♡.⋆˚. ݁𓃹 ݁.˚⋆.♡

He smiles. That shy, lopsided thing that doesn't belong on Bobby's face because Bobby never smiled like that; Bobby's smiles were teasing and self-aware and loaded, and this one is open and unguarded and a little bit terrified that you won't like it.

“You do? You like it?”

You lift your eyes toward him, and smile. “I love it.”

The yellow warms toward gold around you. Just slightly. Just enough to notice.

You hold out for months.

That's the part that's going to eat you alive later, the part you'll turn over and over in your head. The part where you knew. 

You knew what kissing him did to you from the first time, that clumsy mortifying moment in the blankets when he'd come in his shorts and watched himself discover his new body. The look on BB’s face had carved itself into you like a brand.

You knew because kissing BB isn't kissing. Kissing BB is a substance. It enters your bloodstream through the point of contact, and within thirty seconds, you can feel it spreading. Warm and heavy and stupid, a fog that settles behind your eyes and at the base of your spine. 

The longer his mouth is on yours, the worse it gets. Or better. You can't tell anymore which of those words applies. The two collapse into the same sensation when BB is touching you because his version of pleasure isn't built on the human axis where good and too-much are different categories.

His skin is cool when he isn't touching you. That's one of the things that took getting used to. The temperature of him. His hands when they find your wrist in the dark, his chest when you lean against him in the nest. Cool like marble or water from a deep well. 

There's warmth underneath the surface, banked and dormant, waiting, but it only comes alive when he touches you. The warmth bleeds through contact, drawn out by your body heat, rising to meet you and then surpassing you. And once the warmth is going, it does things. It sinks. It reads. It feeds information back to him through his palms, fingertips, and mouth, a living scan of your nervous system in real time through his skin.

So you hold out. You let BB kiss you sometimes. Short, careful, your hand on his chest when it threatens to become more. His immediate compliance every single time, pulling back to press his forehead to yours. Just breathing even though he doesn’t need oxygen the way you do, hands shaking on your waist, always mortifyingly patient.

For months after the first kiss. Just that.

“Do you dream?” BB asks one evening, his fingers working over your hair. 

You're lying with your head in his lap. The yellow hum is low tonight, and the ghost-flowers on the wallpaper have settled into stillness for once.

“Sometimes,” you tell him honestly.

“What about?”

You almost say Bobby. You catch it in your teeth. “Home, mostly. The apartment. My side of the bed.”

BB's fingers pause over your hair for half a second. Then they resume, slower.

“Do you miss it?”

You think about that. Really think about it, while his cool fingers stroke over your hair and the hum fills the silence with its tuneless drone. Do you miss it? Do you miss the apartment where Bobby's camera equipment colonised every surface? Do you miss the kitchen where he stopped looking at you? Do you miss your side of the bed, which was your side because Bobby took the other side and the middle and left you the edge.

“I miss what it used to be,” you say quietly. “Before it went bad.”

BB's hand settles on your temple. Warm now, from the contact with your skin. His thumb traces the curve of your eyebrow.

“Tell me about before,” he says softly.

Before was good. That's the thing, the thing that makes the after so unbearable. Before was so good.

Bobby in the early months was a revelation. Bobby with his camera aimed at you across a crowded room, lowering it to grin at you with his whole crooked face, saying the light's doing something crazy on you, babe and meaning it with every fibre of his skinny sun-browned body. 

Bobby who kissed you in parking lots and edited footage with his head in your lap and rolled joints on the kitchen counter while telling you about his day in that low lazy drawl that made your stomach flip even when he was talking about lens caps.

Bobby who touched you like you mattered. Hands on the small of your back in a crowd, arm around your shoulder or waist, always. Fingers laced through yours during movies. His mouth on the back of your neck while you were doing dishes, warm and idle, a press of lips that said I'm here and I like being here. Bobby in bed in the early days, Bobby with his chain tangled between your bodies, looking at you with those pale eyes and saying come here, baby, let me feel you with a softness that undid you every single time.

The good was so good it spoiled you for everything that came after. 

The good taught you what Bobby was capable of, what he contained, and that knowledge made the withdrawal so much worse. Because you knew. You knew he could be tender. You'd seen the inside of him, the soft unguarded core he showed you, and then he'd locked the door.

You'd tried to get back in. That's the part that hurts the most now. 

You'd asked him what was wrong. You'd asked him if he was okay, if he wanted to talk, if he needed space, if you'd done something. You'd tried every key you could think of, and the door stayed shut. And the worst part, the very worst part, was that you could hear him on the other side. You could hear him breathing. He was right there, your Bobby, the real one, the one who filmed you sleeping because the light was good, and he wouldn't open the door for a reason you didn’t know.

That hurt more than the silence. More than the grunting. More than the nights he turned his back. Because the silence you could have explained away. You could have told yourself he'd changed, that the tenderness was a phase, that you'd imagined the depth of it. But you hadn't imagined it. You'd been inside. You'd touched the walls. And knowing what was in there and being locked out of it was a cruelty so singular it felt designed.

You tell BB some of this. Not all. You tell him about the parking lot kisses and the kitchen touches and the way Bobby used to look at you through the viewfinder. The way he hugged you with his whole body every time he saw you, nuzzling into your shoulder with a muffled sigh. You tell him about the door closing. BB listens with his head tilted, his fingers still in your hair, his pale eyes fixed on your face with that total, unwavering attention.

“He had all of that,” BB says quietly when you finish. “And he put it behind a locked door and won’t even tell you why.”

“Yeah.”

“And you kept knocking.”

You force a breath over the lump in your throat. “Yeah.”

BB is quiet for a long time after that. His thumb traces your temple. The yellow walls warm around you, trying to bleed toward gold again.

“I don't have a door,” he says softly, quietly. “I don't know how to build one. Everything I have is right here. You can see all of it.”

You close your eyes, and the purr starts low in his chest.

You don't say anything. But you reach up and press his hand against your cheek, keeping him there, close. BB's breath catches, and he holds perfectly still, and the yellow turns gold.

You hold out for months, and the guilt sits inside you like a stone. 

Guilt for wanting it. Guilt for not wanting it enough. Guilt for thinking about real Bobby while BB's mouth is on you, and guilt for not thinking about real Bobby enough. Guilt for the fact that some traitor part of you has stopped flinching at BB's touch and started anticipating it, leaning into it. 

You go to bed with your back to him and wake up curled into his chest, because your body made a decision before your conscious mind could.

And you didn't leave. 

That's the thing you can't explain to yourself, the thing that damns you. 

You didn't leave because after what happened with Bobby, after months of being invisible in your own space, being wanted felt so good. Being needed felt so good. BB looked at you every single day like the sun rose and set in the shape of your body, and that kind of attention was a drug more potent than anything his kiss could do to your bloodstream. 

You were terrified of how much you liked it. You were more terrified of losing it. 

The nest also changed. You don't remember when. You'd been asleep, and BB had been out, doing whatever BB does when he leaves the territory, and you'd woken to find your apartment.

Not exactly. A yellow-tinged approximation of it, laid overtop the warm patch of carpet. The blankets rearranged into a bed with your bedspread from Santa Clara, the one with the faded blue flowers. The pillows you'd left in the apartment when the wall took you. The little side table with the lamp from the yard sale in Sunnyvale. Even the pattern of the wallpaper had shifted, not away from yellow but around it, a suggestion of the flowered paper you'd hung in the bedroom, ghosted through the buttercup background.

BB had been sitting cross-legged beside the nest when you woke, watching your face for the reaction, hands twisted together in his lap. He'd looked at you with such raw nervous hope that you'd started crying before you understood what he'd built.

“I heard you,” he'd said, voice unsure, small. “You said you missed home. So I—” He gestured at the room, his hands shaking. “I don't know if I got the pattern right. I only saw vague glimpses in your mind. I could change it, if it's wrong.”

You'd crawled into his lap. Buried your face in his neck. His cool skin had warmed slowly under your cheek.

That was weeks ago. Months ago. Time is soft here. It's before you started noticing the flowers on the wallpaper moving when you weren't looking directly at them. Before you noticed the lamp doesn't have a cord. Before you noticed that when BB is happy, the yellow warms toward gold, and when he's worried it cools toward green, and the whole territory has become an extension of his mood.

None of it scares you the way it should. That's the part that actually scares you.

“Baby?”

BB is sitting on the edge of the bed. He's holding a blanket he found somewhere, a thick, dark green wool one, and he's folding it with careful absorption. His long fingers crease the edges. He’s already gazing at you when you glance his way. His eyes are Bobby's blue today, human-shaped, the entity safely tucked away behind the mask.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?” he asks carefully. 

You nod. “Of course.”

He visibly hesitates, his head lowered. “Do you want to go home?”

Your chest tightens. “BB—”

“You don't have to answer.” He folds the blanket smaller. His voice is steady, and his hands are also steady, but neither of those things is true underneath. “I just… I've been thinking about it. About whether you're staying because you want to or because you don't know how to leave. And I want, baby, I want you to know that if you—” He swallows. “If you need to go... I won't…”

He stops, staring at the blanket in his hands. 

“I won't stop you,” he finishes, practically choking the words out. 

You gaze at him. At the green blanket folded in his lap. At his hands, which are familiar and gripping the wool hard enough to dimple the fabric. At his face, which is Bobby's face and isn't, which is the face of a thing that heard you crying through a wall and built itself a body to hold you and is now offering to let you go because it loves you more than it loves having you.

“I don't know,” you say honestly. “I don't know, BB.”

He nods, keeps folding. You sit together in the quiet, and the yellow is the palest green you've ever seen it, almost grey, and BB's hands are shaking slightly around the blanket, and he's pretending they're not.

That night you lie awake in the nest that looks like your old apartment with BB's arm across your waist, and you think about going home. Really think about it. You think about the apartment in Santa Clara and the kitchen and your mug on the drying rack and your shoes by the mat. You think about Bobby. You think about whether Bobby is sitting in that apartment right now, or if he moved on without you there to nag him.

You think about going back to him, walking through the wall and climbing the stairs. Finding him. And you try to feel what that would be like, the reunion, the homecoming, and what you feel is—

Grief. You feel grief. 

Because going home means going back to Bobby, and going back to Bobby means going back to a man who locked the door. Who might open it now, might fling it wide, might weep and hold you and swear he'll be different. But you've spent months on the other side of that door. Months knocking. Months making yourself smaller and smaller to fit through the crack underneath. And even if Bobby opens the door now, you know what it's like when it's closed. You know the sound of his back turning. You know the weight of his indifference. You carry it in your bones.

The relationship was over months before you left. You know that now. The wall in Clark's basement didn't end your relationship with Bobby. Bobby ended it. Quietly, one day at a time, one turned back at a time, and you'd stood in the wreckage pretending it was still standing because the alternative was admitting you'd been alone for months in a room with someone who used to love you.

You're only here because you're finally letting the ghost of going home go.

Because letting BB in means choosing the yellow. Choosing the hum. Choosing a place with no sky and no weather. No yard sales on El Camino with golden retrievers named Mango. Letting BB in means letting the real world go, and admitting that the girl who fell through the wall in Clark's basement is not the girl sitting in this nest. 

That girl was going home. That girl was holding on. 

This girl has let go of everything except the creature beside her, and she doesn't want to pick any of it back up. 

It means letting Bobby's ghost go, too. 

The real one, the Bobby who exists in Santa Clara, the one who grunts at your goodbyes, that Bobby has been a ghost to you for longer than BB has been real. And the Bobby you've been holding onto, the candle in the draft, the one who filmed you sleeping and called you my girl, that Bobby is a memory. 

A beautiful, aching, preserved memory of a man who doesn't exist anymore. 

Loving a memory is not the same as loving a person. A memory can't change. A memory can't hurt you, can't grow, can't learn. A memory just sits in your chest, glows, and keeps you warm, and slowly, slowly starves you because you're using it to feed a hunger it was never designed to fill.

BB is not a memory. BB is real. He’s flawed in his own inhuman ways, learning in real time, and holding you right now, his cool arm across your waist, his purr a low vibration you can feel through the mattress. BB is the one who brought you a red button because your mom had a red mug years ago. BB is the one who offered to let you leave even though it would destroy him.

You love him. Not as a replacement. Not because he wears the right face. You love the thing behind the face. The thing that has no door, that never had it.

You turn over. Press your face into BB's chest. His arms tighten around you at once, his skin warming under your cheek.

“I'm staying,” you tell him in a tender whisper.

BB goes still.

“You—”

“I'm staying, BB,” you tell him again, pressing closer, tucking yourself close. “I'm choosing this. I'm choosing you.”

The purr cracks. Breaks apart. Reassembles into something so deep and so full it vibrates in your skull. BB's arms crush you against him and his face buries in your hair, and he's shaking, shaking, his cool body warming everywhere you touch him, and the yellow floods gold. 

The whole room, the whole level, gold as sunlight, gold as the thing inside his chest that has waited longer than time itself for someone to say those exact words.

You kiss him the next day.

He's beside you in the nest, cross-legged, telling you about a level he found that loops back on itself, and you're half-listening, more focused on the shape of his mouth than the words coming out of it. You lean over and press your lips to the hinge of his jaw. Just there. A small, warm press between his ear and his chin. 

BB falters mid-sentence. A stutter, a swallow, his eyes flicking to you and away.

“—and the walls change texture right where it loops, which is, um. Interesting because—”

You kiss the corner of his mouth. Lightly. Barely there. And your hand finds the back of his nape.

BB stops talking.

His neck is cool under your palm. Smooth, the tendons shifting as he swallows. Your fingers curl into the short hair at his nape. The change is immediate: his skin warming under your touch, temperature rising from mild to warm in three heartbeats. 

“Baby,” he says carefully, his voice dropping half an octave. “What are you—”

You kiss him again. On the mouth. Full. Your lips part against his, and you make it different. You don't hold back. You don't keep your hand on his chest as a brake. You kiss him with your whole body leaning into it, and your hand on his nape tightens, pulling him closer.

BB makes a sound against your lips. Small. Startled. His hands come up to your waist on instinct, and you can feel them warm against your skin in real time, heat blooming where you're connected. He's bracing himself for the pull-back. He's already preparing to be patient about it.

You press forward instead. Your weight shifts, your knee coming up onto the blankets, your body tipping into his. BB's hands tighten on your waist. You can feel the exact moment he realises you're not stopping, his fingers digging in, his breath hitching, his mouth opening wider for you. And you push him.

Gentle but firm, both hands on his chest now, and BB goes where you push him. 

His back hits the wall. The ghost-flowered wallpaper presses against his shoulder blades, and you're in his lap, knees on either side of his hips, chest against his chest. You kiss him fully. Mouth open. Tongue sliding against his. Your fingers in his hair and your hips pressing down against him and every last ounce of restraint you've been maintaining for months dissolving into the heat flooding through you.

The heat. The fog. It hits you the second you stop fighting it. Months of buildup pouring through. Your head swims. Your skin goes electric. BB's warmth blazes against you, drawn out by your body, his cool skin going hot wherever you touch him.

BB moans. Deep, ragged, pulled from somewhere below his chest, vibrating through his ribs into yours. Hungry and wanting. The sound of a creature starved, weak with wanting you so much. 

His hands move. They stop being still on your waist, and they move. Both of them, everywhere at once, kneading. His fingers grip the fat of your hips. His palms slide up your ribs. His hands cup your breasts through your shirt, fingers pressing and kneading with a desperate, tactile hunger. He needs to touch all of you at once, and two hands aren't enough.

His tongue slides along your lower lip, longer than it should be, and you open your mouth wider and let him in. BB groans desperately, his hips rolling up against you.

The sound is wet. BB’s tongue slides against yours in a coil that tightens and releases in eager pulses, saliva building between your joint mouths. The kiss is messy and open, drool collecting at the corner of your lips because you can't swallow around the thickness of his tongue filling your mouth.

You roll your hips against him again, harder. BB makes a broken sound, and his head drops back against the wall, his throat baring. You kiss it. The spot his pulse should be, his Adam's apple, the hollow at the base. His skin is warm now, fully warm, almost hot.

You pull back, your face inches from his. Your hands settle on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slamming against your palms. BB’s eyes are half-black. His mouth is swollen and wet, gaping open. His hands grip your hips hard enough to leave marks, his whole body trembling.

“I want you,” you gasp against his lips.

BB goes still. Every muscle in his body locks, his hands freezing on your hips. His breathing stops. His eyes search your face with an intensity that has nothing to do with Bobby and everything to do with the ancient thing behind the mask.

“You—” His voice trembles, going thin. “You want—”

You press your forehead against his. “I want you, BB.”

“Do… do you mean—”

“I mean all of it,” you rasp, your hand slipping into his hair. “I mean you."

BB’s face cracks open. His expression unravels completely, and what's underneath is raw and enormous and terrified and so, so joyful. His eyes go fully black, the entity surging to the surface, and he looks at you like you've just handed him the universe.

“You want me,” he whispers desperately, testing the words, faint with disbelief.

You cup his face with both hands. Your palms on his jaw, your thumbs on his cheekbones. His skin is burning under your hands.

“I want you,” you repeat, and you kiss him. Deeper. Slower. His tongue coils around yours, gentle, trembling, the grip shaky because BB is shaking, his whole body is.

He pulls back a centimetre, forehead nudging against yours. Eyes black and wet as they drink you in.

“I waited so long,” he whispers, his voice pained. “I waited so long for you. You don't know how long I was alone. And there was nothing. Just the hum, and the yellow. And then there was you. I heard your voice and I—”

His breath hitches, a wounded sound vibrating at the back of his throat.

“I'd rarely heard anything except the hum and the things in the dark, but then you were on the other side of the wall, and you were talking. Your voice… it was the first beautiful thing I ever heard. I built this—” He touches his own face. Bobby's face. His hand trembling. “I built all of this for you. Because I heard you crying and needed hands because you were sad. And I… I wanted to hold you, and I didn't have anything to hold you with.”

Tears burn your eyes. BB's thumbs trace your cheekbones lightly, wiping the tears as they threaten to escape.

“You were born for me,” he breathes, fierce and tender all at once. “I know that now. I was in the walls for—I don't have a number. But then you came along, and I knew. I was waiting for you this whole time. You were always going to be mine. I just had to learn how to deserve you.”

“I love you,” you choke out. “BB. I love you.”

He makes a broken, needy sound, pressing kisses to your face, your cheek, your jaw, your eyelids, the corner of your mouth. “I love you. Let me touch you. Please. Baby, please. I've waited so long.”

“Yes,” you whisper. “Take me to bed.”

He carries you. Two steps, three, his inhuman strength on casual display, and he lays you down on the bedspread with the faded blue flowers. 

His hands are shaking. The purr starts in his chest, a deep warm vibration you can feel through the mattress. He kneels between your legs and looks at you, just looks. His mouth swollen and wet. His chest heaving.

“I don't know how to. I've never—”

“I know.” You reach up and cup his face. His cool skin warms immediately under your palm. “I know, baby. I'll show you. I've got you.”

He drops down against you, his weight settling along your body, his face burying in your neck. His mouth opens against your pulse, and you feel his tongue, just the tip, tracing the vein under your skin. His lips close over your pulse point, and he sucks gently, the purr vibrating through his mouth into your neck.

“You're so warm,” he breathes against your skin. “Baby. You're so warm. I've been cold forever. And you're like a fire. I can feel your heartbeat through your skin. You're so alive. You're the most alive thing I've ever touched.”

His hands slide up your sides, pushing your shirt. His palms drag over your ribs, warming as they travel, and you can feel each finger pressing independently, the cool-to-warm transition happening in streaks along your skin. He pushes your shirt up and off, and his breath catches.

“Oh,” he exhales. Awed. “Oh.”

His hands hover an inch above your body, fingers spread, trembling. He looks at you like touching might break him entirely.

“It's okay,” you whisper. “BB. Touch me.”

Both hands settle on your breasts. Cool palms cupping you, and his temperature spikes, warming fast from the centre of his palms. His thumbs drag across your nipples, and you arch into the sensation, shivering.

“There,” he breathes. “Look at you. You're so soft. I've been touching concrete and monsters forever, and you're, you're so—”

He ducks his head and presses his mouth to the swell of your breast. Open-mouthed. Hot. His tongue slides out, the tip tracing the curve of you in a wet drag, and you gasp. BB makes a hungry sound against your skin, half moan, half purr.

“You taste alive,” he murmurs between greedy, slick licks. “I don't have a word, baby. You taste like everything I was missing.”

His mouth finds your nipple. His tongue coils around it, wrapping and squeezing gently, and he sucks. The purr intensifies, vibrating through his lips and his tongue into you. You cry out, sharp and broken, cupping his head to keep him there.

BB's hand kneads your other breast, fingers gripping, the wrong-textured pads of his thumbs dragging across your nipple. Between the attention to both at once, your head swims, your hips lifting off the bed. He murmurs praise into your skin, pulling off with a wet pop to press his open mouth to the underside of your breast, licking the crease there, nosing into the soft skin desperately.

“So beautiful. You have no idea what you look like. I didn't even know what this body was for until I saw you.”

He sucks a mark into the inner curve of your breast, suckling greedily. Then his mouth moves lower. BB’s tongue draws a long, unbroken line from between your breasts to your navel. He presses his mouth flat against your stomach and breathes in, eyes fluttering shut.

“I could stay here forever,” he mumbles against your belly. “Just breathing you in. You smell warm. I didn't know warm had a smell until you.”

BB’s fingers hook into your underwear and pull them down gradually. His breath catches as he bares you. His eyes go wide and fully black, fixed between your thighs. He's looking at you with such naked reverence it steals your breath.

“You're wet,” he says, hushed. His thumbs trace the crease where your thighs meet your hips, slow even as you sense the shaking still quaking his fingertips. “So wet, baby. Is that for me?”

You shiver at the touch, squirming. “Yes. All for you, BB.”

BB’s whole, borrowed body shudders at the confirmation. His tongue slides out, long and sinuous, and he licks his lips with it. The hunger on his face is staggering.

“Let me taste you,” he begs quietly. “Baby, please. I've never… please.”

Heat floods through your veins, molten and thick, at the pleading note in his voice. “Yes. God, yes.”

BB drops down immediately. His mouth presses to the inside of your knee. Cool lips warming as they drag up your inner thigh, pressing open-mouthed kisses into the soft skin there. His tongue traces the path, licking long wet stripes up your thigh. He pauses an inch away. Breathes. His breath is hot and damp, and your hips jerk toward him.

“You smell so good,” he murmurs. “And you're hot. I can feel it on my face.”

His tongue makes contact. Long and wet, dragging flat from the base of you all the way up. You sob, and your hands fly to his hair. BB makes a deep, guttural moan that vibrates through his tongue and into you, the purr kicking up so hard it vibrates the bed frame. His fingers dig into your thighs, and his mouth opens wide, and he licks you again. Slower. Longer. The tongue lingering at the top, the tip curling and pressing between your folds curiously.

“Baby. Baby. You taste… you’re dripping for me and so alive. I can't stop, I can't—”

He buries his face in you. His mouth open and his tongue extended to its full impossible length, lapping and stroking and coiling with the desperate, artless hunger. The sounds are obscene. Wet, squelching, sloppy. Saliva and your own arousal mix and drips down his chin. BB’s moaning into you with a continuous low vibration, his fingers gripping your thighs hard enough to bruise, pulling you closer, pressing his face deeper, taking more.

“More,” you gasp through a breathy moan. “BB, more. Please.”

His tongue extends further. Longer. Longer. You feel it pressing inside you, and your hips buck, and BB growls against your clit then keeps pushing. The muscular length of it curls and coils inside you, filling you, reaching deeper than fingers could reach. Deeper than anything human could, and you feel it pressing against the back of you, the very deepest place, and your whole body seizes.

“BB, that's, oh God, that's—”

His tongue presses against the mouth of your womb. The tip of it, delicate and hot, nudging that innermost barrier, and the sensation is so deep and so foreign that your entire body goes rigid and your hands yank at his hair and you make a gasping, yelping sound. High and ragged, pitching toward half a scream.

BB moans into you. The vibration travels through the full length of his tongue, from your clit where his lips are sealed to the deepest place where the tip is pressing. Stimulation at both ends simultaneously and all through the middle, his tongue moving, coiling and uncoiling, massaging places that have never been touched. His lips close over your clit and suck, hard, and the tongue is so deep you can feel it in your stomach.

You're thrusting into his face. Your hips rolling, grinding against his mouth, and BB makes a pleased sound and holds you tighter to him, delighted. Then his hands clamp on your thighs, and he pins you. Presses your hips flat to the mattress with an inhuman grip you couldn't break if you tried, and the sudden loss of control makes you writhe.

Your sounds don't belong to you anymore. You're gripping his hair with both fists. BB is purring so hard the vibration sits at the back of your throat, and his tongue is touching places that have never been bordered. His chin is soaked, and you can hear the wet, filthy sounds, and you're sobbing, thrashing against his grip.

“You're gonna come for me,” he mumbles against you, his mouth never fully leaving. “I can feel it. So close, baby. Give it to me. I want to taste you when you come.”

You come. Hard. 

Your whole body arches against BB’s grip, thighs clamping around his head, hands pulling his hair. BB moans into you and holds you down and licks you through it, his long tongue working inside you as you clench and spasm around him. 

He's swallowing, sucking, drawing every last drop into his mouth and gulping it down hungrily. His lips close over your swollen folds and he laps at them, slow and thorough, licking you clean with long flat drags. Each pass over your over-sensitive skin makes you twitch and whimper, and he keeps going. Collecting every trace of wetness, every last drop, his tongue dragging through the mess of you with a patience that borders on worship.

“Every drop,” he's murmuring, practically slurring. “I want every drop. My perfect girl.”

His tongue retracts gradually, inch by inch, and you can feel every inch leaving you. The emptiness when it's gone is aching.

BB presses a kiss to your cunt. Right there. Soft. His swollen lips against your swollen folds, gentle and lingering. He pulls back just enough to breathe against you.

“I'll be inside here soon, baby,” he murmurs, his lips brushing your throbbing core as he speaks. “Right here. Right where my tongue was. I'll be so deep. I'll fill you up.” Another kiss. Softer, absent. Like he has no idea what his words and actions are doing to you. “I'll take good care of you. I promise.”

He crawls up your body. Wet open-mouthed kisses up your stomach, between your breasts, on your throat. He tastes like you. You can taste yourself on his tongue when he kisses your mouth, wet and deep, and the intimacy of it, tasting yourself inside his kiss, makes your whole body clench.

“I need you,” he pants against your lips. “I need to be inside you. Please. I need—”

You peck his lips, breathing against them, “Go on. Need you, too. But I want you to show me. Show me what you really are.”

He goes still. The fear rises behind Bobby's eyes. His whole body goes rigid, and his hands tighten on your hips.

“It’s fine.” His voice quivers. “I can keep the shape. You don't have to—”

You trace his cheek, outlining the ridge of his cheek. “I want to.”

“I don't—” He swallows hard. “I don't want you to see me and—” His jaw pulses from how hard he’s clenching his teeth. “What if you can't look at me after? What if I'm—”

“BB.” You cup his jaw, the constructed bones trembling under your palms. “Whatever you're comfortable with. Whatever you want to show me. I'm not going anywhere.”

He gazes down at you. Black-eyed and trembling, searching your face for the lie, for the flinch, for the moment you take it back. He doesn't find it.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay. Just, just a little. Let me just…”

His jaw sharpens under your hands. Just slightly. The line of it going harder, more angular, the bone shifting beneath his skin. He watches your face the whole time, ready to snap back at the first sign of revulsion.

You stroke your thumb over his newly sharp cheekbone. “Beautiful,” you exhale.

BB makes a low, choked sound. His eyes go wider, blacker. The pupils elongate slightly, going vertical. He's shivering. Genuinely shivering, full-body tremors, and you can feel his skin gaining a faint iridescent sheen under your palms, cool and smooth.

“More?” he asks, barely audible.

You take him in, all of him. “More, baby.”

His shoulders lengthen. His neck gains an inch. The proportions of his face slide further from Bobby, the mouth too wide, the cheekbones too high, and you trace the new angles with your fingertips and press your mouth to his jaw and lick the iridescent skin and BB whines. High and desperate and pleased.

“You're… you're not—” He's stammering, trembling in your hold. “You're not scared?”

“I'm not scared, BB. Keep going.”

He gives you more. His spine gains extra vertebrae you can feel through his skin, his torso gaining a sinuous quality. The ghost of a diamond pattern moves beneath his skin, the suggestion of scales. His fingers lengthen slightly, extra articulation appearing in the joints.

You run your palms down his chest, trace the diamond pattern. You press your mouth to his collarbone, where the iridescent sheen is strongest, and kiss the skin there, open-mouthed, tasting the chilly smoothness of him.

BB drops his face into your neck. Hiding. He's hiding, his too-sharp jaw pressed against your shoulder, his shivering intensifying, and you can feel his features still shifting against your skin. He's giving you more, but he can't watch you see it.

“Hey,” you coax, putting your hand under his chin. Tip his face up. “Hey. Look at me.”

He resists for a second. Then he lets you lift his face.

He looks alien. His eyes are polished obsidian, no whites. His jaw is too defined. His mouth is too wide. The iridescent skin catches the yellow light in shimmering refractions. He looks terrified. He looks beautiful.

“There you are, baby,” you whisper, and lean up and kiss him.

BB produces a broken, grateful sound against your mouth, and the purr comes back so hard the walls vibrate.

He adjusts his position, still kissing you as he settles between your thighs, and you understand, immediately, that he’s not a copy.

The mimicry that he's maintained for months falls away the second BB pushes inside you. He's BB. A creature in a body he built to love you, figuring out what it can do in real time.

The shape of him inside you is not human. It's close enough that the entry works. But once he's seated, the texture is wrong, and the temperature is wrong, cool at first then warming fast, and he fills you in ways men don't. His anatomy is adjusting, learning you, reshaping moment by moment. Ridges where there were none. Swells of pressure in places human anatomy couldn't produce. The length of him moving with a sinuous quality. And it's still changing, adjusting his shape to hit exactly what makes you cry out.

“Oh baby,” he breathes, his voice cracking, ragged. “I can feel everything. I can feel your heartbeat through your—” He shudders, his back arching like it’s too overwhelming. “How do humans survive this?”

“BB, you feel so good, right there, don’t stop, baby—”

You press your hips up against him, taking him deeper, squeezing him with your inner muscles, and BB makes a choked, groaning sound, his whole body going taut above you. 

You can feel the fullness of him shifting inside you, the ridges dragging, his cock reshaping in response to the pressure of your squeeze. Where you tighten, he swells. Where you release, he fills. It's a feedback loop made flesh, his anatomy learning yours in real time, and the sensation is so foreign and so full that your eyes water.

“Yeah? Is that good?” His voice breaks. His hips roll again, deeper this time, and the ridges snag and drag on the withdrawal, a slow slick pull that makes an obscene dripping sound. You both gasp at it. You both hear it. The slick, filthy evidence of how wet you are, how aroused, and BB's eyes go glassy, his mouth falling open. “Tell me. Tell me I’m good.”

You adjust your thighs again, opening even wider, hooking your ankles behind his back and pulling him in until he's nestled so deep you can feel the cool-turning-warm base of him flush against you. The fullness is immense, a stretch that borders on too much, and you squeeze him again and BB's arms buckle. His elbows hit the mattress on either side of your head, and his face is inches from yours. 

His mouth opens, and the sound he makes is a raw, ruined whine.

“Y-You're perfect, BB. Don't, ah, stop.”

He rolls his hips again. Slow, sinuous, that serpentine wave he can't suppress anymore, and the motion drags his cock against you, every ridge and swell and shifting contour lighting up nerve endings you didn't know you had. The slick sounds between your bodies are continuous now, a gushing symphony between your joint flesh. You can feel your own arousal dripping down onto the sheets below, and you don't care because the fullness is extraordinary, and every roll of his hips makes the ridges snag against your walls and catch and pull, and each pull sends you closer to the edge.

You push your hips up to meet his next stroke. The impact makes you both groan. You do it again. Finding a tempo together, his wave and your thrust, the wet lewd sounds getting louder, and BB is panting against your mouth, his breath hot and damp, his eyes half-closed.

“You're so tight,” he gasps. “Baby, every time you squeeze me I can feel your whole body, I can feel everything tighten, you're gripping me so hard, and it's, it's—”

You squeeze him harder. On purpose. Clench around the shifting shape of him and hold. BB's eyes fly open, and his mouth stretches wide, and a sound comes out of him that’s pure entity, a harmonic moan that vibrates through his cock and into you and through the walls. His hips stutter out of the wave and slam forward, involuntary, and the ridges catch deep inside you and your back bows off the bed.

“There,” you gasp, your eyes burning from burning pleasure ravaging through your body.

“There,” he echoes, awed. “I can feel what that does to you. I didn't know anything could—”

He shudders, and his features shift with it. His jaw sharpens a degree. The iridescence pulses brighter on his cheekbones. He ducks his face into your neck, hiding.

“No,” you say, breathless, your hand tangling into his sandy hair. “Let me see you.”

He resists. His jaw pressed against your shoulder, his breath ragged against your throat.

“BB. Let me see.”

He lets you lift his face, his features having slipped further. Cheekbones too high. Mouth even wider. The iridescence brighter. His eyes are completely black and wet, and he's so scared, you can see it. You look directly into them and say, “Don't hide from me. You're beautiful.”

BB makes a strangled sound, his hips stuttering. The purr cracks and reforms. His features shift more, right in front of you, and you watch them move, watch his face rearrange itself in real time, and the intimacy of it makes you reel. Because it’s more intimate than the sex. He’s literally coming apart in front of you and letting you watch.

“Good,” you moan, stroking his shifting jaw. “That's it, BB.”

The pleasure isn't building in a line; it's accumulating in layers. 

His hand under your back, lifting you. His mouth on your throat, usually cool lips searing. His thumb at the hinge of your hip, longer now, bending where thumbs don't bend. The appendages emerging one by one, warm and tapered, gripping your thighs, holding your legs open at an obscene angle. Each one a new layer feeding into the one beneath it.

His hips slam deeper, and your breasts ripple with the force. BB is watching, his too-wide mouth lolling open, and his eyes are glazed, his features shifting faster now, responding to pleasure the way a human face flushes. His jaw sharpens then softens then sharpens again. His pupils dilate and contract in pulses seemingly against his control. 

“Look at what I do to you,” he pants, his voice hitting a deeper register that’s decidedly not Bobby. “I can't stop touching you. Your skin is so soft, every part of you is burning for me, and you're—” His voice fails him. He ducks his face into your neck again, his features shifting against your skin, and you feel the rasp of scales that aren't quite scales, there and gone.

You pull him back up again, hold his face. He's whining, high and continuous, his eyes wet.

“Stay with me,” you say. 

He moans loudly. His features ripple again, even further from Bobby, and his mouth is trembling, and BB looks destroyed, open, the ancient thing behind the mask laid bare while he fucks you, and the vulnerability of it makes your chest ache.

“You're incredible,” he breathes. “You're so wet for me, all of this is for me. I can f-feel how close you are. I can feel it building. Baby, please. Come for me."

Your orgasm rips through you, and BB snarls at the sensation, his features sharpening, the entity surging to the surface, and he doesn't stop, doesn't slow. His hips keep working ruthlessly. The shape of him inside you keeps shifting with each thrust. The appendages grip your thighs tighter, and your orgasm rolls into another one immediately, pinned down, taking whatever he gives you.

“That's it,” he purrs against your ear, nuzzling. “My girl. I can feel you fluttering around me. I've never felt anything like you.”

His tongue slides out, longer than it should be. Drags up the side of your neck. His teeth catch your earlobe, too sharp, and the tiny sting makes you gasp. His hand kneads your breast, gripping, his ridged thumb dragging across your nipple.

“You're so perfect,” he mumbles against your ear, his hips still working, the wet squelching symphony filling the room. “Every time I push in, I can feel you opening and closing around me, and it's—baby, it's the best thing I've ever felt, it's better than anything, you're better than anything—”

His length adjusts on every stroke, swelling and contracting, ridges rubbing against your sensitive walls. The sheets are getting damp beneath you. BB is moaning with every thrust now, layered over the purr, and the purr is vibrating through his cock and into you.

You can't control the sounds coming out of you. You're moaning and sobbing continuously, mindless, drool on your chin, tears on your face, your nails clawing at his back and leaving furrows in the iridescent skin.

The third hits. Your whole body seizes with it. BB cock swells inside you, expanding impossibly, and the stretch shoves you over again, a fourth on the heels of the third. 

“That's it,” he gasps. “You're taking me so well. You're the first. The only one. There's never been anyone except you.”

The truth of those words hits you straight in the heart. He made this body for you. It has never known anyone else, and likely never will. 

By the fifth round, you can't produce words anymore. Your mouth is open, and nothing's coming out. BB is murmuring into your skin, his tongue licking the tears off your cheeks, tasting your throat, your sweat, every available inch of skin. Your body is nothing but sensation. He's whispering, awed and dazed: “I've got you, baby. So brave. So warm. You're everything, my everything.”

Around the sixth, your hands go limp. Your whole body goes slack except for the involuntary tremors. You're drooling freely onto the pillow. Your eyes are glazed and half-open. You’re conscious but only just, held in a state of continuous pleasure that has dissolved every boundary between your body and his.

BB feels himself getting close. His breathing changes. His hips lose their fluid wave and become harder, urgent, perfectly ruthless. The purr breaks into a low keening sound, and he pulls back.

He cups your ass. Both hands, those long wrong-jointed fingers gripping the flesh of you. He raises your hips off the mattress, tilts you up toward him. Holds you there, suspended.

And he peers down. At your stomach.

You follow his gaze through the fog. You look down at your own body.

You can see him. The shape of him moving inside you. A subtle bulge beneath the skin of your lower stomach, pressing outward with every thrust, the length of him shifting and adjusting. The bulge presses up and recedes in time with his hips. Your stomach ripples with each motion.

BB is staring, transfixed. His black eyes are nailed to the sight of himself inside you, his mouth parted. 

“Look at that,” he purrs, and this time you see and hear the predator underneath, satisfied with what he’s seeing. “Look at that. I can see myself inside you. You're so full of me.”

He presses deeper, and the bulge pushes higher. You moan, a thin broken sound, and BB makes a soft noise back, almost soothing, and his hips work faster, holding you up, watching himself move inside you.

“You're taking all of me,” he remarks appreciatively, head cocked. “Every inch. Look at what you're holding.”

His tongue extends, slipping to wrap around the spot where his cock keeps sliding into you, and you moan when the tip prods almost playfully at your swollen clit. 

He thrusts into you twice more, hard and deep, finishing inside you with a pleased sigh.

Warm. Impossibly warm. It pulses in time with the harmonic, filling you, filling and filling, overflowing, spilling out around him. The faint gold glow. Pale and luminescent, pooling on your inner thighs, gushing down onto the sheets. Puddles of it. The bed soaked. His release casts a soft light upward onto both your bodies. BB is still inside you, still shaking through it, his mouth on your neck, licking slow grateful stripes up the column of your throat now. 

You’ve never heard the purr going louder. 

“You did so good, baby,” he rasps affectionately, peppering small kisses behind your ear. “Look at what you took. All of me.”

You can't answer. You can barely breathe. Your whole body is a limp pile of limbs beneath him. You’re boneless against the pillows, drool on your chin, tears drying on your face, hair plastered to your forehead.

BB pulls back to examine you. His face is a mess, too, half-slipped, jaw too sharp on one side and human on the other. Black eyes and swollen mouth, chin still dripping with you. He's grinning. That dark pleased grin, all predator, the purr rumbling on in his chest cavity.

His hips roll again. Slow, testing. Still hard inside you.

“Again, baby?” Low, dark, almost mocking. “One more for me?”

You don't have one more in you. You’re empty, wrung out, incapable of forming sentences.

You nod anyway.

BB whines, high and pleased, and drops his mouth back to yours and starts moving all over again.

He fucks you until you black out.

You lose consciousness somewhere in the middle because your body cannot sustain the amount of pleasure being poured into it and your brain, mercifully, shuts down. The last thing you're aware of is BB's purr vibrating through both your bodies and the faint gold glow pooling under you and his mouth against your temple whispering I love you, I love you, I waited so long, I love you.

When you come back, you have no idea how long it's been. You're clean. He's cleaned you. The bed is dry. You're wrapped in the blankets, wearing one of his shirts. BB is curled around you, human-shaped again, mostly, his face buried in your hair, his arm heavy across your waist. He’s purring. Low and pleased and constant. His skin is cool again, warm only where you're pressed together.

You stir. He notices immediately.

“Baby,” he calls out, his mouth finding your temple. “You're awake. Are you okay? Did I… was I too—”

“Perfect,” you slur, your throat aches from the sheer amount of moaning and screaming you’ve done. “You were perfect, BB.”

He goes still. Then he shudders, his arm tightening around you. He presses his mouth to your hairline and holds it there for a long time. The purr deepens into something so full it borders on mournful, loving, perfectly content.

“I love you,” he says, his voice small, shy again. “I love you more than anything.”

Your eyes burn, but for a different reason now. “I love you too, BB.”

He shivers at the words, a full-body reaction. Under the blankets, one of the appendages, not retracted all the way, probably never fully retracting again, curls around your thigh. Possessive. Settling. Warming as it holds.

“Again later,” he murmurs against your temple. That cocky dark satisfaction layered underneath the tenderness. “We're going to do that again.”

You should be terrified.

But you’re not. Because you’re finally home.

You fall asleep to the sound of BB’s purring, and his whispered I love you in the yellow light of a nest that looks like your old apartment, in the arms of an ancient lonely being that has finally, finally been chosen.