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The air hit him first—sweet and chemical, thick enough to choke on. Artificial watermelon, guava, blueberry, or some unholy combination of all three, fogging the taproom like cheap incense.
Higuruma realized the graveness of his error the moment he entered.
Humid with the sweat of too many bodies packed too close like sardines, stinking of cheap beer and syrupy cocktails, and that sticky undercurrent of desperation and carelessness he does not—did not—subscribe to. The music was too loud, some bass-heavy monstrosity rattling the floorboards, vibrating his teeth with a mindless thrum that dictated the movement of the room. The entire place reeked of youth and body spray, both were equally suffocating.
All he’d known was the place was popular, busy, and reviews were overwhelmingly positive… he failed to account for its prime location, situated between three large universities, and that those reviews were due to the tendency of the staff not to card its patrons.
What he’d thought was just a bar was in fact a shitty college bar.
He hadn’t set foot in a place like this in over a decade, repelled from entryways like uncrossable salt barriers. Even back then, it had been out of necessity rather than preference—somewhere to get drunk as quickly as possible for as cheap as possible, to sit shoulder to shoulder with classmates he hardly knew, and drink until the edges of his brain blurred enough to stomach whatever stressed or sorry state his life was in.
He dodged swaying girls with glossy lips and half-lidded eyes, shuffled past boys (and really, that’s what they were to him: boys) in letterman jackets sloshing their drinks down their wrists as they postured and peacocked in front of any half engaged girl.
They were all so fucking young. Their skin still tight with optimism, their lives still brimming with possibility. They looked barely old enough to drink, much less exist in his vicinity.
He slid into a stool, exhaled and raked a hand through his hair, disheveling the strands to fall mussed and curled over his forehead. The exhaustion of the week settled heavier now that he had nowhere productive to direct it.
Another long day in a long week in a long year atop the mountain of many. A never-ending cycle of cases and clients, of carefully crafted words and methodical dismantling, and fighting battles that rarely ever felt like victories.
The ice in his glass clicked as he tilted it, staring down into the shallow topaz pool of scotch. No doubt watered down and thin, both the drink and any sort of epiphany it may provide.
He was tired. Of work, of routine, of coming home to a quiet apartment where the silence stewed and only made him feel the weight of it that much more until his spine buckled him to his lumpy old couch.
He needed something different. A deviation.
A warm body, a willing mouth, a night spent drowning in something other than a bottle and depositions. A quick fuck, messy and anonymous, just enough to set him back to an uncomfortable but manageable baseline.
He’d thought, naively, this might be the place to find it.
But looking at the crowd now, the reality was jarring. The whole thing reeked of dissonance and miscalculation.
He wasn’t stupid. He was an aging man in a bar full of college students and he felt it.
The worst part was that they noticed it too.
The first had been easy enough to ignore—a girl barely past twenty, teetering in heels too tall for her as she draped herself across the bar beside him, giggling at something said by a friend before turning those narrow, glassy eyes on him. “You’re too handsome to be drinking alone,” she’d slurred, voice syrupy, fingers dragging over the counter and inching toward his arm.
He ignored her outright.
The second was harder to stomach—another girl, more forward, wrapped in something tight and sequined, barely passable for a dress that looked one sudden move away from fleeing her body.
“You look like trouble,” she’d purred, hanging herself off his arm, squeezing his bicep between her overflowing breasts that he thought surely should’ve stirred something in his loins but only stirred the nausea in his stomach. “Like you could teach me a thing or two.”
No, he thought miserably. I look tired and like I could be your father.
He spent his time buried in the bottom of a glass, head down, the original purpose of this foray all but abandoned to the wind he wished to be three sheets to. That glass made for his weapon and shield as he fended off comments about his hands, and his nose, and always liking older men.
He hated it. Hated the way it made his skin crawl and run hot then cold, his presence here felt even more wrong the more notice he attracted.
He could see it in their faces, the way they looked at him—not like a man, but an idea. Some sleazy fantasy conjured from parental issues and too many cheap romance novels.
It disgusted him.
What was he doing? Was this really what he’d been reduced to?
A pathetic old man wolfing at the edges of youth, hoping to lap up whatever scraps were left for him? He felt gross just being here and breathing the same air as these kids.
Does it make him lesser, that these advances don’t ignite hunger and flattery but revulsion? That the heat curling in his belly isn’t desire but disgust? Or does it make him greater, that he does not stoop, does not prowl, does not take, like a less scrupulous man might?
But what does it matter—lesser, greater—when the result is the same? When he is still here, nursing a drink in the dim fugue of a bar too loud, too young, too dizzying with its perfume of cheap liquor and cheaper thrills. When he is still a man past his prime, not the wolf but in fact seated among them, and though he does not salivate, does not sink his teeth into the softness offered up to him, the very fact of his presence damns him all the same.
Because what else could a man like him be doing here, if not waiting to be fed?
He should leave. Should have left the moment the first giggling thing slithered too close, before this whole endeavor soured into something even more pitiful; and that base, ill-advised need that had driven him here rotted into septic self-loathing. He resolved that he would leave. Would finish his drink, cut his losses, and slouch back to his apartment where his loneliness at least had the decency to be private.
And then the bartender set another drink before him.
Higuruma blinked. “I didn’t order this.”
The guy didn’t bother looking up as he wiped down the counter. “From her.”
A sigh curled from Higuruma’s lips, bone-deep, scraping at his ribs. No doubt this would be another girl, one with at least the restraint not to immediately drape herself over him and start peeling off his clothes or hers. He turned, already preparing a polite but firm rejection—
But then he saw you.
Already looking at him.
Higuruma tried to categorize you, and couldn’t do it fast enough.
You weren’t one of them; not young and reckless or drunk on the novelty of being seen or heedless in your indulgences. You held yourself with enviable serenity, chin propped in your palm, eyes bright with rationed amusement, like you’d already taken measure of the room and found it wanting.
Older than the crowd. Polished in a way that made you an island amid the tumult, unmoved and untouched by it. And when your gaze lifted and caught his, something in his chest went taut, sharp and immediate, as if he’d just stepped into the path of something he should’ve seen coming.
And for reasons he couldn’t immediately articulate, you were acutely aware of him.
And you’d sent him a drink.
Higuruma frowned, fingers curling around the glass, rolling the cool condensation between his palms as he considered it. Considered you.
The tilt of your head, the way your eyes held steady when most would already have turned away. You weren’t a child playing at adulthood, emboldened by too many vodka sodas and the illusion of invincibility. You weren’t swaying on unsteady heels, lips self-bitten and red with grenadine, or scanning the room for the next best thing.
You had chosen him.
And then you waved.
And god help him—he was already planning on choosing you back.
It had been a long time since he’d played this game, and longer still since he’d played it well. The motions felt rusty, the confidence (even if staggish and unearned) once honed to a razor's edge was now dulled from disuse. But you had played the first hand, and it would be remiss of him not to answer in kind.
He smiled—grimaced, more like—slow through his teeth, then lifted your gifted glass in acknowledgment. He flagged the bartender and sent one right back.
You smiled, pleased. And then, without ceremony, you stood.
He knew as surely as he felt the first bead of sweat travel down his nape that you weren’t the type to wait or play games.
“This seat isn’t taken, is it?”
Your voice was smooth, carrying easily between the electronic thumping that blew out crackling speakers, slipping to his ear as easily as you did into the stool beside him—close but not intrusive, poised but not distant. Everything about you screamed open and available and interested.
Higuruma’s gaze slid sidelong to meet yours. “I suppose it is now.”
“Mm.” You lifted the drink he’d sent back to you, studying the pink liquor like you might divine something from its depths, delphic in the way you regarded it, and then him, like you had gathered something after all.
“You look like you’d rather be anywhere but here.”
He leaned forward against the bartop, brows lifting as he rubbed his fingers against his jaw—relieved if only slightly by the cold suffusion of his drink to his sweaty skin. “That obvious?”
“Painfully.”
“So.” You took your time with your drink, rolling the stem of your glass between two fingers, your gaze still pinned lazily on him, expectant. “Are you going to tell me what brought you here, or do I get to keep coming up with my own ideas?”
His fingers tensed minutely where they rested, jumping around the sweat of his scotch. Then he grinned, slow and sloping. “I’m worthy of conspiracy?”
“Curiosity, at least,” you countered.
Higuruma was not accustomed to being an object of curio.
Befuddled humor lit his eyes, the strike of flint in a dark room that eased the severity of his brooding into something dangerously approachable. He grunted and leaned back slightly, like he needed space to take you in more fully.
“Well…” His perusal was indulgent as he looked you up and down, but you didn’t seem the type to be unsettled by it. “What have you got so far?”
“Oh, a few.” You leaned in, eliminating the small space he’d just made between you, elbows resting on your knees, voice dipping lower into conspiratorial invitation. “One: you’re engaging in some self-imposed punishment. A martyrdom of misery, if you will.”
He hummed, lips twitching. “That would be dramatic.”
You lifted two fingers. “Two: you lost a bet. Maybe with a colleague. Had to endure an hour of this as penance?”
He shook his head and the wry curve of his lips grew, sipping his whiskey. “That would require me to have friends who make bets.”
A beat of silence.
The nonchalance and ease with which he wielded self-deprecation came far too easily, and with a sudden prickle of ‘oh shit’ sluicing down his spine, the coy aversion of his gaze from yours snapped back with a quickness to read you.
He’s too jaded, too cynical, too friendless and uninteresting really, and now surely, you’d see it too, and this beacon of hope and charity you’d graced him with would be snuffed by his own droll and heavy hand.
But looking at you had been a mistake, because when you lowered your glass, your expression had changed—not pity, but something worse and far more thrilling. Interest.
Then: “Oof,” you muttered, and he watched with awe as your jaw quivered, valiantly warding off a grin that showed instead in the feline glimmer of your eye. You weren’t thrown by his fumbling or self-effacing honesty or the awkward shuffle of his own apparent attraction. You were entertained.
“Alright, then. Number three—” A casual swirl of your drink, the slow drag of your fingertip around the rim. “You’re just trying to get laid.”
Higuruma blinked and wrinkled his nose, left feeling again like he’d committed some kind of faux pas. Of course that’s why he was here, and he’d changed his mind about it almost as soon as he walked through the door. His intentions were as transparent as the shitty, waterlogged napkins used for coasters on the bartop, but he still blanched under your scrutiny.
The laughter that spilled from you was entirely unrepentant. “Oh, there it is.” You giggled. The truth was glaring—that he was a lonely man, just trying to get his dick wet.
“Was,” he corrected before he could stop the defense, his expression souring. “I think I’ve changed my mind.”
“This place isn't your speed? I never would've guessed.”
“Not at all,” he grumbled.
“That’s a real shame for your suitors,” you said lightly. “Hopefully they’ll recover in time for their eight a.m. lectures. Or midterms. Or whatever it is they’re stressed about this week—you’ve ruined their plans.”
He ducked his head, exhaling sharply through his nose as he tried—failed—not to snicker, caught by how cleanly you’d skewered them. And him, just a little.
He found himself liking that far more than expected.
“And here I thought you were trying to charm me.” His voice was rougher now, the low scrape of it accusingly sheepish as he held you in his periphery, like the distance afforded away from direct eye-contact might actually save him.
“Oh, I am.”
You lifted your glass in a slow, deliberate toast. “I’m also trying to decide whether I should be flattered or offended that you haven’t tried to charm me back yet.”
He stared at you outright. That alone should have clued him in. The evening had been an awkward dance of jerky avoidance, avoiding grabby hands, twisting away in ways that were probably (definitely) rude, stiffening under unwelcome touches and words and looks but you made him look.
You were different, in ways he could only begin to guess at. Your interest was overt, to call it coy would be an outright lie, and in that way you weren’t much different from his ‘suitors’. But your approach, your appearance, that little kernel of something catty—there was a certain je ne sais quoi about you that stirred something in him that nobody else had managed.
Excitement. Curiosity. A conquest of interest and intellect—the unnerving sort that slipped past his defenses before he’d realized he was being studied—and he’d swallowed your lure down to the sinker with the first sip of your offered drink.
He let out a disbelieving breath, amazed by his own blindness at having stepped straight into a bear trap. His tongue clucked against the inside of his cheek, his smile was tight-lipped. “I’m out of practice,” he warned, apologized.
Your smile deepened. “I can tell.”
He took his time to let the weight of that realization settle—to go through all stages of embarrassment, frustration, acceptance, and finally determination, before he finally turned his full attention to you. If you were not one to play with pretense, then neither would he.
He shifted, letting his forearm rest on the bar, his knee cocked outward to just barely brush yours beneath the counter. Accidental, if anyone asked. “Would you like me to?”
Your brows slid upward. “Like you to…?”
“Charm you.”
There was a flicker in your eyes, the slip of a match before the ember caught, and when it did your lips pulled back from your teeth with a pyres heat. He’d managed to surprise you, and the thrill of that made him want to keep doing it.
“I would.”
Higuruma might be out of practice and out of his league—he’s quite sure he’s not even playing the same sport as you. But he finds himself most desperately wanting to play anyway.
The bartender called last rounds, but Higuruma hardly registered it. He’d long since stopped keeping track of time, lost in grains of sand and the ebb and flow of conversation, the cadence of your voice, the pace of the evening dictated by the curve of your smile and the way your lips curled around your words, shaping them with a self-assurance he was only playing at… at least initially.
He was used to talking to people who either wanted something from him or wanted something of him.
His clients, his colleagues, the prosecution’s sneering cross-examinations, all of it a game of words measured to the ounce of controlled perceptions. Clients want outcomes, colleagues want leverage, and strangers, apparently, want a fantasy.
But this was different. There was no angle to you, no agenda, you approached with your palms open and out, your honesty was an easy pill to swallow with a throat so lubricated by drink.
You’d asked him what he did for a living. He’d told you—defense attorney—and braced himself for the inevitable.
Most people fell into one of two categories: the ones who saw him as a parasite, a man who twisted the law in favor of money and monsters; and the ones who saw him as some noble crusader, the last line of defense against a system that devoured the weak and helpless. Neither view sat comfortably with him.
But you only hummed, lips pursed in a way he came to recognize as thoughtful, considering it like a fact rather than a moral dilemma.
“Someone has to do it,” you’d said, before taking a sip of your rosé—the second glass he’d bought you. “Might as well be someone good at it.”
It knocked something loose in him he hadn’t realized wasn’t nailed down. No scorn, no admiration, just the bare truth of it. He wasn’t sure why that made his skin prickle and cheeks warm, why his eyes averted down to the melted ice thinning his drink when he smiled. Was the bar truly so low that a little compassion—no, not even compassion, it was damn near apathy—could undo him?
You’d asked him if he liked it.
And he’d told you the truth: “No, but I’m good at it.”
You snickered, and he smiled fuller. He’d never quite admitted that out loud before, but he didn’t think you’d pity him. All of the school, the sleepless nights, the blood and sweat poured over cases that barely graced the judges bench—not a waste.
You talked about books, the ones you pretended to have read to come off higher brow and the ones that lived permanently on your nightstand, dogeared and underlined. He hoped tomorrow he would remember some of their names. He wondered what annotations you’d have made in the margins and what lines spoke to you enough to bring pen to paper.
You asked him what he did with his time outside of work, and he scoffed at the notion—what time? But you just gave him that look again, like you’d already learned to read through his bullshit as easily as you could tear through wet paper, and so he told you.
He used to like going to the theater but hadn’t in years. He used to play the piano but couldn’t remember the last time he touched the keys. That he had an extensive collection of old vinyl records kept in cardboard boxes in his closet that he never had the time or energy to unpack. That, frankly, he didn’t know what he did outside of work anymore.
And you listened. Not just heard, but listened and smiled and laughed and somehow, that made it worse.
Because he’d come here looking for an escape. Take someone home for the cost of a drink and maybe a joke or two. And instead, he’d found this.
What could be, might be, a connection.
Something he hadn’t expected or accounted for.
And that was precisely why he couldn’t take you home.
The thought calcified in his head as he set his empty glass down, as he glanced at the bartender closing out tabs, as he felt the toe of your shoe brush his ankle beneath the bar the way you had for the last hour and a half when you dangled your heel just so. You were waiting for him to make the final move and say “I have another bottle back at my place, care to join me?” or “Why don’t I show you some of those records?” and turn this night into what it was supposed to be.
He could take you home.
He could press you up against his front door and taste the night on your tongue, trace it past your lips as he tilted your head back with his hands. He could let you whisper something ticklish against his mouth, something about impatience and the audacity of restraint, and answer with his teeth at your throat, his fingers already working at the zipper of your dress. He could lay you out beneath him, drink in every slow arch of your back, the pull of your fingers in his hair, the way his name might break apart in your mouth when he finally—
He could have you tonight.
But he would not.
Because for the first time in longer than he could remember, the anticipation was better than the certainty. He liked the flames curling slow and sweet in his gut, the game between you and the war waged between what he wanted and what he was willing to take—an advantage he lost ground on embarrassingly fast with the way you cocked your head and waited for him to catch up.
And maybe—just maybe—he liked the way you waited for him to catch up. The way you watched him fumble, entertained but not unkind, not cruel, not condescending. You played him expertly, but with the kind of patience that never made him feel like you were keeping score.
And if he took you home now, if he let himself indulge in you like he so desperately wanted to, he’d cheapen it. He’d wake up tomorrow and feel like shit about it, and maybe you would too, and then this thing, whatever it was, would be ruined.
He couldn't remember you as the mysterious stranger in a bar that he wouldn't forget. You'd just be someone in his bed he wishes he could.
You were worth more than two glasses of rosé. You deserved better than the hands of a man who walked in with no standards beyond warm and willing.
You were not the cheap fling he’d been looking for.
Because this was the first real human connection he’d had in months, and he’d rather let that live on a pedestal in his head than cheapen it with something so fleeting and selfish. This could not be the transactional exchange of value that he came here to barter in liquor for sex.
He swallowed.
“Come on,” he rasped. “Let’s get you a cab.”
Your head tilted, barely perceptible, but he caught it. The fractional hesitation, the surprise in your eyes like a candle flickering in a draft. A blink, too slow, lips parted as if to speak, before pressing together again.
This clearly wasn’t the ending you’d expected.
Higuruma could see it in the minute shift of your posture, the way you squared your shoulders.
For the first time all night, he’d thrown you off balance, and the satisfaction of that warmed him. He’d managed to surprise you one last time. That you, who had him spinning in dizzy circles, who toyed with him like a cat does a mouse, had still miscalculated.
But he’d disappointed you. And he hated that.
Not enough to take it back.
But god, almost. Almost nearly had him snatching the words right out of the air and replacing them with an invitation, a proposition, and a plea for forgiveness and more of you.
But he stayed firm. Noble, or some attempt at it.
He thought you might press. Might tilt your head, drag your nail along the rim of your glass or right up his twitching thigh, part your lips around something as sharp as it was saccharine, a playfully twirled ‘Oh, really?’ dripping from your tongue that would shatter his resolve like the fragile thing he knew it was.
And he wished you would, because that would absolve him. You invited him. You pursued him after he tried to do the right thing. He could hardly be blamed for succumbing to the talent of your tongue that had played him all evening.
He forced himself to stand, to gesture toward the door instead of the obvious alternative; the one where he pressed his palm to the nape of your neck and pulled you into him, where the night ended in the dark quiet of his sheets and the frenetic undoing of you both.
And you didn’t argue.
You sighed and tipped back the last of your drink, exposing the smooth line of your throat to him like a provocation, like an invitation that he would spend the rest of the night vividly imagining taking.
You hadn’t a care in the world that he’d cut the evening short—short? Could hours be considered short?—short, maybe, of what it was meant to be, the foregone conclusion of the evening cast back to the dark primordial pool of its conception.
Your hair tumbled back from your neck to reveal the flawless hollow of your collarbone set aflame with orange and red neon marquee, a bewitching and captivating pyroead; would that he could grab you then, for his hand to support the small of your back as you arched back, and back, and back to ease the straight passage of alcohol down your flame-burned throat. He would ease that burn with his mouth, his lips, his tongue, suck the embers into his mouth and snuff them out—
Your glass met the bar with a soft click, the final punctuation on the evening.
And you looked at him looking at you, and maybe it was the stricken clenching of his jaw, or the way his eyes slid upward just a fraction in an expression undeniably pleading for compliance, that brought back your smile.
He followed you out, because of course he did. Held the door for you, stepped onto the cracked pavement at your side, adjusting to the shift in atmosphere, the cool night air dampening the heat that had been circling between you, diluting it into something easier to swallow.
His fingers twitched to his pocket, instinctively honed for the smushed carton of cigarettes in his coat but seemed to think better of it. The idea of ending the evening on a flaw, the abrupt reveal of an unattractive vice, sat poorly. He’d never cared for being known, it was a terrifying ordeal after all, but he hoped if he were to be remembered, if only for a night, it would be positively and not for his crutches.
You crossed your arms. “You always this much of a gentleman?”
He kicked a stray pebble with the toe of his shoe, shifting subtly closer as he feigned distraction. “I wouldn’t call myself that.”
“No?”
“No.”
“I would,” you sighed, studying him. “Shame that it suits you.”
He huffed a quiet laugh, shaking his head. “You think so?”
“I know so.” You tilted your head, the curve of your lips widening. “Could’ve fooled me though, the way you were looking at me all night.”
His throat worked around a swallow. A slow blink, a glance at the curb, at the headlights slicing through the dark as a cab approached, anywhere but at you, his reprieve and his punishment all at once.
You took a step back as it slowed, the moment folding and collapsing into the black hole of itself.
Higuruma reached for the handle before you could, pulling it open, and you arched a brow.
“See?” You slipped into the seat, fingers drumming lightly against your knee as you considered him. “Perfect gentleman.”
He was still standing there blocking the door.
Standing like a pitiful monument to hesitation, caught in the limbo of decision and regret, watching the city’s sodium glow lap over the soft plane of your cheekbones, the divot of your collarbone, the long stretch of your legs beneath the hem of your dress.
His fingers flexed over the doorframe. He should move. Step back. Close the door.
It should’ve made it easier. If you didn’t ask, if you didn’t pout, if you didn’t lean forward or tilt your chin or murmur something coy or pleading, he should have no trouble stepping back, folding his hands behind his back like a penitent monk and watching you disappear into the night. But you didn’t ask nor did you dismiss. You just waited.
He considered closing the door without a word, deliberately debonair and mysterious and aloof. But he couldn’t quite snub you like that, not after he already had.
“Goodnight,” he said. “Get home safe.” He closed the door.
A sharp, clinical severance. A blade pressed clean through tendon and sinew, dividing this moment from all the ones that could have been.
Because this, you, had been good. And he was too fucking starved for the cadence of conversations that didn’t feel like transactions, for the acute, teasing barbs that engaged his tired brain rather than let it slip like goo through a storm grate.
You played him like a master's instrument, never in a way that made him feel like he was simply being tolerated for what was expected in return, and he knew it would be all too easy to get addicted off a single hit of what you had to offer.
The sex, he was sure, would have been good. But it would have been just that—good. Fleeting. A momentary indulgence that would have diluted the hours spent circling each other, indulging in something richer and better. He would’ve woken up hollow, the memory of it swallowed by the weight of knowing he had reduced it all to a simple means to an end.
And whether or not you would agree with that assessment was irrelevant to him.
The cab’s headlights cut through the dark, illuminating the stretch of empty pavement and took you with it.
He stood, hands in his pockets fiddling with a cardboard carton, watching the tail lights shrink, with nothing but the phantom heat of your gaze curling around his throat like a leash held in a rapidly receding hand.
“Fuck.” He spat.
Too weak to take you home.
Too proud to chase after you.
And knowing with certainty that he already regretted both.
A week passed.
And with it came adulthood's object impermanence—he had no time to think of you. And in those brief periods where he tried, it had been long enough for the memory to become uncooperative. He tried to chase it at night when the days ran him ragged and the mind sought something to smooth the frayed edges.
It frustrated him, left him hot and unsatisfied, a bitter echo of the night’s original goal and subsequent failure: he had left alone.
Higuruma never expected to see you again.
And yet, against all logic, there you were.
Not at the same bar, but a different one, his usual haunt, where the lighting was low enough to swallow him whole, and the only bodies pressed close were the ones who had come in together. A place for drinking, not for the company of strangers, which suited him just fine, because he had decided—resolutely, stubbornly—that hookups were not in his cards. He just wanted a drink.
At first, he’d thought it was an anomaly. An unfortunate alignment of stars placing you in his path just like it had the first time, as if you hadn’t tormented him enough. He didn’t believe in fate, too rational, too familiar with the staggering predictability of human error to entertain the notion of grand design. No, it couldn’t be you. A trick of the light. A doppelgänger, maybe.
But then you looked up, caught him staring, and your lips parted first with surprise, eyes full saucers, and then split with something suspiciously welcoming.
“Well!” You called, lifting your drink in a friendly salute. “I guess you do have a friend after all.”
Higuruma blinked. And then, before he could think better of it, sighed and took the seat beside you.
That night had been awkward in a way neither of you acknowledged, two actors stumbling through the second act of a play that had never quite finished its first. But the script came back quickly. The rhythm found itself. And he almost didn’t recognize you.
You didn’t play with him: the flirtatious foil you wielded at your first meeting was sheathed, and in its place you held a white flag. No games: you already considered it lost. No expectations: you considered his interest depleted. The sultry air about you was gone, but somehow the version of you he sat with that evening was even more beguiling.
Still friendly, not because you wanted him but because you wanted him. You spoke like you were old friends, not mere acquaintances with a brief and strange history. You made him comfortable enough to stay until he couldn’t justify lingering anymore, but still he was loath to leave as the clock struck midnight.
And when he left, alone just as he had the first time, there was something unfamiliar nestled beneath his breastbone. Not obtrusive and not in the way. Just… there, quiet and benign.
And then it happened again. And again.
He reasoned it was a coincidence. That bars were finite and he was predictable. But as the weeks stretched on, as your conversations bled from one meeting to the next without missing a beat, he could no longer pretend this was random.
The pattern was an accident until it wasn’t. It became something neither of you mentioned but both understood, until “see you next week” became synonymous for goodbye. Twice was chance. Three times, deliberate. And now, what did that make four and five? Habit?
Higuruma wasn’t a man given to fanciful thinking, but he was a man of logic and precedent. And precedent told him that this wasn’t normal. That it shouldn’t be this easy to fall into a routine outside of his normal footways.
He had his routines, he was comfortable in them, an old dog could learn new tricks but he had no desire to sit or roll over. And despite what every rational part of him insisted, you were beginning to look less like chance and an awful lot like certainty.
It wasn’t just the way you always seemed pleased to see him, but the way he’d begun expecting it. The way his eyes swept the room without thinking the second he entered, and how his muscles unknotted when he spotted you, perched in your usual spot, waiting but not waiting, and how a smile would brighten your face when you noticed him walking to you as quickly as he could without tripping over himself like an overeager puppy.
Somewhere along the way, his occasional desperation-driven crawls to the bar became habitual too. What were once monthly visits became weekly visits, and if anyone were close enough to him then maybe they’d be concerned about a budding development of alcoholism, but it wasn’t the drink he was drunk on.
It was this.
The simple joy of having something in his life that wasn’t an obligation but something he wanted.
With you, there were no buried landmines, no careful maneuvering or bomb squad precision required. You never made him feel like he was performing, never measured his words against an invisible rubric, because you had seen him from the start and you still looked anyway.
You knew what he was. An exhausted man, a woeful introvert burned out from playing extrovert all day. And with you, he didn’t have to keep up the act. He could slump over the bar, curl his posture, and snarl grievances into an ear that always stayed softer than his words.
You balanced sly barbs with sincerity so effortlessly it often made his head spin, catching him off guard in ways he hadn’t been caught in years. He was used to being the one reading people, dissecting them like puzzles to be solved, but you weren’t a puzzle at all.
You told him about your cat with a death wish who had a penchant for climbing curtains, and how you once moved across the world on a whim and sometimes felt the urge to do it again. That you thought the best movies were the ones that ended a little unsatisfactorily, and you were a menace when drunk and picked ridiculous hills to die on: like whether aliens had already made contact, or whether time travel could ever be ethical.
And in return, you learned about him too. You knew he hated mustard, and that he always carried two pens because he was the kind of person who lost them constantly, despite how meticulous he was about everything else. That he only speaks to his mother three times a year: on her birthday, on his, and on Christmas. That he’d once cracked a tooth on a popcorn kernel and now, without thinking, he always chewed gingerly on the left side.
He’d never offered any of it freely, but you had a way of coaxing things out of him that he never even considered to be of consequence until you smiled and encouraged him on.
Rain or shine, you’d be there. He knew you when his suit was wet from the rain and no umbrella, watching the shadows of raindrops slide down your shoulder as they raced outside an adjacent window; and he knew you when snow started to fall, blanketing the pavement in white with you bundled in his coat wrapped snug around your shoulders.
At some point, he couldn’t pinpoint when, the bartender stopped asking if they wanted separate tabs, and he started choosing darker shirts on Fridays—ones that wouldn’t show the inevitable splash of your lipstick when you hugged him goodbye.
And Higuruma still didn’t believe in fate.
But if he did, he’d think it was fucking with him.
Because no matter where the night ended, it always seemed to begin with you.
And tonight came at the tail end of one of those days.
The kind that left teeth marks in his patience, gnawed him down to marrow, stripped him of anything soft and spit out only the brittle, splintered remains. Hours in court, arguing a case he should have won—had won, if the world wasn’t built on loopholes and technicalities and the smug, self-assured handshakes of men who never had to fear the consequences of their actions.
A man who deserved to walk free had instead been led away in cuffs. And Higuruma could only stand by while the prosecution clapped each other on their backs, beaming over a win they’d stolen through a well-timed procedural roadblock. Nausea curled thick and acrid in his gut, the taste of injustice so familiar by now it hardly warranted a grimace.
But tonight, something in him had shifted.
It wasn’t just bitterness. It wasn’t just exhaustion.
It was rage. Hot, visceral fury that darkened his vision at the edges while he shook hands and accepted condolences like he was the one who had lost something, when the man behind those mahogany doors was the only one who would go to sleep in a cell tonight.
Higuruma had walked out of that courthouse itching.
To fight. To burn it all down. To throw something hard against the wall just to hear it break. He thought briefly that maybe he should’ve been the one in cuffs, because he was ready and willing to do something monstrous. If justice would not be served, he would be its sword and gavel and mete it out himself.
Instead, he’d come here.
Because it was Friday.
And no matter how long the week, no matter what fresh hell he’d had to wade through to get there, Friday meant you.
His grip on the door handle was tight when he stepped inside, flinging open the brassy door which clattered under his urgency. He found himself bracing against the possibility that tonight, of all nights, would be the one you weren’t there.
His gaze swept the room, fevered and searching, drinking in the dim haze of liquor-warmed bodies, the languid lull of conversation, the flickering hush of candlelight in lowball glasses until he found you.
Something inside him fractured with relief.
You looked up before he could move or his presence could be confirmed by anything as mundane as sound or sight—gravitational certainty clicking into place. The axis tilted. The inevitable collision loomed.
A smile started to form until your gaze traveled down, catching the undone knot of his tie, the disarray in his collar, the exhaustion pressed into the delicate creases around his eyes. Your expression dimmed.
And God help him, your concern filled him with a selfish pleasure he had no right to feel.
His stride devoured distance, any distance that would’ve kept him from you, driven by rankled recklessness into something cataclysmic, balancing the knife's edge of too much and he didn’t care over which side he fell.
You didn’t have time to turn fully before he was on you, his forehead pressing heavy into the curve of your shoulder, a groan, low and frayed, rumbling from deep in his chest, arms wound tight around your waist.
The force of him checked itself, urgency tempered. Where desperation drove him to crush you, as if the breaking of your pieces would produce the material to mend his own, he instead softened, reeling awareness back to himself with the pinprick narrowing of his eyes, fingers curled tight into the cotton of your sweater where he clung like a limpet.
His breath smoothed out as he exhaled against your throat, chin hooked over your shoulder. Eyes hardened and battle-weary slipped into heavy placidity, a conscious sinking rather than crashing, seeking out the soft shores that would smooth his entry into safe harbor; the warpath surrendered rather than succumbed.
A shuddering release, a tether unspooled and rolled up neater. He hadn’t just found you, he was letting himself—hoping to be—found, just before tipping over the precipice of something he didn’t think he could come back from.
The force of him unsteadied you, his weight bone-deep, pleading, arms locking around you like a drowning man.
“Oh—”
You gasped, startled but not unwelcome, your hands drifted down to hold his forearms, your body catching him as much as he ensnared you.
The tension in your frame bled out as you melted into him, your head tipping back onto his shoulder, an unspoken surrender that sent a shudder down his spine. He felt your breath, warm and steady, stirring the disheveled strands of hair by his ear, felt the rise and fall of your breath through your back, the rhythm of it grounding, lulling, undoing.
You smelled nice.
You always did, and he always noticed. He noticed it when you leaned in too close with a joke, or when you shrugged his coat over your shoulders, and when he got home at the end of the night and still caught traces of you on his sleeves.
A weaker man might’ve burned his coat just to rid himself of the evidence, but him? No, he was far worse.
He’d stand by the door some nights, fingers curling into the lapels, lifting them to his face and dragging in a breath deep enough to hurt like some lovelorn parishioner taking communion.
You chuckled, slipping a hand up into his hair, fingers threading through the strands, nails scraping light against his scalp. A shudder ripped down his spine, his eyes falling shut as he sighed into you, an old, weary dog curling into warmth. His arms tightened around you to keep himself from falling over.
“Poor baby,” you crooned, teasing but downy soft, softer than he figured he deserved.
He should let you go. A loaded thought, in more ways than one. He should release you, both from his arms and from the unhealthy dependence he’d let weave its way into his life.
But then again—
It wasn’t that bad, was it? If he’d replaced one vice with another? If he reached for you instead of a cigarette, if he found himself less addicted to nicotine and more addicted to the sound of your voice, or the way you looked at him, or how you always made things feel better, or— yeah, he was addicted.
But he hadn’t smoked in a month which was a month longer than he’d been clean in the last eight years. He could argue codependency could be cleansing, couldn’t he?
If he was going to break the habit, it wouldn’t be tonight.
He inhaled deeply, pulling you into his lungs, before finally peeling himself away, shoulders slumping as he sank onto the stool beside you. Immediately, he dropped his face into his hands, fingers pressing hard against his eyes.
You’d seen Higuruma after bad days before. He didn’t hide them well, never had. But tonight was different.
You studied him, tracing the open collar of his shirt with buttons undone, the way his tie hung limp and dead like it had been yanked loose the moment he could. You caught the way his fingers curled, flexed, like he was fighting the urge to clench them into fists.
“Bad day?”
“Something like that.”
You nodded slowly. “Wanna talk about it?”
He stewed on it, jaw tight. He could, and he knew you’d listen the way you always did. You’d nod, you’d tilt your head in that way you did when you were really hearing him, you’d let your own frustration flare up on his behalf, let your teeth flash when you called it bullshit in that sharp, biting way that always made him laugh despite himself.
And maybe that was the problem.
Because honesty wouldn’t just be about today. It would be about you. About why he had really come here, why he had reached for you like instinct, why the thought of spending the night not being here, not being with you, had been intolerable.
He wasn’t just used to this routine of yours now; this time, it just wasn’t enough. And if he were honest—with you, with himself—it never really had been. Not on the first night, not on the second, not on the fifth, and especially not tonight.
His fingers dragged down his face, sighing as he turned to you fully. “Honestly?” His pulse thrummed in his ribs where he felt the sharp warning dig of don’t do it, his throat tightened. He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t do it. He can’t do it—
“I don’t want to be here.”
Your lips pursed before they softened back into a smile, your eyebrows lowering sympathetically. “Well… for what it’s worth, I’d have missed you if you didn’t come.” You admitted and oh, Higuruma really wished you hadn’t.
“What’re you doing here then? I’d have understood if you just went home, if you had a bad day…”
He hesitated.
And it was ridiculous, wasn’t it? How his stomach twisted and his throat went dry and cracked and hurt, and this part felt like it should be so much easier. He’d spent the last month in the palm of your gentle hand, let you pry him open piece by piece without ever realizing it was happening with lockpick and ice pick alike. And yet—
This felt like a leap.
This was the natural conclusion of the first act. The unsatisfactory ending that had been retconned, rewritten months later into something unfinished and still waiting to happen.
He smiled. Thought he did, anyway, but he didn’t feel his face move, couldn’t feel anything save for the cold adrenaline-hopped pounding of his heart as it tried to flee his body.
“I wanted to see you.”
Your expression warmed, a splash of color blooming across the bridge of your nose.
He swallowed. “And…” His voice cracked, quieter now, rougher. He cleared his throat. “To ask you to come home with me.”
The breath in his lungs locked tight in tandem with yours, the slow rise and fall of your shoulders freezing.
“Since I really would rather be home, but… I’d rather be there with ah—with you.”
Silence.
Then—
Slow and unhurried, your smile widened.
Higuruma’s stomach soared.
He was so fucking done for.
He’d gotten in the cab in a daze, hardly daring to look away from you, much less relinquish his grip on your hand. His fingers tangled with yours, tendons pulled taut, knuckles blanched white where they bridged the gulf of the backseat. He held your closed fist against his thigh, where the restless twitch of his leg betrayed the nerves sparking through his veins like wildfire.
You weren’t faring much better. The passing streetlamps carved fleeting, fevered impressions of you into his retinas; the curve of your lips, the flush licking up your throat, the jittery flicker of your gaze as it skittered away, then back, then away again. Every time it returned, it came with that small, demure smile that he had no interest in trying to reciprocate.
The ascent to his apartment was a blur of clumsy haste. Two stairs at a time, his hand pressing soft but impatient against the small of your back to herd you left, then right, then around the corner.
His keys rattled in his trembling fingers, slipped once, hit the floor. You giggled—high and pink-hued, like champagne bubbles bursting at the rim of a glass. Had you been drinking? He didn’t think so; he couldn’t smell it on you, but maybe he’d taste it—
The door swung open, barely, before he spun you against it, kicking it shut on the same breath he sealed his mouth over yours.
No, you hadn’t been drinking.
Higuruma’s hand shot out, bracing the back of your skull before it could meet the wood, his palm a buffer between you and impact. The moment slowed just enough for him to feel the way your breath hitched, the sharp little intake before his fingers curled into your hair, before he tilted his head and deepened the kiss. Half-dazed, like he still couldn’t believe this was really happening.
You, in his home. You, kissing him back like you meant it, fingers slipping beneath his collar, fumbling with the buttons in desperate, uncoordinated tugs.
His other hand traced the line of your spine, fingers pressing into each divot of vertebrae, urging you closer. But then it drifted, restless—up between your shoulder blades where your muscles pinched together; down, over the slope of your waist; everywhere and nowhere, greedy, utterly lost in what to do with you.
And you laughed.
“You’re shaking,” whispered through victoriously bared teeth, a giddy grin against his lips that Higuruma couldn’t help but reciprocate, delivering a playful nip to the plush lower lip against his incisors—a compromise to the firmer tug he itched to give.
He exhaled a breath of laughter, pulled back just enough to lift a trembling hand horizontally between your faces, fingers twitching from wrist to fingertip, eyes wide and feverish. “Maybe ah—just a little.”
Then, sheepish but unrelenting, that same hand cupped your jaw, tilting you up to meet him again. Because for all his nerves, he wasn’t done tasting you yet.
His lips slanted over yours, his tongue a bold sweep against your lower lip, and you met him with the same urgency, because hadn’t you always? Maybe never like this, but you’d learned the language of Higuruma in a different dialect—navigating the sway of barstools and the clumsy tangle of drunk limbs, stepping in sync down rain-slicked sidewalks, his hand polite at the small of your back to steer you clear of potholes and broken concrete. You had moved together for weeks, months—two celestial bodies caught in an orbit of their own making, drawn inexorably closer by gravity or lust or lov—curiosity.
Yes, it must be that.
Perhaps it was no surprise that this came as second nature. That when his hands slid down, skimming your waist before tightening possessive at your hips—when he hauled you against him and groaned into your mouth like he’d been starving for you—your body simply followed. That when his palms smoothed lower still, fingers digging into the plush curve of your ass, you felt the precise moment he decided.
And when he lifted you—when you gasped and synchronized your upward hop and locked your legs around his waist, ankles hooking at the small of his back—you decided too a long time ago. He’d just finally caught up.
He lurched down the hall with you, the path illuminated by muscle memory and the dull, ambient glow from the city bleeding through the blinds. You wondered, absently, how many nights he’d made this same trek under far different circumstances—staggering home from long hours, from longer cases, from cigarettes burned down to the filter on cold walks back from nowhere. But now his footing faltered for a different reason entirely, the weight of you shifting against him, pressing in, urging him deeper into the dark.
You peeled away from his mouth, chasing the warmth of him elsewhere—tracing the corner of his lips with the tip of your tongue, then lower to the dimple that had teased you for weeks, there and gone in a flicker of wry amusement, now yours to claim. The scrape of his jaw followed and you sought to carve yourself into it, dragging your mouth over the bristled edge until your tongue laved at the hinge and you felt a shudder rack through him like a fault line cracking.
He groaned, stumbling sideways, bracing himself against the wall with a heavy thud. His grip on you tightened, hands sliding impatiently down, then settling with a punishing squeeze of your ass, fingers roughly dimpling the flesh.
“I’m going to trip and kill us both,” he warned, voice ragged but trembling with something perilously close to laughter.
“Bedroom, Hiromi.” Your arm looped tighter around his shoulders, fingers slipping into his hair, nails raking just enough to make him jerk. You sealed your mouth to his throat, chasing the frantic pulse of the vein there, and when you finally latched your lips around it, sucked—
The noise that broke from him was wounded, a guttural gasp, part grunt, part whimper, his entire body seizing under the force of it. He nearly lost his hold on you, staggered against the wall again, his breath punching out in a sharp wheeze.
“Fuck—okay, okay we’re walking,” he managed, stumbling forward in a blind, desperate beeline toward the bedroom before he lost what little sense remained.
He used your back to push open the door, shuffling forward until his knees met the edge of his mattress where he dropped you. Not intentionally, of course, but he never claimed to be the strongest man, and a controlled descent was marginally less embarrassing than tripping headlong onto the bed with you.
You bounced once with a surprised squeak at the sudden lawyer-assisted gravity check, then laughed over the muttered ‘sorry’ that rumbled from the dark.
But it hardly mattered, because the second Higuruma’s hands were free, they were on you again, chasing the warmth he’d lost for half a second too long.
There was no ceremony, no pretense of grace—his urgency eclipsed everything else. His fingers found the hem of your shirt, bunched and yanked it over your head in a single graceless motion, the fabric vanishing somewhere behind him in the void of the room. He was already moving, already chasing you up the bed with the slow, insistent press of his hips, urging you backward until the headboard stopped you.
And then you were both grappling, tugging, and undoing.
His fingers hooked into your pants and yours dove for his tie, worked into the loosened knot and yanked it free, letting it slither away like a discarded leash. Next came the buttons of his shirt—one by one, popping free beneath your nails. Your hands followed the movement downward, skating over the crease of his collarbone, the ridges of his ribs, the flat, firm plane of his stomach as you shucked the open garment from his body.
He wasn’t built for show, wasn’t sculpted into the broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped frame of an effortless heartbreaker. He was lean, fit in a way that felt practical, arms strong from lifting boxes of manilla folders instead of weights, a dark smattering of hair dusting his chest, trailing down the center of his stomach to disappear beneath his belt. He wasn’t imposing or even particularly polished—and god, you wanted him.
It wasn’t some vague, floaty kind of attraction, either.
It was gnawing, aching, restless. A twist of want low in your belly, a feral little part of you that said this was yours, something that made your nails dig in a little harder when you threw his shirt aside and dragged him back down to you.
Your stomach twitched where his pressed against it, instinct warring with want, the heat of him searing into you like a brand, nerves fraying beneath the surface of your blood-rushed skin. Your body betrayed you in shivers, in the thin, winding breaths that stuttered from your lips as adrenaline tangled with something heavier. A slow-burning ache, a pulling tide. And you—marooned beneath him, the lighthouse and the lost ship all at once, beacon and wreckage, your fingers curling into his shoulders as though they might anchor you.
Higuruma hovered, his gaze trailing the contours of you with the same reverence his hands would soon follow. The hollow of your throat, the glint of saliva catching in the dim light as you swallowed, your chest rising and falling, your lacy bra doing nothing to conceal the softness of your breasts, the way your pert nipples peaked at the chill or the anticipation or both. The dip of your waist, the plush give of your stomach, the swell of your hips, thick and welcoming and overflowing the elastic of your panties, thighs pressed together in a way that made his mouth water. He could live there, bury himself there for hours, die there if he could—
Fuck, you were somehow more beautiful than he’d ever imagined.
His fingers curled at your sides, thumbs tracing the curve where waist met hip, salvation and starvation winding so tightly in his chest he could hardly tell the difference between them.
He followed the slope of your ribs with his mouth, fingers following suit, tracing their gaps and sinews, not skimming or skirting or rushing past the touching, he wanted to map you, to relearn the topography of desire with your body. His palms spread wide over the breadth of your thighs, squeezing into the softness like he could stamp his gratitude there.
“Look at you,” he murmured. “You’re fucking perfect.”
Higuruma pushed up, nuzzling into the valley between your breasts to press a kiss to your sternum, then traced his way downward, dragging his lips in slow, reverent succession. A trail of petals laid in heat against your skin, his tongue dipping briefly into the shallow pool of your navel. His hands slid beneath your thighs, curling over their plush expanse with an eager grip, pulling you closer.
"Want to know something embarrassing?"
You watched him in the low light, his dark head inching lower, his breath panting soft shivers along your skin. The sight alone had your pulse clawing at the walls of your chest, a frantic, hummingbird beat rattling and railing against its cage. You propped yourself up on your elbows, breath coming short. "What?"
"I've thought about this a lot," Higuruma confessed, lips grazing your knee. He kissed the other, fingers tightening where they kneaded into your thighs, gently coaxing them apart.
"The first night we met, of course," another kiss, deeper now, just inside the tender skin of your knee. "A few times between then and the second..." His fingers skimmed higher, dragging up the curve of your legs like he would memorize them blind.
Higuruma thrilled at how easily they fell open for him, how sweetly you bared yourself.
"Every time after that too, actually," he said, littering open-mouthed kisses along the inside of one thigh, then the other. His voice was rough and thick, something that weighed heavy on the tongue that dared lower and lower and lower. "Never stopped thinking about you. And this. Doing this—" His lips hovered just shy of the damp patch in the sheer lace—absolutely useless as a garment now. “You made me come every time.”
His fingers dipped beneath the edge of your underwear, easing them down, the unveiling of this most holy of places far slower than the clawing and tearing of before. His eyes caught and hung on yours, bright and gleaming in the dark that painted your body in muted gradients and shades of monochrome—you were still the most vivid thing in the room—quite possibly his entire life, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say.
Wet and glistening in the low light, your thighs draped over his elbows, your pussy splayed open before him like something sacramental meant to be revered. Higuruma felt his mouth go dry, contradictory to the saliva pooling beneath his tongue. His eyelids drooped and melted with the anticipatory blush that kindled across his face. The scent of you filled his lungs, heady and intoxicating, both sedative and stimulant, turning his blood to magma.
He swallowed thickly around the lump in his throat. His fingers twitched with renewed tremors as they dragged lower, pressing into the softness of your inner thighs, thumbs spreading you wider, baring you completely to his hungry gaze.
And oh, he sighed, wistful and wanting to see how your hips rolled and stomach concaved with held breath. This need of his had festered, unchecked and untreated ever since he opened that cab door for you and let you go.
You were too good for him then. But it was different now, wasn't it?
It wasn’t just about sex now—it was about you, in a way it wouldn’t have been back then.
And he could prove himself worthy.
He could be cleaner, better, someone who could be held and kept, like the first creature to crawl out of the woods and deemed fit for domestication. You had let him into your orbit, let him sit close in your incendiary glow and be warmed by you, the pitiful creature that he was that night. And he could worship you, pious and thankful at your altar until he changed shape entirely, molded by your boundless patience and fashioned into something of use to you.
He could earn you.
You barely had time to process the suggestive rasp of the day's stubble scraping your skin before his mouth dipped lower, his tongue drawing a thin, exploratory stripe through your slit.
Your lips parted in a wet gasp, then muzzled by your teeth closing around your lower lip. He paused, the briefest moment where you thought he hesitated or changed his mind, only for his fingers to tighten their iron grip and drag you harder onto his mouth.
Months.
He’d spent months sitting next to you, drinking yourselves silly every Friday like clockwork, when this was between your legs all along? When he could’ve been drunk on you?
His eyes fluttered, conflicted by the need to keep them open and watch your face as your elbows wobbled and collapsed and your back flattened to his bed, or to let his eyes close and truly savor the taste of you on his tongue.
Slow blinks would suffice. Darkness, bliss and ambrosia only heightening the flavorful flavorlessness of you, then open, you bisected in orange from a streetlight slat sliced straight across your belly. You were always orange.
The needle point of his tongue flattened, a broad unhurried stroke from bottom to top, grinding over your clit in casual cruelty just to watch how you arched for him, the bend and bow of your spine and ripple of your thighs under his hands. His eyes slid open to watch it happen. Satisfied, they closed again when he lapped at you once more, savaging his face from side to side, lathering his tongue between your folds with a brutalized groan.
The sound that tore from your throat was breathless, the fractured gasp crackling between you, and when your mouth curled into something closer to a laugh—disbelief—he nearly preened. You, dazed and stunned that this was happening finally, and further, that he was any good at it.
He buried himself into you until the only thing that stopped him was the bent cartilage of his nose—no less a tool than his tongue as his mouth opened wider, the obscene splash of your arousal made to flow straight down his throat with the persuasive fucking of his tongue, his nose grinding firmly into your clit in a way that made your toes curl.
Your fingers clenched the sheets in desperate handfuls, nails digging into fabric like an anchor, but Higuruma wasn’t having that. He pulled back for a breath, imparting a flat and quick lick to your spit-slick cunt just long enough to rasp: “No. No—” his hands shot up, prying your grip from the bedding with firm insistence. “Not th’fuckin’ sheets—”
Your hands barely had the time to register the loss of their grip before he smacked them roughly upon the back of his head. “You pull on my hair,” he grumbled, muffled and slurred before his mouth was back on you, lips sealing around the hard pearl of your clit with a sudden, hard suck.
You howled, fingers digging deep into his roots. You were sure you’d find black strands under your nails come morning. But you did as you were told, yanking him down as your hips involuntarily bucked upward, grinding into his mouth. “Hiromi!”
His name had never sounded so sweet as it did painted by your breathless moan. He wished he could bottle it, save it for later…
Higuruma jerked off to the memory of that first cry of his name for years.
“Fuck-yes, jus’like that… keep goin’ jus’like that—” he encouraged.
His cock strained against the zipper of his slacks, aching and neglected for far longer than just tonight. The barrier of his briefs did nothing to protect from the bitter bite of the metal, and he hissed trying not to focus on the discomfort in his groin and instead on every little noise you made, what caused your thighs to spread wider and what made them clamp around his ears.
But he couldn’t focus. Couldn’t think. He just couldn’t enjoy you the way you deserved to be enjoyed when he was so hard it fucking hurt.
Clinking metal and rasping leather played a poignant soundtrack to the obscene sucking of his mouth as he yanked, tugging his belt free of the loops, fingers shaking as he wrenched his zipper down with a damning zzrrt!
Finally relief—he gasped for air, his hips jerking forward instinctively clamoring to bury himself inside you as the unbearable pressure gave way to something almost manageable.
You watched enraptured, breath caught high in your mouth, full and gasping on air that never made it down to your lungs. Your already frantic pulse skipped at least three beats when his hand disappeared into his slacks, a soft, helpless whimper dripping from your lips. Higuruma felt how you tensed and quivered over his shoulders and fuck, knowing you were watching nearly ended him embarrassingly quick against his belly.
He adjusted himself, cock pointed up toward his navel and pinned flush beneath the band of his briefs but his hand had a mind of its own. His fingers wrapped around himself, tight and lubricated with your arousal, and he stroked just once—twice, three times—quick and desperate, his thumb sweeping over the swollen head with a breathy moan muffled only by his tongue buried deep in your cunt.
But he stopped there. His focus back where it belonged when you squirmed, your shoulder blades pinching together to arch your back off the bed, gasping your wordless warning to the ceiling. Higuruma's hand left himself immediately, looping back over your thigh to keep you still, desperation renewed to do good enough for you.
God, if he could make you come on his mouth he’d die a happy man, never ask for anything ever again, he’d have accomplished all he needed to anyway—
You yanked at the roots of his hair, grinding against his face, butting against his nose in a grand departure from the composure you’d clung to as your vision popped and undulated. “—don’t stop, please don’t stop—pleasepleasepleaseplease…” you chanted your desperate litany of pleas, and Higuruma knew there was not a force on earth that could part him from you.
He focused his attention on your clit, suctioning and grinding up-down-up-down with his tongue—at the same moment he bunched his index and middle finger, bundled tight and dragging them through the mess of his spit and bluntly drove them into you. He set a brutal pace, the obscene wet schlick of his fingers almost drowning out the needy moan of his own making as he rutted against the mattress.
“—you got it… right there, I’gotchu—”
His aim may not have been perfect, but it was enough. A final cry, a curl of his fingers, and your thighs snapped tight around his head so fast it was a miracle he still had one.
But what left him reeling wasn’t survival, it was the way you arched, fingers tangled in his hair, holding him there to take what you needed as he dragged you fractious and feral and drunk through your orgasm.
He worked you through it, thorough and slow and methodical in how he indulged himself. His fingers stilled but did not retract, and his tongue softened in savoring strokes, slow and calming but his chest squeezed. Rain clouds sprung heavy and wet his eyes, a suspicious teary shine making his throat stick.
One hand squeezed and massaged your thigh, while the other slipped from you and smoothed up your stomach with a grounding pressure over your ribs, holding you together while your chest heaved, and not even the dark could disguise the rosy glow in your throat. He’d done that. Done that to you, for you, and he was grateful that you’d even let him try.
“Stay with me, sweetheart.”
He rasped the words into you, heavy and congested. His lips followed, pressing a parting kiss to your clit before he reluctantly sat back on his heels, unaware of the tenderness that had slipped loose with his breath. He wasn’t sure if he meant conscious or forever.
You were weightless, floaty and elysian, lingering in that hazy blur at the fringes of reality where your body was warm and your brain was blessedly quiet. You managed a nod and a dazed smile. Eventually you evened, and when you finally opened your eyes, Higuruma was already watching.
He’d moved above you now, braced on a forearm beside your pillow—your pillow he thought, smitten, if you’d only take it—his face flushed and damp, doused in your slick from chin to cheek, lips swollen from the ruin he’d built of you. He looked wrecked and utterly flustered, with his messy hair and watery eyes.
“Still with me?” He asked, cupping your cheek to brush his thumb beneath your eye to snick away a teary streak racing to your hairline. Devastatingly tender, he cataloged each blink of your lashes up at him, felt the stir of your breath to sync his own.
Your breath crackled into an unsteady chuckle. “Barely.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, warring between a grin and besotted relief. He dipped down and pressed a sloppy kiss to your temple. Then another to the opposite side.
“Good,” he murmured. “I’m glad.”
His kisses bloomed across your skin, drowsy and unhurried, and you giggled, hoarse and breathless, turning your face away in a futile escape from his affectionate assault. But he followed.
Only when your face was nearly as damp as his he finally relented, forehead dropping heavily against your cheek, and you finally turned back, tucking your nose into his hair, burrowing close with a playful back-and-forth nuzzle-nudge.
“Thank you.”
Higuruma hummed, sedated and sated by the scent of your skin and the taste of you on his tongue. “For?”
“...That.”
He scoffed, drawing back just enough to narrow his eyes at you, shaking his head, firm and resolute. “Don’t thank me.” He kissed you before you could protest, stealing the words from your tongue. “Not for that. Never for that.”
You laughed against his lips, soft and sticky and uncoordinated, your mouth pressing into his like you weren’t quite sure how to shape words anymore. “Okay…but still—”
“No.”
“—still—”
“No.”
Another kiss, deeper this time to shush you, lips parting just enough for his tongue to slip past yours—teasing, curling, coaxing, like he could tempt the breath right out of your lungs. He shared the taste of you, because to him, there was no greater gift he could give.
You were warm beneath his bare chest, soft where he was hard in every sense. Your arms looped around his neck, fingers light on his nape, and you sighed against his mouth; gratitude imparted not in words but in the slow, melting press of your lips, where you could sneak it in unchallenged.
Your leg shifted, your toes scrunched against the back of his calf, and he followed, settling more heavily over you, because any inch of his skin not touching yours was space wasted. And as always, you moved with him, tandem-tied to synchronicity, habit and routine, a rhythm already written into your bodies long before tonight.
His hips met yours in an unconscious grind, and his breath snagged.
“…Do you…”
His lips barely parted from yours before his train of thought shattered, derailed entirely by the roll of your hips—a shift so slight, so innocent it may have been accidental—Higuruma’s brow pinched, the muscles in his forearms twitching where they braced above you.
“Do you still want this?”
A stupid question, and you made that clear in the bemused flare of your nostrils and deadpan lift of your brow. As if you would’ve stopped wanting him after that, like you’d scurry back into your clothes and leave right then and there.
“You?” You scoffed, breath warm against his mouth where he hovered, spellbound and hung on every word. “Yeah. I want you. ‘Course I want you.”
Higuruma’s sanity wobbled on its last legs, and he just barely managed to lock his elbows before he’d crumble into you. ‘Are you sure?’ and ‘You really don’t have to, there’s no pressure, I don’t mind, we can stop if you’d prefer’, all excuses and absolutions that immediately burst to his tongue. But they didn’t get far.
Your mouth returned to his, and now it was your tongue that coaxed his to silence before self doubt could sabotage.
It was a tough pill to swallow, even with your holistic husbandry. Doubt and deprecation had long been his bedfellows, an endemic entity in the ecosystem of his psyche. But your hands were gentle, not lancing old wounds but soothing them as you smoothed down his back, tight and knotted muscles shuddering beneath your fingertips, and he groaned when you dug in a little harder, working out a kink you’d found either by chance or some preternatural sense for his discomfort.
His breath rattled through his teeth as he broke the kiss with a final, fleeting peck, lips clinging for a second longer, reluctant to part from you. But he moved, because hesitation would be cowardice, and he refused to be a coward with you anymore.
He was forceful in how he lifted his hips and shoved his slacks and briefs lower, not letting himself think about it, kicking them free like he couldn’t stand the sensation on his over-sensitive skin a second longer. His cock flushed dark against his stomach, swollen so stiff it didn’t even move once deprived of support.
Your gaze slithered down his body, serpentine and glinting.
A gossamer veil descended over your pupils, hunger threading its fingers through your irises, curling into something that sent off a quiet danger! alarm in the rational part of his brain…but his other head transmuted the warning into pure oxygen, fueling the inferno of his lust.
It had been so long since anyone looked at him like that—had anyone ever looked at him like that? No. He didn’t think so. Not like he was a soft thing for you to sink your teeth into, to bite and never let go and devour him down to the pulp in his bones.
He almost laughed—his shaky breath fleeing to safety in a shuddering woosh—you were special. You would ruin him if he let you… and he would let you. You already had.
“One second,” he promised.
The drawer of his nightstand rattled as he wrenched it open, fingers skimming frantic and fluttering over his old watch, a few loose and crumpled receipts, the stiff spine of a forgotten book, and—
There.
A box—the box—of condoms. Unopened.
Bought months ago and placed atop the stand like a staggish monument, hubristic in his certainty that they would be used that night. Purchased with an itch in his blood and a desperation that whittled him down to that once craven creature seeking some anemic facsimile of intimacy.
But after that night, after you, the itch changed shape. No longer an abstract craving but a single-pointed ache, refined and sharpened to something specific. You, laughing over your drink. You, meeting his eyes like you saw through him. You, a storm and a hearthfire all at once, wreaking havoc on the solitude he’d chosen for himself and offering the brand of intimacy he’d all but decided he couldn’t afford.
It had been a long time. Too long. The realization struck like ice water poured over his head—fuck, what if he was shit at this? What if after months of wanting and self-denial and stringing you along you left his bed feeling disappointed and underwhelmed?
His fingers fumbled against the cardboard, nails catching at the plastic seal, but his nail slipped. Stupid. So fucking stupid, his hands were unsteady, breath shallow, the seal crinkling under his touch as he pried and clawed and come on, come on—
“You okay?”
His head snapped toward you, already defensive, scowling with hackles raised and bracing for some kind of judgment, he was floundering before he even got started.
But you were there, stretched languid and supine against his sheets, hips tilted just so, one arm above your head, lazy and patient and waiting for him. A slow smile curved your lips, softness dampening your gaze. The same look you’d given him across a bar table, the same look you gave him when you listened to his shitty days with a patience saints would envy.
That look could undo a man.
He dragged a hand down his face, exhaling. “I’m fine.” He made an effort to temper himself when he looked at you again, to erode his edges down to a smoother albeit sheepish smile.
“Packaging’s a scam.”
No, he’s just panicking.
You laughed. The movement was effortless, sinuous as you rolled onto your knees, thighs parting, muscles flexing with the shift of weight, graceful and poised; the tremors that still twitched beneath your skin only made him salivate more. The low light caught on the sheen of sweat caressing your curves like a lover's hand, tracing the soft bend of your stomach, gilded your skin like something ethereal, diaphanous and not made for mortal hands.
“Cmere,” you crooked your finger.
The box crumpled in his grip like tissue paper, his knuckles bone white as the flimsy package yielded to the force of his fist. Relief could’ve made him cry as he clawed through the remains, tearing at foil, fumbling for a packet with shaking fingers while the rest spilled onto the floor.
He rolled the latex over his cock with a wince, his head falling back with a pained grunt at the aching pleasure wrought by his own hand, his thighs flexed with the effort of not fucking into his palm like he immediately wanted to do.
He turned and gathered you, all at once, clumsy and desperate like if he didn’t touch you right then he might lose his nerve entirely.
His hands slid under your thighs, hauling you closer, up and over his hips which fell neatly between your own. He crowded into your space, no hesitation left to him now, no pauses to collect himself, his need laid bare and shaking spurring him forward.
Higuruma’s mouth crashed into yours, and you met him with equal fervor. With forearms bracketing your shoulders, weight warm and solid above you, he pressed into you and felt his breath shatter against your lips.
Stars streaked across his eyes, and there was a moment where Higuruma thought he might’ve died.
His head dropped to your shoulder, teeth catching on your shoulder with the need to bite down on something to keep from crumbling entirely.
He filled you with urgency, and didn’t stop until his pelvis ground against yours. With each thrust he told himself he could have this, and that you were special. He wanted to laugh at the sweet, reassuring nothings and praises you buried into his hair. And when your hand found his, clenched in the pillow beside your head, he held it tight—slammed it back down onto the pillow and hoped it would leave an indent forever.
And when you moaned his name again, he hissed yours like a reprimand.
It didn’t take long. It was never going to.
The tension snapped all at once, a low, helpless gasp wrenched from his throat as he folded over you, stiff and quivering, dampening your neck with humid, uneven breaths.
You held him. With your arm, your legs, your body, you held him and didn’t let go. Didn’t complain when the strength to hold himself together waned and he collapsed upon you fully, didn’t insist he move or clean up or let you go.
Higuruma let himself hold you, just as you held him. And somehow—impossibly—the intimacy of that surrender eclipsed that of any sex or orgasm that came before.
Moments passed. Minutes, hours, it could’ve been years, where his body went cool and sticky against yours; he didn’t move for fear of tearing it, undoing what fragile equilibrium he’d finally found. So he stayed heavy and unguarded, breath slowing in uneven stages while aftershocks ran through him in faint, involuntary tremors.
Your fingers traced idle patterns along his spine. Little circles, hearts, he thought he might’ve felt your name tattooed between his shoulders. This is the part where he would’ve expected you to leave.
Where you would slither out from under him, gather your clothes, and bid him goodnight while he went to sleep. Or where he would’ve run first, because he hated the sort of small talk that came as a side effect of these exchanges.
But Higuruma found he wasn’t bracing for that impact, wasn’t preparing to cut and bolt, and had to close his eyes against the soft brilliance of you when you eventually cracked a smile up at him.
“Hey,” you murmured.
He groaned in response, the sound low and contented. It occurred to you, distantly, that this may be the quietest you’d ever heard him—and for a man whose mouth was usually a reflection of his brain, you relished what that silence may mean.
“Where are your records at?”
One of his eyes cracked open. Then the other. “Hm?”
“Your vinyl,” you clarified, still dazed and smiling. “Said you keep them in a closet.”
Higuruma exhaled through his nose, roughened between a scoff and an exhausted groan. His weight shifted, pressing you more firmly into the mattress as his hand slid up to cup your jaw, brushing the corner of your mouth with his thumb like he’d already forgotten what you were talking about.
“I don’t know,” he muttered and leaned down to kiss you.
It was lazy, unhurried and meant to derail you—he felt too good to ruin it with thinking, and it almost worked. You kissed him back, because of course you did, fingers curling into his hair, indulging in the warmth and solidity of him. But when he pulls away, just to burrow into your throat, satisfied like he’d successfully avoided a conversation, you laughed and scratched his neck.
“I’m serious,” you said. “Which closet?”
Higuruma frowned, brow scrunched as if you’d posed a genuinely difficult question. His gaze drifted to the ceiling, then toward the hall beyond the bedroom door, tracking the layout of his apartment in reverse of the mental map he’d never bothered to consult this closely.
“...Down the hall,” he said finally. “On the left…we passed it.”
“Mmm.” You nodded, then fell silent, and for once he felt no rush to fill it with whatever lackluster words he might come up with.
So silent, that Higuruma thought you might’ve fallen asleep…and though he did not feel obligated to fill your silences, he found himself unnerved, wanting you to speak and be as present with him as you had been before.
He pulled back to ask about this sudden line of inquiry, only to find you peering up at him.
“You should unpack them.”
And he sighed. The suggestion landed gently, without weight or expectation, but he stiffened just enough to feel it where your hand rested. His mouth opened, already forming some deflective response about ‘not having the time or space’ or ‘not knowing where to start’.
But you were special, Higuruma was quickly coming to accept. You know him well enough not to give him the chance.
“In the morning,” you added. “After breakfast.”
The future tense settled upon him like a blanket, and he found it strange. Not the concept, but the lack of hesitation with which he regarded it. And the knee-jerk reaction was not to refuse, but to kiss you again. And again a second time, where he finally said against your lips: “You don’t even know what’s in those boxes.”
“Vinyls, I assume.”
Higuruma hummed and tweaked your ear. “There could be bodies.”
“Sounds way more exciting,” you grinned.
And in between the lull of falling asleep, listening to distant cars outside his window, groggily arguing the merits of old records versus streaming, and warning you of the distinct possibility that he would in fact burn breakfast, he felt more at peace than he had in years.
He did not try to analyze that peace, and he did not interrogate it or demand justification for its existence. He simply let it exist, and allowed himself to exist within it.
Tomorrow did not seem so daunting a prospect, when the worst of it would be egregiously overcooking an omelette and being rewarded with your laughter.