The Words He Had Never Heard
Warm, slick flesh closed around him. Soft and yielding, it seemed unsettled by the unfamiliar thing that had slipped inside, and tried to push him back out.
Shall I push all the way in, just like this?
He weighed it for a moment, then carefully drew his finger back—not all the way. It still traced the shallow place just inside her lips, rubbing slowly, so Laniakea would not startle, so she might grow a little more used to him and to all of this.
Perhaps the patience told. As he swept over that tender flesh with careful endurance, the lips that had been shut tight, as if to forbid him entry, parted again by a fraction. Into the place that no longer refused him, Hyperion slowly pressed himself once more.
“Ha…….”
A thick, heated breath leaked through his teeth.
Unlike Laniakea, who had let go of every tension and sunk into sleep, his body still carried the day’s arousal intact. Merely slipping a little way inside her had been enough to bring him fully erect. The resolve to treat her as something precious, something to be handled with care, collided in him with the urge to drive in without restraint and glut himself on that warmth for as long as he pleased.
In truth, his nature lay closer to the latter.
Everyone praised him for guarding the border so admirably.
They would have.
Attack being the best defense, Hyperion had kept the frontier by killing everything that crossed it. On the days he returned drenched in the blood of the barbarians, even Signo could not easily come near him. A body that had flung itself at death all day, walking the line between living and dying, wanted—under that ceaseless goad—to break whatever drew close. Perhaps it was because he fought every single day. The destructive impulse he had at first found loathsome in himself was, before he knew it, becoming natural to him.
Hyperion’s breathing roughened. Somewhere in the midst of it, his finger had sunk deeper into Laniakea’s mouth. When he stirred it carefully, her wet inside wrapped around him, and the clinging, viscous feel of it drove him further out of his mind. A slick, wet sound quietly filled the room.
After he had quietly ravaged her for a long while, he slowly drew his hand out. His long fingers glistened, soaked in saliva. Hyperion looked at them a moment, then licked without hesitation.
Sweet. Just as he had thought.
When he had licked every trace of her from his hand, he lowered it to Laniakea’s throat. The buttons fastened neatly down her front came undone in quick succession, and once he had opened her to the waist, a sight he had grown somewhat used to lay defenseless before him. Beneath the white nape, a collarbone just barely bared; below that, a soft curve that could scatter a man’s wits the instant he took it in.
Even with only part of it revealed past her underclothes, the dizziness made Hyperion slowly close his eyes and open them again. He was spared the disgrace of staggering, but that did nothing to cool his arousal. If anything, what hung below him only gathered more force.
Should I take her?
A voice whispered from deep within him.
Tonight was meant to be the night the two of them slept here together—a night they were obliged to try, for duty’s sake. Laniakea had grown used to his touch by now, used enough that she had not refused him when he entered her a little while ago. Hyperion seized himself with one hand, half afraid he might tear straight through his trousers.
“Haa…….”
A shallow breath, pushed to its limit, spilled out of him. Not knowing women did not mean he did not know how to pleasure himself. Unlike a mind that felt no desire, his body had sometimes followed instinct faithfully and moved of its own accord. When he opened his eyes in the morning and found himself hard and alone, he felt no embarrassment of any kind. He had killed rather a lot yesterday, and he had lived to see today. No other thought occurred to him.
Only when a battle looked likely to start early did he sometimes take himself in hand on purpose and work himself off, so it would not become a nuisance later. He was large, and long. The other knights tossed him jokes that were half sincere—must be nice—but Hyperion thought nothing of it. If anything, it was a bother. What good was size? It only made dressing a nuisance, and when he dealt with his desire alone, it would not fit in one hand and was nothing but trouble. So he had believed himself a man incapable of feeling pleasure of this kind.
That, however, had been an utterly absurd delusion.
Hyperion gripped himself beneath his clothes and moved his hand slowly. Wrapped in soft cloth, it showed a stark outline, and at the tip there was a wet mark. He did not need to slip his hand inside to imagine the state of it: veins standing proud, greedily spilling from the head a desire it could no longer hold.
He looked again at his wife lying beside him. Before he even realized it, joy had settled over his face.
My wife.
My wife, beside me, looking at me.
That thought alone sent the blood rushing downward again. Hyperion’s hand closed around the shaft and moved up and down. He knew how to bring himself off quickly, but now he wanted to go as slowly as he could, to hold the desire as it boiled. Their bodies were not even touching, and yet every stroke sent a pleasure through him as if his mind were burning away. Was this what a man felt when he was starving to death, if you forced into him all at once a flavor too sharp to bear?
The pleasure had passed its measure and drawn near to pain, but Hyperion did not stop his hand. Instinct led him toward a greater pleasure still. His hand moved faster, and what was below him swelled to its limit. The lust seething there was aimed at only one person.
Everything he saw came at him as stimulus. Platinum hair of a bright, pale color; a straight nose; red lips; breasts so soft, when he had taken them in his hands, that he could scarcely believe it. Parts of the body everyone possessed became pleasure to him for no reason except that they belonged to Laniakea.
I want to hold you.
He remembered the dizzying pleasure he had felt, tangled with pain, on the day she accepted him. When Laniakea fainted, that sensation had vanished in an instant, yet still, whenever he closed his eyes at night, it kept rising up. He could feel it again now. If he took that deeply sleeping body in his arms, stripped away the clothes that covered her, spread her wide, and pushed himself in—
A grind of teeth escaped between Hyperion’s jaws. His desire to take a sleeping woman as he pleased was so base that he despised himself, and yet the self that kept thinking it anyway seemed the filthiest beast in the world. What had already reached its limit hardened further. A twitching movement told him release was not far off.
Hyperion searched for a stimulus onto which he could pour out everything he held. Long, slender fingers; hair soft as silk; soft breasts; the secret place between her legs. Things he could seize the moment he reached out goaded him. But—
Into his mind came Laniakea as she had been, wet-eyed, sobbing that she had worried for him.
She had worried. Worried for him.
It was the first time in his life he had heard such words. The former empress, dabbing false tears as she sent him off to the monastery, had not said she worried for him even as a lie. The knights around him had been no different. Hyperion was overwhelming—not someone to be worried over, but someone who had to worry over others. So when Laniakea told him she had worried for him, he had not known what answer to give.
While he failed to find the words, his body recognized the feeling faster than his head. The corners of his mouth kept rising. Something deep in his chest itched, and he could not keep his hands still.
She worried about me. About me……
The moment he recalled her reddened eyes and the wet catch in her voice as she choked out that she had worried, Hyperion’s mind went pure white. At the same time, what he gripped below him spent itself in a rough release. Something cloudy white dripped between the fingers clenched around the tip, and each time his body jerked hard, more of it spilled from his hand onto the bed.
“Haa…….”
A long while later, Hyperion slowly sat up and made for the bath. When he came out in fresh clothes, cold droplets fell from his body and his hair, but the heat in him had not cooled in the slightest. He lay down beside Laniakea, drew her into his arms, and pulled the blanket over them.
Feeling the warmth, she squirmed and nestled deeper into his embrace, her face clear and innocent, knowing nothing at all of what he had done while he looked at her asleep. Hyperion pressed a light kiss to the forehead of the woman sunk deep in sleep—to the lovely one who must have waited for him all day.
She probably doesn’t know.
Laniakea seemed to think the desire he showed was merely something that came along, unavoidably, with an act performed for the sake of an heir. Nothing of the sort. Had she not been the one, the business of getting an heir would already have been finished. It would have been nothing more than a dry coupling, without a shred of arousal.
Hyperion gathered his wife against him with his whole body. Laniakea would never guess it—when it was that he had taken her into his heart.
He closed his eyes. The body that had poured its desire out once finally loosened its tension. Until morning came, he and she would be able to sleep deeply.