Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Satoru doesn’t typically care for sentimentality. He likes to look ahead, to take things easy, to form attachments and lose them just as easily. Time and experience have taught him how fleeting even the deepest of bonds can be.  

The first day of the trimester is an exception.  

Sometimes, on days like today, when he’s fresh from the break and free from distractions, it feels like it’s twelve years in the past, and there’s a different, black-haired boy standing at his side.

Satoru can’t help but to think about it.

Ahead of him, Megumi hangs his head, already exhausted.

“Hurry up,” he sighs, turning back to glower at Satoru’s stopped form. “We’re already late.”

“It’s fine, it’s the first day,” says Satoru, staring up at the flower-less cherry blossom trees. The lenses of his sunglasses cast the branches in a tint of blue. “Lectures don’t start until five past anyway.”

And it’s his third-years. They’d be used to his lateness by now.

“I’m going then,” says Megumi. “Yuji’s waiting for me.”

“Yuji?” Satoru repeats, finally walking again. He grins, tries not to sound too teasing, as he asks, “You saw him just last night, didn’t you? Can’t stand to be parted for that long?”

He’s only let out half a laugh, brought on by the fierce look of annoyance on Megumi’s face, when a weight lands itself around his wrist.

He cuts off, pausing with annoyance. He hates it when people grab, when they touch without asking.

“Satoru.”

It’s not him, Satoru thinks, instantly, but then he’s turning and of course it is, he’d know that voice anywhere, he’d know the feel of those hands.

He’s never had to ask.

“…Suguru.”

It is him. He looks the same, his hair longer and his shoulders wider, but still sharp-eyed and handsome and strong, based on the way his fingers have tightened around Satoru’s wrist.

Satoru stares, and then straightens. His hand is starting to shake. He curls it into a fist, hard as he can, so Suguru won’t notice.

“Go on without me, Megumi,” he says, evenly, pretending he’s not swallowing back his heart with every breath. “I’ll see you after class.”

Satoru looks at him, sees the single movement of worry disappear from his face the moment he and Satoru make eye contact.

“Right,” Megumi says. “See you later, Gojo.”

He keeps going, head-lowered. Satoru can’t begin to imagine what he’s thinking.

Suguru is still holding onto his wrist. Satoru’s arm feels numb from the touch of it, from how hard he’s trying to keep himself still. Any sudden movement, and Suguru will let go.

The curiosity he musters feels false and unconvincing, when he turns back to Suguru and asks, “What are you doing here, Suguru?”

He doesn’t care what the answer is. He already knows, despite himself, that Suguru isn’t here for him.

Suguru gestures vaguely behind him, and says, “I’m just…dropping someone off.” Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, completely out of reach, and pulls his shoulders back. “What about you?”

“I’m a professor here.”

“You are?” Suguru’s eyes widen, the corners of his mouth lifting with what seems like genuine surprise. “That’s…unexpected, honestly.”

Satoru’s chest hardens. Raising his eyebrows, he says, with no small degree of hurt, “Well, it has been a while.”

Suguru winces instantly, his smile slipping away. The sight of it turns any of Satoru’s offense to guilt. Trying for softness that feels all too exposing, he asks, “Did you want to come up to my office?”

Suguru’s eyes brighten with interest, but it lasts little more than a moment.

“I-I have work,” he says, and there’s a stutter in his voice, a break that sounds like disappointment. Then he’s pushing a black card into Satoru’s hand. “Here, take it. My number…”

Satoru glances at it, at where Suguru holds it out to him. It’s entirely deliberate, the way he brushes their fingers together as he takes it from him.

“Call me, please,” Suguru continues. “We can get a drink and…and talk. Or something.”

Satoru can’t look away from the card, not yet. He hasn’t had Suguru’s number, a way of contacting him, in more than ten years. It almost doesn’t seem possible.

“All right,” he says, and the smile he levels at him feels more real than any of the ones before it, more genuine with happiness and not forced out around his nerves. “I’ll call you after work.”

He steps back, thinking that’s the end of it. With that black hard slipped away into his pocket, he can part more easily than he might of without it.

But Suguru says, hastily, like he’s desperate to get one last word in, “It was…”

He pauses. Satoru stares back at him, waiting,

“I’m so happy to see you. Satoru.”

Satoru smiles. It’s nice to hear, especially from Suguru.

I wish I could believe you, he thinks.

“Me too, Suguru.”

It takes Satoru twice as long as it usually would, to climb the three flights of stairs that lead up to his office. He’s not sure if he attributes that more to the slow pace he’d taken or the fact he’d had to stop on the second floor to stop himself from crying.

Shoko gives him a strange look when he steps into his office. She’s been waiting for him, as she usually does, even though it’s only the first day of term. A cloud of smoke makes her hazy around the edges.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asks, frowning deeply. “Why do you look like that?”

Satoru drops his bag in his desk chair, drapes his coat over the back of it. His throat feels thick, his hands numb. He can’t stop thinking about the little black card in his coat pocket.

“I just ran into Suguru downstairs.”

Shoko lowers her cigarette.

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“How’d it go?” she asks, obviously.

Satoru grimaces. “Fine,” he says, though it feels far from certain. He thinks about the easy, unbothered way Suguru had been, how he’d ran his hands through his hair, how he’d smiled and told him it was nice to see him like it hadn’t been more than ten years.

He thinks about that iron-grip around his wrist, the slight stutter of disappointment when he’d said he couldn’t come up to his office with him.

More softly, more openly, Satoru adds, “He gave me his card, so I can call him after work. To get a drink, or something.”

“Are you going to?”

Satoru stills. It hadn’t really occurred to him, that he doesn’t have to call if he doesn’t want to. He could rip that card to pieces and burn it up with one of the dozen lighters Shoko’s left around the room, pretend it was never anything more than a grey puff of ash dispersing in the air.

He slips his hand into his coat pocket, runs the tip of his finger along the thin edge to make sure it’s still there.  

God, he wants to see him. He wants to follow that urge he’s held inside of himself the last ten years and chase after him like he was supposed to from the very beginning.

“Yeah, I’m going to,” he says, because there really is no other choice.

“Good,” says Shoko. She gives a decisive nod, a little smile of encouragement. “You can tell me all about it tomorrow.”

Satoru’s sure he will. There’s not a single thing he hasn’t told her, over the past decade. Especially where Suguru is concerned.

If he’s distracted through his first two lectures and the following tutorials, his students don’t mention it. He fast-tracks through the unit overviews, explains the different assessments, acknowledges the smattering of nods when he asks if everyone’s found a copy of the prescribed textbook, and then rushes back to his office the moment the lecture recording ends.

He'd left the business card on his desk, so he wouldn’t be tempted to look at it in the middle of his classes. Now, as he holds it gently by the edges, wary of putting fingerprints on the clean black surface, he finds himself hesitating.  

It’s probably not too early to call. Despite how quickly he’d pressed on through his classes, they’d still carried him through to five-thirty.

He puts it down again, picks it up, turns it around to look at the logo on the back. He can’t tell what kind of business it is, based on that alone. He wonders if that’s intentional.

He’s well and truly memorised the phone number by this time, but he still double checks, again and again, after he’s typed it into his phone, still worries he’s somehow messed up, as he brings the phone to his ear and listens to it ring.

Then the ringing stops, sooner than he’d expected. Satoru has a split second to prepare himself to speak, as he hears Suguru’s answering greeting.

“Suguru?” he asks, forcing his voice out like it’s supposed to sound, when he’s not biting through his tongue with nerves. “Is this a bad time?”

He asks Suguru to meet him back outside the college, in the same place where they’d stood and stared at each other that morning. Something of that disbelief still lingers in Satoru’s chest, as he waits, his jaw aching with a tension that snakes right down his throat to his sternum.

Suguru appears out of the darkness without warning, dressed as he is in all black. He joins Satoru in the circle of light beneath the streetlight, his cheeks tinged a soft shade of pink and his hair vaguely wind-blown.

Satoru swallows, faltering, as Suguru smiles at him.

“Did you walk here?” he asks, though the answer is clear enough. He’d have offered to drive to him, if he knew, even if the thought of sitting in a car beside him makes his hands shake.

Suguru blinks, then shrugs, still smiling. “I took the train today.”

Why? Satoru thinks, instantly. Where do you work? Where do you live? Will you let me come home with you?

He wants to ask him so many questions, and he wants a decade worth of answers. Nothing could be unimportant to him.

“So where are we going?” Suguru asks, thin eyebrows raised expectantly.

“There’s a tearoom around the corner,” Satoru tells him, gesturing to a side path. Then, in a flash of uncertainty, he explains, “I don’t actually drink alcohol, so…”

“That’s all right. I don’t either, really,” says Suguru, as soothing as ever, as quick to put at ease. “A tearoom is fine.”

Satoru breathes in. With a smile of his own, entirely genuine and entirely forced, he asks, “Should we go then?”

Suguru nods and steps back, but still he stays close enough that Satoru can’t help but brush up against him, their shoulders touching for a single moment, as they fall in beside each other.

Suguru speaks first, as they walk, glancing over at him every few steps as he asks, “Did you have a good day? First day of classes, right?”

Satoru hums thoughtfully. It could have been the worst of his entire teaching career, and he still wouldn’t be able to complain. Not with how the day started, with where it is now.

“It was good,” he says, smiling over at him. “Some of my third years brought in a cake as a welcome back.”

He doesn’t mention that he’d been too tense, too distracted, to properly enjoy it, that the taste of chocolate and cream had been dulled by the constant thought of black hair and piercings and purple eyes.

Suguru raises an eyebrow at him, looking amused. “They already bribing you to give them good grades?” he asks.

“My students are brilliant, they don’t need to bribe me!” Satoru exclaims, gapping at him with more indignation than he feels. Then he grins. “Believe it or not, I’m a fantastic teacher. I’ve never had a student fail one of my classes.”

“I believe you,” says Suguru, and with enough intention behind it to smash right into Satoru’s heart, he knocks their shoulders together in a show of teasing familiarity Satoru hadn’t felt since they’d last parted.

“So do you teach lit?”

Satoru doesn’t immediately catch Suguru’s next question, caught up as he is in his proximity. Suguru’s wider in the shoulders than he used to be, back when they were teenagers.

“I teach a few humanities subjects,” he spits out, doggedly keeping his eyes on the road so he won’t think about how his shoulder is still burning for more of Suguru’s touch. “Mainly literature, but linguistics and history classes too. And art history, since the last professor went part time.”

His hand somehow burns even more. As they cross the street he presses it to Suguru’s spine, his mouth dry, and feels something in his sternum strangle itself with desperation.

He never minded in the past, Satoru tells himself, as he tries not to imagine Suguru stepping away from his touch. But that was a long time ago.

Suguru stays close to him, and he doesn’t pull away. Satoru takes that as enough approval, that such a small touch is welcome enough.

“Damn, sounds like a lot,” Suguru comments, his eyebrows pulled together in the centre. “But you like it?”

Satoru smiles to himself. It’s not hard at all, to tell him, “It’s the best thing in the world.” Then he presses his hand more firmly to his spine. “Just in here.”

The tearoom is small and non-descript, exactly the sort of place you’d go if the intention was to avoid every other crowded izakaya in the area. The few customers sit at their low tables, talking amongst each other in quiet voices that filter into a low hum.

Satoru orders for them, ignores the pain in his stomach when Suguru’s surprised he still remembers his favourite drink, and tries, in vain, to think of something worthwhile to say that doesn’t let on just how much he’s struggling to contain himself.

By the time their drinks arrive, neither of them have spoken. Suguru doesn’t seem to mind, content enough to take in the surroundings, but Satoru can’t help but to clench his teeth in frustration at his own lack of action.

Sighing softly to himself, he runs his fingers through his hair, pushing the white strands back just long enough to feel the cool air against his forehead, before it falls back down.  

“You look the same,” Suguru says, suddenly. When Satoru looks at him, he’s already staring.

He can’t help but raise his eyebrows, pleased.

“So do you.”

He does, but he also doesn’t. He didn’t have any tattoos the last time Satoru had seen him, and the only piercings he had were the two gages in his ears.

“But these are new,” he says, and before he can stop himself he’s reaching out to touch, to brush the tips of his fingers over Suguru’s eyebrow, over the ring of metal through the side of his nose.

“And these,” he adds, staring at the ink crawling up his throat.

Suguru stills beneath his hand. It’s for that reason only that Satoru realises what he’s doing.

He draws his hand away before he can smooth it down Suguru’s throat, beneath the collar of his shirt, to feel if those really had been nipple piercings he’d seen the outline of that morning.

Voice low, Suguru explains, “I get them done in my free time at the shop.” He’s not looking at him anymore, his eyes lowered to where Satoru grips his peach iced tea.

“The shop?” Satoru repeats, jaggedly forcing out the words. He taps his finger against the cold glass, training his eyes on Suguru’s mouth so he won’t think about how he still wants to touch, wants to pull at the collar of Suguru’s shirt to see how much of that broad chest is covered in ink.  

“Where I work. I’m a tattoo artist. Have been since I…”

Since I left.

Are we allowed to talk about it? Satoru doubts it, doubts Suguru’s willing, if he can’t even make himself say those few short words, but at least Satoru’s not thinking about sticking his hand down Suguru’s shirt anymore.

“Not quite as prestigious as a university professor,” Suguru continues, smiling modestly. “But it works for me.”

Satoru tilts his head to the side, thoughtful. The Suguru he remembers from university had spent so much of that last year looking at the future with confusion and dread, unconvinced that any of the options pressed on him were the right ones.

But that smile on his face looks genuine, and the softness in his eyes is one Satoru remembers well, from before the stress and frustration of university had hardened him.

The sight of it reminds him that it’s still Suguru in front of him, still his best friend, even if so much has changed since they last saw each other.

It’s easier, after that, to relax.

He takes a sip of tea. “And you like it?”

“It’s the best thing in the world.”

Satoru smiles, and Suguru smiles right back.

“So you have a lot of these now?” Satoru asks, unable to help himself, as he gestures at the tattoos down the side of Suguru’s neck. The lighting in the shop is too dark to make out any details, but he still wants a better look, even if he has to keep his hands to himself.  

“A fair few. I’ll show you one day.”

Satoru pauses, his eyes flickering to Suguru’s, to make sure he hadn’t imagined the edge of flirtation in his otherwise casual voice.

Sure enough, Suguru’s looking at him with his eyelids slightly lowered over his phoenix eyes, the corner of his mouth brought up into a smirk.

It’s at once as familiar as it is strange. Satoru had seen this look more than once, back then, enough times to know what it meant. He hadn’t considered the possibility of seeing it again now.

Almost by instinct, he feels his lips twitch into a similar, sly grin.

He’s not naïve enough to put any hope into it, like he did as a teenager, but he can’t deny his relief that the attraction is still there, if not anything else.

I always knew you wanted to fuck me, Suguru, he thinks, raising his glass to his lips. Would’ve been nice if you’d done something about it.

He wonders if Suguru would now. He wonders if he’d say yes, if Suguru offered.

Probably. Self-control had never been his virtue.

He can’t be sure how long they would have stayed like that, eyes locked onto each other, not saying a single word but with a thousand different emotions flooding the space between them, if his phone hadn’t cut through the tension.

Barely reacting, Satoru’s eyes drop to his lit-up phone, Megumi’s name written across the screen as it vibrates faintly on the table.

Satoru reaches for it at once, his mouth twisting apologetically as he says to Suguru, “Sorry. I have to take this.”

Suguru just shakes his head, unconcerned.

“Megumi,” Satoru says, forcing more brightness than necessary into his voice. “What an honour. You never call me.”

Megumi gives a dull, almost unnoticeable scoff. “Don’t get used to it,” he says. “Are you going to be home soon? Yuji is here and we’re ordering take out.”

“Oh, where from?” Satoru asks. He hadn’t eaten anything beyond a slice of cake, and the thought of food is somewhat appetizing, in this one moment of distraction. “Doesn’t matter. Just get me something sweet.”

“All right,” Megumi says. His voice goes fainter, as he says to Yuji,  “He’ll have honey chicken and rice. And a pack of those assorted mochi ice creams.”

Satoru straightens, beaming. “Ahh, you know me so well, Megumi,” he simpers, already picturing the disgust spreading across Megumi’s face. “I knew you cared.”

“Fuck off,” says Megumi, unsurprisingly. Satoru laughs, is pleased to hear Suguru do the same from across the table. “It’ll be here in twenty. Be on time or we’ll eat the mango mochi.”

It’s an empty threat, but Satoru’s eyes still narrow with distrust.

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“I won’t let him, Gojo-Sensei!” Yuji shouts, only a second before the line goes silent.

Satoru pulls his phone away from his ear to grin down at the screen, fondness making his teeth ache.

“Are those your students?” Suguru asks him.

Satoru blinks, and shoves his phone away.

“Oh, technically,” he says. “Megumi’s kind of my kid. Yuji is his friend but he’s in a few of my classes too.”

Suguru’s glass thumps against the table.

“You have a kid?” he asks, with a sudden urgency, a disbelief, that almost makes Satoru laugh. “How?”

“I mean, it’s not like I birthed him myself, Suguru,” says Satoru, reaching across the table to flick at his shoulder. “His dad died, and he asked me to take care of him and his sister. Not long after you…”

After you left.

Maybe Satoru can’t talk about it either. The ten-year-old wound is still fresh, still feverish and bleeding. If he interferes too much it’ll only get worse.

Suguru blinks at him, a strange look on his face. Then he asks, with what can only disappointment, “You need to go, don’t you?”

It’s a kind of panic, a helpless uncertainty over what reasons he could give to linger, that makes Satoru grimace and say, “Yes. I’m sorry.”

Truthfully, he could stay for longer. It wouldn’t take much more than ten minutes to walk back to his car and drive home. But he doesn’t know what’s safe to talk about, doesn’t think he can stop himself from scrubbing at that wound until its beyond healing.  

Suguru drinks the last of his ginger beer, the ink moving over his throat as he swallows, and then stands. “Come on,” he says, leaving several bills on the table. “Can’t have them stealing your mochi ice cream.”

Then he offers out his hand. Satoru stares at it, his heart thumping. They haven’t held hands since they were seventeen.

He can barely remember how, as he presses their palms together, as he lets Suguru pull him to his feet and guide him back through the shop. It’s more overwhelming than it should be, that one point of contact. He wants to bring Suguru’s warm hand to his mouth, so he can kiss his knuckles.

Satoru shivers.

He can’t keep holding onto him. He can’t. Any longer and he won’t be able to resist the temptation, to pull him around and move in close to him, to touch him, to kiss him.

It’s probably a good thing, that they’ve been interrupted. Much longer and it was only inevitable, that he’d do something he shouldn’t.

He tugs his hand free. Suguru doesn’t react, but he’d probably already planned on letting go. There was no reason for it anymore, after all, not now that they’re both outside in the near-empty street.

Somehow, it makes Satoru wish he’d held on. Maybe the risk would’ve been worth it, to feel Suguru’s warmth for just a little bit longer.

They walk back in silence, but it’s not as awkward as Satoru might have expected it to be. Their shoulders brush with every few steps, and it’s enough.

“Do you want a lift home?” Satoru offers, when they reach his car beneath the main building. He doesn’t know how long of a train ride it is back to Suguru’s place, or where Suguru’s place even is, but nowhere is too far.

“No, it’s okay,” Suguru says. He steps back, unbothered, his hand sweeping the hair out of his face. Satoru watches the movement, aching. “It’s too far from here. And your dinner is waiting.”

I don’t care, Satoru thinks. Let me take you home. Let me stay.

He swallows, and says, “You sure?”

“I’m sure. Thanks anyway.”

Satoru’s not about to argue with him. Shrugging off his disappointment, he opens the car door and throws his bag onto the passenger seat.

“Satoru.”

He hesitates, glances back up at where Suguru’s watching him.

“Will you call me again?”

He sounds soft. Vulnerable. Like he thinks he’s asking for something he shouldn’t be allowed to have.

Satoru gives him a crooked smile. The wave of affection in his stomach feels just the same as it used to. The force of it almost hurts.

“You have my number,” he says. “You call me.”

There’s a ringing in Satoru’s ears, when he leaves Suguru behind in the car park. He feels vaguely sick, his hands numb, his throat thick and dry at the same time.

Seeing Suguru again is so much better, so much more intense, then he had really anticipated over the years. In so many ways it feels like they’d never been apart.

He looks as good as he did ten years ago, or better, with his hair and his piercings and his goddamn tattoos. He looks like he’s supposed to.

And he looks happy. In Satoru’s last few memories of him, he remembers dark shadows beneath tired eyes, a frame thinning out, unkept hair and clothes hanging loosely.

There’s nothing to be seen of that Suguru in this one now. He’s filled back out, broad-shouldered and slightly thicker around the waist than Satoru with muscles. His hair is longer, his eyes brighter, his mouth quicker to curve up into that beautiful smile.

Satoru draws in a shuddering breath. His hands tighten on the steering wheel. He wishes he’d stayed longer, even if he probably would have ended up sprouting every single desperate thought of longing he’s had the last decade.

There’s not even any guarantee that Suguru will call him again. Satoru knows he’d asked, which should have been all the indication he needed, but there’s every chance it was just out of politeness.

He’ll call, he tells himself, with as much assurance as he can. He was disappointed that I had to go. I could tell.

He sits in his car for longer than he needs to, after he gets home, even if his dessert is in danger of getting eaten. When at last he drags himself up to his apartment, he’s mustered up an easy enough smile it should convince Megumi there’s nothing wrong with him other than the usual.

“Did you go somewhere after work?” Megumi asks, anyway, frowning at him when he comes inside. He’s got two bowls in his hands, two pairs of chopsticks.

“Yeah,” says Satoru. He grins warmly, tries to mask the conflict in his mind. “Got a drink with an old friend.”

He doesn’t add anything else onto it. Megumi can probably guess exactly who, just from that.

“Your food is in the kitchen,” he says, without asking anymore questions. “Yuji and I are eating in my room.”

Satoru waves him off. “Say hi to Yuji,” he says, as Megumi moves down the hall and disappears behind his bedroom door.

His food is waiting for him, just as Megumi had said, but he doesn’t have much of an appetite for any of it. He’ll admit, he’d rather be back at that tea room with Suguru than here, even if he’d been burning himself up with unnecessary nerves the entire time.

In the end, he puts it all away for later. The night’s gone quiet in the short time it’d taken him to get home, and he feels strange and unnerved, that numbness in his hands lingering despite the warmth of the apartment.

And it’s calm, aside from the occasional noise from whatever movie they’re watching in Megumi’s bedroom. Satoru could so easily let the rest of the evening slip away, caught up in his own thoughts.

He’s still standing in the kitchen, contemplating whether it’s worth it, staying up much longer, when his phone vibrates in his pocket. Half-distracted, he pulls it out and reads,

Suguru
Is texting allowed?
6:14

He stares at his phone, not quite believing it. Barely more than twenty minutes and Suguru’s already reached out to him.

His thumbs hover over the screen, unsure. He wants to hit the call button right now, just so he can hear his voice, just so he can tell him how absolutely allowed it is.

Instead, with a great deal of control, he types.

As if it wouldn’t be.
6:16

He bites his bottom lip. He doesn’t want to seem over-eager, but that might have been too dry. Nothing about it at all feels natural anymore.

Did you get home all right?
6:16

My Mango Mochi was safe, if that’s what you’re asking.
6:17

I’m glad. I know how devastated you’d be otherwise.
Can we meet again soon?
6:18

Satoru swallows. His eyes narrow in on that last, leading message, on the suggestion of wanting more. He types without thought.

Yes. Whenever you like.
6:18

Tomorrow? After work again?
6:18

Yes. I’ll meet you outside the college, same as today.
6:19

I can’t wait.
6:19

Me too.
6:19

Satoru drops his phone on the counter, grinning. This time yesterday he’d only distantly dreamed of seeing Suguru again, and now here they were planning their second meeting.

It doesn’t feel real at all. If it weren’t for the very tangible evidence of Suguru’s messages on his phone, he’d think he’d imagined the whole thing.

But slowly, the smile fades from his face.

Seeing Suguru again is the one thing he’s always wanted most, out of everything in the world - nothing has ever felt more important to him. Now that he has, he’s not sure what comes next. He’s not even sure they’ll see each other again, after tomorrow.

There are no guarantees, especially with Suguru. He’d learned that the hard way.

He doesn’t want to live that pain again. The things it would do to him, to convince himself he had Suguru back only to lose him again…there would be no recovering from it.

Because it’s clear to him, even after only one day.

The way he feels about Suguru hasn’t changed.

Chapter Text

“How was it?” Shoko asks him, foregoing greetings, when he comes into his office that next morning. She’s already let herself in, must have been waiting for him a good while, because she’s sat by the open window with a burnt-out cigarette mashed into the ash tray he keeps around just for her. There’s another between her long fingers.

Satoru sets his messenger bag on his desk. He’d forgotten his coat at home, and the breeze coming in through the window makes him shiver.

Weakly, he says, “I’m still in love with him.”

Shoko flicks her cigarette thoughtfully.

“Okay,” she says. “What are you going to do about it?”

Satoru swallows. What he should do is obvious, but not exactly feasible. He can’t begin to imagine how Suguru would react to a confession of that sort, after so long apart. Satoru can’t even be sure how he’d have reacted to that confession ten years ago.

“I can’t tell him,” he says, shaking his head. “Not yet.”

“What if he feels the same?”

Satoru hasn’t let himself think about that possibility in so long it doesn’t seem like a real thought.

“I know he…he loved me back then, before he left.” Even if it might not have been the way I wanted him to. “It doesn’t mean he feels anything like that now.”

Shoko breathes out through her nose, streaming trails of smoke.

“Well, you have time to figure it out,” she says, thoughtfully. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can just be friends until you sort out what you want from each other.”

Satoru feels his eyebrows twitch with self-reproach.

“I know what I want from him,” he says.

“So you’re already halfway there.” She points her smoke at him, deliberate and forceful. “Things will make themselves clear, Satoru. You have to trust the process. I bet he’s trying to figure out how you feel about him right now too.”

Satoru frowns. There’s only one way he’s ever felt about Suguru, from the moment they met. There’s no chance Suguru isn’t aware of that, at least in part.

“Are you seeing him again?” Shoko asks.

Satoru let’s all the air out of his lungs.

“Yes,” he says, with another jolt of nerves, of excitement, at the prospect. “Today. After work.”

“So you’ve got the chance to have a proper talk.” She stands, snuffs out the last of her cigarette and comes around to lean against the edge of his desk. “I’m sure things will make more sense afterwards.”

“I hope so.”

“God knows you’ve waited long enough for some real answers,” she sighs, and her hand lands on his shoulder, squeezes just so. “He better give you them, if he knows what’s good for him.”

Satoru smiles, despite the infernal ache. “Thanks, Shoko.”

“If he hurts you again I’m going to kill him.”

Softening, Satoru wraps an arm around her hips and rests against her side. “C’mon, Shoko,” he sighs, turning his face in against her. “I don’t want to think like that. I’m just glad I get to see him again.”

“Hm.” She sniffs, unconvinced, but rests her palm against the crown of his head anyway. Her fingers move back and forth through his hair, as deliberate with him as they’d been with her cigarette. “Let me know how it goes, anyway.”

She leaves him with one final look, as all-knowing as all the others.

Satoru sits at his desk for hours, restless and aimless, with no lectures or tutorials yet to occupy him and no assignments to grade. The handful of emails he gets from Haibara are answered within minutes, the ones from Yaga entirely ignored.

As noon draws closer, he can at least distract himself by giving a lecture to his third years, but even then, before long, he can’t help his impulses.

As his students copy notes from the board, he reaches for his phone, opens his messages with Suguru, and types,

You still want to meet up after work again?
11:33

When he looks up, Inumaki and Panda are staring at him, eyebrows raised. Satoru stares back, feeling like he’s broken some unspoken rule. It’s not like he hasn’t ever touched his phone before during a class.

He ignores them, spends another five minutes speaking to the benefit of the students that are there to actually learn, who haven’t continued his classes because they like how he looks.

When his phone vibrates a few minutes later, he has to force himself not to reach for it straight away. Half his students, the ones familiar enough with him to risk the impertinence, are all looking at where it lies discarded on the desk.

“You should probably answer that,” says Maki, bluntly.

Satoru sneers at her, but picks his phone up anyway.

Of course.
Unless you don’t want to?
11:37

He should’ve waited. The grin on his face can’t be helped, but he knows it’s only going to make his students more pushy.

Are you crazy?
I can’t wait to see you.
11:42

“You look cheerful, sensei,” says Panda, leaning back in his chair. He’s grinning around the end of his pencil, one heavy black eyebrow lifted with amusement. “Talking to someone cute?”

“Yeah, your mum,” says Satoru. Inumaki snorts, and on his other side, Yuuta covers his mouth to hide his grin.

“Are you gonna be my new dad?” says Panda, sitting up straight and looking far too horrified.

“I have enough kids already,” Satoru responds. Then he points at the board. “Are any of you guys getting this, or are you too busy wondering who I spend my time talking to?”

“Shoko-sensei is your only friend,” says Maki. “And she still uses a pager.”

Satoru scoffs. “Don’t pretend you know anything about my personal life,” he says. “I have plenty of other friends.”

“Fine. Haibara-sensei too.”

His phone vibrates again. Satoru snatches it up, deliberately obvious this time, and reads,

Me neither.
I’m glad I saw you outside the college.
11:45

His face colours, softens. He doesn’t even look to see his students reactions, as he responds,

To think we might have just missed each other too, if I was any later.
My students keep asking me why I’m on my phone.
11:46

That was my coworkers yesterday when I was waiting for you to call.
They definitely think I’m dating someone.
11:47

Satoru swallows, his mouth suddenly dry. He doesn’t know how to respond to that, whether his heart can handle joking about it.

He’s in dangerous territory now, he can feel it. Much more and he won’t be able to recover.

I bet you didn’t deny it.
I’m in the middle of a lecture, I should go.
I’ll see you at 5:30
11:54

When he shoves his phone away, safely into his messenger bag, and forces himself to look back up at his students, they’re all still staring at him. At the front, Panda, Inumaki, Yuuta, and Maki all share varying looks of surprise.

“Ah,” says Panda, sounding slightly guilty. “Sorry, sensei. Didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“Do you think I’m capable of feeling embarrassment?” Satoru says, forcing a grin, as he pushed aside the part of his mind that’s still locked on those messages, on that word Suguru seems so happy to use.

They definitely think I’m dating someone.

It’s hard to imagine how Suguru might be acting, how he might be looking at his phone, to make people think that. Satoru knows he’s always been obvious himself, but Suguru was always good at keeping a blank face.  

He finishes the lecture, and his students don’t comment again.

An undercurrent of anxiety lingers in Satoru’s stomach for the rest of the afternoon, makes the tea he drinks taste weak, the cigarettes Shoko smokes more pungent. He resolutely leaves his phone alone, convinced if he touches it he won’t be able to stop himself from checking again, and again, and again, that their plans haven’t changed.

When he finally leaves the building in the evening, that anxiety in his stomach tightens, clenches to the point of sickness. He’s not sure if he’s shivering from the cold or the tension.

He can’t see Suguru anywhere. In his head, he assumes the worst over and over and over again.

“Satoru.”

Like always, the sound of Suguru’s voice cuts right through him. The anxiety crumbles, dries up and drifts away.

He watches Suguru step into the light of a streetlamp, hands in his leather jacket, his hair pulled back out of his face, his mouth curved into a warm smile.

Satoru moves towards him at once, drawn closer by nothing less than overwhelming longing.

“Yo,” he says, grinning like he wasn’t on the edge of a panic attack only moments earlier. “You still like hiding in the dark, I see.”

“Old habits,” Suguru says, smirking. Then he touches Satoru’s elbow, his fingers firm through the thin material of his dress shirt. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” Satoru asks. He doesn’t strictly care what the answer is. He’d like it if Suguru touched him again.

“Not sure yet,” Suguru says, oblivious. “Somewhere with sweets?”

Satoru huffs. He lands his fist lightly against Suguru’s chest, tells himself he’s allowed to touch too.

“Hah, nice,” he says, pleased. “Is this your bike? Let’s take it.”

It has to be his bike. The rest of the street is abandoned, not a car in sight, and Suguru must have been keeping a protectively close watch on it to not want to move any closer to the school.  

Suguru sounds unexpectedly surprised, when he asks, “You want to?”

Satoru raises his eyebrows. He can’t remember ever giving the impression that he was any less reckless than Suguru was, when they were teenagers.

“Why do I even ask?” Suguru sighs, shaking his head and grinning. “Hurry up then. There’s a late-night café I like but it’s a ten-minute ride. We’ll go there.”

Satoru feels almost embarrassed, when he pulls on the helmet Suguru presses against his chest, like he’s making a claim to something that doesn’t belong to him. He wonders how many other people Suguru has offered this helmet to, who he bought it for in the first place.  

“You ever ridden before?” Suguru asks, mistaking his silence for nerves. Satoru feels his fingers again, brushing against his throat as he checks the helmet’s in place.

Satoru shakes his head.

Suguru gives him a far too eager look. Satoru recognises it from a thousand different memories.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go slow,” he says, his voice low and mischievous and just a little bit flirtatious. “At first.”

Satoru rolls his eyes, grinning. Suguru always did like hitting him with those teasing lines, back when they were teenagers. They’d be just as effective now, if Satoru let himself think about it a little longer.

When he drops into the seat behind Suguru and drapes his arms around his waist, he uses it as an opportunity to touch as freely and as firmly as he desires, content in the excuse he’s been given.

Suguru’s more solid then he had been a decade ago. With his hands linked against his stomach, Satoru can feel how he’s grown bulkier with muscle, how he’s lost that lean, worrisome thinness he’d had in the months they’d last spent together.

Can I stop worrying about that? Satoru asks himself, pressing his chest to Suguru’s spine. Are you finally eating enough, Suguru?

It will be strange, to let that burden of concern go after so many years of carrying it, but he welcomes the relief.

He doesn’t pay attention to where Suguru’s taking them, on how long they’ve been riding for. He’d be happy to go on for hours, pressed up against Suguru’s body, even with the cold cutting through him and the dryness in his throat.

Suguru stops outside of a late-night café, nondescript but welcoming enough, for anyone not interested in a bar or pub.

“Have you ever been here?” Suguru asks him, leaning back over his shoulder to look at him.

Satoru shakes his head, as he hands over his helmet. He can see through the glass storefront that the inside is nearly empty, save for a girl working behind the counter and a single customer.

Good, he thinks, climbing off the bike. Suguru and I can talk for as long as we want like this.

He has no intention of racing off like he did yesterday, after barely more than a sip of tea and a few passing comments. He wants to sit in Suguru’s presence for the rest of the night, for as long as Suguru will give him.

Unsurprisingly, Suguru orders the least sweet thing they have to offer. Satoru counters by doing the exact opposite, like it might balance things out.

He pays before Suguru can even touch his wallet. When Suguru glares at him, full of disapproval, he can only grin and say, “My shout. You paid yesterday.”

“Yeah, but this costs more than a peach iced tea, Toru.”

Toru, Satoru thinks. It’s been a long time since I heard that one.

“You can buy me something next time,” he says, swallowing.

The girl behind the counter looks between the both of them, as she hands over their drinks, a knowing tilt to her eyebrows and a slight blush on her cheeks. Satoru smiles at her and watches the blush spread across the entirety of her face.

“Enjoy your date,” she says, timidly enough Satoru doubts Suguru would have noticed.

His smile softens anyway. It’s a nice sentiment, even if it’s not quite the truth.  

“We will,” he says, sincerely. He shouldn’t speak for Suguru, not on something so ill-defined, but he can’t see the harm in allowing himself such a simple lovely misunderstanding.

And it could be real. If Satoru said something, if he asked the question, than whatever they’re doing could become exactly what it looks like from the outside.

 He follows Suguru back out the door, sits across from him at a table closed off from the rest of the street by planters of jasmine shrubs.

“Do anything interesting at work?” Satoru asks, as he adds another unnecessary spoonful of sugar to his coffee. He eyes Suguru’s neck, where a peak of his tattoo juts out just above his collar. “Tattoo anything weird?”

“Depends on your definition of weird,” says Suguru, with a small shrug. “It was slow today, actually. I spent most of the day working on something for myself.”

“Will you show me?”

“Yeah, if you want,” says Suguru, turning to his lemon cake. Satoru watches how he cuts a tidy mouthful with the edge of his fork, how he eats it just as neatly.

Satoru breathes in a shallow breath. He never did like the taste of lemon, but he thinks he could get used to it, if he was tasting it from Suguru’s mouth.

“I don’t have my sketchbook with me so you’ll have to wait,” Suguru continues. Oblivious.

Satoru looks away, forces himself to take a bite of his pastry. The apricot is sweet, sweet enough to take the phantom tang of lemon off of his tongue.

“Have you always worked at that studio?” he makes himself ask, before the silence can linger too long.

Suguru doesn’t answer straight away. He sips his green tea, squints down the street to where he parked his bike.

“Not always,” he says. “We moved from a couple of districts over about a year ago. My coworkers’ little brother started at the college, and they wanted to be closer for his sake.”

Satoru can understand that. He’d bought his current apartment the moment Tsumiki was accepted into the university, more concerned than he’d expected of himself, to make the experience easy for her. It didn’t hurt that it was around the same time he started working there.

“That’s nice,” he says, smiling to himself. “So where do you live, anyway?”

“Shibuya. The old studio used to be in Shibuya. But I don’t mind the ride in now.”

“You never mentioned wanting a bike before,” says Satoru, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

“Kind of an impulse buy,” says Suguru. “I don’t really like driving that much.”

Satoru blinks, nodding absently. He’s not sure if he imagined it, the weakness in Suguru’s voice as he finished speaking, but he knows him well enough to notice the way his mouth twitches distastefully at the corners.  

“How long have you been a professor?” Suguru asks, and his voice sounds the same it always has, his mouth an even, tempting line.

Satoru brushes off his curiosity, then finds himself wincing.

“Uh, three years?” he guesses. It’s hard to tell, when his study blended right into his work. “Something like that. I got my PhD when I turned twenty-five and started teaching straight away.”

“That’s really impressive, Satoru,” Suguru says, with a genuine warmth that has Satoru shivering. “Although in hindsight, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“You’re not?”

“Of course,” says Suguru, like there was never any question of it. “You’ve always been brilliant. I always knew you’d be the best at anything you chose to do.”

Satoru stills. His lips part around slow, shallow breaths.

That’s not true, he thinks. If I was the best, you would’ve stayed.

“Why teaching though?” Suguru asks, still oblivious, still painfully unaware of his effect. “I don’t remember you ever talking about that when we were younger.”

It takes more effort than it should, to pull himself out of his thoughts.

“That was an impulse decision too,” he tells Suguru. “Yaga came to me with the offer a few months after I graduated. Said I knew more than professors twice my age, although it hurt him to admit it.”

There’s more to it than that, but Satoru doesn’t quite know how to explain. He runs his fingers across the side of mug, tapping them back and forth, as he tentatively continues,

“I thought I could help the students, too. Help them enjoy those last years of their youth before it was lost to them.”

He likes to think he’s been successful, if only a little bit. His students enjoying teasing him, but that’s always been the extent of it. When he sees how stiff and formal, how uncaring they are with some of the other professors, he can only assume it says something good about him.  

“I can understand that,” Suguru says, with a softness that has Satoru straightening, has him frowning with confusion. He’s never heard that kind of tone before from Suguru, not with anyone.

Suguru asks, before he can question him, “Is that why you took in Megumi? And his sister, you said?”

Oh, if only it were that simple, Satoru thinks, grinning wryly, but as usual the mention of them clears any kind of lingering haze from his mind.

“Sort of. Megumi’s dad is Toji Fushiguro. Do you remember him?”

Suguru grimaces instantly. “That asshole son of the Zen’in Clan? Wasn’t his family like business rivals of yours, or something?”

“Defected son, but yeah,” says Satoru. He leans in against the table, hushing his voice like it’s a story he’s not told a hundred different people. “He got himself killed in a freak accident. I was actually with him when he died, and I guess that’s why he asked me to find Megumi and his sister. Must have been feeling sentimental towards the end because he really didn’t want him going back to the Zen’ins.”

“Damn,” Suguru sighs, sitting back in his chair. His eyebrow raises. “How’d you manage raising two kids and studying for your doctorate at the same time?”

“Made good on the Gojo inheritance,” says Satoru, shrugging. “My mother died. I’m technically the de facto head of the family, so I can do what I want with the fortune. Raising two orphans seemed a good use for it, even if I never wanted any of it for myself.”

“I’m glad,” Suguru says. “And sorry about your mother.”

It doesn’t sound at all genuine. Satoru supposes he remembers the old stories of her, that he hasn’t forgotten how she was from the few, brief instances he’d met her.

“Don’t be,” he says. “You know as well as I do what she was like. At least now she can’t dig her talons into my life anymore.”

“Does Megumi take any of your classes?”

Satoru scoffs out a laugh.

“I think he’d rather go to the stake than take my classes,” he says, without any hurt. “He’s pretty embarrassed that most of his friends deliberately choose my lectures.”

“Sounds about right,” says Suguru, grinning around the edge of his teacup. “I don’t know anyone who’d like to have their dad as their teacher.”

“Tsumiki didn’t seem to mind,” says Satoru, and then he can’t help it, as he tells Suguru about the internship he’d gotten her at one of the best publishing houses in Tokyo.

After that, it’s only instinctual for him to share everything about her, about Megumi, about what they were like as kids and what they’re like now, as adults, as people who must like him enough to stick around when there’s no longer any obligation to.

He thinks he might’ve continued speaking for hours, if he hadn’t noticed the student from inside the shop packing up her things, the girl behind the counter slowly wandering around wiping down tables and stacking chairs.

He rises, almost surprising himself with the suddenness of it.

“I should probably start home,” he says, regretfully, as Suguru looks at him, as he stands too. “It looks like they’re closing up.”

“I’ll take you back to the college so you can get your car.”

“Didn’t bring my car,” says Satoru. He shoves his hands in his pant pockets, more aware of the chill in the air now that he know he has to walk in it. “I only live a few streets away.”

Suguru frowns. “Why did you drive to the college yesterday if you live within walking distance?”

“I was feeling lazy, Suguru.”

“Sure, you were,” says Suguru, unconvinced. “What’s the real answer?”

Satoru can’t quite look at him, reluctant as he is to admit, “…I was running late to my first class.”

“And you still invited me up to your office?”

Of course, Satoru thinks. What other option was there, to keep you around longer?  

His face feels warm, and there’s a touch of that anxiety back in his stomach, as he says, completely honest, “I wanted to talk to you. Or had you forgotten that we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in ten years?”

He has to say the last part teasingly, like it’s not more painful than a mouthful of broken glass, like he hasn’t been cutting his insides up on the shards of it for more than a decade.

Suguru stares at him, and he’s not smiling, isn’t fooled at all by the teasing, as he says, “As if I possibly could.” Then he sniffs and starts walking towards his bike. “I’ll take you home then.”

Satoru wishes he could tell what Suguru was thinking, as he falls back in behind him, as he presses himself back up against his spine, as he guides him home with desperate, lingering, guiding touches to his left and right thighs.

The closer they get, the more his reluctance grows. He doesn’t want to cut their evening short like he had to yesterday, doesn’t want to tear himself away from the proximity he’s been allowed.

It’s entirely deliberate, that he gets Suguru to stop further down the street from his front gate than he otherwise would, if he were with anyone else.

If Suguru is the same person who he loved all those years ago, he’ll offer to walk him to front door. Satoru is confident enough in that, at least.

“I live down the other end of the street,” he explains, as he pulls himself away from the bike, from Suguru’s body. He hands the helmet back, scrubs his fingers through his hair, and tries to pretend he’s not waiting.

“I’ll walk you to the door.”

I knew it.

Satoru beams, with more genuine, unrestrained happiness, relief, than he’s been willing to let himself feel before that moment.

It almost makes him tempted, to do more things he wouldn’t usually otherwise do. He could take Suguru’s hand, could link their fingers together like it’s normal. He could embrace him, could kiss, could tell him he loves him.

He could invite him into his house, into his bedroom, into his bed.

Walking together down the street, not touching but standing close enough to feel his presence, Satoru imagines a thousand different endings to the single confession he wants to give.

He’s so entirely aware of Suguru’s presence at his side, he notices instantly when it disappears.

Smiling unsurely, he looks over his shoulder at where Suguru’s stopped walking, at where he’s staring at him, his mouth a thin line and his eyes unreadable.  

“What’s with the look?” Satoru asks, as his chest start to tighten with worry.

Suguru keeps staring at him, still with that unreadable look in his eyes, with that hint of sadness around his mouth.

“I missed you, Satoru.”

Satoru’s expression turns blank. The worry in his chest disappears for a peculiar, unexpected calm.

His voice low, Suguru continues, “I’ve missed you every day since we last saw each other.”

We’re doing this now, then, Satoru thinks. That’s quite the opening you’ve given me.

He looks away, brushes at his hair. He doesn’t know how to react. When he breathes in, the air rattles coldly in his lungs.

All at once, the calm reveals itself for the illusion that it is.

He can’t control himself. Not now that Suguru’s started it.   

Okay. You asked for it.

“Fuck, Suguru,” he chokes, shoving in against him, against his warmth. His eyes sting, but Suguru’s throat is right there for him to hide his face. “Why did you just leave like that? Why couldn’t you tell me what was going on?”

Suguru’s arms wrap around him, pull him in with, Satoru can’t quite tell, the same kind of desperation that’s eating away at his own insides.

“I wanted to,” Suguru says, still in that same low, unsure voice, like he thinks there’s a possibility Satoru won’t understand him in every single way a person can. “Believe me, Satoru. I wanted to.”

Frustration rears, hot and unexpected, in Satoru’s mind.

He rips himself away, feels the absence stab like a knife through his chest, through his throat. For once, the bitterness and hurt is stronger than the longing.

“I know you didn’t like university the way I did and you wanted to leave,” he says, dragging his hands back through his hair. It’s cold, yet his body burns. “But you didn’t have to cut me off like that. We could have still been-”

“Been what?” Suguru interrupts. “Friends?”

He says it like he knows it’s the wrong word.

Satoru looks at him, and he knows he looks weak, vulnerable, knows his eyes are still red at the corners from the effort of not crying, knows it’s the only word for it, when he says, “Together. We could have still been together.”

He watches as it sinks in, as Suguru turns his face away, as he brings his hands up, shaking, to hide whatever expression is in his eyes, as he drops them back to his sides.  

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice breaks, comes out raspy and guilty and desperate. “It wasn’t that easy.”

Whatever bitterness Satoru feels, it leaves him the moment Suguru finishes speaking. He wants to touch again. He wants to take back the moment where he pulled himself free from Suguru’s embrace.

“Will you tell me now?” he asks.

“If you really want to know,” says Suguru, but Satoru sees how he hesitates, how he doesn’t want to, even now. “But not just yet. I need to…to sort out the story first.”

Don’t you trust me? Satoru thinks, sadly. Don’t you know I’d do anything for you?

“Fine,” he sighs, wrapping his arms around himself. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Suguru reaches out to touch him, but Satoru steps back. If he feels Suguru’s hands, his warmth, he really will fall apart completely.

“Satoru…”

“Come on,” says Satoru, shortly. “Let’s keep going. I’m cold.”

Suguru blinks at him, his face falling. Then he pulls at his leather jacket.

“Here, take this.”

“No, it’s fine-”

Satoru pauses. Suguru is covered in far more tattoos than he’d expected, the entirety of both arms filled with ink. It’s too dark out for Satoru to decipher any of it, but it doesn’t matter. He wants to run his hands over them regardless.

“Just take it, Satoru,” Suguru says, pressing the jacket against his chest. “You know I run hot.”

Satoru knows, and he can’t bring himself to keep refusing. He takes the jacket, slips his arms through the sleeves, and wraps himself in the remnants of Suguru’s warmth. Wearing the jacket isn’t quite the same as his embrace, but it will have to do.

He keeps walking down the street, silent, more attuned than ever to where Suguru walks a step behind him. The tension from before feels twice as thick, twice as dangerous.

He stops outside the gated side-path leading into his courtyard. From where he stands, he can see the light of Megumi’s bedroom shining through the gaps in the curtains. No doubt Yuji will be over again. They seem to have grown closer, over the last few weeks.

Satoru’s not sure if it’s envy or bittersweetness that he feels, at the thought of it. He and Suguru were once like that. He can so easily imagine how Megumi must be feeling.

He sighs, slips his hands into the pockets of Suguru’s jacket. He should say goodbye now and move on with his night before he says anything else to overcomplicate things.

Instead, he turns and looks at the uncertainty on Suguru’s face, at the guilt, at what Satoru can convince him is longing.

Any of Satoru’s resolve waivers at just one glance. No matter what he feels, he can’t let them part like this. It’s only been a day.

 Things can’t fall apart so quickly.

“Come upstairs,” he says, like he’s not prepared to beg at the slightest hint of reluctance. “It’s still early enough.”

Suguru’s face softens. He steps through the gate after Satoru, closes it behind him with a gentleness like it might mean something, and follows him up to the house.

There are two pairs of shoes at the edge of the genkan. Satoru eyes them, then calls down through the hall, “You home, Megumi?”

“Yeah, in here,” Megumi says, his voice faint through his bedroom door.

Satoru smiles, pulls the leather jacket off and hangs it beside several of his own. Next to him, Suguru yanks off his black boots, half-distracted as he peers around the corner into the living room.

Satoru can’t help but feel self-conscious as Suguru openly gazes around the room, lips parted, eyebrows raised, but entirely unspeaking.

Megumi appears at the end of the hall. He waves absently at Satoru, but he’s looking at Suguru, his mouth a thin, disapproving line.

Satoru pretends not to notice. He gives Megumi a knowing grin, when Yuji steps out behind him.

Then Yuji’s mouth splits into an excited smile. Sounding even more joyful than usual, he shouts, “Suguru-San!”

Satoru jolts and looks over his at shoulder at Suguru, who’s looking equally as stunned as he says, “Yuji?”

Satoru glances between them both, more caught off guard than he’d be willing to admit. Slowly, he asks, “You know each other, then?”

It seems unlikely, really, but then he thinks about all the hints, about Suguru working nearby as a tattoo artist, about his co-workers moving closer to be near their younger brother. If he’d thought about just a little more, it seems almost too obvious.

“Oh yeah!” Yuji exclaims, moving closer, further away from Megumi’s sider. Satoru flicks a glance at him, sees his face darken. “Suguru-San works with my older brothers.”

“Sukuna and Choso?” Satoru says, distastefully. He gives Suguru a grimace, more strongly than he feels. “I don’t envy you.”

 Yuji rolls his eyes, unconcerned, and says, “They’re not that bad.”

“I won’t speak badly about Choso, but we both know Sukuna is an animal,” Suguru says, but he’s reaching out to fondly ruffle Yuji’s hair as he speaks, familiar enough and comfortable enough to not even hesitate. “At least he’s good at his work.”

Yuji snickers at him, leans further into his affectionate hand as he warns, “I’m telling him you said that.”

Suguru sighs and shoves Yuji away. “Please don’t. We don’t need to feed his ego.”

Satoru looks at Megumi again, and finds some unfair solace in the frustration he sees. Somehow, watching Suguru interact with Yuji hurts a little bit, a shared past he can’t ever be part of. It’s another painful reminder, of all the things he doesn’t know about him.

He wonders if that is what’s bothering Megumi, or if it’s just Suguru’s presence. Somehow, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was both.

“How do you know Gojo-Sensei?” Yuji asks.

Satoru straightens, looks at Suguru with his own curiosity. It’s a question with so many answers, he can’t help but wonder which one Suguru is willing to give.

Suguru casts him a look from the corner of his eye and says, his voice slow and careful, “We went to college together, before I dropped out.”

“You went to college?” Yuji asks, unconvinced.

Suguru blinks. Then his once affectionate hand lands a light smack against the back of Yuji’s head. “Did you not hear the part where I dropped out, brat?” he barks, but he casts Satoru an amused glance as he speaks.

Yuji gives him a hurt look, his palm covering the back of his neck.

“You’re as mean as Sukuna,” he says.

Satoru’s mouth twitches. He doubts Suguru’s capable of even half the careless cruelty he’s seen Sukuna exhibit, or at least not intentionally.

“Oh, you think so?” Suguru asks, entirely unoffended, even if he does throw a muscled bicep around Yuji’s shoulders and pull him in to scuffle him.

Yuji breaks free easily, more easily than he should considering he’s ten years Suguru’s younger. The punch he aims at Suguru’s stomach looks to have enough force behind it to make Satoru wince, even if Suguru dodges it easily.

He assumes they could have gone on forever, laughing and grunting and throwing dirty punches, if Megumi hadn’t stepped forwards to catch Yuji’s wrist before the next blow could land.

“Come on, Yuji,” he says, with a controlled sharpness Satoru imagines only he would notice. “Let’s keep watching the movie.”

Yuji doesn’t need convincing. Pink-cheeked and already following behind him, he says with a distant, unfocused wave over his shoulder, “Ok. See you later, Suguru-San.”

Megumi’s door closes with an unmistakable click. Satoru doubts he’ll see either of them again for the rest of the evening.

“Just out of curiosity,” Suguru says, with a not-so-subtle look at him. “Are they…”

“Dating?” Satoru finishes. He can’t say the question is all that unexpected. “I don’t think so, not yet. But give it a minute and they’ll pull their acts together.”

“I suppose we’re not in a great position to judge,” says Suguru, absently. Then his mouth twitches. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” says Satoru. He gestures Suguru into the kitchen, takes down mugs for more coffee, and tells himself it doesn’t mean anything, the easy way Suguru’s been saying these weary, raw things. “You’re right, anyway. Maybe if I’d said something you would’ve stayed.”

“I don’t think anything would’ve changed.”

Something inside Satoru’s chest tightens, tightens so hard it snaps.

“Wow, that makes me feel important,” he says, grinning around the taste of iron in his mouth. He fights the compulsion to hang his head, to reveal just how deeply those few words cut.

Then Suguru’s hands land on his waist, unexpected enough Satoru would’ve shaken, if Suguru hadn’t already been gentling him around so they could look at each other, so he could reach up to brush the tips of his fingers against Satoru’s jaw, the rapidly thumping pulse in his throat.

“No. That’s not what I meant,” he says, close enough to kiss, close enough to bite. “Satoru, we both knew what we felt back then, even if we never said anything. But I wasn’t in the right mind to give you what you deserved.”

Why couldn’t you let me decide that? Satoru thinks. He grips the edge of the counter, his hands aching. I would’ve taken anything you had to spare.

He would have. It would have been more than enough for him.

He lets go of the counter, and touches Suguru’s hands instead, circles his shaking fingers around his strong, steady wrists where they hold him.

“All right,” he sighs, closing his eyes, even though it’s not. He hasn’t slept properly in more than ten years. “I wish you could tell me why though.”

“I promise I will,” Suguru says, leaning in closer, touching him harder. “As soon as I’m able.”

Satoru swallows, as he looks at him. Suguru is shorter than him, but pressed together as close as they are it makes no difference at all.

We can still kiss, can’t we? He thinks. I don’t need to know everything yet for us to kiss.

Suguru has to want to. He wouldn’t be looking like that, wouldn’t be staring Satoru down like that, if he didn’t want something to happen.

Satoru wishes it were a good enough call to action. As it is, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be brave enough to make the first move.

Not anymore.

Satoru feels almost saved, by the loud shout from Megumi’s room. He’s not sure he could have managed it, if Suguru had pulled away without an excuse.

“They watch a lot of horror movies,” he explains, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck, as Suguru steps back, hands to himself. “Yuji’s a film student.”

“I know,” says Suguru. He sounds unfairly out-of-breath, like he might have been effected by all of that more than Satoru. “I used to take him to the cinema, when he was little.”

Satoru can imagine it, a younger Suguru, a younger Yuji hanging off his arm like he was another one of his brothers. Yuji had looked so genuinely happy at the sight of him.

“I should…go. I need to get home.”

Satoru deflates, but he tries not to show it. He can’t help but feel he’s done something wrong, overstepped the mark in some way he’s too blind to recognise.

“All right,” he says.

But Suguru looks sad and reluctant, like he’s the one who’s misstepped, when he gives Satoru one last lingering look and leaves the kitchen.

Satoru has to breathe in, long and hard, before he can follow.

Suguru’s pulling on his leather jacket, when Satoru joins him in the genkan. Satoru bites his lips as he watches. He would ask Suguru to leave it, if he were anymore shameless.

He touches the back of Suguru’s arm, his fingertips smoothing over the leather.

“Suguru,” he says. “I’ll see you later?”

Suguru turns and smiles at him, as warm as ever.

“Yeah. Of course.”

Satoru’s all but standing over him, from the top of the genkan step. With Suguru’s face raised up to him, it would be too easy to lean down and kiss him. He doubts Suguru would mind.

But he can’t. He thinks, deep down, that he wants Suguru to be the one who does it. He wants the proof that Suguru’s acting, and not just reacting.

He sees Suguru out the door.

“Text me when you get home,” he says. “So I know you’re safe.”

Suguru nods, smiles one last time, and leaves.

Satoru doesn’t watch him down the steps, or the garden path, or the front gate. That would be another kind of unnecessary torture.

Just like then night before, the house feels silent and empty. Even knowing Megumi and Yuji are just in the other room, even though he’s just spent another evening with Suguru, there’s a dissatisfaction, a shrieking that it’s not enough.

We both knew what we felt back then.

So Suguru is willing to admit that much.

“At least I wasn’t imagining things,” Satoru tells himself.

Then he sits on the genkan step, bows his head, and buries his hands in his hair.

He wants to cry. He wants to pretend none of it ever happened, if it means Suguru will stay. He wants to kiss him endlessly, until their bodies fuse together into one, inseparable being.

He wants to tell him that he loves him, and that he always has. Nothing short of the truth will satisfy this desperation.

Chapter Text

“You kissed yet?”

Satoru rolls his head back against the back of his chair, eyes closed and aching. He really wishes Shoko would stop smoking for a minute, so the air might have a chance of clearing out.

“Can you do that by the window?” he asks, squinting just enough to look at her, sat across the desk in one of his two black leather armchairs. “Or are you trying to smoke me out of my own office?”

“Answer the question and I’ll put it out.”

“No, we haven’t kissed yet,” Satoru sighs. “I would have told you that anyway, you didn’t need to coerce me.”

“Why not?”

Satoru lifts his head and frowns at her.

“What do you mean?” he asks. “I tell you everything.”

“No, I mean why haven’t you kissed yet?”

“Because I’m too chicken and he doesn’t seem to want to.”

“Or he’s also too chicken,” Shoko suggests.

“You said you’d put it out,” he reminds her, with a pointed glare at the cigarette still between her fingers. She tucks it back between her lips, takes several quick, shallow breathes, then snuffs it out in the glass ash tray he offers her. 

Satoru grimaces at the lingering ribbons of smoke.

“When you die,” he says, as she takes the burnt-out butt and drops it into her white coat pocket, “they’ll cut you open and find you full of ash.”

Unbothered, Shoko bares her white teeth and scoffs, “Who says I’m going to die? The feds?”

She leans back in the chair and crosses her arms, staring him down. Satoru frowns at her, waiting. He knows the look on her face well enough to assume she’s considering something important.

He sits back too, mirrors her crossed arms and her thoughtful scowl.

“Ask him to come here,” she says. “I want to see him.”

“Why?”

“Just ask him. I’m sure if he’s still in love with you, I’ll be able to tell.”

Satoru doubts it, but he doesn’t argue with her.

He and Suguru have texted each other enough throughout the morning already, that he feels no apprehension in pulling out his phone and messaging,

I don’t have any more classes today.
What time do you finish?
2:12

Now, if you want. I don’t have anything booked in.
And Sukuna can handle the walk-ins.
2:13

Come back to the college? I want you to see someone.
2:13

Sure. Be there in ten.
2:14

“He’s coming here now,” Satoru says, dropping his phone on the desk. “Satisfied?”

“Not yet,” says Shoko. She reaches for her cigarette packet, then withdraws her hand just as quickly, catching Satoru’s cutting look. She gives a small sniff, and says, “I’m really not happy with him, you know.”

Satoru had assumed as much, given how very nearly every mention of him puts a conflicted scowl on her face. She’s probably got more reasons than he knows about, to be angry.   

“I suppose,” he says. “You were closer with him in school than you were with me. It must have upset you a lot too that he left.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” says Shoko, sharply enough Satoru raises his eyebrows at her. “He hurt you so badly there was a time I didn’t think you’d ever recover. You may forgive him for it, but I don’t know if I can. Or even want to.”

Satoru sits back in his armchair, stunned. He can’t deny the truth of what she’s said, much as he’d like to, much as he wishes he could forget how lifeless he’d felt at Suguru’s leaving. It’s not worth it to anyone, to recall such things.

“Why not?” he asks.

“Because he…” She swallows, looks away to glare at the corner of his desk. “I don’t care why he felt he had to leave, or cut us off. Clearly something happened that he was struggling with. But at the very least he owed you an explanation.”

Satoru shakes his head, sighing. “He didn’t owe me anything.”

Shoko’s mouth thins.

“You’re wrong,” she says. “You were his best friend. For fuck’s sake, you were already more than that, if we’re being honest with ourselves. We all knew you two were going to end up together.”

“Who’s we?” Satoru asks, smiling weakly. “I didn’t think Nanami cared about that sort of thing.”

She doesn’t react. Satoru already knows what she’s thinking – that he’s not taking this seriously enough, that he’s going to be hurt again if he’s not careful, that he’s giving in too easily.

He can’t much deny it. But this is more serious to him than anything else he’s ever done.

“You can’t let him get away with what he did,” Shoko says, her voice clipped and disapproving. “Not without understanding why. And you shouldn’t forgive him so easily.”

There’s no escaping her anger, Satoru knows that much. She won’t be satisfied until she hears it from him, some confirmation that he’s not about to give up his principles or his pain.

“He said he’d tell me,” he admits. “He’s just trying to figure out how.”

That doesn’t seem to impress her. Lip curling, she scoffs, “He’s had twelve years to think about what he should be saying to you. At this point, he should be kow-towing and begging to be a part of your life again, not wasting your time with playing coy.”

She reaches once again for her cigarette packet, flicks the cover open and closed but doesn’t take one out. Satoru can see her jaw clenching and unclenching.

“Please be nice when he gets here,” he says. “I don’t want a scene.”

Her fingers pause on the edge of the packet.

It takes her a long moment to relent, to give up the confrontation Satoru knows she wants to have.

“Fine,” she says, with no shortage of reluctance. “But I’m doing it for your sake, not his.”

Satoru doesn’t have time to thank her for it. Several light knocks on his office door have him straightening, stomaching tensing, to call out, “Come in.”

He hadn’t been expecting anyone else, of course, but he still holds his breath, as the door opens and Suguru, for the first time, steps into his office.

Suguru smiles at him, but it freezes on his face the moment he spots Shoko.

“What’s up, Geto?” she asks, her voice so measured it gives nothing away. ‘It’s been a while.”

Suguru stares at her, more caught off guard than Satoru had expected him to be. He almost feels guilty, that he hadn’t warned him properly.

“Shoko,” Suguru eventually says, seemingly the only greeting he can manage. He’s still standing in the open doorway, like he’s weighing up the thought of leaving.

“Surprised you remember who I am,” she says. As she stands, she casts Satoru one last knowing look, then turns to face Suguru completely. “After you left so abruptly.”

Suguru blinks, and then finally moves closer.

“Fuck, of course I do,” he sighs, raking his fingers through his hair. He smiles at her, but it looks sheepish and guilty, even if he does add, “I’m happy to see you.”

“Yeah, me too.” She doesn’t attempt to hide it, the way she looks him up and down. “You look good.”

“Thanks. You’re a professor here too, then?”

He sounds painfully uncomfortable. Satoru would find it amusing, if he wasn’t more worried that the discomfort would drive Suguru right back out of his office as quickly as he’d arrived.

Shoko seems to have no such worries. Humming with self-satisfaction, she says, “I teach forensic science. But Satoru says you’re a tattoo artist.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” says Suguru. He pulls his shoulders back, shoves his hands in his pockets, and adds, sounding more at ease, “Let me now if you’re ever interested.”

“And give the feds another way to identify my body?” Shoko scoffs. Satoru catches her eye, matches her amused smirk with one of his own. “We’ll see about that.”

Suguru glances between the two of them, vaguely lost, but he doesn’t ask. 

“Anyway. I have a class,” Shoko continues, stepping out from behind her chair. “See you around, Geto. Don’t disappear again.”

“I won’t,” Suguru says, without hesitating. He looks genuine enough, in the way his eyebrows pull up in the centre, in the way he touches her hand where it comes to rest on his forearm. “I promise, Shoko.”

Satoru bites back his relief. Even when Shoko nails him with a look severe enough to make him shiver, he can only grin and wave her off.

It’s the best outcome he could have hoped for, from such a brief interaction. Maybe he hadn’t quite believed her, when she said she wouldn’t cause a scene.

“Have you guys worked together this whole time?” Suguru asks, as the sound of her heels fades down the hallway.

“Mm, something like that,” says Satoru. He leans back, too pleased to feel any of the nerves from the past two days. “She started taking classes last year. But we didn’t lose touch between graduation and then like…”

“Like you and me?” Suguru finishes. He smiles sadly, wilting just so along the broad line of his shoulders. “I really am sorry, Satoru. None of it was what I planned.”

“You don’t need to keep apologising,” says Satoru, and he means it, even if, from the way Suguru grimaces, he doesn’t feel the same. He can only amend, “At least, not until I know the whole story.”

It’s true, anyway. Satoru believes him, when he says he’s sorry, but it doesn’t make much of a difference if it still doesn’t come with an explanation.

But Satoru doesn’t want to think about it, not right now.

“Shall we go out for food?” he asks, standing. He pulls on his wool coat, already anticipating Suguru’s agreement. “The cafeteria here is still as bad as when we were students.”

“Let’s go out,” Suguru says. He’s looking all around him, at the bookcases and the leather furniture and the high ceilings, with a strange, unreadable frown on his face. “It’s kind of weird being here.”

Satoru falters. All of a sudden his office takes on a sinister aspect, unwelcoming and foreign. “How do you mean?”

“Like a glimpse into another life,” Suguru says, unsurely, like he doesn’t truly know the answer himself.

“A worse one?”

“No, not worse. Just different.”

Satoru swallows, and keeps moving. He doesn’t feel like thinking about that either, even if he can’t help but feel curious.  

“Come on.” He knocks the side of his fist against Suguru’s sternum, then gestures him to follow. “Let’s go to Takeshita street like we used to. I feel like crepes.”

Like all other things he’d rather not think about, Satoru ignores the curious looks he gets from his more familiar students as he and Suguru wander down the corridors and staircases towards the entrance hall. He’ll deal with their questions tomorrow, if it comes to it, but for now he doesn’t want anything to delay his plans.

Takeshita street is as busy as it always is, at that time of day, but Satoru still pulls himself away from Suguru’s bike, urgently tugging at him, and says, “Quick. Before the high school students get let out.”

He slips into the mixed crowd of locals and tourists, only half-aware of if Suguru is following yet. It’s the same crepe shop they used to go to ten years ago, so there’s no risk of getting lost.

Even so, Satoru’s surprised when Suguru’s hand slides against his.

Satoru stops walking, his body quite numb but burning all the same, as he turns to look back at him.

“Don’t leave me behind,” Suguru says, grinning warmly.

Satoru’s lips part. Slowly, his fingers close over Suguru’s hand, locking him in.

“As if,” he says, and then he beams, yanks on Suguru’s hand and pulls him along down the street like he’d done a million times in the past.

Their hands stay together, hidden between their bodies, as they wait in line. Satoru makes only a weak attempt at hiding his contentment at the feel of it, of how Suguru keeps brushing his thumb over Satoru’s knuckles, how he’s standing close enough for Satoru to catch the clean, musky scent of his cologne.  

It's the same, or almost, to the one he used to wear. Every time he notices it, Satoru fights the desire to bury his nose against Suguru’s pulse and breathe him all in.

“I’ll have a chocolate crepe with strawberries and cream,” he tells the blushing girl behind the counter, grinning more widely than he should. He looks over his shoulder at Suguru.  “What about you?”

“Lemon and sugar,” he says, unsurprisingly. Satoru wonders if he should make a list, of all the things that haven’ changed about him.

“You should try the chocolate and orange one,” he says, dragging him out of the line by their still connected hands. “You’ll like it. And the wild berry and cream is really good too.”

Satoru’s tried them all at some point or another, when he’d take Megumi and Tsumiki out for treats, or the rare occasion Shoko felt like something other than a cigarette, and even more recently, when Megumi and Yuji had all but forced him to come along in showing their friend that part of the city.

Suguru nods in agreement and smiles, but there’s a distant, thoughtful look in his eyes, soft and peaceful like he’s imagining some heart-warming scene. His thumb starts moving again over Satoru’s knuckles, rhythmic and automatic.

Satoru doesn’t interrupt whatever thought it is. Like this, he can use the opportunity to gaze openly at Suguru’s face, his own eyes hidden by his sunglasses, and pretend this is something they’ve done every week for years on end, that the hand in his is an indication of something certain, and not only longed for.

He has to collect their crepes with one hand, caught up as his other is. Then he squeezes, just hard enough to get Suguru’s attention, and raises the crepes up in triumph.

“Come on,” he says, pulling him along once again. “Let’s find somewhere outside to eat.”

They’re forced to let go, reluctant as Satoru is, as they lean against the outside of the shop to eat. Satoru doesn’t hesitate in taking a too-large mouthful, sweet as it is and all the more satisfying for Suguru’s presence.

He wants Suguru to have the same taste in his mouth, the same sweetness.

He makes do with a forkful held up to Suguru’s mouth, and the eager request, “Try it.”

Suguru’s fingers circle around his wrist, steadying him, as he leans in to take what’s offered. Satoru watches as he licks the trace of white from his lips, as he nods appraisingly and says, “It’s good.”

Then he holds up his own and teases, “Should I assume you don’t want to try mine?”

Satoru screws his face up, as though already chocking on the sourness. When Suguru laughs, he can only shove roughly against his shoulder and go back to his food, his own amusement masked.

They eat quickly, without speaking. Satoru fully intends on making good on all the other shops, and he wants to have as much as he can to do it.

He can feel a cold spot of cream at the edge of his lip, is already reaching for it, when it’s covered by the warm, familiar touch of Suguru’s thumb.

He watches, entirely captivated, as Suguru brings his thumb to his mouth, as the cream disappears on the tip of his tongue. His own mouth goes dry at the sight of it, at the implication of it.

Well, Satoru thinks, weakly, that was as intimate as a fucking kiss.

Suguru had never done anything like that before, back when they were teenagers. It would have been far too obvious, far too suggestive.

It’s suggestive now.

Suguru stares at him, an eyebrow raised.

“If I didn’t know better,” he says, entirely unaffected. “I’d think this was a date.”

Satoru breathes in sharpy. He feels called out, like Suguru thinks he’s made more of this outing than he should.

“And if it was?” he asks.

Suguru’s eyelashes shutter with surprise, his lips parting wordlessly.

Satoru turns away. His face is warm, with shame or frustration he can’t quite tell. Maybe both. Suguru always did manage to make him feel conflicted.

“You don’t need to answer that,” he sighs.

From the corner of his eye, he sees Suguru step closer to him.

“Satoru, you know I-”

He doesn’t finish. His phone starts vibrating, loud and disruptive.

Satoru stares out into the street, fighting back his disappointment. It feels, probably falsely, like a confession had just slipped right through his fingers.

“Hey, Nanako,” Suguru says, more warmly, more affectionately, than he’s ever sounded before.

Satoru blinks, caught off guard, and looks at him.

“No, I’m just getting food with Satoru.”

It’s a woman’s voice on the other end of the line.

Slowly, like some kind of oil pouring through him, Satoru’s veins grow sluggish and heavy with horror.

He’s always assumed that Suguru preferred men, but they’d never really discussed it. He didn’t care what Suguru was into, after all, as long as it was him at the top of the list.

He blocks out the rest of his conversation, desperately trying to calm an illogical panic.

Don’t assume, he tells himself, harshly. It could be anyone.

The call doesn’t last long. After an equally warm goodbye, the girl on the other end hangs up.

Suguru grins down at his phone and then shoves it away in his back pocket, but his happiness instantly disappears the moment he looks up at Satoru’s face.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, urgently, reaching out like he half expects Satoru to collapse.

Satoru can only imagine what expression he must have to make Suguru worry like that. With some effort, he tries to push back the sickening tension in his stomach, the horrified twist of his mouth.

“Do you have a girlfriend or something?” he asks, his throat flooding with bitterness at the very thought.

Suguru blinks at him. Then his face goes white.

“What? No!” he shouts, sounding as horrified as Satoru feels. He stumbles for a moment, one of his hands latching onto Satoru’s like he’s afraid he’s going to leave. “She’s…it’s part of the story.”

The story, Satoru thinks. The story I’ve still yet to hear.

He thinks of Shoko, of her warning glare. She’d be smacking him across the back of the head, if she were here, would be ordering Suguru out with it or demanding that he leave.

Satoru wishes he had her kind of resolve. It wouldn’t make things less painful, but it would be simpler.

“Right,” he says, unsurely.

“She’s not my…I don’t have a girlfriend.” His fingers circle Satoru’s wrist, so he’s holding him with both hands. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

He sounds sincere, and his grip on Satoru’s wrist feels desperate.

Satoru’s not self-deprecating enough to keep believing the worst.

“Okay. Good,” he says, swallowing hard. He can’t keep looking at Suguru’s face like that, all nervous and hesitant and wanting. “Okay.”

Suguru stays silent, for a moment. Then he nudges Satoru’s arm with his own and, amused, says, “You know, you sounded jealous for a second there, Satoru.”

“So what if I was?” says Satoru. He doesn’t find it funny at all. “You said it yourself, Suguru, we both know how we felt back then. Would you really be surprised if I still felt that way?”

The teasing smile falls.

“No, I guess not,” he agrees, more seriously. “But that might change when you know everything.”

“I doubt it,” says Satoru. He’s imagined a lot of bad things over the years, and he always still wanted him back. “Ten years is a long time. If that didn’t change things I don’t think anything will.”

Suguru breathes deeply. The hand around Satoru’s wrist pulls away, but the other one stays carefully pressed against his palm.

He says, “I hope you’re right.”

Satoru gives him a reassuring smile. If the story is really as bad as all that, then he can appreciate how difficult it must be for him.

“I’m always right.”

Suguru shakes his head.

“Come on,” he sighs, leaning his weight against Satoru’s hand. “I need to get macarons.”

They continue down the way they had come, hands still linked and trailing back and forth after each other, as they stop to glance through storefronts and to consider the various food stands.

Then Satoru gestures him into one of the various patisseries, run by the same old lady who’d worked there the first time he ever entered the shop.

She greets them both warmly, but she doesn’t seem to recognise Suguru, even if he’d been in the store just as many times as Satoru back when they were teenagers.

Satoru listens to him making his order, a whole assortment of the sweetest, strangest options they have. When he steps away from the counter with his parcel, Satoru can’t help but ask,

“You’re not getting the lemon or coffee one?”

“Oh, these aren’t for me,” Suguru explains. Then he tilts his head to the side. “You really do remember everything about me, don’t you?”

Satoru scoffs, almost offended. “How could I forget?” he says, pressing their arms together. Grinning, he adds, “Don’t worry, I won’t blame you if you don’t know my favourite macaron flavours anymore.”

Suguru levels him with an even look. Then he presses the box against his chest and goes back to the counter.

“Sorry, can I buy a few more?” he asks the woman, smiling gratefully. “Can I buy two of the strawberry cream, the rose, and the blackcurrant?”

He’s still leaning over the counter, looking at his options, but Satoru’s ears are ringing. He doesn’t think he breathes at all, in the time it takes Suguru to pay and move back to his side.

“They didn’t have any peaches and cream left,” he says, with a self-satisfied grin, as he offers Satoru the parcel. “But will these do?”

Satoru swallows. He glances from Suguru’s face down to the box, but he can’t make himself take it just yet.

It would be a small, unremarkable gesture, coming from anyone else.

But from Suguru it means everything.

“They’re supposed to make you happy,” Suguru says, smiling more unsurely. “Not sad. I swear these used to be your favourite.”

“They are. And I am happy.” He huffs, and grins, so widely it must look ridiculous. “This…this is the happiest I’ve been in ten years.”

Suguru falters. “I’m…not sure if that’s a good thing.”

“It is,” Satoru assures him. He puts his box of macarons in his messenger bag, then takes Suguru’s hand once more. “Don’t worry about it, Suguru. Let’s keep going.”

Megumi will want Daifuku, if he can find it, and he’ll have to get enough for Yuji too. And if they see Nobara, which he’s sure they will, he’ll have to male sure there’s enough for her too.

By the time they’ve crossed back down to the other end of the street, Satoru’s shoved his bag full of different colours boxes, each filled with their own assortment of treats and pastries.

“I’m going to share it all with Megumi, honestly,” he says, but Suguru just shakes his head, an air of neutrality about him, and keeps going.

Suguru doesn’t buy himself anything else, in any of the other stores they go into. Satoru isn’t all too surprised, that Suguru still isn’t much interested in sweet food. The crepe will keep him satisfied for at least a week, Satoru’s sure of it.

He still leads him into one more store, before he himself is satisfied.

There’s enough people inside that Suguru has to stand by the front windows, whilst Satoru makes his order, absently staring out into the street as crowds of school students and tourists wonder past.

“Welcome, Gojo-Sama,” says the smiling woman behind the counter, another he’s known for over a decade. “What would you like?”

“Miss Saori,” he greets her, beaming. “Two each of your sweet breads, please.”

“Right away, Gojo-Sama,” Miss Saori says, already preparing a white parcel. As she packs away his order, she asks, “Who is your handsome friend, Gojo-Sama?”

Satoru throws a look over his shoulder at Suguru. The crowd has thinned out from the other workers, as he’d been ordering, and he can see right through to where he leans beside the open door.

“You should recognise him, Miss Saori,” Satoru says, pleased. “That’s Suguru Geto. Don’t you remember him?”

Miss Saori blinks, and then her mouth opens in surprise.

“Of course, of course,” she says, smiling warmly at Suguru, even if he doesn’t notice. “My sister lives in his old town. Oh, how unfortunate that business was.”

Satoru freezes. His body suddenly feels quite cold.

“What business?” he asks, before he can stop himself.

Miss Saori tilts her head at him. She opens her mouth to speak.

“Oh, never mind,” Satoru says, hurriedly, before she can say anything. “I shouldn’t distract you from your work.”

He can’t ask her. Whatever it is, he can feel it in his gut that it has something to do with why Suguru left.

And Suguru promised he’d tell him. Satoru doesn’t want to find out about it in any other way.

He smiles, tries not to let on how bone-deep that dread had just been, and takes the offered parcel from her. Half-way through shoving it into his bag, he leans closer of the glass counter for one last look.

Then he pauses once again. The corners of his mouth twitch upwards in delight.

“Can I get two osmanthus cakes too, please?” he asks, before he can think too long about it. “In a separate packet, if that’s all right?”

“Of course, Gojo-Sama.” Quickly, she places two of the delicate cakes in an oil-paper bag, the offers it to him with both hands held out respectfully. “Please, you and Geto-Same enjoy.”  

“We will,” Satoru assures her, hiding the osmanthus cakes in his own coat pocket. He waves her farewell, arranges his face into a careful smile, and rejoins Suguru.

Without asking, they both start back towards Suguru’s bike.

“You sure you have enough?” Suguru asks, an eyebrow raised appreciatively, as Satoru tries to organize the boxes more safely inside his bag, as he fails several times to latch it closed. “You know these shops will still be here tomorrow, right?”

“Piss off,” Satoru responds, cheerfully. “You shouldn’t be surprised.”

Suguru passes his helmet over, still eyeing Satoru’s bag like he expects the seams to start ripping. “I’m not,” he responds. “I am surprised by your self-control though. It’s improved.”

“If I had my car with me it’d be a different story,” says Satoru, taking his sunglasses off to shove the helmet in place. It’s dark enough out now that he doesn’t need them, anyway. “We’re taking that next time.”

Suguru looks more than pleased at the sound of that, if the eager flash of his teeth is anything to go by.

He can’t help his own amusement, as Suguru needlessly checks the strap of his helmet for him again, but it goes unseen. Then he falls back into place behind him, arms wrapped tight around his waist and thighs locked firm beside his hips, and enjoys the movement of Suguru’s body held against him as he rides out into the street.

The ride back is longer than it would usually be, from how Suguru takes side streets and alley ways to avoid the traffic, but Satoru thinks it must be deliberate, at least in part, the dragging out.

He doesn’t mind anyway, and he’s disappointed, when Suguru brings them to a stop in his street, far enough away from Satoru’s apartment he’ll have no choice but to walk with him again.

Much like yesterday, Satoru is more than reluctant, as he takes off his helmet, as he puts some space between his and Suguru’s bodies. If he had even the slightest reason, he’d suggest they ride around a little bit longer, just to waste the time.

Instead, he passes his helmet over Suguru’s shoulder and inches away from him, just enough to reach into his own coat. As he pulls away, he slips the packet of osmanthus cakes into the pocket of Suguru’s leather jacket.

Suguru doesn’t notice. He climbs off the bike after Satoru, leans against the seat, and eyes Satoru’s wool coat with a vague look of disapproval.

“I should get you a leather jacket,” he says, flicking at his collar. “That would fall apart if we ever came off.”

Satoru shivers at the thought. “Does that happen to you a lot?”

“Once or twice, in the past,” Suguru admits, unphased. Clearly not bad enough to linger. “But I don’t make a habit of it.”

“And I’ll be riding with you often enough, will I?”

“I hope so.”

Satoru’s heart softens entirely.

Trying not to reveal his growing hope, he asks, “Are you coming in?”

Suguru sighs, dips his head. “Not tonight,” he says, and he sounds regretful, even if he offers no reason more than, “I need to get home.”

Satoru forces down his disappointment. He’s had half the day with Suguru. There was no need to get greedy now.

Even still, he asks, “But you’ll walk me to the door, won’t you?”

Suguru grins at him like he’d already been waiting to be asked.

“Of course,” he says, straightening.

They don’t speak, as they walk. Satoru can’t think of anything light enough to say, when every spoken thought would feel like an attempt to get him to stay just a little bit longer.

He wants to take his hand again. He wants to link their fingers and pull him all the way upstairs, so they can have the tea they never got to yesterday, so they can kiss at the door before he leaves.

He stops at his front gate instead, half-turns himself to Suguru so he can steal one last interaction.

The streetlamp is directly behind him, casting his face in shadows.

Maybe if he’d been able to see him, Satoru would have found some indication, that Suguru was about to press in against him, arms slipped around his waist, and draw him into an embrace.

He can feel the warmth in Suguru’s cheek, where it presses against the side of his jaw. He can feel his own cheek heating up in response.

His breath shuddering out of him, Satoru drapes himself over Suguru’s shoulders and pulls him in tighter, desperately so, his heart beating hard against his ribs and his eyes stinging, quite unexpectedly, with some aching misery for more.

He tucks his nose against Suguru’s throat, breathes in that clean, musky cologne, and commits it to all of his other dearest memories.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asks, his voice muffled against the smooth, aged leather.

Suguru nods. He squeezes him, pulls him in even more firmly against his chest, and then lets go.

Satoru doesn’t hang on, much as he’d like to.

But more than anything, Satoru wants to kiss him.

Just one, he thinks, desperately. Just to give him the idea.

He reaches out, the tips of his fingers trembling, and touches Suguru’s throat, smooths his hand along until he’s cupping his jaw in his palm.

Then he leans in.

At the last moment, his heart weakens. He angles his face away, brushes his mouth just so against the very corner of Suguru’s lips.

It’s not a real kiss, but Satoru’s body burns up.

He’s not brave enough to do it again, much as he wants to.

He pulls back, takes some solace in the soft, stunned look in Suguru’s eyes, in his parted lips, and says, “Goodnight, Suguru.”

“Goodnight,” Suguru rasps, automatically, his voice low. Then, like he can’t stop it, like it’s purely instinct, he says, “Satoru.”

Satoru shivers. His name shouldn’t sound like that, so loving, so desperate, but when it’s with Suguru’s voice it feels right.

Suguru’s face is still caught in the shadows, unreadable. Satoru stares anyway, just for a little while longer.

Then he smiles and steps away, makes himself close the gate behind him and start down the garden path. He gets the feeling he has to be the first one to leave, or they’ll be standing there all night long.

The thought doesn’t seem half bad.

He’s opening his front door when he hears Suguru’s bike start, a faint rumbling in the otherwise quiet street. He can’t see him over the garden wall but regardless he waits, listening, as the bike grows louder and then fades away into the night.

Unthinking, he touches his fingers to his mouth.

He’s sure he’s kissed Suguru on the cheek in the past, but he can’t think of when. If he could, maybe this one would feel less overwhelming than it does.

The lights are on, and Megumi sits at the kitchen counter, an empty tea cup beside him and one of his textbooks open.

“No Yuji?” Satoru asks, admittedly surprised, as he drops his messenger bag down in the empty chair beside him and starts to pull out boxes.

“Not yet,” says Megumi. He flips his textbook closed, already eyeing them as they’re stacked one on top of the other. “I’m meeting him later.”

Satoru smiles, then pushes half of them closer. He says, “I got you these from Takeshita Street. You can share with Yuji.”

Megumi blinks. For a moment, the careful disdain he usually maintains slips away for genuine surprise.

“Oh. Thanks,” he says, pulling a box closer to lift the lid. He takes out a custard bun, nibbles the edge of the soft bread, and then asks, as an afterthought, “What were you doing in Takeshita street?”

“Getting some food with Suguru,” Satoru tells him.

Megumi stills. His face darkens.

“What is it?” Satoru asks, quietly.

Megumi glares at his custard bun. Satoru thinks, for a moment, that he’s not going to answer, and then he bites out, “I don’t like him.”

“Why not?” Satoru asks. He can’t say he’s surprised, exactly, at such a response, but it still cuts through him.

“Because he ruined your life.”

Satoru huffs. “He didn’t ruin my life,” he says, even if it feels like a lie. “He didn’t owe me anything.”

“He owed you a fucking explanation.”

Satoru’s heard that from enough people now that he can’t make himself argue with it.

“You sound like Shoko,” he says, dropping into the seat beside him. He drags his hands through his hair, his eyes aching faintly, and reaches for a plain milk bread.  

He can feel Megumi looking at him still, can feel him working himself up to ask more questions.

“Has he told you why yet?”

“Not yet.”

“And you’re just going to let him back into your life anyway?” Megumi glares at him, more harshly than even Shoko. “What if he hurts you again?”

Satoru grits his teeth, frustration sparking at the back of his throat. He’s already asked himself that question enough times. He doesn’t need more people doing the same.

“That’s a risk I have to take, Megumi,” he exclaims, louder than he intends. Then he draws in a deep breath, and continues, more softly, “I don’t care what he’s done. I love him. I’ll do anything to keep him.”

Megumi continues staring, unresponsive. Then he shakes his head  incredulously

“I don’t understand you,” he says.

“You will,” Satoru responds. “You’d do anything for Yuji.”

“That’s different. Yuji’s never hurt me.”

Satoru just smiles.

“The only way Suguru can hurt me now is by leaving again.” He breathes in, and reaches out to grip Megumi’s shoulder. “I can’t explain it, but I know I won’t ever by happy without him.”

It takes several moments, for the fight to fade from Megumi’s shoulders, from the severe line of his mouth. He slips back into his seat, heaves a reluctant sigh, and takes another bite of his bread.

“Yuji says he’s like another brother to him,” he says, quietly.

“Is he?” Satoru responds, pleased. “That’s nice. He’d be a good brother.”

“He made a terrible fucking friend, apparently.”

Satoru closes his eyes, doesn’t let himself react. He can tell he’s not going to convince Megumi anytime soon.

“I know what I’m doing, Megumi,” he says, warily. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

Megumi’s top lip curls. Satoru knows that expression, knows it means he wants to deny whatever Satoru’s just said, only because it’s the truth. He’d never admit to worrying about him.

But Satoru knows he does.

“I need to go,” Megumi says, stiffly. “Yuji will be done at work soon.”

Satoru nods, lets the wariness go in favour of genuine fondness.

“Okay,” he says, nodding. “Tell him I say hi.”

“Yeah,” says Megumi. He hesitates for a moment, gives Satoru a frown like he wants to say more. Then he takes up one of the boxes of treats and disappears down the hall.

Satoru turns back to his milk bun, takes a savage bite that does nothing to appease the restlessness in his body.

Then his phone vibrates.

Satoru grabs for it, already anticipating who it is.

Suguru

Thank you for the Osmanthus Cakes.
I didn’t even notice you buying them.
6:20

That was my intention.
They’re still your favourite, right?
6:20

They are.
Satoru.
6:21

What is it?
6:21

This is the happiest I’ve been in ten years too.
Goodnight x
6:21

Goodnight xx
6:22

Chapter Text

Satoru keeps his eyes shaded with one hand, as he leans over his lecture notes. The lights at the front of the auditorium are always a few lumens too bright for his comfort and, like he hadn’t learned his lesson a million times before, he’d left his sunglasses somewhere stupid and unhelpful to him.

The lecture doors open, then slam closed. Satoru winces. The base of his skull aches faintly. He looks up, squinting beneath the bright lights, and watches Yaga take several long strides down the auditorium steps towards his desk. 

“Gojo,” he says, with his typical gruff scowl. “I need you to cover Haibara’s lecture and tutorial tonight. He’s had a family emergency.”

Satoru stares at him, barely listening. He envies his sunglasses, tasteless and unfashionable as they are. The room must look so nice and dark with them on.

“It can’t be rescheduled?” he asks.

“Not on this occasion.”

Satoru sniffs, then turns back to his lecture notes. He doesn’t have the focus to argue for the sake of being annoying, not when he’s only got half an hour left to get his own class sorted.

“Fine,” he drawls. “What time?”

“Five o’clock until nine,” says Yaga, and then, before Satoru can splutter too long with indignation, he adds, “It’s a late one, I know. We’ll make up for it somehow.”

Satoru glares. One of his temples throbs, radiates behind his eye and down behind his ear, and then fades away to nothing.

He lets out his breath in a deep, irritated sigh, and says, “Sure. Is Haibara okay?”

“You’d be better asking him.” Yaga drops a file on top of Satoru’s notes. “Here’s the information. You’ve taught this unit before.”

He leaves straight after, brushing himself off of the trouble now that it’s Satoru’s alone to deal with.

Satoru’s not going to complain, not if it’s Haibara. They’ve covered for each other enough times over the years that they owe each other, by this stage.

He opens the file. A two-hour lecture at five, followed by a two-hour tutorial. Easy enough, at this point in the semester. It’s not as though Satoru ever particularly cared for his sleep schedule.

But what about Suguru?

“Fuck,” he groans, snatching at his phone. I didn’t even think about my plans with him.

Cancelling is the last thing he wants to do, especially after he’d made an idiot of himself by kissing Suguru’s cheek last night. He wants to see him again quickly, so he can test just how much more awkward he’s gone and made things.

Not that they could get that much more awkward.

Or maybe tense is the better word for it.

Satoru’s felt so rigid the last few days it’s as though any sudden movement would snap him up into tiny little pieces. Something’s going to have to give soon, and he knows it’s probably going to be him.

He messages Suguru,

I’m working late tonight. I don’t think I’ll be able to meet up :((((
12:58

Disappointment weighs heavily in stomach, and guilt shortens his breathing. He thinks about typing more, about adding some kind of explanation, but it won’t make a difference either way.

Suguru responds quickly enough that he doesn’t have to worry too long.

When do you finish?
1:01

Not until after nine, at least.
I’m covering a lecture for another professor.
1:03

That’s okay.
I should probably get some stuff done at home anyway.
1:03

Satoru bites his bottom lip. He wants to see him. Even if it’s just for five minutes.

You can’t come here at all?
1:05

I don’t think so.
The entire day is booked.
And I’ve already had my half hour.
1:06

I really want to see you.
1:06

I know. I want to see you too.
More than anything.
Tomorrow, Satoru.
1:06

That’s ages away :((((((((
1:06

Ring me when you’re home.
I’ll wait up for you.
1:06

Satoru stares at the screen, trying not to feel too annoyed with himself, with the situation. It’s the best he’s going to get. He can’t expect Suguru to stay out that late on a work night, and he definitely can’t expect Suguru to invite him over. He doubts that will happen before he hears this story of his, if it ever happens at all.

Okay xo
1:06

He puts his phone down, and gets to work.

Satoru leaves his car in the university parking garage when he goes, even if it does mean he’ll have to brave the walk home in the cold and dark. Somehow, he doesn’t see any good in getting behind the wheel, not with how his vision is blurry around the edges, his temples aching with fatigue.  

It’s not too long of a walk. If he moves quickly he can cut it down to ten minutes, even if the impact of his feet against the concrete sends shockwaves right up through his spine, the base of his skull.

God, his eyes hurt. Even when he closes them, he can see the burning imprints of the lecture hall lights behind his eyelids. The streetlamps overhead refract in his vision, and the passing head lights leave black spots that don’t fade no matter how much he blinks.

When he gets home, he leaves his coat, shoes, and messenger bag in a pile on the floor of the genkan, too tired to arrange any of it properly.

Megumi’s on the sofa, sat cross-legged with his Nintendo switch in his hands. Satoru pats the top of his head as he passes behind him, but doesn’t say anything as greeting.

Megumi must find it strange, because he puts down the console, twists to look at Satoru over the back of the sofa, and asks,  

“What’s wrong with you?”

Satoru drops heavily into one of the armchairs, and says, “Nothing.”

He’s never sounded so unconvincing in his life. He has to wonder if he looks as bad as he feels, as he sounds. Even his hair feels brittle and annoying where it hangs in his eyes.

“If you have a migraine I can make a hot water bottle for you,” says Megumi, already standing.

Satoru squints at him. His head hurts just a little bit less, with warmth pooling behind his breastbone.  

“Ah, Megumi,” he sighs, wistful. “You’re a good kid.”

He closes his eyes completely, but he can sense Megumi standing over him, watching him with one of his typical disapproving scowls.

It doesn’t surprise him one bit, that Megumi’s blame goes to Suguru, that he sounds accusatory and distasteful, as he asks,

“Did that guy do something?”

“That guy,” Satoru repeats, smiling weakly to himself. “No, he didn’t do anything. I’m just sad I didn’t get to see him today.”

It’s true. He can imagine how his body would settle, muscles relaxing completely, beneath the touch of Suguru’s hands in his hair, across his shoulders. Suguru could kiss his forehead and draw the pain right out of him like it was nothing, like it was all made up.

But even with that, Satoru just wants to be close to him. It makes all the difference in the world.

When Megumi returns, he offers him a hot water battle, a cup of tea, and two pills. Satoru takes them both, throat working painfully to swallow. None of it will work as effectively as Suguru’s presence, but it will do.

He watches, as Megumi settles back down on the couch across from him, clutching his own tea. Somehow, the scene doesn’t look right. There should be a pink-haired boy beside him, huddled into his side and grinning like it’s too natural, like he doesn’t realises he’s doing it.

“Is Yuji coming here tonight?” he asks.

“Not tonight,” Megumi says, and an edge of disappointment enters his voice, makes him sound even gruffer. “He’s working with Nanami-San.”

Satoru gets the feeling he’ll have hot tea thrown in his face, if he makes the comparison to him and Suguru. It’s not quite the same, anyway. Megumi probably knows exactly how Yuji feels about him.

“Okay.” He heaves himself up, takes his tea and hot water bottle in one hand, and pats Megumi on the head again. Megumi doesn’t complain, not the way he would have, if Satoru were well, if Yuji were there. “I’m going to bed.”

Megumi mumbles a goodnight and returns to his switch.

The rest of the lights in the house are off. Satoru leaves them that way, walking near-blindly down the hall to his room.

It’s probably a good thing he hadn’t made plans to see Suguru after all. He doesn’t want Suguru to see him like this, weak and tired and brought down by something so trivial as a headache.

But, despite the fatigue layering itself over him, he’s already eagerly anticipating their phone call.

In his bedroom, he peels himself out of his dress shirt, his trousers, and then sits on the end of his bed with his phone held delicately in his hand.

He’ll shower afterwards. Right now, all he wants is to hear Suguru’s voice.

In a way, he feels almost as nervous as the first time he called him, only two days ago. It might as well be two hundred, based on the longing he feels inside.

They only have to greet each other, single-word exchanges, for Suguru’s voice to lower, to soften.

“You okay?” he asks, like he can feel the ache through the phone, like it’s transmitting more than just Satoru’s voice.

“Headache,” Satoru explains. “I forgot my sunglasses today. And the lights in the lecture hall are painfully bright.”

“I should let you sleep.”

Satoru tenses. Pain shoots up the side of his neck, but he ignores it, clutches the phone more tightly in his hand.

“No, it’s okay,” he says, quickly, desperately. He doesn’t care if he lets on how much he needs this. “I want to talk to you.”

“Are you comfortable at least?”

Satoru blinks around the room. He can’t see anything but the outline of light around his curtains, the soft glow of the phone from the corner of his eye.

“I’m in bed, and it’s pitch black,” he tells him. “I literally couldn’t be more comfortable.” He sips his tea, and amends, “Well, maybe if you were here.”

Suguru doesn’t speak, long enough that Satoru nervously swallows, forces himself to ask, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yeah, I’m just having a smoke on the balcony.” Suguru sighs, and Satoru catches the phantom scent of burning tobacco. “I still need to shower, than I’ll go to bed.”

So you do still smoke, Satoru thinks. He’d been wondering about that. A part of him is pleased, even if he shouldn’t be. It was always more attractive than he’d admit to, the sight of Suguru with a cigarette held between his fingers, a trail of smoke curling around him.

He didn’t even mind the smell, would sometimes stand close enough to breathe in the second-hand smoke, to know it had been in Suguru’s body and now it was in his.

“You’re not working late tomorrow, right?” Suguru asks.

“Right,” Satoru says, clearing his throat. His mouth tastes dry, ashy. “This was a one-off thing.”

He drinks more tea. It’s black, and tastes of carbon just beneath the bitterness.  

“Good,” says Suguru. “Then we’ll be able to see each other.”

Satoru hopes so. The phone call is nice, a privilege, especially if he’s trying not to be greedy. But he wants to see Suguru’s face.

“Did you have a good day?”

“It was fine. Busy,” says Suguru. “We’ve been getting a lot of walk-ins since Yuji made an Instagram page for us.”

“You guys are pretty popular, huh?” Satoru says, relaxing. He sets his empty mug down on the floor, lays back against the mattress. “I was speaking to Yuki this morning, she says she’s been going to you guys since you were at your old studio.”

Suguru gives a small huff, amused and fond. “That’s probably got more to do with the fact she and Choso have been circling around each other for years now,” he says.

Satoru smiles. He knows Choso, even if only in passing. He could understand how Yuji had turned out so kind, with a brother like that.

“It’s encouraging to know we’re not the only ones who are hopeless,” he jokes.

Suguru doesn’t respond. Satoru can feel him thinking, can feel him trying to pick the right reaction.

“Hey, Satoru?”

“Yeah, Suguru?”

“If I told you I wanted to stop being so hopeless…” He pauses. Satoru hears him draw in a breath, long and steady, as though preparing himself. “Is that something you would want?”

“Yes,” Satoru says, easily. It doesn’t need considering. “But you know that already.”

“Yeah, I do. I just needed to hear you say it.”

Satoru presses his mouth tightly closed. He feels so tired of it, of this tripping around the subject. He doesn’t want to adapt his language anymore, doesn’t want to bite his tongue on every telling phrase, every pseudo-confession.

“I could tell you exactly how I’m feeling, Suguru.”

It wouldn’t be hard. If anything, it would bring him some long-sought-after relief – a wound healed over enough it no longer itches, a curse finally exorcised.

That’s not right, though. Satoru’s missing him was a wound, but not his love. His love was the best part of him.  

“Not yet, Toru,” Suguru says, and there’s another apology in his voice, a longing kind of guilt. “It has to be in person.”

“Okay.”

He can wait a little bit longer. Just a little bit.

And in person will be better.

“What else did you do today?” he asks, voice level even as he flicks his fingertips beneath his eyes, dries away the thin moisture.

“I digitised a piece that Sukuna wants done,” Suguru tells him. Always oblivious, always unaware. “I’m probably starting it tomorrow. And some guy came in today talking about wanting weird scar tattoos done all over him, so I’m doing that tomorrow too.”

“Scar tattoos?” Satoru repeats, distastefully. He can’t imagine it.

“Like surgical scars, or something,” says Suguru. “Black stitches, like patchwork.”

Like Frankenstein’s fucking monster? Satoru thinks, but he doesn’t say it, even if it would make Suguru laugh. It’s his job after all, and he’s the one who’ll have to do it.

“Weird,” he says, instead.

“Do you have any?”

“Surgical scars?”

“Tattoos, idiot.”

Satoru grins. His eyes don’t sting anymore, and the sadness has faded right into the back of his mind, behind the lingering headache and the steadying comfort, always there right alongside Suguru’s presence, his voice.

“Not yet,” he says. “I never really thought about it. But I suppose I’d get something one day.”

“You know who to ask.”

“Sukuna.”

“Fuck you,” Suguru splutters, laughing. “You could have at least said Choso.”

Satoru’s heart punches at him. Suguru sounds so beautiful when he laughs. The sound of it had become rare, an anomaly, in those final few months before he left.

“I’m kidding,” Satoru tells him, unnecessarily. “Of course I’d go to you. As if I’d trust anyone else to tattoo me.”

“That’s what I thought,” says Suguru. He sounds smug, which is fair enough. His art always was incredible, even when he’d just been starting out as a teenager. “I’m the best, anyway.”

“I believe you.”

He falls silent, and Suguru does the same. He can’t think of what else to say, how to keep the conversation going. He doesn’t really feel like talking at all anymore, not really. He just doesn’t want Suguru to go.

“You should go to sleep, Toru,” Suguru sighs, like he knows.

“I wish you were here,” Satoru says. Maybe it sounds pathetic, maybe it doesn’t. Once again, Satoru can’t quite make himself care.  

“Me too,” says Suguru, and he says it in the same way, matches the same aching longing like he could possibly feel it as strongly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

God, he hopes so. He doesn’t want another day like today.

“Okay. Goodnight, Suguru.”

“Goodnight, sweetheart.”

Suddenly, Satoru feels wide awake, his entire body thrumming. He doesn’t say anything else, but his breathing changes, just enough that Suguru will have noticed, in the few seconds between him hanging up.

Sweetheart, Satoru repeats, over and over again, inside his own head. Suguru’s never called him that before.

He presses the phone to his forehead, eyes squeezed closed and heart pounding. His migraine has disappeared entirely, replaced by the warming rhythm of Suguru’s soft voice.

He always was soft-spoken, an evenness in his tone no one could possibly emulate. He couldn’t raise his voice even if he wanted to.

Satoru liked it. He could listen to it all day, even when everything else got too loud and overbearing. Suguru could soften all harshness in the world, in him.  

Satoru can only imagine what it would sound like to hear him say I love you.

The thought makes him shiver and burn all at once. He sits up, abruptly enough his head starts to pound again.  

A shower sounds all too appealing, now that he thinks about it.

By the time he’s made it to the bathroom, undressed entirely, and stepped beneath the hot water, the burning in his chest has spread through his entire body, down his spine, between his legs, to the soles of his feet.

He presses his hands flat against the tiles and bows his head, eyes closed, not touching himself even as his cock thickens, fills out until it hangs heavily between his thighs.

Breathing heavily, he presses his palm against his chest, circles his thumb around his nipple until it stiffens. Suguru’s nipples are pierced, he remembers. Satoru hadn’t seen anything more than the outline of them, but it was enough to make his gut tighten.

His imagination has always been good. If he closes his eyes, relaxes his body beneath the water, he can pretend it’s Suguru’s hands trailing over his chest, wrapping around his cock, stroking him just to the point of discomfort.

It’s always had to be enough. He’s spent years touching himself to the thought of Suguru’s hands, his voice, his body, never expecting or anticipating the real thing. Even now, with the image of him renewed in his mind, it does more for him than anyone else, real or imagined.

The tension in his gut grows, but he still doesn’t touch himself anymore than the twisting and tugging at his nipple, his hand moving across his chest to pull desperately at the other one.

Slowly, more slowly than it would if Suguru were here, his control falters. He reaches for himself, squeezes his cock in the tight circle of his fist, and strokes himself, legs trembling, chest heaving, until he spills over his fingers only minutes later.

In his head, he pictures Suguru on his knees, mouth wide open and tongue covered in cum, so his tongue piercing only just glints through the mess. Satoru would stuff his cock into his mouth until it was full, until Suguru was choking on it, until he’d have no choice but to swallow and swallow and swallow, until he brought another orgasm out of him with the tight movements of his throat and was forced to swallow that too.

Like cigarette smoke in his lungs, he wants to be a part of him, physically, even if it’s messy, even if it’s foul. He wants Suguru to take something of him into himself, with as much desperate desire as Satoru gives it to him.  

He wants to kiss the taste of his mouth. He wants, wants, wants, so much it’s going to kill him. He hopes it does, if it’s that or nothing.

Just no more of this unsurety. No more waiting. No more heartache.

No more living without him.

He has to catch up, has to push until he knows, has to drag Suguru back into his life even if it takes another decade. He can’t let himself be left behind again.

Chapter Text

Haibara had bought him a piece of castella cake and an overly sweet latte as thanks for covering his classes yesterday, but Satoru doesn’t taste any of it, as he eats, as he drinks, as he forces himself to do something other than fret hopelessly over the remaining hours of work.

On the phone last night, he said he would tell Suguru exactly how he felt, if it was what he wanted. That in itself was a type of confession, even if he hadn’t said the real words.

But Suguru wants to do it in person. Satoru will grant him that, but his patience won’t allow for anything more. If Suguru hasn’t kissed him by the end of the night, Satoru somehow doubts it will ever happen.

Tonight, he thinks, forcefully, again and again and again. Do it tonight. He’s waiting for you to do it.

He left it too late last time and spent the last decade paying for it as a result. If he lets the same thing happen again, he’ll never be able to live with himself.

Satoru crams the last of the castella cake in his mouth, forces it down with the last mouthful of coffee. The leftover taste in his mouth is, for the first time ever, just a bit too sweet. Whatever he and Suguru end up doing, he hopes it doesn’t involve food.

 At least his head is clear. He’s had migraines in the past that have crippled him for days, made his vision so sensitive he couldn’t even open his eyes to squint. He’s not sure he could count on himself to act sensibly, if that were the case now, to not drag himself to Suguru’s side despite the pain so he could suffer in his presence.

But there are no traces of that stinging ache, of the black spots in his vision, and his sunglasses are set atop his nose just in case. He doesn’t even feel tired, as he usually would after one of his bouts, which he can only owe to the lingering effect of Suguru’s voice softening him through.

He can only imagine how much stronger the effect would’ve been if Suguru had been there in person, pressed up against his side, so he could feel the physical humming of his voice inside his chest.

Maybe another headache wouldn’t be so bad, Satoru thinks, biting at his lip. He’s sure Suguru would take care of him if he knew, would do anything Satoru asked of him if he thought it would ease his suffering. They could lie in bed together and do nothing but sleep, soothed by the sound of each other’s breathing.

Satoru scrubs his hands across his mouth, teeth gritted.

“Stop,” he hisses, under his breath, to nobody but himself. “You’re only making it worse.”

It’s going to hurt no matter what, when he goes to sleep tonight without Suguru beside him once again. But his imagination will only make it all the more obvious, just what he’s missing.

And it’s best not to get carried away. For both of them.

He can’t help but fear the worst, when Suguru calls him around the same time they’d usually be meeting up.

“Yo,” he answers, trying to sound normal, to sound like he’s not dreading whatever Suguru’s about to say next. He can’t bear the thought of more cancelled plans.

“Hey, Satoru,” Suguru says, slightly breathless, with an edge of a distress uncharacteristic of him. “Listen, I’m running late.”

Satoru swallows. Late doesn’t have to mean anything more than that. There’s so much time in the evening.

“How late?” he asks.

“Like I haven’t even started closing up the shop yet.” There’s clattering on the end, Suguru still working as he speaks. “My last tattoo went for longer than we thought. The guy wanted a break like every half hour.”

“All right,” Satoru says. It’s not a cancellation, not yet. “I’ll meet you at the tattoo shop then. Where is it?”

Don’t turn me down, he pleads. Don’t tell me we should wait any longer than we already have.  

Suguru tells him the address without hesitating. If anything, Satoru thinks he might detect some relief in his voice.  

“See you soon.”

The line goes quiet. Satoru shoves his phone in his pocket, reaches blindly for his messenger bag. He leaves the stacks of class papers and reports on his desk, a mess he wouldn’t stand by if he were off to meet anyone else.

It’s stupid to take his car, but it turns a fifteen-minute walk into a two-minute drive, and that’s more than worth it if it means he gets that extra time with Suguru.

He couldn’t miss the tattoo shop even if he tried. Standing outside the entrance, shoulder to shoulder and both holding cigarettes, are Sukuna and Choso, already eyeing his car as he climbs out of it, as its doors lock and its lights flash.

“What’s up, Gojo?” says Sukuna, baring his teeth. “Careful with that. Someone might steal it.”

Satoru glances at his car, and shrugs.

“I’ll buy another one,” he says, evenly. “My bank account would survive it.”

Sukuna’s jagged eyebrows twitch with delight.

“I like a man with money,” he says. He drops the end of his cigarette, stamps it out with his heel, and draws close enough Satoru can smell the bitter smoke on him. They’re the same height, fully eye-to-eye.

“Why don’t you come home with me instead, hm?” he simpers, his voice gone uncomfortably soft as he scans Satoru up and down. “I’ll fuck you so good you won’t even remember Geto’s name.”

Satoru’s heard him make enough sex jokes to be phased by it. He doesn’t think they’ve made it through a single sparring session together without Sukuna making some pass at him.

“Tempting,” he says, dryly. “But you just don’t do it for me.”

“How can you be sure?” Sukuna asks. He’s got all his teeth on display now, smirking wickedly. Even his eyes have taken on a possessed tinge, full of too much enjoyment. “I know you like how I push you around when we fight.”

Satoru would gladly bite back, if Suguru wasn’t expecting him. As it is, whatever satisfaction he might get from bickering with Sukuna pales in comparison to what he knows is waiting for him inside the studio.

Then Sukuna is yanked back by the collar of his haori, hard and sharp enough the self-satisfied smirk drops.

“Stop harassing him,” Choso sighs, sounding as weary as he looks. “He came here to see Geto, not you.”

Sukuna pouts. It makes him long too much like Yuji, even if it is an act for his own benefit.

“Go in,” Choso tells Satoru, with a considerate nod towards the studio. “He’s been waiting for you all day.”

Satoru’s eyes turn at once towards the shop windows. He can’t see Suguru anywhere, but he knows he’s only just out of view.

And he’s been waiting, Satoru thinks, with a heavy breath.

“Come on, Ryomen,” says Choso, pulling more gently at Sukuna’s collar. He lets go, starts walking down the pavement, and calls over his shoulder like he’s beckoning a dog, “Home time.”

“Takoyaki first!” Sukuna shouts, and he launches himself onto Choso’s back like he’s not twice his size.

Satoru watches Choso struggling down the street beneath Sukuna’s weight, his feet dragging from exasperation more than any real difficulty. They make it to the end of the street before Choso manages to shake him off.

Grinning crookedly, Satoru opens the studio door, too amused to feel any trepidation.

He finds Suguru past the sitting area, already turned towards him in greeting, but for once he’s too distracted by all the prints lining the walls, the boards full of flash designs, to look at him first.

He recognises Suguru’s work at once, even though his style has changed since Satoru last had a good look at it. There’s something undeniably familiar about it, from being a teenager, from the brief glimpses he’d gotten at the tattoos covering Suguru’s arms.

When at last he looks at Suguru, he can only give a sheepish smile as a greeting.

“Hey,” Suguru says, smiling right back.

Satoru shivers.

He hopes Suguru doesn’t smile at anyone else like that, otherwise there’d be countless people wandering the streets in a daze.

“No one else here?” he asks, glancing around the studio. Just in case. He doesn’t want to compete with a straggling client or an oblivious apprentice for Suguru’s attention, not when he’s waited so long for it.

“I handle closing,” Suguru tells him, turning to collect a stack of flash books. “I don’t usually trust Choso or Sukuna to do a good job of it, for different reasons.”

“I can imagine,” says Satoru, grinning once again as he thinks of their little interaction outside. He picks up another flash book, runs his fingers down the edge of the cover, then offers it out. “It’s funny how different the three of them are, for brothers.”

Suguru hums, as he takes it, as he sets them all down in a neat pile on a side table. “Sukuna and Choso aren’t brothers, technically,” he says. “It’s Yuji they share a parent with.”

“That’d explain it,” Satoru says, huffing a laugh. He’s not sure if he already knew that, but it seems obvious enough anyway, now that Suguru’s mentioned it. “The kid must’ve gotten the best traits of both of them.”

“The nicest ones, at least.”

Suguru must be done with closing, because he doesn’t make to do anything else around the work area. Instead, he watches Satoru closely, like he can tell Satoru’s on the cusp of something.

Satoru supposes he’s not being particularly discreet, in the way he keeps looking at Suguru’s art, hung on the walls above what must be his workstation. He feels daring, and reckless, and like he’s been presented an opportunity he wouldn’t typically come by.

“You feel like doing another tattoo tonight?” he asks, before he can think too much about it. There’s every chance Suguru will say no, after the day he’s had.

But Satoru can’t quite help himself.

“You want one?” Suguru asks, with enough pleased surprise Satoru can let go of his doubt, that Suguru might be against the idea. The way he’s grinning is indication enough without words.

“No time like the present,” says Satoru. “But only if you’re down.”

Suguru’s grin grows, takes him over entirely. He gestures Satoru towards one of the benches, tells him with no small degree of enthusiasm, “Let me get set up.”

Satoru sits, watching curiously, as Suguru prepares his station, as he ties back his hair, as he gives Satoru an inquiring look and asks, “So what are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” says Satoru. He hadn’t actually thought about it all that much, before he’d asked. “You decide.”

Suguru pauses. “That’s a lot of pressure.”

It’s the only guarantee I’ll like it, Satoru thinks, but he doesn’t say so out loud.

“I trust you,” he says.

Suguru blinks slowly at him. Then he gives a little shake of his head, looking pleased.

“All right,” he says, reaching for his tablet. “These are some of my latest designs. They’re not in the flash book yet, so no one else will have them.”

Satoru has to remind himself not to spend more time than he should looking at each design, as he flicks through them, aware of the extra work he’s making Suguru do even if he does seem eager to do it.

He likes them all, would happily get any of them done, but he knows at once which one he wants the moment he sees it.

He’s not sure if Suguru did it intentionally, but the black betta fish looks strangely like him, in the colouring, in the long, straight fins like his hair.

“This one,” he says, handing the tablet back.  

Suguru nods his approval, and he doesn’t ask why. Satoru’s not sure he’d be able to explain it, if he did.  

“Wait here,” Suguru says, standing, his eyes trained on the tablet as he takes several steps towards a side door. “I’ll just be a second.”

He disappears into a back room, but he’s only gone for a few minutes. When he returns, he offers Satoru the option of three different sizes.

Satoru picks the biggest one, the one most like the real thing. He wants it to be clear, when he looks at it in the mirror, when he traces his fingertips around the fading edges thirty years from now.

“Where do you want it?”

“My ribs.”

Satoru touches his right side. He doesn’t think he has it in him to get it done over his heart. Maybe it would make the whole thing hurt more.

“Take your shirt off then.”

“Make me,” Satoru says, just to see the exasperated grin Suguru throws at him, but he’s already reaching for his buttons, fingers shaking slightly around each one.

“Stand up.”

Satoru stands, lets his shirt fall open so his chest and abs are exposed. He doubts he needs to remove it completely but he does anyway, drapes it across the end of the tattoo bed so it stays uncreased.

Then he turns to Suguru, his breath already shortening, and holds himself still as Suguru lines the template up against his skin.

Was this a bad idea? Satoru asks himself, tensing beneath the slight touches of Suguru’s fingers against his rib-cage.

He hadn’t thought about that either, about how he’s going to be spending the next few hours with Suguru bent over him, his hands pressed right up against his torso. He’ll be able to feel every shiver that passes through him, every deep breath, every skipped heartbeat.

“How’s the placement?” Suguru asks. If he notices Satoru’s unsteady breathing, he doesn’t say anything.

“Perfect,” Satoru answers. He doesn’t even need to look. If Suguru’s happy with it, than so is he.

“Lie down on your back.”

Satoru does as he’s told.

“Let me know if it hurts,” Suguru says, leaning over him with his tattoo gun raised. “If you need me to stop, just say so.”

Satoru hums. The sound of buzzing fills his ears, stabs little pinpricks into his skin with its frequency.

It hurts, but it feels good. It feels good, but it hurts.

He’s not sure if Suguru’s touch soothes the pain or makes it worse, but he keeps his eyes closed anyway, so he doesn’t stare at him, so he doesn’t distract him from his careful concentration.

“How’s the pain?” Suguru asks, as he stops to gather more ink on his needle.

“Not bad,” says Satoru. “Feels kind of good.”

“Masochist.”

Satoru grins. “Look who’s talking.”

He opens one eye, so he can see the crooked smirk he knows Suguru is giving him. This time he keeps watching, unable to help himself, as Suguru turns back to his work, as his eyebrows pull together and his gloved hand splays out over Satoru’s chest.

Natural, Satoru thinks. That’s what he looks like. It’s obvious he’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing, in a way he never did when they were students, when they were being forced to decide what to do with their lives.

He’s not sure how long he watches, but Suguru never once looks up at him, and the focus on his face only grows, as he switches out attachments, as he gathers ink, as he compares the image on his tablet to the one he’s inking into Satoru’s skin.

Then vibrating stops, and so does the stinging. Satoru closes his eyes, keeps his breathing controlled, as Suguru’s hands disappear from his ribs. It’s too early to be finished, he knows that much.

Then he feels the light tap of something against his bottom lip.

He opens his eyes. Suguru’s got a lollipop held against his mouth, already unwrapped. When Satoru parts his lips, Suguru presses it down against his tongue until Satoru sucks.

It’s strawberry flavoured. Satoru lets the syrupy sweetness fill his mouth, lets it distract him from the image in his head of sucking something else.

By the time they’re done, the lollipop is gone. Satoru chews on the plastic stick, fights the urge to tap his foot, to move in some way. He doesn’t think he’s had to sit still for so long since he was a child, under the careful, critical eye of nannies and governesses.

Suguru sits back.

“Come on,” he says, tapping Satoru’s hip with his knuckles. “Go have a look.”

Satoru rises, crosses the room to look at himself in the floor-length mirror.

The dark smear across his ribs looks like a bruise at first glance, but then Satoru’s eyes adjust, focus in on all the tiny details, on the white and purple highlights, the shading so well-placed it could rise right off his skin to swim around the room.

He brushes his fingertips against the reddened skin around the edges, tracing the shape of it. It looks exactly as Satoru thought it would.

Suguru stands, steps up behind him.

In the reflection of the mirror, he can see Suguru looking at him, his lips parted, his eyes dark. His pupils are so wide they nearly swallow up the purple entirely.

Satoru knows it’s not hopeful thinking. The desire is right there on Suguru’s face, more obvious and more revealing than it’s ever been.

“Are you happy?” he asks, more softly than he’s ever sounded.

Then presses his hands to Satoru’s waist. Even that isn’t enough.

Satoru’s been grappling with his longing for years, and finally, he’s lost.

“Not yet.”

He has more hope now than he ever has before, but he also has more fear. There have been no promises made, even if this is the closest they’ve ever gotten to a confession.

But a confession isn’t a promise until they’ve both bared their souls to it. Maybe that’s what the tattoo is.

Because the point isn’t the tattoo. The point is that it’s Suguru doing it, that it’s something of Suguru’s he can have forever, even if it turns out he can’t have him.

It’s that one day, probably soon, Suguru is going to disappear again, will vanish from his life as quickly and as painfully as he had the first time and leave no reminders that he’d once been.

And Satoru needs to prepare himself for that moment. He needs to know he did everything he could to have him. He needs to look at himself and see Suguru looking back at him, because he’s half his soul.

He’s braver than he once was. And he’s tired of waiting.

He turns beneath the hands on his hips.

“Suguru, please,” he begs, and he feels alive for it, burning to finally ask for what he wants, even if he can’t say the actual words. “I can’t wait anymore.”

Suguru stares at him, always soft around the edges, always like he wants to give Satoru everything. Satoru wants to trust it, but he’d looked like that when he left.

His fingertips are as gentle against Satoru’s jaw as they had been against his ribs.

His mouth isn’t.

It happens before Satoru realises it, the insistent, forceful, desperate pressure of Suguru’s kiss. There’s heat, the sting of teeth in his lip, the press of Suguru’s nose against his cheek, and then it’s all there is.

Satoru’s imagined this enough times in the past to have thought of all possibilities. He’s imagined softness and warmth, uncertainty, the pain in his chest from relief, the roughness of Suguru’s hands against the back of his neck. He’s imagined himself coming apart entirely.

He hasn’t imagined this primal hunger, this urgency, this bodily recognition as his heart melds itself back to wholeness after ten years spent in pieces.

He couldn’t know it would be like this. Ten years wasn’t enough time to prepare.

Then Suguru seals his tongue into his mouth, flicks at his teeth with his piercing, and Satoru doesn’t need the memories of his imagination anymore, doesn’t need the old fantasies, because they’re nothing but shadows to the real thing.

Suguru kisses him properly, open-mouthed and already breathless, bites at his mouth and sucks on his tongue, presses against his tensed stomach, tugs on his hair until he moans, until he understands just what it is Suguru’s trying to tell him.   

Oh, Satoru thinks, the realisation settling warmly behind his breastbone. You really do want me.

People don’t kiss like this unless they feel it in their soul.

Satoru’s never been kissed like this.  

He would smile, if he didn’t feel like crying, if he weren’t already working desperately at keeping Suguru’s mouth against his. He’d stopped breathing a while ago, but for once the ache in his chest is good.

When he gasps for air he curses himself, but Suguru’s lips stay on him, even if he leaves his mouth alone to let him breathe. Satoru feels a trail of touches running across his cheek, down his throat, feels the wetness of his tongue as he licks, the hard edge of his teeth as he rests them over the thumping skin above his pulse point.

Are we going to have sex? Satoru thinks, grasping at him, shoving himself in closer. Is that where this is leading?

God, he wants to. He wants, wants, wants, so much it’s the one thing keeping him alive. He can only breathe when it’s air from Suguru’s lungs. His heart can only beat when he’s feeling Suguru’s touch.  

“Suguru…” he gasps, digging his hands into his hips so he can pull at him, so he can make him feel how his cock is hardening from just this alone.

Suguru groans, low down at the base of his throat. He pulls back from Satoru’s throat, but Satoru shoves into him, fights to bring their mouths back together.

“Satoru,” Suguru warns, his voice gone rough and wanting. His breath is warm against Satoru’s mouth, close enough their lips brush in another kind of kiss as he speaks. “We either stop now or not at all.”

It’s not even an option.

“Please, don’t stop,” Satoru begs. The words come out as a whimper, but he doesn’t care as long as it’s persuasive. “Don’t stop, Suguru.”

Suguru pushes his thigh between Satoru’s legs.

Thoughtless and desperate, Satoru drops his weight against it, grinds his cock against the solid muscle.  

He wants to feel more. Suguru’s pressed in as close to him as they can physically be, but there’s not enough skin, not enough contact. He wants to feel Suguru’s bare stomach against his own, wants to feel the smooth lines of his abs, the faint trail of dark hair beneath his navel.

He shoves his hands beneath Suguru’s shirt, yanking it up, out of the way, so he can mould his fingertips over his abs and his rib-cage, over the soft dip of his sternum, so he can cup and squeeze at the untensed meat of his chest muscles.

When he rubs his thumbs over Suguru’s nipples, he stills. The uncontrolled urgency in his movements slows right down.

Suguru pulls his mouth away, gives him a careful, unrevealing look.

“Fuck.” Satoru swallows, his throat gone dry. He’d almost forgotten about the nipple piercings, distracted by the one in his tongue. “How many piercings do you have?”

Suguru grins at him, and pulls his thigh back from between his legs.

“Nine.”

As he speaks, he lines his hips up against Satoru’s and drags the hard, thick weight of his cock against Satoru’s hipbone.

Satoru shivers, tries to concentrate. He can see six, in his eyebrow, his ears, his nose, his tongue. He can feel the two in his nipples, circles them with his thumbs.

He doesn’t need to think about the last one. The smug grin on Suguru’s face says it all.

“Don’t tell me.”

He can’t mean it.

Suguru rocks his hips back and forth, dragging his cock against Satoru’s. He leans in closer to him, their faces only a breath apart, and sighs, “Why don’t you find out?”

“Fuck.”

It’s an invitation to touch more, to bring this closer to where they both know it’s already going.

Satoru doesn’t hesitate. He presses his palm flat to Suguru’s stomach, slides his hand beneath the edge of his sweats, and finally, finally touches.

Suguru trembles, his breath hissing out between his teeth.

Even half-hard, his cock rests heavy and hot against Satoru’s palm. Satoru only has to squeeze it, to give it the slightest of pressure as he pulls it free, for it to fill out completely.

He doesn’t look yet, but already he can feel how big it is just from the weight of it against his palm, from how much there is to touch as he strokes his fingers up his shaft.

His thumb finds the titanium bar through the underneath, just below his cockhead.

Breathing heavily, he looks up, stares right into Suguru’s dark eyes.

You’re thinking about it too, right?

He has to be, has to be imagining it, the feeling of his cock stretching Satoru open, filling him up, the drag as he moves inside of him.

He pulls on the piercing, just enough for Suguru to flinch, for him to groan with pleasure. Then he grasps him properly, squeezes his cockhead in the tight hole of his fist.

“That’ll be fun,” he sighs, tugging at him. It’s dry, too dry to feel as good as Satoru can make it, but Suguru’s already trying to thrust into his hand. “I’ve never been fucked with a pierced cock before.”

There’s a certain savagery in Suguru’s eyes, as Satoru finishes speaking, a sharpness in his bared teeth. His hand closes around the base of Satoru’s throat, keeping him pressed back flat against the mirror.

“You ever had your cock sucked with a pierced tongue?” he asks, roughly.

Satoru bites his bottom lip, beaming. That piercing will feel nice, he can tell that much. It felt fantastic when Suguru had his tongue in his mouth.

“Not yet,” he says, brightly. “But you’re going to fix that.”

“Am I?” Suguru breathes, grinning weakly. He leans his forehead against Satoru’s throat, sinks his teeth into his collarbone so he can suck a mark there. Voice muffled and husky, he says, “You’re sounding a little bossy, Satoru.”

Satoru doesn’t respond. He can feel Suguru’s cock twitching against his palm. When he smooths the pad of his thumb over the tip, it’s wet with pre-come.

He lets go, brings his thumb to his mouth so he can taste the bitterness on his tongue.

Suguru stares up at him, his mouth hanging

“Fuck,” he chokes. His hips rock forwards, the tip of his cock catching on the smooth fabric of Satoru’s trousers. “Yeah, I’m going to fix that.”

Satoru nods urgently, but he raises his hands back to Suguru’s face, cradles his jaw, so he can seal their mouths together again. He’s not done kissing, not done feeling out that piercing with his tongue. 

Then Suguru twists his mouth away.

“We shouldn’t do this here,” he breathes, pressing his forehead hard against Satoru’s.

“Why not?” Satoru asks. Desperation and despair gather in his throat, suffocating him. He digs his hands into Suguru’s hair, gasping. “Suguru, don’t do this. You have to finish what you started.”

“I will,” Suguru says, and his body tenses, holds him in firmly against the mirror so he can’t move, so he can’t let the panic take hold. “I will, Satoru. But I won’t fuck you like this. Not for our first time.”

Our first time.

That’s right. Familiar as it all feels, they’ve never done this before.

The air between them calms. Satoru breathes in shakily, touches his fingertips to Suguru’s cheeks, brushes his bangs back for him.

“Suguru,” he says. “You have to know how much I want this.”

Suguru’s eyes are shining. He’s never looked more beautiful in all the years Satoru has known him.

“I know. Of course, I know,” he says, kissing him again, one slow, loose touch of his mouth. Then he swallows hard, and asks, “Let me blow you?”

As he speaks, he pulls at the button of Satoru’s trousers, unlatches it before he gets an answer. The smooth fabric slips easily down Satoru’s thighs.

Suguru drops to his knees, pushes Satoru’s clothes further out the way. Then he leans in, buries his nose into the trimmed, white hair at the base of Satoru’s cock, and breathes him in.

“Oh, God,” Satoru whimpers, letting his head fall back against the mirror. He digs his fingers through Suguru’s hair, keeping him where he is.

His chest feels tight, his head dizzy. He pants for air, knowing it won’t be enough. Nothing about his body is prepared for when Suguru gets his mouth on him properly.

The heat of Suguru’s cheeks disappears from against his hip.

Satoru tenses up, his thighs trembling beneath Suguru’s hands.

Suguru’s lips close around the tip of his cock. His tongue flicks over his slit, licking up dribbles of pre-come, flattens against the underside so Satoru can feel the hard drag of his piercing as he sinks his lips down further around him, as he takes him right into the back of his throat.

His mouth is so warm. The heat of it spreads through Satoru’s stomach, up his chest, his throat, to the delicate skin beneath his eyes.

He moans. The sound of it resonates from deep within his chest, rough and telling. 

Suguru forces himself in closer, shoves his shoulder up beneath one of Satoru’s thighs, grips his hip with one hand and strokes his calf muscle with the other. His throat constricts as he swallows, squeezing the head of Satoru’s cock.

Satoru tries hard not to clench his hands too tightly in Suguru’s hair. He wants to hold his head still, wants to fuck his mouth. He wants Suguru’s fingers inside of him, stretching him open, preparing him to take more.

He looks down, even if he knows the sight of it will finish him too soon, Suguru on his knees, mouth opened wide around his cock, his cheeks red and wet with tears from the force of it, from the strain of taking him so deep.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “You look good like this.”

He reaches out, slips his fingers around Suguru’s throat. He can feel the rapid beating of his pulse beneath his thumb, the rush of blood, the movement of his Adams apple.

Suguru groans, then breathes in hard through his nose. Slowly, his mouth slides down further around Satoru’s cock. Another inch and his nose will be pressed right up against Satoru’s stomach.

Satoru lightens his hold against him, disbelieving.

“S-Suguru, don’t…don’t force yourself,” he stutters, trailing his fingertips cautiously along Suguru’s jaw, past his ears, to grab at the back of his neck. A part of him wants to pull Suguru back, wants to hold him steady and kiss him instead. The other, stronger part still wants to fuck his throat.

Suguru just hums again. Satoru feels his nose jut against his lower stomach, as he sinks that last little bit.

Tight, Satoru thinks, weakly. Suguru’s throat is so tight around him it must hurt, from the thickness of Satoru’s cock pushed in so deep.

Then he pulls back, suddenly enough Satoru whimpers, and starts to suck him properly, his tongue working against the underside of his shaft, the muscles in his jaw popping as he takes him into his throat over and over again.

Satoru grits his teeth. His entire body shakes, so violently it makes the edges of his vision blur out of focus.   

“Ahh, fuck-Suguru,” he cries, and it’s the only warning he manages.

He curls in on himself, all of his muscles contracting at once. Suguru presses his hips urgently back against the mirror, locks him in place and swallows around him again and again and again until he’s taken all of Satoru’s release. Traces of it spill out around his lips, dribble down his chin, but he licks and sucks and swallows until Satoru’s full-body tremors subside.

He keeps Satoru’s cock in his mouth even after it’s softened, his tongue rubbing back and forth against the underneath. Satoru can still feel the hard edge of his piercing, smooth against his sensitive tip. He doubts a blowjob will ever feel as good without it.

If he was any more desperate, he’d beg Suguru to fuck him against the mirror. As it is, his desperation is telling him he needs to get home, to his bed, so he can feel Suguru’s naked body against his own, so he can spread his legs for him properly.

 Suguru pulls away from him, but his hands stay firmly grasped at the meat of his thigh muscles.

“Satoru,” he rasps, his voice shaking, each syllable of Satoru’s name stressed and broken and wanting. “Toru. Sweetheart.”

“Suguru?” Satoru mumbles. He drops his chin, blinks against the dark spots in his vision until Suguru’s face comes into focus.

He’s gazing up at him, his mouth wet, his eyes shining, red at the corners. “I want to fuck you. In a bed,” he says, or maybe he’s begging, because he’s looking like his world will fall apart if Satoru says no. “Please let me.”

Satoru stares at him, his chest heaving.

Is this what your desperation looks like, Suguru?

Satoru’s seen it before, glimpsed it through a smoke-screen of carefully maintained control. He recognises it like he does every other part of him.

He presses his thumb to Suguru’s swollen bottom lip.

“Come home with me, then,” he says, with more control than he feels. “Suguru.”

Suguru smiles at him, his mouth stretching wide beneath the touch of Satoru’s thumbprint.

Then he rises. His fingers pull at Satoru’s clothes, fixing them back into place, then move to where his own cock, still hard and wet with pre, sticks out from above the elastic of his sweats.

“Wait,” Satoru says, grasping at his wrist. “Wait.”

Suguru pauses, and lets Satoru pull his hands away.

“What is it?” he asks, warily.

“I want to finish you first.” Satoru licks his lips, widens his eyes at him, pouts like he used to when they were younger, when he wanted something badly enough. “Can I? With my hands?”

The concern in Suguru’s eyes clears at once. He shakes his head, huffing, and crowds Satoru back in against the mirror.

“If it’s what you want,” he says, all but purring.

Satoru searches out that piercing straight away. He wants to drop to his knees so he can look at it, so he find out what it feels like against his mouth.

But he wants to look at Suguru’s face more, at how his eyebrows have pulled together at the centre, at how his lips have parted as he takes in shallow sips of breath.

He knows just how to touch him, the pressure he needs as he strokes his palm up and down his shaft, the tightened squeeze around his head, the swipe of his thumb over his tip to gather more moisture.

It’s just on the pleasurable side of too dry.  

Suguru’s hand closes around his own, gentle but firm, with no attempt at all to change the pressure or the pace. Satoru can feel him twitching and throbbing already. It won’t take much at all to finish him.

He twists his wrist, dugs his thumb into Suguru’s cock piercing, and feels him spill instantly over his hand.

Suguru presses his forehead into the curve of Satoru’s shoulder, shaking against him, panting tiny gasps of pleasure against Satoru’s collarbone. He’s got so much of his weight resting on him, it feels as though Satoru alone is keeping him up.

It’s everything he’s ever wanted, to have Suguru close like this, to touch and taste, to be surrounded entirely. He could lose himself easily in this feeling, sink into the void and stay there as long as it remained like this.

Still he wants more. He wants everything Suguru is willing to give.

He doesn’t want it to end.

He turns his mouth against Suguru’s temple, closes his eyes, and whispers, “Please, Suguru.”

Suguru slides his hands up his bare back. His palms feel rough, built up with callouses. Ten years ago, they were as smooth as the rest of him.

“Please what, sweetheart?” he asks, softly.

Satoru breathes in and out. He can feel his heart beating.

“Please don’t leave again.”

He’ll beg if he has to. He’ll break his fingers holding Suguru to him.

Slowly, Suguru pulls back, just enough to look him in the eyes.

Satoru doesn’t hide the fact that he’s on the verge of tears.

“I won’t, Satoru. I’m with you now.”

He sounds like he means it. There’s not a single trace of uncertainty on his face.

But still, Satoru quakes. The pit of his stomach is heavy. Somehow, he doesn’t feel the comfort that he should, from Suguru’s words.

He leans in, presses a burning kiss to Suguru’s mouth so he won’t see the disbelief.

If Suguru notices, he doesn’t say anything, but he opens his mouth against Satoru’s and kisses him just as deeply.

“Wait a minute,” Suguru says, grinning against his mouth. He squeezes his waist, gentles him back against the mirror. “I need to wrap you up. I probably should have done that before…”

He doesn’t finish, but there’s no need to. He’s gone pink along his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and the corners of his mouth twitch like he’s trying not to laugh with happiness.

Satoru stays leaning against the mirror, staring, as Suguru moves around the studio collecting different things. He looks exactly like he’s just blown someone, like he’s just been jerked off. His clothes sit crookedly all over him, hanging as loosely as his limbs.

There’s no gravity to him, as he works, as he carefully cleans over Satoru’s tattoo and wraps him up. There’s no heaviness in him at all.

You look comfortable, Satoru thinks. Relaxed.

“Leave that on for a few hours,” Suguru says, delicately smoothing his fingertips over Satoru’s tattoo one last time. “When you take it off, wash it gently with water and soap. You can keep doing that for a few days and then you can start using an aftercare balm once it’s started to heal.”

Satoru’s eyebrows twitch. He grins, shoves away his darker thoughts, and leans down to tease, “You’re hot when you talk aftercare to me.”

Suguru’s hands clamp back down around his hips.

“I’ll show you proper aftercare tonight,” he says, his voice gone low.

Satoru beams, his doubts entirely forgotten in light of his excitement.

“So you are coming home with me then?” he asks, his entire body suffused with delight. “No one else is there tonight.”

“Yeah,” Suguru sighs, catching Satoru in one more sweet, lingering kiss. “Yeah, I’ll come home.”

It is your home, Satoru thinks, barely stops himself from saying the words out loud. His face warms at the thought of it.

“Come on, then,” he says, clearing his throat. “You can follow me on your bike.”

“I’ll meet you outside,” says Suguru, turning his face away to look around the studio. “I need to check a few things.”

Satoru nods, but he’s distracted by the sharp line of Suguru’s jaw. He moves in, bites at the edge of it until Suguru laughs and shoves him towards the door. Then he snatches up his shirt from the end of the tattoo bed and throws it at him.

Satoru does up his buttons, grinning to himself, as he steps out into the street. It takes a conscious effort, but he doesn’t want to let his doubts creep back over him when he should only be feeling happiness.

And he is, happier than he’s felt in his whole life, happier than he ever imagined he could be.

Leaning against his car window, the remnants of pleasure lingering still in his nervous system, he could imagine this is something he’s done hundreds of times.

Maybe it’s something he’ll get to do in the future, waiting for Suguru outside his studio as he finishes closing up for the day, so they can go home together, so they can spend the rest of their nights together and hopefully the mornings too.  

The studio lights flick off, leaving Satoru in the faint glow of an overhead streetlamp. He watches Suguru step through the door, close and lock it behind him.

“Ready?” he asks, straightening.

“Not yet.”

Suguru sweeps in against him, presses him back up against the car door in a reflection of how they’d been only moments earlier inside the studio, Satoru caught between his body and the mirror behind him. He opens his mouth against Suguru’s tongue, lets him suck until the pleasure of it travels right down his throat, his lungs, his stomach, to his cock.

“Get on your bike,” he groans, shoving at Suguru’s chest. “Hurry. I’m going to die if you don’t fuck me. And we’re covered in cum.”

Suguru smirks at him, and does as he’s told.

Chapter Text

The house is dark and empty, much as Satoru expected it to be, but it doesn’t disappoint him as it would any other night if he were coming home alone.

“Megumi?” he calls out, down the empty hallway, just in case. No answer. “Probably at Yuji’s. He mentioned it yesterday.”

Suguru shoves his boots into the corner of the genkan and follows up after him into the living room. He asks, as he hooks his finger through the belt loop of Satoru’s trousers, “I take it they’ve sorted things out then?”

“I guess so,” Satoru says. All the lights are off, and he can barely see at all, but he finds Suguru easily in the dark. “He takes after me, of course. Goes after what he wants.”

“Is that so?” Suguru asks, holding himself steady, whilst Satoru drapes his arms over his shoulders, as he kisses along his temple and ear.

“Uh, yes,” Satoru says, mildly, weaving his fingers through the hair at the nape of Suguru’s neck. “This is happening because I finally begged you.”

“You didn’t need to beg,” says Suguru. His mouth brushes, soft and delicate, against the side of Satoru’s throat. “But you’re right.”

He touches Satoru’s waist, brings his hands up beneath the hanging fabric of his shirt tails to touch skin.

In a low, regretful murmur, he adds, “You’ve always been braver than me.”

Satoru’s fingers pause in their loving movements, still tangled up in Suguru’s hair. The warmth of Suguru’s cheek pulls away from his shoulder, leaving him cold.

Not true, Satoru thinks. I couldn’t do any of this until you gave me hope.  

“Don’t look like that, Satoru,” Suguru says. His smile is just visible in the faint moonlight. “I’m glad. Who knows how long I might have waited if you didn’t do it first.”

He touches his jaw, cradling him, drops his thumb against Satoru’s lips. At any other moment, Satoru would take it into his mouth and suck.

But he’s too caught up in Suguru’s words, on the implications. That uncertainly he’d pushed aside so painfully filters right back through him.  

“You would have said something eventually though, right?”

“Yes,” Suguru says. Satoru feels him lean in closer, feels the soft touch of his forehead coming to rest against his own. “I wanted to say something the moment I saw you outside the college.”

Satoru swallows. It would have saved him a lot of grief, if Suguru did, but he doubts his own self-control.

“Good thing you didn’t.” He smiles weakly, and admits, “I would have abandoned my classes and let you fuck me in my office.”

He’s not kidding. If Suguru had added a confession to the shock of his appearance, after so many years apart, he would’ve given up everything to go with him.

Suguru hums, half a laugh in his low voice. He presses his face back against Satoru’s throat and kisses him there, smiles when Satoru shivers.

“I think I like the way it’s happened,” he sighs, wrapping his hands back around Satoru’s waist. “But I would like to fuck you on that bed now.”

Satoru feels it, the way his heartbeat picks up and his stomach tenses, the way his mouth goes dry with anticipation. Suguru’s palms are burning hot against his skin, branding him as permanently as his tattoo.

“I’m not stopping you,” he breathes.

“Take your clothes off then.”

“You do it for me.”

“Brat.”

Suguru pulls back to grin at him, already yanking at his buttons. Satoru hears one of them clatter against the floor.

“That shirt is Comme de Garcons,” he protests, slapping Suguru’s hands away, but his shirt is already hanging loosely from his shoulders, open and revealing.

“If you want to be treated gently than you have to ask for it, Satoru,” Suguru warns, unbothered, as he shoves the shirt down his arms.

Does that mean you’re going to treat me roughly?

Satoru’s eyes go distant, his thoughts elsewhere. He knows how much strength Suguru has in his body, even if he hasn’t felt it yet. He has no intention of struggling against it.

“…I can afford another one.”

“Fuck, how rich are you?” Suguru laughs, pressing more urgently at his sides. “Don’t answer that.”

Satoru takes a step towards the bedrooms, latches onto Suguru’s wrist, and yanks him along after him.

He barely gets the lamp on, unsteady as his fingers are with eagerness, before Suguru’s shoving him down against his bed, his hands working at the button of his trousers.

“Lube?” he asks, as he pulls his shirt off over his head, as he reaches down to palm at his cock through his sweatpants.

Satoru blinks. He leans towards the bedside table, draws out a half-empty bottle and shoves it into Suguru’s waiting hand.

He can’t make himself look away from Suguru’s chest.

“I didn’t realise you had so many,” he says, weakly.

“So many what?”

“Tattoos.” They’re all over him, from his wrists to his shoulders, travelling down one side of his chest, his ribs, his waist and hips. Satoru can’t pick one single part to focus on, when there’s so much to take in. “You’re covered. I didn’t get a good look earlier.”

Suguru stills, lets his arms fall back to his sides.

“Go on, then,” he says, with an encouraging smile.

His fingers shaking slightly, Satoru traces over the great rainbow dragon at his shoulder, the sting ray and the white bird, a dozen other smaller twisted creatures half-dissipated into smoke, like they’re trying to bury themselves into the flesh and sinew of his arms.

Then he moves to the swirling clouds all over his chest, a willow tree on his right side, creeping vines and olive branches, writhing snakes and bolts of lightning that trail below the band of his sweatpants.

It doesn’t make sense, not really, but Satoru doesn’t think it’s supposed to. He thinks it’s fantastic.

“You’re hard to read when you want to be,” Suguru sighs, uncertainly, and he tilts Satoru’s face up to him with a touch beneath his chin. “What are you thinking?”

Satoru doesn’t think he’s hard to read at all. He feels like his worship is written all over his face, is emanating out of him.

“I think you’re beautiful,” he says. He’ll tell Suguru as many times as he’d like to hear it. “You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”

He moves his hands to Suguru’s sweats, so he can draw them down over his hips, his solid thighs. Then he lies back against the sheets and lets Suguru press him down harder, their bare skin aligned along every surface.

When Suguru kisses him, it’s not the same as all the open, breathless, desperate kisses they’d already shared. Somehow, this one slows Satoru right down, settles any lingering nerves he may feel over having Suguru so close and clears his mind of anything other than the weight of his body and the softness of his mouth.

The intensity builds more gradually, this time, like mist clearing in the morning sun.

Satoru closes his eyes and breathes in deeply, as he hears the lube bottle opening, as he feels Suguru shifting above him, leaning his weight to one side so he can free up his other arm.

He pushes Satoru’s legs apart, guides one of his knees up against his chest. Then his fingers press gently against Satoru’s hole, rubbing in little circles. His other hand lands on Satoru’s stomach, petting him with gentle strokes like he can feel the tension right beneath his skin.

Satoru can’t look at him, not when he’s touching there, his fingers pressing with more and more force. He keeps his face turned to the side, trying to control his breathing, to not take in the harsh, panting breaths he wants.

“Don’t be nervous, sweetheart,” Suguru says, soothingly, not so oblivious as he once was to his own effect. “I’ll take care of you.”

“I’m not nervous,” Satoru gasps, weakly shifting his hips down against Suguru’s hand. His cock aches where it curves towards his stomach, desperate for some kind of touch. “It’s just…been awhile.”

He’s never reluctant to touch himself when the desire arises, but he hasn’t had another person in his bed in over a year, let alone took instead of gave.

“Like I said,” Suguru sighs, and he lays a kiss against the crease of Satoru’s hip and thigh. “I’ll take care of you.”

He hasn’t even pushed inside of him yet.

“Show me, then,” Satoru mumbles, pulling his knee up higher.

Suguru’s hand goes still between his thighs. Satoru can feel his eyes on him, even if his own are closed.

He breathes in. Suguru’s palm against his stomach is searing hot.

Suguru presses inside of him almost too easily, sinks his finger in to the first knuckle, the second, like he already knows him intimately, like he’s already done this to him before.

His fingertip drags up Satoru’s insides, pressing and brushing and feeling him out, until Satoru jolts and clenches down hard. A moan catches in his throat, wanton enough his face colours with embarrassment, as well as pleasure.

“Found it,” Suguru says, smugly.

“Good for you,” Satoru chokes, as Suguru’s finger burns him up from the inside. He swallows, digs his hands into the bedsheets, and says, “More. Please.”

He wants another finger, but more of anything will do. Even Suguru’s breath against his skin feels good, the softness as he brushes kisses against him. It’s more intense than sucking bruises.

Suguru doesn’t give him another one, but Satoru feels the flat of his tongue against the underside of his cock, the outline of his mouth as he kisses the same spot.

His hair is falling forwards onto Satoru’s thighs and hips, another point of scolding contact. Satoru releases the bedsheets, winds his hands through his hair and holds onto him instead.

Suguru works so maddeningly slowly over his cock, stretches his open so patiently on his fingers, he has Satoru dripping clear pre-cum all over his stomach by the time Suguru’s pushed three inside of him.

Satoru tries desperately hard not to grab at himself, not to stroke himself to orgasm. He’s already so close to the edge, it wouldn’t take much at all.

Suguru’s touch feels familiar, but the reactions of his own body are foreign, more receptive than he’s ever been with anyone else.

And Suguru knows exactly what he’s doing.

“I won’t last, Suguru,” Satoru tells him.

He won’t, not with Suguru’s fingers working so languidly inside of him, the wet heat of his mouth as he gently tongues over the thin skin at the base of his cock. If he doesn’t come from this, he will the moment Suguru puts it inside of him.

“That’s okay,” Suguru says, without pausing, without moving his mouth away from Satoru’s cock. “You’re being so good for me.”

Satoru shivers. Even Suguru’s voice feels good, humming against his skin. Satoru wants to fuck his throat again, so can bring that raspiness back.

“I want you to finish like this.”

Satoru raises himself up on his elbows, completely enthralled, as Suguru kisses the tip of his cock, as he circles his tongue around the head, as he takes him into his mouth and lightly sucks.

Then he sinks down around him. His fingers press hard against his prostate, coaxing him closer and closer to his release.

When he sucks Satoru as hard as he can, it finishes him completely.

Satoru moans, his hips spasming, and tries in vain to shove his cock further into Suguru’s mouth, but the weight of Suguru’s arm across his stomach and the forceful thrusting of his fingers in his hole keeps him pinned down firm against the mattress.

He throws back his head instead, choking on nothing, on pleasure, on the wave of painful desperation flowing from the hollow of his throat to where Suguru’s mouth encircles him.

Suguru sucks him until he’s soft, until he’s squirming to get away. Then his forehead lands heavily against the crease of his thigh. Satoru can hear him breathing heavily, can feel the movement of his chest between his legs.

His hair covers his face. Satoru smooths it back for him, tucks his bangs behind his ear and keeps petting at the smooth, soft strands.

“Your mouth…” he sighs, wondrously.

Suguru looks up at him through his dark eyelashes, his lips still slick with spit, and asks, “Good?”

“Incredible.”

Suguru smiles, and kisses the inside of his thigh.

But he keeps shifting slightly, rocking his hips just so against the bed.

“Are you hard?” Satoru asks, gazing down at him, even if the answer is perfectly obvious. Suguru is pink across the bridge of his nose, is hazy-eyed and open-mouthed. His lips are redder than ever, even more so than the first time he blew him.

“Mm,” he murmurs.

“You going to fuck me?”

Suguru turns his face back into Satoru’s hip and groans. Then he drags himself back along Satoru’s body, pulls one of Satoru’s legs up with him, and reaches for the bottle of lube.

He doesn’t ask for a condom, and Satoru doesn’t offer one.

“You think you can give me another one, sweetheart?” Suguru says,  running his palm up and down Satoru’s thigh muscle.

Satoru bares his teeth. “Ah, fuck, you’d like that wouldn’t you?” he spits, as he angles his hips up, as he draws his other leg up over Suguru’s side and pulls him in.

Suguru slides his cock between his ass cheeks. The tip catches on his hole, but doesn’t push in.

“Mm, I would,” Suguru sighs, his eyes heavy as he stares down at him.

Satoru inhales sharply. He reaches his hand out, grabs the tensed muscle between Suguru’s shoulder and neck. It’s harder than it should be, to pull in air, but he doesn’t want to show how much he craves. Not yet.  

“I like it when you call me that,” he admits.

“Sweetheart?”

“Yeah.” He bites his lip, glances away from Suguru’s lazy smile, the overwhelming fondness in it. Weakly, he adds, “It’s cute.”

Suguru leans down over him. One of his hands disappears between their bodies, so he can line himself up with Satoru’s hole.

Then he brushes his mouth against Satoru’s cheek, and breathes, “Are you ready, sweetheart?”

Yes, I’m ready, Satoru thinks, begs, but he can’t make himself say the words, pathetic and desperate as they are.

I need you inside of me, Suguru. I’ve always needed it.

“Please,” he whimpers.                                         

He’s said please more times in one evening than he has his whole life. Even if some of it’s only been his thoughts gone begging.

Suguru pushes his cockhead past his rim, but no further.

Satoru’s breath hitches in a weak cry.

He tenses up, he can’t help it.

“Breathe, sweetheart,” Suguru says, stroking his side. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Satoru isn’t afraid of being hurt, not like that. But he is afraid of Suguru stopping.

He draws in a sip of air, forces himself to untense, to release the pressure in his muscles, to let his legs fall open wider around Suguru’s hips. He feels so open, so exposed, he may as well tear his heart from his chest and offer it up to him.

But Suguru’s cock is so big, so hot, as he slowly presses it into him, as he makes a space for himself inside his body, that Satoru can barely feel anything else at all but the fullness of it, by the time Suguru’s hips meet his own.

Then he pauses again, curled in over Satoru’s body, his weight held just above him. The sound of their breathing, broken and desperate, matches up in the otherwise quiet room.

Suguru is shaking though, and his fingers are digging painfully into Satoru’s hip. Satoru can feel Suguru’s pulse beating against his palm where he presses it to his throat.

He’s barely in control, Satoru realises, as he grabs at Suguru’s shoulders, strokes his palms over his back to drag him down, to feel the lines of his stomach and chest against his own.

“Suguru…”

He catches at Suguru’s hair, tugs on him just enough so he can see his eyes, so he can use the depth in them to contain himself.

The moment Suguru looks at him, his body relaxes. The last traces of discomfort between his thighs feels more pleasurable than anything else.

Suguru nudges the very tip of his nose against Satoru’s, grazes it along his cheekbone, brushes his lips in an imitation kiss against the corner of his mouth.

Quietly, he asks, “Gentle or hard?”

Satoru unclenches his jaw and sighs, “Hard.”

He’s too impatient for anything less, and he’s too far gone to drag this out any longer. He wants Suguru to give him everything he has.

Suguru nods, his forehead rubbing against Satoru’s temple. Then he draws his hips back, slowly, like he’s testing just how ready either of them really are, and stills just once more with just the press of his cockhead keeping him stretched.

Satoru breathes in again, keeps his body soft and pliable.

Suguru tenses above him, the veins standing out in his forearms, in his neck. The hand on Satoru’s hip releases him, caresses him instead.

He forces his cock back in so suddenly, so brutally, Satoru feels the shock of it in the base of his skull, in his teeth.  

He forces his mouth closed around a silent cry, but the sounds of it punch out from between his teeth, brutal moans and pathetic mewls and the stuttered syllables of Suguru’s name.

He hadn’t honestly expected that he would be able to feel it, that piercing through the underside of Suguru’s cock, but he can, the titanium edges dragging along his insides with each one of Suguru’s thrusts.

Satoru clings to him in every way he can, thinking, Finally.

In all these years, he had scarcely let himself hope.

But Suguru’s here, carving himself into Satoru’s willing body like he’s trying to create something new. 

Maybe it’s only now, as the building of his third release starts to cloud his mind, that he can truly accept it, the fact that it’s Suguru on top of him, surrounding him, inside of him, Suguru’s cock filling him up and stretching him open and forcing that tormenting pleasure through all his parts with every thrust, every touch, every kiss.

He’s crying, but he always knew he would, the first time he and Suguru ever did this. A decade of longing and heartbreak is being torn right out of him.

He doesn’t try to hide it. He wants Suguru to know exactly what this is doing to him, how much its cutting him open and bleeding all the sadness.

And of course, Suguru sees. He always does, when it truly matters.

“Satoru?” he asks, concerned in the way he lowers his voice, in the way his hand moves to Satoru’s cheek to touch at the tear marks, in the way he slows his pace right down to something tender and thoughtful.

“I’m okay,” Satoru says, gasping, smiling. “Keep going.”

He curls his arms over Suguru’s shoulders, presses his parted lips against his hair, and whispers, “It feels good.”

It’s too good. Satoru’s cock is leaking all over his stomach, but the only contact he gets is the brief press of Suguru’s abs when his cock sinks deep inside of him.

He grabs at himself without thinking, but Suguru knocks his grasping fingers away, pins his wrists back against the mattress with one secure hand and brings the other one back between Satoru’s legs.

“No touching,” he warns, his voice smooth and low, his steady pace unfaltering even as Satoru squirms and struggles and arches his spine off the bed beneath him.

“But I-’”

“Just this once, Satoru,” he interrupts, rubbing his thumb over the tip of Satoru’s cock. “I want to do it.”

He softens a sweet kiss against Satoru’s open mouth.

Even more softly, he tells him, “I’ll do whatever you want next time.”

Then he presses his palm down against Satoru’s balls.

Satoru whines. He can’t get his wrists out of Suguru’s grip. Somehow, he can’t even tell if he’s trying, if his arm muscles are responding at all.

His body won’t respond, but his voice still works just fine.

Breathing weakly, he turns his face into the curve of his arm, hiding away, and asks, “You gonna come inside me, Suguru?”

“Do you want that?” Suguru rasps, panting just as weakly. “Want me to fill you up?”

“Yes, I-I want that,” Satoru moans. He wants to sink his teeth into his own bicep, so it might even out all the other pleasures twisting around inside of him. “Please, Suguru.”

He’s going to come. Any second now, Suguru will nudge back up against his prostate or press his abs down against his stomach, and the barest hint of that friction will finish him completely.

“You-” He pauses, sips harshly on the warm air between them, and gasps out, “You come first.”

Suguru doesn’t question him, and he acts immediately, dropping his wrists so he can grab instead at his ankle, already pulled up high around his waist, and yank it further up onto his shoulder.

Satoru barely feels the stretch. His body is so loose, so easy, Suguru could fold him in half and it wouldn’t be too much for him to take.

But Suguru’s pace fastens. Quiet, throaty moans keep slipping past his lips on each forceful thrust, as he pushes in deeper, harder, as he uses Satoru’s hole to build up his orgasm.  

Then his hips stutter. He grinds his cock in hard, as deep as it will go.

Satoru’s insides flood with liquid heat. He clenches down hard, prays Suguru doesn’t pull out, and watches for a second time that night as Suguru comes apart against him.

But his stomach tightens, burning with a different kind of pleasure. He’d been so focused on the blush across the bridge of Suguru’s nose and the heavy weight of come inside of himself, that he hadn’t noticed Suguru’s hand moving, reaching for him.

His fingers close around Satoru’s cock and squeeze.

Satoru curls in on himself, shuddering. Suguru’s palm is hot, dry, is gripping at him too tightly. The feel of it coaxes more whimpers from him, more wanting, overstimulated whines.

He comes on the first stroke, but Suguru’s finished him so many times already his release amounts to a weak, watery dribble of come.

It feels as good as all the others. Better, because it happened with Suguru inside of him, all around him, like it’s always supposed to have happened.

Gently, Suguru eases Satoru’s ankle down from his shoulder. His hips are locked in against him, his softened cock pressed up inside.

Satoru stares up at the ceiling. His eyes are still wet from his tears, and he’s still at risk of more.

It’s not enough to close them, to block out the orange light of the lamp and the moon shining in around the gaps of the curtains.

He throws his forearm over his face.

“Fuck,” he groans. “I’ve never come dry before.”

Suguru lies his weight down on top of him, trapping Satoru’s cock between their bodies. He taps his fingertips over Satoru’s chest, rolls his thumbs over his stiff nipples.

He says, thoughtfully, “Sounds to me like no one’s ever taken care of you properly.”

He leans down, brushes his lips against the slope of Satoru’s sternum.

Satoru lifts his forearm away from his eyes.

“They haven’t,” he says, staring. Suguru’s bangs are covering his face. He runs his hands through them, strokes them back behind his ear. Then he touches the gage in his earlobe, gently tugs on it.  “Not like this.”

“They weren’t worthy of you,” Suguru sighs, resting his chin against Satoru’s chest. His mouth twists into a distasteful frown. “No one deserves you.”

“You do,” says Satoru. Never in his life has he believed otherwise.

But that frown on Suguru’s face deepens, and he withdraws slightly, lifts his chin from Satoru’s chest like he has thoughts of retreating further.

Shaking his head, he says, “Me least of all, Satoru.”

Satoru’s heart hardens. He digs his heels into the back of Suguru’s thighs, forcing him in closer.

“That’s not true,” he says, more upset, more angry, than he ought to be. “I deserve you. I deserve to get what I want. It’s the same thing.”

Suguru blinks at him, looking considerate. He doesn’t say anything, but Satoru doesn’t care, not if it means he won’t deny it.

Then he seals their mouths together in a slow, deep kiss that, in some strange, revealing way, feels like the first one they’ve ever shared.

Satoru leans after him, when he pulls back, presses insistently on the back of his neck to bring him back down. He’s not done kissing, not when he could feel the way Suguru’s cock, still inside of him, had twitched and throbbed from the wanting of it.

But Suguru keeps moving back, grinning and laughing.

“Wait,” he says, with a consoling caress of Satoru’s waist. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He eases his hips back, carefully, his cock dragging sensitively against Satoru’s walls with every inch. Satoru forces himself to keep breathing, much as he’d done when Suguru first put it in him.

But he stills, his face flushing, when Suguru slides down the bed to look between his spread thighs at his hole, clenching around nothing and leaking come.

Satoru can only imagine what he must look like down there, but there’s a flare of desire on Suguru’s face, a hunger in the way he stares, in the way he leans in like he’s thinking of putting his mouth there.

Satoru wouldn’t say no, if he asked to. There’s not a single thing Satoru would deny him.

But Suguru swallows, his throat visibly moving from the force of it, and stands.

“Bathroom?” he asks, sounding weak, as his eyes pass over Satoru’s body.

“In there.”

Suguru gives him one last lingering look, and goes.

Satoru tries not to move too much, in his brief absence. He can feel Suguru’s come leaking out of him, drying on his thighs. He rolls over onto his stomach, to keep it inside for just a little bit longer. He wants Suguru to finger it out of him when they shower, another excuse to have him inside of his body again.

But there are still tremors running up his legs, his spine. His breathing doesn’t quite satisfy the way it usually would, if he hadn’t spent the last hour so entirely breathless.

He relaxes into the sheets, burying his smile into a pillow, and listens to the faint noises of Suguru in his bathroom, the tap as he washes his hands, the louder sound of the shower drowning out all the rest of it. 

Suguru doesn’t take long. Satoru feels the dip in the mattress as he leans his knee against it, feels the water droplets on his skin as he touches Satoru’s waist.

“Come on,” he sighs, drawing him up with his hands, his smooth voice. “Shower.”

Satoru’s spine twinges, as he stands. The muscle ache in his ass and thighs, in his stomach, is probably going to stay with him for the rest of night.

He doesn’t care, even if he does glare at Suguru. The sheepish grin Suguru gives him is more than enough to compensate for any pain.

And it fades anyway, right to the back of his mind, the moment he steps beneath the water, hot enough its already filled the bathroom with steam.

He soaks his hair, his entire body, feels his skin prickle and itch as the water reddens him. It’s how he’s always liked it.

Suguru must remember. He always did scold him for wasting all the hot water, all those years ago.

“Just relax,” Suguru says, gentling him back against the tiles. “You don’t need to do anything.”

Oh, but I want to, Satoru thinks, even if he does as Suguru asks, keeps his hands to himself and dutifully parts his legs, so Suguru can slide two fingers into his hole and, more carefully than ever, massage the mess back out of him.

His care is worse than if he’d been brutal. The curling of his knuckles, the dragging up and down Satoru’s walls, is more than enough to rouse him, to have his cock filling out where it hangs heavily between his thighs.

“You’re insatiable,” Suguru laughs, sounding pleased, even if he doesn’t move to touch him.

“Feels good,” Satoru responds, exhaling. He closes his eyes, tips his head back against the tiles, and tries not too move his hips against Suguru’s hand.

“I know,” Suguru says. His lips touch the corner of Satoru’s mouth, lighter than the spray of water. “But we have plenty of time.”

Plenty of time. That’s all Satoru’s ever wanted from him, really. More time, spent together, without doubt or pain or dread of it coming to an end.

“Do we?” he asks.

He looks at him. The steam makes him hazy around the edges, his eyes a darker, deeper shade of purple.

You look the same, Satoru thinks, again. As lovely as he was ten years ago, as familiar and as delicate. The piercings and the tattoos don’t harshen him, as they might somebody else.

Suguru looks right back at him, with his lovely, delicate eyes, and says, “Yes, we do.”

Almost to his surprise, and against all he’s felt in the past, Satoru believes him.

It hurts, but it’s good. It’s good, but it hurts. Like a tattoo needle piercing into his skin.

Then Suguru’s fingertips brush tentatively over his prostate.

Satoru whimpers, and drops his forehead against Suguru’s shoulder.

“That…That’s enough,” he gasps, his thighs shuddering. “I can’t…”

Suguru pulls his hand away at once, his fingers eased out just as carefully. He presses his mouth to Satoru’s temple, taking a moment to breathe against his damp skin.

Then he reaches for Satoru’s expensive bottle of body wash, like he has every intention of touching him more.

He does, runs his hands all over Satoru’s body, his forearms and his collarbones, the small of his back, his inner thighs, even gets down on his knees and cleans his feet for him in some innocent imitation of what he’d done back at that tattoo studio, with all the same degrees of tender worship.

Satoru is shaking again by the time he’s done, feeling pathetic and desperate for it. Suguru’s hands are so soft on his skin, even if his palms are rough with callouses, and he keeps staring, observing every reaction Satoru has to his touch.

It would feel more intimate than having Suguru inside of him, if he weren’t already convinced that Suguru can take care of him in every single way, from sex to aftercare to whatever this is, the careful, reverent cleaning of his body.

He wants to do the same to Suguru. He wants it to be his turn, to feel him all over, to explore every striation of muscle, to circle his hands around his solid waist, to push his fingers between his legs, if it was something Suguru wanted too.

He wants, wants, wants, so much he feels sick inside for the intensity of it. He doesn’t know what to do with all the desire inside of him, except to offer it out to Suguru with all the sincerity he has.

But Suguru stills him, grasps at his hips and presses him back against the tiles, entirely unaware as he says, still focused in on his body, “Hold on.”

Satoru sighs, but he can’t be too disappointed. He should have known Suguru would be like this, would want to take charge and do everything for him, would want to look after him. He was like that when they were younger, just in other sweet ways.

And Suguru clearly has some purpose, in how he catches at the edges of the covering over Satoru’s tattoo, works at it until it loosens and falls away from his skin.

Then he rinses it over with warm water, his eyebrows creased with concentration.

“Look all right?” Satoru asks, unbothered. He already knows it’s perfect.

Suguru nods, humming, and traces the edge of his thumb along the bottom of his ribcage.

Then he sighs and nudges at Satoru’s hips, guiding him towards the glass door.

“Go on,” he says. “Go dry off. I’ll finish up here.”

Satoru has neither the energy nor the desire to argue with him, not now that he’s been made weak from Suguru’s constant attentions. He leaves him behind in the bathroom, content with the thought that he’s still there, even if there’s that little bit of distance.

He dries himself, his hands lazy and not nearly as satisfying where they pass over his body, and dresses. Then he looks at the mess they’ve made of his bed, the rumpled bedsheets and the wet spot and the duvet half hanging off the mattress.

Suguru’s clothes are thrown across the floor.

That resolves it, more than anything.  

He’d know if he was dreaming, surely. He’d know if he’d fallen asleep at his desk, or on that tattoo bed, or behind the wheel of his car.

Dreams don’t usually last this long.

And they don’t feel this normal.

How is it, that he’d gone from missing Suguru with his entire being to having him just in the other room, using his shower to wash the remnants of sex from his skin. All in a matter of days.

But his body feels good, in a way it never has before. All the aches Suguru has given him belong there, right alongside the soft touches, the caresses, the brushed kisses.

He wants to feel like this always. He wants to have the evidence of Suguru’s love-making all over him, all the time, for as long as he lives.

That’s what it was. Suguru wasn’t fucking him, not like that, like two strangers who’d fallen in together through chance and circumstance.

Satoru’s never slept with anyone that he loved. It’s an entirely different experience all together.

And it’s finished him. He’ll never have anyone else, not now, even if Suguru leaves him again.

It didn’t feel like he planned on leaving. Not from the way he fucked him. Made love to him. If he does, then this moment will have to be enough, this feeling. He’ll sustain himself off of it for the rest of his life, if it’s all he’s given.

He stares at the bed, then starts moving again. He has it stripped in the time it takes Suguru to turn off the water, is half-way through putting on a new set when Suguru appears in the open doorway.

“There’s some sweatpants for you,” Satoru says, forcing his voice out evenly. “I figured you wouldn’t want to wear your other ones.”

He straightens out the sheets, his back turned to him.

Suguru’s arms circle around his waist. He pulls Satoru back against his bare chest, still warm and damp from the hot water.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, his lips moving against Satoru’s shoulder.

Satoru goes still.

You truly do notice everything, when you want to.

“I just…” he starts, and then he stops, the words catching unsurely at the back of his throat. He breathes in, feels the weight of Suguru’s arms rising with his chest. “It doesn’t feel strange.”

“What doesn’t?”

Everything.

“Touching you like this,” Satoru says, little more than a whisper. The house is quiet, and Suguru is so close there’s no chance of him missing it. “Being with you. It should feel new, shouldn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Suguru says, gently. “I think if we were seventeen again it would feel like that. But I’ve imagined us doing this for so long it’s like it’s already happened.”

Satoru grins. Whatever weight he had in his heart disappears, at least for now. He turns in Suguru’s arms.

“And do I live up to your imagination?” he asks.

Suguru’s mouth twitches up into a revealing smile.

“You give me too much credit,” he says. “You’re perfect.”

“Am I?” Satoru says, leaning further into him.

Suguru’s arms tighten around his waist. His voice deepens, as he says, “Yes.”

Satoru shudders, the moment Suguru’s mouth slides in against his, delicate and soft-lipped and sweet with the taste of affection.

He almost feels like crying again, when they part, and it must show on his face, because Suguru caresses his jaw, brushes the tip of his finger over his cheekbone like he’s gathering up tears.

“I’m sorry I made you cry earlier,” he says, softly, with an apologetic frown. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t hurt me,” Satoru tells him. “I was just…overwhelmed.”

Suguru smirks, looks up at him through his dark eyelashes. “Was my dick too much for you?” he asks, far too pleased by the idea.

“Don’t be vulgar,” Satoru responds, even if it is around some amusement. “It’s the last resort for people with no wit.”

“But was it?”

“No.” He drapes his arms over Suguru’s shoulders, tempted to hide his face away, but Suguru is smiling expectantly at him. “I was happy. They were…tears of happiness.”

He rolls his eyes at himself, as he finishes speaking. It’s a strange thing to admit to, and it doesn’t help his dignity at all.

But he’s already behaved in such a revealing way that night. One more confession won’t hurt him.

And Suguru is looking at him with such pleased fondness, like Satoru’s words have moved him, like he might also be on the verge of tears from some deep-rooted joy.

He buries his expression in the curve of Satoru’s neck and shoulder.

Satoru strokes his hand down the back of his head, then tangles his fingers in his soft, still-damp hair.

“Are you working tomorrow?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter.”

“So you’ll stay the night?” he asks, letting the hope seep into his tone, in case he needs more convincing.

Suguru’s nose presses into his pulse-point and breathes in deeply enough Satoru feels it, the rush of warm air against his skin.

“Yeah, I’ll stay,” he says.

“Are you hungry?”

“Mm,” Suguru hums. His hands drop to Satoru’s ass, squeezing him. “Starving.”

Satoru doesn’t react, not in the way he knows Suguru is hoping for. Instead, he hooks his finger in the edge of the towel wrapped around his hips, tugs it free, and shoves him away without laying a single hand on his body.

“Get dressed,” he says, ignoring Suguru’s half-hard cock. “I’ll make something.”  

Suguru raises an eyebrow at him, but Satoru refuses to falter, except for one conciliatory kiss pressed quickly to the corner of his mouth. When he leaves him, they’re both still smiling to themselves.

That night, Satoru lays awake in his bed with Suguru pressed up close against his body. The last person to somebody beside him was Suguru too, but there was more space between them, more clothes, more distance of feelings still unspoken of.

There’s still so much left to be said, but the urgency feels less potent, less like it might lead to ruin.

He pulls Suguru’s thigh up over his hip, so the solid weight of it presses him further into the mattress. Suguru’s cock is half-hard against his own. He shifts, so he can push their bodies closer together, so he can feel that ache of pleasure in his lower stomach.

Then he strokes his palm from Suguru’s ankle up to his hip, slow and light. Suguru had spent so much of the evening on his knees, he was bound to be sore in places.

“Suguru?” he says, voice hushed down to almost nothing. “Are you awake?”

Suguru’s face rests so close to his on the pillow Satoru feels it, the vibration in his throat as he mumbles, “Mm.”

Satoru’s hand continues up his side, to his chest. He brushes his thumb over his nipple, catches at the piercing with his nail. He’s yet to get his mouth on him, but if Suguru means what he says, he’ll have plenty of opportunity in the future.

“When did you get them done?” he asks.

“Mm…” Suguru hums again, tired and slow. He closes the space between them, presses his face up right against Satoru’s. “Six years ago.”

“Who did it?”

“Choso. He’s done all of my piercings.”

“Even that one?”

Suguru’s mouth curves into a smile against his cheek.

“Even that one,” he confirms, more alert, as he pulls away from him, as he lifts himself up on his elbows to look right down at him. “I thought you might like it.”

He takes Satoru’s earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the smooth, unpierced skin.

“I thought about you when I got all my piercings,” he admits, with a wistful sigh and another sheepish smile. “Because you liked my ears so much when I got them done.”

“I did,” Satoru agrees, can remember how he’d stared with too much wonder, the first day Suguru came to school with them. “I-I love them all.”

What Satoru really wants to say is, I love you.

He’s nearly said it so many times that night. He would have, if he thought Suguru wanted to hear it.

He’ll make do with thinking it for now, with kissing the feeling of it against Suguru’s mouth, with caressing it back up and down Suguru’s side as he falls asleep against him.

And he doesn’t mind Suguru’s silence, not truly. Even if Suguru doesn’t want to say it, he’s shown it.

Satoru can recognise love, especially when it comes from Suguru’s touch, from the warmth in his eyes, the subtle shift in his delicate features every time Satoru speaks.

But it’s not about whether or not he loves me. I know that he does. It’s about whether he loves me enough to stay.

Because he didn’t back then.

He didn’t want to think of any reasons for why. None of them could have been bad enough to explain why he’d gone, because in Satoru’s head, if their roles were reserved, nothing could have made Satoru leave.

And then of course there had been that one persistent thought, the one he’d had to remind himself again and again had no real claim.

That Suguru didn’t love him.

That Suguru didn’t need him.

That, for some reason Satoru couldn’t possibly fathom, Suguru hated him. Because if he could leave just like that, then Satoru mustn’t have been as important to him as he thought he was.

He stares at Suguru’s sleeping face, shadowed and peaceful. He can’t help but to reach out again, to brush his fingertips against his hairline, his cheekbone, to lightly rest his palm against his jaw.

Suguru breathes in, shallow, and turns his nose into Satoru’s hand. Satoru stills, but Suguru doesn’t wake.

I’ll get it right this time, Satoru tells himself, tells Suguru. He cradles him close, aching for more contact. I’ll make you happy. You’ll want to stay.

Chapter Text

Satoru doesn’t sleep until the sky outside lightens, the soft grey watered-down colours of it filtering in through the gaps in the curtains.

Suguru sleeps the whole night through without once waking, but Satoru uses it for the opportunity that it is. He’s down so deep, he doesn’t notice at all that Satoru can’t keep his hands to himself.

But Suguru’s hair is soft, and it’s longer than it’s ever been, and it looks so dark against Satoru’s pale hands when he weaves his fingers through it.

It’s all still too much. He couldn’t sleep even if he wanted to, content as he is to lie there in silence with Suguru beside him, an arm locked around his waist, a solid thigh shoved between his legs.

He doesn’t mind. It wouldn’t be the first night he’s lost all sleep for thought of Suguru, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Only when the heaviness in his eyes grow to be too much does he give in, his vision blurring more and more each time he blinks until the sight of Suguru fades out entirely.

When he opens them again, the room is full of sunlight, and Suguru is touching him, is stroking his hands up and down his spine and kissing along his forehead and temple.

He doubts more than an hour has passed. The light is just on the edge of too bright, even if most of it is blocked out by the curtains, and he and Suguru are still pressed up against each other in all the ways they were before, nothing changed.

He hides his face away beneath Suguru’s jaw, breathing in. The peppermint smell of Satoru’s bath products isn’t as strong as it had been, when he’d showered, but it’s still there.  

“What’s the time?” he asks, speaking the words against the steady beating of Suguru’s pulse.

“Seven,” Suguru tells him, keeping his voice soft against Satoru’s ear. He’s got a hand on his narrow hip, squeezing him. “I need to leave soon if I want to go home first.”

Leave soon, Satoru mocks, inside his own head. The very idea floods him with bitter disappointment.

He lets it be known, his displeasure, in a groan muffled even deeper into Suguru’s throat. He wants to open his mouth and sink his teeth into the meat of him.

“Why do you need to go home first?” he asks instead.

“You think Sukuna won’t notice if I show up in the same clothes as yesterday?”

“Take something of mine,” Satoru says, easily. “It’ll fit you.”

They’ve done it before. Suguru’s been stealing his clothes since they met, ten-year gap notwithstanding, and Satoru’s been no less willing.

Suguru doesn’t put any kind of fight. The hand on Satoru’s hip moves to his ass, gently kneading like he’s already trying to make him pliable.

“Fine,” he says, and there’s something wanting in his voice, something suggestive. “What should we do in the meantime?”

Satoru draws away, so he can look at him.

He’s not surprised at all, that Suguru’s eyes have darkened to a near-blackness, that his lips have parted in expectation of a kiss.

Satoru swallows. He brings his knee up between Suguru’s thighs, and finds the heavy, hard weight of his erection.

“You know exactly what we should do,” he says, weakly.

“Do I?”

His cock feels big against Satoru’s knee, bigger than it did last night. Satoru was probably more concerned with having it inside of him,  than to give any real thought to how much he was taking.

He’ll have to fix that, at some point over the course of the day. He’s sure he’ll be able to appraise him properly, with his mouth.

“You seemed pretty sure of what you were doing last night,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “Or was that a one-time thing?”

He feels Suguru’s palm against his cock, squeezing him through his sweatpants until he fills out.

“You tell me.”

Satoru fumbles for the half-empty bottle of lube on his bedside table and shoves it at him. Then he yanks at his sweatpants, doesn’t care that he looks over-eager, and throws them aside with the sheets, the pillows, anything else he doesn’t care to have against him when he could be feeling Suguru instead.

Suguru pushes him onto his back, slicks his fingers with lube, and works two inside of him one after the other, curling and scissoring and pumping them in and out until the noises spill from Satoru’s mouth.

But he can see it on Suguru’s face, can feel it in the depth that Suguru presses inside of him, just how reactive he is to every moan and whimper and mewl that Satoru gives.

Satoru will be as loud and desperate as Suguru wants, if it means he’ll keep rubbing over his prostate like that. He doesn’t think he could hold back the noises even if he wanted to.  

“Ah, fuck, Suguru,” he gasps, looking down at himself, at his cock leaking over his stomach, at Suguru kneeling between his spread legs. “I’m ready, I’m ready, please fuck me.”

He rolls his hips down, to prove his point, feels Suguru’s three fingers sink inside of him as far as they can go.

But Suguru only grins at him.

“I think I’ll keep doing this,” he says, coolly, like he can’t feel Satoru clenching and squeezing around him. He pulls his fingers out to the first knuckle, stretching him at the rim but no further. “We have plenty of time, don’t we, Satoru?”

Satoru groans, pulling at his hair. His body keeps twisting away from Suguru’s hand, over-stimulated but seeking more. The stretch isn’t enough, not when he knows first-hand just what it’s like to take Suguru’s cock.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Suguru continues, soft in his encouragement, even if he’s hard everywhere else. “You can wait just a little bit longer, can’t you?”

Satoru knows he can, but he doesn’t want to. He wants Suguru inside of him properly, fully. He’d lain awake all night thinking about it.

And he knows what Suguru’s doing, knows he’s building it up and taking his time and driving Satoru crazy because it will make it all the more intense, when he fucks him.

It doesn’t make Satoru any more patient.

Suguru’s fingers are in him for so long, it feels strange and empty and uncomfortable, the moment he pulls them out. Unintentional, Satoru tries to close his legs around the void Suguru’s left there.

But Suguru grips his knees, holds them down against the bed and sits back to watch as the tension slowly bleeds out of him.  

Satoru inhales, shakily, and lifts himself up on his elbows, his arms weak beneath the weight of his own body.

Suguru’s cock is so hard it looks painful. Pre-come beads in his tip, and there are veins standing out in his shaft, so swollen with blood Satoru can see them throbbing. The piercing in the underside is made all the more obvious by it, shining silver against the purple tinge his skin has taken on.

He stares, unspeaking, as Suguru grabs himself, his hand covered in lube, and strokes his cock from tip to base until he’s slick with it, his movement slow and leisurely and entirely for Satoru’s enjoyment.

It feels like he’s seeing it for the first time. He doesn’t think he quite appreciated just what he was taking on, when he first took him in.

“Fuck, you’re so big,” he chokes, his throat gone dry. “How the fuck did you make that fit last night?”

Suguru doesn’t answer. His thin eyebrows have creased with concentration, as he presses Satoru back down against the bed, as he lifts his hips for him, as he nestles his cockhead up against his hole and slowly opens him back up with it.

Satoru bites down on his lip until he tastes iron, but his hole takes Suguru easily, made loose and open from his drawn-out attention, takes him right down to his base without any pain at all.

Suguru stops and looks at him, before he starts, with something unidentifiable in his eyes. Satoru wonders if it’s hunger he sees, a deprivation of some kind only Satoru’s body can satiate, or something more virtuous.

Maybe it’s love. Satoru was so ready to call it that, last night, but he’s not so brave in the daylight.   

He’d spent much of the night imaging how Suguru might fuck him next, slow and tender like the early morning would suggest, or with the same savage, desperate passion that had taken hold of them the first time.

But this is different entirely, even if it still lacking any semblance of real control. Suguru crushes him down and takes from him, takes and takes and takes, but he gives so much back Satoru overflows with it, the equivalent exchange of pleasure and satisfaction.

If it’s what Suguru wants, to take the lead like this, to do the hard work, then Satoru has no intention of fighting. He’ll lay against the sheets with his legs spread and be good for him, all power willingly ceded for Suguru’s approval. 

And it works. Suguru does everything Satoru wants before he can ask for it, kisses his mouth and angles his hips and fastens his pace like he can feel the pleasure he’s making in Satoru’s body, like Satoru is giving it right back to him with his own yearning, aching responses.

But he doesn’t touch him, no matter how obvious Satoru makes it that he wants him too.

He’s not allowed to touch himself, he knows that much, but he feels more and more vulnerable, more cut open, the longer it takes for Suguru to do it for him.

“Are you going to touch me?” he finally whines, frustration sitting with aching pleasure in his lower stomach, where his abs tense and his skin shines with his own pre-come.

“No,” Suguru says, without faltering, gathering Satoru’s wrists in his hands. “You can come like this.”

Satoru’s eyes widen with dismay.

“I can’t-”

“Yes, you can.” Suguru bears down into him, bruising him up on the inside and out with his force, but his voice is soft and encouraging, as he sighs, “Let me see you come, Satoru.”

Satoru’s body reacts like it’s an order, like he has no choice in the matter, like Suguru’s voice alone is enough stimulation.

“Suguru,” he moans, and then he can’t stop, keeps panting and gasping over the sound of it, as his stomach tightens, as his thighs spasm, as his hole clenches down hard around Suguru’s cock and his own throbs with his coming orgasm.

 He finishes without a single hand on his cock, his or Suguru’s, but it’s with such force that he coats himself with it, come spilling up the centre of his stomach, his chest, into the hollow of his throat.

Suguru releases his wrists, curves over him, and gathers it up with his tongue, as much as he can reach without his pace slowing or stuttering or losing any depth.

For just a moment, Satoru’s head goes faint. His limbs weaken. His hands on Suguru’s shoulders go numb from the rush of blood to his core.

“S-Suguru,” he breathes, much more calmly but with just as much helplessness, than his previous invocations of the name. “Suguru…”

He only has to lift his hips, angled just right for Suguru to sink that little bit deeper inside of him, for it to finish things.

Suguru buries his groan against Satoru’s throat and stays there, shuddering, as he grinds his cock into Satoru’s hole and fills him with come, scorching hot and overflowing on every shortened, jagged thrust.

He barely gives himself a moment to recover before he pulls out, his softened cock slipping free from Satoru’s body.

Satoru pants around his whimpers, but he can feel Suguru’s come leaking out of him, his hole twitching to be stuffed full again, to squeeze down around something so he can keep the heat inside.

Then he cries out.

Suguru’s tongue laps between his thighs. The suddenness of it, the easy way Suguru had slid down the length of his body to kneel between his spread legs, to grab his cheeks and spread them even further, had almost gone unnoticed in the haze of Satoru’s pleasure.

He doesn’t know exactly what it is that he’s feeling, only that it’s wet, and soft, and gentle where before Suguru’s cock had been so demanding. It slips inside of him and gives something he didn’t know he needed, until he’d taken it.

And it feels good, more than he had ever imagined it to. He can’t even be embarrassed, not when he’d half-expected it. The way Suguru looked at his abused hole last night was more than telling of his appetite.

Suguru sucks on his hole like it’s for his own pleasure, and then he hovers over him, his eyes burning.

Satoru’s lips part.

Suguru seals their mouths together in a wet, spit-slick kiss.

He takes Satoru’s moan with him, biting and sucking at him, the forceful desperation for contact returning in the way he kisses, in the way he shares the taste of himself.

It should be disgusting, the obscenity of it, of Suguru fucking his own come into Satoru’s mouth.

It fills Satoru with satisfaction instead.

It’s only more proof of what this is. Satoru knows Suguru, knows he wouldn’t so readily give in to such animalistic desire with anyone else, knows he wouldn’t trust anyone else with something so dirty.

But Satoru wants it dirty, unclean, with the lewd sound of skin on skin and the taste of come on his tongue. He wants Suguru’s sweat on him, his spit, wants to be covered in all their filthy, lustful byproducts of sex.

He’s always been scrubbed and shining, made perfect for the benefit of everyone else, but only Suguru gets to see him like this, so thoroughly consumed. Only Suguru is capable of making it happen.

He thinks Suguru might be trying to fuck him again with just his tongue, testing to see if he can come from that too without being touched.

It wouldn’t surprise him, if Satoru managed it. He’s never come like that before, after all. His body could do anything, if it was Suguru asking for it.

But he can’t keep up with Suguru’s kiss. It overwhelms him, the passion in it, the pressure forcing him down into the sheets, Suguru’s nose digging into his cheek.

He goes limp, ready and willing to let Suguru kiss him however he wants, for as long as he wants, even if he can’t match the movements of it. The strength of it soothes something deep inside of him, cauterising that old, open, bleeding injury.

Suguru gentles though, lightens his kiss until he’s barely brushing their lips together, which is just as nice, just as all-consuming, if in a different, more lovingly affectionate way.

They’re both breathing heavily, by the time Suguru releases him, their chests rising and falling against each other. Suguru puts enough space between them for Satoru to see his face, but no more.

He can’t quite focus his eyes in on him. He blinks, tries to bring himself back, tries to focus instead on the soft caress of Suguru’s hand against his cheek, his jaw.

“All right, sweetheart?” Suguru asks him, keeping his voice down low and quiet in the otherwise silent room.

Satoru inhales, and nods.

Suguru grins down at him. “Can’t speak?”

“Fuck you,” Satoru spits, indignantly. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

“Did what?”

“Made me come without touching me!” He shoves at Suguru’s shoulders, but his arms are still weak. Suguru doesn’t budge. “You said we’d do what I wanted this time.”

“Are you saying we didn’t?” Suguru asks, his eyebrows rising. “I can touch you now, if you want?”

His hand disappears between Satoru’s thighs.

“No, don’t!” Satoru shouts, eyes widening. His fingers dig into Suguru’s shoulders, trying in vain to shove him back. “I’m too…it’s too much.”

He doesn’t have any more in him, not after this morning, after last night. He’s come more times in the last twelve hours than he has in the last year, if he doesn’t count the use of his own hands or the toys he has hidden away in the bottom drawer of his dresser.

“Okay,” Suguru soothes him, tracing his hand up his hip to the side of his ribcage. He’s still smiling, more adoring than anything else. “You just rest. You were so good for me, sweetheart. Perfect. Gave me everything I wanted.”

The praise reaches right into Satoru’s chest and sticks there, twisting him up with pride and happiness and embarrassment. He inhales, curls his hands over Suguru’s shoulders, and draws him back down, close enough the ache of want in his body can be shared between them.

“I hope you don’t have work today,” Suguru continues, concern softening him even more. His thumb touches over the sensitive edge of Satoru’s tattoo.

“It’s Saturday. No classes.” Satoru tells him, closing his eyes. Suguru’s skin feels good against his own, warm and comforting. He wants to sleep like this, wants to make up for all the lost hours of the early morning.

He gets no more than two minutes, of Suguru’s crushing weight on top of him, of their synchronised breathing.

Then Suguru burrows down more deeply into his chest and sighs, his voice lowered with reluctance and regret, “I need to go soon.”

Satoru’s arms tighten. He turns his face into Suguru’s neck and breathes him in, the peppermint and the sweat and the sex, and then he kisses the same spot.

He really doesn’t want to let him go.

“Go shower,” he says, his arms falling away from Suguru’s broad shoulders. “I’ll find you something to wear.”

“What about you?”

Satoru smiles. He can’t shower with him again, not when he already feels so overheated. He’d pass out the moment the hot water touched him.

“I’m too fucked,” he says, and watches as Suguru’s eyes narrow with smug satisfaction. “I’ll have one later, but you go.”

Suguru huffs, gives him a disappointed pout, and rises, but Satoru just smiles. It’s a nice view, watching Suguru walk away from him towards the bathroom, even if he would rather have him back in the bed.

But Satoru could admire him all morning. Suguru’s body is perfect, and Satoru loves all of it, loves Suguru’s stomach, loves the definition in his abs, loves how he’s slightly thicker in the waist, bulkier with muscle. It’s so different to how he’d been all those years ago, when he was slowly thinning away alongside his happiness.

His cock twitches just from looking at him, but Suguru disappears into the bathroom without turning back.

Satoru sighs and drops back against the mattress. He’ll need to change the sheets again, messy as they’d gotten, but he still feels shaky and weak, sensitive all over.

Hesitating, he slips his fingers between his thighs and rubs over his hole, pushes two of his fingertips inside. It’s so much more brutal, after Suguru’s tongue. He can feel what’s left of Suguru’s come dribbling out, tacky as it dries.

It’s a mostly new sensation. He’s never let anyone fuck him without protection, let alone allowed them to finish inside. There’s so many firsts he suspects he’s saved, however unconsciously, for Suguru.

Before yesterday it had been a long time since he had anyone inside of himself, when everyone felt lacklustre and inferior to the version of Suguru still haunting his heart.

He can’t even claim to have ever been in a real relationship. He’s not sure that’s what this is.

He’s not sure he knows how to ask.

Like in everything else, it’s usually easier to follow Suguru’s lead. He doesn’t want to force things, not at the risk of them breaking.

He listens to the shower running, picturing the water pouring over Suguru’s wet body, but he doesn’t touch himself any further.

He drags himself up instead, walks naked down the hall to the main bathroom so he can wash his hands, so he can soak a washcloth and wipe down his chest and between his thighs. Suguru had done such a thorough job of licking at him, there’s not much left to clean.

Suguru’s still showering, when he returns to his room. Satoru finds the tightest black shirt he has, a pair of black trousers, anything else Suguru might need, and leaves them folded neatly on top of his dresser.

He’s more lazy with himself, pulling on a pair of pale grey sweatpants and nothing else, so he’s at least somewhat decent when he goes to make their tea. Suguru’s already cutting things so close, he won’t have time for anything more.

He’s only just finished them, when he feels Suguru come up behind him, the press of his shoulder against his back and a hand settled on his waist.

He turns, offers him his tea, and drinks his own, all the while eyeing his clothes on Suguru’s perfect, perfect body. They fit him better than they do Satoru, or maybe it’s just that Suguru looks good in everything.

Suguru’s staring at him too, which only feeds his own ego. He knows he looks good, his lean abs uncovered, his sweatpants hanging low on his hips, his lips reddened by the hot edge of his teacup.

He thinks Suguru should skip work and fuck him against the kitchen counter. He can take it again, if Suguru is slow and gentle, if he kisses him through it.

Suguru finishes his tea and steps back from him, all his body language beckoning Satoru to follow, right through to the genkan, so he can stand there looking forlorn and lost as Suguru pulls on his boots.

When he helps him up, Suguru pulls down on his hand and yanks him in, close enough he can press a searing, smothering kiss against his mouth.

It makes Satoru laugh, which he supposes was Suguru’s intention, because when they part he’s looking happy and relieved and pleased with himself.

“Can I come back after work?” he asks, hopeful, even though they both know the answer is guaranteed.

“Yes,” Satoru says, beaming. “You don’t have to ask.”

“I’ll go home first,” says Suguru. “But I’ll message you when I’m on the way.”

“Okay,” Satoru says, stepping closer. “I’ll see you later.”

Suguru nods, and then he goes pliant, as Satoru presses him up against the front door, as he sucks on his tongue, as he squeezes his chest and thumbs at his nipple piercing and grind their cocks together until they both start to harden.

If he were to give in to his impulses, he’d drop to his knees and blow him. He could be tidy about it, could make sure he doesn’t spill a drop when Suguru comes down his throat. Nobody would be able to tell, even if Satoru’s saliva was left to dry on him.

“Get out,” he says, bringing his hands to Suguru’s ass so he can grab the firm muscle. “Or I really will have no choice but to suck you off.”

He shoves himself away, reaches around him so he can open the door, so he can follow him outside.

Suguru reaches for him one last time, before he goes, gives him a soft, open-mouthed kiss to calm them both down. Neither of them say another word, not as Suguru smiles at him, as he fixes his bag on his shoulder, as he takes the steps down to the courtyard.

He stops at the front gate and glances back up at him, looking warm and appealing in the sunlight.

“Hey, Suguru,” Satoru calls out, before he can leave.

“Yeah?”

He grins, so wide he knows Suguru will be able to see it even with such space between them, and says, “You’re going to do that again tonight, right?”

Suguru smirks, brighter than the morning sun.

“Anything you want.”

He disappears into the street, hidden by the courtyard wall. A moment later, his motorbike thunders past and fades into the distance.

With Suguru gone, Satoru allows himself the luxury of freaking out just a little bit. Uncomfortably jittery, he rushes back to his bedroom, seizes his phone, and opens up Shoko’s contact to urgently write,

Shoko.
Can you come over?
7:48

There’s no point to his rush. Shoko’s always been shit at answering her phone. He drops it without hoping for any timely response, feeling vaguely lost and unsure of what he should be doing.

Then he takes in the rumpled mess of bedsheets, more clothes discarded on the floor, more evidence everywhere of what he and Suguru had just been doing to each other.

Twice now, he’s had Suguru inside of him.

And now his tongue, too, Satoru thinks, covering his mouth.  

Satoru’s never been eaten out before. The offers and attempts of any past partners had always been refused, such intimacy unwanted from anyone who wasn’t Suguru.

He’d never been in denial about it. Suguru has always been in his mind, in his heart, no matter who he was with.

No wonder he could never be bothered with relationships. It was pointless, when no one could replace the one person he wanted most of all.

But Satoru has him now, or at least, he thinks he does. Suguru was coming back, after all.

And he said he’ll fuck me again tonight, Satoru remembers, dazed. Anything I want.

He tries not to think about it, as he strips the bed again, as he gathers up all their messy clothes and puts them on to wash. Too much of it and he’ll get greedy and impatient, unnecessarily so, when Suguru’s come is still sticky on his thighs.

He makes himself shower too, even though he doesn’t much want to, his leg muscles aching as he tips himself beneath the steaming water and stands there long enough to scrub at the remnants of filth.

He has to stare at his reflection, for a moment afterwards, at the purple marks and red scratches across his shoulders and chest, at the black splash of ink across his ribcage.

The ache is worse than last night, but it’s still good, still entirely wanted. He’ll be ready again, by the time Suguru gets home, ready to take all that Suguru has promised him.

But he feels tense and uncomfortable in a different way, his tongue heavy in his mouth with a desperate urge to speak, to pour out his heart.

Except, not to Suguru.

He checks his phone again, and breathes with relief to see Shoko’s response.

Why are you messaging me so early??
When?
8:19

Wanna talk.
And as soon as you can.
8:25

I’ll be there around ten.
8:26

Satoru sighs and throws his phone down, but it buzzes with another notification before it hits the mattress. He snatches it back up, his heartrate rising when he sees Suguru’s name.

Any chance you’ve heard from Megumi today?
8:26

Not yet, I’ll probably call him later.
Why?
8:27

He stares, his curiosity growing, until Suguru responds,

Just something Sukuna mentioned about him and Yuji.
Not sure if he was at Yuji’s last night after all.
8:30

I’ll text him now.
Thanks for telling me xoxoxo
8:30

Frowning, he opens his chat with Megumi and writes,

Call me when you get the chance.
8:32

Like with Shoko, he doesn’t get any hasty response. He remakes his bed, eats breakfast, drinks two more cups of tea and hangs the clean washing out to dry in the courtyard by the time Megumi finally rings him, nearly an hour and a half later.

“Megumi!” he says, matching Megumi’s dull tone with his own equal brightness. “What are you doing right now? Is Yuji with you?”

“Why?” Megumi asks.

Satoru blinks. In that one moment alone Megumi’s voice had changed, stiffened with wariness.

“It’s the weekend,” Satoru says. “Don’t kids always hang out with their friends on the weekend.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“Okay, Megumi-Chan.” He grins, picturing Megumi’s glowering face.  “Where are you, then? If you’re not with Yuji.”

“Tsumiki’s. She’s making me breakfast. I gotta go.”

“Hi, Sato-Chan!” he hears, muffled, down the other end of the line.

Satoru grins even wider, and shouts straight back, “Hi, Tsumiki-Chan!”

Megumi hangs up without another word. In the silence, Satoru looks at the blank screen and says,

“Well, that was fucking weird.”

Megumi’s always been short with people, and he’s hung up on Satoru mid-conversation on the majority of their phone calls, but he’s never been so quick to shut down any question about where he is or what he’s doing.

Especially when Yuji is involved. Megumi’s never been more talkative then when it comes to Yuji Itadori.

Still brooding, he messages Suguru,

Heard from Megumi. He’s at Tsumiki’s.
10:04

He has no time to wait for a response. There’s a sharp knock on his front door, followed by the rattle of the lock as Shoko let’s herself in with her spare key.

“Why the urgency?” she asks, when Satoru joins her in the genkan. She passes over two cups of coffee, so she can kick off her heels more easily.

Satoru doesn’t answer until they’re sat in the living room, facing each other on either end of the lounge.

“So, here’s the thing,” he says, clearing his throat. He hadn’t even thought to prepare what he was going to say, despites his impatience. “Uh…”

Shoko watches him flounder and hesitate.

Then she asks, “You and Geto fucked?”

She says it like it’s a joke, deadpan and unserious.

Satoru doesn’t react, but he feels his face colour.

 “Holy shit,” Shoko says, straightening. “When?”

“Last night,” says Satoru. He grimaces, covers his mouth again, like what he feels is modesty and not complete satisfaction with himself. “And again this morning.”

“Was it good?” she asks, her thin eyebrows rising.

“Fucking incredible.” Satoru bites his lips, can feel his mouth curving into an uncontainable grin. “Easily the best I’ve ever had.”

It’s not an exaggeration. He knows he’s biased, that no matter what Suguru was always going to give him more pleasure than anybody else – but the same would be true if he and Suguru were strangers, if they knew nothing about each other but their names and their bodies.

He can’t help but think they were made for each other’s pleasure.

Then Shoko gives him another more telling look, mischief hanging off the uplifted corners of her lips.

“Is it big?”

Satoru’s lower half aches at the question. He looks her dead in the eye and says, “Enormous.”

Shoko smirks and tips her coffee cup at him.

“When are you seeing him next?” she asks, more innocently, folding her legs up beneath herself. She sips her coffee, eyeing him over the edge of the cup.

“Tonight,” Satoru tells her, inhaling. Somehow, the thought still fills him nerves, even if it’s overshadowed by excitement. “He’s coming back after work.”

Shoko knows him well, and she can read him better than anyone. Sometimes even Suguru. She’ll see the nerves no matter how deep he has them buried.

Softly, she says, “I hope you’ll be happier now.”

That, more than anything, makes him want to cry.

“I am,” he says, and he means it, feels it more strongly than any nervousness or excitement or satisfaction. “Shoko, I’m so happy.”

Shoko reaches for him, takes his coffee cup, and sets them both on the chabudai. Then she seizes his hands in both of her own and holds on tight to him.

Never of them need to say any more. She’s been waiting for this moment for just as long as he has, has witnessed him at the deepest point of his heartbreak. Like Satoru, that deep-lived worry has finally loosened its grip.

Then she moves closer to him, hands his coffee back, and sighs, humourlessly, “At least one of us is getting some.”

Satoru frowns instantly.

“I’m sorry,” he says, guiltily. “I haven’t asked much about your life lately.”

She shrugs, unbothered. “There’s nothing to talk about really.”

“Do you ever hear from Utahime?”

“Sometimes. But she’s happy in Kyoto.”

“And you’re happy here?”

“I am.” She widens her eyes, pouts, and adds, “Happier than I would be in Kyoto, at any rate.”

Then she drinks the last of her coffee and stands.

“Anyway,” she says, straightening out her sweater. “I’m going. I have some grad students eager for letters of recommendation to be signed.”

“Best get to it,” says Satoru, following her back through to the genkan. “Grad students are savages.”

“You should know,” she counters. Satoru tries not to think of the stack of instructor requests he has on his desk for the next semester, the culling he’ll have to do and the applications he’ll have to reject.

“Satoru,” Shoko says, in a tone that draws his attention straight back to her.

She’s looking serious again, when they make eye contact. Satoru swallows, preparing himself for the firm advice he knows he’s about to get.

Shoko looks at him for a long while, before she says, “I know I don’t have to tell you again to be careful.”

“But?”

“But don’t be too lenient either,” she finishes. “He can tell you in his own time, if he wants. But he has to tell you.”

Satoru smiles weakly and nods, but he can’t bring himself to say anything, agreeable or otherwise.

She can say it as much as she likes, but he’s not sure it changes anything. If Suguru chooses not to tell him the story, he doubts he’d have the strength or the resolve to fight him on it. Not at the risk of him leaving again.

But he’s glad that Shoko cares, and he’s more glad, too, that she lets him fold her into a rare hug, tucked up close beneath his chin.

When she goes, Satoru is reminded more strongly of how much he dislikes being on his own. It’s not often that Megumi is out, on a Saturday morning. For weeks, months now, Satoru’s woken to find both him and Yuji in some part of the house, eating breakfast out on the front balcony or lounging in the living room.

The house feels empty all the time now, or maybe Satoru just notices it more, when he’s alone. It’s quiet, and still, in a way that makes his thoughts feel fast and uncollected.

In the end, and maybe shamefully so, he ends up back in bed, sprawled out on the side Suguru had slept on last night. The sheets are new and clean, and any lingering scent of Suguru is gone, but he likes the thought of it anyway, that he’s resting where Suguru had rested.

He’s tired, more tired than he would be from any other sleepless night, and he has nothing better to pass the time with.

For the rest of the morning he sleeps on and off, and then he reads through the afternoon, first the last few memoirs written by Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, and then, because again he has nothing better to do, an issue of Shonen Jump Yuji had lent him.

He’s napping again, his face buried in Suguru’s pillow, when next to his ear his phone vibrates with a new message.

Satoru knows, without checking, that it’s Suguru.  

I’m finished at work x.
Just gotta clean up. Should be there in less than an hour.
5:13

Sweet, I can’t wait xo
5:14

He sits up in bed, his heart beating hard in his chest. An hour is more than manageable, after the effort he’d exhausted in not thinking about his longing.

Half an hour later, he messages him again,

I’m going to order food, what do you want to eat?
The usual?
5:43

The usual, as in, one of the various places they used to order from when they were living together as teenagers. Satoru doubts he needs to ask for his approval on any of them, but he likes that he can.

He’s already ordered, by the time Suguru responds.

Yeah, sounds good
I’ll be there in twenty. Leaving home now.
5:49

Satoru’s grin widens. He’s almost shaking with his excitement, as he writes back,

See you soon xo
5:50