Skrimps

When his stomach is empty, Rindou takes stock of his surroundings. He is shirtless, wearing an unfamiliar pair of YSL sweats. The bedroom is twice as large as his with a sitting area opposite the bed and subdued paintings of hunting dogs and long-dead kings peering down from the walls. By the puddle of bile seeping into the fibers of the carpet, a meowing British Shorthair pokes around curiously until Rindou shoos it away.

This is Ran’s bedroom.

Regaining his bearings, Rindou makes his way to Ran’s bathroom. He helps himself to Ran’s toothbrush and drinks water straight from the tap until his guts gurgle miserably and he vomits again, this time into the toilet. The process repeats itself one more time before his hangover recedes enough to risk leaving the bathroom. He grabs a hand towel to throw over the mess he left on the floor in a quick detour before he hunts for his brother.

It is some indiscriminate hour of the day. The curtains are drawn tight in every room, blocking the sun or moon from view, and Rindou can’t find his phone in the master bedroom where he slept, which should concern him more, but he is too disoriented to worry. Ran isn’t in the kitchen or dining room, his study or living room, so Rindou checks the guest bedroom.

A long, thin lump shaped more like a body pillow than a man though much too tall, hides beneath the comforter in the guest room. A grandfather clock with the chimes removed shows the time to be near one, presumably in the afternoon. Too early to wake Ran without a fight.

“Oi, where’s my phone?” Rindou barks. He wants to ask why he’s here because somewhere between vomiting the second and third time, Rindou realized he has no memories of how he came to sleep in his brother’s bed. He remembers the sight of your teary face in the bathroom – it’s crystal clear unfortunately – remembers finishing the bottle of bourbon in the car, remembers driving – oh fuck and he should not have been driving black out last night. Shit. The memories grow glossier as the hours progress, the scope of his mental vision shrinking like a burning photograph, until eventually there is nothing but emptiness left.

He wants to fill in the blanks of his hazy memory, but admitting to Ran that he blacked out like a sorority girl after her third vodka cranberry is too harrowing, so Rindou asks after his phone instead.

The lump that is his brother groans and shifts but does not emerge from beneath the covers. Rindou grips the railing at the foot of the bedframe and gives it a weighty shake until Ran’s head pops out. His eyes are covered by a sleep mask, hair a mess.

“Phone. Where is it?” Rindou says.

“Go away,” Ran hisses, or at least that’s how Rindou interprets the garbled words as Ran burrows back beneath his blankets.

“I need my phone now, dickhead. Come one, where is it?”

Only Ran’s arm appears this time, feeling around on the bedside table until he finds a paperweight, which he promptly flings at Rindou’s head. It is well-aimed and thrown with enough force to knock him unconscious but too slow by half, and Rindou easily dodges aside.

“Ran –!”

“Coffee! Coffee first!” Rindou tries to interrupt but Ran talks right over him. “Coffee!”

Resigned and more than a little annoyed, Rindou returns to the kitchen and brews a pot of instant coffee. No sugar, no milk. Exactly the way he knows his brother hates. While rifling through Ran’s cabinets for a mug, his stomach flips again, so Rindou decides to eat a late breakfast.

Thirty minutes later, Rindou sits, chowing down on a fried omelet, leftover onigiri found in the fridge, and a bowl of steamed rice when his brother finally emerges from his den. Ran beelines to the coffee and drinks the first cup without pause before pouring a second. This one, he bothers to treat with milk and gomme syrup for taste. Ran follows Rindou’s example then, starting on his own breakfast, expertly carving up a grapefruit as the first caffeine blast hits his system. Rindou can see the moment sleep fully leaves his brother’s eyes.

“Well, good afternoon, Sleeping Beauty,” Rindou scoffs.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to mock. I did, after all, let you sleep in my bed last night. You’re welcome for that.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. I threw up on your floor by the way. Probably want to deep clean that,” Rindou returns.

Ran cranes his long neck heavenward as if searching for divine intervention. “Little brothers…the gift that never stops giving.”

“Anyway, I’m gonna head out. Just hand over my phone,” Rindou says.

“Can I trust you with this?” Ran asks seriously, unearthing the phone from the pocket of his silk pajama pants.

“Uh…yeah?”

“Convincing,” Ran grimaces, but he tosses the phone Rindou’s way anyway. “She didn’t call or text by the way.”

Rindou ignores this unasked for information in favor of scrolling his notifications: a few nonurgent business emails, a call from Mochi he should return, and an update on an MMA match he follows. When he flips to his calls log to check what time Mochi called, he sees a slew of outbound calls, 34 to be exact, all to your number. He slumps in his seat and groans.

“Don’t tell me you blacked out,” Ran sneers, missing nothing as he watches Rindou over his cup of coffee.

“Piss off.”

“I gave you so much advice last night, too. Some of my best work, and you went and forgot it. Well, don’t think I’m going to repeat everything for your benefit now. You’ll have to settle for the Cliff Notes version.”

“I don’t need advice,” Rindou snaps.

“Oh, don’t you? Why don’t I fill you in on what you forgot? I got home from work this morning around 7 AM, and what did I find? My baby brother sleeping on my front step. No idea how long you were there by the way. I figured, okay, he just needs to sleep it off. But, oh no, you spent the next two hours talking my ear off about your girl problems. Crying intermittently, I might add. Really moving stuff if you’re the type for it. I had to take your phone after the ninth time you tried calling her. It was getting pathetic.”

The timestamps on his outbound calls show the last attempt was logged at 7:45 AM true to Ran’s accounts. If anyone but Mikey blew up his phone that much, he would block them on principle. Considering the lack of reply, you probably did just that.

Rindou doesn’t remember any of it.

“The long and short of my advice, by the way, call her. Today. Tell her you’re so sorry and want to be with her, just her. No wait, tell her, you’re sorry, and that you just got scared because you’ve never felt this way about a woman before. Tell her you love her and that you want to be with her and only her. That no woman can compare! That she’s more beautiful than Lady Kiritsubo, sexier than Kyoko Fukada and Naomi combined, more bewitching than Lady Murasaki, that you would not stop at the murder of 130 men but would fell 10,000 if only to look upon the moon of her face. Are you writing this down? This is good stuff,” Ran says.

“I’m not saying any of that stuff,” Rindou groans.

“Fine, not sure why. That sweet girl of yours would just about cream herself if you compared her to all those literary figures, but whatever. For some reason, she likes you, so I’m sure whatever you say will move her,” Ran allows.

“I’m not going to say anything to her.”

The knife contacts the cutting board with a sharp knocking sound that rings out in the otherwise silent kitchen. Juices from the grapefruit drip off its serrated edge. The British Shorthair, whose name Rindou remembers is Tortoiseshell, leaps onto the counter and winds her bushy tail along Ran’s arms in an affectionate gesture, like she can sense Ran’s growing ire, neck going red and heat rising higher by the second.

“And why the hello not?”

“Because she told me not to call her,” Rindou says simply.

“Sure didn’t stop you yesterday,” Ran says, but Rindou waves that away with the excuse that he was drunk. Ran sights like his personally pained by Rindou’s stupidity. “When she told you not to contact her, she meant don’t waste my time. I promise you, she did not mean, don’t call me and give me everything I want and am asking for. Tell her you’re a one-woman man from here on out, and it should work out just fine.”

“But I’m not. I’ve never wanted to be a boyfriend or whatever. That’s not what this was, and she understands that,” Rindou says.

“So, you don’t want to be with her?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Then, you want to be with her but not as much as you want to be with other women? There’s something other women are giving you that she can’t?” Ran tries.

“Not necessarily.”

“Then, what? Because I’m getting mad like I’m the girl you’ve been stepping out on. You’re not making sense. She does all the freaky stuff you’re into. She’s the best lay of your life,” Ran says, brushing aside Rindou’s threatening glare. “These are your words, Rin. Not mine. You said so last night. You also said that she loves you and that you love her.”

This time, when his stomach flips, Rindou knows better than to blame it on his hangover. He almost accuses Ran of lying, but he can read Ran’s facial tics and mannerisms as clearly as directives in an instruction manual, all concise, clinical language and the steps in sequence. There is no lie hidden in Ran’s hands as they wave about, punctuating this or that point, only frustration at Rindou’s stubbornness in the tilt of Ran’s chin.

He remembers the track of your tears down your face. How they stubbornly clung to your jaw line, refusing that final plummet until new tears slid down and forced them away. Overcrowding. The memory is so clear in the way memories can be, meaning it is false and true at the same time. In his memory, there is only the facsimile of a public toilet, and the edges fade to black like they do on film. The counters of your face are so familiar to him, so easy to trace, but an aura of white, hot light shines around you, transforming you into an angel, the kind built for God’s bloodiest wars. The details of your hair and clothes are wrong, but not the tears. Those are clear enough that he can imagine wiping them away with his thumb here and now.

As Ran carries on, Rindou downs an entire bottle of water without coming up for air as if by blocking one sense, he might drown out whatever Ran says next. The words – about how Rindou pledged his love for you last night – reach him regardless.

Neither brother speaks for several minutes. Both busy themselves in their respective breakfasts and eye the lined marble of the tabletop like its trajectory of cracks map to the elixir of life. Rindou tries to deaden his mind, to ward off thoughts second and feelings first.

Eventually, Ran sighs and sits down at the counter opposite him. All that remains of the grapefruit is the sticky rind and guts clinging to the forgotten knife.

“Do you remember our time in family court before we went to juvie?” Ran asks. “I was so pissed they were locking us up. I didn’t wanna leave Miki behind or what we’d built in Roppongi, but I was so damn pleased when we walked into lockup that first day. You and I together. Felt like it was just another neighborhood, just another street war, and we were going to win it.”

Rindou smiles faintly at the memory. He remembers their first days with less fondness, but he also left nothing behind when they were sentenced away. All he claimed in the world was his brother and his own body, and they couldn’t take either away from him. It was hardly a punishment at all.

“I never told you, but Izana said something to me a couple months in. Something I never forgot…He asked me why I didn’t…why I didn’t tell them it was all me. Try to take the fall for everything and get you off,” Ran says.

“What are you talking about? They had us on everything. With witnesses. You couldn’t have gotten me off.”

“Probably not,” Ran admits dully. “But maybe…maybe I could have told them that you never wanted any of it. That I was kicking your ass at home and forcing you into the gang life. Maybe they would have believed it, been lenient.”

“No one would have believed that,” Rindou scoffs.

“Maybe. Probably not. But the point is…the point is I didn’t even try.” Ran lets the words sit between them for a long moment, eyes on his plate but mind turned inward to the sins of his past. “Because it had always been you and me. We didn’t need a gang so long as we were together. And that’s exactly how I wanted it. Us against the world. I’ve lost things. But I chose this, all of it, for better or worse. You? I watch you sleepwalking through life, and I can’t remember if you ever really chose anything, or I just dragged you along behind me. I wonder if you’re just on a bullet train, and it’s moving too fast for you to get off, and you’ve been on it so long, you figure you might as well ride it to the final destination, just speeding along, doing what you’ve always done.”

When Rindou tries to swallow, all the moisture in his mouth evaporates, and his throat stutters over a rough, empty path to his gullet. He struggles to even look at Ran. His entire being shrinks away from his brother only to find that sentiment waits for him wherever he retreats. Ran’s sincerity, the power in these hypnotic, never before spoken words, cows him into submission. He breaks free only through an extreme display of will.

“You’re telling me I should quit? Settle down with a wife and kids and become what? A salaryman?”

“Fuck no! No, you don’t up and quit. We’re in this for life,” Ran says, flicking his fingers in Rindou’s direction as if to signal that he finds his brother’s lack of intelligence exhausting. “I’m saying that you have a chance to make a choice and change things for yourself right now. I’m saying that opportunities like this don’t come around all that often, get rarer every year we get closer to the grave, and I’m saying that if you let this chance pass you by, I’m going to blame myself forever.”

“I’m never drinking again,” Rindou groans because it is easier than searching for a grain of sincerity to match Ran’s earnest sermon.

Thankfully, Ran depletes his stores of sincerity in the same moment, tossing his parting words over his shoulder, “I’m going back to bed. Your clothes are in the dryer. You puked on them, too, by the way. You really are the greatest house guest. Can’t imagine why we don’t do this more.”

Ran disappears back into the dark, tunnel-like halls for a few hours of much deserved sleep. Rindou stays at the table for another long half hour, not thinking. In fact, he uses every ounce of his brain’s considerable powers to avoid thinking altogether. By the time he leaves, he is an expert at meditation.

--

In the days that follow the explosion of your relationship – less plane crashed into the side of a mountain and more nuclear holocaust – Rindou descends into his own nuclear winter. The days are short as snow blankets the city. It weighs down telephone lines and cartwheels down slanted roofs. Pipes burst from the cold. Rindou foregoes his car and walks to the store, no gloves or hat, hands wind-chapped and roughened to hewn wood. Boots left to dry in the entryway, he steps into puddles of melted ice whether he comes or goes.

The roads clear quickly, and he returns to work. Then, he returns home.

Amidst the wreckage, Rindou wiles away the hours with thoughtless labor. His bottom line thrives. Not that anyone but Kokonoi notices enough to comment on his newfound dedication. All the inroads he made with his fellow executives in the last several months dry up, the waters of goodwill between them polluted by the radioactive dust typical of any nuclear fallout. He finds his colleagues too loud, too vulgar, too happy, too miserable, too much, too much, too much. And so, he avoids them entirely.

He goes through the motions, relying on pure muscle memory to wake his empty husk of a body in the mornings, to carry it to the gym, to navigate rush hour traffic, to feed it just enough to survive. Little else reaches him. He does not touch another human being.

The days repeat with so little variation that when Rindou lies down to sleep at night, he struggles to remember what he did that day. He tries to retrace his steps and form something coherent from the detritus, but the effort exhausts him, and he often falls asleep without making any progress.

Like he is bunkered down in a fallout shelter, he lives but does little else.

Weekends pose the most harrowing challenge. He sleeps as many hours as his body will allow, which for the first time since adolescence means half the day. When he blinks awake to a messy bedroom in the evenings, he turns to video games to pass the time. Music irritates him. The notes are discordant and false. Sometimes, he reads. Not your books, never those, kicked into a dusty corner under his bed, but books on dinosaurs, the deep sea, space, anything long ago or far away from here.

In one chapter on Newton’s second law of motion, he reads about the earliest understanding of “inertia,” how scientists billed it as the resistance to motion, assuming that stillness was the natural state of any object. He reads that the word “inertia” is derived from the Latin “inertem,” meaning, amongst other things, inactive, helpless, and weak.

He notices his foot has fallen asleep, that he has not sat up from his slump on the couch in hours.

Yet another weekend, he surrenders himself to the authority of the television. He skips past sitcoms with their long-married couples, dramas with their tender romances, sports with their screeching optimism, and finally settles on documentaries. Despite his sleep-saturated body, he drifts off to one, waking up to a scientist crooning to his captive jellyfish. The scientist explains that the jellyfish he raises are biologically immortal, that after reaching sexual maturity, they are able to regenerate to the polyp stage once again, return fresh and renewed. They could continue forever and ever this way. The documentarians fawn over the jellyfish as an elevated being, their cells key to humanity’s future immortality. He half-hallucinates, half-images the documentarians talking to him from the screen, promising him that there will be no end to this, that they will inject him with jellyfish venom and return him to this purgatory again and again and again.

He turns off the TV and dreams of drowning.

The temperature rises as March dawns, the sun beating heat down on the back of his neck for the first time in as long as he can remember. And that’s not all. He remembers the child throwing a tantrum outside the konbini as he walks to work, he remembers a joke Sanzu tells to no laughs before a meeting, he remembers the taste of a cold beer breaking on his tongue.

Spring draws near and winter thaws, and with it, Rindou lets himself feel for the first time in nearly three weeks. He misses you terribly.

The memory of you is a blistering wound, barely healed enough to touch, but he tries, remembering every time he made you laugh, every time you made him laugh in turn. He remembers soft flesh yielding in his hands when he gripped your waist and the equally soft flesh of your inner thigh. He remembers your bottomless appetite for new experiences, how you wanted to experience the world with him at your side. He remembers until the past and present merge into a stagnant stream, until the only thing he can’t remember is why he refused monogamy so insistently when it means an eternity without summers.

There is no autopilot, nothing natural at all about texting you after so long apart, but he chooses to anyway. His fingers move key by key, every word carefully considered and chosen, and then he chooses to push send. He moves.

It is as simple a message as he could manage: Can we talk?

That night, for the first time in a long time, Rindou does not dream.

--

Rindou is well-acquainted with the exterior of your apartment block. It is a relic from when architecture built out rather than up. Each apartment has its own front door and step. The building is an ugly white block of cement and plaster, but the neighborhood has planted symmetrical stripes of shrubbery between each apartment to liven it up, and you say that in the spring when the flowers bloom, the block is transformed in a vibrant display of every imaginable color: soft blue nemophilas and sickeningly yellow canola flowers, plump purple tulips and tender pink plum blossoms. Now, with the frost barely thawed, the flower beds lie dormant.

A minute passes after he knocks on your door, and he wonders if he dreamed your response last night when you invited him over to talk. At his feet, a cat meows. Rindou makes eye contact, and the cat flees into the bushes that separate your stoop from your neighbor’s. He watches for some sign of the cat, but the bushes don’t so much as rustle on your quiet street.

Maybe he dreamed the cat, too.

Just as Rindou decides to shoot you a text, the door opens, and then there is you. You, just as he remembered, all light and life and color. A lifetime’s worth of tension plummets off his shoulders at this measly, first sight of you.

Voice clear and lovely and unavoidable as the chiming of a temple bell calling him home, you usher him inside, past the entryway and up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor. You chatter away about how you are in the middle of laundry, and would he mind if you do chores while he talks?

Under normal circumstances, he would closely observe your childhood home, looking for clues to the person you once were in the wear of the tatami and pictures framed on the wall, but the mere nape of your neck enthralls him and fixes his gaze. You shine like a beacon, the kind of light that doesn’t merely attract but blurs and blends the shadows until he can see nothing else.

Your clothes hang drying on the balcony, which is too cramped for two to stand comfortably, so he opts to hang back in the attached living room, while you fold your clothes into a basket. Rindou realizes that the task gives you the perfect excuse to avoid eye contact, which you have gracefully evaded since he arrived. It is a worrying sign perhaps, but it means he can study your face shamelessly as you work. There is a layer of grease atop your scalp and no makeup to cover the shadows that border your eyes. He looks no better, of course, but at least he’s been sleeping, and he frowns at these signs of neglect. Even so, he could get drunk on watching you unhindered like this.

The tension of all that is left unsaid writhes until you can’t help but break the silence, always the first to snap.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” you ask.

“I know you asked me to leave you alone, but I don’t want to. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” you confess quietly.

Something stronger than relief blooms where there has been so much pain, and Rindou spits out his response, words tumbling into one another without pause.

“Then what are we doing? Let me take you out!”

“Rindou, we can’t just go back to how things were,” you sigh. “I don’t mean that I won’t. I mean that I can’t. When things started between us, I thought I was just down for the ride, and I had no expectations of you or us, but then…everything just kind of snuck up on me, and when we were together, I felt so safe and cared for, like I never have before, and it was wonderful. Then, with a snap of your fingers, all of that just went away, and I was left with nothing, and it sucked. Trust me, I’ve thought about calling you a hundred times a day because it’s been so hard. But if I break now, I’m going to have to start moving on all over again from scratch, and I can’t do that. I need to just…get it over with.”

“Well, I don’t want to just get over it.”

The sun beats down on his brow through the glass, and a base sheen of sweat bursts from beneath his skin. The way you express yourself, honest and eloquent, as if inviting him to truly understand you, will never not amaze him, never not leave him scrambling for something half as true to share with you in turn. Words have never been his weapon of choice; he leads with his fists, his wits if pressed, the allure of fresh banknotes, but never his words, and now, they are the only thing that may save him. He had hours to prepare something to convince you to give him another chance, but the words sounded so stupid in his mind that he threw out every option as fast as he could imagine them. His memory has been shaky lately or he would recite the speech Ran wrote for him verbatim. His brother had been right. He should have written it down.

So, it is with no plan and with brains scrambled like a cracked egg that Rindou continues, “You’re not the only one who things snuck up on. You’re the best part of my day. Even now, as shitty as things stand between us, you’re still the best thing in my life. I never wanted to be a boyfriend. But I’ve had lots of time to learn that I want to lose you even less. A lot less. If you need me to give up seeing other women, to commit, or whatever else, then I’ll do it. If it means you can feel safe with me again, I’ll do it.”

“I’m not trying to trap you, or change you,” you sigh.

“Too late! I’m fucking trapped! And I don’t care. I want you way more than I want my freedom.”

Finally, you turn away from the laundry, back to the horizon, and look at him. You are guarded, no fake smiles to reassure or disarm. You are, however, listening, and Rindou lets himself hope that somehow, somehow, he has found the words powerful enough to undo the damage he wrought.

“That all sounds really nice,” you admit, “But you obviously don’t want to be my boyfriend, or we would have had this talk a while ago. It took you weeks to realize you want me.”

For such a smart woman, you could say the stupidest things, and Rindou is incensed enough at the very idea of not wanting you that he tells you as much. A spark of fire, something finally more impassioned than dull resignation sparks in your eye at the insult, but he plows forward before you can snark back.

“I knew I wanted you from the moment I first saw you. And I always miss you the second you leave my side. What it took me weeks to admit was…well shit, that I can’t live without you because I love you.”

A gust of wind weaves its way between the taller buildings that flank your apartment to blast past the balcony just as your fingers fumble removing a white tee-shirt from the clothesline. The shirt flies out on an updraft. As if dancing with the wind, it whirls in tight circles just out of reach of your outstretched hand, a brief white flag before the wind dies down and it plummets to the street.

You lean over the balcony, like you might leap to follow it, but finding no escape in that direction, you turn to face Rindou’s love confession head-on, just as he once faced yours. He had expected the words, “I-love-you” to hurt, to tear open his throat on their journey out and to ache like a rotting tooth. After all, people lost their minds for love. They died for love. And when love was gone, they cauterized the wound, all decayed flesh and mindless bumbling through the motions, like living zombies. Love hurt or some shit, right?

Yet, he doesn’t regret telling you now, even as you stand quietly without returning his feelings. A million possibilities for heartbreak manifest in front of him, but Rindou feels stronger than he has in weeks. There are so many secrets that still divide you, but this one fundamental truth is undeniable, unretractable. Never again will he be able to claim he’s never loved. This love will forever be a part of his history, and Rindou embraces the fixedness of the path that lies before him, one that is forever imprinted upon by your shared love.

“You’re making it nearly impossible to refuse you,” you sigh out.

“Good. You shouldn’t,” Rindou agrees.

The screen door squeaks as you close it behind you, stepping close enough that he can faintly sense your body heat and lavender scented detergent emanating from the laundry basket. You stand together at a precipice. Your mouth twists to the side in what he recognizes as fear.

“I’m scared,” you whisper. “If we do this, and I get hurt again…I can’t –”

“Do you remember our first date, when you told me all about your favorite story? The one with the girl whose brother kills her?” Rindou blurts out. He doesn’t know where he is going with this. Inspiration hovers three steps ahead of his brain.

“A Smiling Death’s Head?” you ask uncertainly.

“Yeah, you said you hated that one version of it because the woman dies for a man who won’t choose her in return. You like the one where the woman is brain and risks everything – her honor, her family’s honor, her life even – for love, and the man she loves is willing to do the same. I’m thinking, that’s us right now. I’m here, baby, and I’m choosing this even though you might hurt me now. I don’t care what shit there is down the road, I’m choosing you, and I want you to do the same. Be brave like the women in your books and take this leap with me, please.”

Like a sunflower to the sun, your whole body leans in his direction as you say, “That might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I’d tell you not to get used to it, but who knows? This is the first time I’ve ever been in love. Maybe I am a romantic. You’ll have to choose me to find out.”

Pure joy knocks you off balance and tumbling into his arms. In seconds, you are tangled together. Your thighs clamp tight around his hips and your chin tucks into the notch between his neck and shoulders. His nose buries into the crook of your exposed throat, breathing in the balmy scent of sweat and sun. Just as naturally, your arms wrap around his waist as he holds you aloft. There is no space between your bodies. Nothing has felt more right since he first drew breath upon entering the world.

He has made his choice, and now you have made yours.

Rindou carries you into the open kitchen, sitting you on a high countertop, where neither of you need loosen your grip on the other. In fact, as he no longer needs to support your weight with his hands, he is free to tighten the embrace, wrapping two big arms around your back to clutch you even tighter to the heat of him.

Together like this, you both breathe through what feels like two blissful eternities that make the time spent apart seem like the passing of a few errant seconds. Time stops when you are gone, and it races when you are near. Rindou doubts he’ll ever return to the days of idly passing the time again. Not so long as he has you.

It is one of the happiest moments of his life. Not the happiness of a victory, but the absolute relief of a stay of execution, a sparing of the hangman’s noose. You are so unbelievably warm and soft as you cling to him. Little noises escape your mouth and get lost against his chest. It takes him a moment to recognize those sounds are words: “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

The fabric of his shirt sags from the weight of your tears as you weep, and he hates to imagine how exhausting the last several weeks have been as you ran yourself into the ground to avoid your heartbreak. He promises to care for you even when you can’t, or won’t, care for yourself. And now is as good a time as any to get started.

“No more tears,” Rindou cajoles, loosening your embrace just enough to draw your head up and look into those pretty eyes.

“I know I’m being ridiculous,” you hiccup-laugh. “I’m just so happy.”

He pinches the fat of your cheeks between his fingers, squishing your face into an adorable pout that stops the tears in their tracks.

“Now that I’m back, you’re going to be a good girl and listen to me, right?” he coaches.

You attempt a nod around his grip on your face, an eager half bob at the command.

“Good. First things first, you’re going to tell me everything I’ve missed while we were apart. And, I mean everything, baby. What’s going on with school, your mom, your friends. I want to know how Naoto’s work event went, how things are at the library, what you’re reading. If you read the nutritional information off a cereal box, I want to know about it,” Rindou orders.

“Yes, sir,” you slur through his fingers, and somehow you manage to sound perky and enthused despite your pinched lips and bloated cheeks.

“And you’re going to start taking care of yourself now that I’m back. No more all-nighters or studying until you collapse. You get seven hours of sleep every night minimum. You eat three meals a day. And you take at least one hour every day to do something fun, I don’t care what.”

“But sir!” you protest.

“That’s an order. Blink twice if you understand me.”

As your wet lashes bat down twice, Rindou notices the dreamy film that descends over your eyes, that recognizable, sleepy slide towards subspace as you relax your brain and surrender entirely to his will. All it took was the sound of his voice to affect you. And that’s not all. When the fingers of his other hand, the one not manipulating your cute little face, shift slightly on your neck, not even a full caress, you suck in a powerful breath like the touch might shatter you to pieces.

He vows to never take this, the power he commands over you, for granted again. Because as ardently as you react to his slightest touch, he is just as devoted in the hunt for those same reactions. He drinks up your sighs and pleasures and delicious little nose scrunches like an alcoholic at an open bar.

The sun filtering into the room is dimmer now, lighting up the dust mites as they float past the window. Rindou massages the base of your neck with a firm hand. Like a kitten, you purr and cant into the touch. He could stay like this until nightfall, until forever. Based on the little shivers that wrack your spine, the pathetic whimpers you can’t suppress, you are less contented, calves winding around his hips in a suggestion he only pretends to ignore.

“I have to tell you something,” you murmur, lips trailing his neck until they reach his ear. “I have to tell you, I was bad while we were apart.”

Rindou hides his smile in the base of your neck, continuing to stroke you like a beloved pet, “Were you now? I find that hard to believe.”

“I was, Sir. I came three times without permission. Twice on my own and once at the club,” you report.

Technically, you had his permission at the club when you came on Lady’s fingers as he nodded along with the audience, but he doesn’t tell you that, too amused by the eager way you tattle on yourself in the hopes he’ll spank you clean through a dry orgasm, thighs flexing around his waist as you imagine it. And he might punish you yet, but not today. Not when the weight of you in his arms feels like returning home after an odyssey, and unlike Odysseus, Rindou would have forgiven you anything – any infidelity, any betrayal, any treason – in his relief to find peace here once again.

“Hmm, you have been bad,” Rindou plays along. “And what do you think I ought to do about that?”

“Whatever you think best, Sir,” you offer, trying and failing to perform meekness as your excitement grows.

Rindou untethers you from his body, making sure you are seated securely on the counter beside an overflowing drying rack before he slides down, down, down to the floor, dragging your sweatpants along with him. You loom over him like a mountain in your half-naked glory, built like you were hand-crafted by a divine power for his enjoyment, designed to be worshipped. He belongs on his knees.

He lifts a foot to his mouth, tongue teasing past the toes, where he knows you are most ticklish, and pressing steady kisses to the arch. Slowly, he laps higher, passing your ankles, laving the muscles of your calves, and dedicating special attention to the sensitive skin behind your knees. An unstoppable giggle breaks free at the tickle, but your eyes warn him this is no laughing matter. His descent is achingly slow. Every centimeter he rises on your left leg must be repeated on his right before he will go higher, drawing out the torture until your breath goes shallow. It is an unhurried kind of worship that relaxes as well as arouses. There is a voluptuous surrender in the way he lingers on your legs, ignoring where you most want him as if time presents no obstacle to his exploration. All the while, he maintains eye contact, violet eyes transfixing you in place.

At your inner thighs, Rindou can’t resist, and he sucks twin hickeys onto each side. It’s the silken softness of your skin there, where you are never exposed to the sun. It’s the way your cunt smells, so close to his face as he marks you. You haven’t shaved in a few days, but the fine hairs hardly detract from the pillowy flesh. His cock aches for you.

Your panties join your sweatpants on the floor. For a solid minute, Rindou can do nothing but stare at your pretty pussy, so familiar and so missed. His hot breath dances over the sensitive skin, and you squirm, begging for the return of his mouth.

He smothers your cunt and himself in the process with open mouth kisses. Wet trails of his spit glisten in the wake of his lips. He uses his fingers to pinch at your hood until your glossy, little clit peeks out for him. The kisses he lays there are purposeful, devotional.

“Rindou, sir, please,” you whimper.

“You want me to eat this pretty pussy the way my pretty girl likes it?” Rindou asks.

You nod eagerly, and Rindou makes a show of considering it. The kisses he just gifted you were merely playful, a pantomime of what you really needed. Even as he toyed with your clit, your hips bucked greedily against the anchor of his hands at your hips, begging for more pressure, more, more, more.

“I was going to reacquaint myself with this perfect body from your toes to your eyelids. If I get distracted here, who will play with the rest of your body? Who will play with your pretty tits? Do you still want me to lick this cunt?”

“Yes, sir,” you answer swiftly.

“Well, since you’re being so polite,” Rindou hums, rubbing a firm hand up your inner thigh until you arch. “I’ll do it, but only if you play with your tits just the way you know I would. You’ll have to be my hands, baby.”

It is an uncharacteristically kind decision, but Rindou can’t summon up the will to call you belittling names or deny you too badly. You may be a pathetic, needy cockslut, but he is the one who couldn’t survive three weeks without the hug of your cunt, so what does that make him? At least, for today, he is simply too drunk on your body to degrade you the way you deserve.

Even without his firm hand, you are still an obedient little thing – one of the things he loves most about you – so you hasten to show off, tugging your tee-shirt up over your breasts and grabbing handfuls of your own flesh. He loves the way your fingers leave marks from how hard you grope and squeeze them. Rindou slips a hand in his pants, so that he can thumb at the head of his cock, watching the way you touch yourself. The foot he previously licked plants right on his shoulder to keep you spread open for him. Then, he dives back into your pussy.

With his tongue, Rindou laps out the wetness that collects at your entrance and smears it up to the top of your mound. It is messy. You practically flood his mouth at first contact, and he relishes that familiar tang. He buries everything – from his tongue to his nose – between your folds, lapping and sucking until your thighs quiver. With your clit, he is merciless, all pressure and speed as it has left the defenses of your clitoral hood and now beckons to him, an engorged button for him to tweak and nudge and suction into the hot wetness of his mouth.

You express your approval of his efforts by overenthusiastically abusing your tits. When you pinch your nipples, you tug that extra amount until they’re sore. When you squeeze them, you grope your tits like a pervert, hard and merciless. When you caress the undersides, you follow up with a stinging slap to the center that alights your nerves and brings tears to your eyes. It is masterful, a work of pure artistry, for an audience of one. And what an appreciative audience! Rindou shucks off his jeans, so he can palm the head of his cock as he watches the student become the master. He taught you this, this brutality, this unrestrained use of your body, and he wonders whether you spanked your ass raw in his absence, pretending your little hand was larger, meatier, his.

The toes on his shoulder clench, and he knows you are going to cum. All of those signs particular to you and your pleasure are committed to his memory and on display now as he worries your clit with his tongue.

So, of course, Rindou pulls back from your cunt, breaking a strand of spit that connects him to your pussy with his hand.

It is adorable the way your hips arc, humping at air like that might give you the stimulation you need to fly over the edge. As soft as he feels towards you in the new dawn of your shared love, Rindou can’t help but laugh at the pathetic display. It is easy to bat your hand away when you move it towards your own pussy, funny how the pitiful moue of your lips trembles at being denied. You must be out of practice to think for a second he would let you rut yourself to orgasm without permission. An out of practice needy hole in need of discipline. He can’t even feel disappointment. It’s simply too pathetic. Too pathetic and too intoxicating.

Nothing in his long life of vice compares to the knowledge that your pleasure belongs to him. His to control, his to provide. Like a headrush, a heady sense of his own power and gratitude for it stuns him into stillness. Rindou has always liked this power, enjoyed the needy pleas of the women he fucked and the way they would surrender beneath his hands, hoping, praying, that he might let them cum. He would snicker and mock their desperation even as the blood rushed to his cock. But there is an opposite side to the coin as well, a kind of self-flagellation because even as he denies you, he is simultaneously denying himself. Because the only sight better than your miserable cries at an edge is the glorious sight of you coming undone, brain blitzed and tongue heavy and breasts heaving and stomach clenching and…

“I didn’t tell you to stop abusing those tits,” Rindou warns.

He simply watches and you spring back to action, drawing the meat of your breast as high as it will go to try to tongue at your own nipple. When you aren’t satisfied, you spit and use the slick to rub aching little circles over each nipple. Your neck arches back at the feeling. Rindou can see when a zap of pleasure rolls through your body in the way your throat swallows, in the way your untouched hole spasms around nothing. He jerks his cock rapidly, splitting his attention between your performance and that clenching hole.

Two minutes pass after your first edge before Rindou decides he can safely return to your clit without immediately sparking an orgasm. Rindou licks his fingers, messy and thorough, before guiding them to your entrance. There is a nudge of resistance as he sinks two fingers inside as it’s been weeks since he last used you here, and he imagines that same tight pressure massaging his shaft, suffocating him at the root.

Sunk inside to the second knuckle, Rindou maneuvers until he finds your front walls, and then he plunges his fingers repeatedly into that spot as you shake and moan. He doesn’t even need to touch your clit now as it all but vibrates at the internal stimulation. One hand plants on your belly to hold you in place as he picks up speed, fingering your tiny cunt expertly until your squeals are as loud as the wet gushing from between your thighs and the sound of blood pounding in Rindou’s head.

Rindou works a third finger inside you, so that you won’t shatter when his cock breaks you open later. Then, he kisses up and down your stomach to where your cunt is stretched open by his fingers and only just grazing your clit with his passing tongue. Your head lolls like a broken doll, waist twitching one way then the next. Your twitchy little hole tells him that you will cum soon, fluttering like a vice around his fingers. He leaves it to the last possible second, so that he almost worries his mistimed it before abandoning your pussy again.

This time, you don’t try to alleviate the ache but bite down on your own fist in a childish cry of grievance at what is taken from you. He can literally see your hole clench around nothing, an enticing invitation for his neglected cock. An invitation he has ignored long enough.

Rindou stands, lifting you off the counter and depositing you knees-first on the cold tile. His cock hovers at face level, hard, demanding, weeping from missing you too long.

He smacks the meat of your cheek with his cock. A few heavy blows that bounce the head off your lip, leaving it stained with his essence. Whenever Rindou jerks off, he is vicious with his prick. His hand would blur from how fast he jerks it, but in contrast, you are always so delicate to start, all kitten licks and starry eyes at his cock like it is a rare book or something equally valuable to you. It is not so different from the worshipful way he learned your body. He craves that show of devotion from you, its own kind of commitment ceremony more powerful than swearing oneself in front of a priest or signing some stupid papers. He wants to see you pledge yourself to him in the basest ways imaginable.

“No hands. No tongue. No mouth,” Rindou says, voice too tight for the command to land as one, but you listen anyway. You are perfect like that.

The skin of your cheek is soft as you rub yourself against him like a cat. You twist under his cock, so that it rests heavy across your pretty features. A fan whirs overhead, but Rindou can clearly hear the deep breath you take through your nose as you soak in the smell of him. Laid out like this, his cock is nearly as long as your face.

Despite the limitations he imposed, you find a way to shift his cock, so it stands to attention between his stomach and your face, which you then rub up and down in time to his heartbeat. You have eyes only for his cock, so close to your nose that it crosses your eyes. The understimulation combined with your debauched face is the worst kind of torment. He has known hell in broken ribs, in a child’s empty belly, in the devastation of the drug trade he peddles. He has known hell. But he has never known a hell that lived so close to heaven as this.

“Go ahead and add your hands and tongue. Still no mouth,” Rindou urges.

Your hand is gentle when it grips him at the base and strokes. His skin stretches forward as you skim up, up, up the length of him. He jumps when slim fingers ghost over the head.

Both hands begin to work in tandem, stroking in opposite directions, different rhythms, so that every centimeter of him is caressed. Like you want to tempt him to sink into your mouth, you open wide and let his tip sit on your tongue. The pink little muscle writhes against the underside where he is most sensitive. Too often when he uses your mouth, he chokes you on the length of him until you flounder, wild-eyed and proud in your accomplishment. This, letting you take the lead and showcase all your skill and study of him, may become a guilty a pleasure for him though. As you trace your tongue up the vein lining his shaft, he realizes you know his body every bit as well as he knows yours.

“Please, can I suck it, sir? I want to make you feel good,” you plead.

“You’re already making me feel good. And besides, you look too pretty like this,” Rindou murmurs, gliding a hand down your spit-stained cheek.

“Like this, sir?”

There is nothing submissive, sweet, or innocent in the way you lick a wet streak from base to tip. So terribly slowly that by the time you kiss the plump head of him, his eyes have rolled back in bliss.

Then, like a secret, you whisper into his cockhead,” I love you, sir.”

By you, he is undone.

Most likely, Rindou thinks, he lowered you gently to the ground then, but this is pure speculation as one moment you are on your knees, and the next you are on your back, legs wound his waist, and his cock bullying its way into your pussy.

It is like coming home when your hips meet with a loud smack, as close as two people can be, cock pressed up and into your stomach. He is gentler when he pulls out, making sure your walls can accommodate him. Your heels dig painfully into his ass at the slow slide. They tighten as if to keep him there when he sinks back in deep.

The only way he could possibly fuck you after everything you shared today is deep. Not too hard or fast, but penetrating, inescapable thrusts that make you wail when he bottoms out.

A cunt is a cunt, he always thought. There is only so much variation in depth, in tightness, in slickness, in heat from one woman to the next. And that’s true of yours, too, except when he’s inside you, he’s not only feeling your walls massage his cock, he’s also smelling the natural perfume that emanates from your neck and thighs. He’s tasting the sweat off your delicious breasts. He’s soaking up the cries and moans that you offer him like a votive.  Yes, you are deliciously obedient and hot, but you are also just you, and that is manifold times more addictive than the drugs he sells for a living.

His balls draw up, and Rindou is shocked to realize he could cum already. He empties his mind, counting his breaths until the urge to fill you ebbs away to more manageable levels. Still his balls ache fiercely.

You fare little better as each thrust breaks you open. His hips grind into yours, pressing him tight to where you folds spread open, where your clit is engorged and primed. Your hands rub through layers of sweat on his back to press him even closer. Nose-to-nose, so you trade breaths and groans through open mouths.

“Please, can I cum, sir?” you ask.

“You wanna cum?” Rindou grits out.

You grasp his wrist, the one not supporting his bodyweight off the floor, and guide his hand to your bared throat. Instinctively, his fingers curl around your pretty neck, not pressing, just there, like a favorite necklace.

“Make me cum,” you say.

Your hand folds over his own and flexes until he begins to squeeze, cutting off your air supply. A little smile of pure contentment curls your lips as you ease into the sensation of being choked. Without air, your brain panics, the cock digging its way to your center begins to feel less welcome, less safe, more startling and therefore unignorable. And then, your brain slackens, and his grinding cock becomes the center of your universe. Just feeling remains and nothing else.

It is a wonder you still trust him enough to let him do this.

A wonder. That’s what you are.

“Cum for me, baby,” Rindou prays, lips to your ear. “Cum as hard as you can.”

His hand loosens to allow a windfall of air to flood your lungs and short circuit your brain. The sudden relief compounds the way he speeds up his thrusts, so that your cunt is filled just the way he knows you need it.

You start to cum sometimes on the second stroke. The little bit of slack he had to maneuver inside you disappears. It is a vice that wraps around his cock. Your pussy pulses haphazardly, like a clenching fist, and he floods your womb with cum.

Lips meet in a messy kiss. Off-center and desperate. But neither of you have the brain power for artistry. His cock is too busy with the aftershocks, managing seven hot spurts into the haven of your cunt after the initial torrent. And you are practically crying into his mouth; a short but obliterating orgasm that wracked you to your core and left you devastated in the aftermath.

This must be what people call ‘making love.’

--

Sometime in the aftermath, Rindou remembers that you share the apartment with your mother, and that he cannot make a bed here on the kitchen floor with a soft cock buried in her daughter’s cunt. First, impressions count after all.

On autopilot, he takes you to the shower, where you both clean up, bodies limp against one another. At no point do you stop holding hands. Even when you pee after. You remain tethered to each other every step of the way.

Your mind wakes up just enough to direct him to your bedroom afterward. The bed is only a twin, but he prefers it, the way it forces you both to stay wrapped up entirely in each other’s arms. You practically lay across his thigh as you both fall into a deep sleep.

An hour or two after judging by the angle of the sun seeping through your window, Rindou wakes up. Vaguely, he notices for the first time his surroundings. The duvet on your bed is threadbare and patchy, but the sheets are surprisingly soft. The room is mostly neat with dirty clothes tucked away in a hamper and clean clothes folded away, though the desk in the corner is piled haphazardly with books and looseleaf notes. A pen must have rolled off your desk earlier because the wheel of your desk chair is lodged atop it. The walls are painted a delicate eggshell yellow, and there are no embarrassing childhood posters there but rather tacked-up photos of you and your friends, you and your mom, you and him.

Rindou finds it hard to swallow when he sees the photos, looks away.

“Morning,” you rumble sleepily into his skin.

He kisses you soundly before correcting you that it is sometime in the early evening. It doesn’t matter either way. Time has abdicated its power. Whether it’s six in the evening or six in the morning, he will stay in this cramped bed, holding you. Short of the police breaking down the door or a zombie apocalypse, nothing could compel him to stop.

“I didn’t dream it,” you murmur to yourself.

“No,” Rindou confirms simply. He has never been a man of many words and now that the time for speeches has passed, he finds himself exhausted of them. He prefers to listen anyway, missed your songbird voice in his ear.

“And you’re not going to regret it?” you say.

Rindou shakes his head.

“I can introduce you as my boyfriend now?” you question.

“Mmmhmm,” Rindou hums, placing a delicate kiss to the crest of your ear.

Your fingers curl tightly around his hand, and you say urgently, “Please don’t cheat on me. I think it’ll kill me.”

“Shh, stop worrying. I won’t even look at another woman again, okay?” Rindou promises.

This little bout of insecurity passes, unable to survive the absolute security of his deep-voiced assurances. Then, you proceed to tell him all about your time apart. Rindou hardly speaks a word, soaking up the way you effortlessly create a full-bodied narrative of details and characters and feelings. You talk mostly about schoolwork and the library, your friends weaving in and out of the periphery of your stories. Occasionally, he asks a question, sparking new stories that outrun the clock until the sky is dark outside and your voice scratchy from overuse.

It takes Rindou by surprise when you say seemingly out of the blue, “Earlier, when you said you would never even look at a woman again…I don’t think you have to take it that far. I mean, unless you want to, but I’m not asking you to.”

“Thanks, that would have made leaving the house kind of hard,” Rindou laughs lowly. “But seriously, I won’t touch anyone but you. You have my word.”

You squirm out from the cocoon of his arms, and he unconsciously chases your body heat. Once you are sitting up, sheets tumbling over your peaked nipples, you say, “I don’t mind if you do, a little.”

Now it is Rindou’s turn to sit up.

“You don’t mind if I touch other women a little?”

“Oh, this is so embarrassing,” you groan at the disbelief in his voice. “I just mean, when we first met and you flogged that woman…I thought that was so hot, watching you. And I could see us wanting to go to the club again sometime, as a couple, and it would be okay with me at least, if you wanted to umm, do a scene with someone else. I think I might even like it. Or, umm, so long as it’s not sex, I think it would be fine even if I’m not there so long as you tell me all about it,” you say.

“What does sex mean to you?”

You think about it for a moment. “Anything that gets your dick wet.”

A beat later Rindou starts to laugh. He laughs until his stomach hurts, while you beat your fists into his shoulder and insist it’s not funny. But it is funny! It is funny that he wasted so many weeks thanks to his stubborn pride when you weren’t even demanding his forever faithfulness, leaving the door wide open to all kinds of sins and debauchery so long as he what? Maintained open communication?

All you ask is that he gives up sticking his dick in other women and in exchange he gets…everything. He gets everything.

When Rindou finally catches his breath, he eyes you like the marvel you are and says, “I really don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

“Funny, I feel the same way,” you smile. “So, I don’t want you getting your dick wet with anyone else, and I want to know what you do with other people. I may change my mind down the road, but I actually thought about it a lot after everything that happened, and I think that’s my boundary. So, until I do change my mind, that’s the rule. What about you? What boundaries do you have for me?”

Rindou has put little thought into it, assuming a vanilla-style definition of monogamy would be your future together, but half the answer comes instantly, “I control your orgasms. No cumming without my permission.”

“I like that,” you agree.

“And no dating anyone else. Watching you with Lady was fucking hot, and I wouldn’t mind sharing you with other doms if you are interested down the line, but no cumming and no going out with them.”

“Oh, no dating for you either! No dating and no falling in love. And you can’t do scenes with the same woman over and over without me. I don’t want you developing feelings for anyone. I didn’t think of that,” you say.

Rindou nods. “It sounds like we’ll both have to work out the details as they come along. But I’m open to changing the rules as we go because all that really matters is that we’re together, and you’re happy.”

“You’re going to make me happy?” you tease.

You smile beatifically, an angel on earth. A sun to his sunflower, a planet to his moon sucking him into your orbit. Rindou never believed he could make anyone happy, but he knows now that he is going to try until there’s no fight left in him.

“I’m going to make you very happy,” he vows.

It is a rebirth, and it is a start. And you both think in that moment that you hope there is no end to the bright future that lies in front of you.

This is love.

A/N: editing this was a saga, so sorry if i missed anything!

With every minute that passes, his ire rises higher.

Rindou strains through another set of lat pulls, refusing to let you and your silent treatment slow him down. Opposite him, Benkei deadlifts a stunning 300 kg. When the bar hits the floor, the clang echoes off the mirror-lined walls.

There is a gym in the basement of his apartment complex, guaranteed to be empty in the early pre-dawn hours, which he prefers for the privacy it offers. Wakasa’s gym is never empty. Fighters practice boxing, MMA, and jujutsu with retired pros morning and night. Most of the customers sport tattoos from one syndicate or another, and Rindou often recognizes the guys on his own payroll by the free weights or sweating in the saunas. Rindou only started returning to Wakasa’s gym for the occasional practice bout or strength training session in the last few months. Wakasa’s been filling his ear with the idea of taking you and his girl on a double date, a vacation to the mountains when your semester wraps, and Rindou has been coming by to talk the details.

A text finally lights up his screen, and Rindou forces himself to ignore it for a solid minute while he finishes his set even as his eyes dart back against his will.

I can’t do dinner. Plans with Naoya. But I could do drinks.

Wakasa lopes forward, hands in his pockets, before Rindou can answer. It’s his turn to leave you with the ellipsis of anxiety and doom. He locks his phone and tosses face-down on a bench.

“Wanted to tell you we got the goods through Nagoya yesterday,” Wakasa says tonelessly. “Ushioda’s really come through. My guy says customs not only didn’t check, they agreed to decrease security personnel during offboarding. Ran is going to be a menace about being the one to make this happen, but he’s worked his magic on this.”

Rindou matches Wakasa’s subdued attitude beat for beat, but in his mind, he runs through a month’s worth of memos and emails to recall if he knew about this plan. “You sent a shipment of girls through the port? That’s fucking brazen.”

“Mochi wanted to test the limits early with something cheap before we put our expensive shit through there,” Wakasa said.

According to Takeomi, Ushioda begged on bended knee for clemency for his son. It was hard to say whether love or shame drove the father, but the outcome was the same. Acme Corp would smuggle Bonten contraband through the Port of Nagoya, so long as they streamlined into their regular shipping schedule to avoid setting off any alarm bells.

This was the second shipment received through the port after moving a little marijuana through a few weeks earlier. Rindou tries to keep his expectations in check as operations continue smoothly, but his hopes rise against his better judgment.

“Mochi says he wants to do a few more runs, but that you should start thinking through where you could source the heroine,” Wakasa relays.

They could source through the triads as the Chinese and Russian gangs already have inroads with the producers, but they would each take their cut and ruin Bonten’s margins. The drug would be new on the market. Rindou doesn’t want to price high outright. Start cheap and once the clientele can’t live without their fix, then drive the prices up. They could run a deficit to start, but that would mean Koko up his ass. Cutting the triads out completely isn’t an option either as they would need to ship out of China, but if they could build their own supplier network, they could negotiate a better rate.

“It’s gonna be too obvious if we have guys coming in and out of Afghanistan all the time. They don’t even run direct flights out of Seoul. We’d get picked instantly. I’m thinking we could get away with sending someone through to Turkey though. With a little palm greasing, they can cross into Iran without getting their passport stamped. The IRGC run the heroine trade through Afghanistan, so we could develop our own connections from there,” Rindou says.

Wakasa nods along at what he already figured. “Who you gonna send?”

“Not me if that’s what you’re thinking. I hate plane rides,” Rindou says.

“Of course, not you. We need you. I was thinking Hanma.”

Rindou groans. “I fucking hate that guy.”

“We all fucking hate that guy. But that’s why he’s good at this shit. He’s done great work in Hong Kong. Send him over there. He knows how to make the coldest man sweat,” Wakasa suggests.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll think about it.”

He finishes another set of lat pulls, while Wakasa and Benkei chat away about the insipid rise of Peloton. Endorphins rush to his brain, and he feels magnanimous enough to finally shoot you a reply.

See you at 5.

If he has anything to say about it, Naoya will be eating dinner alone tonight.

--

Two people could not be dressed more oppositely. Fresh from his post-workout shower, Rindou wears nothing but a pair of sweats. Droplets of water scatter across his bare shoulder blade as his long, wet hair drips freely. Strong chest and arms still pumped from muscle training great you at the door. You, meanwhile, dressed for an Arctic exploration in a floor-length parka, bulging in all the wrong places, a fluffy scarf wound three-times round your neck, and an equally fluffy, fur-lined hood. A mask completes the look, so the only skin he can see is a sliver of your forehead and your narrowed eyes.

“Just looking at you makes me feel cold,” you scowl.

“Just looking at you is making me cold.”

You barge right past him into his apartment. The heater works overtime to keep the entire complex a toasty 23 degrees. Past the entryway, where you slip out of your boots, the dining room table is lined with boxes of Chinese takeout; Unsure what you’d want to eat, Rindou opted to order a smorgasbord of options.

Beneath the unflattering coat, you wear a black dress. The long sleeves and tasteful length contrast a daring vee that dips down to show off the swell of your lovely, little breasts. You’re packaged like a delicious gift for the unwrapping, and Rindou can’t resist planting a soft kiss to the back of your neck as you hang your coat. He expects the battle tonight will be a long and painful one, but still you dressed up for him.

“Good to see it’s you under there. For a second, I thought it might be an assassin,” Rindou jokes.

“Easy for you to laugh all warm in here! It’s freezing outside. They’re calling for snow tonight into tomorrow, which sucks. I can’t miss class at this point in the semester,” you complain.

“Well, I’ve got everything you need to warm up,” Rindou says. He gestures at the table laden with food, and then, more critically, brandishes the bottle of wine bought just for tonight. “And if the weather’s too bad tomorrow, I’m sure they’ll cancel. You can just hang out here all day.”

“My professors are all sadists. I wouldn’t put it past them to host class as they get double-bypass surgery. They’d have the surgeon right there in the lecture hall,” you grumble.

Rindou half listens as you launch into a prolonged rant about your upcoming finals. His attention is understandably split as he searches your lively expressions for the ugly shadow of jealousy. Behind every word, he hunts for double meanings.

The look of pure betrayal on your face when he ran into you yesterday in Chiba will not soon leave his mind. It colored his scenes yesterday with Mayuri, turning him mean and unmerciful as he bound and belted her ass red. She deserved his full attention after putting her trust in him, but Rindou twice almost walked away to call you. Had you answered, he might have berated you for daring to look at him like that, like you’d caught him fucking your mother or murdering the family pet. Like he’d done something unforgivable to you.

Now, as you gripe about exams, every bit the picture of the beleaguered uni student, your words ring false. Like you are filling time and space to put distance between the you of yesterday, so judgey and offended, and the you of today. You tell him how exams are two months out, and like a good student, you are already studying in earnest in the pits of what you dub “flashcard hell” as Kii has taken to posting flashcards over every expanse of wall in her apartment, springing prep questions on unconsenting listeners, and crying periodically about how she should have spent fewer hours sleeping and more time reading the supplementary materials. Rindou hums in sympathy in all the right places, and he almost, almost begins to relax into the conversation. Like an idiot.

“Are you feeling the dumplings or the pork?” Rindou asks, plating up a hearty helping of food for himself.

“Neither. I can’t eat, remember?” you say.

“Oh, come on. Stay the night. It’s too cold to be going out.”

“True, but I promised Naoto. We’re going to this really fancy curry restaurant, and he said he’d pay, so I’m planning to go all out and get dessert,” you say.

Noticing his wine glass is running low, Rindou drains the last dregs and pours himself a healthy portion. This will be easier drunk. He debates pouring you more as well, wondering if a little tipsiness would make you spunkier or mellow the worst of your impulses. Because he senses the fit approaching, the moment you break your pretense that everything is fine and well and force a confrontation.

“You know, I don’t like playing games,” he says.

 “I don’t like playing games either.”

“Then, don’t.”

Rindou says it shortly, definitively. The barest hint of command reinforces his voice, and he watches the way you receive the order, squirming in that delightfully submissive way of yours before you reject your inclination to obedience. You set your jaw.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say.

Rindou sighs. He expected you would be difficult but not passive aggressive. Not like this.

“You have dinner plans with Naoto? Seriously?”

“Yes?”

“Bullshit,” Rindou snaps. “I expected you to be immature about what happened yesterday, but this? You’re better than this. Forget your conveniently timed dinner plans, and let’s act like adults. Then, we can have a nice night.”

“It’s a work event. Naoto was nervous about going alone, so he asked me to come with him. This was planned weeks ago. I just forgot until he reminded me,” you insist, standing up from your chair, like the added height will strengthen your lie.

“Convenient,” Rindou sneers.

In the six months you’ve been together, you have never had a genuine fight or even argument. Seeing your smiling face typically puts Rindou in too good a mood, curbs the worst of his temper, so he is slow to pick fights. You, meanwhile, listen so well, adapting your behavior without him having to utter a word. Bickering typically becomes flirtatious banter in a matter of minutes, the kind that ends with your panties in his pocket.

So, Rindou doesn’t know what to expect from you in a real fight. He half expected you to fold at the slightest correction. You are still young, so he doesn’t write off the possibility of some kind of petty manipulation either, the silent treatment maybe, or more probably breaking into a mess of tears, the kind that bring so many men to a panic; Unfortunately for you, Rindou doesn’t capitulate to a woman’s cries or begging, going cold at any miserable attempt to manipulate his emotions.

Faced with you now, the tendons in your neck pulse as you square of against him without any sign of crumbling. You worry your lower lip between your teeth until it is red and swollen. It is the only sign of anxiety. Otherwise, you stand strong.

“If you feel like I’m somehow attacking you, it must be a guilty conscience. Because I haven’t said or done anything to you.”

“What do I have to feel guilty about?” Rindou demands coldly.

“You’d have to tell me. Because I thought about it all day and night –”

“See, I knew you were wound up about yesterday –”

“I thought about it all day and night,” you raise your voice to drown him out. “And, yes, it was weird to see you with someone else. Yes, it hurt. It was so unexpected. But, if you think I’m trying to punish you over it, you’re out of line because my eyes are wide open. You’re not my boyfriend –”

“No, I’m not. Which is why you shouldn’t –”

“I know, I know. How can I be hurt or angry when you’re not my boyfriend? You didn’t cheat on me or break any promises. I have nothing to be upset about.”

“Right.”

Confused and more than a little wary, Rindou sits back down at the table. He has held conversations like this a few times in his life. Most subs understand the importance of negotiation implicitly and take him for what he is. There have been a handful of in the past, however, usually inexperienced women like you, who struggled to work through the limitations of their relationship with him, crashing futilely against the boundaries of what he offered.

Because he doesn’t do relationships. Blame it on the dangers of his work, the secrecy inherent in the lifestyle, or some intrinsic flaw in his makeup. Regardless, he never plans to tie himself down to one woman. All that road offers is the erosion of his freedom.

“Since you wanted to talk about it so much though, bringing it up and all, I would like to ask about what I should expect,” you continue. “Because I didn’t realize you were seeing other people, and that raises questions. Like, are you practicing safe sex with these women? Have you been getting tested for STDs? Should we be using condoms? And, are you looking for more long-term subs? How would you even fit in another sub? Would we have to see each other less, so you could make time for a new one? What should I expect going forward?”

Each question is too reasonable to deny, so Rindou answers plainly, “You’re the only person I see regularly, so I use condoms with everyone else and get tested on the first of every month. If you want to use condoms together, that is entirely your decision. I’ll accept whatever you decide. I’m not looking to train anyone else right now. If I found someone that suited my tastes, I might consider it though, and yeah, that would mean adjusting my schedule around because I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you would not be open to training together.”

“No!”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Rindou says.

“How many women have you been with since we got together?” you demand.

There is no good answer, and Rindou groans, “Seriously? Don’t start overreacting now.”

“I’m cool! I’m being so cool. Just answer the question,” you smile, but it is a mockery of your normal, gleaming smiles. Teeth clenched tight together, it is more like an animal baring its fangs.

“No! I don’t owe you a fucking itemized list of every woman I’ve fucked. Just like I don’t run around town telling them about you. I haven’t cheated on you. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“I just wanna know how and when you’re finding time to meet other people.”

Rindou rolls his eyes. “Because that’s rational. You don’t actually want to know the answer to that.”

“I just don’t know where you’re possibly finding the time to meet all these women –”

“Again, you’re exaggerating. Not all these women. Some, like Mayuri, I knew before you. Some I meet through work. Straightforward stuff.”

“Mayuri is the woman from yesterday?”

“I think we’re done with this conversation now,” Rindou says tightly.

A shininess blurs the color of your eyes then, and Rindou sighs. He wants to wrap you up in his arms and praise you for being such a strong, beautiful girl because despite all your tough words, this isn’t easy for you. If he could be a better man for you, he would consider it, but there is only so much he can offer, and the burden of accepting that is on you.

“Thank you for being honest with me. I really do need to head out and meet Naoto, but I’ll think about the condom thing,” you murmur.

“Baby, don’t leave like this,” Rindou tries. There is no more fight in your stance and now that the threat of conflict is ended, he finds the energy draining from his whole body.

“I’m fine! We’re fine. Seriously, Rindou. I’m not going to overreact or stamp my foot at you like that might change something. My eyes are wide open like I told you. I understand where you’re coming from completely. We can hang out soon,” you say.

Rindou doesn’t like the idea of you leaving when your foundations are so shaken, wants to stuff you full of gone-cold Chinese food and cuddle on the couch until you fall asleep on his shoulder. Even if neither of you yelled or descended into insults, he feels like he fought a war, and the only way to recover is in your arms.

He follows you to the entryway.

You redon your winter gear in a hurry. The puffy coat is plush and cozy as he pulls you close and kisses you long and slow. You return the kiss with wind-chapped lips not fighting him at all. The heat that always explodes between you blazes, and he cups and caresses you through the barrier of the coat.

He wants you to stay.

You break the kiss after only a minute and smile.

“I’ll call you, ok?”

And then, you are gone.

--

When Rindou sleeps, he dreams of shopping malls built like mazes, window shopping displays of the finest goods, and he understands without knowing that to obtain even one miraculous product from these stores would spell his salvation; But whenever he tries to enter one of the stores, the maze shifts, redirects him until he is walking forwards again, searching. Still searching. During the slippery seconds between sleep and waking, that liminal space where dreams and life converge, he stews in resentment for what he can’t possess. That resentment often follows him into the day, though he tries not to dwell on it. The recurring dream started sometime in his early twenties. He remembers that dream joining him in sleep on at least a monthly basis, but for all he knows, he dreams it every night only to forget with the rising of the sun.

The weeks that follow the lingerie incident remind him of that dream only there is no supernatural force reworking the architecture of time and space to prevent him from entering the store. It feels like he’s piloting a plane headed straight for a cliff. There is still time to push the emergency button and eject to safety if he is only willing to abandon the plane to its solitary, fiery fate. But, he is a pilot, and the plane is all he’s ever known, and the longer he goes without pushing the button, the slighter his chances of escaping unscathed.

Because you are not fine.

The three weeks that follow pass at a crawl. Time reshapes itself into molasses around the giant you-sized absence in his days. It is easy, at first, to deny the obvious as you offer such convincing excuses to blow him off. After all, your friends do often lean on you for emotional support, and finals are drawing close, and your mother does deserve a break. So what if you leave his texts on read for hours at a time?

On the fourth day, he calls you in the free period he knows falls between your Wednesday lectures. When you answer, Rindou mistakes your sing-song hello for the voicemail you have relegated him to recently. You apologize for not having time to talk, squeezing more words into a breath than humanly plausible as you explain your packed study schedule. You promise to see him soon before you hang up.

You sounded fine on the phone. The same voice, light and airy like spring personified, that Rindou knows so well.

But you are not fine.

The ice wall between you thaws a little in the second week when Rindou reminds you that he bought tickets to the Inaba/Salas tour. Again, you surprise him by joining as planned at the stadium. Throughout the concert, you smile and cheer along, and the open delight on your face as you groove to the music invites him to join in the fun. At the end of the night, he drives you home to where you swear your mom is waiting. He kisses you breathless in the front seat of his car. You sigh hot and sticky into his mouth, notched into the crook of his shoulder like you have carved a space for yourself there, and whisper “Sir” with more fervor than a prayer. Everything seems fine.

But you are not fine.

Only a few days later, you agree to a date. The familiarity as he texts you details and soaks up your liberal usage of emojis relaxes him into thinking all is well. He takes you ice skating at Tokyo Midtown Gardens. With your little gloved hand in his, you half carry each other around the rink, equally graceless without the surety of solid ground. Rindou laughs more than he has for two weeks. You both fall again and again, Rindou toppling each time so as to shield your body from the worst of it. As you sprawl on top of him, padded from head to toe in winter wear, you promise to kiss his purple bruises better and call him your hero. Back at his apartment, you do just that, licking and kissing every part of his body, losing track of time. The trains stop running, so you sleep where you belong in the cradle of his arms. He wakes up at 6AM to the sound of you shuffling, halfway out the door citing an early start to the day. You would have left without a goodbye, but at his groggy inquiry, you tell him you are fine.

But you are not fine.

Rindou wants to confront you about the change. He hates playing stupid games more than accusations or tears and would rather have it out at this point. But, whenever you visit, he never broaches the subject. Because you are so singularly you! And fuck it. He misses you. The contrast between seeing you fives time a week and this drought is stark. Now, when you leave, you don’t send him dumb memes or answer his calls to talk about your day. You don’t rush to make plans to see him again either, and Rindou knows he can’t accept your lame excuses anymore. Something is fundamentally broken.

For the first time in maybe ever, Rindou throws himself into his work. The timing is convenient with recent developments, so he offers to take the meetings outside the perimeter of Tokyo when before he might have dragged his feet. He personally briefs Takeomi every day. When Kakucho mentions a security threat in passing, Rindou volunteers to help even though it falls well outside his purview. Anything to keep the body active.

You had come to fill up the hours of his day, to be the dessert he could look forward to after a meal of veggies. Rindou can’t comprehend how he used to fill the interminable hours between six PM and sleep without your assistance.

So, he works, and he tries not to think about anything much at all.

The plane soars onward without any assistance on his part. The details of the exposed cliff face, jagged and unforgiving, grow clearer by the hour. There will be no escape. When he crashes, Rindou knows he is going to explode.

--

Ran once said all of Bonten has PTSD in one form or another. Overexposure to high stress, life-or-death situations puts too much stress on the adrenal system, so now half the executives drop to their stomachs when a car misfires, stand with their backs flat to the nearest wall in every new room, avoid crowds like some people avoid traffic tickets. Rindou considers himself free of this affliction, but on the road, hands flexing on the steering wheel and eyes split between mirrors like a car might strike out into his lane at any moment, he is every bit as activated.

The hour is late, creeping towards midnight when Rindou pulls onto the expressway. There are predictably few passenger cars sharing the road. Semitrucks kick up a mist of rain that obscures his windshield.

To fill the sleepless hours, Rindou is developing all kinds of new habits. Driving, brain preciously blank to all but the threat of traffic, is one of them. So is going to the office. Just today, he went to the Ueno office of all places rather than watch the hours of the day tick by in his apartment. There is no email unanswered, directive unissued, or memo unread to keep his brain occupied. He wishes there was because his apartment holds as little allure now as it did this this morning.

A notification lights up the display. It’s a reminder that the BDSM club in Roppongi – the one where you first met – is open for play tonight. Rindou palms his cock, and it feels like an animal, a dead one, in his pants. Not even a stir. His mood is too black and distracted to responsibly dom anyone, so he dismisses the notification.

Screeching the tires, Rindou almost misses his exit. He brakes hard down the ramp until he shoots out on a quiet street. At the drab buildings, he does a double take, recognizing the north entrance to Nakano Station.

He has driven straight past his real exit and an extra twenty minutes without noticing to arrive in your neighborhood.

Rindou feels drunk despite not taking a sip of alcohol all day. He pulls into a gas station and refills the tank. While it pumps, he pops his contacts out of sore eyes. Everything blurs like a photograph in soft focus. He closes his eyes against a headache and breathes deep for 120 torturous breaths. Back in the car, he unearths his glasses from the glove compartment. They’re the same style, though a stronger prescription, that he wore as a teen. Catching his reflection in the rearview, Rindou sees the boy he once was. Just as lost, letting things happen around him without a thought, only leaping to action when stronger powers (namely Ran) prompted). Someone who watches as life happens.

Nothing is in his control.

The BDSM club is five minutes closer to Nakano than his apartment, a negligible difference, but after the driving mix-up he changes course. Nostalgia takes the wheel to lead to where you first met, where he has not visited since.

The ticket takers at the theater don’t recognize him, hesitating until he points at the tattoo on his throat. He looks unkempt: hair ratty and unbrushed, jacket slung over his shoulder and button-up crumpled at the ends, and his glasses highlight the eyes of a man who has barely slept in days. It is no surprise that subs don’t flock to him when he enters. He doesn’t look like the all-powerful dom tonight. Best he sits back and watches.

Rindou pays for a full bottle of bourbon, served neat and hard on the taste buds. The club is busy as it’s Saturday, and couples and groups clog the four stages. There are no tables left close enough for a view of the action, so Rindou stands in the corner, taking heavy swigs straight from the bottle until his stomach cramps.

There is little variety on stage. Three doms whip, cane, and flog their subs. All older man with younger women. They are impersonal, showing perfunctory delight at the infliction of pain. These are the kinds of scenes that bore him when done without finesse.

On the fourth stage, he recognizes Lady X, a domme he knows from many shared nights spent just like this, bringing women to their knees. Lost in his memories is Lady X’s real name. Yuzu something…Yuzuriha? Yuzuyu? In the clubs, she always goes by her alias or is called simply Lady, but Rindou remembers her vaguely as the sister of the tenth gen leader of the Black Dragons.

Lady is the antithesis of Rindou as a dom.

If Rindou finds control in manipulating a pliant body and acceptance in a sub’s embrace of his touch, whether it offers pain or pleasure, Lady finds release in giving her subs what they want. Where Rindou hoards women’s orgasms like precious jewels, flaunting his ownership of them only to hide them away again, Lady distributes them like cheap birdseed, doling out orgasm after orgasm to her thankful subs. Eventually said thanks turns to pleading, as one orgasm becomes four and the pleasure twists to something monumental. Lady then ups the vibrator or nips the woman’s clit with blunt teeth because, as she told Rindou once over a drink at this very bar, her goal in every scene is to create a world where her subs’ worst problem is the existence of too much pleasure, not its absence, nor its inverse, pain.

Tonight, Lady commands the largest audience of patrons. No surprise there as she strikes quite the picture herself, tall and lovely in a pencil skirt as she brings three subs on stage to piteous tears. Rindou slides closer to her stage for a better look.

Suspended in a harness of ropes, the first sub weeps wretchedly. There is a hitachi wand held to her clit. The setting must be high because the buzz travels from the stage to his ears. The woman cries but does not beg for mercy. There is the sheen of the acolyte behind her eyes, like she might commit unspeakable acts if they only bring her back here to Lady’s ropes and generous toys.

A second sub at her side stands restrained but not suspended. Her arms are tied above her, so that she can do nothing while Lady strokes her cock. Lady’s little hand smears messily over the tip, which is an inflamed red. There is a puddle of cum on the floor from the woman’s past orgasms. Little drips of semen harden on her legs. Every touch must hurt, but Lady keeps playing with the tip, forcing her back to hardness whether she likes it or not.

The third sub is just an ass in the air. A perfect ass at that.

Bent over a wooden block and shackled at the ankle, so that her legs are to the audience, the sub’s pussy is spread wide around a vibrator taped to her clit. Her feet kick ineffectually against her restraints, little trembles jiggling her thighs.

Rindou enjoys watching Lady work, so self-assured, so competent at bringing her subs to the brink and past. His eyes stray again and again to the pretty ass in the air. A stir in his pants makes him question his decision to abstain tonight. It has been over a week of his own hand.

After fifteen minutes of more of the same, Lady releases the first two subs from their ropes and cuffs. They are felled heaps on the stage, panting in puddles of their own slick and cum. Lady rounds to the third sub, leaning toward that hidden face in private conversation. Then she stands, and sighs for the audience’s benefit.

“Here I am being so generous, telling this slut to cum as many times as she wants, and she hasn’t cum once! What to do?”

Lady answers her own question by crouching down in front of the sub’s spread pussy and burying her whole face in it. There is a lull in the music, and Rindou can hear just how lewdly Lady laves that pussy with her tongue. Her fingers stretch the sub’s hole at a brutal pace. The woman keens loudly and kicks her feet again. Everything from her little naked toes to canting hips look beautiful in the throws of overstimulation.

Of course, Rindou knows without knowing. A presentiment colors the scene. He leans forward with interest, compelled toward that wet cunt, not wanting to miss a moment of the action, but his stomach sickens too. He ignores the sensation, blames the bourbon warming its way down his belly.

Lady tuts as the sub continues to hang on the precipice without teetering over.

She turns to the audience and says, “Little slut is having a hard time coming without permission from her old dom. Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard? Why don’t you let her know she has permission to cum? Tell her to squirt all over my hand.”

Eager to join in more actively, the crowd of about thirty hoot and holler in encouragement, mixing in obscenities about the sub’s wet cunt and place beneath Lady’s toys. Rindou claps along.

Four fingers slam in and out of that sloppy hole, and the time between shakes and cries from the sub evaporates until she is blubbering at the stimulation. Lady yanks her up by the hair to gift her the added sting at her scalp, and it pushes the sub over the edge.

Correction: it pushes you over the edge.

Because Rindou knows that ass, and he knows those toes, and even at a distance with the lights too bright and a row of people in front of him, he knows that pretty pussy, too. That pretty pussy now clenches around Lady’s fingers in an orgasm far too long and powerful for your overstimulated body.

Rindou watches your face screw up in pain and tears, an expression just as familiar to him. It is an expression that should belong solely to him.

All three subs follow Lady dutifully off stage after your orgasm finally settles. She bundles you all in blankets, heaping compliments and affection down on you as is your due after such a trying scene. Rindou hovers within earshot as Lady pets your head and rubs a tear from your check. Twenty minutes elapse as you come out of subspace, during which time Rindou drains half the bottle of bourbon.

“I look like a racoon. I’m gonna head to the bathroom and fix my makeup,” you laugh, pointing at the streaks of mascara that paint your cheeks.

You replace the blanket with an overcoat to shield your nakedness then weave your way through the crowd. Compliments on your performance rain down from all sides. Rindou shadows your step. Not far from the bathroom, you drop your phone. When you turn to pick it up off the floor, Rindou is there, already scooping it off the ground.

“Rin – Rindou!” you yelp.

“Not trying to scare you,” Rindou says immediately, defensively, and he passes the phone back to you without even scanning the lock screen for a peek at your messages. “Just saw you and wanted to say hey.”

“Well, hey…um…”

“You might wanna fix your makeup. You’ve got…” Rindou gestures at the cakey residue you already know is there, and you curse.

“Yeah, sorry. I need to go to the bathroom and deal with this.”

“I’ll come with you,” Rindou says, opening the door for you.

“Rindou, you can’t come in here with me,” you whisper.

He almost tells you it’s his club and he can do whatever he wants, but Rindou wears his secrecy like a second skin and only smirks at your worries before following you into the women’s bathroom. It is a six-stall affair with a wall mirror above the sinks. He can hear a woman pee behind the door of one stall, but he ignores the stranger’s presence as you ignore his, turning to the mirrors.

“You did good up there. Looked like you had a lot of tension to work out, which isn’t surprising considering all the studying you’ve been doing. Didn’t you have a paper due this week?” Rindou prompts.

You rub dry fingertips against your cheeks. When that doesn’t work, you wad up three paper towels, wet from the sink, and scrub.

“Yeah, I had a paper on Bashō’s references to music and instrumentation in his poems, which was due on Thursday. It could have been a lot worse honestly. I like the subject, and I thought my first draft was good for once. Of course, I had a complete breakdown on Wednesday after dreaming that the paper was really supposed to be about Nishiyama Sōin and that I’d miscited every source in there, but um, I managed to calm myself down.”

“Good. I don’t know why you always have nightmares about your papers. You always get an A.”

“Not always,” you say darkly.

The woman in the occupied stall hurries out, casting a few curious glances Rindou’s way as she washes her hands. She doesn’t dry them, leaving little splatters of water on the counter. Then, they are truly alone.

“Are you planning to stick around now that you finished your scene? Can’t imagine you wanna do another after that? It looked intense.”

“You really watched that?” you ask.

“Most of it,” he confirms. “You did good.”

“Thanks,” you say without looking at him. You dry your hands while staring at your now streak-free reflection in the mirror.

“If you don’t wanna stay, I could take you home. Or, if you’re hungry, I know a 24/7 breakfast place not far from here. You never eat enough after a scene,” Rindou says.

“Um, I’m good…Have you been coming here often?”

“No, it’s my first time in forever. You?” he asks in a tone that just misses casual.

“It’s my second time in the last two weeks. I’m kind of trying out stuff right now,” you say.

“Trying out stuff…” he tests the words.

“Are you okay? You look a little tense.”

Normally, Rindou chooses his words with precision, but he finds himself unable to process his surroundings. He exists somewhere outside his body, outside his brain, outside this room entirely. He peers down on the scene almost like a security camera, removed and distant. No, rather more like footage from a security camera, viewed days after the fact in a little room by someone who neither knows nor understands the context of the scene. Trying to think through the likely consequences of his words or choosing an alternative phrase, he finds his thoughts vaporous and ungraspable. So, he simply speaks.

“I didn’t like it.”

“Like what? Watching me with someone else?” you say quickly.

He grunts because that’s easier than searching for any kind of answer.

“You said we could fuck other people.”

“I know. You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rindou agrees. It is the correct and automatic response, but he can’t resist tacking on the truth at the end. “I didn’t like watching.”

“Well, that’s flattering at least,” you mutter.

In a different reality, one where he sent you up there with a pat on the ass, he might have liked watching Lady work your cunt up to a waterfall before returning you to him, still hovering on the precipice, edged and needy. He might have liked teasing you all night with the possibility of an orgasm. But he did not like watching you cum for someone else. Not without his permission. Even with a filmy gauze slowing down his brain from the half bottle of bourbon, he knows that much.

“We’re not okay, are we?” Rindou asks.

“No, Rindou. We are not okay.”

“Well, can we talk about it?”

“I don’t know. Can we talk about it without you making me feel like a complete idiot?” you snap.

A woman pushes open the door to the bathroom, but upon hearing the direction of your conversation, she turns right around, leaving you to a privacy tinged by history. The door creaks back into place with a choked slam.

“Like a…? You’re not an idiot?” Rindou insists.

“I know I’m not an idiot! I have spent the last few weeks going back and forth between feeling so sad and then so goddamn angry with you! Because I know that I could not have been more chill about things if I had a lobotomy to remove my frontal cortex first! I was so cool about everything, so understanding, so kind, and you treated me like, like some fucking bother you had to get out of the way!”

The first feeling to reemerge from the confused pit you dumped him in is embarrassment at himself as he is admittedly slow on the uptake, stuttering out, “Wait…this isn’t about…? This is about our conversation at my apartment?”

“Yes!” you hiss, hands flapping emphatically and voice echoing off the tile. The overcoat swallows you whole, a sea of black fabric trailing the floor, but somehow you stand tall within it. “Yes! I came that night so prepared to listen to your side of things and be reasonable and empathetic and all the rest, and you treated me like I was a hysterical child that you had to manage. Far be it from me to criticize the great Rindou! Not that I even did criticize you before you were jumping down my throat. I am not unreasonable. I am not hysterical. And I am not a child. I did not appreciate being treated like I was.”

Rindou remembers back to the hours before you arrived at his apartment that day. How he’d been so sure you would accuse him of cheating or play mind games to negate your own jealousy. The whole time you were there, he maintained that sureness even when you acted contrary to those expectations.

It, he admits, hadn’t been fair.

Worse, it may have been patronizing.

He groans, not at you but at the memory, and rubs a hand over his face. “Fuck, yeah, yeah, you’re probably right. I see that. I didn’t want you to blow things out of proportion, so I tried to shut you down before you could. But I guess I acted like a prick.”

“A prick might be understating it. I came to you to have a conversation in good faith, and you made me feel so…small. Insignificant. Like, I’m just this easy thing to you. Like you could use and discard me, so I better shut my mouth before you throw me away.”

Rindou opens his mouth to give a rebuttal-like reassurance that you are wrong about your supposed disposability to him, but you plow forward, pointed finger punctuating every word, which is a welcome distraction from the look of raw pain on your face. It is like the sun. Too painful to look at directly.

“I know what that feels like, Rindou, because I’ve been treated that way before. I’m young and people call me sweet, and that means people think I’m stupid or superficial, but I’m not. I’m capable of dealing with the hard things and having the hard conversations, and I do not deserve to be treated like I’m too naïve to know how things work.”

There is a layer of grime on his tongue. He focuses on how foreign it feels in his mouth rather than the thumping organ in his ribcage. The way his heart races and the room feels too small is not dissimilar to the sensations he feels when someone fires a gun, when his life is momentarily suspended. A kind of physical panic that quickly settles into alertness.

He breathes deep, calming. Rindou smells the antibacterial soap and weak air freshener blowing from the vents. The colors of the room appear saturated, more contrast and more details accessible to the eye. Most importantly, he sees you clearly. The veins of your throat strain as if bursting with tension your body can’t contain. There are new smudges at the edges as tiny tears wet your eyeline. There is every emotion in those eyes from disgust to anger to sadness, but most of all, there is a question lingering there as you silently beg him to answer: where can we go from here?

“I have never thought of you as some easy thing. I fucked up. I don’t know what was going on in my head that day, but you’re right. I wasn’t seeing you. I should have shut my fucking mouth and listened. I’m sorry.”

Relief warms your eyes.

“I accept your apology,” you say.

“Really?” Rindou asks. After weeks of brewing resentment and your impassioned speech, he didn’t expect a speedy turnaround no matter how many pretty speeches he made himself.

“Yeah, I don’t like being angry. It takes a lot of energy,” you half laugh.

The abrupt about face from anger to laughter throws into stark relief that the is very drunk and very tired.  Beneath that, Rindou recognizes a more abstract emotion, too: happiness.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner. I didn’t realize what you were upset about,” Rindou says, and then he adds helpfully. “Because I’m stupid. Thanks for forgiving me.”

“Yeah, you are stupid, but I figure you deserve a little grace because this was the first time in six months that you disrespected me. So long as you never treat me that way again. Seriously. My mother taught me to never put up with that from anyone,” you say.

“On my honor,” Rindou vows. “So, can I buy you something to eat now?”

The happiness explodes out like a shaken soda bottle. One second, he’s filled to the brim with it, and the next it’s gone, bubbling to nothing on the tile because you don’t say yes. Instead, you stare grimly at the wall, all traces of reconciliation gone as you clutch the sleeves of your overcoat tight.

He wonders if his apology is not enough, if he might prove his sincerity to you in some other way. If you were Mikey, he would cut off his pinky. He would gladly gift you the ring, index, and middle fingers of his left hand, too, if you demanded them. But fingers out of the question, he has nothing to give you to prove himself, and you don’t say yes.

“Rindou…I do accept your apology for insulting me, but that’s not all…The truth is, I tried to be cool about it, but I’ve had weeks to think, and…I’m not okay with things going back to how they were if you are dating or hell, sleeping with other people. I’m jealous and hurt. And I can’t accept it,” you say.

“It’s normal to be jealous,” Rindou tries, tone bracing and supportive. “I got jealous today, but I worked through it. I’ve been a dom since I was nineteen, and I’ve never been tied down to one person before. It’s not the way I know how to do things. That’s why I didn’t make any promises when we got together. I didn’t cheat on –”

“Please don’t start that again! I know! I know you technically didn’t do anything wrong. And I know that I can’t make you stop seeing other people. It’s your relationship, too, and you can have your boundaries, but…”

“But?”

“But if I can’t ask you to stop seeing other people, then you can’t ask me to keep loving you.”

You clap a hand to your mouth as if shocked by the confession, or like you might herd the words back into your mouth where they will remain unspoken. But it is too late. He can count on one hand the number of times anyone has told him they loved him, and he will not forget this.

“Baby…” Rindou tries to reach for you, but you scramble away, and now tears fall down your cheeks.

“I’m sorry, but that’s the problem, ya know? It hasn’t just been sex or hanging out for me. What we were doing, for me at least, was love, and it hurts too much to love someone who…I tried to take a step back, just have fun with you every once in a while, but there’s no medicine for falling in love, and every time I saw your stupid face, my heart started doing backflips. It doesn’t listen to me when I tell it we shouldn’t love you anymore. And that’s why…”

Your face blurs. It takes Rindou several confused seconds to realize his eyes are wet and blink the moisture away. When you reappear, you have steeled your nerves for the finishing blow.

“That’s why I don’t want to see you anymore. I need space and time to get over you, so um, please just stop calling and texting and all the rest. Just stop.”

Your face blurs again, and this time Rindou knows it’s because his eyes are watering. He blames his stupid glasses. He needs a stronger prescription.

There is no such excuse for your tears that drip past your chin to land on your collar. You wipe fruitlessly at the leakage, too slow to stimmy their fall.

If you say anything after that, Rindou doesn’t hear you over the ringing in his ears. Three women enter the bathroom arm-in-arm and immediately jabber at him about how he isn’t welcome, like three harpies sent to drive him away. Rindou doesn’t fight them as they push him out the door with their words.

Outside in the club, in the dark and music, far from the bright quiet of the bathroom, Rindou feels like he’s stepped onto the surface of Mars. Like he’s planets away from where you are, and he might as well be.

He doesn’t know how to find his way back to you because he stands now amid the wreckage, engine on fire, wings cracked. The plane has finally crashed.

A/N: entering my villain era

With every minute that passes, his ire rises higher.

Rindou strains through another set of lat pulls, refusing to let you and your silent treatment slow him down. Opposite him, Benkei deadlifts a stunning 300 kg. When the bar hits the floor, the clang echoes off the mirror-lined walls.

There is a gym in the basement of his apartment complex, guaranteed to be empty in the early pre-dawn hours, which he prefers for the privacy it offers. Wakasa’s gym is never empty. Fighters practice boxing, MMA, and jujutsu with retired pros morning and night. Most of the customers sport tattoos from one syndicate or another, and Rindou often recognizes the guys on his own payroll by the free weights or sweating in the saunas. Rindou only started returning to Wakasa’s gym for the occasional practice bout or strength training session in the last few months. Wakasa’s been filling his ear with the idea of taking you and his girl on a double date, a vacation to the mountains when your semester wraps, and Rindou has been coming by to talk the details.

A text finally lights up his screen, and Rindou forces himself to ignore it for a solid minute while he finishes his set even as his eyes dart back against his will.

I can’t do dinner. Plans with Naoya. But I could do drinks.

Wakasa lopes forward, hands in his pockets, before Rindou can answer. It’s his turn to leave you with the ellipsis of anxiety and doom. He locks his phone and tosses face-down on a bench.

“Wanted to tell you we got the goods through Nagoya yesterday,” Wakasa says tonelessly. “Ushioda’s really come through. My guy says customs not only didn’t check, they agreed to decrease security personnel during offboarding. Ran is going to be a menace about being the one to make this happen, but he’s worked his magic on this.”

Rindou matches Wakasa’s subdued attitude beat for beat, but in his mind, he runs through a month’s worth of memos and emails to recall if he knew about this plan. “You sent a shipment of girls through the port? That’s fucking brazen.”

“Mochi wanted to test the limits early with something cheap before we put our expensive shit through there,” Wakasa said.

According to Takeomi, Ushioda begged on bended knee for clemency for his son. It was hard to say whether love or shame drove the father, but the outcome was the same. Acme Corp would smuggle Bonten contraband through the Port of Nagoya, so long as they streamlined into their regular shipping schedule to avoid setting off any alarm bells.

This was the second shipment received through the port after moving a little marijuana through a few weeks earlier. Rindou tries to keep his expectations in check as operations continue smoothly, but his hopes rise against his better judgment.

“Mochi says he wants to do a few more runs, but that you should start thinking through where you could source the heroine,” Wakasa relays.

They could source through the triads as the Chinese and Russian gangs already have inroads with the producers, but they would each take their cut and ruin Bonten’s margins. The drug would be new on the market. Rindou doesn’t want to price high outright. Start cheap and once the clientele can’t live without their fix, then drive the prices up. They could run a deficit to start, but that would mean Koko up his ass. Cutting the triads out completely isn’t an option either as they would need to ship out of China, but if they could build their own supplier network, they could negotiate a better rate.

“It’s gonna be too obvious if we have guys coming in and out of Afghanistan all the time. They don’t even run direct flights out of Seoul. We’d get picked instantly. I’m thinking we could get away with sending someone through to Turkey though. With a little palm greasing, they can cross into Iran without getting their passport stamped. The IRGC run the heroine trade through Afghanistan, so we could develop our own connections from there,” Rindou says.

Wakasa nods along at what he already figured. “Who you gonna send?”

“Not me if that’s what you’re thinking. I hate plane rides,” Rindou says.

“Of course, not you. We need you. I was thinking Hanma.”

Rindou groans. “I fucking hate that guy.”

“We all fucking hate that guy. But that’s why he’s good at this shit. He’s done great work in Hong Kong. Send him over there. He knows how to make the coldest man sweat,” Wakasa suggests.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll think about it.”

He finishes another set of lat pulls, while Wakasa and Benkei chat away about the insipid rise of Peloton. Endorphins rush to his brain, and he feels magnanimous enough to finally shoot you a reply.

See you at 5.

If he has anything to say about it, Naoya will be eating dinner alone tonight.

--

Two people could not be dressed more oppositely. Fresh from his post-workout shower, Rindou wears nothing but a pair of sweats. Droplets of water scatter across his bare shoulder blade as his long, wet hair drips freely. Strong chest and arms still pumped from muscle training great you at the door. You, meanwhile, dressed for an Arctic exploration in a floor-length parka, bulging in all the wrong places, a fluffy scarf wound three-times round your neck, and an equally fluffy, fur-lined hood. A mask completes the look, so the only skin he can see is a sliver of your forehead and your narrowed eyes.

“Just looking at you makes me feel cold,” you scowl.

“Just looking at you is making me cold.”

You barge right past him into his apartment. The heater works overtime to keep the entire complex a toasty 23 degrees. Past the entryway, where you slip out of your boots, the dining room table is lined with boxes of Chinese takeout; Unsure what you’d want to eat, Rindou opted to order a smorgasbord of options.

Beneath the unflattering coat, you wear a black dress. The long sleeves and tasteful length contrast a daring vee that dips down to show off the swell of your lovely, little breasts. You’re packaged like a delicious gift for the unwrapping, and Rindou can’t resist planting a soft kiss to the back of your neck as you hang your coat. He expects the battle tonight will be a long and painful one, but still you dressed up for him.

“Good to see it’s you under there. For a second, I thought it might be an assassin,” Rindou jokes.

“Easy for you to laugh all warm in here! It’s freezing outside. They’re calling for snow tonight into tomorrow, which sucks. I can’t miss class at this point in the semester,” you complain.

“Well, I’ve got everything you need to warm up,” Rindou says. He gestures at the table laden with food, and then, more critically, brandishes the bottle of wine bought just for tonight. “And if the weather’s too bad tomorrow, I’m sure they’ll cancel. You can just hang out here all day.”

“My professors are all sadists. I wouldn’t put it past them to host class as they get double-bypass surgery. They’d have the surgeon right there in the lecture hall,” you grumble.

Rindou half listens as you launch into a prolonged rant about your upcoming finals. His attention is understandably split as he searches your lively expressions for the ugly shadow of jealousy. Behind every word, he hunts for double meanings.

The look of pure betrayal on your face when he ran into you yesterday in Chiba will not soon leave his mind. It colored his scenes yesterday with Mayuri, turning him mean and unmerciful as he bound and belted her ass red. She deserved his full attention after putting her trust in him, but Rindou twice almost walked away to call you. Had you answered, he might have berated you for daring to look at him like that, like you’d caught him fucking your mother or murdering the family pet. Like he’d done something unforgivable to you.

Now, as you gripe about exams, every bit the picture of the beleaguered uni student, your words ring false. Like you are filling time and space to put distance between the you of yesterday, so judgey and offended, and the you of today. You tell him how exams are two months out, and like a good student, you are already studying in earnest in the pits of what you dub “flashcard hell” as Kii has taken to posting flashcards over every expanse of wall in her apartment, springing prep questions on unconsenting listeners, and crying periodically about how she should have spent fewer hours sleeping and more time reading the supplementary materials. Rindou hums in sympathy in all the right places, and he almost, almost begins to relax into the conversation. Like an idiot.

“Are you feeling the dumplings or the pork?” Rindou asks, plating up a hearty helping of food for himself.

“Neither. I can’t eat, remember?” you say.

“Oh, come on. Stay the night. It’s too cold to be going out.”

“True, but I promised Naoto. We’re going to this really fancy curry restaurant, and he said he’d pay, so I’m planning to go all out and get dessert,” you say.

Noticing his wine glass is running low, Rindou drains the last dregs and pours himself a healthy portion. This will be easier drunk. He debates pouring you more as well, wondering if a little tipsiness would make you spunkier or mellow the worst of your impulses. Because he senses the fit approaching, the moment you break your pretense that everything is fine and well and force a confrontation.

“You know, I don’t like playing games,” he says.

 “I don’t like playing games either.”

“Then, don’t.”

Rindou says it shortly, definitively. The barest hint of command reinforces his voice, and he watches the way you receive the order, squirming in that delightfully submissive way of yours before you reject your inclination to obedience. You set your jaw.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say.

Rindou sighs. He expected you would be difficult but not passive aggressive. Not like this.

“You have dinner plans with Naoto? Seriously?”

“Yes?”

“Bullshit,” Rindou snaps. “I expected you to be immature about what happened yesterday, but this? You’re better than this. Forget your conveniently timed dinner plans, and let’s act like adults. Then, we can have a nice night.”

“It’s a work event. Naoto was nervous about going alone, so he asked me to come with him. This was planned weeks ago. I just forgot until he reminded me,” you insist, standing up from your chair, like the added height will strengthen your lie.

“Convenient,” Rindou sneers.

In the six months you’ve been together, you have never had a genuine fight or even argument. Seeing your smiling face typically puts Rindou in too good a mood, curbs the worst of his temper, so he is slow to pick fights. You, meanwhile, listen so well, adapting your behavior without him having to utter a word. Bickering typically becomes flirtatious banter in a matter of minutes, the kind that ends with your panties in his pocket.

So, Rindou doesn’t know what to expect from you in a real fight. He half expected you to fold at the slightest correction. You are still young, so he doesn’t write off the possibility of some kind of petty manipulation either, the silent treatment maybe, or more probably breaking into a mess of tears, the kind that bring so many men to a panic; Unfortunately for you, Rindou doesn’t capitulate to a woman’s cries or begging, going cold at any miserable attempt to manipulate his emotions.

Faced with you now, the tendons in your neck pulse as you square of against him without any sign of crumbling. You worry your lower lip between your teeth until it is red and swollen. It is the only sign of anxiety. Otherwise, you stand strong.

“If you feel like I’m somehow attacking you, it must be a guilty conscience. Because I haven’t said or done anything to you.”

“What do I have to feel guilty about?” Rindou demands coldly.

“You’d have to tell me. Because I thought about it all day and night –”

“See, I knew you were wound up about yesterday –”

“I thought about it all day and night,” you raise your voice to drown him out. “And, yes, it was weird to see you with someone else. Yes, it hurt. It was so unexpected. But, if you think I’m trying to punish you over it, you’re out of line because my eyes are wide open. You’re not my boyfriend –”

“No, I’m not. Which is why you shouldn’t –”

“I know, I know. How can I be hurt or angry when you’re not my boyfriend? You didn’t cheat on me or break any promises. I have nothing to be upset about.”

“Right.”

Confused and more than a little wary, Rindou sits back down at the table. He has held conversations like this a few times in his life. Most subs understand the importance of negotiation implicitly and take him for what he is. There have been a handful of in the past, however, usually inexperienced women like you, who struggled to work through the limitations of their relationship with him, crashing futilely against the boundaries of what he offered.

Because he doesn’t do relationships. Blame it on the dangers of his work, the secrecy inherent in the lifestyle, or some intrinsic flaw in his makeup. Regardless, he never plans to tie himself down to one woman. All that road offers is the erosion of his freedom.

“Since you wanted to talk about it so much though, bringing it up and all, I would like to ask about what I should expect,” you continue. “Because I didn’t realize you were seeing other people, and that raises questions. Like, are you practicing safe sex with these women? Have you been getting tested for STDs? Should we be using condoms? And, are you looking for more long-term subs? How would you even fit in another sub? Would we have to see each other less, so you could make time for a new one? What should I expect going forward?”

Each question is too reasonable to deny, so Rindou answers plainly, “You’re the only person I see regularly, so I use condoms with everyone else and get tested on the first of every month. If you want to use condoms together, that is entirely your decision. I’ll accept whatever you decide. I’m not looking to train anyone else right now. If I found someone that suited my tastes, I might consider it though, and yeah, that would mean adjusting my schedule around because I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you would not be open to training together.”

“No!”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Rindou says.

“How many women have you been with since we got together?” you demand.

There is no good answer, and Rindou groans, “Seriously? Don’t start overreacting now.”

“I’m cool! I’m being so cool. Just answer the question,” you smile, but it is a mockery of your normal, gleaming smiles. Teeth clenched tight together, it is more like an animal baring its fangs.

“No! I don’t owe you a fucking itemized list of every woman I’ve fucked. Just like I don’t run around town telling them about you. I haven’t cheated on you. I don’t owe you an explanation.”

“I just wanna know how and when you’re finding time to meet other people.”

Rindou rolls his eyes. “Because that’s rational. You don’t actually want to know the answer to that.”

“I just don’t know where you’re possibly finding the time to meet all these women –”

“Again, you’re exaggerating. Not all these women. Some, like Mayuri, I knew before you. Some I meet through work. Straightforward stuff.”

“Mayuri is the woman from yesterday?”

“I think we’re done with this conversation now,” Rindou says tightly.

A shininess blurs the color of your eyes then, and Rindou sighs. He wants to wrap you up in his arms and praise you for being such a strong, beautiful girl because despite all your tough words, this isn’t easy for you. If he could be a better man for you, he would consider it, but there is only so much he can offer, and the burden of accepting that is on you.

“Thank you for being honest with me. I really do need to head out and meet Naoto, but I’ll think about the condom thing,” you murmur.

“Baby, don’t leave like this,” Rindou tries. There is no more fight in your stance and now that the threat of conflict is ended, he finds the energy draining from his whole body.

“I’m fine! We’re fine. Seriously, Rindou. I’m not going to overreact or stamp my foot at you like that might change something. My eyes are wide open like I told you. I understand where you’re coming from completely. We can hang out soon,” you say.

Rindou doesn’t like the idea of you leaving when your foundations are so shaken, wants to stuff you full of gone-cold Chinese food and cuddle on the couch until you fall asleep on his shoulder. Even if neither of you yelled or descended into insults, he feels like he fought a war, and the only way to recover is in your arms.

He follows you to the entryway.

You redon your winter gear in a hurry. The puffy coat is plush and cozy as he pulls you close and kisses you long and slow. You return the kiss with wind-chapped lips not fighting him at all. The heat that always explodes between you blazes, and he cups and caresses you through the barrier of the coat.

He wants you to stay.

You break the kiss after only a minute and smile.

“I’ll call you, ok?”

And then, you are gone.

--

When Rindou sleeps, he dreams of shopping malls built like mazes, window shopping displays of the finest goods, and he understands without knowing that to obtain even one miraculous product from these stores would spell his salvation; But whenever he tries to enter one of the stores, the maze shifts, redirects him until he is walking forwards again, searching. Still searching. During the slippery seconds between sleep and waking, that liminal space where dreams and life converge, he stews in resentment for what he can’t possess. That resentment often follows him into the day, though he tries not to dwell on it. The recurring dream started sometime in his early twenties. He remembers that dream joining him in sleep on at least a monthly basis, but for all he knows, he dreams it every night only to forget with the rising of the sun.

The weeks that follow the lingerie incident remind him of that dream only there is no supernatural force reworking the architecture of time and space to prevent him from entering the store. It feels like he’s piloting a plane headed straight for a cliff. There is still time to push the emergency button and eject to safety if he is only willing to abandon the plane to its solitary, fiery fate. But, he is a pilot, and the plane is all he’s ever known, and the longer he goes without pushing the button, the slighter his chances of escaping unscathed.

Because you are not fine.

The three weeks that follow pass at a crawl. Time reshapes itself into molasses around the giant you-sized absence in his days. It is easy, at first, to deny the obvious as you offer such convincing excuses to blow him off. After all, your friends do often lean on you for emotional support, and finals are drawing close, and your mother does deserve a break. So what if you leave his texts on read for hours at a time?

On the fourth day, he calls you in the free period he knows falls between your Wednesday lectures. When you answer, Rindou mistakes your sing-song hello for the voicemail you have relegated him to recently. You apologize for not having time to talk, squeezing more words into a breath than humanly plausible as you explain your packed study schedule. You promise to see him soon before you hang up.

You sounded fine on the phone. The same voice, light and airy like spring personified, that Rindou knows so well.

But you are not fine.

The ice wall between you thaws a little in the second week when Rindou reminds you that he bought tickets to the Inaba/Salas tour. Again, you surprise him by joining as planned at the stadium. Throughout the concert, you smile and cheer along, and the open delight on your face as you groove to the music invites him to join in the fun. At the end of the night, he drives you home to where you swear your mom is waiting. He kisses you breathless in the front seat of his car. You sigh hot and sticky into his mouth, notched into the crook of his shoulder like you have carved a space for yourself there, and whisper “Sir” with more fervor than a prayer. Everything seems fine.

But you are not fine.

Only a few days later, you agree to a date. The familiarity as he texts you details and soaks up your liberal usage of emojis relaxes him into thinking all is well. He takes you ice skating at Tokyo Midtown Gardens. With your little gloved hand in his, you half carry each other around the rink, equally graceless without the surety of solid ground. Rindou laughs more than he has for two weeks. You both fall again and again, Rindou toppling each time so as to shield your body from the worst of it. As you sprawl on top of him, padded from head to toe in winter wear, you promise to kiss his purple bruises better and call him your hero. Back at his apartment, you do just that, licking and kissing every part of his body, losing track of time. The trains stop running, so you sleep where you belong in the cradle of his arms. He wakes up at 6AM to the sound of you shuffling, halfway out the door citing an early start to the day. You would have left without a goodbye, but at his groggy inquiry, you tell him you are fine.

But you are not fine.

Rindou wants to confront you about the change. He hates playing stupid games more than accusations or tears and would rather have it out at this point. But, whenever you visit, he never broaches the subject. Because you are so singularly you! And fuck it. He misses you. The contrast between seeing you fives time a week and this drought is stark. Now, when you leave, you don’t send him dumb memes or answer his calls to talk about your day. You don’t rush to make plans to see him again either, and Rindou knows he can’t accept your lame excuses anymore. Something is fundamentally broken.

For the first time in maybe ever, Rindou throws himself into his work. The timing is convenient with recent developments, so he offers to take the meetings outside the perimeter of Tokyo when before he might have dragged his feet. He personally briefs Takeomi every day. When Kakucho mentions a security threat in passing, Rindou volunteers to help even though it falls well outside his purview. Anything to keep the body active.

You had come to fill up the hours of his day, to be the dessert he could look forward to after a meal of veggies. Rindou can’t comprehend how he used to fill the interminable hours between six PM and sleep without your assistance.

So, he works, and he tries not to think about anything much at all.

The plane soars onward without any assistance on his part. The details of the exposed cliff face, jagged and unforgiving, grow clearer by the hour. There will be no escape. When he crashes, Rindou knows he is going to explode.

--

Ran once said all of Bonten has PTSD in one form or another. Overexposure to high stress, life-or-death situations puts too much stress on the adrenal system, so now half the executives drop to their stomachs when a car misfires, stand with their backs flat to the nearest wall in every new room, avoid crowds like some people avoid traffic tickets. Rindou considers himself free of this affliction, but on the road, hands flexing on the steering wheel and eyes split between mirrors like a car might strike out into his lane at any moment, he is every bit as activated.

The hour is late, creeping towards midnight when Rindou pulls onto the expressway. There are predictably few passenger cars sharing the road. Semitrucks kick up a mist of rain that obscures his windshield.

To fill the sleepless hours, Rindou is developing all kinds of new habits. Driving, brain preciously blank to all but the threat of traffic, is one of them. So is going to the office. Just today, he went to the Ueno office of all places rather than watch the hours of the day tick by in his apartment. There is no email unanswered, directive unissued, or memo unread to keep his brain occupied. He wishes there was because his apartment holds as little allure now as it did this this morning.

A notification lights up the display. It’s a reminder that the BDSM club in Roppongi – the one where you first met – is open for play tonight. Rindou palms his cock, and it feels like an animal, a dead one, in his pants. Not even a stir. His mood is too black and distracted to responsibly dom anyone, so he dismisses the notification.

Screeching the tires, Rindou almost misses his exit. He brakes hard down the ramp until he shoots out on a quiet street. At the drab buildings, he does a double take, recognizing the north entrance to Nakano Station.

He has driven straight past his real exit and an extra twenty minutes without noticing to arrive in your neighborhood.

Rindou feels drunk despite not taking a sip of alcohol all day. He pulls into a gas station and refills the tank. While it pumps, he pops his contacts out of sore eyes. Everything blurs like a photograph in soft focus. He closes his eyes against a headache and breathes deep for 120 torturous breaths. Back in the car, he unearths his glasses from the glove compartment. They’re the same style, though a stronger prescription, that he wore as a teen. Catching his reflection in the rearview, Rindou sees the boy he once was. Just as lost, letting things happen around him without a thought, only leaping to action when stronger powers (namely Ran) prompted). Someone who watches as life happens.

Nothing is in his control.

The BDSM club is five minutes closer to Nakano than his apartment, a negligible difference, but after the driving mix-up he changes course. Nostalgia takes the wheel to lead to where you first met, where he has not visited since.

The ticket takers at the theater don’t recognize him, hesitating until he points at the tattoo on his throat. He looks unkempt: hair ratty and unbrushed, jacket slung over his shoulder and button-up crumpled at the ends, and his glasses highlight the eyes of a man who has barely slept in days. It is no surprise that subs don’t flock to him when he enters. He doesn’t look like the all-powerful dom tonight. Best he sits back and watches.

Rindou pays for a full bottle of bourbon, served neat and hard on the taste buds. The club is busy as it’s Saturday, and couples and groups clog the four stages. There are no tables left close enough for a view of the action, so Rindou stands in the corner, taking heavy swigs straight from the bottle until his stomach cramps.

There is little variety on stage. Three doms whip, cane, and flog their subs. All older man with younger women. They are impersonal, showing perfunctory delight at the infliction of pain. These are the kinds of scenes that bore him when done without finesse.

On the fourth stage, he recognizes Lady X, a domme he knows from many shared nights spent just like this, bringing women to their knees. Lost in his memories is Lady X’s real name. Yuzu something…Yuzuriha? Yuzuyu? In the clubs, she always goes by her alias or is called simply Lady, but Rindou remembers her vaguely as the sister of the tenth gen leader of the Black Dragons.

Lady is the antithesis of Rindou as a dom.

If Rindou finds control in manipulating a pliant body and acceptance in a sub’s embrace of his touch, whether it offers pain or pleasure, Lady finds release in giving her subs what they want. Where Rindou hoards women’s orgasms like precious jewels, flaunting his ownership of them only to hide them away again, Lady distributes them like cheap birdseed, doling out orgasm after orgasm to her thankful subs. Eventually said thanks turns to pleading, as one orgasm becomes four and the pleasure twists to something monumental. Lady then ups the vibrator or nips the woman’s clit with blunt teeth because, as she told Rindou once over a drink at this very bar, her goal in every scene is to create a world where her subs’ worst problem is the existence of too much pleasure, not its absence, nor its inverse, pain.

Tonight, Lady commands the largest audience of patrons. No surprise there as she strikes quite the picture herself, tall and lovely in a pencil skirt as she brings three subs on stage to piteous tears. Rindou slides closer to her stage for a better look.

Suspended in a harness of ropes, the first sub weeps wretchedly. There is a hitachi wand held to her clit. The setting must be high because the buzz travels from the stage to his ears. The woman cries but does not beg for mercy. There is the sheen of the acolyte behind her eyes, like she might commit unspeakable acts if they only bring her back here to Lady’s ropes and generous toys.

A second sub at her side stands restrained but not suspended. Her arms are tied above her, so that she can do nothing while Lady strokes her cock. Lady’s little hand smears messily over the tip, which is an inflamed red. There is a puddle of cum on the floor from the woman’s past orgasms. Little drips of semen harden on her legs. Every touch must hurt, but Lady keeps playing with the tip, forcing her back to hardness whether she likes it or not.

The third sub is just an ass in the air. A perfect ass at that.

Bent over a wooden block and shackled at the ankle, so that her legs are to the audience, the sub’s pussy is spread wide around a vibrator taped to her clit. Her feet kick ineffectually against her restraints, little trembles jiggling her thighs.

Rindou enjoys watching Lady work, so self-assured, so competent at bringing her subs to the brink and past. His eyes stray again and again to the pretty ass in the air. A stir in his pants makes him question his decision to abstain tonight. It has been over a week of his own hand.

After fifteen minutes of more of the same, Lady releases the first two subs from their ropes and cuffs. They are felled heaps on the stage, panting in puddles of their own slick and cum. Lady rounds to the third sub, leaning toward that hidden face in private conversation. Then she stands, and sighs for the audience’s benefit.

“Here I am being so generous, telling this slut to cum as many times as she wants, and she hasn’t cum once! What to do?”

Lady answers her own question by crouching down in front of the sub’s spread pussy and burying her whole face in it. There is a lull in the music, and Rindou can hear just how lewdly Lady laves that pussy with her tongue. Her fingers stretch the sub’s hole at a brutal pace. The woman keens loudly and kicks her feet again. Everything from her little naked toes to canting hips look beautiful in the throws of overstimulation.

Of course, Rindou knows without knowing. A presentiment colors the scene. He leans forward with interest, compelled toward that wet cunt, not wanting to miss a moment of the action, but his stomach sickens too. He ignores the sensation, blames the bourbon warming its way down his belly.

Lady tuts as the sub continues to hang on the precipice without teetering over.

She turns to the audience and says, “Little slut is having a hard time coming without permission from her old dom. Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard? Why don’t you let her know she has permission to cum? Tell her to squirt all over my hand.”

Eager to join in more actively, the crowd of about thirty hoot and holler in encouragement, mixing in obscenities about the sub’s wet cunt and place beneath Lady’s toys. Rindou claps along.

Four fingers slam in and out of that sloppy hole, and the time between shakes and cries from the sub evaporates until she is blubbering at the stimulation. Lady yanks her up by the hair to gift her the added sting at her scalp, and it pushes the sub over the edge.

Correction: it pushes you over the edge.

Because Rindou knows that ass, and he knows those toes, and even at a distance with the lights too bright and a row of people in front of him, he knows that pretty pussy, too. That pretty pussy now clenches around Lady’s fingers in an orgasm far too long and powerful for your overstimulated body.

Rindou watches your face screw up in pain and tears, an expression just as familiar to him. It is an expression that should belong solely to him.

All three subs follow Lady dutifully off stage after your orgasm finally settles. She bundles you all in blankets, heaping compliments and affection down on you as is your due after such a trying scene. Rindou hovers within earshot as Lady pets your head and rubs a tear from your check. Twenty minutes elapse as you come out of subspace, during which time Rindou drains half the bottle of bourbon.

“I look like a racoon. I’m gonna head to the bathroom and fix my makeup,” you laugh, pointing at the streaks of mascara that paint your cheeks.

You replace the blanket with an overcoat to shield your nakedness then weave your way through the crowd. Compliments on your performance rain down from all sides. Rindou shadows your step. Not far from the bathroom, you drop your phone. When you turn to pick it up off the floor, Rindou is there, already scooping it off the ground.

“Rin – Rindou!” you yelp.

“Not trying to scare you,” Rindou says immediately, defensively, and he passes the phone back to you without even scanning the lock screen for a peek at your messages. “Just saw you and wanted to say hey.”

“Well, hey…um…”

“You might wanna fix your makeup. You’ve got…” Rindou gestures at the cakey residue you already know is there, and you curse.

“Yeah, sorry. I need to go to the bathroom and deal with this.”

“I’ll come with you,” Rindou says, opening the door for you.

“Rindou, you can’t come in here with me,” you whisper.

He almost tells you it’s his club and he can do whatever he wants, but Rindou wears his secrecy like a second skin and only smirks at your worries before following you into the women’s bathroom. It is a six-stall affair with a wall mirror above the sinks. He can hear a woman pee behind the door of one stall, but he ignores the stranger’s presence as you ignore his, turning to the mirrors.

“You did good up there. Looked like you had a lot of tension to work out, which isn’t surprising considering all the studying you’ve been doing. Didn’t you have a paper due this week?” Rindou prompts.

You rub dry fingertips against your cheeks. When that doesn’t work, you wad up three paper towels, wet from the sink, and scrub.

“Yeah, I had a paper on Bashō’s references to music and instrumentation in his poems, which was due on Thursday. It could have been a lot worse honestly. I like the subject, and I thought my first draft was good for once. Of course, I had a complete breakdown on Wednesday after dreaming that the paper was really supposed to be about Nishiyama Sōin and that I’d miscited every source in there, but um, I managed to calm myself down.”

“Good. I don’t know why you always have nightmares about your papers. You always get an A.”

“Not always,” you say darkly.

The woman in the occupied stall hurries out, casting a few curious glances Rindou’s way as she washes her hands. She doesn’t dry them, leaving little splatters of water on the counter. Then, they are truly alone.

“Are you planning to stick around now that you finished your scene? Can’t imagine you wanna do another after that? It looked intense.”

“You really watched that?” you ask.

“Most of it,” he confirms. “You did good.”

“Thanks,” you say without looking at him. You dry your hands while staring at your now streak-free reflection in the mirror.

“If you don’t wanna stay, I could take you home. Or, if you’re hungry, I know a 24/7 breakfast place not far from here. You never eat enough after a scene,” Rindou says.

“Um, I’m good…Have you been coming here often?”

“No, it’s my first time in forever. You?” he asks in a tone that just misses casual.

“It’s my second time in the last two weeks. I’m kind of trying out stuff right now,” you say.

“Trying out stuff…” he tests the words.

“Are you okay? You look a little tense.”

Normally, Rindou chooses his words with precision, but he finds himself unable to process his surroundings. He exists somewhere outside his body, outside his brain, outside this room entirely. He peers down on the scene almost like a security camera, removed and distant. No, rather more like footage from a security camera, viewed days after the fact in a little room by someone who neither knows nor understands the context of the scene. Trying to think through the likely consequences of his words or choosing an alternative phrase, he finds his thoughts vaporous and ungraspable. So, he simply speaks.

“I didn’t like it.”

“Like what? Watching me with someone else?” you say quickly.

He grunts because that’s easier than searching for any kind of answer.

“You said we could fuck other people.”

“I know. You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rindou agrees. It is the correct and automatic response, but he can’t resist tacking on the truth at the end. “I didn’t like watching.”

“Well, that’s flattering at least,” you mutter.

In a different reality, one where he sent you up there with a pat on the ass, he might have liked watching Lady work your cunt up to a waterfall before returning you to him, still hovering on the precipice, edged and needy. He might have liked teasing you all night with the possibility of an orgasm. But he did not like watching you cum for someone else. Not without his permission. Even with a filmy gauze slowing down his brain from the half bottle of bourbon, he knows that much.

“We’re not okay, are we?” Rindou asks.

“No, Rindou. We are not okay.”

“Well, can we talk about it?”

“I don’t know. Can we talk about it without you making me feel like a complete idiot?” you snap.

A woman pushes open the door to the bathroom, but upon hearing the direction of your conversation, she turns right around, leaving you to a privacy tinged by history. The door creaks back into place with a choked slam.

“Like a…? You’re not an idiot?” Rindou insists.

“I know I’m not an idiot! I have spent the last few weeks going back and forth between feeling so sad and then so goddamn angry with you! Because I know that I could not have been more chill about things if I had a lobotomy to remove my frontal cortex first! I was so cool about everything, so understanding, so kind, and you treated me like, like some fucking bother you had to get out of the way!”

The first feeling to reemerge from the confused pit you dumped him in is embarrassment at himself as he is admittedly slow on the uptake, stuttering out, “Wait…this isn’t about…? This is about our conversation at my apartment?”

“Yes!” you hiss, hands flapping emphatically and voice echoing off the tile. The overcoat swallows you whole, a sea of black fabric trailing the floor, but somehow you stand tall within it. “Yes! I came that night so prepared to listen to your side of things and be reasonable and empathetic and all the rest, and you treated me like I was a hysterical child that you had to manage. Far be it from me to criticize the great Rindou! Not that I even did criticize you before you were jumping down my throat. I am not unreasonable. I am not hysterical. And I am not a child. I did not appreciate being treated like I was.”

Rindou remembers back to the hours before you arrived at his apartment that day. How he’d been so sure you would accuse him of cheating or play mind games to negate your own jealousy. The whole time you were there, he maintained that sureness even when you acted contrary to those expectations.

It, he admits, hadn’t been fair.

Worse, it may have been patronizing.

He groans, not at you but at the memory, and rubs a hand over his face. “Fuck, yeah, yeah, you’re probably right. I see that. I didn’t want you to blow things out of proportion, so I tried to shut you down before you could. But I guess I acted like a prick.”

“A prick might be understating it. I came to you to have a conversation in good faith, and you made me feel so…small. Insignificant. Like, I’m just this easy thing to you. Like you could use and discard me, so I better shut my mouth before you throw me away.”

Rindou opens his mouth to give a rebuttal-like reassurance that you are wrong about your supposed disposability to him, but you plow forward, pointed finger punctuating every word, which is a welcome distraction from the look of raw pain on your face. It is like the sun. Too painful to look at directly.

“I know what that feels like, Rindou, because I’ve been treated that way before. I’m young and people call me sweet, and that means people think I’m stupid or superficial, but I’m not. I’m capable of dealing with the hard things and having the hard conversations, and I do not deserve to be treated like I’m too naïve to know how things work.”

There is a layer of grime on his tongue. He focuses on how foreign it feels in his mouth rather than the thumping organ in his ribcage. The way his heart races and the room feels too small is not dissimilar to the sensations he feels when someone fires a gun, when his life is momentarily suspended. A kind of physical panic that quickly settles into alertness.

He breathes deep, calming. Rindou smells the antibacterial soap and weak air freshener blowing from the vents. The colors of the room appear saturated, more contrast and more details accessible to the eye. Most importantly, he sees you clearly. The veins of your throat strain as if bursting with tension your body can’t contain. There are new smudges at the edges as tiny tears wet your eyeline. There is every emotion in those eyes from disgust to anger to sadness, but most of all, there is a question lingering there as you silently beg him to answer: where can we go from here?

“I have never thought of you as some easy thing. I fucked up. I don’t know what was going on in my head that day, but you’re right. I wasn’t seeing you. I should have shut my fucking mouth and listened. I’m sorry.”

Relief warms your eyes.

“I accept your apology,” you say.

“Really?” Rindou asks. After weeks of brewing resentment and your impassioned speech, he didn’t expect a speedy turnaround no matter how many pretty speeches he made himself.

“Yeah, I don’t like being angry. It takes a lot of energy,” you half laugh.

The abrupt about face from anger to laughter throws into stark relief that the is very drunk and very tired.  Beneath that, Rindou recognizes a more abstract emotion, too: happiness.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner. I didn’t realize what you were upset about,” Rindou says, and then he adds helpfully. “Because I’m stupid. Thanks for forgiving me.”

“Yeah, you are stupid, but I figure you deserve a little grace because this was the first time in six months that you disrespected me. So long as you never treat me that way again. Seriously. My mother taught me to never put up with that from anyone,” you say.

“On my honor,” Rindou vows. “So, can I buy you something to eat now?”

The happiness explodes out like a shaken soda bottle. One second, he’s filled to the brim with it, and the next it’s gone, bubbling to nothing on the tile because you don’t say yes. Instead, you stare grimly at the wall, all traces of reconciliation gone as you clutch the sleeves of your overcoat tight.

He wonders if his apology is not enough, if he might prove his sincerity to you in some other way. If you were Mikey, he would cut off his pinky. He would gladly gift you the ring, index, and middle fingers of his left hand, too, if you demanded them. But fingers out of the question, he has nothing to give you to prove himself, and you don’t say yes.

“Rindou…I do accept your apology for insulting me, but that’s not all…The truth is, I tried to be cool about it, but I’ve had weeks to think, and…I’m not okay with things going back to how they were if you are dating or hell, sleeping with other people. I’m jealous and hurt. And I can’t accept it,” you say.

“It’s normal to be jealous,” Rindou tries, tone bracing and supportive. “I got jealous today, but I worked through it. I’ve been a dom since I was nineteen, and I’ve never been tied down to one person before. It’s not the way I know how to do things. That’s why I didn’t make any promises when we got together. I didn’t cheat on –”

“Please don’t start that again! I know! I know you technically didn’t do anything wrong. And I know that I can’t make you stop seeing other people. It’s your relationship, too, and you can have your boundaries, but…”

“But?”

“But if I can’t ask you to stop seeing other people, then you can’t ask me to keep loving you.”

You clap a hand to your mouth as if shocked by the confession, or like you might herd the words back into your mouth where they will remain unspoken. But it is too late. He can count on one hand the number of times anyone has told him they loved him, and he will not forget this.

“Baby…” Rindou tries to reach for you, but you scramble away, and now tears fall down your cheeks.

“I’m sorry, but that’s the problem, ya know? It hasn’t just been sex or hanging out for me. What we were doing, for me at least, was love, and it hurts too much to love someone who…I tried to take a step back, just have fun with you every once in a while, but there’s no medicine for falling in love, and every time I saw your stupid face, my heart started doing backflips. It doesn’t listen to me when I tell it we shouldn’t love you anymore. And that’s why…”

Your face blurs. It takes Rindou several confused seconds to realize his eyes are wet and blink the moisture away. When you reappear, you have steeled your nerves for the finishing blow.

“That’s why I don’t want to see you anymore. I need space and time to get over you, so um, please just stop calling and texting and all the rest. Just stop.”

Your face blurs again, and this time Rindou knows it’s because his eyes are watering. He blames his stupid glasses. He needs a stronger prescription.

There is no such excuse for your tears that drip past your chin to land on your collar. You wipe fruitlessly at the leakage, too slow to stimmy their fall.

If you say anything after that, Rindou doesn’t hear you over the ringing in his ears. Three women enter the bathroom arm-in-arm and immediately jabber at him about how he isn’t welcome, like three harpies sent to drive him away. Rindou doesn’t fight them as they push him out the door with their words.

Outside in the club, in the dark and music, far from the bright quiet of the bathroom, Rindou feels like he’s stepped onto the surface of Mars. Like he’s planets away from where you are, and he might as well be.

He doesn’t know how to find his way back to you because he stands now amid the wreckage, engine on fire, wings cracked. The plane has finally crashed.

A/N: entering my villain era

“Have you been eating well? I worry with you always running out the door.”

“I’ve been eating too well. I’m afraid to step on a scale at this rate. I’m not sure there’s a restaurant in Roppongi I haven’t tried at this point.

“Roppongi? Why are you spending so much time there?”

There is no conspiracy to keep your mother out of the loop when it comes to Rindou. Unlike most of your classmates, you always considered your mom more a friend than a strict parental figure. Days and nights alike took your mother out of the house to man cash registers, stock shelves, iron suits, and mind other families’ children as the opportunity presented itself; so, in her stead, you took on the mantel of de facto mother to your little sister, of homemaker for your older brother. Rare nights with your mother at home were often spent debriefing her on the goings on of the household, which created a uniquely female solidarity between you both, a kind of perverse equality that warped the boundaries of parent and child.

You told your mother about your first heart break, first kiss, and every other milestone, so when she asks about Roppongi, you remind her that you’ve been seeing someone and offer up a few details: what he does for work (export/import), where he lives (Roppongi), how you met (a lie about a coffee shop).

“I recognize that look in your eye,” your mother says. “You’re in love.”

“Oh, because I’ve been in love so many times before?” you scoff.

“Exactly because you haven’t been in love before. This look is different. New. But I’ve seen it on other women far too many times. Tell me, what is it about this boy that has you falling in love?”

You slurp your udon, stalling not because you need time to think of an answer but because the answer is too readily available.

All your great heroes are writers, yet you never reckoned yourself one until recently when you started a journal. Great, heaping emotional confessions splay out across the pages as you unburden yourself of the too-big-feelings you harbor for Rindou. His every advantage and grace is captured on those pages, and the only trouble is translating the truth into something less scandalous for your mother’s ears. Because you may be close, nearly friends, but you cannot tell your mother that when Rindou chokes you, in the space between thinking and emptiness, you could make yourself a home.

“Well, he’s always there for me. Even when he’s busy. I know I can rely on him when it’s important,” you say.

Translation: Rindou works without making it his life, placing it lower in the balance of his priorities than time with you. It is a privilege to commit to lovers or even family over work. Your mother’s chapped hands, reddened from nights doused in dish detergent remind you of her sacrifices every time she stirs the pot. Rindou, free from those worries and hardships, strikes you as a fairytale prince.

Only a few weeks ago, he dropped everything to come to your side in the middle of a workday.

You normally answer texts within a matter of minutes, so five weeks ago, when half an hour passed with Rindou’s message left on read, he called you. Brave face on, you tried to answer like nothing was wrong, but sniffling tears warped the words, and Rindou forced you to admit what had happened.

“It’s not a big deal. I just got a really bad mark on my last essay. The professor’s comments are…harsh, yeah, harsh…but I’m okay,” you blubbered.

“What an asshole. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come pick you up,” Rindou said.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Seriously, I’m just being a baby. It’s not like I failed the class. From here on out, I just need to get A’s on all my assignments,” and here you drew a shaky breath as all A’s would be a near miraculous feat, “to pass the class. You work hard, and I’ll see you tonight.”

“Forget that. Tell me where you are now.”

“You said you had an important meeting with investors –”

“Don’t’ be a brat,” Rindou warned, and your jaw clicked shut and stayed there. “You think I give a fuck about this meeting? Compared to you? Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to find the closest froyo or ice cream shop. Go there and drop me your location. Then, buy every flavor with every topping you can imagine wanting. I don’t care if there are twenty bowls, and you take one bite from each. Buy every kind you like. Once I’m there, I’ll cheer you up, baby, but until then, treat yourself on me.”

The day played out exactly as Rindou commanded. You nursed a stomachache that night as Rindou listened to you talk through your anxieties. He treated you so softly as you cried that you couldn’t remember what you were so worried about when morning dawned. He never once checked his phone for messages from work, all his attention on you.

“What else? He’s a great listener. He doesn’t talk as much as me, and before you say it, Mom, yes haha, who out there talks as much as me? You’re hilarious. But, um, he isn’t just not talking, but he’s really listening even when I don’t think he is,” you say.

No translation needed for this one.

Slumped in his seat, eyes hidden by his bangs, sometimes you worry you are talking to a wall when you tell Rindou about your day. The problem is especially painful over the phone, where you can’t search his body language for any clues, and his affirmative noises come few and far between.

You told yourself that he cared, but sometimes, when you were at your lowest, it was hard to believe.

All your lingering worries were relieved shortly after New Year’s, when you broke the seal on staying over at Rindou’s place and began joining him several times a week at his apartment for nights of long, dirty sex. Times not spent in bed together usually found Rindou playing video games or listening to music, while you did your homework in a pile of blankets on his heated floors.

You thought you knew Rindou’s apartment inside and out until one day you dropped an earring on the floor. You lazily tapped around with your feet, but when it didn’t turn up, you dropped to your belly to look under the bed. Your earring shone gold and unmistakable, but your greedy eyes glossed over it to latch onto a pile of books. There were only a couple books in the stack, but as browsing other people’s libraries was one of your greatest pleasures in life, you crawled out from under the bed with the humble bounty in tow.

The first book compiled the short stories of Edogawa Rampo. The paper cover looked uncracked. New book smell oozed off the pages when you pressed your nose against them. You traced the titles on the back, picking out a few favorites like ‘The Human Chair’ to read later.

Impressed as you already were by Rindou’s taste as you long enjoyed Rampo’s uncanny valley explorations of 20th century new Japan, you were equally surprised to find Kani by Kōno Taeko as the next book. You remembered mentioning her work to him a few months ago as something you hoped to make time for outside your studies because while you loved 19th century literature, you also enjoyed the modern classics when time allowed.

The next book after that weighed heavy in your hands, and when you saw the title, you dropped it hard on the floor. Hakkenden. Rindou was reading Hakkenden. A bookmark saved his spot on the nineteenth of ninety-eight chapters.

You had been working your way through the epic behemoth, one of the longest in world literature, for the better part of two years and often brought it up in conversation. Rindou would sit stone-faced and seemingly bored as you talked about the most recent chapter. Yet here was the book. And now that you thought about it, you’d mentioned Rampo to him as well.

“Why are you on the floor?” Rindou’s voice came from behind your shoulder.

“You’re reading the books I talk about!” you squealed, holding the massive tome up in accusation.

Rindou scratched the back of his neck. “Well, yeah, but not all of it. I wanted to read everything you mention, but you read too fast for me. I got through Kani pretty fast in between meetings, but Hakkenden slowed me down way more than I thought. You weren’t kidding about that thing.”

“But just because I mention it doesn’t mean you’re going to like it. I could make better recommendations tailored to your tastes,” you said.

“That’s not the point. I’m reading them so we can talk about them,” Rindou said.

Heat swelled in your chest, and you understood for the first time why ancient peoples believed the heart was the source of all love. You dropped your books to the floor and took Rindou’s hand.

“Rindou, baby, sit down on the bed. I’m going to suck your cock now.”

“Oh, are you?” Rindou scowled, but his voice was light and unoffended, just the hint of the thwarted dom peeking through.

“Yeah, just this once, shut up and let me,” you said.

And maybe he understood how your heart pulsed in your chest, or maybe he just wanted his dick sucked because Rindou didn’t argue. He had, after all, proven he knew how to listen.

Face hot at the memory of what happened next, you fan yourself, hoping your mother will think it’s from the heat of the sukiyaki. Your mother, for her part, nods wisely.

“Listening is good. You do like to fill a silence. But understanding is something else. Some men seem like good listeners but truthfully they just have nothing to say,” your mom says, sage advice stemming from a decade plus of caving to the glorified fuck boy masquerading as a man that was your father.

“No, I know,” you agree. “But I do think he understands. When I dated Sensyuu for a bit – remember him? The guy from the factory? The one with the goatee – well, I thought he was so experienced and smart because he was in this thirties, but I know now that he was an immature idiot. With Rindou…it feels like he’s so intuitive. Like there’s so much about the world and people that he understands and could teach me.”

“Wait, how old is this boy again?” your mother asks.

“Relax, Mama. He’s only twenty-eight,” you reassure her.

“And you’re turning twenty-two in a few weeks…I suppose that’s reasonable. About the same as your grandparents,” your mother allows.

Relieved by your mother’s approval, you take a meaty bite of beef, chewing slowly to savor the flavor. Rindou never fashioned himself as some great teacher with you the pupil. Yet, you do learn so much when you’re with him. Not facts or even opinions, but about yourself. From his example, you discover a confident way of moving through the world, unapologetic of making a scene or breaking some social more that no one could justify in the first place. He shows you how to have fun outside of books, to take risks. And, oh how deliciously he teaches you about the limits of your own body.

Fucking Rindou teaches you about the pleasure of anticipation. Obliterating and ossifying as an orgasm may be, you learn to relish the ascent to the pinnacle, the delights of the journey. Discover that stretching the moments leading to the fall, finding new ways to lengthen that coiling rope inside your tummy, not only intensifies the descent, it is the very point.

Thus, every moment you spend with Rindou’s hands on your skin becomes a kind of pre-climax, like snacking on sweet grapes before a swish of white wine.

Because you are always listening to him, for his words and the subtle language of the body. If he nudges you with a thigh, you leap to correct your position. To his word, you follow. Such ecstasy in obeyance. And in every moment that passes without his direction, you wait and enjoy the act of waiting.

One time, a work emergency popped up, a problem with customs at the shipyard holding up a barge of goods. The call came right as Rindou promised you could cum after an hour of teasing cruelty. Your body was bowstring tight, ready to fire, when cursing to himself, Rindou unwound from your body and set to work. It went without saying that you did not dare cum then.

You tried to regain his permission, petting his arm, thumbing at your own pussy, and crying to soften the coldest of hearts, but Rindou didn’t even discipline you for the brattiness, too focused on his work.

Annoyed when your attempts didn’t let up, Rindou gave you a task of your own, pushing your head into his lap, your throat swallowing up the full length of him, and keeping you still with a submission hold.

Now, you cried in earnest, not just because of your needy pussy but the ugly obstruction that blocked your throat. Intellectually, you recognized that you could breathe through your nose, but your body insisted it couldn’t, that you would die here, suffocated on his dick. And for the next half hour, as Rindou made phone call after phone call, that’s what you did. You choked and whined and cried until your tears mixed with the steady stream of drool that streamed past your overstretched lips and down his balls. The details of Rindou’s phone call went straight over your head as your mental faculties busied themselves with restraining your hands and feet, both of which wanted to kick and claw for survival.

Finally, Rindou hung up the phone. The work crisis handled.

Thrusting up, he managed to choke you on the bare centimeter of his dick not already buried in your wet mouth. A few bruising pumps, and then his cum rushed unimpeded down your throat. Thick and rich, he came with more spurts than he’d ever gifted you before, and your body quivered with it.

Only then did Rindou dip one finger down to your clit and tap. Tiny inconsequential nudges, yet your edged and desperate body answered that knock by throwing open the door of your orgasm. You came like your own personal rapture, sending you first to hell and then to paradise as your body spasmed uncontrollably. Then, Rindou reincarnated you with a kiss to the cheek, and you were whole once again, staring into those velvet eyes.

“Well, it sounds like young love,” your mother says, and you nearly choke on a mushroom as her voice rips you violently from torrid daydreams. “Just remember that no matter how much you love this boy, you should never let him push you into doing something you don’t want. If he threatens to leave, let him. Benefit from my mistakes. Don’t go repeating them. Don’t ever make yourself small for a man.”

These words are delivered blithely as your mother pokes at the simmering pot with a chopstick. Yet she touches her wrinkling neck as if on reflex. You remember once staring up at then supple and unmarred skin with the uncomplicated, admiring gaze of an infant or small child. You were young when you came to see your mother as a tragic heroine, a sympathetic one sure, but one doomed by her narrow choices or maybe by the lessons learnt from her own mother and her grandmother before that. Because there was no shepherding hand to guide her away from unloving men, no strident lessons woman-to-woman about the need for her own money, to never empty her pockets with the trust that some man would fill them. When other girls went through the stage where they became hypercritical of their mothers, picking at faults and laughing at the sad repetitions in their lives, you continued to look at her with that child’s loving eyes. You drink up the words of concern and advice as if she delivers the scripture.

You feel pride in your relationship with Rindou as you can put your mom at ease without telling a single lie.

“The best thing about him, Mama, is I know he isn’t treating me like some easy thing. He never makes me feel silly or inconsequential. He shows me how important I am through his actions, but not just that, he lets me set the tone of things, too. He doesn’t push against my boundaries or pigeonhole me in some box set aside for a girl. I know that he wants me to feel important and safe when I’m with him. And I do.”

A few nights ago, you hooked a calf over his while lying in bd. Half a dozen pillows stacked behind you supported your chest, so you wound your sweaty, just-released lower bodies together. The sex had been intense but not too rough, and he had let you cum, so your brain was half way to shutting down for a deep sleep when you turned to look at him speculatively.

“I think we should come up with pet names for each other.”

Rindou cracked one eye open from where he lounged in his own post-sex haze. “You want me to call you more pet names?”

“We should have ones just for us.”

“Here’s an idea. You can call me Sir, and I’ll call you slut, whore, cocksleeve…I’m tired but I promise to come up with some more in the morning,” Rindou yawned.

You poked him in the side, right below his ribs where his chest hair ended.

“A pet name we can use in public.”

“I’m more than happy to call you a slut in public.”

“A cute one! Like…I’m thinking I could call you…Tanuki-chan,” you said.

Just like that you felt the full weight of Rindou’s attention as he rolled onto his side to stare you down. Rindou exclusively operated on one of two modes: inscrutable stoicism or searing intensity. As he weighed his new nickname, his observation carried the weight of the universe.

“Tanuki-chan?”

“Yes, I thought it fit because of the dark circles under your eye and your two-toned hair. Plus, it’s just cute!” you explained.

Rindou sighed, “Fine, but if you call me Tanuki-chan instead of Sir while we’re fucking, I’ll belt you.”

“Oh, good to know,” you murmured, like you just might try it. Rindou cursed under his breath, rolling over to serve you his back. The thick trapezius muscles there flexed, and a stirring lust rose in you that shouldn’t have been possible so soon after you last took him inside you. “Don’t go to sleep! You have to give me a nickname, too!’

No response came and soon after, you heard his grumbling snores. Only a little piqued, you followed him into sleep.

The next morning, you scrubbed your toothbrush – a second bought just to live on the sink in Rindou’s apartment – against the overnight scum on your teeth, when Rindou entered the bathroom, wrapped two arms around your waist and whispered in your ear.

“Good morning, Mozu-Mozu.”

Peppermint fluoride slipped precariously down your throat as you struggle to respond through a mouth full of toothpaste. “Where’d that come from?”

“You wanted a pet name, right? Well, I thought about it all night. Since you made me a tanuki, I wanted to go with an animal for you, too, and I couldn’t stop thinking you would be a bird because I love waking up to that beautiful voice in my ear. So, what better than the hundred songs bird?” Rindou said.

You spit in the sink.

“You stayed up all night thinking about that?”

“I took my time with it. Wanted to choose the right one.”

True to his word, Rindou slips Mozu into your texts and softer moments now, caressing the word with his tongue like it’s something sinful and secret just for your ears. No man has ever taken you half as seriously.

Your mother has nothing to worry about. Nothing.

--

Bicycles meander past the shop fronts barely faster than the pedestrians who lazily stroll the street. Shopping in Ginza is intimidating on a student’s budget. The names of the high-end brands fall clumsily off your tongue. Even the Japanese ones taste like a different language.

Hair hastily thrown back with a tie and sneakers tattered from stomping the streets on many a rainy day, you know you stand out in the boutique lingerie shop. The women manning the front of the store appear airbrushed. Poreless and unfairly tall, they tower in watch at the front of the store like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades.

Akane – one of your closest university friends – flings yet another bra onto the pile in your waiting arms. You asked Akane to join you, yes, but the plan was simply to make a return and then visit the bookstore, not play her personal shopper as she tries on a hundred bras she could never hope to afford.

The lingerie set in your bag consists of a sheer teddy, bite-sized thong, and bra with crisscrossing straps all in the most delicate crème colors. When you wear the outfit, you look like a virginal sacrifice, all contradictions and enticement. But, the bra digs into your chest and leaves ugly red marks in its wake, so you decided to return it.

Rindou has gifted you more than a dozen similarly priced and fine outfits at this point. The gifts make you nervous as you were taught to never trust a man who trades in love for money, but you do trust in Rindou’s eyes when he sees you in a chosen negligee or strip of leather. Trust that these gifts are a treat for him, turning you into a feast for the eyes, rather than an attempt to own you with his wealth.

“Would I look cute in this, you think?” Akane questions, holding up a corset top and matching panties.

“Anyone would look good in that. You’d shouldn’t try it on though. Better not to know how good you would have looked in it,” you say.

“I could spoil myself just this once,” Akane wheedles, like any underwear, no matter how sexy, could be worth a full week’s worth of wages.”

Set on leaving your friend to her bad decisions, you mindlessly scroll Twitter, liking any post that remotely catches your eye. The jangle of the bell announces new customers entering the store. You hope the gorgeous shop attendants might stop staring you down if there are other customers to assist.

“Hey, isn’t that Rindou? Rindou!” Akane calls out, bumping you in the side. “Wait, but who is that?”

Excitement and exasperation compete as you turn to follow Akane’s pointing finger, figuring if Rindou is in a lingerie shop, it is to buy you yet another unnecessary pantie set. He looks particularly debonair, dressed for the office, in a turquoise three-piece suit and matching vest. The color sets off the garish purple of his hair nicely. He looks like the kind of man who can afford to shop in stores like this.

So too does the woman at his side.

Both of them notice you at the same time, following the call of Akane’s voice in the quiet store. Rindou wears a neutral mask, revealing no particular care in running into you out and about on a Wednesday afternoon. The woman at his side, on the other hand, looks genuinely interested.

You scan her up and down. The graceful arc of her body drops to an ironed skirt and towering high heels, everything obviously designer or at least expensively made. She wears her hair in a chignon that would take you an hour to get right, which frames a delicate neck. Tasteful makeup on an already beautiful face completes her daunting impression.

Unsure what to think of Rindou’s appearance with such a beautiful, far more sophisticated woman, you wave. Rindou barely reacts causing your stomach to flip over. Twice.

“Oh, wow, she’s really pretty,” Akane whispers.

“Are you good to try on this stuff alone? I’m going to go return this,” you say, shoving the stack of hangers at your friend. She doesn’t argue at all, eyes glued to the other woman.

As you approach, Rindou whispers something in the other woman’s ear. You watch eagle-eyed at the way his mouth nears her skin, how his breath dislodges a loose tendril of hair. They don’t touch, but their bodies are too close as they commune. Then, the woman struts off to browse a section of the store you already know contains high-end fetish wear.

Rindou turns his attention to you only when the other woman leaves his side. His face is blank.

“Hey, I um, didn’t expect to run into you here,” you greet him. Normally, you would kiss his cheek, nuzzle into his neck, unable to stand any physical space after time apart, but now you keep your distance. Rindou doesn’t reach for you either.

“Yeah, you don’t normally shop here,” Rindou says, voice low. His eyes scan over your head like he’s looking for something, or maybe he’s just avoiding looking at you.

“I just came here to make a return. That set with the teddy doesn’t fit. But then, Akane insisted on shopping around, so I’m keeping her company until she’s ready to leave. I keep telling her she can’t afford this place, but you know Akane,” you explain.

“You’ll have to tell me how it turns out later,” Rindou says.

“Right, yeah, and you’ll have to tell me about your friend.”

You deserve awards for the even tone you manage as you circle the question, like it isn’t driving you crazy to wonder why your lover is in a lingerie shop with an attractive woman. You can feign casual; you’ve done it before with other men. Granted, you didn’t love those men like you love Rindou, but your muscle memory is good as you affect perfect nonchalance, hand on your hip and reassuring smile on your face.

Or, more likely, you radiate awkwardness, but at least that’s better than jealousy and suspicion.

“Not much to tell,” Rindou shrugs, and you wish he would stop speaking before the next words even leave his mouth. “She’s one of the subs I’ve done scene work with for the last few years. She moved to Kobe, but she’s back in town for a bit, so I promised to spoil her for the day.”

“Spoil her? What does that entail?”

“Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow. It’s rude to keep her waiting, and you should go back to Akane,” Rindou says, and the clear dismissal of what you’re feeling somehow hurts worse than the awful, fantastical images that dance through your mind: Rindou zipping this woman into a naughty maid’s outfit, Rindou spanking her in the dressing room, Rindou kissing her with those red lips that should be yours.

“Cool.”

As you return to Akane, who does not argue at all when you insist you leave immediately, return completely forgotten, you don’t feel remotely cool. Not. At. All.

--

Over winter break, you and your university friends drank shochu until you reached a spectacular level of drunkenness. You swore lifelong loyalty to one another, crying at how thankful you were that fate tied you together in the same major. Somehow, a dirty napkin became the site of an official friendship contract that included provisions for favors. Things like, a friend must assist in helping one of the others move apartments given a week’s notice, or a friend must always pick up a fellow friend from the airport. More importantly, it included a clause instituting that all prior commitments short of finals and family funerals must be dropped if an emergency friend meeting is called.

Now definitely constitutes an emergency.

Two hours after Rindou blows you off in Ginza, you snuggle up beside all your friends on the couch in Akane’s apartment, tipsy on wine coolers and completely losing your mind.

“I say you just break up with him. He’s no good for you,” Naoto says for the dozenth time since he’s arrived.

“You should have seen her! She was freaking gorgeous, like I’d have wanted to hang her picture on my wall as a kid gorgeous,” you moan.

“I disagree. You are ten times cuter,” Akane lies.

“Cute? Cute?”

You stuff your face into a throw pillow and scream. All your friends trade concerned glances. Unsure what to do, they settle on pushing another wine cooler your way. You guzzle until your throat burns on the acidic drink.

“I think we’re jumping to conclusions, and you should give him a chance to explain. He said he was spoiling his ex-girlfriend, and yes, that does sound like he meant to buy her underwear, but that doesn’t mean he wants to see her in it! Maybe she has blackmail material on him. Or, maybe they broke up because he sees her as a sister? You should wait for him to explain tomorrow,” one of your friends, Tsumugi, offers.

Himeka, another friend, scoffs uncharitably. “No man buys underwear for a woman unless he intends to see her in it. Let’s get real. He’s a dog. I can’t believe I liked that cheater! I gave him half my scone at brunch!”

You skipped over the background info about doms and subs when regaling your friends with the story. You told them instead that the other woman was an ex-girlfriend rather than a scene partner. Much like you skated around the truth of your relationship with Rindou all this time.

“I mean, it’s not technically cheating,” you admit ruefully. “We never said we were exclusive. In fact, we basically said the opposite when we first started dating. I just thought…it’s been almost six months! Six months of seeing him like five days a week. How does he even have time to see other people? I sure don’t!”

“He probably doesn’t! Like you said, when would he even find the time? He probably just met up with this woman because of nostalgia or pity, and he’s going to realize he made a mistake and come crawling back. For sure,” Tsumugi says.

“Then, why hasn’t he texted? He knows the impression he left on her. He should be blowing up her phone right now. Besides, husbands find ways to cheat on their wives all the time, and they live together,” Himeka, ever the pessimist, insists.

“Akane, what do you think?” you ask, turning big, pleading eyes towards the only witness of today’s incident.

“I mean…it doesn’t look…good,” Akane stutters, face beet red as she delivers the death knell to your heart. “But like you said, you aren’t official. So, if you have a problem with him seeing other people, you should communicate that. I wouldn’t trust any guy to stick to one woman if he’s not even asked to. For all he knows, you’ve been seeing all kinds of university guys behind his back, too. So, you should communicate with him, and see what he says.”

“I wouldn’t need a woman to ask,” Naoto mutters. As the only guy in the room, he is tasked with bearing the burden of men everywhere.

The tick tock of the wall clock in Akane’s kitchen sounds like a countdown to your personal misery. Rindou promised to call tomorrow, and the anticipation blurs into anxiety. Tomorrow may well be the end of your relationship, and you don’t think you could bear that. But in the same vein, Akane could be right, so you should wish time brought your reconciliation even sooner.

You bite your fingernails as you think through your options.

“What do we even know about this guy? He knows everything about you, but he keeps you at arm’s length from his life. You’ve never met his friends or work colleagues, except for his brother that one time. For all you know he could have a harem of women all over Tokyo. And, you have to admit, he looks fishy. The neck tattoo? The money? The hair? He isn’t some upstanding citizen,” Naoto says heatedly.

“See, that’s your problem, Naoto,” Tsumugi says. “You’re a police officer now. You can’t go around with these discriminatory attitudes assuming anyone who dares to dress like an individual is a bad guy. I honestly expected more from you.”

The two argue back and forth for a few minutes, but their words don’t reach you. A self-defense mechanism slides into place. It empties your brain, protects you from any thoughts that may churn your guts. The wine coolers are doing a good enough job of that already.

“Enough! Nobody cares,” Himeka lectures them before turning to you with solemn eyes. “If you talk to him tomorrow, and he says, yes, I am seeing other women, and I’m going to keep seeing other women. There’s nothing you can do about it. What are you going to do?”

You want to evade the question, but Himeka’s narrow eyes follow yours, and stop you from fading into nothingness. It’s a good question, which is what makes it so uniquely cruel.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to break up if he is. I mean, you were okay not being exclusive before,” Akane points out.

“Wouldn’t that make me, I don’t know, pathetic?”

“It would only make you pathetic if you let him sleep around with as many women as he wants while you wait for him to call like a good little housewife. I say go out and have some fun of your own. You are young and smart and beautiful, and guys are going to line up to take you out. So, why not let them? That way, you’re even,” Akane advises.

The idea of someone else’s touching your body with foreign hands makes you shudder. Yet, Rindou shows no signs of the same revulsion. He can stomach a woman’s hand wandering down his chest, tracing his thighs, palming his cock, and who knows what else? Maybe he even lets them sleep in his apartment, curled up like true lovers, like the two of you. The thought sours the sweet wine in your mouth.

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I just…need to talk to him. Yeah, I’ll communicate with him, and I’m sure everything will just work itself out. No reason to worry.”

Looking around the circle of sympathetic faces, not a single one of your friends looks like they believe it. And neither do you.

A/N: So be honest guys...am I completely evil?

“In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are water.” – Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

Rindou lies with his back propped in the bath, knees bent to fit the tub and thighs spread to fit your body. Your back nestles into his chest, the crown of your head even with his lips. He can’t resist taking big breathfuls of your scent as the clean shampoo smell drifts up to his nose. There is no place for his hands to rest other than your supple body, and he casually holds your breasts in each palm, just enjoying the weight of them and the way your nipples pebble in the cool air.

“My perfect day, huh?” Rindou muses. “It would have to be a day off, I suppose.”

“Naturally.”

“And, you’d be there,” Rindou hums into your ear.

“Even more naturally,” you agree primly.

Rindou tweaks your nipple, and you squeal. Water sloshes over the rim and drenches the bathmat as you squirm in his unrelenting hold.

“What a cocky brat,” Rindou says mournfully, but internally he marvels for the nth time at how seamlessly you’ve carved out a place in his life, how quickly you’ve become the best part of his day, his week. It defies everything he understands of women, of himself, and yet here you are, nuzzling into his chest like a prized cat and whispering sweet nothings into his ear. “My perfect day…I guess I’d want to get out and see as much of the city as possible, do as much as possible. Maybe start with a walk at Yoyogi Park, get breakfast from a street vendor, take you to a flea market and buy you whatever you want.”

“Is this my perfect day or yours?” you laugh, and the vibration of your chest shifts your tits in his hands.

“Hmm, actually, let’s go back a step. First, I’d wake you up with my cock in your cunt. Just lazy spooning until I fill this pussy up,” Rindou says. His fingers dance to your mound, twirling through the short hairs there and gliding through the seam that blocks your pussy from him. It parts easily at the slightest pressure.

“Again, is this my perfect day or yours?”

“And, then I’d take you out. Wherever you wanted to go, an art gallery, coffee –”

“A bookstore café,” you interrupt eagerly.

“Sure, a bookstore café and –”

Before he can continue, you interrupt again, “And would I have taken a shower that morning, sir? Or would you be showing me off around the city while my pussy is filled with cum?”

Rindou groans, for one moment utterly at your mercy as he pictures your stained thighs, skirt so short that anyone who looked carefully would know what a mess he made of your drippy cunt. He would let you wear panties, just to guarantee you kept his cum close for hours.

He can’t resist rubbing touching you, heavy palm slowly waking your clit up from its slumber as he rubs around it.

“Naughty little slut. Of course, I’d keep you dripping with me. Nothing’s free either. Everything I bought you would cost you, too. One belt against this hot ass per.”

You strain back into him, your ass sinking into the crease of his thighs, and gasp, “Yes! I’d try to buy everything!”

“I know. A pain slut like you would earn her whipping,” Rindou agrees. He feels your clit peak through your hood and redirects his fingers to your slick mouth, wetting them thoroughly against your velvet tongue before returning to tease slow circles around your it. With your hips canted up, the waters don’t quite reach the height to wash away your spit.

“After shopping?” you moan.

“Hmm, I think we’d go right home. You’d need to pay for your frivolous purchases. Wasting my money like that? I’d have to teach you a lesson. I’d bend you over standing, right in front of a mirror, so you can see what a whore you are when you take my belt, and then I’d whip your ass black and blue.”

“Would I cry?”

“Of course, slut. You’d be sobbing before I was done.” Your nails scramble desperately up and down his arm, sparking little pinpricks of pain. “Don’t you dare cum! Greedy bitch.”

“No, sir!” you gasp, but he can see by your tensed thighs that you are fighting your way back from the edge of oblivion. To be mean, he rubs a little directly over your clit, and you keen but don’t cum. Your head thrashes back and forth, almost bucking into his nose, but you don’t cum.

Since you started seeing each other, you have cum five times without permission, each one an accident you dearly regretted even before your punishment. And punish you he did. Each second of pleasure was paid back a hundred-fold, for the first in orgasm denial, for the second in bruises to the back of your throat, for the third bruises to your tits and thighs, and for the fourth stripes to the back. The last time, he took a different approach. Tying you to a vibrator at the highest-setting, Rindou left you for hours until your tears ran dry like a desert, your brain foggy, and your clit numb to anything for a week. You have behaved since.

Stirring with pride at your continued restraint – the restraint he taught you – Rindou kisses your quivering cheeks and slows his fingers.

“After, we’d do this. Exactly this. I’d hold you in the hot water, soothe your welts, kiss away every pretty tear.”

“This is nice,” you agree, and when you present your lips for a kiss, he can’t resist giving you several, darting around the edges of your mouth until you are smiling.

The blanks of his so-called perfect day fill in readily, and Rindou continues, “Then, you’d need to rest up, so I’d put you in bed for an hour, while I go to the gym –”

“So, this is the part where you come up with a way to get rid of me. I see how it is,” you say.

“Oh, suddenly interested in weightlifting? In MMA? You wanna come to the gym with me?” Rindou challenges.

“Well, no. I think I’ll enjoy my nap,” you concede.

The ghost of a smile lingers on the corner of your lips. You know just how funny you are, never quite bratting as you obey all commands without argument, but playfully teasing him until he puts you back in your place. Rindou enjoys your teasing almost as much as he enjoys showing you exactly where you belong.

“After the gym, we’d go out clubbing, somewhere so loud and so crowded we can’t hear ourselves think. And we’d dance until the club closes. I’d dress you up in something nice and slutty, so that I can get a hand on this ass whenever I want, so that when I grind into you, you feel every part of me. You’d be so sore still, wincing whenever I rubbed you the wrong way. I could just reach over and pinch you at any moment, bring tears back to your eyes.”

Rindou resumes his fingers on your clit, amping them up faster and faster until you shiver. Your lower lip is ripe and red from where you bite into it. A screamer always presents a lot of fun, and you scream as loud as anyone he’s ever met.

“We’d be all but fucking by the time we leave the club. I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you,” Rindou murmurs, breath tickling the shell of your ear. “And when we got back, I wouldn’t. I’d fuck you face down, ass up, while you begged to cum until you were hoarse. I’d put my hands around your throat, squeezing just right so you can’t breathe, can’t think, can hear your pussy pounding so loud. I’d drag you around by your hair, manhandle you like my little fucktoy.”

“Sir!” you gasp, scrambling.

Peering at you sideways, Rindou notes the wildness in your eyes. Ever atom of your body is poised for the fall, taut and trembling with the strength it takes not to cum. Your nipples are so tight and chewable. He can’t resist tugging on one cruelly, and now you shriek.

“Please can I cum, sir? Please, sir. Please!”

“On my perfect day, I would let you cum if you begged me prettily enough,” Rindou says conversationally, above the desperate pleas that spill forth from your lips. “I’d let you cum, but then I wouldn’t stop. I’d rub your clit for hours, make you cum again and again until you were begging me to deny you. Maybe I’d use up all your orgasms for the whole year. Whenever you begged to cum in the future, I’d be able to remind you how many times I’d let you cum already. Only a greedy whore would beg for more.”

“I’m begging, sir. I’m begging!”

Your fat clit pulses between his fingers, and Rindou draws it side to side. He watches the panic in your eyes with cruel pride. As desperate as you are to cum for pleasure’s sake, you are twice as desperate to earn his permission before you fail. You can only stay at the precipice so long, lacking the years of orgasm denial and control that seasoned subs could boast, and soon, you will cum regardless of whether he grants you permission.

Yet, you don’t want to disappoint him. You so badly don’t want to disappoint him, in fact, that you draw your own arm to your mouth and bite down into the fragile skin. It breaks and little beads of blood run down into the waters you share and dye them pink. A stupid move from a stupid little pain slut. Your hips buck. If anything, the pain only brings you closer to the edge.

Rindou laughs down at your pitiful face, decides maybe you deserve a little mercy if only because you are so pathetic.

“Do you really want to cum so badly?” he asks.

“Please, sir,” you slur around the blood in your teeth.

“Go ahead and cum then, slut,” Rindou coos.

He rubs circles onto your clit for a few more seconds until your body is tight as a rubber band stretched to its limits. You snap. Your orgasm starts to unwind from your cunt, and Rindou removes his fingers, removes his hands, removes his lips from your neck. He leaves you entirely empty and untouched.

Ruined.

You scream.

Quickly, he pins your arms with one hand and keeps your thighs separated with the other. Your body fights him, trying with everything it has to get some friction, but all you can do is writhe in his unforgiving hold as your orgasm is ruined. The pathetic, aborted orgasm falls to nothing, the memory of almost pleasure making the denial even more brutal.

“Aww, aren’t I so generous? Giving a greedy whore a ruin when she hasn’t even earned one. What do you say?” Rindou taunts.

Something incomprehensible escapes your lips, a little angry but mostly broken and agonized. Rindou smiles at the rictus of pain on your features and prompts you a second time.

“Thank…you…sir,” you pant through gritted teeth.

“Aww, any time baby,” he says.

The serenity of your bath is broken now, the romance disintegrated by his games, but he feels closer to you than ever as your body instinctually clings to his for comfort. He kisses your hair and runs strong hands up and down your sides. The water is long cold, so he drains the tub and wraps you in a fuzzy towel. Life returns to your eyes as he warms you up.

Later, as you both get dressed, he feels your eyes on his back. You keep your silence for several minutes, rare for you.

Finally, you say, “Hey, Rindou…Is that really your perfect day?”

He isn’t lying when he answers, “Yes, sweet girl. That’s my perfect day.”

--

If he fakes an asthma attack, will the others finally take his complaints about their incessant smoking seriously? Or will they just laugh as he heaves?

Safe Heaven, like always, is wreathed in smoke. It circles upwards until it disappears into the vents to be recirculated into their weary lungs in an endless, cancerous loop. If he coughs up phlegm on Mochi’s paunchy face, Rindou thinks the man may finally take him seriously about those smelly cigars.

While never intended to become Bonten’s go-to-place for casual meetings, Safe Heaven has become unavoidable. It is Ran’s domain, a gentleman’s club where the girls are discrete and the drinks top-shelf by default. Mochi loves it here. He especially loves the pink-haired darling, appropriately named Candy, who works up front and giggles at his every joke like he’s George Carlin reincarnated. Mochi eats that shit up. And since Mochi’s smuggling operation can’t be disentangled from Rindou’s domestic drug trafficking, he finds himself regularly seated in one of the soundproofed backrooms to discuss business.

As the smoke clings to his lungs like crud, Rindou swears he feels the years sliding off his lifespan.

All of the usual suspects gather around the table – Ran, Mochi, Rindou – plus the less common but not unheard of Takeomi, Sanzu, and Wakasa. Tonight, they have caught a big fish.

The fish – one Ushioda Junichi – cries alone in Ran’s office. At twenty-two years old with a degree from Tokyo University, everyone would agree he’s a fine young man from a fine young family.

Yesterday when he hit the town and one of Bonten’s clubs with his friends, his life was a wide open plain of possibilities, every day promising something better than the last. Tonight, after waking up from a bender with the blood of his girlfriend drenching his hands, Ushioda still believed he might have a future once he got his story straight. Then, Ran found him, showed the security footage of just how brutally he beat the life from his girlfriend in the alley outside the club, reminded him of the sentence for murder. Now, his wracking cries are louder than the sound proofing, his life shrunk to the size of a tick.

Rindou almost feels bad for him. He knows what it’s like to be out of options. But he watched the video too and knows the scumbag deserves to rot.

Kicked back on a leather sofa with a cigarette burning to nothing in his hand, Ran updates the group on the opportunity Ushioda presents, “From what I could gather, Ushioda’s daddy is the kind of man who would jump out of a window before he saw the family name shamed. He built their family up from nothing. He’ll leap at the chance to cover up what the kid did.”

“Does he like the kid?” Mochi asks.

“Piece of shit burns the man’s entire life down in a blackout? Of course, he doesn’t like him,” Sanzu guffaws.

“Poor men who grow rich always hate the kids they raise. They resent them,” Wakasa wisely intones.

“Not necessarily –” Takeomi argues. The image of his kids, spoiled and spared the horrors of the street, probably flashes before his eyes.

“Maybe not,” Ran interrupts, returning them to the subject at hand. “But he loves him. He’s his only son.”

“So, he loves the kid and will play ball to cover it up. What does that mean for us?” Rindou asks.

“Ushioda Shotaro is the Senior Vice President of Operations at Acme Corporation, which means he’s ultimately responsible for supply chain and manufacturing of their semiconductors. Acme Corporation is one of the few companies manufacturing their semiconductors in Japan, and they import the base components through the Port of Nagoya, mostly from China,” Ran explains.

“And that is a windfall opportunity for us,” Mochi grunts, sounding sober for once as this is his area of expertise. “Since 2005, freight shipping’s been a pipedream for us as far as trafficking. Customs is clenched down tighter than Takeomi’s asshole. But that’s not the case for the mega corporations. Customs barely glances at what they’re importing, and if they ask to expedite, they are greenlit without a second thought. We use Acme as a front to ship through all the meth we got from the Chinese. We don’t have to worry about our mules getting picked up at the airports, no risky line back to us, no lost merchandise. And we can move a lot of it.”

“We talking about one big shipment, or are we trying to slip it in every shipment for months? If so, we’d need a whole new operation in Nagoya,” Rindou says.

“Think we need to meet with Ushioda to know, but I’m hoping we can wring this guy dry. Could be our path to heroin,” Mochi says.

Everyone sucks in a breath at the prospect.

Heroin is a money-maker, the drug that could catapult Bonten’s revenues from the tens of billions to the hundreds of billions. There is no domestic market for it. Yet. But Rindou knows how they will introduce it, has studied the proliferation in the US and knows that once people get a taste, they’ll come back for more, and they’ll find Bonten, raising the prices higher and higher.

Rindou doesn’t consider himself very ambitious, the job’s a bore, the money’s good but it makes no difference to him if they grow or stagnate, but even he gets goosebumps imagining this windfall.

The only person who remains dull eyed at the thought is Wakasa. Everyone knows that cousin of his is an addict, lost somewhere with a needle in her arm. She stays far away from Tokyo where Wakasa might find her and throw her into rehab. She hasn’t been seen in a few years. Sharp-eyed, Rindou catches how Takeomi looks to Wakasa first at Mochi’s announcement, puts business second to Wakasa’s personal life.

Like he knows everyone is waiting, Wakasa speaks next, “Well, what are we fucking waiting for? Let’s tell the pig to take us home to Daddy.”

Sanzu doesn’t need more encouragement. He throws open the door to the office with a cackle and the sound of cracking knuckles. He’s high, brimming with violence. Ushioda should be crying. More measuredly behind him, Takeomi follows.

Given how this opportunity may mean major changes to his operation, Rindou almost stands to follow, but then his phone lights up with a notification from you. Once he dreaded the buzz of his phone, but lately he feels a little…pleased when it flashes because it may be a text from you.

You’re constantly sending him the dumbest shit he’s ever seen: cats racing on treadmills, squealing gifs of anime girls, obscure references to books he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know how you find these memes or how to go about sending one back. All of Rindou’s knowledge of emojis come from Sanzu, who texts in hieroglyphics because he says it’ll be harder to use as evidence. Sanzu favors the vomit emoji, which so far, Rindou has avoided sending to you. The whole thing makes him feel like an old man.

Checking his phone, he sees you haven’t sent him a new meme but a link to a movie playing in Shinjuku next weekend. They’re reshowing Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, a movie you know he can’t resist.

It would be your second movie date. Rindou regularly revisits the memory of that first, how you clung to his arm as he played with the settings on the vibrator in your pussy, quiet enough that no one could overhear, but loud enough that you didn’t realize they couldn’t, shuddering in fear at the threat of discovery. In the dark, there was no one to see you squirm when he sucked a line up your throat or caressed your inner arms. The whole time, you stared straight forward, never cumming like the good little edge slut he promised to train you into. What shocked him most was after, when you called one of your friends and recited the entire plot of the movie, character names and all, without missing a detail. Despite his best efforts, you enjoyed the movie to its fullest.

“Look at that grin! Who’s making little Rinny smile like that?” Ran coos.

The phone is locked and in his pocket in the span of a second.

Not for the first time, Rindou wishes there could be something on the ceiling, so he could pretend a distraction. His favorite strategy, faking a can’t-miss email, is out of the question given the circumstances. If he had a lighter, maybe he could set off the fire alarm? Maybe, he thinks, everyone smokes because it gives them an excuse to do something with their hands.

“Nothing,” he grunts. “Wanna bet how long it takes Sanzu to break him? I think we’ll hear screams in two minutes.”

No one takes the bait.

“Nothing? You were grinning at your phone like it just told you you’re going to be a father, and congratulations, it’s a boy,” Ran says.

“I thought you said it was good news,” Wakasa snarks, just as Mochi chimes in with his own attempt at a witticism, “Or like it just promised you a blow job.”

“It’s your mom. She sent nudes,” Rindou snipes back at Mochi, though the man is too busy smirking over at Ran in mutual glee to care.

“So, who is she? The girl who makes my brother smile,” Ran pesters.

“There is no girl.”

Trading places with Ushioda would be preferable to standing the guys’ bullshit. They all take the piss out of each other constantly, but Rindou finds himself in the hotseat more than anyone else because Ran lives to put him there.

His pocket vibrates twice with yet another message from you, but Rindou doesn’t dare check it. Instead, he affects the patented you’re-full-of-shit eye roll that he’s been using against Ran for nearly three decades and loosens his tie.

“Really, Rin…” Ran shakes his head.

“Maybe it’s not a girl,” Wakasa volunteers. “Maybe he’s addicted to those…what are those perverted games otaku are always playing? Where you like roll to own a pair of tits?”

“Gacha games,” Ran volunteers happily.

“Yeah, those. Benkei’s addicted to ‘em, and when he plays, he’s always smiling like a demon at his phone,” Wakasa says.

Behind the shag of his bangs, Rindou’s face conveys nothing but yawning boredom. Ran can get a rise from him, but no one else. As no more than Machi’s top goon, stuck on the miserable human trafficking gig that no one else wanted, Wakasa is beneath Rindou’s notice. Mochi too, though it is slightly more annoying as Mochi can egg Ran on to greater heights of sibling pettiness if he tries. Those two always make each other laugh.

“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten into V-Tubers, Rin. We can get you a real girl if you’re struggling,” Ran says, and immediately Rindou’s composure breaks.

“Oi! Sanzu! Hurry it the fuck up!” Rindou shouts, banging on the wall a few times for good measure.

Pissing Rindou off has its shelf-life like any diversion and eventually, reluctantly, the others move onto new topics of conversation.

They never hear Ushioda’s scream because he faints at the first suggestion of threat. When he comes to, he calls his father without argument. Ran arranges a neutral location for the meeting, and Takeomi schedules it for later that night. Takeomi, Sanzu, and Mochi will take it from here.

The hour is late, and Rindou wants to squeeze in one last workout before the dawn saturates the sky with color. As he stands to leave, Ran follows. Together they walk into the brisk night air.

Even on a weeknight, a steady stream of patrons come in and out of Save Heaven. It caters to trust fund brats that have never woken early for a hard day’s work in their life, boys with popped collars and starvation-sharp collar bones. In the day, these boys rule the world with daddy’s money, but here, outside Safe Heaven, with the moon a beacon in the sky, they give Rindou and Ran a respectful berth, nodding a little as they pass without daring to eavesdrop lest they learn something unlearnable. None of them would guess the two intimidating yakuza are discussing their love lives.

“Hey, you know I think it’s good, right? That you have a girlfriend,” Ran says.

A large crack splits the sidewalk, and Rindou toes the crevice with the tip of his boot, wondering if he can widen it large enough to escape this conversation altogether.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Rindou insists.

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say. I just think it sounds like a good thing for you. And I wanna meet her when you’re ready,” Ran says.

“You are not meeting her!”

“Uh-huh,” Ran sings with the shit-eating grin of a professional shit-eater. “So, there is a her, huh?”

“I’m seeing a girl right now, yeah. But she’s not my girlfriend. It’s not a big deal,” Rindou says.

“It is a big deal,” Ran protests. “You’ve never had a girlfriend before!”

“First of all, yes I fucking have. Second of all, am I going batshit? Or did I not just say she is not my girlfriend?”

“In middle school! Honestly, at your age it’s just too embarrassing to count that.”

This is what Ran does best, gets him stuck on some garbage side point, wasting all his energies arguing something that doesn’t matter, so he is defenseless when Ran returns to the real subject. Usually, Rindou is a master at evading Ran’s every strategy, but tonight he is easily baited. He takes a deep breath, reminds himself to slow down and stop reacting to start thinking.

“Whatever. I’m just saying, I’m not Mikey. It’s not like I never see the same woman twice. I have seen lots of girls before. No need to make it some big thing,” Rindou says.

“Maybe…but if a woman can make you smile like that, I’d like to meet her,” Ran says quietly, with a voice far too sincere for a night when there are no shadows to take the brunt of his fraternal attack, just too brothers standing together.

Unable to stay angry when Ran is serious, Rindou feels his teeth unclench, his shoulders loosen. Something streaks across the sky, and Rindou thinks for a split-second it is a shooting star, feels the soaring hope of a child, and then realizes it’s nothing more than a Chinese satellite. He is too old and has seen too much to believe in fairytales.

“She’s a nice girl,” Rindou admits quietly. “Even if I wanted to bring her around …she doesn’t belong in this world. Doesn’t know what I do, and I can’t tell her.”

“Not necessarily –”

“You of all people know how it works,” Rindou interrupts.

The specter of Miki, a love long dead stirs between them, and Rindou almost feels guilt at nudging that old wound. It is scarred over, yet somehow still bleeds whenever Ran thinks too long about the only woman he’s ever loved. A woman who staring down the barrel of an uncertain and violent future, picked up and left, leaving Ran behind with the memories to haunt him.

You would do the same. Worse, because at least Miki was game for a while before she changed her mind. Rindou knows you would run home to your mother’s apartment, your childhood bed, your young and lively friends at the first suggestion of the truth. So many of the things he likes most about you – your softness, your smiles, your honesty and freely given trust – couldn’t survive the word he lives in.

There are only three options for men like them. They can live like Mikey with a sporadic array of one-night stands, like Mochi with a few chosen whores that playact a real relationship for the right price, or like Takeomi with a marriage built on a foundation of deceit. He won’t turn you into the latter option.

“If you wanna use Miki, then at least get it right. Yeah, Miki made a choice, but she made a choice because I gave her one. I wasn’t a coward. I didn’t piss away true love because I was too scared to look it in the eye,” Ran says, voice hard, though Rindou knows that Ran must still be feeling affectionate towards him or he’d be on his back with a black eye for daring to mention Miki like this.

He claps Ran on the shoulder, a half-baked apology. Stands there as his brother smokes yet another cigarette and doesn’t even complain as the wind whips the smoke in his direction.

As they linger on the curb, the cityscape sounds competing with the thundering bass of the club inside, Rindou wonders where everyone got the idea you’re some great love.

He doesn’t believe in that fairytale shit.

You’re a cute girl, but he doesn’t love you.

He doesn’t.

--

Fucking you is like biting into a ripe peach. The hint of pressure, a squeeze, and juice dribbles on his tongue, a smearing mess made of your thighs. Sometimes, Rindou presses his nose into the center of your panties and breathes. He can smell the wetness deep inside you. All that fresh, tangy cum that you relinquish only at his command.

Like a peach, you bruise easily too. You walk away from every date covered in his marks. Fingerprints brand your hips, purpling welts cling to your ass, flames on your tits.

Rindou makes a habit, at the start of every date, of spanking your ass just once. It’s like a greeting. The flouncy, darling skirts you wear flip up at his nod, and then he delivers a quick smack to the center of your quivering cheeks. Hours later, when you finish your meal – or movie or dance or walk in the park, or any of a dozen other dream dates made reality – and he shepherds you to a love hotel, he will bend you over and there will be the mark of his handprint, still visible and impassioned on your cute ass.

The sight makes him burn for you.

One day, he lays newspaper on the bathroom floor and orders you to lie still for him. There, he traces each bruise and mark of your lovemaking with a calligraphy brush. Big, black strokes of ink memorializing the places where he marked you.

The paint is cold and the bristles coarse. Good girl that you are – and he never met anyone who earns this praise so easily – you follow his instructions not to move, but can’t help but flinch, a spasm of your lips and feet whenever the paint twirls across your navel. The breathiest sighs escape your lips whenever he leans close to blow cool air along his work, drying out the paint and beckoning goosepimples to rise along your arms.

He saves the photos he takes of you that day in his phone gallery, flips to them whenever there is a lull in his workday. They are hardly pornographic, kind of artsy thanks to the dim lighting, and yet something else. With your honest beauty, no one could mistake you for a professional model. Your eyes project too much raw vulnerability. A submission that haunts and entrances him. Since the night he met you, those eyes have owned him.

Finding places to meet, poses a challenge from day one. You require neutral, fertile ground.

There are dangers that lurk in the shadows of Rindou’s life, so his apartment is out of the question. Meanwhile, your mother looms like a vengeful dragon over the suggestion of yours.

So, like so many other young lovers, you make a home of love hotels.

In the sanctuary of the many love hotels around the city, you fuck and play like animals.

Through your eyes, he rediscovers the love hotel’s charms, the fun of it. With the right attitude, they become a kind of adult playland. The mirrors mounted on the ceiling can be a playful voyeur not just to sex but to a dance party; the karaoke machine is a must-try on every visit – watching your cute furrowed brow as you labor over what to sing before always going back to Alicia Keys, the English masticated on the already butchered notes you can never quite hit; the massagers are worth every yen when applied to stiff joints (and can double as makeshift vibrators with a little ingenuity); and you might as well take advantage of the free condoms, shoving extras in your pockets before leaving.

In each hotel, you always insist on a bath. You explain your mother taught you to never leave a hotel without at least trying the bathtub. Sometimes he joins you, but sometimes he watches from the bed as if you are a siren of shallow bath waters, hypnotized by the view of your elegant neck, the peak of a breast, the arm slung haphazardly over the rim to cool.

The seediest rooms turn glistening when you enter, like you can cleanse the dirt of the world and replace it with something new and shining. He forgets about the hairy couples that occupied the room before, about the outside world, and submits to the taste of your lips.

He loves the rare still moments, when he lays his head in the bony cradle of knees and thighs, closes his eyes and drifts off into a strange half sleep. Your songbird voice drifts over him as you recite the poetry of men and women long dead or from across a sea you never once crossed yourself. The emotion of the poems sweep you up like a song, and you rush through some lines to reach the emphatic point, voice pitching deep and low when you find a phrase particularly powerful, and jabbing aggressively, like a pen digging through paper to emphasize key lines.

He could listen to you talk for hours.

The smallest things excite you. And when excited, your voice rises in volume. You are loud in your pain, louder in your pleasure, and somehow louder still when your clothes are on, and you are talking up a storm. They receive noise complaint after noise complaint until Rindou gets into the habit of greasing the hand of the front desk clerk as they check in.

Friends and family must coddle you because you never realize. He won’t be the first person to hurt your feelings by revealing this flaw. In his estimation, it’s not much of a flaw anyway and he would hate if you clammed up because now, the world is wide open to you. Every day you learn something new, whether from class or the internet or your friends in passing, and you are so bright-eyed in your eagerness to share with him.

On days when you can’t meet in person, in the twilight hours when the city sighs out its last breaths, he calls you. You tell him about your day, about what you’ve learned, about who you’ve met, what you watch on TV or read in the pages of a book.

Through you, he learns what it’s like to be a university student: the late nighters to finish a paper, the argumentative study sessions when friendships strain over erudite nonsense before they repair over shared bottles of beer, and the uncontainable joy of finding a hundred yen note on the street because it means one more vending machine coffee before your bank account hits zero.

Another student could never teach him these things. Because you were nearly denied your collegiate opportunity, you embrace every day like a gift, and the mood is infectious.

One night, he stays on the phone with you for four hours. The time slips away unnoticed as you vent about your friends. An affair between two of your classmates, both of whom were in relationships with other members of your friend group, promises a schism that you assure him will make the breakdown of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches look like child’s play.

Rindou smiles as you passionately advocate in defense of your wronged friends. So easily you adopt the moral position. If reconciliation is impossible, the traitors ought to be excised from the group, the victims preserved. Nothing else would be fair. He admires your naivety even as he cautious you against being too loud or hasty in your judgment because he knows full well how often the villains come out on top.

One of your friends, Naoto, is another endless source of drama. Even though he isn’t a fellow student, already a suit-wearing graduate, he is a steady member of your friend group. Lately, he’s been prying into your comings and goings, like he doesn’t believe you are mature enough to make your own choices you complain. Your new relationship is an especial source of contention.

Twice now, Rindou joined your friends for brunch, meeting Naoto amid the sea of undergrads who fawned over him. He remembers Naoto as quiet, thoughtful, beneath his notice. Ever since, you say Naoto always wants to know where you are going, when you are meeting, what you talk about.

Rindou thinks Naoto has a fat hard-on for you but knows better than to say so. It will only make you angry, and you are cuter when you smile.

He starts looking for ways to make you smile. Your whimpers and tears are precious in the bedroom, but elsewhere, he likes to spoil you with the riches you never experience. Nothing too luxurious, but a locket here, a trinket there, a book you mentioned signed by the author, or a bottle of wine worth six weeks of your old salary. Each offering is met with a pretty kiss to his cheek, a whispered thank you, and then a screamingly denied orgasm before the night ends.

Right before the Christmas break, you call him amid squeals and screams so high-pitched they break the sound barrier. He pulls the receiver a few sparing centimeters from his ear and asks you to repeat yourself.

“I got the job! The library, Rindou! It doesn’t make any sense. Like, I literally can’t believe it. I am not qualified. I was already putting in applications at restaurants around campus, but now I don’t need to because I got the job!”

“Congratulations,” Rindou murmurs warmly.

“I’m going to hyperventilate. I’m so excited!” you shout. “I mean, even in my wildest dreams, I was hoping to get hired for the new term in April, but they say they have a sudden opening, and now I don’t have to wait! Can you believe it?”

The depth of your gratitude and excitement is the best Christmas present he could receive. He knows exactly how the sudden opening appeared at the library as he personally arranged it. He paid for a kid’s rent for the next year just so he would resign and recommend you for the job. It’s a happy Christmas for everyone involved.

“I’m going to take you out to dinner when I get my first paycheck. Just you wait!” you promise joyfully.

“Hmm, I’ll get the most expensive thing on the menu then.”

“Yes, whatever you want, baby! I’ve got it!” you are giggling madly, and he wishes he was there with you to sweep you up in the circle of his arms and swing you about until you collapse dizzy to the floor.

Making you happy is addictive but also reciprocal. Without seeming to try, you make him happy too.

--

The new year dawns with a sunny sky, so unerringly blue without clouds or gradation that it’s impossible to stare into it without seeing a world washed clean. New beginnings.

The first day of the year is meant to unfold as follows: wake up, work, waste time around the apartment, join Ran for an obligatory meal in celebration, back to the apartment and a YouTube rabbit hole.

You told him weeks ago that you would be out of commission until the end of the holidays. For the first time since he married, your brother, his wife, and kids are staying over. Every time Rindou scrolls your social media, you greet him with a new picture where you smile to outshine the sun, surrounded by people who share the same arched eyebrows and dimpled cheeks. Beyond a goodnight text, he hasn’t heard from you in nine days.

Rindou misses you in ways he can’t articulate even to himself.

Because he misses you, Rindou jumps when his phone rings and your name flashes across the screen. You should be deep in the midst of familial bliss right now. When he answers, you tell him that your brother’s family returned home early because the baby is colicky. Meanwhile, your mother’s arthritis has flared up, and she’s gone to the hospital, insisting you not join her lest you be cursed for the rest of the year. Rindou sprints to his car before you can even ask him to come over, having to circle back because he forgets his coat in the rush.

Two hours later, Rindou stands in line at Sensoji Temple, your little gloved hand warming his and the vendors hawking souvenirs at the captive audience echoing down the busy street.

Temple visits were a tradition he loathed back when his grandparents would force him along. Like most of their neighbors, his grandparents observed Buddhist rituals only when a holiday and good meal came attached. The hypocrisy would drive him crazy, and Rindou would sulk, cold-chapped hands buried in his pockets and Ran talking his ear off as the hours of waiting in line limped by.

It’s different waiting with you. All the jokes and observations you stored up for the past week pour past your lips. You recount story after story about your family reunion – about losing your bed to your brother’s children, crawling onto your mother’s mattress like you were a little girl again, and how she snores just as loudly as you remember. And how your brother desperately tries to offload his kids on anyone foolish enough to agree to watch them. You think he and his wife had sex on your bed when everyone was busy in the kitchen, and you share this information with the scandalized screech of a betrayed virgin. The low point of the trip is your sister who could not make it, but she joins every night by facetime, her role in the family harmony uncontested.

The line moves slowly, but Rindou doesn’t feel the passage of time. He’s frozen in place, exactly where he wants to be with you by his side.

He buys you red bean manju from a food stall and warns you not to spoil your appetite for dinner. He promises it will be a feast.

Naturally, unthinkingly, he’s invited you to dinner with Ran of all people. He wants to take it back or at least cancel on Ran, but you clap in delight, unshed tears glistening as you admit your heart broke at the idea of not eating osechi-ryori this year, your first ever holiday without. Rindou doesn’t like your moue of disappointment when you describe your anxiety at missing out on this tradition and doesn’t retract the invite.

So…you meet Ran.

Ran never left Roppongi, but he did leave behind their shared apartment above the laundromat in favor of a five-bedroom house on a quiet side street lined by Japanese dogwoods that bloom pink as a promise in the spring.

The outside is unassuming, but the inside is striking. Most of Ran’s free time for the better part of three years has poured into appointing his house in a Baroque style. No counterspace is left empty. No furniture is left unadorned. Vases, winding statues of frolicking angels, and baskets of fruit stand proud in the sitting room, resting on gilded commodes and low desks painted with cherubs. There is always a fire crackling merrily in the living room, adding an orange glow to a room already rich with browns, reds, and purples.

You marvel at the decorations, and Ran is impressed by your taste, so used to unappreciative yakuza who can only ask how much his furniture is worth rather than after its artistic merit. Ran insists on giving you a tour, pleasantly pointing to each piece and detailing the great pains he took to acquire it. Rindou trails a few steps behind as you eagerly soak up the history lesson.

“I can understand why you love this so much,” you say, reverently quiet, like this is a church or sacred place you shouldn’t disturb. “It’s a remarkable period when you think about it. Europe starts 1600 with Hamlet and Shakespeare and Cervantes not long after and ends it with the novel about to take off. And it was the same here. The birth of the haiku, of Bashō, and by the end of the century, we had Saikaku’s prose…so much innovation, so much art on opposite sides of the world.”

“It was the same in Europe and Japan. We can thank money for all of it. Here we had the rise of the middle class, finally peace after the wars, trade with the Dutch, and in Europe, they had new lands to rape and pillage for profit. All that chaos, and from it?” Ran spreads his arms wide to gesture at the beauty of the rooms he slaved over. “Art!”

You stare up at a painting wide as your arm span of sailors in a storm, fighting the elements to secure the mast. Even as their faces scream, ravaged by threat, there is something hopeful in the piece, a promise that together they will right the ship and sail off to calmer seas. Rindou can see why you like it. It isn’t baroque, an eighteenth-century anachronism in the otherwise themed room.

Towards the end of the tour, Ran recounts a dramatic auction where he won a bust of Frederick the Great out of the greedy hands of an Australian businessman.

It is only the hundredth time Rindou has heard this heroic tale from Ran, and he could supply it word for word at this point. They’re nearing the part where the Australian businessman kicks a wall in a fit of pique at being outbid and breaks his big toe – the climax – when you bring the story to a crashing, off-script halt.

“Wait, eight million yen!” you cry.

“…yes,” Ran says blankly.

“For that statue?” you point accusingly at the head of Frederick the Great like you’re questioning what’s so great about him to justify an eight-million-yen price tag. It is intricately carved, the polychrome wood painted white for dramatic effect, but it does not appear to shit gold, so you struggle to understand its value.

“It’s a bust not a statue,” Ran says snidely, forgetting himself for a moment in his irritation before he says more kindly, “And it’s an artefact. From the right artist, I’ve seen pieces go for much more. It may just resell for even higher. There’s a lot of money to be made in art investment.”

“That’s just a lot of money.”

“What can I say? Business has been good to us,” Ran says.

“Export-import,” Rindou barks out quickly.

“Yes, the…export-import business has been good to us,” Ran repeats, taking up the story with a roll of his eyes that goes right over your head. You’re too busy tucking your elbows and glaring at the furniture like it might leap out and shatter on your body at the slightest provocation. You’re barely breathing in fear of breaking something.

“Wait,..,” you say, coming back to the conversation after a moment of buffering. “You’re in business with Rindou? And you’ve made this much money? Oh, oh no! I’m so sorry. That was so invasive and rude. Please forgive me!”

“Rin! Why does your beautiful friend think you’re poor? Please tell me you’ve not been making her pay for dates! I taught you when you were younger that a gentleman always pays,” Ran tuts, ignoring your apologies. When Ran is at his most spiteful, he smiles, and his lips quirk now with malicious glee.

“Oh no –” you try to protest, but Ran is on a roll, apologizing to you now on his “shameful little brother’s behalf.”

Rindou is going to stab him.

“I pay for our damn dates!”

“He does!” you agree with a vigorous nod of support. “I just thought…well, I thought you had nice dinner twice a week money not bust of Frederick the Great money.”

Pleading eyes turn to Ran as you beg him to believe you. It reminds Rindou of how sweetly you beg him for forgiveness when he overstimulates your clit or squeezes your nipples to a bruise. Damned cute. Ran’s lips curve indulgently in spit of himself at your expression.

Rindou thinks that his brother isn’t half bad at all. At least he has very different taste in women, taste that does not include you.

The dining room is every bit as unconventional as the rest of the house with a tall wooden table large enough to seat eight and high-backed chairs that demand perfect posture much to Rindou’s chagrin. In contrast, Ran serves a traditional osechi ryori meal neatly separated into lacquered containers.

With so many options to choose from, everyone sets in on a different dish first. Rindou gravitates to the crunch of kazunoko, the juicy Satoimo potatoes, and the snackable baby anchovies. You giggle a little as you munch on a sweet omelet roll, and when Rindou asks why, you whisper that everything he’s eating symbolizes fertility. He quickly uses his chopsticks to try the buri, which he recalls symbolizes a more general kind of success.

“This is delicious,” you offer Ran warmly. “Did you cook all this yourself?”

Rindou snorts, and his brother gives him one of those quelling looks that used to reduce him to knocking knees and hiding in closets. Ran rarely hit him beyond normal brotherly playfighting, but he would chase him with that baton for blocks when angered.

“No, there was no need this year. A friend was kind enough to cook for me,” Ran says.

“Ran is a menace in the kitchen. If it was left to him, we’d be eating plain bread.”

The quelling look grows sharper.

“Oh, that’s not so bad. I’m not much of a cook either,” you say politely.

“Don’t play so nice with the guy. I’m not saying he’s not a chef. I’m saying he couldn’t figure out how to cook a grilled cheese or boil some noodles.”

“Why would I want to eat a grilled cheese?” Ran demands.

Rindou stabs his chopsticks in Ran’s direction, a lifetime of culinary wrongs powering his spite. “That’s what I’m saying! The problem is that Ran has the palette of a fucking prince. When we were kids, we’d have no money, no adults to help, and I’d find him trying to cook a whole duck and setting the kitchen on fire. When that happened, I’d have to make noodles. He just flushed our grocery money down the drain every week.”

“To be fair, I stole the duck,” Ran sniffs.

A candied chestnut pelts Ran in the forehead, a bullseye for Rindou who would strangle his brother if he were within reach. The bastard knows not to mention their criminal activity around you. Rindou looks nervously to you and your reaction but finds your eyes alight with curiosity.

“How the hell does a child steal a duck?”

The tense atmosphere lifts, and Ran leans forward with a grin to answer, “A child doesn’t. Two children, however? One to fake an asthma attack and draw all the adults and one with an empty backpack? Those two children could steal a duck no problem.”

“What a little criminal mastermind!” you laugh.

“Good thing I went straight when I did, or I’d be running the city’s underground today, huh?” Ran smirks.

Against Rindou’s will, he finds himself drawn into a long recounting of some of their greatest childhood misadventures. None are violent or hint at future gang activity. Instead, they recount shoplifting, stealing out into the late hours of the night, and outwitting their teachers. None of it scandalizes you, and Rindou relaxes just an iota.

Because it’s dinner with Ran and they can’t help themselves, the brothers bicker every other word, but sometime after your third glass of wine, you stop hiding your laughter. You treat it like a sideshow to a good meal, one you could watch a hundred times.

Having you here doesn’t feel unnatural at all.

As the final bites dwindle to nothing, you say, “Thank you really for inviting me. I was dreading spending New Years without family for the first time, and well, being here with you didn’t feel all that different.”

Everyone pretends not to notice the beading of tears on your lash line. Your sincerity is so at odds with their usual attitudes that neither brother quite knows how to react. Rindou settles for squeezing your hand tightly in his, but it is Ran who finds the perfect words.

“I propose a toast. To 2017. And to hoping that we welcome the next new year together, too.”

--

Just as, possessed by your infectious holiday cheer, Rindou didn’t think before taking you to Ran’s house,  he unthinkingly brings you back to his apartment, too. It is the first time you’ve come over.

His apartment is less impressive than Ran’s museum of a house. The space is mostly decorated with sleek, standard furnishings with only one bedroom for guests. If anything stands out, it’s the fancy gadgets: big screen TV, gaming computer set up, topline speakers in every room.

For the first hour, you piece through his record collection. He answers your questions about different artists, shows you how to position the needle. You land on a rock album that’s all bass. It shakes the vinyl shelf with every pulse.

Satisfied with your choice, you invite yourself to root through his dresser drawers. You strip in front of him without an ounce of embarrassment. The apartment runs chilly, so your skin is only bared for a few seconds before you scramble into a pair of his sweatpants, a tee-shirt that hangs low past your hips, and the thickest socks you can find.

You look all ready for bed, so that’s where you go next. The short hairs that curl at the base of your neck are baby chick soft, and he twirls the strands absently around his fingers while your head makes a pillow of his chest.

Everything feels strange. Not bad, just strange.

Rindou has lived in this apartment for nearly four years, slept in this bedroom most nights, and somehow he doesn’t recognize it. Here, with you in his arms, the room is transformed. The bed is warmer, and he discards the heavy comforter he uses in the winters; the taste of flowers fills his nose whenever he breathes, drifting up from that body lotion you slather everywhere in the mornings; he lies on his back, noticing the water stains on the ceiling for the first time ever, instead of flopping to his stomach and falling into a dead sleep the moment his head hits the pillow. You’re the first person, besides him, to ever enter this room.

“Thanks for inviting me tonight,” you murmur. “I was so sad when I woke up this morning and everything happened, but you cheered me right up.”

“Thanks for calling me. I was bored out of my mind,” Rindou counters.

“You’re too sweet sometimes…It was really nice to meet your brother, too. Ran’s an interesting guy. He’s like some nineteenth century dandy. Like, he’s a character on TV not a real person. So different from you except when he gives you a hard time. Then, it’s like a switch flips, and I can see the resemblance. It reminds me of my brother, giving me a hard time just to show he can.”

“Older brothers,” Rindou says with only half-hearted disgust. Without Ran to push him, to teach him to stay on his toes, he would probably be moving furniture in some warehouse not trading in people’s life savings over morning coffee.

“It was fun,” you repeat. “And I feel like I understand you even better now.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, like I learned how you get away with having such ridiculous hair. I always wondered what kind of business could overlook that, but you’re rich. Plus, your brother’s hair isn’t much better. At least it’s short, I guess, but pink?”

“You should have seen our hair when we were younger. Ran used to have longer hair than you. He’d wear two braids with blonde highlights. Back then, mine was neck-length, but blue and blonde,” Rindou says. At your raised eyebrows, Rindou opens his personal phone to find an old photo.

“Like a Squirtle,” you whisper.

“Like a what?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Anyway, pretty much all our executives have dyed hair,” Rindou admits. “Ran’s not even the only one with pink.”

“I wish I could show you off to my middle school homeroom teacher. She used to say we wouldn’t get good jobs if we so much as double pierced our ears and look at you! Successful and tattooed and dyed! We’ve really become a modern country, huh?”

“I’ll introduce you sometime…Our CFO, Koko is the smartest guy I’ve ever met, and his girlfriend’s the second. I think you’d like them. Maybe we can double date,” Rindou says.

Two days ago, Rindou was still intent on keeping you as far from his work life as possible, building up steel walls that wouldn’t break no matter how much pressure you or his colleagues applied. But what can’t be knocked down can still be unlocked, and here Rindou is, key in hand, throwing open the doors with no excuse or explanation.

Maybe if he hadn’t built the damn wall in the first place, he could have seen you throughout the holidays. He could have met your mother, fucked you in your twin bed while the memories of your childhood peered down in judgment, and tried your home cooking.

“I learned something else about you from Ran, too,” you chirp.

“Oh yeah?” he repeats.

“Yeah, I learned why you don’t ‘suffer brats.”

Rindou laughs. “Oh yeah because Ran’s brat enough for the rest of my life.”

“No, because behind closed doors, you’re the big brat!”

Your gleeful giggle turns into a yelp as Rindou harshly pinches your nipple, hand dipping through shirt and bra to find gold.

“Want to repeat that?”

“I’m just repeating what I saw. Where your brother is concerned, you act like a big bra–urgh!”

Your plush, hot little mouth is a source of hours of pleasure, but sometimes you talk too much. With it wide open around your nonsense, it makes an easy target. Three of Rindou’s fingers force their way past your lips, tongue, and teeth. He can feel the place where your throat closes up in instinctive panic, a hard barrier that with a few pushes will break.

“Blink twice for green, once for yellow, and none for red,” Rindou says seriously.

Two quick but emphatic blinks answer him as you gaze up with absolute trust. Rindou sits up to tower over you, strands of his hair dangling down to brush your quivering cheeks.

“If you want to act like a fucking brat, I’ll find other ways to put your mouth to use. Open the fuck up.”

Under his insistent prodding, the barrier of your throat relaxes, and he pushes in as deep as his fingers are long. Your mouth stretches wide, obscene and red as you swallow around the obstruction. His fingers can’t bully you as well as his cock, so you manage the intrusion with minimal gagging. He pets along the ridges of your throat, remembering how the ribbing feels sliding up and down his dick when he throat fucks you.

The memory is tempting. He loves the way you tear up when he stuffs his cock deeper than you think you can manage. Then, you choke and whine and learn to regret mouthing off to him, but there’s no need to teach you a lesson. It is not a brat that tries to suck the fingers lodged in the back of her throat, but his good little slut, the one who tries so hard to please him.

Slowly, Rindou pulls back from your mouth, letting you suckle needily in the retreat.

“Spit,” he orders, holding out his open palm.

You demur. Only a discrete amount of spit lands in his hand. With the way he toyed with your throat, you should have more than that to offer him. He should be drenched in ribbons of it.

Slap.

The wet hand meets your cheek hard, snapping your head to the side. Rindou likes the look of it. Little strands of spit cling to your hot cheeks. He decides you could be even messier.

Rindou purses his lips and hocks a glob of spit directly into your face. It lands on your cheek, near the corner of your mouth. You yelp and turn accusing eyes to him, more aggrieved by this than the initial slap. Those eyes quickly close as Rindou smears a heavy palm across your whole face, making sure your spit covers you from chin to eyelids.

“I think you look prettiest like this slut,” Rindou says. You whine in the back of your throat, a noise of dissent and not passion. Rindou relishes it. It’s rare for you to show anything but easy submission. “No? You don’t like looking like a little drool slut? Well, then you shouldn’t have acted like such a brat, huh, baby? Good girls get to swallow, but bad girls have to spit all over themselves. That’s what you’re going to do until I decide you’re good and messy enough. You’re going to drool all over your face and tits. No swallowing. Give me a color and let me know you understand.”

“Green,” you whisper. “And yes, sir. I understand.”

To accompany your words, you let a glob of spit dribble past your lips. It doesn’t have much momentum, landing on your chin, where its shine draws the eye like shiny jewelry.

When you look shame faced, dribbling and pathetic and hanging on his every word, is when Rindou wants you most. His cock twitches to life against his thigh at the mess he made of you.

He wants to see more. The tee-shirt is ripped to the ground as he attacks your tits with his mouth and tongue. The proud nipples rise to greet him, and he mouths at them desperately.

For hours at time, he’s subjected you to his systematic exploration of your chest. He knows exactly what to do to eek a response from you, and he employs all of that knowledge now. He circles the nubs gently with his tongue, knowing every hair on your body will stand at attention. When he sucks at just the right amount of pressure, you sigh like he intended. Then, he increases the pressure, and right on schedule, your hands dig into the shag of his hair, not pulling away but anchoring yourself, as the pleasure pain assaults you.

There is a flogger in the bottom dresser door perfect for burning your tits red which he considers, but he doesn’t want to separate from your body for an instant. Your soft belly feels so right beneath the hardness of him, and when he cants his cock into the crease of your open thighs, the friction leaves him lightheaded.

He plumps up your breasts instead, leaving fat hickeys wherever his mouth lands. His hands squeeze to the beat of the drumming bass, and you start to hump your hips in time with him.

All the while, he hears you spitting pathetically above him.

The time between each spit lessens as he continues. Lust conquers shame, and you grow eager to impress him, drooling like a bitch in heat. You should be running out of saliva, but when that happens, he hears yours coughing gags as you fuck your fingers deep into your throat just so you can earn more precious spit.

It’s pathetic, really, how desperate you get for him, how much you need him to take you in hand, show you what a whore you are.

Alongside the speed of your spitting, the distance increases as well. Soon drool lands on your tits, globs falling near his mouth, sometimes pelting his cheek or sticking to his hair. He eagerly laps it up, uses his mouth to smear it all over your breasts. He can barely find purchase, slipping and sliding through the valley of your lubed up tits, so wet and hot they remind him of your pussy.

It has been over a week since you last fucked, and Rindou thinks you must be drenched, drooling just as much down your thighs. He needs to know for sure.

Rindou doesn’t stop caressing your nipples with his lips as his hand dips into your sweatpants. Sticky panties cling to your folds, and he struggles for a moment to separate them enough for his fingers to find your soaked little pussy.

“Did you control yourself and not touch this cute cunt while you were gone?” Rindou asks.

“I didn’t, sir. I swear. I didn’t touch myself at all. Didn’t cheat and find some other way to cum either,” you plead as if he didn’t already know the answer.

“Hmm, maybe you’re not such a bad girl after all,” Rindou muses as his fingers rub through your folds, circling the entrance that drools so eagerly at his proximity. “Do you know why girls like you only cum with permission?”

“Because all my orgasms belong to you, sir,” you sigh as if that is a helplessly romantic prospect.

“No. It’s because stupid sluts can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them. You have to trust me to tell you when to cum, and when to ruin, and when to go no touch because otherwise, you’d waste away. If no one was there to look out for you, you’d spend all day toying with this clit and fucking this little hole, and then what would happen?”

You gurgle happily at his words.

Rindou likes to talk during sex, loves it even, but he finds himself calling out every filthy thought when he’s with you because your pussy clenches so tight at a simple word of praise, even tighter at an insult. He can see your hole flex now, and he wants to feel it. He wants to be inside you.

Off go the sweatpants and panties as well as his own clothes. Cock in hand, he strokes himself while looking at the swollen folds, wet like morning dew. When he slides up your slit, that wetness clings to him.

He glances at your face for the first time in minutes only to find you absolutely wrecked. There is not a dry space on your neck, chest, or chin. All of it glistens with multiple coats of spit. Several long strands tangle together as they drool out of your mouth.

“Who told you to make such a mess, slut?” Rindou snaps, slapping one of your tits hard enough to bounce.

You gape at the sudden change. Every time you fuck, you try to stay on top of his whims, to answer his every desire before he can think to articulate it, never understanding that it is a Sisyphean task. He would not be a good dom if he didn’t rip your attempts at power out of your hands, disrupt the scene, and leave you scrambling in that subspace that makes your eyes go foggy and mouth fuzzy.

Rindou shakes his head in faux disappointment even as he taps his cock against your puffy clit. “What should I tell the housekeeper tomorrow when she finds my sheets stained. Should I tell her a little drool slut decided to make a mess of herself and the bed? Should I tell her that some whores have so little dignity they drool all over their tits on command? Maybe I should take a video, so she can see just how much you wanted to be used like a tight little cocksleeve.”

The degradation makes you wild, and your hips start bucking like they answer to something separate from your brain, making your point as effectively as your babbling mouth. “Please, sir, yes, please use me however you want. I can make you feel so good. I wanna make you feel so good.”

“Then, show me.”

Rindou manhandles you roughly, yanking you down the mattress and then flipping your legs back. They fold almost to your ears. It brings your pussy close to your own mouth, and an idea hits him like a bullet at close quarters. He spreads your pussy lips wide with his fingers.

“Get that hole wet for me,” he orders.

You spit straight onto your cunt. Again and again until you get the aim right. Rindou joins you. Soon, you are flooding over with the combined juices of your body. Your hole sucks at air, so desperate to be filled, and some of it is slurped straight into your pussy.

It has been too long.

“It’s been a while since you had anything in this hole. It may hurt at first in this position,” Rindou warns, as if you have any say in positions outside using your safe words.

“Please give me your cock, sir,” you chant eagerly. “I can take it. I promise!”

His cock slides through your slippery folds so easily that he wonders if he’ll ever go back to normal, unlubed sex again. The ring of your pussy is tight when the head breaches it, but so wet too. So very wet. It’s immediate ecstasy.

There’s nothing like that first penetration. Snug, warm, your pussy molding to embrace his cock. Pure paradise lays between your thighs.

In a single thrust, he slides halfway in.

You hiss through gritted teeth. Another three centimeters disappear into your body, and you start to moan. He doesn’t force himself further at first, instead rocking back to start fucking you open all the way.

Squatting over you, his balance is precarious, so Rindou grips the fat of your thighs for support. The skin dimples where his fingers dig in. He can fuck you so good at this angle, can angle his hips to slam into your ass so it claps to temporarily drown out the squelch of your slick pussy.

It only takes a few heavy thrusts to break you open the rest of the way. Now, when he slides out, the ridged walls caressing every centimeter of him as he draws away, he can then thrust back to the hilt. Deep, hard, and slow, that’s how he fucks you. The furthest reaches of your pussy are at his mercy, and he taps your cervix every couple thrusts, enjoying the way his tip tingles and nerve endings alight. When he batters your cervix, you don’t cry out but embrace the pain and shudder into the pillows like an addict.

Just as hot for him is the way his balls slap into your ass when he bottoms out each time, sending little sparks of pleasure dancing through his brain. He doesn’t know how to think when he’s inside you. Every sense is focused on the need to fuck you to oblivion.

As he pounds into you, your calves dangle somewhere between his ears and yours. They start to shake as he punches the breath from your lungs over and over again. When he angles his hips so they smack hard against your clit on a downward thrust, they quake out of your control.

He watches your eyes to see the way they dart out of focus. Your face is so expressive, he can watch as you experience every thrust like a miniature earthquake to your senses. So pretty how they glaze over with lust.

The song changes on the record playing. Now, something fast and heavy blares out, sex on speed. He pumps his hips faster to time it to the music, lets it take over what little thought remains. And with it comes every dirty word he’s been holding back.

“If there’s one thing a greedy whore like you can do, it’s take a fucking dick. Just look at how you swallow me up. Filthy girl with her legs spread so she can get used and abused,” he huffs through short breaths.

Rindou yanks your hair hard, folding your body into an even smaller and tighter sleeve for him and positioning your face parallel with your cunt. You stare dumb and desperate at the space where his cock disappears inside you. Little mumbles of nonsense tumble out of your mouth.

“Aww, baby can’t think. That’s okay. All you need to do is keep that cunt tight and fucking. Take. This. Fat. Cock.”

The final words are punctuated by hard thrusts that batter your cervix cruelly. Your pussy clamps down in a frantic squeeze, and panic breaks through your fucked out haze.

Now, he can understand the words as you cry, “Wait, sir! Oh, no! Sir, can I cum! Oh no, oh no, oh no!”

There is going to be no stopping it, not when your cunt has been neglected for so long. Knowing how tightly you’re going to squeeze down, Rindou doesn’t want to deny either of you the feeling, not today.

“Go ahead. Squirt all over my cock, slut. Cum as much as you want.”

You do – or maybe you don’t squirt. It’s hard to say when your pussy is already a river. Regardless, you do seize up, calves spasming, cunt coiling, eyes crossing. It’s an absolute avalanche of sensation, and you don’t stop screaming your pleasure for a solid minute after the first warning quivers.

Rindou loses himself in the feel of you. Each pulse against his cock is a shot of pleasure and a new challenge. Instincts tell him to pound deeper into your defenseless body, make his home here in the heat of you. When he fucks to your cervix, he swears he won’t find the strength to pull out, but he does, if only to feel that bliss again when he shoves his cock inside you.

He starts to imagine just how wet you will be when he cums. If he thinks you’re wet now, imagine once he fills you up with four days’ worth of buildup, cum he’s saved just to paint you white once again. It’s where his cum belongs. In fact, he almost hates you for denying him your pussy for these last days, days where his cum died ignominiously on his stomach or shower floor when it should have been flooding your cervix.

His heart races, and then Rindou cums hard. Vision blacked out, brain empty, muscles dead. Hard.

For five seconds, he spasms and grunts as his cum shoots out of you. It’s so overpowering, he almost doesn’t notice that you start to shake around him once again, your pussy growing tighter and tighter and your little fists beating into the sheets as a second orgasm sucks all his cum deep into your belly.

The endorphins hit, and Rindou mellows like he’s just smoked a joint. Hazily, he realizes the way you twitch and cry beneath him. He pulls out and watches as streams of liquid slide right out of your hole and down your thighs.

Uncaring of the mess, Rindou collapses to his side and pulls you into the crook of his body. He’s not sure which one of you needs the aftercare after that. It was so intense that his brain still isn’t formulating thoughts. Your head nestles near his heart, breath darting across his navel, and he pets your hair in encouragement.

He feels like a fucking king.

Several minutes pass before you speak again.

“I’ve missed you,” you whisper, and when you say it, it sounds like a confession.

“I missed you, too.”

And when Rindou says it, it truly is.

A confession that is.

It is their voices, joined together in an eerie collective, one discordant note, that ring in your head as you dial Rindou’s number, as you make plans to meet for coffee. Going on a date with a stranger is dangerous. Going on a date with a stranger that likes to tie women up and beat them is suicidal.

But there is no escaping those penetrating eyes. When you brush your hair after a shower or laugh at a meme, you imagine his violet eyes are watching. You swear he watched you that night in the club, even as he played with the body of an older, more experienced woman, his eyes pierced through to the center of your dirty soul, where you imagined yourself in place of the other woman, how you would not be able to withhold your whimpers in her place, how you would beg – if he allowed it – how you would lose your sanity to the barest graze of his fingertips.

It was like he understood what you truly wanted in your venture to the underbelly of town, not one night of sin but a lifetime of pleasure. You hoped to meet a man who would take you under his wing and into his heart, to train and love in equal measure.

Imagine your delight then to be taken to a café so similar to a lifetime of past first dates, all with men intent on charming you. The café is charming but unremarkable. Located on a busy street of restaurants, retailers and real estate offices. It sees a steady stream of patrons on the weekends and in the early mornings before the work rush, but on a Wednesday at 3 PM, the place is mostly empty. The barista’s rehearsed greeting rings loud in the quiet shop when you first enter. This is a place where two people can really talk, the hours tallying up with none the wiser.

He wants to court you in the bright light of day, like in the stories.

Rindou strikes a different impression here than in the dimmed dungeon. As he orders and pays for your drinks, you study him shamelessly.

The garishly dyed hair and startling tattoo – a literal neck tattoo! – seemed right at home in the deep of night, but now they draw stares. He is younger than you first realized, all of that confidence befits a man in his forties, but Rindou looks like he might be in his late twenties or early-thirties. Just a very worn-out young man. You thought he wore makeup when you first saw him, dark rimmed eyes and purple circles beneath, but your realize now that he is simply tired. Like the other night, he dresses casually in a black tee shirt and black jeans. The effect is flattering, and you surreptitiously trace where muscles stretch the material with your eyes.

When you first greeted him, he didn’t smile, even as you beamed at him like an idiot. There was ice in his gaze, not the hot fire that burned your gut. You were thankful when he took your order, left you nestled in a corner table by a window overlooking the main street. It gave you a moment to regain your confidence. He chose you.

“Here you are,” Rindou says, returning to the table with your drinks.

Rindou ordered a black coffee, roasted from the café’s proprietary blend. Despite the modern décor and menu, the coffee is served in a vintage ceramic mug. Steam circles the cup.

“Don’t judge me,” you say cheerfully as you accept your own iced coffee and immediately reach for the gomme syrup and coffee fresh.

“Are you putting that in your coffee?” Rindou asks, somewhat unnecessarily as you tip the cream into your coffee, followed a moment later by the sugary syrup. The black of your coffee lightens into something milder, and you stir the new mixture around.

“I know it’s not very sophisticated, but I can’t drink my coffee black. It makes my heart race,” you say.

“You like it.” Rindou’s voice is as mild as your newly flattened coffee, and you can’t tell if he means it as a question.

You take a tentative sip, and your face immediately puckers. You add a second serving of coffee fresh.

“Delicious,” you lie, and Rindou rewards you with a small smile. He drinks his coffee without hesitation, of course, and you almost scowl.

“I shouldn’t be surprised. Sweet thing like you,” Rindou says.

“Does that make you hard and bitter to swallow?

He isn’t far off. You do like sweet things, candies and grenadine-flavored cocktails, Shoujo manga and romances, walks through the park with friends and gifts on Ochugen. Every day you find a new series of little pleasures to sweeten the hard work or tedium. Right now, the pleasure of his praise lights you up from the inside.

“I was happy you invited me out,” you admit.

“I was glad you called.”

Hard to take him at his word, when he appears to apathetic now, slouched in his seat and eyeing the coffee nearly as much as he glances at you. He is courteous, but dispassionate. You wonder if he is always so monotone and tired or if you fail to excite him.

You want to impress him, and the nerves make you ramble.

“Well, I like this place. It was a good pick. I live by Nakano Station, so when I’m home, anywhere in the city is an easy meeting place, but I go to Seikei University, and the bus is a pain, so meeting in Ikebukuro is a good middle for me. Only had to switch trains once to get here.”

“Seikei? That’s a good school.”

“Thanks, but I’m not like the daughter of nobility or something. I know that’s the reputation, but a lot of normal kids go to Seikei, too. We’re not all sons and daughters of CEOs.”

“Still impressive you got in,” Rindou says.

“Oh, um, thanks,” you mutter, embarrassed at even more unearned praise. “It’s been a dream so far. I mean, the campus is beautiful and the professors are like the smartest people I’ve ever met. I wasn’t sure if I’d make many friends with being so busy, but a lot of people commute like me, so we have a study group and are always together. It’s been wonderful.”

“The stereotypical student life,” Rindou says. His warm tone makes you think he is making fun of you, but when you meet his eyes, you see they are focused and bright for the first time. “What are you studying?”

“Early Modern Japanese literature. Not very practical, I know, but I love it.”

“Who’s your favorite?” Rindou says.

Sharing a favorite story or author always embarrasses you. It is too revelatory of how you see the world, or worse, how you want to see the world. Too many classmates have asked only to pounce on your answer. For that reason, you have a stable of fake responses, designed to make you sound smart, but they dry up on your tongue. Lying to Rindou doesn’t sit right with you.

“Well, depends on if you mean poetry or fiction. My favorite haiku poet is probably Fukuda Chiyo-ni, but I hate telling people because I worry they’ll think I just like her because she’s a woman, and I’m trying to prove something. But, I’m not. I just think the scenes she sets are beautiful, so clever. And for stories…probably A Smiling Death’s Head by Ueda Akinari.”

‘Why?”

“It’s kind of a long explanation,” you hedge, eyes sliding downward to where an ice cube bobs in your cup. The reason you never admit to your love of this story is to avoid the question of why. Why not one of Ueda Akinari more beloved and well-studied works? Why the one often dismissed as the diminished storytelling of a dying old man?

“Look at me,” Rindou says, and the lack of give in his voice startles your eyes back to his. “Tell me in detail. I want to hear it.”

It is a voice that brooks no challenges, the same voice he might use when telling you to stop squirming and take it, and you lose the breath from your lungs. Helpless to resist, you begin to spill out the whole wretched story.

“Well, it’s based on historical fact, and it was fictionalized several times. According to historical record, Unai was the son of the once noble and still affluent Danji, and Yae was the daughter of the Danji’s impoverished kinsman. Yae and Unai loved one another, but Danji refused to let them marry. Yae ignored her mother’s counsel to let the matter drop and went to beg Danji herself, only for her brother, Genta, to behead her. Everyone in the entire ridiculous affair got off with barely a slap on the wrist – well, except Yae, obviously – because Genta was seen as so noble, doing what he must to protect his family’s honor. Ayatari Takebe famously wrote about it in the Nishiyama Monogatari, which is interesting in its own right, as he himself was exiled after a shameful affair with his brother’s wife…” you trail off self-consciously. “Tell me if I’m boring you.”

“Not at all,” Rindou reassures you. “You’re teaching me something new.”

The warmth in his voice is at complete odds with his blank face, and you think you may be starting to figure out his weirdly contrasting signals. You decide then and there to stop worrying about what Rindou thinks of you. Making friends has always been a special talent of yours, and this self-consciousness doesn’t fit you at all. You love to talk about literature. With his permission, you see no reason to stop.

“Right, well Ayatari Takebe’s version follows the general consensus of the time, that Genta is the hero, Danji an ass, and Yae unfilial. In his version, a familial curse that caused a ghost to literally terrorize their family is broken by her death and Genta’s heroism. It’s…kind of upsetting to read as a woman and hard to understand as Ayatari himself is guilty of the sin he writes about. Then, in The Tale of a Man of Valor, Ueda Akinari writes about it for the first time. What I like about this version is it has Yae ask to be killed and made a martyr. It treats her as if she is just as capable of honor as Genta and the men, but it doesn’t give her or her mother a name. That just bugs me for some reason! So that brings us to A Smiling Death’s Head, which is the second time Ueda writes about the incident, only this time it’s really a romance! In real life and every other version, the Unai character completely abandons Yae at his father’s orders, but in this version, he actually stands to leave with her even though it will mean his disinheritance. So, then the brother executes Yae the shame of marrying a disinherited son, not for shaming the family. I like that the love is actually validated in this one, that the character of Yae isn’t dying for a man that wouldn’t even protect her. And, best of all, everyone gets punished in the end! The brother is exiled, the lover and father exiled to monastic life. No one was on that girl’s side in life. They celebrated her murder, and the original stories afterwards did the same. I actually cried when I read a version where she gets a kind of justice. It was such a shock to see any kind of justice for her, even if it is in the unreality of literature. I think it’s lovely.”

“I’ll have to check it out,” Rindou says, and while it may be a throwaway line, just something to say after you spilled out a whole thesis on the story, you think there’s real approval in Rindou’s eyes, the subtlest sparking of interest.

“Are you a big reader?” you ask.

“Sometimes I listen to audio books. Mostly about history. I don’t have much time to sit down with a book,” Rindou says.

“Audio books totally count,” you say. “And if you like history, you should check out the first one by Ayatari. They say he actually met Genta and wrote the story based on the facts. It’s technically considered fiction, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“I’m surprised that’s not your favorite version.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“I understand wanting justice for the girl, but in that version she doesn’t even need justice. She wanted to die. It makes her an active participant in the story, doesn’t it?” Rindou says.

“Ugh, I know! I’m a bad person. I should prefer that one. It’s better written, too. I just hate the lover in that version. I think it’s so pathetic, the idea of dying for a man who won’t even fight for you. Who could choose dying for a man like that? I don’t believe she wanted to die, and there’s something so twisted about perverting the historical fact to make you complicit in your own murder,” you explain.

“You’re a romantic,” Rindou snorts.

“Yeah, well, a girl shouldn’t be judged for being a romantic, especially when she reads.”

When Rindou straightens his back from the hunch he affected while listening to you, you are reminded just how much taller he is than you. Sitting casually across from one another, it is easy to forget. You cross and uncross your legs a few times, aware of the laminate, sticky against your bare thighs. The little flared skirt you wear is hiked higher than you usually dare. You spent over an hour that morning shaving and moisturizing the skin to a supple invitation.

“How old are you?” Rindou asks abruptly.

“Guess,” you urge.

“Young enough that I should feel ashamed,” Rindou sighs, and you are charmed at what you imagine to be self-flagellation in his posture as he returns to a comma-like hunch. The couple lovers you enjoyed until now have all been older, likely older than Rindou even, and none of them hesitated for a second at your vulnerable age. They liked you most when you were nineteen and starry-eyed.

“I’m twenty-one,” you say, sparing his feelings.

“Twenty-one?” Rindou repeats. “And you’re just starting your first semester at university? Sorry, that’s none of my business.”

“Don’t’ be. We’re here to get to know each other, right? Besides, I’m not ashamed of it. Proud actually,” you reassure him.

A crowd of high-school boys coopt the table to your right, striking up an immediate ruckus. If they are seniors, they may be closer to your age than Rindou, but the chasm between you and these almost children is enormous. One of the boys props his feet on the chair opposite him, another drops crumbs all over the floor, and another yet laughs like the crack of a gun, interrupting the peace of the café.

With a concerted effort to block out the disruptive students, you say, “My mom raised me and my siblings on her own pretty much. My dad was only sporadically in the picture. So, money was always tight. I’d planned to go to university right after I graduated high school, but my mom lost her temporary position right before I would have enrolled. I knew she wouldn’t be able to support my little sister on her own, so I decided to stay at home and work until my sister could go to school, too, which she did. She’s left Tokyo altogether. Her university is in Kyushu.”

Maybe this was oversharing, but you feel no shame when it comes to this subject. The sacrifices you made for your family mean they are now set to start new chapters in their lives. Putting off university for four years was nothing compared to the payoff.

“You said siblings, plural,” Rindou says. “Guessing you’re the oldest.”

“No, I have an older brother.”

Rindou frowns. You realize his blank face is far quicker to twist into a frown than a smile. It will be twice as satisfying when you manage to earn a rare smile.

“Where was your brother in all of this?” Rindou asks, clear judgment in his voice. You also realize that his tone is a more honest indicator of his feelings than his expressions.

You wave his judgment off. “It’s okay. I don’t blame him or anything. He eloped with his girlfriend right out of high school, so he had his own family to take care of. They have two kids already. The advantage of being an aunt so young is I plan to be a cool aunt and spoil them rotten!”

“So, you re-enrolled once your sister was in school. Must be difficult to go from earning an income to being a student. How do you support yourself?”

Talking to Rindou feels a little like an interrogation, like he is building a profile on you or something. You went on dates before where the guy bombarded you with questions, but that was usually because your date was shy or uninteresting and wanted to keep the focus on you. Not for a second do you believe Rindou is shy or boring.

You pride yourself on being an open book, so you shrug off the weirdness.

“It’s not that tough, to be honest. I still live at home, so I don’t have to worry about rent, just food, tuition, books, the usual. I actually made a pretty good salary as a factory worker, and every dollar I didn’t give to my mother for household expenses went straight to savings, so I’m able to support myself mostly. I do plan to start applying for jobs next semester though. It would be nice to have some fun money and treat my classmates on occasion,” you say.

Rindou leans back in his seat, arms crossed and scans you up and down. “You’re a lot tougher than you look, aren’t you?”

“I guess that depends on how I tough I look.”

Finally, you earn a smile from Rindou, and it’s the smile of a predator. “Oh honey, you look positively breakable.”

The coffee shop is a world away from a seedy sex dungeon, so you found it easy to compartmentalize, act like this date is no different than any other, or like there are two Rindous. Both dress flamboyantly and are reserved in manner, but one looks at home with an espresso and the other belongs to your dirtiest daydreams. Now, the two collide, and your body tenses with the reminder of just what this man could do to you. What he would like to do to you.

You lick your lips, completely submerged in Rindou’s gaze. Those same eyes studied his handiwork on that woman’s body so clinically, so proudly, so…

To your right, the students start arguing about copying each other’s homework, and you skyrocket back to reality. A reality where you are nearly drooling in a public place.

Time for a subject change.

“Anyways, I’m applying for all the on-campus food service positions. I’d like to get something in copywriting or proofreading because it’s at least somewhat relevant to my career, but I have to be realistic. My dream would be to work at the library though,” you speed through the words as if each is a battering ram against the tension in your belly.

“You as a librarian? I think I could be bothered to check out a book once in a while,” Rindou says.

“Well, it won’t happen. Everyone wants to work there. Only the upperclassmen get hired,” you say. “What about you? Who are you Haitani Rindou? Do you have family? Friends? What do you do for work? For fun? I’m curious.”

Typically, when you go on a first date, you already know the basics about the man you’re seeing. On arranged dates, your friends or coworkers would give you their credentials as if the man is interviewing for the coveted position of your boyfriend. And, in those instances where you met a guy at a party first, you would have already talked for some time. Dates are meant to determine if you have any chemistry. Nine times out of ten, you leave disappointed.

With Rindou, it is the exact opposite. You know you want the man across from you. Too much. If he asks to take you home, you won’t have the power to resist him. Hell, if hells you to get on your knees under the table, a delirious part of yourself would be tempted. He is so serious, so impenetrable, but his focus when he looks at a woman…

You shiver in your seat.

“You’re cold,” Rindou says. “Get yourself another coffee. Whatever you want on me.”

Without realizing, you sipped your coffee to the dregs. Hard to imagine when you got the time considering you’ve done all the talking until now.

“No thanks. If I drink another cup, I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” you say. It’s a lie. You don’t want to interrupt the conversation, not when it’s finally on Rindou to answer a question for once.

Without a word, Rindou pushes a bottle of water towards you, and you, thankfully, take it. This man makes you thirsty in more ways than one.

“So, tell me about yourself,” you urge.

“You wanted to know about my family. What is there to say? I have an older brother. We’re close. Then, there’s my grandmother. My grandfather passed a few years back. I see her once a month. Good woman,” Rindou says.

“How much older is your brother?” you ask.

“Only a year.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” you pout. “He probably doesn’t spoil you so much then.”

Rindou snorts, literally snorts. “No, he really doesn’t. He’s my best friend, but he positively terrorized me as a kid.”

“Same! I always wanted an older sibling to spoil me rotten, like I do with my sister, but my brother was always teasing me and eating my food!” you moan.

“Tell me about it. We lived together for a few years as adults, and I bet you can guess how that went. It was his rules all the time. I couldn’t have friends over or play music or do anything past eight pm because he needed his beauty sleep. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get him to take out the trash on his turn or follow any one of my rules,” Rindou complains.

“Ugh, that’s just so typical. Younger siblings get all the character,” you say.

Rindou nods solemnly, and you find yourself giggling at your own joke.

“I’m surprised that you haven’t asked about my parents. Most people would.”

It barely qualifies as a compliment, yet you wiggle in your seat at the idea this impresses him.

“I didn’t tell you all the sordid details about why my dad isn’t in the picture either,” you point out.

“True. How about a deal? You tell me why your dad isn’t around, and I’ll tell you about my parents.”

Your father is a sore spot. Not because you have any feeling towards the man at all. His name evokes the memory of a grassy hill, mud sticking to your boots, and the air scented with manure. The memory sticks somewhere in the back of your brain, but the details of the when, where, and why skitter away when you try to grasp them. Nothing there to cling to.

No, it is not for your father’s sake that you avoid the topic, but rather for your mother. The story of your conception doesn’t paint your mother in the best light. You already told Rindou she failed to support her children on her own. Your mother whose very name summons up too many memories for you to catalogue. Who smells like mikans and can never pass a book vendor without bringing you something home to read. Your mother who raised you and praised you from an embryo into the young woman you are today. In how many ways can you poison Rindou against your mother before he even meets her?

Wait…before he meets her?

Rindou may be a wet dream with a voice that makes you want to follow his every order, but he is a stranger. You do not need to worry about what he thinks of your freaking mother.

Squaring your shoulders, you confess, “My father was married when he met my mother. Still is. I only met him a few times when I was a kid. He’s not someone I think about.”

“What about your siblings? Did your mother marry?”

“They have the same father,” you admit. “It was a…prolonged lapse in judgment on my mother’s part.”

Growing up, your school friends and the neighborhood kids would insist you visit their homes or meet at a neutral shopping district. Your mother was silently ostracized by the parents, punished on behalf of wives everywhere. You learned to tolerate the indignity. Less sufferable were the fathers, introducing themselves to your mom at school, offering to help around the house, eyeing her like easy meat on the bone. Your mother never noticed any of it. Her eyeline rested above the heads of most people; she looked to the sky, never the ground.

But you noticed. You saw it all.

Rindou reacts unlike anyone you have ever told about your mother. He doesn’t seem to process that you are a bastard or that your mother is the kind of woman condemned in proper homes. He nods in understanding. His nods contains years of experience in the sins of people. It isn’t really that surprising. Plenty of men become beats where women are concerned.

“My mom died when I was still pretty young, and my dad basically disappeared on us. Technically we lived with him in his apartment, but he would stop by maybe once a month with no warning, leaving just enough cash to eat for a week and then disappear again. Found out later he had several women around Tokyo that he would stay with, didn’t hold down a job for more than a few weeks at a time. Our grandparents made sure we were fed, but my brother and I were left to fend mostly for ourselves. It made us strong, smart,” Rindou says.

“I feel the same,” you whisper. “I mean, just that people always pity me when I talk about my background, but I think I’m a lot stronger for having sacrificed for my family and lived the life I have. It also makes me more appreciative of where I am now.”

“Exactly.”

Where have your nerves disappeared? The conversation wraps around you, weighs you down like a heavy stone, and you sink into some liminal space where the coffee shop and its patrons disappear. Where only you and Rindou exist. It’s unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You find yourself thinking about a passage in Snow Country: “Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.”

What did it mean to think of a doomed romance now of all times? And yet, how perfectly the words capture your feelings!

“Because we didn’t have enough money, I skipped university and went straight to work,” Rindou tells you. “It’s honestly a miracle I graduated high school. I knew a diploma wouldn’t matter one way or another, but my brother insisted and paid my school fees. When I graduated, my schoolmates started a business, and I joined up with them.”

“Oh, that must be fun to work with friends!”

“I don’t know if I’d call them friends, maybe a couple of them. I think it’s good to keep some distance between your life and your work, not to be one of those men who only socializes with his coworkers and lives for the job,” Rindou says.

“What do you do?”

“I’m in the export-import business,” Rindou answers.

Your mouth drops, which is completely impolite, but you can’t help it. You expected to hear that he was a landscaper or drove a taxi or a million other respectable blue-collar jobs. (Or, yes, a yakuza. The tattoos are hard to ignore. But Rindou doesn’t match the look of the old men with their big bellies and cat calls that lurk outside pachinko parlors. He is not yakuza.) Rindou doesn’t match at all your vision of an international businessman. He doesn’t wear a million-yen suit or check his phone every other minute or talk in jargon. Rindou, despite his eye-catching hair and sexual predilections, seems so…normal.

“Wow. I mean. Wow! That sounds so cool. Do you travel a lot? Do you get discounts on products? What does it mean to be in export-import?”

“No. yes. And it means that my business imports goods into the country, and then my role is to connect with buyers in Japan to purchase our products. It’s more boring than you make it sound: supply chain, payroll, competitive analyses.”

“You’re telling me you and your friends started your own business in international trade and expect me not to be impressed?” you laugh.

Rindou shrugs. “I don’t talk much about work. I work to live, not live to work. I’d much rather be drinking coffee with a pretty literature student than discussing pricing strategies.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” you say. How many times did he call you pretty? You think it’s twice now.

“I always wanted to go to university to be honest. I love to learn, and there are so many classes that I know I’d love, but at first, I couldn’t afford it, and even now the timing just doesn’t make sense,” Rindou admits. “I know you can relate to that.”

“Alright, a thought experiment,” you say. “If money, time, location wasn’t an object, and you could go to any university in the world, what would you major in?”

“Easy, history. I’d probably specialize in the Tokugawa period, but I’m also interested in modern warfare, post-atomic bomb,” Rindou says.

“Little boy in love with the age of samurai,” you tease.

“That’s definitely part of it,” Rindou laughs. “But it’s also the politics, the way the period is brimming with restrained forces because change is right around the corner. There’s this stubbornness to the period, this refusal that may look ridiculous in retrospect, but it’s not. They held out for two hundred years. Sometimes, I think every good thing I have is bound to collapse, and that I should just submit to it, so maybe I find that resistance inspiring.”

“Can I steal that? Write my thesis on the continuing popularity of literature from the Edo Era and use that as my theory.”

“No way. Maybe I’ll publish it myself,” he says.

“You won’t let me copy your homework? And I thought we were friends!” you whine, casting a surreptitious glance over at the students from before, now diligently at work on their own assignments. The copying campaign failed.

“We aren’t going to be friends.”

Your eyes snap back to Rindou, and this time, you don’t look away. The strange color of Rindou’s eyes only make them more magnetic. Your breath is caught in your hammering chest. If he doesn’t grant you mercy, you may drop from oxygen depletion.

“Tell me,” Rindou’s voice dips low on the command. “How much experience do you have with SM?”

You glance again, this time nervously, at the table of students. You wish they would abandon their homework and start shouting again to drown out your answer. The most noise they make is the occasional screech-scratch of a chair against the floor.

You lower your voice.

“I was seeing this guy from work a few years ago, and he kind of introduced me to it. Nothing hardcore, just simple stuff. It’s cliché, but I guess you could say it awakened something in me.”

“Cliches persist because they’re true,” Rindou reassures you.

“After that, I tried things with a few guys. None were like…serious doms or anything, but the more I experimented with it, the more I knew I really liked it. It made me want to try for real with someone who knew what they were doing. It’s frustrating having to take the lead when I’m trying to sub. So, that’s why I went to the club the other night. It was my first time, and I wanted to see what it looked like.”

A spot on your chin begins to itch, but you refuse to scratch it lest Rindou think it’s a nervous tic. Ever since Rindou called, you dreaded the moment when you would need to share your lack of experience. You feel like a play actor in the SM space, a weekend enthusiast rather than a proper sub. If Rindou wants someone more sophisticated and worldly, you won’t blame him. Compared to his, your world is small.

“Do you know what SM entails?” Rindou asks.

“I think so,” you mumble, and then more confidently, “Yes.”

“It’s different for everyone. I want to know exactly what you want to get out of this and for you to understand what I want too.”

You nod in agreement.

To your relief – because you would not know how to get started – Rindou goes first, detailing his sexual desires without a hint of hesitation or shame. “I want control, first and foremost. I want to decide what happens, how, and when. I’m mean to the women I’m with. I call them names, set them up for failure, and laugh and punish them when the inevitable happens. What that looks like is mostly negotiable. There are lots of ways to punish a woman. So, for example, if you didn’t like impact play, I could find some other way to punish you. That said, I demand orgasm control during a scene. If that’s something a sub isn’t comfortable with, we go our separate ways. I also don’t tame brats. If you need to be put in your place once or twice, that’s one thing, but I don’t want a sub who makes a habit out of it.”

Beneath your shirt, your nipples harden into peaks. It’s the way he switches from an anonymous sub to the direct you that sets your heart racing. That and his voice throughout, so steady and uncompromising.

“How does that sound to you? What are you looking for?” Rindou asks.

“All of that sounds fine.” You tuck a lock of hair behind your ear. “I like being called names…um, though I think I need some affirmation too, when I’m doing a good job.”

“Good girl?” Rindou says.

You swear you will melt if Rindou ever rewards you with that moniker sincerely.

“Yes, yes, like that! Um, and I’ve tried a little with orgasm control and liked it a lot. I can’t…do it on command or anything like that, but withholding and stuff. I’d like to try more impact play. I’ve done some spanking, but nothing more.” Your voice lowers to a whisper as you bleat out ‘spanking’ and Rindou leans in across the linoleum tabletop to better hear you. “I don’t know what all my limits are yet, though I do know that I don’t want any marks that others will see.”

“No marking,” Rindou confirms with a nod.

“Yeah, and um, I want to try being tied up and more sensory deprivation stuff. I’ve liked everything there. I like when I’m given a challenge, like um, to stay still or be quiet, something that’s really hard to do.”

Rindou’s smile is positively sinister.

“If you had to sum it up, what’s the main thing you want to get out of this?” Rindou asks.

A hysterical part of you wants to answer true love, like an idiot, but you know he’s asking about sex.

“I don’t want to be in control,” you reply simply.

“Isn’t it funny how two people can have the exact opposite desires. I want to be in control of another person, and you want to cede it. It’s perfect how that happens.”

“There are as many types of people as there are people,” you say, repeating a line you heard elsewhere but can’t place.

“You mentioned wanting to do a scene with someone more experienced,” Rindou says. “Is that because you had trouble submitting to past partners? They weren’t commanding enough?”

“No, that’s not it. I’m a good listener,” you say quickly, defensively.

Barely had a command issued from the mouths of your past partners before you dropped everything to follow it, so eager to give your all in a scene and get to that delirious release of control. The problem arose from their lack of creativity. None of the men you dated knew how to sustain a scene, running out of things to say or orders to give in the first half. Then, the mood would peter out to an anti-climactic finish (though not always literally). Inside of you is the certainty that if a man simply took the situation in hand, you would be reduced, raised, destroyed, and you would thank him for it.

“For safe words, I prefer the red, yellow, green system, but I will use whatever you prefer,” Rindou says.

“Red for stop, yellow for slow down or less of that, and green for good, right?” you ask.

“Perfect marks.”

“Then, yes. I’m good with that.”

“Good. That will apply in every scene, though I’ll remind you before each as well. It can be easy to forget when you’re caught up in the moment.”

“Can I ask you a question? At the club, the woman you were with called you ‘sir.’ Is that what you like?”

“Yes, but if it’s an issue for you, we would come up with something else,” Rindou offers.

“No, ‘sir’ is good with me.” An understatement.

“What about you? Like I said, I will call you names. Anything off limits?”

You think about it seriously, flipping through a catalog of the sweet and sour names you’ve heard used in porn.

“I don’t think I would like to be called anything involving animals, whether it’s an insult or a compliment. I want to be a person,” you say.

“That’s good to know,” Rindou says encouragingly, giving you the confidence to continue.

“And I don’t want anything to do with…rape.”

Again, Rindou nods. “Very common. Neither are a problem. What about ‘slut’, ‘whore,’ ‘bitch,’ and variations on the same?”

“Those are all fine, so long as, like I said, I get some validation when I earn it.”

One of those rare smiles breaks across Rindou’s face. “It won’t be easy to earn it, sweetheart.”

This is the kind of charisma that inspires women to empty their bank accounts, soldiers to march into battle, and believers to pray to an unseen god. It’s visceral. You will earn his praise even if it means you must empty your bank account, die in battle, and pray to a god you can’t see.

“I’m going to send you a list of different acts, names, kinks, etc. for you to look through. I want you to mark anything that you’re not comfortable with, that you especially want to try, or that you’re open but nervous about. Be completely honest. Just because it’s on the list doesn’t mean I’m open to it either, but I want to know all of your hard limits regardless. If you don’t know what anything means or have questions, just ask.”

“I can do that,” you agree easily. No as the conversation about consent and kinks nears its end, you guffaw in disbelief that you were daring enough to speak so openly where someone might overhear you. You tell Rindou as much.

“Why not?” Rindou challenges. “We’ll never see these people again. They don’t matter.”

The collection of faces around you could be found in a thousand coffee and tea shops across Tokyo with nothing to distinguish them from each other. A sea of department store bought tee-shirts, dark hair, and animated expressions. Every one of them going about their own lives with more important concerns that the sexual corruption of the co-ed on a first date. The only person in the whole establishment with an iota of individualism is Rindou with his atypical – and to be honest, ugly – violet shag. He would stand out in a police lineup, but not you, and not any of the other customers either.

“Can you do something for me?” Rindou asks. You nod quickly, feeling like a bobble head with how often you’ve nodded in encouragement these last fifteen minutes. “I’m going to order another drink. I want you to sit here and hold this in your first, closed over, so no one can see what you’re holding.”

From his pocket, Rindou unearths a dozen or so thousand-yen coins. You accept them from him and turn one over. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“But why?” you half-protest.

Rindou smirks. “Because I’m telling you to. If you want to stop, say ‘red.’ Do you understand? What color are you at right now?”

A test? A challenge? The start of play? It’s such an innocuous beginning that you don’t know what to think. But, you do know that you will listen. His voice brooks no disagreement.

“Green,” you say, folding the stack of coins into your left fist in compliance.

Rindou’s lips twitch in what you believe is approval.

“I’m going to order another drink. Would you like another iced coffee?” Rindou asks.

“I can’t have the caffeine…maybe something decaf though, or something sweet.”

Rindou joins the short line at the counter to order your new drinks. You see him shoot out a flurry of texts or emails while he waits for his turn, so you figure it won’t be rude to check your phone either. Nothing urgently requiring your attention: an email about a rescheduled class, a friend tagging you in a video from karaoke the other night, and a text from your mom reminding you to pick up some rice on the way home.

The stack of coins grows warm in your palm. A strange yet innocent secret that positions you opposite the rest of the patrons of the café. You struggle to imagine how you might share any of this strange date with your friends, as if telling might diminish the spell that Rindou weaves around you.

Rindou returns with an Americano for himself, a decaf latte with plenty of foam for you, and an apple pastry with two forks and spoons.

“The cashier said that everyone raves about this,” Rindou says, gesturing the pastry.

“Thank you. I love sweet things,” you say.

You choose not to dive straight into the pastry, instead sipping at your new drink. With Rindou focused on his food, quiet descends on the table. Your earlier observation, that Rindou is taciturn, appears accurate, though he had plenty to say when the conversation of your sexual relationship arose.

“I like this café. The coffee’s so good. I might need to come again sometime,” you say. “Do you come here often?”

“First time,” Rindou grunts around a half-swallowed bite.

“Really? Then why did you pick this place?”

Rindou chews for a moment and swallows before explaining, “Once I learned you were a student, I wanted to come to a place like this. It’s exactly what I picture when I imagine a university date.”

“Well, you picked well. I feel right at home here,” you beam. “Though if it was a true university date, you would have bored me half to death by now describing your course load.”

“Maybe I should be thanking you for sparing me the details of your course load,” Rindou says.

“You really should. I’m being incredibly gracious in sparing you. It can take hours,” you tase back.

You reach for the knife to cut into your first bite of pastry and then pause. The smile evaporates from your face.

The logistical conundrum occurs to you in one sudden realization. Rindou buying you the pastry doesn’t seem so kind now that you consider your situation.

In your right hand is the knife and in your left the stack of coins. The hold the pastry steady with a fork would require opening your fist and exposing the coins to the world. In other words, it would require disobeying him.

Rindou watches your discovery closely. His eyes miss nothing, cataloging your brain’s feeble attempts to problem solve your dilemma. Somehow, you know that not eating the pastry isn’t an option. It’s akin to admitting failure every bit as much as opening your left hand.

Giggling nervously, you deflect from the obvious situation, “So, you said you work to live. What does living look like for you? What do you like to do for fun or rest?”

Simultaneously, you busy yourself trying to test if you can lift the weight of a metal fork with just your thumb and forefinger. The answer is yes, but the stack of coins bulge in your fist, and you realize that moving your forefinger too much risks exposing a sliver of what’s hidden, so you drop it back to the table.

“I workout every day. It’s not a chore for me. I’ve always loved the chemical rush of muscle training –” you note this with little surprise as his shirt strains against the muscles of his chest. “– and I practice jujitsu, too. I love music, listening to albums, going to concerts, DJing. All of it.”

“Oh! Would you believe I’ve never been to a concert?”

“Never?”

“Not really. I’ve gone to some clubs where they had a guitar player or a DJ, but the guitarist was just doing covers, not his own music, so I don’t think that counts. Plus, no one was really listening. He was just background noise,” you explain.

You split your attention between the conversation and the pastry. You consider if you can use your thumb to anchor the pastry but quickly reject it. The pastry is flaky and covered in a wet, sticky glaze. It is not finger food.

“Having trouble?” Rindou asks.

“No!” you insist stubbornly. You try to just cut the damn thing with the knife, fork be damned, but without the proper leverage, the knife merely presses the pastry inward without breaking through the apple filling. You would need a sharper knife for that to work.

“If you say so,” Rindou smirks. You manage to break off a haphazard sliver of pastry and gloatingly take your first nibble. It’s good. “What kind of music do you listen to?”

Your task is temporarily forgotten as you groan your embarrassment into your arm. “You’re going to think I’m lame!”

“Probably,” Rindou agrees.

“Ugh, definitely,” you lament. “I don’t even know where everyone is finding these cool new bands all the time. Every time I think I’ve finally caught up, all my friends are listening to some brand new album I’ve never even heard of! I mostly just listen to playlists on my phone, so I don’t hear many new songs unless I listen to the radio, at which point…”

“You hear crap,” Rindou finishes for you.

“No! I happen to like the radio.”

Rindou eyes you suspiciously. “You’re going to tell me you’re an Arashi fan, aren’t you?”

“No! It was KAT-UN,” and now you smile gleefully at how Rindou can’t hide the disgust on his face. “I was eleven when they came out, and I was in love with Kazuya from the moment I laid eyes on him. It was a three-year love affair, and I am not ashamed.”

“He’s your type, huh?”

“He was when I was twelve at least,” you correct.

“What’s your type now?” Rindou teases back.

You pretend to think about it. “Someone who cuts a woman’s food for her. I find that very manly.”

Rindou’s laugh is as deep as his speaking voice. It seems to break free from him, resonant and rich. Even more rare than his smile, though no less precious.

“I like house music, especially techno and ambient,” Rindou says, and you almost don’t catch that he is dodging your prompt for help.

You huff in displeasure and reach back for the blasted knife.

“Is that the stuff they play at the clubs?”

“House, yes. The techno scene isn’t that big here. It’s fading out.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. What’s a song I should listen to? I’ll check it out.”

“There’s some really good stuff that just came out. Check out Emiya Elena. But to get started, you may want to try the classics: Midori Takada, Ebi, Fumitoshi Takkyu, Satoshi Tomiie, I could go on.”

“I am going to forget all of that,” you admit. “But I can remember Ebi. I’ll check them out. You mentioned DJing. Did you ever want to be a musician for real?”

“Yes and no. the best way to get exposure is to play the big clubs, and the best way to play at the big clubs is to have success and connections. So, when we were building up our business back in the day, I would sometimes imagine it was a steppingstone for my future, but that’s just not how life works.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…you can’t unring a bell. I made my choices, and I’ll die with them.”

“I think the expression is live with them.”

“I know.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” you argue. “No one’s path in life is fixed. There’s always a choice. It’s the coward’s way out to pretend that you have no control over your life or that all your choices are already made. People are just scared to live with the ambiguities of the future. It’s a way to pretend that tomorrow won’t surprise you, but it will.”

“You are very passionate about this,” Rindou comments.

Your speech surprises you as well. To call it impassioned would be an understatement. But, you would not be where you are today if not for your stubborn determination to control the circumstances of your life. No one expected you to get an education, to be successful, to do anything but get pregnant and work yourself to the coffin. A fixed life was simply too depressing to contemplate, so you didn’t. You may be a romantic, someone who believes real love is around the corner, but you still recognize that if a person doesn’t bother to check around those corners, they’ll miss their opportunity. You tell Rindou as much.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” he says, tone flat. “Some opportunities are just dead.”

You roll your eyes at his fatalism, so similar to your edgier classmates. “Whatever you say. I think you just don’t want to miss that you’re not that talented a musician.”

Rindou smiles conspiratorially. “To be honest…I kind of suck.”

He starts to laugh and you join along, giggling up a storm. You cover your open mouth with a palm, but Rindou doesn’t bother. His teeth are too straight and white not to be a product of orthodontia, and you wonder if he pursued that as an adult or if his grandmother stepped in to fix his teeth. His laugh makes him look younger.

“It’s not really my fault,” Rindou continues. “Whenever I would try to practice, my brother would start yelling about how I wasn’t making music, just noise. He would throw out my equipment sometimes, and I’ve have to go dumpster diving to get it back. I lost a lot of shirts to broth stains.”

“No! that’s so gross! I can’t blame him completely though. I bet you were such an annoying little brother.”

“Rude…but true. When I was a kid, I would read a page of the encyclopedia, memorize some facts, and then quiz my brother in front of our friends. When he couldn’t answer, I’d say things like, ‘You don’t know something that easy?’ or “Wow, you should really show up to class sometimes.’ Just really rubbing it in, even though I literally learned in that morning.”

“Menace! I bet your brother loved that.”

“Oh yeah, he used to kick my ass.” Mid-laugh, Rindou pauses and frowns. “You’re…surprisingly easy to talk to. I find myself telling you things I never talk about.”

That quickly, your laughter dries up into nothing, and the blistering sexual tension from earlier returns. Rindou has you on a yo-yo, whipping you back and forth at his discretion. It’s his eyes. When they drift half-way closed into a lidded stare, your whole body reacts.

“Thank you,” you whisper, tucking your hair behind your ears, shy as a schoolgirl.

“You’re so easy to compliment, too. You react so deliciously,” Rindou says. He broaches the distances to untuck a lock of hair. The strands drift back, and you track the long fingers of his hand. “I should warn you again. You won’t get many compliments from me.”

You couldn’t find your voice, so you just nod.

“Eat your dessert,” Rindou orders.

Throughout your conversation, you exhausted every trick, every angle, every idea for how to cut this pastry short of ripping it apart with one hand in a feat of barbarism that would shame you for eternity. You might problem-solve better if the fog wrapped around your brain cleared a bit. But, so long as Rindou is near, that’s unlikely to happen. You need his help.

“Could you please help me cut it, sir?”

Trained on your mouth, Rindou traces the shape of your lips around the title. His lips curve like a scythe. “Of course, baby. Open up.”

Parting your wet lips, you drop your jaw. It is strange to wait with an open mouth. A draft from the air con drifts down your throat. Like waiting at the dentist.

Then, the spoon presses down on your tongue. Sweet and tart. You moan a little at the taste.

“Do you want another?” Rindou asks.

You nod, and the spoon is removed and the process repeats. Again and again, until you’ve eaten your fill. To outsiders, this must appear romantic, a couple feeding one another. You know there is no romance here. Your pussy is a chaotic pulse between your legs, keeping time with your beating heart.

“There was another reason I chose this restaurant,” Rindou says. “Follow me.”

He doesn’t pause for the trash left on the table, so you don’t either despite your instincts to clean up. His warm hand guides you across the café, beyond its oblivious patrons, past the smiling baristas, through a door marked ‘employees only.’ He steers you further beyond the storage rooms until the very end of the hall, where an empty, single-use bathroom awaits you.

The click of the lock echoes.

“What color are you at?” Rindou asks.

“Green.”

“Red, I stop. Yellow, I slow down or change what I’m doing,” Rindou reminds you.

“Understood, sir.”

The words are still half in your mouth when he backs you into the wall opposite the door. The plaster is cool on your back, but Rindou’s body heat swallows you whole. The set of Rindou’s shoulders is wide and strong. It blocks out the world around you, so that all you can see, smell or feel is Rindou. Like he becomes the world.

Deliberately, slowly, Rindou tilts his head down. Your lips part, begging to be kissed as he lingers, denying you. His breath is sweet and warm.

With aching care, he brushes his lips across yours, drawing back before you can react, and then doing it again. Soon, you are chasing his mouth, little desperate jerks of your neck as you try to keep him close to you. Barely the taste of him, and already your lips are glistening wet.

Rindou never closes his eyes.

“Give me your hand,” he orders.

Unthinkingly, you place your right hand in his and try to pull him closer.

“The other one.”

Oh…oh! Rindou unclasps your left hand, where the stack of coins remained hidden since you left the table. You forgot they were there. Rindou drops them into a pocket of his jean, forgotten already.

“At least you know how to follow directions, huh?” Rindou says, a little unkindly, the half compliment soured, but you nod vociferously. You will take scraps if they drip from his lips.

Those same lips finally kiss you in earnest. Hands cradle your head, pinning you in place. It may be the lewdest kiss of your life. More tongue, but skillfully done, coaxing and teasing and domineering, so that you have to tilt your neck back to receive him.

Your lidded eyes remain half-open. He is focused and certain, yes, but no longer apathetic. No, now his violet eyes alight with his own passion. A passion you have sparked within him.

He sucks your lower lip deliberately, hard enough to turn it swollen and red. You aren’t shy in meeting his tongue in return, disappearing into his mouth briefly before retreating, an incitement for his to chase after

The kiss would be all-encompassing if not for the growing demands of your own body to draw closer and closer. Maybe it was poor etiquette, but Rindou never directly told you to sit still, so you throw caution to the wind and fling your arms around him – one around his shoulder, and the other clutching at his waist, his ass close enough for a squeeze. The ksis grows in intensity, somehow faster. You struggle to follow Rindou’s lead. Your hands grope up and down his back, and you can feel the muscles that hide beneath this shirt, flexing and pulsing for you.

On pure instinct, you guide him closer, until you can feel the hot bar of his erection grinding into your stomach. The size and shape are unclear through the fabric, but you can feel that he is hard. Very hard. You try to cant your hips up to confirm.

Before you can slot him between your thighs, Rindou hoists you into the air. Hands grip your ass and your legs flail for a moment before he walks you to the sink. There are dual sinks set within a solid countertop. Plenty of space to sit between the vitreous china bowls to serve as a seat. Rindou places you there and presses firmly against your breastbone, until your back caves into the inlaid mirror behind you.

You lie slumped with your head and neck straight even as the rest of your body is prone. It’s mildly uncomfortable, puts you at a disadvantage. Rindou may not be the tallest man, but from this position, he casts a tall shadow. Instinctively, your legs part, so that Rindou can slot himself closer to where you most crave him. The stretch hums sweetly through your veins and you further tilt your hips up.

Something parts inside you, peels open ripe and perspiring.

You wiggle on your elbows, searching for leverage to prop yourself up. Before you rise, Rindou stops you with a steady hand on your throat. No pressure yet, but a promise.

“Stay still,” Rindou warns.

Submission comes naturally what with Rindou glaring down at you imperiously. Your “place” has never been more obvious: quiet, obedient, spread open and accepting of whatever is to come.

A palm skims the exposed skin of your inner thigh, where you skirt rides up. Where Rindou’s palm touches, his teasing fingers follow, almost ticklish in how gently they graze your delicate skin. The back of your knee proves especially sensitive and you squirm helplessly at the caress.

“I want you to always wear skirts for me,” Rindou says lowly, eyes trained on the dark shadow at the edge of your skirt. “Do you know why?”

“I think I have some idea,” you giggle.

“You are going to stay still, while li lick and suck this little pussy. Do you understand?”

“Oh, yes, sir!”

Rindou flips your skirt up, so that it splays across your stomach. Blue lace panties greet him. One of your better pairs but they barely get their moment in the light before Rindou presses his nose directly between your legs and inhales deeply. He closes his eyes like he is savoring it, and when they open again and lock with yours, you can’t breathe.

“You can make as much noise as you like, but you may want to stay quiet. After all, there are people outside,” Rindou murmurs, his lips graze your panties as they move. He is so close.

You nod over and over again like a bobble head, unable to do anything but receive whatever Rindou offers. Satisfied, Rindou curls a finger beneath the seat of your panties and pulls them aside. He stares at your pussy, plump and wide awake from just a few minutes of heated kisses.

Rindou slides a finger through your lips until he reaches your entrance, circling the hole a few times until wetness leaks out onto the digit. Then, he glides the finger up, bringing that coating with him. Just a few circuits like this, never quiet reaching your clit, and your center melts into pure liquid. Who could resist a taste?

His red tongue darts along the edge of your cunt, drawing a drop of you into his mouth. It is a tease as it skims through your folds, flat and wide to grace every part of you except where you most want him. Meanwhile, his finger returns to your entrance. This time it nudges and pushes until your flesh parts, and he can slip inside your body. Languidly, he begins to pump.

Remembering where you are and what Rindou warned, you don’t moan or cry out as he fingers you slowly. Your breath escapes you in labored pants; but, otherwise, the only sound in the room is from your squelching pussy and – best of all – Rindou’s occasional grunt of satisfaction.

You are captivated by Rindou’s eyes as he works you over, sometimes trained directly on his finger opening you up, and sometimes trained directly on your scrunched face. Everything he does is deliberate. Even the way his other hand skims along the crease of your hip and thigh is a calculated choice to drive you wild.

There is no need to think or speak or to participate. All that is demanded of you is that you don’t move. Conceding to that simple command escalates your pleasure enormously. There are no questions, just Rindou and his fat tongue.

As Rindou’s teasing works you up, your clitoral hood starts to part, clit growing fatter and needier with every passing second of neglect. When it finally peaks out into the open, Rindou sees it and smiles.

“There she is,” he murmurs softly, and then less kindly, “Does the little slut like getting her pussy teased?”

Before you can respond, a second finger drives inside your hole, and you keen.

“Yes sir, I love it!”

“Hmmm, I wonder how much teasing you can really handle.”

These half-ominous and half-promising words are forgotten once he drops between your thighs and plants a wet, lingering kiss on your clit. Your clit, so long untouched, pulses at the barest pressure.

 Rindou doesn’t leave you there either. His tongue returns, this time circling your clit, soaking you in saliva for an easy glide before flicking back down your pussy lips. He does this again and again, never stopping the thrust of his fingers inside you either.

Trying to stay completely quiet is pointless, and you permit yourself a few breathy cries, nothing too loud. Nothing a stranger will hear unless they stand directly outside the door.

Dual heat burns inside you. Your slowly approaching orgasm comes from two directions at once. Your clit is only swelling hotter and hotter as Rindou flicks it with his nimble tongue, the process so wet and dirty you want to cry. But meanwhile, his fingers are even more distracting as they press deep to parts of your cunt you can’t reach without help, pace steady and unchanging. If it was your finger inside, you would have lost the rhythm several times over by now, but Rindou doesn’t struggle to pump in and out of you, like your pussy sucks him back in time to a beat.

“Fuck, please I –” the shout escapes you, and you slam one of your hands over your mouth to prevent further cries.

It is Rindou’s mouth, that red wicked mouth, now closed around your clit and sucking so gently but so determinedly. And those fingers crooking, touching something spongy and sensitive inside you. Everything is too wet and too warm and too much.

All you see is violet: violet hair, violet eyes, violet stars behind closed eyelids as you approach your climax.

You want to cling to his hair, pull him back before you erupt all over his face, but also push him deeper, press his mouth against you forever and–

Everything stops.

Rindou’s finger stills inside your quivering cunt, and his mouth drops your bruised little clit, tongue disappearing back into his mouth. Your thighs clench as if to keep him there, but Rindou doesn’t try to leave. He leans his cheek against your thigh and stares up at you, smirking with a shiny mouth and chin. Your juices glow in the unforgiving light.

And all at once, you want to cry.

You were so close, a brutal apex moments away, one that was sure to shake you to your core. So close, in fact, that you are sure with just a few quick rubs of your thumb against your clit, you would shatter. You could do it yourself. Or Rindou could be so kind as to return to the task at hand.

You whimper pitifully in the hope that he’ll do just that.

“Stand up,” Rindou orders.

Knocking knees and a spasming core make following his command harder than it should be, but you manage to shimmy off the sink and onto your own two feet. Your skirt flips back down, crooked but effectively covering your spit-slick sex. Now in Rindou’s shadow, you clench your thighs together to bring back a hint of the building pleasure he robbed from you.

As you squirm and pout, Rindou rights the both of you. He pets down your errant hair, straightens your skirt, and licks the slick from his own lips. Panties soaked and nipples hard beneath the mask of your clothing, you are debauched. Yet with everything in place, no one would be the wiser.

Gripping your chin, Rindou tilts your face up to meet his gaze and says, “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to make me cum,” you say immediately. The burn between your legs doesn’t allow for coyness.

“Good. I’m glad you want that,” Rindou coos. “But, I want you to go home with a wet, aching cunt. I want to see that pretty face all twisted and needy. So what now?”

Your stomach drops. You search his face for a hint of sympathy but find none. Instead, Rindou’s eyes mock you, victorious as he watches your flushed and trembling form suffer through this denial.

“Whatever you say sir,” you grit out weakly, only half suppressing a pout.

It earns you a smile. Rindou’s thumb eases across your lower lip as he adds, “You really are adorable.”

Right now, you would rather be adorable and cum drunk, but alas.

“I want to see you again, and until I do, you’re going to keep your hands off your greedy cunt. No touching, no cumming. If you do as you’re told, I’ll let you cum once on my fingers, once on my tongue, and twice on my cock. Do that, and I’ll play with you for real.”

You positively melt into the hands that grip your waist. It won’t be easy to deny yourself for long, but with Rindou whispering pure sin in your ear, you want to show him how well you can satisfy him in turn.

“I’ll be good, sir. I promise,” you vow.

Rindou’s mouth quirks, and then he kisses you, deep and low. It’s torture in its purest form to feel his body pressed so close and to taste yourself so strongly on his tongue, but you ignore the ache in your pussy and focus on the way he owns your mouth. You made a promise, and you will keep it.

Between leaving the bathroom and depositing you in a taxi – he insisted – Rindou kisses you several more times, ignoring the irritated glares of passerby. It’s like he knows what those drugging kisses do to you and wants to send you away in as much agony as possible.

Right before the car door swings shut and returns you to your normal life, you call out, “Rindou, thanks so much the coffee!”

It’s not quite what you mean, what you want to thank him for. Your first leap into BDSM with an experienced partner could not have been more comfortable, more enjoyable. You’re not sure if he understands how much that is thanks to him.

“I’ll buy you as many cups of coffee as you want,” Rindou declares.

As the taxi pulls away from the curb, you think that maybe, just maybe, Rindou understands after all.

Hanma could be a piece of shit in bed. You often realized it too late.

You were red and sweaty under him, because for some reason he decided to put in some work tonight. You hated it and loved it at the same time.

He was already inside you, his thrusts slow and deep like he was trying to make you insane. You angled your face to the side, trying to hide the effect he had on you, because he was always insufferable about it.

- “Eyes up here, doll.” He purred, his hand finding your chin to turn your face back to him.

You could barely look him in the eye, as you were already teary from the long minutes he spent teasing you, thumb on your clit drawing slow circles. Slow enough to keep you in edge.

You wrapped your legs around his waist, trying to pull him closer.

- “Shuji… please…”

You hated how soft your voice sounded right now, it gave him grounds to be even more obnoxious.

- “Please what? You can’t even use your words anymore?”

He gave a deeper thrust, staying still for a moment, taking in the sight of you, all flushed and breathless.

- “Yeah... That’s what I thought… I already fucked you dumb, huh?”

You didn’t even need to open your eyes to see the smug expression on his face. It was everywhere in his voice. But at this point, your dignity was on the floor with your clothes.

- “More…” You muttered, trying to bury your face in his neck.

He didn’t let you, of course. Shuji never let you hide. He straightened up, trying to find a position that would give him more control than he already had.

- “You’re being greedy now… I’m already givin’ you plenty.”

He started moving again, your pussy making a noise so wet and obscene he stopped for a second. He smirked, his thumb slowing down then leaving your clit, caressing the area around his cock. You flinched again, thighs tightening around his hips.

- “Damn, sweetheart… don’t tell me you’re embarrassed already?”

He thrusted again, hips slower, his cock grazing that spot inside you without ever really committing to it.

- “My girl… getting so shy when she’s full of my cock…”

He moved deeper, letting your back arch into him. Your mouth fell open from the pleasure. He leaned down, lips brushing yours in a kiss so soft it almost looked like an apology. It wasn’t, of course. This was Shuji after all.

- “You poor thing… Can’t help it, right?”

You whimpered, hands gripping his shoulders because you needed something to hold onto. His mouth curved against your skin. He continued moving, letting your back arch into him. The sound you let out was so embarrassing your hands left his shoulders to cover your mouth.

He laughed softly. Not loud, not mocking in a harsh way. Just amused, almost fond. He took both your wrists and pulled your hands away, pinning them gently beside your head.

- “I’m trying to talk to you.”

You looked up at him, face hot, eyes glossy. Shuji’s expression melted into something close to affectionate.

- “So fuckin’ cute when you’re desperate.”

You shook your head weakly, trying to deny it.

- “M’not…”

- “No?”

He pulled out slowly, your thighs tightening again at the loss, fingers curling in the sheets, before pushing back in with a smooth, deep stroke. You moaned, his brow lifting.

- “Not desperate?”

You turned your face away, but he followed, lips brushing your ear.

- “You sound desperate.”

He started going slightly faster, arm hooking under your thigh to bring it higher against his side. Your body was clenching uncontrollably around him, your own hips following him.

- “You feel desperate too. All wet and tight around me…” He groaned, burying his face in your neck. “Gripping me every time I say something mean…”

You tried to protest, but he thrusted harder, keeping your words stuck in your throat. He kissed your temple, his mean pace contrasting with his gesture.

- “That’s okay, I know thinking is hard for you like this.”

The humiliation hit low in your stomach, hot in a way you couldn’t even hide. Your body was betraying you, clenching so hard his breath caught. His composure broke for a moment.

- “Oh, you like that huh…” His voice was lower now, different than the one he used to tease you.

You let out a small, helpless breath as his thumb found your clit again, his motions getting faster with a precise pressure that made your hips jerk.

- “Fuck, Shuji!..”

- “I know…” He said softly. “Fuck, I know, baby.” His tone was so soothing and so horribly sweet. So fake. It just helped make you wetter.

- “You don’t have to explain.” He punctuated his words with a harsh thrust and a deeper press on your clit. “I know you like being all pretty and dumb for me…”

You knew you couldn’t hold back much more, feeling your high approaching rapidly. He kissed your mouth, swallowing the louder moans you couldn’t stop from getting out, tongue sliding against yours slowly.

It was too much. His cock moving inside you, his hand between your thighs, his silky voice saying things you should’ve hated…

- “You get so shy after…” He murmured against your lips. “Like you weren’t begging with your body the whole time.”

You shook your head beneath him.

- “I don’t beg…”

Shuji pulled back, eyes bright with amusement.

- “No?”

His hips slowed again, cruel and mocking.

- “Should we test that?” His voice was teasing enough to make your stomach drop.

He kept his thumb on your clit, but lightened the pressure until it was barely enough. His thrusts turned shallow, teasing, keeping you right on the edge without letting you fall.

Your breath turned uneven as Shuji watched your face with a lazy fascination.

- “Look at you…”

- “Shuji, please…”

His smile became beautiful and awful.

- “There.”

You realized too late, face going red as he kissed your cheek.

- “So easy.”

You nearly sobbed out of embarrassment as he kissed your other cheek.

- “And so polite. Always saying please when you want to be fucked properly.”

At this point, you could feel he was close too. His pace turned less controlled and deeper, like he was trying to bury himself inside you.

Your orgasm started building too fast, coiling tight in your stomach. You tried to close your thighs, but his hips kept them open. His body pinned yours down with the casual confidence of someone who knew exactly how much you liked being overwhelmed.

- “Wanna come? You know what you have to do, baby.” His voice was breathless too, and you hated how even while he was so obviously affected, he still sounded so in control.

- “Please… I want to come…” You whimpered, biting at his neck and shoulder like you couldn’t hold it back anymore.

He smirked, angling his hips just right, his thumb rolling faster.

- “Good fuckin’ girl… sounding so sweet while begging for my cock…”

His thrusts grew faster, more frantic, he was about to come too. But not before you did.

He kissed you hard and you wrapped your arms around his neck, kissing him back like you were angry at him for teasing you so much. You weren’t.

You came with a loud moan, partly swallowed by his mouth, and he followed shortly after with a groan.

You both stayed still for a moment, breathless and sweaty. His face dropped to your neck.

- “Damn… you alive?”

You groaned, lightly hitting his shoulder.

- “Your fault…” You muttered, eyes closing, already feeling the exhaustion catching up to you.

You curled against him, and he let you this time, feeling you completely boneless in his arms. He kissed your cheek, smirking.