Chapter 96: Salon 4
Chapter 96: Salon 4
At first, my mind simply refused to process it.
'What is that...?!'
The very idea of showing him my naked body was mortifying. I might not have had any excess flesh from tending to the plants every day, but compared to soldiers and patrollers like my mother, mine was a pitifully frail body, utterly without muscle. Perhaps my mind had recoiled out of pure embarrassment, unable to face the prospect.
'He's... he's getting hard because of me, isn't he?'
This was the first time I'd ever seen a man's member with my own eyes. What reason would there be to see another's inside the World Tree barrier? There were humans and beastkin who occasionally tried to steal peeks at lovers in their intimate moments, but I'd never felt any particular curiosity back then.
Staring at that column of flesh, longer than my palm, a storm of emotions churned inside me.
In that frantic current, the most powerful stream was relief.
'He's enjoying this...!'
I'd heard it said that a man's member only swells and rises when he's aroused. Despite my clumsy blunders and my untrustworthy display, this Dream Demon's flesh was responding to me. It felt like fuel being poured onto the sparks of courage the spiced wine had kindled.
Drawing on the courage surging within me, I reached out.
Contrary to my intentions, my hand moved very slowly.
Part of it was touching a man's member for the first time, but I was also worried I'd blunder again, just as I had with the kiss. A man's member was a vital spot beyond all comparison with lips. My mother had told me, during my lessons, to handle it more gently than a newborn leaf.
Haa... It was bigger, thicker, and harder than I'd ever heard described—
'I mustn't hurt him again...'
Since I'd never touched one before, I'd just have to be gentle.
The man's member throbbed faintly in my palm. It was part of a living body, so of course it had veins and blood pulsing in time with the heart. Perhaps because of that, my palm felt a spreading warmth. I curled my fingers around it with infinite slowness, as if wiping dust from a young leaf.
'I'm holding a man's member...'
The texture of that long column of flesh was wholly different from a finger, a forearm, or a tree branch. Worried I might be hurting him, I glanced down at the boy lying beneath me. A shy flush and a kind smile that met my eyes each time I looked, as if to say it was alright.
He wasn't gritting his teeth for the sake of the mood or showing any sign of distaste, and that put my heart at ease.
I moved my hand up and down with a gentle, unsteady motion. Before we parted, my mother had always told me to treat men tenderly, to treasure them. Maybe she'd said it thinking of my childhood friend, though his face had grown hazy in my memory by now.
that friend had hanged himself from a branch of the World Tree in our ruined world, and the man before my eyes now was someone else entirely. Here I was in bed with a man, thinking of another. I probably deserved a slap for that.
'Oh... now what?'
As I shook him gently up and down, a pulsing throb traveled into my hand. At some point, it felt as though our hearts had begun beating together. The trouble was I had no idea what came after.
'Ah... do I just climb on top of him and put it in?'
I'd heard plenty of lewd talk. That if you rubbed them with your hands they'd stiffen up, that you were supposed to climb on top of a man, swallow him into the cleft of your flesh, and bear down. But wasn't there supposed to be something in between? Was I supposed to just keep stroking him here and then climb on top?
Even with proper education, no one had taught me the entire sequence step by step.
The bare, pale body lying on the bed—eyes half-lidded, letting me touch his member with my hand. The fact that I was about to sit on another person's body, completely naked, suddenly struck me as blindingly embarrassing. My hand, still moving in a daze, and the lingering sweetness on my tongue—those I could ignore.
I hadn't a clue what to do, and his bare skin looked cold without a single blanket. On impulse, I climbed on top of him—not straddling him with my hips, but laying my body flush against his, skin to skin.
"I'm not too heavy, am I?"
"No, you're not heavy."
With our chests pressed together, the sound of our hearts grew even clearer.
As if folding a sheet of paper in half to lay one side on the other, I took his hand. Our fingers laced together, and naturally our lips met. Hot breath brushed my face. We were tickling each other with our own breathing.
'It's so hot...'
And a searing heat that nudged insistently against my lower belly. I'd felt it when I'd held it in my hand, but a man's member was hot enough to seem like it might burn. Was it because he was a Dream Demon, or was it heat from arousal—flushed like his reddening face—because of me?
With every new point of contact between our bare skin, there was no stopping my racing heart.
Just then, I felt a gentle touch tracing up the curve of my back.
※
Humans and elves are different.
A difference in kind that seeps into your bones when you press skin to skin and share your emotions.
'Something about her is... cool.'
A beautiful maiden, eyes clenched tightly shut to overcome her embarrassment, was squirming naked on top of me—hardly the time for idle thoughts, but what could I do? The truth was, I was awash in the scent of a deep forest, as if I'd come for a woodland bath.
Her pale, bare body was exquisitely soft as she twitched and shifted atop me, seeking a comfortable position—and yet there was absolutely none of the sticky, unpleasant sensation you'd expect from naked flesh rubbing together. It made me question: wasn't the air supposed to grow hot and heavy with sweat when a man and woman spent such time together?
With a gentle palm that might as well have been stroking a curious animal, she had cradled my shaft and begun to shake it with tentative motions. Now she was on top of me, radiating a fragile, desperate hope to overcome her own bewilderment. To feel only the pleasure of being male, without any of the usual muggy, sticky heat that follows—it was a full-blown cognitive dissonance.
The sensation was contradictory—simultaneously refreshing and sticky. My hands rose to encircle her slender waist before I knew it. The thought might have been an insult to every elf besides her, but cradling this cool, clean body in my arms, I began to understand why, even in a world where elves were real, you heard stories of men wanting to make them lovers or even slaves.
Her small, pale breasts—hardly what you'd call voluptuous—pressed softly against my chest, squished into my skin, and I could feel our heartbeats thudding together, gradually falling into sync.
It must have been the Dream Demon's empathic sense, and the moment I thought it, her emotions came flooding in like a tide.
Confusion awash in overwhelming joy.
'Well, it's not like you can watch porn inside the World Tree.'
I read her mind while stroking her back. How could a few scraps of whispered gossip turn a girl who'd never once masturbated into an expert? She didn't know what to do, but her body was burning up, and as she squirmed and adjusted herself against me, I secretly, quietly aimed myself.
I was dying of thirst and the feeling of a single drop of water landing on my tongue was excruciating, but what could I do—we'd come this far. I couldn't just suddenly sit up, flip her over, and start thrusting. I had to let her decide where to put that very first drop of paint on a blank, innocent canvas.
Her pale bottom twitched and squirmed, lewd yet somehow adorable, as she positioned herself on top of me. An ignorant maiden who'd only ever heard things and never seen them—yet with my subtle help, she'd managed to find the spot. I allowed myself a faint smirk at the sticky, damp sensation touching the tip of my glans.
"Pu-put it in?"
Her voice broke the awkward, sweet air for the first time in a while. With tension, excitement, and a dash of happiness mixed in, it cracked and trembled—a complete mess. In any other situation, I might have had a hard time suppressing a laugh.
Yet she paid her own voice no mind, solely focused on the tip of me pressing against her tightly closed, creamy cleft. She rocked her hips back and forth with tiny, stealthy movements, and her firmly shut flesh clung to my glans and shaft, coating me with a sticky slickness.
She was hesitating—too frightened to take it all at once, unsure if she was even allowed to proceed.
I held our laced fingers and subtly tilted my hips upward.
There was no violent tearing pain or resistance. Past a faint sensation barely hinting at something being breached, I was caught off guard by a tightness that squeezed me like a fist. My size had shrunk just enough that the insertion itself was simple, without resistance—but inside, her inner flesh clenched around me so tightly I couldn't move a millimeter.
"You're not hurt, are you?"
Why was she the one asking the question I was supposed to ask?
Perhaps noticing my flustered expression, she wrapped her arms around me. Her embrace was gentle, but her inner walls kept clenching down mercilessly, refusing to let me move. Misreading my startlement at the elf body—so unlike a human's—she began to move her hips with extreme slowness.
It wasn't just a woman's inner flesh. It was like countless folds perfectly suctioned to me, as if cast in a mold. From our hearts beating as one, to the way her insides gradually seemed to reshape to the mold of my cock, to the torrent of emotion washing over me.
"Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet," as the saying goes.
That saying held perfectly true even in another world.