Chapter 39

The incomprehensible words rang against Yuri’s ears.

A shadow descended like a storm, engulfed him completely, and pulled him toward Cherriot. The man who had crashed into Yuri’s life like fate locked him firmly inside his arms. As Cherriot lowered his head and rubbed their lips together, Yuri opened his mouth for him.

Their breathing turned ragged in an instant. As though both had been waiting, they began tasting each other. Heat spread in every direction as if something had caught fire. Cherriot pushed Yuri down onto the sofa and climbed over him.

Yuri was still holding the book even as he fell. Looking down at him with an expression of near desperation, Cherriot bent and kissed him again. Yuri caught Cherriot’s cheeks in both hands and pushed his tongue into the man’s mouth, returning the frantic kiss.

They both knew exactly what would happen next. Cherriot’s hand slipped beneath Yuri’s clothes. Like sunlight melting ice, every place he touched dissolved beneath the heat of his palm. It was Yuri’s first time joining his body with someone because he wanted them desperately. He had never clung to anyone with such need or kissed them like this. Never before had another person reached beneath his clothing with the intention of undressing him. Yuri’s life had been spent choosing the lesser evil over the worst one. Never had he made a choice simply because his heart urged him toward it.

Perhaps that was why everything felt unfamiliar.

Although he had already kissed Cherriot beside the lake, nothing about this felt easier. If anything, he trembled so violently he could barely breathe. Yuri had had sex countless times, yet the tension made him dizzy, as though this were his first experience.

When they briefly parted to release their labored breaths, Cherriot tightened the arm beneath Yuri’s waist and dragged him close again. The fingers that had left Cherriot’s cheek returned to cradle him.

His skin was so smooth it felt precious, and Yuri could not bring himself to grip hard. He feared that if he used too much strength, someone this beautiful might be harmed. While Yuri struggled to withstand the relentless kisses, the hand beneath his T-shirt skillfully pushed the fabric upward and stroked the skin it exposed. Hard abdominal muscles cast faint shadows across Yuri’s pale stomach, wrapped in dimly visible blue veins and scars.

Cherriot’s fingertips found a long scar along Yuri’s left side. The border was uneven as torn paper, filled with white flesh different from Yuri’s natural skin. Yuri could no longer remember when he had received it. He had stopped counting where and how he had been injured a long time ago.

The moment Cherriot touched the scar, Yuri’s attention fixed there. He had intended to ignore it if Cherriot merely brushed over the place, but the man continued stroking the damaged skin gently. Yuri stopped kissing him, seized his chin, and narrowed his eyes in warning. He did not want Cherriot looking at a shape Yuri himself found grotesque whenever he saw it in a mirror.

“Stop touching that.”

Resisting the hand gripping his jaw, Cherriot lowered his gaze openly toward Yuri’s abdomen. When Yuri saw his eyes settle on the scar, he lifted his upper body and curled inward, trying to conceal it. He attempted to pull his shirt down again, but Cherriot caught his arm and pinned it firmly.

Pressing Yuri’s right wrist down with one hand, Cherriot straddled Yuri’s lower body like an animal. “I’m not allowed to touch it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I won’t feel anything there, and I don’t like it.”

With Yuri now lying fully beneath him, Cherriot’s face filled his vision. The sight of Cherriot looking down with fever-bright eyes briefly stole Yuri’s words. With his long lashes fluttering as he whispered, Cherriot seemed as unreal as the legendary being Yuri had imagined had secretly come searching for him. Taking advantage of Yuri’s pause, Cherriot lowered his head and studied Yuri’s upper body.

With the hand that was not pinning Yuri’s wrist, he shoved the T-shirt above Yuri’s chest and stared intently at the scars covering him. Then he bent down. The beautiful face disappeared from Yuri’s vision, replaced by reddish-gold hair stirring before his eyes. Yuri came back to himself and twisted, but Cherriot was faster.

Something soft and wet touched the scar on his side with the delicacy of a falling feather. Like an animal tending a wound, Cherriot extended his tongue and licked slowly along the white scar. The nerves there had been too badly damaged for Yuri to feel anything, yet he experienced the illusion of a small warmth rising through the deadened flesh. His waist twisted without permission, and a shallow moan slipped from him.

“Ah… Hah… ” A tickling sensation spread inside his body, tightening his throat.

The tongue gently tending the scar moved toward his navel. Startled by the contact against such a sensitive place, Yuri squeezed his eyes shut and opened his mouth. He barely swallowed the strange gasp that nearly escaped, but Cherriot stimulated him again. Sharpening his tongue, Cherriot licked along the line dividing the center of Yuri’s abdomen.

At the slow, wet sensation traveling upward, Yuri grabbed Cherriot’s hair in alarm. The touch made him so self-conscious and nauseously embarrassed that he could no longer endure the caress. “Stop. Enough. Just… ”

Just what?

The sudden question closed Yuri’s mouth. Cherriot raised his head and met his eyes.

His green irises had darkened further, their pupils narrowed, and they stared as though he intended to devour Yuri. “Just what? What do you want me to do?” Judging by his rippling pheromones, Cherriot was unquestionably aroused.

The palm holding Yuri’s wrist was hot enough to burn, and an Alpha already in rut wanted only one thing. As Yuri had thought beside the lake, Cherriot appeared to want to take him.

“I’ve never been with an Alpha. But if that’s what you want, I can take you.”

Because Yuri had never imagined himself on the other side of such an act, those were the words he whispered. Cherriot was somewhat larger, but size made little difference when penetrating someone. The moment Yuri spoke, however, Cherriot lowered his head again. Still held by the hair, he pressed his lips to the sculpted muscle of Yuri’s chest, then licked the nipple that had already stiffened beneath the cool air.

Yuri’s eyes flew open at the unfamiliar sensation spreading from his chest. Disturbance flashed through the blue as he seized Cherriot’s shoulder in alarm.

Sucking his chest? Yuri was not an Omega. Licking him there could not possibly make him feel—

“Do you even know how to take an Alpha?”

It should not have felt good.

“If two Alphas are going to do it, you have to loosen me properly. It isn’t like being with an Omega. Nothing back there gets wet on its own. you’d have to lick and touch me until every part of my body relaxed.”

Strength abruptly left Yuri’s hand.

Cherriot had flattened his tongue and was dragging it wetly across the pointed pink nipple.

A sharp burst of pleasure struck through it like the prick of a needle.

“Ah—!”

The arousal that had briefly settled when Cherriot touched his scars flared like wildfire. At Yuri’s moan, Cherriot caught the rigid nipple lightly between his teeth, then closed his lips over the areola and sucked hard enough to make a soft sound.

The round pink flesh against Yuri’s chest disappeared completely into Cherriot’s mouth.

“Hah… God… ”

Yuri released trembling breaths, repeatedly curling and loosening the fingers gripping Cherriot’s shoulder.

Pleasure radiated wildly from the small nipple, leaving him unable to think. It was nothing like having his cock touched. The sensation was so strange it frightened him. This was unquestionably his own body, yet it no longer felt like his. He had treated it like a tool for decades and never imagined it could contain sensations like this.

Seeing Yuri frozen and speechless beneath the pleasure, Cherriot moved his mouth to the opposite side. When he willingly sucked the small, firm pink bud standing as though begging for touch, Yuri’s lower body responded immediately. His neglected cock had been hard for some time, and clear fluid suddenly spilled from the tip.

The sensation of something leaking from the head finally brought Yuri back to awareness. What was happening to him? In only a short span, he had become aroused in ways he had never experienced. Confusion distorted his eyes as the reactions chained through him.

Cherriot, who had been tasting Yuri’s nipple like candy, released it and met his gaze. “Can you do it, Wolfie?”

The pale green eyes curved into a suggestive smile. Looking at Cherriot’s lips, reddened further from sucking his chest, and at the face dark with desire, made even Yuri’s eyes seem to itch.

Cherriot watched Yuri’s confusion with fond amusement, then reached out and cupped his cheek. The shift of his weight pressed Yuri’s trapped wrist even harder beneath his palm.

“I don’t think you can.”

Cherriot looked immensely satisfied. Watching his mouth curl into such a pleased smile made Yuri forget to insist that he could.

“You feel this much from having your nipples sucked a little. It would be ridiculous to keep pretending otherwise. ”

Protecting his pride as an Alpha seemed less valuable than allowing Cherriot to keep wearing that satisfied expression. This was no longer a choice between the worst and second worst. It was a choice between good and best.

“And I’m the one in rut, Yuri.”

The best choice for Yuri was seeing Cherriot satisfied.

“I’m the one taking you.”

Cherriot had made suggestions like that from their first meeting. Yuri did not understand why the man wanted him that way. They were similar in build, and Yuri was not an Omega. Yet even after seeing the ugly, scar-ridden body beneath his clothes, Cherriot still desired him.

Yuri did not dislike that.

It felt as though Cherriot truly did not care what sort of person Yuri was. All his life, Yuri had believed no one could know his true identity and still want him. Least of all someone as kind and ordinary as Cherriot.

But what Yuri had actually desired was the exact opposite of that belief. He had wanted to remain beside someone gentler and better than himself. He had wanted a person who would call the abnormal things in his life ordinary and neither deny nor despise the existence Yuri had endured. But because he knew desiring that was too greedy, he had kept everyone away.

A man who had learned his place long ago had trained himself to be content with insignificant things. Yuri had tried to find meaning in nothing more than the fact that he remained alive and breathing. And then, one day, this uninvited guest appeared.

“You really are strange.”

And made Yuri understand what he had wanted all along.

“I don’t understand.”

The father and friend who had watched Yuri for a lifetime had never revealed it to him. Yet a man he had known for only a few days had done so effortlessly.

Cherriot surely attached no special meaning to him. Yuri was probably only a midsummer diversion passing briefly through the man’s life.

“In my opinion, it would be stranger not to want someone as beautiful as you,” Cherriot replied.

Even so, if Yuri could remain as one small fragment in the life of someone so lovable, that alone would make him deeply happy.

Resistance was impossible.

Cherriot knew how to make Yuri surrender without ever pressing a gun to his head. One sentence had filled Yuri with a fierce desire to give this man anything he wanted. The choice was utterly irrational and offered Yuri no possible advantage, yet he felt no regret.

“I’ve been thinking this for a while.” Yuri glanced at the arm pinning his right wrist, then looked up at Cherriot, who had impudently trapped him beneath his weight. “You talk too much.”

Their positions reversed in the blink of an eye. Yuri, who had willingly remained beneath him, shoved Cherriot hard by the shoulders and overturned him in one movement. Cherriot landed with his head just short of the sofa’s edge and blinked up in surprise. Looking down on that pretty face, bewildered by what had happened, filled Yuri with satisfaction.

I’m about to do something completely unlike me. I should at least be the one who decides the position.

Yuri climbed over Cherriot, who had dared pin him down, and settled his weight across him. He pressed Cherriot’s waist between his thighs so the man could not escape. Belatedly understanding the situation, Cherriot’s face filled with displeasure, disbelief, and fierce possessiveness.

“What is this?”

“Did you bring any lubricant?”

“Of course I didn’t. I’m not so ruled by lust that I planned to have sex with someone while running for my life. Wait. That isn’t the point. What exactly are you trying to do, Wolfie?”