– 4 –

Sky

Kagome awoke, her heart racing. The clock on the nightstand glared 1 AM.

Her dizzy head pounded. Her parched throat ached. She was coming down in the worst way.

Propping herself up on an elbow, she drained the glass of water at her bedside. With a groan, she collapsed onto her stomach and passed out in a daze.

…

At 3 AM she woke again.

This time she was lucid, sober. She wondered why she was even awake, but the throbbing heat between her thighs was a clue. Beneath the short scrunched hem of her gown, she touched herself, almost wonderingly. The folds of her sex were flushed and swollen, slick to the touch. Sticky moisture stringed from her fingers as she drew them away.

She hadn’t even been dreaming of anything, that she could remember. But she was so terribly, painfully aroused.

Staggering into the bathroom, she filled her empty glass and drained it in a feverish gulp. In the spare seep of moonlight, she stared at her reflection in the mirror, distantly horrified at the starved, wolfish expression on her face. To hell with it all, she fumed. Hiking up her gown, she spread her legs apart. Her hand shoved between them, plunging right into her weeping core. Bracing her palm on the sink, she fucked herself until her knees gave out.

She was sinking, falling toward the floor. But she couldn’t stop herself. She was possessed, unhinged. She needed to come like she needed air to breathe.

Crudely, Kagome squatted down. Ramming her fingers into her cunt, she pawed at her clit until she was moaning so loud she should’ve embarrassed herself. But she was so needy she was beyond shame.

Strong arms went suddenly around her. When she felt herself being hoisted from the tiles, anger flared through her. Her reiki, also. Dark magic razed across her senses in return, and she choked. An eternity of frustration, condensed into the span of a moment.

Her belly hit the bed as Sesshoumaru threw her face-first onto it. She gasped in shock. When he wrenched her up by the hips and fell upon her from behind, a strangled animal-cry tore from her lips. His mouth was so hot and heavy on her prone, naked sex she saw red despite the utter darkness of night. His rough tongue swiped the length of her slit, delving into her. He claimed the path to her womb with such primal ferocity she jerked on pure reflex, shocked through to the marrow of her bones.

“Stop!” she shrieked, wildly and inanely, out of her goddamned mind.

With a savage growl, Sesshoumaru detached from her. He released her abruptly as he rose, panting behind her. Kagome twisted around to see him glaring down at her, feral and glinting. He dashed a hand across his gleaming mouth. He started to turn away toward the stairs. That was when she lunged for him, crying out.

“Don’t you leave me, Sesshoumaru—don’t you fucking dare!“

Sesshoumaru’s eyes flashed red above her, and she forgot how to speak. How to breathe—even before he tackled her back onto the bed and crushed his mouth down on hers. Then she was moaning into him, clawing at him, ripping off the clothes he was fast shedding himself. He plundered her open mouth. He shredded her flimsy little nightgown like it was nothing. He seized fistfuls of her flinching ass and hauled her toward him, skewering her on the standing beam of his cock.

She was coming before the head of him even fully breached her, losing herself just on the sensation of him opening her up. Because he was—he was. With his hands, with his mouth, with every part of him, he was reaching into her, past to present. He was pulling her back through time.

…

“Sesshoumaru…Sesshoumaru, please don’t stop. Just keep fucking me like this. Keep fucking me, please…please, don’t stop…”

Morning light spilled through the windows, and he was fucking her still. He hadn’t stopped, not for more than a few minutes between climaxes. But now in the daylight she could see him—truly see him, with all his glamors long dispelled.

His shining hair streamed free past the elvish points of his ears. His vibrant markings stood out on his fey, snowy face. The red slices of his cheek stripes glared out at her, the indigo crescent of the moon on his brow. His wrists were striped red, and his hips also—which she had never known before, and which enamored her endlessly as she scratched her blunt nails over them, as she mimicked the claws that cut into her wrists and raked over her delicate mortal skin.

The enormity of his cock overwhelmed her with every thrust. It seemed like her body just couldn’t grow used to its invasion. Or maybe it was her miko instincts, railing at the violation of him. It was like sacrilege, every time he surged his hips into hers. Every time she felt his shaft coring her open, it was dark damnation, all-consuming in its scourge.

Ruthlessly, he sought her womb, assaulting her again and again at its limit. She was so full of his spent seed at this point it bled out of her like an open wound. She felt like an open wound before him, utterly raw and exposed. Even more so now in the light of dawn, when she could see her flushed sex split apart around the stony column of his flesh. Putting her hand between their bodies, she felt how wantonly she slicked him, how relentlessly hard she made him still. How the veins rose on his marble skin, how he looked down on her like he wanted to devour her whole, and how she knew she looked back at him the same.

…

After showering off, they soaked together in the clawfoot tub. It was a tight squeeze for two, especially with how tall Sesshoumaru was. His bent knees jutted above the sides. But he didn’t seem to mind it, as Kagome wriggled her thighs around him to wedge herself in. Her chest crushed to his—all the nicks to her breasts from his fangs and claws salved over by his tongue. Thinking of how he’d tended to her battered sex the same, Kagome flushed. Closing her eyes, she resurrected the phantom tingle of those healing licks gliding over her puffy lower lips, dipping long and deep into that aching channel still coated with the mingled aftermath of their pleasure.

Unconsciously, she rocked her hips at the thought. His cock stirred beneath her. Smiling dreamily, she kept up that gentle rocking glide. Together they reveled in the sensation of her open sex trailing along his shaft like a parted mouth, pressing down to kiss him at intervals. The bathwater sloshed in time, keeping the faint erotic rhythm. Like a sensual lullaby.

Sesshoumaru’s eyes were at half-mast. She enjoyed his hooded look. Her wet fingers traced the markings on his face. His silver lashes fluttered as a few diamond droplets skittered onto them, hanging there like beads of glass.

“Who would’ve guessed we’d ever end up like this?” she murmured.

“…”

Kagome cupped his face, tilting his heavy-lidded eyes up to hers. “No way,” she said, searching his sphinxlike expression. “You tried to kill me more than once!”

Sesshoumaru’s eyes closed, his lips quirking up at the corners. “And?”

“And?!” Kagome spluttered, before shaking her head. “You youkai sure are strange. I could have sworn at the very least you couldn’t stand me.”

“You’re misremembering. We clashed a bit at first, perhaps, but after that I was amicable toward you.”

“Amicable? I don’t think so. I have very distinct memories to the contrary. Those last few parting glares you gave me—that sort of thing tends to leave an impression. If I didn’t know any better,” she said wryly, “I’d think you were trying to rewrite history to suit your purposes.”

“And if I am?” Sesshoumaru’s eyes slid open, smoldering, as he cupped her around the hips and angled himself against her. “What of it? Where we are now is all that matters.”

He pressed inside her, filling her up, and all coherent thought left her mind.

…

“I never stopped.”

“Hm?” Kagome said drowsily, not bothering to lift her flushed face from his chest. “Never stopped what?”

The water had long since grown cold around them. But the radiant heat of him kept her warm. A good deal of the bathwater had splashed out onto the floor when she’d started to buck him in earnest, striving to keep pace with his driving hips. Softly now, she held him inside her. When her walls gave a fluttering squeeze, he twitched lazily in response. On the surface of the water, her long dark hair curled around him. Little clinging tendrils caught against his biceps, his chiseled chest, as if every fiber of her being were intent on holding him to her for as long as she could.

“Looking for you,” he murmured in reply.

Kagome lifted her face then. She lifted herself up from him only to pull his mouth down onto hers.

…

After, lying sprawled together on the bathroom floor, she smiled wistfully.

“If you’d never left Japan, the past twelve years of my life would have turned out quite differently, I think.”

“Even one such as I can covet lost time.”

His voice was gruff with regret. Pushing herself up on her hands, Kagome frowned down at him. Her pruny fingers trailed his face. When she brushed his lips, his slit pupils dilated slightly.

“You’re not so closed-off like you were before.” Her wandering hand skimmed down his throat. Her lips curved in a teasing grin. “Just looking at you now, I can tell you’re thinking indecent thoughts about me.”

Sesshoumaru’s eyes glinted. “What makes you think my thoughts about you were ever decent?”

Kagome laughed. When he tipped her over onto her back, she never felt the tiles. Snowy fur bloomed beneath her, breaking her fall.

…

While she prepared dinner for herself out of sheer necessity, just to give her growling stomach a rest, Kagome laundered the sheets. Clothed in a camisole and panties, she flitted between the laundry closet and the kitchen. Golden eyes followed her raptly all the while. After dinner was over and the sheets were done, she scooped them out of the dryer and traipsed up the stairs.

Though the steps didn’t so much as creak behind her, she could feel him following soundlessly after. Her stomach cinched. Anticipation pooled low in her belly. Smoothing down the clean fitted sheet, she crooked a smile to herself—

If ever there was a lost cause, it’s this, she thought, a moment before he slipped his claws down the slim front of her panties and carded through the curls at her mound in a voluptuous scrape.

…

“I know it’s sudden,” she whispered, straining to keep her eyes open in the encroaching dark, “but I think I’m in love with you.”

Nestled against him in the rumpled bed, Kagome figured Sesshoumaru was already sleeping. Deep and even and faintly rumbling, he breathed. It was a contenting sound. She wanted to stay awake, just to keep listening to it. Just to feel him there beside her still. The ethereal glow of his aura buffeted against hers, keeping languid time with each exhale. But sheer exhaustion was dragging her under—just as surely as she figured it’d already dragged him.

Until he said to her, lowly yet distinctly, “…What’s so sudden about it?”

…

That night, Kagome dreamed a dream that was not her own—

A nightmare.

The world he knew was a smoldering hellscape, unrecognizable. A blasted ruin. The smell of death choked the air, the sound of suffering crowded out all others. In the midst of this devastation he stood, frozen. Numb.

But Rin’s children were safe—resurrected from the wreckage. He led them out, whisked them away to new shelter. But the curse of war followed after. They grew leprous, sickly and shriveled. In the hospital, he looked on helpless as they wasted away. One by one, their frail spirits sputtered out, like snuffed candle flames.

In dark kimono, he laid them to rest with their ancestors. Despite the driving rain, the funeral smoke clung to him still. He could not wash it out. So he wandered to the coast, to an island of jagged rock, where the waves of the sea thundered against the earth in a futile wrath that was nothing compared to his own.

Nothing.

The fang of his inheritance was in his fist. Then it was sailing off, hurled by the force of his grief through the churning, lightning-slashed skies. Flying far over the sea, to be swallowed up by some fathomless surge and lie forgotten, forever, in the dark and the deep.

Tenseiga…curse you and be damned.

Black claws scored into black rock. It was a great white dog that howled after the sunken blade, the sounds of his agony drowning out the roar of the storm.

…

Kagome awoke with tears in her eyes.

Lips trembling, she touched the handsome face that rested beside hers. She slid back her fingers to tangle in the silvery silk of his hair. At the caress, Sesshoumaru’s eyes cracked open, dark and distant. They closed again when she slanted her mouth against his. Between them, she tasted the salt of her tears.

It tasted like the sea.

She slid her thigh over his naked hip. Reaching down, she stoked him back to life in her hand. Warming him, kindling him, she brought him home to rest within her, in the cradle of her being.

…

It rained all the next day, from dawn until dusk.

Kagome couldn’t have cared less.

…

In the standing mirror, she watched their conjoined reflections, flushed and rutting on all fours in the middle of the bedroom floor. Her knees burned against the bristly carpet with every thrust. Her breasts swayed, peaked and heavy. In a fanged grimace of pure lust, his features contorted. The sleek muscles of his torso rippled as he pounded into her, his claws digging into her at the shoulder and hip.

His searing gold eyes caught hers in the mirror. Ferally, he smirked. The hand at her shoulder smoothed up to fist in her mussed, fallen hair. Kagome whimpered as he tightened his grip. He tilted back her head, baring the pale curve of her throat as she swallowed.

“Do you like it,” he asked gruffly, “watching me fuck you like this?”

Kagome nodded as best she could without causing more pain to her stinging scalp. “I like it…” she rasped out. “I like it so much…”

“Tell me what you like about it,” he rumbled, angling into her in a way that made her yelp.

“I like watching you take me from behind like an animal…I like watching the way my whole body shakes every time you ram into me…I like seeing how my breasts sag and swing…like I’m just some horny bitch in heat, starving for your cock…”

Sesshoumaru growled. The dark heat of his youki burned into her, chafing, making her reiki flare in response. Against his chest, he hauled her up and thrust into her all in one fluid motion. Her legs splayed back around his bent knees. His arm was an iron bar beneath her quivering breasts.

In the mirror, she could see her sundered sex spread open. Wetly she choked around the thick cock goring up into her. The heft of his balls crashed up and down as he pistoned into her—a heavy circuit that mesmerized her as she clutched at his hips for purchase. He pummeled her from within, the cherry nub of her clit pulsing faintly in time with each excruciating stroke.

She was hurtling toward the end even before he reached forward and rubbed at that needy bit of flesh. Circling and lightly pinching in a way that had her screaming his name, he buried his face in her neck and lost himself in the tumult boiling between them.

…

On her knees before the fire, Kagome slid one hand up the smooth stony back of his thigh. With the other, she guided him into her mouth. He was standing, looming above her, but she felt her power over him, this mighty daiyoukai. When she skimmed her tongue over the minute opening in the head of his sex, the faintest tremor quaked through him.

“Kagome…” he said, and she heard the reverence in it.

Ringing her lips around the head of him, she suckled. She savored the clean, faintly salty taste of him. Again, she was reminded of the sea. Thinking of the waves, surging and receding, she worked her mouth over him, inch by inch. Gliding forward and retreating back, she left the shimmer of her course shining damp upon his marble flesh. A shadow of her desire for him, lingering in the wake of her touch.

Kagome knew now, with acute clarity, why all her marriages had failed. Why they’d all been doomed to fail. She’d had an inkling of it, the first time she and Sesshoumaru had made love.

But now she felt it clearly, as her throat opened to receive him, to take him into her to the limit. Her eyes glistened, hot with tears. Her lips grazed the sparse silver strands that fringed the base of his cock. She breathed carefully through her nose, devoutly. His claws scraped her scalp as he buried his fingers in her hair. The edge of his thumb traced the bone of her cheek.

“You’re so beautiful,” he rasped, as he began to move in her mouth, in her throat. “You always were.”

How many times over the years had men said these sorts of things to her? But Kagome had never heard them, not until now. Not until it was his deep voice that had spoken them. His rich praise flowed into her, through her. It pervaded her senses. She could feel in that intonation of his the depth of the centuries, layer upon layer—the dark denial, the grey and grudging acceptance, and now, here at the end, that openness which was so light and warm. Unvarnished and uncomplicated.

Pure feeling. When the well had sealed shut, she had sealed herself off as well. But now she opened herself to it, to him. In this act of penetration, she felt the touchpoint of her unsealing. Tears streamed freely from her eyes. She whimpered around him, gazing rapturously up. She clutched at his muscular thighs like a lifeline. He guided her over him. He crushed her face into him and demanded that much more of her to yield to him.

And yield to him she did. She made an offering of herself to him. She gave herself over as an offering to him.

She watched the firelight gild over the graven contours of his body. His bright eyes turned to liquid gold. He was like a god gazing back down at her in turn. He was her god—the spiritual embodiment of all she had loved and lost through time. He was the personification of all that was wild and wondrous and glorious in a life she had once thought dead, and her soul along with it.

With her eyes, she told him she loved him, as she worshipped him within and without, with all that she had.

…

“Tomorrow is my last day here,” she said as they lay together in the little double bed, intertwined. “I’ll have to check out of this place the day after that.”

“I see,” Sesshoumaru said.

Trailing her fingers along the hard muscle of his chest, Kagome waited. But he didn’t say anything more than that. She frowned a little, ultimately shrugging off her misgivings when he turned over and pinned her down against the mattress, and made her his again.

…

That night, she dreamed of thunder booming above the darkened hills, of flowered fields stripped bare by the wind and rain.

She dreamed of the sea in bitter storm.

…

When Kagome woke in the morning, the bed was empty except for her.

Crawling out into the chill, she shivered and padded downstairs. Her heart sank with every step. In the living space below, Sesshoumaru was nowhere to be found.

The fire had died out overnight. Cinders glittered darkly from the grate.

Kagome felt the truth pierce her heart like a knife. She felt it bleeding coldly through her chest long before the first tears fell from her eyes to the patter against the wooden floor.

Sesshoumaru was gone.

He was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.

…

“You’re a fool,” she seethed to herself. “A stupid, fucking fool.”

When was she ever going to learn? When?

Kagome downed the last of the wine in record-time. But she was so angry and sad and embarrassed and enraged, she didn’t feel a damn thing. Her wounded feelings blazed too hot and raw for the wine to dull them.

Tearing through the cottage, she found a big bottle of whiskey that was nearly full and started in on that. She drank straight from the bottle—who was she kidding? She took four big swallows and prowled around the room, cursing Sesshoumaru and Akito and all her other exes, and herself most of all.

A few minutes later, the whiskey hit her like a ton of bricks. She collapsed onto the couch in a merciful daze, cradling the bottle in her lap like an infant. She passed out. When she came to, it was nearly dark.

Taking another couple of hefty swigs, Kagome capped the bottle. Cramming it into her backpack, she staggered outside into the dusk. Wrestling the bike out of the woodshed, she paused to take another gulp of booze before pitching herself into the seat and pedaling off down the grassy slope.

She was weaving and wobbling so drunkenly on that bike that only the force of gravity and pure dumb luck kept her going straight on toward the coast. It was a miracle she didn’t crash headlong into a wall, or a sheep, or a person or get hit by a car as she careened wildly across fields and roads alike—only barely steering the course which was mostly blind to her from the tears and liquor that were fogging her sight.

She sobbed loudly and brokenly the whole way she went. A few passersby did notice that much—though they really only had the time to scratch their heads and stare in brief confusion at the crazy Japanese woman freewheeling through the Irish countryside like the devil himself was on her heels.

If only, Kagome thought wretchedly, furiously, as she hiccupped all over again. She’d purify his ass right on the spot!

No, he’d never given a fuck about her. She should’ve known. She deserved it. He’d played her like a fiddle, all right. He’d used her good and hard. Whether it was some sort of vengeance over past grudges, resentment of future knowledge she’d withheld, or just sheer assholery on his part, he’d gotten the last laugh with her.

Well, good for fucking him!

She shouted this last part aloud to the uncaring hills. Almost mockingly, they echoed it back to her. Kagome growled in unutterable rage until her throat went raw.

Somehow, she noticed when the coast was in sight. Slamming on the brakes so hard she nearly threw herself over the handlebars, she skidded to a halt. The salt air whipped back her hair. Whistling through the gap between her backpack and sweaty t-shirt, it chilled her to the bone. Her intoxicated brain hadn’t even considered the possibility of a jacket.

But there was a heavy fleece sweatshirt in the backpack. She ripped it over her head as she straddled the bike on swaying legs—then laughed at herself at why she was even bothering with any of it. The bottle of whiskey was what she’d been really rifling for. Taking it out, she tucked it under one arm while she struggled drunkenly to dismount the bike. But somehow or other the hem of her jeans had gotten snagged in the gears, and she toppled over onto her side—not the booze-bottle side, thank the gods!—and felt the breath rush out of her as she smacked the ground hard.

Groaning, Kagome shook herself off and dragged herself upright. Her jeans ripped as she freed herself from the pesky bike. Drinking from the bottle again, she staggered straight up to the ragged edge of the land, which dropped off precipitously into the churning grey seas far below.

“Well, well, well, here we are…” she slurred to no one, peering down unsteadily as she swayed. “Here we fucking are, Kagome…this is it—end of the line…one last jump down the ol’ well, eh?”

Chuckling, she rocked forward onto the balls of her feet. The motion jostled a stray pebble off the edge. It was so small and she was so high up, she didn’t even see it hit. Maybe it was like that for the gods too, when people went splat—they were spared the gory details.

Lost in her inebriated musings, Kagome realized belatedly when her balance started to give. It all happened in the span of a second—she felt the shift in equilibrium like a lurch in her gut. Her arms pinwheeled on instinct. In that same eternal, horrifying second she realized something quite vital and profound—

She absolutely did not want to die!

A gasp tore from her lips. All the life-saving reflexes that had lain dormant in her for years suddenly flared to life, searing through the haze like a blast of reiki. Maybe it even was a blast of reiki that threw her back, as she pitched the heavy bottle forward, away from her, over the edge.

Kagome fell back flat on her ass with a grunt. Panting, crying, she felt nothing but the sheer elation of being alive. Her feet dangled off the edge. Sobbing and laughing hysterically in equal measure, she keeled over at last and passed out cold on the side of the cliff.

…

That night, Kagome dreamed she’d gone over the edge after all.

By her own power, she’d caught herself. She drifted out over the sea, into the sky.

…

Rosy light scalded into her eyes. Its rays were like fiery little fingers, prying open her leaden lids to the day.

Kagome was curled on her side, cold and wet with dew from the grass. The half of her face that was adhered to the ground was drenched in her own sour vomit as well. Peeling herself up with a grimace, she wiped off the concoction that smelled more or less like pure whiskey. Blearily, she stumbled over to her bike.

It was a long walk-ride back to the cottage. As it turned out, she’d taken some sort of hellish shortcut through all that open hilly pasture. The road back was much longer, windier and steeper. Every quarter mile or so, she had to stop pedaling. She had to walk for a bit or even drag herself over to the side of the road to dry-heave from her abused, empty stomach.

But she made it back, eventually. Even she was shocked at how early in the morning it still was.

Thank the gods.

Rinsing herself off, Kagome packed up her luggage and tidied up the cottage as best she could. In her drunken rampage, she’d broken a few vases, glasses and other fragile knickknacks. Scribbling a lopsided note of apology to the owners, she taped it to the fridge along with a wad of cash.

Locking up the place, she left the skeleton key under a flowerpot in the garden and dragged herself over to the curb to wait on her cab.

It was the same nice old driver who came to pick her up once again. Gratefully, she let him load up all her bags in his slow unhurried way. In the meantime, she languished on the rock wall, sipping water and nibbling crackers in tiny increments that still threatened to turn her stomach.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, forcing a wan smile as he opened the door for her with a jaunty, gold-toothed grin.

“Aye, lass—and how did ye enjoy yer stay?” he asked cheerily, as he slipped into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine.

“Well, I was drunk for most of it,” Kagome admitted, taking another mincing sip.

The old man chortled heartily. “Sounds ta me like a foine holiday!”

Kagome’s mustered smile turned green as they trundled off down the steep, gravel decline.

…

At the Dublin airport, Kagome found her terminal and sank with indescribable relief into a seat near the gate. Her head felt like iron spikes had been pounded through it. So far no amount of water or painkillers had been able to dampen the pain to any noticeable degree.

But emotionally, she felt surprisingly okay. Not better than she’d felt thirty-six hours ago, when she’d fallen asleep in the arms of the one who she’d thought was the love of her life—but better by far compared to how she’d felt over the past decade or so.

In her current mood, she was feeling a bit more charitable toward herself. So she’d gotten duped by a guy who just wanted to love her and leave her—really, was that any sort of great and unusual tragedy? If she were honest with herself, she didn’t really know Sesshoumaru that well, despite the breadth of their shared past.

It had been a holiday hookup, and nothing more. And if she were looking on the bright side, which she couldn’t help but do after rock-bottoming out in the most obscene and literal way, reuniting with him had given her a measure of closure on her old life at long last—painful and nasty though the sudden shock of his departure had been.

At least now she could say she had been there, done that. Even though the wound in her heart was still raw, and likely would be for some time, she was grateful to be alive to feel it. She knew that much now, too.

Kagome smiled a little, feeling like her old self again. She’d go back to Tokyo. She’d pick herself up by her bootstraps, finalize her divorce with Akito and then see what the future held for her from there.

For the first time since the well had shut, she felt like she could see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. And she’d found it herself.

Swept up in her newfound optimism, Kagome only noticed out of the corner of her eye when a tall, darkly-clad figure sat down right beside her in the row of gate seats. There were plenty of empty spots, so she was genuinely a little confused by the action—until she turned to glance at him, and her eyes nearly bugged out of her skull.

“S-Sesshoumaru?!”

Light brown under his glamor, his eyes slid to her as he turned. The shadow of a smile played about his lips. “No,” he said calmly, showing her the boarding passes and flipped-open ID he withdrew from his blazer, “Nakamoto Ken.”

“Nakamoto Ken,” Kagome could only dumbly repeat, staring at the name on the tickets and the vaguely glamorized portrait in the passport. “…Is that an alias of yours?”

“Temporarily,” he answered briskly, stowing the boarding passes back into the pocket of his coat.

Kagome’s expression went pale. “…Sesshoumaru,” she said, her voice lowering to a whisper. “The real Nakamoto Ken…please tell me he’s still alive.”

“Of course he is,” Sesshoumaru said lightly. “He merely misplaced his passport and overslept his flight.”

Kagome shook her head at this, distantly relieved though she was. She had a feeling there was a whole other story to all of this, but right now she was frankly too exhausted to care.

“I just don’t understand,” she sighed, glancing aside. “The other day you walked out on me without a word, and now suddenly you’re here with plane tickets to Tokyo. Why?—why are you doing all this now?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Sesshoumaru murmured. Hooking a finger beneath her chin, he tipped her gaze back to his. “I’m settling down.”

Kagome’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really.”

“With me?”

“Yes, you,” he said, catching her lips against his briefly. “Who else? I’ve been in love with you for half a millennium. I’d prefer not to waste any more of our precious time.”

Kissing him back, Kagome held his face to hers as she muttered, sniffling, “…You really could have given me a heads-up, you know. I was a total trainwreck after you left.”

Sesshoumaru frowned against her mouth. “I thought it would be a pleasant surprise.”

“Then you’ve got a lot left to learn, old dog,” she said, giving his ear a sharp tug as she drew away. “But because I love you, I’ll let it slide.”

His eyes glittered at her. A flash of sultry gold showed through the brown. “This is going to be a tediously long flight.”

“There’s a three-hour layover in Frankfurt,” she said, stroking his thigh.

“Then we’ll have to make the most of it.”

The devious curve of his lips made her heart skip a beat. The sudden sound of the boarding announcement a moment later made her jump in her seat.

“That’s us,” she said with a grin. Her fingers threaded through his as they rose and headed toward the gate. “Time to go home.”

“Yes,” he said.

Together, they boarded the plane.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Hope y’all enjoyed <3

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