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Suguru Geto was two people.
On Fridays, he was the kind of person who ruled over rooftops and crowded living rooms like a benevolent king. His fraternity brothers loved him—he was laid-back, funny without trying, quick to refill someone’s drink or toss an arm around a sulking first-year and drag them back into the noise. He had a talent for making people feel like they belonged. Maybe because, deep down, he never quite felt like he did.
His room at the frat house was sacred territory, tucked away on the top floor where the bass from the speakers was muffled and the scent of spilled beer didn’t quite reach. The walls were lined with posters from concerts he barely remembered, string lights that stayed on even when he wasn’t home, and trophies from sports he used to care about more.
Suguru’s friends knew him as the guy who always had the lighter. The one who showed up first to parties and left last. The one who carried the sound system on his shoulder, ran barefoot through rain-soaked grass on dares, and knew just when to switch the playlist from EDM to indie to keep the backyard buzzing past midnight. To them, he’s a natural host, a golden boy with laughter in his voice and a twinkle in his eye, born to float from conversation to conversation like nothing in the world could hold him down.
His Fridays were always a blast. Always loud, easy, forgettable.
But none of them knew about his Mondays.
Because his Mondays were different. His weekdays were different from his weekends.
On Fridays, he smelled like tequila and citrus. On Mondays, he smelled like old paper and the faintest trace of caffeine from the black coffee he kept hidden in a thermos—something he would only start drinking during reading a poem about scent and memories someone else had once annotated.
Fridays were all noise. Red solo cups stacked like pyramids, neon lights cutting through haze, limbs moving in a crowd that pulsed like one organism. Girls draped across couches. Someone passed him a guitar he didn’t know how to play. Someone else offered him a hit, and he laughed and said, “I’m already high on vibes, bro.” Suguru’s dark hoodies always smelled faintly of bonfire smoke from the weekends. He was the sun they all revolved around.
But on Mondays, he dimmed.
On Mondays, Suguru slips into the campus library as the sun dipped low, casting long amber shadows across the floor. His steps were slower, quieter, like he didn’t want to wake whatever version of himself emerged in the stillness. The building was mostly empty then—just a few students cramming for midterms or dozing in the reading room. None of the frat members ever noticed his absence on weekday afternoons because everyone else is too busy grilling barbecue or preparing for another Friday night playlist.
He’ll walk to the campus library, always with a coffee in hand, the kind of bitter that clung to his tongue long after the first sip. He’d sit by the third-floor window, just far enough from his crush’s usual seat that it didn’t look deliberate, but close enough to see the way the sunlight framed the other boy like a portrait.
Satoru Gojo.
Suguru had known Satoru Gojo from a distance, long before they ever spoke.
Not in the way most people claimed to know him—that was different. Everyone on campus knew Gojo. He was the kind of genius professors muttered about with a mix of awe and exhaustion, the one who derailed lectures with obscure references or solved problems so fast it made everyone else feel like they were still stuck on the prologue.
But Suguru knew of him in a quieter way. They had shared a few classes—Postwar Japanese Literature, a philosophy seminar on absurdism, something weirdly specific about metaphysics and the ethics of time—but they never talked. Gojo always sat near the front, alone, sometimes with his knees pulled up to the seat like he forgot anyone else existed.
He wore oversized glasses that constantly slid down his nose and spoke in a voice that didn’t quite know how to modulate itself. A little too loud when he was excited, a little too fast when he was nervous. He was awkward—not in the way that invited teasing, but in the way that made people hesitate. Because he was smart. Uncomfortably so. You could feel it the way you feel heat radiating off asphalt in summer. Like if you stood too close, you might come undone.
So, naturally, most people kept their distance.
And Suguru did, too.
Even if he didn’t want to.
He watched him sometimes—quietly, subtly, or so he told himself. He watched the way Gojo fiddled with his pen when he was bored, the way he tilted his head when something intrigued him. He never took notes, but always remembered everything. When he answered questions, it was never to show off—he just thought like that. Out loud, a little messy, half-laughing at his own tangents.
Suguru could never decide if he was brilliant or just… lonely.
Because the thing was—Gojo never went to parties. He never joined clubs. He wasn’t part of any friend group, not that Suguru could tell. He existed around the edges, a myth made of brainpower and bad posture, towering height and sleepy eyes behind fogged-up lenses.
They never talked.
Not when they shared a class. Not in the hallway. Not in the coffee shop where Suguru sometimes spotted him staring into space like he was trying to solve the shape of the universe over a lukewarm drink.
But Suguru began tracing his footsteps—quietly, in the only place Gojo seemed to leave pieces of himself behind.
They never talked. But in the books?
That’s where the conversation began.
Suguru Geto wasn’t supposed to be in the library.
Not that there was a rule against it—just an unspoken understanding. The campus library, with its aging hardwood shelves and mothball-scented silence, didn’t exactly suit the frat boy image he wore like a second skin. But here he was. Sitting under the buzzing fluorescent lights, hunched over a novel with a dog-eared spine and a name stamped and written inside the cover that tugged at something in his chest.
Satoru Gojo.
Satoru Gojo didn’t notice him. Not at first.
But Suguru noticed everything.
He noticed how Gojo chewed on his headphone wire when he was deep in thought. How he furrowed his brow slightly when reading something difficult, but his eyes never stopped moving. How he’d scribble notes in the margins in ink that bled slightly through the thin pages.
And Suguru had never known he could want someone this quietly.
It wasn’t like the drunken flings he had after parties—those were loud, fleeting things. Bodies and mouths and motion. But this… this was stillness. The kind of want that built slowly, like the tension in a sentence you hadn’t finished reading yet.
He’d seen the name first on a shared syllabus. Then, weeks later, on the checkout card of a dusty poetry book he randomly grabbed while pretending to browse for a college paper. Then again. And again. And again. His friends didn’t understand his sudden interest in literature. “Dude, you’re reading?” one of them asked, wrinkling his nose like the title alone was an infection.
“Don’t worry about it,” Suguru said, flipping a page and pretending the words didn’t feel like a mirror. “It’s for a class.”
It wasn’t for a class. It was for Gojo.
There was something magnetic about Gojo. He was weird, but not in a bad way. He was weird in the way stars are weird—impossibly distant, too bright, as if the rest of them were just trying to keep up. He carried a canvas tote bag covered in pins. He always wore his headphones, even when his phone battery was probably long dead. His laugh was rare, but when it came, it echoed.
Suguru had never even spoken to him.
Still, he found himself looking for that name. Sometimes, it was stamped. Most of the times, it was scribbled in messy, looping handwriting: Gojo S.
At first, it was curiosity. Why did he read so much? And why were they always the most obscure books—translations, philosophy texts, memoirs of Japanese authors no one else in their generation seemed to care about? And then, he started timing his library visits right after Gojo’s usual hours, just to see which books had been returned. He’d skim the checkout slips, his heart quickening when he saw that familiar messy scrawl. He’d check them out himself, even if he didn’t understand half of what they said.
It wasn’t that Geto had meant to become obsessed. But it started quietly—like a whisper. A flicker of interest. A joke he was telling to his friends outside the cafeteria when he caught a flash of white hair through the crowd. A pause in the conversation as he watched a tall, thin boy in round glasses walk past them, head buried in a novel, lost to the world.
After that, it became a ritual. He’d go to the library after boring university classes, usually when the building was nearly empty, and scan the recently returned pile. Not for anything specific—just to see if Gojo’s name was there again.
It always was.
It started with a book. Then two. Then a dozen. And then it became something else. Not just curiosity. Not just admiration.
He started carrying a notebook, jotting down quotes Gojo underlined. He began looking for patterns in Gojo’s selections. Sometimes it felt like following a secret trail of breadcrumbs left behind just for him—novels about longing, characters trapped in their own heads, poems about distance and missed connections.
It felt like Gojo was always just out of reach.
And Suguru ached for him.
The first time he read Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, it was like something cracked inside him. He stayed up until 3AM, not understanding half of it but unable to stop. Suguru read it sprawled across his bed, music playing softly from his speaker—a vinyl record he found in a thrift store, something melancholic and jazzy. The prose was too close to the bone. Yozo's isolation, his performance of being human, the way he folded himself into personas that never fit—Suguru didn’t identify completely, but he understood the edges.
It made him feel like he’d been reading with his back turned to a mirror.
He thought about Gojo often. What had Gojo underlined? Which lines made him pause and stare? He kept imagining a version of Gojo that might respond to his thoughts. A Gojo who’d say something dry and cutting about Dazai’s melodrama, but then quietly admit that he, too, had cried at the line: “Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes.”
The sentences wrapped around him like smoke. The main protagonist felt like someone who had slipped through life instead of lived it. A ghost in his own skin.
By dawn, Suguru had scribbled in the margins:
“Does it feel this lonely to you too?”
He didn’t know who he was asking. Maybe Osamu Dazai. Maybe Gojo. Maybe himself. He returned the book the next day but checked it out again a week later, just to see if Gojo had touched it again.
He hadn’t.
Or maybe he had and returned it before Suguru could catch it. It was a dance they played without music.
Then came Dostoevsky.
Suguru didn’t think he had the stamina for Russian literature. But he pushed through the dense paragraphs of Crime and Punishment, haunted by Raskolnikov’s fevered guilt and moral spiral. By the time he got to the dream about the horse—violent, harrowing—he had to close the book and breathe.
Was this what Gojo thought about when he stared at the sky?
All of the sudden, he started reading more slowly. Carefully. Like Gojo was sitting across from him, and they were reading together.
Notes from Underground. The Metamorphosis. White Nights. Schoolgirl. Books that made Geto’s chest ache. Pages that made him think, Is this what you feel when you read, Gojo? Is this where your mind goes when you zone out in class and stare out the window like the world isn’t quite enough for you?
Suguru started hunting for Gojo’s trail like a detective in a dream. The Brothers Karamazov, which he didn't understand, but read anyway—twice. The Strangers, which nearly undid him. He kept notes of everything he found—quotes Gojo underlined, pages folded at the corners, scribbles in the margins that read more like confessions than comments.
One line, in a random novel, still echoed in his head:
“I thought I was loved. I thought I was understood.”
He had read it alone, in the dim light of his room while his housemates drank outside, and nearly cried. Something inside him broke out in the open, and it wasn’t just about the book anymore.
Suguru had everything. Friends. Parties. A room that smelled like cologne and cedarwood. An Instagram feed full of blurry party photos with him in the center, shirt half-off, someone’s arms around his neck. Or did he?
Suguru Geto liked to believe he had it all figured out.
His friends called him charming, easy to like, always the one laughing the loudest at midnight. His name was passed around like a favorite song. People gravitated toward him, and he let them. It was easier that way. Easier to be the version of himself that knew the right punchlines and carried extra lighters in his back pocket.
And for a while, it worked.
He had friends. A house that was never quiet. A social calendar that filled itself.
But some nights, usually after the music faded and everyone had either passed out or gone home, Suguru would sit alone on the kitchen floor—fingertips smelling like beer and cigarette ash—and wonder why he still felt like he was waiting for something. Or someone.
It hit hardest on Monday evenings, when the sun dipped low and the house finally went quiet. When the laughter was gone and the air felt still. That was when he stopped pretending. When he picked up a book instead of a bottle and let himself be quiet. Be real. And in those moments, he realized the truth:
He had everything—and yet, he still felt empty.
Lonely, even.
That’s what scared him the most.
Because when you’re the guy everyone likes, you start to forget what it means to be known. And if he felt that way—with all his noise and friends and distractions—what about Gojo?
That thought stayed with him longer than expected.
Gojo, who sat in the corner of every class like he wasn’t quite part of the room. Who never came to parties, who always walked alone, who lived like he’d made peace with being unreadable. Gojo, with eyes too bright and glasses too big, who left thoughts in the margins of books like tiny distress signals.
What if Gojo felt it worse?
What if all that brilliance came with its own kind of solitude?
Suguru didn’t know when it started. That worry, that ache. But once it lodged itself in his chest, it refused to leave. It changed how he read those notes, how he looked for them. How he started writing back.
Maybe Gojo was lonely, too.
And maybe, in the silence of old books and secondhand pages, they could stop being strangers. Maybe, in reading each other, they were trying to say: you don’t have to be alone in this. Because none of them knew him like he imagined Gojo might—if he let him.
And Gojo? Gojo didn’t seem to want to be known by anyone. Not the way Suguru did.
But Suguru tried anyway. Not by talking to him. Not by texting or finding excuses to sit closer in two classes they shared together but never interacted with one another. But by chasing the shadow he left behind in books.
It was strange, intimate—reading Gojo’s favorite lines, breathing in the scent of books his fingers had touched. Suguru found himself lingering longer over those passages, letting them fill the quiet ache inside him that no party, no crowd, could reach.
He wondered sometimes: Did Gojo know? Did he notice the way I always checked the books right after him? Did he feel my presence in the reading room, like static before a storm?
And then came a note.
In Norwegian Wood. Of course, it had to be that one. Murakami. The author of grief, of unspoken longing, of people brushing past each other like trains on separate tracks.
The note was tucked between two pages, folded neatly.
“I see you’ve been following me. Took you long enough to catch up. - SG”
Suguru reread it five times. He read it while standing in the middle of the library, and again in the hallway, and once more in the mirror of the third-floor bathroom, where he was trying not to panic. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t mocking. It was—playful. And that, somehow, was worse.
Because it meant Gojo had noticed.
And he had let him.
.
When he saw him the next day, sitting like he always did—slouched, disinterested, cool in that way Suguru would never be—he walked over with the book still in his hands. Gojo had claimed his usual spot by the window. The sunlight caught in his white hair, glowing at the edges like an overexposed photograph.
“You left me a note,” Suguru said.
His voice caught at the edges—tight, a little unsure, like someone stepping out from behind a curtain into a story he wasn’t certain he was allowed to be part of. His hands were buried in the pockets of his hoodie, sleeves pushed up to his forearms in that casually messy way that made him look younger than he was. Beneath all that swagger and the echo of too many Friday nights, there was just a boy—nervous, heart stuttering, eyes flickering toward the open book in Gojo’s lap.
Gojo looked up from his spot by the window, where late-afternoon sun cast long, golden bars across the table. His expression was unreadable behind the reflective sheen of his glasses, but the corners of his mouth curled upward, like he’d been expecting this.
“Mm,” he hummed, tilting his head slightly. “You’ve been borrowing my entire personality through literature.” He said it like a joke—light, airy—but the smile was real. Suguru could tell, because it reached his eyes.
Gojo closed his book with one hand, slow and deliberate. “Figured it was time we meet. I was starting to think you were trying to become me.”
Suguru’s laugh escaped before he could stop it. Soft, caught somewhere between embarrassment and something warmer. “I wasn’t trying to become you,” he said. “I was trying to understand you.”
That made Gojo pause.
His smile didn’t fade entirely, but it settled into something quieter. He leaned forward slightly, the sunlight flashing briefly against his lenses as he studied Suguru—not like a puzzle, but like a page he hadn’t quite finished reading.
“And what did you learn?” he asked, voice low. Curious.
Suguru looked down for a moment, then met his eyes again. “That you’re probably just as lonely as I am.”
Something in the air shifted. Gojo blinked slowly, like the words had knocked something loose in him. His smirk slipped, replaced by something unreadable—raw, even. The space between them seemed to hold its breath.
“You could’ve said something,” Gojo said after a moment, quieter now, his voice not quite meeting its usual lightness. He looked at Suguru with those crystalline blue eyes behind the big square frames, the kind that made you feel like he was seeing past everything you were pretending to be.
Suguru could only give a nervous, boyish laugh. “I didn’t think you’d want to talk to someone like me.”
Gojo tilted his head, intrigued. “Someone like you?”
“You know,” Suguru started, voice soft and self-deprecating. “The guy who throws parties every weekend. The guy who only reads The Iliad because he thinks it makes him sound cultured.”
Gojo leaned forward again, elbows resting on the table, expression unreadable and devastatingly sincere. “You read No Longer Human in one sitting.”
Suguru’s eyes widened. “How do you know that?”
“You returned it the next day.” Gojo’s voice dropped a fraction. “Underlined the same line I did.”
Suguru froze. That line.
“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes.”
The silence between them vibrated, not empty but full—of words left unsaid, of the margins they’d been scribbling into each other without realizing.
He swallowed. “You… keep track?”
Gojo’s mouth quirked. “Of course, I do. You always check them out right after me. Like clockwork.”
Suguru blinked.
“I noticed after the second one,” Gojo said, fingers grazing the edge of the book absentmindedly, like he didn’t want to overwhelm the moment by holding it too tightly. “But I didn’t say anything. I wanted to see how long you’d keep doing it.”
Suguru’s throat was dry. “So, you’ve… known this whole time?”
Gojo looked up at him fully now. And for the first time, he wasn’t Gojo the enigma, Gojo the genius, Gojo the unattainable—he was just Satoru. Just a boy sitting in a sunlit corner of a library, seeing him.
“Geto,” he said, the name gentle on his tongue, like it belonged there; like he’d said it in his head a hundred times before this. And he likes to think that was truly the case.
“You wrote in No Longer Human,” Gojo started, “That margin note—‘Does it feel this lonely to you too?’”
Suguru’s pulse thundered in his ears.
“I’ve been watching you watch me,” Gojo said simply. “But I didn’t say anything because…” He hesitated, just for a quick heartbeat. “Because I kind of liked being followed like that. Quietly. Like we were in the same story, just a few pages apart.”
The words landed with weight and grace—like snow on warm skin. And Suguru could barely breathe.
“I thought I was being subtle,” he whispered, voice cracking with something that wasn’t quite sadness, wasn’t quite relief.
“You were,” Gojo said. “That’s what made it beautiful.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of all the months, all the pages, all the words passed through ink and borrowed spines. The library around them buzzed faintly—printers humming, students whispering, the distant sound of a chair scraping—but none of it seemed real compared to the soft gold pooling across the floor, the golden hour clinging to Gojo’s hair, and the ache blooming slowly in Suguru’s chest.
Unbeknownst to him, Gojo has been watching him too—tracking the mirrored highlights, the hesitant notes, the shared silences. What unfolds is a tender romance told through books before it’s ever spoken aloud. Over months of missed chances, late-night reading, and quiet yearning, the distance between them begins to close—until one marked page, one returned book, finally opens a chapter they can write together.
In that moment—in that quiet, breathing pause—Suguru Geto realized he hadn’t been chasing a shadow. And he hadn’t been reading alone.
Because Satoru Gojo had been there the whole time.
Reading him back.
Patiently. Silently.
Like he was worth understanding. Like he was already part of the story.
.
Five months later, Suguru Geto was still two people.
But these days, it didn’t feel like he was failing at balance—just shifting between rhythms. Like high tide and low. One minute, he was draped over a couch in the house, drink in hand, shoulder-to-shoulder with his friends as someone shouted over the bass about Mario Kart drinking rules. The next, he was on the library’s third floor, folded into a worn leather armchair, reading Demons with a pen tucked behind his ear, annotated margins trailing like breadcrumbs toward someone he hoped might follow.
Both versions of him felt real now. The party boy with the laugh too loud for 2 am, and the quietly aching reader who found himself underlining Dostoevsky’s more bitter lines, not out of performance—but recognition.
“You’re a walking identity crisis,” Shoko joked one Friday as Suguru poured cheap whiskey into mismatched shot glasses. “Like, are you gonna quote Shakespeare or drink another beer? Pick a lane.”
“I can do both,” Suguru said, smiling lazily. “Duality is in this year.”
“Sure, bro. Just don’t start crying about a book again while we’re playing beer pong.”
He laughed, let the teasing wash over him like warm water. That was the thing—his friends teased him, but none of them meant it cruelly. They ribbed him about his new library boyfriend even though he and Satoru had never defined anything. No one said it with malice. It was just one of those things—like the sky being blue, or Suguru turning pink the second Satoru so much as looked at him across campus.
“You seeing Gojo tonight?” Someone would inevitably ask, around the third drink in.
And Suguru would shrug, the corner of his mouth twitching upward like he couldn’t help it. “Probably. He’s got a thing for stealing my hoodie and not returning it.”
It wasn’t a lie. Satoru did steal his hoodie. Repeatedly. He wore it like armor, sleeves too long, smelling like Suguru’s detergent and leftover cologne. Sometimes, he’d sit across from Suguru in the library in it, sipping on overpriced iced coffee, and scrawl notes in his books in that chicken-scratch handwriting of his.
Somehow, Satoru Gojo had slipped into the quieter corners of Suguru Geto’s life, and he never made a big deal about it. He just... stayed.
Suguru’s friends rolled their eyes whenever he got caught texting in the middle of a party. (“If you send another ‘wyd’ to library boy, I swear to god—”) But they never really pushed it. They knew. Everyone knew. Suguru Geto was in love with the boy who annotated his Dostoevsky novels and wrote petty margin notes like:
“The underground man has less drama than you.”
“You circled this quote three times, please seek help.”
“PS. I underlined this first. Get in line.”
They still weren’t together—not officially. No labels, no declarations. Just this slow, unspoken something. A closeness that hummed like static under the skin.
Sometimes, Suguru wondered if he should ask. If he should say it. What are we? What do you want from me? But then Satoru would do something stupidly gentle—like fall asleep next to him in the library, glasses sliding down his nose, lips parted in the softest breath—and Suguru would think, Maybe this is enough.
Maybe this is love, just spoken in a different language.
.
It was a Monday when it happened—the kind that smelled like coming spring, with golden sunlight bleeding through the quad and wind that didn’t quite bite anymore. Suguru skipped the last half of his econ lecture because his brain had decided it was absolutely vital to see Satoru right then, and maybe also because he wanted to sit in their library corner before someone else took it.
When he got to the third floor, Satoru was already there.
Of course, he was.
He was wearing his hoodie again—Suguru’s hoodie, too big on him in a way that made Suguru feel weirdly protective and irrationally smug. Satoru’s hair was a soft mess, his glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, and a book open in front of him. The whole thing would’ve looked romantic if he weren’t eating dried mangoes directly out of the bag with one hand.
Suguru dropped his backpack on the chair beside him. “You’re eating mango over The Idiot?”
“Dostoevsky would approve,” Satoru said, not looking up. “It’s a deeply existential snack.”
“Yeah, okay.” Suguru sat beside him, shoulder brushing shoulder, close enough to steal warmth. “What’s the existential crisis today?”
Satoru passed him the book without a word.
Suguru took it without hesitation and flipped to the page already marked with a folded corner. Nestled in the margin, written in that lazy, looping scrawl he now recognized instantly, was a familiar voice pressed into ink:
“Still trying to impress someone with your reading list?”
It was teasing, almost smug—classic Satoru—but the edges of it were soft, like a nudge rather than a jab. Beneath it, in Suguru’s tighter, neater script—written in a moment he hadn’t expected Satoru to ever read—was a quieter reply:
“I hope you know it had always been you.”
The world outside the library window softened, the golden light slipping away as dusk settled in. The pages between them turned, but the silence between Suguru and Satoru felt like its own language—a language they had both learned, slowly, over months. It had never been fast, never hurried, but the feeling now was unmistakable. They were on the same page.
Suguru’s fingers hovered over the book in front of him, tracing the edge of the page where the white-haired’s notes lay. He could hear his breath, feel the weight of his presence beside him, a comforting pull like gravity. And in that moment, there was no rush. No need for pushing. No need for anything but this. The quiet between them, the stillness, felt more real than anything else.
Satoru’s voice broke the silence, low and unguarded.
“I’m not going anywhere, you know.”
Suguru glanced up, meeting his gaze, and for the first time today, he felt the weight of their unspoken connection settle comfortably around them. It was easy, so easy, to be here with him. And he smiled softly, almost to himself.
“I know.”
And when he finally looked back down at the book, at Satoru’s notes and his own scrawled replies, it was clear. This wasn’t just about the books. This wasn’t about the stolen moments or the long months of quiet anticipation. It was about them, about finally being here, in this moment, together. They had both been reading this story for so long, turning pages and wondering if they would ever reach the end.
And now they had.
And so, this is how it feels—to finally catch up to the story you’ve been trying to read.