#neighbor romance
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lexxwithbooks · 1 year ago
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📖: 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝑼𝑭𝑭 (𝐻𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑙𝑡𝑜𝑛 𝐻𝑖𝑔ℎ #1) 📚🪨💘
✍🏽: 𝐊𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐊𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫
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silly--fangirl · 5 months ago
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oh i just ADORE me some good neighbor romance
like you're telling me there's this absolute hunk of a man who lives next door??? and i meet him without really leaving my house?? sounds like a dream to me
(and he'll rail me?? in both of our flats?? SIGN ME TF UP)
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yandere-writer-momo · 8 months ago
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Yandere Short Stories:
Let Me In
Yandere Francis Mosses (Doppelgänger) x GN Reader
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Swish. Swish.
You leaned back as your foot steadily rocked the cushioned seat of your desk chair from side to side. It was yet another boring day of being the doorman for this apartment complex. Yet you couldn’t help the shudder run down your spine from time to time since you constantly felt under surveillance. Then again, perhaps you were going slightly insane from working such long hours in such a narrow space? There was no way someone would stalk you of all people… right?
You let out a low chuckle at your thoughts. You recently felt as if your days melt together. It was the same routine every single day. Stop the doppelgängers from entering the apartment complex. Check their IDs and entry requests. Call their room. You were tired of this consistent repetitive pattern! You wanted some excitement for once-
“Hello.” You jumped to attention when a handsome man stood before you. Your eyes nearly shot out of your head at the blood that stained his face. Was it macabre of you to find that attractive. “I just got off work and I’d like to call it a day in my apartment.”
“Y-you have a little.” Your breath hitched when he wiped the blood off with his thumb and gave you the faintest of smiles.
“Ah. I hadn’t realized I made a mess earlier. Thank you.” The man then handed you his ID and entry request. Francis Mosses was it? He was indeed a looker and his ID checked out… but he wasn’t on today’s list.
“I’m sorry, Francis. You’re not on the list today-“ you scream when he slammed his hands on the window. His half-lidded eyes now wide open and bloodshot. This man no longer looked like an angel, but rather a demon. A demon that would no doubt rip you apart and swallow you whole.
“I’m not on the list? I’m sure you could let me in.” You quickly push the emergency button but his large hands grab the metal doors before you can shut them completely. You gulp when you spot the veins bulging from his gray hands. “Haven’t you been bored lately? You always look so lonely at your desk… I’m sure I could show you a good time.”
Well, Francis wasn’t wrong- no! You can’t endanger the residents! You dialed the D.D.D’s number with haste which made the doppelgänger sigh.
“Fine! Have it your way.” Francis casted you one last look. “But I will be back. And you will let me in. Remember, I’m always watching.”
You deflated like a ballon and sunk back into your chair. Your body felt as if your bones had completely melted from how scared you were… you’ve never encountered such an aggressive doppelgänger before…
“You have contacted the D.D.D. A group of agents has been sent to your building.” The garbled voice on the other end of the line brought you back down to reality.
You sighed and leaned forward to put your face in your palms. What on earth did Francis mean that he would always be watching?
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jojikawa · 7 months ago
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Beauty and the Beast
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An event where you are a woman in the 50s trying to turn the head of your neighbor, Francis Mosses when you are stalked and pursued by his evil counterpart.
Art by ilameys
Zettai Zetsumei • Co shu Nie
Word Count: 5.7k
⚠️: DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT ♥ Manhandling, Slight body horror descriptions, descriptions of blood, himbo!doppelgänger!Francis Mosses, Yandere Behavior, Mentions of Stalking, sexualization of the female MC by Fake Francis, SMUT(CNC, mentions of a "rape kit"), and monster cock.
I write for free, but if you wanna further support me > Ko-Fi 🎀
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Life was somewhat boring for you as a woman in the 50s. Despite being sought after by a lot of the men in your apartment complex, you had your heart set on one man. You only got to see him once a day. Francis Mosses. When he would deliver milk to your door in the morning. No matter how cute or cherry you were, it seemed like his mind was set on other things. The man always looked tired but you thought he was handsome no matter what. Maybe even more handsome…it was just something about hot men being tired that made them so much hotter.
You had hoped that eventually, he’d notice you and finally take you on a date!
But that hope soon faded when you read the newspapers. They talked about how doppelgängers are becoming a lot more frequent and the D.D.D. would be installing new units everywhere to ensure that no evil counterparts are making their way into the homes of others and killing people. You were able to tell if this made you feel safer or a lot more scared. What if someone made a mistake…?
Well, you didn’t have a chance to feel anything really, as the D.D.D. was extremely secretive about this kind of threat. After some time, it became normalized and it soon left your mind. The Doorman job seemed to be pretty effective as you had never seen any monsters before and were very much alive. It was rumored that the creatures would murder and eat any person they encountered if they succeeded in passing as humans. This is another reason you had your heart set on Francis. You felt as though he could protect you at a time like this. Maybe it was naive of you but after all, you were just a girl.
“Good Morning.”
Upon hearing the small knock at your door, you went to greet him. Francis stood tall, rather confused about you coming to get your bottled milk so quickly.
“Oh, good morning…” He replied flatly, gripping the strap of his milk bag. You thought that maybe he had a mutual crush on you and was too shy to act on it. So, you could take that step for him.
“How are you this morning? I hope that life is agreeing with you today.” You stepped outside of your apartment door with your glass of milk in hand. Francis shrugged. “I suppose it is.” He then yawned before saying “What’s wrong? Are you looking for another?”
You blinked. “Huh?” Your eyes then darted down to your hands. “O-Oh…sure.” You smiled attractively, causing him to break eye contact with you. He reached into his milk carrier and revealed and took out another. “You’re only allowed to get one every day but you can have mine.” He walked up to you and placed the bottle into your free hand.
“Th-Thanks!”
“Don’t mention it.”
After he disappeared around the corner, you were filled with joy! That interaction was such a good sign. He gave you his milk bottle. You had to make him something for dinner tonight as a gift!
Thunk!
You almost jumped at the sound of glass falling on the carpet at the far end of the hallway behind you. It looked like an empty milk bottle if you squinted hard enough. There was a shadow as well. It made you feel uneasy and quickly made you retreat into your home.
You wanted to try seeing if you could have more time with Francis. There was a job opening for the D.D.D. Doorman of your building and you instantly took it. Being able to meet with Francis when he wasn’t busy might have your conversations with him take a turn for the better. You really appreciated his selfless gesture. So, seeing him at least twice a day would make your life so much brighter. Francis was the complete package. Tall, handsome, quiet, and most of all, soft-spoken. You’d be a good wife to him.
On the first day of the job, you didn’t receive any proper training. You were given an informational video and a set of instructions that you scrambled to memorize as a long line of your neighbors awaited their inspection outside. The job was easy at first and you did it well. It was a chore but those are easy. You let in the right people and you called the D.D.D. when you found a doppelganger like you were instructed to. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, Francis didn’t pay you any mind. You gave him a soft smile through the glass before asking him about his day. 
“I hope work is treating you well.” You pitched your voice up to sound cuter. Your graceful hands moved swiftly as you sifted through the many layers of documents, trying to organize them before your next neighbor. “Yeah, I suppose.” He answered, blinking rather slowly. Your smile widened. “Any days off soon? I’d like to see you outside of your uniform.” You winked at him and he just shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Well, maybe, sometime after your hard work, you tell me a day you’d think you would be free?” 
You waited with anticipation for his response. He seemed rather confused and it was rather adorable. Then he said “I don’t really know. I think I’m busy but I’ll let you know if that changes.”
Your smile faltered just a little but you were good at faking emotions. “Oh, no worries.” You waved him off in a playful manner before pressing the button to allow him inside. Your shift ended and you thought that you should probably get to making that dinner for him as a ‘thank you’ for the free milk. As you began to clean up, the pressure of your job began to set in. This wasn’t something that you could just quit if Francis were to reject you. Ignoring all the unexplainable noises, the dark figures, and the constant feeling of being watched, it would be very awkward seeing him every day after that.
It was a new day. Francis came to check into the building and you let him go without chatting with him because you didn’t want to seem like a bother. But…then you saw him again.
“Francis?” You cutely tilted your head. The way he looked at you was much different than usual. The Francis you knew could barely make meaningful eye contact with you but right now he had no problem burning holes into your skull with his eyes. Not only that but he was visibly bigger as well. Taller and more masculine. His arms were big and veiny. This was NOT Francis Mosses.
“I-ID…?” You gave a nervous half-smile as you tried to hide your stutter. The humanoid creature gawked, a subtle sense of happiness washing over its face the longer it stayed there. “Don’t have it on me.” It replied plainly. You picked up the clipboard before exing out the box that was labeled “ID.”
“W-Well, you seem to look a lot like someone who’s already checked in. Please, give me a moment to confirm.” You flashed it a close-eyed smile. Upon seeing it, the fake Francis moved closer to the window, fogging it up with its mouth breathing.
You pressed the big red button to close the shutter before dialing the number to the D.D.D. 
The representative told you someone would be over right away to dispose of the doppelgänger. It only took about a minute before they’d arrive. Normally, the shutter would open on its own after being reset by the D.D.D. member but for some reason, it didn’t You figured that now would be a good time to open it to help the last neighbors but when you did, you were not met with the hazmat suit you were so familiar with. 
In front of you was the same fake Francis from before, now covered in some blood. His expression was one of annoyance and the veins in his arms were pulsating as if he were trying to contain some kind of anger.
“E-Excuse me, but you need to—!”
“Let me in.”
Your heart dropped. It talked! And it sounded just like Francis too. 
You shook your head. “N-No! I’m not letting a monster in.” You reached for the number to re-dial the number again.
“But I think you look so pretty today. You wore that just for me, huh? I’d love to t-tear it off of you.” The creature’s neck involuntarily cracked its neck, twisting it in a demonic way. You screamed at the sight, pressing the button once more to close the shutters so that you wouldn’t have to see it. As they went down, the doppelgänger tried to stop it by putting his hand under it. It got caught in the track, causing it to get stuck on the track and it was open halfway.
“Come on, Darling, I know you’re not about to call those bastards again. I don’t want to have to hurt anyone else.” The large man-creature crouched down. You could see his fanged canine teeth poking out of his mouth. You backed away from the window with the telephone in hand.
3312…
You listened to the dial tone for a few seconds before the receptionist answered.
“Hello?”
“P-Please send help!” You cried over the phone. Tears began to spill out of your eyes upon hearing the squeal of metal as the predator stretched and bent it to his will. The glass was the only thing left that could stop him from entering.
You saw how abnormally long his tongue was when it glided over his lips. “I just want to taste you…”
The receptionist dispatched another group of workers to help dispose of the doppelgänger. They arrived almost instantly. It was only then that the fake Francis moved away from the window. You sighed in relief, trying to calm yourself down from the events that transpired. You ran over to the tempered glass. The mental door looked like sheet paper.
You saw no trace of the Hazmat people but you also didn’t see the fake Francis anymore. You quickly gathered your things and rushed to leave. You opened the door to let yourself out. You planned to run to your room and lock the door but as soon as you had left the room, you bumped into a stiff, toned chest. The figure grabbed you by your neck and forced you to look at them. The gloved hand was covered in blood and it stained your skin and the collar of your dress.
“Where do you think you’re going, Princess?”
His grip around your throat was so tight that you weren’t able to form words. It was completely covered in blood and in its other hand was a knife dripping with blood as well. It kept the violence to one side of the room so that you weren’t able to see anything unless you completely left the screening room.
The light clank of the knife hitting the ground could be heard and its newly free hand grabbed your waist. The doppelgänger hugged you to its masculine chest. Its head rested itself on top of yours before it planted its nose in the crown of your head before inhaling your scent deeply. The blaring sound of the alarm continued to go off and it was deafening.
Your nose was overloaded with the scent of fresh blood. The pure shock didn’t let you resist his touch. His grip loosened and you dropped everything you had in your hands on the floor, staining it in with the red substance
“P-Please.”
You felt its large hand around the back of your neck and you feared that it would snap it and kill you any second. You held your breath as you felt it set the other hand on your waist as well, rubbing it gingerly.
It felt like the doppelgänger was sizing you up to see if you’d be a good enough meal for it.
“He-ey, beautiful. It's… okay…” 
The doppelgänger’s speech was somewhat disconnected but it was fluid for the most part. At first, it was clear he was a fake but the more he kept talking, the more it sounded like the real thing…like it was learning in real time.
Your heart rate accelerated when you felt its hand travel ever so slowly from your waist to the collar of your dress. The inhuman smile on its face widened and it suddenly ripped the cloth that covered your torso. You gasped, instinctively covering your now exposed bra.
You wiggled out of its grip and used the opportunity to run. You kicked off your pumps and ran barefoot to your apartment. All you could do was hope that more of the D.D.D. would come and solve the issue before anyone else could get hurt. The emergency alarm was still going off so the authorities should be there soon.
When you arrived at your door, you tried to scramble to look for your keys so that you could get inside but…
…you remembered that you dropped them along with the rest of your possessions.
The sound of heavy footsteps approaching behind you. The large shadow engulfed your smaller form.
“Allow me.” The stranger said, calmly. Their large fist went through the door handle, shattering the lock and making it completely useless. You were too shocked to try running again. It found you.
The doppelganger shoved you against the door, swinging it open and causing you to fall forward inside of your home. You hit the floor with a soft but swift thud. “I see the way you look at him.” Its voice was laced with venom—anger but left more to be desired. It was playing with you awfully long for a creature that was trying to kill you.
“But you’d never look at me that way…”
The Fake Francis entered the apartment making sure to secure the door behind it so that you couldn’t run anymore. You cried and whimpered as it took its sweet time pushing your bookcase in front of the door so no one would intervene with what was supposed to happen next.
“I-I don’t know what you’re—” You couldn’t even finish your sentence as it smashed its lips into yours. Its tongue was like that of a serpent, slipping its way into your mouth. You tried to push it away but any attempts just resulted in your lips connecting once more. It was too strong. 
You were terrified but it passed so much for the real Francis.
“Tell me you don’t like it ‘n I’ll stop.” It whispered into your mouth before it French kissed you once more. You kissed it back, unable to resist his appearance any longer. When it pulled away, a string of saliva connected between both of your mouths. It’s warm breath hits the surface of your face, eyes full of lust and horror.
It’s soft lips attached themselves to your neck, biting and sucking until your skin slowly began turning red. “Mmm.” It hummed deeply, traveling lower and lower until it reached the cavern between your breasts. “You’re sensitive here, aren’t you?” It placed kisses in the valley of your chest, waiting for a reply. You were unable to form words at this point. It wanted to ravage you and steal your innocence. It took your idleness as consent, continuing on with satisfying itself and by extension, satisfying you.
It took the delicate hand you had been using to drive a wedge between the both of you. You thought that at this point it was going to break your arm! You squeezed your eyes shut, ready to endure the pain but…it didn’t. You felt the heated bulge beneath it’s bloodied white trousers. It throbbed. 
That’s when it finally clicked for you. It wasn’t playing with you like you were food. It wasn’t trying to taste you and pick it’s teeth with your bones. It wanted to be with you. To breed you.
“I—ah~♡!” You bit down on your lip to contain the pretty moans that left your mouth. Your bra was removed, fully exposing your breasts. Its tongue touched the tip of your nipple and its mouth enveloped over your entire areola. It licked and sucked on the bud until it was nice and hard. The other hand was subtly slipped under your dress.
It took barely any strength at all to rip the fabric, showing how inappropriately wet you’d become from this activity. It craved the essence that was oozing from your tiny cunt.
At the feeling of the cold wind, you brought your legs together just to have them forced apart again. The creature made you feel so small and vulnerable. It used force when it felt necessary but overall, it was….soft. Licking, kissing, biting but no drawing blood, taste, loving.
It salivated at your legs, raising one and nuzzling the side of its face into the smooth skin. “So…gorgeous.” It pulled you forward. “When I saw you, I knew I wanted you.”
“Y-You did…?” You squeaked. It’s touch sent goosebumps from your limp to the rest of your body. “Two years I’ve been watching you. It was so damn annoying seeing you talk to that piece of meat.”
Piece of meat?
“I don’t know who you mean.” You shied away from the perfect creature. Could it mean…
“F-Francis?” You knitted your eyes together in confusion.
“Yes—HIM!” The doppelgänger dropped your leg and pulled you by your thighs to its crotch. “…I could never decide what skin would be the best to pursue you in. But then I’d see the way you look at him.” Pre-cum was beginning to show from its member inside. You could feel the wet fabric on the lips of your hot cunt. “So, I became him…but better.”
You heard the subtle unzipping sound of the pants and it took out its thick cock. It was larger than normal and didn't look like the standard male genitalia. You’d need to use both hands to hold it.
There was no denying this thing could perfectly replicate a human man. Before you could even react, the big “man” picked you up by your hair.
“Get on your knees.” He commanded and you felt obligated to obey him. You’ve never been in a situation where you were being held up by a man like this.
“I’m gonna split you in half with this cock.” He pushed its large tip against your cheek, straining it with warm cum. “Open your mouth.”
Your lips parted for a moment but you hesitated. There was no way that whole thing could fit into your mouth. Your eyes traveled up to his for guidance. He only stared down at you with hard, tired eyes. The corner of his mouth tugged upward into a smirk.
“I said…open your mouth.”
He spoke through his teeth as if it were a threat. You were reluctant but tried to ease it in. You kissed his tip, causing him to grunt and tighten his fist around your hair. “Open.” He growled, yanking your head back. His cock was so close to your face that you could truly take in its side. It was nearly the length of your skull. 
You opened your mouth out of fear and he shoved it inside. He was kind enough to let you get used to it in your throat by going soft and slow…or maybe he was just distracted by the imprint showing on your throat. 
You grabbed his hips to keep yourself from falling backward. Even a bit of force made you lose your balance. “Good girl.” He sighed, relaxing into you, pushing the limits by pushing it deeper. Your choking and gagging only made him feel pleasure.
“You struggling with my dick in your mouth is so hot.” You heard him mutter under his breath. Your eyes began to water from the choking, causing tears to carry mascara down your cheeks.
“Keep sucking.” He fucked into your throat and gentle too. “I’m close.”
 Both of his hands found themselves on the back of your head. He sped up his pace until a loud groan emitted from his chest and a mysterious liquid found its way down your throat.
The doppelgänger let go of your hair. You fell back on your bottom and he crouched down. “Hey.” He called, grabbed both sides of your face with one hand. He squeezed your cheeks together. “Swallow.”
You swallowed what was left and once he knew it was in your belly, his lips crashed into yours. His tongue wormed its way into your mouth and explored every cavern.
You felt yourself get lifted again but this time to your feet. He walked you over to your dining table and shoved you into it. “Bend over.”
You didn’t really get a choice. When you tried to stand, he forced you down to the table with his hand on the back of your head. 
You expected him to say something, but he stayed silent. You felt him explore your backside from your hips to your exposed ass. The wind was so cold but his hands were so warm.
He chuckled darkly, spreading your ass cheeks and sticking his shaft in between. His dick was so much bigger than you that you would definitely have a belly bulge because of it. He wanted to experience it for himself.
You waited with silent anticipation for him what he would do next. You weren’t too sexually active anymore because you wanted to reserve that for the real Francis, if you ever got the chance with him, so you were really nervous about having something so big inside.
“Uah!” You squeaked, feeling a wet, warm muscle enter the deepest part of your cunt. It was his tongue!
You whipped your head around to see that his face was buried in you from behind. “Mmm.” You heard him hum vibrations into you. He consumed all of your juices as they came out. It must’ve tasted so good coming from a pretty human like you.
With every moan and whimper that left your mouth, it made his dick grow harder and harder. He didn’t stop until you had creamed all over his tongue. So much came out that it got all over his face too.
“I-Is that it? Is that what you want…?” You asked, but you were only ignored.
“Pick a hole.”
“Wh-wha—“
“Pick a hole, or I will.”
Pick…a hole…?
His large thumb massaged your asshole while his knuckles, now sleek with your cream, was stimulating your pussy.
“Um…I—“ 
“Both it is!”
Your eyes widened. “Wait, what?!”
You felt his thumb sink deep into your ass while he struggled to get his large tip into your pussy. “Damn you’re fucking tight.” He growled through his teeth. His free hand grabbed your ass, fingers sinking in so deep they’d leave marks. 
“W-Wait, you have to go slow!” You cried, face heating up from being touched in such filthy ways. “I am.” He grumbled, pushing the limits of your vagina by forcing himself inside. Despite going at the pace of a snail, the pain of trying to fit himself inside didn’t decrease at all. You helplessly clawed at the table beneath you. It didn’t matter how wet you were. He was too big.
It took a moment but he was able to get it. It slipped in with much ease on his end but the difference inside made you gasp so hard you needed to cover your mouth.
The doppelgänger began thrusting without warning, quickly overstimulating you. You could feel him in your stomach too. You reach back to push him off of you but he just grabbed your arm and kept it. There wasn’t much you could do to get someone this big off of you. You would only take it.
“P-Please…I can’t take it!” You gapped out, drool escaped your mouth as you tried to form words. He was fucking you so hard you couldn’t even think. All that could be heard around the room was the lewd slapping of his filled balls against the bottom of your pussy. 
“Beg for it then. Say you love me.” His breath hitched. “Say you want me and I’ll let you go.”
“I—“ Slap! 
You tried to speak. “I wa—“ Slap!
It seemed that when you tried to comply with him, he’d remove the hand playing with your asshole to leave a rough, skin-reddening slap on your ass. Your struggling amused him. He couldn’t help but smile.
The doppelgänger has been stalking you for so long. It was hard getting into your apartment normally because of the last doorman but he couldn’t resist you once you were sitting at that desk.
“What’s wrong?” He teased, his deep voice going soft. “My dick isn’t in your mouth anymore…so what’s the issue?” He chuckled. “Beg.”
“I want you!” You blurted out.
“You…want me? Say there’s no one else. Say you love me!” It was like music to his ears, really. It was helping him reach his climax.
“I…I love you—“
“FUCK!”
Your belly bulge quickly became bigger as his cum painted your walls and womb. Even with his dick growing more flaccid, he continued to fuck his cum into you so that you both knew who you belonged to now. Tears spilled out of your eyes as you squirted onto his cock, mixing your juices together.
“I love you too, Princess. More than you could ever imagine—“ Before he could finish, his ears perked up almost like an animal. His attention turned towards your door that he had destroyed before. “Here they come.” He muttered, putting his member back into his pants.
You weakly lifted yourself from the table. Your hand placed itself tight below your navel. It was so sore now. “Who’s coming…? What are you talking about…?”
The doppelgänger ignored you, its horns flesh and bones began contorting and changing color. Its physique turned from that of a huge masculine man to the familiar form of that of a D.D.D. member. Yellow suit and all. 
It ran to the door, opening it, and sticking its head out. “I found her, she's in here!” Its voice changed to a generic man as well. Not at all like the deep gruff from before.
Your legs felt like jelly, you fell to the ground as soon as you were able to stand. They were numb from the pleasure, leaving you unable to walk.
What happened next went by as a blur. The D.D.D. Reinforcement Team took you to a hospital where you were taken care of and given rape kit. You were unable to refuse it once the forensics team found semen at the scene. In order to maintain faith in the D.D.D., your assault was largely covered up but only those who were in the apartment that day knew about it.
After the commotion of filing our paperwork and giving information, you were sent home. You didn’t sustain any life threatening injuries but you were asked to come in periodically to see how your body would react to having the semen of a doppelgänger inside of you…so now you were a bit of a test subject to them. You quit the job after that but you were quickly replaced by a new guy. 
You hadn’t seen the doppelgänger the entire time. Or at least, you thought you didn’t. You wanted to process the situation but you were more confused as to why it craved so much validation from you. It wanted you to say you loved it. It wanted you to say that you wanted it. It said that it’s been waiting two years to be this close to you. It looked like Francis.
You had just arrived back home. Carpenters quickly replaced your door before you got home and you decided to continue life as usual by making dinner for yourself. Your heart still aches from the fear you felt when you thought you were going to die. And so did your vagina. It didn’t bleed, thank god, but it was sore to the touch from how big that monster was.
“Man, I thought you’d never come back.”
You were alone in your kitchen when a voice emitted from behind you. The familiarity in the voice made your heart drop. You quickly turned around to see the doppelgänger from before, masquerading as Francis again.
“What are you doing here? What do you—“
“Shh, princess.” He strided through your small kitchen, stepping so close to you that you were against the counter with nowhere else to go. You placed your hands on his chest, giving you the illusion that you could push him away. He grabbed your arm by the wrist before kissing the inside of your palm. He kissed your fingers and then the back of your hand before making you cup his cheek, which he nuzzled into lovingly.
You wanted to rip your hand away but his grip was so strong. You blushed. Was it wrong to admit that he…it, was attractive? 
“Why didn’t you kill me and eat me? Why did you do that to me?” You questioned meekly. His eyes were closed, enjoying your warm touch with a smile before they opened. His eyes were like hunter's eyes. “Because I love you.” He replied flatly. 
“I don’t know what that means…” 
You opened your mouth to speak again but you were cut off by a knock at your door. 
“I’ll get it.” The doppelgänger quickly said and in a mere second, it shapeshifted to turn into…you. It was able to mimic you in all your glory, including the hickeys, bites and bruises from your attack.
“No!” You blurted out. “Don’t do that.”
The doppelgänger allowed you to move away from it and your arm fell to your side. You went to get the door but you made sure to check who it was before opening.
It was Francis!
“It’s him!” You hurried to your bedroom to find your cardigan to cover your tattered clothes before answering the door.
“Francis? What brings you here?” You forced a smile but your eyes looked just as tired as his. You couldn’t hide anything from him.
“I heard what happened. ‘m so glad you’re okay.” Francis sighed, quickly invading your personal space. He hugged you to his chest. You blinked “F-Francis…?”
“I felt all torn up when I thought you died but when I heard that you were just fine, I just had to come see you myself.” Your stomach burned with delight. Francis was worried about you?
Francis let go of you and you pulled away. His face was red like he was blushing and you couldn’t help but blush too. Your lips curled into a smile. “W-Well, I’m a lot tougher than I look.”
He wanted to smile back but he couldn’t. He saw the marks on your skin. You were hurt. “I know you are.” He masked his sadness with a weak smile. He rested his hand on your head and ruffled it a bit.
It would probably be inappropriate for him to admit that he’s actually had feelings for you all this time, so he’d save it for another day. Hearing the news about the doppelgänger through gossip during his job of going door to door made him realize he could lose you at any moment. But today, he settled with placing a kiss at the crown of your head. “Stay safe. I’ll check on you again later.”
For a moment, everything in your life went still. Even after he had walked away and left you standing there, it didn’t feel real. This more or less confirmed he had a crush on you as well. No man just does that and doesn’t see you as more than just a neighbor.
Your heart fluttered as you came back to reality. You slipped back inside of your home. You need to get cleaned up! You had to bathe and find something suitable just in case Francis wanted to come inside upon your next meeting.
But then….
“You look awfully happy.”
The doppelgänger was still here. You gulped, seeing his much bigger form. He grabbed the sides of your face with his hand again. He didn’t bother crouching because of your size difference, leaving you standing on the tips of your toes.
You were too shocked to try defending yourself, so he continued. “I saw everything so don’t even try to lie. That bastard is so lucky that I have to lay low until the D.D.D. gets their claws out of you or else I would’ve…”
“Don’t hurt him!” You tried to beat and punch his arm to get him off but he didn’t budge. “Why not?!”
“Because…I’ll be sad. And you don’t want me to be sad, do you?” Your voice was unlabeled and lacked confidence. It was a Hail Mary but you’d do anything to prevent Francis from getting hurt.
“Shit.” The doppelgänger let go of you, setting you back on your feet. It seemed…conflicted. He paced around your living room briefly. It had a soft spot for you but you could tell it has trouble processing emotions like a person. It was just imitating a person to get what it wanted.
“You don’t want him. You just wanna marry a guy. I’ll marry you.” 
You shook your head. “No. Y-You can’t. You’re not him.”
“Of course I am.” His expression became mischievous. A smirk settled on his handsome face. “You can even call me Francis in bed if it fancies you.” 
You felt your stomach do a flip!
“No! I’m not calling you that. Even though you look just like him…wh-what do I call you anyway…?” You retreated inward, hugging yourself and looking quite nervous as if the situation was beginning to dawn on you. You were currently desired by one of the most dangerous beings in the world.
“Francis.”
“Stop! I’m never using that name for you.” You got angry enough to shove him but he didn’t move an inch. You quickly realized that you shouldn’t push too hard or else it might change its mind and kill you. 
“Mmm….” You pursed your lips, avoiding eye contact with the monster. “Wh-What about Franz? Is that good enough for you…?”
Franz, huh?
“Perfect.”
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Tagged Folks: @z3r0art @chilifrylizard2
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celestie0 · 1 month ago
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gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]
in holy matriphony ch4. in a mother’s eyes
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ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)
ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, and have been taking care of your sick mother ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket to more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance plan in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.
ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity, mentions of cigarettes, depression/anxiety; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s
ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!
ᰔ chapter. 4/x
ᰔ words. 10k (omg a whole number...very sexy)
a/n. hellooo my ihm friends! hope you're all doing well. ahh i'm glad to finally be posting this chapter lolol. it's a littleee off tangent from what happens in ch3, but still has some important plot developments. it does dive into feelings of depression & anxiety, so just wanted to give a warning on that! but yea other than that i hope you enjoy and see you at the bottom!! :) also so sorry if there are errors i only had time to skim through it once :((
nav. ch1 :: ch2 :: ch3 :: ch4 :: ch5 (pending)
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“Just go ahead and sign right here for me.”
You take the pen from the hospice nurse’s hand. It’s cheap black plastic with a pink fuzzy pom pom attached to the end of it with peeling glue. 
Your eyes briefly flit across the paragraphs detailed in printed ink until your gaze lands on the highlighted lines at the bottom of the page. Your signature. Spouse’s signature.
“We’ll need to have your husband come here to sign the paperwork as well, since he’ll have to add your mother on his list of dependents, but we can certainly get started on expediting this process for you since the insurance has already been pre-approved,” the nurse tells you as she accepts your signed paperwork and then neatly tucks it into one of the compartment holders. 
The afternoon goes by smoothly, with your mother surprisingly patient as she sits in the waiting room while you wait for the nurses to formally show you to her new room.
You thought that you could put off putting her in hospice for a little longer, because in all honesty, you weren’t prepared to let her go just yet. You weren’t prepared to not have her in the house anymore. But lately, she’s been putting herself in lots of danger, like attempting to take her own medications when she does not know the correct dosing, and forgetting things on the stove when she attempts to cook.
But the last straw was when you came home from a very brief run to the grocery store at night a couple days ago to see a handful of your neighbors out on the front lawn with your mother at their side. She had apparently gotten out of the house and walked down the neighborhood, then fallen on the sidewalk but was unable to get up. When your neighbors had found her, a miracle as they were just coming home from dinner and caught sight of her in the illumination of their headlights, they tried to help her get up but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even tell the firefighters that came by to help her what her name was, or what year it was, or where she lived.
It was when you realized you couldn’t even keep her safe anymore that you had to let go.
“Is that a wedding ring?” your mother asks, pointing a trembling finger to it as she lays tucked inside her new hospice bed, “are you married?”
You glance down at the ring Gojo gave you in the courthouse, almost surprised to find that you were still wearing it in good faith. “Yes, mom. I am.”
“Why am I here?” she asks you, “I don’t want to be here.”
You stiffen a little. Although you were mentally preparing yourself to answer these questions, the preparation didn’t make it any easier. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just for a little short while, okay? The doctors want to run some tests on you.”
“Who are you married to?” she asks.
“To Satoru,” you tell her, “our neighbor.”
She lets out a small gasp. “The sweet boy who fixed our A/C?”
You roll your eyes. not sure why your mother has hyper fixated on that memory with Gojo when most days she’ll look at you like you’re a stranger. “Yes mom.”
“Oh, I like him,” she tells you with an affectionate nod. She hesitates slightly, wearisome of some other thought that flashes through her mind. “How long have you been married?”
You let out a small sigh. This is already a conversation you had with her a couple days ago, and it doesn’t feel good to lie to her. It was hard enough to do once, but to have to constantly lie to her over and over again over all the smallest things just so that she stays calm and safe and happy seems to drain you of all your energy and happiness you had left in your bones.
Little white lies, that’s what they are. Harmless ones. That’s what you tell yourself to absolve yourself of the guilt.
“I’ll come back soon, okay? I’ll tell you more about him some other day,” you say to her, speaking gently in the way an adult would speak to a child. The way she used to speak to you. You could never exactly pinpoint when those roles became reversed.
You finish discussing some more insurance matters with the front-desk nurse as she puts together a small folder of documents for you. While she works, you glance at the little counter shelf that includes a plethora of pamphlets on how to deal with the complicated feelings that arise from putting a loved one in hospice care, and dealing with the emotions of having a relative with advanced stage dementia. They are pretty brochures, lovingly creased at the folds as if looked through multiple times by people who walk in and out of this facility, but seemingly only few take them home. You slip one of each into your folder when the nurse hands it to you, manage the best smile possible, and then turn on your heel to head out the hospice doors.
The sun is setting outside as you take the walk back to your car, which was purposefully parked a half mile away to afford you the luxury of a melancholic stroll. Somehow, you feel like you’ve left a piece of yourself back at the hospice. A feeling you can’t quite shake from your bones.
Your feet stop walking somewhere along the sidewalk on their own, the street lights above you flickering brighter into life as the sky is now a dusty gray with only streaks of purple. There’s a liquor store you spot across a small parking lot to your right, and you’re guided towards it, but not without a sickening feeling in your chest.
When you open the door, the bell at the top jingles, and you glance to the right where you see a lanky young man playing some sort of shooter game on his phone by the cash register. You grab a bottle of vodka, a bottle of white wine, some packs of skittles, one of the mini pizza boxes at the hot food station, and then dump it all onto the counter.
The young man scans all your items without even so much as sparing you a glance, but does take a look at your ID, then says, “Total’s $68.65, cash or card?”
“Card.”
Just before you tap your card, something displayed behind the cashier counter catches your eye. Something familiar, something tempting, something you weigh in your head about twenty times within one millisecond all due to the cortisol coursing through your veins and you eventually say, “Uh, and could I get one of those, too?”
The cashier looks behind himself to what you’re pointing at before turning around. “Sure.”
The same jingle is heard on top of your head as you leave the store, now with a burning hot mini pizza box in your hand as well as a plastic bag that carries your candy and the two clinking bottles of alcohol.
“Oh!! omg, y/n,” you hear a feminine voice call out and you’re instantly wincing. The last thing you wanted was to be bothered right now. You just wanted to go home and get drunk and then pass out on the floor of your living room. But alas, the world is small.
You turn around to see Hana come running across the sidewalk lot towards you, and when she’s about a few feet away, she glances down at your hands and all the things you were carrying. You quickly shove your last-minute purchase into your jacket pocket with a shameful conscience, and try to hide the plastic bag of liquor behind your calves. There was no hiding the pizza box, but at least that was the least incriminating.
“Oh, Hana, wow! What a coincidence seeing you here,” you say to her, pressing your lips into a small smile.
“Yeah, I um,” she points over her shoulder towards the hospice that’s standing tall in the darkness of night, cells with windows illuminated with light. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a prison. “Remember I told you my friend’s mom is sick and she’s at this hospice?”
“Yeah,” you say.
“I was just visiting her mom with her,” she tells you.
“Aw,” you comment, “I see, I see.”
You adore Hana, you really do. She was there for you when the whole Yuna and Choso thing went down, picking your shifts up for a good week when you couldn’t stomach going into work when your ex-best friend’s stupid face was gloating in the halls over how she stole your boyfriend. Hana was there for you when you were a new hire and all the doctors were being bitchy about a “newbie in the ED”, but she stood up for you, even cussed the fuck out of one of attendings for the whole hall to hear when you were being disrespected by one of them. She’s someone you can beam about how hot the EMT and Firefighter men that stroll into the ED are, too. A priceless companion.
And even though you two have hung out after hours sometimes, it was still always a little awkward to see a coworker outside of work.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“I actually, um, was going to tell you at our shift tomorrow, but I just admitted my mom to the hospice too,” you say, “and…thanks a lot for telling me about it. I really appreciate it. It seems like a wonderful facility.”
Her eyes briefly widen with surprise before they soften once again. “Oh, that’s wonderful, love. I hope all goes well. And your little insurance scam worked! Good for you!”
“Shhh,” you hiss at her, looking around yourself with paranoia, “the feds are everywhere.”
She laughs, sweet in the air, before the sound settles and she looks at you with something reminiscent of well-intentioned concern. Her eyes flit to the plastic bag you were still holding behind your legs. “Hey…um, if…if you ever want some company when you come to visit your mom, just let me know. I hope you know you don’t have to do everything alone.”
You blink at her, sucking in a short breath to respond, but it only leaves you as a slight puff of air. There’s a silent gratitude that you give her, because it’s hard for you to express any feelings with words, but you’ve found that the people in your life who know you best can always read you without them. 
“Thank you, Hana,” you manage to say with a slight croak to your voice because you were fighting back tears.
She smiles at you. “Take care, okay? And see ya tomorroooowwwwww,” she coos at you, coming up to you to give you a small hug, a squeeze of your upper arm, and then she heads back towards the direction of the hospice.
You watch her walk away until you can’t see her anymore. And then you head towards your car.
When you arrive at your neighborhood, you park in front of Gojo’s house. You have a feeling that you won’t be able to bear the vast emptiness of your home now that your mother is elsewhere, and so you drag your feet up the stone stairs of his house with a heavy heart instead.
The spare key that he gave you weakly pushes into the keyhole with about as much force as your fingers can manage, and you realize they almost feel atrophied. 
The house is dark when you step inside, spare for the ambient street lights shining through cracked open blinds on the windows, and the curtains rustle gently from the draft of the AC, a chill that reaches you too by the time you make it to the staircase.
It doesn’t seem like Gojo’s home. A glance at the clock tells you it’s close to 8pm. You briefly consider texting him to ask where he’s at, why he’s out so late, when he’ll be home, and what’s for dinner, but you can’t even bring yourself to pull your phone out of your coat pocket.
Weak legs manage to take you upstairs and you’re about to pass through to your room when the slightly open door to the master bedroom taunts you, like a peephole into some other wordly dimension. Like the wardrobe in the chronicles of Narnia. A portal into your fake husband’s life.
With a palm pushing on the door, you slowly crack it open, and you know the anxious voices in your head are getting worse by the day when the creaking of the door hinges sounds like a lullaby to you. 
Was this an invasion of privacy? And did you really care if it was?
The room is big, with a king sized bed off to the left, sheets neatly made and duvet primly tucked under, like the way hotel beds are set up. You feel a slight flush of embarrassment when you remember you haven’t been making your bed in the mornings for the past couple days you’ve been living here so far, and you wonder if Gojo would judge you for something like that. If he’d think you were a messy or undisciplined person. If he would think less of you.
Truthfully, in a lot of ways, you still felt like a child. You barely weathered a lot of your formative adolescent years when dealing with your parents’ divorce, and you’ve had to put so much of your life on pause to take care of your mom ever since she got diagnosed. So here you were, in the body of a 29-year-old woman, yet still feeling so painfully juvenile. One that forgets to make her bed in the mornings, and on most nights can’t seem to stomach anything other than cereal for dinner. It was like you were still at a party that everyone else had left, except all it ever was is hell. Your life was such a stark contrast to the lives of other adults you’ve come across. The ones that wake up at six to go on runs, the ones that have paid off mortgages with five figures in their retirement accounts, oh god, the ones that meal prep, and the ones that, all things considered, have their lives together. The ones that don’t spend at least an hour of every day, in fetal position on their bed, sobbing until tears soak through the sheets of the pillow down to the feathers like bone, because you’re so overwhelmed with stress and preparing yourself for the grief of losing your mother which you know that, no matter how hard you try to save her from, will inevitably one day come. 
You used to cook dinner every night, make your bed every morning, and go to pilates on the weekends. Back when you were a little younger and healed and excited to live life. But now, you barely get by. Your priorities are with your mother. You can’t remember the last time you did anything nice for yourself, including something as simple as the luxury of getting to come home to a clean house because you hardly ever had time to clean it, not with all the doctor’s appointments you were driving your mother to, not with all the extra shifts you were picking up at the hospital to pay off your debt, not with all the times you felt too depressed to even get out of bed. 
But your mother is in hospice now, so you’ve made time, right? You’ve made the decision that everyone in your life has been begging you to finally do. So why do you still feel so empty inside?
By a quick survey of the room, you notice Gojo doesn’t really have many framed photos hung up on the walls or perched up on surfaces. None, actually. Only a contemporary painting above his bed frame and then a faded vintage horror movie poster plastered up near his desk. Not terribly odd, since in your experience most men don’t really do the whole “cluttering the house with millions of photos of their family” thing until they at least have a couple of kids and some purebred dog. The thought of Gojo someday setting up a little portrait photo at his desk with his wife’s—his eventual real forever wife’s, pretty face in it, posing with their two beautiful kids, makes an oddly melancholic feeling waft through you. You wonder if he would keep a two-by-two in his wallet, too.
Your feet move one in front of the other as your finger traces the surface wood of a dresser cabinet, something that looks a little vintage and oaky, in stark contrast to the modern minimalist vibe Gojo has set up in the rest of the room. A family heirloom, maybe? There’s no dust that coats your finger, which surprises you. If you were to run your finger across your dresser at home you’d have collected enough dust to snort down your windpipes like a recreational drug. But Gojo’s a real estate agent, making a living off of dressing houses up in perfect cosplay so that monetarily stable middle class families feel inclined to buy them. So you’re not exactly surprised he’s invested in keeping his own house in pristine condition too. 
There is a little bit of chaos, though. Like the shirt he has haphazardly hung over his chair at his office space over to the right. There’s a coffee mug sitting there too, porcelain and reflecting the moon light off, but upon peering inside you see that it’s half empty with stale coffee. He’s got pens sprawled across the desk, in a fashion that suggests he accidentally knocked them over in a rush, and slowly, like some grounding exercise, you place them one by one back into the paper mache pencil holder. It briefly occurs to you that he has a lot of paper mache containers of sorts around the house. You lift up the pencil cup, turning it in your hand until your eyes catch something written on it with glittery pink gel pen.
i luv u unkle toru! -yur BEST FREND 4EVUR juno!!! :D
A small smile makes it onto your face. The handwriting was messy, more like scratches than smooth lines, and nothing less than what you would expect of a child. You remember making paper mache and clay trinkets at preschool for your mom and dad when you were younger. And you’re sure if you were brave enough to open the box of memorabilia that sits in your attic some day, you’d see your own scratchy scribbled handwriting on them. An innocence that is long gone and buried, never again to be delicately placed on desks or counters for all the living.
The draft from the AC reaches you once again, brushing over your skin and causing a chill to shiver down your spine. It kicks at the curtains as well, causing them to ruffle up towards you, baring the dark outside world into the streets. And you notice in that momentary glance that there’s a roof just outside the window that overlooks the backyard. A roof? Spotted by a depressed woman going through a quarter life crisis? There was nothing more tempting than that. 
The window was easy to open, which only caused unease over the revelation of how easy it would be for someone to rob this house. You make a mental note to tell Gojo to get a ring camera or security system of some sort since he doesn’t seem to have one, but you can already picture him telling you something about how statistically low the crime rates are in this neighborhood compared to all the other neighborhoods, and then you’d tell him that it’s just for your peace of mind. But whether he’d compromise or not after that, you’re really not sure.
You take a seat on the roof, a little scared as you sit because of the slight slope, but it’s comfortable once you’re settled. You sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, staring out into the neighborhood of perfectly lined up suburban houses. You’ve got a better view into some neighbors' backyards, noticing that a couple of them had pools while some of them have big gardens. There's a cat resting up on a fence in the distance. A car drives by with headlights illuminating everything in its proximity briefly before zooming off. You glance up at the sky, and notice the full moon, but it’s too cloudy to see any stars. Or perhaps it was just the light pollution from the lamps making it difficult to see.
On instinct, your hand reaches inside your coat pocket for your phone, but your knuckles hit something else instead. A moment of brief confusion flickers through your head, but then you immediately recall the last-minute purchase you made at the gas station.
Your hand pulls out the object, and then you stare down at it. Squinting your eyes a little, because it’s a sight that feels familiar but also one you haven’t seen in so long: a pack of twenty Marlboro red cigarettes. 
You’ve tried a lot of things to manage your stress over the years. Excessively working out, eating a lot of sugar, going on six hour hikes to touch grass, flirting with random men at bars, fucking Choso until he was rendered speechless, multiple types of antidepressants, you almost tried smoking weed once with your roommate in college but you wimped out last second. But the habit that had gotten you through the years of 21 to 24 is held loosely in your hand right now. It’s been five years since you quit, but resolve was often a fickle thing. As the saying goes, once an addict, always an addict. 
There’s a brief moment of hesitation as you slowly peel the plastic off of the back, but then it all comes back to you like a reflex you’ll never forget up to where you slide a cigar up out and then pinch it between your two fingers. Forgetting to buy a lighter with the cigarettes is definitely something you would do, but because you remembered it was something that you would do, you remembered not to do it. The flick of the flame coming to life is ASMR you didn’t know you were painfully nostalgic for, and you balance the cigarette between your lips in that sort of movie-star way people used to obsess over back in the day. But just as you bring the lighter up to the end of the cigarette, and just before you can light it—
A hand shoots out in your periphery, grabbing your wrist and entirely stalling the movement.
You gasp, lips parting enough for the cigarette to fall from them and into your lap. The hand wrapped around your wrist is large and masculine, and you briefly consider screaming, but when you snap your neck to look at the perpetrator, you see Gojo crouched down next to you on this roof. You notice he’s wearing a black suit, a tie that was loosely secure hanging from his neck into the space between his spread thighs as he’s crouched, and whatever gel he had in his hair from earlier only barely remains as strands fall over his forehead haphazardly. He looks like he’s on the other end of a long work day. 
You blink at him, expression plastered with surprise, but his is only earnest. With breathtaking blue eyes that you realize he could easily use to surrender a person just by looking at them, like the way he’s looking at you right now. His lips are pressed together into a firm line, as if to suppress some emotion, but the slight crease to his brow makes you feel like you’re in trouble somehow. Like he was silently scolding you for something.
“I—” you stutter.
He lets go of your wrist and discreetly pulls the lighter out of your hand. And then his hand reaches for the pack of cigarettes you were balancing on your knee, but on some reflex that you don’t even think about, you try to snatch them away from him, and now you’re both tugging at the same pack of cigarettes.
“y/n,” he says, “let go.”
“No,” you say stubbornly.
He sighs and tugs a little harder. “Give them to me.”
“But—” you stammer, voice becoming softer to see if that’d work on him, “I’m…” Your grip on them tightens. “I’m stressed.”
He raises an eyebrow at you, then finally loses his patience and snatches them right out of your hand. He stands up from his crouched down position to toss the pack off to the side onto the roof somewhere. You’re surprised when he lets out a sigh and sits down next to you on the roof, as if he felt the obligation to. His legs stretch out in front of him, but still bent slightly at the knees, and he leans backwards with his body weight braced on his palms laid flat on wood paneling behind him. “There are better ways to relieve stress,” he tells you candidly. 
“Like what?” you ask, and just when he opens his mouth to speak, you clarify, “and don’t say sex.”
He shuts his mouth and his eyes flit up to the sky for a brief second. “Damn. I didn’t have a back-up answer.” 
You roll your eyes, releasing a deep breath, then draw your knees to your chest before resting your chin on top of them. 
“I didn’t know you smoke,” he says after a century-long minute. 
You wince a little, because you were half hoping he was going to just drop the subject all together. 
You bite your lip nervously and hug your knees to your chest tighter as if to hide yourself from him. “I don’t. Well, I haven’t. Um, not for a while.”
“Huh. I see,” he says.
Another silence passes, and as he shuffles next to you, the fabric of his suit brushes against the fabric of your coat, and you’ve become entirely too aware of the feeling.
“So,” he says, breaking the awkward silence, “your mom’s in hospice now?”
You nod, enthusiastic enough to where you won’t look like you’re entirely depressed about it.
“That’s good,” he says, “no issues with the insurance?”
You shake your head. “They need you to sign some papers by the end of the week though,” you tell him. “We’ll have to go in person.”
He nods slowly to affirm he’ll make time for it. “I really hope things get better for your mom,” he says, voice soft as he stares off into neighbors homes like you had been doing ten minutes ago. You see the cat that was resting on the fence get up, do a big stretch, and start walking along the length of the fence. Your eyes briefly glance at Gojo, and you notice his gaze is tracing the cat’s path. 
“My—” you start, hesitant all of a sudden by the vulnerability you already feel swelling within you, most definitely due to sitting with someone on a rooftop late at night, but you decide that you’ll be nice to him for once, “…my mom seems to remember you a lot. More than she remembers me.” You let out a small humoring laugh, as if that fact doesn’t completely destroy you. “She was blabbering to me again for the seventh time about how you apparently fixed our AC.” You try to bite your tongue, but can’t help it when you say, “although I’m pretty sure you just pressed a bunch of buttons until it started working again.”
“Yup. That’s exactly what I did.”
You roll your eyes and sigh.
Another awkward silence.
“Can I ask you a question?” you say.
“Sure.” His voice sounds deeper, like he’s sleepy. 
“Why did you agree to marry me? That’s not something people just do out of nowhere.”
He glances over at you, and you flicker your eyes to him. “Why? Having regrets?” he teases, with a slight nudge of his elbow to your side. 
“Just answer me.”
He lifts his palms up from behind him and leans forward, placing his hands on his knees instead. “I don’t know. If something I could do would help someone out that much, I wasn’t going to say no.”
You hum quietly, still confused by his intentions. But you’re too jaded to question them.
“It costs nothing to be nice,” he adds. 
You run soothing circles over your thigh through the fabric of your jeans. For some reason, your mind wanders to Choso. Thinking of all the years you wasted staying with him even though you knew his affections were long gone, just because you didn’t want to break his heart. Only to realize that you never had that privilege in the first place. 
“I think,” you say, your voice barely above a whisper as you draw your knees closer to your chest, “that sometimes it does.”
A gust of autumn wind breezes by, ruffling the trees that the two of you are at eye-level with at the moment. You're pretty sure you’ve completely lost Gojo’s interest at this point, where he’s finally too tired to deal with your oddly cryptic attitudes and overall generally displeasing vibe, assuming this based solely on his prolonged silence beside you. You’re ready for him to get up and abandon you here on this roof, left to ponder every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life. It was any second now.
“Sometimes,” he instead speaks up, and it’s so surprising to you that you jolt a little bit, “you can do everything right, and people will still find a way to fuck you over. But I don’t think that’s any reason to stop being nice to others.”
You glance over at him, your eyes widening slightly, but he just continues to peer off straight into the night. His blinks are slow, lingering on being closed for a moment before he opens them again, and you’re mesmerized by the sight. The skin under his eyes is slightly dark from exhaustion, heavy with character that makes you aware that he’s just a person too. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, you realize that he’s—…handsome. And for what feels like the tenth time this week, your heart flutters in your chest.
He scoffs suddenly and dusts his hands off. “I sound like a fucking youth pastor.” He lets out an exhale before suddenly standing up onto his feet before you can think more on it. He looks off into the night again and lets out another exhale that sounds more like a sigh this time. ��God, it’s getting a lot colder these days. Might have to start running the heater.”
You blink up at him with no commentary to add. 
He looks down at you. His face is relaxed, but you can tell those eyes are distracted. A shimmering blue ocean in its own world while he attempts to stay present in this one. 
He holds his hand out to you, and you stare at it blankly like you’ve got no clue what he intends for you to do with it. But you finally take the hint and curl your hand around his palm so that he can pull you up onto your feet too.
You stumble a little, falling forward from the sudden blood flow to your brain, but he holds you steady by the strong grip of his hands on your elbows. He’s close to you, close enough to where you can smell the faint lingering scent of his cologne. Something different than that expensive one he wore to the courthouse, but it’s comforting somehow. A fragrance that’s more him. And you feel nervous as you look up at him underneath pale moonlight. 
He lets go of your elbows. You feel cold from the loss of his touch. But his right hand moves to gently hold your left hand in his palm, holding it curled as his thumb barely grazes the stone you wear on your ring finger; the one he gave you.
The way his thumb prods at the silver band is like he’s inspecting its quality, as if it has to pass some test to be worthy of sitting on your finger. Or maybe just any finger, if you were to quell the delusion. You’re not sure if he’s satisfied with his inspection.
“Where did you get it—” you blurt out.
His gaze flickers up to your face briefly before he’s back to examining the ring. “It was my mom’s.”
Your mouth gapes slightly in shock, heart dropping a little in your chest, and all of a sudden you feel guilty. Guilty that he put his mother’s ring on your finger for something that was fake, something that was essentially a business deal, something exchanged to you out of fraud when it was a precious family heirloom that should be exchanged with love. And maybe he didn’t care about it much, some people don’t care about the sentiments of objects. But your mind thinks of the oaky vintage dresser in his room, so out of place in the aesthetic of its surroundings, a decision you can only imagine him of all people, mr. “everything in this house has to look like an IKEA catalog”, would do if the dresser held some importance to him that was more than meets the eye. And so you’re compelled to think that maybe this ring did, too. 
“Why would you give me this?! You could’ve just gotten a cheap fake diamond ring from a pawn shop and called it a day,” you ask him, suddenly feeling burdened by it.
“Well I wasn’t exactly given much time to think of other options.”
“But—” you start, only to realize you have no counter arguments for that.
He lets out a huh noise, like the sound someone makes when they’re pleasantly surprised by something, as he looks down at your hand that he still held in his. “It’s kinda crazy that it fits you perfectly. I wasn’t sure.”
Your mind wanders to when he slipped the ring onto your finger in the courtroom, followed by the kiss. Soft, sweet, the lingering warm sensation of his palm on your cheek as he cupped your face, the same way those heartthrob actors do in all those romance movies and kdramas that you watch on Friday nights while snuggled up in a blanket, wondering when anyone will ever kiss you like that. You remember the ghost sensation of his hand hovering over the small of your back, fingers lightly grazing the nape of your neck, his frame blocking out everything around you as he kissed you, just to pull away and for the two of you to then pretend like it never happened, as if it wasn’t one of the sweetest kisses you’ve ever known.
You slowly pull your hand out of his, the moment feeling too tender for your liking, and you clear your throat before flitting your eyes up to his. 
“Rule #1,” you remind him with a soft whisper, “no touching.”
You purse your lips, watching his round eyes blink once, then twice, before he shoves his hands in his suit pockets. He rocks back and forth on his heels for a few seconds, nodding slowly in submission, and then he turns on them to head back to the house. You’re standing a little stunned from the abrupt ending to this trance of a moment on the roof, and you’re also a little surprised with how your chest is heaving a little bit with fast breaths, but you eventually snap out of it to follow him inside too. 
You two make it back inside the house, with little words exchanged. You pretend to not notice the way Gojo tilts his head at his desk, like he’s confused about why it looks tidier than when he left it. You’re prepared to feign innocence or ignorance, but he doesn’t press you about it. 
“Y’know,” he says from behind you, his chest briefly brushing against the back of your head as he pushes the bedroom door in front of you open so that you can head out into the loft, “those oversized 1800s-esque nightgowns you’ve been wearing around the house kinda make you look like a less-hot version of Ebenezer Scrooge.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•
“Sign right here for me, sir.”
You watch as the nurse slides the papers across the high-raised counter of the hospice nursing desk towards Gojo, his eyebrows narrowing as his eyes skim the words on the paper and land at the highlighted lines where he’s been intended to sign. You feel nervous for some reason, as if he’d suddenly find something disagreeable and refuse to sign, then take you to the courthouse first thing to finalize a divorce and send you off to prison while claiming he was blackmailed into the whole marriage in the first place.
Instead, he pulls a pen from the chest pocket of his suit jacket, clicking the end of it and scribbling his signature onto the paper with some jet black ink that looks like it takes a second to dry. How pretentious of him. The pink pom-pom pen was right there.
The nurse behind the counter continues to chat with him about something, blah blah dependents, blah blah tax claims, blah blah you’ll receive an itemized bill in the mail. You’re trying your best to eavesdrop in on the conversation, but most of your senses are being occupied by examining all your surroundings. When you dropped your mother off at the hospice, your feelings were at the forefront of conscience, but now that you’ve had a couple days to come down from that overwhelming emotional high, you’re here to scope out the quality of this place you’ve just dumped your mom at.
The facility is clean and sleek, with a color theme of red and an ocean blue across the signs, the furniture, even with the paperwork they hand out. All the workers had color-coded scrubs based on their occupation or specialty, and none of them had stains on the fabric. You take a glance down at the modest leather pumps you were wearing past the creases of the long skirt, and notice that the floor was shimmering off their reflection in a perfect polish. It wasn’t bad, this place.
“Thanks, you too,” you hear Gojo say to the nurse behind the counter. He has a professional smile on his face, but still kind and genuine, which makes the woman at the computer something bashful and unable to make eye contact. He folds something that looks like a receipt into his chest pocket before tucking his pen back in there too and then turns to face you. You make a mental note to pay him back for whatever he just paid for, at least once you move some money around. 
Your eyebrows lift, feeling a little dazed as you blink at him blankly.
“Alright,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets, the sound of his shoes on the polished hospital floors satisfactorily tapping in your ears as he took a couple steps towards you, “where’s your mom’s room?”
“Huh?”
“What’s her room number?” he asks you.
“Y-You wanna go see her??”
“Of course I want to,” he says, “she’s my mother-in-law.”
You roll your eyes and pet the fabric of your skirt to smooth the wrinkles out. “You’re getting a little too invested in this role of fake husband.”
“I get to annoy you all day and ride the adrenaline rush of committing a federal crime,” he says, “of fucking course I’d get invested.”
You sigh, tossing some of your hair to behind your shoulder before glancing up at the signs, squinting slightly to locate the ward where your mother’s room is, before you hear an extremely high-pitched and somewhat catty feminine voice call out from behind you. You glance at Gojo’s face as he peers off to whoever’s behind you, and you see him visibly stiffen a little.
“Is that Dayton county’s sexiest realtooorrr???” the voice purrs, and you turn on your heel to see a blonde bombshell of a woman clacking her kitten heels down the glistening floors of the hospice, with another brunette bombshell just a few paces behind her. Bombshell #2 sighs something like “it issss” before they walk right up to your fake husband and take turns at giving him a playful squeeze of his bicep. You have to physically stop your jaw from dropping at the sight. 
“Wow! Ladies, so–...so great to see you two,” he says out of polite obligation, and you immediately clock the fact that he doesn’t address them by name.
Bombshell #1 turns to look at you, all of her hair moving as one solid entity with the motion from all the hair spray that’s probably holding it up, and she points at you with a long slender finger that narrows into a french-tip. “Oh who’s this?? Another one of your clients??”
“Oh, no, she’s my–”
“I’m his wife,” you interrupt him, irritated for some reason. 
Both the women chirp something out like oh! before their faces twist with confusion. 
“I didn’t know you were married,” Bombshell #2 says in a thick New Jersey accent.
Gojo lifts his left hand up, the silver band on his hand glimmering under fluorescent hospice lighting. “Very happily,” he says, as if someone was holding a gun to his head.
Bombshell #1 crosses her arms, and you try not to stare at how nice her boobs look in the low scoop-neck jaguar print top she was wearing. You were no better than a man. And now you’re pissed off at the idea of Gojo glancing down too, but a flick of your gaze up to his face tells you he’s safe. For now. 
“You weren’t married when I asked you if you were a month ago,” Bombshell #1 sneers at him. It’s true, the math wouldn’t make sense, but in his defense, this marriage was a fraud.
“Or when you took me out for dinner last week after I bought my house,” Bombshell #2 snarls with an undertone of hurt. 
Gojo clears his throat beside you before pointing at Bombshell #2. “How is that, by the way?” he asks in an attempt to change the subject, “the half acre down on Maple Ave, right? You, uh, enjoying the pool?”
The woman let out an offended scoff and–were her eyes sheening with tears?? She puts her hands on her hips. “No. Mine is the three bedroom house with the cedar gazebo on 14th street.”
Her friend next to her rolls her eyes and smacks her gum between her cheek. “I’m the one that bought the half acre down on Maple Ave, jerk. Ugh!” She grabs her friend’s arm with a high-pitched hmph noise leaving her throat, and you can hear the other one sniffling subtly as she wobbles on her heels with her friend’s pull of her arm. 
Right before leaving the two of you alone, Bombshell #1 turns to you and says, “I hope you find someone who treats you better,” and then they storm off together down the hallway, their perfectly blow-dried hair bouncing in sync with each stomp.
You blink at the sight, a little flabbergasted from the interaction, and then flit your faze up to Gojo. You see him awkwardly scratching at the back of his head with a grimace on his stupidly handsome face. 
“That’s what you get for being a manwhore,” you tell him.
“I’m not a manwhor–”
“You went on a date with another woman while you were maaaaarrrieeeddd?!” you coo as you let out a fake gasp and slap your cheeks with your hands, “despicable, really.”
He lets out some disgruntled noise, the source coming from deep within his throat. “No. We weren’t fake-married yet,” he vindicates himself, “and it wasn’t a date. I just bought her dinner as a congrats for buying a house. Not a big deal. I do it for all my clients.”
“Satoru. You do realize you’re leading these women on, right? I mean, I’ve seen the way you talk to them. Even if you think you’re just being friendly, please know that your definition of friendly is most people’s definition of flirting.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s true.”
He raises an eyebrow as he glances down at you. “Alright, how come this flirting in disguise of friendliness hasn’t worked on you then?”
You scoff in disbelief before crossing your arms. Maybe you did deserve a better fake husband. “You’re never friendly with me. You’re always rude to me.”
“What? I’m not always rude to you.”
“Well, you’re certainly much more rude to me than you are to other women,” you say, tapping the tip of your shoe with irritation.
“Can we not do this right now? We’re in the middle of a hospice.” 
“God, you’re such a cop-out,” you mumble as you forcefully push past him towards the hallway that’ll lead you to your mother. You can hear that Gojo’s on your tail, following you down one of the more dimly lit hallways, and you can tell he needs to stall the strides of his Daddy Longlegs to not overtake your pace.
“What the fuck is a cop-out?” he asks you from behind.
“Look it up on urban dictionary, Grandpa. Unless you don’t know what the Internet is, either,” you spat. 
You waltz right up to your mother’s room just in time to see a nurse making her way out with a clipboard in her hands. She glances over to you when she sees you approaching in her periphery.
“Hi! How can I help you?” she asks.
“Is it alright if we visit my mother?” you ask her.
“Oh! Sure, let me just clean her bed pan really quick.”
Your brow furrows. “B-Bedpan?? Why is she using a bedpan??”
The nurse stops in her movements. “Well, yesterday and today, that’s just what she has decided to use.”
You immediately become hostile. “That’s not right. She never needed to use one at home. Why is she suddenly using one here? Is that not a clear sign of deterioration? The restrooms must not be kept well enough here if she doesn’t want to use them.”
The nurse becomes something meek, her eyes widening as her mouth gapes slightly. “Ma’am,” she squeaks out, “we see this commonly with patients as they begin to adjust to hospice life. We’ll urge her to use the restroom, but as of right now, we need to prioritize what she finds most comfortable.”
Your expression softens, your shoulders relaxing from their tense position, and you duck your head a little with guilt. “Right…I’m sorry.”
The nurse presses her lips together with a well-meaning smile before shuffling into the room and closing the door behind her. You sigh and lean your back against the wall next to the number plate, cheeks flushing slightly from the confrontation. You have no idea how loud your voice was or who heard you. But you try to convince yourself that you’re just stressed and trying to look out for your mother, although the guilt still sits.
You glance up to see Gojo staring at you with slightly wide eyes, his hands shoved into his pockets, and he tilts his head to study your expression.
“What?” you snap at him.
“Are you doing okay?”
“Just fine, thanks.”
“Are you sure?”
“Satoru,” you cut his questioning off by raising a palm into the air, “just—…just stop.”
His brow furrows together slightly, but before he can show any further concern, the nurse exits the room and holds the door open for the two of you. 
“All set!” she chirps, and Gojo moves to hold the door open in her stead, and then the nurse bolts down to disappear somewhere down the hallway.
You hear Gojo let out a small huff of a scoff as he stares down in the direction the nurse ran off in. “Glad to know I’m not the only one that’s scared of you.”
You roll your eyes and walk into the room through the open door.
Your mother lays in her bed, looking out the window with her hands resting on top of layers of white linen sheets, her skin looking slightly paler than usual. You approach her bedside slowly and she finally turns her head to look at you.
“Hi mom,” you gently greet her, sitting down on the stool beside her bed, “how are you doing?”
Her eyes dart across the features of your face, and you briefly glance towards the wall to the right where you see Gojo standing from a slight distance.
“Oh, hi dear,” she says with a smile, and relief washes over you.
You match her smile with your own. “Mom, I brought someone here to see you.” You glance over at Gojo, who starts to close distance now as he approaches the foot of the bed, “this is Satoru, my husband.”
Your mother’s eyes widen, “Oh! I know him,” she scoldingly swats a hand at you, like you’ve embarrassed her somehow by assuming that she doesn’t know who he is, “he’s my neighbor!”
You sigh, “yes mom, the one that fixed the A/C?” You attempt to finish her sentence for her.
She looks confused for a moment, but slightly nods as if to avoid any further confusion for herself. “But—…but, why…” she trails off and then looks at you, “I’m sorry, are you my nurse?”
Your shoulders drop slightly. “No, mom, it’s me. Your daughter. Do you remember?”
Her face scrunches before it entirely relaxes to keep some image of composure despite the haze you know she feels in her head. “Oh…yes, yes…my little girl. I remember you, of course!”
Your eyes become layered with a slight sheen of tears, “I’m glad.”
“Where’s your father?” she asks, “he said he’d bring me some…oh dear, what—…he said he’d bring me tea. I’ve been waiting.”
“Mom, dad is—” you pause for a moment to think on your feet. You could either tell the truth, or a little white lie. You never know what to do. And either one comes with either guilt or sorrow. “Well, he’ll be here soon, I just wanted to come see you.”
“Oh okay…” she trails off, her eyes squinting at you once more with that same look of confusion on it, but then they drift towards Gojo. “Oh you’re a very handsome young man! You look just like my neighbor.”
Your eyes flicker up to Gojo, and he walks up to your side by your mom’s bed. “Yes, Mrs. l/n, I am your neighbor.”
“With the lemon tree!”
“The avocado tree,” you correct her with a small sigh. “And he’s my husband mom. And also our neighbor.”
“Oh I see I see…” she says, looking up at him, and in a moment that shocks you, she holds her hand up for him to take.
There’s a slight moment of surprise on his face too, but he accepts her frail hand in his, and you glance over to your mom to see her look at him with some look of peace on her face.
“Oh, sit down here, won’t you?” she tells him, and you both blink at her in a moment of hesitation.
He pulls a stool up to the side of the bed right next to you and takes a seat down onto it. Your mother holds his hand with both of hers now, soothing her palm over the back of it before she taps on it lightly.
“Oh, my little girl is very sweet. She would bring me flowers from the garden when she was,” she glances at you, confused once more, “well I remember her when she was so little but she looks…a little older now. Ah, but she would bring me such pretty flowers.”
Your heart aches in your chest. You never knew what version of you your mother would remember. Some days, you’re still supposed to be an angsty teenager that shuts doors in her face, some days you were just as you are right now, and other days, you were just her little girl. And it confused her, the image of not seeing you in the way that she remembers. In the only way she knew how.
“You’ll take good care of my sweet girl, won’t you?” she asks him.
And it knocks the wind out of you.
It drops your heart to the center of the earth.
The thought that, after so many moments where she doesn’t remember you, she still knows that you’re someone she wants to keep safe.
Your mouth gapes slightly, tears welling in your eyes and you try your best to blink them away, but you see Gojo’s hand slip out from being held by your mother’s hands, to instead use both of his to hold hers. Your eyes snap to his face, and you see that same earnest expression you’ve been growing used to seeing these days. 
“Yes,” he responds, eye contact level with hers, “I will.”
A small puff of air leaves your lips, a single tear streaming down your cheek and you quickly swipe your trembling fingers to remove any evidence of it before you huff out a shaky, “excuse me.” And then you’re standing up off the stool, and in a few hurried steps across the room as more tears continue to stream down your face, you make it to the door to push out into the suffocating air of the hallway.
It’s hard to breathe, huffs and puffs barely leaving your lips as you struggle to pull air into your lungs while you storm down the hallway at a fast pace, your heels clicking underneath you in a way that only sets you off further. Suddenly, all the sounds around you make you sick to your stomach, a wave of nausea washing over you, and your nose burns with the intensity of the tears that continue to stream down your face. A few hospice staff look at you with concerned expressions, and you eventually reach a heavy-duty door that leads you out into a secluded staircase hallway where the dim lighting serves to relax at least some of your senses, but you still feel like you’re about to pass out.
Even in the haze of your emotions, there’s this glimmer of a memory that comes to mind. One from when you were younger and you were pushed on the playground at school. You cried and cried and cried in your mother’s arms, but even then, you didn’t want her to baby you. You would say to her, I’m a big girl now! in that same way a child knows nothing of what it truly means to brave the world. 
That little girl had no idea that one day, there would be moments where she wouldn’t be remembered as her mother’s little girl anymore. 
No matter how old you grow, you will always be my little girl, your mother’s voice echoes to you, the feeling of her squeezing you in her arms as she holds your sobbing little form in hers casting a ghost sensation across your skin.
In a mother’s eyes, you’ll always be her baby.
And that’s why it hurts.
Because it’s all fake.
It’s phony.
It’s not real.
This arrangement you have with Gojo.
And if your mother were to die tomorrow, there would be no one to take care of her little girl anymore.
Not in the way she believes there will be.
Of all the white lies, this one pierces you straight through your heart in a way that leaves you gasping for air.
Amidst your whirlwind of thoughts, you hear the door push open harshly, and when you glance over, you see Gojo standing in this dimly lit hallway as he turns his head quickly to the left and sees you standing there.
“Hey,” he says, catching his breath as he lightly jogs up to you, “hey, hey, hey,” he repeats with more concern now when he sees the state you’re in, and he seamlessly pulls you into a hug, your cheek pressing against his chest that feels warm even through the fabric of his suit jacket and shirt, and that familiar scent of him completely engulfs you.
You sob quietly, wiping your snot on his tie and your tears on the felt fabric beside it, your hands balled into tiny fists at your chest, squeezed between the two of you. You feel him tuck your head under his chin and his arms wrap around you tighter. You don’t even realize it at first, but suddenly, it has become easier to breathe.
Then, you wail, and you cry, and you sob, because you don’t have the words to even explain how you feel, about not just this, but with everything, a buildup of everything that has been suffocating you in your life that just comes crashing down on you all at once.
“I know,” he says, his palm resting on the back of your head as he holds your face to his chest, his voice soothing in your ears while you sob until there’s nothing left to cry. “I know.”
You two stay like this for another minute or so as you come down from the cries, your remnant sniffling echoing in the hallway while you wipe more of your snot on his jacket. You make the first move to pull your face away from his chest, but he still keeps his arms wrapped around you when you look up at him.
With your gaze darting across his face, you take in the blue in his eyes. Eyes that are looking at you so softly it’s suddenly hard to breathe once more. And when those eyes flit to your lips, your mouth parts slightly as you two breathe in unison.
It’s possible that you could have dreamed the moment you saw him lean down slightly towards you, his eyes still set on your lips, but it didn’t matter because you’re pushing him away with strong fists before you can even register the thought in your head.
He lets go of you entirely, his eyes wide once more, and you glance down at your feet. 
A tender moment, just like on the roof, broken just because you can’t handle that—…that way, that intense way that he looks at you. New rule, no looking at me longingly like you want to kiss me. I won’t allow it.
“I want to go home,” you whisper, still examining your shoes. And you suddenly feel embarrassed that he had to see you this way. He’s supposed to be scared and intimidated by you, not holding you in his arms while you cry. 
He’s silent for a moment, but you can tell he’s searching for things to say. “You don’t want to say bye to your mom before we go?”
You swipe your palm against the wetness on your cheek. “No. I just want to go home.”
“y/n,” he tried to convince you.
You finally look up at him. “Please.”
He breathes in a few breaths as he studies the features of your face in a way that makes you feel so seen that it’s frightening. But he slowly nods, then says,
“Okay.”
.
.
.
.
.
[end of chapter 4]
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a/n. hi friendsss i hope you enjoyed :'') yea like i said at the a/n in the beginning, this chapter is a slight off-tangent from last chapter, but ch5 will continue with a lot of the stuffs that were brought up in ch3. but yea i wanted to explore the whole process of emotions reader would go through putting her mom in hospice, since it kinda felt like a big thing, hence why it got its own chapter. aaa i hope to see you in the next one!! much love from me :''0
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casinocarpediem · 7 months ago
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▪︎■☆ Новое Mолоко 🐮🥛 ☆■▪︎
(Translation: New Milk)
☆ 🔞!!NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!🔞
☆ male! subtop! Francis Mosses / male! dombottom! Reader
☆ overstimulation if ya squint a lil, milking, breeding, dumbification, passing out, belly bulge (If your not into this, look away!! 👻👻)
☆ implied Russian speaking Francis (translated from google translate and research for needed accuracy, however, any form of critique or correction definetely is allowed!)
☆ short (I think???)
☆ author has played Not My Neighbor
°○☆nsfw under the cut☆○°
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You and Francis had a thing. And, fuck, for a minimum wage worker who barely gets any kind of rest at all, he's fucking good at what he does. He's a big fan of milking. Not his job, no, he could rant about how shitty it can be despite not wanting to get a new one (A/N: so real) but he's a fan of milking. Just the other kind of milking.
The first tim you two had sex, he was pretty sheepish about it, yeah. He didn't know if you prefered topping or bottoming so he settled for a handjob. You did the same as well. Until you both got used to each other and realized that he was pretty flexible. He'd do whatever you'd want to do, whatever you had in store, as long as if it wasn't too much for either of you. He loves fucking but he surely isn't a sex devient. Somewhere in the middle. Pliant to whatever you to had planned. But recently, he may or may not have discovered a new kink. Somethig that made his legs flex and his stamina increase and the gooey, warm, and fuzzy gears in his head grind back to life to keep on going. The last time you two had sex, there was now no condom, and he was pounding you into the bed that you swore Isaack would definetely send a formally written complain, persuasive enough for the both of you to not have such intense, hot, steamy sex for the next few months, (He's a reporter after all, have to respect the man informing the people, and he definetely has a way with words).
Humming, groaning, a little against your neck. You swore it was like a kitten, as if he was purring in a way. You pulled his hair as per usual and with a louder grunt his dark brown eyes roll up just a slight and flutter, closing shut as he fills you to the brim with his warm baby batter. Shaking, sweating, and biting his lip when he just keeps on cumming until theres nothing more to give. Or is there?
What he didn't expect, was when you suddenly whispered in the midst of him balls deep inside you,
"Thats it... good boy, you fuckin slut... Cum in me, keep milkin' yourself f'me"
Ah shit, he swore something inside of him just snapped loose. With the way he shivered violently, and as your hand loosened on his sweaty brown hair he moves again. Oh how odd, after a few rounds, the last one being penetration, he's always so tired, opting to give you a handjob or finger you if you didnt get a taste of your climax but shit. If this wasn't hot then what was?!
When you had basically degraded him to milk his balls dry you didn't mean literally, but fuck. This was so appealing, that your little milk boy had his quirks.
You look down at yourself seeing the bulge appearing on your abdoment everytime he thrusts in and god does it make you feel dizzy. Your hard dick, leaking as well just begging to cum while Francis gasps and shudders a little more, oh he looks so dumb. Trying to do as he's told. To keep milking himself. Milking himself for you. Just for motherfucking you. It keeps fuzzy sparks inside of his brain that has him smiling and drooling against your chest.
"Awe, what an adorable little cow you are... Milking your-...yourself for me... Giving me every ounce of that sweet sweet milk of yours, hmm? You wanna give me your milk Francis? You wanna fucking cum in me again?"
He feels so lightheaded that he smiles dumbly at the idea and nods as if his head is too heavy, full of warm cream. Muttering several words in russian mixed in with english as he nods slowly, trembling as his cock, still hard and moving perfectly against every spot inside of you.
"Please please please К-Куколка please... fuck fuckk- let me cum... inside... inside... cum inside please please milk me- oh... П-Пожалуйста... З-...Золотце... Пожалуйста..."
The pathetic, brown haired man sobs. Pawing at your sides like an injured little puppy. Begging so prettily, who could deny those eyes of his? all teary and tired. Small blobs of salty water dripping down his eyebags which were now disappearing, thanks to yourself for keeping his sleep schedule normal again after years of nap malnutrition.
After a few more moments of Francis groaning so softly against your ear, you feel yourself about to cum too, and when you order it directly, he really does come undone. Panting like a dog in heat while nails dig against his back skin. All the while he buries himself deep inside of you once again and fills you up with a second load of his fluids that it's practically drooling out of your hole. You hiss as well, shutting your eyes with a shudder as your dick spurts out a thick white rope of cum, coating Francis' stomach and your chest. Fuck.
Francis pants, collapsing on you. You gently push him to the side and just watch him catch his breath. Eyes closed, skin warm and sweaty while he's still inside you. All soft. But its not uncomfortable. At least now, you definetely know how you can abuse this new found information with your lovely boyfriend.
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monstersflashlight · 4 months ago
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This is for the Minotaur x reader x Orc thruple. Imagine reader getting pouty cause her monster boyfriends will slap each others asses for fun just walking past one another. Or your orc boyfriend will literally just spank your Minotaur boyfriend as a form of punishment or for play. But they won’t do it to you cause they are worried to hurt you. So reader starts bratting like crazy for not getting her way and in hopes that they will put her in her place and finally spank her. Minotaur boyfriend sees whats going on and finds it amusing. Orc boyfriend realizes what’s happening too, and his patience is thinning.
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Hey darling, I've been thinking about this ask long and hard and if I should do one more part of the story aviable for everyone, and I'm sad to announce that I'm gonna pass that story to Patreon, BUT, I do love to talk about them and I'm not opposed to do tiny snipets of their lives here, so here we have a tiny snipet of the scene you propose:
[For people who hadn't read the story, heres part 1, part 2 and part 3]
You turn around when you hear a very VERY loud smack behind you. There's a muttered "ouch" and then your minotaur boyfriend is there, rubbing his now sore ass, and your orc boyfriend is smirking in that smug way that drives you fucking insane.
"Why do you ignore my ass?" You ask, they turn around to look at you completely confused. "As in, why don't you smack my ass when I pass by, for example," you explain.
"We..." The orc starts.
"We don't want to hurt you, honey," the minotaur finished for him.
"But I want to." You try not to sound too needy, but you fail.
Your orc boyfriend rises an eyebrow, "Oh? Do you want to be spanked, little human?" He asks, a hint of danger behind his words. You shiver, biting your tongue not to moan.
"We can spank you if that's what you want," your minotaur's boyfriend's tone is a lot more measured, like he's not sure about it. You smile at him, tenderly. He's so soft.
"Yes, please." As soon as the words are out of your mouth, your body is being grabbed and thrown over your orc's shoulder, his hand groping your ass on the way to the bedroom.
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transmechanicus · 8 months ago
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Good morning everyone, I am ravaged by my curse (impeccable taste and correct opinions about everything)
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Theres a reason he looks like he does. Other nightmares helped style him up to bring in more prey and he replied with: "Mmmm. Alright."
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trulyumai · 7 months ago
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Oh, Mr Mosses (Series) II
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Part one can be found here!
https://www.tumblr.com/trulyumai/746978557424812032/oh-mr-mosses-series?source=share
Synopsis: You were fine with the job, the steps were easy enough but the secret  of the D.D.D was getting harder and harder to contain. Each night a new entity would enter the building, each with its own horrific look and intentions. Just as you debate on leaving, a new resident has entered the premises; Francis Mosses who is absolutely entranced by your being.
Will you be as smitten of him as he is of you? Only time will tell.
Taglist; @tfamidoingwithmylife (Let me know if you want to be added!)
Oh, Mr. Mosses II
“There you are Ms. Svertchz, have a wonderful day!” The receptionist smiled and through the glass she carefully looked at the woman in front of her. Her nails were so clean, she noticed, they were always gelled, matching whatever premium outfit she had on that day. 
“Yes, you too dear.” Without a glance at the younger woman the resident walked off, the tapping of her heels echoed through the old corridor and finally ceased when the elevator creaked its way down. 
It had been a week since meeting Francis, and she hadn’t really gotten a true impression of the man. He was so quiet, so… watchful. Anything she did in front of him she could feel his eyes on her, always staring at her with this thoughtful yet blank expression. 
He was just shy, she had thought. And if she was to make a move at all, it had to be small enough so that neither of them would be too embarrassed or caught off guard. 
He was so handsome, he was dressed nicely all the time and his lazy gaze fit his face so well. His nose was a bit hooked and larger than the average, but he made it look rugged, sexy even. 
With a shake to the head and a glance at the clock she let out a sigh. It was break time. 
Clouds rolled in, the rain came down soon after and poured down mercilessly. The winds howled along with it and she swore that if it got any stronger, the building would come cascading down. Almost everyone had checked in for the night, everyone except, she eyed the list again; Francis Mosses. 
With a squeeze to the paper she couldn’t help but let out a shaky breath. 
It was hell waiting to see if the dupe would come through the doors. Recently it had been trickier to spot the fake, they were getting smarter, better. 
Just the other day she almost let in a double of Ms. Bubbles, if she hadn’t noticed the lipstick was maroon instead of its usual raspberry who knows how many bodies would be littering the floor right now. The monster was furious she had caught on, it was so close, so close to being let in and getting its way through the building. 
A slam startled her out of her thoughts, the doors to the plaza burst open from someone- or something walking inside. 
The steps were slow, lazy, it had to be- 
“Mmm. Hello.” The milkman smiled, and although it was small, it comforted the receptionist dearly. 
“Hello Francis! The regular forms, please.” Straight to business, then who knows? Maybe ask him about coffee, a bookstore date, anything! 
Grabbing the papers he slid them over to the entrance, pushing them through with ease.
Turning them over she began her rambling. 
“How was your day, Francis? Things have been super slow here.” She mumbled, lining up each number and form. 
“Mm, it was fine. The rain was a bit of a hindrance but it didn’t stop me from completing my routes.” God, the way she said his name, he had to stop himself from biting down on his knuckles. Perfect, how could someone be so perfect all the time? 
He was enamored, obsessed even, with everything she was. It had been a week, sure, but it felt like a lifetime for him. 
She was distracted, per usual so he could stare at her freely now with no embarrassment to be had. Yet.
Her blouse was simple, a nice pale pink that hugged her in all the right places. And was that, a pencil skirt? Holy hell, this woman would be the death of him. 
With a glance to her left she looked at the schedule for the hundredth time, Francis' name was indeed there. 
“Everything’s clear, sorry for the wait.” She smiled at him then, her perfect teeth molded smoothly around her lips and- did he say she was perfect yet?
“Thank you.” Those glossy lips were tantalizing him, that had to be new lipstick, there’s no way he hadn’t noticed that sheen before on those plump, kissable- 
“Are you okay? You space out a lot,” she laughed. 
Quickly grabbing his forms he shoved them in his pocket, not bothering to open his wallet once more. 
He had to leave, the thoughts were getting to him, he felt hot, sweaty and tight in all the wrong places. It was a good thing his uniform came with black pants, otherwise he wouldn’t bother to show his face around any longer. 
“Mm, have a good night.” Without a pause he made his way to the elevator, and if it wasn't for the hand that shot out the paper slot he would have made it there.
“Wait! I’m sorry I didn’t mean to grab you like that, but um,” his eyes couldn’t help but widen, looking down her hand was still around his wrist. So small, so soft. 
“Do you… want to get coffee sometime?” She mumbled, although the rain was heavy and sounded out almost anything, he heard her. Because of course he did. Lifting his other arm, he couldn’t help but cover his mouth and cheeks. He rubbed his face, played it off as if he was really thinking it over, like it was a hard answer. 
“Mmm. Sure that sounds good.” And with a light smile he met her eyes. They were shining, full of emotion and if he looked any longer there was no way he was leaving. 
“Wait, really?” She gasped, letting go of his hand quickly and slotting it back to the other side. 
“Mhm, just… I’ll come to you, my schedule is quite hectic, you see.” 
“No of course! That sounds great, I'm sorry again for grabbing you,” And she truly looked apologetic, her face was so sympathetic, chin tilted downwards and she looked more like a kicked puppy than anything else. 
“Don’t worry about it, it’s fine,” he’s totally not going to imagine her hands later, gripping his shoulders, neck, trailing them down further and further.  
“I’ll see you soon then!” She pushed her hair back, letting it fall behind her gorgeous neck, collarbones and, what was he saying again? 
“Mm? Yes. Yes I’ll see you soon.” With a little pep to his step he pushed the elevator button. 
It was then a call rang out, it was the work phone. 
With a dreamy sigh she imagined him, the date and how perfect it all would be. Maybe they could grab dessert after. 
“Resident desk, employee 29 speaking.” 
“Hey 29! Great to catch you!” The manager's voice rang through and she sighed, her break was almost up and of course, the most extroverted person had to come talk her ear off. 
“Hello sir, what can I do for you?” 
“Straight to the point, you know I love that! You got the schedule for next week, right? Should be in a yellow envelope,” he smacked his teeth on the other end, and she could picture him now with his toothpick and big glasses staring right at her. 
“Yes sir, you told me not to open it until the day of.” 
He laughed. “Yep yep! Just uh, making sure. So, while I have you I thought I should mention,” shuffling was heard on the other end, like papers were being sorted through and thrown about. 
“The D.D.D wanted to make sure all employees know that this month will be more active than ever, and uh, they're sending in new forms to sign, waivers and what not.” 
She frowned. Active? What, how, why? 
Cutting him off she couldn’t help but talk fast. “Sir? Active? Why are they more active?” 
He paused, and she swore she could hear her heartbeat through her ears before he spoke up again. 
“Yeah, yeah, they said it had something to do with the weather? No idea, didn’t really bother to ask them you know, it’s hard to hold a conversation with a guy in a hazmat suit.” 
He laughed again and she wanted to strangle him, the man couldn’t take anything serious. 
“That’s all doll, you have a wonderful evening you here?” 
“Wait, sir-“ Click. 
That bastard, who does he think he is? Who does management think they are? Putting the phone back on the hook she couldn’t help but feel tired. Tired from work bullshit, how everyone brushed her off even though she was helping people, saving lives each and every night. 
The clock chimed, signaling for her shift to be over and she lazily rolled her chair back, getting up while picking at her nails. 
At least she had the date to look forward to, right? 
A/N: Second chapter done! We are slowly getting to the darker side of things woo! The next chapter will be a big one. I'll be introducing Francis’ mimic and will the receptionist be able to tell which is which? Well see! Let me know if i should implement more smuttier descriptions or content, for now i haven't but that can change! See you lovelies soon, TrulyUmai
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gaycrouton · 1 year ago
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pov: you look out of the peephole in your apartment and see your neighbor and his girlfriend are being weird in the hallway again
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lexxwithbooks · 1 year ago
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📖: 𝑪𝒓𝒂𝒔𝒉𝒆𝒅 (𝑀𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝐵𝑟𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑠 #2) 🦽🎂👙
✍🏽: 𝐉𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐊𝐫𝐢𝐬���
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elizabugz · 7 months ago
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Some silly little ghibli + rain pfps <3
From: Kiki’s Delivery Service, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Arrietty, and two from My Neighbour Totoro
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ghouldtime · 1 month ago
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I feel like König can absolutely melt your heart like this in the kitchen while a big pot of stew is simmering. Feel like it would be mid winter, a cozy fire going in the living room, probably a smudge of paint on his face from having just completed the miniature diorama he made of your wedding day or something. I JUST FEEL LIKE HES SECRETLY A HOPELESS ROMANTIC
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/CZRSbWa5D1b2ryCA/?mibextid=uSdriS
(If you don't want to click the link, it's cool. It's like a really slow beautiful old timey princess kind of dance. Lots of twirling and the holding hands behind your back kind of thing?)
I'm sorry I'm bursting yet another bubble here 😭 while that's a sweet thought and he has plenty of romantic actions to boot, he's not a hopeless romantic or even close to it.
A hopeless romantic is someone who believes in love conquering all and they have an idealistic view of it. They're someone who believes in love, no matter what they've seen or their past. They're someone who holds onto love above all and usually centers their life around it.
He doesn't even come close. Truth be told, he's extremely pessimistic and is near the polar opposite of that 😭
He's seen a lot, experienced a lot, and has never been one to feel that way. After being ruthlessly bullied as a kid for simply existing as himself and seeing his comrades torn into meat confetti for stepping one foot too far, he's doesn't exactly have a pearly world view. He doesn't think about love first, or second, or even third, fourth, or fifth. Love wasn't a focus for him or an interest - it wasn't a necessity in that department, he's been without romantic love most of his life, why would he need it then or now?
Love didn't stop bullets from spiraling towards you on the field, love can't conquer all when things like hate, retribution, and vengeance are sung much stronger in his world. Love could motivate but it destroyed many from the inside out. He wasn't going to start believing in love or wanting it just cause.
Sure, he had familial love. He loves his parents and that did wonders in a world that was usually otherwise cruel towards him. But romantic? He wasn't ever particularly interested. To him, it's usually yet another complication in the line of things. And anyone who is nice to him, he's usually suspicious of. He doesn't let people close for a reason.
Quite frankly, he usually thinks others have ulterior motives, especially if they're trying to cozy up to him. All his life, he's pretty much been an outcast. People tended to only be nice when they wanted something. He can count on one hand the few people who have genuinely been nice to him without WANTING something from him, whether that be his perks with his rank or just to have him as a human shield as they charge into battle.
He was the awkward kid, the loner, the one no one talked to in school. He never had a romantic life there. And he went straight to the military which left him no time or room for one - not that he cared for it. It's just not something he cared for or went after because he hadn't really experienced it and it wouldn't do him any good. He's seen how many marriages end and heard of all the troubles.
He was never actively looking for it or thinking of love. He wasn't seeking it because he's seen how miserable people are in and out of it. He's very much "if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, I'm happy with being me." König is a very independent man, he's fine on his own and is content with himself and where he stands.
I actually wouldn't describe him as any kind of romantic aside from unintentional because it's not a conscious thought! He's not doing it to woo or impress or to be a big gesture, he's just doing it because he likes you and wants to see you happy. What he does isn't born out of romance or desire or the want for either - it's just from the heart. It's an instinct.
He's not thinking of how romantic it would be as he plants your favorite flowers in his garden. He's growing them because he wants to see you happy and wants to put more of what you like in the world. He stocks your favorite drinks and snacks in his house because he wants you over - he wants you happy, comfortable, and enjoying his company. His actions are how he shows how he feels, but he's also not actively doing it because he's enamored with love itself or loving and how it feels. He doesn't care about the idea of love in particular, but he cares about you and what he feels for you.
He isn't making a diorama of the wedding because it's a romantic gesture, he's doing it because it captured how you both felt that day - and how truly beautiful you were in that moment, outshining the stars that danced above that night. He's memorializing his love in every brushstroke and clay flower, making sure to take extra care on the model he built of you. If he could relive any day over and over, it would be that. Sadly, he doesn't have that power, so he'll stick for the photos that captured it and the replicas he could make to truly memorialize it in the physical realm for years to come.
König's love isn't flashy, it isn't showy, it isn't meant to be something grand or fairytale levels of romance. It's simply his. Will he make you a ballgown if you wanted? Absolutely, but he's no prince, nor a king despite his name. Will he dance with you like that if you wanted? Absolutely. But that's not his first thought or a fantasy he really thinks of unless you implement it in his head. He's just him, living in the smaller moments of life. He doesn't need to show off to the world, he doesn't need it to be extravagant or formal, he doesn't need it to be by the books romantic - all of what he does is heartfelt, that's what he knows matters. And it has to be with and for you 💚 that's what matters the most
He's more one for holding you close and slow dancing in the kitchen as the water in the kettle boils, with no rush to be anywhere else. He's not hopelessly romantic, he's not even intentionally romantic, the only thing he's hopelessly in is love 💚
Besides, he's gotta save some moves for the wedding to make it that much more special 👀(he's signing you both up for ballroom dancing the second you express wanting anything like that. He's already picking out the fabric for the dress too)
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jojikawa · 3 months ago
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Beauty and the Beast
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art by ilameys
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-Part One-
⚠️: DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT ♥ Manhandling, Slight body horror descriptions, descriptions of blood, himbo!doppelgänger!Francis Mosses, Yandere Behavior, Mentions of Stalking, sexualization of the female MC by Fake Francis, double SMUT(CNC and consensual separately =), and monster cock, Shibari
I write for free, but if you wanna further support me > Ko-Fi 🎀
Care for typos!
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Francis decided he wanted to take things slow with you. He heard through the grapevine that your encounter with a doppelgänger was more than just a simple attack. He heard that it had violated you. Now you were being moderated by the D.D.D. It wasn’t his fault but he still felt bad and used those feelings of guilt to be good to you.
The man was kind enough to take you to the local dress store so that you could pick out something new as a gift from him. You were worried that your incident with the doppelgänger would make you less desirable to Francis. At some point, you’d have to tell him that the creature took the form of him.
“Here, let me.”
You felt the presence of a large man behind you. He tugged the back of your dress, straightening it so that he could zip up the new dress. You couldn’t help but blush at the contact. This is the closest the two of you had ever been. Years went by, and you could only meet him at your door or neighborhood events. Now, he was in your dressing room, touching your body.
Wait—touching your body…?
You felt his hand lingering on your back, slowly traveling lower and lower…
“Excuse me~!” You whipped around to face him. He was as red as a tomato with a surprised look. “You haven’t even gotten me a drink yet!” You joked cutely. It wasn’t common for a woman to be forward the way you were, but you often got away with a lot of things because of your pretty privilege.
“S-Sorry, I was just straightening the fabric.” His rather deep voice was quite adorable when he was flushed. Your grin widened. It felt best to help him move things along…just a bit.
You stepped closer to him, grabbing both of his arms and ushering him to place them on your waist. He obeyed, wrapping his large hands around your midsection and pulling you closer.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it.” You brought your bodies close enough to touch. Francis didn’t say a word. You could tell that he was rather shy, but he didn’t seem to be rejecting you.
You stood on your toes to place a kiss on his lips. His hands traveled from your waist to your ass, lifting you so that you wouldn’t need to try as hard to reach him. The contact made you gasp and he took the opportunity to slip his tongue into your mouth. 
You moaned at how aggressive he was, your voice sending blood rushing to his cock. You immediately felt him grow and his hard dick brushed against your leg. Your thigh touched it, causing him to react even more to the situation. 
Francis let go of you and broke away from the kiss. “Not here.” He said, quickly remembering that the two of you were in a public dressing room. 
At first, you were confused but your face quickly lit up when you realized what was about to happen.
The milkman took you by your hand, leading you out of the clothing store and bringing you to his car. You didn’t acknowledge it earlier, but he had a newer model. Perhaps, being a milkman paid well.
Just a month ago, you had felt as if you had no chance with this man. You thought that despite being the ideal woman a man desired, you simply weren’t his type. It got to a point where you felt as though you were bland. Men were easy to you. Always. When they saw how pretty you were, they’d easily fold and become easy to read but because everything was so easy, reading a man like Francis was hard.
But here you were, straddling him in the driver's seat of his car. The man was pretty timid but he knew what he wanted and he wanted you.
You ground your pussy on his bulge. You bit your lip and hummed at the sensation. You wanted to look as attractive as possible and your panties quickly became wet. Although he was hungry, he was really gentle. He left wet kisses on your collarbone, going up to your neck and face. His hands tugged at the thin fabric of your dress, threatening to tear it if he were too rough.
Your nipples hardened and you squeezed your eyes shut. Words couldn’t describe how happy you were right now. All the pining paid off. But it was just more than sex. The marks and bruises left by Franz were still there and Francis didn’t think any less of you. He still loved you all the same. Such traits are rare among men these days.
You felt his hand slip under your dress. His fingers grazed themselves over your damp fabric.
Snap!
“F-Francis?” You ceased your movements and looked him in the eye. Your face was hot with pleasure and embarrassment. He looked somewhat surprised as well. “I-I’ll buy you new ones.”
He used his strength to tear the fabric of your bottoms under your dress. His forwardness took you aback but it turned you on even more. His being quite unsure of himself only added to his attractiveness. It made you want to guide him. 
“Of course,” You licked your lips. “And I want a new pair of shoes as well.” You chirped, happily. Your hands were already resting on his chest. They traveled down and you made the mental note that you hadn’t seen him in anything else but his work clothes until today…but he still decided to wear a white T-shirt. White suited him well.
Your free hand tugged at his trousers. You were ready to finally have him. “Are you sure?” You heard him say with uncertainty but his actions communicated otherwise. He helped you free his cock from his pants. You didn’t know why but you thought of Franz and how big he was. You were grateful that Francis has a normal size—no, above average size.
His tip was shiny with precum, it was already smeared on the abdomen of your newly purchased dress.
“I am sure.” You reassured him. “If you want, I can lead.” You offered. You felt him squirm beneath you. How long has it been since he was with a woman?
He shook his head. “No, it’s fine.” He told you. “I just don’t want to mess this up.” His face was as red as a tomato and his eyes were filled with lust.  Your face grew warmer. He could be so hot without trying. You eased yourself and allowed him to take control.
You felt Francis’ hand creep up behind your neck while the other subtly slipped up your dress. You didn’t even know until you felt his palm and fingers gripping your plump ass cheek. Upon taking you in his hand, he bit his lip, jiggling your ass meekly. His cock pulsated and leaked from the tip due to his actions. You blushed too, your panties getting wet from being touched in such a way.
“F-Francis—Mmm…” His large hand guided you down to his lips, silencing you in the prettiest way. His kisses were short and hurried, it seemed like he was more concerned at feeling you up from the back. In the midst of it all, he pulled and tugged at your bottoms until he was able to pull them to the side. You grabbed his dick and pushed it between your lips. You almost jumped when you felt his warm tip in your folds. 
“Mm!” You tried to pull away but his grasp on the back of your neck wouldn’t let you move as freely as you desired. His tongue forced its way inside, exploring the warm, wet cavern that was your mouth. You have no idea how many times he’s imagined doing this to you. A part of Francis thought that this was a dream. One that he didn’t want to wake up from.
When Francis pulled away, you saw how his breath hitched. His skin flushed red while he huffed for air because of all the kissing. 
His hand moved from the back of your neck to your hips. He liked the way you felt on top of him. Your sexes were so close that he could probably slip his dick inside without you even realizing it at first.
“(y/n), let me put it inside.” He muttered, lowly. It almost made you laugh. Was he still asking for consent this far in? What a gentleman. “Franci—“ You opened your mouth to speak but his muttering continued.
“Please, please please, let me put it in. I want to feel you.”
Your abdomen burned with delight.  You never thought you’d be able to get Francis of all people to beg to fuck you. Having his attention made you feel sexy.
“Of course, my love.” You smiled attractively before having your pelvis brutally slammed down on his cock. The way he entered you was so perfect. He was just the right size for you.
You began to take part with him, moving your hips on his groin as best as you could. All he could do was moan your name, not caring that at any moment someone could hear him and know exactly what you were doing to him.
“Franc–ah!” You pleasured yourself on his cock and you could feel yourself heating up. Your juices mixed, causing the slick to drip from inside of you onto his pelvis. It was so close to getting on his clothes.
“Mmm.” You hummed in delight. “Just like that.”
At that moment, it felt like the two of you were perfect for each other. You couldn’t believe how reserved he always was with you and it was so much to the point where you didn’t even think he liked you. Now, here he was, fucking into you like a dog in heat, moaning your name like the two of you weren’t still in public. The riskiness made things so much better!
“Fuck, I’m gonna c-cum, sweetheart!” His voice was so delightful! The way he squirmed underneath you was so satisfying.
“Go on then~ Cum for me.” You leaned forward so that your torsos touched. Your nose brushed his and his warm breath hit your face. “Just make sure to pull—”
A rush of his liquid filled you up and painted your walls.
Out.
In one large motion, Francis slammed into you, forcing you to stay on his cock whether you wanted to or not. A warm feeling filled your hole so much that it leaked from your womb, down his shaft, and onto both of your clothes. It made you climax as well. You rode your high and tried to push yourself off of him to get him to pull out but your legs were too weak from the sexual activity.
The next few minutes that followed were awkward, to say the least.
You were sitting in the passenger seat of his car again, feeling the leftover cum pooling inside of your panties. You hadn’t spoken a word since the two of you finished but you could tell that Francis was getting a bit antsy.
You had occupied yourself by looking out the window as he drove. Through the reflection, you could see him glance at you from time to time as if he wanted to speak but was too nervous to. 
The two of you were almost at your apartment when he finally gained the courage to address the elephant in the room.
“I-I’m sorry for, uh, finishing inside of you like that.” He muttered quickly. You raise your hands slightly. “Oh no! It was just a heat of the moment thing, I understand—“
“If you get p-pregnant, you know, I can provide for you…”
Your heart clenched. You’d hate for your motherhood to begin because of some split-second decision to have sex but you’ve been pining after Francis for the better part of a few years. 
The car came to a slow and what awaited to the side of you was your apartment complex. You only blinked, a delayed response just on the tip of your tongue. How would you be able to tell him that you could already be pregnant…?
“…I’d like that very much.” A subtle blush warmed your cheeks. Your brain made you feel better by imagining what it would be like to start a family with him. He was a father of one already so he should be familiar with being a husband and parent.
Your expression caused him to blush as well. You felt like a teenager again, doing risky things like sex in a car with your long-time crush. 
Francis informed you that he had planned to take his daughter and some of her friends from school to the carnival. You wished that you could’ve accompanied him but it might’ve been too awkward with the daughter of his ex-wife.
Upon exchanging a kiss goodbye, you exited his vehicle and went to check yourself in so that you could rest. The new attendant was a young man that you hadn’t seen before. He seems to enjoy his job regardless. You submitted your paperwork and you were quickly identified as the real deal.
It wasn’t the first time but you couldn’t help but get the looming feeling of being watched every time you had gotten to your door. When you reach for your doorknob, you can still feel the huge figure of Franz standing behind you. It was like you were still experiencing that horrible tragedy…
Even if it felt good.
You mentioned it to your therapist immediately and she just told you that the trauma would linger a while longer since it was so fresh.
You entered your home, quickly making your way to your room to change out of your clothing and freshen up in the bathroom. Post-sex self-care is extremely crucial for a high-value woman like yourself. There was nothing you could do if you were pregnant but cleaning up did make you feel better.
Now, all that was left was to cook yourself dinner and begin planning your next week with Francis.
Yet, those thoughts of happiness left your mind when you caught a glimpse of red in your peripheral vision. You hadn’t noticed it when you came in but now it was painfully obvious that something was terribly wrong.
As you began to approach the doorway that led to your kitchen, you ended up slipping on something wet. The force pulled your legs from under you, causing you to fall on your bottom but before you could actually hit the ground—you were caught.
When you registered what was going on, you saw that your savior had glowing eyes, pale skin, and brown hair. His white attire was covered in a very red substance that made you fall. The irony crimson coated your legs and bare feet. The figure before you was now smearing it on your clothes as well.
“F-Franz…!?”
Your eyes darted downward. His free hand was the one that was able to catch you, it was large and cradled your bottom. But in his other hand was one of your kitchen knives. It dripped with blood and it was fresh too. 
Behind him, you caught a glimpse of what he was doing. Your refrigerator was wide open with a trail of blood leading from underneath you to whatever it was that he put inside. 
Memories fill your mind of the past, sending you into panic mode. How did he get inside? How has he not been caught? Was he going to ravage you again?
“Wh-What are you doing? Why are you h-here?” You could already feel your eyes welling up with tears at the sight of him. He was already terrifying but in both encounters with him, he killed someone.
“I live here now.”
The knife dropped to the ground with a loud metallic tone and you felt his bloodied hand grip the back of your head. “Where have you been?”
The creature took a deep whiff of your hair. It enjoyed the natural scent of you, even catching a bit of your slick that you washed away. It was faint but still there. Your vaginal juice was so potent that it would know it anywhere. 
“I…” Your voice cracked before you could get out another word. You weren’t ready. 
“…I-I just went out—“
“Where?”
“It was a local dress shop…”
His strong body enveloped you, picking you up from the spot where you were hovering above the floor. In his arms, he held you as if you were a princess, cradling you by the back of your knees and lower back.
Franz took you away from the kitchen before you could see what he was up to.
“With who? And don’t lie.”
Your eyes went from left to right. “What reason would I have to lie?” You secured your arms around his neck, coyly playing along for the sake of your safety. He might act like he wants you but he is still an it, a Dopple.
“I know what you look like when you lie. I’ve studied you. I can become you...” The corner of his mouth raised into a smirk. “…but I like the taste of you better.”
Your cheeks warmed at his perverseness. You weren’t used to such a handsome man acting this way towards you. It was always the men with no self-care or dignity that would catcall you in the evenings but never someone so…attractive. Would it be wrong to say you felt that wanted? 
Could you make Franz behave like a normal man…?
“I was…with a friend.” You answered somewhat nervously, your mind instantly going to your time with Francis. Your pupils shifted and your mouth instinctively curled into a smile. Franz didn’t seem to catch that you were lying. Perhaps, he was bluffing as well to get you to tell the truth. He was somewhat aware of the effect he had on you.
“Hm.” You felt his chest rumble with a hum. He took you to your bedroom where he placed you on your bed.
You gripped the sheets with anticipation. Meeting like this was so odd. He was covered in blood and it made you even more frightened that he refused to elaborate on what he was up to exactly. “Just a friend?” He repeated, leaving the room for only a moment. He didn’t go far as his steps didn’t fade at all. This was the first time you’ve ever felt unsafe in your own home like this.
Moments later, he returned, a thick rope in hand. On his face was a dark look that you recognized all too well, so much so that it triggered your memories of the day he ravaged you. 
“Wh-What’s that for?”  You questioned.
“You.” He replied. 
You blinked. “Me? What—“
“I don’t believe you.” 
The two of you stared at each other for a moment. Then he began to get closer. He was planning to tie you up in your room forever, wasn’t he?
“What do you mean?” 
His half-smirk turned into a cold line and silent anger washed over his features. His lifeless eyes were fixated on your smaller form, clinging to the bedsheets like a scared little girl. “You see, I don’t believe you.” He answered. You bit your lip in anticipation and fell silent. You thought he’d be gone for good so you were completely unprepared for today. You let him continue as it looked like he had more to say. 
“...there’s this thing you do when you lie. You don’t even know that you do it, but I know it.” He grew closer like a predator stalking its prey. The bed sank from the weight of him climbing onto it with you. “And, I can smell him all over you!” His large hand grabbed the back of your head with a fist full of your hair. You cried out as he jerked you around like a ragdoll into whichever position he pleased.
No matter how hard you fought against him, he never budged and you couldn’t stop him from tying the thick rope around your neck and limbs. You struggled, thinking that he was chaining you to your bed but that didn’t seem to be it. His hands bloodied various parts of you. The clothes you just had on before he tore them off of you, more of your hair along with your arms, hips, and ass cheeks. 
Your arms were tied behind your back and your legs together so that you could no longer push him away or run. “F-Franz, come on—“
“Shut up!” Franz snarled, silencing you with a loud smack to your ass. It would’ve hurt if it didn’t feel so right. You felt your head being pushed into the mattress as a warm, thick, fleshy, hard object rubbed itself between your thighs. The contact made of his pulsating shaft was soon slick in your juices. Its potent smell of femininity made him feel like he wouldn’t be able to control himself any longer.
His mouth attached to your behind, right between your cheeks. The wet muscle of his tongue went between your folds before entering your pussy.
“Franz please!” But your cries only fueled his need for your fluids. His slimy monstrous explored your innards, consuming any juices you made just as they produced. The pleasure and roughness were too much. You tried to inch away but it was like his mouth was attached to your backside. 
You could tell that he was really into it. He kneaded and fondled your ass to his liking, making sure you felt good to maximize the amount of vaginal fluid that could be made. Like an animal, his salvation dripped and wet the bed and his calloused fingers dug into the soft flesh of your cheeks. 
The overstimulation caused you to reach your high so quickly. Before you could even warn him, you squirted all over his face and lips. His growling intensified like he couldn’t get enough, slurping all of your juices. When he was done, he didn’t bother to wipe his mouth. He grabbed the decorative rope that kept you restrained for a sloppy kiss.
“So good.” He muttered on your lips before using his strength to push you on your side. “P-Please, Franz, not so hard this time…” You sputtered out. Your legs were numb from pleasure so all of the movement from this point on was up to you. “Don’t tell me what to do.” His dick slid in between your closed thighs. He gave it a few thrusts before moving to your hole slick with his saliva.
Slowly but surely he pushed himself inside. He relished in the sound of your cries as you struggled to take his size and length, proud that he could say he was the biggest you’ll ever have. No human man could match him in any way, shape, or form. Every stroke sent butterflies to your stomach. The noise filled the hallway outside of your home and you were sure that your neighbors could hear. You felt so embarrassed that you squeezed your eyes shut and tried to endure until it felt like he finished.
But it felt like it went on forever. The inside of your pussy was sloshy and constantly leaking onto the bed but Franz didn’t want to let up. His beautiful body was glistening with sweat after he had removed his top half through his session. His cum shot into your womb and he slumped on top of you.
The sweat, juices, and remnants of blood made you feel icky. You were still tied up and couldn’t move.
“Franz.” You called.
“Franz.”
No answer.
You nudged him a bit. You needed to get cleaned up. Everything was leaking from your holes and your face was a mess from the crying and kissing. “I need to go to the bathroom.” You whined, wiggling beneath him. He was so big and heavy.
Without a word, he rose to free you from the Shibari rope. Once again, your whole body was sore despite being the bottom from how relentlessly he was. You were surprised that he seemed to be somewhat experienced with aftercare. Last time, he left so abruptly, that you felt like he would’ve left you there.
But today was different. He carried you to the bathroom when you needed to go. He helped you clean up and put on some fresh clothes. It saddened you that the new dress Francis got you was now soiled with…everything. But life goes on. Perhaps, you could salvage what was left of the dress. You could hand wash it and use your skill in sewing to repair anything else if needed. You just didn’t know how you’d break the news to Francis that the gift he got you on your date was ruined at the hands of another man sucking and fucking your holes. 
Franz seemed to exert himself. He was sprawled out on your bed while you just stood there, wondering what was supposed to happen now. You decided to finally go look at what he had been doing in the kitchen all along.
The crimson smell hit your nose again as you approached the dark room. You hit the light to see that gore covered every inch of your kitchen. A trail of blood that started from your doorway led to the fridge where Franz had been standing when you walked in on him.
You investigated further to see that inside was a man you had never seen before, freshly murdered and stuffed into the back. “Oh my—!“ You covered your mouth in a desperate attempt to prevent yourself from vomiting at the sight.
In a fit of anger, you stormed to your bedroom where Franz was still sleeping to confront him about it. 
“Excuse me!”
He didn’t budge.
“Franz!” 
Your foot made contact with his side, knocking you off of your own feet and stumbling to keep balance. He was like a rock.
“I saw what you did in my kitchen. Who was that?! Why did you do that?!” Your soft voice firmed and wavered with emotion. You finally got him to respond but it was a mumble and the only things you could make out were “some guy.” And “hungry.” 
“I can’t house you if you’re bringing bodies into my home.” You told him. “They’ve installed new cameras since last time when you first showed up. What am I supposed to say when the D.D.D. comes to investigate?”
“They won’t come.”
“They will.” You pressed on. “I’ve been getting watched ever since you—“
“The D.D.D. won’t come because that rat was already stowed away when I got here. I did you a favor.” He then turned over so that you could only see his back. “He wants to be me so bad.”
“Wh-what…?” You blinked. “Someone was in my house while I was away? Doing what?”
And then he dozed off to sleep. He no longer reacted to your calls and kicks to the side. He didn’t wake. He didn’t budge. 
Taglist: @crybabies-hearts @z3r0art @chilifrylizard2 @luciledreamz
There were so many ppl who wanted to be tagged that I lost track so I really hope you guys find this! Thanks for being patient with me.
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celestie0 · 3 months ago
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gojo satoru x reader | fake marriage au [18+]
in holy matriphony ch3. domestic encounters
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ᰔ pairing. fake marriage au - neighbor&realtor!gojo x nurse!reader (ft. choso x reader & suguru x reader)
ᰔ summary. gojo satoru is your extremely annoying next-door-neighbor who you're pretty sure is the most insufferable man you've ever met. given the fact that you exclusively work the night shift at a chaotic emergency dept, just got broken up with your boyfriend of seven years, n have been taking care of your sick mom ever since her multitude of diagnoses, yet somehow your neighbor is the main source of stress in your life should speak volumes. but when your mother's medical bills start to skyrocket more than you can manage, and you learn that said neighbor of yours has the best private health insurance in the country, you ask him to enter a matrimonial agreement with you for the spousal benefits all in the name of saving a few hundred thousand dollars. but you'll have to see if suffering cohabitation w him is worth any amount of money.
ᰔ genre/tags. fluff, smut, angst, enemies to lovers (sort of), annoyances to lovers (that's more like it), small town romance, fake marriage, next door neighbors, lots of bickering, suburban shenanigans, slow burn, mutual pining, mild love triangle(s), gojo likes to play house but you don't, hatred for the american healthcare system, gojo always forgets to mow the lawn, jealousy, an insane amount of profanity; btw gojo in this fic is in his mid 30s n reader is in her late 20s
ᰔ warnings. reader in this fic has a sick mother w alzheimer's & cancer so there is secondary medical angst!!
ᰔ chapter. 3/x (probably 10)
ᰔ word count. 14.1k (i like this number)
a/n. hello hellooo my ihm bb's :'') so good to see you all again. so this is actually the first half of an original 26k word chapter 3 that i had written lmfaooo i genuinely entertained the idea of posting a 26k word chapter but like gat damn. idk i thought it would be too much. so there is this first part which is 14k and then the next chapter will be 12k! anywho, this chapter was fun to write, there's still a lot of set-up tho hahah. ihm has been really fun to write for me cuz it's kinda chaotic but chill at the same time lol :0 i really hope you enjoy!! see ya at the bottom!!
nav. ch1 :: ch2 :: ch3 :: ch4 :: ch5 (pending)
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“Soooo…..ready to consummate the marriage?”
You turn fast on your heel, so fast that Gojo almost trips over his own Welcome mat at his doorstep in an attempt to not accidentally topple over you, which you’re sure by the sheer size he has on you would’ve killed you or at the very least paralyzed you from the neck down, so it’s a good thing his hands fly out of his pockets then brace himself on the wood paneling above the door. 
“Wha–” you stutter, “what?!”
He stands up straight before leaning against the doorframe and crossing his arms, the sleeve fabric of his suit stretching across thick muscle but you refuse to give him the satisfaction of looking. “The marriage technically isn’t valid unless we consummate it.”
You roll your eyes and dig your finger into your heel to take it off and then do the same with your other, relishing in the freedom of your feet from the shackles of constrictive feminine clothing articles, although you’re a solid two and a half inches shorter again. “I would rather make love to one of those inflatable balloon salesmen at car dealerships that flail and flap around in the wind than let you touch me for the purpose of sex.”
“Fuck that’s harsh,” he laughs, like he’s genuinely impressed by the comeback this time, “so a dead bedroom then, huh?”
“Can’t be dead if it was never alive in the first place,” you mumble as you tread into his house and toss the documents envelope you had been holding onto the coffee table. You hear Gojo make his way across the hardwood floor behind you paired with the metal clanking of keys as he throws them into the paper mache bowl on the foyer table. 
“By the way,” you hear him say, and you turn your torso slightly to side eye him only to see that he’s casually taking his suit jacket off with a flip of it backwards, “who was that guy in the courtroom that was glaring daggers into my soul?”
Your eyes widen briefly. And then you sigh. “My ex.”
He pulls the jacket off behind him by the sleeves and tosses it onto the loveseat. “Huhhh. You used to date a cop? You don’t seem like the type.”
“What?” you say as you face him fully. He’s loosening his tie now with a tug. “Why not?”
“You’re kinda…delinquent. Figured a cop would like a more ‘docile’ woman,” he says.
“You sound creepy as fuck,” you say, grimacing a little as you narrow your eyes at him.
He sighs before tossing his tie off to the side as well. “I don’t agree with it. I’m just getting into their headspace. Everyone knows how cops are. Y’know, controlling.”
“Choso is different,” you immediately spat back at him, before your head can even run the words through a filter, and you realize it came off as defensive. Your cheeks warm, because now it looks like you’re not over your ex. And you want to be. Why were you still protecting Choso’s dignity?
Gojo blinks at you, a little surprised before he swallows slowly and he holds his hands up in front of him in surrender. “Alright. I believe you.”
You turn away from him and worry your bottom lip between your teeth, feeling awkward before you scratch your elbow and then turn back to face him again. “Well. If you run into him around town,” you say, “can you try to make him feel emasculated and jealous? He did me dirty.”
Gojo runs a hand through his hair. “Uhhh. How?”
“I dunno,” you shrug, “brag about how great our sex life is or something.”
“But we have a sexless marriage.”
“Oh, yes, speaking of this sexless marriage,” you start, jutting your hip out to the side as you cross your arms sternly, “there are some ground rules that need to be set between you and I.” You point between the two of you.
“Ground rules?” he mimics after you as he undoes the top couple buttons of his white dress shirt, “like what?”
You hold a finger up. “Like no touching.” You hold another finger up. “Obviously, no sex.” You hold another finger up. “No sneaking into my room in the middle of the night.” You hold another finger up. “No peeping in on me while I’m showering.” You hold another finger up. “No ogling me around the hou–”
“These rules sound incredibly one-sided,” he snorts. 
“Yeah, well, don’t break them, you creep.”
“And if I catch you ogling me around the house?” he asks. 
You roll your eyes. “Such a thing will not happen.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he sarcastically affirms, and he approaches you which makes you flinch a little but you realize he’s just walking past you towards the living room.
“Y–” you stutter, “you heard me, right? Once I start living here, you have to adhere to these rules.”
He waves his hand in the air dismissively with his back facing you. “Yes ma’am.”
Your eye twitches slightly, and you storm towards him only to watch him slump down onto his couch, knees spread wide as he leans forward with a small grunt to grab the remote off the coffee table before settling back again. He lays an arm up and stretched across the backrest of the couch before he turns the TV on and scrolls through news channels. 
You make your way in front of him, obstructing the view of the TV, and he leans off to the side to try to catch a glimpse at the screen but you reposition your body so that he still can’t see it. His eyes slowly move to you and he has an irritated look on his face. 
“I’m tryna watch CNN,” he says. 
“Punishment,” you say, “for breaking any of these rules will be severe.”
He raises an eyebrow, interested all of a sudden as he tosses the remote back onto the coffee table and leans forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “Oh? What’s the punishment?”
Honestly, you don’t know. You just want to threaten him to keep him in line. Forget the fact that he’s the one doing you the favor here with this marital arrangement, and yet you’re threatening him. But it has to be done. “You don’t want to find out,” you say, trying to sound as eerie as possible.
“Not knowing what it is makes me want to find out,” he tells you, his knee swaying side to side like a dog wagging its tail. 
You briefly glance down, and for fucks sake why is all of his clothing so perfectly fit and stretched taut whenever he does anything? You try not to eye the shape of his thighs as the black fabric stretches while he’s seated.
You clench your fists at your side, worry your bottom lip under your front teeth, furrow your brow and blink rapidly from not being able to come up with something to say, and Gojo seems to read this as worry before he laughs a little.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’m not gonna break any of your silly rules, despite how tempting it might sound to me.”
“I don’t believe you,” you mutter as you walk around the couch towards the kitchen, feeling thirsty all of a sudden. 
“Seriously. I won’t. You’re not my type,” he says from behind you on the couch, with a tone that tells you he’s trying to sound reassuring but it really just pisses you off even more, “I don’t really go after women with daddy issues.”
“Wha–” you gasp, offended, and you spin on your heel to glare at the back of his head. “Who the fuck said I have daddy issues?!?!”
“No one has to say it, I can feel it,” he says as he continues to clicks through channels.
You pick an avocado up out of the pile of fruits from the bowl at the center of the island, holding it over your shoulder to charge up as much kinetic energy as possible so you can chuck it at him hard enough to knock him unconscious, and it’s like he senses the malice radiating off of your body because he looks over his shoulder at you.
“What’s that in your hand?” he asks.
“A grenade,” you say, “that I’m gonna launch at you.”
“Oh, thank god,” he exhales in relief, “I almost thought it was an avocado for a second.”
You deadpan stare at him. “I don't find you funny.”
“I think I’m pretty funny,” he says mindlessly, like he’s just arguing with you for the sake of arguing.
“No. I have never once laughed at a single thing you’ve ever said. Only grimaced with disgust,” you say.
He sighs. “Look at us. We’ve barely been married for an hour and we’re already fighting.”
You abandon your empty glass on the counter, shuffling around the corner towards the front entrance of the house because you can feel the headache from your pure annoyance starting to creep up on you. You sense Gojo’s eyes on you from the couch as you shove your feet back into the uncomfortableness of your heels. 
“Where are you going?” he asks. 
“Back to my house,” you grumble, wobbling a little when you take a step towards the door and place your hand on the handle.
“When are you gonna move in?” he asks suddenly.
You freeze in your tracks at his question. You’ve never heard the question before, because you’ve never had the chance to live anywhere that wasn’t your childhood home next door. So the question is jarring at best, and threatens to make you cry a little at worst. 
“Once I get my mom into hospice,” you say, quiet enough to where it’s possible he might not have even been able to hear it over the sound of presidential election updates. And then you make your way out of his house. 
•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•
It’s a beautiful sunny spring morning, clouds trailing by across the sky offering momentary relief from the heat reaching the pavement, and you’ve got a good marching band walk going on as you stroll down the sidewalk of your neighborhood for your morning walk. Well, that phrase implies that you go on morning walks often. You really don’t, you very rarely have the time or energy. But today you decided it was time to turn your life around (your running shoes will see you same time next month). 
You hear some commotion off at the right side of the street, and when you lift your head up a little to clear the obstructed view of your sun visor, you see a couple of cops standing on a lawn, chatting up your elderly women neighbors with their laughter bolstering in the air. One of the cops turns around, making eye contact with you, and—  of fucking course, it’s Choso.
“Oh, fuck me,” you mutter under your breath and try to walk faster down the sidewalk in Korean ahjumma style. 
“Hey! y/n! Wait!” you hear him call out and he jogs across the street to catch up with you.
You continue to military march down pavement. “What do you want, Choso? Why are you stalking me?”
He runs up in front of you to stop you in your tracks. You frown at him and cross your arms across your chest. “I’m not stalking you,” he says, “I got a call about a stray dog out here.”
“Oh. Wonderful. So glad to know our officers are keeping us safe from cute street dogs,” you say, tone dripping with sarcasm.
“The dog had rabies. It bit an old man. Had to put it down,” he deadpans.
“O-Oh,” you stutter, cheeks flushing, “well, then, leave? Your job here is done.”
“I just—” he starts, “I want to—” He sighs, looking flustered like he’s trying to gain some sort of courage. And you’re almost entirely certain he didn’t need to garner this much courage to face a rabid dog than he seems to be needing for you. “I, uh, I want to meet your husband.”
“W-What??” you exasperate.
“To say congrats,” he says, but through gritted teeth.
You roll your eyes. “Yeah fucking right. You just wanna abuse your po-po powers to arrest him then throw him into jail then kill him to leave me widowed so that I’ll get back together with you and make a fool out of myself all over again.”
“Your capacity for catastrophization never fails to amaze me,” he says.
You’re pretty sure your therapist said something similar to you last week, too. 
“Ahhh!! y/n!!” you hear a familiar feminine voice call from down the street, and both you and Choso turn your heads toward the source of the sound.
Amaya, your neighbor, who is roughly thirty-weeks pregnant at the moment and therefore waddling down the street to get to you, is waving her arms in the air as her husband as well as another one of your neighbors follows after her. She finally reaches you and takes your hands into hers. “I haven’t seen you in forever!! How’s your mom doing?”
“She’s doing well…just getting by,” you say awkwardly, as Choso’s cop partner also approaches this little group that’s forming here, along with the elderly neighbors that he had been talking to. 
“Doctors taking good care of her?” Amaya’s husband, Ren, asks you with a twisted expression on his face and arms tightly crossed over his chest like he was gonna beat the doctors up if they weren’t. 
“Yes…” you say, “although, I think I’ll be transferring her care to Kaiser.” Oh. Fuck. You should’ve kept that to yourself. Big mouth.
You can feel Choso’s eyes on you as he watches this interaction between you and your neighbors. 
“Oh! That’s interesting,” Amaya says, and as her hands soothe over yours, she feels the bump of the ring on your left hand. She glances down. “H-Huh??? Is this a wedding ring?!”
Choso crosses his arms and tucks his hands under his armpits in your periphery.
“Y…yeeeeesss…” you say awkwardly.
“You’ve finally married?” your elderly neighbors chirp out at the same time.
You shoot them a dirty look over the word finally. “Yes.” Please drop the subject, please drop the subject.
But Amaya has always been the gossipy nosy neighbor. “To who??”
Choso snaps his face to you, intently studying your body language. You take a deep breath.
“I-I didn’t tell you?? I married Satoru!!” you chirp, as if it was a normal thing.
“Ehhh?!” you hear multiple of your neighbors’ voices call out. 
“You married Satoru??? But you hate him!!” Amaya blurts out, her voice loud and echoing down the street of the neighborhood.
“I—” you stammer, ducking your head a little to hide behind your visor, “um, oh, y’know…those feelings just…snuck up on me!”
“Awwww good for youuu,” Amaya coos, and one of your elderly neighbors comes up to you with a cheeky smile to then rubs your arm approvingly, “he’s sooooo handsome, you’re so lucky!!”
Ren lets out a hmph over his wife’s flattery of another man, and you roll your eyes, wanting to put Gojo in his place even in the face of just your neighbors, but then you remember that a loving wife wouldn’t say something like his personality makes him an ugly rat. 
“But when did this happen?” Choso’s partner speaks up, his voice accusatory. Choso hits his partner’s chest vest with the back of his hand, as if to say cut it out.
You feel pissed off at that.
“Oh yeahhh, you and Choso only recently broke up!” Amaya says, pointing between the two of you.
You purse your lips together from the anxiety of this entire conversation. “Three weeks ago. Choso and I broke up three weeks ago,” you say, not even sure why you’re disclosing your personal matters to this group of congregated people, but the peer pressure was damning, and you’re pretty sure silence on this subject in front of your neighbors would only make Choso more suspicious, “and—” you had to get your story straight, “well…within those three weeks, Satoru and I just…got to know each other.”
“Eh?” Ren speaks up. “But he was out of town for two weeks. He only came back a week and a half ago.”
You blink at him.
“Ohhh yes, yes, that’s right, honey,” Amaya agrees with a slow nod in remembrance as she pats her husband's chest, “those chocolates he brought us were from London, right?”
Choso tilts his head at you, giving you a glare with the intent of having you crack under this pressure, because you’ve just been caught in a cold hard lie. More importantly, how the fuck did you not notice that Satoru had been gone for TWO WEEKS??? He was your next door neighbor. You’ve seriously been so damn out of it these days. Also, why the fuck didn’t he get you chocolates from London?!?!?! The fucking snake. 
“A marriage within three weeks is a little odd, no?” Choso’s partner speaks up, but with less of a casual conversation tone and more of a I sense something illegal going on here tone.
“Alright, alright, alright,” Choso sighs, taking a step to stand in front of you. “Let’s all get on with our days. She doesn’t have to share any information she doesn’t want to.”
You blink in surprise at Choso’s words, of which all your neighbors acknowledge albeit slightly reluctantly as they wave goodbye to you and start dispersing back to their homes. Choso’s partner gets some notice through his radio, and he pulls it from the velcro of his chest to speak into it before heading back to their cop car with a slight jog. Once everyone is gone and it’s just you and Choso again, he turns around to face you. His arms are still crossed at his chest while he wears a very skeptical and almost reprimanding look on his face.
“What are you up to, y/n?” he immediately asks you, and you feel goosebumps tickle your skin even in the heat. “I really hope it’s not something fishy. Or illegal.”
You swallow hard. You know the U.S. federal codes in the law for marital & insurance fraud like the back of your hand, since you read through them hundreds of times before deciding if your arrangement with Gojo would be worth it. 8 U.S.C. 1033 and 18 U.S.C. 371 provide for a penalty of up to ten years in prison for insurance fraud. And under that statute, you can also be fined up to $250,000. The best case scenario is that you just have to divorce Gojo, and forfeit your chances of ever recovering from your crippling debt. And while it’s hard to prove marital fraud, Choso had reason for a personal vendetta against you, and he has the resources to launch an investigation. 
“Why would I do something illegal??” you ask, as if to convince him that the possibility was absurd. 
He takes a step closer to you, and your breathing picks up. “People do illegal things all the time,” he says, “for the thrill, out of curiosity,” another step closer, “the most common reason that I’ve seen?” He’s so close to you now that you catch the familiar scent of his skin. “Desperation.”
You catch a small gasp of air from his imposition in your personal space, and finally, your weak legs manage to take you a step back. 
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about here,” you say with a shaky voice.
He raises an eyebrow at you. And then he sighs. “Stay out of trouble.”
Your eye twitches at him, annoyance resurging but you have to bite your tongue for self preservation. Gojo’s words about cops liking more docile women ring in your ears for a brief moment, and you have to physically shake your head to get his voice out of it. 
His partner yells for him from his car, something about a call they got for a robbery downtown, and Choso spares you a warning look before he turns on his heel and jogs back to the car. The sound of police sirens mimic the panic in your beating heart as you watch them speed off down the street and out of sight.
•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•
You pull into your neighborhood at the early hours of the morning, skin feeling dry and eyes feeling heavy with exhaustion as you yank your hospital badge clip off your scrub top to toss onto the passenger seat along with your stethoscope, releasing it from your neck like pulling a noose loose. 
Before your shift last night, you had to take your mom to the hospital because she was have shortness of breath, and her oxygen saturation was low on her pulse oximeter. She’s stable now, it was just yet another flare up of her COPD, but given her other risk factors, the hospitalist admitted her to monitor her overnight and through to the evening today if all goes well. Which meant that you could have the house to yourself for once. It might sound selfish to say, because shouldn’t the more dominant feeling be I hope my mom will be okay, but the reality was that there’s only so much of that worry you can have at a time. It doesn’t mean you’re not thinking of her literally every second of the day. It just means you’re human. 
The weirdest thing about working the night shift is seeing everyone else’s days start while yours is just ending. There’s a bit of satisfaction with it. Like imagining laughing at their faces ha ha! You have to go to work now at seven in the morning, meanwhile I get to sleep! as if working the night shift doesn’t lead to substantially higher rates of cardiovascular disease and other chronic illness, as well as an early death. So who really got the last laugh? Day shift workers. Literally.
It wasn’t something you did because you liked working the night shift. You do it because you get paid a 20% differential for it. And you need all the money you can get right now.
Your brain seems to be working more than usual if you’re able to think about all these things after a shift. Swiftly pulling into the driveway of your home, around the hull of Gojo’s obnoxious boat in the driveway, you get out of your car with your purse hanging from your shoulder and just before you shut the door, you see one of your elderly neighbors waving at you from across the street. You’re pretty sure her name is Margaret, but you’re awful with names. You do remember that she was in the posse of neighbors that were flocking you yesterday and asking you pushy questions about your marriage in the presence of Choso. And your body stiffens a little. 
She tilts her head at you as you stand in your driveway, and you awkwardly glance over at Gojo’s house.
“Oops!” you chirp from across the street, “always forget to pull into the Hubby’s driveway instead! Silly me!!”
You grab your emergency overnight stay bag from the back of your car and hurry over to Gojo’s house, knocking on the door incessantly and ringing the bell so as to not arouse any more suspicion from your neighbors about why two married people aren’t living together. “Forgot my keys!! Hahahhahaha,” you exclaim while your pounding on the door intensifies. You’re sure you're just being paranoid, because why would sweet old lady Margaret (Janice? Patricia?) snitch on you? But you’ve been paranoid all your life. It’s one of your fatal flaws. 
The door opens suddenly, right as you were about to pound harshly once again, and you stop the motion in time to not sock Gojo in the abdomen with your fist. He blinks down at you, his face a little puffy from sleep, his hair shooting out in all different directions, and he scratches at his chest through the thin cotton of his shirt, one he clearly threw on last minute before opening the door considering the fact that he put it on backwards. And inside-out. 
“Huh? y/n?” he mumbles, his voice deep and kind of raspy with sleep, “what are you doing here?”
“Just let me in,” you hiss at him, glancing over your shoulder to your elderly neighbor's lawn for a second, and then duck under his arm that was holding the door open to get inside the house.
You turn around to see him shrug his shoulders and slowly close the door, clearly too tired to deal with the bullshit this early in the AM, and he turns around to face you before leaning back onto the surface. His eyes close, like he’s trying to preserve the sleepy feeling for when he gets back into bed.
“Can I help you?” he says. His head falls back with a small thump to rest on the door.
“I’m going to sleep here for the night. Er, for the day,” you say. “I will move in starting today.”
“Okay,” he easily agrees.
You blink at him. “Um. Show me to my room.”
“Yeah, sure,” he says, scratching the back of his neck as he heads for the stairs with the shuffle of his slippers across the hardwood floor. You note that he is very easily malleable and overall smooth brained when he’s sleepy. You try to ignore the fact that you find it kinda cute. 
You follow him up the stairs and he leads you across the loft into a hallway studded with a couple of doors. He opens one of them for you, his head drifting a little like he’s about to fall back asleep. “Here you go,” he says while gesturing inside the bedroom and rubbing his eye with a weakly closed fist, “guest bedroom. Uh, there’s another one near the master too that’s a bit bigger, but this one has a lock on the door. So that I don’t sneak into your room in the middle of the night.”
“Thanks,” you accept and head inside. You set your emergency overnight stay bag on the bed and then turn around to face the door to find Gojo still standing in the frame. He has his hands pushed into the pockets of his pajama pants as he squints at you. 
You feel…a little…nervous? Shy? Who the fuck were you to be shy in front of Gojo? You really don’t give a damn what he thinks about you, since a lion does not concern itself with the opinions of a sheep (you’ve been doing reruns of Game of Thrones this past week), but starting today, you’ll be in his territory, and this whole situation is so domestic that you feel vulnerable in front of him. Like the sheep somehow managed to splay the lion open this time, and now the real you is on display for him. You’re suddenly self conscious of the unruly state of your hair and the stains of IV fluid on your black scrubs and the fact that the allegedly flake-proof mascara you put on at the beginning of your shift has long since flaked all over your cheeks.
“Um. Can you leave?” you say in a small voice.
“Huh?” he responds, like he himself forgot that he was still standing there. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” He lets out a very long exhale. “Make yourself at home.” And then, still facing you, he walks off to the side veeeeeeery slowly until he’s out of sight.
You walk up to the doorframe and peak your head around to the left to see him still standing there.
“Satoru. Stop treating me like I’m some animal at the zoo. Leave.” 
“It’s just so weird seeing you in my house like thi—”
You slam the door on him, your breathing finally slowing down again as your palms lay flat on painted white wood. You move your hand down to the handle, thumb and forefinger lingering on the lock as you look at it for a moment, but ultimately decide against locking it.
The room has a bathroom attached to it which is nice. The bed is a queen size, fitted with light blue and eggshell white sheets, tucked neatly spare for one corner of the bed where the duvet is flipped over. To the left of the bed is a nightstand and to the right is a dresser that looks very new. You take a glance at your reflection in the mirror sitting above it, and let out a small gasp at your less than flattering appearance. 
A five minute shower does you wonders, and you pat yourself dry with a towel that matches the shower curtain. You find one of your floor-length vintage nightgowns, with the long frilly sleeves, after rustling through your overnight stay bag, along with a toothbrush and some moisturizer. 
As you brush your teeth, you pace around the room. There’s a little staggered rack near the window that is lined with plants and the blinds are angled perfectly for sunlight to get through to them. You poke your finger to one of the plant’s soil and notice that it’s damp. Been watered recently. Gojo is a plant guy? He really doesn’t seem the type. Well, actually, he’s pretty vain about his avocado tree. But houseplants were a different story. A whole different trope of person.
After getting ready for bed, you slip into the sheets and lay stiff despite the comfortable mattress as you stare up at the ceiling with the duvet tucked under your arms. It’s bright in the room. Back home, you have blackout curtains, which help you sleep because it blocks out the morning light. Here, you don’t have that. You don’t have your melatonin either. But you do have the exhaustion in your veins, making you blink slowly and slowly until the water in your eyes feels as thick as oil. You’re so tired to the point that you can’t even sleep.
You force your eyes to close anyway. You’ll pretend you’re a queen in a palace, here in a foreign land she has recently conquered under her empire. A daydream that you find doesn’t really help you drift off to sleep. But counting sheep never fails you. 
•┈┈┈••✦☽✦••┈┈┈•
You awake in the afternoon with a headache that pounds at your head like the FBI is trying to infiltrate your own mind. And all you can hear now is the FBI OPEN UP!!! meme as you groan and rub at your temples with one hand while leaning over the bed to pet at the nightstand for your go-to bottle of Tylenol just to–
Pet around at nothing.
“Mm?” you mumble, opening your eyes cautiously before harsh light makes you close them again. But even behind the protection of your eyelids, you’re still very keen on the brightness that finds you in this room. Finally, you’re able to blink the sleepiness away and adjust to the light, and when the blur of your vision subsides, you realize that you’re in a bed that is most definitely not your own. And then you remember.
You spent your first night (well, technically morning and early afternoon), at Gojo’s house.
You swing your legs over the edge of the bed, balled up fist rubbing at your eyes ferociously as you sit groggy from the sleep that enveloped you so performatively after your shift last night. You can’t even remember coming to his house, which is concerning, since that could mean you forgot to do a lot of other things when coming home. Like changing your clothes, and scrubbing your make-up off. But it seems like habit and routine has saved you, since you glance down and see yourself in one of your nightgowns and your skin doesn’t feel dry.
A loud thud! noise from directly beneath you startles you, jolting some of the sleepiness out of you, and you finally feel inclined to head out the door.
You make it across the loft and to the top of the staircase so you can peer over the railing to the downstairs floor. But from the top, you can’t see anything except for the entry area and the family room, but you assume the sounds you hear are coming from the kitchen, because it sounds like the closing of a fridge and ceramic on marble paired with footsteps on hardwood. Lifting the hem of your nightgown up so you don’t trip over it, you creep down the stairs, diligent in avoiding the 2nd and 7th step (you’ve since learned that they creak a little), and make steady progress in getting to the bottom of the stairwell to then stealthily peak your head around the rail and peer into the kitchen. You only have a view of one side, the long counter strip with the stove and the fridge, but you freeze when you’re met with the sight of a man standing there shirtless pouring orange juice into a coffee mug.
You’re temporarily shocked, your fight of flight immediately kicking in as you clutch the imaginary pearls around your neck in fear…but then…you slowly…find yourself starting to stare. This man’s back is huge, massive really…with tense and defined muscles, expansive smooth lines with ridges that meet bone. His shoulders are broad, rounding down into strong arms that are split with veins. And your eyes trail the way his waist narrows down to his hips, of which gray sweatpants very loosely hang from. Honestly, if the door in the movie Titanic was as large as this man’s back, then maybe Rose AND Jack could have fit on it and survived. (a/n. basically picture this)
And in the middle of your drooling, you realize. That this man. Is. Gojo.
Which should be a relief to you, because if it wasn’t Gojo, and there was just some random man in the house, then you’d have to start looking for a weapon of sorts. But instead you just continue to watch him silently without coming out of your hiding. Shirtless in his own kitchen (a crime, really) as he pours OJ into a black mug (who the fuck drinks juice from a coffee mug). He suddenly turns around to face the island and a small gasp leaves your lips before you duck your head behind the rail to hide yourself from his line of sight, and when you realize you’re in the clear, you slowly peak your head back out.
The sight of his chest and torso nearly knocks you breathless, because why is his skin so smooth…and taut across the defined muscles of his abs, glistening with a sheen you can only guess is a salty layer of sweat. His fringe is damp, sticking to his forehead and the sides of his face, a droplet of sweat rolling down from his temple towards his chin but he uses his bare shoulder to wipe the sweat off before it can get that far. He brings the mug of OJ to his lips and tips it back with a swallow, the thick muscles of his neck rippling and rolling with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, a singular droplet of orange juice escaping from the corner of his lips, trailing down the vein on his neck and into the territory of his chest. Okay. You were being creepy as fuck right now. He can’t find out that you’re staring at him like this, you’d literally move to a different country if he ever caught you. And yet, for some reason, you just can’t stop either. 
He pulls the mug from his mouth, letting out a large exhale since he literally just gulped it all down in one go. He places his palms flat on the table, slightly distant from one another, as he takes in the sight of his counter, while you take in the sight of the way his biceps bulge and the veins on his thick forearms tense. He looks like he’s contemplating something. And then he shrugs his shoulders slightly before grabbing the carton next to him and chugging straight from it, like whatever he poured himself wasn’t enough to quench the thirst for citrus juice he seems to have after–you can only assume–the workout he just had. 
There’s a deep noise that’s muffled in his throat in the second before he pulls the carton away from his mouth and his eyes glance at something on the floor. You can’t see what it is, but you can see the marvelous shape of his ass through his sweatpants– I mean, you can see him furrow his brow a little and then he’s suddenly crouched down on the floor, ducked behind the island and out of sight, before he mutters something that you think sounds like damn fridge…
You stand on your tiptoes on the last step, trying to peer over the obstructing view of the counter, but you trip over the hem of your nightgown, losing balance and–
–fall straight onto the hardwood in front of you, on all fours. 
“Ah,” you exclaim blandly, and in your periphery, see Gojo suddenly stand up straight from his crouched position.
“y/n?” he calls out from the kitchen, his tone surprised.
“Sorry!” you chirp as you feel embarrassment creeping up on your cheeks, “just, uh, fell down the stairs!”
“What?!?” he exclaims in a panic, and you forgot that most people would panic if someone said that to them. He rushes over to you and gets down on one of his knees to peer at your face, his hand shooting out to grab your upper arm with little delicacy out of concern, and his eyes roam all across you to assess for injuries. “Are you okay??”
“Just!” you chirp as you yank your arm out of his hold, “Peachy!” You’re not able to make eye contact with him as he remains kneeled next to you, but you can’t find yourself able to move either. So you just relish in the ridiculous feeling of being on all fours in your vintage grandma nightgown in front of your shirtless and, breaking news: very hot, fake husband. God you can smell the musk and sweat from him when he’s this close, and it’s sexy. You have to be careful to not just straight up mount him on the floor right now. Much to your aroused dismay. 
“Um,” you squeak out, “can you put a shirt on.”
“Huh?” he looks down at himself, like he forgot he’s half naked. “Oh. Yeah.” He stands up. “Sorry, I’m not really used to having someone in the house anymore,” he says, and his use of the word anymore isn’t lost on you. 
He heads over to the coat closet, pulling a gray sweatshirt that’s a shade darker than his sweatpants off of a coat hanger and then pulling it on over his head. He pulls the hood off, and now his hair looks damp with sweat and sexily ruffled up. And he’s also in a comfy-looking sweatshirt. That was way hotter than being shirtless, for fucks sake. You wonder if he’d reconsider being shirtless again. He’s kneeling down beside you once more, and yes you are still on all fours just staring down at the hardwood floor like an animal paralyzed with fear. 
“Have some decency, please. Especially since I am to start living here from today onwards. I would appreciate modesty around the house,” you say as a tactic of self preservation. “Take note of my attire–appropriately covering all skin.”
“Are you gonna stand up?” he asks you.
“No. I shan't.”
“What? Why not? And why are you talking like that?” 
“It appears I am frozen.”
“Are your knees okay?”
“I believe so.”
He sighs and gets up from his knelt position, then suddenly comes up behind you, bending over to wrap his arms around your waist tightly before picking you up with the same ease in which someone would pick up a plastic lawn chair. You gasp, still retaining your four-legged creature formation, until he shakes it out of you and then sets you back down onto your feet. 
“Don’t be so dramatic,” he says with a sigh as he heads back towards the kitchen, and he’s back to crouching down somewhere behind the counter.
You shuffle your feet over to the kitchen and peer over the kitchen island to see that he’s examining the floor in front of the fridge.
“What’s wrong?” you ask.
He scratches at his eyebrow. “The fridge is leaking again.”
“Oh.”
He clicks something on both sides of the fridge's feet and then grips the corners of its body, pulling it out from the wall with a small grunt leaving his lips. Even with the baggy sweatshirt, you can see the curves of the muscles in his arms as he works. 
You place your elbows on the island and hold your face in your hands as you watch him. “How are you gonna fix it?”
He’s dabbing at the wet hardwood with a very worn out rag to get it dry. “I just have to shut the water valve off for a bit.”
“How do you do that?”
He points over his shoulder with his thumb, and you trace the line of it to the cabinet under the sink. 
“Really? You’re gonna get under the sink?”
He dusts his hands off and tosses the rug off to the side. “Uh-huh.”
“Are you sure you can fix it?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
“How long has this been an issue?”
His gaze flicks to yours briefly before he stands up. “About a week.”
“Don’t you think you should just call someone?”
“What?” He turns to face you and crosses his arms across his chest while raising an eyebrow at you, like you’ve just deeply offended him. “Why the fuck would I call someone for a job I could do myself?”
You tilt your head at him, trying to hide the smirk that threatens to tug at your lips. “Well you said it’s been a whole week.”
“Yeah, I’ve–...I’ve just been busy. So I haven’t had a chance to really take a look at it.”
“Ohhhh okay okay,” you say in a teasingly skeptic tone, poking your tongue to your cheek as it’s getting progressively harder to hide your grin.
“What?” he says to you, impatiently.
“Nothinggg,” you purr, and you watch him with a cheeky look on your face as he glares at you before he disappears off towards the garage.
He comes back with a tool box and you spend some time poking around in it curiously as he grabs a couple of tools before crouching down in front of the sink.
For some reason, you feel shy watching him. Maybe it’s because when he’s laying on his back, the top twenty-percent of him ducked underneath the sink, and he’s working his hands on some pipes that you can’t see, his sweatshirt rides up a little and you can see the very lower part of his torso. And then when he yanks particularly hard on something, it rides up more and you can see his abs tensing and relaxing with almost every breath he takes and every move he makes. You’re just grateful he can’t see you, and the urge to clench your thighs together is almost stronger than your brain’s disposition to convince yourself that he’s not attractive just because you think he’s annoying most of the time. 
“y/n,” he calls out to you from under the sink, and you jump a little. He tilts his head a little so he can make eye contact with you from under. “Can you hand me those slip-joint pliers?”
“I have no idea what that is or where to even begin to know what that is.”
“The pliers that have the serrated edges,” he tries.
“Huh?”
“.........shark with sharp teeth.” 
“Oh! Yes. Yes, of course,” you grab them and then shuffle over to him before crouching down, balancing on your toes, “here you go.”
“Thanks,” he says in a flat tone, slowly taking them from you. 
“You’re welcome!” you chirp. You feel very useful. 
His head disappears back to deep underneath the sink again to work on stuff again. Even though this whole thing is probably just his masculine ego wanting to fix things around the house by himself rather than just call a person that is literally paid to fix these sorts of things, you have to admit that you’re not complaining for getting to watch him do something handy. 
“I’ve just– gotta–” he grunts a little and you hear the creaking of pipes, “tighten this up a bit–” he lets out another gruff noise, his voice strained with effort, and you’re ashamed to say it sounds hot. “Alright!” He pulls himself out from under the sink and stands up back onto his feet with a bounce in his step as he dusts his hands off. “Fixed. For now.”
The fridge starts making a strange whirring noise. You raise an eyebrow at him. He quickly reaches behind it and clicks some button before the eerie whirring stops.
“Okay. Now it’s fixed.”
You give him a very skeptic look. “Sure, Jan.”
“Don’t sure jan me. Trust. It won’t leak anymore.”
“Whatever you say,” you respond before heading back up the stairs to freshen up. 
By the time you go back downstairs, Gojo is nowhere to be found, and you take the opportunity to sit on his couch in the living room to then peruse which streaming services he has on his TV. It isn’t until about ten minutes later that you hear someone coming down the stairs, because he makes no effort to avoid the creaky steps.
You put your elbow up on the couch backrest and twist your torso to look at him. He’s wearing pajama pants and an unmatching black short sleeve cotton T-shirt that’s loose around his torso but tight at the arms. He’s ruffling his hair up with a hand towel, attempting to get it dry from the shower he clearly just took. As he makes his way towards the living room, you catch a waft of the clean soapy aqua fragrance of shampoo lingering in his hair. He stops about four feet behind the couch.
You glance down at his feet. “Why the fuck are you, as a grown ass man, wearing bunny slippers inside the house?”
He opens one eye to glance down at his slippers as he continues to tousle his hair dry, “oh, Juno got them for me for Christmas last year. She wanted me to wear them ‘all the time or else uncle toru’s feet will burn off from the floor lava.”
A small smile makes its way onto your face. 
Juno is Gojo’s five-year-old niece, and from the interactions you’ve seen between them, and from the way My Little Pony was the first thing that popped up when you turned the TV on, you know that Gojo absolutely adores her and vice versa. You’ve met her a couple times, even babysat her once in an emergency, and she’s a cute and bright little kid that you certainly have way more fondness for than her obnoxiously annoying uncle who is also now your fake husband. Wait, does that mean that Juno is your niece now, too?
Gojo lets out a sigh before hanging the towel over his shoulder, his hair apparently adequately dry enough for him now. He looks younger when his hair is messy and a little damp, falling over his forehead flatter than usual. It’s kinda boyish and dare-you-say charming.
He looks down at his slippers again with a pleasant reminiscent look on his face before placing his hands on his hips like he’s a baseball dad of three. “Y’know, when I was growing up–”
“Ah yes. During the Great Depression.”
He gives you an annoyed look. “Quit it. When I was a kid–”
“Back in the 1800s.”
“Aren’t you pushing thirty?” he asks you.
“Aren’t you in need of some new dentures?” you ask him.
“Fuckin’ rude,” he mumbles as he walks towards the foyer table to rip open some of the mail that was scattered across it.
“What happened when you were a kid?” you ask.
“Forget it,” he says, tucking some of his bills back into envelopes.
“What!! I wanna know,” you say.
“Yeah well I don’t want to tell you anymore,” he responds.
As you two fully grown adults continue bickering like toddlers for the better part of two minutes, your phone is ringing upstairs unbeknownst to you. 
“Wait. Shut up,” Gojo cuts off your next insult as he snaps his head up-right suddenly. 
“What?! Did you just tell me to shut u–”
“Shhhhhh,” he hushes you, turning his ear towards the stairs with a concentrated expression on his face.
You silence yourself, and then you hear the ringing coming from upstairs.
“Fuck,” you mumble as you scramble off the couch and jog to the bottom of the staircase, Gojo’s eyes on you the entire time as you run up the steps back to your room.
You hear your phone ringing on the bed somewhere but you can’t find it so you rummage through the sheets before finally spotting it, swiping on the call and bringing it to your ear without even checking the caller ID.
“Hello?” you say.
“Oh! y/n, hi there. It’s Dr. Johnson calling. I was prepared to leave you a voicemail,” he says.
“I’m here,” you say hastily, holding your phone to your ear with both hands as you feel your entire body tense up. 
You never knew what to expect with any sort of phone calls these days, especially when you’re at work or when your mom isn’t home, because a phone call could be something as simple as approving a refill on some of her medication, to something much worse than that. Something much more final than that. 
“It’s not an emergency,” Dr. Johnson says on the other line, like he can sense your fear and anxiety through the phone, “just wanted to reach out to let you know that I spoke with the hospitalist who admitted your mother to the hospital and she’s doing better now. They’ll likely discharge her by the end of the day.”
You slowly let out the breath you were holding. “Oh, that’s wonderful. I know she needs to come in for chemo tomorrow, so it’s perfect timing.”
“Yes, we’ll see her tomorrow.”
“Uh, Dr. Johnson, I do want to let you know…I’ll be admitting my mom for hospice in a couple of days,” you tell him. You wince a little, because you know it’s probably something that you should’ve discussed with him prior to all of this. “It’s…likely that you won’t have to continue her care anymore, since she’s been approved for Kaiser insurance, I’ll be transferring her care to Kaiser physicians.”
There’s a moment of silence on the other line, the briefest moment of hesitation from a self-assured doctor who always had something to say right away. “Really? That’s–...wow. I can’t say I won’t be extremely sad to not see her anymore.”
“I know…” you say, worrying your bottom lip through your teeth, feeling a sudden wave of guilt overtake your senses, “you’ve been following her progress ever since her diagnosis, even got her into remission…it’s just a little complicated with some insurance stuff and some bills as well. If I could have things my way, I would continue care with you and your team.”
Even though you can’t see it, you can tell he’s nodding on the other line. “I understand, y/n. I know that there’s more to healthcare in this country than just…receiving care. But I don’t have to explain those things to you, since you’re a nurse. Do what’s best for you and your family. Give me the details for the hospice, and I’ll have my MAs send over your mother’s chart.”
“Thank you, Dr. Johnson,” you whisper, your voice cracking slightly. “Really. For everything.”
“You’re most welcome.”
“Oh–” you stutter, in fear he might hang up right as you remembered to ask him something.
“Yes?”
“I know I’ll see you tomorrow so we can discuss it then too, but I was just wondering if the scans were back from my mom’s brain MRI she had done? I know they usually take three weeks to come back but just wanted to check.”
He lets out a low chuckle. “I had a feeling you’d follow up about that. No, there are no scans that have come back. I’ll let you know right away when they do.”
“Okay…” you say.
“I know you’re worried about a possible glioma,” he speaks up, “but let’s just try to stay positive until we see the scans, okay?”
“Yes. Sounds good. Thank you, doctor.”
“Alright. I will see you and your mom tomorrow.”
“Yes. Bye,” you say and hear his word of farewell too before hanging up. 
You stare down at the screen of your phone, taking in slow deep breaths to calm down your nerves. You just wanted these scans to come back already so that you could feel at peace knowing that your mom’s worsening neurological condition is due to her Alzheimer’s and not a tumor in her brain. The average survival length of a person with a brain tumor is low, and even worse if it’s a glioblastoma, ranging at around 12-18 months. You can buy her a few years at least with the stage of cancer progression she’s at right now, even with the possibility of remission, but if it becomes severely advanced disease then–
You gasp softly and cover your mouth with your hand, unable to even fathom the thought without feeling a feverish chill run down your entire body. Now's not the time to spiral. Deep breaths. One, two, three. Now is the time to stay positive. Just like Dr. Johnson said. 
Putting one step ahead of the other, you leave the room, cross the loft and slowly make your way down the stairs and stop at the very last step when you see Gojo rushing across the foyer with his dress shoes on, wearing a dark blue suit, save for the tie, and he looks like he’s pressed for time.
“Are you going somewhere?” you ask from the last step, your hand curled around the rail still.
“Hey, uh, yeah,” he scrambles, grabbing his keys from the paper mache bowl on the foyer table and then pats at his pockets for his wallet only to notice it’s absent. “Fuck.” He disappears somewhere into the house in a hurry and then returns with his wallet in his hand before shoving it in his pocket with the jingle of his keys too. “I had to push a couple house viewings from this afternoon up, so I need to leave.” He finally turns to face you and exhales slowly to regain his breath. “Small favor?”
“What’s up,” you say.
He rubs the back of his neck a little guiltily. “Well, Sana called a few minutes ago asking if I could watch Juno since she had to pick her up early from school, and I said sure, but I have to leave now, so–”
“I can watch her,” you say.
He claps his hands together in prayer form and holds them up to his face, “I owe you one.”
“Mhmmmmm,” you hum, watching as he resumes his haste to leave the house. And just before he heads out the door, you say— “Collar.”
“Huh?” He turns around to face you. “Oh.” He takes a second to flatten the collar of his shirt. “Thanks.” And then he’s out the door.
You sigh, relishing in the emptiness of the house. Maybe you should raid his pantry, or play porn on the TV super loud so all the neighbors think he’s a creep. But perhaps that is not appropriate, given that his sister will be bringing his niece over very soon.
You quickly head over to your house to change into something more appropriate than your nightgown, just some blue jeans that honestly make you look like a soccer mom, and then a T-shirt. You walk back to Gojo’s house and only get about five minutes to peruse his pantry when the doorbell rings.
When you open the door, you’re met face-to-face with Gojo’s sister, Sana. How would you describe Sana? Well, first of all, she’s beautiful, with all the same features as Gojo except in female form. Striking round blue eyes, silky white hair that shimmers silver underneath sunlight (you would describe Gojo less poetically than this, though). Her hair is pin straight, falling down just past her shoulders. She’s sweet, or at least has been the couple of times that you’ve met her, but she can also be a little serious and strict. The type to not really laugh at the dinner table if you make a pointed joke about the current political state of the country, but maybe it’s because she didn’t even understand the joke to begin with. Either way, she’s very different from the annoying and irritating temperament of her older brother, and how their mother managed to give birth to such two different kids is beyond you.
“Hey,” you greet her at the door with a small smile.
“Hi, y/n,” she returns with a polite smile of her own. She’s holding onto Juno’s scrawny shoulders as the kid stands in front of her, barely to the height of her mother’s hips. Juno was toying with the light pink baseball cap on her head, her hair pulled through the opening in the back and tied up into a ponytail. “I’m so sorry to bother you with her.”
“Oh! No, not a bother at all, I love getting to see her,” you say as you crouch down to get at eye level with her. “Hi Juno!”
Juno has curly white hair rather than the pin straight that her mother possessed, a feature that more closely resembles her father’s hair, along with her hazel eyes. You’ve only met Sana’s husband, Jun, once before. From what you know, he’s some type of businessman, and the first thing you noticed about him was that he was the same height as Sana. But his wife was blessed with supermodel height and was probably taller than most men, so it wasn’t surprising. Jun was hearty, almost suspiciously kind, laughed boisterously loud, and in the small amount of time you met him, it was easy to see that Sana very rarely humored his ill-mannered and awkwardly-placed jokes, but they seemed very in love with each other regardless. Apparently he and Gojo go golfing every other weekend. Information that you seem to know despite any desire to know it. 
Juno hugs her water bottle to her chest, shy as she makes eye contact with you. “Hi, auntie y/n.”
“I loooooove your baseball cap! It’s so cute, where did you get it?” you ask her.
She blinks off to the side timidly, her fluffy white lashes fluttering over her bright eyes. “Um. Uncle Toru.”
“Ohhh I see, I see! It suits you.”
Sana nudges her a little with her knee. “What do we say, Juno?”
“Thank you, auntie y/n,” she immediately squeaks out in reflex.
Your eyes catch a glimpse of the white bandage wrapped over her tiny arm and your brow furrows before reaching out to gently hold it. Juno winces a little from the sensation. You stand up straight.
“What happened to her arm?” you ask Sana.
Sana sighs as she tucks some of her hair behind her ear. “She fell on the playground at school today. It’s a pretty large scrape and it’s been hurting her a lot.”
“Did you disinfect it?”
“Oh…I just–...washed it with some water. The school nurse wasn’t there today so I just had to pick her up early.” 
“Mm, I see,” you say, “I can take a look at it. I have some neosporin in my purse.”
She lets out a relieved sigh, like she was secretly hoping you would make the offer. “Thank you. Really.” She gently pushes on her daughter’s shoulder. “C’mon Juno. Go inside and set your homework up on the table.”
Juno cranes her neck up to look at her mom. “Mommy, can I have a snack first? Pop-tart!”
“If your uncle has them in the pantry, then sure,” Sana says, and immediately upon hearing those words, Juno rushes inside the house with giggles filling the air. “But only one!!” Sana yells out to her in a strict tone, and you watch with amusement as Juno skips off before returning your attention back to Sana.
“Sooo…” she starts, a small hint of hesitation playing on her usually prim face, “I suppose we’re sisters now. Sisters-in-law.”
Your eyes widen and your shoulders stiffen. It was at least a good thing that Gojo told his family already that you two are married, because it seems that most of his extended family live here in this town. At least, you know that his sister’s family and his parents live here. Better to be heard from him directly than to run into you randomly living at his house all of a sudden when they drop by. You’re sure his family has questions about this extremely sudden marriage to say the least. You’re not sure how much they’ll try to pry, but you hope it’s not much, because you’ve never really been a great actress. “Yes. Yes, we are.”
“Mm,” she hums pleasantly at you, nodding slowly and peering off into the house beyond your shoulder, “say…I’m, um, just a little…surprised by how sudden this all is.”
“Hmm?”
“With you and my brother,” she says straightforwardly. “Obviously, you must know he’s been married before, but it’s…a little odd, it feels like just yesterday when he told us he was…getting a divorce. And now he’s married again.” She trails off when she has some sobering thought that flashes through her head. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m blabbering about this. I’m just–...I’m just thinking out loud. It must be a sore topic.”
“Oh, no, no, not at all. No worries,” you say with an awkward laugh, “I’ve, um, come to terms with it?” You try your best to come up with a believable response.
“That’s good,” she says while she runs soothing circles with her thumb over the skin at her elbow, “well, some love moves faster than others.” She displays a well-meaning smile on her face. “I’m really happy for you two.”
For some reason, your heart warms. Like when the lines of reality and imagination blur, and so you’re left here with a truly comforting feeling. Only it’s fleeting and temporary, like escapism. “Thank you,” you say softly. And after a moment, “by the way, I’m really sorry for…Satoru and I not having a proper wedding. We just wanted something simple.”
She lets out a small scoff. “Oh, gosh, don’t apologize for that. I’m sick of weddings. I was so glad I didn’t have to peruse yet another wedding registry this year. There are only so many toaster ovens I can buy.”
You’re a little surprised by the humor from her, but the two of you let out small laughs in unison at the doorstep.
Sana glances at her watch. “I have to get going. Call me if you need anything, okay?” 
You nod. “Sure. Thanks.”
You close the door slowly, watching her briefly through the stained glass window as she heads towards her car and gets inside before promptly driving off. 
There’s the sound of ruffling heard and then the sound of things falling off a shelf towards the kitchen. You turn on your heel and head in the direction. “Junooo,” you call out, “where are youuuu?”
“In here!” she chirps from the pantry room. You turn the light on to see her standing in the center with a couple boxes of cereal fallen around her. She’s holding an empty box in her hand. “The pop-tart box is empty,” she says with a pout and sulk of her shoulders as she makes the most :(( face you’ve ever seen a child make.
“Oh no,” you say, grabbing the box from her and inspecting the inside, “your devious uncle must’ve eaten them all in a manic episode.”
“What is a manic mean?” she asks you as she looks up, rubbing her ankle with her other foot.
“Oh, it’s like…crazy? He went crazy?”
She giggles at the thought.
“If you’re hungry, I can make you something,” you offer.
She shyly nods her head but her grin fully rounds her cheeks before she darts off towards the kitchen. 
You find her standing near the kitchen island, trying to get up onto one of the bar stools but to no avail. You come up behind her to pick her up then set her down on the seat, adjusting it so it’s a little higher. 
“What do you want me to make?” you ask her as you come around to the other side of the island and set your elbows up on the cold marble, leaning over to place your chin in your palm. 
“Um…” she brings her index finger up to her bottom lip in thought, “pancakes? Can I have blubbery pancakes?”
“Huh?” 
“Um…” she starts again, “last time, when I eated them at your house. Um, when I ated them at your house,” she tries to correct herself, “I really liked them.”
“Oh!” you perch up from your bent over position, “I remember! The blueberry pancakes. Aww, Juno, you remember that? How sweet.”
She becomes a little bashful and glances down at the her lap.
“Okayyy,” you say, placing your hands on your waist as you look around at the kitchen, “well I’ll have to see what ingredients I’m working with here, but hopefully I can make them for you.” You tilt your head at her before pointing a finger. “Have you ever seen the show Chopped?” 
She sits up straight with excitement. “Yes yes! Me and mommy love it.”
“Good. Let’s pretend I’m working with a mystery basket here,” you say, and then you turn around to open Gojo’s fridge. 
You can learn a lot about a person based on what the inside of their fridge looks like. You’re surprised to find the inside of his looks…sparkly? That was the only way you knew how to describe it. With clean shelves that reflect the bright lighting off the plastic, plastic that looks as mirror sheen as glass. As your eyes take in the contents inside, you notice he has some leftover thai food at the front, most likely leftovers from as recent as last night. One of the produce drawers is filled to the brim while the other is mostly empty, and you notice he separates them by leafy stuff vs. veggies. The leafy stuff is the drawer that’s filled to the brim, and you just know he’s stressed out over how to use all of it up before it starts wilting. Must’ve been on sale, you think to yourself. To the right of the fridge, there are an insane amount of orange juice cartons, and you notice he drinks the same one as you–pulp free with the added vitamins and calcium that’s made for kids. Although maybe he has an excuse for it, since he has a five-year-old niece. There’s a few containers of meal prep stacked up at the back of the fridge that look like some sort of arrangement of quinoa, chicken and Mediterranean vegetables. And then there’s just a bunch of assorted cans of beer throughout the fridge, which you assume are to appease the diverse preferences of his friends whenever he has them over. 
You grab a couple of eggs from the egg carton, placing them on the counter along with a stick of butter plus a half-full carton of milk, and peer deep into the fridge past the wall of condiments to eye for any fresh fruit such as berries, but you don’t see any. You try the freezer and are relieved when you see he has some frozen blueberries in there.
“Okay!” you shut the fridge. “Just need to grab a few more things from the pantry room and then I’ll make you your pancakes, okay?” 
Juno nods enthusiastically. “Um. Can I get my backpack?”
“Sure.” You pick her up off the bar stool to set her down on the ground and she runs to the coffee table in front of the TV to grab her things as you head to the pantry room. 
Flour, sugar, baking powder, all tucked in your elbows as you carry the ingredients back to the kitchen before dropping them onto the counter and picking Juno up to place her on the barstool again. She starts to lay out her glittery pens and pristinely sharpened pencils in front of her as well as a packet of papers. 
“I can’t believe they’re giving Kindergarteners homework these days…” you mutter under your breath as you grab a bowl. “Juno, wanna help me crack the eggs?”
“Yes!”
“Let’s go wash our hands then.”
As you mix all your ingredients together and Juno continues to stare at her papers with her face awfully close to them (does she need glasses?), you think to yourself what a nice little life this is. Although you haven’t been able to spend the day at your house like you were hoping you would, since you could finally have it for yourself, it was nice to spend it at Gojo’s. It was something different, something refreshing, something grounding. An escape that you needed. 
“Um. Auntie y/n?” Juno calls from behind you as you flip a pancake at the stove.
“Yes sweetheart.”
“How is mommy?”
“Hmm?” you hum. “My mommy?”
“Yes!”
“Oh you are just the sweetest thing. She’s doing okay. She’s just a little sick still.”
“When I’m sick,” Juno speaks up with a childlike enthusiasm in her voice, “my mommy gives me grape soor–...stir–” she struggles with the word, “shrup, ah, syrup! Grape syrup. It makes me better.”
“Ohhh honey, I know,” you coo as you try to match her enthusiasm, placing two little pancakes onto a plate for her. “When you get the sniffles, right?”
“Yes! Maybe your mommy will be better too if I give her some of my grape syoorup?”
You stop in your tracks, staring down at the food you were just plating.
The innocence of a child. It was hard to stay strong in the face of it. When you were younger, you probably would’ve thought that a magical potion would make your mom all better, too.
You turn around to face her. “Well,” you say, clearing your throat a little to fight the knot that you find is twisting it, “I think,” and now you’re blinking away the faint sheer of tears as you press your lips into a thin smile, your soft soft above a whisper, “that that is a wonderful idea.”
Juno gobbles up her blubbery pancakes with the extra maple syrup on them and you watch her take every bite. There was something satisfying about seeing a little kid eat so well. The sight made you feel well-fed on their behalf.
“Alright,” you say with a small grunt as you pick Juno up and set her down onto the ground, then take her hand to lead her over to the carpeted family room. “Let me take a look at this scrape of yours.”
Juno’s hand tugs slightly when you try to pull on it, so you turn around to see that she has stopped in her tracks halfway through the trek to the other room.
“What’s wrong?” you ask her.
“I don’t want you to see it…”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s ugly.”
“Juno,” you tug on her hand a little, “I have to see it so that I can clean it. Otherwise you might get sick. A type of sick that even grape syrup can’t fix.”
She looks up at you with curious eyes, not fearful ones. 
“There is sick like that?” she asks you.
“Yes. Now give me your arm.”
Juno follows you to the family room and stands still, the front of her jutting out slightly as she pouts, a display of her remaining disapproval for you taking a look at her scrape. You get down onto your knees and slowly undo the bandages, unwrapping the layers one-by-one before the end falls off and you’re staring at a 4x2cm superficial abrasion on her arm, and when your thumb lightly swipes at the skin underneath it, Juno winces from the pain.
You also notice she has a bruise on her left upper thigh, right below where the hem of her shorts end.
“You…only fell onto your right side, right?” you ask her.
“Mhm,” she nods.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“How come you have a bruise on your left thigh then?”
Her eyes widen slightly with shock and her head quickly snaps down to look at her thigh. “Um. Um. I don’t know. Um. Um.”
“Juno,” you say, trying to muster up a strict tone, but she refuses to make eye contact with you anymore as she stares at the carpet beneath her. You gently grab a hold of both of her wrists. “Sweetheart. Look at me.” Her eyes slowly lift up to meet yours. “I want to help you, but I can't help you unless you’re honest with me.”
Her big eyes blink at you slowly and her bottom lip quivers slightly.
“How did you really hurt yourself?”
She immediately starts bawling. Full on sobs that echo throughout the room and startle you slightly as the tears freely fall down her cheeks and she struggles to wipe them off with her left arm, but they only drip down her elbow.
“Oh–” you stutter, holding her by her shoulders, “Juno–”
She sniffles. “They–” she hiccups, “they pushed me…they always push me.”
“Who pushed you?? Who always pushes you??”
She sucks in a deep breath as she continues to cry and you struggle to wipe at her tears for her with the pad of your thumb. “The–hic–girls at school. They’re so–hic–...wahhh…they’re so mean.”
“They pushed you on the playground and that’s how you got this scrape and bruise?” you ask her.
She nods as she slowly begins to come down from her outburst, her remnant sniffles and short sharp inhales showing that she was struggling to breath. You run to grab some tissues and then come back, holding them to her nose before she blows into them.
“Oh sweetheart…I’m so sorry,” you say to her.
She suddenly runs into you, hugging you tightly, and you’re momentarily surprised before wrapping an arm around her too and then gently patting at her back.
“How long has this been going on?” you ask her.
“Mm…ever since I–hic–ever since I got on T-ball team…but they couldn’t get on.”
“Oh…” you coo, gently rubbing her back now. You’re not a mom, you’ve got no fucking clue how to navigate this sort of situation. But you can try your best to give some advice. “Juno, you have every right to feel happy and safe at school.” You gently pull her away from the hug so that you can look at her face. “And it’s okay to stand up for yourself and against anyone that is being mean to you. Don’t let them take that power away from you.”
She nods slowly, her lip quivering slightly again.
You sigh slowly before giving her another hug. “And we’ll work out something with your mom too, okay? She can talk to the teachers.”
“No!” Juno shrieks, pulling away from you suddenly. You blink at her. “No. Please don’t tell my mommy.”
“W-Why not??”
“Because–” she stutters, “um…I want to tell her myself. Because I lied, and mommy always says to me to not tell lies. So I have to fix it myself.”
You tilt your head at her, frowning slightly. You’re not exactly sure how much autonomy over such things you should be granting a five-year-old, but you decide to give her the choice. You hold your pinky finger out to her, “you have to promise me you’ll tell her though, okay?”
She nods and wraps her pinky around yours. 
After getting her scrape cleaned up and tended to, Juno spends the next hour or so watching My Little Pony on the TV as you clean up the mess you made in the kitchen. And as you’re staring out into the backyard while wiping down the cutting board, the sound of the doorbell ringing makes you jump with a startle and breaks you out of your trance.
You were prepared to open the door to find Sana standing at the entrance, but instead you’re met with the sight of a different woman.
Much older, and with all the same features, it doesn’t really take you long to figure out who she is.
“Ah! There she is!” the woman chirps out. “I’m—”
“Juno’s grandmother,” you finish the statement for her.
“—Satoru’s mother,” she instead says.
You both blink at one another.
“Well,” she chirps, “I’m both!”
Gojo’s mother appears to be a kind woman, and it’s evident that being gorgeous must run in the family. Although she has aged features, they’re still beautiful in a graceful way, where people would take a look at her and think of aging as a privilege and not a curse. Her eyes are somewhat feline, different from the roundness of those you’ve seen in her family, and her hair is a shimmering silver all around with a pretty silk press layered hair style that flatters her frail jaw. She was wearing a French-style button up dress with a rather gaudy belt around her waist, and you catch the scent of her lilac perfume even while she’s standing three feet away.
She puts her hands on her hips and has a forced smile on her face. “My son gets married and he doesn’t even tell me a peep about it, or introduce me to his new wife! I have to come all the way over here myself!” she exclaims, and her tone is like she’s trying to play it off with nonchalance but the stiffness of her features makes it look like she’s losing her mind. “Well,” she clicks her tongue, “he’s always had the penchant for never sharing anything he ever does with me.”
“Ah…I’m so sorry, Mrs. Gojo,” you say to her, unsure why you’re apologizing, but there was this energy to her that made you realize she had a skill for making people feel apologetic in her presence.
“No worries! Not your fault. I’ll deal with him later,” she says, her smile growing to where it almost fully crescents her eyes in a frightening way that almost sends a shiver down your spine, “anywhoooo,” she takes both of your hands into hers, “you’re very beautiful, and you have a very lucky-looking nose!”
“Lucky?”
“Yes, yes. You will bring luck to our family.”
“Thanks?” you say, trying to manage a smile.
She takes a step closer to you. “Tell me, what do your parents do for a living?”
“Oh! Um, well, my mom is retired, but she used to be an art teacher. My dad is in the food business, but uh, I haven’t spoken to him in years ever since my parents got divorced.”
“Ah,” she says curtly, her face blank as if she couldn’t think of a single thing to follow up with after that. She peers past your shoulder. “Where’s the little princess?”
“She’s just inside grabbing her things.” You gently slip your hands out of her hold and turn around to face the inside of the house. “Juno!! Do you need help?”
“No!!” she calls from the kitchen.
“Say, my dear,” Gojo’s mother speaks up, “why don’t you and Satoru come by for dinner this weekend? Jun and Sana apparently have some important news they’d like to share with the family, and I offered that we all hear it together over a meal. This way you can meet your father-in-law too!”
You take a deep breath in, realizing that this fake marriage agreement involves a lot more deceit than you ever thought it would. “Sure. Yes. I’d love that. Let me know if I can bring anything.”
“Wonderful!” she exclaims, just in time for when you feel Juno brush past you towards her grandma, hunching over slightly with her backpack’s weight. Gojo’s mother pulls you in for a hug which entirely startles you and you slowly wrap your arms around her as well. “It’s so lovely to have a daughter-in-law. Oh, I am just so happy to have you in our family.”
She lets go of you but still keeps you close by a delicate hold of your elbows, a gleeful smile on her face as she looks you up and down slowly.
“Bye, auntie y/n!!” Juno squeaks out, hugging your leg, and you pat at the top of her head. Her grandmother finally lets go of you and takes Juno’s tiny hand in her frail one, and you see them off to the car.
By the time you make it back inside the house, you let out a deep slow breath, one that you didn’t know you were holding in, as you lay your weight back on the front door. You feel a pressure in your head from your dwindling social battery and all these tricky encounters.
So, you’re part of a whole other family, now?
That. Is. Frightening.
.
.
.
[end of chapter 3]
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a/n. ah!! hope you enjoyed this ihm chapter :’’) sorry if it seemed like a bunch of random scenes lolol i swear it’s all set up for stuff that will happen down the lineee. i just be yappin so the word count ends up kinda high. hope to see you in the next one!! <3 love u all. also it’s my frank ocean anons bday today so i dedicate this chapter to themm 🫶🏼💕 manifesting dilf gojo for u bb for anyone curious about why reader is a bit paranoid w potentially being busted for her fake marriage, i had another reader that was curious about this too so i answered them here if you'd like to check it out :)
➸ take me to chapter four!
note: please do not ask me for updates or when i will next update (read rules)
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