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wibben · 3 months ago

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icymi 🍜🤒 Hiromi Higuruma takes care of you when you're sick (with an appropriate amount of over thinking as god intended).

Rain Check

When the flu forces a rain check on date night, Higuruma brings "date night" to you.

↳ pairing: hiromi higuruma x fem. reader

↳ wc: 7k

↳ notes: wrote this while laid up with the flu. it was meant to be something else, but i felt sniffly and miserable and desperately wanted to be babied (while also rejecting any and all babying offers, as nature intended).

The bedroom smelled like sickness. Not the clinical kind of sharp antiseptic and bitter pharmaceuticals, but damp and fever-thick, cloying with the sour tang of old sweat and the ghost of citrus cough drops sucked down to their waxy centers. The air was heavy with it, humidity clinging to the walls like condensation on a glass, dense enough to smother. It settled in your sheets, in the tangled nest of blankets wrapped around your limbs like a cocoon – Saharan-hot, unpleasant, and inescapable. Your bed was a battlefield, ground zero of your body’s losing battle against the flu.

Tissues, wadded and tragic, lay strewn like the fallen, a half-empty water bottle lolled somewhere out of reach, and an untouched bowl of instant miso soup perched precariously on the nightstand, abandoned after a single, underwhelming sip. Somewhere in the mess, your phone lay buried, intermittently buzzing beneath the detritus of your decline. You felt disgusting. And this did not lend itself well to what was supposed to be date night. You moaned as a sharp spear of pain lanced from temple to temple, skewering your brain. You barely resisted the urge to cry – and only because you were too dehydrated to conjure the necessary tears.

Somehow, that managed to be the worst part. Not the shivering, not the congestion rattling in your lungs, not the way your skin burned one moment and chilled near-hypothermic the next. No, the worst part was that you were missing the one thing you had actually been looking forward to all week. That you had picked out an outfit, planned your hair, agonized over which earrings best captured the effortless I-woke-up-like-this charm you were still desperately trying to convince Hiromi you naturally possessed. Now you were pale and sallow, hair matted with sweat, buried beneath a mountain of blankets and self-pity. You groaned, three-fourths delirious, and fished for your phone, each movement sluggish, leaden, fingers tingling with that strange, disconnected weight of illness. Squinting against the assault of the screen’s brightness which felt more and more like a lobotomy, you fumbled out a text with hands that felt miles away from your body.

‘I’m so sorry. A bit sick and can’t make it tonight. Rain check?’

You pressed send, then immediately regretted it. There was nothing embarrassing about the words, but still, a wave of dread churned in your gut. Maybe because you and Hiromi were still in that early, precarious stage where everything felt light and bright and thrilling. Where dates were a polished, effortful, meticulously curated portrayal of your best self. And now here you were, stripped raw to the ugly, unromantic truth of human frailty. Or maybe it was the feral kernel of deeply ingrained animal instinct that told you to hide your weakness, a wild whim to bury it and yourself deep in your den and lick your wounds until you were well enough to emerge and rejoin the world without risk of being cast out or eaten.

He responded almost instantly.

‘No worries at all! Do you need anything :(?’

You groaned again, this time in frustration. Why did he have to be nice about it? You couldn’t even wallow properly without the sting of guilt, exacerbated by imagining the furrow of concern in his brow, the way his head would tilt just a little when he read your message, the soft exhale through his nose and sympathetic cluck of his tongue before he typed his reply. The only thing worse than being sick was knowing that your sickness was inconvenient, that you’d disappointed the person you’d been pulling out all the stops to impress. You debated how to respond, but exhaustion was already dragging you under, pressing you back into the sheets. You inhaled through your nose – attempted to, anyway. It came out a congested wheeze. The idea of Hiromi seeing you like this was inconceivable. Animal instinct, you figured, better to die alone.

‘Just need some rest!’ you typed back, trying to imbue the words with a breezy, casual tone, as if you weren’t on the precipice of death.

The truth was, you were dying.

Dramatically. Theatrically. This was, undoubtedly, the end. Your body would be discovered days later, shrouded in blankets, an unsent draft of a final will and testament open on your phone, detailing the precise eulogy you deserved.

But Hiromi didn’t need to know that.

Your phone buzzed again.

‘OK. Let me know if you need me.’

You smiled a little, despite yourself, then groaned and rolled back over. The room spun. The fever tugged at you, deep and relentless, and you let it coax you back to merciful unconsciousness.

Hiromi had been looking forward to tonight.

Not in the nice dinner, casual plans sort of way, but in the way a man who has spent too many years thinking of romance as something for other people looks forward to the one thing that has, recently, rewritten his understanding of the concept entirely.

Because your presence in his life was warm. Feather-filled. It had kind eyes and a pretty laugh, hands that had learned him too quickly, adapted to the sharp angles of his face too well – cradling his jaw in playful moments, tapping his chin with an audacity that should have knocked him off balance, but instead left him floating. You had carved out a space for yourself somewhere he never intended to lease out, and it should have been unsettling, it should have made him hesitate, but instead—

Instead, it felt like relief. When was the last time he’d laughed before you? The last time he’d taken a moment to breathe of his own volition and not when his tired lungs screamed at him to do so?

He hadn’t walked into your first date with any expectations. Not because he wasn’t interested – but because he had long since tempered the part of himself that dared to hope for things. He had let himself want before, and he had been let down before. So he told himself he was prepared for a perfectly fine evening. Maybe a few laughs. Maybe a polite conversation. Maybe he’d even go home and think: That was nice. Instead, he left feeling like a man half-starved and only just realizing how long it’d been since he was full.

You were quick-witted, sharp, you built upon his dry humor instead of letting it evaporate in the air between you. He would say something wry and expect the usual polite chuckle, or god forbid that tight-lipped nod of pity he was so accustomed to, but you fired back without hesitation, tossing the joke back into his lap harder, razor-edged, funnier than when he first laid it out. And that was dangerous, because it made him want more. More conversation, more of your thoughts, more of your laughter – not the socially polite and etiquette dictated pressed-lipped one, but the real one, the one that cracked open your ribs and shook your shoulders, the one that made you lean into him like gravity had given up on its usual rules just between the two of you, blessing him with the opportunity to support you until you straightened.

So he asked for a second date. And then a third.

And then he stopped counting, because by then, it was already too late for him. Somewhere between dinner and drinks, between needle-point banter that led to soft, sleepy whispers beneath the cold sheets of his bed, he had started looking forward to you in a way he never meant to. You had become a rhythm in his week, something as natural as breathing, as necessary as sleep, and the part of him that should have been alarmed had long since been sedated by the part of him that just liked you too much to care.

You had him standing in front of his closet for far longer than any reasonable man should, holding up nearly identical dress shirts in varying shades of white – ivory, eggshell, cream – the back and forth had him squinting at the fabric and failing to tell the difference, he started over. Was the left one cream? No, no that was eggshell… only he thought the eggshell shirt was the one in his right hand, not his left— And he never used to check his phone like this. Never used to anticipate – not dread – the buzz in his pocket that heralded social interaction. Never used to hope for one specific name to light up his screen, nor experience the slack-sailed disappointment whenever it was anyone else. But now he did. Now he caught himself thinking about you between consults and arguments, during the brief stretches of quiet in his long, exhausting days.

Because he needed this tonight. It had been a week. Seven days since he’d seen you, which was not many in the grand scheme of the newness of this engagement, but texts and calls and even the occasional facetime could hardly whet the appetite you’d roused in him. Dry exchanges with his colleagues did nothing for him, nor the trace interaction with cashiers or other passersby, because none of them gripped him quite like you.

By midweek, he was exercising every ounce of self-control not to reach for his phone and ask for more – not to betray the fact that one week already felt like five, and he had to physically stop himself from finding excuses to see you sooner. It’s pathetic.

Hiromi thinks he’s a bad boyfriend – is that what he is? He’d never been much good with posture and pretense, he hopes that’s what he is – because he’s pretty sure he’s supposed to be keeping things casual, but he’s also pretty sure he’s in love with you. He doesn’t let himself think about it too long. He won’t dwell on the weight of it in his chest, or how it tastes on his tongue when he rolls it behind his teeth and cracks it under his molars just to keep from spitting it out. He doesn’t know how you’d take it, if you’d pull back the moment you realized he’s already a good few steps ahead of where he probably should be.

Being needy is unattractive. Hounding at your heels for scraps of attention is a turn off, one he wouldn’t fault you for, and so he resists. Even when his work week was awful, the sort of familiar twitching frustration he wore like a second skin that left his shoulders tense and heavy and patience frayed at its translucent edges, he settled for phone calls, even when he’d much rather go home – to a shared home – and collapse into you. Just to hear your voice and tell you about the sheer absurdity of some of the shit that landed on his desk; to let you make him laugh about it, and forget why he was irritated in the first place. Hiromi felt like a boy again.

Except, even as a boy, nobody ever set his heart affluter or made his stomach flip the way you do. The world was evermore tinted the same shade of rose as the tip of his nose whenever your lips brushed his cheek in thanks for things as simple as opening a door, or helping you in and out of a coat. You made him ridiculous. So when your text came through – short, simple and apologetic – he wilted like a sad houseplant. And of course he understood. You weren’t feeling well.

But understanding and acceptance were two different things.

The thought of you sick, curled up somewhere miserable, missing the same night he had been quietly clinging to all week made his stomach twist. You were probably just as disappointed as he was – missing dinner, missing the late-night movie that he would normally never agree to, that you had insisted was better past midnight in a near empty theater. He had even resigned himself to the fact that he would get home at an indecent hour, that he would be wrecked in the morning, and that you were absolutely worth it anyway. So he did the only thing he could do. He stopped at a store. He picked up tea, a box of overpriced honey-lemon lozenges that you’d never buy for yourself because the storebrand was good enough, a pack of chocolate-covered cookies, and a pre-sliced fruit tray because he wasn’t sure what you’d be able to stomach.

And then, for the first time in his entire adult life, Hiromi lingered in the chilly produce aisle. Not out of obligation. Not because of some nagging reminder from his physician that he should really cook something with nutritional value before his dietary habits caught up to him. But because he was irreparably undone by the simple fact that you weren’t feeling well, and he couldn’t stand the thought of you being unhappy and alone.

There was no recovering from this, this terminal affliction of affection. And he didn’t care to fight it, either. He would deny treatment. It might not be the full course experience he hoped to treat you to tonight, but he’d bring a little bit of it home to you.

The evening air spun itself into gold, stretching long and low across the pavement as Hiromi jumped the familiar steps up to your door, a bag slung from one hand, the other tucked into the pocket of his coat to occupy his fidgeting fingers with jingling keys. The sky above was painted in the hazy black bruise that came before twilight, a slow bleed from orange to indigo, the last gasps of sun swallowing the buildings whole and creeping dark from alleyways and side streets. You’d be sitting down for dinner around now, had the evening gone to plan. He’d probably be pulling out your chair at that very moment. It was a far cry from the night he imagined, and yet he still effused a quiet happiness as he approached your door.

Part of him thrilled at the opportunity to see you anyway – to play the part of something good and steady, and bring you warmth wrapped in plastic packaging and a sloping, dimpled smile. There was something deeply satisfying in the thought of you bundled in blankets, just a little worse for wear and flush with a cold, blinking up at him surprised but pleased and letting him fuss over you like a mother hen. He could prove himself as a provider, a caretaker, a man worth keeping around. All things he never cared to be before, but you made him want.

He knocked on your door, and rocked back and forth on his heels, waiting with a smile already twitching at the corners of his lips that he was trying his best to keep a lid on. He could picture your surprise already, maybe you’d be relieved, maybe you’d even be feeling better and well enough to go out after all. No answer.

The smile on his face was stubborn, but the sediment settled into an expression more subdued when he adjusted the bag onto his hip and knocked again. The only response was the wall-muffled barking of a neighboring dog roused by his presence, but neither of which seemed to draw you out. It does occur to him that you may be asleep – taken something that knocked you out good and proper. But in the chance that he might catch you, he persists. His phone was in his palm before he had time to think, thumb tapping out a quick message. ‘I’m outside, don’t mean to bother you. Let me know if you’re awake.’

A minute passed. Then another. Then he noticed a neighbor across the street peek through her blinds, making direct and awkward eye-contact with him. He hesitated a moment before raising his phone in an awkward, stilted wave. Seeming reassured that your caller was not in fact a burglar, the old woman snapped her blinds closed. His breath curled in the cooling air, ribboning up, up, up into the quiet awning of your darkening porch. His eager fidgeting now served the dual purpose of keeping him warm when he tried calling.

He dialed, head cocked and phone pressed tight to his ear like he might hear you through the static and shrill rings, and finally hung up on the final tone before it would click over to voicemail. Hiromi sighed, pocketing his phone and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Did he look crazy? Was this too much? You were just a little sick, you’d said so yourself. He didn’t need to do all of this, and in the face of rejection by silence – however inadvertent – insecurity crept its insidious fingers into his brain. He was absolutely doing too much.

He would just leave the bag at your door and text you that it was there. That would be normal – a simple care package, and probably better received than his unexpected and uninvited visit, now that he finally thought about it a moment longer, many moments too late. With hands a little numb from the cold, and certainly not at all from disappointment, he stepped to wrap the paper handles around your doorknob, affixing it where you wouldn’t even have to stoop over when you finally came to retrieve it—

Only your door knob turned with no resistance, nudged open with the slightest pressure of his palm and the weight of the bag. You were always good about locking your door.

He’d born witness to your many small rituals, always double checking that your stove was off, all unattended candles blown out and snuffed, and he’d watched – more times than he could count – you twisting your door knob once, twice, thrice, testing for any give before stepping away and into him with a pleased smile and chirpy “all set!” A practiced precaution that he always found himself quietly, irrationally proud of. Worry sank razor-sharp claws deep into his marrow, tugging at his bones and drawing him through the doorway.

“Hey—” he called, stepping inside and closing the door softly behind him. The lock slid into place with a dull snick for good measure. “It’s just me! Your door was open!” The apartment was dark with lights untouched. No TV murmuring from the other room, no warmth of any sort of activity. Still, save for the spiraling dust motes that hovered and sunk, floating without purpose with not the slightest ripple of movement to disturb them in the slanting orange beams that sliced through your blinds.

Your shoes were by the door, your coat draped over the back of a chair, a single slipper kicked off in the hallway – its twin wedged haphazardly beneath a bookcase, as if you’d stopped halfway to retrieve it and never did. Little traces of you, proof of your presence, but no you.

Hiromi flicked on the lights, illuminating your kitchen in all of its unoccupied, untouched glory. He set the bag down carefully on the counter, mindful of its contents and the rustling of its paper in the silence, listening, sweeping the space with a wary frown.

His voice was softer when he called your name again, cautious and questioning in the dead, unanswering air.

No answer or movement, no startled shuffle to investigate the unexpected visitor in your home. Just the blanketing stillness of empty space and the staticky ringing of tinnitus in his ears that strained to hear anything at all.

Hiromi checked the bathroom – it was logical. Maybe you’d gotten up for water, or medicine, maybe you’d fallen asleep with your cheek squished against the cold porcelain of the tub the way he sometimes did after a rough night. Empty. The couch – vacant, a blanket slipping off the edge to pool on the floor, a shallow dent in the cushions where a body had been, once. He rubbed at the tension between his brows, willed them to unknit. Your bedroom was next.

The air was thick there, heavy with the sticky scent of sleep and sickness. The curtains were drawn, the room wrapped in a murky personal twilight a few steps ahead of that outside, and for a moment, he almost didn’t see you at all. Then, in the dark, a raspy gurgle of pinched nostrils struggling for breath and the roaring snore of a sore throat forced to breathe from a gaping mouth. Your hair splayed against the pillow, a just barely visible nest over the duvet pulled up high to your ears, as if you sought to sweat the fever from your bones with stubbornness and layers alone.

Relief softened the chokehold on his lungs, and he felt a smidge guilty for how easy it was to breathe when it was so obvious how you struggled. You were here. Safe. His worry had not been unfounded, but at least it had not been warranted. He took one step closer— Even at that distance, he could feel the heat pour from you like an open convection oven.

Hiromi knelt beside the bed, reaching out to graze your forehead with the backs of his fingers. Heat met him like an open palm laid upon an active cooktop. His jaw ticked and his lips pursed to silence the sigh that gathered in his mouth. This was just a little sick to you? This was something to recover from with just a little rest? He could feel the sweat dampening your hairline, curling the strands of fine baby hairs to your temple. He retracted his hand long enough to scrub his palm over his mouth to loosen the tense bunching of his lips and sighed into his palm.

“Ridiculous woman,” he murmured, softer than the press of his palm against your clammy and fever-flushed skin. He’d known you were proud. Stubborn, too. But not like this – not to a fault and to your own detriment. Not when you had people – had him – all too willing to drop everything and care for you. But he didn’t move away. Didn’t stop the slow sweep of his hand as it continued past your cheek and forehead, over your hair to brush it back and away from your face, gently manipulating the sticky flyaways off of your skin. His touch lingered, long enough to settle his own worry as he stood back up to regard you.

You were here, and now he was too. And, he hoped, that was significantly better off than how you started – he could work with that.

The bed swayed beneath you, a slow, nauseating lurch, like a ship lost in stormy seas. The fever had drawn you into its undertow, dragging you down into a strange, liminal space where time stretched and folded then folded again, where reality slipped through your fingers like fine seabed silt. You dreamed in fever heat, in the suffocating weight of tangled blankets, in the ghosts of voices at the vestige of your consciousness. Then – real noise.

A muffled clatter, a distant sound spit with the venom which could only have been a curse. A shifting presence wandered beyond the walls of your delirium. You drifted, mind syrup-thick with cotton and fog, before another sound – the metallic scrape of something, the thump and ceramic click of things lifted and placed on tile. For a long moment you simply lay there, waiting for the dread to settle heavy as stones in your gut, for fear to bloom in your phlegm-y lungs. But all you felt was exhaustion seeping deep into your bones, rooting you to the mattress like creeping ivy curling to a brick wall. You peeled open your eyes. The room was dark, muddled with shapes shifting as your vision adjusted, but nothing seemed amiss.

If someone had broken in, you could only hope they’d be merciful. Perhaps they’d take pity on you, a tragic creature lost to disease, and put you out of your misery before they ransacked the place. It took a few tries to drag yourself up, the room tilting precariously as you swung your legs over the side of the bed, your feet kicking for slippers you couldn’t find. Your limbs felt detached, boneless, your joints grinding and stuck like rusted machinery as you shuffled forward, blanket still clutched around your shoulders like a burial shroud.

A scent reached you – warm and vaguely edible, tasted more on your exposed mouth-breathing tongue than in your clogged nose. You didn’t remember ordering food. You didn’t remember much at all. A burglar, then. A very considerate burglar, stopping to make you a meal before robbing you blind. You hoped, at the very least, they’d be efficient about it. Leave you to your final meal before taking you out. End your suffering.

The hallway swam in and out of focus as you shuffled down it, one hand bracing the wall as the other clutched at your blanket, pulling it tight around your shoulders like armor, your vision haloed with the sickly glow of streetlights cutting through the blinds. And when you turned the corner, there he was.

Hiromi stood in your kitchen, sleeves pushed up, an old shirt loose on his frame, stirring something over the stove like this was the most natural thing in the world. Like he belonged there. Like he’d always been there. Your breath hitched, horror settling in sluggish as you took him in – the softness of his posture, hip cocked against the counter, the domestic ease with which he handled the wooden spoon, the way the light from the range hood cast a warm yellow glow over his face.

And then you remembered yourself. The sweat-damp face, your nest of unruly hair plastered and flattened every which way, and – your fingers trembled and shook as you swatted at your face – a tissue fluttered down to your bare feet from where it was glued with drool. You wrapped your blanket tighter in a tragic facsimile of dignity. You were a creature dredged up from the depths, a relic of sickness and suffering, a ghoul appeared to haunt the man who’d only ever seen you at your best.

You swayed, your hand slapping for the doorway to hold yourself upright for support, your fever-pickled brain conjuring a single, resounding thought: You were going to have to kill him. Or yourself. Probably both. Hiromi turned at the sound of your clammy fingers against the lacquered wood, bright-eyed and easy-smiled, as if he weren’t standing in the absolute wreckage of you.

“There you are,” he said, as if you had simply been misplaced, like he hadn’t already found you burrowed in your bed hours ago, burning up and tangled in your own sheets and misery. He held up a bowl, cradled carefully in both hands, as though presenting you with something delicate and precious. “I made soup,” he announced proudly. And then, as though remembering the reality of what he’d actually made, he sighed, tilting the bowl to inspect its own dubious contents. “Well, I attempted soup. Chicken, allegedly.” You blinked, slow, molasses-brained.

Hiromi, in your kitchen. Hiromi, in his sweatpants and rolled up sleeves, barefoot in the soft glow of the stove light, holding a bowl of— You squinted.

The soup was a color that nature never intended. A concerning beige-grey hue that no poultry-based dish had any right to be. If there were vegetables in there, they had long since disintegrated into anonymity.

He must've seen the suspicion on your face because his smile turned apologetically lopsided, crooked as the shredded piece of what could’ve been chicken floating near the spoon. “I’m banking on your taste buds being so dead you won’t even notice if it’s awful, to be frank with you,” he admitted, wry but earnest, shifting his grip on the bowl to offer it out to you. It might have been funny if you had the capacity for humor. If your mind wasn’t still trying to claw its way through the mud of mortification and illness, if the sight of him standing there so casually, so unbothered by the absolute state of you, wasn’t making your chest feel unbearably tight.

He took a step closer, and instinctively you shrank back. “How are you here?” you rasped, raw and nasal. Hiromi had the sense to pause in his approach, looking for all the world guilty and contrite. “I wanted to bring you a few things and check in. Your door was unlocked, so I was worried.”

Processing was a monumental effort, slow-moving glaciers melted in the cauldron of your skull. You frowned. “Oh…” you mumbled. “I didn’t realize…” That you’d left the door open. That you had been so out of it, so careless, that he had been able to walk right in without resistance. That you had been vulnerable enough for it. That you were lucky it was just Hiromi. And worse – that he had seen you like this.

You weren’t supposed to let anyone see you like this. Not ever. Not before month six at the very least. Not before you could safely unveil the inevitable truth that you were not always put together, not always effortless, not always charming and composed. That sometimes you were pitiful and weak and driven to your knees with sickness. But here Hiromi was, watching you watch him like a wary animal, looking at you like— Like nothing. Like he hadn’t even noticed. Like you weren’t standing there with your hair a ratty mess, your skin damp and wan, your nose and cheeks red and drippy. Like you were just you, still you, always you.

Something thick lodged itself in your throat. Because this was uncharted. Unfamiliar. You didn’t let people take care of you. You had spent years, an entire lifetime, making sure of it. You prided yourself on it, in fact. You could be independent, self-sufficient, sturdy on your own two feet. You didn’t need this. You had half a mind to bristle, every remaining instinct that hadn’t been boiled to a crisp whined for you to do so. To snap and snarl, to tell him to get the hell out of your house, because you hadn’t invited him.

Except.

Here was a man who had let himself into your home – because your door was unlocked, because he was worried, because he cared – and he had made you soup. Bad soup, terrible soup, soup that might send you to a hospital even if your illness doesn’t, but he had made it for you. That first, awful tug of emotion clawed its way up your throat like a hell beast, thick and swollen, a molten and uncontainable chrysalis spawning inside your ribcage. You swallowed it down, stubborn – but it surged again, hotter and heavier until it filled the hollow of your chest cavity with pressure unbearable, pressing against your lungs, curling around your heart like a fist.

You weren’t someone who cried easily. Not in front of people where it could be seen and turned over in someone else’s hands and inspected like a foreign object. Your face crumpled. “Oh, shit,” Hiromi blurted, panicked.

Your breath hitched, a fractured, watery sound, and before you could steel yourself, the dam cracked. The first sob broke loose in a shuddering quake, splintering through your fragile frame like a fault line giving way, the house of cards of your body collapsing inward.

Hiromi fumbled for somewhere to set the soup down, his head jerking side to side, searching, his movements sharp and uncoordinated in his frantic attempt to find a flat surface. He spun in place before practically hurling the bowl onto your now cluttered countertop.

The moment his hands were free, they were on you. He pulled you in without hesitation, firm but careful, gathering you against him like something breakable. One hand smoothed over the trembling line of your spine, the other curled over the back of your head, tucking you into the dark warmth of his neck.

You tried to hold yourself together. To choke it back and swallow it down, to wriggle out of the arms that were stronger than you even on your best day. But he was warm, and quiet, and steady, the steadfast certainty of his presence— The weight of it all dragged you down, your fingers fisting weakly into the dampening fabric of his collar, your body wracked with those awful, stuttering sniffles that made your breath catch, and your chest feel like it was caving in under something heavier than nausea. It wasn’t dignified, it wasn’t graceful, but he stayed, held you tighter, wrapped himself around you like it didn’t matter.

It wasn’t just the sickness. Not just the fever or exhaustion or embarrassment. It was him. The patient care. The fact that he was here, unasked, unprompted, cradling you in the warm wreath of his arms in the middle of your kitchen like it was the most natural thing in the world. The fact that for once – for the first time – you hadn’t had to ask for help. You hadn’t had to prove that you needed it. And you didn’t know what to do with that.

His chin dipped, the slope of his nose brushing through your hair, like the mess of you didn’t faze him at all – he welcomed it, in fact. His breath was warm against your ear as he murmured something soft and low, something you couldn’t quite catch over the humiliating crack of your own nasally weeping. “Brutal review,” he sighed. “Tears before you’ve even tried it, sweetheart?”

You sniffled, hiccuped, curled further into his chest. Your voice was watery but you managed to choke: “You weren’t supposed to see me like this.” Hiromi scoffed, the sound warm with exasperation, like what you’d said was patently absurd.

“Like what?” His palm smoothed over the tangled wreckage of your hair, fingers threading through the knots, careful in their slow combing – not because it bothered him, but because it clearly bothered you. “Sick? Human?” He was deliberate in the way he nuzzled into your ear and skated his nose over your temple, like he had every intention of reassuring you through sheer stubborn affection alone.

“You’re beautiful, even now,” he said simply. “Actually—” a hum, low and thoughtful, but still coy “—maybe even more now. You might be a little less intimidating like this.” You let out an affronted, congested scoff. “Intimidating?” “Mmh,” he confirmed. He tipped his head back as if in contemplation. “A little.”

“How?” You pulled back just enough to peer up at him, bleary-eyed, tear-streaked, your lips trembling around the words. Hiromi really doesn’t think he’d ever seen anything more beautiful than you, with your lashes weighed down with crystals and your face splotchy and wet. Hiromi smiled. That slow, lazy curve of his mouth, dark eyes crinkling at the corners as if to say, once again: There you are. And then – without ceremony or hesitation – bluntly he said, “You’re obviously out of my league.”

A laugh punched out of you, wet and miserable, but startled into sincerity. “Nuh uh,” you objected. “Am I?” He nodded solemnly, unshaken. “Devastatingly so.” It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. And yet, somehow, impossibly, you could feel the tight ache in your chest start to ease. You swiped at your face with the wet sleeve of your sweater, groggy and sniffling, weakly you pawed at Hiromi trying to push him back toward the door. “You should go. I don’t want you to catch this.”

Hiromi clicked his tongue, unimpressed.

Before you could blink or protest, his hands framed your face, long enough to cradle you in your entirety. His thumbs smoothed over the heat of your fever-warmed cheeks, swiping away the tear tracks there, and leaned in to press a kiss to your forehead – warm, solid, and deliberately sloppy, he was making a point. “You see,” he whispered gravely, lips still resting against your skin to where you could feel his smile rather than see it, “I’m afraid I’ve already been exposed.” He drew back just enough to look at you, still cupping your face like you might bolt – or shamble – off if he let go. He was smiling that easy, lopsided smile that made your stomach flip, even now and even like this.

“If I catch it, I catch it,” he said it like it was nothing. His thumbs traced one last, final arc beneath your eyes. “Worth it. I can think of worse things than being stuck in bed with you.” And really, what was there left to say to that

You exhaled, unsteady, too exhausted to argue, too wrung out to push him away. Your body had given up fighting long ago, and now, so had you. You let your forehead tip forward until it rested against his collarbone, the steady rise and fall of his breathing a quiet reassurance, the warmth of his hands still cupping your jaw an anchor against the dizzying swirl of sickness and sentiment lodged deep in your chest.

Time unraveled after that, stretching and looping in lazy, meandering circles, dissolving at the edges. Minutes, hours, yesterday, tomorrow – you weren’t sure where one ended and the next began or that it mattered, only that Hiromi was there through all of it. He insisted you try the soup. You did. It was terrible. You grimaced, he laughed – head tipping back, eyes crinkling at the corners, full-bodied delight at his own failure – and still he looked unreasonably pleased with himself for having tried.

Later, when your stomach rebelled, he was there, crouched behind you on the hard bathroom tile, one hand firm between your shoulder blades, the other gathering your hand in gentle sweeps away from your pallid face. He murmured comfortingly into the back of your neck, and pressed a kiss to your temple once the worst had passed.

You barely remembered being guided to the sink, or the cool drag of a washcloth over your face, or the sting of mint in your mouth as he coaxed you through brushing your teeth – only that, by the end of it all, you felt cleaner. And then – finally – you were cleared for couch recovery. You melted against Hiromi, bundled in a nest of blankets, your cheek pressed to the warmth of his chest, slack-jawed and droopy-eyed. And oddly enough, you no longer cared. At this point, he’d seen much worse.

The movie on the screen flickered dimly, sound low, more backdrop than entertainment. Hiromi hadn’t moved except to shift you against him, tucking you tighter into his side. His arm was a steady weight along your shoulders, his fingers tracing absent-minded patterns where they rested against your upper arm. Your head lolled slightly as you peered up at him, bleary-eyed and sluggish, still tucked into the warmth of his chest. “You should go,” you croaked. “I’m wretched.”

Hiromi exhaled through his nose and gave your shoulder a firm, pointed squeeze. “Nope. We’ll be doing none of that.”

His palm skimmed up, tucking a stray curl behind your ear with the same ease he did everything – with the same quiet, unwavering patience he’d shown all night… and well before tonight when you truly thought about it. That empathy had always been there. “I like you. Messy hair, soup critic, flu monster—you.”

A sound bubbled up from your chest, too weak to be called a proper laugh but a close approximation of one. “Flu monster?”

“You should hear yourself,” he teased, gaze soft but amused. “It’s like a death rattle.”

You groaned, burying yourself deeper into the folds of the blanket. But it was hard to stay embarrassed when his arm curled around you again, when he squeezed the heat of you into his side like he would simply graft your hip to his if afforded the choice.

His voice rumbled somewhere above your head. “I’m staying, by the way.”

You slumped, your body had long since given up on full coordination and was far too weak to wage the war you wanted. “Hiromi—”

“Not up for debate,” he said simply, adjusting the blankets around you both to stake his claim – wordlessly declaring: deal with it. “I’ll take the couch. Or the floor. Or the kitchen, if you really want me to suffer. But I’m not leaving.”

You stared at him, groggy, and rheumy-eyed. “Why?”

He huffed, tilting his head back against the couch, eyes slipping shut as though already digging in for the night. “In case you need something, obviously.

Your heart stumbled in your chest, stuttering somewhere between protest and a much softer place. You hadn’t asked him to stay. You hadn’t even thought to. But there was no hesitation in his voice, no question of whether he should – only that he would

Hiromi was a steady presence in your life, in ways you hadn’t noticed until now. His name lit up your phone screen with casual check-ins even when you knew he was too busy for such frivolousness, he lingered at your door a minute extra after dropping you off, making sure to see you inside, and now – now he was here, willing to trade his bed for your couch just because he thought you might need him.

You thought about telling him no. You thought about insisting.

You didn’t… and why would you, when you wanted him to stay, too?

You made a soft sound of agreement, already half-asleep and slipping into the quiet pull of exhaustion – but it was much brighter than before. You thought, dizzily, that you might love him. It was too soon to say it, of course… if seeing you like this hadn’t scared him off, then surely a premature confession would. Maybe one day you’d tell him. Month six, maybe, you quietly plotted.

For now you let that warm bloom soothe you, green roots chasing away the sickly dark planted in your body. Your eyes slipped shut, and your fingers curled into the fabric of his sleeve enough to hold on. Hiromi hummed, wordlessly pleased with your agreement, before his hand fished for yours beneath the blanket. He laced his fingers through yours and gave them a firm squeeze. “Next time,” he murmured, “we’ll do it the regular way. Perfect date and all.” You grunted in response, the last dredges of consciousness slipping from you to the soft orchestral repetition of the movies credits. “But for now,” he continued, dropping his cheek to the crown of your head, “this isn’t so bad, hm?” Your fingers twitched in his hand, barely an acknowledgment. No, you thought. Not bad at all.

#icymi <3 #jjk #higuruma hiromi #jjk higuruma #hiromi x reader #hiromi higuruma x reader #higuruma x reader #jjk comfort #higuruma fluff

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wibben · 3 months ago

Text

icymi 🖇️🖥️ office sex with your boss Hiromi Higuruma

404

It's supposed to be Higuruma's day off, but he just couldn't help himself.

↳ pairing: hiromi higuruma x fem. reader

↳ warnings: 18+, nsfw, smut, sexual tension, exhibitionism, semi-public sex, oral sex (f. receiving), hr violations, improper use of a desk, boss-employee power imbalance if that bothers you, grey sweatpants should be their own warning

↳ wc: 9.2k

↳ notes: wouldn't catch me letting him leave the house looking like that, that's for sure. higuruma you get back inside right now.

The office felt quieter without him in it.

Not just quieter – wrong.

The kind of wrong that wasn’t loud or obvious, but insidious, creeping in through the cracks of routine and settling heavy in your chest. The walls hummed faintly under the fluorescents, the air stagnant and too still, like a room that hadn’t been lived in for a long time. Nothing had changed – your desk was still tucked into the corner of his office, the blinds still tilted to let in those pale, anemic slants of morning light, the coffee machine still wheezing dutifully in its nook. But the balance was off, something fundamental had been knocked out of place.

All because Higuruma had taken the day off.

You should have been glad. You had been glad when you first suggested it – flippant and teasing, after catching him pinching the bridge of his nose for the third time in an hour.

"Take a day, Higuruma. The firm won’t fall apart without you. I’ve got it!"

You hadn’t expected him to actually listen. He never did before. But now, knee-deep in briefs that refused to organize themselves, picking at the plastic lip of your highlighter just to have something else to do, you found yourself regretting it. The absence of him pressed against your ribs like an itch you couldn’t scratch, and you couldn't quite eschew ‘I'm glad he's resting’ from ‘how dare he leave me here alone’. It wasn’t that you couldn’t work without him. You were perfectly capable – good at your job, in fact. You’d fought tooth and nail to carve out your place here, earned every ounce of the trust and respect Higuruma placed in you. The firm didn’t need him today. You didn’t need him today.

But the office felt empty without him anyway. And maybe that was the problem – because Higuruma wasn’t loud, or particularly overbearing, but he had a way of filling up a space without you noticing. Not in big, sweeping ways, but in the quiet, unassuming things you hadn’t realized you’d come to expect. The soft clatter of his pen against his desk as he mulled over a case. The steady tick of his keyboard, the shff of paper sliding against paper. The occasional, absent-minded hum as he read through a deposition, too lost in thought to realize he was doing it. Or the cup of coffee he’d nudge across your desk with his knuckles, sweetened with sugar and a subtle wink conveying: I see you’re about to lose it, so here. Or one of his deadpan jokes that landed so poorly it looped back around to being funny and – against your better judgement and exacting standards for comedy – always managed to make you snicker. And even the way he’d check in – “How are you holding up? Fine? Good!” – just before a fresh avalanche of paperwork from his own arms threatened to swallow you whole.

It was ridiculous, really – how easily you’d come to calibrate yourself around his presence, the rhythm of his movements, the weight of his sighs, the rare, reluctant chuckle when something you said actually managed to slip past his exhaustion.

Without him here, the space felt unmoored, and you a slack-sailed ship set adrift in uncannily still waters.

You leaned back in your chair, twirling your pen between your fingers, glaring at the door as if sheer force of will might conjure him into existence, a punching bag for you to gripe at.

It didn’t. Of course it didn’t. You huffed, tilting your head back to stare at the ceiling, restless energy thrumming under your skin. It was ridiculous. He’d taken one measly day off – his first in who-knows-how-long – and you were falling apart like he’d abandoned you in the wilderness with nothing but a stapler and your wits.

The coffee wasn’t helping. You’d long since crossed the threshold into over-caffeinated jitters, and restless energy crawled up your spine like ants.

And for the first time, work wasn’t enough to occupy you. The murmur of voices in the hallway barely registered – just another piece of the building's white noise, slipping between the rhythmic tap of your keyboard and the distant shrieking tantrum of the printer. You paid no mind to the shuffle of footsteps or the scrape of a chair. Until they stopped right outside your door. You snapped upright, spine un-shrimped and pencil straight, fingers hovering over your keys, suddenly alert in a way that felt completely ridiculous. It wasn’t like you’d actually been waiting for something to happen. It wasn’t like you’d been hoping—

A knock. Sharp, perfunctory. And then, before you could do so much as blink, the door creaked open, like permission was an afterthought. Higuruma’s head poked around the frame. “Excuse me, I have an appointment…”

All dry humor and faux seriousness, low and familiar as the tone but underscored with a lopsided smile meant just for you, and whatever tension had been sitting squarely between your shoulders unraveled like an unfurled lily returned to water.

Relief washed through you, unreasonable in its enormity, such a thin and frayed lifeline tossed down into the well of your boredom. You tsked, air sucking between your teeth as your incisors caught and imprisoned your bottom lip, barely biting back a grin.

“Schedule’s packed, I’m afraid,” you said, leaning back in your chair. “Get out of my office.” Higuruma scoffed, stepping inside fully and letting the door swing shut behind him. “Your office?” “You’re not here, are you?” You gestured vaguely to the empty space he usually occupied, tilting your head. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

His lips twitched like he wanted to smirk, but instead, he just exhaled a quiet chuckle, shaking his head.

“Relax,” he said, waving a lazy hand. “Just forgot something.” And as he did so, you found yourself stuck there, pinned by a gravity far different than the tedious duty that bound you before. Maybe you were truly driven to madness through sheer boredom, because what you saw could not possibly be your Higuruma. Gone was the usual sharp, severe silhouette of a three-piece suit, the crisp lines and muted ties with their perfect Windsor knots, the clean-shaven jaw that usually looked carved from marble. This Higuruma was softer. Messier. He looked comfortable. And that was jarring in and of itself. His hair was tousled, fluffy, strands dragged slightly out of place like he’d raked a hand through it exactly once before stepping outside. He was wearing glasses – since when did he wear glasses? – thin, wire rimmed things perched on the roman bridge of his nose, lending a velveteen boyishness and charm, an age-defying panacea. And the scruff – God, the scruff – rough and dark along his jaw, prickling up over his cheekbones, dusting the hollow of his throat, suggesting carelessness or exhaustion, maybe both, but it forced you to trace this new and unexpected feature with far too much fascination.

You swallowed. Okay. Fine. Whatever. But it was his clothes that struck the killing blow. The black sweater was simple, plain, but the way the fabric clung, stretched over his shoulders and arms, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, strong sinewy forearms bared to your gaze and the chilly office air that raised goosebumps and fine dark hair alike was what made it noteworthy. Sneakers, scuffed and worn, suited for morning runs you knew he didn’t partake in. And then… the sweatpants. Oh. God help you. Grey sweatpants.

Soft and loose, they hung low on his hips, one size too large, the drawstring tied in a bow that felt obscene in its innocence; the drooping loop just begging to be caught on your crooked finger and tugged. The heathered fabric skimmed over his thighs, and every shift and step sent a ripple through the material, drawing your gaze against your better judgement to the unmistakable, undeniable, print beneath. They were absolutely shameless. And so was he for wearing them. And so were you for looking. Your brain crashed. Buffered. Blue screened. For a moment you forgot how to breathe. The brain function required for such automation went to worthier endeavors – like the slow shift of your knees to lock together, squishing your thighs shut beneath your desk as if the physical wrist-slap of no, bad, down girl! would silence the overwhelming yes, oh fuck yes! crowing in your head.

“... What are you doing here?” you croaked.

“Nice to see you too,” he said, dry as ever, though the switchblade flick of his eyes over his shoulder was undeniably humored by your apparent lack of manners. “Don’t worry, I’m still technically ‘relaxing.’” He made air quotes with his fingers. As if that were the problem.

“But I couldn’t stop thinking about that book I left here,” he continued, sifting through a neat stack of binders. “Figured I’d swing by and grab it.”

His words went in one ear, whistled through the cavernous cavity that became your skull, and out the other.

Every synapse in your brain was too busy short-circuiting, trying to reconcile this version of him with the man you thought you knew. This wasn’t the same Higuruma who swept into courtrooms like a force of nature, cutting through the prosecution like a scalpel through tissue. No, this was someone else entirely. Someone devastatingly casual, achingly comfortable, and unintentionally – no, intentionally, it had to be intentional, no one looked that good by accident – sexy. Someone who made coffee in a small, cute kitchen with smushed and tousled bed head, those sweatpants fighting for their life to cling to sharp hip bones, sans shirt, a crescent-soft smile cast over a bare and scratch marked shoulder to sleepily ask whether you liked your eggs scrambled or over easy, or better yet what size ring you wear and you’d be more than willing to drop to your knees yourself— You swallowed the cotton lumps in your throat, your gaze catching on the subtle shift of his hips as he rifled through the papers on his desk. You couldn’t stop staring. Couldn’t even pretend to. Didn’t even want to. Every part of your brain pickled in brine at once, one chaotic spiral after another: Why does he look like that? Why does he look better out of a suit than in one? How is that even possible, never mind allowed? Has he always been hot? Your brain screeched, and the death knell rung thrice. Had he been? Surely not, surely you’d have noticed, surely this would’ve been a problem months ago, surely you’re just hopped up on caffeine and jittery, yes, of course—

The tinnitus in your ears reached a fever pitch, and you quickly sniffed, surreptitiously dragging your knuckles beneath your nose with a quick flicker glance down, fully expecting to see a bloody vessel popped from the sheer pressure building in your sinuses.

You were going to die. Right here, at your desk, taken out by the unholy combination of casual clothing and Higuruma Hiromi.

You were devastated.

Why would he think twice about walking into his own office, dressed like he just rolled out of bed and into the middle of some cruelly curated thirst trap? Why would he stop to consider the devastating consequences of soft, messy hair and grey sweatpants on his wonderful, straight-laced, dedicated assistant? You were as much a fixture of the room as was the standing lamp in the corner, without opinion or recourse or stray thoughts that gleefully skipped down paths they shouldn’t.

“So, do you miss me? Check the box for yes or no.”

The question was so offhand, so casual, it felt like a personal attack. Higuruma didn’t even look at you when he said it – just kept scanning the bookshelves behind his desk. Meanwhile, you were unraveling in real-time, layer by secret layer, like some chaotic nesting doll of poorly disguised attraction and absolute mortification. Yes. Yes, I have, you thought miserably, but you couldn’t say that. Instead, you scrambled to pick up a file from your desk and brandished it like a shield. “Well, you left me with a mountain of work, so… maybe a little.” Higuruma finally glanced at you, something knowing flickering behind his gaze before it softened into almost pity – like he actually felt bad for something so frivolous as taking a break.

He sighed, shaking his head. “Consider it character-building.”

You narrowed your eyes. “That’s what people say when they want to justify unnecessary suffering.”

His lips twitched. “And?”

“And I don’t see you suffering,” you pointed out, waving vaguely at the absurdly soft-looking sweater draped over his frame, at the sweatpants hanging loose on his hips. “You look like you just woke up from a nap.”

He grinned, smug and self-satisfied. “It was a good nap.”

You grunted, a syllable that fractured in the middle like a dropped plate. You winced, nodding stiffly, every joint in your body locking into a marionette’s mimicry of calm. Your eyes, however, refused to cooperate. They widened, traitorous and gleaming, glued to him like he was the shiny prize in some deviously deceitful claw machine, just out of reach but taunting you with every twitch of the joystick in your fingers.

Higuruma hummed thoughtfully, tilting his head just enough to make the soft fall of his hair shift against his forehead. His fingers – long, deft, maddeningly precise – trailed along the spines of the books, pausing here and there to linger. It was methodical, unhurried, and utterly oblivious to the fact that every subtle flex of his arm, every shift of his shoulders beneath that infuriatingly soft-looking shirt, was eroding what little coherence you had left.

And those fucking pants.

Did he not have a mother who chastised him for wearing indecent clothing? Or were you just a voyeur? Loose in all the wrong places, snug in all the right ones. The fabric clung, suggested, hinted at truths your mind had no business trying to parse. Every time he moved, the lines and shadows shifted like a cruel optical illusion, and you couldn’t stop your eyes from darting back to them, helpless and hogtied as they betrayed every ounce of professionalism you clung to with blanched knuckles.

Your fingers hovered uselessly above your keyboard, and the sentence you’d been typing devolved into a jagged line of hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. It blinked at you accusingly from the screen, a digital monument to your brain’s complete implosion.

“Everything okay?” His voice broke through the fog, and you flinched. He glanced over his shoulder, brows furrowed and stitched together, and for a moment, the weight of his attention – direct, steady, disarming – was worse than any punishment.

“Yep! Yeah—totally fine!” you stammered, the words tumbling over themselves in their haste to escape. A nervous laugh followed, high-pitched and strained, like the dying wheeze of a deflating balloon. “Just, you know… great. Really productive.”

Higuruma’s lips twitched – whether in amusement or suspicion, you couldn’t tell – but he let it go, turning back to the shelf with a quiet hum. “Right. Well, no slacking just because I’m not here to breathe down your neck.”

Not that you'd have minded the warmth of his breath at your nape, or the pointed traipse of his nose down the satin soft and secret zone behind your ear— You exhaled sharply, sagging in your seat, only to be yanked back to reality when your pen slipped from your fingers.

The sharp clatter as it hit the floor made your breath hitch. You bent down to retrieve it, but your elbow clipped the edge of your desk in your haste, sending an entire stack of papers cascading to the floor.

“Shit,” you hissed under your breath, scrambling to fix the mess, but before you could even reach for the first sheet, Higuruma moved, a seeking missile with its primary directive being to organize disorder, to settle the mess in his space. Even off the clock, he just couldn’t help himself but leap to occupy his hands.

“I’ve got it,” he said, already crouching down beside you. “Don’t worry about it. You keep working.”

“But—”

“Seriously, it’s fine,” he interrupted. He fluttered his hand at you, dismissive but not unkind, a gentle command to stay put. And then he was there – on his knees, right between yours, filling the narrow space under your desk like he belonged there.

You stopped breathing. Froze entirely. Because Higuruma Hiromi, the unflappable, immovable bastion of composure, was crouched so close that you swore you could feel his breath breeze against your knees. His hunched shoulders filled the gap between them, his presence suffusing and suffocating in the best and worst possible way.

Every movement was torturous. His fingers curled around each sheet of paper with a kind of care that somehow felt intimate, as though he were handling something far more delicate than office supplies. The flex of muscle in his forearms was subtle but devastating, the faint ridge of veins tracing elegant paths beneath his skin, a roadmap of destruction you couldn’t help but follow.

His glasses slipped and slid down his nose – crawling along the bridge, like they were in on the conspiracy against your sanity – and he nudged them back up with the edge of his knuckle, the motion infuriatingly casual but still made your pulse trip over itself.

You could imagine it so easily. Too easily. His shoulders hunched just like this, his head bowed low, but not over papers. His hands skimming, not the floor, but your skin, those precise fingers teasing a path along your thighs, coaxing your knees apart, his glasses fogging as his lips parted with a sly smile and—

“Here,” he said, breaking the spell as he rose fluidly to his feet, the papers stacked neatly in hand. He placed them on your desk, his small, faint smile utterly unaware of the chaos he’d just wreaked on your psyche. “Crisis averted.”

No, no, crisis caused, actually.

You stared at him, utterly mute, your throat dry, your heart threatening to hammer its way out of your chest. A quiet hum of satisfaction escaped him as he turned back to his desk, leaving you to pick up the pieces of your shattered composure.

And then, because the universe had a cruel sense of humor, he stretched.

Arms lifting high above his head, fingers lacing together, spine arching in one long, slow pull. A quiet, absentminded groan slipped from his throat, low and indulgent, like the stretch felt good, and something inside you – something delicate and self-preserving – snapped clean in half. Saliva pooled beneath your tongue.

But then his shirt rode up.

The hem lifted, inch by inch like a sinful satin stage curtain drawing back to reveal the main event upon the corpse of your sanity. Pale, smooth skin stretched taut over the lean planes of his stomach. The sharp jut of his hip bones, the faint, devastating groove of muscle dipping into the perfect V of his pelvis.

And there, just below his navel, a dark trail of curls, disappearing under the waistband of those godforsaken sweatpants. You forgot how to breathe. Of course he had a happy trail. Of course you were now going to think about that trail every time you saw him stretch from now on. That was one trail you’d happily hike down, hands, mouth, anything, straight to the promised land, actually—

You whimpered.

Higuruma froze mid-stretch. Slowly his arms lowered, his eyes sliding open with a heavy-lidded, almost feline sort of acute appraisal, one brow arched over his glasses. “Sorry?” he asked, his voice calm but laced with something new – something sharper, more curious.

Your brain scrambled, words piling up in a frantic, disjointed heap, none of them useful.

“Nothing!” you blurted. “I just—uh—spider! There was a spider.”

Higuruma blinked.

“Huge—” bad word choice “—Hairy—” oh my god, shut up “—but it’s gone now.”

Silence.

The corner of his mouth twitched, and you watched in real time as a dimple formed on his cheek from where he bit into the inside. “A spider?”

You nodded far too hard. “Yep. Massive. Terrifying. And gone.”

He didn’t move at first, didn’t blink. Just stood there with his head cocked to the left, eyes shrouded behind the glinting of the overhead light, but you had the distinct impression he saw straight through you. You wondered if it was too late to crawl under your desk and die or hide until he left, whichever came first.

His brow furrowed behind those glasses, just a hair – not enough to be suspicious really, but enough to make your chest feel like it was shrinking in on itself. Suddenly, you missed the boredom. You’d take loneliness over this catastrophic mental collapse any day. Maybe you were dreaming – one of those stress-induced nightmares where you showed up to work without clothes, only so much worse. “Well,” he sighed, tone light, offhanded. “I guess I’d better take a look.” You felt the color drain from your eyes, running off as icy dread that slammed into the sweltering wall of heat just held back by your diaphragm. A convection cauldron boiled inside you, and your silence had you nursing the blunt edge of your tongue, usually so adroit you struggled to whittle it back into some sort of functioning point.

“W-wha—?” “For the spider.” He clarified, pushing off the corner of his desk in favor of yours, slipping around the back to where you sat with a leisurely gait that felt gut-twistingly ominous. “If it’s that big, it could bite. I’d hate to leave you alone to deal with it once I’m gone.”

“No need!” you blurted, a little too loud, a little too fast, and you tried to recall when the last time you updated your resume was. “I’m sure it’s gone.” But he only hummed, unconvinced. “Just to be sure,” he said, and before you could protest, he was already behind you. His gaze swept the desk, eagle-eyed and determined, like he might actually see the thing lurking among the chaos of pens and loose papers your station had become. Then, he leaned in. Leaned over.

You felt the give of the upholstery that cushioned the back of your chair dimple beneath his talon-like grip, and slowly, he rolled your chair back. The swivel wheels spun, a mirror to the frantic cartwheeling in your chest, and it was far too late for you to counter-maneuver by the time he’d pulled you. It was too late to stand, or excuse yourself, or create any plausible explanation short of “I think I want you and I really shouldn’t,” and “this is going to be a problem so please go back home, oh god please.”

The solid weight of his chest hovered just behind your shoulder blades, the clean scent of fabric softener and soap invading your bubble like you’d walked past a perfume store. Too close, way too close. And then his forearms reached past you, one moving to grip the arm of your chair, forcing your own to drop limply down into your lap, while the other braced forward on the edge of your desk. Pinned, bracketed, you could do nothing but face forward like a statue bust.

Your breath caught and you held it in an iron fist, because every inhale welcomed more of that fresh Higuruma smell deep into your lungs, and you were pretty sure it was already imprinted into your cell lining. You had to actively remind yourself to inhale, exhale, repeat, shallow as you could manage, because your body seemed to have forgotten how. You weren’t sure if the lightheadedness was from lack of oxygen outright or lack of free oxygen. He stretched further, one arm snaking past you to lift a loose stack of leafed papers, then a book, then another book. “Hmm,” he mused, his voice low and thoughtful and you could feel the rumbling bass judder down each and every one of your vertebrae like a xylophone. “Nothing here.” You swallowed hard, your pulse hammering in your throat as he moved closer, his weight shifting slightly so that your chair gave a little rock forward with the accidental nudge of his pelvis. You could feel the soft brush of his sleeve against your shoulder, the rhythmic and completely calm exhalation of his breath against your temple when he deigned to tilt his head just so to address you. “I suppose it could be under here,” he murmured, reaching across to lift the edge of your keyboard. His fingers brushed yours along the way and your eyes slammed shut like old window shutters, blocking out the accompanying visual to the live-wire jolt that galvanized your spine to ratchet up straighter, inadvertently lengthening the stretch of your body pressed against the front of his. “I-it’s not under there,” you stammered, your voice a crackly whisper, too shaky, something he’d have chastised you for any other day. A good lawyer has presence. He’d scold. Enunciate. Use your chest. And maybe the fact that he doesn’t scold you should’ve clued you in. But you don’t think about it beyond the feeling of gratitude because you’re certain if he spoke to you in that tone he uses, if you were able to track the slow crawl of his lips down in that disapproving pout so close to your face, you’d simply self immolate. “Well you never know,” he said instead, his tone breezy and conversational. “Spiders are sneaky little things. They like dark corners. Lots of dark corners in a desk, on a desk, under a desk…” He shifted again, this time pressed just a little more firmly into your back – enough to be completely improper, you think, you’re pretty sure, but plausibly deniable as accidental. Because he’s only trying to help you, see? He’s looking for a spider that doesn’t exist, one that you made up because you were ogling the mouth watering muscle of his hips and wanted to trace the lattice work of fine blue lines with your tongue— You swallowed, and you were grateful you’d already crossed your legs because there was no way you could do so subtly now, grateful that instead you could just squeeze them closed a little tighter, your thighs squishing shut, chained and gated, and your nostrils flared with frustration and your brows knitted together just so at the slightest bit of pressure that pressed upon your center. “You sure it’s gone?” he asked, his voice dropping just a fraction lower in time with the tilt of his head towards yours. He craned around, forcefully catching your eye, and you met them feeling every bit a deer in headlights. You nodded, a quick up and down bob of your chin that you hoped passed well enough for an answer. You didn’t trust your mouth to open – you didn’t think anything would come out of it, but the things that could shouldn’t be afforded the chance to. He didn’t move right away. Instead, he lingered, his fingers idly toying with the edge of your mousepad. One of those ergonomic things, gelly and squishy, to elevate your wrist. A gift from a friend who didn’t quite care, who didn’t quite know you beyond your occupation as “office worker” so of course you would appreciate office supplies.

You watched with dawning horror, struck mute as his fingers gripped the gel pad, rolling it into his palm with a slow squeeze.

Your mouth went dry.

Pinned between his palm and the meat of his thumb, he lifted it, checking beneath for the arachnid interloper, before he sighed and returned it back down to your desk. But his hand stayed put, circling his thumb in slow, rhythmic circuits over the material, rolling the gel beneath his fingertip in an unhurried, back-and-forth knead, and you swallowed. Hard enough to hurt your throat, loud enough to know he heard, and with equal parts mortification and shame, you could feel the slick evidence of your unabashed ogling pooling between your thighs.

This man was a danger to society, and most certainly a danger to you.

“Hm…” he grumbled. And you watched as his hand quit fondling the squishy mouse pad you’d never be able to look at the same way again, one long finger flicked up to your computer screen. “You’ve got some typos there. Planning to fix those?”

Your jaw ticked and your eyes snapped to narrow slits. Your head jerked to face him with an indignant defense on your tongue – failing to account for how that would put you nearly nose to nose. And instantly you were cowed. You watched in real-time as your reflection deflated, mirrored in the gleam of his glasses, and your voice came out far more petulant when you muttered: “You’re distracting me.” His expression shifted, subtle, but there – your proximity made you privy to the amusement kept captive behind the lenses of his readers, a patient and knowing hook that drew a single brow up over the wire rim. “Am I?” His voice was mild, casual as you’ve ever heard it, but the way his fingers traced a deliberate line along the desks surface betrayed him, there was nothing absent about his mind in the gesture. His thumb grazed the edge of a page, smoothing over the corner before flicking it back with a sharp snap. You jumped, flinching to look at the offending sheet. It was not a fidget at all, but a consideration, a temperature check, and he smiled at the side of your turned head. “You’re jumpy today. Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” His hand moved again, his fingers walking toward the armrest of your chair, resting on the small island of space unoccupied by your elbow. He didn’t touch you, but he hovered close enough that you felt he already had. You could stop this. You should. You could laugh it off, spin your chair, remind him and yourself that this is not the time nor the place, and isn’t professional in the slightest. You could try to convince yourself that your boss wasn’t reading you like an open book, and wasn’t seconds from confirming something you could never walk back. But you didn’t. “Well, I saw a spider, you know how I feel about those,” you tried to excuse. Higuruma’s lips puffed and pursed, daring to inch his thumb just a little closer, piercing your bubble to pluck a frayed string on your sleeve. “I didn’t see any spiders.” You were floundering. What the hell is happening, who is this man, and what has he done with your boss? It was the glasses. It must be. This overconfidence – even if irritatingly warranted – had to be a byproduct of knowing he looked good dressed down. And you wouldn’t mind dressing him down, undressing him, peeling off those already flimsy layers yourself, but you couldn’t. So you resisted, your arguments a sieve through which not a drop of water would hold. A shitty lawyer you’d make. “So just because you didn’t see it, it was never there?” you rebuffed. And that, it seemed, gave Higuruma pause. At least for a moment, until his head teetered down to almost rest on your shoulder, his back quaking with a vibrating laugh. “Oh? Schrödinger, is it? That’s what we’re doing?” You cringed as soon as you said it, knowing full well that quantum theory would not save you, but you certainly wouldn’t have minded a convenient box into which you could crawl and die. But he didn’t let it go. He never did. He thrived on contradiction, lived and breathed the thrill of the argument, got off on unraveling logic until all that remained was the truth. And right now, you hid yours poorly. You were caught red handed, red faced, damned by the scarlet that creeped ever higher up your throat and refused to be swallowed down. His voice dipped, amusement curling at the edges. “If I don’t see the spider, how do I know it’s real?” Your lips parted, but nothing came out. His hand still perched on the armrest curled inward by degrees – knuckles brushing against the back of your hand in the barest contact.

You couldn’t take it anymore. You inhaled, sharp and shallow between your teeth. “Higuruma.”

He stilled. His jaw twitched. And then—

“Do you want me to stop?”

No soft edges, no careful subtext. The words landed between you with a dull, leaden weight, devoid of that razor-edged coyness he’d been wielding like a paring knife. No shields, no plausible deniability – just blunt, naked truth.

You blinked at him, pulse thudding erratically against your ribs. Surely you had misheard.

But his eyes, fixed on yours, were clear. Watchful. Expectant. Beneath the wary composure, something raw flickered – uncertain and unsteady. A breath, a blink, a second too long with no answer, and you watched him start to fold in on himself like a flimsy card house.

“Shit,” he exhaled, quiet, almost to himself. His lashes flickered in rapid succession – once, twice, again. Like shaking off a trance, dragging himself out of something he knew he shouldn’t have sunk into in the first place. “I overstepped. You’re uncomfortable, I’m sorry.”

A sharp nod. A muscle clenched in his jaw, then smoothed out, his mouth flattening into something more neutral and practiced in its artificiality. Already withdrawing. Already gone.

And he looked—

God, he looked like a kicked dog.

Panic surged up your throat, knocking the breath clean out of you. Your hand shot out before your brain could catch up, fingers latching around his wrist, gripping firm. Warm skin, quick pulse beneath your touch.

“Stop what?” The words tumbled out, unsteady, breathless.

His gaze flickered back to you, impassive, unreadable. He didn’t answer.

You squeezed his wrist. “Stop what, Higuruma?” Higuruma swallowed. His wrist tensed beneath your grip, and you felt the subtle flex of his fingers curling inward, like he wanted to hold onto something but didn’t quite dare. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

You dragged in a breath, forcing your voice into something steadier. “Higuruma,” you pressed, voice softer now, urging. “Stop what?”

A beat.

Then another.

His mouth twitched. Not in a smirk, not in amusement, but like he was physically fighting himself, trying to bite something back before it slipped past his teeth. His head tilted just slightly, his gaze drifting – not away from you, not entirely, but somewhere to the side, anywhere safer than your face, as if the words he was about to say were too much to deliver straight on.

Then he exhaled, slow and shuddering.

“I lied,” he confessed.

“I didn’t come in for a book,” he admitted, and now it was like the floodgates had cracked. “I didn’t need anything. I just—” He laughed, soft, humorless, dragging a tired hand down his face. “I just wanted to see you.”

Your fingers twitched against his wrist.

He shook his head, incredulous at himself. “It felt wrong. Not seeing you today. Kept thinking I forgot something. Like I was missing a step all day and couldn’t figure out why until I caught myself reaching for my phone, halfway through texting you, trying to find an excuse, hoped you’d need me to come in after all, and I—” He inhaled sharply through his nose, closing his eyes for the briefest, tortured second before forcing them open again. “I just wanted to see you. That’s all.”

Silence pooled thick and electric between you, and now you were the one who had no words.

His throat bobbed with a swallow, his voice quieter when he spoke again. “So – I don’t want to stop. But I can. I will.”

There it was.

The inevitable moment where everything clicked into place and left no room for interpretation, no exit route to hide behind. He wasn’t teasing. He wasn’t testing you, waiting for you to fold and deny it. His face was open, stripped of all pretense, and that earnest sincerity – the kind that people mistook for courtroom performance but you knew better – hit you like a freefall drop straight to the pit of your stomach.

Higuruma Hiromi wanted you.

A slow, consuming warmth curled through your limbs, filling your veins, burning your capillaries.

Your grip on his wrist softened, fingers smoothing over the bone. A shift of weight, barely perceptible, but his breath hitched all the same. He was still watching you, eyes darting minutely between yours, scanning, waiting, bracing for rejection, for hesitation, for anything that would tell him he’d misread this, that he’d just set himself up for ruin.

You leaned in, just slightly, just enough to catch the scent of his cologne clinging to the fabric of his shirt, the warmth of his skin beneath it.

And you whispered, “Then don’t.”

Higuruma inhaled.

He was closer now, his weight shifting like his body had made the decision before his mind had caught up. His knee brushed yours. His fingers flexed against the armrest. His head dipped, slow, inevitable, like the pull of gravity was stronger now, like whatever unseen force had been keeping him tethered had finally snapped.

Your mouth parted – either to speak or meet him halfway – but then his forehead dropped, pressing briefly, firmly against yours.

His breath shook against your lips. “God,” he muttered, laughing softly in disbelief. “I really shouldn't.”

Then his fingers brushed your thigh, just barely, tentative at first – like he still wasn’t sure he was allowed. You exhaled, heat curling low in your belly, and reached for him, closing the space with a slow, deliberate roll of your knee to the outside of his. “I promise I won’t call HR if you don’t.”

He groaned.

And then he sank to his knees.

His hands slid over your thighs, smoothing upward in slow, reverent strokes, coaxing them apart, and your breath hitched. He watched, eyes heavy-lidded, flickering up to catch yours as he pressed a kiss – light, lingering – to the inside of your knee.

“Keep working,” he murmured, voice a little raw, a little wrecked already. His fingers curled into the hem of your skirt. “Don’t mind me.”

And then he dragged his mouth higher. Higuruma was breathing hard. You could hear it, feel it – the unsteady push of air against your bare thigh, the way it stuttered. His hands, already so warm, traced slow, sweeping lines up the outside of your thighs, fingers flexing against the hem of your skirt, seeming fascinated by the give and shift of the polyester, gathering the courage to do what he really wanted.

Like he still thought he needed permission.

You exhaled, shifting slightly in your chair, parting your thighs just enough that his fingertips slipped over the sensitive inner skin. His breath hitched, a quiet, sharp inhale through his nose. His head dipped lower, hair brushing against your knee, and you felt the tremor in his fingers as he finally, finally pushed your skirt up.

He did it slow, like he wanted to savor it, like he was unwrapping something precious.

Higuruma dragged the fabric upward, baring inch after inch of soft, warm skin, his thumbs pressing into the meat of your thighs, kneading absently like he couldn’t help it. And then he reached your panties, delicate lace darkened at the center with proof of your wanting. He made a sound, low and unsteady between a groan and a whimper. His fingers curled into the elastic, hesitating, holding.

Then he hooked them to the side.

He went still.

For a long moment, all he did was look. His hands tightened against your thighs, fingers dimpling the flesh, and he let out a sharp, unstable exhale. His glasses slipped a fraction of an inch down the bridge of his nose, but he didn’t move to fix them this time, didn’t move at all – just stared, breathing through his mouth now, lips parted like he was on the verge of either something catastrophic or panting like a dog.

“Oh,” he murmured, voice wrecked.

His thumbs smoothed against your skin, a reverent, subconscious caress.

“Fuck.”

You should have felt self-conscious, spread open for him like this, but the look on his face, the sincere, trembling hunger in his expression burned away any hesitation. His pupils were blown wide, swallowing up the brown of his irises black as pitch, his brows furrowed like he was in pain.

His hands slid under your thighs, lifting them, shifting you forward in your seat, making you open for him, spreading you wider. His nose – sharp, sloped, aristocratic you’d always thought – skirted along the inside of your thigh, his breath scalding, his lips dragging heat against skin. His stubble caught, a scratch of sensation that made your stomach jolt, made your cunt clench around nothing.

“Higuruma—”

He shuddered. “Hiromi,” he corrected, wide and needy eyes slowly swiveling up to your face, though not without great effort at having been reeled away from the exquisite glistening between your legs. “Hiromi’s just fine for right now.”

Then his mouth was on you.

The first stroke of his tongue was slow, broad, deliberate – a long, dragging lick from your dripping entrance to the stiff, aching pearl of your clit. Your whole body jerked, a broken gasp catching in your throat.

Hiromi moaned. Deep, desperate, guttural.

It vibrated against your cunt, made your thighs twitch where they bracketed his head. His hands flexed against your hips, squeezing like he needed something to ground himself, like the feel of you under his palms was the only thing keeping him tethered to reality; he’d mold the clay of your flesh into a life preserver, because he fully intended to drown here.

And then he did it again.

He was savoring it, the obscene, deliberate press of his tongue slipping through the slick mess of you, catching every little twitch, every tiny intake of breath. His nose brushed your clit with every motion, the bridge of it dragging just enough to make you squeak, your hands curling into the armrests, nails biting into the leather. A moan spilled from your lips before you could snag it back, too loud. Hiromi’s hands tensed against your thighs. He pulled back just slightly, just enough to glance up at you, his lips wet, mouth gleaming with dew, and glasses hopelessly lopsided. His voice was low, giddy and playful but the effect was outshone by how breathless he spoke – shaken and twitchy. “You’re supposed to be working, remember?” It took too long for you to realize what he was waiting for as he looked up at you. The clack of the keyboard. The pretense of professionalism. You laughed, choked and gravelly. Your gaze wrenched from the delicious sight of him below you up to the bleary glare of your monitor, blinking cursor and abandoned typo’s and all. Your fingers hovered over the keys before you forced yourself to type something, anything. A sentence. Just a few words. Hiromi hummed against you, pleased. His hands slid higher, hooking around your thighs to grip their fronts and tug you closer to him. Then he dipped his head and sighed – long and low, the sound that made your stomach tighten and heat pool in your gut, and would fuel countless wet dreams for the rest of your life.

You barely registered the way your thighs started to tremble, the restless shifting of your hips to wordlessly tempt him back, your body chasing after every slow, devastating pass of his tongue.

Hiromi felt it, though.

Felt the way you arched into him, the way your muscles twitched when he flattened his tongue against your clit and pressed, the way your breath caught when he let out a quiet, helpless whimper against you. He felt utterly pathetic, deranged, oh he could write empirical dissertations on every ethical breach occuring in his office today – but you liked it. Whether it was the taboo of it all or simply him – he hoped to god it was him – he could hardly drink you down fast enough before your sweet pussy drooled down into the cleft of your ass on the seat.

His fingers curled lower, slipping between your thighs from above, thumbs spreading you open.

He was shaking.

His shoulders quivered, adrenaline puppeteered his muscles into a jittery mess and he could do nothing but try to work through the tremors.

Then, like something in him had finally snapped, he gripped your thighs tighter and shook his head – side to side and feral, his nose rubbing against your clit, his tongue pressing inside you, spreading you open for him in a way that had you gasping, a choked-off moan catching in your throat.

“Oh, fuck—”

Hiromi growled into you, deep and needy, and then he was fucking his tongue inside you, quick and filthy and wet. His nose ground against your clit, his stubble rasping against the delicate skin of your inner thighs, and your entire body jolted at the overture of conflicting sensation.

You didn’t notice the way one of his hands slipped from your thigh, moving lower, until you felt the determined press of his fingers, felt the slow, careful stretch of two of them sinking into you, filling you alongside the obscene, messy slide of his tongue.

Your head dropped back against the chair, a broken, gasping moan slipping past your lips.

Higuruma growled into you, curling his fingers, pressing them just right, like he already knew exactly where to touch you, like he’d spent months learning your body before he ever laid a hand on it.

And maybe he had. Maybe those long, bleary nights where you caught him watching you – when your skin prickled under the self-conscious weight of his gaze – had never been idle, absent-minded staring at all. Maybe he hadn’t been zoning out, lost in legalese and exhaustion. Maybe he’d been looking at you like this all along.

Noticing the way you chewed on the end of your pen when you were thinking. The way you stretched your arms over your head after too many hours hunched over case files, the soft sigh you let out, the way your shirt lifted just enough to show the barest sliver of skin if he were lucky. The way your fingers tapped against your coffee cup in restless little rhythms, how your brows knit together when you were deep in thought, the way you bit your lip when you were holding back a smile.

Maybe, when he used to linger a little too long after walking you to your car – hands in his pockets, rocking slightly on his heels, like he had something else to say but couldn’t quite get it out – it wasn’t just his usual brand of overworked buffering. Maybe it was this, all of this, eroding at the edges of his restraint, wearing it thinner every time you laughed at one of his dry remarks, every time your shoulder brushed his in passing, every time you looked up from your desk and caught him already watching.

And those guilty little smiles he used to give you?

Maybe they weren’t guilt at all. Maybe they were apologies.

For thinking about you in ways he shouldn’t have. For picturing you like this, like you were now, spread open beneath him, panting and flushed and trembling under the crooked curls of his fingers.

The realization hit you like a live wire, striking something deep and low inside you, flicking the taut rubber band behind your navel. Hiromi made a sound – low, half a moan, half a fuck, muffled into the slick, messy heat of your core.

And now that you knew – now that you saw it – there was no unseeing it.

Your pussy clenched around his fingers, sucking him deeper to the knuckle.

His whole body jerked, a sharp inhale through his nose, and his hips rolled against nothing, a ragged whimper spilling out muffled against your pussy.

He finger-fucked you slow and deep, his lips sealing around your clit and sucking it clear of its hood, rubbing with the flat of his tongue like it was his job. Like he’d done this a hundred times before, and he reckoned he has, if the lackluster imaginings in his head while he jerked himself to completion in bed were to be tallied. And just below your desk, he shifted, his breath fleeing the deflated balloon of his lungs in an embarrassingly high-pitched whine as he shouldered your legs and palmed himself through the soft grey cotton of his sweatpants. His cock twitched under the roll of his palm, thick and aching, the damp patch down the inseam darkening with every helpless grind of his hips against air.

His voice was wrecked, muffled, words half-swallowed against your skin.

“—fuck, y’taste s’good…lil’ more. Lemme have it…s’wet n’ pretty—”

Your breath stuttered, your hands flew to collect a fistful of his hair and yanked. He gasped against you, the vibrations shooting straight through your core to strike flint to steel, igniting the short and kerosene-soaked fuse in your belly.

“Hiromi, I—” you only just managed to squeak.

His free hand – it hadn’t been free though, but he’d sooner abandon himself than abandon you – shot up, grasping blindly for yours, lacing your fingers together, squeezing tight. His tongue dragged over your clit, slow and deliberate, then he sucked, and—

You shattered.

Your whole body seized, back bowing, thighs clamping tight around his head. You barely heard the choked, desperate groan that tore from his throat as he swallowed you down, tongue fucking you through your orgasm like he was starving for it.

Everything blurred, your breath stuttering, your fingers tangled in his hair, clenching tight as your body pulsed around his fingers, your cum soaking his face, his mouth, slicking his wrist.

And still he didn’t stop.

Didn’t stop licking, sucking, devouring, his consumption of you was absolute. His lips wrapping around your clit, gentle and coaxing, dragging you through the trembling aftershocks until your body sagged, boneless, against the chair. But you felt the way his whole body shuddered and suddenly convulsed, the heave of his shoulders beneath your limp legs, the muffled broken moan that gargled in his throat as his fingers squeezed tight against yours— And the way he abruptly stilled.

When he finally pulled away, his breathing was ragged, panting against the inside of your thigh, his glasses fogged up, his lips swollen and shining, his stubble slick with the mess he’d made of you, earned from you.

“… fuck,” he rasped. His forehead dropped against your thigh, his fingers squeezing where they still clung to yours. “God. I—” He swallowed hard, his voice thick. It was rare for Hiromi to be rendered anything resembling speechless.

His shoulders shook between laughter and disbelief.

“Would’ve done that ages ago if I knew you’d let me.” Hiromi exhaled a slow, steady breath against your thigh. Then another. His fingers flexed in your grip once, twice, before finally loosening, slipping free only so he could smooth his palms along the tops of your legs, rubbing lazy, absentminded circles into your skin. His forehead rested against you, warm and damp, glasses tilted near sideways and lifted from his face.

Neither of you said anything for a long moment. The hum of the office settled back in around you – the faint click of a keyboard from down the hall, the intermittent trill of a phone ringing elsewhere, the low hiss of the air vent. But all of it felt far away, like a different world, like something that had no bearing on the one you were currently sinking into, pacified and hazy in your chair, while Hiromi sighed heavy and contented into your lap.

Then, just as the static buzz of post-orgasmic bliss started to fade—

His jaw went slack against your thigh.

You barely had time to react before his mouth stretched wide, lips grazing your skin, and chomp.

Not hard – just enough to make you squeal, swatting at him with the force of a wet napkin.

“Stop it!” you half-laughed, half-scolded, still breathless, shaking him off as he grinned, cheek smushed against your thigh.

He hummed, entirely unrepentant, his lips pressing an exaggerated, obnoxiously loud mwah right where he’d bitten you.

“Sorry,” he said, voice still raspy. “Couldn’t help myself.”

You huffed, still laughing, running absent fingers through his hair in retaliation. “You’re awful.”

“Mm,” he agreed, eyes slipping shut as he nuzzled deeper, getting comfortable like he had every intention of staying there for the rest of the afternoon.

You hesitated, still gathering the courage to say it, but you were riding the same high he was, and you wanted to. So you smoothed your hand down, fingers slipping under his prickly chin, tilting his face up just enough that he had to look at you.

“You want me to return the favor?”

His eyelids lifted just slightly, heavy-lidded and unreadable, like he was parsing whether or not you were serious. Then his mouth quirked, slow and wry, his voice a quiet rasp.

“There’s no need.”

You blinked. “No need?”

A beat.

Then – his ears went pink.

Oh.

A slow, wicked grin curled at the edges of your lips.

“Hiromi Higuruma,” you said, voice rich with delight, dragging your fingers through the sweaty, mussed strands of his hair. “Did you—”

He groaned and dropped his face back into your lap, burying it in your skirt. “Don’t.”

You laughed, warm and breathless, carding through his hair, absolutely gleeful. “Oh my God,” you whispered, voice high-pitched, teasing. “I didn’t even touch you.”

His arms curled around your thighs, squeezing once in a half-hearted warning, but the damage was done.

“That’s…” You exhaled, still smiling, still floating. “God, that’s so hot.”

A muffled groan vibrated against your lap.

You weren’t going to let him off easy. Not after this. Not after knowing that just getting you off had been enough to get him off, too.

“What happened to all that patience, Hiromi?” you teased, nudging his chest with your knee. “What happened to self-control?”

He grunted, shifting, and you rolled your head to the side and saw it – the sticky, wet mess that turned the pale grey of his pants a darker charcoal.

You grinned. Oh, you were never letting him live this down.

He lifted his head slightly, glaring at you from under his lashes, though there was no real heat behind it. “I was patient,” he grumbled, jaw ticking. “It just… caught up to me.”

“Uh-huh,” you mused, biting back another laugh, still stroking your fingers through his hair. “Maybe you should take days off more often.”

Hiromi made a sound, indistinguishable between a laugh and a groan, squeezing your thighs where they still rested over his shoulders. “Don’t start.”

You hummed, smirking. Then, gentler, pressing the pads of your fingers to his scalp: “Seriously. You should.”

He went quiet for a moment, then sighed, long and slow, shifting his arms so he could rest more comfortably in your lap. “Maybe I will.”

Maybe he would. Maybe he’d let himself have more than just a stolen afternoon, a guilty indulgence. Maybe he’d stop making himself wait for nice things. Or at least consider it.

But for now, he'd stay there, warm and content against your thighs, letting you thread your fingers through his hair, letting you touch him like you wanted to.

And for the first time in a long time – maybe ever – he let himself enjoy a day off.

#jjk #higuruma hiromi #hiromi higuruma x reader #hiromi smut #higuruma x reader #higuruma x you #jjk smut #icymi <3

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wibben · 3 months ago

Text

icymi 🤍�� Hiromi Higuruma's white day shenanigans

White Day

You never meant to fall for your neighbor across the hall.

↳ pairing: hiromi higuruma x fem. reader

↳ wc: 5.4k

↳ notes: i've been wanting to write for my favorite defense attorney for a long time. i'm really excited to have finally gotten around to it! i hope you enjoy!

The day you moved in, you met Hiromi Higuruma on the fourth trip up the elevator with an armful of boxes and the vague promise of a herniated disk.

He was on his way out, manilla folders tucked under one arm, tie just slightly askew – like he’d started the day neat and polished but had since been worn down by whatever mountain of legalese he’d been tackling. There was a quiet, practiced politeness about him as he reached past you to hold the elevator doors, murmuring an apology as if the arm braced overhead were some grand imposition and not, in fact, the only reason you weren’t pancaked between steel.

“You’re new,” he said, glancing from the leaning tower of tape-bound boxes you carried to you teetering behind it. His voice was smooth, deliberate – measured in a way that suggested he was used to choosing his words carefully. “Welcome to the building.”

It wasn’t much, but it was the first kind thing anyone had said to you all week. You clung to it tighter than the packing tape holding your precariously stacked belongings together – a bond that gave out the moment the elevator doors dinged closed behind him, spilling the contents of your life onto the scuffed tile floor.

In the months that followed, you pieced together fragments of his life like a puzzle. Accidentally, you never sought the pieces out so much as found them in your pockets. Hiromi, across the hall, worked too much, slept too little, and lived almost entirely off a diet of conbini meals. He smoked late at night by the building’s front steps – just long enough for you to catch the faint trace of tobacco lingering in the stairwell the next morning – and returned emails from his phone with the grim efficiency of someone accruing more inescapable sleep debt rather than paying it off.

You were an insomniac, with a habit of ordering takeout at hours best described as ungodly. The overlap in your schedules was impossible to ignore – him arriving home as you ventured out to retrieve a bag of comfort food from the lobby. At first, you nodded in passing. Then the perfunctory nods turned into murmured “evenings,” which turned into chats on the way back to your respective doors. One night, you lingered in the entryway longer than usual, your coat doing little to ward off the cold. He stood nearby, a cigarette between his fingers, the ember’s orange glow painting flickering shadows across his face. You hadn’t meant to stay – it was cold, and you were already exhausted – but he looked over and asked, “Rough night?”

You nodded. “Always.”

His laugh was quiet, dry, and just a little self-deprecating. “Yeah,” he said, eyes fixed on the empty street ahead. “I get that.”

The next time, you started the conversation. “Long day?” you asked as he fished a lighter from his pocket.

“Mm.” He flicked his gaze toward you, his lips quirking into something that wasn’t quite a smile but close enough to send your stomach into a curious tailspin. “They’re all long.”

And so it went – short, fleeting exchanges that somehow turned ritual, little moments you found yourself looking forward to in the long evenings when the hot languor of your eyelids paved way for dark orbital bruises.

“Do you work nights?” he asked one evening, nodding toward the takeout bag in your hand.

“No,” you replied, shrugging. “I just don’t sleep much.”

His brows lifted faintly, a silent acknowledgment of shared affliction. “Ah.”

The silences between you weren’t uncomfortable, and you found you didn’t mind sitting beside him on the building’s concrete steps, a cigarette in his hand and a carton of fries in yours with not a word spoken between you. Other times though, the quiet felt cradled in something else. A brush of his fingers against yours when you handed him a takeout menu you didn’t need anymore, the drawling rasp of his voice murmuring an apology so quiet it made your nervous laugh feel like a hyena's scream in comparison. Once, you caught him glancing back at you just as the elevator doors slid shut, and you couldn’t decide if the flutter in your chest was ridiculous or warranted.

There were the little gestures: a cup of coffee left outside your door, still warm. A text after the building’s hot water went out, letting you know it was fixed. The day he offered his umbrella because yours disappeared somewhere between your door and the front steps – you missed the endearing way he rubbed the back of his neck when you turned your back to unfurl it, pleased you’d accepted it at all.

You told yourself it was nothing. Just coincidence and neighborly kindness, just the nature of living in close quarters with someone whose schedule aligned so improbably with your own.

Somehow, those small moments stacked up – shared smiles in the hallway, quiet exchanges about the weather or the truly horrible plumbing in the building – and one day, you realized you had a problem.

You had a spectacularly inconvenient crush on a man who looked like he hadn’t rested properly in years, and wouldn’t know romance if it flashed a neon sign.

It started small. But then the little things began to stand out. The faint scrunch of his nose when he read a text he didn’t like, which was completely different from the wrinkle that formed at the curve of his bridge when he smiled. The way he always looked up – no matter how dead on his feet he seemed – just to meet your eyes when he said hello. And the way his profile seemed to cut through the gritty, timeworn backdrop of the building’s facade, stark and clean against the crumbling edges. His face would flash crimson as he cupped the end of his cigarette to shield the ember from the wind, flicking the lighter, the filter pinned between his teeth in a way that shouldn’t have been nearly as fascinating as you found it.

By then it wasn’t just noticing, but appreciating. And by the time February rolled around you were hopelessly smitten, your goggles turned the world pastel pink, and you were fully in over your head.

Which was why, on Valentine’s Day, you found yourself carefully wrapping a box of homemade chocolates. They weren’t over the top – no heart-shaped nonsense, nothing pink or frilly – but each piece was infused with flavors he’d mentioned in passing: mocha, coffee, matcha, dark chocolate. Things you’d quietly noted, stored away for no reason other than that you’d wanted to.

You left a note tucked under the ribbon. Simple, casual.

“Hope you like them. Let me know what you think.”

The elevator doors were crawling shut when you heard the brisk thud of shoes on old beaten carpet, followed by the slap of a hurried hand against metal. Long fingers curled through the narrowing gap, prying the steel doors open with a strained push.

Hiromi slipped into the elevator, slightly disheveled and a little breathless, murmuring a bitten curse under his breath as he bent to retrieve the keys he’d dropped. Folders were precariously shoved under one arm, a pen just barely hanging on to the collar of his shirt.

“Morning,” you offered, your smile kind but tinged with the quiet amusement his harried state often inspired.

“Morning,” he replied, straightening and glancing over, his tie already starting its daily rebellion against proper alignment. His sunken but shrewd gaze flickered briefly to the box in your hands, but if he thought anything of it, he didn’t say. “Sorry – didn’t mean to hold you up.”

“You didn’t,” you assured him, shifting your weight as the elevator shuddered back into motion. The box felt heavier than it had five minutes ago. “Busy day?”

Hiromi laughed but it was throaty enough to be a scoff, clearly bracing himself for the expected impact of another brutally long day. “Aren’t they all?”

You smiled faintly. The silence that followed felt charged, and nerves jangled in your chest. Your heart was hammering, loud enough that you were sure he could hear it, but you hoped it might be mistaken for the grinding clunk of the old elevator gears.

It’s not a big deal, you reminded yourself again. Just a gift. Just a thoughtful gesture. Just a little too forward for two neighbors hovering in that nebulous space between circumstantial friends and something more, but one that might nudge things in a direction you were too cautious to name outright.

When the elevator gave its telltale groan as it neared the ground floor, you cleared your throat and stepped forward.

“Um, hey—” You held the box out to him, hands steadier than you’d feared but not quite steady enough for your liking. “I… made these. Thought you might like them.”

Hiromi blinked, his gaze snapping to the box with faint surprise. For a moment, his expression teetered between caught-off-guard and something softer, before smoothing into that burnt-out neutrality you’d seen him wear so many times. “Oh.” He juggled his folders into one hand, careful despite his hurry, and accepted the box with a quick bow. “That’s kind of you. Thank you.”

When he straightened, he offered you a small, fleeting smile – it made your stomach twist in on itself and spawn butterflies, no matter how many times you’d seen it.

The elevator dinged as it reached the lobby, and he stepped out with an apologetic glance at his watch. “I’ll see you around, won’t I?”

“Yeah,” you barely managed to eek.

And then he was gone, disappearing into the morning rush with your chocolates in one hand and his folders in the other with pages fluttering like paper wings.

You lingered in the elevator after the doors slid shut again, staring at the empty space he’d left behind.

It hadn’t gone how you’d expected – not your pre-planned worst-case scenario of a mortifying rejection of your feelings, and yet, somehow so much worse, because it wasn’t the rose-tinted reciprocation you’d naively dared to daydream about, either. The thanks and hurried acknowledgment barely registered against the clear distraction in his eyes. You’d poured so much into those chocolates, and you were left clutching distracted politeness like a consolation prize.

By the time you made it back to your floor – after a mortifying number of circuits up and down – you’d collapsed into the corner, head buried between your knees. Embarrassment wasn’t just a flush in your cheeks; it was a whole-body takeover, wrapping you in shame as thick as the tiles were cold. When the next passengers shuffled in, you peeled yourself off the floor, dodging their alarmed glances like a guilty specter as you slunk back to your apartment to lick your wounds.

Hiromi never mentioned the chocolates. Not once.

So, you did the only reasonable thing: you avoided him. It wasn’t like you’d outright confessed, but the thought of that little box sitting in his hands – or worse, the top of his trash bin – had you cringing so hard your spine might’ve snapped. Passing his door became a tactical mission: footsteps muted, breath held. The faintest whiff of tobacco from your window had you retreating like a skittish alley cat.

But while you ducked and dodged, Hiromi… didn’t. Every afternoon, he plucked another piece from that box, letting them melt on his tongue during rare, stolen breaks at his desk. Mocha when the morning slog threatened to drown him. Matcha when coffee breaks needed a little extra something. Dark chocolate after a colleague dumped another stack of case files onto his desk with an apologetic shrug.

Every evening, Hiromi waited beneath the weather-beaten veranda, the spot you both claimed without ever speaking something so official. His coat collar turned up against the cold, cigarette glowing like a signal flare, he’d scan the dim hallways for your familiar shuffle. He wanted to thank you. Tell you how your chocolates made the grind a little sweeter, made him feel a little lighter, and he was grateful for the little things.

But you never came. Not for long enough to speak, at least. Instead, you became a blur – an apparitional gremlin of mismatched pajamas, half-smushed pillow hair, and hurried footsteps. The only sign of you was the tributes he’d leave on your doorstep, his offerings of coffee and muffins, gone by the next time he passed.

Through the curling smoke of his cigarette, he wondered if you were sleeping better. Maybe that’s why you don’t join him as often anymore, why your late night rendezvous suddenly returned to being a solo affair. He hoped so.

The day had been a marathon of mediocrity, the kind of relentless tedium that blurred its edges into monotony. Paperwork bred more paperwork, meetings inexplicably managed to feel both crucial and utterly pointless, and the office coffee – gritty with a scorched aftertaste – served only as a cruel reminder of how far his standards had fallen.

Hiromi moved through it all like a ghost of himself, his body operating two steps behind his thoughts, trailing in that sluggish haze unique to too-little sleep. Four hours wasn’t the worst he’d had this week, but it came with its usual cargo: dreams that clung like cobwebs, fragile but persistent. Unfiled briefs, missed deadlines, the kind of nonsense that soaked through his undershirt and had him gasping awake at three in the morning.

By early evening, when a colleague materialized in the doorway, Hiromi had surrendered himself to the day’s slow crawl. His office, lit in jagged strips of orange from the low-hanging sun slicing through the blinds, had taken on a tomb-like quality – stifling, quiet, and inescapable.

“You’re still here?” The man lounged against the doorframe like a picture of eight hours' sleep and a decent breakfast, a stark contrast to Hiromi’s wilting state. He wore the smug energy of someone whose day had gone entirely to plan. Must be nice.

Hiromi didn’t lift his gaze from the monitor. “Where else would I be?”

“Home. Out. Making the most of the day,” came the reply, too chipper for this hour.

There was something in his tone that prickled, a faint suggestion that today should be different, though Hiromi could only just summon the curiosity to ask why. “What makes this Friday any different from last?”

His colleague shrugged, the movement loose and nonchalant. “Oh, nothing. Just, you know, White Day and all.”

Hiromi blinked, his expression an unbroken mask of indifference, save for the flicker of his eyes, which shifted upward with the kind of mechanical courtesy reserved for the truly drained. “Hm?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Should I?”

“It’s March fourteenth,” his colleague drawled, the words slow and deliberate. “White Day. The day you’re supposed to return the favor for Valentine’s Day.”

Hiromi’s brain sputtered, then juddered to life with all the elegance of an old engine coughing through winter. “Oh,” he said, leaning back in his chair, his hand dragging through his hair as if trying to pull clarity from his skull. “That’s today?”

“Brutal.” His colleague sucked air through his teeth, his expression a caricature of pity, though his eyes gleamed with the mischief of someone who’d spotted an opening. “Didn’t get a gift for anyone?”

Hiromi snorted with arms stretched above his head, his exhaustion thinning his filter. “No one got me anything, so there’s no one to return the favor to.”

“Huh. Rough.” The younger man pushed off the doorframe with a shrug, his jacket slung over his shoulder in a gesture that felt entirely too self-assured. “Well, I’m heading out early. Got a dinner reservation. Gotta make sure I’m on her good side before I make it official.” He grinned, throwing a thumbs-up so cheerfully condescending it bordered on insult. “Good luck with… whatever’s keeping you here.”

“Good luck,” Hiromi replied flatly, already turning his focus back to his monitor.

But the thought lingered, catching like a burr in his mind, tugging at him with small, relentless hooks. No one had given him anything for Valentine’s Day – no soft-spoken confessions, no blushing declarations with trembling hands and gift-wrapped tokens. There had been no shyly offered gestures for him to downplay, no dramatic moments requiring his polite reassurance: “No, no, please, there’s really no need for all of that.” Nothing.

Except… there had been.

The memory surfaced slowly, a faint glimmer in the fog of his overworked mind, before it crashed into him with the force of a truck on the freeway. One moment he was scrolling through a deposition; the next, his pulse skipped, his hands frozen over the keyboard as the realization unraveled in merciless detail.

The elevator.

You’d both been in it that morning – was it really a month ago, now? – him juggling loose files and mentally compiling an impossible to-do list. You’d handed him a small box, your voice soft but steady, and said, in a way he thought was oddly shy for you, “Thought you might like these.”

He’d thanked you automatically, his tone clipped with the reflex to bury the ridiculous warmth that kindled in his chest, before all but sprinting through the entryway doors. He hadn’t even realized it was Valentine’s Day then, hadn’t stopped to consider the gift as anything more than one of your many small kindnesses that were always his undoing.

You were thoughtful like that. Always had been. The spare umbrella you’d pressed into his hands during last year’s rainy season. The mugs of instant coffee you’d offered during late-night power outages when the dim hallway emergency lights turned the corridor into an impromptu meeting ground.

You, who never made him feel like his exhaustion was something to apologize for, even when he collapsed into your shared conversations like a marionette with its strings cut.

You, who had been the quiet balm to so many of his sorriest days.

And somehow, he’d forgotten.

The box had ended up buried under a week’s worth of neglected paperwork by mid-morning that day, forgotten until a rare, unhurried moment between consults. When he finally opened it, he’d been greeted by chocolates arranged with precision that could only come from care. Not the haphazard, store-bought variety, but something deliberate – each flavor attuned to his preferences, each one a quiet nod to things he’d mentioned in passing, likely without even realizing you’d been listening.

He’d eaten them over the following days, savoring the indulgence but not the intention. The empty box, now stripped of its original purpose, sat on his desk, crammed with paperclips, pens, and a single stray thumbtack.

Hiromi leaned forward, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes as if he could blot out the creeping tide of guilt threatening to swallow him whole. The past month replayed in his mind, vivid in a way they never were before – a montage of your silences, the way your smiles had grown quieter, your usual warmth edged with something more cautious. He’d chalked it up to stress, bad timing, anything but what it really was: his own staggering obtuseness.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” he muttered suddenly, his head falling back against the chair as he twisted sideways, fixing his beleaguered coworker with a look that bordered on desperation.

The younger man froze mid-step, clearly debating the safest answer. “Uh…”

“I like my job a lot, sir,” he hedged, after a moment too long.

Hiromi let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Forget it. Go enjoy your dinner.”

The man didn’t wait to be told twice. The door clicked shut, and Hiromi was left alone in the oppressive quiet of his office, slumped in his chair, staring at a crack in the ceiling like it held answers.

God, he was an idiot.

Because the truth was, he noticed things about you, and he wasn’t used to being so perceptive about anything but work. The way your apartment light stayed on well past midnight, the faint glow visible from the sliver beneath your door. The way you hummed to yourself in the hallway, just barely audible, your voice low and private – except he was always listening for it, attuned to it, lingering by his own door in case he might "happen" to step out at the same time as you.

He’d been so careful not to overstep, so committed to keeping his distance, convinced that somehow, you’d notice him the way he noticed you. Maybe he’d been too subtle. Standing in the same spot every night, cigarette after cigarette, the nicotine rush indistinguishable from the pleasure gleaned from moments he stole with you. And now?

Now he owed you.

Big time.

Hiromi shoved back from his desk, grabbing his coat and his phone in one motion. His fingers fumbled over the search bar as he walked, half-blindly typing: “last-minute White Day gifts.”

Jewelry? Too much. Flowers? Too predictable. He swore under his breath, shoving the phone back into his pocket. He’d figure it out when he got there. Something would speak to him. He didn’t have time to second-guess himself anymore.

Not about you. Hiromi sprinted through the office, his coat slipping from one shoulder, tie askew as he lunged for the elevator button. When the doors stalled, he snarled a sharp curse, bouncing on his heels, as though sheer impatience could force them to hurry. The moment he hit the street, the cold air stung his face, jarring him into focus. His breath fogged in frantic bursts as he dodged through the evening crowd, weaving between briefcases and backpacks with a single refrain pounding in his skull: Weeks, Hiromi. You’ve had weeks.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this – racing to fix what he’d fumbled, clutching at something he should’ve noticed was already slipping away. You’re a grown man, not some clueless teenager. But that was exactly what he felt like as he stumbled into the nearest store, his heart sinking the moment he stepped inside.

It was carnage.

The shelves had been picked clean by people far more organized, thoughtful, and prepared than he’d ever managed to be. Half-empty displays of gaudy packaging mocked him from every aisle. Cheap chocolates in crushed boxes. Plush bears with matted fur that looked like they’d been stepped on. The sad, plastic sheen of leftover trinkets that no one with an ounce of dignity would ever gift to someone they actually cared about.

Hiromi ran a hand through his hair, pulling at the roots in frustration as he paced the aisles like a trapped animal. His brain, which had spent the day sluggishly dragging its feet, was now overcompensating – overthinking everything in the worst possible way.

What if she hates this? What if she thinks it’s insulting? What if this just makes everything worse?

He could picture it now: your face falling in polite disappointment, your soft, "Oh, you didn’t have to," laced with the kind of subtext that screamed you really shouldn’t have.

No. That wasn’t an option.

Hiromi doubled back for the third time, his footsteps echoing in the near-empty store. His phone buzzed with an email reminder of the job he’d abandoned, and he resisted the urge to hurl it into the nearest display of cheap candles. He grabbed at something – not because it felt right, but because he was out of time and out of options.

It wasn’t great. Hell, it wasn’t even good. But it was something.

And the rest? The rest would just have to be a groveling apology. A way to explain himself without coming off like a total asshole, to let you know he wasn’t the man you probably thought he was after weeks of appearing apathetic.

It would have to be enough.

He clutched the bag to his chest as he jogged out of the store, and started making his dash for home.

Maybe, if he was lucky, the gesture would mean more than the thing itself. Maybe.

The evening air burned in his lungs as Hiromi sprinted down the sidewalk, the soles of his dress shoes slapping against the pavement with a rhythm as erratic as his breathing. A suit, he learned – rather painfully – was not designed for anything more strenuous than a brisk walk.

His tie had long since loosened lest it choke his already struggling airway, and his coat flapped behind him like a cape, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not when lady serendipity smiled upon him with pity when he saw you just ahead, reaching for the brassy bar of the building's entry door.

“Wait! Wait!” You froze mid-step at the sound of your name, sharp and startling, ricocheting off the concrete walls. Turning quickly, you caught sight of Hiromi – half-bent over, hands braced against his knees as he dragged in air a few short steps below you. “Are you okay?” The question slipped from your tongue before it even rooted in your brain, concern knotting your brows as you took in the disheveled sight of him.

Hiromi straightened, not quite gracefully, his chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. “I realized—” he began, words forced out between gulps of air, one hand lifting to clutch a small plastic bag that swayed pitifully against his trembling fingers. “I realized – hah I’m out of shape – I never properly thanked you for your Valentine’s gift.” The admission caught you entirely off guard.

“Oh.” Your voice came out faint, startled, and entirely inadequate to convey your sudden tangle of emotions. Relief mixed with confusion, unraveling the anxious knots you’d carried for weeks.

“I’m a complete and utter ass,” Hiromi barreled on, his words tumbling over each other in his haste. “Truly, an irredeemable ass. The chocolates? Fucking stellar.” He swallowed, wetting his throat that stuck itself closed from the cold air sucked down his windpipe. “But I hope you can forgive me for my… my ass-ery.”

Despite yourself, a laugh escaped, and the tension in your shoulders eased. Your hand dropped from the door to more casually clasp your wrist in front of you. “Your… ass-ery?” “Yes,” he deadpanned, though the corner of his mouth twitched. “It’s a clinical diagnosis, I’m afraid.” You shook your head, smiling now as it was always so easy to do as he thrust the bag toward you. “Here. I—well, it’s not much, and honestly, it’s terrible, but…” He rubbed the back of his neck, eyes locked on the bag rather than you. “I thought you deserved something. And an apology.” Your heart warmed, then grew hotter still, a supernova blooming in your chest until you were certain you must be a brilliant viewing hazard. Oh my god, this is happening, this is really happening— Curious, you peeked into the bag…

To find a small potted cactus, squat and prickly, nestled beside a tin of mints.

You stared at the contents, your brain valiantly attempting to connect dots that refused to align. Then, slowly, you looked back up at Hiromi, blinking as the sheer absurdity of it all began to take shape. “Hiromi…” you started, your voice dragging slightly, in perfect sync with the slow crawl of your eyebrows knitting together. “What am I looking at right now?” His throat bobbed as he swallowed, his discomfort manifesting in the faint flush creeping up from the open collar of his shirt. “They were out of flowers,” he said, a little too quickly, his tone and expression both pleaded for understanding. “Cacti are… supposed to be hardy. Low maintenance. Practical.”

Your lips parted, but no sound came out, your gaze drifting helplessly back to the cactus like it might somehow offer an explanation. Finally, your eyes narrowed on the tin of mints, holding it up as if demanding it speak for itself. “And these? Am I being politely told I have bad breath? Should I…?” You gestured vaguely toward your mouth, your deadpan delivery sharpened by the incredulous lift of your brow. “What? No! Of course not!” Hiromi’s wide-eyed horror was immediate, followed by a sigh that bordered on despair. “They were out of decent chocolates too, if you can believe that. All the ones left looked like they’d been stepped on or…” His nose scrunched slightly. “...or licked, probably.” It all hit you square in the chest then, and you couldn’t hold back the laugh that burst out. It rang across the sidewalk, echoing against the walls, and for a fleeting moment, Hiromi looked almost dazed, like the sound itself had knocked him off balance. “Hiromi…” You shook your head, trying to catch your breath as you gestured vaguely at the gifts still cradled in your hands. “A cactus and breath mints. I don’t even know where to start with that—”

His lips twitched, the faintest hint of a smile tugging at the corners, and he ran a hand through his sweat-dampened hair, ruffling the stubborn strands to fall in hooks over his forehead with a self-deprecating snort. “You’re not supposed to start. You’re supposed to forgive me for being an idiot, and let me take you out for dinner.” You looked up from the strange gifts cradled in your palms, meeting his gaze. His face was still flushed, his tie hanging on for dear life over his shoulder, and his chest rose and fell unevenly, but there was something so earnest in the way he looked at you – like he would and did run all the way across the city just to say this. “I’m going to put these… thoughtful gifts inside,” you said, the sickle curve of your smile applying a damning edge to the teasing lilt in your voice.

You turned to head upstairs, but hesitated, the words catching on the tip of your tongue. Your pulse thrummed, and for a moment, you felt suspended – caught between the weight of your nerves and the feather-light hope fluttering just beneath them. Before you could second-guess yourself, the question tumbled out. “Do you… want to go to the izakaya a few blocks over?” For a moment, Hiromi simply stared, wide-eyed and stunned like you’d offered him the key to salvation. His stillness stretched the seconds thin, and then – bit by bit as he finally seemed to believe you – the rigidity in his frame unraveled, replaced by something altogether softer and breathtaking in its sincerity. “Oh thank god,” he said, frayed at the edges and incredulous. He cleared his throat straightening with a sheepish cant of his head. “Yes, I’d like that. A lot.” The way he looked at you then – with such gratitude and appreciation – sent your heart into a clumsy somersault. It wasn’t all that different from how he’d looked at you all along during those late night smoke breaks or slow traipses down the hall. Maybe you were a fool too for not noticing sooner. “Okay,” you replied, your smile curling so wide onto your face in a way that made it impossible to even try to play coy. “Yeah! Yeah—okay… give me a few minutes!”

Hiromi stepped aside to let you pass. He watched until you disappeared into the building, his calm, composed exterior holding steady until the door clicked shut behind you. Only then did the cracks appear – his breath shuddered out in a rush, and he broke into a tight, eager circle of pacing on the sidewalk. His hands flexed at his sides, barely containing the bubbling energy before one shot up in a victorious fist pump. Yes. Yes! The word pulsed in his chest, each repeat hitting harder than the last. His grin stretched wide, a little lopsided, and he dragged his hand down his face to rein it in – unsuccessfully. Inside your apartment, your composure unraveled just as spectacularly. The door slammed behind you as you collapsed against it, pressing your back to the wood, chest heaving as the realization hit in waves. You were going on a date with Hiromi. Your breath caught, your hands flying up to cover your face as a giddy squeal escaped – a sound you didn’t even try to stifle. You slid down the door to sit on the floor, every inch of you vibrating with pure, unfiltered excitement. You quickly peeled yourself off the ground, your grin so wide it ached as you darted through your apartment. The little cactus found a place on the bedroom windowsill, perfectly positioned for sunlight, but your thoughts had already wandered far beyond it. You regarded the mints, staring at them clutched in your palm, your thoughts spinning out in a thousand directions. Dates. Late nights. The shape of his smile. His mouth. His mouth alone was an entirely separate line of thought that sent your stomach into freefall. Your fingers lingered on the tin before you flipped it open, popping a mint in your mouth with a little hum of delight at the cool burst of peppermint. You tucked the rest into your bag with a flicker of a grin that might’ve been a little too self-satisfied, but who could blame you? Just in case you needed them.

#jjk #higuruma hiromi #hiromi higuruma x reader #higuruma x you #icymi <3

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wibben · 3 months ago

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Oh.....oh Teri.....this should be in a museum and you really just dropped this on tumblr.com on a sunday *feral noises*

Quiet moments

#jjk #nanami kento #nanami art #nanami fanart #jujutsu kaisen nanami #artists on tumblr

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wibben · 3 months ago

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Rain Check

When the flu forces a rain check on date night, Higuruma brings "date night" to you.

↳ pairing: hiromi higuruma x fem. reader

↳ wc: 7k

‘I’m so sorry. A bit sick and can’t make it tonight. Rain check?’

He responded almost instantly.

‘No worries at all! Do you need anything :(?’

‘Just need some rest!’ you typed back, trying to imbue the words with a breezy, casual tone, as if you weren’t on the precipice of death.

The truth was, you were dying.

But Hiromi didn’t need to know that.

Your phone buzzed again.

‘OK. Let me know if you need me.’

You smiled a little, despite yourself, then groaned and rolled back over. The room spun. The fever tugged at you, deep and relentless, and you let it coax you back to merciful unconsciousness.

Hiromi had been looking forward to tonight.

So he asked for a second date. And then a third.

But understanding and acceptance were two different things.

Only your door knob turned with no resistance, nudged open with the slightest pressure of his palm and the weight of the bag. You were always good about locking your door.

His voice was softer when he called your name again, cautious and questioning in the dead, unanswering air.

You were here, and now he was too. And, he hoped, that was significantly better off than how you started – he could work with that.

Hiromi, in your kitchen. Hiromi, in his sweatpants and rolled up sleeves, barefoot in the soft glow of the stove light, holding a bowl of— You squinted.

Except.

Hiromi clicked his tongue, unimpressed.

Hiromi exhaled through his nose and gave your shoulder a firm, pointed squeeze. “Nope. We’ll be doing none of that.”

A sound bubbled up from your chest, too weak to be called a proper laugh but a close approximation of one. “Flu monster?”

“You should hear yourself,” he teased, gaze soft but amused. “It’s like a death rattle.”

His voice rumbled somewhere above your head. “I’m staying, by the way.”

You slumped, your body had long since given up on full coordination and was far too weak to wage the war you wanted. “Hiromi—”

You stared at him, groggy, and rheumy-eyed. “Why?”

He huffed, tilting his head back against the couch, eyes slipping shut as though already digging in for the night. “In case you need something, obviously.

You thought about telling him no. You thought about insisting.

You didn’t… and why would you, when you wanted him to stay, too?

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