oops all fallout!

"Now, you've gotta be quiet. There's others around."

The hotel right off the crumbling black highway you'd been walking for about two days wasn't the nicest place you'd ever traded caps for a room, but it was decent enough. The walls and ceiling were cracked and stained, every piece of furniture reeking of cigarette smoke, but the bed seemed nice and steady. That was the important part.

Charon let out a tight, amused chuckle at your comment as he yanked your underwear down your legs and discarded them wherever your pants and boots had disappeared off to. He was always quiet, letting little more than a growl or a rumble slip until the moment he could feel himself tip over the edge.

You, on the other hand, could barely keep quiet if your life depended on it as long as he was touching you, which was one of the major reasons you almost never got laid out on the road.

When you'd first started messing around, things had been stilted and sort of slow, getting to know one another's bodies and limits. Now that there was a baseline of trust and knowledge, you were both comfortable enough to get things started rather quickly. Despite his willingness, even eagerness, he still seemed to grow more and more nervous as things progressed.

The bed frame held both of your weights, Charon's more significant than your own, but it did groan as the bulky ghoul moved himself onto it, hand disappearing between your bodies to start touching you. His whole body seemed stiff, his breathing erratic.

"Relax." you breathed against his skin, playing gently with the remaining tufts of fiery red hair that still decorated his scalp. His only response was to ghost his thin lips down your exposed torso, mouth tracing along your skin and making you shiver. Posture rigid, those big, rough hands found your thighs and pulled them open, settling himself over you. You wrapped your arms around him as best as you could, both of you grunting as he slid inside. He didn't mirror the relieved breath you let out.

Charon always seemed tense during sex.

Well, that wasn't quite it. Everyone held a certain amount of tension during sex; that wasn't so unusual. But the quiet, beefy ghoul you'd essentially taken into your employ was already a walking ball of constant tension even when his pants were on, so the way he was so tightly wound it seemed he might explode into dust throughout every sexual encounter you had with him was hard to miss.

Initially, you'd chalked it up to a long period of celibacy, or maybe just an overall lack of experience. After all, that first time had been full of awkwardness, months of lingering looks and yearning comments boiling over into fumbling your way through removing just enough clothing that you could feel one another. The aftermath was full of dodged eye contact and nearly oppressive silence as both of you struggled to think of something to say, but neither of you pulled away.

You weren't entirely sure what you'd call your relationship, even now. There was no real title between you, nor had there ever really been one, but there had been a closeness growing between you since you'd purchased his contract to free him from Ahzrukhal. As things stood, he'd saved your life more times than you could count, had followed you into the depths of hell and back, sat by your side while you slept at night. Still, you'd never talked feelings...not that you weren't keen.

In the time you'd known him, you'd come to understand that Charon could be very sweet and vulnerable in his own ways, especially when the mood was right, but it took a lot of knowledge of his personal quirks to be able to see it. He was more of a man of action than a man of words, that much had been clear from the moment you'd met. But with the increased affection, that same tension came in spades.

He held you very carefully when you slept together, both during and after the actual act. You were certain at least part of it was him wanting to be close, anchoring your body as near to his as he could manage. But, at the same time, it always felt like he was gripping you the way one might hold a delicate-winged moth in your hand, trying to keep it from slipping away without crushing it.

"Ugh." you huffed as he found his rhythm, the texture of his scarred cock making you clench and rock against him.

You lost track of time for a while, unsure of exactly how long you'd been tangled in a ball of limbs and flesh. It was difficult to keep your eyes open. Charon's frame began to tremble with the effort of holding himself above you, every muscle taut and exuding a warmth that only contributed to the heat around you. A light film of sweat clung to you as your hand moved down to give yourself more stimulation where you needed it most. The sight of it made him sigh wantonly, working your leg up higher on his hip.

"Fuck, yes." you praised, gripping loosely at his broad shoulders as he nuzzled into the side of your neck, his heavy, rhythmic breathing adding an additional, delicious edge to every thrust he gave as it tickled down your spine. His whole body was stiff, his movements rigid. Your nails dug harder and harder into whatever parts of him you could reach as your core tightened, the way you squeezed around him drawing a growl from his chest.

He continued on, fucking you through the orgasm that broke over you rather unexpectedly, washing you in wave after wave of toe-curling pleasure and only relenting once you started to fuss from the overstimulation. Chest heaving, he spooned up behind you, arm around your waist as he pulled you snug against him.

"You done?" you panted, sheepish and hiding it poorly.

"Mm." he replied in the affirmative, pressing his face into the back of your head. You rolled to face him, taking advantage of his seemingly receptive state, and wound your arms around his neck. As always, that second pesky question began to form on your lips, but you already knew the answer, and you knew that asking would only make him feel insecure about the whole thing. Of course, he'd never admit that that's how he felt out loud, but for all his anger-tinged stoicism, Charon was fairly easy to read once you'd had enough time to observe him.

For a few silent minutes, you laid there, face buried in his chest as you caught your breath. One of his arms remained slung over you, petting absentmindedly at your lower back. The continuous throb of his erection, still stiff between you, had only faded a little by the time you began to stir again.

Measuredly, you pulled yourself up on top of him, straddling his hips and leaning down to peck at his thin lips. You took your time, showing him bolder affection than you typically would, heart thundering at the idea that he might reject you for doing so. He didn't, thankfully, but he was giving you the same nervous side-eye a stray dog might when you tried to approach it, curious, but hesitant.

"What're you doing?" he asked.

In a soothing gesture, you rested your head against his chest and peered up at him.

"Aww, relax. I wanna take care of you." you reassured, lips brushing against his rough, patchy skin as you spoke, leaning in to plant a few soft kisses. "You didn't finish."

He squirmed in discomfort at the statement, grabbing cautiously, but firmly, at your shoulders to halt you as you tried to make your way down his torso towards his hips.

"Don't need to." he insisted.

You rolled your eyes, though playfully as you could manage to show you weren't really upset.

"I know you don't need to." you replied, running a free hand up and down his bare thigh while giving his most sensitive bits a wide berth. "Do you want to, though?"

Sighing heavily, he narrowed his lids at you ever so slightly. Still, there was a glint of intrigue in his eyes. You laid another kiss on his sternum, lingering this time.

"C'mon. You take such good care of me. Let me return the favor. It's only fair."

The pair of you stared at one another, each one seemingly waiting for the other to crack. Charon won that particular challenge, as he always did with his impeccably flat affect, his milky eyes betraying far more about his thoughts than his otherwise mildly sour facial expression. However, when you sucked your teeth at him, waving away his minor victory with a loose pass of your hand, he seized that hand and held it to his sternum, flush against his warm, warped skin despite the loose grip he maintained. You turned your hand and placed it palm-down, feeling the steady beat of his heart. The sensation brought a small smile to your lips.

"Alright." he said suddenly, tone hardly one of a man giving in after a long, hard fight. It made you laugh.

"Oh, thank you so much for the sacrifice." you smirked, a swift peck landing right on his cheek. It made that little grin you sometimes saw flashes of tug at the edges of his mouth appear for a split second, and you felt yourself smiling much more genuinely as you gave him a careful push, encouraging him to roll from his side onto his back. His bare skin was warm beneath you as you pulled yourself over him, kissing and nipping your way down from his lips. Most of the flesh along both sides of Charon's neck had been stripped away by the ghoulification process, leaving exposed muscle fibers to harden with time. The single strip that remained intact ran from his strong chin straight down to the base of his throat, a path you traced with the tip of your tongue. When you tickled at his Adam's apple, he let out a hum, squirming beneath you almost imperceptibly.

You straightened back up as you moved lower, sitting rather squarely between his legs as you grabbed at his half-hard cock, flagging a bit from a lack of stimulation. Stroking him with one hand, the other roamed aimlessly from his scarred-over navel and across his inner thigh, exploratory. As he hardened fully once again, he seemed to begin to lose himself in the pleasure, if only enough to get him to close his eyes and arc his hips up into your touch a bit. Still, it was more fully engrossed than he ever seemed to be otherwise.

Setting a steady pace as you stroked him, he gave a soft sigh of approval. Moving on from his inner thigh, your palm swept upward to cup at his scrotum, something that never failed to make him visibly jump. However, you carefully massaged at him, feeling the way his boys pulsed and responded to your touch, something that made him groan more openly. The sound made your own core ache again, but you ignored the feeling to focus on the show.

You were a little hesitant to go too far when it came to poking around. He'd never stopped your wandering hands, even when they slid further south to dance along the cleft of his ass, but that's about as far as you'd gone. Though rather chaste, technically, he still seemed to really enjoy it, hips bucking up into your grip in short bursts.

"Close?" you breathed, feeling him jerk in response to the sultriness in your voice.

"Ugh." he breathed with a single nod. Your teeth dug hard into your lower lip as you continued to watch him, unblinking. Only a moment later, he shuddered, muscles flexing as he shot his load all over his own abdomen and your hand. It made quite the mess, reaching almost all the way up to his chin in one spot, but he helped you clean up silently, hands a bit shaky.

As you dug into your bag later, packing up so you could head out, you brushed past the small leather pouch where you kept Charon's contract, the folded piece of paper never leaving your person. Despite not really believing in the power Ahzrukhal (and, seemingly, Charon) prescribed to it, you strongly preferred if no one else got their hands on it. You tucked it deeper into your things, covering it with some back up trousers you carried.

The contract was a confounding item to you, one that never ceased to feel like it was burning a hole through your pack as you carried it around. When you'd first "freed" Charon from indentured servitude by purchasing it from the now-dead Ahzrukhal, you'd immediately tried to give it to him, not even a second thought in your mind that if anyone should have it, it should be him. He'd refused you outright, though, just as he had every other time you'd subsequently made the same offer. Thinking something about his pride was keeping him from accepting, you'd offered to sell it to him instead, or to let him work off its value if that would make him more comfortable. No dice. He continued to insist that you held his contract, therefore you were his employer and he would go where you went.

As more time went by, you began to wonder if he even had anywhere else to go. While he had proven to know various people throughout the Capitol and beyond, he didn't seem to have friends, only business connections he had no warmth for (and who seemed to have none in return). He never spoke of any family, either—not that that was odd for anyone throughout the Wasteland, let alone a ghoul. Still, the longer the two of you travelled together, the more you began to slowly realize just how alone he seemed.

Maybe that's why he'd chosen to follow you in the beginning.

Maybe that's why he was still following you.

The thought churned into a knot in your gut as you walked along the old interstate, baking in the hot sun. Sighing, you cast a quick glimpse at him, a pace or two in front of you, as per usual, his head on a swivel. Perhaps it was a bit self-involved to worry this much on his behalf when he'd never expressed any unhappiness to you. But, then again, you didn't think Charon was the kind of guy who would bother to say he was unhappy to begin with.

"What's the matter?" he asked suddenly, navigating both of you through what appeared to have once been the courtyard of one of the taller buildings you were passing.

"Hmm?" you asked, feigning confusion.

"Quiet today." Charon observed, scanning you over quickly before turning his head back to the road.

You frowned halfheartedly in response.

"Oh. Guess I'm just tired." you replied, silently returning to fretting. You'd never want him to only be with you because he felt as if he had no other choice, or because of some weird contract you'd never taken seriously, and the idea had really started to consume your thoughts as the shadows began to grow longer and darker.

It was once you reached a small town that your pace slowed, each of you scanning the homes you passed to see if any of them seemed like a feasible place to spend the night. Finding one that didn't seem primed to come down if the breeze blew too hard for even a second took longer than usual, but at least some of the tension you'd been carrying in your now-aching back had subsided by the time you'd settled into the old sitting room for the evening, Charon sitting on the moldering old couch and watching the door.

"Hey." you said, saddling up close beside him, hip to hip.

A short, silent nod was his reply, hands working away at cleaning the riot shotgun he always kept strapped to his back. He was meticulous about its maintenance, as well as that of your own weapons. Once he was finished with his own, he'd move on to them. That had been his routine since the very first time you'd made camp together. The small fire you'd built in the old hearth crackled along, combining with the sound of the breeze pushing leaves along the crumbled street outside to create a strangely soothing sort of music. Hesitantly, you reached out and put your hand on his knee.

"I care about you." you said, words quieter than you'd meant them to be. "You know that, right?"

Charon looked distinctly uncomfortable as he sat the gun down on his lap, but the look on his face when he turned his full attention to you was more one of hesitant confusion than one of annoyance.

"What makes you ask that?"

Your chest and neck began to flush hotly, and you shifted your weight from hip to hip, the cushion uneven.

"Hm?" you replied, simply not ready to answer and refusing to do so.

"What makes you ask if I know?"

You shrugged, studying the flames. The heat in your neck began to seep up into your face.

"I dunno." you answered, fidgeting with the knobs on your Pip-Boy just to have something to do. "We never say stuff like that, so I guess I wanted to make sure we're both on the same page."

He was doing that thing again, studying your face like he was worried you were coming down with something as he very clearly tried to calculate what the right thing to say was. Immediately, you felt guilty for stressing him out.

"We are." he said bluntly, waiting to see if that would placate you.

You smiled, unwilling to keep on in the face of his obvious discomfort.

"Okay. I'm glad."

Once the tension in the air seemed to mostly dissipate, you had a light supper and tucked in for some shut-eye, curling up on the long sofa beside him. He seemed extra quiet, if that were even possible, but he petted at your head rather affectionately where it rested against his outer thigh as you dozed off, feet dangling over the edge of the far arm rest. Soaking in the feeling, you tried your best to hide your excitement, as well as the relief that he might've actually been telling you the truth instead of what you wanted to hear, as you'd feared.

The next morning, as you were in the midst of shaking yourself awake, he propositioned you. Of course, you didn't turn him down, eager to express some of the tenderness you'd tried to communicate in a more physical way. There was more kissing than usual, more caressing and cuddling, but your lover yet again failed to reach any sort of climax, leaving you veiled in guilt as you laid across his chest afterwards.

"I wanna ask you something." you said suddenly.

He actually huffed a laugh at that, though it was a more sarcastic sound than you'd expected.

"Got a lot of questions lately." he said, sitting up so he could begin redressing. He was never too keen on hitting the road late.

You rolled your eyes and gave his shoulder a light, playful shove, holding yourself still despite the way you wanted to wriggle in embarrassment. His incredibly frank manner was something you'd come to really appreciate, but it never failed to make you squirm when it was deployed in your direction.

"Do you enjoy yourself when we sleep together?" you asked, trying to be frank in return.

The way he looked at you, the question may as well have been whether or not he enjoyed breathing oxygen.

"I guess that's not really what I wanted to ask." you went on, brain churning through different approaches. "What I mean is that you seem tense, you know?"

Charon seemed to bristle a bit at that, his chin lifting a few degrees. He seemed to wait for the rest of your statement. When it didn't come, he shrugged, soft and rather genuinely confused.

"So? Still have a good time."

"Well, a lot of the time you don't—"

He immediately cut you off.

"Don't wanna talk about that. Not your fault."

"I know!" you insisted softly, trying to keep so you wouldn't egg on his defensiveness. He was already talking more than you'd expected. Scooting closer until your sides touched, you reached out very carefully and placed your hand on his thigh, moving the way one might offer their hand to a cautious stray.

"I think being on top stresses you out."

He shook his head, suddenly looking to the side of you instead of right at you.

"Come on," you encouraged. "I won't judge you for being honest."

Again, he shook his head, his facade cracking a bit around the edges the longer you stared at him. You started to understand why this is how he handled most of his social interactions. To your surprise, instead of getting up and going outside to smoke, which was his usual response when he didn't want to continue with a conversation, he leaned back in his seat again and hummed quietly.

"I guess," he admitted.

You felt yourself relax, too, leaning against him more casually. Both of you seemed to take a breath.

"So...you don't have to be on top. Not if you don't want to be."

He stared at you, mouth set into a hard line.

"Not all the time, at least." you added on, brows high. "I just don't want every time we have sex to be stressful for you. I want you to be able to relax and enjoy yourself like I get to."

His gaze softened, but his suddenly re-stiffened posture didn't. No matter how hard you tried to keep quiet while he seemed to think, you just couldn't help yourself.

"If you really don't want to, that's fine. I just don't want you to say no because you're afraid I'll judge you or something. And it's not like anyone else would have to know."

Your tall, ghoulish mate was staring at you hard, an entirely new look on his face that you'd never seen before. It was as if he was weighing how much he really trusted you. After a minute or two passed, he gave a shrug.

"Guess I could try it."

Charon never ceased to surprise you in a plethora of ways. You'd always assumed that his lack of control throughout so much of his life would have led him to want to be in the driver's seat in every moment moving forward, to be able to exercise his newfound freedom in every way. Apparently you'd been dead wrong, at least when it came to this one particular thing. Slowly but surely, he demonstrated his eagerness to cede some control.

He was the most delicious kind of pitiful the more comfortable he got with you touching him, exploring what he liked. Though his insistence that he take care of you before anything else persisted, he slowly became more and more agreeable to letting you take the reins in the later portion of your encounters. The light teasing you'd already been doing with the tips of your fingers gradually became exploring with your tongue, sliding it carefully along his aching cock until you were teasing at the quivering ring of muscle you eventually found while you continued to stroke him. The gasp he'd let out when you first lapped at him, shaky and sharp, made you grin like an idiot...though not as much as watching him writhe in pleasure as his orgasm overtook him had.

For a long while, that's how things were between you. Charon would fuck you until you could hardly stand, then he'd lie back and let you finish him off with your hands and mouth, growing bolder and bolder with each instance. Eventually, you began prodding at his entrance with your spit-slickened fingers, rubbing your body against him as you applied strategic pressure in slow, deliberate circles. He hummed, a strangely pleading sound like you'd never heard before.

Actually penetrating him in any way, even with your fingers that were much smaller than even his own, was more nerve-wracking in the beginning than you'd anticipated, much to your surprise. You knew how easy it was to accidentally hurt someone if you did something like this wrong, and the idea that he'd heal quickly if you did something wrong gave you no comfort. Thankfully, he didn't seem to mind you taking your time in working your way up to more than one digit, the longest one still enough to give him enough stretch to make his cock throb wildly. At the right angle, you could even stimulate his prostate a bit...something you didn't need to do for long to make him completely lose control, which was good because it was a bit hard on your wrist. You flexed it to and fro as you watched him try to compose himself.

As summer turned to fall, the new way of things became normal enough that he no longer seemed embarrassed when you started on the path to where you were going, only eager. His enthusiasm turned you on, the ability to be as generous with him as he often was with you a boost to both your ego and your libido.

He'd become agreeable to cuddling afterwards more often with time—at least, to the degree he would normally let you cuddle him. The wind was kicking up loudly outside the hundredth room you'd paid for, blowing dust and sand beneath the door. You studied the sound with one ear while the other listened to Charon's racing heart.

"Would you ever...let me full-on fuck you, you think?" you asked, peeking up at him.

The big ghoul didn't instantly laugh dismissively or attempt to throw anything at you, thankfully, but the way he cut his eyes at you, lids narrowed all of the sudden, didn't exactly inspire confidence. There were a few beats of quiet between the two of you, not enough for anything to happen, but just enough time for you to blink, both metaphorically and literally.

"Sorry, I didn't mean—"

"I didn't say no." he interjected suddenly, expression hardly changing at all.

You blinked a few times, mouth lagging behind your brain.

"You didn't say yes, either."

Silently, he shrugged, seemingly measuring you up rather thoroughly. You snorted a laugh before you could stop yourself, unsurprised by his strange sort of coyness.

Your efforts to acclimate Charon (and yourself) to penetration became rather experimental in the following weeks. Sure, there were plenty of...adequately-shaped things that existed for you to try out, that was no issue. But the more you did so, the more you found yourself afraid of something going horribly wrong. You'd heard stories. In fact, you'd been turning one of those stories over in your mind as the two of you had picked through a trade outpost, your companion looking through the proprietor's ammunition stock before stepping outside for a smoke. You'd been about to follow him when you spotted something that might have been adequate to put your worries to bed.

It was hard to tell what the thing was made of, but it was solid, weighty and obviously hand-carved, polished with effort until the surface was smooth. It was heavy, rounded at the tip and flared at the base, decorating a shelf beside some other innocuous things.

"Is this a...?" you asked the seller.

"It's whatever you want it to be," he replied.

It had been a bit of an ordeal to obtain the thing, and it had cost you more caps than you'd expected—an eyebrow-raising amount, really. But you'd paid it and you were excited, regardless of the increasing nervousness that gripped you as the two of you discussed where you'd stop for the night. Cresting the next hill, you let out a breath of relief.

At a distance, the old motel didn't look any different from any of the other places you'd stayed, but when you got close you could see that the front office was actually boarded up completely. That was both good and bad; good because you'd save caps, bad because the place might be a trap or harboring some other kind of threat. It took over an hour, but together the pair of you swept the building, double-checking the most intact room for signs of recent occupation. The lock on the door still worked fine, but the door itself seemed as if it might crumble into a pile of splinters if you so much as looked at it wrong, so Charon slid the incredibly heavy-seeming chest of drawers in front of it.

"This is about as nice as the last room we actually paid for." you observed jokingly, and he hummed in a mix of agreement and amusement.

With the only window boarded up, the room instantly grew incredibly dark, leaving you scrambling through your bag for the small lantern you usually carried. The batteries were starting to reach the end of their life span, and you had to give it a whack or two to get it to the level of brightness it usually produced. Even with that, the room was dim, but in a sort of romantic way. Well, it would have been more romantic if the place wasn't sort of trashed, but it only took a few minutes of working together to clear off the (mercifully dry and non-moldy) bed and the corner it sat in, a single liveable spot in the entire building.

There was still an hour or so of daylight left outside, but you wouldn't have really known it as the two of you began to settle in a little, your companion visibly more comfortable after the door had been shored up. He settled into the stuffed chair against the wall and started reading a book he'd been carrying around lately, some sort of manual or another. A lit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth as his eyes studied the page, only a couple inches from his face. The sight made you giggle, and he shot you a chastising look.

"Want anything to eat?" you asked, nonchalant and fidgety as you dug through your bag in search of your little stash of canned food.

"Mmm." he replied, turning you down.

"You sure? You didn't eat this morning." you continued, your hand bumping against the very distinct shape of your new purchase. You sighed, taking a sign as a sign.

When you lifted your head to look in his direction, he was already eyeing you in a heated way.

"I have something I wanna show you." you said, face growing hot.

Adjusting his posture to sit more upright, he closed the thing and sat it on his lap, casting you the sort of patient look one might give their child who asked to show off their latest trick. It didn't help your sudden case of performance anxiety. You swallowed hard, mustering up the gumption you needed to make it over the finish line. After all, you'd already done the truly hard work of finding it.

Of course, the big ghoul didn't react instantly, his eyes obviously struggling to make out the shape of the implement in your hand. You moved a step or two closer, but kept enough space between you that he couldn't lunge if he decided to.

"Oh, Christ." he said finally, sinking back into the chair loosely.

You giggled, but it was a nervous sound.

"Where the hell did you get it?" he asked, lids narrowed as he studied the thing in your hand like it might transform and attack him at any moment.

"Does it really matter?" you responded, trying to wave it around a little less. "I happened upon it and decided to buy it."

"Bet you got scammed." he shot back instantly.

Your jaw dropped loose, an indignant huff flying out of your mouth. Since the earliest days of your time together, he'd loved to give you shit for how bad you were at bartering and trading, something you'd never really considered yourself a master of. The back and forth and one-upping just didn't agree with you, and you were often eager enough for a transaction to end to just hand over whatever they asked for, something Charon found incredibly gauche after years of doing business on behalf of penny-pinching Ahzrukhal.

"I didn't!" you insisted. "I haggled!"

He scoffed, though more playfully than his expression would have suggested.

"Mhmm."

"Look, you're changing the subject!" you said, giggling in a mix of actual frustration and mild beguilement at his attitude. Something about the sound seemed to tickle him a little, and he pursed his lips in the same slight way he often would when he was trying to avoid laughter.

"And...?" he inquired.

"Well? Are you interested?" you lobbed back, fidgeting in place.

He blinked very deliberately, cocking his head at you by a few degrees. You held your breath.

"I guess." he said finally, tinted with poorly feined casualness.

That made you laugh again, and you finally closed the last bit of distance between you and tossed yourself down into his lap, wrapping an arm around his impossibly thick neck and planting a long kiss on his scarred mouth. Though tense for a moment, he melted into the affection rather easily after a long moment, smoothing your hair as he cast you a sort of unreadable look. You poked him square in the middle of the chest with the thing, and he rolled his eyes.

"Next trader we come across, I'm keeping a close eye on you." he muttered, finishing his cigarette off with a single long drag and tossing the butt into the fireplace. You could smell the tobacco lingering on him as he tugged you close and let his hands wander across your body

"Excited?" you teased, running your hands down his chest.

"Shut up."

You refused to let him wrestle your pants off like he immediately tried to, clamoring on top of him to try and use your weight to force him down onto his back. You failed miserably, of course, but he reclined anyway, hands on your waist as you showered him with kisses and nips. He wasn't much of a biter, himself, but every time your teeth so much as skimmed him anywhere, he seemed to melt. In fact, he was putty by the time you'd both shed your clothes, your face buried in his chest as you bit at him over and over.

The feeling of cooking oil wasn't high on your list of favorite sensations, but it was about the only thing you could reliably get your hands on to provide what felt like enough lubrication. Charon grunted in disapproval at the slick, cool feeling of the stuff against him, just like he always did, but he didn't outright complain. Or, he didn't have the time to complain before you were massaging at him, teasing his puckered hole with one hand and the leaking head of him with the other. He outright whimpered, and you groaned in reply.

"You're so cute like this." you praised, pressing one finger, then two inside him, spreading them apart just slightly with each pass. He let out a sound that was somewhere between a hiss and a scoff; you knew he hated when you teased him like that, but you also knew he wasn't really in any place to argue with you.

The sex toy wasn't all that girthy, but it was definitely a bit larger than three of your fingers put together, which was the most the two of you had ever worked up to. Despite how painfully aroused you were, trying your best to keep the hand stroking at his erection steady so you wouldn't overwhelm him and spoil the fun, you found yourself nervous in a way you hadn't been in a while as you eyed the thing. You didn't want to hurt him by accident. The steadying breath you drew in was embarrassingly loud, but Charon didn't even seem to notice, too busy lowing at the third finger you'd begun to prepare him with. He was producing an almost obscene amount of pre-cum, the clear fluid dribbling down your hand as you teased him.

"Ready?" you asked, swallowing hard. Your whole body was covered in a sheen of sweat despite the late autumn chill in the room.

"Mhmm." he nodded, hips already rocking against your hand, eyes screwed shut. You wished ghouls could still blush; it would have been adorable to see him red from head to toe.

Trying to work the smooth, polished thing inside him was infinitely more scary than the first time you'd used your fingers on him, you discovered. In fact, when you realized, dumbly, that you wouldn't have the same sensory input to monitor the situation, you almost backed out. If something went wrong, you weren't sure you'd ever be able to forgive yourself. The way he wriggled and huffed, however, changed your mind.

Your lover was a bit tense beneath you, breathing his way through the initial stretch of you pushing inside him, but he didn't protest. In fact, his hand moved up to clasp over yours, tightening the grip you had on his leaking manhood and groaning again. For a while, you didn't press as deep as the toy would allow you, working your way further inside with trembling, tight-gutted patience. More than once, your free hand moved from between his legs to between your own, touching yourself to the sweet, pathetic sound of him letting you fuck him.

"Jesus," he spat suddenly when you gave an especially deep, slow thrust that must have hit right where you were aiming. His erection jerked angrily in his grip, and you wrapped your hand around it again, desperate to feel him come apart. Your patience was well rewarded, Charon nearly ripping a hole in the upholstery of the couch when his orgasm broke out. It may have been your ego convincing you of what you wanted to hear, but you could have sworn he sighed your name as he exploded.

Afterwards, you marveled at him, collapsed and panting. You'd never seen him struggle to collect himself for so long, almost a full minute passing as he tried to steady his breathing and slow his heart, which thundered excitedly against the side of his ribcage, each thud resonating into your sweaty flank.

"Still think I got scammed?" you grinned.

Charon let out a huff of consideration. The look in his eyes said he was grateful for the handhold, the way to segue from what had just happened back to something a bit less directly exposing.

"Probably," he concluded, swallowing thickly. "Still haven't told me what you spent on it."

You laughed warmly, rolling yourself back on top of him and resting your chin on his chest, staring up at him from your perch.

"And I won't," you teased. "Besides, it's already paid for itself, if you ask me."

He groaned in embarrassment, giving you a gentle tap on the forehead in chastisement.

"Pushing it."

"Oh, not even close. Not yet."

That earned you a prompt whack with whatever wadded-up article of clothing was closest, a move that put you on the defensive just long enough for him to flip you onto your back, hovering over you, shielding you beneath him.

"Didn't finish."

"I don't need to." you smiled, reaching out to pet at him lovingly.

His face lit up with smugness, as if he'd been waiting for you to say those exact words.

"I know. Want to?" he asked.

You bit your lip to keep from grinning, stretching yourself out beneath him in a beckoning pose.

"Alright." you sighed dramatically.