Keeping a Kitsune Ch. 04

"That's not fair! I'll never be able to learn how to cook if you never let me try. And I decided while I was in the shower that I don't want to always be sitting around useless while you do everything. I can help out, even with my leg."

"Okay, that's fair. If you want to help, you can do the dishes again after we eat, and I'll let you help make lunch."

Chiyo pronounced that acceptable and made her way to the table. I settled down opposite her and we began to eat. After a few bites, I cleared my throat.

"Um, Chiyo, you remember I said no more rules, right? You can wear clothes around the apartment."

She looked down at her breasts, then at me. A slow grin spread across her face and she shook them slightly. I swallowed and shifted in my seat, my eyes tracking her breasts as they swayed. Her grin widened; she was clearly enjoying the effect she had on me. "I remember."

My fist clenched momentarily around my fork. Whenever Chiyo got bratty, my instinctual response was to discipline her. Chiyo flinched as soon as my fist clenched, but she straightened her shoulders and met my eyes.

"No rules means I can wear whatever I want, right? I want to be naked. Unless there are still rules, they're just different ones now?"

I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. Be a better man, one step at a time. I wanted Chiyo to be more independent, after all. It was time to try something new instead of just giving orders.

"Alright, that's fine if you want to be naked. No more rules means no more rules. But, we do still have to fit in around other humans, so you will need to wear clothes then, and you might want to get used to wearing them. Like I told you, humans think it's polite to wear clothes around others, even friends. Last night when you changed skirts in front of Aiko? That was rude. We're lucky that she was cool about it."

"Oh no! I didn't mean to be rude to her, I like her." Chiyo covered her mouth with her hands, mortified at the thought.

"Don't worry, I'm sure she knows that you didn't mean to be rude."

Chiyo still looked worried that she had offended Aiko, but at least I'd avoided a fight over the clothing issue. She stayed naked while she did the dishes, to prove her point, but after they were all put away she did go ahead and slip into a hip hugger skirt and a long-sleeved knit top that she could tuck her tails under. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

Once she was dressed, I asked her to meet me again at the dining table to talk strategy. I wanted to make sure we were on the same page with the hunt for Kylie, and I also wanted to suggest something I'd thought of this morning on the bus ride back.

It was an awkward conversation – I'd first seen Chiyo on Saturday, trapped her on Monday, and today was Thursday. In those four short days, we'd gone from captor and prisoner, to an ad-hoc sex-fueled BDSM relationship, to whatever the hell we were now. I couldn't get a handle on what we were to each other, because things kept changing too quickly. As if being a different species and her legally being my property weren't difficult enough. Still, we managed to make progress in the conversation by sticking to practical matters and avoiding anything more personal or complicated.

I had a hunch that Rob's contact in the BZ was our best bet to finding Kylie, and Chiyo agreed that there wasn't much point driving around the country trying to corner random suspects or get security footage from the charging station until we heard back from Rob. My computer had finished pulling together every mugshot in the AZ that might be Kylie overnight, so I was planning to load Aiko's sketch into a couple of different facial recognition tools and try and pare the collection of mugshots down to a small enough size that we could manually check it.

There wasn't much either of us could do while the computer did its thing, so I moved on to the second topic I had in mind. I wanted Chiyo to start trying to figure out some things she was interested in on her own, so that she could start to develop a life independent of me. Obviously her legal status and total ignorance of the human world meant she couldn't get a job or go sight-seeing around Kyoto by herself, but I wanted her to have something of her own.

It was a weird conversation. Spending most of your life in fox form didn't really give you much in the way of starting points for developing hobbies beyond hunting, eating, and sleeping. I didn't have any great suggestions, but in the end we agreed to start with something small. Chiyo had expressed an interest in cooking, so I said I could show her how to use the internet and introduce her to cooking shows online. Using the internet would be a good way for her to explore our world at a safe distance as she found more things she was curious about.

I was a little terrified at the prospect of letting a naïve fox spirit learn about the world through the internet, so I gave her the full lecture while I showed her how to surf the web. Don't read the comments, never give anyone your personal information, don't believe everything you read on the internet, etc.

Chiyo learned quickly. There were a few things I skipped over because they were so basic I forgot about them, but she asked good questions, and soaked information up like a sponge. Once she was comfortable getting around on my tablet, I got her hooked up with a few different cooking channels on YouTube and turned her loose.

I wasn't sure what to do with myself after that. I'm an extrovert and an outdoorsy type. I prefer doing something active or trying to pick up chicks. If I'm hanging around the apartment, I watch sports, surf the web, or play video games. Doing pointless stuff like that felt like a waste when I had a mission, even if the mission was stalled at the moment. In the end I compromised – I pulled up the ESPN stream on one window on my computer and put in head-phones, while I opened a pair of smaller windows showing my email and the progress bar of the facial recognition software, so I could at least be instantly aware of any opportunity to take action.

After a while I popped off the headphones and stood up to go to the bathroom. I froze as soon as I was standing and facing the main area of my loft.

"Chiyo, what the fuck are you doing?"

She was curled up in the recliner, her shirt tugged up to her chin, one hand down her skirt, the other playing with her exposed breast. The sound of feminine moans echoed out from the tablet balanced on her knee. She paused the video and looked up at me, one hand still down her skirt.

"Watching lesbians have sex."

"How on earth did you get from cooking shows to porn?"

"I was watching a funny channel with a cute girl called Hannah about cooking, and one of the videos was about her being a lesbian. I wanted to know more about what that meant, so I did a search and I found a whole bunch of videos. I like them!"

"I can't even begin to describe how wrong this is."

"I don't understand. What's wrong?"

"You're fucking masturbating in the middle of the day!"

"So? You won't have sex with me, and you said it was okay to masturbate." Chiyo stared me down, daring me to challenge her.

I groped for an answer that might make sense to a fox spirit who apparently had no concept of basic decency. "Well, for starters you're doing it in the middle of my living room a dozen feet behind my back."

"So what? We had sex on that couch yesterday; and in your bed, and up against the door, and all over the place. It's okay when you're fucking me, but it's not okay when I'm doing it by myself?"

She was getting more confident in standing up to me. And I couldn't come up with a good counter-argument on the spot. To be honest, a cute chick masturbating to porn in my apartment was something I'd usually be ecstatic about. I didn't really understand why it bugged me now, but I guess I felt protective of Chiyo. If I was giving up on corrupting her sexually, I didn't want the internet to take over. I couldn't come up with a way to justify that without being a complete hypocrite or resorting to laying down rules again. I stood there at a loss for words.

"Is it because I didn't let you know first? You can watch too if you want to; you said you can hook the tablet up to the TV, right?" Chiyo brightened up slightly at the idea.

I threw up my hands in frustration and stormed off to the bathroom. I heard Chiyo mutter something about stupid humans as she started the video again.

Once I had a closed door between me and the masturbating fox spirit, I may or may not have jacked off myself. I'm not admitting anything, but why the hell couldn't she have found out that she was bisexual when I was still having sex with her? I knew that we could probably still have sex, given Chiyo's relaxed take on the subject, but my emotions were still too volatile for me to consider it.

I studiously ignored Chiyo's activities once I returned the main room, jamming my headphones back in and pretending the only thing that interested me was Sports Center.

I refused to look over and keep track of Chiyo's self-pleasure adventures, focusing on my computer. Eventually my inbox lit up with an email from Rob's UK contact – exactly what I'd hoped for, the vehicle registrations for all of the '95 Heterdynes in the British Occupied Zone. There were 27 of them, and the eighth one I looked at was Kylie. I whooped and pulled my headphones off, spiking them in victory as I jumped to my feet.

Chiyo limped over to see what had gotten me so excited, and I picked her up in a giant hug and spun her around before laughing and setting her down, handing her crutches back to her from where she'd dropped them when I picked her up. Getting her a chair, I showed her the registration and she followed along as I dug for more details.

Kylie's real name was Tsumura Yumi, or Yumi Tsumura if you want to use the western convention for naming and put the family name second. She was 22, a little more than a year and a half younger than me. The Het was a gift on her sixteenth birthday from her father, a senior VP at Honda. Yumi's birth certificate was in the BZ; she'd had British citizenship since birth, applied for and received US dual-citizenship with the rest of her family when her father took the job at Honda when she was seventeen. The address on her driver's license was a ski condo the family owned on Mount Aso in the BZ. Those were the relevant details I could find in thirty minutes of public record searches. I also found a cell phone number in her name, but I wanted to get some deeper background on her before I tried to make contact.

"Why don't we just call her and ask for my pearl back?" Chiyo asked from over my shoulder.

I ran my hands through my hair and stopped to consider the point. "Well, we don't know very much about her. She had a gun, and you may remember that she didn't want to get involved with the police. That doesn't match the profile of a rich girl that I'm seeing here. If I can find out more about her, we can maybe find some leverage on her. If I do this research, find something, and we call her up and she just hands your pearl over, all we've lost is a little bit of time. But if we call and she says no, maybe having some leverage changes her mind. I think it's worth a little delay, but we're partners in this, so if you disagree I'm willing to listen."

Chiyo frowned in thought. "How long do you want to wait?"

I mulled it over. "I can't say for sure; I could find something in the next few hours, or it could take days. I agree that we shouldn't wait forever. How about if I haven't found anything by lunchtime on Saturday, we just go ahead and call her then?"

"That's two days from now?"

"Yep."

"I . . . okay. You know more about this type of thing than me. If you think that's right, we'll try that. What are you going to do to look for this 'leverage'?"

I grinned and spun back to the computer, explaining what I was doing. It was all tricks and tactics I'd learned for my job, online research of a target. I did it to our clients in order to identify possible threats, and I did it to possible threats once we'd flagged them. The difference was, usually the clients gave permission and passwords; targets, like young Ms. Tsumura, required a bit more effort.

Public records were a great starting point. Now that I had that starting point, I was going to dig deeper. It would take a while – even with the tools I had access to, it takes time to really dig into someone's history and get to know them. I was going to get access to her social media accounts, email and phone records, her family's profiles, and those of any close friends or lovers. Some of them I could access through backdoors my company had arranged with the social media companies – some I had to hack.

The easy hacks were with illegal but not hard to find password crackers – simple programs that tested the account to see if it used any of the 10,000 most common passwords. If those didn't work, I switched to hacking the human aspect. Friend requests from fake profiles of "friends from grade school" getting back in touch, calls to customer service explaining that I'd changed my email and forgotten my password for Instagram and couldn't use the "forgot password" link, things like that. As long as I didn't use it to steal credit card numbers or anything like that, a lawyer might be able to keep from getting convicted for anything if I was caught doing this, but it would take a really good lawyer. Much easier to just avoid getting caught; I did this for a living, and I was pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself.

Chiyo got bored after about an hour of watching me and wandered back to the couch, curling up again with my tablet. Meanwhile, I slipped into the zone, gradually reaching my tendrils further into Yumi's digital life.

Chiyo had to remind me when it was time for lunch. I fulfilled the letter of my promise in terms of teaching her to cook – we made grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. Not much risk of her destroying anything, but she got to turn the stove on and actually cook something. I did the dishes while Chiyo popped another pain pill. By the time I'd pulled up in front of the computer again, she'd drifted off into a nap on the couch.

I spent the afternoon slowly worming my way into the digital lives of Yumi and her family. Chiyo eventually woke up and after checking in on my progress and declaring it boring, she went back to reading something on the tablet. She seemed to be getting a little bored and frustrated, but I was too focused on my task to deal with it at the moment.

Chiyo interrupted me a couple of hours later to get approval for her dinner plan. She'd found a few different tutorials on YouTube for various dishes. I had to veto a couple because I didn't have the appropriate ingredients or kitchen tools, but it turned out I did have everything she needed for a sukiyaki recipe she'd found.

I helped Chiyo find everything then turned her loose in my kitchen at her insistence that she could handle it herself. I was a little nervous about letting her run loose, especially limping around on her crutches, but she was insistent that she could do it without help. I watched for a little bit until she growled at me for hovering, so I threw up my hands in mock surrender and went back to work on the computer.

While I worked, my loft gradually filled with an enticing scent that suggested Chiyo was actually doing pretty well. I ended up just pretending to work for the last half hour or so, really just savoring the smell and stealing glances at Chiyo out the corner of my eye as she hovered over the soup pot, her tails twitching as she monitored the taste and occasionally added another dash of spice.

She seemed to be doing well, until she went to watch her YouTube tutorial for the fifth or sixth time and suddenly cursed out loud in Japanese. I turned around just in time to see her stomp her cast on the floor, which resulted in a yelp of pain and her almost falling as she dropped one of her crutches.

I was out of my chair and at her side in an instant, one arm around her slim shoulders to steady her. "Are you okay? What's wrong?"

Chiyo sniffled and bit her lip. "I'm sorry, I messed up dinner."

I pulled her into my arms and gently rubbed her shoulders. "First off, it certainly doesn't smell like you messed anything up. Second, even if you did, it's no big deal. I'm just worried you might have hurt yourself there – is your leg okay?"

She nodded slightly, her face buried in my shoulder. "Hurts a little more than normal, but I don't think I made it worse. I just forgot it was broken for a second because I was mad at myself for messing up after I'd been trying so hard to get everything perfect."

"Shhh, it's alright. I'm just glad you're okay. I want you to pay close attention to it for the rest of the night, okay? If it's not feeling better later, we'll make an appointment with Dr. Amy to check up on you. Now tell me what you think you did to mess up dinner."

"I forgot to start the rice on time. You're supposed to start the rice when you add the sugar, sake, and soy sauce so that it's all ready at the same time, but I did that half an hour ago and I've already added the vegetables and it's all messed up now and I've ruined my first meal and . . ."

I cut her off with a laugh. Chiyo punched me in the shoulder and tried to pull herself out of my arms, her eyes flashing angrily. "It's not funny!"

"Chiyo, Chiyo, I'm sorry." I managed to mostly get myself under control, while still keeping her caught in my arms. I looked down at her angry face and cupped her chin, making her meet my eyes. "Listen, you haven't ruined anything. We can let the sukiyaki simmer while the rice cooks, it won't hurt it at all. It's not actually a problem, trust me."

Chiyo frowned up at me. She looked like she was caught between relief at my statement and lingering anger at me for laughing. "Really?"

"Yes, I promise. But you're going to have to let me finish from here – I want you off your feet until we're sure you didn't reinjure your leg. You can direct me from the dining room table – just think of me as your hands and direct me."

Chiyo didn't want to sit down, but I insisted. A few repeated promises to follow her directions exactly (and the fact that her leg really was hurting her) finally convinced her to let me carry her to a chair and prop her leg up on a cushion on another chair.

She made me bring her the tablet, and then directed me on starting the rice while she watched the video again for instructions. I knew how to use my rice cooker perfectly well, but I didn't bring that fact up and just followed her directions. After the rice was started, I had to carry a ladle from the sukiyaki over for her to taste again, and then add another tablespoon of brown sugar to the pot. When I went to take a taste for myself, I was informed that assistants were not allowed to taste the meal before it was ready, even if the chef was temporarily an invalid. I grinned and apologized profusely.

During a brief break, I got a text from Aiko saying she wanted to drop by if we were free. I responded in the affirmative on instinct, and only realized after I'd done so that I should have checked with Chiyo first. Fortunately, Chiyo's only concern when I broached the subject was whether she'd made enough food for three people. I reassured her that she'd made plenty, and sent a quick follow-up text to Aiko letting her know that there'd be food available if she got here in time. That got a reply consisting entirely of fireworks and smiley face emojis. Poor girl really didn't get enough opportunities for home cooked meals.

Chiyo kept fretting once the sukiyaki was done, worrying that leaving it simmering too long would ruin the taste, but I assured her that soups didn't work like that. Knowing that her debut performance in the kitchen was going to be for Aiko as well as me just set her further on edge. I set the table for three, and just before the rice finished, cracked a few eggs into a bowl for dipping.