Before the Battle

Family Name 10/17

"Well," Shira said breathlessly, "I think we woke up everyone in this house and maybe even the neighbours."

With my heart still racing and my endorphin-filled brain refusing to take in anything but the lingering echoes of the ecstasy I'd just experienced, the undisturbed sleep of the people in the house was the last thing I was concerned about.

"What, you're not blushing?" he whispered teasingly, still holding me tightly in his arms.

"Give me a few seconds to catch my breath and then maybe I'll start," I grinned, brushing the sweaty strands of the hair out of his face.

The more my heartbeat calmed down, the more I realised that we really were quite loud.

No matter how much we tried to keep it down.

At least at first.

But then the bed began to creak horribly, and Shira laughingly threw me to the floor, where all the blankets slid down. Then the lamp fell off the bedside table and rolled to the floor with a deafening thud. In addition to our vocal expressions, Shira wasn't too far off with his guess. And the black-haired devil was trying all the harder to make it impossible for me to stay quiet.

In the end, though, it was a lot of fun. I felt like a sixteen-year-old boy again, bringing home a girl he wanted to spend the night with for the first time. Only this time I felt a lot less embarrassed and nervous and was able to enjoy the whole thing a lot more.

There were several reasons for this. I wasn't sixteen anymore, I wasn't an inexperienced teenager, and my bed partner wasn't the shy girl next door.

I smiled at the memory.

"What amused you so much?" Shira asked, rolling onto his side next to me and supporting his head with his hand. We were both still on the floor, but I didn't have the strength to climb back onto the bed.

"It felt like the first time I slept with a girl. I also tried to keep it a secret from my mother. Only then it was upstairs in my room."

"How old were you?"

"Sixteen."

"Sixteen, that's when I came to Kashima and joined the Imperial Guard."

The thought that at the time I was having my first sexual experience, he, only ten months older, was already serving in the Imperial Guard, killing for the Emperor, spoilt my good mood a little.

"What about your first time?" I wanted to bring the conversation back to something more cheerful.

"I was fifteen," he started his story. "The girl was older and more experienced. The problem came when my father found out I was seeing her. He felt I was neglecting my training because of her. He forbade me to meet her."

"So you stopped seeing her?"

"No, I didn't. My mother intervened and talked him down," a smile crossed his face. "She always managed to settle all our disputes with my father."

Shira spoke little of his parents, only occasionally mentioning them. I was grateful for even these few bits of information. I would have liked to know more about them, but now didn't seem like a good time to try to get anything out of him.

"And with a boy?" I asked instead, looking for more details about his romantic history.

"I slept with a guy for the first time about two years later. I was already serving in the palace. The Emperor sent us to put down a rebellion in Nara."

The Nara Rebellion was one of the major armed conflicts that foreshadowed the outbreak of the civil war a few years later. I didn't know all the details, only what I read in the news, which mainly highlighted the glorious victory of the Imperial army.