The Rose of Sharon (5)
"Mm……."
Han Seoyeon carefully took stock of her own body.
"…This feels even stranger than I expected."
She lay on the bed of a love hotel, under lighting that somehow managed to feel indecent — and with her arms and legs bound, no less.
Only a little while ago, Hitomi had caught sight of the restraints stocked in the room and casually floated the suggestion, going so far as to invoke their bet at the movie theater when she made the request. Seoyeon's wrists were locked in cuffs, her arms stretched high overhead, and the cuffs themselves were fastened to the head of the bed. The design had clearly been made from the start on the assumption that someone would be fixed to a bed exactly like this.
Her legs weren't free either. Each ankle had been secured separately to the foot of the bed, so that they fell naturally a little apart, opened into the shape of the written character for person. Her clothes, of course, were gone. She still had on a black sports bra and the panties that matched it, but even so, it was more than embarrassing enough.
Hitomi sat perched on the bed, looking down at her, and slowly let out a breath that had, for reasons she couldn't quite name, begun to tremble. She had never once thought of herself as having this sort of inclination, and yet faced with a sight like this, a hunger to conquer — one she hadn't even possessed before — was welling up in her. She swallowed hard, forcing the boiling desire back down along with her saliva.
"Tonight, I want to take the lead. It's been a while."
"A while…?"
Seoyeon couldn't help questioning that. To use a phrase like "a while" at all, Hitomi would have had to have properly gotten on top at some point, and she wasn't at all sure that had ever happened.
"I-I have too, you know?!"
Hitomi bristled and raised her voice. It wasn't as if she had never taken the lead first.
…It was only that, in most cases, stamina had gotten the better of her, and the whole thing had ended with her being overturned.
"Tonight I'm really going to be the one who takes you. I mean it."
Wasn't that exactly why she had gone so far as this drastic measure(?) of restraining Seoyeon? Hitomi nodded, as if steeling her resolve.
"So until I let you go, no slipping out on your own. That was the promise."
"Yes. Of course it should be."
Hitomi said it while meeting Seoyeon's eyes, and Seoyeon answered with a nod. As if rewarding the reply, Hitomi pressed a brief kiss to her lips. Not for a single instant did it cross her mind to wonder whether she might be tired of it, after doing so very much of the same at the theater.
In truth, the restraints she was wearing didn't mean all that much to Seoyeon. She had assumed handcuffs in a place like this would be cheap junk, and while she was impressed to find the construction sturdier than expected, that was as far as it went. That they were far weaker than the cuffs actually used by the military and the police went without saying — and since Han Seoyeon could handle even those professional ones, these were really little more than toys. If she truly set her mind on breaking them, it would be a little difficult, but she could probably smash them to pieces with nothing but raw strength.
So for her, the far firmer binding was not the physical hardware but her promise to Hitomi. Sure enough, the moment she heard those words, Seoyeon neatly gathered both hands and even laced her fingers together.
"Then…"
"Ah— one moment. You're putting a blindfold on me as well?"
"I heard it makes the other senses sharper this way."
With that, Hitomi brought the blindfold she had set by the bedside up to Seoyeon's face. Seoyeon looked a little thrown, as if she hadn't anticipated this, but she didn't resist. Even while she thought, vaguely, that this was getting rather serious, there was no reason she couldn't indulge Hitomi if this was what she wanted in the end.
Her vision sank into darkness, and just as Hitomi had said, her awareness gathered of its own accord around her other senses. Being unable to see at all didn't unsettle her much. She had been dropped into environments where she truly couldn't see a thing more than once, carrying out operations on nothing but her exceptional sense of smell.
What did puzzle her a little was the sound that followed. A click, like a plastic cap coming off. Then a faint wet sound, and with it a scent she couldn't place. There was nothing nearby that ought to make a sound like that, and Hitomi hadn't left the bed either, so she had probably sent a familiar off to fetch it.
Lavender and lemongrass. And… rapeseed oil? They've put it through quite a deodorizing process to strip the smell, but there's still the faintest trace of oil…
"Nnh—?!"
And the instant that thought finished, something cool dropped onto her thigh, and Han Seoyeon flinched and drew herself in.
"Ah, I'm sorry. Was that a little cold?"
"This is…"
"I think it's oil meant for play. I was going to warm it in my hands a bit before putting it on you, but I spilled a little by accident."
Then the back of Hitomi's hand touched Seoyeon's leg. She really had been cupping the oil in her palm — Seoyeon could feel it seeping out between her fingers. Hitomi tilted her hand and let it run slowly over the leg. It was still cool, but far more lukewarm than the first droplet that had fallen. Spreading it with both hands, she began to rub, and once she seemed to have worked it thoroughly into one leg, she started pressing firmly around the ankle and calf, massaging.
"How is it? Does it feel good?"
"Ah… haah. Yes. It certainly does feel good, but……."
This was, frankly, a little outside her expectations. Given that Hitomi had gone so far as to restrain her, she had assumed an excited Hitomi would simply throw herself at her. But what she was doing now was a massage so thoroughly wholesome it was hard even to call it a caress, and the refreshing sensation drew a heated sigh out of Seoyeon before she realized it.
"Still — a massage, all of a sudden?"
"The truth is, it's something I'd been meaning to try someday."
She had stumbled across it online, thought it looked nice, and then forgotten about it for a good while. Now that the place happened to be arranged, and oil for a massage had caught her eye besides, she had decided to give it a try. Hitomi explained all this in a voice that was smiling.
Her hands worked carefully to loosen the legs. She rubbed with a bit of strength from ankle to calf, kneaded the calf itself, then climbed to the thigh to rub and press. When one leg was finished, she oiled the other and carried on the same way, and at the last she laid a hand on each and massaged them both with a smooth, gliding softness.
"Nn…?"
It was around then that something briefly pulled Seoyeon's awareness back up out of the drowsy languor she had melted into. Suddenly, someone's hand touched her shoulder.
Hitomi's hands were still massaging her legs. Unless those arms had abruptly multiplied to four, it made no sense. No — even granting that a spare pair had sprouted out of nowhere, it was a spot Hitomi's hands could not have reached while she was concentrating the massage on the lower body.
In the brief moment she spent startled by that, Han Seoyeon felt an unplaceable wrongness, and soon identified what it was. There was no scent. Someone was unmistakably at her head, and yet there wasn't even the faintest smell a living thing ought to have.
It was Hitomi's familiar. With her eyes covered, she couldn't tell whether it wore its original form in a maid's outfit, or the copy of Hitomi it showed from time to time. The familiar's hands, too, spread oil over Seoyeon's shoulders and arms and massaged them, and the wariness and tension that had briefly risen dissolved in an instant under that touch.
At some point the hands on her legs multiplied as well. Having left the leg massage to the familiar, Hitomi began aiming a little higher.
"Hnn… Hitomi…"
"Yes. I'm right here."
Her fingers traced the outer line of the thigh, brushed past hip and waist, and stroked the abdominal muscles a few times before dripping more oil onto them, drop by drop. When the ticklish sensation made Seoyeon call her name without meaning to, Hitomi answered in a soft, coaxing voice. Even so, her hands didn't stop.
"Haah……."
The movement was a little different from the massage her arms and legs had been getting. Rather than gripping with her fingers or pressing firmly with her palms, she raised her fingertips just slightly and traced the ridged lines of those abs this way and that, as if tickling them. More than ten minutes of having her whole body loosened had left her barely able to put any strength into it, and into that body a new stimulus seeped.
"Ah— nnh…"
It was never intense. But precisely because the sensation was so faint, the stimulus was all the sharper. Fingers swept up her side and stroked just beneath her chest, then came back down, wriggling as they tickled her stomach. Just when a thumb seemed about to press into her lower belly, it moved on somewhere else again.
How many times was it repeated? Before she knew it, the hands tending her limbs had shifted as well, into something a little more blatant — a light, tickling touch that made use of the fingers' movement. Those, too, worked their way further inward and began concentrating on sensitive places, her armpits and the insides of her thighs.
And that went on for a long while again. Under hands that tickled and yet somehow seemed to stir something hot inside her, her body twisted of its own accord. Sweat beaded on her skin, and heated sighs slipped out between her parted lips. Even through all of this, the parts covered by her underwear were barely touched — at most a finger or two brushing the edge of the fabric now and then. Little by little her senses were waking and heat was rising in her, her sensitivity growing terribly keen, and still Hitomi's assault didn't intensify beyond that.
"Hito— mi… nnh."
"No. I intend to tease you a little longer."
Seoyeon had been about to say something, so Hitomi sealed her mouth with a kiss and smiled, languid and alluring.
The physical gap between Han Seoyeon and Ninomae Hitomi was, regrettably, overwhelming. Hitomi had already gained strength that far transcended a human being, but it was nothing compared to hers, and the same held true in bed. No matter what she tried, when they actually went at it, the one whose stamina gave out first was always Hitomi. For her, it was a worry that wasn't quite a worry.
"Tonight I'm going to tease you right up to your limit… no, past Shion's limit, until you're whimpering. Please think of it as punishment for tormenting me so much with kisses at the movie theater."
It wasn't as if Seoyeon seemed unsatisfied. But this was a matter of feeling, and so Hitomi had secretly thought up all sorts of remedies. The clone play and the cosplay play she had tried before were part of that. At the time she had ended up having the initiative stolen from her again and left panting, but the idea itself hadn't been wrong.
She couldn't even compete on quantity. So even if it was brief, she had no choice but to raise the quality of a single time — and the idea she had come to think rather good was precisely this: teasing her to the extreme. A strategy of drawing it out and drawing it out, then making everything burst in one short moment. Of giving her a pleasure so intense that she would think tonight was enough, that any more would only be tiring.
"Ah, right. Do you remember?"
"Wh-what are you referring to?"
She leaned in slightly and let a sweet voice spill at Seoyeon's ear, as if whispering.
"They said we only have to check out by noon tomorrow."
"Nnh…?!"
Seoyeon's body shuddered. She must have pictured what was coming next. Hitomi kissed her mouth once more, then smiled brightly.
There would probably be… no, there was a fairly high chance of hell to pay afterward, but she could leave that to the future Ninomae Hitomi. For tonight, at least, she had resolved to enjoy herself exactly as she pleased.