For three seconds, he is stone.
Then his hand comes up and closes around the back of my neck and he takes the kiss from me like I never owned it. Tilts my head the way he wants it, parts my lips with his tongue, and the taste of him is dark and warm and nothing I have a name for. His other hand finds my hip and his grip is precise the way everything about him is precise, fingerspressing into the bone like he's measuring me, mapping me, claiming territory by touch.
I make a sound. I don't mean to. It comes from somewhere behind my ribs, caught between a gasp and something worse, something hungrier, and his marks blaze brighter in response. I can see the light through my closed eyelids, cyan burning against the dark.
He pulls back just far enough to speak. His lips brush mine with every word.
"Say it."
"I already stepped forward."
"That's not what I asked."
My breath is coming in short, uneven pulls. His hand on my neck is warm and steady and it would take so little pressure to turn that hold into something else entirely. I can feel his pulse through his fingertips, or maybe it's the bond translating his heartbeat to me, and it's faster than his face would ever admit.
"Yes," I say. And then, because I need to hear myself say it, because I need this to be a choice and not a surrender, "I want this."
Something changes behind his eyes. A shift, tectonic and silent, like a fault line giving way deep underground where no one can see the damage yet. His grip tightens on my neck, not painful, possessive, and then he's standing and I'm moving backward and the view port is cold against my shoulder blades when I hit it.
Stars wheel behind me. I can feel the glass vibrating with the station's rotation, a low hum that travels through my spine and settles in my teeth. The void is at my back, infinite and indifferent, and he is at my front, blocking out everything else.
He pins me there with his hips, and Ifeel him hard against my stomach, and the reality of that is different from the abstraction. The abstraction was safe. A thought I could have and discard. This is the heat of him through two layers of fabric, the way my body arches into it without permission, the sound of his breath changing near my ear.
"I've felt you," he says, low enough that the words are more vibration than sound. "Every night. Lying in your quarters. Wanting."
My face burns. "That's not fair."
"Nothing about this is fair." His mouth finds the curve of my neck and he doesn't kiss it so much as claim it, teeth grazing the skin over my pulse, tongue pressing flat against the place where my heartbeat is loudest. "You think I chose this? Feeling you ache from three corridors away? Knowing exactly when you touch yourself and exactly when you stop, because you're too angry to finish?"
I close my eyes and the darkness behind my lids is full of cyan light.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and he lifts it over my head in one motion, efficient and unhurried, the way he does everything. The station air hits my skin and I shiver, and he watches me shiver, and his marks are so bright now that they cast shadows on the view port behind me.
He drops to his knees.
It's not what I expected. This man, this creature who owns a station and the lives inside it, on his knees on the cold floor of his quarters with his hands on my hips and his mouth pressing open against my stomach. The muscles in my abdomen clench under his lips and he makes a sound, quiet and rough, something that might be my name if I listened harder.
He unfastens my pants with the same deliberate precision he uses on everything. Draws them down. I stepout of them and I'm in nothing but underwear, which is his underwear, provided by him, chosen by someone on his staff, and the thought almost makes me laugh except his fingers are hooking into the waistband and pulling and then I'm bare against the cold view port with the stars at my back and a crime lord kneeling between my legs.
"Hold on to something," he says.
I grip the view port frame above my head. The metal is cold and my fingers wrap around it and the position stretches me out, long and exposed, and he looks up at me from the floor with an expression that would terrify me if I had any survival instinct left.
Then his mouth is on me and I forget how to be afraid.
He doesn't tease. He takes. His tongue is hot and flat and certain, stroking through me in long, measured passes that find every nerve ending I have and light them on fire. My thighs tremble against his jaw and he grips them, holds them apart, fingers denting the flesh hard enough to bruise, and I will see the marks tomorrow and I will remember this and that's the point.
I try to be quiet and I fail spectacularly. The sounds coming out of me are raw and wrecked and nothing I'd recognize as my own voice. He pulls one of my legs over his shoulder, changing the angle, opening me further, and the view port glass is fogging behind me from the heat of my skin.
His tongue circles and presses and retreats, building a rhythm that's designed to undo me, and through the bond I can feel his focus, the terrifying totality of his attention narrowed to this single task. He is not thinking about cargo manifests or station politics or the man arriving tomorrow. He is thinking about nothing but making me come, and thepurity of that focus is the most intimate thing that's ever happened to me.
I get close. I get so close that my vision whites out at the edges and my grip on the view port frame turns my knuckles to bone, and his tongue does something devastating and deliberate and I feel myself start to fall.
"Wait," I gasp.
He stops.
Immediately. Completely. His mouth lifts from me and his hands go still on my thighs and he looks up at me, breathing hard, his lips wet, his marks pulsing in time with something I can't hear, and he waits.
