disclaimer: Skip Beat! is the exclusive creative property of Yoshiki Nakamura.

AN: *sigh* It's getting to be a running joke at this point, but yes, this is another chapter I had to cut in half. Good news is I do intend for there to be at least 10-12 chapters, so we're making good time.

Trigger warning for dubcon overtones.

Enjoy!

Chapter Seven

Tense silence hung in the air.

"Well?" Kuon prompted.

A hiss escaped from between her clenched teeth.

"Fine!" she snarled, attempting to pull away. The attempt failed because Kuon didn't release her. She tried pulling away again only to confirm that his grip still hadn't relaxed, then finally looked up at him in bewildered irritation. He beamed down at her, unbothered by her reaction. Which just irritated her more.

"Well, are you going to let me sit down or not?"

He seemed to deliberate for a moment.

"No."

"What the - ! Why not?"

"You're pretty, and I enjoy holding you," he said with a straight face.

"... What does that have to do with anything?!" she howled, quivering with frustration even as her face turned pink.

He shrugged, the slightest grin beginning to peek through his impassive expression. "Not much. I just thought I would remind you. But if you really want to sit down so badly ..."

"Hey!" she yelped as he knelt slightly and scooped her legs out from under her in a bridal carry. Before she could offer more protest, he rounded the couch and took a seat right in the middle. He took his arm out from under her knees so that Kyoko was now perched on his lap. She started to shift, but his arm tightened around her waist and his other hand gripped her hip, fastening her in another embrace.

"There," he said bluntly. "You're seated."

"It's bad enough you're forcing me to take part in this conversation! Why do we have to do it like this?"

"I cite my previous statement on the matter," he deadpanned.

"Kuon!"

"Alright, fine. I can keep a better eye on you this way, in case you try another one of your brilliant schemes. Also you can't run from me so easily now."

"Are you serious?"

"What's wrong? You were ready to curl up and go to sleep with me a minute ago," he reminded her, "and now you can't even sit on my lap? Is there something wrong with the way I'm holding you?"

Her eyes widened when she realized there was, indeed, something wrong with the way she was nestled against him. Every time she squirmed or shifted in his grasp, she rubbed up against him. More specifically, Kyoko was rubbing against the bulge she had been around him too long not to recognize.

Oh, joy, she thought miserably as she felt the answering twinge of her own desire. It isn't just me then.

Kuon saw the exact moment that she noticed; her flustered glances might as well have been neon arrows pointing to his erection. He didn't do anything to mitigate the situation, instead opting to stare directly into her eyes as if silently daring her to acknowledge it in some way. He wasn't entirely sure what had prompted this decision, other than his lingering frustration with her for trying to act her way out of their discussion. In lieu of an answer, she narrowed her golden eyes at the ground, folded her arms and tried to look as dignified as one could whilst sitting side saddle on her boyfriend's lap during an argument.

He sighed. "I know you must think I'm crazy at this point. I've definitely given you reason to believe it, given my behavior in all of this. What I've been trying to say is that I overstepped a huge boundary, and in so doing, I hurt you."

"... Yes," she conceded quietly, unfolding her arms.

"I'm sorry, Kyoko-chan."

Still looking at the ground, she stammered, "I-I know you are. You already said."

He tilted her chin up with his knuckle so he could look her in the eye. "I'm sorry I did this to you. I should have tried harder to find out the truth from you directly instead of going behind your back like that."

She sighed, shoulders sagging as the fight began to drain out of her. How did he expect her to argue effectively at a time like this? It took a colossal effort not to rub against his hand like a cat. She took a deep breath as quietly as she could, but even that turned out to be a mistake. Inhaling his cologne was like huffing catnip. All she wanted to was curl up in a ball, right there in his lap, and forget everything. As silly as she felt sitting here at the moment, it wasn't a bad lap to be in, all things considered ...

"I'm not asking you to forgive me. I know you're upset -"

"You don't know anything!" she snapped, trying to recover her mind and her missing backbone from the gutter. "I'm not upset. I think you're an idiot for having done this. I feel like an idiot for blowing this out of proportion. And I think my timing couldn't have been worse in all this."

His brow furrowed. "Timing?"

"I had decided to stop carrying it with me everywhere. Once the entries started getting ... explicit," she muttered, glancing away from him, "I thought it best to take it back home with me. You must have gotten it the day before I took back to the darumaya."

So there are other entries like the one I saw, he thought, clamping down on any outward reaction to this discovery. If she wanted to talk about that, it would have to be when she was ready, and she clearly wasn't.

"So, yes," she continued in a rush as she folded her arms again, "you did something stupid, but we don't need to keep talking about it, really! Just don't do it again!"

"I won't."

"Thank you! Can I get up now?"

"... No."

"Kuon!"

He sighed. "Look ... I'm not entitled to your private thoughts. This isn't an interrogation."

"No? What do you call this then?"

His expression darkened suddenly at her words, and her teeth made an audible click as her mouth snapped shut.

"Just so we're clear," he said, "I'm not trying to interrogate you about your journal. What I will interrogate you about is where you got this idea that I was leaving you?"

God damn it, she thought ruefully.

The one final thing she was trying to avoid talking about, and he had just asked it as straightforwardly as she feared he would. Kuon had left her no way to maneuver out of answering directly.

Kyoko turned her head away from him and tried to come up with a response that didn't make her sound horrendously broken inside. His hand suddenly came back into view, startling her. He cupped her jaw gently and guided her back until she was looking straight at him. Subjected to the full force of his forthright stare, she nervously bit her bottom lip only for his thumb to reach up and caress it, tugging it free of her front teeth.

"It's harder to come up with a story," he said sweetly, "when you have to look at the person you're telling it to, isn't it?"

She shifted in his lap uncomfortably, then tensed up when she felt him adjust beneath her. By the look in his eyes, he didn't appear to care about the state he was in, being too focused on this perverse discussion. If only she could say the same!

"I told you already, and I meant it. It was a misunderstanding. I already said I overreacted!"

"You did a lot more than that, Kyoko-chan" he replied, still stroking her lip. "You as much as accused me of being the sort of man that picks up and leaves someone he loves with no warning and no goodbye."

Kyoko shut her eyes for a moment as the hurt behind his words struck true and lanced her right in the gut.

"Is that the kind of person you think I am? To just disappear without even discussing it? Like it's nothing?"

"N-no! I - ! I misinterpreted some things that were said, and I jumped to a bad conclusion, that's all!"

"That's all? That's all? Kyoko, why on earth was that even a thought in your mind? I would never make a move like that without taking you with me!" he argued.

She blinked, momentarily sidetracked by the conviction she could hear alongside the anger in his voice. Something about the two being side by side - the anger and the conviction - made the words ring truer somehow. Then she realized: the fear that he was still going to leave her was still very much with her. Nothing about there confrontation thus far had so much as touched it.

"... Really?" she asked.

"Yes, really!" he snapped before reigning himself back in. "I-I'm sorry to yell, but Kyoko ... Why would you even question that?"

"I was confused," she said, deflating somewhat as a familiar gloom began to descend over her. "It happens all the time."

"That isn't it, and you know it."

"Do I?"

"Kyoko - !"

"Just let me go. You're going to anyway, I know it. Why not just get it over with?"

The slightest touch of panic began to creep in at these words. She didn't sound angry anymore, just tired and defeated. Defeated in a way he couldn't quite grasp.

"Do you even hear yourself? You say I'm the one leaving you, but you're this eager to run out on me? You're already thinking of the end when we've hardly begun. Stop dodging the question, and tell me now why you feel this way."

"B-Because - ! That's - !"

"What?"

"Because - !"

"Because what?"

"Because that's all everyone does, Kuon! THEY LEAVE ME!"

And there it was. The whole, wretched point of it all.

The thing Kyoko hadn't wanted to say, and the thing Kuon had been afraid he would hear. Kuon felt an aching tenderness come over him as the incomparable "Megami*", the chaotic shapeshifting titaness of screen and stage, the woman who could probably level a city block with nothing more than a glance, beloved by so many, suddenly revealed that lost child she still carried within. For a moment he couldn't even speak past the lump in his throat, and he was overwhelmed by the loneliness he could feel beneath the wrath in her words. How had he not sensed this? Or, rather, having clearly sensed it, how had he not fathomed the extent of it?

Kyoko took one look at the raw emotion in Kuon's eyes, felt her gut clenched from being so utterly seen and thought, No. No, none of this! I wanted to avoid this!

"Keep your pity to yourself!" she whispered venomously, shoving at his chest in a bid to stand up.

He grabbed her arms and drew her back against him.

"Don't do that." His voice was a gravelly whisper.

"Don't do what?" she fired back.

"Don't put words in my mouth. Don't make this into something it isn't. You're hurt. You've been hurt for a while, and you're just telling me now."

"No! I told you this when we got together, didn't I? If you don't leave me soon, then you'll leave me later. That's how it's always been," she sneered, taking shelter in her anger, "and that's how it'll always be."

Kuon recalled the morbid note that those exact words had sounded in the midst of their euphoric honeymoon phase. He had been so sure he could convince her otherwise. Clearly, there was more work to be done.

His slowly unclenched his hold on her arms for fear that his sudden determination to prove her wrong might leave bruises.

"And I told you that that's never going to happen."

"So you say. Whatever. I'm done," she snapped, taking advantage of his slackened grip to stagger to her feet. It was only when she had her back turned that it occurred to her: she hadn't differentiated between done for the night and done with you. She shut her eyes and tried to explain, but her moment of stricken hesitation proved to be, quite literally, her downfall.

"I-I meant - Aaah!"

The words I'm done coming out of Kyoko's mouth snapped the tether that had kept Kuon in some kind of check this entire time. She had just gotten to her feet when she felt his arms around her waist again. The room swung around her in a full one-eighty degree spin as she felt herself being lifted and flung. When it stopped spinning, she opened her eyes to see Kuon staring down at her. She was on her side now, pressed to the back cushions of the couch with Kuon on his side, trapping her in place.

"Let me up!"

"No."

"I said, let me - !"

"And I said, no."

She lifted her leg over his hip and clawed at his shoulder, attempting to crawl over him. She only succeeded in clinging to him further before sliding back off. Shoving at him did nothing, partially because it was like shoving a brick wall and partially because her senses were too muddled to put her weight into it.

She floundered for a moment, glaring at his chest and utterly infuriated when she noticed that he hadn't moved so much as a muscle to either hinder or help her while she was flailing. She took a few deep steadying breathes and continued to stare daggers at his broad chest, but that only served to distract her again. Kyoko was weighing the pros and cons of biting him when he finally spoke again, evidently bored with watching her struggle in vain:

"I don't know where you think you're going," he muttered to the top of her head, "but you're not getting there any time soon. But by all means, tire yourself out trying."

She sucked in a breath and finally lifted her head to yell at him, only to realize how much closer he had gotten when her nose touched his. She gulped and then wished she hadn't; she could feel his lips twitching into a grin at the sound.

And suddenly they were right back where they were in the LME parking lot, her resistance crumbling against the force of his will and magnetism.

Being this close to her, looking into her eyes and feeling the way her body responded to his nearness settled his earlier concerns: it hadn't been adrenaline mimicking desire. It had been the real thing. It was still the real thing, if the way she kept staring at him with those sleepy, sulky eyes was any indication.

With that in mind, he wrapped an arm around her slowly, gathering her body closer to his. His lips pressed softly to hers, once, and then twice, and then for a third time when he realized the first time times weren't going to be enough. He groaned when he felt her hands running up his stomach and chest; her leg lifted over his hip once again, pulling his pelvis against hers. Her leg pulled him even harder when his tongue slipped into her mouth and coaxed hers until he felt her groaning as well. He shifted restlessly, breaking the kiss without pulling away, and was gratified to feel her entire body shaking against him.

"Why are you acting this way?" Kyoko panted against his mouth. "Are you trying to drive me insane?"

"I'll consider that a bonus," he said, gathering her back against him as she tried to wriggle away. "But, no, that's not the point."

She pouted up at him. "Then why?"

"This seems to be the only way to make you listen. Get it through your head, Kyoko ... You're not getting away from me."

"... I'm not?" she asked, looking up at him with blatant need. A need that, at long last, he recognized as being only partially physical. He wasn't sure where this strange clarity came from, but suddenly it couldn't have been more obvious.

Comfort.

A kind of comfort he either hadn't been giving her, or not giving enough of, or not giving her in a way she could really feel or understand. This fear that everything between them was doomed to end seemed to have dug deep inside her when he wasn't looking, nursed along by the other betrayals and abandonments she had suffered through earlier in life. He had been so ecstatic about having her that he had neglected to consider what keeping her would entail. All at once he felt strangely helpless in the face of that need. It had a weight and heft to it. And even so, Kuon held her head in his hands and spoke directly to that need, determined to satiate it for all the times he hadn't before.

"You will never be rid of me. Not now. Not ever. Not if I have anything to say about it."

Sweet, sweet reassurance washed over her as she lay there engulfed by his shadow and cradled by his hands. It came against her will, of course, but it was there. And despite herself, despite everything, she was beginning to understand why. It was so much easier to believe what he said when he backed up his words with action. After all, hadn't she been fooled by words alone before? Sure, he could say he wanted her to stay. He could say it until he was blue in the face, until the words lost all meaning. But if he didn't hold her down when he said it, how could she be sure he really meant it?

There is something so wrong with me, she lamented, feeling the hitch in her throat that preceded a crying fit in tandem with that incessant throbbing between her legs.

She sighed and looked up at him, tracing his features with the eyes of someone who wanted to commit them to memory.

"Why do you bother?"

"What?"

"Why do you bother, Kuon? Knowing ... what you know about me now, how I've acted lately, and then tonight? I just ... Why do you bother with me? Why would you want to?"

He looked at her for a moment, stone-faced. Then, arms still wrapped around her waist, he maneuvered her onto her back and hoisted himself up on his hands and knees. She had more room to breathe now, but still not much avenue for escape. Not with every inch of him hovering over her and primed to pin her back down if she tried it.

"What do I have to do to make you understand that I mean what I say?"

A single tear fell, and even that was somehow too much for her to share with him. Before he could either reach down to catch it or kiss it away, she sniffled impatiently and turned her head to hide it, letting the cushion beneath her absorb it. Strangely angered by the rebuff, her put his hand to her face and turned her head back towards him.

"Do I have to keep chasing you? I'll do it. I did it once, and I'll do it again. Or would you prefer that I tie you down?" Her eyes flare slightly at this, then slid away from his guiltily. "Maybe stamp your forehead with a seal so you know you belong to me? What do you need me to do?"

A long silence ensued. She stared up at him for a long time, her expression gradually growing less and less despondent as she seemed to weigh his words. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a dreamlike quality that gave him pause. She seemed to almost be speaking more to herself than to him, as though she were in the midst of a realization.

"I need you to prove it to me."

"How?" he demanded. "Tell me how."

"... Let me up first."

His eyes narrowed suspiciously, but she didn't shy away from his scrutiny. She lifted a hand to touch his jaw, those golden eyes limpid with unshed tears. He sighed.

"I'm trusting you, Kyoko-chan. Don't run from me. Do whatever you need to do, but do not run from me."

Her head grew light at the thought of what he might do if she tried it. Steady.

"I won't."

He stood up and watched her as she walked slowly towards the foyer, his every muscle tensed for flight if she made it necessary. She knelt down and picked up her things, then turned back to face him. He hadn't moved from where he was leaning against the couch. He was staring at her with the fixed expression of a hunter waiting for its prey to stumble into a trap. She walked past him, away from the front door, and down the hallway that lead to his bedroom. All the while she never felt him look away.

Without turning around, Kyoko asked, "Could you do me a favor, please, Kuon?"

A slight pause.

"What's that?"

"Take out your contacts for me? Please?"

Kuon blinked several times, flummoxed. Of all the things he had expected in the moment, that hadn't been it. He had almost forgotten he was still wearing them. Usually the first thing he did when they arrived at his home was to take them out; it was part of the ritual of him divesting the armor of Ren Tsuruga, so that he could be with her as Kuon Hizuri. But tonight being the hectic affair that it was, Kuon hadn't trusted her to stay put while he stepped into the bathroom. For a split second he wondered if this was another trick like her hostess gambit from earlier, but discarded the notion almost instantly. Whatever this request was about, she seemed to want it sincerely enough.

"... Alright."

Without another word, she stepped into his bedroom and eased the door half-shut, blocking his view.

Okay, she thought, dropping her bag by the bedroom door frame. Here goes nothing.

Using the guest bathroom down the hallway, Kuon took out his contacts, blinked some solution into his green eyes and listened for her through the open door. What he heard was almost more confusing than her request. He heard the sound of the same drawer being opened, closed, opened again and then shut for a final time. He heard the rustling and shuffling of fabric. Strangest of all was the sound of something metallic clattering against something else metallic.

Putting all these things together in his mind didn't produce a clear picture. What on earth was she doing? Was she looking for something? The very last thing he heard was the unmistakable sound of her climbing into his bed. Then silence.

He washed his hands slowly, still listening. Nothing. He stepped out into the hallway and closer to his bedroom door. She hadn't shut it. She had turned on one of the ambient lights, so she couldn't be going to sleep. Could she? Maybe she wanted to rest on their argument and try again in the morning? Or was she really planning to continue this discussion in bed?

She's probably exhausted, he thought, disgusted with himself. I would be, too, after all the stunts I pulled to get us here.

"Kyo - ?"

There was a pile of clothing on his carpet.

That was the first thing that caught his eye when he walked into his bedroom. Between where he stood in the doorway and the foot of the king-sized bed, there lay a pile of clothing. Clothing that looked distressingly familiar. He looked up to see Kyoko sitting dead-center on his bed, the covers and duvet wrapped up around her like a cocoon. Only her head was visible. He blinked several times and tilted his head, trying in vain to make sense of what was in front of him.

Where are we now? What's happening?

He knelt down and scooped up the clothing in one hand, unable to process what he was seeing. These were her clothes. The clothes she had been wearing. The clothes she had walked into his apartment wearing.

Tonight.

In that moment, his brain was reduced to exactly one gear trying and failing to turn against a century's worth of rust and cobwebs. All thought ceased in that moment, then continued on in a fraught, jagged manner.

She isn't ... she's not ... ? he trailed off silently, hazarding another look in her direction.

The pile of clothes on the floor was one thing, but the curious way she had bundled the covers up to her neck served as another undeniable clue to what was happening here. With a jolt, he realized she had her eyes squarely on his face. Indeed, she had been staring at him since he entered the room. The only way to describe her expression was patient.

But ... she isn't ... fully - ?

His grip tightened, and he felt the unmistakable ridge of an underwire bra in the heap of clothing, shooting that theory to pieces.

Oh ... oh, hell.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked. He meant to sound firm, but the words came out more awestruck than anything. Whatever upper hand he had gained in their struggle was rendered moot in this one move that he could never have predicted, even if he had craved the mere possibility of it with every fiber of his being.

"Do I have to spell it out for you?" she huffed. "You see those are my clothes there. I'm in your bed. Do the math."

His brows raised. He stood up, still clutching the clothes in his fist. He didn't make a move in her direction. It was honestly a toss-up as to who he trusted less, Kyoko or himself.

"Why?" was all he could muster in the moment.

"For god's sake, Kuon ... I thought you were lea -" she choked, "leaving me. And I -"

The tears finally came in earnest then, having been stifled long enough.

"I thought that for the last f-f-four days. And, yes, I've been scared it would happen since we got together. I've been thinking of the end, just as you said. And I was so angry, but I missed you and - and I couldn't stop thinking about you that whole time and - and -"

Her tears and the pain in her voice brought him well within arm's length before he could think better about getting that close to her. She shifted slightly as her hand came up to wipe at her eyes, momentarily revealing a bare shoulder and arm. The sight of it brought him up short.

Eyes up top, eyes on her face, he warned himself as she tucked her arm away. A little skin is not going to change anything. We're going to talk. That's all. Just talk.

She sniffled, hiccuped and kept going. "And even tonight, even when I was mad at you, even though I'm still mad at you, all I can think about is being with you, being i-in this bed with you and forgetting everything else. Like you made me forget last time."

His heart clenched and then sped into a gallop. Amidst the chaos his body had erupted in, Kuon suddenly had the notion that being with Kyoko Mogami meant submitting to a lifetime of whiplash. Willingly, yes. Happily, of course. But god help him, the whiplash was entirely too real.

"And I know w-we need to talk, I just - I-I'm not going to be able to focus on talking or anything else until we do this."

It didn't seem medically possible, but his dick somehow managed to get even harder in response to these words. Passing out from such a thing also didn't seem possible, but Kyoko seemed determined to disprove these medical findings as well. He leaned forward, hands braced on the mattress and his head down."

"Kyoko ... if you feel you have to do something," he said, his vision swimming slightly, "you're not ready for, just to keep me here ... I already told you - "

"This isn't about keeping you here," she said softly, sinking deeper into her bundle with another sniffle. "You saw through me once before. I'm not trying to seduce you, Kuon. I clearly don't know how, as you can see."

He raised his head and gawked at her in disbelief. She couldn't be that oblivious. There was no way. Whatever her idea of seduction was, it somehow didn't involve morphing into a distressed damsel, climbing nude into a man's bed and asking him to prove his devotion to her physically? With a look on her face like she was going to wither to dust at any moment if she didn't have him?

This had to be a joke. Or another trick. Maybe even a mind game, similar to the one she had played with him previous days.

Kuon took one more look at the beautiful, tear-streaked face and knew this wasn't any such thing.

This was real.

This was happening.

Somehow, this was happening.

This could just be the setup to another whiplash. She hasn't actually asked me to do anything, he thought desperately. Maybe this is some kind of trust exercise?

"You asked me what I needed. This is what I need," she said, "You said it yourself, Kuon. Do you remember?"

He blinked rapidly, trying to think back. "What did I say?"

"That I was willing to go to bed with you even feeling the way I do about this whole thing," she shyly reminded him. "That wasn't acting, Kuon, and I ..."

Her eyes were on his face, suddenly alight with an awareness of how he was holding himself so rigidly apart from her. She caught the way his eyes would flick guiltily down to her exposed shoulder before returning upwards, his tongue nervously wetting his top lip every so often as he tried and failed to look elsewhere. She watched him closely as she lifted her arm back out of her nest. She brought her hand up slowly and pushed her hair out of where it had fallen in front of her face. He followed the motion of her arm, tracing every inch as though compelled by a force greater than himself. Then he seemed to catch himself, only to meet her unwavering stare and realize that he had betrayed himself.

"I wasn't acting in the parking lot either," she blurted out.

He blinked a few times, once again thrown off. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean ... when you kissed me. And I didn't stop you."

She felt something akin to power stirring inside her at the sight of this big, powerful man held in awe of her bare arm and her sudden audacity. This had long since ceased to be a game of one-upping or out-maneuvering. All that was left was this aching need, this specter of loneliness that only he had the power to vanquish. If she had to wring that power from him with her bare hands, then so be it.

"If you had wanted me there, you could have had me there."

Kuon straightened, the shock on his face almost masking the lust he felt.

Almost.

You're not immune to me, she thought as she slowly released her grip on the blankets. I can't resist you, but you can't resist me either.

Kuon felt something like a crisis threatening to overtake him as she looked at him with eyes like molten gold. She hadn't really just said that to him, had she? Was he losing his mind? Was this all a near-death hallucination? Some feverish wet dream? Why else would his mind's eye suddenly be flooded with images of the two of them fucking against a streetlight?

He shook his head, yanking himself back into the present moment with an effort. "I-I wouldn't have done a thing like that!"

"I know you wouldn't have," she whispered. "But I would have let you. If you had."

"I ... Just -"

He froze for a second, hearing the rustle of the covers as her limbs began to move more freely underneath them.

"Just," he asked, swaying a bit, "tell me what you need."

Silence.

"Kyoko-chan ...?"

Without warning, Kyoko crawled out of her cocoon of sheets, prowling the short distance between them on her hands and knees. He inhaled sharply as his traitorous eyes fell from her face to confirm what he already knew, but with one other twist he hadn't seen coming.

The only thing she was wearing was his pendant necklace.

I've dreamt of this moment, he thought rather pitifully, utterly shattered by how much she exceeded the perfection he had envisioned.

He opened his mouth to say something, though God only knew what that could have been. Nothing was coming out because all he could hear was his own blood pounding like the tide in his ears and all he could see was five feet and three divine inches of soft skin encasing an elegant fusion of defined curves and balletic musculature.

He felt his jaw slacken as an age-old impulse took hold of him. The impulse that begged: I will lay jewels at your feet, I will carve stone monuments, I will walk through fire, I will throw myself off a cliff, I will do anything you ask, only let me look a moment longer.

She got up on her knees, almost eye-to-eye with him thanks to the plush mattress. He closed his own eyes and took a deep breath, trying to give himself a snowball's chance in hell of getting a grip on his sanity. This proved to be fatally useless as he felt her arms sliding around his neck. Without meaning to he clasped her around the waist in turn, reflexively trying to steady her lest she topple off the edge of the bed. He marveled at the unfiltered feel of her body pressing against him. Even through his clothes he could feel how scalding hot she was to the touch; his hands felt like they would melt at any second.

She drew him closer to her as surely as a mermaid wrapping a shipwrecked sailor in a seaweed tangle. She rubbed her nose against his, and he sucked in a ragged breath as though drawing on the salty sea air one last time before this bewitching creature could finish pulling him under the surf.

"I need you," she whispered against his mouth, "to prove it to me."

*Megami = Goddess. It's Kyoko's industry nickname.

Till next time!