A Reason to Return
"Ehk— nngh, nngh— ohk...!"
Sexual desire in this body, in this world, worked like that. A single climax never felt like enough; if anything, it only made the hunger burn hotter.
In that sense, Soyeon had clearly been holding back for my sake all this time. Every previous time had been slow, careful, almost gentle.
"Nngh—! I—I'm coming...!"
The wet slap of skin on skin showed no sign of stopping. My head was already a wreck, flooded with whatever chemical rush this body pumped out, but it was still more than enough to register the raw, stabbing pleasure of something driving mercilessly into places that had gone hypersensitive.
There was a conquering edge to the roughness of it.
I'd already let my body go slack; that kind of treatment barely registered anymore—but I at least wanted a moment to catch my breath, and when I opened my mouth to say so—
Fingers shoved in, pressing hard against my tongue. They hooked the corner of my mouth like a claw and dragged it wide, the pace of the thrusts behind me climbing higher and higher.
"Ebhh—!"
Even after climax after climax had left me raw... that piercing kind of pleasure was still pleasure.
So it didn't take long at all for me to tip over the edge again.
"...!!!"
The strength went out of my legs.
"W-wait—!"
The sound of flesh striking flesh like fists sped up even further. The door I was braced against shuddered so hard I half-expected it to splinter—and that was when Soyeon seized my hips in a rough, possessive grip.
Soyeon. I had to keep naming the person behind me that way, or the disgust boiling up would have nowhere to go.
Not a man—just Soyeon. The other person was obviously a woman; it was only because I was smaller that the hands and the force felt so large—
I had to think of it like that, or I couldn't keep myself from feeling sick.
"Ah—hyaah...!"
Air I'd only just dragged into my lungs came bursting straight back out. I wasn't even moving; all I was doing was locking my muscles so I wouldn't collapse, and still it was like this.
From behind me came the same ragged breathing as someone sprinting flat-out.
"...Nngh— ihk...?!"
Then the pace climbed again. It was a speed no one could sustain—clearly a final, headlong rush toward the end.
Current raced up my spine and set my brain on fire, and at a tempo that barely even qualified as sex anymore I was being driven into over and over until—
A thick pulse. I felt the condom swell inside me.
Another. The pressure was so intense that for a second I went cold, wondering if the latex would tear.
"Ghk—!"
Thud, thud. Two more thrusts slammed home in that familiar finishing pattern, and the rhythm of my insides completely came apart, everything inside me jolting and churning—
Then a heavy surge. The condom had reached its limit and refused to expand any further, so the semen forced its way out along the shaft, ignoring even the grip of my walls clenched tight around it, and spilled in a thick, strange trickle that made my stomach turn.
"Haa...! Haa... ahh...!"
"Kyahk—?!"
The second the orgasm ended and I let my guard down, the thrusting started again and a raw scream tore out of me. Five more strokes this time—long enough that I was genuinely afraid a third round was starting—until Soyeon buried that thing as deep as it would go, grinding it in place like a brand, and bent over me.
Thankfully it wasn't another beginning. Soyeon just pressed flush against my back.
I felt my chest crushed flat under the weight of those breasts.
"...Hwek, heek..."
"Huu, h-ha... Unnie..."
Is it over? That was the first thought that surfaced—because of course it was. For me, sex still tilted a little more toward pain than pleasure.
It felt something like watching a torturer put the tools away. Relief came first.
...I wondered, briefly, what expression Soyeon would make if she ever found that out. More sadness than anger, I guessed.
"Heek... hek, huuuh...!"
It was all because of the condom.
I didn't understand the design, but the opening of that thing gripped tighter than the rest of it—probably engineered to keep anything from leaking out.
The problem was that I'd just come too.
It wasn't as if I had no idea how a vagina moved during orgasm; I'd felt it before, even if half the time it had been forced on me...
Twitch, flutter, squeeze. Whether it was trying to take something in or just amplifying the other person's pleasure, I still didn't know—but that was how the walls moved.
Which was how the accident happened: the condom stayed put.
Meaning only the cock itself slipped free. I had no idea how Soyeon interpreted that, but a moment later it twitched and rose again.
If we'd been a real couple and this had been both of our first times, it would have been mortifying—but Soyeon simply decided to pull the condom out herself.
Well. It was right there in front of her, so of course she did.
She tugged... and it didn't come free.
She told me to try relaxing a little, but this wasn't a place I could just move on command.
Whether that was because my brain still hadn't finished mapping the circuits of a female body, or because it was simply an organ you couldn't control, I didn't know...
But the sight of it seemed to flip some switch deep in Soyeon's head. Something tied to breeding instinct, maybe.
Like my body was refusing to let the semen go? I wouldn't know. I'd never even dated, let alone had sex, before all this.
"Heu, hiik, hiik..."
Anyway, that hardly mattered now. I was just trying to get my breathing under control when—
Soyeon, who had been kneading my chest with a faint, gravity-assisted weight, finally eased the thing free.
It came out gentler than before, which was a small mercy; the shock of it wasn't as bad this time.
"..."
Soyeon had gone quiet. Whether it was guilt or some unfathomable love swelling even larger, I couldn't tell...
But the way those hands kept working my chest made me lean toward the latter.
"...So—Soyeon..."
"Mm...?"
The exhausted voice that answered sounded almost like mine.
"H-hold me... heuk...! I—I think I'm going to fall..."
I was half-propped in an awkward lean. You could have said Soyeon's strength was the only thing keeping me upright.
And semen had already hit the floor. My legs and feet were trembling so hard they felt ready to skid out from under me.
"...Okay."
A short answer—but the way she gathered me up as if I were something precious, tucking that still-slick length into the cleft of my ass, made me think she was laboring under a delusion.
The size of my love for her hadn't so much as twitched. My feelings toward the lover who had sold me off to Yujin—
Condom or no condom, a creampie wasn't going to turn any of that around.
People called it body-love, or something like that. We hadn't built any of it up yet—and I was glad of that.
Cradled against her, I helped with the cleanup, wiping away the cooling mess with wet wipes.
And just like that, the exhausting stretch of time was over.
Tomorrow I would have to walk a long road—round trip or one-way, no one could say—without the protection of anyone who was actually kind to me.
By ordinary standards—even by the standards of the era I'd come from—it wasn't an impossible distance. But walking it with no technology of any kind was a different story entirely.
No cars. Not even a simple wheel. And even if we'd had wheels, the terrain might have made them useless anyway.
It was closer to a forced march than a hike.
And human beings being what they are—even in combat boots built for discomfort—twenty kilometers of marching was enough to strip the skin off the soles of your feet.
People in their physical prime struggled with that distance. I was going to have to walk more than twice as far...
Of course I was uneasy. Even if I somehow managed the first day, could I really keep walking the day after that, and the day after that?
Everyone else's bodies were already superior to mine. I was obviously going to set the pace for the whole group. The thought of having to watch their faces the whole way was already exhausting.
So before I set out on a road where I might get beaten and left behind, there was only one place I was going to go.
The person I wanted to spend my last free hours with, a few days before what might be the end, had been decided a long time ago.
"...H-hello..."
The door I'd knocked on opened, and Dahyun's face appeared—hair a little mussed.
Even the mess looked like something a team of stylists had arranged on purpose. And thankfully, her expression was pure welcome.
"Oh—you want to sleep here?"
She asked it with a smile, as if the question had already become familiar. No damp undercurrent, no demand dressed up as a question—just a real one. The relief of that loosened something in my chest.
"Y-yes... s-since it's the last time..."
I answered. I was holding a pillow; even if I hadn't said a word, she would have opened the door for me.
"......Last time? Why last time. Hmm. That won't happen—but you still want to sleep together?"
"...Yes..."
Something in me went soft and warm.
Especially after having the right to decide what happened to my own body stripped away, after being told they'd freely remodel my erogenous zones, after the brutal sex that had followed to "test" the results—especially after all of that.
"Come in."
I stepped inside. A few pairs of eyes flicked toward me, then recognized a familiar face and went back to whatever they'd been doing.
Dahyun picked up the terminal from the table and headed for the bed. A pen, paper, and a half-finished glass of water still sat on the tabletop—so she'd been in the middle of something when she came to the door.
Meaning her original plan for this moment had not been to go straight to sleep.
And yet she quietly put everything away, drew me toward the bed, and pulled me in.
"..."
Something soft and full stirred in my chest; even my lips twitched. Because she was being considerate of me.
Because she'd stopped what she was doing for my sake—and never once said so out loud, never tried to make a show of it. The quiet of that kindness was almost enough to bring something up behind my eyes.
"......"
I climbed onto the bed. I turned my back the way I always did, and an arm and a hand rose gently and wound around me. A little tight. Tight enough I almost worried something would creak.
"H-huu..."
Only then did the tension start to drain. I thought, vaguely, that maybe I could hold on after all—
"You smell."
Dahyun murmured it against me.
"...!"
My whole body went rigid. She must have already known. Rumors, or whatever else—how could she not?
But she'd never said it out loud before. So for a second I thought maybe the revulsion had finally hit a limit, and that was why the words had come out.
My legs locked. My waist, my mouth. I couldn't find a single answer worth giving.
"...Ahaha. I'm not saying it to get at you. It's fine. Things like that happen. That's all it is..."
The arm around me eased a little. Her hand settled on my stomach.
A slow stroke. Soft. And she kept talking.
"You're leaving tomorrow. And of course you're coming back. I just hope at least one person over there is still alive. Right?"
"Y-yeah..."
Was she changing the subject for me? I was grateful she'd let it go, and sorry I couldn't talk about it properly.
"Then that person would still have the access rights, so the drones and everything else would open up. If they bring food back, we won't even go hungry."
"...Y-yeah. That's true."
"That'd be nice. Do you think you'd like steak on rice, just with wasabi...? Ah—sorry."
Her hand, still stroking my stomach, brushed the underside of my breast by accident, and she apologized at once. As if I would have minded, coming from her.
"..."
Had I ever eaten it that way? I'd never prepared steak and rice and wasabi all at once at home, and anything you bought outside always came drowning in sauce.
But I was sure it would taste good. Not just because I'd been eating garbage for over a month—it would simply taste good, full stop.
"...Yeah."
I answered.
"Heh. I used to love it like that. The meat always had to be huge. From a distance my cheeks would get this big. Pfft."
"Is—is that so..."
"It was cute. So when you get back, we can eat it that way again. Once the printers come online we could even make a bike... no, a bicycle, and ride around. Throw a party in a private room. I don't know if you liked drinking—I never saw you drink, at least."
She wasn't picturing a future where I didn't come back at all. Only happy ones.
It wasn't that she was refusing to look at reality. It was closer to comfort—words meant to soothe how scared I was.
"...Hehe..."
So for the first time in a long while, a laugh came out. The muscles around my mouth twitched awkwardly, as if they hadn't been used that way in ages.
"I wonder if there's anywhere good for fishing. If there is, I want to try it together. There have to be fish here too, right?"
I listened to her sketch those futures, and I enjoyed every one of them.
A few hundred years ago, people had treated video calls like a technology that would never exist.
Someone already used to every piece of tech that, by my standards, belonged in science fiction was inventing new daydreams out loud—and every single one of them was too interesting to miss.
I only answered in short scraps, but Dahyun never stopped talking.
The conversation stretched on. For the first time in ages my own mouth loosened a little, and I started asking about the things I'd been curious about—is there this, is there that.
There was one small slip at the end, but...
With the tension finally gone, I set down my fear of tomorrow and fell asleep easily.
Her arms were so warm that, for all the relief of letting go, I still wished morning would never come.
Ah—and the slip wasn't anything serious.
I'd just asked whether she saw women as sexual partners too. She'd answered that as long as it wasn't a man, it was fine.
There was one last question I'd wanted to ask. I decided to save it for after I came back.
If I heard the answer before I left, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to concentrate on walking at all.
Now I had a reason to return.