A Bouquet of Orchids
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 5: Plain and Simple
Romantic Sex Story: Chapter 5: Plain and Simple - 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
The week after the shrine was a different kind of week.
Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. The compound ran exactly as it always ran — the morning market, the household accounts, the cook’s fire, the evening meal on the veranda. Mali moved through all of it with the same quiet efficiency she brought to everything and if the household boys noticed anything different about the atmosphere they were sensible enough not to mention it.
What was different was the air between them.
It had weight now. A specific, warm, not unpleasant weight that hadn’t been there before. When Pieter came in from the trading post in the evenings and found her in the kitchen or the garden or at her accounts desk the moment of seeing each other carried something in it that hadn’t been there the week before. Not awkwardness. Something more like — awareness. The particular awareness of two people who have kissed in the rain and are now going about their ordinary lives with that fact sitting between them like a lamp that had been lit and was not going to be unlit.
They talked on the veranda as usual. About the city, about his trading business, about the small dramas of the market lane. Comfortable. Easy. The conversation they had been building for weeks.
But sometimes he looked at her in the middle of a sentence and whatever he had been saying briefly stopped mattering.
And sometimes she looked at him and thought about the way his hand had felt closing around hers and had to redirect her attention firmly back to whatever they were discussing.
She was not a woman who lost her attention easily. She found this mildly alarming and privately amusing in equal measure.
On Thursday evening he came home later than usual, the particular lateness of a man who had been turning something over in his mind all day and had finally finished turning it. Mali was on the veranda with the household accounts when she heard his step on the compound path — she knew his step the way she knew everything about the compound, automatically, without having decided to learn it — and something in the quality of it told her this evening was going to be different from the previous four.
She closed the accounts ledger and waited.
He came through the veranda door and stopped when he saw her. Looked at her for a moment with those direct eyes. Then he pulled the other chair around so it faced her rather than the river and sat down.
Mali set her hands in her lap and looked back at him and said nothing. She had learned that Pieter de la Cort said things when he was ready to say them and not before, and that waiting for him was never wasted time.
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about what happened on Sunday.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I want to be plain with you.”
“You usually are.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Then it settled and he looked at her with the most serious expression she had seen from him — not grave, not worried, just completely honest and completely certain.
“When I kissed you,” he said, “I knew what it meant. I knew what I was saying when I did it even though I didn’t say it in words.” He paused. “I’m saying it in words now.”
Mali waited.
“I’m going to marry you,” he said. “That’s what I want. Not to take what I want and leave you to work out what you are to me. Not to make promises with my hands that I won’t make with my mouth.” He looked at her steadily. “I want you. Plain and simple. And I’m not ashamed to claim you in front of anyone who asks.”
The veranda was very quiet. The river sounds came through as they always did — the water, the distant bells, a boat somewhere calling across the channel.
“If you want out,” Pieter said, “now is the time. We both know where this goes if we proceed. I will not deceive you and I will not toy with your heart. So if you have doubts — say them now. I would rather hear them than pretend they don’t exist.”
Mali looked at him for a long moment.
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