Spit, Kiss, or Blood
As if in answer to his words, the guide who had been standing there in a daze finally moved. In the space of a few blinks, she had closed the distance to right in front of him—and every nerve in Jerry's body snapped taut toward her.
Just a little more, just a little more….
Jerry smiled with lazy ease and ran his tongue across his dry lips.
He wanted to snatch that guide up this very second, cram her into his mouth, chew her apart, and savor every last morsel of her—skin, flesh, and every single drop of blood.
"…Hand."
Jerry blinked.
"Hand."
The voice was firmer than before. Jerry stared at the hand extended toward him, then let slip an amused laugh. A moment later he blinked with a touch of theatrical exaggeration and made a show of laying his hand over hers.
"Well then, pardon me for a moment."
Nothing like the languor in his voice, the grip that seized the guide's hand and hauled it toward him was impatient to the point of desperation.
Their hands laced together. Pale fingers burrowed in between hers, and their upper bodies pressed flush—close enough that they might as well have been sharing a single heartbeat.
"Haa."
A moan brimming with satisfaction scattered against her ear, and when his ragged breathing tickled the back of her neck, Baek Yeo-eul hunched her shoulders without meaning to.
"W-wait…."
Flustered past all thought, the words tumbled out of her in Korean.
"Just a bit. A little longer."
The man clung to her, utterly out of his mind.
Baek Yeo-eul realized the iron forearm banded around her waist wasn't going to budge an inch, and finally stopped struggling. The moment she tried to gather her strength, the arm cinched tighter still.
"Ngh."
Can't… breathe.
Her brow knitted. She sat with her knees drawn up, legs parted just enough to cage the man's legs between them, and since he was still seated behind her, his face ended up exactly level with the nape of her neck.
Tangled with blood and sweat though it was, his soft blond hair rubbed against her nape. She tried to flinch away on reflex, but with his face right there, all she managed was to press him harder against herself.
Whether he liked the tightening or not, another heavy sigh washed over the back of her neck. Baek Yeo-eul chose to close her eyes.
The instant the tension drained out of her body, the man—as if he had been waiting for precisely that—leaned in harder. Her upper body tipped until she was all but collapsing onto his chest.
She had to weigh something, but he couldn't have cared less, only scattering warm breaths over her nape.
Every so often, a Guide ends up guiding an Esper in dangerous condition—guiding thrown together in haste because, for one reason or another, the Esper's own partner can't do it.
Baek Yeo-eul's matching rates were nothing special, but her guiding effect was disproportionately strong. To get what she delivered with a simple clasp of the hand, another Guide would have to go as far as a full embrace.
Her assigned partners knew this, and so they kept to small touches. But an Esper meeting her in an emergency had no way of knowing—they would throw their arms around her without warning, or in the worst cases go straight for a kiss to take her saliva directly.
Most ability users were easy on the eyes, granted, but pressing your mouth to a total stranger's the moment you met him was a hard pill to swallow. And Baek Yeo-eul, who had never been drilled as a Guide from childhood, found the prospect of swapping spit with a perfect stranger utterly repugnant.
The reason she was dredging all of this up now was simple: the man who had been nuzzling at her nape had lifted his head and was staring, unblinking, at her lips.
Under that strange, weighted gaze, Baek Yeo-eul unconsciously flicked her tongue out to wet her dry lips.
Only when the man's eyes flashed sharp did she register what she'd just done—and the color drained from her face.
He's going to kiss me.
Her body broke into a fine tremor. Back when she had first awakened as a Guide, her partner would come around claiming he was on the verge of a rampage and demand guiding.
Hand-holding. Then embraces. Then, without warning, his mouth on hers. Skinship she had never agreed to, with no gap to slip through—and Baek Yeo-eul, defenseless, had been forced to endure those kisses. She hadn't yet understood back then how vital the watch was, so she wasn't wearing one, and it was only just before her partner's hand burrowed under her clothes that Lee Mi-so's arrival dragged her out of that nightmare.
She learned the truth only later: her first partner was an Esper with notoriously grabby hands, one who had already collected several official warnings through headquarters. The "rampage risk" had been a lie, too.
"I don't want this…."
Caught in the grip of full-blown panic, Baek Yeo-eul shook like a leaf, never once realizing that the hole punched through the man's abdomen meant she could have pushed free with the slightest effort.
"Open your eyes."
The voice that reached her was hoarse clear through.
At the fluent Korean, Baek Yeo-eul's eyes flew open in shock.
Somewhere along the way, the man who had been studying her lips was meeting her gaze instead. Still languid. Still hazy. Green eyes.
"Why don't you spit for me."
"…Pardon?"
While her attention hung on a face that stayed astonishingly beautiful even caked in blood, the man opened his mouth. The red of his tongue against those white teeth was, for some reason, unbearably lewd.
"Spit."
"In my mouth."
He stretched out his tongue and hollowed its center—curving it, quite obviously, to catch the saliva more easily.
The whole display was filthy. Lewd beyond all reason.
Baek Yeo-eul knew her face was burning, and still she couldn't tear her eyes from his tongue.
"See, I'm in a state where I need deep guiding."
The man smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. The flushed skin there drew a soft curve—and somehow that was its own brand of obscene.
"So. Will you kiss me?"
A kiss, or spit.
Baek Yeo-eul couldn't hide her bewilderment at the options laid out before her.
When she said nothing, the man apparently took it as a vote for the latter, and began explaining, step by careful step.
"You've spat before, haven't you? Just do exactly that. To put it simply—think of me as roughly on par with a tissue."
"H-how can you even say…."
A person—and a once-in-a-generation handsome one at that—filed under tissue. The man was out of his mind.
"Or a kiss?"
The pressure came, smooth as you please.
"Or, if you'd rather just hold your tongue out, I can manage the rest on my own."
"T-tongue…."
Baek Yeo-eul stammered, white-faced. She had no faith whatsoever that she was following what he was saying. He was utterly relentless, and she was starting to regret ever offering him her hand.
"Hm?"
The man flipped their tightly interlocked hands over and nuzzled his face against the back of her hand. It was clearly meant to pass for cutesy wheedling—and yet from the very first moment they'd met, even with him doing nothing but asking favors of her, it had never once felt like he was the one beneath her.
She swallowed against an inexplicable creep of dread—and right then, the cut on her palm stung.
"Hk."
Her shoulders jumped, and he immediately unwove their intertwined fingers. The little scrape had grown a touch larger, probably from being squeezed and rubbed in his grip.
Red blood welled up in a round bead.
Silence pooled between them.
"I'll take this one."
She didn't even get the chance to object.
The man pressed his lips straight down onto her filthy palm, dust and grime and all. When soft, damp flesh licked slowly up the center of her hand, Baek Yeo-eul's shoulders shot into the air.
"Wait—"
But her hand was already locked fast in his grip; there was no pulling it free.
Chup. Chup.
Too flustered to even notice he was making the sounds on purpose, Baek Yeo-eul stamped her foot in restless agony, face burning.
The man bared his teeth and pressed down hard right beside the cut.
"Ugh."
A sharp sting—and with it, she felt blood surge up from the wound. Except it wasn't pooling in her palm. It was running into the man's mouth.
Terrified that some mortifying sound was about to slip out of her, Baek Yeo-eul clenched her other hand into a fist. The man, for all that his attention was buried in her palm, somehow knew—he reached over and pried her clenched fingers open.
Four crescent marks were stamped into the skin, vivid and red.
"Here too?"
"That's not—! Hk!"
Before she could get the protest out, he was sucking at her palm again—chup, chup—deep dimples blooming and vanishing in his snow-white cheeks.
Baek Yeo-eul simply stared at the whole performance. None of this felt real.
It took her a while to register that the man awash in his own blood was an Esper. His instability was plain to the eye, and he looked desperate for guiding.
She had planned on something light. A little contact, nothing more.
How on earth did it come to this….
The instant her eyes met that green gaze—smiling something filthy—Baek Yeo-eul snapped back to her senses.
"That's enough!"
She planted her palm flat against his face and shoved, then scrambled to her feet. The man smacked his lips, disappointment dripping off every line of his face.
He plainly wanted to seize her and keep her right there, but his body was in far too sorry a state to move, and that much was obvious.
"That should be enough, right?"
He fudged some vague answer, but Baek Yeo-eul had already noted that his complexion was less corpse-pale than before.
"How did you even get these wounds…? Anyway, let me stop the bleeding first."
Baek Yeo-eul fished bandages, antiseptic, and gauze out of her survival kit. When she peeled back the shredded rags of his clothes, a wound far more serious than she'd expected came into view.
She asked her question while she worked.
"How did you end up stranded in a Gate? These injuries don't look like they came from a monster, and your rank seems pretty… high."
Perhaps because she'd heard him speaking Korean, the words spilled out in Korean rather than English, entirely of their own accord.
"Let's just hold out like this until the rescue team gets here."
Baek Yeo-eul scratched her cheek, eyeing the bandage job—sloppy even by her own admission.
"Um. Hello?"
He hadn't said a word for a while now.
Puzzled, she lifted her head. And in that exact instant, the man lunged at her.
Pure reflex.
That was what had shoved his body away.
Bang!
With a sound that was anything but small, the wall his head cracked against shuddered faintly.
"…U-um. Are you okay?"
Baek Yeo-eul reached out gingerly and shook his shoulder. His jaw dropped slack, thudding down.
Before she could even yank her hand back—drip—a thin thread of blood ran down from the temple that had struck the wall.
"…Uh."
Plop.
The instant that blood, born at his temple, hit the floor, a prickling bead of cold sweat broke out on Baek Yeo-eul's forehead at the very same moment.