( she could have and might have opened them for him—much as she had, or had suggested in milder form, upon his lap on the road down from hightown—but she enjoys the wait, and the briskness of his hands setting to it, and the sharp bite of his teeth that has the foot she was adjusting beside him suddenly a heel dug into his back and her hips rising, which is like making her jump. the angle of it opens her to him, her knee over his shoulder, and feels more like meeting him in kind than simply spreading her thighs and casting a wrist up to her forehead.
her hand finds the headboard behind her, instead, pulling the line of her taut and giving her something against which to brace. the contrast of his beard scraping against soft, wet flesh and the soft, wet heat out of his mouth is something she would find difficult to describe later—her vocabulary feels clumsy for it, and in bed she has a habit of directness.
directly, then, a hint of impatience that she has tamped down since that carriage ride: )
Put your fingers inside me.
( his wandering hands had been of great interest to her, at her garter and nestled at the top of her thigh. )
[Maybe next time, he will refuse her the first time she tells him - until she either asks or demands while he grins somewhere high against her thigh. But he can think of no reason not to follow an order tonight. The taste of her is so full on his tongue, and they are meant to be playing a game where he is hers.
So he sets one hand to feel the rise of her hip and applies himself at her direction, two fingers through all her wet heat before pushing relentlessly into her. His growl of satisfaction against her open cunt is a low, thick sound.]
( the push of his fingers is the curve of her back, the rise of her ribs as she breathes in deeply, blinking away momentary impulse to give that growl surrender. her toes curl, knees rising high either side of him and then falling open and not crowding his shoulders any longer, one foot churning bedding and the other still pressed against his skin, feeling muscle shift beneath her.
his beard prickles where the silk skin of her inner thighs meets the high curve of her backside and the obscene wetness of her renders his rough fingers a heady friction, different to the callused drag on her skin elsewhere. she is cataloging sensations, and straining in the midst of them, exhaling that deep breath she hadn't noticed holding explosively.
she feels delicate—fine-boned, breakable, malleable under stronger hands—but she does not move as if she is, no tremor of awareness, only her fine, ink-stained fingers curling around the back of his neck and pressing her nails in as if aggravated to find no hair she can pull. )
[He doesn't treat her like she is delicate, like she is her small waist and slim thighs and her golden hair in its lovely twisting curtain spread across the bed. Because if she had looked at him, his examination is felt - the sharp sound of her breath hanging in the air like something he could touch were his hands not occupied, the curving line of her body, and the set of her heel as encouraging as the dig of her fingernails -, and all of it seems sweet in his ready mouth as he sinks his fingers fully into her.
Slowly at first. Just to feel how her body opens to him while he hums against her. But then, with a last lathe of his tongue, he draws back to set his rough cheek (her slick in his beard) against her thigh and to shift his weight so he can begin to drive into her properly - so he can see how she takes his fingers, and raise his eyes to watch when he grows more rough with her.
If she wants his hands, she can have them. He can think of less pleasant ways to occupy them.]
( when he looks up to her, she does not look fragile. a sheen of sweat focuses her sharply in the light, an only slightly duller gleam than the shine of her wet on his beard; her fingers busy, too, the hand that is not cupped around the nape of his neck cupped instead sliding up and down the the side of her abdomen, beneath her breast and higher to roll between thumb and forefinger the nipple pebbled in the cooler air away from the heat of him between her thighs. restless, insistent touches in pursuit of the same thing he is driving her towards, tense either side of and all around him.
and she is watching him, too, eyes lidded but not given to forgetting where she is or with whom. that it is him, particularly, sprawled in his own bed between her legs and who will remember when he is holding a pen above some requisition of hers to be signed or not the way her cunt felt tightening around the same fingers. it seems fair when she has imagined them there, watching him sign his name and considering what it might be, to have the whole of his attention for a time.
she holds his eyes until she can't, her head tipping backwards suddenly and her breath coming in pants that heave with all the promise of the tightly laced bodices she taps her quill pen against, some afternoons, deep in thought. )
[He pushes her through it, the persistent work of his hand not quite it time to the jerk of her breathing and how she tightens around him, but leading it as his teeth briefly find her skin again to feel how she shudders under his mouth, and between his hands, and everywhere. It's only after the sharpest edge of that has been knocked free that he slows - pressing all the way into her and grinding absently (pointedly) with the heel of his hand where she is so wet. Next time, they keep saying as if it's some foregone conclusion and not just a phrase for preliminary negotiation, and all of this the pieces to bargain with.
(Will she have won something if next time is during what are ostensibly his office hours? Likely.)
Sliding his fingers free of her, Flint presses a warm kiss over the tender place he'd applied his teeth before working upright to kneel between the appealing splay of her legs. His hand occupied previously by the small of her back rises to scrub down over the bristle of beard, the other leaving damp finger prints at the outside of her thigh.
His breathing is thick. He can hear it.]
It occurs to me, [running his tongue behind his lip and against the roof of his mouth; setting his hand low on her abdomen, and regarding first the width of his hand there and then her habit of attention,] that you might have notes.
( by next time, very likely literal ones—albeit more obliquely written than those julius had stumbled across. the warm, languid look she regards him with now is a different thing entirely to the prim, pleasant and precise smiles she employs readily most days; a glimpse behind the curtain, at the sort of mind that takes notes, even now, even here. some self-satisfaction, and some straight-forward affection, buoyed by the fuzzy-around-the-edges feeling post-climax and enjoying the rebuilding anticipation of him knelt there.
the weight of his hands, the line of his shoulders. the shadow he casts, and how warm he feels between her legs. )
Are you in want, ( a lower, lazier voice than she has ever elsewhere used in his hearing, ) of a performance review, Commander Flint?
( if she uses his title like that anywhere else, they're in real trouble. she considers and discards several things that she might say, visibly, and instead: ) Tell me what you want.
( not that it isn't, in broad strokes, fucking obvious. )
[For what should be such an obvious answer, his subsequent study of her is blatant and fixed, thumb scuffing a slow methodical circle beneath her navel. It's genuine consideration in the face of impatience and the droning want humming under skin, the apparent picking up and putting down of compulsive responses even as a muscle in his thigh twitches against her in reply to the low sway of her voice.
(He's been told to say what he wants before, and has formed the habit of treating it as a real question, like a real thing.)]
I want you over me. [His hand sliding the length of her thigh, honing in compulsively on that arrangement of fingerprint bruises. The grin blooming crookedly at the corner of his mouth is as heated and firm as his fingers, not impulsive but hungry. He tugs her closer by his grip on her.] I want to see how you like to move, Madame.
( as much as she might have enjoyed the obvious answers—impatience given voice—she enjoys, too, this momentary slowing, drawn out like candle-wax sliding down over itself. (she might see that, were she to turn her head. she does not.) she means the question to have an answer, and the warm look becomes a smile as if he has—not cleverly passed some test, but perhaps demonstrated something she might have looked for without necessarily expecting.
muscle memory runs a shiver through her where his fingers slide and press, and she lets her knee rise a little in his hand before she pushes up onto her elbows, and then onto her knees, swinging her feet beneath her and rising sinuous into his space in a way that she would struggle to do anywhere else. )
Then,
( with a push—a firm one, not a tease, and she presumes under the circumstances he isn't going to thwart her even if he could—to his shoulder, her knee swinging over his thigh and the movement graceful the way something practised is, )
let me show you.
( sweat curls her hair around her face, and the rest of it tumbles down her back above him, a mess; her knees find the bedding either side of him and she flattens her hand on his stomach, considering her new vantage point with her head tilted, a mirror of the way he had studied her moments before. that hand slides lower, wrapping around his cock—the lazy stroke of her fingers in the process less purposeful than it is hello, again, I was beginning to miss you friendly—and holding him in place to guide herself down, her feet hooked backwards over his calves both to brace herself and to hold him beneath her where she likes him.
it is a slow, wet slide and then a more experimental series of incremental shifts as she finds the angle that she wants, just so. there is a moment with her hand in her hair and his cock in her cunt and some muffled sound hissing out through her teeth that it doesn't seem so terribly outlandish someone might have looked at her and thought she might look well upon a throne. )
[The draw of his breathing comes thick beneath her, his hands having immediately found their way to settle at her hip and thigh. Not that he needs the additional points of contact to feel the way she settles around him - the clutching little cant of her frame as she rearranges by degrees. She is low, liquid heat, the glow of the rift shard casting a strange shifting light in the wild patterns of her golden hair.
And if he was sturdy before, Flint is heavy now under her: a shifting plane of weight in the slow irregular adjustment of his hip and how it travels the length of him, the twist of his heel in the bed's linens bucking his calf against her foot. Not the kind of man to be swayed by the tip of a head, no. But maybe the kind who can't help himself when it comes to the studied way she takes him. There is something in all her sure intention that draws eye even when it's the heat and press of her body that should be the thing winding him into her by degrees. It's her all sharp and aware that has him twitching into her stark heat and prompts the slide of his hand - touching first where they meet, then the rough pad of his thumb to her clit.
( her inhale when his thumb presses is loud in a quiet room, the lazy sway of her above him accommodating first for the shift of his hip and then the press of his thumb and her toes hooked beneath his legs brace her to what seems at first no particular end. she takes her time to acquaint herself with the way that he feels inside and beneath her—catalogs every incremental shift of his body like tectonic plates. she knows to be messy, risky want what feels in the moment so deliberate as to be the only logical outcome.
she decides not to regret it, later, in the same moment that she rises up and rocks back down, rough and without warning and with her hand splayed over his to keep his thumb where she wants it in the process. )
[He doesn't have any clear expectation; he hasn't for hours, but certainly not for this - how she rises and falls, the set of her hand, the particular rhythm she sets. So it's not surprising how she takes him - the forceful, specific line of her body -, but it does light some satisfied spark, striking against that low impulse he'd felt at the first sight of her on her back: the urge to drag her to him by a hand at her slim waist, to fuck roughly into her and feel how she gives. Maybe the low sound he makes says something close to that effect, or maybe his thumb stroking under the brace of her hand or the dig of his fingers at her thigh do. With the first driving stroke of her, he goes all narrow and dark. Focus keen like a sharp point.
Pressing up to meet her is a question of degrees. But his hands on her are very sure, encouraging the pace.]
( the way that she's anchored herself against him provides leverage for the way that she moves, though less than if she were moving faster; taut lines of tension in her thighs where she takes him into her rough but not as quick as she might, the hand that doesn't wander up the line of her own body pressed to his hip just beneath her thigh. steadying. habitual; the gesture of someone who has bounced a little too hard and come off entirely a time or two before, and as much as he doesn't strike her as someone she couldn't laugh with in bed she is not, presently, interested in minor, amusing catastrophe.
she's interested in the look in his eyes as she catches glimpses of it through her own bouncing hair; the way all of his bare, freckled skin looks laid out underneath her in candle-glow. that she may have a new set of bruises to counterpoint the first, that the sound he makes feels like it's reverberating through her much as the stroke of his thumb. he makes that sound and she determines she will have it from him again, that pleasure is something she might secure with a hook and drag out of him forcefully—
her hair falls down her back as she tips her head, the harsh exhalation something like a sigh or some might-have-been a word, and it is a tangible thing when she lets go of whatever terrible sexual scheme is forming in her head to fuck herself faster and harder against that perfect angle he is pushing into her. her fingers clutch reflexively at his hip, and every gasp inches closer to something that might be petrana crying out above him. )
[His hand follows her through it, the stroke of his thumb increasingly insistent with every sound she makes. The shape of her breathing coming sharper coils tight in him, clutching as effectively as her body does. She has all those practiced points by which she secures herself and finds her leverage and her pleasure. There are other people she fucks like this, he thinks with a short panting groan. His hand at her thigh is its own point of leverage for driving her down to him. All the marks he wants to leave on her are just to communicate this want outside this bed, to whomever else is looking.]
Fuck, [in Trade, then cursing a bluer streak in Tevene. Half the heady satisfaction is just making noise under her, and the other is knowing she will understand what he means when he growls out a small litany in time with the course of her over him.
In the Imperium, Tevene speaks to power. It's good for being under a woman and telling her how he's going to have her after this, a heated promise breathed out in time to the stroke of his thumb about how if she comes before he does then he'll roll her over and fuck her into the mattress next. He can't remember the last time he had any reason to speak so much of it.]
( it isn't that he talks her to orgasm—she is doing a great deal of that work herself, and vigorously, and much of her attention has narrowed to the fine point of his thumb on her clit and the rhythmic way she tightens around him. the counterpoint of how deliberately he touches her there and the grasp of his free hand on her thigh, and the angle that she's rocking down onto him at, and how wet she's been since she took him in her mouth.
it's just that it's not not that, either. it's not just the content, but it's not not that. the low growl of it, that she understands him—that she understands him from hours of poring tirelessly over work she is certain began almost entirely as his inclination to humor her—that he has perhaps taken the victory from her if they don't make it all the way through his office hours without indecency, the way he shapes these words ringing in her ears.
it is entirely due to him that she can answer, with just one word: )
If,
( and then almost immediately undermines herself by falling forward and biting down on his shoulder as she clenches tightly around him and comes apart. )
[There's a thrill in it - how she goes she goes so taut around him, and the sting of her teeth, and the length of her body and where his hand is still trapped between them. It goes without saying that he breathes hard into the tangle of her pale hair and that his hand at her thigh holds her cinched in tight against him as she unravels. What is less given is the punch of self-satisfaction, felt hot between his ribs. Or how he finds he grins against her, somewhere between a low laugh and a warm growl in her ear before setting his teeth there.
There is a specific pleasure to saying something and watching it become real in his hands. Who doesn't find some reward in getting what they want? It's only monstrous if he isn't true to his word. And once she's taken her first breaths - whatever form they take - and her teeth have lost some of their edge, he endeavors to make good on his promises: guiding her over with an enthusiastic hip and hand, all that sturdy weight of him gone from willing foundation to eager flexing muscle.
If the rearrangment is less than smoothly choreographed, then who fucking cares. It doesn't feel awkward or fumbling in the moment. It doesn't seem like much of an interval between her flush over him and the reverse, his fingers tangling in her hair as he resumes her ready pace.]
( the space between panting on top of him and her back pressed into the mattress (half of it warm underneath her where he had been and half cool, tangled bedding) feels briefly weightless, and the moan he knocks out of her is mingled with something that resembles laughter. her hands splay on his back, sliding down as if she can pull him deeper into her; a knee hitched over his hip, a heel dug into the bed beneath to brace her against him.
commander flint is very direct, she hears herself saying primly, elsewhere, or some words to that effect: a man of his word.
that's probably why she's giggling into his shoulder, slick from an orgasm still contracting around him. this is stupid. they're being stupid. she wants to know, badly, what he looks like when he comes; she wants to see the shape of the smile that he keeps pressing into her skin. )
[What's stupid is how quickly this becomes unfocused, ceding into grasping hands and the press of her knee and how roughly he drives into the twitching heat at unorganized counterpoint with all her bright and breathless laughter, and how he grins gasping against her. They aren't senselessly young and eager for a quick hard fuck anymore than he is the devoted pirate captain on the rifter witch's leash they'd played at in Hightown, but it's a good story. It's a sly joke, worth all her hairpins arranged on his bedside table, and his shirt lost under the bed, and all the time its taken to tell it.
So:]
What's so funny? [A warm, demanding murmur at her cheek like he doesn't know. Like he's going to give her any opportunity to answer before kissing her.]
(you, she can't say into his mouth, i am—it isn't so urgent that she absolutely must, but he can feel the way she's still smiling against his mouth, the musical, lilting tone of the not-words that don't quite become anything between their lips. it might be a mess but it isn't, yet, it feels more like who she was and who she is meeting in the middle to agree firmly on something, finally.
the kiss is messy, is more kisses, is a lovely, warm contrast to the way she sets her hips against his and slides her hand down between them—not to touch herself but to wrap her fingers tight around the base of his cock shoving into her and press, insistent, determined pressure. )
We are, ( she says, eventually, into his shoulder. )Dieu.
( she thinks she might make it a third time before he finishes; she isn't certain, isn't hurried. it isn't as if she won't be well-satisfied regardless. )
[Her hand is rewarded with an arrhythmic jerk and a sharp sound presses into her skin that becomes first a groan, then an inhale like a laugh. And when he presses into her again, he is just as rough but finds himself lingering there fully in the sweet heat of her cunt and the firm grip of her fingers. Grinding against her hand and into her and relieved somehow by the shape his pleasure in her takes there.
It's been a long time since he laughed midfuck, and the thought - occurring to him distantly like something untouchable - should make his appetite for this go lopsided, but doesn't. She is warm and her breath is high and lovely and he is tired and wants so much to be exhausted for no better reason than enthusiastic screwing in the dark. When next he draws from her, he leaves her almost completely before driving back into the core of her heat. It is slower and sturdier and more full and doesn't require his hand on her hip so he can insinuate both arms under her. To press his hands between tousled bed clothes and the planes of her shoulders and use every part of both of them as his leverage.
He kisses her again. It's a better one this time.]
( the heat and weight of him is welcome, that warm space in between them where a laugh was filled instead with the press of her breasts to his chest and the way that his slower, more methodical pace draws sighs out of her that she hadn't expected. she likes the taste of him, the way his hip bones feel between her thighs, and that she can already feel this will wring one more little death out of her whether she'd entirely intended it to or not. the way what they were doing a moment before probably wouldn't have, and that it's—
that isn't the part that makes it better, exactly.
she drags her mouth to his ear when it's her own again, )
I want to see you come, James, ( quiet the way that intimate things are, the sound of what it feels like when she looks at him. )
[It turns something over in him - not the sound of his name in her mouth specifically, but the shape of it breathed against his ear. The sound he makes low against her neck in reply is the gentlest (and most stupid because it is honest) thing he's done for her all evening, for the entire length of their association. His hands flex around her. It's a testament to how close he actually is that he doesn't linger there for long before drawing back to his elbows, far enough to look at her and for her to see him there in the poor glow of the candlelight. It's proof how much he'd rather not be finished with her that he manages to push a few more steady, full strokes into her while studying the supple curve of her mouth and how shockingly dark her blue eyes seem viewed in the fits and starts between the press of his hip.
When he spills suddenly into her, it isn't because she asked him to. But it is what keeps him from burying his face into the tangle of her gold hair, what drives the low noise from him, what keeps him moving until he can't bear to retreat from being buried in her.]
( she's a breath behind him, a slower, softer thing than how she'd arched under his mouth or writhed on top of him; tightening involuntarily and dragging out the remnants of his end, holding his gaze with her eyes huge and her lips parted, her hand finally drawn from between the two of them so she can skid her fingers restlessly up and down his arms, incongruous with the purposeful way she's touched him.
one elbow braces behind her and she pushes up, curls her fingers around the back of his neck and kisses him like conversation. like an answer to something, or a conclusive argument. or just: how good it feels to do so, how hard she's breathing, how close it is to being altogether too much. )
[She smells like sweat and lilac water and their sex and tastes like he feels: drawn in and satisfied by it, the heated tangle of him over and inside her and her under and about him and both of them all alternating points of sharpening and smoothing, urgent and undoing. His hands curl at her sides, knuckles to her ribs, and he breathes hard into her until the distinct lines of them begin to reassemble.
Instead of shifting off her then, twisting out of the sticky heat of their closeness, Flint slides his arms back around her and settles with a pleased chuckle.]
( it's a deep breath that she takes—breathing them both in, all the taut lines of her going lax to fit against the firmness of him. cosy, how she nestles in when he wraps his arms around her, catching her breath slower than she relaxes, aware of without being in a great hurry to deal with slowly drying sweat and slick and semen.
(witherstalk, yes, but one thing leads to another and she's very busy and she hasn't always been methodical about it, but in nearly two years there's never been the hint of a happy accident and she could speak to a healer but she doesn't need to be sure, not yet. she is not concerned about the possible consequences of careless coupling, but there is a part of her that still needs to be not sure.)
being held by him is—comfortable. easy, like all of this even since he took her gloves from her has been easy, like none of what came before that was. the intimacy of it; not the sex but the chuckle. it's that that she finds herself fascinated by, for all that there is very little question—in her mind, at least—of this being a one-off. probably it should be. probably it shouldn't have happened at all. it pleases her that it did, and that she feels...
welcome. yes. that's the (difference) word.
she presses a kiss to his shoulder. )
I hope, ( a low, rolling amusement, ) that you were not expecting me to move in a great hurry.
( she is not completely convinced her knees will cooperate. )
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her hand finds the headboard behind her, instead, pulling the line of her taut and giving her something against which to brace. the contrast of his beard scraping against soft, wet flesh and the soft, wet heat out of his mouth is something she would find difficult to describe later—her vocabulary feels clumsy for it, and in bed she has a habit of directness.
directly, then, a hint of impatience that she has tamped down since that carriage ride: )
Put your fingers inside me.
( his wandering hands had been of great interest to her, at her garter and nestled at the top of her thigh. )
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So he sets one hand to feel the rise of her hip and applies himself at her direction, two fingers through all her wet heat before pushing relentlessly into her. His growl of satisfaction against her open cunt is a low, thick sound.]
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his beard prickles where the silk skin of her inner thighs meets the high curve of her backside and the obscene wetness of her renders his rough fingers a heady friction, different to the callused drag on her skin elsewhere. she is cataloging sensations, and straining in the midst of them, exhaling that deep breath she hadn't noticed holding explosively.
she feels delicate—fine-boned, breakable, malleable under stronger hands—but she does not move as if she is, no tremor of awareness, only her fine, ink-stained fingers curling around the back of his neck and pressing her nails in as if aggravated to find no hair she can pull. )
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Slowly at first. Just to feel how her body opens to him while he hums against her. But then, with a last lathe of his tongue, he draws back to set his rough cheek (her slick in his beard) against her thigh and to shift his weight so he can begin to drive into her properly - so he can see how she takes his fingers, and raise his eyes to watch when he grows more rough with her.
If she wants his hands, she can have them. He can think of less pleasant ways to occupy them.]
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and she is watching him, too, eyes lidded but not given to forgetting where she is or with whom. that it is him, particularly, sprawled in his own bed between her legs and who will remember when he is holding a pen above some requisition of hers to be signed or not the way her cunt felt tightening around the same fingers. it seems fair when she has imagined them there, watching him sign his name and considering what it might be, to have the whole of his attention for a time.
she holds his eyes until she can't, her head tipping backwards suddenly and her breath coming in pants that heave with all the promise of the tightly laced bodices she taps her quill pen against, some afternoons, deep in thought. )
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(Will she have won something if next time is during what are ostensibly his office hours? Likely.)
Sliding his fingers free of her, Flint presses a warm kiss over the tender place he'd applied his teeth before working upright to kneel between the appealing splay of her legs. His hand occupied previously by the small of her back rises to scrub down over the bristle of beard, the other leaving damp finger prints at the outside of her thigh.
His breathing is thick. He can hear it.]
It occurs to me, [running his tongue behind his lip and against the roof of his mouth; setting his hand low on her abdomen, and regarding first the width of his hand there and then her habit of attention,] that you might have notes.
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the weight of his hands, the line of his shoulders. the shadow he casts, and how warm he feels between her legs. )
Are you in want, ( a lower, lazier voice than she has ever elsewhere used in his hearing, ) of a performance review, Commander Flint?
( if she uses his title like that anywhere else, they're in real trouble. she considers and discards several things that she might say, visibly, and instead: ) Tell me what you want.
( not that it isn't, in broad strokes, fucking obvious. )
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(He's been told to say what he wants before, and has formed the habit of treating it as a real question, like a real thing.)]
I want you over me. [His hand sliding the length of her thigh, honing in compulsively on that arrangement of fingerprint bruises. The grin blooming crookedly at the corner of his mouth is as heated and firm as his fingers, not impulsive but hungry. He tugs her closer by his grip on her.] I want to see how you like to move, Madame.
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muscle memory runs a shiver through her where his fingers slide and press, and she lets her knee rise a little in his hand before she pushes up onto her elbows, and then onto her knees, swinging her feet beneath her and rising sinuous into his space in a way that she would struggle to do anywhere else. )
Then,
( with a push—a firm one, not a tease, and she presumes under the circumstances he isn't going to thwart her even if he could—to his shoulder, her knee swinging over his thigh and the movement graceful the way something practised is, )
let me show you.
( sweat curls her hair around her face, and the rest of it tumbles down her back above him, a mess; her knees find the bedding either side of him and she flattens her hand on his stomach, considering her new vantage point with her head tilted, a mirror of the way he had studied her moments before. that hand slides lower, wrapping around his cock—the lazy stroke of her fingers in the process less purposeful than it is hello, again, I was beginning to miss you friendly—and holding him in place to guide herself down, her feet hooked backwards over his calves both to brace herself and to hold him beneath her where she likes him.
it is a slow, wet slide and then a more experimental series of incremental shifts as she finds the angle that she wants, just so. there is a moment with her hand in her hair and his cock in her cunt and some muffled sound hissing out through her teeth that it doesn't seem so terribly outlandish someone might have looked at her and thought she might look well upon a throne. )
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And if he was sturdy before, Flint is heavy now under her: a shifting plane of weight in the slow irregular adjustment of his hip and how it travels the length of him, the twist of his heel in the bed's linens bucking his calf against her foot. Not the kind of man to be swayed by the tip of a head, no. But maybe the kind who can't help himself when it comes to the studied way she takes him. There is something in all her sure intention that draws eye even when it's the heat and press of her body that should be the thing winding him into her by degrees. It's her all sharp and aware that has him twitching into her stark heat and prompts the slide of his hand - touching first where they meet, then the rough pad of his thumb to her clit.
She has his attention, drawn in slow circles.]
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she decides not to regret it, later, in the same moment that she rises up and rocks back down, rough and without warning and with her hand splayed over his to keep his thumb where she wants it in the process. )
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Pressing up to meet her is a question of degrees. But his hands on her are very sure, encouraging the pace.]
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she's interested in the look in his eyes as she catches glimpses of it through her own bouncing hair; the way all of his bare, freckled skin looks laid out underneath her in candle-glow. that she may have a new set of bruises to counterpoint the first, that the sound he makes feels like it's reverberating through her much as the stroke of his thumb. he makes that sound and she determines she will have it from him again, that pleasure is something she might secure with a hook and drag out of him forcefully—
her hair falls down her back as she tips her head, the harsh exhalation something like a sigh or some might-have-been a word, and it is a tangible thing when she lets go of whatever terrible sexual scheme is forming in her head to fuck herself faster and harder against that perfect angle he is pushing into her. her fingers clutch reflexively at his hip, and every gasp inches closer to something that might be petrana crying out above him. )
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Fuck, [in Trade, then cursing a bluer streak in Tevene. Half the heady satisfaction is just making noise under her, and the other is knowing she will understand what he means when he growls out a small litany in time with the course of her over him.
In the Imperium, Tevene speaks to power. It's good for being under a woman and telling her how he's going to have her after this, a heated promise breathed out in time to the stroke of his thumb about how if she comes before he does then he'll roll her over and fuck her into the mattress next. He can't remember the last time he had any reason to speak so much of it.]
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it's just that it's not not that, either. it's not just the content, but it's not not that. the low growl of it, that she understands him—that she understands him from hours of poring tirelessly over work she is certain began almost entirely as his inclination to humor her—that he has perhaps taken the victory from her if they don't make it all the way through his office hours without indecency, the way he shapes these words ringing in her ears.
it is entirely due to him that she can answer, with just one word: )
If,
( and then almost immediately undermines herself by falling forward and biting down on his shoulder as she clenches tightly around him and comes apart. )
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There is a specific pleasure to saying something and watching it become real in his hands. Who doesn't find some reward in getting what they want? It's only monstrous if he isn't true to his word. And once she's taken her first breaths - whatever form they take - and her teeth have lost some of their edge, he endeavors to make good on his promises: guiding her over with an enthusiastic hip and hand, all that sturdy weight of him gone from willing foundation to eager flexing muscle.
If the rearrangment is less than smoothly choreographed, then who fucking cares. It doesn't feel awkward or fumbling in the moment. It doesn't seem like much of an interval between her flush over him and the reverse, his fingers tangling in her hair as he resumes her ready pace.]
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commander flint is very direct, she hears herself saying primly, elsewhere, or some words to that effect: a man of his word.
that's probably why she's giggling into his shoulder, slick from an orgasm still contracting around him. this is stupid. they're being stupid. she wants to know, badly, what he looks like when he comes; she wants to see the shape of the smile that he keeps pressing into her skin. )
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So:]
What's so funny? [A warm, demanding murmur at her cheek like he doesn't know. Like he's going to give her any opportunity to answer before kissing her.]
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the kiss is messy, is more kisses, is a lovely, warm contrast to the way she sets her hips against his and slides her hand down between them—not to touch herself but to wrap her fingers tight around the base of his cock shoving into her and press, insistent, determined pressure. )
We are, ( she says, eventually, into his shoulder. ) Dieu.
( she thinks she might make it a third time before he finishes; she isn't certain, isn't hurried. it isn't as if she won't be well-satisfied regardless. )
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It's been a long time since he laughed midfuck, and the thought - occurring to him distantly like something untouchable - should make his appetite for this go lopsided, but doesn't. She is warm and her breath is high and lovely and he is tired and wants so much to be exhausted for no better reason than enthusiastic screwing in the dark. When next he draws from her, he leaves her almost completely before driving back into the core of her heat. It is slower and sturdier and more full and doesn't require his hand on her hip so he can insinuate both arms under her. To press his hands between tousled bed clothes and the planes of her shoulders and use every part of both of them as his leverage.
He kisses her again. It's a better one this time.]
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that isn't the part that makes it better, exactly.
she drags her mouth to his ear when it's her own again, )
I want to see you come, James, ( quiet the way that intimate things are, the sound of what it feels like when she looks at him. )
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When he spills suddenly into her, it isn't because she asked him to. But it is what keeps him from burying his face into the tangle of her gold hair, what drives the low noise from him, what keeps him moving until he can't bear to retreat from being buried in her.]
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one elbow braces behind her and she pushes up, curls her fingers around the back of his neck and kisses him like conversation. like an answer to something, or a conclusive argument. or just: how good it feels to do so, how hard she's breathing, how close it is to being altogether too much. )
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Instead of shifting off her then, twisting out of the sticky heat of their closeness, Flint slides his arms back around her and settles with a pleased chuckle.]
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(witherstalk, yes, but one thing leads to another and she's very busy and she hasn't always been methodical about it, but in nearly two years there's never been the hint of a happy accident and she could speak to a healer but she doesn't need to be sure, not yet. she is not concerned about the possible consequences of careless coupling, but there is a part of her that still needs to be not sure.)
being held by him is—comfortable. easy, like all of this even since he took her gloves from her has been easy, like none of what came before that was. the intimacy of it; not the sex but the chuckle. it's that that she finds herself fascinated by, for all that there is very little question—in her mind, at least—of this being a one-off. probably it should be. probably it shouldn't have happened at all. it pleases her that it did, and that she feels...
welcome. yes. that's the (difference) word.
she presses a kiss to his shoulder. )
I hope, ( a low, rolling amusement, ) that you were not expecting me to move in a great hurry.
( she is not completely convinced her knees will cooperate. )
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