WARNING: This is horrendously long, and probably horrendous in other ways too. I don’t know. I’m not a good judge of that sort of thing, so I’ll just leave off with this –

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

---

 

 

 

She did not know her age precisely, but in the two dozen or so years the gods had granted her, Sumire had seen many things. Things no man or woman should see, in her reckoning. Yet the world had no regard for fairness. It did not gird itself for the sake of innocent eyes. It did not temper its cruelty for anyone or anything. In nature, such a concept did not exist. Things simply were—in all their beauty and grace, in all their ugliness and brutality. Even as a child, she had learned the truth of this.

Even as a child, she had not been spared the truth of this.

Sitting alone in a dark corner of the overgrown courtyard, Sumire took another long draw from her pipe, and reflected. Like the sun, fortune shone down on good and ill alike, and where it fell and where it did not, men perished and men survived. Sumire thought of herself as a flower that had found a way to flourish in the shade. Among other things, her name meant ‘small bliss’, and she supposed this was fitting enough for what she had become. Whatever her birth name had been, she no longer remembered. Memory was in part an act of will. She had spent her life honing it to fit her purposes, dispensing with what no longer suited her—often wishing she could dispense with more.

Yet against her will, images remained that she could not forget. Fragments of memory, sharp-edged and piercing. The pipe helped somewhat to dull these remembrances; sake, even more. But with that, it was like gripping the blade through a cushion of cloud. Once the haze lifted, she was cut through all the deeper for it. So she stuck to the pipe, holding to the jagged edges of herself with a delicate hand. This lightness of touch was what she excelled at, was it not?

Sumire inhaled the fragrant smoke like air. No, she did not remember her first name. Another name for another life, as far as she was concerned. The moment she was old enough to be sold, she had been. Even at that tender age, her beauty must have been apparent. Low though she wagered it was, the price for her would have seemed high to a peasant farmer. After all, what was another daughter when there were sons to clothe and feed? She could hardly blame her parents, yet blame them she had. Not so much for the act of giving her away, as for what had come, after.

Madam Noh had been a cruel mistress.

A more worldly woman Sumire had yet to see. Madam Noh had been the embodiment of the world in all its callousness and vulgarity, and her moods had been as temperamental as the weather outside—and yet near-indecipherable even to the well-trained eye. Even in her wrath, her stony expressions had scarcely changed—the subtlest drawing of her wire-thin brows, the merest glint in her hard brown eyes. She had bartered the flesh of others as easily as she had bartered for rice. She had thrown girls away like refuse when they were of no further use to her, and had dolled out punishments as a matter of course.

All throughout her youth Sumire had lived in fear of being ‘sold over the river.’ This had been Madam Noh’s favorite threat and had served her far better at keeping her whores in line than her arsenal of switches, scourges, and canes. Over the river, she had told them, even the youngest of girls were locked in stalls like chattel and used for a pittance by the lowest of sorts…until they could be used no more. Every time a bloated female corpse had been sighted bobbing downriver of that dreaded place, Madam Noh had gathered them together on the bank to view it in all its gruesomeness and morbidity.

“Mind what I say,” she would tell them in her cold flat voice, “or that’ll be you.”

As a child, Sumire had minded. She had completed her chores timely and well. She had kept her appearance neat, her posture straight, her tongue in check. Demure, but never timid, she had been the brothel’s model servant girl. When she had been asked to speak, she had done so clearly and succinctly. When she had shown herself intelligent in these responses, Madam Noh had taken an interest in her. She had begun to teach Sumire numbers and letters. She had begun sending her out to the markets to bargain for goods in her place.

Sumire had begun to think she would escape the fate of the others. But her beauty had thwarted her yet again. Because of it, she had been noticed by a man. Not even a woman bled, she had been led upstairs to one of the rooms with the red silk screens. She had been made to sit on the bed and await the one who had purchased her. She had made herself lie still while her too-young body had been ravished and plundered and torn from within.

No one had made her lie still in her own blood thereafter, but she had done so anyway. She might have continued to lie there unto death had not the screen door whisked open on its track. It had been Madam Noh herself who had come to tend to her, who had wiped her clean with the same brisk indifference she would sweep away a glob of ink or a spill of tea.

“His offer for you was the highest I’ve ever received,” she had said, as she wrung out the bloodied rag yet again. “You should be proud.”

Proud, Sumire thought presently. Around the slender stem of her pipe, a bitter smile curved her lips. Perhaps, if Madam Noh had never said this, Sumire would have withered away from the horror of her violation. But the galling absurdity, the sheer and utter wickedness of it, had sparked something like new life within her. She had never before thought of herself as proud, yet now it had seemed like this pride was all she had left to her, when even her body could be taken from her.

And so she had nurtured this pride in secret, feeding it with thoughts of revenge.

A flower in shade cannot endure without thorns to protect it. From that day, Sumire’s thorns had begun to grow, though she had kept them concealed behind a veneer of loveliness and perfect manners. For ten more years, she had continued on as Madam Noh’s diligent assistant, and all the while she had been sold at a whim to the highest bidder, though never at small expense. And when one of them had chanced to abuse her terribly, as some of them will chance to do regardless of the price, Madam Noh had thrashed the man half to death with her own dreadful cane. Perverse as it was, a fleeting hope had risen in Sumire that perhaps her mistress had some compassion yet within her, until Madam Noh had whirled toward her battered body and exclaimed—

“That dog, that wretched cur! How dare he—your beautiful face, your lovely frame…if this is what he wanted, he could have done it to any old whore, but no! He had to have you—my jewel, the prize of my harem. And now look at you—gods only know how many weeks’ worth of gold this will cost me…”

Sumire had decided, then. With her failing eyesight, Madam Noh had entrusted the accounts to her increasingly. From these, the brothel guards had been bribed. The documents of inheritance had been forged and witnessed to by a blackmailed patron. All that had been left had been to sprinkle a bit of powdered poison into Madam Noh’s evening tea.

When the convulsions had begun—and how quickly they had begun—Sumire had stood by, straight and proud. She had shown her thorns at long last, and Madam Noh had seen them. Seizing and frothing at the mouth, she had gazed up at Sumire in agony, had reached toward her in helpless appeal. Yet still Sumire had stood by, unmoved, and when her mistress’s stout body had finally gone still, when her hateful eyes had rolled back to the whites, Sumire had stepped over her and gone out to the others.

From her apprenticeship to Madam Noh, she may well have been seen as her natural successor. Yet Sumire was one of them, too, and this had never been more apparent than it was on that night, with her beautiful face still swollen and bruised. Perhaps it had even served to lend her an added fierceness, for the girls had huddled together before her, silent and anxious, as the guards had flanked her at her sign.

“Madam Noh is dead,” Sumire had said to them in her clear, even way. “I am Madam now. Any of you who wish to leave may do so. Those of you who wish to stay will abide by the rules I set forth.”

That had been four years ago. In the time that had passed since then, a few had left the brothel, but most had stayed. And a few more had been added to their number.

Sumire felt that she should be surprised at this, and yet she was not. Outside of a brothel, what was a whore to do? It was a question she had asked herself upon securing her own freedom. Despite her beauty, no man of good character would ever have her as his wife—and she could not imagine herself as one, at any rate. The truth was that she had come to loathe men intensely—their animal grunting and heaving, their coarse greedy hands always grasping and prodding, their bulky frames crushing and grinding and thrusting. The most peaceful life she could imagine was to be free of them, and this she had achieved.

Was she lonely? Perhaps she was, in a sense. But she was secure here, and so were her girls. The guards were no longer paid to keep them prisoner, but to keep the customers in line. In this establishment, any injury done to a whore was repaid twofold, and so far the threat of this alone had served to prevent such tragedy—and to attract enterprising whores from across the land.

Sumire turned no girl away who agreed to abide by her rules. She sold no one away. Neither did she buy girls for the brothel, as Madam Noh had done—with one exception. At the end of each season, with the funds she had set aside, she would make a trip over the river, to the ramshackle whorehouse she had been threatened with as a child. The conditions there, while squalid, were not nearly so dreadful as Madam Noh had made them out to be—neither were the girls so young. Yet during each trip, Sumire would purchase as many of the despairing ones as she could. She would return with them to her own brothel and present them with coin and the same simple choice she had given to all the others before them: stay here in peace, or go.

The sweet tobacco in her pipe had at last run its course. Setting it down upon the stone bench beside her, Sumire eyed the wing of her brothel that today had been torn asunder. She had seen the destruction that men could wreak, yet this had been something else entirely. Another force of nature with which to contend.

Oh, she had performed the rites to protect the place from pesky youkai, to cleanse the grounds of malignant spirits—of which Madam Noh’s was at the forefront of her thoughts. Yet a part of Sumire had remained dismissive of the supernatural. She was a pragmatist at heart and had given little thought to gods and monsters when mankind was so rife with good and evil of its own.

Still, when the oni had come rampaging through town, when she had seen with her own eyes its horns towering above the rooftops in the distance, she had barred the gates and gathered the girls to her here, in this inner court. Even her stalwart guards had gone white-faced with terror. Sumire herself had been deathly afraid, though she had dared not show it. Instead, she had cooed to the panicking women, had shushed them when the clamor of smashing and roaring from beyond had risen to such a deafening pitch that even screams could not be heard above it, let alone the feeble whimpering of a few frightened whores.

Frail though it had seemed even then, Sumire’s only hope had been that the oni would pass them by. That, like a funnel cloud, it would skip their rooftop and leave them unscathed. All her faith and will she poured into this one prayer. Perhaps it would even have been so—had not a woman’s infant child begun to shrill. Sumire’s blood had drained from her face as she had felt the demon turning back, coming toward them.

No. No. 

Strange as it was, her fear had turned to anger then—to a ludicrous sort of indignation. One thinks strange things when one is about to die, she supposed, but so it had been. The prospect of dying in such a way, of being slaughtered at random by this demonic entity, so uniquely and viscerally repellent to her, had outraged her to the depths of her soul. And even when the oni’s reptilian tail had crashed through one of the brothel’s outer halls, even as its scaled smoking claws had streaked toward them through the wreckage, Sumire’s defiance had kept her spine straight and her eyes piercing ahead.

No, she would not die cowering in fear of this monster or any other. Her will was so strong, so resolute in this, that it had seemed to burn from her like a living flame, and as the oni’s searing red eyes had met hers through a shimmer of dust, its clawed reach had seemed to still, its gaze had seemed to narrow in recognition of this.

Yet whether that moment of pause had been imagined or not, in the next instant there had been a flash of silver like lightning through the haze. A horrendous howling had rent the miasmic air. Black-red blood had fallen in a downpour to drench the shredded wood and busted stone. With her palms crushed to her ears, the ground-shaking thud of that scaled limb severing had been dampened, and so Sumire had scarcely noticed it.

At any rate, her attention had been riveted on the one who had dealt the blow. He had been no more to her at first than a pale, glowing blur. Yet as the dust had begun to settle, she had seen him clearly—

A young man with his face half-shielded, armored in grey and black, and riding airborne astride a white, flaming beast.

Sumire had seen many things—yet she had never seen anything like this.

“Youkai taijiya…” one of the girls clustered around her had whispered, and Sumire’s brow had furrowed.

She had thought demon slayers all but extinct, yet looking at him, she had been inclined to believe otherwise. She had not known a man could move with such deadly grace. From his hand, a chained silver sickle had whipped out in a glinting arc, and as easily as cutting rice from the stalk, another of the fell demon’s legs had been sliced from beneath it in a torrent of black, steaming blood.

Hobbled, the snarling oni had lurched forward into the splintered wreckage, the taijiya’s lean dark figure descending after it like a falling spear. Slipping from his curious mount with sword in hand, he had sunk the blade square between the creature’s virulent eyes, and it had snarled no more.

Watching him, Sumire had felt, for the first time in her life, genuinely captivated by a man. Perhaps his youth had given him a guilelessness that had allowed her to appreciate his heroics for what they were. But whatever the reason, captivated she had been—and no less so than when in one deft motion he had pulled his sword free and cleaned it in a flicker, and sparing only the most cursory of glances toward Sumire and her silk-clad girls, had leapt lightly atop his beast of a mount and soared back toward the heart of town.

It was an image that would stay with Sumire for the rest of her days.

Even now, as she eyed the jagged gap in the brothel’s edifice, scaled only with dried, flaking blood since the oni’s carcass had been hacked up and hauled away, she committed this image of him to vivid memory once again, like tracing over an etching in her mind.

And so it was with no small amount of disappointment, as she picked up her pipe and went back inside the brothel, that she beheld the sight that awaited her within. With the town and its neighbors in upheaval after the demonic attack, she had not expected any customers that night. Indeed, in the main hall of the brothel there was only one.

It was the taijiya.

On a silk cushion in one corner of the room he sat seiza, his posture perfect despite the encumbrance of his armor. In a single look, Sumire could tell that he came from good stock, if the fine lines of his face weren’t enough to suggest it. Like a gaggle of hens, the girls flocked around him, tittering and cooing at his every word and glance—and not merely because he was the hero of the town. He was quite a handsome young man. Striking really, Sumire reflected, with his slate-dark eyes and brooding expression.

Yet there was a touch of boyishness about him. He did not quite look at the girls, as he politely refused their attempts to ply him with sake and sweets. Sumire had become adept over the years at reading men, and she could see from the subtle tension in his jaw that he was uncomfortable despite his composure. If she had to guess, this was his first time in such a place, and he seemed at a loss as to what to do. When at last his averted eyes happened to glimpse her, the obvious Madam of this harem, a flicker of relief crossed his features.

It was quite the opposite of what Sumire felt when she looked at him. But if there was one thing she had inherited from Madam Noh, it was her mask.

With her most disarming smile in place, Sumire glided toward him. “My lord,” she said with a slight bow, as the girls drew back from her in deference, “welcome to our humble house. I am Madam Sumire—I trust the girls have introduced themselves?”

“They have,” he replied, inclining his head to her in turn, “Sumire-san.”

Above the edge of her opened fan, Sumire considered him, smiling still. His voice was brisk yet smooth—not a haughty tone, though there was a natural note of authority in it. A first son, doubtless.

“Good,” she said simply. “I am glad. We owe you our lives this day, lord taijiya. I am sure that any girl of your choosing would be happy to entertain you at no charge this evening.”

Fluttering their lashes and playing with their hair, the girls pursed their lips into grins as they nodded, and began closing in on him once again. The young man stiffened, his eyes seizing Sumire’s.

“I have gold,” he protested.

Clearly, the idea of a transaction put him at ease. Ever willing to accommodate, especially in matters of comfort, Sumire responded mildly, “Then of course we are grateful to receive it, my lord, if that is your wish. Now, is there a girl here who has caught your eye?”

“Yes, Sumire-san,” he said, still holding her gaze. “You.”

Sumire was grateful for her fan, because her smile had slipped beneath it. A chill breath of tension gripped the air as the girls frowned toward her in apprehension. Yet after a beat, she recovered herself, her expression as mild as before.

“Ah, my lord, I apologize,” she said, bowing again. “Unfortunately, that is not possible. Yet I am confident that any one of these lovely ladies will be sure to please you greatly—”

“No,” he said shortly. “Forgive me, Sumire-san, but it’s you I want or no one at all.”

At this impertinence and stubborn insistence, it took every ounce of Sumire’s considerable patience not to show her displeasure. Difficult customers were not an uncommon occurrence, yet something about this taijiya rankled her intensely. Still, it happened occasionally that rumors circulated about a particular whore and her assets or abilities, and men arrived demanding one or the other. If she could ascertain what his real wants were, Sumire was confident she could divert his attentions elsewhere. Calmed by the thought, she looked to him directly.

“Perhaps,” she said lightly, “we may speak in private, my lord, so that I may better understand what it is that you seek.”

Nodding, the taijiya stood and followed her from the main hall. Passing through the courtyard, Sumire could not help but let her eyes stray toward the damaged wing of her brothel. Normally, she would hold these types of consultations there, in her solar, but the room had been rendered inaccessible due to the rubble. Her own quarters would have to do.

There were no guards posted here, yet from what Sumire had seen of his fighting ability, she doubted they would offer much protection at any rate. She would have to trust to her own intuition concerning him, and though she sensed he meant her no harm, she felt distinctly rattled nevertheless. As the screen snapped shut behind her, she crossed to the far side of the well-appointed room, where a kettle and service sat waiting for her atop a little lacquered table. This was not the time of night she ordinarily took her evening meal, but with the day being what it was, she had prepared to retire early.

Touching the back of her hand to the kettle, she glanced toward him with her practiced smile in place. “Ah, we are in luck—the tea is still warm. Would you care for a cup, my lord?”

“No, thank you,” the young man said, rather stiffly.

If he had been discomfited earlier, surrounded by all the girls, he seemed only that much more so alone in her presence. Conversely, this put Sumire more at ease. Pouring a cup for herself, she invited him to kneel across from her on the tatami, which he did.

“Now,” she began, adopting an almost sisterly tone as she sipped her tea, “you say that you only want me, my lord, yet I can assure you that whatever you have heard about me is nothing more than rumors on the breeze. It is true that I was once a working girl here; however, that was many years ago. Though I am woefully out of practice for whatever pleasures you have in mind, if you will describe them to me, I am certain I can direct you to a girl who will satisfy them.”

The taijiya shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything about you, Sumire-san. Before I arrived here tonight, I didn’t even know your name.”

Sumire took another dainty sip, eyeing him over the rim of her cup. “Then tell me, my lord, what is it about me that attracts you so?”

His keen dark eyes slanted aside. His voice fell almost to a murmur.

“The way you look…”

As he trailed off in embarrassment, Sumire’s lips twisted against the porcelain. Ah, so it was as simple as that. A young man’s first taste of infatuation—not that the older and wiser ones were fully immune. Prickly as she had become, Sumire had thought herself past the point of stirring such feelings in a man. Yet this taijiya had singled her out for the same accursed reason she had always been singled out—

And then, he spoke again.

“…You look like a woman who would be difficult to please.” When his dark eyes cut back to hers, flinty and penetrating, Sumire felt pinned to the spot. “You look like you wouldn’t lie to me about it, either.”

Sumire’s lashes slid briefly shut as she composed herself under the guise of another sip. Still, with some sharpness she retorted, “If it is honesty you are after, my lord, that can be bought here the same as anything else.”

His lips lifted dryly at a corner. “Now,” he said to her, “you are lying.”

Swiftly, Sumire stood and turned from him. She had borne more than enough of this impudence, she decided. A bit of tea sloshed from her cup as she set it down on the tabletop with a clatter and yanked open the drawer beneath it to refill her little pipe. Sitting down primly upon the adjacent sofa, she looked coolly at him.

“It would seem we are at an impasse, my good lord taijiya. I am sorry I cannot find a way to fulfill your present wishes. Should your tastes ever change, our doors will be open to you. Yet now I must ask you kindly to leave.”

The young man rose and turned for the door. Yet before he took a second step toward it, he paused and frowned back at her.

“There’s a woman,” he said tightly, as though each word must be wrenched from his chest. “I’ve known her since I was a boy—I’ve been in love with her since I was a boy. But I don’t want her to see me that way anymore. I want her to see me as a man. I want to know what a man knows so that she will see me that way, so that I can please her.” And now he glanced away from Sumire once more, and as though changing tack, he added tersely, “I’ve seen something of it, how to please a woman. I know it can be done, and I want to know how to do it myself.”

Almost in challenge now, he stared Sumire square in the eye. It was the most severe expression of plea she had ever beheld. Setting her unlit pipe down upon the table, she regarded him in turn.

“How old are you?” she asked him, after a moment.

“Sixteen,” he replied.

“Sixteen.” Sumire smiled slightly. “I would have guessed you older than that.”

The taijiya’s chest swelled with pride, his features losing a little of their severity. Yes, he was still young—this was true. But he was certainly shaping up to be a remarkable man. Sumire’s smile turned strangely wistful.

“She must be some woman, this love of yours.”

A hint of red dusted his high cheekbones. “She’s a priestess,” he said, the ink wells of his eyes bottomless and dark as he gazed somewhere beyond her. “A powerful priestess. She was married, before, but her husband was killed in battle.” His features steeled with the same fierce resolve she had witnessed earlier that day. “I have a chance with her now that I never thought I’d have. When she comes out of mourning, I want to be the only man she sees.”

Sumire considered him a moment more. There was a touch of naivete in all of this, to be certain. But in the face of such earnest passion for a fellow woman, she could not help but be moved. His sincerity of feeling, which somehow struck her as chaste despite the circumstances, had restored her image of him, and for that Sumire was grateful.

“The first and most important step toward pleasing a woman,” she said to him gently, “is to desire to do so. In that respect, my dear taijiya, you are already ahead of most men.”

The young man’s expression turned hopeful. “…Are you accepting my offer, Sumire-san?”

Was she?

Her look was stern. “I am not for sale.” As the taijiya’s face began to fall, she held up a slender hand in pause. “However,” she said with careful distinction, “if you wish to spend the evening with me, you may.”

His eyes widened slightly. For a moment, Sumire was afraid—afraid, she marveled at herself—that he would decline. Then he gave a slight nod, and the tension within her abated.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Kohaku,” he answered.

Sumire’s eyes trailed his face briefly before resting on his own. “Come here, Kohaku.”

A gleam of surprise lit the dark surface of his gaze. Sumire wasn’t sure what had startled him more—the lack of honorific in her address, or the directness of her invitation. But whatever it had been, he mastered it soon enough, and stepped toward her across the tatami.

At his approach, Sumire experienced a peculiar nervousness of her own. She had been with more men than she cared to remember, but this one was a first—and not merely for the fact that he was not paying her. Sumire wished now that she had not asked him his age. To know that she was eight years his senior set her conscience on edge.

But as he had mastered his own reservations, so she mastered hers. He saw himself as a man fully grown, and so had she, before she’d known otherwise. Had she not herself led men to believe her as old or as young as they wished to presume? Particularly in matters of business, she carried herself as a woman of greater age and maturity than she was. It would be hypocritical of her to begrudge him the same. And so she would see him as a man still—if for no other reason than the fact that no boy would seek out what he had sought.

There was something else, too, that she felt as he came to stand before her. It was like nervousness, yet different somehow. As he advanced upon her, she began to appreciate his build and stature, the length and poise of his stride, and recognized this flutter of feeling at last for what it was—

Anticipation.

And when he did draw to a stop at the side of the sofa, when looming tall above her, he fixed that fine, intent expression of his upon her, the feeling within her deepened to a throb. So close to her now, she could feel the subtle heat of him, scent the warmed steel and leather that he wore, and the musk of his skin beneath it. Sumire’s lashes lowered.

“Undress for me,” she said to him, her voice sounding husky even to her own ears. “I want to see you.”

As he complied, she managed to keep herself reasonably restrained, not allowing her gaze to linger too long on the sculpted breadth of his shoulders or the hard muscle of his stomach and chest. At his young age, he still had some filling out to do, of course, but he was coming along quite nicely, from the glimpses that she stole of him. Yet when he unclasped his sword belt and bared his lower half to her, Sumire’s eyes snapped between his legs without the slimmest regard for discretion. The young man’s spine went straight as a pin.

“Old habit,” she said as she caught herself, giving him a small smile to reassure him. “The gods have surely blessed you, Kohaku.”

Red stained his cheeks as he shifted slightly. Clearly he did not know what to say to this, and Sumire could hardly blame him, even as she resumed her brazen assessment. Without question, this was her least favorite part of a man—yet his was one of the nicest she had seen. Not quite yet hard due to nerves, his manhood was still an impressive sight, and she stared at it in open interest, not least of all for the fact that, for once, it did not offend her to look upon it.

But she had ogled him long enough. Wishing to spare him further discomfort, she rose from her seat and turned her back to him. In a faint jangle of combs, she swept the long, ornamented fall of her hair over her shoulder and touched her fingertips to the knot of her obi.

“Will you help me untie this, please?”

She could almost feel the relief ebbing from him, as he worked at the knot. Not that a former whore ever needed much aid in disrobing—the front-tying slips of silk she used to wear she could shed in an instant—but these days Sumire donned full kimono, and there was no sense in fumbling to untie it herself, when there was a man here who was eager to do it for her. And if he seemed to take a little longer about it than she sensed that he should, she indulged this as well.

As the broad silk band whispered free of her at last, Sumire removed the outer layers of her dress and undid the thin inner sash. With only this lightest layer remaining to conceal her, she turned around and lay back on the sofa once more. The folds fell open with her recline, concealing very little of her at all.

Slowly, his gaze traveled the length of her, as she scrutinized him in turn. What did he think of her, she wondered. That she even cared to wonder amazed her in itself. His expression as he took her in was largely unreadable to her, yet the stiffening of his sex was telling at least. With one of her legs dangling over the edge of the sofa, there was nothing of her between them that he could not see, including the glimmer of wetness that presently chilled her, as it met with the open air.

Before him, Sumire felt more exposed now than she ever had. In the past when she had presented herself to a man, it had been with her face painted, her body perfumed, her breasts sweetened, her lower lips rouged. She had shielded herself behind these sorts of whorish trappings, and now without them she felt truly stripped bare. She felt like how a normal woman must feel, as she lay in wait of a man.

It was a surreal sensation to her, to feel like a normal woman.

As he continued to regard her in heavy silence, she could hear the accelerated beating of her heart. When his dark eyes finally came to settle upon hers, the intensity in them was almost more than she could bear.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

Sumire’s breath caught for an instant. All her life, she had been told she was beautiful. She had been called beautiful so many times that for her the word had lost its intended meaning, that it had taken on for her another meaning entirely. She had quickly come to despise the word, as she come to despise the men who lavished it upon her.

But when he said this to her, she felt the true sentiment of it at last.

Sumire smiled up at him, a touch of warmth rising to her cheeks. Straightening a little, she patted the sofa beside her in invitation. As he padded over and sat down on the edge of it, she skimmed her fingertips along the line of his jaw, the brushstroke bangs that framed his temples. Reaching behind him, she unbound his tied-up hair and watched it fall to just below his shoulders, as fine and dark as the shade of his eyes. She combed through its smoothness like water in a stream, and when she urged him lower, he followed her lead without resistance, his lips meeting hers just as smoothly.

If he had not done this before, Sumire would have been surprised. But he erred on the side of being too cautious with her, which did not surprise her at all. With little moans of encouragement, she urged him to kiss her harder, deeper—uttering a faint sound of protest when he he nicked her lower lip in his exuberance.

“…I’m sorry,” he panted, drawing back from her.

“Never mind it,” she said just as breathlessly, shaking her head. “Some women like that sort of thing.” Worrying a little at her bitten lip, Sumire held his eye. “Every woman is different, you must know that.”

“That’s not what you would have had me believe earlier,” he said, his lips quirking slightly, “when you were trying to pawn me off on another girl.”

Sumire failed to suppress a wry smile of her own. “You really have some cheek—but you must know that, too.”

“I know it,” Kohaku said, as he leaned down and caught her mouth with his again.

This time, he needed no further instruction. It was only when Sumire could no longer breathe that she broke away from him. Pressing down upon his shoulders, she guided him lower over her—letting his lips trace a heated path along her collar and throat. When he reached her breast, she stilled him—though she doubted she had needed to. Like a suckling babe, his mouth latched to her nipple at once, dragging what felt like half her breast in along with it.

“No, no,” she groaned. “That was much too fast. Use your tongue a bit first.”

When he seemed uncertain about this, she took hold of the hand not being used to support his weight and fit it to her other breast. With the pressure of her touch, she directed his own, teaching him how to caress and squeeze with his palm, how to flick and roll her nipple with the pad of his thumb. He picked this up quickly enough, and bending his mouth to her breast again, he used his tongue to mimic this action so well that Sumire’s back arched and toes curled as she gasped aloud in pleasure.

Forgetting himself at this, he made a sound like a growl against her and took her tender flesh between his teeth once again. It was clear now to Sumire that he had an inclination toward aggression, and though it distressed her personally, she did not hold this against him. Slaying demons, he had lived a life of violence. Perhaps violence was all he knew; perhaps, despite the kindness in his heart, he even delighted in it. Yet Sumire did not share this passion. At a sharp word from her, he relented, his lips and tongue soothing over her in wordless apology.

By now, she was finding it difficult not to writhe. The space between her legs was so hot and sensitive that even rubbing her thighs together could not relieve it, and merely served to stoke the blaze. She could not recall ever wanting to feel a man’s touch upon her so badly, even with the rare customer who had enjoyed bringing her to pleasure. Almost desperately she grabbed at Kohaku’s hand, smoothing it down from her breast to her belly. The first brush of his fingers against the fringes of her sex ignited her afresh, her hips bucking to meet it as she moaned.

Releasing her nipple abruptly, Kohaku braced his brow against the dewy skin of her breast and murmured, “Yes, just like that…”

He was thinking of her, Sumire realized, the woman he loved. But the jealousy she felt was a fleeting thing, and ridiculous besides. It was all illusion. The idea of his love being her was no more real than the idea of him being hers. The lies they told themselves did not matter. All that mattered was the pleasure of the moment.

And so Sumire slid his hand between the cleft in her thighs, tracing a route for him through the slick maze within. Nestled in these slight folds of flesh was a woman’s greatest mystery, a secret that had confounded many a man. Unlocking it could not be learned by rote; even were Sumire to attempt it, the moment she removed her guiding touch, he would surely be lost, and a proper woman might be too ignorant or modest to instruct him in the first place.

“Listen to how my breathing changes as you touch me,” she told him instead, her voice falling to a rasp as he glided along the underside of that most delicate peak. “Pay attention to how my thighs tense, how I shiver; how my hips lift toward you or shy away. You know the types of sounds to listen for—so use your instincts and go slowly, to start.”

With that, she released him to his own devices. Almost immediately, he sped up along the swirling course she had shown him, applying too much frenzied pressure to the spot he now knew pleased her most. It was a common mistake, for in this area women contrasted so starkly with men in their wants—particularly at the outset, when the risk of overstimulation was greatest.

“Slower,” Sumire said, as her hips jerked back from him. “Much slower.”

Kohaku nodded and slowed. This abrupt transition of pace made Sumire shudder and groan, the languid slide of his calloused fingertips chafing her exquisitely. Even at her entrance the sensation was nearly enough to undo her, and his eyes darkened somehow further in primal awareness of it. With an almost predatory intentness, he studied her expression—cataloging her reactions as he might an opponent in battle, making reflexive adjustments based on what he observed.

At what point he had switched to this instinctive pattern, Sumire could not precisely say. But now that he had fit her to it, there was a confidence and finesse to his movements not unlike the sort she had witnessed in him earlier that day. Inflicted with pleasure instead of pain, Sumire herself was not unlike that hamstrung oni—prone and tensely awaiting the final stroke.

“Put your finger inside me now,” she begged, and when he did, her head fell back against the sofa in speechless bliss.

She was so wet that even with the tightness of her disuse, she experienced only the most delightful inner friction. By the time he had settled his hand against her to the hilt, she was pleading with him for another, which he teased past her entrance to join with the first. Her whole body was aquiver at the sight of her thus impaled, the urge to move against him irrepressible. Minutely, her hips worked back and forth, leaving a gleaming trail of moisture on his skin, before his slow pursuit of her eclipsed it.

Peeking ripe and red from the peel of her feminine folds, the little bud that was the nexus of her pleasure visibly throbbed, and Kohaku’s keen eyes were riveted on it. His jaw and shoulders were set, the muscles of his arms and chest graven with tension. Sumire could see that he was struggling to keep himself in check, resisting with difficultly the urge to crush and ram her with his hand. The force of that look alone robbed Sumire of breath, made her tighten around his buried fingers as if to hold them there.

“Use your mouth on me,” she rasped to him, “like you did on my breast.”

Kohaku’s eyes strayed to hers, as though he did not catch what she had said. But as Sumire’s lips parted to tell him again, he eased down from the sofa to kneel beside her on the floor. Drawing her hips toward him with his free hand, he started to retract the fingers of the other, before Sumire’s own hand fluttered to his cheek to stop him.

“Leave them in,” she whispered silkily, lying back. “…And for Kami’s sake, no teeth.”

Kohaku smiled tightly as he lowered his mouth to her. The first graze of his tongue nearly sent her nails tearing through the silk cushion beneath her—

It was perfection.

Just this quickly, Sumire realized, he had learned her, and the knowledge sent her reeling. Combined with the skillful and absolute command of self that he possessed, he had her entirely at his mercy. Her end was inevitable now, she knew, and she was fast careening toward it.

No fortitude of her own could prevail against this. If she focused for even a moment on what he was doing to her with his lips and tongue, she would be undone in an instant. And so she concentrated her will on the fingers inside her, their unhurried thrusting driving her slightly less insane. Dividing her mind, she grasped for release only in their inward course, accentuated though it was by the background sensations that inundated her from without.

“Harder now, Kohaku,” she breathed, gripping his sleek hair for purchase as he raggedly obliged her. “Bend your fingers toward my stomach.”

This he did, and Sumire’s thighs began to quake beneath the pounding arc of his touch, the relentless press and sweep of his tongue. The pressure that had been building in the core of her being could no longer be contained—by strength or will or the gods themselves. In rush that whitened the edges of her vision, it erupted from her, and amid the ecstatic cries that followed after, Kohaku ripped his fingers from her and thrust his tongue into the convulsing depths of her instead.

It felt to Sumire as if he were devouring her pleasure. As the last waves of it wracked through her, he surfaced from the trembling junction of her thighs, his face smeared with her arousal from nose to chin. There was a wild look in his eyes as he heavily breathed, making no move to wipe himself clean of her essence.

The white of an incisor glinted as he wolfishly grinned. “How soon can we do that again?”

Easing herself up on her hands, Sumire smiled languorously at him. “So hasty,” she said, slipping the sheer robe of silk from her shoulders, the bottom of which was quite soaked through. “…What makes you think we are finished?”

Kohaku gazed at her, unspeaking. With both arms extended, she reached for him, and when he had taken her in his own, she pulled herself down to him, straddling his narrow hips with her thighs. Their lips and chests met together in a rapturous crush, yet it was nothing compared to the firm upward press of him against her. Her lush softness gave way to his hardness so naturally, as she lowered herself slowly onto him.

It had been so long since she had felt a man inside her, and Sumire was glad for the distance of mind those years had given her. There was no muddling of the past with the present as she took him in, the sensation of her opening around him no longer mundane to her, but refreshingly singular. This was a new experience for her, to give herself freely to a man, and though the act was one she had performed so many times before, she flushed and gasped like a maiden now, as he filled her inch-by-inch.

When at last he was seated within her, Sumire leaned forward on her knees, grinding her pelvis experimentally against his. Kohaku’s iron hold on her waist tightened further at this, his features a grimace of concentration. The poor man hardly dared to breathe, let alone move against her in return. Stilling her hips, Sumire ran her tongue lightly along the bone of his cheek, intercepting a bead of sweat that had trailed from his temple.

“Relax, my dear,” she purred against his ear. “We have all night.”

He swallowed at this, yet remained rigid still. Smiling a little, Sumire wound her arms around his shoulders, letting her head rest near the hollow of his throat. Her eyes drifted shut as she relished his closeness. Against her he was solid and strong, a perfect contrast for the soft feminine curves of her body. How perfectly she seemed to fit against him, her heart beating alongside his, the echo of it pulsing faintly inside her.

“I didn’t think you would want this,” he said thickly at last.

Half hiding her face against him, Sumire replied, “…Neither did I.”

Sharing this sort of intimacy with a man was not something she had thought possible for her to want. It was entirely likely that after this night she would never want it again. Yet she wanted it now. She wanted him now.

And so she began to rock against him, holding him to her still. This union was so sweet to her, and so novel for its sweetness, that she wished it could go on forever. But she could not demand this of him any more than she could demand for time to stop.

Still dreadfully tense with the effort not to end it, Kohaku clung to her back. “I don’t want to disappoint you,” he panted near her ear.

His hips were rolling up to meet hers now, and the sensation was sublime. Pulling back to catch his eye, Sumire smiled warmly.

“You are the only man who has not.”

Kohaku’s eyes went endearingly wide. Slanting her lips against his, she rose off him almost entirely—only to sink back down upon him in a smooth sheathing motion that made him groan full and deep into her mouth. Sumire groaned into him just as needfully. Against all her expectations, she was peaking again, each graze of her pebbled nipples, each plunge of her hips jolting her closer to the edge along with him.

His grip tightened on her to the point of pain, his guttural cry muffling against her. As he poured himself out into her, she did the same, her hips still languidly seeking his minutes after they were through.

Brow pressed to hers, Kohaku eased his grip. “You enjoyed it?”

“I did,” Sumire replied, skimming her lips against his. “Very much.”

Rising gingerly to her feet, she took him by the hand and pulled him up after her. Fingers intertwined with his, she led him toward the back of the room, where her drawn bath awaited. The water within was no longer piping hot, but it was warm enough to serve—especially given how flushed and sweaty they both were. As Sumire lowered herself into the large wooden tub with a sigh, Kohaku climbed in after her.

Yes, for once in her life, she was grateful for the relative coolness of this bath. In the past, after a long night of whoring, the water could never be hot enough to suit her. She would have scalded her flesh from her bones if she thought it might make her feel clean again—or if she thought Madam Noh would allow it.

“You look like a boiled shrimp,” her former mistress had used to say with a thin purse of lips—right before dropping a bucket of cold water over Sumire’s head.

Sumire’s mouth twisted presently in chagrin. Perhaps, in some small and misguided way, Madam Noh had cared something for her after all. It was impossible now for Sumire tell, with the collection of remembrances she had retained. Had she been unjust, she wondered, in choosing which memories to cull from the rest? Had she been unjust, she wondered, in ending Madam Noh’s life as she had?

For the first time in four years, Sumire allowed herself to wonder this, and felt the palest shadow of remorse.

“What are you thinking of?” Kohaku asked her, taking the washcloth from her hand.

Sumire looked at him, a curious lump forming in her throat. She had been dabbing at his cheek when these musings had overtaken her, and she must have left the cloth pressed against him all this time.

“I…” she began, uncertain.

In all her years of whoring, she had listened to men spill out their secrets to her, never confiding anything of herself to them in the slightest. There had been so very little of her that was truly hers that the thought of sharing any more than she absolutely must had seemed abhorrent to her. She had hoarded her thoughts to herself as a peasant hoards his coin.

But Sumire’s thoughts had always been many, and they had only grown in number over the years, along with her regrets. Now they felt so heavy upon her, like a great weight she had been carrying with her all her life.

“I was thinking of the woman who raised me,” Sumire said, retrieving the cloth from him and dipping it into the bath. “Four years ago, I put poison into her tea and killed her.”

Kohaku was silent for a while. In this silence, the drip and slide of the cloth seemed very loud, yet he did not flinch from Sumire’s touch or make to push her away.

“She was not your mother?” he asked at last.

“No,” Sumire answered, dabbing now at his chest. “I never knew my mother. This woman’s name was Madam Noh. She bought me when I was three or fours years old, and brought me here, to this place.”

Again, Kohaku was quiet for a time. When Sumire chanced to glance up at his face, his eyes were hard as flint.

“She must have deserved it,” he decided.

“Perhaps,” Sumire said, her lips twisting once more. “I thought so at the time, of course, but now I am not so sure…”

When he pulled the cloth from her, she let him keep it. As the warm water sluiced over her from behind, Sumire felt clean for the first time since that night, long ago, when her innocence had been stolen from her.

“I never knew my mother, either,” Kohaku said. His nails scraped pleasurably along her scalp, as he carded back her damp hair. “She died giving birth to me. And my father…” His voice trailed off to a place Sumire could not hope to follow. Yet after a moment, he said, “He died, too.”

Frowning, Sumire turned in the circle of his arms. “Then, you have no one?”

“I have an older sister,” he answered, his expression still seeming far away. “She’s married now, with children of her own. But the village where we were raised is no more.”

Sumire studied his face. Now she saw what it was that had made her think he was older than his sixteen years. It was this expression in his dark eyes, so somber and distant. It was an expression that spoke of great suffering, and Sumire knew all too well how heavy such suffering could weigh on young shoulders not yet strong enough to carry it.

It was with this same expression that Kohaku’s eyes stared past her, toward the wall.

“You have bars on the windows here,” he remarked, almost on a murmur.

Sumire followed his gaze, to the wooden grid that scored the night sky into squares of sprinkled black. “A relic of the past,” she replied. “The girls who live here now are free to come and go as they please. The guards are only here for protection.”

She did not know why she felt the need to make this clear to him. But it felt important to her, in that moment, that he should know.

Kohaku nodded, though his haunted expression did not change. “When I was a boy,” he said quietly, “I was held in bondage by a wicked man. He forced me to do…terrible things…”

Sumire took his face in both hands, her eyes seizing his. “Whatever he made you do, Kohaku, it was not your fault.”

“I know,” he replied, a corner of his mouth curling faintly with bitterness. “But I still have to live with it.”

Smoothing her thumb along his cheek, Sumire smiled faintly in commiseration. “…I know.”

Kohaku’s shoulders sank a little further into the bath. “On that man’s orders, I nearly killed her, once—the priestess I told you about. She never held this against me though. She knows…everything. Everything I’ve ever done. And still, she doesn’t hate me for it.” His voice roughened with emotion. “She saved me from him. She defeated him, and set me free.”

In his eyes was a depth of devotion bordering on worship. Sumire had seen every inch of Kohaku’s naked body. There were no scars of shackles upon him, as there were none upon her. The bonds lay beneath the skin, and shackled he was, only now to a more benevolent master. Perhaps for a slave, this was the best that could be hoped for.

Perhaps no man or woman was truly free, except in the choice of what would rule them.

There was a reason why Sumire had not troubled to have the bars removed from this place. Even if they were gone, she would still see their imprint behind her shuttered lids. She would still feel the stricture of them, caging her from within.

“I can see why you love her so,” she said gently to Kohaku. “She sounds like a lovely person.”

The young man blushed, glancing away. “I should have told you earlier, but you remind me of her.”

This was hardly a revelation to Sumire, yet she smiled all the same, genuinely pleased to hear it. In the quiet of this shared reflection, she lay against his chest, watching the swirls of fragrant oil break and coalesce on the water’s still surface.

Tilting her head a little, Sumire gazed softly up at him. “Would you like something to eat?”

In her experience, men generally grew hungry after finishing, and presented now with such an offer, Kohaku did not even attempt to decline it. As he nodded, she rose from the bath, his keen eyes following her a minute before the rest of him did. The droplets of moisture that clung to their skin glittered like glass beads in the lamplight, as he sat down atop the bed beside her.

From her dinner tray nearby, she fed him bits of vegetable and meat, first with her chopsticks, then with her fingers. At each brush of his lips and tongue against her, Sumire shivered, and his eyes seemed to darken another shade. Before the tray was half cleared, he was gathering her to him, her legs splaying against him in a messy sprawl as he sought her mouth with his. Hot and hard he grated along her stomach, groaning when Sumire slipped her hand between them and pressed him closer still.

“I want to taste you,” he rasped as she broke for air, a spider-silk strand of wetness still connecting their lips. “I want to make you come again.”

Sumire’s stomach tightened in the most voluptuous cinch. “Lie back,” she whispered, urging him down at the chest.

At the feather-lightness of that touch, Kohaku fell to the bed like a stone. Just as lightly, Sumire dusted her fingertips over the chiseled edges of his pectorals, the ribbed flinching planes of his stomach. His sex twitched as the inside of her wrist grazed him in its course—and twitched again as she drew herself over him on her hands and knees, her soft inner flesh gliding along the length of him. He gasped when she paused briefly in her forward ascent, letting him test with that most sensitive point of him just how eager she was herself.

“I want that, too,” she said in a purr, taking him into her a slick, fleeting fraction. “I want all of you.”

Reflexively, Kohaku grabbed her by the hips—frozen in a lust of indecision. But as Sumire lowered herself to her elbows, the proximity of her breasts delivered him from it. As his lips closed around one swaying tip, she levered her hips in his hold. Her breath stilted at the caress of his sex against hers—heightened all the more by the flicker of his tongue against her puckered flesh.

“I need it now, Kohaku,” she moaned, arching and spreading beneath his hands. “I need to feel your mouth on me.”

Her captive breast sprang wetly from his lips as he hauled her forward over him, his mouth latching to her sex with a muted growl. Sumire cried out at the force with which he cleaved and claimed her. With a violent, shaking release of breath, Kohaku gentled himself and relaxed against her.

Balanced on her palms, Sumire gasped and shivered as he traversed her lengthwise from slit to sultry peak. Yet as her pleasure mounted, she began to grow restless, and turning around his hold, she repositioned herself over him so that their bodies were aligned top-to-bottom. Resting her cheek near his hip, she curled her fingers around the burning column of his flesh, Kohaku’s fingers digging slightly into her as she pulled it toward her and glazed her tongue along the silky outer sleeve.

More even than the chore of coupling Sumire had detested this particular task. Yet among many other firsts this night, she found herself yearning to experience Kohaku in this way. On her tongue he was clean and slightly salty, and this initial questing sample of him only made her that much more eager to taste him to the fullest. Hovering above him, she pumped him slowly, methodically, her thighs and stomach clenching as Kohaku’s tongue drove into her much the same.

A dewdrop of clear liquid beaded the crown of his sex. As Sumire’s thumb smeared it over him, another rose quivering to take its place. Dipping her head, she whisked it away with the flat of her tongue, and Kohaku went rigid for a moment, as though rendered briefly senseless by it.

Only for a moment, of course.

With renewed vehemence he resumed his attentions on her, and it was all Sumire could do not to come in a blinding rush. Abruptly, she wrenched her hips up and away from him, and the threat of it subsided.

“…So good,” Kohaku ground out into her thigh, and Sumire could only nod, panting, in agreement.

Easing herself back into the heat of his waiting mouth, she drew him silkily into her own. Nursing at the heady tip of him, she whimpered as Kohaku did the same, the faint flutter of his tongue that accompanied this sweet suction threatening to finish her yet again. And so plunging forward she took as much of him down her throat as she could muster—the shock of being so swiftly and thoroughly engulfed by her serving to distract him. All he could do was keep his face crushed to her as she worked him in and out of her in a rhythmic circuit, her technique so smooth and flawless that she did not once gag or miss a breath—though well she might have, given just how much of him there was to take.

But the sensation of him filling her mouth and throat had compounded the ache between her legs, leaving her insatiable and frenzied. Possessed by the need to have him inside her, Sumire released him on a breath and wriggled free of his grasp—only to impale herself upon him a moment later. Kohaku arched from the bed as Sumire cried out, neither of them quite prepared for the suddenness of this joining. Yet after a few seconds, their pulses slowed and their breathing evened, her white-knuckled grip on his shoulders relaxing as she rolled her hips against him.

Now it was Kohaku who was gripping her harder, his teeth gritted as he fought to keep his own hips tame and still. “Sumire…”

The wrongness of the address made her pause, frowning.

Bringing one hand to the slick seam where her sex joined with his, she gave her head a terse little shake. “Please, Kohaku…do not call me that. ‘Sumire’ is not my name.”

“Then,” he asked gruffly, sliding his hands back around her hips to cup and lift her from below, “what should I call you?”

“Call me…” Her eyes screwed briefly closed, her lips parting helplessly when he hit the most delicious spot within her. “…Call me by her name…the name of the woman you love.”

Kohaku stared up at her in hazy shock, his nails setting against her. “…Are you certain?”

“Yes!” Sumire gasped, flashing him a watery smile as her motions above him grew jerky, insistent. “Please, Kohaku—this is what I want.”

Continuing to gaze inscrutably up at her, Kohaku swallowed tensely—no longer able to resist the urge to meet her thrust for ragged thrust. As her arms trembled from the strain, he brought her down to his chest and moved for them both, the added friction between their bodies causing Sumire’s eyes to well and trickle.

She had no name, no self of her own apart from this place. Yet, here, behind these walls in which she was both prisoner and mistress, she could become whoever she pleased. She could become, in this moment, a woman worth loving.

She could become the woman he loved.

The first spasms of pleasure were rippling through her. “Please, Kohaku…Kohaku, please…”

His embrace on her now was so tight it was smothering, the pistoning of his hips unhinged by a passion that was fast overtaking him. As Sumire surrendered to it with a sob, Kohaku surrendered with a name.

“Kagome…”

So deep inside her, he pressed her deeper still.

“Kagome…”

At the edge of her womb, he pulsed and spilled.

“Kagome…”

He spoke her name until he had spent himself empty of it, empty of everything, and she held herself open to receive it all—all of the lust and need, the love and devotion. All of it for Kagome, who was in this moment herself.

And as the moment passed, as Kohaku went drowsy and lax and Sumire returned to herself, she held herself open to him still. In her arms he shifted, turning them both onto their sides.

As Sumire brushed his bangs from his heavy-lidded eyes, he murmured, “If I had known you then, I would have killed that woman for you.”

Sumire’s hand stilled at his temple. “…Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because then you wouldn’t have had to,” he answered, his eyes sliding shut as he smiled, soft and grim. “Because I am a killer, it’s what I’ve always been…”

Sliding her fingers back into his hair, Sumire lay her cheek to the pillow beside his. “We are what we choose to be, Kohaku.”

But his eyes did not open again, and Sumire did not know if her words had reached him.

All through the night she slept in his arms, as she had for no other man before him. She might have slept there beside him for many hours more. But in the pale grey hour before dawn, he stirred awake, and Sumire knew from the leaden feeling in her stomach that he was leaving.

After he had dressed and put on his armor, he returned to the bed and knelt beside it, and Sumire turned slowly back toward him, half-wishing he had not. Imposing though he looked, with a tenderness that no longer surprised her, he reached out and stroked her face.

“Perhaps I’ll return someday,” he said, and Sumire could not help but smile softly at this.

Reaching for him in turn, she pressed the lightest brush of a kiss to his lips. “…Let us hope you do not.”

With that he left her, silent as a shadow slipping through the screen, and she found herself alone again. The first rays of sun felt pleasantly warm on her face, and Sumire sighed, basking in them.

Absently, her hand strayed to her belly, and her mind, always so quick to calculate, ticked off the days. The possibility was there, she determined, and curiously enough, another wisp of smile graced her lips. In her mind a new image arose, that of a piece of herself not condemned to live forever in the darkness of this place, but one that could thrive outside of it, in the full, unshaded light of the sun.

Cheered by the thought, Sumire rolled over, into the faint depression his body had left in the sheets. Traces of his scent lingered still, and she closed her eyes as she held her face to the pillow, and breathed him in.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Whew…okay, now I can move on with my life D: Thanks for bearing with me, guys. If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been working on for the past week, well, this is it.

<3