He knocked on the door with a grin already on his face.

There was a short pause — the sound of footsteps, then the door swung open and Gina appeared, slightly out of breath, a dish towel over one shoulder and flour on her left elbow from something she’d been doing in the kitchen. She looked at him. Then at the bags. Then back at him.

"Yuto—"

He held up the smaller bag first, then the sandals, then angled the wrapped meat forward like a man presenting evidence at a trial.

Whatever she’d been about to say dissolved entirely. Her eyes went wide, and then she made a sound that wasn’t quite a word and launched herself at him.

Yuto caught her on instinct, which meant he was now holding Gina with both arms while also holding three bags, a wrapped cut of premium meat, and rapidly losing structural stability. He hugged her back and managed not to drop anything, which he privately considered an athletic achievement.

She smelled like whatever she’d been cooking. Her arms were tight around his neck.

Inwardly, he made a note: she is going to crush it every time I bring food home, and I am going to have to factor this into the load distribution.

She let go eventually, grabbed his wrist, and dragged him inside.

"Come in, come in — I have something for you too."

"You didn’t have to—"

"I did," she said, already pulling him through the doorway. "I absolutely did. Come on."

Shiny floated in behind them and the door clicked shut.

Gina turned around.

Her gaze found Shiny, sitting there glowing faintly in the entryway with the mild, patient expression of a spirit who had nowhere to be.

She cleared her throat.

"You know," she said, addressing Yuto but looking somewhere else, "you might want to dismiss Shiny for this."

Yuto blinked. "Why?"

"Just — maybe."

He looked at Shiny. Shiny looked at him. The look communicated nothing useful.

"...Shiny, you can go."

Shiny bowed once, dissolved, and was gone.

Gina beamed.

And it was at that precise moment that Yuto actually looked at her — properly, the way he hadn’t when the door first opened because he’d been focused on the bags, on her reaction, on not dropping the meat — and his brain performed a small, involuntary error.

She was in a nightgown.

That was not, by itself, the issue. People wore nightgowns. He lived with her. This was a domestic setting. All of this was fine.

The issue was the nightgown itself, which was white and loose and made of something that the candlelight from the kitchen was passing through with very little resistance. The fabric was thin enough that her silhouette read clearly through it — the line of her waist, the curve of her hips, the shape of her that he had been successfully not thinking about for a carefully maintained stretch of time... and her boobs.

Her boobs were perfectly and completely outlined by the nightgown, infact he could see their pale colour and he could see her nipples poking through the cloth in their pink glory.

Yuto face burned red and he looked away.

Then he looked back, because looking away too fast was its own kind of obvious. Yeah right that’s a good excuse.

His face had gone warm in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. Something else was happening that he was going to need a moment to compose himself about — preferably alone, in a different room, his dick had jumped.

Get it together, he told himself firmly. You live with her. You have always lived with her. None of this is new information.

His body declined to engage with this argument.

Gina, apparently unaware that he was undergoing a quiet internal emergency, smiled at him with the easy warmth of someone who was simply happy to see him.

"Your gift," she said, "is a bath."

"A—"

"You smell terrible."

He opened his mouth.

"From the hunt," she added, helpfully. "You smell terrible from the hunt. I prepared it already. Hot water, everything. Come on."

Before he could produce a sentence, she had his wrist again and was walking, and he was following, because that was apparently what was happening now.

The problem with following Gina was the following part.

The nightgown, from the back, had done something — shifted, or settled, or simply obeyed gravity in the way that loose fabric sometimes does — and the result was that it was doing considerably less work than garments were generally expected to do. It was lodged in the crack of her ass and as result he could see the shape of her mounds clearly, he watcned as they jiggled with each step she took

Yuri swallowed. Had her butt always been this big?

They arrived at the bathroom.

The tub was full, steaming gently, the surface of the water shifting in slow ripples beneath the dim bathroom light. A faint herbal scent drifted through the room, warm and earthy, coming from the pale green soap she always kept on the windowsill beside the cracked little pot of lavender that somehow refused to die. The smell clung to the steam, mixing with the damp air until the whole room felt softened by it. She had lit the small candle on the shelf too, the flame trembling every now and then whenever the draft from the hallway slipped under the door. Its glow painted the tiles in uneven gold. A folded cloth rested neatly over the side of the tub, carefully placed, like every detail had been considered long before he arrived.

Yuto stood in the doorway for a moment longer than he meant to. He kept one hand against the frame, fingers curling slightly against the wood as he looked around the room in silence. It wasn’t extravagant, not even particularly beautiful by most standards, but it felt lived in. Quiet. Intentional. The kind of place that carried traces of a person in every object they touched.

He noticed the tiny water stains near the sink. The way the candle had burned unevenly from being lit too many times on one side. The soap dish with its chipped corner. Things most people would overlook

She’d done all of this for him.

He stood in the doorway feeling something warm settle in his chest that was different and quieter than the other thing he’d been managing in the hallway.

"Okay," he said, clearing his throat. "Thank you. You can — I’ll take it from here."

Gina laughed.

"Don’t be silly," she said. "I’ll bathe you."

Yuto went very still.

"...I’m sorry?"