Chapter 3: Infinity, Minus One
"Don't move," Gojo says. "Actually, no. Move. Come here. Around the counter. Slowly. Like you're bored."
You have never been less bored in your life. You come around the counter anyway, madeleine tray still in your oven mitts, because some animal part of your brain has decided the safest place in the world is the doorway he's standing in. Behind you, the baguettes go on tilting one by one, a soft wooden clatter, something long and patient easing its way along the rack.
You reach him. He doesn't touch you. He doesn't step back either. He just shifts, very slightly, so that his body is between you and your own kitchen, and you feel the air beside him go dense and strange, like standing next to a wall you can't see.
"You can see it," you whisper.
"I can see everything." He doesn't say it like a boast. He says it like a symptom. "It's a sneaky one. It feeds on people who notice things. Gets close, stays out of the corner of their eye, eats a little bit of their attention every night until they stop noticing anything at all. You'd have started forgetting your recipes in a week or two."
Something cold goes through you that has nothing to do with the curse. "My recipes."
"Your grandfather's baguette. Gone. The mont blanc. Gone." He tilts his head toward the kitchen, considering. "That's the kind of thing that really makes me want to be dramatic about this."
"Can you be dramatic about it without destroying my shop?"
"Probably."
"Probably?"
"Ninety-five percent. Ninety. Hold the madeleines."
He lifts one hand, two fingers raised, almost lazy, like he's flagging down a waiter. The air in the kitchen bends. You feel it in your teeth first, then in your ears, a pressure drop like a plane descending, and every loose thing in the room starts to lean toward a single point above the cooling rack: the dish towel, a paper bag, three receipts, the steam off the coffee urn. Something in the middle of that point screams without sound. For half a second you see it. A pale, boneless length of a thing, its whole body crowded with shut eyelids, all of them squeezed tight like it's been pretending not to look at you for weeks.
Then Gojo closes his fingers, and it folds into nothing, and the room lets go.
The dish towel drops. The receipts flutter down. The overhead lights hum back to life all at once, so bright you squint. The oven clicks, thinks about it, and starts warming up again like nothing happened.
There's a long silence.
"Okay," Gojo says. "So, one casualty."
You look. On the rack, a single baguette has been compressed into a perfect, dense sphere about the size of a golf ball.
"It died a hero," he says solemnly. "I'll pay for it."
You start laughing. You don't decide to. It just comes out of you, high and cracked and totally out of proportion, and you're still holding the madeleine tray, and your knees seem to have quietly resigned. You sit down hard on the floor of your own shop with your back against the front of the counter. The madeleines survive. You are weirdly proud of that.
Gojo stands over you for a moment with his hands hovering like he isn't sure where to put them. Then he sits down too, folding his absurd legs up, close enough that his shoulder is a breath from yours. Not touching. You can feel the edge of the thing that isn't touching, that faint resistant hum, like a fridge in another room.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"I just watched you fold a monster into a point."
"Yes, but are you okay."
You think about it honestly. "I'm going to have a lot of feelings about my kitchen for a while."
"That's fair."
"Is it gone? Actually gone?"
"Actually gone." He leans his head back against the counter. "I'd tell you if it wasn't. I'm a lot of things. I don't lie about curses."
"Just about emergencies."
He's quiet for a second. "Yeah," he says. "Just about those."
You make tea, because you'd rather be doing something with your hands, and you sit back down on the floor with him, because the stools feel too far away. It's twenty past two. The sign on the door says CLOSED in your neat, defiant hand. The penguin plushie stares at you both from the register.
"Can I explain?" he says, eventually. "About the running. I've been trying to figure out how to say it so it doesn't sound pathetic, and I can't, so I'm just going to say it pathetically."
"Okay."
He looks at his tea instead of you. Without the blindfold or the glasses, his eyelashes are white, too, which seems excessive, which seems like a design decision someone should have been consulted on.
"The thing you hit, at the yakitori place. It's called Infinity. It's always on. I don't think about it. I sleep with it on. I eat with it on. Rain doesn't land on me. Nobody bumps me on the train. Nothing gets in unless I let it, and I basically never let it." He rolls the cup between his palms. "It's the best technique in the world. I'm not being modest. It's the reason I'm the strongest. It's also why nobody's touched me by accident in years."
You wait. You've learned that from Nanami: sometimes the kindest thing is a stool and a silence.
"Everybody who's ever reached for me wanted something," he says. "Usually they wanted to kill me. Sometimes they wanted me to kill something for them. I'm good at that. I like being good at that." A breath. "And then you reached up to wipe sauce off my face like I was some idiot on a date, and you hit the wall, and you didn't flinch. You just said, oh, that's the thing Shoko meant. Like it was a quirk. Like I had a weird allergy."
"You kind of do."
"I know!" He laughs, but it cracks in the middle. "And the second you said it, all I wanted to do was take the wall down. Just for you. And I've never, I couldn't, my whole body went, what are you doing, you'll get hurt, and I was in Sendai before I'd finished the thought." He glances at you, finally, and his eyes are so blue it's hard to look straight at them. "That's it. That's the big secret. The strongest sorcerer alive got scared of a pastry chef wiping his face."
"Not of me."
"Of you. A little." He considers. "Mostly of how much I wanted you to."
The oven ticks as it heats. Out on the street, a delivery scooter goes by and the sound fades into the dark.
"Okay," you say. "So what now?"
He sets his tea down on the floor. Very carefully, like he's defusing something, he holds out his hand between you, palm up.
"I'm going to try something," he says. "If I disappear, I'm sorry in advance, and I'll bring you something back from somewhere cold."
"Gojo."
"Just. Try."
You set your cup down. You reach out, slowly, the way you'd reach toward a wild animal you've been feeding for weeks, and you brace for the hum.
There isn't one.
Your fingertips touch his palm, and it's warm. It's just a hand. A big, warm, ordinary hand, with a callus at the base of the fingers and a faint tremor running through it like a wire in the wind. You lay your hand flat against his, and his fingers curl, very slowly, around yours.
"Oh," he says.
He says it exactly the way you did, under the train tracks, a week and a lifetime ago. Like he's just found out something about himself that nobody told him.
You don't let go. He doesn't vanish. You sit on the floor of your shop holding hands with the strongest man in the world, and he stares down at your joined fingers like he's watching a jellyfish named Kenji in a tunnel of violet light. You can feel his pulse going hard in his wrist. You can feel your own.
"Still here," you say softly.
"Still here," he agrees. His voice is unsteady. "Still. Wow. This is. You're very warm. Is that normal? Are people always this warm?"
"I've been standing next to an oven for nine hours."
"That's a great answer. Very grounding." He hasn't looked up. "Can I tell you something embarrassing?"
"Everything you've said tonight has been embarrassing."
"I liked you before the mont blanc. The first night. When you told me the castella would be fine and I said it was a war crime, you looked at me like you wanted to throw it at my head. Nobody looks at me like that. Everybody's either scared or they want an autograph or they want me dead." Now he looks up. "You just wanted me to shut up and pay."
"You did tip well."
"I was trying to impress you! It's the only thing I know how to do!"
You lean in.
You do it slowly, so he can see it coming from a mile off with those eyes that see everything. So he has every chance to leave. You stop a breath away from his mouth, and there's no wall. There's nothing between you but a few centimeters of warm air and the smell of tea and burnt sugar.
"Don't teleport," you whisper.
"Not technically teleporting," he whispers back.
"Gojo."
"Not going anywhere," he says, and closes the distance himself.
He kisses like someone who's read about it. Careful at first, almost formal, his free hand coming up to hover near your jaw, then landing there, warm against your cheek, like he's checking it's allowed. Then you make a small sound against his mouth, and something in him gives, and he pulls you in by the hand he's still holding and kisses you like he's been thinking about it every night on stool three for six weeks. Which, it turns out, he has. He tells you so afterward, his forehead pressed to yours, both of you breathing like you've run up a stairwell.
"Every night," he says. "Every single night. I ate so much castella to stay longer. I hate castella."
"You don't hate castella. You hated my old castella."
"I hate all castella now. It reminds me of my cowardice."
You laugh into his collar. He laughs too, and his whole body shakes with it, and his arms go around you, all of him, nothing in the way. He's so warm. He holds on like you're the thing that might vanish.
"Can I ask you now?" he says, a while later. You're still on the floor. The tea has gone cold. "Condition two. About the building."
"You want to put someone on my building."
"I want to put me on your building. Occasionally. On the stairs. Being a menace to any curse that tries it." He pauses. "And maybe in the kitchen sometimes. On stool three. Indefinitely."
"That's not asking about the building."
"No," he admits. "That's asking about you."
You pretend to think about it, for exactly long enough to watch him panic.
"Yes," you say. "Fine. Yes."
He lights up. There's no other way to describe it. It's like watching someone switch on every lamp in a house.
"Great. Okay. Great. Then I need to break condition one, just once, for a very good reason."
"Absolutely not."
"It's for a very good reason," he repeats, already standing, already holding out both hands. "Trust me. Do you trust me?"
You look at his hands. No wall. No hum. Just him, waiting.
"If you drop me in the ocean," you say, and take them.
The shop vanishes.
There's a lurch like missing a stair in the dark, a rush of nothing, and then cold air hits your face, sharp and clean and smelling of rain and pine. You're standing on a quiet street you've never seen, under a sky going gray at the edges. Across the road is a small shop with a green noren and a sign you recognize from a white box in your fridge. The hours on the door say it opens at nine.
It's four in the morning in Sendai.
"We're early," Gojo says happily. He sits down on the curb, pulls you down beside him, and laces his fingers through yours like he's been doing it his whole life. "I figured we'd wait. It's a good wait. Best kikufuku in the world, and we're first in line."
You look at him, the strongest sorcerer alive, sitting on a cold curb in Miyagi at dawn, beaming, holding your hand like it's the prize.
In his jacket pocket, his phone starts buzzing. It doesn't stop. You glimpse the screen: thirty-eight missed calls, every one of them from someone saved as IJICHI (CRYING).
Gojo silences it without looking.
"They can wait," he says. "I'm on a date."