The Fruit of Ignorance
“Is the pressure all right?”
“…It feels like I'm being tickled.”
“If I apply more force, it will likely leave marks.”
“That's fine.”
“The frame is thinner than I expected. There is a risk it could snap.”
By this point, Libitina was starting to think a lecher would have been the better option. A debauched man, at the very least, wouldn't have produced this excruciating atmosphere by asking for confirmation at every single step!
“Wait, just a moment.”
Clearly this wasn't going to work. Fingers or anything else — there was no need to go that far. Maybe passing out after days of burning fever and waking up was the better path for both of them.
Libitina, doing her utmost to settle her nerves, ultimately ended up pushing Asselin's hand away and rolling onto her side again.
“We cannot afford to waste time. Please try to enjoy this.”
Enjoy it? Was that really something a man who'd been droning on about ribcages in the one moment that called for fanning the flames could say? Looking up at Asselin with an expression of pure disbelief, Libitina retorted in protest.
“I've never done this outdoors before, for the record. We're on a stone floor covered with a few blankets — what exactly am I supposed to be enjoy—ah!”
In that instant, the man's enormous hand, which had been doing nothing more than brushing ticklishly across her skin, seized her breast in one grip. The plump peak of her nipple was pressed flat and crushed within his palm.
Libitina reflexively let out a yelp and broke off mid-sentence, her eyes going wide. Asselin brushed a glance across her face, then peered down at the breast he had seized.
“You have such a precious body, it seems you've only ever been treated preciously.”
If his voice sounded vaguely aggrieved as he said it, was she imagining things?
“My hands have spent their whole life gripping a sword, so they are rather rough. I ask for your understanding. It is the fruit of ignorance.”
Libitina, who had been staring at him without so much as breathing, recovered herself belatedly — and flared up all over again.
“It's not ignorance, it's just sloppy—hnngh!”
The man's fingers, which had seemed to slacken for a moment, tightened again.
“…Yes, I understand perfectly what you are saying.”
He clearly had no idea what he was doing, just moving his hand this way and that to see what happened — Libitina bit down on her words and gritted her teeth. The touch wasn't even practiced, yet the way it made her so acutely aware of her own body stung her pride almost past bearing.
Seriously — she'd lived her whole life without the faintest inkling her body was this sensitive!
No. That wasn't it. She wasn't in a normal state to begin with. The excessive depletion of her holy power had her fever constantly boiling over, and just before this she'd practically poured out the last dregs of it. Her head was so addled that the scalding heat no longer even registered as unusual. Lying on the hard cavern floor, her body felt as though it were floating — a strange weightlessness had swallowed her whole.
The fact that she responded this easily to a man's hand was, without a doubt, entirely due to this abnormal state.
A flash of injustice made her gnaw at her lips, and she grumbled between trembling breaths.
“Can't you just shut up and focus? What kind of time is this to be waxing poetic about the fruit of ignorance….”
At the nearly tearful murmur, Asselin's eyes narrowed. He fell silent for a moment, then answered calmly.
“Then I will understand that you have granted consent in advance for every act I am about to perform.”
What is he going to do?
The question spun around her mouth, because the hand kneading her breast had, at some point, changed its motion. He seemed to have noticed that every time his fingers bore down on her nipple, Libitina could barely hold back a moan.
Asselin abandoned his rough, whole-handed gripping and began to roll the stiffened peak between his fingertips instead.
“Ah….”
A sharp jolt of sensation shot out from the mercilessly teased peak. The feeling came in short, intermittent flashes like lightning, and Libitina's chest arched up to meet it. She was practically offering her breasts to him, spurring his every movement on — all without the slightest awareness that she was doing it herself.
Only Asselin, looking down at her as though cataloguing her every reaction, was recording her unconscious display. After pinching and tugging at the nipple, he pressed it firmly with his thumb and swirled it in slow circles. At that single-minded attention to one spot, Libitina — who had been moaning freely — felt her brow pinch faintly.
“That's enough.”
Asselin's gaze dropped to her swollen nipple. He'd realized, in trying to stoke her higher, that he'd prodded far more persistently than necessary, and promptly withdrew his hand. However good it felt at first, friction repeated too long always turned to pain.
Which was to say, Libitina was apparently not the type to find pleasure in pain.
He filed that small, casually discovered piece of information away in memory and set his hand moving again. Not quite as much as when he'd been fondling her chest, but wherever he touched, the naked body beneath him shivered in acute response. Skin that had been nothing but pale was now flushed red in patches, burning hot enough to seem on the verge of melting outright.
Judging that he had raised her enough, Asselin drew a slow, deep breath. The time had come to face the territory below that he had not dared to touch.
Libitina, for her part, had been subjected to nothing but that maddening tickling over her skin the entire time — it was sheer torture. She could feel the low simmer of pleasure fusing with her fever, and she could feel it fanning her most primal lust — that was all well and good, but it stopped right there, and that was the problem. She needed something to burst through her, sharp and shattering….
“Ah—hng!”
Just as her irritation crested, her legs were finally parted. From the enormous hands gripping her thighs and spreading them, the faintest tremor could be felt.
“I am going to insert them.”
As though determined to announce to her whole body that this, too, was his first time, his fingers probed her opening with excruciating care. Then, entering at a snail's pace, they startled at the feel of her rippling inner walls and slipped straight back out.
A low exhale sounded from above her — and then the fingers were burrowing down again. The fevered inner walls clung to the man's fingers and squeezed, as though they'd been waiting for them. At that movement, Asselin seemed only to grow more tense, his fingers going stiff.
“Mmh….”
The fingers parting her slick, heated depths on their way in were unmistakably thick. Perhaps, as he'd boasted, they were above the average man's standard.
The pity of it was, no matter how long his middle finger happened to be….
“Ah, there. Hnngh!”
…It still couldn't reach the place she wanted.
The frustration made her hitch her hips upward, and after a moment's deliberation Asselin added another finger. Not, of course, that his index finger joining his middle finger carried him any deeper.
“Haa….”
Between Libitina's parted lips spilled a hot breath laced with a groan. The fingers' movement — slow, cautious, retreating at the slightest alarm like something utterly spooked — was simply exasperating.
Slipping in to the very edge of contact and drawing back out again — it felt less like inexperience and more like he was deliberately taunting her. Or possibly he had become so engrossed in the fact that this was a treatment procedure that he had entirely forgotten the requirement to grant her pleasure.
Libitina clenched her jaw. It was her first time, and her body was hardly in its right state — but instinct told her clearly enough. If she wanted the pleasure she truly craved, he had to thrust deeper.
“Hng.”
At last the mounting frustration broke her, and she began to sob. Asselin froze, then pulled his hand away.
“What did I do wrong?”
The way he scrambled to straighten up suggested he, too, had sensed something was amiss.
Your fingers are all thickness and no give — less supple than a wooden staff rolling around out there on the ground. Do fingers simply not have joints where you come from? And moving that clumsily, how much pleasure do you imagine you can possibly give? If you can't do it, don't put yourself forward. The world is full of men, and you're nothing but a virginal boy with nothing going for him but size — what could you possibly know?
She managed to strain her scattered thoughts down to a single grain, and forced her mouth open.
“Just… stop with the half-hearted fumbling and do it properly….”
“If you provide precise instructions, I will correct it.”
He didn't even have the gift of sweet talk to make up for it. When a man's hands fell short, the least he could do was fill the gap with his mouth!
“You don't even know what you're doing — what did you expect to accomplish with your fingers?”
The barb finally crawled out of Libitina's mouth. A faint flicker of grievance crossed Asselin's face at that — but Libitina, drowning in the half-lit pleasure that had been needled awake in her and the searing heat coursing through her body, could not have read it if she'd tried. The mind that the man's hand had set slowly ablaze grew less and less capable of deeper thought with every passing moment.