CHAPTER 16 #2
I reached down between us and freed his cock from what was left of the yukata. He was already hard, thick and heavy in my hand, and the low, broken sound he made when I closed my fingers around him was the best thing I'd heard all day.
His hands found my hips, patient and warm. I could feel the restraint in his fingers, the way he was letting this be mine to set the pace of, and something in me loved him for it, fierce and sudden, before I'd even let myself use that word in my own head.
“Naomi.” His voice had gone low, rough. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I said. “All of you. Slow. And then not.”
I sank down onto him slowly, felt my pussy stretch around him, slow and full, and it stole the breath clean out of both of us.
He watched my face, didn't look away for even a second, like he meant to memorize whatever crossed it, and I braced my hands on his chest, over the koi and the black lines of the dragon climbing toward his collarbone, and started to move.
Slow at first, the way I'd said. Learning the angle of him, the exact tilt of my hips that made his fingers dig into me and his jaw go tight.
His thumb found my hip bone and pressed there, grounding, and I rode him like that, unhurried, watching the careful, contained face he wore into every boardroom in Tokyo come undone by degrees, because of me.
Every roll of my hips pulled a new sound out of him, low and involuntary, and I understood for the first time what it meant to hold that much power over a man who held half of Tokyo in his hands and didn't seem to want it back.
“Migoto da,” he said, low and wrecked. Exquisite. His hand slid up my ribs to cover my breast, thumb finding my nipple, and I gasped and lost the rhythm for a second before I found it again, faster now, both of us chasing something we'd already half caught.
“You are mine,” he said, in English this time, each word deliberate even with his breath gone ragged under me. “And I am yours. Say it back to me.”
“You're mine.” My voice broke on it. “You're mine, Kenji, and I'm yours, I'm—”
I came apart before I finished the sentence, arching back, one hand flat over his heart like I could hold the beat of it still, his name breaking out of me on a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.
He followed almost at once, both hands hard on my hips, my name in his throat like something he'd been keeping there a long time and had finally let go.
I folded over his chest, my ear above his racing heart. His arms closed around me, ink reaching both wrists, the right forearm marked by a thin healing line where Riko had removed the stitches the day before. He held me as though there were nowhere else on earth he needed to be.
He kissed the top of my head. Once. Then he said, so quiet I almost missed it, in Japanese: “Anata wa boku no subete.” You are everything to me.
I pressed closer and let him hold me until my heartbeat found his rhythm instead of the other way around.
After a while he said, against my hair, “Are you all right?”
“I'm perfect,” I said, and meant it in a way I hadn't expected to mean anything that day. “Are you?”
“I am, for the first time since last night, entirely all right.” He said it like a man reporting a fact, bare of comfort, and somehow that made it land harder.
He ran the bath himself after, refusing to let me help, moving through his own dim rooms with patient care while I lay wrapped in his yukata and watched him.
When he came back he lifted me like I weighed nothing and carried me through the wash room to the hinoki tub, steam already curling gold off the water, yuzu peel scattered across the surface like small suns.
I settled back against his chest, his knees bracketing my hips, the water warm enough to loosen every muscle I'd been holding tight since breakfast. His arms circled my waist. One hand spread flat and warm over the soft skin below my navel, not asking for anything, just resting there like a question he wasn't ready to say out loud yet.
I tipped my head back against his shoulder and looked up at the dark window, at the small scatter of stars Tokyo let through when the neon dimmed enough to let them.
Somewhere below us the city kept humming along, indifferent, the way it had every night since I'd arrived, except tonight I didn't feel like something the city had swallowed.
I felt like something it was, very quietly, keeping safe.
I turned within his arms until I could see him. I found his left hand at my hip, lifted it, and kissed his ring finger where a band might someday sit.
“One day,” I said.
Something moved behind his eyes, careful and enormous at once. He caught my other hand, the one with my mother's ring on it, and brought it to his mouth, and kissed the jade itself, once, reverent.
“One day soon,” he said.
We didn't talk after that. We toweled off, slow and unembarrassed, and fell into his bed faintly damp, tangled together under the cool sheet, my leg thrown over his, his hand splayed low on my back like he meant to hold me there even in sleep. I went under fast and warm and didn't dream at all.
I woke to a small blue light pulsing against the dark.
My phone was ringing on the nightstand, the screen lit with the one name I'd never asked anyone to block, because some stubborn part of me had never let myself close that door all the way. My father.
I went still. Beside me, Kenji's breathing had already changed.
He was awake, had probably been awake before the first ring, the way he seemed to wake before danger did.
He didn't reach for the phone. He didn't reach for me either.
He just watched me in the dark, waiting to see what I'd do with it, giving me the same silent room he'd given every other choice that had ever mattered between us.
I found my mother's ring with my thumb and twisted it once, the old habit, the steadying one. The phone kept ringing.
I let it ring. Four times. Five.
Then I picked up.
For a second neither of us said anything, an ocean of dead air between Tokyo and wherever he was calling from, and I could hear him breathing like a man rehearsing an opening line.
“Naomi.” My father's voice, clipped and cold as a Boston winter, like no ocean and no weeks had passed at all. “You are going to listen to me very carefully. There is a way out of this for you. A real one. Not whatever that man has told you—”
“I know exactly where I am,” I said. The words came out level, no shake in them at all, though my pulse was slamming hard enough to feel in my throat. “And I know exactly who I'm with. And I don't want a way out.”
Silence answered me down the line. It was the first silence my father had ever given me instead of taking one.
I hung up before he could fill it, my hands finally calm, and set the phone face-down on the nightstand. Kenji's hand found mine in the dark, and I let it, and I didn't reach for the phone again. I was done being anyone's collateral.
“He will call again,” Kenji said, voice low, like he'd already lived through this exact hour before. “Men like your father do not let go of a thing they still believe they own.”
I turned toward him in the dark. “You don't sound surprised.”
He didn't answer that. He only drew me in against his chest, his heartbeat slow and sure under my ear, and held on, like whatever was coming, he intended to meet it with his hands already on me.