Chapter 4

“Close your eyes. I’ll teach you.”

Aaron tilted his head at an angle. His high nose came so close it was almost touching Chloe’s cheek.

Without meaning to, Chloe grew tense, and her mouth instead clamped shut. A short laugh escaped Aaron’s lips again.

“You need to open your mouth.”

Rubbing his lips against her soft ones, Aaron smiled playfully.

He could feel, even without touching, that everything from the slender waist in his grasp to the legs she had neatly pressed together was stiff with tension. Watching the lips that seemed about to part yet only let out faint little breaths, Aaron finally bit down on her lower lip.

“Ah.”

With that short m*an, he slipped his tongue between her parted lips. Softly and carefully, he swept over her mouth as if soothing her, teasing the tip of his tongue little by little as though coaxing out a timid child hidden away in tension.

“Mmm.”

Without realizing it, Chloe let out a small sound. It was her first time in her life, so she did not know what this feeling was, but it made her restless. Every time he touched her it tickled, and just when it felt like she might truly begin to feel it, it vanished.

If only he would touch her a little more. If only it would last a little longer. Before she could even think it through, her body moved first. Aaron did not miss that clumsy little motion of her small body twitching toward him. When he wrapped himself around her soft, damp tongue from the root as if seizing it, the faintly sweet breath circling between them felt deeply satisfying.

Aaron twisted his head farther and went in deeper. The more he did, the stickier, more tangled sounds filling the quiet carriage became.

“This is what a kiss is.”

Aaron said it plainly as he pulled away from her. And yet his dangerously gleaming blue eyes gave no sign of leaving Chloe’s face. More precisely, they could not leave those special blue eyes, hazy and loosened now, shimmering softly.

“And even now, do you still want to do things with me that go further than this?”

“……Yes.”

A sweet breath spilled from between Chloe’s reddened, swollen lips. Her blue eyes, heavy and dazed, even curved prettily as they reflected Aaron.

“You really are a dangerous young lady. Junior, do you even understand what you’re saying right now?”

“I do. Because I’m not a child.”

Haha. With a small sigh, Aaron buried his nose at the nape of Chloe’s neck. The sweet scent rising from her smooth, soft skin seeped pleasantly into his lungs.

This is…… better than I expected. What should I do.

He had intended to satisfy and cut off this passing playfulness that had risen in him like glittering early summer sunlight on water, but Chloe’s reactions pleased him more than he had expected. Hmm, perhaps it was curiosity more than playfulness.

“Do you really want to be my mistress?”

“……Yes.”

“And do the sorts of things a mistress would do?”

“Yes.”

“If I want, even somewhere like this?”

“Yes.”

At that one word, mixed with breath and almost too soft to hear, Aaron pulled Chloe close and kissed her again. The thick tongue that came boldly between their tightly joined lips swept through the tender inside of her mouth.

When her shyly moving little tongue was quickly caught and toyed with, Chloe felt as though her breath might stop.

“Ah, hng……”

So this, this was a real kiss. 

She had never felt anything so dizzying, so strange, and so intense before. It was frightening and overwhelming, and yet she liked it. More than the first one.

It was similar to eating a fresh cream cake, yet different. Similar to eating candy or caramel, yet different. What was different was that it was not soft or fluffy, but suitably firm and yielding, not sticky, and yet it coated the whole inside of her mouth with a rich sweetness.

To think she had considered something like this a simple act of pressing lips together, she had truly misunderstood it completely. No wonder she was being treated like a child. Once Chloe’s thoughts reached that point, she bravely moved her tongue. She had said she would learn, had boldly declared that she learned anything well, so she had to do something.

But Aaron pulled his lips away at once. Had she done something wrong? Chloe blinked with her mouth slightly open.

“We’ll stop here for today.”

“What?”

With a light stroke, his thumb brushed over Chloe’s lips, glistening with saliva.

Maybe he had gone a bit too far for broad daylight. Her lips were red and plump, swollen just enough to look especially appealing.

“I’ll teach you step by step.”

“Ah…… yes.”

“Until then, my answer is on hold.”

“What?”

“I’m more proper than you think. I’ve never had a mistress before.”

“R-really……”

“Fine. For now, let’s say you’re an apprentice. I’ll keep you by my side, and if you behave in a way that pleases me, we can discuss it again then.”

Speaking with a fair amount of sternness, Aaron firmly removed the woman’s arms from around his neck, where they had wound themselves like vines.

After helping Chloe up and seating her beside him, the man soon put on a courteous and perfectly mannered smile, like a gentleman no one could find fault with.

“Oh, Chloe. Don’t take off your glasses. Be sure to keep wearing them.”

“Yes. I will.”

“Good girl.”

Sweeping Chloe’s fallen hair behind her ear, Aaron smiled softly. During the kiss he had seemed somehow different, but that unfamiliar face had already disappeared, and he had returned to being the dependable senior Chloe knew so well.

Unable to meet his eyes any longer, she quietly turned her head away. She had done nothing wrong, and yet somehow it felt as though she had committed a sin. It was probably because, for her, this was her first transgression. And such an enormous one too, greater than anything the old Chloe could ever even have imagined.

Seeing Chloe’s complicated expression only now, Aaron found the situation strangely amusing. That was why a faint smile escaped him. She had been the one to come at him first, and so he had played along, and now what was that expression? It did not seem to be regret, but rather the face of someone with many emotions all tangled together.

“Then let’s wrap things up here for today.”

Well, she was probably troubled too. Just as Professor Everdeen had always said while boasting of his daughter, she had been an innocent who had spent her whole life doing nothing but studying, so after suddenly kissing a man, and not just any man but one she had met only a few times and was practically still a stranger to, it was only natural.

Wearing a fairly gentle smile, Aaron lifted the small hand that could not stay still for even a moment, fidgeting endlessly. Gazing insistently into Chloe’s eyes, which seemed to be subtly avoiding him, he pressed a lingering kiss to the back of her hand.

“Let’s meet again soon. In a place fit for teaching you all sorts of things.”

It was the season shifting from spring into summer. One day when spring seemed, as always, to be ending in dullness.

Willingly accepting the bold and unexpected proposal that had come to him, he finished the day with a good deal of interest.