Chapter Text
It’s quite possible that Kento hates Mei Mei.
Here, right now, in some hidden room, on top of an unused desk, leaning over her, holding her leg open while he pushes up into her, he is actually pretty sure that he hates her. She’s up on one of her hands, so that she can breathe into his mouth, and she’s looking up at him from beneath her brow, with these big eyes that make his heart thump.
She’s smiling up at him. He has no proof that she knows what she’s doing, but he thinks that she must. Her dress is pushed up over her hips, and her thong is by his foot. He’s not sure where his jacket and tie ended up—she took those off. Mei Mei kept her stupid impractical boots on because she said it was hotter way, and of course, she’s right. He can see her nipples through her dress. She’s moving her hips, giving it back to him, opening further. Her hand is between her legs, playing with herself. He doesn’t know which one of them it’s for—probably both, honestly.
Thanks to Mei Mei, he’s pretty sure he knows what his douchebag former boss meant when he talked about drowning in pussy. It’s not just because she’s so wet either. She’s all he can smell, taste, hear, see, and feel. He eases her open a little more, and she makes this soft noise that makes him twitch.
“Did that hurt?”
“No,” she moans, “keep going.” She doesn’t use words like ‘please’ because she always already believes that she deserves the world. That confidence is something he finds very attractive. He wishes that he had it for himself.
They moan and groan with each other, teetering, teetering, teetering, like they can’t decide if they want it to be over. Mei Mei comes first, because she always does, and it turns her into complete goo. She reaches up and takes his face in her hands, pressing her thumbs into his cheekbones. She smiles at him, this happy expression on her face, like she cares about him too. He’s pretty sure that she only wants him to come so that she can brag about her game, but when she looks at him like this, he hopes that maybe, just maybe, she likes him back.
“Don’t stop,” she sighs, like he could prevent what’s about to happen, what always happens. Kento would never say this, but Mei Mei’s pussy is so good that pulling out, unless asked, feels disrespectful. Like, who says no to this kind of pussy when it’s so good at doing what it’s made for?
Kento would rather kill himself than admit that he sometimes thinks this way. People would think less of him if they knew that he likes pussy just as much as the next guy. Satoru would probably laugh himself into an early grave and take Shoko with him and—fuck, why is he thinking about this right now? Kento, you disrespectful and ungrateful asshole, you’re going to miss the best part!
He leans back into the moment, looking at Mei Mei right in the eyes, biting his lower lip while he takes it all in. He rarely has to fantasize before he comes when he’s inside Mei Mei, it’s just that good to be with her. There’s nothing that could’ve prepared him for what Mei Mei does to him. He’s glad that he only found out after he turned twenty-five. She easily would’ve stunted his brain development.
Kento presses his forehead to hers, moving with more force. Mei Mei’s moans sound like they are being beaten out of her, thump, thump, thump, but he knows that she likes feeling a little used (she read out a filthy story on the internet that used words ‘cock puppet’ and Kento doesn’t know how he didn’t choke and die right there from second-hand embarrassment), so he keeps going.
He pushes all the way up inside of her, violent enough that the desk groans too, sliding across the floor by an inch or two. She kisses him on the mouth while his semen leaks inside of her, and for a second, he gets why it’s not just fucking when there’s kissing involved. Her nails scratch his scalp, and it makes his spine tingle. Mei Mei pulls away and smiles at him, all sweet and nice because she got what she wanted, presumably. Nonetheless, he feels good for having given it to her.
“It’s going to suck when this is over,” Mei Mei says, right to him, like he is on the same page as her about their not-relationship. His stomach drops and he feels his nostrils flare.
Yep, Kento really, really hates Mei Mei right now.
**
“Honestly,” Mei Mei says, “I don’t get why you’re always in a hurry to leave after. I like just being with you.” Kento frowns while he zips his fly, not in the mood to tell her that she has basically murdered all his happy feelings. He wonders if she is clueless or mean or maybe a bit of both. He thinks that his feelings are very clear. He doesn’t lie down on top of just anyone and laze around for five minutes before pulling out. Or rather, he saves that for real girlfriends, even though he can’t really remember the last time he had one. He is always too busy working, and he has been on a steady diet of Mei Mei for a year, so he hasn’t really been looking.
“I wouldn’t want you to get comfortable,” he says, looking for his tie. He doesn’t even know why he let her take it off. He curses Past Kento for being a horny idiot who only thinks with his dick.
“But don’t you like me?” she asks, batting her eyelashes. Kento is pretty sure that she’s joking. She must be. How is this even a question?
“No,” he lies, spotting his tie on a desk. He walks over and picks it up, deciding to just stick it in his pocket and get the fuck out of here.
Mei Mei still hasn’t said anything. He turns around and she’s beside him, holding her little navy thong in her hand. It’s the kind of underwear only a person with a flat stomach can pull off, which of course, Mei Mei has.
“You should keep ‘em,” she says, holding her underwear out to him. Kento looks at her hand, before looking up at her.
“No thank you,” he replies, in a petty mood. Mei Mei’s mouth twitches, before she steps forward and slips them into his pocket, her whole hand going in. He feels her knuckles through the fabric of his pocket. It makes him tingle.
“I wasn’t really asking,” she says, “I don’t like this pair.” Pressing her knuckles against him, she leaves her hand in his pocket, bunching it into a fist. Kento doesn’t think; he just does that seems logical. He leans in and kisses her, right on the mouth. It’s very nice—sweet is the word. When he pulls back, she’s smiling.
“You’re good at kissing,” she hums, tilting her head at him. He shrugs.
“Guess all that porn was good for something.” He doesn’t consume more than the average person, but he’s keenly aware of how it has affected his brain development.
“Drink bleach,” she says, this sweet expression on her face. Kento rolls his eyes.
“I’ll think about it,” he replies. She takes her hand out of his pocket. He steps away and picks up his jacket, straightening it out. When he turns around Mei Mei is still there. “Yes?”
“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “I’ll see you around.”
**
The thing with Mei Mei is that she has sex with him like she loves him, and then tells him to drink bleach.
The thing with Kento (and he can freely admit it) is that he only really pays attention when she’s telling him to make good on all the times that he has freely welcomed death. All the nice things she says don’t seem to count as particularly noteworthy. Maybe because the mean things she says have a place in his world. Nice things don’t really make sense.
His feelings are confusing to him because he goes out of his way to avoid forming deep connections or permanent attachments. He’s at maximum capacity. There’s no more room in his heart for a girlfriend. At the end of the day, he doesn’t have the emotional real estate.
Maybe his mother is right, and he has low self-esteem and high-functioning depression that he is too stubborn to get treatment for.
Maybe the psychoanalyst, who was a waste of time and money, was right when they said that his parents didn’t love him the right way.
Or maybe all the panicky think pieces about millennials and intimacy and lower birthrates got it right, and that all the porn and accompanying warped expectations of sex and genuine human connection have rotted his brain.
Whatever it is, Kento is willing to concede that he wouldn’t know what to do if Mei Mei were nicer to him. He’d honestly probably ask her if she were having a stroke, it’d be so out of character for her. He doesn’t even know why he likes her so much. Satoru put it best, after she said that Gakuganji looks like the inside of a cheap leather handbag, under the ugly branded satin lining. Satoru clapped his hands, laughing so hard he couldn’t speak, before wiping the tears from his eyes and saying, She’s just so mean! Satoru clearly admires her for it, and has said that when he grows up, he wants to be as clever and insightful as his senpai.
Kento frowns while Satoru hums, looking through one of Shoko’s gossip magazines, which he ‘borrowed’ (a.k.a. is holding hostage) until she finishes up in the morgue. He wants to go out for dinner and she’s the only one who openly enjoys his company. We are Goblin Nation! Satoru once said, How durst you question us? He was standing on Shoko’s office chair, hands in a vent, while Shoko was holding the vent cover. They never told Kiyotaka and Kento what they had hidden in there—honestly, neither of them wanted to know.
“You know,” Satoru says, “what’s the point in getting plastic surgery when you’ll one day have a kid with your old face?”
“Do I look like I know why people get plastic surgery?” Kento asks, looking over the top of his newspaper. Satoru shrugs.
“You seem like you’d be into that kind of girl,” he says, “you’re very image conscious that way.” Kento sighs out loud.
“You think I’d want a girl who has a face she wasn’t born with?”
“You’d one hundred and fifty percent date a woman who uses filler and Botox to stay young looking,” Satoru says, “I mean, it’d be tasteful cosmetic procedures, but nonetheless, not their natural face.”
“I can’t believe you,” Kento says, “I don’t even date.” Besides, Mei Mei has a perfect face.
“If you did,” Satoru said, “it’s just a casual observation.”
“You’ve been waiting to use that,” Kento says, “wanting the right prop and set up.” It frustrates him, how Satoru is so good at engineering the circumstances for most of his dumb jokes.
“I won’t deny it,” Satoru grins, looking back down at the magazine, “for what it’s worth, Shoko found it very funny.”
“You two are a cancer,” Kento says, “should be radiated right out of society.”
“Kento,” Satoru says with a fake gasp, “that is very insensitive of you, given this country’s history—”
“You don’t care!” Kento huffs, “I don’t even know how we got here.”
“You took a joke too personally and made a tasteless remark about wishing that two of your oldest and dearest friends would die of radiation poisoning,” Satoru says, “so nasty and rude.”
“You said I like women who don’t have the face they were born with!”
“I’d actually take it a step further and say that you’d marry an Instagram filter.”
“That’s it!” Kento says, throwing his newspaper down. “You can keep yourself company.” Satoru pouts, which just makes Kento understand why Utahime has said that she wants to strangle Satoru so hard that his face turns purple, and his stupid eyes pop out of their sockets. Kento likes Utahime the best, but he has never empathized with her so much before.
“It’s just a joke.” Satoru closes the magazine and sets it on his lap. “You don’t have to take it so personally.”
“Not all of us are Kiyotaka, I’m not paid to spend time with you,” Kento crosses the room, heading for the door.
He puts his hands over his ears, blocking out Satoru, scowling to himself. Just outside the door is Kiyotaka, clutching a file, who clearly can’t make sense of what he’s seeing.
“Don’t ask me about it,” Kento huffs, walking right by him, having absolutely no interest in sticking around.
**
“He really said that?” Mei Mei asks, wheezing a little, picking up a fry from Kento’s plate, while he scowls at her. She smiles as she sticks the fry into her mouth, which doesn’t make him feel any better.
They’re sitting at the table between his kitchen and living room. The television is on in the background. He had been watching a documentary about a plane crash, that he has already watched ten times, it appalled him so much (the decisions leading up to the crash, not the documentary—it’s tasteful and is quite informative). Mei Mei just showed up with burgers and fries, and a two-liter bottle of cola, telling him that she’s too pretty to be alone on a Tuesday night. Kento told her that she could’ve just asked to spend time with him, but she ignored him, walking into his apartment, handing him the food, and taking off her boots, then walking to his kitchen.
“Do you think it’s funny?” Kento asks, tearing a piece off his burger, instead of taking a bite like a normal person would.
“Yes,” Mei Mei says, “it’s clever.”
“Are you calling me shallow?”
“Treating you mean to keep you keen,” she simpers, and Kento just frowns deeper. “Would you have sex with me if I were ugly?” She rolls her eyes when Kento’s face puffs up, and he thinks about being offended, before his inner Mei Mei (who he resents and despises) whispers that not everybody is born equal and that he should be honest with himself. “Fine, have you ever dated someone who is unconventionally attractive?”
“What does that mean?” he asks, playing dumb while he mentally goes through the women he has slept with. They don’t all look alike, but they are definitely conventionally good looking. Mei Mei smiles, stealing another one of his fries.
“That you’re not as enlightened as you think you are,” she says, “even I have fucked someone ugly, but I guess I’m not as image conscious as you.” She smirks at that last comment, as Kento drops the burger back onto his plate. “You know, I have a theory,” she continues, “I think when someone is confident about something they excel in, it doesn’t matter to them so much if their partner lacks it.”
“So, you’re saying I’m insecure about my looks?” he deadpans, reaching for his glass of cola, which has red wine mixed in it, cos he had nothing else. It’s kind of disgusting, but it’s a thing in Spain, so whatever.
Mei Mei sits back in her chair, resting her chin on her fist, looking at him with this amused expression. Kento takes a sip of his drink and feels self-conscious when he realizes that she’s watching his throat move as he swallows. “My ugliest boyfriend had the best sense of humor. I was always laughing with him, even when he pissed me off.”
“Oh?” Kento says, not really interested in hearing anymore but not knowing how else to respond.
“Yeah, his personality made up for everything,” she says, “he was totally compensating.”
“Compensating?”
“Yeah,” she says, “even cheated on me with a model.” She gets this sad expression on her face, for only a second, but it’s enough to reveal that her insides are just as soft as everybody else’s.
“That’s awful. I’m sorry that he did that to you,” he says, “that’s real asshole behavior.” Mei Mei shrugs, sticking out her lower lip. She hates being pitied—only losers deserve it.
“Whatever,” she says, picking up her own drink, “it is what it is.” Kento hates that phrase, because it means nothing but the obvious, however, it feels fitting for this moment.
He loosens his tie, and Mei Mei sips her drink. It’s quiet between them. As she closes her eyes, he watches her tip the glass up. The television buzzes in the background, a calm voice listing off statistics about plane crashes, which Kento finds very fitting for this moment, and honestly, associating the odds of a plane crashing with Mei Mei better than thinking of her when he hears a song. It’s not as corny and it won’t give him whiplash the way a song would, after their little thing dies.