I kissed the inside of her thigh again, slower this ti.
She made that sound again. The almost-moan. Like she was trying to hold it back but her body had already voted and wasn’t waiting for her brain to catch up.
I pressed my mouth to her and tasted her for the first ti.
Sweet.
Actually sweet, like sothing warm and light with a faint trace of sothing deeper underneath. My past life had not prepared for this. Won tasted like won, which is to say they tasted like salt and heat and the particular penny like tang. That was the rule. That was the data I’d accumulated across years of fieldwork.
The won of this world apparently hadn’t read that mo.
She tasted like honey dissolved in warm water with sothing floral underneath that I couldn’t na. I pulled back for half a second just to process that information, which was apparently the wrong half second to pause because her thighs imdiately tried to close around my head.
Not shyness. Instinct. Her body pulling toward the source of sensation before her brain could interfere.
I pushed her thighs back open with both hands, pressing them flat against the mattress. She gasped, her hips jerking up.
"Ro—"
"Stay open," I said against her, and felt her shudder at the vibration.
I went back to work.
She was already slick, already wound tight from the classroom and the elevator and the slow drag of the zipper down her spine. I used my tongue flat and broad at first, learning the geography of her. She was responsive everywhere, hypersensitive in the specific way of soone who had never had another person’s mouth here before, never felt anything except her own hands on her own terms in the dark.
This was different and she knew it and her body was screaming about it.
Her fingers found my hair. Not pushing, not guiding. Just holding on. Like she needed an anchor point while everything else ca loose.
I found the spot that made her voice crack.
She went rigid, thighs straining against my hands. I kept her pinned. Both palms flat on the inside of her legs, holding her exactly where I wanted her. She was strong, all that academy conditioning, but she wasn’t trying that hard to escape and we both knew it.
"I can’t—" she started.
I humd against her.
The sound that ca out of her was nothing like her classroom voice. Nothing like the class representative who had cornered three separate tis about rule infractions. This was sothing raw and private that had been locked behind the ponytail and the perfect posture and the color-coded planner.
I liked it considerably.
The drain was doing sothing interesting. Her Essentia ran electric and bright the way it always did, but the taste of it was different during this, layered and complex, carrying the edge of sothing almost painful in its intensity. Like touching both terminals of a battery simultaneously. Every ti she got closer to the edge, the current jumped.
I worked the flat of my tongue against her, slow circles, then faster when I felt her hips trying to roll toward despite my grip on her thighs. She was chasing it. She’d gone past embarrassed and landed sowhere desperate, her breathing coming in shallow pulls that hitched every ti I hit the right angle.
"Ro," she said, and my na in her mouth sounded nothing like it did in class. "Ro, I think I’m going to—"
I slid two fingers inside her.
She arched completely off the bed.
Her back left the mattress. Her thighs fought against my hands so hard I had to lean into it, pressing her back down through pure bodyweight while her fingers went white-knuckled in my hair. The sound she made was not a moan. It was sothing past a moan, sothing she’d never made before in her life because nothing had ever given her cause to make it.
I crooked my fingers.
"Oh," she said, high and broken. "Oh no, oh—"
I kept going.
The orgasm hit her like a circuit breaker tripping. Every muscle locked simultaneously, her whole body rigid for three full seconds of perfect silence where she’d run out of air to make sound with, and then she ca apart.
She squirted.
It hit my chin and my hand and the sheets beneath her, warm and slick and sweet in the sa register as everything else about her, and she made a sound like she was furious about it, this sharp mortified noise buried underneath the pleasure that was still rolling through her in waves.
Her thighs finally closed, not from shyness this ti but because she had no control left over anything.
I let them.
I straightened up slowly, wiped my chin with the back of my hand. Looked at her.
She lay flat on my sheets, completely undone. Her light blue hair was spread across the pillow, loose from whatever internal composure usually held it in alignnt. Her chest moved fast, breasts rising and falling as she tried to locate her breathing. Her face was flushed all the way to her collarbones, eyes closed, lips parted.
One arm was thrown over her face.
"I need you to never speak of that," she said, muffled by her own elbow.
"Speak of what," I said.
A pause.
"The..." She couldn’t finish the sentence.
"Hae-Won," I said, and waited until she moved her arm to look at . "You are spectacular."
She stared at . Sothing moved across her face, complicated and unguarded, and she pressed her arm back over her eyes imdiately.
"Don’t say things like that."
"Why not."
"Because I can’t think when you say things like that and I need to be able to think."
I pressed my mouth to her stomach.
She went still.
I kissed up slowly, taking my ti. The soft skin below her ribs. The underside of her left breast, which made her inhale sharply. The upper curve of her chest. Her collarbone, where her pulse still ran fast. The line of her throat. Her jaw.
She’d dropped her arm by the ti I reached her face.
Her eyes were open, watching . Grey and sharp and currently carrying an expression I’d never once seen in horoom.
I kissed her mouth softly.
She kissed back after half a second’s hesitation, and I could feel the exact mont she registered what she was tasting, her own sweetness on my tongue. She made a small sound into the kiss that was half shock and half sothing else entirely.
I pulled back enough to look at her.
"How was that," I said.
"You know how it was." Her voice had gone to sothing lower and quieter, the performing quality completely absent. This was the real one. The voice underneath the class representative.
"I want you to say it."
She held my gaze, chin lifting slightly in that reflex she had, the one that said she didn’t back down from things even when she was shaking.
"It was the best thing anyone has ever done to ."
"That’s because nobody has ever done anything to you before."
"That makes it worse, Ro. You’ve set a standard against nothing."
I laughed, genuinely. She blinked like she hadn’t expected it, and sothing in her expression went a little soft at the edges.
The drain between us was still running, low and warm. Not pulling hard. Just present, the way a current stays in water even when nothing is disturbing the surface.
I reached over to the nightstand and pulled open the drawer. She watched , her eyes tracking my hands.
I set the condom on the sheet beside her.
Her eyes went to it, then back to my face.
"Aurora," she said.
"What about her."
"She told to bring one." Cheon glanced toward her bag on the chair across the room. "I brought several. I didn’t know how many tis." She stopped herself. "That sounds presumptuous."
"That sounds thorough," I said. "It’s one of your better qualities."
She looked at with the expression she usually saved for when I said sothing that she wanted to be annoyed by and couldn’t quite manage it. "You genuinely believe that."
"I do."
She sat up, which brought her close enough that I could feel the warmth of her skin. Without her heels, without the uniform, without the ponytail and the tablet and the color-coded sense of authority, she looked young. Not naive, not fragile. Just young, and curious, and trying to stay present in a mont her whole body was telling her to run from.
She wasn’t running.
"Can I," she started, and then reached out and put her hand flat against my chest, over my sternum. Like she was checking sothing. "Your heart is faster than usual."
"You’re very observant."
"It’s my ability."
"I know what your ability is, Hae-Won."
She left her hand where it was. Her palm warm and steady. The drain registered the contact, a low hum, and I saw her register it too in the slight widening of her eyes.
"Does it always feel like that," she said. "When you touch soone."
"Only with people whose Essentia I respond to."
"And mine responds to yours."
"Evidently."
I kissed her again, and this ti she leaned into it instead of bracing against it, her hand turning under mine so our fingers interlaced. The drain opened between us, wider, and her Essentia poured through the channel in long warm pulls while mine pushed back in the sa rhythm, that circuit she’d asked about running clean and complete for the first ti.
She made a sound against my mouth that wasn’t quite a moan and wasn’t quite surprise. Sothing between the two.
I pulled back to look at her face and she looked devastated in the best possible way, like sothing she’d been holding very tightly had just been gently removed from her grip.
"That," she said, barely above a whisper. "That’s what I missed."
"Every ti you run," I said, "you miss it."
She absorbed that. Then she reached up and pushed back against the pillows, swinging one leg over to straddle my hips, her bare thighs warm on either side of . She looked down at with that chin-up reflex, and in this particular configuration it read completely different than it did in class.
"Then I won’t run," she said.
The class representative had left the building.
Whoever this was looking down at had always been underneath her, waiting for sufficient cause to appear. I’d provided it, apparently, which was either my greatest achievent or the beginning of a significant complication.
Knowing my life, both.
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