Dignified Night
Perzen von Schweik Brutein—no. The man who now bore the same surname as her own, Luerg, let his hand drift, very gently, along the line of her waist.
The wedding night she had never wanted was not a memory she could forget, and set against it, a touch this tender left Euphemia stranded in a bewildering dissonance.
“……!”
The heat of his breath spread warm across her collarbone, and the tickle of it made her flinch before she could stop herself.
“Nnh—!”
He did not stop there. Perzen pressed his lips slowly along her collarbone, nuzzling, and drew in through his nose the pure scent of her body, untouched by perfume. It was like a cat grooming her—as if he meant to loosen a body gone rigid with tension—and Euphemia had no idea how she was supposed to answer it.
“D-don’t look……”
When had he caught the strap of her dress and drawn it down? She knew the resistance meant nothing, and still she reached out with a trembling hand to cover her breasts.
Perzen said nothing. Indifferently, he caught both her wrists and pinned them firmly above her head. At once her nipples—pink, shy, and yet intent on announcing themselves—stood stiff and twitched without cease.
“Ah……!”
Like a night sky that darkens so the stars and the moon may shine the brighter, Perzen’s hair, black as obsidian, settled over Euphemia’s chest and made a curtain of itself.
“Haah—!”
And within that curtain he took her pink nipple into his mouth and rolled his tongue over it, gently. However tightly she clamped her lips, the moans that pried their way free would not obey her, and Euphemia, more than a little flustered, twisted at the waist in place of any real resistance. But as time passed, the waist that had writhed this way and that grew still, and like a fish just caught it only jerked, now and then, in fitful spasms.
Why… why on earth…
The long prelude ended, and Perzen lifted his head. Her nipple, glistening with his saliva, quivered pitifully in the comparatively cool spring air, as if begging to be taken into his mouth again.
“Do it… the way you always do……”
“……”
“If all you want is to use me as a broodmare, you don’t have to do this…… Th-this doesn’t make me happy at all……”
“Is that so.”
Unlike Euphemia, who barely forced the words out through breath that had climbed steep and hot, Perzen answered in the same flat, uninflected tone, as if he felt nothing at all. Then he reached for her thigh, drew the hem of her dress upward, and slowly peeled away the black panties, which looked rather fine.
“Hardly convincing.”
From the plump line of her sex, closed tight, her slick stretched in a stubborn strand and showed no sign of breaking. She gave him no answer and turned her head aside. Watching her, Perzen reached out and drew his fingers once across the wet mess of her.
“Did you know? The clearer the fluid, the greater the amount, and the stickier it is, the more ideal the conditions for conceiving a child.”
“I don’t… know things like that.”
“Good. There’s no need for you to. You’re already like this.”
He had been stroking the tightly closed cleft with his palm. Now, very slowly, he pushed his middle finger—nails neatly kept—into Euphemia.
“Hh, nn……!”
No sound had been made at all, and yet a lewd, wet hallucination seemed to seep in at her ear, and she drew her legs together on reflex.
“……”
Perzen frowned for a moment at that futile resistance. Then, with his free hand, he caught both her ankles, set her legs neatly together, and lifted them with practiced ease.
“I-I don’t want this……!”
The higher her lower body rose, the more she felt the slick leaking obscenely from her sex run down along her perineum until it reached her anus. He could see all of it, plainly, she was sure. With a soft slip of skin, Perzen let go of the hand that held her ankles.
At a glance it looked like consideration. In truth it was nothing more than a one-sided choice, dressed up as kindness and forced upon her. For Euphemia did, in fact, hide her face—flushed deep red—in both hands, and spread her legs wide before him, wide enough that one might have called it vulgar.
“Ah……!”
She thought she heard the sound of his scorn at her ear, and yet at the feeling of the finger pressing gently inward she clenched, without meaning to, tight in her lower belly. Perzen stopped the finger where it was, hooked it upward, and rubbed very slowly, as if scraping down from above.
“Hh, nn…… ah……!”
A tingling, aching pleasure kept stretching on and on, almost within reach and never quite caught. In her frustration Euphemia took her hands from her face and seized the sheet hard. And Perzen went on working the sensitive place inside her, so that she might be sure of catching it.
“Ha…… aahn!”
The effort was not wasted. Every time his finger found that particular spot, Euphemia flinched and let out a wanton moan.
“S-s-stop… stop it……”
Quite apart from a pleasure she had never known in her life, there came with it, at the end, a familiar urge to urinate. Euphemia reached out with a badly shaking hand and barely caught his wrist.
“P-please……!”
Neither hand had the strength to hold him. In the end she forced her upper body up, bent over his wrist as if clinging to it, and begged almost in tears. But Perzen showed no intention of stopping. He reached back with his free hand, stroked gently down her spine, and—following the passage that clenched tight around him—pressed down, very firmly, on the place he had been stimulating all this while.
“Hk!”
The breath she had been letting out so unsteadily stopped all at once. Under a fierce ecstasy that rushed in like a tide, the legs she held open shook madly.
A wet, sticky sound.
“Hhh……!”
Then, following his finger as it drew out of her, Euphemia could not hold herself. She spilled a moan and poured out a thick rush of clear fluid.
“Ah, aaaah…… ah…… ha…… aaahn!”
Her body would not obey her. It convulsed. Twitching as if in a fit, it drowned her thoughts in the afterglow, and Euphemia, toes curled tight, clung to Perzen’s wrist like a child while the sheet beneath her grew soaked through.
“I-I told you to s-stop…… I told you……!”
She clutched his sleeve in crumpled fistfuls. The sheets around her hips were wet as if she had pissed herself, and with pleasure and shame sharing the same face she wept and spat out her resentment.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Perzen, as if it were nothing, stroked her hair and gently pushed her back down onto the bed. Then he undid the buttons of his shirt one by one, shrugged the garment off, lowered his trousers, and drew out a sex that throbbed violently, settling himself between her legs.
“……”
Looking at him, Euphemia turned her head away at last. His composure, so utterly unlike the thoroughly undone woman she was now, seemed to tell her, as if it were only natural, that she was vulgar, and that she was lewd.
“Ah…… hk!”
Into her softly loosened inside he entered from the head and filled her to the root, without a gap. She did not want to tense, and yet her lower belly, as if chasing the afterglow of the pleasure she had felt a moment before, squeezed tight around what filled her and guided it all the way to the mouth of her womb.
I want to stop coming apart. I want to stop panting. Her reason thrashed to say so. But between the satisfaction of being filled so warmly and a motion that seemed to rekindle the pleasure that had briefly gone out, Euphemia forgot how to resist.
“Hk…… nngh!”
A rhythm: drawing out as if scraping her inner walls, then coming slowly back in to press, again and again, up against the mouth of her womb. As if he meant to train her, the repetition of the motion that gave her the most pleasure undid her without end. It could not have been otherwise. Instinct told her that at the end of this she would feel that pleasure once more.
A child who has tasted candy for the first time, lost to the sweetness, and the little jar discovered on the shelf above. Candies of every bright color gathered there to welcome her, and she has dragged over a chair and is only just reaching—there was no way she could keep her senses.
“Ah……”
And then, for a moment, Perzen stopped the movement of his hips. Euphemia’s first feeling was a question. Why? Inside her, his sex, which had been pulsing more distinctly than at the start, had swollen a little further—an unmistakable sign that he was about to come—and yet he had suddenly stopped. She did not want to hold that question for long.
“Th… ah…… th-this is……!”
And her body, far too honest, accepted its owner’s will and wrapped both legs around his waist. At a sight shocking enough to send the reason that had briefly sunk flaring up all at once, Euphemia stammered, at a loss. Perzen, as if satisfied, brushed a faint kiss across the bridge of her nose and whispered.
“Well done.”
No. I didn’t act the way you wanted. I didn’t do this because I wanted to hear that. A dozen rebuttals surged up to her throat. But he moved the hips he had stilled, filled her again to her very end, reached the mouth of her womb, and spilled thick, hot semen—
“Hhh, nngh……!”
Euphemia took the rest of the pleasure she had lacked, and held against his chest she trembled, faintly.
The bed creaked. The pleasure that had gathered and mingled slowly cooled.
When the sex that had been filling her all this while drew out, hot, thick semen leaked after it, but Euphemia did not even have the strength left to close her legs. Her body’s stamina was cleanly spent; she was wrung out. Her mind, though, was returning little by little, growing clear, recovering its reason, and with that recovery rose self-loathing, and resentment toward Perzen.
“……”
And yet, unlike her, who had come apart to a shameful degree, he had never once lost his dignity, not even while their bodies were joined. If some third person were to look back on what had just happened, they would surely point at her and call her a temptress who had seduced Perzen to slake her own lust. And Perzen would look like a husband who had only indulged her because he could not help it—because he was bound by the duty of getting an heir.
She herself was already judging that a stranger’s eyes would see it so. Where, then, was she to turn this surging resentment? On the night they had consummated the marriage, Perzen had not come undone either. But that night, neither had she. The memory of then stood in even sharper contrast, and Euphemia wanted to erase from her mind the sight of herself only moments ago, panting and thrashing in pleasure.
“You must be tired.”
He stroked her hair gently and drew the blanket over her. Even that small touch left the afterglow still in her, and her body shivered, while he had only sweated a little and remained as expressionless as ever.
“Sleep well.”
“You cowardly…… bastard……”
It was not she who had stolen the thing, but the child beside her, and yet she was the one accused, because the clothes she wore looked shabby. Unfair as it was, it was still, strictly speaking, plausible. And so she barely managed to call him a coward. She could not bring herself to pour the whole of her risen resentment into the word bad, because the disgrace she had shown was, set beside him, too vulgar and too lewd.
“Coward……”
The resentment, having lost its sense of direction, drifted as if it did not know where to go, and at last seeped into self-loathing and scattered with it. A soft pass of his hand. He might at least have answered her once, but Perzen kept his silence and only went on, quietly, stroking her hair.
In the end she could not withstand the sleep rushing in. Her eyelids closed slowly, and Euphemia sank.
And right up to the moment before she was wholly asleep, the nobility and the dignity her eyes had taken in of him……
were still so self-righteous that they left her feeling shabby.