Chapter 22
To the girls of the VIP floor he laid out what he knew about the bane of his existence: how long it had been going on, how it still allowed him to get hard in the morning, and the pattern he'd started to map of when those impromptu erections struck.
"I was going to say you got cursed by a girl," said a girl named Zaraha, seated on the floor while another girl did her braid. "But the more I hear, it sounds like you only manage to get hard for a girl."
"One specific girl," someone else contributed from the right.
"Which means," Zaraha continued, "you're in love with her."
"Nah." Shiro categorically declared.
"What do you mean, nah? You said you only managed to get hard naturally when you saw a glimpse of her naked body and when you held hands. Those were the only times it happened. Has to be it, right?" General murmuring of agreement came from the girls seated around the bed he shared with Thalia.
"I’m a huge romantic. I believe in true love," Shiro said. "Which means if I'd fallen for someone I'd know. My heart right now could genuinely be claimed by any one of you beauties, and I say that as a monogamous man."
"Monogamous my ass," someone exploded with a laugh, echoed by the others.
"Or, or," Thalia offered, poking his cheek, "you're the kind of man who only gets there for someone he's genuinely close to.
" From his position he tried to look at her from the corner of his eyes.
Shiro failed to make eye contact, but her chest stood in between them.
"Chaska's the person you've spent the most time with since you woke up, yes?
The closest thing you have to familiarity in a world you don't remember. "
"...That holds up."
"Stability," she said. "Familiarity. I think that's just what you need. Your body might know things your brain hasn't caught up to yet."
"Not sure about the stability part, but I can-" A commotion from behind the curtain cut him off. Most of the girls were in here with him and Thalia, but others had chosen to stay out there, intervening about their summit from beyond the curtain that soon parted to reveal: Chaska.
The sight of her and the state she was in made Shiro frown. She was flushed in a way he'd genuinely never seen on her before, cheeks burning pink against her tan skin. What the hell did the girl downstairs do to you?
She looked confusedly at the girls at the foot of the bed.
There were four of them there, the most gossip-savvy of the girls on this floor, who exchanged a glance with him and all withdrew from the room, partly reticent to leave this behind but also not wanting to be too directly involved.
The next person Chaska's eyes locked onto was Thalia, whom she seemed to study, then onto Shiro.
Onto whom she asked, "What are you doing?
" with a glare that could have stripped paint.
"Talya offered to clean my ears," he said, explaining the sight of him laying his head on the girl's laps.
"Hi," Thalia said warmly. "You must be Chaska."
"How did—"
"Shiro mentioned you."
"Don't casually rat me out like that," Shiro said, lifting himself to look at the girl in the eyes, something he couldn't do earlier with her chest in the way.
"Sorry."
"We're leaving," Chaska said, crossing the length of the bed to reach for his arm before dragging him away.
"Why?" Shiro protested, bringing himself to a halt by the end of the bed.
She pulled harder, but Shiro wouldn't budge.
Not until she gave him a proper reason to leave.
She stubbornly wouldn't give him that, pulling harder and harder.
Shiro felt a little vindictive, pulling in turn, which sent her off-balance, toppling forward, landing on top of him as he laid back on the bed.
Their faces were closer than they'd ever been, so close that every shallow exhale from her lips warmed his skin, a soft, trembling rhythm that tangled instantly with his own sharp intake of air.
The reaction he'd immediately expected was her withdrawing, and she did, but only after it happened. The thing that he’d earlier tried so hard to trigger happened, pressing against her.
She felt the poke. He couldn't blame her for her immediate reaction of surprise, trying to prop herself up and withdraw, but before his brain came to a decision his arm acted, wrapping around her waist, the other to the back of her neck, bringing her closer until once again their breath intermingled.
"What are you doing," she asked, shivering.
"Confirming something."
"Confirming what?" she weakly asked.
Shiro answered not with words but with a claim on her lips.
It was a tentative kiss, almost shy, and he withdrew after only a moment, leaving a sweet aftertaste to his lips.
Unlike Thalia, he'd never seen the girl bother with something like lipstick, so either she had naturally tasted sweet or he was imagining that sweet taste.
He yearned for another taste. His wish was answered in the form of her claiming him as he had claimed her.
It was just as hesitant as his, perhaps even more so, which made him suspect she was partly returning his earlier claim out of sheer stubbornness.
Whatever the reason, to Shiro it felt like an opening.
Permission to stop holding back the desire he'd been struggling to contain.
He figured he had interpreted it right when he felt her lips mellowing against his, welcoming his warmth as she welcomed his.
His mouth was not alone in feeling explorative.
His hands were too. Well, one to be exact, as one hand remained glued to her hips to press her against him.
He liked the pressure of his crotch against her.
The other, more aHeadbirde hand traced the contours of her body starting from her hips, slithering to her back before changing direction to her chest.
The moment his thumb flicked across her nipple, a sharp, guttural moan broke from her throat, "Nngh!
" and she pulled her face back from his.
For a heartbeat, Shiro froze, a flicker of worry crossing his mind that he'd pushed too fast. But the worry vanished instantly, replaced by a surge of triumphant heat.
Chaska wasn't pulling away. She was preparing.
With a sudden, virile determination, she gripped the hem of her top and ripped it over her head in one fluid motion, tossing it aside.
Seeing her reciprocate his affection brought a smile to his face.
As she moved closer again, Shiro wished she gave him more time to engrave this view, but that was fine.
He would do it with his hand. She moaned at the direct contact, unleashing pleasing runt-like breaths at his caress, which only got Shiro more fired up.
So much that he was impatient to penetrate her, but Shiro reminded himself who the girl was.
She was Chaska. Not Thalia, to whom the favor was one to be exchanged for money.
What best could he offer than to make sure she had fun?
They rolled to the side, bringing Shiro atop her, where he went to discover a little more than just her lips with his mouth.
He descended to her neck, then slowly to her nipple, which he found quite sensitive to the teasing of his tongue.
Frankly, compared to hand he'd rather this.
Chaska wasn't particularly endowed in the chest department, so his hand felt a lot more gratified where it slithered next.
It was a warm and moist place, which made her let out a high, needy whimper, "Ahhh!
" a sound that sent a jolt of electricity straight to his groin, prompting him to get bolder and bolder.
At some point, she must have had enough, for with a rageful, desperate determination she clawed at her remaining clothes, ripping her bottoms away and throwing them across the room.
"Do it," she practically begged, her voice a wrecked whisper. "Please, just do it."
He didn't need to be told twice. Shiro shed his clothes and crawled into the space she had made for him between her legs. Yet, just as the plane was lining up to dock in the hangar, everything changed. He watched and felt, in agonizing real time, the opposite of a miracle take place.
"Goddamn it!"
Being so deep into this whole thing, he'd partially forgotten about his condition which made the sudden mellowing of his cock all the more tragic. And as if it wasn't tragic enough, he saw the expression on Chaska. The poor girl was looking at him with a flushed red but mainly confused expression.
This is going to disappoint her, he thought, sinking down, only to immediately realize it didn't have to.
Not for her at least. Backing up, Shiro kissed her midriff, repeatedly, progressively lowering his head down to where he'd welcomed her in.
The joust was canceled, but the feast remained.
With victory denied on the field, he turned his attention to the endless platters before him.
???
"You're heavy," Chaska complained.
Shiro raised his head from her naked chest, where he could hear her erratically beating heart slowly calming down toward a normal level.
"That's mean."
"Well, you're still heavy."
Shiro lifted himself to her face level, where he leaned in for something she clearly expected to be a kiss by the way she welcomed him, but all he did was collapse to her left. It amused him that she still wanted to kiss him after where he'd been, but he wanted his revenge.
She glared at him, saying nothing, at least not about that. "So... you're not going to penetrate me?" she asked, after a quick glance down.
"Wow, Chaska, greedy much?" Shiro gasped. "You actually want more? I never pegged you for that type. But I guess today is just full of revelations. I had no idea you were this much of a pervert."
"A pervert?! Me?!"
"Yes, you."
"What about you?! You're the one who just spent the last ten minutes face-down between my thighs!"
"Yeah, I'm a pervert. I know it, and I've completely accepted that about myself," Shiro replied, leaning back against the pillows with a calm shrug.
"But you? I definitely didn't know this side of you.
Because you're a pervert, right?" Shiro asked to confirm.
This confused her, so he clarified. "You weren't down for all of this because you're like... in love with me, are you?"
The girl stared at him for a moment before exploding in laughter. "No. Of course not!"
"Pfiouuuu, you got me scared right there," he sighed in relief, watching the girl laughing and laughing so hard it looked like it hurt her stomach.
"Okay, this is starting to get into mean territory because the idea of being in love with me can't be that funny."
"I mean," she said, wiping tears, "your face when you asked that was just so stupid." This earned a real glare from Shiro. "Sorry, I'll stop, hahaha."
"Oh come on."
"Okay, don't worry, I'm not in love with you, I'm just a pervert," she still chuckled, before taking an ominous expression, and with a glance down to his downstairs, said, "Now that I've answered that for you, answer something for me. What's up with you?"
With a deep exhale, Shiro just told her. The whole of it: how long it had been going on, the healers who couldn't diagnose it, Antonein's potions and what the Morpheus Brew had done to him, the pattern he'd started to notice, the few times it got hard, what they'd had in common.
"And you're the one asking me in concern if I'm in love with you."
"I'm not. I was jus—"
"I know. I know, I'm not daft. You saw a pattern and wanted to confirm. That's all it was, right? An attempt to confirm that the lust you had toward me could be what you needed, a cure of some sort to your problem?"
"The way you put it I sound like a villainous predator, but it's kinda something like that."
"You could have told me."
"About this? And you would have like… helped me."
"No, but I wouldn't have gotten in your way to go find a brothel. All this time I was sticking to you, you were most likely thinking about coming here..."
"...Erm, you want me to confirm that or..."
"My point is it could have been easier for you. I have nothing against places like this."
"I've noticed that, yeah. You ever done this before? I mean, visit a brothel."
Shiro was expecting a yes. She shook her head.
"Really?! Then you're saying you want to visit this place because..."
"I was just curious."
"That's why?"
"Yeah."
"I guess that's a good enough reason. If a boy can want girls' company, why wouldn't a girl," he mused, before doing a one-eighty. "Nevermind, I don't think I'm that open-minded to just shrug that off. You're into girls as well, right?"
She saw how quickly the girl downstairs managed to get her attention. A man would have shown more resistance to their charm than she did, so here Shiro was just waiting for elaboration rather than actual confirmation.
"I grew up somewhere surrounded by a lot of girls," she explained. "What happened earlier reminded me of it, a little."
"Where was that?"
She was quiet for a beat before answering. "Deep in the land of all the Andoe people. We call it the Eye of the Ancestors. It's a sanct—you could think of it as the closest thing my people have to a temple."
"Oh. You grew up in a temple."
"And like most of the other girls there, I grew up to become a priestess of some sort."
"A priestess. You?"
"Of some sort, yes," she said, frowning sharply. "Why do you say it like that's unbelievable?"
"My bad, I didn't mean—okay, I admit I did mean it. You don't exactly give off priestess energy. What do you think, Thalia?" Shiro asked the girl they were sharing the bed with.
"What?" The girl who, since earlier, had been a silent witness to everything that happened, clearly didn't expect to be suddenly spoken to. "You noticed me?"
"Erm, yeah, we're sharing one bed. It's big but not that big, so of course I noticed you. You thought what? That you went invisible or something?" He couldn't help but laugh.
"Then... then why didn't you say anything when you two just began doing what you did?"
"Well, I was very focused on what I had in front of me. When it began I didn't know how I would react to any interruption and how she would have reacted," Shiro said, pointing at Chaska, to whom he asked, "Curiously, did you notice her?"
"Yeah, she was there all along, so..."
"Why didn't you say anything?" Shiro asked, quite curious about her answer.
"Why did you expect me to say, go, leave your room to the two of us?"
"You could have," Shiro said.
Chaska shrugged, before deflecting the whole thing back to Thalia. "Why didn't you just say anything or just leave? You could have at any time instead of sitting there."
"I didn't want to interrupt," she timidly said.
"Awww..."
"That's sweet,” Shiro genuinely thought. “You know what, Thalia? You can charge me double what you would have charged me. This is what I call 10/10 customer service. That's passion to serve right there."