Kawasaki Saki was the eldest daughter of the Kawasaki household, and the Kawasaki household was not the kind of home where a girl's uniform got replaced before the sleeves frayed. Both her parents took long-haul work that kept them out of the apartment for weeks at a stretch, so from the time she was barely tall enough to reach the stovetop, Saki had shouldered the raising of her younger brother Taishi and her little sister Keika without being asked.
She'd even fudged her age on a part-time application at a corner shop once, hunching her shoulders under a too-big apron, thinking every yen she scraped together might lighten what her mother carried.
Children from poor families ripen early, the old proverb went. Saki had never spent her breath complaining about hardship or the thinness of the family's wallet. She'd faced the shape of her life head-on and set her jaw against it, the way Aoyama Nanami from that other neighborhood faced hers — with a quiet, unromantic tenacity that refused to break.
If her mother hadn't collapsed that spring, if the hospital hadn't demanded a sum with too many zeroes, Hozuki Nozomi would not have gotten her this easily.
...
Right now, though, he was holding her.
She had a coolness about her that was starting to blur at the edges — the elegant, aloof girl with the ponytail and the sharp collarbones, softening under his hands. He'd told her he only wanted to hold her for a while, and technically that wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth. Calling his grown-up little secretary all the way across town simply to hug her would have been an insult to the effort she took getting dressed.
So he lowered his head, slow, and kissed her.
Her cheeks flushed the color of steeped rooibos. She didn't push him away. At first — those early weeks — she'd felt like she'd stepped onto a pirate ship with the gangplank already retracted, but Saki was too honest with herself to keep pretending she hadn't come to owe him something more complicated than money.
He'd wired the hospital fee without a lecture. He'd carved out a stage for her instead of a cage — no leash, no ownership clause written in ink. Haruno-nee had signed off with that razored smile of hers, and even Yukinoshita Yukino, prim and pale and terrifyingly composed, had folded her arms and said fine.
Both his fiancées had approved. What ground did a secretary have to stand on and refuse?
Besides. He was handsome, in that dry, understated way. His competence and his sense of responsibility outstripped most men she'd met in this world. And there was that other thing about him — a mystery she couldn't name — that pulled at her like an undertow.
She wasn't losing anything by leaning in.
Her breathing sped up.
A pair of fair arms — her arms, though she barely registered the decision — hooked around his neck, and Hozuki Nozomi felt his mood tilt into something warmer. Saki was, unquestionably, top-shelf.
Strip away the family's poverty and her presence could have rivaled Miura Yumiko's queen-of-the-classroom aura; the two had the same shape of pride, just wearing different clothes. It was only because her parents' absence stole all her afternoons that Saki had never had time to fold herself into a clique, and Hozuki Nozomi had, admittedly, exploited that solitude with both hands.
His mouth moved against hers slower now, coaxing her lips open. She made a small sound — nn — into his teeth, and he took that as invitation. His hand slid from the small of her back down over the curve of her ass through her skirt, squeezing, learning the shape of her again after the weeks apart. Saki's breath hitched, sharp through her nose.
"Nozomi—" she whispered, and he swallowed the rest of it.
He walked her backward until the backs of her knees hit the couch and she sat down hard, blinking up at him with her ponytail already loosening. He knelt between her thighs, pushed her skirt up her pale legs, and pressed his mouth to the inside of her knee. Slow.Working upward. Saki covered her face with one hand and made a strangled haa sound when his lips reached the crease of her hip.
"Wait — the door—"
"Locked."
"You're — mmh—"
Her panties were plain white cotton, sensible, already darkening at the center. He hooked them down her legs with two fingers and dropped them on the floor. She smelled clean and sharp, faintly of the drugstore soap she used, mixed with the humid sweetness of her getting turned on. He nosed against her inner thigh, breathing her in, and Saki's fingers curled tight in his hair.
"Nnh — don't just — look at it—"
He laughed low against her skin and licked her, one long flat stroke from her opening up to her clit. Her hips jolted off the cushion.
"Aah—!"
She thought: this is unfair, his mouth is unfair, I said I'd only stay an hour.
He took his time. He always did with her — Kawasaki Saki, all sharp edges and pragmatic economy, deserved to be undone slowly. He circled her clit with the tip of his tongue, sucked lightly, worked two fingers into her cunt when she was wet enough to take them without complaint. Her thighs shook against his ears. She bit down on the back of her own wrist to keep quiet, which was pointless because the shk shk shk of his fingers inside her was louder than any moan she was smothering.
"Sa-ki-chan," he murmured, curling his fingers up against that spongy spot behind her pubic bone. "You've been practicing being quiet at home, huh."
"Sh-shut — up — hah — nnh—"
She came with a stifled cry against her own arm, thighs clamping around his head, her whole body arching off the couch in one long tremor before collapsing back. Fine beads of sweat had risen on her forehead. Her ponytail had given up entirely.
A long minute passed.
He lifted his head, wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, and stroked her cheek with his other hand — rosy, damp, faintly enticing in the way she never let herself be in public.
"Saki. So what are you actually going to do about your brother?"
He was, after all, finally circling back to the point. Yukino-chan had handed him this task personally, and he wanted to turn in decent work.
Saki lay limply against his chest as he sat up beside her, nuzzling her cheek into the fabric of his shirt like a cat that had decided to stop being dignified.
"Leave it to me."
"I'll give him a proper talking-to. Honestly — thinking his own sister was doing enjo kōsai... what is going on in that boy's head?"
Compensated dating
"He's in middle school. That's not so young anymore. And you have been pretty scarce at home lately, haven't you?"
He said it evenly, without accusation. Saki couldn't argue.
She sighed, small and rueful. "Ever since I started bringing in more than my parents, they mostly stopped managing me. They're proud of me, in their way — so these days I have the final vote in family matters. Keika's still tiny, she's in elementary. I can't sit her down and explain my paycheck to a little girl. And Taishi..." Her mouth twisted. "He's fourteen. Even if I told him the truth, it wouldn't fix anything. But letting him spiral into something like this — that's on me. I'll straighten it out."
She tilted her chin up, eyes meeting his properly for the first time since he'd carried her to the couch.
"And, Nozomi... thank you."
He smiled, the faintest crook. "For what, now?"
"Saki, I used pretty underhanded methods to end up with you. That doesn't mean I don't care about how you're doing. — Also, Haruno-nee's definitely warned you already, but I'm a petty man and I get jealous fast, so keep a healthy distance from your brother, please."
Saki laughed — actually laughed, a low breath of it against his collarbone.
"A middle schooler. My own brother. You're jealous of him? At that rate, with how flighty you are, shouldn't the rest of us be throwing dishes?"
"...I don't actually have a comeback to that."
"Pfft. Idiot. Ridiculous request, but — fine, I promise. Actually, when I think about it, you're right. He's growing up. He's already imagining strange things, already suspecting his sister of being some old man's kept woman. Keeping distance is probably wise."
She leaned in close to his ear, warm breath brushing the shell of it.
"Also. I don't think you're underhanded."
"Following you — I'm doing it willingly."
Hozuki Nozomi felt, distinctly, like he was being flirted with. He had genuinely thought of himself as the villain in this arrangement — lending money at her lowest ebb, then leveraging the debt to reel her in a hand's-breadth at a time. But she'd apparently made her peace with all of it, and somewhere between then and now she'd started, quietly, to like him. Which, when he thought about it, tracked. If she'd truly hated him she wouldn't have been the one hooking her arms around his neck earlier.
He ran his palm along the slender dip of her waist and let a mischievous curve pull at his mouth.
"Saki-chan. You're not in any particular hurry to go scold your brother, are you?"
"Not really. Why?"
"Mm. How about we go over the proper dynamics between a secretary and her boss a little more thoroughly."
"..."
She rolled her eyes at him — she'd clocked his intent the second he'd opened his mouth. Just like people said. He really was a bad guy.
But then. Who was the one who'd gone and fallen for him.
Saki closed her eyes, tilted her chin up, and puckered her lips first.
Hozuki Nozomi, naturally, did not stand on ceremony. After a thorough lesson on the fundamentals of being his secretary — one that left her ponytail in ruins and her voice hoarse — he finally took his leave, cradling her against him.
Saki rested a while against the pillow, then wobbled off to the bath to rinse the evening off her skin and change into something presentable. Only then did she follow him out.
Hozuki Nozomi had already texted Komachi to say the matter was handled, and to tell Kawasaki Taishi to come out and meet them.
That's right. He'd gotten Komachi's number just like that.
Wonder how loudly Hikigaya Hachiman would howl if he ever found out.