This was completely self indulgent of me, I'll be completely honest. But I'm very interested in historical views on sex, marriage and love... so this was born. Watch out, it's... a little smutty and crude in places.

Huge thanks to animaniacal for beta'ing... you are a blessing for sifting through all this, my dear!

She saw her first shunga when she was twelve. Back then she had found it extraordinarily silly, and had laughed point blank upon its presentation to her. The man and woman painted on the rough textured paper were contorted into strange shapes, arching around each other and melding into a long, slithering mass of human flesh and hair. Their genitals looked over-exaggerated and quite strange as they joined, as the different players in this peculiar performance bent their limbs and backs to make love.

"What is this, haha-ue, some sort of joke?" she asked, poking her fingers at the page, in particular at the mushrooming head of the man's penis, where it just barely peeked out into view from its place inside his partner. "How am I going to learn anything from this?"

"Please behave yourself, Izayoi."

"What does it mean?" she pressed, still curious despite her initial disgust. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to take away from this.

"I will tell you when you're good and ready for that! This is only to get you used to the idea," her mother said sagely, folding her hands over her lap and tipping her head forward. She had a very serious expression on her face and Izayoi swallowed the sudden lump of anxiety in her throat. "The relationship between men and women is… it's very important."

"It looks uncomfortable and stupid."

"It's very important," her mother repeated again, her face only showing the teeniest hint of amusement peeking through her veil of dignity.

That had been many years ago.

Izayoi had grown up since then, as everyone does, but she never forgot the feeling of repulsion and nervousness that the images had wrought in her, the wrongness of it. It wasn't sex itself that made her nervous. It was her fate at the hands of unknown men. If she was lucky she might be as euphoric and wanton as the women in her scrolls and woodcuts, but if she wasn't? She didn't know what awaited her—and that was really what it all came down to. At nearly eighteen she'd still had no physical experience with the opposite sex.

The servants had always talked a great deal when they should have been working. Some of them went on at length about their lovers and paramours, and the bluntness with which they spoke was shocking to Izayoi—some liked it very much, others hated it. Some women had none at all, others had a new man every week and never got caught.

But she wasn't given the chance to live like that. She hadn't been born to the life of a servant girl—a painful, laboring life, to be sure, but one that didn't revolve so much around maintaining a good reputation. Hers was a different kind of sexuality from that of the servant girls—they could do what they liked with little enough trouble, and take their pleasure when and where they wanted. But Izayoi was required to wait until the timing was perfect.

It was unpleasant to think about, but she took it at face value. This was the purpose of sex for her: it was simply a function of her body, one that she would deal with when the time came. She would lie with her husband and bear him children, as women did, would look over her household and entertain herself in acceptable, respectable ways. In time, sex and the responsibility it would bring would be her life's purpose.

But until then, her sexuality lay dormant beneath her skin, like a scratch she kept forgetting to itch.

o0o

One of the few things that she had come to understand was that compared to men, women were forever doomed to be conflicted, or perhaps incomplete. Men were a diverse group, with the freedom to call themselves what they liked and behave how l they saw fit. But women were always getting categorized in one way or another, and she was no exception. Already she'd been funneled into a description of herself that didn't quite match reality. Izayoi was a princess by birth and thus she was soft, feminine, and quiet. But this was only the face that men saw, that her father had instilled in her and that her suitors delighted in.

The other side of her was as stubborn as a mule, picky to a fault, always frightening away the men who came in pursuit of her for a wife. She drew pictures of plants and morbid, abstract things, and was fascinated with the supernatural. Her face was pretty, to be sure, and she had no doubts about the extent of her beauty, but she fought viciously with her ladies in waiting over her morning toilet. They were not to paint her face and teeth, and they were not to pluck her dark brows. Izayoi knew she was misbehaving and she didn't care at all. With her mother she was louder and more boisterous than she would've dared to be with her father, laughing until she snorted or crying fat, ugly tears. And yet, still, to the masculine world, she was only a princess, as gentle and static as a doll.

This particular view of her, like many other things in life, extended into romance, intimacy, and sex.

For instance, the dichotomy of wife versus mistress, which she had seen in her very own home. Her father had only one wife, and from what Izayoi understood, he was as fond of her as any man towards his wife. Her mother was the woman who stayed by his side at all times, who comforted him, who had given birth to his only beloved daughter. And yet, despite the relative comfort of their marriage, he also maintained a small group of mistresses. These were women of many different ages, from as old as her own mother to some young enough to be Izayoi's older sisters. She wondered at it, at these women with whom she had been raised and who were even her friends. They treated Izayoi like she was a member of their own family, despite the fact that their only tenuous connection to her was that they were sleeping with her father.

Stranger still, when Izayoi asked her mother what it all meant, she only smiled fondly and said that she was thankful to these women. After all, they were responsible in good part for their marital success, because when wife and husband grew tired of each other there was always another woman waiting to receive. Izayoi couldn't quite wrap her head around it—she had been told from an early age that her duty was to marry, that marriage was the only option, and yet her own family seemed unperturbed by this little clan of unwed women.

"Why couldn't I just be somebody's mistress?" she asked, naively.

Her mother's mouth dropped in shock, her eyes flashing with something like scandal. "You mustn't talk that way. God forbid your father hears you!"

"I don't understand! You just got through telling me how much you like chichi-ue's mistresses," she went on. "Why shouldn't I consider becoming one?"

"I may like them, but it's not an enviable position," her mother explained, shaking her head. "They will never be respected like I am. Their children will never be recognized like you are. That is not a life I wish for you."

"Oh," she said, understanding it all at once.

So it seemed you could be a wife, demure and submissive and willing to receive with open arms, or you could be a common mistress, slaking your master's desire by whatever means necessary. Being a wife meant you were respected; but being a mistress meant you were ranked above and beyond your means. After all, these women were eating among nobles, sitting beside them and whispering suggestions into their powerful lovers' ears.

Izayoi had never heard of her mother taking another man, and she certainly did not have the same open, transparent group of partners that her father was allowed. In return for respect, she was unable to care for her own desires. In return for a mistress's power, they would never be respected fully.

But then, that was in theory. All Izayoi had ever known was theory, and it was her wealthier cousins who had explained to her what she'd seen in their own homes, among people who followed different rules. It was not that wives could not have affairs, could not take lovers in secret; it was that they must create the appearance of being discreet, of having good taste. Izayoi had never been a stringent follower of good taste, and her family's pressure on her to perform as the beautiful and noble princess of a dying house had convinced her that sex was a mistake.

No, Izayoi was not like her wealthier cousins and aunts—women who'd been bred to ooze class and elegance, to know the ins and outs of conducting a good affair. They wrote poems, were subtle in their suggestions, and knew when and how to break things off. But she was isolated and sheltered; she knew absolutely nothing and so she stumbled into her sexual awakening headfirst and fearful. Her mother spoke of it in vague terms, a sign of her own good breeding, but without the context of the wealthy home her mother had had, Izayoi was lost.

So instead, she listened with careful ears to the things her maids said in secret, the conversations they believed she couldn't hear:

"Hakuro was so rough with me, I couldn't wait for him to finish-"

"You poor thing! Mine's so attentive, he eats me like he's starving!"

"Hm, let's trade."

-and then there might be a chorus of titters, or appreciative hums, or empathetic sighs from them all. These things were common to them and of little note, but to her they were like pearls, hidden gems of information that she simply couldn't find elsewhere. If she asked outright nobody would tell her, but she absorbed knowledge in secret like she were a hungry child, starving for nourishment and eager to grow.

o0o

Something changed when she met the daiyōkai in the woods. At first, of course, she was good and scared of him—with very good reason, for he was as imposing as a mountain and as sharp as a dagger. But she got used to him, and soon she stopped fearing his fangs and the claws, and instead saw him as a sort of… peculiar version of a man. He was sophisticated, due simply to his age, but also honest and occasionally brutal. Izayoi grew fond of his peculiarities and found that she liked him a great deal. The Inu no Taishō was excellent company, because he never tiptoed around her the way other people did. If he had something to say he simply said it, without worrying whether it might be indecent or not, and he indulged her vast curiosity with stories and conversation.

She found that the longer she knew him, the more her feelings began to spin out of control, until she was infatuated with the very thought of him beside her. It was so simple and so innocent that at first she mistook it for budding friendship. Of course she should like to see him—he was her dearest companion and a source of unending information. But that couldn't explain away the other feelings that began their slow but unstoppable bloom. Izayoi convinced herself for a little while that anyone would feel this way about him: he was tall, strong, absolutely beautiful despite his unusual features. His lips curved in a way that struck her as being immensely clever, his eyes intense one moment and then soft the next like they were molten gold, constantly shifting. And he had a pleasant voice, one she thought she could listen to for hours quite happily—calm and even in tone, but deep to the point that she almost thought she felt it reverberating in her own chest when he spoke. All of these things built and built, and with a jolt one evening she came to a certain realization.

Izayoi was attracted to him. No, more than that: she desired him.

Now she understood the whispers of the servant women, of her cousin who spoke about desire like it was as natural as being hungry or thirsting for water. Izayoi burned with want for him, a sensation so base and rooted in instinct that it seemed almost crude.

Uncomplicated though it might have been, it was strong and it influenced everything, from her thoughts to her emotions. It even began to touch her sleep. She dreamt once that he came to her in the middle of the day, breaking their unspoken rule about only meeting at night when nobody could see them. She began to ask why he'd come, but somehow she already knew the answer. It seemed that her dream self had even prepared for this, because she was laid out on her futon like a doll, veiled in silks that draped her body like warm water, in soft, liquidy sheen. The feeling was so tactile and real that she truly believed it.

And he knelt in front of her, saying things she couldn't remember upon waking, his perfect lips dropping down to her neck and kissing her fiercely along her slim, arching throat. The next thing she knew she was bared and so was he, and then like the scrolls she had seen so many times before, their bodies wrapped around each other and melded into one. She saw it as though she were outside of herself, imagining the places his hands would touch and the fast, desperate work of his mouth on hers. When she opened her eyes she was throbbing, her heart pounding in her chest and lights swimming before her eyes. She lay in tremors, the aftershocks rolling over her body with their deep, heady thrum. In all of Izayoi's life she had never felt this way, so high and blissful, and yet so embarrassed and ashamed. The feeling of guilt and excitement lasted for the rest of the day, until at last she was forced to confront what she felt for him.

If she wanted to, she could make a list of reasons to ignore her feelings. It was not an exhaustive one, but every reason was a very good one on its own and could stand against them all on its own.

For one, to desire so blatantly and with such openness was a vulgarity.

Secondly, she expected to become betrothed to the samurai soon. Her energy was better spent preparing for her engagement and this marriage that was absolutely necessary and thus imperative for her to get right.

Third, and most alarming—but not necessarily alarming to her—was that he was a yōkai. It didn't matter what anyone said about affairs and sex; those rules only extended to the realm of human men. Where demons were concerned, the numerous, complex rules distilled down to one: stay away from them at all costs, and certainly don't take one as a lover.

Yes, very good reasons, all compelling, cautioning her in their own ways, and yet she could only think instead about the short list of reasons she should not ignore her feelings. He had an addictive quality about him, one that increased the more she drank in his time and presence; when he was near, her heart soared into her throat and her body craved him, and when he was gone, she felt eager, excited for their next stolen meeting. Their whole situation rang of an old romance, forbidden and wild, delicious and scandalous. The only problem was that she wasn't sure if he thought of her that way—and in fact, she was sure he only saw her as something of an oddity, his human friend, a young woman who had not yet hit her stride.

And yet he was something else to her entirely. He came for her with increasing frequency and spirited her away to his world of beauty and magic and secrets, where he lingered at the edges of her periphery, catching her eye with little flashes of gold and silver —like he was not made of flesh and blood, but stone and precious metal. She did not mean to idolize him. That had never been her intention; she knew that he was prone to bouts of temper and moodiness, silliness, that sometimes when he didn't know what to say to her insatiable curiosity he would blurt out the most offensive, stupid things she'd ever heard. He stumbled occasionally over his words and he was still capable of being surprised. She'd witnessed his face turn red in a hot, ferocious blush.

Perhaps if he had not given her those moments of humanlike imperfection, her feelings would not have become so strong. Izayoi would have gone on thinking of him as only a mononoke, the harbinger of death itself. But now he was simply Taishō, who laughed and shouted and whispered, who smelled perpetually of trees in autumn.

Because of this it became a little too easy to imagine his hands in places they shouldn't be, his face making expressions that she'd never actually seen him make, sounds that had not ever come from his lips. It made her feel ashamed, but it did more than that—it made her knees weak, and her back arch, like she was seeking relief from a deep, terrible aching pain. It was relief that simply wouldn't come.

And so, naturally she was forced to seek relief on her own. Her brain tugged at her incessantly that she must do something, anything, or else she would be left a shuddering, weeping husk of a woman, dead from her own longing. Izayoi could only come up with one solution.

At first it was a very mechanical process. That was alright with her; deep down, she still saw sex as mostly functional, and masturbation was simply an extension of that. She'd done it before, certainly, because she'd been bored or curious. It wasn't exactly new to her.

What was new, however, was the feeling that it left in her. It was quickly done, over her clothing and late at night to quiet the flame enough to let her sleep in peace; but after, in the space between completion and unconsciousness, she felt lonely and vulnerable. Even if she could calm her body, her heart wouldn't be stopped, and she wished for him beside her.

One night it simply stopped working altogether, and she was in an even worse predicament than she'd been before—roiling with desire, unable to slake it by her usual method, and with sleep far beyond her now. Reluctantly, with her eyes and ears trained for any possible movement, anything that would betray her actions, she ducked under her covers and parted the hem of her sleeping kimono and carefully, dipped a finger in past the dark nest of curls where her thighs met. This was not new either, of course; but now she was imagining those fingers belonging to someone else.

Gently, still nervous and wary, she ran little circles over her flesh, trying to get it over and done with quickly but somehow too afraid to move very quickly at all. She reached down a little further and pressed a single finger inside, drawing out the wetness and feeling it spread around—it was exploratory, even though she already knew what it felt like. Her hands now mimicked the actions of someone who'd never touched her before, someone prodding her to learn the secrets of her anatomy. A few more touches, careful, careful touches, and she was at the precipice of a climax. Without warning she envisioned him above her, eyes glinting their ferocious, inhuman yellow in the night's darkness, predatory with lust. She shook and tried not to whimper, laying very still though her legs trembled, and then she turned over and prayed for sleep to take her quickly, so that she wouldn't have to think about what she'd just done.

But that, of course, didn't work for long either. In less time than she liked it was just a hair away from doing the trick, and so now she was forced to pull off her night clothes entirely. Nude bodies were utterly tasteless and forbidden, and yet the feeling of air around her was thrilling, and the sight of her own skin was exciting. Her hands lingered over curves of skin that she'd been so careful not to touch before, feeling around for places that might help her reach her end faster, faster. She gasped and bit down cries as one hand did its filthy work between her legs, stroking in long, hard swipes while another searched over the swell of her abdomen, the dips in her waist, her soft little breasts, her neck, anywhere. Nothing felt half as good as sliding two slender, pale fingers into her mouth to stifle the noises that threatened to rip free, and then, with the slickness left on them, dragging them down her body and back up again. That way, she could almost imagine that they were like kisses left by a lover—she could pretend, could feel the cool air hitting wet skin, and so it was a bit more satisfying. Even still her need grew, untamable and unbearable.

Because now when she saw him, she could only imagine what it might feel like to really have his mouth on her body, what would be different about him touching her the way she touched herself. And when he left her alone again, always with his quiet, mysterious smile lingering in the corners of her mind, she wanted his lips over hers with a passion so fierce it almost hurt.

One night, only moments after he'd left her alone again, she did something so unlike herself that she almost couldn't believe it. She slumped heavily against the wall, working fast to pull her robes off of her shoulders, baring herself to the night air. The hairs on the back of her neck rose suddenly, wondering what he might think if he could see the state she'd worked herself into. What if he saw her now, and he didn't hate her? What if he tilted his head, appraising her, and gave her that smart, satisfied half-smile he wore when she said something sly or funny? Or what if he did more than that—what if he did this too, indulged in this disgusting, undignified act? The thought gave her chills, and she moaned out loud. She rocked her hips against her hand, and without any good reason to stop herself, she imagined.

Yes, what if he was no better than her? What if it was never enough for him either? She plunged two fingers inside, where they fit so nicely, and her head fell back against the wall with a little whump. She bit her lip hard, but she wanted to cry out for him, wanted to be whole so desperately, just this once. With one last, hard flick of her middle finger, she broke completely, shuddering with the effort of staying silent. On her own hands, she felt the proof that it was too late for denial and remorse. The wetness pooled on the floor and was sticky on her fingers.

o0o

Eventually the tides of her fortune turned. She had kissed him first, but it was returned with every last bit of enthusiasm she had for him, his hands sliding into her hair and holding her firmly to him. Dizzy with happiness, utterly breathless, they had kissed nearly the whole night away.

They were not chaste kisses, per say, because once or twice she opened her mouth and felt the slide of his tongue on hers, felt his teeth pull at her lips, but that was okay. There was nothing wrong about these kisses; she didn't know what she was doing, but he was a good teacher. It was done with the utmost gentleness, with absolute respect. Now she was over the first hurdle of their relationship—and as time passed her craving grew from its obsessive, immature nature to one that was more adult. She wanted him to bed her, like she had before, but now that was a real possibility, something she could have a hand in.

Months after that first kiss, she found herself further tempting fate. Her hands would stray from their safe positions on his shoulders or in his hair to slide down his back, would sneak beneath the collar of his haori to touch his bare skin. Sometimes she was unscrupulous, and moaned a little at the taste of his lips, trying to instill hunger in him. It worked more often than not, and he always pulled away, breathing heavily and warning her silently that if they didn't stop then, there would be consequences. It was a kind of game to get him worked up like that—but he was extraordinarily patient, and his self control was impressive.

This only changed when she announced to him that she was not interested in her betrothed, that she would not marry him.

"Why?"

"I don't love him."

The unspoken bit was this: I will not make love to him, only to you, if you will have me. Yes, Izayoi had been able to accept her fate before, but she couldn't now. Tōga, in her mind, deserved more than half of her heart, half of her devotion. She would not force herself to lay beneath another man when all she wanted was him. And so the decision was made that night—she would be his wife, if not in name then in practice.

The first time they made love, it was nothing like the flowing, dreamlike joinings of shunga, nor was it the painful, brutal thing that she'd heard of in rumors and bawdy stories from ladies in waiting and from the mansion's guards. When he touched her she felt bright and alive, as though she was being set aspark by his movements. He left wounds all over her skin, bruises that bloomed dark and purple, flowers on her pale neck and shoulders. She breathed him in and exhaled his name like she was praying, don't stop, my love, don't stop.

But even with her mind half gone to the heavens and her voice coming in high, breathy gasps, her body felt solid and grounded in reality. In truth, it was a messy thing to have sex—she was sweating hard and the air around her felt damp and heavy, hot and perfumed with lust.

His lips dropped light as a feather over the dip of her collarbone and lower, lower, until he was kissing places she hadn't even dreamt of his mouth touching. This was an absolute sign of his respect for her, that he worshipped the very font of her womanhood, the thing that marked her as forever incomplete and conflicted. She grabbed his hair and pulled at the strands as her orgasm washed over her, light and vibrant, fluttering along her nerves like the desperate wings of a caged bird.

His hunger was not lost on her. Far from it; she watched the slits of his pupils widen until his eyes were dark, and instead of simply acknowledging it, she moved sinuously to invite him into her. Her thighs parted again and this time he sunk in, slowly, pushing past her maidenhead and lodging deep inside of her. Her power was not in her ability to receive; it was in her ability to give back, so it pleased her to no end to see his eyes close in bliss as she stretched around him. She loved him and was happy to please him; she desired him and was pleased by him.

The two feelings met somewhere in the middle as they moved. When he kissed her it was with absolute love, something he had once feared feeling for a human like her. She kissed him back and it was all desire, the excitement of touch and pleasure, ripping her body to pieces and putting it messily back together again. Another climax began to build as he thrust into her, as she pushed her eager little hips up to meet his on the downstroke. Every single movement was heavenly, absolutely heavenly, and her brain rushed with giddiness at the thought that they were really doing this. He was her lover, this man who wasn't really a man, pinning her down beneath him and giving her the very thing she'd been craving for so long. He was filling every single gap in her senses: the smell of his skin, addictive and heavy like a sort of musky perfume; the taste of his lips as he pressed them over hers; the way he looked as he moved, the muscles in his arms and shoulders and neck entrancing her, delicious enough that she leaned her head up and kissed his collarbone, laving her tongue along it and pulling on the skin with her teeth.

This time it felt as though she was being shoved into climax rather than drawn to it, like she was trying not to be swept away by force. He groaned that he was going to come, voice rough and strained in her ear, and she finally had no choice but to succumb. Izayoi was absolutely flooded with pleasure, so intense that it walked the borderline of pain and made her cry wordlessly to the heavens in her shock. She scrambled frantically to clutch at his hair and his back, to hold him as he rocked helplessly into her hips, and then finally slumped, spent, warm and heavy on top of her.

It had been nothing like she'd expected it to be. He lay beside her and took her small, exhausted body into the shelter of his much larger frame, murmuring words of love to her until she was nearly dozing, touching her bare skin with the tips of his fingers and claws.

She fell asleep happy that night, pleased with herself and with what they had done. Izayoi dreamt of all of the details she loved the most, the deep rumble of his voice and the shape of his body, so unlike her own. In her mind's eye she envisioned his skin next to hers, tanned and dark where she was pale, the hardness of him meeting her moldable and feminine shape, the differences between them as obvious as night and day... before suddenly, inexplicably, they had become one.

When dawn's rosy, golden fingers began to creep across the sky, he had already gone and left her behind. But the memory he'd left was like a little flame inside of her, flaring to life at times and subdued at others. She was giddy and danced from room to room, light on her feet and pleasant to her servants and to her parents. Izayoi wanted to laugh at them for not knowing, feeling for all the world that it must be obvious that she was in love and she was pleased, but she was in no hurry for them to know. She had discovered sex and she was joyful. She laid out the scrolls of shunga once more and looked at them now with a more critical eye, finding the things she understood and the things that didn't make sense and comparing them all in her mind.

For instance: they could not capture the movement correctly, the grinding of hips into hips, nor could it accurately portray the feeling of the first thrust of a man into a woman, the gasping, open-mouthed pleasure of that intimate union. And the pictures were always of people half clothed, people who were proper and followed the age-old rules of good romance, and so they could not speak to the vulnerability of nakedness. They could not show her what she had seen with her own eyes, or make her feel what she had felt the night before. And now, as Izayoi thought of it, the little flame inside her belly grew brilliant and strong. She squirmed, wishing for him, wishing for his voice in her ear, urging her to take what she liked and make it her own. The rest of the day passed in bated breaths and withheld sighs.

He returned that evening, a warm smile on his face that reached his eyes. He stepped over the threshold of the cold, outside world and into her room where the air was already thick with sexual tension, crackling hot and vibrant between them.

"Did you miss me?" he teased, his voice deep and rough from amusement and arousal.

"Very much, dearest," she answered back, not missing a single beat. In moments she was gathered up in his arms, sighing and letting her head fall back to expose her throat. Izayoi had worn her thinnest yukata, something nearly sheer in its lightness and completely inappropriate for the chilly winter months. It was loosely tied, already falling open from the force of his embrace, slipping gently down one shoulder and showing off a swath of pale, delicate skin. He growled, low in his throat, utterly appreciative.

And then she was pulled down, over to her futon where they tumbled and collided with one another. Already he had tugged the fabric away, until it pooled around her waist and wrapped haphazardly about her legs. His fingers brushed over the newly exposed flesh, light as feathers, touching first her collarbone and then the swell of each small, soft breast. It lasted for a few long moments, and her eyes fluttered closed with every careful and deliberate sweep of his roughened hands over her body. Then, like a spell being shattered, her obi was untied and she was left naked before him, pleasingly open to his gaze.

To her surprise, the rest of the night did not proceed with immediate copulation, as she had hoped it might. The novelty of having him inside her was attractive, certainly, and so she was eager to repeat that experience as soon as possible. But instead what she received was a more subtle version of sex, more touch and taste than the eager, desperate joining of the night before. If she was disappointed in this, it was only briefly; for again he was proving to be clever and talented at working her into that blissful high she was coming to know and like so well. This particular night was more of a true, slow exploration of one another's bodies, dedicated only to the pursuit of pleasure and nothing more. There was no intercourse, but that was okay with her, because in the aftermath of all of it, the slow and hazy burn of passion, she felt satisfied and quiet, pleased from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

"Perhaps we should have started like that," he wondered aloud, lazily stroking her hair.

"No matter," she yawned back at him, sleepy and sated. Izayoi curled around him where they lay, wrapping her little body up next to his, basking in his heat.

o0o

This was a whirlwind affair she'd never anticipated having. The romance did not lie in traditional things, because he did not write her poetry or send her gifts, and he certainly didn't ever put on airs with her family—they didn't even know that he was returning to the mansion, night after night. For all they knew, he'd left after their first, tense meeting and had moved on to haunt some other clan's region.

No, it was nothing like that. The romance was in his sincerity, in how dead set he was about loving her, despite the obvious barriers to their relationship. It was in the way he spoke to her as an equal, even though she was only a human, though she knew in her heart that he was as great as the sea and had seen history beyond her comprehension. It was in the genuine respect that he gave to her, and how she felt wholly loved by him. Her adoration seemed to increase by leaps and bounds each and every night that he came to visit. Sometimes they made love, almost always very quietly and absolutely smoldering with barely restrained passion for one another, but just as often they sat up and talked like they'd done before. She might lean against his side and begin to doze as he told her stories about his long, extraordinary life—and then, upon noticing that her breathing had slowed and evened out, he would kiss her temple and stay with her until the very earliest break of dawn. It was a good way to spend the time, and she was content like she'd never been before, satisfied, and happier than ever. They were both rejecting the roles they'd been given, in their own ways: she was supposed to deny herself the pleasures of an honest and simple life, because those were vulgar things and she was a princess, born into the high class world of constant pressure and pretty forms of trickery. He was supposed to be savage, above feelings of tenderness and compassion, above all other creatures, because he was a daiyōkai and therefore not meant to feel this kind of deep, all encompassing love for any living thing… and certainly not for a human. But that was part of what made their relationship so interesting, so wonderful. They were not supposed to love each other, but they did it anyway, and it was a kind of rebellion that they had both been craving for a long time.

As good as it felt, the world was still going on all around them. Izayoi was engaged now, to the samurai her father had chosen for her. She felt like she was backed into a corner, biding her time until the Inu no Taishō finally took her away from all of this. But until he did, she was trapped in her lovely, gilded cage, with a fiance who didn't know that his intended had no real intention of marrying him. Here was the trickery of the noble class; Takemaru didn't know that Izayoi wasn't pure, and she wasn't going to tell him. He thought she was beautiful and elegant and quiet, and didn't have any idea that in the dark of night she took a dangerous lover. He didn't know that the Inu no Taishō had already laid claim to her, and that she gave herself willingly to him. Nobody knew this. She was two-faced; honest and open, tender with the daiyōki, and reserved and cautious with her family and betrothed, and the rest of her human household. There was a certain irony to it all, that her whole life she had looked at affairs and thought that she would never be able to conduct one successfully, and now here she was in the midst of one. Izayoi had been pulled into it by chance, and now she was entrenched in it fully. But it wouldn't be for long, she reasoned, because she wouldn't marry Takemaru and she certainly had no desire to become his paramour.

She was learning though, that the reason people made such an art out of affairs was because they were an art. It was difficult to protect her secrets, and though her lover had the benefit of very good hearing and always knew when someone was coming, she struggled to hide the after effects from people. Sometimes they slipped up, and became careless—in the morning, after he'd already left, she would wake up in a pile of discarded and messy silk clothing, bruises on her neck from where he's kissed her, looking for all the world like a woman who had spent the night before doing illicit things. Her maids took one look at her and Izayoi felt that they had to know what she'd done, even if they never said anything about it. They left it alone, more or less.

It couldn't be that way forever, certainly. Somewhere along the line, Izayoi had forgotten the main purpose of sex and stopped seeing it as a tool for survival. Instead, it was something she did for pleasure, just because it felt so, so good and made her feel as though nothing in the world could stop her. But nature had not forgotten the purpose of sex, and so she found herself pregnant.

That, in and of itself, was the biggest slip up of them all. Love bites and messy clothing could be explained away, and if it came down to it she knew that her maids would likely put Takemaru down as the culprit. But now that she was with child, the truth would be forced out into the open, brutal and plain—and everyone would know that the child's father was a yōkai. It frightened her terribly; not because she did not want to have the Inu no Taishō's child, but because of the violence and hatred that was sure to befall her and the little life rooted inside of her if anyone found out. The secrecy that had been fun and intoxicating before turned terrifying and necessary.

When she told him about it she was surprised by his joy, starkly contrasting her stormy heart. He'd lifted her clear off her feet, spinning her in a whirling circle, laughing until she was nearly brought to tears. They were unceasing when they came, tears of release and happiness as she thought about what his acceptance meant. It was permanent, their love, the physical proof of it hidden away under her skin where it would grow and grow. He was going to take her away from all of this and she would live the remainder of her life with him and their child, blessedly happy. This was the path they had chosen.

o0o

Izayoi wasn't surprised by her family's inevitable reaction, nor by the shame they heaped upon her at every turn for her mistake. They called the child all manner of things, an abomination, a curse, and towards its father they showed even less respect. To them he was a devil, the mononoke who had devoured their poor daughter's young heart, who'd spirited away her innocence and planted a vile seed inside of her womb. But she didn't care. Her dearest was making plans to take her far from their spiteful words and suspicious glares.

What amazed her most was how her pregnancy felt—satisfying in a way she hadn't expected, despite all its difficulties and inconveniences. All her life she'd been a little uncomfortable in her own skin, feeling too young and awkward, but this seemed to center her somehow. She felt womanly, graceful in the face of an unsure future, pleased beyond all reason. Maybe it was simply because this had been up to her and the man she had chosen to love. For the first time, her heart and her sex didn't belong to the world of men, or to the nobility's ideas about propriety and allure. It belonged to her, plain and simple, and she could do what she liked with it. Even now, as the child grew and changed the shape and curve of her body, she felt free and unburdened.

A few weeks before the child was meant to be born, she sat down with the shunga one last time. It was still peculiar to her, and she realized that she was never really meant to learn anything about sex from them, so much as to take in the aesthetic of sex. In them, sex was half clothed and quiet, not messy, there to give the illusion of pleasure, much the same way people ate fine foods even when they weren't hungry, as proof that they could. But Izayoi had done it a little differently, like she did everything in her life.

She'd taken it out of the hands of others, and made it hers.