#jadeite x rei
what the body knows
A gift of smut and angst for the wonderful, magical @coppercrane2, one of the mods over at @ssminibang, and also? Very much one of my favorite people. I hope you enjoy this, Charlie!
title: what the body knows
fandom: Sailor Moon
characters/ships: Rei/Mars x reincarnated!Jadeite
rating: R for explicit sexual content below the cut, along with canon and non-canon character death“You just a little hungry, or,” he wonders, warm breath shivering across her breastbone, “you starving?”
Reblogging just to add the AO3 link!
what the body knows
A gift of smut and angst for the wonderful, magical @coppercrane2, one of the mods over at @ssminibang, and also? Very much one of my favorite people. I hope you enjoy this, Charlie!
title: what the body knows
fandom: Sailor Moon
characters/ships: Rei/Mars x reincarnated!Jadeite
rating: R for explicit sexual content below the cut, along with canon and non-canon character death
“You just a little hungry, or,” he wonders, warm breath shivering across her breastbone, “you starving?”
what the body knows
…
In the windows the sky is thickly concrete, a fine film of drizzle that had gone all morning and kept them indoors, and perhaps it’s only because of a brief lull in its gentle rush against the roof that he can even hear her pause, sock–footed and quiet, on her way down the hall. Feet arrested on the threshold to the kitchen where he stands facing the sink. She listens to the ripe snap of his teeth, breaking the taut skin of a plum; the back of his hand abortively wiping juice from his chin as he turns partially around. Dim light silhouettes the edge of his jaw.
“Hey,” Junin says to her, mouth full, not even looking in her direction, “it’s getting late. Eat something.”
Sunday, and so far she’s spent it in the pantry, clearing out the back for the first time anyone’s done in – years. The smell of old crumbling contact paper lining the shelves, ringed with rusty stains from canned tuna, pineapples, curry, all with expiration dates embarrassingly long gone by. Twine, cracked soup bowls, aluminum foil, a casserole someone had gifted her (bizarrely) after the funeral. Other things. Packets of her grandfather’s aspartame, the mints he nibbled when his sugar slid, protein shakes with ingredients she still couldn’t pronounce. Milk protein concentrate, calcium caseinate, 1% or less of the following: inulin, cellulose gel, magnesium phosphate, artificial flavors. What does the body know, Rei thinks, recalling how she poured down the drain half-glasses of chocolate-flavored fluid while her grandfather dozed, his belly rejecting the decoy of sustenance, patiently eating itself down to something that could be lost or wander away, float off on a breeze. Into trash bags they all went, revealing space in the pantry like new skin. When she had emerged blinking into the hall even that darkening afternoon had seemed too bright. Now here she is – and here he is. In one hand the plum, in the other a bowl with a second one. Cut up how she liked, to keep her lip balm intact.
This was what stopped her short. How he would’ve had to have seen her pickily dicing her fruit like that; how alarming, to find herself the focus of such complete and close attention.
She’s already moving without conscious thought, hand on his arm, turning him. Rei gives him no chance to see her face. Her fingers climb the shaved sides of his head, taking the slightly grown-out hair atop for purchase; her eyes fall shut as her jaw cants up, triangulating from memory where his mouth is. His small surprised laugh is swallowed down her throat. “Rei.”
What does the body ask for? Under her palms the cord of his neck, his chest and stomach are all tangibilities, warm blood and muscle, and it feels, almost, as if she’s the one who might fly away. Months ago when he’d first reached for her she’d jumped back as if scorched; it had been so long since she felt another person’s skin. Now, she sucks his tongue from his mouth, sticky plum juice off his day-old beard. If she could she’d suck the air out of his lungs. She gets her hand in his briefs, around his cock, and he does not hesitate. The fruit goes rolling across the floor when he hoists her on the counter, accidentally dislodging her hand; there’s a brief struggle of crossing limbs, she straining for him as he steps between her legs, somehow both tugging down and rucking up her short dress. It’s faster than he usually moves, unlike him to accede to her impatience. He palms her breast in a rough squeeze, ducks his head to lick the nipple. Tiny hairs rise all over her skin. When she rubs her thumb over the wet tip of his cock he laughs and gasps both at once, and it’s so exactly what she’d wanted from him without needing to ask that closed, still, the corners of Rei’s eyes suddenly sting.
“You just a little hungry, or,” he wonders, warm breath shivering across her breastbone, “you starving?”
She wants to tell him, but what’s lodged in her gullet is an animal or the selfish type of spirit (her own) she read about in childhood, devouring whatever would come out, ravenous for anything coming in. So she tells him by doing, gets a brusquer hold on him, throttling down, the rough edge she’s learned he craves. When they’re like this he’s vocal but not about his desires; always they seem matched to hers, as if he’s afraid she’ll balk. I like everything you do to me. But what does the body want? Surely there are acts he had begged from others before her, as they kissed and touched skin and shed their clothes on the floor, acts he and she have yet to perform. Clear directives and not only suggestions found in the jump of his stomach, his head lolling back to the futon in lamp light, brow strained, almost as if he’s in pain. Maybe he is. Starving the same as her, desire tamped down inside. But in his presence it’s impossible to swallow her wants, hide or make them casual. As she beats Junin off, her hand sure in a way she does not feel, he drops his face in her chest, shuddering. His fingers insinuate themselves along her inner thigh, twist away her underwear. The tip of one dipping there, barely into her sex. Maybe he doesn’t realize. How much of him she would take.
The air in the kitchen feels heavy and cool, window cracked open (broken), all that unspent water loading the sky. In her ears is the hushed mix of their breaths and she finds herself counting his, noting each hitch, each sigh. Familiar. But Junin feels more solid than anyone she has held, hips digging into her thighs, width of his torso crowding her, his head tucked under her chin in the guarded apostrophe of her throat. She has an urge to take him further into herself somehow, a sentiment that feels protective but lacks the associated tenderness: selfish again, the frank way she would consume air or water, things the body needs. When he leaks a little the friction eases, so she grips harder to compensate, drags slow from root to tip. His answering groan is muffled into her sternum, a low, defenseless thing, and her mouth goes wet. A dozen unwired thoughts light up her mind at once. The noise her father made when the hospital called – Kaidou’s lips tensely closed under her own – Junin’s thumb stroking her throat as she kissed him, imbuing her with an odd, illogical sense of safety – the deep chill of her grandfather’s forehead the time she touched it last. Going out under the eaves this morning, looking at the sky, wondering if the drizzle was rain, really, or only mist. Putting out her palm to check as if this was a distinction that mattered. Sustenance, decoy.
What does the body know? Her eyelids flutter when Junin pushes two fingers into her, long and recurving like a bow, hooking at the place where she already feels something – not pleasure, not quite – starting to take form. Something stronger and less anodyne, like biting the inside of her cheek and tonguing the resulting wound: a sharp, dizzy sensation of brilliance, copper dissolving in her mouth. Something her body already knew for itself, what was asked for, wanted, needed. The first time he’d so much as touched her hand – that recognition – instant. In that moment she had understood what was known could never be unknown. But where did that leave her without him? The broad slope of Junin’s back encompasses her field of vision, the old gray college T-shirt in graying light, his shoulder moving up and down. Breaths burst from her in harsh little pants. He shifts into focus, making no attempt to delay or tease, working the tips of his fingers into that tenderness again and again with brutal efficiency. As if from someplace far away Rei hears herself whimper.
Junin kisses the divot of her collarbone. “You good?” he murmurs. His voice ragged. “You okay?”
The gentleness in his words calls up that thing in her gullet again, another pang of hunger, and she feels as if she’s being carved wide, skinned and left out open. Any moment he could glance up and witness her. The late day shines darkly through the windows, through the gleam of what could be rain or mist or nothing at all. Her skin feels like a bruise everywhere he’s against it, throbbing and too soft to be touched. Down where she’s holding him she can feel the trip of his pulse. What does the body know? The length of his cock overfills her small hand and she wonders if when they make love this will be enough to sate her. If anything is.
“I’m fine,” Rei tells him. She licks her lips, swallows. “Go harder.”
contingency
Resurfacing with fic! A short-ish smut thing I did for a challenge hosted by the lovely folks who run @ssminibang. Prompter was the lovely @venuscrescent: Hino Rei/Sailor Mars x Jadeite, “Mindfuck.” Here goes nothing. Sexytimes follow under the cut.
title:contingency
fandom: Sailor Moon
characters/ships: Rei/Mars x Jadeite
rating: R for explicit sexual content
“Did you really come into my bedroom in the middle of the night because you trust me?” Jadeite bends his head to catch her eyes. His own are cool, appraising. “Or because you want me to fuck you until you can’t think straight and it doesn’t matter anymore?”
contingency
…
“Who,” says Zoisite, “would be the greatest lover in the Dark Kingdom?”
At first, nobody says anything; Castor and Pollux simultaneously drain their wineglasses, exchanging significant looks. Then Nephrite says, in a slightly sullen tone: “Why is this a theoretical question? And why,” he adds, growing more miffed, “isn’t the answer obvious?”
Night has fallen on Earth, and Sailor Mercury is dead. After Beryl left the High Table, dragging Kunzite with her, the celebrations have gone from boisterous to feral. There are youma everywhere the eye can reach: youma drinking, youma singing, youma fighting, youma asleep, youma coupling, youma at (scandalously) the High Table, youma coupling under the High Table. Carnelian has kicked this last at least eight times now. She’s fairly sure her heel has blinded one of the threesome, but so far nothing seems to dent their enthusiasm. She kicks again, hears a soft grunt, and looks up to meet Jadeite’s startled blue eyes.
“You’re right,” says Zoisite. “It’s Kunzite.”
“What,” explodes Nephrite, at the same time as Yasha begins to titter.
“He’sso powerful,” sighs Zoisite. “Don’t you remember that time he erected the dome over Moon and Mercury, and they couldn’t breathe for, like, minutes? Imagine if that were you.”
There is a long, uncertain pause.
“What the fuck,” says the West-king pitifully. “What’s wrong with you all? Do you know what an advantage it is, having half a dozen shadows around to do your bidding in bed? Ask anyone.”
“It’s true,” says Widow loyally. “They have so many hands.”
Thetis, who has been sitting silent on Jadeite’s thigh until now, pipes up. “It is my lord.”
Zoisite’s eyes narrow. “No, it isn’t.”
“Sour grapes,” murmurs one of the DD Girls. Carnelian still can’t remember all their names.
“What does Carnelian think,” titters Yasha.
“Carnelian used to be a priestess,” snaps Zoisite. “Obviously she’s a prude.”
That, thinks Carnelian, is not strictly true. But she shakes her head, affects boredom. “I don’t have an opinion,” she says, tossing back her long dark hair. “Why are we talking about this?”
“See? Prude.”
“I’m curious, Zoisite,” says Jadeite. She notices his wineglass is largely untouched. “Why don’t you think it’s you?”
“How dare you speak to me after what you - ” the king of the North begins in a stage-hiss, and then colors. “Wait, you think it’s me?”
“It’s not you,” says Thetis derisively. “I already said, it is my lord.”
Carnelian swallows a gulp of wine that burns all the way down. “What is your rationale, Thetis?”
The pretty youma doesn’t look at her. “My lord is a master of illusion.”
“Yes, but Kunzite,” Zoisite starts.
“No, wait,” says Nephrite. “Now I’m curious. Tell us what you mean.”
Thetis straightens, unselfconscious. “I mean, when making love, he is able to construct anything one may imagine, and make it seem as reality. Any sight, any smell, any taste, any…touch.”
“Well, shit,” says Nephrite, impressed despite himself. “That does sound pretty hot.”
“I don’t want to make love to you, Nephrite,” says Jadeite, grinning.
“Cheers to that,” Nephrite replies fervently, reaching over to clink his wineglass with the Far Eastern king’s.
“The DD Girls can do all that,” titters Yasha. “What’s so special about illusion?”
Thetis smiles. “My lord trained the DD Girls.”
Carnelian leans white arms on the table. “Isn’t that cheating?”
A hush falls all around. Even the threesome under the table goes silent.
She goes on. “How can you call yourself a great lover if the pleasure you give is only an illusion?” As she says the last, she glances at Jadeite. “Is that any better than a magician performing a trick?”
His expression is amused as usual, and entirely unreadable. He says nothing, while Nephrite hoots.
“To properly construct an illusion, one must have had the experience,” Thetis begins coldly.
Another one of the DD Girls calls mockingly, “You claim to speak for one of the Shitennou, youma?”
“Kunzite’s protocol, not mine,” the Far Eastern king drawls back, clearly enjoying himself. “I can’t fit a stick that large up my ass.” An appreciative snicker goes up from all the youma.
“We thought you didn’t have an opinion,” Castor and Pollux intone in unison at Carnelian.
She shrugs. “Nothing personal. Only theory.”
“Well, if you’re ever interested in practical application,” bellows Nephrite, leering genially at her, and she smiles.
“Handle Jupiter the way you did Mercury and I might take you up on that, hero.”
“I’m a king of heaven, not a fucking demigod,” he protests, and everyone laughs.
The king of the North has been quiet some time, gaze flitting between Carnelian and Jadeite. Now he speaks up. “Carnelian, you were friendly with Moon and Mercury as a civilian, weren’t you? Today must feel strange for you,” his voice drips like treacle, “given your history.”
Carnelian blinks, confused, but before she can respond, Jadeite does.
“We were all chosen by the Queen to carry out the great work of the Dark Kingdom.” He speaks against Thetis’s temple, but Carnelian is startled to find his gaze focused on her. His tone is bland. “Certainly none of us would question the judgement of the woman we owe our fealty.”
“Oh,” says Zoisite hastily. “No. Never. Our great Queen is wise in every choice she makes. Also,” his voice rising slightly to carry, “no doubt she must be a lover beyond compare. The greatest. In fact, let’s just stop talking about this?”
“I want to talk about this,” titters Yasha, and Carnelian sees Zoisite materialize a crystal shard and stab her in the ribs. She topples without ceremony, blood oozing from her side.
Carnelian stands up and almost immediately feels a little dizzy. Too much wine, she thinks, swaying. She sets a hand on the table for support. “I’m going to retire for the night.”
Jadeite is still watching her. “Feeling all right?”
She ignores him, makes her way out of the great room and down one of the halls. As she turns into a narrower passageway she hears the Far Eastern king make his excuses as well.
…
She’s lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. She’s tried sleeping on her stomach, her side, her back, thinking of nothing, thinking of him, masturbating. The last only left her more restless.
Cursing softly, Carnelian swings her legs out of bed, ties on her red silk banyan. She can’t find her slippers, so she doesn’t bother. Her bare feet take her out the door. Down the dark halls and passageways that twist and turn like the wind in this place. In her palm she holds a flame to guide her, but if she’s honest with herself, this is a way with which she’s quite familiar.
When she knocks on the heavy wooden door no one answers. Someone inside laughs.
She knocks again, harder this time. “Jadeite.”
Behind the door she hears silence, and then footsteps. It’s still another minute or two before the door opens and she’s greeted by the sight of Jadeite, wearing loose pants and no shirt.
Carnelian brushes past him. “I can’t sleep.”
“Hello, Carnelian,” he says drily, shutting the door.
His quarters are as she remembers them: large, minimal, luxurious. After he brought her in, Beryl gave him a promotion of sorts, and now he more or less jockeys for rank with Kunzite, though the latter still has the lead. Accommodations show Beryl’s favor, even though he doesn’t care much for material objects. Only concrete floors, an enormous bed. A handsome leather chair with ottoman, deep wood tub, and an angular block of marble that serves as a bar. Looking around, it occurs to Carnelian that she’s been on her back, or had him on his, in or on every single one of these. Except the bar. That’s new.
Thetis claps her hands in front of Carnelian’s face, and she blinks. “Thetis?”
“My lady,” Thetis says. Her dark eyes brim liquid with hate. “I apologize that we didn’t hear your knocking the door. We were - somewhat busy. How might my lord or I help you?”
“I - ” she starts.
“Thetis,” his voice comes from behind her, and they both turn to find him leaning a shoulder to the wall, arms folded across his front. “Carnelian and I have matters to discuss. Would you mind?”
“My lord,” the youma begins. Carnelian notices, belatedly, that she’s naked.
His eyes are fixed on Carnelian as he says, with inexpressible gentleness: “Get out, Thetis.”
After a moment, Thetis bows. Neither of them speak as she gathers her clothes and leaves.
“Now,” says Jadeite once the door shuts. He goes to the bar, materializes a small charcoal-dark bowl for tea and glass tumbler of water on the otherwise bare surface. The former he hands to her. The latter he leaves where it is. “What’s this about not sleeping?”
“I told you,” Carnelian answers peevishly, taking it. When she sniffs its contents a thickly green smell steams up from the bowl. Gyokuro leaves, quite good ones. “I just can’t.”
The Far Eastern king sighs heavily. She tries not to notice what this does for the lean musculature of his chest. “I should’ve been more specific. How would you like me to help you go to sleep?” When she doesn’t reply he adds, “Not that I don’t have ideas, but - ”
“Well, I don’t think drinking tea is going to help.”
A smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. “It might with your impending hangover, Hino.”
She takes a sip. “I like this gyokuro.”
“I remember.”
Too close. She looks away, at the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling window. It’s all snow outside, vast drifts of it, still and moonlit. It must be another illusion, of course; there’s no “view” to speak of in the dimension they occupy. But it slots in close enough with reality - they are, after all, situated around the Earth’s northern pole - that she could pass over it, unquestioning.
“Don’t,” she says quietly. “We’re not doing that anymore, Asa.”
“Yes. Because you left and never came back.” His tone is even. “Begs the question: why are you here?”
She sees he has his arms folded again. His hair is absurdly disheveled, wild, curls springing out everywhere. It makes him look like the boy king she’d first met. Somehow it’s been, what - she counts the time in human terms - five years? Six? since she’d woken up with a vague memory of a bus and little else. He had been the first person she saw when she opened her eyes in the Dark Kingdom. Her hand had been sweaty in his. The first to take her to Beryl, the first to show her the power she held, the first…
She hasn’t thought about all that in a long time.
Carnelian opens her mouth and it tumbles right out.
“Did you really do that? Use illusion when we - ”
“Ah,” he says, almost to himself.
“I know what you can do. Obviously. But until Thetis said - I never thought - ”
He waits patiently, not helping. He rarely does. After her first mission, he had told her that often the best thing was to let others be fools, and it had been good advice. But even then there had been a softness in the way he dealt with her, despite her naivete, that was like the flawed, included side of a gem; and she knows that softness remains, even as the Dark Kingdom has cut away every other gentle, foolish thing she knew in him, made sharp every aspect.
Carnelian gathers her straying thoughts. “Look, I just want to know if, when we were - ”
“Together,” he supplies.
“Together - if you - ”
“No. I didn’t.” He frowns. “Hino. How is it possible, after everything, you’re still such a prude?”
Carnelian ignores this, as well as the note in his voice that seems to suggest he considers her remaining inhibitions a personal failure on his part. “You didn’t. But - why not?”
A muscle twitches in his jaw. “Because I didn’t need to. It was good without it.”
She tries to keep her face from showing how remarkably gratifying that is to hear. “But wouldn’t it make it even better for you? I thought illusion was your greatest pleasure.”
It’s a drug, he’d said once. They were in the bath. Better than wine, than the stuff the Queen gives us. Better than fucking. Nothing feels better than knowing your power and using it.
“It would’ve been too much.” His voice pulls her back to the room, expands into the high open space, its echoes. The same room, but different. “When you and I were…”
“Together?”
Jadeite shoots her a flat look. “Together.” He goes quiet abruptly, glancing down, as if lost in the past. Then he says, “I don’t think I could’ve stayed in control, if I’d done that with you. I don’t think…” he trails off, considering. There’s a furrow in his brow, which clears when he looks up.
“It was good,” he says simply. “I didn’t want more. I was already - happy.”
She glances away, embarrassed - for him or for herself, she’s not sure.
“Look at you,” she hears him say quietly. “How you’ve changed.”
She senses him coming closer, keeps her eyes trained where they are. There’s a spot on the otherwise flawless concrete, slightly darker than the rest. She focuses on it, and he follows.
“From that time you burned a hole through my sheets. Remember?” When she looks up he’s smiling, though his eyes don’t wrinkle as they should. “And then you stole Kunzite’s shitty ones to make it up to me.”
Now, objectively, is not the best time to note that she’s toured Kunzite’s bed recently, and he’s significantly upgraded his linens. That’s a rivalry too white-hot to probe, even for her.
Carnelian sets down her empty bowl with a soft clink. “How would I ever know?”
“Know what?”
“If you did use illusion. Keep up, Asa.”
The Far Eastern king blows out a breath. “You’re the most powerful seer in the Dark Kingdom. The strongest of the Queen’s warriors, too, except maybe for Kunzite. Stronger than me.”
“Don’t be evasive.”
“I already told you. I never used it like that with you.”
She scoffs. “And I’m supposed to trust you when you say that?”
“Let me ask. Did you really come into my bedroom in the middle of the night because you trust me?” Jadeite bends his head to catch her eyes. His own are cool, appraising. “Or because you want me to fuck you until you can’t think straight and it doesn’t matter anymore?”
For what feels like a hundred long seconds Carnelian stares at him, thinking.
Then she steps between his feet, takes his face into hot palms, and seals her mouth over his.
…
He doesn’t miss a beat. His own hands rise, skimming her waist through the slippery silk. His fingers find the opening, splay warm across her ribcage, spreading the garment apart. Her heart is thudding so loudly in her ears, she’s sure it reverberates in his fingertips.
“Show - me,” she says, words rounded, cut off by his mouth. “I want to see - if I can tell - what’s real.”
He doesn’t respond, only continues to kiss her, to take her out of her clothes, movements fluent, and she tries to remember if it was like this the first time she came to him, when they were both so young, or if his sureness is the product of all the times that came after.
She loosens the drawstring of his pants at the same time as her robe falls noiselessly around her body, leaving her in black panties. Jadeite walks her back to the foot of the bed, kicking off the pants as he goes, and he’s completely nude under. “Were you with Thetis just now?”
“You saw for yourself.”
“Answer me.”
Jadeite stops, breaks off a kiss to look down at her. His expression is amused. “There’s no need to be jealous of Thetis.”
Carnelian gazes up at him. Then she twists her foot around his calf and yanks, using the momentum to reverse their positions, throwing him down onto his back in the bed. He lands with a grunt, followed by another, as she straddles his hips.
She leans down until their noses touch. Improbably, the blueness of his eyes still astonishes her. “I’m not jealous of Thetis.”
She’s about to say more but then his hand slides between her thighs, and whatever words she had die in her throat.
He’s studying her, gaze dark and intent. His knuckles graze the damp silk of her panties, back and forth. But instead of slipping in he hooks the fabric and pulls her forward. “Come up here.”
Swallowing, she crawls up his torso, resettles. When he twists the silk aside completely, tongue slipping out to taste her, she can’t help herself, falling forward. She catches herself with elbows on the mattress, calves tensing for balance, and feels him chuckle, a soft puff of air against her sex, followed by the tip of his tongue.
She closes her eyes, shuddering at the feel of it, circling her clit. “Oh, my God.”
He licks up into her with the flat of it, fast but light the way she likes, keeping the pressure consistent even as her legs splay and she begins to move, involuntary, rocking over his chin. His blunt fingernails dig into the curve of her ass to keep her steady.
For prolonged seconds - minutes - she has no idea - can’t feel anything but for the thoroughness of his mouth, exploring her sex. Kissing the way he did her mouth, suckling on her clit as if it’s her tongue he’s tasting, small and soft as fruit. She’s distantly aware of how noisy he’s being, making the most obscene sounds, wet smacks, low hums and grunts of satisfaction as he works her over. The coolness of the room hits everywhere he’s lapped at her and she feels so wide-open it’s unbearable.
“S- stop,” she manages, finding a sliver of her presence of mind. “Stop, I can’t - I want you inside.”
She pushes off her elbows, struggles back backward on all fours, so he can sit upright. He’s already leaning over her, tugging her panties down her legs, easing her onto the mattress. She senses more than sees his hand, working himself in long deliberate strokes. The lights are bright without harshness and every feature of his face is visible, planes flushed dark and drawn taut as a drum, lips and chin smeared shiny with saliva and her slick; she sees it all in a half-second before he’s kissing her again, other hand cupping her skull, dragging her up to him. His tongue tastes strongly of her sex, so much that she almost recoils. But before she can think, there’s suddenly the heavy, hot weight of his cock dragging against her thigh, and he’s positioning himself. The head pushing in, stretching her, slow.
She comes just like that - from the sensation of being filled, finally; the pad of his thumb rubbing her swollen clit. Her own moan startles her - a loud, breathy thing, almost comically elongated. His grip on her biceps turns into a vice as she clenches helplessly around his cock, over and over.
When she finally finishes, gasping, he drops his forehead to hers. She notices, somehow, in the drift of bliss, that he’s not moving in her. “Fuck,” he murmurs. “That was embarrassing.”
It takes a few tries to speak. “What was?”
His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows once, twice. “You almost made me come.”
“Oh.” A shaky half-laugh escapes her. “Good.”
She waits until her muscles cease to quiver, and then, though her legs feel like deadweight, she somehow wills herself to wind them about his hips, groping at his ass, rolling up to get him deep, get him moving. He groans against her cheek.
“Don’t - I won’t last - ”
“I don’t care, Asa,” she whispers. Her fingers find his temples and smooth back the matting curls so she can catch the blue of his eyes again. His pupils are dilated wide like an animal’s, dark as glass at their centers. “I want to see you lose it.”
He hisses, face contorting, but then his hips buck and almost without volition he begins to thrust; not even pulling out all the way, instead fucking deep, as close to her body as possible. The base of his cock is wide enough she can still feel the stretch at the opening of her sex. For a few thrusts it burns, and then suddenly she’s so shockingly, copiously wet, she hears his breath go sharp.
“My…” His hand on her head, fingers curling in her hair. “My name.”
For half a second she thinks he wants her to say it, some game of dominance, submission - then she understands - remembers. “Asa.” She reaches up blindly for him, whatever she can touch. “It was Asa Junin.”
He inhales at the lee of her neck, breathing high and hard, like he’s been held underwater. “Rei.”
“Rei,” she squeezes her eyes briefly shut. He’s driving into her body so unrelentingly it’s difficult to configure speech, sentences breaking off, words fragmenting. “Hino - Rei. I was - was a - priestess.”
He withdraws completely, reaching down to pull up her knee, then grips her hipbone to keep her in place before sliding all the way back in. “And I wanted you,” he pants against her cheek, “the moment I saw you.”
“It’s - real,” she breathes. The words punctuated, each thud of his hips. “This - is real. I can tell.”
Her arms anchor around his neck as he presses his open mouth to her shoulder. Their bodies working together, now slicked by sweat. It’s almost too much - her thigh wedged between them, bending her in half, like hammered metal - nipples tight under the friction of his chest - the dull slap of his thrusts - an odd, tingling pressure, the place he’s hitting deep in her, again and again. When his hand slides around, one finger slipping past her clit, past where they fuck, tracing the cleft further up, it’s another sensation added to all the rest and she tenses under him, unsure.
“Okay?” his voice is low in her ear.
She’s trembling all over. “I - yes.”
The feeling of fullness, it’s - different. Sharper, more, entire. She wants to get away from it, wants to take more, both at once. A jolt of pleasure races down her spine as he pulls back; their eyes connect just as she realizes, vaguely stunned, that she’s going to come again.
Her eyes widen. “Junin - ”
“Almost,” he gasps, breakneck rhythm gone staccato. “I - ”
Her hoarse cry cuts off whatever he’s about to say as she flies apart. It’s much faster, harder than the first time, brinking on violence, shocking bright hot tears to her eyes.
Every part of her falls slack, her sex throbbing and raw. As she comes down she feels his pace stutter. A high, juddering sound escapes him as he thrusts a last time and pulls out, jerking off frantically. She props herself up on her elbows to watch as he spurts all over her, eyes landing where semen drips viscous, nacred, into the dark nest of curls between her thighs.
…
She’s laughing, even now as they lie in the dark; tiny, fitful, idiotic huffs against the still-perspiring side of his chest. Her stomach is quivering like she’s done a thousand sit-ups, and her thighs are sticky and sore. She feels - wonderful.
“I should clean you up,” she hears him mutter exhaustedly above her, but he makes no effort to move. She laughs again.
“Leave it there,” Carnelian tells him. “I told you I wanted to see you lose it.”
“Think I have to take back what I said about you being a prude.” He yawns prodigiously. “You’re a dirty girl, Hino.”
“Tell Zoisite that the next time he comes through.”
“Kind of making my bedroom sound like a merry-go-round, here.”
She smiles a little, without warmth, but he can’t see it, anyway.
“Both,” she says.
“Both?”
“You asked if I trusted you, or if I wanted you to fuck me.” She stares at the ceiling, allowing the whorls of concrete to resolve themselves into patterns of significance. “Both.”
She can feel his ribs rise and fall, still fast, under her cheek.
“Junin.”
“Hm?”
“Do you ever think…” she bites the tip of her tongue, worrying it between her teeth. “That maybe, this - this all is the big illusion. That the people we were before were the real ones. Who we should’ve been.”
Jadeite doesn’t speak.
“And - and what we are now…”
Quietly, he says, “We should go to sleep.”
Her eyelids flutter, moth-winged. “Right,” she replies, soft.
In a few minutes his breathing slows, evens out. She shifts a little; in slumber, he adjusts, unconsciously making room. When she touches his chest his heart beats in her fingertips.
Carnelian closes her eyes. Before she can form another conscious thought, she’s gone.
