Archive of Our Own ^beta

The moment everything begins is so insignificant. You walk into your organic chemistry lecture in one of the smaller auditorium-like classrooms in UA’s science building, and there’s a couple of seats near the back next to a guy that looks like he’d be quiet. That’s what you want. To talk to nobody. To not be seen. To do the college thing and then get out as fast as possible, because there’s so much more in life that you need to do. So you sit down, putting your bag between your legs and pulling out your laptop, leaving a seat between you and the guy who’s supposed to be quiet.

He disappoints you by speaking. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Sitting,” you say. “Obviously.”

“Did I say you could?” The question is rhetorical. Threatening. He has a performative bad boy kind of vibe—a couple piercings in his upper ear, black metal hoops hugging the cartilage tight, an intimidatingly broad set of shoulders under his heavy metal band shirt. His eyes are red, you notice, a deep, shadowed crimson, and that adds to his whole presence. He probably thinks he’s really fucking cool.

“You’re an asshole,” you inform him. Your laptop screen flashes to life and you open up an empty Word document even though you should be taking your notes by hand, in a notebook, like the asshole next to you is doing.

“You’re gonna fail this class if you don’t write out your notes. Good luck remembering shit.” He’s intently watching the professor at the front of the room setting up his projector and PowerPoint slides instead of talking directly to you. How he read your fucking mind is a mystery, but it’s not one you want to unravel. He can stay entirely raveled up in his one-seat-away seat and write his own fucking notes and keep his nose in his business instead of yours.

The glare you send him is one he doesn’t see, but you’re sure he feels it. His frown deepens just the slightest bit. Good. Fuck him.

You still sit next to (but a seat away from) him for the following few weeks. It’s a Tuesday and Thursday class, which isn’t bad, but it’s a 9AM. This makes him grouchier, you think. Or maybe he’s always insufferable. He doesn’t say hello to you when you sit down and he doesn’t say goodbye when he leaves, but you both make eye contact at least once per class. You try to express your extreme disgust with him plain enough that you won’t even have to talk for him to know how you feel.

He does the same, but he’s better at it than you. He probably has no friends and lives in a shitty studio apartment off-campus because he couldn’t get anyone to room with him.

This back-and-forth is fine until you’re studying with your roommate Mina and she’s getting excited about a new show that’s airing tonight and her elbow knocks over her gargantuan iced coffee right onto your laptop. Everything is soaked within seconds. She grabs napkins and apologizes and offers to buy you a new laptop, but the damage is done.

You try to get it fixed but your hard drive is water damaged, even in its protective case. All of your work is gone. Lost forever. Who the fuck even likes iced coffee anyway?

In class the next morning, a notebook in hand, you realize that every single set of notes you took over the past five weeks is gone. Destroyed by Mina’s coffee and enthusiasm. You’re not an idiot—you know there’s no way you’re going to pass orgo if you don’t have notes. Your professor doesn’t put his PowerPoints online because he’s the traditional kind of guy that expects perfect attendance and attention every class. This is arguably the hardest course you need to take to graduate, and you’re not going to take it twice.

So you swallow your pride while you sit in your usual seat, the asshole resolutely looking at his phone and not at you. You hate that you have to do this. “Can I get a copy of your notes?”

He looks at you, narrows his eyes. “Fuck no. Why?”

“I shouldn’t have even asked.” What other answer did you expect? There are so many other students in this class you can ask, and the notes you get from them will be nowhere near as clear and meticulous as his. You watch him, sometimes, fascinated by the sheer level of organization on each page. His cramped handwriting is sectioned off purposefully, marking down important concepts at the top of the page and then separating longer, more detailed explanations into different squares and columns that make sense intuitively. “I bet you were the kind of kid that didn’t help your mom take the groceries inside from the car.”

“You can just copy the notes down from your laptop. It’s good you finally fucking realized you can’t just retain information from typing, but you won’t pass if you’re lazy, either.” He spares your notebook a glance, but not you. The professor has started going over simple amino acid structures and the asshole is somehow both taking notes and talking shit to you at the same time. “You have to put your pen on the paper to start writing, dumbass. Or were you trying to get today’s notes from me too?”

You’re tired—you just want a shred of human decency out of this guy. He wasn’t loved as a child, or something. Maybe he’s a sociopath. “Can you stop being an asshole for two seconds? My laptop died.”

“Not my problem.”

“Wow. Fuck you,” you hiss, and you start taking notes but the conversation has already taken an unexpected toll on you. The asshole is a peripheral person in your life. He doesn’t matter to you at all. He’s just someone you kind of argue with before class and then don’t think about again until you get up at seven in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays so you can get to campus early enough to find parking.

Tears sting in the corners of your eyes—you’re not going to cry, but your body is letting you know that you’re stressed. Too fucking stressed. You’re taking four classes and two labs and no sane person would do that in a semester—no sane person would take orgo and anatomy at the same time—but you’re obviously not sane. This has been okay for the past few years. You’re going to graduate early. You’re going to go to grad school and get a job and just be able to relax and pay off all the debt you’ve accrued over the course of your life.

But everything comes to a head, right now, right here, in this dumb fucking lecture. Your hand is so tight on your pen that you hear the plastic snap just a little. The notes you take are bad even though you’re not a bad notetaker. It’s just another class you’ll have no recollection of because of the asshole and your own unluckiness.

Thursday rolls around and you decide that you’re not going to sit near him. It’s strange to break formation in classes, even though you’re in college—it’s like there’s something ingrained in everyone’s brain from assigned seating in high school. You get to pick your own seat, but you stay there for the rest of the semester. It’s really the only logical reason you kept sitting near him day after day.

He won’t even notice that you’ve moved. Not that you care.

When you get to class, a lukewarm coffee in your hand from the campus Einstein Bro’s that’s so sweet it almost tastes like you’re drinking syrup, you’re about to go sit on the other side of the room when you notice that something is amiss.

He’s not here.

Usually, the asshole is the first person in the classroom. You’re a little late because of the line at the bagel shop, but you’re still early compared to a lot of your other classmates—there’s ten minutes until class starts.

This is something you don’t have to care about. He doesn’t deserve this much thought. You sit across the room from where you normally do, still towards the back. Most of the students are crowded at the front, so there’s no one you really alienate by sitting back here, moving into new, uncharted territory that hasn’t already been claimed. The lecture begins and you take notes in your notebook—better than you had last class—and thirty minutes in, someone sits down next to you so sudden and unexpected that you jump out of your skin.

The asshole looks at you like he wants to commit a murder. Maybe yours. “You’d better fucking thank me.”

He pushes a folder into your hands, blue and dog-eared, something that looks like it’s been lying around his room for a while. There’s something scribbled onto the lower left corner of the folder, and you recognize his cramped, tight handwriting. Katsuki Bakugou. The asshole finally has a name.

But what’s much more immediately arresting is that when you open the folder, you find photocopies of every single sheet of notes he’s taken for this class, organized by lecture dates, which are written in sharpie in the right-hand corners of each separately stapled set.

You’re astounded. Somehow, the asshole has learned how to be a good person. That doesn’t happen in real life. Assholes stay assholes. “Why did you do this?”

He has his own notebook out on his desk, already writing down important things from the lecture, and you realize that he’s staying here, in the seat next to you instead of one away, instead of moving back across the room. “If you’re not grateful, I’ll take them back. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“No, I—thank you, Bakugou. Really. You didn’t have to do this.”

His eyes go a little wide and he looks at the binder, and he must notice his name on the front. Something in his expression hardens. Maybe he never wanted you to know his name. You weren’t really keen on asking, and you’re still not keen on telling him yours. “Never seen anyone cry over organic chemistry. It was pathetic.”

It’s almost embarrassing that he noticed how close you were to tears the other day, and you turn that embarrassment into frustration because it feels better. “You were half an hour late today. That’s pretty pathetic in my opinion.”

“That’s your fault too,” he says, and he looks at you head on for what might be the first time and his face has a kind of symmetry to it that you hadn’t noticed before. He’s handsome in a lot of ways that involve hard angles and arrogance. “The library photocopier kept printing the pages wrong. We pay thousands of fucking dollars to come here and UA can’t even buy a printer that works. Just give me a copy of your notes from today and we’re even.”

A lot of things mount at once in your head, and it’s at this moment when you start to think that maybe you actually like Katsuki Bakugou much more than you thought you had.

After class, he tears a piece of paper out of his notebook and writes something down on it, then opens the folder and slips it inside, into the pocket with everything else. “Send the notes to me when you get home.”

His email, you think. He stands up and walks away without so much as a goodbye, and you open the folder and see that he’s written his first name, Katsuki, followed by a phone number.

Your heart kind of flutters in a really self-destructive way, and you text him the notes when you get home and he asks you if you’ve been to the place that does single-serving tacos for a dollar fifty each and you say you haven’t, and then you suddenly have plans for the evening.

Mina doesn’t understand it when you tell her, the both of you sitting on your apartment’s uncomfortable couch and catching up on episodes of The Bachelorette. “You literally told me yesterday that you hate him. You said that you wouldn’t save him if he was drowning.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Uh, one-hundred percent you did, because I remember you telling me that you hoped he choked and then I asked, ‘On what?’ and then you were like, ‘On his last breath while he’s sinking into the ocean,’ because you’re so dramatic—”

“Okay, fine. Maybe I did.” You definitely did. You described the ways you wanted him to die for a good fifteen minutes at the campus food court where you and Mina got morning bagels and astringent coffee. “I’m still getting tacos with him.”

“I already have a bad impression. He doesn’t pass the friend test.” She frowns and it’s puppy-dog cute. Exaggerated but genuine. “I just don’t want you to get treated bad by a guy that thinks he’s way better than like, all women ever. ‘Cause I can already tell you he’s not.”

You don’t want to make her unhappy, but you want to see where this goes. “How about this? If he’s still a dick, I won’t go out with him again. Even if it’s just a little bit. I’ll drop him.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, Mina, I promise.”

You break your promise almost immediately.

When you get there, parking in a grassy off-road area scattered with other students’ cars, you see the place you’re about to eat at and you know the food is going to be good. It’s a food truck with picnic tables outside, a menu hand-written in chalk on a large board sticking out of the ground under the order window, and when you get out of the car, everything smells like hot grease and cayenne pepper.

He’s already sitting at one of the tables, dressed in a hoodie and joggers like every other guy that goes to college and doesn’t know how to dress, even if he does fill them out well. You’re wearing a nice, knit sweater with a low neckline and a gold necklace with a little 3D-printed cat skull hanging in the hollow between your collar bones. A statement piece. Because you’re supposed to dress up for things like this and try to make a statement, which Bakugou obviously never learned.

His clothes are more well-made than the usual sweater-jogger combos you see on campus, though. You’ll give him that. He’s so handsome, and the afternoon sunlight glimmers off his hair, turning it a soft gold, and all of this excites you until you walk over and he opens his mouth. “Could’ve told me you were gonna be late.”

You look at your phone. “I’m one minute late. Seriously, one minute.”

“Whatever. Hurry up and order. I’m fucking starving.”

And even though he’s greeted you with this awful attitude, you still order a side of tostones and two tacos de lengua, which you’re positive is some kind of organ but you’re not sure which one. Maybe you don’t want to know. The food is amazing regardless. He gets eight carnitas tacos, extra spicy, and you give him a look that he ignores. That’s a ridiculous amount of food.

While the two of you eat, you ask him questions and he answers half-heartedly or not at all, sometimes just offering a grunt to affirm or negate the things you’ve said. It’s annoying, and you start to wonder why you said yes to this, because even though he had that brief moment of being nice to you and looking sort of handsome, he’s still an asshole. “Bakugou. If you want me to stay until we’re finished with the food, you have to talk to me.”

“I am talking to you.”

“Okay, forget it. Thanks for showing me the food truck. I’m leaving.” You get up, grabbing your plastic netted bowl to take your unfinished food with you.

He grabs your wrist. Skin against skin. His hands are so warm, and his grip is firm but not painful. He’s conflicted when he looks at you. Thinking about something. When he speaks again, it’s strained and kind of stiff. “Tell me stuff. About you.”

You can’t tell if he says it like that because he doesn’t actually want to know or if it’s because he’s so socially inept that even asking someone a personal question is an insurmountable task for him.

This should be a red flag. So many guys his age are emotionally immature to the point where they’re looking for a mother rather than a girlfriend. Someone to handle their emotional burdens for them. You’re not going to do that for any man, but you’ve seen the way he takes notes. You’ve seen how organized his backpack is, the books tucked into the correct pockets, the pens all neat together in their own plastic protector case. He at least has the capacity to be independent and structured. It’s the only reason you sit back down.

“Is there anything specific you want to know?” You eat the last toston and watch as he very quickly glances at your tongue running across the corner of your top lip, swiping at the honey-like dip that came with the fried plantains.

Maybe that’s all he wants. The thought is almost disappointing to you, even though he’s maybe the most attractive man you’ve seen on campus. Or ever. You’re just tired of the college experience. You want someone to like you because of the way you think, but maybe that’s too romance-movie hopeful.

“You’ve got to be taking orgo for a reason,” he manages.

It’s not a question. Not even fucking close. But it’s a prompt, at least, so you tell him about your career plans—teaching in the medical field post PhD—and he tells you about his. He wants to be a surgeon, because every self-important twenty-something trying to get into med school does. You ask why to gauge how close you hit the mark.

“It’s risky. Difficult.” He shrugs. “I want to be the best.”

“The best surgeon?”

“Yeah.”

“Out of like, what? All surgeons? Is there even a measurement system for ‘best surgeon’? Do you have to sleep with the most nurses, or something?”

“Fuck off,” he says, but there’s the edge of a grin on his face and you think it just makes him even more handsome, and—you could kiss him, maybe. If he wanted you to. You think he’d use his teeth more than necessary because he seems like the type.

It’s stilted but easier after that. He seems genuinely interested in your career path, as if he’s pushing his desire to be the best onto you. Not that you can be the best teacher in any medical field. It’s just unquantifiable. Like his goals—but that doesn’t seem to deter him.

“My friend works at a bar near here,” he tells you when the daylight gets low and the sky turns a shade of blood red that’s reminiscent of his eyes. Behind him, the setting sun makes him look dangerous. More sharp. His body is a threat and you’re threatened in so many ways, but you can’t seem to say no when he asks you to go there with him.

Adding another person makes things feel like they’re going smooth—or maybe that’s the alcohol. Bakugou’s friend, an extremely friendly redhead that introduces himself as Eijirou—“but you can call me Kiri, everyone does”—comps you on the first drink, a gin and tonic with a blackberry floating between ice cubes.

You don’t really remember how many more drinks you have. You’re not drunk, per se, but you’re definitely a little woozy. You and Bakugou are sitting on two tall bar stools placed a little too close together, and every now and then your thigh will brush his. Bakugou smiles easier when you’re talking to Kiri, something that looks so out of place on his serious face. Never a full smile—just a slight curve of the lips. But it’s more than you usually see. He mellows out when he’s around someone he knows well.

Kiri leaves the two of you every now and then to take other customers’ orders, and a point comes where you and Bakugou are just silent, and you’re tipsy so you smile at him and he kind of narrows his eyes in confusion and asks, “What?”

“Tonight’s been really good,” you say. You hadn’t expected to say that to him, even though you’d been thinking it. “Surprisingly.”

“That’s rude.”

You scoff, because out of everyone, he shouldn’t be allowed to say that. “As if you’re not rude to me all the time. Do you even know how to be nice to people?”

His fingers brush against the hand you have wrapped around your glass on the bar, an unexpected shock running through your body at the contact. He leans closer but not close enough for his sudden advance to be obvious to any onlookers. You still feel your cheeks warm at the attention. When he decides that he’s close enough, he asks, “You want me to show you how nice I can be?”

You do.

His house is a five-minute drive from the bar, and he has one hand on your thigh the entire trip. Your body is buzzing and it could be the alcohol or it could be the contact. His touch is warm. You can barely look at him the entire drive because you don’t do this—sleep with people on the first date. With people you don’t know. It’s kind of anxiety-inducing, another film of something that makes your heart beat too hard layered on top of the excitement that’s already building inside you.

He pulls up to a frat house and parks in the lot, and you say, “No fucking way.”

“Not up to your standards, or something?”

You run a hand down your face. “I can’t believe you’re a frat boy.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he says, and you look at him and it’s got to be the alcohol, but his face is kind of red. “Ei asked me to join with him, so I did. It’s not a bad thing.”

“It feels like it is.”

“I can take you back to your car if you’re gonna run your fucking mouth like this.”

You consider it. His hand is still on your thigh. It’s cold outside and it would be warmer with him. “Let’s get inside before I change my mind.”

It’s not super late, but everything is quiet. Dark. No one is here or no one is awake. It’s a three-floor house on the edge of campus along the fraternity row. You walk by it every day on your way to the smaller science building where your anatomy class is held. You never thought you’d be inside of it.

It doesn’t smell bad like you expected it would. There’s a kind of pumpkin-spice-vanilla scent in the air that you’re sure is probably from a Glade air freshener, and you’re mildly impressed. Not enough to stop disliking frat boys, but maybe just enough to tolerate the boys in this frat house.

His room is on the top floor at the end of a long hall of doors, and when you’re inside he closes the door and presses you up against it and his lips are on yours, the kiss hot and just as full of teeth as you imagined it would be.

He kisses like he’s angry. Like he doesn’t have the time to be soft. His arms cage you against the long, hard line of his body, and your hands pull at the material of his shirt. It comes off without complaint and even though you knew he was in shape, you didn’t know he was this fucking in shape. You try not to stare but that’s not much of an issue because he doesn’t stop kissing you for a second, his lips on your jaw, your throat, biting a kiss into your nape.

You push him back enough to tell him that you want to be on the bed, and you can tell he likes to be in control, but he lets you lead him there.

And then he’s on top of you, his lips against yours and his tongue sliding against your teeth and a large, muscular thigh between your legs. His mouth and hands are focused on driving you insane. He’s already hard, and you palm his dick through his joggers and run your hand up the length, and fuck, this is about to be good.

He pulls back and bites his lip and groans, grabbing your wrist. “Wait.”

That’s the worst thing you’ve ever fucking heard, and it’s insensitive, but you ask, “Are you kidding me?”

“How much did you have to drink?” He’s looking down at you from above and you really like his face like this. Brows drawn in something like concern, pretty, kiss-slick lips tilted into a frown. His hand is still gently holding your wrist, his body still against yours, but it’s no longer with that same kind of heat—there’s an intimacy in this moment that you haven’t experienced since the last time you seriously dated, and you just stare at him because he’s so fucking hot. “You gonna answer the question or not?”

“I don’t know.” You try to think. Your brain is foggy. “Maybe a lot. You’re, like, gorgeous.”

“Fucking—shut up,” he snaps back, an automatic reaction. His face is just barely pink again. He probably doesn’t get compliments often when he treats everyone like they’re beneath him. “Don’t just say that shit out of nowhere.”

“We were making out two seconds ago. Is that really out of nowhere?”

“Yeah,” he says, like it’s obvious. “That’s different.”

You’re not sure what he wants. Probably just sex. Most guys do. Your brain is too much of a mess to stop yourself from asking, “So I’m not gonna get a compliment back?”

He rolls his eyes and gets up, and it’s freezing on the bed without him, even though you’re in a sweater and jeans. It’s nearly cold outside. The pre-winter chill. The days are mild enough, but the nights have teeth. It seeps into his room and you bet it’s because the frat boys are trying to save money by not turning the heating on.

“You want to stay here, or should I take you home?”

A good question, but one you already have an answer to before he’s even done asking it. “I want to stay.”

He looks at you with an unreadable expression and then opens a drawer in the dresser across the room and pulls out some clothes, brings them to you. “I’ll go change in the bathroom. Text me when you’re done.”

No matter how nice the house smells, how tidy Bakugou’s bedroom is, the idea of a shared bathroom at a frat house makes you feel kind of sick. When he’s gone, you change into his clothes, worn and comfortable and too big, and when you text him the all clear he comes back in just a pair of sweats.

You feel awkward. He joins you in bed and you’re sure it’s going to be the kind of thing where you both sleep at either end of the mattress and refuse to acknowledge what happened in the morning.

Instead, he pulls you close when you move to turn away, tucking your head against his chest. “C’mere, dumbass.”

You can tell he’s already close to falling asleep. You are too. It’s easy in the post-alcohol haze, in the warmth of his body against yours, in his comfortable clothes and his almost too-firm bed. You wrap your arms around him and trace the muscles of his back and he hums in what you think is appreciation. Or maybe he’s just drunk, making noise to make noise.

Without really thinking, you tilt your head up and press a kiss just under the hollow of his throat, at the very top of his chest.

He stills, and you think you might have done something wrong, but after a moment he pulls you to him tighter. When he speaks, it’s almost too quiet to hear. “Your voice is nice.”

It’s your turn to still, to process things as they happen, delayed by the inability to understand why he would tell you that. “Um, okay?”

“That was a compliment. You said you wanted one.”

“I did.” You trace a finger down his spine and you can feel him shiver. You like the way he moves against you. “That was sweet.”

He grunts. “Fuck off. I’m never saying that kind of shit to you ever again.”

You laugh and he kisses the top of your head and everything is hazy and beautiful. You fall asleep like that, contented, warm, and safe.

In the morning, with everything processing through your sober head, you can’t fathom how you went from hating Bakugou yesterday morning to falling asleep in his arms. It’s a little frightening. Circumstances change so fast.

Things are missing. You’re not wearing your necklace and you don’t remember taking it off. You no longer have the memories of how you got from the bar back to his place.

You remember everything after, though.

He’s lying on his stomach with his arm stretched across your waist, a warm weight. You’re pretty sure he’s asleep. You shift, careful, trying not to wake him, as if—what, you’re going to sneak out? Leave him and forget about this? You don’t want to forget. You want to relive it.

His eyes open the second you move. He peers at you like he’s confused, and for a long, horrible moment, you think that maybe he doesn’t remember last night. That you should have been worried about how many drinks he’d at the bar instead of the other way around. But then he asks, voice rough from sleep, “You going somewhere?”

“I should probably get home.” Mina will be waiting for you. You won’t be surprised if you have fifty notifications waiting from her on your phone, all asking if Bakugou killed you or not.

Regardless, you don’t protest when his arm pulls you to him tighter, when he kisses you, when he pulls his own clothes from your body and lets his hands run across every exposed inch of your skin, when his head sinks between your legs and he has you covering your own mouth so his roommates don’t hear your moans.

He’s too good with his fingers, and once they’re inside you, curving just right, your legs tighten around his head and you ride out your climax, his hands moving to hold your thighs down hard, the painful pressure against your skin heightening every sensation.

When you’re panting, dizzy and wondering if the asshole in your orgo class will forever be the guy that brought you to the best orgasm of your life, he kisses the inside of your thigh and you’re whipped. You like him.

“You sound so fucking pretty when I’m eating you out,” he whispers against your skin. It’s such a strange compliment but it makes your heart flip in a way that one more simple and less sexual wouldn’t have been able to achieve.

You’re so exposed and he’s so not, and when you prop yourself up and look at him this seems to click for him too, because he’s kissing you again, and his sweats are off, and he slides inside you so easy that it’s like it was meant to be.

“You wanted this bad, didn’t you, sweetheart?” His voice is rough and it almost breaks halfway through and he bottoms out and just breathes, his face tucked into the crook of your shoulder, barely holding himself together.

You think he wanted it more than you did just from this, and that messes with something in your head. It makes you feel softer towards him in ways you couldn’t have been before.

He starts moving after a moment, and he kisses you more gentle than he did last night, and you have slow, sleepy sex, the kind that people that have known each other for too long have, where each moment feels sacred and quiet.

It’s not long before he’s close and you think he’s kind of embarrassed by this because he’s not mentioning it at all, but it’s clear from his stuttering movements, the way he can barely kiss you for more than a second before he has to stop and lean his head next to yours against his pillow, his lips brushing your collar bone as he whispers things you don’t quite catch.

His name is pulled from your lips, a whispered, “Katsuki,” because you’re not going to use his last fucking name in bed.

And that’s all it takes for him. After only a few, deep strokes he’s pulling out and gripping you like a fucking lifeline and making the most graphic noises you’ve ever heard, and it’s fucking hot even if you didn’t get off. You wouldn’t change the experience for anything.

But he doesn’t feel the same way. When he’s collected himself, he sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, obviously frustrated.

“It’s okay,” you tell him. “I enjoyed it.”

“Don’t fucking pity me.” He sounds genuinely affronted.

“No, I—”

“You’re gonna regret it. Gonna make you cum so fucking hard you won’t know how to walk.” He kisses his way down your body and his teeth scrape against your skin, tracing over your neck, your breasts, your stomach. “I’ll have to carry you home.”

He uses his tongue again and his hands are roughly prying your thighs apart and he does make you regret it. More than once. Until your legs are shaking so bad you have to ask him to stop.

“You really want that?” he asks, but you know he knows you do. He looks so smug.

“Fucking—yes, please. God.”

“Say my name again,” he says, and he slides his fingers inside of you and you basically whine, covering your mouth at the last moment.

You’re blushing and you can barely look him in the eye. “If I say it, you’ll stop?”

He kind of laughs at that, confused, like he doesn’t really know why you want him to stop so bad even though your legs are on his shoulders and he can definitely feel the tremors running through them. “Are you embarrassed?”

Yeah, you are—because you’re sure one or more of his roommates must have heard you by now, and they’re frat boys, so they’re going to be children about it. “I don’t want them to hear me.”

He knows what you mean without you explaining further. “You think I give a shit? They can leave if they’re uncomfortable.”

“I give a shit. I’m going to have to look at them.” You cover your face with your hands and your skin is hot, burning, because just the thought of looking someone in the face that heard some of the noises this man has made you make is fucking terrible. “Oh my god. They’re going to think I’m someone that fucks frat boys all the time.”

He removes his fingers and you shiver even at that slight movement, oversensitive to the point of pain, and he makes direct eye contact with you before putting his fingers into his mouth and pulling them out slow, making sure you know how much he likes what he’s doing.

How the fuck did you get here? You’ve never had a man look at you like this before—like he could just keep going with you for hours because you’re all he wants. It’s intimidating and strange and it’s made worse when he presses a soft kiss to the top of your thigh before sliding your legs off his shoulders. “Come get breakfast with me.”

And you do.

Days pass and it’s just—Katsuki. All the time. There was a moment where your brain shifted to allow yourself to call him by his first name and it was during that breakfast, where he ate more than you’ve ever seen a human being physically eat and you had three cups of the best coffee of your life. You think it was the post-sex feeling, not the coffee itself. He gave you a look on the third cup and you laughed and he handed you the sugar packets while telling you that sugar’s bad for you, and it was the best breakfast you’d had in a long time.

You do your best to keep up with Mina, who’s pretty much your only friend on campus, because you’ve heard stories about girls getting a boyfriend and then cutting themselves off from everyone else around them and you don’t want to do that. You’re not going to sever a connection just because you’re sleeping with someone now.

And technically, that's all it is. You and Katsuki aren't dating. You don’t really talk about it. He just—is. He exists, and you exist next to him, and that’s the best form of existing. You study together for organic chemistry and you both pass the class—your A- and his A only cause the most minute tension—and this semester turns into another. Into your final semester at UA and also his, and both of you send out grad school applications and life starts to feel like it’s coming together. You both want to attend different graduate programs at UA. You could just stay here, in town, just like this. Together. Nothing would have to change.

This feels like something you would discuss if you were dating, but you’re still not. Part of you wants to do the ‘what are we?’ conversation and part of you can’t even bring yourself to mention it. One morning at the frat house, while coming downstairs after getting ready in the communal bathroom (which is not as bad as you thought it would be), you hear something you shouldn’t. Katsuki’s cooking breakfast in the kitchen that, for a house full of guys, is pretty clean, and Kiri asks the question you want to ask. A quiet, “Are you and her together, dude? Or is it like a casual thing?”

You stop on the stairs. You try to quiet your breathing, to not be heard, even though you shouldn’t be eavesdropping. He thinks about it for a while, or maybe it feels like a long time because you’re doing something bad.

His eventual answer is, “She’s my best friend. But don't tell her that.”

And that’s enough for you for now, because no matter what else is going on, you think he’s your best friend, too.

He gets to know Mina. Even though she snipes at him and he yells back, they tolerate one another when he’s over at your apartment. You meet almost all the guys in his frat and find out that Kiri is the person that got Katsuki to join with a lot of begging and whining about how good it would be for him to talk to new people.

He gives in easy when it comes to Kiri. There’s a soft spot there. They’ve been friends for years and you want to hang out with Kiri just to ask questions about Katsuki, but that feels ingenuine so you don’t. You should want to hang out with him just because it’s him.

You think you’re doing well. Keeping boundaries. Making sure you have connections outside of him. You’re responsible, and you’re independent, and you’re healthy.

And then he has to go back home for a week.

He tells you this when you’re at your apartment on a night Mina is working. She just transferred into UA’s art program from the environmental sciences program, and she seems happier, but she’s picked up more shifts at the local bookstore where she stocks shelves and mans the counter.

You’re on the couch, lying between his legs, your head resting comfortably on his chest. He works so hard for his body and you’ve seen that—the workouts that are an almost everyday thing, the training sessions with Kiri, the mixed martial art courses that he teaches part-time at a gym down the street from the frat house. He likes to get compliments on physical things because he’s proud of the way he looks and he’s also able to accept those compliments much better than ones about who he is as a person.

It’s only been a few months, but you know so much about him. So you’ve known all day that there’s something he has to tell you, and you’re anxious. He runs a hand across your shoulders and rests it on your lower back and tells you that he has to go away like he’s telling you he’s leaving for war.

“It’s not serious,” he clarifies. “My dad’s just getting surgery for a slipped disc. But my mom would be pissed if I didn’t come home for it.”

You cross your hands on his chest and prop your chin up so you can look at him better. “Of course you should go. It’s important. I’ll be here when you get back. Don’t worry.”

Because he had been worried and you’re worried and you think that this isn’t good. You still scoot forward and kiss his chin, just where you can reach from your vantage point, and he does that half-smile that, on a real, fully emotionally developed human being would be a full smile. You try to pretend that everything is okay.

The first day that he’s gone is agony.

You have class but you don’t go. You have homework to do and you finish it but it’s half-hearted, not really your best effort. Katsuki texts you but his mom is apparently really strict about phone usage, so he doesn’t get to call you the first night, and even after that, it’s not for long, if at all.

On the fourth day of his absence, Mina comes home at lunchtime from her morning classes and sees you sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket that still smells like him, that strange but pleasant burnt sugar scent that’s got to be from his deodorant or his shampoo. You don’t know which but you just want to have him here and not have only the vestiges, the left-behinds, the whispers and shadows that stay in his absence.

“Let’s go,” Mina says, grabbing your arm.

“What?” You immediately protest at this because you’re comfortable and you don’t want to move because there’s nothing to move for.

She pulls you and she might be small, but she’s way stronger than she looks. You’re off the couch and out the door in no time. She leads you down the sidewalk towards campus, the mild spring day smelling of pollen and gasoline from the Shell across the street.

“Is it because of Bakugou?” she asks.

You miss seeing him already. You miss the way he holds you. You miss the way he sometimes calls you such sweet terms of endearment that you wouldn’t think he’d use, and that when you ask him about it he gets embarrassed. “Yeah.”

She stops. Her face twists and she looks almost sad. Cars pass the two of you on the busy street that separates campus from the rest of town, bass thumps through the road from a car with boosted speakers somewhere on this or the next block. “I think you need to take some time for yourself. Away from him.”

That’s the last thing you want to do. You’re good. You spend time with other people. You don’t need to be around him all the time. You just need him close. “Why would I do that?”

Mina reaches out and grabs your hand, and terrible as it is, your first instinct is to wrench it away. You don’t like what she’s trying to tell you. You jerk back but she holds on tight until your rational brain kicks in. Mina isn’t attacking you. She isn’t trying to say you’re doing something wrong.

She’s so non-confrontational with big issues like this—she can easily talk about little problems, like dishes not being done in the sink or laundry left in the dryer for too long, but she’s always had a problem with the more important things. If she’s telling you this, it means a lot to her.

“It isn’t good that you’re so sad just because he’s away. Like, you can text him. He’s not dead. And I know you know that. But him being gone shouldn’t send you into a depressive spiral.” She pulls your hand close to her chest, a sort-of-hug in the least physical way possible. “You need to be okay on your own, you know? Because things like this are gonna happen in life and he won’t always be able to be there.”

Times like these remind you how much Mina sees that you don’t. She’s so in tune with her emotions and the feelings of others in a way that you’ll never fully be able to comprehend. You should probably listen to her. “Okay. Maybe.”

She tugs on your hand, getting you to start walking again. “Let me get you some food.”

You let Mina take you to lunch and you talk about things that don’t involve Katsuki, and because of this you realize how often you do talk about him. How much you rely on his presence to keep you grounded and happy and calm. And Mina’s right. It’s fucking terrible, but she’s right.

When you get home, she asks you what you want to do. And with her there, it’s easy to say that you’re going to do what she said you should. Tell him that you need space. That you need to learn how to be on your own before you can truly be with him.

He calls later that night when you’re sitting in bed. You watch your phone ring for a few seconds, dreading this call. Wanting it to already be over and wanting it to not be necessary at all. When you pick up, you ask, “Katsuki?”

“Hey, angel.”

This is painful. This is horrifying. You just want to wear his clothes again and sit in his bed and let him take care of you, and you want to kiss him and have him close at all times. You don’t want to not know where he is, or what he’s doing.

And that’s not good. That’s not how non-toxic relationships work.

“Is your dad okay?”

“Yeah. They got him in for surgery this morning and he’s recovering now. Mom made us wait in the hospital the whole fucking time, even though we knew it would take forever. Still feels like I’m sitting in the waiting room.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And the coffee was trash, too. Tasted just like the shit they served at the diner we go to. I don’t know how you drink it.”

“Mm.”

“Wish I was there.”

“Me too.”

“I told my mom about you.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to drive up here? We have a guest bedroom—”

“Katsuki.”

The silence is deafening. It stretches out so long that the phone starts picking up Katsuki’s breathing, like it’s looking for any sort of noise it can to transfer over to you in the absence of his voice. He can probably hear yours too. You don’t want to do this.

“Tell me what’s wrong.” He’s worried. He doesn’t often show it, but you’ve heard him worried just enough to know what it sounds like. And it’s this.

“I don’t think…” You take a breath, and your brain hurts, your body is screaming at you to stop, to just give in and go back to normal and listen to him tell you about his day at the hospital and then convince you to drive up to his house to meet his mom and maybe his dad, even though you’re still not technically dating. You’d sleep in the guest bedroom and he’d sneak in and hold you like he always does, like he’s so good at, a kind of innate talent he must have been born with. “I don’t think what we’re doing is healthy.”

He's quiet for a long time. “The fuck are you trying to say?”

You’re not quite sure how to sum it up. To put what Mina made you realize into words. “I’m worried that I need you too much.”

“I like that you need me.”

“See, does that sound like a good thing to you?” You’re gripping the phone so hard that its metal edges are digging into your palm. Your covers are too warm. You’re sweating but it’s a cold sweat that sticks your clothes to your skin and makes you want to exit your body just to get away from the sensation. “I think maybe we need time.”

“Time.”

“Time apart.”

“Apart.”

“Yeah.” Your voice is shaking and your vision is blurry and everything feels too hot, your face and your hands and the place where the phone digs into your palm. “I need to be able to be okay with just me. I think that’s important.”

“It is,” he says. His voice is kind of hoarse. The words are quiet. You don’t know how to end this conversation.

You don’t know if you want it to end. Because what if this is the last time you talk to him? What if this is the last conversation in a line of so many other, better ones? “I’ll see you when you get back.”

You want to believe you will, even though you shouldn’t, because if you see him, it might break every inch of the resolve you built up throughout the day to say all this to him.

“Yeah.” He hangs up and everything is empty.

✴

You get accepted into two schools for a grad program geared towards medical education. UA, your first choice, and Shiketsu, a smaller university a few hours away.

Mina is sad when you accept Shiketsu’s offer almost immediately, but she understands. It’s hard to walk around UA. There are places on campus and in your own home that are so inextricably tied to Katsuki that you can’t be there without missing him. Without wanting to call him.

Some nights, you get close. But you think he would be mad at you if you did. Not only because you pushed him away just to ask for him to come back, but because you gave up that easily on your own convictions. You’re not sure how he reacted to everything because you haven’t seen him, haven’t spoken to him, and you graduate without him by your side and move to the sleepy town outside of Shiketsu, nothing like the city that UA is crammed inside of.

It’s comfortable and quiet. You learn to be okay with moving slow. Your grad program will take five years to complete, a joint master’s degree and PhD, and you’re lucky that you got into two places. Your grades were great, and part of that is due to Katsuki.

Even far away, you still think about him. You still appreciate him for all he did for you in the brief time you spent together.

But you’re soon unable to think about much at all. You never anticipated how much time would have to go into something like grad school, even though it should have been obvious. If you’re not studying, you’re teaching intro classes to unruly freshmen. If you’re not teaching, you’re pulling shifts at the coffee shop in the library for extra cash to supplement your pitiful teaching stipend. If you’re not working, you’re so deeply asleep that it’s like you’re dead.

You don’t dream anymore. Every night is still, like a stone at the bottom of a pond.

But you enjoy what you’re doing. You start to feel confident about your career and in the notion that you’ll be good at teaching. In undergrad, you wanted to get out of college quickly because you just wanted to move on with your life. You always thought that getting to the part where you didn’t have to achieve anything more was the goal. Get that tenure track teaching position and you’re golden.

But you realize that thinking like that strips you of the real life you could be having. You need to grow slowly, appreciate things as they come. Take root in these experiences and allow yourself to bloom through what they teach you.

You make friends with some of the members of your cohort. Only a few, but they know you well. You Shindou and Momo Yaoyorozu are two of the smartest people you’ve ever fucking met, and they hold parties in their shared townhouse every other weekend—Momo always calls them tea parties, because she has good intentions, but Shindou buys at least six handles to fill people’s cups with.

The responsibilities you have don’t often let you attend, but most of the time things don’t devolve until after dark, so you can get some good hours of studying and cups of high-quality tea in with Momo before the night truly begins. She cuts down the time you usually spend doing homework by half.

This doesn’t mean Shindou doesn’t needle you until you give in, sometimes. Nights like tonight are blurs. You had too many shots and you’re not sure what any of them were. They all started to taste the same after a while. You’re outside smoking a cigarette that you can’t remember being given—you don’t even smoke, but something about it with the buzz in your head and the slight pounding behind your eyes feels good. It’s calming everything in your body that’s about to riot.

Your phone rings and you think it could be Mina, who you still call weekly, or it could be someone else in your cohort asking for Momo’s address. But it’s not.

The alcohol is what makes you pick up. You can’t control yourself. You’ve slid your thumb across the screen to accept the call without half a thought. The party is loud, even closed behind the balcony door. Music thumps through the walls and people are speaking loud to be heard over it.

You cover one ear with your hand and press your phone tight to the other and ask, “Katsuki?”

It’s quiet. He might have not meant to call you. He might not even be on the line right now. You should hang up.

But you don’t. You wait because you’re hopeful for something.

“It’s loud. Where are you?” You can’t tell what he’s feeling and you don’t know if it’s because he spoke for such a short amount of time or if it’s because you’ve lost that knack you had for him, for knowing exactly what he was thinking from his tone of voice alone.

“Sorry,” you say. You’re trying not to slur your words because you don’t want him to know you’re drunk. “I’m at a friend’s house.”

He got into UA. Of course he did. He’s the smartest fucking man you’ve ever met. Even smarter than Shindou, or Momo, or both combined. He’s doing what you’re doing now, but harder, because he’s at med school. You wonder what kind of hours he has to pull. You wonder how tired he is.

“How are you?” you ask, because it sounds like he’s just done talking, or doesn’t know what to say, or maybe he’s as drunk as you and he’s just processing the moment.

“I, uh.” He clears his throat. Goes quiet again.

The door opens, the music cutting into the night, and you turn and Shindou is in the doorway, concerned. He motions to the phone and mouths, What’s up?

You should probably respond but you’re still waiting for Katsuki to continue. You think you can hear his breathing over the phone but that might just be your brain making it up. Bringing you back to the last phone call you and he had. You’re glad you’ve stopped dreaming because you would dream about him sometimes when you first moved to Shiketsu and those were always the nights you woke up crying.

Shindou must think you didn’t hear him because he asks aloud, “Is everything okay?”

“Who’s that?” Katsuki asks, and this time you know exactly what he’s feeling.

“My friend,” you tell him.

“I shouldn’t have called.”

“Katsuki, please—”

But he’s gone.

You try not to be mad at Shindou because he’s a nice guy and he really does care. It’s not his fault. But you wanted to talk to Katsuki. Calling him yourself feels like a crime because you were the one that broke things off. It was the one chance you had to do something. You want things to be okay. You want to talk to him because he would always listen to you like no one else knew how to.

You get through your first semester with a lot of tears and consistent stress that’s so bad you stop eating for a few days. Recovery is winter break spent in town, even though Mina said you were welcome to visit. You’ll go see her in the summer. You’ll have longer, then, and you’ll also be able to sleep for twelve hours every day for a week before driving up.

Momo takes you out to late lunches at different bistros throughout the town that you couldn’t have found by yourself. Her family provided a lot of the funds that built the city and the college. She knows the place and the people so well. She’s like a politician’s daughter, if that politician was also well regarded by literally everyone in town.

“It gets easier,” she tells you the first time the two of you go out. You’re at a little French place that does onion soup in a clay pot with a film of melting, chewy cheese on top. It somehow tastes good when paired with the rich broth and the perfectly cooked onions.

“School?” you ask, because nothing feels like it’s been easy.

“Both of my parents got their PhDs from Shiketsu. They told me that the first semester is the hardest. If you make it through that, you can make it to the end.” She says this with such confidence. You know people that have dropped out already, cracked under the pressure.

You try to believe her because you want things to get better. You want to get better.

That becomes something you don’t just tell yourself every morning in the mirror. You enjoy time by yourself more. You learn to spend stolen moments working on various hobbies you pick up. Momo teaches you how to knit. Shindou explains the concept of shotgunning beer, and you get pretty good at it, even though it’s a talent you hope never to really put to use. Sometimes—if you have the free time and extra cash—you go to the pottery studio near your studio apartment and make pots and cups and little vases on their rentable wheels. You’re not very good, but that’s part of the fun.

There’s no one watching you. No one breathing down your neck, making sure you do everything perfectly. And you don’t really have anyone doing that to you in the other areas of your life except yourself. You want to be good at things, and that can be damaging sometimes. The art helps you realize this.

All good things come with time. All plants take months to root and stem and bloom. You are your own plant. You learn how to water yourself with care. You figure out what kind of sunlight you thrive in.

You’re not as lonely anymore, but you cave just once. After a nice dinner with some members of your cohort at one of the places that you and Momo have started to frequent, Shindou asks you to come over and there’s no reason for you to, because the two of you never really hang out alone. You say yes.

The sex isn’t the best you’ve had, but you’re entirely sure that you’ll never sleep with anyone that would be willing to give as much as Katsuki did. You try not to think about him. Not when you’re sleeping with another man.

Shindou’s hands are rough, callouses scraping against your thighs, and you wonder why. He doesn’t really do anything labor intensive. He works out, but not as much as Katsuki.

You have trouble keeping his name out of your head, even when Shindou breathes things into your ear that are much too filthy to be repeated, even when he kisses you short and kind with not enough teeth.

He barely gets you to climax once and then afterwards asks if you want to watch a movie. You humor him. He wants to hold you on the couch and you let him just because it feels nice, but you’re entirely positive that this will never happen again.

You think this is a step forward, too. You’re not going to end up with Shindou—god forbid, because he’s a nice guy, but he’s a bit of a narcissist and honestly gets scary sometimes when he’s mad—but you can end up with someone else. You can find someone that’s not Katsuki and sleep with them and not feel guilty and maybe fall in love with them, too.

It’s two weeks before your second semester is about to end, three until you’ll be back home with Mina, when you’re sent an Instagram post that knocks the breath out of you.

It’s from Denki, who you haven’t spoken to in years, but he knows literally everyone on the UA campus. He and Mina hung out a lot during your freshman year of college, so you’re included in his Insta group chat called UA Gossip. He’s nothing if not subtle.

Your heart drops into your stomach when you see it. Your skin feels cold in ways it shouldn’t. Katsuki has his arm around a woman you don’t recognize, and she’s kissing his cheek. He’s not smiling but he doesn’t look unhappy. That’s a lot to ask from him, especially for a photo. You never got one with him where he wasn’t frowning.

The caption reads, finally got this grumpy guy to let me post a pic! photo cred ochako thnks bb

You fucking hate it.

‘This grumpy guy’? Who the fuck calls Katsuki that and gets away with it? It’s almost humiliating, and you’re positive he wouldn’t like it but apparently he let her post the picture with its awful caption.

She’s gorgeous. Her body is fantastic—she’s wearing a sundress in the picture and Katsuki’s hand rests on a very impressively curved waist. They look like models next to each other. They’re magazine-cover perfect.

Every special, intimate moment you have stored in your brain between you and Katsuki flashes across your eyes and you think about him doing those things with another person. Making this woman food and sharing a meal with her. Calling her angel or sweetheart or something else equally tooth-rotting and entirely too soft coming from someone so sharp. Kissing the inside of her thigh, telling her he likes her voice, telling her how pretty she sounds.

Jesus fucking Christ. You shouldn’t be thinking about this. This is wrong.

He doesn’t belong to you. You have absolutely no claim on him. But you feel sick to your stomach. You call out of work and lie in bed and wonder if you’ll never be a fully realized, well-rounded person. You were doing so good.

But maybe this is what you needed. Sleeping with another person wasn’t really a wake-up call—it was just sex. Seeing Katsuki in a relationship is different. It’s the end of everything that you and he had together.

When you get to Mina’s a few weeks later, you’re prepared to lay low. She’s moved into a new apartment with a spare bedroom, and you put away your stuff as if you live there. You’re only planning to stay for a month because Mina is wonderful and you miss her, but you know you’re going to run into people and you’re not sure how much socializing you can take.

It’s a city, but campus is small. Like its own little town. This only further proves to be true when Mina tells you that you’ve both been invited to a party at Kiri’s. You’re both sitting at the table sandwiched between the kitchen and the tastefully decorated living room eating lunch, and suddenly your appetite is gone.

“Like, the Kiri? Like—Katsuki’s Kiri?” You haven’t spoken to either of them in nearly a year. You left early summer last year to move everything to your new home. “How do you even know him?”

“So, Denki’s friend Sero works at that bar downtown that serves the best strawberry gin cocktails and Kiri works there too, and apparently they got on really well so we all went out one night and it was just so fun, and it kind of kept going from there.” Mina shoves some sour cream and onion chips into her mouth, chewing happily. “I think it’d be good for you to come with. You can see everyone again and actually hang out with us instead of doing like a million school and work things at once.”

She’s right—you hadn’t really spent time hanging out with anyone but her when you were here. It’s why you’d fallen out of touch with Denki. Why you never really talked to Kiri long enough to become his friend. Still, you don’t want to admit it. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

“Sorry, Mom, jeez,” she mumbles around her food, but she smiles at you, mischievous, and you know that whether you like it or not you’re going to be forced to go.

You have to ask. You don’t want to. “Is he going to be there?”

Mina stops chewing, the smile falling from her face. She’s like a puppy. Happy and sad are the only two emotions she flits between, and she feels both of them so deeply. She reaches across the table, slow, and takes your hand when you offer it. “I’ll text Kiri and tell him to keep Bakugou out of the house. You don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.”

But you want to.

They don’t live in the frat house anymore. When Katsuki graduated, they moved in together, finding an apartment just outside campus limits with a lot of windows that you can see from outside. You get there when it’s already dark, but you’re sure it’s a nice, refreshing space when the sun rises and shines through the street-facing double-paned glass in the mornings.

It’s in a row of buildings that are essentially classy, red brick townhouses with one unit upstairs and one downstairs. They’re in the upper unit, and you can feel yourself getting nervous as you walk up the steps behind Mina. You shouldn’t drink tonight. You don’t know if you could. Even though he’s not going to be here, you’re going to be looking for him all night because it’s his apartment you’re about to enter. A new place where you haven’t spent time with him. A home that he’s shared with his new girlfriend. All traces of you have been washed away.

Kiri opens the door and smiles wide, and then his eyes go to you and he smiles even wider. “Oh, awesome! I didn’t think you were gonna come!”

You’re surprised by how genuinely excited he sounds, as if you’re a friend that he’d missed. “Thought I’d check in and say hi to everyone.”

Inside, there are less people than you expected. It’s more of a kickback than a party. Sero and Denki are sharing a blunt by the open window facing the street, and a couple of other people you vaguely recognize are sitting on the two threadbare couches in the center of the wide living room. There’s a kitchenette at the back, a few doors next to it. The apartment is smaller than it looked from outside, but it’s cozy. Posters of Kiri’s favorite bands line the walls, there are at least six twelve-packs of Truly Hard Iced Teas scattered throughout the room, on tables and on the floor next to the couches and on the mantel of a fireplace that sits in the far, red-brick wall, its glow making everything softer. It’s fake, but it looks nice. The whole apartment still retains a frat-boy-esque vibe, but it smells like pumpkin spice Glade air freshener and it kind of feels like home.

You remember a few of the people on the couch—Midoriya, a childhood friend of Katsuki’s that would visit the frat house sometimes, and Uraraka, a kind woman that used to work at the campus Starbucks. You ordered from her a million times and she remembered your name. You almost never remembered hers because you just weren’t paying attention to things in undergrad that you didn’t think were important.

Maybe there are things you still need to work on. Maybe you’re not a complete human just yet. But you can at least feel reassured by the fact that you’ve realized life isn’t worth living if you make everything unimportant. Each moment is special. One you won’t get to live again. Nothing is unimportant when you put things in that perspective, and you find yourself wanting to reconnect with these tangential people from your undergrad years.

It’s easy after three Trulys. Mina and Kiri are drinking the harder stuff, but you, Midoriya, and Uraraka sip on the iced teas and talk quietly about books. Uraraka is getting into mysteries and true crime novels even though they creep her out, and Midoriya outs himself as an absolute nerd when he mentions the “cool new book I got about the repercussions of Spanish Influenza. Did you know it didn’t actually originate in Spain?”

You like this. You can see yourself coming back every summer and hanging out with these people. Having friends at both UA and at Shiketsu. It feels possible in this moment, and that loosens the tension you carried with you into this party. That and the Trulys.

The front door opens unexpectedly, and someone walks in that you don’t know personally but whose Instagram you stalked a few weeks ago, and behind her, one hand on the small of her back, is your worst nightmare.

He sees you immediately. You make eye contact so intense that it burns and his jaw is tight and you think he might be angry that you’re here, in his house, without his permission. You suddenly can’t look anywhere but at your hands, folded carefully in your lap.

Even after a year, as if that small amount of time would make much difference, he’s so beautiful. More so, maybe, than he had been before. Or you’d just missed him so much that seeing him fills you with a new kind of appreciation for the hard planes of his face, his broad chest, his basic fashion sense—the plain shirts and the joggers and the high-top sneakers that cost too much at Journey’s—that he still manages to make look good.

“Hey, bro,” Kiri says, and he sounds kind of bewildered but also kind of drunk. “Thought you weren’t coming home ‘til late.”

“It’s my fucking apartment. I can come back whenever I want.”

You chance a look at his girlfriend and she looks between the two of them, confused, and you’re positive that she doesn’t know about you. Why would she? It’s not like people really talk about their exes all that much.

Not that you even dated. You didn’t. You’re an ex-something, though. An ex-space-coinhabitor. An ex-best-friend. An ex-codependent.

Still, it sits badly with you. Maybe you didn’t have as much of an effect on Katsuki as he did on you. He’s dating already. You hadn’t even considered dating anyone yet.

He doesn’t wait for Kiri to respond. He walks to one of the kitchenette-adjacent doors with his girlfriend behind him and they enter his room and shut themselves off from everyone, but he’s still there, physically, just a couple dozen feet from you.

“Can we go home?” you ask Mina, low so no one else hears.

She’s sad again. You hate that you’ve helped ruin this nice, quiet evening, but you think you’re going to be sick if you stay. She knows this because she knows you. “Of course, babe.” And then to Kiri, loudly, she says, “Okay! I’m done for the night. Need to sleep to keep my skin looking this good.”

“Your skin just naturally looks that good,” Denki says from the couch, where he’s laying half-slumped against Sero. Neither of them have said anything for a good hour, just vibing on the outskirts of the group’s conversations. “I pay so much for face wash and… moisturizers. So many moisturizers.”

“He does have a lot of moisturizers,” Sero adds, slurred and quiet.

“And you get to just eat chips and shit? And look like that? God has favorites.” With that, all conviction flows out of Denki and he’s once again half-asleep against his best friend.

You say your goodbyes and leave, and on the drive home, you ask Mina what the fuck that was.

She snorts, an unexpected laugh, and maybe she shouldn’t be driving. You should have walked or offered to take her in your car instead. Her hands are tight on the wheel. “He’s like that with everyone. He’s the thirstiest guy I’ve ever met, but he’s harmless.”

“Would you ever…?”

“Hell no, oh my god. Have you seen those guys? Their brains are operating on a third-grade level.” She breaks particularly hard at a red light and you have to put your hands out to brace yourself against the dash. “They’re still frat guys, even though none of them are in the frat anymore. It’ll take them like, twice as long as everyone else to learn how to be adults.”

Maybe that’s true. You don’t think Katsuki ever really fit the archetype of a frat boy, but those are the kinds of people he’s around all the time. Maybe it’s better that he has a new girlfriend. That there’s no chance for the two of you to reconnect and build up something close to what you used to have but better.

Not that you ever really thought that was an option. When you’d broken up with him over the phone (you weren’t dating, you remind yourself again), you tried to leave that option open. You needed time. A limited amount. Not forever.

But he made his feelings clear. He didn’t talk to you for a long while, and when he did, it was just to ask for his clothes back. You had a hoodie and two of his worn concert shirts from when he and Kiri followed their favorite heavy metal band across the state during the summer after their senior year of high school.

You drove to the frat house and put the clothes on the doorstep and that’s the last you heard from him until he called you at Shindou and Momo’s party. Until now.

Even though you didn’t really hear anything from him. He just looked at you. Unhappy that you were there. It hurts more than you thought it would—not just seeing him, but the fact that he so clearly didn’t want to see you.

It doesn’t take much for Mina to convince you to stay up with her for a glass of wine, and that turns into a whole bottle, and eventually you’re both on the thrifted, pale-pink couch tucked under the narrow window of her little apartment, holding each other up by leaning against each other’s shoulders. Eventually it gets uncomfortable and you readjust, laying back and pulling her down with you, holding her tight. She laughs a little.

“What?” you ask, groggy.

“You never used to hug me. Did someone replace you when you were gone?” She snuggles into your embrace. “Are you like a little demon secretly in a human body?”

“What kind of question even is that? I just missed you all.” You lay your cheek against her hair and she tells you she missed you too and you wake up the next morning still on the couch, stiff, an ache in your neck that you can’t quite dislodge even after stretching and taking three ibuprofen.

Mina has work at the nice law firm she got a secretary position at, a step up from the bookstore, so you’re alone for lunch. You decide to go to the food truck, because why not? The tacos are good, and even if you go by yourself, you’ll at least enjoy that.

It’s more crowded than you thought it would be when you get there. It felt like a well-kept secret when Katsuki had taken you there the first time. Someone must have told the entirety of UA about it, because each table is packed to the gills, and groups of college kids are loitering on almost every inch of the grassy field surrounding the truck, talking and eating food from their red plastic-netted baskets.

You’re hungry enough that you don’t leave. You can eat in your car. In the long line, you half-heartedly play a shitty logic game on your phone and promise yourself that the food will be worth the wait.

Everything is a murmur around you, each person that’s talking blending into the next, a muted hum surrounding the food truck and melting into the smell of cayenne-grease. But a voice catches your attention just because you trained yourself to listen for it at some point, and you hear, “We should go.”

You turn and fucking of course, Katsuki and his girlfriend are three spots behind you in line. He’s turned towards the grassy parking lot so he doesn’t see you notice him. Your attention snaps back to your phone fast, as if the sight of them together is a flame that’ll burn you if you look at it for too long.

“What’s up, baby?” she asks, and her voice is really pretty. Low, kind of smoky, like in those ads that try to sell brands of razors by pretending that shaving your legs every single day is sexy and not at all a burden. “Are there too many people? We can head back if you’re not comfortable.”

She’s considerate. He doesn’t like crowds. You bet she’s really nice. You bet she’s everything Katsuki has ever wanted and deserved and that she’s everything you’re not.

You get to the front of the line and order your usual, the tacos de lengua, the tostones, and a cup of horchata because you’re here and you have to deal with Katsuki also being here now. You’ve earned a treat. Stepping back from the window, you try to walk strategically so that you’re never really angled towards them, so that Katsuki won’t know that you know he’s there. It’ll be easier for everyone like this.

But your luck doesn’t hold, because it never has, going as far back as Mina knocking an iced coffee onto your laptop and starting everything. A small moment that led to so much pain.

“Oh, hey! You!”

There’s an ingrained human reaction to exclamations like that. Everyone wants to know if it’s them that has earned an enthusiastic greeting. But the ‘you’ she calls to is you, and you’re suddenly, against your will, looking at Katsuki’s girlfriend. He’s standing to the side with a hand across the bottom of his face, holding his jaw as if he’s stopping himself from snapping at her, or you, or anyone close enough.

“You were at the party the other night.” She walks over, smiles and offers a hand, and you take it, shaking it like you’re business associates meeting for the first time. Two coworkers that both know how much Katsuki likes giving head. Her hands are really soft. “I’m Camie. You’re Mina’s friend from Shiketsu, right? She talks about you all the time.”

You introduce yourself and confirm you’re “Mina’s friend from Shiketsu” because that’s what you’ve become to everyone here. You were “A student with a habit of self-punishment” once. You were “a member of UA’s finest that graduated summa cum laude.” You were “Katsuki’s best friend” to the guys in the frat house that would attach you to him when they talked about you as easy as breathing. Like you were two parallel pieces, a yin and yang. Inseparable and matching.

Mina told you that they haven’t been dating for long, so she can’t have known Camie for much more than a few months. It’s a surprise that they’ve talked at length until you realize just how much Camie likes to talk.

You chat with her while you wait for your food, and she’s just as kind as you thought she would be. She’s in the nursing program, because of course she is, and she’s a few years older than you and Katsuki. She’s doing her nursing residency, close to graduating. She’s excited to get a job at the hospital in town. “They have great benefits, and such nice staff. Their chief nursing officer is seriously an inspiration,” she tells you, as if you care. You pretend to because you don’t want to be mean to someone who’s so obviously oblivious to how tense a situation she’s unwittingly created. Katsuki doesn’t look at either of you the whole time. He’s always in your peripherals, though, simmering. Staring at the food truck like he wants to blow it the fuck up.

The woman in the order window calls your name and you grab your food, glad to have an excuse to get away. “It was nice to meet you,” you tell Camie as you pass by her to leave, and you’re so close to escape before she stops you.

“You and Mina should come over sometime soon!” She’s being so earnest. She really does want to hang out. “It’d be really nice to spend time with people other than the boys. They just don’t always understand, you know?”

Slowly, you piece together a conclusion from the things she’s just said. “Do you guys live together?”

You know you’ve slipped bad as soon as you say it. Katsuki glances towards you for the first time since you and Camie started talking, and you can’t stand it. You can’t stand the way he looks at you now because it’s so different from how he looked at you before. He obviously didn’t want you to ask and doesn’t want you to know.

Camie laughs. “No, I live downtown. I come up a lot, though. It’s so much easier to get to campus in the mornings from their apartment. And we share a couple classes—that’s how me and Katsuki met. We had an ethics course with the worst professor ever.”

This is an info dump you didn’t ask for, but she’s so genuine. It makes your heart hurt. Part of you feels like you’re supposed to hate her, but she makes it so hard. You don’t like that she’s allowed to call him by his first name even though she should be allowed to and you shouldn’t.

You attempt a smile and say, “That’s so cool.” It’s weak, but she doesn’t notice. Katsuki does. His frown gets deeper and he keeps looking at you and you accidentally make eye contact with him and flinch. “I have to get going, sorry. Mina’s going to get home from work soon and I promised her I’d be there.”

You did no such thing.

Camie smiles and nods and tells you that’s fine, like she has some claim over whether you have to stay at the food truck or not, and then says, “Promise you’ll both come over soon, though.”

You promise. You don’t intend to keep it.

Mina listens to the entire story when she gets home, asking for every specific detail. Like you’re a gossip mag telling her the specifics of some celebrity drama. She sits next to you at the kitchen table and gawks, dramatic, or offers noises of sympathy. She’s her own studio audience. When you’re done, she says, “Oh my god. We have to hang out with her.”

“No,” you correct, “we don’t. We aren’t going to.”

“He doesn’t have to be there.” She gets up and walks back to the entrance of the apartment, slides her jacket off and hangs it up on the wall-mounted hooks next to the front door. The minute you told her you’d met Camie, she sat down and grilled you without even decompressing from work. She slips her flats off as well, putting them neat on her shoe rack. “Maybe it’ll be good, too. You’ll get to know her and like, I don’t know. Something’ll work itself out. You won’t feel as bad about stuff that has to do with him.”

“I just—don’t know if that’ll help.”

“What else are you gonna do? Everyone we know knows him. It’s gonna suck if you guys can’t be in the same room without like, wanting to bang, or whatever.”

“What the fuck did you just say?” You don’t often snap at Mina, but that was out of nowhere. Out of nothing.

She puts her hands up, playing at innocence. “Literally why else would it be so hard for you guys? I know you had a bad break up—”

“We weren’t dating.”

“Oh my god, shut up. Something broke. It was bad, but it’s been a while.” She obviously doesn’t understand that emotional wounds don’t heal like physical wounds do, especially the ones Katsuki left you with. The ones he’s still inflicting upon you. “He looked like he wanted to jump down Kiri’s throat at the party just ‘cause he saw you. That’s not normal. Like, what else could it be?”

“He hates me.” You didn’t really think that was true until you said it out loud, but it has to be. The anger, the inability to even look at you without thinking of murder. “It’s even worse than when we first met. I don’t think he knows how to forgive people.”

“There’s nothing for him to forgive. You did what was best.” She walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge, considering its contents and then pulling out a strawberry Greek yogurt. “If he can’t see that, then he’s not emotionally there enough for you to have to worry about him. Like I told you. They’re all like, elementary school age in their brains. Bakugou still thinks pulling a girl’s hair is how to show her he likes her.”

He’s kinder than that, but Mina’s right, for the most part. His rough edges can’t be soothed by other people. If you want to get close to Katsuki, you have to adapt to him, not the other way around. He’s unyielding in everything he does.

“So are we hanging out with her or what?” Mina starts shoveling yogurt into her mouth. Denki was right—there’s no way she can eat like she does and still have perfect skin. Somehow, she pulls it off.

“Fine. Only because she’s nice.”

And she is. She invites you and Mina over to the boys’ apartment because Kiri says it’s okay. He and Katsuki will be out. They both work at the mixed martial arts gym near campus now, Katsuki pulling strings to get Kiri a position as a trainer, and they teach late-night classes for adults.

Kiri graduated with a degree in exercise science last semester, and he tells you over the phone (when you call to make sure it’s absolutely okay that you’re at his place without him there) that he’s happy he’s getting to put his degree to use while teaching people how to defend themselves. He says you should come take classes with him and you laugh and give him a solid maybe, even when he offers to cut the starting fee in half. You talk to him like you used to be friends. And maybe you had been, but you’d been too wrapped up in Katsuki to really notice. It’s nice to talk to him like you’re both normal people with your own lives.

The apartment is just as cozy in the late afternoon, buttery sunlight filtering in through the windows and spilling across the floors. They’re hardwood, and you hadn’t realized that the last time you’d been here. It looks real. This townhouse complex was probably built in the late nineties, judging by the exposed brick of the far wall that holds the fireplace and the exposed wooden beams across the ceiling. It’s all so comfortable and artsy. Everything is softened by the sun’s gentle touch. You barely even think about Katsuki when Camie makes enthusiastic small talk and pours everyone a glass of chilled Riesling, shortly after bringing out a charcuterie board she’s painstakingly put together, an outrageous assortment of meats and cheeses and fruits and honeycomb.

It must have cost a fortune to do all this. And you barely even wanted to come.

“You guys all went to UA together, right?” Camie is sitting on the couch opposite the one you and Mina are side-by-side on, leg against leg. She’s a warm reassurance. This feels almost like an interview, and it’s giving you that same kind of anxiety you get when talking to someone whose job it is to judge you.

“Yeah,” you say, “we were all in the STEM department.”

Mina nudges you slightly.

“We all used to be in STEM. Mina’s the artistic one that we keep around to feel cultured.”

Camie laughs as if that’s particularly funny, which it really isn’t. Mina laughs along too, and you want this to feel natural, but you can’t force yourself to laugh with them. You don’t want to be fake.

“I’m glad I’m done, though.” You want to be honest. Say something slightly vulnerable. Let Camie know that you’re willing to be open with her. “Those last couple of semesters were rough. They were harder than the program I’m in now.”

This is technically true. The first semester was hell, but just like Momo said, the second semester was easier. Things evened out. Maybe your body just learned how to deal with the stress better, pushed to its absolute limits.

“Oh, right!” Camie says, like she’s remembering something she was told a long time ago. “You took organic chemistry with Katsuki, didn’t you?”

You freeze like you’ve been caught committing a crime. Mina looks at you and clears her throat because you should be able to answer that like it’s a normal question, but you’re just thinking about how he’d sometimes lay a gentle hand on your thigh during class, a sweet reminder that he was there next to you, and how he’d sometimes take you to the custodian’s closet down the hall afterwards and fuck you senseless.

Jesus. You can’t be thinking about this while staring Camie in the face.

You need to answer her question but there’s calabrese salami in your mouth and the pepper is almost overpowering. Your eyes water and you nod, swallowing harshly. The food doesn’t taste as good as it did when she first brought it out.

“He told me a little about it. I think it’s really cool that you all know each other. The college I came from is so big, so no one really knows anyone like they do here.” She smiles prettily and all tension is diffused.

“It’s only cool until you get tired of seeing the same people all the time,” Mina chimes in. “There was like a week straight where the only person I talked to was Denki and I thought I was gonna go crazy. Did you know he’s watched the entire Fast and Furious series eight times?”

It makes sense, knowing Denki, but you still don’t like that you know that about him now. “That’s… so sad.”

“He can quote most of Tokyo Drift.” Mina takes a large sip of her wine, cheeks tinged slightly pink. She has such a low tolerance. “With the Australian accents and everything.”

This is what finally breaks through the film of uneasiness that wrapped itself around your interactions. From here on out, conversation is easier. Camie tells you about why she wants to be a nurse and you realize that not only is she and outwardly nice person, but she’s inwardly nice as well. There’s not a malicious bone in her body. She wants to help people because she thinks that everyone should want to help people. She’s wonderful and beautiful and you’re happy that you’re getting to know her, despite the circumstances.

When the night curls in through the windows and Mina has had more than a few too many glasses of wine, you decide it’s time to take her home. You want to help clean up because Camie made this amazing spread just for the two of you, but when you try to pick things up, she shoos you away. “Seriously, don’t worry about it. I’m super glad you came over, it’s the least I can do.”

She leans forward to pick up the charcuterie board and a necklace that had previously been tucked into her collared blouse shimmies its way out of its fabric prison, hanging in the air only a foot from your face.

A small, 3D-printed cat skull charm hanging from a fine gold chain, its exposed teeth grinning at you. Too familiar. “Where’d you get that necklace?”

“Oh, do you like it? I think it’s so cute. Honestly, just a secret between all of us, I found it in Katsuki’s desk.” She grabs the skull and looks down at it, running a careful finger over the bridge of its nose. You used to do that. Something about the way it was printed makes the fake bone feel soft. You would worry it in class during tests, rubbing the skull as if it would give you good luck. “I feel a little bad for taking it but it’s just so perfect for this outfit. Definitely a statement piece.”

“Definitely.”

When you’re back home, you tuck Mina into her bed. She sleepily thanks you and tells you she appreciates you and that you should move in with her and drop out of grad school. You tell her that you’ll consider it, but you won’t.

You go to bed and think about the necklace. Sitting in the bottom of a drawer in Katsuki’s apartment for the past year. He must have brought it there with him from the frat house. Found it the morning after you’d lost it. Kept it, for some reason.

And now Camie’s wearing it, and it’ll never be yours again.

✴

The bar Mina takes you to is loud. It’s on the student side of town, so that’s not much of a surprise, but you get this ringing in your left ear every now and again when particularly bass-heavy songs play and you think this means you’re getting old.

You miss the bar that Kiri used to work at. It’s still there, but Mina said that there’s a vibe she’s looking for tonight and that bar just doesn’t have the vibe. The vibe here is loud and wild and energetic, and it sums up Mina to a tee. You’re not surprised that this is the kind of place she’d take you to.

The bartender working your side is slow, probably new. He looks a little overwhelmed at the crowd of people surrounding the outdoor bar, a little square tucked off to the side of the dance floor. Some people are waving dollar bills at him to get their drinks faster, but he just stares at the money like it’ll hurt him if he grabs it. He hasn’t even taken your order yet. Mina is getting you a table to stand-slash-sit at because you won’t want to dance until you’re drunk and she knows that, and you don’t want to make her wait too long without you.

The college student at your side, a pretty blonde in too-tall heels, is given her drink, and finally the bartender gets to you and takes your order. You know you’ll still have to wait a while for him to come back, though.

A guy that looks a little younger than you replaces the blonde. He’s mildly handsome, a little rugged in the way that he probably puts effort into. His hair is artfully tousled, a style that’s supposed to look like he just rolled out of bed but actually took a lot of product and time.

You spare him a glance and then go back to waiting for your drinks, staring off into the middle-distance, bored out of your fucking mind. You don’t know half the songs that are playing, but that won’t matter by the end of the night.

The guy next to you kind of nudges your arm with his and you recoil, because you don’t know him and aren’t particularly fond of people you don’t know touching you. When you turn to him, he has that look on his face that’s reminiscent of every R&B artist’s top music video from the late 2000s—soulful in a way that’s supposed to be sexy but just comes off looking performative. “I haven’t seen you here before. New in town?” he asks, yelling over the music.

You don’t care about this guy, but you don’t want to ignore him if he’s going to be standing next to you for the next five to ten minutes. Might as well make it comfortable. “No,” you yell back.

“You here alone?”

Quickly, you realize you have made a terrible mistake by tolerating him. This question rubs you the wrong way for a lot of reasons. “Not any concern of yours, but no.”

“That’s fine,” he half-yells, hands up. Pretending to back off. “You should bring your friends over to meet mine. We have a table.” He nods towards a corner of the bar and there’s no possible way you could discern who he’s gesturing to in the crowd of bodies pulsing to the beat of the music.

You’re getting increasingly frustrated with this guy and the bartender is half-way down the bar, taking a complicated order down on a notepad even though he probably should be trying to serve the people whose orders he’s already taken. “We’re okay. We already have a table.”

The guy slides an arm across the bartop in front of you—doesn’t touch you, but kind of cages you against the people behind you with his body. “Just join us for a little bit.”

You back up as far as you can without full-body pressing yourself against the girl behind you, but the asshole that can’t take a fucking hint gets just a little closer and you don’t control your temper well, especially when someone tries to corner you like this. “You need to get the fuck away from me.”

“I’ll pay for your drinks. That sound good?” He reaches a hand up as if he’s going to touch your face and you jerk back, but his hand keeps moving closer and you’re going to have to fucking fight this guy, you think, if you want him to leave you alone.

He stops an inch from your face, another, larger hand grabbing his wrist tight. The asshole’s face falls and he looks at whoever grabbed him just as you do, and you’re not prepared for it. You never are.

“Get the fuck out of here.” Katsuki is the definition of violence right now. He always looks serious, but you can see it in his eyes—anger in its clearest, most dangerous form.

“Dude, my drinks are—”

“Does it look like I care?” You think he tightens his hold on the guy’s wrist, but you’re not sure.

He rests a hand on your lower back, and you jump hard, not ready to be touched and also not expecting to be touched by him. He’s just sending a message. He’s showing this guy that you’re not someone he should be talking to. Still, it’s the first time he’s touched you in a year and you get goosebumps so bad that you have to suppress the way they make you shiver.

“Fine. Shit, bro, I’ll leave. Just get off me.”

Katsuki lets go and the asshole heads into the crowd, towards the corner and the group of people that you’re positive you would never want to meet ever, in your life, at all. Fucking frat guys. You don’t even know if he was in a frat, but he reminds you of the picture you had of every single twenty-one-year-old asshole that thought he deserved whatever girl he wanted because he lived in a house with twenty of his closest friends and did charity events on the weekends.

“You okay?” he asks. His hand is still on the small of your back.

You kind of wish you were dead, or across the country, or anywhere that would put you in the jurisdiction of Not Here. “I’m fine,” you say, even though you’re still a little shaken by being approached like you just were. You never expect people to be that shitty even though you should. “What are you doing here?”

“Am I not allowed to go out, or something?”

“You hate going out.”

“So do you.”

At least you know he hasn’t stopped being a little shit since the last time you talked to him. “Don’t change the subject.”

“We’re talking about the same thing. How the fuck is that a subject change?”

“Don’t be an asshole, then. Better?”

He removes his hand, and you realize that he’d been touching you this whole time and it had felt good and natural and normal. You look away from him, but you can still feel the heat radiating from his body. He’s always run kind of hot. The crowd has pushed him closer to you and you can’t believe that this is the reunion you’re getting.

“Fine,” he says, low. You almost can’t hear him over the music. “Camie asked me to be here. She’s got a thing with the other nurses in her program but she didn’t want to go alone.”

“That’s nice of you.” You also keep your voice low. You hope he can’t hear you. It is nice of him to do that for her, because he doesn’t do clubs. He prefers sitting in silence or having deep conversation and sipping on a drink instead of slamming six in a row like most of the kids here are fond of doing. Like you and Mina were planning on doing tonight. You feel kind of immature for it under his heavy gaze.

“How long are you in town?” He’s lost that anger you saw in him before, at his apartment and the food truck. Maybe he’s trying to be good. He doesn’t want you to know that he hates you. The lights wrapped around the bar flash neon and reflect on his hair, his skin. The shadows make his angles more harsh and this makes him look carved and perfect. Marble in its softest form.

“We don’t have to do this,” you tell him.

“Do what?” He sounds affronted, but he must know what you’re talking about.

You shrug. “Make small talk. Pretend. I know you don’t want me to be here. Literally every time I’ve seen you since I’ve been back, you’ve looked like you wanted to kill someone.”

“I don’t—I didn’t look like that.” He at least has the decency to sound sort of guilty, even if it’s his own personal brand of guilt. It presents itself as defensiveness. “You can be here. I can’t tell you what to do, fucking obviously. You’re your own person.”

“Katsuki. Please be real with me.”

He looks kind of uncomfortable, and he scans the crowd. Maybe looking for Camie. You wonder if he wants to make sure she doesn’t see the two of you together. Both times you’ve seen him before now, he’s been with her, and both times he’s been angry. Maybe her absence is what’s allowing him to talk to you like this. “I just—wasn’t expecting to see you. Didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Of course you’d come back. Mina’s here. Everyone you know from undergrad is here, and you made friends at Shiketsu, but the people here have known you for so much longer. It would be a shame to throw that away. Especially now, when you feel like you’ve learned how to open up to them all a little better. Cracking open your carefully constructed exterior to let them all inside.

“You went to Shiketsu. If things were so bad that you wouldn’t go to the best school in the country for medical ed, I didn’t think you’d force yourself to come back.” It’s clear that he’s disappointed you didn’t go to UA, and even now, he’s pushing his desire to succeed, to be the best, onto you. Projecting. Maybe he hasn’t changed at all.

You think you wanted him to have improved on himself while you were away in those minute ways that you have. You wanted him to be better so you could be better together. But Camie’s the one that wears your necklace now. “I told you I needed time. I took time, and now I’m back.”

The bartender sets your drinks where you can see them on the bar, and you hand him a twenty and thank him, even though he could’ve gotten them to you so much faster than this.

Katsuki looks at the clear cups of gin and sparkling soda that Mina insisted you both get and narrows his eyes. “You here with someone?”

“Mina.”

He nods. Nothing is going to be normal again for you and him. That thought kills the entire night for you. It’s not like you thought things would get better from him literally yelling at Kiri the first night he found out you were back, but you didn’t think they’d be as tense and painful as this.

“I’m going to get Mina her drink before she hunts me down.” A weak excuse. “Um—thank you. For keeping me safe.”

You kick yourself for saying it like that the minute it’s out of your mouth. Your brain is fried from the music and the idiot from earlier and from Katsuki, so fucking close, from the way his hand felt in its possessive spot on your lower back.

“I’m not just gonna let some asshole touch you,” he says, as if you should know this. As if it’s a given. As if he doesn’t have a girlfriend he should be talking to right now instead of you.

You nod. You’re not sure what to say. He must be at the bar to get drinks and you’re in his way so you maneuver around him but you’re still uncomfortably close. His arm brushes against yours and he never dresses up for anything—he’s got his regular black band tee on and you’re wearing a dress, your arms exposed, and skin brushes skin and everything feels like it’s burning. You’re acutely reminded of such a small moment, of his fingers sliding over yours at the bar where Kiri used to work. Small intimacies.

You get back to Mina and hand her the gin and soda. “What took so long? I was getting worried.”

With a quick look at the bar, you can still see Katsuki, too broad shouldered to really blend into the rest of the crowd. Camie is next to him now. They’re talking about something, close and quiet, and you wish you knew what. “The bartender was slow. Sorry.”

Instead of getting drunk and dancing like you planned to, you leave early and Mina’s too kind of a person to let you leave alone, so you get home at midnight and put Xena: Warrior Princess on the TV and fall asleep together on the couch.

It’s only a few weeks before your time to leave comes up. You’ve been hanging out with everyone so much more. You feel like you actually know Kiri as a person. Denki texts you dumb things every day and more often than not, they make you laugh. It doesn’t take much for Mina to convince you to stick around for another month. You have enough saved up from the coffee shop that you can afford to stay with her as long as you budget things right.

She decides that your decision to stay deserves celebration, and she invites everyone to her place for another kickback before you can tell her that it’s not a big deal and that you don’t really want to celebrate.

“We all hang out like every couple weeks anyway. It would’ve happened here at some point,” Mina tells you the morning she sends out the group text. You’re eating apple-spiced oatmeal that came from a box that cost two dollars at Walmart. The cheapest breakfast you could find. “But if you really want, I can ask Kiri if we can have it at his.”

That would be worse, almost definitely. You tell her it’s fine, and then resolve to suck it up and appreciate the fact that your group of friends—finally a group that you can actually claim as your own—is celebrating the fact that you’ll be around a little longer.

Leaving becomes something you’re not looking forward to. When you got here, you thought it would be nice to just drop in and visit Mina and then go back to Shiketsu, but you think you’ll miss everyone here more now. You’ll want to come back to visit much more often. You have four years left in your program and that’s a long time to be gone.

Denki is the first to arrive with a bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold and six solid, Himalayan salt shot glasses. “You pour the tequila in there and then you don’t need to lick the salt afterwards because it’s already salty,” he says by way of greeting, walking into the apartment and arranging the glasses on the table in a straight line.

You’re not going to take shots with Denki. He’s insane when it comes to liquor—hence the extra-ness of this whole thing. Who the fuck buys Himalayan salt shot glasses and brings them to a party?

Your mind changes the next time the doorbell rings. Mina opens the door and reveals the newest guests. Kiri, smiling, yells your name and pulls you into a tight hug. He tells you how glad he is that you decided to stick around.

But behind him is a man that seems much less enthusiastic to be here.

Mina looks between you and Katsuki and asks, “Is Camie not coming?”

“She has a shift tonight for her residency,” Kiri says. “She told me to tell you that she’s really glad you invited her, though! She wants to make it next time.”

Katsuki looks uncomfortable. He doesn’t say hello to anyone, just walks over to the couch and sits, only briefly narrowing his eyes at Denki’s shot glasses before he starts pretending to watch Xena. It’s become a constant in the apartment. Something playing at all times to fill space. Great background noise.

Kiri offers the both of you an apologetic smile and goes to join his friend on the couch, Denki coming out of the kitchen where he’d somehow found limes, even though neither you nor Mina have bought limes in the past month. He loudly tells the two newcomers about his shot glasses.

“I didn’t invite him,” Mina whispers to you. “I thought it would be nice to see Camie because she’s so sweet, but I told her that the party wouldn’t really be Bakugou’s scene and that she could leave him at home, so I thought—”

“It’s okay.” It’s not okay. You’re worried that he’ll be like he was at the bar the other night. You’re worried he’ll talk to you like you’re still friends. Still something. “I can handle one night, Mina.”

The shot glasses, to Denki’s credit, are really great with the low-shelf tequila. They tamp down the burn and add missing flavor. Sero shows up half an hour late and plants himself in a beanbag chair in the corner and all of you relax and talk and drink.

The night goes very quickly, but you think it’s the alcohol and the fact that you’re so focused on not looking at Katsuki that you don’t even notice the passage of time. He doesn’t move all night. Just sits and offers one-word answers when people ask him questions or say things to him until no one does except for Kiri, determined to pay attention to his best friend even when Katsuki is being antisocial.

Kiri’s the one that gets Katsuki to have a rum and coke. And then two. And then you lose count because you shouldn’t really be paying attention anyway, and the night draws to a close when the moon is much too high. Sero and Denki leave together. They’re both walking distance from Mina’s, but Kiri and Katsuki live much farther and neither of them are in shape to drive.

“You guys can take my room if you want,” Mina tells Kiri. She ignores Katsuki when he’s grouchy because it’s one of the rare things that actually annoys her. Kiri accepts the offer. You and Mina will sleep in the guest bed and the guys will sleep in the master bedroom, and while Mina and Kiri head off to their respective sleeping places, you and Katsuki don’t move.

Everyone rational enough to tell you to go to bed is already drunk and on their way to sleeping. You look at each other from different couches, and something possesses you to slip off the couch so you’re sitting on the floor. It grounds you a little. Makes your head feel like it’s not spinning as bad as it was when you were higher up. You watch Xena and wish that you were a warrior princess. It seems better than whatever the fuck is going on in your life right now.

It doesn’t take long for Katsuki to join you, sitting right beside you. Automatically, like it’s muscle memory, you rest your head on his shoulder and he puts his arm across the couch cushion behind your back and you both sit there, melting in warmth, like this is okay.

You missed him so fucking much. And you tell him this, because why the fuck not? You’re both drunk. You’ll laugh this off in the morning and maybe never speak to each other again.

“You could have fuckin’ called if you missed me so much,” he says, but he doesn’t sound angry. Just tired. He rests his cheek on your hair and pulls you closer to his side, his arm curling around your shoulders. Your bodies are relearning how to fit together as well as they once did.

“I didn’t think I was allowed.”

He laughs, just once. A little mean. “Who was stopping you? Me? ‘Cause I don’t remember telling you not to.”

You reach up to the arm around your shoulder, running a hand down his forearm and then tangling your fingers with his. You missed how strong his hands felt. This is wrong for so many reasons and you’re a piece of shit for letting him hold you like this when he’s dating someone else, but the shots make things hazy. You’re not as good at controlling yourself as usual. “Would you have even wanted to talk to me?”

Silence stretches out. You wait for an answer until it doesn’t feel like you’re going to get one. But eventually, he murmurs, “I just wanted to know what happened. You broke things off so fucking fast.”

“We were never dating,” you say. Force of habit.

“We could’ve been.”

“Maybe.” You pause. Xena is monologuing about heroism and for a moment you just watch. “I slept with a guy at Shiketsu.”

His hand tightens on yours. You feel him nod, just slightly. His breathing is almost too even, like he’s controlling each separate inhale and exhale, like there’s a tightness in his chest that mirrors the one in yours. A kind of muted guilt and unhappiness and discontentment that you only feel when you think about him. Something deeper than the thrill of him being next to you, of him holding you like he once did.

Even when you tried not to, the whole time you were with Shindou, you’d been thinking about Katsuki. About how much you wanted to be with him instead. You shouldn’t have told him about it but you fucking did and you feel like crying because this whole situation is so fucked.

You’re growing. You grew. You’re better than this. But a deep, buried part of you will always want Katsuki more than anything. “I didn’t like that it wasn’t you.”

He sighs, long and deep, then shifts to press his lips to the crown of your head. The slightest, softest kiss.

“I’m sorry,” you say, because what else can you say? You’re sorry for something. Maybe not for being with someone that wasn’t him, but for not allowing yourself to detach enough from him to enjoy the experience with Shindou as something separate from your past. Maybe for telling him this when you should have shut up a few minutes ago. Hours ago. You shouldn’t have spoken to him at all since you got into town.

It doesn’t even make sense, because he’s with someone else. He’s sleeping with someone else. He’s going home to someone and holding them in his arms just like this and telling them things that he used to tell you, and the thought makes you sick but this makes you sicker. Being here and feeling this way and wanting both forgiveness and the ability to forget everything you want to be forgiven for.

“Don’t apologize to me.” He presses another kiss to the top of your head before laying his cheek against your hair again, relaxing into you. “None of this shit is your fault.”

For a span of time that could be ten minutes or two hours, you watch Xena with him. It’s like it was when you were together. When you would watch shows with him episode by episode and he would get so annoyed with you if you watched any of them without him that you used it as an excuse to see him almost every day. To just sit with him and share time and space. It’s the most precious thing you can give another person, and you gave it to him so easily. You’re giving it to him too easily still.

It would be nice to fall asleep like this, even though you’re sitting on the floor, your head propped against his shoulder at such an awkward angle. He makes things feel so good with his warmth and his touch and his solidness. You forgot the way his body felt.

But you’re not a complete sociopath. You know that this is wrong. Camie’s face flashes behind your eyelids and you feel a little disgusted with yourself. When you build the conviction to act on the rational thought that floods your head, you pull your hand from his, shift out of his grasp, and stand, slow, unsteady. You miss his warmth immediately. You don’t think you’ll get to experience it again after this. “Night, Katsuki.”

He leans his head back against the couch so he’s facing up towards the ceiling and closes his eyes. Breathes. This is probably the most he’s had to drink in a long time. Med school doesn’t allow a lot of nights like this.

You watch him for only a moment. The light from the television plays across his features, and he could be a painting. A work of art in a national gallery. Every angle is beautiful, perfect, like lines drawn by the steadiest hand. Camie’s lucky to have him.

He just barely opens one eye to look at you, still standing there. Like you’re waiting for something. Quietly, he says, “Night, angel.”

You lie in bed next to Mina and think about the way he said that for hours. It’s haunting. It’s a ghost of what used to be.

And you’re fucked up for this, but you’d do anything to hear him say it again.

✴

Katsuki goes quiet for a while. You don’t hear from him. You don’t see him at any get togethers or the few times you agree to work out with Kiri because he won’t stop bothering you about going to the gym with him. Camie comes over a couple times to see you and Mina, and it doesn’t seem like anything’s wrong with her, so you assume he’s just going through one of those phases he has where he doesn’t really want to see people. Where socializing becomes too much for him.

Or he could just be busy. He’s taking a few summer classes, and you’re not sure how much work that implies. It could be just as much as a regular semester.

And then everything goes to shit when Camie shows up on Mina’s doorstep a week before you’re slated to leave, her eyes red, makeup staining her cheeks.

You open the door and she looks like she’s going to start crying again, so you invite her in and have her sit on the couch. Mina’s at work, and you’re so underprepared to deal with this situation. You can barely figure out what to do when Mina cries, let alone someone you don’t know nearly as well. You kneel in front of her and ask, “What’s wrong?”

“Do you have feelings for him?” Her question is so sudden. So sharp. Hot tears begin to roll down her face and her body shakes a little but she doesn’t sob—she stares at you. Imploring you.

“For who?”

“Please don’t do that.” Her mouth twists a little and it’s obvious that she’s doing everything she can to hold herself together. “Tell me if you’re in love with Katsuki.”

That’s too large a concept to consider. Too concrete an emotion. You and he didn’t even date. “I… care about him.”

She grabs your hands and you think, for a brief moment, that she’s going to try to hurt you. To break your fingers and kick you while you’re down because you deserve it. But instead she holds your hands in hers so gently and says, “I think I knew already. He has a copy of some notes from organic chemistry that he keeps in the bottom of his desk, and I always thought it was weird. But your name is on them. I knew it before I even met you. So when we were finally introduced, it just clicked.”

He kept your necklace. He kept your fucking orgo notes. The ones you texted him when he was late, photocopying his own notes to give to you. He must have printed them out, put them in his perfectly organized notebook and pulled them out at the end of the semester. You bite your lip to feel something other than building pressure in your head, in your throat, in your lungs.

“I confronted him about it, and he broke up with me. He said he couldn’t deal with it.” Her thin façade of calm crumbles and she starts crying again, and she leans forward and you’re forehead to forehead, hands intertwined with hands, holding this woman as she cries over a man that you have inadvertently caused her to lose.

You sit there as she sobs, as tremors wrack her body, as she says things that are incoherent, muffled by her tears. But you can make out two sentences repeated, constants she comes back to. “I loved him. I love him.”

“I know,” you tell her. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

And you are. She was happy before you came back to visit. Before you did this to her.

Your back hurts by the time she’s done. Your knees are stiff and your hands are wet with her tears, dripping from her chin into the union of your fingers. It’s getting into late afternoon and Mina will be home soon.

“Thank you,” she says, shaky and weak, a wilted leaf in a tropical storm.

You swallow, nervous. “You should hate me.”

“It’s not your fault,” she tells you. “It was going to happen either way. You can’t be in love with two people.”

He’s not in love with you. You never even dated. “You’re a good person, Camie. A really good person.” Much better than you.

She laughs, and it’s a humorless, broken sound that you think you’re going to think about later even though you won’t want to. “That wasn’t enough for him.”

“You’re more than enough. You’re more than he deserves.” Because if he could do this to a person as perfect and kind as Camie, does he really deserve her?

“You know, I knew that the minute I confronted him about it. If he can’t deal with his own emotions, I should find someone that can. But it doesn’t stop me wanting everything to go back to how it was before I figured it out. Isn’t that sad?”

No. It’s not. And you know this because you’ve felt the exact same way. It’s just an inevitability of life. Everyone wants the worst if it makes them feel good. Humans will destroy themselves for comfort—it’s a universal rule. Because it’s easier to take the good now and forget that you’ll have to deal with the bad later. “I don’t think anyone would expect you to feel anything else.”

“Or maybe we’re both just sad people.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

She leaves before Mina gets home and thanks you again, as if you haven’t committed the biggest crime of the fucking century by making her cry. Camie, the person that spent a shit ton of money to make a charcuterie board just so she could do something for people she wanted to be friends with. Who smiled so easily before all of this. Who wore your necklace because she didn’t know any better, because she assumed the best of her boyfriend.

You want to say that you and Katsuki deserve each other, but you don’t. You’re different kinds of bad, two levels that can’t yet be equated. You’re going to go back to Shiketsu. He’s going to stay here and become a surgeon. And maybe you’ll see him again, years from now, and everything will be forgiven.

But there’s so much to forgive. Too much. No one person can offer you absolution.

Leaving is easier because of what happened with Camie. You kind of want to get out of town to let things calm down. Mina asks you to stay for the rest of the summer, but you’ve done your damage. You love the friends you have here, the ones from before and the new ones you’ve made, but they’ll be here when you come to visit again. You promise Mina you’ll be back for winter break and she’s not happy about it, but she lets you leave to drive back to Shiketsu with only minimal complaining.

It’s nice to see Momo, who invites you over almost immediately once you’re back in town. You sit together on her really nice couch (you’re positive it’s made of real leather, which is kind of gross but also kind of impressive) and talk to her about everyone back home. You don’t mention Katsuki once. Shindou listens half-heartedly from the kitchen and chimes in to tell you that your friends are weird when you describe the stranger parts of your visit, usually Denki-related.

Momo, an early riser, goes to bed around ten. Shindou walks you to the front door, and before you leave, he asks, “Do you wanna spend the night?”

“Shindou, I’m not really looking for anything—”

“Neither am I.” He leans against the frame of the front door, nonthreatening. It’s getting cold outside. Summer weather here usually tapers out around August. Fall semester will once again lead to a chilly winter spent drinking hot chocolate in Momo’s favorite campus café, but right now it’s just on the edge of frigid. You can feel the heating from the house blasting warm air onto your face, even here, just outside. Slipping out into the night. They have the money to burn just for things like this. “No expectations, for real.”

“It’s kind of sad that you can’t get any other girl in town to sleep with you.”

He frowns. “That’s not true.”

It is, because he’s the least smooth guy you’ve ever met, even though he’s attractive. He’s had one girlfriend in the entire time you’ve known him, and it only lasted two weeks. You think his ex is still traumatized from dealing with his mood swings, which you can’t blame her for—you don’t like dealing with him when he mopes, or gets frustrated because he’s having trouble understanding chemical compositions in class.

“Okay,” you say, despite your better judgement. You don’t think about telling Katsuki about him when you were drunk, watching Xena and sinking into his warmth. “Just this once, though.”

It’s better than last time. You focus on Shindou, on his handsome face and his still-calloused hands and the way his body looks while he’s below you and because you’re not distracted, you go as far as enjoying it. Momo’s asleep in the room next door so you’re as quiet as physically possible, but there are even points where if she was awake, she might have heard you, which is an improvement for Shindou. You don’t even mind that he’s too careful with you, that his fingers don’t leave bruises by digging into your skin too hard on purpose.

Afterwards, you thank him as if the sex was a business transaction and go home, and you don’t feel guilty about it at all. You’re not even lying to yourself when you realize this, because usually you are. There’s a pit where you hide guilt inside your chest and you’re learning to stop burying things there.

For the rest of the summer break, you go to the pottery studio at least once a week and pick up double shifts at the coffee shop to pay for your expensive hobby. You’re getting better at using the wheel. You learn how to talk about pottery with the correct words, throwing and flooring and opening, a vocabulary of violent terms for such a delicate craft.

Before the semester begins, you have a set of stoneware cups in your kitchen cabinets that you shaped, glazed, and kiln fired. A set of two matching pots sits on the windowsill of your living room, reds and oranges and deep blacks making each piece of pottery look like flame. Or something more. The red is familiar, deep and beautiful and brilliantly crimson.

You’ll plant something in them when you have time to go to a nursery. Heart-leaf pothos, or something equally green and cheery and fast-growing.

You keep in contact with Mina, Denki, and Kiri, and the four of you set up a Discord server where you watch movies together sometimes and post memes that you find on Twitter, and you start to feel like you think other people do. You have a grasp on your social life and you figure out how to let it fulfill you in ways it hadn’t before.

This was something you didn’t let yourself have when you were younger. These things were distractions. But you’re still keeping your grades up, and you’re finding teaching to be more and more rewarding, and you think the passion you had for medical ed in undergrad has blossomed into something more intricate and beautiful. You don’t just want to be good at what you’re doing—you enjoy it.

Katsuki told you that he wanted to be the best surgeon, and you understand that drive better now. If you have something to strive towards, it makes it easier to destroy yourself just to come out on top. But you don’t want to destroy yourself. You want to figure out how to live and have hobbies and friends and passions, and you have. You’re there.

Maybe it took everything with Camie to disconnect you from him fully. It still weighs on you that she had to get caught in the middle of things. That you had to make her cry like that because Katsuki and you shared that moment on the floor of Mina’s apartment. You text her towards the end of the semester one night when you’re feeling especially bad about things, and she calls you, which intimidates the fuck out of you, but it’s not like you’re not going to answer.

You think she’s going to yell at you, suddenly mad when looking at everything in retrospect. But the first thing she says when you pick up is, “I’m so glad you texted me.”

The two of you catch up. She’s graduating this semester from UA’s nursing program and she’s already got a position secured at the local hospital because she did so well during her residency. She’s smart and kind—it makes sense that she would succeed, and you’re genuinely happy for her.

You add her to the Discord after asking everyone about it and she easily enters the fold, catching an hour or two of the movies you guys watch when she’s not working or studying, sending extremely enthusiastic reactions to jokes she finds especially funny. She’s the only twenty-six-year-old you know that still uses the laughing crying emoji. It’s endearing coming from her.

When winter break rolls around, you find that you’re excited to go back. You think things will be normal, like they were before that final couple of weeks there in the summer, and you loved the time you got to spend with your friends. You want more of it.

Mina hugs you so hard that your shoulders pop when you finally make it to her place, parking in the apartment complex’s surface lot around six. The sun is setting and your body is stiff and you’re so happy to see Mina that you hug her back even tighter.

She helps you get your stuff upstairs and into the guest bedroom that feels more like your bedroom now, and she tells you, “Kiri’s having a thing tonight, if you want to go.”

“A thing?”

“Just like, casual.” She puts your laptop bag down next to the bed and sits on the mattress, bouncing slightly. “We’re gonna watch the last two episodes of Xena.”

“You already finished the whole series?” There are so many seasons. So many fucking episodes. You watched them all a long time ago, and not a lot of them stuck.

Mina nods. “I got everyone else to watch it, too. You wanna come?”

“Definitely.” You want to see everyone, even if you’re tired and your body kind of hurts.

“Can you be designated driver?”

You narrow your eyes. “Is that the only reason you want me to go?”

“No,” Mina says, covering her mouth with a hand, overly dramatic, like you’ve said something preposterous and you’re both 1800s ladies with ridiculously high senses of propriety. “I would never use you like that. But! I would super appreciate it because I wasn’t gonna drink but I kind of want to because Denki bought the good stuff for tonight, and you know he never does that.”

“Which good stuff?”

“Bombay Sapphire. The big bottle.”

Shit. That really is the good stuff. “Fine.”

Mina smiles, absentmindedly wrapping a strand of hair around a finger. “Love you.”

“Sure.”

“Oh, also.” That switch in her flips again. Happy to sad. Free-spirited to worried. “Bakugou’ll be there. Just so you know. He hangs out with us a lot more now.”

Now that he’s not in a relationship. Mina doesn’t have to say it for you to know.

It helps that you and Camie are on good terms, but there’s still a distant feeling of guilt that aches in your bones when you think about the last time you’d been in town.

“You can stay here if you want.” Her brow creases with worry. “Or I can reschedule and we can just have a night in.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll still go.”

It’s way past sunset when you finally arrive. You wanted to shower before you left because long drives always leave you feeling kind of disgusting, like there’s sweat baked into your skin, settled on top of it like a sticky, uncomfortable film.

Your hair is only slightly wet when you get there. Sero lets the two of you in. A chill runs down your spine, and it could be from the way your almost-wet hair retains the cold from outside or it could be because the first person you see when Sero moves is Katsuki, leaning against the fireplace and talking to Kiri, and you’re shocked at how good he looks.

Not just appearance-wise—although he is gorgeous from this angle, his sharp jaw accentuated by the soft glow of the overhead Edison bulbs—but he doesn’t look as tired as the last time you’d seen him. He looks almost happy, in that muted way you know a little too well, and you can’t remember the last time you saw him look like this in person.

No. You can. The night before he left to go to his parents’ place, before the codependency became clear to you and the depression set in and the next year blurred by, you’d been at the frat house. The second floor had a balcony, and there was a little hammock seat that the boys had somehow gotten up the stairs and out the balcony’s narrow door. You were sitting between Katsuki’s legs, his arms around you, the both of you rocking back and forth gently. You told him you were excited to graduate. He asked you why.

“It’ll be nice to move on,” you said then, before everything.

He hummed, unreadable. A sound you could feel against your body. “You ever think about taking it slow?”

“Do you?”

The answer to that question didn’t need to be said aloud.

You turned back towards him. The angle was awkward and it was uncomfortable, but looking at him made everything worth it. Seeing the way he looked at you. It was so easy to feel whole when you were together. You kissed him the softest you ever had and he held you so gently even though being gentle was something he was never good at. It still isn’t, you think.

You did exactly what you told him you were going to do. Moved on. It just hurt more than you expected.

And now, in his apartment that he hasn’t shared with you, he looks across the room and sees you and something in him brightens. His face doesn’t change, but there’s this sense of contentment you read just through his body language, through the easy way he responds to whatever Kiri said to him even though his attention is more on you. You offer a smile and then Mina is pulling you towards the kitchenette at the back of the apartment for drinks and snacks, three massive bowls of chips and baked Cheetos and a pretzel snack mix that looks like it’s gone completely untouched.

Denki’s sitting on the floor next to the coffee table, practicing a magic trick with a deck of cards. The bottle of Bombay sits uncorked in the table’s center, as if it’s a beautiful vase on display. It just needs flowers. Sero is sinking into the couch, a drink in his hand. Kiri’s enthusiastically telling a story to anyone that’ll listen, his hands moving animatedly, the liquid in his solo cup sloshing dangerously with each gesture.

It’s like the last party you had with all of them before you’d left in the summer, but a little lighter. You don’t have that constant threat of Katsuki weighing you down because he doesn’t feel like a threat anymore. He’s just there, and you’re just there—and it’s okay.

You’re all sitting on the two couches and the floor around the coffee table when Kiri rolls out a TV on a stand that looks like it belongs in a public high school. He plugs it in by the fireplace and asks, “You guys ready to see some kickass ladies fight God?”

Katsuki doesn’t look excited. He leaves his perch at the fireplace and sits on the couch opposite you, and you and he make the briefest eye contact before Denki groans loud and overdramatic.

“I keep telling you to mount the TV on the wall, dude.” He throws his hands up as if this is a massive issue for him. “It’s so easy. You can buy a wall mount for like fifteen bucks.”

Kiri pulls up Netflix and starts painstakingly typing out Xena: Warrior Princess in the search bar even though he could easily search 'Xena’ and get the same result. “I can watch the TV from anywhere when I can wheel it around like this. Seriously, it’s a game changer.”

They argue light-heartedly even though it’s about the most inane thing they could possibly choose, and eventually the lights are out and the bowls of snacks are on the coffee table and you’re all quiet, enraptured by this old show’s final two episodes.

They don’t fight God. They do fight a lot of ghosts and a guy that controls the ghosts, and none of it makes sense but it’s enjoyable. It’s nice to laugh at the bad acting and the terrible special effects and just be together.

“Oh my god,” Mina whispers to you at one point. “No one could like, physically do that flip without breaking their legs.”

You start to turn towards her and stop when you see Katsuki turning to look at you, like it was instinct, like he knew exactly when to look your way. Neither of you break eye contact. Nobody seems to notice. It’s like there’s a separate space you’re both existing in, away from everyone else. His brow furrows, like he didn’t expect you to keep looking at him when he kept looking at you, and something builds in the way you both won’t stop looking at each other until something breaks and his eyes flick back to the television and you’re freed from the prison his gaze put you in.

“Yeah,” you say to Mina. You can’t really remember what she said to you in the first place. You only think about the color of his eyes in the darkness of the room, the way they’re such a deep red that in the darkness they almost look black.

Xena realizes she’s going to have to die to save the lost souls of a plethora of innocent people, and she sacrifices herself, allowing her life to be taken so that so others can be set free. The credits roll, and Mina is sniffling next to you, tears streaking her makeup down her cheeks.

“That’s how it ends?” Denki stands, as if he’s suddenly been filled with such negative energy that he can’t bear to be still. “Are you kidding?”

“I bet it was a budget thing and they had to stop the series short,” Sero says. He’s barely awake, and you’re pretty sure he slept through a majority of the two episodes.

“She gave up her life.” Kiri looks back at Denki and you can see that he, too, has tears in his eyes. “Is there anything manlier than that? Sacrificing yourself for others?”

You all discuss the ending and drink and laugh, and you enjoy everything unfolding around you as the night stretches long, until Mina is passed out on the couch and everyone else is either sleeping in Kiri’s room or on the floor. It’s just you and Katsuki that are still awake. You don’t think he had anything to drink. That’s probably why.

Something feels like it’s supposed to happen. Mina’s feet are in your lap, her head propped up on a fuzzy green pillow.

“I should get going,” you whisper, even though Katsuki said absolutely nothing to prompt it. You don’t want to wake Mina up, even though she’ll have to get up so you can leave.

“You sure?” His voice feels too loud in the now empty room even though he’s basically whispering back.

You put a hand on Mina’s ankle and try to gently shift it off you, watching her face to see if what you’re doing is enough to rip her from drunken unconsciousness. “I mean, we’re not going to stay here.”

“Why not?”

Your eyes snap to his. There’s a challenge in that question. One he wants you to rise to, you think. “Katsuki,” you say, and you don’t know what you’re trying to communicate, but it’s something. There’s something he wants. And there’s something you might want. You’re deciding.

He stands and walks around the coffee table, waiting in front of you. Slowly, you get Mina’s feet off your lap and you stand too, and you’re just inches from being chest to chest, body to body. You wonder if you’d still fit together as well as you used to.

There’s not that absolute need for him that you used to have, and you think this is good. You’re still attracted to him. You still long for him. But it doesn’t feel like such a deep necessity to have him that it’s destructive. You think you’ve grown more than you thought you had.

Carefully, he reaches out and takes your hand. You let him. And you follow him when he leads you to his room. You feel your heart flutter as he closes the door, and now you’re in this new, unfamiliar territory, a cramped room that’s so reminiscent of the one you knew so well at the frat house. He still has the same black comforter on his bed and band poster on his wall, framed, the one that you had the concert shirts of.

He stands in the middle of the room and just waits, like he doesn’t know what to do in this situation. You remember how sure he’d been the first time you ever entered his room at the frat house, how he kissed you like he’d been waiting to do it all night. Tonight, slowly, he approaches you. One step at a time.

You don’t move away. You want to let him know that this is okay but you don’t want to say it. It feels like you shouldn’t break the silence in here, as if it’s a sacred place that only deserves reverence and overwhelming quiet.

His brows draw in together and you admire the way his face moves, the way the angles play off one another. He’s symmetrical and not. There’s a tiny scar on his upper lip, digging into his mouth’s left corner. It wasn’t there the last time you were this close to him. You want to ask him about it. You want him to tell you everything you missed.

When he’s right in front of you, he reaches out and runs his hands down your arms, then settles them on your waist. They’re so warm through your shirt, and you want to remember how they feel with nothing in their way.

You’re nervous but you don’t want him to know that. You’ve been in so many intimate situations with him before, but you’re relearning how, exactly, to be intimate with him. How to be close and have it feel natural. You put your hands on his chest and splay your fingers out, allowing yourself to feel the hard muscle there, and then you trace the slope of his collar bones, the gentle curves of his shoulders, the back of his neck.

The undercut is new. Before now, you hadn't allowed yourself to look at him long enough to notice it. It feels nice to run your fingers across the short hair, revel in the way he seems to enjoy your attention. Slowly, you move one hand to brush his cheek and he leans into the touch, closing his eyes. You don’t remember his eyelashes being so long.

“I don’t want to do this if it’s going to be a one time thing,” you tell him. Because you’re tired of one-time-things, of just-this-onces and never-agains. You’re tired of not having consistency, a person to come back to when you need them and who will wait when you need only yourself.

He opens his eyes slow, languid. They’re such a deep red, like the glaze on the pots you kiln fired yourself. They glow blood-dark in the mornings, when the sunrise sets its sights on them. “Doesn’t have to be.”

“Do you want it to be?” Because he might only want this to happen once. He might just want a taste of before when you want much more than a taste.

He takes your wrist between his careful fingers and pulls it to his mouth, presses a kiss to the pulse point. He can probably feel how fast your heart’s beating. “No.”

“Good.”

And then he’s kissing you.

It’s not messy, not driven by a heightened passion, but there’s a kind of low desperation in his grip on your waist, pulling you tight against him, in the way he can’t seem to stop kissing you now that he’s started. His tongue slides against yours in such a familiar way and it’s like you’re figuring him out again, remembering his habits. Everything is hot and slick, new and old.

He picks you up and you forgot that he could just do things like that so effortlessly, and he lies you down on his bed, making sure your head is resting comfortable on his pillows. He’s gotten more conscientious. With every piece of clothing he removes from you, he asks permission, so many times that it starts to bother you.

“You don’t have to keep asking.”

He kisses a hot line down your throat and then murmurs, “Thought you liked me being nice. That kind of shit turns you on.”

His hair is soft between your fingers. You pull hard and drag him back up to your face and kiss him once, long and slow. “Don't be nice.”

There’s no hesitation from there on out. He takes off every single piece of clothing on your body with care and then spends time bringing you to the edge with his fingers, but he doesn’t let you cum, and then he does it again, and then his head is between your legs and he still won’t give you what you need to hit that edge.

“Fuck, Katsuki,” you say, breathy, and he rewards you for saying his name by using the point of his tongue just right, but it’s still not enough. “Stop playing with me. Please.”

“I want to be inside you,” he murmurs against you, and he doesn’t fucking let up for a second between words. “I want to feel it.”

“Then—oh.” You let out a quiet moan when his fingers curl inside you again, and you need to be quiet, to not let any of the many close friends that are in this apartment right now know what’s happening in Katsuki’s room. “Please fuck me. Like right now.”

He’s not often fond of doing what people tell him, but he listens to you just this once. You think that he knows you shouldn’t be too loud, because when he takes his clothes off, spreads your legs, grinds against you for a few agonizing moments before filling you so completely, he moves slow.

It’s like your first time. Careful, quiet, the knowledge of each other from so long ago resurfacing and slotting back into place. Like you’d never left.

You’re so overstimulated that after only a few thrusts, you’re already coming apart around him, suppressing the noise you make with the back of your hand.

He makes a noise of appreciation that’s guttural, and when he kisses you it’s primal, perfect. “Doing so good for me, angel,” he whispers. “So good.”

He quickens his pace, and your legs tighten around him and you move your hips to match each thrust, and he slides a hand up your chest and presses it careful against your throat, gripping your chin and pressing his thumb against your lips.

“You have no idea how fucking gorgeous you look right now." The words are panted, barely strung together. His thumb swipes across your lower lip hard and his hand presses into the underside of your jaw with each stroke, forcing your face to tilt up towards his. He kisses you hard, his teeth knocking against yours, untamed and raw.

You’re surrounded by him, his hands mapping every bare plane of your body, his voice reverberating in your head, every sense overwhelmed, and all you can do when he pulls away is say his name, say you want more, say you want nothing else.

He lets go of your throat to push your thighs apart wider, painfully so, and he fucks you so deep that you don’t think anyone else could ever come close. “You know how many times I’ve got off just thinking about your voice? The way you sound when you beg like this?”

You dig your nails into his lower back and it feels like it’s physically impossible for him to get any closer to you, like all you'll ever know after this is the sound of his labored breathing and the burnt sugar scent of his skin and the quiet and half-broken noises he makes, more desperate with every passing moment. The most beautiful sounds you've ever fucking heard. Everything builds tight within you, a hot coil in your gut, a pleasure that gets hotter with every hard thrust inside you, curved just right to hit nerves that make you see stars.

His movements become erratic and he has his face buried into your neck like he always does when you’re in this position and he’s about to cum, like he can’t bear to feel anything but you, closing his eyes to block everything out but the way your skin slides against his and the way your body reacts to him. “You always feel so fucking good,” he breathes. “I missed this. I missed you.”

He slows his thrusts but gets as deep as possible with each one and it’s just enough to send you over the edge, tensing around him, and with a few more strokes he joins you, trying to stifle the noise he makes but failing badly, its vibrations mixing with the buzz that runs across your skin like static, his hips rocking against yours as you both come down from the high.

It takes longer than you think it normally would, or maybe you just haven’t had sex like this in too long. There’s a kind of afterglow that comes with something so perfect, so fulfilling, and it’s rewarding just to feel him pressed against you, breathing slow, heavy, and knowing he can feel the same of you.

Eventually, when things feel real again and reality fades back in around you, he lays down at your side, keeping you close. You lie together on top of the covers and you’re both sweaty and still breathing heavy and you bask in it. In him. “I missed you too.”

He tenses up just a little. You wonder if he meant to tell you that he missed you. If he meant to say any of what he did. It doesn’t stop him from pulling you closer, tucking your body into his, resting his chin on top of your head. “Took you long enough to come back.”

You’re not sure what he’s referring to. To the city. To UA. To him. Still, you say, “I needed the time. And I think I’m—better. I think I’m someone that can handle something like this now.”

His fingers trail down your side. He connects the marks on your skin, drawing gentle lines between beauty spots and bruises, forward and back like he’s committing them to memory.

Pulling away from him enough to see his face, you reach a hand up to gently touch the indentation of the scar above his lip. “This is new.”

He pulls your hand away from his face and then holds it in his own, sheltered between you. “Idiot at the gym went too hard in a training session. Kicked me in the face when I had my guard down.”

“You never have your guard down.”

“I was picking up my fuckin’ gym bag. It was a potshot. He was mad he couldn’t beat me in a fair fight.”

You like hearing him talk. Just the sound of it. The slight rough undertones, the depth that’s magnified when he speaks quietly. “You’re slipping, Katsuki.”

“Shut up,” he says, soft, and pulls you back to him. You lie there for a long while before he speaks again. “Tell me something about you. Something new.”

It’s sweet. Thoughtful. He doesn’t ask personal questions and that was something you’d gotten used to when the two of you were together. Not dating. “There’s a pottery studio near my place at Shiketsu. I make things there sometimes.”

He laughs, kind of, a harsh exhale that expresses amusement because he can’t just laugh like normal people do. “Like, pots and shit?”

You laugh like a normal person does, because you’re a well-adjusted human being. “Yeah. Pots and shit. I get to keep them after, too.”

“I hope so. What’s the point otherwise?”

You shrug, awkward in his embrace but still comfortable. “The process of making art, I guess. Of making something new out of something old.”

“Sounds dumb.”

“It’s not.”

He hums, kisses your hair. “I could go with you, if you want. I can tell you if it’s dumb or not when I have hands-on experience.”

A smile is on your face before you can stop it, but he can’t see it. How pleased you are by him being willing to go to a pottery studio with you is a secret you’ll keep from him and the rest of the world. “I think it’d be good for you. It’s really soothing.”

“Fuck you. I don’t need to be soothed.”

You laugh again, quieter now. You’re getting tired, even though you want to stay up with him for as long as you can. “It has to be a date if we go. We’d have to be dating.”

It’s late, and you’re a little delirious, and maybe that was too blunt for Katsuki. He’s aggressively candid with everyone, but he doesn’t often appreciate people being straight up like this with him. But you have nothing to lose, at this point. If he says no, you can keep existing, keep growing. If he says yes, you can do the same but have that certainty you didn’t have last time.

“Good. We can go whenever.”

It’s what you wanted him to say. He makes you feel like no one else does. Fits you and your edges, calms you with his rough words. You’re matching again, like you used to be, a yin and yang pried apart and reconnected. But you’ve learned how to be by yourself and to be okay with it. You’ve learned the importance of having your own space.

Adding him to that space is just a bonus. An extra, a gift for the hardships you’ve endured. You may not be able to tell what he’s thinking most of the time, but you’re certain that he feels the same. You’re his answer and his question. His eventuality, just as he’s yours. There was no other outcome for your life, no other way things could have played out. You and he just needed time to grow. To stem. To bloom. You are your own plant.

But roots tangle. They link and grow in their own ways. There’s no one else you’d rather share that tangled connection with than Katsuki, whispering things into your hair that he would never say to other people, holding you like he’s always known how.