*Ha-ah...*
The sound escaped her before she could catch it — a small, involuntary sigh of relief as Sohwa sank into the water.
The bath was hot, fragrant with plum oil, and her body received it the way parched earth receives rain: without reservation, without grace, with the complete surrender of something that has been enduring for too long. Every muscle she had used running through the wet mountain dark loosened by degrees, the ache dissolving from her calves and shoulders and the soles of her feet.
Her mind, unfortunately, did not follow.
_What does Dohwi want from me?_
The question had been circling for hours, wearing a groove in her thoughts. She pressed her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them and tried, as she had been trying since she stopped running, to arrange the facts into some shape that made sense.
Could creatures as different as they were truly build something together? A family — children — a life that held both of them without one consuming the other? Could she look at him in his true form, those gold eyes burning in the dark, those fangs that had ended a fox's life with a single shake — could she look at that and find, on the other side of the fear, something she could live beside?
_What if one day he gets hungry?_
The thought completed itself before she could stop it. She pressed her face harder into her knees.
The tiger was somewhere in the house. Waiting. She knew the particular quality of his waiting — patient, absolute, the stillness of something that has already decided and is simply allowing time to catch up with the decision. She had lived beside it for twenty years without fully understanding what it was, and now she understood, and it did not make it easier to be in the same house with it.
Fatigue crept up on her argument by argument and won them all.
Her eyes closed.
---
Something warm poured over her shoulders.
Sohwa's head came up so fast she nearly struck the edge of the tub.
Dohwi was crouching beside the bath, a wooden ladle in one hand and an expression of careful, attentive calm on his face. He had removed his outer robe. The light cape beneath it fell open at the chest, and the firelight from the small brazier in the corner cast warm shadows across his collarbones, the long line of his throat, the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
"Dohwi—" Her voice came out smaller than she intended. "What are you — this is the bathhouse, you can't just—"
"You fell asleep," he said simply. "You would have slipped under."
"I wasn't—" She stopped. She had been.
He set the ladle aside and placed his hand on her shoulder, and the warmth of it — palm-broad, steady, familiar after twenty years of proximity — pressed the rest of her protest into silence.
"You must be exhausted, my little fox," he said. The sly tenderness in his voice was exactly the same as it had always been, and somehow that made it worse and better simultaneously.
"I'm fine," she said, which was not entirely true.
"You've been running since this morning." He began to work his thumb in a slow circle at the base of her neck, finding the knot of tension there with the accuracy of long practice. "Let me."
"You don't need to—" But the sentence dissolved the moment the pressure increased, finding exactly the right place with the ease of someone who has mapped this particular landscape thoroughly, and the sound that left her was not a refusal.
He knew her shoulders the way he knew the mountain — every ridge and valley of her, every place where tension gathered and could be persuaded to release. She had not thought, in all the years he had done this, to wonder how he had learned. Now the question arrived and she did not quite have the composure to ask it.
Her head tipped forward. Her wet hair fell across her cheek.
"Better?" he asked.
"...A little," she admitted.
His quiet laugh was warm against the back of her neck.
He shifted — moving around the side of the tub, crouching low so his face was level with hers — and the firelight moved across his profile, that ink-brushstroke line she had noticed through the paper partition and been trying to un-notice ever since.
"Your legs must ache," he said. "All that running."
"They're fine."
"Are they?"
"Mostly."
"Let me."
Before she had assembled a coherent refusal, he had lifted her left foot from the water with both hands, cradling it with a carefulness that was almost reverent, and begun to work his thumbs in firm circles across the sole.
"Oh—" The sound left her involuntarily. Pain and relief arrived simultaneously, indistinguishable from one another, and she grabbed the edge of the tub. "That — that hurts—"
"I know." He did not stop.
"Dohwi—"
"It will pass."
It did, gradually, the sharp ache giving way to something looser and warmer, and Sohwa sat in the fragrant water and let him work through her foot and her heel and the long tight muscles of her calves with the systematic thoroughness he brought to everything he decided to do. She tried to keep her breathing even. She tried to think about something else.
She was not entirely successful at either.
His hands moved higher. Her breath snagged.
"And here?" His voice had dropped a register without making any apparent effort to.
"It — yes, that's—" She stopped.
His palms pressed into the inside of her knee, and Sohwa felt the world simplify dramatically. His gaze was on her face, watching her reaction with the focused, unhurried attention of a student ensuring he has understood the lesson correctly. The water lapped gently at the edges of the tub.
A hand moved to the inside of her thigh.
"Dohwi." The word came out half-warning, half-something she didn't have a name for. She pulled back slightly. "There is — that's not — you shouldn't—"
He laughed — low, brief, warm — and instead of his hand it was his lips that moved, pressing to the pale arch of her foot, and Sohwa's mind went briefly sideways.
_He's going to eat me,_ she thought, with sudden wild clarity. _He's actually going to—_
His teeth closed on her foot.
"*Ow!*"
The bite was sharp and deliberate, and she yelped before she could stop herself — and then she became aware that there was nothing there, no mark, no blood, just the ghost of pressure and the lingering heat of his mouth — and Dohwi was laughing, actually laughing, and for one disoriented moment she could not decide whether she was frightened or furious.
She settled on furious as a working position.
"You—!"
But he was already moving, releasing her foot and shifting forward with the fluid, unhurried inevitability of water finding level ground, and his lips were at her neck before she had reorganized her objection. They moved slowly. Down the curve of her throat. Along her jaw. The shell of her ear. He paused at her lips as though reading something written there, his breath warm and measured.
Everything smelled of plum oil and hot water and him.
"Did you eat that fox?" she whispered. The question felt important, though she couldn't entirely say why.
_Those lips I could bite right now._
He smiled against the corner of her mouth instead, pulled back a fraction, and opened his eyes. The look in them was equal parts challenge and something darker and warmer than she had words for.
"Why?" he said. "Were you hoping he'd survived? Planning to console him?"
"That's — no, I wasn't—"
"It's a shame." His tone was perfectly, infuriatingly light. "I ate all of him. Not a piece left."
She held her breath.
"I thought he might be sweet and tender." His lips moved to her shoulder, finding the curve of it with closed eyes, as though by memory. "Like you."
She made a small, strangled sound.
"Should I describe the taste?" he asked, against her skin.
Each place his lips landed seemed to leave an impression, a warmth that lingered after he moved on, as though he were mapping her — patient, methodical, collecting information he intended to keep.
_He's going to—_
"I was lying," he said.
She blinked.
"Foxes have no flavor worth speaking of. That male in particular smelled so foul I couldn't have finished him if I'd tried."
The breath she released shook slightly. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and tried to arrange her face into something that did not reveal how thoroughly her composure had just scattered.
His hand found her leg beneath the water, fingers trailing along the soft skin below her knee, and the flinch that moved through her produced something in his expression — an intensification, a focusing, like a flame finding new fuel.
"The only fox I have any interest in eating," he said, his voice dropping to the register that seemed to live below language, that she felt more than heard, "is you."
The words hung in the hot, fragrant air between them.
Then he kissed her.
It was not tentative. It was not exploratory. It was the kiss of something that has been waiting a very specific number of years and has finished waiting — his mouth finding hers with complete certainty, his hand sliding into her wet hair to angle her face the way he needed it, and Sohwa made a small sound against his lips that she was not entirely in control of.
His tongue traced the seam of her mouth. She opened without deciding to. He deepened the kiss with a slow, greedy thoroughness that was also, somehow, intensely careful — drinking her in by degrees, like something precious being savored rather than consumed — and the water sloshed over the edge of the tub as he moved closer, closer, until his chest was at the rim and his broad shoulders blocked out the firelight and the whole world had narrowed to the heat of his mouth and the pressure of his hand cradling her face.
She broke away gasping.
"Dohwi—" She pressed a hand flat against his chest, feeling his heart beating steadily beneath her palm, far more composed than her own. "There are deer on this mountain. And roe deer, and — foxes aren't even palatable, you said so yourself—"
He was not listening.
"Sweet," he murmured, his eyes half-lidded, the gold burning at the edges of his irises. His gaze had fixed on her mouth with an intensity that made rational thought feel like a very distant country. "*So* sweet." A pause, in which he appeared to be conducting an internal assessment. "Your taste — I want more of it. All of it."
"You are *insane,*" she said.
"Yes," he agreed, without particular concern. His thumb traced her lower lip, slow and deliberate. "Give me more."
The brazier crackled. The water dripped from the tub's edge onto the wooden floor in a slow, patient rhythm. Outside, the mountain was dark and still, and the rain had finally stopped.
Sohwa sat in the cooling bath and looked at the gold in his eyes, that ancient, patient, absolutely certain gold, and felt the last of her arguments dissolve into the fragrant steam between them — not gone, exactly, but deferred, surrendered to some later version of herself who might have more composure than she currently possessed.
She did not have any more composure.
She was not sure, at this precise moment, that she wanted any.