The Fox Demon Came to Repay the Monk Before His Vows novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Last Night

At sunset a covered basket appeared on the hermitage step, and nobody knocked.

Inside were two bowls of rice with pickled radish and a dish of braised mushrooms, still steaming.

There was also a slip of paper in a round, cheerful hand.

"I saw nothing," it said. "Eat. Z."

Jingmo read it twice, and his ears went dark red.

They ate sitting on the floor with the bowls on their knees.

The mushrooms were the best thing Yanzhi had ever put in his mouth, and he said so with his mouth full.

Jingmo watched him chew with an expression he could not read.

"What?"

"You eat like a person who has been hungry."

"I've been hungry for three hundred years."

"For food?"

Yanzhi swallowed.

"Mostly not," he said, and put his bowl down.

The room had gone blue, and then dark, and Jingmo lit the small oil lamp on the shelf beside the Buddha.

It threw a low gold light across the mat and the wall and the side of his face.

He sat with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out.

He was looking at Yanzhi, with that same stillness.

Now it did not look like grief.

It looked like a man standing at the edge of a cliff in good weather.

"Tell me about her," Yanzhi said suddenly. "The fox the Warden hunted."

Jingmo's face closed.

"I don't ask for the sake of your vows," said Yanzhi.

"I ask because I had a mother, and I haven't said her name to a living person in seven years."

"What was she called?"

"Hu Qingwan."

Yanzhi said it out loud, and it fell into the little room.

"She told me a debt left unpaid sits in the belly like a swallowed stone," he said. "That's why I came. She would have wanted it paid."

"Yanzhi."

"Yes?"

"I think she would have wanted you to be warm," said Jingmo, very low.

Yanzhi turned his head away because his eyes had stung without warning.

Jingmo crossed the floor on his knees, took Yanzhi's face in his scarred hand and kissed him.

It was nothing like their first kiss.

The first had been questions, and this was an answer.

Yanzhi met it with his whole body.

They fell back onto the mat in a tangle of grey and orange silk, and Jingmo's weight came down over him.

"I have no idea how to do this," Jingmo said against his mouth.

"Neither do I."

"I read the books."

"So did I. The fox books are mostly lies, but the pictures are accurate."

Jingmo laughed, a real laugh, deep in his chest.

It was the first time Yanzhi had heard it, and it made his heart hurt.

He pushed the grey robe back from Jingmo's shoulders, and Jingmo sat up to let him.

Yanzhi took his time.

Jingmo was golden in the lamplight, a landscape of muscle with the wide shadow of his collarbones.

Yanzhi put his mouth to each collarbone in turn.

Jingmo undid his sash with hands that were clumsy and certain at once, just as they had been in the water.

When the layers of silk fell open down Yanzhi's chest, Jingmo made a low, wondering sound.

His thumb found the mole under Yanzhi's left eye, and then slid down to his collarbone, and lower.

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