The First Night
Public facilities powered by artifacts built around the Permanent Magic Stones — the moment we prodded Alphonse into unveiling a portion of that district ahead of schedule, public opinion erupted into exactly the commotion I had anticipated.
Under the cover of that uproar, Aria and I went down to the Capital and, without delay, held a small, unadorned wedding.
Of course, small as it was meant to be, I made certain not to omit the things that mattered: a wedding dress made just for her, and musicians borrowed from the Imperial Palace to play for the ceremony.
The only guests in attendance were her mother and father, nothing more.
And yet Aria seemed perfectly content with that alone.
……No, in truth I suspect she was satisfied simply by the fact of marrying me at all — the scale of the ceremony never entered her mind in the slightest.
Somehow, that left a quiet ache of guilt in my chest.
Given the choice, she would surely have preferred a grander celebration for herself as well. A wedding, man or woman alike, is meant to be the most momentous day of an ordinary life.
But I had also wanted the public's attention pointed anywhere but at us.
And if this ceremony had looked grander or more beautiful than Lapis's, that would have made things awkward for everyone in its own way.
So when we stood facing each other during the congratulatory address, I held her hand tightly and smiled back at her — at the woman beaming up at me with pure, unguarded happiness.
After that modest ceremony ended, I returned to the duchy with her.
"It's quiet, isn't it."
The news would seep out in time, but we had moved swiftly and in secret, so neither the maids nor the butler of the estate yet knew that Aria and I had been wed.
Even so, for the mansion to be this hushed between seven and eight in the evening — that had to be Lapis's doing. She had arranged it, surely.
Aria gazed up for a moment at Rohen, who stood silent in the corridor, then took hold of that large hand of his and stepped out ahead of him, leading the way.
He can be sly as a fox when it suits him.
A husband on his way to share a bed with his second wife — on the very bed his lawful wife had prepared for them.
Lapis made it seem like nothing more than a small courtesy, and yet with that single gesture she had pressed the knowledge deep into the marrow of his mind.
Perhaps that was reading too much into it……
But jealousy that hides itself so neatly beneath the surface — wasn't that precisely the true nature of a woman's heart?
Calling Lapis sly in her thoughts even as she privately found her endearing, Aria let out a small laugh.
Had Lapis been her own sister, the two of them might have gotten along wonderfully.
But that easy composure of hers soon guttered out like a lantern dimming at dawn, the closer they drew to the bedroom door — and the first night waiting behind it.
Click.
Aria flinched.
"……"
Rohen, who had been trailing docilely behind her, reached out and turned the doorknob of the bedroom.
She stole a glance back at him.
How was it that he never carried even a shred of tension at moments like this?
Well — for him, this hardly counted as a first night, did it.
"Wh-what are you……"
His hand settled at her waist, a thick forearm drawing her gently into his embrace, and before she could even gather her nerves, Aria found herself carried along in his wake.
The door swung shut behind them. When moonlight spilling faintly through the window revealed the bed, she swallowed hard.
It was the moment she had longed for, and yet…… her trembling would not be helped.
"You seem awfully worked up."
Watching Rohen speak in a voice he hadn't even used at the ceremony itself, Aria offered no reply.
You were surely a hopeless, shivering mess your first time with Lapis, too……
Now that he'd had his fill of experience with Lapis, watching him take the lead with such practiced ease stoked a small, bitter fire of jealousy in her.
"Hnn……!"
And so, as Rohen buried his face into the nape of her neck just short of the bed, Aria reached behind her and slipped a slender hand into the front of his trousers.
Lapis, demure as she was, would never have dared act so boldly.
The one you grew used to is Lapis…… not me.
With Lapis's temperament being as gentle as it was, applying that experience to an ordinary woman would have been no great matter —
No. To be exact, Aria simply refused to be counted among those ordinary women.
How could she possibly be pleased by a man who tried to handle her with techniques learned through another woman's body?
Through Lapis, of all people.
What she wanted was for him to learn her — learn her — as though she were a woman unlike any he had ever known. So, using the hand she'd slipped inside his trousers, she clumsily closed her fingers around the soft, slack weight of him.
He jolted.
Even so, Rohen only smiled faintly, took her breast into his hand, and began kneading it in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
Then he eased her gently down onto the bed, gripped her shoulders, and laid her back.
Still dressed in her wedding gown, she felt a strange, decadent thrill pour oil upon her desire, slow and searing — and when he gathered up the hem that draped over her slender legs and lifted it,
Aria pressed her knees together, prim and demure.
"Did you…… do this with Lapis?"
"……"
Rohen fell silent for a moment, unsure what the question meant — then grasped the words she'd left unsaid, and the corner of his mouth curled faintly upward.
"No."
"……Then you may."
Legs once squeezed shut fell open in open invitation, parting the space beneath her gown to reveal the sensual scarlet of her underthings.
At the sight, Rohen reached for her, gripped that slender waist, bowed his head, and pressed his lips softly against her navel.
It was the dead of winter outside.
Perhaps because her body had already worked up a light sheen of sweat, the air beneath the tent of her wedding dress drifted heavy with the scent of her — a warmth like a flower garden in springtime.
He drew her underwear down, and when the tip of his tongue brushed once against the lips so tightly pressed together, the seam that had been sealed shut flinched and clenched all the harder.
Yet her body, dimly remembering the pleasure this act once brought it, was afraid and expectant all at once — her small, tender bud peeking out shyly to greet him.
He licked it, then pushed his tongue deeper into that stubbornly closed heat, and Aria's toes curled hard as her whole body shuddered.
Instinct drove her hands toward his hair, but they were lost beneath the vast drape of her skirts — and so they flailed a moment with nowhere to go before finally coming to rest upon her own chest.
"Ah…… ngh! Hahh!"
His tongue was nothing like it had been that time — nothing so crude, nothing so ruthlessly thorough as it combed through her.
Instead it moved like a slow massage undoing the knots of a weary body, and that gentle foreplay gathered pleasure inside Aria's frame drop by drop, patient and relentless.
The dead of winter, with its biting frost — and yet,
like the sweat-slick heat of a midsummer afternoon, the air beneath her gown grew damp in moments, giving off the unmistakable scent of a female in heat.
Unable to bear it, Aria stretched out the hands she had left folded on her chest, pressed down on Rohen's head, and arched her hips upward.
A faint, tingling pressure — the ghost of an urge to relieve herself — was climbing through her.
If Rohen tormented her as lewdly as he had that time, this thirsting pleasure would surely blossom in full.
And so, in a way most unbefitting a bride on her wedding night, Aria began to beg shamelessly — but Rohen only turned his face away and slowly wiped his glistening lips clean.
When he swept the hem of her dress up and out of the way, the lips that had been clenched so stubbornly shut fell open in an instant……
and breath after hot breath spilled from him as he gazed down at her — at Aria, mouth slack, drool pooling at the corner of her lips, her eyes gone hazy.
It wasn't long, though, before her pupils found their focus again.
Rohen had stripped off his trousers entirely, was gripping his swaying length, and had settled himself between her legs — the very tip of him already nudging just barely inside.
Squelch……!
When a sound that raw echoed through the quiet bedroom, a burning wave of mortification washed over Aria.
Above all — he had only pushed in the very tip, and already she could feel her impossibly narrow passage stretching little by little to accommodate his shape, and with it a fulfillment too overwhelming for words came blooming up through her.
A well-worn treasure conforms, over time, to the preferences of its owner.
A sword's grip is the classic example.
The feel of a blade you have carried for years is an entirely different thing from the feel of a new one in your hand.
And now the sensation that a part of her own body had become Rohen's treasured possession — that she had been made wholly, utterly his — sent a shiver racing through Aria's frame.
⟨ Relax. ⟩
No voice rang out — none ever could — but she could read the simple intent from the shape of his lips, and so Aria gave a small nod, drew in a deep breath, and let her tension slip away, loosening everything……
"Hik——!"
Neither slow nor hurried.
The instant he parted her and drove through the last barrier of her maidenhood, Aria's back arched hard enough to shake the bed, her fists crushing the sheets into ruin.
The membrane was thicker than most — and so, unlike Lapis, Aria felt no small measure of pain despite the ample preparation.
A sharp sting——
But before she could even register it, Rohen drove his hips forward, sheathing himself to the hilt, and leaned down over her. Aria, in turn, breathed out a ragged, disheveled gasp and pulled him into a fierce embrace.
Their lower bellies pressed flush together, the sensation of him seated deep — nudging at the very mouth of her womb — brought a pressure that bordered on torment……
"Mm…… hn……! Hah……"
And yet Aria did not hate that foreign fullness. Not in the slightest.
If anything, she wanted to wring more pleasure from him than Lapis ever had — so, following the only knowledge she had, clumsy as it was, she tightened herself around him and squeezed.
……Ah.
She was nowhere near her fertile days.
And still Aria felt her womb sink low, as though aching to receive him — as though pressing a kiss to the throbbing tip that swayed within her.
"Mm……!"
Then Rohen cradled her cheek, slipped his tongue past her lips, and passed his saliva to her with a greedy, devouring hunger; Aria answered him as best she could, awkward and unpracticed——
Creak!
But the moment his hips began to move, even that clumsy answer fell apart, and she could do nothing but cry out their joining in lewd, unrestrained harmony.
"Hah……! Ngh……!"
Slap!
The crude percussion of flesh striking flesh where their hips met, spreading through the room again and again.
The heavy weight of him dragging along her inner walls, knocking against her womb with every deep stroke, each thrust sending pleasure crashing through her skull.
And it did not end there — a large hand seized her breast and kneaded it without mercy, teeth grazed the nape of her neck, and Rohen exhaled his scorching breath against her skin.
When the realization finally struck her — that the man above her was devouring her, body and soul, as nothing more than a female in heat, savoring every inch of her with a passion that burned——
Aria, too, let go, and surrendered herself completely to his rhythm.