Chapter 21

The plane shuddered.

Dante, who had fallen into a light doze, woke from the faint impact rocking the aircraft cabin. Perhaps because he had been looking at the photo of that donut candle right before closing his eyes, he had dreamed vividly of the day he had given it to him.

Instead of properly reclining the seat, he had fallen asleep sitting uncomfortably with his arms tightly crossed, leaving his neck incredibly stiff. Feeling the hard tension knotted in his muscles, he stared blankly at the seatback monitor playing a film. His face, faintly reflected on the dark screen, didn’t look lively and youthful like it did in the memory. It just looked deeply, profoundly tired.

…I should try to go back to sleep. I want to go back to the past, back to where my sly little Rhys is.

The past version of Rhys he had just encountered in his dream had been truly lovely. Dante hadn’t realized it at the time because he had been living with his brain entirely switched off, but looking back now, twenty-five-year-old Rhys had made all his romantic moves painfully obvious.

Honestly. Modeling, his ass. Not once after that day had they actually gone to his art studio. Instead, the two of them had spent more than half a year locked in a delicate push-and-pull that wasn’t even a proper push-and-pull.

Dante had stubbornly believed he was only capable of dating women, but after meeting Rhys four times in a single month, he had reached a sudden enlightenment. Had he ever privately met up with a man this many times in such a short window? Never. Then what the hell was he doing right now? Wasn’t this dating? It was obviously dating. The sight of him meticulously slicking his hair back and picking out his nicest clothes just to go meet up with some male bastard looked like dating no matter how he sliced it.

Even after realizing he harbored genuine romantic feelings, he had absolutely no clue how to court a man, so they simply kept repeating the same safe routines. They met up regularly like clockwork and yet never even properly held hands.

Only after Dante, entirely unable to endure the suffocating frustration, finally asked Rhys to officially date him did they make any semblance of progress. Even then, hugging and holding hands were the absolute extent of it. If Dante hadn’t blurted out those stupid, impulsive words—let’s break up—who knew how late their first actual kiss would have been? Even though it was well in the past, imagining that alternate reality was horrifying.

Before they officially began dating, Dante had believed Rhys’s claim that he had no particular interest in dating anyone was just a polite, standard lie. He only realized through a romantic pace so agonizingly slow it nearly drove him insane that the man had been telling the absolute truth. Rhys was incredibly awkward at kissing, too. Even until very recently, after years had passed, Dante’s boyfriend—no, ex-boyfriend—had still kissed only gently, meekly.

How could a person remain that utterly inexperienced?

Still seated in his uncomfortable position, Dante sank into serious thought. Setting actual sex aside, they had kissed fairly often over the years. If two people stuck together for about four years, didn’t their skills naturally improve through sheer practice? And yet, Rhys had maintained the exact same tame method with truly astonishing, unwavering consistency.

For example, it always went down like this: when Dante grew heated and tried to push his tongue in deep, Rhys would instinctively retreat as if embarrassed. Then, after reluctantly tangling their tongues for a brief, fleeting moment, he would turn his head slightly as if signaling that was more than enough. If Dante gripped his jaw roughly and pulled him back in to kiss him again, Rhys would simply let Dante do as he pleased while effectively cooling the heated mood down.

Then, when Dante pulled back with a visibly dissatisfied expression, Rhys would stretch out his long arms, trap him in his embrace, and peck his lips. Peck, peck. As Dante accepted those soft, rubbing bird kisses, he would resignedly think that this was apparently the childish sort of affection Rhys preferred. With no other viable choice, Dante simply adjusted his tempo to match.

Yet, remembering the days when they kissed so lovingly made a deep ache of desire rise up in his chest. Even if the kisses were entirely well-behaved, doing it was still incomparably better than not doing it at all. Dante personally preferred rough, breathless sex after kisses that pushed so hard they entirely emptied a person’s soul, but even if that specific desire wasn’t fully satisfied, he could easily endure it. As long as he could feel Rhys’s distinct warmth and breath, everything in the world became instantly okay. Though it had been more than two months since he had been permitted to feel even that much.

“Haa…”

Dante let out a gloomy, heavy sigh, turned off the movie he hadn’t been watching anyway, and picked up the remote. Should he play a game? This was getting unbearable. There were still about four hours left in the long-haul flight, and Dante had nothing in particular he wanted to do. Business class offered excellent service and incredibly comfortable seats, just as he had always heard, but perhaps because his mental state was so depressed, he wasn’t nearly as excited as he had once expected to be.

…Though he had still eaten every single bite of the multi-course meal. He had even asked for extra bread and happily devoured the mid-flight snacks. He had ordered an elaborate cocktail for no real reason, and as for the wine list, he had downed four glasses of expensive champagne entirely on his own.

Even after all of that, time refused to pass. He had watched a movie and dozed off, yet now that he actively wanted to fall back asleep, his mind was perfectly, agonizingly clear. It seemed thinking about those kisses had woken his body right up.

To drive away the unsatisfied desire pooling in his gut, Dante rose from his seat. Perhaps they were passing through a zone of severe weather, because the plane shook intermittently with dull thuds, but the seatbelt sign hadn’t illuminated yet.

Did you know? If you buy an expensive premium seat, the airline gifts you a luxury travel kit from a high-end cosmetics brand. It contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, and premium mouthwash. There was a full skincare set, a wooden comb, earplugs, and even a heavy, silk-logoed eye mask. It was pure culture shock.

Wanting to splash some water on his face and snap out of his funk, Dante slid open the suite door, stepped out into the aisle, and headed toward the rear of the cabin. The lavatory on his side of the aisle was currently occupied, leaving him no choice but to cross over to the opposite side. Unlike cramped domestic airplane bathrooms, which felt ridiculously claustrophobic for a tall, heavily muscled man like Dante, the premium lavatory on an international flight offered a decent amount of space.

Dante quietly admired the expensive bathroom facilities he would probably never use again in his life, finishing up brushing his teeth and washing his face. Once he splashed his face with freezing cold water, his obscene, lingering thoughts finally began to recede. Now he could go back to his seat and focus on the logistical nightmare of how to convince Rhys to share a hotel room with him.

“Huh?”

Dante opened the door and stepped out, only to find Rhys standing right there, waiting his turn. When the passenger who had been next in line brushed past Dante and entered the vacant restroom, only Dante and Rhys remained standing in the narrow aisle beside the galley.

Unlike Dante, whose hair was slightly disheveled from his nap, Rhys looked as immaculately neat as he had when they first boarded. He regarded Dante with cool, indifferent eyes, then immediately turned on his heel to walk away. The moment Dante saw that cold rejection, he quickly reached out.

“Don’t go. I won’t talk to you. I’ll go right back to my seat, so just stay.”

Because he had lunged to grab him in such a frantic hurry, he ended up clamping down tightly around Rhys’s wrist. Rhys was the one being held, but Dante’s own left wrist throbbed with a dull ache. He looked down, realizing it was because of the brutal grip print Rhys had left on him earlier. The wrist Dante had expected to bruise was indeed heavily marked in shades of angry red and deep purple.

“You say that when you’re already talking to me…” Rhys frowned, starting to sharply shake off the grip, but he suddenly froze when his eyes landed on Dante’s exposed wrist peeking out beneath his sleeve. His gaze fixed entirely on the dark red marks left in the distinct shape of his own fingers.

So he does actually care about this? Sensing an opening he should absolutely exploit, Dante intentionally made his voice sound as pitiful as humanly possible.

“If you’re going to shake me off, at least be gentle. It hurts like absolute hell.”

Only after hearing Dante’s low voice did Rhys finally tear his gaze away from the injury. Pressing his pale lips tightly together with his brows drawn, he muttered quietly, “…Liar. You don’t even notice the injuries you bring back from the field.”

Just as Rhys said, Dante typically didn’t even realize he had minor bruises, cuts, or scrapes until Rhys point-blank touched them and he discovered them belatedly. Perhaps it was because he was so baseline healthy he could count the number of days he had been genuinely sick in his life on a single hand. Even when he was cut or heavily bruised, his cellular regeneration was freakishly faster than normal people. The sole reason he had been able to physically endure Rhys’s impressive lower half in bed was also due to the fact that his body was built like a brick wall.

“I think this hurts specifically because you’re the one who left it, Rhys,” Dante murmured. Still desperately craving Rhys’s attention, he sold his conscience down the river for a moment, actively pretending to be in pain.

“Ha… stop talking utter nonsense.”

As expected, Rhys didn’t fall for the trap. Perhaps he no longer even possessed the energy to get genuinely annoyed, because he wiped all remaining expression from his face, flatly dismissing his ex-lover’s complaint as a pathetic fabrication. But at the exact split second Rhys lifted his arm to violently shake off Dante’s hand, the plane happened to violently lurch. Unlike the minor bumps from before, this turbulence hit with a heavy, rattling shudder.

The overhead seatbelt sign instantly chimed to life. Dante staggered wildly, his center of gravity completely thrown off. He didn’t even have a fraction of a second to reach out and grab the nearby galley wall.

Ah, damn. I’m going down. If I fall wrong here, I’m going to crack my head wide open on an edge. The thoughts flashed through his brain with a strange, detached clarity, as if it were happening to someone else entirely.

Just as Dante was about to fall backward onto the hard floor, Rhys caught him.

Balancing his entire weight with one powerful hand braced firmly against the aircraft wall, Rhys snatched Dante around the waist with his other arm, violently pulling him flush against his body. In the blink of an eye, Dante found himself completely enveloped in Rhys’s arms, his hands reflexively gripping both of Rhys’s broad shoulders. Contrary to his grim expectation that he would fall helplessly, he didn’t crack the back of his head against a sharp corner. Instead, he ended up pressed entirely close against Rhys.

From the strong arms holding him captive came a mingled scent of clean, faint detergent and fresh flowers. Directly before his eyes was Rhys’s white, firm throat, the elegant veins standing out slightly from the physical exertion. Maybe it was because it had been so agonizingly long since he had been this physically close to Rhys, but he felt an intense wave of nervousness. Damn it, the absolute truth was, he felt incredibly, devastatingly nervous. What the hell was wrong with him?

They had rolled around entirely naked together for years, so could his body really react like this just because they had gone a mere two months without seeing each other? Dante consciously tried to relax his rigid muscles, slowly lifting his head. As his gaze traveled upward, Rhys’s clean, sharp jawline came into view, and then his eyes inevitably landed directly on Rhys’s lips.

The moment he saw those pink lips, which looked somehow redder than usual, the impure, intimate scene he had been imagining back in his pod flashed vividly through his mind. Rhys’s own signature kind of kiss, where he rubbed their lips together softly like a innocent children’s game.

Even though he had recalled the memory perfectly fine on his own, having that exact thought while actively pressed against Rhys made a massive wave of useless embarrassment surge up in his chest. Dante panicked entirely internally, hurriedly darting his eyes away. A fleeting thought flickered through him that he should seize this golden moment of sudden closeness and aggressively push forward, but his physical body remained utterly locked up. He felt with absolute certainty that if he met Rhys’s dark eyes right now, something dangerous would happen.

Slowly loosening his desperate grip on Rhys’s shoulders, he murmured, “Thanks for catching me. I nearly took a nasty fall.”