Chapter 4: The Drive Home
The bike’s engine was a raw, vibrating snarl between Sukuna’s thighs. The city night air, thick with exhaust and the damp smell of impending rain, whipped past them. In the rearview mirror, he’d seen the pale oval of Mizuki’s face at the window, a distant ghost already fading. He felt nothing about it. It was a closed door. A wiped slate.
Megumi’s arms were a tight band around his waist, her hands slipped under his jacket to press against the hard plane of his stomach. She wasn’t holding on for safety. She was claiming. He could feel the slight shift of her body as she turned, just enough to look back at Mizuki’s building one last time. Then she settled, her cheek a warm pressure against his spine, her breath hot through the thin fabric of his shirt.
He gunned the engine, taking a corner too fast. The bike leaned, metal groaning in protest. Megumi didn’t flinch. She let out a short, exhilarated laugh he felt more than heard.
They didn’t speak until they were in the garage, a cramped, oily-smelling space attached to their small house. The sudden silence after he killed the engine was profound, ringing in their ears. Fluorescent light buzzed overhead, flickering once.
Megumi slid off the bike first, her movements fluid. The oversized shirt she’d stolen from his drawer—soft grey cotton, worn thin—rode up as she dismounted, revealing a sliver of pale skin and the curve of her hip. She didn’t adjust it.
He swung his leg over and stood, rolling the tension from his shoulders. The confrontation lingered in his muscles, a static charge.
“She looked like a lost kitten,” Megumi said, her voice a quiet melody in the dank space. She was looking at a rusted tool cabinet, tracing a finger through the dust on its surface. “All wide-eyed and tragic in her little kitchen.” She glanced at him, a sly tilt to her head. “Did she cry, Kuna-nii?”
“Didn’t stick around to find out.” He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it over the bike’s seat. The grease on his hands was a second skin. He felt filthy, in a good way. In a real way.
“Hm.” Megumi moved then, closing the distance between them in two silent steps. She looked up at him, her dark eyes huge and unblinking. “You’re angry.”
“I’m annoyed.”
“Same thing.” She reached up, her fingers brushing the tight line of his jaw. “You taste like cigarettes and someone else’s stupid questions.”
He caught her wrist, not roughly, but with a finality that made her breath hitch. He looked down at her. At the girl he’d raised. The girl he’d ruined. The only thing in the world that made any sense. The anger from Mizuki’s kitchen—the audacity of her prying, her pathetic attempt to name what they were—curdled into something darker, hotter, more focused.
“She’s gone,” he said, the words low, meant only for the space between their mouths.
A slow smile spread across Megumi’s face. It wasn’t innocent. It was a key turning in a lock. “Good.”
He moved. One hand still on her wrist, the other fisted in the back of her stolen shirt. He spun her, pushed her back against the cold cinderblock wall of the garage. A can of spray paint clattered to the concrete floor. He didn’t care.
His mouth crashed down on hers. It wasn’t a kiss of love; it was a confirmation. A reassertion of territory. She tasted like the cherry soda she’d been drinking while she waited for him, and something uniquely, fundamentally her. She opened for him immediately, a soft sound escaping her throat as her hands came up to tangle in his wild pink hair, pulling him closer, deeper.
He broke the kiss, breathing hard, his forehead resting against hers. “She asked if I loved her.”
Megumi’s laughter was a quiet puff of air against his lips. “Silly girl.”
“She asked if she was a substitute for Mom.”
That made Megumi go still for a fraction of a second. Then her gaze sharpened, turning flinty. “What did you say?”
He didn’t answer with words. He kissed her again, harder, a punishment and a promise. His hand slid from her wrist down to her thigh, hiking up the hem of the shirt, his rough, calloused palms against her smooth skin. She gasped, arching into him, her body a perfect, pliant line against his.
“I said she couldn’t compete,” he muttered, the words swallowed by her mouth.
“She can’t.” Megumi’s voice was fierce, possessive. Her nails scraped against his scalp. “No one can. This is it. This is all there is.”
He believed her. He always had.
With a grunt, he bent, getting an arm under her knees, and lifted her. She was light, a familiar weight. She immediately wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, clinging to him like a vice. He carried her like that, through the cluttered garage, kicking open the door that led into the house.
The inside was dim, warm, a stark contrast to the sterile world they’d just left. The air smelled of the incense Megumi liked to burn and the underlying scent of their life together—old books, motor oil, skin. He didn’t turn on any lights. The faint glow from the streetlamp outside bled through the blinds, painting stripes across the floor.
He didn’t make it to the bedroom. He backed her against the wall in the hallway, next to the framed photo of the two of them as kids, her small hand in his. The glass in the frame was cool against her shoulder blade.
Her eyes gleamed in the semi-darkness. She wiggled against him, a deliberate, frustrating motion. “Impatient.”
“You started it,” he growled, yanking the soft cotton shirt up and over her head. It caught for a moment on her arms, then joined his jacket in the unseen clutter of their life.
She was bare underneath. The pale curves of her breasts were illuminated in the strips of light, her nipples already pebbled from the cool air or from anticipation. He looked his fill, his gaze a physical touch. There was no shyness in her, only a quiet, defiant pride. She knew what she was to him.
He dipped his head, capturing one peak in his mouth, his tongue circling the tight bud. She cried out, her head thumping back against the wall, her fingers gripping his hair hard enough to hurt. “Nii-chan…”
He switched to the other, his hands moving down to grip her hips, holding her steady against the rolling thrust of his own. The rough denim of his jeans scraped against the tender skin of her inner thighs. Every movement was ragged, unrefined, a frantic erasure of the last hour, of Mizuki, of every outside rule they’d ever broken.
“Say it,” he demanded against her skin, his voice thick.
“Yours,” she breathed, her own hands dragging down his back, under the waistband of his jeans. “I’m yours. Only yours. Always.”
It was the only scripture that mattered.
He carried her the rest of the way to their room, a tangle of limbs and hungry mouths, falling onto the unmade bed in a heap of shared breath and familiar heat. The outside world, with its judgments and its Mizukis, ceased to exist. There was only this: the slide of skin on skin, the bitten-off curses, the whispered names that were secrets and sacraments, the perfect, devastating rightness of a wrong that had built their entire world.
Later, much later, with the rain finally pattering against the window, they lay tangled in the damp sheets. The anger was gone, burned away. Sukuna smoked, the tip of his cigarette glowing a dull orange in the dark. Megumi had her head on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart, her finger tracing the lines of a tattoo over his ribs.
“She’ll tell people,” Megumi said, not as a worry, but as a statement of fact.
“Let her.” He exhaled a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “Who’s gonna believe her? The stable schoolteacher scorned by the town screw-up? She’ll sound insane.”
Megumi smiled, a small, satisfied thing he felt against his skin. “We are insane.”
“Yeah.” He stubbed out the cigarette, then rolled, pinning her beneath him again, just to see her eyes widen. “But we’re the only ones who get to define it.”
Outside, the rain fell, washing the city clean. In the small, warm room that smelled of sex and them, the door was not just shut. It was sealed.