Chapter Text
Iori Utahime was already pacing down the university avenue, her book bag thumping against her legs, when she realised that she had forgotten her copy of the novel on the bus. She cursed breathlessly, stopping short, the toe of her little tennis shoe catching on the paving, a rubberised rebound. She stretched her neck, her long hair caught under the strap of her bag, weighing out the likelihood that she would ever see her book again.
She had annotated it, with little coloured tags for themes and motifs. She’d used yellow tags for references to physicality, orange for the sensual and red for the mechanical. It had been right there in her hand, fringed with her observations and now she had abandoned it on the seat. Their professor told them not to be coy about writing in the margins of beloved novels, but Utahime just couldn’t bring herself to do it. The coloured tags were numbered and she’d put her annotations in a separate ring-bound notebook. Everything she knew, bound with wire.
She started walking again, a little sapped now. She would have to get a new one and put all those tags back in the new copy. She had been humming with excitement for the class. She’d admired her handiwork on the bus, her novel edged with the little flames of her ideas — yellow, orange, red.
The lecture theatre was not one of the bigger ones on campus. It was a bit of a relic, small and wooden. In one of the humanities faculty buildings, a few lecture venues were still sentimentally preserved in their original design. Utahime loved the curve of the theatre, with shallow wooden benches like the ribs of a boat. She paused on the threshold, looking up to where Ieiri Shoko, her dearest friend, was sitting halfway up the stacks of seats, waiting for her.
Shoko’s head was bent towards the book in her hand, the light from the narrow windows hitting the top of her glossy head like a blessing. The air was close and dusty, Brownian movement sinking and rising around her friend.
“I left my novel on the bus,” Utahime sighed, sinking down on the hard bench beside Shoko.
Shoko smiled in greeting.
“How romantic,” she said dryly, closing the novel. “Maybe someone will find it and return it in the third act.”
Shoko pushed her copy of the novel into Utahime’s hands and sank back into the uncomfortable seat. She smiled kindly, reaching for her cardboard cup of coffee instead. Its sleeve told Utahime that it was from the medical campus, not this one. It reminded Utahime that Shoko really didn’t need to be there, taking this course or reading this novel. Utahime had begged until Shoko conceded to do one semester of a course she didn’t need. Utahime thought it would be fun for them all to do it together. After the twisting slopes of their paths, which intersected at high school and thereafter became very complicated, Utahime wanted some stasis, some common ground.
Utahime was trying to pull their ships level, even for a moment, and this literature course felt like the last opportunity. Even then, the whole thing had looped back on itself, snagging on the corners, but she was trying to make it work. They were almost converging, almost knowing the same thing. Utahime had finally enrolled after she’d saved up enough, and it meant that, even though she was three years older than them, she was already three years behind them all academically.
Geto had done this exact course the year before and so possessed similar, but older knowledge. Shoko, who was already well into her medical studies, did not need a literature credit and did not fully buy into the discipline, was quietly going along with it. Gojo had agreed gamely but so far had made no effort to do any of the secondary readings or write any of the papers. While they were all well-meaning, none of them perfectly understood what Utahime was trying to craft.
“You can have my copy. I’ve finished,” Shoko told her warmly, sipping her coffee, easing out the smudges under her eyes.
Other students were starting to filter into the lecture theatre, making the floorboards creak and the dust particles flee to the corners of the room.
“What? You need it for re-reading it, surely?” Utahime blinked, flicking through the pages and finding them blank of annotations, blank of sticky notes.
Shoko smiled like she found Utahime cute.
“You can borrow it then,” she conceded graciously, a teasing glint in her eye.
Utahime rolled her eyes good-naturedly. It was not the same edition as hers and so her annotations wouldn’t match up to the page numbers. She placed it between them on the narrow, curved plank that served as a desk in the amphitheatre-style seating, to show that could share it.
Utahime’s attention sank down the rows, dropping down the stairs like a loose marble, to their Professor, who had entered quietly with the flood. She curiously watched him arranging his items at the lectern as he did before every lecture. He pulled out a copy of the novel out of his briefcase, his laser pointer, his chalk. She loved that this lecture venue still had blackboards in a grid pattern against the wall behind the projector. She loved watching them move, a Rubix cube, a puzzle, one behind the other as the ideas grew too many to be framed.
Their professor was always immaculately attired — dress shirt, perfectly pressed slacks. He wore grey trousers today and a crisp white Oxford shirt with dark buttons. The girl in front of Utahime let out an audible murmur of appreciation. They all found him fascinating. Handsome, bookish, PhD at 27.
Utahime looked at the cover of Shoko’s copy of the novel and then at the copy sitting on the edge of the lectern. They were the same.
“He recommended this edition, remember?” Shoko said, watching Utahime do the sums.
Their professor ran his fingers nervously through his blonde hair, waiting for everyone to settle. He always seemed a little anxious, shy even, until he started speaking. Then, his voice was clear and deep. The size of the venue and some miracle of acoustics meant that a microphone was not required. They sat, maybe seventy students, semi-circled around him, and listened while he pulled the meaning from the text and let them peer into the pool.
Just before the lecture was about to begin, Gojo Satoru came bounding into the hall, empty-handed and with the hood of his hoodie over his head. His sunglasses were sliding down his nose. He honed in on Shoko and Utahime, sitting in their usual spot in the middle of the staggered seats. He darted up the steps to them and clambered through those already seated, wobbling along the back of the bench, apologising insincerely to the classmates he was kneeing in the back.
He flopped in beside Utahime, nudging her against Shoko, elbowing her inadvertently as he crammed himself into the space she hadn’t left for him.
“Made it,” he breathed, his smile too smug for so small an achievement.
“God, we were worried,” Shoko said dryly.
Gojo ignored her, reaching across Utahime’s body to grab the novel on the desk between her and Shoko.
“Where is your copy, Uta?” he asked, his brow furrowing.
He fanned through the pages, finding them blank of pencil markings just as Utahime had, and dropped it down in front of Shoko, satisfied that it was hers.
“I left it on the bus,” Utahime sighed, bracing for how he would make this annoying.
“Are you taking the same bus back? Or is it waiting for you?” he hummed, pulling out a bent copy from the front pocket of his hoodie.
He hadn’t brought anything else with him, not even a pen, but he was bending the book back and forth to get it to straighten out. He was flexing it, smug that he had the novel and she didn’t.
Shoko chuckled in amusement.
“Gojo, do you know how buses work?”
He flashed a grin, biting his lower lip.
“On a molecular level, yes.”
“Why am I surprised?” Utahime asked Shoko despairingly.
“That I’ve never been on a bus? Not sure,” Gojo cooed, tilting his head, manufacturing some sentimentality out of thin air. “Nice we can still surprise each other, after all these years.”
He was sliding his rumpled copy of the novel across the table, shunting Shoko’s copy out of the way.
“You can have mine. I’m finished with it,” he said dismissively.
Utahime pushed it back, making an exasperated noise.
“You’re supposed to keep the text! Re-read it, relish it and use a second or third reading to write the paper!”
Gojo, his eyes behind the dark glass, flashed a raucous smile.
“I did relish it. Twice yesterday and once in the shower before I got here,” he grinned. “This book is fucking filthy.”
Utahime wrinkled her nose.
“Ew, Gojo. I don’t want to know about that.”
“I thought you’d be happy I read your smutty novel, Utahime,” Gojo said, mock offended, too loudly because the class had started to simmer down so that the lecture could begin.
“It’s not...I didn’t…!” Utahime hissed, but could make no better defence for herself because their professor began his lecture.
Utahime watched as the slight apprehension fell away from his features.
“We left off last week talking about how this novel concerns itself with two different modes of being, two contrasting orientations of life…”
Utahime sucked in a little breath of despair, thinking of her lost novel, her coloured tags flickering on the edge of the pages with the same thing Professor Nanami was articulating — the abstract and the organic, the mechanical and the sensual.
Professor Nanami pulled a pair of reading glasses off the lectern, propping the book open with long fingers, preparing to read from it.
As he flicked the glasses open, Utahime heard an audible sigh from behind her. Shoko snorted in amusement.
“God, he’s yummy,” the girl behind them whispered to her friend.
“Married,” the friend whispered back, pointing at her own ring finger with a little shake of her head.
“Oh, Kento,” the girl despaired of Professor Nanami’s foolhardy choice of matrimony, shaking her head.
Gojo leaned over, his cheek near the surface of the desk so that Shoko could hear him too.
“Do you two think he’s yummy?” he asked, his voice steeped in irony.
Shoko glared at him, because his whisper was theatrically loud.
“Married,” she deadpanned in the same stage whisper, pushing his head back, her palm on his forehead.
Gojo, sitting straight in his seat again, drummed his fingers on the cover of the book, smirking.
“Yes. Married,” he said mockingly. “Which is watertight, as we know from literature.”
Utahime shushed him, because she was missing some of what Professor Nanami was saying.
“...abandoned in the destitution of her innermost desires, she seeks relief in forbidden love…”
Gojo was quiet for a little while and so Utahime could let herself get lost in the slides, in the carefully made points, in the sudden clarity the lecturer was offering her.
“I really did like the novel, Uta,” Gojo’s voice in her ear suddenly startled her.
He had slid down in his seat so that he could be level with her, his shoulder pushing at hers, tilting his head into the crook of her neck.
“Good. It’s a classic. A seminal text,” she whispered impatiently, wanting to listen, fruitlessly shoving his shoulder away from hers.
“Oh, it’s seminal alright,” Gojo chuckled wryly, his face too close to hers with his head propped on her shoulder and his breath on her neck.
“Shut up, you absolute moron. I’m trying to listen.”
“I didn’t expect to read the word ‘fuck’ quite so much in a work of great literature,” he murmured happily, tilting his head back so that his lips touched her ear at the crucial syllables, “or the word ‘cunt’.”
Flushing, Utahime pushed him away. She felt the tingle of the word — the stick of the hard “c” and the little tsk of the “t” — against her ear lingering as he laughed silently, shoulders shaking.
“I regret asking you to do this course with me,” she whispered harshly through her teeth. “Go back to physics. You’re learning nothing here.”
“On the contrary, Uta,” Gojo whispered in amusement, pointing to the screen behind Professor Nanami, upon which was a particularly florid passage of text.
“...In this passage, we see how it is in the simultaneity of orgasm, in what our protagonist perceives as a true sensual communion, that she is able to achieve the ultimate awareness of her desire to be free…”
“Goddamn,” Gojo whistled softly, as they all re-read the passage, splayed in big letters across the screen.
Utahime flushed, even though she had not been scandalised by the passage when she read it alone. It was Gojo, riling her up, saying ‘cunt’ against her ear, making her irritable. Maybe it was also Professor Nanami’s mild and acutely intelligent voice, now slipping over the words on the screen in scholarly tones.
“...it is significant, too, that the salient sexual act is an adulterous one, a transgression of the strictures that confine her…”
Utahime tried to tune Gojo out, jotting down notes in her notebook. Sometimes she didn’t know how to take him. He was an old friend, just like Shoko and Geto, but she found his high energy and his maverick behaviour unsettlingly unpredictable. He seemed to like it — foxing her, teasing her. He knew how to let his treatment of her teeter just on the right side of friendship. He made her laugh as much as he made her angry and, during that pitch black time in high school, she was sure that it was him who had stopped the torment. Utahime touched the scar that stretched over her cheek and nose. They didn’t talk about it, but there was really only one person with the social capital to have accomplished it in the end.
“...the distinct aesthetic styling in the novel around so-called obscene imagery carries with it a revolutionary vocabulary. That is, a way to write about the sexual act and its concomitant spiritual congress…”
Utahime braced for a comment from Gojo, but he said nothing for once. He was taken in, as they all were suddenly by the intellectual crescendo of the lesson. Professor Nanami pushed his fingers through his hair, gesturing, growing passionate in his explanation. The wedding ring hit the light from the projector, a flash of blindness which ricocheted off Gojo’s sunglasses for just a second.
Utahime was a little smug, because even Gojo’s cavalier attitude slipped. She knew that they would all like this course. She had been so dismayed when Geto had told her that he had already done it. She probably should be surprised — he could be rather coy about his university experience. It was weird to think that Geto would have been sitting in this quaint lecture hall a year before with his copy of the novel open on the desk in front of him.
“As we reach the conclusion of this lecture series, I’d like you all to start preparing for the submission task for this novel. The prompt allows you to make use of many of the lenses we’ve used to unpack the text, but the critical response will ultimately be yours.”
Utahime blinked at the screen as the paper topic ran along it, too quickly and too frantic. It was not enough asked.
Critically discuss the notion of “knowledge” in the novel.
The question was threadbare, compared to everything that had come out of Professor Nanami’s mouth. Utahime looked down at her notes quickly, feeling something like a decompression caused by two poles shifting; panic rising, heart-sinking. She scanned the pages, coming up too quickly from a comfortable depth.
Not once had she written down the word “knowledge”.
She looked up sharply, her heartbeat uncertain as a bird. Shoko was picking at the cuticle of her thumb. Gojo was on his phone, not even looking at the crisis on the screen.
Too little asked!
Utahime swallowed angular panic, looking around for another distressed face.
“Shoko…Shoko, do you understand…” she mumbled, grabbing Shoko’s sleeve as she started to get up.
“Yeah, I guess. Knowledge, sure,” she nodded.
Utahime wasn’t even going to ask Gojo, because he would pretend to be an imbecile until the moment he trounced her with some staggering grade.
Utahime touched her lips and found they were rough with her panic. She got up onto legs that felt like stilts, an ignorant newborn.
“I don’t…I don’t get…” she said softly as they filtered to the end of their row.
Utahime knew that if she let her anxiety subside a bit she might be able to think. But it was a whitening feeling.
“Why don’t you just ask Dr. Nanami?” Shoko suggested, nudging her forward, almost shunting her gently into Gojo’s back.
Utahime looked down at her professor gathering all his artefacts.
“Oh. Oh no,” she mumbled, quietly aghast.
The thought was debilitatingly embarrassing. She didn’t want to admit to him, of all people, that she didn’t know. She couldn’t go before him with no idea, no copy of the novel, no proof of her industry.
“You have a little crush, Utahime?” Gojo asked slyly, only half-knowing her distress, looking back at her over his shoulder.
Utahime glowered at him, feeling a little undignified because she was shuffling along the row to get out with the crowd and kept bumping her nose into the middle of his back whenever he stopped still.
“I don’t. He’s just…intimidating,” she grumbled, shoving Gojo forward.
“He’s actually very nice. Sweet, even,” Shoko reassured her.
Utahime, stepping down the steps now in a slow file, gazed over at their professor as he put his reading glasses back in their case. Someone stopped at the lectern to ask a question and his head snapped up, a little flustered.
“....office hours…” Utahime heard him say.
“Oh yes, you have to go during office hours though. He’s quite staunch about that,” Shoko added casually.
Utahime paled at the idea of a faux pas like that. She had only been a university student for a few weeks so it would be easy for her to do that kind of thing. She shook her head instinctively.
They finally filtered out of the lecture hall and into the main corridor leading out into the avenue. The weak, autumnal light was coming through the trees in straight bars. Shoko tipped her empty coffee cup into a concrete dustbin. Immediately, she tipped her head out of the breeze and lit a cigarette.
When she was planning things, hanging a shelf or budgeting, Utahime knew that she had so much more practical experience of the world than they did. Gojo couldn’t relicense his car or manage a busy restaurant shift. Shoko couldn’t barely feed herself properly. But this kind of thing made her nervous. She’d been listening to them talk over the past three years, not understanding fully their esoteric knowledge. She didn’t presume to know half of what Gojo and Shoko were babbling about when they talked about the organic chemistry class they did together in their first year. Even Geto and Shoko had taken an introductory latin class together.
She was already starting to feel a bit better in the fresh air as Shoko smiled kindly at her, and fixed her collar where the strap of her bookbag had snagged it. When she was calmer, she could think of a plan.
“Aren’t you worried about the essay?” she asked Shoko quietly.
Shoko shook her head with a small smile and put the cigarette to her lips.
“Don’t fret so much, Uta. You’re smarter than us all.”
That probably wasn’t true. Everyone knew Gojo was the strongest academically, even though he did his best to hide it under layers of childishness. Shoko’s intelligence leant away from the arts. And then, Geto. Utahime hardly knew the length and breadth of everything he knew. Casting about for a solution as her panic tugged her down again, she realised that was the answer.
She’d ask Geto for help.
“What will you have, Uta?”
Gojo’s voice broke the film over Utahime’s thoughts.
“Hmm? Oh, a beer please.”
The little café-bar wasn’t crowded. A few people were at their laptops still, trying to peer at open textbooks in the low light, sipping cheap red wine. It was a shabby, cheerful place that they frequented during the week. None of the chairs matched. One wall was a sheet of painted metal on which letter fridge magnets had been liberally applied. The menu used to be on there in magnets, but now it was obscene messages to fellow patrons.
Utahime used to work at a place like this. She adjusted the plastic placard so that the correct specials were facing outwards.
Shoko was outside having a smoke. Utahime looked at her through the glass front of the café and smiled. Shoko grinned back, making a little wave with her fingers. Utahime’s heart plumped up, happy for this shared moment.
“Are you okay, Utahime?” Geto Suguru asked, sliding into the seat across from her, making her jump at his sudden appearance.
“Oh! Yes! Hi!” she breathed, trying to recover from the little start she’d done in her seat.
Geto’s smile was slow like a dawn.
“Hello.”
Gojo plonked a beer bottle on the tabletop in front of Utahime.
“She’s grumpy,” he reported, a beer clunking down in front of Geto too.
Geto’s long fingers slid around the bottle, his expression thoughtful. His long hair was tied up, a little messy from where he had pulled off a woollen hat.
“No, I’m not. I’m distracted,” Utahime said irritably.
“She’s hot for a teacher,” Gojo explained, sipping his own drink and smirking.
“No, I am not! I’m just intimidated by him,” Utahime snapped, gripping her bottle too tightly.
“Who wouldn’t be? Takes a real man to say ‘good cunt’ with a straight face in an academic setting,” Gojo snorted.
Geto frowned thoughtfully.
“Professor Nanami?” he queried, “You’re scared of him, Uta?”
Utahime flushed, not only because Geto didn’t often call her by the nickname.
“No! I just….he’s very impressive. He’s only four years older than me and he has a PhD.”
Utahime shifted uncomfortably in her seat. It wasn’t the PhD that unsettled her. The blonde man at the lectern represented something continuous, expertise in a straight line. Her friends, on the same rod-straight trajectory towards their own refined proficiency, couldn’t possibly understand. They didn’t know enough of the world to realise what Utahime felt.
She took an urgent glug of her beer.
“And I left the novel on the bus. Everything I know about the text was in my copy,” she muttered, before taking another too-big mouthful, cheeks puffing to capacity.
“I said you can have mine, Uta,” Gojo pressed, crunching down on ice.
He was drinking something silly, as usual.
“And I explained that you need it,” Utahime muttered impatiently. “You also have to write the paper, remember?”
“I don’t. You can have my copy,” Geto cut in, “From last year.”
Utahime met his gaze, taking in his still features. He was always so composed. Utahime wondered what that was like; to be so handsome, so unperturbed.
“I forgot you also took Smut 101 with Professor Straightface,” Gojo said, leaning back in his seat.
Geto ignored him, somehow without malice, sipping his beer and taking Utahime in carefully, everything measured, every detail catalogued.
“Do you like it, Utahime?” he asked softly, lowering the bottle from his lips after a sip.
Utahime’s eyes widened, a little flushed from the alcohol hitting her blood like a rock thrown from a bridge.
“The novel is…beautiful. Romantic. Erotic,” she mumbled, suddenly self-conscious that he knew what she meant, that he could picture her reading the same scenes.
“Deeply erotic,” he nodded, his gaze steady on her face, “Fucking and transgressing.”
“Frilly,” Gojo added sagely.
Utahime looked over to the window, because Shoko was taking so long to get back from her smoke. Something about sitting between the other two felt charged; Gojo, who had skimmed the book lightly and Geto, who had peeled back its layers.
Shoko was still standing there, watching them through the window. She returned Utahime’s smile again, but fainter, maybe a little blurred by the glass. Maybe a little autumn fog was rolling in.
A tugging pressure on her hair suddenly made Utahime suck in her breath. She spun in her seat, but it was only Gojo, wrapping the edge of her hair ribbon around his index finger.
Only Gojo.
It would stop there, no yanking pain, no cruel parting words.
She blinked rapidly, trying to metre her heart, wondering where that had come from.
“Stop,” she said weakly, gathering the tail of her ribbon towards herself like she’d gathered so many scattered things before.
She sipped her beer with a shaky hand, fingers slippery on the condensation, wondering at this archaeology, this unwelcome resurfacing.
She suddenly felt Geto’s foot slide between her ankles, discreetly drawing her attention back to him. He raised a questioning eyebrow as her eyes met his.
It took her by surprise, her lips parting, that he had noticed how the prickle of panic had slid over her like a rough skin.
She shook her head slightly, trying to reassure him that it was nothing.
“It’s not only about sex. The novel,” she murmured, her voice wobbling like a bent wheel.
“Yes, I suppose there are all those bits about trees and industry,” Gojo said flippantly, turning the menu the wrong way again to annoy her.
“It’s also about love,” she continued stubbornly, locking her jaw.
Geto ran his tongue over his teeth, an amused glint in his eye.
“Does fucking mean love for you, Uta?”
Thankfully, she didn’t have to say anything more, because the bell over the door jangled and Shoko finally joined them at the table.
She kissed Geto’s cheek in greeting, and playfully pushed Gojo’s head as she sat down.
“What are we talking about, gang?”
“Oh, y’know, the simultaneity of orgasm,” Gojo said, playfully nonchalant, his face flushed.
He was a terrible lightweight. His eyes were already too shiny, the tips of his ears pink.
“Oh, of course. Have you already talked about true sensual communion?” Shoko quipped dryly.
“It was just about to come up,” Utahime grinned, a flash of good humour at their shared joke.
But it quickly turned to ether. She was also feeling a bit faint, as if some of the fog from outside had slipped under the door and was curling into the corners of her vision.
And with the fog came the uncertainty of what she knew, the uncomfortable, twisting anxiety.
Critically discuss. Knowledge.
Her breath was leaving her — a longer exhale, a shorter inhale — before she had realised it.
It was the tug on her hair that had started it, but her mind quickly cast around for the other things that made her panic.
Geto’s foot between her shoes suddenly moved again, tapping each ankle lightly, reminding her where the floor was in relation to the ceiling.
“You’re fretting,” he pointed out quietly.
“Geto, I need help with the paper. I don’t know why, but I literally have no ideas,” she gulped.
“I’ll help. I’ll lend you a copy, I told you. And we can chat through the paper brief when you come to collect it,” he said calmly.
He never spoke warmly, she realised. His voice was smooth, cool, deep.
Utahime put the bottle to her lips, but discovered it was empty.
“Another?” Geto offered with another slow smile, like he was shy.
Utahime, grinned, nodding her head. The mistiness was suddenly pleasant, bumpers on the edges.
By the time she was on her fourth beer, it had all been softened out. She gazed at each of her friends, her head moving faster than her field of vision could stabilise, with a soft love.
She’d been on her own once and fared badly. She wouldn’t think about it now — especially not about the fact she hadn’t sorted it out by her own intervention.
After a round of whiskey, Gojo was a little sloppy too. She laughed at him, as he used the condiments and the menus to eagerly explain something in quantum physics that none of them could possibly understand.
Suddenly, she felt the foot between her ankles move, catching the lip of her seat from underneath and dragging it closer. She looked up in misty confusion, but Geto wasn’t even looking at her. His knees threaded with hers, like the tines of a cog.
She looked down at the surface of the table, feeling the warmth of his thighs against hers, then looked up at Geto again, but he still kept his eyes on Gojo. Geto was laughing softly now as a menu collapsed, a model universe destroyed.
“I must go,” Shoko said softly, drawing Utahime’s startled eyes to her.
Her gentle smile, the same one from the window, pulled on a string in Utahime’s drunken brain. She pushed her chair back quickly, unthreading her knees from Geto’s, standing up quickly.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” she mumbled, flustered and drunk.
Shoko let her, an amused smile on her lips, but only when they were out on the street did Utahime realise it was actually a cab waiting for her on the curb.
“It’s okay, go back in,” Shoko urged gently.
“S’kay,” Utahime slurred, only realising how drunk she was when she was moving.
Shoko paused, taking a deep breath.
“Uta, I’m going to stop coming to the literature class,” she said heavily.
“What?! Why?” Utahime exclaimed, her words broken by a hiccup.
“I have to be honest with you, I never actually registered for it. I’ve just been coming with you,” Shoko divulged sheepishly.
Utahime frowned, struggling to follow.
“Huh? But…”
“It’s just a bit much for me. I’ve tried to stick it out and it…there’s a complication. I’m sorry, I know you’ll be let down.”
Utahime swallowed her crestfallen expression as best she could. It had to be a lot — Shoko’s actual classes, the commute from the medical campus.
“Is this why you weren’t stressed about the paper?” Utahime asked with a wry smile to mask her disappointment.
Shoko recognised the lifeline Utahime had thrown her, and smiled back convincingly.
“I was way more stressed about how I was going to pretend to write all these papers,” she laughed lightly.
When her laugh faded, Shoko looked more tired than Utahime had realised. She rubbed her eyes and opened the door of the cab, catching it in her slim fingers.
“We’ll talk soon,” Shoko said quietly, and Utahime wondered if it was whiskey that made her voice sound so wafer-thin.
Utahime watched the cab drive away, the mist in her mind taking on a blue tinge. When she went back inside, she saw that drunk Gojo had arranged the letter magnets on the wall behind their table to say GO0D CVNT.
“There was no letter U,” Gojo explained, his speech in the wrong cadence.
Utahime shook her head at his antics, leaning over the table and mussing up the letters on the wall, obscuring their meaning again.
“I must go home too. I’m going to miss the last bus,” she said, picking up her jacket.
“Can I come with you?” Gojo asked eagerly, childishly hopeful.
“On the bus?” Utahime queried, shoving her arms into the sleeves, ungainly and drunk. It unbalanced her and she had to take a little step back to steady herself again.
“I’ve famously never ridden a bus,” he reminded her, struggling to hold her gaze. “I don’t know how to.”
“Everyone knows how to ride the bus,” Utahime scoffed, shaking her head in disbelief, certain this was a prank.
“I don’t.”
Gojo was already getting up, eager as if it were a carnival ride.
“Goodnight, Suguru. I’ve got a bus to catch.”
“It’s going in the opposite direction to your place,” Utahime tried to explain, but perhaps Gojo really didn’t know how the bus system worked.
“I’ll get an Uber back,” he dismissed, waving a hand.
Geto watched in amusement as his two friends argued, both as drunk as the other.
“Goodnight Satoru,” he said levelly, making no motion to leave with them. “Goodnight, Utahime.”
The bell jangled as they left, wobbling a little into the thickening mist.
As they made their way to the bus stop, Utahime tried to recall the schedule, wondering if she actually had missed the last bus. Her footfalls were a little too heavy.
“Maybe your lost novel will still be there, Uta,” Gojo said encouragingly, lolling his head back as they settled into the bus shelter.
He was struggling a bit with his syllables. Utahime snorted a laugh, finding their joint drunken incompetence amusing.
“It’s not the sh...same bus as this morning, Gojo. It’s a different route.”
Gojo smiled bashfully at her and it was not like Geto’s shyness. This time she was sure that this was the genuine article.
“How can you be so smart and not know how public transport works?” Utahime giggled.
“How can you be so smart and not even fully realise it?” he shot back.
Utahime’s smile waned a little.
“I know that I’m smart,” she said softly.
The downward pressure on her hair was imaginary this time.
Mouthbreather.
“I’m sorry, Uta. That’s not what I meant,” Gojo said, swallowing, slurring.
Utahime nodded, trying to brush it aside. She knew she was emotional because of the alcohol. And because Shoko was dropping out of the course, abandoning what Utahime had wanted — something jointly known, an even proficiency. They sat side by side at the back of the empty bus, a little too sleepy to talk. She let Gojo put his arm around her shoulders. His warmth felt nice, and so she let herself enjoy it for once. They spilt out again just a street down from the flat that Utahime shared with her cousin.
“So that’s the bus,” Gojo murmured.
“I’ve taught you all I know,” Utahime replied dryly.
Gojo looked down at her, smiling a little crookedly, unable to fully focus his gaze.
“Surely not?” he asked, alcohol making him suddenly outrageous. “What else can you show me how to ride?”
His palms slid into the contour of Utahime’s waist and she wiggled in his grip, pushing his hands away, huffing.
“God, you’re a moron,” she flushed.
Gojo laughed happily, not the least bit offended as she pulled away from his grasp.
“Goodnight, Gojo,” she said shortly, pulling her keys from her bag.
“See you in class, Uta,” He drawled.
Suddenly realising that it would just be the two of them, Utahime stopped in her tracks up the stairs.
“Shoko’s not coming anymore,” she blurted. “She says there’s been a complication.”
Gojo blinked, eyebrows shooting up in surprise and then lowering suddenly.
“I’m really bummed,” Utahime continued, the keys feeling heavy in her fingers.
“We all know what the complication is, right?” Gojo interrupted, his brow tight.
Utahime gaped at him, taken aback by his rough tone.
“Uh. No… her med studies seem pretty complex to navigate…”
Gojo gazed at her, trying to read her face. He then seemed to button up his thoughts.
“Am I the only one who knows everything?” he asked, the loneliest star.
Utahime stared, mouth unmechanised suddenly, uncertain what to say, distantly offended.
“I’ll see you in class, Uta.” He repeated with a quick smile, turning to walk down the steps and out into the autumn fog.
Indeed he did arrive in the nick of time for the lecture, sunglasses and hoodie against his hangover.
“Midweek drinking, why?” he asked unhappily, sliding onto the harsh bench.
There was a lot more room in their usual spot without Shoko.
“No talking, please,” Utahime begged, opening her notebook and taking a sip of water.
They watched the usual crowd shuffle in and take their seats, waiting for Professor Nanami to arrive. He was uncharacteristically late, giving Utahime too much time to fully experience her hangover without distraction.
Finally, the blonde lecturer strode through the doors, laying his briefcase on the lectern.
“Thank you for your patience,” he said, setting down his coffee cup.
Utahime swallowed down a wave of nausea at the sight of the coffee. Leaning forward on her chin, she watched while Professor Nanami unpacked his effects.
The coffee cup was new in the routine, she suddenly realised. She squinted at it, because it seemed out of character for him to have grabbed a shitty campus coffee while he was running late.
It wasn’t from this campus though, she suddenly realised, catching sight of the familiar sleeve on the cup.
It was from the medical campus.