If Only He Had Been Content
Hyperion could tell Laniakea was nearing her limit from her voice alone. The harder he drove her, the sweeter the sounds she spilled became. Sound had no shape, and yet hers clung to his ear like sugar boiled down to syrup—sticky, and unwilling to fade.
It was good. When, in all his life, had he ever tasted anything so sweet?
And so, before Laniakea could reach her end entirely, he eased his hold once more. The shallow breaths she let out, still falling short of release, were threaded with resentment meant for him. He liked even that to the point of madness.
He pushed her on, then let her go; wound her tight to the very brink again, and loosened his grip. He repeated it until, at some moment, Laniakea stopped making any sound at all. When he looked at her with care, the corners of her eyes were damp, and she was breathing as though the effort had cost her everything. After that she simply slept, worn out to the point of fainting.
Hyperion gazed with something like resentment at the small lips that would no longer give him that sweetness, and only then uncurled the hand he had been holding all the while.
Laniakea no doubt believed this was one of the assignments the Ensi couple had set them. It was true they had told the two of them to be intimate more often. They had not, however, told him to keep hold of her hand the entire day.
Hyperion clenched his sweat-damp palm and opened it again, several times. He did not find it unpleasant. If anything, the only thought that crossed his mind was that this, too, was something Laniakea had left on him—and whether he ought to lick it clean. He abandoned the notion almost at once. What he wanted to taste was something far richer than this.
He watched the sleeping Laniakea for a long while. When he noticed that her breathing had grown easier, he rose. She had been caught by him before she even had time to change, and she had suffered for it; because of that, she still had not put on her nightclothes. A soft smile rose on his face as he looked at her.
While he tormented her, Hyperion had asked:
"May I change your clothes for you again today?"
At the question she had nodded like mad. Whether she was answering him, or whether it was because he had been nibbling her earlobe and stroking along her neck, he could not tell. Nor did he particularly care to ask which it was. In any case, she had nodded. That was enough, was it not?
He reached first for her hair, which had come utterly undone. When she first came in it had been neatly arranged and pinned up; now stray strands had escaped every which way, and it was half loosened—the trace of how fiercely she had writhed in pleasure.
Hyperion tugged at the ornaments binding it. Having undone them once before, he drew them free far more deftly this time. Once every ornament was out without catching a single strand, he slipped a hand beneath her waist and lifted her. She rose so lightly that he gathered her into his arms as she was, and for a moment he buried his face against the nape that had come so close before him.
He had done this until he was sick of it only moments ago. Why, then, did it thrill him every single time?
Desperately ignoring how disgracefully he had risen below, he moved his hands. One by one, the buttons at the back of her neck came undone beneath his fingers. For a moment he wondered whether he ought to undress her more slowly.
To think that taking off another person's clothes could be so intoxicating. He had done it before, and yet today was more enjoyable still, because this time he was far clearer-headed, savoring every moment in full. He might have lingered over it at his leisure. Instead the hands unfastening her buttons only grew more urgent—because he knew very well what would be waiting for him once all of this was undone.
When the buttons were open and he had stripped her upper garments away completely, he gazed for a long time at the body laid bare.
In the flesh-cutting cold of the Northern Border, people closed their eyes before sleep and pictured the most beautiful thing they could imagine. Without that, the harshness was simply impossible to endure. Some called to mind the fierce liquor of the distant southern sea; others, a peaceful village where they had lived for a little while as children. Most, though, thought of someone they loved.
Back then, someone they loved had carried a very wide meaning—parents and family, a lover, the person who had helped them most in life, even a stranger whose name they never learned but who had once saved them. And so, before sleep, everyone on the Northern Border smiled. Now and then someone slipped into a sleep from which they would never wake, that smile still caught at the corner of the mouth. Which was why they all recalled, even more desperately, the things they cherished, loved, longed for, and hungered after. They did not want to die with their faces twisted by the terror of the cold and of their enemies.
But until three years ago, Hyperion had thought of nothing at all before he slept. No—it would be more accurate to say he could not. There had been nothing in his life that could make him smile merely by being thought of. He could not call up a mother whose face he no longer remembered, nor the father who had cast him aside the moment a new empress was brought in.
In the monastery where he had been discarded, no one paid him any mind. Wariness of the empress played its part, but the place had been a life of near-ascetic hardship to begin with. In summer he labored beneath a blazing sun, worse than any slave; in winter he huddled without a blanket inside a room hewn from stone, without so much as a wooden shutter to keep out the cold.
Having lived like that, when he came to the Northern Border he thought it a rather decent place. So he had no need to close his eyes and imagine anything. Open or shut, the landscape before him was always the same: a cold, bleak, endless forest.
But from a certain moment on, he began to close his eyes. And like the others, he became able to fall asleep smiling.
If only he had been content with that.
Still holding her, Hyperion turned toward the bed. The nightclothes the maids had laid out were waiting there. He nudged them slightly aside and set Laniakea down.
"Mmm..."
Perhaps because her body had shifted, she let out a fretful little moan.
"Oh, dear."
At the sound, he slowly reached for the undergarment still covering her chest. Last time, it had given him considerable trouble. Of course it had. Never in his life had he had occasion to remove a woman's underclothes, nor had he ever taken an interest in such things. He had not even known women wore anything of the sort until the last time he changed Laniakea's clothes.
With a face both troubled and glad, Hyperion peeled away the last scrap of cloth left on her upper body. The moment it fell onto the bed, he stopped breathing.
Since the day he had begun to imagine her, she had appeared in his dreams now and then in a form unlike her usual self. This very form—covered by nothing at all, the shape she had been given at the beginning. The night he first saw Laniakea like that in a dream, he learned what the nocturnal emission he had only ever read about in books actually was. To have one long after becoming a man, and over the image of a wife bound to him by paperwork alone, was an absurd thing.
He hesitated. Suddenly bared after hiding beneath cloth, the tips of her breasts had already risen, and he wanted to catch them between his lips the way he had bitten her earlobe moments before. The mere imagining made him so heavy and aching below that strength gathered in his hands. A languid breath slipped through his teeth, and his mind went hazy. He had only pictured lightly biting one small part of her, and yet he sank so deep into the fantasy that he could do nothing at all.
Then the sleeping Laniakea curled in on herself. Laid fully bare, she must have felt the cold. In that instant Hyperion moved quickly, fetching the nightclothes and dressing her. The buttons of the gown closed at a speed that could not be compared with how he had undressed her. He changed her lower garments just as swiftly, drew the covers over her, and—as if even that were not enough—rolled her up tight in the blanket.
She had been reduced to something like a bagworm swaddled in its case, but she must have been warm. The faint frown smoothed from her face, and her breathing grew easier still. Only then did Hyperion let out a breath of relief and draw her, blankets and all, into his arms.
She was still held against him, and already his mind was on what came next. The arm around her tightened.
Next time, it would be better to let her reach her peak at least once. And then...
The swollen breasts he had seen only moments ago rose again in his thoughts. If Laniakea grew only a little more at ease with him, then surely he could indulge, to his heart's content, in the fullness that had taught him his first nocturnal emission and the first time he ever took himself in hand.
"Ha..."
A sigh thick with longing escaped him. To think that taking his own wife would prove so difficult, and take so long. Even so, he would not rush and spoil it.
A year, he had said.
He recalled the span of time he had promised her. No matter what happened, he would draw that time out longer. The right to stay was hers, so in the meanwhile he had to seize hold of her heart by whatever means he could. He had absolutely no intention of letting his wife go.
For a moment Hyperion imagined seeing Laniakea off with his own hands. Then he let out a hollow laugh. Because no matter what happened, that day would never come.