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The forge is going hard. The small cabin is hot from its efforts. Red coals, the yellowwhite spaces between, their shift and tumble and eventual burn to ash. The red afterimages of its flames leap behind Taigen’s eyes when he closes them, rests his head to the wall, feels the throw of their heat. Across from him Mizu is working at the bench. Taigen can sense him without having to look. The lean shape of his body. Hard like metal about to break. Taigen thinks about the flash of his eyes in the semidarkness. Blue as shallow, freezing water.
At the forge the old master works the bellows. The doors are open and the birdsong filters in. Before long it will be dark and Taigen will watch the sleeping shape of Mizu with the fervour of a livestock guardian. For now he rests and feels the pain of his healing body. Mizu had told him it was a good sign, but he doesn’t seem to be feeling the pain of his own wounds so Taigen is unconvinced.
At the bench Mizu half turns. Taigen sees his profile and the pommel he’s been working at, the curls of shorn wood clinging hold to the front of his clothes. “The cherry carves better,” he tells the master. His voice is low and light. Taigen lets his eyes close. He drifts into a doze listening to the two men speak.
——
He dreams of lamplight glancing off a blade’s edge. He dreams of hair that’s brown in sunlight. He dreams of indigo dye and fingernails stained stubbornly red at their beds. When he wakes the room the dark and empty save for Mizu at the hearth. The fire lights the sleek curve of the man’s profile; turns his eyes to pale, glassy marbles. Taigen makes no move but he knows Mizu senses his waking. It’s there in the knit of his brow, the brief sidelong dart of those eyes. Mizu is a man tuned to things beyond this realm. Taigen wonders if he might’ve been snoring.
“Days are passing me by,” he says, by way of greeting.
Mizu responds: “I will soon have to duel you in this room if you rest any longer.”
Taigen laughs. Good morning, good evening, goodnight have never been part of their language. He watches Mizu’s eyes turn forward and thinks of how his pupil had bloomed when trained on him. A cat’s will dilate when a bird hops into their path. He wonders if he makes Mizu feel half as hungry.
“What are you doing?” he asks, propping himself carefully upright on an elbow as he surrenders to his wakefulness. Beyond the window the moon is full and bright, but he feels alert and sharp. The pain is less. His sleep was deep and steady.
Mizu is staring unflinchingly into the flames. Taigen watches his fingers pluck idly at the knees of his pants. “Just thinking,” he says, after a beat. His voice is soft. Under his thighs his bare feet are curled pale and white as fish. The sight of them causes a warm, foreign stir between Taigen’s thighs. He’s never seen much of the man’s bare skin before, save the swallow-like curve of his bare collarbone, his long throat, when removing Taigen’s stolen scarf. The round of his heel is dark with callus, as is the ball. But the high, inviting arch; its soft crease, its moonlit glow. Unbidden, irrational, Taigen thinks of Akemi. The lines of her fine, small palms. The bones of her wrists, the surprising firmness of her smooth forearms.
Mizu, he thinks, must possess even stronger arms. The hair in his armpits would be coarser than the fine black dew of Akemi’s. The lines of his body more rigid; waist and hip and muscled thigh. Hair on his stomach, the tang of salt between his legs. Beneath the blankets, beneath his kimono, Taigen feels himself stir. Mizu is still staring into the fire. His hands now lie flat and upturned on his thighs. Taigen looks at their creases and aches for reasons beyond his broken body.
During their earlier grappling Taigen had been reminded of the snake and the mongoose. Two things whose hate for the other is so great that they die locked in each other’s arms. But it hadn’t felt like a death embrace — when Mizu reared back it wasn’t to spit poison into his eyes, and when Taigen toppled them it was only to conceal the growing evidence of his arousal. Recently he’s been wondering if he ever really hated him. If it wasn’t just boyish fear morphing into adult envy, which turned, as it often does, to this.
Mizu is an indigo shadow against the flames. Taigen thinks of the weight of him on top. The press of his groin to Taigen’s chest, the smell of his clothes and his body. Then, touching him — touching him as he hasn’t before, without any intention to harm or roughhouse or even to protect. Touching just to touch. Under all those clothes his body is lean and athletic. He had felt both the narrow dip of the man’s waist and the unmistakeable strength of his muscles. It’s this memory which stirs Taigen now. Eyes on those bare feet, on the sinewy hands he can see by the fire’s shifting light.
It’s easy to slip a hand beneath his kimono. The room is dim and the crackle of the fire loud enough to conceal the noise of shifting fabric. Easier still to grip himself, half-hard and wanting. To part his thighs, to cup his balls, to flex his shoulders and pillow his cheek to his shoulder to best keep Mizu in his sight. The futon is thin and doesn’t keep the chill from the ground, but the fire throws out a wall of heat that soon gets a sweat kicking between his shoulder blades. And from there it’s the stick of cotton to flesh, the restless shift of foot against bed, the slip of foreskin over head, of fist over cock, of thought over thought over thought.
Taigen thinks of the bite of Mizu’s blade. He thinks of the red of Mizu’s blood. He thinks of his strong, supple hands and the fall of his dark hair. He pushes his hips toward his own fist and imagines those hands taking over — how Mizu might touch him as he himself likes to be touched, how he might be sweet with him, or cruel, how his strange, lamplit eyes will rest on Taigen, brought low and sweating at his hand —
Taigen lifts his gaze and realises then that Mizu is watching him. Turned just so at the waist, as if intending perhaps to turn back. The firelight hits his ear from behind and by its light the thin skin glows. Pink as a springtime sunset, as the tender buds that bring low the cherry blossom’s branch. Taigen has heard that some white men’s nipples are pink. Their cocks too. The thought makes him groan. The noise seems to stir Mizu, who jerks as if Taigen had called his name. His eyes are cool and colourless in the darkness. “Taigen,” he says, and Taigen spills hot and premature over his own knuckles.
It’s a wet, boyish, almost painful thing. His broken ribs protest the flex of his spine. Mizu watches Taigen through it. Still as a statue, like some dutiful bedside guard. His knuckles shine white through the skin of his hands, bunched into fists in the loose blue thighs of his pants.
“That was quick,” is all he says. His voice is terse, his eyes cling.
Taigen manages, “I’m sorry,” and then shudders himself into silence. The orgasm is protracted. He presses the tips of his fingers to the swell behind his balls and groans into his own shoulder as his cock jerks and leaks. Mizu doesn’t respond. When Taigen slits his eyes open to look at him, he can see that the man is breathing heavily. His chest rising and falling as if he’s sprinted a mile to arrive here. Those eyes trained and fierce on Taigen’s face.
Afterwards Taigen turns away. He breathes in the smell of smoke and metal; his own excited sweat. At his back Mizu is a static, silent spot. The flames crackle into the silence that swells between them. Taigen tracks the dance of the shadows they throw on the wall, feeling tense but cottony, creeping with warm shame. His hand is wet with seed. His cock softening in the damp crease of his thigh. Behind him he hears Mizu stand. Then there comes the soft tread of his footsteps, his presence at Taigen’s back.
“Show me,” he says. The room is hot and feels very small. For a moment, Taigen lies there, still and uncomprehending. But then Mizu’s hand touches his shoulder. “Show me,” he says again.
Taigen rolls onto his back. He stares up at Mizu through the gloom. He sees the set of their jaw and the heat in their eyes and then, before he can convince himself otherwise, he flicks back the blanket and then the skirt of his kimono, and bares his soft cock to the firelight.
Mizu’s eyes flick down. Taigen doesn’t follow them. He doesn’t need to see the seed in his pubic hair, the shine of sweat on his thighs, nor the flush of his softening cock. He watches Mizu take it all in. Watches his tongue touch his lips. Watches the rise of blood to his cheeks. Watches when those pale eyes flick to his and then hold them, wordless.
Akemi liked to talk through sex. Sometimes she would cradle his jaw in her soft hands and coo into his mouth as he drove into her. But Mizu doesn’t speak a word as he bends over Taigen’s lap and noses first at his belly and then at his groin; at the damp hair and the ejaculate and the limp shape of his cock. It’s him who makes noise, who hisses when Mizu takes his cock into his mouth, who moans open-mouthed when he sucks at him, still tender from orgasm. Who cries out and shakes and clutches at Mizu’s hair until it escapes its chignon and brushes across his hips and thighs as he presses his nose to his balls and then there, finally, sounds out a little moan of his own.
“Mizu,” Taigen whispers, desperately. A sweat is springing up on his brow. His body hurts from all the movement. Mizu’s hand is an iron against his thigh, keeping him still. “Mizu.”
He doesn’t get hard. He doesn’t orgasm again. It hadn’t seemed to be Mizu’s goal. Instead he pulls off Taigen and then spits down into the mess of his crotch, making Taigen muffle a moan into the curve of his own shoulder. Then he feels a hand on his face, two fingers on his jaw, and he opens his mouth blindly, a starving fledgeling waiting for anything to fill it. All that enters are those fingers, tasting like soot and like metal, like skin and like sweat. Immediately pushing to the back, to the slick arc of his hard palate and the fleshy wetness beyond. Taigen gags, just so. Mizu groans. The fingers withdraw to rest flat and lovely on his tongue. Taigen sucks inexpertly at them as he watches Mizu’s other hand make short work of the lacing at the waist of his pants. He sees the pale flash of belly, he sees the dark hair that furs the navel, but then the man’s clothes fall back into place as his hand dips beneath and his hips rise to meet it.
“Oh,” Mizu mutters, almost wonderingly.
Upon realising what he’s doing — the agony of not being able to see, but instead having to track it through loose, dark clothing — Taigen groans. His teeth close around Mizu’s knuckles. He pays it little mind.
It’s a confusing, near abject, ecstasy. Taigen has never done this with another man — has never felt like this for another man, and so all he knows to do is suck dutifully at Mizu’s long fingers and watch Mizu’s hand work beneath his clothes. The dip of his eyelids and the press of his brow, the way his mouth opens the more Taigen’s does, until they’re both panting and wet-lipped and Taigen’s mouth feels thoroughly used from Mizu’s touch. He thinks Mizu must orgasm, though he sees little evidence of it — only a flattening of his mouth, a screwing up of his eyes, a vicious tear of a tremor passing through him. Then the fingers are slipped from his mouth and Taigen is left panting and staring; at Mizu’s face, red-cheeked and bright-eyed. At his hand drawing up out of his trousers, the seed on his fingers shining in the fire’s light. The glow of sweat on his brow, the heave of his chest beneath his clothes.
Taigen swallows and tastes skin. Mizu’s eyes lower to his mouth and then flick away, the shadows from the hearth rendering him expressionless. His right hand is open and upturned on his thigh. As Taigen watches Mizu rubs his thumb across his index and middle fingers, smearing what wet shines there. Silence settles between them. It’s a unsteady thing, made incomplete by their loud breathing and the sounds of night outside. Crickets whine in the long grass. A piece of wood shifts in the fire. A shatter of embers disappears up the long blackened throat of the chimney. Taigen clears his throat.
“I should like to suck you properly one day,” he murmurs, once it becomes clear Mizu isn’t going to speak. Supine and post-coital, he feels vulnerable. He flicks his kimono closed and watches Mizu follow the movement. A smile is tugging the corner of his mouth. Taigen frowns. “What’s funny?”
“This,” the man says. And then, “I think I should like the same of you.”
Between them silence falls. Taigen huffs out a half-laugh and tips his head back, studying the ceiling. At his side Mizu slowly relaxes from a crouch into sitting, and scrubs the palm of his hand across his face.
“What were you thinking about?” Taigen asks, and Mizu looks at him. It’s a keen, assessing glance.
“You,” he says, simply.