The afternoon sun spills through the kitchen windows, soft and honey-gold, casting long shadows over the mess spread across the counter. There are half-eaten slices of cake, frosting-streaked forks, and a notebook scrawled with tasting notes that gradually dissolve into lazy doodles of wedding bells and tiny hearts in the margins.

The air smells like sugar and something warmer. Something domestic. Something like love.

Satoru sits on a stool, legs spread wide, posture careless but not unaware. His white hair is a mess of soft waves, catching the light like spun silk, and the blindfold he’s discarded lies curled beside a napkin stained pink with raspberry cream. He doesn’t need it today. Today, he wants to see everything; the cakes, sure, but mostly you.

His mouth moves slowly as he chews, blue eyes unfocused, pointed skyward as he thinks, really thinks, about the mango-guava sponge melting on his tongue. There’s a smudge of frosting at the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t wipe it.

“I don’t know,” Satoru muses, licking the frosting off his thumb. “I like the mango guava better. Has that mmf—you know, zing. Like you, sweetheart. Tropical and just a little dangerous.”

You blink slowly. “Satoru.”

“I described perfect cake,” Satoru says around a mouthful, grinning. “And also my fiancée. Two birds, one smooth operator.”

You stand across from him, rolling your eyes as he grins at you, frosting at the corner of his mouth. It’s your third sample in an hour. You’d started the afternoon with structure: rankings, scoring criteria, flavor breakdowns. But Satoru, predictably, derailed it within minutes. He tasted everything with the same intensity he brought to cursed technique analysis, then immediately abandoned your system to lick icing from his knuckles.

The kitchen is a quiet war zone of sugar and soft affection. He gets up eventually, trailing his fingers along the edge of the counter as he crosses to you. His shirt hangs open at the collar, sleeves rolled up, wrists dusted with powdered sugar where he forgot to brush them off.

You sigh and he just slips an arm around your waist, the other hand still holding a fork, forgotten now. His nose brushes the side of your temple. You can feel the warmth of him behind you, sunlit, sprawling, too big for this kitchen but somehow perfectly fitted into it all the same, the way he has since you were teens in Jujutsu Tech. “What do you like best? Matcha or the coconut one? You lose voting rights if you say the raspberry one,” he mumbles into your throat with a grin.