#nerd!sukuna

And, because your mind is cruel and likes to press on bruises before the day has even properly started, the second thought that arrives after presentation day is what happens after.

You can go back.

That is the obvious answer. You can go back to what your evenings used to be before a literature class and a cruelly assigned pair project changed the shape of your month. You can go back to drifting from practice to showers to somebody’s room to somebody else’s party. You can go back to your clutter of girls laughing too loudly while getting ready, to boys from rugby or fraternities or wherever else acting like your presence means the night got better by default. You can go back to making yourself available to whatever looked fun enough to deserve your time. You can go back to being easy company and bright noise and the person everybody expects when they think of you.

You can go back to being the girl who always has people around her.

The girl people reach for because she’s pleasant to be seen beside and entertaining to be near.

The girl who has things come easily, who knows how to move through rooms without catching on corners, who never had to think too hard about how she was read because most readings of her have been favorable.

The girl who saw Sukuna one month ago, decided exactly what he was, and walked away feeling clever for it.

That last thought sits badly with you.

You shift onto your back and press the heels of your hands against your eyes for a second, annoyed with yourself for even letting it grow this early. You do not have time to start dissecting the person you were before this project and the person you are becoming after it. You certainly do not have time to start wondering whether those are different people at all or just different angles of the same one. You do not have time, this morning of all mornings, to stand over your own identity with a clipboard and start taking inventory.

So you breathe.

Long, slow, deliberate. The way Sukuna told you to do before speaking if you wanted your voice steady instead of thin. The way you only grudgingly admitted helped.

Then you get up.

The day does not slow down just because you woke up too early and started thinking dangerous thoughts. It keeps going. Shower. Skincare. Hair. Clothes chosen with more care than you’d like to admit because if you’re going to stand in front of a classroom and do well, you also want to look like the kind of person who does well as a matter of course. You pick something that walks the line properly — polished enough to read serious, flattering enough not to feel like a costume. You pack your bag three times to make sure the printout is there, the notes are there even if you won’t need them, the bottle of water is there, the stupid pen you like is there.

You eat, though your stomach complains about it. You go to your morning classes. You answer one question wrong in a seminar because your mind is somewhere else, then recover by answering the next one too well. You listen to none of the gossip around you with any sincerity because all the voices today seem to come from a different depth than the one you’re standing in. People say your name. You answer. You smile. You move through the hours like a person who has done this before, who knows how to carry herself, who is not secretly counting down the time until literature.

By the time the literature class arrives, you feel wrung out and overcharged all at once.

The hallway outside the room is full of the usual before-class traffic. Half-heard complaints. People checking phones. Somebody making a joke too loudly because they’re nervous about their own group going later. You spot Sukuna before he spots you, which almost never happens. He’s leaning against the wall a little away from everyone else, bag on one shoulder, face composed in the exact expression that says he considers the whole species around him mildly disappointing but not worth comment yet.

He notices you looking two seconds later.

Your eyes meet. Nothing dramatic happens. No secret smile, no softening, none of the romantic nonsense your teammates would probably assign to a moment like this if they were watching. He just takes you in once, quick and assessing, and you understand immediately that he can tell you’re wound too tight.

You walk over before you can decide whether you want to.

“I’m fine,” you say.

His gaze drops to your mouth, then up again.

“I didn’t ask.”

“That was implied politeness.”

“I’m capable of more direct insults than implication.”

You glare at him because he deserves it and because the exchange helps you relax. It grounds you in something familiar. The two of you standing in a hallway, needling each other with the easy, low-grade hostility that has become your preferred form of composure.

“I’m not nervous,” you say too low.

“You’re lying. Badly.”

“I’m prepared.”

“That wasn’t a question either.”

You hate how easily he sees through you when your nerves are bad. You hate that he says almost nothing and still manages to make you feel more gathered.

The other group presents first.

That part feels longer than it probably is, though their work is not even bad. You sit there beside Sukuna with your notes in your lap and your ankle bouncing once before you catch it. Their topic is close enough to yours to make you pay attention, but not close enough to distract you properly. You nod when appropriate. You hear the teacher’s questions. You watch the way the room’s attention shifts around whoever is speaking. All of it helps a little.

You are not just waiting for your execution. This is still a class. Still a structure. Still a thing with patterns you recognize.

When they finish, your pulse trips again.

Your group is next.

Sukuna gets up before you do, because of course he does. He moves to the front with the calm economy of somebody walking toward something which fate is already decided by now. He plugs in his laptop. He sets up the slides. He doesn't rush, doesn't make any sign of feeling the room differently from the way he always does, which is to say he seems to belong at the front of it more than most of the people sitting down.

You gather your things and stand.

When you reach the front beside him, he glances sideways at you. One dark pierced brow lifts. Not mockery. Not even warning. More like a silent, stop being ridiculous, you know this. The briefest glare follows it when he catches the exact shape of your tension, and it says what his mouth doesn’t need to.

You’re ready. Stop acting like prey.

It works on you with infuriating efficiency.

You plant your feet. You straighten your shoulders. You take one breath.

Then the presentation begins.

The first few sentences are the hardest.

That part is true of almost everything. It is not the middle that threatens you.

The first opening. The moment when your voice has to cross the room and either settle correctly or leave you chasing it.

You hear yourself start and, for a second, you are too aware of your own mouth. Then the structure Sukuna drilled into you clicks into place. Not the exact words. The order. The anchors. What comes after what. Why one idea has to open the door for the next.

It steadies you.

By the time Sukuna takes over for his part, you are no longer thinking about whether you sound nervous. You are thinking about the material, which is exactly where you need to be.

And he is good. So good it almost annoys you all over again, even now. He never sounds rehearsed in the strained way some smart people do, like he is reciting brilliance by brute force. He sounds like the argument belongs to him and he is merely walking the class through what should already be obvious if anyone else had bothered to think properly. He is clear without being bland. Sharp without showing off too openly. He uses just enough of that dry edge in his voice to make the material feel alive instead of embalmed.

You listen to him and think, not for the first time, that if people actually heard him before deciding what he was, half the room would be obsessed with him and the other half would hate him for making them feel stupid.

When your turn comes again, you step back in without stumbling.

That is the real victory.

Not perfection. Not ease. Continuity. You know where you are in the argument. You know how the points connect. You speak and it feels less like performance now than possession, like you helped build this and therefore you have the right to explain it. You watch the teacher taking notes. You watch two classmates in the second row stop pretending not to care and actually look up. You hear yourself clarifying something someone else in class definitely would have glossed over a month ago, and the thought almost makes you laugh in the middle of it.

When it is over, the questions come.

You were afraid of this part more than the presentation itself, which is annoying in hindsight because it turns out questions are easier when the material actually lives in your head instead of your notes. One classmate asks about a thematic contrast you and Sukuna chose to emphasize. Sukuna answers the first half, then looks at you and you pick up the rest cleanly. Someone else asks whether your interpretation relies too much on biographical context. You explain why it does not, and when Sukuna adds a final note after you, it feels less like being corrected and more like being backed up.

The teacher asks the last question.

It is not easy. It is the kind of question she only bothers asking when she thinks the work deserves a real conversation rather than a polite dismissal. You feel it the second it leaves her mouth. The room goes a little still. Sukuna answers first, naturally, but not alone. You step in once, then again, and for the strangest brief second it feels like the two of you are doing what you have been doing all month in private, only now at the front of a classroom. Handing thoughts back and forth. Refining. Tightening. Trusting the other not to drop the line.

When the discussion ends, your teacher looks at both of you for a moment longer than usual.

Then she says, with an approval she does not hand out cheaply, that the project is one of the strongest she has seen in the class this term.

The relief that goes through you is almost physical.

You sit down afterward with your body still upright like the presentation is somehow continuing in your muscles even though the slides are gone and the room has shifted back toward class mode. Sukuna slides into the seat beside you and says nothing. You do not look at him immediately because you are too busy trying not to grin like a fool.

Later, when the teacher hands back the grades and confirms what you already suspected from her face, you and Sukuna have the highest note.

Of course he looks unimpressed.

That is his baseline. He could be crowned emperor of academia in the middle of the room and probably act as if they finally caught up. But you know him better now. You catch the tiny relaxation in his posture, the way he does not bother pretending not to see the number, the way his hand pauses once over the paper before he sets it down.

Inside, you are cheering.

It is done.

Done.

No deadline looming over your sleep. No more anxiety splitting its attention between volleyball and analysis and whether your citations are in the right order. No more hauling yourself to his dorm with a bag full of notes and the sense that every evening has become part of some inevitable route.

You should feel only relief.

You do feel relief. Enormous relief. Bright enough to make you want to laugh and run and text too many people about how well it went.

But there is something else under it.

Something quieter and more dangerous.

Now what.

That question waits until class starts emptying before it rises fully.

People stand. Chairs drag. Backpacks get slung over shoulders. A few classmates come by to say your presentation was really good in the complimentary tone people use when they did not expect that much from you intellectually and are trying not to sound surprised by it. You smile. You say thanks. You even mean it. But you stay where you are rather than following the stream out.

You are waiting for Sukuna.

That, once again, would have offended the version of you from a month ago.

He takes his time packing up. Not because he is slow. Because he is always exactly as slow as he wants to be. When he finally stands, he glances down at you and says,

“You look smug.”

“I earned smug.”

“You earned competency. Don’t overreach.”

You grin anyway and follow him out.

The afternoon has softened by then into the beginning of evening, that pleasant hour where the air cools just enough to feel like a reward after stale classroom heat. There is a boba place a short walk away, the kind of place that has become so normal to your routine lately that the first time you went there with him already feels both recent and permanently installed in your memory.

You drag him there because you promised. He makes a mild show of reluctance because if he accepted nice things easily he would stop being Sukuna.

Then you buy him the tea.

It is not ceremonial. Just the two of you at the counter, you insisting this counts as compensation for educational labor and emotional damages, him saying your debt cannot be settled in sugar. Still, when he takes the cup from the cashier and glances sideways at you, there is something almost approving in the line of his mouth.

You take your drinks outside and sit on one of the benches near the quad.

The campus is in that in-between mood where people are still moving around but the day’s academic energy has drained off them. A couple students cross the path laughing too loudly. Somebody rides past on a bike. Leaves move faintly in the breeze. The light is gentler now, less punishing, enough gold still hanging around the edges of things to make the whole evening feel a little slower than the rest of the day did.

For the first time in weeks, you are sitting beside Sukuna with nothing left due.

No reading to finish. No section to revise. No notes to rehearse.

No argument still needing to be sharpened. Just the drinks in your hands and the strange emptiness that follows sustained pressure finally letting go.

You sip yours and exhale.

“That’s it,” you say after a minute. “You get your room back.”

He glances at you over his straw.

“Tragic, really.”

“You sound devastated.”

“I’m trying to manage.”

You smile and lean back against the bench.

“You’re free. No more me taking over your bed and insulting your books.”

“You never insulted the books. You insulted my patience.”

“That’s because it was easy.”

He makes a low sound that might be amusement, might not.

You look down at your tea for a second, watching the pearls drift against the cup when you move it. The next question rises before you quite decide to ask it, because now that the project is over the silence around it feels larger than you expected.

“So,” you say lightly, though the lightness is manufactured and you know he can hear it. “Are you happier now that you don’t have to put up with me every day?”

His answer comes without hesitation.

“I’m unaffected. I still have to listen to your offensive analysis in class.”

You actually start to hit his knee out of reflex.

Your hand lifts. Begins the motion.

Then your brain flashes a vivid memory of his fingers at your side, your wrists pinned, the humiliation of laughing until you cried, and the movement stalls halfway through. Your fingers curl uselessly in the air before you pull the hand back to yourself with all the dignity of someone who has just remembered the stove is hot.

Sukuna sees it.

Of course he does.

A quiet laugh escapes him — not loud, not taunting, just genuine enough to sting your pride worse than open mockery would have.

“You’re learning.”

“You are such a terrible person.”

“You remember consequences. That’s growth.”

You glare into your drink because looking at him while he is enjoying himself is too much.

The problem, now that the project is done, is that only one part of the original bargain remains unresolved.

You feel it there between you as tangibly as the bench and the drinks and the evening air.

The research is over. The grade is secured. The whole thing should dissolve neatly into memory and maybe an odd little almost-friendship you would both aggressively deny if cornered.

Except there is still that one stupid composed promise hanging around like a loose thread that did not get cut.

Teaching him how to talk to girls.

Teaching him how to kiss.

A month ago those words came out of you with so much more nerve than you feel now. You said them because you wanted leverage and because you assumed boldness would protect you. You were glib then. Certain in the way you always are when the stakes feel unreal. Now the stakes feel embarrassingly real and all that easy brazenness appears to have gone somewhere without leaving a forwarding address.

Still, pride is a monster. You fed it too long to ignore it now.

So you set your drink down beside you and say, in a voice that you hope sounds more stable than it feels,

“There is still your final lesson.”

He turns his head toward you slowly, already amused.

“I’ve been waiting my entire life for this.”

The sarcasm is dry enough to crack.

You glare.

“You are impossible to educate.”

“That seems unlikely. You’ve spent a month trying.”

You ignore that because if you do not keep moving you will lose your nerve completely. You tell yourself that the first half is easier, and maybe it is.

Talking. Explaining. Building systems around your own habits. That part lives in your usual language.

You know girls like you.

Or rather, you know the kind of girls you actually spend time around — your teammates, your friends, women who are smart and social and too used to men performing at them instead of speaking to them.

So you begin there.

You sit on the bench with your empty hand gesturing more than necessary while your other one keeps your drink anchored, and you explain as if this is a real workshop and not a delay tactic born out of fear.

You tell him that girls are not a single category, first of all, and if he walks into any interaction acting like there is one formula, he deserves to be publicly shamed.

You tell him that listening matters, actual listening, not waiting for a woman to stop talking so he can return to whatever he thinks is important.

You tell him confidence is fine until it curdles into entitlement.

You tell him there is a very specific kind of man who mistakes bluntness for honesty and then wonders why people hate him, and that if he wants women to enjoy him he needs to understand the difference.

He sips his tea and lets you go on.

He is indulgent in the most infuriating way, not interrupting much, just watching you with that slight tilt to his head that means he is either genuinely listening or cataloguing your entire personality for later use against you. Probably both.

Every now and then he asks something dry enough to keep you honest.

“So your method is what. Speak less and smile more?”

“No, you idiot. I’m saying don’t treat them like a competition.”

“They usually feel competitive first.”

“That is because you walk around like socializing is a duel.”

“It often is.”

“Not if you want to kiss people.”

“Debatable.”

You keep going because if you stop he will look at you too directly and the last part of the bargain will loom bigger.

So you explain tone.

You explain that being funny only works if the other person feels safe enough to laugh.

You explain that making a girl feel seen is not the same as making her feel inspected.

You explain that there is a difference between flirting and looming, though with his size that distinction may require active effort.

At one point you hear yourself say

“You’re fine as long as you’re not rude.”

His eyebrows go up.

You wave a hand.

“Okay, not not rude. That’s probably impossible for you. But less openly hostile. If you talk to them the way you talk to me—”

“That sounds like a poor strategy.”

“Not exactly the way you talk to me.” You make a face. “Minus the unbearable parts. Minus acting like you’re above everyone. Minus insulting them for sport. Just… the real parts.”

“The real parts.”

“Yes.” You look at him more directly now because the subject has grown too close to the center of him to stay theoretical. “You’re intelligent. You’re patient when you want to be. You can be unexpectedly charming, which is annoying. And you’re less frightening once people realize you’re not about to bite them.”

He goes quiet.

That quiet is different from his usual ones. Not empty. Not dismissive. More like your words touched something he does not often leave exposed to air. You feel it immediately and nearly wish you had softened the phrasing, except you also know he would have despised that.

After a moment he asks,

“Do you actually believe all that?”

You blink.

“I already answered this question once.”

“And I’m asking again.”

You look down at the cup in your hand, then back at him.

“Yes,” you say. “I do. It's true.”

Because they are, and they have been, true.

Because you are tired of pretending otherwise. Because somewhere in the past weeks he stopped being a puzzle you could summarize from a distance and became a person you know through accumulated evidence — the way he works, the way he listens, the way he goes still when something real is asked of him, the way his care arrives sideways and unsentimental and unmistakable all the same.

You probably do sound a little like a person confessing.

He certainly looks at you like you do.

There it is again — that unbearable grin, not broad, just sharp enough to cut, the expression of someone watching you stand too near a truth and not fully realizing how visible it makes you. You want to wipe it off his face with your palm.

Instead you mutter,

“Don’t start.”

“Start what,” he drawls.

“Looking pleased with yourself.”

“Maybe I’m pleased with your teaching methods, for once.”

You narrow your eyes.

“You don’t deserve me.”

“That’s true.”

You huff out a laugh and shake your head because arguing with him about himself has become too natural.

Then the silence returns. Not hostile. Not awkward exactly.

Heavier now because there is nowhere left to go but forward.

You have spent your last few minutes building a staircase around the problem, and now you are at the top of it with nowhere to step except the obvious.

Teaching him how to kiss.

You are a fraud in one important regard — you have never been the one to lead.

That part hits you all at once when you set your drink down fully and realize there is no more plausible theory to hide behind. You can talk forever. You can explain social cues until the sun goes down.

But the final piece of the bargain was never really about talking, and both of you know it.

You ask, because your pride drags the question out of you before your fear can bury it again,

“Are you ready for the last part?"

His face stays wonderfully serious.

“Absolutely. My entire academic future depends on understanding mouth placement.”

The sarcasm is so dry and pointed you nearly laugh in his face.

“You are such an ass.”

“So I’ve been told.”

This is the point, you realize, where someone else would take over. Any boy you have ever kissed handled the lead automatically.

They closed distance. They decided tempo. They tilted their head and you reacted.

You were wanted, approached, kissed.

You did not have to think about mechanics or courage in the initiating sense.

You just had to decide whether to let it happen and, later, whether to deepen it.

Now you are the one who offered.

Now he is sitting beside you, close enough that you can see the fine shadow of his lashes when he blinks, the glint at his piercing when the light catches, the line of his mouth that always looks a little too knowing when he is amused.

And he is enjoying every second of your struggle.

That offends you enough to become useful.

You set the empty cup down on the bench with more care than necessary because if you move too fast your hands might tell on you. The breeze has picked up just enough to lift a few strands of hair off your cheek. The campus around you feels far away for a moment, all the footsteps and distant conversation turning into background texture while the space between you and him becomes the only thing with edges.

You turn toward him.

Now or never, right?

One hand braces on the bench beside you because you need the support. The other you lift, slow enough to stay in control, and guide to his jaw. The tremor there is faint, but it exists. You pray he does not notice. Then immediately know that if he notices anything at all, he notices that.

His skin is warm. The angle of his jaw under your hand is sharper than you expect and then not, because you know his face well by now from all the times you have studied his expressions when he was not supposed to realize it. Still, touching him like this is different. Intentional in a new direction. Your pulse stumbles hard enough that you think for one humiliating second he must be able to see it in your throat.

His eyes are on you.

Not wandering. Not dropping to your mouth in the obvious way boys usually do when they are trying to perform desire back at you. Just fixed on your face with a levelness so complete it feels predatory. Not because he looks hungry exactly.

Because his attention has always been a kind of hunt.

Total when it chooses something. Difficult to endure if you are not ready.

You feel exposed under it.

You do not pull away.

You could still make a joke. That is the easiest escape. You could say something snarky, laugh, call this enough proof of effort and retreat with your pride mostly intact. The joke rises to your mouth and you bite it back. You are tired of escaping through style. Tired of playing brave only while the danger is theoretical.

So you lean in.

You hear the change in your own breathing. You feel the bench under your palm, solid and cool. His face is near enough now that the rest of the world loses depth. Your nose brushes his. The contact is so slight it almost isn’t one, just the awareness of how close another person can be before a kiss becomes inevitable.

You are right there.

Then he stops you.

Not abruptly or cruelly. His forefinger comes up between you with infuriating gentleness, the pad of it pressing lightly to your lips before they can reach his. It is such an unexpected interruption that you freeze without even thinking to be offended first. Your breath catches against his finger. Your hand remains on his jaw because you forgot to remove it.

You blink at him.

He tilts his head a little, gaze searching yours in a way you cannot read cleanly because whatever is moving through him now is not the usual amusement exactly. There is restraint there. Something held. Something chosen.

“You’re fine,” he says quietly. “You don’t have to follow through on a stupid bet.”

For a second you just stare.

That is not the answer you expected. Not the scene you prepared for. He does not sound relieved. He does not sound triumphant either, like he has tested your nerve and found the edge of it.

He sounds — this is the maddening part — like he is releasing you from something.

Like he believes you are forcing yourself into completion for the sake of pride and he refuses to take the thing if it costs you too much to give it.

The insight lands in your chest with more force than if he had laughed.

Because that means he sees your hesitation.

Not as rejection. Not as disinterest. As effort against yourself.

And he would rather stop you than let you do it just to honor some reckless bargain.

You do not know how he reached that reading.

Maybe from the tremor in your hand. Maybe from the way your breathing changed. Maybe because he is far too observant when it comes to you and you keep forgetting that out loud.

Whatever the reason, the look in his eyes tells you he is serious. He is not mocking you. He is offering you an exit and pretending not to care whether you take it.

You wish, briefly and intensely, that you were brave enough to ask what exactly he thinks he is protecting here.

Protecting you from yourself? Protecting himself from you? Protecting the thing between you from becoming something else under bad terms?

But you are not that brave.

Not right now, sitting on a bench with your hand on his face and his finger on your mouth and your whole body lit up with the fact that he stopped you for a reason he is not fully saying.

Before you can decide whether to answer at all, he taps your forehead with the same hand, a small flick that should be annoying and somehow makes the moment more unbearable because it is so him.

“I’m heading back,” he says.

You lower your hand slowly from his jaw. It feels strange without the contact. Your fingers are warm. Your lips are still aware of the pressure of his fingertip.

He stands.

The movement snaps the world back into scale. Campus sound returns. A laugh somewhere down the path. Wind in the trees. Distant doors opening and closing.

You stay seated for a beat too long because your body has not caught up yet.

Sukuna looks down at you. Something unreadable passes over his face again, so fast you cannot hold it.

“Now you can finally go back to your old life,” he says. “You must miss it.”

The words strike deeper than they should.

Maybe because he says them lightly, almost casually, as if handing you something obvious. As if this is the natural conclusion. Project over, bargain done, disruption complete.

Back you go to the life you had before he got assigned to you in a literature classroom and forced his way into the structure of your days until the space he occupies feels embarrassingly normal.

You open your mouth.

Nothing useful comes out.

Because what exactly are you supposed to say?

That the thought of returning untouched to the girl you were a month ago now feels like wearing a dress that still fits but no longer belongs to you?

That parties and boys and easy laughter still sound good in theory but not enough, not in the same uncomplicated way, not when every version of “before” now contains the knowledge of him?

That you do not know whether what changed in you is temporary or devastating or just finally honest?

He waits a second, maybe for an answer, maybe only because he always knows when you are thinking too hard.

You say the safest thing because you are still yourself enough to do that.

“You sound like you already made up what I want.”

He studies you.

“Have I.”

It is not quite a question. More an invitation you do not know how to step into.

Your throat feels too tight suddenly. You hate that. Hate being left on this side of a sentence, full of all the things you might say and none of the courage to pick the right one.

So you force a crooked little smile and say,

“You’re very annoying when you act perceptive.”

“That implies there are moments when I’m not perceptive.”

“There are moments when I wish you weren’t.”

“That sounds like your problem.”

There. Familiar ground. He hands it back to you at the exact second it becomes too real, and you almost resent him for the mercy.

He steps back from the bench.

You look up at him, the fading light behind one shoulder, the empty boba cup still between you on the bench like evidence of a conversation you are both pretending was less loaded than it felt. He is not smiling. Not softened. Just there, watching you with that same impossible steadiness that keeps undoing your balance in new ways.

You want to ask him not to decide your old life for you.

You want to ask him why he stopped you like that.

You want to ask him whether he really is as indifferent as he keeps pretending.

Instead you say, because it is the only thing you can trust yourself with,

“I’ll see you in class.”

He nods once.

Then he turns and walks away.

You stay on the bench after he leaves, eyes on the path where he disappeared, the evening cooling further around you.

Your drink is gone. Your lips still remember a kiss that never happened. Your pride is not sure whether it has been spared or injured. Your chest feels full of things without names.

Somewhere behind all of that, the old life waits.

Still available.

Still easy to step back into.

And for the first time since this all started, sitting there alone with the last light thinning over campus, you know with awful certainty that even if you wanted to go back unchanged, you couldn’t.

You stay on the bench long after he leaves.

At first you do not mean to. You think you are only going to sit there for another minute, finish the feeling, let the last of the evening settle in your body before you get up and go be a normal person again. But the minute stretches. The campus keeps moving around you in its slow, ordinary way, and you do not move with it. Students pass by in pairs and little groups. Somebody laughs across the path. A bike cuts through the edge of the quad, tires humming softly on pavement. The light keeps thinning, evening sliding toward night without asking whether you are ready to let it.

Your empty cup sits by your thigh on the bench, the plastic cooling fast in the air. You keep one hand around it anyway for a while, just to have something to hold while your thoughts grind and run and double back on themselves until you want to grab them by the throat and make them line up.

Why do you feel like this?

That is the first real question that forms. Not the safe one, not the practical one, not the one about what to do next or whether you should text one of the girls or go back to your room and wash your face and act like this entire stupid month happened to someone else. No. The first real question is the ugliest one.

Why are you like this?

Because this is not you.

Or at least, it does not feel like you. Not the version of you that knows herself best. Not the girl who walks into a room already understanding what people will make of her and what she can make of them in return. You have eyes. You are not blind. Sukuna has been handsome since the first second you saw him sitting at the back of literature class looking like he would rather be dissecting someone than listening to a lecture. He was handsome when he was just the weird guy with tattoos and flowers and tragic poetry tastes. He was handsome when you thought he was just another arrogant asshole who sat in judgment of everyone else and maybe wrote his feelings in some black notebook no one was allowed to see.

You saw that then.

You were not interested then.

You noticed him because he was noticeable. That was all. A thing with a shape. A person you slotted into a category and moved on from because your life was full and easy and made no room for complications you did not choose yourself.

So what the fuck happened?

You stare out at the darkening campus and press the edge of the plastic cup against your knee until it bends a little under your fingers. The answer is not one thing. That would be easier. Easier to dismiss too. If it were just that he is handsome, then fine, you would already understand the problem. You have wanted handsome men before. You have kissed handsome men and laughed at handsome men and let handsome men buy you drinks and tell you things you barely listened to because all you wanted from them was a pleasant night and maybe some validation you did not even really need. That is simple. That is familiar.

This is not simple.

You spent a month with him.

That is the first ugly truth of it. A month is not forever. It is not even that long, really. But it is longer than the kind of concentrated time you usually give anyone who is not already folded into your life. Longer than the kind of person you are with men. You do not sit in rooms with them for hours while they work and think and mutter under their breath. You do not watch them up close while they get annoyed and focused and cruel and unexpectedly funny. You do not learn the small things. The rhythm of their typing. The specific face they make when a source pisses them off. The way they go still when listening. The way their sarcasm sharpens or softens depending on what they think you can bear. The way kindness, when it appears, comes through them warped by pride and habit and something harsher than that.

You got used to him.

That realization lands and sits.

Not just used to his face, his body, his looks. Used to his presence. Used to his room and his desk and the way you never had to knock twice because he would always open the door like he expected you. Used to him turning his head when you came in. Used to the way his attention settled on you when you said something stupid or clever or both. Used to him making the work hard and real and impossible to fake. Used to him refusing to let you stay decorative around him if you wanted his respect, or maybe just his lack of contempt.

You exhale through your nose and hunch forward, elbows on your knees.

He made everything hard.

That thought comes next, bitter and automatic. He made you think. He made you put effort into a project you thought would be boring and annoying and mostly his problem. He made you feel lazy in a way that actually pricked you rather than slipping off like usual. He made you aware of your own half-assed habits. He made you read harder and speak better and work until you stopped making excuses and started actually wanting to understand things. He made you feel stupid more than once.

Then you proved him wrong. Or at least, you proved him not fully right.

That matters too.

Because it was not just him dragging you along. He pushed and you pushed back. He called your research trash and you brought better sources next time. He cut apart weak ideas and you came back with stronger ones. He treated you like you were capable of more than your own laziness wanted to admit, and the worst part is that he was right. You could do more. You could be sharper. You could meet him there. Once you started to, you wanted to keep doing it. Wanted him to look at what you brought and find it usable. Wanted the project to be good because it was yours too now. Wanted, God help you, for him to see that you were not just some spoiled girl playing at competence because she could smile and coast.

You wanted him to be proud of you.

The thought hits so cleanly you sit back a little, like somebody slapped you.

You stare at the path in front of you and feel your whole face go hot even though nobody is looking.

That is humiliating.

More humiliating because it is true.

Not in some childish, gold-star way. Not because you need male approval in general. You know exactly how much of that you can get whenever you want. Men approve of you all the time, for stupid reasons, for surface reasons, for reasons so easy they barely register anymore. You can walk into a room and have men approve of the way you stand, the way you laugh, the fact that you exist in a body they enjoy seeing.

That is not what this is.

You wanted something harder from him. Something narrower and more real. You wanted the look he gets when something meets his standards and he cannot deny it. You wanted his attention in the form that means respect, not just notice. Wanted him to see you trying and not dismiss it.

You rub a hand over your mouth and look away from your own thoughts like that will help.

Do you... have a crush on him?

The question sits there with all the grace of a dropped weight.

You hate how juvenile it sounds. How small. How insufficient for the shape of this. Crush feels like hallway blushing and stupid little notebooks and girls whispering during lunch. Crush feels too flimsy, too neat, too innocent for the mess inside your head right now. But maybe that is what it is. Maybe everything complicated is still, underneath the extra thinking, just that.

Do you want him because he is hard?

Because he is difficult and withholding and emotionally unavailable enough that wanting him feels like wanting a locked door to open only for you. That would be a cliché, wouldn’t it. The pretty girl who always gets easy attention becomes obsessed with the one man who doesn’t bend. It makes you want to bite something. Not because it is impossible, but because it is cheap. Too easy a story. Too flattering and too embarrassing at the same time.

But that is not all of it either.

You are not drawn to him just because he is difficult.

If difficulty were enough, you would have stopped at irritation.

Instead you kept going because beneath the difficulty there is shape. Substance. A real person. Someone who thinks hard and notices too much and says things that rearrange your understanding of yourself before you can defend properly against them. Someone who is not good in any simple, polished way, but who has done specific, undeniable good by you. Someone who worried. Someone who came when you needed him. Someone who let you sleep on him rather than waking you because it would have been easier for his own body. Someone who refuses easy sentiment and still cannot quite keep care from leaking through in gestures too odd to be mistaken for performance.

So maybe it is not that he is unavailable.

Maybe it is that he is available in ways that matter to you more than you expected.

That thought makes your stomach knot.

Because if that is true, this is worse than a crush.

You sit there and think yourself in circles.

Ten minutes. Twenty. Maybe more.

The cup by your side goes cold. The sky deepens. The breeze changes from pleasant to something sharper. At some point you realize you have been frowning so hard your forehead hurts, and the image of yourself from a distance rises in your mind — a girl alone on a bench at night, bent over her own thoughts like a tiny furious philosopher who lost a war against an elective class.

You probably look psycho.

That almost makes you laugh, except the laugh does not get far because the feeling in you is too raw and too jagged to be funny yet.

Laughing would also make you look even more psycho, honestly.

Eventually you stand because if you stay any longer you really will start looking like a campus ghost, and because sitting still has clearly not solved anything. Walking might. Motion usually helps. You sling your bag higher, leave the empty cup in the nearby bin, and start moving with no real plan except to let your body take over where your brain has failed.

You do not want to go to your dorm.

The thought arrives instantly, firm as a wall.

You could. You should, probably. Take off your shoes, wash your face, get into bed, maybe text one of the girls back, maybe scroll until your thoughts blunt themselves. That is the normal answer. But your whole body rejects it. Your dorm feels wrong in prospect. Too far from whatever this is. Too solitary in the unhelpful way. Too final. At this time, for the last month, you would probably be on your way to his room. You would be angling across campus with notes in your bag and irritation already ready on your tongue and the expectation of his face on the other side of the door.

That’s over.

Right?

You take another ten steps before you realize you are not heading anywhere neutral. You are heading toward his dorm.

You stop dead on the path.

“No,” you say out loud to nobody.

A girl walking past glances at you and then away quickly. She walks faster.

You turn in place like you can physically redirect your own stupid instincts by force. Then you start walking the other way. Then slower. Then stop again because every part of you still feels pulled in his direction like your body made a decision and forgot to ask your pride for input.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” you mutter.

You start walking again.

Toward his dorm.

Now that you have caught yourself doing it, the whole thing becomes actively infuriating. You are basically arguing with yourself under your breath as you go, cursing the path, cursing your own legs, cursing him because blaming him is easier than blaming the fact that you do not want to be alone with this anymore.

It becomes, somewhere around the second corner, a kind of momentum.

If you are going to be insane, maybe you should at least be purposeful about it.

That thought arrives hot and stupid and oddly clarifying.

Fine.

Fine.

You are pissed.

You are confused.

He stopped you.

He looked at you like he knew something you had not said out loud.

He handed you back your old life like it was obvious you would want it, like he knew what was best interpreted for you.

Maybe you do not know what the fuck is wrong with your head, but maybe you can make part of it his problem instead of sitting on a bench chewing through yourself alone.

By the time you reach his building, you are walking fast enough to count as a storm.

The stairs are irritating. The hallway is irritating. The fact that your heart is beating this hard is irritating.

Everything in you feels too bright and too unstable, like anger and humiliation and want all got poured into the same container and are now sloshing against the sides.

When you reach his door, you knock harder than necessary.

Not pounding, not enough to wake the building, but enough that the sharp sound cracks down the hall in a way that says whoever opens better be ready to deal with something.

There is a beat.

Then the lock turns.

And of course he opens the door like that.

Shirtless.

Sweatpants low on his hips, damp hair falling over his forehead because he clearly just showered, skin still carrying that just-clean heat that makes everything about him look a little less edged and a little more devastating.

For one horrible second you only stare.

There are water-dark strands near his temples, a drop still caught at the base of his throat, tattoos stark against clean skin, shoulders broad and bare and completely inappropriate for the state your mind is already in.

He smells like his soap.

Citrus, clean and sharp.

And under it, you think, winter pine. Cologne, probably. Something cool and dry and expensive enough not to scream about itself.

This should not be happening.

It is, obviously, because the universe has decided your self-control is funny as fuck to mess with.

His gaze flicks over your face once, then down and back up, catching the force of your entrance, the expression you are probably wearing, the fact that you showed up here at night after the project is over looking like you are about to accuse him of a crime.

He does not look alarmed.

Curious, yes. Amused, faintly. Like he is seeing a weather pattern he has never personally witnessed but has always suspected existed somewhere.

You pretend you did not stare.

You stomp past him before he can fully block the doorway because if you pause now you might actually lose your nerve. He lets you in, which is the only sensible choice left to him once he recognizes that you are on some sort of mission and will not be explained to in the hall like a civilized person.

His room is the same.

That is the first thing you notice once you are inside and the first shock of his half-dressed existence stops knocking holes in your focus. Same desk. Same bed. Same stack of books. Same faint scent of paper and laundry and him. But there is one thing different, one thing you have never seen before because until now he never let your evenings contain anything but the project.

His TV is on.

Not loud. Just on. Some movie or show washed over the screen in low light, meaningless noise behind the room. The sight of it is weirdly intimate.

This is not project Sukuna. Not student Sukuna. Not the man at his desk while you sprawl across his bed and pretend not to watch him work.

This is whatever he is when he is alone and not performing even his version of indifference because there is no one there to witness it.

He shuts the door behind you.

Then says, with no heat at all, only interest,

“What exactly are you doing?”

You turn on him.

Your finger comes up before your words do, accusatory and rigid, and if you were less busy being furious and strange you might realize how absurd you look.

You probably do look absurd.

A girl in the middle of his room, eyes bright with something too hot to name, pointing at his bare chest like she has come to issue an arrest warrant.

You are not really sure why you are mad.

That is the worst part. Or top ten worst parts of this whole mess.

You feel mad. That is true, okay, that far you know.

Mad at him, mad at yourself, mad at the whole impossible situation. But the reasons keep slipping and reforming before you can pin one down cleanly. So the first thing that leaves your mouth is not elegant.

“Why did you bail on the deal?”

He blinks once.

Not dramatically. Just enough to register that this is, in fact, where you’ve started.

A brief surprise lifts both brows, then settles into something sharper.

“Excuse me.”

“You're excused.” You grit through your teeth and keep the finger pointed because lowering it now would feel like surrender. “Why did you pull back? Why didn’t you let me follow through?”

His mouth goes flat in that infuriating way that means he thinks you are either being ridiculous or fascinating, often both.

He says, very evenly,

“Because I assumed you offered it in a desperate, pathetic attempt to save your grade. You made that fairly clear.”

That strikes because it is not untrue. It is also not the whole truth, not anymore, and maybe not even then in the way he thinks.

But you are not here for nuance.

Not right now.

“That’s bullshit,” you snap.

His expression shifts almost imperceptibly at the speed of your answer.

You step closer before you consciously decide to. The finger you are using as a weapon taps once against his chest.

Bare skin. Warm. Too warm. That does nothing useful for your concentration. You do it again anyway, because now the contact is part of the argument and you do not know how to stop.

“Don’t tell me that and expect me to swallow it.”

His eyes drop briefly to where you are poking him. Then rise back to your face.

“I can tell you many things,” he says. “What you do with them is your failing.”

You want to shake him.

Instead you say,

“Do you really think I offered it out of sheer panic?”

“Yes.”

The answer comes too quickly. Too simply. As if the matter is obvious and closed.

You stare at him, incredulous.

Again your finger presses into his chest. Less a poke now than a hard punctuation mark.

“And you think you were doing me some huge favor by canceling it, huh.”

His upper lip twitches.

There it is.

Irritation. Real irritation, because your behavior tonight is not making much sense and he knows it. You know it too.

But now that you have started, sense feels optional.

You are too full of the thing that pushed you here, whatever mix of humiliated longing and wounded pride and frantic clarity it really is.

He looks down at you with that sneer that becomes dangerous only when a grin starts living behind it.

“Well,” he says, and the smile that follows is a little cruel in exactly the way he knows how to be, “you look almost upset you didn’t get to kiss me.”

The words catch you cleanly.

For one second your whole face rearranges before you can stop it.

Shock, offense, recognition, rage that he found the line so quickly and stepped on it with both feet.

He sees all of it.

That is why he said it.

Because he wanted this exact reaction. Because if he is going to let you storm into his room and start accusing him of pity, he is going to make you bleed for it first.

You frown harder, the expression probably bordering on childish now from the force of your own denial.

“That is absurd.”

“Is it.”

“Yes!”

“Then why are you here?”

That is too good a question.

You hate that.

You should say something cutting. Something clever. Instead what comes out is more honest than intended and somehow more insane because of it.

“Maybe I am upset,” you say. The words surprise even you with how quickly they arrive. “Maybe I am upset because now it looks like I used your big stupid brain for a grade and didn’t give back enough. So much for a so called perceptive dumbfuck.”

Silence.

A really remarkable silence, because the whole argument is so ridiculous when laid bare like that. You marched into his room after the project ended to accuse him of making you look bad because he would not let you teach him how to kiss. If someone described this to you happening to another girl, you would laugh until you choked.

He exhales.

The sound is almost the same one he made that first day in the hallway when you caged him in with your hands on the wall and a terrible bargain in your mouth. Long-suffering. Mildly offended by the existence of other people. Deeply aware that he is now trapped in a conversation only one of you fully understands.

“Are you really angry,” he asks, slower now, like he is feeling his way through the edges of your madness, “because you think you look like you took advantage of me over something only the two of us know about.”

You really wish he were wearing a shirt.

Because then maybe you could grab him by the collar and shake all this into a cleaner form.

But no. Of course not.

He had to stand here half-dressed and make every line of his body visible while speaking to you like this, which only makes the whole thing more impossible.

“No,” you say automatically.

Then you hear how weak the denial sounds.

You are breathing too hard. Standing too close. Pointing at his chest like you are trying to mark him with blame that you have not organized into language properly.

He watches you catch your own lie.

Something in his face hardens.

Then the air shifts.

You have spent the month learning the difference between Sukuna still and Sukuna deciding.

It is subtle sometimes, but never once you know where to look.

A change in the shoulders. A narrowing in the eyes. The way his whole focus clicks into one line.

You are not the one crowding him anymore.

He leans down into your space, and because he is so much taller than you it barely costs him anything.

One moment you are jabbing your finger at his chest.

The next the world has narrowed around the fact of him above you, near enough that the clean scent of soap and skin and cologne folds over your thoughts.

“Who the fuck,” he asks, almost a snarl now, “do you think you are to call me a dumbfuck.”

Your whole body goes still.

Not from fear exactly. From the force of the moment. From the way anger rearranges him when it is not theoretical.

“And what,” he continues, lower, “do you think you know about perception that I haven’t already seen coming from you?”

There.

There is the opening.

The cue.

Maybe it is madness that lets you read it.

Maybe just desperation finally clarifying instead of blurring. But suddenly you know exactly what to do, as if the whole argument had only been you kicking at the right wall until the hidden door showed itself.

You raise both hands.

They go to his face.

Not tentative this time. Not trembling in the same way, though your pulse is so hard now you can feel it everywhere.

You cup his jaw in both palms, forcing him to either pull back or accept the contact, and because you are too far gone to be subtle anymore, because all the restraint burned off somewhere between the bench and his doorway, you hold his gaze and say,

“This, dumbass.”

Then you kiss him.

Not carefully.

Not like a lesson.

Not like a workshop fulfilling a bargain for pride.

You kiss him like the answer finally got dragged out of you by force and now there is no point pretending you do not know it. You kiss him because he did not clock this. Did not understand that what stopped you on the bench was not reluctance to kiss him but the sheer, humiliating size of wanting to. He thought he was sparing you. He thought you were trapped by your own promise. He did not notice that the promise had stopped mattering and the wanting had taken over.

You push your mouth to his and for the briefest fraction of a second he is genuinely shocked.

You feel it.

The stillness. The pause. The split second where the snarl in his mouth has nowhere to go because you reached him before his next word did.

Then his hands close around your waist.

Fast.

So fast your breath catches with the force of it. He drags you flush to him like the space between you has become offensive, and the kiss changes under that first shocked beat into something else entirely. Something hungry. Immediate.

A month’s worth of tension and irritation and swallowed things coming out through his mouth all at once.

His mouth opens against yours.

Your hands slide from his jaw to the back of his neck because there is nowhere else sensible for them to go once his body hauls yours in this close. His skin is still warm from the shower. Damp hair brushes your fingers. His tongue meets yours with a kind of eagerness that feels almost violent after the restraint on the bench. You do not have time to feel triumphant about being right. You barely have time to feel anything coherent at all before the whole world narrows into heat and breath and the rough, immediate fact of him kissing you back like he has been denied something and is done — finally done — being polite about it.

You make a sound into his mouth.

You do not even know what kind. Something startled and pleased and wrecked.

His hands tighten at your waist. One spreads across your back. The other stays firm enough at your side that you are half certain he could lift you outright if he wanted. The kiss goes deeper. Messier. Your earlier anger does not disappear; it turns. Becomes part of the force of it. You kiss him like you are proving a point. He kisses you like he is done listening and wants to taste the argument instead.

The edge of the bed hits the back of your legs before you fully register moving.

Then you are tipping.

He follows immediately, one arm braced so his whole weight does not crush you as the mattress gives under both of you. The transition is so fast it feels like the room simply reoriented around the fact that kissing standing up was no longer enough.

Your spine meets the bed. His body cages yours. One hand near your head, one still at your waist, mouth still on yours with no sign of relenting.

You have to break the kiss first because breathing becomes urgent.

The second you do, dragging your mouth away with a breathless sound, he is there over you, face close and altered in a way you have never seen on him before.

Ruined.

There is no prettier word for it and no need for one. His mouth is swollen from kissing. His hair is a little worse for your hands in it. His eyes are dark and direct and no longer pretending to be less affected than they are. He looks hungry in the most literal, terrible way, like he could bend down and keep kissing you until the room stopped existing around it.

He is so handsome it hits you like something chemical.

You stare up at him and a little euphoric giggle escapes before you can stop it, ridiculous and honest and totally beyond your control.

His mouth twitches at the sound, disbelieving and half wrecked.

Then you catch the back of his neck again and pull him back down.

This time the kiss is less surprised and more stubborn. Meaner too, in the mutual way both of you seem to like without discussing. Months of wanting live badly in bodies like yours, apparently. Not soft first trial and brushing of lips. Not careful. It comes out like a challenge and relief and appetite all at once. Your mouth finds his. His teeth graze your lower lip hard enough to make your pulse jump. You answer by kissing him more deeply, more insistently, one hand sliding from the back of his neck into his hair because you need something to hold.

At some point he shifts and you shift with him and the geometry changes.

One second you are on your back. Then you are turning, pushing, climbing, and he is letting you because he is just as busy kissing you as you are kissing him.

The mattress dips and settles again and suddenly his back is on the bed and you are over him, one knee braced beside his hip, your hair falling around both your faces while your mouths keep finding each other like you have lost the ability to do anything else.

A month’s worth of kissing gets done in minutes.

Or it feels that way. Time goes strange. You only know it in breath and pressure. The shape of his chest under your palm. The way his hands move over your waist and back as if checking that you are real and still there. The slight scrape of stubble and his lip piercings against your mouth and chin. The hot, soft, infuriating pleasure of being wanted back without distance, without theory, without him stopping you right at the brink and handing you an excuse to hide behind.

Sometimes you break apart only far enough to breathe.

Each time the space lasts barely a second before one of you closes it again.

Your foreheads bump once because you are both moving too fast. You laugh against his mouth for half a breath. He bites lightly at your lip for it in retaliation and you make a scandalized sound that melts the second his mouth takes yours again.

Once, when you pull back to catch air, you stare down at him and the outrage comes back in the sweetest stupidest form possible.

“You are so dumb,” you whisper, voice wrecked. “For someone so smart.”

That earns you a hand at the back of your neck and a sharper kiss that feels like an answer.

Another time the insult is softer for your standards.

“Absolute fucking idiot.”

He answers by dragging his mouth down the line of your jaw and biting at your neck, not enough to really hurt, enough to make you gasp and clutch at his shoulders. You hate how delighted that makes you. You hate how much more you want immediately after.

You kiss him again to punish him for it and because punishment has fully lost meaning.

There is nothing graceful about either of you.

That might be the best part.

This is not cinematic. It is not elegant at all. It is two stubborn people making up for too much delayed wanting at once, all awkward angles and eager mouths and the occasional collision of nose or teeth because you are both moving with more need than polish. And yet it works. Better than works. The awkwardness makes it more real. The hunger gives it shape. Every time your mouth returns to his, something in you settles and ignites at the same time, a terrible contradiction your body understands without needing to explain.

His hands are everywhere they can be without breaking the spell of the thing.

At your waist again. Splaying over your side. One broad palm between your shoulder blades when he hauls you down closer and closer until there is almost no room left between your bodies at all. The contact is dizzying. Not because it goes farther than that — because right now it does not need to. The sheer fact of being held by him while he kisses you like this is enough to make your nerves feel too bright for your own skin.

You realize, somewhere in the middle of all this, that he is just as gone as you are.

That should not shock you by now, given the way he kissed you back, but it does anyway in the little details. The way his breathing goes rough when you tug lightly at his hair. The way he follows your mouth the instant you start to pull away. The lack of any cool, superior composure left in him. No distance. No dry comment waiting just behind the next inhale. Just him, openly affected, lying on his own bed with you over him and his eyes blown dark with it.

You break apart again for air and stay hovering close enough that the next breath mixes.

His lips are swollen. Yours probably are too. His chest rises harder than usual beneath your hand.

You grin at him because you cannot help it, because the sight of him like this fills you with something too bright to keep contained.

He looks up at you with the exact expression of a man deciding whether to haul you back down or flip you over or both. The look of it makes your body feel hot all over.

“You really didn’t know,” you murmur, still half disbelieving. “You didn’t notice.”

One of his hands slides up your back, slow now, grounding rather than urgent.

“You hide behind too much noise.”

“That’s very rich coming from you.”

“It’s still true.”

You almost argue.

Then his mouth touches yours again, slower for one brief moment, and the argument dissolves like it never existed. This kiss is no less intense, just less frantic now. More deliberate. It makes the room feel smaller. His hand cups the back of your neck. Your fingers spread over his jaw. You taste the lingering sweetness of boba and the clean edge of his cologne and something else entirely his own beneath it all. He tastes good.

When you pull back this time, it is not because one of you lunged for more air too late. It is because you are both finally breathing hard enough to hear it, and because even your anger cannot keep pace with your body forever.

You sit back a little on his hips, hair a mess, mouth still tingling, and he lets his head fall against the mattress for one second while his hands stay on you as if they do not trust the distance.

The TV still glows across the room, absurdly ignored. Some actor is probably speaking somewhere in that light. Neither of you has any idea what about.

Your chest lifts and falls too fast.

He looks up at you.

You look down at him.

The laughter comes again, smaller this time, softer and stranger because it is wrapped in relief now. Not at the kiss itself. At the fact that it happened and was real and terrible and wanted by both of you.

At the fact that you were not insane after all.

Or rather, you were insane, but for the right reasons.

You lean down and kiss him once more, not as hard this time.

He answers immediately anyway, because apparently that is no longer a question between you.

When you finally make yourselves stop, it is only because stopping has become necessary to think.

That part arrives slowly and unwillingly. You shift off him enough to sit beside him on the bed instead of over him, though one of his hands stays at your lower back for an extra second before leaving, like both of you are still adjusting to the idea of air. Your legs feel weak in a way you refuse to examine. Your neck already aches slightly where he bit you. His hair is wrecked. Yours must be worse. Your mouth feels thoroughly kissed.

You rub your thumb once over your lower lip and look at him sideways.

He is sitting now too, braced back on one hand, breathing steadier than before but not by much.

He catches you looking and says, voice rougher than usual,

“You look pleased with yourself.”

“I am pleased with myself.” You turn more fully toward him. “I was right.”

“About?”

“You being oblivious.”

That gets you a look.

“Dangerous word choice.”

“You deserved it.”

“You stormed into my room to accuse me of pitying you and then attacked me with a finger.”

“Because you were being ridiculous.”

“You were being incoherent.”

“That’s your fault.”

He actually laughs then, once, short and disbelieving.

You stare because the sound is rare enough that it still feels like stolen property.

He notices that too.

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“You just laughed.”

“That was not laughter.”

“That was absolutely laughter.”

“That was disappointment.”

You roll your eyes and lean your shoulder against his. The contact happens before you think about it and then stays because neither of you moves away.

The whole room feels changed now, as if everything in it understands a boundary got crossed and does not know how to go back to its old arrangement.

Bed. Desk. TV. Half-damp towel near the bathroom door. All the ordinary stuff of his life, now holding this too.

You think, belatedly, that you did exactly what he said you would not do.

You did not go back to your old life.

You came here instead.

You made it his problem.

And now here you are, both of you kissed stupid and sitting in the aftermath like the question of what comes next can wait another minute.

You do not know how long you stay like that before speaking again.

Long enough for your breathing to fully settle. Long enough for the anger to drain and leave only the raw little place beneath it.

Finally you ask, quieter now,

“Why did you stop me on the bench.”

He does not answer at once.

You look at him.

He is staring ahead at the dim TV, face altered back toward its usual lines but not fully. There is still too much loosened in him to hide behind the old expression completely. When he does answer, his voice has lost the bite it had earlier.

“Because you looked like you were forcing yourself.”

You swallow the knot formed in your throat.

“I really wasn’t.”

“I know that now.”

You let that sit. Then ask the next thing before you can decide against it.

“Did you really think I missed my old life that much?”

At that he turns toward you again, and the look in his eyes is different from anything earlier. Still sharp. Still him. But with less certainty than he usually wears.

“I thought,” he says slowly, “it would be easier for you to go back to it than admit you might want something else.”

The honesty of that hits you in the chest.

Because he is not just talking about parties.

You know he isn’t.

You also know, with a kind of cold clarity, that he has probably been expecting you to leave from the second the project ended.

Expecting you to drift back toward the easy life that fit you so naturally before he got in the way of it.

Maybe even bracing for it.

And if that is true, then some small awful part of him had already decided to let you.

That makes your chest ache unexpectedly.

So you do the only thing you can think of.

You lean back in, catch his jaw again, and kiss him once. Shorter. Cleaner. No argument in it this time. Just answer.

When you pull away, you say,

“I came here, didn’t I?”

He looks at you for a long second.

Then one of his hands lifts and cups the side of your neck, thumb resting just under your jaw, not quite pulling you back in, just holding there. His expression gives you nothing easy. No promise. No soft declaration.

Just the weight of being taken seriously.

“That you did,” he says, and both of you know that that's enough for now.

Every now and then I fall Every now and then I lose control In your eyes I see your ghost surrounding me And I've a little bit of thought for you

'Cause every now and then I fall a bit behind Every time I stare into your eyes 'Cause every now and then I fall a bit behind Every time I stare into your eyes

With your thrills, I find It's not hard to be left behind So I'll run, and you'll hide We know better than to stay outside

You're cold and you're awake You said I should never have stayed But there's no better place for me

'Cause every now and then I fall a bit behind Every time I stare into your eyes 'Cause every now and then I fall a bit behind Every time I stare into your eyes

Your life has always had that same quality to it — comfortable, clean, buffered from anything truly ugly. Even the inconveniences arrive softened around the edges. A delayed flight becomes an amusing story. A bad grade becomes a brief annoyance. A twisted ankle becomes a reason to be fussed over.

You have never had to become hard to survive. You get to be soft because the world has, so far, made room for it.

It suits your face, your body, your last name, your schedule, your easy confidence, the way people make room for you without making it obvious they are doing it.

It suits the clean sweep of your life so far, all the doors already half-open before you even put your hand on the knob.

You have a nice scholarship for volleyball because of course you do, because you are good and disciplined and photogenic enough for the athletic department to love putting you on brochures, but the scholarship is more a pretty line to add to your life than a necessity.

If you lost it, your parents would pay. If tuition doubled, your parents would pay. If you changed majors three times and decided to spend a semester abroad only because you liked the city in the pictures, your parents would pay and ask whether you wanted the nicer apartment.

You know this. You are not ashamed of it. You do not pretend you fought for your place in the world with bleeding hands. Life has been generous to you, and you have learned to move through that generosity like you were born to it.

You are pretty. Not in a way you have to convince yourself of while staring too long at mirrors, but in the way other people decide for you before you even open your mouth. It smooths paths. It buys patience. It gets smiles from professors and free drinks from boys and longer looks from girls.

Add the volleyball scholarship on top of that, the expensive shampoo, the nice posture, the family money nobody sees unless they know where to look, and your life fits together in a neat, enviable little arrangement.

You train. You go to class. You flirt when you feel like it. You complain when things annoy you. You call your mother and half-listen while she talks about charity dinners and somebody’s second divorce. You study exactly enough to keep the grades that make everyone think you are more disciplined than you really are.

It is a good life.

Easy, even.

So when literature class assigns a joint project worth a disgusting amount of your final grade, your first reaction is not panic.

Your first reaction is annoyance.

You are sitting near the window in that stupid room with the bad air conditioning, one leg bouncing under the desk while Professor Hayashi reads out pairs with the tone of a woman who enjoys academic suffering more than is strictly professional. Around you there is the usual scrape of chairs, the rustle of notebooks, the quiet groans from students who already know they are going to get trapped doing all the labor while someone else contributes a title page and a smile.

You intend to be the latter, but not even a title page to add, just the smile.

You are only half listening until you hear your name.

Then his.

You look back at the same time half the room does.

Sukuna is exactly where he always is, sprawled in the back like he owns the worst seat on purpose. He is impossible not to notice and somehow still manages to make people avoid noticing him directly. He is enormous, unfairly so, shoulders wide enough to make the chair look undersized, body built like he should be carrying kegs or throwing people through walls instead of sitting in a literature elective with a pencil between his fingers. The tattoos climb from under his collar up the side of his neck and face in a way that adorn his jaw and cheekbone in dark deliberate lines that end on the drawing of a pair of eyes right under his own eyes, which make him look even less approachable than he already is. He has piercings on his eyebrows, lower lips and bridge of his nose. His eyes have that strange reddish cast that keeps catching the light in a way you never quite get used to.

He always looks vaguely irritated to be alive and specifically irritated that other people insist on being alive around him.

You have noticed him all semester, obviously.

Everyone has.

He writes during lectures when he is supposed to be listening, except then he opens his mouth during discussion and casually says something so pointed and specific that it becomes clear he heard every word anyway.

Once he spent ten minutes arguing with Professor Hayashi about floral symbolism in a poem none of the rest of you had even finished reading properly, and he did it with that low, clipped voice of his, like he was insulting the text and worshiping it at the same time. You were only half-paying attention until you hear him mention camellias, then spider lilies, then funerary symbolism in a poem you barely skimmed.

He says it like he is annoyed to have to explain something obvious. Your professor, who scares half the class, actually smiles.

Another day he called a classmate’s interpretation “the kind of insight produced by a lobotomized squirrel,” and when the room went silent he did not even look embarrassed, only bored.

He is, in your private opinion, a big weird nerd.

A very mean weirdo.

A weirdo who writes tragic poetry about loneliness and humanity and otherness in the margins of his notes like he is a nineteenth-century exile trapped in a public university. A weirdo  who might genuinely love flowers because he speaks about them with more patience than he uses for actual human beings. A weirdo who is also almost two meters tall, built like violence, and handsome enough to make the whole situation profoundly irritating.

You turn in your seat just enough to catch his face.

He is already looking at you.

There is nothing friendly in it. No curiosity either. Just a flat, assessing stare that makes it feel, for one brief second, like he is trying to figure out whether this is an inconvenience or a punishment.

Then he looks away.

That annoys you a bit too much.

After class, while everyone starts shuffling toward the door and complaining about schedules, you take your time putting your things away. You are already planning how little effort you can get away with.

Literature is not hard, exactly. You are not stupid. You can write when you have to. But your week is full, you have practice, lifting, game footage, two other classes with actual deadlines, and a dinner your mother wants you to attend because some family friend’s son is “promising” and apparently that should matter to you.

And besides, you have eyes.

Sukuna is the sort of person who has probably already thought about this project more deeply in the ten seconds after the assignment than you ever intend to.

You catch up to him in the hallway.

He walks with the same stripped-down efficiency he does everything else with, like he has no wasted movement in him. You have to take three quicker steps to match one of his longer ones, and that alone makes you mildly resentful. He glances down when your shadow falls beside his.

“Hi,” you say, in your pleasant voice, the one that gets used when you are trying to make someone else easier to deal with. “Looks like we’re partners.”

His gaze drops over you once, not in any admiring way, just taking stock.

“So it seems.”

Well. Charming.

You keep smiling anyway.

“We should probably talk about how we want to split it up.”

“Probably,” he says.

He makes no move to continue.

You wait a beat.

“Okay. So?”

He lifts one shoulder in a shrug that is more dismissal than gesture.

“So talk.”

Something hot and annoyed flickers across your nerves.

You are not used to having to drag conversation out of people. Not when you are being perfectly reasonable. Not when you are being nice.

“I have practice most afternoons this week, and we’ve got an away game on Friday, so I’d rather get a plan down now. We can divide the reading, maybe split the research, then put it together next week.”

He stares at you for one silent second too long.

Then he says,

“You say that like I care about your schedule.”

Your smile goes thinner.

“Excuse me?”

“I said,” he replies, as if you are slow, “you listed your commitments as though they should mean something to me. They don't.”

You blink at him.

Not because you do not understand. Because nobody says things like that out loud.

Most rude people still bother to dress it up. They give it a little polite wrapper, a soft laugh, a fake apology. Sukuna just hands it to you naked and sharp-edged and waits.

You straighten.

“Okay,” you say, tone sweeter now, which usually means danger if someone knows you at all. “Then let me simplify. We have a project. I do not want a bad grade because you’re insufferable. So let’s figure this out, shall we?”

He slings his bag over one shoulder.

“Figure it out yourself.”

And then he starts walking away.

For one stunned second, you just stand there.

Then offense catches up with you and you spin on your heel and go after him.

He gets halfway down the hall before you catch him near a row of windows where late afternoon sun spills across the floor. Students drift past in clusters, but there is enough space, enough noise, enough movement around you that it still feels oddly private when you step in front of him hard enough to make him stop.

He looks down at you.

“Can I help you,” he says, and even that sounds like an accusation.

You smile at him with easy sweetness.

“You can, actually. As I said… we should probably figure out how we’re dividing the project.”

“We are not ‘dividing’ anything until I know whether you are capable of reading without injuring yourself.”

You blink once, then laugh because that is genuinely rude enough to be funny.

“Oh, you’re one of those,” you say.

“One of what.”

“One of the deeply unpleasant people who thinks being smart is an excuse to act feral and uncivilized in public.”

He stares at you.

You stare back, because you have forced that much at least.

He looks down at you in a way that should probably be intimidating. It is, a little. Not enough to matter.

“If this is your version of charming,” he says, “I see why you rely on being pretty.”

That lands hard and scorching, because how dare him.

It doesn't hurt you, exactly, but it is pointed in a place most people never dare aim. Most people are too busy reacting to the obvious surface of you.

They like you, want you, want things from you, want proximity to you, want your attention, want your smile after games, want your number, want you at their parties.

They do not usually look past all that in the first three minutes.

You tilt your head.

“And yet you’re still the one I got paired with.”

“Sucks for both of us.”

You huff a laugh.

“Look, I’m busy. You’re obviously not.”

A pause.

Then his eyebrows lift, barely.

“Did you just decide that for me.”

“You sit in the back of the room writing moody poetry and picking fights with people over dead authors. That doesn’t scream packed social calendar. Screams weird nerd. Loner.”

His mouth twists in a humorless little curve.

“I also have practice.”

You look him over. The height, the dense muscle under the dark shirt, the thick forearms, the way his hands look like they could close around a throat as easily as around a pen.

“What sport?”

“Why.”

“Because now I’m curious.”

“Then stay curious.”

There it is again, that immediate resistance, like every question is something to be swatted away. It should put you off. Instead it makes you more interested, because people usually either soften for you or perform for you.

Sukuna does neither.

Sukuna looks at you like he would gladly leave you standing here mid-sentence if you became annoying enough.

It does something ugly and bright in the middle of your chest.

You decide not to inspect that too closely.

“Fine,” you say. “Whatever mysterious life you lead outside class, the point stands. You’re the big literature brain here, and I would prefer not to get a bad grade because Professor Hayashi thinks collaborative work builds character.”

“And I would prefer not to carry a decorative idiot across the finish line because she bats her eyelashes and assumes the world arranges itself around her preferences.”

There are a few heads turning now. Not many, just enough for you to become aware that the conversation has heat.

You step closer.

His eyes drop to the movement.

“You are extremely dramatic,” you tell him, frowning a little already. “All I’m saying is that you are better at this, you know you are better at this, and I have zero desire to spend my week pretending otherwise.”

He leans slightly, not toward you but down, enough to make it clear he heard every word and is choosing his response.

“Then let me save us both time. No.”

You stare at him like he spoke some thing in other language.

“No?”

“No, princess. You will read, annotate, contribute, and speak when needed, or I will happily let you fail on your own merit.”

It is the princess that does it.

Not because it is just demeaning. Because it is demeaning on purpose, and because he says it like he expects you to either pout or retreat.

You do neither.

Instead you plant a hand on the wall beside him when he moves to step around you.

You do it almost without thinking.

A fucking kabedon.

The hallway is narrower here, near the stairwell, and with his size he should have no trouble moving you if he wants to.

He could pick you up and set you somewhere else, probably with one arm. But he stops.

Maybe because you catch him off guard. Maybe because he wants to see what you think you are doing. Maybe because, at some level, this amuses him.

He looks from your hand on the wall to your face.

It is ridiculous.

You know it is ridiculous — better yet, it would be ridiculous if it were not working.

He is nearly two meters of muscle and impatience built like a mythological punishment, and yes, you are smaller than him by enough to make the whole thing almost comedic, but there is something about the sheer audacity of it that makes him pause instead of simply stepping around you. Your forearm could fit inside one of his. If he breathes too hard you might tip backward. Maybe he stops because most people would not dare. Maybe you continue because you are too irritated to care.

And yet.

You lift your chin and smile at him like this is an entirely reasonable position for the two of you to be in.

“Let’s not be difficult,” you say softly, with that sweet, poisonous smile. “You are not walking away from me,” you tell him, final.

One pierced brow lifts.

“Or what?”

You put your other hand against the wall too, caging him in as much as someone your size can cage someone like him.

His mouth twitches like he is deciding whether to laugh in your face.

Students pass behind you. Someone glances over, then quickly looks away.

“Or,” you say, “I will make this the most annoying semester of your life. You know I can.”

He gives you a look so flat it would be insulting if it were not almost impressive.

“You overestimate yourself.”

“No, I think I estimate myself perfectly. I also think you are a huge asshole, and since I am stuck with you, I need this project done well.”

“And?”

“And,” you say slowly, like you are talking to a stubborn animal, “you’re clearly the kind of person who already knows half the material before it’s assigned. So you can stop pretending you weren’t going to be good at this.”

His eyes narrow, not offended exactly, but watchful now.

He goes still in a way that is more noticeable than movement. The sound of conversation keeps rolling through the hall, somewhere a locker door slams. None of it seems to touch the space between the two of you.

His gaze lowers, deliberate, to your mouth for one second.

Then comes back to your eyes.

“You seem to be under the impression that sweetening your voice changes the content of what you’re saying.”

“It makes it nicer to hear.”

“For people with weak minds.”

You grin.

“Then good thing you’re strong enough to survive it.”

His jaw shifts. Not with anger, with restraint.

You are absurdly pleased by that.

“Here is what I think,” you continue, keeping your voice light. “I think you are fully capable of doing this entire project alone and doing it better than the two of us could together. I think you know that. I think you also know I am not going to let my grade sink because of some principled little stand on academic fairness. So now the only interesting question is what you want in return.”

You half expect him to laugh in your face.

Instead his expression changes in a way you cannot read at first. Not surprise, exactly. Not interest either. It is more like he was prepared for one version of you and you have wandered off-script.

“What I want,” he says slowly, “is not usually offered by girls who sound like they are negotiating for a manicure.”

“Try me.”

His stare lingers. You feel it on your skin.

“You have a very inflated sense of what you bring to the table.”

“Oh, definitely,” you say. “But I’m also right a lot, which helps.”

A breath leaves him through his nose, almost a laugh and not kind enough to count as one.

He is quiet a moment, gaze lingering on your face in a way that prickles the back of your neck. Not flirtatious. Evaluating. Like he is trying to decide what exactly you are and whether it is worth the trouble of finding out.

Then he finally says,

“You know what." He kisses his teeth. "You try me. What do I get?”

You frown at the sudden shift.

“What?”

“If I do all the work you are clearly trying to manipulate me into doing,” he says, voice low and edged with contemptuous amusement now, “what do I get?”

You should probably answer with money.

Money would be the easiest answer.

Clean. Simple. Safe. Something you know how to use.

If he is as unimpressed by everyone as he acts, cash might at least be practical.

But something about the way he is looking at you makes you veer off instinctively into something stupider.

More reckless.

Risky.

Your shot lands in your mouth before you can reconsider it.

“If you do it,” you say, “I’ll teach you how to kiss.”

The silence after that is immediate and thick.

You are suddenly very aware of everything. The warmth from the sunlit window. The distant clatter of voices from downstairs. The way his shoulders go still.

You decide, because you have already committed to being an idiot, to commit harder.

“And,” you add, tilting slightly your head, “I can probably teach you how to talk to girls too.”

There.

It is out.

It sounds even more insane in the open air.

Because you do not actually know if he is inexperienced.

He is handsome as fuck, offensively so if you bother to look for longer than a few seconds.

Not pretty, not soft — nothing easy.

He is all severe lines and brute physicality, deliberate ink and piercings, and those unnerving eyes and that permanent expression like everyone in the world is wasting his time. Plenty of people would find that hot. You are not blind. You just assume he scares off every opportunity by acting like Sukuna.

Still, he never talks to anyone. Never flirts. Never lingers. Never seems interested. So the offer jumps out of you half as a joke, half as bait, half because you want to see if you can get a real reaction out of him.

That is too many halves, but your brain is not especially useful right now.

He looks down at you.

You keep going before he can cut in.

“Come on. You’re handsome, obviously, and huge, and mysterious in a way some people are into. But you sit in the back glowering at everyone like human connection gave you food poisoning once and now you’re cautious. You never flirt with girls. You never even try to be liked. I’m offering a valuable service of tutoring you into behaving like a normal person.”

“Your confidence would be impressive if it were attached to a functioning brain.”

“You are not denying it.”

“I am deciding whether to let you continue embarrassing yourself.”

“Please do,” you say. “I’m invested now.”

That does it for him.

Not a laugh, exactly. More like his mouth pulls into a sneer because the idea is either offensive or funny or both.

Now he's looking at your face, carmine eyes bored into yours.

His gaze is unreadable for the span of one breath, two.

Long enough that a tiny, humiliating thread of uncertainty starts unspooling in your stomach. Maybe you pushed too far. Maybe he is going to tell you to fuck off and walk away. Maybe he is going to say he has kissed plenty of people and that the offer says more about you than it does about him. Maybe he is going to call you ridiculous and leave you standing here feeling like a child who mistook daring for charm.

You brace for the rejection. For a cutting remark. For him to call you pathetic, insane, spoiled, whatever else.

Then he sighs and drags his hand down his face.

It is not a polite sigh.

It is the kind of sound someone makes when agreeing to something ill-advised because the alternative has become even more tedious.

“Fine.”

You stare.

“Fine?” you repeat and try your best not to sound shocked or hopeful.

“I’ll do it,” he says and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think there’s a little bit of dark amusement under his tone. “And then I’m having my way with you.”

The words hit low in your stomach, swift and hot and mortifying.

You do not let it show.

You refuse to let it show.

So you fold your arms and tilt your chin up like this is exactly the outcome you wanted and not one that just made your skin go electric.

“Very bold for a man I just accused of not knowing how to kiss a girl.”

“Keep talking,” he says. “I might decide to make you regret having a mouth sooner.”

Your pulse gives one ugly, delighted jump.

You hate that.

You hate that your body is so immediate and traitorous.

You hate that some ugly little part of you likes being spoken to that way by someone who very clearly does not bend for anybody.

But you are not about to hand him that knowledge.

So you only scoff.

“You still have to do the project.”

“I will,” he says. “But you’ll be there with me.”

Your eyebrows pull together.

“What? Why?”

“Because if I’m doing all of it, princess,” he says, “you can at least sit there and be useless where I can see you. Every time I work on this project, you will be present. Even if your contribution is limited to sitting down and wasting oxygen, you will be there.”

“That sounds controlling.”

“That is because I am.”

“That defeats the entire point.”

“The point,” he says, “is that I don’t trust you not to vanish and then show up at the end smiling like you participated.”

“That is exactly what I was planning to do.”

“I know.”

You make a face at him. He does not look moved.

“You are unbelievably annoying.”

“And yet here you are begging me to carry your ass in this and then kiss you.”

He makes no sign of finding you charming. You don't dignify that with a comment.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “My dorm. Seven.”

You groan before you can stop yourself.

“Tomorrow? I have practice.”

“Then come after.”

“You’re infuriating.”

“You’re lazy.”

“You don’t even know me.”

He leans down just a little bit more, enough that the air between you changes. He smells good, you think, like winter pine.

“I know enough.”

Then, because apparently he has decided this conversation is over, he steps out of your little trap as if it was never there to begin with and walks off down the hallway without looking back.

You stand there for a full second.

Then another.

Then you press your lips together so hard they almost disappear, because if you smile right now you will feel deeply stupid about it.

By the time the next evening comes around, irritation has burned down into curiosity.

You stand in front of your mirror longer than you need to, you took a quick shower after your practice and you’re trying to look normal, not because you care what he thinks — you refuse to frame it that way — but because being seen by Sukuna feels more specific than being seen by other people.

Most men look at you and you can tell what they want from the first second. With him it is harder. He notices too much and reveals too little. That makes dressing strangely strategic.

In the end, you settle on fitted leggings, an oversized sweatshirt in a color that looks soft against your skin, gloss on your lips, hair up and then down again because down looks less like you tried.

You tell yourself the choice is for comfort. You do not interrogate that lie either.

You’re not going there because you are eager. Obviously not.

Because you are practical, and you would rather supervise your grade than leave it fully in the hands of a malicious giant with an attitude problem.

You feel mildly out of place walking through it carrying nothing but your phone and a charger in your bag, because bringing your laptop would imply effort and you are committed to the bit now.

His dorm building is older than yours, farther from the prettier part of campus, all brick and dim hall lights and linoleum that has seen decades of student misery.

You find his number and knock once, twice.

He opens the door almost immediately, as if he was already standing there.

He is wearing a dark t-shirt and loose gray sweatpants, nothing remarkable, except on him even plain clothes look deliberate. There is a book in one hand. His hair is damp, pushed back carelessly.

The sight of him inside his own space does something strange to your sense of balance. It is intimate in a way that should not matter and yet does a little bit.

“You’re on time,” he says.

“You sound surprised.”

“I’m adjusting to the possibility that you are only insufferable, not incompetent.”

You smile sweetly and step past him into the room before he can invite you in.

The first thing you notice is how clean it is.

His dorm is not what you expected.

You thought it might be messy in an absentminded way, or sterile in a hostile way, or maybe full of dark pretentious nonsense because you already built a version of him in your head and your imagination has never been especially modest.

Instead it is just... him, in ways you do not yet understand.

You turn slowly, taking it in.

It is tidy, but not obsessively so. The bed is made with military sharpness that does not match the scattered stack of books on the desk. There is a small shelf with paperbacks and marked-up hardcovers crammed together two rows deep. A secondhand kettle sits on top of a mini fridge. The desk itself is clean except for his laptop, notebooks, a ceramic mug, and a vase.

You stop at the vase.

There are flowers in it.

Not decorative little grocery-store things either. Real flowers, arranged with enough care to prove intent. White chrysanthemums, maybe, and something purple you do not know, with a few clipped stems of greenery.

You glance at him.

He notices.

“Say something stupid about them,” he says, shutting the door behind you, “and I’ll throw you back into the hallway.”

You grin despite yourself.

“So you do love flowers.”

“I don’t love anything.”

“That sounds healthy.”

“It is healthy when people are disappointing.”

You set your bag down by the bed and walk further in, letting your eyes travel over the room in a way you do not bother hiding. There are notes pinned above the desk. A printed page with lines highlighted in three different colors. A sketchbook half-shoved beneath a pile of articles. A heavy old anthology on the nightstand beside a charger and a glass of water.

His room smells faintly like laundry detergent, coffee, paper, and something clean and dry beneath all that, maybe his cologne, maybe that winter pine smell, or something that you abruptly decide is just him.

It is deeply inconvenient how aware of him you are in here.

“This is much nicer than I expected.”

“What did you expect.”

“Something moodier. Candles. Evidence of a tortured soul. Maybe a single black towel hanging dramatically from a chair.”

“You have the investigative instincts of a dead raccoon.”

“See, that is exactly why you need me to teach you how to talk to girls.”

“I do talk to girls.” He moves past you toward the desk. “I just don’t waste charm on them.”

You drop onto his bed on purpose, shoes off, body sprawling across the blanket in a way that is at least a little provocative and mostly very comfortable, just to see if it annoys him.

“That sounds like something a man says when girls don’t like him enough.”

“And you sound like someone who has never had to distinguish between being wanted and being tolerated by someone.”

That one makes you go quiet for a second.

He notices. Of course he does.

He then plugs his laptop in like he did not just sink something small and sharp between your ribs.

You narrow your eyes at the back of his head.

“You are rude in a way that suggests unresolved issues.”

“And you are lying on my bed wearing lip gloss while I do the work for both of us. One of us is clearly making better choices.”

You shift onto your stomach and prop your chin on your hand, phone already in the other.

“Yeah, me, obviously. And I already paid the first installment by showing up.”

“Your attendance prevents murder. It doesn’t qualify as payment.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“You keep saying that as if it will become a meaningful criticism.”

He sits at his desk and opens his laptop finally, just like that. No fuss, no scene, no attempt to make you feel welcome. You expected none, but there is still something oddly refreshing about how little he tries to perform politeness.

He starts working.

Actually working.

Not pretending, not tapping around aimlessly, not wasting time complaining. He opens documents, flips through notes, pulls up articles, cross-references passages from the assigned reading with outside sources, and types with brisk, irritated efficiency.

You watch him for another minute because there is something irritatingly compelling about the way he works. No hesitation. No preening about his own intelligence.

He just gets on with it, pulling up journal databases, opening tabs, building an outline with the kind of speed that makes it clear he already has a shape for the project in his head.

The muscles in his forearms tighten and shift under tattooed skin every time he moves his hands. He sits upright, all concentration and contained impatience.

Occasionally he mutters under his breath when a source is useless or a website loads too slowly.

You meant to stay detached.

Really, you did.

The whole point was to let him be the big nerd while you sat there and benefited.

You even get your phone out and scroll for a while, half replying to texts from teammates, half liking pictures you do not care about, half listening to the soft clack of his keyboard and the occasional scrape when he reaches for a notebook.

Again, too many halves.

The problem is that after twenty minutes, curiosity starts gnawing at you.

Because he is not just smart in the boring, dependable way some students are smart.

He is quick. Razor quick. He sees links between texts and themes and historical context fast enough that it almost feels unfair.

When he gets annoyed, which is often, his annoyance sharpens him rather than blunting him.

He reads like he is trying to catch the author in a lie.

At one point he says, mostly to himself,

“If this critic uses the phrase feminine melancholy one more time I’m going to assume he’s illiterate.”

You snort.

His eyes flick toward you.

“Was that noise necessary?”

“Yes. That was funny.”

“It was just a fact.”

“That too.”

He goes back to typing and ignoring you as if he didn't force you to be there while he works, before muttering,

“Then try not to sound shocked. You’ll offend me.”

You stare at the side of his face.

It comes to you then, slowly and against your will, that he is funny.

Not in a broad, obvious way. Not charming, not playful, not warm. But dry enough to make you want to needle him again just to see what comes back.

His sarcasm is precise. His remarks have bite because there is so much thought behind them.

It is not meanness for its own sake, though he has plenty of that too.

It is the meanness of somebody who is tired of being surrounded by people who say flimsy things and expect them to hold.

You do not want to pay attention to any of this.

You find yourself doing it anyway.

An hour in, he says without turning around,

“Read this abstract.”

You blink and scoff.

“No?”

He swivels slightly, enough to glance back at you.

“Then get off my bed.”

“You said I just had to be here.”

“I said you could sit there doing nothing. I did not say you could become decorative clutter.”

You groan loudly, dramatically, and flop onto your back.

“You are revising the contract in real time.”

“Welcome to dealing with someone smarter than you.”

“You know, normal people would try to be a little nicer to the person who is eventually going to put her mouth on them.”

This gets a pause.

Not big. Just long enough.

Then he turns more fully in his chair and looks at you.

Carmine eyes boring into you in that lazy, predatory way.

Your legs are stretched across his bed. The hem of your sweatshirt has ridden up slightly. Your hair spills over his pillow. Gloss catches the lamplight when you talk.

You know what picture you make.

You are not naive enough to miss the effect of it.

His expression stays unreadable.

But his eyes linger.

“Read the abstract,” he says.

It should not feel like a victory that his voice is lower than before. Yet.

You sit up with a sigh that says you are being grievously overworked and hold out your hand. He passes the laptop back without letting your fingers touch his. Petty.

You scan the abstract, frown, then read it aloud. Halfway through you stop.

“This is unbearably boring.”

“That is because academic writing is mostly produced by cowards trying to sound really objective.”

“You say that like you aspire to something nobler.”

“I aspire to sentences that do not wheeze and die halfway through their own premise.”

You snort despite yourself.

“That is… annoyingly well phrased.”

“I know.”

He takes the laptop back and starts typing again while you keep talking, because you are not used to anyone around you being so consistently uncooperative and that makes him impossible to leave alone.

“What sport do you play?”

“No.”

“You said you do play one.”

“I said enough.”

“What if I make it part of your tutoring. Interpersonal openness. You have to disclose basic facts about yourself.”

He glances at you.

“You are not tutoring me.”

“I am absolutely tutoring you. You just happen to be doing all the homework too.”

“You keep talking like I need your expertise.”

“You agreed to the deal.”

“I agreed because I wanted to see whether you would actually say something that stupid to my face and then stand by it.”

You grin.

“And?”

“And I was not disappointed.”

You slide off the bed and wander the small room because sitting still while he ignores you becomes impossible after a while.

There are books everywhere, though not in cluttered stacks. Poetry, novels, theory, two field guides to flowers, one thick mythology compendium, a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov with tabs sticking out from the top.

On the desk beside his laptop there is a notebook open to a page of dense handwriting. The lines are neat, angular, pressed hard enough into the paper to leave grooves.

You recognize one phrase from lecture.

Another is not for class.

You read it before you can stop yourself.

Something about mouths learning tenderness only after violence.

Your eyes catch on it. Then the next line. Then the next.

It is good.

Embarrassingly good.

Not in the cliché dramatic campus-magazine way some boys write when they want girls to think they are damaged. There is none of that pleading in it, none of that transparent performance of suffering.

It is precise and ugly and controlled, like whoever wrote it has feelings locked in a room somewhere and only lets them out one at a time to study their behavior.

“You write a lot,” you say.

He does not sound surprised when he answers.

“You mean you’re snooping.”

“You left it open.”

“In my room.”

“Well, yes. Where else would your notebook be?”

His mouth twitches and vanishes again.

“Put it down.”

You do, though not before reading one more line.

Then you turn and look at the flowers on his windowsill. Small white blooms, delicate without being fussy and go on with your annoying Sukuna program.

“What are these.”

He says the name without looking up.

You repeat it and get the pronunciation wrong on purpose.

He corrects you immediately.

You smile to yourself.

“Why do you like flowers?”

“They are less disappointing than people.” he says again.

“That is such an aggressively literature-student thing to say.”

“Coming from someone who thinks scholarship means she no longer has to read, I’ll survive the criticism.”

You sit back on the bed, this time cross-legged, and watch him type some more.

There is something almost peaceful about the room once you stop expecting it to entertain you. The whirl of the laptop’s fans. The occasional noise from the hallway outside. The lamp throwing a warm cone of light over his desk while the rest of the room settles into soft shadow. Your own body going loose with comfort because his bed is nicer than dorm beds have any right to be.

At some point he gets up to make tea.

He does not ask if you want any.

You ask anyway.

He makes you a cup without comment.

It is better than anything from the campus café.

“You are unexpectedly domestic, you know?” you tell him after the first sip.

“I can also do laundry and read multi-syllabic words. Try not to faint.”

You hold the mug under your chin and look at him over the rim.

“You know, under all the hostility, there might be a person.”

“There isn’t.”

“That sounds lonely.”

He does not answer right away. He goes back to the desk, sits, opens another tab, scans a source.

Then, without turning, he says,

“Only for people who think company is automatically a gift.”

The line lands heavier than the others.

You study the back of his head for a moment, suddenly more aware of the places where his sharpness is not just style. You have spent enough time around boys who perform hardness because they think it makes them interesting.

Sukuna does not perform. At all.

The distance in him feels chosen for practical reasons, like he looked at the world and concluded it was not worth the softness most people demand from each other.

Instead of asking anything that might make him close up further, you take another sip of tea and say,

“You are still coming off as someone who has absolutely never had a girlfriend.”

He leans back in his chair and finally looks at you again.

“And you are still talking like a woman who confuses access with skill.”

Your eyebrows go up.

“Excuse me.”

“You are excused.” he grins. “I’ve seen the men who orbit girls like you.”

“Orbit.” You narrow your eyes at him.

“They circle. They wait. They light up when you look their way. It is… not subtle.”

You stare, caught off guard not by the observation itself but by the fact that he noticed.

You did not think he paid that kind of attention. Not to you.

He continues before you answer.

“That does not make you an expert,” he says. “It makes you practiced at being received.”

“And what exactly is your expertise, then. Brooding in corners until women develop a savior complex?”

He almost smiles.

“No. My expertise is recognizing when people mistake being catered to for being compelling.”

It should piss you off more than it does. Instead you find yourself weirdly alert, like he keeps pressing on points no one else touches and your body does not know whether to bristle or lean in.

You choose bristling because it is safer.

“I am compelling!” you say.

“Oh, absolutely.” He turns back to the screen. “You’re vain, spoiled, physically graceful, socially efficient, and just self-aware enough to be interesting for a while. Men love that combination.”

You go very still, almost like he has thrown a glass of cold water right on your face.

But you don’t freeze because it is cruel, although it is. It’s because it is too accurate in some places and unfair in others and spoken like he has been watching you much more closely than you ever realized.

For a moment all you can do is stare.

Then you say,

“You forgot charming.”

“No,” he says. “I omitted it on purpose.”

That gets a laugh out of you before you can help it.

And that, maybe more than anything so far, changes the room.

Because he looks back when you laugh. Not in annoyance this time, not defensively either.

Just briefly, like he wanted to see what it sounded like when he caused it.

The next few days fall into a rhythm that should not exist.

Practice, shower, his dorm.

Sometimes you bring coffee. Sometimes he already has some. Sometimes you arrive grumpy and throw yourself onto his bed with a full-body groan and announce that he is ruining your college experience. Sometimes he tells you your presence is a tax on his patience. Sometimes you read over a paragraph and make a suggestion just to prove you can, and he narrows his eyes like the fact that it is a good suggestion irritates him more than if it were stupid.

Mostly, though, you lounge there while he works, phone in hand, legs kicked out across his bed, occasionally asking questions you pretend are only about the grade.

“What does that mean?”

“What’s pathetic fallacy again?”

“Why are you making that face at that article?”

“Why do men in old literature hate women and also want them dead and worshiped at the same time?”

His answers vary between clipped, mocking, and surprisingly thorough.

“Because weather reflecting mood is easier than writing nuance.”

“Because this scholar is compensating.”

“Because they wanted women symbolic enough to desire and voiceless enough to control.”

That one makes you look at him.

He does not look back. Just keeps typing, expression unchanged.

You become, against all good sense, more curious.

About him. About the room. About the life implied by the strange little details he leaves lying around.

He gets up to make tea another night, and you are already moving before you decide not to. You slide off the bed and drift to his shelf, pretending maybe that you are just stretching your legs.

A cheap notebook with black pages and silver gel-pen scribbles inside the cover is there on his shelf. You lean closer to read the title of a spine in Japanese and hear his voice from behind you.

“Touch that and I’ll break your little fingers.”

You turn your head. He is standing by the kettle with two mugs, staring at you like he regrets letting you in here unsupervised.

“I was just looking!”

“You were being nosy again.”

“That’s a rude way to phrase intellectual curiosity.”

“You are in my room,” he reminds you.

“And I’m expanding my worldview.”

He sets one mug on the desk and strides over. You are still half-bent toward the shelf when he reaches you, one big hand closing around your upper arm, not painful, just firm enough to make your balance tip.

Before you can protest, he steers you backward with humiliating ease and deposits you onto the bed again.

Deposits is the exact word for it, which makes it worse.

You bounce once on the mattress, staring up at him in outrage.

“Did you just manhandle me?”

“Yes.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“And yet here you are, prying on my shit.”

He returns to the desk like nothing happened.

You sit there, affronted and weirdly thrilled, adjusting your shirt and scowling at the back of his head.

It becomes a thing after that.

You snoop.

He catches you.

He physically removes you from wherever you should not be.

Sometimes by the wrist. Sometimes by the elbow. Once by the waist, which leaves you silent for a full ten seconds after because his hand nearly spans the width of you there and you hate how much that fact lingers in your body.

He never lets you get far.

“Don’t touch my notebooks.”

“Then stop leaving them where I can see them.”

“That is my desk, in my room, are you being dumb on purpose?”

“That sounds like a you problem then.”

“I’m gonna make it a you problem soon enough. Keep trying me.”

“You keep inviting me back.”

“I’m containing a bigger problem.”

“You’re obsessed with me.”

That earns you a look over his shoulder, flat and scathing and very nearly entertained. You blow him a little kiss and he sneers like it offended him.

You start learning his habits.

He reads faster when irritated.

He taps his ring finger against the desk when he is thinking.

He drinks coffee too hot and tea too strong.

He has a tendency to go very still when listening carefully, as if all his size disappears into focus.

He swears with creativity when technology fails him.

He likes being right so much it borders on a religion.

He is vain in odd, specific ways — not about the obvious things, not his face or body, but his mind, his taste, his ability to see what other people miss.

He notices more than he should.

The first time he points that last one at you, it annoys you.

You are sprawled on his bed, half-reading an article he made you look over, when he says without turning around,

“You only pretend not to care about this because you don’t like working unless you’re immediately good at it.”

You look up sharply, offended, shocked maybe.

“What the fuck?”

He keeps typing.

“You heard me.”

“That is not true!”

“It is absolutely true.”

“You know nothing about me, nerd.”

“I know,” he says, “that every time you don’t understand something right away, you either joke about it or call it boring. Same defense mechanism, different dress.”

You sit up.

“Wow,” you say. “You really are judgmental.”

“Yes.”

“No, I mean clinically.”

“And yet I’m still correct. Funny how that keeps happening.”

You want to snap back, but the worst part is that he kind of is.

So instead you throw a pillow at him.

He catches it one-handed without looking and drops it on the floor.

“You throw like someone with sponsorship deals.”

“I play volleyball, asshole.”

“And still.”

There are moments, too, when he says things that do not fit the version of him you started with. That first impression, the Sukuna that you made up in your head before you even talked to him.

You come in one evening complaining about a teammate who keeps trying to play through a shoulder strain because she is terrified of losing her starting position.

Sukuna listens in silence longer than expected, then asks precise questions about how she serves, where it hurts, whether the trainer taped it correctly, whether the coach is pushing too hard.

He ends up explaining the mechanics of overuse injuries in a way that is so detailed you stop halfway through taking off your earrings and stare.

“How do you know that?”

He shrugs.

“I have interests.”

“You’re secretly a hundred years old,” you half whisper in feigned awe.

“You’re not so secretly undereducated,” he just deadpans.

Another night you notice the arrangement in his vase has changed. The chrysanthemums are gone, replaced by dark red carnations and a stem of eucalyptus.

“You really do know your flowers,” you say, softer this time.

He glances at the vase, then at you.

“They’re useful.”

“For what?”

“For saying things when words would waste time.”

You roll onto your stomach, chin propped on crossed arms.

“That is the most dramatic and borderline romantic thing anyone has ever said in a dorm room.”

“That is because most people in dorm rooms are profoundly dull.”

He says it so matter-of-factly that you laugh.

The sound makes him look at you again.

Something in his face shifts, very slightly. Not softened. Just less armored for a second than you are used to.

You look away first.

By the second week you bring snacks because it feels rude not to and because you are not as useless as you pretend to be for convenience. He eyes the expensive packaging, says nothing, and eats half of them while reviewing the material.

Once you arrive after practice with damp hair, sore legs, and no patience, and he takes one look at you and tells you to stop sighing like you’re dying because athletes are the most self-congratulatory people on earth.

You tell him literature students are worse because they turn every inconvenience into identity.

He says at least his field knows it is pretentious.

You end up laughing again.

That becomes a problem.

Because you are not supposed to enjoy this arrangement.

You are supposed to tolerate it, maybe find it amusing, maybe keep count of the hours until he turns in your completed project and you pay him with one calculated lesson in kissing that lets you walk away having won, then never talking to him again, probably.

Instead you start knowing what his room smells like at different times of day.

Tea at night. Laundry soap in the afternoon. The sharp clean air after he opens the window because the heat gets stuffy.

You start noticing the tiny furrow between his brows when he edits a sentence and hates the rhythm.

You start recognizing the look he gets when he is about to say something mean enough to be memorable.

You start learning which topics make him speak more — poetry, mythology, certain flowers, training, the stupidity of institutional authority, the way language gets flattened by people who want every text to mean one safe thing.

Sometimes he makes you read sources aloud because he says hearing them helps him sort useful ideas from dead weight.

Sometimes he asks what you think just to insult the first answer and then unexpectedly build on the second.

Sometimes he ignores you for twenty minutes straight while you lie on his bed with your legs kicked up against the wall, only to suddenly ask whether your coach is still using the same defensive structure she screamed about last month.

The first time he mentions volleyball unprompted, you stare at him.

“You know my coach’s name?”

He does not even glance away from the article he is skimming.

“You post the schedule on your story like it’s wartime intelligence, hard not to.”

“That does not explain why you know what she yells about,” you raise your eyebrows, considering that he sees your stories.

“You are loud outside after practice.”

“That is invasive.”

“That is campus housing.”

You narrow your eyes.

“You pay attention to me.”

He clicks to another tab.

“Unfortunately.”

You hate how pleased that makes you.

In class, things get stranger.

Not visibly, maybe. Not enough for anyone else to comment.

But now you know what it feels like when Sukuna’s attention lands on you intentionally, and that makes every small glance from the back row feel weighted.

Once Professor Hayashi asks a question and you answer poorly because you only half read the poem, and before she can move on Sukuna speaks from behind you and cleaves your answer open in front of everyone.

He does it with surgical contempt, the bastard, and by the end of his response three people are staring at you in sympathy.

You turn in your seat and mouth, You are evil.

He mouths back, Then read better.

Later, after class, you catch him by the door and say,

“You did not have to make me look stupid.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you did not!”

“You were wrong in public. I corrected the problem in public.”

“That is not how human interaction works.”

“For most people, maybe.”

“You realize this is why you have no social life.”

He leans against the wall near the door while students flow around you.

“And yet you keep seeking me out. That says deeply unflattering things about your judgment.”

You open your mouth, close it, then smile because he is right in a way you refuse to explore.

“I do it because you're making me stand by your side while you work for me.”

“I am carrying the project and dragging your attention span behind me like roadkill.”

“Still counts.”

“You are very committed to your own delusions, brat.”

“And you are very committed to pretending you do not enjoy having me around.”

That makes his gaze settle on your face in a way that sends a little current through your skin.

“Enjoy is not the term I’d use here.”

The air shifts.

You should probably step back from it.

Instead you say, in that sweet teasing way,

“No?”

“No.”

“What word would you use?”

He looks at you for a beat too long.

Then he says,

“Stand. You’re useful.”

You laugh because that is safer than admitting how that answer twists inside you.

“Useful for what?”

His eyes flick to your mouth again, and it's just a flick of a second.

This time you notice with painful clarity.

“For now,” he says, pushing off the wall, “for staying where I put you.”

And then he is gone down the hall before you can decide whether to be offended or thrilled by his lack of social skills when talking about you.

By the second week, your friends start asking why you disappear so often in the evenings.

You tell them you are stuck on a project with a nightmare.

They ask if the nightmare is hot.

You say yes, but in an academic way.

They laugh for a full minute.

You do not mention the whole deal you got going.

You definitely do not mention that every time you go to his room now, the first thing your body notices is whether he is close enough to touch.

You do not mention that you have started arriving with your hair done even on days you were planning not to care.

You do not mention that one night you catch him stepping out of the shower shirtless with a towel around his neck and damp hair pushed back from his face and nearly forget the sentence you are saying mid-word.

He notices that too, of course.

“Careful,” he says, drying his hair while you sit frozen on his bed pretending your brain works. “You’ll start giving the impression you have a thought happening behind those eyes.”

“Shut up, weirdo”

“There it is, I was worried the sight had taken your last braincell,” he smirks and that sight it still does something very weird to you.

You throw a pillow at him. He catches it one-handed without looking, drops it back on the bed, and keeps toweling his hair dry like this happens every day.

Maybe it does now.

Oh, when it's cold I get warm just thinking of you When I'm alone I stare at stars and hope dreams come true

You're probably not aware That I'm even here Well you might not know I exist But I don't even care

Sweet talk Everything you say It sounds like Sweet talk to my ears You could yell Piss off! Won't you stay away? It'll still be Sweet talk to my ears

Oh, when you laugh I forget that it's about me But it's alright Yeah, cause being your punchline Still is something

Yeah well I'm not scared I'm not going nowhere Yeah, you might want me to drop dead But I don't even care

Sweet talk Everything you say It sounds like Sweet talk to my ears You could yell Piss off! Won't you stay away? It'll still be Sweet talk to my ears

Ooh, everything you say It sounds like Ooh, to my ears Ooh, won't you stay away? It sounds like Ooh, to my ears

Sweet talk Everything you say It sounds like Sweet talk to my ears You could yell Piss off! Won't you stay away? It'll still be Sweet talk to my ears

He is not just well read — he thinks with a kind of depth that makes half the classroom seem decorative by comparison. He can be mean because he sees exactly where someone’s argument is flimsy and has no instinct whatsoever to cushion the blow.

He is funny because he is fast. He is condescending because, unfortunately, he often has the material to support it.

And people treat him like he is just a damn big jock because of how he looks.

You start noticing the way professors talk to him more carefully than they do to other students, as if expecting trouble.

The way some classmates lower their voice around him and simplify things before he even speaks.

The way girls sometimes stare and then quickly look away when he catches them, like they cannot decide whether he is dangerous or hot and are embarrassed by both conclusions.

It bothers you more than it should right now.

Not in some noble, righteous way.

Just personally. Sharply.

Because you begin to understand that the reason his sarcasm always lands so hard is that it is defensive first and cruel second.

People arrive with assumptions. He cuts them before they can settle. Simple. Effective.

You do not say any of this to him. Obviously.

You would rather die than turn sincere unprompted to this fucker.

But your behavior changes in small ways and you can't really stop.

You ask him more real questions.

You stay off your phone longer.

You actually read the passages he highlights for you.

You start offering opinions you care about instead of tossing out whatever sounds easy.

He notices, because he notices everything.

“You’re less stupid this week,” he mentions one night.

You gasp.

“That is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Sukunerd.”

“Do not make me take it back. Drop the stupid nickname as well.”

“You can’t. I’m treasuring it. Do you prefer Kuna?”

“You have no standards. I prefer you shut the fuck up forever if you call me this shit again.”

“Not true. I’m in your room, aren’t I? Maybe Suku, then...”

His mouth twitches.

Again, not a smile. But enough to make heat spread stupidly through you and it always feels like a small victory.

This whole thing becomes, somewhere along the way, a little stupid friendship.

Not soft, and definitely not wholesome. Nothing you would admit to your teammates if they asked too directly.

But real.

You start bringing him snacks without announcing you are doing it. He pretends not to care and then eats them while insulting your new ideas. He starts setting aside the better mug for you when he makes tea because you once said the chipped one felt ugly in your hand and unaesthetic to take pics of. 

He calls you spoiled at least once per visit.

You call him a miserable freak in return.

You read aloud lines from bad criticism in your most pompous voice until he tells you to shut the fuck up.

He tells you to stop kicking your shoes under his bed.

You ignore him and do it again.

One evening you flop down and announce,

“I think your bed is better than mine, Suku.”

He does not look up from his laptop.

“That sounds like a personal failing, brat.”

“It sounds like your mattress isn’t made of concrete, makes me wanna nap.”

“Maybe I simply have superior taste in this too.”

“You definitely have superior blanket quality.”

“You say that as though it means something to me.”

“It means you’re domestic.”

At that, he finally turns in his chair to look at you fully.

You are on your back, one knee up, arms spread, occupying far too much of his bed for somebody who does not live here.

His eyes drag from your face down to your body, then back up.

“Mm, careful,” he says quietly. “You keep getting comfortable in here.”

The room goes still.

You know what he means.

Or at least you know what your body hears in it.

So you smile lazily, because that is safer than honesty.

“Maybe you keep making it easy for me.”

He holds your gaze one second longer than necessary.

Then turns back to his screen.

You lie there staring at the ceiling for a while, suddenly too awake in your own skin.

The project keeps progressing. More than progressing.

It gets good. Obnoxiously good.

You know enough to see that now.

You end up contributing more than you meant to, not because he pressures you exactly, but because being around him while he works makes laziness feel embarrassingly transparent.

He does not ask for effort with the same hungry need for validation that professors do. He simply functions at a level that makes not keeping up feel childish.

That annoys you enough to try.

One night, when you finally make a genuinely good point about a recurring image in one of the texts, he pauses with his hands above the keyboard.

Then he says,

“There. I knew there was a brain cell in there somewhere.”

You should be insulted.

Instead you grin so hard your cheeks hurt.

“You are welcome.”

“Don’t fish for praise. It makes you look common.”

“You literally just praised me.”

“I acknowledged a momentary and rare event.”

“That still counts.”

“It does not.”

You lean back on your hands.

“You’re impossible to please.”

“And yet you’re smiling, aren't you?”

You stop smiling immediately out of spite.

He looks pleased with himself for the rest of the evening.

His research is thorough, your presentation voice is excellent, and together the final thing starts taking on a shape that is far better than anything you would have made alone.

He even makes you practice your section out loud.

“I hate this,” you tell him after stumbling over a line the third time.

“I don’t care.”

“You should. My suffering should affect you.”

“It affects me aesthetically. Continue.”

“You are the worst audience in the world.”

“I’m the one improving you.”

He is right about that too, which only makes it worse.

The bargain between you remains mostly unspoken after that first day, but never forgotten.

Sometimes it slips into the room sideways.

When you tease him about the fact that he has never once mentioned a girlfriend.

When he asks whether all the boys who circle you are actually this stupid or whether you selectively attract the worst.

The first few times he says things like that, your stomach drops.

After a while, it becomes part of the air between you. A line stretched taut but never fully touched. It makes everything feel charged even when nothing is happening. Especially then.

You ask him whether he is excited for his lessons.

He asks whether you have prepared a curriculum or whether this, like everything else in your life, is built mostly on inflated self-regard.

You ask if he has ever kissed anyone.

He says,

“Why would I answer that?”

You say because you need a baseline.

He says he would rather staple his mouth shut than explain his romantic history to you.

Then one night you ask,

“Have you at least talked to girls before.”

He looks at you over the top of his laptop.

“I am talking to one now because she never shuts up, apparently.”

“That doesn’t count. You hate me,” you cross your arms over your chest.

“I don’t hate you.”

The answer comes too quickly.

Your breath catches before you can stop it and you may have sounded a little shocked.

Then he adds,

“I find you exhausting. That's different.”

You swallow the lump in your throat.

“That’s almost kind coming from you.”

“Don’t get sentimental on me.”

You are suddenly very aware of how late it is. Of how close the room feels. Of the way his lamp turns the lines of his face darker and warmer all at once.

“Why did you say yes?” you ask before you can lose the nerve.

He watches you.

Not your mouth this time. Just your eyes.

“At the hallway,” you clarify. “Why did you actually say yes.”

“I told you.”

“No, you told me you were curious whether I’d commit to saying something stupid. That explains five seconds. Not two weeks.”

His chair creaks softly when he leans back. His arms fold over his chest. In that posture he looks even larger, all width and contained force and that permanent air of someone who will not be handled unless he allows it.

“I said yes,” he answers eventually, “because I wanted to see how far your arrogance extends when someone stops rewarding it immediately.”

You stare.

“That is a terrible reason, really.”

“It has been very educational.”

“For who?”

“For me.” His gaze moves over your face with unbearable steadiness. “And, slowly, for you.”

You should have a neat response. Something clever and glossy. Instead all you can manage is,

“You’re so irritating, that's why you don't have a girlfriend.”

He inclines his head once, like he accepts the truth of that.

Then he turns back to the screen, and the conversation ends there, but the feeling of it stays in your body for the rest of the night.

You start thinking about him at inconvenient times.

On the bus back from games.

In the shower after practice.

Half-asleep in class when someone says something pompous and you immediately imagine the exact expression he would make.

You think about the deal too, and then get annoyed with yourself, because the entire point had been to say something reckless and win.

Not to become curious about what he would actually do if you handed him your mouth. Not to wonder whether he would still be that controlled up close. Not to think about his hands at your waist when he drags you away from his shelves, or the way he says your name only when irritated enough to make it feel significant.

So naturally, because your life has always allowed you the freedom to be a little self-destructive for entertainment, you decide to go to a frat party instead of one of your study sessions.

It is not entirely because of him.

That is what you tell yourself all afternoon while getting ready.

You have reasons.

You are tired. You have been good all week. There is a party everybody is going to. One of your teammates has been talking about it nonstop. You are in college. You are young. You like loud music and attention and looking good under bad lighting.

You do not owe Sukuna every evening just because he has somehow inserted himself into your schedule and your thoughts with the efficiency of a hostile takeover.

Still, when your phone lights up with his name around six-thirty and the message reads "Are you coming or not," something sly and defiant wakes in your chest.

You stare at it while sitting cross-legged on your bed in a towel, makeup bag open in front of you.

Then you type:

Busy tonight

The response comes almost immediately.

Doing what?

You should not smile.

You do anyway.

Having a life, u wouldn't get it

There is a pause this time.

Then:

A shallow one, I assume.

You laugh out loud.

Asshole

You send back.

No reply.

That should be the end of it.

Instead you set the phone face-down and tell yourself the mild, restless feeling in your chest is only irritation.

Your roommate is out, which means you get the mirror to yourself and time to draw the whole thing out. You straighten your hair until it falls smooth and glossy over your shoulders. You take your time with your makeup, building it a little heavier than you would for class — good skin, sharp liner, gloss that catches light when you turn your head. You stand in your underwear for longer than necessary deciding between two tops and choose the tighter one, the one that makes your waist look smaller and your chest sit higher.

Your skirt is short.

Your heels are impractical.

Your perfume is expensive.

By the time you are dressed, you look exactly like the kind of girl who never has to worry about getting in anywhere and knows it.

You look, in other words, like yourself.

Only maybe a little more deliberate than usual.

You tell yourself this is because parties are performance. Because half the fun is becoming a brighter, glossier version of whatever you already are. Because glitter on your collarbones and your tightest clothes and the right lip color are all part of the ritual.

You absolutely do not tell yourself that some ugly part of you enjoys the thought of Sukuna picturing this and being annoyed.

That would be embarrassing.

You are fastening an earring when your phone buzzes again.

You glance at it.

Did you forget we have work to finish.

You type back with one hand.

You’ll survive bb

This time the typing bubble appears almost immediately, vanishes, appears again.

Then:

I’ll drag you out by the ankle myself if you don’t show up

You stare.

Heat curls low and unhelpful in your stomach, because of course that is how your body reacts to threats now.

Very dignified. Very sane.

You roll your eyes at yourself and send back

I’d like to see you try

The answer is simple.

I hope you know I mean it.

You hate how hard that lands.

Your pulse trips. Your face stays calm in the mirror, but your fingers go still against your earlobe.

Because yes, you know.

You know he’s gonna drag you by the ankle, but you wish he did it by the arm, the waist, the wrist. Lifted, redirected, set back where he wants you.

And the fact that he knows you know exactly what he means makes your skin feel suddenly too fitted to your body.

Your teammate honks outside.

You inhale, force yourself back into motion, finish with your earrings, grab your clutch.

Another message comes just as you are slipping on your heels.

Have it your way.

You snort softly.

u wish nerd

Then, after a beat, because you are incapable of leaving anything alone,

Try not to miss me too much x

You do not wait for the answer.

You pick up your small purse, take one last look in the mirror, and head downstairs with the kind of light, easy confidence that has always lived in your bones.

The night air meets you warm and lively, full of weekend noise and headlights and laughter spilling down campus streets. Your teammate shouts your name from the passenger side, music already too loud from inside the car, and when you slide in beside her she lets out a whistle at your outfit.

“Oh, you look dangerous.”

“I know,” you say, pleased.

The drive is short and loud and full of the usual nonsense — who is going, who already got there, who hooked up last weekend, who cried in a bathroom, who is definitely wearing something ugly on purpose and calling it fashion.

You laugh, you talk, you check your gloss in the visor mirror. You do not check your phone.

When the fraternity house comes into view, it is exactly what it always is and exactly what you want tonight.

Loud music shaking the walls hard enough to feel from outside. Strings of lights slung badly across the porch. People moving in glittering little groups through the front yard and along the sidewalk. Someone yelling from an upstairs window. Somebody else already drunk enough to miss a step and catch themselves on a friend’s shoulder. Bass pulsing under everything, thick and immediate, like the whole house has a second heartbeat.

You step out of the car into warmth, noise, perfume, sweat, cheap liquor, the sour-sweet smell of beer already in the grass, and a spray of glitter somebody must have hugged onto somebody else.

Your skirt is tight. Your makeup is perfect. Your mouth is glossy. The music is terrible and the lights are low and your life is easy and bright and waiting for you to walk straight into it.

So you do.

The party feels deserved.

That is the first thing you keep telling yourself, the first thing that keeps the night bright and easy and harmless while you walk into it. After so many evenings spent in Sukuna’s dorm, after so many pages and notes and articles and his dry voice cutting through your laziness until you actually start using your brain instead of relying on charm and luck, you deserve one stupid night. You deserve loud music and cheap beer and girls you know pulling you into badly lit rooms by the wrist because some song everyone swears they hate is suddenly the only thing worth screaming. You deserve to stop thinking about your literature project for one evening. You deserve to be twenty, pretty, spoiled, and a little careless.

It isn’t even that you are tired of Sukuna.

That part is almost annoying to admit to yourself.

He is not tiresome, not really. He is mean, sharp, arrogant, controlling in ways that should bother you more than they do, but he is never dull.

Even when he is making you feel lazy and underprepared, even when he is pushing your shoulder with two fingers and telling you to reread a paragraph because your interpretation is shallow, there is always something alive in it.

He irritates you into being more awake. He pisses you off into participating. He makes you feel watched in a way that is invasive and useful all at once.

You are not escaping him tonight because you are exhausted by him.

You are slipping back into your old rhythm because it is familiar, because it is easier, because it feels good to walk into a room where nobody expects anything from you except to look good and laugh at the right moments and maybe flirt back if the person trying deserves it.

You want the weightless version of yourself for a few hours. The easy one. The one who never has to sit in a dorm room being psychoanalyzed by a giant literature freak with a God complex and flowers on his desk.

The fraternity house is already hot by the time you get inside.

Heat rolls against your skin before the door even fully swings shut behind you. Music shakes through the floorboards and into your legs, bass deep enough to settle in your ribs. The house smells like beer and bodies and too much perfume, with some smoky sweetness trapped beneath all of it from someone vaping near the kitchen. The lighting is terrible in the best possible way. Everything blurs a little under it. Glitter catches where it should not. Faces become softer or hotter depending on the angle. Everyone looks less real and more fun.

A girl from one of your classes squeals when she spots you and drags you into a hug that smears something sparkly onto your shoulder. Somebody compliments your skirt. Somebody else asks if you came with the volleyball girls. One of your teammates spots you from the dining room and lifts a red plastic cup in greeting, already flushed and louder than usual.

You slide into it all easily.

This is your language too. Not just classrooms and polished smiles and scholarship dinners and controlled little conversations with adults who like your parents. This too. The noise, the bodies pressed too close in hallways, the way girls lean in to be heard and end up talking half into each other’s mouths because the music is so loud, the way boys circle in groups pretending not to be looking while absolutely looking, the way every room is trying to become something more exciting than the room next to it.

You dance first because that is what the girls want.

The living room has been turned into a shifting, sweaty knot of people moving shoulder to shoulder, and when your friends pull you into it you go willingly, laughing when somebody nearly elbows you in the face during a bad turn. The song is awful. Then the next one is better. Then one you know comes on and suddenly everyone is yelling the lyrics, arms flung around each other, drinks lifting dangerously overhead. Your hair sticks lightly to the back of your neck. Your heels make your calves ache just enough to remind you that you chose them because they make your legs look better, not because they make sense.

It is fun.

Really fun.

You sway and laugh and let yourself be twirled by a girl you vaguely know from the student union, and when somebody hands you a beer you take it without thinking too much about where it came from because it is a sealed can and because you are not an idiot, not that kind of idiot, right? You crack it yourself and drink and grimace because it tastes exactly like bad college beer always tastes, but it is cold and it works. The burn of it settles warm in your stomach. Another song. More dancing. A break in the kitchen where you lean against the counter and talk over the music about some girl who cried over her economics TA last week. Back into the crowd.

You start feeling loose in the right way.

Not sloppy. Not even close yet. Just pleasantly warm, entertained, bright around the edges. The house becomes easier to move through. The music becomes less separate from your body and more like something passing through it. Dumb guys start trying their luck in more obvious ways, and tonight you do not even mind that much. One tries to tell you he has seen all your volleyball games even though you know for a fact he has not. Another asks if you are majoring in breaking hearts and you nearly spit your drink laughing because really, that is what he came up with. One boy with freckles and truly tragic confidence asks if he can buy you a drink because he finds strong women intimidating and would like the opportunity to grow.

That one almost gets a point for originality.

You are good at this. At letting them orbit without promising too much. At giving back just enough smile, enough eye contact, enough teasing to keep the night easy.

It is mostly harmless. Mostly entertaining.

Mostly exactly what you wanted.

Orbit.

At some point someone suggests beer pong and suddenly you are in the dining room leaning over a scarred table while people crowd around and shout bad advice. You play terribly at first because you are laughing too much, then better because your pride gets involved. One of your teammates leans into you between throws and says you look too good to be this competitive. You tell her that is probably why you have so many enemies. A cluster of boys on the other side cheer too loudly when you miss on purpose once just to see if one of them notices. He does not. None of them do. That makes you laugh harder.

By then you have another drink in your hand. Then another.

Not too many. You are not counting, but you know your body and you know your limits and you are nowhere near them yet. You keep moving, keep weaving through rooms, keep letting the night carry you. Somebody insists on taking a blurry picture with you under the staircase because the lighting is “kind of cunt” there, which means nothing but somehow makes sense in the moment. You fix your lip gloss in a bathroom mirror with three other girls crammed beside you. You step over a guy sitting on the floor in a hallway looking like he has suddenly discovered his own mortality.

You are having the kind of night people claim college should be made of.

And then you meet Ken.

Or rather, he has been around for a while and you only properly notice him when he slides into the open space beside you near the kitchen archway while you are waiting for one of your friends to come back from upstairs.

He is cute in a very polished way. Not your usual type, if you were being honest, but objectively cute. Dark hair, long and done on purpose, shirt that fits correctly, watch that probably costs more than most people’s rent, and a smell that hits you only when he steps close enough — expensive cologne, warm and clean and clearly chosen with care.

He smiles like he knows exactly how he comes off and has found it useful. Reminds you of yourself.

“You look like you’re either having the best night here or judging everyone who is,” he says.

You glance at him, amused.

“Maybe both.”

“That sounds promising.”

“It sounds honest.”

He laughs at that, and it is easier than some of the other boys tonight. Less trying. Less obvious effort. You ask his name and he says everybody just calls him Ken, and you are not sure if that is a real nickname or one he wants to sound easier to know, but you let it pass. He asks yours even though he probably already knows it, because a lot of people do, at least in the campus way where your face gets ahead of your person. He compliments your skirt without making it sound like he is talking to your thighs. He asks if you play volleyball because he has seen you around the athletic center. That might even be true.

It is nice enough.

Not special. Not electric. But nice enough that when he offers to get you something better than beer, you hesitate for only a moment.

You know better than to take random open drinks from strangers.

You do.

That is the thing that haunts you later.

You know better. You know better than this.

You know the stories, know the rules, know the casual vigilance girls are taught so early it becomes instinct.

Watch your glass. Open it yourself. Do not lose sight of it. Do not trust charm. Do not trust nice shoes.

Do not trust boys who smell expensive and speak gently and look like they belong in a cologne ad.

You know all that.

But the night has been easy. You are feeling light. He has been standing right there, talking, smiling, not crowding you. He asks what you like and you say something sweet if he insists on showing off, and he grins and says he knows exactly the thing.

You should say no.

Instead you say,

“Fine. Surprise me.”

He returns a couple minutes later with a short plastic cup filled with something pale and fruity-looking, ice clinking in it. He hands it to you with a little flourish.

You take it.

The first sip is sweet and stronger than you expected, citrusy with something sharper beneath it. You wrinkle your nose.

“This tastes a little dangerous.”

“That's a compliment.”

“It absolutely is not.”

“It will be in ten minutes.”

You roll your eyes and drink again.

Maybe that is the exact moment the night tilts, though you do not feel it yet. Maybe it is later. Maybe whatever is in it starts working before you have even laughed at his next line. You try to think back afterward and cannot find the clean edge where things stop being normal.

At first, everything still feels fine.

You talk to him for a few more minutes. Somebody steals him away to yell something in his ear. Your friend comes back from upstairs and hooks a hand in your elbow and you drift away from him without any real goodbye because that is how party conversations die. You stand in the dining room again. Somebody misses a shot in beer pong so badly the ball bounces into a bowl of chips. Everyone erupts. You laugh.

Then the floor feels wrong.

Not visibly or in any way anybody else would notice. It just seems to move a half-second after your body does, like your balance is getting relayed through water.

You blink, stand still, take a breath.

Maybe you stood up too fast.

Maybe you need water.

You glance at your cup and realize it is empty. You do not remember finishing it.

That should worry you more immediately than it does. Instead your thoughts drag a little, like each one has to climb through syrup before it reaches you. The room is louder than it was a second ago, or maybe your head is just making it feel that way. Bass strikes behind your eyes. Somebody says your name from too far away and you turn too slowly.

You tell yourself it is fine.

You had beer before that. You danced. The house is hot. You are in heels. Maybe it just hit weirdly.

You move toward the edge of the room because suddenly being in the center of other people feels impossible. The crowd brushes against you and your skin hates it. Your heart starts picking up in a strange, not-quite-logical rhythm. Not panic exactly, not yet, but something in the family. A hard little throb of wrongness.

You find the arm of an overstuffed chair by the wall and perch on it because sitting fully feels too committed and standing feels worse. You press your fingertips to the side of your cup and realize you are gripping it too hard even though it is empty.

The dizziness does not go away.

It gets worse.

Too fast.

That is when the real thought arrives, cold and precise even through the growing haze.

Oh, you stupid bitch. You know better than this.

It lands so hard it almost clears your head for a second.

You look toward the kitchen. Toward the hallway. Toward the rooms filling and emptying with people. You think of Ken, expensive cologne, easy smile. You think of your drink in his hand. You think of how sweet it was, how strong, how you barely watched him return with it because why would you, why would you, what kind of spoiled, complacent idiot does that?

Your stomach twists.

Panic starts properly then, not loud but fast. Not a scream, not a dramatic collapse, just a terrible crawling certainty climbing through your body. Drugged. Roofied. Maybe not that exactly, maybe something else, but not right, not alcohol, not normal. Your brain is still working enough to know that much, and maybe that is the worst part. Knowing and not being able to stop the rest of yourself from slipping.

You do not want to find out what happens if the wrong person notices before you act.

That thought cuts through everything else.

Not the embarrassment. Not even the fear of the drug itself. The fear of becoming prey in a room full of people who might not realize in time what is happening to you. Or worse, realize and do nothing. Or worse than that, realize and be the ones who wanted it.

Your body moves before your thoughts can tangle again.

You stand too quickly and grab the armchair for a second when the room lurches under you. Somebody nearby asks if you are okay. You nod because lying is faster and start moving. Not toward your friends, though maybe you should. Your pride, your fear, your instinct, whatever it is, chooses differently.

You do not want to startle the wrong person by looking alarmed. You do not want to be stopped by whoever did this. You do not want to stand in the middle of a room and announce vulnerability out loud.

You just want a lock.

A door.

A minute.

The downstairs hallway appears in pieces as you make your way toward it. Music from the living room, shouting from upstairs, a couple pressed up against a wall laughing into each other’s faces, the air getting tighter around you. You keep your head down and move like you know exactly where you are going. Your legs feel strange, too light and too far away. Your hands are clumsy. Somebody says something to you and you do not catch it.

The bathroom door appears and you nearly cry from relief.

You get inside, fumble the lock twice before it catches, then brace both hands on the sink and stare at yourself in the mirror.

You are a mess already.

Not visibly ruined, not yet at least, but wrong. Your pupils are too big. Your skin looks pale under the terrible light. Your eyeliner is still sharp, your hair still mostly in place, your mouth still glossy, but your face is not obeying you properly anymore. Your expression keeps slipping away from what you intend.

You inhale through your nose, slow and hard.

“Okay,” you whisper, and your voice sounds strange to your own ears. “Okay.”

It does not feel okay.

The bathroom is small, old tile and a cheap little frosted window over the toilet. The air is stuffy. Your pulse is everywhere. Your body cannot decide if it is overheated or cold. You grip the sink harder and try to think.

Call someone.

Who?

Your friends are upstairs, scattered, drunk, loud, unhelpfully distant.

Call campus security?

Say what? That you think maybe you accepted a drink from the wrong guy at a party because you forgot every rule you have ever known? That you are locked in a frat bathroom with a spinning head and no clear idea what is in your system?

Maybe yes. Maybe that is what a smarter person would do.

But your thoughts are fragmenting now. The panic keeps rising and receding, each wave taking more coherence with it. You need air. Suddenly, desperately, stupidly, you need air. You lunge for the little window and manage to shove it open just enough for cold night air to slide in. It is not much, but it is something. You lean toward it and suck in breath like you have been underwater.

You have no one to call.

You have no one you trust not to do anything to you in that state.

The room still spins.

You splash water on your face.

The cold shocks you and then immediately does not feel like enough. Droplets run down your cheeks, into your hairline, along your neck. You do it again. Your mascara does not run much because it is expensive and stubborn, which feels like such a ridiculous thing for your brain to notice now that you almost laugh, except if you laugh you think you might start crying instead.

The thought comes suddenly and in perfect, sober shape despite the chaos around it.

You could die in here and no one would notice for hours.

It is absurd. You know it is absurd. People do not usually die instantly in frat bathrooms from one drugged drink. That is not how your rational brain works. But your rational brain is not driving cleanly anymore. Everything is too loud and too sharp and too far away, and the fear keeps finding the most catastrophic interpretation available and putting it directly in front of you.

You grip the sink and stare at the mirror again.

“This is not how you die,” you tell your reflection, because hearing it out loud feels like maybe it could anchor something.

Your reflection looks unconvinced.

Your stomach turns with sudden violence. You barely make it to the toilet before you are on your knees, one hand on the seat, the other braced against the tile, throwing up hard enough to make your throat burn and your eyes flood.

It is awful and humiliating and for one stupid second you are furious that you are doing this in a skirt and a party top, that even now some ridiculous part of you still registers humiliation before survival.

When it is over, you stay there breathing through your mouth, cheek damp, hair falling in your face.

Your phone buzzes in your clutch.

You ignore it.

Then it buzzes again.

The sound feels enormous in the tiled room.

You drag yourself upright enough to dig it out with clumsy fingers. The screen swims. You blink hard, squint, hold it further away, then closer. The name resolves in pieces.

Sukuna.

Of course.

Of fucking course.

There is something so deeply unfair about that that a weak, miserable whine actually leaves your throat.

Because yes, you forgot about him. About the fact that you were supposed to be at his dorm or at least answering his messages. About the fact that somewhere out there on this campus is the last person you want finding you like this and maybe, suddenly, the first person you can think to trust.

His first message is already there.

Where the fuck are you.

The second lights up while you stare.

Did you pass out in a gutter.

Even like this, you can hear his voice in it. Flat, irritated, cutting.

You try to type a response.

Your thumbs miss letters. The keyboard tilts. You erase half of it, start over, watch nonsense appear under your fingers like your phone no longer speaks your language. The letters refuse to line up into meaning. Frustration bites so sharply you nearly throw the phone into the sink.

im the bdroom

Well, that was shit.

You try again with slow, painful care.

bathroom

That part works. One word, manageable.

Then,

help

It comes out on the first attempt and you send it before you can second-guess yourself.

For one second there is nothing.

Then your phone rings so suddenly you flinch.

You almost drop it. You answer on the third fumble and press it too hard against your ear.

The noise of the party crashes through first, huge and distorted through the speaker, and that alone shocks you so badly you go still.

He is here.

The thought barely lands before his voice cuts through the background, low and terrifyingly calm.

“Where exactly are you.”

You shut your eyes.

Relief comes so fast it hurts.

“I think,” you say, and hate how wrecked your voice sounds, “I think downstairs. Bathroom. The one by— I don’t know, the hallway. Near the kitchen? I don’t know.”

You feel like crying and you know you sound like that too.

There is a beat.

“Stay there.”

It is such a stupid instruction you almost laugh because where the hell else are you going to go, but the sound that comes out of you is small and shaky and nothing like laughter at all.

“I wasn’t planning a grand escape.”

“Good,” he says. “Because if I have to search this entire cesspool for you, I’ll be unpleasant about it.”

Then the line goes dead.

You stare at the screen for a second before lowering it.

He is here.

You do not know what to do with the amount of relief that fact gives you. It is enormous and ugly and immediate. You want to hate it on principle. Instead you just sit there on the bathroom floor under a cracked little window, breathing through the tail end of panic, waiting.

There is a knock at the door less than a minute later.

Not the careless rattling kind, not some drunk idiot trying the wrong handle. Sharp. Certain.

You freeze anyway.

Then his voice comes through the wood.

“Open the door.”

You move too fast again, catch yourself on the sink, fumble the lock. For one stupid second your fingers will not cooperate and panic spikes again because what if you cannot get it open, what if you are trapped even now, what if—

Then it clicks.

The door opens inward.

Sukuna fills the frame.

He is not dressed for a party in any real sense, which somehow makes his presence here feel even stranger. Dark shirt, black jeans, jacket open, hair a little disordered like he came in irritated and stayed that way. The hallway light catches on the metal of his piercings, small glints at his ear and brow. His eyes take you in so quickly it almost feels like being struck.

You know what he sees.

Smeared at the edges, damp-faced, pale, breathless, skirt hiked wrong from kneeling on the tile, clutching your stupid phone like it might keep you alive, pupils blown, confidence not present.

Humiliation comes sharp and hot for you, babygirl.

You open your mouth, maybe to explain, maybe to apologize, maybe to make some kind of joke because that is still your favorite shield even now.

He does not let you get a word out.

He exhales once through his nose, long and irritated, then shrugs off his jacket and wraps it around your shoulders with a kind of rough efficiency that makes your throat tighten.

It is too big, of course. Enormous on you. Heavy with warmth, with his smell, with something clean, dark that reminds you of oolong tea, and that coppery one that's unmistakably him. The collar brushes your jaw. The sleeves swallow your hands when he drags it into place.

“You look awful,” he says.

You blink at him.

A tiny, offended laugh escapes you.

“That was so mean.”

“You’ll live,” he replies. “Can you walk.”

You think about lying.

You sway in place.

His face hardens in a way you have not seen directed at you before. Not anger at you, exactly. Anger around you.

Contained. Dangerous.

Without waiting for your answer, he hooks a hand around your upper arm and steers you out into the hallway. The party noise crashes back over you instantly, louder than before, the music obscene after the sealed bathroom quiet. You hunch instinctively into his jacket, head ducked, and realize only then that he is positioning himself just slightly in front of you, broad enough to block half the hallway from view.

“Did you throw up,” he asks without looking down.

“Yes.”

“How much did you drink.”

“Not enough for this.”

“So you do have some self-preservation.”

“Sometimes,” you mutter.

He makes a low sound that could mean anything.

The walk through the house is brief and terrible. You are too aware of everything now. Faces turning. Music pounding. Somebody trying to catch Sukuna’s attention and wisely failing when he does not even glance their way. You keep your eyes on the floor and let him guide you, one hand on your arm, the other ready at your back when your balance falters. You smell sweat and beer and stale air and underneath it all the fabric of his jacket around you, comforting in a way that would embarrass you if you had the energy for embarrassment beyond what you are already drowning in.

Outside air hits your face and you nearly moan from relief. Maybe you do moan.

It is cold enough now to raise goosebumps on your bare legs, but after the house it feels holy. You breathe hard, blinking under porch lights and the dim scatter of the street beyond. Sukuna does not slow until he reaches a dark car parked a little way down from the house.

That startles you enough to cut through the haze.

“You have a car?”

He opens the passenger door and looks at you like you have said something insulting to his ancestors.

“What did you think I did? Commute by spellcraft?”

“You are such a bitch.”

“The bitch who's rescuing your ass. Get in.”

You would laugh if your head did not feel packed with wet cotton.

Instead you let him guide you into the passenger seat. The car is cool and smells faintly like leather, coffee, and his cologne. You fumble with the seatbelt and get it twisted wrong. He leans in with a sharp little sound of impatience and takes over, one hand braced near your shoulder, the other pulling the belt clean across your body and clicking it into place.

He is close enough that you can see the dark fan of his lashes, the shape of his mouth set hard, the glint of a piercing when the streetlight catches it. You see it almost in slow motion, every detail of his face.

Your heart does something stupid and disloyal.

This is not the time for that. Not remotely.

“Thank you,” you murmur softly, because the words make it out before pride can stop them.

He shuts the door instead of answering.

The ride back is quiet.

Not the soft, companionable kind. Not at first at least. Just dense silence wrapped around the hum of the engine and the occasional wash of streetlights across the windshield. You sink into the passenger seat with his jacket still around you and try not to be sick again while clutching the fabric of it like a simple piece of clothing could protect you from yourself and your past bad decisions. Your head throbs now in a full, punishing way. Every stoplight paints the inside of the car red for a second, then green, then darkness again. Sukuna drives with one hand on the wheel, fingers tapping once against the leather every now and then in a rhythm that tells you he is thinking too much.

You look at him more than you should.

Maybe because there is nothing else to look at that stays still. Maybe because he is the only solid thing in your world right now. His jaw is set so hard you can see the muscle jump when he clenches it. His profile is severe under passing light, all sharp lines and irritation. The metal in his ear flashes silver then disappears. His mouth stays unsmiling.

You wonder where he was in the party before you texted him. Whether he really came to drag you by the ankle like he threatened. Whether he was already looking for you when he sent those messages. Whether he is angry at you, angry for you, or simply angry in general, which is often his resting state anyway.

You do not ask.

You lean your head carefully against the cool window and watch campus blur by. Your thoughts keep slipping in and out of coherence. For a second you are nauseous again. Then fine. Then terrified for no reason. Then absurdly sleepy. The drug, whatever it is, still moves through you in ugly waves. But each time panic tries to rise properly, you look at Sukuna’s hands on the wheel and it recedes a little.

That should bother you more.

Instead it just feels true.

When he finally parks outside his dorm, you blink at the building for a moment like you have never seen it before.

“Come on,” he says.

“I can walk,” you tell him, the lie arriving automatically.

You immediately prove otherwise by putting weight on the wrong foot and catching yourself against the doorframe.

He sighs. The kind of sigh he reserves for when the world is disappointing in boring, predictable ways. Then he comes around the car, opens your door, unbuckles you before you can protest, and gets one arm around you to haul you upright.

The air is colder now. Your legs feel light and useless. His hand stays firm at your side while you cross the parking lot, not coddling, not particularly gentle, just immovably there. You mumble some version of thanks, then something about how he did not have to, then something about how you are going to be okay and he should not have bothered and the words all fall over each other enough that even you know you sound out of it.

He only makes a noncommittal hum and keeps walking.

The hallways of his dorm are quiet at this hour, which feels unreal after the party. Fluorescent lights. Old carpet. Distant plumbing sounds. A door shutting somewhere down the hall. Your shoes feel loud. His keys jingle once. Then his room is there, the lock turning, the familiar space opening up around you in muted lamplight.

You have never been so relieved to see his room.

That realization is so humiliating you decide not to examine it.

He guides you straight to the bathroom first. The same little sink, the same mirror, the same shelf with spare razors and face wash and the hand towel you once mocked for being too nice for a college boy. He sets a glass of water in front of you. Then another. Then opens the medicine cabinet and shakes out a pill into his palm.

You stare at it.

He notices immediately, because of course he does.

“It’s for the headache,” he says.

You hesitate anyway, hand hovering over the sink.

Something changes in his face. Not much. Just enough. He leans one shoulder against the doorframe and holds your gaze.

“You can distrust me tomorrow,” he says. “Tonight is inconvenient for that.”

Shame prickles hot under your skin.

You do trust him. That is the terrifying part. The hesitation is not truly about him, not really. It is about the whole night, about the fact that your body betrayed you once already and now everything feels like a decision with consequences you cannot fully see. But he is watching you with that same hard, level focus he uses when he wants something done, and underneath it is an impatience that somehow makes the whole thing easier.

You take the pill.

You wash it down with the water in a few quick swallows. The glass clicks against the sink when you set it down.

“There,” you mutter with a tone you're not entitled to right now. “Happy?”

“No,” he says. “But less annoyed.”

You would smile if your head were not pounding.

Instead you rinse your mouth and wipe your face with the towel. Your reflection still looks wrecked. Less panicked now, but undeniably ruined. No makeup where it matters, hair damp around the temples, eyes heavy and glassy. Sukuna sees you in the mirror from behind, leaning there in the doorway, arms crossed, taking in the same image.

Self-consciousness hits hard and stupidly.

You straighten, tug the giant jacket closer around yourself, and say,

“I’m really grateful, but I can go back to my place now.”

His expression does not change.

Then, very evenly, he says,

“No.”

You stare at him.

“I’m not kidding. I’ll just sleep it off.”

“You’ll do that here.”

“You cannot decide that for me.”

“I just did.”

The audacity of him would almost be impressive if you were not so foggy and so aware of how little energy you have for a real argument. Still, pride rises on instinct.

“Sukuna.”

“No.”

“You are not my father.”

“Obviously. Your father sounds useless.”

You blink, offended enough to forget your dizziness for half a second.

“That is such a wild thing to say right now.”

“Yeah, and I said it anyway.” He uncrosses his arms and steps closer, not all the way into your space but enough that the small bathroom feels smaller. “You are staying until I know you’re not going to stop breathing in your sleep and ruin my fucking week.”

Your mouth falls open.

“That is not comforting.”

“It was not meant to be.”

“I can’t just stay here.”

“You can and you will.”

“I’m inconveniencing you.”

“Yes,” he says. “And yet here we are.”

He is so maddeningly calm about it that it short-circuits something in you. You want to tell him he cannot force you. You want to tell him you are perfectly capable of managing yourself. You want to cling to the version of yourself who walks into rooms bright and in control and never lets anybody decide things for her.

Instead what comes out is,

“You’re an ass.”

He steps closer still.

Maybe he is not actually leaning in that much. Maybe you are just too affected by whatever is still moving through your system. But suddenly he feels very near, all body heat and sharp attention and the hard line of his mouth.

“I need to make sure you’re not dying before the project is done,” he says quietly. “So you’re going to obey me for one night and stop being a spoiled annoying brat.”

The words should make you furious.

Instead a helpless little shiver runs through you that has nothing to do with the cold.

You hate yourself a little for that.

You hate him a little too.

But not enough to keep arguing.

Something in his face tells you this battle is over anyway. Dead serious, as always, with that impossible certainty that makes everything around him feel arranged according to his will. He is not bluffing. He is not being protective in some soft, sentimental way either. He is simply taking charge because he has decided it is necessary, and for tonight, with your thoughts fraying and your body unreliable, you do not have enough left to fight him on principle.

So you exhale and mutter,

“Control freak.”

“Yes.”

“You say that like it’s charming.”

“It isn’t. Sit down.”

You actually laugh at that, weak and unwilling, and the sound seems to ease something in the room by half a degree.

He leaves the bathroom, returns a minute later with a folded pair of sweats and a sweatshirt. His. Obviously his. The sight of them in his hands makes something tight and embarrassed twist in your chest.

“Take a shower,” he says. “Change into these.”

You look between the clothes and his face.

“A shower?”

“You smell like vomit and fraternity air. An open sewage smells better.”

“Wow.”

“You’ll feel better.”

The rude part is that he is right. Again.

So you do it.

You shut the bathroom door and peel yourself out of your party clothes slowly, clumsily, trying not to notice how wrong it feels to be standing in Sukuna’s bathroom half-drugged and barefaced, wiping away the careful version of yourself you put on before the night started. Your makeup comes off in streaks. Your eyeliner smears before it vanishes. Glitter clings stubbornly to your collarbone and temple. You tie your hair up and step under the hot water and nearly cry from relief when it hits you.

Everything softens a little under the steam.

Not fixed. Not normal. But less pointed. Less terrifying.

The smell of the party lifts from your skin. Your muscles unclench. The room still tilts slightly when you close your eyes, but the panic has worn itself down into something quieter. You stand there longer than you mean to, letting the heat work through you, trying not to think too hard about the fact that Sukuna is in the next room, probably at his desk already, probably listening for the water to stop, probably acting like this whole night is a logistical problem he intends to solve by force of will.

When you finally dry off and pull on his clothes, they hang ridiculously on you. The sweatshirt swallows your hands. The sweats bunch at the ankles. His soap is still on your skin, clean and a little citrussy. You look in the mirror and almost do not recognize yourself.

No makeup. Hair damp and loose. Hidden in clothes much too big for you. Smaller, somehow, than you felt earlier tonight. Softer. More real.

It does not help that he is going to see you like this.

It really, really does not help.

You gather your own clothes in a small heap and open the bathroom door.

Sukuna looks up from his desk immediately.

That is the first thing you notice. Not the laptop open in front of him, not the notes spread around it, not the cup of tea by his hand. Just the fact that he looks up at once, as if he has been waiting for that sound specifically.

His gaze moves over you once, from damp hair to bare face to the oversized clothes trailing off your frame.

You want to disappear.

Or bite him first so he cannot say anything.

He says nothing for a second.

Then, maddeningly neutral,

“Better.”

You stare at him.

“That’s all?”

“What did you want? A poem?”

You cross the room on slightly steadier feet and point a finger at him.

“You could at least have the decency to pretend I don’t look terrible.”

“You do not look terrible.”

The words stop you.

His eyes are already back on the screen by the time it lands.

You stand there like an idiot for one beat too long, then recover just enough to say,

“You could have led with that.”

“I prefer accuracy.”

He infuriates you, and you're grateful for that.

You shuffle toward the bed and sit, then let yourself fall backward until you are flat on the mattress, staring at the ceiling. It is familiar by now, this angle. His room from his bed, the slight crack in the paint near the corner, the shadow of the lamp, the soft sound of him typing. Except tonight everything still spins a little around the edges. Not violently anymore, just enough to make your stomach uneasy if you turn your head too fast.

He points without looking.

“Water.”

You follow the direction of his gesture and see the bottle on the nightstand.

“You better drink it all,” he says, “before you pass out.”

You turn your head just enough to glare at him.

“You are such a neat...bag.”

“Neat-freak, and yes,” he says. “Drink.”

You drag the bottle toward yourself and take a few reluctant swallows.

Then a few more.

The water tastes absurdly good. Cool, clean, grounding. You hold it against your chest afterward for a second, letting the plastic chill your skin through the sweatshirt.

The room is quiet except for the tap of keys and the occasional rustle of paper.

You listen.

That is what surprises you most, maybe. Not the fact that he brought you here, not the clothes, not the pill, not even the impossible certainty settling into your bones now that you are horizontal in his bed and his room smells like paper and tea and soap and him. It is the quiet.

No lecture.

No interrogation.

He could ask a hundred things and he does not. He could make you relive the night while your head still hurts and your pride is still bleeding from the whole thing. He could demand names, details, explanations, force you to confront how careless you were, how stupid, how unlike the sharp version of yourself you prefer to believe in.

He does none of that.

He just lets you lie there while he works.

After a few minutes, you say softly,

“I’m sorry.”

His typing stops.

“For what.”

“For ruining your night.”

He resumes after a second.

“You didn’t ruin anything.”

“I definitely did.”

“You overestimate your importance again.”

You roll your eyes at the ceiling.

“I hate how rude you are when I’m trying to be sincere.”

“I hate when you’re sincere. It never lasts.”

“That is not true...”

“It is absolutely true.”

You turn your head toward him.

He is still at the desk, profile sharp under the lamp, attention half on the screen and half clearly on you despite appearances. You can tell now when he is dividing himself that way. It has become one of those things you know about him against your own will.

“You came fast,” you say.

He does not answer immediately.

Then,

“Yes.”

“Were you already there?”

“Yes.”

That sits with you for a second.

“You really came to drag me by the ankle.”

That gets the faintest exhale through his nose. Not a laugh. But close enough that you feel it.

“I came,” he says, “because your text looked like it had been written by somebody having a stroke.”

“Mean.”

“True.”

You close your eyes briefly.

“I didn’t know who else to text.”

The words come out quieter than you intended.

Silence stretches.

When he finally answers, his voice is flatter than usual, which means he is choosing it carefully.

“You made the correct choice.”

Something about that does more to settle you than anything else tonight.

You swallow.

“I really thought,” you begin, then stop because the thought feels too big and childish once it is near your mouth.

He waits.

You open your eyes and stare at the ceiling again.

“I really thought something worse was going to happen.”

His typing stops completely this time.

When he speaks, there is iron under his voice.

“It didn’t.”

You nod once even though he is not looking.

“It didn’t,” you repeat.

You do not say why. You do not have to. The answer is sitting a few feet away at a desk, acting like this is ordinary, like dragging girls out of frat houses and dosing them with headache medicine and forcing them into his bed for monitoring purposes is just part of his scholarly process.

After that, sleep starts coming for you in strange little waves.

Your body is finally releasing its grip on panic. The hot shower, the clean clothes, the water, the pill starting to work, the steady quiet of his room — together they are dragging you downward. Your muscles feel heavy now instead of jangling. The spinning has eased into a faint drift rather than a violent pull. Your eyelids keep lowering on their own.

Still, you fight it a little.

Partly because you are embarrassed to fall asleep in his bed while he is still awake. Partly because some frayed little part of you is still afraid to let go fully after what happened.

Sukuna notices that too.

Of course he does.

“You can sleep,” he says without turning around.

“I’m not sleeping.”

“You are losing that argument by the second.”

You make a vague protesting sound.

He keeps typing.

“Drink more water.”

“You are so bossy.”

“Yes.”

You take another few swallows mostly because disobeying him would take more energy than you have.

He glances back then, just briefly. Long enough to confirm you did it. Long enough for your gaze to catch on his and stay there one second too long.

You say, before you can stop yourself, in that hazy state of mind that has you thinking if you really spoke out loud or if you just thought,

“I can really trust you not to hurt me.”

The words hang there.

You hear how they sound the instant they leave you, so you spoke them out loud.

Too vulnerable. Too plain. Not quite a question, not quite a statement. Something deeper and stranger than either.

His face changes in a way you feel more than read.

He turns his chair a little toward you. Not fully.

“No,” he says.

It is not soft and sentimental. It is just certain.

Your throat tightens.

The terrible, absurd thing is that you are one hundred percent sure he means it.

This enormous, impossible nerd with the body of a brawler and the mouth of an asshole really could break people’s bones if he wanted. You have never doubted that. You have seen it in the way he moves, in the careless strength of his hands when he lifts things or redirects you or braces against the world like he expects it to push back. He could hurt people. Easily. Terribly. You know that in the blunt animal way people know when someone is dangerous.

And yet tonight he did the opposite at every turn.

He came when you asked.

He wrapped you in his jacket.

He got you out.

He drove you here.

He gave you water.

He gave you space.

He told you what to do until your body calmed down enough to listen.

He did not ask for anything in return.

Not one smug reminder of your deal. Not one cruel little joke about how you owe him now. Not one glance that made your skin crawl. Nothing. Just this hard, irritated, terrifying competence applied entirely to keeping you safe.

You do not know what to do with that.

Maybe tomorrow you will. Maybe tomorrow you will wake up embarrassed and sharp-tongued again and figure out how to turn tonight into banter or deflection or some mutual agreement not to examine it too closely.

Tonight, though, you just lie there in his clothes with the bottle resting against your stomach and watch him in the lamp glow while sleep loosens your body piece by piece.

Your eyes keep drifting shut.

Each time they reopen, he is still there.

Once you wake enough to find him rubbing at his temple while reading something on the screen, irritation etched between his brows. Once you catch him looking toward you and pretending immediately that he was not. Once you mumble something incoherent and hear him answer,

“Go to sleep, brat,” in a voice so low it almost folds into the quiet.

At some point the jacket he wrapped around you earlier appears folded over the desk chair, and that detail makes something soft and strange uncurl inside your chest. His room feels different tonight. Not because the room itself changed. Because you did in it. Because he did. Because a place that had become familiar through snark and irritation and laziness has suddenly become something else too, something that holds one of the worst moments of your semester and somehow makes it survivable.

Your thoughts turn hazy around the edges.

You think of the party only in flashes now. Ken’s smile. The cup in your hand. The bathroom tile under your knees. Panic under fluorescent light. The door opening. Sukuna in the frame.

That image stays brightest.

You do not know when your breathing evens out enough to count as sleep. You only know that the last things you register are small and physical and steady.

The sound of keys slowing, then stopping.

The faint clink of his mug set down.

The mattress dipping just slightly near your feet, maybe because he is checking whether you are awake, maybe because he is pulling the blanket higher over you.

The quiet click of the lamp dimming.

And the knowledge, simple and heavy and impossible to argue with even half-drugged and barefaced in borrowed sweats, that you are safe here.

Then the room slides away at last, and you let it.

Sweat, ache, hands shake Heart begins to palpitate Legs twitch Twist and kick Something’s wrong Eyes wide, dilate Every shadow seems unsafe Can’t sleep, can’t eat Help me, I’m gone Well I drank, sipped, sucked it up Threw every last shred of hope in the cup Then knocked it back, world fades to black Not quenched until I drown Now where’s my soul, said I This twitching kid with the bloodshot eyes Got oh so high, failed to fly Now falling to the ground

What would make you get so battered That your bones betray you, start to shatter And you can’t relate to all the happy little night-time boys and girls

Stop. Kick. Twist. Now

Teeth clench, hands too

Won’t do what I want them to Can’t think, need drink Wrong kind of thirst But it’s done, sense won Couldn’t handle all this fun Save breath, crave death Can’t be much worse And I'm sick, sigh, can’t abide This twitching track from wet to dry I’m too old to cry, too young to die Too rabid for the pack So I’ll spit, try to hold it in Search for a sign of life within And I’ll fake a grin, until my skin Is starting to crack

What would make you get so battered That your bones betray you, start to shatter And you can’t relate to all the happy little night-time boys and girls Well you’ve got to break through, got to battle through The nights that hate you, ‘til you’re better And the shakes can’t shake you Like the happy little night-time boys and girls

So just stay cool and break through this sick delirium state

I got wasted, now I’m tasting the cruel justice of fate Can’t sleep, bones creak Must seek the night-time boys and girls

What would make you get so battered That your bones betray you, start to shatter And you can’t relate to all the happy little night-time boys and girls Well you’ve got to break through, got to battle through The nights that hate you, ‘til you’re better And the shakes can’t shake you Like the happy little night-time boys and girls

Not vanished entirely in the emotional sense, because the memory of it is still somewhere in you, waiting to be examined once you are fully awake and capable of hating yourself properly for how careless you were. But the worst of the physical aftermath has receded. Your head does not feel split open anymore. Your throat is only faintly sore from vomiting. Your body is heavy in the normal, post-sleep way instead of the terrifying, drugged way it felt earlier.

Your mind, though, is still a little blurred at the edges.

You feel functional, but not sharp. Like somebody cleaned the glass and forgot the corners. Your thoughts come through with a slight delay. Your limbs obey you, but they still seem to belong to a softer, slower version of yourself. You breathe in and smell clean cotton, paper, old wood, tea gone cool, a trace of soap that is not yours.

Then you remember where you are.

Your eyes snap open.

Dark room, dimmed by a desk lamp rather than overhead light. Sukuna’s room. His bed. The blanket pulled over you. The giant sweatshirt still on your body, sleeves pushed up now because sometime in your sleep you must have gotten warmer. The water bottle on the nightstand, half empty. Your damp hair now mostly dry, spread a little over his pillow.

And there, at the desk, Sukuna.

It takes a second for the sight to arrange itself in your mind because he does not look like the Sukuna you know first. He looks like a version of him you were not meant to see. His shoulders are still broad enough to crowd the chair, but there is something slackened in the line of them. His head tips forward every few seconds as if sleep is tugging it down by force. One elbow is on the desk. His fingers still rest over the keyboard, but not with any real intent anymore. The laptop screen throws pale blue light up into his face, catching under his eyes, along the planes of his cheekbones, over the hard line of his mouth, which tonight looks less severe simply because he is too tired to hold it that way.

He is half asleep.

Actually half asleep, not pretending indifference, not merely quieter than usual. He is working himself past the point of sense right there in the chair while the room sits in the heavy silence of sometime after midnight. You do not know the exact hour yet, only that it must be late enough to make everything feel separate from the real world.

Your gaze shifts to the laptop. There are notes open, citations, the project file, lines half rewritten.

He did keep working. Of course he did, this infuriating nerd.

He probably dragged you out of a frat house, brought you here, made sure you showered, made sure you drank water, watched your breathing until he believed you were actually okay, and then returned to the project because the project exists and he does not seem built to leave anything unfinished while consciousness remains available to him.

The thought sits strangely in your chest.

You knew he was taking care of you before you fell asleep, in a sense. You felt it in the way he moved around you, in the water, in the medicine, in the stern certainty with which he decided you were staying. But now, seeing him like this, actually seeing the cost of that care on him, seeing that he did not just check once and then leave you to the night but stayed awake, kept working, kept watch, it lands differently.

You are spoiled, yes, you never denied this.

Arrogant too. Brave in the stupid, glossy way that comes from a life where consequences usually arrive padded enough to be survived without much damage. But you are not blind. You notice things. You notice when someone means the sharp thing and when they use the sharp thing to hide the softer one. You notice the difference between control for its own sake and control born out of worry. You notice when someone does something gentle in a way that is not sentimental, not performative, not dressed up for praise.

Sukuna worried.

There is no way around that truth now. No easy joke to fold over it. No smug reinterpretation. He worried and then he acted like himself through it, which means he barked orders and insulted your intelligence and treated your wellbeing like a logistical problem he intended to solve, but underneath all of that sat worry all the same.

You stare at him too long.

The room is quiet enough that your movement should not matter much when you push yourself upright, but it does. The mattress shifts. The blanket drags softly over the sheets. That tiny disturbance is enough. Sukuna’s head lifts instantly.

Not slowly. Not drowsily.

Instantly.

His eyes are on you in the same second, alert in a way that should not belong to somebody who was moments from sleeping face-first into a laptop. It is startling, how quickly he wakes toward you specifically, like some part of him never truly went under because his attention was still anchored here, to the bed, to whether you moved, whether you needed something, whether tonight was done being cruel to you.

You sit there with the blanket pooled around your lap and your hair a little wild around your face, and for a second neither of you says anything.

Then you blink and whisper,

“You should sleep.”

His expression shifts into a frown almost on instinct, like the words annoy him before he has fully processed them.

“You need more sleep than I do.”

“You are almost falling into your computer.”

“I am not.”

“You really are,” you say, and because your mind is still soft from sleep and drug residue and the weird honesty of the hour, there is none of your usual performance in it. No teasing edge. No bratty emphasis. Just plain truth. “You look like another ten minutes and your face is going to hit the keyboard.”

He leans back a little in the chair as if to prove the opposite. It does not help his case much. If anything, the movement only makes the fatigue more obvious. He rubs once at the bridge of his nose and glances at the screen like the project itself might step in and defend him.

“I’m fine.”

“You sound deeply unconvinced.”

“I sound correct.”

“You sound exhausted.”

He gives you a look then, one of those flat, displeased looks that normally would make you grin just to annoy him further. Tonight it only makes your chest ache in that strange, quiet way again.

“This is my room,” he says, and the words are familiar enough that they almost make you smile.

He has said variations of that so many times now. Half warning, half territorial instinct.

My room. My desk. My shelf. My notes. My bed, by implication, even while he kept letting you sprawl across it every evening.

“I know,” you tell him. “That's why you should sleep in it.”

His gaze lingers on you, searching your face as if waiting for the punchline. Maybe because you do not usually offer him things without making them difficult. Maybe because care from you is normally dressed in snark too. But you are too tired to perform tonight. Too fogged. Too honestly affected by the sight of him trying and failing to stay upright.

You glance at the empty space beside you and then back at him.

“I can scoot over,” you say. “You can take half your bed back.”

He does not move at your offer.

The silence that follows is long enough to make you wonder if you accidentally said something insane. Again. Maybe you did. It sounds normal in your own head, but your own head is not currently the most reliable authority. The room is too quiet, the hour too late, your body still too tender and loosened by fear and its aftermath. An offer like that is not neutral and you know it. You know exactly how it could be read on any other night, by anybody else, and the fact that you still make it means you are either much braver than usual or simply too tired to protect yourself from the shape of it.

Sukuna keeps staring.

Not in a heated way. Not even in an annoyed way. More like he is checking for insincerity and not finding it, which bothers him.

You are barefaced. Damp-haired still at the roots. Wrapped in his clothes and half tangled in his blankets and nowhere near practiced enough right now to build your usual little walls of expression. He can probably read all of that too easily.

You clear your throat.

“I won’t be weird,” you say, and immediately hate how that sounds.

One of his brows lifts.

You sigh into the embarrassment and force yourself to continue.

“I really just want you to rest. You keep telling me this is your bed, and you are the one currently ruining your spine in that chair while your laptop is seconds away from wearing your face as a hood ornament. I’m not… I’m not doing something. I’m just saying you can sleep. You should sleep.”

That earns the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. The ghost of a smile, maybe. Or maybe just amusement at your miserable attempt to sound casual.

“You’re babbling,” he says.

“I know. Please don’t make me more self-aware than I already am.”

His eyes stay on you another beat. Then another.

It feels like waiting for weather.

Finally he exhales through his nose, closes the laptop halfway — not fully, as if even now some part of him refuses to surrender the project completely — and pushes back from the desk.

The scrape of the chair against the floor sounds enormous in the room.

“Move.”

You almost laugh from relief, though the relief itself surprises you. You did not realize you wanted him to agree this badly until he does.

You scoot at once, dragging the blanket with you and pressing yourself toward the wall side of the bed. It is a narrow dorm bed at the best of times, definitely not designed for two people, and the mattress gives under your shifting weight enough to make you hyperaware of the smallness of the space. Suddenly there is a wall behind your shoulder blades and too much room in your chest for your heart to beat the way it decides to beat.

He stands there a second with the lamp still on, looking down at the arrangement you have made.

You have left him more than half, probably. You are practically against the wall, one arm tucked under your head, knees drawn in just a little on instinct. It must look ridiculous. Like you are trying to disappear into plaster rather than share a mattress.

He scoffs.

You know that sound by now. You know his scoff for stupid scholarship articles, his scoff for professors who overstate mediocre arguments, his scoff for your worst moments, your most obvious attempts to annoy him, the things he secretly finds amusing and refuses to reward properly. This one lands somewhere between all of those.

Then he reaches past you to switch off the lamp.

Darkness folds over the room immediately, soft and deep and close, broken only by the faint wash of light from outside sneaking around the edges of the blinds. You hear him move, the rustle of clothes, the low dip of mattress beside you, and then he is there.

Actually there.

Lying by your side.

You knew that was what you offered. You knew exactly what it meant in practical terms. But knowing it and feeling it are humiliatingly different things. The bed becomes very small very fast. The air changes. His weight settles into the mattress and changes the angle of your whole body by a fraction. Heat rolls off him almost instantly, stronger than yours, denser somehow, and the line of his presence beside you is impossible to ignore.

He turns onto his side.

Facing you.

Of course he does.

It would almost be easier if he lay on his back or turned away or made this feel less deliberate. Instead he faces you in the dark, one arm bent under the pillow, body a long shadow only inches away, and suddenly all your earlier bravery becomes much less convincing. Your back presses into the wall without your permission. Your eyes, traitorous as ever, go straight to him.

You can make out the shape of his face now that your eyes adjust. His hair darker in the low light. The pale catch of one piercing when he shifts slightly. The line of his nose. The quiet rise and fall of his breathing, still not fully relaxed even as tired as he is.

This is weird.

Not objectively, maybe. Not in some massive moral sense. Two exhausted college students sharing a bed for one night because one of them got drugged and the other is too stubborn to sleep in a chair is not the most scandalous thing to happen on campus by a mile. But for you, for your body, for your poor half-recovered mind and your disastrously attentive heart, it is deeply weird.

You keep staring.

You know you are staring. You still cannot stop.

His voice comes through the dark, low and roughened by sleep.

“Stop staring at me.”

You inhale sharply because you did not realize he was that awake.

“I’m trying,” you whisper back.

That is a lie.

Or not fully a lie. You are trying a little. Mostly you are failing. His face is right there, half in shadow, and there is something unfair about how intimate darkness makes it. In daylight, in his chair, at his desk, in the rhythm of your usual evenings, Sukuna is all angles and interruptions and cruel little remarks that keep too much softness from gathering between you. Here, like this, there is nothing to hide behind except low light and your own breathing.

He is quiet for a beat.

Then he says,

“You don’t need to try and enter the wall. Relax.”

You become painfully aware of your posture.

The wall is practically imprinted on your shoulder. Your knees are tucked tighter than they need to be. Your whole body is braced with the specific stiffness of somebody trying so hard not to touch the person beside them that they become absurd about it.

Heat climbs your neck.

“I am relaxed.”

“You are lying.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.” Even half-asleep, his voice carries that same maddening certainty. “I don’t move much while sleeping. You can stop acting like I’m about to maul you.”

That would be easier if you were afraid of being mauled.

You swallow and let some of the stiffness go. Just some. Then a little more. Your shoulders ease first. Then your knees. You inch away from the wall by what cannot be more than two inches, but on this mattress it feels like a declaration. The movement brings you a touch closer to him and suddenly the heat coming off his body is unmistakable.

It is ridiculous how warm he is.

Not feverish. Not uncomfortable. Just intensely alive in the coolness of the room. You can feel the difference between his side of the bed and the air beyond it. It wraps around the front of you in a way that makes your whole body too aware again, but differently now, less sharp and more strange. He's like a furnace. Comfortable as a fireplace in a cold winter.

He notices your face even in the dark, apparently, because of course he does.

“What’s with that expression.”

You blink once, confused.

“What expression?”

“The one you’re making.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do.”

Self-consciousness hits so suddenly it is almost funny. You are lying in his bed in his clothes with your hair a mess and your thoughts nowhere near as controlled as usual, and somehow you are still trying to bluff your way through a conversation with the only person on campus who seems physically incapable of missing anything.

You look away for half a second, then back.

Your voice comes out lower than intended.

“You’re really warm.”

The words leave you and seem to suspend there.

He does not respond.

In the dim light you can only just see his face, but even that is enough to tell when something genuinely catches him off guard. It is small. A pause more than an expression. The kind of stillness that happens when he expected sarcasm and got honesty instead.

He stares at you.

You stare back, suddenly too aware of your own mouth, your own pulse, the embarrassing softness of what you just said. Not flirtatious. You did not mean it that way. It just came out because it was true, because your body noticed before your pride could intercept it.

Sukuna keeps staring that one extra beat that makes everything around him feel heavier.

Then, like some half-feral creature encountering a problem it refuses to name, he lifts one hand and places his entire palm over your face.

Not hard. Not aggressively. Just there. Odd just like him.

His hand is so big it nearly covers everything from your brow to your jaw. The heel of his palm rests warm over your chin, his palm covers your nose and most of your face, his thumb angled near your temple, the span of his fingers splayed enough that the tips reach your hairline. It is absurd. Completely absurd. A deeply annoying, deeply strange thing to do.

A laugh bursts out of you muffled and helpless against his hand.

“Thanks,” you say into his palm, voice flattened by it but the smile is there, undeniable. “Very nice.”

He does not remove it.

That should make you swat him away. Roll your eyes. Call him a freak and twist his wrist until he relents. On any other night, maybe you would. But the warmth of his hand is immediate, solid, almost embarrassingly comforting. Big enough to blot out half your face, yes, but gentle in the pressure of it. Not pressing you away. Not shoving you down. Just... there, so so warm.

You leave it where it is.

You can feel his skin warming further against yours, the roughness at the base of his fingers, the faint trace of callus against your cheek. It is such a bizarre answer to what you said that you almost want to ask what the hell is wrong with him.

But your body seems to understand before your brain does.

He did not know what to do with your softness, so he answered in the oddest version of softness available to him. Not a sweet word. Not a normal gesture. His palm over your face like he is muting you by hand and somehow taking care of you at the same time.

Weirdo.

The word floats through your head with so much affection tucked into it that you refuse to inspect it.

You close your eyes under his hand.

The darkness was already deep, now it is warmer too, smelling faintly of skin and whatever trace of soap remains on him. His hand blocks some of the cool air from reaching your face. His body heat curls against the front of you. The mattress is narrow and firm beneath your side. The wall is still behind your back but further away now, your body no longer trying to disappear into it.

Your breathing starts to slow.

His hand remains where it is.

He does not tease you. Does not remark on the way you accepted it. Does not pull back after a second once the joke is made. He simply keeps his palm there as if this is now a reasonable arrangement between the two of you.

You smile a little under it.

The smile fades into something softer, sleepier. Your mouth parts with the next breath. Your body keeps loosening without asking permission anymore. The fear that clung to your nerves earlier is too far away now to reach you properly. In its place there is only this strange quiet, the too-small bed, the impossible warmth of him, the very real fact that he stayed.

Your thoughts wander in slow circles.

You think of the bathroom floor and try not to.

You think of his jacket around your shoulders.

You think of the way he answered the phone, too calm, which meant he was already furious.

You think of the way he looked in the doorframe.

You think of the absurd tenderness of being palmed in the face like an unruly cat chose you.

Your body sinks deeper.

Sleep comes not as a drop this time, but as a slow undertow. Your limbs get heavier first. Then the space between thoughts widens. Your lips part further on a sigh you barely hear yourself make. Somewhere in all of that your breathing shifts from alert to sleeping without ever formally telling you it has changed.

His hand moves eventually.

You are almost sure of it.

Not all at once. Not lifting cleanly away. More like the pressure changes. The broad center of his palm eases off your mouth and nose. His fingers slide slightly, careful enough that the movement barely registers except as a change in warmth. The heel of his hand leaves your cheek. Then, if you are not dreaming it, if your half-drugged mind is not inventing mercy where there is only drowsy accident, his hand settles differently.

Not over your whole face anymore.

Around it.

Cupping.

His palm against the side of your cheek and jaw, thumb resting near your cheekbone.

The gentleness of it is so unexpected that your whole body seems to notice even in sleep. Not enough to wake you, not enough to pull you all the way up again, just enough that some softer instinct inside you leans into it before you can help yourself. The pad of his thumb moves once, maybe twice, a slight brushing caress along your cheekbone that is so warm and careful and unlike anything you have ever felt from anybody that your nearly-sleeping mind cannot hold it properly.

You must be dreaming.

You tell yourself that in the last little flicker of consciousness you have.

You must be.

Then the tide takes you fully.

Morning does not arrive gently.

At first it is only brightness pressing weakly through your eyelids. Then the awareness of warmth again, but much stronger this time. Then the fact that your neck feels oddly angled and one leg is tangled in something that is definitely not just your blanket. Your mind climbs toward waking slowly, still sticky at the edges, and the first clear thought you have is that you are not where you usually are.

The second clear thought is that you are holding onto something.

Your eyes open slowly.

For one beautiful, ignorant second you do not understand what you are seeing. The room is washed in pale morning light. Sukuna’s room, immediately recognizable now. The desk. The vase. The chair. The laptop closed this time. The wall. The blinds letting thin lines of light across everything.

Then your own body resolves.

You are wrapped around Sukuna’s side.

Not delicately, oh no, that would be too easy to explain. Not accidentally in some subtle, defensible way. No. Thoroughly. One arm across his torso, your cheek against his chest, one leg hooked over his thigh, your body clinging to his side with the shameless commitment of a koala attached to a tree trunk.

You stop breathing.

Horror hits first because horror is easy and familiar and practical.

What the fuck.

Oh my god.

You jerk your gaze upward.

Sukuna is awake.

Very awake.

Lying flat on his back, one arm stretched stiffly above the blanket, the other trapped somewhere beneath or around you, impossible to tell from the angle. Every visible line of him is taut. Not strained exactly, but held. Controlled. Suspiciously motionless. Like if he moves one inch something catastrophic might happen — not to him, not physically, but in the atmosphere between you.

He stares at the ceiling with the expression of a man enduring an extremely strange military exercise without complaint.

The instant he feels you realize it, his eyes shift down to you.

Neither of you speaks.

It's a long, weird and tense moment right there.

Your entire body goes hot.

Not just your face. Your entire body. Heat floods through you so fast it almost makes you dizzy again. Because yes, you are clinging to him like a stuffed animal. Because yes, he is completely awake and has apparently been lying there not moving so as not to wake you. Because yes, his body under yours is solid and real and warm in a way that makes last night’s sleepy observation feel pathetic by comparison.

You scramble backward so quickly the blanket snarls around your ankle.

“Oh my God.”

Your voice comes out wrecked with sleep and humiliation. You push yourself up on your elbows, then your hands, trying to untangle yourself without kneeing him somewhere unforgivable.

“Oh my God, why didn’t you wake me up.”

He stays on his back a second longer, like he is waiting to see whether you are done panicking.

Then he turns his head slightly toward you, expression unreadable.

“You needed some more sleep.”

“That's— that's not a good reason!”

“It is the only one you’re getting.”

You stare at him in disbelief. His hair is messy from sleep. There is a crease in the pillow near one cheek. He looks tired still, though much better than he did at nearly two in the morning, and unfairly handsome in the brutal kind of morning light that should have been less forgiving. And he is acting as if you did not just wake up physically attached to half his body.

“I was sleeping on top of you.”

“Exaggeration doesn’t improve your situation, you know.”

“I was wrapped around you!”

That seems, finally, to make something flicker at the corner of his mouth. Not enough to be called a smile, that would be new. Just enough to suggest that underneath all that composure, some part of him is entertained by your suffering.

“You said you wouldn’t be weird,” he replies and you immediately wanna kill him and die.

You make a helpless sound somewhere between outrage and despair and bury your face in your hands for one second because there is no dignity left to preserve here. Not a scrap. You offered him half his own bed out of genuine concern and ended up glued to his side by sunrise like an emotionally damaged housepet.

When you lower your hands again, he has finally shifted enough to sit up slightly against the headboard. The movement is careful, as if he is making sure you have fully untangled yourself first. He does not comment on the way your cheeks are burning. Does not mention whether he woke during the night and found you there. Does not tell you if he noticed before you did. He only looks at you, calm and deeply infuriating.

“You look less dead,” he says.

That is so like him that you nearly laugh in spite of yourself.

“You have an incredible gift,” you mutter, “for making every tender moment revolting.”

“There has not been a single tender moment.”

You look at him.

Then at the morning light.

Then back at him.

He lifts one brow, daring you to argue.

You remember his hand on your face. On your cheek. That thumb against your cheekbone. The strange warmth of it. The softness.

Did that happen?

You cannot be sure anymore. Morning has the unpleasant power to make night feel half fictional, especially nights like that one, strung between panic and sleep and the blur of something nasty leaving your system. Maybe you dreamed it. Maybe not. Looking at him now does not help. His face gives you nothing useful. Only that same severe calm, only the slightest exhaustion under it, only the maddening sense that whatever gentleness exists in him has to be excavated from a quarry of pride and teeth.

Still, you ask before you can stop yourself.

“Did you sleep at all?”

He watches you a second longer than necessary, maybe recognizing the real question buried under that easier one.

“Enough.”

“That is not very convincing.”

“I don’t need to convince you.”

“Clearly not, since you seem thrilled to suffer for no reason.”

He looks toward the clock.

“It’s after nine. That no reason has a deadline.”

You follow his glance automatically and then groan because right, the project. The actual project. The one that started all of this. It is absurd that life can keep moving at all after a night like the one you had, and yet there it is, waiting, due date intact, indifferent to drugged drinks and near-misses and waking up wrapped around the most impossible man on campus.

You swing your legs carefully over the side of the bed and sit there for a moment, gathering yourself. The room is brighter now, the shapes of everything familiar again in morning light. Your body feels better than it has any right to. Tired, yes. A little tender. But not shattered. Not ruined. Not poisoned by lingering panic. The headache is gone. The blur is faint enough now that you trust your hands, your legs, your words.

Sukuna made sure of that.

The realization arrives quieter this time, less shocking than during the night but no less real. He made sure. He stayed awake. He monitored you. He shared the bed when you asked because he was too tired to argue and maybe because he knew you were not playing games. He did not wake you when you attached yourself to him in your sleep. He lay there and let you rest.

Something shifts inside you around that truth.

Not all at once. Not even in some dramatic click like you see in movies.

A small rearranging is what you get. Another piece of the image you made of him falling away.

You glance back at him over your shoulder.

He is watching you again, obviously. He always is.

“What,” he says.

You wet your lips.

“Thank you.”

He goes very still.

Not because gratitude shocks him. More because you are saying it now, in the bright and obvious morning, with none of the haze of the night to excuse it.

You make yourself continue because if you stop now you never will.

“For last night. For all of it. Getting me out of there. Making me stay. Not…” You look down at the floor for a second, then back up. “Not making it worse.”

His face changes by so little it would be easy to miss if you did not know him now.

Finally he says,

“Try not to do it again.”

You almost laugh.

“That’s your response?”

“That and you owe me breakfast.”

“There it is.”

“You expected nobility from me. That was your first mistake.”

The laugh comes anyway this time, quiet but real, and something in the room eases with it. He gets out of bed then, unfolding himself from the narrow mattress with sleepy stiffness he would probably deny if accused. He is all angles and quiet menace again in daylight, but your body remembers too much now to believe the whole performance.

Not that the menace is fake. Just that it is not the whole of him.

He crosses to the desk, lifts the laptop, checks something, then closes it again with finality.

“What are you doing,” you ask.

“Giving you ten minutes before I start insulting your lack of efficiency.”

“You are such a nightmare.”

“And yet you slept on me voluntarily, hm?”

You make a noise of outrage and grab the nearest pillow on reflex. He has already turned away, but you can see the satisfaction in the line of his shoulders all the same. He knows exactly what he just did to you.

You throw the pillow.

He catches it without looking.

Then he sets it neatly back on the bed and says,

“Ten minutes.”

You stare at him while your heart does one more humiliating little jump in your chest, less wild now, less frightening than during the night, but no less present.

Somewhere between the party and the bathroom and the car and the bed and his palm over your face and the morning light on his impossible composure, something changed. You do not know what to call it yet. You are not stupid enough to give it a name too soon. But you feel it all the same, moving just beneath your skin.

You stand slowly, still wrapped in his clothes, still carrying the warmth of his side in your body like a secret, and realize with a strange, sinking sort of certainty that going back to your old routine is not going to be as easy as you thought.

Because now you know what Sukuna looks like when he worries.

Now you know what it feels like when he chooses to take care of you.

And now, worst of all, you know how safe it feels to wake up tangled around him.

If someone asked you when it started, when you started to notice some changes, you would probably roll your eyes and say something dramatic like the moment you woke up wrapped around Sukuna like an idiot and realized he had let you sleep. Or maybe you would say it began in the fraternity bathroom, when his voice came through the phone too calm, too controlled, and you understood before he even found you that you were going to be safe.

If you were being honest, though, it starts in smaller places than that. In quieter ones.

In the stupid accumulation of choices you do not mean to make until one day you look at your own routine and realize you have been rearranging your life around a man you once intended to use for a grade and a kiss.

The first thing to shift is practice.

You are not giving up volleyball for a literature project and a giant asshole with a laptop. You are not insane. But you do start moving things where you can. You trade one conditioning slot with a teammate who likes early mornings more than any sane person should. You tell coach you would rather do one set of drills before class than after because you focus better that way, which is true enough that she accepts it without much suspicion. You start paying attention to how wrung out you feel after the more punishing sessions, how useless you become when your legs ache and your shoulders are tight and your brain wants sugar and sleep more than it wants nineteenth-century suffering.

At first you tell yourself it is about the grade.

You do not want to show up to Sukuna’s dorm limp with exhaustion and expect him to drag your half-dead mind through all the remaining work. That would be embarrassing now, in a different way than before. Before, laziness felt almost like a style choice, some bratty little game between the two of you. Now it feels more personal than that. Because now you know what he looks like when he is exhausted and still trying. Now you know what it means when he stays awake for you. You cannot, in good conscience, keep wandering into his room dead on your feet and hoping his intelligence will do the work of two people.

That thought annoys you.

Not because it is wrong, but because it means you have started caring in a direction that is difficult to joke away.

So you reschedule what you can. You eat a little better before going over. You stop pretending reading the assigned texts is a burden equivalent to war. You still complain, because complaining is one of your foundational rights as a pretty girl with opinions, but the complaining has changed. It no longer means refusal. It just means you are still yourself.

And you are, still.

You still walk through campus like it likes you. People still turn toward you more easily than away. Professors still soften half a degree when you smile and ask a thoughtful question. Boys still offer to carry things you do not need carried. Girls still loop their arms through yours and tell you gossip like you are a confessional booth with better hair. The rugby boys still greet you as if you are some patron saint of their chaos whenever you pass near the athletic center.

The difference is that lately, when they ask where you have been, you do not have the answer they expect.

They catch you one afternoon outside the gym after you finish stretching, all loud shoulders and ugly team hoodies and too much confidence for people who voluntarily get tackled for fun. Their captain is there too, broad and sun-reddened and always carrying himself like any room he enters should immediately become his. He grins when he sees you and spreads his arms as if your absence has injured him personally.

“There she is! We were starting to think you went respectable on us.”

You snort and adjust your bag higher on your shoulder.

“Respectable is a disgusting accusation.”

“Then where have you been?” one of the others asks. “You used to crash our parties at least often enough to remind us women existed.”

“Please,” you say, deadpan. “As if you need reminding.”

The captain puts a hand over his chest.

“That was cruel. I asked a sincere question.”

“No, you didn’t. You asked in a rugby way, which means badly and with too much volume.”

That gets the expected laughs. They bend easy around you. They always have. Big men are often oddly simple when you know how to angle your voice just right. A little mockery, a little charm, a look that says they are being ridiculous but not dangerously so, and they become eager to take whatever role you hand them as long as it still lets them feel like men.

You know this. You have always known it. You grew up learning what kinds of smiles lower shoulders, what kinds of teasing can turn a tense interaction playful, what kinds of glances make boys trip over themselves trying to impress you. You do it without thinking now. Most days it feels harmless. Some days it feels like power. Some days it feels like an old language you speak because everyone expects it and it is easier than resisting.

The captain hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his hoodie and asks again,

“Seriously. Where have you been?”

You shrug.

“Busy studying.”

That makes them howl.

Not because they think you are stupid. Quite the opposite. The reaction is immediate admiration, theatrical and easy and annoyingly genuine.

“See, that’s why she’s smarter than all of us.”

“She’s going to graduate with honors and leave the rest of us in the dirt.”

“I always said she had her priorities straight.”

“If only she’d apply those priorities to improving her beer pong aim.”

You grin despite yourself.

“My beer pong aim is emotionally intuitive.”

“Your beer pong aim is trash.”

“Study harder and maybe you’ll learn nuance,” you tell him, and lift your chin in a little parting gesture. “I have to shower. Try not to destroy public property while I’m gone.”

They laugh again. Someone says, “Smart girl,” with the kind of open, admiring tone that makes the whole exchange dissolve into easy warmth. None of them presses. None of them imagines your studying involves sitting on Sukuna’s bed with your shoes kicked off while he tears apart an academic source and you argue about whether a character is tragic or simply insufferable.

If only they knew.

The thought almost makes you laugh as you walk away.

Because yes, if only they knew.

If only they knew you are not just showing up anymore. You are helping.

Actually helping.

It starts in the most humiliatingly simple way — you do not want to feel stupid in front of him more often than necessary.

Sukuna has this infuriating habit of muttering things under his breath that are too interesting to ignore and too contemptuous to let pass without comment. At first you only half-listen, the way you would eavesdrop on weather. Then one night he says, almost to himself,

“This entire section is pretending class is not the real reason she gets punished for desiring anything.”

You are sprawled on his bed with your notebook open, highlighter uncapped, actually reading for once. The sentence lands hard enough that you push yourself up on one elbow.

“What do you mean?”

He does not look back.

“What do you think I mean.”

“I think you are annoying and unclear on purpose.”

“That is not an answer.”

You sigh and sit up properly, your hair falling over one shoulder.

“I think you mean the moral language is fake. Like they call it a punishment for desire, but really they are punishing the fact that she wants outside the role she is allowed.”

He turns halfway in his chair to look at you. Really look now. Not with surprise exactly, he knows you are intelligent. More like recalibration.

“Yes,” he says after a second. “That.”

You hate how much satisfaction that gives you.

After that, it gets easier to join in. Not because the work gets easier, but because you stop pretending distance is a virtue. When he mutters about a critic overreading symbolism, you ask why. When he says a poem’s speaker is full of shit, you ask in what way. When he shoves a book toward you and tells you to read page one hundred and twelve because the author is actually useful there, you roll your eyes and read it anyway, then end up arguing over two sentences for half an hour.

Your involvement starts to leave marks on the project that even you can see.

The file gets thicker with your comments. Your notes become less decorative and more usable. You start showing up with articles you found yourself, not always the right ones, but sometimes good enough to earn a nod instead of a correction.

Once you bring an essay that is genuinely valuable and Sukuna reads the abstract in silence, then says,

“Finally. Proof you are not just ornamental.”

You throw a pen at him for that.

He catches it. Of course.

Then there is the library conversation, which in hindsight should have stayed a fantasy.

It starts because you get tired of the dorm room sometimes, tired in the sensory way rather than the emotional one. His room is comfortable now in a way that feels dangerous to admit because you're getting used to stay there, to spend time with him there. Too comfortable. The bed. The smell. The routine of arriving after practice or class or dinner and settling into his space as if you belong there just a little.

You start worrying, without saying it out loud, that maybe you are becoming too used to it.

Too used to him at his desk.

Too used to being looked at by him in the private rhythm of his own room.

So one day while you are both working and the afternoon light is slanting across the desk and he is three seconds from calling an entire field of criticism useless again, you say,

“We could go to the library tomorrow.”

His typing stops.

That by itself tells you a lot.

He turns slowly in his chair and squints at you like you have suggested arson.

“Why.”

You shrug as if the suggestion is casual, because it kind of is.

“Because normal students study in places other than your cave.”

“This is not a cave.”

“It is a little bit a cave.”

“It has windows.”

“So does prison.”

That earns a flat stare.

You grin.

“My point is that maybe a change of environment would be nice.”

“For whom.”

“For both of us.”

“No.”

You kick lightly at the edge of his mattress with your foot.

“You didn’t even consider it.”

“I did. The answer is still no.”

“Why.”

He turns back to the laptop.

“Because people are irritating.”

“You are around people in class.”

“That is class. There are rules.”

“You are around people in whatever sport you claim to practice and refuse to name.”

“That is different.”

“How.”

He finally looks over his shoulder.

“Because there I am allowed to hit things. And people.”

You laugh so hard you have to cover your mouth for a second.

Still, you keep pushing over the next couple days. Not relentlessly — small comments, suggestions, teasing remarks about his territorial habits, questions about whether he is ever going to let the world see him voluntarily.

Eventually, partly because you are annoying and partly because he has started taking your actual participation more seriously, he gives in with the expression of a man agreeing to surgery without anesthetic.

“Fine,” he says one afternoon. “One time.”

You clap a hand over your heart.

“Growth. I’m witnessing growth.”

“You are witnessing my patience dying.”

“Same difference.”

So the next day you meet at the library.

He arrives looking like he regrets being born.

That part would be funny even if you did not know him, but because you do know him now, because you can already read his moods in the set of his shoulders and the exact amount of tension in his jaw, it becomes almost endearing. He stands just outside the entrance, backpack slung over one shoulder, coffee in hand, eyes narrowed at the building as though it has insulted him and his whole lineage just by being there.

You wave from the steps.

He walks up with all the enthusiasm of an execution march.

“This better be worth it.”

“It’s a library, not trench warfare.”

“It is full of undergraduates.”

“So is your dorm.”

“My dorm contains only one undergraduate I am obligated to tolerate.”

You smile sweetly.

“I feel cherished.”

He looks at you, then at the doors, then at you again as if weighing whether it is still possible to leave. In the end he follows you in.

The library itself is fine at first.

Quiet enough. Bright enough. Smelling of paper and carpet and whatever industrial cleaner all institutions secretly share. You find a table on the third floor near a window, tucked far enough into the stacks that foot traffic is light. You spread out books. He opens the laptop. You steal his coffee for one sip and nearly choke because he still drinks it too strong.

He says,

“That is theft.”

You cough and hand it back.

“That is punishment.”

For almost an hour it goes well. Better than expected, even. Maybe because the library version of silence is different from his dorm. Less intimate. More neutral. You can hear pages turning somewhere nearby, the low squeak of cart wheels, the occasional whispered conversation several stacks over.

Sukuna is still Sukuna, of course. Still muttering when he dislikes a sentence. Still marking passages with vindictive precision. Still correcting you whenever you get sloppy. But you are focused too, and the project is close enough to finished now that everything feels more exact, more purposeful. You are doing finishing work, smoothing the argument, tightening the presentation notes, checking citations.

At one point you catch him already rewriting a paragraph you drafted and say,

“Hey.”

He does not stop typing.

“What.”

“That was mine.”

“It was weak.”

“That is so rude.”

“Doesn't make it less true.”

You lean over and scan what he changed.

Dammit. It is better.

You hate that.

He notices your expression without needing to look.

“You’re sulking.”

“I’m evaluating.”

“You’re sulking because I fixed it.”

“You could at least pretend you hate editing my work less than you do.”

His mouth twitches.

“I don’t hate editing your work.”

You lift your brows.

“I hate that you are making me say kind things in public,” he amends.

You laugh quietly enough not to earn a librarian’s glare.

By the time you leave, the sun is lower and both of you are a little frayed in the satisfying way that comes from actual intellectual work. You pack slowly, stretching your wrists, stacking books, talking in low voices about one final point you still want to sharpen tomorrow. There is a little convenience store just off the library entrance, and on impulse you insist on boba because you have earned it.

Sukuna says boba is for children and weaklings.

You make him come anyway.

He buys one for himself after pretending he will not.

You choose a sweeter one. He chooses something darker and less cheerful, which you tell him is deeply in character and he tells you to mind your own damn drink.

The cups are cool in your hands when you step outside. The seal film is tight and slightly fogged from the temperature difference. You stick the straw through yours with a satisfying pop and take the first drink while you walk. Sweet, cold, perfect after dry library air. Sukuna is beside you with his own cup in hand, bag over one shoulder, moving with that same quiet self-possession he always has in public. People look at him. They always do. Some because he is large enough to demand it, some because of the tattoos, some because his face is impossible to ignore once seen. More than one glance slides from him to you and back again.

You are used to that now too.

Used to being seen near him sometimes. Used to the assumptions people might make. You do not think too hard about which assumptions those are because the answers would probably annoy you.

You are halfway down the path toward the residence halls when chaos steps out of nowhere wearing a rugby hoodie.

At first you do not register him beyond shape and movement. Just a big body angling toward yours from the side path, broad enough to interrupt the flow of walking without quite touching either of you. Then your brain catches up. Rugby captain. Same one from outside the gym. Same shoulders, same self-important gait, same face that always looks like it has been told yes too often.

There are others behind him.

Three, maybe four. Also rugby, probably. Hanging back just enough to pretend they are not part of whatever this is while obviously being part of it.

Sukuna stops because there is a person in his path.

You stop because he does.

For one second you are only confused. The captain plants himself there like this is a dramatic movie confrontation and not a university walkway between the library and the dorms. He looks at Sukuna, not you, with that special kind of righteous stupidity only men full of secondhand rumor seem able to achieve.

“I heard,” he begins, too loud already, “you’ve been going around blackmailing girls into hanging out with you.”

Your brows furrow so hard you actually feel it hurting.

Sukuna does not move. He does not even blink at first. He just stands there with the boba cup in one hand, unreadable in the way that means danger only if you know him.

The captain keeps going, because men like him always think the first stupid sentence deserves a sequel.

“And dragging them back to your dorm because you’re too much of a freak to get girls any other way.”

The world seems to stop for one deeply stupid heartbeat.

Then, before you can help it, the words leave your mouth.

“What the fuck.”

Your voice comes out sharp enough that even the guys behind him shift a little.

You look up at Sukuna instinctively. From the side, his face gives you almost nothing. Almost. But his hand on the boba cup has tightened. Not visibly enough for strangers, maybe. For you, yes. You see the pressure in his fingers, the minute change in the plastic. It is the only sign you get that the words landed as hard as they should have.

You do not need to defend him. The rational part of your brain knows that. You are a girl with a sweet drink standing between two men built like sports injuries. If one of them decides to throw a punch, your opinion is not going to stop the impact.

Still, your mouth works before fear does.

“Cut the crap,” you say. “He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

The captain finally looks at you, like he forgot you were there or maybe expected you to stay ornamental while he performed whatever savior fantasy this is.

“You don’t have to pretend, doll,” he says, and the pity in his voice is so offensive you nearly laugh. “We already know what’s going on. You don’t have to keep hanging around him because he’s got something on you. If he’s blackmailing you, just say it. We’ll handle it.”

For one bizarre second you genuinely wonder if maybe you are still having some kind of delayed bad reaction because there is no way this conversation is real. No way this idiot has assembled a little posse and ambushed you outside the library because a bunch of girls started gossiping and his male savior instincts got a hard-on.

It is too absurd. Too stupid. Too perfectly male in the worst possible way.

You feel almost lightheaded from the force of it.

“Where,” you ask, very carefully, “did you even hear something this stupid?”

He puffs up a little, as if being questioned is an invitation to become more heroic.

“People are talking.”

“Then people are morons.”

“Look, you don’t have to cover for him.”

That does it.

You step forward before you fully decide to. One second you are at Sukuna’s side, the next you are between them, nearly sandwiched by pure bad judgment and indignation like a damn chihuahua between two wild buffaloes.

You jab one finger right into the captain’s chest because sometimes men need physical punctuation to understand a sentence.

“Cut. The. Crap,” you tell him, steepled finger poking and punctuating your demand on his chest. “And stop talking shit you know nothing about.”

He looks down at your finger, then at your face, and for the first time tonight seems to realize you are not playing along in any version of this fantasy. That you are not grateful. Not secretly relieved. Not waiting to be rescued.

Sukuna is silent behind you.

You feel his eyes drop to the top of your head from where he stands. You do not need to look to know it. The awareness is physical all the same, a line of attention down your spine.

The captain takes a half-step back.

Not much. Enough.

You keep your finger there another beat just to make the point, then you lower your hand and go back to Sukuna’s side with a furious exhale, heart beating harder now less from fear than from rage. The whole situation is so humiliating on his behalf and insulting on yours that you can barely see straight.

You open your mouth to say something else.

Sukuna beats you to it.

“The problem with men like you,” he says, voice low and almost bored, “is that you talk too much shit and fold immediately when a pretty girl bats her eyelashes at you.”

The insult lands with surgical precision.

You hear it happen in real time. The ego wound. The hit straight to whatever pathetic structure is holding the captain upright. Because yes, men are fucking stupid. Not all of them, maybe, but enough of them, and especially this kind.

Loud boys with teams behind them and muscles as their first language. They can tolerate being told they are wrong. Sometimes. They can even tolerate being publicly corrected if the tone is soft enough. But call them easy. Call them weak in front of the girl they meant to impress. Call them susceptible. Suddenly they remember violence because it is simpler than feeling small.

The captain’s face changes.

You see it a half-second before he moves, which is still not enough time to stop anything.

He swings.

Everything that happens next splits into flashes.

Your boba cup leaving your hand because shock makes your fingers open. The cold splash against the pavement. Sukuna’s cup dropping too. The thud of both plastic lids bursting and pearls scattering like stupid little black beads across the ground.

Sukuna’s arm hauling you back hard enough that your body stumbles behind him. The rush of air where the punch should have connected. The captain’s momentum carrying him just slightly too far because he aimed for a face and found empty space.

Then Sukuna moves.

Not wildly. Not angrily even, not in the messy way most people think of fights. He moves with horrifying economy. One hand catches the captain’s wrist after the missed punch. The other finds his elbow. There is a pivot — sharp, controlled, efficient — and suddenly the captain is no longer a man throwing a punch but a body being folded by someone who understands leverage too well.

It happens so fast your mind arrives late.

One blink and the captain is bent forward.

The next and his arm is behind his back at an angle that makes your own shoulder hurt in sympathy.

By the time the rest of your thoughts catch up, he is already on the ground. Stomach down. Face twisted toward the pavement. Sukuna’s knee planted hard against his lower back. One hand controlling the trapped arm, the other braced with such calm precision that the whole thing looks almost casual.

It clearly is not casual for the captain.

The sound that comes out of him is more outrage than pain at first. Then pain joins it. His free hand scrabbles against the ground once. Uselessly.

You stare.

It costs Sukuna nothing.

That is the most shocking part. Not the violence itself. You already knew, abstractly, that he could hurt people. You already knew his body was not decoration. But seeing it like this, seeing how little effort it takes him to immobilize someone larger than most men, someone used to throwing his weight around, is another thing entirely. There is no strain in him. No sloppiness. No adrenaline-fueled chaos.

Just control. Complete and immediate.

The other rugby guys rush forward then, suddenly very alarmed now that their captain’s masculinity is face-down on the pavement.

You find your voice before they can turn it into something worse.

“Grab your idiot captain and get the fuck out of here,” you snap, louder than you expected your voice could go. “Before I report every one of you for assaulting students outside the library.”

That stops them better than fear would have.

Maybe because fear would challenge them. Authority is different. Rules. Reports. Student conduct. Real consequences that involve paperwork and coaching staff and maybe suspension if anyone decides to be serious. Their faces change the second the word assault lands. The confrontation stops being a guy thing and becomes an institutional one.

They hesitate.

Sukuna does not.

He keeps the captain pinned with exactly the same calm as before, gaze on the others now, cold enough that even from the side it makes the air feel thinner.

One of the boys — shorter, less committed-looking than the rest — puts both hands out slightly in a placating gesture.

“All right. All right. We’re going.”

“Then pick up your trash,” you say, furious enough not to care that the phrase is childish. “Including him.”

The captain hisses something from the ground that does not form words properly because Sukuna shifts the angle on his arm by what cannot be more than half an inch.

That sound, finally, seems to persuade everyone that dignity is no longer recoverable here.

Sukuna lets go only when the other boys are close enough to take over. He removes his knee from the captain’s back and releases the arm in one fluid movement, then steps away at once. No theatrical shove. No last kick. No threat. He simply lets the man have his own body back once it is clear the lesson has landed.

The captain rolls onto one hip, clutching his shoulder and elbow with his good hand, face twisted with pain and humiliation. He does not meet your eyes. He does not meet Sukuna’s either. The others haul him up between them in a haphazard cluster of wounded pride and muttered curses.

You lift your chin and say,

“Go.”

This time they do.

Just like that. The whole ugly spectacle dissolves into retreating backs and a limping captain and the scattered remains of two obliterated boba teas on the pavement. The path goes quiet again in the strange, embarrassed way public spaces do after brief violence. A couple students at the far end pretend not to stare. Somebody exiting the library slows, senses trouble is over, keeps walking.

You look at the mess on the ground.

Then at Sukuna.

Then at his hand, flexing once at his side now that the adrenaline part is done, though he would probably kill you for calling it adrenaline.

“Are you good,” you ask.

The question comes out softer than everything else did.

He looks at the ruined drinks, then at you, then toward the direction the rugby boys disappeared.

“I’m not entertaining your ideas anymore,” he says. “I’m sticking to research in my dorm.”

You actually almost laugh, the absurdity of that being his first concern colliding with the leftover shock in your body. Your pulse is still too high. The image of him dropping that man is still flashing in your head. And here he is, acting like the real casualty is the failure of public studying as an institution.

“That is your takeaway?”

“Yes.”

“That didn’t scare you even a little?”

He lifts one shoulder.

“Should it have.”

You do not answer because the truthful answer is not flattering to anyone involved.

What scares you is not that he handled it. It is how easily he handled it. How fast. How completely. How the sight of his arm dragging you behind him is now engraved somewhere low in your body alongside all the other inconvenient things he has done to you.

You walk again because standing there is stupid now.

The path toward the residence halls feels different afterward, charged with the awkward aftertaste of conflict. Your hands feel too empty without the boba. You keep rubbing one thumb against your other palm because your body has not fully remembered how to calm down yet. Sukuna walks beside you with the same broad, quiet stride as always, which annoys you because it emphasizes how much steadier he is than you.

After a few moments you say,

“Did that kind of thing happen to you a lot?”

He does not answer immediately.

The pause stretches. You know enough by now to let it. Pushing him when he is deciding whether to hand you something real rarely works. Better to let him turn the thought over and choose his own level of mercy.

So you wait.

Your footsteps sound too loud in your own ears. Somewhere across the quad somebody is laughing. A bicycle passes behind you. Life resumes with terrible indifference.

Finally he says,

“I’m used to idiots.”

You glance at him.

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“No,” he agrees. “It wasn’t.”

Another few steps.

Then,

“I’m used to violent people too.”

The words are simple enough. Flat. But something under them opens anyway.

You look straight ahead again because looking at him while he says something like that feels like too much. You are not sure why. Maybe because you know he is not just talking about rugby captains. Not just about random men posturing on walkways.

He means something older than that. More lived-in. Something that shaped the way he carries himself through rooms, expecting hostility before curiosity, contempt before understanding.

He keeps speaking before you can decide whether to respond.

“People like him,” he says, “people like the rugby boys, the frat boys, half the campus — people like you — grew up making people like me feel like freaks.”

It lands hard enough that you nearly miss a step.

He says it without looking at you. Without heat. That somehow makes it so much worse. If he spat it at you, you could defend yourself. If he turned it into an accusation, you could argue nuance. You could say you never did that exactly, never cornered somebody on a walkway, never started rumors about blackmail, never played vigilante with male ego and gossip. But he does not frame it as a crime. He frames it as a category.

People like you.

And that is true.

Not in detail. Not in intent. But in type.

You are exactly the kind of person the world has always bent toward. Pretty. Social. Appropriately feminine when it suits you, appropriately sharp only when it is entertaining. The kind of girl around whom boys puff themselves up and other girls form constellations. The kind of person who belongs everywhere by default and only has to notice exclusion when it chooses to.

The kind of person who could, very easily, laugh at the wrong boy in high school and make his entire week hell without ever knowing the scale of what she did.

You swallow.

The lump that forms in your throat is immediate and ugly. Not because you think he is accusing you personally of his whole life. He is not. That would somehow be easier. No, what hurts is that he is right in a way larger than blame. You come from the side of the world that teaches people like him what it means to be seen as wrong before they speak.

And yes, there is irony in it now. Fate is such a bitch. A stupid project, a lazy bargain, one party gone wrong, and suddenly you are walking across campus with the exact kind of man people would have warned you away from years ago while he quietly tells you that people like you built the cage he grew up in.

You go quiet.

It feels like the only honest thing to do for several steps. You need the silence to think and you hate that he gives it to you without making it easier.

Because the truth is complicated.

You were not cruel in the ways other people were cruel. You were not the leader of any social firing squad. You did not go out of your way to isolate boys who looked strange or talked differently or moved through the world like it was always one inch too hostile.

But you also did not need to. That is part of the problem. People like you do not have to actively wound in order to uphold the shape of the room.

Sometimes you only have to belong to it.

The realization tastes bitter.

When you finally speak, your voice is quieter than usual.

“I’m sorry.”

He turns his head enough to glance at you.

You stare stubbornly ahead because the apology feels too raw to survive eye contact.

He says nothing.

You try again, hating how inadequate it sounds.

“I don’t even know exactly what I’m apologizing for. I just…” You breathe out slowly. “I think I mean I’m sorry for being the kind of person who made that true.”

The sentence sits between you.

It feels clumsy and incomplete, but you do not know how to make it better. There is no elegant way to apologize for a category. No clean phrasing for I did not mean to be built by a world that bruised you and rewarded me for not noticing.

Sukuna is quiet long enough that you begin to regret speaking at all.

Then he chuckles.

Briefly. Softly. Not unkindly, which somehow embarrasses you more than cruelty would have.

You look at him then, startled.

He is not laughing at you exactly. More at the whole strange situation, perhaps. At your earnestness. At the fact that you, of all people, are now walking around apologizing to him for social architecture while his hand still probably remembers the shape of some idiot’s elbow.

By the time you reach the turnoff toward your buildings, the tension has changed again. Not gone. Just absorbed into the larger, stranger thing the two of you have become to each other over the past weeks.

You slow to a stop outside the path that splits toward your residence hall.

Next week suddenly feels important. The finishing touches. The end of the project. The fact that all of this — every study session, every bickered paragraph, every strange hour in his room — has been moving toward an ending whether you wanted to think about that or not.

You adjust the strap of your bag and say,

“I’ll meet you at your dorm tomorrow.”

He nods once.

“We start on the finishing touches.”

Another nod.

You hesitate.

Then, because apparently you are incapable of letting sincerity die cleanly, you say it again.

“I’m... really sorry.”

This time you do look at him.

He looks back, unreadable in the dimming light. Tired, maybe. A little sharper around the edges after what happened. Still carrying himself with that unnerving composed violence that now lives in your mind next to the sight of him half-asleep at his desk, next to his hand over your face in the dark, next to waking up wrapped around him like a fool.

Before you can decide whether the second apology was unnecessary, he lifts one hand.

You go very still because you don't know what's going on.

He places his entire palm over your face.

Exactly like that night.

The warmth hits first. Then the absurdity. Then the recognition.

You freeze for half a heartbeat because memory is physical and immediate, because his hand is once again too large and too sure and somehow gentler than it has any right to be.

Then your body remembers before your pride can interfere.

You relax into it.

The laugh that escapes you is small and helpless and pleased in spite of yourself.

Weirdo.

“Thanks,” you say, voice muffled under his palm. “Very nice.”

That gets him.

Not visibly much. But enough. Enough that you hear the air shift around his next breath, enough that you know he remembers too, remembers the dark room and the narrow bed and your face under his hand. For one second the whole day collapses inward around that private little gesture, turning it into something that belongs only to the two of you.

Then he takes his hand away.

You miss the warmth immediately, which is mortifying.

So you giggle instead, because that is less revealing than standing there looking like the loss of his hand on your face constitutes a genuine emotional event.

He gives you one of those long, unreadable looks that always makes you feel like he sees too much and says too little.

Then he turns toward his own building.

You stand there another second watching him go, backpack slung over one shoulder, hands empty now that both your drinks are decorating a path outside the library, body moving with that same controlled certainty that somehow looks different to you every time now.

Less frightening. More honest. Or maybe just more complicated.

When he disappears inside, you finally turn toward your own room.

The walk back feels oddly quiet after everything. Your body has fully come down now from the confrontation, leaving only the residue of it in your nerves. You can still picture the captain on the ground. Still feel the quick panic of being yanked behind Sukuna. Still hear the way he said people like you as if he had already thought about that category far more than you ever had.

Your hall is warm when you enter.

Too warm, like all student housing. Someone down the corridor is playing music too loudly through a speaker with no bass. A door slams, laughter erupts from somewhere near the communal kitchen. Ordinary life presses around you again in all its small, stupid detail.

You unlock your room and step inside.

For a few moments you do nothing except set down your bag and stand there in the half-light, shoes still on, mind moving too fast and too slow at once.

The project. The library. The rugby captain’s face. Sukuna’s hand. The apology. The category he put you in. The one you belong to whether you like it or not.

You peel off your shoes and sit on the edge of your bed.

Your room feels different tonight in a way you cannot quite define. It feels... not wrong, maybe just a little thinner. Less interesting. You have gotten too used to his space, maybe. Too used to the smell of his tea, the sound of his keyboard, the precise meanness of his voice when he catches you cutting corners. That thought should alarm you more than it does. Instead it settles over you with a strange kind of inevitability.

You think about tomorrow’s finishing touches.

About the fact that after the project ends there will be no natural reason to show up at his dorm every evening.

That thought lands more painfully than you want it to.

So you get up before it can sit too deeply, wash your face, brush your teeth, change into something soft and familiar. You move through the motions with the steadiness of habit, but your mind does not leave the walkway outside the library. It circles back again and again to different parts of the exchange.

Not just the fight. Not even mainly the fight.

The sentence after.

People like you.

You sit with that one longest once you are under your own blanket with the light off and your room finally dim.

You think of high school. Of college. Of every boy who stood wrong in the social frame and got turned into a joke before he opened his mouth. Of every time you laughed because everyone else did. Of every time you did not laugh but did not object either. Of every version of yourself rewarded for fitting so well into spaces that would have bruised someone else on entry.

You do not think you were cruel.

You also do not think innocence lives where comfort does.

That is a harder thing to hold. Less flattering. More adult, maybe. You are not sure. You only know that Sukuna does not say things carelessly when they matter, and that if he handed you that truth, even briefly, it means he wanted you to sit with it.

So you do.

Your phone buzzes once on the nightstand. You turn your head and squint at the screen. A message. From him.

Bring the notes on Browning. Yours are less terrible now.

A smile breaks across your face before you can stop it.

It is such a Sukuna thing to say that the whole ache of the day shifts around it. Not gone. Never gone, you fear. But altered. Made livable.

You pick up the phone and type back.

That’s the closest thing to praise I’m ever getting, isn’t it?

The reply comes after a minute.

Probably.

You laugh quietly into the dark.

Then, because you cannot help yourself, you type,

Thanks, very nice.

There is no answer after that.

You stare at the screen for a second longer anyway, smiling like an idiot in the dark where nobody can see you.

Then you set the phone aside, turn onto your side, and let your eyes close slowly.

Tomorrow you will go to his dorm again.

Tomorrow you will start to finish the project you once planned to dump on him entirely.

Tomorrow you will sit beside him with your notes and your arguments and your changed schedule and your inconveniently active conscience and try not to think too hard about what happens after.

Tonight, though, you let yourself keep one thing simple.

You are going to sleep.

And somewhere across campus, Sukuna is probably doing the same — with his laptop shut, his room quiet, and perhaps, if the world is feeling generous, the memory of your face under his hand still warm in his palm.

Smile like you do Come around again This presence of mind Perspective can lend Take take take You give and take How’s it gonna feel when You break break break This thin veneer The air of indifference you make

Tell me how Tell me when I'll ever tire of you here And I could comb this town For years and years And never find a gaze That’s quite as clear Clear as you

Sing to me at night And put me to sleep A lucid lullaby My heart you would keep Hold hold hold You hold me here In your palm with fingers curled Told told told I told you my dear That you would be my world

And you could quench All of my thirst The drink is sweetest When it's sour first

You had gone back to your own dorm.

Classes had happened, because they always do, cruelly, indifferently, no matter what personal catastrophe or revelation has taken place the night before. Your practices had kept happening too, then games, then workouts, then all the little public obligations of being you. You have still been smiling in hallways, still been answering messages, still been showing up looking polished and put together enough that nobody would guess you are spending entire lectures thinking about a man who insulted you into kissing him.

And Sukuna has kept existing in that infuriatingly specific way he does.

He keeps texting you.

Not constantly in some soft desperate way that would make everything easy and obvious, but enough. Enough that there is never any clean emotional distance to retreat into. He sends you dry one-liners when your professor posts something ridiculous on the class forum. You send him screenshots of memes that remind you of him, mostly because they are violent or humorless or weirdly overdramatic, and he reacts with exactly enough contempt to make you grin at your phone like an idiot.

He asks once if you survived practice or if the sport has finally done the world a favor.

You tell him volleyball hasn’t succeeded yet, but you’re rooting for it.

He sends back, shamelessly, I’m not.

It keeps going like that.

Lightly bickering. Bantering. Needling each other the same way you always have, except now there is something warm and messy and inconvenient under it all. Something that makes every message feel like it has a second meaning. Something that makes you stare at your screen after he leaves you on read for forty minutes and pretend you are not at all the sort of girl who notices a thing like that.

You do not know what you are to each other.

That is the problem you have now.

You did not ask. He did not ask. Neither of you stood in the aftermath of that first night and said something stupid and explicit like so what does this mean, because apparently both of you would rather die than phrase a vulnerable thought in a direct way.

So now you are stuck in this limbo where one night exists in perfect vivid detail between the two of you and neither of you has actually named it. Maybe it was a one-time thing. Maybe it was not. Maybe he is the sort of person who can kiss you like he wants to break your composure apart with his mouth and then simply go on with his week afterward. Maybe he thinks you can do the same.

You cannot.

Not gracefully, anyway.

It is not even just that you want to kiss him again. Though you do. God, you do. It sits in your body like a physical memory with teeth. The thought of his mouth on yours keeps hitting you at stupid times — while you are stretching before practice, while you are brushing your hair, while you are waiting for coffee, while you are supposed to be listening to a lecture on symbolism and all you can think about is how his hand had felt at your waist.

It is that you miss him in a way that feels structurally embarrassing.

You miss being in his dorm, miss the strange calm of that room, the lamp light and the tea and the books and the way he takes up space without ever seeming to perform for it. You miss lying on his bed and acting useless while he works. You miss the awful little rhythm of your evenings there, the low-grade irritation of him refusing to soften his insults for your benefit, the way he makes you feel both overstimulated and weirdly settled at once.

You are not used to this side of things.

You are used to being pursued.

You are used to men calling first, texting first, hovering close at parties, finding reasons to sit next to you, asking what you are doing later, whether you have plans, whether you are free this weekend, whether you maybe want to get dinner, maybe want to go out, maybe want to come over, maybe want to let them orbit you for a while until you decide whether their attention is flattering enough to keep. You are used to being desired in obvious ways. You are used to reading the room and knowing exactly where you stand in it.

With Sukuna, you keep feeling like the room changed shape while you were inside it.

Now you are in literature class chewing on the cap of your pen like a child with bad impulse control while Professor Hayashi says something you absolutely do not hear. The lecture hall hums around you with that familiar afternoon restlessness, pages turning, keyboards clicking, someone coughing two rows over, someone else whispering a summary of last weekend’s party into a sleeve. Usually you would at least fake attention. Usually you would take notes even if you do not care, because being visibly diligent has become second nature at this point.

Today your notebook is mostly empty.

You write a sentence fragment about narrative self-construction, then cross it out. You doodle the edge of a flower in the margin without thinking and immediately get irritated with yourself, because that is the kind of detail he would notice and use against you.

Every few seconds your eyes drift to the clock.

Then to the back of the room.

Sukuna is where he always is, occupying that back-row desk like the architecture was designed around him. One elbow braced on the surface, one long leg stretched out farther than anyone else’s chair seems able to allow, his notebook open but his expression unreadable. Today he is wearing dark cargo pants and a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up just enough to expose part of the tattoos along his forearms. His hair is half pushed back, half fallen loose again in the careless way it always does by the end of the day. He looks exactly like he always looks — tall, broad, dangerous in that way campus lighting cannot soften, bored enough to scare lesser people into silence.

And then Professor Hayashi asks a question and he answers in that clipped low voice of his and half the room goes quiet because even when he sounds mildly contemptuous of the text, he is still the smartest person in it.

You should probably dislike him more.

Instead your stomach does that stupid little drop every time he speaks.

He glances at you once during the lecture.

Only once.

But because you have been waiting for it without admitting that to yourself, the second his gaze catches yours you nearly choke on the pen cap.

He notices that too, of course, and one eyebrow lifts a fraction, amused.

Then he looks away.

Bastard.

The rest of the class becomes even more unbearable after that. You spend the final ten minutes trying not to count them. By the time the bell finally rings, something in you is already lunging forward before the noise fully settles. Chairs scrape back. Bags zip. People start their usual noisy migration toward the door.

You are already on your feet.

You do not sprint, because you have standards, but you move quickly enough that one girl from your section gives you a startled look when you slip past her row. By the time you reach Sukuna’s desk, he is slinging his backpack over one shoulder with that same unhurried economy he does everything with, as if time works differently around him and he is generous enough to let the rest of you borrow it.

He looks up when your shadow falls over him.

One eyebrow goes up again, the pierced one.

You do not give yourself time to overthink this. If you stop now, you will lose your nerve and spend the rest of the weekend mad at yourself.

“What are you doing tonight?”

That gets his full attention a little faster than it should.

He straightens enough that the distance between you shifts and you have the awful immediate sense of having walked directly into his line of fire on purpose.

Around you the room is emptying. There are still a few students lingering near the front, some talking to the professor, others shoving notebooks into bags, but the sound around the two of you feels oddly distant.

“My plans,” he says, voice dry as old paper, “currently involve studying, eating something, and avoiding my brother for the entire weekend.”

You blink once.

“Avoiding your brother?”

“Yes.”

“On purpose?”

He gives you a look that says you are lagging behind conversationally.

“That is generally what avoiding someone means.”

You cross your arms.

“I’m clarifying, don't be rude.”

“You don’t sound capable of it.”

You ignore that with practice born from weeks of dealing with him.

“Why are you avoiding your brother?”

“Because the brat wants to visit,” he says, pulling the strap of his backpack more securely onto his shoulder, “and I don’t want Yuuji in my room touching things with whatever disease-ridden hands he uses to experience joy.”

You stare at him for half a second.

Then laugh, because that is a real brother answer if you have ever heard one.

“You’re awful.”

“I’m protective of my property.”

“Against your own family.”

“Especially against my own family.”

You smile despite yourself.

“That’s not a very exciting Friday night you have planned, mh?”

He steps out from behind the desk and there it is again, that subtle immediate awareness of scale. In the lecture hall, with chairs and tables and rows between you, his size becomes part of the scenery after a while. Out in the aisle, with nothing buffering the fact that he is absurdly tall and broad and solidly put together in a way that looks more built than merely athletic, it becomes impossible to ignore. You hold your ground anyway.

“I’m not miss congeniality like you,” he drawls mockingly in that dry tone of his. “I have no intention of crashing some mediocre party and walking back out smelling like puke and bad cologne.”

You make an offended face and smack his bicep.

Light. Barely more than a tap.

Still.

His eyes narrow immediately.

You feel the exact moment your body remembers the last time you got overconfident about touching him like that on his dorm and earned a retaliatory tickling session that had been humiliating enough to make you avoid letting him get both hands on you for two days. The memory flashes through you in one bright mortifying streak, and before you can help yourself you take half a step back.

He notices that too, because of course he does. Something like amusement flickers at the corner of his mouth and vanishes.

“Coward,” he says.

“I'm being strategic.”

“You slapped me. In public.”

“Lightly. Barely touched you.”

“Public aggression is still aggression.”

“Sukuna, your arm is bigger than my thigh.”

He looks down at you with flat disdain.

“That's irrelevant. Violence is violence. It has consequences.”

You groan dramatically, but your nerves are so tightly wound already that even this stupid exchange feels like it is burning off energy you do not know where else to put. Around you the classroom has almost fully emptied. Professor Hayashi is stacking papers at the front. Someone holds the door for a friend. The whole ordinary shape of the afternoon keeps moving.

You take a breath.

Then another.

All right. Fine. You can do this.

“So,” you say, hating how casual you are trying to sound. “Do you want to hang out after my practice?”

He studies your face for a second longer than the question seems to require.

“Hang out?”

“Yeah.” You smile softly.

He waits.

It is unbearable.

You clear your throat.

“Maybe eat something. Maybe watch something. Maybe… I don’t know. Netflix and chill at your dorm?”

The second the words are out, you want to physically drag them back into your mouth and bury them alive.

Netflix and chill.

Really.

You sound like exactly the kind of horny, transparent frat boy you would never ordinarily give more than thirty seconds of patient attention to at a mixer.

You sound like some dude who still thinks euphemism is subtle because he has not once been forced to hear himself aloud.

It is so bad that for one whole second you consider turning around and leaving the country.

Sukuna, maddeningly, does not laugh.

He just looks at you.

Not blankly. Not cruelly either. Just in that awful measured way he has when he seems to be sorting through several interpretations of what you said and deciding which one amuses him most.

Then he says,

“I’m down for that, sure.”

For a moment you forget how to breathe.

“Really?”

“No,” he says flatly. “I thought I’d lie for entertainment.”

You glare at him even while relief spills through your body so fast it almost makes you lightheaded.

“You don’t have to be horrible every second of the day.”

“I do, actually.” Then, after a beat, “And you’re paying for the food.”

You stare.

“Excuse me.”

“You’re excused.” he smirks. “You hit me, so that's your consequence.”

“I tapped your arm.”

“Assaulted me. In public.” He corrects you and you see the smirk he's not letting show.

“It was hardly an assault.”

“Pay for the food.”

You throw your head back for a second because he is impossible, impossible, impossible, and yet you are so stupidly happy he said yes that even this sounds almost charming.

“Your biceps are bigger than my thighs, maybe both of them together, Sukuna!” you repeat, because that feels like a morally relevant point. “You cannot act like I endangered you. I don’t think I can endanger you.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me!”

“To your legal defense, maybe.”

“Oh my god.”

“Food,” he says.

You point at him.

“I hate that this is working, just so you know.”

“I know.”

And that is the end of the conversation, at least on the surface. He steps around you, shoulder close enough to brush yours if either of you leaned wrong, and heads for the door with that same infuriating calm. You stand there for a second feeling like all your insides have suddenly developed wings.

Then you remember you have practice.

The extra energy has nowhere reasonable to go.

So it goes to volleyball.

You practice like your life depends on it.

You show up to the gym already humming with too much adrenaline and too much relief and too much mortifying anticipation, and the only possible thing to do with all of it is turn it into force.

Your warm-up is sharper than usual. Your feet are quicker. Your serves come off your hand hard enough that one of your teammates whistles low and asks who pissed you off today. You tell her nobody, which is technically true and not at all informative.

You correct stances. You call out mistakes. You pressure people harder than you usually do on a Friday because if you let the session drag even a little, you are convinced you might start vibrating out of your own skin. The coach actually looks pleased with you for once instead of irritated by your tendency to rely on instinct and charm where discipline would do. You drill until your shirt clings damply to your back and your lungs feel open and raw and clean. Every time your thoughts threaten to drift back to Sukuna, you throw yourself harder into the next play.

It works, a little.

Not enough.

By the time practice ends on schedule, you are sweaty and flushed and still too eager by half. You shower faster than you should, take the stairs two at a time back to your dorm, and stand dripping in a towel in front of your closet with the suddenly enormous task of figuring out what exactly one wears to a maybe-date-maybe-not-date with a man who has already seen you sprawled across his bed and kissing him like you were trying to win something.

You do not want to look like you tried too hard.

You do not want to look like you did not try at all either.

In the end you settle on a soft cotton shirt that skims rather than clings, a pleated skirt because it makes your legs look good and that is simply strategic thinking, a light jacket because evenings have started turning colder and campus wind has no mercy. White sneakers. No jewelry because somehow it feels too deliberate tonight, too jangly and ornamental for the mood you are pretending not to take seriously. Just cherry lip gloss, because you know it tastes good and that fact slides into your thoughts with a warmth you should maybe feel more embarrassed about than you do.

You choose a perfume that smells clean and warm and a little expensive without being heavy. You brush your hair until it falls the way you like. You look at yourself once in the mirror, then again from farther back, then roll your eyes because at some point self-awareness becomes parody.

Still, when you finally leave, you are glad for the effort.

You walk to his dorm too fast.

Not visibly too fast, you tell yourself. Not enough that anyone watching would think you are practically trotting across campus in the direction of a man’s room on a Friday night. But your steps are quicker than usual, your body light with anticipation, your thoughts all bunching forward toward the next hour as if the rest of the day no longer counts.

By the time you reach his building, you make yourself stop at the entrance for one steadying breath.

Then another.

Then you go up and knock.

When the door opens, your brain blanks for one absurd second.

You have no idea what you expected.

A kiss, maybe? A grin, maybe not soft but at least pointed. Some sign in the doorway that the atmosphere of the evening would match the atmosphere living under your skin.

Something that says yes, I was waiting for you too.

Instead he just fills the frame.

Black shirt, black sweatpants, hair pushed back and still slightly damp, like he showered recently enough that you can catch the clean, sharp scent of his soap the second the door swings open. He looks freshly scrubbed and somehow even more dangerous for it, all broad shoulders and ink and that face of his set in its usual unreadable lines.

His eyes run over you once.

Then he says,

“Take off your shoes.”

And steps back, leaving the door open.

That’s it.

No kiss. No hug. No immediate shift in the air.

Just that.

Your mood drops so quickly it almost embarrasses you. Not because you are owed anything. You know that. You are not an idiot. But some foolish hopeful part of you had apparently been expecting a little more visible wanting. A little acknowledgment. Something.

Anything.

You toe off your shoes near the door and line them up beside his boots with more care than the task deserves. Your jacket comes off next and gets draped over the back of his chair because by now you know where everything in this room goes and that fact brings its own sting of fondness. Then you walk to his bed and sit down without asking permission, because if nothing else that much at least has become natural.

You plop down hard enough to bounce once, then settle in and fold one leg beneath you.

He watches you for a second.

Just watches.

Then he grabs the TV remote from the desk, comes over, and sits beside you on the bed with a comfortable sort of distance, not far enough to feel formal, not close enough to satisfy anything in you.

He hands you the controller.

“Pick something good,” he says. “Or I’m taking it from you and banning you from choosing ever again.”

You glare at him on reflex.

“That is not how democracy works.”

“This room is not a democracy. It's a tyranny.”

“You’re so controlling.”

“And you have terrible instincts. Pick.”

The mixture of excitement and disappointment inside you becomes harder to untangle the longer you sit there.

On the one hand, you are very obviously happy to be here. Almost stupidly so. Just being back in his room does something immediate to your nervous system, a strange relaxing around the edges. The air is familiar, the bed familiar, the quiet between you familiar. You like being near him. You like how natural it feels to settle into his space. You like how little effort it takes now.

On the other hand, a bigger part of you than you want to admit keeps waiting for some sign that he wants the same kind of night you came here wanting.

And when it does not come instantly, your thoughts start turning ugly.

Maybe you read too much into last week.

Maybe one night of aggressive making out and accidental sleeping-together, without anything else, had meant much more to you than it did to him. Maybe he is perfectly capable of filing that under interesting experience and moving on. Maybe the texting and the banter and the background warmth of the week had all been exactly what they looked like and nothing more — the aftermath of two people who now happen to be friends, or something close enough to it.

What a ridiculous little arc, if that is true.

Strangers, to bickering classmates, to your project-induced bargain, to a fling, to friends.

You hate how much that possibility hurts.

You scroll through the streaming service anyway because your pride is still functional enough to keep your face neutral. You choose The Expanse after scanning the description and deciding it sounds like something he would probably enjoy — dense enough to keep his attention, bleak enough not to offend his aesthetic preferences, smart enough that he cannot accuse you of having the media taste of a decorative houseplant.

“This one,” you say.

He glances at the screen.

“Better than I expected.”

“That sounded dangerously close to a compliment, Sukuna.”

“Don’t get used to it, then.”

You tuck one leg under the other and settle more comfortably against the wall.

“I’ll order food later when we’re actually hungry.”

He squints at you, deeply suspicious.

“You’re really paying this time.”

“If you say so.”

“You aren’t escaping this.”

“I’m aware, you’re good in extorting innocent girls, apparently.”

“You assaulted me.”

“With the force of a feather?”

“Aggression nonetheless.”

You make a face at him, but the argument feels so familiar now that it smooths some of the awkwardness inside you. He reaches over and flicks off the lamp, leaving only the TV light washing the room in shifting blues and whites. Then you press play.

The show starts.

For a while, neither of you says anything.

You sit side by side with your backs to the wall, legs stretched out over the mattress. He has one leg half folded, the other angled off the side so his foot can rest on the floor. His profile in the television light is all sharp planes and calm boredom, the kind of face that could look sculptural if he were not so obviously real and alive and faintly mean in every stillness. His attention seems to be on the screen. Your attention keeps drifting.

You last maybe ten minutes.

Maybe less.

Then, because you have never been subtle and apparently now is not the time to start, you lean sideways and lay your head on his shoulder.

The reaction is not dramatic, but immediate.

His whole body goes just a little still, a little alert, as if his muscles locked around the new information before deciding whether to accept it. You feel him turn his head. Not quickly. Just enough to look down at you.

Your heart starts thudding too hard.

You tilt your face up from his shoulder just enough to meet his eyes through your lashes.

He looks puzzled.

Genuinely, faintly puzzled, as if he is trying to determine what exactly you think you are doing and why you are doing it now.

Because you are, apparently, a very bold coward, he is the one who speaks first.

“What’s with the affection,” he asks, “instead of the usual aggression.”

You try to smile like you planned this all along.

“Maybe you’re more comfortable than you give yourself credit for.”

He scoffs softly.

“Don’t get too comfortable using me as a bed.”

“You’re warmer than the wall to lean on.”

“That sounds like a you problem once again.”

“And broad enough to be very useful,” you add.

That gets a flash of teeth.

Not a smile, exactly, but enough to count.

It gives you just enough courage to ask the thing you have actually been circling all evening.

“Do... you regret that night?” You blurt out before you can talk yourself out of it.

He stills.

Not in the same startled way as before. More deliberate now, like he actually takes the question in and gives it the dignity of thought instead of immediate deflection.

The TV continues throwing sound into the room. Somewhere in the hallway outside, a door closes.

None of it matters.

“No,” he says after a second. Then, because he is not going to let you keep the vulnerability all to yourself, “Do you?”

You swallow.

“No. Not at all.”

His shoulder under your cheek stays warm and steady.

“Then what’s the problem?”

You lift your head fully now because this deserves eye contact, even if that makes the whole thing more humiliating. You sit a little straighter and face him while he turns just enough to see you properly, the screen light moving over his face in pale cuts.

“I don’t know what it makes us.”

He looks at you for a beat.

“What.”

You exhale through your nose, frustrated already because the words sound stupid the second they leave your mouth, exactly like you feared they would.

“I don’t know what’s in your head, Sukuna,” you say. “We don’t spend time together like we did before, when I was always in your dorm for the project. I don’t see you after class every day. We text and send each other dumb things and that’s… fine, but I don’t know what to expect from you, because you’re not like anyone I’ve dealt with before.”

His eyebrows lift very slightly.

“Am I the first one you’ve met with a brain?”

You jerk back just enough to glare at him properly.

“I’m being serious, asshole.”

“So am I,” he says, and annoyingly, there is the faintest grin there. Not enough to make this easy. Just enough to force you to keep working.

Bastard. A thousand times bastard.

You cross your arms over your chest.

“Can you not do this for one second?”

“You chose a very dramatic method for a very simple question.”

“I did not.”

“You absolutely did, though.”

“No, I didn’t!”

He looks at you, then at the TV, then back at you.

“You invited yourself over on a Friday night, picked a science-fiction show neither of us is watching, leaned on me like a clingy cat, and now you’re trying to coax me into defining whatever this is without having to say you missed me.”

Heat floods your face so fast you almost feel dizzy.

“That— is not—”

“It is exactly what that is.”

You stare at him, horrified because he is right in such a specific and complete way that there is no graceful angle of denial left available to you. You came here wanting to make the whole thing look casual. Cool. Plausibly deniable. Instead he has apparently been reading your intentions like subtitles all evening.

He sees the exact second it lands.

And because he is evil, his mouth curves a little more.

“You elaborate this entire Netflix-and-chill plan,” he says, voice even and maddeningly thoughtful, “instead of just telling me you missed making out with me until you passed out on my bed.”

You are hot, and possibly bright red.

You know it.

You can feel the heat blasting out of your face hard enough to light the room.

You react before thinking.

You spring off the bed as if sheer vertical movement will somehow prove he is wrong, as if indignation has ever disguised desire from a man who notices everything. The mattress dips and rises behind you. The show keeps playing, forgotten instantly. You hear him breathe out something that is not quite a laugh and might be worse, that contained little chuckle.

“Stop being so full of yourself!” you snap, because it is the only weapon your pride can still grab. “Maybe you are projecting! Maybe you are the one who missed kissing me!”

That gets an actual chuckle because you sound so insanely childish and in denial.

Low. Annoyingly pleased. It follows you across the room as you march toward the little kitchen area without any real plan beyond escape. You do not even know what you are doing there until your hands start reaching automatically for the kettle, because fine, if you are going to die of mortification you may as well put water on for tea first.

You start filling it at the sink.

The pout on your face feels enormous and childish and very hard to control.

Behind you, the bed shifts. Then footsteps. Slow. Unhurried. Deliberate enough that every sound of them seems to land between your shoulder blades.

You refuse to turn around.

You set the kettle down, adjust the tap, watch the water rise. It is suddenly incredibly important to focus on this one practical task and not on the fact that Sukuna is still in the room with you and probably enjoying every second of your unraveling.

“You know,” he says from the kitchen doorway, “it really isn’t that hard to admit you missed my mouth on yours.”

You grip the kettle handle tighter, sulking.

He keeps going, because of course he does. Evil, evil nerd.

“You could’ve just said it.”

You do not look at him.

“Shut. Up.”

The water keeps running.

He pushes off the the doorframe.

You feel that change in the air that makes the back of your neck prickle. Then he is behind you, close enough that the heat of him reaches you even before the contact does, towering over you as you set the kettle down on the counter and reach toward the stove.

His arms come down on either side of you before you do.

Hands braced on the counter.

Caging you in without actually touching you.

Your breath snags. Hard.

His chin brushes the top of your head in the smallest accidental-seeming contact, and you know it is not accidental at all because he immediately speaks again in that voice of his, too calm for the position he has you in.

“You should’ve told me earlier you were this needy. I could give you some attention.”

You bristle instantly.

Not even lighting the stove, you turn in the little pocket of space he has trapped you in, one hand still on the counter, the other half lifted uselessly between you as if that could possibly help.

“You need to shut your mouth before I make you swallow your own fist!”

The threat should land better than it does.

It cannot, not when his face is that close.

Not when he is smirking.

Not the full hard smile he sometimes gets when he knows he has you cornered, just the faint upward pull at one corner of his mouth that makes him look much too pleased with himself and much too handsome to be tolerated.

Gods, why is he like this?

Your anger trips over itself. You frown at him because it is the only thing left.

“Stop playing with me as if you could win, nerd.”

His eyes drop to your mouth for half a beat.

Then back up, and the smirk becomes a grin.

“I’m absolutely winning this,” he murmurs.

Before you can retort, his hands leave the counter and close around your waist.

You gasp.

The sound humiliates you instantly, but there is no time to recover because he is already moving you. Not roughly. Effortlessly. As if your weight is nothing worth acknowledging.

He turns and walks you backward out of the kitchen, your hands going automatically to his shoulders for balance because the alternative is stumbling while being manhandled. You barely get out a protest before the backs of your knees hit the mattress and he uses the momentum to put you down on it.

The bed gives under your weight.

Then him.

You land half reclined, then fully when he follows and crowds in close enough to erase any practical space between your bodies. He does not trap you by force exactly, not the way a hand on your wrists or a knee between your legs would.

He traps you by presence, by keeping you flush against him, one arm around your waist and the other braced so near your shoulder that moving away would become an obvious choice instead of an accidental drift.

And apparently now that he has you here, he means to get his answer properly.

“Why didn’t you say it straight,” he asks, looking down at you with infuriating calm, “if you wanted to do this again.”

You try to wriggle out of his hold on pure reflex and get nowhere.

He barely tightens his arm. Barely. It is still enough to remind you how stupidly easy it would be for him to keep you right where he wants you.

“Because!” you spit, and then have to stop because the explanation sounds worse than silence.

His eyes narrow very slightly.

“Because what.”

You squirm again, fail again, and finally exhale in defeat because there is no dignified version of this.

“Because this is how normal people flirt, okay?”

He blinks once.

You hate that this apparently genuinely interests him.

You keep going because now you have committed and your pride is already dead on the floor somewhere.

“This is how people communicate things.” you mutter. “I learned that boys don’t usually just ask a girl out and say they want to bang her. They ask if she wants to hang out, or watch something, or come over, or do something that sounds casual, and then everybody understands what the subtext is supposed to be.”

He is silent for a second.

Then another.

You can feel yourself dying from the inside out just hearing your own explanation reflected off his total lack of rescue.

“You really just taught me flirting one-on-one,” he says at last, voice almost thoughtful.

“Do not phrase it like that ever again or I'm punching you.”

“You literally just did.”

“Fine! Will you shut up about it?” You grit out through your teeth.

He does not shut up.

He leans in instead, so that his mouth is suddenly much too close to yours for your thoughts to remain coherent. His eyes stay on your face. Every inch closer makes your pulse pound harder.

“If I understand you correctly,” he says softly, “you asked me to come back here tonight because you wanted to bang me.”

That is it.

That is the moment you actually leave your body.

Because hearing it said like that, plainly, with none of the euphemism or social choreography you were hiding inside, is enough to reduce every functioning part of your brain to smoke.

You make some sound. Not a word. Not even a syllable with enough dignity to be called an answer. Just a small wrecked noise that betrays you so completely you want to fling yourself through the window.

He chuckles.

Of course he does.

Of course he is enjoying this.

And then, finally, mercifully, he kisses you.

The relief is immediate and almost violent.

You do not ease into it. You latch onto it. One second you are burning alive under his gaze, the next your hands are on his jaw and your mouth is on his like you have been waiting for exactly this permission all week. The kiss lands hard, not rough in a careless way, but decisive. Real, hot, wanting. Full enough to knock the breath out of every stupid thought you have been choking on.

God.

You missed this.

That is the first clear thing in your head. Not even desire at first, just missing.

Missing the shape of his mouth, the heat of him, the deeply irritating fact that kissing him feels better than it has any right to after only one night. You kiss him harder because now that you have the thing itself again, the waiting of the past week feels unbearable in retrospect.

He rolls you both so you are now laying on top of him for once.

He is warm under you, all solid muscle and contained force and that maddening steadiness of his. He tastes clean, faintly of tea from earlier and something that is just him underneath, if you remember well — and oh you do. His hand tightens at your waist when you kiss him like that, greedy and a little angry with relief, and the response sends a thrill through your whole body.

You keep going.

You really do forget about the series.

The screen keeps throwing pale blue light over the room, spaceships drifting silent and important through some enormous black stretch of nothing, but it may as well be static for all you care. It turns into background hum, just noise and flicker, something to stain the walls with motion while your entire world narrows down to the man under you and the fact that he is warm everywhere you touch him.

You kiss him because now that he has finally shut up and put his mouth on yours, you remember with humiliating clarity that you did want this. Too much. More than made sense for one night of making out and a week of texting like two people pretending they are not circling the same thing over and over.

His mouth is as good as you remembered, which is the first problem.

The second problem is that now you know how he reacts when you get greedy.

You keep your body pressed close. You keep your mouth on his until your breathing starts breaking apart around it.

Somewhere behind you the TV still keeps playing.

It no longer matters.

Nothing matters except the fact that Sukuna is under you again and kissing you back with enough focus to make the rest of the world feel unsubstantial.

You pull back just enough to breathe and then go right back in.

This time you shift more fully over him, your weight settling on top of his hips and stomach, your knee pressing into the mattress beside him, your body using his like he actually is the bed you accused him of being earlier. The position suits you better than it should.

Gives you leverage.

Gives you access.

Gives you the dizzy little satisfaction of being the one above him for once, even if you know perfectly well he could reverse it in a heartbeat if he felt like it.

You drag your lips from his mouth to the sharp line of his jaw, then lower, because if he got to make you feel stupid in the kitchen then you get to take something back. His skin is warm and clean under your mouth, still holding traces of his soap, and there is something deeply satisfying about the way his breathing changes when you start paying attention to his neck. Not dramatically. Sukuna does not do dramatic responses. But his chest rises a little deeper under you, and the hand at your waist tightens just enough to let you know he is not as indifferent as he enjoys pretending.

That alone makes you braver to keep going.

You kiss lower, slower, then nibble lightly at the spot below his ear because you want to see what happens.

He hisses a laugh through his teeth, low and disbelieving.

“You get one victory and become insufferable.”

You pull back just enough to look at him, still straddling his hips, hair sliding over your shoulder.

“I am not hearing a complaint.”

“You wouldn’t. Your ego is too loud.”

You smile and lean down to kiss him again before he can keep talking. This time he meets you halfway with a hand sliding up your back under the thin cotton of your shirt, broad palm hot against bare skin where the hem has ridden up.

The touch is simple, almost absent-minded, but it lands in your body like a struck match. You feel it everywhere all at once. Your shoulders. Your stomach. The backs of your thighs where his other hand had settled earlier and now stays like he has a right to it.

Maybe he does.

That thought comes out of nowhere and settles hard.

You ignore it immediately.

His hands stay on you.

One at your waist. One sliding up your back over the fabric of your shirt, broad and hot enough that you feel every inch of the path.

He does not stop you. That almost makes it worse, the way he lets you climb him and kiss him like you are making up for lost time while he lies there accepting it with narrowed eyes and that faint, crooked smile threatening at the corners of his mouth whenever you pull away.

“You’re enjoying this too much,” you murmur against his jaw.

“I told you I was,” he says, and you can hear the smirk in it.

So you bite him.

Not hard. Just enough to make the skin of his jaw catch between your teeth for a second before you soothe it with a kiss.

That gets a real reaction.

Small and very real. His fingers flex at your waist. His breathing changes. Satisfaction blooms instantly and shamelessly in your chest.

Oh.

Fine, then.

You kiss along his jaw again. Slow at first, then less patient. Down toward his neck, where his skin is warmer and the clean scent of his soap lingers strongest. You can smell better the shower on him there, the freshness of it, the faint heat of skin fully dried after as you nuzzle softly.

Your mouth keeps finding places to land as if you have known this body longer than you have.

Your hands move too, one staying at his face long enough to thumb over the sharp line of his cheekbone, the other sliding down over his chest and then lower, traveling under the hem of his shirt because at this point restraint feels like a joke.

His skin is so damn hot.

The first touch of his bare stomach under your palm sends a shiver through you so strong you almost lose track of your own breathing.

He is exactly what he looks like — hard, solid, defined muscle under smooth warm skin, the shift of his abdomen under your hand immediate and impossible not to notice. You spread your fingers there without thinking, tracing up the ridges of him with a kind of fascinated hunger that might be embarrassing if you had any spare dignity left.

He tilts his head back just enough to watch you.

You catch the sight of his teeth when you look up — those sharp canines of his flashing in the low light, the edge of a crooked smile that is more amused than kind. His eyes are narrowed, not in annoyance but in concentration, fixed on you with that same intensity that makes you feel like he is always seeing two layers deeper than you intended.

You should probably feel self-conscious under that gaze.

Instead it only makes you bolder.

You kiss his throat.

You kiss the place just beneath his jaw that makes his breathing hitch almost imperceptibly. You let your hand slide higher under his shirt, over the flat plane of his stomach and the harder cut of his ribs, feeling the shift of muscle under your palm as he breathes.

You are a little feral about it now, and you know it.

The week of waiting, of texting and wondering and trying not to want too visibly, has apparently made you far less delicate than usual.

You keep kissing him and touching him and taking the fact of his body in with a kind of greedy delight.

He lets you.

That is the wildest part, when you think about it.

He lets you have your way with him for those moments, not passive, never passive, but permissive in a way that feels deliberate. He watches you work yourself into a state over him and does nothing to slow you down. One hand stays at your waist, the other slides up into your hair and rests there, not directing yet, just keeping contact.

He seems content to let you spend all the frustration you carried in with you.

You are thriving in it.

You kiss your way back up to his mouth, then down again, then back, unable to settle because every place you touch him gives you something back. The line of his throat. The rougher warmth under his shirt. The faint sound he makes when your nails drag lightly over his side. The way his mouth opens on an exhale when you kiss him deep and slow instead of hard and desperate.

“You’re staring,” you mutter against his mouth.

“I know.”

“That’s creepy.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s useful.”

You lift your head, suspicious.

“Useful for what?”

“For seeing how quickly you forget to act smug once you get what you want.”

You should pull away on principle. Instead you glare down at him, which only makes his mouth twitch.

“You are the worst possible person.”

“And yet you came here in a skirt that makes your intentions embarrassingly obvious.”

You go hot so quickly it almost hurts.

“My intentions were not embarrassingly obvious. It was an innocent hang out.”

Says you, the girl straddling his hips.

“Cherry lip gloss.” One thumb slides across your thigh, not wandering further, just tracing the line where your skirt ended. “Perfume. No jewelry because you wanted to look effortless, which means you thought about it long enough to decide effort should look accidental. Then you came to my room and pouted because I didn’t greet you with my mouth.”

You stare at him hard enough to poke holes on his head.

He stares back with quiet satisfaction.

You hate how cleanly he reads you. You hate it almost as much as you love the feeling of being seen that exactly.

“That is an invasive level of observation,” you tell him.

“It is basic pattern recognition.”

“You make me sound pathetic.”

“No.” His eyes drop briefly to your mouth, then back. “Just transparent.”

You lean down and bite his lower lip lightly for that.

He makes a small sound, one that goes straight through your ribs, and then his hand is at the back of your neck and he is kissing you harder, enough to turn your neat little retaliation into something that barely counts as winning. You laugh into his mouth once, breathless and startled and still a little giddy from how quickly the balance shifts with him.

With other men, you always know where you stand. You know how much to smile, how much to touch, how much to hold back so they keep wanting. You know how to steer the moment and how to let them think they found it themselves.

With Sukuna it never feels that simple.

With Sukuna you keep reaching for control and finding that you do not actually mind when he takes it from you.

That should concern you more than it does.

You sit up a little to catch your breath, one hand still spread under his shirt over the hard plane of his stomach. His hair is messier now, pushed back and then forward again by your fingers, his mouth pinker than before, expression ruined just enough to make the whole severe handsome thing of him feel unfair. He looks up at you from the bed, broad and relaxed under your weight, one arm crooked behind his head now like he has decided he can afford to enjoy himself.

That pisses you off on principle.

“You’re too pleased with yourself,” you say.

“You climbed on top of me and started kissing my neck like you were starving, why shouldn't I be?”

“I can still be right about you projecting.”

“You can be many things. Right is rare.”

You push at his shoulder, not enough to move him.

“You talk too much for someone who was begging to be kissed five minutes ago.”

One eyebrow lifts.

“Begging?”

“Yes.”

“When.”

“In the kitchen. Obviously.”

“I seem to recall you pouting over a kettle because I pointed out the obvious.”

You gasp softly.

“I was making tea.”

“You were hiding.”

“I was… regrouping.”

“That is a very pretty word for hiding.”

You narrow your eyes at him.

“You are trying extremely hard to make me admit I wanted this.”

He says it without hesitation.

“Because you are stubborn enough to choke on it otherwise.”

The answer knocks something loose in you.

You know, rationally, that he has wanted you since at least the hallway if not before. You know it from the way he looks at your mouth before he says something especially mean, from the way he made you show up at his dorm every time he worked on that project, from the fact that one kiss turned into a whole night and then a week of messages and memes and those infuriating little comments that are only possible when someone has been paying attention.

Still, hearing him talk like it is obvious matters.

You do not know what to do with the little bloom of relief that follows.

So you cover it with sarcasm, because that is apparently the only defense you have left with him.

“Maybe I just missed bullying you in person.”

His hand slips to the back of your thigh and squeezes, firm enough to make your breath catch.

“Liar.”

At some point he catches your chin.

Not to stop you. Just to make you look at him.

You do, breathing a little too hard, hair probably a mess by now, lip gloss long ruined.

His expression is unreadable for a second.

Then he says, very quietly,

“There. That’s what you wanted.”

You stare at him.

The words aren’t cruel. Not even mocking, really. They sound more like observation. Like he is naming the thing you spent all week trying to avoid saying aloud.

Your hand stays under his shirt.

His hand stays at your jaw.

The TV light flickers over both of you.

“Yes,” you admit, because at this point honesty has become less frightening than continuing to pretend. “It is.”

Something shifts in his face then. Small. Deep. Not softness exactly, but something adjacent to it, something realer than teasing.

His thumb brushes once at the corner of your mouth.

“You should say it sooner next time.”

Your heart trips so hard it almost hurts.

Next time.

Not maybe. Not if. Not some vague future possibility.

Next time.

You know he sees the effect because one side of his mouth pulls up again, faint and private and unbearably pleased with himself. But he does not ruin it by pointing the reaction out. For once he gives you the mercy of silence and lets the words sit there between you like an answer.

So there is a next time.

There will be a next time.

Something inside you unclenches so fully that the relief of it almost makes you dizzy. You had not realized how tightly you had been holding yourself until then, how much of tonight had been built on the fear of wanting something that might not be wanted back.

You exhale slowly.

Then lean down and kiss him again, not out of desperation this time, not to shut him up or prove something, but because the answer in his words settles warmly in your chest and you do not know what else to do with it.

This kiss changes too.

Still hungry, still charged, still full of the undeniable fact that you both want each other in ways neither of you is especially good at phrasing. But steadier now. Less like trying to seize ground, more like lingering over what you have already taken. You kiss him slower. He meets you there. One of his hands slides from your hair to the back of your neck, warm and firm and unhurried, and the other stays at your waist like he has no intention of letting you drift far.

You can feel the difference in him too. Not less intense. Just less set on making you squirm for sport. Or maybe he already got enough out of that in the kitchen.

When you pull away, you do not go far.

Your forehead nearly touches his. Your fingers stay hooked under the hem of his shirt. His breath brushes your lips when he speaks.

“You’re thinking again,” he murmurs.

“You say that like it’s a medical emergency.”

“It usually is with you.”

You want to be offended. Instead you huff out a laugh against his mouth.

Then, because you are still you and he is still him and nothing between you has ever lasted long without a little friction, you say,

“You know, most people would’ve just kissed me at the door.”

He looks at you with immediate disdain.

“Most people are transparent.”

“You’re telling me you weren’t waiting?”

“No,” he says. “I’m telling you I wanted to see how long you’d take before doing something entertaining or stupid.”

You groan and drop your forehead to his shoulder for a second because that tracks so perfectly it is almost offensive.

“You’re a jerk.”

He shifts one hand up your spine, slow and absentminded, almost a pet.

“And yet.”

“And yet,” you mutter into his shirt, “I keep ending up here.”

“That sounds like a personal failure, hm?”

You lift your head and glare down at him.

“You can just say you want me carnally, you know it, right?”

His eyes drift over your face. Over your mouth. Over the hair that has probably started sticking to your cheeks by now.

“You came here in cherry gloss because you knew it tastes good, you’re not subtle at all.”

Everything in you stops.

You blink. Once.

“Excuse me.”

He does not look remotely ashamed.

“I noticed last time.”

The heat that rushes through you then is almost too much to hold in one body.

“You noticed that about my lip gloss?”

“I noticed your mouth,” he corrects.

That is so unfair you have to kiss him again just to make him stop talking.

He laughs into it once, quietly, and the sound goes through you like a match dropped somewhere dry.

After that the night settles into something softer around the edges without losing any of its charge. At some point you do order food, because eventually even desire has to make room for hunger and because if you do not, he will absolutely use your failure to uphold the terms of his invented compensation against you for the next month.

The two of you eat half reclined against his headboard with the show still running, both pretending to follow enough of the plot to justify not restarting it later. He complains about your choice of takeout and then steals half of it for himself. You complain about his criticism and then eat from his container when yours runs low. It is absurdly domestic for two people who spent the last hour proving they are deeply incapable of behaving like normal adults around each other.

After the food, the bed swallows you both again.

Not immediately into kissing, though that returns on and off in waves, easy now that the tension of uncertainty has broken. Sometimes you watch the screen. Sometimes you talk over it. Sometimes one of you says something mean enough to start an argument that dissolves into mouths and hands before it gets very far.

At one point you end up tucked half against his side again, your head on his shoulder like earlier, except now one of his arms is actually around you instead of stubbornly absent. The possessiveness of it is subtle but unmistakable. You do not comment on it. He does not either. You simply let yourself fit there and feel the slow steadiness of his breathing under your cheek.

“What are we,” you ask eventually, because apparently you are going to squeeze all the dignity out of this evening while you can.

He does not answer immediately.

The question hangs there while some ship explodes on the screen and somebody delivers a grim line about survival you only half hear. His thumb moves once over your arm where it rests across you.

Then he says,

“You really like labels.”

“I like knowing what kind of idiot I’m being here.”

“That’s fair.”

You wait.

He glances down at you.

“We’re whatever this is while it’s happening.”

You make a face.

“That’s maddeningly vague for a control freak like you.”

“It’s accurate enough, I’d say.”

“It sounds like something said by an emotionally constipated man.”

He snorts softly.

“It sounds like you want guarantees after one week.”

You go quiet because that is, annoyingly, not entirely wrong. Not guarantees, maybe, but shape. Definition. Something you can hold up to the light and know where its edges are.

He must feel the shift in you because his voice loses some of its bite when he speaks again.

“I’m not uninterested,” he says. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” you echo, because you refuse to let him get away with pretending that part is self-explanatory.

“You’re still here, aren’t you.”

“Yeah.”

“You'll keep coming back, won't you.”

“Yes, because apparently I’m just like a dog.”

He looks at you.

“You keep coming back." Then, very lightly, taps two fingers against your thigh where your skirt has ridden up a little from all the shifting around. "That’s the answer you need for now.”

You study his face.

It is not the full sweeping declaration some softer man might give. No speech. No confession. No clean romantic arc tied up with a bow. It is still Sukuna. Still blunt where it suits him, still evasive where language tries to pin him down too early.

And yet.

There is honesty in it.

More than enough, maybe, for now.

You settle deeper against him and exhale.

“Fine,” you say. “But if you disappear on me, I’m keying something important.”

“You don’t know what I own.”

“I know your car. Your plants. Your door. I’ll improvise.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

You tilt your head up.

“Oh? Are you flirting with me again?”

“I’m threatening you.”

“That’s basically your version of flirting.”

He looks faintly offended by how correct that is.

You smile into his shoulder and the night keeps stretching.

The show moves on in fragments. You miss whole sections of it. Once you restart an episode because neither of you actually followed the last twenty minutes and he refuses to admit that he was distracted by you biting his neck.

You tell him he made no effort to stop you. He says that was his mistake and yours at once. You kiss the corner of his mouth while he is mid-insult and feel the sentence die there.

Eventually the room goes quieter.

You think that this might be the real thing you wanted.

Not just the kissing, though that is very much wanted. Not just the confirmation that he had missed you too. But this strange, charged comfort. The way the sharpness between you no longer feels like a wall so much as a language. The way his room already feels familiar enough to settle into. The way being with him still keeps you alert while somehow also making the rest of your life go quiet at the edges.

You are not used to wanting a person and the atmosphere around them with equal intensity.

With him, apparently, you do.

At some point your fingers find the hem of his shirt again and slide beneath it without even thinking, just to rest on the warmth of his stomach. He glances down at the movement, then at you, but says nothing. He lets you keep your hand there as if it belongs. The simple allowance of it does something absurd to your chest.

You look up at him and find him already looking back.

“What,” you ask.

“You’re so damn smug.”

“Am I now.”

“You are. You’ve been smug for the past ten minutes.”

“Maybe because I’m winning.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“At what.”

“At this.”

You gesture vaguely with your free hand, encompassing the bed, the room, him, your position half on top of him again without even realizing you drifted there.

“At whatever this is.”

The corner of his mouth lifts.

Then, because he cannot help himself,

“Remember you're here because you asked me if we could Netflix and chill like a nineteen-year-old idiot.”

You gasp, offended and delighted at once.

“That is ageist,” you squint at him.

“It’s just the truth.”

“You said yes even though you knew what it meant beneath it.” You narrow your eyes trying to go for scrutiny and landing on mildly provoking, probably.

“I know.” His hand slides up your side once, slow and possessive and far too easy. “And you’re still blushing about it.”

You hate that he is right.

You hate it enough to kiss him again.

He lets you win a little, this time. Or maybe he simply enjoys watching what confidence does to you when it comes back in waves.

Either way, he lets you climb into his lap properly, lets you take his face in both hands and kiss him until you feel that same answering heat spark through him and gather, lets you taste the pleased little exhale he tries not to make when you nip at his lip and soothe it with your tongue.

This time when you move down to his jaw and neck again, he tips his head back for you with only the faintest look of annoyance at his own compliance.

That alone might keep you happy for a week.

You smile against his skin and feel him notice.

“Don’t start,” he murmurs.

“Too late.”

“You’re so annoying when you think you’ve learned something.”

“I have learned something.”

His hand curls at the back of your neck and keeps you there a second longer before letting you pull away just enough to grin at him.

“You like me.”

He stares at you.

Then gives you the most insultingly calm answer possible.

“I tolerate you at a very high level.”

You laugh so hard you almost collapse back onto his chest.

He does not deny it further, and for you that is answer enough.

You do not know how long it has been since he dragged you out of the kitchen and deposited you back on his bed, since the whole thing stopped being a stupidly elaborate attempt at plausible deniability and turned into honesty, into making out, more bickering, bantering and that tenderness underneath it all.

Maybe an hour. Maybe several. Time in his room has already started behaving strangely for you, shrinking and stretching around whatever you are feeling too intensely to measure. All you know is that you are warm all over, your hair is a mess, your lip gloss is definitely gone, and every last stupid worry you carried here has been burned down by the simple repeated proof that Sukuna wants you back.

That knowledge does something dangerous to your confidence.

It makes you bolder. Softer in some places, worse in others. You stop second-guessing every touch. You stop monitoring yourself so hard. You let your body settle into the fact that this is real, that he is under you because he wants to be, that his hands keep finding you because he cannot seem to help himself either. You are both young and hot for each other and too stubborn to be graceful about it, and once you let that truth sit openly between you, the whole room starts feeling thick with it.

So of course your body notices the next shift before your brain can politely ignore it.

You are straddling his hips in that pleated skirt, — for the nth time this night — knees braced on either side of him, kissing at the column of his throat while both your hands roam under his shirt again because apparently you got addicted to tracing his muscles with your fingertips while drowning him in kisses.

You have spent the last several minutes alternating between his mouth and his neck and the lines of his chest under the fabric, loving the small sounds you can pull out of him when you stop trying to win and start simply indulging yourself. Somewhere in the middle of that, his body answers in the most obvious way possible.

At first it is only a firmer pressure beneath you.

Then your mind catches up.

Oh.

You go still for just a fraction of a second as the awareness settles into place. Even through the soft material of his sweatpants, there is no mistaking it now, no way to pretend his body is not reacting exactly as yours has been reacting all evening.

Heat. Hardness. The unmistakable weight of want answering yours.

You lift your head slowly.

Your eyes find his face at the same moment he realizes you have noticed.

And for once, for one tiny almost-imperceptible moment, Sukuna actually looks flustered.

Not undone, not panicked, nothing dramatic enough that anyone else would clock it from across a room. But you are on top of him, close enough to see every small change. You catch the way his mouth tightens before he bites lightly at one of the piercings in his lower lip. You catch the faint tension in his jaw, the way his eyes search your face as if gauging whether this changes the balance of the moment. It is such a small crack in his usual composure, but because it is him, because he is so rarely anything but controlled, it feels enormous.

And because you are apparently terrible, something hot and delighted flares through you at the sight.

You are not exactly in a position to pretend innocence yourself.

Your body has been betraying you since the moment you stepped back into his dorm. Since before that, honestly, if you count the whole ridiculous walk across campus in your skirt and cherry gloss and hopeful little heartbeat. You are warm everywhere, damp with want in a way that has been steadily getting more impossible to ignore the longer you stay draped over him.

A horrible little part of you wonders whether you are leaving evidence of that on his sweatpants too, a wet patch perhaps.

Another, much worse part of you stops caring.

You test it.

Just once.

You roll your hips on top of fim.

The reaction is instant.

His breath catches sharply, low and unmistakable, and the hand already resting at your hip squeezes hard enough to make your pulse jump. His other hand, the one that had been spread lazily over the back of your thigh, slides higher under your skirt with a deliberate heat that wipes the grin right off your face and replaces it with something much less composed.

The atmosphere changes so quickly it almost feels physical.

You mouth once at the line of his jaw because you need one second to think. Then you press a kiss at the corner of his lips and, for the first time in a while, the teasing slips clean out of your voice.

“Do you want this?”

You ask it low. Honest. No mockery, no little performative edge to protect yourself if he turns away from it. Just the question.

His eyes stay on your face.

They are dark already from the room and from everything that has been building, but now there is something else in them too, something almost scorching in how directly it lands on you. He is breathing harder than he was a moment ago.

His fingers flex once at your hip, once at your thigh. And when he answers, his voice is rougher than usual, like the words are being dragged up from somewhere deep and stubborn in him.

“Yeah,” he says, a little rougher than usual. “I do.”

Relief hits you first.

Then delight.

Then a smile you do not even try to stop.

You kiss him again, quick and warm and far too pleased, and feel rather than see the way his face changes under it.

Then he adds, abruptly enough to make you pause,

“I’m a virgin, though.”

You blink.

You pull back just enough to look at him properly.

For one second the room seems to sharpen around that sentence.

The TV glow. The dim line of his desk. The jacket you tossed over his chair. The way he is lying under you, broad and composed everywhere except the eyes.