Not a Competition (Narrator: It Was)
Chapters Three & Four — Special Double Chapter
her place, his place, and a very unfortunate accident
part 1 part 2 part 3 ~ m.list
Synopsis: chapters three & four — double special your place, his place, and a very unfortunate accident
After being partnered for the semester project, Gojo insists on your place. Then his place, if it was up to him the very next day, now a clusmy moment leaves you spending the night with this very sexy rival of yours....
The project is going well. You are less sure about everything else. Wait a minute....Did he do this on purpose?
Contenttag: #chapters three and four #double special #reader insert #second person pov #mild obsessive behaviour #mild swearing #sexual tension #suggestive content #no explicit content this chapter #slow burn #forced proximity #pining #class difference #he cooked for her #the water glass scene #overnight stay #they share a bed #no smut this chapter but it is coming
a/n: heeey im dropping a double special today eek i know I’m having a lot of fun posting these instead of letting them collect just in word lmao I have most chapters pre-written and im writing the next ones now so more coming! Ty for all the love i appreciate u guys have a great week!
taglist<3 open just drop a comment babes ! x: @diangelofan599 @lem-hhn @sissi4tete
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The thing about Gojo Satoru was that he had absolutely no concept of personal space.
Not in a threatening way. Not even in a particularly intentional way — or at least that's what you told yourself as he jogged up to you after the lecture, his arm knocking yours as he shoved his hands in his pockets, bag over one shoulder, walking at a pace that slowed you down a little.
"Library or yours?" he said.
"The project, Y/N. We should at least draft a few rough ideas. It's 40% y'know."
"I know that," you snapped a little. Of course the project.
You looked at him. "I was thinking the library."
"You've never been to mine."
"Exactly." He said it like that was a perfectly logical response. "Library's loud on Tuesdays. There's a study group that takes over the whole east wing and they always smell like instant noodles."
You opened your mouth to say that the library was neutral and professional and an appropriate venue for a project meeting between two people who were research partners and nothing else.
His car was — fine. It was fine. It was just a car.
A very nice car. A quietly, almost offensively nice car in the way that very expensive things sometimes were — understated enough that you had to know what you were looking at to understand what it meant. You knew what you were looking at.
You thought about the bus route you'd had memorised since freshers week. Twenty-three minutes, two changes, forty pence cheaper if you loaded the travel card before 8am.
Gojo didn't say anything about it. Didn't make it a thing, didn't look at you sideways, just asked for your postcode and connected his phone to the aux without asking what you wanted to listen to — which should have been annoying, and was, a little, except the song that came on was actually good and you were not going to tell him that.
You watched the campus disappear in the side mirror.
Two different worlds, you thought. Same lecture hall, same Tuesday, same project. Completely different everything else.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. You looked out the window. The song changed.
"You're not, actually." He said it like he'd been paying attention. "You just pick when."
You glanced at him, a little side eye. Rich coming from him.
"What's that face for?" he chuckled — he looked genuinely happy you were here with him. "You think I didn't notice you?"
You didn't have an answer for that. Face feeling warmer, you looked out the window for the rest of the drive.
"Kitchen's through there," you said, dropping your bag to the floor and starting to subtly tidy — you were not expecting guests today. "Tea?" Clearing the table. "Or I've got juice, I think. Water for sure." You moved into your small kitchen, putting some clean dishes back into the cupboard you hadn't got round to this morning.
The joy of a studio apartment the size of a big shoe box is that you don't have more space for more mess. For someone so academically structured, your personal life was a little messier.
"Tea's good." He hadn't moved from the doorway. He was looking at something on your wall — one of the prints, the good ones, the ones you'd found at a convention. A pink-haired main character from your favourite anime. "Is that—"
"Yes." You filled the kettle. "Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You had a face. You were going to say something."
"You had a face." You clicked the kettle on and turned around, and he'd finally moved, was pulling out the chair across from yours and dropping into it like gravity had specifically invited him. His bag hit the floor. His long legs stretched out. He looked — annoyingly comfortable. Annoyingly at home. "Sit properly."
He adjusted approximately nothing. You sat down across from him and opened your notes, because this was a project meeting and you had an agenda and forty percent of your grade was not going to write itself.
"Right," you said. "I've been thinking about the structure—"
"I looked at the Yamamoto brief again." He reached into his bag and pulled out — actual notes. Handwritten. Organised. You stared at them. "There's a gap in the literature around the boundary conditions we were discussing in week three. I think that's our angle."
You looked at his notes. You looked at him.
He looked back at you with the faint expression of someone who knew exactly what you were thinking and found it privately delightful.
"...That's what I was going to say," you said.
"I know." He uncapped his pen. "You were jotting ideas in the last lecture."
"After Yamamoto called out us as partners." He tapped his notes. "I took notes on your notes so now we're on the same page for the project." He pushed his glasses up. "What now, gorgeous."
You pulled your notes closer and said nothing — slightly pissed he'd been reading your notes, and yes, that could be a little creepy, if it wasn't for the fact that a part of you loved how proactive it was. What? At your core you respected people who put in the work.
Satoru knew he could pull it off. He was a genius after all. And now he was actually walking into your apartment.
He'd clocked everything in the first forty seconds. The cinema cups lined up on the shelf above the sink — the collectible ones, the ones you had to pay extra for at the concession stand, which meant she'd been to see all of those films in the cinema and paid the premium without thinking twice about it. The prints. The small stack of manga on the windowsill that she'd half-heartedly covered with a physics textbook, like she'd tidied in a hurry and almost gotten away with it.
Tasteful, he thought. Specific. She knows exactly what she likes.
He wanted to ask about every single item. He was going to ask about exactly none of them, because they had the whole rest of their lives for that and he was being very disciplined about the order of operations here.
She came back with two mugs and set his down in front of him without asking how he took it — which meant she'd noticed, at some point, how he took it from the machine in the physics department. He hadn't known she'd noticed. Did she feel it too?
He watched her sit down. Open her notes. Uncap her pen — her hands looked really soft, he thought to himself.
Something in his chest did something unhelpful.
Patience, he told himself. We have our whole lives for that. All good things and that.
Because since the beginning of this class — when she corrected Yamamoto that day, and every day after that — she had piqued his interest in a way no one else ever had. He could watch her all day, every day. And he would. In his mind this was like destiny. How the Earth spins around the Sun. How the sky is just blue. You and I are just going to end up together. It's inevitable. It's okay — I know you're not there yet. I can wait. Honestly I don't mind. We have our whole life together yet.
You'd expected to spend the entire session managing him, diplomatically redirecting his contributions, politely ignoring the wrong ones. You had a whole strategy. A very good strategy. A strategy that became increasingly irrelevant as the afternoon progressed and it turned out that Gojo Satoru really was — quietly, almost irritatingly — brilliant at this.
Not in the way he was usually brilliant, the casual effortless way that made you want to flip a table. In a different way. A focused way. He asked questions that pushed the argument further. He caught a flaw in your second methodology before you'd finished explaining it and fixed it in the same breath, no fanfare, just — fixed it and moved on.
You'd had to stop yourself from saying good point out loud twice.
"The Nakamura framework is the right reference here," he said, tapping the page, "but we need to be careful about how we cite it because Yamamoto's got beef with Nakamura going back about fifteen years and if we lead with it he'll be in a bad mood when he marks the intro."
He looked up, a small lift at the corner of his lips. "I keep up with the departmental politics."
"You're such a fucking idiot," you said, moving to adjust the citation — and hating to admit it, you held back a smile yourself. He was alright, really. And honestly not bad to look at either.
He held your gaze for a beat too long. You looked back at your notes. "We should bury the Nakamura citation in section two. By the time he gets there he'll already think it was his idea."
"That's — actually quite calculated." He squinted at the correction, pushing his glasses up.
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I know." He was smiling. "You're making a face again."
"You have several faces, really."
You looked at him steadily for a moment. He looked back, easy and unbothered, the pen between his fingers, afternoon light catching the white of his hair, the thin frame of his glasses.
"Don't push it," you said.
It was somewhere around the third hour that things became complicated.
"Same time next week?" you said, both of you noticing how dark it was getting.
He stretched — top lifting just enough to make out the end of some very well-carved V-lines and a trace of white hair below the hem, and — you were not looking — he reached for his bag.
"Both of us." He stood. Slung his bag. Looked down at you with that cheesy grin that made your stomach drop. "I'll text you."
"You don't have my—" you started.
"I got it from Shoko." He was already heading for the door. "After week four."
You sat with that for a moment.
"That was weeks ago," you said.
"I know." He opened the door. "Wednesday. I'll pick you up."
You sat in the quiet of your flat and looked at your notes and the two empty mugs and the chair he'd been sitting in, still slightly pulled out from the table at the angle he'd left it.
He texted at 11:47pm that same night.
That was it. No question, no follow up. Just — that.
You looked at it for longer than was reasonable. Put your phone face down. Picked it up again.
yeah, you typed back. you actually helped.
You put your phone down. Went to bed. Lay there for a while.
Wednesday, you thought again, for no particular reason.
You texted him the next morning.
hey — good meeting yesterday. when works for you next? i'm free most of next week.
You sent it before you could think too hard about it. Professional. Appropriate. Just two research partners confirming a meeting time.
His reply came back in four minutes.
us. bring your nakamura notes the ones i know you made after i mentioned it yesterday
You had made the Nakamura notes. Last night. At midnight. Because he'd been right and you'd wanted to be prepared.
friday, you typed. take it or leave it.
A longer pause this time.
fine. mine this time. i'll pick you up.
Satoru, standing in his kitchen at 9am on a Thursday.
Today would have been better. Today he could have just — kept her here. Her notes were already on his table, theoretically. This was a completely reasonable logistical argument that he was aware had no bearing on anything.
Friday, she'd said. His place.
Not as a gesture — or not only as a gesture — but because he was actually good at it and the dining hall food was objectively terrible and she was a scholarship student who lived off campus and he'd watched her eat a convenience store sandwich at their last meeting and something about that had sat with him in a way he wasn't fully examining.
Friday, he thought. I can wait I guess
He was being extremely reasonable about this.
His place was not what you'd expected. Which was to say: it was exactly what the car and the quiet confidence and the general everything of Gojo Satoru had suggested, but somehow seeing it directly was different from having predicted it. High ceilings. Good light. The kind of clean that came from actually caring about space rather than just tidying before company. You doubted this was student accommodation — it made sense he wasn't in the campus dorms, but this was definitely a private rental.
And something on the stove.
You stopped in the kitchen doorway.
"Sit down," he said, already at the hob, doing something competent with a wooden spoon. "Notes out. We're doing the methodology section tonight."
"I'm cooking. It's not done yet." He glanced back at you over his shoulder. "Sit down, Y/N."
He cooked. It smelled extraordinary. You opened your notes and stared at them and thought he cooked on a low loop in the background of your brain that you were doing your best to ignore.
"Stop making it a thing," he said, without turning around.
"I'm not making it a thing, I'm looking at my notes."
"It's dinner. We were going to be here for hours anyway. Eat while you work."
You looked at him standing there in his kitchen, sleeves pushed up. His forearms looked strong.
Dinner was good. Better than good — which you said, you didn't mind throwing him a compliment — and he'd looked at you with something that wasn't quite the usual grin, something a little less performed, and said good and that had been that.
You worked through the methodology. He was sharp and focused and every time you thought you had the measure of him he said something that shifted it slightly. You got through more than you'd planned. You kept finding things you agreed on — not just academically, but in the particular way of people who find the same things funny and annoying in equal measure.
He'd said something at one point about a film — offhand, a reference, half a sentence — and you'd finished it without thinking, and there'd been a pause, and then you'd both moved on, but it sat in the room between you for a while after.
He might not be that bad, said some traitorous part of your brain, around the second hour.
He's infuriating, said the rest of you, firmly.
Sure, said the traitorous part. But also.
You told it to shut up. You went back to your notes.
You looked up. The kitchen window was dark. Your notes were spread across half the table. Your tea had gone cold twice and been reheated twice and gone cold again.
"Oh." You started gathering pages. "Yeah, okay — sorry, I didn't notice the time—"
"Don't apologise." He was leaning back in his chair, watching you with that expression again. "Good session."
"Yeah." You stacked your notes. It had been, genuinely, a good session. "We're actually ahead of schedule."
You zipped your bag. He stood, stretched — that same long unhurried stretch, and you were definitely not looking again — and reached past you for the mugs to put in the sink.
He was right next to you when he reached.
Close. Closer than necessary for the mug retrieval. You felt the warmth of him and the faint smell of whatever he used, something clean and warm, and your brain did something extremely unhelpful that you immediately buried.
Then you felt the sudden cold on your chest. Satoru had spilled the water you'd barely touched — all over you.
"Oh no," said Gojo Satoru.
Your top — the grey one, the thin grey one — was wet. The fabric, which had been perfectly fine thirty seconds ago, had become immediately, comprehensively see-through.
Gojo Satoru was crouching down. Inspecting, apparently, the damage. At eye level with your chest.
He looked — deliberately, unhurriedly, in the warm kitchen light that caught the wet fabric and the outline of your bra and the skin beneath and all of it — and then he looked up.
His eyes dragged up from your chest, over your collarbone, up your throat, and found yours. His glasses had slid down slightly from the crouch. He didn't push them up.
That expression was back. Not the usual grin — something sharper than that.
The sudden warmth that had been a low simmer somewhere below your stomach, suddenly, extremely difficult to ignore.
Your chest was moving faster than it should have been. You were aware of the wet fabric against your skin, of the kitchen light, of the fact that he was still crouching, still looking up at you, and the distance between you was not very much distance at all.
"Looks like I'll have to get you out of those," he said, your stomach flipped.
Your brain stopped working.
He stood up and glanced at the window.
"It's late anyway," he said, already walking toward the hallway, easy and unhurried, like none of this had just happened. "Lucky it's Friday. No class tomorrow."
"I'll grab you a towel. You can use the shower." He was somewhere down the hall now, the sound of a cupboard opening. "I've got clean bedding — just changed it actually. You can bunk with me, the sofa's terrible for your back."
"I'll drop you home after breakfast." More rustling. He appeared back in the doorway holding a towel and what appeared to be folded pyjamas, which he held out to you. "These will be big on you."
You looked at the towel. You looked at the pyjamas. You looked at him.
He looked back at you with those eyes — pale and blue and very, very awake — and said nothing else.
"Fine," you said, because it was late, and you didn't know the bus route from his side of the city, and the sofa was in fact terrible for your back, and both of you knew in your own way that none of those were the reason.
His bed was — fine. Large. Clean-sheeted, as promised. He'd given you the left side without discussion and taken the right, and there was a reasonable amount of space between you, and the lamp was off, and you were lying there in his too-large pyjamas staring at the ceiling while your heart did something thoroughly unreasonable in your chest.
He was quiet. You couldn't tell if he was asleep.
You thought about the kitchen. The wet fabric. The way he'd looked up at you from below, glasses slipped down, not bothering to fix them. The warmth that was still there — if you were being completely honest with yourself — not entirely resolved.
You thought about the project. The Nakamura citations. The methodology section, which you'd actually finished, which was ahead of schedule, which was — good. That was what mattered. The project.
You thought about I'll have to get you out of those and the way he'd said it like it was a perfectly normal sentence that people said.
You stared at the ceiling.
You thought about all the times he'd been infuriating and all the times he'd been surprisingly, quietly good at this and the film reference and the dinner he'd cooked and the way he sometimes looked at you when he thought you weren't looking and—
You turned that over for a second.
Did he do this on purpose?
Gojo Satoru breathed quietly beside you, the absolute picture of innocence.
You were going to kill him.
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End of chapters three & four — double special.
