Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons novel Chapter 1017

1017 /1042

Chapter 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.