Chapter 6

“I was very little when I first met your father…”

I stood impatiently while Kazuo searched for words to tell his story.

“…he found me playing by myself in the streets with a wooden sword one day. I was pretending to be a samurai. Whacking trees, chasing cats as if they were bandits and such… rather than reprimanding me for being so unruly, he showed me the proper fighting stances. He taught me how to swing the blade. For such an important samurai to go out of his way like that… I’ll never forget it. I mourned for him when he did not return last winter. Even if his death was a samurai’s death, it was hard for me to bear. He was not like the others. I guess I’m telling you this to say that I’m sorry for what you have gone through, my lady. But… I am also glad that you are here. I hope you don’t mind me saying so — in many ways, you remind me of him. It has been an honor to serve you.”

I found myself overcome with much emotion at the unexpected story and empathy from Kazuo. Tears welled up in my eyes.

“Thank you, Kazuo. For sharing that. I’m very lucky to have you in the castle.”

He bowed. I touched his shoulder, then left. I was truly fortunate to have Kazuo there who showed me respect, but I wondered if he would have felt that way if he knew of my disloyalty to my husband.

The following night I returned when the castle was at its quietest.

Kiyo looked stronger than I had found her the night before. She was sitting upright. Her skin was flushed with blood. But she was still gaunt.

I knelt in front of her and offered my breasts to her. She leaned in and took a nipple in her mouth and sucked. She drank until she was full, and then I left, not a word spoken between us.

By the third night, her face had become fuller. Her rib cages showed less.

My breasts milk could not replace solid, nutritious food, but it did give her fat, energy, and staved off the pain of starvation.

After satisfying herself, she spoke the first words since I had started feeding her.

“Why are you doing this?” She asked.

“I do not know. Why do you accept it?”

Kiyo looked down. At first, I thought it was shame by which she did so, but then I saw the smirk on her face and knew something else had affected her.

Still facing the floor, she said in a voice with a volume just above breathing, “I saw how it pleased you to feed me. And I could not deny myself watching the pleasure on your face. That, more than your milk, is a craving I need to satisfy.”

It was my turn to look away, but unlike Kiyo, I did so out of shame, and I wrapped my kimono tightly shut. She was right. There was no denying it. As shocking a thing to discover about myself as it was, I knew without a doubt that I took pleasure from breastfeeding her. I just wasn’t ready to admit to it.

But she offered me no choice. Suddenly, I felt her hands ever so gently, pry my kimono open. Then she pressed the flat of her palms against my breasts. Against my very hard and sensitive nipples. They were cold, so I flinched, but otherwise I offered no protest. I let her touch me, and I enjoyed the touch. She touched tenderly, and it had been too long

She brought herself nearer to me. She brought her lips to my ears and whispered, “Have you ever been with a woman?”

I exhaled a shuddering breath, shut my eyes.

She began to rub her hands in slow circles, massaging my breasts, and at the same time, her lips lingered a hair’s breadth from my ear, giving me her soft warm breathing.

“You would like it, wouldn’t you?” She whispered. “You can have it now… if you’d like.”

My sensibilities screamed at me to jump to my feet and flee, words of protest and denial built up on my tongue, but I could not let them out. I could not hide it. She already knew that I wanted it. That I wanted her tender touches. Her warmth. I wanted all of her, and she was willing to give it to me. Could I not allow myself to get what I wanted?

To that end, I turned to face her. I moved in tentatively. She did not back away, and so I touched my lips to hers, and her lips parted, and I felt her tongue, and so I put my tongue against hers to taste it. The taste of my milk still lingered in her mouth. A subtle sweetness that gratified me and provoked more desire inside me. I made my kiss more vigorous, more unabashed, and she did the same as if we were engaged in a vicious duel, and we both breathed heavily, as if exerting ourselves tremendously.

I found myself removing her kimono in a mad rush, and once it was off, I flung mine off, then myself atop her, and put my hands on every part of her to warm up every cold part of her, and used my mouth to do the same, planting it wherever I could, and even, without thinking, between her legs.

She spread her legs for me, and I did not question what I needed to do. I did what I desired to do, which was to pleasure her with my tongue and delight in the soft sounds of pleasure, and in the taste of her musky sex, and the hotness and wetness of her fruit, and even the tickling sensation of her soft, straight pubic hair on my nose. It’s hard to say if there is anything else that evoked the same amount of pleasure as I felt having her this way. There was none. How could there be? What could be the same as giving my would-be killer life with my milk, and for her, instead of death, to make me feel alive once more by giving me as much of her body as I desired, which was all of it. Not the most elegant poem, nor the most colorful sunrise could compare. Nothing was more divine.

Before long, her undulant body trembled ecstatically. I did not relent licking her until she burst like a dam in a summer monsoon storm.

She wasted no time to do the same to me. She behaved forcibly with me, eager to get at my sex. She pushed me up against the column to which she was shackled, and I held onto it while she held me pinned against it. She kissed my neck and shoulder, my spine, and finally between my legs, where she let her tongue explore my wet slit, all the while, gently fingering my sensitive bud.

I kept my leaning posture against the wooden column, holding onto it as if for dear life while she brought me to breathtaking culmination, after which, I collapsed atop her.

We held each other in a tight embrace, bound to one another by the red thread of fate.

Once the heady waves of pleasure subsided, I realized my breasts were already aching from fullness again, and so I said to Kiyo, “You should have more milk if you can.”

“As you wish, my lady,” she said with a glint in her eyes, and without hesitation, she drank until she could drink no more.

It went like this for many nights. Every night, just past when the castle had all turned in for sleep save for the castle guards, I would make my way clandestinely to the prison. Kazuo would let me in without a second thought, and I would breastfeed my prisoner, and then I would fail against temptation and allow myself to be seduced into sexual pleasure and I would be happy for it.

At some point, the gossip in the castle about the prisoner turned from morbid fascination (there were bets placed on how long it would take for her to succumb to her immurement), to growing dread. The castle guards who came in daily on their rounds to check on her noticed that with each passing day, she became healthier. They observed her wounds healing, and her skin returning to a blushing, healthy pink. Day by day, the whispers that she was indeed a demon solidified into truth.

There were suggestions that she was spiriting herself into the kitchen in the middle of the night to abscond meals, and, as irrational as that theory sounded, and despite Renshō ‘s insistence that this was impossible, as no food had gone unaccounted for, the castle guards and the fire watchmen more frequently patrolled the kitchen in the hopes of catching Kiyo, the demon princess red-handed.

Only Kazuo suspected that Kiyo’s improved health had something to do with my nightly visits, but he said nothing to the others. He guarded our secret as if it were his own.

So night after night I came down, and visited unopposed, and without drawing any suspicion. That is, I thought I had not drawn any suspicion, until one night, Kazuo was not in his normal place, but another guard – a portly one that I knew as one of the gate men of the town’s gate. He did not eye me with surprise that I was down there, nor did he treat me with due formality. Instead, he simply glared, and that glare made my heart sink.

Nervous as I was, I did my best to keep a straight face and bid the guard good evening and asked about Kazuo.

“Reassigned to the city wall,” he replied gruffly.

I remained decidedly unperturbed and tested my luck. “May I see the prisoner?”

He snorted. “Can’t let you do that. Orders straight from the daimyo: No one sees the prisoner. Not even you. Especially you.”

It was that last emphasis, and in the way he unconsciously clutched his spear that I knew, not only would it be impossible to see Kiyo tonight, or any other night, but I would soon face a reckoning.

Unsure of what to do, I headed back to my chamber, and sure enough, what I had most feared was waiting there for me. Tanenaga was standing my bed chamber.

His eyes were cold. His face was stone.

“Awfully late for a stroll,” he said.

“I could not sleep,” I replied quickly, not wasting time feigning innocence, choosing rather to put a slight weight of curtness in my words, and daring to look back into his eyes unflinchingly.

As if nothing should be the matter, I unpinned my hair and began to undress for sleep. “I was afflicted with a terrible dream,” I remarked.

“Ah,” Tanenaga replied simply.

My heart pounded like thunder in my ears, and my mind raced unproductively.

He came over to me and drew his finger down the center of my kimono to part the flaps at my chest, baring my breasts.

“Your breasts are quite large.”

I looked down at my chest. “So, they are.” I feigned a surprised tone.

“You’re producing milk,” he said.

“Perhaps another child is on the way,” I said meekly. “Another son, I hope.”

“As it is my hope,” he replied. He spoke distantly.

Tanenaga removed his kimono and let it fall to the ground to stand naked. He ran a hand over my breasts, while I stood there frigid, like a deer upon hearing a distant snapping of twigs.

I hoped beyond hope that I had it all wrong. That the change in guard was merely a matter of course, and that my husband was merely yearning for sex from his wife. Acting upon this hope, I undid the sash of my kimono, and let it and my kosode fall so that I was naked before him.

My husband studied my breasts and was pleased. He grabbed at them. He pinched harshly to eke milk from them, causing me to flinch with pain.

When he went down to suck on them, I gave him moans of sexual pleasure.

“You like how that feels, don’t you?” Tanenaga said.

I nodded and whimpered to give him the answer he wanted. He continued sucking, and I, in order to temper the squirming protest inside me, committed to disloyalty by imagining that it was not he, but Kiyo at my breasts.

Yes, I allowed myself to latch onto lucid imaginations. I imagined it was Kiyo’s lips on my nipples, and the pressing of her tongue, and I was so aroused by this that wetness crept in profusely between my legs.

When Tanenaga finished at my breasts, he laid me down on my futon. He pulled my knees apart to reveal my blushing blossom and with taut agitation pulled his hard cock and pushed into me deeply. I let out a cry of pain as his cock stretched me. “Please, slowly dear,” I urged softly.

He ignored my request. He thrusted harshly. He penetrated forcefully, pushing all the way in, and his eyes, beads of coal that had caught the wet glow of the fire from the brazier beside my bed, dared me to protest further, to squirm against his will. I was frozen with fear, unthinking now, because to think at all would be to realize that he knew that I had betrayed his trust. That I was the one responsible for keeping his prisoner alive.

He came inside me, then collapsed atop me.

I, hoping beyond hope that my suspicions were wrong, cloyingly said, “will you stay the night with me?”

Tanenaga grunted, which was as good of a ‘yes’ that I would receive from him. Before long he was snoring, his arm draped over me.