You don't hyper-decant?

He has grown quieter in the aftermath of the end of the world; content to keep to himself and stay out of the way. It's not a very good story, and it's not a particularly new one. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has. Willa left only a few months after the wedding. The only reminder of an asteroid after impact is the crater it leaves and the stories of the people who saw it. What a sad little fate, to only be remembered for the holes you leave in things. Moths, for example; we take them for granted until they're eating the sweaters in our closets, and then they're more of a nuisance than something beautiful just trying to live their lives.

He is just trying to live his life.

You had been an unplanned development in the story. You'd fallen into his life like you'd meant to land there - on purpose; so few things are deliberate for him. You had approached him at a bar not too far from his ranch in New Mexico, had said you liked his eyes. The way they looked kind of sad, like he was missing something. You told him you hoped you could help him find it, whatever it was. That was seven months ago. Every day he worries you are going to leave. You don't. You move in with him.

On purpose. I am going to love you on purpose.

"I've never really understood poetry." He says, like it doesn't tear him up inside that someone would feel that way about him. Like his heart isn't a war zone, shrapnel on the inside, the wound still weeping and all the lights off.

"It's from a book, I think." You say, because you can bring him to water, but you cannot force him to drink. Fear drives us away from comfort, makes us think we don't deserve it.

He hums in acknowledgement and goes back to slicing the tomatoes on the cutting board in front of him. He's careful, quiet. The knife does not slip. He is still scared it might, even after it has been set to the side, tucked into the sink. Like it might grow sentience and choose to dig itself into the meat of his palm just for the hell of it. 'Who is this asshole, using me to cut up the things he likes into pieces?'

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

You're having sex when it hits him, that resounding, thunderbolt sort of clarity that only happens every once in a great while. He's on top of you, his hands on either side of your shoulders. Disheveled, his hair sticking to his forehead, his lips spit-slick and swollen. And he stops - looks at you like he's seeing you for the first time. Really seeing. Knowing someone, wholly and completely.

His hand shakes as he brings it up to cup your cheek, his thumb swiping over the ridge of your cheek bone. The sadness in his eyes is gone, now, in this moment. Replaced by something softer, and a heat, burning at the center of it all like a pulsar.

"On purpose." He murmurs. The words taste unfamiliar on his tongue.

"Yeah, Con." You let yourself smile a little, looking up at him with a dewy sort of wonder. Watching Selenicereus grandiflorus bloom in the pale moonlight. "On purpose."

He kisses you, then; softer, slower. Purposefully. His hands finding your own, lacing your fingers together. Sweet. He is sweet. He always has been, you think, he just had to find it in himself. You helped, in the ways you could. Salve on the bruises, lips on his knuckles. You cannot undo the past - cannot draw the hurt out of the wound with your mouth like sucking the venom from a snakebite. But you can see the holes in your sweaters, and you can remember the creatures that left them there. You can know him to be more than a frustration. Because he is. So much more than that.

He's learned to swallow down bile with the best of them. That sour ache on the edges of your tongue, tingling in its aftermath; makes the backs of your teeth ache, makes your fingers itch. The shoes and the waiting and the dropping. First, then second. Shit always hits the fan eventually - this is real life, there are certainties.

The meteor hits the ground. It leaves a bruise.

He is everywhere, and he is nowhere, all at once. His hands grasping at your own, pressing them down into the mattress, and his eyes - God, his eyes - peering into your own like you have all of the answers. You don't, but you do know some things; that he prefers cologne that smells like vetiver, that he's been smoking again, and that the slow roll of his hips against your own may just have the power to kill you entirely. It's like this, with him; your entire worldview narrowed down to a pinprick in the span of a moment. Him. Everything is him. His smell, the taste of tobacco on his lips, the roughness of his palms against your own. His stubble scrapes against your skin, makes you sigh and arch into him.

Your mouth tries to wrap itself around the syllables of his name, but all the breath has been punched from your lungs, and so all you can muster is a breathy, choked sort of sound. He's got his lips pressed together, a pinch in his brow - focus, always so much focus from him, even in this. There's a thin sheen of sweat on his face, and the minutes have bled together until they feel like eternity. It just might be.

One of his hands leaves your own, and you feel almost empty from the absence of it until you feel it brushing against your inner thighs, finding the space where you're joined together. The calloused pads of two fingers press firm against your clit, and you moan. He'd usually grin - shit-eating and overly proud - and tease you for a bit, but tonight is different, somehow. A charged sort of energy. He doesn't grin at all; instead, his tongue dips out to wet his lips, and there's something about the sight of it that makes that knot in your belly tighten. His fingers move - slow, slow, slow. Deliberation. The undoing.

"I love you." He rasps out, low and rough. It sticks to your ribs, fills you up. Satiety. You want to say it back, but your mouth isn't working right - everything is bright and fluorescent, the edges of your vision a halo of white. It feels like that one time he convinced you to do coke with him. Everything floral and pretty and sharp.

You don't need to say it back, you suppose, because he's talking again, soothing you. "I know, baby. I know. Just take it."

You don't really think you have much choice in the matter, not that you're complaining.

Release finds you slowly; a buzzing sort of heat spreading out through your limbs, your fingers, your toes. Your body shakes beneath him, and he clings to you - buries his face in the crook of your neck and rocks his hips slower, deeper. Hushes you with words you can't quite make out. Your mouth is dry, your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth. You squeeze your eyes shut as it just keeps going; it feels like you're never going to come down. Maybe you never will. Maybe that's okay.

You don't know when he tips over that edge, you just know that he's shaking against you, one hand clutching at your own so tightly you're sure your knuckles are white, the other gently grasping at your hip. You tremble together. Vibrate at some frequency unknown to anyone but the two of you.

Love, and all these things. Cracked edges and the light spilling out. God, but he is beautiful when he shines.

He slips out of you, and you feel it - this weird sort of hollowness. The aching want for something to last forever. You whine softly to make your protest known, and he does, finally, chuckle at that - a smile with teeth. Happy Ken. For once. For good, you hope.

It took a long time to get him to this point, after everything. Moving on from a dream unrealized. It was a year and a half of carefully building him back up, fitting the pieces back together and smoothing out the edges. He's softer, now. Safer. Home.

"I love you, too." You whisper into the sudden stillness of the room. To his now-sleeping form beside you. "More than, I think, you'll ever know."

There is an entire language in his hands. Curled fingers against the meat of his palm, the way the digits flex against nothing when he's thinking; sheer air, riding a wave of mania and adrenaline and looking for love like that because that's the only way he knows how. You could write sonnets about those hands. A guide for how to decipher how he's feeling - how much, how deeply. Observations with no solutions. You do not know how to quiet the buzzing in his mind, but you do know this: you can uncurl those fingers, interlace them with your own, hold him steady. The world keeps spinning, yes, but here, together, you are steady.

He doesn't need to voice his exhaustion - you can see it written across his face that it has been a long, likely painful day; the droop of the corners of his mouth, the heavy hood to his eyes. And his hands. Always his hands. You cross the room in a few quick strides, there in an instant to hold him up, to be his rock. Whatever he needs. 'Whatever you need.' Whispered into the sticky-sweet press of lips. Damp and sliding. Searching. Hands curling into the lapels of his suit jacket. 'Whatever you need.'

"You." He murmurs against your lips. "Just you. Just this."

It has to be enough.

You don't know how or when you end up on the couch, but suddenly you're there, pressed against the cushions. Your feet touch the arm of it on the other end, the leather smooth against your skin. He's all forest fire fury here, passion blurring the edges where you end and he begins. His lips have found your neck, and you hum softly, tilt your head to the side. Something warm settles low in your belly, pools there. Familiar and sweet.

"Kendall." You breathe as his lips drag unceremoniously down your stomach, to the hem of your pants. He wastes no time. He never does. Always efficient. Capital letter and period and the breath between the sentences. Purposeful.

"I'm gonna eat you out." He says. Looks up at you to see if you have any objections. God knows you do not. The heat is buzzing now, dispersed throughout your limbs, swallowing you up and dragging you down.

It never gets old, the way his brown eyes - leaves on the top of a pool in the thick, sticky heat of july, the copper tang of sucking a papercut clean - meet your own as he settles into his worship. His tongue pressed flat, licking a long, deliberate stroke up the length of your sex. It makes your knees feel shaky, makes everything feel like it's being brought up in technicolor.

Want. Want. Want.

Movement that, by sheer happenstance, led him to her.

In the beginning of their relationship, things had been sweet, if chaste; his job was demanding, and often required a large swathe of the time he would have preferred to have been spending with her. There were dinner dates, sure. Shared nights at his penthouse, sleeping in the same bed and yet, somehow, miles apart. Stolen moments of intimacy that seemed almost clumsy, juvenile, when compared to how things used to be with Shiv. But she was not Shiv, and it was unfair to compare the ragged beast of what they had - certainly not love - to what this was. Better. Sweeter. Warmer.

Needless to say, sex was not a topic that was broached. Not for a long while. Not for a lack of wanting on either of their parts - there had been more than a few times that Tom had thought the moment to be right; kisses turning hot and heavy, open-mouthed, sharing the same air. Hands under shirts, clumsy and grasping. Only to be interrupted by a business call, or fatigue, or some other inane distraction. And indeed, there were many nights that he laid in bed alone, staring at his ceiling, one hand on his cock and her name in his mouth.

They were both, mercifully, patient people.

And now they're here, finally. Him standing in naught but his boxers at the foot of the bed, fingers tucked under the waistband, getting ready to pull them down, gazing at her bare form with all the dewy-eyed wonder of a man smitten beyond comprehension. Masculinity, sure - pomp and circumstance and muscle and posturing and whatever. But tenderness, too. Warmth. Care. Adoration.

There's something roiling within her, muddying the waters of her self. Is there a graceful way to broach the topic? Is it even worth bringing up now, after everything? What is the importance of the title, save for posturing for purity culture? Virgin. A title made for chaste women in loveless marriages. A porn category at the bottom of a page. The wet dream of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants everywhere. Pure. Whole. Whatever.

But maybe he cares. Maybe that's something that's important to him. And she would rather have him know than not, so she unceremoniously blurts it out, "I've never done this before."

He pauses for just a moment, his brow knitting together for the briefest flicker of a second before his expression has smoothed out, neutral again. "Okay. That's okay. Do you - Do you want to do this? With me?"

Duh, she wants to say, I wouldn't be here if I didn't. But he's asking sincerely, and that feels impolite. Dismissive. "Yes, Tom, I'm sure. I want you. I want this."

"Good." He says, a dopey sort of smile on his face. Relieved, maybe. "That's good."

The mattress dips with his weight as he comes to sit on his knees between her thighs, one hand coming down to support his weight. She watches, enraptured, as he brings the other up to his mouth. The firm muscle of his tongue runs from the heel of his palm to the tips of his middle three fingers, the skin now slick with spit, and she hardly has time to process how the sight makes her stomach feel taut because he's cupping her cunt with that hand now. Fingertips pressing against her entrance.

"Gonna get you nice and ready." He murmurs, his voice warm. "Let me know if you need to stop for any reason."

And she doesn't have time to voice her understanding, because he's slowly - so fucking slowly - crooking his fingers into her. To the first knuckle, then the second, crooking, searching. She whines when he presses against her g-spot, and he hums, seemingly pleased by her reaction, before paying attention to the spot with deliberation. It leaves her vision blurry, her lips parted with the weight of her breath. Brow furrowed together, fingers curled into the sheets - debauched.

"That's it, honey. Just like that. Feels so good, doesn't it?"

She manages a nod, she thinks, or at least some vague approximation of it. Her head is tilted back against the pillows, and she can feel the tension rising in her abdomen, a spring coiled tighter and tighter. Her heels dig into the edge of the mattress, her hips moving against the rocking of his fingers as if of their own accord. Everything is white-hot and electric.

"Are you going to cum for me?" His voice is so low; the filth dripping with tenderness that's intoxicating. "Hm? Gonna cum on my fingers, pretty girl? Can't give you my cock 'til you do that, honey."

His thumb finds the swollen bud of her clitoris, and she knows she's a goner; her muscles are so tense she's trembling, and he's looking at her with such determination in his gaze - his brow knit, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.

"That's it. Let go for me, honey. You're so fuckin' tight, I can feel it."

She surrenders to the heat, lets it swallow her up. Her back arches off of the bed, fingertips grasping at the sheets with an intensity that borders on desperation, her body jerking involuntarily as the full force of the first orgasm she's ever shared with another person slams into her. She's sure her lips form the shape of his name - she's sure it's the only syllable they know, here and now.

He's cooing something at her, his voice warm, but she can't make out the words. It matters little, anyways; he's peeling off his boxers and all she can think about is the thought of him inside of her, the rightness of union. He's clambering back onto the bed, grasping one of her hands in his own and gently pressing it down against the mattress.

"You ready for me?" He asks softly, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance.

"Please." She offers up in return, because she's certain if she doesn't feel him within the next ten seconds, she's going to perish. Blood replaced with the heavy clawing of such immense desperation that she doesn't know how to comprehend it. "Please."

The stretch stings, but it's not unpleasant. She exhales slowly through her nose, and he pauses once he's fully seated within her, his pubic bone pressed against her sex. His thumb runs over the back of her hand in a soothing gesture, his gaze set upon her with a tentative sort of hunger.

"Take all the time you need." He dips down to press his lips against her own, covering her body with his. She feels safe, here. "There's no rush."

"You can start moving." She says after moment, the words thick against her tongue.

He complies with her request with little in the way of hesitation, setting a slow, gentle pace. It feels like he's somehow seeped into every part of her; the spaces between her ribs, the alveoli of her lungs, the marrow in her bones. Tom. Tom. Tom. His name on her lips like a litany. He has become the very air she's breathing. There's nothing else.

"That's it. Taking me so well, honey. I'm - You're so tight. Not gonna last long. Fuck."

She wraps her legs around his waist, her hands squeezing against his, their fingers interlaced. Their eyes are caught on one another's, a wordless exchange happening. Novels in the span of moments, all without the movement of lips.

"Fuck. I love you. I love you. I'm - Shit." He groans, long and ragged, the movement of his hips stilling as he buries himself into her wholly. She can feel every twitch of muscle, the involuntary jerking of his hips as he spills himself.

She clings to him as he gently lowers himself down against her, her hands tracing idle shapes against his back, the space between his shoulder blades. The only sound in the room is the heaviness of their shared breath. There doesn't need to be anything else. Not when everything feels so right.

"I love you, too." She whispers against the crook of his neck. Hardly the first time the words have been exchanged, but something about this feels concrete and consequential. "So much, Tom."