#lex's corner

You went to the Night Market in the old district, full of neon signs, sizzling woks, and crushing crowds. It was the last place you expected the fastidious Rafayel Qi to visit, yet he moved through it with a fascinated, wide-eyed delight.

He was a paradox. He would wrinkle his nose at the smell of stinky tofu, dramatically shielding his face with a fan he’d bought from a grandmother three stalls back, only to drag you enthusiastically toward a display of hand-blown sugar glass figures, his eyes shining with genuine wonder.

“Look at the viscosity,” he murmured, pointing at a dragon cooling on a marble slab. “He’s working too fast. If he slowed down the cooling process, the clarity would be better.”

“He’s making candy for tourists, Rafayel, not sculpting for the Louvre,” you teased, bumping his shoulder with yours.

He looked down at you, feigning offense. “Art is art, Miss Liaison. Whether it’s sugar or marble. You have no appreciation for the ephemeral.”

“I appreciate that it tastes good,” you countered, buying two. You handed him a fish-shaped one.

He stared at it. “Is this a mockery?”

“It’s a snack. Eat the fish, Rafayel.”

He took a bite, grimaced at the sweetness, and then, before you could react, he leaned down.

“You have a bit of sugar,” he murmured. His thumb brushed the corner of your mouth, wiping away a stray crystal. The air around you seemed to freeze, the noise of the market fading into a dull roar. His eyes dropped to your lips, dark and focused.

He replaced his thumb with his mouth. It was a thief’s kiss—quick, startling, and tasting of burnt sugar. He stole it right there in the middle of the crowd, under the glare of a red lantern.

When he pulled back, he looked incredibly pleased with himself. “Too sweet,” he critiqued the candy, licking his lips. “But the garnish was acceptable.”

You stood there, face heating, while he casually turned to inspect a stall selling vintage cameras. You were relearning him, you realized. You were learning that his arrogance was often a shield for playfulness, that he was tactile in a way that made your skin hum, and that he had absolutely no shame about catching you off guard.

The night wound down as you walked along the river embankment, away from the crowds. The city skyline reflected in the dark water, a fractured mirror of gold and white.

“You’ve changed,” he said suddenly. He was walking on the river side, balancing on the low stone curb like a tightrope walker, his arms out for balance.

“I got older,” you said, watching him to make sure he didn’t fall. “I got boring.”

“No,” he corrected, hopping down to land softly beside you. “You got... guarded. But the guard is lowering. I can see the girl who used to race me to the vending machines starting to peek out.”

“She was a brat,” you laughed.

“She was my favorite person,” he said simply.

He stopped walking. You stopped with him. The river breeze blew a strand of hair across your face. He reached out to tuck it behind your ear, his hand lingering on your neck. The playfulness was gone, replaced by that heavy, magnetic gravity that seemed to stir between you.

“I missed her,” he whispered. “But I think I like who she grew up to be even more.”

He kissed you again, and this one wasn’t stolen. It was given. He took his time, his lips moving over yours with a slow, savoring pressure that made your knees weak. It was a kiss that asked a question, one you answered by stepping closer, your hands finding the silk of his shirt.

The roar of the night market bled back into your ears as he slowly pulled away. You let out a shaky breath, your lungs struggling to catch up with the sudden, frantic racing of your heart.

“You taste like burnt sugar.” he brushed a stray strand of hair from your face, his thumb lingering on your jawline.

You stepped back, putting a fraction of much-needed space between the two of you to let the heat in your cheeks dissipate. “And you still dislike sweets.”

“I’ve developed a tolerance.” he smoothed down the silk of his shirt where your fingers had clenched the fabric just moments before.

You started walking again before either of you could let the moment root itself too deeply into the pavement, before the warmth of his mouth on yours could calcify into something that demanded immediate examination. The river moved alongside you, slow and indifferent, reflecting the city back at itself in long, distorted ribbons of gold. He fell into step beside you, close enough that the sleeve of his silk shirt grazed your arm with each stride.

He had, you noticed, stopped balancing on the stone curb. He was walking properly now, hands loose at his sides, the performative ease of earlier replaced by something quieter and less curated. Like he’d run out of energy for the performance somewhere between the sugar glass dragon and the second kiss and had simply... stopped bothering.

You found you preferred it. The unedited version of him.

“There was a stall back there,” he began, tilting his head in the vague direction of the market behind you, “selling antique ice skate blades. Did you see it?”

Your stride hitched, just barely. “I didn’t.”

“I stopped for a moment when you were looking at the embroidery.” he kept his eyes on the river, his tone carefully light. “The blades were old. 1940s, maybe. Double runner style. They had this quality of…” he paused, turning his wrist over as if searching his own palm for the word. “Weariness. Like they’d been somewhere and come back with stories they didn’t know how to tell.”

Your throat did something complicated. You kept your own gaze forward. “You sound like someone who’s been looking at too many antiquities.”

A soft exhale of breath, almost a laugh. “Probably.” he glanced at you sideways, a quick, checking look. “I didn’t buy them. I thought about it. And then I thought about how they’d look on a shelf in a hotel suite in whatever city comes next, and I put them back.”

The honesty of it landed quietly in your sternum. You understood it without requiring an explanation. That there were some things too freighted with meaning to carry casually, that some objects in your hand became mirrors you weren’t ready to look into. You pressed your lips together and said nothing, and he seemed to understand that your silence was not absence but agreement.

The embankment curved gently, leading you away from the brightest stretch of the city lights and into a section lined with old plane trees, their roots lifting the stone path in small, patient rebellions. The noise of the market had thinned to a distant hum. Somewhere ahead, a street musician was playing something slow on a stringed instrument you couldn’t immediately name, the notes carrying on the river breeze in fragments.

“Do you still listen to music when you run?” he asked.

You blinked. The specificity of it, the fact that he’d retained something that small from the rink years, when you’d complained once about the earbud situation during a warm-up jog, caught you entirely off guard. Your ribs contracted around the surprise of it. “How do you even remember that?”

“You had that ancient mp3 player. The yellow one.” he glanced at you again, something amused pulling at the corner of his mouth. “You were incredibly defensive about it.”

“It had excellent battery life.”

“It was the size of a small brick.”

“Functional design.”

He made a sound of gentle skepticism. You huffed, and the huff dissolved into something that was nearly a laugh, and that was worse, because laughing at things he said felt increasingly like a habit you were developing without having consciously decided to. You tucked your hands into the pockets of your jacket and tried to recollect yourself.

“I listen to podcasts now,” you admitted. “True crime, mostly. And one about the history of textiles that I maintain is more interesting than it sounds.”

He absorbed this with the focused sincerity he gave to information he was actually storing. “Textiles.”

“The history of how fabric moves across borders and economies and centuries. It’s essentially logistics, but softer.” you shrugged one shoulder. “I find it calming.”

“You find logistics calming.”

“I find understanding systems calming. Yes.” you slid him a look. “Go ahead.”

He raised both hands, a gesture of peace, the silk of his shirt catching the light. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You had a face.”

“I didn’t have a face.”

“You had the face you get when something confirms a theory you’ve been quietly running.”

The corner of his mouth curved. He dropped his hands. “I was simply noting the consistency of your character.”

“That’s a very diplomatic way of saying I’m boring.”

“I said nothing about boring.” he stepped around a lifted tree root with automatic grace, that deep-seated fluidity that never fully went offline regardless of context. “I said consistent. There’s a difference. Consistent means you’ve built something real. Something that holds its shape.” a brief pause, his gaze returning to the river. “Most people I know are performing a version of themselves so polished it doesn’t have any real edges left. You have edges.”

The warmth that moved through your chest at that was inconvenient and immediate. You stared at a fixed point between two of the plane trees and willed your cheekbones to behave. “I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one.” he said it simply, without the cushion of irony, and that plainness was somehow the most disarming thing he’d done all evening, which was saying a considerable amount given the sugar thief business back at the market.

You walked a few steps in silence. The musician’s notes drifted closer, something that resolved itself gradually into a slow, minor-key waltz. You could see him now, an older man on a folding stool under one of the trees, an erhu resting against his shoulder, his eyes closed, playing for himself as much as anyone.

Rafayel slowed. 

He stopped fully, standing at a slight distance from the musician, his head tilted just a degree as he listened. You stopped with him. You watched his face in the low ambient glow of the embankment lights, and what you saw there was the same quality you’d glimpsed when he’d talked about the antique skates. The specific stillness of someone being given permission to simply stand in one place and receive something.

He stood like that for nearly a full minute. The musician played, unhurried, unaware of his audience, and Rafayel listened with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes half-closed and something in the set of his jaw that was not the controlled composure of the superstar but something older and younger at once.

Your chest ached with a tenderness that you didn’t entirely know what to do with. You looked away, at the river, giving him the privacy of not being watched.

When the phrase resolved and the musician paused to shift his bow grip, Rafayel reached into his pocket and set something folded on the open case beside the man’s stool with a quiet care that the musician acknowledged only with a slow nod, eyes still closed, already finding the next note. Rafayel stepped back to you.

He didn’t comment on it. He simply started walking again, and you fell into step beside him, and neither of you said anything for a stretch that felt like breathing after holding it, easy and necessary.

“What was the piece?” you asked, eventually.

“I don’t know.” he turned his collar up slightly against the river breeze, a small, unthinking gesture. “Something that sounded like missing a person.”

Your throat closed around the response you might have offered. You walked instead, and the silence was not empty and not painful and was, you realized with a faint, dazed shock, comfortable. You were comfortable in the silence beside him. You couldn’t quite remember when that had started happening.

—

The night market had a second life further along the embankment, a smaller, quieter version of itself tucked into a covered arcade where the stalls were fewer and the lighting was warmer and the vendors had the settled, unhurried energy of people who had been selling the same things in the same spot for a long time. Rafayel wandered into it with the expression of a man who had no agenda whatsoever, which meant, you had learned, that he was intensely interested in everything and was calibrating accordingly.

He stopped at a stall displaying small, hand-painted cloisonné pieces. Boxes, pendants, figures in vivid blues and greens and a specific shade of red that had no business being as saturated as it was. He picked up a small round box, the paint worked in a pattern of overlapping waves, and turned it in his fingers with an attention that was almost clinical.

“The craftsmanship on this is better than the stuff they sell near the museums,” he observed, not to you specifically but to the general principle of the thing.

The woman running the stall, who appeared entirely unbothered by the arrival of a person who looked like he’d been assembled by a marketing department, leaned forward on her elbows. “My grandmother made it,” she offered, in the flat, direct way of someone who had heard a great many people express appreciation and was interested primarily in whether this one meant it.

Rafayel looked up at her. His expression did the thing it sometimes did, the mask fully absent, just a person talking to another person. “How long did she work in this style?”

“Sixty years.”

He set the box down with a gentleness that was almost reverent. “Sixty years doing one thing with your hands and learning it properly.” Something moved through his voice, a quality you recognized as genuine envy. “That’s extraordinary.”

The woman studied him for a moment, then glanced at you with an expression that you interpreted, with a small private jolt, as he’s a keeper, that one. You looked at the boxes with intense focus and said nothing.

He bought the wave box. He slipped it into his pocket with the particular care of someone who intended to put it somewhere they’d see it. You decided not to think about what that implied.

At the next stall, which sold dried botanicals and small paper packets of things with handwritten labels, he picked up a bundle of dried lavender and held it to his face with absolutely no self-consciousness whatsoever. You watched him do it and felt something creak open in the vicinity of your sternum.

“I can’t smell much when I’m competing,” he said, setting the bundle back down with the particularity of someone placing an object in exactly the right spot. “The cold dries everything out. The only thing that gets through is the ice itself, which has a specific smell that isn’t quite water and isn’t quite nothing.” he glanced at the other bundles, reaching out to touch one labeled in a small neat hand. “I’ve been trying to re-establish a relationship with other smells. It sounds idiotic.”

“It doesn’t.” your voice came out quieter than you intended. “It sounds like someone trying to get their body back.”

He was still for a beat. Just a beat. Then he picked up the small paper packet his finger had landed on and turned it over. Dried chamomile. He bought it without reading the label, tucking it into the same pocket as the box, and moved on to the next stall, and you followed him through the warm light of the arcade feeling slightly winded in a way that had nothing to do with the walking.

The things you were learning about him, the accumulated, unsorted pile of them, were not the things you’d expected. You’d expected remnants of the boy you’d known, familiar furniture in a rearranged room. Instead you were finding entirely new architecture. The deliberate, almost methodical process of reclaiming ordinary life from the hands of a management apparatus that had been running it since he was twelve. The way he stopped to listen to a street musician and left something in the case and didn’t mention it. The careful purchase of a grandmother’s sixty-year work. The dried chamomile for a body that had been managed and maintained and optimized and was, somewhere beneath all of that, just trying to remember what lavender smelled like.

You thought about what he’d told you in Seoul, on the phone in the dark of his hotel room, his voice tight with the specific helplessness of exhaustion. Thomas orders everything in advance. You hadn’t fully understood, then, how structural the dependency was, how deep the roots of it went. You were beginning to understand it now, through these small, undefended moments at stalls in a night market, and it pulled at something in you with a gravity you were less and less interested in resisting.

“Tell me something,” he began, pausing at a junction in the arcade where two paths split toward different clusters of stalls. He tilted his head in a question.

“Left,” you said, reading the stalls rather than the geography.

He turned left without argument. “Tell me something you’ve gotten better at. Since. Something you couldn’t do before.”

The question took you slightly by surprise. You walked a few paces while it settled. “Cooking,” you offered eventually. “I was catastrophic at it for years. I subsisted on things that required a kettle and a bowl. And then during the lockdowns I ran out of excuses and I learned properly.” you passed a stall selling paper lanterns, their light falling warm and orange across your path. “I make a very decent ragu now. It takes four hours and it’s an act of genuine commitment each time.”

“Four hours.” he considered this with appropriate gravity.

“It’s meditative. You have to pay attention but not too much. It’s like…” you searched for it. “It’s like the muscle memory of something. You don’t have to think about it intellectually, you just have to be present with it.”

He looked at you then, a glancing, sideways look that you caught at the edge of your peripheral vision. “You should make it for me sometime.”

The simplicity of the statement, its casual, enormous implication, the sometime of it that assumed a future in which such a thing might simply happen, pressed against your ribs like a held breath. You kept your eyes on the paper lanterns. “It takes four hours,” you repeated.

“I have time.” a beat. “I’m learning to have time.”

—

The stall that stopped you was selling vintage photographs. Black and white, some hand-tinted in faded pastels, arranged in neat rows under a string of yellow bulbs. Portraits, cityscapes, anonymous moments from decades past, a woman laughing on a bridge, two children racing something along a gutter, a man reading a newspaper on a park bench with the focused serenity of someone who believed the world could wait.

You'd stopped without quite deciding to, drawn by a small photograph in the second row. A skating rink, outdoor, from some indeterminate mid-century winter. The skaters were blurred slightly with motion, their coats and scarves describing the cold better than any caption could. In the foreground, slightly clearer than the rest, two figures skated together, their hands joined, looking not at each other but at the ice ahead of them with the easy certainty of people who did not need to look to know the other was there.

You stared at it for a moment that stretched.

Rafayel, who had been examining a tinted portrait two photographs down, drifted back to you. He looked at the photograph. He looked at your face. He said nothing, but you felt him settle in beside you, his shoulder solid against yours, the warmth of him a steady presence.

“How much?” you heard yourself ask the vendor.

The vendor named a price. You paid it. You tucked the small photograph into your bag without examining your reasons for doing so, and you turned to find Rafayel watching you with an expression you could not fully decode, something between careful and tender, the expression of a man encountering information he intended to keep.

“Field research,” you said, before he could say anything.

The smile that broke over his face was genuine and immediate and did something specific and unwelcome to your pulse rate. “Obviously,” he agreed.

After a while, you ended up, by the unplotted logic of the evening, at a small tea house at the edge of the arcade, the kind with low wooden tables and ceramic cups with no handles and a menu written on a single long strip of rice paper. It was nearly eleven. The market was thinning around you, the vendors beginning the slow, practiced choreography of closing down, stacking and wrapping and covering, and the tea house was warm and amber-lit and smelled of roasted grain and something floral you couldn’t immediately identify.

Rafayel sat across from you, both hands wrapped around his cup, the wave-pattern cloisonné box on the table between you where he’d placed it without explanation, and he was, for the first time all evening, entirely still. Not the performer’s stillness or the strategic stillness. Just a person sitting with tea and the end of a long, good evening.

You watched him trace the rim of his cup with one thumb, a slow, thoughtless circle.

“You used to do that,” you said.

He looked up. “What?”

“That.” you nodded at the rim. “At the rink. With your water bottle. You’d trace the edge of the cap when you were lost in thought.”

He looked down at his thumb as if meeting it for the first time. A faint color climbed the side of his neck. “Old habit.”

“Good habit,” you said, surprising yourself. “It means you’re not performing anything.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, with the small, careful motion that characterized him when something actually mattered, he lifted his gaze to yours. “What am I thinking?”

“I don’t know,” you answered honestly. “I’m still learning your new patterns.”

The words landed between you with a weight that neither of you moved to examine directly. His thumb stilled against the ceramic. You picked up your own cup and drank, letting the warmth of the tea move through your chest and into your hands, and across the low wooden table the cloisonné box sat in the warm light with its sixty years of craft and its waves that went nowhere and came from nothing and just kept moving.

“The chamomile,” you said, because the quiet was becoming a thing that required tending.

He tilted his head.

“Earlier. The dried chamomile.” you set your cup down. “My mother used to put it in everything. Tea, sachets in the linen cupboard. The whole flat smelled of it.” you turned your cup slightly. “After the injury, when I was home with the cast, it was everywhere. I used to find it irritating. The smell of it was too associated with lying still and being useless.” a breath stretched between you. “I can stand it now. It took years, but I can stand it now.”

He listened to this with his full attention, the cup cradled in both hands, his eyes steady on your face. He did not offer a solution or a silver lining or a comparative suffering. He simply received it.

“What changed?” he asked, eventually.

“I stopped needing the smell to mean something else,” you said. “I stopped needing it to only be the injury. I let it go back to being just... chamomile.”

His jaw shifted, a small, barely visible movement, the internal response of a man turning something over. “I’m trying to do that,” he murmured, “with the ice. Let it go back to being just... the ice.” he looked at the box. “It’s slower than I thought.”

“It always is.”

“You sound experienced.”

“I’ve had practice with slow things.” you picked up your cup again. “The basil plant I’m growing took eight months to stop being a source of anxiety.”

He laughed. It was the short, real, slightly undignified laugh, the one that still flustered him slightly, the one you were cataloguing with a dedication that you would examine later, privately, in the safety of your own flat. He pressed his free hand briefly over his mouth and looked at the table and the color moved higher on his neck and you felt the warmth spread from your sternum outward in a way that was becoming, frankly, a structural concern.

—

It was past eleven when you left the tea house, stepping back out into the cooler air of the embankment. The market had gone mostly quiet, the last stragglers making their way home, the vendors’ lights winking out stall by stall. The musician under the plane trees was gone, just the imprint of his folding stool remaining in the soft ground.

You walked back along the river toward the street where a taxi would be logical. He walked beside you and did not take your hand, but his arm brushed yours every few steps with a frequency that was almost certainly not entirely accidental, and you did not move away.

“You used to race me,” he said, unprompted, looking ahead. “To everything. The vending machine, yes, but also the boards after a cooldown. The exit after practice. You always pretended it was incidental. That you just happened to be moving faster.”

“I was competitive.”

“You were competitive with me specifically.” he slid you an amused look. “With everyone else you were entirely professional. With me you were a nightmare.”

“You were provoking.”

“I was minding my own business.”

“You were never minding your own business, Rafayel. You had a pathological inability to mind your own business that expressed itself exclusively as minding mine.”

He turned his head fully toward you then, a bright, delighted expression that he was making absolutely no effort to contain, and you felt your own mouth doing something thoroughly uncooperative in response, and you looked away at the river and composed yourself with the discipline of someone who had survived sixteen cities of wanting to smile at him and had mostly managed not to.

“Fair,” he conceded. “I couldn’t help it. You were always the most interesting thing in the room.”

The river absorbed your silence. A taxi’s headlights swept the embankment ahead. You raised your hand.

The taxi moved through the quieting city with the unhurried confidence of late-night traffic, and you sat with your bag in your lap and the photograph inside it and the accumulated warmth of the evening settling over you like something physical, like the specific, pleasant weight of a night that had given more than you’d braced for. He sat beside you, not close enough for the contact to feel claimed, but close enough that the warmth of him was a presence you were continuously, helplessly aware of, a frequency you could not tune out no matter how many times you had tried.

He was looking out his window. His reflection in the glass was faint, overlaid on the streaming lights of the city, and you watched it for a moment before you caught yourself and looked at your own window instead.

The cloisonné box was still in his pocket. You’d watched him check it once, a small, unconscious gesture, his hand briefly touching the outside of the pocket the way you might check for a key.

He had bought something fragile and placed it somewhere close.

You were not going to think about what that meant right now.

Your building’s entrance was its usual self. The outer light was doing something noncommittal with electricity, somewhere between on and off and deeply unbothered about it, which gave the small vestibule the quality of a place that existed slightly outside of normal time. You stopped on the step, searching your bag for your key, and the taxi pulled away behind you with the quiet finality of transportation that had done its job.

He stood on the pavement, hands in his pockets, watching you search your bag with an expression of patient amusement.

“I know it’s in here,” you informed him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You had a face.”

“I simply have a face. It’s the one I was given.”

You found the key. You held it up. He tilted his head in a small, gracious acknowledgment of the victory.

You stood on the step, which put you at approximately his eye level, which was a circumstance you had not entirely planned and were now navigating with the composure of someone who was absolutely fine and completely in control of themselves. The light flickered above. He looked up at it once, then back at you.

“Thank you,” you said. The words came out before you’d composed them into anything more managed. Sincere and slightly exposed and carrying the full weight of the evening behind them. “For tonight. It was…” you pressed your lips together, reaching for the right word, and then the honest one arrived, unbidden and unscreened, “It was a really good date.”

The half-second of silence that followed had a quality you recognized immediately as the drawing back of an arrow.

His expression shifted slowly. Deliberately. The smirk arrived in stages, the corners of his mouth, then the rest of it, the specific sheepish smugness of a man who has just been handed something he intends to hold onto and is making no attempt to be subtle about it. His head tilted slightly.

“A date,” he repeated, his voice warm and low and deeply, insufferably satisfied.

The heat climbed your face with extraordinary speed. “I used the word loosely.”

“You said ‘a really good date.’” he appeared to be savoring each syllable individually. “The adverb included.”

“I was being conversational.”

“You were being honest.” his eyes were bright, the blue-pink of them catching the flickering light, and the sheepishness in his expression was doing significant structural damage to your ability to maintain any kind of front. He was not being cruel about it. He was being, if anything, genuinely and transparently pleased, in the way of someone who had hoped for a thing and received confirmation of it and was slightly overwhelmed by the simplicity of that, and the openness of that pleasure was worse than any smirk. 

“It was a date,” he murmured, more quietly now, the teasing settling into something softer. “A good one.”

Your cheeks were, at this point, simply committed to the warmth and had stopped consulting you about it. You looked at the key in your hand. “I’m going inside.”

“You enjoyed the date,” he said pleasantly.

“Goodnight, Rafayel.”

“The adverb,” he added, entirely unnecessary, “really.”

You pointed the key at him with what you intended to be a withering look and was almost certainly not that. He had the audacity to look charmed by it. His hands were still in his pockets and his shoulders were doing the thing they did when he was actively suppressing a laugh out of a sense of self-preservation.

“You’re very annoying,” you informed him.

“You said it was a good date,” he returned, mild as anything, and the smile was fully visible now, that lopsided, genuine one that no photographer had ever caught, the one that made him look entirely undone and entirely himself at once.

You gave up on dignity as a short-term strategy. You stepped down from the step and kissed him, because it was that or stand there being flustered indefinitely, and you had always preferred a decision to an impasse. It was a brief kiss, firm and warm, and when you pulled back his eyes were slightly wider than they’d been before, the smirk displaced entirely by something that was simply startled and pleased, the sheepish quality of it rising so quickly into his face that you felt it in your own chest like an echo.

His ears were faintly, improbably pink.

“Goodnight,” you said again, steadier now.

He swallowed once. Nodded, with the composure of a man reassembling himself in real time. “Goodnight, cutie.”

You stopped with your hand on the door.

“Absolutely not,” you said, without turning around.

A soft, warm laugh reached you through the door as it swung shut, and you stood in the flickering hallway with the heat in your ears and a feeling in your chest that you could not immediately name and were not yet ready to try, something provisional and warm and frighteningly, quietly alive.

Outside, on the pavement, you heard his footsteps recede with an ease that suggested he was, in fact, very pleased with himself.

You allowed yourself, alone in the imperfect light, a smile that had nowhere to hide.

—

Your flat received you the way it always did, quietly and without judgment. You dropped your keys in the bowl by the door and stood for a moment in the hallway just breathing, the city muffled through the windows, the night settled into its late-hour frequency. On the balcony, the basil plant was a dark shape behind the glass. Alive. Stubbornly, successfully alive.

You changed in the low light of your bedroom, trading the going-out clothes for the oversized university shirt that had survived more postcodes and more bad evenings than it had any right to, and you went to the bathroom and turned the tap on and stood there with your hands under the water for a moment before you remembered you were meant to be washing your face.

The mirror held you. You looked at yourself in it, and you looked like someone who had been kissed twice on a riverbank under a red lantern and once more on a doorstep in a flickering light, and who had accidentally told the truth about all of it by saying the word date out loud in a moment of insufficient judgement.

You pressed your wet hands lightly against your face. The coolness of the water was grounding.

A really good date. You could hear your own voice saying it. You could hear the precise, particular pleasure with which he’d repeated it back.

You dried your hands. You found the cleanser. You began the motion of the routine, and your mind, freed from the requirement of managing your face or your words or the exact right amount of space between yourself and him, moved forward ahead of your hands and began doing the thing it had been building toward all evening.

It did this, lately. Reviewed. Like a body going back over a route it had been running, checking the ground for changes, for new information, for the places where the terrain had shifted without announcement.

It went, as it often did now, to the beginning.

The dressing room had smelled of cold air and performance sweat and the particular chemical sharpness of blade polish, and you’d stood in the doorway of it watching the back of his head while he rummaged through his duffel bag with the casualness of a man putting on a show of not caring that you’d just walked in, and you’d known, immediately, with the bone-deep instinct of someone who had spent years reading the particular tells of his body, that he was not as unbothered as the rummaging implied.

Oh. It’s you.

Two words. You’d catalogued them at the time as dismissal. You’d turned them over in the weeks since, held them up against everything that had come after, and you understood them differently now. The flinch inside the control. The thing that had broken the surface of him for just a fraction of a second before he pulled it back under.

He’d been thrown. He’d been thrown the same way you'd been thrown, standing in those stands watching him complete a quadruple lutz like gravity was a guideline and not a rule, and thinking: I know him. I knew him. He doesn’t know that he still lives in me like a room I never emptied.

You rinsed the cleanser from your face and reached for the toner, moving through the familiar motions.

The gala. The museum’s east pavilion and the white ice under the blue light and him in the aubergine tuxedo that made his hair look like spilled ink, moving through the crowd the way he moved through everything, as if the space arranged itself around him by consent rather than physical law. You’d spent the entire evening using your tablet as a weapon and your professionalism as armor and counting every glance he sent across the room as an advance to be neutralized.

You’d been so furious at him for engineering it. For requesting you by name. For using a contract and a campaign and a corporate apparatus as the language of something that was never, not for a single moment, purely about logistics.

Standing in the cold bathroom at nearly midnight, the toner cool against your fingertips, you turned that fury over and examined its underside the way you hadn’t been quite able to then.

He’d had no other language. That was the thing. The boy who’d left without a word had grown into a man who’d been managed for so long that the ordinary channels of simply asking for something, of saying I need to see you, I’ve needed to see you for years, there are things I should have said and didn’t and I don’t know how to say them in the open air of normal life had atrophied the same way the menu-reading muscle had atrophied, the same way smelling things properly had atrophied, the same way choosing his own music had atrophied. He'd pulled the one lever available to him and pulled it, because Thomas ran his schedule and the sponsors ran his image and the machine ran everything else, but the contract had been his.

You had been his.

That thought sat in the middle of your chest and glowed with a quiet, almost unbearable heat.

You moved to the moisturizer. The motions were automatic, well-worn, and your mind traveled further.

Kyoto. The small backstage room with the fluorescent light and his costume catching it, the deep blue of stormy seas, and him pacing that tight, exhausted path and using the lighting director as a proxy for whatever was actually coiling in him, and you’d stood in the doorway holding your clipboard like a shield and told him to go to the party and he’d asked you to get him out of it and you’d said say no, you’re a grown man, and he’d said it’s not that simple, and you’d said it never is with you, is it, and the words had been aimed precisely at the old wound and you’d known it even as you’d said them.

You really have built a very high, very cold wall, haven’t you? Is what he said to you back then.

He’d seen you. He’d been seeing you the whole time and you’d been so busy defending the wall that you’d mistaken being seen for being attacked.

You picked up the lip balm. An old habit, before sleep.

The rink in the unnamed city. The practice rink with the severed coolant line and the melting ice and the horror of watching him lace up those old skates while Thomas pinched the bridge of his nose and you heard yourself say you’ll break an ankle, for fuck’s sake like the words were being pulled out of you from somewhere below the professional register, from somewhere that didn’t care about the contract or the campaign or any of it, that cared only that he was about to do something reckless on bad ice for reasons that had nothing to do with art and everything to do with trying to outrun a ghost.

And then the sound. Not dramatic. Not the crack from your own memory, the one that lived in your right ankle as a phantom frequency. Just the wet, sickening wrench of his blade catching a fissure and his grunt of pain as he went down into the meltwater.

You’d been moving before the sound fully registered.

You looked at your hands in the bathroom mirror. Still, now. Steady. They hadn’t been steady then, kneeling in the cold water, the blood spreading red through the white leather of his skate, your fingers working the laces with a precision that was pure adrenaline dressed up as competence.

He’d looked at you from the ice with pain glazing his eyes and said, Now we match, with that faint, wrecked smirk, and something in you had gone very still and very clear in a way that had nothing to do with logistics.

I’m always hurt, he’d told you.

You’d finished the bandaging and looked at his pale, stubborn face and felt the thing you’d been not-naming for weeks rear up behind your sternum with a force that was frankly terrifying.

You cared. You cared with a depth and a specificity and an ache that had nothing provisional about it, nothing professional, nothing that could be filed under lingering history or nostalgia or any of the other neat labels you’d been applying for months to contain it. You cared about the injury and the bad ice and the fact that he’d called himself a defective product and was sitting there in a hotel room bleeding on the good linen because he didn’t know how to stop.

You’d called it being a mess. He’d accepted that without argument.

The night phone call came next in the sequence. His voice in the dark of your room, strained and smaller than it ever was in the daylight. It hurts. And the boyish reluctance beneath it, the specific difficulty of admitting a weakness that wasn’t technical or strategic but just human, just physical, just the ordinary vulnerability of a body in pain, and you’d gotten out of bed without deliberating because deliberation wasn’t something you’d had available to you in that moment.

You put the lip balm down. You leaned both hands on the edge of the sink and looked at yourself in the mirror.

The hotel suite. You’d gone back after the bandaging because he’d asked you to stay, not in those words, but in the way he’d said the tour brief is extensive in the voice of someone who knew the brief was a fiction and was offering it as a courtesy exit in case you needed one. You hadn’t taken it. You’d sat in that cold, elegant room while he told you about Switzerland and the glass and steel academy and the technical coach and the fitness coach and the nutritionist and the media trainer and the psychologist who had never once asked him if he liked the music, and you’d felt the understanding of it arrive in you with a slowness that was almost physical, like something large passing through a narrow space.

The only program music I ever chose for myself was the one I skated the day you watched.

You remembered sitting in the White Dove Arena months ago, watching that oceanic piece and thinking, masterpiece. Thinking, he’s so far from where I am it’s laughable. Thinking, this is why you stopped. And all the while not knowing that the music was a message, that it had been chosen to sound like something lost and deep and present, that somewhere in the choosing of it there had been a version of you he was speaking to across the years of silence.

The kiss, then. In the suite. You couldn’t always reconstruct who had moved first, it remained genuinely unclear, a simultaneous collapse rather than a sequence, and you’d said mistake into the cold air of the room and fled down the corridor with the ghost of his mouth on yours and your heart battering its own walls, and you’d meant the word even as you’d known it was insufficient, that mistake implied regret and what you’d actually felt was something more like standing too close to a fire and knowing precisely why people did that anyway.

You turned off the bathroom light. You moved to the bedroom. You pulled back the duvet and sat on the edge of the bed the way you sometimes did at the end of a long day, just existing for a moment before sleep pulled you under..

Jakarta. The gala and the black car and the city lights through the tinted windows and his voice saying he’d wanted you there with him all along, and the slow kiss that followed, which had been nothing like the desperate one in the suite, which had the quality of something chosen rather than seized. And then later, much later, in your hotel room with the window open over the city and the night folding around you both, his hands unhurried, his voice low and rough and saying your name like it was a thing he’d been saving up, and the world narrowing to the specific and overwhelming truth of being wanted by someone you’d wanted for so long the wanting had become part of yourself.

And then the morning. The cold empty space of the bed, and the panic arriving before the evidence, the old wound tearing open on pure reflex, the fifteen-year-old girl waking in a hospital to find the finish line gone and the boy who’d been at the center of her world simply no longer present.

Except he’d been there to pull your right out of your panic attack.

Breathe with me. I’m right here.

You lay back against your pillow. The ceiling was its familiar self. The city was quiet outside, the night quiet, the quiet that arrived after all the evening’s noise had finished and left.

He’d held your face and breathed with you and wiped the tear that escaped with his thumb and there had been no performance in any of it, no strategy, no clinical assessment. Just a person in a towel standing in the morning light doing the specific and careful work of not letting you fall.

You rolled onto your side. The duvet was warm. Outside, a bus moved through the street below, its sound low and passing, and then the quiet came back.

Tonight had been a market and a musician and a woman’s grandmother’s sixty years of craft and the particular embarrassment of a man who couldn’t read a bar menu without help and dried chamomile from a market stall in the pocket beside a cloisonné box, and two kisses, and a third one you’d given on impulse that had left him faintly pink about the ears, and the word cutie said in a low, private, entirely insufferable voice as your door closed.

And before any of that, an agreement. Made in a rink with bad lighting, his hand held out, palm up, the same patient and unwavering offer it had always been.

One day at a time. One conversation. One skate.

The new Rafayel, the one arriving in pieces, the one you were learning the way you learned a new route. Not all at once but incrementally, one landmark at a time, building a map in real time. The man who stood still for street musicians and wept, probably, in front of Rothkos in forty managed minutes in London and was quietly, methodically trying to take back the ordinary life that had been administered on his behalf since he was twelve years old.

The boy who had seen a sigh in a step sequence and murmured it like a secret, who had handed you watery hot chocolate in a silent, cold arena and said the ice is jealous with absolute sincerity, who had held your face in his hands in the dark and said breathe with me with a steadiness that had nothing to do with performance.

The same person. The same frequency, running beneath everything, recognizable even through all the years of static.

I missed her, he’d said tonight, on the embankment, his hand at your neck, the river doing its indifferent thing behind him. But I think I like who she grew up to be even more.

You pressed your face lightly into the pillow.

The fear was still there. It was smaller than it had been in the dressing room, smaller than it had been in Jakarta, smaller than it had been in the empty rink in Seoul when you’d watched him trace his circles in the dark and felt the ghost of your own ankles ache. It had been the loudest thing for so long that you’d forgotten it was possible for it to be otherwise. It was possible for it to be otherwise.

The basil plant had nearly died twice.

You’d kept it alive on spite and a youtube tutorial, and now it was the most thriving thing on the balcony, and every time you walked past it you felt unreasonably proud.

People were not basil plants. You were aware of this. The metaphor had limits. But the principle, the principle of tending something past its difficult patches without knowing for certain it would survive, of showing up for it on the strength of wanting it to live rather than certainty that it would, that principle felt, lying in the dark with the city quiet outside and the warmth of the evening still settled somewhere under your sternum, like one you were prepared to apply.

The smile arrived the way it had on the embankment, gradually, without announcement. You didn’t notice it until it was already there, small and provisional and slightly helpless and entirely yours.

Cutie, you thought, with the internal tone of someone who has just decided to be annoyed about something and is already failing.

You closed your eyes.

The city murmured. The basil plant survived. The photograph of the two skaters was in your bag, where you’d tucked it with studied casualness and absolutely intentional purpose.

You fell asleep.

You were still smiling when you did.

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The scales are spreading further than they were an hour ago, iridescent and restless, crawling up from the jut of his collarbone, dusting his ribs where the light catches them and makes them flash iridescent blue, then violet. His chest rises and falls too quickly. His cock is flushed dark and heavy against his stomach, already wet at the tip just from your hands in his hair, and when you let your gaze rest there it twitches, as if it knows. As if he knows exactly what you’re looking at, which, of course, he does.

You close your hand around him.

The exhale he releases is enormous. Every muscle in his torso contracts and then releases at once, his whole body bowing into your grip like a tide answering the moon. You work him slowly, a long, easy roll from base to tip, and he’s so warm, so much warmer than usual, the heat of him bleeding into your palm and up your wrist and radiating somewhere behind your sternum. His hips rock up on the second stroke. On the third, his head tips back entirely, the long pale line of his throat fully exposed, the scales on his neck pulsing with every kick of his heartbeat.

You love him so much it frightens you sometimes.

Not in a terrible way. In the way that very large, very permanent things are frightening. The sea at night, the way certain songs sit in the ribcage for days, the weight of his hand in yours when he reaches for it without looking. You love the way his breath is already breaking this quickly, the way his bound wrists strain upward with nothing to hold onto. You love that he let you tie them. You love that he trusts you with the wanting.

You thumb over the head of his cock on the upstroke and he makes a sound like something in him snaps.

His hips buck. He laughs, a little, helpless and disbelieving, and the laugh dissolves immediately into a groan when you do it again, your grip tightening, pace still achingly unhurried. He’s leaking steadily now, slicking your palm, and you spread it down his shaft and feel him shudder with his whole body at the sensation, the muscles in his thighs jumping, the scales on his neck catching the amber light and throwing it back. He turns his face into his own arm, embarrassed by the sounds he’s making, and you use your free hand to nudge it gently away. You want to see him. You always want to see him.

He lets you.

His cheeks are burning, his lips parted, his brow furrowed with the concentrated effort of feeling everything you’re giving him, and he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever been trusted with. When he cums the first time it’s with his back arched clean off the mattress, a low, breaking sound tearing out of him that he doesn’t try to muffle, and the wet cum spills over your fingers while you coax him through every last aftershock, slow and tender and entirely devoted.

He’s still trembling when you press a kiss to the corner of his jaw. He turns his head and catches your mouth with his, heavy and graceless, tasting like salt. You feel him smile against your lips even while his chest is still heaving.

You give him approximately ninety seconds.

Then you kiss down his throat, his collarbone, the shimmer of scales on his sternum. You feel his sharp intake of breath when you mouth at them, open and warm, because the scales are a live wire on Ebb Day, conducting every sensation straight to his core. His hips shift restlessly. His bound hands drop to the top of your head, just resting there, because he desperately needs something to hold.

You press your lips to each scale you can reach, so so careful and tender, feeling them shiver under your mouth, feeling him shiver under your mouth, his thighs tensing around you as you work lower, kissing the flat of his stomach, the jut of his hip, the soft skin of his inner thigh where he’s flushed deep and hypersensitive and lets out a sound so punched-out and helpless that you actually pause to look up at him.

He’s watching you. Eyes dark, cheeks blazing, chest still rising and falling too fast. He’s already hard again. Ebb Day, you’ve learned, has no mercy for him, the tide in his blood running and running and running, and you’ve made peace with the fact that you’re going to be here all evening. For him. Always for him.

You hold his gaze and take him into your mouth.

The sound he makes is loud. Louder than he usually lets himself be, loud enough that some distant, fond part of your brain notes it as a gift, as him deciding you deserve to hear what you do to him. His thighs bracket your head. His fingers curl in your hair without directing, just gripping, just holding on, while you take your time with him, working your tongue flat along the underside, learning the weight and heat of him with the same attention you’d give something you intend to keep. And you intend to keep him until the end of times.

He tastes like salt and the sea and something faintly electric, and when you hollow your cheeks and pull up slowly he says your name on an exhale so fractured it barely holds its shape.

You stay there for a long time. You don’t rush. You work him with your hand and your mouth in turns, dragging him right to the edge by feel alone, by the way his breathing shifts and his hips lose their rhythm and the grip in your hair goes tight and frantic, and then you ease back just enough to hear him make a desperate, wrecked sound at the loss of it. He laughs again, shaky and incredulous, because he can’t quite believe you. Because you’ve been doing this for a year and he still can’t quite believe you. You kiss the inside of his thigh and feel him exhale in a long, shuddering wave.

Then you take him back in and don’t stop until he comes with his whole body shaking, one hand fisted in your hair and the other twisted in the sheets where the silk has gone loose, his moans spilling out of him open and unguarded and entirely real. His thick cum fills your mouth, and you swallow eagerly, eager to take whatever he gives you, whatever part of him he feels like giving you, whether it’s his desire, his body, his heart or soul or just his vulnerability.

You crawl up his body afterward and he wraps both arms around you before you’ve even settled, pulling you in, face burrowing into your neck with a low, satisfied sound. He’s burning up everywhere. His heart is still slamming. And he needs you close, you know he does, and your heart feels some type of way at the knowledge that he needs you, and shows it to you, too.

You press your lips to the top of his head and he squeezes you tighter, and there’s a minute, maybe two, where neither of you moves and the amber light deepens in the room and his breathing begins to slow.

Then his hands slide up the back of your shirt.

He doesn’t say anything. He just touches you, broad and warm and purposeful, his palms mapping the length of your spine, and you feel his heartbeat begin to quicken again under your cheek, and you feel exactly what he wants pressing against your hip. You lift your head to look at his face.

Still flushed. Still a little dazed at the edges. Watching you with something so open in his expression that it makes your chest ache in the best possible way, something that says... I trust you. I trust you completely. Do whatever you want with it.

You sit up and he watches you undress without touching, arms loose at his sides, the silk hanging from one wrist, and the look in his eyes is so purely unguarded that you have to look away for a moment just to collect yourself.

You swing your leg over him. Settle your weight onto his thighs, and reach between you to line him up, and when you sink down onto him the sound he makes is low and long and shameless. His hands find your hips immediately, not to guide or direct, just to have somewhere to put them, just to be touching you, and you feel the grip of his fingers trembling slightly.

His head falls back. You take your time.

You roll your hips slow and deep and watch him come apart one layer at a time. Watch the flush spread further down his chest, watch his lips part wider, watch his brow work through every iteration of the feeling. He moans freely, with his full chest, the sounds coming out of him loose and uncontrolled and generous, each one louder than the last because he is doing this on purpose, you understand, because he decided somewhere in the soft ruins of the last hour that this is what he wants to give you.

All of it. The sounds and the openness and the trust laid entirely bare. He isn’t performing. He’s giving. And there’s something so special in the way Rafayel gives things, the way he gives parts of himself to you. Only to you. Always to you.

You brace your hands on his chest and feel his heart hammering under your palms and move, and he lets you. And the light in the room goes amber and then deep and his scales throw it back in blues and you lose track of time entirely.

When he cums the third time he pulls you down against him so tightly you feel it through your whole body, his face pressed into your hair, his arms around your back, shaking and shaking and shaking.

Afterward, he keeps holding you.’

He doesn’t let go for a very long time.

You don’t want him to. You press your lips to his throat, his jaw, the corner of his mouth, and he makes a soft sound against each one like he’s receiving something he didn’t know he needed. His hands move slow and sleepy across your back. The scales settle. His heartbeat gradually finds its pace.

“Still with me? It’s okay, I got you. You’re safe.” you murmur into his jaw.

The only response you get is a low, content hum. His arms tighten fractionally.

Still with you. Still with you. So entirely and completely still with you.

You close your eyes and stay.

© zaynessbeloved 2025. please don’t copy, repost or translate my works. thank you!

“You look like you’ve been through a war zone,” he jokes lightly but concerned as he pulls you into a loose hug. His hands rub slow circles on your back, warm through your shirt.

You lean into him, letting out a tired sigh. “Feels like it. Ugh, everything hurts.”

Rafayel pulls back just enough to tilt your chin up, studying you slowly. He just caresses your cheek, making you melt into his touch with a soft sigh of relief.

“Then let me take care of you tonight, yeah? Let me give you some proper princess treatment.” he hums, giving you a relaxed smile. “Remember those candles you bought a while back? The ones made for massages? How about we light them up, and I’ll help you unwind.” he speaks softly, pausing to give you a slow kiss, “Melt some of that tension away.”

The words land in your brain like gasoline over fire. You remember the candles he’s talking about. Those white ones, specially chosen because you knew what was in them. The subtle aphrodisiac infused in the wax, something to heighten senses, stir up heat without being obvious. You’d bought them on a whim, joking about trying them someday. Apparently that someday is today.

Suddenly, you don’t feel as tired anymore. A subtle  wave of excitement stirs up in your chest despite the ache in your limbs. 

You perk up, eyes widening as you grab his hand, trying to hide the smirk of delight.  “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds perfect. Now? Can we do it now?”

He chuckles, surprised by your sudden burst of energy, but doesn’t question it. “Eager much, cutie? Alriiight, go get comfortable. I’ll set everything up, yeah?”

You fling yourself onto his bed, heart racing a little as you strip down to nothing, the cool sheets a relief against your skin. The room is dim, lit only by a lamp in the corner, and you hear him moving around. The faint scent of the candles starts to fill the air as he lights a few, placing them on the nightstand. White wax, pooling slowly as they burn. You smirk to yourself, burying your face in the pillow. He has no idea what’s coming.

Rafayel joins you a moment later, the mattress dipping under his weight. “Okay, lie on your stomach first. Let me start with your back.” his voice is gentle, all innocence, like he really thinks this will be just about relaxation.

You do as he says, folding your arms under your head, eyes closing. His hands are warm when they touch you, kneading into the knots along your shoulders. He’s good at this, with his artist’s hands, steady and precise and so very skilled at making you both relaxed and worked up simultaneously. The pressure eases some of the tightness, and you let out a soft groan.

“Feels good?” he asks, thumbs pressing deeper.

“Mmm, yeah. Keep going.” you mumble, sighing into the pillow.

He works methodically, moving down your spine, fingers spreading out to cover more skin. The room warms from the candles, their light flickering softly. You feel the first hints of the aphrodisiac in the air. So very subtle at first, a faint sweetness that makes your skin tingle where he touches. Rafayel doesn’t seem to notice yet, focused solely on the massage, his breaths even and calm.

After a while, he shifts on the bed, reaching for one of the candles. “Alright, time for the wax part. It’s supposed to be soothing when it melts on you, so just relax.”

You nod, anticipation washing over you. Partly because you never had candle wax used on you like this so you’re curious about the feeling of it. And partly because you just know the second the wax touches your skin, it’ll be the second Rafayel’s downfall for the night begins.

He tips the candle carefully, and the first drop hits your back. It’s warm, not too hot, spreading across your skin as it cools. You shiver slightly, the sensation new but pleasant.

“Is it too hot?” he checks, voice close to your ear.

“No, it’s quite nice.” you sigh, soft and content.

He continues, dripping more along your spine, his free hand smoothing it in right after. The wax hardens quickly, but the heat lingers on your aching skin. You feel yourself relaxing deeper, even as the aphrodisiac’s effect starts to creep in, making every touch feel a little more intense than it should. Rafayel’s fingers trail lower, kneading your lower back, and you bite your lip to hold back a sound.

Unaware to you, Rafayel also feels a strange warmth creeping in his chest as he works the wax on your skin, something beyond the candle flames. The scent in the air is sweeter than he remembers, almost heady. He shakes it off, focusing on you and the way your body melts under his hands. Your skin looks beautiful in the candlelight, and he finds himself lingering a bit longer on each spot he covers.

“Turn over,” he says after a while, voice a touch huskier than before.

You roll onto your back, molten eyes meeting his. He looks calm, but there’s a faint flush on his cheeks. Good. It’s starting, then. 

You fight the urge to show any reaction of satisfaction, nothing to let him catch onto your little act. From the looks of it, he’s still unaware that this is going exactly as you planned a long time ago when you bought the candles, avoiding on purpose to let him know they weren’t usual massage candles.

He starts again, slender fingers smoothing on your slightly tense shoulders, then moving down your arms. The wax comes next, dripping onto your collarbone, trailing down toward your chest where your breasts sit untouched and given no attention to. The heat of the melting wax makes you arch slightly, a small whimper escaping your parted lips.

Rafayel pauses, eyes darkening a fraction. “Are you sure it’s not too hot? You’re reacting so…” he doesn’t get to finish his sentence before you cut him off softly.

“Yeah, just… sensitive. You know that already.” Of course he knows that, and oh, how well he knows it indeed. Incapable of holding back, a slight flush spreads on your cheeks as you remember just how well he knows your sensitive spots. Especially your breasts.

He nods, but you see his throat bob as he swallows. He tips the candle again, watching the white wax slide down your skin, following the curve of your breast. It’s warmer here, closer to sensitive spots, and you feel it pool just above your nipple before cooling. Your reaction comes naturally, breath hitching a little.

He’s quieter now, his breaths coming a little faster than before. He’s usually not this quiet, so the scent must really get to him, you think. The aphrodisiac is hitting him, you can tell by the way his hands tremble slightly when he smooths the wax over your breasts, avoiding your perked nipples on purpose. Goosebumps rise on his arms, visible in the flickering light, and you spot a single scale glimmering at the base of his neck, a big tell that he's turned on.

“Y’know cutie…” he sighs, a smirk painting his lips as he leans a little closer, “My intentions were purely innocent when I proposed this massage.” He’s messing with you, you notice in the way he almost huffs the words. Oh, he’s caught on…

“I really meant this for your relaxation, sooo…” he whispers, almost to himself, voice low. His eyes drag from where more wax drips on your breasts, dripping slowly over your right nipple. The sensation pulls a moan out of you, small and unrestrained, and his smirk is soon to follow, even as his purple eyes darken where they follow the hardening wax on your nipple. He licks his lips, “...Only the wax will touch you tonight.”

You meet his eyes, shifting your hips just enough to draw his gaze lower. He drips more wax, letting it trail down your stomach, inching toward your hips. “Then you should—ah…massage me lower, too.” you quip, voice light and a tad more innocent-sounding. “Be thorough, Raf.” 

Your words determine him to meet your gaze again, his eyebrow shifting just a fraction, narrowing but doing as you told him. Your whole body feels hotter with each drop, responding to the multiple sensations, core throbbing already. You whimper again, louder this time, making his eyes lock on the path the wax follows.

Rafayel fights the urge rising in him like an ocean tide. The scent is everywhere now, enveloping all his senses. Making his skin prickle, his ears turning red. He sees the way you react, hears those little, sweet sounds you make, and it’s driving him utterly crazy. The wax drips lower, white trails resembling something far more intimate, and all he can think is how dare it touch you there, when he’s the one craving it? When the sudden urge to paint you in his desire consumes him whole. 

The wax reaches slowly until it’s so close to your pussy, hovering just above it. His eyes follow as if hypnotized, and you watch him with bathed breath as he slowly seems to put the pieces together. The way your pussy drips onto the sheets in the same manner as the wax drips on your skin, it changes something in his expression. He tilts the candle back, breath ragged. “Dammit,” he mutters under his breath.

And before you know it, his eyes slowly lock on yours, dark and frustrated, because how dare you get so wet from nothing but a little bit of wax dripping on you? He’s gonna lose it, but first, he has to give you a taste of your own little game. Then suddenly, he’s on you, pinning your wrists above your head with one hand, his weight pressing you into the mattress. 

He’s huffing, panting, face inches from yours, eyes dark and wild. “You planned this… didn’t you? Tsk, you tricked me.”

The candlelight illuminates his flushed skin, sweat glistening, more scales appearing in faint waves along his neck. You grin up at him, fox-like, satisfaction warming your chest even more than the melting wax.

“So you admit it worked. You got caught, fishie.” you let your soft lips curve into your sweetest, most devious smile you can muster, utterly pleased you got him crazed like this without trying.

His grip tightens on your wrists, a smirk curling his lips despite the frustration he’s surely feeling. “I’m gonna bully you for this.” he tilts his head until his breath fawns your lips, sending your pulse spiking a little, “And I won’t show you any mercy…”

You laugh softly, but it turns into a gasp as he leans down, mouth brushing your ear. The innocence is all gone now. He’s all heat and intent. His other hand trails down your side, avoiding the wax for now, and settles his fingers ghosting over your hip.

“Think you’re clever, huh?” he whispers, voice rough. He releases your wrists but doesn’t move away, instead shifting to grab another candle. “Let’s see how you like it when I take my time.”  he huffs, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think he’s annoyed. But the mirth in his eyes and the dangerous smirk plastering his face is enough evidence to point otherwise. 

He’s gonna get you now.

He starts slow again, dripping wax along your thigh, watching you squirm. The heat is just enough to make you whimper, your body arching toward him. He smooths it with his palm, fingers lingering longer than necessary, teasing along the inside of your thighs until he’s hovering near your pussy without touching.

“Rafayel…” you breathe, a soft whimper as you shift your hips closer to his hand.

He chuckles low, eyes on the white wax trails. “Only the wax, remember? That’s what you wanted, cutie. A massage…”

Rafayel feels the strain in his pants, hard and aching, but he pushes it down for now. Payback comes first. He wants you to feel every bit of the tease you started with those candles. More scales shimmer across his arms and chest, the aphrodisiac making his skin hot and sensitive. He grabs another candle, tipping it over your breasts, letting the wax drip without smoothing it this time. No hands, just the heat cooling on your skin as silent revenge.

You gasp at the sensation, the wax hardening over your nipples. He moves lower, dripping over your stomach, then finally between your thighs. He checks the temperature first, making sure it’s safe, and lets a small drop fall right there. You moan, reaching out for him, but he clicks his tongue and pulls back, face flushed, eyes dark with want. Still, he keeps it playful, mocking you gently.

“Nuh-uh, hands off, cutie,” he says, smirking. “You’ve been a sly little fox, so you don’t get to touch me as you please.”

He pins your hands above your head again, using his Evol to melt more wax over your body. The warmth spreads, leaving you out of breath, your eyes almost pleading. The aphrodisiac hits you too, making everything feel sharper, but you’re in more control than him. You know exactly what sounds to make, how to arch just right to drive him crazy.

His kisses turn heated and messy, all groans into your mouth. Then, with a smirk and a dazed look, he starts kissing and licking down your body, focusing on your breasts. You praise him, voice soft. “Good boy.”

Rafayel shudders at the words, his scales flaring brighter. He didn’t expect that to hit him so hard, but it does, making him groan against your skin.

“What’s in these candles anyway?” he asks, voice rough. “Their scent is so... I feel so hot.” He huffs, pulling back a little. “Spill, cutie. I know your little tricks now, don’t think you’re so sly...”

You smirk up at him, acting all sly, even pinned down. Rafayel loses it a bit more—when did you get this bold? All those nights praising you in bed must have built this confidence. Now he’s got a woman toying with him from underneath, and it turns him on even more.

“I, however, can have my way with your pretty body as I please. Yeah?” he teases, trying to regain control.

You pout, giving him those fuck-me eyes, daring him. “Since you promised me princess treatment tonight, why are you suddenly bullying me?”

He licks his lips, still smirking, but his breathing goes erratic. He pins you harder into the mattress, setting the candle aside. His fingers toy with your nipples, teasing slow circles.

“Tsk, cutie… You’re complaining as if me bullying you doesn’t get you so wet I could drown if I dived in between your legs right now.” he chuckles, kissing your neck and nipping lightly. Then he moves to the hardened wax on your clit, pinching and rolling it, making you a mess.

“I’m also sore here,” you say innocently, shifting your hips. “Massage it for me? Pretty please?” you beg, biting his lower lip.

You’re so wet, and Rafayel chuckles roughly against your neck, groaning deep. The scent messes with his head, patience cracking. He kisses messily down your body, leaving wet and sloppy marks everywhere. With a small growl, he pushes your legs apart, eyes wide and dark and hazed, licking his lips.

“So wet, fuck…”

He dives in, licking slow and drawn out, groans vibrating against you.

“Good boy,” you praise, purring to make him even more gone. “Won’t you keep going? Need your mouth on me... are you gonna behave and give us both what we want?”

Rafayel feels the words shoot straight through him, making his scales pulse and his hips grind against the bed for relief. He laps at you harder, tongue flat and pressing, determined to make you fall apart first. But the aphrodisiac has him too far gone—he can’t stop the way his hands grip your thighs tighter, pulling you closer to his mouth.

The wet heat of his mouth against your pussy is maddening, tongue working slow and dragging like h’s savoring every second of it. Every languid drag pulls a sound out of you, small and trembling, and you feel him groan against you in response—the vibration alone enough to make your thighs clench around his head.

You thread your fingers through his purple hair and tug, feeling him shudder.

“Rafayel...” his name breaks apart on your lips, dissolving into a whimper as his tongue circles your clit with renewed intent, relentless and practiced and so unbearably focused. Your hips roll up toward his mouth without permission. He lets you, hands smoothing up your inner thighs—and then, right when the tension in your belly coils tightest, he pulls back.

Just enough. Just far enough.

The loss of his mouth makes you gasp, hips chasing after him on instinct. He rests his chin against your inner thigh, cheek warm against your skin, looking up at you through half-lidded amethyst eyes. Flushed, chest heaving, a smear of you on his bottom lip that he licks away slowly while maintaining eye contact.

“You were gonna cum, weren’t you.” it isn’t even a question, the way he says it. Low and rough and so satisfied with himself.

“Rafayel—”

“Mm-mm.” he presses a single, chaste kiss to your inner thigh instead, watching your reaction. His scales shimmer along his collarbone in the candlelight, spreading faintly down his chest. The aphrodisiac is wound through him now, wound through both of you, the air thick with that heady sweetness and the warm smell of melting wax. “That’s what you get, cutie. You wanna cum, you gotta beg for it a little. Fair’s fair.”

“You’re the worst,” you manage, breathless and trembling.

He grins, sharp and delighted, pressing another kiss a little higher on your thigh. “Yeah, I know.” another kiss, closer. “Still want my mouth on you?” he mouths at the crease of your hip, tongue dragging warm and slow. He knows exactly what he's doing.

You exhale sharply. “Yes.”

“Yes what?” he hums against your skin, not moving.

Your fingers tighten in his hair. “Yes, please.”

A soft, dark laugh against your hip. “Since you asked so nicely...”

He dips back down without preamble, and the moan that escapes you is helpless and unguarded, head tipping back into the pillow. He eats you out like he’s got nowhere else to be. Like time is irrelevant, like the only thing that exists is the heat of his mouth and the slow, agonizing circles his tongue traces. Two fingers press at your entrance, just resting there, teasing. The suggestion of them is almost worse than the absence entirely.

“Raf—inside, please, I need—”

“Need what?” he murmurs against you, barely lifting his mouth, breath hot where you’re most sensitive. His fingers curl just barely, not entering. Teasing the slick heat gathered there.

“Fingers,” you breathe, “please, your fingers, please—”

He makes a soft sound of approval, low in his throat, and obliges. One finger, slow and easy, curling as it fills you. You clench around him involuntarily, and you hear him exhale hard through his nose like it costs him something. His tongue works in tandem now, and the stretch of one finger becomes two, scissoring just enough to draw a broken sound out of you.

“Good girl...” he murmurs against your clit, the same praise you'd leveled at him turned back like a weapon.

Your whole body arches.

He works you open with devastating patience, fingers crooked just right, his mouth merciless, until you’re gripping the sheets in both fists, thighs trembling where they bracket his head. The orgasm builds so fast it almost scares you, sharp and bright.

“Don’t stop again,” you manage. “Don’t you dare—”

He doesn’t. His fingers press deeper, curling against that spot that makes your vision white at the edges, and his lips close around your clit and suck—

You fall apart, head thrown back, spine lifting clean off the mattress. His name comes out wrecked, half-swallowed, and he works you through it, gentling gradually, tongue soft and coaxing as the waves roll through you.

When you finally sink back into the sheets, boneless, he presses a slow, open-mouthed kiss to the inside of your thigh and withdraws his fingers. You hear him exhale shakily. The aphrodisiac has him strung wire-tight, you can see it in every line of him, the flush crawling down his chest, scales catching the candlelight in warm pulses, cock hard and aching against the fabric of his pants.

He crawls up your body, hair disheveled, lips swollen, and he looks absolutely wrecked and entirely smug about it at once.

“Still sore anywhere?” he asks, mock-sweetly, tilting his head.

You reach up, hook your fingers into the waistband of his pants, and tug. “No, but I think you need a little release too, hmm?”

His breath hitches.

“Poor thing,” you say softly, and you watch his throat move as he swallows. “Better let me take care of you, then.”

Rafayel lets you pull him down, let’s you work the fabric down his hips, and when your hand wraps around his cock—finally, fully—his head drops to your shoulder with a rough, ragged exhale.

“...Fuck,” he breathes, the word barely held together. His hips press forward on instinct, chasing your grip. “You’re…” he starts, but his train of thought clearly derails. He huffs a strained laugh against your neck. “You’re just so evil, y’know that?”

“Mm.” you tighten your grip just slightly. “Say it again.”

He groans, hips stuttering, scales blazing bright now across his shoulders. “Evil.” he punctuates it with a nip to your throat, sharp and retaliatory. “Absolute brat. Got me like… like this...” his voice is wrecked, barely more than breath. “And you’re just...” his teeth graze your ear. “...sitting there looking all pretty and smug about it, c’mon, that’s not fair—”

“Wasn’t very fair of you to stop either,” you point out.

“That was different, that was—” you stroke upward and he bites off whatever justification he was coming up with, hips snapping forward and a moan pressing out of him, low and involuntary and so genuinely raw that it sends heat pooling straight back through your core despite having just cum. He pulls back enough to look at you, pupils blown wide, the last thread of his composure worn gossamer-thin.

“Gonna let me—” he starts.

“Yes,” you say, before he finishes.

He holds your gaze for half a second. Something in those storm-dark amethyst eyes turns soft for just a moment, and then he’s kissing you, deep and slow, both hands cradling your face like you’re something worth holding carefully.

Then he settles between your thighs, and the softness gives way to something hungrier.

“Lemme hear you,” he murmurs against your mouth, low and warm. “Wanna hear all of it.”

And when he finally pushes inside, slow and full, you give him exactly that. The first slow drag of him filling you draws a sound from somewhere deep in your chest—involuntary, unguarded, embarrassingly loud in the quiet of the room.

You feel the laugh before you hear it, the vibration of it moving through his chest where it presses against yours. He drops his chin, looking down at you with those ruined amethyst eyes and that insufferable smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“That fast, huh?”

“Don’t.” you shift your hips in warning.

“I’m just saying...” he doesn’t move. Stays buried inside you, completely still, watching your face as his thumb traces a slow, idle circle at your hip. “We just started, cutie. Already making those sounds...”

The aphrodisiac has him flushed from his cheekbones down to his collarbones, scales shimmering faintly in waves along his neck and shoulders—beautiful and damning all at once, because it means he’s just as turned on as you are and still managing to be smug about it. You feel him hard and deep and unmoving inside you, and the deliberateness of his stillness is its own cruelty.

“Shut up,” you manage.

“I don’t think I will.” he rolls his hips forward again, so slow, burying himself fully, watching your face with those dark, hooded eyes. “There it is again.” a tilt of his head, voice dropping lower. “...And you’re already so wet. I could feel you dripping before I even—” he pulls back and sinks in again, punctuating his words, “—got inside you.”

The heat that crawls up your face has nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with how right he is. He’s been teasing you for so long that you’re slick and swollen around him, your arousal coating him obscenely every time he moves, the wet sound of it filling the low silence of the room alongside the guttering candles.

“You’re the one who spent twenty minutes with your mouth on me,” you point out, breathless.

“Mmm.” he glances down between your bodies with condescension. “And look at the state of you...” his thumb presses to your clit, circling slow, and your hips jerk. “Soaking. Dripping down to the sheets, cutie... All of that just for me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself—”

He crooks his hips on the next thrust and the rest of that sentence dissolves.

“Yeah,” he says softly, satisfied. “That’s what I thought.”

You dig your nails hard into his shoulder in response, and he hisses sharply, the rhythm he’d been building staggering. He pulls back just enough to look at the marks blooming across his skin, then looks back at you.

Something dangerous settles into his expression.

“Oh,” he says, very quietly, almost dangerously so. “So it’s gonna be like that, huh?”

He pulls almost entirely out and drives back in hard, punching a cry out of you, the headboard cracking dully against the wall. His hand slides from your hip to the small of your back, tilting you just slightly, and the next thrust lands somewhere that scrubs your mind blank. He finds that angle and keeps it, relentless, watching you come apart beneath him with something predatory and delighted in his eyes.

“Loud,” he observes, breathless. “So fucking loud. The whole Linkon’s gonna know how wet you are for me, aren’t they—”

“You’re—” you gasp, fingers scrabbling at his back, “—so annoying—”

“Riiight.” he doesn’t slow down. His cock drags against your walls on every withdrawal, slow enough that you feel every inch of him, and the wet slide of it is obscene and perfect and maddening. “You’re clenching, by the way.” a rough exhale through his nose. “Every time I pull back you just—” he groans, deep and involuntary, “—god, you’re tight, c’mon, stop doing that...”

“I’m not doing it on purpose—”

“Little liar.” he drives in deep and grinds, rolling his hips in slow circles, and your back peels off the mattress. “Your body wants me that bad, huh? Can’t even help it...”

You sink your teeth into his shoulder. He groans low, guttural, entirely undone, hips stuttering before he catches himself. His forehead drops to your neck and he laughs, strained and disbelieving, breath ragged and hot against your skin.

“You bit me.” genuine scandal in his voice. “You actually—”

“Was that too hard?” all innocence.

“...Nah.” the admission drags out of him rough and reluctant, and you feel the full-body shudder that follows it. “No, it really—” another shudder, “—wasn’t.”

His grip on your hip tightens hard enough to bruise and he picks the pace back up, messier now, chasing something. The candlelight throws gold and shadow across the planes of his chest and shoulders, scales shimmering in bright pulses along his collarbone, his arms, spilling down across his stomach like something lit from inside. His hair hangs damp across his forehead. He looks absolutely wrecked.

“Harder,” you tell him.

He stills and looks at you. “...What?”

You hold his gaze and roll your hips up to meet his, feeling him twitch inside you. “You heard me.”

The smirk that spreads across his face is slow and dangerous. “Thought you were sore.”

“I am.” you do it again, feeling him curse quietly. “Harder, Raf.”

He obliges. The pace he sets after that is rough enough to slide you up the mattress, your nails dragging lines down his back as you scramble for purchase. The sound of skin and the wet, slick noise of him fucking into you fills the room, and you feel him shudder every time your pussy clenches around him, every time your arousal gathers at the base of him and coats the inside of your thighs.

“Drenched,” he mutters against your jaw, sounding faintly delirious. “You’re absolutely fucking drenched, do you—do you know what that does to me—”

You turn your mouth to his ear. “Tell me what it does to you,” you breathe, soft and coaxing on purpose.

He twitches inside you. Hard, unmistakable, a full pulse of him that draws a whimper out of you and a strained sound out of him.

“Don’t do that—”

“You’re so hard,” you murmur into his ear, feeling him drive deeper on reflex. “...Can feel you everywhere. You like how wet I am that much?”

“I swear to—” his hips snap forward, punching the word off, “—I swear—”

“Such a good boy for me,” you moan into his ear.

His whole body shudders violently, a sound tearing out of him that he clearly did not intend to make. He buries himself to the hilt and stays there, jaw tight, head dropped, chest heaving against yours. A single scale pulses bright at the base of his throat.

“...You’re a bully,” he grits out, barely holding himself together.

“Am I?” you clench around him again, so tight.

He makes a noise like you’ve physically wounded him. Then he lifts his head, meets your eyes—pupils blown so wide his irises are just thin violet rings—and something shifts in his expression from tortured to intent.

He pulls back slowly. Buries himself. Slow. Devastating. Grinding deep on every stroke until you’re the one losing her mind, fingers twisted in his hair, trying to pull him closer, faster, anything.

“Now who’s desperate?” he murmurs, watching your face, insufferably calm except for the way his breath catches on every thrust.

“R-Rafayel—go faster—”

“Tsk.” he tilts his head. “Beg a little nicer. Just a little, it’s not gonna kill you—”

“I will bite you again.”

He huffs a breathless laugh against your jaw. “Promises, promises—”

You grab his hair and yank his head back. The laugh cuts off into a raw, open moan that spills out of him unguarded, his hips stuttering, cock twitching inside you from the pull. The sound of it floods straight down your spine.

“...Fuuck,” he breathes at the ceiling, blinking, jaw working. His throat bobs. More scales spread across his chest, his shoulders, blazing blue in the low light. “Okay, yeah. You wanna play dirty—fine.” his eyes drop back to yours. “Fine.”

He moves. Hard and fast and deep, the headboard hitting the wall in a steady rhythm that knocks one of the candles sideways in its dish, wax pooling in the low light. The room fills with the sounds of both of you—graceless and unrestrained, the teasing burned entirely away. Every thrust pushes a sound out of you, loud and shameless, and Rafayel watches your face like it’s the best thing he’s ever seen, cheeks flushed dark, sweat at his temple, lips parted around his own broken exhales.

“Loud,” he says again, breathless, not stopping. “Shit, you’re so damn loud for me—if anyone were to hear you now, they’re gonna think I’m killing you...”

“You’re the one moaning shamelessly—”

“That—” a rough exhale, “—is different... your pussy is—” he groans, long and low, hips snapping, “—fuck, you’re gripping me so tight—every time I try to pull back you—”

You scratch him again, long slow lines down his back, and his sentence dissolves into a curse. He nips your throat in retaliation, quite sharp, and you gasp, and he smirks the smirk of a man who has catalogued every sensitive spot on your body and feels no guilt about using them.

“Close, yeah?” he murmurs against your throat.

“Hah, y-yeah, gonna cum...” you manage.

He shifts his angle. The orgasm hits without warning, fast and vicious, every muscle in your body seizing tight. You clench around him hard and he groans like it knocks the air out of him, hips grinding through it, riding every pulse of it with you as you fall apart, loud and helpless and entirely past caring.

“...Fu-uuck,” he breathes, watching your face, his rhythm fracturing. “...You feel so—when you cum you’re so—” he doesn’t finish, just groans instead, deep and wrecked, because you’re still clenching, still trembling, and his cock is twitching against your walls with every clench.

You feel him right there at the edge. You lift your hips against him. “C’mon baby,” you murmur, voice wrecked and raspy. You let your lips brush his ear. “...Can feel you, Raf. Feel how close you are. Come on, let me hear you—”

“Don’t—” it comes out fractured, “—don’t do that, if you do that I’m gonna—”

“My good boy,” you breathe. “Give it to me. Need your cum to fill me up...”

Rafayel comes undone so completely it’s almost violent, a groan that tears out of him low and raw and helpless, hips snapping forward, scales blazing across every inch of visible skin, fingers gripping your hips hard as he shudders through it, your name breaking apart in his mouth against your neck as he spills inside you, spluttering thick and warm.

He stays buried inside you, shaking. The candles burn low in the silence after. Both of you breathe. The room smells like wax and salt and the fading sweetness of the aphrodisiac, and the sheets beneath you are thoroughly ruined.

Then he lifts his head. And he has the absolute, unmitigated nerve to smirk at you.

“So,” he says, voice scraped raw. “The candles.”

“The candles,” you confirm, your own lips curving in a sheepish smile.

He drops back against the pillow, one arm thrown over his face, chest still heaving. “I want every single one they have.” his voice is thick and raspy and still raises goosebumps up your body as he murmurs, “Also—” he tilts his head toward you without moving his arm, “—you were dripping before I even touched you tonight. Just so you know. I saw it, when the wax—”

“Rafayel.”

“I’m just saying—”

“If you finish that sentence I will never buy those candles again.”

His arm drops from his face. He looks at you, something caught between a smirk and genuine consideration.

“...You were really wet,” he says anyway.

You hit him with the pillow. He catches it, laughing, and pulls you against his side with the arm that catches it, tucking you in like punctuation. 

“Next time,” he says to the ceiling, “I’m picking up the candles.”

You grin into his bare chest. “Scared I’ll out-trick you again?”

He smiles, slow and full of mischief. His chin finds the top of your head. His heartbeat is still fast under your ear, scales cooling to skin in slow degrees. “Just think it’s my turn to plan something.”

You tip your head up to look at him. “Should I be worried?”

Rafayel stares at the ceiling, lips turning into a slow smile like he has already decided exactly what he’s going to do to you next time.

“Probably,” he smirks, and you know you’re fucked.

© zaynessbeloved 2025. please don’t copy, repost or translate my works. thank you!