tender are her crevices
on the supple curve of her mouth
inlaid with sweet cunning
Her skin is delicate from the heat of the bathwater, warm and blushing beneath her fingertips. Kagura's hands are graceful things, gliding on the slope of her shoulders, and by a subtle brush, the underside of her breasts. A woman can be most tender here.
There are other places too. Red and sensitive to the touch, like the cove of every coy flower.
Lady Hitomi draws in a quiet tense breath when her fingers roam down the washcloth to her knee, slipping between the shapely crevice of her leg.
"Did he touch you there?"
She chuckles, but it lacks mirth. "Is there a part of me that he hasn't touched?"
"Perhaps not," Kagura says, absentmindedly thinking to herself, how can he not lose himself inside her thighs?
The Lady winces.
"You're sore."
"Be gentle with me, Kagura. It was . . . a long night."
"Does it always hurt?" asks Kagura, taken aback of her words. She means to be spiteful, mocking as her inflections should suggest, but they are as sincere and considerate as the hand that climbs up the field of her stomach.
"It never does," Lady Hitomi frowns, leaning against the edge of the wooden tub. "All his afflictions aren't meant to bruise."
Though they do last, aching between her legs.
"You would know this too, wouldn't you?" then their eyes meet for a smoldering moment, hanging from the cusp of her shoulder. "Hm, you don't have your feathers this time."
Her hand flutters to her hair and curls into itself; a white-knuckled grip, grasping for air.
"He took them away."
"What a shame," the Lady remarks, glancing at her with genuine disappointment. "They look lovely on you."
But his marks do not suit her arms, the silk of her skin, the unfurling sweep of her collarbones . . .
Her fingers chase after her pulse, stopping at the valley between her breasts. The fiery-amber glow of the light has made them pronounced against the dark water, enticing that what lurks beneath its surface is something far more precious and forbidden.
The dampness is stuck on her lashes. Kagura is reminded of sticky dew hanging on a spiderweb, but she does not reach where her hand must not touch. Attraction is a different kind of entrapment. She is the wind, and she will not be swayed by this curiosity to be bound, like how this woman is bound despondently to her master.
"You look lovelier when you aren't pretending to be his," Kagura finally says, upset of the implication, but she attempts to be clever with her words, conspiring within them, as her thumb gently prods at the bruise of her right clavicle, a sore reminder. "Honestly, look at you. You're spent, used. Tired. Why don't you just escape him?"
Lady Hitomi scoffs. "And why do you care? I'm not a woman that seeks to be saved."
Kagura has never thought that she needs to be saved by her hands or another.
She only speaks out of bitterness. "I don't care for human life. However, no one understands a woman more than a woman. He makes you miserable, doesn't he?"
The Lady shifts, urging small waves to ripple out from her shoulder blades. Her hair clings closely against her scalp and throat like the intimate shadows in the room, and she is once again as obscure as her thoughts. "Kagura, there will always come a time that you will love the wrong person. That's how you get betrayed. That's how you get miserable. But I'm not. What I feel for him isn't love, not the one I know of, but it's close and hateful and cruel. He . . . knows that most of all, the empty man that he is."
"You know this too," she trails off into a soft insinuating hum. "A part of you is also him."
"What do you mean?" asks Kagura, lips pulled back in mild vexation and uncertainty.
"Does an empty man have a heart beneath it all?"
Kagura can only feel her heart throb, encased inside earthenware that is placed haphazardly on a rotting dust-polluted shelf.
She grits her teeth. But what of his?
Ensconced somewhere within the deepest chest of this castle, waiting to be unearthed. Wrung by the palm, ripped apart for its mortality.
Then Kagura looks back at her. Perhaps, this woman knows how to eat the hearts of men.
Some resentful desperate part of her compels her to open her mouth. "His heart . . . is his weakness. His human heart."
The Lady blinks, bemused.
". . . human?"
Kagura seals her lips shut, determined to finish her ministrations, when she moves the washcloth away and prepares a dry towel for her. "I've told you too much already. You can piece this together yourself."
Naraku admires her for that after all. It ought to be that bastard's downfall too.
"Kagura."
Lady Hitomi rises from the wooden tub and the fragrant water parts for her dripping body, curling along the tantalizing light where it catches how the moisture laps along the peaks of her breasts and lazily down the firm suppleness of her hips.
She steps out, one slender leg at a time, and she draws closer with an imminence that makes the air thick and stifled, by a sigh fanned against Kagura's cheek; reminiscent of a summer breeze, sweet and ripe and wet.
"My lady," breathes out Kagura.
The Lady stops between the barrier of a soaked towel, held falteringly by Kagura's hands, and now clenched on her curves. The wrinkled cotton on her frame can't compare to the softness of her skin and the flesh of her lips, pressed against hers for a lingering second. Kagura shudders out a gasp.
"You do care," she says with a slow knowing smile. Kagura can still taste the shape of it, even as she leans back from her. "Woman to woman, perhaps we should be closer."
All Kagura can think about throughout the morning is how lovely her lip paint is marked on this woman's mouth. It might as well have been a bloodstain; ghastly love like entrails between her bare flat teeth, had she been her husband.
A/N: I was itching for Sapphic content. Anyway, the next two chapters are pivotal and... heated