Counterparts

CHAPTER 4

"OK," Gojyo said, "I'm ready.”

Sanzo jumped a bit when the kappa spoke, wondering if he had been caught in his furtive observations of the man’s physique. Sanzo’s heart raced despite his attempt to appear nonchalant, and he cursed his pale coloring as he felt a faint blush race across his cheeks.

"Alright, already, let's get this over with so I can go to bed."

Sanzo tried to cover his embarrassment by affecting his usual air of bored impatience. He cursed himself again, this time for drinking too much.

“Stand up,” Gojyo commanded gently, standing up himself and looking down at Sanzo on the couch.

“What?” Sanzo was suspicious.

“Just stand up, ok?”

Gojyo extended his hand down to Sanzo. Sanzo batted away Gojyo’s hand and stood up.

“Alright, whatever,” he grumbled.

He wobbled a bit from the combined effects of alcohol and the fatigue, but tried not to let Gojyo see.

The kappa did notice, however, and caught Sanzo gently by one of his elbows to steady him, saying, “easy there, man.”

He coiled his other arm lightly around Sanzo and gently pulled the monk as closer to him.

“So what’s your bloody question? Get on with it,” Sanzo demanded, stiff in Gojyo’s arms and with as much defiance as he could muster.

It was far more difficult for him than usual to assume his typical arrogant pose when the floor kept tilting him around like a carnival ride, and the goddamn kappa was holding him so close. With all that skin… and …hair…

“My question is this, Sanzo houshi-sama: would you be afraid to be kissed by a lowly erogappa?”

Gojyo posed his seemingly simple query in a level tone, with an amused and only slightly wicked smile. He froze just as he was, holding Sanzo in the barest of embraces, and watched the priest’s face as he processed and struggled with the situation he was in.

Sanzo stared at Gojyo in stunned silence, his brain wrestled with the possible permutations of all the different replies he could give to the question.

If he said yes, then he was afraid, he looked like a wimp and a coward, and his pride would simply not allow that.

If he said no, he was not afraid, then what did that mean? Would that be a lie?

Was he afraid to be kissed by the kappa? Would that be giving him permission? Was that what he wanted to do?

Did that mean he was a homosexual? Oh gods, what the hell if that was true? His mind reeled. There was simply no way to… it just couldn’t be…

”No, I ….” he said, thinking out loud.

“All I needed to hear,” Gojyo said quickly.

Before Sanzo could pull back Gojyo quickly snaked his face in close to the monk’s, head turned at a slight angle, and kissed him firmly and deliberately on the lips. Gojyo knew better than to move too fast or Sanzo would surely balk. But he also knew if he moved too slow, the pretty blonde man that he finally had his lips on after so long would have too much time to think, and for Sanzo right now, the kappa knew instinctively that too much thinking was a bad thing.

Gojyo kissed the monk again with his lips moist and slightly open this time, and he lingered a moment like that until he both heard and felt Sanzo react with a sharp sighing intake of breath. Knowing from that sound that he was getting just the reaction he wanted, Gojyo was emboldened to continue.

He kissed the monk more fervently this time, teasing Sanzo’s lips with the tip of his tongue, asking entry to his sweet mouth. Sanzo didn’t stop him, so Gojyo pressed on, and when his tongue first met Sanzo’s a slight moan of pleasure escaped the monk’s throat. Sanzo’s arms moved up Gojyo’s sides as if they had minds of their own and his hands splayed out across Gojyo’s back. As the kiss deepened and their tongues sparred Sanzo brought one arm around Gojyo’s waist, and the other hand up onto the back of his head, twining his fingers through the other man’s scarlet hair.

Gojyo let out a little growl deep down in his throat and reveled in the sheer pleasure he felt, having the priest finally and so firmly in his arms. It was already so much better than he had imagined, from the feel of the Sanzo’s hard muscles moving under the smooth pale skin beneath his hands, to the intoxicating feel of their lips crushing together.

He drank in the delicious collection of smells emanating from the man he held in his arms – even muddled with the smells of beer and cigarettes, his youkai senses could discern that blend of scents that was purely Sanzo, that which made him unique. Only now all of Sanzo’s normal smells, which were heady enough to the intoxicate the kappa on their own, were now combined with the beginnings of that aroma of pure sex… It was that smell that humans males put off when they were aroused, which in turn only served to get the kappa all the more turned on by this man he held in his arms.

Gojyo smiled to himself. “When they were aroused”… He knew what that smell meant even before he pushed his hips sensuously up against Sanzo’s that first time. He knew he would find Sanzo’s cock completely hard when he leaned into it, just as hard as he was. He reached down and held Sanzo’s hips as he started grinding his hips against the monk’s, gently at first, just enough to brush their hard-ons against each other, which brought a muffled groan from Sanzo.

Meanwhile their kisses were steadily deepening in intensity, and at times were almost becoming almost violent in their forcefulness. Gojyo kept half-expecting Sanzo to come to his senses and pull away from him at any minute, but whether because of the alcohol, or pure need, or both, he never did. As they kissed Gojyo encouraged the priest to match his lusting tongue thrust for thrust, and every nuance and move he introduced into their passionate meeting of lips and tongues, Sanzo learned and returned greedily.

The more intense their kisses became, the louder the throaty moans issuing from the blonde. He started to push his hips back against Gojyo’s more aggressively, instinctively, driven by needs too long denied and unfulfilled. Gojyo broke away from Sanzo’s kiss and nuzzled and nipped at his ears and neck. Sanzo showed his approval by turning his head to give the kappa better access to his neck above his shirtline, and groaned appreciatively as Gojyo continued on. As Gojyo caught bits of the tender flesh of Sanzo’s neck in his teeth and alternatively nipped and sucked, it sent new shivers thrilling through the priest’s body, and he felt his groin muscles tighten in response. Gojyo tugged the black sleeveless shirt out of Sanzo’s pants and over his head, and then slowly peeled his sleeves off of his arms, stopping to kiss the tender spot at the inside of his elbows, and suck his at his fingers as he slipped each sleeve off of the monk. Guttural pleasure sounds escaped from Sanzo each time a finger disappeared between Gojyo’s kiss-swollen lips, He stared intently into Gojyo’s crimson eyes, not saying a word.
Gojyo was pleased and amazed – he had been sure that as soon as the Sanzo had been allowed to come up for air he would come to his senses and bolt – yet there he was, staring him in straight the eyes. His beautiful purple eyes showed no fear or trepidation, only a lifetime of need and a hunger darker than the night outside their cabin. Gojyo may not have had the book smarts Hakkai had but he was no fool, and he knew better than to question anything that happened now.

In the back of his mind Gojyo couldn’t help but wonder just how worldly this monk was, and if he knew what he was getting himself into. He himself had spent time on the streets, and had experimented with sex in all its forms at one time or another, but Sanzo…. Gojyo felt a pang in the back of his mind even as he felt Sanzo pull his face back up for another ferocious kiss. Gojyo knew he had to keep control of the situation or he would never be able to live with himself later. He already cared enough about this man to want to do the right thing by him. Besides, he may be an erogappa, but he still had a conscience.

Gojyo returned Sanzo’s kiss with as ferociously as it was given, and pulled Sanzo’s hips tightly against his as he ground their jeans-clad hard-ons roughly together one more time.

“You see what you have done to me, monk?” he purred in Sanzo’s ear and nipped at his earlobe.

Sanzo growled deep in his throat and rasped out the first words he had said since before they had kissed.

“What now?” he said in a sotto voce so throttled by want that Gojyo could just barely understand him.

Gojyo scooped Sanzo up in his arms and carried the monk to the bed. Before lying him down he pulled off Sanzo’s jeans. Sanzo gasped as the cold air hit his fully-nude body, and looked up at Gojyo from the bed with wide-eyed realization bordering on fear. The redhead quickly shucked off the rest of his own clothes and slid into bed alongside Sanzo. The priest’s fears were quickly forgotten as he was engulfed in the sheer unadulterated animal pleasure of finally feeling the two bodies merging full length skin-on-skin.

Sanzo pulled back to better look at this man he was with, and his breath caught in his throat at the sight of the kappa fully naked. He was dizzy with the intensity of it all, after so long with so little real physical contact in his life, so little attention ever paid to his body’s human needs. He felt the drunk on the kappa’s dark skin, running his hands all over his body as if he wanted to commit the feel of every inch, of every curve and crevice of his body, to his memory, to be recalled again in those long sad solitary nights.

Gojyo kissed Sanzo deeply just once more and then began to trail small kisses down the monk’s chest, where he laved small wet circles around Sanzo’s hard nipples with the tip of his tongue. This brought a sudden gasp from the houshi, and the harsh groan that he made next when Gojyo sucked and nipped at his small caramel-colored bud told him that Sanzo was not going to be able to last indefinitely at this. At this rate, and as beautiful as the monk looked and felt to him, neither would he.

Gojyo continued to work on Sanzo’s nipple with his skilled mouth, and reached down and grabbed Sanzo’s sleek ass and pulled their hips as close together as possible. Their naked hardened cocks brushed against each other, each now glistening with large drops of slick fluid on the purpled heads. Gojyo lightly ran his hand over both of their dicks together, and Sanzo reacted to his first touch with a quick intake of breath through his clenched teeth, followed by a groan of frank need from deep in his throat. Sanzo shuddered when the erogappa reached down and raked his blunt fingernails through the soft golden curls at the base of his shaft.

Gojyo then began to softly explore and cradle Sanzo’s balls, and ran his hand lightly over his erect shaft, appreciating how handsome Sanzo’s equipment was- his naked body truly looked like a Greek sculpture fresh from a museum. Gojyo was worldly enough to have seen more than a few men up close and personal like this, and while he knew that while many were as well-endowed as the monk, he also knew that very few had a cock and balls as nicely put-together as the blonde’s set was. Sanzo’s equipment was just like the rest of him, easy on the eye to put it mildly, and Gojyo realized he could be happy looking at this monk - and his beautiful cock and his handsome balls - for a very long time.

The thought whirred through Gojyo’s mind, only momentarily, like a breeze blowing through, about how truly odd all this was. That after all the women he had fucked over the years, and all the tits and asses he had chased, that he should feel so happy and so right with this pretty blonde priest and his pretty dick – and he hadn’t even fucked him yet. But for some strange reason it made absolutely perfect sense to him, and it didn’t cause him a moment of concern. He just knew he had been found what he had been looking for all those years, through all those women, all that wandering, and all that sex, and never been able to find it. Of course. This was it. So why wouldn’t it make sense that he would feel like he was so pleased with what he saw, and why wouldn’t he know that this right here was what he wanted to keep looking at and holding close for a long long time? Duh. And as soon as the thought came into his head, it was resolved, and disappeared. Simple.

Gojyo trailed his long fingers casually up and down Sanzo’s dick before wraping them around both of their hard pricks. The blonde gasped as he held them together with just the right pressure and started stroking them both slowly and sensuously. Sanzo was becoming increasingly agitated now and he groaned as he buried his face in Gojyo’s neck and hair. He moved his hips insistently against Gojyo’s, leaning into the kappa’s deft strokes and trying instinctively to find his release in the other man’s hand.

Gojyo started slowly at first, getting more and more turned on by the feel of the monk’s cock in his own hand. He loved the feel of sliding the smooth skin over the hard shaft beneath it. He could barely stand the delicious feeling of holding Sanzo’s cock tightly against his own, sliding his hand up and down their shafts together in unison, feeling that delicious tension building deep in his belly and knowing it he was making it happen for Sanzo at the same time. He reveled in the moans he got out of the monk with each firm stroke, and shivered from the sweet pain of the bites Sanzo was making all over his neck and shoulders in-between his moans.

Gojyo could see Sanzo’s stomach muscles starting to clench, and he could tell from his deep groans and insistent movements that the houshi wasn’t going to last much longer. Hearing how turned-on Sanzo was getting was all it took to bring the redhead right to the edge, too, and he started to pick up the speed he using on their pricks now. As he pumped up and down their cocks he ran his thumb along that sensitive spot on the underside of the head of Sanzo’s shaft, and with each stroke he ran the head of Sanzo’s prick up against his own hard belly for even more friction. The monk growled low as his hips bucked against the bed in time with Gojyo’s motions. When Gojyo increased his tempo and pressure still more Sanzo dipped his head and sunk his teeth in the kappa’s neck, biting and sucking the sensitive skin even harder, the coppery tang of blood flooding his mouth.

Sanzo was lost in a place Gojyo had never expected him to go, and Gojyo was enthralled by the unexpected passion he was seeing revealed in this man that liked the world to think he was so cold and in control. This man in his arms right now was no longer the gruff cynical monk he had first met -when he looked up at Gojyo out of those hooded and night-dark violet eyes, Sanzo seemed to be the one who had yielded to his darker demon side that night. Gojyo almost wondered if the priest had surreptitiously been wearing youkai limiters and taken them one or two of them off, the change in him was so great. The monk that was normally in such absolute control had surrendered it, at least for this one night, to Gojyo and to his own needs.

The exquisite addition of the pleasure and pain from Sanzo’s hot mouth on his neck, combined with the feel of the monk’s stiff prick in his hand and seeing that look of sheer unadulterated ecstasy on his face, was more than enough for Gojyo at this point to make him lose what little restraint he had left. The kappa finally surrendered to the heat that was driving him and brought them both over the edge to their mutual ecstatic climax, grasping and moving their cocks together side by side until they each found their own explosive release accompanied by the spasms of the other, spraying their hot spends mixed together onto their hard bellies.

As Sanzo started to come he clutched at the kappa’s ass and long hair with both hands splayed and grasping. He felt the need to moor himself to something lest the earth lose its bonds on him completely and he hurtle off towards space. His mind and body were totally overwhelmed with waves of heat and electricity that went through him like balls of lightning rolling across the desert, and as the last waves hit him he growled out Gojyo’s name over and over.

A brilliant white light exploded behind Gojyo’s closed eyes as his spasms started, and his body was wracked from the cock outwards through all his extremities with shudders of intense pleasure. Through his ecstasy he heard as if from miles away a voice calling him back, and he opened his eyes to see Sanzo’s purple eyes fixed on his, wide-eyed and almost black. It surprised and pleased the kappa much more than he would have ever expected, to hear Sanzo cry out his name as he came. For some reason he felt his heart would burst at that sound, and he wanted to hear it again and again.

Gojyo pulled Sanzo close with his free arm and kissed him softly, then lay stock still and silent, holding their pulsing cocks in his hand for some time while their breathing and their racing heart rates slowly returned to normal. He was reluctant to let go of his embrace of the monk or his gentle grasp on Sanzo’s slowly shrinking member. It was as if he was afraid that letting go of any of those connections would break the spell and return them back to the normal lives they had resided in before this wonderful interlude together.

He was about to suggest that he get them both some tea or another beer and definitely their smokes when he heard a quiet snoring sound coming from Sanzo, and realized that the priest had neither moved nor uttered a sound since he last cried out Gojyo’s name at the end of his climax.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he chuckled softly to himself, “the bastard passed out on me!”

Smiling and shaking his head, the kappa gently extracted himself from his embrace with the sleeping man. He padded to the bathroom and got a warm wet washcloth and washed himself off, and came back to the bed and gently washed off the monk’s stomach. Pausing to admire the priest as he lay there, naked and by now snoring loudly, Gojyo mused about Sanzo, about the great man, and his pride, and wondered how much of this evening he would even remember. And how much he should tell him… He lovingly kissed the bouzu on his forehead, pulled the covers up around him, slipped on some silk drawstring pants, grabbed a pillow and blanket, and went to sleep on the couch.

Sanzo lit another cigarette as he sat on the park bench and reminisced about the night of the card game in Gojyo’s cabin. The last thing he remembered really clearly was somewhere after the card game, when he and the kappa had been sitting on the couch. He remembered the goddamn question, and that there was no way he could answer it without looking like a fool or a pussy, and he remembered drinking another beer or two while he tried to figure out how he was going to extricate himself from the situation. He recalled dimly Gojyo telling him to stand up, and he got dizzy for some reason, and then it all got very confused after that.

He knew he woke up the next morning in Gojyo’s bed, naked, with the hangover from hell, but then Gojyo was sleeping on the couch, and he wasn’t naked. When he took inventory of himself that morning, he didn’t appear to be any the worse for the wear, other than the effects of the alcohol. There were no obvious signs on him that any kind of hanky-panky had gone on, but then when Gojyo was sitting across from him at breakfast he noticed several bruises on his neck that looked like bite marks. When Sanzo asked him what they were, Gojyo just smiled cryptically.

“What- oh, these? Just mosquito bites.” They didn’t look like any mosquito bites Sanzo had ever seen.

Sanzo also knew whatever had or hadn’t happened between them, something had changed. From that day on he had really started having to fight his feelings of attraction for the damn kappa, feeling like he was in his blood like a goddamn disease. It was one of the reasons he had fought the Sanbutsushin when they had said he was supposed to take Gojyo along on this journey. That nagging feeling, accompanied by the erogappa’s incessant flirting, would certainly prove to be a constant irritant that Sanzo just did not need. Having to deal with the monkey day in and day out was irritant enough.

A rush of shame washed over Sanzo as he pictured Gojyo back in the bed in the hotel, nearly lifeless, and he thought about how he had ended up that way. Irritant or not, the kappa had a big heart, and that heart had latched itself onto Sanzo and cared for him a great deal. Shit! He had never asked him to love him! He had warned him not to, in fact. But the damned cockroach wouldn’t listen, he had to be a fucking hardhead. Always the hardheaded one… Sanzo shook his head, stubbed out his cigarette and looked up. The park around him was starting to get dark – he realized he had better get back to the hotel and help Hakkai with Gojyo before it got much later.
*************************************
Dear Hakkai,

I am so sorry to hear that Sha Gojyo’s condition has not significantly improved. Head injuries can among be the most difficult to diagnose and treat, and I am sure it is even more frustrating for you since you and Gojyo are such close friends. It must be quite dreadful for you. I will certainly conduct some in-depth research in my materials here to see if there are any remedies I may have overlooked that may be of assistance, and if I find anything I will let you know immediately.

Naturally Dokugakuji is quite concerned for his brother’s welfare. Despite their past squabbles, every time the subject of his brother comes up it is evident to me that Doku cares very deeply for Gojyo. He has requested, if you don’t mind, and the subject is not too painful for you, that I ask you for the details of how Gojyo sustained these injuries. I think he still feels a big brother’s responsibility for Gojyo, and it is important to him to know how his brother was hurt and at whose hands. If the subject is still too difficult to discuss, I would most certainly understand, but I did tell Dokugakuji I would broach the subject for him with you.

Along those same lines, Doku wishes very much to see his brother without any further delay, so with your kind permission we will be planning a trip to the village you are staying in sometime early next week. Our party will consist of Lord Kougaiji, Dokugakuji, and myself. Our intention is for Lady Lirin to remain here at Houtou Castle rather than travel with us. Given the stressful circumstances of our trip and her penchant for aggravating Priest Genjyo Sanzo, we think it prudent. I am assuming we will stay at least one or two days, depending on circumstances, and will take rooms at the same hotel at which your party is staying if at all possible, for the sake of convenience.

Please let me know if there is anything at all which you need for Sha Gojyo’s care that I may bring with us when we come. I look forward to seeing you despite the unfortunate circumstances and I remain,

Your humble servant,

Yaone