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“Almost sounds like you’re in love with her. No, definitely sounds like you’re in love with her.” Nanami scowls at the jovial tone carried in Satoru’s voice. “You aren’t in love with her, are you?”
Satoru peers over the rim of his rectangular shades, blue eyes sparkling with mischief as they catch the golden light of the lounge. Satoru may act like an idiot, was an idiot most times in fact, but even he could pick up on the social cues of others.
The stiff shoulders certainly aren’t doing Nanami any favors, neither is the tightening hand around his drink – a Cinderella, not by choice – which also does little to help his mood. Almost rubbing his amusement in Nanami’s face, Satoru swivels in the bar chair and leans in close while a smile reminiscent of a Cheshire cat grows on his face.
“We could always crash it,” he nearly purrs. “Whattaya say?”
Nanami takes a long drink, pausing before continuing, “It’s my sister’s wedding.”
“Oh!” Gojo reels back, immediately dropping whatever fantasy he was concocting. There’s a long stretch of silence, which Nanami would have been thankful for outside of this situation. “And here I thought you were just jealous. So, why the constipated look? I mean more than normal.”
Nanami exhales slowly in the hopes of calming his temper. He regrets the incidental slip of the tongue that clued Satoru in on his frustration in the first place; him saying that he was frustrated by the marriage of a close person, and now he isn’t quite sure how to escape this line of questioning.
If he waits long enough, he wonders if Satoru will get bored, or if he should excuse himself somehow. Choosing the latter, Nanami let the fog that had settled on the edge of his glass dissipate before sitting it down and reaching into his pocket for his wallet.
Still curious, Satoru tilts his head and hums before interrupting. “Don’t like the guy?” he concludes, and Nanami freezes. “He a jerk or something?”
Hesitantly slipping his hand out of his pocket, Nanami crosses his legs at the knee and folds his arms at his chest. As much as he knows about your lover, which is a normal amount he guesses, he can’t say he dislikes the man. He gets along with him more than most, never knew him as one to be late or improper, and whatever you knew under that obviously made you happy enough to accept his proposal.
“That’s not the case at all.”
“Hah, like hell, it’s written all over your face. So tight,” he coos like one to a lover. “You can tell me.”
“There isn’t a reason,” Nanami argues, yet he can definitely feel what Gojo pointed out. His face does feel tight and irritated; and surprisingly, he feels that it isn’t because of the sorcerer next to him.
Nanami is certain that anyone you choose would be a fine partner. You were an intelligent woman, practically raised him yourself between working to help the family and going to school, taught him everything he knows about interacting with the world and the proper way to treat a woman. So, why was he irritated at your choice, and why was Gojo able to pick it up so easily that it was bothering him.
Satoru leans back, stretching one arm behind his head as he grips his elbow with the other. “Fine, fine, but one last thing before we talk about why I called you.” He grins. “Am I invited?”
Foolish Gojo. Ridiculous Gojo. Annoying Gojo.
That’s the only thing that repeats in Nanami’s mind on the way back to his apartment, albeit in different iterations each time. He blames the special grade for putting this ridiculous wheel of spiraling thoughts into his head with his ceaseless questioning.
He wasn’t in love with you in any way that wasn’t to be expected for a brother and sister.
Nanami still holds onto this denial even when the sight of you sitting in his living room greets him – your current visit due to your fiancée finishing up some work and house closing in your old city. When he crashes next to you and throws an arm over his eyes it’s with relief and a lightening heart especially when the soft chub of your thigh, spread in your seated position, pillows against the side of his leg and your comforting hand faithfully finds the nape of his neck.
“Long day?”
“That doesn’t begin to describe the half of it.”
With a soft chuckle, you brush your hand through his hair, and Kento shudders lightly at the touch but doesn’t move away as it draws out memories of over a decade ago when the only time he was able to relax was against your plush chest and his muscular body hugged against a comfortable, full frame.
After all these years apart, he thinks maybe back then the warmth of having him was your comfort at the end of tiring days as well.
“What about you?” he asks.
“Everything’s coming along, slowly but surely,” you explain, and he misses some of the finer details when your fingers find the perfect spot on his scalp and your heel gently bumps his ankle. You lean in tighter, and he ignores the voice in his head, wishing there were fewer clothes between you so he could fully enjoy the warmth emanating from you. Yet, your meek calling, almost a plea, tingles down his spine and boils his blood under his collar.
“Hey, I need a favor—”
“What is it?” he asks.
But it’s not like he’d tell you no. No matter what the request.
Outside the dressing room, Nanami squints in the blaring bright lights of the wedding boutique’s sitting area. When you asked for a favor, he didn’t think it would be for dress shopping. Yet here he is, on his morning off, doing a dress tour with you.
As you change, he busies himself with the many shelves and mannequin heads sporting accessories until you come out back. You squeeze the skirt of your gown lightly and pull the fabric, decorated in sparkling mesh, to show off.
“What do you think?”
Nanami remains stone-faced at the question, a single finger pushing his goggles further up his nose bridge. The dress you picked out is beautiful, the same as the others, framing you nicely. Honestly, there wasn’t much he could think of that wouldn’t suit you, but he’s positive you wouldn’t be satisfied with that answer.
“Surely, you would prefer someone else’s opinion on these sorts of things,” he explains but you shake your head.
“You have the better eye for this sort of thing,” you answer, a leisurely grin forming. “Besides, I think an opinion from a man is more valuable in this sort of situation. If you approve, he will most likely approve.”
Nanami isn’t sure why that reasoning leaves a sickening taste in his mouth, like a putrid must. Even if he knows you’re right. “In that case, it looks fine.”
“Fine isn’t going to cut it,” you say seriously. “…This is my first wedding, and I’m hoping it’ll be the last.”
Nanami doesn’t respond, remembering well how difficult dating has been for you and how your independent and serious disposition, similar to his own, makes finding someone hard. As he watches your return behind the curtain, his mind wanders to the many wedding dresses and bridesmaid’s gowns, the garish sight of bright colors pushing against his increasingly sinking mood.
“Oh no…” he hears you groan from behind the curtain. It’s soft and airy, inviting a familiar sensation in his lower body that he curses to go away. It does go away but is replaced by a racing heart when you whimper.
“Kento, I need you.”
Why, in here of all places, does his heart start going into overdrive. His body feels too hot.
“I need your help.”
Nanami ignores the feelings, carting them away, hopefully, to be forgotten.
“Are you decent?”
“Enough,” you answer, and he quickly slips behind the curtain.
“I think the zipper is stuck,” you explain but he stopped listening three seconds ago. Your upper back is shown to him, curved in your desperate struggle to reach your hand behind you, your chest pushed up and heaving in the dressing room mirror.
Nanami shifts his gaze down, too annoyed to see his guilty expression reflecting back at him. “I’ll get the assistant.”
“It’ll take two seconds,” you say but to him those two seconds seem to drag on forever as he pushes the flat of his palm to your back, holding it down above the zipper, right against the clasp of your bra. His knuckles drag against the metal as he folds his hand, tugging on the annoying silver zipper. Your skin teases his fingers as he pulls it down, yielding to his touch that he could have slipped his finger into the crook of your bra strap.
The curve of your back greets him, and he bites the inside of his cheek to distract from the closeness of the situation. Your skin feels so smooth, and you smell good, like lilac. And the accidental sensuality of his hand drawing to your lower back, stopping where the zipper ends right above your ass, and the fact that you’re only inches away from pushing up against his chest, leaves him embarrassingly aroused, like a child struggling through puberty while you hold your loosening dress tighter to your chest to prevent it from slipping and exposing too much.
“Thank you,” you say.
He isn’t one to blush.
Except when it’s you, it seems.
Nanami has never been so happy to leave the dressing room, and he also hasn’t moved so fast to get out of a situation, one that leaves his brain fuzzy and his brow slightly sheened. He’s sure if he looked in one of the many mirrors in this place and pushed aside his eyewear, his pupils would be dilated.
He finds a quiet corner to take a breath and recollect himself from the irritation and the shame of arousal nicking at him. The idea he could be attracted to you, let alone in love with you, was going to drive him insane.
Annoying Gojo mantras in his head again. Directing his frustration at the white-haired man is enough to clear his head of his previous distracting thoughts.
When he returns to the changing area, he’s positive that he can keep his pattering heart and the muddled feelings coming with it from the forefront of his mind. When you reveal yourself again with a hopeful glow on your face, he decides the universe is working against him.
If he was any less in control, his jaw might have slacked. The dress is so tight, expertly woven to flutter at the bottom, and so, so beautiful as it shapes your curves. It pushes up your chest, accentuates your better assets, and he thinks it might have to be peeled off of you, slowly and delicately, or ripped off with a burning passion. Both situations are undeserved for your fiancée. No matter how good he is.
“All the silence is starting to make me nervous…” you comment with a dying confidence. “It isn’t too tight, is it? Maybe I should go with something else.”
Nanami shakes his head. It’s a perfect size, and with a purposeful eye, he could barely make out the soft lines of your stomach, and somehow it makes him ache even more to see, and if you spin, would he be able to make out the lining of your lush ass. Probably.
“No. It suits you,” he answers bitterly. You smile, watching the way his fingers glide across the many wedding veils on display, stopping at the one best suited for this outfit. He carefully places it on your head. “Perfect.”
You almost giggle. “I knew I was right to ask you to come.”
You decide to purchase the dress. You’re practically floating in your steps back to the car. He’s not sure he’s ever seen you so outwardly happy. The two of you are very much the same in regard to outward emotions. You always seemed so tired, working so endlessly to help the family since your teenage years before he could do anything. The lines on your face were too hard for your age, like his own.
He thought maybe if he managed to save enough money, take care of the family, and also retire somewhere nice, then he could make you that happy. Instead, the softness of your expression is caused by someone else.
As if begging for his attention, the blissful and content sigh you make as you lean against his car window conjures deeper thoughts. The ones that conjure images of you, in too tight a dress, chest heaved in the gripping fabric. His lips brushed against your skin as you moaned that same sound.
The very idea is making him hot and bothered. It shocked him how quickly these images kept playing on. It was disgusting and barbaric. As he grips tighter on the steering wheel, he tries to think of anything else to get it to go away. The traffic, his hectic line of work, stupid, annoying Gojo for putting these thoughts in his head in the first place. He refused to acknowledge that these could have always been there.
Nanami brings you back to his place. After helping with your bags, the many of them joining the clutter you made of his apartment, Nanami quickly excuses himself to shower. The coldest one the pipes allow.
He rips off his clothes and steps in, allowing the beads of water to drain over his face. Dampen blond hair waves against his forehead, still warm from the thoughts of you, and the beads slowly trail down the angles of rippling muscles lined on his body.
His flesh is all too sensitive to the stroking of soap along his skin. His scars tickle when the rag crosses over it. When the scent of his bathing reaches his nose, his throat clenches, the thick muscles stretching as he chokes down his saliva. He grabbed your soap by mistake, yet he couldn’t stop taking it in.
As he inhales the scent of lilac, his mind draws back to you, how his hands caressed against your back with the dragging of your zipper.
The groan that comes from him is deep and carnal. It’s no use to deny the throbbing between his legs as his cock stands forward, growing hard and long from the bristles of blond body hair surrounding the bass. Was this what he was reduced to so easily, from scent alone?
“Shit,” he growls out. One hand was already at his stomach, glossing past his strained lower abdominals while he held the washcloth at his nose.
He questions himself. “Is this really…how I break?”
It’s pathetic and weak but the soapy hand gripping around his cock feels all too good. Surprising to even himself, he manages to push back the guilt and the fact that this is his sister he’s thinking about as he begins to work his hand up his twitching shaft.
At first, he tries to keep his thrust smooth and slow, as if he’s trying to resist, but it becomes clearer that he’s savoring this moment. It’s a shaky feeling, falling into temptation, and he isn’t sure he would ever be on this side of sinful impulses.
There’s a desperate gasp followed by a hungry groan as he relentlessly thrusts into his palm, the same one that holds the memory of your flesh in it. He knows he’s lost when the first word that comes to his lips is your name.
He wants to fuck you out of your clothes. He wants to see your body convulsing and shaking as you bounce on his cock. He wants to hear you say, “I do”. As he twists his hand around heated skin and drags his callused thumb along his weeping slit, he isn’t sure if the heat behind his eyes is from pleasure or mortification.
Soon, his breath becomes ragged and shallow huffs. His cock is edging higher and higher until he can almost feel himself there.
Then, he hears a knock at the door.
“Kento.”
“Damn it,” he curses, closing his eyes tight. It’s you. Your voice reaches out to him causing him to groan. “Yes?” And it sounds too husky, too needy, and it’s only by luck that you can’t hear his desperate moaning from the muffling roar of the shower.
“I’m ordering dinner. Is there anything you want?”
His cock throbs with the cool and casual tone of your voice. He can sense it pulsing hard in his grip despite how tightly wound his fingers are. The strength is almost painful, but the throbbing would be even worse not to deal with right now.
Is it because of your voice? It has to be, and how shameless of him to get off to the sound of you calling for him.
“Kento?”
“Anything,” he coughs out, the water draining into his gasping mouth and down his square jaw. “Anything you choose is fine.”
You agree, and he almost wants to call out to you. Tell you to stay right there, make some pretty excuse for you to keep saying anything.
“Hey,” he barely manages.
“What is it?” you call out.
“I love you.”
“Oh…” you say. “I love you too,” you reply back in easy-to-hear confusion, but he doesn’t care. It’s enough to make his heart stutter and have him spilling out to his hand, imagining it was into you.
Nanami stands there, holding onto his quickly softening cock, as his breath slowly begins to even out and the lust begins to leave with the spiraling water around the drain. He closes his eyes, letting the water fall over his face as if it can wash away what he’s just done.
If he wasn’t already the worst, this definitely makes him.
When he finally convinces himself that he’s washed enough of the disgust away, he skips dinner with you – too ashamed to look you in the eye – and retires to his room early. It’s useless to sleep when all he can do is think about you, and he’s sure even if sleep came, he’d still dream about you.
Shamefully, Gojo’s offer to “crash your wedding” plays on his mind, and for a second he almost wants to take him up on it. He could be so much better for you; and if you weren’t related, perhaps you would agree.
Instead, he has to finally face the facts and bitterly admit the most powerful, insufferable, arrogant Satoru Gojo is right: he’s in love with you.
And he hates himself for it.
When finally hunger calls long after midnight, he decides to head to the kitchen, positive that you’d be asleep in the extra room by now. But it’s a cruel joke as he finds you passed out on the couch, your hand thrown over your waist.
Nanami stares, longing to close the gap on instinct and brush your cheek but he resists that much. Carefully, he pushes a hand to your waist, curling it around you to slowly pick up your limp body and move you to your bed.
The shuffling of your body knocks something to the floor – a small notebook he’s seen you writing in a lot lately. It splays open, and he gently lays you back on the couch before picking it up.
He briefly scans over the words. Some were jumbled and crossed out, moved around to different positions.
I promise to be your best friend, your confidant, and your soulmate.
The more he reads, the more he begins to realize that you are struggling with your vows, specifically how to place your thoughts together.
I promise to always be there to hold your hand.
And the more he reads, the more he can feel his heart aching. It’s the first time he’s ever heard your thoughts so earnestly, so nervously, like the young woman you rarely got to be in this world. He hoped that after all you’d done for him, he’d be able to give you that, somehow. Instead, he gives you a brother, who isn’t any good for you.
With a renewed determination trickling through the weariness in his soul and body, he finds a pen and sits on the couch at your feet. He writes down what he can understand, trying to help make sense of the words that you were struggling to bring to life, hoping that can somehow make up for the thoughts that will always continue to plague his heart.