Chapter 9: Both Sides of the Gate

As they walked through the opening of the building, for some reason the long breezeway reminded Yumi of a giant gullet. Maybe it was because most of the moonlight was concentrated near the entrance, and the small white lights on the ceiling barely lit the rest of the corridor. It looked like a stretching throat that grew darker and darker, leading all the way down to God-knows-where.

She couldn't shake the feeling that she was about to be sucked into that emptiness. She didn't mind it, though. In a way, the sensation seduced her. Maybe the beast that would be eating her wasn't part of the building; maybe it was the lanky woman who was slowing easing down the dimly-lit walkway in front of her.

Of course, Yumi had followed her. Perhaps this time it was Yumi who had become the beast.

She looked from side to side as they wandered down the aisle of bland gray doors, their footfalls making the concrete vibrate with disproportionate echoes. It made her want to start tiptoeing. There was still a side of her that was deathly nervous of getting caught.

Caught doing what? she asked herself.

They weren't doing anything wrong—not yet, anyway—and it wasn't like anyone knew or cared about what they were going to be up to. Even when they had kissed on the empty train and Yumi had pushed Sei away after coming to her senses, no one in the other rail cars had seemed to notice their public display.

And since she had resisted, Sei hadn't tried to kiss her again. This had frustrated Yumi far more than she could have predicted. It was the first time anyone had ever kissed her like that—deeply, confidently, and without any pretenses about what it was supposed to mean. The moment they had broken contact, she had immediately resented that it was over.

She wanted more. This, too, she found troubling, though. The sudden feeling of raw need worried her, as did the amount of impatience that she had when Sei stopped by a random door and began fiddling with the lock at a leisurely pace. She found herself wishing that there was no door, just as she had wished that the train ride hadn't been so long—just as she had wished that she hadn't waited years to kiss Satou Sei.

"Sei-sama," she blurted out in a sharp whisper. Her voice reverberated lightly through the breezeway. She had meant to hurry Sei, but knowing that this would be extremely ill-mannered and desperate, she hadn't committed to any urgency in her tone, and it came out sounding flat instead.

Sei very slowly turned to face her, her hand still gripping the doorknob. "What?" Sei asked. Yumi couldn't tell if she was playing dumb or not.

"Let's go inside already. It's...cold out here," Yumi mumbled.

Sei looked at her strangely. "No it isn't. It's not cold at all." Then a teasing smile spread across her face and it made Yumi want to reach out and smack her arm.

Before that could happen, though, Sei leaned her weight into the door and pulled the handle clockwise. The barrier opened by a crack. The hinges squeaked. After what seemed like forever, Yumi could see a small, dark apartment spreading before her. It was filled with the ghosts of small bits of furniture, but she couldn't see the layout very clearly until Sei stepped towards a wall and slapped the lights on.

"Come on in," Sei said, dropping her baggage near the entrance and kicking off her shoes. She looked at Yumi, and somehow didn't seem at all impatient. She held open the door in silence, even as Yumi suddenly felt an itch of hesitation.

This would change something, wouldn't it? She had the vague sense that the moment she stepped over the threshold, she would be swallowed up into Sei's apartment and undergo some transformation in there. The next day, or later that night, or whenever they were destined to part again, Yumi was bound to be different than she was now.

Sure, there were some things that even Sei could not change about her, but the thought that something in her was about to crumble away—about to die—filled the back of her mind with some residual fear. It was not unlike the hesitation she had felt in facing her Onee-sama, in looking squarely at the truth that they had never been merely soeurs, that maybe even the entire idea of soeurs had just been a story they had told themselves.

She felt like she was about to uncover another truth in there, beyond the door frame.

"You're not afraid of me, are you, Yumi-chan?" Sei asked. There was a smirk on her face.

Yumi, who had clasped her hands together and was peering cautiously into the room, met Sei's gaze directly. "Yes," she admitted, "I'm afraid of you, Sei-sama."

And then she crossed over.

While Yumi slipped off her shoes just inside the apartment, Sei pushed the door shut with one hand. The lock made an audible click. It was a sound that seemed to carry a heavy finality to Yumi.

They were both inside together now. Alone.

Yumi stood up straight after discarding her shoes, her heart thumping so wildly in her ribcage that she wondered if Sei could sense it as well. When she looked up, she saw that Sei was staring at her body quite openly.

"You do look older," Sei murmured. "Something about the way you hold yourself is different. I like it."

Yumi blushed and crossed her arms, feeling a bit self-conscious, especially with how shamelessly Sei's eyes had settled on her chest. Still, she wanted Sei to kiss her again, so she took a single cautious step towards her.

Sei didn't move, only watched. "What do you want, Yumi?" she asked in an oddly gruff voice.

Yumi's breath hitched. Such an obvious question was a little unexpected. She averted her eyes, but found that her gaze was automatically traveling over to the Western-style bed that sat across the room from them. "I don't want anything," she whispered.

"Bullshit. You came here for a reason. Say it."

Yumi stared at her, taken off guard. This is why I'm afraid of you, Sei-sama, she thought.

This time it was Sei who took a step towards her. "I want to hear you say it," she said. "I don't want to pretend later that this was accidental, or that we got carried away. You came here on purpose, and what we're about to do is on purpose."

Yumi could feel the heat from Sei's body radiating and it made her legs become suddenly weak. Her body grew even more tense with arousal; she wanted to rush towards Sei and make the burning need inside of her perfectly clear.

It was strange: years ago, what Sei was saying might have paralyzed her, might have made her unable to go on. Examining the obvious a little too closely had a way of shutting it down. Pointing to those feelings so directly tended to take away the mystery and the magic, the ambiguity of it all—the safety.

Except that Sei seemed to have her own magic, a new kind that Yumi hadn't grown used to just yet, a kind that was all about exposing her and forcing her into a state of nakedness. Sei was taking a huge risk that she might scare Yumi off—and yet she didn't seem to care if she did.

This only made Yumi want it more. "I'd like...to spend the night here. With you," she said. It took a lot more energy than she thought it would to force that out. Inviting herself over was one thing, but facing the vulnerability of actually asking for what she wanted was something else entirely.

Sei took another small step forward, then another. Yumi could smell her unique scent very clearly now; it started to fill the air around her. They were standing only centimeters away from each other, and Sei was looking at her with very deliberate intention. It made Yumi feel a bit uncomfortable; a bit like she was being exposed by a huge spotlight.

Then Sei grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and jerked her upwards. Their lips met. She felt Sei's teeth scrape lightly against her mouth. She felt a heat smoldering deep in her belly, one that began to rush quickly downwards as soon as they had touched.

Sei kissed her violently and held her with no trace of tenderness, and her collar began to dig uncomfortably into the back of her neck. A jolt of energy shot through Yumi's body. She kissed Sei back, just as violently, but she found herself pounding her fist hard against Sei's sternum at the same time. It made an audible thud and Sei let her go at once.

Yumi looked up at her, eyes wide, breath coming in gasps, the back of her hand pressed to her now swollen lips. "That's...too much," Yumi said. She missed the contact immediately, though, and began moving towards Sei again.

This time Sei pushed her back, gently enough that it didn't hurt her, but hard enough that she stumbled further into the room and nearly tripped on the nearby low table. Sei leaned over her, grinning wickedly. For some reason, this filled Yumi with an odd sensation that she couldn't really understand—something heavily made up of arousal, but tinged with the sharpness of rage.

She smacked both hands hard against Sei's shoulders and forced her back, trying to equal the force of Sei's earlier blow. She was even more irritated when she found that Sei had hardly been thrown off. In fact, Sei reached out and pushed her again.

Yumi almost fell that time, and with a loud grunt of frustration, she rammed the palms of her hands against Sei's upper chest. Again, Sei only paused and took half a step back, but seemed otherwise unaffected. Sei started to laugh. When she pushed Yumi a final time, Yumi felt the back of her legs bump against the edge of a wooden bed frame.

She was cornered against the mattress, but somehow she had managed to stay standing. "What are you doing, Sei?" Yumi asked, out of breath, her body buzzing with overwhelming fear—and a deep, pulsing excitement more intense than any she had ever felt before. It was only a few seconds later that she realized she had dropped the honorific from Sei's name.

"What are you doing, Yumi?" Sei responded in kind. The supremely irritating grin was still there. "Go ahead and run. I'll chase you around the room if you want. Do you need to be tired out first?"

"Shut up," Yumi said. "Just shut up."

Sei looked genuinely bewildered for a moment, though her amusement hadn't faded. "What's wrong, Yumi-chan? You look a little scary like that. Is it me who should be running, then?"

"God, just please stop talking and…"

Then Yumi said it. She said it plainly, in all its uncensored glory, through gritted teeth. She couldn't remember ever having pronounced the phrase before in her life—and it made her blush immediately—but it had come out of her mouth like a reflex.

Because she meant it.

Sei had the decency to be taken aback. She stared at Yumi, her own arousal suddenly much more obvious. "If that's what you want," she whispered, after she had recovered from the mild shock. She stepped forward until her body was pressed against Yumi's, until Yumi could feel Sei's heart racing along with her own.

Thankfully, Sei appeared to be done forcing her into emotional nakedness, and was suddenly more interested in Yumi's physical body. Without any preamble, she grasped the bottom hem of Yumi's shirt and yanked it upwards, so that most of her torso and chest were exposed. She pressed her mouth to the small swell of flesh just above the cup of Yumi's bra.

Yumi gasped. She felt heat radiate from that spot, and it was from more than just Sei's breath. Before she could even think it through, she grabbed Sei's hand and pressed it hard to the other side of her chest.

When Sei leaned over and kissed her, all of her thoughts seemed to evaporate. She opened her mouth immediately. She let Sei slip a thigh between her legs with no resistance at all. All of the tenseness had left her body.

She had surrendered again.


"Yumi."

It was the first time Sei had spoken in a long while, since she had freed Yumi of her clothes. The touch of Sei's bare skin felt oddly natural to Yumi now, like it had always been there, gliding against her body and stoking her desire.

It took Yumi a moment to recognize her own name. It sounded like a collection of meaningless syllables initially, little more than a ragged sigh coming out of Sei's mouth. In the same way, the room became hazy before Yumi's eyes, as if all of the furniture flowed together, as if all boundaries had begun to break down.

She even felt like she herself was melting into all of it—into the bedsheets, into the mattress, into Sei.

She couldn't understand what she was feeling. It had been painful at first, and then pleasurable, and then painful again, and then so pleasurable that she had thought she would go insane. Both of these extremes had danced together until they pushed her beyond a point where neither seemed to exist. She felt like she was being cracked open.

Her mind went blank. She cried out. She pushed back against Sei and dug her fingernails into the muscles of Sei's shoulders. Her body helplessly spasmed and she could do nothing but tense herself against the rolling waves of pleasure-pain that suddenly exploded within her.

Sei didn't stop. She crashed into Yumi in time with each pulse. It made Yumi want to pull her close and slap her away at the same time. Instead, as the intense feeling died down within mere seconds and the pain began to overwhelm the rest of the sensation, she reached up and pressed her hand to Sei's face. Gasping, she pushed her away.

At some point—she could not tell when, since she had lost all sense of time—Sei fell heavily beside her. At some point, Yumi crawled onto Sei and buried her face into her naked chest. There was a long moment of complete emptiness, a stillness in the room, the quality of an echo without any sound.

Except that Yumi could hear Sei's heart beating. Inside her own self, though, only a ringing hollowness emerged.

She pressed her face hard against Sei's chest, and then her body exploded into sobs.

"Yumi-chan…."

There was alarm in Sei's voice, but Yumi couldn't stop. She watched her own tears marking transparent paths down the line of Sei's ribs. She grasped violently at Sei's skin with her hands, the tips of her fingers making red, angry indentations into the flesh.

But Sei didn't flinch. She did nothing.

The sobs kept coming, pushing through Yumi in succession, as if there were something inside her body that was trying to burst out. It felt like she would purge at any moment, and the thought of that terrified her. She swallowed against the churning sensation in her stomach.

"It hurts," she groaned into Sei's skin. She felt the vibrations of her voice and of her sobs ringing against the older woman's bones. She squeezed her eyes shut and cried for a long time.

Then, slowly, the feeling faded. It came and passed just as her climax had, like a counterpoint to the bliss of moments before. When the shudders had died down, she wasn't sure what to do. The inside of her mouth felt salty from the tears that had rolled in past her lips.

"I'm sorry," Yumi whispered eventually.

It took Sei a moment to answer, but her body soon rumbled with a hoarse response: "Don't apologize. I shouldn't have been so rough. I hurt you."

"No," Yumi said. She pressed a hand to the wet spot on Sei's stomach where her tears had collected. "It's not that. Yes, you did hurt me there—but most of it is...a different kind of hurt. It hurts more than just in my body. But it feels good, too. I can't explain it."

Sei paused again for a short while. "It was the first time for you, wasn't it? Sometimes the first time hurts."

Yumi lifted her head slowly from its place on Sei's sternum. Though it felt extremely heavy for some reason, she managed to sit up. She covered her face with her hands. "Was it like this for you the first time?" Yumi asked. She glanced quickly at Sei's face through the cracks between her fingers, but turned away when she saw that Sei was staring at her directly.

"No," Sei replied. "It was different for me." Another pause. "I didn't sleep with someone I was in love with."

A weird feeling came over Yumi. It was yet another sensation of both attraction and revulsion towards Sei, a feeling that made her want to scream into Sei's face.

I'm not in love! Yumi cried out in her own mind. I'm not in love. Not with such an aloof, unconcerned, unholy person. Not if I know what's good for me.

But of course she was, so her internal battle died down rather quickly. These were the last vestiges of her resistance. She sighed and let her hands slip from her face, and she finally met Sei's gaze with her swollen eyes.

When Sei grabbed her arm and pulled her closer, Yumi didn't fight it. She accepted a light kiss and relaxed into the embrace, feeling oddly safe, and at the same time even more exposed and vulnerable than she had before. She could feel Sei's hips pressing against hers—whether deliberately or not, she couldn't tell—and it awakened another small wave of arousal in her.

"Sei."

The intimacy of whispering Sei's bare first name left an odd sensation in her mouth. Still, she knew that soon enough she would be tasting deeper things.


Alice knew that long ago, all of those crisscrossing rods of iron had belonged inside the earth and had once looked very different. For millions of years, they had waited as ore to be ripped out of the ground and melted and poured into the kind of mould that would serve a purpose for society. Without the guiding walls of the mould, the iron would be useless. What nature had made on its own was useless.

And the iron gate in front of her was very useful. The idea of a gate was that it could open only for certain people, that you could use it to pick and choose who belonged inside.

She stood outside now. The wind huffed against her, reminding her every few seconds of the billowing skirt around her waist. She stared between the bars of the gate and followed the garden path with her eyes. The front door was closed and the window above it was blacked out.

She hoped to God that they had all gone to sleep. Maybe the uniform had made her more religious suddenly, but for a moment she wished that the statue of Venus that her mother kept near the roses had instead been of Maria-sama.

Her feet hurt badly enough that she hesitated at the thought of crunching her way through that garden, feeling blades of grass poking her through her now ripped socks. It's funny that she hadn't really noticed that part while she was dashing through the streets. In was only now, as she looked hard towards he final steps of her journey, that the blisters at the soles of her feet became intolerable.

She hadn't been thinking of anything as she ran, until she ended up here. She hadn't even thought to find herself some decent clothes, though her wallet had been left behind in the pocket of her trousers along with all of her money, so she had no idea how she could have pulled that off either. All she had in the world were the clothes on her back.

She pressed her code into the gate lock. She felt like an impostor, like someone who had looked over the homeowner's shoulder the day before, memorized the numbers, and was now breaking through the gate with criminal audacity.

Still, the gates seemed to believe that it was her. She had fooled them well enough that they opened into a creaky yawn, as if they were offering her a sleepy embrace. She walked through, and was careful to lower her feet exactly onto the concrete stepping stones that her mother had laid out in the garden.

When she reached the door, she very slowly put in the key and very slowly turned the lock. Once the door was open by a small enough crack that she could slip through without much commotion, she made her way inside as silently as a thief in the night.

She felt relieved to find that all of the lights were off except for a small table lamp near the couch. She winced and peeled off her socks while she stood at the foyer, then made her way across the living room and over to the stairs.

It had never occurred to her before how loud the stairs actually were until that moment. In the dead silence of the house, she could hear every little creak and feel every little vibration against her bare feet. She tried to tiptoe her way up, but it didn't seem to help much. Before long, though, she could see the door to her room—the door to safety, for the moment.

Then she noticed that there was light shining out from between the cracks. Her heart felt like it had paused along with her steps. An entirely unhelpful shiver passed through her.

No. No one is in there, she reminded herself. I forgot to turn the light off earlier. I was in such a rush to get out that I barely even closed the door after me.

She let out a sigh—to convince herself that she was relaxed more than for any other reason—and pushed herself across those last few paces until she could reach out and grasp the doorknob.

But as she began turning, her hand seemed to twist on its own.

Oh no. God, no.

And the door burst open. The sound that it made when it hit the other side of the wall may as well have been a gunshot, it seemed so impossibly loud to her.

There was her mother. She stood on the opposite end of the door frame, a glow of yellow, diffused light coming from behind her so that her features were momentarily obscured in the shadows. As Alice's eyes adjusted, though, and she could make out her expression, she wished that she couldn't see at all. Her body reacted on its own and made a move to run away, but her mother stopped her.

She reached out and grabbed Alice by the wrist, yanking her into the room where the light could further expose the situation. She stared at Alice with a look of shock at first, seemingly at a complete loss for words.

"Where...have you been?" she said finally, when she appeared to regain her ability to form words. "Wearing that?" That last part, she had almost shrieked, but something—perhaps the knowledge that Alice's father was asleep in another room—kept her a bit subdued.

Alice felt her stomach drop. She didn't know what to say—she couldn't say anything. She wanted to vomit.

Before Alice could offer even the semblance of an explanation, though, her mother shut the door and pushed her further into the room. "We house you, we feed you, we invest so much of our lives in you. We pay for your education—and this is how you repay us?" Her mother's voice was rising, and Alice could see that her teeth were smashed tightly together as she spoke. When Alice took a step back, her mother took a step forward. "Who do you think you are, Kintarou? What kind of world do you think you're living in?"

She reached out and gabbed a fistful of Alice's sailor collar, then tugged it with an angry amount of strength. It made Alice stumble forward and it made her shoulder pop out of the neck of the dress.

"Stop!" Alice cried. She snatched the end of the scarf from her mother's hand. "You'll break it," she added in a more timid voice. "It's not mine."

"Obviously," her mother said. "This is the Lillian Academy uniform, isn't it? That half-foreigner who's been tutoring you gave you this, didn't she? It baffles my mind how a prestigious school like Lillian could tolerate a crazed weirdo such as her."

Alice felt her jaw tighten. "Don't say things like that about Satou-san! She's a kind, talented student!"

But her mother ignored her protests. "She can practice all the strange customs that she wants in her personal life, but she's not going to tarnish the good name of a local school and turn my son into a...pervert—not if I have anything to do with it!" She balled her hands into a pair of fists. "She's absolutely fired. I don't care what your father has to say about it. You are never going to see her again—and I'm reporting what she did to her school."

"You can't do that!" Alice shouted. For the first time, she surged forward in anger, but her mother stopped her with a sharp tap to the face. Alice pulled back and covered her face with her hands. As much as she tried hard to suppress them, the tears immediately began to flow.

"Stop crying and look at what you're becoming, Kintarou." Her mother's voice was full of disgust. "Do you really want to live like this? Do you want this to be your future? Get out of those clothes."

Alice reached down and grasped the collar of her dress tightly in her hand. The sobs still shook her body. "I...I didn't want to disappoint you, Mother, but I can't—"

"You can, Kintarou. I know you can. I do trust you, even if it seems that I don't. You're a smart boy, so I know you can do the right thing." Her mother's voice had softened, and Alice couldn't help but feel a sudden glimmer of hope, a feeling that there would be some way to get to the other side of this humiliating experience. "You stopped all of these...weird behaviors this entire past year, didn't you? I never found even a single tube of lipstick in your room. It was only after that queer tutor of yours influenced you, wasn't it? If you stop seeing her, then everything will be back to normal. You had stopped dressing like this before, right? When we had all agreed that it wasn't good for you?"

Alice felt her breathing cut out. Even with the ache in her chest, she still managed to close her eyes and nod. Every time she did it, it became easier to lie.

"For instance," her mother continued slowly, "if I were to look inside your closet right now, I wouldn't find any other women's clothes, would I?"

"N-no, Mother." Alice had not kept any of her women's clothes at the house for a long time. Even the few times that she had dared dress outside the house after graduating high school, she had merely bought a cheap outfit, stashed her regular clothes in a public locker after changing, and then discarded the female clothes after changing back at the end of the day.

"I'm glad." Her mother started to walk towards the entrance of the room, the anger on her face still quite evident, but her body looking slightly less tense. Alice let out the breath that she was holding and could finally feel a slight bit of relief. Perhaps the situation was salvageable in some way after all.

But then her mother suddenly turned on her heel and began walking quickly back into the room, her feet thudding loudly with the urgency of her movements. She ripped open the closet doors before Alice could say anything to stop her.

The wardrobe was filled with Alice's regular male outfits—"Kintarou's" clothes—and a row of innocuous casual shoes underneath. Alice's mother let out a long breath and the tension finally seemed to completely leave her body. "I'm sorry, Kintarou," she said. "I just had to be sure. I'm not trying to bully you, or to make you feel like I don't trust you, but considering your history, I—"

Something seemed to catch her eye. She turned her head. Alice followed the direction of her gaze deep into the edge of the closet, in the far left corner, where just a tiny tuft of light blue fabric stuck out from between a few winter coats.

What? Why is she—?

Suddenly, her brain made the connection. She had forgotten all about it somehow. It was the one thing that she hadn't had the heart to throw away that night, weeks ago. Against her better judgment, she had brought it home and stashed it somewhere out of sight.

Alice bit her lip and suppressed a groan. Her insides felt like they were being twisted into a knot. Maybe she was mistaken, and her mother hadn't seen it.

Her mother walked towards the corner of the wardrobe, picked up the bit of fabric that seemed out of place, then pulled it out to reveal half of a knitted sleeve. Her eyebrows knotted. She yanked the rest of it hard, pulling it clean off its hanger and out of the closet.

"Mother, don't—!" Alice cried.

Still, her mother ignored her. She only stared at the sweater in her hand, her breaths heaving out violently through her nostrils. "What...is this?"

Why, it was the sweater that Sei had given to Alice the first night they met—a sweater that smelled a bit funny, a bit like old spare tires in the back of a car, but which nonetheless carried the lingering undertone of Sei's scent. Occasionally, Alice would take it out of the closet and press her face to it, but she had always been careful to quickly stuff it back underneath the heavy coats afterwards.

Even though it was clearly too big for her—having suited Sei's lanky frame much better—it was also very clearly a woman's sweater.

Alice's mother tightened her fist around the fabric. "I wish you hadn't lied to me," she said, her voice eerily flat. "I wish we could go back to the way things were, to before you had shown me that we very obviously need to do something drastic. I'm sorry, Kintarou—but your father and I won't fail you again."

This time, when she turned and walked towards the front door of the room, she did not hesitate to leave, the sweater still clasped in her hand. A rushing puff of air came in as the door flew open, and the gust hit Alice directly in the face.


A/N:

Hello there! Thanks for reading.

This was probably one of the hardest chapters to write, and I found myself cutting out a lot of content before settling on the final basic shape of this chapter. Maybe it was the subject matter, which is a bit hard to tastefully convey. Hopefully I managed to do that to some degree.

Next chapter coming soon...probably.