Free Web NovelChapter 1017: Chapter 1017 - Taming Impossible Puzzles
Ren hesitated.
Not pulling back, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to... It was the hesitation of someone who has something they need to say first, something that would be better left clear before the moment moves on without them, even when the moment is exactly the one they’ve been wanting to arrive.
Luckily Luna caught it before he had to put it into words.
She stopped at one centimeter.
The bubbles kept spawning slowly from the plant stems around them, the fine rain continued its soft white noise and the space it created felt like something that existed between the outside world and wherever they were.
The distance between them was the distance left where noses touched, which was close enough to be something neither of them would deny was intimate and slightly closer than it had any right to be from a standing start, but less than the distance of something that had already happened before and that therefore didn’t carry the full weight of the completely new or unknown.
So Luna didn’t pull back... She instead rested her forehead against his.
Closed her eyes.
"Why do I feel you’re hesitating?"
Ren opened his mouth.
"I’m... N-no," he said, and the word arrived with less conviction than he’d intended.
He breathed deeply. Closed his own eyes, because with his eyes closed he couldn’t see that beautiful face so close and the weight of the last five seconds was marginally more manageable.
"It’s just..." another breath, "...I don’t want you to do this because you feel like you owe me something. Or because you’ve just been through a lot." He found the words in the order that made them true rather than the order that was easiest. "When you’re ready for things like this, that’s fine. You don’t have to push yourself."
Silence.
The mist settled on their faces in small drops that were barely there, like the control of their bubble had lost a bit of stability.
Luna exhaled slowly.
"Yes," she said. "I’m extremely grateful." The plain honesty she used when she had decided not to filter. "Probably enough that I’d do almost anything you asked..."
Ren swallowed.
"Saying that to me is dangerous you know..."
"I don’t care." Luna’s lips moved a fraction closer without closing the remaining distance, though at this range the warmth between them was tangible regardless.
"I’ve already watched you be dangerous and trusted you anyway." She breathed in slowly, and they were sharing some of the air leaving their nostrils now, a sweet hormone charged scent in the same small warm space between them. "Maybe you’re allowed to act a little dangerous once in a while... Because you think about other people too much. It would maybe do you good to think about yourself more."
Ren breathed in and the scent of her, the combination of rain and earth and shadow mana and something he’d never found an accurate name for, made everything considerably harder.
But he held on.
"I still feel a little guilty..."
Luna’s exhale was the exhale of someone who has accepted that certain people are simply this way and that arguing with them has a low return that she has already calculated.
"Then blame me again."
And she closed the distance.
It wasn’t like the first time.
The first time had arrived with the urgency of a grief that was spilling over, that had found the exit it found because that was the one available, with real sadness washed in the rain, and the full emotional weight of everything that had come before that moment and everything that was going to come after it pressing down from above.
That first kiss had happened the way it happened, with that force, in that moment, because it was wrong but deep down it was what she wanted.
She wanted this too.
But this was entirely different.
The first contact was soft. Just a touch, the kind that verified the thing was real, that asked the nervous system to confirm and received confirmation: yes, real, temperature and texture both present, and the texture was one the brain had been attempting to categorize for a long time through descriptions that never quite reached the reality of the thing itself.
The thing they were feeling now.
Then another kiss... A little longer.
The sensation moved through Ren’s back the way electricity moved, involuntary, nothing he had a real frame of reference for except that the corruption had promised something at this scale of intensity, had offered that same full-body awareness as a lure, and yet this shared absolutely nothing with that.
This was a different category entirely at the same scale of feeling. It didn’t promise anything because it didn’t need to promise anything. It didn’t try to convince him he should want it because it was already too deeply present in their instinct.
The kiss grew.
Slowly... Without either of them making a conscious decision to let it grow, it simply found its own pace the way things found their own pace when you stopped trying to set one for them.
Luna’s arms were around him.
Ren’s hands had found the places they made sense in the last few minutes, though not yet the places they felt like they ultimately wanted to be.
Neither of them measured the time.
The rain continued to fall and the bubbles continued to rise and the afternoon light continued to do what afternoon light did through fine water in the air, and none of it required their attention because the only thing requiring that attention was exactly what was getting it.
At some point the intensity found a level and stayed there, not climbing further, not settling back, the kind of place where something that could continue decides it doesn’t need to because what it has right now is already enough, and the enough it has now is worth more than the hypothetical more it might reach if it kept going.
When they finally separated, both their lips had the small irritation generated by people who had discovered what they didn’t know about something by doing it too much for the first time, without the instruction manual, with more enthusiasm than technique and with enough genuine willingness that the result was still what it was regardless.
Luna rested her head on Ren’s chest.
Her arms tightened around him.
Ren didn’t move. He let the moment keep being the moment, which was the right response and also the only one he had. freeweɓnøvel.com
♢♢♢♢
The bubbles were still rising when Luna asked.
"What are you going to do now that you know your limits?"
Ren opened his mouth.
"Don’t worry, I won’t rest until I finish repairing your mother’s crystal and..."
"I’m not asking about that." She interrupted and looked up slightly without moving her head from where it was. "I already told you it can be done slowly... I know you’ll do it." A pause. "I want to know about further ahead."
Ren thought about it.
"Cultivate... Up to the highest rank I know, high Platinum." His eyes found the bubbles rising beside them, the expression of someone who has been avoiding something and has decided to stop. "It seems like my..." he exhaled through his nose with something that had the texture of a laugh without quite being one. "All right. We can keep the name Mooshito."
Luna raised her head.
The expression on her face was the one she had when she had just heard something she had been waiting to hear for a while and the happiness of hearing it was slightly larger than her ability to conceal it.
"It seems that at that level he’s going to be freed from the situation I got him into," Ren continued. "Completely..."
"...I also want to look at the ruin where your father ended up. And your mother’s ruin too, when I can. And also finish what Dragarion started with the elemental rings, because I have a bad feeling that Selthia is working and growing to get to all of that first."
Luna nodded.
"I want to help you," she said. "With whatever you do."
"Thank you." He said it without the discomfort that kind of offer would have produced in him a short time ago. The word arrived clean. "But at least for today I’m not going to do any of that."
He healed her lips first.
Then went back to the kiss.
Because a teenager who has just discovered something like this was likely going to find it very difficult to stop.
♢♢♢♢
Luna arrived late to her room.
Her lips had been treated three times today, and she’d had them treated again on the way to her room. But they still held that lingering warmth that things have when the body decides it wants to remember them a little longer, regardless of whether the mind has finished processing what happened.
She opened the door.
Larissa and Liora pounced on her like they had been waiting for this exact moment, with the focus of wild beasts who had no other target available.
"Tell us everything," Liora said, without preamble, without the slightest pretense that there was any other way to start this conversation.
Larissa had the expression of someone who had already formulated the first question and was waiting for the right moment to blurt it out.
Luna looked at both of them.
There isn’t enough calm in the world to handle this.
But they deserve to know. Both of them deserve to know.
She sat on the bed.
And she began to talk.
♢♢♢♢
"Tell me everything," Min said. With the same energy as Liora and Larissa. With the same complete lack of preamble.
Ren stared at the ceiling.
Luna won’t be the only one questioned tonight.
He exhaled.
And began to talk.
