Chapter 54 Episode 54: Lucid Dreams R19

Kael’s POV

Reiss closed the office door behind him with the same quiet precision he brought to everything else. The latch clicked and his footsteps receded down the corridor. I waited until his mana signature faded past the outer ward before I let the operational posture drop.

My office was still as I watched the afternoon light cut across the desk in a hard rectangle, catching the edge of the mission chip still sitting in its reader. The Winged Lion was dead a long time ago. Fuck it, the gate collapsed, and yet the only thing that remained of the run was the memory of Akira’s mouth under mine. The way his body had gone still and open against the column when I took what four months of restraint had finally allowed.

I sat back in the chair. The leather creaked under the weight. My hand rested on the armrest for a long moment before I reached for the drawer.

His photograph being there was not new. Mission files carried standard identification stills. This one was different. It was taken during a Thursday session three weeks ago, when the training room lights had been lower and Akira had been between sets, suppression holding, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt.

Someone on the observation deck had captured it without either of us noticing at the time. Reiss had flagged it as non-essential and tried to delete it. I had stopped him last minute.

I set the photograph on the desk.

Akira looked back at me from the matte surface. Lean shoulders. Long silver hair that made him look like a freaking temptress. The finer bone structure that made the standard hunter uniform sit differently on him than it did on anyone else in the unit. Soft mouth. Longer lashes that caught the light even in a still image. The faint flush across his cheekbones from exertion.

And somewhere under the printed ink, the memory of the scent that had risen off his skin the moment I put my hand on his jaw behind the column.

I had a bottle of house conditioner in the private washroom attached to the office. Peach-scented.

The kind of thing that was supposed to be pleasant without being noticeable. I had bought it the week, when the original scent had first registered properly and refused to leave my head. It did not come close.

Nothing manufactured did. The real thing lived under Akira’s skin, rising with his pulse and his mana, stronger when he was stressed or aroused or simply close enough that the residual of whatever he was feeling pushed it into the air between us. It had been the strongest when I kissed him. When his breath had stuttered and his body had answered instead of retreating.

I stared at the photograph. Our next meeting was a few days away.

.

I had told him that on the street like it was a simple continuation of the training schedule. But it was not. The word had carried everything the kiss had opened and everything the four months before it had built.

I had watched him walk away without looking back, the same way he always did when the mission ended and the formation dissolved. The ordinary distance had felt wrong the moment it settled between us again.

My hand moved without a formal decision.

I opened the lower drawer, took out the small bottle of oil I kept for occasions that had nothing to do with recovery protocols, and set it beside the photograph.

Then I leaned back further in the chair, unfastened my trousers, and freed myself. Already half-hard from the simple act of looking at him and remembering the exact pressure of his mouth.

Four months of controlled proximity had turned into something sharper the second his suppression broke in that chamber and the real mana signature flashed through.

I poured oil into my palm and wrapped my hand around my cock.

The first stroke was slow. I kept my eyes on the photograph. On the soft line of his mouth. On the way his mouth would bulge with my cock in there. On the way his throat looked when his head tilted back during exertion. I remembered the exact sound he had made against my mouth when I deepened the kiss.

Uncontrolled for half a second before the training reasserted. I had wanted to pull more of those sounds out of him. I had wanted to put him against a proper surface and fuck him until the residual of the wish projection was the least of what was moving through his system.

My hand tightened. The pace stayed deliberate. I did not rush it. Rushing would have been a waste of the image in front of me and the memory of his scent still clinging to the inside of my head. My growls slowly slipping into the air.

The conditioner in the washroom smelled like fruit and chemicals. But how wrong they were.

Akira’s scent was warmer. It rose from the hollow of his throat and the soft skin under his jaw and the places where his pulse ran close to the surface. When I had pressed my face there after the kiss briefly, it had filled my lungs like something I had been denied for longer than the registration period.

I wanted it on my tongue. On my hands. Under me while I fucked the careful control out of him and replaced it with something that belonged to both of us.

My strokes became harder as my control started slipping.

The office stayed quiet. No one would interrupt. Reiss knew better than to return without being called, and the rest of the floor operated on the understanding that a closed door meant their only S-rank hunter was not to be disturbed unless the city was ending.

I kept my eyes open. On the photograph. On the lean line of Akira’s body captured mid-breath. I imagined him here instead; standing between my knees, looking down at me with that same measured expression he used when he was processing something he had not yet decided how to name.

I imagined the peachy scent thickening in the closed air of the office as his pulse climbed. I imagined putting my hands on his narrow hips and pulling him forward until he had no choice but to straddle my lap, until the soft heat of him settled against the hard length of me and the only thing left to do was take what I had been circling for months.

My breathing deepened.

The strokes lengthened. Oil slicked the way; the wet sound of it was quiet but distinct in the still room. I thought about the way his body had fit against mine behind the column, it would be smaller, finer, yielding in the places my hands had held him.

The difference in size had registered in every point of contact. I had been careful with it even while the hunger pushed harder. I would be careful again. And then I would not be.

I would put him on his back or against the wall or over the edge of this desk and open him slowly until he took every inch, until the soft sounds he made turned into something broken and honest, until the peachy scent saturated the air and I could finally bury my face against his throat and breathe it while I fucked him through the release I had been denying both of us.

The image sharpened.

I was no longer only looking at the photograph. The edges of the office softened. The hard rectangle of light on the desk blurred. The scent in my head grew stronger; warmer, realer, the exact register of Akira’s skin when his mana ran high and his control slipped. I kept stroking, slower now, deeper, chasing the sensation of him instead of the simple friction of my own hand.

Then he was there. Or at least to me he was.

Standing between my knees the way I had imagined. Looking down at me with those steady eyes. The soft mouth slightly parted. The peachy scent rising off him in a clean, living wave that made the conditioner in the washroom feel like a cheap joke.

I did not question how he had entered the office. The wards were intact. The door had not opened. None of it fucking mattered. He was here. Real enough that when I reached out and set my hands on his hips, the fabric under my palms was the same training gear he wore on Thursdays, and the body beneath it was the lean, fine-boned shape I had catalogued across four months of proximity.

"Kael," he moaned out. The same level voice he used when the residual was still working through him and he was choosing not to hide it.

I pulled him forward.

He came without resistance. Straddled my lap the way hunger had written it. The heat of him settled against my cock through the remaining layers, and the scent of him filled the space between us until I had to turn my face into the side of his neck and breathe it in like oxygen.

He shivered when my mouth opened against his skin. The sound he made was small and uncontrolled. I answered by biting carefully above the pulse, then soothing the mark with my tongue, then biting again a fraction harder.

My hands moved under his shirt. Mapped the soft plane of his stomach, the narrower ribcage, the places where the body was more delicate than anything an S-rank was built to handle carefully. I handled him carefully anyway. And then less carefully.

I pushed the shirt higher, lowered my head, and put my mouth on the soft skin of his chest, tasting the scent at the source while my hands gripped his hips and ground him down against the thick length of me. My mouth slowly found his already hardened nipple.

Akira’s breath stuttered. His hands found my shoulders. The fine bones of his wrists looked fragile against the heavier muscle there. I liked the contrast. I had always liked the contrast. It made the act of taking him feel like something precise and deliberate rather than simple force.

I lifted him just enough to free myself fully, then settled him back down so that the slick head of my cock pressed against the soft heat between his legs. Even through the remaining fabric the contact was enough to pull a low sound out of my chest. He was warm.

The body under my hands answered the pressure with a subtle shift that told me he was already open to the idea of being taken, even if the waking mind still carried doubts about what it meant that both of us were men and that the feelings had nowhere to land.

I did not care about them now. But I wouldn’t name them till I was sure of his.

I pushed the last barriers aside and pressed into him.

The same measured entry I would have used if this had been the column instead of the chair, if this had been the dungeon instead of the office. The stretch of him around me was tight and perfect. The peachy scent spiked as his breath caught and his fingers dug into my shoulders.

I held him there, fully seated, and let both of us feel the size difference in the most intimate way possible. My cock buried deep inside the narrower body, my hands spanning his hips easily, my mouth against his throat where the scent was strongest.

"Look at me," I growled.

He did.

The expression was a different one from behind the column after the kiss, undefended, present, carrying the same quiet decision that had let him kiss me back instead of turning away. I held his gaze and began to move.

The first thrusts were deep and rolling. I kept the pace deliberate, watching every shift in his face, every small sound that escaped when I angled just right. The chair creaked under the combined weight.

The office air thickened with the real scent of him, so much richer than anything the conditioner could manufacture that the comparison became insulting. I fucked him harder for that alone. For every time I had stood in the washroom and tried to approximate what I actually wanted, for every Thursday I had watched him suppress and left with the taste of restraint still in my mouth.

And he took it. Like the good little fuck toy he was.

His body opened around me with each stroke, soft and responsive, the lean muscles of his thighs tightening against my sides as he adjusted to the depth. I wrapped one arm around his back and held him flush against my chest so that every thrust dragged his cock against the hard plane of my stomach.

The dual stimulation pulled broken sounds out of him that I swallowed with deeper kisses. The aggression that usually stayed locked under S-rank protocols surfaced fully now. I wanted him marked. I wanted him filled. I wanted the peachy scent saturated into my skin and my clothes and the air of this office so that even after he left it would still be here, proof that I had finally stopped circling and taken what the four months had been building toward.

I shifted my grip, lifted him slightly, and drove up into him with shorter, harder thrusts. The wet sound of it filled the quiet room. His head tipped back. Hands still wrapped around my neck. The soft line of his throat was exposed and I put my mouth on it again, biting and breathing him in while the pressure at the base of my spine tightened past the point of control.

"Kael... Fuckkk... Just like that... Ughh..."

My name in that voice, strained and honest, finished it. And fuck it. He would make a perfect screamer and a good whimperer.

I came hard, buried deep, holding him locked against me while the pulses filled him. The intensity of it white-out sharp. I kept moving through it in smaller, deeper rolls, dragging every last second of the sensation out while his body clenched around me and the real scent of him flooded everything.

For a long moment neither of us moved.

Then the edges of the office began to reassert themselves. The hard rectangle of light on the desk. The photograph is still lying where I had set it. The quiet hum of the wards.

Akira was not on my lap.

My hand was still wrapped around my cock, slick and spent. The chair was the same. The air carried only the faint chemical peach of the conditioner from the washroom and the sharper, more private scent of my own release.

I sat there breathing until my heart rate settled. The lucid quality of it lingered; the exact heat of him, the exact way he had looked at me while I took him, the exact richness of the scent that no bottle could match. It had felt real enough that the absence now registered as a physical lack.

I cleaned up with the same efficiency I brought to everything else, restored the photograph to the drawer, and closed it.

I leaned back in the chair and stared at the empty air where he had been. The hunger had not eased. If anything, it had sharpened.

I would see him soon. And this time I would not stop at a kiss.