Chapter 2: Heavenly Restriction
He did eat a lot. That was the first thing you learned about Toji Fushiguro the old-fashioned way.
He ate four bowls of rice for breakfast on the first morning, and six eggs, and all the grilled mackerel you'd bought for the week, and then went through your cupboards with the methodical thoroughness of a man casing a building, and ate a packet of rice crackers standing up. He watched the boat races on your tiny television with the sound turned all the way down and swore at the screen in a low, continuous mutter, and when you asked him who he'd bet on, he said "Number four," and when number four came in last, he said nothing at all for twenty minutes.
He slept on your couch with his feet hanging off the end and the inventory curse coiled on the floor beside him like a dog. You came out at three in the morning for water, and he was awake, lying on his back in the dark, staring at the ceiling. You both pretended he wasn't.
The second thing you learned was that he moved through your shop like he'd lived there for years. He checked every door and window on the first afternoon, frowning at your wards like a man looking at a burglar alarm made of tinsel. He reinforced the back door with a steel bar he got from somewhere. He found the loose floorboard on the stairs, and the gap under the shop window, and the place in the alley where someone could climb onto the roof of the hostess bar next door and drop onto yours. "Sloppy," he said, about all of it. Then, about your wards, more slowly: "Smart, though. For sorcerers. Smart."
The third thing you learned was that he watched you. He watched you work at the bench, your loupe in your eye and a cursed tool in your hand. He watched you cook. He watched you read a set of old Edo-period tantō for a dealer in Osaka, your fingers on the steel and your eyes going distant, and when you came back to yourself, white and sweating, he was crouched beside your stool with a glass of water, not touching you, just there.
"What'd you see?" he said.
"A man who killed his brother over a woman. Three hundred years ago." You drank. Your hand shook. "And then the woman killed him."
"Good for her," said Toji, and you laughed despite yourself, and he looked at you laughing like you'd done something astonishing.
On the second night it rained, hard, drumming on the corrugated roof of the hostess bar next door. He'd taken a shower and come out in nothing but the loose black trousers, towelling his hair, and you were sitting on the floor with your back against the couch pretending to read a catalogue, pretending not to look.
You'd seen bodies. Reading tools meant seeing bodies, in flashes, through a hundred years of violence. You'd never seen one like his: heavy shoulders, a broad chest, a stomach cut into hard ridges, and scars. A lot of scars, small and pale and old, like a map of every fight he'd ever walked out of. He'd been made to be a weapon, by the restriction or the Zen'in or both, and he'd made sure he was the best one in the world.
"You're staring," he said.
"I'm appraising."
"Yeah?" He dropped the towel on the arm of the couch and sat down on the floor next to you, close enough that his shoulder was against yours. He was warm from the shower. "What am I worth?"
"I can't read you, remember. I'd have to guess."
"So guess."
You turned your head. He was already looking at you, and his eyes were not bored and not lazy and not anything you could put a word to. Just very green, and very close, and waiting.
"I think you're worth a lot more than thirty million yen," you said quietly. "I think nobody's ever told you that, and I think you'd hate it if I did."
Something moved behind his face. He didn't look away.
"Can't read me," Toji said, low. "But you keep doing that."
"Doing what?"
"Getting it right."
You didn't know who moved first. You thought about it afterwards and genuinely couldn't tell. One second there was an inch of air between your mouths and the next there wasn't, and his hand was on the side of your neck, and he was kissing you, slow and deep, his thumb tilting your jaw up, the scar on his lip rough against your mouth. He kissed like he fought: no wasted movement, total focus, all of him in it at once.
You made a sound into his mouth and he pulled back.
Barely. An inch. His forehead against yours, his breath uneven.
"Tell me to stop," he said, "and I stop. Right now. I go back to the couch and we never talk about it."
"Don't stop."
"You sure?" His hand stayed on your neck, very still. "I'm not a good guy, sweetheart. You read the spear. You know what I've done."
"I know what you've done," you said. "I don't know you. I want to." You put your hand on his chest, over his heart, and felt it slamming. "Yes, Toji. I'm sure. Please."
He let out a breath like something giving way.
Then he picked you up off the floor like you weighed nothing and carried you to your bedroom with the rain hammering on the roof, and kicked the door shut behind him.
He undressed you slowly, which you hadn't expected. He pulled your sweater over your head and then just looked at you for a long moment in the grey light from the window, and then he bent his head and kissed your shoulder, the hollow of your throat, the top of your breast, as if he was learning a building he meant to come back to. His hands were enormous and rough and very careful. When he unhooked your bra, he did it with one hand, and he grinned, quick and crooked, when you rolled your eyes.
"Show-off," you said.
"I'm good with my hands," said Toji, and then proved it.
He laid you back on the bed and kissed his way down your body, unhurried, his stubble scraping over your ribs and your stomach and the inside of your hip, and when he pulled your underwear down your legs and settled between your thighs, he looked up at you, his eyes dark.
"Yeah?"
"Yes," you said, and he put his mouth on you.
You stopped thinking. You stopped being able to. He licked into you slow and filthy, his hands gripping your thighs to hold you open, his tongue finding your clit and circling, and then flattening, and then circling again, learning you with that same total focus until you were gasping and clutching at his hair. He pushed two thick fingers into you and crooked them and you heard yourself cry out, loud, over the rain. He hummed against you, pleased, and didn't stop. He didn't stop when you started shaking. He didn't stop when your hips bucked against his mouth and he had to pin you down with one forearm across your stomach. He kept going, relentless and steady, until you came apart under him with your back arching off the bed and his name breaking out of you.
He kissed the inside of your thigh while you came down. Then he crawled back up your body and kissed your mouth, and you could taste yourself on him.
"Again?" he murmured.
"Toji..."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a no," you agreed, breathless, and reached for the waistband of his trousers.
He was big. You'd expected that, and it still made you catch your breath when he kicked the trousers off and knelt between your legs, thick and hard and flushed dark, and you wrapped your hand around him and stroked him once, slowly, and watched the Sorcerer Killer close his eyes and groan through his teeth like he'd been shot.
"Fuck," he said. "Keep doing that and this'll be real short."
"Then don't make me wait."
He reached for the drawer you pointed at, and then he was over you, braced on his forearms, the head of him pressing against you, and he stopped. Looked at you. Waited.
"Yes," you said. "Yes, Toji. Now."
He pushed into you in one long, slow, unstoppable slide, and you both made a sound at the same time, and then he was all the way in, and you were full of him, stretched around him, your nails digging into his back. He held there, breathing hard, his face pressed into your neck.
"You okay?" Rough. Barely holding on.
"Move," you said. "Please. I need you to move."
He moved. Slow at first, long deep strokes that you felt everywhere, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in until his hips met yours. Then harder. He hooked one arm under your knee and pulled it up against his ribs, and the new angle made you cry out, and he did it again, and again, his strength completely unleashed and completely controlled, every stroke driving the breath out of you. The headboard hit the wall. The rain drowned it out. You wrapped your arms around his shoulders and held on, and he watched your face the whole time, every flinch and gasp and moan, the same way he'd watched you read the spear.
"There," he said hoarsely. "That's it. Let me see."
You came for the second time with his name in your mouth and his hand on your jaw, keeping your eyes on his. He followed a moment later, his rhythm breaking, his hips jerking hard against you, a low, raw sound torn out of his chest as he buried his face in your hair and shook.
Afterwards he didn't go back to the couch. He lay on his back in your bed with you sprawled across his chest, and he traced slow circles on your bare shoulder with two fingers, and he didn't say anything for a long time.
"I could get used to this," he said at last, to the ceiling. He sounded like he hated it.
"To what?"
"Breakfast." His hand slid into your hair. "Somebody who notices if I'm awake at three."
You opened your mouth to answer, and his phone buzzed on the bedside table.
He looked at the screen. His whole body went still beneath you, still in a way that wasn't relaxed. It was the stillness you'd felt through the spear, a second before it moved.
He answered. "Yeah."
You heard Shiu's voice, small and tinny. Toji listened for maybe ten seconds. Then he said "Got it," and hung up, and lay there.
"Who was it?" you asked. "What did he say?"
Toji sat up. He reached for his trousers. The inventory curse was already uncoiling on the floor at the foot of the bed, sensing something you couldn't.
"Zen'in clan found out I passed on the job," he said. "And who I passed it for. They're not sending a freelancer anymore." His mouth twisted, and for the first time since you'd met him, you saw something that might have been fear in it. Not for himself. "They're sending the Hei. Tonight."