I thought I might have expected his brief question, asked while he looked down at me with glossy eyes.
Breathing in ragged, broken gasps like someone shaking with fear, I moved the hand that had been scratching my lower belly down between my legs and felt along where we were joined. His eyes flared, terrifyingly bright, as if the instant I gave the okay sign he was ready to swallow me whole.
Meeting that gaze head-on, I found the base of his penis, more than half withdrawn outside my anus, with my trembling hand. And I pulled him into me.
His pupils, looking down at me, dilated and trembled as if faced with something unbelievable. His lips parted and a gasp-like moan slipped out.
It seemed better to just erase the distance between us, so with my other arm I looped his neck and drew him close. Cheek to cheek, our ragged breaths wetted each other’s ears.
“Harder... put this in more.... Fill my belly tight, and inside, all of it... rub me with this, with your cock. Shake me like you’re going to break me...!”
Once my mouth opened, it was like my words gained acceleration; his mouth clamped over mine, cutting off the torrent of filthy talk. Before I could spit them all out, he ransacked my mouth as if he meant to swallow every obscene plea first himself.
“Mm! Mmh—mm!”
He shoved the remaining half of his length in, all at once.
He didn’t hold back; he spread his mouth wide and rammed his tongue in, and the moan I gave, with his tongue in my mouth, boomed dully like in a cave.
The hand gripping his root got wedged between his pubic hair and my thighs. As if he wouldn’t let me go, he twisted his groin hard and pressed even my hand. The rough scrape of his pubic hair against the back of my hand made my hips twist.
His fluttering tongue slipped out of my mouth, and before I could blow out the breath that had been blocked, he bit my lips next.
“What on earth... is this supposed to be stopping.”
Muttering like to himself as he savagely chewed my lips, he looked like an angry man. His thrusts—hips and ass lifted in the air and pounding inside me—were as unhesitating as a jockey running a horse at top speed, making his earlier hesitation look absurd.
But the eyes looking down seemed at a loss, full of confusion and fear like a boy having sex for the first time. That couldn’t be, but that’s how it looked.
“What... should I do? Hm? What on earth should I....”
He murmured like a sigh and bit his own lower lip this time. With the thrusts that felt like they filled my whole body and hammered through it, not just between my legs, my vision went blurry.
It’s strange, I said. I feel like I’m going to die. It’s like the thin scraps of knowledge left in my head and all my bad and good memories alike will blow away. Feeling wet track down toward my temples, I appealed to him.
“Why is that scary.... That’s what I’m working my hips hard for right now.”
I opened my eyes at his hand wiping away the tracks of tears and looked up at him. He was right. Today I wanted that.
“Erase it all and blow it away. Hm? Let’s just blow it all away.”
He corrected the imperative to a coaxing plea, whispering it into my breath, and his mutter scattered softly. He didn’t speak anymore.
Using the weight of his whole body as if to push me down into the mattress and pin me there, he stilled his hips for an instant and pressed in, deep.
“Hh-ugh, hah... khh.”
At the pressure of a knot swelling with that fierce, addictive pull, I couldn’t even moan; mouth open, choking, I spilled semen over my belly and chest. I had wanted to reach climax like that so badly, and yet the inner pleasure thudding like a new heartbeat planted inside outran the forward-facing pleasure felt in the penis.
He was pounding inside me. Even without the back-and-forth friction of withdrawing and driving in again, his knotted penis, splitting skin and thudding like a heart just pulled out, kept contracting and swelling on its own, drumming at my belly from within.
My whole body shook at that blazing heat that pushed up my organs and seemed to choke my throat. A dangerous thought, but I felt like I could understand the taste of people who want their throat squeezed at the moment of climax.
Pressure pushing up from below was joined by the pressure of his kiss. My breath was only lacking, but clinging to the scent he fed me, I didn’t refuse the kiss.
Sex that pressed and drove me with overwhelming force made me forget myself. It was sex that felt like I was being required to dismantle and bare everything of me and to accept everything of him bared in turn.
Everything was swept away, and in that empty space everything of him rushed in at once. With a strange relief born of a vague certainty that for him, too, this sex meant the same, I closed my eyes in his scent.
■ ■ ■
He came from the inner bedroom dressing room with fresh sheets and draped them over my curled, naked body. My thanks came in a badly hoarse voice, embarrassing me, but I didn’t even have the strength to steady it.
I wasn’t screaming in a high pitch, but after being with him my voice always went hoarse. It seemed the effort to suppress moans by force also strained the throat.
Just as my voice had cracked like usual, his sex, though he’d ejaculated, was still rigid. I suddenly wondered if he’d ever kept having sex until it returned to its pre-erect state—and if so, with whom, what kind of sex, and how long it had been. I didn’t have the courage to ask.
Unlike last time, when we had sex for a very long time with multiple ejaculations including knotting, this time ended relatively short, but the boneless slackness as if my spine had melted was the same.
I don’t know about him, the one who knots, but for the one taking it, it seemed a rather taxing act. There was still a tingling residue inside, and now and then my body shivered on its own.
Maybe being this drained was because I’m a Beta. An Alpha’s knotting wasn’t for a Beta anyway.
After covering me with the sheet, he left the room and came back /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ with a big cup of water.
“It’s an empty house so there’s no bottled water, but it’s from the purifier—have some.”
I awkwardly pushed myself up and took the cup. Maybe my arms were trembling too finely to be steady; he didn’t take his hand off the cup until I had it to my lips and was drinking properly.
It was only awkward where to put my eyes because his penis, still hard, was gleaming as he stood by and watched. After he pulled out of me and before he wiped it, traces of rough thrusting and ejaculation had begun to dry chalky-white on his shaft.
“Shall we rest just long enough for one cigarette.”
Taking back the cup and setting it on the nightstand with that suggestion, he walked around to the far side of the bed. To keep the cumbersome bob of his penis from nodding, he held between his legs as he moved.
The motion itself had no sexual nuance—if anything it was everyday—but the fact that it was a sex so large he had to hold it still to be comfortable was already unbearably sexual.
When he bent to pick up the jacket from the floor, I glimpsed his scrotum between his thighs. Watching the heavy pouch’s elastic sway, I had to rub my thighs together under the sheet in secret. To hide the slight rise of an impending erection, I slid my body down from the headboard and lay prone on the mattress.
He cut a glance down at me like that, took a cigarette from the jacket, and lit it standing.
In profile, he looked like the human embodiment of the word perfection.
The thickness of his chest and the swell of the muscles, the sharp waistline that broke down from his back, the firmly lifted buttocks, the long solid legs. Even the sex that called to mind that magazine shot we once found—Yuni and Gwon Juhan giggling—of a champagne bottle wedged between a foreign model’s legs.
Thick black hair that somehow always fluttered lightly, and blue-gray eyes that felt like they changed shade and temperature with emotion.
Even if one hundred percent of why I liked him were his looks, even I would have to accept it; he was beautiful, all over again.
But it wasn’t the same confident, flawless beauty I’d seen through him when we first met—like a jewel lavishly cut and displayed in a glass case.
He, too, had a past that weighed on his heart, and he was someone ruled by that past at times. He also had a clumsy side, the kind that babbles because he wants to comfort someone but doesn’t know how.
With his own warps and flaws, the beauty he showed now, which reflected light and distorted it, felt incomparably more attractive. I wanted to know more of his curves and chips, and if he wanted, I wanted to tell him about me too.
Someone else might dismiss it as ordinary things that happen in the world, but to me, the person who’d lived them, not only the things weighted enough to warp a person beyond recognition but also the trivial, silly, laughable small things.
It was the first time I’d felt the urge to tell someone my story.
In the big kindness that calmed anxiety, it was only natural that my feelings grew thicker the more our bodies overlapped.
So much so that it was a wonder how Gwon Juhan or Yuni could be around this kind of kindness and not like him as someone to date.
He set the ashtray from the table in front of the armchair on the bed’s edge and, brushing back hair mussed quite a bit, drew on the cigarette.
Watching his profile as he lifted both arms like a stretch with the filter in his mouth and loosened his body lightly, I murmured without meaning to.
“......Thank you.”
“.......”
He stopped, looked down at me in surprise, slowly let his arms drop, and took the cigarette from his mouth with his fingers.
“Was it good enough to be thankful for.”
The voice and expression, tinged with a smile, spoke of satisfaction with the sex.
I thought to add that wasn’t it, but felt I didn’t need to. The hand not holding the cigarette reached over and smoothed back my hair where I lay prone, cheek on the mattress, still limp. Along with a smile that said he knew that wasn’t what I meant.
Because the glass door to the garden was open, the sound of rain drumming on the wooden deck was close. The lines were thicker than when we left the airport. The sheer curtains, see-through thin, billowed up irregularly and sank. Against the sunken ash-gray backdrop, the sight of him touching me seemed to etch into my eyes with a special texture.
After lifting his hand from my hair, he tapped ash into the tray set to his left and spoke in a calm tone.
“To be honest, I expected you’d feel uncomfortable about staying in this house. I knew and still offered it as a Plan B just in case... Plan A is separate. I offered them out of order.”
Bracing the mattress with the hand holding the cigarette, he turned toward me and met my eyes.
“Chief Han also said he’d feel more at ease with you staying with me rather than alone. I think so too. For a while you’ll probably feel a bit uneasy, and it’s not like I can ask you to text me every time before you go into the shower, right?”
He mixed in mischief as he said it and took a short, sharp drag. My whole body was languid and it was hard to put strength in my waist, but it sounded like something I should take seriously, so I pushed myself up from lying prone and gathered the sheet over my hips.
With our eye levels much closer, he gave me a glance that broke into small pieces. Then, as if to avoid it, he turned his head and took on the cigarette.
“I want to give you space, too... but as you know, the situation is what it is. Safety comes first, and I can’t compromise on that. Please understand.”
In his voice there was a note of earnestness that didn’t match a statement that left no room for compromise and nailed down that he couldn’t yield.
It was strange that someone else, on the grounds of my safety, was appealing to me for understanding.
Whether it was loyalty to a partner he’d slept with, responsibility toward an exclusive artist, or some other little affection layered on top... his firm insistence—strongly worrying about my safety and making it hard for me to decline—was a clearer comfort than offers of alcohol, shopping, or living in a luxurious villa.
In the gray, calmly settled air from the doggedly persistent monsoon rain, while I watched his profile drawing on a cigarette with his brows knit, a sudden but perfectly natural urge touched something inside me, like hunger.
I wasn’t forcing it out, and I wasn’t commanding myself to feel it. Like a water level that had slowly risen to saturation and overflowed the top of a levee, the urge to paint the man before my eyes arose of itself.
I fixed my gaze on his profile to focus on that shimmering sense that a feeling I’d written off as fully severed might revive.
“What is it?”
He looked back at me—my body gone stiff, eyes trembling anxiously—and asked, concerned. I dodged his gaze and fumbled a clumsy answer.
“No, just... I feel sorry....”
Still on about that? He snorted a laugh and reached out to muss my hair.
I’d thought of the game of finding myself in a crack along a mug, in the cement sacks abandoned on a halted construction lot, in the face of an old woman sitting stonily at a curbside stall, as a kind of privilege I’d willingly given up. The price for setting the brush aside too long, that I’d never again find something I wanted to draw in that way.
But he’d been right.
Before Hong Kong, when we talked outside the rooftop door, he’d been sure I would definitely find something I wanted to draw again. It was true.
A pulse thumped over my head as if it were pounding through my whole body. Like when he knotted inside me.
■ Suppression ■
A weekday evening.
A man, on his way home, parked in front of a pharmacy and, stalling with a cigarette, soon seemed to make up his mind; he hurriedly crushed out the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and got out of the car.
