#hello woolf

and a part of you likes that a great deal; there is no sense of injustice with him, no upset that he is asking something of you that he cannot himself achieve. you and the rest of the dancers watch as his twists and bows, displaying himself to guide through the moves, and it’s such a striking thing to behold that you can’t bring yourself to mind.

still, his beauty is the hardest part of being his student. the cording of his muscles, the sleek ink of his hair, the lithe curvature of his movements, it’s torturous. all at once you want to dance as he does, want to make your audience feel as he makes you feel, want him to shed himself of all professionalism and touch you somewhere irrevocable. you feel terrible and silly wanting it, wanting him, but there’s no helping it, you think.

and anyway, you insist that this wanting you indulge in in the dark isn’t dangerous. there is no oxygen for it in the studio, nothing to nurture your fantasies, and so you have to believe that they will wither and die with time. 

of course, while you tie the ribbons of your pointe shoes around your ankles in the empty studio, you pray this fantasy death will happen sooner rather than later. it’s completely exhausting to be so constantly wondering what his cock feels like, and mr. geto likes to remind you that exhausted is no state to dance in.

you love arriving to the studio early like this. before the room is overtaken with the smell of sweat and resin, you can breathe in the marley flooring and stretch your legs wide, grateful. you seek out lonely moments to appreciate how rare it is that you’ve succeeded in ballet enough to make a living from it; you close your eyes and get overdramatically philosophical, and it’s a privilege. you love it.

and yes, fine, it secures mr. geto’s first five minutes in the studio for yourself. this cannot be helping your attempt to suffocate your wanting, you know, but then he’s walking through the door draped in fine linen and hair pulled messy to the crown of his head, and you go boneless.

“good morning, dove,” he calls over his shoulder, turned away from you as he sets his things down.

you don’t remember when he started calling you that, and you don’t know if he uses it with other dancers, but god how can you blame yourself for getting sticky for him when he addresses you that way?

“good morning, mr. geto,” you call back, trying to sound lazy with the dawn as you continue stretching. you watch your fingers splayed on the floor, the borders of each vinyl panel, anything other than his strides towards his seat at the front of the room.

he plops rather unceremoniously down, legs spread slightly and head tipped back as he groans something truly criminal. you can feel something hot and biting between your legs but you try to ignore it, looking up at him.

“exhausted is no state to dance in,” you say with a smile.

he does not lift his head—you wonder if he wants to cause you pain by forcing you to watch the curved tilt of his throat and jaw—but you can see from the movement of his cheeks that he is smiling a little.

“i’m not dancing, dove, you are.”

you roll onto your back and starfish out, sufficiently limber. “what sort of terror will rain down on us today?”

he does look down at you then, lip still curved enough to look like a smirk, and when his head tilts just slightly you die a little death. “terror? i’m never terrible, i know i’m not.” his fingers make a soft sound against his thigh as he taps on it mindlessly. “you’ll like the combos today.”

you can’t help but bark a little laugh. “you don’t mean that. that’s something you only say when they’re hard.”

a chuckle pushes out through his nose. “yes, i know.” and then, matter-of-factly, he adds, “you like it hard.”

and god you try not to draw attention to the innuendo in that comment. just as he says it the doors are pushed open with a low thunk and the rest of the dancers come filtering in, and so you have every possible opportunity to be normal and professional and not silly and terrible, but you are a silly and terrible woman, so your chest stutters on your next breath. and he watches. 

you choose to believe, for your health and happiness, that he still couldn’t quite discern what your reaction was, or why it would have happened. but you cannot deny the fleeting scent of smugness on him, or the way his jaw twitches when his eyes flit to you between greeting your colleagues. 

he must be, you decide as you come to take your place at the barre, a cruel and unusual man who has recognized your unrequited lust and wants to punish you for it. 

yes, that must be it, you assure yourself. 

the rest of class is excruciating. all the typical torment of watching the man whose bones you are so desperate to jump contort himself into beautiful shapes is mounted further by the way he watched you this morning, the way his head dropped to the side just so to see you fluster for a moment. 

you try to channel it into the combos. as you travel across the room, you work to carve the feeling from your chest and toss it outwards, anywhere else. your legs burn with your leaping and turning but you push harder, hoping you’ll reach some critical point at which the physical soreness of your muscles eclipses the fluttering behind your navel, but you can’t quite catch it. and every time you hope you might be close, you feel your fingertips just grazing a moment of forgetting, you catch his eye again, and something hungry pulses in your stomach.

you probably need to get fucked. you definitely need to get fucked, actually, because you’ll ruin all your leotards if this continues. 

sweat shines down your body by the time class is finally, mercifully over, and the plan has already solidified then. you’ll go out tonight, you’ll get well and sufficiently railed, and at long last you will be able to address your fucking ballet instructor properly. 

even collecting your bag from the floor makes your muscles scream. your steps drag as you shuffle about, removing your pointe shoes and slinging your purse over your shoulder in the waning light of the day. 

“was that your attempt at proving me wrong?”

you straighten, inhaling sharply. when you look over your shoulder, it’s only you and mr. geto in the studio again. he’s standing in the threshold now, body leaned against the door as he watches you finish packing. 

fuck.

normally you might relish this sort of attention from him, but at this point you feel overfilled with the smoke of your desperation and you need to breathe. you need to go to the club and release some of this pent up sexual energy. you need to get out before you spread your legs for him in front of the fucking mirror. 

you try to laugh lightly, but it sounds tired and reedy. “yeah, i guess not.” shrugging a little, you add, “couldn’t help it.” and you tried to use that tone of voice one uses when a conversation is over, for the first time since meeting him hoping he simply turns and leaves, but he stays static there, watching you.

you flounder, looking for anything else to say. you want to lighten the tension that’s pulling your hips towards him, so you put on a wry smile. “i’ll try less tomorrow.”

that makes him chuckle as he brings a hand up to massage one shoulder. inevitably you think of how it might feel under your fingers, how it might tense if you were riding him and he was using that arm to lift and drop you on his—

“i do have one note for you, actually,” he murmurs, and you try to mask the horror on your face as he begins walking towards you. “show me your grand adage from the last combo.”

you hesitate a moment, clutching your purse tightly with one arm and opening your diaphragm so he doesn’t see your lungs constrict. this is normal, you remind yourself, he is being a normal instructor.

and it’s true, this is normal, but he has abnormal sex appeal and you are abnormally tightly wound and and he has never adjusted you with his hands before. this is a terrible, horrible, grotesque idea, but what are you supposed to say? no?

you drop your things slowly at your feet, tracking the sweeping of his eyes along your movements. with your hands empty again you stand still a moment, surely looking as bewildered as you feel, but he nods slightly: go ahead. 

you steady the soft tremble of your fingers as you extend your arms outwards, aligning your spine as your leg extends behind you. your core engages to keep your hips from tilting upwards, chin high to create a sloping line from your neck and down your torso. even though you do not—cannot—look mr. geto in the eyes you can feel him watching, your muscles twitch when he assesses them, fluttering like little birds under your skin.

“yes, that’s it,” he says, low, behind his teeth. he begins to walk around you, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think he was trying to make you feel predated. 

two things happen at once. you realize—and the weight of it nearly buckles your knees and takes you through the floor of the studio—that he is not going to show you want he wants by doing it at precisely the moment one long finger brushes the under side of your thigh. there isn’t even anything promiscuous about where he grazes the fingerpad, but nevertheless you feel like an open wound, a nerve, only barely restraining a full body shudder at the feeling. what the fuck is he doing?

“you can lift this higher.”

you’re almost thankful that you scoff on instinct; it makes you sound less affected by this than you are. “i’m—i’m trying, but–”

and then you really do shudder, hot and tacky from the nexus of your legs as his hand grips your thigh in full, pulling it a centimeter higher and watching your body absorb the movement to balance. your breaths puff sharp and you can’t even attempt to stop them now.

his voice is no louder than a whisper but there’s no breath in it, all timbre and sound. “there, dove. hold that.” his hand pulls away torturously slow, and at such an angle that you feel the point of each fingertip as his palm falls away. you hope he’s spontaneously blinded so he can’t see the goosebumps erupting down your arms, but instead he leans an inch closer to you, close enough that you can feel the warmth of him, watching you strain to keep the position from just behind your shoulder.

“it makes it harder if you hold your breath.” you can hear the twitch of his lips in that and it makes it no easier for you to take in air, but you pull a trembling gulp of air in anyways. to please him, you suppose, because apparently that’s all you’re capable of doing.

he hums in approval, “that’s good enough, dove, thank you.” 

and no sooner do the words leave his lips are you dropping your leg and fleeing out the door, only barely remembering your bag.

~~~~~~~

you’re learning that your desperation for your ballet instructor is an exceptionally powerful tool.

earlier today, you pushed your body beyond its limit in the name of exorcising yourself of the curse of him. you were an outward force then, expanding and swelling and trying to expel the dark sweetness between your thighs.

now, haunting the neon shadows of this club in your highest, most painful heels, you think your desperation has a scent. you can’t remember ever being looked at in this way; from across the dance floor and behind the bar and in a far away corner, you catch men’s glances, all of them wolfish and interested. they can tell you need to be fucked, immediately.

you select the largest specimen you can find; a hulking mountain of a creature with a scar down one side of his mouth. he’s not quite handsome in the way suguru is handsome, it’s a louder, more insistent sort of attractiveness, but nonetheless you eye fuck him until he approaches you, knowing his weight will feel nice enough from behind.

he grabs at your side when he arrives in front of you, sliding a paw down your lower back. “come dance with me,” he rasps into your ear, and while normally you’d ask for the decency of exchanging names, tonight you’re sold.

you laugh as he tugs you into the fray, a throng of bodies pressed close and tacky with sweat. there’s a strange relief as he settles behind you, strobes flaring in your vision and his thick fingers around your waist. you can already feel how this ends, something sloppy and vaguely grotesque but you don’t even mind, you’re so coiled and greedy for this man you cannot have.

the music pulls you together and he grinds with you in time with it, pulling your ass against his jeans and twisting your hips back and forth. 

he runs his nose down the slope of your neck, feeling how pliant your limbs move for him. “you’re flexible, huh?”

with your head tilted back against his shoulder he brings one hand slowly up the front of your body, grasping loosely at your neck. you grin and nod into it, letting your eyes go hazy as you look up at the rigged lights and the rising fog.

you’re fucking soaked. you really would just like it if he’d bully his cock into you here in the middle of the dance floor so you can finally think straight, and you’re considering pulling him into the bathroom to do something truly indefensible against the dirty basin of a sink, but you feel his tendons tense around your throat and it makes you tilt your chin back down on instinct.

into your ear he asks, almost amused by what he’s seeing, “d’you know him?”

your heart sinks. 

whatever buoy you had wrestled between your arms was dissolving back into salt water, you’re slipping, you’re frantic, you’re looking across the dance floor and fucking suguru geto is there.

his hair is down and silky over his shoulders, which pull a white t shirt taut across the planes of his chest. you can see, even from here, the shadows of lean muscle, his body’s capacity for dance. the sleeves of his shirt are short enough that you can see, for the first time, the head of a snake tattoo peeking just below the hem. 

fuck.

and no wonder your enormous dance partner figured you knew each other; the way he’s looking at you is lethal, a sharp slice of a stare from across the room, a pointed watching. his lips twitch when he sees you notice him, something conspiratorial and entirely his own there. it looks as though he’s holding a live animal in his mouth, sly and coy and biting down on a moving thing behind his tongue. a single, sinewy hand lifts from his side and he waves.

fuck fuck fuck.

in a fleeting out-of-body event, you can appreciate the hilarity of this moment. it pulls a sound from your throat, almost a laugh, almost a scoff, too, and you stumble slightly out of the hold of the man behind you. “i—well, yeah, actually.” you have no idea what look you’re wearing, but when you turn to face your dance partner, it makes him chuckle under his breath. 

“you uh,” he scratches at his scar with his thumb, “you wanna go over there?” 

he’s teasing you—this much is obvious to you—and so much of you is desperate to tell him no, i’d like to stay right here, and grip to the veins of his forearms and let him take you home. but then you think of mr. geto’s hands along your thigh as he adjusted it and it’s almost like he has you between his fingers again, towing you towards him. 

“i–i’m sorry, i just think i should go and–” you gesticulate behind you, vaguely, reaching for something dignified to say, “and say hi.” a failure of the highest order.

the man in front of you laughs again, deep and from his stomach this time. he’s already tilting his body away from you, already letting you go, already sensing that the smell of your pussy was meant for the long-haired figure a few feet away. “you go right ahead, ma,” you think if he wasn’t so huge a person, his laughing would sound like giggling, “i’ll be fine.”

the sight of him slipping away from you makes you nauseous. you’re watching your own failure, all six feet and four inches of him, dissipating again into the sea of people, already under the manicured fingers of other women who aren’t waiting to arch for someone who essentially equates to their boss.

but there’s something secret and sweet to watching him go, too. standing resigned on the dance floor, accepting whatever honeyed trap fate has set for you, you can unburden yourself from this taxing process of trying so hard not to embarrass yourself. yes, you think, i will simply embarrass myself, and maybe whatever follows won’t feel so excruciatingly painful. 

geto watches you carefully as you slink to his table. he keeps the muscles in his face slack, neutral enough to obscure the meaning from his expression, but the faint pull of his jaw reminds you of this morning, of after class. despite yourself, you align your body properly as you take the six odd steps to stand at his feet, extending your legs the way you know he’d want in the light of day. 

he smells like musk and something botanical when you get close enough. you hope you don’t smell like your own slick. 

“it was sort of deja vu, watching that,” he begins. even under the beating of the music he refuses to shout, voice unfurling from behind his lips and just barely reaching your ears.

you wrinkle your nose a little. “how do you mean?”

the ice in his drink chimes with a flick of his wrist. “watching you dance.”

you tilt your head back and forth, feigning some sort of consideration. “no, i think this might be different.”

he’s smiling enough now that you can almost see his teeth. the part of you that is desperate to be cautious screeches that he’s playing with you, he doesn’t want you, but with each tip of your skull you can feel that voice liquifying. you hope it slips out your ear.

“how so?” he asks.

you do your best to keep a straight face. “well, for one, i don’t want your notes.”

he looks almost joyful to spit this back at you: “oh i have a few, actually.”

your laugh is too breathy and real to truly hear it against the ambient noise of the room, but he tracks it anyway, swishes his ice again. “you’re unqualified, unfortunately. this type of dancing isn’t your expertise, mr. geto—”

“suguru,” he interjects. “suguru here.”

your thighs twitch, almost stinging with need now, but you steady yourself with a breath, humming, “okay, suguru, this type of dancing isn’t your expertise. i only accept edits from experts.”

“i might surprise you, dove.”

you run your tongue along the front of your teeth. he’s asking you to play, you think, and so you raise your eyebrows and tilt your chin the way he does when he wants you to begin.

“well,” he takes a fraction of a step towards you and you match it backwards, pushed by the heat of him and the smell of his cologne, “i think you moved a little too quickly.”

you’re moving entirely in tandem now, him forward and you back, all the way until your head bumps a wall. cornered like this, he eclipses almost your entire line of sight, a vignette of dark hair.

“the part when you tilt your head back here,” and he gestures to his shoulder, “that’s the best part. you fell straight into it.”

something shudders up your legs and you squeeze them together, desperate for a moment of anything against the swelling button between them.

“they need to wait longer for it. makes it better.”

his smirk is slowly fading, something more intimate making space for itself across his mouth. if he recognizes the irony of this, he doesn’t show it, demanding simply: “show me.”

you have half a mind to gape at him, at what he’s offering, but instead you turn—stupid, whorish thing—as he asked, pressing yourself slowly to him. when your ass bumps against his pelvis he groans low. he’s rock hard against you, and a gasp moves up your windpipe but he has his free hand on your chin first, forcing your head back to his shoulder.

contorted like this, his nose grazes your cheek, his breath filtered into your ear. you whine, feline and soft, and he hums in return.

“yeah, it’s good, huh?” and he ruts his hips slightly into yours to emphasize his point, nosing your cheekbone. “so you have to start somewhere else.”

the hand on your chin falls away, moving to the small of your back where it bends back for him. he pushes his thumb to your spine, and then the rest of his palm, bending you forward at the waist. your hands come up to brace on the wall and you let your forehead fall there, too, letting the cool concrete tether you to whatever sanity you have left.

he exhales like veneered restraint watching you tilt, feeling the extra push of your thighs against his cock twitching in his pants. “yes, dove, like that.” he grinds against you in earnest then, dragging the clothed shaft of him over the globes of your ass. “he should work for it a little.”

he pushes again and you moan fully. it leaps from the wall to his ears and it earns you another drag, his fingers bruising against your waist.

“and then,” his composure is dwindling, you can hear it, and he ruts again, “once he’s worked up,” he drags the hand at your hip up your side, around your front, between your breasts to arch you back to him again. your back bows taut and impossible to meet him, head falling immediately to his shoulder this time, eyes squeezed shut. you wonder if your slick is running down your legs now, or if it’s still pooled in your panties. he finishes into your ear,  “then you come up here.”

you wiggle your hips against him, needy, and he grunts. “what did he say to you?” he grits out.

your capacity to think is low, practically panting like he’s already inside you. “huh?”

“when he had you here, he said something that made you laugh, i wanna know what it was.” with his hand fanned across your stomach he can pull you tight against his thrusts.

“h-he, he said i—fuck suguru, i-”

“come on, little dove,” he coos.

your eyes flutter open to find him watching you, purple eyes skidding across your skin. “he said i was flexible,” you huff.

he smiles like he’s going to eat you. “oh yeah? and did you tell him it’s because your mr. geto stretches you?”

your fists bunch and pull against the wall. you’re certain he can feel you clenching through your dress. your mr. geto, jesus. “n-no,” you breathe.

“oh, that cuts deep, dove,” he tuts, but he fucks against your ass again anyway, “i work so hard to stretch you open and you’re not giving me credit?”

you find yourself with the fleeting and miraculous wherewithal to laugh, light and towards the ceiling. “i’ll tell him next time, then.”

that makes suguru laugh, too, the both of you almost manic with the truly absurd suggestion that you would ever be touched by anyone else.

you feel very suddenly like a stray dog at his doorstep, scrap-fed by his hand, bony and waiting for something warm to be tossed out again. the fear that he doesn’t mean this the way you’re taking it, that he wants you only briefly, chokes you still.

“are you drunk?” you ask him.

he lets you feel the frenetic pattern of his breathing against your neck. “no.”

and then even smaller, you can’t help it: “are you messing with me?”

slowly, he brings the hand with his drink up, extending his forefinger out around your front. it’s cold from the glass as it taps on your chin once, twice, and then drags down the line of your throat. “no.”

and you aren’t quite sure how you would describe what you feel move through him then, a trembling sort of shake, maybe, but as it buzzes through his hips he thrusts the momentum up into you. later, you would come to realize this was the sensation of him, at last, deciding something he could not take back.

“i think you left something with me at the studio today,” he murmurs. the electricity of knowing you did not leave something at the studio takes hold of your ribs and tugs. “you left in such a rush.”

“i think you know that’s you’re fault, suguru.”

he smiles small into the side of your face. “yes, i know.” a finger brushes under the swell of your breast. “i can drive you there to come get it.”

you’re beginning to squirm in his hold now, the beastly thing between your thighs drooling in full, usurping control of your limbs. “haven’t you been drinking?”

and suguru is all too pleased to bring his glass to your lips, tipping it slowly onto your tongue.

he’s drinking fucking sparkling water.

he isn’t even tipsy.

you’re nodding before you can even gulp enough air to say yes.

~~~~~~~

you barely make it out of his car before he’s on you. pressed against the passenger door, he kisses you like he wants to reach inside and pull out a rib. it’s teeth and tongue and your mewls in his mouth, and it makes him pull one leg up around his hip to grind slow against your clothed pussy.

he strokes his tongue along yours as he guides you to the front door, bucking into you when you bite down soft on his bottom lip.

“fuck,” he pants. “get inside.”

seeing the studio at night is strange. the moonlight glints off the mirror, bathing the room in silver streaks. stranger still is hearing geto come in behind you, locking the door with a low snick.

he passes behind you like a memory, stepping just to graze your back and shoulder before pulling away and towards his usual seat at the mirror. “stand center floor for me, dove,” he instructs.

your body moves without much thought. it’s so easy to do as he says here, to pervert the habit of following his directions as you stand at the center of the vinyl.

suguru runs a hand across his jaw, over his lips, watching you stand static as asked. you know how lust blown your eyes are already because you can see the black depth of them in the mirror behind his head. “stretch for me,” he sighs. 

a strange confidence feeds and swells in your belly, something alight and excited as you bend at the waist. your movements are no more salacious than they normally are, simple contortions to warm your hips and thighs, but you slow them enough to match the moment. your dress, too, heightens it; the hem teases the curve of your ass, your swollen mound, tight against you in ways your dance clothes aren’t. geto has sharpened the air to a fine point, and you teeter on it.

your head flips over, legs softly bent and then straight again, swishing open and closed. between each movement you glance up at him, swallowing thick at the shadow behind the tent in his jeans, the clench of his fist as it approaches his length. when you open your legs past second position and bend to stretch between them, he moans, unashamed, and you can tell from the lilt of pain in it that he’s stroking himself over his pants now. your pussy nearly opens in this position, faced away from him, and you feel the fever say his name. 

“your middle split now, dove,” he grips himself like he means to strangle, tipping his head back against the mirror to watch you over the bridge of his nose, adding, “please.”

with your hands splayed on the floor, you drop simply into it. when your clit bumps the cool flooring you whine in your throat, settling your weight. suguru is stroking himself in earnest over the denim when you peer up at him. “uh huh,” he pants, “and bend the knees now, just a little.”

your knees cant up and you tuck your tailbone, forcing your dress to ruck up around your hips and display, fully, the wet mess of your panties. the suffocated whine suguru sounds punches the air from your lungs, and you lean back onto your elbows behind you, looking to breathe, looking to survive for another moment.

you wish you could have a picture of the two of you this way; you entirely on display for him—and for yourself, too, as you cannot avoid your own reflection beside him—and your unflappably composed instructor, squeezing down the veins of his cock through the rough pull of his jeans, watching. and because you spend hours every day being directed by him, you know what he will ask you next before he even voices it, but you wait to hear it anyway.

“touch yourself for me.”

your fingers fly to your clit, drawing slow circles around, crossing over to feel yourself jolt. your hole pulses and spits, and suguru growls like he can see it from halfway across the room. the utter relief of friction, fucking finally, makes you tip your head back, moaning wild into the still air.

but then you hear his lips part to say something and you’re pulling your head back straight, still circling over your clit and then your entrance, meaningless patterns over your thong that make your toes curl in your heels.

“you know i never once—ngh, fuck—had the urge to adjust a student with my hands? i always hated that when i was in class,” he grits. with trembling hands, he begins to unbutton himself, pulling his cock out and tugging on it immediately.

god, he’s pretty. long and soft and leaning the way the rest of him leans, gliding between his fingers with the pearls of pre beading at his tip. 

“but i thought that if i,” he pauses to groan with you, “if i touched you once i could fucking forget about it.”

you speed your fingers with each word he says, each stroke of his hand over all eight inches of his cock. a far away voice registers that you’re whining, too, but your mind filters it away, tuned completely to suguru’s confession in the dark.

your smile is wry, and reveals as much as anything. “did it work?”

he laughs then, almost at you. “no, you know what dove, it didn’t really—hah—didn’t really work for me.”

your hips buck into your fingers, a buzzing coil now. “suguru,” you begin, but he doesn’t need to hear any more.

“i know,” he moans.

you have transcended his direction, you think, merged into him enough to comply without listening. he’s tearing his shirt and pants off as frantically as you tug your dress up and over your shoulders, and you’ve only barely shimmied your panties down your legs when he arrives in front of you, completely bare. you think suguru geto, tacky with sweat and need and cock nearly swollen purple, has achieved his own pinnacle, descending to his knees to meet you.

and there’s an ephemeral, fleeting moment, when you both simply watch each other in all the places you’ve kept obscured for so long. his eyes circle over your tits, the pert peaks of your nipples, the gleaming of your slit. you track the snake tattoo from the bulge of his shoulder and around his back, pupils flitting between him and his reflection.

suguru takes hold of both your ankles on each side of his narrows hips, squeezing once, and then gliding them up, up, around your knee, along the inside of your thighs. it dawns on you that he knows exactly where to press, where each muscle begins and ends, because of how much he watches you flex and extend. your breathing comes labored and round, small yips and whines when goosebumps push into his fingers.

he can’t help but tug your hips towards his bobbing cock when his hands arrive there. you squirm and twist to try and sink him inside but he holds you to the floor, jaw tight. 

“not yet, dove, i need to stretch you,” he grunts.

and you’re giggling before you can stop it. “you use a lot of double entendre, is that on purpose?”

he’s smiling now, too, but more than anything you think its a wicked joy with how your mouth drops open as he circles two fingers around your entrance. your arousal is so hot and so everywhere that you think you can hear it dripping onto the marley.

“keep your legs open.” he uses the tone of voice he employs during class and it only makes you gush more, but you do as he asks, tightening your outer thighs to hold yourself spread as he pushes two fingers inside.

“oh fuck,” you pant.

it seems to affect him in equal measure, cock twitching with each pull of his digits, lips parted ever so slightly. he scissors his fingers apart and back again, feeling along the inside of your walls, looking. 

“ah—yeah, yes, there,” you mewl, and he moans something sincere in turn. the pads of his fingers brush and swish along that spot and something behind your ribs is turning over, growing teeth. you whine out a small fuck and that’s it: suguru is gone.

in a single motion, he pulls his fingers from you, breathes in your protest of a whine, and lowers his hips to run the ruddy tip of his cock over your clit, down, down. you run your nose along his forearm as he braces them on each side of your head, feeling the brush of his hair along your shoulder.

his mouth parts directly over your ear like this, and you feel his hand squeeze your left thigh. “lift this for me.”

and as you extend it up to hook over his shoulder, legs spread in almost a full split below his hold, he notches his head inside, a lewd pop that echos up your spine and between your ears.

suguru’s head drops to your shoulder as he bares his teeth. “fuuuuuuck jesus christ.”

you’re no better, winding your right leg around his left and bucking your hips to slide him home. he indulges you this time—perhaps for the first time since meeting him—and cants his hips again. you’re so fucking wet and ready and open for him that he slides to the hilt that way, and both of you are reduced to animals then. the sounds between you are completely inhuman, and you can’t tell where yours end and his begin.

and suguru fucks you like he teaches: not slow, but intentional, precise, every movement with an insurmountable sense of purpose. 

and fucking bossy.

“ngh yeah, squeeze me like that again, dove.”

“oh f-fuck, baby, align your hips.”

“c-can you—haah—arch into me a little more? yeah, that’s right.”

with each driving thrust of his hips you rub your clit along his pelvis, warmth spreading behind your belly button and down each leg. suguru never quite recovered from that first thrust, forehead damp and still at your shoulder as he groans directions into the soft skin there. and your hands grab anywhere they can reach: into the roots of his hair, down the planes of his back, along the slope of his ass to feel the muscles grind.

the friction his happy trail makes with your clit is driving you wild, you’re fucking close, and he can feel it in the way you pulse around him.

with the sudden capacity to mock you he coos gently, “oh, little dove, are you close?”

and you can only nod and pant and whine like a bitch in heat, the crest of your pleasure tapping leisurely on the wing of your shoulder, ready to round the corner.

“hah—yeah, i can fucking feel it.” he adjusts his weight to one arm so he can band the other around your back, pulling your tits flush to his chest. the leverage only grinds him harder into you and you’re nearly screeching with the pressure. he wants to kiss you and you want to return it, but your lips meet open, exchanging air to be puffed back and forth.

“make a mess for me,” he encourages, each thrust more erratic than the last—he’s close, too—and every moan pitched higher. “c’mon, i—shit, unh—i wanna feel your pussy choke me.”

you come so hard you feel like you’re spinning, like you’re on stage, like there’s some great applause awaiting you. it detaches from deep in your groin and pulses outwards, gushing arousal and cream over suguru’s cock and entirely fragmenting you, boneless as he fucks you through it.

“fuckfuckfuck,” he bites the juncture of your shoulder with your neck, “i made this body, dove. you’re mine, huh?”

and hearing it, even from his own lips, takes him over, too, hips stuttering to a stop as he growls wild, seed spurting inside you, warm. your name, your real name, unspools from his mouth, and it sounds like thank you.

part of you expects, sweaty and still and plugged with suguru’s softening cock, that a great shame will dawn upon you now. you think maybe you should feel ashamed for letting him fuck you here, raw, his student.

but as you’re whining into each other’s mouths when he pulls out, as he smooths his hands over your stomach and thighs, as he kisses you again without the sort of demands he had before, the guilt doesn’t arrive.

suguru watches you closely—he’s good at that, you’ve determined—as he sits back on his haunches. you realize he’s waiting for that guilt to come, too.

“okay?” he asks softly.

you could laugh at him for that question, but you grin instead. “mhm.”

his chest unburdens a weight seeing that look on your face. you can see something gathering on his palate, too, something he likes the taste of. 

and then he spits it: “there’s a shower in my office bathroom.”

you really do laugh this time, full-bodied and sore and wet again.

~~~~~~~

you don’t think you’ve ever seen mr. geto with eye bags before. you don’t think anyone has. though, you suppose he seems the type to prioritize his beauty sleep.

or, most of the time, anyway. you couldn’t help that he wanted you again in the shower, and then at his desk chair, and then from behind with your knee propped against the barre, and then—

nobara bows into a pigeon stretch next to you, snickering as she assesses him in his seat. she heckles him: “exhausted is no state to dance in.”

your body seizes with embarrassment and delight all at once, and even though your chin drops to your chest as you stretch your hips, you can feel him watching you all the same.

nobara is watching you now, too, but you notice it too late. she stifles a giggle next to you. “is that a fucking hickey?”

~~~~~~~

thank you for reading !!! comments and reblogs always appreciated >:)

you suppose, as different as this line of work is from your other job on the face of things, it appeals to the same sort of animal in your belly that drew you to nightlife. you like feeling in control, enjoy the subversion of being so pretty and young and self assured.

you are delighted, too, by how often satoru gojo needs your help.

he has lost his email password at least three times in the last two months, accidentally deleted his own profile from the internal website, and filed his income tax forms in the shared google drive. 

each time you have been there, fingers flying over your keyboard in your slack dms as you sort through his technological missteps. it’s only made more entertaining by how intelligent he clearly is—you are under no illusion—it seems simply his single blind spot rests securely over your area of expertise.

he is…not what you expected. he seems to respect you far more than you had anticipated a CEO to respect his remote intern. he knows that, as it relates to IT, you know better. there is no denial of his mistakes, no shame, only a brief request sent your way with a hint of playful self-deprecation. you like him. 

this most recent problem has spanned almost all afternoon. he’s been locked out of his internal account, it seems. you bite back a smile as you respond to him.

You 5:27pm Hmm. I’ve scanned backend three times now, and everything seems to be working. What’s the error message exactly?

Satoru Gojo 5:28pm Says I don’t have permissions.

now you really are smiling, responding immediately.

You 5:28pm Oh, well I can fix that here, but that’s something another admin could have done, too. Probably not a system error. It says here the other admin is Suguru Geto. Would he have changed permissions for some reason?

he drafts a few responses to that before going silent. suguru geto has never needed your help and is thus wholly enigmatic to you, though you know he is satoru’s CFO; you also know—certainly not because you poked around in their personal slack messages—that they are close childhood friends. it wouldn’t be the first time one had attempted a practical joke on the other, the workplace often caught in the middle, though you commend geto for his foresight to humiliate gojo in the only way gojo couldn’t fix himself.

after a few minutes you see him typing again.

Satoru Gojo 5:34pm Yeah ok it was him. He just did it to mess with me. I’m sorry to have bothered you! :/

your laugh rings through your apartment.

You 5:34pm No worries!

and this should be the end of it, really. but the part of you that you reckon satoru gojo shares—a joy in flagrant pettiness—compels you to keep your computer open. your digital landscape is quiet for a few moments, your dms empty. you stretch your arms over your head and yawn.

ping!

Satoru Gojo 5:37pm On second thought, can I get your help with one more thing?

You 5:37pm Of course

Satoru Gojo 5:37pm You’re too sweet for your own good. Your shift ended 7 minutes ago.

you enjoy this, too. rare moments when his personality bares itself in the way he writes to you: the sort of harmless flirtation that you doubt he even notices as he types it.

you’ve known enough womanizers to know he’s harmless. still, you bask in fleeting moments of his digital attention.

You 5:38pm What can I help you with?

Satoru Gojo 5:39pm Can you make his launch button this link?

Satoru Gojo 5:39pm DON’T OPEN IT

you open it immediately.

oh.

oh.

your bottom lip gets caught under your teeth. of course you knew vaguely what gojo looks like, you had sufficiently googled the company when you first came upon the job listing.

and there are pictures of him everywhere, pretty face splashed under headlines like BILLIONAIRE CEO TURNED PLAYBOY?—that article made you laugh, some ten thousand words about a blurry photo taken outside a nightclub, a white head of hair in motion walking out—but still, in all of them he is pressed perfectly into well-tailored suits, hair brushed through and facial expressed tempered, even trained. he looks so professional, so proper, so terribly handsome, but not quite your type. or, really, a stage before your interest.

you like when men like that are disheveled, hair mussed and skin tacky with sweat.

though this photo he’s attached isn’t all that far off.

something stirs, shakes awake between your legs looking at it. you grin with something devious and awful before responding.

You 5:40pm I have to open it if you want me to use it.

Satoru Gojo 5:41pm Is that true?

no.

You 5:42pm Yes?

Satoru Gojo 5:43pm Did you already look?

You 5:43pm Yes

Satoru Gojo 5:44pm You’re fired

You 5:45pm No I’m not.

Satoru Gojo 5:45pm No, you’re not.

with a giddy little grin you do as he asks. it is entirely unprofessional, you know, but you are surely exempt from blame when doing the bidding of the CEO, right?

you link suguru’s login button to the photo, laughing to yourself lightly.

You 5:50pm I did it. 

You 5:51pm I have to admit I’m sort of surprised you’d ask me to do something so childish on your behalf.

Satoru Gojo 5:51pm He started it

You 5:52pm Aren’t you a CEO?

Satoru Gojo 5:52pm Aren’t you my intern?

You 5:53pm My shift ended 23 minutes ago.

Satoru Gojo 5:54pm So then you’ve committed this “childish act” for me out of the kindness of your heart?

You 5:55pm No, actually. I get paid double for overtime.

Satoru Gojo logged off 5:55pm

your heartbeat rings lightly in your ears, you feel like you might have rattled him a little and that delights you to no end.

you wonder what he imagines you look like. surely he could have searched your name, though any photos of your face wouldn’t be attached there. 

there are, of course, ample photos of your face across the internet, most of them behind a paywall, though some of the tamer ones are available for free. but all of them are under a different name.

you had chosen tsukiko, meaning moon child, as your stage name initially as something of a joke. she isn’t an alter ego so much as an exaggerated caricaturization of your femininity, one who feeds on starlight and slinks about in the dark. you delegate the hungrier parts of yourself, the parts that ache and need for things, to her.

your manager at club cabal had spotted you first at a stoplight waiting to cross the street, pin striped pencil skirt down to your knees and shiny black pumps in each hand. you had been looking for months for a full time job, but the market was so saturated by then with IT workers that there seemed to be no space for you. you remember leaning your forehead against the cool metal of the stoplight pole, surely infected with some fifty diseases but you weren’t in a place to mind, when an enormous and glamorously dressed woman approached you. 

you remember so clearly what she said to you, the words cutting through your delirium and sinking sense of defeat: you look absolutely riveting in business clothes.

you barely had the wherewithal to lift your head but nonetheless you had, assessing all six feet of her, draped in fine furs and silk gloves. the whole getup would have looked like a costume on anyone else but she wore it all with such purpose that it looked like the most natural outfit in the world. 

you still cringe thinking about the tactless way you’d simply replied: “huh?”

she had laughed at you, but there was no humiliation in it, she almost seemed endeared to you, amused and halfway pleased by the bleary look on your face. she had handed you an ivory business card, embossed and shiny with her name and her place of work.

長澤長子 (nagasawa hisako)

CLUB CABAL MANAGER

“come to see me if you’d like to make some real money,” she offered, not waiting for your reply before strutting back down the block, coat fluttering in the evening wind like a cloak.

when your savings dipped into the single digits a week later you paid her a visit.

working at the most exclusive hostess bar in tokyo fits you stunningly well. your clients are disallowed from propositioning you, serving you alcohol, offering you drugs, and, most importantly, touching you. you spend your weekday evenings in clothes that could pass as business formal if they were longer—tiny miniskirts and button-ups that urged the plush of your tits to spill out—and entertain the most wealthy business people of the tokyo metropolitan area.

all of them just want someone to talk to, you have come to learn. it helps, naturally, that you arrive to them dripping in sex appeal, but most of your returning clients seem to remember first and foremost the way you speak to them. 

after two years collecting a rather well-to-do roster of exclusive clientele, hisako began operating you out of a private room. 

and there are real, tangible things you have learned from catering to top performers in all fields. you might have majored in math and CS but you know now, too, about the global economy, about agriculture, about the intricacies of factory-owning. 

and you flare bright, a star in spinning orbit, in that subtle performance under the moody lighting of the club. every hand gesture, every curl of your lips, it all means something, and the fine precision has come to excite you. you are untouchable there, a coveted thing, paid to see.

speaking of which, you think, it’s about time to get ready.

you have very few reservations tonight, though you don’t mind much now that you have your own space. you extend your legs across the couch, stilettos hanging off each foot as you tap them to the humming bass of the music. your room sits right off the main hallway, just big enough for a plush, navy couch and a coffee table, wiped shiny between clients. lanterns hang golden and coy at each corner, illuminating your face just enough to provoke your visitors to lean in closer.

you can hear the distinct click of hisako’s heels as they approach your door, and you turn your head on the armrest with a smile to greet her.

“hi baby,” she coos. you sit up and cross one leg over the other, lest she have a client in tow.

“good evening,” you reply with a smile. she leans on the threshold with a conspiratorial grin.

“i have a new client for you. a real big hitter. can you handle him?”

you tilt your head. “are you really asking me that?”

she laughs, full-bodied. “i guess not,” she muses, turning back to send him in. you pull a chilled bottle of sake from a small fridge at one end of the couch and place a glass next to it on the coffee table.

there are about 30 seconds as a client approaches your door when you learn some of the most vital things about them. the weight of their shoes, the sound their clothes make as they walk, whether they make conversation with the other hostesses passing by, all of it is catalogued as you listen. 

the so-called big hitter makes his way towards your door with purpose, though he is in no rush. his footsteps fall deliberately, a hair’s breadth away from heavy but not quite, just fast enough to sound intentional, just slow enough to keep from missing your door. 

the face they make when they enter matters, too. how they assess you, where they look, you cater your posture to their tastes. an interested man is an honest man, you have found, and you learn the most when they want you. 

the door swings open.

fuck.

fuck.

he is so tall he takes up almost the entire doorway, weight leaned on one hip like he’s waiting to be invited in, though surely confident enough to know you will. his suit is bespoke, you can tell from the way it sits just so on his shoulders, and he’s loosened his tie a centimeter or two. he’s one of the most attractive young men you’ve ever seen in your life, which would typically excite you. you love beautiful clients. 

but blinking at you from a few feet away is satoru gojo.

your boss.

satoru gojo.

is at your door.

for one of the first times in your entire career, you have no idea the sort of look pulled across your face. what the fuck are you supposed to do?

you know you have at most one more second before the silence shifts from anticipatory into awkward, and you consume it in full to think. okay. gojo has no clue what you look like, of this much you are almost certain. further, the name on your door is not one he would recognize. by all accounts the person who sits before him has absolutely no relation to his remote IT intern, despite the fact that you’re in fact the same woman. you take stock of his face; if you have any sense left, you think he shows no sign of recognition on your face.

okay. you swallow. refusing him would be a first for you, and by hisako’s description he’s an important client to please. you almost laugh at yourself for that thought; of course he’s an important client to please, he’s something like the wealthiest man in the country. 

what is there to do other than act as though he’s any other customer?

you smile, small and wry, and gesture him inside. gojo nods his head in hello, closing the door behind him and settling gracefully on the other end of the couch. his legs are long and spread so far his knee almost touches yours, almost, and he reclines back into the upholstery like he owns the room. you suppose he could, if he had any interest. he holds a broad hand out to you, smiling sharp and wolfish. he likes you.

“it’s nice to meet you. you can call me satoru.”

if you can push beyond the strangeness of meeting your boss like this, you acknowledge the unique position you have been unceremoniously pushed into. namely, that unlike any other first-time client, you know a great deal about him.

you smile warmly but don’t move your hand to shake his. “it’s my pleasure.”

he wiggles his fingers slightly. “you don’t shake hands?”

“you know the rules, satoru,” you admonish lightly.

he chuckles and lowers his hand. “i guess i was hoping otherwise.”

you move to pour him a glass of sake and feel his eyes trace you as you bend. his irises flit over the swell of your breasts, the arch of your back, though he stays reposed back into the cushions, watching you like a predator. you coach a smile that doesn’t reveal what is becoming clearer to you with each moment: it’s almost fun to have this secret. 

or it would be, if your internship wasn’t on the line.

it may still be, actually.

you cross your other leg over, let the tip of your stiletto hang close to his shin. the muscle of his thigh twitches but he remains still.

“so what brings you here tonight?”

gojo keeps his eyes on you over his glass as he takes a slow pull. he smacks his lips lightly, shrugging. “i wanted company.”

“do you struggle to find good company?” you tease.

he tilts his head back and forth, thinking, before admitting, “yeah, i guess i do.”

“i find that sort of hard to believe.”

the corner of gojo’s mouth tilts up. “and why’s that?”

you roll your eyes lightly. “you’ll have to work a little harder if you want me to stroke your ego that overtly.”

“i’ll work as hard as it takes,” he fires back, only half joking.

your laugh is breathy and real. he communicates himself rather well over slack, you think. all the cheekiness, all the bite, you have felt moments of it in your communications online. though seeing it all from his mouth is a different beast you are, if you can admit it, becoming increasingly elated to face. how fucking hot he looks while talking is not something easily captured online.

“so what do you do for work, satoru?”

you hope that question is convincing. he didn’t tell you his last name on purpose, you think. 

“i run a business.” his eyes are narrowed almost imperceptibly, and it unnerves you, so you bend at the waist again to refill the sip he took from his glass. the tension in his face goes limp watching the curve of your ass.

“what sort of business?”

“oh, it’s all so boring,” he dismisses, sounding almost disappointed that you’d ask.

you scoff and chuckle all at once. “most of my clients come to talk about their work.”

he extends an arm across the back of the couch, fingers a few inches from your neck but still not touching. you let him.

“i think that’d be a waste.”

“why’s that?”

“i could pay a lot less money for someone who doesn’t look like you to listen to stories about my work.”

you breathe in sharply. he’s fun. “you could pay a lot less money for someone you could touch, too,” you add.

his eyes flit a moment to his hand, so close to your skin, surely sensing the warmth of you, but still making no move to actually feel. it seems almost like he gets off on the not-touching, like that inch of space between you thrills him. he flexes all five fingers.

“i find that pretty boring, too,” he murmurs.

“you don’t like fucking pretty girls?” 

your sudden crassness makes him shift, crossing one leg over the other. he liked that. 

“i suppose i’m just tired of it now.”

your grin grows. “oh, i see, so you’ve fucked too many pretty girls.”

he shrugs with that predatory smile, running his free hand through his hair to muss it slightly. “the waiting’s the best part anyway.”

“so what do you find not boring?” you ask.

he looks at the ceiling in a show of consideration that makes you laugh. his gaze snaps back to you at the sound, immediately preening with it. “you’re doing a pretty good job so far.”

your scoff only sets him alight further, scooting just barely closer to you, angling his legs so they still don’t touch yours. but you’re tucked further into his side now, noses closer, and it makes something animal inside you flex and bite. your thighs squeeze quickly but you track his eyes as they catch the movement.

“see that, right there,” his hair flops to one side, loose now from its gel in all his fussing, “you’re scoffing at me. do you know how rare that is?”

he seems genuinely delighted, whole-heartedly excited by your diminutive little noise.

“oh i see,” you start, “you like being degraded?”

he scrunches his nose and it’s sort of boyish. “no, honestly, not really. i just have so few people in my life that treat me like a real person.”

you chew on this slowly. “so you…” a coy smile breaks through, “you came to a hostess bar for the humanity?” but you can hardly finish your sentence without laughing again, light and amused but real, and he chuckles at himself, too.

“yeah, i guess so.”

you feel his pointer finger brush the skin at the back of your neck and you shudder, narrowing your eyes at him again. he corrects himself immediately, pulling away, and breathing out, “sorry. i forgot.”

you can see on his face that he means it.

“tell me about your life, little moon,” he says, voice low and quieter as it fans over your face. when did you get so close together? both of your bodies contort beyond reasonable expectation to fit so closely without touching.

you have never felt quite so charmed by a client before. whether it’s because you already feel so familiar with him outside of this room or the appeal of harboring this secret you cannot decipher, but nonetheless you are doing things you would normally never allow yourself. you have never leaned so close before, have flirted so overtly with the breaking of a rule you have historically enjoyed.

you want him to touch you. for so many reasons that is a terrible, life-alteringly horrific idea.

you try to speak with him instead.

“little moon?” you ask.

he points to your door. “tsukiko. moon-child,” he clarifies, but something thinly veiled and knowing tugs at his lips.

you hum. 

“but i guess that isn’t your real name, is it?”

something about the low rumble of his voice tickles at your spine, makes you want to arch into his touch. you’re trying so hard to remember yourself, to remember who he is.

“i don’t think it’s wise for me to answer that question.”

he doesn’t miss a beat. “then answer my other one. tell me about your life.” you hesitate and he grins. “or scoff at me again.”

you smile and push an amused breath through your nose. this is a somewhat perilous trap of a question but you don’t show it on your face.

“wouldn’t that ruin the illusion? peeking behind the curtain and all?”

“what illusion do you think i’m under?”

you appraise his face slowly. you suppose you don’t have an answer to that, so you relent to his other question, at last.

“i’m fairly boring outside of this job, actually.”

“i don’t believe that.”

“i spend all my time here and at home.”

“oh, little moon, such a shame. pretty young thing all alone all the time?”

the teasing lilt of his voice, sweeping in that low whisper of a register, makes your thighs clench again. he doesn’t even look this time, only grins a little bigger to show you he knows.

“i’m around people all the time, people are my job,” you argue.

“that’s not the sort of alone i’m talking about.”

you cannot help but want to play this game with him, you lob the ball back, though your voice comes out a fraction more breathless than usual. “what sort of alone are you talking about then, satoru?”

“well i can’t touch you,” you can feel his pointer finger hover over your shoulder again, intentional this time, running a knuckle so close you can sense it without looking, but still not touching. “but is anyone?”

you’re taking in a stuttering breath in an attempt to respond but he continues, lips closer to the shell of your ear.

“surely someone gets to feel this tight pussy, huh?”

you huff out all your air, fuck you’re so wet and he’s looking at you like you can smell it. what the fuck is happening? you have never, ever reacted to a client this way. and better yet, this is your boss.

but rationality slips from your ears and down your neck, you think, because you only shake your head.

pity drips from his voice like honey, every ounce of power you implicitly relinquish to him a thing he takes on with what appears to be great pleasure.

“surely you must have needs.”

“i can take care of myself, but i appreciate your concern.” your double entendre doesn’t dawn upon you until you’ve already said it and he’s laughing with a lewd sort of tenderness. your face burns and you make use of your remaining faculty, looking away from him knowing he cannot tilt your chin back himself.

“uh huh. and how often are you…taking care of yourself?”

“i don’t have to answer that.” that’s a weak retort and you both know it.

“no, you don’t.”

you try to deflect. “i thought fucking pretty girls bored you.”

“i’m not fucking you, am i? unless you’ve had a change of heart about the touching rule.”

“no,” you reply, as firmly as you can manage, though something below your navel is bellowing for him.

“i figured not,” he admits, leaning just slightly further into you, whispering low and hot into your ear, “it’s enough just knowing how fucking wet you are in that little skirt just from the sound of my voice.”

your mouth drops open in disbelief, head snapping towards his, so close your noses almost bump. “i’m not,” you protest, voice clipped. fucking liar. 

“no?”

“no.”

“why don’t you prove it for me?” he taunts softly.

you squeeze your thighs harder, desperate for any sort of friction, anything, but your restraint is waning with him whispering so sinfully in your ear.

“you’re not allowed to touch me,” you remind him again.

“but you can touch me, can’t you?”

this is a suggestion you’ve heard from a few patrons before but it’s a first to feel so tempted to take one up on it. you search his face for anything to tether to, looking for a reason to refuse, but god he’s so pretty and you want him. he has almost as keen an eye as you do, you think, because he sees the moment your trepidation lowers.

“why don’t you get on my thigh and let me feel?”

his legs uncross and he splays them out, a saddle for you. your eyes drop there, and then to the tent in his slacks as they pull tight across his hips, to his face—wild and manic—and then back again. shit. 

you brace one hand on his shoulder, just to see what he’ll do. he tenses with the contact but doesn’t move, doesn’t make to grab at you. you look at each other a moment longer, both of you waiting for something terrible or wonderful or both, and then you’re swinging one bare leg over his, settling slowly on his pant leg, skirt fanned just to the middle of your thigh.

the pressure of his muscle under your swollen clit makes you whimper as soon as you sit down and a breath punches from his lungs but still he does as you have asked, still he doesn’t touch you. he tilts his head to the side, mouth parted. 

“come on, little moon,” he encourages lowly. “use me.” he punctuates it with a little bounce of his leg and you’re gone.

you start slow, dragging your clit on the warmth of his slacks, surely leaving something shiny and humiliating behind but you can’t find it in you to care. you brace your other hand on his other shoulder for balance, rolling your hips faster now, mewling quietly as he watches with rapt attention.

“you’re fucking soaked, aren’t you? that all for me?”

you nod wordlessly but he bounces his leg again. you only barely stop yourself from screaming. “answer me.”

“f-fuck, yes, satoru, f-for you,” you exhale, words stuttering and stumbled as your stomach tenses with your movement. the pleasure whips through your body, coils around your diaphragm and around your hole. you flutter and pulse and surely he feels it, how badly you want to be filled. his fists clench at his sides watching it, cock aching and huge from the looks of it, jumping in time with your little grinds along the fabric.

with each roll you thrust harder, whimpering as the feeling bubbles and smokes inside of you. “fuck,” you whisper, to yourself or to him you do not know.

“fuck you look so fucking—oh that’s it—perfect humping me like a slut,” he groans.

you throw your head back, rolling your hips harder, faster, you need to cum and it’s so close you can taste it, can feel it between your fingers. he takes the opportunity to lean closer to your neck, exhaling slowly on the beating of your jugular.

“i’m so cl-close,” you whine.

he bares his teeth against your skin. “oh baby you really did need it, huh? cumming so fast.”

you nod, all pretenses and attempts at self-possession abandoned. the maw of your heat unhinges its jaw as ecstasy washes over you, hips gone frantic and lost of all rhythm, riding your high as you gush over the fabric of his pants. he moans with you watching it happen, feeling the wet heat spread across his thigh.

with one final sigh you slow to a stop, panting lightly. when you raise your head to meet his eyes again you feel something like sheepishness coiling feverish in your chest but his expression is so open in its wanting that the humiliation doesn’t last.

“fuck,” he sighs, running a hand through his hair. 

with the remaining shreds of your crazed desire you are put upon to slide two fingers past the hem of your panties, collecting your slick where it pools. you raise them in front of his face, shiny and tacky.

“open,” you order softly.

he obeys immediately, gratefully. you press your fingers lightly on his tongue and his eyes almost roll back, half-lidded as he licks your fingers clean, his groaning around them reverberating down your hand. you pull away with a faint pop.

“you are fantastic,” he breathes, as dazed as you are.

you smile something small and honest, slowly disentangling yourself from him to right yourself on the couch again. 

“thank you,” you say, for the compliment and…for everything else, you suppose.

he almost seems nervous now that he’s seen you cum. his cock is still obscenely swollen in his pants, still jumps every time you look at it, but it feels like he’s swallowed his swagger along with your cum. he reaches for his sake cup and takes it all in one swig before standing.

“i’ll…see you again, i’m sure,” he says as he makes for the door. you sort of want to giggle at the absurdity of it all, at this situation you find yourself in. but then he turns back, as if remembering something, and digs through his pocket.

he pulls out a wallet, leather and embossed with the kanji of his name, a tidbit you know but cannot divulge. yes, the fact is slapping you across the face again: this is your boss. 

he throws something to the tune of 150 thousand yen on the table, for the first time looking less than certain about what to do. you think for a moment that he seems like he’s just remembered, there at the threshold and one foot out the door, that this has been first and foremost a transactional encounter. 

when the sound of his expensive shoes walking down the hallway fades into silence—or as close to silence as the club is capable—you hang your head in your hands. what the fuck did you just do?

the next week passes like torture. for the first time in your life you dread going to work, dread seeing him again; even worse you spend equal time hoping he’ll turn up at your private room. satoru gojo plagues you, plagues tsukiko, infiltrates somewhere deeper beyond the character.

to add insult to injury, you are subject to continued messages from him under your real name, a new character borne of necessity under the pretense that you didn’t fuck his thigh last thursday. though you suppose the only benefit to keeping such close contact with him is that you do not have to wonder when he doesn’t turn up for a week after his first appearance; you know he is busy, know he’s working past sunset, and you have the slack receipts to prove it.

he is as hopeless with his computer as he has always been—you suppose a clandestine encounter with a hostess wouldn’t have changed that—and every time he turns to you, endlessly grateful and funny and reverent, somehow, of the ways in which you help him.

like now.

Satoru Gojo 6:06pm Sweet intern

normally you would have logged off by now, but you have the night off from the club, and what better way to spend your evening than with a glass of wine and engaged in a treacherous IT session with your boss and best single-visit client?

you nibble on your lip as you respond.

You 6:06pm Good evening

Satoru Gojo 6:07pm My evening has been terrible.

You 6:07pm More computer troubles?

Satoru Gojo 6:08pm You must think I’m an idiot.

You 6:09pm Definitely not.

Satoru Gojo 6:09pm Helpless?

You 6:10pm Something like that.

oh god. did you just send that? you need to log off. take a week of PTO. do anything other than continue responding while a little tipsy and still fucking horny for him. to his credit, he takes that comment in stride.

Satoru Gojo 6:11pm I appreciate your honesty.

Satoru Gojo 6:11pm And yes, more computer troubles.

You 6:12pm Do tell.

Satoru Gojo 6:13pm Suguru retaliated

You 6:14pm From your retaliation? It’s becoming a vicious cycle.

Satoru Gojo 6:14pm He logged me out of my Partiful account

you almost spit up wine laughing at him.

You 6:15pm Why is your Partiful account attached to your business email?

Satoru Gojo 6:15pm It’s a business party!

You 6:16pm Go ahead and request the Forgot Password email. It should send to the domain admin (me) and I’ll fix it for you. It’ll be a temp password and then you can reset when you log in again.

it’s an easy fix; so many of his requests are. he is never any less grateful.

Satoru Gojo 6:18pm Thank you thank you!

case in point.

you begin to rise from your bed to refill your glass when another ping! lights up your screen. 

Satoru Gojo 6:20pm Do you live in Tokyo?

you pause. is this…still business related?

You 6:21pm Yes

Satoru Gojo 6:21pm You should come by then.

something skittish pokes from behind your ribs. 

You 6:22pm Come to what?

Satoru Gojo 6:23pm This business party. It’s the company’s 100th anniversary. You can come by the office, meet your poor disciples in person

despite everything that still makes you smile. 

of course, you cannot under any circumstances attend. the moment he sees you in person he’ll know, likely firing you in the middle of the party. and he’ll know, too, that the night you met in person, you knew who he was even though he took great care to equivocate. was that a betrayal on your part? should you have suggested he leave that night when he walked in?

it’s all so hazy now, glossed over with your lust and his, the heat a contagion you haven’t quite baptised yourself of.

his message blinks before you still.

You 6:25pm I’m busy that night, unfortunately

Satoru Gojo 6:25pm I haven’t told you what night it is yet

are you the stupidest young woman on the planet? it is so unfamiliar to feel so out of control, your grip slack where it normally tightens, white-knuckled.

you aren’t entirely ready to concede.

You 6:26pm I just don’t do well with people.

lie.

Satoru Gojo 6:26pm I really would like it if you dropped by. You don’t have to stay for long.

you groan aloud.

Satoru Gojo 6:27pm You’ve helped me so much the last few months

Satoru Gojo 6:28pm It’s next Friday at 7pm. Most people will be there straight from work so business formal is fine. I hope you’ll come

the truth—it descends upon you like wrath, venomous and toothy—is that you have no options. you cannot deny the CEO at the company for which you intern three times. you also surely cannot attend, cannot let him see your face. but the former is a more pressing problem, you suppose. maybe it’s the wine, but you feel your resolve bruising into submission.

maybe this is for the best; you’ve saved enough now that you can stay in this apartment long enough to find another job. and was it really sustainable to continue to work alongside gojo after what happened at the club?

the terrible part of you—you’ll never forgive her—wants to think you would sustain this as long as it was viable. but the rest of you acknowledges that the lifespan has arrived at its bloody, inelegant end.

You 6:30pm Okay

there is something deeply ironic about zipping up a pencil skirt of appropriate length in preparation to go see satoru gojo again. your stockings are sheer and black, catching the light where your foot curves into the lowest heels you managed to find in your closet. no matter how you arrange your gray sweater over your torso you feel sort of crude-looking. you have come to associate this style of clothing so closely with the club that you cannot process your silhouette in the mirror as anything other than whorish.

with a manic sort of giggle you think, oh well. you’re getting fired anyway!

you’ve considered, over the last week, feigning sickness or some personal tragedy, all manner of terrible scenarios which would keep you from the party. but in the first place you suspect, after your couplet of dreadful attempts at rejecting the invitation, that he would know outright you were simply trying to weasel your way out of the obligation. 

and secondly, some naive part of you does want to go. the other coworkers you’ve helped online seemed so excited when they found out you had committed to come: yuuji itadori, a new hire who seems entirely incapable of recalling his passwords, kento nanami, a clearly whip-smart high-level employee who harbors a secret fear of pressing buttons he doesn’t understand, ieri shoko, an altogether efficient young woman who simply cannot remember to clock in and out.

you have put in tangible time of your life to help these people, and in turn have forged something like friendships with them. what you had said to gojo that night is true; other than the club, you don’t encounter people much. there is something embarrassingly exciting to you about solidifying, even if only for ten minutes, these little bonds you find you care a lot about.

the gojo enterprises building is enormous and beautifully designed, you notice, as you walk towards the revolving entrance doors. the scaffolding gleams in sleek gray steel, large windows across swaths of floors cleaned to a pristine shine. the lobby is still full of people, even at this hour, shuffling about in all directions along the marble flooring.

nobody seems to pay you any attention, which soothes your nerves slightly. at least only you and him will know you’re a slut. 

you approach a pretty young woman at the front desk, hair cut recently in an auburn bob that suits her face.

“um…hi,” you begin, resting one hand on the counter. “i’m here for the office party?”

she smiles at you easily, like you aren’t about to be fired and potentially publicly humiliated. “wonderful! it’s on the penultimate floor, so just click the second button from the top.”

you nod and thank her, heartbeat increasingly demanding in the cavity of your ribs. a part of you remembers the way gojo acted that night, how pliable and kind he remained even as he paid you and stumbled out. you’d like to think the man you know—both versions—would spare you the degradation of announcing your misdeeds in front of everyone. it’s not like he isn’t lewdly implicated in such an announcement, either.

but you can’t help the slight tremble in your hands as you press on the button and it chimes, thrusting you upwards.

the last thing you consider before the doors open is that he simply won’t mind, that you’ll laugh about it together. it’s a little startling how much you find you’re hoping that he isn’t upset with you. 

and then the doors slide open.

you are reminded, as you wade through the gaggle of people chatting over champagne, that the only person here who knows what you look like is gojo, and even he might not realize at the outset that you are you. you have no way of recognizing your familiar coworkers, and thus no reasonable way to begin conversation with anyone. you make a beeline for the bar.

you assess the room around you from the far end, nursing your champagne with as much poise as you can manage. this floor has only a few, large desks in an open bullpen, surrounded by even larger board rooms flush with long, dark tables and leather seats. at the far left corner you see two single-person offices with plaques by the doors, surely gojo and geto’s offices, you think.

you cannot see gojo anywhere, though you’re unable to decide whether that’s a relief or a disappointment. you scrutinize the crowd so hard you hardly sense the figure approaching at your side until they’re already there. a deep voice clears its throat.

the man you find when you turn is rather beautiful. hair long and dark around his shoulders, face sharp and fox-like, eyes the sort of keen that might frighten someone who didn’t enjoy observant people so much. you give him a polite smile.

“you’re new,” he says simply.

you shake your head. “only partly.” you hold your hand out to shake and tell him your name. “i’m actually your remote IT intern,” you explain.

the man smiles wider, almost secretive, and assesses you quickly. his eyes rake down your form, across your face, but it isn’t hungry so much as it feels vigilant, void of the voyeuristic heat you’re used to. 

he introduces himself: “suguru geto.”

you grin at him, laughing a little. “it’s great to meet you. i’ve been wondering what you’re like.”

he raises one eyebrow. “that so?”

you realize only now that it’s more difficult than you anticipated to speak with attractive men in a different way than how you talk at the club.

“i just mean that you’ve never needed my help. i only know the technologically-challenged of you.”

he chuckles. “you must know satoru well.”

actually, you go back on your previous thought; you are positively indebted to your time at the club. all your practiced grace and easy charm prevents you from choking on your champagne. just barely. 

“yeah, in fact, i do.”

“are you the one who helps him get back at me?”

“guilty as charged.”

he clicks his tongue in his mouth. “i knew he couldn’t have been doing it on his own.”

you take another sip of your drink. “i really am sorry for my participation,” you assure him, “but when the CEO demands you attach a lewd photo to your launch button i don’t have much of a choice.”

geto’s lips tug up at one corner. “so you saw that photo then?”

heat licks over your nose and you hope the fluorescents cover it. “unfortunately, yes.”

“he’ll be so hurt you said that.”

your eyes widen only slightly, but you know he catches it. you try to imbue your voice with the casual leisure you hope to convey. “don’t tell him.”

he clinks his glass against yours with a small, knowing smile. “you have my word.” and then, over his shoulder as he begins to walk back into the heart of the party, he adds: “it was nice to meet you.”

you wave him off politely, leaning again against the bar.

your attention is pulled quickly towards a broad, blonde man as he approaches the bar, another, much younger man seemingly attached to his hip. 

“no, itadori, you can’t handle your alcohol,” the older man admonishes.

“please? it’s the company party, nanamin,” he pouts.

you smile to yourself. two of your frequent flyers.

“look, you’re an adult,” kento sounds wholly unconvinced of this, even as he says it, “but if you’re asking my permission for some godforsaken reason, then i’ll tell you–”

“wait a second,” yuuji stops. it takes you a second to realize he’s looking at you. “aren’t you our IT intern?”

you sputter in surprise. “i–um…yes?”

yuuji beams. “i knew it! it’s nice to meet you in person.” his handshake is so firm and eager it jostles you a little bit. something lost in his online translation is how frenetic of a thing he is, bouncing about in a constant state of buzzing that endears you to him.

“how did you know it was me?”

“he has a weird sense for those things,” nanami interjects, taking your hand next.

“it’s really nice to meet you both,” you smile.

“thank you so much for all your help. i was just mentioning to gojo how i wouldn’t ever get any work done without you.”

“you said that to gojo?” nanami asks disapprovingly, though yuuji doesn’t even seem to register it.

“i know he wanted to meet you, too. i’ll go get him!” he chirps, bounding off between people beyond your reach, not hearing—or choosing to ignore—your feeble oh no you don’t have to!

you turn back to nanami to find an almost pitying look on his face. you scrunch your nose. “is he that bad in person?”

“he’s…a lot,” he qualifies.

you lean an elbow on the counter of the bar, watch your champagne swirl about in the flute. “it’s sort of strange meeting all of you in person,” you admit.

nanami scans the throng briefly again, quickly muttering into his own drink: “into the eye of the hurricane.”

you have only a moment too little to discern what he means.

“—and he keeps taking my champagne away,” itadori grumbles.

lord help you you recognize gojo’s footsteps as they approach, still as certain as you remember them, and the discs of your spine align in a taut stack, but you do not turn to him.

his laugh is easy, unaware, the low scratch of it only a few feet away now, but you learned that night that he watches when he speaks. he doesn’t see you yet, surely still turned and attentive towards yuuji. “probably because you threw up in his office trash can at the last christmas party.”

“i told you, that wasn’t me.”

“who else could it have possibly—oh.” the footsteps stop, and you feel his eyes fall on you.

when you turn your head, a number of things become obvious at once.

he is as handsome as you remember him. melted a little around the edges, tie loose, suit jacket gone and button-up bunched at the elbows to expose his forearms. his scent makes your thighs clench a little, less perceptible under your reasonable skirt, his hair disrupted by the long day and possibly a glass of champagne. the terror of your present circumstances, and the punch of guilt, too, come fettered to how badly you want him. 

the other revelation—or, you suppose it’s more like a reminder—is that gojo is a great deal like you. you can almost see the way he’s counting the moments in his head, taking stock of the time he can allot himself to think, to decide, knowing that this gnawing silence will at some point grow too monstrous too ignore.

in that time the shock meets his eyes first. they widen and then pinch, flitting across your face and down your body, and you do your best not to preen in the attention. and then his lips part a little, any further salutations stone dead in the back of his mouth, swallowed down. he breathes out once, twice, heavy things you think he wanted to attach to words but couldn’t quite manage to animate.

and you want to say something, want to apologize; you almost want to encourage him to fire you now so you can avoid the anticipation and get home before your feet hurt. 

but then something devious pokes out from behind his teeth, something vital and alive, something like a smirk. his head cocks just so, bearing his large hand out.

“it’s so nice to finally meet you in person,” he says, voice so even you could strike him. 

and this is the final cognizance, thrust towards you between his lithe fingers; he plans to enjoy this. beginning, it seems with a cheeky homage to that night, the shaking of hands you refused him once but cannot deny him now. 

you shake his hand firmly, smiling something only he would identify as divergent from polite. he grazes the inside of your wrist with his pointer finger before your arms drop, posture twitching with the feeling of you despite the mundanity.

you nod your head in acknowledgment. “good to see you, sir.”

his tongue pokes briefly on the inside of his cheek. “i trust nanamin has introduced you around.”

“don’t call me that.” nanami sounds exhausted with him already, weighed down further by what you fear is a flicker of recognition. whatever dynamic flare is crackling between you and gojo, nanami’s eyes narrow, just a moment, like he sees it.

“you let me call you that,” yuuji adds unhelpfully.

and even though you’ve come upon this game in the wake of a monumentally terrible decision—or maybe because of that, you’re unsure one way or the other—you let the other proverbial pleaser drop.

“would you introduce me?” you ask gojo.

both his eyebrows jump, something silent exchanged, but he takes little time to seize the opportunity. he rounds beside you to lay a hand on the small of your back, all but delighted to guide you away, pressing only minutely harder than what would be appropriate. enough to remind you that he can touch you now.

“it was nice to meet you both again,” you offer to nanami and yuuji as satoru shepherds you off, but as soon as the pair looks away gojo is leaning down to your level slightly.

you beat him to the punch. “is this really wise?”

low enough that it’s only for the both of you: “definitely not.” he squeezes your side again quickly. “but i think i’d like to show you off to all your lovely coworkers before i fuck you in my office.”

you suck on the back of your teeth and try your best to glare up at him, but it’s hard when your panties stick so tacky to your mound. he bumps into you on purpose, giving you one, ephemeral moment to feel how hard he is in those expensive slacks. 

“can you even wait that long?”

he drops his hand from your back just to graze the swell of your ass, swipe there once with his thumb. “i already told you, little moon…the waiting is my favorite part.”

with what is clearly no small amount of reserved prudence, gojo stays true to his word. he deposits you about the party, peering at you heavy-lidded as you greet the people you’ve thus far only known over email. every time you steal a glance at him he’s already staring, the weight of his gaze so heavy your knees nearly buckle. you feel more supine than you ever have in your life, soft and watched and wanted.

but surely he must know you’re observant enough to notice he is winding you, slowly, to his office. with each new introduction you are a few feet closer to his door; it’s just shy of torture waiting this way. how long has it been since you’ve been fucked? you choose not to answer that question for yourself, though with each step you feel the gluey swipe of your slick between your legs and you cannot deny that you’re greedy to be filled.

still, you do your best to appear something like normal when you walk through the threshold of his office door, when you hear the metal snick of the lock behind you. 

the panel of glass looking out into the bullpen is so frosted you can hardly see through it, a modern design choice that suits the building, and the rest of the room follows suit; a glass coffee table stacked neatly with books, an enormous desk flush with papers and folders and an intercom system, windows that span the outer wall to boast half of tokyo.

gojo stays a moment by the closed door but gives you no direction, so you simply stand in the middle of the room, hands clasped behind your back and waiting for further instruction. you suppose he likes the look of it, because he makes no move to gesture you anywhere, smoothing a hand over his jaw as he watches you.

“get down on your knees for me, baby,” he says simply.

the air punches from your lungs and you bite down on the inside of your cheek but you find your legs curling under themselves anyway. you can’t look way from his face, that crazed manner of watching you a scorching cloak you don’t want to shed. 

only once you’re on your knees does he approach you, reaching a hand to your face to cup your jaw. with a little tug of your jaw your nose is brushing against the bulge in his pants and you exhale over it. he sighs up at the ceiling as you bring one hand up to cup his twitching cock—god it’s so big.

“you’re not mad at me?” you murmur.

he laughs once, sharp and humorless. “oh i’m fucking furious—ah” he’s cut off by your palm applying more pressure, rubbing him in earnest, and his hips buck into your fingers. his right hand weaves into your hair and grips it like a handle, humming at the way you whine.

“so i have rules of my own now,” he finishes. you still and blink back up at his face. “no touching.” you lower both hands and fasten them behind your back again. 

gojo pulls his belt loose and tugs the zipper of his pants down, aching cock jumping up and out. he’s so red it looks like it hurts, curved up a little and as massive as you thought he was, and with one hand he wraps his long fingers around the base, tugging up once, twice. your lips part as precum pearls at the tip and he grips the back of your head, bumping his slit against your lips to gloss them. when you don’t take more than you’re given he groans low, “good girl.”

and then in one, mean thrust, he’s fucking the entire girth of him into your mouth. he’s so big he bumps halfway down your throat, you gasp and sputter around him, spit pooling already and eyes watering but you’re nothing if not determined, swallowing hard around his tip.

“fuck i knew you’d take it,” he growls.

you try to nod but his length pins your head in place, not to mention each of his hands taking a tight grip on each side of your face to start thrusting into your mouth.

he’s loud, so loud that you have moments of clarity when you worry the party will hear, but he’s so fucking long that mostly you dedicate all your attention to taking him without gagging. with each thrust your nose brushes the neatly trimmed hair at his base and you lave your tongue along the underside of his shaft, feeling a vein there that pulses every time you moan around him.

“that’s it, that’s it,” he lets one hand travel down to your throat and wrap there, not pressing so much as feeling himself as he fucks in and out, “swallow—fuck me—swallow around me again, baby.”

you do and he moans wild and honest, almost surprised at how good it feels, and you’re so desperate for anything that your hips start to rock over your own heels. feeling the wet trail you leave on your shoes is vaguely humiliating but the pressure behind your pulsing clit is almost unbearable and you’re afraid he’ll pull out if you use your fingers, still clung together behind you. gojo looks like a deity with his head tipped forward watching you, brows pinched together and mouth agape, droopy eyes sharpening when he sees the little ruts of your hips.

“you fucking like this don’t you?”

you hum out a pathetic mmhmm around his skin and his eyes almost roll back. forgetting yourself you bring both hands up to claw at the vee of his hips but he catches them immediately, thrusting once with a particular malevolence to tell you to behave.

his thrusts are gaining urgency, losing their rhythm, you know he’s close and you can’t tell if you want him to finish or would prefer it be inside of you. most of all, though, you find you want to please him, so you whine one more time around his cock to hear him mewl something broken and desperate. he does.

“fuckfuckfuck i’m g’na cum, i–”

he can’t even finish his own sentence, hips stuttering and growl caught in the back of his throat as he finishes heavy on your tongue. you swallow it all down like a blessing and the bob of your throat makes him pulse a little more, whispering mainly to himself a breathy: jesus. when you pull your lips away slowly a few webs of spit snap down your chin but you let them glisten there.

gojo can hardly allow you enough time to get to your feet, wrapping his arms under yours to haul you up and over his desk. your hands press over files and polished wood and he bends you into a deep arch with one hand. with no less urgency than before his first orgasm gojo rips your skirt and stockings down to your ankles, groaning low at the damp spot in your panties, on display with your legs spread and hips flared out to him.

he uses one finger to pull your thong to the side and you can feel the filthy slide of your slick as it slips around your folds, down your thighs. you can hear the squelching of his hand on his cock again, jerking himself over the remnants of your spit and his own cum, and you tense your legs waiting for him to breach your tight hole.

he chuckles when he sees the cords of your muscles move.

“oh baby,” he coos, “are you waiting to get fucked?”

your fingers pull in and leave crescent marks on your palms. “please,” you whimper, wiggling your hips, “please fuck me.”

“i dunno,” the fwap of his hand is speeding up seeing you present yourself further for him. “i think seeing you like this is enough to—fuckfuck—make me cum again.”

you drop your forehead to the wood to ground yourself but still your words come out like a sob: “i need you satoru please, please.”

“fuck!” again his hand gets quicker, “beg me again baby. beg me better than that.”

“please satoru i need your cock so bad, i need you to fuck me, i–”

in all honesty you don’t know whether it was you begging that did it or the dissolution of his own resolve, but without warning gojo fits his angry tip at your hole and pushes, hips slapping against your ass as he sheaths himself fully in one go.

you both groan in unison, relief and nirvana and the aching heat with her claws in both of you, and satoru holds your head to his desk as he starts to move.

his thrusts now are not exactly like the way he fucked your mouth; he isn’t testing your limits, isn’t using every ounce of his remaining strength, each grind is calculated, slower than before. it almost feels like he’s pausing after each rut to hear the sound you make and learn. that consideration alone is enough to make you clamp down around him, and a moan claps like thunder from his mouth.

“god it’s like fucking a virgin you’re so fucking tight,” he hisses. 

recovering from the burn of the initial stretch you start to incline your hips back into each thrust, the punches of his tip around your walls even harder as you arch to meet him. your arms reach back to feel for him but he only seizes the opportunity to wind them in one hand and hold them to the curve of your spine. 

“was it worth it fucking embarassing me?” he pants out, beginning to bend at the waist to fuck up into harder, words nearly spat onto the wing of your shoulder. “i’ve spent all—fuck—week thinking about it.”

you mewl and hum into the wood of the desk.

“made me feel like a fucking teenager at the club,” he thrusts harder, the sound of his skin on yours louder in your ears, “made me feel like a fucking creep at my job.”

you…what?

somewhere between your insistent moaning you ask him “what—ah! oh f-fuuck satoru—what do you mean a creep?”

he bands one arm around your torso and shifts upright, holding you to his chest as his hips continue to buck wildly, more erratic, more in it. his lips just barely graze the shell of your ear.

“all this time i’ve wanted to fuck my sweet intern,” your mouth drops open in surprise and pleasure and something else, the mounting feeling of ecstasy scintillating through your body, “thinking you were some fucking hermit,” he spits. your ass is surely red from the snapping of his toned hips but you’re so close and the hot tickle of his breath on your face just might be enough to get you there.

he almost seems to hear what you’re thinking, though, because then his free hand is jumping to your swollen clit, rubbing messy circles over and under the hood. “went to the club hoping to—oh yeah baby, squeeze me like that—get her off my mind just for you to fuck me over again,” he spits, but it isn’t angry, not really, he’s just desperately and pathetically close.

your body catches and locks, toes curling into your heels as you start to come undone, the dull pleasure coming first and then that cutting slice of your high. you shudder and pulse and milk him as it washes over you, about to pull him over the cliffside with you.

“i’m g’na fuck my cum deep in this cunt and you’re gonna have to fucking walk out of here with it dripping out of you.”

and then he’s gone too, rutting quick and thoughtless and then exploding inside of you, groaning deep in your ear and arm tight across your chest. he thrusts lazily through it, plugging you with the ropes of his seed, trying to feel the slosh of it in your channel.

the disentanglement of his body from yours is almost silent save for your shared quiet groaning at the overstimulation, an almost self-conscious kiss pressed to your temple as you redress, and the murmuring buzz of the corporate party still going outside. 

fuck. the party.

satoru takes great care righting your clothing, brushing fingers through your hair. he doesn’t say anything—he doesn’t have to—only smiling sort of boyishly as you do the same for him. you try to replicate the easy and rushed tug on his tie from before, the right pleating of his sleeves halfway up his arms. 

really it’s no use. you look like you’ve been railed, you can feel it, and the scent of sex sticks to gojo, supplanting even his cologne. you shrug at him and he laughs softly, muttering a small c’mon as he ushers you back out.

to your surprise and great delight, the party outside seems…normal. people hardly turn when you exit, engaged in their own conversations, a considerable group of them watching yuuji—absolutely plastered now—trying to get nanami to dance. satoru places his hand again on your back one last time and presses there, but it isn’t hungry now. he means it to be comforting, you think, and it is.

or it would’ve been, if your eyes didn’t immediately land on geto, leaned against the wall and watching you both with that serpentine glare. you nudge gojo with your elbow to get his attention.

when they make eye contact suguru only smirks wider. you turn slow and dangerous to satoru, who stands upright like a statue.

“satoru,” you begin, a calm that should frighten him if he’s smart, “what does he know?”

he shakes his head quickly, lips turned down in a dismissal. “nothing.” 

satoru gojo is frustratingly excellent at a great number of things. lying isn’t one of them.

when you return to your apartment that night, legs sore and aching and happy, you flop immediately onto your bed and pry open your computer, single-minded. it only takes a few moments of navigation through the admin channels to find it, a conversation from two weeks after you first started.

Satoru Gojo 3:11pm Hello

Suguru Geto 3:13pm Oh I’m sorry I don’t have any change

Satoru Gojo 3:14pm I need your help

Suguru Geto 3:15pm I’m not a philanthropist

Satoru Gojo 3:15pm I’ll give you 3 extra days of PTO

Suguru Geto 3:15pm What is it

Satoru Gojo 3:15pm You’re not gonna like it

Suguru Geto 3:16pm When do I ever

Satoru Gojo 3:16pm I need to fuck the IT intern

Suguru Geto logged off 3:16pm

~~~~~~~~~~~

to anyone who read to the end dm me you're entitled to a big messy kiss!!

SATORU, for his part, never resented you for leaving. he missed you almost masochistically: he dreamt of you on purpose, refused outright to forget, dragged your memory behind him, the whole comatose body of it. but soon after your leaving he failed so spectacularly at protecting amanai, and suguru defected not long after. he lost that year in totality to his own failure, to a boundless and indiscriminate wash of waste and desecration. it was everywhere. and so covered in it as he was, it was impossible to discern the particulars; your disappearance was a limb to a much larger, beastly thing. 

for a time he hated himself for losing two of the most important people in his life, though even that he had to abandon for megumi and tsumiki’s sake. by the time he had enough clarity to truly wonder why you left, he had the sense to recognize that returning to 2006 could do him no good. so no, there has been no hatred—in fact, he doesn’t think he could ever hate you—only a quiet wanting, the remainder of the ways he once loved you, and your koi fish in the stream. 

he hasn’t spent much time in this part of tokyo. shoko seems to have crested her temporary calm and dissolved again into a tremor satoru pretends not to see. she scans the neighborhood with fear and appetite in equal measure and he finds himself doing the same. she stops suddenly, remembering something.

“you should take off your blindfold.”

his brows pinch together. “ha?” it doesn’t come out cruel so much as confused.

shoko makes an expectant face: you are at my mercy. satoru continues walking as he slips a finger behind the fabric and pulls it off. “you know, it’s cruel to string me along in the dark like this. just because you know something i don’t doesn’t mean you can prey on me,” he mutters.

shoko scoffs. “you think i’m enjoying this?”

“yeah, actually, i think you are at least a little bit,” he bites.

“gojo, i have scanned medical records, cctv footage, eye witness accounts—god i got teachers at the kyoto school involved for this—”

a small grin slides over satoru’s face. “utahime?”

shoko’s annoyance persists. “i’ve put years into doing this for you and you can’t offer me the courtesy of trusting me? this one time? after i’ve done something so monumental on your behalf? jesus, gojo, you really are—”

something behind satoru’s ribs turns over once, twice, snaps open. there are teeth in his sternum. he feels it all before he sees it, the tug to square his shoulders towards something, the echo of the person he used to be bellowing something inside of him, but he can’t make any of it out. he sees his eyes first, they’re his eyes, looking over your shoulder. they look frightened; he’s never seen his own eyes so afraid before.

there are a few things satoru knows immediately and a few others that are slower on the uptake. that is his child—this point is undeniable, though there isn’t much internalization that can happen right at this moment—and you are his mother. he would know you anywhere, he would know you in the dark, he would know you senseless, and he certainly knows you like this, eyes wide open and ten yards away. your back is turned and satoru also knows, right then, that you cannot sense him yet.

the kid does, though. he looks like a ghost, embraced in your arms, an eerie reconstruction of himself at that age. satoru wonders now if everyone found him as incandescently striking looking as he now finds this child, or whether it’s because it’s his. his child. there are no words or musings in him, only this feeling, the bite of wonderment and love and hurt. the latter, he thinks, wins out on his face.

the child whispers something in your ear and your back straightens. you shake your head a little, and the movement lets satoru see the side of your face for a brief and monumental second. god, you are just as terribly lovely as the day you left. there are more whispers between you and you stand, slowly, and satoru sees that you are now terrified, too. you come all the way up before you turn.

there is only a deep breath’s worth of time spent like this: satoru, frozen on the sidewalk and as helpless as he’s ever been, you, eyes wide, refusing to panic but nonetheless knowing that everything has changed, and your baby, the siphoning of each of you, stepped now in front of your legs. and that’s the worst part, satoru thinks. yes, it may be the most awful thing to have ever happened to him that this child worries satoru may hurt you. shoko and the neighborhood fade, blurred on the periphery of this little massacre shared among the three of you.

satoru moves first. a step towards you, and then another. you don’t make to protect your son, he knows you know that you don’t have to, but the boy clings to your knee behind him, so furious somehow and so petrified, and most of all determined to keep you safe. for one of the first times in his life satoru is glad for his six eyes; he can look at you both at once.

when he arrives at the altar of your feet satoru squats to his son’s level. it occurs to him only then that he must recognize satoru as his father; if he knows at all what his own face looks like then it would be impossible to miss it. 

the belated circumstances arrive in satoru’s head; this child has cursed energy, he has a cursed technique, he’s using it right now. satoru extends a hand towards the boy slowly, pauses each time he flinches, until suddenly his palm just…stops. whatever was left holding him upright leaks out his ears now as satoru sinks all the way to his knees.

your voice, against all odds, is even. “it’s okay, takara.” takara. he slumps a little as he relaxes, but keeps a chubby arm barring your legs from moving forward. you drop to the ground anyway, tears streaming down your face, and they look like they burn.

“say something,” you plead quietly.

satoru wrenches your name from his mouth like a death rattle. “what can i say? what do you want me to say?”

you shake your head, “i don’t know, i—i’m sorry. i can’t—you were never meant to meet him.”

“and what? you were just gonna keep him from me forever?”

you almost look confused as to how he couldn’t understand. “of course i was. he is your son, satoru. if people knew they would take him,” your voice raises only a fraction, “nobody could protect him from the onslaught of people who would use him to hurt you,” your words sound like sobs, they are heartbreaking, but you continue, “it was all i could do to protect you both.”

“and what about you? what about your protection? i could have been there for you and for him—”

“satoru, stop.”

“no, be serious with me. be honest with me. don’t you owe me that?” he’s almost manic now, so angry and so devastated and it bares itself in his voice, “how could you have decided without me?”

satoru wonders if you’d be yelling at him if takara wasn’t between you, but as it is you keep two hands on your volume. “i was practically a child! and so were you! i did what i thought was best. i did it for you. how could you ever be a father? i couldn’t burden you with that responsibility, there was too much on you already!”

satoru shakes with a terrible laughter. “and yet i ended up halfway to parenthood anyway!” he exclaims.

you suck in a breath. “what does that mean?”

where does he even begin? he tries his best to keep himself human but god how could you rob him of this? “i took in two zenin kids around when suguru defected.”

this information only slows you down for a moment before your face twists again. you had heard about suguru’s defection; yaga left you a voicemail, worried he’d seek you out. it’s one of the only times you had to well and fully restrain yourself from reaching out to satoru, who had loved geto voraciously, you think. you cast the thought aside and say again, slower, “i felt like i had no options. no way out but…away. i knew what you’d do if i told you.” 

and this is by far the most devastating thing you’d said to him so far. to acknowledge how deeply he cared for you seared you both, each of you shuddering with the memory. satoru practically whispers, “i can’t believe you took this from me…took him from me.”

the words rush out of your lips faster now. “i never wanted to hurt you, not ever, and that’s why i left. i stand by that choice.” you poke your pointer finger into his chest and he lets you. “he’s gotten to live free from us.” 

satoru grabs your wrist and keeps it close, firm but gentle, still. even feeling so betrayed by a version of you gone by he seeks your touch for comfort: his fingers wrap around to your pulse to feel you living. neither of you think much about how physically familiar you remain to one another. “he has my technique.” 

you both look at takara now, the first time since you began arguing. he looks even smaller up close, satoru thinks. his hands are wrung behind his back and his toes point in but he does not look at all confused. it’s clear to the both of you that he’s understood every word, or at least the meaning, and his eyes well with the knowing but he refuses to loosen. he stands stiff as satoru tilts his head and holds his hand out, releasing your wrist.

“my name is satoru.”

~~~~~~~

YOU cannot, try as you might, reconcile satoru gojo in your living room. takara points out his various toys at your request, and satoru watches him intently, nods when takara glances up at him. shoko had slipped quietly away watching the tableau of the three of you at the park, and against your better judgment you had let satoru through your front door; the two of them are blinding, beaming in each others company despite takara’s trepidation and satoru’s lingering hurt. they kneel together on the floor while you watch from the couch, witness now to a sacred moment, trying not to move.

you’re only mildly alarmed that you still know satoru’s posture enough to know he is trying to consume as much of takara’s presence as he possibly can. he’s hunched the way he is when he eats, ingesting the sight of his son who he’s known less than an hour. and you have so much left to say to him but you are not so cruel as to rip from him this time, too.

takara is sharp, too. in between turning his wooden trains upside down and sideways in this strange, stilted performance, he asks satoru enough questions to make a running catalogue in his mind: where do you live? do you have a job? do you have parents? how long did it take to get here? and satoru’s smile, already fond, nearly takes you to an early grave.

at least, you think to yourself, you can at last put to bed your questioning: you are still in love with satoru. watching them acclimate to each other's company, for the first time in a long time, you remember what it is you gave up for takara’s sake. in taking takara from satoru you forsake him, yes, but you denied yourself these moments, too. and part of you dreads the conversations with gojo that are sure to follow, but the rest opens itself to the warmth of the two of them, splayed unceremoniously across your carpet.

still, you meant what you said before; you don’t regret your decisions. the world of jujutsu asks for takara now, and you find a small comfort in the fact that he knows, to some degree, what he would lose if he took up the post of his lineage. 

takara’s eyes are sleepy as you glance at him now.

“bubba why don’t you say goodnight to satoru and i’ll come help you wash up in a few minutes?” 

takara hesitates. “will i see him again?”

you refuse to look at gojo when he asks. “yes,” you assure him, “i promise you will.” you mean it in a way takara can feel. he drags himself away and down the hall, leaving you alone with…what would you call your relationship now?

satoru takes his time situating himself on the couch next to you. how strange it is to see him again, to be thrust into such devastating conflict, to miss him so strongly at an arm’s length. he’s more stunning than you’ve ever seen him, blindfold still off and unfurled on your coffee table.

“he’s amazing,” he breathes. 

you can’t help the small smile that makes its way onto your face. “yeah, i know.”

satoru chews a moment on his question before he asks it. “did he ever ask about me?”

you deflate a little. “don’t do that.”

“don’t do what? don’t ask? don’t i deserve to know about my son?” his hands gesticulate ahead of him. you suppose the both of you are as angry at the other as you were earlier today, which is to say not very much, you think. mostly he is hurt—he cannot hide this from you—and you, somehow, are wounded, too, and you’re both floundering watching the other lick their blood dry. satoru continues, “don’t i deserve to know whether my son needed his father?”

“needed you? i assure you, satoru, i have been more than enough for him. i’ve given up the rest of my life in service of—”

“—that’s not what i meant—”

“isn’t it?” his eyes flit across your face, he’s looking for something and you’re unsure whether he’ll find it. “aren’t you asking me how often i’ve left a gap big enough for him to miss a man he never met? how often i failed?”

“no! i—no,” gojo reaches for you on instinct but leaves his palms hovering an inch from your forearms. “it’s obvious you’ve done an amazing job with him, especially given the circumstances, but—”

“and what circumstances would those be, exactly?” you ask with no small amount of cruelty. the funny thing is, you know exactly to which realities he is referring—your financial and familial solitude—but still it stings to feel questioned by this heir to a very real monetary fortune, beyond the immense power already bequeathed to him. “i may have wanted for things, gojo, but takara never has.”

bluer than anything human, satoru’s eyes look devastated, taken by gravity down his face. “don’t call me that.”

you purse your lips. “i just…” something vicious and sharp dissipates into the air, the both of you taking a breath, softly. “i’ve worked so hard to be proud of the way i have parented him.” satoru nods you on. “it’s not that i don’t want you in his life, i mean—i don’t think there was ever a moment when i didn’t want that at least a little bit. i can’t tell you how many times i wanted you to be there. but i feel…” you reach for him this time, resting a palm lightly on the back of his hand. “a little afraid, i guess,” you whisper.

satoru lets your admission flower in the silence a moment before he smiles, tiny and wry. “afraid of me?”

“yes,” you breathe. the white gleam of his hair bounces in the lamplight. “because everything is different.” you feel the steeled tension melt a little; you want to be honest with him, more than anything. “it feels a little bit like you’ve spoiled everything.”

satoru nods a little again, sober. “maybe i have.”

and your next confession will sound to satoru like a promise, you know it will, but it finds its way out anyway: “i can’t deny you him now, can i?”

“not without being terrible.”

you laugh something watery and real. “yeah, i guess not.” 

a silence consumes you both again, but it’s no longer hostile, the both of you too exhaustedly malleable  for anything more charged now. 

in the soft sounds of your apartment you are given the space to notice that you have an urge to ask about satoru’s life now. you don’t think you are capable of philosophizing more on your choices and the unyielding consequences tonight, and he’s seen now—at the cost, maybe, of your sanity—what your life has been in your six years away. and you suspect it may hurt you somehow to know more concretely how he’s lived in your absence, but the day has been long. you are tired. you allow yourself this luxury.

“you said you…adopted two kids? is that right?”

“i—yeah,” satoru says, surprised in a gentle sort of way, “they were collateral from a mission that summer.”

you soften even further at the thought of satoru growing into guardianship at the same time you did. something catches in your lungs. “how old are they now?”

satoru smiles at the thought of them. “the little one, megumi—a pain, honestly, and so mean to me—will be ten this year. tsumiki is three years older. i sometimes forget it, though. she acts so much like a little adult,” he laughs softly.

“i’d like to meet them,” you admit.

“i want you to, too,” satoru says, almost too fondly. you preen a little in it anyway.

“do they live on campus with you?”

“no, no. i tried that at the beginning but it felt…i don’t know, inappropriate? i got an apartment as close by as i could, and i stay there as often as i can.”

you hum. “you seem…” you have to look for the right words, “suited to this.”

“are you surprised?” he scoffs, not unkindly.

“i don’t know, i guess so,” you admit with a grin. a little teasing. a time capsule.

“i’m very mature now,” satoru says back.

and because the only secret you could ever keep from satoru was ruined this afternoon, you confess: “the you i have in my head has been from when you were 18. all this time has passed and—” you tilt your head back and forth slightly, “—and you haven’t aged in my mind at all. not until today, all at once.”

satoru’s eyes on you warm your cheeks and you can’t bring yourself to feel embarrassed, not really for anything. “and?”

you narrow your eyes. “and what?”

“am i still as wonderful all grown up?”

the laugh that comes from you is real. “that’s yet to be determined, actually.”

“smart girl,” he says, you hope without thinking. the quiet asserts itself again.

all these years later, you find yourself still intimately familiar with the choices satoru makes in your company. when he moves, and how: all of it has been in his own image, a predictable force. you have never flinched when he has reached for you, in part because you are unafraid, but also because you have always seemed to know when he wanted to move his hands.

but you are rendered entirely still as you realize—your mind is a moment behind you—that satoru is holding you, now. 

his arms are so warm you almost want to tear them from your body. instead—fool and terminally lovesick that you are—you press your forehead to the cradle of his neck and breathe the scent of him in. nothing has been settled tonight, not really, but neither of you move to acknowledge it, lest this sacrosanct handful of seconds be broken. you merely allow the bruising grip of his elbows around your biceps, the claw of your fingers around his sides, to hold.

tomorrow teases you from below the skyline. it’s only beginning to darken to evening but still you are confronted with the passing of time, with the reality of today. 

though you remember, here in his grasp, one of the things you used to love so much about pressing up against a supernova like satoru; all other light fades, and the darkness, too, is gobbled up. time stops for a moment, you think, a withholding of breath as the sun stalls in its burial below the city. you allow yourself to forget temporarily about the fact that you have no idea what to do, of how to continue living on top of the remains of this life you crafted so carefully, and push your nose further into satoru’s shoulder.  he whispers into your hair, so quiet you wonder if it isn’t meant for you: “i missed you.”

~~~~~~~

a/n: i feel SO eternally grateful as the taglist for this series continues to grow. i can't tell you all how much it means to me that you keep reading. i adore you <3 also, if you're interested in having a say on my chapter length in the future, vote in the poll i posted on sunday hehe. as always, let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!

2006

the funny thing about pregnancy, YOU think, is that despite how axis-tilting the fact of it may feel, you have ample time to become accustomed. after the initial devastation—and it was nearly fatal to you—of leaving satoru and the rest behind, the shock of composing this godly thing in your body ebbs. you’d come to the conclusion that it would grow nonetheless, the wingspan of the color and the power and the life of them is ceaseless. this child would be born, you would be their mother. there isn’t much point in surprise, you determine, and so you let that sharp and startled feeling go. it leaves easily.

in the first few months, you begin to wonder whether you were fated for this. your technique being what it is—an ingestion of the earth’s natural cursed energy, a trail of trees and grasses under your feet and hands—has allowed you some familiarity with the act of being a creator. being cast out from your family in pursuit of your cursed technique, too, means you know how to survive somewhat on your own. the tangible particulars of what your life has become are not altogether new. you find a job at a cafe and an apartment close by, work yourself overtime while you only have to care for one body. 

there are moments when the tragedy of being 18 and pregnant and alone dawn on you, but when have you ever fret over the inevitable? and it is so hard, you find, to stay hateful when what you imagine is only a few clumps of cells exudes energy that looks so much like their father’s. 

of course, you miss satoru in a terminal way. that isn’t much of a surprise, either, and you cannot escape him. in the smell of sugar at the cafe, in the plants you grow in your apartment window sills, he is all over them, so potently in your life despite being so factually absent. but you know, too, that his traces remain on you for all the reasons you fell in love with him. he’s like ocean on your hands; dry and invisible but you can still smell the salt. and so much like everything else, you make peace with the constant reminders of the man you love, the father of your child, who is so far away by your own design. the first trimester passes that way, almost mindless, living in the decision you could not help but make, growing used to the growing.

only at your most weak, in the dead of night, do you allow yourself any thought of why this is necessary. an indulgent masochism you did not use to be prone to, you think of how much a target this child would be if the world knew whose it was. techniqueless, your baby would be essentially gone the moment they left you. insurmountably more petrifying, though, was knowing that this baby did have sorcery in them.

you think of this now, watching your ceiling fan spin and spreading your fingers across your stomach. this child, your child, would be tethered to jujutsu. there could be no running, not from this. 

your doctor told you today that your baby is a boy. you sat with your knees tipped inward on the floor, holding the phone to your face, and you’d laughed something waterlogged and conflicted when she said it. there was something terrible about knowing he would look like his father, but there was comfort, too. your love for satoru is unselfish and indiscriminate, even now; you cannot help some unbridled joy that this life you’ve made together will have echoes, like everything else in the scenery of your day-to-day, of him.

when you first ran away to learn jujutsu from your grandmother, she told you stories of her father, who mastered the technique before her. takara: a gift from god. laying in your bed now, thinking still of what your son is doomed to be, you hold your middle tighter, which steadily grows now into the unmissable signs of life. you smile, something soft and small, thinking that this baby is your gift from god, from your satoru. takara. yes, you think. your takara.

~~~~~~~

2007

SATORU has, at 19, felt a great deal. power and fear and hubris and devastation: he has been lost, he has been dead, he has been in love. he takes some level of pride in this disproportionality. it’s what makes him a good guardian to megumi and tsumiki, he thinks, despite how incompetent shoko and yaga seem to believe him to be. 

but nothing has ever felt like this. on the last day of january, stretched in front of a space heater with megumi as snow collects outside the window, satoru’s body straightens, folds, something inside him yawns open. he sits up.

megumi levels him with a stare. “what?”

satoru rubs a hand over his face. it feels like his heart is turning inside of him, like his soul is moving. something deep and fundamental is happening. he’s terrified, for a moment. his silence, unnatural as it is, draws megumi’s attention. he asks again, a little kinder, “what?”

satoru shakes his head. “i don’t know.” he looks at megumi’s little furrowed brow and schools his expression. “i’m fine, sorry. all good.” and for the sake of convincing, though it sounds even more desperate, he says again: “i’m fine.”

megumi only scoffs and turns back to watching the mounting blanket of ice outside, but satoru remains unwell. what the fuck is happening to me? he can only barely stop himself from clutching his chest, from clawing his hands into his body and pulling something out.

he looks around; there are no discernible perturbations in the energy on campus, no physical ailments on or in him. the space heater hums, but the warmth is almost stifling now. 

with a great deal of effort, he lays flat again and tries to calm his breathing. eyes closed, satoru thinks. the sensation beats behind his ribs, kicks from the inside. and as suddenly as it onset, satoru knows: it is familiar. or maybe familial. it feels, almost, like someone from his clan appeared in the area. this is impossible, he knows, but it’s almost unmistakable. he shoots to a standing position and pushes out of the room, disregards megumi’s discontented little “hey!” as he trudges towards shoko’s office.

the door flings open as shoko blows a puff of smoke from her lips. yaga allotted her an office space as soon as they graduated so she could begin healing sorcerers when they returned from missions; she leans both elbows on her desk, exasperated with him already.

“do you know how to knock?”

satoru can’t even rise to that quip, still heaving. “do i have any relatives coming to tokyo?” he asks.

shoko lifts a brow. “satoru why on earth would i know that?”

his eyes are wild as he asks again, breathless: “do i?”

shoko’s exhaustion begins to morph into something different, something like concern, and she puts her cigarette out in the ashtray by her hand. “no, i…no. i mean, i wouldn’t know,” she admits. satoru nods, trying to self soothe, but shoko presses on. “why?”

satoru shakes his head again like he’s trying to free something between his ears. “i don’t know, i’m so fucking freaked out, i was just with megumi and—and all of a sudden i felt….god, i don’t even know.” he looks shoko in the eye now, something fatally serious in his face, “someone related to me is in tokyo. i can feel it, i—i don’t know.”

shoko tilts her head a little to urge him on.

“if a gojo is here, one that i don’t know about, wouldn’t that be…like…bad? terrible?”

at last shoko laughs a little, comforted by the sense that satoru is returning to himself. “i guess. does it matter?”

“yes!” satoru throws his hands up.

“well what do you want from me? you want me to go and scalpel them? be serious.”

satoru scoffs, “no! jesus, i just need help figuring this out.” he’s quiet a moment. “please? help me find out who it is, if it’s anyone?”

shoko tips her head back in her chair and exhales slowly like there’s smoke to release, but her breath comes out clean. satoru is still buzzing, hands trembling at his sides, but the world is clarifying around him, slowly. shoko straightens herself. “if i say yes will you leave my office?”

“will you actually help me if you say yes?”

“yes.”

there’s a sigh shared between them. satoru’s shoulders slump, partially with the weight of this feeling and partially with relief. “okay…okay. thank you.”

he makes his way slowly to where he’d left megumi, dragging his feet a little. this is so uncomfortable. megumi is furious in that tiny way only he is capable of when satoru reenters the room.

“what was that?!”

satoru shrugs. “i don’t know, honestly.” megumi isn’t convinced, and satoru sighs for the thousandth time. “it’s adult stuff.”

megumi doesn’t miss a beat. “you are not an adult.”

“i am too!”

“nuh uh.”

“uh huh!”

megumi imitates him in a voice even squeakier than his real one: “uh huh!”

satoru almost gags on his gasp before smiling a little, despite himself. “you think you can take it, little man?” he asks, only joking halfway. megumi nods. “i thought i felt…i guess…almost like someone i’m related to is closeby. all of a sudden.” megumi remains stone faced. “and i don’t—well, if someone from my clan appeared without me knowing that would be bad, i guess. i think.”

megumi nods and crosses his arms. satoru wonders whether he’s trying to look adult, or if he just is. “aren’t you supposed to be the strongest?”

satoru can’t help but smile and tilt his head. “yes.”

“then what’s the problem? worst case, you fight with them. but you’d win.” satoru nods, pleased even now to be implicitly praised by his greatest critic. “best case, you have a brother. or a sister. or an uncle. i dunno. i like having a sister. why would it be bad?”

satoru can’t answer that. not immediately, anyway. maybe not ever. he decides to grin instead, wry and teasing. “aren’t you, like, three years old? do you even understand what you’re saying?”

megumi clearly doesn’t think very hard before picking up the closest pillow and throwing it at satoru’s head. he cackles, loud and delighted, as he lets it hit him. 

in the end, though, the truth remains; satoru does not know how to let go. not when you left, not when suguru defected, and not now. he is hopeless in the face of his remembering, and there is so much memory in him. mostly he has been as noble as his predispositions allow; he, at your request, has not looked for you, and he has extended the same courtesy to suguru. but this? something wiry and taut has coiled his arteries and snagged his breath, and with no one left to bar him, satoru resolves—engaged in fierce battle with his five-year-old charge—to find whoever tugs at the other end of the line. 

~~~~~~~

YOU cannot remember much from takara’s birth. you remember your own wailing, the sound of it more than the sensation, and you remember realizing you’ve been torn down the middle. you suspect it was the greatest pain you had ever been in, but the memory frays, fuzzy. 

you remember taking him in your arms, though. seeing his eyes squeeze as he screeched just as you had, seeing them open only to heave in air and sob harder, he looked so furious. you wept and laughed at him, the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen, a tiny thing even though he came a week late. 

it was almost too obvious to think of it consciously: how much he looked like satoru, even from the first moment. the beginnings of his silver hair, the blue of his eyes, it was all there, your satoru, your takara, bellowing at you. your earlier sense of satoru’s memory as a salt on your hands expounded, made enormous by the life in your grasp, made new. undeniably yours, undeniably his, less like an ocean and more like the sun, even his anger at taking his first breaths gleamed, some invisible illumination. 

he was born january 31, snow pitching outside. all at once you are terrified, overjoyed, a mother, all of a sudden.

~~~~~~~

a/n: ok i know i said i would wait a week before posting the next part but i was excited :) i hope you enjoyed, and let me know if you want to be added to taglist <3<3

roommate!suguru who notices you like to watch movies on thursday evenings in the living room, curled under a blanket and eyes rapt on the screen. and he’s only being a cordial roommate when he starts to join you. the arm slung across the back of the couch, the thigh bumping your knee, his secret glances at your pert nipples through your tank top, it’s all cordial roommate business. polite, even.

roommate!suguru who jumps a little, startled when you slide open the balcony door while he smokes late one night. you sidle up next to him on the railing, nose tipping into the gray plumes as they unfurl from behind his teeth.

“want one?” he offers you.

you scrunch your nose. “i’ve never smoked before,” you admit, though you don’t say it like a refusal. “i…i like the smell, i just can’t tell if i’ll like the taste.”

and roommate!suguru is speaking before he can think, tilting his head down to yours and telling you to open.

you blink at him and he worries he’s spoiled it but then your lips part, slowly at first, and then all at once.

roommate!suguru who takes a long pull from his cig and slots his lips an inch from yours, blowing the smoke onto your waiting tongue. your shudder makes hip grip the rail white-knuckled like it’ll save him, and you nod a little in approval. you reach up to take the cigarette from his fingers but he holds it over his head.

you huff and furrow your eyebrows which only delights him more. “nah, baby,” he grins, “they’re bad for you.”

roommate!suguru who can only hang his head when you stomp your way back inside, painfully hard and utterly fucked.

i’ve never done drabbles before does this make you wanna throw up or is it cute