Chapter Text
Shinobu isn’t a professional dominatrix but she’s well aware that this isn’t an excuse for lacking basic ethics.
The problem with kindness is that the man in front of her deserves cruelty. And since she promised her sister she wouldn’t try to kill him again, these little trysts are the only chance she has to take her revenge.
Douma makes it so easy. He wants her attention so desperately. He’s like a little boy with a schoolyard crush, a stumbling fawn just figuring out emotions. His heart beats fast when she deigns to touch him, his pearlescent eyes go dark and wide, everything about him screams infatuation.
Just a few months ago he was an untouchable statue, mocking her pain and her sister’s injuries, so cool and collected during the many court order conciliation sessions. Now he’s compromised. Now he does not seem so inhuman and strange.
He’s still a monster, of course. He’s been running a cult (sorry, “New Religious Movement”) since he was old enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. Dozens of people have disappeared under questionable circumstances around him. There have been accidents.
The investigation took more than a year. A year of waiting, of hope, of slowly pulling the pieces together.
The police weren’t able to pin the attack on Kanae on the Eternal Paradise sect beyond a shadow of a doubt but the evidence they had collected was convincing. Shinobu’s personal investigations had turned up even more coincidences and little details. How often did a lawyer working to take down a cult get attacked on the street by a complete stranger who vanished into the morning mist?
No, he was responsible one way or another. Shinobu had been able to see it in his cold eyes in that little mediation room during the months of court ordered reconciliation, recognized culpability in the curve of his fake smile and character of his innocent friendliness. Everytime he took her hand and kissed it the police officers laughed but Shinobu’s skin crawled. She wanted to tear out his eyes and feed them to him. She wanted to strip away his skin and make him scream for all that he had done.
And then the plan had come to her, as simple and clean as a chemical formula. C6760H10447N1743O2010S32 , to be precise.
Graduate school had been a pain and work as a toxicologist was exhausting but she did love it. There was something about the nature of poison that had always appealed to her. Maybe it was fate.
The last mediation meeting had been scheduled for a winter day. Kanae had still been in a wheelchair full time then. Even if she’d been hale, hearty, and in fighting form, Shinobu still would have insisted on accompanying her.
Just before they’d entered the police station she’d taken her gloves out of a special little bag in her purse and slid them on. Maybe that looked strange, but she could always claim she was tired of feeling that man’s lips brush over her bare skin.
Shinobu shakes herself out of a memory. There’s no time to linger on past attempts to seek justice. The world is unfair (she’s 5’0 and under 100 pounds so she knows that better than anyone) and the only way to rectify it is to strike down the monsters with your own hands.
As Douma tries to rest his chin on her knee, she smacks him with an old textbook. “Stay still, please! You don’t deserve to touch me.”
This only serves to make his delight brighter, and now his smile seems to light up the room. He really is unfairly beautiful. Nature has at least seen fit to make it an Arctic beauty, as if warning all onlookers that this is poisonous creature. He shimmers with too many colors to be safe to touch.
“Stay there, on the floor. You still have crimes to do penance for.” It’s not hard for Shinobu to smile with venom and only in the back of her mind does she hear Kanae’s voice telling her to be kind even to those who don’t deserve it. It’s for Kanae’s sake that she’s doing this. If she can’t kill him she can at least make him wish he were dead.
As soon as they were home, Kanae cornered her, trapping her in the front hall of their family home with her bulky wheelchair.
“Little sister, what did you do?”
She considers lying but only for a moment. There are no lies between the two of them.
“I made him pay. With his life, if he’s lucky.” Her voice stayed low. The girls were down the hall in the dining room, waiting for them, and the Butterfly House though large by city standards was still small enough that any shouting match became a matter of public record.
Kanae reached for her purse and pulled it from her unresisting fingers. It didn’t take her long to find the series of plastic bags with the gloves folded inside, the chlorine soaked wipes, and the tiny glass tube.
“What did you use?” There was no question of if in Kanae’s soft voice. She knew what Shinobu could do and had ever since they’d been children rescuing stray kittens with extreme prejudice.
“Botulinum. Don’t touch any of that, it might still be active. I need to soak everything in chlorine and boiling water.”
“Shinobu. Is there an antidote?”
That question threw Shinobu off guard. “Of course. I wasn’t going to take a chance that someone could get hurt. Botulism isn’t pleasant but it can be treated. Hopefully he’ll have gotten a large dose though, and he’ll put off going to the hospital…”
Kanae’s smile sharpened. “Right. He’ll be fine if we tip off the right people and get him treatment then.”
“What? No! Kanae, Kanae!”
Even staring up at her from a wheelchair, Kanae commanded the room. “I am your older sister. This isn’t a suggestion. Now go entertain the girls while I make some calls. Kanao has been tetchy lately and Aoi is still feeling sad.”
As Kanae wheeled off to undo all her sister’s perfectly laid schemes, she sighed and added. “I do appreciate it. Someone needs to do something, just not this. Not at the cost of your safety, Shinobu.”
Feeling like a scolded child, Shinobu fled to the dining room, to talk to her little sisters and bask in the company of people who listened to her rather than expecting things to be the other way around.
Before she left, Kanae made her swear not to try again. And for her sister, who had all but raised her after the car accident, who was good and kind and clever, who had taken in a half feral preteen while she was still in law school because it was “the right thing to do”, Shinobu promised.
Then three weeks later Douma had turned up on her doorstep.
He’s getting antsy. Good. Let him squirm.
She finishes texting Tomioka about the next Saturday’s Pillar Corps meeting (it’s camp counselor training season, which means even more time than usual sunk into the volunteer job that seems to take up half her life). She leisurely flips through her monthly safety re-orientation packet (the lab is so picky about the people who handle deadly toxins being safety conscious). She makes sure to respond to Kanao’s Instagram posts which are as impossible to decipher as ever.
Then she shifts her attention to the man at her feet.
Douma gives her a smile full of gleaming white teeth. “Shinobu hi.”
There’s something just a little too artificial about his grin, too perfect about his straight backed posture.
“You really are a cardboard person,” she says softly, resting her chin on her hand.
They’ve had this conversation before. He’s quick to retread old arguments. “But I’ve never felt like this before. You awakened something new in me. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“That I was able to make a pathetic, empty shell like you feel a fraction of fear and you interpreted it as love?” Kochou stands and cups his face, his velvety cheek fitting into her curled palm. “It counts as evidence of your serious issues, I’m afraid.”
“And yet you keep inviting me in.” Douma turns in towards her touch. “I did offer to let you kill me again. We could go to hell together, if it’s real.”
It had been so frightening to find him on her doorstep weeks after the day of poisoned gloves and arguments. Kanae had quietly, calmly taken care of things and had Shinobu had trusted her reassurances that she wasn’t implicated.
Yet somehow Douma had found her.
“Shinobu Kochou, right? You’re the one who poisoned me. It was a pretty good job!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kochou said, pushing past him to get to her apartment. “But if you ever come here again I’ll sue you for harassing the family of a victim.” She could keep her face blank and still but in her chest her heart was pounding.
“I thought long and hard about who could have done it and then I remembered your face. So cold and thoughtful. You really did have everything planned out. It was an admirable effort.”
Long trained self-control can only stretch so far. Shinobu felt hers start to crack. “Shut up. Just- shut up. After what you did to my sister you have the nerve-”
“I spent two weeks on a ventilator,” Douma told her in an undertone and she was suddenly grateful that the cameras in her apartment complex didn’t pick up sound. “I felt my heart struggling to keep moving. Even after I recovered it seemed like it was beating strangely. Then I realized the problem was that I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
Huh. Shinobu stopped trying to unlock her front door. That was unexpected.
“I’ve never felt this way before about anyone, not my friends, not my parents. You’re so beautiful and dangerous- I really think I’m in love with you. Kill me again, tear out my heart, just promise you’ll stay with me.”
Well, she had promised not to kill him.
Her hand gripped her doorknob tightly. She smiled. “Why don’t you come inside?” It’s rude to leave a guest on the stoop.
“I thought you didn’t believe in hell?” That had been an interesting confession to drag out of him.
“Not really,” Douma shrugs, “But my efforts to live forever seem like they aren’t going anywhere and I’m going to die at some point so why not do it in style, with a beautiful woman?” He speaks of his own death so callously. Even with this new, exploitable weak spot, he’s still a fundamentally strange person.
Part of it might be that he’s 22. Kochou mostly remembers 22 as a blur of tests- she’d been in grad school at the time- but there had been a recklessness there. She’s taken enough medical classes to know that his brain, though probably fucked up whatever way you look at it, isn’t fully grown. Hers barely is.
(Possibly they are both too young for this. Not that that’s ever stopped anyone before.)
“Everyone dies alone,” she reminds him lovingly. “No matter how many slavish followers you have, no matter how in love you are, in the end it’s just you and your sins crossing the river. I’ve seen death. People scream and plead for a hint of mercy. Would you scream, sweet boy?”
She’s not a professional dominatrix. The whips and chains stuff makes her kind of leery; she doesn’t have the strength or inclination to push anyone down or do real physical damage. What she can do is be cruel, in small, satisfying ways.
A twist of the wrist and she digs her short, neat nails into the side of his neck, leaving red marks there. His pulse hammers, his Adam’s apple bobs, and she wants more than anything to tear him apart. How much force would she need to puncture his carotid artery?
“For you, dear, I could at least whimper.” Douma offers happily. “Anything for the happiness of my people. Can I kiss you? I hear that is what people do.”
It’s so hard to faze him. He’s untouchable, unflappable, as human as a statue. The threat of physical harm just doesn’t do much to him.
Emotional harm it is then.
He’s taller than her and bends over almost double to kiss her. She lets him press his clammy lips to her her cheek, her neck, her collarbone. Then, just as he reaches for the top button of her shirt, she yanks so hard at his scalp that warm blood oozes underneath her fingernails.
“Do you usually impress people with this?” she asks as he pulls away, looking mildly distressed but not nearly upset enough. “Pretty words, soft touches, cold comfort. Do they love you for it?”
“Almost always.” He has sharp incisors, she’s noticed, fitting for a demon like him. They gleam when he speaks.
“You’re so sad. You want so badly to make people happy but all you can give them is emptiness.” Shinobu yanks him to his feet and backs them both into the kitchen. The counters are good for sitting on. They give her a height advantage. “I feel sorry for you.” She doesn’t.
“Emptiness is all they want. Empty promises and reassurance.” He boosts her up on the counter and then presses close like a heat seeking snake. “I succeed at making them happy. I succeed at making you happy too! Don’t you love to pretend to hurt me?”
“It’s the pretending that bothers me, darling.” There is a second reason she came to the kitchen. Behind her is a magnetic knife rack.
Shinobu always keeps her knives flawlessly sharpened. She doesn’t have the luxury of hacking away at winter gourds and rutabagas; she takes her culinary advantages where she can find them.
There are other advantages as well. The largest blade is easy to reach for and whip around in an arc of silver. It settles next to Douma’s neck, resting on his collarbone.
“Are you just happy to see me?” There is a blasphemous joy hidden behind his upbeat banter. The idea of danger, of being threatened, excites him in a way that she's not entirely comfortable with.
But she didn’t invite him into her home for comfort. Quite the opposite. She presses the knife a little harder against the soft ribbed fabric of his turtleneck and wraps her legs around his waist so he can’t squirm away- not that he’s trying.
“I think you’re empty,” she muses as she feels threads begin to break under the stinger sharp blade. “You’re so empty that someone trying to murder you was the closest thing to full you’ve come in a long time. You feel so little, matter so little.”
Douma’s breath quickens. “You’re welcome to the sport if you want to try again. I’ll even fight you- in fact I don’t know if I’ll be able to help myself.”
“Please say something of meaning for once.” Shinobu demands, tugging a fistful of cloth away from his chest and beginning to cut at it. “Repent, confess your sins, anything .”
It’s rough work, getting through the solid knit of his shirt, but her knife manages it. Soon he’s standing in tatters and that fills her with a sense of triumph. Let him go home shirtless underneath his red wool coat.
“My sins,” Douma says, when she’s finally done. “Well, there’s your sister for one. What was her name, Kanae?”
Shinobu returns the point of the knife to just under his chin. “Shut up,” she says sweetly “I just realized I don’t want to hear you speak her name.”
“But there is so much more! You demanded a confession- I’m not Catholic, you know that right?- and a confession you will have. Do you want me to tell you about the suicides? The shunnings?”
There’s another flash of silver and a sudden welling of dark red blood as Shinobu instinctively lurches forward to stop him and her knife (she’d almost forgotten she had a knife) breaks skin.
They didn’t have anything as healthy as a safeword. She wouldn’t be opposed to one, since it is basic etiquette, but she also refused to make any suggestions for his comfort.
He had given her a sort of blanket permission, very early on, and she’d been running with that as far as it could take her.
“You know, you can hurt me,” he said with a soft, self-satisfied grin. “If you can manage it.”
Pinned against the wall, staring up at his horrible face, made ugly not by nature but by common malice, something in Shinobu snaps.
She pulls her knee up with the force of 2 years of anger and watches contentedly as he wheezes and bends over double.
It’s not the first time she’s made him bleed, not by a long shot, but the previous instances were cruder, more impassioned. That was nails on skin, teeth on soft tissue, brutal and yet less premeditated.
The wound itself is shallow, only oozing slowly. Based on Shinobu’s pre-med classes it doesn’t seem serious. She isn’t a doctor, however (the best schools wouldn’t take her when she graduated, she was too young) and she isn’t technically qualified to give advice.
“What a wonderful effort!” Douma laughs, once the shock is gone. “You might kill me after all.”
“When I kill you,” Shinobu advises, “You’ll be caught completely off guard.”
To make her point she kisses him, tongue deep and hands yanking on his hair, drawing more blood. An image fills her mind of his strange pale head covered in red, caking dark through silver strands. When she’s done she trails the knife thoughtfully down his sternum one last time and then casts it aside.
It doesn’t do to be too predictable and… it does weigh on her conscience. The idea of stabbing upsets her where poison didn’t.
Douma watches her, utterly enchanted. There is something wonderful about having such power. He’s unabashedly awful and they both know it- sometimes he’ll make offhand comments about people in his life and Shinobu wonders how many of them he’s ruined or driven mad (his little organization is littered with bodies). Not all of the casualties can be laid at his feet, he was a child for many of the Eternal Paradise cult’s early years, but he’s been the main leader since he was fifteen. That’s plenty of time to take advantage of women, like his father did, or force people into desperate poverty in pursuit of eternity, like his mother.
“Do you know how my parents died?”
It wasn’t standard pillow talk. Shinobu hadn’t expected anything different from this pathetic creature.
She combed her fingers through her loose hair and then pins it back with a clip from her bedside table. “Did you kill them with your own bare hands?”
Douma pressed a hand to his chest. “That wounds me. They were my parents. I loved them. No, it was a murder-suicide.”
Now the details started to trickle back. All those hours of research on Kanae’s behalf had turned up some interesting tidbits. “Oh, right. How sad.”
“It really was,” Douma agreed, putting only a little more effort into simulating grief than her. Beautiful, tears, clear and genuine as the glue dew-drops on plastic flowers, trickled from his eyes. “I saw the bodies myself, you know. All that blood. I knew that they were gone forever and I couldn’t even mourn. I had to be strong for my followers. I couldn’t let the carnage upset them.”
“You didn’t have to be.” Kochou points out.
“I was nine.”
“And probably cleverer than most adults. You know I did read up on you. Police files, news clippings, snippets of gossip from the child welfare center. Your father used the little religion he created to prey on women. Your mother sucked entire families dry. Whenever the municipal welfare officers checked on you, you would spin them stories about religious bliss to throw investigations off track. After the murder you told crowds of people about the paradise your parents had been called to. You used their corpses as chum for the hungry sharks.”
“I was a child,” Douma said, “Raised into a bad situation. And I was grieving.” The tears were falling faster now. Shinobu might as well be chopping an onion.
“I was a grieving child too. I didn’t use my dead parents as a tool to take advantage of others. I didn’t turn away all assistance so that I could live unmonitored under the guardianship of crooks and con artists.”
Gently, he patted her hand. “No, you didn’t. You learned to poison people as a healthy, well-rounded adult.”
That stung a little. It always hurt when he compared himself to her. She turned away, pressing her face into the pillow. “My sin is that of passion. My anger is born of love. All your transgressions are the result of an empty heart. Do you ever remember them alone? Do you ever grieve privately, without making it a show?”
She caould hear the confusion in his voice. “I have to do that?”
There was only so much a woman could take, even in the pursuit of vengeance. “Kindly take your things and leave. If you’re still here in two minutes I cannot be held responsible for the consequences.”
He left.
Now he’s besotted. It’s a fascination borne of a psychopath’s need for stimulation, sure. The dysfunction of the affection doesn’t change its depth or reality.
A kinder person, like Kanae, wouldn’t entertain him. A kinder person, like Kanae, would know that there are some people who can’t be saved or, more importantly, destroyed without destroying yourself.
Shinobu unwraps her legs from around Douma’s waist and folds them up next to her on the counter. When he surges closer, always hungry for heat and a challenge, she shifts position again and gets her knees between their bodies, feet pressed against his chest. Before he can react she kicks out, using all her not insignificant lower body strength to send him stumbling back but not out of reach of another two rabbit kicks.
That puts him on his back on the floor. He lays for a moment, stunned, and then says, “You know, it’s good manners to sweep before a guest comes over.”
“I hate to remind you, but it’s bad manners to comment on your host’s housekeeping.” Shinobu snipes back, leaping down from the counter. When she reaches his head on the floor (dodging the quick hands that try to grab her ankles), she grabs him by his hair again. She’s been rather fixated tonight. Maybe it’s the fact that she knows that his pretty coloring is what made him who he is, is what convinced simple weak minds that a little boy was their key to salvation. It’s just a pigment mutation, he’d confessed in that eager way of his, so ready to try to convince you that he had feelings too. Still, his iridescent eyes and wild, straw like hair have her fuming.
Dragging someone up by their hair isn’t especially feasible, especially when they’re twice your size, but Douma helpfully grabs her wrist and pulls himself up.
“Where would you like to go, Miss Kochou?”
Her lips thin, and then she forces a smile. “I thought the bedroom. We are here for a reason, aren’t we?”
“Oh, I would never presume...” he demurs, acting the gentleman quite well for the born cad he is.
“I insist!” She pulls sharply at his head, leading him scalp first to her little room.
It’s a soft and purple space, private and secure, and she tries not to give Douma a chance to look around too much. If he did he’d see the pictures of her little sisters on the walls, the terrarium where she cares for caterpillars in the spring, chemistry textbooks, notices from her apartment complex about changes in security measures, and the stack of treasured letters from kids in the Pillar Corps. All markers of the Shinobu Kochou who is gentle and kind, who works patiently to make the world a better place and certainly doesn’t tear herself to pieces for a revenge even her older sister has given up on.
Instead she shoves him onto the bed, uses a butterfly embroidered throw pillow to cover his face because she is tired of looking at him , and works on getting his clothes off.
His slacks are easy enough to shimmy down and his shirt is already in tatters. She lingers for a moment over the shoes but decides that the roughness of socks isn’t worth the impersonal touch it lends the whole affair. He’s better bare, vulnerable. She doesn’t like him at all but she hates him least when he’s helpless.
Then he’s naked underneath her. Shinobu takes a moment to survey his smooth pale skin and lets the disgust fill her up. Loathsomeness comes in many forms and there’s nothing attractive to her about his body however objectively lovely it may be.
It’s not even that she doesn’t like men. Her short dating history is much more slanted towards women, sure, but she dated a few guys in college and found them pleasing. What she’s mostly preferred in lovers is softness. A pretty face, elegant hands, just enough muscle to be interesting, a soothing voice- looking back Mitsuri is the summation of all of Shinobu’s crushes which might be why their relationship lasted so long (until the stresses of Shinobu’s thesis year and Mitsuri’s job knocked them solidly back down to friendship).
Douma technically most of her requirements. It’s a shame he’s so unabashedly awful.
“Oh, I love women.”
She always viewed everything he said with suspicion but now that she had a better idea of his vices the suspicion had transformed into tired insight.
“Really?”
“Yes, they’re so pretty and naive. Men are just as stupid but they’re much uglier. Women at least act nice and-”
Maybe they’re both coming to an understanding of each other because Douma pauses.
“What I mean,” he amends slowly, like a teenager faced with calculus for the first time, “Is that I respect them... a lot. They have a lot of power because they can have babies.”
Shinobu sighed.
“You don’t have to lie with me, you know. Stop pretending you’re something you not.”
She wraps her hands around his dick and tugs at it a few times, pulling hard enough to make him hiss with pain. Despite her rough ministrations- or perhaps because of them- he still gets hard.
It’s late and she’s at home so her own clothing is easy enough to shuck off; just pajama bottoms and cotton briefs. Her shirt stays on, he doesn’t deserve to touch her tonight. In truth he doesn’t deserve to touch her any night, but she sometimes makes compromises in pursuit of her goal.
Douma peeks out from under the pillow. “Ah, you look pretty!” he ventures. That makes Shinobu stand and rifle through her dresser. She’s not a professional dominatrix so she has to make do with what she finds on hand. Encounters with Douma always stretch her innovation.
Finally she finds a solid, skinny leather belt and perches on his stomach to wrap it around his jaw.
“If I say no?” he asks, not looking especially like some about to object.
“Then you leave. My patience with you is wearing thin, dear.”
He shrugs and accepts the makeshift gag. It’s always interesting to see what she can get him to go along with. For such a world class creep, he seems to prefer it when she treats him cruelly.
Once that’s done, she briefly returns her attention to his cock. It’s bigger than she likes, though not improportional to him or impossible to manage. If it were anyone else there would be laughter and blow jobs. He could eat her out and kiss her with her taste still on his lips and that would be fine. Here, with Douma, she has to take a different tack.
Trying to ignore his eyes on her, she begins to touch herself. It’s hard to force back the discomfort and find a place where this seems natural, sensible. Even with vengeance on her mind, some allowances have to be made for sanity.
Shinobu doesn’t do this for him, never for him. That would be a step too far. Instead she focuses on her pleasure, on the soft warmth of her own body and the simple joy of having someone else near her, whoever they are. Every jab and twist of the knife is for her sake, for the hunger deep inside her. Every second of shared bliss is actually hers alone. He’s not a partner, just a body in her bed.
The thing was, she had a strap on. It was simple and easy to use and mostly lived in a locked drawer in her bedroom. She hadn’t actually taken it out since… probably since she’d dated Nakime, and that relationship hadn’t lasted long. In spite of her professional skills and dedication, the woman was too cold for Shinobu’s tastes. Besides, her interior design company worked with Kibutsuji and Shinobu had a distaste for that name.
She debated for a while whether to use it on Douma. Ultimately, she decided against it. It would bring him far more joy than it would bring her, and besides, she was trying to reign in her vindictiveness.
There’s a sort of zen to the certainty that this liaison will not play into his hands. Like her absolute faith that she will have justice, it comforts her.
When the hot thrum of arousal finally begins to build in her core, she moves down his body and presses the shaft of his still hard cock against her delicate wings of skin. Douma blushes a deep pink, colour spreading up his cheeks and down his chest, as she moves against him. His teeth bite into her belt, probably ruining it.
She ignores that, grinding against him, setting her own pace. It’s good to have a body to press into. However cold his heart is, his skin is still warm enough. The little thrusts of his hips and subtle arches of his back bring an element of chaos to the proceedings. When he grabs her hips, she pushes his hands away but keeps squeezing their bodies together. Her goal is incredibly close.
Ideally, she’d be thinking of other people, of exes and workplaces crushes, of celebrities, of anyone really. Shinobu tries to conjure up images of the handful of people she’s slept with in the past, but it doesn’t work. None of them are comparable to this monster. It would slander the good names of her actual exes to bring thoughts of them into this wet nightmare.
That means she’s left looking at Douma’s face, blushing and lovely and reprehensible. The little wound she gave him has scabbed over, leaving a dark smear at his throat. The top of his head is similarly marred with blood.
Instinctively, she reaches for his throat, then settles on digging her fingers into his shoulders until his face creases up with a hint of pain.
A sudden tensing in his pelvis warns her that she needs to move. Quickly, Shinobu rises on her knees, then reaches down and pinches the tip of Douma’s cock just as the pressure of a building orgasm begins to pull at his scrotum. He bucks against her hand and whines against the gag, but she holds firm and after a moment the danger is over. Maybe she should have found a condom. Pill or not, it’s always awful to have to clean up a mess.
Once the crisis is past she lets herself sit again, and resumes the slow work of wringing pleasure from a stone. Little, hip twisting circles, a hand moved up to touch her breast under her shirt, the fingers of her other hand digging into Douma’s deltoid as his hands twist futilely in her sheets.
Her climax is so close, so close, and she gives in and slides down just a little on his dick, pressing forward so hot hard flesh can reach the places surface stimulation could not. Biting back a moan, she feels her muscles tense and then release, heat and the rush of endorphins spreading through her body.
There, done.
She rolls off of him. Narrow as her bed is, there’s not much space to flee too, so she does the only sensible thing; braces herself against the wall and kicks him out of bed. He avoids banging his head on her dresser (a shame, that) and sits up to rest his chin on the very edge of her bedspread.
To Shinobu’s surprise, he’s not looking at her. His gaze is fixed on the small window and the tiny square of night sky it shows.
“You know, it’s a lovely night. Did you see the moon?” He got the gag off. No surprise, his hands have been free the whole time.
Reluctantly, she looks. The thin crescent hanging low in the sky is pretty- deep gold and softly shining. Besides, abject hatred is no excuse to be rude. If their dynamic is built on anything, it’s barely maintained social nicety over a deep pit of dysfunction.
“It’s beautiful,” she agrees.
"Not as beautiful as you," he says ardently, as if he has a shred of ardent in him.
Shinobu's heart races and her mouth fills with venom.
I'm going to tear you to shreds, she thinks, and smiles.