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The second gimlet hits the back of Nanami’s tongue and it tastes like I want nicotine, like where’s Ieiri when you need her, like fuck, maybe I should have eaten dinner before this. But what could he do? Work had run long, longer than usual, and cooking for him is a process, one that he refuses to rush. So, the bar it had been, alcohol representing the lower tier on this particular evening in the hierarchy of his needs.
He feels around in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, hanging over the back of the stool he’s perched on, feels the miraculous edge of the cardboard package he thinks he remembers stacking alongside a new toothbrush in the convenience store, recent enough that he’s almost sure it’s not empty. He nearly sighs in relief, pulling it from the pocket, flipping the lid to find no less than two cigarettes. Another sip of the gimlet this time tastes like everything is perfect, blurred around the edges as he slots one of the million coffin nails in his life between his lips. HIs next quest is for a lighter, one he’s sure is deeper in that same pocket, and his hand is half-buried in it with fingers searching below the returned and mostly-empty pack when a voice cuts through the fuzzy background noise of the bar.
“You can’t smoke in here.”
Nanami’s gaze shoots up to the bartender, recognizable from a few other late nights here and who he’s almost sure made direct eye contact with him at the flip of his hair from his eyes over the cigarette pinched in his mouth and had looked anywhere but disapproving. She isn’t even looking at him now, turned instead in conversation with three very young-looking women who are verbally fawning over her earrings, more quietly admiring the cleavage between undone buttons of her top. Nanami had noticed both himself. When it becomes obvious that she is not the one forbidding him from lighting up, he scans the rest of the bar slowly. He doesn’t even look back toward the tables, which in fairness to whomever had spoken push this particular bar over the grandfathered-in 100m2 establishments where smoking is more commonly allowed, rather than just tolerated with averted eyes; on entrance, they had been populated exclusively with groups Nanami is sure are uninterested in anything going on at the bar, and the noise in the atmosphere makes it less likely he’d hear any conversation from them, even if directed at him. On a stool a few away from his, unseparated by other patrons, he finds the answer.
At first glance, there isn’t much special about the man Nanami locks eyes with, aside from the unusual attention he’s paying to someone trying to smoke in a bar. Nanami wonders, fantastically, for a moment if this man’s hobby somehow is hopping establishments, shutting down attempts to light up. Maybe the bartender has paid him. He dismisses the nonsensical thought as the last gasp of the food he should have had before drinking.
“No one else seems to care.” Nanami isn’t stupid; he knows that technically, legally, he cannot smoke in here. But the long arm of the law has failed thus far to extend to dim bars and the hunger at the edge of his nerves for something to counteract the gin, to let the night roll on smoothly. And he wants the smoke badly. The bartender not giving him shit about it is merely the icing on the cake at this point.
“That doesn’t change the law.” Nanami gives him a second glance, the man in the suit rolling a glass of what looks like whiskey between his hands. He’s slumped a little so it’s difficult to tell exactly how tall he is, but if Nanami’s guessing his height is average, build on the skinny side of the median. His face is more interesting, eyes that roam past tired into jaded, strong nose, mouth in a semi-permanent frown. He’s watching Nanami with something that’s almost curiosity, slightly more bland. Nanami can feel the filter growing damp against the tip of his tongue and finds his irritation stirring. It’s not far from the surface these days.
“Are you planning to do something about it?” Nanami is far from his sorcery days, four or so years removed at this point, but he hasn’t let himself lose the physical prowess it gave him. If it’s a fight this idiot is looking for he can provide. He’s off the clock but some part of him deep in his bloodstream is still looking for the high that physical violence provided. He wouldn’t mind delivering the humbling of a beatdown. Maybe he’s searching for one.
But as the man on the stool cocks his head, something in his gaze shifts in a way that tells Nanami this will not be the night for that. It may be the night for something else, he thinks. The man is sort of handsome, in an average way, and Nanami knows from experience that he himself is not lacking. He may be getting ahead of himself; it’s not like they’re in Ni-Chome. “If you want,” the man says. He gestures to the stool next to him, empty and a little undignified for Nanami to make his way to; he tries to convey this in the raise of an eyebrow, but the man seems unwilling to understand. He looks older, Nanami thinks. “I’ll buy you another of whatever you’re drinking.”
“Whose tab is it going on?” Nanami asks the question mainly to cover the awkward shuffling of his body between stools, unsure in the moment of why he’s even moving at all, why he’s sliding that jacket back over another seatback and the cigarette into the breast pocket of his shirt for later indulgence except that the man had seemed so earnest in his forbiddance. It’s strange. The part of Nanami that still pulses hard and heavy with cursed energy likes strange.
“Are you asking my name?” His wave to the bartender is authoritative, knowledgeable, experienced, and she leaves the girls she’s talking to apologetically and quick. “Higuruma.”
No first name seems incoming. He’s been found out, so he sees no need to lie. “I was.”
“And yours?” The bartender deposits Nanami’s gimlet first, takes Higuruma’s glass and refills it from a middle of the road bottle. Nanami’s gin is on the shelf just above it.
“Nanami,” he says, and then for some reason he continues, “Kento.”
“Nanami.” Higuruma’s repetition splits the name into the two sounds that make it up, the sounds that had given or predicted his technique, the ones that Gojo used to tease him over, the ones Haibara had— “Seven and three usually make ten.” His voice is tired. This is a white-collar bar, not for the upper echelons but the ones toiling in positions for the physically unskilled, the lost masses of what everyone calls nine-to-five but is usually substantially more. It’s been a long day already for both of them and it isn’t done yet. “We’ll see about that.”
//
They close the bar out after all. It isn’t the charming hours after a meet-cute, the kind that seem to go by in no time at all; nothing could be farther from the truth, Nanami thinks, finally getting his smoke in the alley next to the shut-off porchlight. Higuruma is a lawyer, a surprisingly convicted one, and their conversation had spiraled from debate to shared sigh to joint corporate misery in quick succession, ending both of them up below the awning of the side entrance irritated and mostly out of the rain pouring down around them. Nanami still finds it hard to talk to the vast majority of humanity, even with his days beaten down into rotten monotony, a level between them that can never be crossed where that thrum of cursed energy and the smell of death haunt him, but Higuruma crosses it. Nanami doesn’t think he’s a sorcerer too, doesn’t even know how he’d broach the subject should he feel so inclined, but there’s some level of understanding there. Higuruma, he thinks, would take his fist to a problem if he thought that would bring him the solution he wanted, and Nanami can understand that.
“Is it good?” Higuruma asks, slim fingers pointing toward the embers stirring with his inhale. Nanami thinks at this moment in time there’s nothing particularly better. He nods, offers Higuruma the half-smoked stem, and Higuruma takes it. He doesn’t put it to his lips, instead just looks at it like he may be able to glean the feeling just from observation.
“If you won’t smoke it, give it back,” Nanami says. It’s almost a snap. Not since Gojo has someone brought his aggravation so close to the simmering surface of him. He’s not sure whether he’s grateful or not, happy or not. “They’re expensive.”
“You don’t look like you’re struggling,” Higuruma argues, but he does pass the cigarette back without taking a drag. Their fingers bump a little. Higuruma’s are cold, but neither of them shiver. “Does it bother you that much?”
“I’m not.” Nanami leaves the words to cover both statuses, his struggle and his bother. The next inhale is a little bitter. “Do you know if it’s supposed to rain much longer?”
Higuruma pulls a phone from the pocket of his coat — long trench, classically deep grey, the kind of adulthood Nanami hasn’t yet managed to ape with his corporate job and his Shimbashi address and his multi-digit paychecks. It’s the kind of thing that it feels like appears in your closet once you reach a certain maturity level. Nanami’s own suit is beige, shirt dark blue, tie only interesting enough to keep his coworkers from calling him a geezer. Higuruma’s phone isn’t as nice as he might have expected for a lawyer, but Higuruma doesn’t really exude the aura of wealth that Nanami can smell like blood in the water from all his time in salaryman work anyway. “Looks like another twenty minutes.”
Nanami doesn’t curse, not out loud, but he does mentally measure the distance to his apartment compared to the closest train station. He’ll end up drier than Higuruma, he’s sure of it. Neither have pulled out umbrellas, concealed in the deep pockets of grown men’s coats, so he’s sure the forecast hadn’t included precipitation. Only occasional evictions from the bars and late-night eateries around them trickle past, huddled under spread newspapers or the hoods of a younger generations’ fashion sense, in the street crossing the mouth of their alley. “Do you live around here?” he asks, finally, cigarette close to embers between his fingers at this point. He stubs it out with his foot against the pavement.
“Do you?” Higuruma turns it around on him. He has been like this the entire course of their conversation, not one to volunteer something personal before getting it in investment as a return. Nanami thinks of the courtroom dramas he’s seen on scattered nights in front of the television, thinks that it’s much subtler in reality, not nearly the dramatic and inescapable trap-setting that the actors make it seem. “Kind of an older person’s neighborhood for someone like you, hmm?”
Nanami hasn’t commented on the patent difference in their ages before now. He’s a little glad Higuruma brought it up first, acknowledged it. He’s also a little glad he doesn’t seem especially bothered by it; the admission of someone like you is unlaced with disgust or wariness. It’s a statement of fact, a presentation of evidence. “I’m a few blocks away.”
Higuruma looks surprised as he pockets his phone. “I didn’t realize there was much of anything residential around here. I was meeting with a client in advertising today.” The last sentence is as much a personal admission as anything Nanami has gotten so far; a why for Higuruma being in the area.
“It’s a big building.” This is only an explanation as much as Higuruma is looking for one. Nanami suddenly finds himself done with the back and forth. “It’s farther to the station.”
“It’s too late for the trains,” Higuruma agrees. “My plan was a cab.”
“Was it?” Nanami asks then, casting his attention over Higuruma. He’s strange, he thinks, oddly driven in his work, eyes caved in with the weight of the justice system and the crushing pressure of adulthood that increasingly sinks Nanami into the ground day by day, fingers dextrous from flexing around a physical pen, calloused at the edge of his pinky from rubbing against a legal pad. Nanami is okay with strange.
“Well,” Higuruma says, and with this sentence he delivers the first conscious physical contact between them, the salvo of a hand at Nanami’s waist to tug him further under the awning, away from the stubbed-out end of his cigarette quickly snuffing out in the precipitation, “I wasn’t going to ask you back to my place.”
Nanami’s skin does not crawl at the touch; neither does it spark. Perfect, he thinks. He turns his body purposefully to lead Higuruma by that hand to his apartment, to whatever comes after.
//
Nanami is twenty-four years old with the decorative sense of a loner several decades older. Ieiri had somehow found out where he settled first, had stopped by the door of that initial apartment with a dry smile and a framed photograph of the five of them before everything in Okinawa and everything after (and a bottle of red wine, but that hadn’t lasted beyond the middle of her housewarming visit), and that photograph remains the most sentimental thing in the place. It’s fraught to have a picture of himself with Geto Suguru these days, Nanami is vaguely aware without knowing all the details, but Higuruma examines the faces without judgment, without understanding.
His shoes, where he’d left them in the entryway, are nicer than Nanami expects. An investment, he assumes. Almost everyone in the salaried world has one thing that’s far more expensive than anything else in their closet. Nanami has a watch, sitting in the drawer of his nightstand, an old Mathiesen from his grandfather that doesn’t fit so well with in general with the Japanese style but serves to impress at the occasional meeting or after-hours socialization with the higher-ups at work. Higuruma’s must be these shoes, real leather to Nanami’s somewhat knowledgeable eye, shined and low on creasing, maybe repaired once or twice to extend their lifespan, the memory of the animal that allowed them to exist.
“Were these friends of yours?” Higuruma asks; the question is polite, but the past tense demonstrates a perceptiveness that Nanami isn’t sure whether he likes. Sure, he’s probably eight years older than he had been when the photo was taken but that shouldn’t matter. Ieiri had found him, after all, that one time. He still has Gojo’s number buried in his cellphone under some adolescent and unchanged nickname.
Nanami doesn’t look especially happy in the photograph. “We went to school together,” he offers, a complete non-answer. Let Higuruma think what he wants. “Do you want a drink?”
“Another one?” Higuruma doesn’t look surprised, but he does let one eyebrow rise. “Maybe you’re younger than I thought.”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“Hmm.” Higuruma doesn’t repulse from the truth, blunt and undiluted as Nanami only knows how. He doesn’t even look like Nanami really is younger than he thought. “Do you want to know my age?”
Does he? “If you’re offering,” Nanami agrees. “And if you’ll tell me whether you’d like a drink.” He’s already in his burgeoning liquor cabinet, resigning himself to drinking whiskey himself since that’s what Higuruma had been sipping at the bar, when the answer comes.
“I’m thirty-two. And,” he adds, tacked on like he’d forgotten the original question, “sure.”
Nanami has had older, by a little, the woman from Azabu who had poured him a glass of Scotch worth more than a month of his salary in what sounded like just one of her palatial apartments and ridden him within an inch of his young life — younger even then than now. It doesn’t phase him.
They drink their whiskey standing in Nanami’s kitchen, like they both know it isn’t worth it to sit in the living room where the light has not been turned on. Higuruma maintains the conversation, mostly; he’s interesting, Nanami can’t deny that, with a voice that commands attention. It had been what ultimately kept him settled on that second bar stool, Higuruma’s mind and his heavy x-ray gaze and the way he seemed to have or at least be willing to develop an opinion on almost anything. He asks intelligently about the Bertelsen reproduction over the table, wants to know Nanami’s plans with the mango on the counter like a cooking lesson is what he’d come over for, manages to coax a story from his day out of Nanami after all.
Nanami doesn’t let that last, watching the end of the whiskey slide into Higuruma’s open mouth, watching his slim throat bob around it. “My bedroom is through there,” he says before Higuruma can drag it out longer, the way older people are sometimes wont to do, gesturing to the only open door in the apartment. The bathroom and the meager closet stay shut tight when anyone else is inside; call it precaution, call it the memory of Gojo’s endless amusement when it came to stealing and hiding Nanami’s things, more noticeably missing in his spartan living space than his thieving senpai’s cluttered dorm.
Higuruma, to his credit, doesn’t seem off-put by his directness, setting his glass neatly in the sink, glancing toward the chair where his coat is draped like he’s already mapping out the quickest route to a dignified exit. “I have court in the morning,” he says, seemingly apropos of nothing, and Nanami wonders for a moment if he’s going to make an excuse before they even get into it, but then he finishes, “so I’ll be topping.”
This startles a laugh out of Nanami, one he doesn’t even bother to turn into a cough, and Higuruma meets his eyes with a half-smile of his own, more reaction than anything else. “I have a desk job, you know,” he says, but he’s already stepping over the threshold, unmarked by any change besides the lintel, a new light fixture to provide their acts with illumination. “It’s an awful lot of work done sitting down. Far more than a lawyer, I’d think.”
“My sympathies,” Higuruma offers. Nanami feels one single trickle of heat run down his spine, clinging atop his vertebrae, settling deep in his gut and saying yes, this had been the right call. Higuruma in the as yet unresolved darkness of his bedroom is a different man altogether than the one in the dim light of the bar, in the refracting shadows of the alleyway and puddles and awning, in the calm fluorescence of Nanami’s kitchen. “I’ll be topping.”
“And if I wasn’t interested in that arrangement?” Nanami isn’t afraid; should the worst happen he’s sure he could physically overpower Higuruma, and he doesn’t really get the feeling that things would ever trend in that way. Higuruma is upright, fair, just, truth-seeking, and surely evil men have seemed that way but this is different. Nanami has known enough rotten-to-the-core people to be a fairly good judge of character at this point, maybe to a fault.
As if to prove his hypothesis, Higuruma grins a little, the wry kind of smile innate to men with serious jobs where expressions are meaningful, and he steps a little closer to Nanami, close enough that body heat passes between them. “I’m pretty good with my mouth,” he says.
//
There’s not a lot of lead-in. Higuruma doesn’t try to kiss him, which Nanami appreciates on some level, going instead for the buttons of his shirt.
“Been wanting to see what’s under here,” he says, a little flattering enthusiasm in his voice. Nanami hasn’t worked as hard as he should have on the state of his body but his youth more than makes up for it, he’s sure. He lets Higuruma strip him half-naked, sport coat first then what’s left under it. He tugs Nanami a little closer under cover of loosening the knot of his tie, letting their hips press together briefly before releasing his grip to tug the tie over his head, to finish sliding his shirt from his shoulders. Nanami doesn’t always let his partners touch him so much but he allows Higuruma the slow smoothing of his palms down his arms and back up to the lines of his deltoids, his admiring gaze almost but not quite clinical, like someone looking at an especially fine statue in a museum.
“Nice,” is his appraisal, finally, and Nanami huffs and goes to work on Higuruma’s own shirt, still closed all the way to the hollow of his throat, and when he undoes the top button to bring sharp collarbones into the light, Nanami leans in a bit more to press his open mouth to the heat of the thin skin nested there.
Higuruma inhales; it’s good, Nanami feels it echoed in the momentary press of their chests against each other, more skin on skin as his fingers wander down his placket. Close but not too close, they make their way to Nanami’s bed, dropping clothing as they go until they’re nearly naked, Higuruma not quite looming over Nanami on his back against the sheets.
“What size are you?” Nanami asks, rolling sideways toward the drawer where his lube and condoms live, alongside a few other things he thinks they won’t need tonight, but Higuruma leans over the side of the bed for a moment before returning with a foil packet between his fingers.
“Hope you don’t mind,” he says, flipping the condom so the light shines on the packaging. “I brought one of my own.”
“Were you looking to go home with someone?” Nanami asks the question more for conversation, to fill the time as he settles back with the lube and watches Higuruma’s body moving above him, knotted muscle and tight skin. He has a little hair on his chest, dark in contrast with his overall paleness, a man of stark contrast. Fitting, Nanami thinks to himself, for a lawyer.
“Not necessarily.” Higuruma grins. It’s not a rarity, based on their conversation earlier; Higuruma is blunted off but not inexpressive. Nanami likes it, always wants to be the one giving less away in a conversation, though he’s fairly sure he’s let on more than he likes without even trying. “Guess I got lucky.”
“Ha.” Nanami reaches up toward Higuruma’s hand, snatches the condom from between his fingers and tears it open in his teeth. His younger partners all can do that move but the older ones seem to like it, and Higuruma does keep his eyes on Nanami’s mouth like he’s looking to move into it. “Take those off.”
Higuruma’s briefs are dark, black fabric that does a lot to camouflage the arousal underneath them, but when Higuruma obediently shuffles his way out of them Nanami can’t help but blink a little. Higuruma’s cock, free between his legs, isn’t especially thick but it is long, long the way that they say a taller, skinnier man’s might be. Nanami feels his throat dry, and doesn’t catch the smirk on Higuruma’s face as he takes his reaction in.
“Don’t worry,” Higuruma says, back on top of Nanami now, nudging the hand holding the condom with the tip of that cock, and Nanami swallows, hard. “I’m a pretty thorough prepper.”
“Good mouth, good prep…” Nanami rolls the condom on, feeling the weight of his cock in his hands, measuring his own insides with the distance they travel and feeling a shiver of anticipation run down his spine. “Anything you think you can’t do?”
Higuruma laughs, rough like a sawed-off shotgun, thrusts his hips a little into the sleeve of Nanami’s hands to savor the friction against his cock. “We don’t need to get into that,” he says, dismissive. “I’ll be on my best behavior.”
He mouths his way down Nanami’s torso then, returning to his position between Nanami’s bent legs, settling himself and tugging at the boxer briefs still hugging Nanami’s hips. Nanami cants his pelvis off the bed, watching Higuruma watch his thighs flex, trying to get back some semblance of control of the situation as his cock springs up to touch his stomach for a moment. He’s thicker than but not as long as Higuruma. Higuruma watches his cock avidly, enthralled, reaching up for it when he’s divested Nanami of his underwear and stroking it with tight and reverent fingers.
“Fuck,” Nanami grunts.
“Hmm.” It’s like a hum from Higuruma’s mouth as he stares at his own hand along Nanami’s cock, his thumb glancing over the vein running along the base of the shaft, flicking over the head. “You’re pretty hard already.”
Sue me, Nanami thinks. Higuruma’s cock had laid a lot of groundwork for him, the fantasy of it inside him, how full and accomplished Nanami would feel if he could take it. He grits his teeth against another practiced twist of Higuruma’s hand. “Aren’t lawyers all about evidence?” he asks, and Higuruma looks up at him with half a question and half an answer in his expression. “You were saying… about your mouth…”
Higuruma laughs a little at that, breathless which is comforting. “I wish I knew more about whatever a salaryman does,” he says, sliding back on the bed until his hips are level with Nanami’s knees. “I’m sure my jokes would be just as good.”
Nanami wants to respond, wants to turn this into banter somehow; he really does. But Higuruma purses his lips and spits on his cock, letting the saliva slide down the hot stroked skin for a moment before he opens his mouth and swallows Nanami down, and every thought he has is gone like smoke waved away in the cold.
Higuruma’s tongue is solid against him while his lips tighten around his cock, the suction almost but not quite too much, practiced in a way that makes Nanami grateful for the condom, and Nanami tries and fails to keep his hips from bucking up into that mouth, that heat. “Fuck,” he says, again, more than that beyond him for a moment as Higuruma sets a rhythm, up and down like he’s on a mission. “Fuck, you were right.”
Higuruma groans around his cock; it might be a laugh, Nanami doesn’t care, the reverberations shudder through him and jangle his nerves. He’s hard as he’s maybe ever been, fucking up into the wet heat of Higuruma’s mouth. And Higuruma reciprocates, his tongue active, his head tipping one way then the other to change the angle, and Nanami almost misses when his hand reaches blindly out for the bottle of lube Nanami had tossed somewhere near his thigh.
Higuruma’s fingers hit the body there first, blindly, and both of them allow them to linger, the pads of his prints against the long thick lines of Nanami’s muscles where they move. It’s not intimate, nothing more than the meeting of skin and skin, but Nanami feels the hairs there rise to stiffness anyway. Higuruma continues then, reaching over his leg to find the lube, and when he touches it he doesn’t waste time.
Nanami is impressed, a little, watching with wide-blown eyes as Higuruma slicks his fingers up without letting up at all on sucking Nanami’s cock, deft with both motions. He’s not a sorcerer, Nanami is sure he hadn’t felt any residuals on him in the den of that bar, but if he were… Nanami wonders, briefly, if they would be equals, before Higuruma’s slippery finger is circling his hole, and then he isn’t wondering anything at all.
When Higuruma pushes into him, just one finger first all the way to the hilt, he pulls off Nanami’s cock with a sound that’s lewd almost to the point of disgust and mouths at it instead, letting Nanami rut against his cheek to stir some movement inside him as well. “Okay?” he asks, unnecessarily, but Nanami nods nonetheless. “Another?”
“Another,” Nanami confirms, out of breath and hard as hell as Higuruma works another finger into him, starting a pace of movement in and out that leaves Nanami near-empty and wanting on every pull. “Fuck,” he says, too soon, “another.”
“Be patient.” Higuruma spreads his middle and ring finger, buried deep in him, the words imprinting along the outside of Nanami’s cock where his mouth is still pressed and loose. “We’ll get there.”
They do, three fingers inside Nanami, spreading and hitting his prostate just enough to make him feel ready to come before the main event has even started, and Nanami can hear noises once in a while that he’s shocked to think are coming from his own mouth, the kind of moaning he usually takes some kind of pleasure in pulling from his partners, exposing their weak points. Higuruma is grinding down against his mattress, he can see from where he stares with hazy eyes down between his own legs, both of them hard, Nanami spurting precome and nearing the point of impatience.
“It’s enough,” he says, finally, when words return to him, when he’s halfway to numb and his cock is ready to burst in Higuruma’s mouth and the fire in his belly has simmered to a boil. “It’s enough, I’m ready.”
Higuruma hums again, vibration against the sensitive head of Nanami’s cock where his tongue is pressed, and Nanami swears but Higuruma pulls back again, wiping his mouth on the back of his clean hand. “If you say.” He slides out of Nanami, leaving an emptiness that Nanami holds onto, clenches down on in anticipation of being filled again. “I’m sure I can still make you come twice.”
The thought of Higuruma swallowing Nanami’s come, painting his chin, licking it from the corner of that mouth, so talkative, so smart, has Nanami wanting to be back inside him, but it isn’t to be. Higuruma lines himself up between Nanami’s thighs again, one last slick of lube along his own cock and over the latex.
“Breathe out,” Higuruma says, and Nanami does, and Higuruma pushes into him, pushes and pushes until Nanami’s sure that there’s no more to go, and then he bottoms out. It’s like he can’t get air into his lungs, like the inside of him is so full that there is room for nothing else. Higuruma stills over him, panting for a moment. “You’re tight,” he says, finally, gasping where his head hangs over Nanami’s chest. It’s not a sentiment Nanami hears often, settling at the base of his spine with a pleasant weight. “Feels good.”
“Move,” Nanami commands before he’s really ready, but he has a feeling he’ll never really be ready and they might as well go on with it. Higuruma breathes once more, luxurious, adjusts the slant of his hips, pulls out almost all the way, and just as Nanami is about to complain about it he pushes in again, hard and at a new angle, and as soon as the head of his cock hits Nanami’s prostate he comes.
Nanami feels rather than sees in the proper sense his vision whiting out, the groan tearing from his throat wild and out of his control, his hands twisting in the sheets somewhere to the sides of Higuruma’s palms pressed to his mattress. Higuruma, above him, shudders, picking up the pace of his thrusts mercilessly to Nanami’s increased sensitivity, pounding into him with all the rhythm of a judge’s gavel, all the blindness of justice, and Nanami isn’t sure what his refractory period is after the amount of liquor he’d had throughout the evening but he’s hoping it’s low.
Higuruma props himself on one arm, smears the other hand through the come painting Nanami’s stomach, and then brings that same hand to Nanami’s open mouth, and his body is too wrung out, too full of Higuruma’s cock, to do anything but take what he’s given, sucking his own come from the fingers of a lawyer eight years his senior whose cheap suit is scattered in pieces over his floor. Nanami has a terrible feeling this will stick with him.
“Fuck,” Higuruma groans, “fuck, so tight. Gonna make you come again.”
“Do it then.” Nanami can feel the headboard behind him with each of Higuruma’s movements, pushing him closer, thinning the barrier of the pillow between him and the wood, but he can’t find it in himself to want things to slow down. He wants that second orgasm, wants it with every half-painful brush of Higuruma’s cock against his prostate, wants it with the taste of his own come on his tongue still even after Higuruma readjusts his weight to both his hands, the better to fuck him with.
Time slows and speeds up, moving at the speed of both of them together in Nanami’s bed. Higuruma grabs his cock again, when the pace of his own hips starts to stutter, and Nanami is hard again, leaking, smearing his own precome into the mess already splattered over his stomach. It’s a strange hypnotism, the overstimulation, the bright pulse of Higuruma’s fingers tight around his shaft, the cresting wave of what he already knows will be his second orgasm. The sex has been quiet, unverbose, the noises between them unintelligible and primal. Higuruma’s head is bent next to Nanami’s, his breath ghosting over the shell of his ear as he pants. He has to be tired, Nanami thinks. He’s too old for this sort of thing.
“Close,” Higuruma murmurs, just loud enough for Nanami to hear. “Wanna feel you come again, while I’m inside you.” Nanami only nods; it’s not worth fighting over, not worth his dignity, not tonight and not with a man he already knows he’ll never see again. “Come on, Nanami, one more time.”
The name surprises him a little, wakes him from his stupor, and Nanami’s hips buck again, weakly but with purpose, into Higuruma’s tight grip and above him he moans, redoubles the stroke of his fingers. It’s enough.
The second orgasm is like a blackout rolling through a city on a muggy summer afternoon, sweat and sex and smog all rising at once and shutting him down, splattering Higuruma’s hand, clenching down around Higuruma’s cock with his mouth torn open in a silent scream, and Higuruma curses one more time and follows him all the way down, pistoning his hips through his release like that might prolong it. Nanami is once again grateful for the condom, can already feel the stiffness in his lower back that in the morning will have his coworkers asking why he’s such an old man already. Higuruma rolls off, panting.
“Fuck.” And, really, what else is there to say?
//
“Why did you become a lawyer?”
Nanami isn’t sure why he’s chosen this moment, when Higuruma is tucking his newly-buttoned shirt back into his pants, to finally be a little friendly. He supposes it’s the last gasp, the post-orgasm haze, the comfort of his own bed and the knowledge that Higuruma has a long trip back to his own apartment, wherever the hell that is. Nanami never plans to find out. Neither had asked for the other’s phone number. Nanami doesn’t intend to.
Higuruma looks around the room for a moment, blankly, then lights on his tie and bends to pick it up. It’s like this, with his face hidden, that he answers the question. “I guess I wasn’t ambitious enough to be a judge.” It’s a non-answer. Nanami knows it, tries to convey that knowledge without speaking further. He really is tired. Tomorrow is going to be shit. “It’s all about inputs and outputs, really,” Higuruma continues without prompting. Maybe he could tell what Nanami was feeling after all. Sorcerer, Nanami doesn’t think. “Our lives are a series of choices. I decided what I could live with, and what I couldn’t, and what I couldn’t live with I decided to change.”
“And?”
“And how do you think that’s working out for me?” Higuruma smiles at Nanami, pocketing his tie; he’s weary too. Nanami isn’t going to ask him to stay, won’t even offer the much closer length of the couch. Higuruma doesn’t look like he’s expecting it either. “People are ugly and weak. My job is to find the good and believable in that ugly weakness, and show it to the world — or the corner of the world that controls the lives of my clients. It’s stressful.”
Nanami considers this for a moment. When he’d gone through this same process, the feeling of what one could do weighing so heavily on his mind, he had seen a world in sorcery that he couldn’t effect, not in a meaningful way, not in a way that could surpass Gojo, or even Geto, not one where he could help like Ieiri or be brave like Haibara. He had felt that stress and he had been crushed under it, run away from it, left it all to Gojo without a good bye or good luck.
“So why do you stay with it?” The question comes out smaller than Nanami would like. He feels every second of his age in this moment; it’s undoubtedly the inquiry of a student to a mentor. Higuruma doesn’t seem to mind.
“You know the conviction rate in Japan?” he asks. Nanami doesn’t, and indicates so. He’s still refreshingly close to nude, the softness of his sheets a comfort on his overworn skin. “It’s something like ninety-nine point nine percent. The prosecutors here don’t bring a case to court unless they’re more than sure they’ll get the result they want. I won’t call it a racket. I do it because it’s easy to find my type of client, an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time, a near-guaranteed guilty verdict. And if no one else can do that then I will.”
Higuruma is putting on his jacket now. A condom full of his semen is tied off in Nanami’s bedroom trashcan. “Is it… meaningful?” Another question too small for its meaning. Nanami asks it anyway. “The work that only you can do.”
“If there’s any meaning in this life, it’s there.” Higuruma speaks with conviction, he punctuates it with a tug at the body of his jacket, the buttoning of his suit. “I’m sure there are things in your life that only you can do.”
Nanami thinks, for the first time tonight, of the bakery. He thinks of the girl with the curse on her shoulder. He thinks of Gojo, alone in the ivory tower of the special grade without Geto by his side as a buffer against Tsukumo’s unpredictability, her capriciousness. “There are some things.” It’s an acknowledgement to Higuruma as much as it is a reassurance to Nanami himself. There are some things.
“I’m glad.” Higuruma is dressed now, both socks firmly on his feet, and he looks ready to go. Nanami wonders whether he should walk him to the door, but Higuruma solves that problem for him, coming closer to where Nanami is barely sitting upright against the headboard. He leans in then and, strangely tender, not unwelcome, kisses Nanami’s forehead. “I don’t go to that bar very often.”
Nanami looks up at him, tired and sated and overall satisfied with the progression of his night in a way he’s sure not to feel in the morning, watches Higuruma pull back and leave a safe, professional distance between them. “I don’t either,” he says. It’s not entirely a lie, although the location is certainly convenient. There are other convenient places, though. “How fortunate that we ran into each other.”
“Mmm.” Higuruma offers a wave, small and a little ridiculous. “I’m guessing the door will lock behind me.”
“It will.” Nanami watches him leave, for the first and the last time, these strange points of intersection with other people impressing upon him only in their transience. Higuruma could have been anyone, he thinks, listening to the brief shuffling of the gathering of coat and shoes, the click of his front door, the beep of the electronic lock behind him.
Nanami allows himself one gratuitous, childish, full-body slump down into his bed, not even bothering to turn off the lamp on his nightstand, rolling onto his side and aimlessly turning on his phone. Without really thinking about it, mind still on the conversation with Higuruma, he opens his email to see a message from his boss (nice work on the Murata account today, got some new files for you to look at in the morning), switches to his messaging app to an abundance of nothing, and then for some reason finds his fingers drifting to the contacts app. He wonders, slowly and half in the haze of sleep, what that nickname for Gojo had been.