Free

Seijiro and I barely make it through the door.

His hat hits the floor first. Then his katana, forgotten against the wall. My robe is off one shoulder and his shirt is gone and my hands are on his stomach, his ribs, the muscle that tenses under my palms when I drag my nails across it. He kicks the cabin door shut behind us because his hands are on me, pulling, and we fall into the room in a tangle of limbs and unfinished clothing.

The captain's cabin. A bunk. A chart table. A hanging lamp that swings with the ship's lift, throwing shadows across the walls.

Free. The word is so big it fills my chest. I want to feel every inch of it in my body, in his hands pulling my robe the rest of the way off.

I stand naked under his eyes and let him look.

"Come here," I say.

He comes. His mouth is on mine and he tastes like smoke and the iron tang of adrenaline and underneath it, himself, that specific taste I've mapped across weeks of rented rooms and narrow corridors. He grips my hips, lifting, and my back hits the bunk and the frame groans and his weight settles over me and the lamp swings and the shadows shift and I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him down.

His mouth moves down my neck. My collarbone. The hollow between my breasts, his breath hot against my skin, and I'm arching up into him. His lips close around my nipple and I grab the back of his head and hold him there and the sound I make is loud, too loud for a cabin with thin walls. The crew can hear me. Every Oni and human on this ship can hear me and that's fine because I've spent ten years being silent in a paper cage and silence is done.

"Louder," he says against my skin. A dare. His teeth graze my nipple and I gasp and his hand slides down my stomach, over my hip, between my thighs.

I'm so wet his fingers slip and he groans, that low sound, the one I replay in the sand garden on mornings when Itsumi isn't watching. His fingers push into me and my hips lift off the bunk and I grab the edge of the mattress.

"Don't be gentle," I tell him. The words come out hoarse. "I don't want gentle."

He obeys. His fingers curl inside me, deep, pressing the spot that makes my legs shake, and his thumb finds my clit and works it in tight circles and I'm gripping the mattress with both hands and the bunk is creaking and I can hear the crew above us, feet on deck, laughter, the celebration of a raid won, and beneath it all the hum of the shōki tanks carrying us away from Waraku and everything that was Waraku.

I come on his hand. Hard, sudden, my spine locking and my thighs clamping around his wrist and the noise fills the cabin, bounces off timber walls. He keeps going, drawing it out until I'm shaking and pulling at his wrist and he looks up at me with that insufferable grin.

"More," I say, and the word comes back to me from the cabin walls.

He pulls his hand free and licks his fingers. Looking at me while he does it. His eyes don't leave mine and the sight of him tasting me sends a pulse through my stomach. My thighs close on empty air.

His trousers come off. He's hard, flushed, and I reach for him because I want to feel it in my hand first, the weight, the heat. He sucks a breath through his teeth when I grip him. I tighten my hand and get the sound again. I can do this to the captain of Tielong's Daughter by closing my fingers.

"Sae." The short name. The one nobody else uses. Low, wrecked. The composure that never breaks is breaking.

I guide him to me. The first push is slow, the pressure splitting me open, and I feel every inch of him sliding in. My breath locks. My fingers dig into his shoulders and he stops, buried, holding still, and the stretch of it and the fullness make my body clench around him before I mean to.

He pulls back. The drag of him leaving makes my hips chase. He pushes in again. Slow. Deep. The slick pressure of him filling me, then the loss when he withdraws, then the fill again, and my breath catches every time, the same catch, the same sound, and he's watching my face while he does it.

In. The stretch. My father's compound is behind me.

Out. The ache of wanting him back.

In. Deeper. My mother's rooms are gone.

Out. I say his name and my hips follow him.

In. I grab the wooden frame above my head because I need something to hold onto. Itsumi's careful handwriting will never reach my father's desk again.

Out. His eyes stay on my face. Waiting.

In. I let the sound go, loud enough for the deck above us.

He keeps that pace, steady, relentless, each stroke wetter than the last. The friction builds something low in my stomach that tightens every time he pushes home, and my mind goes white and fills and goes white again. When I can think, I look at Seijiro. I pull him deeper and watch what it does to his face. I did that. I can hear myself, the wet sounds between us, the creak of the bunk, my own breathing gone ragged and open. I don't recognize the woman making these sounds and I don't want to. She's new.

He speeds up. The bunk starts slamming against the cabin wall, percussive, and I match him, my hips snapping up to meet every thrust. The cabin is warm and close and it smells like sweat and sex.

I pull his mouth to mine. Bite his lip. He groans into my mouth and his hips stutter and he grabs the wooden frame above my head for leverage and drives into me harder and my thighs clamp around him and I take it. My nails score lines down his back. His breath comes harsh against my neck.

I come again. Longer this time, building from somewhere deep in my pelvis, and then it cracks through me all at once, white and total. I pull him so deep he can't move and he's saying my name, broken, repeated, and then he comes too, his whole body going rigid over me, his face pressed into my neck, and I can feel him pulse inside me, the heat, the release.

He collapses beside me, one arm under my neck, his chest heaving. The bunk is too small for two bodies side by side but we're tangled close enough that it doesn't matter. The lamp settles. The shadows stop swinging.

Waraku has vanished beyond the porthole. Only the ship reaches me now, the creak and hum of it climbing into the blue.

I lie on my back in the captain's bunk and stare at the ceiling. My body is humming. No footsteps wait outside the door. No careful hand is reaching for a pen.

I laugh. It comes out of me uncontrolled, sharp, bright.

Seijiro lifts his head. Looks at me. Doesn't ask why.

He doesn't need to.

His hand tightens on my stomach. He pulls me closer. Through the porthole, the sky opens ahead of us: islands at different altitudes, cloud banks drifting, the void below dark and vast. Somewhere in the distance, the High Keiten current is running northeast, and Tielong's Daughter is climbing toward it, and I've never had a horizon before.

I put my hand over his.

"Again," I say.

He grins.