Both, at once. There's no untangling them.
He uses the knife to flick open the button of my jeans. One precise movement. Then the zipper, the blade angled flat against the metal, sliding down. My jeans loosen. He doesn't pull them off. He waits, the blade still resting against the open zipper, and looks at me.
I push them down myself. Slowly. Step out of them one foot at a time, the knife following the movement, never quite touching but always near.
He drags the knife around my hip, slowly, positioning it carefully between my legs. My ankles are still caught up in the legs of my jeans, so I can barely move. And that blade is sharp, so I don’t dare to. He edges my legs apart, holding me steady so I don’t trip over my jeans, and then one foot is free of the denim.
His gaze is focused on my panties. He moves the knife, so the handle presses against my core and a sound comes out that I don't recognize as mine.
Not quite pleasure. Not quite fear. Both wires twisted together so tightly they share a current — the fear rushing through the same channel as the want, each one making the other louder. The warmth between my thighs is immediate andI am wet, slick and aching, and the handle of a knife is pressing against my pussy through the thin cotton of my underwear and I am so far past the woman who answered a forum post at 2am that she is barely a memory.
He drags the cotton aside.
The textured grip of the handle meets bare skin and the sound I make is no longer quiet.
His eyes drop for a half second, and I follow their path — the hungry assessment, the way he looks at me as if this is an experiment and also something holy. I can feel him gauging my reactions, the micro expressions, my thighs tensing, the desperate keening noise I cannot quiet. He doesn’t say anything, he just looks back up at my face.
He wants to see me come apart, and not just to watch it — to be the one drawing the lines and then making me walk them. I see it in his posture, in the set of his jaw, in the absolute focus of his gaze. He is present in a way impossible to fake — so completely it sews my body to his, even if he barely touches me.
The first pass is exploratory. He drags the flat side of the handle along my slit, back and forth, gentle at first, like he is mapping new territory. I am already wet enough that the sound of it is audible, slick and obscene, and his eyes flicker at the sound. He experiments with pressure, pushing a little harder, then lighter, then rotating the handle slightly so the next ridge catches and drags and sends a spark straight through my hips to my spine. I can’t decide if I want to close my thighs around it or force them farther apart. My body vibrates somewhere in between, in a holding pattern of helpless anticipation.
He slides the handle along my slit, working me slowly, and it's maddening — the hard unyielding shape of it, so completely different from a hand, alien and cold. My hips move forward without my permission. He lets them, adjusts his angle fractionally, and the sound I make becomes something Iwould be embarrassed about if I had any embarrassment left. My hands find his jacket sleeve — not grabbing, just landing there, my palms against his forearm, the nearest solid thing, the gauze warm under my fingers — and I grip the fabric while my forehead drops toward his shoulder.
He keeps his left hand braced at my hip, fingers splayed, holding me steady — both to control my movement and to steady himself. The control is total. He is guiding every part of this, but he doesn’t force. He waits for my body to answer, then responds as though we are playing a game with rules only he knows, and I am losing spectacularly.
My forehead lands on his shoulder, the starched fabric of his shirt pressing into my skin, and I let myself ground there, my eyes squeezed shut. There is a moment of stasis, a moment where it feels like maybe he will stop, maybe this will be where he lets me down, but then the handle presses against me and the cold shock of it sends my head back up. My mouth opens, involuntary, and I bite down on my own tongue to stop the sound I want to make. I can taste blood.
He slides the handle inside me, inch by inch, and I begin to sob.
It's not just the sensation — it's the totality of it, the way he occupies every part of my awareness. My body so open, so vulnerable. He's holding all the cards. I'm letting him. I don't want him to stop.
My legs are trembling already, and I can feel the muscle quiver that says I am dangerously close to giving out, but I force myself to stay upright, to hold onto the fabric of his sleeve and not collapse.
He works the handle in slow, shallow thrusts, not enough to hurt but enough to fill, enough to make me aware of every nerve ending, every seam, every difference between this and anything that came before. My vision goes white at the edges every timehe pulls back and pushes in again. I can feel slickness dripping down my thigh, and he must see it, because he lets out a small, animal sound at the back of his throat. That’s the only sound he makes. Everything else is silent and tense, except for the wet rhythm of the handle and the noise I am making against his shoulder.
I get close — my thighs trembling, breath coming in ragged increments, the orgasm assembling itself in the base of my spine — and he slows. A fraction. Enough. The pleasure crests and doesn't break, and I make a desperate sound against his shoulder that I feel him register in the slight tightening of the hand that holds the handle.
He brings me to the edge and leaves me there, thrumming and helpless, and I realize he is matching my rhythm to his own. The way he holds the knife — so careful, so calculated — is how he holds himself. The same control he showed last night, when he let the armor slip and showed me something soft and raw beneath.
Now he is the one in control, and I am the one stripped down to skin and trembling. There is a symmetry here. I don’t know if he planned it, or if this is just how he is, but I can feel it.
He brings me back from further away. Builds me again, slower this time, the angle changed — something deeper, something that coils the sensation inward — and I am shaking the way he was shaking last night. He shook in his own apartment and I held still and said nothing. Now I'm shaking against his shoulder and he is absolutely, precisely, deliberately doing this to me.
I get close again. He slows again.
"Please." The word comes out broken, barely a word, barely air.
He doesn't answer. He doesn't slow down this time, either.
The orgasm builds for the third time and I am so frayed and desperate that when he finally — finally — gives me the angle back, the pressure back, the exact friction my body has been screaming for, I shatter.
It crashes through me. My body doesn't wait for safety. It just breaks open — completely, overwhelmingly, my whole body shuddering against his while I'm still terrified, while my pulse is still hammering its emergency signal against my throat, while the blade is still inches from my insides and I can’t rule out what he intends to do with it.
The pleasure and the fear move through me in the same wave. I can't find the seam between them. I am undone. The orgasm is still moving through me in aftershocks I feel in my hands, my knees, my teeth.
My legs stop working.
He catches me when I fall and, for a moment, holds me tight against his chest. Then he takes three strides and places me gently atop a dining chair. I’m shattered, broken, one foot still trailing my jeans behind me, my t-shirt sweaty and sticky. I must look terrible, but I can’t bring myself to care.
