Unhealthy Obsessions

The weekend is a long time.

The weekend is a thing that has, historically, taken approximately forty-eight hours, and the weekend you have just been through took, conservatively, six weeks. You spent it doing things. You went to the grocery store. You did laundry. You graded a stack of redox quizzes and you made notes for next week's lesson and you did not think about Ryland Grace at all, except for the fourteen hours of Saturday and the eleven hours of Sunday during which you thought about almost nothing else.

You replayed the meeting. You replayed it the way he must have replayed eight months in one night, you suspect, and yours took two days. You replayed the word lazy. You replayed the careful neutral face. You replayed him walking out without looking at you, and the small cold rush of oh, no, and you replayed it from every angle, and at no point did any of the angles get any better.

You have arrived at Monday with a plan.

The plan is: act normal. The plan is: do not give him anything. The plan is: he has made his point, and if you behave for a week he will go back to being the slightly flustered man in a cardigan who you used to be able to ruin with eye contact, and the equilibrium will be restored, and you will have learned a valuable lesson about hubris.

You are very committed to the plan. You believe in the plan. The plan is going to work.

The plan lasts forty minutes.

—

He comes into your classroom at 8:20.

You are at the lab benches, setting up for second period, which is a titration unit and which therefore requires you to be carrying a bottle of sodium hydroxide across the room when he opens the door. You do not drop the bottle. You consider it. You do not.

"Morning," he says.

"Morning."

He is wearing the cardigan. He is wearing, under the cardigan, a t-shirt you cannot fully see, and he has a coffee in one hand and a manila folder in the other and he is standing in your doorway like he belongs there, which, technically, he does, because he is a colleague, and colleagues come into colleagues' classrooms, and you have to keep telling yourself this because your body is reacting to him being in here like he has come in to commit a crime.

"You got a second?"

"I'm setting up."

"I can see that. You got a second."

"Grace."

"Two seconds."

You put the sodium hydroxide down. Carefully. With both hands. He waits.

"What."

He holds up the folder. "Curriculum thing. Alvarez wants it by Wednesday. Thought you might have notes."

"You could have emailed."

"I could have."

He has not moved from the doorway. He is still holding the coffee. He is looking at you with the very mild, very patient, very neutral expression of a man delivering an administrative update, except that his eyes have not left your face since he came in, and a man delivering an administrative update would have looked at the folder at least once.

"Was there something else," you say.

"You said my teaching was lazy."

"Grace."

"I just want to make sure I understood what you meant."

"I was making a point."

"In a meeting."

"Yes."

"In front of the department."

"Yes, Grace, that is generally where meetings happen."

"Mm."

He takes a sip of his coffee. He does not look away. You have, in the last forty seconds, lost approximately three layers of skin and you are trying very hard not to show it.

"Do you still think it's lazy."

"I-"

"Because I went home and looked at the unit and I think you might be right."

"What."

"I think you might be right. I'm changing the unit. I'm doing the yeast thing."

"Grace."

"I just wanted to say that. In person. Since you said it in person."

He is, you realise, not letting you off the hook. He has come in here at 8:20 on a Monday morning to agree with you, and he has done it with the polite, neutral, conscientious face of a man closing a loop, and you cannot tell if you are being thanked or being punished or both, and the both is, you suspect, the answer.

"Okay," you say.

"Okay."

"Was there anything else."

"No."

"Okay."

He nods. He does not leave. He takes another sip of his coffee. He looks, very briefly and very deliberately, at the lab bench where you are standing, and then back at your face. He is, you realise, doing a thing. He is doing a thing that is so subtle that if you described it to anyone they would say you were imagining it, and if you described it to him he would say what thing, and you would have nothing to point at, because the thing is not a thing, the thing is a series of very small choices that add up to him standing in your classroom drinking coffee and looking at you and not leaving.

He is doing exactly what you used to do to him.

"You should go to your classroom," you say.

"Probably."

"First period's about to start."

"Mm."

"Stop."

"Stop what."

"Stop saying mm."

"You say mm."

"That's different."

"How."

You don't have an answer to how. You stand there with your mouth slightly open, and he watches you not answer, and the corner of his mouth does the millimetre thing, and he takes another sip of his coffee.

"Have a good first period," he says.

He turns. He goes. He pulls the door closed behind him with the quiet, considerate click of a man who has just left you in a chemistry lab holding nothing and staring at nothing and having to teach sixteen-year-olds about titration in eighteen minutes.

You sit down on the lab stool.

You sit down on the lab stool and you put your face in your hands and you laugh, which is the wrong reaction, which is the reaction of a person whose brain has fully come off the rails, and you laugh for approximately fifteen seconds and then you sit up and you finish setting up the titration and you do not, for the rest of the morning, allow yourself to think his name.

—

You make it until last period.

Last period is your prep. Last period he also has prep on Mondays, which is a piece of information you have, regrettably, retained, and which you are trying very hard to pretend you do not have. You stay in your classroom. You grade. You do not go to the staff room. You do not walk past his classroom. You do excellent, focused work for forty-five minutes and you feel virtuous and you feel mature and you feel like a person who has, finally, gotten a grip.

At 2:40 he knocks on your door.

You look up. He is in the doorway again, except this time he doesn't have a coffee, and he doesn't have a folder, and he doesn't have a reason. He is just there. He is leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets and he is looking at you with the same mild, neutral expression he had this morning, and you realise, with a kind of slow-motion clarity, that you are not going to make it through the rest of this conversation upright.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi."

"Are you busy."

"Yes."

"What are you doing."

"Grading."

"Grading what."

"Grace."

"I'm just asking."

"You're not just asking."

He smiles. Full smile this time. The one that crinkles his eyes.

"I'm just asking," he says again, gentler.

He comes into the room. He closes the door behind him. He walks over to your desk. He does not sit down in the student chair across from you. He sits on the edge of your desk, sideways, with one foot on the floor and one leg bent, and he looks down at you.

The teacher voice is bad. This is worse. This is the teacher voice with proximity.

"So," he says.

"So."

"You've been weird since the meeting."

"I've been weird."

"Mm-hm."

"You've been weird."

"Have I."

"Yes."

"How."

"Grace."

"How."

You stare at him. He waits. He is very, very good at waiting. You suspect, with a flash of belated insight, that he has been good at waiting this entire time and you simply never made him do it.

"You're being mean," you say.

"I'm being attentive."

"It's the same thing."

"It's really not."

He's looking down at you. His glasses are sliding down his nose, the way they always do, and this time he pushes them up himself, with one finger, slowly, and you watch him do it and you understand that he has done it slowly on purpose, and you understand that he has been waiting to do that since Tuesday in the supply closet, and you understand that you are, possibly, going to die in this chair.

He looks at you for a long second. The mild face does not change. His foot, the one on the floor, taps once against the leg of your desk.

"Stand up," he says.

It is a small instruction. It is delivered at low volume. It is delivered in the voice he uses on a student he wants to give a job to, come up to the board, hand out the worksheets, get the door for me, the easy reasonable teacher voice that you have heard him use a thousand times to a thousand sixteen-year-olds and that you have, you realise in real time, never had pointed at you.

You do not stand up.

You sit in your chair and you look up at him from your chair and you feel, very clearly, the moment he registers that you are not standing up, and the moment passes, and he is still looking at you, and he is waiting.

You should stand up.

You should stand up because standing up is the small reasonable thing he has asked for, and because complying with the small reasonable thing is the move that lets you keep your dignity, and because every cell in your body is currently telling you that not complying will be a catastrophe.

You open your mouth. You say it before your brain catches your mouth.

"Make me."

The room goes quiet.

It goes quiet in the way that a room goes quiet when you have just dropped a glass and have not yet heard it hit the floor. There is a one-second window in which you could take it back. You watch the window open and you watch the window close and you do not take it back, because the part of you that said it is the same part of you that said lazy, and that part of you is, evidently, in charge of the steering wheel and committed to driving off the cliff.

He does not move for a beat. He does not move for two.

Then, slowly, he gets off the desk.

He does not come around to your side of the desk. He does not reach for you. He does not touch you. He just stands up, at his full height, two feet from your chair, with his hands at his sides, and he is suddenly much taller than he is when he is sitting on furniture, and the height of him is taking up more of the room than it has any right to.

You stand up.

You stand up without deciding to. Your body has, ahead of your brain, calculated that remaining seated while he is standing over you like that is not a survivable position, and it has corrected for the imbalance, and you are now on your feet and six inches from him and you have to tip your chin up to keep the eye contact.

He has not done anything. He has not made you. You have made yourself. He is watching you have done it, and the corner of his mouth is doing the millimetre thing, and the millimetre thing right now is the worst thing you have ever seen on anyone's face.

"Grace."

"Don't."

"Don't what."

"Don't talk."

"I-"

"You don't get to say make me in this room, do you understand. Not here. Not at school. I cannot do anything about make me in this room, and you said it anyway, and I want you to think about that for a second."

You think about it for a second.

You think about it for several seconds. He is watching you think about it. The patient teacher mask has burned through and what is underneath is the same man, but with a finger of frustration laid quietly along the jawline of it, and the frustration is so much hotter than the patience was that you cannot, immediately, do anything except stand there and absorb it.

"Get your bag," he says.

"Grace, I-"

"Get your bag."

"I-"

"Get your bag."

You get your bag.

You get your bag without saying another word, because there is, you have correctly intuited, no word available to you that will not make this worse. He waits by the door. He does not look at you while you pack up. When you are done he opens the door and he holds it open and you walk through it, and he follows you out, and he pulls the door closed behind him with the same quiet considerate click as this morning, and the considerate click, given what is happening underneath everything, is the most threatening sound you have ever heard.

In the hallway he walks slightly behind you. Not close. Not far. Close enough that you can feel him there. You do not turn around. You do not speak. You walk through the hall and out into the parking lot and the late-afternoon air hits you and you take a breath and you keep walking.

"Did you drive," he says.

"Yes."

"Good. I biked."

"You-"

"Yeah. So you're driving."

You stop walking. You turn to look at him. He has stopped one step behind you and he is, in the late afternoon light, calmly waiting for you to process the logistics of the situation he has just described, which are: you are going to drive him to your apartment, in your car, with him in your passenger seat, for fifteen minutes, in silence, having just said make me to him in your own classroom.

"My bike's locked up at the rack," he says, helpfully. "It'll be fine overnight."

"Overnight?"

"Mm."

"Grace, you biked?"

"I bike every day."

"It's October."

"I have a coat."

You stare at him. He stares back. He is not, you realise, ever going to defend the bike. The bike is a fact of his life, like his glasses or his terrible t-shirts, and he has, in the middle of this, casually mentioned it the way one might mention having brought a packed lunch.

"Get in the car," you say.

"Mm."

"Get in the car, Grace, I swear to-"

"Easy."

He says easy in the same mild teacher voice he said stand up in. You close your mouth. You get in the car. He walks around to the passenger side. He gets in. He puts his bag on the floor between his feet. He buckles his seatbelt. He folds his hands in his lap.

He looks at you.

"You can start driving," he says.

You drive.

You drive out of the lot and you take a left at the light and you do not look at him, because you cannot afford to look at him. You can feel him in your peripheral vision. He is just sitting there. He is sitting in your passenger seat with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes, you can feel, on the side of your face, and he is not saying anything, and the not-saying-anything is filling the car like water.

You make it three minutes before you have to speak.

"You're being weird."

"Mm."

"You're being weird on purpose."

"Mm."

"Grace."

"Eyes on the road."

You snap your eyes back to the road. You did not realise you had taken them off the road. You had, at some point in the last sentence, turned to look at him, and you had not noticed yourself doing it, and he had noticed, and he had, very calmly, redirected you.

The teacher voice is going to kill you in this car.

You make it another four minutes. You make it through two more lights and one merge and a stretch of road where nothing happens. You can hear him breathing. You can hear, you are fairly sure, the seconds of your life ticking away. At one point, at a red light, he reaches over and adjusts the air vent on his side of the dashboard, casually, the way a man might in any car he was riding in, and the casualness of it is the most intimate thing he has ever done.

You make a small sound.

"What," he says.

"Nothing."

"Mm."

"Stop mming."

"No."

The light goes green. You drive. You make it another two minutes. You think, at minute eleven, I could just keep driving. I could keep driving past my apartment and just keep going and we could be in Vermont by midnight.

"You're not going to Vermont," he says, conversationally, like he can hear it.

"What."

"You're doing the face. The face you do when you're considering an exit strategy. You're not going to Vermont."

"How did you-"

"I've been watching your face for eight months, sweetheart, I know what it does."

You almost run a stop sign. You catch yourself. You brake hard. He puts one hand, casually, on the dashboard to steady himself, and does not comment.

"Don't call me that in the car," you say, through your teeth.

"Mm."

"Grace"

"You're going to miss your turn."

You make the turn. You make the turn and you pull into your lot and you park and you sit there for one second with both hands on the wheel and you think, very clearly: I am not going to survive this afternoon.

You get out of the car. He gets out of the car. He walks around to your side and he stands there, calmly, waiting for you, and you lock the car and you walk to your building and he walks one step behind you and you can feel him there and you fumble the key in the lock once, twice, and you get the door open on the third try, and he reaches over your shoulder and pushes it the rest of the way open for you, polite, and the politeness of it, given everything, is what nearly takes you down at the threshold.

You walk in.

He follows you.

He closes the door.

You turn around to face him.

You have, on the drive, prepared a speech. The speech was supposed to land you back on level ground. The speech contained the deli voice and a wry observation about his pacing and a small joke about Vermont, and you had it organised by the time you parked, and you were going to deliver it the moment the door closed, and you were going to win.

You open your mouth.

He kisses you.

He kisses you before you can get the first word out, and the kiss is not a patient, tangential, slow thing. The kiss is a man whose composure has been scratched off by the last forty minutes of you and who is, finally, allowed to use his hands. One hand is in your hair. One hand is at the small of your back. He has pulled you in hard against him and your bag has dropped somewhere and the wall is at your shoulder blades and his mouth is on yours and you understand, in a single small bright pulse of clarity, that you have miscalculated.

You go up on your toes into it because your body has made an executive decision without consulting you.

You get your hands in his hair.

You get your hands in his hair and you pull, because you cannot help yourself, because the bratting is autonomic at this point, because the part of you that has been driving all afternoon does not know how to stop driving even when the road has ended. You pull and he makes a small sound against your mouth, almost amused, and you take the amused noise personally, and you bite his bottom lip.

You bite it on purpose. You bite it harder than you mean to. You feel his lip catch between your teeth and you hear, very distinctly, the sound he makes, and the sound is not amused anymore.

He pulls back.

Not far. Just enough to look at you. His mouth is wet. There is a red mark on his bottom lip where your teeth were. His glasses are crooked. His face is doing something that has nothing to do with patience and nothing to do with mildness and nothing to do with any of the registers he has been using all day, and you stare at him and you understand, with a small descending lurch, that you have snapped him.

He does not move for a second.

Then he says, very quietly: "Okay."

A beat.

"Okay. You want to do it like that."

It is not a question. You do not answer it. You could not answer it. Your mouth has gone dry and your knees are doing something concerning and you are pressed against your hallway wall with a man you have spent eight months teasing and you have just bitten him, and he is looking at you like he is, finally, going to do something about it.

He turns you around.

He turns you around with one hand on your shoulder, not rough, just decisive, and you are now facing the wall and his hand is on the back of your neck, light, not pressing, just there, and his other hand is at your hip, and his mouth is at your ear.

"You are going to listen to me," he says, into your ear. Soft. Almost gentle. "I am going to tell you what is about to happen. And you are going to be quiet and let me tell you. Can you do that."

"I-"

"Words."

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes, I can do that."

"Good."

The good goes all the way down your spine. You make a sound. He hears it. He does not comment on it. The hand at the back of your neck stays where it is.

"I am going to take you to your bedroom," he says, into your ear. "And I am going to take a great deal of time. And every time you try to rush me, I am going to stop. And every time you try to bite me again, I am going to stop. And every time you say something cute, I am going to stop. Three strikes, sweetheart, and I leave you on that bed and I go home. Do you understand me."

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes Grace."

He pauses. The hand at your neck flexes, once, very slightly.

"Try again."

You stare at the wall in front of you. You can feel his breath at the side of your head and his hand at the back of your neck and your face is hot and you are, suddenly, not sure what he is asking for.

He waits.

He waits long enough that you have to think it through, and then you understand, and your stomach does the wrong thing.

"Yes," you say. "Ryland."

"Good girl."

The words do something to you that you will, later, deny. Your knees actually buckle, briefly, and his hand at your hip catches you, and he laughs, very quietly, against the side of your head.

"Down the hall?"

"Yeah."

"Show me."

You show him.

You walk down the hall and he walks behind you with his hand on the small of your back, and the hand is not gripping, it is just present, and the present-ness of it is keeping you upright in a way that is not entirely metaphorical. You get to your bedroom. You stop at the threshold. You do not know what to do.

"Inside," he says, behind you.

You go inside.

He follows you. He closes the door, which is unnecessary because you live alone, and the unnecessariness of the door-closing is a deliberate choice he is making, and you clock it, and your stomach does the wrong thing. He stops in front of you. He looks at you. He pushes his glasses up his nose with one finger, slowly, the way he did at your desk.

"Take your cardigan off," he says.

You take your cardigan off. You drop it on the chair.

"Shoes."

You take your shoes off.

"Good."

You make a sound. You can't help it. He hears it. He does not smile. The not-smiling is somehow worse than the smiling would be. You are standing in front of him in your skirt and your blouse and your bare feet on the cold wood and you are absolutely certain that you have never been looked at like this in your entire life.

"Grace."

"Don't talk."

"I-"

"I said don't talk."

You close your mouth.

He walks around you. Slowly. A full circle. He is looking at you like a thing he is appraising. You stand still because you have been told to stand still and because, frankly, you are not sure your legs could be doing anything else. When he comes back around to your front he stops and he looks at your face and he says, very mildly:

"You bit me."

"I-"

"That was a question."

"It-"

"Was that a question."

"Yes."

"So answer it."

"Yes, I bit you."

"Why."

"I-"

"Yes or no would be easier. Did you bite me because you wanted to, or because you were trying to make me stop being slow."

You stare at him. You understand the trap. The trap is that there is a correct answer and a true answer and they are not the same answer, and he is going to wait until you give him the true one.

"Both," you say.

"Mm."

"Don't mm-"

"I will mm if I want to. Sit on the bed."

You sit on the bed.

He stands in front of you. He is, now, fully out of the patient teacher register and into something else entirely, something where he is paying attention to you with the same focus he uses on a problem he is genuinely interested in, and the focus, which has been pointed everywhere else in his life for forty-eight years, is now pointed at you and you cannot, you find, look away from him.

"Look at me," he says.

You were already looking at him. You keep looking.

"You can be a brat," he says, very calmly. "I figured that out. I figured it out eight months in but I figured it out. You can be a brat with me all you want. You can say make me and you can bite me and you can do whatever you have planned for the next time you want to wind me up, and I am not going to break, sweetheart, I am going to handle it. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes Ryland."

"Good."

He kneels down in front of you. He is, suddenly, eye level. He puts his hands on your knees. He pushes them apart, slow, and steps in between them, and his hands are on your thighs, sliding up under the skirt, and his mouth is on the inside of your knee, and your hands fly to his hair.

"No," he says, against your knee. "Hands behind you."

You put your hands behind you, on the bed.

"Good."

The good is going to kill you. You are going to die in this bed. Of the goods. You make a small sound and he hears it and he does not comment on it and he moves his mouth higher up your thigh, slowly, and you bite the inside of your own cheek to keep from saying anything.

"You can talk," he says. "I just don't want you to push. Tell me if it's too much. Tell me if you want me to do something else. Just don't tell me to hurry. Got it."

"Got it."

"What was that."

"Got it, Ryland."

He laughs, very softly, against your thigh. He is, you realise, pleased. He is pleased with the Ryland. He is pleased with all of it.

He pushes your skirt up around your hips. His hands hook into your underwear and he pulls it down, slow, and you lift your hips for him without being asked and he says, soft, "good," and you make a sound that is not language. He drops the underwear somewhere on the floor. He puts his hands back on your thighs and he pushes them wider apart and he just looks at you for a second, with his glasses sliding down his nose and his hair already a wreck and the most focused expression you have ever seen on his face.

"Grace."

"Mm."

"Don't look at me like that."

"Like what."

"Like you're going to write a paper on it."

He laughs. He laughs against the inside of your thigh and the laugh hits you in three different places and you make a sound and his laugh stops, abruptly, like he has just discovered something.

"Okay," he says, quieter. "Okay. Hold on."

He leans in.

The first thing he does is not what you expect. He does not put his mouth on you. He kisses the inside of your thigh, high up, slow, and then the crease where your thigh meets your hip, and then the other crease, and you are already, embarrassingly, lifting your hips toward his mouth because your body has stopped consulting you on anything, and he places one flat hand on your stomach and presses you back down against the bed.

"Stay."

"Grace-"

"Stay."

You stay.

He puts his mouth on you.

He does it slow, the way he does everything in this bed. The first pass is just his tongue, broad and warm and exploratory, and you make a sound that is not a word and his free hand tightens on your thigh in answer. He does it again. He does it again, slightly different, slightly higher, and you can feel him paying attention, the way he pays attention to a malfunctioning copier, the way he pays attention to a problem he wants to actually solve. He is learning you. He is logging which thing makes you make which sound, and he is going to use it.

"Ryland."

"Mm-hm."

"Ryland, what are you-"

"Shh."

He finds your clit. He finds it and he closes his mouth around it, gently, and he sucks, once, and you make a noise that you would, ordinarily, be deeply embarrassed by, and the noise tells him what he wanted to know, and he does it again.

Your hands fist in the sheets behind you.

He goes slow. He goes unbearably slow. He is not in a hurry. He is, you understand with mounting horror, going to take the entire afternoon to do this if he wants to, and he wants to, and there is nothing you can do about it. He keeps his rhythm steady and patient and exact, and every time your hips try to come up off the bed his hand on your stomach presses you back down, and every time you make a sound he files it, and every time he files a sound he comes back to whatever caused it and does it again.

He slides one hand up the inside of your thigh. He hooks two fingers, gentle, just at your entrance, and pauses there.

"Yes?"

"Yes, Grace, please-"

"Words."

"Yes, you can-"

"Yes what."

"Yes you can, Ryland, please, please-"

"Good."

He pushes the two fingers into you, slow, and your back arches off the bed and his mouth is back on your clit and his fingers are crooked just exactly right inside you, like he has been practicing, like he has been thinking about it, and you are immediately, embarrassingly, very close.

"Ryland, I'm-"

He pulls his mouth off you.

His fingers stay where they are. The fingers stay where they are, slow, lazy, exactly not enough, and his mouth is at your inner thigh again, kissing, like nothing is happening, and you make a sound that is genuinely the most undignified thing your throat has ever produced.

"Grace-"

"Mm-hm."

"What are you doing-"

"Taking my time."

"Ryland, I will-"

"Mm."

He moves his fingers, just a little, just enough to make you make another sound, and then he keeps them still, and your hips try to move and he presses you down with his free hand and you understand, with a kind of furious clarity, that he is going to keep you exactly here, on the edge, for as long as he decides to, and there is nothing you can do.

You drop your head back against the pillow and you make a sound that is half a laugh and half something that is not a laugh.

"You are evil."

"Mm-hm."

"You are literally evil-"

"Ask me for it."

"What?"

"Ask me for it. Properly. Like you mean it."

You lift your head. You look at him. He is between your thighs with his glasses fogged and his fingers inside you and his free hand on your stomach and his mouth wet, and he is waiting, and you understand that he is going to wait as long as it takes, and you understand that you cannot wait as long as it would take, and you give up.

"Please, Ryland."

"Please what."

"Please, your mouth, please will you finish, please-"

"Good."

He puts his mouth back on you.

He does not, this time, go slow. He has gotten his answer, and now he is going to give you what you asked for, and what he gives you is steady and focused and exactly the rhythm he had a minute ago, and his fingers crook inside you on the same beat, and you come apart in under thirty seconds with both hands fisted in the sheets and his name in pieces in your mouth.

You come for what feels like a long time. He works you through it, mouth and fingers, until you are pushing at his shoulder with one hand because you cannot take any more, and only then does he ease off, slow, and rest his forehead against your inner thigh for one second, breathing.

"Ryland."

"Yeah."

"Up."

"Are you asking."

"I am asking, Grace, please, get up here-"

"Mm."

He gets up there.

He pulls his fingers out of you, slow, and you make a small protesting sound that you hate yourself for, and he kisses the inside of your thigh once more, and then he climbs up your body, slow, kissing as he goes. He kisses your hip. He kisses your stomach. He pushes your skirt the rest of the way up and then off you entirely, dropping it over the side of the bed, and he kisses up between your ribs and unbuttons your blouse one button at a time with his teeth around the third button which makes you laugh, and he says "don't make me laugh, I will lose track," and undoes the rest with his hands.

He pushes the blouse open. He looks at you. His face does the thing it does when he is looking at something he genuinely cannot believe is in front of him.

"Hi," he says.

"Ryland, please get off me and take your pants off."

He stops.

He stops kissing your sternum and he lifts his head and he looks at you. The look is not angry. The look is patient and very slightly disappointed, in the way a teacher looks at a student who has just done the exact thing the teacher told them not to do five minutes ago.

He sits up. He sits back on his heels between your knees. He puts his hands on his thighs.

He waits.

"Grace."

"Mm."

"What did I-"

"You're pushing."

"I'm not-"

"Mm."

You stare at him. He stares back. He is, you realise with a kind of dawning horror, not going to do anything else until you correct yourself. He is going to sit there, between your bare knees, with his glasses fogged and his hands on his own thighs, until you ask him properly.

The afterglow of the orgasm he just gave you is still in your bones. Your body is still loose and shaky and grateful, and you have just demanded that he hurry up like none of the last forty minutes happened, and he is now demonstrating, with great patience, that they did.

"Ryland."

"Mm."

"I'm sorry."

"Mm."

"I'm sorry, I-"

"Try again."

"Please. Please, will you take your pants off."

"Better."

He stands up off the bed.

He stands up and he turns away from you, slightly, and he pulls his t-shirt off over his head, slow, and you finally get to see him properly, and what you see is a man who is, by any honest measure, real. Real chest. Real shoulders. Real soft middle where his cardigan has been hiding it. Real chest hair, going grey in places. The most Ryland Grace body you have ever seen, and your mouth goes dry.

"Stop looking," he says, without turning around.

"No."

"That's my line."

"Mm."

He laughs, soft. He unbuckles his belt. He undoes his pants. He pushes them down with his underwear in one movement and steps out of them, and he is, you note with some considerable feeling, very hard, and he turns around and he sees you looking and he does not, for once, tell you to stop.

He leans over and picks his pants up off the floor and fishes in the pocket. He comes back up with his wallet. He opens his wallet. He takes out a condom.

You stare at him.

"You had that in your wallet?"

"Mm-hm."

"Since when."

"Couple weeks."

"Couple weeks?"

"Mm-hm."

"Ryland-"

"You want to keep talking about it, or-"

"Get over here."

He stops.

He stops with the condom in his hand and he looks at you, calmly, and he does not move toward the bed.

"Try again," he says.

"Grace, I-"

"Try again."

"I-"

He waits. He holds the condom. He is standing two feet from your bed, naked, hard, with his glasses sliding down his nose, and he is not coming, and you are spread out on the bed with your blouse hanging open and your underwear gone and your skin still flushed from the orgasm he just gave you, and you have just told a naked man holding a condom to get over here, and you are about to lose your mind.

"Please."

"Please what."

"Please, will you, will you come back to the bed, please, Ryland-"

"Better."

He comes back to the bed.

He rolls the condom on, slow, watching your face the whole time, and you watch his hand on himself and you make a sound and he hears it and the corner of his mouth pulls and then he is kneeling between your thighs again and he leans down and kisses you, slow, and his mouth tastes like you, and you make another sound and you reach for him and he catches both your wrists, gently, and pins them next to your head.

"Hands here," he says, against your mouth.

"Ryland."

"Stay."

You stay.

He braces himself on one forearm next to your head. He reaches down with his other hand and lines himself up, and he pauses there, just at your entrance, and looks down at you.

"Yes?"

"Yes, Grace, I have been saying yes-"

"Just checking."

He pushes in.

He pushes in slow. He pushes in unbearably slow, because of course he does, because he has not stopped being himself for one minute of this afternoon, and you feel every inch of him going in and you make a sound that has no shape, and he is making small sounds back into your neck that are not words, and when he is all the way in he goes still and drops his forehead onto your shoulder and breathes out, ragged, against your skin.

"God."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Ryland."

"Yeah."

"Move."

He moves.

He moves slow at first because he cannot, evidently, help it, because slow is his whole afternoon, but the slow does not last very long this time. The slow lasts maybe thirty seconds. The slow lasts until you wrap one leg around his hip and tilt up into him and make a small please sound against his ear, and then the slow goes out of him in long peeling sheets, and what is underneath it is a man who has been wanting this for eight months and has been holding himself together with both hands, and he is not, now, holding himself together.

He picks up the pace. He picks it up and he does not put it down. He is over you, braced on both forearms now, his hips snapping into yours in a steady deep rhythm, and his face is in your neck and he is talking, of course he is talking, and what he is saying is not the patient teacher voice from the hallway, it is not the careful handler from the desk, it is Ryland Grace talking like he talks, breathless and tangential and chaotic, into your skin.

"God, you are, you are, I have thought about this, I have thought about this so much you have no idea-"

"Ryland"

"You have no idea, I have, eight months, eight whole months of you sitting on my desk and-"

"Ryland, I-"

"Lazy, you called my teaching lazy-"

"Grace."

"In front of everyone, in front of-"

You laugh. You laugh and the laugh shakes you both and he makes a small surprised sound at the way you tighten around him and his hips stutter once before he catches the rhythm again, and you bite his shoulder, the same one as before, harder this time, and he says fuck into your neck which is the first time you have ever heard him swear and the swearing does something to you that you will, later, have to think about carefully.

He pulls his head up out of your neck.

He looks down at you. His mouth is still wet. The red mark from your teeth is still on his bottom lip. His hips have not stopped moving in that deep steady rhythm, and his face, above yours, is focused, and he is looking at you with the calm decisive attention of a man who has just decided to do something about a thing.

He leans down.

He puts his mouth on the place where your neck meets your shoulder. He does it carefully. He does it without hurrying. And then he closes his teeth around the skin there, not hard, just deliberate, and bites you.

You make a sound.

He holds the bite for one beat longer than you expect, and then he releases it, and his tongue passes over the mark he has just left, slow and soothing, and he kisses the spot once, and lifts his head again.

"There," he says, mild. "Closer to even."

You stare up at him. He is still moving. The mark on your neck is throbbing in a way that is travelling through the rest of you, and you make a sound that is not a word, and the corner of his mouth pulls.

You have, in the middle of all of it, one single very clear thought.

The thought arrives without tone. The thought arrives without any particular feeling attached to it, just a flat declarative line in your own voice in the middle of your own head, which is: I am going to murder him and then I am going to marry him.

He laughs, very softly, against the side of your head, like he has somehow heard it.

"Ryland."

"Yeah."

"Harder. Don't ask, just do it."

He stops.

He stops moving. He does not pull out. He stays exactly where he is, all the way inside you, and he goes completely still, and he lifts his head off your neck and looks down at you.

You stare up at him.

"No," you say. "No, no, no, Grace, please, please don't-"

"What did I tell you at the wall."

"Ryland-"

"What did I tell you. About the third strike."

You make a sound. It is not a word. It is the sound of you understanding, in a single small bright pulse, that he has been counting. He has been counting the pulls and he has been waiting to use the threat and the threat is now, and you are full of him and he is not moving and you are going to die.

"Ryland, I'm sorry-"

"What was the rule."

"Don't push, don't push, Ryland please-"

"And what did you just do."

"I-"

"Look at me."

You look at him.

His glasses are fogged. His hair is a wreck. His face, above yours, is focused and patient and unmoving, and his hips are still and his weight is heavy and you can feel him inside you still hard and still right there and he is doing nothing, and you understand, in the same small bright pulse, that he can do this all afternoon, that he is patient enough and frustrated enough and attentive enough to do this all afternoon, and that the only way out is through.

"I pushed."

"Mm-hm."

"I pushed, I'm sorry, Ryland, please-"

"Please what."

"Please, please will you, will you please go harder, please-"

"Mm."

He waits one more beat. He waits long enough to make you sure, for one terrible second, that he is going to say no, and then he leans down and kisses you, gently, on the forehead, and he says, very softly, "okay," and he gives you what you asked for.

It is not gentle this time.

It is not gentle and you cry out at the first hard thrust and his mouth comes down on yours and swallows the sound and then he is fucking you, properly, hard, the way you have been pushing for, and the difference between thirty seconds ago when he was still and right now is so vast that your whole body is shaking with it. His hand has come up to cradle the back of your skull, carefully, like he is making sure you don't hit the headboard, and the carefulness of the hand in contrast to the rest of him is what finally undoes you.

You feel it coming. He feels it coming. He somehow knows, because he is paying attention the way he pays attention to everything, and he reaches down between you with his free hand and his fingers find your clit and he says, into your ear, "come on, sweetheart, come on, I've got you, I've got you, good girl," and you come apart underneath him with his name in your mouth, both of them, Ryland Grace, broken, and you are not, this time, trying to be quiet, and he is saying it again into your ear while you come, good girl, that's it, good girl, over and over, soft and certain, and you understand dimly that he has waited to deploy that one, that he has held it back since the hallway, and the saving of it is the last thing that goes through your mind before everything goes white.

He follows you a few thrusts later with his face buried in your neck and a sound he makes that you will think about for weeks.

He goes still.

He is heavy on top of you. His whole weight. He is breathing hard. His hand is still cradling the back of your skull. His other hand is gripping your hip, hard enough that there will be marks tomorrow, and you do not, you find, mind.

You lie there.

You lie there for a long time. He does not move. You do not push him off. His breath slows. Yours slows. His glasses are pressed sideways against your cheek and are, definitely, bent.

Eventually he kisses the side of your neck, very softly, and lifts his head, and looks at you.

He looks like a man who has just been hit by a small truck.

"Hi," he says.

You laugh. You cannot help it. The laugh shakes you both and he laughs too, and he drops his forehead back onto your shoulder, and you put your arms around him, and he sighs, and the sigh is the most relaxed sound you have ever heard him make.

"Ryland."

"Yeah."

"You had a condom in your wallet for two weeks."

"Yes."

"That's presumptuous."

"Mm-hm."

"You were that sure?"

"I was hopeful."

You laugh again. He laughs into your shoulder. He kisses your collarbone, sleepy now, and after a second he eases out of you, careful, and deals with the condom, and comes back and sprawls half on top of you with his face in your neck.

"Your glasses are bent."

"I know."

"They're really bent."

"I'm aware."

"You should take them off."

"I'm not moving."

"Grace."

"Mm."

You laugh. You laugh and he laughs into your neck and he presses a kiss to your jaw, and you reach up and, gently, take his glasses off his face and put them on the nightstand. He makes a small grateful noise. He closes his eyes.

"Hey," he says, into your neck. Quiet now.

"Yeah."

"You're not actually allowed to call my teaching lazy in front of the whole department."

"Oh my god."

"I'm just saying. As a general policy."

"Grace, I will throw you out of my bed."

"You won't."

"I will."

"You won't."

You won't.

He pulls you closer. He is warm. He is heavy. After a minute, into your hair, he says, very softly:

"I clocked you at the meeting."

"I know."

"I want to be on record. About when I clocked it."

"Grace, I know."

"Just so we're clear."

"We're clear."

"Mm."

A pause.

"You really did call it lazy, though."

"Grace."

He laughs into your neck. You close your eyes. The afternoon light is doing something through the curtains and your apartment is very quiet and his weight is heavy against you and you think, very clearly, oh.

Oh, fine.

Okay.

You go to sleep too.

--

Enjoyed - let me know?

She pushed off.

The Hail Mary fell away beneath her. Or above her. Orientation was a choice out here and today she chose beneath, the long pale body of the ship dropping into the dark while she rose toward the task. Panel repair on the forward sensor array. Routine. She’d run the sim twice. Her hands knew the work. Her hands were not the problem.

“Looking good,” he said. “Tether’s tracking clean. You’ve got a nice line.”

She said nothing. Moved along the hull, mag-boots clicking in the rhythm she’d settled into across a dozen EVAs. Click, release, click, release. There was a meditation to it. There had been, once. Before the last time.

“Quiet out there,” he said, after a minute. Not a question. Just an observation, lightly tossed, see if it landed.

“Focusing,” she said.

“Right. Yeah. Good. I’ll just.” A pause. She could hear him shifting, the faint creak of the chair that always gave him away. “I’ll be here.”

That was the problem.

She reached the forward array. Knelt, if kneeling was the word for locking your boots and folding at the waist in zero-G. The panel housing was exactly where the schematics said it would be. She unclipped her toolkit, set it against the magnetised strip on her thigh, and got to work.

Two minutes of silence. Her breathing settled into the suit’s rhythm, the soft cycle of air across her face. She unseated the first bolt. Then the second. Her fingers were still steady. Fine. She was fine.

“So I’ve been thinking about thermal conductivity,” he said.

She closed her eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to absorb the fact that this was going to be a Ryland-explains-something EVA and she was going to have to survive it.

“Not about. I mean. Related to the visor issue from last time. Which is resolved, obviously. The recalibration fixed it. I ran the numbers three times, everything’s solid. But it got me thinking about the more general case. Heat dissipation across the faceplate as a function of solar angle, and how the coating interacts with.” He stopped. Started again, differently. “You know how a car windshield fogs up from the inside when it’s cold outside?”

“Yes, Grace.”

“Okay, so it’s basically like that, except instead of your breath it’s the suit’s thermal regulation overshooting on the exhaust side, and instead of a car you’re in vacuum, so the delta is.” He paused. “Are you listening or are you tolerating?”

“I’m removing a panel housing.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“They might be.”

He laughed. Just a short sound, barely there, but it came through the comms like a physical thing. She felt it behind her sternum, which was idiotic, which she noted clinically and filed away for later examination.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll save the thrilling conclusion for debrief.”

She got the housing off. Underneath, the sensor cluster was exactly as expected. One contact point showing corrosion. Simple swap. She reached for the replacement module and slotted it in, and her hands did not shake, and his breathing was steady in her ear like it had always been there, like it was part of the suit’s life-support systems, one more thing keeping her alive that she was not supposed to notice.

“Module’s seated,” she said. “Running the diagnostic now.”

“Copy. I’m seeing it on my end. Give it a second.”

She gave it a second. Then three. The silence stretched, and in it she could hear everything. The suit’s air circulation. Her own pulse, which she was not going to think about. His breathing, which she was absolutely not going to think about.

“Diagnostic’s clean,” he said. “Nice work.”

Something about the way he said it. Nice work. Two words, nothing behind them, except she could hear the shape of the other thing he’d said last time. You handled it really well. Same cadence. Same low, even tone. Like praise was just how he talked when he wasn’t trying to be anything, and the fact that it landed like a hand on the back of her neck was her problem, not his.

“Replacing the housing now,” she said.

“Take your time. No rush. Just nice and easy.”

She didn’t want to take her time. She wanted to finish and get back inside and take the suit off and stop being in a small sealed space with his voice and nothing else. Except she also didn’t want that. Except the part of her that had been managing this for months, the part that kept careful distance and showed up to meals five minutes after he sat down and chose the chair on the opposite side of the lab, that part was losing an argument she hadn’t agreed to have.

She lined up the first bolt. Drove it home.

“Good. That’s seated. Second one should line up if you angle it about ten degrees left.”

She angled it. It caught. He was right, because he was always right about the mechanical things, the spatial things, the things he could see from the console better than she could feel with her hands.

“There you go. Just like that. Steady.”

His voice had dropped. Not dramatically. Not in a way she thought he’d noticed. But the register had shifted, the same way it had shifted last time without either of them naming it. Slower. More deliberate. The spaces between the words wider, like each one was being placed carefully instead of tumbling out in the usual pile.

She drove the second bolt in.

“That’s it,” he said. Low. Warm. “Two down. You’re doing really well.”

Her hands stopped. Not because of the words. Because of the way he said them. Unhurried. Patient. Like he had nothing else in the world to attend to except her, out here, alone with him in her ear. Like guiding her through a task was something he could do all day. Like the sound of her breathing was a readout he was monitoring and the data was good and he wanted her to know.

He didn’t know he was doing it. She was almost sure he didn’t know. The teaching register and the other register lived in the same part of his voice and he couldn’t always tell which one he’d reached for.

“Third bolt,” he said. “You might need to apply a bit more pressure on this one. The threading’s tighter on the forward mounts. Just. Press in and hold it. Firm. Let it catch.”

She pressed. Held. The bolt caught. Her breath left her harder than it should have, and the suit picked it up and the channel carried it, and in the silence after she heard him register it. A tiny pause. The creak of the chair as he shifted.

“That’s good,” he said, and his voice was even lower now, and she did not think he was talking about the bolt anymore, or rather she thought he thought he was talking about the bolt but something underneath the words had come unmoored and was drifting. “Really good. One more. Take it slow.”

Take it slow. Her hands were shaking. The bolt was in her fingers and the stars were above her and his voice was in her ear telling her to take it slow and she was wet inside the suit, actually wet, and there was nowhere to put that information except in the same sealed chamber where his breathing lived.

She lined up the last bolt. Her fingers slipped. She re-seated it.

“Easy,” he said. Almost a murmur. “You’ve got it. Nice and slow. I’ll tell you when it’s there.”

She drove it in. Slowly. The threading caught, resisted, then gave, and the bolt sank home and she exhaled and his breathing was right there with hers, matched, like he’d been holding his breath along with her the whole time.

“There,” he said. Soft. Satisfied. “That’s perfect. You’re all done.”

A beat of silence.

Then another.

She could hear the moment it hit him. The sharp little intake of breath, the chair creaking as he sat up straighter. The sound of a man replaying the last two minutes in his head and hearing what she’d been hearing the whole time.

“Was that.” He stopped. Started again. His voice was different now. Higher. The warmth had been replaced by something startled and slightly panicked. “Okay, I need to. Can I ask you something?”

She pressed her forehead against the inside of her visor. The glass was cool. Clear. She could see the stars over the top of the hull and her own breath was doing nothing to them.

“Depends,” she said.

“Was that. What I just. The way I was.” He exhaled hard. “Is this weird? This. Right now. The comms. Is this weird for you? Because I just listened back to the last three minutes in my head and I. Hm. I did not sound like a flight controller.”

Her eyes were closed. Something in her chest was caught between a laugh and a freefall.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

“What did I sound like?”

She said nothing. He knew. The silence told him.

“Oh,” he said. Quietly. Then: “Oh, no.” The chair creaked. She could picture him exactly. Leaned back, one hand dragging down his face, glasses getting shoved askew, the other hand gripping whatever he’d been fidgeting with. “Okay. I didn’t. I wasn’t doing that on purpose. I need you to know that. That was not. I was just talking you through the repair and then at some point my voice apparently decided to. Without consulting me. It just.”

“I know,” she said.

“You know?”

“It happened last time too.”

Silence. A long one. She could hear him breathing and she could hear the exact moment the implication of what she’d said landed, which was the moment his breathing changed.

“It happened last time,” he repeated. Slowly. Like he was looking at a result he’d been avoiding. “And you. Noticed.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t say anything.”

“What would I have said?”

Another silence. Longer. She could hear him thinking, which was unusual, because normally his mouth and his brain were on the same wire and there was no lag at all. When Ryland Grace went quiet it meant the thing he was processing was bigger than his usual buffer.

“I pulled the comms log,” he said. Different voice now. Not panicked. Not the teaching register. Something underneath both. “After last time. I told myself I was checking the thermal data but I listened to the whole thing and the thermal data was not what I was listening to.”

She gripped the edge of the panel housing.

“I know what you sound like when you’re concentrating,” he said. “And I know what you sound like when you’re not. And last time, there was a point where you stopped concentrating on the task and started concentrating on something else. And I noticed. And I didn’t stop talking.” A pause. She could hear him swallow. “And apparently I just did it again. Without even trying. Which means it’s not a choice, it’s a. It’s a reflex. My voice hears your breathing and it just. Goes there.”

Her breath was audible. She knew it was audible because the suit picked up everything and the channel was open and he was hearing it right now, the exact thing he was describing, happening live.

“I know what it does to you,” he said. Quieter. “The voice. The channel. I know because I heard it on the recording and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The sound you made when I said ‘good girl’ was.” He stopped. “I have not been able to stop thinking about it. And I just spent three minutes doing it again without meaning to and you let me, and your breathing is doing the thing it does when you.”

“Ryland.”

“Yeah.” Barely a word. A vibration.

“I need to get back inside.”

“You do. You should.” Then, lower, so low she felt it in the base of her spine, and she didn’t know if this one was involuntary or not and she didn’t think he did either: “Come back in.”

Come back in. Two meanings. She heard both.

“Housing’s secure,” she said. “Heading back.”

“I’ll be here.” Then, after a beat, almost to himself but not quite: “I’ve been right here the whole time.”

The walk back was long. Not in distance. In the quality of the silence between them, which had changed texture and was now holding something that hadn’t been there on the way out. She moved along the hull and he tracked her on the console and neither of them spoke and it was the loudest quiet she had ever been inside. Her body was a problem she was going to have to solve in private, the suit holding in heat she could not account for on any readout, the slick gathering awareness between her legs that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with a man who had just discovered, live, on an open channel, that his voice went somewhere without him when she was the one listening.

The airlock cycled. She stepped in. Pressure normalised. Green lights. She pulled her helmet off and the ship air hit her face and she stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, breathing air that was not recycled through a small glass box three inches from her mouth.

He was not in the airlock bay.

He had been, last time. He’d been right there, hands on the clasp at her jaw, face close, and she’d had to hold very still while he disconnected her and his fingers moved and she had mapped the exact temperature of each one against her skin. He had stepped back then. Given her space.

She desuited alone. Hung the EVA gear in its locker. Went through the post-EVA checklist with her own hands and nobody else’s. Logged the panel swap. Noted the diagnostic result. Filed it.

Then she went back to her quarters and stood in the middle of the room and did not know what to do with herself.

The message from last time was still on her screen. She had not deleted it. She had also not re-read it, because re-reading it was a door and she had been standing in the frame for days.

Thermal line’s recalibrated. Should be good for next EVA. Sorry about the visor. For what it’s worth, you handled it really well.

She sat down on the edge of her bunk. Pressed her palms flat against her thighs. Thought about his voice dropping without his permission, going low and warm and deliberate while he walked her through bolt after bolt, and the exact moment he’d heard himself and panicked. My voice hears your breathing and it just goes there. A reflex, he’d called it. Not a choice. Something his body did when hers was listening. Thought about the wetness she could still feel between her legs and how she’d walked the length of the ship with it and he probably knew that too.

Twenty minutes passed. Maybe thirty. She was not counting, which was unusual, because she always counted. She counted steps to the lab, minutes between meals, the exact number of seconds it took his laugh to decay in a room. She was very good at counting and right now she was not doing it because the numbers were all wrong and she didn’t trust them.

Someone knocked.

It was a particular knock. Two quick, one slow. She’d heard it on the lab door, on storage bay panels, on the hull itself once when he was testing resonance because he’d had a theory about vibration frequencies and wanted to hear it for himself. It was a knock she would know in the dark. She did know it in the dark. Her quarters were not lit.

She got up. Her hand found the panel. The door opened.

He was standing in the corridor in a faded t-shirt that said CHEMISTRY JOKES ARE BORON and joggers and bare feet, which meant he had come from his quarters and had not stopped to put on shoes, which meant this was not a planned visit, which meant he’d gotten up and walked here before the part of his brain that edited impulses had caught up.

His glasses were askew. He had a look on his face like he’d been doing long division in his head and the answer had come out wrong in an interesting way.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“So. I’ve been. Thinking. Which, I know, not breaking news, I’m always thinking, it’s sort of a persistent condition, but I’ve been thinking about. Specifically.” He pushed his glasses up. They went crooked in the other direction. “Can I come in?”

She stepped back.

He stepped in. The door closed behind him and now they were in her quarters together and the room was small and she was acutely aware of every object in it. Bunk. Desk. Chair. Her suit liner draped over the chair’s back. The screen with his message still on it, visible from where he was standing if he looked left, which he did, because he was Ryland and he looked at everything.

He saw it. She watched him see it.

“You kept that,” he said.

“I didn’t not delete it.”

“That’s. Yeah. That’s not the same as keeping it.” But he was smiling. Barely. A tilt at the corner of his mouth that she had catalogued across months of careful observation from across tables and labs and corridors and was now seeing from four feet away.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Not unkindly. She needed the data.

“I’m. Okay.” He pressed his hands together in front of his mouth, the gesture he made when he was organising information. When he was about to teach something. “I’ve been running the numbers. On this. On us. And I know that sounds. I know you can’t actually run numbers on. But I’m me, so that’s how I. The point is, I arrived at a conclusion, and the conclusion is that I can’t actually keep pretending the conclusion is ambiguous, because it isn’t, it hasn’t been for a while, and I think you know that, and I think I knew you knew that when I sent that message, and I think we’re in a feedback loop that is not going to resolve by leaving it alone.”

She was standing very still. She could feel her pulse in her wrists.

“Also my voice apparently does things without my permission when you’re on comms and I can’t. I can’t unknow that. And I told you about the comms log and I’m not sorry I told you and I’m here because I’d rather be in this room dealing with the consequences than in my room pretending there aren’t any.”

“So you came to my quarters. At.” She glanced at nothing, because there was no clock where she looked. “Whatever time it is.”

“It’s 2340 ship time.”

“At 2340 ship time. Without shoes.”

He looked down at his feet. Looked back up. “Yeah, the shoes thing was. I was horizontal and then I was walking and the shoes just. They didn’t make the cut. I prioritised.”

“Prioritised.”

“Getting here. Before I talked myself out of getting here. Which I was going to do, for the record. I had a whole out prepared. I was going to tell myself that the EVA comms thing was just. Proximity and adrenaline and the channel doing something acoustic that. But it’s not. That’s not what it is. And I think you know that.”

“I know that,” she said.

He stopped. Everything stopped. The monologue, the fidgeting, the low-grade chaos of his energy filling the room. For one second he was completely still, and she understood that this was what it looked like when a joke was supposed to arrive and didn’t.

“Okay,” he said. Softly. “Okay, so. Now what.”

She didn’t answer. She closed the distance herself.

It was two steps. His back hit the door and her hands found his chest and his were at her waist before she registered that he’d moved, which meant his reflexes were faster than his editorial process, which she had suspected for months and was now confirming empirically.

“Oh,” he said, against her mouth. Not a word. A sound. Like he’d just observed something unexpected under a microscope and found it very, very interesting.

She kissed him and he tasted like recycled ship water and the peppermint gum he rationed like it was oxygen and he kissed her back immediately, no hesitation, no second-guessing, his hands pulling her in like he’d already solved the logistics of this and was just waiting for the experimental phase. His tongue found hers and the sound she made was involuntary and small and he swallowed it, pulled her closer, his fingers digging into her hips through her clothes.

His glasses pressed into her cheekbone. She reached up and took them off and he made a sound like she’d removed something structural.

“I can’t see,” he said.

“You don’t need to see.”

“Fair point. Very fair point. Excellent point.” He was talking into the kiss, words dissolving against her mouth, and she realised that this was what it was going to be like with him. That the monologue did not stop. That the thinking engine ran and ran and ran and the only way to change the output was to change the input.

She bit his lower lip. Gently. Experimentally.

The monologue stopped.

His hands tightened at her waist and then moved, one sliding up her spine and the other pulling her hips flush against his, and she could feel him already hard against her stomach, the specific undeniable shape of it through his joggers, and the sound he made was low and involuntary and she felt it everywhere. In her teeth. In the base of her spine. In the space behind her ribs where she’d been storing the sound of his voice for months, carefully, the way you store something volatile.

“I have thought about this,” he said, pulling back just far enough to breathe. His eyes were unfocused without the glasses, pupils blown, and he was looking at her like she was data he couldn’t quite believe. “A lot. More than is. Professionally appropriate. Or personally sustainable. I’ve thought about this a lot.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“You’re not subtle.”

He laughed. A real one. The kind she’d heard through walls and across labs and once, memorably, from three compartments away when something in an experiment had surprised him. It broke open in the small room and she felt the last of her careful distance collapse like a structure that had been waiting for permission.

“I’m really not,” he said. “I’m really, really not.” And then he kissed her again, and this time there was no talking, just his hands and her hands and the slow, deliberate process of learning how another person worked.

She pulled his shirt up. He helped, arms tangling briefly because the room was small and he was clumsy and she was impatient, and then it was off and her palms were flat against his chest and he was warm. Warmer than the suit contact, warmer than the accidental brushes in the lab, warmer than anything her imagination had been able to construct in the weeks she’d spent not thinking about this while thinking about nothing else.

“Your turn,” he said, and his voice had dropped into that register. The one from the comms channel. The one that had started all of this, the patient, low, instructional tone that he used without knowing what it did and then, at some point, had started knowing.

She pulled her shirt off.

He looked at her. Not quickly, not with a glance he’d pretend was casual. He looked at her the way he looked at things that fascinated him. Openly. With his whole attention. Like she was a phenomenon he intended to understand completely.

“Wow,” he said, barely audible. Then, quieter: “Wow.”

“Is that a scientific assessment?”

“It’s a preliminary observation. I’ll need more data.” His hands came up and she thought he’d go for the obvious but he didn’t. He traced the line of her collarbone. Followed it from her shoulder to the hollow of her throat and then down, fingertips dragging over the swell of her breast, circling but not touching where she wanted him to. Mapping her. Learning the territory before committing to a direction.

“You’re doing the teacher thing,” she said. Her voice was thinner than she wanted it to be.

“What teacher thing.”

“Where you go slow so the student can keep up.”

His hand stilled against her ribs. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen before. Not the grin, not the deflection, not the curiosity. Something underneath all of that. The thing that lived under the noise.

“You keep up fine,” he said. Quietly. The way he’d said I’m really not on the comms. Bare.

Then his thumb dragged across her nipple and her breath caught and his eyes darkened, watching the reaction like it was the most important result he’d ever observed. He did it again. Slower. Circling, then a light pinch that made her gasp and press into his hand.

“There it is,” he murmured. “That sound. That’s the one.”

She kissed him again because she didn’t know what to do with that and he pulled her against him and they made it to the bunk through some combination of steps and stumbles, and she felt his shin connect with the frame and heard the short, bitten-off “ow, okay, that’s” and then they were down and the narrow mattress was not built for two people and neither of them cared.

He was over her, mouth on her throat, her collarbone, the space between her breasts. His hand found one and his mouth found the other and the wet heat of his tongue on her nipple made her arch into him so hard she almost lost contact with the mattress. He groaned against her skin, a vibration she felt in her ribs, and his hips pressed into hers and she could feel how hard he was, the full thick length of him pinned between their bodies, and she rolled up against it and the sound he made was ragged and desperate and nothing like a man who was in control of anything.

“You’re. You can’t just.” He was breathing against her breast, forehead pressed to her sternum, trying to assemble a sentence while she rocked against him. “I’m trying to take my time here. I have a whole. I had a sequence planned. You’re skipping ahead.”

“Your sequence is taking too long.”

“It’s thorough. I’m a thorough person. I have a scientific obligation to be.” She rolled her hips again and the sentence died. “Okay. Okay, you win. You win.”

His hands went to her waistband. Pulled her pants down, underwear with them, and then his palm was flat on her bare thigh and she was naked under him and the air in the room was cool against skin that was not cool at all. He looked down the length of her and his expression went slack for a second, completely unguarded, and she watched him lose a fight with himself in real time.

“You are.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to be able to be articulate about this. I need you to accept that I have a PhD and I am currently unable to form a complete sentence.”

His hand slid up the inside of her thigh. Slow. She let her legs fall open for him and his breath stuttered, audibly, on the comms-quality microphone of the two feet between his mouth and her ear.

His fingers found her and they both went still.

“You’re so wet,” he said. Low and wrecked and honest. “Is this. How long have you been like this? Since the EVA? Since I.”

“Since you told me you pulled the comms log.” Her voice was barely functional. “Since you told me you listened.”

His fingers slid through the slick of her, parting her, learning the shape of her with the same careful attention he gave everything that fascinated him. He found her clit and circled it once, lightly, testing, and her whole body tightened.

“Right here?” he asked. Not a guess. A confirmation.

“Yes. There. Right there.”

“Okay. Good. That’s.” His thumb settled into a rhythm, slow circles with exactly enough pressure, and then his fingers slid lower and one pushed inside her and she bit down on her own lip and his breath caught. “You make the best sounds. Has anyone ever told you that? You probably don’t want me to talk right now.”

“Don’t stop talking.”

He looked at her. Registered what she’d said. And she watched the understanding land, the data point connecting with every other data point he’d been collecting since the comms channel. The breathing, the silence, the way she’d fallen apart to nothing but his voice in her ear.

“Yeah?” Low. Lower than the comms. Lower than anything. “You want to hear me.”

She couldn’t speak. She nodded.

“Okay.” He added a second finger and curled them and she choked on air. His mouth came down to her ear, and he was right there, the same distance as the comms, the same frequency, the same voice but warmer and real and in the same room, and when he spoke she felt it through her whole body. “You’re so tight around my fingers. I can feel every time you clench. Right here.” He pressed deeper, curled again, found the spot that made her vision blur. “There. That’s the one. I can tell because you stop breathing for a second and then it comes back twice as hard.”

Her back arched off the bunk. Her hand found his wrist and held on.

“You’re close, aren’t you? I can tell. I’ve been listening to you for months and I know what you sound like when you’re trying to hold it together and I know what you sound like when you can’t.” His thumb kept circling her clit, his fingers kept that devastating rhythm inside her, and his voice was the third point of contact, the one that had always undone her. “Let go. I want to feel it. I want to feel you come on my hand and I want to hear what that sounds like when I’m in the room for it.”

She broke. Not gently. Not quietly. She came with his voice in her ear and his fingers inside her and her hand clenched around his wrist and the sound she made was loud enough that in any other context she would have been mortified but he was making a sound too, a low, shattered groan against her temple, and he was working her through it, not stopping, fingers and thumb keeping the rhythm while her body clenched and released and clenched around him.

“That’s it,” he breathed. “That’s it. You have no idea what you look like right now.”

She floated. Came back. His hand had stilled but not left, fingers still inside her, and his forehead was pressed against her temple, and he was breathing like he’d been running.

“Okay,” he said. Hoarse. “Okay. So. That was.”

“Don’t analyse it.”

“I’m not analysing it. I’m appreciating it. There’s a difference. One involves spreadsheets and the other involves lying here with my hand still inside you trying to remember how my cardiovascular system works.” He lifted his head. Looked at her. In the low light of her quarters, without his glasses, his face was open and stripped and slightly stunned. “You’re incredible.”

She reached for him. The waistband of his joggers, tugging them down, and he helped with the graceless urgency of a man who had been patient for exactly as long as his nervous system could sustain and had arrived at the limit. His cock was hard and flushed and when she wrapped her hand around it he hissed through his teeth and his hips jerked, one sharp involuntary thrust into her fist.

“Oh. That’s. Okay. That is.” He was propped on one arm and his head dropped forward and she could see his stomach muscles tighten as she stroked him, slow, root to tip, learning the weight and the heat and the specific way he throbbed in her hand. Thick. Hot. The skin velvet-soft and the shaft rigid beneath it. She ran her thumb over the head and it was slick already, leaking, and the sound he made was the sound of a man who had been thinking about this for weeks and was unprepared for the reality of it.

“I need to,” he started. “I should get. There might be. In my quarters, I have.”

“Implant,” she said. “I’m cleared. If you are.”

“I. Yes. Yeah. Clean bill. The pre-mission physicals were. They were very thorough. Uncomfortably thorough, actually, there was a whole thing with.” He closed his eyes. “I’m talking about medical exams right now. While you’re holding my. You’re holding my dick and I’m talking about medical exams.”

“It’s very you.”

“It’s really not my best work.” He kissed her. Hard, graceless, and she guided him between her legs and he settled against her, the length of him pressed along the wet heat of her, and when he rocked forward the drag of his cock through her folds made them both groan.

“Like this?” he asked, pressed against her entrance, barely there, trembling with the effort of not pushing in.

“Yes.”

He pushed into her slowly. One long, devastating slide, inch by inch, and she felt every part of it, the stretch and the fullness and the way her body opened around him and pulled him deeper. He was big enough that it ached at first, a bright, sweet sting that faded into pressure that faded into heat, and she exhaled and he exhaled and the sound he made into her mouth was the best thing she had ever heard. Better than the comms. Better than her name. A broken, shuddering breath that contained the ruins of every joke he’d ever used to keep distance.

He bottomed out. Held still. Buried in her to the hilt, his hip bones flush against the inside of her thighs, and she could feel him everywhere. The throb of him inside her. The weight of his body braced over hers. His heartbeat against her ribs, fast and real and here.

“Oh,” he said, very quietly. “You feel. I can’t. You’re so.” He pressed his face into her neck and breathed and she felt his cock twitch inside her and his whole body shudder. He held there. Not moving. Just breathing. Just feeling her. She could feel the effort of it in his arms, in the locked line of his shoulders, and she understood that he was trying to stay inside this moment without rushing through it. That he was paying attention the way he paid attention to everything that mattered to him.

She clenched around him. Deliberately.

His breath left him in a rush against her throat. She did it again.

“You’re mean. You’re a mean person. I want you to know that.” But his hips moved, a shallow rocking thrust that was less decision than reflex, and the friction of it dragged a sound out of her that made him do it again, harder.

He started to move. Slow at first, careful, long deep strokes that pulled almost all the way out and then sank back in, and each one pressed the head of his cock against the spot his fingers had found earlier and she couldn’t keep quiet. Every thrust punched a sound out of her that she couldn’t shape or control and he was cataloguing each one, she could see it in his face, the way his jaw tightened when she moaned, the way his rhythm shifted when she gasped.

“There,” she said. “Right there, don’t change anything, just.”

“Here?” He angled his hips and thrust and she nearly came off the mattress. “Yeah. There. I can feel it, you get so tight when I.” He did it again. “When I hit that spot you just.” He lost the sentence entirely.

His composure was cracking. She could hear it in his voice, the sentences getting shorter, the spaces between words getting wider. The monologue was failing and what was underneath it was raw and wrecked and honest.

“You feel so good,” he said, and it was the least complicated thing he’d said all night. No analogy, no deflection, no self-deprecating follow-up. Just the fact. “You feel so good I can’t think.”

She put her arm over her eyes.

It was instinct. Not a decision. She needed to stop seeing him so she could hear him, needed the dark behind her forearm to turn his voice back into the thing it had been in the suit, the thing it had been on the comms, close and disembodied and everywhere. The visual was too much. Too real. Too many inputs. She needed the channel. She needed just his voice.

He slowed. She felt it immediately, the rhythm dropping, his hips stilling halfway through a stroke.

“Hey,” he said. Soft. Careful. “Are you.”

“Don’t stop.” Her voice was wrecked. “Keep going. Keep talking. I just need to. I can’t look at you and hear you at the same time. It’s too much. I need to just hear you.”

A beat. She couldn’t see his face but she heard the breath he took, the sharp little catch of understanding. She heard the chair on the comms. She heard the EVA. She heard him put it together.

“Oh,” he said. Barely a sound. And then, lower, the register dropping back to the place it went when her breathing changed: “You want it like the channel.”

She nodded behind her arm.

He started to move again. Slower now. Deliberate. Each thrust deep and measured and she could feel every inch of him and the dark behind her arm was the dark inside the suit and his voice was right there, right in the space where it lived, where it had always lived.

“I’m right here,” he said. Close. His mouth near her ear, his weight over her, and the voice was the voice. The frequency. The low, warm, patient thing that had taken her apart through vacuum-sealed glass. “I’ve got you. Can you feel that? How deep I am? You’re taking all of me and you’re. The sounds you make when I’m all the way in. I’ve been thinking about those sounds for weeks. I used to sit in the lab and watch you across the room and wonder what you’d sound like if I.”

She made a sound. She didn’t know what it was. It came from somewhere below language and his hips snapped forward and the combination of the dark and his voice and the fullness of him inside her was the EVA and the comms and the suit all over again except he was real and warm and pressing her into the mattress and she was going to come apart.

“That’s it,” he said, and his voice was fraying. “Right there. You’re so close. I can feel you getting tighter and I can hear it in your breathing, the same way I could hear it on the channel, except now I can feel it too and it’s.” The sentence broke. His hips stuttered. “It’s so much better than I imagined and I imagined it a lot.”

She pulled him down with her free hand. Kissed him blind, her arm still over her eyes, finding his mouth by feel, and his sound against her lips was shattered and desperate. His pace picked up, harder now, the careful rhythm dissolving into something uncoordinated, his hips snapping into hers, and she could hear the slick wet sounds of their bodies meeting on every thrust and his breathing ragged and her own voice saying things she wouldn’t remember, his name and “harder” and “please” and “there, right there, don’t stop.”

“I’m close,” he said, strained. “I can’t. I’m going to.”

“Not yet.” She reached between them. Found her clit. Circled it with her fingers while he kept moving and the combination of both was too much and not enough and exactly right. Her arm was still over her eyes. She was in the dark with his voice and his body and her own hand and nothing else.

“Are you.” His rhythm stuttered when he realised what she was doing. She couldn’t see his face but she heard the sound he made, punched out of him. “You’re touching yourself. While I’m inside you. That is. That is the single best thing I have ever. In my whole life. Including the thing with the Astrophage. This is better. This is objectively better than discovery-level science.”

She would have laughed but her orgasm hit her like a system failure, sudden and total, her whole body locking tight around him, clenching in waves, and the sound she made was broken and loud and she felt it in her throat for hours afterward. He felt it too. She knew because his hips stuttered and his mouth opened on a sound that had no consonants in it.

“Oh. Oh, I can feel you. I can feel you coming. That’s.” His rhythm fell apart. Three more thrusts, deep and desperate and graceless, and then he buried himself to the hilt and came inside her with a groan that started in his chest and ended nowhere, just kept going, his cock pulsing inside her while his body shook and his hands gripped the sheets and he said her name into her neck in a voice she had never heard from him and would never forget.

She moved her arm. Opened her eyes. The light in the room was low and his face was right there, closer than she’d expected, and the expression on it was the most undefended thing she had ever seen on another person. Like he’d been taken apart and hadn’t started reassembling yet. Like she’d found the frequency under all his frequencies, the one he didn’t know he was broadcasting.

She held him through it. Hands on his back, feeling the aftershocks run through him, the small involuntary jerks of his hips as he emptied himself inside her. She could feel the warmth of it, the spreading fullness, and he was shaking and she was shaking and the small bed in her small quarters on the ship that was carrying them both through the incomprehensible dark held them anyway.

Silence. The real kind. Not the loaded, waiting silence of the comms channel but the thick, settling quiet of two people who had just stopped pretending and were lying in the aftermath of honesty.

He pulled out slowly. She felt the loss of him and then the slick mess of it, evidence, running down the inside of her thigh, and he looked down and his expression was something she filed away carefully. Possessive was the wrong word. Awed was closer.

He rolled onto his back. One arm slung over his face. She could see his chest moving. Could count his ribs in the low light if she wanted to. She wanted to.

“So,” he said, to the ceiling.

“So.”

“I came here to talk.”

“You did talk.”

“I did. I talked a lot. I talked during.” He moved his arm and looked at her. His hair was wrecked and his face was flushed and he looked like a man who had just had every equation he’d relied on for composure solved out from under him. “I talked during sex. That happened. I compared you to discovery-level science. While inside you. That is a thing that I said out loud.”

“I liked it.”

He stared at her. “You liked it.”

“I asked you not to stop.”

“You did. You did do that.” He was quiet for a second. Then: “Is it. I mean. This isn’t going to be a thing where tomorrow we pretend this was an anomalous result and go back to. Separate tables and looking at opposite walls and me talking about thermal conductivity to fill the silence because if I stop talking I’ll think about your breathing and if I think about your breathing I’ll.”

She put her hand on his chest. Over his heart. He stopped.

“It’s not an anomalous result,” she said.

He covered her hand with his. Pressed it there. His heartbeat was still fast under her palm, and he turned his head to look at her and his expression was the one from the comms, the bare one, the one under everything. The loneliness that looked like wonder when someone finally matched it.

“Okay,” he said. “Good. That’s. Good.” He exhaled. Long, slow, shaky. “I really like you. I should have. That’s what I came here to say, before the whole. I just really like you. As a scientist I feel obligated to state the hypothesis up front and I didn’t, so. For the record.”

She curled into him. His arm came around her. The ship hummed its low, constant hum, the frequency that lived beneath everything, that you stopped hearing until you listened for it.

“I know,” she said. “The signal was pretty clear.”

He laughed. Softly, into her hair. His arm tightened.

“Frequency locked,” he said.

That is the entire arrangement. That is the whole plan. He is inside you, and you are simply sitting there, and the rule, the single rule he himself laid down with the gravity of a man chalking an equation onto a board, is that nobody moves.

It was his idea.

You want that on the record, because in about ninety seconds it is going to stop being relevant to him that it was his idea, and you intend to remind him.

His hands are resting on your hips. Not gripping. Resting, the way you rest your hands on something you are trying very hard not to touch. His glasses have already gone askew. You did not do that. He did that, somewhere in the last eleven seconds, by frowning thoughtfully at the middle distance over your shoulder.

"Okay," he says.

You wait.

"Okay, so," he says, and stops again, and his hands tighten by maybe two millimeters, and you feel the whole length of him go a little harder inside you in a way that is involuntary and that he absolutely registers, because his breath catches and then he says, with enormous dignity, "that's just data."

"That's data," you agree.

"That's the experiment working."

"Mm."

"The experiment is going great."

The experiment is going great the way a soufflé is going great in the thirty seconds before it isn't.

—

It started, as a frankly indecent number of things start with him, with an article.

You don't even know where he finds them. He surfaces from his phone roughly twice a week with some new fact lodged in him like a splinter, and you have learned to recognize the symptoms: the eyebrows go up, the phone comes down, and he turns to you with the expression of a golden retriever that has found a second tennis ball.

Three nights ago the symptoms had presented over dinner.

"Did you know," he had said, around a mouthful of the pasta, which is a sentence that has preceded some of the strangest conversations of your adult life, "that people do a thing where the guy just. Stays in. On purpose. And nothing happens."

You had put down your fork. "I'm familiar with the concept, yeah."

"You're familiar with it." He had pointed his own fork at you, delighted, betrayed, thrilled. "Okay, see, this is the thing about you. I bring you a fact and you already have the fact. How do you already have the fact."

"It's a fairly well known fact."

"It is not a well known fact, it is a fact I just learned, which by definition makes it cutting edge." He had leaned in. "But okay, here's what I don't get. Walk me through the appeal. Because as far as I can tell the appeal is, and I want to make sure I'm reading this right, the appeal is nothing. The appeal is that nothing happens. You go to all this trouble to get into a position where historically a great deal happens, and then, on purpose, like monks, you make nothing happen."

"It's about closeness," you had said. "Being close. Staying connected. It's not about the friction, it's about the. You know. The being."

He had stared at you for a moment with the specific stricken wonder of a man encountering a foreign cuisine he has decided he must understand from the inside out.

"The being," he had repeated.

"The being."

He had set his fork down entirely at that point, which is how you know a thing has truly taken hold of him, because Ryland Grace abandoning food mid-meal is a seismic event.

"Okay, but here's my problem," he had said. "And it's a methodology problem. Because everything I'm good at, everything, the whole skill set, it's all about doing. You give me a problem, I poke it, I take it apart, I build a worse version and then a better version, I run it twenty times. Right? That's the move. That's the only move I have." He had gestured with both hands, knocking the salt over, ignoring it. "And you're telling me there's a whole, a whole discipline, where the entire point is to not do the thing. To just hold still and let it happen to you. That's. I don't even have the wiring for that. That's like asking a shark to stop swimming and appreciate the ocean."

"Sharks do have to keep swimming, though."

"Exactly! Thank you! That's my entire point! I'm a shark!" He had been thrilled to be a shark. "I would die. Conceptually. If I stopped."

"It's not really a swim-or-die situation."

"Everything's a swim-or-die situation if you think about it hard enough," he had said, which is the single most Ryland thing he has ever said at a dinner table, and you had married the idea of him a little further in your head right then, the way you do about twice a week.

"I need to try this," he had said, the way other men announce they need to see a specialist.

So here you are. Being.

—

"It's basically thermal equilibrium," he says now, twelve, thirteen seconds into the quiet, because he cannot leave a silence the way some people cannot leave a hangnail.

"Is it."

"It's totally thermal equilibrium. Okay, imagine, no, okay. You've got two objects, right, two bodies, different temperatures, and you put them in contact, and heat flows from the hot one to the cold one until they hit the same temperature and then. Nothing. Net zero. No more heat moving. That's equilibrium. That's us. We're two bodies that have reached the same temperature and now there's no net flow and it's peaceful, it's the most peaceful thing in the universe, it's the heat death of the universe except cozy."

"You've made cockwarming about the heat death of the universe."

"I've made it cozy," he says, wounded. "Were you listening. Cozy heat death. That's the whole pitch."

You shift your weight. Just barely. Just enough to settle a little deeper, not even on purpose, the kind of small adjustment a body makes on its own when it's getting comfortable.

His hands clamp down on your hips like he's bracing for reentry.

"Don't," he says, strangled. "Don't, that's, you can't do that, that's against the rules, those are my rules."

"I didn't do anything."

"You did a thing."

"I breathed."

"You breathed with intent."

You hold very still, and you let your face do nothing at all, which you have discovered is the single most devastating weapon in your arsenal where he is concerned. Ryland Grace can survive almost anything except an audience that refuses to react.

He looks at you for a long moment. His glasses are now at a genuinely impressive angle. There is a flush coming up his throat that you can feel more than see, the warmth of him radiating where your chest is against his.

"You're really good at this," he says, and it comes out almost accusatory.

"At sitting still?"

"At sitting still. Yeah. You're a natural. It's annoying. I'm the one who proposed the study and you're out here being zen about it and I'm." He swallows. "I'm having a lot of thoughts."

"What kind of thoughts."

"Scientific ones."

"Uh huh."

"Rigorous ones," he insists, and then his hips do a thing, the smallest unconscious flex upward, barely a centimeter, the kind of motion a body makes entirely without consulting its owner, and you both feel it, and he says "okay that wasn't me, that was an autonomic response, that doesn't count, the brain didn't authorize that."

"The brain's not really running the show right now, is it."

"The brain," he says with dignity, "is collecting valuable data."

The thing about him, the thing you fell for somewhere around the second month, is that he cannot do anything without trying to understand it, and he cannot try to understand a thing without poking it.

So of course he starts adjusting variables.

It begins almost innocently. His hands, which have been gripping your hips like handles, gentle, and start to move. Not anywhere scandalous. Up your sides, slow, mapping. You recognize the touch. It's the same touch he uses on a problem, the same patient curious pressure he puts on anything he's trying to figure out, and the fact that the thing he's trying to figure out is you makes something low in your stomach pull tight.

"So like," he murmurs, and his thumbs have found the dip of your waist and settled there, "the interesting thing is the anticipation, right, because nothing's happening, so your nervous system is just. Idling. It's revving. It's like sitting at a red light with the engine going." His thumbs stroke once. "Everything's primed and there's nowhere for it to go."

"You're narrating," you tell him.

"I narrate, it's a whole thing, you knew this going in." His mouth has wandered to your jaw. Not kissing. Just resting there, breathing you in, talking against your skin so you feel every word as much as hear it. "The question I have, the real research question, is whether the stillness amplifies sensation or dulls it, because there's an argument both ways. Like on one hand, no new stimulus, so you'd think it'd fade. Habituation. You stop feeling your own socks after a minute, right. But on the other hand."

He goes quiet.

You wait.

"On the other hand," he says, and his voice has dropped about half an octave, "I can feel your pulse."

You go still in a different way.

"Right here," he says, soft, wondering, the wonder doing the thing it always does where it stops being funny and starts being unbearable. "I can feel your heartbeat. From the inside. I didn't, I didn't know I'd be able to feel that. It's going kind of fast, by the way. For someone so zen."

"Shut up."

"I'm just collecting data."

"Collect it quietly."

"That's not really my strong suit," he says against your throat, and you can feel him grin, and then he goes thoughtful in the specific dangerous way that means he's had an idea. His hand slides up your spine to the back of your neck, cradling. "Okay, new variable, hold on, I want to isolate one thing." And he tips his head and kisses you. Slow. Deep. The kind of kiss that has a thesis. The whole time his other hand stays flat and still on your hip, anchoring you down onto him, so the only thing moving anywhere between the two of you is his mouth on yours, and somehow that makes it worse, makes the stillness everywhere else roar.

When he pulls back his pupils are blown and he looks genuinely rattled by his own findings.

"Yeah, that's, okay, that did something," he reports, a little hoarse. "That changed the readings. The readings are way up. I felt you do that thing, the clench thing, you did the clench thing when I kissed you, don't tell me you didn't, I have direct evidence."

"That's not fair."

"Science isn't fair," he says, delighted and wrecked. "Science is just true."

"That's not what that means."

"It's what it means tonight," he says, and then, because he is who he is, because the curiosity is always going to win, his hands slide around to your back and pull you in that final fraction so there is no space left anywhere between you, and he exhales like a man who has just understood something. "Oh, that's the appeal. Okay. Okay, yeah. I get it now. I get the being."

And the worst part, the part that undoes you, is that he means it. He's not performing. He has genuinely, in this moment, with his glasses crooked and his heart hammering against your chest and himself buried as deep in you as he can get without moving, arrived at a real understanding of why people do this, and the understanding has cracked something open in him, and the something is tenderness, and it is pouring out of him at a rate his mouth cannot keep up with.

"You're a menace," you tell him, but your voice has gone unsteady.

"I'm a scientist," he says, and kisses you.

That's where it starts to come apart, and it comes apart on his end first, which is exactly how you both secretly knew it would go.

Because once he's kissing you he can't stop talking into the kisses, and once he's talking he's getting worked up, and once he's worked up his hands won't stay still, and his hands not staying still means his whole body wants to follow, and the entire structure of the experiment is now resting on the willpower of a man who has never successfully resisted finding out what happens next.

"The hypothesis," he says against your mouth, breathing hard, "the hypothesis was that I could just. Be. Be in the moment. Very enlightened. Very still."

"Mm hm."

"I want to flag that the hypothesis is in trouble."

"Is it."

"It's in serious trouble. We may need to revise the hypothesis. The hypothesis may need to be that I have the self control of a, of a, I don't even have an analogy, that's how bad it is, the analogy generator is offline."

You almost laugh, and then you make a decision, and you do not move at all.

You stay completely, perfectly, infuriatingly still. You let him do all the wanting. You sit there, warm and soft and unhurried in his lap, and you watch the experiment he designed turn around and start running him.

His hips flex again. He catches it. Stops.

His breath shudders out.

"Okay, I'm controlling for breathing," he announces, to nobody, to the ceiling, in the voice of a man clutching the last shred of his methodology. "If I just regulate the breathing, right, box breathing, in for four, hold for four, the Navy SEALs do it, I read a thing, I can bring the whole system back down to baseline and then I can. I can just." He takes a slow, deliberate, theatrical breath in, and you feel his chest expand against yours, and you feel exactly what that does to the rest of him where he's seated inside you, and so does he, because the breath comes out as a wreck instead of a four-count. "Okay, the breathing makes it worse. Filing that. Breathing is contraindicated. Who knew. Everybody, probably. Everybody knew."

"You're doing great."

"I'm doing terribly, and we both know it, and the cruel thing, the genuinely cruel thing, is that you're enjoying watching me do terribly."

You are. You make absolutely no effort to hide it.

"You could just," he tries.

"Mm?"

"You could just move. A little. Hypothetically. For science."

"But it was so peaceful," you say. "The cozy heat death. I was really getting into the being."

He makes a sound that is not a word.

"You said nobody moves," you remind him sweetly. "Those were the rules. Your rules."

"I have done extensive research since I made those rules," he says, very fast. "There's new data. The rules are out of date. I'm issuing a correction. A formal correction. I was wrong, the original parameters were flawed, I'd like to move now please, I'd really like to move, I think about thirty seconds ago I would have said I could do this all day and I want to retract that, I want it stricken from the record, please."

"You're begging."

"I am peer reviewing," he gasps, and his hands are gripping you again, white knuckled, and the flush has gone all the way up to his hairline, and his glasses are so far gone they're practically vertical, and he is the single most undone you have ever seen a fully verbal human being get, and he has not moved an inch, because the one thing more powerful in him than the wanting is the part of him that will not, ever, be the one to break a rule he set for the experiment, even as the experiment dismantles him in real time.

It is, you decide, the most him thing you have ever witnessed.

So you take pity on him.

You lean in, your lips against the shell of his ear, and you feel him go rigid with hope, and you say, very quietly, "Okay."

And you move.

The sound he makes when you finally roll your hips is not dignified, and you treasure it, because Ryland Grace has been talking for what feels like a geological age and you have rendered him, for one perfect second, completely silent.

It lasts exactly that one second.

"Oh thank god," he breathes, and then he's moving, finally, hips driving up to meet you as you sink back down, and the first real slide of him is so much after all that holding that you both make a noise into it. His hands clamp on your hips and drag you down onto him, all the way, deep enough that you feel it in your stomach, and the relief in him is so total it's almost a religious experience. He's laughing, breathless and a little wild, the way he laughs when something works. "Oh, okay, yeah, no, this, this is the appeal, I had it backwards, the appeal is when you stop, the stopping is the appeal because then there's the. The." He loses the word as you grind down hard and feel him twitch inside you. "The starting. God. The starting is the whole thing. Don't stop, do not stop, that's an official finding."

"I thought it was about the being."

"It's about the becoming," he says, which is either profound or completely meaningless, and you don't care which, because his hands are everywhere now and his mouth has found your throat and the careful, agonizing stillness of the last however-long has wound you both so tight that every drag of him in and out of you lands like something much bigger than it is. You're slick enough that there's no friction left to fight, just the slow obscene ease of taking all of him and lifting off and taking him again, and the wet sound of it fills the quiet where his voice used to be.

You set the pace. He lets you. That's the deal you've worked out over months, that he can run his mouth about variables and equilibria all he likes but in the end he goes pliant and grateful under your hands, follows wherever you take him. So you take him slow. You ride him in long unhurried strokes, drawing all the way up until he's barely inside you, until he's panting and his fingers are flexing helplessly against your skin, and then down again, slow, slow, watching his eyes roll back. The contrast, the manic brilliant chatterbox going soft and obedient and wrecked underneath you, is something you will never, ever get tired of.

"You held out," you tell him, rolling your hips in a slow grind that has him gasping. "You actually held out. I'm impressed."

"I'm a professional." His voice is shredded. "I'm extremely. Professional. I had a hypothesis and I tested it and the hypothesis was that I'd die, and I was right, I'm dying, this is what dying is, write it down," and the last word breaks in half as you clench around him on a downstroke, deliberate, just to watch it happen.

His head goes back against the armrest. "Okay, that's, you can't just, that's not in the protocol, you can't do that," but his hips are snapping up into you now, losing the rhythm, chasing it, all his careful method dissolving into want. One of his hands leaves your hip and slides between you, thumb finding you exactly where you need it because of course he knows, he has studied you the way he studies everything, and the first slow circle he draws makes your whole body jolt down onto him.

"There she is," he says, ragged and delighted and reverent all at once. "Okay. Okay, I've got data on this, I know what this does," and he does it again, steady pressure in time with the way you're riding him, and the two sensations stack and stack and you stop being able to keep your pace even. "Yeah. Yeah, there you go. You're allowed to fall apart, that's, I'd actually really like to observe that, for science, please, I want to feel it."

"You're going to make me," you manage.

"That's the entire research objective," he gasps. "That was always the objective. Come on. Come on, I've got you, I'm right here, I'm not going anywhere, I'm cozy heat death, remember, no net flow," and he's babbling now, half nonsense, his thumb relentless and his hips driving up to bury himself in you again and again, and the wound-tight pressure that's been building since the very first still minute finally crests and breaks. You come hard around him, clenching tight, and you hear him swear, genuinely swear, the fear-gauge profanity he saves for when the floor drops, because the feeling of you tightening on him is the thing that finally takes him too. He pulls you down flush and holds you there and lets go with a broken sound against your throat, hips stuttering up into you, spilling deep while you're still pulsing around him, both of you locked together at the exact point where neither of you can tell whose shaking is whose.

For a long moment there is no net flow at all. Just the two of you, joined, gasping, finding the same temperature.

When you finally lift your head he's looking at you with his crooked glasses and his blown pupils and that specific expression he gets, the one underneath all the noise, the one that you don't think he knows he makes. The one that says you are the most interesting thing that has ever happened to him and he cannot believe his luck and he is a little bit scared of how much he means it.

He gets there late. He gets there sideways. But he gets there.

"Hey," he says, soft, and for once there's no preamble, no analogy, no okay-so. Just: "I'm really glad it was you who already knew the fact."

Your heart does something complicated.

"Why's that," you manage.

"Because I would've been embarrassed to be this bad at sitting still in front of anyone else," he says, and grins, and ruins the moment perfectly, on purpose, the way he always does the second a feeling gets too big to hold, and you love him so much in that instant that you have to close your eyes.

---

You stay like that for a while, the two of you, not moving for an entirely different reason now. He's still inside you, softening, and neither of you is in any hurry to change that, which strikes you as funny given that not moving was the whole problem twenty minutes ago. His hand has found the back of your head again and he's just holding it there, thumb tracing slow shapes you don't think he's aware of, his heartbeat slowing under your cheek from a sprint to a walk to something steady.

"You okay," he murmurs into your hair. The voice has gone soft and low, the post-disaster voice, the one that comes out after the engine cools.

"Mm."

"You went somewhere at the end there."

"I did."

"Good somewhere?"

"Very good somewhere."

He's quiet for a second, and you can feel him deciding whether to make a joke, and you can feel him choose not to, which is its own small miracle.

"I think I had the appeal backwards the whole time," he says instead, slow, working it out the way he works everything out, sideways and out loud. "I kept thinking the still part was the experiment and the moving part was the reward. But it's not two things. It's the same thing. The staying still is just. It's trust, right. It's me sitting here doing nothing useful and you letting me, and neither of us going anywhere." A pause. "That's the whole experiment. That's all it ever was. Everything else was just me being a shark about it."

You lift your head to look at him, because that is dangerously close to him being cleanly self-aware, and you want to see it before it evaporates.

It evaporates. He sees you looking and the grin comes back, sheepish, reflexive, the shutter coming down over something he showed you for exactly one second.

"Don't write that down," he says. "That one's not for the record."

"Too late."

"You can't publish that, it's not peer reviewed."

"I'm publishing it everywhere."

"Devastating," he says happily, and pulls you back down against his chest, and you let him.

After, much after, when the experiment has reached its actual conclusion and you are both a boneless tangle on the couch with the good blanket half on the floor and his glasses somewhere that is going to be a problem to find later, he is quiet again.

Genuinely quiet. The rare kind. The kind that means he's run out, fully, that the engine has finally idled all the way down.

You give it eleven seconds.

You count.

At twelve, predictably, gloriously, he stirs against you, and you feel him take a breath to say something, and you brace for it.

"So in conclusion," Ryland Grace says, to the ceiling, with the deep satisfaction of a man filing a final report, "the appeal is real, the methodology was sound, and I think for the next round we should isolate some additional variables."

You don't even open your eyes.

"Go to sleep, Ryland."

"I'm just saying. For science."

"Sleep."

He goes quiet. He lasts almost thirty seconds this time.

he pressed two fingers to your pulse point once again, triple checking. you flinched, and simon pulled his hand away quickly. your eyes fluttered, a pained, groggy moan leaving your mouth.

“hey, hey,” simon murmured, cupping the side of your head to keep it still, wanting to keep pressure on your wound. “it’s okay, don’t move.”

you finally cracked your eyes open, your hand instinctively coming up to touch your head, but simon grabbed it.

“don’t touch,” he told you softly, “i’m here.”

you closed your eyes again, groaning as the throbbing in your head intensified the more you woke up.

“fuck,” you rasped, “‘s cold.”

he couldn’t help but chuckle a little.

“yeah. let’s get you up.” he murmured, sliding one arm under your legs and the other under your back.

he lifted you up, carrying you the few feet to his bed and laying you down. you groaned as the movement made your head throb more.

“why am i wet?” you asked groggily, “why are you… where are we?”

simon was silent for a moment, pressing the bedding against your head again. “you, uh… they threw you in here with me.” he explained quietly. “we’re stuck in solitary together.”

your head shot up off of the pillow. “what?”

“relax,” he tried to push you back down, but you resisted. “it’s okay, i’ll figure something out.”

“no, no no no,” you muttered, sitting up and pushing simon’s arm away. “i can’t be stuck down here, what do you mean?”

he sighed as you climbed out of bed, nearly slipping on the water in your frantic state. you stumbled to the door, pushing against it harshly. the metal rattled with each movement, and simon watched you feel along the seam of it, searching for any way out.

he remembered acting the same way when he was first thrown down here. the fear and the panic so intense it made his fingers numb. he remembered screaming and begging until his voice gave out. the cycle of despair, anger, depression. begging and pleading for forgiveness followed by angry outbursts. then the weeks he spent in bed, unable to pull himself out. at least he didn't have someone else there to witness his breakdown.

simon wasn't sure what to do as you spiraled down the same cycle. desperately pulling on the door, shouting like they could hear you, begging to be released until your voice was hoarse and the floor of the cell was dry. it broke his heart.

you leaned your forehead against the door as your voice finally gave out, and only then did simon stand. he managed to catch you as your knees buckled, slowing your fall and lowering you both to the ground. he kneeled next to you, letting you sag your weight against him as you cried weakly, just as he did years ago.

you don’t remember falling asleep. simon gently shook your shoulder, and it took you a few seconds to blink your puffy eyes open.

“—to eat?” he asked. he was crouched next to the bed, about eye level with you.

you blinked a few times. “what?”

your voice was weak and raspy, the vibrations making your vocal chords burn.

“someone brought food.” he repeated, his voice soft. “do you want to eat?”

you let out a quiet whine, letting your head loll to the side. the throbbing had dulled, but the persistent ache in your skull was still there.

“no.” you answered, trying to roll onto your side but simon didn’t let you.

“hey, c’mon.” he sighed, “a few bites. you haven’t eaten all day.”

you lazily turned your head to look at him. “all day?” you repeated, “what do you mean all day? how long have i been asleep?”

simon didn’t say anything, and you sat up a little, propping yourself up on your elbows. “simon.”

he looked away for a moment, running a hand down his face. “nineteen hours.”

your eyes nearly bugged out of your head. “nineteen hours?” you sat up fully, the movement sending a rush to your head. simon reached out to steady you as you swayed.

“maybe closer to twenty.” he told you, “my sense of time is probably a little off.”

you huffed, burying your face in your hands. “god… twenty— okay.” you shook your head for a moment, trying to get your brain kicked into gear. “okay, um… did they say anything?”

“they?”

“whoever dropped off the food, simon, did they say anything?” you snapped.

“like what?”

“anything- did they say anything? about me, about how long i'm supposed to be down here, what i did wrong, anything.”

simon was quiet for a moment before shaking his head as he looked away. “no. they just dropped off the food and left.”

you stared at him through the darkness.

“nothing? they said nothing?”

“do you want food or not?” he asked sharply, “they only brought one tray, so we’ll have to split it.”

you clenched your jaw, turning your head away. you shook your head again, pulling back the covers and settling yourself under them. all your energy was gone, the temptation of sleep pulling at your body.

you slept off and on for days. it almost felt like looking back in time. you were a mirror image of him all those years ago.

by the third day, simon rolled you onto your back. he dragged the food tray over, scooping some of it up on the spoon and holding it out.

“come on,” he coaxed quietly, “just a few bites. i know you’re tired, but please.”

simon waited patiently, watching for any sign of acknowledgement. the silence buzzed in his ears.

“can you at least drink some water?” he asked, setting the spoon down and grabbing the cup of water. “please, sweetheart?”

he slid a hand under your head, lifting it up slightly and trying to get you to drink. he poured the water out, and it only slid down your chin and pooled on the bed. he set it back down, grabbing the blanket and wiping the water off of your skin.

“i’m sorry.” he whispered, resting his hand on your forehead and gently stroking between your eyebrows with his thumb.

by the eighth day, he tried to coax you out of bed. you were awake, but unresponsive. he sat beside you, hand on your shoulder as he patiently waited for you to show any indication of hearing him. with a sigh, he stood, only to scoop you up and carry you over to the shower in the corner of the room. he gently set you down, leaning you against the wall before reaching up to turn on the water.

he carefully undressed you, setting your clothes aside. grabbing an empty water cup from dinner, he filled it with the lukewarm water raining from the showerhead, using it to fully saturate your hair. you kept your eyes closed, shivering from the cold as he began to wash your hair.

“i know it’s cold, i’m sorry.” he murmured, fingers scrubbing your scalp.

you didn’t say anything, didn’t move, didn’t open your eyes. he scrubbed and rinsed the suds away, before applying a little more and massaging your scalp again.

“i still remember the first time you delivered my food.” he said quietly, “i… i felt bad for scaring you. i didn’t mean to.”

he carefully rinsed your hair before grabbing the bar soap and a clean rag. “you were the sixth person to have that job, but you were the first to be kind. it made things a little easier, you know? knowing there was someone out there who cared. who pitied me enough to warm up my food, or sneak me candy.”

he lathered up the soap in the rag, gently scrubbing your skin clean. you weakly shook your head after a few moments of silence. simon paused his movements, looking at you.

“no?” he asked, “no, what?”

your lips moved, but the words stuck in your throat. simon leaned closer as you tried again.

“not pity?” he repeated, pulling back a little to look at you as you shook your head weakly again.

he resumed carefully cleaning you, the only sound for a small stretch of time being the shower running.

“you didn’t pity me, huh?” he chuckled softly, “that’s good to know. you just liked me that much?”

the corner of your lips tugged a little.

the longer your silence went on, the more simon found himself talking. you mostly laid curled up on the bed, blankets tight around you. simon would lay next to you, one arm behind his head and the other resting on his stomach. he had recounted as many stories from his childhood as he could remember, stories of his mother, of his few memories before the quiet rapture. he talked softly, his voice a comforting rumble next to you.

simon fell into a rhythm with taking care of you. he slept on the floor next to the bed, listening to your stifled sobs at night. he forced you to eat a few bites at every meal, carried you over to the shower and bathed you every few days. anything to keep you comfortable while you shut down.

by the fourth week, simon knew he needed to step in. a few minutes after lunch had been delivered, he sat on the edge of the bed next to you, gently resting a hand on your shoulder.

“wake up, sweetheart.” he murmured, shaking you gently.

he felt you tense, waking up despite not opening your eyes. he gave you a few seconds before letting out a soft sigh. he pulled the blankets up, sliding underneath them and slotting himself behind you. his arms encircled you and he pressed his forehead to your shoulder. you didn’t pull away.

“i know how it feels.” he whispered, like his voice could break you if he spoke too loud. “i was just like this when i was first thrown down here. the only difference is that i didn’t have anybody.”

he knew you were listening. he had grown accustomed to your breathing patterns when you were awake versus asleep. he had lost his eloquence years ago, but he hoped his words brought you some comfort, or at least the knowledge that you weren’t alone. that he understood.

“i slept for weeks.” he continued. “i barely ate, i didn’t shower, i didn’t get up unless i had to. i gave myself bed sores. i let myself nearly die from neglect because i just… couldn’t get myself to get up. it felt pointless.”

he felt your breath hitch, a shudder running through you as you tried to keep from crying again.

“i can’t let you get that far.” he whispered fiercely. “i won’t let you get that far. if i have to force feed you every meal and bathe you myself every day, i will. you’re too… you’re too important to me.”

the words hung heavy in the air, and he felt you curl in on yourself, a choked sob leaving you. he could only hold you tighter, pressing his forehead to your shoulder as he let you cry until you couldn’t anymore. eventually, you sniffled weakly, wiping your face with the back of your hand.

“okay.” you croaked, taking in a shuddering breath. he loosened his grip on you as you turned around to face him, the blanket getting tangled between you both.

“okay?” he repeated softly, his warm palm cupping your face.

“i’m done wallowing.” you whispered, your voice shaky from disuse. “i’m just… scared.”

“i know you are.” he murmured, his thumb stroking your cheek gently. “but you’re not alone. i won’t let anything happen to you. i promise.”

you nodded, not taking your eyes off of his. he glanced down at your lips, the movement of his irises barely noticeable in the dark. he urged you closer with a subtle pull of his hand on your cheek, and suddenly his lips were on yours.

you returned the kiss almost immediately, your arms coming up to circle around his neck and pulling him flush against you. your whole body shivered, goosebumps raising on your skin at his gentleness. he kissed you until he was breathless, pulling back much too soon for his liking and resting his forehead against yours. he let you catch your breath, before leaning in for another slower, shorter kiss.

“let’s get you taken care of, ‘kay?” he murmured, and you nodded, reluctantly letting him pull away to grab the two lunch trays.

a/n; only one more part after this 😩 im excited to wrap it up but i'll also miss this series 🥹 hope you all enjoyed!

He thinks you’re very pretty. You’re wearing some sort of white cape. Lots of gold jewellery. It’s very modest. Beel can’t help but wonder what you might look like underneath it. Would your skin be soft and squishy? Tender even? 

“You need to stop staring,” Belphegor yawns. Beel shakes his head before looking at his brother. “What?”

“I mean, if I’m noticing it, then you know it’s bad. They’ve definitely noticed. You’re being creepy. And not the good kind,” Belphegor sends his brother a lazy smile. Beel feels his cheeks grow hot as he looks back at you to find you already looking at him. Your eyes meet for a second before you quickly look away. You rub the back of your neck before taking another bite of your cake. 

Oh. So you do eat when you get nervous. 

Beelzebub feels his mouth salivate. He swallows slowly, but it hardly helps. 

“I’m gonna get some more cake,” he mumbles, making a beeline for the buffet. He’s barely scarfed down his fourth piece of cake before you interrupt him. 

“Hi,” 

Beel turns to look at you, quickly chewing on his cake before swallowing. 

“Hello,” 

You’re even prettier up close. Your skin has the kind of glow that only angels have, your eyes almost light up the room, and your smile is pleasantly soft. So cute. So unassuming. 

“It’s a good cake,” you say, motioning to the table in front of you. Beelzebub, however, can barely take his eyes off you, merely humming as he keeps his gaze locked on the real treat. You giggle nervously. Beel remembers he should probably reply. 

“Yeah, it’s alright,” he states, eyes still fixed on you. His stomach growls. He hopes you don’t notice, but you do; of course you do. Your smile hasn’t faltered during the whole interaction. It’s awfully polite, but Beel can’t help but wonder what you might look like, dishevelled and bewildered. How the real you look under all this facade and pretend that angels do. That he did once, too. For some reason, he wants to release you. Help set you free. Let the bird out of its cage. Never mind that he’s planning to roast the bird and eat it afterwards. 

“Are you hungry?” you ask curiously. Beelzebub smiles. 

“Yes, ‘m always hungry,” he says, extending his hand to you. “Beelzebub, the Avatar of Gluttony,” 

Your mouth shapes into a little o as you politely take his hand and shake it. 

“Simeon told me to look out for you and your brothers,” you teasingly reply, before giving him your name as well. Beelzebub has to hold back a grin as he looks towards the other angel. With satisfaction, he notes that he’s far too busy trying to calm down Luke. 

“You know, we could always go to the kitchens. They always make me food if I ask,” he says, looking back at you. You look slightly flustered about the prospect of being alone with the demon as you glance towards Simon. Then you meet Beelzebub’s eyes, and a small grin replaces your hesitation.

“We have to strengthen connections, right?”

You don’t make it to the kitchen. No, Beel has a meal in front of him that he finds much more delectable than anything the kitchen could make him. Which is how you find yourself in one of Diavolo’s many guestrooms, pressed up against a door. Beel’s hands are all over you, grabbing at your hips, waist, thighs. His hands are warm on your skin, burning through your clothes, but it doesn’t stop you from pulling him closer to you, your arms wrapped around his neck, your fingers curling into his hair. 

It’s hard to keep up with the way Beelzebub kisses you. He kisses like you’re the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted, lips moving seamlessly against yours, swallowing up every little gasp you make when his hands travel too low, too far, too intimate. 

You break away for air, moving your head to the side when Beel chases your lips. He doesn’t seem bothered, trailing soft kisses along your jaw, licking a stripe along your neck. 

“I shouldn’t, hah, I shouldn’t do this; I should get back–” you gasp, hands moving to push at his chest, but Beelzebub doesn’t move an inch, his soft lips moving to your collarbones, tucking your shirt out of the way with a finger. 

“We should go back,” you whine, and Beelzebub moves to look at you, violet eyes somehow gleaming red. You blink, thinking it might be the light tricking you, but the red glint remains. “Why?” he asks, and you pout, shifting against the wall, that's keeping you trapped against Beel’s boiling-hot body. 

“This isn't right. I shouldn’t be doing this,” you say, resting your head against the door. Beel hums and kisses your cheek. 

“But you like it, don’t you?” he asks, his voice sounding almost seductive. You frown, your eyebrows furrowing, but Beel merely looks at you like he just asked what’s for dinner.

“Do you not feel good?” he continues, and his thumbs begin to rub circles into your hips. “Do you not want to feel good?” 

He kisses your neck again, slightly nibbling at the skin. You sigh and close your eyes. It’s hard to ignore the way your whole body burns with desire, the way your core pulses with need. You want so badly to turn back to the party, but some part of you can’t help but wonder what it might be like to stay here with this gluttonous demon you just met. 

To give in. Just for one night. 

Which is why you let Beelzebub lead you to the bed and slowly remove your clothes piece after piece till you’re completely naked underneath him. You feel vulnerable, with the way Beel’s gaze takes in every inch of your body, yet in this moment you feel more worshipped than ever. He takes his time with you, kissing down your chest, trailing spit and care along your stomach with each wet kiss, till he reaches your pulsing core. 

You gasp when he touches you, hands flying to his wrists. Beel watches your reactions, waiting till you slowly let go again, your hands gripping the pillows beside you instead. Beel grins, fangs showing as he kisses your thigh, before placing your legs on his shoulders. He works you open slowly, watching your face intently as your brows furrow and your little pout returns to your face.

Angels. They’re all so uptight. 

He waits till he can’t anymore, zipping open his pants and positioning himself at your entrance. Arousal clouds his mind as he rubs his tip against you. You glance down, eyes immediately widening as you spot his flushed cock between your legs, dripping with precum. 

“There’s no way that’s going to fit,” you say, placing yourself on your elbows, but Beel merely grins, one hand finding your hip to keep you where he wants you. 

“Relax. Of course, it will,” he states, leaning down to kiss your cheek, effectively pushing your legs to your chest. “Little angel,” he murmurs as he pushes past the first ring of resistance. You gasp at the foreign feeling, eyes squeezing shut. Beelzebub coos. You’re so soft, so gentle. He almost feels bad for you, that you’ve had to go for so long without knowing what this is like. The only reason he doesn't is because it means you've ended up here. With him. Allowing him to show you what it's like. He remembers how he felt back when he fell. How new it all was before the hunger came. Now he just wants to satisfy the gaping feeling. 

He pushes further in, and you grip his shoulders. You’re strong, but you’re no match for Beel, who lets you use him as a stress toy while he bullies his thick inches inside of you. 

Usually, Beel isn’t much of a talker. His escapades are few compared to most of his brothers (at least if he doesn't count Leviathan), preferring to use the fridge to drown his desires, but with you, Beel thinks he can change his mind. He isn't like this usually, but then again neither are you. Each gasp and sigh that leaves your lips is music in his ears. He might just forget that the kitchen is only fourteen doors down the hall. 

He bottoms out and stays there. Your eyes are still squeezed shut as you adjust to the foreign feeling in your gut. You’ve never felt so full, so completely stuffed. It’s dizzying, the way his cock pulses and drools inside of you as you squeeze down on him. 

“Doesn’t it feel good?” Beel asks, nipping at your jaw. His hands hold your thighs in place as he slowly pulls out again till only his tip is inside you. “To give in? To listen to your body for once?” he asks. His eyes are now trained on where you’re connected, as he pushes in again and watches himself disappear inside of you. A tiny moan leaves you as you throw your head back into the pillow. 

He places a hand on the back of your head, making you watch as he fucks you, and the moan that's ripped from your throat is downright sinful.

His pace is slow, as though he’s savouring you. The initial sting is soon replaced with pleasure as your walls adjust to his cock. “Look at that,” he breathes, completely lost in how warm you are. “It’s almost like you were made for this.” 

Violet eyes meet yours. “You just needed to get fucked, didn’t you?” 

You whimper, clawing at Beelzebub’s chest as tears stream down your cheeks. It’s all so overwhelming, so completely foreign. Part of you expected something to happen—for a pair of horns to sprout out of your forehead or your skin to turn red—but all you can think about is how good it all feels. How can this be wrong when Beelzebub fits so well inside of you, when his cock stretches you out perfectly and reaches every spot just right?

Beelzebub’s pace grows rougher as he licks the salty tears of your cheeks, settling his weight on top of you and fucking you into the mattress. "You taste good," he murmurs. You’re speechless, reduced to whimpers and moans, feeling like you can’t get enough air inside your lungs. Beel groans into your ear, repeating praises and sweet nothings that make you dizzy. 

“Pretty angels just want to get fucked, don’t they?”

“You’re so good, nngh, I could e- eat you.” 

“Poor thing, aren’t you? Let me make you feel good.” 

And, god, do you feel good as pressure builds in your stomach. It’s euphoric, really, how good Beelzebub feels inside of you. You’re not even sure you can go back to the celestial realm after this.

Not sure if you want to. 

Beel watches your carefully crafted facade crack with each thrust of his cock, and the sight satisfies a deep hunger in his gut. He wishes he’d done this sooner. Hell, he wishes he could watch your pretty face morph in pleasure and disbelief forever. Doubt and scepticism look so marvellous on your face as you’re fucked into oblivion. 

It doesn’t take much for you to reach your high, and you cry out as your back arches off the bed and your walls pulse and clench around Beel’s cock. Pleasure courses through every part of you, making your toes curl and your eyes roll back. It takes even less for Beelzebub to follow you, groaning into your ear as he fucks you both through your high. His cock twitches as he fills you up with cum. He comes a lot, so much that it’s dripping out where you’re connected, down your ass and Beel's balls, onto the sheets below you. 

You lay still for a while, both catching your breaths before Beelzebub pulls out and removes himself from your sticky body. You lay, still in disbelief at what just happened. It occurs to you that you’re still completely naked, while Beel is dressed, and you pull at the sheets to cover your body. 

Beelzebub grins at your attempt to hide yourself and the way you look so perplexed. You both know he’s ruined you for good now. He can’t help but wonder if you’ll try to pretend this never happened, if you’ll clean yourself up and go back up to Simeon and Luke. He hopes you’ll give into your desires, and let him fuck you till you both pass out.

“You did good,” he says. You bite your lip. “Thank you,” you reply. 

He looms over you for a while longer. “It was nice,” he says, feeling his post-orgasm haze slowly dissipate as he sheepishly rubs his neck. “I—uh,” his eyes dart around the room. 

You blink almost owlishly at him, shocked at how he seems so shy after he just rearranged your guts. 

“Thank you for letting me do that to you,” he says, and you can’t help the laugh that escapes past your lips. 

thank you for reading!

tags: @madaqueue / @mystically-yours / @mcmisa / @malleuus / @clone-force-99

@the-realest-unicorn / @delightfulmentalityturtle / @malleus-draconias-rose

Vanilla… Like the cake you baked for him for his birthday. That's how most saw your beloved husband - vanilla… Oh, but they couldn't be more wrong.

Sure, lots of nights he wanted to be soft and slow, make love to you like you were the only person in the universe that mattered…. But some nights it got filthy.

“I'm sorry!”

You yelped out as his hand meets your already sore pussy, a light slap delivered that sent a stinging pain straight through your very core, your legs held apart - ankles tied to the bedposts… Your hands cuffed to the headboard. Nowhere to go.

“Are you really, sweetheart? I don't think I believe you.”

You had thought it'd be fun to tease your husband earlier in the kitchen, wearing a cute sundress with no panties underneath, pretending to drop something and flashing him… Playing that game all morning - even though you knew he had to go to work and didn't have time to play… But god when he got home tonight.

“Color?”

“Green.”

His fingers dip into your pussy nice and slow, thumb rolling your sore clit, your body fights against the restraints but you're unsure if It's to get closer or get away. He repeatedly curls his fingers just right, having learned your body better than even you yourself knew.

“You're so damn greedy, y’know that?”

Your whine is broken and desperate as he pulls his beautiful fingers away, just as you were almost there, he simply flicks your clit lightly and watches the way you flinch again.

“This is your punishment, remember? Take it like a good girl.”

Vanilla… Like the cake you baked for him for his birthday. That's how most saw your beloved husband - vanilla… Oh, but they couldn't be more wrong.

Sure, lots of nights he wanted to be soft and slow, make love to you like you were the only person in the universe that mattered…. But some nights it got filthy.

“I'm sorry!”

You yelped out as his hand meets your already sore pussy, a light slap delivered that sent a stinging pain straight through your very core, your legs held apart - ankles tied to the bedposts… Your hands cuffed to the headboard. Nowhere to go.

“Are you really, sweetheart? I don't think I believe you.”

You had thought it'd be fun to tease your husband earlier in the kitchen, wearing a cute sundress with no panties underneath, pretending to drop something and flashing him… Playing that game all morning - even though you knew he had to go to work and didn't have time to play… But god when he got home tonight.

“Color?”

“Green.”

His fingers dip into your pussy nice and slow, thumb rolling your sore clit, your body fights against the restraints but you're unsure if It's to get closer or get away. He repeatedly curls his fingers just right, having learned your body better than even you yourself knew.

“You're so damn greedy, y’know that?”

Your whine is broken and desperate as he pulls his beautiful fingers away, just as you were almost there, he simply flicks your clit lightly and watches the way you flinch again.

“This is your punishment, remember? Take it like a good girl.”