His hands are everywhere. Rough. My ribs, my breasts, the waistband of my pants yanked down with no ceremony, no seduction, just the blunt mechanics of two people trying to get at each other's skin. I shove at his pants and he helps, kicking them off, and then we're bare together in the blue-grey dark, and the contact is so much I almost can't breathe. His skin is fever-hot and the marks are pulsing under it, and everywhere we touch I can feel them, a low-frequency hum that vibrates in my teeth and behind my eyes.
"Harder," I say, and I don't even know what I mean. All of it harder. His hands, his mouth, the way he rolls his hips against mine so I can feel the full length of him dragging against me where I'm already wet, already aching, already gone.
He bites the curve of my breast and I claw at his shoulders. He grips my hip hard enough that I feel bone grind, and the hurt is wonderful, a clean clear signal cutting through the static of everything I don't want to think about. I don't want to think. I want to be a body, just a body, bruised and used and present in this moment instead of lost in the one where he chose the mission over me.
"Push me," I hear myself say. The words come out ragged. "Use your abilities. Make me want this. Make it not my choice."
He goes still. Completely, unnervingly still, his mouth against the inside of my breast, his breath hot on skin he just marked with his teeth. The marks on his throat dim for a moment, then flare brighter than before.
"No."
"Zane."
He lifts his head. Looks at me. And what I see in his face is the first real anger he's shown all night, hotter and more honest than anything I've thrown at him. "If you want to hate yourself for this, you'll do it honestly."
The words land in my stomach like a fist. Because he's right. Because asking him to take the choice away was thecoward's exit, the one door I could have walked through and come out the other side clean, able to say I didn't choose this, he made me, it wasn't my fault. And he won't let me have it.
He won't let me off the hook.
I pull his mouth back to mine. The kiss is vicious, teeth and tongues and the taste of his blood still on my lips, and I reach between us and take him in my hand. He's hard and hot and the sound he makes when I stroke him is guttural, animal, stripped of every layer of control he wraps around himself like armor. I guide him to me and rock my hips up, and he slides inside in one long, devastating stroke that fills me so completely my vision whites out at the edges.
For a moment neither of us moves. Just the feeling of him, deep, stretching, so present it's almost unbearable. I can feel his pulse inside me, or maybe that's mine. They've synced. His marks are blazing against his skin, throwing blue-white light across the ceiling, and his eyes are closed and his jaw is clenched and he looks like a man in pain. Like a man trying to survive something.
I move first. Rolling my hips up, clenching around him, and he groans and his hands find my hips and he starts to thrust and there is nothing gentle about it. The bed sounds brutal beneath us, the frame protesting, and I match him stroke for stroke, rising to meet him every time he drives in, and it hurts in the way that relief hurts, like crying, like confession.
I scratch welts down his back. He grips my thigh, yanks it higher, changes the angle so he's hitting something deep inside me that makes me shout. His mouth is on my throat again, teeth on the tender underside of my jaw, and his hand slides up from my hip to the soft inside of my thigh and his thumb presses into the muscle there, hard, a bruise forming in real time under his touch.
"More," I tell him, because I'm selfish, because I'm angry, because my body is the only language I have left for this. "More."
He gives me more. Harder, deeper, faster, his breath ragged against my neck, and I can feel the marks on him pulsing with every thrust, and I realize he's feeling everything I feel. Every scrape of pleasure, every twinge of pain, every complicated, contradictory emotion that I can't untangle, he's taking it all in, doubled, reflected back. He'sdrowning in me and I'm drowning in him and neither of us is throwing a line.
The orgasm builds like something structural failing. Not the slow sweet climb of pleasure but a fault line cracking, pressure building in places that weren't designed to hold this much weight. I'm crying again and I don't care, tears running into my hair, my throat raw from sounds I don't recognize, and his hand comes up to my neck. Not squeezing. Resting. His palm against my throat, his thumb along my jaw, and the warmth of his hand and the promise of pressure is enough, is too much.
I come apart with a sob. The kind that wrenches up from somewhere below language, the body's last honest sound when the mind has lost the ability to lie. I feel it in my teeth, in my skull, in the spaces between my ribs where breath is supposed to live. I feel it everywhere, and it's not pleasure, not exactly, not only. It's every feeling I've been holding crushed together and released at once, a detonation that leaves me shaking and open and wrecked.
His hand tightens on my throat. Not enough to choke. Enough to feel. Enough to remind me whose hand it is, whose bed this is, whose name I just screamed into the dark like a prayer I'll deny in the morning.
He comes with a sound that's barely human. Low. Torn out of him. His face pressed hard against the curve of my neck, teeth still resting on skin he's already marked, his entire body rigid, every muscle locked against something that looks less like pleasure and more like survival. The marks on his skin flare so bright I can see them through my closed eyelids, blue-white constellations burning behind the thin membrane of my lids like I'm staring into a sun that shouldn't exist. He pulses inside me and I feel that too, the kick of it, the heat, and my body clenches around himwithout my permission because nothing my body does around him requires my permission anymore.
He's feeling all of it. Everything I feel. Everything he feels. Doubled and folded and layered until the sensation collapses under its own mass, a gravity well neither of us can climb out of. My grief. His guilt. My fury. His refusal to be sorry for it. The orgasm still shuddering through my nerve endings. The tears drying on my temples. The taste of his blood still on my tongue. All of it feeding through whatever empathic wire runs between us, the one I didn't consent to and can't sever, the one that means he knows exactly how ruined I am right now. Not guessing. Knowing. Feeling it in his own chest like a second heartbeat laid over the first.
I wonder if that's its own kind of punishment. I hope it is.
His breath shakes against my throat. One ragged exhale. Then another. His hand loosens on my neck but doesn't leave. His thumb traces the line of my jaw, slow, almost absent, the way you'd touch something you broke and weren't sure you could fix. The tenderness of it is worse than the grip. The grip I understood. The grip was honest. This... this is the part that will ruin me. Not his violence. His care.
I keep my eyes closed. If I look at him right now, I'll see whatever's in his face, and I'm not ready. I'm not ready for it to be cold. I'm not ready for it to be soft. Both options are a kind of annihilation I can't afford.
The silence in the room is enormous. Just our breathing and the station's hum and the faint tick of the bed frame cooling, contracting, settling back into its shape after what we did to it.
My body aches in places I'll catalogue later. Between mylegs. My hip where his fingers dug in hard enough to hit bone. My throat where his hand rested like a question he never quite asked. The scratches on my shoulders from the sheets, or from his nails, or from my own desperate writhing. I can't tell which marks are his and which are mine. I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.
It's not okay. None of this is okay.
Not the way I came here. Not the way I hit him and then kissed him and then begged him not to be gentle. Not the way I asked him to take my choice away and he refused, because the refusal was crueler, because the refusal meant I have to own every second of this. Every sound I made. Every time I said more. Every nail I dragged down his back and every tear I shed while he was inside me. Mine. All of it mine. He made sure of that.
It's not okay that I followed a man who used me as bait into his bed and let him wreck me and wrecked him back and called it something close to necessary. It's not okay that his hand on my throat felt like the safest I've been since I got to this station. It's not okay that I can feel his heartbeat slowing against my ribs and the steadiness of it makes me want to stay.
None of this is okay.
