Double take | shy!nerdjo x shy!reader
warnings: drabble, pure fluff, meet cute awkward, café au, slow burn, mutual crush, mutual pining, shy!gojo, shy fem!reader word count: 3.8k
You are a simple creature of habit. This was your café. Your corner nook. Your wobbly table by the window where the sunlight hit just right every time you came in.
You have a system, a routine, your sacred order the barista starts making automatically anytime you walk through the front door, noise-canceling headphones, and mild productivity. You do not bother the universe, and the universe does not bother you.
It was your emotional support place, an unassuming little spot where you went to work, study, read, or just exist. Cliché, yes, but you were a coffeehouse loafer, so what.
Until one day the universe decides to intervene. It was raining that day, sudden downpour, and he'd forgotten his umbrella, of course, so when he spotted the café on his frantic walk downtown, he ducked in to just wait it out somewhere dry, somewhere cozy. A cup of coffee sounded good anyway.
He tumbled through the door with a soft, breathless laugh, shaking the rain from his shoulders like a very tall wet dog.Â
You instinctively looked up from your book. The chapter was dragging like craaazy and you were getting bored. He was at the counter, currently trying to wipe the fog off his glasses.
Ohâ
You blinked away, but your eyes betrayed you.Â
You did a double take.
OHâ
Tall. Cute. Pale cheeks flushed from the cold, hair plastered to his forehead, and he was burying his fingers into the sleeves of his sweater just to warm his hands up. Wet and cold from the rain but probably the most attractive man you'd seen in your entire life.
You looked back at your book. Bit your lip. Looked up again. Back at your book. Up again.
Triple take.
You could feel your cheeks involuntarily heating up as you took in his wet hair, his nose, his jaw, the adorable little shiver that ran through him while he waited. God, he was really your type. But you just glanced at him, nothing more. As one does. Casuallyâ
Quadruple take.
Okay. Fine. You were staring.
Internal spiral initiated. Deep breaths, babe. He was just a ridiculously attractive stranger. This was a normal human experience. You were in a public space. Hot people existed. You would survive this.
He turned around, clutching a steaming cup of his americano with both hands, and scanned the room. The moment he turned around, you caught a glimpse of the most absurdly blue eyes you had ever seen. Even his eyes were so, so pretty. It wasnât really fair.
You looked back at your book. You'd read the same sentence four times now.
You forced your eyes to stay glued to the page, aggressively willing yourself to comprehend the actual freaking words.
Focus. You were reading! It was just a man.
But out of the corner of your eye, you tracked him as he settled into a chair a few tables down. The scrape of the chair. The soft rustle of his wet sweater. He finally gave up on wiping his glasses dry on a damp sleeve and just shoved them back onto his face. God, cute men with glasses really did something to your knees. You were so pathetic.
And for the next twenty minutes, you were super aware of his every movement. The plot of your romance novel be damned, âcause you glanced at him every few sentences through your peripheral vision only.
You heard the quiet clink of his cup being set down. You heard him sneeze once, very quietly, which was lowkey a ridiculous sound to come out of a man who was easily six-foot-three.
But you did not look directly anymore. You held your ground as you were the godâs strongest soldier right now.
Eventually the frantic drumming of the rain against the window slowed to only a light drizzle. The storm broke and you heard his chair scrape again.
You risked one final, fleeting glance as he stood up. He grabbed his empty cup, ran a hand through his semi-dry, messy hair, and headed for the exit. And you wondered if his hair was as soft as it lookedâŠ
As he pushed the door open, he paused as if hesitating, glancing over his shoulder. For one terrifying, totally heart-stopping millisecond, those bright blue eyes flicked over to your corner. Directly, not directly, you couldn't tell because you ducked your eyes back to your book as quickly, immediately chickening out. So he pushed through the door. The little bell above it chimed and off he went.
The air in the café immediately felt weirdly lighter.
Okay, you thought, finally turning the page. Not that you'd been on this page for the last fifteen minutes or anything. Happens to the best of us, I guess.
He was just a glitch in the matrix. A very tall, very blue-eyed glitch in the matrix. You survived the hot stranger. He got his coffee, he dried off, he left.
The gravitational pull you felt was just what happens when you see the man of your dreams. And in true man-of-your-dreams fashion, he disappeared as quickly as he materialized.
Normal human experience.
Except, a week later, on a perfectly sunny afternoon, the little bell above the door chimed a little more loudly in your perceived little bubble.
Hmm. Weird.
You didn't even mean to look up. It was a reflex at this point. But there he was.
Wearing an aggressively cozy hoodie this time, those big glasses, and that ridiculous height with it.
Your stomach violently dropped to your shoes. Oh no. He wasn't just a figment of your imagination. He was freaking back.
And a few days later, he was back again.
You figured he just really liked the coffee. And to be fair, just your luck perhaps, because the coffee here actually was that good. The Google Maps reviews were damn right about it being the best espresso in town. So it made perfect sense that a guy who stumbled in out of the rain would become a repeat customer after tasting the superb roast.
Perfectly logical. Totally normal. Nothing to do with you. Why would it anyway.
But there was something you didn't know.
He also came back because there was this girl in the corner with a book who looked up when he walked in and then immediately looked away like she hadn't â and something about that was, well. He didn't have exactly a word for it. Because while you were busy having a silent, hyper-fixated meltdown over him on that rainy first day, he had clocked you too.
In fact, the moment he'd turned around from the register with that steaming americano and caught you aggressively chewing your lip while pretending to read, his brain had completely stalled out. White-out.
So on his very second visit, Satoru had stood on the pavement half a block away, pathetically arguing with himself whether you'd even be there â or if he was actually crazy for thinking about it at all. He told himself he just wanted to take a lewk. Just to confirm that a girl that pretty! actually existed and wasn't some kind of fever dream brought on by the rain.
He walked in. There you were. Same corner. And just as cute as the first time, maybe even cuter.
So he kept coming back. And he felt a little pathetic about it, tbh. Showing up like a well-trained dog just because he was crushing on a girl he'd never even spoken to. But he couldn't help it. He was just a man, after all.
Satoru learned quickly. Look your way from his table. Look away. Look back. Realize he was staring, look away again too fast. Rinse and repeat.
He caught you looking, twice, three times, every single time. The first time your eyes actually met properly, you both snapped your heads away so fast it was a miracle neither of you pulled something.
He told himself he wasn't a coward. He just⊠He figured you'd say something eventually. You kept looking at him. And that meant something, right? You were practically telegraphing your interest! Which â was it interest though? What if you were staring only because he looked weird, hair a mess or some stain on his clothes â
Oh god.
OH GOD.
He wasn't great at reading people. So he decided to simply wait it out. His strategy was simple: exist in your general vicinity, look nice, and eventually you would come over and say something. He was not a coward. He wasn't, I swear!
Except you did not, in fact, say something.
You just kept staring at him like he was a jump scare and then violently burying your face back in your book, or your laptop, or your hands.
Your eyes betrayed you constantly. Do not look at him, you would tell yourself. You would look at him anyway. You would catch him glancing in your directionâchewing on the end of a stir stick, his glasses slipping slightly down his noseâand panic would seize your throat. You would snap your head away just to study the gluten-free muffins in the pastry case.
He would realize you caught him, and heâd immediately pretend to be so so engrossed in a completely blank stretch of the wall. Sometimes heâd accidentally bump his knees against the bottom of the table and the soft thump! followed by his quiet sigh would make you want to literally melt into your chair.
A lot of fleeting glances, a lot of unnecessary throat-clearing, and one very serious pep talk he gave himself in the bathroom mirror. But to no avail.Â
So once you locked eyes again, you did that awkwardly, very pathetically, very often, he tried to be brave brave. He did this tiny, little nod, like a quick acknowledgment, a gentle, hesitant yes, I see you seeing me, hi hello.
You stared back at him with a blank, wide-eyed face of a person whose brain had simply ceased to operate. What the hell. Affectionately, of course.
His cheeks flushed, turning this soft, pretty pink.
Your cheeks flushed so hot you were surprised you weren't actively steaming.
He held the look for a beat, his expression so painfully hopeful, before you completely gave up, turned away like a loser, and snapped your gaze back to your mug. He deflated a little, pushing his glasses back up his nose with a quiet exhale. And here went his chance. Well, damn...
It was truly agonizing, if you ask me. It was the most physically painful, heart-fluttering, ridiculous thing to endure.
Satoru was too invested now, but entirely out of his depth. He kept coming back, genuinely believing every single day that this would be the day! you finally made the move, because surely you realized how cute he thought you were.
And you believed every single dayâevery single oneâthat this would be the day! he finally made the move, because surely he knew he was the most gorgeous man to ever walk into your life.
Yet every day, neither of you did.Â
The panic just kept growing. Growing. Growing! And the respective crush along with it.Â
Until a rainy Wednesday, exactly one month after he first walked in.
You were there, you always were.Â
You didn't even need to look up to know. Your stomach did the thing, the fluttery one, that happened only when a specific six-foot-three man in glasses walked through the door.
Satoru got his order, sat at his usual table.
For the next hour, you fell into the build of your usual dance. You were actually working, doing okay, but your eyes kept drifting, always drifting. He caught you once or twice; you caught him twice or thrice. Your silent language. Settled into something almost comfortable. Something that made you look forward to coming here beside the actual coffee. A quiet, familiar routine noone had balls big enough to break.Â
And then, he ruined it. By taking the leap again.
You glanced over, expecting him to be snapping his neck sideways. Instead, he was already looking right at you.
He visibly swallowed, sat up a little straighter, and risked to lift a hand off the table, offering a small, hesitant wave, accompanied by a soft, genuine smile that completely transformed his face. Breaking the stalemate, daring you to participate too.
Oh my. Your hand spasmed and in said hand was your mug with your latté. Your wrist ungracefully, unceremoniously jerked and enough espresso and oat milk splashed! over the rim to soak your notes and pool dangerously close to your laptop.
Humiliation hit your face like a freight train.
You couldn't find the courage to look up, if you did right now, you would literally expire on the spot. You grabbed a fistful of dry napkins, slapped them blindly over the puddle, and immediately started shoving your things into your bag.
Book? In. Laptop? Shoved. Dignity? Left in the puddle of dairy. Hotel? Trivago. (And I swear I will stop using this phrase. One dayâŠ)
You were packed and out of your chair in record time. The little bell chimed its cheery goodbye, and you noped the fuck out into the downtown crowd before you could actively perish from the secondhand embarrassment.
The air in the café suddenly felt completely different. Heavier. Emptier.
Satoru sat frozen in his chair, his hand still half-raised in that pathetic, brave little wave.
But you were fucking gone.
He lowered his hand, staring blankly at the empty chair you'd left behind. His heart hammered in his chest, but it wasnât because of the fluttery panic of having a crush. No no. This was faaar more dreadful.
Oh no.
He had spooked you. He had tried to be brave, bravest either of you ever allowed yourselves to be, he had tried to just smile at you, and you had literally rather fled the premises.
Satoru buried his face in his hands, his glasses digging uncomfortably into his palms.Â
Fuck, fuck. He didn't know your name, for fuckâs sake! He didn't know what you did for a living, or what you were always reading, or anything other than the fact that you had a sacred order and the cutest face he had ever seen.
He sat frozen to his spot with very icy, very ugly realization. What if you stop coming in because of him?
What if you were so so embarrassed that you will never come back to your wobbly little table? What if he had just ruined the one undeniably good thing about his week, all because he had spent a month staring at you like a coward, okay he is a coward he admits it okay?!, instead of just walking over and saying hello?
He furrowed his eyebrows as he eyed the soggy pile of soaked napkins as he sipped his own coffee. Tapped a finger against the ceramics.Â
Next time.
Next time he was just going to walk over. That was it. That was the whole plan. Simple.
NEXT TIME!
Except, there almost wasn't a next time. And he cursed himself every time you didnât show up. You didn't show up the day after, nor the day after that.
By the following week, Satoru was practically vibrating out of his skin. He went in every single day, just in case you broke your routine. But every single time he sat in the café alone, he almost convinced himself that he had ruined his own life by smiling too aggressively. Were his parents lying when they taught him to be nice to strangers?
But then you came back. Of course you came back. Itâs your freaking cafĂ©.
Yes, you had been avoiding it for almost a week, surviving on approximately seventeen different bathroom mirror pep talks and five different affirmation YouTube videos about how you were going to be completely, totally normal this time.
You will not stare! You will not spill a single drop of anything! You can drink a caffeinated beverage in the same zip code as a super hot guy in glasses. You can do this! You go girl!
You pushed the door open and he was there. Obviously, he was there. Why was he there.
You ordered your drink. But when you turned around to head to your cozy familiar corner, you froze.
Your table was taken. Some random-ass guy was sitting at your precious wobbly table, aggressively typing on a laptop. What the hell? Just your fucking luck. You stood in the middle of the café, clutching your mug, completely derailed. You scanned the room in a mild panic.
And the only open table left was... oh, God.
It was exactly one table away from Satoru.
It was closer than you had ever sat before. Closer than you would ever choose to sit. But you had no choice, though. You power-walked over like the big girl you were and practically threw yourself into the chair.
You were instantly off balance. You took out your book of the week, but you couldn't focus. You were so close now. Too close now.
You could feel the warmth radiating off him. You could smell his ridiculously good, subtle cologne. Something like cedar and clean laundry mixed with the scent of roasted beans. It was making you so, so pleasantly dizzy, or perhaps it was just him. You couldnât really tell.
You both fell right back into the unspoken dance, but it was completely different now. More exposed. You looked. He looked. The usual betrayal of your eyes, but with the closeness dialed up to an utterly suffocating, heart-fluttering level. Every time he shifted in his seat, you felt it. Every time you shifted, he felt it. Hyperaware of every movement, of every breath taken, of him.
You decided to look sideways, properly, for the first time today.
And it locked. It held.
It was longer than usual, electric! and absolutely terrifying. You could feel your heartbeat in your throat, yet the warm flutter that spread from your stomach all over your body prevented you from chickening out right away. It felt too good. You were pleasantly stuck. You were curious. And you were maybe testing the waters, too.
His eyes started darting all over your face, as if searching for clues, checking if he would, could, should take it further, if you dared to look even longer. He oh-so-wanted to. Needed to.
But as those absurdly pretty blues softened, melting into something fond and undeniably sweet, your breath hitched. You completely panicked again. You broke the gaze, snapping your eyes down to your novel and bracing for the agonizing silence as a hot, deeply betraying flush spread all over your neck and hiked up all the way to your cheeks.Â
Then, Satoru sighed.
It wasn't from disappointment, or from being angry. After all, he so proudly said next time, didn't he? And he understood that if anything, you were even more shy than him. He found it impossibly endearing.
It was a definitive, resolute sound, and you froze. You heard his chair being pushed back. Was he leaving because you were being such a coward again?
Then, a few soft footsteps closing the short distance between your respective tables.
A tall shadow fell over your table.
You slowly lifted your eyes and he was standing right there. Up close, he was somehow even tallerânot imposing though, more like inviting. And his chest was rising and falling a little too fast.
He reached out with a shaking hand, grabbed the chair across from you, and pulled it out.
The tips of his ears went brilliantly pink. He rubbed the back of his neck, burying his hands into the sleeves of his sweater, but he didn't run away. Now or never, baby. Hail Mary. He sat down. Right across from you.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, looked you right in the eyes, and let out a long, shaky exhale.
"I, uh." A pause. He cleared his throat. Pushed his glasses up again even though he'd just done that. "Caught you staring." His ears somehow got pinker. He wanted to sound more confident, but oh well... "I MEANâI was alsoâI've been staring. That's notâ" A beat. He ducked his head slightly, peering at you through his long lashes. "Hi. Can I sit with you?"
What. You stared at him.
"...you're already sitting."
"Yeah." He let out a breathless, cute little laugh. "Is that okay?"
You eyed the way his broad shoulders were hunched inward, how he was practically holding his breath while he waited for your permission to stay. He had actually crossed the unspoken line between you, managed to completely fumble his opening line, and was now looking at you with wide, nervous eyes.
"Yeah," you said softly, your voice barely above a whisper. "It's okay."
He smiled. A real one, wide and slightly crooked, and it did the thing to his face that made you always bite your lip, but up close it was somehow so much worse in the best way possible. He had dimples. Of course he had dimples.
"I'm Satoru," he said.
You told him your name. His smile just grew softer at the sound of it.
He reached over and stole the little glass sugar dispenser from the center of the table, turning it over in his hands like he desperately needed something to keep his fingers occupied.
Over the past week, Satoru had been planning, deciding how he would approach you. He had asked friends, scoured Reddit, and practically checked a freaking WikiHow on how to approach a cute girl in a cafĂ© when you've both been mutually staring at each other.Â
He hated all the cliché café-adjacent pick-up lines, but perhaps it was the gravity of your doe eyes, or perhaps he was just nervous. Either way, his mouth went on autopilot, asking with terrible casualness:
"You come here often?"
You looked at him.
He looked back, expectant, already cursing himself that his vocal cords had picked the absolute most ass question imaginable, but he tried to play it cool and you genuinely could not tell if he was joking or dead serious.
But this was the next time he had promised himself. And honestly, you had missed him over the week you spent caving at home. You thought about your café. Your corner. Your sacred table by the window that was currently occupied by a stranger who had no idea what he'd just accidentally done. Which you were currently thankful for. To Satoru. And to the stranger, too.
You picked up your coffee.
"Yeah," you said, a tiny, helpless smile finally breaking across your own face. As you decided that he meant it dead serious afterall. "Actually."
He looked unbearably pleased about this. You looked out the window so he wouldn't see just how hard you were blushing.
Then you thought about this table. This one, right here. The one that wasnât yours, nor his.
But as Satoru stretched his long legs out and his knees accidentally bumped gently against yours under the wood and neither of you pulled away you realized that maybe, just maybe, this table might just become yours. Both of yours.
ââ Divider from muerdida!
UGH THIS WAS SO CUTE I was giggling and smiling the whole time. So wholesome and cute. ugh shy nerdjo has my heart









