With their house's liveliness lapsed to quiet, and the looming summer rain hanging heavy in the air, Tang Fan seizes upon a temptingly rare proposition of opportunity. She coaxes Sui Zhou to her room, baiting the lure with a reminder that it sees less sun for the hour than the master wing. Once they are both ensconced in the encroaching shadows of the day's turn, she then poses her offering: the weather is choking enough without the suffocation of all their clothes. They are expecting no visitors, and the prop of something against the sliding door will snatch the surprise from the arrival of anyone unannounced.

Assured by that — or at least appeased, if nothing else — Sui Zhou agrees. Capitulation comes in the slow furl of her fingers in her belt; the lazy slackening of her robe's collar from her throat, the petal of the cotton from her shoulders. Tang Fan is captivated by her— the stubble pearling her jaw; the small, taut crescents of her breasts. The scars scattered over the prairie of her sun-kissed skin. She stares her fill until her mouth is dry and Sui Zhou is bare, and still she finds herself wanting.

"I have been thinking on a new story," she says, as Sui Zhou crosses between them and sets, unasked, to her undressing. "A licentiate, having placed well in the provincial examinations, prepares to embark on the leg of the journey that will take him to the next." The catch of her breath, here, as Sui Zhou's fingers graze her soft belly almost feels too poetic. Grave on her tongue, like tea at a wedding. "On the night of his departure, his father dreams a vision of great fanfare, a prophetic glimpse into his son's future…"

It does not matter, truly, what she is saying. The meaning lies in the very saying of it; how its due lulls and drawls allow for Sui Zhou to hum and nod, attentive less on that than on her work of pooling Tang Fan's robes at her ankles. She goes to her knees with her militaristic efficiency; lingers, even after she has peeled Tang Fan's trousers down from her thighs, for the heady exhale that pets over her cock, soft in the nest of her lap.

Tang Fan wants to bed her hand in Sui Zhou's hair; to steady her as she presses against her full lips, pushes into the wet heat of her mouth. Sui Zhou would take it gladly, and well, as she so often does. As she so readily allows. But the moment passes, and Sui Zhou stands again.

She has other plans for them. "Come to bed," she tells Sui Zhou, eyelids hooded, chin lofting high. "Take the sun on your back so I can see my pages while I write."

"All right," says Sui Zhou, with such fondness in her cadence that she may as well have asked Is that all?

In spite of the heat, or because of it, Tang Fan orchestrates it so that their bodies are most intricately met together: lounged in repose at opposite ends to her bed, one of Sui Zhou's legs threaded between her own. Tang Fan can feel Sui Zhou's cunt pressed flush to the underside of her thigh; the dampness of her folds where they've spread apart, the scuff of the coarse hairs on her mound. It sparks a syrupy heat low in Tang Fan's belly; stirs her cock just as lazily.

Tang Fan leafs her papers back up from her bed, then props an arm up on Sui Zhou's shin to steady them before her face. The hand that should be wielding her pen, however, finds its intended way down between the join of their bodies, settling on Sui Zhou's thigh. She traces her nails through the hairs, there, and relishes, nonprivately, the quiet stutter in Sui Zhou's exhale; the way her shiver flinches through the muscle.

Sui Zhou is the most beautiful woman Tang Fan has ever seen; the most handsome. Exemplary of something truly heavenly, wonder-encompassing. Infatuated from the start, it is both her frustration and her fortune, now, to call Sui Zhou wife. To be what they were; to have since been promised what will come.

As they are, of one moment transgressing to another, Tang Fan is steadily graced with a sight she will never tire of: how good Sui Zhou looks when she greets a calm. Slowly, surely, the tension Sui Zhou is spooled so stranglingly around sleets from her body, just like the sweat that dapples her skin and sticks them together, slippery-warm. It fills Tang Fan's head with the most poignant of inspiration— yet she keeps her pen stayed, and hoards the vision from her paper.

She burns through a joss stick of time like that, certain that Sui Zhou realised the full scope of her indolence at least by half. Then,

"How goes your draft?" Sui Zhou finally asks. Velvet voice as sparing as her glance up from the book she plucked from one of the piles framing Tang Fan's canopy. Shadow is starting to drape across her shoulders, now, like a shroud.

"Who could write on a day like this?" Tang Fan sighs, put upon. "Heat thicker than what could be cut by the wittiest thought. Be reasonable, Guangchuan."

"Mm," says Sui Zhou, wise save for the smile that tugs at her mouth. She turns a page, having not even read the last.

Tang Fan squirms, half-pointed, more-clumsy, until she is better slumped in the embrace of Sui Zhou's body, breast pressed to her calf. "Ah, be still," she pre-empts, only to yet then fail to chide when Sui Zhou neglects to abide, bracing her foot against the bedframe to better carry Tang Fan's puddling weight.

Tang Fan's mind will surely itch against this comfort, with eventuality, and then her body will follow that call to action. She can never stand to be still for long, despite every want. For now, however, she is content to simply idle in her admiration. Monotony is a blessing she has learned, these days past, to always welcome in its every visitation.