Chapter 2: Izuku's 'I'm so sorry' gets cut off as Sophia grabs his face and kisses him hungrily, her tongue tasting of salt and alcohol as she grinds against him - his shocked moan turns to ragged breaths when she unzips his pants right there, her small hands stroking him to full hardness before hiking up her skirt in the dim alleyway.
The third shot of tequila was a mistake. It hit her empty stomach like a lit match dropped into a gas can. The world tilted, the neon sign outside The Gritty Nail smearing into a wobbly pink line. The chatter of the bar faded into a dull roar, and the weathered face of the man beside her blurred into a smudge of leering interest.
“Whoa there, sweetheart.” His hand landed on her lower back, possessive and slick. “Maybe you oughta slow down.”
The touch was the final insult. Sophia shrugged it off with a violent twist of her shoulders. “Don’t fucking touch me.” Her words were slurry but sharp. She shoved off the bar stool, her legs threatening to buckle. She needed air, or she was going to be sick right there on the sticky floor.
She stumbled past the few patrons, pushed through the heavy door, and the cool night hit her like a wall. She made it three steps into the alley before her body revolted. She crashed into the rough brick wall, one hand braced against it as her stomach convulsed. The tequila, bitter and acidic, burned its way back up her throat. She retched violently, the sound ugly and echoing in the narrow space.
Tears of pure physical misery streamed from her eyes, mixing with the mess on her chin. She was a fucking disaster. This was what it had all come to. Vomiting cheap liquor in a stinking alley while the two people she’d stupidly built her heart around were probably still entwined on Mina’s balcony, lost in each other.
A sob escaped her, choked and pathetic.
Then, a presence behind her. Not the barfly. This one was different—hesitant, closer. She braced for another unwelcome advance.
“Sophia?”
The voice was soft. Familiar. It cut through the haze of alcohol and shame like a knife.
She froze, her body rigid against the brick. No. It couldn’t be. Of all the people…
Gentle hands, infinitely careful, gathered her wild, sweat-damp curls away from her face. His touch was so tender it was worse than a slap. He held her hair back, his other hand coming to rest lightly between her shoulder blades as another wave of sickness racked her. He didn’t flinch. He just waited, a silent, solid presence in the squalor.
When the heaving subsided, leaving her trembling and hollow, he spoke again. His voice was thick. “Okay. Just breathe. It’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. With a ragged gasp, she pushed herself back from the wall, turning to face him.
Izuku Midoriya stood there, his face pale under the single, buzzing alley light. His green hair was mussed, his freckles standing out in stark relief. His eyes, wide and green and full of a turmoil she recognized, searched her face. In his hand was a cheap paper napkin, offered like a peace flag.
“What are you doing here?” The question came out as a raw accusation.
“I… I saw you leave the party,” he said, his gaze dropping for a second before meeting hers again. “You looked… I was worried. I tried calling, but it went straight to voicemail. Mina said Ochako told her you were upset. I tracked your location sharing from our study group app. I’m sorry, I just…” He trailed off, helpless.
Location sharing. A stupid, practical tool for coordinating project meetings. He’d used it to hunt her down to this pathetic corner of hell. The intimacy of it, the violation of it, collided with the memory of his mouth on Bakugou’s.
She laughed, a short, brittle sound that tasted of bile. “Worried? Don’t bother. You should be back at the party. With him.”
He flinched as if she’d struck him. The napkin crumpled in his fist. “I saw you, Sophia. On the balcony. You saw us.”
“Yeah. I saw.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, not taking his napkin. The anger was curdling into something else, something hot and reckless and desperate. The tequila fogged her brain, but his proximity, his stupid, kind, guilty face, ignited a different kind of fire. “It looked very… committed. Congrats, by the way. You finally got your childhood crush. Must feel like a real win.”
“It’s not… it’s not like that,” he muttered, but the protest was weak, drowned in his own confusion.
“Then what is it like, Izuku?” She took a step closer, backing him up against the opposite wall of the alley. The scent of her vomit and his clean, faintly spicy cologne mixed in the damp air. “You told me I was your best friend. That you ‘just didn’t see me that way.’ Was that a lie? Or am I just not fucking enough of a challenge?”
“No! God, Sophia, no.” His eyes glistened. “You’re… you’re incredible. You always have been. It was never about that.”
“Then what?” she demanded, her voice cracking. The pain was a live wire now, sparking and dangerous. “What was it about? Tell me!”
He had no answer. He just looked at her, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his own carefully constructed world clearly in shambles. He had come looking for her, drawn to her in her misery, abandoning the balcony, the kiss, the boyfriend. The contradiction was too glaring. The space between them was electric with everything unsaid for years.
She saw it then—the same bewildering want she’d bottled up forever, mirrored in his eyes. Mixed with guilt, and fear, and tequila-fueled opportunity.
Without thinking, acting purely on the cyclone of hurt and need, she closed the last inch between them and kissed him.
It was nothing like the soft, fantasy kisses she’d imagined. It was salty and sour and desperate. She poured every ounce of her frustration, her jealousy, her longing into it, biting his lower lip, her tongue pushing into his mouth. For a second, he stood frozen in shock. Then, with a broken groan that sounded like it was torn from his soul, he kissed her back.
His hands came up to cradle her face, his touch reverent for a heartbeat before turning hungry. He kissed her like he was starving, like he was trying to consume the last three years of misunderstanding. It was messy and wet and tasted of tears and tequila. It was everything she’d ever wanted and it felt like a crime scene.
His body pressed her back against the brick wall, the rough surface scraping through her hoodie. One of his knees nudged her legs apart. The hard line of his erection pressed against her thigh, a shocking, undeniable heat.
“Izuku,” she panted against his mouth, her hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely, his lips trailing down her jaw to her neck. “I’m so sorry, Sophia. I’m fucked up. This is so fucked up.”
But he didn’t stop. His hands slid down her sides, over her hips, squeezing the curve of her waist through the leggings. The touch was possessive, exploring, and it sent a jolt of raw need straight to her core. This was Izuku. Her best friend. The one who’d gently friend-zoned her. And now his fingers were hooking into the waistband of her leggings and her underwear, tugging them down her hips in one rough, urgent motion.
The cool alley air hit her exposed skin. She should have been cold. She was burning up.
“Are you sure?” he breathed, his forehead pressed to hers, his eyes wild. “God, we shouldn’t…”
“Don’t you dare stop,” she snarled, her own hands scrambling for his belt buckle. It was awkward, fumbling. The metal clinked loudly in the silent alley. She got it open, yanked the button of his jeans, and shoved them and his boxers down just enough to free him. He was hard and thick in her hand, hot as a brand. He gasped, hips bucking involuntarily.
He didn’t need more encouragement. He grabbed the back of her thigh, hitching her leg up around his hip. The change in angle aligned them perfectly. She felt the blunt, insistent pressure of him against her entrance. She was wet, embarrassingly, overwhelmingly so, her body betraying every sane thought.
He looked into her eyes, a final, silent question in the gloom. She answered by sinking her teeth into his shoulder and rolling her hips, taking the tip of him inside.
He swore, a filthy, grateful sound, and pushed forward.
The stretch was immediate, a burning fullness that stole her breath. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming. He buried himself to the hilt in one smooth, relentless thrust, pinning her to the unyielding brick. A sharp cry tore from her throat—part pain, part shock, part overwhelming relief.
“Fuck,” he choked out, his body shuddering. “Oh, fuck, Sophia.”
He began to move. There was no rhythm, no finesse. It was pure, frantic need. The brick scraped her back with each driving plunge. His hips slapped against hers, a wet, obscene sound in the confined space. He held her thigh up, his grip almost bruising, his other hand braced against the wall beside her head.
Every thrust was a punishment. For the years of longing. For the balcony. For Bakugou. For his own indecision. She took it all, nails digging into his shoulders, meeting him grind for grind. The pleasure was a dark, coiling thing, inextricably tangled with the pain in her heart. She could feel the sweat slick between them, hear his ragged grunts in her ear.
“You feel… so fucking good,” he groaned, his mouth on her neck, sucking a mark into her skin. “Why did I… why did I ever…”
She didn’t want his reasons. Not now. She hooked her other leg around him, pulling him deeper, wanting to erase everything, to be filled so completely there was no room for thought. The coil inside her tightened, unbearably. This was wrong. It was dirty and perfect and devastating.
His pace grew erratic, desperate. “I’m gonna… I can’t…”
“Do it,” she urged, her voice a harsh whisper. “Come inside me. Do it.”
The crude permission shattered his last shred of control. With a strangled shout that echoed off the alley walls, he drove into her one last, deep time and went rigid. She felt the hot, pulsing flood of his release inside her, and it triggered her own climax. It ripped through her without mercy, a brutal wave of sensation that wrung a broken sob from her throat. Her vision whited out, her body clamping around him in rhythmic, punishing waves.
They stayed like that, locked together, trembling, for what felt like an eternity. The only sounds were their ragged breathing and a distant siren.
Slowly, the world seeped back in. The rough brick against her ravaged back. The damp chill on her exposed skin. The sickly sweet smell of the alley. The wet, cooling stickiness between her thighs.
Izuku’s grip on her leg loosened. Gently, he lowered her until her feet found the grimy cobblestones. He was softening inside her, and the sensation made her wince. He pulled out, and a fresh trickle of warmth slid down her inner thigh. He quickly fumbled to pull his jeans up, his face a mask of dawning horror.
He couldn’t look at her. “Sophia… I… oh my god.” His voice was small, shattered.
She pulled her own leggings up, the fabric clinging uncomfortably. The physical reality was brutal. She felt raw, used, and utterly hollow. The tequila haze was gone, burnt away by the adrenaline, leaving a crystalline, painful clarity.
This wasn’t a reunion. It wasn’t a love story beginning. It was a catastrophic collision of two broken people.
He finally met her eyes, his own brimming with tears. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean… we shouldn’t have…”
“Stop apologizing,” she said, her voice flat, dead. “You wanted to. I wanted to. Now it’s done.” She looked past him, down the alley toward the street. “Your boyfriend is probably looking for you.”
The word ‘boyfriend’ hung in the air like a poison. Izuku paled further. “Katsuki… he’s… it’s complicated.”
“Yeah.” She pushed off the wall, her legs unsteady. “Tell me about it.”
She started to walk away, her gait stiff.
“Wait! Where are you going?” he called after her, desperate.
She didn’t turn around. “Home. To shower. To try and forget this ever happened.” She paused, a bitter taste in her mouth. “Delete my number, Izuku. And next time… stay on your fucking balcony.”
She walked out of the alley, leaving him standing alone in the dim light, the ghost of their heat still lingering in the cold air. The city hadn’t changed. It still pulsed, indifferent. But she felt irrevocably altered, marked not by passion, but by a profound, dirty truth. She had gotten exactly what she thought she wanted. And it had broken something inside her that no amount of scrubbing would ever clean.
She walked the twelve blocks home on trembling legs, the sticky residue between her thighs a cold, brutal reminder. Her apartment door clicked shut behind her, the familiar silence now accusing. She stripped in the middle of the living room, letting her soiled clothes fall onto the floor where the sequined top already lay. She stood naked, shivering in the dark.
The shower was scalding. She scrubbed her skin raw with a coarse loofah, the soap stinging the fresh scrapes on her back from the brick. The water swirled down the drain, grey and unclean. She watched it, her mind a perfect, horrifying blank. She could still feel the ghost of him inside her, a phantom fullness that made her stomach clench. When her fingers brushed between her legs, she jerked them away as if burned.
She wrapped herself in a towel and walked back into the living room, her hair dripping. A shadow moved by the window.
She froze. Izuku was standing there, his silhouette framed against the city lights. He must have followed her the whole way. He turned, his face ravaged in the low light.
“You didn’t lock your door,” he said, his voice hollow.
“Get out.”
“I can’t.” He took a step forward. “Not after… not like that.”
“It was exactly like that,” she spat, tightening the towel around her chest. “It was fucking in an alley. It was grimy and sad. Now get out.”
He flinched but held his ground. His eyes were red-rimmed, his usually bright green gaze clouded with a desperate anguish. “Do you hate me?”
The question was so childish, so painfully Izuku, that a bitter laugh burst from her. “I don’t know what I feel. But I know you need to leave before you make it all a thousand times worse.”
“It already is worse!” The words exploded from him, sharp with frustration. He ran a trembling hand through his hair. “Do you think I wanted to hurt you? Do you think I enjoy being this… this confused? I saw your face on that balcony and it felt like my ribs were caving in. I left him there to find you.”
“And what did you find?” She spread her arms, indicating her bare skin, the damp room, the mess of her life. “You found a pathetic drunk girl and used her to feel better about your own shitty choices. Congratulations. You’re just like him now.”
“Don’t say that.” His voice dropped to a whisper. He moved closer, drawn in by the gravity of their mutual damage. “You’re not pathetic. You’re the strongest person I know. What I did… what we did… it wasn’t about using you. It was…” He searched for the words, finding none that didn’t sound like a lie.
“It was what?” she pressed, her heart hammering against her ribs. “A mistake? A moment of weakness? Tell me, Izuku. Use your words.”
He was in front of her now, close enough to touch. The air crackled with the same dangerous charge from the alley. His breath hitched. “It was the only thing that felt real in years,” he breathed, and the raw honesty in it was more devastating than any lie.
His hand lifted, slowly, as if moving through deep water. His fingertips brushed a wet curl from her temple. The touch was electric. She should slap his hand away. She should scream. She stood motionless, a statue of conflicted flesh.
“I think about you,” he confessed, the words leaving him in a guilty rush. “All the time. The way you laugh. The way you bite your lip when you’re thinking. That time you fell asleep on my couch in second year and I just… watched you for an hour. I told myself it was friendship. I was a coward.”
His thumb traced the line of her jaw. She shut her eyes, a traitorous tear escaping. “You don’t get to say this now.”
“I have to.” His other hand came up, cradling her face. “Because if I don’t, I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I’d just been brave enough to kiss you in my living room instead of fucking you against a wall.”
Her eyes snapped open. The crude word on his usually polite tongue was a shock. It tore down the last pretense. The towel felt flimsy, insignificant. His gaze dropped to her lips, then lower, to where the terry cloth wedged between her breasts.
“Show me,” she heard herself say, the voice not quite her own.
“What?”
“Show me you’re brave. Not in a dirty alley.” She let go of the towel. It pooled at her feet with a soft whisper. She stood before him, completely bare, skin still pink from the shower. “Here. Where it’s clean. Where you can see me.”
A strangled sound escaped his throat. His control, always so tightly wound, snapped. He kissed her with a consuming hunger that erased the memory of the alley’s desperation. This was slower, deeper, a deliberate devouring. His hands slid down her back, over the curve of her ass, pulling her firmly against him. She could feel him already hard again through his jeans.
She fumbled with his belt, her fingers more assured now. The leather slid free, the button popped, the zipper grated down. She pushed his jeans and boxers past his hips, freeing his erection. He was fully hard, thick and hot in her hand. He shuddered at her touch.
“Sophia,” he gasped against her mouth.
“No talking.” She walked backward, leading him by the cock, until her knees hit the edge of her rumpled bed. She fell onto it, pulling him down on top of her. The weight of him was a shock, solid and real. He braced himself on his elbows, looking down at her, his green eyes dark with a terrified wonder.
He positioned himself at her entrance, the head nudging against her slick warmth. She was already wet for him again, a traitorous, visceral response. He pushed in slowly, an agonizing, inch-by-inch invasion that made her arch her back and dig her nails into his shoulders. It felt different here—sober, intentional, intimate. It hurt more.
“Look at me,” she commanded, her voice husky.
He obeyed, his gaze locked on hers as he sheathed himself completely inside her. A tear traced a path through his freckles. She watched it fall as he began to move.
This wasn’t the frantic, punishing pace of the alley. This was a deep, rocking rhythm, a cruel mockery of lovemaking. Each thrust was a question. Each withdrawal was an apology. Her legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him deeper, giving him the answer he feared.
“You feel… God, you feel…” He buried his face in her neck, his hips settling into a relentless, grinding cadence. The bedsprings creaked a soft, rhythmic protest beneath them.
She let her head fall back, giving him access to her throat. He kissed and bit the tender skin there, his breath coming in hot, ragged bursts. One of his hands slid between their joined bodies, his fingers finding her clit. He touched her with an engineer’s focused precision, circling the swollen bud in time with his thrusts.
The dual sensation was too much. The coil of pleasure, tight and hot, began to spiral impossibly fast. This was worse than the alley. This felt like being known. “Izuku…” His name was a plea and a curse.
“Come for me,” he growled, his voice thick with a need that bordered on violence. “I want to feel you come around my cock. I need to feel it.”
The filthy command, from his mouth, shattered her. Her orgasm ripped through her with a silent, breathless intensity, a series of clenching, fluttering spasms that milked him deep inside her. She convulsed, her vision spotting, a broken sound caught in her throat.
Feeling her climax, his own restraint dissolved. His thrusts lost their rhythm, becoming short, frantic jerks. “I’m… I can’t…”
“Do it,” she whispered, her body still pulsing. “Mark me. Let him smell you on me tomorrow.”
With a hoarse cry that was half-sob, half-triumph, he plunged deep and held there, his body rigid. She felt the hot, urgent pulse of his release, jet after jet filling her. He collapsed on top of her, his full weight driving her into the mattress, his face wet against her shoulder.
They lay like that, a tangle of spent limbs and sticky skin, for a long time. The only sound was their gradually slowing breaths. The room smelled of sex and her coconut shampoo.
Reality, cold and sharp, seeped back in first for her. His softening cock was still inside her. His phone, in the pocket of his discarded jeans on the floor, began to vibrate. It buzzed against the floorboards with a frantic, insectile persistence.
Izuku went utterly still. They both knew who it was.
He didn’t move to answer it. The buzzing stopped. A moment of silence hung in the air, thick and suffocating.
Then it started again.