And this time, when Kagome unclasped her bra and slid it out from around and beneath her, it was only for practicality’s sake. She even mumbled as much to him, although with his habitual silence it was hard to tell whether he actually believed her.

Either way, he didn’t seem to mind.

As her chest pressed bare to the moss that had grown downy and warm in her muddled perception, as he smoothed those deft palms of his along the unobstructed breadth of her sides, she curled her fingers into that sleek, tickling softness and exhaled in sheer content.

~

The following morning, she met Kirara’s anxious prowling with a bright, easy smile, and the firecat purred in relief.

With a few extra tins of sardines thrown in to sweeten the deal, it wasn’t difficult for Kagome to secure her feline friend’s continued cooperation after that. And so the next month, they set off for the cave again.

And again.

Perhaps it was just her imagination, but she didn’t seem to have to wait quite so long for him to show up anymore. It seemed she’d scarcely sat down in the moss when she felt his hands on her arms, drawing her back toward him. He was clearly well past the point of formalities with her, and so was she with him.

“…I wish you’d come closer,” Kagome murmured, trailing her fingers beneath the loose silk of his sleeve, after he’d freed her of the burden of her own upper garment. “I wish you’d let me see you…”

When her touch skimmed up toward his shoulder, bumping over something raised and jagged in the swell of his bicep, he went rigid. So did she.

Suddenly, it all made sense—the darkness, the distance…

Kagome’s face fell with a pang. Her hand drifted from his arm in contrition.

“…I’m sorry,” she whispered, ducking her head, “I didn’t realize you were scarred.”

Lightly, she joined her fingers with his. The almost hostile tension between them dissipated, as she raised his frigid claws to her lips and thawed them with a sigh.

~

She stopped pushing him for more after that. Instead, she pushed herself on him—

Not that he didn’t seem to encourage it.

And when his claws slipped beneath the thin band of her underwear to caress the skin at her hip, she wriggled out of her panties with an impatient huff. Her cheeks scalded nevertheless in the wake of such boldness, her heart hammering as she kept her knees snapped tightly shut.

Just as tightly, she replied to his own inscrutable lack of response, “What?—it was just in your way, wasn’t it?”

Naturally, he didn’t reply. Naturally, she found herself reading into it.

As adept as she’d become at interpreting his nonverbal cues, there was a quality to this particular silence which she couldn’t quite place.

Fully naked with a man for the first time in her life, Kagome hid her flaming face in the moss and waited for some sort of deliverance from this state of purgatory she’d flung herself into. She was just starting to wish she could sink straight through the floor, when the tips of his claws crested the curve of her backside, and her reservations melted away.

~

Kagome couldn’t deny anymore that she was harboring feelings for him. More often than not, she found herself spacing out, daydreaming about him. Her silent, scarred companion.

The tragedy of his circumstances moved her deeply. She chided herself for having once thought of him as nothing more than an opportunistic lecher. Now she saw how, in his muteness and deformity, the only way he could bring himself to be close to another was through these blind, isolated encounters.

A recluse by circumstance, not by choice…

Adrift in these romantic notions, Kagome’s heart went out to him. She wanted to be the one to draw him out of his seclusion. ‘Trust’ might be putting it strongly, but there was an undeniable intimacy between them, with her knowing some of his secrets and with him knowing, well, every inch of her.

Kagome flushed.

Maybe she would find the right moment to tell him that she wanted to be with him more than just every twenty-eight days. Maybe he would even feel the same.

The miko’s eyes misted at the thought.

“Oi!” Inuyasha shouted over at her. “You gonna build this fire or not? We got fish to fry!”

Jumping about a foot in the air, Kagome yelped, the firewood in her arms clattering to the ground. “S-sorry—I’m coming!”

~

The moon couldn’t cycle through its phases fast enough. More and more, Kagome lived for him to touch her.

And if she found herself arching her back a little more steeply when he traced down her spine, if she happened to crack her legs open a little wider when he circled around the backs of her thighs, that wasn’t some sort of lewd invitation. It was just incidental to her enjoying the experience.

Or at least, that’s what Kagome kept telling herself.

Still there was a line, and it seemed that both of them felt the invisible boundaries of it, even as they hovered increasingly at the fringes.

Propping herself up so that her breasts just brushed at the lushness beneath her, she didn’t fully appreciate how desperate she was for him to cross that line, until he brought his hands forward and cupped her at last. Kagome’s breath escaped her in a rush of pure release, as he weighed and squeezed her in his palms.

And when he rolled the pad of his thumb just right against one of those raw points of need, she clasped his hand and eased it back down her belly, guiding him to the spot where she ached for him the most.

~

And the next time, there was no need for her to lift a finger.

Kagome squeezed her eyes shut as he ministered to her. The bite of his claws was the keenest sort of thrill, but it was the stroke of his tongue that rendered her senseless with rapture. Gasping and panting, she raised her hips to him a little higher, scarcely finding the space to breathe between moans.

“Please…”

She couldn’t manage to articulate any more than that. It was simply beyond her. But then, when she felt his mouth break from her, when she heard a rustle of silk that made her breath stop and her heart stutter, she realized she didn’t have to.

Against her he felt impossible. Despite her readiness, at the first straining press of him, she was inclined to believe it. Her hiss of discomfort made him pause, but with shaking fingers she gripped his own and urged him onward, until the pain faded and the pleasure overtook her.

And afterward, even when they were both sated and spent, a fresh longing welled within her.

Kagome’s lashes shivered at the seam. Down her cheek, her tears escaped in a helpless trickle, gathering briefly together against the clawed edge of his hand.

“I want to know you,” she said tremulously to him. “I want to be with you all the time.”

~

Yet in the morning, he was gone as usual.

Stiffly, and with vague disappointment, Kagome collected herself and left the cave behind. If Kirara’s gaze seemed a shade too knowing, the miko did her best to ignore it.

Though she couldn’t shake her lingering misgivings, there were more pressing matters at hand.

With only a few unclaimed shards remaining, a showdown with Naraku was inevitable. But Kagome and her friends found themselves ill-prepared for the battle that took place over the second-to-last missing piece. Their enemy and his minions had grown far more powerful since the last confrontation. Sango and Miroku were injured—Kikyou, gravely so, though she and Kagome had managed together to purify and safely extract Kohaku’s shard.

It was the only consolation in a fight that had otherwise ended miserably. While Inuyasha was distraught over Kikyou’s condition, he was beside himself at the fact that all the group’s Jewel shards had been lost in the skirmish. Kagome took his blame for this in exasperated stride. She felt lucky to have escaped with her neck intact—and except for Sesshoumaru’s timely intervention, none of them might’ve.

This observation, of course, hadn’t gone over very well with the infuriated hanyou.

All-in-all, it was one of the worst months Kagome could remember. The reprieve they experienced at Naraku’s total and inexplicable disappearance from the land was more like a bitter pill. There was only one free shard out there now, and while none of them could currently reach it, his gloating departure didn’t bode well for their chances.

As her friends nursed their injuries, physical and otherwise, Kagome’s one solace was the thought of returning to the cave on the night of the full moon. Even if once a month was the only way she could be with him, the miko had decided to accept it, the same way she had accepted everything else about him.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Kirara-chan,” she said to the kitten-sized youkai curled up by the hearth. “But would you mind taking me ‘home’ again tonight?”

For a long, weighty moment, the nekomata held Kagome’s eye. Desperate though she was to see him, something in that look almost made her reconsider.

Yet with a mew and a cat-stretch Kirara rose at last, and after a short westward flight, Kagome found herself alone in the cave once more.

The first hour or so she could reasonably shrug off. He’d been late before, at times. She couldn’t expect him to always come running to her, now could she?

Chewing at the inside of her cheek, Kagome waited. And waited.

And waited…

It was the longest night of her life, and there wasn’t an hour of it she missed. Because Kagome had stayed awake through them all, and still he had never shown up.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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