[IY] Boyfriend Blues 2

She wasn’t ready for that.  In fact, her brain was in full-on “screw the future and consequences be damned” mode, so asking her to “play for keeps”?

In fact, this was Sesshoumaru.  This was the Killing Perfection, the Aristocratic Assassin, Fluffinator 9000, THE Lord of the Western Lands, Sesshoumaru. 

That same Sesshoumaru was staring at her with eyes aglow, gold and molten, pupils wide and sensual as they accepted all of the paltry moonlight around them to watch Kagome’s face, waiting for some indication of her thought processes.  Why was he asking this?  Motives completely unknown, it was hard to say yes or no.  She was fairly prepared that a night like this would put an end to things with Inuyasha.

Bathe as she might, the smell of sex would probably filter through all her best-scented soaps and make quite aware what she’d done and with whom.  Just a hunch, because hey, dog demons.

So if he meant this in a “Your relationship will be kaput” kind of way then yes.  Yes, she was prepared for that.  The relief would be welcome.  It would finally put everyone out of her misery.  Still… still, it was just a hunch, but she thought he might be asking something else.  He didn’t mean Inuyasha.  However impossible, she couldn’t help but think he meant…himself.  He wanted her to play this game, and the prize was himself…to keep.

If she was playing for keeps.

The silence was dragging, but Sesshoumaru’s patience was admirable.  He wasn’t touching her; only watching, just a little ways above her, the non-interaction a way to refrain from influencing her decision in any other way than what she really, truly wanted for herself.  Her blue eyes couldn’t help but trail across his face and note the minute signs of strain; they were really so tiny that no one but perhaps herself or Rin, or maybe Jaken, would notice.  For someone who still appeared to be in his teens, he was terribly complex in his non-expressed expressions.  He was beautiful—enough to outmatch the grand lot of women she’d met in her life—but still very…male.  The shoulders she had bared to wandering fingers were built with taut muscle, something she never would have thought from seeing him in his kimono.  The hint of stripes she could just glimpse at his collarbone was too enticing for words.  Was he sexy as hell?  Did she want to jump his bones?  Absolutely.  If she were any less of a woman, she’d be a babbling mess in front of someone like him.

The question though, was did she want to have him for real?  In a relationship?  The thought was like sour grapes when she considered his usual self and the veritable hell his younger brother had already put her through.  It made her look into his iridescent, glowing eyes, and ask the one thing she had to know above and before all.

“That depends.  Are you willing to let yourself be kept?"

The cord of tension between them snapped with a deafening silence, and before she could even register the viciously hungry gleam in his eye, Sesshoumaru’s lips were on hers, soft and powerful, a forceful return of her seduction.  Clawed hands clasped her wrists, leaving her vulnerable to his whims that sent awry her simple plans.  His body covered hers, lithe and powerful, barely an inch away, heat radiating through silk as if to replace the missing sunlight.  Nips and skillful tongue had her confused and yet sure that this was a purposeful, planned assault on her senses; he demanded surrender from her.  He would not take or plunder; he would demand that she give herself, her all to him before...

…it was just a thought, briefly there and then gone in the heat… but he might just rebuild her into someone better.  Someone stronger.

It made her struggling heart leap.  Instead of always having to be the better person, could she be just as she was?  Could their fallings out become mutual understandings?  Could they build together instead of always tearing down and starting over?  The thought of a relationship had been so awful a moment ago, and yet now she wanted her scabbed-over heart to break and bleed again. She wanted it to be soft again, to heal.

Sesshoumaru noticed from the first tear that she was crying, but her scent… oh, it was opening up in beautiful, enticing ways.  She was thinking inside, he could tell, and he was somehow winning.  Inuyasha, who had hurt her to the point of her heart closing off to men, was fading from her.  The shift from seduction to something tinged with hope and joy was… delightful.  Wonderful.  There weren’t words to appropriately describe the taste that filtered through her skin, the scent that filled his nose.  It was a broken-heartedly beautiful thing.  From desirous kisses to soft licks to take away her tears; from grasping at her wrists to… however tentatively… lacing their fingers together.  The evolution was subtle, just like this change in her that he hadn’t even noticed until tonight when she, proud alpha female, came to him.  Her suitor was too weak to handle her; he was not enough of a male, small-hearted, small-minded, unfaithful.  However true he was to his friends, he could not be true to his lover.

So instead of being his lover, she would be…what?  The demon abhorred the idea of leaving her with the half-breed, a member of his pack made to endure him but no longer his future mate.  Wouldn’t it be agony?  Wouldn’t he, who easily betrayed her, also hold this decision against her for the foreseeable future?  With the exception of her human state, she was almost the perfect mate; ideal in a way he had never hoped to find.  Stout of heart, strong of mind, loyal and independent; strong in her own right and yet happy to have his strength lent to hers.  Beautiful in her purity, honest in her actions and words, without airs and full of a simple, all-encompassing compassion for others that he knew he did not posses.  It hurt to think of all the things Inuyasha had made her suffer out of love for him; this singularity of a female willingly submitting herself to such terrible injustices for that filthy pup’s sake.

Her fingers tightened around his.  Her lips, trembling, met the stripes across his cheek.  He could feel her moving closer, and yet trying to tell him something.  Lips and fangs trailed across her neck and to her collarbone, and beneath the sensitive skin he could feel her pulse leap and jump, erratic and swift.

Kagome was playing their “game,” but she wasn’t sure, really sure, whether or not she wanted to win.