The Devotion of the Girl in the Mirror
Chapter 5 >> Chapter 6 >> Masterlist
✣ Pairing: Rindou x AFAB fem!Reader w/ a chapter cameo of reader/yuzuha
✣ Warning: 18+ explicit content, minors DNI
✣ Series: part of the In the Belly of the Beast fic universe
✣ Chapter CW: ptv sex, oral (blowjobs & eating out), choking, degradation and praise, cock worship, edging and orgasm denial/control
✣ Story CWs: BDSM dob/sub relationship; sex (oral, ptv, pta, etc.); genre typical drug use, alcohol, smoking
✣ Synopsis: A story of two lonely people find love for better or worse. Or, dom!Rindou is sweet on his girl. Or, on paper, you and Rindou have nothing in common. But sometimes chemistry defies logic, and with every conversation, you find yourself more bewitched until all you see, smell, or hear is Rindou.
✣ Word Count: ~10.8k
A great clenching of his bowels catapults Rindou into consciousness. Nausea and the certainty that he is going to puke chases soon after. Rindou stumbles to his feet in the direction of the bathroom only to discover the door is not there. The pressure in his head increases, a high vibrancy of pain accompanied by a vertiginous warping of his vision and equilibrium.
He vomits right on the carpet.
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!
Easing in her
slender forearm
for a pillow
- Matsuo Bashō
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