Chapter 2: Every Minute
You spend a month telling yourself you won't.
You tell yourself in the shower and in the car and at the Kyoto branch's administrative office, where you file your monthly seal report and write Status: stable, and do not write The King of Curses touched my mouth and I let him. You tell yourself while you spar with a grade-two exorcist who is very nice and very boring and asks you to dinner afterward. You go. You talk about barrier theory for two hours. He does not once tell you that your daikon has suffered, and you go home and lie awake for a long time.
You tell yourself all the way up the wet steps on the eighth new moon. You haven't brought a cooler. You've brought nothing at all. You told yourself that was because you forgot.
He's not on the veranda. The doors of the main hall are open, lantern light spilling gold across the boards, and when you step inside he is sitting cross-legged in the centre of the old tatami with his eyes closed, all four hands resting palm-up on his knees like a parody of meditation.
"No food," he says, eyes still closed.
"No."
"No book."
"No."
The upper eyes open. Then the lower. They go over you slowly, the way he looked at the daikon, as if he's grading you for ripeness. You wore a yukata. It's dark blue with a pattern of white bellflowers. You told yourself that was because it was hot.
"Well," Sukuna says. "Look at that."
You stand just inside the threshold. You can feel the vow at your back, steady and humming, rule three wrapped around you like armour. Nothing in this room can hurt you. Everything in this room can hurt you.
"I'm asking," you say.
He doesn't move. His face goes very still, very interested, a predator who has heard grass move.
"Asking what?" he says. "Say it properly, keeper. You're a barrier specialist. You know how much depends on the wording."
You walk across the tatami. You stop right in front of him, close enough that the heat of his cursed energy presses against your shins, and you look down at the King of Curses for the first time in your life.
"I want you," you say. "Tonight. All of it. I'm asking for every minute."
For a second there's nothing. Then he unfolds.
He rises in one movement, all that height uncoiling, until you have to tip your head back to keep his eyes, and his upper hands come up to cradle your jaw while his lower hands settle on your hips, and he holds you like that, all four hands, without doing anything else. You can feel him breathing. You can feel the vow shimmer and let him through, everywhere he touches.
"Good," he says, very softly. "That was very good."
Then he kisses you.
It isn't gentle and it isn't cruel. It's thorough. He kisses you as if he's going to cook you, slow and with total attention, tasting, adjusting. His mouth is hot and his teeth are sharp and he uses them only to drag at your lower lip, and when you gasp, he takes that too. One hand slides into your hair and tilts your head to the angle he wants. Another finds the knot of your obi at the small of your back and simply holds it, as if letting you know where it is.
You grab the front of his kimono in both fists and kiss him back, hard, and he makes a low, pleased sound against your mouth that you feel all the way down your spine.
"Impatient," he murmurs.
"I've had a month."
"I've had a thousand years." His lower hand pulls, and your obi gives. "You'll survive one more minute."
He undresses you like he filleted that mackerel, with insulting precision, the yukata sliding off your shoulders and pooling at your feet, every inch of you laid open under the lantern light. He looks. He takes his time looking. Four eyes is an unfair number of eyes to be looked at with; there's nowhere on your body they're not, and your skin heats in a wave from your throat to your thighs.
"Stop staring," you tell him, and your voice shakes.
"I'm supervising," Sukuna says, and you laugh, helplessly, right in the middle of everything. His mouth curves. He liked that. He catches your laugh with his mouth and walks you backwards across the tatami until your back meets one of the great cedar pillars of the hall, the one you lay your hands on every month to tie him down.
The wood is cool. He is not. He shrugs the kimono off his own shoulders and it falls away, and he's all heavy muscle and black markings, the lines of his curse banding his arms and chest, the seam of the second mouth across his stomach shut tight. He presses you into the pillar with the length of his body and you feel exactly how much he wants this, hard and hot against your belly, and your knees go loose.
His hands are everywhere at once. That's the thing you hadn't let yourself picture properly, in the long month of not picturing it. One hand at your jaw, thumb on your pulse. One sliding down your side, learning the curve of your ribs. One cupping your breast, his thumb circling until your nipple tightens and you arch into it. And the fourth, the lower right, moving slow down your stomach, over your hip, down.
He stops there, his fingers resting at the top of your thigh. His upper eyes are on your face. His lower eyes are watching where his hand is.
"Ask," he says.
"I already..."
"You asked for the night. Now ask for this." His thumb strokes the crease of your hip, back and forth, maddening. "I want to hear it every time, keeper. That's my price."
You think, distantly, that this is the most dangerous negotiation of your career. "Touch me," you say. "Please."
He does. His fingers slide between your thighs and find you already wet, and he exhales through his teeth like a man tasting something he's been promised. He strokes you, slow, exploring, the rough pads of his fingers learning what makes you shudder and what makes you gasp, and then circling exactly there, over and over, with that same awful precision, until your head drops back against the pillar and your hands scrabble at his shoulders.
"Look at me," he says. You do. His thumb at your pulse feels it race. "There. That's what I wanted to see. Not afraid. Not proud. Just this."
He pushes one finger into you, then two, curling, and his thumb keeps up its circling, and his mouth comes down on your throat, his teeth closing on the tendon there not hard enough to bruise, and it's too much. It's four hands and one mouth and a thousand years of attention and you come apart against the pillar with a cry that rings off the rafters, your thighs clamping around his wrist, your nails digging into the black lines on his shoulders.
He holds you through it. He doesn't stop until you're shaking and pushing at his hand, and then he does stop, instantly, and lifts his fingers to his mouth and licks them clean, watching you over them with all four eyes.
"Hm," Sukuna says. "Better than the mackerel."
"You," you pant, "are unbearable."
"And you're not finished." He picks you up as if you weigh nothing, two hands under your thighs, two at your back, and carries you to the middle of the hall where someone, at some point this month, has laid a futon on the old tatami. You stare at it.
"You planned this."
"I had a month." He lays you down on it and follows you, braced over you on his upper arms, his lower hands spreading your knees. "I spent it well."
The tip of him presses against you and he stops again. You could scream. The lantern light catches the markings on his face and the red of his eyes, and for once he isn't smiling, isn't anything but intent.
"Ask," he says, roughly.
You wrap your legs around his hips. "I want you inside me. Now. Every minute, Sukuna. Take all of them."
It's the first time you've ever said his name to him.
Something happens in his face that you will think about for a long time. Then he sinks into you, slow, unrelenting, filling you inch by inch until he's buried to the hilt and you're gasping at the stretch of it, clutching at his back. He holds there, his forehead almost touching yours, his breath ragged, and you realise that he is shaking too, very slightly, like a blade held too long at full tension.
"Say it again," he says.
"Sukuna."
He moves. Long, deep strokes at first, pulling almost all the way out and driving back in, and every time he fills you, your whole body lights. His lower hands lift your hips to change the angle and the next stroke hits something that makes you cry out, and he does it again, and again, relentless, his upper hands braced on either side of your head, his eyes never once leaving your face.
"There," he growls. "Right there. Don't hide it from me."
You don't. You couldn't if you tried. He fucks you with the same attention he gave the knife-work, adjusting at every sound you make, deeper when you moan, harder when you dig your heels into his back, slow and grinding when you start to fall apart, so that you're held right on the edge of it for what feels like hours. Sweat slicks his chest. The markings on his skin seem to darken. Cursed energy rolls off him in waves and laps against the vow around you and the vow lets every bit of it through, because none of it is harm.
When you come the second time it's with your mouth on his shoulder and your hands fisted in his hair and his name broken into pieces. He follows you a few strokes later with a low, savage sound you feel in your bones, his hips stuttering, all four arms closing around you at once and crushing you to his chest as if the seal might drag him under right now and he means to take you with him.
He doesn't let go afterward. You'd expected him to. You'd expected mockery, or boredom, or the slow sneer of a man who has had what he wanted. Instead, the King of Curses lies on his side on a futon he set out himself and holds you against him with three arms, while the fourth draws slow, idle lines up and down your spine.
"How many minutes?" you ask, when you can talk.
"We've used a hundred and forty." His fingers walk up your vertebrae. "There are two hundred and sixty-one left."
"You counted."
"I said I'd use every one." He bites your shoulder, lightly. "I'm not finished. I've barely started."
He isn't lying. He uses them all.
The sky is going grey at the edges of the open doors, and you are half asleep and wholly ruined, when he goes rigid against you.
All four eyes open. He's looking at the doorway, past it, down the long slope of the grounds toward the outer torii.
"Stay here," he says.
"What..." But he's gone, out of your arms and through the doors faster than your eyes can follow, and a second later you feel it: a ripple through the outer barrier, a needle of foreign cursed energy sliding through a gap you didn't know was there. Someone came through the torii while the seal was loose.
Then a sound like a sheet of silk being torn very fast, and then nothing.
You stumble to the doors, the yukata clutched around you. Down at the foot of the slope, just inside the outer torii, at the absolute edge of where he's allowed to stand, Sukuna is looking down at something on the steps. When he turns and walks back up to you, his hands are clean and his face is calm, and he is holding a short blade with a black lacquered hilt.
"A man came through your gate with this," he says. "He was moving very quietly, toward you. Toward your back." He tosses it onto the boards at your feet. On the hilt, very small, there's a crest you recognise: the stylised barrier mark that, until tonight, you thought belonged only to your own family.
"Kill the keeper," Sukuna says softly, "and the seal breaks. Someone wants me out, keeper. And someone gave them your key."