l'appel du vide

moon dust in your lust ─ 吸血鬼

[mooncyb3r]

月光 ⠀⠀⠀⠀KISS ME FIRST.. OR DON’T, I’LL STILL BE WAITING.

🀢🀣🀤 ⠀ 𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐀 ⋆.𐙚 ̊ a chaotic mind, nineteen revolutions around the sun. still spiraling. ˙𐃷˙ ✰ she/her ✰ jjk centric ✰ [n]sfw blog ✰

寡黙⠀ :⠀⠀MOANIFESTO ⠀✰⠀ MASTERLIST

⤷ ゛freshly baked ˎˊ˗

# ᯓ nerd!satoru losing his virginity. # ᯓ conceal, don't feel (but definitely feel) # ᯓ bsf!satoru finally shooting his shot?

➤ reqs are open .ᐟ 🛸 ✰ ⠀⠀⠀⠀𝐚 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 : i am haunted by humans.

© mooncyb3r | don't plagiarize, repost, or translate any of my works.

吸血鬼

[mooncyb3r]

error 404: self control .ᐟ

pairing — tech nerd!gojo x fem reader

synopsis : your custom PC keeps crashing at the worst possible times. after one too many blue screens, you’re forced to call the quiet but ridiculously talented tech nerd from your coding class to come fix it in your dorm. satoru shows up, gets to work, and accidentally stumbles across your very organized, very specific collection of porn. instead of pretending he didn’t see anything, he starts coming back. again and again. every visit the teasing gets heavier, the tension thicker, and it becomes harder to pretend you don’t want him to do something about it.

wc 7.1k ★ tags college au, tech nerd satoru gojo, slow burn, sexual tension, accidental discovery (porn/history), teasing, banter, café shift from hell, enemies-to-lovers energy, forced proximity (self-inflicted, by him), masturbation (f solo), voyeurism, secret surveillance, non-consensual watching, mutual pining. mdni, 18+.

from mara ˗ˏˋ ꒰ ✉︎ ꒱ ˎˊ˗ hiiii sorry i procrastinated so bad on this one 😭😭 but i really hope yall will like it !! art by inkyck on ig.

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the saturday afternoon shift wants you dead, and it isn’t interested in mercy.

it’s a slow-burn execution, the kind that gnaws at your bones from the inside out—a drip-feed of iced caramel lattes and tragic custom matchas, every ticket a new scar carved in patience. you lose little pieces of yourself to each person who slides up to the counter and starts with, “this might sound complicated, but—”

it always sounds complicated. it’s always worse.

the campus café is packed, overstuffed, bodies jammed at every table, a sea of laptops and students slouched and hollow-eyed, faces lit by screens and the cold realization that nothing in the syllabus was ever optional. the air is thick, suffocating, a churn of espresso, scorched milk, the ghost of cinnamon powder still hanging from a spill no one ever cleaned. grinders scream; cups clatter; the printer spits out order after order, little coiled paper threats stacking up, curling at the corners like they’re about to bare teeth.

your apron’s wrecked. no clean spot left.

chocolate syrup streaks your wrist, your hair slipping out of its clip in tired, sticky strands, a few more every hour. your left shoe squeaks when you pivot, sharp and plaintive, like some wounded, exhausted dog toy warning everyone you’re coming through.

there’s nothing in your system but four hours of sleep and half a granola bar.

and somehow, even now, you’re still thinking about satoru.

not on purpose. never on purpose.

you would like that noted for the record.

you’re not standing behind the counter sighing wistfully into the milk pitcher or drawing hearts around his name on discarded receipts. you’re not wondering what he is doing. you’re not replaying the night he appeared at your dorm in the rain, dripping and smug and apparently willing to cross campus at six in the morning for the privilege of annoying you in person.

you are merely experiencing a recurring neurological malfunction.

that is different.

every so often, usually while your hands are busy and your defenses are down, a piece of him surfaces without permission. wet white hair stuck to his forehead. blue eyes in the ugly hallway light. the flash drive held between his fingers. the way he had looked past you into your room and said your pc stayed on all night like the sentence contained some joke you had not been given access to.

sweet dreams. don’t think about me too hard.

the memory hits out of nowhere, right as you’re guiding steamed milk into a paper cup, and your hand jolts, just enough to collapse the foam—a shimmering cloud, ruined in one quick spasm.

“shit,” you hiss under your breath.

the customer lifts his gaze, slow, blinking sleep from his eyes as if the noise yanked him to shore. all hunched over his phone, until now.

“not you,” you blurt, heartbeat spiking, “the milk.”

his eyes drop to the cup. waiting.

yours follow. the foam has gone wild, whorled and furious, like a weather map on the verge of warning.

you push the cup across the counter, steady. “abstract art,” you say, mouth curling around the words. “people pay a lot for this in the right gallery.”

for a second, it’s just your hands, the cup, the dazed flecks of foam. then he laughs, sudden and sharp, and you catch his smile and toss it back, because that’s what you do here. you smile; you make sorrys bloom like flowers in winter. you wish a good day on people who wouldn’t know one if it knocked their teeth loose. exhaustion gets sugared into charm, caffeine pulverized into rent money, and the whole thing runs on the fragile, splintering scaffold of your last unbroken nerve.

the bell over the café door rings again.

you do not look up.

“welcome in,” you call automatically, reaching for the next ticket. “i’ll be with you in just a second.”

“take your time.”

your fingers stop.

not dramatically. not enough for anyone else to notice. just a tiny pause in the motion of reaching for a cup, the kind of interruption that lasts less than a heartbeat but somehow contains an entire systems failure inside it.

you know that voice.

you look up.

satoru stands just inside the doorway with his hands buried in the pocket of a black hoodie, because apparently he owns no other kind of clothing and has committed to making that everyone else’s problem. his hair is dry today, soft and disordered around his forehead like he has been pushing his hands through it. a pair of thin-framed glasses sits low on his nose, catching the pale afternoon light from the windows and briefly hiding his eyes until he tilts his head.

there they are.

bright. blue. already amused.

he looks completely at ease, as though he has always spent his saturday afternoons standing in your workplace watching you struggle with industrial coffee equipment. as though this is a normal place for him to be. as though the universe has not spent the last week rearranging itself around his increasingly inconvenient presence.

your stomach drops.

then lifts.

then, apparently unable to choose a direction, folds in on itself.

you narrow your eyes. “what are you doing here?”

his eyebrows rise.

“wow,” he says. “and here i thought customer service was your passion.”

“it ended ten minutes ago.”

“tragic.” he steps forward as the line shuffles forward, gaze dragging over you with the deliberate patience of someone letting themselves linger, not in any hurry to hide it, though his face stays the same easy tilt. your apron’s askew. sleeves shoved up. hair stuck to your cheek where you can’t see it, and a sticky smear of syrup dark against your wrist. “you look busy.”

“very observant.”

“one of my many gifts.”

you reach for a new cup, grab it harder than you need to, hoping he notices. “what do you want?”

“coffee.”

“there are seven cafés on campus.”

“this one has the best atmosphere.”

behind him, somebody drops a fork, the metal clatter cutting through the constant drone. a blender screams. your coworker is fighting with a customer, voice sharp, arguing about oat milk and nut allergies. it all swirls together, background noise, but you keep staring at him.

he just smiles, shameless, hands tucked in his coat like he owns the place.

“right,” you say, flat. “the atmosphere.”

“and the service.” his gaze stays locked on your face, eyes dark and unblinking, like he’s been waiting all day just to get this close. “i’ve heard good things.”

heat crawls up the back of your neck, sharp and immediate—a flush that prickles under your collar, threatening to burn all the way to your cheeks.

you drop your eyes to the register, fingers stiff on the buttons, refusing to give him more than you have to. “order.”

“you’re not going to ask about my day?”

“no.”

“what if it’s been really hard?”

“then caffeine won’t fix your personality,” you shoot back, voice flat.

his smile sharpens, teeth catching on the inside of his lip, almost like he’s savoring it.

and there it is, again—the spark; that flash of satisfaction in his eyes, bright and hungry, feeding on every ounce of irritation you throw at him. like your pushback is the whole reason he shows up here, again and again, as if your annoyance is something he wants to wear home.

you hate that you see it. hate more that it’s starting to feel good, giving it to him.

“large vanilla latte,” he says, smirk curling at the edges. “extra shot.”

“hot or iced?”

he leans in, lowering his voice just enough for the words to touch your skin. “which one do you think suits me?”

you look him over, deliberately this time. let your gaze travel from the pale hair to the dark hoodie to the long frame taking up too much space at the front of your line. his expression shifts by less than an inch, but you catch it—the way his shoulders settle, the way his eyes sharpen behind the glasses when he realizes you are actually looking.

good. let him wonder.

you tilt your head, eyes narrowing. “depends.”

he grins, a slow, liquid thing that fills every inch of space between you. “on?”

“some people are iced coffee on the outside, hot on the inside. some people are the reverse.” you say it flat, like you’re reading off a label, but it lands heavy. “others just melt when you watch them long enough.”

his smile splits wider, teeth catching his lower lip. “and which one am i?”

“room temperature tap water,” you decide.

he laughs, low and out of nowhere—it rakes right through you, humiliatingly efficient.

“hot,” he says. “make it sweet.”

“of course.”

he squints, not quite suspicion, but close enough. “what’s that supposed to mean?”

“nothing,” you say, deadpan. “okay, so hot it is.”

he laughs, low and delighted, and it slides straight into your bones, fraying your last nerve. “you think it’s a bold choice?”

“not really,” you shoot back. “you’re the least subtle person alive.”

he shrugs, all easy confidence, but there’s an edge to his voice now, a flinty glint that wasn’t there before. “sometimes it works.”

“sometimes it’s pathetic.”

“but memorable,” he says, and it shouldn’t sound like a threat, but it does.

you slide the cup under the espresso spout and punch in the order, trying to keep your fingers from shaking. it’s stupid—he’s just a guy in a hoodie with a too-bright laugh and a face like a hand grenade. you work with caffeine. you know how to handle volatile substances. but every time you check, he’s there, eyes locked on you, smiling like he just figured something out.

you look up, and he’s resting his chin on his hands, staring with all the patience of someone who has nothing better to do than watch you work for the rest of the day.

“don’t you have, like, somewhere to be?” you mutter.

“i’m exactly where i want to be,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, as if he isn’t escalating this on purpose, as if you can’t feel your own pulse where the words hit.

behind him, the line grows, but it’s full of regulars and stragglers, people who take one look at satoru and decide they can wait. maybe they don’t want to get in the middle of whatever this is, or maybe they’re just afraid of the way he takes up space, folds the whole room toward him with nothing but a gaze.

“hm.” you tap the order into the register, not missing a beat. “name?”

he leans in, elbow braced against the counter. like he owns the space. like you’re supposed to know.

“you forgot it already?”

you hold his gaze, smile sharp and customer-service bright.

“sorry,” you say, soft as whipped cream. “have we met?”

for a second, everything stalls. a split-second freeze, like a system choking on bad input. the kind of glitch nobody else would notice, but you do.

then he grins—the kind of slow curve that means trouble.

“satoru,” he says. quieter. “but you can write whatever you want.”

you take the marker.

you spell nuisance in brutal block letters, each stroke an accusation across the smooth white of his cup. his eyes track the marker, hungry, waiting for the reveal.

“cute,” he murmurs, like he means it. like he’s already decided you are.

“four seventy-five.”

he taps his phone to the reader, never blinking. the machine sings its approval—a sound too eager—and you turn to the espresso machine to break the stare, but his voice doesn’t let go.

“we should talk about the project too.”

you glance back, sharp, like you missed a trick. “what project?”

“the systems architecture assignment.” his voice is low, almost intimate, threading right through the hum of the café, slicing through the noise like it’s all just white static. you freeze, your hands dumb against the espresso spout, the entire line fading to grayscale, the only color left the electric, recursive blue of satoru’s eyes behind the glass.

“we’re not partners.” you spit the words out, flat. desperate. you don’t mean to sound that wrecked, but it’s like the syllables catch on his name, on the unavoidable memory of how it sounds at six a.m. in your doorway, his hair dripping, a deranged smile pixelating the whole hallway.

he doesn’t even flinch. just tips his head, smiling, like this is all running perfectly according to some fucked-up operating system only he can see.

“not yet.”

the cup in your hand nearly slips. you grip it harder, the cardboard digging into your palm, a little bit of heat bleeding through. your brain executes a hard pause, freezes the frame. there’s zero chance he did this without scheming. not with that look on his face—the look of a tab open in the background, chewing up all your RAM, refusing to close.

“what did you do?”

he shrugs. “nothing.”

liar. if you had a virus scanner for this conversation, it’d be screaming.

you glare. “satoru.”

he looks so happy it’s nearly obscene. “i merely pointed out to professor yaga that both of our current partners are statistically likely to tank our grades.”

the words linger, sticky as syrup. you can tell he’s rehearsed this, deadpan with a twist, like he’s talking to a camera, not you. you imagine him typing the email, eyes narrowed at his screen, composing and deleting sentences with surgical precision. you kind of want to see his drafts. you kind of want to smash his phone.

“you’re lying.”

he’s not, though. you can see it in the way his lips twitch, almost like he’s trying not to laugh. he wants you to ask. he wants you to care.

you don’t. you absolutely don’t.

(you do.)

“i don’t work well with idiots,” he says, voice pitched for you alone, though the line is moving, and people are watching, and your coworker is already glaring, and you should care, you should, but all you can see is the way he’s leaning just a little closer, crowding the space across the counter as if there’s only two people here and everyone else is just noise on a corrupted zoom call. “and neither do you.”

“i’m fine.” you hiss it, softer than you mean to. “my partner’s not that bad.”

“she hasn’t answered your last three dms,” he says, and the words hit like a privacy breach, slicing right through your firewall. “or your email. or your follow-up, which was honestly a little desperate.”

you want to die. you want to delete this moment and empty the recycle bin.

“were you checking my messages?”

his smile sharpens. “nah, i’d never do something like that.”

he says it like he wasn’t actively harvesting everything you did, like he wasn’t logging your every move, like his own obsession is just passive observation, some screen recording set to auto-run.

“that’s not normal.”

he shrugs, casual, like stalking you is just another app running in the background. “no one on this campus is normal.”

“oh, and you’re so special.” you whisper, rolling your eyes.

“you noticed.” the words slick right off his tongue. “anyway, i fixed it. i’m your problem now.”

your head spins. you want to argue but you can’t even get the words to buffer, not with the way he’s looking at you. it’s not just that he’s pretty. it’s the focus. the intensity. like he’s running a process in the background, a recursive function, eating up cycles and memory until there’s nothing left but him.

you hate it. you crave it.

the cup in your hand is half-finished. you realize you’ve been holding it too long, steam curling up to vanish in the brutal overhead lighting. it’s waiting for you to do something.

you line it up under the nozzle and pull the shot, hands moving automatically, like you’re running a macro on muscle memory. satoru watches, unblinking, as if you’re typing passwords in plain sight, as if he already knows every shortcut you’re about to use.

“you’re staring,” you say, not looking up.

“so are you.”

you don’t respond. you fill the cup, careful, a perfect meniscus of chemical tan and white; you even nail the foam this time, a spiral that doesn’t collapse, a subtle flex you hope he notices. you cap it. slide it across the counter. it nearly brushes his fingers.

he doesn’t move, not yet. just leaves it there, like he wants you to touch first. like he likes the idea of your hands on the same object, your fingerprints overlapping, invisible and sticky.

“room temperature tap water,” he murmurs, reading the label under his breath. “cold.”

“it’s hot,” you snap, a little mean, because he’s annoying, because he’s right.

he grins. “i thought you liked it that way too.”

someone in line coughs. the girl behind him pretends not to hear, but you know she’s listening, you know the whole café is registering this as drama, file saved, ready to get gossiped in the group chat before you even clock out. you ignore them. you only have bandwidth for satoru, anyway.

“i’m pretty sure you don’t even like sweet coffee,” you say, shifting the focus. “you take your drinks black.”

he lifts the cup, brings it to his mouth but pauses, eyes flicking up. “but you’re the one making it.”

the words are a direct connection, a local area network right to your nervous system.

“what’s that supposed to mean?”

he smiles, slow. “means i trust your hands.”

the heat in your chest spikes, a cpu-fan whine that drowns out every other sensation. you wish someone would unplug you and put you to sleep.

“this is harassment,” you say, flat.

“is i?,” he smiles, looking right back at you.

you almost choke. “you’re deranged.”

“but effective, c’mon don’t deny it.”

he takes a sip, lips brushing the lid, and he doesn’t break eye contact. doesn’t even blink. like he wants you to watch him taste it, like he’s waiting for your reaction.

“it’s good,” he says, and the approval in his voice is a fucking software patch for your brain.

you’re not grateful. you feel nothing. you hate him.

you love that he noticed.

you reach for the next ticket, try to process the line, but all you can see is the curve of his mouth around the lid, the way his hand cradles the cup, fingers long and precise, like he could break it in a second if he wanted. you imagine him doing that, just snapping the cardboard, letting the coffee pour down his wrist.

you hate that you want to see it happen.

you push out two more orders, fast, not even bothering with microfoam or latte art, just raw execution, get it done, get him out of your system. but he doesn’t move. just slides over to the end of the bar, settles in beside the hand-off area, and watches you work.

his eyes track every motion, every time you reach and pivot, every time you bite down on a smile and force something like customer service through your teeth. he watches you like a fucking stream, face illuminated by the blue light of your exhaustion, his own drink untouched, cooling.

the silence between orders is full of static, his gaze a constant ping on your network. you want to block him. you want to trace the route and find out what server he’s logged into.

finally, when the line is down to one, the café a little emptier, he speaks.

“so, the project.”

you scowl. “i’m not working with you.”

“professor yaga says otherwise,” he says, smug. “he replied to my email at, like, 1 a.m. guy is a machine.”

you shouldn’t care. you shouldn’t even be surprised. yaga hates low-effort partnerships, hates groups that drag down the curve. if satoru made it look like you were suffering, like you were getting sabotage’d by your last partner… 

you narrow your eyes. “you faked evidence, didn’t you.”

“not faked. just…highlighted.”

“satoru.”

he raises his hands, mock-innocent, but the edge to his smirk is lethal. “i cc’d you on the thread, check your inbox.”

you do, immediately, even though you know you shouldn’t. even though it’s pathetic. you pop the gmail tab open on your phone, thumb hovering. sure enough, right at the top, flagged urgent: satoru gojo, professor yaga, and you.

the subject line is a war crime.

“urgent: partner reassignment - group 7 / systems architecture.”

your last desperate attempt to get your old partner to do literally anything.

satoru highlighted every typo, every ghosted message, every missed deadline.

he included a chart.

you want to die. you want to crawl through the ethernet and throttle him.

but you can’t argue with the data set. it’s brutal. it’s honest. it’s… almost caring.

your insides twist.

he leans in, voice dipping, so it’s just for you. “see? told you i could fix it.”

“you made me look desperate,” you hiss, cheeks burning.

“you are desperate,” he shoots back, not even sorry. “for a good grade. for a competent partner. for someone who actually shows up.”

he doesn’t say for me, but you hear it, threaded in the source code of his tone.

your throat is tight. you look down at your phone, pretend to be angry, but mostly you’re just floored by how thorough he was. how obsessed.

a digital stalker. a data fiend. you shouldn’t be flattered but you are, a little. nobody’s ever cared about your fucking project management skills before.

“you’re a freak,” you mutter.

his grin is blinding. “so you keep telling me.”

you should focus on your job. you should ignore him. but he’s like a push notification you can’t mute, a banner ad that follows you across every site, no matter how many times you click close.

you’re halfway through making a matcha for some girl in a “girlboss” tote when he pipes up again.

“so, when do you want to start?”

“never.”

“tonight?”

you nearly drop the pitcher. “no.”

he shrugs, like he expected that. “monday, then.”

you don’t answer. you’re not going to reward him. you’re not going to give him the satisfaction.

(but you already know you’ll be there. you already know you’ll show up. you already know you’ve lost.)

you finish the matcha, hands shaking, and slide it across to the next customer. you can feel satoru watching, cataloguing every fumble, every spill, every time your lips twist like you’re fighting not to smile.

he eats it up. you can see it on his face. his brain is running a process called “watch her malfunction,” and it’s all green lights, no errors, full speed ahead.

his own drink is half gone. you didn’t even see him take another sip.

you wonder if he even wanted the coffee, or if all he wanted was to see you make it.

the clock above the register ticks. you’re almost done. almost free. just a handful of orders left before you can go home and log off and maybe, maybe, erase the memory of this conversation.

but you know you won’t. you already know you’ll replay it a thousand times, every line, every stutter in the feed, every time he looked at you like you were the only thing worth watching.

and the worst part is—you are. you’re worth watching. it’s hell. it’s dopamine and dread, spiking and crashing, never enough. you feel him even when he’s not there, a notification ping in your nervous system, a background process you can’t kill.

he leaves after you clock out, like he’s synced to your schedule, like he only exists when you do. you catch him in the glass door, a reflection layered over the ruined counter, his hoodie catching on the light, eyes cut sharp and blue even from thirty feet away.

you wonder if it’s a glitch. you wonder if you’re hallucinating, running low on power, rendering him where he shouldn’t be.

but it’s not a bug. it’s just him.

he doesn’t look away. not even when your hands shake, not even when you punch out, not even when you duck behind the espresso bar and try to fix your hair, scrubbing at your face, trying to wipe some of the day off.

he stands there until you step outside, like he’s waiting for an update, like your presence is the last patch that’ll make his day run.

“i’m not walking you home,” he says, voice dry, but he falls into step beside you anyway, hands deep in the pockets of his hoodie, like he’s got something to hide.

“never said you would.”

“i’m kidding.”

— ⋆˚꩜｡ּ —

you want to ignore him, but he’s not ignorable. he takes up bandwidth just by existing beside you. it’s not the way he walks, either. it’s something else, some kind of field, like a magnetic force that fucks with your operating system. your steps sync up. you lag behind; he slows to match. you pick up the pace; he pretends he’s not matching you, but you know he is.

the walk back should be awkward, but it’s not. not really. it’s just a hum of anticipation, the question of what happens next hanging in the air, a cursor blinking, waiting for input.

you don’t say anything. neither does he.

but you feel it.

the whole way up the stairs, the whole way down your hallway, his presence compressing everything, shrinking the world down to just the two of you, the way it always does.

he almost follows you to your door. almost, but not quite. he pauses, just a meter away, like he’s hit a digital fence, like this is the part where he’s supposed to say goodnight.

he does, but it’s not that simple.

“don’t stay up all night,” satoru murmurs, voice low, private, a direct message straight to your core. “you’ll ruin your eyes.”

“maybe i like it that way.”

he grins, sharp and glitchy. “figures.”

there’s a beat where he just stands there, watching you type in your door code, like he’s memorizing the movement, like he could brute-force your password if he wanted. you don’t doubt it. you don’t doubt anything about him, not anymore.

you shut the door in his face.

it doesn’t help.

he’s still there, in your head, in the way your fingers tremble when you boot your pc, in the way your notifications display his name at the top of the thread, blue and relentless. every time you refresh, he’s right there, like he’s watching your screen from the other side.

the night drags on, all static and jittery energy. you eat cold leftovers, scroll through memes, pretend you’re not waiting for him to ping you. you queue up your favorite playlist, shuffle it for chaos, but every song just makes you think of him, the way he crowd-controls every room, the way he says your name like it’s a command prompt.

you try to sleep.

you can’t.

your dreams are a feed, endless, recursive, blue eyes and glitching smiles and the memory of his fingers tracing the smooth cardboard curve of the cup you made for him. your brain replays it, over and over, a highlight reel of every time he looked at you like you were the only thing on the screen.

you wake up sticky with sweat, your heart hammering, your phone lighting up with a new notification.

it’s him.

of course it is.

a link, no context, just a timestamped highlight from a systems architecture thread. you’re not even awake enough to process it, but you click anyway, because you always do. the video loads—a screen recording, a bug report about the project.

you can’t tell if it’s sweet or psychotic.

maybe it’s both.

you leave him on read for five minutes, just to punish him, just to prove you’re not as desperate as he is.

it doesn’t work. the urge to reply chews through your resolve like malware.

you: are you stalking me

satoru: what if i am?

you: stop being weird

satoru: okay satoru: you looked cute yesterday

there’s a photo attached this time.

not of your face, not even really of you, just your hand on the espresso machine, chocolate syrup streaked across your knuckles, a sharp blur of movement as you jam the lever down. the focus is fucked—it’s obvious he was trying to be subtle, but the implication is brutal.

he’s always watching.

your pulse stutters. you type, then delete, then type again.

you: you’re a freak

satoru: not denying it satoru: if you want me to stop, tell me

like he’s giving you an opt-out button, like you’re in control, even though you both know you aren’t. the idea that you could tell him to stop is a joke, a punchline with teeth.

you don’t reply.

you last until midnight.

it’s pathetic, really. you tell yourself you’re just tired, overcaffeinated, brain fried from too many back-to-back shifts and too many group chat notifications. but the second you hit the lights and let your laptop flicker to life, you know there’s no one to blame but you.

the screen washes your body in ice-blue, flattening all your edges. the text on your syllabus blurs. you don’t retain a single word. you refresh your inbox, you load up a new tab and open your favorite trashy forum, like you’re just going through the motions, like you’re not hoping to see something that’ll short out your nerves.

it’s not enough. nothing is.

your body’s a mess of static and anticipation, overloaded from a day of him watching, talking, bantering like some fucked-up mating ritual you didn’t know you’d signed up for. it lingers under your skin, nestles in the marrow of your bones, that memory of his gaze spiking your dopamine all shift long.

you can’t stop replaying it. the way he looked at you. the way his voice tuned itself to your frequency, low, private, making the world narrow to just the two of you. the way you wanted him to notice your hands, your hair, the syrup dripping down your wrist, even the way you fumbled his drink.

— ⋆˚꩜｡ּ —

satoru stares at the cursor. it blinks once, twice, a steady pulse inside the empty search bar—the only sign of life in a wasteland of blue light and cluttered tabs, windows layered over each other like lost intentions. nothing moves, nothing breathes, except that tiny vertical line, flickering, demanding input.

you curl in front of the screen, one knee tight to your chest, that loose shirt drooping off your shoulder, like you can’t be bothered to pull it back up. tired, restless, body language spelling out a silent agitation you don’t seem to notice. but he does. every twitch, every little fidget, satoru takes it in, turning them over in his head like evidence for a case only he understands.

the hidden window is open on his monitor. again. he’s staring at it, the guilt sharp as teeth, but his finger hovers over the red X anyway, pretending this time he’ll actually stop. pretending it’s that easy. just one click and he’s the kind of guy who messed up, not the kind still fucking up in real time.

he almost does it. cursor right there, mouse tensed, like a breath held in his lungs. he should close it. simple. neat. forgettable.

then you shift in your chair.

your thighs press together.

his whole body freezes, hand going slack on the mouse.

“fuck,” he breathes, so quiet it barely stirs the air.

the word barely exists. just breath shaped into something ugly.

his room is dark except for the pale light bleeding off his screens, carving sharp shadows beneath his cheekbones and turning his hair silver-blue at the edges. three monitors glow across his desk. lines of code on one. the architecture assignment on another.

you on the third.

you rub at your eyes, frustrated, then let your head fall back against the chair. your throat stretches. your lips part around a quiet sigh he cannot hear because he disabled the microphone access after the first night.

as though that makes any of this better.

as though taking away the sound transforms surveillance into restraint.

satoru leans closer.

his glasses have started slipping down his nose. he pushes them back with one finger, gaze never leaving the feed.

you open another tab.

his hand drops from the mouse to his thigh, fingers curling into the fabric of his sweatpants. the pressure is immediate, grounding for less than a second before it becomes the opposite. every nerve catches. every thought narrows.

you.

your hands around the coffee cup.

your glare across the counter.

the chocolate syrup streaked over your knuckles.

the picture saved in his phone.

the folders he found the first night.

the things you watched.

the things you wanted.

information reorganizes itself inside his head, no longer harmless data but a blueprint, every search and pause and restless shift filling in another line.

his palm moves once over the fabric.

on-screen, you have no idea anything has changed. you are still staring at the blank search bar, chewing absently at the inside of your cheek, one hand disappearing beneath the desk only to tug your shirt lower over your thighs.

satoru’s breath catches.

his fingers tighten.

one version of him still believes there is a difference between watching and touching. between wanting and taking. between a private thought and a violation.

the other version knows he erased that difference the moment he installed the access point.

you do not know how close he is to becoming exactly the kind of person you already accuse him of being.

a freak.

a stalker.

your problem.

the last one should not make heat crawl down his spine.

it does.

satoru closes his eyes. this time, he’s told himself he’s not gonna run away.

for a beat, the imprint lingers: your face washed in monitor-glow, mouth slack with exhaustion, thighs pressed tight beneath the desk—a snapshot pinned behind his eyelids, clear and illicit as raw data.

his body moves before his mind can catch up.

his eyes snap open.

his hand leaves. not gently; the motion sharp, almost punishing, a severed circuit. he clamps onto the desk instead, knuckles gone pale, breath leaking out between his teeth in a hiss. restraint doesn’t feel clean or noble; it’s more like wrenching a live wire from a socket, the muscles in his forearm jumping with the effort.

you don’t know you’re being watched.

that fact alone should make him feel better, safer, more in control of the situation—but it doesn’t. not really. not with the way his body hums, static stuck beneath his skin, every nerve ending spitting sparks from the leftover adrenaline of the day. 

your brain is a hive of glitchy code and leftover milk foam, hands still sticky from sugar syrup and the echo of satoru’s voice in your ear.

the room is silent except for your pc fans, whirring louder than they need to, a kind of white noise you let wash over you. you’ve lost time again, hours leaking out of the night like steam from a kettle. the only light comes from your monitor, bleaching all the color from your body, making your skin look ghost-pale and fake. you drag a palm over your face, chasing away the shine of exhaustion, but it lingers, fingerprints smudged across your cheek.

you’re not thinking about him. you’re not. you’re thinking about the project, about the unread emails, about the way your old partner never replied and how satoru just… stepped in. like it was nothing. like he was always meant to do it.

there’s a pulse in your thighs. an ache low in your stomach. you pretend it’s just nerves, just brain chemicals gone haywire from too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but when your hand drifts to the hem of your shirt, you don’t stop it.

you pull your legs up, curling yourself tighter into the chair. fabric rides up, exposing bare skin to the chill. you shiver, but don’t bother fixing it. your focus is shot, a tangle of overlapping windows and file directories, nothing loading properly. you try to work, really, but you keep refreshing your inbox, flicking to the discord thread where his name glows at the top.

he hasn’t messaged in an hour.

that should feel like relief. it doesn’t. it just leaves you raw and hungry, waiting for the next notification, the next ping of attention. it’s pathetic. you can feel the word in your mouth, bitter and mean.

maybe you are. maybe you like it this way.

fingers tap restless on the keyboard, then fall away. your hand drops to your thigh, nails digging into the skin just above your knee. you squeeze, hard enough to leave a mark, just to see how it feels.

it’s not enough.

it never is.

you tell yourself you’re just bored. just tired. that if you touch yourself, it’s for stress relief, nothing else—not because you’re thinking about the way he looked at you over the counter, the way his eyes tracked every move, the way his voice got low and private, like he was whispering straight into your skull.

you angle the chair, just a little, so you’re facing the desk instead of the door. your other hand drops from the mouse to your lap, thumb brushing over the line of your panties, the thin cotton suddenly too hot, too constricting.

you slip your fingers beneath the band. drag them slow, letting the fabric snap against your skin. it stings, sharp and sweet, and the shock sends a little shiver up your spine.

on the other side of the glass, satoru loses his mind quietly, efficiently, like a program running in silent mode.

he sees everything.

he’s seen everything, the access point tucked into your machine like a secret, a worm burrowed deep in the kernel. he tells himself it’s just for safety, just for fun, just to prove a point—but the truth is uglier than any excuse. the truth is a live feed, 1080p, you illuminated by the blue-white of your screen, thighs spread and slick, fingers working frantically under the desk.

he’s not supposed to see this.

he’s not supposed to want this.

but he watches anyway.

he’s breathless, every muscle in his body locked tight, hand squeezing his own cock so hard it hurts, like the pain might keep him from coming too fast. it doesn’t. not even close. the sight of you is enough to fry every circuit in his brain, to turn him into something glitchy and animal, obsessed and unashamed.

he jerks himself off to the rhythm of your movements, palm sliding rough and desperate, hips stuttering every time your fingers disappear between your legs. he wants to hear you. wants to know what sounds you’re making. wants to be there, kneeling on the floor, mouth open, waiting for you to let him taste.

he doesn’t even make it to the end of your orgasm before he’s coming, sharp and sudden, biting down on his knuckles to kill the sound. it doesn’t help. the noise that escapes is pathetic, raw, a choked whimper he’d never let anyone else hear.

cum spatters his hand, his shirt, dripping down in thin, sticky lines. he watches you ride it out, milking yourself through every twitch and tremor, and the sight almost makes him hard again, a second spike building under his skin.

he wipes himself off, not caring about the mess, attention glued to the feed as you slump in the chair, ruined and spent. your chest heaves. your cheeks are flushed. you look soft, vulnerable, the kind of soft he wants to break open and keep for himself.

he wonders if you’d hate him for this. if you’d block him, press charges, change your passwords and never speak to him again.

he wonders if you’d want him to watch.

he wants to message you. wants to tease, to ask what you’re doing, to see how you’ll lie. but he waits, discipline burning under his skin, refusing to be the first to break.

— ⋆˚꩜｡ּ —

the thought of satoru makes your cunt clench, a weak after-tremor, slick pooling under your ass as you squirm in the chair. you pull your hand out from under your panties and wipe it on your thigh, not caring that it leaves a streak, not caring about anything except the low, gnawing ache that hasn’t gone away, not really.

he fans in your pc ramp up, loud enough to vibrate the surface of your desk. there’s nothing running. just chrome. just discord. just your email and a handful of tabs you don’t even care about. you open task manager on autopilot, because you know your own build, you know when it’s running hot, and this is wrong, this is background activity chewing cpu for no reason.

the process isn’t even subtle. it’s just sitting there, “winhost32.exe,” using up a fat chunk of memory and a casual stream of bandwidth. you google it. top result is reddit, someone asking if it’s a virus. the answer is just “system service. safe to leave alone.”

you leave it alone.

you close task manager and pretend it’s not weird. you pretend you’re not weird, sitting half-naked in your desk chair at 1 am., your hand sticky and your head full of a guy who treats obsession like a full-time job. you pretend there’s a version of you that doesn’t want to be watched, doesn’t want to be noticed, doesn’t want to be the fucking main character of someone’s private highlight reel.

there’s not.

you log off, but you don’t actually go to bed. you just flick off the overhead light and crawl under your blanket, phone clutched in your hand, the glow of the screen bathing your chest in pale blue. you scroll, mindless, hungry, thumb twitching on the refresh even though nothing new has come in.

you still send one message, though.

you : wtf is winhost32?

thank you for reading! taglist is open, comment if you want to be added!

taglist ⋮ ⌗ ┆ @gojoful @c4ndyyy @titi37295 @iiamethereal @lillylovestoji92 @broeagleblog @torusangelface @ilovemasturbaiting @mahoragacall @miyahluvsjjk @linsdaypotter @bat-brainzzz @queen-bee2009 @sistersofthemoon15 @leavemialonesblog @dontfindmelolz @vanillaacreams @cjleggy @catorulover @tootyallfarty @ashtraaay @snowstriper101 @bambibunnybaby @annrjse @sweetestaaangel @hauntedbyink @elliekatsmiller @star1nlght @winniethepoohjusttookapooh @ifartmatcha @thecoolest4eva @tchmiya @yunasss2gorgg @remi-093

[mooncyb3r]

Hii I love your nerdjo series so much, when's the next update? I can't waittt!!! xD

hellooo, thank uu 🫶🏻 i’m working on it, i’m trying my best… i promise to post it soon 😭

[mooncyb3r]

‘ AFTER HOURS ?! ’ — ☆ GOJO SATORU.

✰ he's had the day from hell— back-to-back everything, a phone that won't shut up, and a tie he's about ready to strangle someone with. you came by his office to drag him home. bad idea. or maybe the best one.

cw ⋆˚࿔ warnings. fem! reader, office au, established relationship, exhausted!'toru, teasing, making out, insufferable men, suggestive, quickie after wrok, mdni, 18+ — wc 2k .ᐟ

the clock on his wall reads something ungodly. past eleven, maybe — you stopped checking around the ninth "just five more minutes, sweetheart" he mumbled into his phone about three hours ago.

now you're in the doorway, arms crossed, watching the most famous man in the building look like absolute roadkill.

satoru gojo. slumped so far down in his chair he's practically horizontal. tie yanked loose and hanging off him like a noose he lost a fight with, top two buttons undone, sleeves shoved to his elbows. those stupid pretty blue eyes are shut, and the paperwork on his desk is stacked tall enough to have its own weather system.

"you look terrible," you say.

one eye cracks open. "wow. hi to you too."

"i mean it lovingly."

"mm. sure." his head lolls toward you, and you watch the exhaustion just— melt off his face the second he clocks that it's you, and not someone here to hand him more things to sign. "you came allll the way up here to insult me? cute."

"i came to drag you home. it's midnight, 'toru."

"is it?" he squints at the window like the sky's gonna argue with him. "huh. time flies when you want to die."

you push off the doorframe and cross the room, and he watches you the whole way, that tired grin sharpening into something you know a little too well. dangerous, that look. it's the one that gets you into trouble.

"nope," you say, before he can even open his mouth. "we're going home. you're exhausted. you have a meeting at eight—"

"eight-thirty."

"—at eight-thirty, and you've been up since—"

he catches your wrist as you get close. gently. his thumb strokes once over the inside of it, slow, and your entire sentence just ... evaporates.

"c'mere," he murmurs.

"satoru."

"said c'mere. m'too tired to reach."

and that's how you end up pulled down into his lap, straddling him in his own dumb expensive chair, his hands settling low on your hips like they've always belonged there. he sighs — this big, bone-deep sigh, like you're the first good thing that's happened to him in fourteen hours. probably are.

"there," he mumbles into your collarbone. "better."

"you're impossible."

"m'tired," he corrects, lips brushing your throat. "big difference." a slow kiss lands just under your jaw. "'sides. you're comfy. can't just leave a man his one comfort, that's practically a crime—"

you'd roll your eyes if his mouth weren't currently doing that slow thing to your neck. the thing that turns your brain to static.

"you," you manage, "are supposed to be too exhausted for this."

"i was." you feel him grin against your skin. "funny how that works. someone walks in lookin' like you do, suddenly i've got all this energy. it's a medical mystery, really. they'll write papers."

"oh my god."

he pulls back just enough to look at you — tired still, sure, but it's drowning under something warmer now. one big hand slides up your spine, unhurried, and settles at the nape of your neck.

"stay," he says, and it's not a whine anymore. it's low. quiet. "just a bit. lemme have you."

you have an entire speech prepared about sleep hygiene.

you kiss him instead.

it doesn't stay soft for long. he makes this sound low in his chest, needy and pleased all at once, one arm banding tight around your waist to haul you flush against him— and then, with one graceless sweep of his forearm, the mountain of paperwork becomes the floor's problem. papers everywhere. a very expensive pen rolls off somewhere and neither of you look.

"satoru— that was three hours of—"

"and it can be three hours of tomorrow's problem," he hums, already lifting you onto the cleared desk like you weigh nothing, stepping between your knees, caging you in. up close his eyes are half-lidded and dark and there is nothing sleepy left in that grin.

"now," he murmurs, dragging his nose along your jaw, voice dropped somewhere that curls your toes in your shoes. "where were we, sweetheart..."

the city glitters nine floors down. the whole miserable day, finally, blissfully— forgotten.

... he is so not making that eight-thirty. — ⋆˚꩜｡ּ —

his mouth finds yours again and it's all teeth and desperation, all that exhaustion burning off like it was never there. his hands come up to frame your face, thumbs stroking your cheekbones while he kisses you like he's trying to convince you of something. or maybe convince himself. the city sounds are so far away— just the hum of the ac unit and the sound of your breathing, quick and uneven.

"been thinkin' about this all day," he murmurs against your lips, and you can feel him smiling. cocky bastard. "every single meeting. every stupid phone call. just you."

"liar," you breathe, but your hands are already sliding up under his shirt, and his skin is warm, so warm. the fabric gives way easy when he shrugs it off, and then it's just him— miles and miles of exhausted man who somehow still manages to look like that. like something carved out of expensive marble and terrible decisions.

his blue eyes track the movement of your hands across his chest, darkening as your fingers trace down the lines of his abdomen. he shivers. actually shivers, despite the fact that he's the one running the temperature in here.

"sensitive?" you ask, teasing, and he lets out this low laugh that rumbles against your palms.

"only for you, sweetheart." he catches both your wrists gently, brings them to his mouth and presses a kiss to each one. slow. intentional. like you're something precious and well, you are something precious to him. "let me."

before you can respond, he's already pushing up under your shirt— easy, checking, giving you a moment to stop him (you don't). his hands are big, so big, and they're everywhere at once. your ribs. your back. the soft curve of your waist. and his mouth is following, leaving this burning trail down your collarbone, your sternum, leaving you gasping his name.

"shh," he hums, clearly amused. "office, baby. anyone could hear."

"you— you just threw papers everywhere," you protest, breathless, but he's already pulling your shirt off and suddenly it's hard to care about the mess he made.

"responsibility is your thing, not mine," he murmurs into your skin, and then he's kissing lower, and lower, and your fingers tangle in his hair— that perfectly styled hair that's now a mess because of you— and you feel the rumble of satisfaction vibrate through his chest.

his tie is still hanging off him somewhere, forgotten. you think about that. how desperate he must have been to feel you, to not even bother finishing undressing properly.

"c'mon, look at me," he says, voice rough, and when you manage to drag your eyes down, his gaze is absolutely molten. half-lidded and focused entirely on you. it's almost too much. the intensity of it. "want to see you. want to see what i do to you."

his hands slide down your thighs, gripping where they meet his hips, and the feeling of his throbbing cock— hard and ready and pressed up against you through the fabric of your pants— makes your breath catch.

"god, you're so responsive," he murmurs, almost to himself, pulling back just enough to work your pants off. "so fucking perfect for me."

the cool air hits your skin and you shiver, but then he's covering you again, pressing his forehead to yours, and you can feel him shaking slightly. from exhaustion or want, you're not sure. probably both.

"'toru—"

"i got you," he whispers, and something in your chest clenches at that. at how sincere he sounds, despite the chaos of the day, despite the fact that he hasn't slept, he's still here, still so careful with you. "always got you."

he enters you slowly— so slowly it's almost torture, filling you inch by inch while his mouth finds yours again. the stretch of him pulls a sound from you, something half-whimper, half-gasp, and his hand comes up to cover your mouth gently.

"shhh, sweetheart," he whispers against your ear, and you can feel him smiling. feel the smugness radiating off him. "remember? office."

you bite the inside of your cheek and try to muffle the sounds he's pulling from you as he starts to move. not fast— he's too tired for fast, you think, but then he shifts his angle and hits something that makes your entire body go rigid, and suddenly you don't think he's tired at all. suddenly it feels like he's been saving this energy just for you.

his pace is deliberate. deep. designed to make you feel every second of it. designed to make you forget why you came here in the first place. his hands are anchored on your hips, holding you steady on the desk, and you can see the strain in his shoulders, the tension in his jaw as he concentrates on keeping it together.

"so tight," he murmurs, mostly to himself. "so perfect. could stay like this forever, you know that?"

your fingers dig into his shoulders as he speeds up fractionally, and the friction is building now, coiling tight in your belly. the desk creaks underneath you —oh god, the desk, anyone could hear— but that thought somehow makes it hotter, makes your breath hitch.

"you close?" he asks, pressing kisses to your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. "can feel you, y'know."

"someone could come in," you manage, even as you're arching up into him, chasing the feeling.

"let 'em," he says, and it's casual and completely serious all at once.

something about the tone, the exhausted certainty of it, pushes you over. your orgasm hits sudden and intense, and you bury your face in his neck to muffle the sounds, tasting salt and cologne and skin.

he follows seconds later, his movements becoming jerky and less controlled, a low groan muffled into your hair as he spills into you. his arms come around you, holding you tight, and for a moment you're both just breathing. just existing in the wreckage of his desk and his abandoned paperwork and this terrible, perfect decision.

he's still inside you, heavy and warm, and you can feel him hardening again already. of course he is. of course satoru gojo's idea of exhaustion recovery is apparently just fucking you stupid in his office.

"round two at home?" he murmurs, voice already taking on that dangerous edge again. his hips shift slightly, deliberately, and the sensation makes you gasp. "or even the car could do it. have you pressed against the window, let anyone driving by just see—"

"satoru, you—" you start, but your voice is already breathless, already betraying you.

he pulls back just enough to look at you, and his eyes are glittering with that infuriating satisfaction. tired as hell but still so smug. still so utterly convinced he can have whatever he wants from you.

"see?" he coos, brushing a strand of hair from your face with surprising gentleness. "you want it too. don't even have to convince you anymore. so easy."

you want to argue. you really do. but then he's kissing you again, slower this time, deeper, like he's got all the time in the world. like he hasn't just destroyed his entire desk in the pursuit of you. like there isn't an eight-thirty meeting looming.

"later," you manage against his lips, more as a promise than a refusal. "we're doing this later."

"mmmh. count on it." he grins, pulling back slightly. then, as if only just remembering: "so... about that eight-thirty meeting."

"you're not making it," you say into his shoulder, running your fingers down his spine.

"sweetheart," he murmurs, and you can hear the smile in his voice. "i was never making it from the second you walked through that door."

and as he holds you there on his ruined desk, surrounded by scattered paperwork and the wreckage of his carefully maintained professional life, you can't help but think he looks completely, utterly content about that fact.

[mooncyb3r]

hi lovely! do you have an ao3 :00

i do! but i never post on ao3 rip 🧍🏻‍♀️

[mooncyb3r]

Hiiii :D I love your works!!

Can I ask where the banner art for ur tech nerd series is from? I’d like to check out the artist

omg i completely forgot to mention it, it's by inkyck on ig!

[mooncyb3r]

⤷ 「 m.list ⋆ 」 error 404: self control .ᐟ

pairing — tech nerd!gojo x fem reader

synopsis : your custom PC keeps crashing at the worst possible times. after one too many blue screens, you’re forced to call the quiet but ridiculously talented tech nerd from your coding class to come fix it in your dorm. satoru shows up, gets to work, and accidentally stumbles across your very organized, very specific collection of porn. instead of pretending he didn’t see anything, he starts coming back. again and again. every visit the teasing gets heavier, the tension thicker, and it becomes harder to pretend you don’t want him to do something about it.

★ tags — college au, tech nerd satoru gojo, slow burn, sexual tension, accidental discovery (porn/history), voyeurism, teasing, banter, eventual smut, every chapter has its own tags/cw below. art by inkyck on ig.

chapter index .𖥔 ݁ ˖

01 ✎﹏ CHAPTER ONE ⋮ ⌗┆ YOUR SEARCH HISTORY AND OTHER CONFESSIONS ᝰ.ᐟ

your pc dies the week before finals, and the only person who can fix it is satoru gojo — coding class know-it-all, two rows ahead, insufferably good at everything. you let him into your room. you let him into your files. you forgot what was in your files. by the time he's done, your computer runs perfectly and you may never recover.

02 ✎﹏ CHAPTER TWO ⋮ ⌗┆ INCOGNITO MODE WAS A LIE ᝰ.ᐟ

it's six in the morning, there's a storm, and satoru gojo is dripping on your welcome mat claiming he's scared of the thunder. (he isn't.) he's got your flash drive and a very smug argument about what counts as "tomorrow." you should not let him in. you really should not let him in.

03 ✎﹏ CHAPTER THREE ⋮ ⌗┆WINHOST32.EXE ᝰ.ᐟ

in which satoru gojo commits light academic fraud to become your lab partner, orders a drink he doesn't want just to watch you make it. you tell him he's a freak. he doesn't deny it. then you get home, and neither of you is going to mention what happens after the lights go off — because only one of you knows it isn't private.

more to come.

taglist ⋮ ⌗ ┆ @gojoful @c4ndyyy @titi37295 @iiamethereal @lillylovestoji92 @broeagleblog @torusangelface @ilovemasturbaiting @mahoragacall @miyahluvsjjk @linsdaypotter @bat-brainzzz @queen-bee2009 @sistersofthemoon15 @leavemialonesblog @dontfindmelolz @vanillaacreams @cjleggy @catorulover @tootyallfarty @ashtraaay @snowstriper101 @bambibunnybaby @annrjse @sweetestaaangel @hauntedbyink @elliekatsmiller @star1nlght @winniethepoohjusttookapooh @ifartmatcha @thecoolest4eva @tchmiya @yunasss2gorgg @remi-093

taglist is open, comment if you want to be added!

[mooncyb3r]

error 404: self control .ᐟ

pairing — tech nerd!gojo x fem reader

synopsis : your custom PC keeps crashing at the worst possible times. after one too many blue screens, you’re forced to call the quiet but ridiculously talented tech nerd from your coding class to come fix it in your dorm. satoru shows up, gets to work, and accidentally stumbles across your very organized, very specific collection of porn. instead of pretending he didn’t see anything, he starts coming back. again and again. every visit the teasing gets heavier, the tension thicker, and it becomes harder to pretend you don’t want him to do something about it.

wc 8.5k ★ tags — college au, tech nerd satoru gojo, slow burn, sexual tension, accidental discovery (porn/history), teasing, banter, he's-not-as-soft-as-he-looks, power dynamics, mutual pining (one of them is in denial), smug!gojo, unreliable narrator (him), obsession (early stage), the reader actually wins this round, storm at night, voyeurism, masturbation (f solo), sex toys, being watched (without knowing), secret surveillance, invasion of privacy, gojo has zero (0) morals. mdni.

from mara ˗ˏˋ ꒰ ✉︎ ꒱ ˎˊ˗ he walked across campus in the rain to be annoying and i think that's beautiful... porn-to-plot ratio recovering next chapter i promise 😽 art by inkyck on ig.

⋮ ⌗ series masterlist

◀ previous — 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝟎𝟐 — next ▶

you are dreaming about something you will not remember in the morning when the knock comes.

it's not a polite knock. it's not the soft, apologetic kind your neighbor does when she locks herself out and needs to borrow your spare. it’s three sharp raps against the door, knuckles on cheap wood, loud enough to punch straight through whatever fog you were drifting in, and your whole body jerks awake like you've been dropped from a height.

for a second you do not know where you are. you do not know what year it is. you do not know your own name.

then the room reassembles itself around you in pieces. the led strips glowing their dim, leftover blue along the ceiling because you fell asleep before turning them off. the soft pastel cycle of the rgb on your tower, still on, still glowing, still humming low in the corner like it has been keeping watch over you. the shape of your desk. the weight of your phone, which has slid off your chest and onto the mattress somewhere near your hip. the dark, wet sound of rain hitting your window hard and steady, like the sky has decided to take it personally tonight.

and the knock. again. three more, slower this time, almost lazy, like whoever is out there knows you're awake now and is in no particular hurry.

your heart is going so fast it hurts.

it’s the specific terror of being woken in the dark by a sound that should not be there. the kind of fear that lives in your spine before your brain has caught up, that floods your mouth with something metallic and turns your hands cold. you are a girl alone in a dorm on the third floor of a building where the elevator has been broken for three weeks and the hallway lights flicker after midnight, and someone is knocking on your door, and it is the middle of the night, and you do not know who it is.

you grab your phone. the screen lights up too bright, scalding your eyes, and you squint at the time through the blur.

6:03 a.m.

it does not compute. it’s not night and it’s not morning. it is the no-man's-land between the two, the hour where nothing good knocks on doors, and your brain is still three-quarters asleep, sluggish and slow and trying to drag itself up through layers of dreaming you can't shake off.

"hello?" you say, except it comes out as barely anything, a cracked whisper that doesn't make it past your own teeth.

the knock comes again. and then a voice, muffled through the door but unmistakable, light and easy and so casual it makes your stomach drop straight through the floor.

"i know you're awake, i heard the bed."

you stop breathing.

you would know that voice anywhere now. you've spent the last however-many hours replaying it on a loop inside your own skull, the low drop of it, the lazy curl at the end of every sentence, the way it sounded when it said i'm learning a lot about you right now like it was the most fascinating thing he'd discovered all week. you fell asleep to it. you woke up damp and dizzy because of it. and now it's here, on the other side of your door, at six in the morning, while rain hammers the window and you are wearing nothing but the same oversized t-shirt that barely reaches your thighs and absolutely no plan for any of this.

satoru gojo is at your door.

your first coherent thought is that you are going to kill him.

your second is that you have morning breath and unbrushed hair and you are not wearing a bra and there is a pillow crease pressed into your cheek and you can feel it.

you swing your legs off the bed. the floor is cold against your bare feet. you cross the room in three unsteady steps, one hand pressed flat against your chest like you can physically hold your heart still, and you stop in front of the door with your fingers hovering over the lock. through the thin wood you can hear him. the shift of his weight. the rustle of fabric. the small, patient sound of someone leaning against the wall like they live here.

"open up," he says, and you can hear the smile in it. "it's an emergency."

you should not open it. you know you should not open it. every sensible part of you that is still functioning at six in the morning is screaming at you to go back to bed and pretend this never happened and deal with whatever this is at a reasonable hour, in daylight, with caffeine and clothes and your dignity at least partially intact.

you open it.

and there he is.

he’s leaning against the doorframe like he was poured there, one shoulder propped against the wood, hands shoved into the pocket of a black hoodie that is dark at the shoulders where the rain has gotten to it. his hair is wet. soaked, actually, white strands stuck to his forehead and dripping at the ends, catching the sick yellow light of the hallway and somehow still looking like spilled moonlight, like something that has no business being on a person who buys energy drinks in bulk and corrects the professor mid-lecture. 

there are droplets sliding down the sharp line of his jaw. his sweatpants are darker at the hems. he looks like he walked here through the storm on purpose, like the weather was an afterthought, like getting drenched was a small price he was perfectly willing to pay for whatever he's about to do to your night.

and his eyes.

his eyes find yours and they are too blue for this hour, too bright, too awake, a cold and cloudless kind of blue that does not match the dark or the rain or how completely lost you feel right now. they flick down once, quick, taking in the t-shirt and the bare legs and the way you've crossed one arm over your chest on instinct, and then they come back up to your face, and the corner of his mouth pulls into something slow and pleased.

"hi," he says.

you stare at him.

your brain is a blue screen. an error message. a slow, spinning wheel of total system failure. you open your mouth and nothing comes out, because there is no correct response to satoru standing in your doorway dripping rainwater onto the hallway carpet at six in the morning, and your sleep-soaked head has not produced a single usable word.

"you look terrible," he offers helpfully.

that does it. "what," you manage, and your voice comes out hoarse and wrecked from sleep, thin and uneven. "what are you—it's—" you look back over your shoulder at your phone glowing on the bed, then back at him, like the time might have changed in the two seconds you weren't looking. "it's six in the morning."

"is it?" he says it like he's mildly surprised. like he hasn't clearly been awake for hours. like the rain in his hair is a coincidence and not evidence.

"what are you doing here."

he straightens up off the doorframe, and even half-asleep and furious you feel it, the way he takes up the entire hallway when he does it, the way the small space of the threshold suddenly isn't enough space at all. he tilts his head. water drips off the end of a strand of hair and lands on the carpet between you. and then, with a perfectly straight face, with the kind of grave sincerity usually reserved for delivering very bad news, he says:

"i'm scared of the thunder."

you blink at him.

somewhere outside, on cue, the sky does in fact rumble, a long low roll of it that you feel in your chest more than hear, and the lights in the hallway flicker once before steadying. it's almost too perfect. it's almost like he timed it.

"... what," you say again, because your vocabulary has been reduced to a single word and you don’t have the resources at this hour to recover the rest of it.

"the thunder," he repeats, slower, like you're the one being unreasonable. he gestures vaguely at the window at the end of the hall, at the rain streaking down the dark glass, at the storm doing exactly what storms do. "it's very loud. i couldn't sleep, and i got scared." he presses a hand flat to his chest, over his heart, mock-wounded. "i thought, you know. who do i know who lives close. who would take me in, comfort me in my hour of need."

"you're—" you are wide awake now, fury doing what caffeine usually has to. "you walked across campus. in the rain. at six in the morning. because you're scared of thunder."

"terrified," he agrees solemnly.

"you're a grown man."

"thunder doesn't care how old you are." he leans in a little, dropping his voice like he's confiding something deeply personal. "it's the unpredictability. you never know when it's coming, very stressful for a sensitive guy like me."

you are going to commit a crime. you are going to commit a serious crime in this hallway and they are going to find your name in the building security footage and you are going to tell the judge it was justified and the judge is going to agree with you, because nobody, nobody, should have to deal with this at six in the morning on three hours of sleep with their guts still in knots from a night spent thinking about the exact person now dripping on their welcome mat.

"i hate you," you tell him, with feeling.

and he laughs.

it's quiet, this one, just a soft exhale of it, his shoulders moving with it, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and it's so warm and so easy and so genuinely delighted with himself that for one traitorous second you forget you're supposed to be slamming the door in his stupid pretty face. for one second you just watch him laugh at you in your doorway with rain in his hair and you feel your own mouth start to betray you, the corner of it twitching, and you have to bite down hard on the inside of your cheek to stop it.

he sees it anyway. of course he sees it. he sees everything.

"okay, okay," he says, lifting one hand in a lazy surrender, the other still tucked into his hoodie pocket. "i'm kidding, obviously i'm kidding." and then he takes that hand out of his pocket, and there is something pinched between his thumb and forefinger, small and dark and innocuous, and he holds it up between you at eye level like a magician revealing the card you picked.

it's a flash drive.

a usb stick. small, black, a little worn around the casing, with a strip of washi tape on one end where you wrote a label months ago in handwriting so small you can barely read it from here. you know exactly which one it is. you know exactly what's on it. years of project files and old editing work and backups of backups and a few folders you would also rather satoru gojo never, ever know about, because at this point that seems to be the recurring theme of your entire relationship with him.

your stomach does something complicated.

"is that—" you reach for it on reflex and he pulls it back, just slightly, just enough, holding it a few inches higher than necessary so you'd have to actually reach for it, actually step into his space to get it. you stop yourself. you fold your arm back over your chest.

"yours," he confirms, far too pleased. "i took it by accident. it was plugged into the back of your tower when i was checking your storage situation and i must've pocketed it when i unplugged it. found it in my hoodie an hour ago." he turns it slowly between his fingers, watching the light catch the casing, watching you watch it. "didn't want you to think i stole it, i'm a professional after all."

you stare at the flash drive. then at him. then back at the flash drive.

"you found it an hour ago," you say slowly.

"give or take."

"and you decided the correct course of action was to walk here. through a storm. and bang on my door. at six in the morning."

"i'm very conscientious."

something in your sleep-fogged brain finally snags on the obvious. "this could have waited," you say, and you hear how thin your own patience has worn, fraying right through. "this could have—satoru, this could have waited until morning. you could have texted me. you could have given it to me in class. you could have done literally anything other than this."

and he smiles.

it's not the laugh from before, the easy warm one that made your face want to give you away. this one is slower. this one has a hook in it. this one starts at one corner of his mouth and spreads like he's just been handed exactly the line he was waiting for, and your stomach pulls tight on instinct, the way it does right before you step on a stair that isn't there.

"the morning," he repeats, like he's tasting the word. he looks down at you, eyes bright and lazy and devastating in the bad hallway light, and he tilts his head, and he says it so gently, so reasonably, like he's explaining something to a child: "sweetheart, it's six in the morning."

you don't say anything.

"we're already the morning."

oh, you hate that. you hate that so much. you hate it because it's stupid and smug and pedantic, and you hate it more because he's right, technically, infuriatingly right, and you can already feel the comeback dying in your throat because there is no comeback, there's just six a.m. and a storm and his dumb logic standing there dripping on your floor being completely correct.

"that's—" you start.

"it's tomorrow," he says again, helpful, ruthless, his head tipping the other way now, white hair shifting wet against his forehead. "you said wait until tomorrow. it's tomorrow. i'm a man of my word, i didn't want to keep you waiting."

"that is not—" your hands have come up off your chest to gesture, which is a mistake, because the t-shirt rides and you have to drop them again fast, and his eyes track the whole thing, lazy and amused, cataloging it the way he cataloged everything on your screen, filing it away somewhere behind that bright unbothered face. "that’s not what i meant and you know it. nobody means six a.m. when they say tomorrow. tomorrow means a normal hour. tomorrow means like, eleven. tomorrow means with coffee and shoes and the sun being out."

"that's a lot of conditions for a flash drive."

"satoru."

"i'm just saying." he turns the usb between his fingers again, and this time when he holds it out it's lower, closer, an offering, except his fingers don't open. "you want it back or not? i can take it home again and bring it to you next week. whenever's convenient. whenever the sun's out and you've had your coffee and you're wearing shoes." his eyes flick down to your bare feet on the cold floor, then back up, slow, the smile sharpening. "i can be patient."

you reach for it.

and he lets you, this time, almost. your fingers close around the casing and for a second his don't let go, the two of you holding the same small stupid object in the gap between your bodies, and you are suddenly, horribly aware of how close you've gotten, how you've drifted forward without meaning to, how he's leaned down without you noticing, until there is maybe a foot of space and a flash drive between your face and his. 

you can smell the rain on him. clean and cold and underneath it that same warm thing from before, detergent and something sweeter, and his hair is dripping and his eyes are right there, too blue, too close, looking at you like you are the single most entertaining thing that has happened to him in a very long time.

he lets go of the usb.

you pull your hand back so fast you nearly drop it.

"thank you," you say stiffly, closing your fist around it. "you can go now."

he doesn't go.

he leans back against the doorframe instead, settling in, getting comfortable, like the two of you have all the time in the world and this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing at six in the morning. like he's waiting for the next part of a conversation you didn't agree to have. his gaze drifts past you, over your shoulder, into the room, and you watch it move; the unmade bed, sheets thrown back where you scrambled out of them, the glow of the led strips, the rgb tower still cycling through its soft pastels in the corner.

"pc's still running," he observes. "no crashes?"

"no," you admit, against your will. "it's been fine."

"told you." he sounds insufferably satisfied about it. "stayed on all night, didn't it."

and you go hot, because it had, it had stayed on all night while you lay in the dark with your phone on your chest replaying everything, and there is no way he knows that, no possible way, but the way he says it, the way his eyes come back to your face and snag there, makes it feel like he does. makes it feel like he can see straight through the door and the dark and the hours and knows exactly how you spent them.

"you should go," you say again, and it comes out softer than you want it to. weaker. less like a command and more like a thing you're trying to convince yourself of.

"it's raining."

"you walked here in the rain."

"and i was very brave about it." he pushes a wet strand of hair off his forehead with one knuckle, and it falls right back, and the casualness of the gesture does something unfair to your chest. "you could at least let me dry off before you throw me back out into the storm. seems cruel. i could catch something you know, i'm fragile."

"you are not fragile."

"emotionally," he clarifies. "i'm scared of thunder, remember?"

and there it is again, that pull at the corner of your mouth, that traitor smile fighting its way up, and you press your lips together hard and look at the floor and the cold press of the flash drive in your fist and you think, very clearly, through the fog of six a.m. and three hours of sleep and the warm stupid weight of him filling your doorway: you could let him in.

you could.

it would be so easy. you could step aside. you could say fine, dry off, you have ten minutes, and he would walk into your room the same way he did before, like he belonged there, like the chair was already his, and the door would close behind him and it would just be the two of you and the rain and the dark and the low hum of the pc that has already shown him everything there is to know about what you want. 

you could let it happen. some hot, half-asleep part of you wants to let it happen so badly it makes your teeth ache, the part that fell asleep to his voice and woke up wanting, the part that's been thinking about for now like a promise for hours, the part that is currently very aware that there is exactly one thin t-shirt between you and the cold and that he keeps looking at you like he knows it.

you think about his fingers on your keyboard. you think about i'm learning a lot about you right now. you think about the way he said any time you need me and how you didn't answer but didn't delete it either, and how it's still sitting in your phone right now, three feet away on the bed, like a door left unlocked.

you think about how good he smells. how warm the room would get with him in it.

and then you think about how he's looking at you.

because that's the thing. that's the thing that snags. he's looking at you the way he looked at your screen. bright. amused. focused. like you are a problem he's enjoying solving, a thing he's taking his time with, and underneath the easy smile and the wet hair and the dumb jokes about thunder there is something in his eyes that is not soft at all, something that is having a very, very good time watching you stand here at six in the morning in a too-big t-shirt with your guard half down and your face giving you away, and some small clear-headed animal part of you, the part that woke up before your brain did when the knock came, recognizes it for what it is.

a game.

you are a game he is playing. and he is winning. and he knows it.

and that, more than anything, more than the cold floor or the hour or your morning breath or the storm, is what finally straightens your spine.

"no," you say.

he blinks. "no?"

"no, you can't dry off." you draw yourself up, arms crossing tight, chin lifting, and you hold the flash drive against your sternum like a tiny black shield. "you can't come in. thanks for the usb. genuinely, thank you, it has my whole life on it and i would've cried if i lost it. but it's six in the morning and i'm tired and you scared the absolute hell out of me, and now i'm going back to sleep." you step back, one hand finding the edge of the door. "so, get out."

for a second he just looks at you.

and you brace for it, you brace for the next move, the next line, the next clever thing he'll say to pry the door back open, because surely he's not just going to—surely he's going to push, the way he pushes everything, the way he leaned back in your chair and said how bad do you want it fixed and watched you fall apart—

but he doesn't.

he laughs.

soft. low. real. his head drops forward and his shoulders shake with it and he laughs like you've genuinely surprised him, like you've done something charming, like get out was the funniest and most delightful thing anyone has said to him all week. and when he lifts his head again his eyes are warm and crinkled and bright with it, and he holds up both hands, palms out, easy, easy, the picture of a man who has lost absolutely nothing.

"okay," he says. "okay. fair enough."

"…okay?"

"you kicked me out. i respect it." he's already pushing off the doorframe, already stepping back into the hall, hands sliding back into his hoodie pocket, like none of it cost him a thing, like he came here to do exactly this and got exactly what he came for. "go back to sleep. you've definitely earned it, and you look like you need it."

"i'm going to throw this flash drive at your head."

"don't, it's got your whole life on it." he's grinning now, walking backward down the hall toward the stairwell, unbothered and unhurried, rain still dripping off the ends of his hair onto the carpet, marking his retreat in little dark spots. "text me if it crashes, or if the thunder scares you. i'm an expert now."

"goodbye, satoru."

"goodbye," he says, sing-song, light, delighted. and then, just before he turns away, just as you're starting to close the door, he tilts his head and looks at you one more time, slow, top to bottom and back up, that bright cold blue catching the bad light, and he smiles in a way that does not match a single word he's said tonight. "sweet dreams. don't think about me too hard."

you close the door in his face.

you hear him laugh on the other side of it. you hear his footsteps move off down the hall, unbothered, easy, fading toward the stairs. you stand there with your back pressed flat against the door and your heart slamming against your ribs and the flash drive biting into your palm, and you exhale, long and shaky, and you tell yourself you did the right thing. you tell yourself you won. you tell yourself you closed the door, you made the smart choice, you sent him away.

then you look down at the usb in your hand and remember he had it in his pocket for who knows how long, and you remember exactly which folders are on it, and you press the heels of your hands into your eyes and slide slowly down the door until you're sitting on the cold floor with your knees pulled up to your chest, and you stay there for a long time while the rain keeps coming down.

your pc glows softly behind you. innocent. oblivious. cycling through its soft pastel colors like it hasn't started anything at all.

— ⋆˚꩜｡ּ —

the rain has thinned to a drizzle by the time satoru pushes through the doors of the twenty-four-hour annex.

the cafeteria proper has been closed for hours, but the little glassed-in corner by the science building stays open all night for the insomniacs and the engineering majors and the people whose lives have stopped resembling anything with a normal schedule, and at this hour it's nearly empty. just the hum of the drink coolers and the buzz of a flickering light over the self-serve station and one exhausted student face-down on a textbook two tables over. satoru shakes the rain out of his hair like a dog, drops into a chair by the window, and pops the tab on a can of something blue and aggressively caffeinated, and he smiles to himself in the empty room like a man replaying his favorite scene.

because that, he thinks, taking a long sip, was so much better than going back to sleep.

he hadn't planned the thunder thing. that part was improvised, a gift, the storm rolling in right as he was standing in your hallway deciding how to play it, and he'd taken one look at you opening the door all blurry and furious and half-asleep with a pillow crease still on your cheek and the line had just arrived, fully formed, perfect. i'm scared of the thunder. and the way your whole face had done that thing, that confused, betrayed, what-is-happening thing, the way your brain had visibly buffered behind your eyes trying to process him being there at all, like you couldn't decide whether to kill him or cry.

god. it had been worth getting wet for.

he tips his head back against the window and lets himself run through it again, slow, the way you'd savor something. the bare feet on the cold floor. the t-shirt. the arm you kept crossing over your chest like that was going to help. he’s seen them. the way your voice cracked when you said it's six in the morning, all wrecked from sleep, all soft at the edges before you remembered to be mad. the way you reached for the usb and stopped yourself. the way you drifted forward without noticing and then went pink when you did. the way you stood in that doorway with want written all over you in handwriting you couldn't read but he could, clear as day, the same handwriting that had been all over your screen, and tried so hard to pretend it wasn't there.

it's the trying that gets him. that's the part he keeps coming back to.

because here's the thing nobody else seems to understand about satoru gojo, here's the thing all six million of the people who think he's the quiet helpful nice guy from coding class have wrong: he is not, fundamentally, a soft person. he is good at looking soft. he is good at the easy smile and the bright eyes and the i don't mind coming back, seriously, any time, he's good at making people feel like he's doing them a favor right up until the moment he isn't. but underneath all of it, underneath the hoodie and the house calls and the carefully friendly cocky charm, there is an ego the size of a small moon and a streak of something much colder that he doesn't bother examining too closely because, frankly, it's never gotten in his way.

and what that cold thing is doing right now, sitting in an empty cafeteria at six in the morning with a blue energy drink and rain in his hair, is purring.

because you had kicked him out. and that was the best part. that was the part he hadn't expected and can't stop turning over. you'd actually done it. you hadd stood there shaking with it, wanting him so obviously it was almost embarrassing, and then you had straightened up and looked him dead in the eye and told him to get out, and he'd felt it land somewhere behind his sternum, sharp and bright and delighted, this hot little spark of oh.

because it means you felt it too. it means you felt the pull strong enough that you had to fight it. you don't slam a door that hard on someone you don't want. you don't kick out a guy you're indifferent to. the get out wasn't rejection. the get out was a girl who knew that if she let him in she wasn't going to be able to stop, and was scared of herself for it. and that, that, is a thousand times more interesting than if you’d just let him through the door.

he laughs under his breath. the guy asleep on the textbook doesn't stir.

he could ruin you, he thinks idly, and the thought is so easy, so casual, that it barely registers as the thing it is. not in a cruel way, necessarily. he's not a monster. he just means it the way you'd mean it about a perfect untouched thing you've found and want to put your fingerprints all over. because that's what you are, aren’t you. that's what makes this so good. everyone in that class thinks you’re the quiet one, the serious one, three rows back with your highlighters and your tired eyes and your café apron, the kind of girl you'd describe as sweet, as harmless, as a little intense about her work. innocent. that's the word. that's the image. 

and he's the only one who's seen behind it. he's the only one who knows about the folders inside folders, the very specific search history, the vibrator in the drawer under the notebooks, the way you press your thighs together when you think he isn't looking and the way you absolutely cannot hide a single thing you feel.

he gets to hold both versions of you in his head at once. the one the rest of the world sees and the one only he does. and the gap between them, the delicious, secret, ruinable gap between sweet quiet girl from coding class and the actual flushed wanting mess standing barefoot in her doorway at dawn, is the most entertaining thing he's stumbled into in longer than he can remember.

he drains the rest of the can, crushes it in one hand, and stands, stretching until something in his spine pops.

it's not about you, exactly. he'd tell you that, if you asked, and he'd believe it. it's not like he's lying awake thinking about your face or your laugh or anything embarrassing like that. it's about the game. it's about the power of it, the lever he's found, the fact that he can knock on a door at six in the morning and watch a person come apart trying to pretend they're fine. it's about how easy you are to read and how fun you are to push and how good it feels, how genuinely, addictively good it feels, to be the only one who gets to see the cracks in something everyone else thinks is whole.

a toy, basically. that's all. a very pretty, very responsive, very entertaining toy that he happens to have exclusive access to, and he intends to play with it for as long as it stays this fun.

he pushes back out into the rain. the storm's almost done now, the thunder rolled off east, the sky going that bruised gray that means morning is coming whether anyone's ready for it or not. his hoodie's still damp. he doesn't care. he walks back across the empty campus with his hands in his pockets and his hair dripping and a smile he isn't even aware of, already running the math on the next visit, the next excuse, the next thing he can do or say to watch you short-circuit, the next crack he can press his thumb into just to see how you break.

he's already thinking about it. he's been thinking about it for hours. he's been thinking about it, in fact, more or less without stopping since he found that folder, turning it over and over the way you worry a loose tooth, and it has not once occurred to him that a person who thinks about something this much, this constantly, with this much hunger, might not be the one in control of the game at all.

it doesn't occur to him now, either.

he just walks home through the gray light, soaked and grinning, and thinks about how badly he wants to ruin you, and tells himself, easily, the way he tells himself everything, that it's only because it's fun.

it's been a week.

a long one. the kind that stacks up on you day by day until you're carrying the whole thing on your shoulders like wet laundry — three exams, a café schedule that had you opening at five twice, an editing deadline you barely made, a group project where you did most of the work and got a third of the credit. you have been running on caffeine and spite and four-hour nights since sunday, and now it's friday, finally friday, and the week is over, and you are so tired you can feel it in your teeth.

and every single night this week, right as you were drifting off, the incident has surfaced.

not in a big way. not in the way you'd expect. it's not that you lie awake thinking about him, romantic and yearning, hand pressed to your chest. it's more like — you'll be brushing your teeth, or halfway into a dream, or standing in line at the campus store, and it'll just arrive, unannounced, fully formed: satoru gojo scrolling through your downloads folder with that small knowing smile. the tilt of his head when he found it. i'm learning a lot about you right now. and your whole body will do a full-system cringe, this hot, involuntary lurch of secondhand embarrassment that makes you want to lie down in traffic, and you'll make a small strangled noise out loud in public and have to pretend you didn't.

it lives there now. rent-free. that stupid night, playing on a loop in the worst possible moments, refusing to be evicted. you've replayed it so many times you've worn grooves in it. the folders inside folders, very organized, i respect the dedication. for now. any time you need me. and the worst part, the absolute worst part, is that you never texted him back, so it just sits there unresolved, a door left half open in your own head that you can't figure out how to close.

but that's not what tonight is about. tonight is about you.

because here is the situation: you are wound so tight you could snap, and you have not been able to properly get off in over a week, and you have a dead weekend stretching out in front of you with nothing due until monday, and your body has been humming at a low, distracting frequency for days now with all this unspent tension, and you have finally, at eleven forty on a friday night, decided to do something about it.

you just have to get past the problem.

and the problem, of course, is the folder.

you sit on the edge of your bed for a long time, chewing the inside of your cheek, staring at the dark shape of your pc across the room. because that's the thing you use. that's the whole setup — the folder, the specific one, the one he found, curated over months of late lonely nights into something that works exactly the way you need it to. and now it's — tainted isn't the right word. haunted, maybe. because you cannot look at that folder anymore without seeing his hands on your keyboard. you cannot think about opening it without hearing that soft amused breath, that's one way to fill up your storage. it feels like he's in there now. like he'd know. like clicking into it would be some kind of admission you're not ready to make even to yourself in an empty room.

which is insane. he's not here. he's across campus in whatever dorm he lives in, probably asleep, definitely not thinking about you, and the idea that you can't use your own files in your own room because a boy looked at them once is exactly the kind of thing you'd roll your eyes at if a friend told you about it.

so you hesitate. and you hesitate. and you talk yourself out of it, and then back into it, and then out of it again. you lie back on the bed and tell yourself to just go to sleep. you stare at the ceiling. you feel the low insistent pull of it, the ache that's been building all week, the specific frustration of a body that's been denied for too long, and you think about how good it would feel to finally, finally let go, and how you deserve it, and how it's your folder, yours, and he doesn't get to take that from you too.

that's the thought that does it. spite, again. he doesn't get to have this.

you get up.

you cross to the desk. the floor is cold. the room is dim and warm, lit blue and gold — the led strips you never turn off, the candle you lit an hour ago guttering low on the shelf. you drop into the chair and it rolls a little under you, and you go very still for a second, because it's the same chair. of course it's the same chair. he sat right here, long legs stretched under the desk, and you try not to think about that, you try so hard, and you fail immediately, and the thought lands somewhere low and hot instead of embarrassing this time, which is its own separate problem you decide not to examine.

you pull the drawer open. you push aside the old notebooks. your vibrator is exactly where it always lives, and your face warms a little just picking it up, thinking about how he'd stood two feet from this drawer and had no idea, how you'd hidden it before he came like a guilty secret. you set it on the desk. you wake the pc.

the screen glows to life, soft and bright in the dark, that pastel rgb throwing gentle color across your hands. you sit there in your oversized t-shirt with your knees drawn up and your heart doing something nervous, and you take a breath, and you open the folder.

and there it is. your whole shameful, specific, carefully-organized library, exactly the way you left it. you click into the one you want, the one that always works, and you turn the volume low, low enough that it's just for you, and you settle back in the chair and let your eyes half-close and let yourself, finally, after a week of holding everything in, start to let go.

your free hand slides up under the hem of your t-shirt first. slow. just resting against your stomach, feeling the way your breath goes uneven already, the way your skin is oversensitive from days of wanting. you're not wearing anything under the shirt and the knowledge of that makes your thighs press together on instinct, that old familiar throb starting up low in your belly, warm and insistent and impatient.

on the screen, sound and light. in the chair, you. you let your hand drift lower.

and it's good. it's so good, after a week of nothing, that first touch punches a soft sound out of you before you can catch it, your hips tilting up into your own hand, your head dropping back against the chair. your eyes flutter. the tension in your shoulders, the exhaustion, the whole terrible week— it all starts to melt out of you and pool into this one bright point of feeling, and you chase it, breath going shallow, your bottom lip caught between your teeth. the pastel light shifts across your face. your other hand fumbles for the vibrator on the desk without looking, because you know exactly what you need now, you know exactly how to get there, you've been aching for this for days—

you turn it on. you press it where you need it. and your whole body arches, a low broken moan slipping out of you into the empty room, your free hand gripping the edge of the desk, and you are so far gone, so completely lost in it, so wrung-out and wanting and finally, finally getting what you've needed all week—

that it does not once occur to you that the little glowing eye of light on your pc is not as innocent as it looks.

that somewhere across campus, a screen has come to life.

that you are not alone in this room after all.

— ⋆˚꩜｡ּ —

satoru can't sleep.

this is not new. this is most nights. he lies in the blue dark of his own room with a half-empty energy drink going warm on the nightstand and his brain running at four times the speed it needs to, refusing to shut off, chewing on nothing. usually he games until his eyes hurt or watches something he won't remember or scrolls until the sun starts coming up. tonight he doesn't feel like any of it. tonight he feels restless in a way he can't name, itchy under his own skin, bored in that specific dangerous way that always gets him into trouble.

so he does the thing he's been doing most nights this week. the thing he tells himself is nothing.

because when he fixed your pc — when he was in there clearing corrupted files and updating drivers and going through your storage — he'd left himself a little window. a quiet little way to look in, running in the background, buried where you'd never think to check. nothing serious, he tells himself. nothing weird. just a way to keep an eye on the machine, make sure his repair holds, make sure it doesn't crash on you again. that's all. that's the story, and it's a good story, and it has the convenient benefit of meaning he can check on you whenever he's bored, which is how he's justified doing it four nights out of the last seven.

it's never anything. that's the point. that's what makes it a harmless little habit and not something he'd have to think too hard about. he opens the window and it's your desktop, idle, or a paused video, or a document open at two a.m. because you're pulling another all-nighter, and he watches for a minute, mildly entertained by the small mundane evidence of your life — you, the girl he's decided is his to poke at — and then he closes it and goes to sleep feeling like he got away with something small and stupid and fun.

so when he pulls the laptop onto his chest tonight and opens the window, he's expecting exactly that. nothing. you, asleep. a screensaver. maybe you left a movie playing.

the screen resolves.

and satoru gojo forgets how to breathe.

it takes him a second. that's the thing he'll think about later — that there's a whole second, maybe two, where his brain simply refuses to process what it's seeing, where it just returns an error, a blue screen of its own, because the input does not match anything he was prepared for. he sees the folder open. he recognizes it instantly, that specific folder, the one that started all of this. and then he sees the rest of the screen, and then he sees you, half-caught at the edge of the frame in the glow of your own monitor, head tipped back, mouth open, one hand disappeared beneath the hem of a t-shirt he recognizes—

and everything in him just. stops.

he can't move. he genuinely can't move. his hand is frozen on the trackpad, his thumb hovering, his whole body gone rigid and useless, and he cannot look away, he cannot even blink, he is just— absorbed, swallowed whole, every ounce of that restless overclocked attention of his narrowing down to this one impossible glowing rectangle in the dark. he's not thinking about the folder anymore. he's not thinking about the game, or the power, or the toy, or any of the easy amused things he's been telling himself all week. 

he's not thinking at all. there's no room for it. 

there's no room for anything except the sound bleeding faint and tinny out of his laptop speakers and the arch of your back and the way your free hand grips the edge of the desk and the soft broken noise you make that he feels somewhere behind his sternum like a struck bell.

this is wrong. some far-off, quiet, sensible part of him knows it's wrong, knows this is a completely different thing than a paused movie or a two a.m. essay, knows he has crossed a line so far past the last line that he can't even see the last line from here. that part of him is very small and very quiet and getting quieter.

the rest of him just watches. paralyzed. breath shallow. heart slamming. minutes he'll never account for.

and then his body catches up to him.

it hits low and sudden— his cock throbbing, hard, insistent, a hot pulse of want that jolts through him and demands to be acknowledged, and it's that, that, the undeniable physical fact of how affected he is, that finally snaps him back into his own skin. because it makes it real. it makes it his. it's one thing to watch, frozen and floating and pretending it's happening to someone else— it's another thing entirely to feel his own body respond, to realize he's lying here in the dark achingly hard because he's spying on you, and you have absolutely no idea he's in this room with you right now.

and something in him recoils.

he moves so fast he nearly drops the laptop. he kills the window— snaps it shut, closes everything, and for good measure yanks the connection entirely, cuts himself off, disconnects, like putting physical distance between himself and what he just did, like slamming a door. the screen goes dark. the room goes quiet. it's just him again, alone, in the blue dark, laptop rising and falling on his chest with breath that's coming way too fast.

he lies there.

his heart is going like he sprinted here. his skin feels too hot. he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and lets out a long, unsteady breath through his teeth, and for a moment satoru— who is never rattled, who is never anything but easy and bright and three steps ahead— is completely, thoroughly rattled. flustered, even. the tips of his ears are hot. his hands aren't quite steady. he can still hear that soft sound you made. he's going to be able to hear it for a long time.

that was not the plan. none of this was the plan. the plan was a toy he pokes at when he's bored, a fun little secret, you going pink when he teases you in a hallway. the plan was that he was the one in control of this, always, the one holding the lever, the one who got to see the cracks in something everyone else thought was whole. and instead he's lying here in the dark, undone, wrecked, breathing like he ran a mile, over something he saw for maybe ninety seconds through a window he wasn't supposed to be looking through.

he should feel bad. he knows he should feel bad. there's a version of this where he feels sick, where he never opens that window again, where he deletes the whole thing and never tells a soul and lets it be the one line he decided not to cross.

that's not what happens.

what happens is that satoru lies there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, heart still going, and slowly —helplessly— starts to smile.

it starts at the corner of his mouth and spreads, this dumb, dazed, disbelieving grin, the grin of a man who's just been handed something he can't believe is real. because— god. because you do that. because you sit and use the folder he found and make that sound, and you have no idea, no idea, that he knows now, that he's seen. because the gap between the sweet quiet girl from coding class and the girl in that chair just got so much wider, so much better, so much more his, and he's the only person in the entire world who gets to hold both.

he laughs, once, quiet and stunned, into the empty room. he drags a hand down his face. he's still smiling. he can't stop smiling. he's alone in the dark, hard and flustered and grinning like an absolute weirdo, like he's lost his mind a little, and somewhere under the grin, buried too deep for him to notice yet, is the first cold hook of something that isn't a game at all.

but he doesn't notice it. he's not looking for it.

he just lies there and smiles at the ceiling and thinks, over and over, i have to see that again.

thank you for reading! taglist is open, comment if you want to be added!

taglist ⋮ ⌗ ┆ @gojoful @c4ndyyy @titi37295 @iiamethereal @lillylovestoji92

[mooncyb3r]

hello mara! you've got a fan in me :D It's been really lovely going through your works since I discovered error 404 and i'm so so charmed by your writing and ideas! (might also be bombarding your notifications with tags and reblogs so sorry about that :P) every sentence of your fic is fresh and meaningful and carries the weight of story. your writing is super phenomenal like that and I can't wait to devour the rest of your works! thanks so much for your hard work!

helloooo, thank uuu!! this is so sweet 🫶🏻 and don’t apologize omg, i love seeing my notifications full so you’re definitely not bothering me hehe 😭

i’m so happy you’ve been enjoying error 404 and my other works!! thank you so much for taking the time to send this, it genuinely made me smile 💗

[mooncyb3r]

error 404: self control .ᐟ

pairing — tech nerd!gojo x fem reader

synopsis : your custom PC keeps crashing at the worst possible times. after one too many blue screens, you’re forced to call the quiet but ridiculously talented tech nerd from your coding class to come fix it in your dorm. satoru shows up, gets to work, and accidentally stumbles across your very organized, very specific collection of porn. instead of pretending he didn’t see anything, he starts coming back. again and again. every visit the teasing gets heavier, the tension thicker, and it becomes harder to pretend you don’t want him to do something about it.

wc 4.4k ★ tags — college au, tech nerd satoru gojo, slow burn, sexual tension, accidental discovery (porn/history), voyeurism, teasing, banter, eventual smut, light choking, making reader watch herself on screen, panties stealing/keeping, secret recording, making reader recreate what he saw, praise + degradation mix, overstimulation, dirty talk, size kink, multiple orgasms, creampie, fingering, oral (f receiving), rough sex, power dynamics, reader-insert, present tense, smut, 18+ only, minors dni, art by inkyck on ig.

hello guys.. hope y'all will like it, it's been a long time 🕺🏻 (smut starts next chapter btw)

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝟎𝟏 — next ▶

your pc is crashing again and it feels personal this time, like it knows exactly when you are already stressed or tired or too worked up to deal with anything else. every time the screen goes black and that blue error message appears something hot and irritated twists in your chest. it isn’t even an old machine. 

you built it yourself last year with money you saved from extra shifts at the campus café and whatever small editing jobs you could pick up online. you stayed up until four in the morning watching tutorials with your knees pulled up to your chest and a highlighter between your teeth, carefully slotting in parts and connecting cables like you were afraid one wrong move would break everything. 

for months it ran perfectly. fast when you needed speed. quiet when the room felt too loud at night. the rgb lights shifted through soft pastel colors when you wanted the space to feel less empty. it survived long evenings with too many tabs open and your headphones on and your hand between your legs because getting up to find your vibrator felt like too much effort. but now it is dying at the worst possible moments and you are taking it personally, like the universe is laughing at you every time the screen goes dark right when you need it most.

you sit on the floor in front of your desk in an old oversized t-shirt that barely reaches the tops of your thighs, knees drawn up to your chest, staring at the dark monitor like it has betrayed you on purpose. the rgb lights on the tower keep cycling through gentle pastels like nothing is wrong. the fans have gone quiet. the only sounds in the room are the low hum of your mini fridge and the distant noise of someone laughing too loud in the hallway outside.

you have already tried everything. 

restarting it over and over until your finger hurts from pressing the button. updating drivers. running every diagnostic tool you could find. even following some shady forum post that told you to delete random system files that probably would have bricked the whole thing if you had actually gone through with it. nothing works. and you cannot exactly carry a full desktop tower across campus to the it helpdesk without looking ridiculous, especially not when you live on the third floor and the elevator has been broken for weeks and you would have to walk through the student union with this giant machine in your arms like some kind of walk of shame.

which leaves you with one option you really do not want to take.

satoru gojo.

you do not know him. not really. he is just the tall guy who sits two rows ahead of you in your coding class and always seems to have the right answer before anyone else has finished processing the question. he wears the same black hoodies and grey sweatpants like they are a uniform and smiles like he knows something the rest of the world is still figuring out. people go to him when their laptops die or when they need help with group projects. he builds custom pcs on the side too. you have seen the pictures in the class discord. clean cable management. beautiful builds. rgb setups that look expensive and intentional. people pay him good money for it and he always delivers.

you have never spoken to him one on one. only the occasional sarcastic reply in the group chat when he says something cocky or teasing. but you are desperate and your pc is currently a very expensive brick sitting on your desk doing nothing but glowing at you like it is mocking your frustration.

so you pick up your phone and type the message before you can overthink it into silence and regret.

hey! random question… you still fix pcs for people?

he answers fast. too fast. like he has been waiting for something to do with his evening and this is the most interesting thing that has happened to him all day.

satoru : depends. what’s wrong with it?

you take a picture of the blue screen and send it without letting yourself hesitate too long.

satoru : yeah that’s not great. you take it to the helpdesk yet?

i don’t want to wait in that line for two hours. also it’s a full desktop… kinda heavy. i live on the third floor

there is a longer pause this time. you watch the typing bubble appear and disappear twice before his next message comes through, and you can almost picture him sitting somewhere with that lazy smile on his face while he types.

satoru : so you want me to come to you?

your stomach flips at the way he phrases it. like you are asking him to come into your space on purpose. which you are. but reading it like that makes it feel more intimate than it should, like he is already in your room even though he is still somewhere else on campus.

only if you’re not busy ! i can pay you or something.

satoru : lmao send me your dorm and room number, i’ll be there in like thirty

lmao? you stare at the screen for a second too long before typing out your building and room number, then you put your phone down on the bed and immediately want to take the whole conversation back. thirty minutes. enough time to completely lose your mind and overthink every single thing that could go wrong when he gets here.

you spend the first ten minutes trying to make your room look less like you have been fighting with exams and losing for three days straight. you throw the pile of clothes on your desk chair into the closet and kick your overflowing laundry basket behind the bed where it will not be immediately visible if he happens to look around. you make sure your vibrator is safely hidden in the drawer next to your bed where it always lives, tucked under a pile of old notebooks like a guilty secret. 

you even light one of your nicer candles even though you tell yourself it is just because the room smells like old takeout containers and not because you care what he thinks about your space or how you live. the thought of satoru gojo standing in your tiny dorm room makes your skin feel too tight and your stomach twist in a way you don’tt want to examine too closely. you have seen him around campus before. watched the way he moves through crowded hallways like he does not notice people staring at him. heard the way he laughs in class when someone makes a joke that lands. watched the way his hoodie sleeves always seem to be pushed up to his elbows like he is too warm or too comfortable in his own skin. 

but you have never been alone with him. and now he is coming here. while your very obvious and very organized porn folders sit on your desktop like they are waiting to be discovered and picked apart.

you change your shirt twice and end up back in the same oversized t-shirt you have been wearing all day because nothing else feels right against your skin. you run a brush through your hair even though you know it will not stay neat for long and check your reflection in the small mirror above your desk before immediately looking away. you look like someone who has been stressed and tired and more than a little pent up for three days straight. which you have been. your face is flushed from frustration and lack of sleep. your eyes look tired. your lips are chapped from biting them while you tried to fix the pc yourself. you look like a mess and there is nothing you can do about it in thirty minutes.

when the knock finally comes on your door you are still a mess of nerves and lowkey embarrassment and something else you don’t want to name yet.

you open it and there he is.

satoru stands in the hallway in a black hoodie that looks soft and worn from too many washes and grey sweatpants that sit low on his hips in a way that makes it hard not to notice how tall he is. his hair is messy like he has run his hands through it on the way over. he is holding a small black toolkit in one hand and when he smiles at you it’s bright and easy and way too confident for someone about to walk into a near-stranger’s dorm room at night. his eyes flick over you once, quick and casual, before settling on your face again.

“patient’s in critical condition?” he asks, voice light and teasing like this is the most normal thing in the world and he does house calls like this all the time.

you step aside to let him in and try not to stare at how tall he looks in your small space, how he seems to fill the doorway without even trying. “it’s on the desk.. hum, try not to judge the mess too hard.”

he walks in without hesitation, eyes moving over everything in the room with that same casual curiosity. the unmade bed with the comforter half hanging off the side. the led strips you stuck around the walls because the overhead light is ugly and yellow. the posters on the wall. the half-empty water bottle on your nightstand. the small pile of books that have nothing to do with coding. his gaze lingers for half a second on the pc tower before he sets his toolkit down on your desk and drops into your chair like he has sat there a hundred times before and it belongs to him.

“nice setup,” he whispers, already reaching for the power button. “shame it’s trying to die on you.”

you hover behind him while he works, arms crossed over your chest, trying not to notice the way his hoodie sleeves are pushed up to his elbows and how his forearms look when he moves. his fingers move fast and sure over your keyboard. he opens task manager, checks event logs, clicks through menus you did not even know existed. every now and then he mutters something under his breath; corrupted files, overheating, something about your storage being almost full and your cooling being inadequate for how hard you are pushing the machine. his voice is low when he speaks to himself. calm. focused. it is strangely attractive in a way you are not prepared to deal with right now, especially not when he is sitting in your chair and the room suddenly feels smaller than it had five minutes ago.

yes, the room feels smaller with him in it. he takes up space without even trying. long legs stretched out under your desk, broad shoulders under that oversized hoodie. every time he shifts in the chair the wheels roll softly on the cheap laminate floor and make a small sound that seems too loud in the quiet. you catch the faint clean scent of his detergent mixed with something sweet like whatever energy drink he has probably been drinking earlier. it’s warm in the room. or maybe that is just the way your face keeps flushing every time you look at his hands or the line of his neck where his hoodie has slipped down a little. you are so busy trying not to stare at the way his fingers move over your keyboard that you almost miss the moment everything changes.

he has been quiet for a minute, just clicking through things, when his fingers slow down. his head tilts slightly to the side. you see the way his posture shifts, just a fraction, like he has found something that caught his attention in a way the error logs had not. something that makes him pause.

“…huh.”

your stomach drops straight through the floor and keeps falling.

he clicks again. then again. the screen changes and you recognize the folder name that pops up even from where you are standing behind him. it’s one you meant to move or at least rename weeks ago but never got around to because you kept telling yourself you would do it later. now it sits there in your downloads folder like it wants to be seen. like it has been waiting for this exact moment to expose you.

satoru does not say anything right away. he just looks at it. scrolls slowly through the contents. clicks into a subfolder. you watch the way his shoulders move with each quiet breath he takes. the room suddenly feels too warm. your skin feels too tight. every small sound feels amplified. the click of your mouse. the soft whir of the pc fans kicking back on now that it is running again. the sound of him exhaling through his nose. the faint creak of the chair when he shifts his weight.

then he lets out a soft, amused breath.

“well,” he whispers, voice still light but lower now, something new underneath it that makes your pulse jump hard in your throat and your stomach twist in a way that is not entirely unpleasant, “that’s one way to fill up your storage.”

your face goes hot so fast it makes you dizzy. “don’t—”

“i’m not judging,” he says, but he is still clicking through files. his tone is casual, almost conversational, like he is commenting on something normal instead of scrolling through your very specific and very organized collection of porn and . “i’m just observing. you’ve got a whole system going on here. folders inside folders. very organized. i respect the dedication. most people just have random downloads they never sort. you actually have structure.”

you want to disappear. you want the floor to open up and swallow you whole. you want to throw something at the back of his stupid head and tell him to get out of your room. instead you stand there with your arms crossed tight over your chest and your face burning so hot you are sure he can feel the heat radiating off you even from where he is sitting.

“can you please just fix the pc,” you say, voice tight and embarrassed, “and pretend you didn’t see any of that.”

he hums like he is actually thinking about it. then he turns the chair around slowly to look at you. his expression is calm but his eyes are bright with something that makes your stomach twist low and tight. amusement. curiosity. something sharper that you cannot quite name yet but makes your thighs press together without your permission.

“depends,” he says, leaning back in your chair like he has all the time in the world and nowhere else he needs to be. “how bad do you want it fixed?”

you stare at him. at the way his hoodie has slipped down one shoulder a little and shows the line of his neck. at the way his hair falls into his eyes. at the small smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “what does that mean.”

“means i could make this blue screen problem disappear for good,” he says, still watching you with that same bright, teasing look in his eyes. “or i could leave a couple things just unstable enough that you might need me to come back. you know. if you want the company. if you don’t mind me seeing more of your… organizational skills.”

your brain short-circuits for a second. he is joking. he has to be joking. this is just how he is with everyone. annoying. teasing. pushing buttons because he can get away with it and people let him because he is tall and pretty and smart in that effortless way that makes it hard to stay mad at him.

right?

“you’re such an asshole,” you mutter, but it comes out weaker than you want it to, your voice thinner than usual.

he laughs under his breath, low and warm, and turns back to the screen. “relax. i’m fixing it. for now.”

the way he says for now makes something low in your stomach pull tight and hot. you cross your arms tighter over your chest and try to will your face to stop burning. it does not work. the room feels smaller. the air feels thicker. every time he shifts in the chair you are too aware of how close he is. how big he is in your small space. how his voice has dropped just a little when he talked about coming back. you can feel the heat in your face spreading down your neck and into your chest. you can feel the way your thighs are pressed together. you can feel the way your breathing has gone shallow without you meaning for it to.

he keeps working. you keep standing there. the silence stretches between you but it is not empty. every few seconds he makes some small comment. about your cable management being surprisingly decent for someone who clearly does not care about that kind of thing. about how you have way too many chrome tabs open in the background and it is probably contributing to the overheating. about one of the error logs that makes him go “interesting” in a tone that does not sound like it is only about the pc anymore. you are so focused on not combusting that you do not notice he has opened your browser history until he speaks again.

“damn,” he says, almost to himself. “you really don’t clear this thing, huh.”

your heart stops beating for a full second.

he is not even trying to hide it now. he is scrolling through days of searches. videos you watched when you were half-asleep and horny and not thinking about anyone ever seeing them. sites you visited late at night when you could not sleep and your hand was already between your legs and your breath was coming too fast. things that make your thighs press together without your permission. things that make your face burn with a fresh wave of humiliation and something hotter underneath that you do not want to name out loud.

satoru glances over his shoulder at you again. his smile is smaller this time. softer around the edges. but his eyes are darker. more focused. like he is seeing something he had not expected to see and he is taking his time with it.

“you’ve got good taste,” he says quietly. “some of this stuff is really specific. i’m learning a lot about you right now.”

you cannot speak. your mouth has gone completely dry. your hands are clenched into fists at your sides. your heart is beating so hard you are sure he can hear it even over the sound of the pc fans. you can feel every beat of it in your throat and in your wrists and between your legs where you are suddenly too aware of how empty you feel and how badly you want something you cannot have right now.

he turns back to the screen and keeps working like nothing has happened, but the damage is already done. the air in the room feels thicker. your skin feels too sensitive. every time he shifts in the chair you are hyper aware of how close he is. how big he is. how his voice has dropped just a little when he spoke about the things he is seeing on your screen. you can feel the heat in your face spreading down your neck. you can feel the way your thighs are pressed together so tightly it almost hurts. you can feel the way your breathing has gone shallow and fast without you meaning for it to. you can feel the way your underwear is starting to stick to you in a way that makes you want to die of embarrassment.

after another ten minutes he leans back and stretches, arms going over his head. the hoodie rides up and you catch a flash of pale skin above the waistband of his sweatpants before you look away fast, like you have been caught doing something you should not have been doing. your face burns even hotter.

“should be good for now,” he says, standing up. the chair rolls back a little on the floor. “i cleared out the corrupted files and updated some drivers. your cooling’s still shit though. that’s probably why it keeps crashing when you put it under stress. you know. when you’re really… using it.”

you want to throw something at him. you also want to crawl under your bed and never come out again. you also want to pull him back down into the chair and ask him what else he has seen and what he thinks about it and whether he is going to keep teasing you like this every time he looks at you now.

he picks up his toolkit and heads for the door, but he pauses with his hand on the knob. when he looks back at you the teasing is still there in his expression, but it has settled into something heavier. something that makes your pulse jump hard in your throat and your stomach twist in a way that is not entirely unpleasant. something that makes you feel seen in a way that is terrifying and exciting at the same time.

“by the way,” he says, almost casual, like he is commenting on the weather instead of everything that has just happened between you, “you should really password protect those folders. or at least name them something that doesn’t scream ‘this is where i keep all my porn.’ just a friendly suggestion. wouldn’t want anyone else finding out what you like when you’re alone in here.”

your face burns all over again. you are pretty sure you are never going to recover from this night. you are pretty sure you are going to think about the way he looked at you and the way he said those words for days. you are pretty sure you are going to hate him a little for making you feel this exposed and want him a little more for the same reason.

he grins, bright and sharp and way too pleased with himself. “text me if it crashes again. i don’t mind coming back. seriously. any time.”

and then he is gone.

the door clicks shut behind him and you stand in the middle of your room for a long time, staring at your now-working pc like it has personally set you up and betrayed you in the worst and best way possible. the rgb lights keep cycling through their soft pastel colors. innocent. oblivious. like they have not just exposed every filthy thing you have ever searched for at two in the morning when you were lonely and needy and not thinking about anyone ever finding out. like they have not just shown him exactly what kind of things make you press your thighs together and bite your lip and forget how to breathe for a little while.

your phone buzzes on the desk where you have left it earlier.

if it crashes again tonight just text me. i don’t mind coming back. seriously. any time you need me.

you stare at the messages until the screen goes dark again.

you do not answer.

but you also do not delete them.

and when you finally climb into bed an hour later, the room still smells faintly like whatever clean detergent he used and the candle you lit earlier and something else that might have just been your own embarrassment and want mixing together in the warm air. you cannot stop thinking about the way he looked at you when he said he was learning a lot about you. or the way his voice dropped when he talked about your search history. or the way he said for now like it was a promise instead of a joke. or the fact that he now knows exactly what kind of things you watch when you are alone in this room with the lights off and your hand between your legs and your breath coming too fast and your body aching for something you cannot have right then.

your pc stays on all night without crashing once.

you do not know if that makes you feel better or worse.

you lie there in the dark with your phone on your chest and replay every moment in your head until the details start to blur together. the way he took up space in your room like he belonged there. the way his fingers moved over your keyboard like he knew exactly what he was doing. the way he looked over his shoulder at you with that small, knowing smile when he found the folders. the way he said i’m learning a lot about you right now like it was the most interesting thing he had discovered all week. the way his hoodie rode up when he stretched and you saw that flash of skin you were not supposed to see and your stomach flipped so hard it made you dizzy. the way he looked at you before he left like he was already thinking about the next time he might see you.

you press your thighs together under the blanket and tell yourself to stop. tell yourself it is just embarrassment. tell yourself you are reading too much into it. tell yourself he is just being his usual teasing self and you are the one making it weird because you are already worked up from three days of failed attempts to get off without your pc crashing in the middle of it and leaving you frustrated and aching and unable to finish what you started.

but when you finally fall asleep, you dream of long fingers on a keyboard and a low voice saying i’m learning a lot about you right now and hands on your skin and a smile that knows too much, and you wake up with your heart racing and your underwear damp and your pc still glowing softly in the corner of the room like it knows exactly what it has done and exactly what it has started.

next ▶

[mooncyb3r]

𝜗ৎ the kind of homecoming that ruins you

the first thing you feel is anger.

not relief. not joy. not even the ugly, shaking gratitude of someone who has spent too many nights bargaining with the ceiling, with the dark, with every god you do not believe in and every curse you do. just anger—cleaner than grief, sharper than longing, easier to hold because it has edges, and edges feel safer than the soft, rotten center you have spent months trying not to touch.

the key turns in the lock with a sound so small it should not be able to split your whole body open. metal against metal. a familiar click. the hush after. then the door easing inward like it already knows it is not welcome.

you are standing in the kitchen with your hands braced against the counter hard enough that your fingers ache, like some stupid animal part of you knew before the rest of you did, knew down to the marrow, down to the place in your chest that has never once mistaken him for anyone else. not the wind. not a neighbor. not a trick of a tired mind. him.

satoru.

he steps inside carrying the cold with him.

for a second—one vicious, suspended second—he is only a silhouette carved into the doorway. too tall. too broad. shoulders catching the dim hall light. the shape of him burned so deep into your body that even after months of absence, months of an untouched side of the bed and meals gone cold and nights stretched thin as old cloth, you know him instantly. your body knows him before your pride can intervene. your pulse knows him. your lungs do too, because they forget, briefly, how to work.

and then the door shuts behind him.

the apartment goes still in that terrible way only homes can. not peaceful. never peaceful. the kind of stillness that listens. that holds its breath. that waits to see if it is about to witness tenderness or disaster.

he looks wrecked.

that is the second thing you feel. not before the anger. never before the anger. but there it is all the same, sliding in under your ribs with quiet cruelty. because you want him whole enough to blame. you want him bright and infuriating and impossible, with that lazy grin and the careless beauty of someone who has never had to earn the room he takes up. you want to look at him and be able to hate him cleanly.

instead, he looks like he has been dragged back from the bottom of something black and endless.

his coat hangs heavier than it should, damp at the hem. his hair is a little too long, a little unkempt, pale strands falling over eyes ringed in sleepless shadows. there is dried blood at the collar—not his, maybe. maybe his. you cannot tell. his mouth, that beautiful, reckless mouth that has smiled at you like mischief and devotion were the same thing, is set too tight. his hands are empty except for the bag slipping from numb fingers, hanging low at his side like even that small weight is too much.

he looks at you the way starving men look at miracles. like he does not know whether to fall to his knees or run.

your jaw locks.

good.

let him feel it.

let him stand there and feel the full, silent shape of what he has done to this place. to you. let him see the brittle order of the apartment he left behind: the dishes put away too neatly, the blanket folded into a cruel little square on the couch, the plant by the window still alive only because you were too stubborn to let one more thing die on your watch. let him see the life you kept moving with furious hands while he was gone long enough for the air to forget the sound of his breathing.

months and months.

too long for promises to remain soft. too long for worry to stay noble. after enough time, love stops being a hymn and starts curdling into something meaner. something with teeth.

you have hated him in pieces.

hated the silence of his side of the bed. hated every unanswered night. hated the toothbrush still leaning against yours in the cup by the sink like it had any right to stay. hated the way his hoodies kept his shape even on the back of a chair, shoulders implied in cotton and memory. hated the door every evening for not opening. hated yourself most of all for listening for him anyway.

and now he is here.

here.

like he can step back into the apartment and make the months between this moment and the last time you saw him collapse into nothing. like time is something that only ever obeys him.

your eyes sting.

you hate that too.

you refuse to cry first.

so you make yourself very still. colder than him. colder than the rain he carried in. colder than the missions that took him. your throat tightens around everything unsaid until it becomes something almost holy in its violence. because what could words even do here? what sentence would be big enough? what language survives this much absence?

he shifts his weight.

you hear it—the tiny scrape of his shoe against the floorboards. the restrained, careful movement of a man who knows he is approaching something wounded. something with every right to bite.

his gaze drags over you with painful slowness, as if he is relearning you piece by piece. your face. your shoulders. your hands flattened to the counter. the shirt you stole from him months ago and never gave back, because anger is still anger even when it wears the shape of longing. something in his expression breaks further when he notices that, some minute fracture at the edges of his eyes.

good.

let him choke on it.

you want him to suffer exactly enough. enough to match the nights you sat on the bathroom floor because the bed felt too large. enough to match the mornings you woke up reaching, hand finding only cold sheets and the stale ghost of his cologne. enough to match the humiliating, animal terror of loving someone who belongs just a little too much to death, to danger, to a world that keeps trying to drag him out of yours.

his bag slips from his hand and lands against the floor with a dull, final thud.

the sound goes through you like a bullet.

because it is so human. so tired. no theatrics. no easy grin. no cocky tilt of the head as if he can charm his way back into your good graces. just a bag dropping from a hand that could not hold on any longer.

your vision blurs.

no.

no.

you blink hard, furious at the wetness burning behind your eyes, furious that your body is already betraying you, that after all this time and all this ache, the first thing it wants to do is grieve into him. you swallow it back so violently it hurts. your chest feels like it has been wired shut. everything inside you rattles.

satoru sees.

of course he sees.

his whole face changes—not dramatically. not enough for anyone else to notice. but you do. you always do. a minute collapse. a small devastation. the look of a man realizing he has finally reached the point where your pain is visible, undeniable, no longer something he can lovingly imagine away from a distance. it is here. it is on your face. it is because of him.

he takes one step forward.

you almost step back.

almost.

the apartment narrows around the space between you until it feels impossible that it ever held furniture, walls, ordinary things. all of it falls away. there is only the distance. only the unbearable fact of him existing on one side of it and you on the other.

you realize, with the strange clarity of someone about to break, that anger has a limit.

not because it weakens. because it burns too hot to last in a human body forever.

something has to give.

it happens when his mouth trembles.

barely.

a tiny, traitorous hitch in that stubborn line of a mouth, like he is fighting the same collapse with everything he has left. and maybe it is unfair, maybe it is pathetic, but you have always been ruined by the moments he stops looking like the strongest man alive and starts looking like just your satoru—too tall for the doorway, too soft in the places no one else gets to see, carrying more of the world than any one person should.

the tears hit before you can stop them.

hot. humiliating. sudden.

you turn your face sharply, as if denial can become dignity if you do it fast enough.

it cannot.

because he is moving at the exact same time you are.

one second you are across the room, choking on hurt so old it has gone metallic. the next, the distance is gone in a violent blur of footsteps and breath and desperate inevitability. neither of you hesitates. neither of you pretends. you crash into each other with enough force to hurt, enough force to mean it, your bodies colliding like two waves after a storm—ugly, loud, helpless in their return.

it is not graceful.

it is not soft.

it is the kind of embrace born from almosts.

almost funerals. almost endings. almost learning how to live without this.

his arms slam around you so tight your feet stumble. your hands fist in the back of his coat with a desperation that has nothing pretty in it. your face hits the hard line of his shoulder, then his throat, then his mouth finds yours with all the starving ruin of someone breaking the surface after too long underwater.

that is what it feels like.

not romance. not even kissing, at first.

air.

a first, violent lungful after drowning.

his mouth on yours is frantic enough to border on painful, and you meet him there, there, exactly there, because tenderness would be unbearable right now. tenderness would kill you. what you need is impact. proof. something bruising enough to convince your body this is real. his mouth is cold from outside, then warm, then shaking. yours opens on a breath that sounds too much like a sob, and he swallows it greedily, like he has been dying for the taste of your grief because at least grief is something you are giving him.

you kiss him angry.

you kiss him like punishment.

you kiss him like you could claw the months back out of his skin if you bit hard enough.

his hands are everywhere and nowhere useful, too desperate to settle, spanning your waist, your ribs, your face, the back of your neck, as if he cannot decide which part of you to hold first, which absence to repair. he cradles your jaw one second and clutches you to his chest the next. his fingers shake so badly when they slide into your hair that it nearly undoes you all over again.

you taste salt.

yours. his. both.

the kiss breaks only because breathing is a cruel biological necessity. not because either of you wants it to. your foreheads knock together. his breath fans over your mouth in ragged bursts. yours catches on the shape of him. you drag him back down by the collar before sense can intervene, and he comes willingly, helplessly, with the low, wrecked sound of a man whose whole body has become one giant exposed nerve.

you back him into the wall.

or maybe he backs you into it.

it barely matters. the apartment has lost all allegiance to logic. there is only heat and impact and the wet, desperate press of mouths. your fingers are clumsy at his coat, shoving it off his shoulders in furious, stumbling jerks. he helps without breaking the kiss, wrenching one arm free, then the other, the dark fabric falling to the floor with a heavy slap. underneath, his shirt clings to him slightly, damp with rain and sweat and whatever remained of the outside world after it chewed on him for months.

you need it off.

you need all of it off.

not for hunger alone—though there is hunger, god, there is hunger, mean and ravenous and sharpened by deprivation—but because his clothes offend you suddenly. they are evidence of where he has been. of all the places that had him when you did not. they smell like distance. like weather. like work. like everything that kept him away.

your fingers find the buttons at his collar. miss them. try again.

he catches your wrists.

not to stop you.

never that.

just to steady them.

his forehead drops briefly to yours, eyes closed, his breath shuddering through him like something torn loose. when he opens them again, those impossible blue eyes look blown wide and raw, grief-bright, and you understand in one clean, devastating instant that he is not holding your hands to restrain you.

he is making sure you know he is here.

that this is mutual. that this is yours too.

you wrench free only to resume the work with more purpose. one button. another. another. your knuckles brush warm skin. he inhales sharply against your mouth, and then his hands are at the hem of your shirt, slipping beneath, palms hot and trembling against your waist. you arch on instinct, or memory, or something older than either. the contact nearly burns. months without him and your body still opens around his touch like a flower stupid enough to trust spring.

he pushes the fabric up slowly at first, almost reverently, and then you get impatient and help, dragging it over your head with him, tossing it somewhere behind you without looking. the cold apartment air skates over your skin for a single startled second before he covers the distance again, mouth dropping to your shoulder, your collarbone, the place beneath your ear where your pulse is frantic and unforgiving.

his lips there feel like an apology too intimate for language.

you clutch at his shirt and peel it from him with desperate hands.

the sight of him nearly stops your heart.

not because he is beautiful, though he is, cruelly so. always. even half-dead, even shaking, even with exhaustion pulled beneath his skin like bruised watercolor. but because he is marked. there are fading cuts crossing his torso, a smear of old bandage shadowing one side, yellowing bruises at his ribs, a livid scrape near his shoulder blade. proof. proof. proof. the outside world written all over the body you love most.

your anger mutates on the spot, becoming something heavier, wetter, harder to survive.

your hands move over the damage before you can think better of it.

featherlight.

the lightest you have touched him all night.

satoru goes still beneath your palms. completely, shockingly still. like even now, after all of that, after everything he has endured, this is the contact capable of undoing him fastest—not your teeth at his lip, not your desperate hands stripping him bare, but your fingertips tracing the wounds with unbearable care.

his eyes close.

his face folds inward.

the next breath he takes is so ragged it sounds almost like pain.

and suddenly you are crying for real. not neatly. not beautifully. tears spill hot and stupid down your face while your thumbs brush the edges of bruises you wish you could have prevented. the sight of him bare-chested and battered in your kitchen feels too intimate, too sacred, too obscene in its honesty. this is what waiting was for. this. not a heroic return, not a triumphant reunion, not anything clean. just your lover in pieces and your hands trying, helplessly, to count them all.

he kisses the tears from your cheeks before they can fall too far.

one side. then the other. then the corner of your mouth.

and then you are on him again, because if you let the tenderness sit any longer, you will drown in it.

you shove at his shoulders, urging him backward, and he follows instantly, blindly, as if there is nowhere on earth he would rather be led than wherever your anger decides to take him. down the hall. bumping into walls. hands dragging over skin. mouths clashing between steps. it is messy and breathless and half-feral, the kind of urgency that makes furniture irrelevant and time obscene.

by the time you reach the bedroom, his belt is half-undone.

your jeans are already open.

there is something almost violent in the way clothing accumulates behind you—his shirt inside-out near the hallway, your bra abandoned at the bedroom door, his belt coiled on the floor like a shed skin, one of your socks somehow stranded by the bed. months reduced to fabric and friction. absence translated into small wreckages.

you push him onto the mattress.

the bed groans under his weight, under the suddenness of him there, silver hair tousled against your pillow, chest rising and falling too fast. for one dizzy second he looks at you from below with such naked devastation that you nearly buckle. he has always known how to look beautiful; that was never special. what ruins you is this—the lack of defense. the way home has stripped him cleaner than any battle ever could.

you climb over him.

your hands frame his face.

his own settle at your hips with a reverence that does not match the hunger in them, thumbs stroking the jut of your bones as if he is cataloguing proof of your existence. his gaze moves over you like prayer and punishment at once. your skin. your mouth swollen from kissing. the track of tears drying at your temples. the chest heaving under his stare. all of it received with the silent awe of a man who did not let himself assume he would ever see this again.

you lean down and kiss him slower.

not gentle. not yet. but slower.

the desperation is still there, yes, still flashing hot between your bodies, but it has changed shape. it is no longer the drowning. it is what comes after—shaking at the shore, coughing up seawater, clutching the person beside you because neither of you can quite believe you made it back.

his hands travel up your sides. over your ribs. your waist. your back. pausing every few inches like he is relearning the map from memory alone. you do the same. down his throat. over the powerful line of his shoulders. across the planes of his chest. lower, where his stomach tightens under your touch, where the scars and bruises give way to familiar heat. every inch of skin uncovered feels like some private miracle. every gasp he breathes into your mouth feels earned.

you are the one who reaches for the fastening of his pants.

he is the one who guides your hand only because your fingers are shaking again.

together, then.

that is how it has to be.

together.

he lifts his hips. you tug fabric down. he sits up long enough to strip the rest away, and then he is reaching for your jeans with equal urgency, palms skimming your thighs as he peels them down your legs, gaze darkening not with conquest but with hunger so grateful it almost hurts to witness. when he presses his face briefly to your stomach, just above the waistband of your underwear, something inside you gives way completely.

because it is not theatrical. not seduction. not an act.

it is grief.

it is him putting his mouth to the place closest to your center like he needs to be forgiven there first.

your fingers dive into his hair. hold. not pushing. just holding.

he closes his eyes.

the room fills with the sound of your breathing.

his. yours. mingling. stumbling. catching.

when he stands again to help you out of the last of your clothes, his movements are almost unbearably careful. not hesitant. never hesitant. just aware. aware of your body like it matters. like it has always mattered. he undresses you the way one might unwrap something returned after being lost at sea: reverent, disbelieving, a little afraid that roughness might make it vanish again. you do the same for him, dragging the last barriers away until there is finally, finally nothing between your skin and his but heat.

bare.

both of you.

the sight should feel erotic first. maybe it does, a little. there is want in it, immediate and liquid and undeniable, curling low in your belly with all the force of deprivation. but stronger than want is the terrible tenderness of recognition. this body. this man. this home you have been grieving while it was still alive.

you push him back onto the bed and follow, skin meeting skin in a collision so intimate it borders on holy. his hands spread over your back, pulling you down until your chests align, until the frantic beat of his heart knocks against yours like it is trying to relearn the rhythm by echo. your thighs tangle. your mouths meet again, and this time the kiss is deep enough to feel endless, slow enough to feel like surrender.

no words.

none needed.

there are too many things lodged in the space between you for language to survive it. the anger is still there, yes, a live coal glowing beneath everything else. forgiveness has not arrived. tomorrow will be brutal in its own way. there will be explanations, maybe. there will be tears you can actually name. there will be days spent picking through the wreckage with more precision than passion allows.

but tonight is not for any of that.

tonight is for the animal fact of return.

for mouths and hands and the silent exchange of i thought i lost you, i thought i lost you too.

his palm cups the back of your neck. yours presses flat over his heart. he kisses you until your lips ache, until the anger inside you softens from blade to bruise, until the grief that had been sitting in your chest like broken glass begins, at last, to melt around the edges. not disappear. never that. just become something you can survive inside his arms.

when he rolls you gently onto your back, it is with both urgency and care, like he cannot decide whether to devour or worship you and is suffering beautifully from the impossibility of choosing. you open for him without shame. not because everything is fixed. because it is not. because maybe that is exactly why. because after months of living with half your breath caught in your throat, there is something almost sacred in choosing to be fully seen.

he lowers himself over you, all long limbs and shaking devotion, silver hair falling around your faces like a curtain drawn around something private and bruised and precious. his nose brushes yours. your fingers trace the slope of his cheekbone. his eyes search yours one last time—not for permission alone, but for reality, for certainty, for the impossible reassurance that this is not some mercy-dream his exhausted body invented on the way home.

you answer by pulling him down.

mouth to mouth. chest to chest. skin to skin.

and as his hands slide beneath your thighs, as your legs open around his waist, as the room fills with the harsh, uneven music of two people trying not to break from the relief of each other, you realize that this is what it means to be loved by someone who belongs too often to catastrophe:

when he returns, he returns like a storm-battered thing crawling back to shore.

and you meet him there.

angry. trembling. ruined.

still his.

still.

[mooncyb3r]

i just need. to get this off my chest. i have been thinking about your "finger on the trigger" fanfiction for weeks now. maybe even months (every day is the same ever since the fateful night i read that masterpiece). EVERY DAY. i think about it at work, i think about it during classes, i think about it while driving, I LITERALLY THOUGHT ABOUT IT DURING A MENTAL BREAKDOWN. i even tried touching grass but nothing helped. you, my sweet, have permanently altered my brain structure. there has been a BCBPF (Before Choso Butt Play Fanfiction) and now there is only ACBPF (After Choso Butt Play Fanfiction). i will never be able to date again because no one can ever be choso written by lyrical prodigy mooncyb3r

🤧 this truly warms my heart bc knowing that some silly fanfic i wrote in the middle of the night to keep myself busy from the real life is someone's favourite is truly the BEST feeling.

and i get you like sometimes i'm in the middle of a lecture and i just have flashbacks of scenarios, and they feel so real i start doubting myself 😭 anyway, it just makes me wanna write again so bad but i have no time unfortunately.

but i promise that i will write again, and i promised to make a part two of « finger on the trigger », let's just hope exams don't get me killed until then.

[mooncyb3r]

hide him from me or i’m gonna bite him

[mooncyb3r]

you’re the only writer that’s ever made me want to start writing my own fan fiction (*^^*)

i love your work sooo much

hearing that something i love doing inspired you… i’m melting thank you 😭🫶🏻 go write that fanfic!!

[mooncyb3r]

bsf!satoru finally shooting his shot? you both have to bleed now... ˙𐃷˙

it’s late in the way apartment nights get late—lamp throwing a honey circle over the coffee table, fridge humming like it’s singing to itself, the paused movie on the tv screen stuck on an actor mid-blink.

the floor is the only place that feels honest, so you’re both down there, backs to the couch, knees up, socks nearly touching. your living room has known satoru since before it was your living room; by now it behaves around him, breathes differently when he wanders in and sprawls like he owns gravity.

there’s a bowl of candy between you. he’s not eating any, but he keeps turning a strawberry wrapper over in his fingers like he’s learning it the same way he learned the shape of your handwriting—slow, careful, a little reverent.

every so often he reaches for your hand and fiddles with your rings, rolling one to your knuckle and back again without thinking about it. your fingers know the route to his hair by muscle memory; you sweep his bangs aside, smooth them down, and two seconds later they spring right back up like a stubborn plant determined to catch light.

it’s comfortable. the kind of quiet that only exists between people who grew up listening to each other breathe. the kind of quiet with no edges.

“i think i’m broken,” you say into it, deadpan, because this is how you do heavy things: you drop them in the middle of the room and see if anyone trips.

satoru tips his head toward you, cheek finding the couch cushion, eyes a ridiculous crystal even in low light. “uh-huh. define ‘broken,’” he murmurs, thumb still worrying your middle ring. “you mean.. unlucky?”

“worse,” you say, pulling at a loose thread on your sweatpants. “i mean i'm romantically defective, the only ‘thing’ i ever had lasted two days. two. days. that's—” the words tangle. you make yourself say them anyway. “i haven’t even… like, had a real kiss.”

his hand, still caught around your rings, slows. something minute flicks behind his eyes—something sharp you can’t read—then he smooths it into a drawl that’s all bite without teeth. “weird. i can’t imagine why.”

you shoot him a look.

“what?” he chuckles quietly.

“say it. i know you’re dying to.”

he goes still the way he gets still before he says something he can’t unsay. then his mouth curves—careful, teasing on the surface, protective underneath. “plenty of people make it through their twenties without letting an idiot put his mouth on them,” he says lightly, but his eyes do the real talking. his eyes say don’t you dare call this a flaw.

“but why am i single?” you press, because you never learned how to leave a bruise alone. “is it the personality? the face? what the hell is wrong? do i smell? be honest.” he’s the worst person to ask this; his honesty would ruin you. he’s addicted to your scent—your hoodie’s afterscent, the shampoo on your pillow, the skin-warm sweetness you carry like a secret.

satoru’s grin breaks out, automatic. “honesty you want, honesty you get. you're too loud, too stubborn, so stupid, so—”

your fist lands, muted, in his ribs. it’s a soft punch; he performs a dramatic death. “ow,” he wheezes, delighted. “violent too.”

“cry about it.” you lean back on your palms. he’s still rolling your ring, thumb warm against the web of your hand, so you tug lightly. he resists just enough to annoy you. “you’re the idiot here.”

he mutters, almost to himself, a pantomimed stage-whisper like he forgot the volume knob exists. “right, i’m the real idiot for arguing with you… for sticking around this long.”

sticky words. they catch like honey in your chest. you ignore them. you’re practiced at that.

“i’m not holding you hostage,” you say, sharper than intended. “if anything, you clinging to me is why i can't get a boyfriend. you scare them away.”

“oh, so your tragic love life is my fault now?” he deadpans, but he looks delighted.

“yes, totally.” you mutter, your cheeks are hot. it’s the heat of being seen too well, not the bad kind. he keeps rolling your ring; you’re going to be left with a ghost of silver on your skin.

“you’re complicated,” he says, gentle now, like he’s listing symptoms he’s grateful for. “and you hate small talk unless it’s with old women. and if you think someone’s lying, your face breaks into itty-bitty pieces because you haven’t learned how to pretend. and—” he pauses, something catching in his throat, “yeah, you’re not easy.”

your eyebrows hike. “wow, cool. thanks. truly uplifting.”

“not like that.” he scoots a little closer until your knees are really touching, his hoodie sleeve brushing your arm. “i mean you’re not easy to… manage. you’re not easy to contain. you’re not easy to put in a box and slap a label on. you’re the complicated puzzle with pieces from a different set and i think that’s—” he shuts up, teeth catching his bottom lip.

you stare at the paused movie because looking at him directly feels like touching an exposed wire. “so... not easy to love,” you whisper, and it comes out softer than you wanted. you try to make it flippant. it fails. “good to know.”

his hand, still wrapped around your finger, squeezes like he’s catching a falling glass before it hits tile. “i didn’t say that,” he answers, voice low, careful, like you’re on a thin ice lake and he’s trying not to crack anything. “don’t twist my words.”

“how is ‘not easy to deal with’ different from ‘not easy to love’?” you ask, obstinate because it’s safer to be stubborn than to be hopeful.

he huffs, small and frustrated and fond. his thumb sketches circles into your palm, tiny galaxies. “because dealing is a choice and love isn’t,” he mutters finally. “you can treat someone right even when they’re difficult. you can want someone even when they drive you insane. you can love someone without them making sense.”

“so love isn’t a choice,” you say, and you aim for a joke but miss and hit the soft meat of it, “and i’m still not chosen.”

the tiny flinch in his eyes would be invisible if you didn’t know every version of him—toddler with a scraped knee, twelve-year-old with a bad haircut, sixteen-year-old pretending he didn’t cry at that movie. “shut up,” he groans, not unkind. “you know that’s not true.”

“do i?” you poke, because you can’t stop yourself. “who would bother? i’m so difficult and—”

“so difficult to understand,” he murmurs, the words cutting through your noise with an ease that’s unfair. his voice flips a switch you didn’t know was in the room. “which is exactly why the right people can’t look away.”

your chest does a weird, painful balloon thing.

“also difficult to have,” he goes on, a crooked smile tugging, “which is exactly why idiots line up anyway, because they think they can be the exception.”

“and?” you whisper, because you want him to keep talking forever, because your mouth tastes like sugar and static.

“and difficult to forget,” he says, and that one lands like a hand on the back of your neck, grounding. his smile is gone. something else is in its place. “i’ve tried, trust me. it’s impossible.”

silence pools under the coffee table, heavy and bright.

you blink at him. your body forgets how to do simple things like breathe and play it cool and be your own worst critic. your mouth opens. nothing comes out.

he’s still talking, like he broke a dam and is trying to build it back with words. “difficult to be mad at for more than five minutes. difficult to keep my hands off when you laugh. difficult to watch other guys text you because i want to break their damn phones. difficult to pretend we’re just—” the words lurch, then steady, “just best friends.”

“are you high, satoru?” you ask, almost not a voice.

he looks at your mouth like he wants to put his hand over it to stop you from ruining yourself with words, then laughs softly, wrecked. “nah,” he says, a whisper, and leans in to do something stupider than finishing a sentence.

the kiss is tiny. barely a tap. a press so quick it might be a misfire, a little mistake people pretend didn’t happen. except your entire body rings like he just struck crystal with the softest part of his knuckle.

you stare at him, eyes wide and pupils probably too dilated. he’s closer than he should be. he stares back like he’s halfway through a long fall and only just realized the ground exists.

you don’t think. what a relief. your hand’s already in his hair and his is already tightening around your fingers, and you’re meeting him again, mouths making a new shape, sweet and tentative and ridiculous because he tastes like soda and a memory of the strawberry candies he refuses to admit he steals only because they somehow hold the taste of his childhood with you.

he feels you fumble, not the kiss itself—your mouth picks it up too fast, as if your heart’s had the choreography forever—but your hands, not knowing where to go like they’ve forgotten anatomy. his fingers glide along your wrist, your forearm, guiding you because he knows this is your first, settling you behind his neck like it’s a cradle built for you. there, he tells you without words. anchor there.

“okay?” he breathes into the space between your lips, his nose bumping yours.

“yeah,” you say back, a little stunned, a little laughing, because somehow the room has stayed exactly the same while every single thing in it has tilted five degrees.

he kisses you like he’s trying to teach you a soft language through your mouth—slow vowels, patient consonants. he pulls back half an inch to see if you’ll chase and you do, you do without thinking, the sound he makes shouldn't be so soft. your rings clicks off his collarbone; later you’ll find a tiny half-moon on his skin and feel smug.

his mouth is gentler than you expected and more demanding in flashes—like he’s toeing a line and the line keeps moving. when he breaks for air, he doesn’t go far. he presses a peck to the corner of your mouth. then another. then one to your jaw, a little smile in it because he knows it drives you nuts, these almost-kisses. his fingers flex around your hand, squeezing—there, good, breathe—then releasing like waves.

“stop it,” you giggle, mortified by the sound of it; but you don’t really care. “you’re so annoying.”

he hums against your skin, pleased. “mm, i know.” another tiny peck, to your cheekbone. you grab both sides of his face on instinct—cheeks, smooth and warm under your palms—so you can direct him like you’re done playing this game. he blushes. actual color, high on the cheekbones, faintly stunned. you try to act like you don’t notice as you pull him down to kiss you properly.

it snowballs. of course it does. of course it’s messy. there’s laughter in it, and breathlessness, and the familiar cadence of two people who’ve been talking forever—only now you speak like this.

his hands bracket your waist and you think, absurdly, about the way his palms are bigger than you remember, how he used to stick stickers on your notebook and write his name like it was shorthand for comfort. when he noses your cheek and you tilt your head, his mouth slots deeper, the kind of kiss that steals time and makes it manageable, as if it softens just for you.

“full disclosure,” you mumble, clinging to humor like a ledge, “this is my first kiss. like actual first, so if i’m doing anything weird just—”

“you’re doing perfect,” he says, immediate, fervent in a way that breaks your knees from the inside. “you’re doing so perfect i’m—”

he doesn’t finish that thought either because your sleep shirt is suddenly the most annoying shirt in the world. you find yourself tugging at your shirt, dragging it up your ribs in a way that feels both graceless and necessary. when the cotton gets stuck around your head, arms trapped up like a caught sweater puppet, you flail, mortified heat stinging your ears.

“oh my god,” you squeak into fabric, trying to wriggle free. you squirm. the hem rides up, exposing a stomach that registers cold air and his gaze at the same time. “help me—”

he’s laughing, the bastard, but it’s so fond it makes something fizzy go off in your chest. “hold on, hold on.” deft, careful, he unhooks you from your own clothing, peeling it off like a skin, stealing a kiss to your forehead as your face emerges, like he’s unwrapping a present he’s been pretending wasn’t under the tree for years. “hey,” he says, eyes taking you in with a slow awe that scrapes your lungs. “there you are.”

air hits your skin; embarrassment hits your face. getting stuck when taking off your shirt is such a good way to ruin the moment, right? “i swear i’m not trying to ruin this,” you mutter from inside the shirt before it pops free of your ears, “but the shirt was fighting for its life—”

his fingers are careful at your wrists, guiding the cotton up and over like you’re something precious—and then it’s off, tossed somewhere near the couch graveyard, and you’re just sitting there in your bra with your face hot enough to heat the kettle back up.

“you’re not ruining anything,” he repeats, and then he looks, really looks.

you’re in your bra. you’re in your bra in satoru’s lap. satoru who you once threw up on in second grade after a bad juice box. satoru whose house you’ve been climbing into since before you were allowed to be out past sunset. satoru whose palm is still holding your hand like it’s a habit no one taught him how to break.

you watch his throat move. you watch his ears go a tiny bit pink. he tries to be normal about it and fails miserably.

he can’t stop. he keeps pressing small soft pecks to your lips like he’s taste-testing, smiling into them, teasing. it’s stupidly sweet. it’s also absolutely annoying. “give me the full thing,” you complain, breathless. “commit to the bit.”

“oh? full thing?” his voice drops as if that’s a switch. “okay, princess.”

you mean to flip him off for that. you don’t get the chance. he guides you when he needs to, little murmurs that don’t need words: here, less, there. you accommodate. he watches you get it right and looks proud. he opens your mouth with his mouth and you forget how to do anything except cling.

you forget until your tongue tastes iron.

you go cold, it's the bitter taste of blood—oh god. you did that. did you bite him? did your teeth do something terrible? are you the world’s worst kisser with documented evidence now? your mind sprints: you’re so bad at this, you ruin everything, you’re about to apologize for the rest of your life—you pull back to assess damages and see it: not your lip, not his. his nose. bleeding. spectacularly.

panic flares dumb and immediate. you jerk back, wide-eyed, touching your lip, convinced you bit him. “oh god—i didn’t—did i—” you start spiraling out loud, the way you do when you stub your toe and narrate your own demise.

a slow, warm spread of red starts under his nose like a sunrise that decided to be brave. he blinks once, twice, goes faintly cross-eyed in a way you will bully him for until you’re both ninety because of veins of red already blooming under his nose. you both watch the first drop form with the concern of two people witnessing a catastrophe unfold in slow motion.

“no way,” you whisper, reverent, and the sight is objectively hilarious. his nose starts bleeding in earnest. you stare at his face, then down at your bra, then back.

“okay,” he says around a laugh that’s trying not to be a laugh, pinching the bridge of his nose, tipping his head forward like he’s done this enough to know the drill. “i’m good.. i think.”

there is a beat of absurd silence. then you snort. then he tries not to laugh. but you absolutely lose it, doubling over, forehead bumping his shoulder, cackling like a witch at a bonfire.

“it’s not—” he gestures with the arrogance of a person trying to maintain dignity while pinching his own nose, “it’s a dry air thing.”

you’re still wheezing. you reach blindly for the tissue box on the coffee table and nearly throw it at him. “uh-huh. totally the humidity. not because you saw boobs for the first time in your entire life.”

“wow,” he says, absolutely wounded. “as if i haven’t seen you—” he cuts himself off, eyes flicking anywhere but your chest like he’s trying to prove a point that’s already bleeding down his face. the tissue soaks through instantly. he fumbles another.

“pinch the soft part,” you instruct, which is what you remember from the times he’s come home from basketball with a busted nose and you’ve played nurse. “lean slightly forward, not back.”

he obeys. you sit cross-legged in front of him and try to stop laughing. you fail. “i’m sorry,” you gasp, not sorry at all. “it’s just—you’re bleeding because of me.”

"shut up, don’t be dramatic about it," he huffs, “and don’t make me laugh right now,” he begs around his own laugh, pinching the bridge of his nose, head tipped forward like a pro. “i will bleed to death on your rug.”

“it's already so dirty,” you chuckle, scrambling for tissues again. “and if you die on it i can finally throw it away with a clear conscience.”

he muffles a grin behind the tissue wad, eyes squeezed shut. he looks stupidly happy for a man hemorrhaging from the face. “not my most dignified moment.”

“you got a nosebleed because you saw me in a bra,” you say, still halfway to feral with laughter. “that’s… that’s cute.”

“correction,” he says smugly, voice all stuffed cotton, “you in a bra on my lap.”

you try to look offended and end up pink. he watches it happen like it’s sunrise number two. you press fresh tissues into his hand; he takes them without letting go of your fingers. the room is bright with ridiculousness, everything edged in this giddy light. the candy bowl watches you like it knows you’re both doomed.

“don’t look at me like that,” he mumbles once the bleeding slows, eyes soft, tissue still clamped, and you hate that your pulse can hear what his voice won’t say.

“but you look good,” you whisper, he groans. you wipe a red smear off his upper lip with exaggerated care and then catch yourself staring. it’s awful how pretty he is under bad lighting with blood on his face. unfair. he’s flushed, a ridiculous soft pink across cheekbones and ears. the curve of his mouth is bitten-wet.

the word hangs in the air and opens a door you’ve both been pretending isn’t in this apartment.

you toss the tissues in the trash, wash your hands, come back, sit the same as before—backs to the couch, knees up, shoulders touching—and somehow everything inside the shape has been re-labeled: familiar, familiar, familiar, new.

“satoru,” you say, and he swallows hard like his name in your mouth is the first drink of water after a long run.

“yeah?”

“you sure?” you ask, trying to sound normal and failing, because normal flew out the window with your shirt.

he nods. the kind that starts in his chest. “i’ve been sure since second grade,” he says, very quiet, like he’s confessing to stealing a holy book. then he catches himself, rolls his shoulders, puts a grin on like a mask, snaps the elastic at the back of it. “obviously,” he adds, cocky, “i have exquisite taste.”

you smack his thigh. his fingers catch your wrist and draw little circles on your pulse like he’s coaxing your heart to stop sprinting.

“the boyfriend thing,” you say, because the argument fluttered away from you but you want it back on the table where it belongs, like a cat dragging a toy back to your feet. “do you… do you scare them off?”

“no,” he says, without hesitation, still playing with your ring, “they scare themselves off. they realize they’re out of their depth. they realize they’d have to learn you like a language and keep learning forever.”

“you just said i was difficult to deal with,” you pout.

“yeah but i'm not complaining,” his smile tips. he leans in, barely there, hovering. “you stay difficult to live without.” he whispers, and that’s the one that breaks you.

you pull him in.

he meets you like he’s been rehearsing this hit his whole life—gentle, greedy, careful in the way that makes greedy feel like a prayer. he kisses you until you’re stupid and your hands get bold and then clumsy again because apparently elbow articulation is advanced physics. you end up half in his lap without remembering how, knees outside his hips, ribs brushing his hoodie’s hem each time you breathe.

“tell me if it’s too fast,” he whispers, and maps you patient as low tide, mouth skimming your cheek, your jaw, the corner of your smile, the small hollow by your ear where your pulse hides. he collects places like seashells and keeps them gentle in his palms. “tell me anything and i’ll listen.”

“okay,” you whisper, and for once you mean it, and something in his chest unclenches so audibly you feel it against your ribs, a little door unlatching

he gets obnoxiously gentle for a while, and you get obnoxiously soft about it. he kisses you like he’s pressing stickers into a memory book. every peck makes you giggle, which makes him grin like a spring day, which makes you drag him in by the cheeks, and it makes him pink all the way to the tips of his ears. you try to act normal about it but you absolutely do not manage it. it’s stupidly sweet. it’s wrecking you clean.

“we don’t have to—” he begins, pauses. his voice is velvet with caution. “we can just make out and call it a spiritual experience.”

“are you chickening out?” you murmur, rolling your eyes because it’s easier than saying please don’t stop.

“oh, suddenly you’re brave?” he grumbles, but it’s fond, and he nips your cheek like a warning that’s really a kiss-in-disguise. you laugh into his mouth, the sound wobbling between you like a loose bead of light.

it takes him half a second to fish a foil wrapper from his wallet—sleight of hand neat as a magician palming a coin, eyes flicking up to yours for permission like a question tucked inside a trick. “i come prepared,” he says, sheepish, a little proud and a lot pink. then, softer still, thumb tracing tiny circles on your wrist, “guess i gotta make you bleed, now.” he whispers, cocky, giving you a stupid little brow wiggle.

you pinch his cheek but he's right, yeah—you want your first time to be with satoru, don’t you?

[mooncyb3r]

hi. sorry to be insane but i think you just changed my life. a little bit.

i’m honoured. you’re welcome 😝

[mooncyb3r]

bsf!satoru finally shooting his shot? you both have to bleed now... ˙𐃷˙

it’s late in the way apartment nights get late—lamp throwing a honey circle over the coffee table, fridge humming like it’s singing to itself, the paused movie on the tv screen stuck on an actor mid-blink.

the floor is the only place that feels honest, so you’re both down there, backs to the couch, knees up, socks nearly touching. your living room has known satoru since before it was your living room; by now it behaves around him, breathes differently when he wanders in and sprawls like he owns gravity.

there’s a bowl of candy between you. he’s not eating any, but he keeps turning a strawberry wrapper over in his fingers like he’s learning it the same way he learned the shape of your handwriting—slow, careful, a little reverent.

every so often he reaches for your hand and fiddles with your rings, rolling one to your knuckle and back again without thinking about it. your fingers know the route to his hair by muscle memory; you sweep his bangs aside, smooth them down, and two seconds later they spring right back up like a stubborn plant determined to catch light.

it’s comfortable. the kind of quiet that only exists between people who grew up listening to each other breathe. the kind of quiet with no edges.

“i think i’m broken,” you say into it, deadpan, because this is how you do heavy things: you drop them in the middle of the room and see if anyone trips.

satoru tips his head toward you, cheek finding the couch cushion, eyes a ridiculous crystal even in low light. “uh-huh. define ‘broken,’” he murmurs, thumb still worrying your middle ring. “you mean.. unlucky?”

“worse,” you say, pulling at a loose thread on your sweatpants. “i mean i'm romantically defective, the only ‘thing’ i ever had lasted two days. two. days. that's—” the words tangle. you make yourself say them anyway. “i haven’t even… like, had a real kiss.”

his hand, still caught around your rings, slows. something minute flicks behind his eyes—something sharp you can’t read—then he smooths it into a drawl that’s all bite without teeth. “weird. i can’t imagine why.”

you shoot him a look.

“what?” he chuckles quietly.

“say it. i know you’re dying to.”

he goes still the way he gets still before he says something he can’t unsay. then his mouth curves—careful, teasing on the surface, protective underneath. “plenty of people make it through their twenties without letting an idiot put his mouth on them,” he says lightly, but his eyes do the real talking. his eyes say don’t you dare call this a flaw.

“but why am i single?” you press, because you never learned how to leave a bruise alone. “is it the personality? the face? what the hell is wrong? do i smell? be honest.” he’s the worst person to ask this; his honesty would ruin you. he’s addicted to your scent—your hoodie’s afterscent, the shampoo on your pillow, the skin-warm sweetness you carry like a secret.

satoru’s grin breaks out, automatic. “honesty you want, honesty you get. you're too loud, too stubborn, so stupid, so—”

your fist lands, muted, in his ribs. it’s a soft punch; he performs a dramatic death. “ow,” he wheezes, delighted. “violent too.”

“cry about it.” you lean back on your palms. he’s still rolling your ring, thumb warm against the web of your hand, so you tug lightly. he resists just enough to annoy you. “you’re the idiot here.”

he mutters, almost to himself, a pantomimed stage-whisper like he forgot the volume knob exists. “right, i’m the real idiot for arguing with you… for sticking around this long.”

sticky words. they catch like honey in your chest. you ignore them. you’re practiced at that.

“i’m not holding you hostage,” you say, sharper than intended. “if anything, you clinging to me is why i can't get a boyfriend. you scare them away.”

“oh, so your tragic love life is my fault now?” he deadpans, but he looks delighted.

“yes, totally.” you mutter, your cheeks are hot. it’s the heat of being seen too well, not the bad kind. he keeps rolling your ring; you’re going to be left with a ghost of silver on your skin.

“you’re complicated,” he says, gentle now, like he’s listing symptoms he’s grateful for. “and you hate small talk unless it’s with old women. and if you think someone’s lying, your face breaks into itty-bitty pieces because you haven’t learned how to pretend. and—” he pauses, something catching in his throat, “yeah, you’re not easy.”

your eyebrows hike. “wow, cool. thanks. truly uplifting.”

“not like that.” he scoots a little closer until your knees are really touching, his hoodie sleeve brushing your arm. “i mean you’re not easy to… manage. you’re not easy to contain. you’re not easy to put in a box and slap a label on. you’re the complicated puzzle with pieces from a different set and i think that’s—” he shuts up, teeth catching his bottom lip.

you stare at the paused movie because looking at him directly feels like touching an exposed wire. “so... not easy to love,” you whisper, and it comes out softer than you wanted. you try to make it flippant. it fails. “good to know.”

his hand, still wrapped around your finger, squeezes like he’s catching a falling glass before it hits tile. “i didn’t say that,” he answers, voice low, careful, like you’re on a thin ice lake and he’s trying not to crack anything. “don’t twist my words.”

“how is ‘not easy to deal with’ different from ‘not easy to love’?” you ask, obstinate because it’s safer to be stubborn than to be hopeful.

he huffs, small and frustrated and fond. his thumb sketches circles into your palm, tiny galaxies. “because dealing is a choice and love isn’t,” he mutters finally. “you can treat someone right even when they’re difficult. you can want someone even when they drive you insane. you can love someone without them making sense.”

“so love isn’t a choice,” you say, and you aim for a joke but miss and hit the soft meat of it, “and i’m still not chosen.”

the tiny flinch in his eyes would be invisible if you didn’t know every version of him—toddler with a scraped knee, twelve-year-old with a bad haircut, sixteen-year-old pretending he didn’t cry at that movie. “shut up,” he groans, not unkind. “you know that’s not true.”

“do i?” you poke, because you can’t stop yourself. “who would bother? i’m so difficult and—”

“so difficult to understand,” he murmurs, the words cutting through your noise with an ease that’s unfair. his voice flips a switch you didn’t know was in the room. “which is exactly why the right people can’t look away.”

your chest does a weird, painful balloon thing.

“also difficult to have,” he goes on, a crooked smile tugging, “which is exactly why idiots line up anyway, because they think they can be the exception.”

“and?” you whisper, because you want him to keep talking forever, because your mouth tastes like sugar and static.

“and difficult to forget,” he says, and that one lands like a hand on the back of your neck, grounding. his smile is gone. something else is in its place. “i’ve tried, trust me. it’s impossible.”

silence pools under the coffee table, heavy and bright.

you blink at him. your body forgets how to do simple things like breathe and play it cool and be your own worst critic. your mouth opens. nothing comes out.

he’s still talking, like he broke a dam and is trying to build it back with words. “difficult to be mad at for more than five minutes. difficult to keep my hands off when you laugh. difficult to watch other guys text you because i want to break their damn phones. difficult to pretend we’re just—” the words lurch, then steady, “just best friends.”

“are you high, satoru?” you ask, almost not a voice.

he looks at your mouth like he wants to put his hand over it to stop you from ruining yourself with words, then laughs softly, wrecked. “nah,” he says, a whisper, and leans in to do something stupider than finishing a sentence.

the kiss is tiny. barely a tap. a press so quick it might be a misfire, a little mistake people pretend didn’t happen. except your entire body rings like he just struck crystal with the softest part of his knuckle.

you stare at him, eyes wide and pupils probably too dilated. he’s closer than he should be. he stares back like he’s halfway through a long fall and only just realized the ground exists.

you don’t think. what a relief. your hand’s already in his hair and his is already tightening around your fingers, and you’re meeting him again, mouths making a new shape, sweet and tentative and ridiculous because he tastes like soda and a memory of the strawberry candies he refuses to admit he steals only because they somehow hold the taste of his childhood with you.

he feels you fumble, not the kiss itself—your mouth picks it up too fast, as if your heart’s had the choreography forever—but your hands, not knowing where to go like they’ve forgotten anatomy. his fingers glide along your wrist, your forearm, guiding you because he knows this is your first, settling you behind his neck like it’s a cradle built for you. there, he tells you without words. anchor there.

“okay?” he breathes into the space between your lips, his nose bumping yours.

“yeah,” you say back, a little stunned, a little laughing, because somehow the room has stayed exactly the same while every single thing in it has tilted five degrees.

he kisses you like he’s trying to teach you a soft language through your mouth—slow vowels, patient consonants. he pulls back half an inch to see if you’ll chase and you do, you do without thinking, the sound he makes shouldn't be so soft. your rings clicks off his collarbone; later you’ll find a tiny half-moon on his skin and feel smug.

his mouth is gentler than you expected and more demanding in flashes—like he’s toeing a line and the line keeps moving. when he breaks for air, he doesn’t go far. he presses a peck to the corner of your mouth. then another. then one to your jaw, a little smile in it because he knows it drives you nuts, these almost-kisses. his fingers flex around your hand, squeezing—there, good, breathe—then releasing like waves.

“stop it,” you giggle, mortified by the sound of it; but you don’t really care. “you’re so annoying.”

he hums against your skin, pleased. “mm, i know.” another tiny peck, to your cheekbone. you grab both sides of his face on instinct—cheeks, smooth and warm under your palms—so you can direct him like you’re done playing this game. he blushes. actual color, high on the cheekbones, faintly stunned. you try to act like you don’t notice as you pull him down to kiss you properly.

it snowballs. of course it does. of course it’s messy. there’s laughter in it, and breathlessness, and the familiar cadence of two people who’ve been talking forever—only now you speak like this.

his hands bracket your waist and you think, absurdly, about the way his palms are bigger than you remember, how he used to stick stickers on your notebook and write his name like it was shorthand for comfort. when he noses your cheek and you tilt your head, his mouth slots deeper, the kind of kiss that steals time and makes it manageable, as if it softens just for you.

“full disclosure,” you mumble, clinging to humor like a ledge, “this is my first kiss. like actual first, so if i’m doing anything weird just—”

“you’re doing perfect,” he says, immediate, fervent in a way that breaks your knees from the inside. “you’re doing so perfect i’m—”

he doesn’t finish that thought either because your sleep shirt is suddenly the most annoying shirt in the world. you find yourself tugging at your shirt, dragging it up your ribs in a way that feels both graceless and necessary. when the cotton gets stuck around your head, arms trapped up like a caught sweater puppet, you flail, mortified heat stinging your ears.

“oh my god,” you squeak into fabric, trying to wriggle free. you squirm. the hem rides up, exposing a stomach that registers cold air and his gaze at the same time. “help me—”

he’s laughing, the bastard, but it’s so fond it makes something fizzy go off in your chest. “hold on, hold on.” deft, careful, he unhooks you from your own clothing, peeling it off like a skin, stealing a kiss to your forehead as your face emerges, like he’s unwrapping a present he’s been pretending wasn’t under the tree for years. “hey,” he says, eyes taking you in with a slow awe that scrapes your lungs. “there you are.”

air hits your skin; embarrassment hits your face. getting stuck when taking off your shirt is such a good way to ruin the moment, right? “i swear i’m not trying to ruin this,” you mutter from inside the shirt before it pops free of your ears, “but the shirt was fighting for its life—”

his fingers are careful at your wrists, guiding the cotton up and over like you’re something precious—and then it’s off, tossed somewhere near the couch graveyard, and you’re just sitting there in your bra with your face hot enough to heat the kettle back up.

“you’re not ruining anything,” he repeats, and then he looks, really looks.

you’re in your bra. you’re in your bra in satoru’s lap. satoru who you once threw up on in second grade after a bad juice box. satoru whose house you’ve been climbing into since before you were allowed to be out past sunset. satoru whose palm is still holding your hand like it’s a habit no one taught him how to break.

you watch his throat move. you watch his ears go a tiny bit pink. he tries to be normal about it and fails miserably.

he can’t stop. he keeps pressing small soft pecks to your lips like he’s taste-testing, smiling into them, teasing. it’s stupidly sweet. it’s also absolutely annoying. “give me the full thing,” you complain, breathless. “commit to the bit.”

“oh? full thing?” his voice drops as if that’s a switch. “okay, princess.”

you mean to flip him off for that. you don’t get the chance. he guides you when he needs to, little murmurs that don’t need words: here, less, there. you accommodate. he watches you get it right and looks proud. he opens your mouth with his mouth and you forget how to do anything except cling.

you forget until your tongue tastes iron.

you go cold, it's the bitter taste of blood—oh god. you did that. did you bite him? did your teeth do something terrible? are you the world’s worst kisser with documented evidence now? your mind sprints: you’re so bad at this, you ruin everything, you’re about to apologize for the rest of your life—you pull back to assess damages and see it: not your lip, not his. his nose. bleeding. spectacularly.

panic flares dumb and immediate. you jerk back, wide-eyed, touching your lip, convinced you bit him. “oh god—i didn’t—did i—” you start spiraling out loud, the way you do when you stub your toe and narrate your own demise.

a slow, warm spread of red starts under his nose like a sunrise that decided to be brave. he blinks once, twice, goes faintly cross-eyed in a way you will bully him for until you’re both ninety because of veins of red already blooming under his nose. you both watch the first drop form with the concern of two people witnessing a catastrophe unfold in slow motion.

“no way,” you whisper, reverent, and the sight is objectively hilarious. his nose starts bleeding in earnest. you stare at his face, then down at your bra, then back.

“okay,” he says around a laugh that’s trying not to be a laugh, pinching the bridge of his nose, tipping his head forward like he’s done this enough to know the drill. “i’m good.. i think.”

there is a beat of absurd silence. then you snort. then he tries not to laugh. but you absolutely lose it, doubling over, forehead bumping his shoulder, cackling like a witch at a bonfire.

“it’s not—” he gestures with the arrogance of a person trying to maintain dignity while pinching his own nose, “it’s a dry air thing.”

you’re still wheezing. you reach blindly for the tissue box on the coffee table and nearly throw it at him. “uh-huh. totally the humidity. not because you saw boobs for the first time in your entire life.”

“wow,” he says, absolutely wounded. “as if i haven’t seen you—” he cuts himself off, eyes flicking anywhere but your chest like he’s trying to prove a point that’s already bleeding down his face. the tissue soaks through instantly. he fumbles another.

“pinch the soft part,” you instruct, which is what you remember from the times he’s come home from basketball with a busted nose and you’ve played nurse. “lean slightly forward, not back.”

he obeys. you sit cross-legged in front of him and try to stop laughing. you fail. “i’m sorry,” you gasp, not sorry at all. “it’s just—you’re bleeding because of me.”

"shut up, don’t be dramatic about it," he huffs, “and don’t make me laugh right now,” he begs around his own laugh, pinching the bridge of his nose, head tipped forward like a pro. “i will bleed to death on your rug.”

“it's already so dirty,” you chuckle, scrambling for tissues again. “and if you die on it i can finally throw it away with a clear conscience.”

he muffles a grin behind the tissue wad, eyes squeezed shut. he looks stupidly happy for a man hemorrhaging from the face. “not my most dignified moment.”

“you got a nosebleed because you saw me in a bra,” you say, still halfway to feral with laughter. “that’s… that’s cute.”

“correction,” he says smugly, voice all stuffed cotton, “you in a bra on my lap.”

you try to look offended and end up pink. he watches it happen like it’s sunrise number two. you press fresh tissues into his hand; he takes them without letting go of your fingers. the room is bright with ridiculousness, everything edged in this giddy light. the candy bowl watches you like it knows you’re both doomed.

“don’t look at me like that,” he mumbles once the bleeding slows, eyes soft, tissue still clamped, and you hate that your pulse can hear what his voice won’t say.

“but you look good,” you whisper, he groans. you wipe a red smear off his upper lip with exaggerated care and then catch yourself staring. it’s awful how pretty he is under bad lighting with blood on his face. unfair. he’s flushed, a ridiculous soft pink across cheekbones and ears. the curve of his mouth is bitten-wet.

the word hangs in the air and opens a door you’ve both been pretending isn’t in this apartment.

you toss the tissues in the trash, wash your hands, come back, sit the same as before—backs to the couch, knees up, shoulders touching—and somehow everything inside the shape has been re-labeled: familiar, familiar, familiar, new.

“satoru,” you say, and he swallows hard like his name in your mouth is the first drink of water after a long run.

“yeah?”

“you sure?” you ask, trying to sound normal and failing, because normal flew out the window with your shirt.

he nods. the kind that starts in his chest. “i’ve been sure since second grade,” he says, very quiet, like he’s confessing to stealing a holy book. then he catches himself, rolls his shoulders, puts a grin on like a mask, snaps the elastic at the back of it. “obviously,” he adds, cocky, “i have exquisite taste.”

you smack his thigh. his fingers catch your wrist and draw little circles on your pulse like he’s coaxing your heart to stop sprinting.

“the boyfriend thing,” you say, because the argument fluttered away from you but you want it back on the table where it belongs, like a cat dragging a toy back to your feet. “do you… do you scare them off?”

“no,” he says, without hesitation, still playing with your ring, “they scare themselves off. they realize they’re out of their depth. they realize they’d have to learn you like a language and keep learning forever.”

“you just said i was difficult to deal with,” you pout.

“yeah but i'm not complaining,” his smile tips. he leans in, barely there, hovering. “you stay difficult to live without.” he whispers, and that’s the one that breaks you.

you pull him in.

he meets you like he’s been rehearsing this hit his whole life—gentle, greedy, careful in the way that makes greedy feel like a prayer. he kisses you until you’re stupid and your hands get bold and then clumsy again because apparently elbow articulation is advanced physics. you end up half in his lap without remembering how, knees outside his hips, ribs brushing his hoodie’s hem each time you breathe.

“tell me if it’s too fast,” he whispers, and maps you patient as low tide, mouth skimming your cheek, your jaw, the corner of your smile, the small hollow by your ear where your pulse hides. he collects places like seashells and keeps them gentle in his palms. “tell me anything and i’ll listen.”

“okay,” you whisper, and for once you mean it, and something in his chest unclenches so audibly you feel it against your ribs, a little door unlatching

he gets obnoxiously gentle for a while, and you get obnoxiously soft about it. he kisses you like he’s pressing stickers into a memory book. every peck makes you giggle, which makes him grin like a spring day, which makes you drag him in by the cheeks, and it makes him pink all the way to the tips of his ears. you try to act normal about it but you absolutely do not manage it. it’s stupidly sweet. it’s wrecking you clean.

“we don’t have to—” he begins, pauses. his voice is velvet with caution. “we can just make out and call it a spiritual experience.”

“are you chickening out?” you murmur, rolling your eyes because it’s easier than saying please don’t stop.

“oh, suddenly you’re brave?” he grumbles, but it’s fond, and he nips your cheek like a warning that’s really a kiss-in-disguise. you laugh into his mouth, the sound wobbling between you like a loose bead of light.

it takes him half a second to fish a foil wrapper from his wallet—sleight of hand neat as a magician palming a coin, eyes flicking up to yours for permission like a question tucked inside a trick. “i come prepared,” he says, sheepish, a little proud and a lot pink. then, softer still, thumb tracing tiny circles on your wrist, “guess i gotta make you bleed, now.” he whispers, cocky, giving you a stupid little brow wiggle.

you pinch his cheek but he's right, yeah—you want your first time to be with satoru, don’t you?