Archive of Our Own ^beta

You didn’t choose chaos.

Chaos simply took one look at you when you were twenty, shrugged its shoulders, and said, “Yeah, this one. This one’s mine.” And then you made the brilliant life decision of chasing academia like it was going to love you back.

Spoiler: it doesn’t. Academia is like dating a man who wears flip-flops in winter. It will take and take and give you nothing but frostbite and despair.

Anyway.

Welcome to The University of Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering (and Tuition Fees).

It’s old. Gothic. Half the buildings are crumbling, but they slap some ivy on it and call it “historic.” The administration is basically a mafia. The campus Starbucks charges $8 for a latte that tastes like scorched regret. And yet—students fight to get in here, because the professors are legends.

Which brings us to him.

The legend. The myth. The man who looks like he was carved from marble but hates that fact with every fiber of his being: Professor Nanami Kento.

Everyone knows him. You’d have to be dead, blind, or in engineering to not know him. He teaches two very different courses:

And Nanami? He does not care. He shows up in his suit. He delivers lectures like he’s preaching the Word of God. He assigns impossible problem sets. He leaves.

The rumors about him are endless:

Meanwhile, you?

Oh, honey.

You are the other campus cryptid. The chaotic.... thing.

You are a doctor, PhD, triple-course teaching menace. Professor of:

Your outfits? Absolute menace energy. Today it’s a galaxy-print dress with matching earrings shaped like neurons. Yesterday it was full Victorian mourning gear because you were teaching Freud. Last week: you showed up in a sundress covered in tiny frogs. Students have stopped questioning it. You are Mrs. Frizzle if Mrs. Frizzle had tenure and a vendetta.

Your teaching style is… aggressive encouragement.

You will drag a C student into the land of B’s and A’s if it kills you. You once sat with a panicking freshman for three hours in the library helping them fix their research methods paper. You’re also the type of professor to yell:

“DO NOT GASLIGHT ME, JASON. YOU CANNOT GASLIGHT ME WITH YOUR POWERPOINT SLIDES. I HAVE A DOCTORATE.”

Students love you for it. Or fear you. Or both.

And this is where the tension simmers. Because you and Nanami? You exist in parallel. He’s the stoic marble statue professor. You’re the deranged carnival barker of academia. You’ve never spoken, not really, beyond the nods of professional acknowledgment at faculty meetings. You’ve seen him from afar, sitting ramrod straight in the conference room, suit immaculate, eyes filled with quiet disdain while you roll in late with coffee stains on your frog-print blouse.

And yet.

The students whisper.

They’re right. You do.

And if one more freshman finance bro tries to corner you in the hallway and say, “So, like… are you and Professor Nanami, like, a thing?” you will commit violence.

Because you don’t know him. You don’t. He’s the scary hot professor who probably judges you for your “Dress Like Your Hypothesis” day. And you? You’re the campus creature who once accidentally lit an overhead projector on fire during Cognitive Psych.

Two planets. Two opposite forces.

But the universe? The university? The ivy-covered hellscape you call home? It has a way of throwing planets into collision.

And let’s be real: if it does? The fallout will be glorious.

*-*

You did not mean to invoke him like some ancient god of spreadsheets and heartbreak. Truly, you did not. But you were in the middle of your Psychology lecture—high on caffeine, sugar, and the power of a captive audience—and the words simply tumbled out of your mouth.

See, you were explaining this thing, right? The whole alpha/beta male illusion that undergrads (mostly finance bros, god bless their dumb protein-shaken hearts) keep dragging into your class like it’s 2003 and they’ve just discovered Reddit.

And you, scholarly menace that you are, thought: Why not make it spicy? Why not drag reality into this?

So you clicked. The slide changed. And there he was. Professor Nanami Kento, projected in 200-inch glory onto the front lecture hall screen. The man himself, in one of the faculty website headshots, crisp suit, jawline sharp enough to slice deli meat.

Cue everyone sighing dreamily.

“Now,” you said, tapping the screen pointer against his face with far too much confidence, “let’s discuss why the finance bros in your cohort spiral into an identity crisis when they encounter… this.”

You gestured broadly. Your earrings (shaped like golden ratios, because you were feeling particularly obnoxious today) jingled in tandem.

“Psychologically,” you went on, “many young men—especially those steeped in gym-bro culture—internalize this so-called ‘alpha male’ myth. But then they meet a real man who radiates competence without posturing, a man who does not grunt about crypto at 2 a.m., a man who wears a tie clip without irony—”

You pointed at Nanami’s photo again. Students were already trying not to laugh.

“—and suddenly, boom! cognitive dissonance. Their fragile masculinity crumbles. They realize, perhaps for the first time, that being a man does not mean screaming at women in group projects. It means… showing up on time. Knowing things. Having a good haircut. Statistically destroying you on a midterm.”

You were on a roll. Absolutely manic. You had the room in the palm of your hand.

What you didn’t notice, of course, was the door at the back of the hall sliding open. The collective panic of sixty undergrads waving their arms like they were on fire. The palpable shift in the atmosphere as the man himself, Professor Nanami Kento, walked in silent as death and stood at the back of the hall.

You kept going.

“Now, what happens when our poor alpha bro meets a professor like—well, this guy—” tap, tap, tap on his projected face, “is that the alpha fantasy collapses. They realize he is not one of them. And the coping mechanisms? Oh, baby, they are ugly. Denial. Projection. One student actually wrote in their course eval that I was ‘jealous’ of Professor Nanami. Sir, he did not fail you. You failed you.”

Giggles. A girl in the front row muttered “oh my god stop” into her sleeve.

You, oblivious, hit the next slide: In-Group/Out-Group Effects.

Behind you, Nanami stepped out the door as quietly as he’d entered. Said nothing. Left like a ghost.

And the rumors? Holy shit.

By the next day, campus was feral.

“He’s gonna sue.” “She’s getting fired, 100%.” “No, they’re in on it together, didn’t you see the way she smirked when she showed his picture?” “Maybe he’s secretly her boyfriend?” “Widower arc. She’s his healing love interest.” “Bro shut up.”

Meanwhile, you? You had no idea. Because you are, in fact, a dumbass. You breezed through your lectures, humming, wearing earrings shaped like pi symbols because it was midterm season and you like to theme.

*-*

It wasn’t until one of your braver students, pale and trembling, came up during office hours and whispered, “Professor… um. Professor Nanami was… in your lecture yesterday. When you… uh. You know. Talked about him.”

You blinked. “What?”

“Like. He was there. In the room.”

“…Oh.” You sipped your coffee. “Well. He didn’t say anything.”

Student: “HE LOOKED SO MAD.”

“He always looks mad.”

And that was that. Did you panic? No. Did you give a single fuck? Also no. Because technically? You hadn’t said anything bad. If anything, you’d academically roasted finance bros in his honor.

Still. Professional courtesy and all that. You typed out an email that evening:

And you thought that was the end of it.

Until.

Until this motherfucker—this six-foot marble statue in a beige suit—swung by your office hours.

He filled the doorway like a tax audit. Students scattered. You looked up from grading exams and almost spilled coffee down your dress (today’s theme: navy-blue with fractal patterns, because math midterms, baby). Good lord he looked like a statue. A flesh statue.

“Professor Nanami,” you said, way too brightly. “Do you need something?”

“I received your email,” he said. Smooth. Calm. Like he hadn’t just materialized to haunt you. “And I thought I’d take you up on your offer.”

You stop. You blink.

“…My offer?”

He adjusted his tie. “To clarify. The theoretical framework.”

Cue silence. Cue your brain wheezing like a Victorian child with asthma.

“Oh! Right, yes. The alpha male thing. Please, sit down.”

And he did. In the chair opposite your desk. Folding his long limbs like some kind of stoic origami crane. Watching you with that expression that could be neutrality or deep disdain—it was impossible to tell.

“So,” he said. “What, precisely, did you mean?”

And you lit up like a Christmas tree. Because talking shop? That’s your cocaine.

“Okay,” you said, bouncing in your seat, “so the whole ‘alpha male’ myth comes from a very outdated wolf study that was later debunked by the same scientist who popularized it. But finance bros don’t care about peer review, they care about vibes. So when they encounter you—” you gestured vaguely at his entire existence, “—someone competent, professional, attractive, but not performing masculinity in their prescribed way, their little pea brains short-circuit. It’s hilarious.”

Nanami actually… smiled. Just barely. “I see.”

You grinned. “It’s like cognitive dissonance meets group identity theory. They put you in their in-group—‘men, powerful men’—but then realize you don’t fit their script, so they shove you into the out-group instead. ‘Too refined. Too smart. Must be gay. Must be something Other.’”

He nodded slowly. “Accurate.”

And then—then—he gestured at your earrings.

“Interesting choice,” he said. “Golden ratio?”

You blinked. “Oh, these? Yeah. Midterms. Cognitive Psych. I like to dress for the occasion. Did you see the dress?” You stood up and twirled so the fractal spirals flared dramatically.

He blinked at you. “…I did not. But it is… fitting.”

Was that a compliment? From Nanami Kento? The stoic god of statistics himself?

The students outside your door were already whispering. You ignored them. You sat back down, grinning.

And just like that, the most unholy of alliances was born.

*-*

Here’s the thing about Nanami Kento: he notices everything. He’s not loud about it, he’s not showy, but the man catalogues the world like a depressed librarian. Which means, unfortunately for him, he notices his students. And worse—he notices they’re little shits.

Not all of them, of course.

Some of them are fine, bright-eyed, diligent. But the finance boys? The engineering disasters? The crypto-loving herd animals who bark “Sigma grindset” in the back row?

They’re… they’re fucking weird.

So Nanami, professional, stoic, secretly-gonna-die-young-from-stress Nanami, does what any sane man would do. He collects evidence. He starts pulling lines from their essays, highlighting disturbing phrases in neon yellow, jotting notes like: “What does this mean? Is he… serious? Should I be concerned?” He builds a file, basically, like he’s about to hand it off to Interpol.

And then he thinks, Well. The Psychology Professor will know.

Which is how he ends up outside your office door. Again. Papers stacked in his arms like some deranged offering.

And when he pushes open the door—BLAM—he smacks right into you. Literally collides. Papers fly. Notes scatter like dead leaves in autumn. The gods laugh.

“Oh shit!” you yelp, immediately dropping to the floor. “Sorry, sorry, sorry—fuck, that’s a lot of paper.”

Nanami, kneeling already, scoops a neat stack off the carpet. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” you argue, grabbing more pages. Except—except here’s the thing. He’s grabbing them from the floor and putting them neatly back on your desk. Meanwhile, you’re scooping papers off your desk (trying to be helpful!) and stacking them on the floor, NEATLY!!!

Neither of you notice at first. It’s chaos, but dignified chaos—until Nanami pauses, still holding a paper midair, and looks at you.

“…Professor.”

You look up, cheerful, hands full of pages. “Yes?”

“We appear to be working against each other.”

You freeze. Look at the desk. Look at the floor. Realize. “…Oh my god.” And then, helpless laughter. “I’m so sorry. I was—I thought—I don’t know what I thought. Jesus.”

For a second—just a second—Nanami looks like he might laugh too. He doesn’t. But he almost does.

Eventually, the two of you sort it out. The papers make it onto the desk. And you, naturally nosy, glance down at the top page.

“Wait. Are these…?”

“Observations,” Nanami says, sitting stiff-backed in the chair across from you.

You flip through them, eyes widening, and then—you cackle. Full-on, ungodly, banshee cackle.

“Oh my god,” you wheeze, “these are your students? ‘Bitcoin is the future, women are the past’—did someone really write that?!”

Nanami presses his fingers to his temple. “…Yes.”

You slap the desk. “This is delicious.”

And that’s how it begins. You, leafing through his students’ horrorshow essays, delighting in the weirdness like it’s wine at a tasting. Nanami, watching you with a kind of morbid fascination.

Because here’s the thing: he expected you to roll your eyes, maybe lecture him about how “students will be students.” He did not expect you to light up like a goddamn Christmas tree and launch into an impromptu TED Talk about male socialization.

“Okay,” you start, pulling a pen out of your hair like it’s Excalibur. “So. The reason they’re little misogynistic shits? Developmental psych 101. Boys get way more leeway as kids. They’re not policed emotionally the way girls are—like, a girl cries and she’s told to shut up, a boy screams and everyone’s like, oh, boys will be boys. Result? They don’t get corrected. They never learn. They’re emotionally lazy.”

Nanami hums. “…I see.”

“And then, because they’re stunted,” you continue gleefully, “they grow up unable to form proper male friendships. No emotional connection, no accountability. So they turn to the Internet, where other emotionally stunted men are screaming about women and money, and—ta-da!—you get Andrew Tate worshippers who think calling you gay is an argument.”

Nanami raises a brow. “And the responsibility lies… with their parents?”

“Oh, absolutely,” you say, pointing your pen at him like a weapon. “Parents are lazy with boys and cruel with girls. They let boys run wild and nitpick their daughters to death. So the boys never learn, and the girls get trauma. Equal opportunity failure, courtesy of the family unit. Womp womp, they lose.”

You grin. Nanami studies you.

From this angle, he can see your desk. Messy as hell, covered in sticky notes and novelty pens shaped like brains. But in pride of place? A framed, very fancy photograph of a cat in a little red bowtie.

Nanami gestures. “…Your cat?”

You beam. “Chairman Meow. Isn’t he handsome? He hates everything.”

There’s a pause. Nanami looks at you. Then the cat. Then back. “…Indeed.”

*-*

Later that day, Nanami has lunch with a few of the law professors. They’re loud, smug, perpetually networking men. The kind who order steak at noon and brag about their clerkships from 1998.

One of them leans over, smirking. “So, Nanami. Heard you’ve been seen hanging around with the… ah… eccentric one.”

“The psychology professor,” another adds, in a tone like he’s talking about a circus act. “The one with the outfits.”

There’s laughter. A little mean-spirited.

Nanami doesn’t laugh. He stirs his coffee, silent.

Because here’s the thing. You are eccentric. You show up in frog-print dresses and math earrings. You make students act out cognitive models like it’s improv night. You’re loud. You’re embarrassing, sometimes.

And yet…

He thinks about the way you lit up explaining developmental psychology. How you turned his students’ nonsense into a lesson. How you cackled over their crypto quotes like it was the funniest shit you’d ever seen. How you called your cat Chairman Meow without a shred of shame.

He thinks, She makes it interesting.

And, though he won’t admit it, not even to himself yet, he thinks: Also… she’s hot.

He sips his coffee. The law professors keep laughing.

Nanami doesn’t join them.

The weeks that followed were… interesting. Which, for Nanami Kento, is code for: “mildly unsettling, deeply distracting, and making me question why I didn’t choose accounting like a sensible man.”

Because suddenly—like the universe had flipped some terrible switch—he began noticing exactly what you’d said.

The behaviors.

The little tells in his students. The alpha-bro posturing. The insecure microaggressions. The group dynamics going sour the second women tried to speak. The aggressive insistence that Bitcoin will heal all wounds.

And he had to admit—you were right. (Which Nanami respected and kinda hated. He did not hate you, necessarily, but he hated that this was the truth. You understand.)

But did he go immediately to you, to admit that your bizarre frog-dress-wearing, cat-photo-displaying, fractal-earring-wielding self had been correct all along?

No.

Of course not.

He is Nanami Kento.

He broods in silence. He folds the truth into his shirt pocket and walks around with it stabbing him like a paperclip. Because why would he talk to you? It’s not like you’re his best friend. Or colleague he respects. Or… anything else.

Except then came the final exam day for your Cognitive Psych students.

And you brought your cat.

Your fucking cat.

Chairman Meow.

Nanami heard about it through the student grapevine first—like all gossip on campus, it spread like wildfire. “Did you see the Psych professor brought a cat to the exam???” “Is that even allowed??” “She gave it a little tie!!!”

He didn’t believe it, not at first. But then he saw.

With his own two eyes.

You, marching across campus in your exam-day regalia: dress patterned with multicolored numbers and statistical symbols (math-core, slutty but academic), earrings shaped like calculators, and Chairman Meow himself riding smugly in a carrier bag with a red bowtie on. You actually set him on the desk before the exam started, announced “Chairman Meow wishes you the best of luck students!” and then—proceeded as if nothing had happened.

Nanami nearly choked on his coffee.

It was… well, cute. Against his better judgment, he thought it was unbearably cute.

Later, he found himself wandering to your office. Again. As if the gods had possessed him. And there you were, feeding Chairman Meow treats while grading.

“Professor,” Nanami said, tone as flat as ever. “I wanted to confirm that I’ve… observed the behaviors you mentioned.”

You looked up, smiling wide. “Oh yeah? Fun, right?”

“Fun” was not the word he would have chosen, but he nodded anyway. And then, impossibly—Chairman Meow strolled over, tail upright, and rubbed against his leg. Nanami hesitated only a fraction of a second before crouching down to offer a hand. The cat accepted. You gasped.

“He likes you. That’s rare. He hates authority figures.”

Nanami blinked. “…I am an authority figure.”

“Exactly,” you said, delighted. “He hates the dean. Scratched him once. It was beautiful.”

And then you handed Nanami a treat. Without thinking, he took it. Gave it to the cat. The Chairman crunched approvingly.

Nanami had never felt so absurdly seen.

*-*

Now, here’s the problem: Nanami was starting to think.

And thinking, for him, was dangerous.

Because he couldn’t stop weighing things.

On the one hand: you were weird. You wore dresses that looked like exploded math textbooks. You brought a cat to a final exam. You laughed like a medieval witch at your own jokes. You were loud, strange, and not at all what a “serious academic” should be.

On the other hand…

Every single student he asked—quietly, neutrally—about you said the same thing.

And the professors you did hang around with—well, they liked you. The historians, the literature eccentrics, the ones who wore scarves indoors. They gravitated toward you like moths to a disco ball.

So maybe it wasn’t that you were unserious. Maybe everyone else was just a piece of shit.

He didn’t like that thought. Because if that was true, then he’d been unfair. And Nanami Kento hates being unfair.

*-*

The thing that really got him, though, was when he started seeing more psychology majors in his courses.

At first he thought it was coincidence. But then one of them—a nervous second-year girl—confessed, when he asked her why she was taking Ancient Myths despite being a psych major:

“Oh, our prof told us you’re really good at explaining things. She said you make complicated stuff feel clear. That’s why I signed up. And y'know.. stats are mandatory.”

Nanami stopped.

He stared.

Because the words really good at explaining things had never, in his entire life, been applied to him in that tone. Not by colleagues. Not by peers. Not even by students—most of whom described him with words like “terrifying,” “unfairly hot,” or “the bane of my fucking existence.”

And you—you, with your frog dresses and fractal earrings and fucking cat—you’d been quietly telling your students he was good. Sending them to him. Praising him.

Nanami didn’t know what to do with that information. So he filed it away, neat and tidy, in the mental folder labeled Things That Hurt To Think About.

*-*

The tension only built from there.

Every faculty meeting, he noticed the looks. Professors rolling their eyes when you arrived in another themed outfit. Snide remarks dressed up as jokes:

Never to your face, of course. Always just off to the side. And you? You never seemed to care. You breezed through it, smiling, cracking jokes, scribbling doodles in the margins of meeting agendas.

Nanami saw. He saw it all. And he wondered—was he complicit, letting them talk about you that way? Was he a coward for not saying anything?

The answer was yes.

But he was Nanami Kento. Which meant he stayed silent. Which meant he carried it, the guilt, the tension, the way you haunted his thoughts even in battle.

But Nanami cared.

Against his better judgment, he cared.

Because on one hand, yes—you were embarrassing. Chaotic. Loud. He could practically hear the blood pressure of the finance department rising whenever you spoke.

But on the other hand… you were passionate. You loved your students. You made things fun. And wasn’t that the whole point? Wasn’t that what academia was supposed to be about?

He stirred his coffee slowly, jaw tight.

And maybe—just maybe—he was starting to have a crush on you.

Not that he’d ever say it aloud. God forbid.

Nanami Kento does not do crushes. Nanami Kento does not do love. Nanami Kento is perfectly content to grade his exams alone, thank you very much.

…Except that you’d sent him students who trusted him. And your cat liked him. And when you smiled at him in meetings, his pulse jumped like a freshman late to class.

So maybe. Just maybe. He was fucked.

(But shhhhh, he doesn't know that yet).

*-*

There were certain rituals in the Great Ivory Institution known as The University of Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering (and Tuition Fees). One of them was the end-of-trimester faculty party.

It was exactly what it sounded like: a sad little bacchanal where professors, exhausted and vibrating on caffeine and loathing, shuffled into the main hall to stand around a buffet table full of lukewarm hors d'oeuvres. They drank, they networked, they gossiped about whose grant got denied and who was definitely sleeping with the Dean.

You rarely attended.

Because why would you? You’d rather lick chalk than sip cheap merlot while someone from the Business School explained “blockchain” to you for the fiftieth time.

But this time—this trimester—you came.

“Oh wow,” one chemistry professor muttered when you breezed in, wearing a glittering dress patterned with constellations and earrings shaped like test tubes. “She actually showed up.”

“She never comes,” whispered another.

“She’s drunk already?”

“No, that’s just her vibe.”

Snide comments. Always the snide comments. But you ignored them, as you always did, and made straight for the wine.

Nanami noticed. Of course he noticed.

He was standing near the sad cheese platter (honestly, who puts Wensleydale on a cheese platter??), nursing a club soda like it was whiskey, when you waltzed in with the energy of a comet.

He watched you laugh too loud at a joke, watched you toss your hair and tell a law professor that his tie looked like it wanted to die. He watched the way the other professors looked at you—sideways, disdainful, like you were the punchline of some unfunny joke.

And he hated it.

Because they didn’t see you the way your students did. They didn’t see the woman who stayed in her office until midnight helping a freshman rewrite an essay. They saw glitter and chaos and called it unserious.

You saw Nanami across the room, of course. How could you not? He looked like someone had dropped a noir detective into the middle of an academic mixer. Beige suit, neat tie, posture so stiff it could have been a crime against God. He was, as always, absurdly, irritatingly handsome.

You decided you were going to talk to him tonight. Wine made you brave.

*-*

Fast forward an hour, and brave had turned into tipsy. Tipsy had turned into very tipsy. And very tipsy you had to be escorted out by one (1) Professor Nanami Kento, who sighed like Atlas himself as you leaned on his arm.

“Are you—steady?” he asked as you tripped slightly on the steps outside the hall.

“I’m graceful,” you declared. “Like a gazelle. A… fat gazelle.”

“Gazelles don’t usually drink wine,” he muttered.

“Not with that attitude.”

He did not smile. But his hand, steady on your arm, was kind. He hailed you a cab with quiet efficiency, opened the door, and practically folded you into the back seat.

“Text me when you get home,” he said.

You blinked. “You—what?”

He slipped you a piece of paper with his number written neatly. “So I know you got home safely.”

Your heart did something violent. You shoved it down. “Fine. But only if you don’t mock me for typos.”

Nanami almost rolled his eyes. Almost.

You got home. You texted him. Well—you tried.

The result was a blurry, too-close photo of Chairman Meow staring (maybe? it was mostly nose and one eye) judgmentally at the camera, captioned:

And Nanami, sitting in his apartment, having just removed is shoes, planning to read his dark, depressing noir novel, put the shoe down. Rubbed his temples. Thought: What the fuck does ‘welth’ mean?

And then reached for his glasses.

Except his glasses weren’t there.

He tore the apartment apart. Flipped couch cushions. Checked under rugs. Checked his jacket, his bag, even the goddamn fridge because maybe, just maybe, he was losing his mind. But no glasses.

Which is how, across town, you ended up staring at the very clean, very stylish glasses sitting neatly in the middle of your kitchen table like they were the One Ring.

“Oh no,” you whispered. “Oh fuck.”

Chairman Meow meowed, unhelpful.

*-*

The next morning, Nanami had turned his apartment into a warzone. He looked like a man personally wronged by the god of vision. He could not read his noir book. He could barely grade. He was muttering to himself when his phone buzzed.

It was you.

Nanami stared at the screen. Long. Hard.

He typed:

He sent it before he could overthink.

*-*

That afternoon, he met you at a small café near campus. You were sitting at a corner table, hair a little mussed, still looking vaguely guilty. On the table in front of you: his glasses, perched like a sacred relic.

“There they are,” you said, dramatically. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t even notice until I got home. I don’t even wear glasses. I’m sorry.”

Nanami picked them up, checked them, cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief. Slid them back on. Relief bloomed quietly in his chest.

“Thank you,” he said simply.

You pushed a coffee across the table toward him. “My treat. For saving me from falling down the steps like a drunk Shakespearean heroine.”

He raised a brow. “I said you didn’t need to—”

“Shut up and drink it.”

Nanami drank it.

And you talked. Somehow. About exams, about students, about how Chairman Meow was plotting world domination. He listened. He found himself actually… enjoying it.

*-*

That night, he called an old friend—a colleague in law, Hiromi Higuruma—just to catch up. And mentioned, carefully, that he’d “had coffee with a fellow professor today.”

Hiromi asked, “Who?”

“The psychology professor.”

Later that night, he called his friend Hiromi Higuruma. Yes, that Higuruma—the guy who could drink an entire bottle of sake while delivering a lecture on tort reform.

“So,” Higuruma said, after Nanami gave a halting, vague explanation about the situation, “You’re dating the psych professor .”

“We are not dating,” Nanami said flatly.

“Uh-huh.”

“It was just coffee.”

“Coffee is a date.”

“It was returning my glasses.”

“Returning stolen property via coffee is a date.”

Nanami pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are incorrect.”

“And you,” Higuruma said cheerfully, “are in denial. Give it up, Nanami. You like her. Probably think about her in bed, too.”

Nanami almost hung up. Instead he said, “I’m not discussing this with you.”

“Oh, so you are.”

Click. Dial tone.

*-*

But Higuruma’s words stuck like a burr.

Because Nanami had been thinking about you. Too much.

When other professors muttered that you were “embarrassing” or “unprofessional,” he bristled in silence. When students described you as “crazy but she saved my GPA,” he felt something warm stir in his chest. When he sat at his desk grading, he caught himself staring at his phone, waiting for a message that never came.

And when he was bleeding, standing in the dark, his tie torn, blade dripping curse matter, he thought of you.

You, with your wild laugh. You, with your academic heresies and your stupid constellations dress. You, with your damn cat in a bowtie.

He can’t stop thinking about you.

Like, actually dangerous.

Because here’s the thing: thinking about you while teaching a lecture? Fine. He can multitask, he’s a professional. Thinking about you while fighting a curse that looks like a twelve-foot centipede made of teeth? Not fine. That nearly got him bisected.

Lord that would be a pathetic death wouldn't it be? The headline: “man dies because he’s horny-adjacent,” how pathetic.

And yet, mid-swing, covered in blood, Nanami found himself thinking: She’d probably call this thing a Freudian metaphor with legs. And then: Why am I thinking about her smile right now? Focus, Kento.

And he nearly died for it.

Twice.