Chapter 6: What Belongs to Them

Nari came to her that night with three weeks of not knowing in her eyes.

She crossed the room without speaking and took Hyo Rin’s face in both hands and kissed her, and when she pulled back her eyes were dark and certain. “I have been thinking about you,” she said. “Every night. What I know about you now. What I want to do with what I know.”

Hyo Rin felt her breath change. “Show me.”

Nari undressed her slowly, her hands sure on the ties of her robe, pushing the silk from her shoulders and letting it pool at her feet, and then she stepped back and looked at her the way she had looked at her the first time — like something almost too much to hold — except now the looking had knowledge behind it, and the knowledge made it different.

“Lie down,” Nari said.

Hyo Rin lay back on the mat and Nari knelt over her and bent her head and took her nipple into her mouth, and Hyo Rin’s back came off the mat because she knew now, from the first night, that this was the thing that undid her fastest — Nari’s mouth there, soft at first and then with more pressure, her tongue moving in a slow circle, and her hand sliding down Hyo Rin’s stomach at the same time so that the two sensations arrived together and Hyo Rin had nowhere to put the feeling except into the hand she pressed hard against Nari’s hair.

Nari sucked her nipple slowly and deliberately and watched her face while she did it, and her fingers moved lower and found her already wet and Hyo Rin heard herself make a sound she had not planned to make.

“I know,” Nari said against her breast, and the knowing was in her voice and in her fingers, which moved through her slickness with the confidence of someone who had done this before and remembered everything. She stroked her slowly, not rushing — the place that made Hyo Rin’s thighs fall open, the pressure that made her breathing go ragged, the rhythm that made her grip in Nari’s hair tighten involuntarily.