Inside Your Mind

72 - Aizawa

A/N: SMUT warning towards the end of the chapter.

I wish I found you sooner

On the way back to his place, Shouta Aizawa had sobered up a lot and was almost perfectly back to normal again. Thank God, Kaori had brought up getting some food, because he realized soon enough that he was starving. The miso soup and rice that they had gotten was absolutely heavenly.

And now he was sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of tea watching Kaori, as she gleefully examined his random collection of books. It was a wild mix of psychology textbooks, true crime and classical literature. There were a few novels thrown in here and there, just some that Aizawa had actually enjoyed over the years.

He had always been an avid reader, even though he hadn't had much time to read lately. Since he had learned how to read as a child, he constantly had a book on him. During high school he was always reading, during breaks or during lessons that were particularly boring to him.

It had gotten him into trouble more than he cared to admit. But at least he could continue reading his books whenever he got detention, so he didn't even really care about that. Kaori looking over the books he owned and once in a while commenting on them was the most attractive thing to him right now, however.

"Zodiac Unmasked! Shouta, I love that book! I devoured it when I first got it, it was so good." she exclaimed, looking back at him.

"I know what you mean, I couldn't put it down myself, when I first got it." Aizawa agreed, smiling to himself. He knew that Kaori liked to read, but until now it had just been a random fact at the back of his mind.

He never really thought about it like this - both of them in his apartment, drinking tea at 2 in the morning, humid and hot air, and her bending down to get a good look at the books on the lower shelves. He had been thinking about putting something else on those shelves, but now he was glad he didn't.

"No, I don't think you understand. I read the whole 500-something pages in like... 2 days? And that was while I was in high school. Not during the summer break or anything." she told him and moved onto a textbook called Leading Theories of Delinquent Behaviour and Criminology. She gasped and carefully took it out of the shelf, looking at it in awe in the dim light that was coming from the standing lamp in the living room.

"I have been trying to get a hold of this book for ages! Where did you get this? It seems I can only get it from America if I pay 40$ in shipping. I don't even want to know how much that is in yen..." she said and put her cup of tea in one of the sections of the bookshelf, as she leafed through the textbook.

"You can borrow it if you want." he offered. She looked up from the book, her eyes glowing. God, why was she so beautiful? Not just her looks, her wits and her whole intellect, it just made her so much better in Aizawa's eyes.

He wouldn't have minded if the rest of he was stuck in this strange, liminal space for the rest of his life - with his student looking through his books while he watched her with a nice cup of tea in his hands, seeing her get excited and appreciate the same kind of things he appreciated.

"Really? Oh my God, thank you so much! Shouldn't take me too long to get through it. You have so many books that I've always wanted to read, but that I could never get my hands on until now. This is amazing. We should do this more often!" she exclaimed giddily and put the book on his living room table. She already had one or two other books lying there that she was borrowing from him.