syne

“Grace.”

“What’s up?”

“Where are your pants.”

He looks down as if he had only just noticed he wasn’t wearing any. “Oh, right. None of them are clean.”

You blink, extremely slowly, and try to stop yourself from glancing down at his bare thighs. “There is not a single pair of clean pants that you can wear? None at all?”

Your attempted restraint is not going unnoticed. Grace smirks a little when your eyes flick down again, and you would very much like to wipe the expression off of his face. Your hand twitches against your leg. “Well, technically I have a pair, but there’s a hole in them.”

“A hole.”

“Yep,” and he pops the ‘p’ very deliberately and shifts in the chair. The movement causes the hem of his boxers to hike up, revealing another sliver of his bare thigh. “Haven’t gotten around to patching them yet.”

“Of course. So the natural solution was to just walk around in your underwear.” You push yourself off the frame to stand straight up. He does not say anything when you look at his legs again, but his smile grows.

His tongue darts out to wet his lips, just barely, and you know that it’s intentional. “They’re basically like shorts.”

Okay, you think, at least this is something to do. You look at the screens, then, and tilt your head toward them. “Can I take a look?” He blinks at that, because this is not where he was expecting you to take the conversation, but he nods anyway and starts to get up so you can sit. “Oh, no, you don’t need to get up.”

You cross the room, but instead of turning your attention to the screen, you slide your legs underneath the chair to sit on the footrest. His legs widen to accommodate you. It is…not a very comfortable place to sit, all things considered, but now you have a front-row seat to the pale skin of his inner thighs. “Ah. You didn’t want to look at our trajectory.”

“Nope.” He looks down and watches as you place your hands on his knees, smoothing the skin with your thumbs. The sight of him, his legs spread, looking down at you with reddening cheeks, the rise and fall of his chest, is so delicious that you wish you were holding a camera. You settle for taking a few mental pictures before you slide your hands forward, now resting midway up his quads, feeling the hairs on the tops of his thighs. Your fingers have almost reached the hem. “How fast are we going?”

“Uh—what?”

You look up at him through your eyelashes, smiling softly. Your finger starts to idly trace random shapes. “How fast are we going? What’s our speed?”

Grace clears his throat and shifts in the seat again. His boxers are already tenting. “You—already know this, but okay. We’re going ninety-two percent the speed of light.”

You nod at his answer and splay your fingers a little wider, so your thumbs reach down to the soft skin of his inner thigh. “And what’s that in miles?”

“Um, that’s—ninety-two percent of, hah,” he gasps, because you’ve just pressed a kiss to the side of his knee, “one hundred and eighty-six thousand, two hundred and eighty-two miles per second, so—about—”

You interrupt him sharply. “I didn’t ask for an estimate.” You look at his thigh, then, just above the crease of his knee, before leaning forward to gently graze your teeth against the spot. His hips shift up, and you glare at him, cheek pressed against his leg. “I didn’t ask you to move, either.”

“Sorry, sorry, I’m—okay, alright, mental math, not super easy at the moment—” His hands tighten their hold on the arm rests when you nip gently at his thigh in warning. “One hundred and seventy-one thousand, two hundred and eight-two point forty-four. Miles. Per, per second.” Grace is already panting slightly.

Pressing a kiss against the spot you just bit, you murmur, “Good. Now in meters?” There’s not actually any way for you to check his numbers, but you know he’s good at math. You trust that he’s giving you the right answers. He’s too much of a nerd not to.

His head falls back onto the headrest, but he keeps his legs and arms still. “You—you’re killing me here, you know that?”

You shift your head to his other leg, moving up a little, and you bite this new area of skin, still on his soft inner thigh. Grace keens, low and desperate, and you can imagine his knuckles turning white from gripping the arm rests so hard.

He is, apparently, not done with talking back. “If that’s the punishment,” he breathes, mouth curling up in a slight smile, “I might just, you know, keep giving the wrong answers.”

This is the wrong thing for him to say, and he realizes it as soon as the words leave his mouth, because then you’re leaning back and nodding, removing your hands from his legs. “I see. Then I probably shouldn’t bother, right?”

“No, that’s—please don’t.” His eyes are wide with panic. “I’m sorry, you—do you still want our speed in meters? I can, I have the number.” You say nothing at that, instead slowly returning your hands to his thighs. “Oh, thank god, okay, it’s—it’s—two hundred and seventy-five million, six hundred and fifty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven point one hundred and nineteen meters per second,” he rushes out.

It is very impressive, so you give him an appreciative squeeze and mouth against his skin gently, right on top of a little mole he has on his right leg. “Very good.” You can hear his head rest against the chair again at the praise. “How long is the journey from Tau Ceti to Erid?”

“It’s almost—” Your nails dig into his skin, not hard, just enough to make him whine. Grace is catching onto the game very quickly—he wants the sting that comes from your teeth and your fingernails, but he doesn’t want to push back so far in order to get it that you’ll stop, so he’s probing the boundaries of what you’ll let him do. “Sorry, you didn’t ask for an estimate, I know, it’s—wait. Do you want from our perspective or Earth’s?”

“Hm, good question,” your purr, sucking lightly on the same spot of this thigh. He whimpers, and you think he’s nodding. You wonder if his eyes are open or closed, but you are too busy to look. “Ours first.”

“A little less than four years.”

The edges of your mouth lift up in a smile, and you switch back to his other thigh and bite, farther up, a little harder than the last one, not enough to break skin, but enough for the imprints of your teeth to remain visible when you pull back. Your tongue darts out to soothe the spot as he groans, and you can just barely see his cock twitch underneath the fabric. “Why did I do that?”

He sucks in a breath through his teeth; he is trying very, very hard not to buck his hips up. “Because—because—you haven’t asked for an estimate, not once, so I shouldn’t have assumed, because you didn’t explicitly say.”

You gently brush your finger across the teeth marks indented in his skin. “That’s exactly right. So…?”

“Three point nine years from our perspective.” Your hands move up just a little bit more, the tips of your fingers now brushing up against the hem of his boxers. His hips shift, almost imperceptibly, but you decide that you will let him off the hook for that. For now. You toy with the edge of the fabric and look up at him. He’s waiting for you to ask how long the journey is from Earth’s perspective. You simply nod, and he exhales in relief. “Thirteen years. I’m sorry, that is an estimate, but I don’t, relativity is really hard—which, right now, feels very topical, I have to say, but ask me another question, please,” he begs.

Maybe on a different day, you might have been a little meaner, might have pointed out that he’s not the one who gets to decide how all of this happens, but right now you would like to keep biting and sucking on his bare thighs, so you show him a little mercy. “Alright. Would you like me to touch you now, Dr. Grace?”

This makes him moan, loudly, and it’s a good thing that Rocky is asleep (though, of course, he would have heard all of this anyway). “Yes, oh my gosh, yes—assuming you mean, well, where I think you mean,” and then he sees the look you give him and decides to stop talking for a few seconds.

First, you keep sliding one of your hands upward, still kissing and biting at his thighs, until you can feel his muscles quivering underneath your mouth from the strain of keeping still. Your fingers hit the crease of his hip and then stop. He looks so good like this, you think, sitting so nicely and waiting for you to do whatever you want with him.

Instead of moving the hand underneath his boxers where you know he would like it to be, you drag it downward, lightly scratching the top of his thigh. Your other hand moves up, over the top of the fabric, and finally, finally slides over his aching cock, and the groan he lets out shoots straight between your legs. You shift, just slightly, so the metal rod connecting the footrest to the chair presses against your core. Grace is too busy squeezing his eyes shut and gasping at the way you’re slowly palming him through his boxers.

“That’s—hah, so good, not exactly what I was thinking, but—”

You stop moving your hand and wait to speak until he’s looking down at you again. “I didn’t ask you to think,” and then you lower your head to bite at his inner thigh, just below the hem of his underwear.

He throws his head back against the chair again. You are slightly worried he might give himself a concussion at this rate. “You’re right, sorry—thank you, this is really good, amazing even, please—I can, are there more questions?”

“Not at the moment,” you murmur, pressing a soft kiss against the bite mark you just left. Your hand resumes in its movements. God, the sounds he is making right now; maybe you could turn the camera on, start recording, and the next time Rocky sleeps again you could play it in the screen room, have two versions of Grace whining and moaning at the same time while you ride him.

It seems like a little too much effort, and you don’t want to pull away to set it all up, so you simply focus on sucking and nipping at his trembling thighs, twisting your hand and listening to the way he gasps when your palm moves over his tip.

You rock your hips forward a little as you consider your options. You could pull his boxers down and take him into your mouth—he really enjoys it when you do that—or, maybe, you could stand up and turn around, placing your hands on the console and let him fuck you. They are all pretty great, but then you wouldn’t get to watch in between bites and kisses as he grips the armrests, alternating between tipping his head back and looking down at you, face entirely flushed.

“I have another question,” you say, and you think he tries to respond, but all that comes out is a choked whimper. “Do you think you could come like this?”

It takes him a few shuddering breaths to gather himself enough for words. “Is that—that’s a rhetorical question, really, yes, yes I can, it won’t even take that long. Which, that might sound a little pathetic, but I have the feeling that you like when I’m—”

You cut him off by sucking another spot on his thigh, your nose brushing against the fabric. Your back is straining a little to lean forward like this, but it is so worth it for the reaction it pulls out of him. You are fairly certain, at this point, that you would probably be able to come like this, too, just from grinding into the footrest.

But that is a side benefit, really, while this is the main event, so you focus on grasping his cock and searching for the movements that make his hips stutter upward, because then you have a reason in this game the two of you have created to nip at his soft skin even more. Grace is right: it won’t take that long, if the way his control starts to deteriorate is anything to go off of.

He swallows hard and manages to whisper, “Can I—would it be alright, would you let me touch you?”

Technically, he’s still not supposed to be asking any questions here, but you nod (and then press your teeth into his thigh for it), and one of his hands lets go of the armrest to gently slide through your hair. He doesn’t grab or pull; he simply cards his fingers through your hair, so softly that it’s almost at odds with the way his cock feels in your hand and the positively obscene noises he’s making.

“So good,” you mumble into his skin, “you’re doing so good. Want you to come like this, whenever you want to, yeah?”

Grace nods feverishly and stops trying to keep his hips pressed against the chair. They jerk and stutter against your hand, and you keep palming him and sucking at his thighs, chasing the thing that you know is coming, the thing that you will watch and hear and tuck away in your mind to replay over and over again.

The sound he lets out when he finally comes is so broken that you might call it a sob. You guide him through it, still moving your hand, tenderly kissing and licking at all of the marks that you’ve left. Finally, you lean back a little to take it all in: the way his glasses have slid down his nose, the flushed tinge of his cheeks, the rise and fall of his chest as he pants, the red splotches you’ve sucked into his thighs, the indents from your teeth, the dark spot in his boxers.

You keep staring for a few moments before looking back up and meeting his eyes. A spark travels down your spine and sits in between your thighs at the thought of him watching you look over his body, taking stock of all of the ways that you have marked him. “So,” he finally says, “I hope you know that this means I will be walking around without pants, like, all the time.”

You simply smile at that and extract your legs from underneath the chair to stand, a little shaky, until he has to tilt his head back to keep looking at you. “I think I would probably lose it a little bit if you did that.”

“Is that a promise?” Grace returns your smile and raises his eyebrows a little bit. You grab his face then, softly, gently, only pressing your fingers in enough to see the way his skin dimples underneath them.