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It felt like the conservatism when it comes to sex in Japanese society only made people gravitate towards it more. Whispers in the hallway about spotting some people tangled in each other's limbs, shirts unbuttoned and drenched with sweat in an unused classroom. The secrecy must have been exhilarating for them, not that she knew in details. She never had that sort of relationship whether in school or in college.
Then there were more condemnable cases. The homeroom teacher that quietly taken away with a piece of cloth over his hands in the middle of a school day. Two-piece suit walking next to a set of sailor uniform. Wandering hands in a crowded train. Revenge porn. Coercion.
Neko had spent all these years standing on the side and sucking up those stories like a sponge, but never got involved. Between devoting her time to catching up with Autumn and keeping a low profile for the "assistant" role, she did not particular had the bandwidth to go on dates, meeting new people, or having sex.
Well, she technically did most of those things as the assistant, didn't she? Their little meetups could pass at dates. She saw new faces all the time. She got close to sexual intercourse, just not intimate. There was nothing intimate about Osoto Masaki as a whole, and judging from the reaction of his unwilling "partners" there was nothing pleasant about having sex with him either. Their relationship was built on the bloody and shaky foundation of each other's words. She tentatively kept a mental record of everything that made Osoto the man he was, the crevices of his difficult personality, the type of people that he would pay attention to, deeming good enough for a satisfying kill, or rape and kill. He had no qualm telling her that she did not fit into that category either.
With that resolve in mind, Neko thought she was careful enough not to get too conceited. She thought that she understood the burn risk after all this time playing with fire. She thought she was prepared to face the music and pay the price for the choice she had made. She thought she was ready for anything Osoto Masaki's volatile mind could make up, even at her own expenses. So when she woke up, she was surprised at her own reaction.
There were no bleeding, for once. No dismembering, because she could not exactly perform that on herself. And amongst the novelty of it all, she was alive and breathing.
The door to the bathroom opened — is it always so echo-y in here? — and Osoto shot a look of slight annoyance and disdain on his face, skin still glistening from washing his face.
"Took you long enough to wake up. Get dressed, we have to check out soon."
Right. This was one of those days. The eerie silence had already enveloped the night as they buried the mangled mess of what used to be a human deep into the ground, or in a bag at the bottom of the burnable trash container. The last train had departed. So after a quick wipe-down of hydrogen peroxide, they spent the night in another love hotel with a faceless receptionist behind the booth handing them the key.
Except it didn't happen like just any other day. And she is naked in bed. There was torn condom wrapper on the nightstand. Her clothes was on the floor — someone didn't seem to care to fold them like with his own clothes, the same way he didn't exactly care about anything but his own frustration and want. Didn't care enough to stop, he had never cared enough to stop.
"Hey, are you even awake?" the grasp on her shoulder felt like electricity and she jolted. They saw eyes to eyes for the first time that morning. The air congealed. She felt like her face was stuck in the position and she had no choice but to look at him.
Was it bizarre for a man of Osoto's look and status to engage in all these criminal activities? It was infuriating to admit that he actually had a nice face, and at times, insultingly kind eyes. He did have a tendency to show his cold and uncaring face around her, when he did not have to cover up his difficult personality and snarky way of speaking. He was already in his shirt and trousers.
The concern planted across his furrowed brows almost felt mocking. Or maybe it was confusion. Or annoyance. She did not know for sure. The moment she had to scramble for actual thoughts she realized how sluggish everything seemed to move, from the blur as she darted her eyes, to the synapses in her brain.
"We did that huh?"
The jaw, the lips, the tongue that moved did not feel like they were attached to her. Rather, the entire motion was almost manned by something external. Osoto's eyes slightly narrowed before he broke the gaze. Maybe he did not want to see. She never stopped to wonder what face she was making.
"Yes. Now get dressed. We need to leave."
Neko looked down to her exposed body for the first time in someone else's presence. Small breasts sitting away from each other. She wasn't so thin that her sternum was visible under the skin, but enough to see the very faint outline of rib bones under. A normal layer of fat on the mid-torso like that of an average person - she was no model or fitness influencer - and a squished belly button. Nothing out of the norm, save for a slight reddening right where the hip bones would be. Light bruising from the grips, which should fade after just a day or two.
Recollection flooded back in. Suddenly the replay was even more vivid and tangible than the reality in front of her eyes. Between Osoto's increasing workload as a resident and her own schedule, they had less chance to meet up and plan his stress relief session, but it also gave her months to tail and map out the poor soul's habit. There target of the night had been in-house counsel of a financial firm. He had a shiny profile on a not-so-popular social media site created exclusively for work oriented people like him, where he had posted about corporate career path and capitalistic motivational quotes, just like all the other profiles. And because Osoto Masaki was not interested in sticking it into a man, the stabs the lawyer only came from a knife. His blood quickly overpowered the expensive cologne still sticking on his tailored suits.
She had thought maybe he was projecting onto the target a little bit. Maybe some man at work had been giving him a hard time. He gave an uncanny attention to the man's mouth and throat, disdainful mumble caught in his own with words she could barely make out.
The rest of the night had carried on as it normally would. Dissecting. Bagging. Cleaning up. Osoto had specifically said that he did not want to sexually violate the target this time — out of exhaustion, or lack of interest — but it felt like he was still reeling from the inertia of the whole act. Maybe old habits die hard and Neko was unlucky enough to be right within his reach.
The ambient LED lights running along edges of the walls were eventually dimmed out and turned off, leaving only the ghostly cold refraction of the streetlamps through the window. The sheets were still smooth and smelling faintly of detergent. The heel of his palm had pressed against her clavical notch and his fingertips had bent arount the tubercle when pushed her into the mattress. His thumb ghosted near a pulsing artery on her neck and Neko remembered thinking to herself that this might be the end of her. She could not reach for the box, but he did not suffocate her to death either.
Instead his hands had wordlessly roamed all over her body, snaked their way under layers of fabric and elastics. The touches were reminiscent of medical check-up, pressing down on skin and muscle for an abnormal cyst or a broken bone. And then they dug deeper into a heat that no one had ever encroached on before. It almost felt like he was looking for a reaction, but how he would have reacted to them, she never knew.
She remembered just dropping like a puppet without strings and not knowing what to do with her limbs. In hindsight, it had never crossed her mind whether she should push back or raise a question about what he was doing. In that moment, she had left her own body to be the spectator role she had always been assigned.
"A moment please. I think my body hasn't woken up."
For a second, she was almost grateful that Osoto had not treated her as roughly as he usually would. Scratch that — it was a miracle that he hadn't stabbed her and left her gargling on her own blood until the oxygen ran out. Though it is possible that he did not strictly associate having sex with murdering people, given that he had five girlfriends that he probably got intimate with on a regular basis.
Obviously he was experienced and, logically, skilled. He knew exactly where to stimulate, to press and prod and caress. The sight of the top of his head when he prepared her was vivid enough. His hair, slightly stiff from the hotel's hard water, obscured part of his face. His eyes were fixed on the part between her thighs. Piano fingers eased their ways against rings of muscles to make space. Then came the condoms. That was the first time she had seen those things in real life, in action. Bodily fluid and sythetic lubricant lathered up with each movement.
Spasms. From the irregular contraction of her diaphragm to the jolts in the pit of her stomach to the tension in her calves.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
What did sex mean to Osoto Masaki? Why does he always had to violently raped women when he killed them? At the hotel, Neko had come to the conclusion that he did it as a way to satisfy his desire. But there were so many other ways to feel good sexually weren't there? And a good looking high-status man like him properly had it easy when it came to getting people to have sex with him. And did she mention the five girlfriends?
So after hundreds of gigabites worth of footages recorded, she had strung together some connections. It had never been about sex alone. Osoto Masaki craved status and worth and reverence (even though he always sneered at people for looking at him just through that lens, what a bizarra and contradictory man) and thus, power.
Fucking was power. Getting fucked was powerless. He was stripping those women of their clothes, their lives, their dignity and power. Women were promiscuous and dirty for having sex, and they were pathetic and worthless for getting fucked. There power were shaky to begin with, and it was taken clean off when he fucked them. He loved seeing them grovel and beg only to be a silent platter of meat sinew and bones later on. He reveled in crushing that inkling of power they posessed.
"I recently read about the actual science behind sleep paralysis, though I'm sure you already know that. The brain relaxes your muscles so that you won't toss and turn too much in your sleep, but you randomly wakes up in between stages of sleep, so it feels like you are trapped inside your own body."
It did not make any sense, the more she thought about it. What would he gain from this? It was more sensical when he had pierced her with a knife in that blazing sunset, or when he had beaten her to pulp in another blazing sunset. They had carefully maintained a distance until now, and there was nothing beneficial for them to get any closer mentally, physically, psychologically. She was not someone that fitted in Osoto's criteria of high status — not with her status, not with her education, and definitely not with her body.
She had threatened to send him to hell, that was for sure, but other than that Neko did not consider herself to pose any sort of threat that would urge him to — how should she put it — assert his power over her, forcibly. It was not particularly forceful either. No disarming, stunting, no restricting. It was her not resisting all by herself.
A pause. He sat down on the bed. His eyes flickered in recognition. He averted his gaze again.
"You didn't say no."
Aside from the act itself, it was novel to look at Osoto's face at that particular angle. The more the air smelled like bodily fluid the more sweat formed on his forehead, rolling in beads down the slight curve of cheekbones or dispered into his brows. His eyes were fixed onto her after he put in, as if to gauge her reaction. A sheen of daze glazed over his irises as the heat swole. He panted and grunted, open mouthed, its corner pulled up slightly to reveal the glimmer of porcelain white teeth. She never caught a clear view of his face in the videos recorded, but she could imagine the maniacal and predatory expression from the fear and distress look of the victims. This view was tamer than what she had expected. That did not stop her from sucking in a breath and anticipated those teeth to rip out the veins and arteries when he drew his face close to her neck.
In hindsight, that was a silly imagery. Osoto Masaki might have been a cold-blooded killer, but that method would be too animalistic and impractical for him. However, she knew for a fact that he was not above cannibalism.
The more it dragged on, the more it felt like being injected with poison. Her limbs were heavy and useless and she just laid there for his whim. Maybe that was what their whole relationship about, microdosing on venom knowing one day she would succumb into its lethal effect.
She had gone that far for him. This should not be that different, should it? Tsukahara Neko had basically turned and compromised her life for him on that train platform, this was the least incriminating thing they had ever done.
Maybe some subconscious part of her had thought that she was an outlier in Osoto's worldview, and thus he would treat her differently.
And now she was sitting in that bed naked and there was a gaping hole beneath her ribs where her lungs would be.
They had sex. Is it even the right word for this? She should have seen it coming.
The sensation his lips and teeth dragging down her neck and the groans in her ears were vivid. His entire frame crushed down on her. Despite the blood rushing underneath his skin still felt cooler when they came into close contact. He was thin, but still considerably taller and heavier then her, so getting crushed under his weight made her already irregular breathing even harder. Neko remembered seeing a sliver of Hell, where everything was just contorted and bloodied bodies. She wondered if this was what it would feel like, to be a part of those mounds.
"We both know that wouldn't have stopped you."
But she did not stop him, did she? Not because she wanted it. She just was not in a position to do so anyway, with the blood she had spilled and the lives she had buried. Hell started at that train platform when she extended her hand and shook his.
It had always been too far right from the beginning, the extent she would go for this complicated, contrarian, vile but oh so miserable man. Now she didn't know where to draw the boundary anymore. They were doomed to Hell, she always thought. She was preemptively in ruin.
What if this sets a presedence? There is this line we have crossed and I do not know what we will be, what I will be afterward.
But she had never given this scenario much thought. Part of her wanted to believe that she was exempted from all of this, because she was special, because he never saw her as someone near his league, and thus she would be spared. Another part thought had mused that the possibility was never zero. But had done things. Abhorrent, despicable things, for this man. She had put her life on the line, her supposed morality to trade with more time with him. So what made her body different? Body for labor. Body for sex.
Body with bodily reaction. The heart picking up the pace was a part of her body. The muscles freezing up and limping out was her body. The skin electrifying every touch and sensation was her body. The blood rushing with shrapnels of ice scratching on the lining of her veins was her body. She was not the lifeless lumps of meat and bone that she had buried or thrown into the river with rocks, because she felt all this hot and cold. She was not unlike the body laid bare in front of the handheld camera's lens with all this hot and cold.
Fear.
Despair.
She was just a human after all, capable of doing horrendous things, and capable of squirming in the aftermath.
His hand reached for her shoulder again. She could feel the muscles underneath instinctively tensing up, but she didn't pull away. Despite the cold fingertips, Osoto's palm was blazing hot. She braced herself for a push, a pull, a drag by the arm. Anything but to have that hand glide to her jaw and tug a loc of hair behind her ear. It was mockingly, distastefully gentle.
"Let's get you cleaned up."
His voice came out barely a whisper. Thin as smoke.
For the first time in that morning, she snapped back into her corpse, anger simmered from the bottom of the pit in her chest.
"That's distasteful, Osoto-san."
There was a slight shake in her hand when she held his wrist, just so that his hand stopped touching her face. Capillaries rushed and expanded, making her skin itch all over. She wanted to escape her own skin.
And after taking and taking — because Neko lets him — there is a miniscule shift in the muscles around his eyes that looked like guilt.
Her skin crawled.