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“A little.” His grip glides down my length, slow, slick, devastating. “The infamous Ciaran Virel, coming apart because somebody finally asked permission.”

“I am not coming ap⁠—”

He twists his wrist on the upstroke. I come apart.

“Rowan." His name leaves me as a warning and a prayer at once. "If you keep that up, this lesson ends embarrassingly early."

“Then I'll move on.” And before my lust-drowned brain can parse what that means, he's reaching for the lube again — not for me this time. He kneels up over my hips, reaches back, and I watch, pinned and breathless, as he works his own slick fingers into himself.

Light. Light.

He's clumsy with it. Still new to his own body this way, biting his lip, brows drawn in that same fierce focus he gives the Noctis, breath stuttering every time he curls his fingers — and it is, without exaggeration, the single most obscene thing I have ever been permitted to witness.

“Let me,” I rasp. My hands are already lifting.

“No.” He shudders around a second finger. “You'll take over. You always take over.”

He's right. I would. I want to so badly my fingers are digging trenches into the sheets — and I don't. I hold still and let him ready himself above me at his own maddening tempo, sweat gathering at my temples with the effort of it, and somewhere in the roar of my blood I understand: this is the lesson. Not his.

Mine.

“Now,” he breathes, finally — finally — lining me up, and the first blunt press of my cock against him rips a growl from somewhere I keep locked. “Stay still. Let me.”

He sinks down in one long, unbroken slide.

The sound he makes — low, cracked open, satisfied — hums straight through my sternum the way the Noctis did, and my vision nearly whites just from that. He's tight and scalding around me, thighs quaking against my hips, palms flat on my chest, and he takes a moment there, seated to the hilt, adjusting, owning it, while I lie beneath him losing my mind by degrees.

“You feel—” I have to stop. Try again. “Nothing has ever felt like this.”

“I know.” No shyness in it at all now. “I can feel what I do to you.”

He starts to move.

Slow at first. A deep, rolling grind that drags the sound out of me in pieces. When I buck up to meet him he plants his weight and stops, waiting, punishing me with patience until I go still again — and only when I surrender, hands open, spine loose, every instinct to seize control lying down and baring its throat, does he give us both what we need. He rides me in earnest then, hard enough that the bedframe knocks time against the wall, his cock flushed and heavy between us, head tipped back, moonlight pouring down the throat I marked.

I'm supposed to be the one watching him. That was the whole arrangement. And lying here letting him play me to pieces, I can't remember the last time I watched Rowan for any reason except that I can't look away.

“Ciaran.” My name in his mouth is ruined and demanding at once. “More. Give me⁠—”

I break. I grip his hips and drive up into him and he moans, loud and unguarded, like I've finally struck the note he's been hunting all night. We find the rhythm together after that, his tempo, my force, the slap of skin on skin and the wet obscene sound of him taking me turning the whole room feverish. I get a fist around his cock and stroke him in time, slick with lube and his own arousal, and watch the composure he wears for the entire academy burn off him layer by layer until there's nothing left but mine, mine, fucking mine.

“I'm— Ciaran, I'm going to⁠—”

“Then break for me, mouse.”

He comes with my name shattering in his throat, spilling hot over my fist and my stomach, clamping down around me so hard that I follow him over with a sound I've never made in my life, emptying into him deep, hips grinding through it, both of us wringing the last shudders out of each other until he folds down onto my chest, boneless and gasping.

For a long while, the only music in the room is breathing.

His heartbeat slams against mine, then slows, then settles like two rhythms drifting into one, the way the Noctis's last resonance hangs in the air after the bow lifts.

“So.” His voice arrives eventually, muffled in my shoulder, insufferably pleased with itself. “Did I learn you right?”

I stare at the ceiling and take stock of the wreckage. My hands, still trembling faintly. My chest, cracked open somewhere no one's supposed to reach. This soft, stubborn, dangerous creature lying on top of me who walked into my room in my own shirt and dismantled nineteen years of control in one night.

“Too fast,” I say against his hair, so he can't see my face. “You learn everything too fast.”

He laughs, and the sound rolls through my chest like a low string, and I feel it in my teeth, in my ribs, in places sound has no business reaching.