fruitjuicer

Tang Fan tests the give of their grasp, and finds she can lift her palm unimpeded, like the lock to a latch. "Shameless," she decries. "I've wedded an animal for a wife."

"So you have," Sui Zhou does not dispute, seamless.

Sui Zhou wants to reach to her, to speak her reassurances with her hands, as she's always best phrased herself. But she has the predilection of knowing this impulse is not the wisest, here; not in unfriendly territory, not on duty, not mid-chastisement. So she stays still. Servility is its own affection.

Yin Ya, flowing resistless, imagines a wife laying beneath her husband's mirrory ministrations, enthused but artless. The love she must feel for him to tolerate it. And then he laughs, because he understands her, and recognises it is not toleration she forbears at all. Nothing so near it.

"Why should I be embarrassed?" Yin Ya chips, huffy. Certainly he had not planned to lay himself in a garden bed somewhere until some late hour before sneaking back to his quarters, seduced by the confidence that the guards are still too unaccustomed to his tricks to either catch or much bother him. "After the Dragon Lord spanks you in front of the Capital, don't you go home in his carriage and sulk across from his hall?"

When Sui Zhou first allowed himself this such fondness — when he surrendered himself not to immutable want but its mutual return — he did not know how he was meant to survive it.

"Can a river be cured of water?" Yin Ya counters at last, heavy. "This is my nature."

Though Yin Ya is as malicious in his obeisance as obedience does permit, it helps little in sparing him.

"I've had my turn of talking," Yin Ya says, with some strange voice — not his, nor a woman's — perhaps owed to how fat his own tongue seems behind his teeth. "Why don't you tell me something."

Though they must be gone early come morning, they drink well into the night.

The aches of Tang Fan's mouth and back are so slight, in this contrast, that it is practically permissible to unlatch from their anchor. To pretend that last night's rescue was a dream; the ambush a nightmare. But while such cowardice is no longer unbecoming, Sui Zhou deserves more than that from him.