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•••
“As good as it is to see you, I’d rather it was somewhere else next time.”
Nanami flexes his hand, fingers touching and then freeing his palm. “That must have been serious,” he says, hazel turning up to meet her. “You’re being nice.”
“I don’t have to be,” Ieiri reminds him. And she isn’t, sometimes, to great effect. But he’s right: it had been serious, significant blood loss through a tear that streaked up his arm like the burnout evidence of a car crash. Whatever the curse had been, its edges were rough.
“You don’t,” Nanami agrees. “There’s barely a scar left.”
She’s been getting good at that, the cosmetic touches. It’s better, she reasons, for the patient and for the conscience she hasn’t managed to stamp out yet. And when the patient is Nanami, it’s better for her too, when they fuck with the lights on and she’s prompted to fewer calculations — fatal, near-fatal, didn’t get there fast enough — at the phenomenal sight of him.
“Lucky you.”
“Lucky me.” Nanami smiles up at her, the way he doesn’t bother with most of the rest of their circle. By now she barely remembers where his reputation came from, all the time they’ve spent sliding the blunted edges of oyster knives between the lips of their ribs, slowly opening them up to each other. Like this, when they’re alone, Ieiri might dare to call him warm. “Are you working tonight?”
“Not unless I need to.” Her hands are already in her pockets, one hand palming the packet of nicotine gum she’s been trying not to give up on, the other missing her cell phone where it’s sitting on her desk. She’s thinking about tomorrow already, about how there haven’t been many bad injuries through her door lately. Maybe Satoru has learned at last that being a teacher doesn’t mean throwing your students into the meat grinder of life entirely unattended. Maybe it will be quiet. “Why?”
“Do you want to get dinner with me?”
“On your dime?”
“If you like.”
“We always do what I like.”
“Do we?” He might be trying to assuage her now, the way he’s sitting back on her preferred examination table with his weight propped halfway on that freshly remade arm. “I generally like what we do.”
“Fine. You pick the place, then.”
“What are you in the mood for?” She can almost see the flipping of that mental Rolodex Nanami maintains, good restaurants, all low lighting and seasonal menus.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Ieiri pulls her hands free again; the easy part, the triage and crisis resolution, is over, but that doesn’t mean they’re done. “I should probably check the rest of you.”
“I’m fine.” He’s not arguing, not exactly, nor does she think he’s under the misapprehension that he has the right to deny her, not after all the times there’s been a secondary injury. Internal bleeding. Once, a concussion that had kept her up all night after with him. He knows it won’t stick, but there’s some level of deference he maintains from the days she spent as his senpai. Don’t trouble yourself. “It hasn’t been long since my physical.”
“I don’t trust your doctor.”
“You don’t have to.”
She rolls her eyes. “You could take me more seriously. I have a degree too, you know.”
“Oh, I know. I remember all the complaining about having to get it, too.”
This earns him a tap against the forehead from the back of her hand. It could be harder, but he just laughs, that miracle she heard so rarely when they were students together.
“And look how it’s serving you now.” She gestures, a vague wave to encompass his body. “Off.”
They’re flirting, overt and unashamed, but he’s respectful and unshy, loosening his tie to unbutton his shirt, unveiling a body made for taking a beating and pushing on through it. It’s tragic, Ieiri thinks. So beautiful and so damned.
She reaches for the tie, tugs it over his head. Tosses it on the chair where a visitor might sit, should he have one. Today the door is locked; there’s no fear of that. Nanami looks up at her but doesn’t say anything, just untucks his shirt and finishes undoing the placket.
“Should I put this there too?”
She nods. It’s almost anger-inducing, the way he folds it so carefully when it had done nothing for him when he’d nearly died earlier. Not that she’ll tell him it was that close; not that she needs to. But where other sorcerers go a little insane — Mei-san, Tsukumo and her odd little charge, whatever new addiction has Kusakabe missing for stretches of every weekend he can get to himself — Nanami has a structure, this meaningless management system he inherits from his time in the corporate world.
But he’s cognizant of it, the futility in the application of this layer of mundanity spread over a life he couldn’t have expected when his brain was forming its lifelong patterns. So it’s hard to be irritated.
“Pants too,” she adds, and he’s compliant but slower, more than methodical in the way he undoes his belt. Like he’s stalling, she thinks, and as it turns out he is. With one more quick glance up at her, Nanami undoes the buttons at his waist — French fly, two of them — and shucks himself with less than his usual alacrity. Still professional, even though now she can see why he’d applied the brakes.
Where he turns to, again, maddening, lay his impossibly neat slacks, pleats intact, on the pile, Nanami is hard. Not entirely, not yet maybe, but getting there.
He’s perfect in this way too, of course. The things that arouse him are many and varied; maybe it’s the nerve wracking no nonsense attitude like a cloud of fog around him but he seems just slightly wound up sexually, in the best way possible. It had taken years, his graduation and his desertion and her realization that she’d never needed to forgive him for it because all along there’d been nothing to forgive, before they’d started to learn each other this way but she can’t say it’s been anything but interesting. Fun, if that word can apply to the world they live in.
She wonders how she’ll handle it, sending one hand back quickly to the reassuring foil feeling of the gum. It could be different every time, if that’s how they want it. How she wants him.
And does she.
“I got a pretty good look at the one arm already,” she says, when he’s situated again, hands folded demurely in his lap, not acknowledging himself until she will, “but I’ll need to check the other one too. And the important stuff.”
Torso, ribs, all the organs in between and underneath. All the things he treats like afterthoughts, not just below the immediate bleed but behind anyone else in harm’s potential way as well. He’s never the first person she looks at, unless he’s the only one to be seen. But with just the two of them in the room he has no grounds to refuse. Nanami undoes the interlacing of his fingers and plants his palms on either side of his hips, pectorals and abdominals moving like an optical illusion under his splattered skin. The burns and slices, nicks and pockmarks she hadn’t managed to get to before they made their mark on him, do nothing to obscure him. In fact, they magnify all the things worth knowing about him — his bravery, his selflessness.
The body they adorn doesn’t hurt, Ieiri thinks, and then it’s time to get to work.
She stretches his arms, listens to his heartbeat from various points: his back, his sternum, just shy of one nipple, a peach in the dim light of dusk. That one isn’t for medical purposes; it’s to watch it harden in the cold of her stethoscope, gooseflesh prickling his areola like the topography of a mountainous region on a globe. The other follows, pleasantly symmetrical.
“Your heart rate is a little faster than usual,” she says, anything but innocent. “Everything all right, Nanami-san?”
“Everything’s fine, Ieiri-senpai.” They’re playing now, she knows it; he’s following her down this path, another winding track away from the gravitational pull at the center of everything, keeping them together. If one of them doesn’t lead, it’s the other.
“All right.” She palms him next, prodding, palpating up and down the space between his ribs. This is only half to get her hands on him; there really is a lot to be learned. But as she glances at his face, between watching the movement of his skin over his viscera, she doesn’t see any indication of pain — or indication of hiding it. Just those hazel eyes, steady and molten, meeting hers each time. The fine hairs on his stomach, thickening in the dirty blond line between navel and groin, stand on end where she touches them. It’s so heady, how much he wants her, makes a feedback loop start humming between them right on the table. Unacknowledged verbally but no less strong, no less mutual. “You feel all right here too. Maybe you were telling the truth for once.”
“I rarely lie.”
“Rarely. Spread your legs.”
He obeys, though still gradually. Without his hands to fold over it, he’d been keeping the bulge in his underwear — frustratingly practical boxer briefs, dark enough that she can’t tell by sight whether he’s leaking or not yet — somewhat demurely between his thighs. Like this, there’s no obscuring it, not even with the camouflage of fabric. He’s fully hard now, maybe just from the near skin-on-skin contact allowed by the nitrile gloves, maybe from being bossed around. Maybe from the lack of responsibility he bears here in her world, though that doesn’t sound much like the Nanami she knows.
She knows exactly what she’s doing when she squats between his knees, manually flexes his ankles; from this vantage point, it’s easy to see the way his knuckles are turning white where he’s gripping the edge of the table, like he’s holding on for dear life. She turns his knees with a little more delicacy and significantly more sincerity before rising again, letting her gaze catch and trace the length of him, spreading down his thigh. The head of his cock is probably just shy of poking out, if she’s doing the math right. He’s perfect there, too, a massive secret with the entirety of him between the world and where he holds it.
“This is all it takes?” she asks, makes a loose fist with one hand and flicks him through his underwear with the inertia behind it. She can see the reaction in his Adam’s apple, bobbing tight in his throat where his jaw is clenched, holding it all in. “Has it been so long for you?”
“We saw each other last week,” he says, through gently gritted teeth; a frisson sweeps her at the blatant admission that he isn’t fucking anyone else. Not that she needs the reassurance, which just makes it makes it all the sweeter. “So not all that long.”
“Then what?” She lets her wrist snap out, wraps her fingers around him through the dark cotton. Not yet damp, her sense of touch tells her where her sight had failed, but he’s getting there. “Just being touched?”
“Ieiri-senpai,” he says, nearly murmurs, shy almost if it weren’t for the heat in his swirling gaze, “don’t tease me.”
She feels it then, or comes to it, the pulse in her cunt, the way she can suddenly sense her heartbeat in her clit where it’s pressed to the seam of her pants. She wants Nanami as badly as he wants her, but it’s more fun not to let him know. Not overtly, anyhow; they’re both aware of the circuit they’ve established, no matter how interesting it is to pretend at each end that it’s more one-sided than it is.
“Tease you?” She tightens her grip before releasing him entirely, reaching for the elastic at her wrists. “Strip.”
He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t peacock; as practically as he might in the privacy of his own home, provided she isn’t there to observe as well, he takes his underwear off, lifting one side of his body before the other, letting the last of his armor drop from his calves, aided by gravity. They’re equally potent, each in their own ways, but it still feels like a delicious imbalance having him naked like this, so much of her authority left to abuse. She could finger him, slow and methodical, until he’s near tears, coming without her ever touching his cock. She could undo her own clothing, lower herself to join him on the table. Kiss him on the mouth. She could make him wait until tomorrow, when maybe she could wear a pencil skirt, mount him and pull her panties to the side and ride him like she may never see him again.
Instead, she takes it in, one nice, long look at his nice, long cock, and then casts her eyes toward the ceiling. “Is this normal for you?” she asks, her hand finding him easily enough, gripping him the way she knows he likes. Maybe just a shade looser, like she can’t feel her own interest dripping slow between her legs, slicking her underwear. “Do you get this hard at every physical?”
“No,” says Nanami, through teeth that sound gritted, grinding together in that clean-cut jaw where no matter how many times she stays over she’s never seen even the hint of a shadow, five o’clock or otherwise.
“Has your doctor had to see you like this?” Ieiri doesn’t really care; they don’t have that kind of thing going on, not that they’ve ever taken the time to discuss the particulars. Not explicitly exclusive but obviously not interested in seeing anyone else. She’s noticed the way he looks at her during faculty meetings, the ones that always seem to include the sorcerers on the roster that don’t actually teach at Jujutsu High. She’s not territorial but she doesn’t need to be.
“No,” he says again, the vowel drawing out as she tightens her hold, speeds up just a little. Like it’s a chore she’s doing, trying to get it done as quickly as possible. “Ieiri-senpai—”
“You’re already wet,” notes Ieiri, recording her observations in this pre-mortem autopsy. “Don’t you touch yourself regularly?”
“I do.”
“You do?” She twists her wrist, driving down on his shaft, leveraging the slickness from the slow drip he has going, helpless under her hand. “It doesn’t seem like it. How often do you masturbate?”
“As often—” A breath, sucked in when she rubs her thumb over his head, exposed now with her tugging, interrupts. “—as I need to.”
“Be specific.” She looks at him, just slightly below her — he’s taller, damnably taller, even on the days she wears a heel to the office — on the table, finds him eyes shut and jaw tipped back, causing problems for his own enamel no doubt. If Nanami has a flaw, and he has many, she’s not shy about admitting it, it’s that he’s too quiet in bed. Doesn’t like to give in. She won’t fix that in a day and especially not with a purposefully shabby hand job, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother her a little. Even now when it’s somewhat to their advantage to keep it down. Satoru might still be on the grounds, lurking somewhere. The thought makes her wince, but Nanami misses it in his effort to answer her demand cogently.
“Weekly,” he mutters, “as needed.”
This won’t, by necessity, be one of those times where he’s borderline drooling under her but he’s still entirely too coherent; Ieiri takes her other hand from her pocket and goes for his taint.
Nanami has a bit too much experience not to want a little something here too, even if he’s too polite to ask outright for it, and while she’s already tossed the gloves this at least is within reach of the pad of her index finger, all the pressure she can put behind it.
It works, as it so often does when her aim is accurate: Nanami is relieved in an instant of that winding control and his mouth falls open around a groan. The muscles in his body tense beautifully — if she’s not careful she really will slip into observation, forgetting the way her own thighs are tense, knees trying not to knock together — in a ripple from his neck to his toes. It’s almost funny how textbook it is, how much and how obviously he likes it, how suddenly the windows in the infirmary seem fogged with the humidity of their desire.
“Do you do this weekly?” she asks, lessens the pressure to better facilitate the movement but emphasizes her question with the circle of her fingertip. She’s done this often enough now to know what works, what’s good, and Nanami’s knuckles whiten again. She can see it from her vantage point, knows those digits intimately enough to recognize even smaller changes in them. This is clear, the forming of Nanami’s body into an instrument of pleasure. An experiment.
“No,” he admits, closer to a cry than she’d hoped to get tonight. But really, even and perhaps especially with all his complications, Nanami is an excellent partner, receptive and compliant without ever seeming to just go along with whatever she wants. Without her ever having to say it. Maybe her expectations, even after all this time, have been too low. “Not often.”
“You’re getting older,” says Ieiri, maybe a little meanly because this gets his eyes flashing open again, glaring at her. Petulant, the way he can be sometimes, all the angst he’d had as a teenager compressed down into a lump somewhere deep inside him. She keeps her composure but he doesn’t, not for long with her pace quick and her pressure consistent, gaze disappearing again behind those lowered lids, head thrown back like he’s posing for something, almost worryingly erotic. “You need to think more about your prostate health.”
“Someone else,” he pants, holding steady only through his extraordinary willpower, “is already thinking about it.”
This puts her on autopilot for a moment, her motions and her thoughts diverging as she sinks into herself. Is this what they are to each other? Is this what they’ve become after years of growing older, together and apart? Nanami had come back and it had been like he’d never left, except that she’d realized a gaping tear somewhere in her life had been repaired with his return. Like suddenly she’d remembered that she’d locked the door after all.
“It’s your responsibility,” she mutters, swirling her thumb around the head of his cock slightly unprofessionally. “I won’t always be around to remind you.”
He doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t give him time to, ratchets up the pressure on his taint and does something with her wrist that makes his breath catch every time and he comes, splatter on the vinyl tile beneath their feet. He’s high enough off the floor that it makes a little sound; she pictures asking him to get down, lick it clean, almost laughs imagining the expression she might get just for bringing it up.
She moves just a moment too long on his cock as it softens; it’s outright wet now with the leavings of his orgasm, spread by her hand, and he winces a little when he goes for her wrists.
“At the school?” he murmurs, and then he’s laying back on the table, pulling her with him. Ieiri stumbles a little, even in her practical shoes, the tops of her thighs bumping the edge before she can get a foot in the air. Nanami is insistent, steady, tugging her until her knees rest on either side of that ribcage she’d been so concerned with earlier, her ass planted light as she can manage just north of his sticky cock. Not totally flaccid yet, some observational part of her that’s hard to shut off notes, and then his hands go to her waistband. He’s deft with the button, the fly, just as familiar with her as she is with him. Careful, careful, quickly undoing what holds her together.
“Move up,” he says, and somehow though she’s spent the past twenty minutes wringing a handcrafted orgasm from him it’s now that Nanami sounds desperate, now that she can hear the saliva coating his mouth when he talks, watching his eyes like magnets drawn to the opposing pole between her legs.
She shimmies up, using his shoulders for slightly more leverage than might strictly be necessary, her waistband sagging slightly now that it’s loose. Nanami does the rest, when her face has passed his with nothing more than the heat between them exchanged, when her cunt is spread and dripping above his chin.
His fingers hook into her underwear, pulling them with her pants down her thighs, stopping just above her knees and letting the fabric bunch up in a way that makes her wish she had reason to keep an iron here in the infirmary. It’s the kind of thing no one will notice when they’re at the dinner Nanami has promised her later but that she’ll think about once in a while. How wrinkled her slacks are. How it was because of—
Nanami’s hands are big on her thighs. He gets more tan than she does in the summer with that Scandinavian grandfather of his interfering in his genetic makeup; even in the fade of fall his skin stands out against hers, fingers pressing into her skin.
“You’re thin,” he murmurs, and the ripple of his voice hits her where he has her spread, makes her bite the inside of her cheek.
“These are in my way,” Ieiri argues, tugging fruitlessly at her waistband. Nanami isn’t helping, tightening the pincers of her thighs around his head with the pull of his hands.
“It’s all right,” he says. Coaxing her, inexorably, forward.
He kisses her first, mouth formed to the shape of her clit like the stone chiseled from the statue that remains. The suction, the slide of his tongue, is unforgivably perfect, impossibly familiar; like this they’ve learned each other the way they never had the chance to when they were vulnerable to the world around them. Before he’d left.
Something she’s not adequately prepared for leaves her mouth, a wet slug of a sound drenched in desire like coughing up a bezoar. She can feel him react against her, the rumble of his laugh between her thighs as good as any vibrator.
“They’ll keep your legs here,” he murmurs. He has to know how his top lip brushes her clit as he says it, makes her throb like her heart is beating from that wound up bundle of nerves. When he gets like this even the seam of her pants is unbearable friction; she’ll have to wear a skirt tomorrow, have to suffer Satoru’s relentless guessing at why. Nanami’s fingers pet down her thighs, stopping at her knees where the bunched up fabric of her underwear sit, tense between her legs. “Has anyone told you you’re a very good doctor, Ieiri-senpai?”
Yaga, maybe, when his sixth sense for her burnout starts to tickle the back of his mind, when a healthy bonus doesn’t feel like it will be enough. Some overly grateful teenager, eyes shining, who’s just managed to land the coin on heads this time, who won’t be as lucky on a toss in the future. “Yes,” she says. Her voice still isn’t entirely her own, but this is what they do to each other.
“Then let me tell you too,” says Nanami, and then that impossible mouth is back on her.
He always starts with the clit, can usually make her come twice if he’s patient — which he is — and the timing is right. Not tonight, though, at least not now; Ieiri knows better than to think Nanami’s forgotten their dinner plans. He’s in a hurry, as much as he ever is. She’s never thought to ask what he’s spelling with his tongue down there, just presses her hips down into it when he lets her, when he doesn’t get it into his head not to let her do any of what he calls the work, like it’s not mindless and effortless pleasure chasing. Whatever it is, it must be poetry the way it makes her follow it, feel the way his fingertips slide against her skin when she rocks her pelvis back and forth, shaking her body with desire.
They’ve fucked enough that when he does that thing with his lips, catching her swollen clit between them like it’s the bracket a pair of pliers is about to tug free, she knows she needs to brace herself. For all the urgency around feeding themselves, he’s sure taking his time now, licking his way down her labia slowly like she’s the dinner.
“Hurry,” she pants, failing to sound as composed as she’d like while his tongue maps the shape of her like he’s going to make a cast when they’re done here, “I want to come.”
“I want you to come, too,” says Nanami, right into her hole, up against her so his voice echoes through her spine up into her chest. The dimensions of her face mean, like always when they do it this way, that his nose is up against her clit now, its tip firm and sharp. “I still have to clean up my mess from earlier.”
It’s the last thing he says for a while, at least aloud; she’s noisy enough for both of them when he tongue-fucks her like this, rubbing along the walls of her vaginal canal; he won’t reach her g-spot, not without his fingers where they’re digging in to her adductors now, but the way he’s nudging his nose against her more than makes up for it. He works his tongue well, knows where he wants her and doesn’t waste time trying to go anywhere else, holds her down when she squeezes around him and unravels.
It starts with that tugging in her gut, hot and familiar, an igneous hand molten and squeezing. When they’re together sometimes it feels like whatever connects them — fingers, strap, cock — is tied by an electrified wire to her inner workings, whatever runs her nerve endings to the pleasure control panel of her brain, like each pull out makes her more desperate to snap it. Her body, already hot, loses its gravity; her center travels from its usual spot behind her navel down into her pelvis like falling into a pool. And then, like the resultant shock of water on a dry body, she comes.
Nanami really is good at this, eases up the pressure on her clit when she can’t stop herself from clamping down around his tongue and sets his hot mouth against her cunt, drenches himself in her. Where her hands ball into fists he gets his fingers in between hers, pulls her down with more force onto his face like the brave, foolish man he is.
She pants above him for a minute when he’s wrung everything she has out of her, trying to take some of the weight off where she’s sure he’ll eventually need to breathe. “Go rinse your mouth,” she says, pushing off and flopping onto her back next to him on the table. There’s not really enough room for two of them, and her pants are still awkward around her knees where they’re shaking and bent; it’s fairly close to perfect, though, with Nanami looking at her, eyebrow raised, skin shining unabashedly. He’s unbearable, has been since she met him a decade ago. “Or you’ll spend all night complaining about how dinner tastes.”
He rolls his eyes but they both know she’s right. With anyone else this would be too intimate, his nakedness spread beside her — she’s even still wearing her coat, the only one she has left that doesn’t have a permanent stain of something or other. But Nanami doesn’t let it last, disappears from her field of view, the sound of running water reaching her ears over the slowing of her heartbeat.
He does clean his come off the floor; when she finally sits up, legs freed completely from her pants and underwear so she can follow him into the little restroom adjoining her domain, he’s at least half-dressed and crouching, scrubbing at the tile with the kind of precision and focus that defines him so thoroughly it has become his power.
“You look good like that,” she says, and while he doesn’t look up at her she can see the corner of his mouth lift in the faded light still making its way to them. “Come over and mop my apartment.”
“No, thank you,” Nanami replies, though she knows he would if she was really asking. “I haven’t lost all my sense of self-preservation just yet.”
“Very funny.” It’s lonely in the bathroom, wiping at her cunt in an effort to spare her underwear the aftermath, staring at herself in the little mirror like a stranger. Her cheeks are pink; her mouth looks empty without a cigarette in it. She doesn’t hurry though she thinks she’d like to.
When she opens the door, shuts the light off behind her, he’s buttoning his shirt. His back is to her but the motions are familiar enough, the angle of his elbows. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Leave the tie off,” answers Ieiri, by way of reply. Her panties, the slacks that had covered them all day, are folded at the end of the examination table they’d spent an hour or so defiling. The epicenter smells like sex and antiseptic; he’s wiped it down. What a man. “I don’t want to go anywhere too fancy anyway.”
“All right.” He’s agreeable now, though he isn’t always. She’s sure he has another orgasm in him still; maybe he’s doing his best to leave the door open for it. “I have a few ideas if you’re ready to go.”
“You’re the slow one. I’m already on the train,” she says, and when he turns and sees her still half-naked behind him he outright laughs.
•••
Nanami takes not too fancy literally, brings her to a repeat haunt with cheap highballs and a good mix of decent fried food and vegetables. Sobering up on karaage gets more and more difficult as the years go by.
“How is this year’s new class?” he asks innocuously. He’s drinking liquor but it’ll be hours until either of them are affected by it; he’s been steeped in practice like a pickling in corporate culture, she’s just born with it. Or maybe it’s some side effect of the reverse curse technique. It does have some application on purely physical damage — or at least, hers does. Maybe that’s why Yaga still seems so at peace keeping her off the mission rotation.
“They’re fine. Ino-kun is acting like a sheepdog with all of them.”
Nanami’s so obviously fond of Ino, though only when the kid is not around to see it; his eyes soften in the warm light of the booth they’re drinking in. Eating too, soon hopefully; something involving tempura. “I’m not surprised,” he says, dryly, like his expression hasn’t already completely killed any attempt at keeping his facade of reserve. It’s habit by now; Ieiri doesn’t take it too personally. There are other people around, after all. “He’ll burn himself out if he isn’t careful.”
“You know, some people get more energy from helping others. Being useful.”
“And I will never understand it.”
“Sure.” Ieiri puts the rim of her glass to her chin, pretend thoughtful. “Who was it that ran around after Satoru after everything happened in school…? And who was it that used to pass out in my desk chair half the time because they were so tired from taking on missions so he didn’t have to…?”
“Must have been someone else,” Nanami mutters, firmly, draining his glass. Somehow he always makes eye contact with bartenders and waitstaff the first time he tries — Ieiri’s sure not all of it can be attributed to them admiring him, since surely some subset of them couldn’t care less about a man, even one as good-looking, as generally magnetic, as Nanami — and before it feels like there’s a break in the conversation he’s got two more highballs on their way to the table. He’d known where she was in her progress through her first drink without asking, without needing to look; rivers carving through the crust of the earth, forming each other. Not something they’ll ever say to each other aloud maybe, with words in the world they live in representing the power to destroy lives, but they don’t need to talk about it. They tell each other every time they see each other, every time she lectures him for showing up in her infirmary again, every time he hangs her jacket up when she isn’t sure whether she’ll stay the night at his apartment.
“I don’t know any other blonds as moody as you,” she says. You can’t smoke inside here, either; Nanami had been thinking of her with that too. “I don’t think it could have been anyone else.”
“Well. I had more energy back then.”
“But you were the same person. Basically.”
“I don’t know. I think I’ve changed a lot since then. It feels like I have,” he adds, and in fairness he’s most familiar with himself over those four years they were apart, sort of.
“Hmm. Your haircut is pretty different.”
“You know, they made me cut it when I started my job.”
“They made you? Knife to your throat at the barber?”
“Worse. It was all unspoken.” A disinterested-looking young waiter with glasses and a formidable stink eye puts a plate of battered vegetables between them. His serving ability doesn’t seem to be affected by his attitude, and Nanami interrupts his own story to thank the boy. Ieiri wonders when she started to think of people his age, university student she’d guess, as boys. “They’d pass me over for big accounts, even when I’d prepared well and made good impressions assisting on calls, and tell me it was just that serious clients didn’t want to work with someone who looked like me.” He places air quotes around the phrase; Ieiri bites into a fairly damn good lotus root. “Once I started styling it like this that tapered off. I guess I should be grateful it wasn’t because of my grandfather. That’s much harder to change.”
“Were there people like that?”
Nanami shrugs. He always eats the lion’s share of the sweet potato, and that’s what he goes for first now too. “It didn’t impact me significantly.”
“Well. One good thing about sorcery is they’ll take whoever.”
“Almost.” His eyes pinch at the corners, though, that almost-smile. “You do have to be good enough.”
“Even that,” she argues, mostly for the fun of it, “there’s the grading system. And being a window. All you really need is to see curses and they’ll give you a spot.”
“For better or worse.”
“I’d never stick up for how things operate.” She sighs. “I’m not drunk enough to talk work.”
“What else is there to talk about?” asks Nanami, though he does take another long sip of his drink. Perfect throat, she thinks, working over the swallow. It’s simply unfair for a man to look like this and be this fun to drink with. And there’s still lingering dampness between her legs from his efforts earlier. Full package, really, and he’s here with her. “I bought one of those hand presses for garlic last week.”
“Really? And here I thought you liked all that slicing.”
“I do. Mostly. But sometimes the press would be easier, I think. My arm aches sometimes.”
“If only you had a really excellent doctor to see about that.”
“I have two doctors I see regularly, actually, and one of them is really excellent. But she has better things to do than handle a grown man’s soreness.”
“I don’t think she does.” The gum in her pocket is calling Ieiri’s name, but that little punk waiter just dropped off the plate of yakitori they’re splitting and she keeps reminding herself that it will ruin the taste. “At least not now that Satoru actually knows how to handle a first-year class. It’s nice not to be up to my elbows in kid organs all the time.”
“Wound closure is what we learned first, I think,” Nanami says, a little too snidely, before he remembers himself and adds, “for all the good it did me.”
“Mmm. Look at you now.” She gestures to the arm she’d fixed up earlier with the hand full of highball, swirls the liquid in Nanami’s direction. “On my table once a week. Sometimes more.”
“It’s not all bad.” The dim light around them flattens Nanami’s eyes into one solid, earthy color, hot as the molten core of the planet suddenly when he meets her gaze and holds it. Flicks one nonchalant thumb across the rim of his glass. When it’s brighter — like in the infirmary, actually — his iris splits into rings, uneven, brown and green and grey. Just like him, to have more to offer on a second, more careful look. “My doctor is very good.”
“A minute ago I was — what was it, excellent?”
“Really excellent, I think.”
“That’s a pretty serious demotion.”
“Good thing I don’t sign your paychecks.” The piece of yam Nanami puts away next must have sat in its battering too long; the tempura drips off one end in a trail frozen in time before he swallows it indiscriminately. “Have you seen Gojo-san lately?”
Ieiri blinks. “I think the only person who sees him as often as I do is Yaga. Or you,” she adds, and Nanami scoffs.
“Does being interrupted on my lunch break count as us seeing each other?”
“That’s practically a confession from Satoru. You know that.”
“That’s just how he is with me. It’s scary how much enjoyment he gets out of ruining my day.”
Ieiri shrugs. “You make it too easy.”
“I do not.”
Even now, he does. Looking at the speed with which his brow furrows across the table at her, the way the little wrinkle above the bridge of his nose digs easily into his skin, Ieiri can completely understand why Satoru is the way he is about this prodigal son of sorcery. And she understands her place too, the third of the legs on this wobbling stool left forever off-kilter.
But they’re here — at least she and Nanami are, and if the two of them are discussing Satoru he might as well be in their midst — and it feels like since Nanami has come back things are steadier, like someone might be able to put weight on the three of them and be held.
“I think he’s still angry with me,” says Nanami, quieter, gaze drowning in his glass. “Sometimes I can tell you are too.”
Denial leaps in Ieiri’s throat and stops itself from being her first response; she thinks instead, gives Nanami what he’s owed in her consideration. “I don’t think I’m angry. Not anymore. Maybe I never was.”
“Ieiri-san…”
“I mean it.” Some threshold of warmth for the ice in her glass is met and it cracks; the people in the booth behind them probably don’t even hear it over the ambient noise but between them it sounds like a gunshot. This is familiar ground they’re treading now but somehow they always find new bones beneath it when they till the soil. “It was hard after you left. Satoru was— I was going to say worse than after Suguru but I don’t think that was it. Maybe the opposite actually.”
“Oh?” Nanami is good at that, knowing when the introvert in her is flagging, when her voice has been too much of the balance in the conversation. He’s observant, the detail-orientedness of his technique bleeding out into the rest of his life. The mirror image of Satoru, really, who sees everything without effort and rarely applies that knowledge to anything good. While they’re on the topic.
“I think we didn’t talk to each other like we should have. Since it had happened before.”
“Geto-san was different. I mean, he… Gojo-san…”
“You too, Nanami. The self-deprecation isn’t as cute as it was in high school.” She smiles, though; it’s still a little cute. “That’s probably what’s left. I just felt lonely.”
“We still saw each other, though.”
“You know it’s not the same. You still see your mom, right?”
This is a targeted shot and it hits; Nanami’s eyes wander again. It’s a little aggravating that, even now when he doesn’t mean to, he gets the attention of their disaffected server. The kid holds up two fingers and mimes drinking, and is turning back toward the bar before Nanami even has a chance to telegraph a reply.
“Sometimes,” he says. “You’re right, it isn’t the same.”
“At least you still knew about the grading system. It did make it a little easier to talk about my day.” The yakitori is good, still fairly hot despite the time it’s been sitting on their table. Her teeth sink in wrong and the juice it manages to maintain drips down her chin, almost too fast for her tongue to catch. “God, this is good.”
“I like it here,” Nanami agrees. “It’s still cheap, too.”
“You still care about that?”
“Only the likes of Gojo-san can afford not to think about price.”
Ieiri swirls the single chunk of ice in her glass, listens to it knock against its sides amidst the after-work chatter around them. “Maybe what I am is wary,” she explains. It feels like the right time, somehow, to slide back into the conversation they’d been having earlier. There’s an acknowledged risk in dropping a topic personal to Nanami, but she’s taken it before and now isn’t the worst time to revisit it. “Maybe it feels to me like you’re just getting ready to leave again.”
“Where would I go?” Nanami has the end of his tie, which he’s inexplicably still wearing loose around his neck this far into the casual portion of his day despite her ask earlier, in the infirmary, tucked into the pocket of his shirt like a precious thing he can’t afford to have in the neighborhood of a dark sauce. “I didn’t give notice when I quit my previous job. They won’t take me back.”
Wherever else Nanami might go, she knows it’s not there; the expression on his face says it all, no matter how measured his words about it.
“It seems like you’d rather be somewhere else.”
“So would you.”
Ieiri taps one finger against the table, nail short, one spot of polish she’d missed removing from the last time Utahime had taken her somewhere nice chipping at its edge. “Maybe. With my skill set I guess it would be the same everywhere.”
Nanami considers her, thoughtful. The way he looks at her sometimes makes it feel like somehow he’s the first person to ever do it. “What specialty would you practice?”
“If I were just a normal doctor?” He nods. “Hmm. Family medicine would be boring. Probably internal too.”
“You enjoy the organs too much.”
“And the blood.” She grins; two and some portion of a third highballs makes it easier to. “Hematology?”
“Is that hands-on enough?”
“Maybe. I don’t really know, honestly. It’s not like I ever had to actually do the junior residency.”
“True.”
“Anyway,” she says, around the remains of another bite of yakitori, “it doesn’t really matter. I’d probably be a surgeon.”
“Is that so?”
“Mmm. It may not look like it but I’m pretty precise.” She reaches across the table, puts the tip of her finger into the crook of his elbow where the fold of his shirtsleeve is bunched up. Even after earlier, laid totally bare to her, he almost looks more erotic like this with the trappings of his day just slightly undone, his usual precision allowing just a little leeway. It feels like people are staring; it feels like she’s staring. “This is where that scar is from the time Satoru was still getting things right and bounced that pencil Suguru threw at him a little too hard.”
Nanami looks down at where she’s touching him, drags his sleeve back out from under her. “I don’t even think I could have told you that,” he says, eyes on the pockmark wrinkling his skin.
“See?” She leans back again, arms folded triumphantly. “Surgeon.”
“Very lucrative. I managed the client account for a surgeon for a while.”
“How was that?”
“Terrible.” Ieiri snorts into her glass. “He didn’t know much about finance but he certainly thought he did.”
“I guess being wealthy doesn’t make you good with money.”
“Have you seen the sort of purchases Gojo-san makes?”
“Mei-san seems to know what she’s doing.”
“Maybe someone where I used to work was managing Mei-san’s account.”
“She keeps it all overseas, I think.”
Nanami doesn’t look surprised at that, just diplomatically offers her a sweet potato piece that he already knows she won’t eat. One more ongoing ritual they engage in, another layer of foundation for whatever their relationship is turning into.
It occurs to her that there’s not another person she’d rather be here with — maybe Satoru, some nights, when the mood is right and it doesn’t feel like they’re in each other’s pockets enough to know they’d both rather be catching up on sleep or work or whatever else they have going on. She thinks Nanami probably feels the same. She’d never ask. He’d never make her feel like she needs to.
They drink what is, as they get older, probably too much, sop it up with oil and breading. Nanami asks if she’s eaten enough, if she wants to go somewhere for what would pass better for actual food. Maybe drink more — they both can. But she’s eaten enough, and in their industry the mornings can start incredibly early, and so with Nanami’s sleeves rolled back down and her coat back on they make their way out into the night.
“Sometimes I don’t want to go back,” she sighs, chin up, sky empty of stars with the blinding city lights around them. It’s loud still, even outside of the truly busy wards.
“Maybe you’re the one who might leave,” says Nanami. They never walk hand in hand, arm in arm, not unless they’ve truly tied one on and it’s that or neither of them make it to the train. “You’re projecting.”
“Same question as you, then,” she says. “Where am I going to go? If I start trying to do my thing in a normal clinic they’ll call me a witch.”
“That’s sort of what we are.” Nanami shrugs, a beige movement in what darkness there is available. They’re walking slowly, slowly enough that if Ieiri were behind herself she’d be complaining about it to whomever she might be with. Maybe another Nanami, the Nanami and Ieiri that exist in the public eye, in the space outside of the bubble they’ve made for themselves. “In the past they might have called us that instead of sorcerers.”
“At least at the school I don’t have anybody asking me where I studied. Or what I studied. Or what experience I have.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t have trouble. You’re a — what was it? Really excellent doctor.”
Ieiri smiles. “I’m pretty good at the curing part,” she admits. “My bedside manner could use some work.”
“I think it’s fairly good.” Just for a second, Nanami bumps their elbows together. She lets their ankles, separated by the layer of fabric where his pants hang down just slightly too far to be stylish, brush. Rituals. Familiarity. What they are to each other, what they’ve been.
“Is it better than your regular doctor? The one you go to for the boring stuff?”
“Ah… well, I’ve never slept with my regular doctor. So you must be doing something right.”
“Most doctors would say sleeping with their patients isn’t a good thing. The ethical ones, anyway,” she adds, and Nanami laughs.
“It’s a good thing for me you’re not ethical, then,” he says, and he’s not looking at her but his eyes fixed ahead of them are so fond it’s almost embarrassing to see them. “I don’t think there’s a replacement if you decide you can’t treat me anymore.”
“We could stop sleeping together,” she says, and she’s laughing too but this does make him look at her. Just for a second before his gaze is, responsibly, turned back in the direction they’re walking.
“Do you want that?” he asks, because he has to, because if he doesn’t and leaves that landmine lie it would be an explosion they can’t survive.
“Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“It’s a personal failure to you if I don’t come first. And,” she adds, watching his cheek turn pinker than they can blame the booze for, “I usually come twice. So no, Nanami-kun, I do not want to stop sleeping together. I’ll just continue being an unethical doctor.”
Her hands, in her pockets with the light chill of the evening, brush the box again on her nicotine gum. The foil, without the cardboard exterior she’d tossed as soon as she’d bought it, would cede easily to that fingernail with the chipped polish. Utahime had been kind about the color, said she should stick with jewel tones. Press.
“Mint?”
Ieiri blinks. “Do I need one?”
Nanami shrugs. The box is in his hand already, one of the metal ones. It doesn’t even look branded, like maybe he’d bought a tin specifically to keep mints in. “I usually want one after I drink,” he says. “It’s up to you.”
“Okay.”
Their fingers don’t brush as she picks one — spearmint, the smell of it strong even before she slots it in under her tongue — which feels almost more intentional with how much other movement they’re engaged in, making their way down the sidewalk to the stairs into the subway, somewhere out of sight ahead of them, than if they had touched. It isn’t, the way none of their interactions need to be. Intention and action blend together now and pour between them in a language only two people could ever learn to speak.
“You know, I’ve been doing a lot better with the gum,” she says, to tear the bandage off. “I don’t think I’ve smoked since—”
“Since I came back.” He’s not bragging, not flaunting the effect his absence in her daily life had had. This is Nanami: humble, reserved, but also honest. He wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t a fact. “You used to smoke every time we went out together.”
“Satoru would lecture me about it.” She wrinkles her nose, hunches her shoulders like he’s about to fly up behind her and start nagging again. “Like he was the doctor.”
“It doesn’t take a degree to know smoking isn’t good for you.”
“Drinking isn’t either.”
“Maybe. But I likely won’t live long enough to deal with that.”
“With me as your doctor?” Her voice is light; the alternative is unbearable. Nanami, honest. “Settle in. You’ll be living a hundred years if I can do anything about it.”
“Do you have a hundred years left in you? You smoke,” he continues, solemnly, “and you drink.”
“And I have a button inside me I can press to undo all that.” She rolls her eyes. “Applying it to other people almost makes using it myself boring. I haven’t really needed it in a while, either.”
“Well,” Nanami says, doing up one button of the jacket of his suit against the night, the breeze created by their movement through it, “stay in practice. I doubt I can handle a century of Gojo-san on my own.”
“All right, Nanami.”
Every silence between them is companionable, comfortable as the kind of cardigan you can’t get anymore unless you have a grandmother somewhere willing to make it for you, and the one that stretches now is no exception. Ieiri looks through windows as they pass them, parlors and restaurants and bars. It’s a business district; salarymen in various stages of the degradation waiting at the end of the day crawl past them, briefcases in hands. This was Nanami’s life for four years, could have been his eternity. Marriage, probably two children, the kind of father that would make his kids’ classmates jealous. Always there for school sporting events, cell phone in his pocket with the ringer off.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you, Ieiri-san,” he says, waking her from what she’s too practical to call a fantasy. She blinks; this is earnest, even for him. Usually they don’t mention the sort of intractable debts they owe one another. It’s not worth it with the scale tipping back and forth on such a regular basis.
“I am a good doctor.”
“Excellent,” he reminds her, and the corners of her mouth lift before she has a chance to stop them. “But not just that.”
“Then what?”
“It was… difficult out here.” Not within the in Nanami implicitly draws, where he is now with the people that can truly understand him. “There were many times where things could have gone seriously wrong. Most of those times I called you.”
“Nanami…”
“I don’t mean to burden you,” he continues, “I just wanted you to know. I’m grateful.”
“Are you sure it’s for the best?” she asks. It feels like the only safe angle to take, the light one, the one that doesn’t look any harder into what it means that while she hasn’t been slaving away under the unfeeling palm of capital she’s messaged him on many occasions when the prudent thing, the stoic thing that sorcery so often demands, would have been to keep it to herself. “You talk all the time about how sorcery is—”
“Ieiri-san.” Once, one shining time ever, Nanami had called her by her first name. He’d been so deep inside her she’d had the impossible thought that she might never be able to get him out, that he’d reached a point so far — like the narrowing of a cave — that he couldn’t leave it. He loved fucking like that, facing each other, his body weight like the gravity holding her to the earth. And like that, not even when he came but before, like the closeness, the exertion and not the hormone evacuation, was what could loosen his tongue, it had landed like a grenade, unpinned and flashing white in her mind. Blinding, deafening, rattling her windows and shattering glass until even her last name, demure with the honorific applied, in his mouth makes her thighs tense. It somehow feels like an appropriate corollary to the tender conversation he has her pinned to, the coin they’re flipping over and over. Heads: matching rings and a place in the suburbs where both of them get their mail, tails: another half of a body in the morgue. Ieiri-san. Shoko. “Anything good in my life now is the result of your intervention.”
She hadn’t thought him drunk when they spilled out of the izakaya, letting some of the light escape with them into the street, but this is so nakedly stated she wonders if she’d been wrong, looks up at him frankly startled. He doesn’t return her gaze, eyes forward still, but like he’d heard her thoughts earlier he puts an arm around her shoulders. Squeezes and doesn’t release her. It’s warm in the space his body makes for her; in the traffic pattern of the sidewalk they’re no longer two obstacles but one. Her elbow taps his ribs in their ambient movement.
“Maybe,” she says, her own voice choking her a little on its way out, sincerity in return the way he’s earned though it’s difficult to deliver, “you should let a few other people bring you good things.”
“Like who? Gojo-san?” Nanami makes a face that has her laughing out loud, has his arm tightening around her for another moment.
“He does keep threatening to buy you things. With all that money he has I bet he could deliver.”
“He does not seem like the type of man to let the recipient give him guidance on the gift.”
“No,” she agrees, “that doesn’t sound like Satoru.”
“Were you planning to go back to the school?” As deftly as he’d opened it Nanami closes the door on the serious portion of their conversation. She doesn’t think he’d been this socially capable when they’d been schoolmates — not that they’d done anything more sophisticated than clinging to each other in the hurricane of adolescence. He’d spent four years talking for a living, does it now without the associated misery of his livelihood depending on it. They’ve grown, she thinks, and then she remembers to answer him.
“As usual.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Nanami-san, broken free from the tether of the school with his insistence on operating as an independent sorcerer, with his off-campus apartment and his commute at the end of the day. No more but also no less than a cell phone call away. “Or would you rather come to my place?”
He’s sure as he asks it that one of these things will come true. With his hand secure around what there is of her bicep they’re bound together for the night; separation will be harder than the decision to go to one place or the other. “Let me text Satoru,” she says, reaching for the phone in the pocket of her jacket. “I should see what he has planned for his students tomorrow.”
“He’ll know if you ask.”
“Know what?”
“He just… he’ll know. Haven’t you noticed, Ieiri-san? Gojo-san has a sense for this kind of thing.”
“And what is this kind of thing, hmm?”
Nanami hesitates; not a common occurrence. “He’ll know you’re spending the night with someone,” he says at last, “and he’ll probably guess that it’s me.”
“He is irritatingly good at that,” agrees Ieiri. “So?”
“He may bother you about it.”
“He bothers me daily, about most things.”
“Fair enough.”
She glances at Nanami, watching his face as she asks, “Will it bother you if I ask him? I don’t want to sleep away from the school if he’s going to take them to… well. You know.”
“I do. He trusts them too much.”
“I’d say he trusts himself too much. I don’t think he thinks much of them at all.”
“You’re harsh, Ieiri-san.”
“I’ve known him longer.”
“That must have been a significant year you two shared without me,” says Nanami, but he’s grinning too so the sarcasm’s sting is all but ameliorated. “I guess I’ll never catch up.”
Ieiri shrugs; the movement jostles Nanami’s hand up and down her arm a little. “I’ve never had to ask Kusakabe-san what his students are doing in the morning,” she argues.
“Because Gojo-san lives at the school? So it’s all the same in the end?”
“You know what I mean, Nanami.”
“I know.” He pulls her closer when they reach the platform proper; she’s already thinking about how there’s one half of a drawer in Nanami’s dresser where a few pairs of her panties are folded, a shirt or two so she doesn’t have to wear one a second time. How the other half of the drawer are his clothes that smell like her by now with how often she’s slept in them, ancient t-shirts and shorts she’s had to be creative with the drawstrings of, socks that bunch up at the bend of her ankle and sag down her calves. “Ask Satoru. We’ll reach your stop first if he does have something dangerous planned.”
“He almost always does,” she sighs, message thread already open. “But I suppose we can hope.”
“We can,” Nanami agrees, crowded against her in the congestion of the post-work crowd. “It’s much quieter where I live.”
It is; when Nanami had used her first name it had been in the safety of his bedroom, the privacy of it all. Here in the train car, as far from that sanctum as could be, Ieiri smiles at him and crosses the index and middle fingers of her left hand. With her right hand, safe in the pocket of her coat, she turns off her phone.
•••