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When Ieiri Shoko graduated from middle school, she’d complained about it non-stop for a week in advance. She hadn’t wanted to dress up, hadn’t wanted to stand in the gymnasium for what felt like an eternity to a thirteen-year-old, hadn’t wanted to fake smile for any pictures with her family, the friends she’d managed to scrounge up.
“Shoko,” her mother had said, finally, after the thousandth or so exasperated sigh out of her daughter’s mouth, “your graduation isn’t meant to be for you.”
Now, nineteen, Shoko doesn’t think she covered it enough. Back inside the school, where light and noise filter through the windows to reach her on the back walkway, you’d think there was one single graduate in the Jujutsu High class of 2010 — and it isn’t Shoko.
Not that she wants to complain about it; the less attention she gets the better. It’s already enough that she started with two special grade sorcerers, that she has her own unique technique that meant Yaga already extended her a job offer. Satoru too, of course, but everyone expected that. You’d be stupid to let him go, she’d heard. She’d seen the envy in Gakuganji’s eyes, watching them crush Kyoto at two sister school events in a row, Utahime fuming on the sidelines.
But they’d be stupid to let her go too, even if her ability is less flashy, and Shoko and her wallet know it and that’s enough for her. When she sighs a little into the March air, she can’t even see the echo of her breath.
“You should come back inside.” Shoko glances to the side, meets Nanami’s eyes in the light pooling near her from the interior. He looks tired. “Gojo is being insufferable.”
“More than usual?” Shoko smiles at him, lets him settle at just the right distance away from her on the same railing she’s leaning against. It smells like it might start raining soon; a breeze rustles the leaves of the trees in the courtyard at their backs.
“Good point.” Nanami smiles back at her; it feels better in private even than it does in front of Satoru, continually bemoaning how Nanami won’t smile at me and why is Shoko so special. When it’s like this, just the two of them outside the galaxy of Gojo Satoru, it really does feel like she’s special. “Take some of the spotlight off him.”
Shoko shakes her head. “It’s their last chance at him. No way am I interrupting all that.”
They’re quiet, the way things can be with Nanami, like they both know they need to enjoy it while it lasts. Inside is chatter and noise and wasted space and time, but outside there’s calm, intentionality; Shoko breathes and thinks about each lungful of air.
“It’s not like I’m leaving,” she says, after a while just watching the sky over her head, past the overhand of the roof, “but it still feels big.”
Nanami nods. “I understand.” It’s so nice, Shoko thinks, the way they agree with each other so often. It’s a great way to win arguments, especially against Satoru who doesn’t go down to anything but majority rule. “Now you have to be an adult.”
Shoko snorts. “I think we’ve had our share of the sort of shit that makes you one of those.” Maybe even more Nanami than her, his ability a better fit for the front lines of violent exorcisms, the kind that kill kids like Haibara. Shoko feels a spike of gratitude, suddenly, that Nanami survived, that he’s here to celebrate with her, to wait out the boring part of the night with her. She watches him in the semi-darkness, the way he looks like a boy on the cover of a book; maybe those old American ones about the brothers who seem to mostly be detectives.
“Maybe,” Nanami says, affably. “Hopefully you got a chance to do some of the things we’re all supposed to get out of our systems in high school. Sex, drugs…” He waves a hand — long fingers, firm wrist — vaguely in the air, says the next part in English. “Rock and roll.”
Shoko laughs. “What year is it?” she asks, batting that hand away, and Nanami laughs a little bit too. “Sounds like something my mom would have lectured me about.”
“Satoru always says I’m too responsible.” Nanami pauses. “Actually, I think the word he usually uses is uptight.”
“Don’t forget a pain in the ass,” adds Shoko.
“Right.”
A drizzle picks up, slowly, stars winking out over them as the clouds begin to roll in. Shoko watches the change, slow, a stretched reminder of how little she’s missed by anyone else left inside at the celebration of her graduation. Her family is home in Osaka, ignorant to the truth of her high school experience — her father had cut off contact completely when she’d insisted on going to a “religious school”. What, he’d wondered, could she get there that she couldn’t get here.
What, indeed. “Depending on how you see nicotine,” she says then, and Nanami cocks his head her way, “I guess I can cross drugs off your list.”
“I don’t think it’s all that bad,” he argues. “You don’t smoke as much anymore, anyway.”
Shoko groans into the night, neck bent to tip her head back toward the sky where rain is starting to fall in earnest. “Let me have one thing. It’s bad enough that I had to spend the last four years learning calculus in between patching all you idiots up instead of doing anything more fun.” Shoko looks over to Nanami when he doesn’t reply, finds him watching her with the kind of impassivity he shows Satoru — like he’s hiding something. “What?”
“You said one thing,” Nanami explains. “One thing from the list?”
Shoko nods, doesn’t let it get to her. Of course Nanami’s done more, been out more, hasn’t been kept locked up at the school like a piece of property. “And what about it?”
Nanami shrugs. “I thought you and Iori…”
Shoko laughs, can’t even wait for him to finish his sentence. “Utahime?” Like there’s another one floating around. “Half the time when she’s sober she’s too nervous to even look at me, Nanami. Surely you’ve noticed.”
“I did,” he agrees. “That’s why I thought— ah, never mind. Sorry for making an assumption.”
Shoko waves her hand, dismissive, catches it in a trickle of water running from the edge of the roof. Nanami doesn’t say anything, just pulls at the hem of his uniform, offering it to her, and she wipes the dampness from her palm. “It’s all right, Nanami. I’m glad I seem like a cooler senpai than I am.” She sighs. “And now my time is up.”
“You’ve still got tonight,” he counters her. His voice is calm; Nanami is always so calm. It makes Satoru crazy, complaining about it in the invaded peace of Shoko’s room after Nanami goes to bed for the night. Why doesn’t he react, is he even a person or is he a robot. Like a gundam, other nonsense Shoko will have even less time for now. “If sex and rock and roll are what’s left you could probably cross off both at once.”
“Mood music?” Shoko laughs. “Right, Nanami, find me someone on this campus willing to tear themselves away from Satoru long enough to have sex with me. Then we’re talking.”
“We are.” The cast of Nanami’s tone makes Shoko look at him, really look at him, turn her entire head his way. He’s looking right back, those hazel eyes watching her, reflecting her own face back to her like it belongs to a stranger. “Talking, I mean.”
Shoko’s eyes widen. She almost takes a step back, like something frightening had appeared in front of her, but she holds still, keeps meeting Nanami’s gaze. “Nanami,” she says, slowly, “don’t be cagey now.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.” Nanami adjusts his body then, turns it to face her, shoulders starting to broaden into an adult’s, waist trim below ribs Shoko has fixed a dozen times at least. “All I’m saying is I’ve had enough of Gojo for a lifetime.”
Shoko thinks she laughs, a little weak thing, dwarfed by uncertainty and disbelief. “You are not going to enjoy your last year here.” She takes a breath, remembers who she’s talking to. “And I don’t think that’s all you’re saying, Nanami.”
Nanami — confident, composed, quietly self-assured Nanami — blushes. It’s hard to see in the semi-dark of night, but the light behind the window nearest them provides just enough reflection on that pale cheek to show it flushing. Somehow, Shoko feels better immediately just seeing it, back on the same footing. “All I’m saying,” he repeats, quieter still, “is that if you want to spend your last night before adulthood doing anything in particular… I’m around.”
“You’re saying you want to help me get rid of my virginity,” Shoko says, bluntly. The disbelief is back in full force. “Nanami, are you serious?”
He scoffs a little, hand to the back of his neck like there’s a weak spot there she might see. “You make it sound like a gift you didn’t really want,” he says, and she can’t help but grin at him. “And I guess I’m serious. It wouldn’t just be your virginity, you know,” he adds, glancing at her again from where his line of sight had been diverted with that sweet little blush, like he’s daring her to mock him.
Her mouth drops open. “Satoru never…?”
Nanami crosses his arms; his uniform stretches over his chest. Shoko finds herself watching him through a brand new lens, that of a potential partner; suddenly, for the first time, she sees things about him she’s sure have nearly always been there but which make an impression on her like they’ve just appeared. She notices that Nanami is lean, tall and wired with muscle, strong without being showy about it. His eyes aren’t ever one color at once, somewhere between green and brown and grey, shifting and intense. The baby fat has been leaching slowly from his face, leaving planed cheekbones, a crisp jawline, a nose that centers his expression. “I do have standards,” he says, and his voice has turned sometime in the past three years into an adult’s voice, deeper, thoughtful.
“Well,” says Shoko, taking in the new picture of Nanami coalescing in her mind, “they’re too high if someone like you still hasn’t slept with anyone. You ought to lower them.”
“Or,” Nanami counters, “I could sleep with you.”
It sounds romantic, Shoko thinks, but Nanami isn’t embarrassed — and she thinks she reads him right. He hasn’t been holding her up as the only one who can meet his requirements, she’s almost certain; she’s just a better option than Satoru, than whomever else had come and maybe gone from Nanami’s life.
“You really want to do this,” she says, then, one last chance to leave the consent form unsigned, to pull back and pretend this conversation never happened and let Shoko into her adult life with one less item checked on the to-do list. “You’re eighteen, you’ve got plenty of time to get this sorted out before your time is up. I guarantee if you wanted him to Satoru would be more than happy to do the honors. Nothing weird,” she adds, not willing to throw him ambiguously under the bus like that, “he’s just kind of been a slut since last year.”
Last year. Nanami doesn’t let it settle, brushes it away like dust from a dug up artifact. “Ieiri,” he says, quick and firm, “I want to do this.” He shrugs. “Might as well get it out of the way now, right?”
“Don’t want a graduation like this one?” Shoko asks, grinning and then wincing. Nanami won’t have a chance to get out of the spotlight when his time at Jujutsu High wraps up.
But Nanami seems to take it in stride, knows they never mean to hurt each other except when they do. “I’ll probably be too busy to find an underclassman to have sex with,” he teases, and she smacks his arm without force, feels how strong it is under her palm, and then they’re both looking around like there might be a building nearby labeled The Having Sex With Your Friend Room.
“Not the dorms,” says Shoko. “I think some of the second-years already left.”
Nanami points diagonally out into the courtyard where the rain is still falling, hard and steady. “What about the shed near the training room?” he asks.
“Romantic.”
“Right?” He shrugs. “Feels like more of the guest rooms will have people in them than usual.”
“Well,” Shoko says, putting a finger to her chin, “I guess there isn’t really a better spot. Besides, it feels all TV-drama.”
Nanami nods, looking amused at her. “We might even get a little wet,” he agrees, gesturing at the sky, still pouring down around their dry-ish little bubble. “That happens in movies a lot.”
Shoko doesn’t reply, just follows Nanami out into the rain, the darkness increasing a little as they leave the light of the party behind. No one has come looking for either of them yet, and Shoko is too used to it by now to let it smart. Satoru is talking to some group of sorcerers who still see him tagged with the price Fushiguro Toji had been paid to kill him, and she’s about to have sex with someone she actually likes well enough not to mind it. Out of the two she would never want to swap positions.
Her uniform does get damp on their trek across part of the campus, working their way between buildings, trying to look casual. Nanami eventually falls into step beside her, instead of a stride or two ahead, offers an arm with his jacket unbuttoned, folds her into it like it will help. It’s warmer at least, she thinks, pressed to his side, arms crossed so her elbow bumps his ribs, but they’re both still getting wet and she thinks her shoes might be suffering a little more than she’d like. They could turn around, she thinks. They could forget it, go back to the stupid party or to the dorms to their separate, isolated rooms; Shoko could light up on the ledge under her window, blowing smoke out into the rain, be an official adult virgin and be done with it.
But they don’t. They make their way to the shed; Nanami holds the door open for her like she’s getting into his car ahead of a date, and she laughs at him about it and he lets her, tells her she’ll only graduate from high school once so he might as well treat it as a special occasion.
The shed isn’t especially comfortable, but it is full of things which makes it unexpectedly warm — mats for when practicing with tools is too rough on the tatami stacked to her thighs, tools shelved around them, filling the air that might otherwise be vacant and chilly. The sound of rain on the roof is noisy enough that Shoko’s nerves about the sounds they might make settle; she’s not expecting much, neither she nor Nanami are porn stars, but better safe than sorry. Yaga can be harsh, and besides the idea of someone else seeing her having sex with Nanami…
God, Shoko thinks suddenly, stopping abruptly with her eyes on a dangling sheathed sword, I’m going to have sex with Nanami.
“Is this too weird?” he asks behind her, like he’d read her mind or been having the same thoughts. She turns, shakes her head, and he watches her a moment as if he’s not sure he believes her, but then he closes the door behind him and locks it. In the sudden darkness she can hear water dripping slowly from one or the other of them. Probably Nanami; he had kept her a little drier after all.
“Maybe,” she replies, “but we’re here.”
Nanami nods. “How do you want to do this?”
“What, suddenly I have to decide?” Shoko hadn’t really expected that, had envisioned just getting to it. She knows Nanami as a practical, straightforward boy. “This was your idea.”
Nanami shrugs. It’s hard to see in the lack of light but she thinks he might be blushing again; Shoko likes the thought just as much as she did before out in the rain. “I was just thinking, since it’s your graduation and all…” He shrugs again, a kind of tell. “I thought it might be nice to do what you’d like.” His voice turns to that familiar, beloved deadpan, the one that drives Satoru crazy and makes Shoko laugh, makes her roll her eyes, makes Yaga trust him more than any of the upperclassmen. “Since I didn’t get you a gift.”
“All right, you make your point,” Shoko says, and she does laugh a little, even now. She looks around, warily; there are a lot of things hanging from ceiling beams, dangling from wall hangers, propped against corners that could kill them. She points to the stacked mats, trying not to think about how many feet have tread upon them, sweating. “Maybe… on those?”
Nanami looks grim, like he’s avoiding the same thoughts, but he nods. “I’ll turn my phone on,” he says, “for a little light.”
“You want to see all this?” Shoko gestures to her thoroughly unimpressive body. Satoru calls her skinny, Utahime pinches her cheek when she’s drunk enough and says her breasts are cute, Suguru had been interested in women and yet had never even seen her as one. Nanami doesn’t answer, just sets his screen to stay illuminated and props it, gingerly, on an empty space along one of the shelves. The mats really don’t look so bad in the surprisingly soft light of whatever image represents Nanami’s background, dimmer than a flashlight but warmer too by a little. Shoko climbs up, gamely, and Nanami puts a friendly palm to the small of her back to keep her steady.
She takes a breath in, lets it out with the sinking of his weight next to hers. This is Nanami, just Nanami, and the reminder is calming the way it had been anxiety-inducing moments before. Nanami is kind, and he’s not stupid the way Satoru is, and this is just something every kid does, wants to do. He’s even handsome, she thinks again, watching him strip his jacket off. The shirt underneath is damp too where he’d let it get wet to keep her warmer, and where it clings to his skin she can see it’s smooth underneath the fabric, appealing like a ripe piece of fruit shines in sunlight.
He’s looking at her too, though probably not thinking about the same things, Shoko has to assume. “What?” she asks, a little defensive. She suddenly feels strange in her own uniform and unbuttons her jacket too, kicks her shoes off over the side of the mats.
“I was just thinking,” Nanami explains, folding his legs lotus-style under him, “you look pretty.”
Shoko snorts at that. “Nanami,” she says, “it’s just me. You don’t have to get me all… we’re just doing this.”
“I thought I should say it.” He’s stubborn about things sometimes, Nanami. Shoko rolls her eyes. “Come here.”
The amusement bleeds out of her like dregs from a wrung sponge. Shoko listens, shuffling on her hands to Nanami’s side. She thinks for a moment about climbing into his lap where it’s presented to her, but that feels forward and a little too intimate, which is a stupid thing to be worried about but she is nevertheless. “How far have you gone before?” she asks instead. They aren’t touching anywhere yet but she can feel his physicality like a tingle on her skin — it could also be goosebumps in the chill of the evening, though. Maybe.
“Ah,” Nanami says, losing a little of that confidence in his embarrassment. “I mean… not very.”
“You’ve kissed though,” Shoko confirms, not even doubting it for a second, but Nanami cups his palm to the back of his neck. She can’t help it, stares a little, dubious. “I do not believe you.”
“Not recently.” It’s almost an argument and Shoko realizes she’s unintentionally touched a nerve, backs down accordingly, softens her gaze. “I think I know what I’m doing, though.”
Shoko smirks. He’s funny, up close. “Porn?”
Strangely it’s that which puts Nanami back on his feet, so to speak — he fixes her with that unimpressed look she likes so much and something about it makes her act on her initial impulse, crawling forward until she’s settled between his legs.
Instinct works for both of them — Nanami gets an arm around her waist, settling that wide hand at her back again, and she drapes her arms over his shoulders without letting herself think too much about it. “We’re doing this,” Nanami says, like he’s confirming it, and Shoko nods. “Is it okay if I kiss you?”
Shoko rolls her eyes. “Nanami,” she says, cognizant of how close they are, bodies touching where her ribs push forward at the arch in her back, “you can’t ask me about every single thing like that.”
“I’ll try.” Nanami moves with decisiveness, just the way he does sparring with Satoru, and Shoko almost laughs but then his mouth is on hers and the urge fades, quickly. Nanami doesn’t push his luck, no teeth, no tongue; his lips are parted, a little, head tilted so their noses slot alongside each other instead of bumping. Almost immediately she wants to back away from it — too close, too soft, Nanami’s arm tightening around her, but when Shoko pushes that urge down what follows is… good. Nanami’s mouth and his body are warm; she’s drawn to them naturally, like the tides to the moon, leaning into him more. He likes it too, she thinks, pulling her in, setting his back against an empty stretch of wall. When he leans his head back, Shoko follows, kisses him again, mouth parted just enough for their lips to slot together more thoroughly.
“Good, huh?” she asks, a moment or two later when they part for breath. Nanami has his arms folded tight around her waist now, and when he looks up to meet her eyes his are glassy, just a little. Shoko grins when he makes a little noise of assent. “Want to keep going?”
“You can’t ask me—” he starts, voice teasing, but Shoko groans and cuts him off, mouth open against his. She’s the first to try tongue, just a flick along Nanami’s bottom lip, but he makes a sound at the back of his throat and moves a little against her, snaking a hand up her back to rest between her shoulder blades, fingers curling a little in the thin fabric of her shirt.
He likes it enough to try himself, prodding the split seam of Shoko’s mouth with the tip of his tongue, and she opens further to him, letting her tongue brush his when he pushes — exploratory, curious — inside.
Nanami starts to feel hungry, pulling a little tighter at her, moving his mouth a little more against hers, and Shoko surfaces for air again with her breathing a little heavier than she’d expected. Nanami’s gaze hits her mouth, travels to her eyes slow and dazed like she’d just given him a beating instead of a kiss. She watches him, faces apart, as she moves her hands to the placket of his shirt and starts to work the buttons there open.
“Should we,” Nanami says, and his voice is low in his throat, sends a thrill through Shoko that feels better than she thought she’d have a chance to, “take it slow? Or do you want to…?”
“We can figure it out,” she replies, and her own tone sounds different, strange in her ears. “It’s not like we know what we’re doing. Besides the porn,” she teases, thinking it might lighten the mood a little with her fingers working Nanami’s second button open, but if anything it feels heavier, Nanami watching her, the grin on her face parting her mouth a little.
She doesn’t undo his shirt all the way, just far enough to get her hands under his collar, the curve where his neck turns into his shoulders. Nanami is strong, she knows that without having to see it like this, strong enough to hold her. His skin is warm under his clothes, still a little wet, clinging to him in spots like the wrapping on a piece of candy.
Shoko wets her lips. “You, uh,” she starts, then stops, shifts her hips in his lap. “Nanami, are you hard already?”
The spell snaps, though she still has her hands on him, with his face flushing red and his eyes losing that cast — he’s embarrassed in that Nanami way, gets stubborn about it immediately. “So what?” he asks, like he’s bickering with Satoru. “I’m not… not all the way.”
Shoko moves experimentally, trying to gauge him, but Nanami tightens his arms around her waist, holds her mostly still. “Come on,” she says, frowning at him, “isn’t that a good thing?”
“Not if you’re going to be rude about it.” He’s pouting, a little; Shoko finds it in herself to think it kind of cute.
“I was just surprised,” she explains, honestly. “Really. What I was going to say first was you look… good.”
He does, blond in the dim light like someones’s wet dream, damp clothes and mussed hair and strong arms. His eyes are softening again, too, mollified by Shoko’s backpedaling. “You too.” He unhooks one elbow from her and lifts his hand to brush some hair out of her eyes. “You’re good at this.”
“I could tell.” Again she means to poke a little fun at him, but when she grinds her hips down alongside the sentence it just makes the air feel hotter, closer, and Nanami’s fingers tighten in her hair where they’re lingering. Shoko feels suddenly like she’s wasting a colossal amount of time not kissing Nanami and she bends to rectify things.
Eventually, mouths moving careless together, she returns to undoing Nanami’s shirt. Shoko dawdles with it, letting her fingers understand the dip of Nanami’s sternum, the split of his ribcage, the fine hairs growing around his navel, hard to see with how light they are on his skin. She supposes she’ll have to see, eventually, have to be seen.
Nanami shrugs out of his shirt when she loosens the final button, not bothering to let go of her so it hangs on his elbows, tugs at the hem of her uniform top until it’s loose from the waistline of her skirt and lets his palms underneath it, up the expanse of her back, hesitant at the line of her bra. It’s nice, Shoko thinks, both of them touching each other like this, skin on skin, and she breaks the kiss again to dip her head down and press her lips to the smooth, vulnerable patch below Nanami’s ear.
“This really is good,” she murmurs, trailing her hands along his stomach. She feels lucky, strangely, thinks of every person they’ve ever met and how unequivocally jealous of her they would be. How many people would like to see Nanami undressed, all lean muscle and half-boy half-man. “You’ve really never done this with anyone else?”
Nanami shakes his head. There’s gooseflesh rising where her breath had hit his skin, and Shoko takes a moment to marvel at it all, the stretch unbroken from neck to collarbone all the way down to where his hipbones drop below the waistband of his uniform. It’s strange, like this, trying to reconcile the Nanami she knows with the one under her now, a Nanami whose virginity matters, whose body means something. His hands move, hesitant again, back to graze the clasp of her bra. “Should I…?” he asks, hooking one finger under the fabric, brushing the skin there. Shoko nods, trying not to leave any room for fear in her own mind. It’s just Nanami still, no matter how new this is; the feeling is still the same underneath all the novelty, the steadiness, the self-assuredness even if it’s smeared a little.
He doesn’t fumble with it, Shoko suspects not so much from experience as the deliberate approach he takes to every action. Her shirt is still buttoned but slowly, eyes on hers, Nanami moves one hand across the stretch of her back, around her ribs, pauses with just the tips of his fingers tracing the edge of what swell her breast has to speak of.
She’s surprised to find herself shivering a little at it, fine hair rising, and her mouth parts.
“I know you said not to ask about everything,” Nanami says, voice a little tight and still deep, “but it still feels like I should.”
“We’ll do it at the same time.” Shoko glances down at Nanami’s body, his chest where she’s kept her hands somewhat modestly focused on his shoulders, his ribs. It isn’t the first time she’s seen him without a shirt thanks to less-eventful beach trips in the last few years they’ve been at school together but for some reason she’s never noticed him like this before. Nanami’s nipples are hard in the cool air of the shed, pinker than she knows hers are thanks to that Danish side of his family, and she looks back up at him for a moment. He nods, moves his hand as she stretches hers out again.
She’s glad, after all, that Nanami hadn’t expected her to open her shirt all at once because as soon as he takes her breast in his hand, caught between her bra and her skin, Shoko feels terribly exposed. It’s like an x-ray the way Nanami’s hand feels, firming his grip up as she gasps, watching her while she looks away in half-shame. It’s almost retaliation, the thoughtless grope over Nanami’s left pectoral, that nipple that casts a tiny shadow of its own in the dim light, his reciprocal inhale making her more confident, arching her back into his palm.
“Utahime,” Shoko says, panting, and Nanami looks up at her, cheekbones smudged with red, hand freezing on her breast like he’s afraid of something, “Utahime says they’re small.”
Nanami shakes his head, stupid with it, rubs two fingers over Shoko’s nipple like he’s soothing her. “No,” he says, boyish, “no, you feel good.”
Nanami too feels good, Shoko thinks, warm and alive and reactive to her. It might be a full minute of them just clutching at each other, learning a new way to understand a friend they’ve had for years, but as both of them somehow, unspoken, move to get at the mirrored image of the flesh under them, Shoko moves in to kiss him again.
This is good, she thinks, pushing her breasts into both of Nanami’s hands, her tongue into his open and heated mouth. If it’s this good with someone she likes, without any further entanglement, she can see why Satoru is the way he is, why people spend their lives looking for that one connection. “You want to look?” she pants into Nanami’s mouth. “Feels unfair if it’s just you.”
“Yeah.” He molds his palm to her breast, tightens and loosens and Shoko leans again into it. “Yes, if it’s okay.”
“Nanami,” she says, pulling back just enough to start unbuttoning her shirt, watching the way his pupils swallow the light around them, “just because we haven’t done this before doesn’t mean we have to be scared about it.”
“I know,” he agrees, watching the practical movement of her hands, the way her bra hangs still in front of her, one loose layer of protection between her and those eyes that don’t miss a thing. “I know, sorry. I really do want this to be good for you.”
Shoko stills then, with Nanami’s hands dropped a little to her ribs, with his cheeks shaded a little, with his expression open and earnest. He’s sweet, she thinks. “You’re sweet,” she says, and kisses that blush, shrugs out of her shirt where it falls down her back and then rolls her shoulders forward. There’s nothing for it now, and Nanami doesn’t do her the disservice of being shy.
“See?” he murmurs, reaching for her breasts again with barely enough time for her to toss her bra aside; he’s out of his shirt now too so the amount of their skin that meets is just short of too much. “You’re good.”
Looking back, Shoko might say this is the point where the strangeness begins to truly fade, to leave just two people looking for something in each other instead of two friends changing how they understand the emotional climate around them. Nanami doesn’t look up to ask permission, spoken or otherwise, as he leans forward, fits his mouth to her left breast and sucks.
The sound that escapes Shoko could be embarrassing, certainly would be if Nanami had done anything but redouble his efforts, paint his tongue flat against her nipple twice before moving to her other breast. Shoko doesn’t feel helpless, not especially, but she leaves herself to him for a moment, indolently pinching his chest in return, letting their breathing score the scene. Sweet, she thinks again when he kisses her just to the right of her nipple, quick and firm, and between his hands and his mouth Nanami is no longer the only one aroused.
“I should,” Shoko pants, Nanami still mouthing at her breast like he can’t get enough of it, “I should get my tights off.”
She’s actually dreading it, a little, unshaven legs where she hadn’t expected to have to show them, the chill of the air around them not quite enough to shrug off, but it’s a practicality and further it’s a measure of nudity that doesn’t scare her. Nanami nods, lets go of her to let her shuffle backwards and sit on her own ass, hiking her hands under her skirt uneventfully. “Right,” he says, and his fingers go to his own waistband. Shoko watches him, shucking her tights and forgetting suddenly any concerns she has with her own body as Nanami shows her more of his.
It’s abrupt and not necessarily welcome, but Shoko suddenly thinks of how she’ll be able to lord it over Satoru, the way she knows what Nanami has under that uniform that makes him look just like everyone else at the school. She can’t tear her eyes away from the way his dark briefs cling to him, how they expose the shape of him, even as she tosses her tights to the side. Nanami’s legs look long, sinewy but youthful, smooth in the light…
The light that suddenly winks out. For a moment there’s just their breath in the dark, the knowledge that unseen they’re both almost naked. “Shit,” Nanami says. Shoko doesn’t hear him move. “My battery must have died.”
“I left my phone in the dorm.” She tries to laugh, a little. “Hope you’ve seen your fill, I guess.”
There’s another second or two of quiet, then shuffling. She feels rather than actually sees anything about the way Nanami moves toward her. “Do you want to stop?” he asks, and this surprises her — pleasantly. “It might be… different like this.”
“It’s okay,” Shoko replies, and maybe it will be or maybe it won’t but she doesn’t want to stop, half-naked and hidden in the dark from everything but Nanami’s hands when they’ll be back on her. “We’re this far, right?
“It is a little cold without my pants on,” agrees Nanami, and Shoko laughs, reaches for him blindly in the dark and thinks she lands on one bicep, one shoulder. She seizes on them with the intent of reeling him in but Nanami holds himself firm.
Instead, his hands seek her out where her legs are stretched flat to the mat, one at each ankle. His fingers are loose, traveling slowly up her calves, tracing the shape of her knees. She’s gripping him, panting in the darkness, and she suddenly hopes he’s hard still, that she’s not the only one feeling how she is, wet between her legs. “I can tell why you’re so fast,” Nanami says, quietly. It’s strange in a good way, not seeing his face, like his voice might belong to someone else but she’s glad it doesn’t. “Your legs feel strong.”
“You’ve never looked?” she asks, glutton for punishment.
“I did,” he replies. One index finger still circles her right kneecap, the other hand stilled below her left at the join with her shin. “Tonight I did.”
“Keep going,” says Shoko, blurts it out really. “Further.”
Nanami obliges her, sliding those hands up her thighs. They feel larger there, somehow, the way they span so much of the circumference, the way his fingers pause infinitesimally at the hem of her skirt before continuing, pushing the fabric up with the movement, the sound of his body shifting and the feel of him settling between her legs where she lifts them to ease the slow progression of her nudity. She doesn’t feel as exposed somehow with the light off.
“Have you ever done this before?” Nanami asks, then rephrases. It’s a little hard to listen to him with the way his hands still feel warm against the skin of her thighs, just shy of the line of her underwear where it cuts at the crease of her pelvis. If he’s bothered by the feeling of the hair she can feel prickling there he’s not letting it on. “How far have you gone before?”
Shoko shrugs, invisible and mostly naked in the darkness. The rain is still coming down above them, almost thunderous on the roof of the shed. “I mean, with myself I’ve obviously… I’ve touched myself.”
“Me too,” he says, quickly, like it’s tripping on his tongue. Shoko hadn’t assumed he’d be so innocent but she supposes it’s natural to want to defend against the allegation anyway. “I mean with someone else. You don’t have to be nervous,” adds Nanami, and from anyone else it might be condescending but he somehow makes it sound considerate. “You know whatever you have done it’s more than me.”
“Well, we’re already further than I’ve gotten if that’s helpful. Just get on with it.”
“Just want to know how out of my depth I am.” Nanami’s voice shakes a little, just that little bit, and his hands are still on her thighs.
“You’re fine,” Shoko reassures him, shuffling a little, hands at her own waistband. “We’re both fine. I’ll take these off.”
She knows he feels the slide of her briefs, down her legs and leaving her cunt wet and exposed at least physically in the night around them, but he doesn’t say anything. Without being able to see Nanami’s expression she’s not sure where they stand anymore, but her hands brush his on the way to stripping off her underwear and it doesn’t feel bad — maybe it even feels good. She doesn’t even have to worry so much about what her face looks like, what she’s giving away in her expression.
“Tell me what to do.” Nanami’s voice is almost desperate, certainly pleading which for him is a lot. “Tell me what you want.”
“You know what to do,” Shoko replies, “just touch me. Keep touching me.”
The idea of walking him through it, guiding Nanami around a two-person version of her masturbation habits, isn’t completely without appeal, but then Nanami’s moving again, slower even than before. His fingertips grace the hinge where her legs meet her hips, and then she hears his body shift in the dark and his mouth is pressed to the inside of her right thigh, right by his own thumb where it’s about halfway up its length.
“Shit.” The curse is on an inhale as Nanami increases the pressure of his mouth, parts his lips to suck a bruise there, under where the hem of her skirt will fall. It’s the ideal balance of pleasure and practicality, and she almost has to laugh at how perfectly Nanami this all is, him doing all the work, him making all the right decisions. With the encouragement of her breath, or maybe the squirming of her hips under the weight of his hands, Nanami moves, lips up her thigh, changing up the pressure each time he hits a new spot so she never knows what to expect.
“Lay back,” Nanami says, says it right into Shoko’s skin, and she does, back onto her elbows as if there’s any way to see clearly what he’s doing. Still, it makes her feel a little more in control.
She can feel his breath on her cunt, his fingers slowly brushing over the fold of her legs into her groin, and she groans. “Nanami,” she says, and those hands twitch against her, bad, “come on.”
“Tell me,” he replies, voice strained, “if I do something wrong.”
She doesn’t bother explaining there’s no wrong in the darkness of this shed with the rain all around them, doesn’t think she could when he finally, exploratory, rubs a finger over her clit. It feels good, just as good as when she’s on her own, and she lets her head drop back, looking up at the dark expanse where the roof is.
“Oh,” Nanami says, and he sounds surprised, “oh, you…”
Shoko starts a sound like What that ends in something closer to a moan as he strokes her again, his breath hitting her, chilling her skin in stark contrast to the heat roiling in her stomach, slowly building. He sets a rhythm of his own with his fingers, rubbing smoothly, more confident. “I’m just glad it’s good,” he explains. “I didn’t know if you… well.”
“Should I…?” Shoko doesn’t finish the sentence, shifts her weight to one elbow and reaches for Nanami. She catches his hair first, bent between her legs, and tightens her fingers there when he tries an experimental angle of his fingers, split around her clit.
“It’s okay.” His voice is low and tight, and Shoko pulls, exploratory at his hair again; his movement stutters, the hand loose on her thigh gripping closer. “Ieiri…”
Nanami shifts again, she can hear it in the dark, the rain and their breathing and the sounds of their skin a quiet soundtrack. His hand moves, dropping from her clit lower, slicking his fingers up with her before he pauses, just a second, and Shoko nods like he’s asking her something, like there’s any way he could see her.
She lets out a sound when his fingers penetrate her, two all at once, half exhale half moan. There’s no pain, her legs falling, rucking her skirt further up her waist, but Nanami asks if she’s all right anyway. She’d made fun of him a little, earlier, but it’s good to hear his voice, humanizing; yeah, she says, I’m good, I’m fine, shit. She says all that, breathless.
“Can I,” Nanami asks, when the slick movement of his fingers is filling the air with its sound, when Shoko’s breathing is uneven and deep and heavy, a moan on every exhale, “can I use my mouth?”
Shoko wonders, once again, how the hell this is Nanami’s first time doing this, how he knows so well what to do, how no innocent girl had seen Nanami out, en route to a mission or on an errand for Satoru or whatever else he fills his schedule with away from the school grounds, and decided to make his first time hers. Nanami is in some ways ideal for this, the taking of something from someone that they’ll never get back; Shoko barely feels he’s taking anything, really, he’s giving her what he has.
“Are you seriously asking?” she asks, disbelieving, strung out on the feeling of Nanami’s fingers curling inside her, the way she wants more, three, four if he’ll let her be greedy. “Nanami, shit, it’s like I made you up in my head.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you can use your mouth.” Shoko grits her teeth against whatever sound is about to be set free, already on edge with the feeling of his breath against her, his skin inside her, the heat building and building from her gut and spreading.
It doesn’t work.
Nanami bends further over her; Shoko can feel it rather than see it in the darkness, although her eyes are starting to adjust enough to see him like a black shape on a black background. He holds still for a moment, fingers curved inside her, and Shoko grinds her hips down just a little, feeling him inside her, feeling his exhale on her.
“Nanami,” she forces out, “get—”
“Sorry,” he says, hasty, and that’s when her strategy fails. It shouldn’t feel so new, so good, the way the friend she’s had for nearly three years plants his tender mouth against her clit, open and warm and followed immediately, avaricious, by a sweep of his tongue.
Shoko moans, and loud; she thinks Nanami might too, if it’s not too egotistical to even consider the possibility. He takes to it all like a natural after a few mistimed movements with his fingers; it’s not even a minute before he’s set a rhythm, fingers, tongue, Shoko grinding down into it all.
It’s more sudden than it should be amidst the sounds they’re making, then, the sharp shine of a rope pulled tight, drawn down to the core of her. “Fuck,” she moans, “shit, Nanami, I…”
Nanami definitely makes a sound at that, she feels it against the slick skin of her cunt, vibrations right to her nerves. He snakes the hand on her thigh blindly up her body to find her breast, cup it in his palm, and maybe it’s the combination of stimulation but Shoko tosses her head back, arches her back into a last roll of her hips, and comes.
Nanami is ravenous for her pleasure, working his mouth and fingers even quicker, stretching her orgasm out until she’s practically pushing him off of her with hands on his shoulders, flipping their positions to crawl over him and kiss him again, tasting herself heady on his tongue.
“How the fuck,” she asks, when she needs to breathe again, hands on autopilot down Nanami’s body, mapping him in the dark — a scar under one nipple she’s willing to bet Satoru has dreamed about, a dip between two ribs just a little more pronounced than the others thanks to uneven application of training, a rough patch of skin to one side of his spine where he’d been burned, sometime before coming to the school, an open book in a language none of them have been allowed to read. “How the fuck are you so good at this?”
“I’m glad,” he says, mouth brushing her nipple with every word, attached to her breast like he needs it to live, “I’m glad it’s good.”
“Well,” says Shoko, a little grouchy, “you make me want to put my back into it.” She’s still wet, more so even, skirt still hitched around her waist. Their bodies intersect at so many places she’s not even sure how to tell them apart. “How do you want to do it?”
“Hmm.” Nanami is quiet against her, licking at her breast, leaving a stripe of spit that cools and leaves goosebumps in its wake. It’s making her crazy but she doesn’t want to let it on just yet, so she holds still, lets him. “Most of the porn I’ve seen is missionary.”
She laughs at that, throaty and a little undercut by the way she’s still touching him all over. “Of course it is,” she agrees. “Well? Is that what you want?”
“It looks nice.” Nanami says it a little shyly, the first real hesitation or coyness since they started. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Maybe I should touch you first.” Shoko thinks her legs are shaking where she’s knelt over him still. “After you did all that.”
“I don’t mind,” Nanami says. His hands map the trembling in her thighs, over the outside of her hips, the bunching of her skirt at her waist. The feeling of his fingers between her skin and the fabric is like a live wire against her and she tries to breathe steadily. “It’s fine if you don’t want to.”
That makes her want it more, the consideration, the fact that it’s such a Nanami thing to indulge in what he has without asking for anything else. “Let me sit,” she says, finding her way between Nanami’s legs so he has to spread them. He’s still in his briefs; her hands hit the edge at his hips when she steadies herself. She feels somehow more naked like this, near him.
“Should I take these off?” he asks. He’s holding her around the waist, loose, close.
“Not yet,” says Shoko, curling her fingers in his waistband, feeling the elastic dig in, “more like high school this way.”
Nanami laughs, just a little, and then he cuts himself off when Shoko slips her hand into his underwear, groping until her palm wraps thoroughly around his cock. The fabric is damp, a little, spread around the top where it’s straining against a seam. Nanami is what she expected, because of course he is, perfect all the way from head to toe to make up for the impenetrable surface of his personality. Like I made it through to him, she thinks, and now I get my reward.
His cock is thick, long but not too long, hard to tell the shape completely with how it’s pinned down to his body, but she strokes it and it feels solid. He’s still hard, she guesses completely; of course he’d have stamina, of course he’d have durability, Shoko’s sparred with him before when forced and felt how strong he is.
“Ah,” he pants, when her thumb catches experimentally on the ridge of the head below his foreskin. It’s a vulnerable thing of a noise, winsome, and Shoko palms him a little tighter, caught in the fabric of his briefs. “It’s good, you feel good…”
“And you’re not even fucking me yet.” It’s easy, so easy, to be in control now, when his fingers loop over her ribs and his cock is jumping against her hand. Shoko doesn’t begrudge him, not a bit, when he leans forward again blind in the dark to latch his mouth onto a nipple, sucking hungry. “Is it like this when you do it?”
“To myself?” More words against her breast, her sternum as he mouths across her skin. “Slower, maybe.” She does, accordingly, and he sighs. Her nipples feel stiff as death, her cunt wet all over again listening to Nanami, talking to him. “Good, Ieiri.”
Something flares a little in her at that, low in her stomach, back behind her navel. “What else?” she asks, breathy. “What else do you do?”
“Mmm.” It’s all she gets for a while, strokes him slow and even, pulls his foreskin back when she’s bold enough to increase her grip — that nets her a moan, sweet and low and reverberating through her. It’s strange, she thinks later, coherent, strange how making Nanami feel like this, react like this, is almost as good as what he’d done for her. “Can you… the tip…”
She nods, hurried, presses a thoughtless and pointless kiss to Nanami’s temple, maybe just because it’s the closest thing to her mouth. She stays close as she does what he’d asked, in a way, sweeping her thumb over the slit of his cock. Nanami exhales, sharp and heavy; precome beads there like pearls, sticky and slick on her thumb where she smears it against him.
“Ready?” she asks, because touching him is good but she’s sure it could be better. “You’ll probably have to get naked for this.”
“Yes,” Nanami says, without really moving, but when Shoko pulls her hand away he lets go of her waist, sits back a little, breathing heavy. “On your back.”
She’s sure it’s a question but Shoko feels it like an order, and onto her back she goes. She hears the shuffling of Nanami out of his briefs, though the sound of them hitting the mat is lost in the rain still falling on the roof. It’s peaceful, almost, though her heart is beating something fierce in her chest.
“Ieiri,” he says again, the name he’s said a hundred times, two hundred maybe, more when she’s not there, defending her to Satoru’s playful vindictiveness. The familiar, the unfamiliar, blend together as she takes another breath, knees knocked together in sudden and strange self-consciousness. The hand that had stroked Nanami’s cock feels heavier than the other, like he’d left something clasped in her palm. His fingers in the dark smooth over her calf from where it hits her ankle, sliding up to spread her legs, touch her cunt as he settles between her hips like he can’t help it. His hand turns exploratory, mapping her, but she still feels the muscles of her thighs tensing, her insides drawing tight. “This is okay still?”
She glares, at the ceiling of the shed in the dark, but he apologizes before she can even protest. Nanami sets his knees against the back of her thighs, pulls her calves to bend around his hips, and for uncertainty of what else to do she lets her feet hang held in the air, inches from the mat. It’s intimate, she thinks. She and Nanami are pushing the edges of their friendship even now and it’s holding, they’re holding.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she says, when he hesitates again, one hand by what feels like her ribs, the other on her hip, moving in aimless circles. “Nanami, get inside me.”
She’s not sure what kind of reaction she expects when she says it — maybe none at all, if she’d been asked — but he laughs and it’s better than anything she would have known to want. It’s throaty and low and she laughs too for a minute with the joy of it, but then Nanami shifts again.
The gasp when he rubs the head of his cock against her, up and down the length of her cunt to slick the tip or just for the pleasure of feeling what he’s done to her, is instinctual, unstoppable. Nanami too makes a sound, deep below his hyoid, and then like he can’t even help it he slips his cock inside her, pushes it in all at once and then stills.
It’s like a spear, buried in her to her lungs, and Shoko pants with it. It’s nothing like her fingers, nothing even like Nanami’s, thicker and more pressing. It feels like her cunt is pulling him down, hand over fist, until he’s sure to pierce whatever is at the very center of her. Drawing her arm over her eyes, she groans.
“I…” Nanami pauses, breathes, that hand on her hip tight as fate. “Can I kiss you?”
“You might have to,” she says, and her voice shakes a little, thin like a thread near snapping. “Nanami, come here.”
He does, beautifully, bends his body over hers and fits their chests, their mouths together. His tongue goes in easily, simply, like there’s nothing else to do about it. She moans into him, sharing air, and he responds in kind like a new language they’re speaking to each other, hands snaking into his hair and holding on tight. Nanami shivers at the pulling, grinds his hips unconscious against hers, and Christ he’s big, Christ he’s inside her, all that cock she’d held in her hand stretching her to the root.
“You can move,” she says when she has the space to, Nanami’s hands curled almost tender by her neck, the swell of her rib cage. Really she’s not sure he can but they can’t just stay here like this permanently. “When you want.”
He kisses her again, hot and deep and nodding against her face so their noses brush, and then he pulls back, just at the hips, carefully. He doesn’t pull out all the way, not even close, but she still groans — the ridge at the head of his cock is everywhere, pressing against every centimeter it touches. Nanami stills, freezes really, but suddenly Shoko knows what to do with her feet and it’s this: to lock her ankles each across the other, and to dig her heel into the small of Nanami’s back where it’s thick with tension, and to pull him back to her.
“Do you want to stop?” she asks, like she knows the answer, and she does when Nanami shakes his head and pushes all the way in again.
The rhythm he hits is quick, thorough; Shoko imagines for a moment he’s activating his technique again and again to find the ideal ratio line to fuck her at. But it’s too good, too potent to be the result of a calculation. Nanami breathes heavy and flattering above her for a minute, the shifting of their skin a play against the background of the rain over their heads.
Then, he speaks. “Ieiri,” he says, and she opens her mouth to reply but instead a little, unintended change in the angle they’re in brushes his cock over what women’s magazines say is her g-spot and so all that leaves her is a moan. He drinks it in, strange and savoring like you would a drink you’ll never try again, and then he speaks again. “Ieiri, God, you feel so good.”
“You,” she replies, gasps it when that ridge runs through her again and over again, “you too. Nanami, fuck, you too.” They’ll forget their earnestness in the cold light of day, when they’re friends once again and nothing more, but in the moment Shoko almost feels like she could cry with it.
She doesn’t, ultimately; nothing but good as they melt together, as Nanami’s hips get sloppy and sensual and their breathing is in sync. He kisses her, or she leans up to kiss him, hands all across each other’s bodies like eyes in the dark. Eventually she feels it building again, that heat from before like the tension of a wave about to break, and she arches up into him more, raises her hips higher to meet him on his way down into her.
“Nanami,” she says, and his mouth is never far away, licking at her neck, careful not to leave a mark someone could see and comment on, make fun of her about, “Nanami, fuck, how—”
“Me too,” he says, even though she hadn’t gotten there yet, hadn’t been able to get there, and even with the layers built on top of it like a pile of blocks about to come crashing down the connection is still there, the friendship compiled through years of sharing time with each other and picking each other over anyone else almost always. “How… where should I…”
“Ah.” Shoko is moaning every other breath, and they should have had this conversation earlier, and Nanami feels so good. “Ah, hold on, not yet. Want it with you inside.”
Nanami groans and the strain of it impresses upon her how much she’s asking, but it’s her graduation and she won’t shy away from it. He nods, the tip of his nose brushing it into her neck, and he strokes into her again and again and firm and warm and deep at that good and better angle.
Shoko reaches down between her legs, finding her clit, rubbing it in time with Nanami’s hips, brushing his cock with the tips of her fingers with his movements and Nanami moans, loud above her. “Fuck,” he says through what sounds like gritted teeth, “fuck, Ieiri, I’m not going to last.”
“You can,” she tries to say, not sure how successful she is with it, and then suddenly that line behind her navel is tugged hard and it’s over, legs shaking, head back against the mat, one of Nanami’s hands clutched so tightly at her hip below the waistband of her skirt that she thinks it could bruise.
“Shit, Ieiri, tell me now,” he warns her, aftershocking her with the pull out of her completely, and then she’s pushing herself up on trembling arms and thinking about turnabout as fair play, and she’s saying it.
“In my mouth.” Nanami curses again, indistinct, potent palm at the back of her head, and she opens up for him.
It’s done before it even really begins; her mouth is barely closed around him, barely sought out in the dark before he’s coming. Once again he doesn’t test their boundaries, doesn’t try to force his cock in any farther than it is, just rocks the head against her tongue with almost gentleness, and it isn’t that she expected Nanami to be worse than the average but it isn’t bad, semen slick and sticky, sliding down her throat as she swallows around him.
He pulls out when there’s nothing left to spend, and Shoko almost misses the sound of him dropping with the noise of her own fall onto her back, letting her arms give up the ghost of holding her weight. The rain still falls above them; their breathing slows eventually so as not to be heard above the sound of it.
“Damn.” Nanami breaks the quiet first. Shoko lolls her head toward the sound of his voice, hopes it’s answer enough. “It’s going to be hard to get dressed again.”
She laughs at that, natural, tired. It is hard, fumbling in the dark, trying to put something back on and realizing it isn’t her shirt, it’s Nanami’s, him passing her tights to her when he comes across them first. He offers to find the door, remembers the layout well enough that he’s not worried about the tools around them, and when they’re both dressed enough with jackets still unbuttoned he opens it, lets the light in from outside.
Shoko expects him, somehow, to look different, but in the wet luminescence he looks like Nanami, hair a little disheveled, eyes kind, mouth smiling. Maybe she looks different, she thinks. It’s uncomfortable, shuffling off the mats, still wet between her legs where Nanami had been, so much of him, but she does it, knees shaking a little as she stands.
“Cold?” he asks, and he’s already pulling at his jacket, making room for her inside it. It’s nice; it’s just like before, before they’d had sex and before Shoko had had to wonder whether things would change.
“That or I just came twice in ten minutes,” she says, and Nanami snorts, elbows her a little with it, and she exhales. She can see her breath now, just a little, on their way through the rain. “Would it be weird if I smoked?”
They end up back where they started, outside the party where the window is a little dimmer now. Shoko lights a cigarette, easy, blows smoke up into Nanami’s face when he says he doesn’t want one and he laughs. Next to each other, backs to the courtyard and the railing behind them again, it’s good still. Nanami doesn’t even make her talk about it, letting her speculate instead about what Satoru’s been doing, what the chances are that they won’t even see him tonight. Maybe he’ll be crying over Suguru’s absence, she thinks. Maybe she will be.
“Yaga’s making me take the licensure exam,” Shoko says, after a while, when it feels right to turn back toward the reason they’re here at all. “Like I don’t already have more experience than anyone I’ll be sitting with.”
“Is it hard?” Nanami asks, hands easy in his pockets. “Knowing the right way to use your technique in the moment.”
“It used to be.” Back when her own skinned knee could turn into an odyssey of exploration, not usually a good one. Looking back, Shoko is sure her parents had to endure some uncomfortable attention at hospitals and urgent care clinics, explaining the after-images of their daughter’s original injuries as best they could. “But now it’s like breathing. I should just get right to work — it’s not like Yaga won’t make me clean up his messes with or without a fancy piece of paper in the infirmary with my name on it.”
He shrugs and she pulls another nicotine lungful. “If they’re still paying you it’s probably all the same.”
“You’re so pragmatic.” It’s not really a criticism but she tries to make it sound like one, but she doesn’t think she fools Nanami by the way the corner of his mouth turns up a little. “So what’s your grand plan, then, when this is all done? You already lost your virginity so you’ve got a leg up over me anyway.”
“In more ways than one,” Nanami offers, deadpan, and she almost chokes on the inhale. He’s quiet when he speaks again though, serious. “I think… I think I’m going to leave.”
Shoko lets herself be shocked, eyebrows raised, watching him in the faded light of the evening. If this is a joke his face doesn’t show it. “Leave,” she repeats, like it might be a word in another language with another meaning. Danish, maybe. But Nanami just nods.
“I don’t think I can do it,” he explains, and the way the words fall out of his mouth like a bursting pipe makes her think this is maybe the first time he’s ever spoken about the subject to another person. “I still… I think about Yu every day, the way I let him down. Imagine who might be next, who I won’t be able to help. And look at Yaga, and Iori, and Mei — they’re always tired, always going from one thing to the next. One time I asked Yaga what his favorite book was and he looked at me like I’d just grown a second head.”
“What’s your favorite book?” she asks.
Nanami shrugs. “I don’t know. And that’s the point.” He suddenly cuts himself off, ducks his face a little like he’s shy. “I… I’ve thought about it a little. I want to work, hard if I have to. Make money until I can retire somewhere. Maybe…” Shoko had just had Nanami inside her, had seen him nearly fully naked in the light of a cell phone, and yet suddenly she understands that this is the most intimate moment they’ve shared all evening. “Maybe I’ll go to Malaysia.”
Shoko watches Nanami for a moment, one that stretches in the quieting drizzle still watering the earth around them. She watches the boy who had literally offered himself up to her, had solved her problem with his body, had thought of her first and only to the point of deprioritizing his own desire, and she tries to picture him turning his back on this. She pictures him on a beach somewhere with sunglasses on and a magazine in his hands, crows feet around his eyes settling in with an age they don’t commonly reach in this profession. She doesn’t hate the image but she thinks, really, that he would.
“You know, Nanami,” she says, flicking her cigarette into the dark where it lands somewhere, invisible when the embers quench in the dampness of the grass, “I really hope you do.”