Chapter Text
The cursor was trembling on the blank page before him again, wobbling between the end of the word and the blank space of his unfinished sentence. Geto Suguru blinked at it slowly, timing the swoop of his eyelids so that he might make the cursor disappear entirely. The sentence had been unfinished for a month.
Leo could recite the history of a shattered vase from memory, but he couldn't remember the last time he had felt
The sentence was in limbo, and Geto wondered blankly if it would be effective to add a full stop and rob his protagonist of any feelings at all. Maybe that was trite. He used to know for sure, but his instincts were clouded these days.
It was probably because of the thing that Callie had said to him.
He was longing for a distraction that was not of his own making. He glanced at his phone, scattered amongst notebooks and dirty coffee mugs on the desk. Even Callie wasn’t nagging him for chapters. Her boss was probably breathing down her neck for some kind of progress. Naturally, she had assumed that Geto’s lagging was a kind of obstinance that was ultimately about her. Maybe she was right.
Maybe he’d just lost his touch.
The relief almost made Geto exhale when the discarded phone illuminated with a new notification — a text. Even from an angle, he could tell from the miniaturised profile picture that it was Gojo. Geto had the decency to pause, letting his eyes wander over the stalled page of writing, across the desk and out the window of the lake house to the lake itself. The hazy, late afternoon sun was glimmering over the water at the end of the pier, muddling the shadows of the encroaching trees at the shoreline. The scene was romantic, and dreamy — it should have provoked the senses but it didn’t in the way he had hoped it would.
Geto picked up his phone.
Satoru: wanna get dinner in the city? Utahime is keen :)
Geto experienced the sucking, tiring feeling of not wanting to be anywhere at all. The thought of facing an evening of the cursor wobbling on the page in his half-lit study, getting morose and high off cheap weed, eating in silence, running on the treadmill until his lungs burned, masturbating in the shower and going to bed anywhere in his house but his bedroom was just tiresome to contemplate. But the notion of a fancy dinner, facing Gojo’s high energy alongside Utahime’s careful questions about the novel and getting dressed properly seemed almost insurmountable. He decided he’d let his friends determine his fate.
Suguru: You’d have to fetch me
Gojo didn’t flicker.
Satoru: Fine.
Satoru: Buy a fucking car, man
Geto smiled at his phone, despite himself, but then raked it off his face with a rough hand before the smile started to feel stale. His latest advance from the publishers certainly wouldn’t stretch to a new car after he’d closed the deal on the lakehouse, but that wasn’t truly the reason he didn’t want one. He sat for a moment, watching the water, thinking about moats, before he pushed his chair back sharply and stood.
He needed to shower. Gojo would be there sooner than most people, driving too fast down wooded roads and somehow always getting away with it. As Geto let the hot water of the shower fizz down the drain, he smiled another ironic smile, thinking of the ways the two of them used to be the same.
“You’re not ready?”
Gojo was grinning, peering around Geto’s kitchen over his sunglasses and ruffling his hair. He yanked open the fridge, took out a soda and kicked the door shut with the heel of a designer shoe. Geto shrugged, smiling amiably and distractedly at his oldest friend, as he ruffled the towel over his damp hair.
“Shouldn’t be long.”
He was only half-dressed, too. Gojo would never actually be impatient with him, but his coiled restlessness could give that impression. Geto could tell Gojo was excited about the evening ahead. Instead of asking about it, Geto pulled a black shirt over his head, tucking the chain around his neck into it.
They’d kept each other waiting plenty of times over the years, laughing dryly at the various misguided, amorous pursuits that had been the cause. Gojo had not seemed to notice that, for months now, Geto was further behind the pace than normal.
“Is Utahime meeting us there?” Geto asked vaguely, watching as Gojo ate a slice of plain bread like a hungry teenage boy.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, she said she’d drive herself because she had to teach a class or something at the art college. Shoko’s on call, so she’s not coming. Nanami is at the office.”
Geto nodded slowly, sitting down on the slumping leather couch to lace his shoes, rolling his shoulders and starting to feel a strange discomfort come over him once he noticed how Gojo did not react to the inclusion of Utahime in their party with any particular interest. He could almost see the scene play out now—Gojo’s teasing of Utahime, his abrasive flirting, her prickly temper and her gentle disappointment when his attention faded away from her towards someone else. Geto knew he probably wasn’t supposed to know about that soft, sad look that lowered Utahime’s eyelashes and tugged at one corner of her mouth.
But it haunted Geto in a benign, uncomfortable way.
Geto watched Gojo find something else half-stale to eat, wondering if Gojo ever noticed.
“How’s the writing going?” Gojo asked through a mouthful of potato crisps. “You almost finished?”
Geto snorted softly as he raked his damp hair back from his face, twisting it up and tying it.
“It’s not going,” he said amiably. “I haven’t written anything in a month. I’m blocked. I’m a cliché.”
Gojo chewed thoughtfully, only the slight shadow of confusion in his expression.
“Huh,” he mumbled, licking salt off his lips. “Are you still fucking your editor?”
Geto’s eyes snapped up to Gojo, wondering if he should be furious with him for this callousness. Or maybe Geto was too desperate to elevate the thing with Callie to the level of a tragic love affair in order to justify the blow it had dealt to his confidence.
Fucking his editor.
Was that the flippant way to describe what he and Callie had been? At the time, Geto hadn’t considered it an earth-shattering dalliance. Neither of them had said anything like the word ‘love’ when he’d pursued her with his usual reserved, detached attention and she’d caved in the face of it. Nothing between them was committed or handed over warmly. It was casual, breathless, pleasurable and guarded.
And yet, perhaps it had broken him somehow? Had he somehow loved her and didn’t notice? He wasn’t even heartbroken now.
He was just numb.
“Nope,” Geto answered, realising he’d find being offended to be tiresome too. “That ended a while ago.”
“Maybe that’s the problem?” Gojo grinned, flopping down opposite Geto in a fancy armchair the lakehouse’s previous owners had left behind. “Maybe you need to fuck someone?”
Geto smiled mildly, finding this slightly more irritating than the mention of Callie. But he knew better than to let Gojo know he was irritating.
“How do you know I haven’t fucked anyone since?” Geto challenged in a placid murmur, smiling a little wryly.
Gojo raised his eyebrows. “Have you?”
Geto sighed, rubbing his fingertips over his eyebrow as he tried to quell a feeling he didn’t like.
“I can’t remember specifics. Probably. The timeline is weird. I’ve been preoccupied with the whole lack of progress thing.”
He hadn’t noticed himself that the last person who’d kissed him and opened their arms and their body to him had been so long ago.
Gojo put up his hands, a non-committal shrug. “Well, then, maybe I’m right. You need to get your blood pumping a bit. Everyone knows that sexuality sparks creativity.”
Geto smirked, slowly shaking his head in despair of the diatribe that he knew was coming when Gojo got into a gallop.
“Everyone knows that, huh?”
“Yes, Renoir said, ‘I paint with my dick’ or something,” Gojo said smugly, slouching down and eating more stale crisps. “You should write with your dick.”
“I wonder how many words a minute I could get,” Geto mused, stooping to tie his other shoe.
Gojo munched pensively, tipping his head from side to side as if he were allowing a thought to roll around in his mind. He swallowed, gazing more intently at Geto.
“I didn’t realise the nonstarter with your editor had made you so morbid,” he observed.
Geto sighed, remembering Callie’s long limbs linked with his in an unmade bed. He remembered her bobbed, dark hair slicked in a taper to the back of her neck when she got out of the shower. He’d thought that was charming. Maybe she was some kind of catalyst for him, but he hadn’t fully noticed.
Maybe she stamped it all out in one conversation.
“I didn’t realise it either, I guess,” Geto mused with a shrug. “I’m not sure that it did.”
“Then give it a try,” Gojo grinned, licking his fingers and scrunching up the packet of crisps into a shape it wouldn’t hold. “Try having some nasty sex and see if it works.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Geto sighed, standing up. “Let’s go.”
Gojo was wrong, of course, and Geto knew that. It wasn’t sex that drove creative impulse. It was longing.
As they drove too fast into the city, trees whispering past, he wondered why he couldn’t feel it.
Utahime ran a little late, which was a little out of character for her. Geto wondered if it was a little strategic delay to avoid sitting in the dimly lit, overpriced restaurant alone for too long. As she entered, she looked uncertain, but something came over her features as she spotted them—and the drink Gojo had ordered for her—waiting.
“Sorry, traffic was crazy,” she mumbled, settling down too quickly for the waiter to pull her chair back decorously. “Class ran late.”
Geto had often thought that it was ironic that Utahime, out of all them, looked the most like she came from old money. Her posture was seemingly always perfect, her clothing understatedly chic, and her speech and mannerisms so careful and liquid. And yet, she was the only one of them who hadn’t grown up disgustingly privileged, and many of the trappings of the world she’d entered seemed to irritate her. Her artistic eye and her measured comportment all signalled a kind of inherent gentility. And yet she also carried an air of art school edginess beneath it all, although that only tended to emerge when she was drunk.
Typically, only one person could coax that refinement out of her grip with minimal effort.
“Uta! So unmannerly,” Gojo hooted. “And you’re covered in paint.”
Utahime tossed her hair back over her shoulder, dark against cream silk, and scowled at him as she scooched her chair in. She impatiently rubbed a small smudge of dried pale blue paint off the underside of her forearm. Only some of the paint came off.
“I am not covered in paint,” she muttered, as her dark hair settled again.
There was something of the imp about Utahime’s prettiness, Geto thought, and wondered why Gojo hadn’t been reckless about taking advantage of what was plainly obvious to everybody else. It wasn’t like him to be careful with things.
“What kind of depraved body painting class were you instructing this evening?” Gojo asked, nudging the glass of champagne across the table towards her so she’d claim it. “Was it a class on paint-smeared hedonism? Sex on canvas?”
“It was a basic life drawing class,” she snapped, her eyes flashing. “This paint is from earlier.”
“Oh, you were writhing around in paint earlier ?” Gojo asked with wide blue eyes like he was a baby lamb, tipping his head at her in faux innocence.
“There was no writhing , Gojo; I was just painting,” she sighed, taking a deep sip of champagne as if she needed it to soothe her. Her eye caught Geto, who had been waiting in amused silence to be acknowledged. “Hello, Suguru. Sorry.”
“Hello, Utahime,” Geto nodded, smiling politely.
Geto wondered if Gojo realised how deftly he had slipped into this familiar pattern and whether he did it intentionally or through mere habit. In one smooth exchange, Gojo had teased her, drawn attention to the fact that he’d looked closely at her and put a gentle sexual spin on the imagery. Gojo had demanded her whole attention from the moment she’d been near enough to engage.
The champagne was an unreadable gesture. It was waiting for her, it was an expensive bottle opened just for her—but Geto couldn’t remember if Utahime even particularly liked champagne.
Geto was sure Gojo wasn’t doing it mean-spiritedly, but the soft, jaded look that came later and the tug of disappointment on her mouth always made Geto a little weary. Anyone could see that Utahime was pretty and clever—why didn’t anyone, Shoko especially, tell her not to waste her time when it came to Gojo?
Maybe that was just too brutal.
“Did you have many students in your class this evening, Utahime?” Geto asked politely, before Gojo could begin his teasing afresh.
Utahime blinked, smiling mildly as if her mind had wandered. She placed the champagne flute on the table.
“Not many, but they were very needy this evening,” she replied. “But It was a long day. Thanks for inviting me, Gojo—I needed a treat.”
“Oh good ,” Gojo grinned, ruffling his hair. “Because I also had a long day and had to drive all the way into the fucking woods to get Suguru. I deserve a treat as well.”
Utahime smiled dryly, looking through her eyelashes in amusement at Gojo.
“Did you make too much money today? Did the gleam off your golden toilet hurt your eyes?” she tutted, with false sympathy.
Gojo’s grin widened, and he chewed his lip to get it in check. The sides of his mouth tilted down into a playful pout and the effect was oddly charming. He knew how to make his boyishness work for him.
“I have a very demanding job, you know,” he murmured, picking up his soda, pleased.
Where someone else might be self-deprecating about his wealth and power and how generational privilege had eased him neatly into the apex of a corporate structure, Gojo didn’t really give a fuck. He liked being powerful, enjoyed being rich, and relished that he was good at his job. His nonchalant arrogance was matched only by his fierce loyalty to his friends wherever he found them.
Maybe that was why Gojo had never tried to fuck Utahime—because Shoko had tersely asked him not to. The night that they met Utahime, in a crowded university pub while they were all masquerading as broke intellectuals in worn-down designer clothes, Shoko had waved her over eagerly while growling at Gojo and Geto under her breath.
“Utahime is not for sport,” she’d hissed. “Gojo, if you try to fuck her, I will never forgive you.”
Gojo had snorted in derision. “I’m not an animal, Shoko. I have some control over my libido.”
But Shoko hadn’t risen to the bait. Her face had been almost sobering in its seriousness.
“Please,” she’d asked levelly. “Not Utahime. Because if you try, Geto will probably try too and she’s not for your amusement. She’s going to be our friend.”
And, for some reason, that had struck a chord. Gojo had never pursued Utahime.
“Okay, Shoko,” he’d nodded back then, teasing her too. “Let’s meet our new friend.”
Gojo was so loyal that Geto knew he’d never discard him, even if they had grown less and less similar as the years rolled on. In the past year, Geto felt he had slipped just a little too far this time. Maybe Geto had liked being rich and being brilliant too, once upon a time. His grip on that unshakeable, ineffable ease seemed to have come loose at some point. He’d probably started the decline before the whole thing with Callie, truth be told.
Geto wondered if Utahime knew that Shoko had been the one to prevent her from getting anywhere with Gojo. Or maybe Shoko had nothing to do with it at all. Maybe Utahime’s petite, sharp prettiness did not suit Gojo’s palate.
Still, it confused Geto as much as it must confuse Utahime that Gojo was the way that he was with her. Here she was now, sipping the unfathomable gesture of the expensive champagne.
“A very demanding job for which you get remunerated quite well,” Utahime sighed, sipping daintily. “The treats are on you.”
Gojo grinned again, charming and boyish.
“Of course, Utahime,” he murmured lazily, winking at her. “Anything you want.”
Geto smiled into his own drink, wondering how Gojo managed to make the flirting appear both a little fabricated but never insincere. Because Geto had long realised that Utahime knew never to take it seriously.
It didn’t stop the look, though.
“How is the writing going, Suguru?” Utahime asked, twisting a chunky gold ring around on her middle finger, a flush coming into her cheeks that was possibly from the champagne.
“Dreadfully,” Geto said with a rueful smile. “Best not discussed.”
“Oh,” Utahime murmured, frowning slightly. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Geto smiled placidly. “How is the painting going?”
Utahime swallowed a sip of champagne, looking a little uncertain, as if she might commit a faux pas by telling the truth, before shrugging slightly.
“It’s going well, I suppose,” she replied, rubbing the spot on her forearm where Gojo had seen the dried paint. “Teaching is very time-consuming, but I’m managing to paint a lot, even if it’s slowly.”
Gojo grinned, turning his attention back to them after charmingly harassing the waiter with their complicated order.
“See, Suguru? Maybe it’s not a case of being blocked at all,” he said reassuringly. “Maybe you’re just working very slowly.”
Utahime’s eyes widened, before her brow snapped into a scowl like Gojo had said something taboo.
“Gojo!”
“What? I shouldn’t say he has writer’s block? Those are his words,” he shrugged, easing back in the restaurant’s plush seat. “Besides, I told him how to fix it.”
Utahime rolled her eyes. “Oh, please do enlighten us.”
“Suguru needs to get laid,” Gojo yawned. “He spends all day staring at a lake and being gloomy about the non-starter with his editor. He needs a decent fuck to snap him out of it.”
Utahime sighed, rubbing her temples. “I’m sorry I asked,” she mumbled.
Gojo put up his hands, surrendering nothing, but looking affable in his supposed defeat.
“Fine, I won’t labour the point,” he said smoothly. “But I’m right.”
“You really think that fucking is going to lead to inspiration?” Utahime asked, tilting her head challengingly. “I think you have it a bit backwards.”
Gojo grinned, because he always liked it when Utahime was either prickly or crude, and he’d managed to provoke both reactions at once.
“In Suguru’s case, I think so,” he asserted, sipping his drink again. “Don’t call it inspiration. Call it a palate cleanser.”
“Charming,” Utahime said dryly. “But hardly groundbreaking.”
“Oh, Utahime,” Gojo murmured, his boyish smile making his cheeks dimple as he made a lewd hand gesture. “Are you also lacking inspiration ?”
“God, you’re so stupid,” Utahime sighed, sipping champagne he had bought her.
“If that’s the case, I know how to fix it,” Gojo said, playfully suggestive. “Like I said.”
Geto let them battle it out on his behalf, growing a little buzzed on the fancy scotch he’d ordered because Gojo was picking up the bill. The meal was delicious—another delight that he strangely couldn’t fully appreciate because its tastiness made him feel strangely impatient. He thought again of the light flickering over the water of the lake, wondering how he could weld and bend these high points of sensory indulgence into something he could use on the page, something to follow that trembling cursor. He would have liked to prove his editor wrong, after all.
Only at the cocktail lounge later did he wonder if he was focusing on the wrong thing.
Maybe he ought to unpack something that made him feel a kind of muted distress. Perhaps he ought to push aside beauty, softness and luxury and let bad feelings swamp over him until he either drowned or pushed for the surface.
Maybe he ought to look directly at the thing that made him uncomfortable.
This evening, it was the moment when that hot flame of Gojo’s attention suddenly shifted. By the time he saw it, Geto was only softly drunk, the rich food having taken the edge of his buzz. When it happened, they were leaning back into velvet seats, fondly arguing about some half-forgotten university memory.
At another table, a tall girl with smokey eyes tilted her head at them like she was catching the light. In days gone by, Geto realised that it would have been something fun or exciting, because Gojo’s boisterous, appealing energy would have played neatly off his quieter allure. The chase would have been almost heady because of this competitive angle, a glinting, giddy race to see whose charm would win out. The girl was tall and long-limbed, like Callie. It made Geto grit his teeth and take a large gulp of his scotch.
Geto almost felt like the challenge now, thinking of how easy it used to be for him. But before he could muster the half-forgotten energy, his eyes shifted unwittingly back to their group, watching Utahime twirl her ring around her middle finger again. Over her head, Gojo smiled at the tall girl at the other table, something almost bashful in how pleased he looked to meet her gaze. He signalled to the waiter.
That unpleasant feeling came over Geto, realising he really would have to witness it again. The bite went out of his sudden urge to woo someone.
He realised he was about to see Utahime’s soft look of disappointment when Gojo’s attention shifted. The smooth edge of his buzz made him a little strangely urgent.
Geto couldn’t bear it after all.
“Utahime,” Geto murmured, touching the bottom of her shoe with the toe of his to get her attention. “Did you drive here?”
“Yes,” she said, clearing her throat. “I had to come straight from my class.”
That was why she was behaving herself, Geto thought ruefully, wishing she had gotten playfully drunk instead. The champagne at the restaurant was a distant memory, but her cheeks were still flushed.
“Please, could you drive me home?”
Somehow, the subtext that Gojo would be too preoccupied to provide this favour was read in a barely a flicker of Utahime’s eyelashes.
Utahime turned her head slightly, looking over her shoulder briefly at the other table and the siren who sat there. The long-limbed girl looked imperiously at the drink that had been set down before her with Gojo’s compliments.
And so Geto watched it — a little tip of Utahime’s mouth, something wry and gentle. And then her eyes slid up to Geto’s, catching low lights from behind the bar.
“Of course,” she said, her voice smooth and light. “Happy to.”
The woods were quieter on the drive back out to the lake house. There was less feverish whispering as Utahime’s car sped through the same woodland drive, now so much more shaded than when Gojo had collected Geto.
Geto watched Utahime’s hands on the steering wheel, noticing how tightly she held it and how small her grip seemed compared to Gojo’s relaxed hold earlier. He wondered if he was just drunk enough to say something or, if, after all these years, he should just let it be.
“Thank you for driving me home,” he said softly, turning his gaze back to the winding road. “I know it’s out of your way.”
Utahime’s gaze flicked over briefly, and then back to the road.
“Please don’t worry about it,” she said politely. “You were going to be stuck there for a while.”
Geto hummed, realising he could have made many other plans to crash at one of his friends’ houses in the city. He could even have gone to his parents’ contested city apartment and seen if the keys were in the lockbox. For some reason, he’d wanted to be back in his isolated lakeside house and not gently drunk in a fancy bar with beautiful women, floundering in the memory of how he used to be.
Apart from that, he realised he wanted Utahime to be the one to drive him back. He felt a curious urge to tell her that he’d noticed the look on her face and that he wanted to shield the scene from her view. Maybe she’d talk to him about it and, in understanding it better, he could use that instead of beautiful lake water and rich meals to shake that blinking cursor into the next word.
“He’s too charming for his own good,” Geto murmured to the road ahead of them.
Utahime was silent for a moment. Geto could see the faint silver of the moonwater between the trees, and suddenly noticed that they’d travelled much longer in silence than he realised.
“For anybody’s good,” she said at last, almost too quietly to hear.
He knew he could leave it there, but suddenly, Geto felt an unusual kinship with her, thinking that he might understand the sensation of being left behind. Maybe that was why, when she pulled up in front of his darkened house, he paused in the gap of the open car door after thanking her for the ride.
“Nightcap?”
Utahime, in pale silk with one hand on her steering wheel, met his gaze frankly. It was a stupid invitation, because she’d be so late back to the city, especially if she had to wait to sober up afterwards. But they looked at one another as the cool lake air poured into the car. Her face was very still, but they both seemed to absorb something in the moment.
Utahime realised that Geto knew.
“Okay.”
Utahime kicked off her shoes in the entrance, padding softly over the wooden floors of Geto’s under-furnished living room and over to the large glass doors. Geto never bothered to close the curtains, so the moon flickered over the lake water and into the house. She wafted over to the glass like she’d never seen it before. Maybe she hadn’t—Geto couldn’t remember if he’d ever had Utahime over here at night.
Watching her in the milky beam of moonlight, Geto realised that Utahime had somehow, in his mind, been Gojo’s to befriend, to woo, to hurt, to tease. Shoko had been wrong all those years ago when she said that Geto would automatically pursue her if Gojo did.
Geto realised he had skirted around even actually being her friend. And now, he felt, with a kind of itching impatience, that he was more like her than he was ever like Gojo.
“Would you like a scotch?” he asked, suddenly desperate to regain some of that buzz from before. “I don’t think I have anything else.”
“Yes, please,” she answered, distantly. “It’s so beautiful here at night. Dark blue.”
Geto poured the drinks, a little ashamed of how messy everything was despite being so spartan. Funny that he hadn’t noticed the mess when Gojo had been rooting around for a snack, but now he was seeing the place through Utahime’s eyes and realising it couldn’t pass aesthetic muster.
“No neighbours,” Geto explained. “No yellow light in the palette. Van Gogh would be pissed.”
Utahime took the whiskey from him, thanking him politely like it was a china cup of tea. He remembered when they met that she’d had black nail polish and nibbled nails. Now, her delicate hands wrapped around the mismatched glass, pale pink on the tips of her fingers.
“Do you prefer champagne?” he asked ruefully, still trying, out of habit, to measure if he were better or worse than Gojo.
“Scotch is lovely, thank you,” she answered with a tight smile.
“Wanna get high?” Geto asked, his smile a little sheepish, realising he was making overtures of friendship. “I’ve got some shitty weed.”
This was an attempt to begin again, he realised. He was starting his kinship with Utahime afresh.
Utahime’s tight smile turned impish, her bangs falling into her eyes as she tilted her head in contemplation.
“God, yes.”
So he sat down on his oversized leather sofa and grabbed the tin and papers, watching Utahime run her fingernails over the edge of the door like it was the frame of a painting.
“You’ve never told me what your novel is about,” Utahime observed quietly, facing the lake that was supposed to give him inspiration.
Geto smiled to himself as he tipped the weed onto the rolling paper.
“It’s about a museum curator spending his days cataloguing relics,” he answered. “At least, it’s supposed to be.”
“Ah,” Utahime said, faintly admonishing. “You’re trying to make it sound boring. What is the central theme of it?”
“Not sure. Disconnection, I guess. The protagonist is haunted by a sense of disconnection, feeling as though he’s merely preserving memories rather than living a life of his own,” Geto murmured, licking the paper.
“Go on,” she said, coming to sit down on the chair where Gojo had sat earlier. Geto wondered if she could somehow sense him like his charm had left a residue.
Geto hesitated, his hand pausing mid-air. “It’s... hard to explain when I’m so fucking blocked,” he said at last. But her steady gaze, patient and expectant, nudged him forward.
He slowly rolled the joint, his fingers working deliberately.
“It’s about a guy named Leo,” he continued cautiously, the words unspooling slowly. “He’s a curator, works in antiquities. His world revolves around these fragments of the past—ancient amphoras, mosaics, artefacts that have survived centuries, but never whole. One day, this amphora comes into his possession that is barely more than dust and shards. Everyone around him says it’s significant, that he has to restore it.”
“Does he?” Utahime asked, tilting her head, as if he had already written it.
Geto gave a small, wry smile at this ploy to brainstorm with him. “He tries. He spends months studying it, laying out the pieces, trying to understand how it all fits. But the more he works, the more it starts to mess with him. He begins seeing himself in it—the cracks in his relationships, the parts of himself he’s tried to ignore. He starts wondering if maybe some things are never meant to be whole again.”
Utahime smiled encouragingly, her fingers curling around her drink. “There are other characters, right? Otherwise, Leo sounds lonely.”
“Yeah, there’s supposed to be a woman,” Geto said with a sigh. “I’m not sure how she fits into the museum setting. I was going to have her as a visiting academic or a PhD student in mythology or something. She doesn’t directly help him fix the vase, but she makes him realise that maybe fixing it isn’t the point.”
Utahime’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. “So, is it... a love story?”
Geto chuckled. “It’s not anything yet,” he said. “I don’t know if it ever will be.”
Utahime winced through a deep gulp of the generous pour of whiskey Geto had given her.
“It doesn’t sound like you’re blocked,” she observed softly. “Sounds like you have it under control.”
Geto put the rolled joint to his lips, flicking the wheel of his lighter. Yellow bloomed in his face as the stringent smoke filled his lungs.
“No, I am stuck,” he said, voice strained as he exhaled, offering her the spliff. “Satoru wasn’t exaggerating.”
Maybe Callie wasn’t exaggerating.
Utahime made a small huff, leaning over to take the joint from him. He watched her put it to her lips, the cherry glowing as she inhaled and her eyes closed briefly. She coughed softly on her exhale, dispersing the smoke with an ineffective wave of her hand like she was a 1930s film star.
“Idiot,” she said, quietly, but didn’t attribute the insult to anyone in particular.
“What are you working on at the moment?” he asked her, taking back the joint she offered. “Something else blue?”
He gestured with the spliff to the streak of pale blue paint on her arm. The smear had cracked like a dried river bed, and some had flaked off in her earlier rubbing. Her cheeks flushed, and her eyes flicked away as she took another long sip of her scotch.
“I’d rather not say,” she answered dryly. “I’m in a different kind of rut to you. I can’t stop producing the same thing over and over again.”
“Is it beautiful?” Geto asked, watching smoke rise, remembering how quickly she had disavowed the blue paint on her forearm when Gojo teased her. “Is that why you can’t stop painting it?”
Utahime tapped her nails over her glass thoughtfully and then nodded slowly. The silence stretched between them as Geto started to feel a pleasant, languid relaxation seep into his bones.
He felt a blossoming goodwill for Utahime, her pixie-like prettiness and the sadness she echoed in her severe and thoughtful gaze.
“Teach me your ways then,” he prompted, feeling agreeable now. “How do you keep producing something beautiful? How do you keep inspired?”
Utahime tilted her head to him, her dark hair falling over her shoulder, smiling again in a slightly ironic way.
“Ask me a deeper question?” she urged, almost teasing him. “I’m a bad example. Enquire about the nature of inspiration.”
Geto chuckled. “So? What is the nature of inspiration?”
“Depends who you ask,” she responded, taking back the joint when he offered it to her. “Plato viewed inspiration as a divine gift, coming from the gods.”
Geto smirked, leaning back in the slippery leather and taking a sip of his own whiskey.
“Is that my problem? I’m just not invoking the right higher power?”
Utahime closed her eyes as she exhaled smoke like an aristocrat into the dim light above them. She opened them with a flutter, smiling a little.
“Well, maybe. He believed that creative individuals, like poets and artists, were not creating from their own minds but were channels for the divine.”
“So, creativity is mystical and uncontrollable?” Geto summarised with a wry smile. “I fear my editor has heard this one before.”
Utahime handed him back the blunt, curling her legs underneath her on the expensive chair. She turned her profile to the darkness outside, where only the moon on shifting water disrupted the deep blue darkness.
“This doesn’t inspire you?” she asked, gesturing with her glass to the view. “Natural beauty?”
Geto looked out where she was looking, then shook his head slowly, ruefully, like it was a rusty confession. “Is that Plato’s jam too?”
“No, that’s more like the Romantic movement,” Utahime said vaguely, her gaze moving in a square around the frame of the window, taking in the moonlit lake carefully. “You know, nature and emotion and all that.”
“No divine power?”
“No, they thought that true creativity came from within, driven by intense feelings and a deep connection to the natural world,” Utahime recounted dreamily, finally turning her gaze back to him and reaching for the joint.
It had gone out, and Geto watched with some interest as Utahime’s slim fingers closed over his cheap plastic lighter on the cluttered coffee table and relit it.
“Maybe I’m the wrong kind of artist,” he answered with a wry smile. “I’m too blunt an instrument these days. There no intense feelings anymore, no divine spark.”
Utahime shrugged, turning her gaze back up to him. Geto relaxed into the tingling warmth spreading through his limbs, the tension in his muscles melting away as time seemed to stretch and bend around them.
“Then perhaps that’s the struggle you can draw on to inspire you? Your experience of that and the meaning you create in a seemingly indifferent or absurd universe,” she said, a giggle hiding in her voice. “Very existential.”
Geto laughed suddenly, surprising himself, because her giggle was so girlish it contrasted very agreeably with what she was saying.
“Do you teach this stuff in your classes?” he asked, smiling.
Utahime shook her head, sipping deeply from her scotch again and not wincing for the burn now. “Sometimes. But it’s stuff I learnt at university. It’s first-year stuff. I’m just regurgitating it.”
“Well, I’m not creating meaning in an absurd world,” Geto chuckled into his glass. “I’m not creating anything. Tell me how you produce too much?”
Utahime smiled a little self-deprecatingly, swinging her legs over the side of the armchair, sinking back into its curve. She didn’t answer his question.
“There’s a school of thought that creativity is an expression of the unconscious mind. Inspiration might stem from something like childhood experiences,” Utahime said distantly, talking to the ceiling rafters, “or repressed desires, unresolved conflicts. That kind of thing.”
Geto was silent, thinking of Utahime’s soft, sad look when the bright light of Gojo’s attention moved away from her. He wondered how it must feel to realise over and over again that his flirtation was superficial —just something like a reflex. Had Geto once been like that? He tried to think of how he’d charmed Callie, his slow smile from the other side of her desk that he knew she’d struggle to resist because he used to be able to sense when someone was attracted to him. How much of what had happened between them was intentional on his part? Was it just his instinct back then to gather things toward himself that made him curious?
“Are you ever going to tell him?” Geto asked quietly, breaking a long, downy silence, one that had lasted years.
Her eyes moved down from the ceiling and along the coffee table, travelling in between the clutter and up to Geto’s face. There was something of Utahime’s sad, resigned expression lingering there, though much diluted now by scotch and weed.
“I don’t think there’d be any point,” she said quietly, her voice admirably steady. “And it’s not… love . It’s something else a little less substantial. Infatuation maybe? A fixation.”
“I see,” Geto said, swallowing thickly, feeling strangely exhilarated by her candour. “I think I know exactly what you mean. At least, I recognise—”
“Is that how you felt about your editor? The non-starter that Satoru was talking about?” Utahime interrupted gently, tilting her head curiously. “A fixation?”
Geto blinked, surprised by her incisiveness and her use of Gojo’s name. He tried to match her.
“Her name is Callie. And yes, I guess so,” he mused. “And maybe that’s why I’m so blocked.”
Utahime looked at him, rubbing the paint off her forearm distractedly again, even though minimal flaky paint residue remained.
“She was a muse for you?” she asked, looking uncertain. “And now that’s gone?”
Geto opened his mouth to answer and then closed it, absorbing the question like red wine sinking into a pale carpet.
“A muse? No, I don’t think so. She’s not in the narrative,” he answered at last, rubbing his temple with one hand. “She’s not in my novel, I mean.”
Utahime smiled slowly, a rueful, girlishly amused smile, and she drained the last of her whiskey.
“She doesn’t have to be there , not all of her at least,” she said into the bottom of the glass.
Geto watched her, trying to think what to say next that wouldn’t compromise the soft, mellow feeling in his belly. Something was rumbling in the corners of his emotional inner world that he couldn’t quite place.
“What does Plato say about muses?” he asked at last, his voice feeling raspy.
Utahime got up, grabbed Geto’s still unfinished glass of whiskey and padded over to the kitchen to find the whiskey bottle. She didn’t look up at Geto as she poured for them both.
“In many ancient cultures, people who inspired artists were thought to be in touch with the divine or otherworldly. They were often revered or even feared for their perceived power.”
Geto shook his head slowly, discarding the idea, unable to help the grin that was passing across his face.
“Yes, I’m afraid of muses, if that’s the case,” he shrugged. “What about the Romantics? Is Mother Nature the only muse?”
Utahime smiled, indulging him, as she came back over and plonked his replenished whiskey down without comment.
“Nope. During the Romantic era, muses were often idealised as perfect, unattainable figures who represented the pinnacle of beauty or intellect,” she said, sipping her whiskey as she curled herself into the armchair again. “They were seen as both a blessing and a curse, providing inspiration but also causing deep longing or obsession.”
Geto grinned at her, sinking back into his seat, feeling a warmth that wasn’t the weed or alcohol blooming into his chest. It felt like the goodwill of someone agreeing with him.
Yearning. That made sense to him.
“That sounds a little more like it,” he said wryly. “Is that why you said Gojo’s idea was backwards?”
“But you said she’s not in the narrative,” Utahime pointed out, tilting her head and not answering his question. “So maybe it’s a different school of thought altogether?”
Geto took a deep sip of the whiskey Utahime had poured him, feeling the turbulence once more.
“The existentialists again?” he teased, trying to deflect.
“No. The psychoanalysts. Freud and a bunch of others—I can’t remember specifics right now—viewed the muse as a projection of the creator’s unconscious desires. In other words, the person who inspired you might be seen as a symbol of deeper psychological conflicts,” she said levelly. “Like I said, Callie doesn’t have to be there . Maybe she’s just a reflection of you? ”
Geto bit down on his back teeth as he swallowed another glug of whiskey, wondering why he was starting to slosh it down a little too eagerly. Maybe he didn’t like the mention of Callie’s name in all this—like she might manifest like a bogeyman if she were invoked too many times.
“Is that what Satoru is for you?” he asked bluntly, feeling a little unsettled in his skin suddenly as the whiskey burned its way down.
Utahime blinked at the impact of Gojo’s name, but she didn’t answer right away.
“I hope I’m a little more of a Romantic than that,” she said softly, smiling distantly.
“Or maybe it’s entirely less complex than we think,” Geto said flippantly, sinking back into the leather of his couch again, feeling a little anxious that he’d hurt her and wanting to be irreverent again. “Maybe Gojo is right.”
Utahime rolled her eyes, and Geto found it a little endearing that she could still disparage Gojo when she might—despite what she said—be in love with him.
“About fucking someone else to get over your fixation?” she queried. “It seems cartoonish, like bonking someone on the head to cure amnesia.”
Geto chuckled easily. “It’s a similar kind of jolt, I guess,” he grinned, forgetting himself momentarily. “Maybe the same remedy applies to you, Utahime.”
Utahime’s cheeks flushed pink, surprising Geto in a way that almost sobered him. He’d never found her to be bashful.
“A random fuck is going to fix me?” she queried, her eyes glittering even though her tone was ironic. “And here I thought you’d say we’d be saved by the holiness of a true muse.”
Geto laughed again, a little more uncertainly, relieved he hadn’t offended her.
“Maybe our so-called muses are the problem entirely,” he sighed. “And that’s why Gojo is right about the fix for the thing that ails us. No divine spark, no deep connection — just a decent fuck.”
Utahime was silent, her fingertip moving around the rim of her glass. Geto watched, surprised by her faraway look at the ceiling rafters again. Her hair fell over the side of the armchair where Gojo had sat earlier. Her silk dress rode up her thighs, making her look a little Baroque with bare feet and exposed collarbones, and Geto wondered if it was just because it was Utahime that he was thinking in painterly terms. His heart thudded steadily in his chest, his mood shifting as something flickered in his belly.
Utahime turned her head, meeting his gaze with a kind of boldness he didn’t expect. Her amber eyes looked almost black in the dim light.
“Are you, Suguru?” she asked softly, her cheeks flushed now.
They stared at one another for a long moment, the air growing very still. Geto remembered the feeling of his slow smile, of his attractiveness, taking root in the mind of someone else and turning the air to pure static between them. The sensation he felt now wasn’t that—it was something like being on the other side of that equation.
“Am I what?”
“A decent fuck,” she clarified.
He paused, feeling warm now, his belly fizzing. He gave her a hesitant smile.
“Yes.”
“Me too,” she said quietly, laughing almost soundlessly to herself, wry, as if Gojo ought to know what he was missing. “I’m fucking amazing.”
Geto felt his blood flood through his body, his gut growing tight with a tingling sensation, as he gazed at her almost dreamily. Maybe he was just a little high and a little drunk, but it seemed suddenly very agreeably symmetrical. Her yearning and his numbness—perhaps they could be jostled away from both by something fleeting but inconsequential.
“More whiskey?” she offered, getting up smoothly.
Geto stood up, too, following her to the kitchen, feeling strange in his belly as he got caught in her wake like she was a stately barge on still water. Just as soon as the idea had entered his head, he discarded it. Even in his mellowed out, uninhibited state, where he was feeling such goodwill towards her, he recognised that it would be foolhardy to try to fuck her.
But he was following her to his kitchen, watching the smooth movement of silk over her body.
Under the pendant lights at the kitchen island, Utahime faced him, sipping her whiskey and looking over the rim at him. Geto leaned back on his hands against the kitchen counter opposite, watching her carefully as she matched his gaze, her lashes making long shadows over her cheeks.
“We could,” she said, softly, putting the glass down on the kitchen island.
Geto had no slow, charming smile for her now. His heart thumped in his chest, desire stirring again in his belly. Utahime would be the first since Callie, he realised, and somehow, there was something restorative in the idea that she wouldn’t be some cold, anonymous hookup nor would it be the heavy, perilous weight of something real.
“We could,” he agreed in a murmur. “We probably shouldn’t, though.”
Utahime smiled wryly and then chewed on her thumbnail.
“I’d like Gojo to be right, I think, because then we could help each other,” she murmured. “Sounds nice.”
Silence settled between them again, as Utahime licked her lower lip uncertainly.
Geto took an experimental step towards her, gauging his own reaction as much as hers. Utahime tilted her head up as he drew closer, their bodies almost touching as they approached the threshold of intimacy. He hadn’t fully realised how much taller he was than her; it really did make her seem like a dark pixie in a soft, pale dress.
“Would it help you?” he asked, his voice a little rusty as he gazed down at her, wanting to be rough with the imagery of her. “If I fucked you?”
In so many ways, he had always been like Satoru, and now, in all his failings, Suguru felt like he had come to be his opposite, his counterpoint. For whatever reason, Gojo would honour the request that Shoko had made off them all those years back, but maybe Geto wouldn’t after all. Maybe there was something in that truth that could unspool the tangle in which Utahime found herself. Even if Gojo was wrong about his flippant assertions, maybe it could be true for Utahime if it were Geto to jolt Utahime out of her fixation. Maybe Geto could be the one to make it so.
“Maybe,” she murmured, her eyes glistening. “Would it help you?”
Geto found himself laughing softly, and he slid his hand up into her waist as an experiment, not sure how to tell her that he didn’t think there was hope for him. His fingers tingled with the slide of silk and the taboo of touching something he never had and never should have.
Utahime’s eyelashes fluttered slightly.
“Maybe,” Geto said in a rough whisper. “Although I do hate it when he’s right about shit.”
“Fuck me, then,” Utahime murmured, eyes glimmering warmly. “See if it works.”
Geto nodded, breathless suddenly, sliding his hands under her jaw to cradle her face. He dipped his head, hesitantly pressing his lips against hers and tasting a sweet alcohol burn off hers. The rush of the taboo of kissing her dissolved outwards into a simmering excitement in his belly. His stomach flipped over as he felt Utahime’s fingers curl into his belt and draw him closer to her. He felt himself get hard against the silk of her stomach as her mouth opened for him. Geto slid his tongue into the heat of her mouth, kissing her deeply as his breathless excitement took over.
“Oh, fuck,” she breathed against his lips, a kind of helpless sound that made his blood flare.
Utahime’s hands slid up under his t-shirt and the taut muscles of his abdomen and he broke from their kiss because this intimate touch caused Geto to gasp softly in surprise.
Her eyes met his in the dim kitchen light and they breathed shallowly together, a moment stretching when they might see sense.
She did look like a pixie, Geto realised, as he saw the sad look in the corner of her lidded gaze. That expression absorbed his whole attention. Utahime reached up and took one of his hands that cradled her face. She drew it down slowly, a sad faerie.
It was reckless, Geto thought, and pointless. It was good to stop this alcohol-fuelled mess before it began.
Utahime’s fingers slid through his.
“Bedroom,” she whispered.
Geto nodded, liking the feel of her slender fingers between his, wanting to slide his hands over the silk of her dress now to feel how her curves felt underneath, wanting to again feel that shocking surprise of her hands on his body.
So he drew her by the hand into the darkness of his unlit bedroom, where he hardly ever slept these days, where the moon through the open curtains turned Utahime pale blue.