Mochizuki [Full Moon] (2/3)

Slowly, she lowered herself into the spring, wincing subtly at the sudden change in temperature. Atsu's back and shoulders were a matrix of scars, both old and new, serrated, diagonal, criss-crossing and everything in-between. Her lower half was less blemished, but still there was a decent share of nicks and bruises where she'd hit hard and been hit back harder. Some days, the simple act of moving was enough to make her ache, but she had long since grown used to it. She could not say anyone had chosen this for her; she walked a path of violence and so she bore the markers of that path. At times, with days at a clip spent alone on the road, swathed in ronin's garb from head to toe, the pain was the only thing she had to remind her there was a body underneath at all. It was only in the lonely, quiet hours, when the kimono unfurled and the hakama came tumbling down, that she could well and truly think of herself as a woman. It came back to her as she descended, the water lapping like a thousand warm tongues at her shins, her calves, her inner thighs, slipping into the gap between them. Her chitsu was every bit the blushing maid she wasn't, with a fat pink pearl adorning the top of her slit and full, plump lips that held a certain tinge of russet redness at the edges; it only grew redder as the heat spread over her skin, and the water came in pressing wetly, warmly, steamingly over her sex, flattening the coiled black bramble of her bush into long streams of dripping, silky curls that clung to her mound and the upper portion of her sex.
Already, she sensed beads of sweat were gathering below the line of her stomach and beginning their long march down onto her legs and crotch. Her buttocks were the last thing to submerge. They were small, but well-formed and cutely rounded, and shining where the water had risen to cup them from beneath. Fans of silvery moonlight played across them, like a pair of pretty white hills, catching the space between them and giving a hint of the furrowed, pink-brown entrance scarcely hidden there.

Exhaling, Atsu allowed the water to take the rest of her, bristling as her upper body sank into it and it washed over her, from her belly all the up to the tops of her glistening breasts. Snowy, bell-shaped slopes they were, playful, buoyant perkiness to them. They were full and hefty at the bottom, with a tapered slenderness toward the top, and crowned by dark, swollen archipelagos of areola, the nipples inverted, smothered sleepily beneath their puffy flesh. Unbidden, a quiet, breathy moan escaped her throat, and she closed her eyes, trying to let the warmth and softness carry away all her worries momentarily away.

                                                                                             **One Hour Later**

All along the back of her neck, a thin layer of fuzz stood sentinel as one. Atsu froze, her fingers outstretched inches from the dangling persimmon, her mouth shriveling into dryness as she sensed the burn of an unseen gaze upon her. Frantically, she looked around, her every instinct bent toward the task of finding the watcher, her heartbeat fluttering girlishly as those first, tentative prickles of unease went creeping down the pale causeway of her spine. Suddenly, there was the sound of motion behind her. Something was wrong, she thought. She shifted nervously in the water, all her usual steel vacating her as the vulnerability of her current position hit her anew. "Show yourself!" she shouted, the subtle quaver in her voice betraying her mounting uncertainty. "Whether pervert or bounty hunter, I know you're there!" A long, drawn-out pause... then, the sound of his voice. "Mochizuki!" he giggled, and the instant he spoke, she knew the truth of him, and her blood ran deathly cold. Right then, with the worry and shame of things still twisting in her gut, a gust of wind came surging on up over the top of the hill, through the nearby tree, and blowing clean over her. Her teeth chattered at the chill of it, the moisture all over her skin shot through with a biting cold as it came whipping across her body and through the gap betwixt her legs. In places, goosebumps rose upon her flesh--on the nape of the neck, the shoulder blades, the upper arms and the dips at her waist, even awakening those drowsy brown nipples from their slumber, a queasy, illicit flutter gathering in her stomach as they burrowed through the soft, tanned skin.

Another giggle, and this time she lost her nerve completely. Frantically and on the tips of her toes she twisted, lacing her fingers together and wedging them tightly into the plump wet canyon under her buttocks, trying to hide from a pair of eyes whose position was unknown to her. A third round of laughter, this one louder and more raucous than the last. This time she caught the bearing of it on the breeze. She whipped her head around, and when she peered closer, a small, huddled shape revealed itself to her. In one of the bushes close to the hot spring's edge, small hands parting the leaves aside to better see through, a pair of wily, mischievous eyes, as wide and bright as pressed gold coins, and a grin alive with disbelief and triumph in nearly equal measure. A boy, the boy from the inn who'd shown her the way here. He must have followed her, hidden himself near the spring for the sake of a free illicit show. Atsu's mouth fell open at the cheek of it. And of course he wasn't looking at her face, probably hadn't been since she'd started taking off her clothes. He wasn't looking at her face! Around the undersides of her shoulders, and at the base of her spine, the prickle of discomfort intensified. A furtive glance down and she saw herself, her chest, her belly, that fuzzy black juncture at her thighs; she'd risen too far up out of the water, offered up too much of herself to his prying eyes, and now... now he was looking right at her—

Atsu turned away from him, desperate to hide her buttocks from his perverted, greedy gaze. He was at that age where a woman's charms were just another kind of jape to him; to come upon one in her bareness was akin to listening at his parents' door and delighting in the overhearing of a curse. He knew he shouldn't be peeping, and that knowledge was a greater thrill than actually watching her splash around in the nude, or beholding the plump, forbidden fruit of her naked shiri in all its peachy little glory. With a loud splash, she hurriedly folded her legs beneath her and lowered her backside into the water. A scarlet streak flushed across her face like the mark of a sword stroke, and started gathering as much of herself into her hands as she could manage, cinching her legs closed beneath the surface of the spring and rushing to shield the little, ripe buds of her nipples behind her arms. There was more motion from within the bush, and a moment later the boy darted out from among its leaves. In her shock, she twisted her torso a fraction to the right and inadverdently shook them in the process, and those water-dappled bells went slapping jigglingly together, droplets flying off their curves, and the night air filling with a loud, mortifying clap.

The boy stopped dead in his tracks. Briefly, as one, he and Atsu stood motionless, then his eyes flicked low to drink in the sight of her breasts, and hers slid agonisingly down to follow them, the eyelids drooping low over her irises, the pug nose furling at the bridge, the bottom lip folding out pathetically as the simmering heat of haji soaked clean through her, like the crisp, clean waters of the spring. The thought occurred to her to say something, but all that came out was a kind of awkward, formless croak. That particular noise seemed to give him courage, and the smile returned to his lips, and his eyes grew wide and mischievous again. He pointed at her and he laughed, brought his hands up under his chest and made a bouncing motion, then scurried on over to the pile on the ground she'd made of her clothes. Atsu's skin crawled, and in a nervous flurry she brought her arm across her breasts in a cradling motion, panting in shock as she splayed her fingers to cover them as best she could. "L-leave it!" she warned. "There are no sweets in my pockets, or money... you've..." she paused to catch her breath, the outrage and shame mingling to render her speechless for a moment. "You've no business rummaging through them!"

But the boy paid her no mind, save to laugh in her face once more for good measure as he gathered up her clothes and underthings, took one more admiring look at that which remained of Atsu's body for him to see. "No!" she shouted, taking a mincing shuffle through the water toward the edge of the spring. "Boy! BOY!" she kept calling after him as he raced down the path from whence she'd come and disappeared over the crest of the hill.