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Toji grins, nips at her fingers when she brushes the backs of her knuckles against the hard planes of his face, tracing the steep cut of his cheek bone and sloping down to press the brunt of her palm to his chin. Gentle, slow, and she laughs as his eyelids flutter, leaning into the touch, rubbing back against her.
She picks at the corner of his mouth, earning herself the barest flinch, pulling away flesh from his cheek to tap against starved dog teeth, unbared with jowls limp. This is not cruelty; she is laughing against him but it is warm, lapping like the tide, softening the clarity of his eyes and the acuteness of his ears.
“Sharp,” she mutters, low, but it’s different from the appraisals he’s used to: lined up, slabs of meat and bulks of muscle, head angled in lowlight to highlight the cording at his throat, the firm of his collarbone and the stone-cut rigging over his abdomen, lethal hands with pulsing vein and lean legs with tendons suited to spring. Here, she speaks simply, remarks plainly, delighted not for his strength or virility, but the pulp between, a selfhood left to wither in the increasingly cramped interstices of his sinew.
The noise her nail makes against his canine, tap-tap-tap , the adoring hum of her voice. Sheets drawn up around their bodies, curtains twitching in tepid air, the sun dipping against the horizon, indulgent and smooth, like fingers sunk into a pint of ice cream.
A sudden warmth sparks in him, hot vanilla syrup, he pulls her against him, letting her raised hand drag awkwardly at his inner lip as she lets herself get hauled forward. He understands well enough, he thinks, what women expect of him, and something of her makes him uncharacteristically eager to reward.
“What’s up, big guy?” she says, a smile at her lips as she presses it to his Adam’s apple, humming against him and sliding forward, pinching gently at his cheek. He ignores her, nosing down against her until he can taste her jugular, lips and tongue pressed against the delicate skin of her throat; instantly, her skin reddens, verging on wine tones with even the barest of pressure, something that startles him, strangely.
Her breath hitches, a two-step stutter that he can feel beneath his ministrations, and it fills him with a vicious pride, makes him reach for her hips to draw her the barest centimeters closer.
“Toji!” she gasps, reaching down to mold her own hands over his grip, thighs stiffening where they press against his waist--but not wrapping around. Her head doesn’t tip back on a wanton moan, she doesn’t blink down at him in a way he’s sure most women think is hot but mostly gives him the impression of dust caught under the eyelid. Still, her pulse quickens and her skin warms as he presses his tongue to the dip of her clavicle, breathes hot over it before scraping against it with his teeth.
“Don’t you ever get tired?” she swats at his hands, laughing from high in her throat. Not the sly, girlish giggle of seduction, but something bright, sun-touched. She squirms against him, the give of her skin brutal against the pure bulk of his muscle.
“You don’t want--?” His brow furrows as he looks up at her scrunched eyes, wide smile, hands still wrapped around her waist.
“I always want you, Toji.” She hums, wriggling until they’re eye-level again, kicking at where his exposed feet hang over the mattress, a quiet prompt to curl his legs--he might get cold, “I just…” her fingers flutter over his, contemplative, “I guess I don’t want you to feel like you have to--not to, to imply anything…about your own feelings…”
“Besides, you’ll get bored of me.” She grins, “you’re a lot better at this than I am, you know.” She tucks again, to rest her head on his chest, and the warmth is riotous in his throat, staining the back of his tongue with the taste of vanilla. Now, she wraps her arms around him, hitching her leg over the Adonis sculpt of his hip bone. That’s what he is, isn’t it?
The sun is gone, only the dark to smooth away his definition, and beneath her touch he softens further, melting with relaxation. Happiness bites at his ribs, swells somewhere uncomfortable and foreign in his belly, hooking like vines in his thoracic cavity, and he fights the urge to thrash. Instead, he sinks further, trying to pick apart the knot of discomfort at his core with a deep breath, nose dipping to trace where her hair parts. She smells good, like skin and a warm meal, and she’s wafting warmth through parted lips in even intervals, nestling even closer.
This is… a first. Even their meeting, unconventional for the way his tastes had run, a homely look over the aisle of a grocery store, an offhand remark about an unpleasant stain on his shirt that made him bark laughter; an apology for forwardness through an offer to clean it for him. A gaze that darted away rather than lingered as he peeled it free for the sake of her reaction, eye mostly caught by the smoothing at the edges of her eyes, the neatness of her dress and the warmth of her manner. Too, the dark hair that hung limp and unstyled, messy about her head--like a Zen’in woman. Like challenge.
Fingers linked clumsily, like teenagers, yet completely natural to stumble into her orbit as their meetings had become more frequent, letting her pull him along the tree-lined streets. Rather than frustration at his odd hours, the constant burner numbers he’d manage to throw her way, the bruises and the scent of blood and the vice of his spending, a tentative worry. One without withdrawal, without resistance, simply a persistent, gentle press into the muck of his life. He wants, badly, in a way he has never known, to keep her clean.
“Ugh,” he growls, “I really want to have sex with you.”
She gives a muted laugh, slowed with the quicksand pull of sleep.
He wakes with her fingers wicking the wet away from the corners of her eyes, and he blinks up at her, dazed, the way a stripe of moonlight crosses her face, oblique and pale, plainly beautiful.
“Did I hurt your feelings?” she says, eyes liquid with fondness, bleary. His face scrunches in confusion, a pull of the brows and a tilt of the lip that furrows the discolored skin of his scar. Was he--
“No? What?” he says, reaching up to cup her face in his hands, feeling the gentle swell of her cheek beneath his thumbs, tracing that union down the body to feel every haphazard, incidental point of contact, wrapped so lazily about each other in sleep. His chest tightens in a painful pulse, overwhelmed with fondness, so solid and so heavy it feels like a foreign object in his bloodstream.
“Okay,” she says, turning her head to press a kiss to his palm, tiredness betrayed in the lilting swoop of her voice, “you were shaking.”
“Oh,” he says. He doesn’t remember having ever woken a bedmate before, nothing lingering close enough to the surface to follow him into dreams beside the sting of lactic acid settled into his flesh, the voiceless void that swims at his feet and isolates him from his intense perceptive capacity, “that’s gross.”
“Nuu-uh,” she breathes, head nodding in his hands, trusting of him as he angles her neck to rest her chin against his pectoral once more. She wraps further around him, lathing kisses across where he places her, “‘s fine… I love you…”
He stiffens momentarily, much too at home in the wrapping of his body to be lost too easily in a reflex he doesn’t command, the afterimage of her gentle hands pulling at the corners of his eyes.
Oh, another first. He wonders, absent at first, but building as her breath evens once again against him, as her kisses slide off into a sloppy snore that relaxes him so fully he worries his flesh will slough completely from the bone. He wonders, with a force that fizzes at his fingertips, what else it will be that she gives him--that he gives her.