Chapter 43
Sylvia offered her advice in a low voice. Owen looked down at her in silence, and only then did Sylvia realize, with a jolt of embarrassment, that she had somehow started fussing over him like a teacher. But there was nothing she could do about it.
At this rate, she honestly felt like Owen would probably forgive even the person who stabbed him with a knife, deciding they just seemed like a poor soul with a miserable life.
“I mean, what I’m saying is that Count Bronovich was wrong too, and pretty much everyone who turned you into this was wrong. If I had to pick the one person who was least at fault, it’d probably be you.”
“You’re surprisingly good at saying embarrassing things.”
“I’m not saying them to be embarrassing!”
Frustrated by his lazily spoken words, utterly devoid of any real understanding, Sylvia raised her voice, and he placed a finger over her lips.
“All right. I get your point.”
Then he swept back the hair that had fallen into a disheveled mess over his forehead, but there was no spark of enlightenment in him at all.
“But hating all those people is too exhausting. It’s easier to just live without thinking about any of it. I’m used to it now.”
With a face that looked painfully worn down, he merely gave a shrug. Of course, Sylvia understood that there were times like this.
Times when you wanted to put out every light that made your vision spin and lie down quietly, staring only at the sky. Times when, like driftwood floating on waves, you wanted nothing more than to let yourself be pushed and pulled wherever the current took you, paying attention only to the body you inhabited and nothing else.
At moments like these, she knew that the people around you telling you not to do that reached you with no force at all. It was no different from throwing a rope to a piece of driftwood and telling it to hold on.
But even so, you couldn’t simply ignore someone who wasn’t actually a log, could you? Sylvia wondered what she could possibly do for him in that moment, and then, all at once, she remembered what he had said before.
Kissing is the best thing there is for comfort.
Come to think of it, when she had rolled around with him in the grass, Sylvia had caught a strange scent. A scent that made her think of green light. There had been the smell of dew, and the earth and life brushing wildly past the tip of her nose, but beneath that was another scent that had held her captive.
Now that she thought about it, hadn’t it been loneliness?
It might have been too sentimental a thought, but there was definitely a particular scent that clung to someone who had been lonely for far too long. Sylvia had smelled it on herself, and from the moment she first laid eyes on Owen, she had suspected that he might be the same kind of person.
Somewhat impulsively, she reached up and cupped Owen’s cheek. Even after their faces had drawn so close, she hesitated, and the distance between their lips would narrow, then widen again as she faltered. Owen simply watched her without moving, as though he already knew exactly what she was about to do.
“……”
His gaze was impossible to read — whether it was encouragement or restraint, she couldn’t tell. Her heart pounded so hard it almost hurt. She gathered her courage at last and pressed her lips to his.
His lips were astonishingly soft. Yet he remained still as stone, frozen in place, as though the days ago when he had devoured her until she could barely breathe had been nothing more than a dream.
Blinding light spilled in through the window, catching on his classical brow and translucent cheek, making him look even more like a statue carved from marble.
Can you stick your tongue out a little?
So Sylvia decided to answer the request he had made days ago. She parted her lips and, doing as he had done, licked up over his mouth with her tongue, then sucked softly at him. Only then did Owen close his eyes and raise a hand, seizing her waist as she threw herself against him.
Their bodies collided as if they were dancing a frantic waltz, and Owen’s hand pressed hard against her back before sliding down to cup her breast. The sensation of being kneaded inside such a large hand was strange. When he bit her lower lip with his teeth, a shameless, eager moan she had never heard from herself slipped from her mouth.
“Hngh.”
In front of her eyes, his rough hair fell loose in disarray. He kissed her everywhere he could reach, biting at her earlobe, breathing heat into her ear, then dragging his teeth across the side of her neck. Her back sank into the sofa and her waist lifted in a helpless twitch.
Owen deftly settled himself between her legs and began unfastening the buttons at the back of her neck. As the thick blouse came open, revealing her collarbones and the rounded swell of her chest, Owen was busy showering her with kisses and thinking that she was wearing far too many undergarments.
Her hand came up, and Sylvia, her face burning bright red, pushed against his thigh. He was too close. Not close enough to make her think he’d hurt his thigh, either. He had come at her so relentlessly that she was worried her underthings might brush against his thigh any moment now.
“Wait, I didn’t mean for this kind of thing to—”
“Sylvie. When you comfort someone, you have to do it with your whole heart.”
He muttered nonsense with an aroused intensity, then tore at the lace at the top of her camisole with his mouth.
“I only meant to kiss you, just kiss you. Wait—hold on. Owen. Mmnh.”
“Back then, I was fully prepared to let myself be comforted by you right there, even if that meant getting fucked.”
“I-I’m not. Really, I’m not.”
And this was Count Arasphe’s study, of all places. She absolutely had no intention of ending up doing a second round with Owen in here. His excitement was spreading to her in waves, so it wasn’t easy for her to force out a refusal. Owen was burying his face in the exposed swell of her breast, looking as though he might lift his hips this instant and seize her in earnest.
Then he leaned in, and the friction between his thigh and her leg turned painful.
“Ahh!”
A fierce jolt of pleasure shot up her spine and slammed into her head. It was so blatantly direct that for a moment she didn’t even feel embarrassed. At the same time, Sylvia could read the intensity of his desire. The hunger and impulse felt so much like her own that it frightened her for an instant.
His feelings were coming through so plainly that even though Owen wasn’t stripping her further or reaching down to touch anything more intimate, Sylvia already felt as if she were naked with him, rolling around on top of this sofa.
“No, really. Seriously, no.”
She murmured it, clutching him tightly. His hand was gripping the edge of her clothes at her waist as though trying to restrain his own excitement, and his mouth was on her exposed breast. He bit down hard enough to seem almost savage, then wet the mound with his tongue.
It was such obscenely erotic behavior that even her breast felt flushed red from it, yet to Owen it seemed like nothing more than a substitute meant to relieve his arousal.
“Sorry.”
He rubbed his face against the rounded flesh and apologized, apparently only then noticing how rigid Sylvia had gone, barely breathing. She wanted nothing more than for Owen to get off her breast, but he moved away only slowly.
His sharp nose pressed between the swells of her chest as he drew a deep breath. Gooseflesh broke out along her back, but it felt closer to excitement than disgust.
“This, you know.”
Then Owen lifted his head and looked directly into her face. This was clearly working for him. For the first time, it felt as though she were meeting the eyes he usually kept half-lidded in true clarity.
“This sharing thing makes me even more aroused. I can feel your excitement through me so clearly. It’s like our minds are having sex. It really gets me going. Don’t you feel that way too?”
Her mind went completely blank at words she had never heard in her life. She could only stare at his face, which looked more heated than it had any right to be, and think helplessly.
Maybe he’s only this lively when he’s having sex. Was all that talk just his way of getting me to kiss him first? Did I somehow end up with a ridiculously, catastrophically promiscuous flirt?
* * *
Owen was a flirt.
It was, of course, a possibility.
“You know, Sylvie. If a handsome man makes you think you’ve got him all wrong? Then he’s either a complete psycho manwhore or he’s got serious interest in you. If someone’s born handsome, they’ve usually been burned enough times that they never go around confusing other people on purpose.”
That day, after Sylvia ended up doing more than kissing Owen in the study, she found herself often turning over a piece of life advice she had once heard from a friend.
At the time, she had never thought it was the sort of wisdom she’d ever need to consider. But now, Sylvia belatedly realized that it was much closer to some kind of truth.
What was more, that story had actually been told about Owen, surprisingly enough.
It must have been five years ago, perhaps when she had first seen him. Back then, Sylvia had been a wreck with anxiety too. Heston had come back injured from a mission, and Sylvia felt as though it was because she herself had been lacking — because she hadn’t been enough to become his partner.
Heston had entrusted everything to them and asked her to work with him, and yet she had been too foolish to even pass a simple test, nearly getting him killed. He had badly injured his leg on that mission, and though he told her he’d made a friend named Owen, he never once explained what had happened to him, perhaps because he didn’t trust her or because he hadn’t felt like talking about it.
So Sylvia had gone to see her superior, Lord Worth, and attended a party in hopes of bribing him to bring her promotion test forward.
Parties centered on entertainment were offered far too often to knights and supporters exposed to dangerous work, and this was one of them. Under normal circumstances, Sylvia would never have bothered to come.
But in the middle of that party was Owen.
He stood surrounded by a crowd of people and was, quite literally, radiating charm. People gathered around him the way bees or butterflies clustered around flowers. And yet they didn’t seem to be bombarding him with conversation or aggressively trying to seduce him into a pleasant little fling; they simply wanted to claim a place near him first.
I’ll never have any reason to speak to that man.
That was Sylvia’s first thought when she saw Owen.