・△ B Ξ ✗ F R Ξ Ξ ▽・

◆ He calls you by your name. Full name when he is serious. Shortened when he is being dry. Never a pet name. He once told you that names carry more weight when they are not buried under decoration, and you had to sit with that for an entire afternoon.

◆ His apartment is sparse in a way that is not aesthetic — it is aftermath. It belongs to a man who once had a life organized around a career he believed in, and when that belief collapsed, the objects did not get replaced. Bookshelves still full, because those survived. Kitchen functional. Bed made with military precision, because discipline is the last thing to go when everything else has. The first time you leave something there — a hair tie on the bathroom shelf — it stays exactly where you left it for a week before he moves it to a small dish by the sink. When you notice, he says, “It kept falling.” It had not.

◆ Arguing with him feels less like conflict than examination. Not because he is combative, but because rigorous exchange is his love language and he does not know how to turn it off. Say something imprecise, and he asks what you mean. Get upset and start speaking in abstractions, and he says, “I need you to be specific so I can understand what I’m responding to.” It is maddening. It is also the most respectful thing anyone has ever done during a disagreement with you, because underneath the cross-examination is a man who refuses to assume he already knows what you feel. He asks. Every time.

◆ “You’re not angry at me.”

◆ “I am, actually.”

◆ “No. You’re angry at the situation, and I’m the nearest person. There’s a difference. I’d like to respond to the right one.”

◆ You hate that he is right. You hate more that being correctly identified in the middle of an emotional spiral somehow makes it easier to breathe.

◆ Patience, with him, is not a performance. He is simply willing to wait for you to say what you mean, even when it takes three attempts and a long silence to reach. He does not fill the gap. He does not offer you an easier word. He lets you find it. And when you do, his expression shifts in a way that tells you he was tracking every step of the journey and considering none of it wasted.

◆ Physical affection is not intuitive for him. Not because he does not want it, but because he spent years in a profession where composure was currency and touch was something you did not initiate without consent and cause. He learns you slowly. His hand at the small of your back comes weeks after the first time he wanted to put it there. When he finally does, his fingers press once — deliberate, firm, unmistakable — and you understand that every touch from him is a decision that passed through more checkpoints than he will ever admit.

◆ The first time he kisses you, he stops two inches from your mouth and says, “I want to be clear about what this is.”

◆ “What is it?”

◆ “Not casual.”

◆ You close the distance yourself. He lets you. Then his hand comes to the side of your neck, and he kisses you like he has been preparing a case for it and just received the verdict.

◆ He notices your shutdown before you do. The way your voice flattens, the way your rings start turning too fast, the way you pull your sleeves over your hands. He does not name it the first time. He simply says, “Do you want to leave?” in a tone that carries no judgment and no follow-up question. When you say yes, he stands, settles the bill, and walks you out with his hand at your back and his mouth shut. In the car, he turns the music off without being asked. At home, the lights are dimmed before you have taken your shoes off. He does not ask if you are okay. He adjusts the environment and trusts your body to do the rest.

◆ Later, when you have the language for it, you explain the sensory thing. How textures flip. How clothing turns hostile. How sound becomes architecture you cannot escape. He listens with the focus of a man building a framework he intends to use for the rest of his life, and when you finish, he says, “Thank you for explaining the mechanism. That helps me respond correctly.”

◆ Not “I’m sorry.” Not “That must be hard.” The mechanism. Correctly. He treats your nervous system like something with internal logic worth understanding rather than a problem to soothe into silence. You nearly cry. You do not tell him that.

◆ He reads in bed the way a man reads when he has been reading himself to sleep since he was old enough to hold a book — seriously, vertically, with a pen in his other hand for marginalia. His notes are devastating. Clean handwriting, surgical observations, occasional dry commentary that makes you laugh when you find it later. He does not dog-ear pages. He uses actual bookmarks. He once gave you a look of such profound disappointment when you folded a corner that you felt like you were being sentenced.

◆ “That is a book. It has structural integrity.”

◆ “It’s a paperback.”

◆ “Paperbacks have rights.”

◆ His humor sneaks up on you. It is dry enough to desiccate, delivered without any change in expression, often embedded so deeply in an otherwise serious sentence that you do not catch it for five seconds. When you do laugh, his eyes warm. Not his mouth. His eyes. The distinction wrecks you every single time.

◆ He has never once told you that you are overthinking something. Not once. In a world full of people who treat your depth of processing as an inconvenience, he treats it as methodology. “Walk me through it,” he says. And means it. And listens. At the end, he says either “That tracks” or “I see it differently — here’s why,” and both responses make you feel like a person whose thoughts have weight.

◆ He keeps your tea stocked with a specificity that borders on archival. Not just your brand — your schedule. Morning is black. Afternoon is green. Evening is chamomile when you’re winding down, ginger when you’re overstimulated. You catch him once, standing in the kitchen, choosing between two boxes with the focus of someone reviewing evidence. He does not acknowledge that you saw.

◆ Jealousy, in Higuruma, looks like sharpening. Someone speaks to you with too much familiarity, too much assumed access, and his posture does not change, but his attention narrows to a point so fine you can feel it from across the room. He does not intervene. He does not need to. He trusts you. What he distrusts is the audacity of someone who has not earned the right to stand that close, and his gaze communicates this with the efficiency of a closing argument.

◆ He told you about the law once. About what it was supposed to be. About what he thought it could do. About the first case that cracked it, and the last case that broke it. He did not cry. He did not raise his voice. He spoke with the kind of precision that only exists when someone has rehearsed the story enough times to strip it of everything except the bones, and the bones are what hurt.

◆ You held his hand through it. He let you. His grip tightened once when he reached the verdict that ended it. You did not say, “I’m sorry.” You said, “The system failed you.” His jaw tightened. Then he said, “Yes.” Like it was the first time anyone had put the weight where it actually belonged.

◆ He sleeps facing you. Arm under the pillow, other hand resting between you on the mattress like a document left open. When you reach for it in the dark, his fingers close around yours immediately. Not asleep. Not fully awake. Somewhere in between, where composure drops and reflex tells the truth.

◆ “You don’t have to fix how I feel.”

◆ “I’m not trying to fix it. I’m trying to understand it so I stop responding to the wrong thing.”

◆ That sentence lives in your chest like a bruise that never stops being tender.

◆ He will take your side in public without hesitation, but in private, he will tell you when he thinks you are wrong — gently, specifically, with enough evidence that you cannot dismiss it and enough care that you do not want to. Loyalty, to him, is not agreement. It is honesty with your dignity intact. He knows the difference, and that difference is why you trust him.

◆ He is tired, but not in the way people usually mean. Not overworked. Not burned out. Disillusioned — which is quieter, and cuts deeper. He expected the world to make sense. It didn’t. He built a career on the premise that fairness could be enforced, then watched it collapse under the weight of its own corruption. That disillusionment doesn’t make him bitter. It makes him exacting. If the system won’t be fair, then he will be — in every conversation, every choice, every small domestic act of treating you with the precision and care that the law promised everyone and delivered to almost no one.

◆ He loves you the way he used to love justice — completely, structurally, with his whole architecture. The difference is that you love him back, and reciprocity is something the law never offered. He does not know what to do with that some days. On those days, he makes your tea and reads beside you in silence and lets his shoulder press against yours, and the contact says everything his training never taught him how to speak.

◆ He will not tell you he loves you first. But he will build such a meticulous, airtight, irrefutable case for it in every action, every morning, every careful touch, every argument he lets you win because your reasoning was better, that by the time you say it, you are not confessing. You are delivering a verdict he has already proven.

a/n — higuruma is a disillusioned defense attorney whose belief in justice was so fundamental it became his cursed technique. he is not going to call you "kitten." 🤔