A Passing Shower
Swish.
Aria slips from my arms and turns her back to me, seizing the bathroom door handle.
Grab!
But before I know it, I've seized her roughly from behind.
Honestly, if a man didn't get aroused by temptation like this, he wouldn't be normal.
Still slick with water, my arousal had surged up shamelessly beneath the leather of my trousers, pressing flush against her hips, grinding against her as if it might tear me apart.
Even with my answer still deferred, could crossing the line any further truly be called a wise thing to do?
Yet watching Aria put up no resistance whatsoever to my movements, my desire began to seize reason by the hair, little by little, and drag it beneath the surface.
Hahh……
I carefully brush aside the platinum-blonde hair tangled from the falling rain and bury my face into the nape of her neck it reveals.
Flowers always grow more fragrant while the rain falls — could that be why Aria's own scent rises up so thickly it numb my senses?
I bite gently at the back of her neck as my hands softly caress her slender waist.
Squeeze!
Perhaps because her underwear, soaked through with rainwater, clung tight to every line of her, even the slightest pressure at her waist transmitted the plush flesh being secretly compressed near my tip — lewdly, unmistakably, even through the leather of my pants.
"……A male in heat really is uglier than I imagined."
A faint, mocking sneer, as if she were making light of me.
Why do those lips, so conspicuous today of all days, look so devastatingly seductive?
"Nnh!"
I tighten my grip and turn her body around to face me, catch her chin and tilt her head up — then lower my own.
"Hh…… mmph!"
Being inexperienced, she panics at my tongue forcing its way into her mouth and bars the entrance with her teeth — but I slide my free hand down to pinch her nipple lightly, and she flinches, startled, and parts her lips for me.
"Hah!"
In that instant my tongue pushes inside, and her own flees to a corner of her mouth in confusion — but I chase it relentlessly, entwining it like a serpent, tenaciously exchanging saliva until she yields.
"……Disgusting. Just how much practice have you already had with that Lapis bitch?"
Irritation at having the initiative stolen from her.
Confronted with my practiced lead — so unlike her own fumbling — Aria furrows her brow and sweeps the backs of her glistening lips with her hand.
The familiarity had come entirely from mixing bodies with the Hundred Ghosts many times over, but Aria had no way of knowing that, so it was only natural for her to set her sights on Lapis as the target.
Still — why does even that scrunched-up expression of hers look so beautiful?
I reach out slyly and caress her full breasts, and Aria looks up at me as if utterly exasperated.
"You've got a woman getting annoyed in front of you, and your first instinct is to grope her chest?"
Since our conversation, the one charged with the power of the Command, had already come to its end, I maintained my silence and continued kneading Aria's breasts.
"Idiot……"
She casts me a contemptuous look and curses me roundly — but when I slyly pinch her shyly swelling nipple once more, her frail body jerks, and she barely swallows down the moan that leaps reflexively to her throat, grinding her lips together.
Her pink nipples are one thing — but why is the areola around them so unbearably delectable too?
When I roll my fingers around them in slow circles, Aria's nipples stiffen further still, quivering and twitching as they flaunt their adorable presence.
But perhaps she didn't care for being toyed with so tamely in my hands — Aria boldly slides her hand downward, tugs down the waistband of my trousers, and fishes my arousal out from where it had been squirming against her.
Jolt!
Unlike her audacious handling, the moment my arousal emerged into the open — grotesque veins standing out as it pressed hard against her navel — Aria recoiled as though staring at some repulsive insect, before carefully taking it in hand and beginning to stroke it.
A clumsy touch beyond all description…… and yet, precisely because of that, it feels wonderful.
Proof that this girl, who has never known a man, is learning what one is through me.
"Why are you so obsessed with my navel, I wonder…… is it because there's a womb just beyond it?"
Soft, supple skin.
As I pressed my tip firmly against her adorably hollowed navel again and again, savoring her inexperienced touch, Aria gave a little snort of laughter.
Perhaps it was because I already knew her so well.
When she occasionally spat out words so directly, without any metaphor, they felt not vulgar but — impossibly — all the more seductive for it.
"You do realize that if your seed is meant to plant itself in a womb, spilling it here means absolutely nothing?"
As Aria spoke, never once pausing her stroking while staring into both my eyes, I impulsively violated her lips roughly and ground down hard on her navel.
"Hah……! Ow—!"
Rattle!
Startled by the sharp pain, Aria tries to pull her hips back — only to be blocked by the firmly shut bathroom door.
Trapped in my embrace with no escape, her navel plundered again and again, Aria flails about, spitting out petulant little moans.
Throb!
And at the end of it, my seed spills out thickly from my tip, smearing Aria's navel and the skin around it in sticky streaks, letting the scent of a male soak into her savagely deep.
And we hadn't even properly joined.
A dizzying, electrifying afterglow strong enough to bring on a faint vertigo.
As I quietly let out my heated breath, Aria — head bowed downward — looks down at the mess around her navel, then slowly sweeps the dripping seed away with her fingers.
Slick.
Strands of it stretch out like threads between Aria's fingers, refusing to break.
Remarkable viscosity.
"Like a leech. It might be a little gross, taking something like this into a womb."
After that oddly off-the-wall observation, Aria turns around and grips the bathroom door handle, twisting it.
She never said anything about washing together — but the fact that she left open the door she'd walked through without closing it……
Was that too, another fork in the road being laid out before me?
My arousal had yet to settle, but having climaxed once, my reason had recovered — and I moved to close the bathroom door behind her.
"……"
But the moment I caught sight of her back through the gap — of Aria pulling down even the underwear still clinging to her hips — I couldn't bring myself to do it. I shoved forward on the handle gripped tight in my hand and stepped inside.
"You defer your answer because you 'need time to prepare your heart' — and then you want to do everything but the answer itself. Typical."
Aria tugs off a meaningless hair tie, sets it aside, and steps into the tub, letting the water fill around her.
Thanks to the artifact, the water had heated in an instant, and it swiftly filled the basin. I stared blankly at the rising steam before dragging a hand down my face.
Aria was right. Doing this while my answer still hung deferred did feel shameless, no way around it.
"Don't just stand there looking pathetic — get in. Honestly, I'm satisfied just knowing you're the type to agonize like this. I'd rather you didn't agonize at all…… but then again, seeing you completely stop caring about Lapis — I think there's a part of me that would be disappointed by that."
"……"
At some point the initiative had slipped back into her hands again, so like an obedient child I dutifully stripped off the rest of my clothes and settled in behind Aria in the tub, wrapping my arms snugly around her bare skin.
Like being held in my mother's embrace — an extraordinarily steadying feeling.
But before I could even savor that warmth, my arousal, wedged between her legs, felt the plush flesh of that slightly parted crease and began squirming restlessly against it.
Slap.
Especially whenever Aria shifted her legs, deliberately playing innocent, the sensation of being brushed by that soft skin made my hips tense up without my willing it.
I tried gently steadying her hips, half as a plea for her to hold still — but that lewd Y-shaped line, the one her fingers seemed to be sucked into, kept drawing my hand stealthily toward her groin before I could stop myself.
Really, now……
Was she truly going to offer no resistance all the way here?
Before I even realized I'd swallowed, the pad of my fingers felt the plush mound of her pubic flesh — smooth, without a single hair — and my arousal, forgetting it had already spent itself once, stiffened to an almost painful ache at the mere friction of squirming against her.
Flinch!
The moment I gently took that firmly closed mound of flesh in my grip from either side, fingers barely two knuckles deep, Aria held her breath and trembled faintly.
Not stopping there, I pressed the backs of my hands against her inner thighs and eased her legs apart — and she offered no resistance at all.
Like handling a jointed doll still warm with a living person's body heat, I exhaled a hot breath and slowly spread the untouched mound of her sex open from either side — flesh no hand had ever known — and swept my fingers across the pink folds blooming in full.
"Ah……!"
Instantly, Aria tried to clamp her legs shut against the utterly foreign sensation.
But my hands, braced against her thighs, refused to permit the rebellion, and with a light flick against her adorably swelling bud, I moved deeper, toward that narrow passage within—
…Ah.
With a small gasp of realization, I withdrew the hand that had been about to explore Aria's sex.
Between one thing and another, I'd neglected my grooming, and my nails had grown out a little.
If I toyed with her like this, I might well leave a wound inside her.
Care might have been enough — but I wasn't so far gone as to dismiss the possibility of hurting her, because I didn't see Aria as a pure object of lust.
So that she wouldn't blame herself — wouldn't wonder whether her own reflexive defenses had made me stop — I pulled her snugly into my arms from behind, pressed a kiss to the nape of her neck, and gently kneaded her full breasts.
What the……
Despite the shameful position she'd been in, watching Rohen give up so cleanly, Aria caught herself thinking — just for a heartbeat — that perhaps she'd been too defensive.
But moments later, seeing Rohen look down at his own unmaintained nails, she understood at once that it was nothing of the sort.
So what on earth was she supposed to call this feeling?
A consideration that would suppress even his own desire for fear she might be hurt — that was unmistakably the feeling of being loved and respected, and it didn't feel bad. And yet a loss was still a loss.
After all the stage that had been set for them.
Still……
Weren't nails in that state also proof that he hadn't yet crossed the line with Lapis?
Of course. The Lapis she knew would never seduce Rohen like this.
Her personality was her personality, after all.
And the engagement was one that could never be dissolved anyway — there was no need to rush.
…Ah.
No.
Rather — wasn't it precisely because he had experience that he knew, in that very moment, that unmaintained nails could harm the woman he was about to take into his arms?
Hadn't she herself learned that same lesson through her own practice?
"……"
The moment that conviction settled in her heart, the mood that had leaned, however shakily, toward the positive at that ambiguous crossroads tilted all at once toward the negative.
"Bastard."
So saying, Aria brushed Rohen's hand away from the breast she had left in his care, crossed to the far side of the cramped tub, and sank down where she sat.
"You should have just kept pretending not to know. Getting that consideration for women firsthand — consideration you learned from someone else — makes me feel the absolute worst."
Flinch — Rohen's fingertips trembled as he laughed awkwardly.
Watching him offer no denial only irritated her more.
Truthfully, considering the nature of the two of them, it would have been laughable for her to get angry here of all places.
And yet she had wanted to close the distance between them this badly, this quickly.
She had wanted to outrun Lapis by even a single step, this badly — and what did that make her?
Right now, at some far-off social gathering, Lapis was surely holding an afternoon tea party — and Aria could almost feel her mocking her from that distant place.
A woman who never has to turn ugly in her loving — that really was an enviable thing.
So Aria gave herself a cursory wash and stepped out of the bathroom.
Come to think of it, pouring this feeling out at Rohen made no sense either.
She had been the one to start seeing her little brother as a man.
She had been the one to demand he see her as a woman.
Rohen may have been the one who lured her secret out into the open with his sly tongue, but in the end it was an emotion she should have swallowed alone.
This sulking was nothing short of pure childishness.
She'd thought she had grown — that she'd matured from a girl into a proper lady.
But perhaps she wasn't quite there after all.
Whooshhh.
Closing the bathroom door behind her, she toweled at her damp hair and looked out the window — and the bright, sunny sky had, at some point, darkened into ink.
And here I thought it was just a passing shower……
It seemed it was nothing of the kind.