I found her in the grove.
Morning light through the tangerine trees. The air thick with citrus and dew. She was on a ladder, pruning a branch that didn't need pruning, because that's what Nojiko did when she was thinking. Her hands needed to be busy or her head wouldn't stop.
She heard me coming. Didn't look down. Kept cutting.
"You smell like my sister."
"I showered."
"You smell like my sister who showered." She cut another branch. Clean stroke. The shears closing with a snap that sent a tangerine tumbling off the tree. It bounced off my shoulder. She didn't apologize.
She looked down. Her good eye assessed me. The other one was still bruised from Chew's backhand, the purple fading to green at the edges. Her gaze found the bite mark on my shoulder. Nami's teeth. Clear, deliberate, still red.
"She marked you," Nojiko said.
"Yeah."
She came down the ladder. Set the shears on a branch. Wiped her hands on her shorts. Stood in front of me with tangerine juice on her fingers and morning light on her skin and the bruises she'd earned fighting beside me still healing across her arms.
"Good," she said. "My turn."
She didn't kiss me. Nojiko didn't start with kissing. She started with her hand on my chest, flat, pressing, feeling my heartbeat the way a farmer checks soil. Then she grabbed my shirt and pulled me toward the cottage.
"We have two hours before Nami wakes up," she said over her shoulder. "She drinks brandy like a sailor and sleeps like the dead."
The cottage was the same. Her bed. Her room. The window open to the grove. The sheets still smelled like last time. Like us. Like tangerines and sweat and the earthy grounding of her cultivation energy. She didn't bother closing the front door. No one was coming.
She pulled her shirt off. Her tan lines. The brown of her shoulders and arms against the paler skin below. Her breasts heavier than Nami's, fuller, the nipples darker. I'd had Nami all night and I was hard looking at her sister in under three seconds. Different bodies. Different hunger.
"Stop comparing," she said.
"I wasn't."
"You were looking at my chest and thinking about hers." She unhooked her bra. Let it drop. "It's fine. Just stop doing it out loud."
"I wasn't doing it out loud."
"Your face does it out loud." She walked to me. Her hands on my shirt. Pulling it up. Over my head. She looked at the bruises. The ones Nami had traced last night. Nojiko didn't trace them. She poked the bite wound.
"Ow."
"Good. You're not invincible." She dropped to her knees.
She pulled my pants down. I was hard and she looked at it with the same practical assessment she gave everything. Then she licked the underside from base to tip. One long stroke. Looked up at me.
"Sit on the bed."
I sat. She knelt between my legs. Took me in her mouth. Nojiko's blowjobs were different from Nami's. No competition. No eye contact games. She did it like she did everything else. Efficiently. Thoroughly. Her mouth warm and her tongue working the underside and her hand gripping the base with the calloused fingers of a woman who'd spent her life in a grove.
"Mm." Low in her throat. The vibration sent a jolt up my spine. She went deeper. Her nose against my stomach. Held it. Swallowed. Pulled back. Spit on the head. Took me again.
I put my hand in her hair. Blue. The color of it in the morning light. She leaned into my grip. Not submissive. Accepting. Her rhythm never changed. Deep, slow, thorough.
Then she pulled off. Wiped her mouth. "Your turn."
She stood. Pushed me back on the bed. Climbed over me. Turned around. Knelt over my face with her back to me, her knees on either side of my head, and lowered herself onto my mouth.
The taste of her. Earth and salt and the particular musk that was Nojiko. Different from Nami's sharpness. Deeper. I put my tongue on her clit and she grunted. Her hips shifted, finding the angle. I could see her back from here, the muscles moving under her skin, the tan line cutting across her shoulders.
I ate her. My hands on her thighs, pulling her down onto my mouth. She was wet. Had been since the grove. The squelch of my tongue inside her was loud in the quiet cottage. I found her clit and sucked and she made the sound she always made. Open. Unashamed. Not performing for anyone.
"Nn- there." Her hips grinding against my face. "Keep- yeah."
I slid a finger into her ass. She stiffened. Then exhaled. Pushed back against it.
"That's… new." Her voice had changed. Lower. Breathier. "Keep going."
I worked my tongue on her clit and my finger in her ass and she came in under two minutes. Her thighs clamped around my head. Her back arched. The sound she made was guttural, deep in her chest, and her body clenched around my finger and my tongue and she rode my face through it with her hips grinding and her hands gripping my thighs hard enough to bruise.
She climbed off. Breathing hard. Her thighs shaking. I kissed the inside of her knee and she flinched. Post-orgasm sensitivity making the light touch spark through her.
"Don't-" She grabbed my hair. "Too much. Give me a second."
I didn't give her a second. I kissed her thigh again. She hissed through her teeth. Pulled my hair harder. Her body couldn't decide if it wanted more or less and the indecision made her hips twitch.
She looked down at me. Her face flushed. Her good eye narrowed.
"Outside," she said.
She put her back against the cottage wall. The wood warm from the morning sun. Tangerine trees around us. The grove was private enough. Nobody came out here except her.
"Pick me up," she said.
I picked her up. Her legs around my waist, her back against the wall, her arms around my neck. She reached between us. Found me. Positioned me. The head against her entrance.
"In," she said.
I pushed in. The angle was different from any bed. Gravity pulled her down onto me. Deeper than any position we'd had. She gasped. Her fingers dug into my shoulders and her head dropped back against the wall.
"That's-" Her words stopped working. Her mouth open. The angle hitting something different, the depth from gravity adding what the bed couldn't. Her thighs tightened around my waist. Her heels digging into my lower back.
I held her against the wall and started moving. The first thrust pushed her up the wood. She slid back down onto me from her own weight. The second thrust made her gasp. The third made her moan. The gravity did half the work. Every time I pushed up, she rose. Every time I pulled back, she sank onto me, deeper than I'd been, and the sound she made was open and unashamed because that's who Nojiko was.
The wood was warm against my knuckles where I braced beside her head. I could smell the tangerines. The sap in the bark. The morning air mixing with her sweat and the sharp scent of sex. Her body weight in my arms was nothing. The cultivation had given me that. A month ago I couldn't have held her for thirty seconds. Now I could hold her all morning.
She knew it too. She tested it. Relaxed her legs, let her full weight drop, and I held her without shifting. Her eyebrow went up. Impressed.
"You're stronger-" she managed. Between impacts. "Than last week."
"That's the point."
But we both knew the subtext had changed. Last week, stronger meant Arlong. Today it meant this. Just this. Her body and mine and the wall and the grove and no fishman to kill and no sister to save. Just wanting.
The rhythm built. Faster. The wall creaking behind her back with every thrust. I could feel the wood flexing. The tangerine branches swaying from the vibration. Her legs locked around me and I braced one hand against the wall beside her head and drove into her with the other arm under her ass and the angle was relentless.
She was loud. Nojiko was always loud. Open sounds that echoed through the trees. Grunts and groans and gasps that she didn't try to muffle because she'd never tried to muffle anything in her life. A tangerine fell from a branch. Then another. The vibration of the wall shaking the nearest tree.
"Harder."
I went harder. Her back scraping against the wood. She'd have splinter marks later and she wouldn't care. Her nails in my shoulders. The wet slap of our bodies filling the grove. PLAP PLAP PLAP. The rhythm fast and hard and I could feel her tightening around me, her body coiling. My arms burned from holding her weight but the cultivation strength held. I drove up into her and her body dropped onto me and the impact made her breasts bounce against my chest and she grunted on every collision.
"Ah- ah- fuck- there-"
She came with her forehead against mine. Eyes open. Looking right at me. Nojiko didn't close her eyes when she came. She stared straight at you like she was cataloguing the moment. Her body clenched around me in waves, tight and then release and then tight again, and her legs crushed my waist.
I came inside her. The orgasm hit from the base of my spine, the clench of her body dragging it out of me. Held her against the wall. My face in her neck. The smell of tangerines and sweat and her. Both of us breathing. The tangerine tree next to us had lost four tangerines and a branch.
She stayed wrapped around me. Forehead to forehead. Her breath on my lips. The sweat between us mixing.
"…I don't want to be the discount version," she said. Quiet. So quiet I almost missed it.
"You're not."
"I'm serious. I know she was first. I know she's Nami. I'm not going to compete with that. But I'm not going to be the girl you fuck because she's asleep."
"Nojiko."
"What."
"You're not the discount version."
She looked at me. Searching. Whatever she found was enough. She exhaled. Dropped her forehead back against mine.
"Okay." She unwrapped her legs. I lowered her down. She stood on the ground, her back against the wall, and she looked like a woman who'd just been fucked against a tree and wasn't sorry about it. "Inside. I want the bed."
She went face down. On her bed. Her face in the pillow. Her ass raised. She looked over her shoulder at me.
"Like this."
I climbed over her. My weight on her back. She sighed at the pressure. Not discomfort. Relief. The heaviness of being covered, held down, surrounded. My chest against her back. My mouth on the nape of her neck. The short blue hair tickling my nose.
I pushed back in. The angle was shallower here. Tighter. She groaned into the pillow. I could feel her everywhere. The press of her body under mine. Her ass against my hips. Her thighs squeezed together, the friction intensified.
"That's-" Muffled by the pillow. "Nn. That's different."
Slow. Deep. I pulled nearly all the way out, the head catching at her entrance, and pushed back in. One long stroke. She exhaled into the cotton. I did it again. And again. Each thrust deliberate. Savoring the drag of her body around me, the way her walls gripped the shaft, the tightness of her thighs adding pressure from all sides.
The bed creaking under our combined weight. Her hands gripping the sheets. The morning light through the window casting the grove's shadow across the bed. Leaves and tangerines in silhouette on her bare back.
I put my weight on my elbows. Pressed my chest into her back. My hips grinding down into her, deep and slow, the angle letting me hit the back of her. She made a sound that was more vibration than voice. Her body pushing back against mine. The instinct.
I kissed the back of her neck. The short blue hair. The bump of her vertebrae. She smelled like sex and tangerines and the wood of the wall outside. I kissed between her shoulder blades. The tan line running across her back. The darker skin above it, the paler below. I kissed the pale part and she shivered.
"Nn-" Muffled. Her hips pushed back against me. Harder. Wanting more depth. I gave it to her. Ground deep and held it and she clenched around me and I could feel every contour of her body from this angle. The curve of her ass against my hips. The small of her back pressed against my stomach. The backs of her thighs against the fronts of mine.
The pace stayed slow but the intensity built. Her breathing getting faster. Her hands white-knuckled on the sheets. The squelch of each thrust louder as her wetness built, the wet sound filling the quiet room along with the creak of the old bed frame.
She couldn't see my face. Her face was in the pillow and my mouth was on the back of her neck and she started talking.
"I didn't expect to feel things," she said. Into the cotton. Her voice vibrating through the pillow. "The plan was simple. Fuck you until you were strong enough. Save Nami. That was it."
I kept moving. Slow. Letting her talk.
"But you kept-" A thrust pushed the words out of her. "Nn. You kept being a person. You kept making jokes and getting hurt and looking at me like-"
"Like what."
"Like I mattered. Not like I was useful. Like I mattered."
I put my mouth against her ear. "You matter."
"Shut up. I'm having a moment." Her voice cracked on the last word. She turned her face sideways on the pillow. One eye visible. Wet. "I don't do moments. I do plans. I do practical. I don't do-" A thrust. Deeper. She lost the sentence. "Ah- I don't do feelings. This wasn't supposed to-"
I reached under her. Found her clit. She jerked. My fingers working her while I moved inside her, the dual sensation making her body clench.
"Kai-" Her voice was breaking. Not from sadness. From the collision of everything she was saying and everything she was feeling and the orgasm building under both. "I'm not- I don't know how to-"
She came with her face in the pillow. The sound muffled. Her whole body rigid under mine. Her hands tearing the sheets. The clench of her around me so tight I had to stop moving. Five seconds. Ten. She shook. Breathed. Turned her head.
"That was a binding agreement," she said. Her voice was wrecked.
I came inside her. Second time. The orgasm pulled out of me by the aftershock ripples of hers, her body still squeezing. I collapsed onto her back. She took the weight. Didn't complain. We lay there, her face sideways on the pillow, my face against the back of her neck, the morning light moving across the bed.
"Get off me," she said. Softly. "You're heavy."
I rolled off. She didn't move. Lay face down for a long minute. Then she rolled onto her side. Looked at me.
"One more," she said.
She pushed me onto my back. Climbed on.
The third time was different. She sat on me and she didn't start moving. She looked around the room. The walls she'd grown up in. The window with the grove outside. Bellemere's house. The bedroom where she'd slept alone for years after her mother died and her sister left and the village went quiet.
She looked down at me. In her bed. In Bellemere's house. Her eyes were wet but she was smiling. Not the dry Nojiko smile. A real one. Soft.
She started moving. Slow. A roll of her hips that was nothing like the urgent farmer's grind of their first time. She savored it. Each movement deliberate. Feeling me inside her at each angle. Her hands on my chest for balance. Her eyes drifting closed.
The bed creaked. The old frame. The sound mixing with her breathing and the birds outside and the quiet of the house around us. I put my hands on her hips. Not guiding. Resting. Letting her take this at her own pace.
She opened her eyes. Looked at me. Rolled her hips forward and back, slow, the sensation dragging along the length of me. I could feel every movement. The deliberate precision of it. The way she rose just enough to feel the head catch at her entrance, then sank back down and ground against my pelvis. Each cycle wetter than the last. The slick sound of us together barely audible over the birdsong.
Her hands spread across my chest. Fingers tracing the bruises Arlong had left. The ones Nami had traced. Nojiko touched them differently. Not reading them like charts. Pressing them like she was checking they were real.
"You know what I like about this?" she said. Riding me. Slow. Her voice quiet. "No math. No cultivation plan. No 'he needs to be strong enough by Tuesday.'" She opened her eyes. Looked down at me. "Just this."
"Just this."
Her hips rolled. I watched her. The morning light on her body. The tan lines. Her breasts moving with each roll, heavy, swaying. The muscles in her stomach working. The sheen of sweat on her skin. She was beautiful. Not Nami's kind of beautiful. Nojiko's kind. The kind that came from work and sun and stubbornness and hands that had been in dirt every day for twenty years.
The pace picked up. Barely. Not urgency. Just the body's own gravity pulling her toward it. Her circles getting tighter. Her breathing getting deeper. Her eyes going half-lidded. She put her hands flat on my chest and leaned forward and the angle changed and she bit her lip.
"Nn- there."
I put my hand between us. Found her clit. She jerked at the contact. Then pressed into it. My thumb circling while she ground against me. Dual sensation. Her hips stuttered. The composure cracking.
The pace stayed slow. She came quietly. The quietest she'd been. A long exhale, her hips pressing down, her body clenching around me in slow waves. Her hands flat on my chest. My name. Just my name. "Kai." Spoken, not moaned. Like she was confirming something she'd decided.
I came inside her. Third time. She stayed on top. Didn't move. Her hands on my chest, her weight settling, her breathing evening out.
She climbed off. Lay beside me. Her hand found mine on the mattress. Laced fingers. The first gentle thing.
"Nami bit you," she said. Looking at the ceiling.
"Yeah."
"I'm not biting you. That's her thing."
"What's your thing?"
She was quiet. Thinking about it. Then she got up. Walked naked to the kitchen. Came back with a tangerine. Sat on the bed cross-legged. Peeled it. The citrus scent filling the room, mixing with the sex and the sweat. She separated a segment.
She put one end between her teeth. Leaned over me. Held the other end to my lips.
I bit. The segment burst between us. Juice ran down her chin. Down mine. She didn't pull back. Her mouth found mine through the tangerine pulp and the kiss was wet and sweet and messy, citrus and spit mixing, her tongue chasing the juice on my lips. I could taste the tangerine and the salt of her skin and the remnant of sex still on both of us. Juice dripped onto my chest. She licked it off. Her tongue on my sternum, flat, following the trail of juice down to my stomach. She came back up. Kissed me again. Her lips sticky. Her chin wet.
She pulled back. Juice on her mouth. On mine. On the sheets between us. Her eyes bright.
"Binding agreement," she said.
She separated another segment. Put it between her teeth. Leaned in again. This time I met her halfway. The fruit crushed between our mouths and we kissed through it, slower, the sweetness mixing with the taste of each other. Her hand on my jaw. My hand in her hair. Tangerine juice running down both our chins and neither of us caring.
The front door opened.
Footsteps. Bare feet on the cottage floor. The creak of the bedroom door pushing wider.
Nami stood in the doorway.
She looked at us. Kai in Nojiko's bed. Nojiko naked, cross-legged, a half-peeled tangerine in her hands. The room thick with the smell of sex and citrus. The sheets destroyed. The bite mark on his shoulder and the scratch marks on his chest and two bodies that had clearly been at this for a while.
Nami's ears went pink.
Her jaw worked. The thing she did. The tell I'd learned weeks ago on a different ocean.
She looked at the tangerine. At Nojiko's bare shoulders. At my chest. Her eyes moved between us for three seconds. Five.
"Move over," she said. She pulled her shirt over her head.