his hair.

the soft laugh you let out when you realized he’d cum in his pants.

god. he was never recovering from this.

by the time he got you back to your dorm, you could barely keep your eyes open. you collapsed face first onto your mattress the second you got inside- your shoes still on.

“hey,” satoru laughed quietly. “at least take your shoes off.”

you groaned dramatically into the pillow, “too tired.”

he let out a laugh and pulled your shoes off your feet before pulling the blanket over you while you mumbled something incoherent, already half asleep.

satoru stared at you for a second too long afterward. then quickly left before he said something insane like tell you he was pretty sure he’d been in love with you as of three hours ago.

the walk to sigchi felt shorter than the walk from it. probably because his brain was playing everything on loop. especially the amused look in your eyes when you saw the wet spot on his sweats.

“yo, satoru,” geto appeared beside him the second he walked back into the house. “where the hell’d you go?”

“had to walk y/n home,” satoru grabbed a water bottle from the fridge.  

geto raised an eyebrow, “you guys makeout?”

“a gentleman never kisses and tells.”

but that was mostly out of his own shame. because there’s no fucking way he was admitting he came untouched while eating you out in the frat bathroom.

at least, not now.

that morning, you woke up in your dorm, unsure how you got there and with one less pair of underwear.

“where’d you go last night?” shoko glanced at you from across the dorm room, laid up on her own bed with a cigarette as she blew the smoke out the window.

you took a second to get past the nausea and try to think about the events of last night. you remembered talking to someone for most of the night. satoru gojo. but you couldn’t remember anything further. just some loud music and then going to the bathroom to get away from how loud it was.

but anything beyond that was just a guess.

“i have no damn clue.”

The next day was your first kkg philanthropy event. you stood in the quad next to a table decorated with all sorts of kkg memorabilia and food. as freshmen members of kkg, you, yuki, shoko, and utahime were tasked with standing in the quad all day and getting people to buy things so the funds could go saint agnes children’s hospital.

if you guys raised over $3000, you would become full-fledged members before the initiation period ended. if not, you had to keep going through initiation.

you had gone through 4 trays of rice Krispies and brownies when the sigma chi pledges arrived.

“oh, hey,” you smiled when you caught sight of the white-haired boy you’d been talking to last night. “satoru, right?”

he froze when he saw you. you were acting normal. like last night hadn’t happened at all. like he hadn’t cum in his pants while eating you out.

“yeah,” he smiled back. “sorry we’re late. prez was giving us a lecture about hooking up with kkg girls.”

“no way. which one of you guys hooked up with a kkg girl?” your eyes widened at the thought.

gojo realized you genuinely had no recollection of what happened last night and lightly pinched geto who unfortunately got the hint.

“me,” geto scratched the back of his head, sending a glare in the direction of his white haired friend.

satoru owed him big time for this.

“wow,” you gawked. “I didn’t think it would be a pledge. which one of the girls was it?”

maybe this was a relief. you wouldn’t know how he came without you even touching him. and he never had to tell you.

“not allowed to say. she said she would get killed for getting with a sigchi pledge.”

you tried your hardest to think of which of the older girls of kappa kappa gamma would have the balls to get with a pledge. only meimei came to mind- according to the older girls, she liked her guys a little younger than her. but truly, you had no idea. you’d only known the girls for a few weeks. so, you dropped it.

satoru bought 8 rice krispies that day when he found out you were the one who made them. apparently, he had a huge sweet tooth and would have bought the whole tray if you let him.

he even helped you guys carry the boxes and table back to the kkg house. then, afterwards, you and shoko ended up getting lunch with him and geto.

you got to know him pretty well that day.

he was well over 6’3.

he played hockey in high school but quit before college because he didn’t think he’d have time.

him, geto, nanami, and haibara knew each other since high school.

he had a crazy sweet tooth. but you could tell just from his 8 rice krispies he’d demolished the second he bought them.

he had only dated two girls in high school despite getting called a player. somehow, both of them tried to get back together with him but he refused since he claimed he wasn’t a good boyfriend to either of them.

he was planning on living at the sigchi house next year. because his dad did and claims it was the best years of his life. he’d even convinced geto to do it too. nanami and haibara weren’t on board for next year but were considering living there the year after.

he learned a lot about you that day, too.

you joined kkg because your friend’s sister said they were the best sorority on campus.

you’d known shoko since high school but became really close with utahime and yuki through rush. turns out, they were from towns neighboring yours.

you were majoring in something stem. he couldn’t remember what exactly. he was busy staring at your face.

you did soccer in high school until you quit your sophomore year because you ‘hated how much of your free time it was taking’.

you loved sweet treats after dinner and had fallen in love with this ice cream place off campus you swore you’d take him to sometime.

you were big on after parties in high school. you never got an opportunity to throw one but after every dance, you’d head over with your friends and get shit faced.

after that day, satoru was practically glued to your hip. the two of you were close friends. you’d even call him a best friend if shoko wouldn’t kill you for trying to replace her.

…

for the rest of freshman year, you and your friends pretty much only went to sigchi parties.

you and shoko stuck together like glue. you’d been best friends since freshman year and somehow, miraculously, both managed to get bids for kkg.

she’d smoke her cigarette while sipping on whatever jungle juice concoction sigchi had come up with that week. you’d rotate through a few cups of jungle juice and then complain by the time you left that your stomach was rumbling. and that was usually only when the lights flicked on and the sigchi president kicked everyone out. though, kkg girls were always invited to stay longer.

you’d been there enough to know that geto had crazy pull but would fumble it at the last second.

you’d been there long enough to know that choso had never been anything other than high at a sigchi party.

you’d been there long enough to question how sukuna even made it into sigchi when all he really did was bark at people to shut up and hook up with girls. he was nice when he wanted to be. but not often.

you’d been there long enough to know that nanami only ever nursed one beer the entire night and just hung out with his friends- parties weren’t really his thing.

you’d been there long enough to know that haibara ended up getting the most girls instagrams throughout the night just by being as sweet as he was. his record was 20 in one night. though, he didn’t care to flex it.

and you’d been there long enough to know that despite talking to multiple girls throughout the night, would never hook up with a single one of them. instead, he’d find you and come hang out with you while you sat in the kitchen with your friends and a few other guys.

“what are you guys up to?”

satoru came into the kitchen, immediately taking your cup out of your hand and taking a sip out of it before making a face.

“it’s orange juice,” you laughed, taking the cup back from him. “i have an interview for an internship tomorrow morning at 10. can’t drink tonight.”

of course you had an interview. you, the smartest and most beautiful woman in the world to him, had an internship because you were the smartest and most beautiful woman in the world.

“booo,” he pouted.

“now, now, satoru. no need to be jealous because she has an internship interview and you don’t,” geto snickered.

“yeah, satoru,” you joined in, turning to face the white-haired boy.

satoru loved that look in your eye when you were making fun of him. it was never malicious, no. it was playful. and he thanked his lucky stars that you were comfortable enough with him for that.

“who said i was jealous? i’m proud of the little bugger,” satoru laughed, ruffling your hair.

“ugh, satoru. my hair,” you glared, trying to fix your hair.

…

semester one finals crept up on you faster than you realized they would. as a biomedical engineering major, your finals felt like they were never ending. chem. calc II. your intro to bme class. even that stupid elective you took because a senior told you it would be easy.

it had you sitting in the library with shoko at all hours of the day. in between classes and dinner, you were at the library. then, you’d go to the library after dinner and then go back to your dorm.

you pretty much did nothing but sleep and shower in your dorm.

the library was nice. it was quiet. it was calm. you and shoko could take breaks whenever you wanted and then lock back in immediately.

“you ladies studying?”

maybe not anymore.

you turned your head to see satoru and geto pulling chairs over to your table. you let out a sigh before looking back at your ipad.

“didn’t see you two at the last sigchi party,” gojo sat down.

“i had a final that monday,” you hummed, not looking up from your ipad.

“same,” shoko spoke, typing away on her laptop. “so did yuki and utahime. we all had calc.”

“oh yeah, nanami and sukuna had that too,” geto hummed, taking out his own computer.

“they were still at the party tho-”

“if you guys came here to talk, you should probably leave. i have three more finals to study and i’m going to be really pissed off if you guys won’t let me study for them.”

you were so stressed that it was eating you up inside. you had so much to do and so little time.

“i have work to do too,” gojo pouted, taking his notebook and laptop out of his bag.

miraculously, gojo was a lot harder of a worker than you thought he was. he had to be. as a physics and business double major, he didn’t have much time to do things other than study and attend the weekly sigchi function.

so was geto. he was a public policy major. he went on a tangent wanting to “change society” or something like that. you zoned out after the first few minutes and just started saying ‘uh huh’ to everything.

gojo had taken ap chem in high school and somehow got a 5 so he helped you and shoko out a little bit whenever he remembered something.

“do you remember stoich? this question has to do with that,” gojo pointed to the question you and shoko had been stumped on for the past 10 minutes.

“seriously?” you and shoko let out a groan.

your study breaks were better than you anticipated. it was only 5 minutes every 25 minutes but it was enough to learn a lot about what had been going on since you’d temporarily sworn off sigchi parties.

according to the two boys, haibara had went home before finals week even started. he was a communications major so all of his finals were just essays or projects. you resented him a lot right now.

sukuna had apparently locked himself in his dorm all week and only left for food and the gym. he was the same major as you, so you supposed he just preferred solitude during stressful times.

nanami had pretty much refused to see any of the other sigchi brothers outside of the weekly function. he studied at café’s but refused to tell anyone which ones. he was a finance major, so he only went there with other finance majors.

choso… they honestly couldn’t tell if choso was studying. they knew he had a pretty good gpa- around a 3.6. but every time they saw him this week, he was sitting outside his dorm smoking a joint.

and gojo and geto had been spending a lot of time in various buildings on and off campus, trying to find the perfect study spot. which is what led them to the library where they ran into you.

for the rest of finals week, you, shoko, gojo, and geto would spend all your free time in the library together, grinding through whatever work or studying you had to do.

…

after winter break, you came back to college and got straight back to your sigchi adventures. though, at first, you assumed that would be parties.

but instead, you’d spent hours upon hours helping the sigchi boys with fundraisers. every fundraiser, you got a call from a certain white haired frat boy begging asking for help with banners since apparently none of the boys were good enough at art.

geto was good at art but he was willing to take the hit if it helped his boy get pussy.

it didn’t.

but the thought was there.

“please,” satoru would say dramatically over the phone, like it was a matter of life or death. “you’re the only person i know who’s good at art.”

the excuse worked every time. not that satoru was complaining.

gojo was desperate to stick close to you. to hear those honey-like moans just one more time before he died.

and because you had a hard time saying no to him, you always showed up.

by sophomore year, you had somehow been the solution to every sigchi issue.

need a banner?

call y/n.

need graphics for a social media post?

call y/n.

need someone to take photos of a philanthropy event?

call y/n

which is exactly how satoru found himself sprawled across the sigchi living room floor one afternoon while you painted yet another fundraiser banner.

“satoru.”

you snapped him out of his daze with your voice as his eyes locked with yours.

you sat cross-legged across from him, surrounded by markers, paint, brushes, and banner sheet.

satoru, meanwhile, had contributed absolutely nothing.

“yes?”

“what’s the banner for?”

satoru blinked.

that’s right.

the excuse he’d used to get you to come over this time. the fundraiser next week needed a banner.

 granted, the current frat sweetheart could do it. but satoru didn’t like her nearly as much as he liked you. not even a fraction of the amount.

“oh. it’s a fundraiser for that hospital down the street. shit. what’s it’s name? uhm… saint… saint something.”

you stared at him.

“saint agnes?”

“yes. that.”

“you’re an idiot.”

satoru couldn’t help but grin as he watched the amused look in your eye as you worked. it was annoyance. it wasn’t anger. it was comfort.

you were comfortable enough to call him an idiot.

comfortable enough to spend your Friday afternoon helping his frat with a fundraiser that didn’t even matter to you.

his eyes dropped from your face to your hands as your fingers held the brush, painting letters across the long banner with confident strokes.

“don’t do everything for him. make him do something too,” geto suggested, walking by and seeing satoru dilly dallying while you painted.

“he’ll just ruin it.”

geto snorted.

“see?” satoru pointed. “she gets me.”

a small smile peered through your lips.

“i just know you far too well, satoru.”

you did a lot for sigchi. more than a lot of people realized.

you knew every brother.

you were at every philanthropy event.

you helped out whenever they needed an extra hand.

and half the chapter trusted you more than they trusted the other members. especially nanami.

which is definitely why satoru the sudden idea while you continued working on the banner.

“you should run for sweetheart.”

you stared at him for a full second before letting out a laugh.

“me? frat sweetheart? are you serious?”

“i’ll endorse you.”

you laughed harder.

“satoru.”

“i’m serious.”

to him, it was obvious.

with the amount of work you did for the sigma chi house, satoru was shocked you hadn’t thought about it sooner. especially since he knew that at least all the current sophmores (including himself) would vote for you in a heartbeat. that was at least 7 votes already.

“are you deadass right now?”

“i’m 1000% deadass.”

for once, satoru wasn’t joking.

and judging by the look in your eye, you were starting to take him seriously too.

you thought about it for about a week.

obviously, you’d already done a lot for sigma chi. most of it was because satoru had begged you. but still, you’d done a lot. whether it was posters, taking photos, or social media captions, you’d become the go to for the sigma chi boys whenever they needed something done cleanly.

and you’d done all this while still maintaining your grades.

plus, if you’d secure the spot by the end of your sophomore year, you would have the position for all of junior and senior year.

the current frat sweetheart, meimei was elected through her higher up connections to sigma chi through her alumni ex-sigchi-president father. she was practically guaranteed the spot the second she decided to run for it last year. but despite having the title, she didn’t honestly do anything worthy of keeping it.

you’d done more for sigma chi in the past year than she had.

luckily, she was graduating. and as far as the sigma chi boys knew, no legacy picks were thinking about running this year.

plus, this year, it was an actual competition where all 50 of the brothers were going to vote.

so, why not?

two days later, your campaign announcement post went up on the sigchi Instagram.

satoru felt good about your chances for sweetheart.

at least, he did until he opened sigma chi’s sweetheart nomination list.

his eyes scanned through the list until they caught on another name.

daniela marston.

“fuck.”

geto glanced over from the couch.

“what?”

satoru turned the screen around. geto only needed one glance to understand.

“oh.”

“yeah.”

neither of them said anything for a moment.

“You want me to get rid of him?” he asks, short dark locks falling into his eyes as he reaches into the pocket of his pants to withdraw his pack of Newports. Flicking a cigarette out of the package, he places it between his lips and lights it. One puff, then another, before he adds, “Up to you.”

“Well, you can’t exactly ban your lawyer,” you mutter, adjusting stray locks of hair until you’re satisfied with the way it looks.

Taking a drag off the cigarette, he shrugs, broad shoulders rising and falling smoothly. “I can always request a different lawyer or tell him it’s not a good time.” It warms your heart how he always puts your comfort first, but then again, that’s just who Higuruma is. Everyone before himself. It makes working for him easy and being his friend even easier.

“No, requesting a new lawyer isn’t going to stop him,” you reply, grabbing your sequined black clutch from the vanity counter as you turn to face him. “He’ll just buy a membership and start showing up as a client. And if that doesn’t work, I wouldn’t put it past him to just wait out in the parking lot every day.” Suguru is as hard-headed as Satoru is. Either way, you know, deep down, that he’s not going to stop showing up. 

“Well, what do you want to do then? He’s sitting at the bar waiting for me, said he has some more papers for me to sign, but honestly, I think it’s bullshit,” Higuruma says, eyes flicking from you to the door then back to you again. 

Your mouth tugs into a frown. The club is closed, only staff are present, and that’s how you’d prefer it to be for this to happen. “I’ll go talk to him,” you say after a long stretch of silence, your voice tight and veined with reluctance. You may as well rip the band-aid off, get this first real meeting over and done with. “But I’m gonna need you to keep him busy when, uh, Satoru arrives.”

“Your boyfriend?” Higuruma teases, dark eyes dancing with amusement.

You immediately pull a face and snap, “He’s not my boyfriend.” He’s not. Shifting from foot to foot, you add irritably, “God, this is so fucking high-school. Boyfriend. Girlfriend. How about we all just shut the fuck up about it, okay?” 

He just laughs, “Defensive much?” At your glare, he just laughs harder and continues, “He thinks he’s your boyfriend because you’re letting him act like your boyfriend. If you stop letting him act like your boyfriend, then he’ll stop thinking he is. But let’s face it, you like the fact that he’s acting like your boyfriend.”

Your jaw falls open the longer he goes on. “Hiromi,” you say after he’s done, “I don’t wanna talk about this anymore. And … you’re wrong. Satoru is an annoying, petulant nepo-brat who doesn’t know how to quit while he’s ahead. I don’t like a single fucking thing about him.” But he’s also funny, charming, generous, and remarkably thoughtful at times, your mind supplies unhelpfully. 

“You know what we call people like you where I’m from?” He asks, one thin dark brow rising. You can already tell from the smirk on his face that you aren’t gonna like what comes out of his mouth next. “Fucking liars.”

Face scrunched up in a mean glare, you scoff and mutter, “Bastard.” But you don’t argue with him further. It would be pointless anyway. 

He takes another few drags off the cigarette before stubbing the smoldering butt out in a nearby ashtray. Inclining his head to the doorway, he says, “Come on, let’s go run off your ex-husband.” It makes you laugh despite the situation. 

You follow Higuruma down the hall and out into the playroom, where staff are getting set up for the day. Across the room, Suguru sits at the bar, briefcase beside him. He looks nicer today than he did yesterday, like he put a lot of thought into grooming and dressing himself today. You can tell when Suguru spots you because he stands up so quickly that he nearly knocks the stool over. He doesn’t move to meet you halfway, though. Instead, he waits for you and Higuruma to cross the playroom.

Every step makes you feel more and more nauseous. Then, you’re standing in front of him, blinking at the man you used to be married to, the man who used to hold your heart in the palm of his hand. His raven hair is glossy beneath the stage lights, his eyes almost chestnut in the dim lighting of the club. “You look nice,” he says, his voice calm and even. He always was good at masking his real feelings behind a calm, pleasant demeanor and a polite smile. 

“Why are you here?” You return sharply, your tone lacking any kind of patience.

A perfunctory, placid smile spreads slowly across Suguru’s mouth. “I work for this place now. I’m your lawyer.” He says he’s your lawyer in a way that doesn’t seem very general and more like he means you specifically. The deceptively gentle smile drops away, his face going cold, “So, since when did you start shaking your ass for tips?” Oh, so he wants a fight. 

Fine, if he wants to have it out, then you’ll have it out with him. 

“Excuse the fuck out of you?” You snap, taken aback by the judgmental note in his voice. He’s pissed off. Like, he has any right to be pissed off. He blinks, startled by your outburst. “You can get the fuck down from your high horse and hop off my dick, please and thanks. Maybe I wouldn’t have to be shaking my ass for tips if you weren’t such a dick during the divorce. Sorry, but I wasn’t really cut out for the whole starving artist thing.”

Higuruma’s eyes bounce between you two. He doesn’t butt in, though, and he won’t until you give him your say-so. You can fight your own battles, he learned after you kneed some client in the groin for getting a little too handsy. The staff dutifully mind their own fucking business. Although occasionally one of the bartenders will throw a glance your way.

Suguru stares at you for a moment, his eyes roving over your face like he doesn’t recognize the person standing in front of him. Good. You don’t want to be the same woman who left him, the woman who clung to him for everything, who needed him. “Somebody got an attitude,” he replies snidely. “Cute. Really cute.” His tone of voice says it’s not cute at all to him, though. “So this is what you’ve been doing over the last five years. Slutting it up, taking off your clothes for a few dollars. I thought you were better than something like this.”

Your teeth grind together. For some reason, his judgment stings. But you just shake your head, your mouth pressing into a thin line. “I’m not doing this with you. What I do with my life, what I do with my body, it’s none of your fucking business,” you bite out. Then, glancing at Higuruma, you say, “We’re done here. I have to go anyway.”

“Where the fuck are you going dressed like that?” Suguru’s golden brown eyes flick up and down you. The cute little pink babydoll, the heels, the choker. You look like you’re about to go on a date. It’s not a date, though. It’s really not.

Back when you were married to him, you never would have worn something like this. It was pants and oversized sweaters, flowy dresses, tunics, overalls, modest shit. You wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that kind of crap now. No, you liked your clothes runway now, always flaunting your assets. 

“Hired for the day, companionship outing,” you answer saccharinely. Let him suck on that. Satoru calls it renting you, the idiot. 

Before Suguru has a chance to ask what that means, Higuruma volunteers the information: “The club lets membership holders borrow the dancers for a fee to go to outside destinations.” Suguru’s head snaps in his direction, momentarily giving you a break, as he continues, “She’s one of our most popular dancers. Gets a lot of requests.” What he doesn’t say is that you actually accept very few of the requests you receive. 

Suguru’s head swivels back so he’s looking into your eyes again. “Oh, so you’re not just a stripper then; you’re a whore now too?” He barks with a bitter laugh. 

Something burns in your chest. Red washes your vision for just a second, your chest rising and falling as you try to get a handle on the forest fire ripping through your heart. Before you even realize what you’re doing, your hand comes up and—crack—you slap him across the face so hard his head jerks slightly to the side. A trickle of blood leaks from the corner of his mouth, but you don’t care. Slowly, carefully, he reaches up and wipes it away, looking at you out of the corner of his eye. There’s a perfect red outline of your hand on his cheek. 

The stinging of your palm grounds you as you say, your voice colder than the snows of Mount Everest, “Don’t you ever fucking talk to me like that again. Asshole.” The insult is spat at his feet. A whore. Who the fuck does he think he is?

You’re about to walk away when his hand clamps around your wrist. “Who is it?” He yanks you closer to him, and you almost stumble. There’s only an inch or so between your mouths as he hisses, his eyes narrowing, “Tell me, who are you going out with looking so fucking …” He trails off, eyes flicking up and down your body, lingering on the plush curve of your tits. His fingers dig into the delicate muscle and bone hard enough to hurt, hard enough that there’s going to be a mark left behind. 

“Don’t say slutty, you already used that one. Use that big brain of yours and think of something better,” you cut in before he can finish, tugging your wrist out of his grip.

That’s when Higuruma gets between you and throws an arm around Suguru’s shoulders. “Alright, that’s about enough of that,” he says, guiding Suguru away, “Let’s you and I go look over those papers you brought, huh? And have a little chat about how I expect my girls to be treated going forward.” His tone brooks no room for argument. 

As he drags Suguru toward his office, you storm off in the opposite direction, slipping out front where Satoru’s Benz is already pulled up to the curb. Pulling open the door, you practically dive into the front seat and mutter, “Drive. Get the hell out of here. Suguru’s inside.”

You don’t have to tell him twice. That’s explanation enough for him. He whips the car so fast that it would have sent you careening into the door had he not reached over to grab your shoulder, ensuring that very thing didn’t happen. Despite your foul mood, you let out a breathless laugh as he tears away from the club, breaking more than one traffic law in the process. 

But you don’t care; you’re still riding the high from the fight with Suguru. The leftover adrenaline translates to recklessness. Once you’re lost in the jungle of LA traffic, Satoru releases your shoulder and takes it a little easier on the car as he muscles his way through traffic. 

Neither of you says anything for a moment, but then when you open your mouth to speak, so does he. 

“About last—“

“So what’s—“

Your face feels warm all of a sudden, and you sink into your seat. “You, uh, you first,” you say, looking out the window. Hiromi’s words from earlier play through your mind. You like the fact that he’s acting like your boyfriend. No, you don’t. Bullshit. 

“Right, you wanna tell me what that was all about?” He looks at you out of the corner of his eye, blue eyes gleaming in the light. “Diving in the car, no hey, fuck you, or how you doing? Just go, go, go. Makin’ me feel like you robbed a bank and I’m the getaway car.”

Despite the foul mood that whole thing left you in, Satoru manages to draw a laugh out of you. Somehow, he’s always making you laugh. At your smile, the corners of his mouth turn upward in kind. It takes you a while to get it out, mostly because you’re still so pissed that what’s liable to come out is a string of unintelligible curses rather than the explanation he’s looking for. Silence stretches out between you again, slow and sticky like pulled taffy. Finally, you say, “Well, I kind of left while he was in his meeting with Higuruma, right after you did actually.”

Outside, LA’s bright blue sky is seemingly endless. Palms and skyscrapers flash past as Satoru pushes the car towards the coast. It’s a gorgeous day out, the sun bright and beating down on the city. 

“So you guys didn’t talk things out last night?” He asks, the words coming out in a rush, eyes darting to look at you for a split second before they go back to the road. He sounds almost nervous. 

You look over at him fully for the first time since getting into the car. He looks good, like always—perfectly tailored dark pants, crisp white shirt, black blazer. But then you notice his bruised, scabbed-over knuckles, the bags under his eyes, the general way he’s holding himself. He seems on edge, uneasy. It’s not that hard to put two and two together, or maybe you’re just able to read him that well.

“Is that really what you thought was gonna happen? That I was gonna look into his eyes and then trip and fall into his arms and we were gonna fuck and get married again and have lots of babies?” You ask sarcastically. They’re rhetorical questions. Scoffing, you continue, “Be so for real, Satoru. Whatever you thought was going to happen, there was pretty much the opposite of what actually happened.”

He seems to let out a sigh of relief, his shoulders slumping a little. “Really?”

“Really,” you reply, “But before we get into what happened with Suguru, how about you tell me what’s going on with your hand and why you look like you ran a marathon last night.” Pausing, you sink your teeth into your lower lip. For a moment, you debate your next words, but in the end, you can’t help yourself. “You were snorting shit again last night, weren’t you?” Your voice is laced with accusation.

He shoots a surprised expression, a silver brow shooting up. One of his long fingers taps against the wheel. A muscle in his jaw feathers, and he takes a while to answer, but when he finally does, his honesty shocks you. “Yeah, sorry. Was having a shit time and slipped up.” Another tap against the wheel. “And as for the hand, well, let’s just say it had an encounter with my desk, then my dresser … and my nightstand.”

Letting out a huff of laughter, you shake your head. You could probably hazard a guess as to why he was having a shit time, but you don’t ask. Another thing to add to the box of things you won’t look too closely at. “Right, maybe try not to have and introduce your fists to any other hard surfaces,” you reply, but then you realize the other thing he said. Slipped up, like he’s trying not to shove that shit up his nose. “What? Are you like getting sober or something?” You ask, leaning your head to rest against the door.

It’s his turn to laugh now. Reaching up with one hand, he rakes his fingers through his snowy locks. “I guess you could say that.” His eyes flick to you for a second, then back to the road. “I know you’re not really about that shit, so I figured I’d quit, or try to anyway.”

Oh. For some reason that tugs at something in your chest, that warm, fluttery sensation you’ve been feeling more and more frequently around him. It’s just nerves, you tell yourself. “Except last night,” you say softly, last night when Suguru found you, last night when Satoru stared at you up on those poles like you were the Madonna and he was a supplicant at your feet, begging for mercy. And you just couldn’t bring yourself to grant it. Not then, not there. 

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then very quietly, he replies, “Right. Except last night.” He looks guilty, like a kid who got caught doing something they were already expressly instructed not to. “Sorry,” he mutters again, like he can’t help it. 

“You don’t have to apologize for that,” you murmur, the tiniest drop of guilt pricking at your heart. It’s ridiculous. You have nothing to feel guilty over. It’s not like you’re responsible for his irresponsible actions. But still, you kind of feel bad because you know that if you’d taken a second to acknowledge him last night, he probably wouldn’t have felt the need for his pills. Looking back out the window, you scramble for the right words to convey what you’re thinking. “I …” you trail off, swallowing down a surge of twisted, tangled-up feelings knotted in your chest, “That’s really cool of you, Satoru. To get sober, I mean.” It’s not exactly a thank you, but it’s close enough. 

“I don’t like that word. Makes it sound way more fucked than it is, like I was shooting up or some shit,” he grouses, his hand flexing around the steering wheel. The initial awkwardness is slowly melting away, the air clearing under the volley of your guys’ dynamic. 

You just chuckle, “Alright, then sober adjacent.”

He laughs again, head tipping back a little, shoulders shaking. He looks at you out of the corner of his eye again, “Better. Makes me sound less boring and less like a tweaker.” He pauses, the car easing to a stop at a red light. “So … you’re really not entertaining Suguru then?”

“You’re really concerned about that,” you say quietly, turning to look at him again. 

A muscle jumps in his jaw as his teeth grind together and his hands are wrapped so tight around the steering wheel that his knuckles are blanched. After a moment, he shrugs and says casually (in a way that actually doesn’t sound very casual at all), “I don’t know. It just seems like we’ve got a good thing going here. You make me come. Then I make you come. You’re mean, and I’m … me.” He pauses, eyes shifting to you for a second before sliding forward again, “I don’t know. Just ignore me. It’s stupid.” The last sentence sounds like he’s pouting, but it’s hard to tell with how he’s facing.

The words, It’s not stupid, sit on the tip of your tongue, heavy but unspoken, and you swallow them down. You can’t bring yourself to say them because if you say them, then that’s basically the same as admitting you care about his feelings. Hahaha, no fucking shot you’re doing that. “Yeah, it’s good,” you say after a moment. Something safe, something relatively neutral. “Look, I’m not really ready to deal with Suguru yet. And, I’m certainly not going to fall over and bat my lashes just from seeing him again.” Your teeth bite into your lower lip for a second before you say, “Besides, I’ve got my hands kind of full with you. How’s Suguru supposed to squeeze in edgewise when you keep renting me and showing up at the club to watch me dance?”

He glances over at you again, his mouth tugging into a smug smirk, and says, “Yeah, I guess I am taking up all your time. You mad about that?”

“Oh yeah, totally pissed, that’s why I keep letting you,” you retort sarcastically. “Higuruma’s offered to have you banned twice, and I haven’t taken him up on it.” 

Satoru laughs again and says, “Oh yeah? See, I knew you liked me somewhere in there. Just admit it already.” That smirk turns into that familiar shit-eating grin, and instead of feeling annoyed like you usually do when you see it, your heart thumps hard against your ribs. 

“Shut up, do not,” you say petulantly, folding your arms under your chest and looking pointedly out the passenger window. He’ll have to pry that from between your teeth because there’s no way you’re saying that. He can say he likes you until he’s blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to say it back or even return the sentiment. 

Instead of being bothered, he just busts out laughing. And with your face turned away from him so he can’t see you smile secretly out the window. 

“So, what did happen then?” he asks after he sobers up. “This morning, I mean.”

“Uh, well, I kind of slapped the shit out of him,” you admit, “But in my defense, he was being an asshole. I don’t know; he was acting like I was committing some sort of sin by being a stripper. Like I was betraying him somehow.”

“You slapped him?” Satoru repeats with barely restrained glee. Of course, that’s the only part he cares about. His jealousy is so plainly obvious that it circles from being annoying to being kind of cute. “I mean,” he clears his throat and says casually, “I’m so sorry. That really sucks.”

Rolling your eyes, you say, “You’re fucking ridiculous.” But your heart beats a little faster, and you have to fight to keep a smile off your face.

♡

(Satoru’s POV)

Satoru pulls up at the Santa Monica airport and parks his Benz in the lot. He spent all morning calling around and planning this out. The memory of calling over to the club last night and asking for you for the day is hazy at best, but when he saw the log in his phone this morning, he started throwing something together. He figured the club would have called him back if you turned it down, and he’s so, so grateful that you did. Losing it the way he did is not a source of pride for him. His room is still trashed from it. 

He’s not really sure how you could tell he used last night, but he’s sort of glad you called him out on it. Sure, the Xanax felt good last night when he was crashing the fuck out, but this morning he just felt like shit. The thing is, though, deep down he knows that if you cut him off, he’s going to go right back to shoving that shit up his nose. 

At least, that awful hollow ache in his chest is softened after the conversation you shared on the way. You don’t seem inclined to indulge Suguru or go running back into his arms like something out of a shitty romcom. He can’t stand the fucking thought of you falling for Suguru again, of you giving him those pretty eyes that he wants to keep on himself all the time. It actually makes him fucking sick. 

The wind tugs on the palm trees, playful and 

“Let’s go,” he says, pulling himself out of his thoughts as he shuts the engine down and gets out of the car. Out of his peripheral vision, he sees you following suit. Before he locks it up, he reaches into the back and pulls out a big duffel bag. Slinging it over his shoulder, he rounds the car to meet you at the front. There’s no hesitation as he slings his arm around your shoulder, pulling you close to him. 

“Where are we going anyway? And what’s with the duffel bag?” You ask, leaning into him, which sends a rush through him. It feels easy, natural. 

“Tch. And spoil the surprise? No way,” Satoru teases, his hand drifting down lower to get a nice handful of your ass to squeeze. He laughs as you yelp, shooting him a dirty look. The problem is, he knows you like it. You’re such a goddamn liar. Same thing with your feelings. “You’ll see, sweetheart. Promise you won’t be disappointed. Have a little patience.” Then, leaning in close, he murmurs against your ear, “By the way, I didn’t get the chance to tell you because of the way you had me star in the Fast and the Furious when I picked you up, but you look …” He trails off, eyes dragging up and down you with intent. “Absolutely delicious today,” he finishes, his voice low and soft.

That dress, the heels, the fucking choker. Lethal. He’d sell his soul just for scraps from your table. 

He just can’t fucking help himself. He pulls you in, your body knocking gently into his, and he captures your lips in a deep kiss. There’s no patience, no easing into it. Right from the get-go, it’s deep and thorough, like he’s laying some sort of claim on you. The taste of your mouth is addictive, your lips so soft and sweet against his, and he nearly whimpers when you start to kiss him back. You melt into him, making him want to drag you back to the car, rip you out of that dress, and fuck you until the only name you can remember is his, until you’re just as drunk off him as he is off you.

Fuck, that’s better than any pills could be. The high goes straight to his head and his cock. He can only fucking imagine what being buried in your pussy is going to feel like. Something close to heaven, he supposes, and he’ll be closer to god than he’s ever been in his sinful, debauched life before. His teeth nip at the soft curve of your lower lip, digging in enough for you to feel the sting, but he promptly releases it. 

When he finally breaks the kiss, he doesn’t move away completely, just leans forward until his forehead is resting against yours. “You drive me fucking insane,” he mutters as he pulls away, pressing a tender kiss against your temple. After, he slings his arm over your shoulders again and leads the way across the tarmac. 

It’s cooler here than in Beverly Hills, with the sea breeze taking the sting from the sun. Eventually, the two of you make it to the helicopter he reserved this morning. His family’s personal pilot is standing beside it, waving him onward. 

“Hey, uh, where the fuck are we going?” You ask, pausing. The confusion on your face is so fucking cute, he wants to kiss it off. 

“Just a little trip,” he teases, his blue eyes twinkling with mischief. Nudging you forward, he coaxes you along until you’re standing by the helicopter’s side. The pilot has opened the door, and Satoru offers you his hand to help you in. “Do you trust me?” He asks, that smile of his bright and unrepentant. 

Your eyes meet his, then you smirk and shake your head before saying, “Not even a little bit.” But you slide your hand into his anyway, smaller than his, so soft. If that doesn’t just make his stomach flip. 

He helps you into the elevator and follows behind. The duffel hits the floor and gets nudged under the seats by his foot. The pilot seals you in before getting into his seat in the front, separated from the cabin by a black divider. Once he’s settled, Satoru pulls you into his lap, wrapping his arms around your waist and resting his chin in the crook of your shoulder. God, you smell so fucking good. Maybe you put some sort of aphrodisiac in your perfume. Maybe that’s why he wants you so fucking badly.

Outside, the rotors kick to life, stirring up dust. Reaching over, he grabs the passenger headsets. Sliding one on you, careful of your hair, he takes the other for himself. They muffle the deafening buzz of the blades cutting through the air, and the internal channel will make it so you can hear each other. 

“I want you so fucking badly,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss against your neck, your jawline. You don’t say anything, but you don’t have to. Your head tilts to give him better access. An appreciative hum rumbles low in his throat, the sound rich and wanting. One of his hands slides up to palm your tit like he owns it. “Fucked my fist thinking about you last night,” he murmurs, unable to stop himself from sucking a little mark into your skin. A small whine leaves your lips, and it goes right to his fucking cock. It twitches under your ass, and he can’t help but grind against you a little. “Thought about how I should have fucked you over the vanity in the dressing room, pumped you so full of my cum it’d be impossible to hide.” He adores the rise and fall of your ribs under his hand, the way it quickens when he grinds against you, squeezes and touches you. 

“The pilot—“ you start.

But he cuts you off, “Is on a separate channel and can’t hear a word I’m saying.”

You’re so pretty like this. 

“Satoru,” you breathe, “Fuck. I want—“ The way you’re squirming in his lap is about to make him fucking lose it. 

“Shhh, I know, pretty girl, I know,” he murmurs against your ear. His warm breath is a soft caress against the sensitive shell of it. There’s a gentle, coaxing tenderness to his tone that he’s never heard out of his own mouth before. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you tonight. I promise. I’m gonna fucking ruin you for anyone else.” And he means that.

You crane your neck to look at him, and you grouse, “You better be talking about your cock.” It’s clear you’re still miffed at him for not railing you like a heathen over vanity in the dressing room of the club. 

It might be stupid and cheesy, but it’s not even that he didn’t want to fuck you then, or even that he was really all that concerned about getting walked in on, even though that was the excuse he gave you. He wants it to be nice, to be special. Jesus, when did he turn into such a fucking sap? This is so not him. Satoru fucks. He doesn’t worship, doesn’t go out of his way, doesn’t do anything but what’s needed to get the girl off. But you? Oh, he’s going to fucking treat you with a reverence he’s never treated anyone else with. 

The cute way you scowl at him, coupled with just how needy you are, makes him laugh. “Yes, I’m talking about my cock, sweets.” He promises, giving your tit another squeeze, “Didn’t know you were so cocky hungry.” His face nuzzles into the crook of your neck.

“Tch. I’ve always been like this,” you say, rolling your eyes. “I feel like you have a fundamental misunderstanding about who I was back when Suguru and I were together. Just because I was shy and dressed all modestly doesn’t mean that I was a prude. Suguru and I fucked almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day. I wanted it as often as he did.”

His arms tighten around you. “Did you really have to tell me that?” He whines the question, kissing down your neck again. “I don’t wanna hear about Suguru fucking you.” He wants you all to himself, his and only his. If you wanna keep being a stripper, then whatever, as long as it makes you happy. It might bother him a little sometimes, the idea of other men wanting you, but in the end, it’s not that big of a deal. Your pretty pussy, the privilege of fucking you stupid on the other hand, he wants that to be for him alone. 

He doesn’t want anyone else to hear that sweet, breathy, high noise you make right before you come. Even though he knows it’s stupid and irrational, it pisses him off that Suguru got to have you at all, but the way your eyes roll back, how your walls spasm, the flush of your cheeks—they’re all for him now, and he’s going to keep it that way. It’s not that he cares you’ve slept with other people. Lord knows he’s not some kind of saint. No, it’s specifically Suguru.

“Well, don’t say stupid shit and you won’t get answers you don’t like,” you retort, true to form. 

“So mean,” he teases, but his cock twitches under your ass again, betraying him. 

God, he’s … he’s in love with you, isn’t he? He doesn’t really know. He’s never been in love before, but he thinks this might be what it feels like. This constant, all-consuming need that sweeps through him and only grows stronger day after day, the way he can’t ever get you out of his head, how he wants nothing more than to keep you to himself, to keep you far out of the reach of any other man, how he’d do anything for you, anything at all. If it’s not love, he doesn’t know what it could be. 

“You gonna tell me where we’re going yet?” You ask, looking at him again. Fuck, those pretty eyes and your lips have him in a chokehold. 

The hand still on your waist slides to cup the arch of your throat. He doesn’t squeeze, just holds, his thumb sweeping up and down the side of the column. “That would ruin the surprise,” he whispers, the fingers wrapped around your tit sinking deeper in the soft flesh. He slants his mouth over yours again, kissing you until you’re breathless. “Just look out the window, pretty girl, and enjoy the view,” he says low, the words forming against your lips. 

He scoots closer to the helicopter’s door so the two of you can look out the window together. The helicopter spirals around the city, showing different landmarks. The city is spread out in the Los Angeles basin—a huge cluster of buildings with a forest of skyscrapers jutting up from the center. The sunlight glints off the glass surfaces, shining far and wide like a beacon. 

At first, it doesn’t seem like you’re actually going anywhere, just flying high over the city. Satoru’s arms are warm and strong, wrapped tight around you, so you can feel every bulge and ripple of muscle. Nestling into his arms, you look at the lovely view all spread out like it’s just for you. You’ve never ridden in a helicopter before, so either way, this is an incredible experience.  

“The Hollywood sign,” you murmur when it comes into view, leaning forward to get a better look. Of course, you’ve seen it a hundred times but not like this. 

Satoru’s answering chuckle makes you squirm in your lap, the sound a low rumble against your ear, “How long have you lived in LA for?”

“Since I was born,” you reply, glancing up at him, “Why do you ask?”

He presses a kiss to your temple and says softly, “Still excited at seeing the Hollywood sign? Cute.” It might sound like a tease, but he’s being serious. The sparkle in your eyes, the way they sparkle when they catch on something interesting or lovely, the smiles you’re giving, he lives for them. He’d spend the rest of his life making you light up like that if you’d let him.

There’s a quiet contentment in his chest from having you in his arms. For all his life, Satoru has been seeking out ways to fill the constant hollow inside him, and the only thing that’s ever actually worked is you. 

You smack him lightly on the arm, which just makes him laugh, “Shut up. I’ve never seen it like this before.” 

His arms tighten around you again, and he shoves his face into your hair, inhaling deeply. “‘M not teasing you,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss into the soft mass of your locks. “Cutest thing I’ve ever seen.” He’s rewarded with the way your ears turn pink, and he’s certain your cheeks are a matching shade. Gorgeous. 

“Idiot,” you mutter, but he can’t stop smiling.

“Keep talking dirty to me, baby, and I’ll fuck you right here in the helicopter. We’ll see just how good that divider soundproofs,” he teases, shifting his head to nip at your shoulder.

You yelp at the scrape of his teeth, but you don’t squirm away to his gratification, so he laves over the spot with the flat of his tongue. He wants you so fucking badly that it aches. The sound you let out, the soft warbling moan, like you’re trying to keep it down but can’t, goes right to his cock. 

“Bastard,” you bite out. 

He just groans and sinks his teeth into your shoulder again. His tongue sweeps over your sensitive skin again before he pulls back, a string of his saliva stretching from your skin to his mouth. It’s like he can’t help leaving little marks. He’s careful not to leave anything that would last too long, considering your job, but he can't help wanting to decorate your pretty body with proof that, even for a little while, it belonged to him. 

The helicopter circles the city twice before heading towards the rugged coastline. The Pacific Ocean glitters far below, like a lovely undulating blanket. You look up at him again, and he can see on your face that you want to ask where the two of you are going again, but you don’t. Either way, he wouldn’t tell you. This is too much fun for him. 

From Los Angeles, it’s about a thirty-minute flight to the destination. The conversation flows naturally back and forth between you the whole way. Your pretty eyes get all big with excitement as the island comes into view, and it’s the most adorable thing he’s ever seen in his life. “Catalina Island?” You ask, craning your neck to look up at him. “But I don’t have anything with me …” You sound so disappointed that he rushes to comfort you.

“It’s okay, baby. I brought a few things for you,” he says, nudging the big duffel bag with his foot, “And anything else you need, I’ll just buy you on the island.”

You seem satisfied with that, considering you just settle back into his lap. He wonders if you understand that this is different, that he’s never acted like this with a girl ever before, and he doesn’t think he ever will again. Fuck, he’s never so much as had an actual relationship, and here he is, doing everything he can to put a smile on your face, and you won’t even admit you like him. He knows it’s a little pathetic, but at this point he’s beyond caring. 

“You planned all this?” You murmur as the helicopter starts to descend toward Pebbly Beach, the island’s main port if it can even be called that. It’s where helicopters land and take off, where boats pick up and drop off passengers. 

“Nah, I’m just bringing you here on a whim,” he replies sarcastically, but at your frown, he adds gently, “Yeah, I planned all this. Sometimes, the spoiled brat’s money comes in handy.”

There’s a slight jolt as the helicopter touches down. For a moment, you just sit there and look at him, a strange expression that he can’t decipher on your face. “You know, for a selfish bastard, you can actually be quite thoughtful when you want to be,” you say, twisting your body to face him more fully. “This is actually … exactly what I needed.” 

“Hey, I’m so thoughtful,” he says smugly, his chest puffing up a bit. There’s a sense of pride in fulfilling your needs, more satisfying than anything else he’s experienced. He’s doing his best to play it cool, but he’s failing miserably. His neck and the tips of his ears are flushed pink. Then, more tenderly, he adds, “I don’t know. You didn’t really seem happy about seeing Suguru last night, and I thought you might not like to be in LA for a day or two.”

“Thank you,” you whisper, your voice tight, eyes shining just a bit.

“Don’t cry, sweets,” he coos against your ear, “And you don’t have to thank me either. I’m doing all this because I like seeing you smile, not because I want you to shed tears.” 

The pilot comes around and opens up the door. You fall silent, but Satoru is sure it’s just because you don’t want him to overhear the conversation. He slides the headphones from his head and then takes yours off too, tucking the locks of hair pulled into disarray by them back where they belong. The gesture is so sweet and domestic that it surprises even him. 

You slide off his lap, and the pilot helps you out. It takes everything in him not to shove his way to the front so that he can be the one helping you out, but he doesn’t. There are probably some limits as to how much of his crazy you’ll tolerate, and he’s not exactly eager to find out where those lines are. As long as you keep those pretty eyes on him, smiling like he’s doing something right, then that’s enough for him. 

♡

(Your POV)

You’ve never been to Catalina Island before. There’s a cool sea breeze tugging at the hem of your dress and your hair, and you have to squint your eyes against the sun. The pilot helps you down from the helicopter. You can hear Satoru’s feet hit the pavement behind you, and one of those big arms wraps around your shoulders immediately. 

He’s so fucking possessive and clingy. Why the fuck does it turn you on? It makes you want to beg him to fuck you right now, but somehow you know that’s not going to happen. For someone who’s never had a real relationship, he’s sure good at acting like a boyfriend. It’s almost weird and certainly not what you would ever have expected from him.

Somehow, he’s always anticipating exactly what you need and providing it before you even bring it up or ask. Like the water yesterday, making you laugh when you feel off, bringing you here. A day of relaxation away from LA is perfect with everything going on with Suguru right now. Then, there’s the promise of finally getting his dick on the horizon. Now that’s what you really need right now. It’s been a while since you’ve had sex and, fuck, you miss it. Yeah, the way he’s been making you come has been great, but you wanna be stretched out and fucked like there’s no tomorrow.

There’s already a car waiting, a black sedan, that Satoru guides you toward. The driver is an older gentleman who smiles at you and goes on about what a handsome couple the two of you are as Satoru helps you into the car. His thick Hispanic accent is pleasing to the ears. 

You’re about to open your mouth to correct him, but Satoru slides in on the other side and cuts in before you can. “Yeah, my girlfriend is the most gorgeous lady in the whole world. I’m just a nice accessory,” he says, a big, cheesy grin on his face. Idiot. 

Despite yourself, it makes your face all hot when he says things like that, and you can’t bring yourself to correct him. Fine, you can be his girlfriend for the day. But that’s it. Just for the day, you tell yourself silently, leaning into him. His arm wraps around you again, and he presses another kiss to your temple. 

The drive into the little town on the island doesn’t take very long. Satoru chats back and forth with the driver the whole time, always making friends everywhere he goes, but you’re happy just to take in the surrounding scenery. It’s so lush and green, the sky an effervescent blue. It feels like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders, the burden taken off, stolen by Satoru and set down for the time being. 

When you arrive at the hotel, the driver opens the door for you and Satoru. Satoru slides out first, then helps you out, the big duffel band tossed causally over his shoulder like it weighs nothing at all. Of course, he tips the driver generously, but then, he’s always generous. That’s one thing you can say has been the same since you first knew him. He is an extremely generous man, happy to buy people things and shower them in money if he thinks it will make them happy. 

Slipping an arm around your waist, he guides you into the Pavilion Hotel to check in. You stand off to the side as he speaks with the lady at the front desk, taking in the island decor and the casual, breezy open-air architecture. The place is painted in a pale yellow. 

When you zone back in, you instantly notice the way the girl is leaning against the counter with stars in her eyes as she looks up at him. She’s getting all giggly and shit, blushing for him, and it fucking pisses you off for some reason. She hands him the room keys, teasing him with them for a second, holding them out, then pulling them back before handing them over. He’s not exactly flirting back, but he’s being overly nice for your taste. You watch as she scrawls something on a sticky note, her number most likely. Then she offers it to him, and before you can stop yourself, you’re marching forward and taking his hand. 

“So, are we doing anything, you know, before you rail me into next week?” It’s just loud enough for her to overhear. Well, if you’re starring in the role of girlfriend, then you may as well act the part. You’re not jealous; you’re just putting on a show. Yep. That’s it. 

Satoru glances down at you, an expression of confusion on his face when you glare at him, but then he breaks out into a big smile. Turning back to the girl at the counter, “Look, you’re a nice girl and all,” he says politely, “But I’ve got everything I need right here.” He lifts his hand where it’s joined with yours, showing her your interlaced fingers. The way he says it is so smug and full of himself that it makes you want to smack him upside the head, the same way you smacked Suguru earlier. Actually, scratch that, Satoru would probably be into that. 

You feel kind of bad when you see the look of complete and utter embarrassment and shame on her face. Actually, no, you don’t. Maybe that should say something about you, but that’s also for the box of things not to look too closely at. Now that he’s got the keys in hand, you tug on the one laced with yours and say, “Come on.” Even though you don’t really feel bad, you don’t feel the need to embarrass her more. 

The whole walk to the room, Satoru struts like he owns the world. “You were jealous,” he crows as he taps the key against the door lock, like it’s a massive achievement of some kind. Pushing the door open, his arm stays outstretched as he jerks his chin for you to go in. 

“Fuck you,” you mutter. You’re not jealous. You’re not. But for some reason, you can’t get the words to cross your lips. 

You slip inside, taking in the gorgeous seaside room. It’s outfitted in soft pinks and pastel teals. There’s a big, comfy couch, a flatscreen TV, and modern art in matching colors along the walls. The bedroom has a separate alcove that can be enclosed by huge wooden doors made of narrow slats. The bed is massive, a king-sized bed, equipped with white comforters and pillows, all pristine like they’re brand new. It’s all got a very island luxe feeling. 

Satoru tosses the duffel on the bed, and before you can react, you’re being pushed up against the wall, his huge body caging you in. One hand beside your head, the other gripping your hip to pin you in place. “It’s so fucking hot when you’re jealous,” he mutters, and before you get a chance to retort, his mouth crashes into yours again. He easily lifts you, and your legs wrap around his waist automatically. The way he kisses you makes you feel like you’re being consumed bit by bit. His hands sink into your hair, manhandling you into the kiss, tugging you this way and that so you’re always in the position he can explore you the most greedily. Your own hands slide into the short undercut, soft and fuzzy, then into the silky white fringe above. 

You moan into the kiss, your eyes fluttering closed as you melt into it. Okay, fine. You can be jealous if it gets you kissed like this. 

When Satoru breaks for air, you gasp a few breaths, then whisper excitedly, “Are you gonna fuck me now?” 

Satoru laughs and kisses the corners of your mouth, “I made all sorts of plans today and dinner reservations.”

Your lower lip juts out. “Tch,” you say brattily, rolling your eyes, “Excuses, excuses.” Then, glaring at him, you say, “What kind of plans?”

“Where would the fun be if I just came out and told you? Have I disappointed yet?” He asks, lowering you gently to the ground. 

Fair. He hasn’t disappointed you yet with his choice of activities. The art museum was fun and exactly to your taste, the dinner afterward intimate and expensive, and the shopping trips generous. “Fine,” you mutter, and he just smiles at you. 

As it turns out, the activities are just as fun as last time. He takes you shopping for a bikini, and you guys peruse the kitchsy little tourist shops for a while. Afterward, he takes you to the Catalina Island casino, which is actually a movie theater, come to find out, where you guys catch a showing of some comedy movie. You don’t really pay much attention to it, or rather you can’t because of the way Satoru is feeling you up the whole time. A squeeze of your plush tit here, a hand up your thigh to tease the line of your panties there. It’s driving you fucking crazy.

And the worst part is that he knows exactly what he’s doing. Every once in a while, you’ll catch him giving you that irritatingly self-satisfied grin or that intense expression that makes you want to crawl into his lap and ride his cock raw. 

You’re not sure how you make it through dinner, then the sunset cruise he booked afterward. The bastard is relentless, teasing you whenever no one is looking. The silk of your panties is sticking to your drenched cunt by the time you finally make it back to the hotel room. 

And you walk into a surprise. Flower petals have been scattered around, a bottle of champagne sits on ice, and there are some chocolates scattered around the bed, their silvery wrappers glinting in the dim lighting. Your head snaps to look up at him, shocked by the blatantly romantic gesture. 

“Who are you and what have you done with Satoru Gojo?” You demand, eyes roving over his face. 

“Hey, no one said I couldn’t do grand romantic shit like this. In fact, this is exactly my style. Maybe there just hasn’t been anyone capable of bringing this side of me out before,” he says as he coaxes you into the room. The door shutting behind him feels heavy and certain, the lock clicking into place somehow deafening. 

You’re acutely aware of his every movement, each breath, each step he takes. He walks over to the bed first, clearing the chocolates and setting them on the nightstand. Then, he gestures for you to sit, so perch on the edge of the bed.

Satoru comes around and slowly sinks to his knees in front of you. Carefully, with sure, slow movements, he eases your heels off your feet, one at a time, a kiss pressed to each ankle after the shoes come off. You can’t help but stare down at him, your breathing starting to quicken as he kisses his way up your legs. When he gets to your knees, he eases your thighs apart and shoves your dress up to your stomach. 

One of those huge hands tugs you forward until your legs are thrown over each shoulder. His head dips down until you can feel his hot breath on your cunt through your soaked underwear. “Satoru,” you whine out, squirming at the sensation. 

When you look down at him, though, his eyes are all glazed over like he’s not really hearing you. “Fuck, you smell so good,” he murmurs, dragging the flat of his tongue over the silk of your panties and moaning as he does so. One finger hooks in them and tugs them to the side. The way the tip of your tongue traces up your slit makes your hips jump. His other hand grabs your thigh to keep you from moving. 

“Don’t interrupt my meal,” he says, a dark note to his voice that makes your cunt clench around nothing. Then he dives in, parting your folds with his tongue. You whimper as he circles his tongue around your needy hole, practically dripping with slick from all the teasing throughout the day. Then, it cuts upward to drag over your needy, swollen clit. 

You moan, your body wanting to curve up to the sensation, but his hand keeps you firmly in place. He starts slow, teasing, dancing around your sensitive nub, then flat out licking over it. You writhe beneath him, the back of your head digging into the mattress. The longer he goes, though, the messier and more intense it gets. When he starts sucking on your clit, your back nearly bows off the bed. 

“Fuck, Satoru, please.” You’re not even sure what you’re asking for. For him to keep eating you up until you come, for him to finally stuff his cock in you. You don’t know, but god do you fucking need. 

He just groans in reply, too lost between your thighs to answer with words. Your center feels empty and neglected, even as Satoru pushes you closer and closer to a climax. He doesn’t even use his fingers like he normally would; he just keeps sucking up your juices like they’re the sweetest nectar he’s ever tasted. The wet sounds of him indulging are filthy and loud, bouncing off the walls of the room. 

Right as that tension starts to ratchet down in your stomach, he finally pulls away, ripping his head back like he’s pulling away from something sacred. He’s breathing heavily, but his voice is a low rumble between breaths when he says, “You’re coming on my cock.” He doesn’t ask or beat around the bush, rather, he states it like it’s a fact of the universe. It only fucking makes you wetter. 

The shedding of clothes is a rushed, frantic thing. He peels off your dress, then your bra, and finally he practically rips off your panties. You help with the buttons of his shirt and his belt buckle. When he shoves his pants and boxers down in one quick move, you almost moan at the sight of his cock slapping up against his stomach. 

The swollen crown is flushed pink and leaking bullets of clear pre from the little slit. Along the shaft, the veins are prominent, standing out from his skin. Christ, he’s so fucking big and thick. You’ve been waiting for so long to get that inside you that a shiver rolls down your spine. 

One of those huge hands slowly presses weight into your shoulder, guiding you to lie back on the bed again. Once you’re lying down, he grabs an ankle in each hand and slowly folds your knees up to your chest. “You know how long I’ve thought about this?” He murmurs feverishly as he drags his cock through your folds, coating himself in your slickness. “Fucking ages,” he continues as he notches the tip right at your aching, weepy entrance. “It took me a while to decide how I wanted to have you for the first time,” he whispers, easing in not even an inch. The stretch already burns a bit, despite how fucking soaked you are.

“Satoru, fuck, more please,” you’re begging shamelessly now. You want to move your body, jerk your cunt up to suck him in deeper, but the hold he’s got you in, there’s no moving. 

“That’s it, my pretty girl,” he whispers, “Beg for me. You look so beautiful like this, all splayed out and mine for the taking. Can’t move, can you? No matter how much you want to.” He gives you another inch, and it draws a moan from your lips. “Considered hitting it from the back. No, too impersonal. Then missionary. Nah, too boring. Up against the wall? Well, that one almost won. But this? This is right where I want you. Underneath me while I fill up your pretty little pussy so many times you forget what it feels like to be empty.” Another inch. 

“Satoru,” you whine out, your thighs shaking from want and anticipation. 

The squeeze, stretch, and burn of it is exquisite. Tears prick the corners of your eyes as he slowly sinks into you, inch by glorious inch. Your body stretches beautifully to accommodate him, his cock splitting you open. You can feel him in your guts, reaching places in you that you didn’t even fucking know existed. When he’s fully seated, both of you are breathing raggedly.

“F-fuck,” he gets out, his face screwing up in pleasure, cock twitching where it’s buried as deep in you as he can get, “So fucking tight. Jesus, baby, if you squeezed me any tighter, I’d fucking bust right now.”

Your cunt spasms his words, and it makes him whimper. “O-oh fuck, sh-shit don’t do that, pretty. Don’t do that, or I really will bust,” he grits out, his grip on your legs tightening just barely hard enough to hurt. 

“Huh, who knew? S-Satoru Gojo, the one-hit wonder,” you bite out, like you’re not just as fucked up as he is over this. 

He hisses between his teeth and mutters, “Fuck you. It’s all your fault for having a perfect fucking pussy.” And that’s when he draws out and slams back in. 

“Fuck,” you cry out, your thighs shaking as he rocks into you hard from the get. Jesus, you swear you can feel it in your bones. When he sinks all the way in, you can feel his tip just barely kissing your cervix. “More, please, fuck, Satoru. Cock feels so fucking good.” 

Your begging spurs him on. He sets a mean, relentless pace, grinding his fat cock into you in a way you’ve never been stretched before. You can feel every ridge and vein as he slides back into you, your soaked, sticky walls clinging to him like they never want to let him go. He pounds your cunt raw, the obscene squelch of it mingling with your breathy moans and his groans of need.

“Jesus, fuck, you’re so fucking perfect. I never want to let you out of my sight. I want to fuck you so full of my cum that it’s dripping out of you,” he mumbles deliriously as he ruts into you. You’re not even sure he knows what he’s saying. “Fuck, want you to—want you to go off your fucking birth control so I can put a baby in you. My baby, my beautiful woman. Lemme, fuck, lemme put a baby in you.”

His words should have you running for the hills, but all you can do is moan for him because holy fuck. He leans over you, pressing you deeper into the mattress, as he fucks you like he’s trying to imprint the shape of himself into your cunt. When you look down, you can see the outline of him in your belly. Every time he grinds deep into you, the print of him presses up into your guts.  You’ve never been so fucking full in your life. It’s a feeling you’re not sure you could willingly let go of. 

Fuck him. Fuck him for being so fucking hung and knowing how to use it. 

His pelvis scrapes deliciously over your clit, making you whimper and cry out his name. You’re so close, right on the edge, thanks to all his teasing earlier and the way he was eating your pussy. Your center feels molten and tense, like just a little bit more will send you any second. 

“Satoru, fuck, gonna come,” you gasp out as that tension starts to ratchet down in your guts. You blink up at him, eyes filled with tears of pleasure as he fucks you so good that you start to think maybe he’s right. Maybe your cunt never really will forget the shape of him. 

“Not yet, sweetheart. Hold on for me, m’kay? Gonna go together,” he groans, spurring him on to grind even harder. 

Fuck, that’s a big ask. You’re so close and every scrape of his cock over that spot inside you that makes you see stars, every brush of his pelvis against your twitchy, needy clit sends another pulse of pleasure through you. Sweat lines his hairline, his pretty blue eyes locking onto yours. “Look at me,” he mutters, “Look at me when you come. Want to see that pretty face.” 

“Satoru,” you whine, your breath coming in quick, high gasps. You’re not sure how much longer you can hold on. There’s a line that you’re skating, the edge of a cliff. 

His movements become sloppy and uncoordinated. “Almost pretty girl,” he grits out, the tip of his cock grinding meanly so deep inside you that you almost come right there. When he finally says, “Alright sweetheart, let go, you can let go,” you whimper in relief. 

You fall over the edge in a free fall that has no beginning and no end. Pleasure shoots through your whole body as your walls spasm and flutter around his thick length. You feel like your body is both a storm and a feather carried away in the winds of it. Every molecule of you feels light and tingly, your vision darkening at the edges for a moment. 

Satoru groans when you squeeze him, a long drawn-out, “Fuuuuuuck,” leaving his lips. He buries himself as deep as he can possibly go, his body going rigid as his cock twitches, filling your greedy hole with thick, sticky white pulses of his cum. Your cunt spasms around him, milking more and more from him, sweet little whimpers falling from his lips and whispers of your name like prayers. 

With your walls wrapped snugly around him, he looks up at you, breathing hard and fast. His eyes meet yours, and he murmurs, his voice achingly soft, “I love you.”

Your eyes go wide, and your heart nearly jumps out of your chest. The only thing playing through your head is, Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.  

A/N: Well, I hope y’all can see why this took me so long. I apologize for this monster of a chapter and how delayed it is. I just really wanted it to come out well and I’m pretty happy with it. Anywho, thank y’all for ready. ILY. Like, reblogs, blah blah blah are always appreciated. 💖

Taglist is OPEN. I kindly ask that you please use THIS link for taglist reqs as it makes it easier for me to keep track and make sure no one gets missed

Once outside the lecture hall, when Gojo walked in late and one of Mina’s friends muttered something sharp enough that the entire row went quiet for a second. Gojo didn’t react. Didn’t even look at them. He just dropped into his seat, took out a pen, and stared at the front like he’d been there the whole time.

The second time was worse.

Geto had been leaving one of the campus cafés when Mina’s group walked past Gojo near the crossing between buildings. One of them shoulder-checked him hard enough that anybody else would’ve snapped at least a little.

Gojo barely slowed down.

That unsettled Geto more than if he’d gotten angry.

Because anger, at least, would've been familiar.

But lately, Gojo moved through campus like someone following instructions only he could hear.

Class. Practice. Training. Repeat.

No lingering conversations. No unnecessary stops. No loud greetings across hallways. No leaning over tables bothering strangers for fun. No lazy grin that usually came before some insufferable comment.

Even the way he walked felt different now.

Geto noticed it one afternoon while sitting alone near the back of one of the larger cafeterias on campus, half-listening to the noise around him while scrolling mindlessly through his phone.

Gojo crossed the entrance a few minutes later.

And for a moment, Geto almost didn’t recognize him.

Not physically. Gojo still looked like Gojo—tall, broad-shouldered, attention-grabbing without trying. People still glanced at him when he entered rooms. Some things didn’t disappear that easily.

But there was something disturbingly hollow about the way he carried himself now.

No looseness. No arrogance. No restless energy spilling out of him in every direction.

Just movement.

Straight line. Steady pace. Eyes forward.

Like he was conserving himself.

A few people called his name as he passed. Gojo lifted a hand without looking at them properly, the gesture automatic enough to feel rehearsed. Someone from one of his classes tried joking with him near the drinks station. Geto watched Gojo smile politely— which felt wrong in itself—before answering with something short that ended the conversation almost immediately.

Then he collected a black coffee he probably didn’t even want and left less than three minutes after entering.

That was the other thing.

Gojo never stayed anywhere anymore.

Not unless he had to.

Geto leaned back slightly in his chair, eyes lingering on the now-empty entrance long after Gojo had disappeared from sight.

Things between them had been strange for a while now. Not hostile. Not completely broken. Just… uneven.

After the fallout with you, something in their entire circle had shifted off-axis.

You were gone. Completely.

Gojo had become harder to reach even before Mina left him.

And Geto, despite everything, still didn’t quite know what to do with either of those things.

Because he understood distance. Understood pride. Understood people needing space when they were hurting.

But this?

This felt different.

It wasn’t just heartbreak. Or stress. Or exhaustion from hockey finals looming over everyone’s heads.

Gojo looked like someone slowly withdrawing from his own life in pieces.

And somehow, that bothered Geto more than the breakup ever did.

Because breakups were familiar territory.

People mourned. They spiraled a little. They drank too much, skipped classes, made regrettable decisions, and eventually crawled their way back into themselves again. Geto had seen it happen enough times to recognize the pattern.

This, though? It didn’t feel like a pattern.

It felt like erosion.

Slow. Quiet. Difficult to notice if you weren’t paying attention.

And maybe that was why, a few days later, when Geto spotted Gojo exiting the hockey building after evening training, sweat still clinging to the collar of his shirt and gym bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, he found himself stopping before he could think too hard about it.

The campus pathways were quieter at this hour, the air cooler now that the sun had dipped low enough for the streetlamps to flicker on one by one.

Gojo looked tired.

Not physically—though there was probably some of that too—but the kind of tiredness that settled somewhere behind the eyes.

Geto shoved his hands into his pockets as Gojo approached.

“You busy?” he asked casually.

Gojo slowed slightly, looking at him.

“For you?” he replied. “Always.”

The joke landed flat. Too automatic.

Geto ignored the uncomfortable twist that came with realizing he could tell.

“There’s a bar a few blocks from here,” he said after a beat. “Thought maybe we could get a drink.”

Honestly, he expected an excuse.

Practice tomorrow. Too exhausted. Maybe another time.

Instead, Gojo adjusted the strap of his bag and shrugged.

“Sure.”

That surprised him more than it should have.

The walk there was quiet in a way that didn’t feel natural between them.

Not tense exactly. Just unfamiliar.

Usually, silence with Gojo never lasted long. He always filled space eventually—complaints about practice, some exaggerated story, random observations that made no sense until somehow they did.

But tonight, he only walked beside Geto with his hands shoved into his pockets, gaze fixed somewhere ahead.

Cars rolled past them in streaks of white and red light. A group of students stumbled out of a convenience store laughing too loudly at something neither of them caught. Somewhere down the block, music drifted faintly from another bar further down the street.

Gojo barely reacted to any of it.

By the time they reached the place, Geto already knew this conversation was going to be harder than he thought.

The bar itself was dimly lit and half-full, buzzing softly with overlapping conversations and the low hum of old music from the speakers overhead. They took seats near the back, away from most people.

Gojo ordered whiskey.

Geto stuck with beer.

For a while, neither of them said much beyond passing comments about classes and campus gossip. The conversation moved awkwardly around anything meaningful, like both of them knew where it would eventually end up but were reluctant to be the first to drag it there.

In the end, Geto did it himself.

“I heard Mina hasn’t been back to class yet.”

Gojo’s expression didn’t change. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass once before taking a sip.

“Hm.”

Geto studied him carefully.

“Breakups suck,” he said finally, leaning back slightly in his chair. “Especially long ones.”

Still nothing.

“I know it probably feels like shit right now,” Geto continued, quieter this time. “But you’ll move on eventually.”

“Yeah,” Gojo responded, but it wasn’t really a response in the way Geto expected one to feel.

It came out flat, almost absentminded, like he was answering from somewhere a little removed from the conversation itself. The words technically fit, technically made sense, but they didn’t quite land where they were supposed to.

Geto noticed it immediately.

The space between them felt heavier than it should’ve been, like the air itself had slowed down.

Geto exhaled softly through his nose and decided not to push the topic further. Not yet. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, letting the moment settle before shifting the conversation away from anything too sharp.

“How’s hockey been treating you?” he asked, tone deliberately lighter. “Finals are next week, right?”

That earned a small shift in Gojo’s posture. Barely noticeable to anyone else, but enough for Geto to register it instantly.

“Yeah,” Gojo said after a beat. “Next Friday.”

He lifted his glass and took a sip before continuing, like the movement helped him organize his thoughts.

“I’ve already got a couple of offers lined up after this season,” he added, voice smoother now, slipping back into something more familiar. “So it’s not just about winning anymore.”

There was a pause, brief but weighted.

“It’s my future.”

Geto studied him carefully as he said it.

There was something different in the way Gojo spoke about it now. Not the usual spark of confidence or careless arrogance, and not quite excitement either. It felt more like something being held too tightly in place, every word carefully measured before it was allowed out.

“I’ve always wanted to go pro,” Gojo went on, eyes fixed somewhere past the table rather than on anything in front of him. “This match is basically… deciding everything.”

On paper, it should’ve sounded like ambition. The kind of statement that carried drive, direction, certainty.

Instead, it landed with a strange weight to it. Like obligation dressed up as focus.

Geto didn’t respond immediately. He just let the words sit there for a moment, watching the way Gojo’s expression stayed controlled even as something underneath it felt slightly off balance.

After a while, he shifted again, trying to ease the atmosphere without forcing it.

“Well,” he said, idly swirling what was left of his drink, “once it’s over, we should go somewhere. Just the three of us. Me, you, Shoko.”

He spoke casually, like it was an easy thought, something simple to look forward to.

“A short trip. A week maybe. Get away from campus for a bit. Celebrate your win”

Gojo finally looked at him properly then.

There was a pause where Geto couldn’t quite read him—something between consideration and distance, like the idea passed through without fully anchoring itself.

“Yeah,” Gojo said eventually. “Sounds good.”

No question. No follow-up. No shift in energy beyond the agreement itself. 

Just acceptance, clean and hollow.

Geto held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary before looking away, the silence between them returning again, but this time feeling different. Not empty, exactly. More like something unspoken had settled into it and refused to move.

Eventually, Geto set his glass down and leaned back slightly with a sigh.

“I just…” he started, then stopped, choosing his words with more care now.

“I hope you feel better soon,” he said eventually, his voice softening in a way that made it sound less like advice and more like something he didn’t know how else to say. “And… I hope you come back to yourself properly after all this.”

He hesitated briefly before adding, “Shoko and I are always around. You know that, right?”

For a moment, Gojo didn’t respond.

He just stared down at his glass, turning it slightly between his fingers as if the motion gave him something to do with the space between Geto’s words and whatever came next. The noise of the bar carried on around them—laughter somewhere behind them, the dull clink of glasses, music too low to properly follow—but their table felt cut off from it, suspended in something quieter.

Then Gojo exhaled.

“I’m really fine.”

The words came out easy. Too easy.

Geto frowned slightly, watching him.

“My life was never really ruined,” Gojo continued, still not looking up. “I still have hockey, I’m doing fine in school, and I have you guys, and… a future.”

A faint pause followed, just long enough to feel deliberate.

“Unlike her.”

That made Geto blink.

For a second, he assumed he knew what Gojo meant. The breakup had been everywhere lately, impossible to avoid, impossible not to hear fragments of. Mina’s absence had become its own kind of noise on campus.

So Geto leaned back slightly, exhaling through his nose.

“I don’t mean to burst your bubble,” he said, tone gentler now, “but I’m sure Mina will get over the breakup soon too.”

It was meant to be reassuring. Grounding, even. But something in Gojo’s expression shifted immediately.

Not anger. Not correction.

Just stillness.

He finally lifted his gaze—not fully, just enough to glance at Geto for a second before looking away again. And that was when Geto felt it.

A subtle wrongness in the timing. In the silence that followed.

“…We’re talking about Mina, right?” Geto added slowly, testing it now.

Gojo didn’t answer right away.

He held his stare for a moment longer than necessary, unreadable in a way that didn’t feel like avoidance anymore. It felt like recognition—like something had finally been named correctly after being avoided for too long.

And in that small, suspended pause, Geto understood.

Oh.

He’s not.

He’s talking about you.

“I didn’t think… you’d still be stuck on that,” Geto said quietly, more to himself than anything, as if the conclusion had only just now formed in his mind.

Gojo let out a short laugh at that—nothing warm about it, nothing amused either. Just a sound that barely made it out before dissolving into the space between them.

“I must’ve been a really shitty best friend of hers if you think I’d move on that quickly from fucking up her life, huh?” He said it lightly, almost joking. Like he was trying to soften something that didn’t actually feel soft at all.

But Geto didn’t respond.

Not because he didn’t have anything to say—but because whatever he thought wasn’t simple enough to be spoken cleanly.

On one hand, he understood it. Understood guilt that settled in and refused to move. Understood the way Gojo tended to carry things until they became part of him instead of something he could set down.

But on the other hand, there was also the quieter truth he couldn’t ignore.

Gojo hadn’t just been a friend who made mistakes.

He had been the reason something had cracked.

And Geto knew well enough to know that your absence was a void Gojo was trying to fill with silence, as if being hollow could somehow make up for being wrong 

So he said nothing.

The silence stretched, not uncomfortable exactly, but dense in a way that made everything else feel further away.

Gojo didn’t seem to mind it.

In fact, he seemed to sink into it.

“I haven’t heard from her in a month,” he said after a while, voice quieter now, like he wasn’t entirely aware he was speaking out loud. “I don’t know if she’s doing okay, or if she’s holed up in her apartment, or if she’s even alive.”

Geto straightened slightly at that.

“Don’t…” he started, then stopped, shaking his head faintly. “Don’t say that.”

But Gojo wasn’t really reacting to him anymore.His gaze had drifted somewhere past the table, unfocused.

“I saw one of the band guys putting up posters for a new guitarist,” he added, a faint, humorless exhale slipping out with the words. “Guess they moved on pretty fast.” 

He gave a small, almost sarcastic chuckle, but it didn’t carry any real weight. Then he looked down, rubbing a hand slowly over his face like he was trying to wipe something off that wasn’t there.

“I ruined everything for her,” he said, quieter this time. Not dramatic. Just certain.

That made Geto pause. 

Because the way Gojo said it wasn’t performative. It wasn’t self-pity dressed up as reflection.

It was acceptance.

And that was worse.

Geto ran a hand through his hair, watching him for a moment before speaking again, more carefully now. “Have you ever thought about reaching out first?” he asked.

Gojo didn’t answer immediately.

He just stared at the glass in front of him like the question had to pass through layers of something before it could be processed properly.

When he finally spoke, his voice was lower. “I know I’m the last person she wants to see.”

Geto didn’t answer right away.

For a moment, he just looked at Gojo, really looked at him—not the version sitting across the table now, but the version he remembered. The one that used to take up space without trying. The one that didn’t sound like every sentence had been weighed before being allowed out.

And something about the difference between those two versions sat wrong in his chest.

He exhaled slowly, rubbing his thumb against the edge of his glass as if grounding himself in something physical before speaking.

“So…” he said at last, voice steady, but no longer as gentle as before. “You think being a shell of a person will fix what’s been broken?”

A pause—just enough space to feel the shift.

“Living your life going through the motions, soulless, not talking to your friends, losing that passion in your eye—you think that’s what amends what you did to her?”

Gojo’s fingers tightened slightly around his glass.

“What else am I supposed to do?” he asked, and for the first time that night there was something less controlled in his voice—something edged, almost raw around the edges. Not anger exactly. More like exhaustion finally slipping through the cracks.

Geto didn’t answer immediately.

Because the truth was simple in a way that didn’t help either of them: he didn’t know.

Not really.

There wasn’t a clean solution for this kind of thing. No sentence that could undo damage, no perfect action that could rewind people back to before everything fractured.

So he exhaled slowly, leaning back into his seat as if trying to physically settle the weight of everything being said.

“I don’t know,” he admitted at last.

A pause.

“But sitting here mourning her like she died isn’t helping either of you.”

Gojo didn’t respond, but his gaze stayed fixed on the table now, unmoving.

Geto’s expression shifted slightly then—not softer, exactly, but less sharp at the edges. Like something in him had stopped trying to push and started trying to reach instead.

“You know what’s really hard to watch?” he continued quietly. “It’s not that you’re hurting. It’s that you disappeared too.”

That made Gojo’s jaw tighten.

Geto didn’t stop this time.

“You losing yourself does not undo hurting her,” he said, voice steadier now. “You think becoming miserable is accountability? You think punishing yourself fixes what happened?”

Silence followed.

A longer one this time.

Gojo looked like he might say something, then didn’t. His eyes dropped slightly, then lifted again, but not quite meeting anything properly.

“I don’t even know if she’s okay,” he said finally.

The shift in tone was subtle, but it changed something in the air again—less defensive now, more uncertain.

Geto softened immediately, the sharpness from before fading as quickly as it had come.

“I think about her too, you know,” he said after a moment. “More than I probably should.”

He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, gaze dropping briefly to the table as if the words were easier to say without eye contact.

“And every day I debate whether I should go knock on her door. Whether I should force her to answer my calls. Whether I should drag her out of whatever hole she’s locked herself into.”

A pause.

“But I don’t.”

He looked back up then, more grounded now.

“Because I know her.”

Another breath, quieter.

“And every time I think about doing it, I remember how much she hates being seen when she’s breaking apart.”

Gojo’s expression flickered at that—small, almost imperceptible.

“And because if there’s one thing I know about her,” Geto added, “it’s that she always comes back to herself eventually.”

The silence that followed felt different now. Less defensive. More listening.

“You’re acting like you destroyed her beyond repair,” Geto continued, not unkind, but firmer now that he’d already crossed the line into honesty. “You hurt her. Badly. But she’s still her, Satoru.”

He paused, letting that settle properly before continuing.

“The thing is, I don’t think she’d want this version of you either. You stopped showing up for yourself the same way you stopped showing up for her.”

Gojo didn’t respond immediately.

His gaze had dropped somewhere to the table again, but it wasn’t really focused on it. There was a stillness to him that felt less like emptiness now and more like pressure being held in place. Like something had shifted, but hadn’t found an exit yet.

“You can’t keep living like your life ended the same day she walked out of it.”

That landed differently.

Not loudly. Not dramatically.

Just fully.

Gojo didn’t respond straight away.

For a moment, he stayed still, gaze lowered to the table as if something in the grain of it had become unexpectedly important. His thumb moved once against the edge of his glass, then stopped, like even that small habit had been interrupted mid-thought.

Geto didn’t speak again. He didn’t need to.

The silence between them had already shifted into something heavier than either of them was trying to name.

Eventually, Gojo exhaled.

Quiet. Controlled. Not relief, not frustration—something in between that didn’t settle cleanly into either.

He leaned back slightly, as if putting a little distance between himself and the conversation without fully leaving it behind.

For a second, it looked like he might say something. Something dismissive, or sarcastic, or even honest in a way that would crack the moment open again.

But nothing came.

Instead, he reached for his bag.

It took him a moment longer than usual to sling it over his shoulder.

When he stood, the chair shifted softly against the floor.

Gojo looked at Geto briefly—just long enough for it to register as acknowledgment rather than avoidance—then let his gaze drop again.

“…I’m gonna head out,” he said finally.

No edge to it. No distance forced into the words. Just something that sounded like he’d already left mentally a few seconds earlier.

Then he turned and walked out. Not fast, not slow. Just steady, like movement was easier than staying.

Geto stayed where he was, watching until the door closed behind him, the noise of the bar swallowing the space Gojo had left behind.

And for a moment, it didn’t feel like the conversation had ended cleanly.