A Bouquet of Orchids
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 16: Whatever Came Next
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 16: Whatever Came Next - In 1685 Ayutthaya, Dutch merchant Pieter de la Cort stops walking in a courtyard because of a woman's eyes. Mali is everything — composed, brilliant, entirely herself. What grows between them is real and permanent. But Mali knows love means honesty, even when honesty costs everything. What she builds for her family — and who she chooses to build it with — will define them all. A story of love without conditions, in a world about to change forever.
Caution: This Romantic Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Romantic Polygamy/Polyamory White Male Oriental Female AI Generated
None of them had been on the open sea before.
Lim had. He stood at the rail of the VOC merchant vessel with his hands behind his back and his expression of permanent mild amusement and watched the coastline of Siam disappear into the haze with the equanimity of a man who had said goodbye to things before and knew that goodbyes, while unpleasant, were survivable.
Som had not. He spent the first two hours at the rail for entirely different reasons, after which he recovered his dignity and pretended the first two hours had not occurred.
Mali stood at the stern and watched Siam go until there was nothing left to watch. Then she turned around and faced the bow and did not look back again. She had made her decision in the gate of the compound. There was nothing to be gained from unmmaking it with her eyes.
Dewi Luna gripped the rail and felt the ship move under her — that long slow pitch and roll that had no equivalent on land — and decided after approximately ten minutes that she found it extraordinary. The vastness of it. The sky going all the way around. The water every direction, green-grey and enormous, entirely indifferent to the small wooden vessel crossing it and everyone aboard.
“It’s so big,” she said to no one in particular.
“Yes,” Pieter said beside her. “It is.”
Tara did not care about the ocean.
Tara cared about milk and warmth and the sound of Mali’s heartbeat which she had been listening to for nine months and found reliably reassuring. The ship’s motion, which undid Som and unsettled Mali and fascinated Dewi Luna, seemed to Tara indistinguishable from being held and rocked, which was her preferred state anyway.
She slept better at sea than she had in the compound.
Mali, observing this, revised her opinion of the voyage slightly upward.
They had a cabin. Small — everything on a working merchant vessel was small — but private, which Pieter had paid for and would have paid considerably more for if necessary. Two sleeping berths, a small table bolted to the wall, a porthole that admitted light and the smell of the sea.
The three of them arranged themselves in the way they had learned to arrange themselves — practically, without drama, with the ease of people who had been sharing space long enough to know each other’s rhythms. Mali and Tara in one berth. Dewi Luna in the other. Pieter wherever he wasn’t in the way, which at sea was largely on deck.
He was a man who needed air and motion and the feeling of doing something useful and a merchant vessel underway provided all three. He made himself useful to the crew in the way that men with competence and no particular ego make themselves useful — observing, offering when asked, staying out of the way when not. The captain, a weathered Dutchman from Zeeland who had made the Batavia run eleven times, assessed him on the first day and thereafter treated him as a man worth talking to, which was its own form of currency on a long voyage.
The days settled into a rhythm.
Mornings on deck when the weather allowed — the sea light different from anything any of them had seen, harder and brighter and going all the way to the horizon without interruption. Mali sitting with Tara in the shelter of the cabin housing, her face turned toward the sun with an expression that was not quite contentment and not quite grief but lived somewhere honest between the two. Dewi Luna beside her or at the rail, always looking outward, that quality of forward-facing readiness that was simply her nature expressed perfectly by the bow of a ship moving through open water.
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