"This is ownership." I tighten my grip. His eyes flutter and his hands, resting on his thighs, curl into fists. "If you're going to belong to anyone, you're going to belong to me. Not the Torrences. Not the Protocol. Not whatever you were before you walked into this marriage. Mine."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"Yours." His voice fractures on the word, a clean break along a fault line that was already there, waiting for the right pressure. "I'm yours."
I pull him closer by the hair. He comes, pressing his face against my stomach, and his breath is hot through the thinfabric of my shirt. His hands come up and grip my hips with a desperation he's stopped trying to control. I feel it through the contact. Not just his physical response, but the empathic resonance of his surrender, wave after wave of something that has no name in any language I speak. Relief and terror and want, tangled together so completely that separating them would destroy all three.
"Earn it," I say.
He lifts his head. Looks at me with eyes that have gone dark, the pupil eating the iris, and his hands slide from my hips down to the waistband of my pants with a deliberation that tells me he's still in there, still conscious, still choosing every movement instead of drowning in reaction.
Good. I want him conscious for this.
He peels the fabric down my legs and I step out of it, and his mouth finds my inner thigh with a precision that should disturb me. He knows bodies. He was trained to read them, to map desire and exploit it, and the fact that he's deploying that skill now, in service of something that isn't manipulation but worship, is the kind of irony that makes my skin prickle with heat.
His tongue traces a path upward and my hand stays in his hair, guiding, controlling the pace. Slow. I want this slow. I want him to feel every second of what it means to kneel for someone who knows exactly what he is and wants him anyway.
When his mouth reaches the center of me, I let my head fall back and grip him harder. He groans against my skin and the vibration of it sends a tremor through my thighs that I have to lock my knees to absorb. His tongue works with an attention that borders on devotion. Long, slow strokes that find every nerve ending, that build pressure in layers so careful and deliberate that I know he's reading my body's responses and adjusting in real time.
I let him. I let him read me here, in this one context, because the intelligence he's gathering is the map of my pleasure and the only person it serves is me.
"More." My voice comes out lower than I intend. Rougher. "Deeper."
He obeys. His mouth opens wider and his tongue pushes into me and the sound I make fills the small room and bounces off the bulkheads, obscene and honest. My hips roll forward and he takes it, takes the force of me pressing against his face with a hunger that shudders through his whole body. I feel his hands tighten on the backs of my thighs, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks I'll see tomorrow.
I want the marks. I want evidence. I want to carry the proof of this into my mother's pristine meeting room and feel it under my clothes like a weapon she can't see.
"Fingers," I tell him. "Two."
He slides his hand between my legs without lifting his mouth and two fingers push inside me, curling forward with a knowledge that sends white sparks scattering across my vision. I hear myself gasp and I don't recognize the sound, don't recognize the woman making it, this creature who is standing in regulation quarters on a station at the edge of mapped space with her husband on his knees and his face buried between her thighs and his fingers working inside her with a focus that could topple governments.
The pressure builds. Layer on layer, each one tighter than the last, his tongue and his fingers working together in a rhythm that I'm controlling through the grip in his hair, pulling him closer when I want more and easing off when the wave crests too fast. He reads the pressure of my hand the way he reads everything, with a fluency that makes my chest ache even as my body climbs toward something that feels like falling.
"Not yet," I say when I feel him try to speed up. "Stay there."
He whimpers against me and the sound of it, the sound of Ethan Eames whimpering on his knees, is something I will carry like a blade for the rest of my life. I hold him there. On the edge. In the place where his control means nothing because I'm the one who decides when he moves, how he moves, where he goes and what he gives.
I hold myself there too. Balanced on the precipice, feeling everything, the heat of his mouth and the stretch of his fingers and the vibration of his desperate sounds against my most sensitive skin, and I stay.
Then I pull his head back. His face is wet. His eyes are glazed, unfocused, and his lips are swollen and shining, and he looks at me from his knees like I'm the only fixed point in a universe that's spinning too fast to navigate.
"Stand up."
He does. Unsteady. I push him toward the bed and he falls back onto it and I follow, straddling him, feeling the hard length of him press against me through his remaining clothes.
"Take them off."
His hands shake as he reaches between us. I lift my hips to give him room and he strips the fabric away, and when I sink down onto him the sound we both make is something that belongs in a language neither of us speaks. Full. Complete. The feeling of him inside me is an anchor and a freefall at the same time, and I brace my hands on his chest and start to move.
He reaches for my hips and I catch his wrists. Pin them above his head. His eyes go wide and his whole body arches up beneath me, and I hold him there, held down and filled up and completely at my mercy, while I ride him with a rhythm that serves only my own pleasure.
"You don't get to touch," I tell him. "Not until I say."
"Aura." My name sounds like a prayer on his mouth. Broken and reverent.
"You don't get to come until I say."
