To My First Love, With Regret - 78

Damn it, this is pointless.

Why had he forced Eve to lie face-down on the table?

Was it to dominate her? Or to degrade the chaste Princess into a bitch? Or was it simply for the physical ease of the act?

If Eve were to ask, he might spit out any one of those excuses. But he would never speak the truth, even if a blade were at his throat:

I simply don’t have the courage to look into her face while we do this.

He feared that in the face of a woman uninhibitedly enjoying a pleasure devoid of love, he alone would be the one forced to confront their shared past.

It would be a desecration of pure memories. But then again, since it was never truly love, the memories were fake anyway—meaning Ethan was the only one being desecrated.

Traitorous bitch.

While his heart screamed, mangled by this humiliation, his foolish body was falling—without a shred of pride—into the familiar abyss of pleasure.

—Ha….

Suddenly, Ethan found this ‘familiarity’ absurd. Familiarity should be a habit woven into the body over a long period, like breathing. The illusion from ten years ago, which had lasted a mere month, had no right to be called familiar.

Ethan felt insufferably pathetic for having spent a decade obsessively chewing over that fleeting mirage. If he could just cut out this mass of foolish instinct—this part of him that remembered a scar as pleasure—could he finally be free from the pain?

It was impossible unless he gouged out his heart as well. Even his mind, in its stubborn stupidity, was becoming intoxicated by the pleasure and drifting back toward the past. In the face of this violent rebellion between body and soul, his reason collapsed, helpless.

He had believed that Evelyn Sherwood would be his only enemy in tonight’s battle, but it was a pathetic delusion. The memories he had clung to for ten years were, in fact, Ethan Fairchild’s most lethal foe.

To charge into a battlefield harboring the enemy within—could there be a more foolish soldier?

In the end, the one who hurled Ethan into the depths was not Eve, but himself.

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Eve was no different. In this affair of hatred, where the residual heat of a devotion she thought extinguished came crashing back, she was falling into the same abyss named pleasure.

Love-less pleasure. She had finally discovered the reality of that taboo she had never understood until now.

When Ethan had first forced her down onto the table, Eve had felt almost grateful, as if she had met a savior. While she lowered her own underwear for a man who saw her as nothing more than a tool for gratification, her pride had been distorted to its limit, and for a moment, fury had nearly overtaken her cold reason. Because of that, she had kept asking herself:

Can I really stop myself from kicking this man between his legs?

Eve was neither a woman without pride nor a saint. A beast in heat, crawling back to the woman who had coldly discarded him—even seeing that, she wasn’t sure she could stop herself from strangling him in a fit of rage.

But the moment Ethan thrust into her from behind, she realized how shortsighted she had been to feel relieved at not having to see his face.

There was no way tonight’s act was love. But had she hoped it would at least look like a mutual tryst on the surface? No, even that was undesirable. A mechanical act for their respective selfish goals was the best-case scenario.

Eve had been certain that no matter what scenario took the stage, she would be the actor, not the prop. But that, too, was a delusion.

—Mph, hng, mmph!

Pinned by the man, blocked from both front and back, she was no longer a dignified human being. Right now, Eve was nothing more than a vent for desire, receiving Ethan Fairchild’s one-sided lust.

He no longer suppressed his nineteen-year-old racing passion to gently soothe her body. He no longer whispered love to set her heart ablaze.

—Damn it….

Throughout the act, the only things that came out of his mouth were low, vulgar curses poured out like a non-stop bombardment, and the names of the men he held a grudge against.

—Mmph!

—Ah, goddamn it….

This violent motion, pushing against the heavy table as if to break it, wasn’t even lust, let alone love for Eve.

—That fucking freak… Ha, goddamn it….

It was nothing more than a competitive instinct aimed at another man. A maddened beast spurring his hips to defeat another male.

The man was alone with her, yet he was not with her.

Ethan Fairchild was only having an affair with his own ‘hatred.’

Suddenly, Eve felt a profound sense of loneliness. And immediately after, she flushed crimson as she realized how absurd that loneliness was.

…Evelyn Sherwood, what do you want right now?

A relationship of the body without the heart was what both sides had agreed upon. Yet Eve was feeling angry at the man who was simply carrying out the transaction exactly as promised.

Simply because his heart wasn’t with her.

Without realizing it, I was chasing the very thing that shouldn’t exist in this pleasure: love.

That man is not my first love!

In truth, a ‘pure first love’ had never even existed from the start. If so, why was this sensation—which ought to be nothing but a hollow fake—so agonizingly vivid?

—Mmph, nngghh!

—Ha, you like that?

The moment Eve’s body betrayed her will and buckled, Ethan’s low laughter pierced her ear. It was undoubtedly a sneer. He must find it hilarious that Eve, despite his movements being nothing but brutal compared to the past, was feeling the exact same pleasure as before.

Fury welled up in her wide-eyed gaze, but Eve refused to let a single tear fall, swallowing them back with venomous resolve. She couldn’t let the shameless hand currently gagging her get wet. She refused to be even more of a laughingstock by letting him know she was crying.

Evelyn Sherwood, you’re already pathetic. No, you’re hideous.

To be gasping for air, mistaking this humiliation beneath the man who discarded her for pleasure. She wanted to stop this mad self-mutilation, to stop before she crossed the irreversible line of self-loathing by reaching a climax.

Get a grip. You can’t stop. Not until he’s finished.

Eve berated herself as she tried to flee from the ‘bottom’ that was slowly approaching in the form of ecstasy.

Endure it. This isn’t a fall from grace. It’s a sacrifice.

She couldn’t bring herself to lie and call it ‘noble,’ not even to herself. This was a hideous sacrifice.

Eve had never conceived a child out of pure love. Her dark womb had always harbored cold, heartless calculations to use the child first. The first time was to secure the family; the second was to protect the future of the child born from that mess. Her womb had always been a tool.

With a history like that, did you really expect to keep your human dignity, Evelyn Sherwood?

The one who had stripped Eve of her dignity wasn’t Ethan Fairchild; it was herself.

Thus, even the word ‘sacrifice’ became a pitiful, loathsome self-defense. Sacrifice? Taking a man’s seed in exchange for sexual satisfaction is a transaction. And that was the very definition of prostitution.

—Ngh, don’t hold back….

Ethan squeezed the words out through grit teeth, finishing with a struggle.

—Come.

I don’t want to ‘come.’ Just hurry up and finish, you bastard.

Shaking her head in resistance, Eve suddenly had a realization. Fine, if I’m a woman selling my body, then I should use it. Reaching a resolve that felt like a cold awakening, Eve bit her lip hard.

Simultaneously, she used the swollen lips between her thighs to clamp down with all her might on the mercilessly thick penis. The man, who had been thrusting with a steady rhythm from behind, flinched—his hips coming to a dead stop.

Don’t stop. Just give me your seed already.

Eve gripped the man’s member with her internal walls as if she were a maid wringing water from a wet towel. The moment she tilted her hips to take over the movement herself, Ethan let out a single, sharp groan like a man who had suddenly snapped.

—Ah…!

Is it over?

—Ha, this hasn’t changed either… damn it….

Disappointingly, it wasn’t. The man, who until now had focused only on blocking her every exit, suddenly pulled Eve into a crushing embrace and began to shake his hips in what could only be described as a seizure.

—Haah….

—Hnggh, mmph!

—Eve, ah, damn it, why are you really like this….

This might actually be a seizure of some sort. The mechanical rules her body had forced itself to learn tonight vanished the moment he reclaimed his raw lust. There was no way to prepare for a rhythm that had lost all control; Eve could only be swept away, convulsing helplessly along with him.

—Ah, aah!

—This is why, ngh, I need the music.

If she tried to lift her upper body by bracing her hands on the table, Ethan would crush her back down. If she tried to support her lower body with her feet, his battering ram would slam into her gates and bring the whole structure crumbling down.

How could she possibly move for someone else’s satisfaction when she couldn’t even support her own weight? By this point, Eve was struggling just to passively accept the weapon entering and exiting her, yet Ethan was under the delusion that she was still actively squeezing and sucking him in.

—Damn it, are you trying to pull my cock right off? I’m going to be inside you so much you won’t have time to feel empty, so why try to take it with you? Huh? If you do that, you won’t have a reason to come looking for me…. Ha….

He babbled vulgarities while lewdly sucking on her earlobe—an act she hadn’t permitted. Yet, why did those words make her think of the old, whispered endearments in her memory, things that weren’t similar in the slightest?