R-rated scene up ahead!
Yàn Shū had a system.
The system was simple, elegant, and had served him well for a long ti: find a quiet corner, open a scroll, and beco invisible.
People tended to overlook scholars. This was not an insult. It was a feature. When you were overlooked, no one interrupted your reading, no one asked you to settle disputes, and no one dragged you into the kind of social catastrophes that seed to find everyone else with alarming regularity.
He was in the middle of a particularly fascinating passage about dicinal root cultivation when the door of the Thousand Fang trading post flew open and a woman walked in.
He looked up.
He imdiately looked back down.
He imdiately looked up again.
She was, objectively, several things at once. Tall. Her eyes, when they swept the space, were the color of athysts catching firelight.
They landed on him.
He looked back down at his scroll.
The words had stopped making sense.
Root cultivation, he thought desperately. You were reading about root cultivation. Focus. The Shāng root requires approximately forty days of—
"Excuse ."
He looked up.
She was standing in front of his table.
Up close she was more alarming, not less. She had a smudge of sothing on her cheekbone that she clearly didn’t know about, and her hair was escaping from wherever she had put it, and she was looking at him.
"You’re the scholar," she said. "Mo Xiao ntioned you."
"I—yes." He adjusted his glasses. "Yàn Shū."
"Bai Yue." She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down without being invited, which should have been startling but sohow wasn’t. "You know everything about dicinal plants?"
"I know a significant amount about—"
"Perfect." She leaned forward, elbows on the table. "I need to know about Hollow Fern root. Soone in the village has a fever that isn’t breaking."
And that was how it started.
He talked about the root. She asked questions that were sharper than he expected, specific, building on each answer like she was constructing sothing. She had a quick mind. He noticed this before he noticed anything else, which was telling.
She stayed for an hour.
She ca back the next day.
~
The second visit, she brought him food.
"You forgot to eat," she said, setting a bowl in front of him.
He looked at it and then at her. "How do you know I forgot to eat?"
"That doesn’t matter." She picked up an apple from sowhere and bit into it. "Eat."
He ate.
She stayed longer this ti. She asked about the scrolls,and then she asked a question that sent him into a ten minute explanation he hadn’t planned to give.
She listened to all of it.
He caught himself mid-sentence, suddenly aware of how long he had been talking. "I apologize. That was—"
"Interesting," she said, and she ant it, he could tell. "Keep going."
No one had ever told him to keep going before.
He kept going.
~
The third day, she sat beside him instead of across from him.
"You sll like paper and herbs," she observed, not looking up from the scroll.
"That’s—yes. Occupational." He cleared his throat. "I spend a lot of ti with both."
"I like it." She turned a page. "Very you."
He had no idea what to do with that, so he did nothing, which seed to be the correct choice because she just kept reading.
After a while she said, "You’re not going to do anything, are you."
He looked up. "I’m sorry?"
"About this." She gestured at the space between them, which was very small.
"I don’t—" He stopped. His face was warm. "I don’t know what you an."
"You do." She turned to look at him directly, and up close, at this distance, with her athyst eyes doing what they were doing, it was extrely difficult to maintain any coherent thought processes. "You have been very careful for three days not to do anything about the fact that you like ."
His glasses slid down his nose. He pushed them back up. "I didn’t say—"
"You didn’t have to." She tilted her head. "You found the scroll about river settlent trade routes because I ntioned I ca from the river settlents. You rembered I said I don’t like sweet fruit and traded your honey-pear to Mo Xiao for a plain one without making anything of it." A pause. "Those are things people do when they like soone."
He had nothing to say to this. It was all true.
"So," she said, "since you’re clearly not going to say anything, I’m going to say sothing instead." She shifted on her seat so she was facing him more fully. "I like you too." She reached out and straightened his top, which had gone askew at so point. Her fingers brushed his neck. "There."
"You—" His voice had done sothing embarrassing.
"You like ."
"That’s what I said."
"You’re very direct."
"Very," she agreed. "Is that a problem?"
"No," he said.
She smiled. It went all the way up.
"Good." She turned back to the scroll. "Then you can take to dinner tonight. There’s a place by the east fire that Mo Xiao says is good."
"That’s—yes. I can do that."
"I know you can." She was already reading again, her shoulder warm against his. "You’re very capable, Yàn Shū. You just don’t always know it."
He looked at the top of her head, at the hair escaping its arrangent, at the smudge on her cheek that she still didn’t know about.
He decided, with a certainty that surprised him with how quickly it arrived, that he was going to spend a great deal of ti making sure she knew she was right back.
He reached over and very gently, with one careful finger, brushed the smudge from her cheek.
She looked up.
"You had sothing," he said.
She reached up and touched where his finger had been. Sothing shifted in her expression, sothing that was warr than before.
"Thank you," she said softly.
"You’re welco," he said, and went back to his scroll, and tried not to smile too widely, and failed completely.
~
Dinner was easy.
He had expected to be nervous. He was always nervous in new social situations, his brain producing worst-case scenarios with helpfully detailed specificity. But she talked easily and asked him things and laughed when he said sothing that was apparently funny, which he hadn’t entirely intended but was happy to take credit for.
When they walked back through the village, she took his hand.
He did not say anything.
He held on.
At the door of the guest hut, she turned to face him.
She looked at him for a mont.
Then she kissed him.
It was brief. Warm. Her hand ca up to his jaw, steadying, and she kissed him. When she pulled back she was close enough that he could see the firelight in her eyes.
"Goodnight, scholar," she said.
"Good—" his voice had done the thing again. "Goodnight."
She smiled, squeezed his hand once, and went inside.
Yàn Shū stood in the dark for a mont.
Then he walked back to his own hut, and sat on the edge of his bed, and looked at his hands.
He picked up his journal.
Today, he wrote, the light changed.
He paused.
Her eyes are the color of athysts catching firelight. She told I was capable. She straightened my scroll when it was upside down without saying anything about it. She took my hand in the dark.
He stopped writing. Looked at the words.
I think, he added, I am going to need more paper.
~
Many more months later
Yàn Shū’s back was against the piled furs, heart hamring so loudly he was certain Bai Yue could hear it. She knelt over him, thighs straddling his hips, her dark hair falling loose around her shoulders like spilled ink.
The simple linen wrap she wore had already been loosened, it hung open just enough to reveal the full, heavy curves of her breasts, dusky nipples already tight from the cool air and from the way he kept staring.
"You’re shaking," she murmured, voice low and warm with amusent. One strong hand settled on his chest, right over his racing heart. "Still so shy even after all these weeks, scholar?"
"I—I’m not—" He swallowed, eyes flicking up to her face and then helplessly back down to her chest. "It’s just... you’re very... beautiful. And close."
Bai Yue’s smile turned predatory in the best way. She leaned down, letting the weight of one breast brush deliberately across his lips.
"Then touch ," she said, the command gentle but unmistakable. "We’re not leaving this bed until you learn how to touch your mate properly. Especially if we’re going to make a cub tonight."
The word cub sent a visible shiver through him.
His hands, elegant scholar’s hands that usually held scrolls and brushes, rose hesitantly. He cupped the soft underside of her breast, feeling the surprising weight and warmth. His thumb brushed over the stiff peak and she humd in approval.
"Like that?" he whispered.
"Mm. Gentler at first... then firr." She covered his hand with her own, guiding him. "Squeeze. Feel how full they are? They’ll get even fuller when I’m carrying your cub."
Yàn Shū made a soft, embarrassed sound and obeyed. He kneaded the plush flesh carefully, then with growing confidence as her breathing deepened.
When he leaned up and closed his mouth around one dark nipple, sucking lightly, Bai Yue let out a low, throaty growl of pleasure that vibrated straight through him.
"Good boy," she praised, threading her fingers into his hair and holding him there. "Use your tongue. Circle it... yes, just like that. Harder now.....suck properly."
He did, cheeks flushed crimson, eyes half-lidded as he lavished attention on her breast. The taste of her skin, warm, faintly salty, with the wild undertone of panther musk, made his head spin. His other hand found her second breast, rolling the nipple between thumb and forefinger the way she had shown him monts ago.
Bai Yue rocked slowly against the growing hardness trapped beneath his robes, letting him feel how ready she already was.
"Look at you," she murmured, voice husky. "So eager once you stop overthinking. These are going to feed our cub one day, you know. You’ll watch them swell...watch milk bead on my nipples... and you’ll still want to put your mouth on them, won’t you?"
He moaned around her breast at the image, sucking harder, tongue flicking rapidly. His hips twitched upward instinctively.
Bai Yue chuckled softly and pulled back just enough to tug his robes open, baring his lean, lightly furred chest and the flushed length of his manhood. She wrapped her hand around him, stroking once, twice, slow and firm.
"Easy, scholar. We have all night." She shifted higher on her knees, guiding the head of his cock to slide through her slick folds. "Tonight I want you deep. I want you to fill until it takes."
Yàn Shū’s hands trembled as they returned to her breasts, kneading and plucking at her nipples while she slowly sank down onto him. The tight, wet heat made his head fall back with a broken whimper.
"Bai Yue..."
"Shh. Eyes on ." She rolled her hips, taking him to the hilt, then leaned forward so her breasts hung heavy above his face. "Keep playing with them while I ride you. Don’t stop until I say."
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