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There is a stranger sitting on your bed.
A lot can change in four months. You’ve changed, in little ways and bigger ones, and Yuuta’s still sitting there. Plaintively looking through the book you’ve got on your nightstand while you wring out wet hair and watch him. A boy -- your boy, Panda would always correct with a look to the others, all laughing at a joke you’re not in on -- who has grown at least 5 centimeters since you last saw him but will still borrow a nightshirt that started as maybe Maki’s but became his and then yours.
You like this, quiet cohabitation as you get ready for bed and he reads your book. There’s a lot to be said but not enough time to say it, so silence works as a middleman. You want to know everything about Yuuta’s 126 days in Africa, and he’s been prodding you with questions about missions and TV shows and lessons he’s missed out on during the day’s whirlwind of introductions and reintroductions and I missed you’s.
His hair is longer. You sneak glances from an awkward angle, a handheld mirror propped up against your wall showing his back if you crane your neck enough. The hair at the back of his neck curls just the slightest, and your attention lingering there makes fingers full of face wash jab into the shell of your ear.
Very softly, Yuuta says your name.
You turn in your chair and he shifts on your bed, turning over a slightly worn photograph acting as your bookmark, his thumb its replacement. Your cheeks warm at his smile, at the picture, at being caught with something embarrassing.
He holds it up like you don’t know what it is. Like you don’t have that night etched into your mind forever, you and him much younger and smaller, curled into one another on the couch in the common room, like you’ll ever forget the satisfaction etched on your classmate’s faces when their considerate gift of a book you’d been wanting came with a bookmark that rendered you too flustered to speak for five minutes.
“Why didn’t you get one printed for me, too?”
You glare at him, but he’s smiling. Yuuta’s careful when he tucks the photo back into its place and clambers over your bed, getting closer to you with that unfamiliar smile that you don’t quite trust. Silently, he grabs a dry washcloth from the tote of toiletries and looks at you. You nod.
His fingertips are calloused, rough on your skin as he places them on your chin. Your head turns obediently, eyes closed so you don’t have to look at him when he’s right there.
“Clumsy,” he chides lightly as he cleans your ear, and were you more familiar with this Yuuta you would’ve kicked at his shin. “What does this do?”
“I don’t know,” you say quietly, head spinning as his closeness makes you feel small. “Gojo-sensei gave it to me for the holidays. I only know the order to put it on.”
Yuuta turns your head to the other side and rubs circles into your cheek. You look at the collar of his -- your -- shirt, eyes lingering on the exposed plane of his clavicle like some debauched Victorian maiden. You must look for too long, because as your eyes linger, a cool, sharp weight comes to rest on your throat.
“Rika,” Yuuta says, chiding and light, the same tone one would use for a puppy or rowdy toddler. “Play nice.”
She drenches you in a deep chill, cursed energy making your skin prickle before it retreats slowly, painfully. Yuuta laughs and you relax, feel his touch on your cheek. Rika’s presence moves slowly into the corner of your bedroom, swell of cursed energy bending and breaking with her distance.
You tried not to think about Yuuta while he was in Africa. He left and you missed him so much that the idea of cursing him came about suddenly, gave your sadness a new dimension of fear. It made you think of Yuuta -- youngest, smallest -- grieving over his best friend, made you think of his love for her being the glue that kept him tethered to a corpse and covered his childhood in a dark shroud.
It was easier to delude yourself when he was across the globe, but now you’ve got him in your bedroom and he’s touching your face so gently and you can’t help but selfishly wish there was a piece of him stuck in you forever.
Fingers tap at the hollow of your cheek, pull you out of your head. “Are you sure it’s alright for me to stay the night? You seem tired.”
Your head does something that’s a mix of a nod and shake as Yuuta eases a leg between yours, turning your chin to better wash off the layer of cream he’s lathered on.
“It was a big day,” you say, eventually, eyes closed because Yuuta’s right there and you’re not sure where to look, “I’m sure it was bigger for you, though… are you sure you don’t want to stay in your own room?”
Yuuta doesn’t miss a beat. “I missed you more than I missed my bed.”
Your face contorts, blinking with closed eyes, and Yuuta laughs. His fingers leave your face, and you hear shuffling on your desk, caps closed, things tucked back into place. When you open your eyes, Yuuta’s crouched in front of you, resting a large and gentle hand on your knee.
“Why are you acting so shy?”
You look at him, finally, his dark eyes, pink cheeks. Eyebrows knitted, just a little. Something has changed in the past four months, in the texts and the calls and the distance, and you’re too afraid to put a name to it.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Yuuta continues, gaze so piercing and earnest that it makes you warm, “If you’d like me to go back to my room just say the word.”
You shoot out to grab the hand resting on your knee as if he’ll get up and turn tail in the moments it’ll take you to conjure a response, and the tether creates an instant and overwhelming sense of comfort.
“I’m worried that if you leave again,” you start, and then feel stupid because of course he’s going to leave again, leave for Africa, not just his room a floor away, “I’ll miss you too much.”
Yuuta always knows what you’re trying to say. He nods, melts your heart. “Then I’ll just have to miss you enough for the both of us.”
HIs words make you feel a little hazy, out of this world. You reach out a hand to touch his hair, cut differently than it was when he left, a little shorter. You like it, you think, like the way Yuuta presses his head into your hand like a kitten.
Slowly, you slide out of your chair. Cold fingers wrap around your forearm, help ease you down to the floor until your knees are against Yuuta’s chest and he’s shifting, sitting down in a way that accommodates your closeness. Your hand slips down to Yuuta’s cheek. Fingers wander over his face. He kisses your thumb.
You’re not sure what to say; if there’s even anything that needs to be said at all. Yuuta speaks to you through the way his hands travel up your arms until they’re knitted at the back of your neck, cradling you towards him. He holds you like you’re something that can be broken, and it’s so refreshing that your eyes sting.
(Those above you like to forget that jujutsu sorcerers are people with expendable lives, people who cry and bleed and love. You’ve seen it go both ways; seen sorcerers who rid their bodies of those mortal functions and live to work, seen sorcerers who are still too raw and die from something sharp to their soft underbelly. You want to be exposed and you want to survive in a world that makes you pick one or the other.)
(Yuuta’s one of the strongest sorcerers you know, yet he holds you like he loves you.)
“C’mere,” he says, like you’re not already half in his lap. One of his hands leaves its gentle hold on your neck to hike your calf up over his hip, pressing you closer, closer, closer.
“You know,” he says, voice the gentlest thing you’ve ever heard, “I had a dream about you last week.”
Your voice is barely audible, something clogged in your throat trying to keep the hope stuck in your esophagus. “A good one?”
Yuuta’s blush intensifies, and your fingers leave his neck to feel it. “Well, I had been watching that drama you were telling me about before I went to sleep. The one with the dentist who goes to love by the seaside. I, um, was a sorcerer in the dream, too, but no one knew except for you.”
“I was the dentist?”
“Yeah,” Yuuta laughs, drawing you impossibly closer. “It’s silly to think about now. But it was a good dream. You were there, and you loved being a dentist.”
“I would hate being a dentist,” you say, and Yuuta laughs again, half anxious and half happy.
“I know, too many teeth. But you would be a great drama lead.” The fluster is back, and you lean your head on his shoulder to hide in his neck. “See, you’re just going and proving my point! So shy and so pretty. Thank goodness you’re not a dentist, some charming country boy would have scooped you up from right under my nose.”
It’s a joke, a reference to the kind of stupid drama you’d gotten him into. But the hitch to his voice belies what he’s actually saying, all of its relief.
“Yuuta, um. I don’t do this with anyone else. I wouldn’t want to.”
He smiles, big, and you have to lift your head to look at him and how gorgeous he is on your bedroom floor. “Me neither.”
You feel a little dizzy, because he really is so handsome, smiling at you like that. It brightens his eyes, always tired, always a little dark, makes him look less like a sorcerer and more like a boy. You want to keep him smiling for the rest of your life.
“Yuuta,” you hide your words into his neck, unsure of what to say and how to say it, “are you ready for bed?”
I think I love you is what you’d been trying to say. I really think I do, but I don’t know how to say it.
“I’d been hoping to kiss you on the floor, though,” he says quietly, and your heart begins its ascent into your throat.
“That’s. Why my floor?” you say, words too fast, not saying the right things. You untuck yourself from him, and he cradles your face gently.
“You’re on the floor right now, and kissing you on your bed would take the time to get you from the floor to your bed. That’s all assuming you’d want to kiss me in the worst place, which if you don’t would make me look like a jerk.”
“You’re not a jerk,” you say quickly, and some of the tension eases out of Yuuta’s face. He reads between the lines.
“I still want to hear you say it, though.”
You stare him down, heart beating a mile a minute and warm all over. He’s wearing your shirt, holding you on your bedroom floor, you’re so certain you love him-- there’s nothing to do but nod.
Yuuta leans in, nose brushing against yours. His eyes are the prettiest shade of blue.
“Say it for me, please? I’d really like to kiss you.”
You think you’re going to explode. Trying to say something, anything, in retaliation just leads to the further clogging of your beating heart in your throat, so in lieu of words, you tilt your head and press your lips to Yuuta’s.
He reciprocates, quick and gentle. The tip of his nose is cold against your cheek, his hands wandering to twist into your hair, hold your chin, meet at the base of your spine. You kiss him. What you want to do is bite his lip, make him bleed, nurse the wound and drink his blood. Let something of his live inside of you. However, your body is under the will of Yuuta’s hands instead of your more obscene thoughts, and is content to be pliant under his touch.
When he stops kissing you you feel lightheaded, endowed with a hazy sort of euphoria that Yuuta nurtures with his gentle hold. He’s smiling at you like he’s in love.
“Let’s go to bed, yeah?”
“I love you.”
Yuuta blinks. You stare him down, too scared to do anything else until his eyes start to well up and you go into panic mode, half trying to scramble off of him and soothe him with your hands hovering over his cheeks.
He doesn’t let you get far, just enough to move both your legs to one side of his lap before his grip around your waist keeps you from getting up.
“Yuuta,” you say, slowly filling with the despair that comes with breaking something new and fragile; trying to get away from him before it all comes spilling out. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have- I don’t want to upset you, please, what can I do-”
“I love you too. I’m happy, so happy to be with you.”
His smile is shaky but his words are so assured, certain enough that you stop dead in your tracks and take the time to believe him. Yuuta loves you.
“I’m sorry,” you say quietly, “I’m- I want to make you happy. I love you, I’m glad you love me too. I’m sorry it took me a long time to tell you. Kiss me again?”
Yuuta doesn’t need to be told twice. He kisses you breathless on your bedroom floor until you’ve grown lethargic, and then after that he kisses you again in your bed. A good night, one you barely feel before you’re dreaming in his arms.
You wake up in the morning to a tacky shutter and bright white flash. Yuuta, who’d woken up before you and took to scolding quietly scolding Inumaki while you stirred, had warm cheeks that you’d kissed three times each after your classmates left the room. The pink tips of Yuuta’s ears are visible in the photo that Maki texts you a couple of hours later.
It gets printed twice, taped to your wall and stuck in the back of Yuuta’s phone case. Much, much later it’s in a frame, the first thing taken out of the myriad of moving boxes and stuck on the wall of a cramped, loved apartment.