vasaros draws

You had been locked in that terminal loop, hands clasped over a wound that would not close - familiar, as if you’d rehearsed it a thousand times before. His pulse faltered under your palms, lips going pale, and the sound of his last exhale was the only thing that woke you. All the light in the room was gone, reduced to the soft ticking of the clock on the wall, a suggestion that time was passing somewhere outside the tomb of your sheets.

But the night doesn’t last forever, no matter how dark and suffocating it may be.

You felt the bed dip, a presence emerging from the periphery. The mattress groaned and you registered the scent of him first, gun oil, cheap aftershave and an odd, chemical tang. You curled tighter, bracing for the confirmation that it was yet again only a ghost of him. But before you could convince yourself it wasn’t real: the slow, deliberate sweep of his hand over the small of your back, the press of skin, so warm, and the scratch of his dry palm as he hooked an arm around your waist and reeled you in.

His lips brushed your ear, breath warm against your skin. “Just me.” His thumb traced circles on your hip as he whispered, “Shh. You’re alright, Schatzi.”

You shuddered, and twist until you faced him. It was him. Real. In the flesh and breathing the same air you were. There was a cut just above his eyebrow, just barely scabbed, and the faintest shadow of fatigue under his eyes. You reached for his face, tracing the ridge of his cheekbone as if to memorize it, as if confirming he wasn’t some twisted figment of a waking nightmare.

“If you leave for that long again-” you tried, but your voice cracked, and he smothered it with a kiss. Not the bruising, impatient pressure you’d become accustomed to, no, but something impossibly gentle. His lips, dry and a little chapped, working over yours until you forgot the taste of blood, the memory of violence, everything that wasn’t this singular point of contact. He kissed you the way you imagined poets wrote about dying: sweet, and so slow you could feel your heart fighting to keep up.

He murmured words against your mouth and you caught only fragments: ‘safe,’ ‘promise,’ ‘never.’ His hands, those same, war-torn hands, mapped your back like he was confirming your existence cell by cell. And you broke. The ache in your chest spread and bloomed into a thousand pinpricks of need, and you gave in to him with a small gasp as the kiss broke.

That small gasp was all the knowledge he needed. His knee nudged between your thighs, not in a hurry but in a claim - ‘this is mine’, his body told yours. There were days, weeks, even months when he was only a voice on the phone or a specter on a screen, but when König came home you remembered you had skin and he had hands and nothing in the world could stop the old animal from asserting all the things waiting behind your teeth. So he took it slow, for you, even with the tremor in his biceps and the grind of his teeth that said slow was a battle he was willing to lose by a narrow margin.

But the first time was always a question after the drought: Do you still know the lay of me? Does your memory match the real thing, mapped in bite marks and aching? ‘Of course’ was the only answer.

He hitched your legs around his waist, let the weight of him pin you, and you clawed at his shoulders just so he would remember he wasn’t the only one who’d been starving.

“König..” You’d breathe against his skin, arching into him in a plea for more, and he’d answer, not with the touch of a gentle lover, but a generous one. He worshipped, he cataloged, he made you a study. There was never a moment where you doubted he wanted to swallow you whole. He kissed you until your jaw ached and your ears rang, until there was no room for fear or nightmare or memory of any world where he wasn’t pinning you together.

Then the heat blossomed into something fierce. The next kiss left you dizzy, a wet heat pooling between your thighs as your hands found purchase in the thin cotton of his shirt. He didn’t resist when you tugged, just let you gather him closer until your breath mingled, noses bumping, teeth grazing. It had been too long - seventeen weeks, if you counted right, and he wasted none of them, didn’t let a single moment go unmarked. Where you were frantic, hungry, he was measured, dragging out each touch as if the world’s ending was measured instead in bedsheets and sweat. When you finally got his shirt over his head, the scars and the new bruises mapped stories onto his chest that you wouldn’t hear until months from now, if ever. You pressed your lips to them anyway, as if some part of him might heal with the attention.

He laughed when your teeth left a crescent at his collarbone. “Eager little thing,” he muttered, not scolding so much as delighted: Considering König was always happiest when your need outpaced his. You weren’t shy about palming the bulge at his groin either, couldn’t help the way your body moved toward him, the way your hips lifted as if you could already feel him inside.

“Missed you,” you said, a confession and an accusation at once. His hand cupped the back of your neck, the thumb stroking your pulse as if to prove he was here. “Gut,” he said.

He moved to strip you with economy, the sleep shirt going first, then your shorts, and when he pressed two fingers against you through your underwear you nearly sobbed at the relief. Three months without and your body was starved for him, slick with want, your resolve a casualty of the war you never signed up for. He kissed your abdomen as he stripped you bare, trading your noises for his own: those little German endearments he tried to bury, the ragged intakes of breath as your hands explored every new mark. “My Schatzi. My good, soft thing.”

He shifted, dragging his lips down the ladder of your ribs as his fingertips hooked the waistband of your panties. “Let’s see who’s been waiting longest,” he crooned, and you felt the shudder of anticipation clench deep in your belly as he pressed a kiss just above your pubic bone, the scratch of stubble shocking and perfect. Then his fingers were sliding beneath the thin cotton, mapping the damp heat that had soaked through.

You gasped as he pushed the underwear aside, then smoothed his palm over your mound, the whole of his hand warm and claiming. His fingers parted you with studied slowness, coaxing you open, and he made a noise - approval, reverence, hunger - as he slipped a thick finger inside. He whispered praise against your thigh, voice gone thick and guttural: “Schon brav. So wet for me, Engel. Good girl, always.” The words landed with the weight of prayer, and you felt your hips roll, chasing the friction, greedy for what you’d gone so long without.

He worked you open with the patience of a practiced man, adding a second finger and curling until the world blurred at the edges, and not once did he take his eyes from your face, even as you arched, his gaze heavy-lidded and dark with want. When your whimpering started, he matched them with soft crooning in his own language, nonsense syllables and pet names that made you clench around his hand.

He murmured against your inner thigh, “Liebling, I missed you more than food. More than sleep.” And you believed him, because you could feel the tremble in his hand, because his fingers stuttered every time you tightened around him. He pulled back only to tug your underwear down your thighs and off you completely, discarding them with impatience before settling between your thighs, shoulders so broad you couldn’t help but fall open for him.

He pressed his mouth to your cunt with an eagerness that bordered on obscene. Eating you was never just licking, never just the surface with him; König devoured. He worked you with abandon, tracing you with the flat of his tongue, then spearing it inside, then returning to your clit until you clawed for something - sheets, his scalp, your own sanity. He moaned into you like a man starved, and every vibration ricocheted through your bones and settled between your ribs. There was nothing careful about the way he licked and sucked you, and when your thighs trembled, he pinned them wide with his forearms, holding you captive and squirming.

The best part? He didn’t stop when you came, not even when you gasped for air or bucked against him, and only when you sobbed into the heel of your palm did he slow; easing back, his mouth shining, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before crawling up your length, bracing himself on one elbow as he slid his waistband down. The cock that sprang free was as heavy and flushed as you’d imagined, and he stroked it lazily, watching as your eyes devoured him. “You missed this, didn’t you?” he teased, the fist around his shaft slow and taunting. “You need it, Schatzi.”

You nodded and so König rewarded you with a hot, open-mouthed kiss, the kind that left teeth marks and wet trails down your throat. He pressed the blunt head against your entrance, not pushing in, just letting the pulse of him throb and threaten. He waited until you swore, until you caught his wrist and tried to drag him closer, and only then did he oblige. He split you with a slow, careful rock, the length of him a bruising promise as he shushed the little litany of cries you made.

“Fuuck,” He groaned, not from pain but from the overwhelming crush of relief, the ecstasy of finally, finally having you again. His hips canted forward, slow and almost reverent at first, every thrust like a confession, an apology. The way you clamped around him made him curse, syllables guttural and worshipful, his brow furrowing in concentration as he tried to keep himself from coming instantly. He shuddered your name, his hand braced to the side of your face, thumb stroking your cheek as he kissed you through the noisy grunts and broken endearments.

You locked your legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back, greedy for every inch as he filled you with a deep, methodical rhythm, groaning at the way you squeezed him. Each time he bottomed out you felt him shake, felt him bite back a whimper with a clenched jaw. He pressed his forehead to yours, sweat beading along his hairline, and you saw how much he missed this - how much he missed you. And he never let up with the praise.

“So schön, so good for me. Missed you,” he rasped into your mouth. His hands curled around your wrists, pinning your arms above your head with one of his own. He rocked into you with a building hunger, quickening the pace as though the longing of seventeen weeks was a fire in his blood. “Never... letting you go,” he promised, the words a growl, a binding. He drove into you with deep, deliberate pace, the slow grind building pressure at your core until every nerve seemed tuned to the pitch of him. The ache that had haunted your dreams transformed into something sharp and sweet, compounding with each thrust.

König’s lips grazed your ear as he leaned in, “Fuck, Schatz, du bist-“ The rest dissolved as he shifted his weight to one forearm, hips snapping forward at a new angle that made stars appear in your peripherals. Your spine arched off the mattress, toes curling, throat tight with sounds you couldn’t control.

Then the world contracted to pinpricks of sensation - his teeth at your pulse, the weight of him pressing you down, the slick friction where your bodies joined. Your vision blurred. You bit your lip trying to hold back, but when his thumb found you again your jaw went slack.

"Kö-"

The rest of his name vanished as your body seized, walls clenching around him in waves. His rhythm faltered, muscles tensing beneath your clawing fingers. He buried his face in your neck with a broken sound and shuddered against you, inside you, his heartbeat thundering against your chest. You felt him jerk inside you, hips locked tight as he spilled into you, every stutter a hot pulse that left you shuddering and breathless. The pressure in your chest broke, dissolving into a boneless, spent warmth. König hovered above you for a lingering moment, his panting breath gusting against your face, before he collapsed to the side and wrapped you against him.

He gathered you in like you were the only thing that mattered, all the restless energy and violence leeched from his body and replaced with a languid gratitude. He pressed his mouth to your temple, the scratch of his unshaven jaw grounding you in the reality of this: he was here. Alive. Not a ghost, not a casualty, not just a name on a screen.

“Ich bin so glücklich,” he murmured, “To be with you. Hier.” He said it again, as if reciting a litany against the world. “Home, Schatzi. My home.”

You buried your face into the curve of his neck and breathed him in. You let the tremors subside, let your heart lose its frantic tempo as you soaked in the simple reality of his weight pinning you to the earth. “You have no idea. You-” He broke off, laughter bubbling up sharp and bright, and you found yourself grinning, your own pulse finally settling into something steady. König nuzzled you, his nose cold and damp in your hair, and you let your eyes flutter shut, feeling the solid warmth of him everywhere, filling every space that had ached empty these past months.

In those stolen hours, you discovered hunger’s true nature - not a single craving but a vast, wordless spectrum. At one end lay the desperate consumption born of isolation; at the other, the gentle feeding of souls finding harbor in each other. You inhabited this in-between place where bodies communicated in primitive sounds and movements, where the line between need and love blurred until they became indistinguishable. For those moments, you spoke only in this ancient language, this raw communion that, in its purest form, might be what others call devotion.