How Long I Have Waited
The moment Laniakea understood what Hyperion meant, heat flooded her face. He had not been crude about it, and yet the meaning was mortifying beyond words.
How often, in an ordinary life, did one hear someone announce that they were about to undress you?
Even so, the man standing before her was the only person in the world with any right to ask it of her. She had no reason to refuse, and if she did, she would only have to undress herself—which seemed every bit as shameful.
Laniakea gave a careful nod. At that, the corner of Hyperion's mouth lifted. Since entering the room he had worn no expression at all.
Her eyes went round. Of every face she had seen him wear, she had never once seen him smile like this. It was the smile of a boy at last receiving a gift he had waited years to hold. For a man about to take off someone else's clothes, he looked purely, uncomplicatedly glad.
Whatever hesitation he had shown at first vanished. His hands began to move with startling speed. The garments prepared for their wedding night came undone with absurd ease—so easily she wondered whether they had been made to fall open at a touch.
Or else…
Laniakea watched his hands work the last tie. They moved quickly, but not with skill. Proof of that lay in how many times those fingers missed the cord, and in the faint tremor running through them. Even so, the callused fingers caught the final tie and drew it loose.
The front of the gown parted, and the white of her breasts came into view.
"Ah…"
At the same moment Hyperion let out a small sound, almost a sigh. His head was bowed, yet Laniakea could feel his gaze fixed on the breast half-bared between the parted cloth. A look could have no weight, and still she felt heat pass over her skin.
He swallowed. The sound was small, but his throat moved hard. With her head lowered, she did not see it.
His hands moved again. As if drawing back a curtain, he pushed the thin nightgown aside.
She was slender, and her breasts could not be called large. Even so, the gentle curves rising from that pale skin drew a line beautiful enough to still anyone who looked. Hyperion's hand hovered above them.
Watching that sun-darkened, rough hand wander over her body, Laniakea felt it settle into her at last: tonight she would share a bed with this man.
And what am I supposed to do now?
Everything she had managed to gather concerned what came after it began. Among all those scraps of knowledge, not one described the moment before. People only said they had been nervous. Should she do something? Should she simply lie still? Why had she never thought to take a lesson in this beforehand?
She tried desperately to think of anything else, hoping the tension might ease. It did not. Her hands only clenched harder.
Then Hyperion's hand moved again. She was certain he would seize her breast at once. Was that not the part of a woman men fixated on most? At summer banquets she had seen plenty of them unable to look away from gowns cut thinner than usual, low across the chest. So when he undid her clothes, she had thought, of course. She closed her fists. Among the many things she had heard, rough caresses had come up as a matter of course. Recalling the women who had grumbled over how much it hurt, how hard it had been, Laniakea braced herself for the pain that was coming.
But his hand did not find her breast. It found her cheek.
He did not grip it. He traced it with his fingers as carefully as if he were stroking the rim of a thin glass.
"……?"
Caught off guard, Laniakea lifted her head to look at him. The smile she had seen a moment ago was gone. In its place Hyperion wore a face more serious and more careful than she had ever seen, and with his own hand he went on stroking her face as though it might break.
He began at her cheek, then little by little moved elsewhere—the line of her cheekbone, her earlobe, her brow, her forehead. Again and again he passed his hand over her face, as if he meant to learn it by touch. At last his hand stopped at her lips. He held her chin lightly and smoothed her mouth with his thumb.
The brush of it tickled, and she flinched more than once. She thought he might take his hand away. Instead his touch only grew heavier, more intent. Then the finger that had been stroking her pressed a little harder. It was not forceful, but Laniakea, who had begun to let her guard down, parted her lips before she knew she had.
In that instant Hyperion, who had been staring at her mouth, bent his head and took her lips as if he meant to devour them.
"Mmph!"
Breath and kiss were stolen from her at once. Startled, Laniakea thrashed. Hyperion did not lift his mouth. His weight, one hand braced at her shoulder, was more than she could resist, and she collapsed back onto the bed.
It was the first kiss of her life, and still she knew. Neither of them was any good at this. Their noses kept colliding. She could not breathe. Lip struck tooth, and it hurt a little. The books she had read in secret as a child had promised that a kiss would ring bells in one's head and sweep a person into some other world of rapture. There was nothing of the sort.
And yet…
…It isn't bad.
She had never mixed herself with another person this way before. She had worried it would be unpleasant, and that Hyperion might find it distasteful too. But she did not hate this clumsy sharing of breath. The thought crossed her mind that it would have been better if both of them were a little more skilled. That thought did not last.
When her breath had climbed all the way to her throat, Hyperion drew back. He sat up and stripped off what remained of his own clothes. They fell aside with a dull sound, tossed down without care. Laniakea, who had been watching them drop, slowly turned her head.
With the lamp behind him, his body looked like some enormous shadow, and at first she did not quite register that he was entirely naked. Then her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she understood that something had gone very wrong.
Undressing had not changed him. There was the slightly ragged breath, the chest she had been unable to look away from the first time she saw it, and the abdomen now clearer still. The problem was what came after.
She was not ignorant of what a man had there. For days she had been stealing glances at the statues in the palace, preparing herself as best she could. She had thought that seeing his would be unfamiliar, nothing more—not a shock.
"Hah!"
Looking below his waist, Laniakea clapped both hands over her mouth before she knew it.
What… is that?
Hyperion was tall. His build surpassed that of ordinary knights. His hands were large and very long; she had even wondered, once, whether one of them might close entirely around her head. So it should not have surprised her that another part of him was large as well.
"Ah…"
She could not manage a word. From beneath him, she could not look away.
It was big. Bigger than she had imagined. The instant she understood what she was seeing, fear dropped through her.
That… is supposed to go inside me?
Impossible. It could not be done. She would die. She had never heard of anyone dying from it, and still she was certain: she could become the first empress to die in the emperor's bed.
While she lay frozen, Hyperion came up over her. He pressed in between her knees, parted her legs as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and settled himself there. Cool air touched the trembling skin between her thighs. Before she could even feel that coolness properly, something met her.
The moment she felt the blunt tip, Laniakea held her breath. He truly meant to enter her. She ought to say no. That this was too much. That they should think it over a little longer before they shared a bed. She meant to say it.
"Laniakea."
A low voice, threaded with unsteady breath, spoke her name. The brush of it against her ear made her shiver, and the whisper that followed came softer still.
"You would not know how long I have waited for this day."