Chapter Text
This is a dream.
Wandering palms on her belly, fingertips tracing hips, molding along pelvic bones, gliding into the divots until her thighs are parting, lips wrapping loose around her nipple and heavy palms climb her ribs.
This is how a world falls apart.
A slow-shifting change, the gradual tipping that flows into a tumble, long fingers sliding into the center of her, spreading out until she cries, lifting a dewy chest—arching up until the softness of her mashes the hard planes of him, the thrum of his heart reverberating inside her where they connect. Is it always this way? She doesn’t ask.
This is how they fell.
The collision, her world into his—low rumbles in the earth, minute deviations deep under the surface swaying them with violence on top. Others named it devastation, marking her, a sentencing in every solemn look, as though none of them understood she could make a home out of anything—and she’s never known a better home than him.
Are you awake?
Whispers from behind the sticky veil of pleasure, gauzy fantasy stretching, and then—a new world of bone-aching bliss. Tugging her closer to an edge, nearer with every curl of his fingers and splashed with his sigh when he feels her fall. Lays cornerstone kisses on her tender belly, then the undersides of her breasts, sown into her with reverence, a sweetness tightening the stitches with every touch.
Can you handle more, sweetheart?
Another sigh, higher, from her throat now, beckoned by the plunge of him into her where she’s soaking, squeezing him, choking. He’s always taken up room inside her but it’s never enough, not even when he’s burrowed in the brief-broad ache; not even when his nails are sinking into her greed-gruff thighs, hitching them higher, carving her deeper, until she feels his grin from behind closed eyes.
Look at me.
Vision shuddering, darkness at the edges of her and in the midst of it, his shadow hovers, bent over, conquering the girl who only ever surrendered. Thumb nudging her chin up to plant more kisses under her jaw, down the line of her neck—a quaking in the center of her, the brink of eruption, and her belly grows tight as rip cords and lets go, pushing pleasure in, then letting it back out, returned with every measured thrust of his hips.
Mine now, all mine tonight.
The desperation of his words lodge in like splinters, tingling pleasure and pin-point pain, scrambling her—awaiting the burst with a wretched scrunching of her face, tears streaming from her eyes, needing more and offering anxious words back to him.
Yes, please, I’m yours.
Panting, fevered breaths on her pulse, then smothering her mouth with his, holding their home tight between her lips and his—their secret—as the world around them breaks and he swallows her cries with a hungry tongue, tasting, devouring her whole.
She could die like this and never know what came after and everything would be gorgeous and glorious and full of life.
Not going anywhere, sweetheart, not ever.
Spasms again, her hold on him fluttering, a slack cord of euphoria slapping the earth as it recoils, driving her cries higher until his head lifts, releasing her sound into the dark of his room, woven with his groan as she’s filled up and he’s rattling her insides until the bars shake loose and fall off so at last she’s free. Whole and wet and pulsing with life.
His forehead falls to hers, their bodies still locked as hips push forward into hers, etching a place for himself deeper in, her legs cling tighter, holding him, straining to fuse them into one single being, even though the ecstasy ebbs away, even though their juices fall out of her in slow drips, even though she doesn’t live here anymore. The need to fuse never really fades.
Happy Birthday, baby.
Sunlight breaks up the night outside, bringing with it anguish as the illusion falls apart, crumbling her world from the bottom up.
Another year, one night to feel like herself, to feel at home.
Twenty-four years old and still waiting for anything to feel as right as this man.
Wants to revel in the joy, the sensation of attachment but—rejection is imminent.
Poised to pounce with the contact of her bare feet on the hardwood, smiling over their morning coffee while she tortures herself remembering all the ways he crashed into her again and again the night before.
He will hug her, kiss her cheek, and send her out, and she will revere the aching soreness between her thighs, and cry over the yellowing bruises of wanting as they fade off her skin over the next few days, and wonder—for the millionth time—if she will ever feel at home without him.
This is how she breaks.