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The tips of the green onions sit better behind Nanami’s arm, where the panel by the row of seats cuts off into open air. The toddler the woman closest to the door is holding eyes them curiously, but she’s well-mannered for a child of her age and doesn’t reach for them. Look, but don’t touch, Nanami’s own mother had always told him.
He’s been trying not to look so much at his phone on the train, has a book nestled fruitlessly in his briefcase where it would be too much trouble to reach it. He’s not always on his way home when it’s still this crowded, but lately…
Well.
The train trip is longer than ideal, though that had been the maybe ill-advised goal in the first place — the separation of work, or at least the hub he considers the office, and home, the forcible disconnect of one from the other in his mind and environment. The walk from station to apartment, though, is perfect. Autumn hasn’t completely chilled the air yet, and scattered leaves from the homes with the luxury of a yard blow beneath his feet. His tie is loose by the time he reaches his building, older but more charming for it.
His landlord, aging crank that he is, isn’t around today, or at least not in what passes for the entrance where all the residents flow through to get in and out. He takes the stairs — in a building from this era there’s not usually another option — methodically, fishes his keys from his pocket when he reaches his floor, lets the breeze blow away the rest of the day from his shoulders. Unlocks the door.
“I’m home.” This is new, the feeling that someone might be waiting to hear him say it; his shoehorn is in hand, briefcase on the sideboard, before he gets a response.
“Welcome home!” Gojo, as always, brings too much energy with him, face appearing from around the lintel of Nanami’s bedroom. Maybe he’d been sleeping; when Nanami looks up, his hair is tousled though his glasses are on already. Not so deeply, then. “You’re early.”
“Iori-san is in town,” he explains, disregarding the face Gojo makes in response — like something smelly has been wafted under his nose, “so Ieiri-san and I adjusted our plans.”
“Ieiri-san,” repeats Gojo, mockingly deferential. “You’ve only known her a decade.”
“Slightly more than that, actually.”
Gojo’s made his way to Nanami by now, body blocks him poking around in his canvas grocery bag. “What are you making?”
“Oyakodon. There was a good deal on chicken today.”
“Do you need a grocery stipend?” asks Gojo, teasingly. He pulls out the onion and tosses it hand to hand before dropping it deftly back in its place.
Nanami takes the handles before he can do any actual damage to his produce. “There’s no reason not to take advantage of a sale when I see one.”
“Either way,” says Gojo, and then suddenly he’s reaching for Nanami, hands along the planes of his face and mouth squarely against his for just a moment, “that doesn’t sound complicated. So we have time.”
His last phrase is just lightly lascivious, another gust in the whirlwind that Gojo represents; Nanami takes his wrists, firmly, and leads them back to his sides.
“Let me start the rice,” he says, bargaining, and Gojo pouts but follows him obediently into the kitchen.
He watches with those shielded blue eyes as Nanami washes the rice, three times the way his mother always had, tells him about how he’d been on a mission with the first years today, how the boy from the Inumaki clan had managed to shout down a second-grade curse on his own without more than a coughing fit as a result. He’s fond of this class, Nanami can tell, interested in the girl from the Zen’in clan with almost no cursed energy, curious about the boy from the kind of family his had treated as secondary his entire life. The panda, of course, that Yaga had created for his own strange ends.
When the rice is in the cooker, Nanami reaches for the canvas again with the hand not choosing the jasmine setting. It should be simple, he knows exactly where he’d left the bag, but Gojo gets there first.
This has been in some ways the most difficult part to grow into, to become accustomed to, the way their bodies move so easily together, around each other. It starts playful, like a goalie with a puck in the net, but Gojo’s fingers mesh with his like sand in an hourglass, inevitable as momentum. He shifts Nanami’s center of gravity with a pull, gentle but firm, at that hand where he has him, settles his back to the counter where behind them the cooker is starting to warm up.
“The actual cooking doesn’t take long, right?” Gojo asks, like he’s ever made anything in his own kitchen in his life.
“You wouldn’t know.” Nanami folds his arms, though he lets Gojo be the one to release his hand to avoid even facetious hard feelings.
“I would,” he argues. “I looked it up before you started on the rice.”
The audacity. “To what end?” asks Nanami, but Gojo just smiles.
“I want to kiss you more,” he says. When his voice gets like this, when a little of the sing-song quality he usually carries washes away into a sea approaching softness, it feels at times like he’s reaching somewhere impossibly deep inside Nanami, touching and warming something that’s usually alone. It makes it hard to turn him down.
“Be quick,” says Nanami, though he uncrosses his arms and by Gojo’s smile he knows he’s already given him the inch that he’ll turn into a mile.
“You be quick,” Gojo retorts, and Nanami doesn’t waste the time it would take to argue back.
Instead, he reaches for the glasses sitting on the fine bridge of Gojo’s nose. This, too, is breathtakingly routine, the way the lids of Gojo’s eyes slide closed, feathered pale lashes drooping nearly to his cheekbones. The way he trusts him so entirely, knows Nanami will fold the frames and set them gently on the counter, will stay in place and let Gojo put his hands on him — his waist, this time — without having to search, will turn his face to meet him when he dips his head to cross the frustrating few centimeters between them.
When they’d started this, this undefined and subsuming thing between them, kissing Gojo had been a physical challenge of sorts. He’d been aggressive, more fumbling than Nanami had expected someone of his appearance and position to be. Like it was something to win, a battle or a competition or a high score on a test they were both taking, and nothing anywhere near the boundaries of Gojo’s comfort zone. And for a while, that had been stimulating enough to have Nanami intrigued. As time went on, though, the movement toward this, what they have now, was what kept him engaged, kept him coming back to one apartment or the other and away from the bars he used to go to with hopes, plans even at times.
Here, where the warmth the sun had left behind is maintained by the size of the room, the heat of their bodies, Gojo is almost gentle. The reality of how light his fingers sit against the bend of Nanami’s waist is more impressive than any expression of his power, its utter absence like a miracle on its own. That this is the same man that can obliterate any obstacle, think through any problem, his subconscious letting down all his guard for him where he’s safe in Nanami’s hands.
This had been surprising too, at first, the way Gojo likes to start things he doesn’t know how to — doesn’t want to finish. Here in the kitchen he lets Nanami push them off the counter, linked at the mouth, lets him back them up against the wall behind them and slide his hands under the sweater Gojo had changed into at the end of his workday. It’s one he’d hung in Nanami’s closet like it was nothing, hundreds of thousands of yen worth of fabric left at the house of someone he’d probably call his coworker if asked. Somewhere between an extra work uniform and a jacket for when they want to go out and it’s cold.
Yeah, Nanami thinks, one hand at the small of Gojo’s back, coworkers.
Gojo melts in his fingers like the snow he brings to mind, pulling Nanami closer as if he’s not already putting his weight into pressing Gojo to the wall, making him go weak enough at the knees that he has to tip that glass-sharp jaw up to keep meeting Nanami’s mouth. He runs cold, all that energy burning off running his technique not leaving much to keep him warm with; where Nanami touches his skin, it prickles. He’s pale, sensitive with the lack of external stimuli in his day-to-day; where Nanami breaks their kiss for a moment to touch teeth to his collarbone, it fades red.
Gojo groans. His voice, so irritating when he’s lecturing his students or interrupting Nanami’s lunch break, sounds sultry like this, when Nanami is pulling noises from his throat like a conductor directing the violinist to let loose. He doesn’t know when he got like this, when looking at Gojo started to make him feel more fond than aggravated, when it made him aware of a tight fist unclenching inside him. “Come back up here,” he says, hands to Nanami’s jaw, and Nanami obeys.
They both obey, like this, mouths meeting again. Tongues first this time, appetites whetted now. Gojo’s fingers are long enough that the tips hook around the base of Nanami’s ears, pull at one lobe, rub the edge of his undercut. He can feel him in stereo this way, every sense attuned to the man in front of him, every touch a ripple in deep water, every slick, hot sound echoing against the walls of the canyon in his heart.
Gojo’s tongue is like the rest of him, long and deft. He likes it when Nanami strokes it, sucks on it, and so he does, leaves saliva running slow and transparent down Gojo’s chin for him to lick away, kiss him all over again.
Slowly Gojo’s arms push forward, elbows over Nanami’s shoulders and hands buried fully in his hair. He lets Nanami work him down the wall until he’s sitting on the floor, lets him sink into his mouth and run his hands along each line of his ribs, still palpable even with that terminal sweet tooth. Lets him kiss across his cheekbone, over the ridge and round of his ear, guided all the way by those hands in his hair. Past his jaw, down his neck, gentle where the tendons rise.
Gojo always lets him, always. Never makes him ask, though still sometimes he does. Rarely makes him wonder, nowadays. Before, earlier in this joint fumbling, there had been more questions than answers, more uncertainty than stability. Lately, nothing needs to be said. They understand.
Nanami knows they understand because when one hand rises higher, leaving a smear of skin at Gojo’s waistline exposed to the open air, to brush gossamer and deliberate over one nipple — peach and pebbling, though Nanami can’t see it under his sweater — Gojo groans, and then he laughs.
“You can’t be serious,” he says. “When you’re counting minutes on the rice in your head.”
“Guilty,” replies Nanami, but he firms up his touch, stroking in a slow circle around Gojo’s nipple, letting his shirt brush against it where their chests press together. He’s crouched between his legs, mouthing at the divot at the center of his collarbone. Eyes closed, heart thumping. What’s been done to me, he wonders, but like before they both know. “How much longer do you think we have?”
“Who cares?” He shouldn’t let it work on him, but when Gojo throws his head back against the wall with a thunk that sounds like it might hurt anyone else in his place, draws out the long-a sound like a warbling bird, tugs at his hair with a playful kind of frustration it’s hard not to. When he thinks about how long it’s taken to get here, how many false starts and land mines and unraveling knots.
“You won’t complain about being hungry?” asks Nanami. He’s still rubbing rings around that areola, not feeling it get any softer, his body entirely honest in never tiring of him. And maybe that’s the thing, the intoxicating thing at the center of all this, that keeps him not just coming back but running, back to his own kitchen where he hopes this man might be waiting for him: that Gojo wants him, keeps wanting him so purely, like a thirsty man wants a sweating glass of water.
Gojo’s breathing matches the motion of his finger, an inhale at each apex of its circumnavigation. “I will,” he says, and Nanami presses down on his nipple in soft reproach. Gojo yelps, another meeting of skull and wall, body jolting under Nanami against the floor of his apartment. The most powerful man in the world brought to this in less than a third of the time it takes to steam rice. It’s intoxicating, better and harsher than whiskey or wine. “I can’t help it.”
“Then you’ll need to let me get to cooking.” Nanami slips his hands free of Gojo’s sweater, sets them where his own slacks stretch tight over his bent knees. “Can you do that?”
“Do I have to?” Gojo’s mouth where it forms the words is pink with effort, with blood brought to the surface of the thin skin there where Nanami had pressed him.
Slowly, he raises one thumb, sets it at the center of his bottom lip. Lets gravity do the tugging for him, show him the sheen of spit on Gojo’s tongue where the gap exposes it between his teeth. “You do,” he says, and then he waits. It’s not a test — there’s no passing or failing here in the safe embrace of their privacy — but it is a choice.
He can watch the calculation in Gojo’s eyes, can see him weigh being good against doing what he wants, can trace the miracle as it happens. Gojo sighs, the breath of it humidifying the pad of Nanami’s thumb as it leaves him, and then he relinquishes his hold on Nanami. Lets his arms fall, defeated, to his sides.
“I am hungry,” he admits. His mouth moves around Nanami’s thumb, just a little bit intentionally provocative; he wouldn’t expect less, often lives with more. “Inumaki-kun needed to go to the pharmacy after the mission.”
“You poor thing,” says Nanami, meaning it, dropping his hand and getting to his feet. He extends a palm to Gojo, who leans forward and licks it before standing entirely on his own power. Not that well-behaved, then, and Nanami would be a fool to think he’d get anything else.
Gojo leans down to eliminate the space that once again divides their heights, mouth to Nanami’s ear with the kind of deadly precision he usually saves for the field. “Be quick,” he says, and hops innocently back up onto the free space on the counter.
•••
This part is unbearably new, the waiting. The wanting Gojo had known in spades, years back and in different circumstances, but that bomb had gone off before he’d even known to expect it. With Nanami, things are different. Stable. Scary.
Nanami does things like make him dinner. Insist he eats. Wash his dishes, deny Gojo’s offer to help only to demand that if he’s going to sit there and chatter at him he may as well do the drying. Let him encroach on his life and hang his clothes in his closet and sleep in his bed.
Tonight it’s oyakodon with a side of interruption, though by now he knows to expect that the best is yet to come. Nanami is unexpected in many ways, but perhaps the most surprising is the way he handles Gojo through all this. How he makes him want to follow his lead, how his many little irritating behaviors all somehow coalesce into a borderline perfect man. How the delay is always worth the gratification.
He grinds his teeth on a bite of chicken. Nanami’s dashi broth is homemade, by the way. He makes it once in a while on a day off and freezes it. Gojo hadn’t even known that was something that could happen outside of a restaurant environment where their literal business was handmade dashi broth. People put that kind of thing on signs as advertisement, enticement, and Nanami is doing it in the silent monastery of his kitchen.
Not so monastic anymore, though. Gojo has seen to that, has riled him up into defiling this temple a time or two. The memory of it flashing back somehow serves to make him hungrier, dig in further.
“See?” Nanami says from across his low dining table, Mister Traditional and right now additionally Mister I Told You So, prim and proper like he hadn’t been sucking Gojo’s mind out through his tongue thirty minutes or so ago. It’s unbearable the way he can be like this, so thoroughly right all the time and so completely annoying about it. The salt in the wound is how delicious the oyakodon is, how easy he’d made it look to put it together. It probably is easy, not that Gojo would know. “It’s good that we’re eating now.”
“I get it.”
That’s the other aggravating factor with Nanami, the way he doesn’t press things, retreats into that self-satisfied little silent smile like he doesn’t know exactly how hard he’s pressing Gojo’s buttons with it. When Gojo brings these types of complaints to Shoko, by the way, he tends to get slapped and then saddled with their bill for the night, so mostly he keeps them to himself.
Tonight, though, he can’t help it. Won’t help it. Nanami had brought them so far earlier and then reeled them back in, and now he thinks he can just look like that and act like that and talk like that without Gojo doing something about it. He’s eating faster, maybe, hoping he doesn’t look like he’s rushing but not entirely sure whether he’d mind if he does. Nanami looks happy enough to watch the disappearing contents of his own bowl, looks up suspiciously when Gojo says he’s going to brush his teeth but doesn’t argue the point. Lets him go, the way he always does when he needs to be and never does when he doesn’t.
They know each other now, Gojo thinks, watching himself in the mirror while his toothbrush whirs. The second outrageously expensive electric variety he owns, the one that stays in Nanami’s bathroom, the light on its charging base providing an ideal dim illumination for middle of the night trips to rinse off the sweat of a nightmare. They’re bleeding into each other now, two watercolor streaks becoming something new altogether. It’s pointless to resist and Gojo knows it, just as surely as he knows that by the time he’s done spitting out his toothpaste into the sink Nanami will be behind him, reaching for his own toothbrush.
“You’re in a hurry,” he comments, rinsing the head without turning off the faucet. One more minuscule thing to share that, weighed together, feels like an anvil dropping onto Gojo’s head, dazing him beyond all recognizance.
“Need to do the dishes,” replies Gojo, and books it out of there. Nanami will never let him if he doesn’t get there while he’s already in the process of doing something else.
He’s done with the rice cooker components by the time he hears Nanami come back into the kitchen. The Six Eyes linger on him now without Gojo really meaning to, the friction of his slippered feet on the floor, the steady in and out of his breathing, the utter restraint of his cursed energy when they’re alone like this. It’s downright romantic, if Gojo lets himself get carried away thinking about it, which he often does. It’s hard not to when the air smells like the dinner Nanami cooked for them and the room is full of his things and the night is ahead of them like this.
“You just sit down and relax,” crows Gojo, airily. It does feel like a marginal win, the way Nanami’s rubber gloves are just slightly too small for him, how he’s clearly not meant to be here and yet he is. “I’ll—”
Nanami sets a hand on his shoulder, heavy and warm, then props his chin on it. His breath smells like his toothpaste when he exhales — spearmint. Gojo doesn’t even know where one might purchase such an elderly flavor. “Thank you,” he says, which is so unexpected as to be nearly nerve-wracking. No argument, no matter how silly and for fun. “You’re faster than I am.”
“You care too much,” Gojo laughs. He’s sure he doesn’t sound like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nanami’s head tilts, sets his temple against Gojo’s cheek, the kind of cavity-inducing sweetness he’s capable of on these very rare occasions. No one would believe him if he told; that has to be why Nanami feels comfortable doing it. Just when they’re on their own, another secret on the pile between them. “Just another few minutes, now.”
He feels Nanami nod, the brush of their skin, their hair. For a second, the washing of a knife he knows Nanami sharpens regularly himself, he pictures them meshing together at this point of intersection, joining somehow into one person.
But then they’d lose what they have. He sets the knife neatly on the rack, finger glancing harmlessly off its shining edge.
“It’s that specific?” asks Nanami, and for a moment Gojo isn’t sure what he’s referring to, but he continues — of course he does. “I’m still touching you here.” He squeezes his hand, presses their heads together just slightly more firmly.
“I’m very good,” Gojo says, and Nanami laughs and spills light into the kitchen with it. It’s blinding, his open happiness, and each glimpse leaves Gojo starving for more.
The rest of the washing up goes quickly, probably more quickly than Nanami’s carefully accumulated kitchen implements deserve, but the charge between them is strong enough by the time Gojo shuts off the sink and peels back the gloves that no one bothers to suggest anything but air-drying.
Nanami, perfect man that he is, doesn’t stop Gojo when he turns, when he swoops forward to grab him again and drag their mouths together. This endless well never stops giving, never stops moving against him and with him. It’s impossible. It had been impossible.
Nanami’s mouth isn’t soft; it might be nicer if it were but Gojo doesn’t care to find out. It’s warm, though, warm and wet and steady. With Nanami this always feels like an exchange, the give and take of saliva and hands and sounds. His skin is softer than it looks with the scars that nick him all over; Gojo’s showered here enough to know he puts time and effort into it, the ritual that keeps him human in the face of everything their lives have forced upon them. It makes touching him feel like the hand of God, stretching from its abstracted heaven to caress Gojo and make his time on this earth worth putting in.
It’s sweet, the way Nanami doesn’t pick them up where they left off earlier. He likes to start off slow, gets some kind of enjoyment out of the buildup that Gojo can’t say he doesn’t feel but also could occasionally do without. And sometimes they do, but not tonight, not with Nanami’s mouth closed against his again, with his hands settling light on Gojo’s hips without much pull to get them closer.
Gojo can take the lead, knows Nanami is doing that thing he does where he lets him like they both don’t know who needs to be in charge between the two of them. He brings their bodies together, the long smooth lines of them forged in the fires of sorcery; the heat rises quickly. Nanami runs warm, embered furnace of a man, isn’t shy about sharing it. Complains about but never bats away Gojo’s cold feet on a dreary morning when they’re both too tired to have left before the sun rises over them. Here he’s impossibly inviting in the comfort of his own space, body and mind utterly at ease.
Gojo opens his mouth first, taking Nanami’s bottom lip between his, biting at it with more tenderness than he’d intended. It always seems that way with Nanami, like he’s turning Gojo into something he hadn’t even known he could be. Nanami still gasps at the touch of his incisor, digs his fingers in and makes Gojo yelp. He’s ticklish there, just slightly; the number of people who know that is vanishingly, punishingly small but Nanami is one of them, rubbing his thumbs just a little more before he lets up.
When his wrists cross at the small of Gojo’s back it feels like the kind of cage that exists for safety, not restriction. When his smile, small and secret and so much more sincere than earlier, presses to Gojo’s mouth it feels like heaven. It makes it hard not to lick his way in to that close-held keep, and Gojo’s never been one to deny himself. At least, he hasn’t been since this began, since Nanami had made it clear he didn’t need to be. That they both wanted the same things and might as well pursue them together.
His mouth tastes like toothpaste and the fading imprint of homemade dashi broth, the inevitable sharpness of fresh green onion, and Gojo delves, tongue, teeth, soft palate. Nanami’s body in his hands is firm and inviting, almost impossibly erotic in its practicality. Rolled sleeves, outrageously old and expensive watch — probably inherited — glinting in the kitchen can lighting, collar and one placket button undone. He looks like the most desirable man on the earth and he’s handed it all over to Gojo without much care for the inevitable shattering they both face at the end of the line. Their line of work doesn’t support retiring, old sorcerers vanishingly few and far between. But here and now, Nanami wants him, and Gojo wants Nanami, and most of the rest of it fades out in the face of that.
Nanami has a way of making these things go the way he wants without seeming to direct them; maybe it’s just that what Gojo wants has become so entirely entwined with Nanami’s desires that it’s impossible to separate them, but he finds himself more often than not the one on his knees, drooling for the man in front of him, half-hard just imagining the sock garters and harness waiting for him beneath the suit. Tonight, though, this second round they’ve started, Nanami feels content, lets Gojo keep remembering the inside of his mouth with his tongue, feeling each dip in his arms, his torso, with his palms. He tips his head back, just a little, invites Gojo’s fingers up his throat with the firm curve of it, lets him pet over his Adam’s apple, thumb along his sternocleidomastoid. And all the while those lips move against his, open, insistent.
“You can touch me again,” Gojo breathes, right into Nanami’s welcoming mouth, “like earlier.”
“Mmm.” That stern voice, soft as butter in the hand like this, has Gojo starving all over again, dinner and earlier dust in the wind of this desire that never seems to wane entirely. “I will. Right now…” He trails off but his arms tighten, one ankle hooking over Gojo’s. They need to get somewhere with a softer landing surface to offer and fast, some remaining rational part of Gojo’s brain knows this, but moving, disrupting this, seems impossible. Nanami is so tempting like this, more even than he usually is — which is already trouble at places like work and dinners with their mutual friends — that Gojo can’t fathom not walking, running, sprinting right into him.
The skin of his neck is salty, just slightly. Maybe from the exertion of the day, or maybe from the steam of the chicken in the pan earlier. The why doesn’t matter so much on Gojo’s tongue, between his lips where he makes his way down. That little beige v of skin where Nanami’s shirt is undone is calling his name, borderline audibly, and as usual Gojo finds himself completely powerless to resist, sets his mouth there and sucks. Noisily, too; Nanami’s neighbors already think his apartment is haunted. Might as well add fuel to the fire.
Nanami does too, an unnamable sound making its way through his gritted teeth. Again he tugs Gojo closer, deliberately brushing their pelvises this time. Both of them are settling their feet more firmly against the gas pedal, always so tempting, ready to hurtle from now into the rest of the night. “Satoru,” he murmurs, like a dam breaking, and suddenly Gojo feels significantly less patient. Less like waiting.
“It sounds so good when you say it,” he tells the mild swell of Nanami’s pectorals — a landscape if he’s ever seen one. “Say it again.”
“Satoru?” It’s question and answer, and Gojo kisses the divot that marks the start of his sternum in reply, earns another repeat, more certain this time when he sets his teeth around the line drawn with muscle and fat.
“Should we go to bed?” he asks, aiming for innocence, but Nanami finally releases him at that, one hand going for Gojo’s chin and pulling sharply up, forcing eye contact between them again.
“What do you think?” he replies, far too even, and then he waits. He’s better at this than Gojo, the game of drawing things out. It doesn’t even feel like a game anymore, just like throwing in the towel and knowing it’s the right choice every time. Like many times before, Gojo capitulates.
“Take me to bed,” he says, and when Nanami’s eyes tell him more is required, or at least desired with how few true conditions there are between them, he continues, “and fuck me.”
“Good boy, Satoru,” says Nanami, like a magic spell. He kisses Gojo once more, closed-mouthed and almost businesslike. Gojo has lost so thoroughly it feels like winning. “Aren’t you glad you ate dinner now?”
He is; he doesn’t need to say it. He could follow Nanami to his bedroom with his eyes closed.