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Utahime cast her gaze one more time down the street, trying not to make her muted distress obvious. Raindrops dribbled down from the café awning, and Utahime tried to roll some of the tension out of her shoulders. She was neither in the slushy mist of the street nor in the yellow warmth of the café. She stood, alone under the awning, laughing at herself for not wearing a raincoat because it would spoil the effect of her outfit.
She had really made an effort too. She’d made an effort with her soft dress and her mother’s earrings, her makeup and a curling iron. She’d even made a very concerted effort to like the man.
He wasn’t necessarily unlikeable. In fact, he dressed well, spoke charmingly, and had treated the waiter politely at their last café date. His mother knew her mother in some tangential way. He was also really good looking, in a very clean-cut way. He was a foreign Sorcerer and well-travelled. Not only that, he was witty and respectable. Truthfully, there were a million things that he was, which Utahime could quantify, and one glaring thing that he wasn’t. But that was something that she had tried to overlook in nearly everyone she dated.
But now that man, the café man, had not materialised at their latest date. As she looked at the wet street in both directions, Utahime was almost relieved that she now had grounds to cease her efforts to like him.
She really wished she had bought a raincoat though.
Her small handbag would offer very little protection from the rain, but she positioned it over her head, half-heartedly shielding the glossy waves that had taken her hours to perfect, and stepped out from under the awning. Her high heels splashed through the shallow puddles as she hurried, hoping she could get to a station before her dress was soaked through.
She hadn’t taken three little frantic steps when she heard it.
“Utahime?!”
Her heart sank.
She paused for a microsecond, and then made a pretence of not hearing the singsong voice floating down the wet street to her. She knew it was pointless, in her heart of hearts, and sure enough, even as she hurried forward along the empty avenue, atoms in the shape of Gojo Satoru reconfigured in front of her. She bounced off his chest, stumbling backwards on wobbly feet. She felt one heel of her shoe crunch, something structural giving up.
“Oh damn, sorry,” he grinned, not at all contrite, as his hand shot out to grasp her wrist and keep her from falling onto her ass.
As he touched her, the rain shimmered off her skin, and she found herself under the eerie shelter of his Infinity. She looked down at her forearm and at the water sliding off it. It was an uncanny feeling, being in the rain and not getting wet.
“Don’t do that, Gojo!” she scolded, “Anyone could see you just disappearing or reappearing out of thin air.”
It was always easier to scold him when he made her flustered. It was substantially less risky.
He cocked his head down at her, smiling in deep amusement. These days, with the blindfold on, Gojo’s expression was only his mouth. He had always been expressive but she thought that he smiled more than ever now. He was always grinning, teasing, smirking. Utahime wondered sometimes if Gojo used his mischievous smile as his poker face.
“You’d be surprised how often I do it and no one notices,” he mused. “People don’t pay attention.”
“Look what you did,” she accused, lifting her foot to show him the way the point of her high heel had crumpled.
Utahime impatiently wrenched her hand away from his grip and immediately, the rain hit her skin, and she wobbled on one foot in the freezing downpour. It was colder now, the rain hitting the pavement harder.
She narrowed her eyes at Gojo, reaching out to clasp his forearm again as he chuckled at her swift capitulation. The sleeve of his Infinity slipped over her once more, the water sparking off the two of them.
“You’re a dick,” she said, knowing that this wasn’t how it worked.
Gojo just wanted to make her uncomfortable because he knew she didn’t care to touch or be touched by him. He knew she shied away from his grating attention and his over-familiarity. For years, she had slapped his hand away from her pigtails and screamed blue murder when he grabbed her to tumble her into the waves at the beach. He’d ramped up his efforts to get in her space from the moment that he had noticed how much it flustered her.
He didn’t need to know that it wasn’t just him she was trying to push away. It was also the troublesome, devastating humiliation of her feelings.
It was demoralising to realise that you were so predictably susceptible. God, to be so flustered when he teased her, to feel her heart race when he looked down at her with his grating amusement, to feel her blood sparking now as her hand touched the warm dry sleeve of the uniform he always wore — it was all so catastrophically unoriginal.
“You going somewhere, senpai?” Gojo asked casually, as she tried uselessly to grind her heel against the wet pavement, as if that might click the broken shoe into place like a mended bone.
“Uh, yes…well, no,” she mumbled, her cheeks flaming even as she started to shiver in cold. “I was supposed to….I had a…date. But I’m going home now.”
“Now who’s disappearing into thin air?” he chuckled, running his hand through his white hair.
“Hey, I showed up…” she began defensively, but realised she was implicating herself in the profound humiliation of being stood up and changed her tone to something more measured. “I’m going home now.”
“Good. Because you look a bit too bedraggled for a date.”
“Thanks to you,” she said through her teeth as they started to chatter, even though it wasn’t exactly his fault.
It wasn’t really his fault that she felt the way she did. She shouldn’t admire him. He was doing nothing to suggest that he wanted her to be attracted to him.
“Lemme make it up to you,” Gojo decided suddenly, a swift movement flicking the hand on his forearm around so he could grasp her wrist again.
He yanked her into the enclave of an apartment building’s entryway, and her heart leapt into her throat as he crowded her against the wall of intercom buttons. She swallowed her excited panic as the street melted into its base parts, the whole world twisting like a Rubik’s Cube, until it found a new shape.
Of course, he was only teleporting her, she scolded herself for her elevated heartbeat. He was doing it out of sight of the street, like she had told him to.
Still, her heartbeat thudded in her arteries, making her ear throb as she felt the world wobble back into place like it was made of gelatin. She took a shaky step away from him, nearly losing her footing as she forgot about her broken shoe.
“Whoa,” he laughed, grasping her under her elbow to stop her, once more, from falling over.
She frowned, glancing about and realising she wasn’t anywhere she recognised.
“This isn’t my apartment,” she mumbled in confusion.
Gojo’s hand slipped away from her elbow and he crossed his arms, cocking his head once more to contemplate her from his superior height.
“That’s presumptuous of you, Uta,” he chided in a way he knew would annoy her. “I don’t know where you live.”
Utahime flashed him a deadly look, before turning to gaze about the open space of the apartment she was in.
“Is this where you live?”
It was luxurious, all marble and hardwood, with the rainy city spread out below them like a furrowed riverbed. The overly-saturated grey-white of the sky spread out from one end of the apartment to the other behind glass. It was panelled in places with black metal crossbars, industrial and modern. Utahime, a country girl, still felt like a fish out of water around flashy modernity.
“Occasionally,” he replied lightly, clearly enjoying the way she was looking around, reading her awe for what it was.
Utahime stepped out of her shoes, feeling self-conscious about her damp footprints on the expensive flooring.
“Huh,” she said faintly, a non-committal noise that she hoped didn’t betray how she felt to be in his personal space.
She shivered, crossing her arms to weather the current as a little dam of despair broke.
“You’re cold. You wanna drink?”
Utahime nodded, doubting that Gojo had anything grown up to drink and fully expecting a supermarket hot chocolate. She imagined what she was doing in an alternate universe where that man had shown up for their date. Would she be in the yellow warmth of the café, sipping a cup of tea, letting him compliment her soft pink dress and her mother’s earrings and two functional shoes?
Instead of being slightly damp and wind-swept, barefoot and accepting a sad drink from the guy she had tried not to be pathetically in love with since she was seventeen. She let her hands fall slowly to her sides, feeling all her defences wash away.
Quietly, gazing out at the rainy city below them, Utahime gave up at last. The starch went out of her and she put her fingertips on the glass. Pointlessly, uselessly, she’d be fighting it for so long.
“Here you go,” Gojo said behind her.
To her surprise, he had two glasses of amber liquid and offered her one.
“But you don’t drink,” she observed, raising an eyebrow.
“I know you don’t like to drink alone,” he shrugged.
This small gentleness made Utahime ache, and she blinked back the little upwelling of feeling, wishing he didn’t have to do the bare minimum to make her feel such a way.
“Cheers,” she said, clearing her throat, dipping her nose into the crystal tumbler to smell what it was.
“Aren't you supposed to look at me when you do that?” Gojo grinned, proffering his glass for the ritual.
Utahime looked at him over the rim of the tumbler, her heart fluttering at his playful tone.
“Cheers, Gojo,” she said quietly, extending the glass to his.
He clinked it gently, smiling wider like he had won, and sank into an expensive-looking leather seat, an office chair pulled back from a glass desk. He put the glass to his lips as he watched her turn back to the view.
“You do that a lot?”
“Get stood up?”
“Go on dates.”
Utahime touched her fingertips to the glass again, steadying herself as she took a deep sip of expensive cognac.
“Occasionally,” she said to the Tokyo skyline.
She tossed back the rest of her glass, suddenly restless at whatever gods had brought about this episode where she was forced to stand in the stylish apartment of the boy she had always loved in a wasted outfit, and talk about a private humiliation.
“Did you like him?” Gojo asked casually.
She could see the light lines of his reflection, swivelling slightly on the chair. She turned around to see him, his head cocked onto his knuckles as he contemplated her against the window.
“Not especially,” she said.
Not like I like you.
She drummed her fingernails against the empty glass. She had had them done especially and cautiously experimented with telling the nail technician shyly about her upcoming third date.
To her surprise, Gojo flung back the rest of his cognac too without even flinching about the taste. She wondered if that was all an affectation too — all the stuff about sweet things and junk food.
“His loss,” he said softly. “What an idiot.”
His words made her freeze. The alcohol was already roaring in her veins as she watched his throat move as he swallowed and put the glass down on the shiny surface of the desk, the chime of glass against glass.
Unthinking, Utahime took a slow step forward towards him and slid her empty tumbler onto the desk too, shifting his further in.
Cheers.
She was falling, she knew it, straight and true and inevitable as a raindrop.
Gojo was smiling, his usual sharp grin, until she reached forward and grasped his blindfold with shaky fingers. As Utahime pulled it over his head, his hair falling down over his forehead like it used to, she saw the smile falter. His eyes fluttered in the light, glistening and bewilderingly pretty. His aspect was immediately different to her, dimension and feeling suddenly entering his expression as she dropped the blindfold onto the persian rug under her bare feet.
“Hime… What are you…” he mumbled, his bright blue eyes fixed on her face.
Utahime slid into his lap, the leather chair rolling back against the glass desk, their empty tumblers clinking musically. She watched as he tried to push down a smile, a genuine one this time.
“And you say other people don’t pay attention,” she whispered.
Gojo swallowed, his gaze drifting down to Utahime’s mouth.
“I do pay attention, Senpai. Do you?” he murmured, his hands settling hesitantly on her hips, warm through the slightly damp fabric of the pink dress.
Utahime looked at his mouth, realising she was about to damn herself completely, realising that Gojo would never let her forget this.
But it didn’t matter if he teased her forever. Because she’d seen the cocksure grin slip when she touched him. He’d never be able to put the poker face back. She slid her palm up his neck, sinking closer, mesmerised by how beautiful he was. She rubbed her thumb along the sharp line of his jaw.
“Took you long enough, Hime,” he said hoarsely, pulling her closer.
She felt his breath on her lips, her heartbeat pattering like bad weather at the hint of a confession. She had always loved his mouth — so expressive. It was shaped into something soft now, something new.
“Took me long enough? What about you?”
“Gimme a break, senpai,” he said softly, his lips almost touching hers. “I’ve been saving this for a rainy day.”