Chapter 40
“Ah.”
Startled, Sylvia jerked at the unfamiliar touch and looked up. She had not expected anyone to be there, and she had not heard a soul approaching. It was too humiliating a moment for anyone to see her like this—strangers or people who knew her alike.
The shame that seized her was deeper even than when her father had struck her across the face. Her emotions surged so violently that, for one wild instant, she felt as if she might not be able to bear the humiliation at all.
“Shh.”
Then the other person gently pressed a hand to her lips, as if she were a child only months old, as if she had cried so loudly she had made her own ears ring.
“Owen.”
When she called his name in a trembling voice, he slowly drew her closer by the shoulders and made her rest her face against him. Sylvia immediately noticed the awkwardness in his movements.
Why is he being awkward?
In a moment like this, one might expect emotion to swallow everything else in a blur, but Sylvia had always noticed more in moments like these, not less. Even when she was fifteen, every sneer and every clumsy shred of pity from the people around her had scraped raw against her nerves.
Does he still dislike me, and yet think I’m pathetic enough that he’s only comforting me because he feels sorry for me?
Only much later would she realize that Owen simply had very little experience comforting anyone, but for now, that was all she could think.
Comforting her for no reason at all. Owen seemed like the sort who would ask why anyone would bother with such a troublesome thing, and yet, just as easily, he might offer a sliver of sincerity without even blinking—as he had once torn bread apart for starving boys with injured hands.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this. Sorry. Let me go, okay?”
When she tried to pull away, Owen did not stubbornly hold on. Sylvia only wanted to run, so the moment his strength eased, she hurriedly stepped back. She scrubbed at her face, wiping away the tracks of tears, and asked,
“How long have you been here?”
Her voice came out sharper than she intended, and she regretted it at once. She had not meant to sound as though she were accusing him. Under Owen’s gaze, as he searched her face so carefully, she only grew more restless.
“Were you here from the beginning? You heard everything? My father found out I spent the night outside with you, didn’t he? He might even send you a threat letter, telling you to propose to me. My father is terribly old-fashioned, and now that he knows you’re connected to Count Bronovich...” She gave a strained laugh. “He loves that sort of thing. Power and all that.”
“You don’t need to say that.”
He spoke quietly. Sylvia realized she was forcing herself to sound casual, the way someone might try to draw out the favor of an awkward colleague who was hard to deal with. But she couldn’t help it. She had no idea what to say or what expression to wear.
“I’m sorry. Then was it because you could feel what I was feeling earlier? Don’t worry about it. I’m used to my father saying things like that. And you don’t need to keep comforting me just because you can feel my emotions all the time. I was only thinking recently that receiving someone else’s feelings without wanting them might be an unpleasant experience too.”
“That’s fine with me now, too.”
His easy agreement, this insistence that everything was fine no matter what, suddenly irritated her. Sylvia rubbed fiercely at her eyes and lifted her head. Owen was still watching her with that unreadable face of his. Only now did she realize she had been rambling and spilling out far too much at once, and so she decided to wait this time until he spoke first.
“Hmm.”
He hesitated briefly, then lifted her face with a gentle hand and brushed at the reddened skin around her eyes.
“What would you have done if Heston had been here?”
“What?”
“What do you want?”
The answer was so completely unlike what she had expected that she felt as though she might hiccup in surprise. Just a moment ago, she had been thinking she wanted to see Heston—did such a thing really carry over too?
“You can feel that, too?”
“Something like that. Longing, or whatever it is.”
“......”
“And right now, the thing you’re longing to see most is Heston.”
He shrugged as he said it, and for some reason Sylvia felt a strange, prickling guilt. As if she were a wife who had strayed for years. As if, one day, the husband sitting at the dinner table had suddenly told her he had known all along that she had been unfaithful. It was an uncanny blend of relief, guilt, and the bizarre feeling of being understood at last by someone, if only once.
Perhaps seeing that flicker of guilt on her face, Owen nodded.
“It’s fine. I’ll do it. Like Heston.”
At the startlingly self-sacrificing offer to become a doll and hold someone else inside him, Sylvia shook her head.
“Forget it. You don’t have to.”
“Then should I help you another way?”
“Why, what are you going to—”
Do?
The rest of the sentence broke off abruptly.
Owen had supported the back of her neck and kissed her deeply. It was an alarmingly rough kiss. He sucked at her upper lip, which had parted as she spoke, then tilted his head, crushing their noses together as his thick, wet tongue slipped in to scrape against her teeth and press insistently at the rigid flesh beyond. The sensation of wet tongue against tongue, of pressure and friction, sent goosebumps racing down her spine.
She remembered kissing Owen in much the same way on the day of Heston’s engagement ceremony, but by then every feeling from that moment had long since vanished, and so this felt almost like their first kiss all over again. It was so intimate, so hot and wet, that it made her head spin.
With every push of his mouth, she was driven backward little by little. He breathed against her lips, worrying every inch of her mouth with a hungry insistence. The ticklish graze against the soft roof of her mouth made her fingers tighten.
“W-wai—”
Her whole body felt absurdly sensitive, as though the heat of his breath had set every nerve alight. Her lips were being suctioned wetly, and when she finally managed to gather her senses, she realized she had been knocked over at some point and was lying in the grass, taking his weight.
Only then did she understand that the hard thing she had been clutching was his trousers, and that he had come over her, gripping her neck as though he meant to drag it long, pouring kiss after kiss into her mouth. She was so late in realizing it all that she might as well have been dreaming.
She slammed both fists against his chest in a frenzy when she felt as though she might suffocate. Only then did he finally lift his head and give her room to breathe. Her mouth was numb and the neck he had held ached. Her skirt had ridden up, and the backs of her calves and thighs stung where the grass had scraped them raw.
She looked at him, trying to catch her breath, unable to make sense of the storm that had just broken over her. He still gazed down at her with that unreadable expression, but whether it was because his eyes had darkened or because their mana sharing had carried over his feelings to her, she could feel with unbearable clarity that he wanted her.
Something like that. Longing, or whatever it is.
The words he had spoken flashed suddenly through her mind, and for a moment she wondered if this was the longing he had meant.
“What are you doing?”
She asked it with her face burning as though it were on fire.
“Why are you suddenly doing this?”
Wiping away saliva she couldn’t tell was his or hers with the back of her hand, she shoved at him. Under her palm, she felt the firm muscle of his chest. Once again, that dreadful spark from the engagement ceremony seemed to revive, fluttering back to life in a few shallow breaths. But back then he had at least been drunk; now... she had no excuse at all.
“That day was clearly a mistake. You know it, and I know it. I was drunk, and, well, you probably were too. That was why it happened, but still...”
Her mouth felt dry despite the kiss they had just shared, and Sylvia had to stop for a moment.
“Still, we shouldn’t do this again.”
She knew they had nearly ignited like this a few times before. When they were trapped in a cramped place and he rammed something into her stomach; when he tilted the corner of his mouth in that teasing way and brushed just shy of her wet panties. Sylvia had learned, for the first time in her life, that overwhelming sexual arousal could make her body tremble. For one brief moment, she had even wanted to surrender to him and drown in the dizzying pleasure of it.
But they had already made a mistake once, and while a single accident could be argued away as an accident, no one could deny that the second time carried some measure of intent. In a situation like this, intent meant feeling. What on earth could there be between them that would make them mingle their bodies again?
But Owen answered with a face full of incomprehension.
“Why not? Nothing helps comfort like a kiss. You said it yourself just now.”
Comfort? This?
Like last time. That had been comfort for being abandoned by Heston, and this was comfort for being abandoned by her father? Was that what he was saying?
Sylvia shoved him hard and sat up. They were speaking past each other. She was talking about everything that would come crashing down after a kiss like this, while he was recklessly behaving as though all that mattered was feeling good in the moment.
“I didn’t. Move.”
But he, shoved back into the grass and landing on his hips, stubbornly caught her elbow again, and she had no choice but to topple over him once more. He draped an arm around her neck in a surprisingly tender, almost courtly fashion, and in the stillness of his posture, she could feel even his breath as he briefly rubbed his nose against hers.
“Don’t tell meaningless lies. We’re like this right now, aren’t we?”
Then he pressed a fist hard against his own thigh, wrapped in bandages. The sharp pain transmitted directly to her, and Sylvia could not help wincing.