Pascale @fluffyvampire - Tumblr Blog

Jun 3

I WANT SWEET REVENGE YEAH! - SATORU GOJO

CTNS. sfw, enemies (frenemies) to lovers esque but lowk not really , crushes (ooo), Gojo & reader are cute weird nerds, based on “get him back” by Olivia Rodrigo!

wc: 5.4k (didn’t reread this 🍟✌️)

– who said revenge can’t be sweet?

PROLOGUE: THE INCIDENT (aka the worst Tuesday of your entire life)

It was the kind of late August evening that smelled like cut grass and gross mildew. The air was still thick with heat even though the sun had mostly given up, the cicadas going absolutely feral in every tree like they had a personal vendetta against silence. You could feel the warmth rising off the pavement through your sandals. Your caramel iced coffee had been practically baking in the sun for forty minutes. None of that mattered, because you had been working on the Pace Gallery pitch for three weeks.

Three. Weeks.

The student arts foundation grant was the single most competitive arts funding opportunity for undergraduates at Jujutsu University, and you had spent the better part of a month building a proposal that was, genuinely, a masterpiece. The concept: a multi-sensory installation exploring the visual language of grief and memory through found objects and light. You had sourced references, drafted a budget, gotten Professor Iori's signature, and assembled a portfolio PDF that was honestly so good you'd considered framing it.

The submission deadline was 11:59 PM. You submitted at 11:47. You went to bed feeling like a person who had their life together.

You woke up to an email.

Dear applicant, due to a clerical error in the shared submission portal, several files were overwritten during the upload window between 11:40 and 11:55 PM. Unfortunately, your submission was affected...

You stared at your phone screen.

You read it again.

You put your phone face-down on your chest and lay there for approximately four minutes doing absolutely nothing, processing, like a Windows laptop trying to open too many tabs.

Then you got up, went to the arts building, and found out — through Nobara, who found out through Megumi, who found out through the kind of social osmosis that only happens in competitive academic programs — exactly what had happened.

Gojo Satoru had also submitted that night.

Gojo Satoru, who was somehow a fine arts major AND a philosophy double major, who walked around campus like the concept of humility had personally wronged him, who had cheekbones that should have been illegal and sunglasses that cost more than your textbooks — that Gojo Satoru — had, in trying to re-upload a revised version of his own submission at 11:52 PM, accidentally triggered a portal glitch that wiped four other submissions including yours.

Did he do it on purpose? Probably not. You were almost sure. Like, sixty percent sure.

Did he apologize? He said, and you are quoting directly from Nobara's secondhand account: “It's not really my fault the portal's infrastructure was inadequate.”

You stood in the hallway of the arts building and felt something crystallize inside you. Cold. Sharp. And very, very malicious.

Okay, you thought. Okay. Okay. Okay.

He wanted to play it like that?

Fine.

You pulled out your notes app, the one you used for actual serious planning, and started typing.

────୨ৎ────

THE PLAN

drafted 8:47 AM, august 29th, on the floor of the arts building hallway

OBJECTIVE: Make Gojo Satoru's life complicated. Not ruined — oh no, you're not a villain — but complicated. Get close. Get trusted. And then, when the moment is exactly right, get even.

RULES:

Do not let him know you hate him.

Do not let anyone know you have a plan.

Do not, under any circumstances, think he's attractive. (You have eyes. This will require discipline.)

Complete each objective before moving to the next.

Document everything. You're an artist. You believe in process.

OBJECTIVES (in order):

ONE: Make first contact. Establish non-hostility. Become someone he notices.

TWO: Become someone he likes. Or at least finds interesting.

THREE: Get close enough that he trusts you.

FOUR: Identify something he cares about.

FIVE: Figure out the revenge. (Details TBD. Poetic. Satisfying. Legal, probably.)

You looked at the list.

Let's go.

────୨ৎ────

OBJECTIVE ONE: Make First Contact

establish non-hostility. become someone he notices.

The Attempt

Gojo Satoru was not a person who was hard to find. He was more of a person who was impossible to miss.

You spotted him three days after the said incident outside the student café sitting with his legs stretched out across the entire bench like he'd rented it, sketching something in a large notebook with his sunglasses pushed up onto his hair.

You took a breath, bought a coffee and walked over.

"Hey," you said.

He looked up. His eyes were — okay, wow, they were very, very blue. That was fine. That was a neutral observation.

"Hey," he said back, like he was mildly surprised people existed.

"You're Gojo, right? From Professor Nanami's contemporary theory seminar?"

He wasn't in Professor Nanami's contemporary theory seminar and you both probably knew that, but it was an opener.

"I'm not," he said, "but I do think Nanami's interpretation of Baudrillard is fundamentally cowardly, so I appreciate being associated with his class."

You blinked.

He tilted his head slightly, like a very tall bird examining something curious. "You're the one who did the grief installation proposal. For the Pace grant."

Your jaw tightened, but you kept your face completely neutral. Did he know you knew? Did he know you were—

"I heard about the portal thing," he said, and his voice was — it was hard to tell with him, that was the thing. It didn't sound mocking. It didn't sound apologetic either. It sounded like he was stating a fact he found vaguely interesting. "For what it's worth, I think your concept sounded better than mine."

You stared at him.

"That's not really the point," you said pleasantly.

"No," he agreed. "It's not." He looked back down at his notebook. "Sit down if you want. I don't bite."

And because the plan required you to establish contact and you were committed, you sat down.

────

Objective One Result: Inconclusive. He remembered your proposal. He said it was better than his. You hate that that's the first thing he said. You hate it so much.

────୨ৎ────

OBJECTIVE TWO: Become Someone He Finds Interesting

or at least, someone he keeps talking to.

The Attempt(s)

This objective took longer than expected. Mostly because Gojo Satoru was — okay, here's the thing nobody warned you about: he was genuinely strange in a way that made him hard to predict.

Like, you had prepared for arrogant. You had prepared for dismissive. You had prepared for the standard hot-guy-who-knows-it behavior pattern: a lot of peacocking, a lot of needing to be the smartest person in the room, a lot of performative indifference to things he definitely cared about.

He did some of that. But he also — he argued with you about art theory for forty-five minutes at that same café, three days later, because you'd made an offhand comment about Rothko being overrated and he had opinions. Genuine, irritating, specific opinions. He referenced three different critics and a documentary. He used the phrase "you're not wrong but you're not right either" and then explained what he meant instead of just letting it sit there as a vibe.

He was infuriating. He was so specific about everything. He cared deeply about the things he cared about, and he was weirdly unbothered about everything else.

"You're not what I expected," you told him, testing it out loud to see how it landed.

"Nobody is," he said, which was an incredibly Gojo Satoru thing to say and also somehow not wrong.

You were in the same two classes by October — Nanami's Critical Theory of Contemporary Art (he had enrolled, you suspected, specifically to argue with Nanami, who seemed to expect this and find it exhausting in a fond way) and an elective studio seminar run by a visiting professor named Haibara. The studio seminar was where it got complicated.

Because you were both good. That was the part that stung.

You would put up a new piece and he would look at it for a long time and say something precise and specific and occasionally correct, and you would want to throw something at his head while also desperately wanting to know what he'd say next. And he'd put up his work and it was — his work was good. Genuinely. He had this way of working with negative space that made you want to cry in the best possible way.

You caught yourself staring at one of his pieces for too long during a critique session once. Like, uncomfortably long. You pivoted immediately and started pointing out a compositional thing that could be improved. He squinted at you like he saw through it.

"You can just say you like it," he said.

"I'm giving critique," you said.

"Sure."

Nobara, from across the studio, looked between you two and said nothing. But she had a very particular expression that you were choosing not to acknowledge.

You got into a habit of arguing with each other in class. It was not strategic at this point — it had started strategic and then developed a life of its own, the way bad habits do. You disagreed on stuff genuinely, and you figured it out in real time, loudly, while Professor Haibara watched with the resigned delight of someone who had taught for twenty years and recognized a recurring dynamic.

"You two should just date," said a guy named Ijichi from the back of the seminar room one day, the way you say something as a joke that you also kind of mean.

"Absolutely not," you said.

"She'd eat me alive," Gojo said at the exact same time, which was — that was not a normal thing to say. That was a very specific thing to say.

You looked at him.

He had his sunglasses back on indoors, which was a choice, and he was smiling in a way that suggested he knew exactly what he'd said.

Do not acknowledge it, you told yourself. Objective Two. You're building rapport. This is fine.

"You wish," you said instead, because you couldn't fully help yourself.

He laughed. Actual, genuine laughing. You noted, strictly for documentation purposes, that it changed his whole face.

────

Objective Two Result: Technically successful. He definitely finds you interesting. This is going according to plan. Everything is going according to plan.

────୨ৎ────

OBJECTIVE THREE: Close Enough to Trust

this is where it gets difficult.

The Attempt

The problem with Gojo Satoru, you were beginning to understand, was that he had approximately two modes: completely unreachable and weirdly, disarmingly real.

The unreachable version was the one he showed most people. The sunglasses, the unbothered deflection, the everything-is-fine-because-nothing-touches-me effect that you could see he'd cultivated with intention. He was funny. He was charming. He kept people at exactly the distance he wanted them.

The real version showed up in flashes that you suspected he didn't always mean to show.

It showed up in November, when Haibara's critique session went long and you ended up being the last two in the studio, both too stubborn to leave before the other. You were touching up something at your workstation and he was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, looking at a piece he'd just finished, and it was quiet for a while.

"Do you think it's actually good?" he asked.

You looked up. He was looking at his piece, not at you. He sounded — not uncertain, exactly. Just genuine.

"Yeah," you said. "I think it's really good."

"You're not going to give me critique?"

"You didn't ask for critique."

He was quiet for a second. "Fair."

You went back to what you were doing. After a minute he said: "The Pace thing — I genuinely didn't know the portal was going to do that. I know that doesn't fix it."

You set down your brush. Your heart was doing something strange. "I know," you said, which was true.

"Your concept was better," he said again, which you already knew he thought, but it still landed differently the second time.

"Mine was more emotionally legible," you said. "Yours was more formally interesting."

He turned to look at you then, and you were not prepared for the expression on his face. It was open in a way he usually wasn't. "That's the nicest thing you've said to me."

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it weird. You're making it weird by being defensive about being nice."

You picked your brush back up. "Go home, Gojo."

"You go home."

Neither of you went home for another hour. You worked. He sketched something new. You didn't talk that much but it was comfortable in a way that you were not prepared to examine right now, thank you very much, because there was a plan and the plan had objectives and feeling comfortable with Gojo Satoru in a quiet art studio was not on the list.

It showed up in December, when the semester was ending and the whole school had that particular frantic energy of finals, and you found him in the library at 1 AM with three energy drinks and what appeared to be an existential crisis.

"Philosophy final," he explained, gesturing at the table like it explained everything, which it did.

You sat down across from him because the alternative was walking away and you were, honestly, too tired to make a strategic choice. "What's the paper on?"

"The relationship between authentic artistic expression and the market." He said it like he was reciting a sentence in a language he found offensive.

"That's actually interesting," you said.

"It's a trap. Every position you take has a counter. The market corrupts art, except maybe it doesn't, except maybe authenticity itself is a market construct—"

"You genuinely love this," you said. You were a little surprised by your own tone. It wasn't mean. It was just — you meant it.

He stopped. "What?"

"The arguing with yourself about philosophy. You love it."

He opened his mouth, closed it, did something with his face that looked like recalibrating. "I mean. Yeah."

"So write that. Write the tension as the actual argument. Don't resolve it."

He stared at you for three full seconds. "That's a good idea."

"I know."

"You're smarter than you let people see," he said, which landed so weirdly between a compliment and an observation that you didn't know what to do with it, so you just looked at him steadily until he looked away.

You helped him outline the paper until 2 AM. He got you a vending machine coffee from down the hall without asking if you wanted one. You took it without commenting.

────

Objective Three Result: I have become someone he trusts. I think. He tells me things he means. He remembers I exist when I'm not in front of him — Nobara confirmed he asked about my final project through Megumi, which is a very long game of telephone for someone who has my number.

The plan is proceeding.

I'm fine.

(I'm going to be honest with myself in these notes even if nowhere else: I cannot, in good conscience, say I still hate him. This is a setback. Reassessing.)

────୨ৎ────

INTERLUDE: EVERYONE ELSE SEES IT

a brief account of what was happening around you while you were busy “being fine”

From Nobara's perspective:

"They're so going to get together," Nobara told Megumi in October, pointing across the quad to where you and Gojo were standing outside the café having what appeared to be a heated argument about something. Both of your hands were moving. He was laughing. You were trying not to.

"Absolutely not," said Megumi.

"He literally texted me last week asking what her favorite coffee order was."

Megumi looked at her. "Why."

"He said he was 'conducting research.' He's so normal and well-adjusted, as you can see."

"She's going to destroy him," Megumi said, which was not a statement he made with concern, just observation.

"Or they destroy each other," Nobara said. "Romantically."

"Please never say that again."

"They both talk about each other when the other one isn't there, Megumi. They both pretend they're not doing it. It's insane. It's like watching two people walk toward each other in a hall and both pretend they weren't going to the same place."

Megumi considered this. "...They do both bring each other up a lot."

"Thank you. I've been losing my mind."

From Gojo's roommate Suguru's perspective:

(yes, they got assigned as roommates junior year. suguru has not recovered)

Suguru came home in December to find Gojo sitting at his desk not doing his paper, staring at nothing.

"What," said Suguru.

"Do you think," said Gojo slowly, "that it's possible to find someone irritating and impressive at the exact same time?"

"Most functional relationships involve that, yes."

"I'm not talking about a relationship."

"I know you're not," said Suguru.

Gojo spun his pen. "She helped me outline my paper tonight."

"Mhm."

"She called me out for loving philosophy like it was a thing she'd been sitting on for a while and just decided to say."

"People who pay attention to you will do that."

"She pays attention to everything. It's like — she's always clocking things. It's kind of terrifying." He paused. "It's kind of great."

Suguru put down his book. He looked at Gojo. "I'm going to say something and you're going to hate it."

"Probably."

"You like her."

Gojo didn't say anything for a moment. "The question is," he said finally, "what she thinks of me."

Suguru picked his book back up. "You've spent three months making her think you're interesting. I'd start there."

────୨ৎ────

OBJECTIVE FOUR: Identify Something He Cares About

find the thing. find the lever. then figure out the revenge.

The Attempt

Second semester. January.

It should have been simple. Spend enough time with someone and you find what matters to them. That was just observation. You were good at observation.

The problem was that spending enough time with Gojo Satoru had become, without your explicit consent, just a thing that you did. He texted you memes at inconvenient hours. You argued about films. He showed up at your studio sessions with a frequency that you could technically call stalking but was more accurately described as a schedule, because he had one and it matched yours in ways you were starting to suspect weren't entirely accidental.

You learned things about him without trying to. That was the thing about the plan that you had maybe not fully anticipated: you'd wanted to get close enough to find the lever, but getting close meant actually knowing someone. And actually knowing Gojo Satoru was — it was a lot.

He cared about his work more than he ever let on in class. The breezy genius thing was partly performance; you'd seen him go back to a piece six or seven times because something wasn't right and he wouldn't leave it until it was. He cared about a younger student in the program, a first-year named Yuuji, who had potential and no money and Gojo had quietly, anonymously, gotten him a supply grant. You found out from Haibara. Gojo never mentioned it.

He cared about his mother, who called him every Sunday morning and who he always picked up for, no matter what. You'd been there once when she called — you were working at adjacent studio stations on a Sunday — and you watched him become someone slightly different for twenty minutes. Softer at the edges. Less performance.

He cared, you realized slowly, about you being honest with him. The times he went stiff and careful were always when he thought someone was being polite instead of real. He'd rather be argued with than agreed with pleasantly. He'd said once, off-handedly: "People are nice to me for weird reasons sometimes. It's hard to tell what's real."

You had sat with that for days.

"You've been weird," Nobara said to you in February, feet up on your dorm room bed, scrolling her phone.

"I've been thinking."

"About what."

"About..." You looked at the ceiling. "Whether I'm still the kind of person who does what I said I was going to do."

Nobara put her phone down. She gave you a look that said she'd been waiting for this conversation. "The plan."

"I never told you about a plan."

"You have extremely legible facial expressions for someone who thinks she's subtle." She sat up. "What happened to it?"

"It's... complicated."

"You like him."

"I don't—"

"You like him," she said, with the flat certainty of someone reading a fact off a piece of paper. "You've liked him for a while. You are currently in a state of crisis about it because you built a whole revenge narrative and then went and got feelings, which is, honestly, the most you thing that has ever happened."

“Ughhhh!!” You covered your face with a pillow. From beneath it: "He wasn't supposed to be like this."

"Like what."

"Like — real. He was supposed to be easy to hate."

“… Well is he easy to like?"

You removed the pillow. You looked at her. You said nothing, which was, of course, an answer.

Nobara lay back down. "For what it's worth," she said to the ceiling, "he's also extremely aware that you exist at all times. Megumi told me he mentioned your name in conversation twice in one afternoon unprompted. For Gojo, that's basically a confession."

You stared at her.

"I'm just saying."

────

Objective Four Result: I know what he cares about. I know what the lever is.

The problem is that I also know him now, and revenge requires a kind of clarity I don't have anymore, and every time I try to reach for it I just — I keep thinking about the Sunday phone call. I keep thinking about Yuuji's supply grant. I keep thinking about him sitting on the floor of the studio looking at his own work and just asking, genuinely, if it was good.

I'm not going to do the plan.

I'm not — I don't think I can do the plan.

I need to sit with this.

────୨ৎ────

OBJECTIVE FIVE: [REDACTED]

originally: figure out the revenge.

current status: the plan is dead. long live the problem.

THE PART WHERE EVERYTHING GETS COMPLICATED

(which is to say: the part where everything becomes more honest)

Late February. Friday night. A party you both ended up at because Nobara invited you both separately and claimed not to have done it on purpose, which was a lie.

It was warm for February. The kind of warm that tricks you for a few days before March remembers to be cold again. The party was at someone's house off campus, and it was the good kind of party — not too crowded, music at a volume where you could still have conversations, lights low enough that everyone looked a little better than usual.

You saw him when you came in. That had become a thing: you scanned rooms and clocked him without meaning to. He was taller than most of the room and he was laughing at something and he had his sunglasses on indoors which was completely unnecessary and still somehow worked, and you hated yourself a little bit.

He saw you. He said something to the person he was talking to and walked over.

"You look good," he said, which was so direct and off-brand and unhedged that you almost didn't know how to answer.

"You wear sunglasses inside," you said. "We can't both be winning."

He pushed them up into his hair. "Better?"

"Marginally."

He was smiling. You were doing your absolute best not to smile back. You were failing.

You ended up talking for a while at the edge of the room, the way you always ended up talking — you'd start arguing about something and it'd become a conversation and then time would pass in a way you hadn't noticed. He told you he'd submitted a new piece to a different grant and wanted to know what you were working on, and you told him about the new installation concept you'd been developing, the one that had come out of the grief piece but had evolved into something you liked better, and he listened in that particular way he had — eyes on you, fully present, actually processing — and said: "That's the best thing you've described to me yet."

"High bar," you said. "I described a Rothko to you once."

"You described a Rothko you hated. This is something you love."

You paused.

"It shows," he said simply.

You looked at him and you thought about the plan, which felt very far away. You thought about the list of objectives and the notes and the whole architecture of getting even, and you thought: what exactly were you getting even for? A portal glitch. A non-apology that was actually, in retrospect, as close to an apology as someone like him probably knew how to give. A comment about your proposal being better than his that he'd said twice, unprompted, like it was just true and he was just saying it.

"I have to tell you something," you said.

He tilted his head. "Okay."

"When I first talked to you. In September. At the café." You watched his face. "I wasn't — I was mad about the grant. I was really mad. And I was..." You exhaled. "I had a whole thing. Like, a plan."

He was very still. "A plan."

"To get close to you and then like — I don't know. Do something. Figure out some kind of revenge."

Silence for a moment. The music went on. Someone laughed across the room.

"How long did you have this plan," he said slowly.

"I wrote it down in September."

"You wrote it down."

"In my notes app."

"With objectives?"

You winced. "...Yes."

He looked at you. He looked at the ceiling. He made a noise that was not quite a laugh and not quite something else. "And now you're telling me."

"Because it's not — I'm not — the plan's gone. It's been gone for a while. I don't want to do it."

"What do you want to do," he said, and his voice was different. Quiet.

Your heart was doing something irresponsible. "I don't know yet," you said, which was not entirely true.

He looked at you for a long moment. "For the record," he said, "I did look you up after the portal thing. Your work."

"Why."

"Because I felt bad. And because your proposal summary was in the system and it was — it was really good. And I was going to find a way to say that and then you walked up to me at the café."

"I walked up to you," you repeated.

"You walked up to me," he confirmed. "Which I thought was interesting. Because I figured you probably knew it was partly my fault."

"It was entirely your fault," you said, automatic.

"Technically the portal—"

"Gojo."

"Yeah, it was my fault." He said it without the deflection this time. "I'm sorry. I should have said that specifically and I didn't."

You stared at him. He met your eyes. He didn't look away.

"Okay," you said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay." You let out a breath. "We're even."

"Even," he said, like he was testing how it felt. "So what now?"

"Now I have no idea what to do with you."

"That's a first for you," he said, the corner of his mouth lifting. "You always know what you're doing."

"I had a plan," you reminded him. "The plan fell apart."

"Plans usually do." He was definitely smiling now. "For what it's worth, whatever this has been — I wasn't just going along with it because you showed up. I showed up too."

"You did show up a lot," you agreed. "That was a little suspicious."

"I'm a suspicious guy."

"You asked Nobara what my coffee order was."

Something crossed his face, fast, almost like embarrassment, which was not an expression you'd seen on him before. "She told you."

"She tells me everything." You were fully smiling now and you couldn't stop it. "It was a very elaborate way to buy me a coffee."

"I was," he started, stopped, started again. "I wanted to get you something. I didn't want to ask you directly."

"Why not?"

He was quiet for a second. "Because you're terrifying," he said, simply, and somehow it landed like the most sincere thing he'd ever said to you.

"You're the most confident person I've ever met," you said.

"Confidence and not-terrified are different things."

You looked at him — really looked at him, the way you'd been carefully not doing for months. He looked back. Neither of you looked away.

"I'm going to get us drinks," he said, very deliberately, "and then I'm going to come back, and we're going to talk about what you actually want to do with me."

"Bold assumption that I want to do anything with you," you said.

He pushed his sunglasses back down, inexplicably, because there was nothing to shield from indoors at night, and said: "I'm a bold guy," and walked away.

You stood there for a moment. Nobara appeared at your elbow from nowhere, which was a skill she'd apparently developed.

"I'm not saying anything," she said.

"Good."

"I'm just standing here."

"Nobara."

"He looks good when he smiles like that, just for the record—"

"Nobara."

She walked away, satisfied.

────୨ৎ────

EPILOGUE: THE ACTUAL GET HIM BACK PART

(which is not what you thought it would be)

He came back with two drinks and he'd taken the sunglasses off and he leaned against the wall next to you and said: "So. What were you going to do? In the plan. What was the revenge?"

"I hadn't fully figured it out," you admitted. "The plan said 'details TBD, poetic, satisfying, legal probably.'"

He choked on his drink. "Legal probably?"

"I was angry."

"You were going to commit a crime for revenge on a portal glitch."

"I said probably legal. I hadn't ruled anything out."

He was laughing — that full, real laugh again, the one that did things to his face. You were watching it and you were not sorry about it.

"I'm glad you told me," he said, once he'd recovered.

"It seemed like the kind of thing you'd want to know."

"Most people wouldn't have."

"I'm not most people."

"No," he said. "You're really not." He looked at you sideways. "For what it's worth, if you had done the plan, I think it would have worked. You're very good at people when you want to be."

"Don't make me sound manipulative."

"I don't mean it like that. I mean — you pay attention. You see things. It's—" He paused, choosing words. "Most people look at me and see the surface version. You kept looking past it. Even when you were trying to get revenge, you were still actually seeing me."

You didn't know what to say to that. It was too honest. It required you to be honest back.

"You were harder to hate than I expected," you said finally.

"Is that a compliment."

"It's the truth."

He turned to face you more fully. The party went on around you.

"So," he said.

"So," you said.

"We're starting over?"

"We're not starting over," you said. "We're just — starting. We're a weird foundation but it's our foundation."

He considered this. "A weird foundation."

"Enemies first. Then whatever this is."

"I think the technical term," he said, "is complicated."

"That's one word for it."

He smiled, and you let yourself smile back this time, all the way, no modulation, and something settled between you — warm and strange and completely, stubbornly real.

"For the record," he said, "I know you're going to argue with me for the rest of time."

"Correct."

"And you're going to be right approximately half the time."

"More than half."

"And it's going to drive me insane."

"Probably."

"Good," he said, and he was looking at you like he meant it, like good wasn't a throwaway word but a choice, a preference, a deliberate thing. "I like it."

You held his gaze. "I know," you said. Because you did. You'd known for a while.

Some plans don't work out the way you design them.

Some plans work out better.

END.

────୨ৎ────

notes from the notes app, final entry:

okay so the plan did not go how i thought it would.

did i get revenge? technically no.

did i get him back? ...

define "get him back."

new objective: figure that out.

(i already know. i just want to say it when i'm ready.)