Archive of Our Own

When Satomi turns twenty, Kyouji orders her a bottle of sake at dinner. The hakutsuru sayuri nigori type with the pink cap, frosted glass, flowers on the label. It's so cute and girly Satomi wrongly assumes it will be sweet, so she takes a generous gulp and nearly chokes at the bitterness, the boozy burn. Kyouji laughs, then stifles it on account of Satomi's glare.

Satomi wipes her mouth, chugs some water, and shoves the sake back across the table. "That's disgusting," she announces. "How do you drink that?!"

"I mean, I don't," Kyouji says, trying in vain to school her grin behind her hand. "Not really much of a sake girl, to be honest. Never was, it reminds me of my Aunt Kushizu, who was always a riot at parties. She lit my mom's dish towels on fire, once. She loved to hit that sake bottle. Always smelled like it, yeesh."

It's true Sake is not Kyouji's drink of choice— in the very few and far between times she indulged in a drink around Satomi, it was a frosty mug of foam-topped golden beer, usually Sapporo. It never looked appetizing to Satomi, but she sometimes stole little sips when Kyouji was in the bathroom, just so she could imagine what it might taste like if she were ever lucky enough to kiss Kyouji on the mouth. "Why didn't you order me a beer, then?" she asks, wrinkling her nose and drinking more water to try and chase the ghost of the sake away. "Do you want me to end up like your Aunt Kushizu?"

Kyouji snorts, sitting back, chin tilted up in that effortless way that always makes her look like a man who is too pretty to be a man: sharp-jawed, short-haired, knees splayed under the table to take up space. It used to piss Satomi off so much that she sat like that, looked like that, but now she realizes it was only because she was so fucking attracted to her, the rage was really just misdirected frustration. At fourteen, she was like one of those dogs who bites its leash because it wants to run so bad. But now, she's like one of those dogs you starve. She'll still bite, but only because she's so fucking hungry. "If you don't like sake, I don't think you'll like beer, either. Hell, it took me years to stomach it. Have you ever been to the horse races? Seen a horse pee?"

Satomi shakes her head, face a mask of calculated indifference.

"Well, bottle that stuff up and stick it in the fridge and you have Sapporo. Drinking it is honestly, probably some sort of masochism. I should get that checked out."

Satomi says nothing, because she doesn't trust herself to even joke about masochism or things one should get checked out in Kyouji's presence. She's one to talk. Satomi knew continuing to meet Kyouji like this was an elaborate form of self destruction, but she has no idea how to quit. Over the years she's tried about a hundred times. Even told Kyouji they shouldn't see each other anymore, that she needed space, that she would never be able to get over her and date girls her own age or be any sort of normal as long as they still got dinner together once a month and the pathetic, idle flame of hope in her chest was stoked to glowing embers.

But she never held to the promise, and Kyouji never took matters into her own hands and just…left. It was really confusing, actually—Kyouji knew how Satomi felt, but refused to address how how she might feel, though she frequently made dark, passive comments about how it would be better for Satomi if they never talked again, shortly before texting her a bunch of blurry cat pictures. Like what the fuck. Satomi couldn't tell if Kyouji wanted her back but felt bad about the circumstances under which they met and had somehow grown a sense of nobility in the three years during which she disappeared, or if it was something worse. Like: she had wanted Satomi like that back when she was fourteen and naive, but now that she was newly twenty and less naive, Kyouji just wasn't into it anymore.

Kyouji wasn't a bad person. Or maybe she was, but she wasn't like. Evil. Satomi may not have been the most reliable source on this but she was fairly certain if Kyouji was an actually dangerous predator woman (did those even exist?) she would be lurking outside schools watching twelve year olds hang up side down from the monkey bars or exposing her breasts on the train or something, not singing in a karaoke bar with a teenager and refusing to smoke lest she mess up her clothes. Nothing ever even happened back then. There's much, much worse she could have done, if she were truly bad. In fact, Satomi finds herself wishing something had. That a concrete line had been crossed, than Kyouji had lost control, touched her, kissed her, anything. Some concrete evidence of desire instead of the mixed signals and bizarre, hard to categorize flirtation.

But still—deep in the cobwebby recesses of Satomi's mind, she wonders. After all, that summer in Osaka their interactions had been significantly more…physical than they were now. Kyouji always sat so close to her, threw an arm around her back, ruffled her hair, squeezed her cheeks,took off her clothes to show off her tattoos, blew kisses at her, winked. She'd told Satomi all sorts of retrospectively inappropriate stories too, about her sex life and the older women who taught her everything about lesbian sex, like older women who teach you everything about lesbian sex were a normal life-fixture. It had scared Satomi as much as it thrilled her, back then.

But upon reentering into her life, Kyouji's penchant for casual intimacy and utter disregard for personal space had been replaced with an unreadable coolness. She also had a few more gray hairs near her temples and lines by her eyes, a wariness that aged her significantly, pushed her somewhere remote, untouchable. Satomi never asked what she had been doing those three years and Kyouji never volunteered the information, but it was clear whatever transpired had sobered her up somehow. There was no reason for Satomi to think it was about her—she grudgingly knew Kyouji had a life outside of their interactions—but still. Sometimes this pitiful, needy part of her born from that fourteen year old fear and thrill cocktail simply wonders: did I get too old for you to like?

"Satomi-channn," Kyouji tuts, snapping her out of her reverie. "You look so thoughtful. Don't tell me you're one of those miserable, morose drunks."

"I'm not drunk," she snaps. "I only had one sip."

"Yeah, about that," Kyouji says, pushing the pink bottle across the table towards Satomi and grinning. "Please don't make me finish this. You gotta try a little harder. Maybe it will grow on you?"

Satomi reaches out, spins the bottle in place, the matte glass cool and rough against her fingers. "Are you trying to get me drunk, Kyouji-san?" she says.

"Ha ha ha! I do think you should loosen up every once and awhile. Maybe you'd be brave enough to flirt with one of the girls from your school and ask her out on a date,. If you still think you're into girls, that is."

Satomi colors, her attempt to put the ball in Kyouji's court abruptly and expertly returned, like always. She also hates when Kyouji questions her sexuality—like she thinks Satomi is just copying her, too young to do anything but parrot and imitate a woman she admires. (Not that she fucking admires Kyouji—if only it were that simple). When she's not wondering if she got too old, she's lamenting that she's too young, that Kyouji sees her as a child and doesn't take her seriously. The only benefit of this line of thinking is that it contradicts her most deeply buried concern. If Kyouji thinks she's too young, she can (and will) remedy that by inevitably getting older. But if she's aged out of Kyouji's interests—then well. Then there's nothing she can do.

Except, maybe there is.

It comes to her in the hazy hours during which darkness seeps into the cold glare of dawn. She couldn't sleep after dinner with Kyouji. This often happens to her, their time together inflating an impossible, aching vacancy between her lungs that makes her want to scream, hit Kyouji, throw herself humiliatingly prostrate at her feet and beg she look at her, touch her, anything. But she knows she can't lash out and rupture the balloon because she'd look so stupid, so immature, and it would only serve to solidify Kyouji's impression of her as a child.

Unless it's all hopeless because I'm not young enough, instead of too young, she things glumly, rolling over onto her side, stewing in her own sweat where it's trapped inside the oversized tent of her sleep shirt. She's been touching herself on and off for the last two hours, thinking of Kyouji's hands on her, her mouth on her neck, her weight bearing down into the parted crux of her legs, pressing her into the mattress and grinding solid and demanding against her. But she keeps stopping just short of orgasm, denying herself release out of some pitiful desire to prolong the fantasy. It's all she has, anyway.

Her panties wet, the space under her sheets close and thick with the spicy smell of her own perspiration. She moves her moisture puckered fingers off of her clit, smearing slick up into her bush instead, combing it messily. The hair usually lays mostly flat under the press of her underwear, but the humidity has made it curl up tightly against her skin, and it's crimped and rubbed every which way, now. She first started masturbating with her hands the summer she met Kyouji—before that she only humped pillows, but there were so many new, powerful feelings coursing through her body that she got curious enough to properly touch herself for the first time. Feel where she was hard, throbbing, needy with a detatched sort of fascination. Back then there hadn't been much hair—just a few downy strands in a little wisp above the crack between her puffy outer lips.

The revelation comes on like a typhoon, a downpour amid cloying stillness. As Satomi thinks about the difference between her body then and now, an insane idea strikes her: would Kyouji finally want her if she looked like a little girl again?

Satomi sits up, heart pounding. Outside birds are starting to call to each other, mourning doves cooing their lover's songs, and a mocking bird imitating a car alarm. It's a naughty, sordid thought and she knows it. She can't pass as fourteen anymore—her tits are too developed, she's gotten taller, her curves filled out even though she mostly hides them under baggy sweatshirts and jeans. But still—she has her school uniform somewhere, stuffed in the corner of a drawer back in her bedroom in Osaka, and she thinks she could fit into it if she tried. Plus, she could shave. Or, wax, she supposes, since the girls in her class are always gossiping about how it's more painful, but nicer and lasts longer. Makes for a smoother surface.

Smooth. That's what she wants, because deep down, she thinks it's what Kyouji wants. Nothing but peach fuzz. Plump, untouched, poised to be ruined.

As the crisp gray morning light filters in through her window she hazily considers it. Getting all smooth for Kyouji, replicating a version of herself that no longer exists. Silly, pathetic, stupid, fourteen year old Satomi. In love for the first time, without even knowing that's what the perpetual sickness was. A fool, a wreck. She shoves her pillow down between her legs for old times' sake, stuffs her fist in her mouth and jerkily rocks her pussy back and forth against it, thinking about Kyouji's long fingers, her sharp smile. It had been so much warmer back then, that summer. Conspiratorial and twinkling, like they were both in on some secret.

Satomi comes imagining she's back in the karaoke booth, straddling Kyouji's thigh with her arms thrown round her neck. It's not the thought of her young, inexperienced pussy spread wide over the divots of Kyouji's slacks that sends her over the edge, but the thought of Kyouji looking down at her there to see it. Staring, wanting, unable to resist.

Kyouji's name slurred, broken around Satomi's spit-wet knuckles. She feels a little ashamed when it's all done—lying there damp like some ugly, naked baby bird newly hatched, bits of shell and membrane still clinging to her skin. With teeth marks indented into the flesh of her hand, she finally nods off into fitful sleep. There she dreams about waxing, and humiliation, and Kyouji raising an eyebrow at her, pity clouding her gaze like she's disappointed, somehow, that Satomi is a knock off fourteen, and not the real thing. But the truth is, Satomi will take a pity fuck. When all you have is fantasy, even crumbs are enough.

She should ditch the idea because it'll be wildly embarrassing if she's wrong, but Satomi is nothing if not obsessive by nature. Once she has a bone, she's gonna chew it until her teeth chip, or she chokes.

It doesn't help that she's incidentally going home to Osaka in early May to see her brother. He's swinging by before a big backpacking trip across Europe with his friends, and requested a family dinner before he departed. This happens to coincide with Kyouji's birthday, so Satomi puts feelers out on her whereabouts, just in case they'll be in the same city at the same time, incidentally where her school uniform also is. I'll be in Osaka during your birthday, want to do karaoke? our old booth? She texts with shaking hands, sucking at a chin-length chunk of her hair,

Awww satomi-kun remembered my birthday! and she's nostalgic for my singing! Kyouji replies.

I just thought it could be a good place to meet. if you sing crimson I'll leave, though.

Kyouji sends a pouting cat sticker, then shoots back I can be in Osaka. 7pm? I'll pick you up?

Satomi likes the message, hoping the non committal thumbs up does not belie the spectacular swoop her stomach does as she realizes her plan—if you can call it that—is falling together. Now, all she needs is to find a place to get waxed.

The prospect frankly terrifies her. Not just the inevitable pain, but the thought of letting someone see her down there. She's worried they'll tell her she's disfigured and ugly—that the spa technician lady will take one look at her and laugh at the way her inner lips poke out slightly from the outer, so there's a distinct , puffy flash of clit-hood visible instead of a neat single fold cleft. Then, she'll be mortified forever. But when she arrives shaking and nauseated the morning of Kyouji's birthday for her appointment, there's plenty of other women in the waiting room who are older and saggier, so she tells herself she's probably fine and they've probably seen every sort of body imaginable and there's no reason to be worried.

Sure enough, the stern, school-marmy woman who does the deed is unflappably professional to a fault, only speaking to Satomi to tell her to roll over or move her legs in various configurations, treating the whole operation with such neutral practicality that Satomi forgets bodies are supposed to be symbolic of anything at all. She mostly feels like a corpse being washed and prepared for its passage down the river Styx, rather than an insecure girl grooming her nether regions for the first time in a desperate seduction ploy. She wishes she was a corpse anyway, because the waxing itself sucks. Her nerves are so completely eclipsed by the pain she forgets what she was scared about entirely and instead pours all her energy into surviving. It's a pure, acute, exhilarating sort of agony. It chases everything out of her head for the entire hour and forty five minute session of miserable, systematic powdering and wax slathering and cooling and ripping. Her legs are shaking from adrenaline when it's over, and she's sweat so much the paper barrier on the table is soaked through and torn. But if her reaction was unusual and she's actually a giant baby, the esthetician says nothing. She just gives Satomi brief aftercare instructions, takes her payment, and ushers her out once she's dressed.

Back at home, she peels off her underwear to examine herself in the mirror. It's surreal, seeing herself hairless like this again—she hasn't been so smooth since she was prepubescent, but back then her body and vulva were differently shaped, so the view isn't particularly familiar. She used to be board thin and bony, her pussy nothing but a single crack between two little lips at the upper junction of her thighs. Now, there's more padding, more flaps. Mostly she looks very raw, the skin inflamed and pink, with a few pinpricks of blood on her mons from torn follicles. The pain doesn't stop her from touching herself at the thought of what she's going to do tonight, though.

She takes a fistful of moisturizing coconut oil and slathers it on, mesmerized by the creamy, baby-soft feeling of her own skin in her palm. The lips feel fatter, her folds slippery between her fingers. She strokes over her puffy mound, imagining her own hand is Kyouj's—Kyouji who maybe, possibly, if she's lucky, prefers a hairless, girlish body. She rubs herself thinking about Kyouji doing the same, spreading her legs and reaching around her waist to stroke over her lips, part them, rub circles into her hard, needy clit. Her pussy doesn't look like a little girl's pussy, not really, but maybe it feels like one. Maybe it will be enough for Kyouji to get off on, to want.

She doesn't let herself come, just works herself up into a frothing lather, clit swollen and peeping out of the hood, slickness making her lips slide together filthily as she pulls a new pair of underwear on—this one a too-tight, white cotton pair from her school days. Then she tugs up the plaid skirt, pulls the polo over her head, and surveys herself in the mirror.

The uniform isn't terribly ill-fitting—in fact, Satomi has perhaps developed significantly less in the last few years than she thought she had. Instead of looking like a twenty year old in a middle-schooler's clothes, she sort of just looks like a middle schooler again. She has the same length hair, the same bony knees and un-muscular calves and her chest isn't flat but there's nothing up there to write home about and the polo is shapeless enough there's no strain against the buttons. However, if she reaches up, it's too short, and a strip of her stomach shows, padded over the cutting hem of her skirt. Her hair is cut nearly the same, in a only slightly more layered bob rather than the stupid mushroom cut her mom always used to give her. She's never branched out and gotten more fashionable frames for her glasses, and although her face has slimmed into a more angular shape, it's not like she looks that much older.

In fact, the only noticeable difference is that she's grown taller, so the skirt rides way higher up her thighs than it used to. Part of her is faintly disappointed—she doesn't actually enjoy passing as a fourteen year old—but then she remembers that tonight, that is precisely what she's going for. It's what Kyouji seemed to like. It made her flirt, tease, sit too close. And, if Satomi's plan fails spectacularly and she's wrong, well. At least she'll know for sure.

She sneaks out the back door so her family won't see her and ask her why the fuck she's dressed like this, then walks a few blocks to the pick up spot she always specified for Kyouji, since she'd been afraid to be spotted with her outside her actual house with a yakuza all those years ago. She feels positively absurd walking around in this extremely short skirt so she keeps tugging it down, worried her ass is showing even though she knows she doesn't even have much of an ass to speak of. She feels so stupid, on the cusp of backing out until she sees familar headlights ahead in the darkness.

When Kyouji rolls up, it's in the same model Century as the one she once totaled, but it's a violent, lipstick red. It shocks Satomi—the luridness, the way it doesn't blend in, the ostentatious shade of roses, and rage, and cherries, and blood. It almost makes her angry, to see it. A spot of love amid all the boring Osaka gray, like popped maidenhead on white wedding sheets. "What are you all googly eyed at?" Kyouji says as she rolls down the window.

Satomi witnesses the moment she takes in what she's wearing—a slight waver in her usually mask-like air of placidity, ripples in a pond. Her eyes flash, then widen, and she frowns briefly before she plasters on a smile. "Satomi-chan! For a second I thought I time traveled. You are nostalgic, aren't you? Or maybe homesick?"

"Your car is ugly," she says plainly, trying to shake off the skin-crawly feeling of excitement zipping up her legs at having been noticed. She isn't sure if the once-over and subsequent crack in Kyouji's ice was a good or a bad thing, but it was a thing, at least. "Red doesn't suit you."

"The black made me too sad! Talk about nostalgia," Kyouji says wistfully, leaning over and opening the passenger side door for Satomi, gaze carefully averted away from her body and instead fixed on the windshield as she clambers in. "But you're right, it's a bit gaudy. I've never looked good in red. Should have gone with silver, like a bullet, or maybe dark blue, but they were all out and I needed a ride. God. Aren't you cold?" she says, eyes finally tripping down but only for a moment before they wrench to the road. "Sure you don't need a jacket?"

"I'm fine," Satomi says, though her teeth are nearly chattering. She's pretty sure that's from adrenaline, though, not the chill. She's hot, actually, hot cheeks, hot cunt throbbing between her legs, still worked up from when she was touching her newly-smooth mound, imagining Kyouji's hands all over her. She glances to the hands in question, the long fingers curled easily and confidently around the steering wheel, and her stomach drops.

"So, no happy birthday wishes for your pal?" Kyouji says, steering one handed while the other drops to her lap, tapping anxiously against her thigh. "I'm hurt."

"Happy birthday," Satomi says mechanically, ripping her eyes away from Kyouji and swallowing a sudden thickness in her throat, making a fist in her skirt and tugging it down. This Century has leather rather than fabric seats, and she can already feel her thighs sticking to them with a light sheen of nervy perspiration. "I have a present for you, but I'll need to give it to you, um. Later. In the night."

"Oooh, intriguing. Satomi-chan, international woman of mystery," Kyouji says with a grin.

The drive is brief but achingly familiar, each turn and stoplight deeply etched into Satomi's memory, even six years later. It doesn't feel like six years—it feels like just yesterday. She was wearing this same too short shirt, chest filled with the same stupid butterflies. "Hopefully it's not more of your hard earned money," Kyouji adds, frowning.

"I've never been outside of Japan, I don't think you can call me international anything," Satomi reminds her. "And no. I've given up on convincing you to get rid of the tattoo."

"Good," Kyouji says, flashing a smile stained Sapporo yellow in the changing streetlight she speeds through. "I like that tattoo."

God. Satomi's stomach and blood are doing crazy things. Dropping, plummeting, rushing at deafening speeds through her ears so she can only half-hear the stuff Kyouji is saying. In fact, her heart is pounding so loudly she's worried Kyouji can hear it from the driver's side, and is about to ask her what she's so anxious about. If she's going to go through with this seduction, she needs to get her shit together. Or else, she's going to need help. She thinks back to Aunt Kushizu and Kyouji's mother's burnt dish towels, and resolves to take a leaf out of her book, no matter how bad Sake tastes.

As they pull into the parking lot of Karaoke Heaven, her body twangs reflexively, a shiver of arousal beyond her control tugging beneath her belly button and settling heavy and molten between her legs. She squeezes her thighs together, watches as Kyouji lets herself out of the driver's side before coming over to the passenger's and opening the door for Satomi, just how she did when she was a kid. You're not a man, she remembers scoffing, cheeks hot as she squirmed, not understanding why it flustered her so much that Kyouji acted that way. Nope, but I'm still a gentleman. Sorry kiddo, there are things I can't explain to you, that I just. Have to do.

Satomi shivers as Kyouji opens the door, offers and hand, and tugs her to her feet, eyes climbing ever so briefly up her legs before she makes a face. "You sure you don't need a jacket? You know the A/C is always blasting in that place. You're going to freeze."

"Too late now," Satomi says, shrugging, yanking her shirt down and resolutely walking inside. What she means is, too late to turn back.

It's like a dream. The same smells, the same squeak of Kyouji's same dress shoes against the same linoleum, but—everything also ever so slightly off because Satomi has grown up, now, into a slightly different person. One who knows what she wants. Karaoke Heaven seems too small to contain that knowledge now, too tight just like her skirt. Just like any place from your childhood shrinks when you return as an adult.

They arrive at their old room and Kyouji holds the door open, gesturing for Satomi to go in ahead of her. Satomi catches a whiff of her tobacco and cologne smell as she passes, and a sudden vice of panic tightens in her throat. God. She can't do this. Except she has to, because she can't keep living this way, sick with want and heartbreak and regret, all the fucking time, stuck in an endless holding pattern of useless wondering want.

Inside, Kyouji makes a beeline for the song catalogue after a cursory glance at the menus. Satomi doesn't bother—she knows what she wants. She calls the kitchen and orders a fried rice, her usual melon soda as a chaser, and a hakutsuru sayuri nigori sake for bravery. The staff apologetically tells her they only have beer, and so she cards a hand through her hair and impulsively changes her order to two Sapporos. "What do you want to eat?" she asks Kyouji, realizing in all their many hours spent together in this very room, she never once saw Kyouji actually buy anything to eat, she only ever finished what Satomi couldn't, mopping up sauce from her plate with the remaining rice. Another stark difference between their interactions then, and now. The presence of food, the pretense of food.

Kyouji looks up, grins and shrugs. "Surprise me, Satomi-chan! You've ordered like every single thing here, right? You know what's good. I entrust my dinner to you."

Irritated, Satomi rolls her eyes, and doubles her fried rice order.

When everything arrives, Kyouji full on sputters at the two beers. "Is this my birthday present?" she asks, cocking her head. "Us finally drinking horse piss together?"

"No," Satomi says, taking a nervous gulp. It's absolutely terrible, but at least significantly smoother and less astringent than the sake. She chokes down another mouthful, then another, each subsequent swallow going down with less of a fight as her pallette adjusts to the flavor. "Or, sort of? It can be part one of your birthday present."

Kyouji's eyes flash again, or maybe Satomi and her three generous sips of beer on an empty stomach only imagine it, but still. It makes her flush and squirm, seeing Kyouji's eyes darken like that. "You have me really curious, not gonna lie," Kyouji says, taking a measured sip of her own beer. "You also have me feeling guilty."

"Guilty?!" Satomi asks, curiosity piqued alongside the ever-present terror she's being too obvious, too desperate. "For what?"

"Corrupting you!" Kyouji says, gesturing to the two beers. "Just yesterday you were a teenage girl eating three meals after school to keep up with the growth spurt," she teases. "Now you're drinking beer! Next, you're gonna ask me to take you to the horse races. Face it Satomi-chan, I'm a very bad influence."

"You could be worse," Satomi reminds her, stabbing chopsticks into her fried rice. It tastes exactly how she remembers it—oily, too salty, just right. "I wish you were."

"Don't say that," Kyouji chides, licking foam from her lip. "I'm an old woman. You'll give me a heart attack."

Satomi grinds her teeth, feeling well on her way to a heart attack herself. "Pick a song," she says then, sucking up some of her soda in an effort to obliterate the bitterness the beer left on her tongue.

"Me?!" Kyouji says with mock surprise, spreading one of those terrible, elegant, long fingered hands across her lapel. "What if, for my birthday, I want to see you sing for a change?"

Prickling, Satomi tenses in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs. No matter how she arranges them, she feels dreadfully exposed in her irritstingly tight white panties. Which is the whole point, but still. It's scarier and scarier, the closer she draws to the crux of her plan. "You sing, I watch. That's how we did it, didn't we?"

"Back then, when you were self conscious, sure," Kyouji breezes, as if it is not a blow to Satomi's ego at all to have her teenage self read so effortlessly, pinned in the muck of her insecurity. "But things are different, now. You're drinking beer like a champ! Your legs are eight million miles long! I'm forty fucking five! That's halfway to fifty, you know what they do to women when they turn fifty? Put them out to pasture. Like a race horse with a broken leg. Actually, no, they shoot those." She says with a laugh, while Satomi's cheeks and mentioned too-long legs burn. Then, as if she has not commented on legs or ages or dead horses, Kyouji selects a song and stands, cracking her back. "But if Satomi-chan insists."

"I do," Satomi says, swirling her straw in her soda so the ice tinkles against the sides of the glass."I know all you really want for your birthday is an excuse to play rockstar and hear yourself sing. You always had way too much fun. That's why you never learned to get better."

"Touché," Kyouji says, with a gut-melting wink. She shucks her jacket with much fanfare, and unbuttons her cuff to roll her dress shirt up to her elbows. When she does this, it reveals the tattoo of Satomi's name etched into the inside of her forearm, but none of the others, and seeing it exposed and isolated like that always makes Satomi's insides gather in raw, blinding desire laced with the anticipation of inevitable pain.

Kyouji starts to belt, and Satomi drinks, and plots, and drinks some more.

When the her mug is empty, Satomi starts in on Kyouji's beer, which has gone a bit warm. It's fine—she's not doing it for the taste, she's doing it for the courage. Kyouji has sung two songs already, there's sweat at her temples and her hair has come undone from its gelled coif and she is so insanely and infuriatingly hot Satomi's all wet again. It's that easy. Just watching Kyouji move, watching her mouth pull back from her teeth whenever she catapults into her awful falsetto, her eyes scrunched up as she screams.

It's not that she's cool or graceful, it's that she doesn't give a single fuck that she's not. Before Kyouji, Satomi had never met a woman who didn't care what people thought about her. A short haired, tattooed, suit-wearing woman who smoked and cursed and cut off men's fingers was unheard of. Taboo. Kyouji was so frightening and so strange and so inspiring that Satomi hadn't been able to stop herself from being forever altered by knowing her. Six years later, here she remains: same skirt, same desperate want thrumming in her chest, changed, indelibly.

She drinks Kuyoji's beer, melting into the booth. At least being tipsy is starting to feel really good. The world hazy, the stakes seemingly lowering before her eyes as a carefree fluidity buzzes through her limbs, loosening the muscles in her neck and formerly clenched jaw. Maybe none of this matters at all. Maybe she's been stupid for years, and all she needed to do was drink a little beer. Maybe being in love really is fun and sexy and not utter and complete agony all the time. She rubs her legs together, pleased by the squishy, dirty feeling of her lips shifting together, slicked in wet.

Kyouji finishes her song, strides to the table, and takes a long swig of water, eyeing Satomi with a narrowed gaze over the rim of the glass. "You should slow down, Satomi-chan. Eat more, or you'll regret it in the morning. Take it from a seasoned pro."

"Leave me alone," Satomi snaps, taking a long, performative sip of beer. "I'm working up some nerve."

"To sing?" Kyouji says, looking so delighted it twists a blade in Satomi's stomach.

"Maybe. You'll have to wait and find out," she says, certain this is flirting. She's never consciously flirted before—she doesn't know how, really. It's not like she conceals her feelings from Kyouji, in fact she's spent the last few years being painfully and humiliatingly honest and forthcoming about being in love with her. There's just nothing like, cute or coy about it. Cute and coy have never come naturally to Satomi, who instead errs on the side of being as normal and not-pathetic as possible until a slow boil crescendos into an overflow and she blurts something terrible like your boss smokes a lot do you think he'll get lung cancer soon, also, I still want to be with you over a ten am breakfast, making Kyouji choke on her coffee. But this—teasing, taunting, sitting with her legs swinging, unafraid of how much skin she's showing and knowing Kyouji has noticed—it's exhilarating, and totally new.

"There she is again! International—sorry—National woman of mystery. Who needs to eat more if she's gonna drink more," Kyouji says, shoving the plate of rice towards Satomi. "Go on, take a few more bites. I won't let you have anymore booze until I watch some go down the hatch."

Satomi obediently eats, eyes locked on Kyouji the whole time. She feels crazy, hot-cheeked and pleasantly dizzy and bold, for perhaps the first time in her life. She wonders if the chopsticks look good going into her mouth, and makes sure to show off a flick of tongue, just in case. Normally the wondering alone would send her into an insecurity spiral, but the beer has smoothed out the wrinkles of worry, left her as smooth and unbothered as a very still pond. Or her waxed pussy.

Kyouji studies her all the while, expression unreadable. Satomi has caught her gaze lingering a few times, on her legs and midriff and mouth as she sips the beer. It might just be because she's acting unlike herself and Kyouji is concerned, but maybe it's for other reasons. Maybe her tactics are working. Satomi shovels down a few more bites of fried rice before wiping the oil from her lips with a napkin and standing on wobbly legs, determination surging through her.

"Oh, is it happening?! Is Satomi-Chan finally serenading me?" Kyouji asks, downing the rest of her beer.

"Not yet," she says, tottering to the door resolutely. "I need to pee first."

"I'll bet you do after that beer and a half," Kyouji says, toasting her with the empty mug. "I'll be waiting."

Satomi nods, lets herself out into the brightly lit hallway, and heads to the bathroom with a resolve she didn't know was possible.

Once she's there, shimmying out of her damp panties and shoving them into her shirt pocket, she loses her nerve a little. Whatever the beer gave her in the dark karaoke booth is transmuted by the humming florescent lights and utter lack of glamour in the grafittied bathroom stall, bravado giving way to queasy doubt. What the hell am I doing?! she thinks as stares at her pigeon toed mary janes on the dirty tile, stream of urine hissing into the bowl, too loud, not at all sexy. She wipes, wincing at how wet and swollen she is, how impossible it feels to get clean. She's made it this far, though—underwear off under her skirt, enough beer in her body the consequences of fucking this thing up seem tolerable. What's the worst that could happen? Kyouji laughing at her? Turning her down gently with more strategic misdirection? She's already endured that, time and time again.

So, Satomi flushes and washes her hands, stomach in knots. She can do this. She will do this. She walks back down the hallway feeling extremely exposed and naked, weaving and unsteady on her legs, teeth grit against the feel of air against her sticky pussy. Then she takes a deep breath, and lets herself back into the dark seclusion of their room.

Kyouji is sitting in the insolent, spread out way she always does, thighs parted, one arm along the back of the booth as the scrolls through the catalogue. Satomi has imagined sidling up under that arm countless times, she knows she'd fit there so perfectly against Kyouji's body, pressed into the slats of her rib cage, face made to nuzzle into the secret ditch of her pit.

Heart racing, she plops down, eyes wide. She must look terrified because Kyouji raises an eyebrow, pinning her there with a calculated gaze. "Everything ok? Did you see a ghost in the toilet? Did the beer catch up to you? Are you gonna puke?"

She is, maybe, going to puke. But instead she just swallows, cheeks positively on fire as she turns to Kyouji, and parts her thighs. "Ok. Happy birthday," she blurts, eyes shutting in abject terror as she reaches down with a violently shaking hand, and lifts her skirt.

The surge of adrenaline that ricochets through her guts at actually revealing herself is so powerful it takes a moment for the humiliation to catch up with her, and she has to fight the urge to not immediately cover herself up again, legs twitching as she feels the air conditioning against her slit.

Time freezes. A minute or an hour might have passed, Satomi doesn't know. Realistically it's only been a few seconds, but they are such silent and loaded and tense seconds she cannot stand another one. "I'm sorry," she stammers, tears springing to her eyes as they wrench open the moment her legs spring shut. "If you hate it we don't ever have to talk about it again, we can just. I'll sing a song. I'll…" she trails off as she actually registers that Kyouji does not look amused of condescending or disgusted or wincing in second hand embarassment. In fact, she looks fucking stricken. Face pale and gaze fixed, one hand clutching the edge of the table in a white-knuckled grip, the other scrubbing over her mouth, pushing it into an unrecognizable shape.

"Say something," Satomi begs, fist clenching and unclenching in the fabric of her skirt.

"Um," Kyouji says, closing her eyes, something twitching in her brow. Um is hardly encouraging—Satomi shifts closer, across the booth towards her and into her space and her radiating heat, desperate to know what she's thinking, to fix things, to be put out of her misery like a fifty year old woman or a race horse with a broken leg. The beer fizzes inside her, makes her tremble, makes her thighs quake open and closed. "You know. I think I am actually speechless, for once," Kyouji manages weakly.

"Are you mad?" Satomi asks.

"Mad like crazy, maybe," Kyouji says. And then, there—in the black of her eyes, Satomi sees it. She knows what it is because she sees it in her own expression every goddamned day, for the last six years: reluctant, self-loathing, terminal desire.

Before she can talk herself out of it she glares hard and half-lidded up at Kyouji, and does it again. Lets her thighs fall into a wide, slutty V, and lifts her skirt up to show herself off. This time, she gets to watch the monumental fracture in real time: Kyouji's flashing eyes, the bob of her throat as she swallows, her whole body flickering in tremor as her gaze is drawn and held fast and electric between Satomi's legs.

The subsequent surge of power Satomi feels is dizzying, cloudy and contaminated with arousal. She only gets to experience the sensation very briefly, though, full of herself for approximately one point five seconds before she's disarmed totally: her view of Kyouji catapulting into a view of the ceiling as Kyouji reaches out, and slams her back into the booth.

She's fantasized about being taken advantage of and pinned and raped and taken by Kyouji so many times she thought it wouldn't scare her, but she's fucking scared. A good scared, an amazing scared as her heart thuds prey-animal quick against her breastbone and Kyouji shoves her skirt up, bears down on her, and just looks for a second, face close enough to her pussy she can feel the heat of her labored exhalations over the needy jut of her clit. Her face burns, her spine arches. She can feel Kyouji wavering, panting. Can hear the indistinct, muttered curse before she palms needily up Satomi's thighs towards her center, parting her with her thumbs before, sudden and molten, her mouth descends to flesh.

It's a chaste kiss, at first. Their first kiss: Kyouji's lips against Satomi's, closed-mouth, a moan trapped between them. Satomi goes crazy, tears squeezed down her cheeks so her vision goes blurry, hips bucking desperately against Kyouji's mouth as she wordlessly begs. Then, the chasteness dissolves into a fucking flood. In all the million times Satomi humped her fingers imagining Kyouji eating her out, she never imagined it so so wet. Not just her own slickness bubbling up from her slit but Kyouji's tongue, her saliva. The wettest feeling she's ever felt, sweet and perfect as Kyouji holds her open, and eats. No part of her is off limits or left un-licked—Kyouji makes out with her deeply, passionately. Swirls her tongue around her needy clit before pulling the inner lips into her hot mouth to suck, lapping down to her opening and fucking the muscle up inside her, prodding at her walls, then down over her taint to the crack of her ass, flicking the tip of her tongue into that hole, too.

The pleasure is blinding, maddening. Satomi parts her legs to give Kyouji more access, she gets one shoe up onto the table top so she has better purchase to grind. None of her mad bucking and shifting deters Kyouji in the slightest. She's a woman possessed, drowning and groaning so noisily it's obscene. Satomi makes a fist in her gelled hair to keep her there, nails razing against her scalp, wanting everything she can touch, wanting, wanting. She can't get enough of Kyouji's mouth, which is fine because it seems like Kyouji's mouth can't get enough of her pussy. She's pressed so deep into the cleft it's amazing she can breathe at all, licking and sucking and groaning and devouring so ravenously a thick wad of drool is dripping down Satomi's bare cunt to her asshole. She's lifted her pelvis clear off the booth but as she comes crashing back down she almost slides off there's so much drool and come collected under her, a fucking mess on the upholstery, Kyouji's mouth smacking as she sucks her clit.

Satomi has been lolling around looking at the ceiling sort of crying in semi-disbelief this whole time, afraid to look down lest witnessing Kyouji's dam breaking will somehow put it back together again, scare her into retreat. But she wants to see her badly enough her own resolve finally cracks. She shakily cranes her neck off the booth to peer down between her own legs, only to be abruptly bowled over by Kyouji looking right back at her. Eyes twinkling, two sucking black holes, reflecting all the meager light of the room. She's staring up at Satomi with such obliterating devotion and hunger is stuns her—how could she have missed it? How could Kyouji have wanted to eat her pussy this badly and hidden it so effectively?

As their eyes lock Kyouji groans, presses her tongue flat against Satomi's clit and flicks it hard, making the tendons of her inner thigh flex and jerk convulsively. Then Kyouji's letting go of the death grip she has on her thighs to smooth over her stomach, her chest, pushing her polo up to expose Satomi's tits, the nipples drawn tight and hard.

She twists one between thumb and forefinger, the sensation zipping right to Satomi's clit in an electric shock. She digs her heel into the table, unable to stop a pathetic, out of control nng sound from ripping its way up her throat. She covers her mouth, pulls Kyouji's hair, close, already so close. There's no escape, Kyouji won't let her squirm away to prolong it. She keeps her locked into place and pinned against the booth, manhandling her little tits as she sucks at her puffy folds, lashing her clit until she explodes in a sudden, vision-eclipsing lurch, scream muffled against her own sweaty palm.

Kyouji moans her way through Satomi's orgasm, never once letting up on her body, licking and slurping her way through every little aftershock until Satomi is a boneless drape of limbs on the booth, every shudder totally beyond her control. Kyouji remains between her legs, mouthing over her pussy very, very gently—no pressure, no overt licks. Just gentle kisses and aimless circling passes of a soft, wet tongue. It feels fucking amazing. Not too much for her oversensitive clit, just a slick distant pleasure, enough to keep her on edge as she pants, glasses so fogged up she can't see anything anymore. Not Kyouji, not the ceiling. In less than a minute she's all worked up again, hips bucking, wanting, needing. It makes Kyouji groan against her and start to eat in earnest again—that expert tongue pressing into her, licking up the mess, flicking back up to circle her clit until she's coming again, so hard, so fucking easy.

This ritual goes on for an eternity. Satomi coming in massive, seismic shudders while she stifles her cries, then lying there like a puddle of melted ice cream while Kyouji patiently works her back up to a fevered state. Rinse, repeat. Her calves start to bunch and cramp and her own sweat is stinging in her eyes, she keeps thinking this is the last time and she won't be able to go again, but Kyouji knows what she's fucking doing. At one point she eases two fingers inside Satomi's sloppy cunt, filling her up, crooking right against a blinding spot inside her to yank her over the edge yet again. She's so wrung out she's shaking involuntarily, teeth chattering so loudly Kyouji finally takes pity on her and slows down.

She looks up, face flushed, plastered from nose to chin with slick and sweat and drool. She smooths her hands down Satomi's heaving stomach to pet over her thighs, thumbs coming to rest on either side of her mons, thumbing over the swollen lips before pulling them apart, gently tugging the hood back to expose her where she's throbbing, most sensitive. "Oh, Satomi-chan," she coos thickly. "I know you're tired but your clit is just so cute I have to kiss her again," she murmurs before leaning in, skating her rubbed-raw lips ever so gently over Satomi's folds, making her whine. "That's what you get for showing her to me. You should have known I wouldn't be able to control myself."

Satomi's head lolls on the booth, hair sweaty and glasses knocked askew as her gaze pinwheels around the room from the forgotten food on the table, to the karaoke screen, to the tiny glass window to the hallway anyone could have spotted them through. Or, spotted them through when they first started—the humidity has long since fogged it, a thick layer of dripping condensation obscuring its transparency. "You don't ever have to stop," she slurs, even as her hips twitch instinctively away from Kyouji's still questing mouth, body lost to overwhelm. "I don't want you to stop. I want you to be obsessed with me."

Kyouji laughs a self deprecating laugh, pressing her forehead to the inside of Satomi's thigh to anchor herself, breath gusting across her raw, swollen pussy and making her keen. "Well. Mission accomplished," she says, licking her lips. "I thought I did a pretty good job of surviving it—who knew you could play so fucking dirty, Satomi-chan."

With the word dirty she sticks her tongue out, flicks it lengthwise up Satomi's slit. The jolt over her clit sends her thrashing up the booth with a yelp, so sensitive it almost hurts. Kyouji laughs, kisses her vulva right above her cleft, finally sitting up. "You're cooked! You need some water." Then she hauls Satomi's liquid, too-heavy body up, and feeds a straw between her lips. Satomi takes small sips, teeth still rattling embarrassingly in her skull, hands shaky as she cleans her glasses with her shirt. Her body feels crazy— shivery with endorphins and not entirely within her control, hot and cold all at once in the sheen of sweat and come and spit. "You ok?" Kyouji asks, brows knitting together at Satomi's silence. "Did I break you?"

Satomi slumps against her, burying her face in the collar of her shirt, hand creeping up to make a fist in it, thumb up and down the starched seam she inhales Kyouji, making sure she's real, she's not running. "I'm just. I don't know," she murmurs, eyes stinging. "Will you kiss me? Like on the mouth? Do you even want that?" she finally blurts into Kyouji's collarbone, unable to look at her as she makes this request.

"Shit," Kyouji says, slapping her own forehead with an open hand. "Of course. I'm such an idiot. I'm usually a gentleman, you know! In a few years, if you hadn't figured out I was a bad person and ditched me forever yet, I was going to do it right. Wine you and dine you and buy you a ring and stuff. I wasn't counting on you flashing me in your school skirt, though, you hotwired me, Satomi-chan. Drove off with me. I totally forgot my manners."

Satomi sort of laughs, though it's very wet and shaky and she's still kind of crying so she's not sure it counts as a real laugh. Then she rubs her face into Kyouji's neck, lips over her pulse until Kyouji gently pries her up, fingers on her chin as she studies her, takes off her glasses. When she finally presses their lips together, everything tastes like sex. Satomi's pussy and ass all over Kyouji's face, spicy on her tongue as she teases Satomi's lips open, flicks over her teeth. She's a good kisser, which Satomi knew already, based on how it felt to be kissed between the legs. She gets all weak and shivery again, climbing into Kyouji's lap, throwing one tremulous leg over her lap so she can press down.

Kyouji breaks the kiss, anchors their brows together to look down, hands sliding up Satomi's waist to grip her tightly, squeezing before she flips up her skirt again, zeroing in on her bare pussy. "Jesus Christ," she says, voice pained, pushed out through her teeth Satomi can't help but pitch forward and kitten lick. "I need to get you somewhere that isn't a karaoke room so we don't get arrested."

Satomi nods, the reality of the situation finally hitting her, pushing through her post-orgasm delirium like a shaft of light parting clouds. Kyouji wants her. Kyouji ate her out, Kyouji kissed her, Kyouji wants to take her somewhere to presumably do it all again. It's dizzying, hard to believe. She's worried if she changes things even slightly—moves from this room, climbs off Kyouji to leave and get in the car, she'll shatter the delicate circumstances that led them here. "Will you take me home?" she asks. "To yours, I mean—not mine."

"Ugh," Kyouji says, hands climbing up Satomi's back, sifting into her hair. "I shouldn't. You undid like. Years worth of work in a single second, you know that? You gotta give me a minute to catch up and figure out how the hell to get away with this."

"What's there to get away with?" Satomi asks in earnest, pitching forward to kiss Kyouji again, loving the way she just caves, moans and kisses back and rocks up against her. That little motion—her body surging towards Satomi's, belying her own desire, her own arousal, drives Satomi fucking crazy. She wants to feel it. Know for certain she's made Kyouji wet, learn how to make her feel good, too, ger her mouth on her, lick it up. "I'm twenty. It's not illegal anymore."

"Key word, anymore," Kyouji murmurs in between kisses. "It's complicated—there's a whole lot of reasons I wanted to wait."

But you like me like this, Satomi thinks wildly, pressing her waxed smooth pussy down, rocking against Kyouji's thigh just like she did in her own fantasies. You liked me at fourteen. You fucked me in my school uniform. You broke because I found your weakness. "I don't want to wait anymore," she begs, biting Kyouji's mouth, hard enough she hisses. "Ok? I want. I want to make you come. I want to eat you out."

Kyouji's head falls back, kathunking against the back of the booth. "Oh my god. No you don't. You're drunk. Sex drunk and one and a half beers drunk and I didn't even ask you nicely before I jumped you. I need to get you home to sober up."

"No," Satomi grits out with a lick of panic in her chest. This was exactly what she was afraid of, exactly why she didn't want to give Kyouji time to think, reconsider. "No you don't." And maybe she is drunk. She's definitely crazy, blitzed out of her mind, so desperate she's lost all sanity and dignity, the last of it licked right out of her cunt and that's Kyouji's fault, actually. All of this is Kyouj's fault for being a fucking pedophile who ruined her at fourteen in the first place.

Dizzy with a sudden, love-sick rage, Satomi gets her feet underneath herself and levers to a standing position right in front of Kyouji. She's so wobbly she has to hold herself up against the wall, legs shaking as she stands over her, lifts her skirt, and defiantly presses her hairless, still-spit-wet pussy directly against her face.

It shuts Kyouji right up. Eyes blown wide, all pupil before she lets them flutter shut, stunned to sudden silence. Satomi pants, rocking her hips ever so slightly, rolling onto the balls of her feet to grind herself against Kyoujis cheek, nose, brow ridge. "Don't fucking pretend," she whispers. "That you don't need it too."

Kyouji's mouth falls open, her head tilts back and she looks like Jesus on the cross for a second, mournful as she noses pitifully against Satomi's folds before craning back and kissing her cunt. Softly, desperately, expression ruined. Satomi has never seen her look like this in her life—the remote, unreadable, humor-deflected chill replaced with martyred powerlessness. It makes her feel crazy. She reaches down, parts her fat outer lips with two fingers to offer Kyouji her clit. Her eyes stay closed, her mouth gets wet. She nurses on it for a few seconds, a line cutting through her forehead, brows knit. Then Satomi's knees start to buckle and she falls over, melting into Kyouji's lap again.

They sit like that, just holding each other. Fresh spit hot between Satomi's legs, shared heartbeats speeding between their bodies as Kyouji clutches her, breathes her in, face buried in the junction of her neck and shoulder. It's weird, feeling her like this. A wavering flame, disarmed to the point of instability. Satomi pets her back, her hair, her shoulders, her arms where they're looped around her own body. Greedily soaking up the touch, taking advantage of all she can, as long as Kyouji's broken down like this.

Finally, Kyouji pulls back and groans. "Ok. You win," she says. "The truth is, I'm not a good person and none of my usual lines are working and I can't—" she cuts herself off, eyes sweeping helplessly to the ceiling for a moment as she chokes out ragged laugh. "I'll do whatever you want, Satomi-chan."

"Thank god," Satomi sighs, climbing off clumsily, eager to get in the car and back to Kyouji's house before she gets any more ideas in her head and tries to derail this train. "Let's go."

"I keep imagining I have to testify in court," Kyouji says faintly, chugging some water, watching with a wince as Satomi tries her hardest to straighten her clothes enough to look presentable enough to leave the room. "And what an absolute shit defense 'she stood up and rubbed it against my lips so I just totally gave up, your honor,' is."

"What's your crime?" Satomi scoffs, tugging the skirt down, deciding not to step back into the panties. It's a short walk to the car anyway, and she doesn't want to add barriers, only strip them. Dressing again feels like a step backward. "Being a bad person? Knowing me when I was fourteen? Neither are illegal, sorry. Not even liking me better when I was fourteen is a crime."

Kyouji snorts, makes a face. "You think I liked you better you were fourteen?!" she asks, following Satomi out the door, head bent, hands shoved into her pockets. "I mean. I'm no saint but you've only gotten way more lethal."

"You touched me more then," Satomi reminds her. "I mean—I seduced you by waxing and dressing in my school uniform. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put it together. It's fine. I know you're fucked up. I don't care. As long as you still want me now, too."

Kyouji is very quiet as they leave Karaoke Heaven, lips sealed in a tight frown as they pile into the car. She's seemingly too distracted to even hold the door open for Satomi, expression so dark that worry spikes in Satomi's chest again, choking her. "It's fine, really," she says quickly, voice pinched. "I mean it. I can stay smooth down there. I'll do whatever you like, I—"

"Satomi," she interrupts, glancing over, all mournful-Jesus-faced again. "I cracked tonight because I've spent the last three years falling deeper and deeper in crazy fucking stupid love with you. I'm hanging on by a thread every time I see you. I stopped touching you so much because you turned into a beautiful fucking woman and I got sincerely freaked out I'd lose control and do something crazy. I cracked tonight because you flashed me. I don't care at all if there's hair or not. I was actually sort of surprised you were all tidy—every time I fantasized about you I figured you didn't shave and pictured you with a bush. You don't even do your laundry, I figured that would be a lot of work for a girl like you. Point being—I've thought about it, wondered what you do with your pubes because I am obsessed with you. You, now. And you, then, sure, I'm a pervert, I'll admit it. But more now."

Satomi is uncertain that Kyouji has ever said so many words in a row to her that weren't badly sung lyrics, so she just sits in it for a minute, floored by how weird it feels to actually get truths from her, unfiltered, no cipher. She thought it would be really satisfying, if Kyouji ever spoke plain to her. But now that it's happening, the shock is almost numbing. "You—you don't like young girls? Or waxed?"

"No," Kyouji says, driving too slow, gaze fixed resolutely on the road. "I've always liked motherly types, actually. Dated milfs. You've sort of been the exception."

"You prefer it hairy?" Satomi blurts, not so sure why she's fixated on this given everything else she's learning—maybe it's the nearly two hours of agonizing pain she put herself through, for seemingly no reason at all.

"Not prefer— I don't have a preference. I am a woman of varied tastes! You don't want ramen every day of your life, sometimes you want pad thai or spagetti or something. There are so many ways to make noodles, but all noodles are tasty."

"You seemed like you liked it waxed, so much," Satomi murmurs, dazed as her understanding of the world and Kyouji struggle to shift.

Kyouji laughs humorlessly. "I like you so much," she says, reaching across the divide and putting a hand on Satomi's thigh. The contact positively obliterates any coherent thoughts Satomi was trying to have, an electric charge coursing up her thighs to the still-sticky place between them. She parts her legs, whimpers. Kyouji squeezes, works her hand an inch or so higher, under the skirt. "I like you so much I am about to crash this car."

Satomi spreads wider, wriggles down and arches her back to push herself against the brush of Kyouji's knuckles. It literally makes her swerve a little—a minute jerk of the hand she has on the wheel, the blood red Century shivering momentarily out of it's lane. Kyouji swallows, and her throat clicks. "You look so sweet, but you are so crazy," she says, inching her pinky out, letting it ghost ever so gently over Satomi's lips under her skirt. "What the hell am I supposed to do?"

"Give in," Satomi breathes, rocking her hips into the heat-seeking cup of Kyouji's hand. "Please."

Kyouji curses, then turns the car suddenly down a residential street, dark and only sparsely dotted in streetlights. Satomi's heart stops, she squeezes her legs together to pin Kyouji's hand there between her thighs, like a rodent in a spring trap. Kyouji kills the engine, turns to her with dark eyes in the still darker cab, face cast in shadow so she looks even older than she actually is. "You're right," she says somberly. "I do need it. Are you going to feed it to me again, Satomi-chan? Right here?"

"Yes," Satomi says automatically, ready for anything, tilting forward so her outer lips part and spread stickily against Kyouji's trapped hand.

Something devastated flickers across Kyouji's face. "Fuck. You aren't afraid of anything, are you?"

You leaving. You stopping. You deciding this whole things makes you feel too dirty and guilty to keep up. You getting it in your head it's better for me, somehow, if you disappear. "Plenty scares me. But not this. Not you."

Kyouji's tilts her neck to press her temple against the carseat headrest, like she's too tired to support the weight of her skull. "I should scare you," she murmurs, using the tip of her index finger to part Satomi's folds, pushing up inside her where she's so wet and needy. "There's a lot you don't know about me."

"You used to scare me. Not anymore," Satomi murmurs, bearing down on that single finger, making Kyouji fuck her, studying the way her brow crumples as her finger slides into the hot canal, her mouth falling open. "Get in the back seat," Satomi says. "You can do whatever you want to me. I don't care about whatever you've done in the past."

Time stops, flickers. Kyouji crooks the finger inside Satomi, tucks behind her pubic bone and tugs her forward with one hand while reaching for her neck with the other, cupping it and dragging her across the divider console to kiss wet, hungry, open. She still tastes like pussy, spice and heat and musk, but also cigarettes, Sapporo. Satomi whines, licks the inside of her mouth, pawing at her shirt and untucking it, getting her hands under the fabric so she can finally touch skin unobstructed. But as soon as she makes contact Kyouji pulls back, twists around, and unbuckles. She finally withdraws her hand from between Satomi's legs, pushing the finger that was in her pussy into her ownmouth as she climbs from the cab to the backseat, so many limbs, so tall, so impossible. It makes Satomi think about the first time she invited Kyouji into her apartment—how out of place she was, this miracle, this thing she couldn't have seeming to suck all the light from the room, close enough to touch, but still a world away.

But she can have her, at least right now, so she does, she will. Dizzy with determination she clambers to the back seat after her, straddles Kyouji's lap, kisses her hard and sinks her hands wrist deep in her hair. They make out furiously for a few minutes until Kyouji gets impatient and dumps her onto the seat beside her, crunching the whole of her body down into the foot well between her spread legs, licking her lips. "Show her me again," she murmurs, so low and hot Satomi feels like she's being stabbed. She does as she's told and lifts her skirt slowly, hips moving almost subconsciously as she rocks her exposed pussy towards Kyouji's face and back again, humping the storm-electric air between them, lower lip raw between her grinding teeth.

"You are so fucking beautiful," Kyouji breathes. "You did this for me?" she says, thumbing so gently up the crease, gliding through the buttery crack. "Got all smooth?"

Satomi nods, reaches down, parts her lips to show off her clit again. She wants to show Kyouji everything, wants to be so exposed, wants her to know what she does to her body because she can see it. The undeniable swelling, throbbing, slicked up evidence of how fucking in love Satomi has been, all these years. "It really hurt," she admits.

Kyouji tuts, leans forward, and starts to press a series of soft, gentle, closed mouth kisses all over her mound. "Poor Satomi-chan," she murmurs. "You didn't have to do that for me. Let me kiss it better."

"Please," Satomi keens, bucking her hips, twisting to try and press her clit into Kyouji's mouth. "Just—Kyouji-san," she grits out, making a fist in her hair and dragging her down where she wants her. "Just. Whatever you do, don't stop."

A low rumble, the kiss softening, opening, her tongue flicking out to swirl sweetly around Satomi's clit. In the karaoke booth it was starving rough head, but this time she's so gentle. Making out with Satomi's slit the same way she kisses her mouth, lingering and exploratory and reverent. The car windows get steamy nd there's nothing but wet snicking sounds alongside Satomi's ragged breath until she comes with a long, shuddering moan. Kyouji pulls away, wipes her mouth, looks up at Satomi with hooded eyes. Not one woman but two as she's doubled in the sheen of tears eclipsing Satomi's vision. "For the record, I could do that all night," she says. "And be more than perfectly happy. So don't go thinking you have to return the favor on my account, ok?"

Satomi blinks, takes her glasses off, mops up her tear-sticky face with her polo. "Are you trying to talk me out of it because you don't like having it done to you, or because think I won't like it? "

Kyouji shrugs, framing her sticky-slick chin between thumb and forefinger thoughtfully. "I just don't want you to feel obligated, Satomi-chan. I'm very satisfied."

"I want to do it because I want to do it," Satomi explains, flipping her skirt down, heart leaping at the way Kyouji frowns the second she's not exposed and shining in the low, orange tinted spill of the streetlights. "It's totally a selfish thing. I want everything with you. But if you hate it…"

Kyouji snorts. "I don't hate it," she says. Then she reaches down, toys with her belt buckle like she's considering. "But if you do, we can stop. I won't be offended. It's not for everyone."

Satomi licks her lips, mouth suddenly flooded. "I won't hate it. I want to put my mouth all over you all the time. I—" she cuts herself off before she says I want to drink your fucking blood, heart constricting because there aren't easy ways to explain, really, how utterly mortifying and all consuming her feelings for Kyouji are. Instead she just reaches for her, makes a fist in her dress shirt. "Will you just—let me show you?"

Another sober nod, serious and brief and noncommittal, like this is a business transaction. Maybe it should sting, but Satomi is used to it. When she is not deflecting with humor Kyouji is a master of imperceptible poker faces, but right here, right now, with Satomi wet in the back of this new stupid red Century, Kyouji's well-worn facade of indifference doesn't hurt her— it pisses her off. She's going to fuck Kyouji up, she's going to suck her soul out, she's going to crack that horrible glass mask she keeps trying to put back on even though she said it, admitted she was obsessed with Satomi, that she wants her back, that she can't control herself around her, that she loves her. Let me show you, she thinks, the desperation eating her from the inside out, an insane yawning wound in the pit of her gut. Let me show you that I love you, too.

They switch places, Kyouji stiff as she climbs onto the seat and parts her long legs very slowly around Satomi, who kneels like she's about to say a prayer at a temple, eyes fixed on Kyouji's hand as she pops her button, tugs down her fly, slips a hand into her underwear. "It's a swamp down there," she says. "Just fyi."

"Good," she says, tucking her hair behind her ears and leaning forward, tongue flitting out to wet her lips as Kyouji studies her. "Have you thought about this view before?" she asks, laying her hands on Kyouji's knees and parting them wider.

Kyouji shakes her head, smile like a slit throat. "I tried not to," she admits.

"But you failed?" she asks, dropping down, pressing a kiss to the inside of Kyouji's thigh, feeling the rope of muscle jump and tense beneath the fabric of her slacks.

"Satomi-chan—I have pictured every evil thing you can imagine. I used to drop you off after karaoke and go home and vibe myself to fucking oblivion thinking about like. The spot behind your ear. Or your ankle bone in your little white socks." Then she laughs, harsh like a dog's bark, before scrubbing her hand over her face and groaning. "I promise I don't have a schoolgirl fetish,but I'm not making a very good case for myself, am I?"

Satomi shakes her head, stomach in knots because she's in such terrible, aching, overwhelmed love. She kisses her way higher, rubs her cheek on the seam. She wants so badly to dive right in to the swamp but she also wants to prolong the moment as long as possible, take in all the sensory details ans commit them to memory. The scrub of wool blend rough against her cheek, the smell of Kyouji's cigarettes in the fabric, the way she's slouching back, staring down, face ruined. Satomi maps the whole long line of her thigh out with her mouth, finally making it to the molten crutch at the center, where she can smell Kyouji's cunt even through her clothes, feel the heat bleeding out onto her lips. She just buries her face there for a minute, feeling Kyouji's heartbeat against the flicker of her closed eyelids. It's a nice, quiet, miraculous place. She sucks the scent of her into her lungs, fills them with the slightly metallic spice. It's like the hot air that comes out of the back of the old PC at her house—burnt plastic, a human musk, HDMI cord, a hint of brine, the ghost of ammonia. Kyouji reaches down, pets her hair, thumbs back to that supposedly compelling swell of flesh hidden behind the shell of Satomi's ear. "You like that?" she hums. "Just sniffing like a dog?"

Satomi nods, rubbing her face up and down the V of Kyouji's spread legs, feeling even drunker off this than she did the beer. Kyouji's stops petting her to dip down into her pants again, feeling Satomi's lips through the fabric of her pants as she collects wetness on them. When she pulls out, she shows Satomi the thick strings of clear, viscous fluid spiderwebbing through her long fingers. "You want to taste this before you check out the source?" she asks gently. "Like a little appetizer."

Satomi's throat is so thick all she can do is nod, crane her head up, and open her mouth. Kyouji slides her fingers in, watching the passage they make through her parted lips, over her tongue. Satomi works hard to keep her eyes open as she sucks Kyouji off her fingers, but it's hard, because it feels so good, tastes even better. Raw and undiluted, salty and real in this way that makes her own clit pulse. She sucks, moans a little as Kyouji pets the roof of her mouth. "You like it?" she asks, pulling out, connected to Satomi's lips with a filament of drool.

"Yes," Satomi promises, licking her lips. "So much."

Kyouji sighs, then lifts her hips enough to yank her pants, belt, and underwear down over her ass in one single motion. "Have at it, then. Like I said—if you change your mind, it's fine, I—"

"Shut up," Satomi breathes, an ecstatic need exploding in her chest as she gets her first real eyeful of Kyouji's cunt in the streetlights. Thick but neat bush, pink-red inner lips sloppy with slick and a big, juicy clit only partially obscured in hair at the top like a dart in the bullseye center of a board. Satomi smooths the black curls away with her fingers, astounded by how wet Kyouji is. A wet wetter that wet, so slippery she can't even gain enough purchase with her thumbs to part her inner lips wider. So she gives up—just puts her face right back up against her and starts to lick: aimless with inexperience but enthusiastic with desire, tongue going all over just lapping up whatever she can reach. Salt and tang and slick slick slick. Though Kyouji ate her out only moments before with expert precision, she forgets everything she might have learned from that experience and just drowns, licking lapping slurping, gaze upturned and fixed on Kyouji with unconcealed adoration.

It must feel nice despite her glaring lack of skill because Kyouji's mouth falls open around a groan, her hips lift and press forward towards her, fucking against Satomi's tongue with the hard bead of her clit. Satomi gets the idea, zeros in and fits her lips around it and starts to suck, nursing on it a nipple. It feels so good going in and out of her lips, pulsing in time with Kyouji's fevered heartbeat. She understands immediately why Kyouji wanted to do this over and over again—it's addictive, delicious, heady, hot.

"Fuck," Kyouji hisses, making a stinging fist in her hair, humping her face. "Tickle it with your tongue, Satomi-chan—between those sucks—I—" and then she's throwing her head back against the headrest and mashing her pubic bone into Satomi's mouth and crying out, low and long and guttural before she goes twitchy and limp. Certain it can't be over, Satomi keeps dutifully licking, grinding her own pussy down desperately on the heel of her mary jane until Kyouji chokes out a laugh and gently pushes her off. "Give me a break, that was a big one," she breathes. "Je-SUS."

Satomi wavers on her knees for a minute, dizzy, dazed. "That was an orgasm?" she asks, baffled. "I made you come?!"

"Mmhm," Kyouji says, head flopped back as she lifts a shaky hand to knead the bridge of her nose. "You sure did."

Satomi licks her lips. "That was really fast."

Kyouji snorts, and it turns into a wheezing cough."Yeah, well. In my defense you've had me really worked up for hours. And you did a good job— 120 out of 100 points on the Karaoke score board. Yayyy," she says, mimicking waving a very small flag before slouching into the uphoulstry even further, a line through her brow and the sides of her mouth turned down. "Oh my god, I can't believe I got my pussy ate in the backseat of a car! I don't think I've done that since I was your age."

"I did good?" Satomi asks, gaze dropping again to Kyouji's pussy, which she still wants to suck on, very badly. She can still taste the spice and salt on her tongue, feel the filmy wetness on her lips and chin. She did not get to lick her fill, that's for sure. "Can I go again?"

"Oh my god, she's insatiable," Kyouji cackles. "You liked that? Got a taste for noodles now?"

She nods, pitching forward. Before she makes contact Kyouji catches her with one open palm on her forehead, with which she pushes her back onto her heels. "At the house," she scolds. "Goddamn you are a little baby pussy hound, aren't you? I get it. I never grew out of it. It's yours, Satomi-chan, you can lick it all you want once we're not in public anymore."

"You're the one who pulled over," Satomi reminds her, though this time, she's too giddy at having made Kyouji come so hard and so easily without even really trying or knowing what the hell she she was doing to be properly annoyed at the usual hypocrisy.

"Because you're impossible to resist! But you don't have a criminal record, they wont lock you up for public indecency if they find you with your pussy out in a car in a nice neighborhood."

Satomi glances out the window. "The neighborhood isn't that nice," she observes, sliding a hand up Kyouji's thigh.

Kyouji grabs her wrist, squeezes, deposits her elsewhere, grinning with her brows raised in amused disbelief. "Did you hear me?! I said you could eat to your hearts content as soon as we're home. Okay?"

"Ok," she says, peeling herself off of her heel, sloppy wet and half crazy, tongue lashing at the inside of her teeth just imagining getting to put her mouth between Kyouji's legs again. "Fine. We'll go to your house, then."

"Good girl," Kyouji sighs, lifting up to tug her pants back on and button them, belt and flies still open. She is so occupied with getting to the driver's seat she entirely misses what it does to Satomi—the good girl, and the careless re-dressing, like she's getting just decent enough to drive, knowing full well in a matter of minutes she'll be taking her pants off again, offering her pussy up to Satomi's needy mouth.

"I love you," she blurts from the back seat, still sitting there on the floor, face wet, stupid, too young to even care how pathetic she must sound.

Kyouji goes still after ducking briefly towards the window in an almost- flinch, refusing to look at Satomi, even in the rear view. "You're so smart, though," she says eventually. "You'd think you'd be too smart for that."

"I don't think it matters," Satomi mumbles, wiping her eyes but not her mouth as she laboriously climbs up to the front seat, legs tingling with bloodlessness. "Whether I'm smart or not. I tried to think my way out of it. But it's not a thinking thing, it's a feeling thing," she explains. "I just…do."

Kyouji says nothing as she starts the car, face blank as Satomi studies it, yearning towards her, spilling out into the divider between the seats. "What about you, Kyouji-san?" she finally asks, not smart, not dignified, not smooth, only desperate. "Do you love me, too?"

Kyouji floors it, takes them away from the suburbs and back to the road. "What do you think, Satomi-chan?"

"I think that I want you to say it again," she says, staring at her lap through smudged glasses. "If it's true."

Kyouji's laugh is a broken thing. Crushed up like a can under a car tire, or like the black century all those years ago, back when Satomi saw it crumpled and steaming and thought for terrible, clarifying certain Kyouji had died. That's what it took, for her to admit what she was feeling. That the rage, the frustration, the tightness, the sickness—it was all just love. Love that wasn't like a pop song but love that was like a car crash, a sore throat, two blinding hours of pain, hair ripped out, skin left raw and bleeding for nothing, nothing at all. That's what the laugh is like: forcibly naked, forcibly stripped. An adult woman doused in wax and transformed back into a little girl. "It's true," she says at long last, dipping towards the window again, anchoring her head there, shutting her eyes even though she is driving. "I am sick over being in love with you. I put myself in jail about it, did you know that? I let the cops catch me so I wouldn't do something worse to you than the stuff I already did."

Satomi blinks at her, floored, confused. "I—when? Those three years?"

Kyouji nods. "The boss had it all set up so I could skip town, get out of the country until the investigation died down. It wasn't serious, one beat tweaker isn't the sort of offense they really pursue to its finish…but I decided. I thought— if I don't go away, I'm going to fuck her up for real. So I went. Thought it would cool me off." Her gaze flickers over, all black, blown apart. "It didn't, clearly."

Satomi's guts churn. "You didn't have to do that. I would have—I wanted you to fuck me up for real."

Kyouji shrugs. "And you didn't have to wax. We're stupid." They sit in silence for a moment, the tires clacking over the shitty road until Kyouji clears her throat and adds, "Fuck. It's really bad, but like you said—I can't logic my way out of feeling this way. I just do."

Satomi sits back, lets her head loll on the headrest, closes her eyes. The satisfaction spreads like poison through her bloodstream, so morphine-sweet it makes her dizzy, makes her chest feel like it's going to explode. She reaches across the divide between them, where loose yen coins rattle in the cup holders like the wheels of a far-away train approaching. Then she puts her hand on Kyouji's thigh, just like Kyouji put a hand on hers. Her index finger slips into the unzipped flies and when Kyouji's breath catches, it sounds like triumph. A gear shifting on the way to a house she hasn't seen yet, but is being invited inside, finally, finally. "Good," she says.